With a recent funding round and growing demand for its radio-frequency geolocation capabilities, HawkEye 360’s chief executive says the company has reached an “inflection point” on the path towards profitability and potentially going public. HawkEye 360 announced July 13 it raised $58 million in a Series D-1 round led by BlackRock. The company said then that the funding would support development of new satellites and analytics products. The company has raised $368 million to date, said John Serafini, chief executive of HawkEye 360, in an interview during World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 13. That round may also be the last private funding the company needs to raise. “Provided that we execute against our revenue forecasts, which are conservative and we think we can do, we won’t need to raise additional private capital,” he said. Profitability, he added, “is on the horizon for us,” but didn’t offer a specific timeline for achieving it. In a presentation at an investor conference a year ago, Serafini said the company was considering going public though an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in two to three years. That is still the plan now, he said, although the timing will depend as much on market conditions as it will the state of the company. “The market being open or closed has a lot to do with it,” he said of the timing of an IPO, which he said remains likely two to three years out. “Whether we can achieve the requisite milestones is the biggest issue,” such as achieving profitability and the right unit economics. “That’s what we can control and we’re rushing like heck to get to that spot.” The new funding and the growth of the business have put HawkEye 360 into a good position, he argued. “I would say we’re at an inflection point,” he said, from the funding to plans to launch additional satellites and development of analytics tools that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence. “All of that in the next 12 to 18 months has got us in a great position.” Governments remain the largest customers for HawkEye 360, which Serafini said will likely be the case for the foreseeable future. That has included defense and intelligence applications as well as some civil and broader security applications, like tracking illegal fishing or deforestation. “One of the tenets we set the company up with was to focus on where the money is. The money in remote sensing is, ultimately, in defense and intelligence,” he said. “If you can’t service those customers, you’re not going to exist as a company.” That work has included work in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion more than a year and a half ago, tracking sources of GPS and other radio-frequency interference . Serafini declined to go into details about the company’s work there, but he said the conflict has highlighted the importance of both commercial remote sensing capabilities in general as well as the need to work closely with the users of those capabilities. “Throwing remote sensing data over a fence probably doesn’t lead to success,” he said. “One of the areas of growth for HawkEye is understanding the tactical intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance requirements of our customers, and the networks and systems that they operate in, such that our data can flow into their existing systems as seamlessly as possible and produce another layer of valuable intelligence, not just drowning them in additional data.” That data comes from 21 satellites currently in orbit. Six more are scheduled to launch later this year on a Rocket Lab Electron from New Zealand. The company’s long-term goal is to have 60 satellites, in 20 three-satellite clusters, which Serafini said the company expects to achieve by 2025 or 2026. Those satellites, built both by the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies as well as HawkEye 360’s own facility in Northern Virginia, will be a mix of both its existing Block 2 design and new Block 3 design. The plans for Block 3 are “very fluid,” he said, and could feature two different designs, a smaller one to focus on specific signals and a larger one to do “very advanced” work. HawkEye 360 also announced Sept. 12 it promoted Rob Rainhart, the company’s chief operating officer since 2019, to president. “Rob and I have been partners together for eight years,” Serafini said. Rainhart handles internal company operations, responsibilities he will continue as president. “He keeps the company running on time, and so it felt like the right time to make the move to promote him to president.”
Multi-orbit satellite operator SES is on the verge of realizing key strategic goals that have been years in the making. After recently deploying the geostationary satellites needed to claim around $3 billion in C-band spectrum clearing proceeds, the company is now just months away from launching initial services for its upgraded O3b mPower broadband network in medium Earth orbit (MEO). So many were surprised to see Steve Collar’s June 12 announcement that he was retiring as CEO two weeks later, following more than 20 years with the Luxembourg-based operator, including five years at the helm. Collar was replaced by Ruy Pinto, who joined the company in 2017 and was previously its chief technology officer. In his first SES earnings call as CEO Aug. 3, Pinto said an electrical glitch on the first four O3b mPower satellites was sporadically tripping off power modules — although the trip-offs could be resolved quickly without affecting payload performance. Still, the issue has delayed the launch of the fifth and sixth O3b mPower satellites, which are needed for initial services and were slated to launch by the end of June as of the operator’s previous earnings call. Boeing is contracted to provide 11 Ka-band O3b mPower satellites to enable full services from the operator’s second-generation MEO constellation. SpaceNews caught up with Pinto on the sidelines of Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris to learn more about how the operator is tackling its opportunities and challenges. Steve Collar’s sudden departure as CEO in June surprised many in the industry. Was it also a surprise for you? It was a surprise to a certain extent. But Steve is staying on as an advisor and is very much engaged in what is happening with the industry and what is happening with SES — I talk to him quite often. Was it partly a result of diverging views with the board? The board, Steve, the management team, and myself have been very consistent on our strategy. We have strong financials, we’ve focused on our unique capabilities around MEO, we are investing in O3b mPower, and we believe in our strong position in markets like cruise and government. We have also been looking at consolidation in the industry. We have acquired [satcoms provider] DRS and we’ve doubled down on our U.S. government business — a great acquisition and we’re really pleased with that. We did look at other options, as we should. We tried to reach a good deal with Intelsat over quite some period of time that didn’t work. But we do believe in the logic of consolidation in the industry. We are on the record saying consolidation is a good thing in a disrupted industry like ours. So it wasn’t connected with what happened with Intelsat, or what didn’t happen? There wasn’t a single thing, and certainly not the negotiations with Intelsat. The negotiations were difficult, otherwise Intelsat and SES would have reached an agreement. In Steve’s words, there is a shelf life to all CEOs, and it was time for him to go, especially since he felt he was leaving SES in good hands. How could the company’s strategy change under your leadership? There is no fundamental shift in the strategy I just outlined, but strategy is not fixed in time, as well. You can think of strategy as a budget. The moment you finalize a budget, the market and customers move on, and the budget has to be updated. The main tenets of our strategy are: With the receipt of the C-band proceeds, which should happen this year, our balance sheet will have a good position in the industry, being an investment-grade company with good cash flows and money to invest in opportunities that are sensible. Not throwing money out of the window, but being selective and objective on where we can invest in technology, partnerships, and products to leverage our strong financial position. And of course, there’s competition from Starlink, and future competition from Project Kuiper and Telesat Lightspeed. We also all expect the deal between Eutelsat and OneWeb will close soon , so that will be another data point. And there’s also potential competition coming to MEO, such as Intelsat as it explores options for this orbit . I’m very proud that Intelsat has followed our strategy in MEO. They’re endorsing what we have been thinking for quite some time — 10 years. But on a more serious side, firstly, they’re in a different frequency. Intelsat have a lot of assets in Ku-band. And even if they were to give you a press release tomorrow with a firm commitment, it will take some time for them to get into orbit to learn what we have learned over the years, and get the experience in software, hardware, infrastructure, and ground segment. I’m mindful, but I’m not losing any sleep over that. Do you expect to decide soon on how to invest the C-band proceeds? Rushing doesn’t necessarily help. We have to be quick once we make a decision, but we don’t necessarily need to be quick in reaching that decision on how best to deploy the capital that we will have. A big source of current investment is O3b mPower. Where are you in resolving the technical glitch you recently disclosed there? We have been working really hard with Boeing and we have a way better understanding of this phenomena than we had two months ago. This gives us the confidence that we can provide the level of service that our customers expect, and that we expect from O3b mPower. With a mix of operational [changes and] updates to the software, we can live with this phenomenon. It doesn’t impact the lifetime of those satellites as far as we know. The current plan is that we are on target to launch the next two in October. We did some small things on them that we hope to mitigate this phenomenon, but it’s not something that prevents us from getting O3b mPower working. And that’s really good news. We are going to put in place a constellation with about 10 years of expected lifetime, so for the sake of one, two, or three months, it doesn’t detract us from doing the right thing. You have seen the unfortunate experiences that Viasat has had over the last two months as a sign that sometimes being a little bit more conservative, and really understanding how the technology performs in a harsh environment, pays off. What changes did you make to the two upcoming satellites? They are good things to do in terms of shielding and cabling. We don’t expect them to be a silver bullet for the phenomena we have observed, but they’re sensible things to do. Of course, launching them gives Boeing and us time to go from: Now we understand what is happening to can I just prevent it from happening altogether on the following five satellites? Are they packed up and ready for the launchpad? They’re not packed up yet, but if we’re going to meet a launch in October we’re going to have to ship them by the end of September. What is your take on the potential for price erosion from the masses of satellites launching in the coming years? When you have a competitor like Starlink, which is increasing its capacity at a fast pace, the demand will continue being outstripped by the supply in certain geographies and markets, and that will drive price erosion. It’s just the nature of competition. But there will be other geographies and market segments. For the concentration of cruise ships in the Mediterranean in the summer, the supply doesn’t meet the demand there. So we should be able to have profitable pricing in that geography and at that time, for example, and there are also hotspots in government and aviation. O3b mPower’s ability to shift capacity from A to B, based on need and time of day, allows us to provide a capability and flexibility that our customers will be willing to pay a premium for. It was interesting to see SES partner with Starlink in the cruise market, which has been a stronghold for you. How did that deal come about? We were the first to launch on a reusable Falcon 9, and we have discussed possible joint initiatives in the past. Our customers in the cruise market have been saying, look, the market is evolving and there is a lot of demand for connectivity. We would like to have the Starlink capability available for our ships — it’s not guaranteed, it may not have burst capacity or the flexibility that you have on MEO, but we want it for certain applications. At the same time, we also want MEO. Given customers want the best of both worlds, and have been coming to us saying we want the capability that Starlink brings, we decided to partner with Starlink to sell this managed service to the market. We’re still giving our customers a choice. Nobody is forcing them to go left or right, but going jointly to certain customers who want it is way better for both companies. And it’s a model that we may wish to discuss or replicate in very selective opportunities, markets or geographies. It doesn’t mean Starlink will not compete directly with us in certain adjacent markets, and vice versa. We’ve seen Intelsat and Inmarsat buy small satellites for their geostationary businesses recently. Are smaller, more regionally focused satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) also of interest to SES? We don’t have any short-term plans for GEO replacements. We have time. But for our next neighbor slot where we need to replace our GEO capacity, we are going to look at those options. There is potential. If they can prove their viability, the price points, and the scale and flexibility, then of course we’re going to look at it. You have partnered with Eutelsat to bid for a role in IRIS². Are you concerned that their acquisition of U.K.-based OneWeb could complicate what is a very European project? If that turns out to be an issue, it’s more of a Eutelsat concern than ours. Having said that, we are part of a team and we believe we have put together something that’s potentially very compelling for the European Commission. This interview has been edited for length and clarity
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX’s ability to quickly change and update services has been awkward for resellers, an executive for the low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellation said Sep. 13. “It’s been challenging because we are so nimble,” Starlink vice president of commercial sales Jonathan Hofeller said Sept. 13, “and we have to be smarter about how [this] affects our resellers.” He said it’s not uncommon for SpaceX to want to add a Starlink plan on a Friday and then adopt it Monday. “Well, that affects our partners and we’re learning how to be better partners in that sense,” he said on a panel for World Satellite Business Week in Paris. However, he said Starlink’s ability to iterate rapidly helps the company adapt to changing customer needs and plans. The constant refining also enables Starlink react to sudden events, such as natural disasters and other changes on a regional or global basis. SpaceX can also change and update Starlink services at pace because the vertically integrated company builds and launches the satellites in-house. After initially solely focusing on selling directly to consumers, Starlink opened up to reseller channels about a year ago to help expand into markets including maritime, energy, and aviation. “We do have channel conflict,” Hofeller said, “which is one of the things that we’re exploring and … figuring out how to work through.” But Starlink is “also seeing that customers look for additional added services such as cybersecurity, install, customer support — above and beyond just great, raw, high-speed, low-latency capacity,” and so the company is “looking to our partners to provide that to the end customers.” Starlink announced a partnership earlier in the day with SES, which operates a constellation of geostationary and medium Earth orbit satellites, to provide a combined service for cruise lines. SES is taking the lead on selling and managing the joint offering, including antenna installation. The financials Starlink now has more than 1.5 million customers worldwide, according to Hofeller. While he did not discuss financials, he said the company is no longer subsidizing user antennas. Starlink achieved $1.4 billion in revenues for 2022 compared with $222 million the year before, reported the Wall Street Journal Sept. 13 , citing documents. According to the report, the company projected in a 2015 investor presentation that Starlink would net nearly $12 billion in revenue for 2022 and have 20 million subscribers by the end of that year, as well as $7 billion in operating profit. Last month, t he Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX had made a $55 million profit for the first three months of 2023, following a loss for 2022. SpaceX has not commented on these reports. Hofeller was asked during the conference about the failure rate for the more than 5,000 Starlink satellites launched to date — tracked by third party spaceflight observer Jonathan McDowell — and he said he did not know this data. Massimiliano Ladovaz, OneWeb’s chief technology officer, told conference delegates it had four failures after deploying more than 630 satellites for its constellation. “Obviously we would have loved not to have those four failures,” he said, but “considering that it’s newspace, it’s quite a low percentage.”
U.S. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said the Space Force is finalizing a blueprint for how it will integrate commercial satellite services into military activities. “One way we are enhancing our relationships with commercial partners is through a soon to be released commercial space strategy,” Saltzman said Sept. 13 at the Global Aerospace Summit organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “This new strategy will provide a unifying guidance to the force to achieve competitive advantage through commercial augmentation,” he said. The Space Force and the U.S. military at large rely on commercial companies for a wide range of peacetime and wartime services, but Saltzman said there is need for specific guidance on emerging space industry services — such as rapid-revisit satellite imaging and low-Earth orbit satellite communications — many of which have only become available in recent years. He characterized the current period as a “true golden era for commercial space.” “One way we are addressing future challenges is by exploring ways to better integrate commercial space,” Saltzman said. “Commercial capabilities, services and activities are expanding rapidly. The competition we are seeing today in commercial space is driving innovation and the Space Force wants to harness these efforts,” he said. “We know our commercial partners are a big reason that we can out compete our adversaries.” “The speed and innovation offered by the commercial space sector can create a strategic advantage,” Saltzman said. The goal of the strategy is to help harness that innovation, he added. “I’m hopeful it will be approved and published in the weeks to come.” ‘Terms of reference’ Saltzman said the new guidance will help clarify the role of commercial providers and how their capabilities might be integrated into military operations, he added. “We will have terms of reference that the Space Force has created to help our industry partners address the augmentation and integration of commercial space capabilities.” “My hope is that this will bring some clarity to the industry so that they can globally support and augment inherently governmental and military activities that we project from the space domain,” Saltzman explained. “ As the conflict in Ukraine has shown us , space is critical to modern warfare,” he said. “It has played a vital role in communications, precision navigation and timing, missile warning, command and control, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance.” “Commercial augmentation has proven its value during this conflict,” particularly in satellite-based surveillance. “It’s unclassified. It has promoted shareability It has enabled us to supplement classified data, he added. ‘Fundamental conversation’ The commercial strategy is intended to help Space Force buyers and contractors speak the same language, Saltzman said. “It’s important that we’re all having the same fundamental conversation. We have to define our terms.” For example, he said, “we define augmentation as the use of commercial space goods, services and activities to increase both capacity and resilience. Similarly, we define what we mean by commercial activity, what is a critical function, what are inherently governmental functions, what tasks can be executed by the private sector.” With regard to the protection of satellites during conflicts, Saltzman noted that the Space Force intends to work with military allies and private companies to ensure collective security, enabled by data sharing. “Going forward, all space users will be in the combat zone during a conflict. You cannot separate civilian and military assets in this domain. So we all share the risk if a war comes to space.” “We need to increase our collaboration with the commercial space industry to enable new capabilities that support integrated deterrence,” he said. This integration includes data sharing, and interoperability between our allies and industry partners.”
United Launch Alliance, one of just two U.S. companies that provide national security launch services, does not have a problem with DoD’s decision to add a third competitor, a senior ULA executive said Sept. 13. Gary Wentz, ULA’s vice president of government and commercial programs, said the company is supportive of the U.S. Space Force’s proposed strategy to add a third heavy-lift launch provider in the next round of contracts, known as National Security Space Launch Phase 3. “From what we saw relative to Lane 2 and the addition of a third provider, we didn’t see any issues with that,” Wentz said during a panel discussion at the Global Aerospace Summit organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Currently ULA and SpaceX are the only NSSL launch providers. Due to concerns about growing commercial demand, the Space Force said it plans to select a third provider in Lane 2 of NSSL Phase 3, creating an opportunity for a new entrant like Blue Origin which is developing a heavy rocket. Lane 2 providers have to be able to fly to low, medium and high orbits. Of the 58 missions expected to be procured under Lane 2, seven — five GPS satellite launches to medium Earth orbit and two direct-to-geostationary orbit launches — will be set aside for a third provider, Space Force officials said. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno in July expressed concerns about the Phase 3 strategy and said he was still reviewing the details. One of Bruno’s concerns was that “it’s not a competition if everybody wins.” A ULA spokesperson in a statement Sept. 13 noted that Bruno in an interview last month with Aviation Week said : “We understand the government’s need to have a broader industrial base at this time of challenge … so we’re OK with the third provider,” The spokesperson said Bruno had concerns about other points in the draft request for proposals not related to a third provider. Wentz said the company reviewed the latest draft solicitation and is on board with the plan to add a third provider. He noted that there are now more missions in Lane 2 than had been previously forecast so allocating seven to a third provider seems reasonable. “So we support it,” he said. Blue Origin ‘looking at the RFP’ Blue Origin’s vice president of government sales Lars Hoffman — also speaking at the Chamber of Commerce event — said the company continues to work with the Space Force to develop a plan to certify the New Glenn rocket for NSSL after it starts flying — which the company projects will happen in 2024. “We’ve been doing that for a while,” said Hoffman. “So we’re actively engaged with them on that front. Things are progressing very nicely and, obviously, we’re looking at the draft requests for proposals that have come out.” Hoffman did not say definitively that Blue Origin will submit a proposal for a Lane 2 contract. With regard to the development of New Glenn, he said, “we’ve got more boosters, we’ve got three fairings. A lot of work is going on down at the Florida manufacturing complex .” “We’re on track for launch next year,” Hoffman said. 
PARIS – To speed up access to Earth observation data for millions of customers, Esri is closely integrating its ArcGIS geographic mapping platform with Microsoft Azure Space. “We’re putting the entire technology stack in Azure Space data centers,” Richard Cooke, Esri, imagery and remote sensing director, told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. “We are co-locating our technology by the antennas to reduce the latency, automate a lot of the post-processing and get to the meaningful data as quickly as possible.” Microsoft made a series of announcements Sept. 11, including partnerships with Esri and Synthetaic . Synthetaic, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze geospatial data, announced a strategic partnership Aug. 29 with Microsoft. As part of the five-year deal, Synthetaic will have access to extensive cloud compute resources. Synthetaic is integrating its technology with Azure Space to harness the “speed and versatility of AI to process geospatial, static and video imagery for a range of use cases,” including national security, disaster response, environmental and sustainability operations, Synthetaic said in a news release . Azure Space also added the Planetary Computer, a Microsoft platform that combines multi-petabyte global datasets related to biodiversity and climate change with machine-learning tools. “Think about the PC as a foundational data management toolset that allows users to manage geosptail data in the cloud in a standardized fashion,” said Steve Kitay, Azure Space senior director. In addition, NASA Langley Research Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Kongsberg Satellite Services demonstrated rapid acquisition, processing and distribution of Earth science data products by working with Azure Space. The NASA centers linked KSAT and Azure Orbital ground stations with NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization Earth-observation and weather satellites: Terra, Aqua, Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership and NOAA-20. The demonstration showed that processed data could reach customers within 25 minutes, according to the Microsoft news release. Another Azure Orbital customer, Muon Space, launched its first weather satellite in June. “Since we’re building constellations of remote sensing spacecraft with unique revisit, resolution and data latency capabilities, our ground station partner was a critical choice,” Jim Martz, Muon vice president engineering, said in a statement. Muon selected Azure Orbital Ground station based on its capabilities and product roadmap. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Global satellite fleet operator Intelsat announced an agreement Sept. 12 with Aalyria Technologies to dramatically speed up satellite communications. “How do you create the capacity and capability of subsea cables but put them in space?” Chris Taylor, Aalyria founder and CEO, asked at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. “Multi-terabit throughput from space is what we’re after. And Intelsat believes in it.” As a first step, Intelsat and Aalyria plan to establish a bi-directional optical ground and space network in 2024 to transfer data at speeds of hundreds of gigabits per second. The network will rely on Tightbeam, Aalyria’s optical communications technology initially developed at Google parent company, Alphabet, and Spacetime, Aalyria network orchestration technology. Accelerated data transfer is a key ingredient of the future space economy, Taylor told SpaceNews . “We can change the way data is moved on the planet, from the planet to the moon, to Mars and beyond.” The memorandum of understanding signed Sept. 12 requires financial commitments from Intelsat and Aalyria in the optical communications technology. “Aalyria’s groundbreaking technologies give us the opportunity to pursue highly secure connectivity at unprecedented speeds, opening up new frontiers in satellite communications,” Bruno Fromont, Intelsat chief technology officer, said in a statement. “The Intelsat-Aalyria collaboration will enable enhanced mobile broadband connections and represents another step forward towards our Next Generation Unifying Network vision enabled by software-defined networking, 5G and multi-orbit operations.” Intelsat is known for operating a fleet of geostationary communications satellites. The McLean, Virginia-based company is considering expanding its constellation to medium Earth orbit . “We look at multi-orbit as being key to the longterm value proposition we bring to our customer sets,” said Gregory Ewert, Intelsat vice president, business development. In addition to working with Intelsat, Livermore, California-based Aalyria is demonstrating SpaceTime through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Hybrid Space Architecture . HSA is designed to link commercial and government satellites with global, high-speed, secure data connections. Spacetime is a software platform to connect aircraft, ships and ground stations with satellites in various orbits. Aalyria also has Spacetime partnerships with Rivada Space Networks , Anduril , Leidos , and a Tightbeam partnership with the U.S. Navy . Successful partnerships are based on relationships, science and a common vision for what’s possible, Taylor said. “We won the lottery with Intelsat with regard to all of those,” Taylor said. “With them deciding what form they will take as a multi-satellite operator, it’s the perfect vehicle onto which we can attach our own capabilities to support their businesses and to develop our own.”
NASA and the other partners on the International Space Station have approved the crew of the third private astronaut mission by Axiom Space, scheduled to launch in early 2024. NASA and Axiom Space announced Sept. 12 that they had finalized the crew for the Ax-3 mission launching no earlier than January 2024. The mission will be commanded by Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut who also led the Ax-1 mission to the ISS in April 2022. The three customers are Alper Gezeravcı, Walter Villadei and Marcus Wandt. Villadei, who will be pilot of Ax-3, is an Italian Air Force colonel who trained as a backup for the Ax-2 mission and flew on Virgin Galactic’s first commercial suborbital flight, Galactic 01 , in June. Gezeravcı, a mission specialist, is a Turkish Air Force officer and Wandt, a mission specialist and former air force officer from Sweden, was selected as a reserve member of ESA’s astronaut corps last November. All three customers had been linked to the upcoming Axiom mission. The Turkish government announced in April it selected Gezeravcı as its first astronaut and had previously signed an agreement with Axiom. Villadei had trained with Axiom for Ax-2 with the expectation of going to space on a future mission. ESA, working with Sweden’s space agency, announced an agreement with Axiom in April for a private astronaut flight , and later named Wandt as the astronaut who would go. “This crew is shifting the paradigm of how governments and space agencies access and reap the benefits of microgravity,” López-Alegría said in a company statement. “The Ax-3 mission will be transformational as it fosters partnerships outside the construct of the ISS and positions European nations as pioneers of the emerging commercial space industry.” As with the first two Axiom missions, Ax-3 will launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and will spend up to 14 days on the ISS. Axiom is also planning a fourth mission, Ax-4, later in 2024. The missions are enabled by NASA’s low Earth orbit commercialization policy, which allows for up to two private astronaut missions a year to the ISS as precursors to both commercial modules Axiom plans to add to the station as well as development of commercial space stations that will ultimately succeed the ISS. “These commercial efforts continue to expand opportunity and access to microgravity research and discovery,” Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s commercial low Earth orbit development program, said in a NASA statement. “Each of these missions is a next step in building our shared future in low Earth orbit.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX and SES are pooling their broadband satellites to offer cruise operators an integrated service promising up to 3 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity per ship. The SES Cruise mPowered + Starlink service would mostly use SpaceX’s low Earth orbit network (LEO) and satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO) from SES. In northern and southern regions, apart from the poles where there is no service, SES vice president of product management for maritime products Gregory Martin said their joint offering would leverage its geostationary satellites. SES would sell and manage the multi-orbit service when it becomes operational later this year and SpaceX would get a cut of the sales, Martin told SpaceNews in an interview. The Luxembourg-based operator is also providing software to optimize the data traffic, said Martin, who used to manage satellite communications at Royal Caribbean, an SES customer that became the first cruise line to adopt Starlink last year. He said SES serves five of the top six cruise lines, which are now either using or testing Starlink services. Starlink and SES can still independently sell standalone connectivity to the cruise market following the deal. But rather than choosing between SES and Starlink, Martin said he expects cruise operators “are going to have multiple connections off the ship” and “we want to help manage that, be a big part of that, and working together with Starlink … we’re able to provide the best possible service.” The service comes in two tiers: Pro at 1.5 Gbps per ship and Premium at 3 Gbps. Martin said there are currently only a handful of cruise ships with anything near 1.5 Gbps, and in many cases the combined offering would enable them to double their throughput at a competitive price. There are currently no plans to develop a user terminal that could connect to Starlink and SES. The Pro tier requires 10 Starlink high throughput flat terminals and Premium needs 18, according to Martin, and both tiers would need two to three terminals for SES in MEO. In a separate interview with SpaceNews , SES CEO Ruy Pinto said the operator is open to discussing replicating its partnership with SpaceX in “very selective opportunities, markets or geographies.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Swissto12 has raised about $28 million in debt to scale up a manufacturing business seeking to disrupt the geostationary market with much smaller satellites, the 3D printing specialist said Sept. 13. Investment bank UBS provided the working capital facility for the venture, which has also raised more than 50 million euros ($54 million) in venture capital funding since spinning out of a Swiss university in 2011. After initially focusing on 3D-printed radio frequency components, the venture expanded into building entire satellites with the support of the European Space Agency. While not all of Swissto12’s HummingSat satellite platform would be 3D-printed, the company plans to leverage its expertise in additive manufacturing to accelerate production, cut costs, and improve performance. HummingSat is about the size of a dishwasher and can be at least three times cheaper than typical commercial telecoms satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO), according to Swissto12, which are typically about 10 times bigger. The company hopes to meet demand for more localized services with satellites that have less capacity than their school bus-sized cousins, which have more room for transponders and power. Intelsat became Swissto12’s first customer last year for a HummingSat that recently secured a 2026 launch with Arianespace , alongside undisclosed co-passengers. Viasat-owned Inmarsat, which also usually orders much larger GEO satellites from more established manufacturers, said in May it had bought three HummingSats for a launch in 2026. In a Sept. 13 news release announcing the working capital facility, Swissto12 said it has more than 200 million euros in orders for HummingSats and its radio frequency product business combined. New competitive landscape Of the 10 orders announced so far this year for GEO commercial communications satellites, six are to be built by small satellite ventures, including three by Astranis of California. Executives from traditional geostationary players cautiously welcomed the market entrants Sept. 12 on a panel of manufacturers at Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business conference in Paris. Chris Banther, vice president of supply chain at Lockheed Martin, said the rise of these small satellite specialists comes as operators seek to diversify their suppliers — a trend he also sees in other areas of the market. “I think it’s actually pretty exciting,” said Ryan Reid, president of Boeing Satellite Systems International, adding during the panel that it is a symptom of how much demand for broadband is outstripping supply. “And I think these small GEO systems allow … additional market creation and niche areas at a lower economic risk,” he said. Stéphane Vesval, senior vice president of sales and marketing for space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, also does not see a shift in the GEO market. “Yes, [they] are addressing some unmet demand but we’re not seeing a direct impact on how the market is growing,” he said, pointing to its recently announced contract to build a more conventionally sized GEO satellite for Thaicom. “We are, of course, always careful and looking at the innovation,” Vesval continued, “because even if some other [parts] are not directly competing [with] us, they are also very innovative. It keeps us on the edge and we keep moving forward.” Marc-Henri Serre, executive vice president for telecoms at Thales Alenia Space, said “clearly there are use [cases] that fit completely with this kind of product,” but the main challenge now “is how to have a product that works, has a good execution, and good delivery.” He said the industry is only “at the beginning of the story” and is still waiting to see if these products meet objectives. Arcturus, the first satellite from Astranis, failed after launching to orbit in April following an issue with its solar array drive assemblies.
A new decadal survey for biological and physical sciences research in space recommends that NASA increase its spending on such activities by a factor of 10, a move the study says would restore such work to historical levels. The decadal survey, titled “Thriving in Space” and released by the National Academies Sept. 12, argues the sharp increase in funding for NASA’s biological and physical sciences (BPS) division this decade is needed to tackle an ambitious set of new science questions in low Earth orbit and beyond. “Research in the space environment has taken remarkable steps over the last decade, but NASA, the rest of the U.S. government, and the wider space community globally have bold exploration plans that require commensurate investments in biological and physical science research,” said the decadal survey’s co-chair, Krystyn Van Vliet, professor of engineering and vice president for research and innovation at Cornell University, in a statement. NASA’s budget for BPS is $85 million in fiscal year 2023. NASA had requested $100 million for the division in its 2023 budget proposal, and is seeking $96.5 million for BPS in 2024. The report argues that BPS research at NASA is “severely underfunded” based on both its portfolio of research, including topics recommended by the previous decadal survey in 2011, as well as historical funding. That division received nearly $700 million in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1996, but suffered severe cuts in the early 2000s as NASA shifted its emphasis to the Constellation exploration program. “In 2010, Constellation was canceled, but the funding for BPS was not restored and many researchers left the field,” the report notes. Another factor driving the proposed spending increase is the science the decadal recommended NASA pursue. It identified 11 key science questions in three themes: adapting to space, living and traveling to space, and probing phenomena hidden by gravity or terrestrial limitations. It also recommended two specific research campaigns that could offer “major and transformative scientific contributions” to research in those fields. One, called Bioregenerative Life Support Systems, or BliSS, would develop capabilities for long-duration spaceflight. The other, Manufacturing Materials and Processes for Sustainability in Space, or MATRICES, would study manufacturing techniques for use in space that reduce waste. The report backed other research in the science of gravitational fields and spacetime and researching the combined effects of radiation and microgravity on different life forms. A larger budget, the decadal added, would help the BPS division handle fluctuations of a few tens of millions of dollars a year that are far more disruptive today. “Moreover, a budget nearer to $1 billion raises the profile of BPS science into the realm of the other divisions within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate,” the report stated, “tangibly recognizing the tremendous human and commercial interest in space exploration, the expansion of the BPS program beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), and the development of the space economy.” Those issues, the report said, “all drive toward the inescapable conclusion that to provide sustainability and visibility for the program, while funding the science needed to support the expansion of space activities prioritized by this survey, the budget must rise by a factor of 10 well before the end of the decade .” [Emphasis in original.] In addition to the science questions and funding levels, the report addressed the impending transition from the International Space Station to commercial space stations, known as commercial LEO destinations (CLDs) at NASA. The report warned that BPS science risks being overlooked during that transition, including a lack of “science-design requirements” for them. “This delay may result in an unintended consequence that CLD companies develop revenue sources to focus on commercial markets, deemphasizing government-funded or fundamental research for public benefit,” the report stated. It called on NASA to engage with CLD developers “with all due haste to ensure that science needs are met with clear priority.” “NASA should work to take advantage of the profusion of research capabilities from academia and through commercial space platforms to tackle these new challenges and ensure BPS can continue meeting the science needs of the nation,” said Rob Ferl, a professor at the University of Florida and other co-chair of the decadal survey, in a statement. NASA said it would take some time to review the report before responding to its recommendations. “We look forward to using the survey to guide our next decade of transformative science as we maintain U.S. science leadership in space,” said Lisa Carnell, BPS division director at NASA, in an agency statement. In an interview last month , Carnell said she hoped the decadal would have “very targeted priority focus areas” that would guide the agency’s investments in the field. She said she also wanted to see “decision rules” that would guide priorities should funding fall short of the report’s recommendations, an approach used in other NASA science decadal surveys. The decadal survey did include several decision rules based on changes in funding or access to the ISS and future CLDs. Carnell said in the interview that she expected the agency to release a formal, high-level public response to the decadal survey, and host a town hall about it, by early next year.
The three companies with multibillion-dollar contracts to launch Amazons’s Project Kuiper constellation say they are committed to deploying those satellites on schedule despite delays in the development of their vehicles. Amazon announced contracts in April 2022 with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance for up to 83 launches of the Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets to deploy the 3,236-satellite constellation. The contracts combined represent the largest single commercial launch order to date. Amazon made the commitments even though none of the vehicles had launched at the time of the contract signing. All three vehicles have suffered extensive development delays and still have yet to attempt a single launch. The contracting process recently triggered a lawsuit by a pension fund that is an Amazon shareholder against the company’s board of directors . During a Sept. 11 panel at Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week here, executives of the three launch companies said they are getting closer to their vehicles’ first launches. Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, noted that the company had planned the inaugural Vulcan Centaur launch for this spring but delayed it after an incident during a test of a Centaur upper stage where hydrogen fuel leaked from the stage and ignited. The company said in June it would modify the Centaur to increase the thickness of part of the stage to correct the problem, pushing that inaugural launch to some time in the fourth quarter . The replacement Centaur that will be used on the first launch is in “final assembly,” he said, having passed a pressure test that qualifies the changes made to correct the problem seen in the earlier test. “We’ll be shipping the vehicle out to the pad in November and I expect to fly the Vulcan in December.” Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said the company is still working towards a first launch of that rocket in 2024 but did not offer a more precise timeframe. The first flight vehicle will arrive at the integration facility by the end of the year, followed by integrated hot-fire tests. Blue Origin is planning “multiple” launches of New Glenn in 2024, but he did not disclose details about the manifest. “We intend to meet our contractual requirements in ’24,” he said. One of those contracted launches would be for NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars smallsat mission, currently scheduled to launch in August 2024. Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, reiterated comments made by officials at a Sept. 4 briefing where they said the European Space Agency would set a target launch period for Ariane 6 after a long-duration hot-fire test of the core stage planned for early October . That test will follow a successful short-duration test Sept. 5 and an upper-stage firing test Sept. 1. That inaugural flight will come some time in 2024, but he declined to be more specific. “Things are progressing very well. We are very happy,” he said. Ariane 6, like both New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur, had once planned initial launches in 2020. For all three companies, Amazon is their largest commercial customer and perhaps their most impatient one. Under terms of its Federal Communication Commission license, the company must deploy at least half of the constellation by July 2026, giving it less than three years to launch more than 1,800 satellites. The remaining satellites must be in orbit by July 2029. All three executives said they are working to ramp up production and launch operations in order to meet Amazon’s deadline. “We will deliver for Kuiper as quick as possible after the maiden flight,” Israël said. Those launches will not begin with the second Ariane 6 flight, he said, but will start “quickly,” intermixed with launches for institutional customers like ESA. Many of the Kuiper launches will use an upgraded version of the Ariane 6’s solid-fuel boosters that will increase its payload performance, allowing each launch to carry as many as 40 satellites. “We are on track for Kuiper.” Blue Origin also does not plan to fly Kuiper satellites on the initial launches of New Glenn, Jones said. The company has four boosters in various stages of development, each designed to be reused up to 25 times. He said the company was also looking at other ways to double its launch capacity that he did not go into. “We’re not concerned about meeting the contractual requirements for Kuiper.” Bruno said ULA was taking a three-part approach to building up its launch capacity. One step involves infrastructure improvements to increase production of vehicles, an investment he suggested ran into the billions of dollars. A second step, he said, is that ULA will start launching Kuiper satellites on Atlas rockets using a contract it previously signed with ULA. Nine Atlas rockets are allocated to Kuiper, including one expected to launch in the next month carrying two prototype satellites that had been slated to fly on the first Vulcan launch. A third step is stockpiling Vulcan hardware, like boosters, to allow launches to take place rapidly once the vehicle is in service. “When the Kuiper satellites come our way, we’ve already got whole rockets in inventory,” he said. Three other companies on the panel do not have Amazon launch contracts but are working to get new vehicles to orbit. Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said the investigation into the failed inaugural H3 launch in March was completed last month. On that flight, the rocket’s first stage appeared to perform as expected but the second stage failed to ignite. “We defined the corrective actions and some of them were applied to the H-2A launch vehicle last week,” he said, a reference to a successful Sept. 6 launch of an H-2A carrying the XRISM X-ray astronomy satellite and SLIM lunar lander. The next H3 launch is planned before the end of the year. Relativity Space retired its Terran 1 small launch vehicle after a single, unsuccessful flight in March so it could focus on its larger Terran R, now planned for 2026. The experience from Terran 1, said Josh Brost, senior vice president at Relativity, “gives us that confidence to pivot on to this much larger launch system.” Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX, reiterated the comments made by the company and the Federal Aviation Administration Sept. 8 about the status of Starship , now that the FAA has closed its investigation into the failed first launch in April. “From a vehicle readiness perspective, we’re almost there,” he said, as the company works with the FAA on an updated launch license. “We’re real close and we hope we can have a cool, successful test flight real soon.”
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — U.S. chief space operations Gen. Chance Saltzman on Sept. 12 announced the Space Force will experiment with a new command structure where a unit is responsible for all aspects of a mission area, including training, procurement and operations. Two integrated units will be established, each run by a Space Force colonel — one for space electronic warfare; and the other for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) satellites. This is a departure from the current structure where responsibilities for procurement, maintenance, sustainment and operations are fragmented under separate chains of command, Saltzman said in a keynote speech at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference. The Space Force will name these units “integrated mission deltas.” Deltas are Space Force units composed of squadrons focused on specific mission areas. Space electronic warfare includes the operation of satellite jammers and equipment used to detect adversary jamming. The PNT delta will be in charge of maintaining and operating Global Positioning System satellites in support of U.S. military and allies organizations. “The Space Force has come to realize that to be effective; a service must align responsibility, authority, and resources for all aspects of unit readiness,” said Saltzman. “This must be comprehensive and include all activities.” The reorganization will bring together electronic warfare operators from Space Operations Command and those who procure and sustain equipment under the Space Systems Command. PNT satellite operators, similarly, will work side-by-side with PNT satellite maintainers. Saltzman called this an example of necessary change in order to keep up with growing demands for space services and support equipment from deployed forces around the world. “The structuring of people to do their jobs will always create seams,” he said. “The key is to arrange the organization to maximize performance around what matters most.” In an era of strategic competition against rival powers, he said, “we cannot afford to split a mission area’s critical activities across organizational seams. Instead, it is essential that all elements of readiness — people, training, equipment and sustainment — fall into the same organizational structure.” Space Force evolving During a meeting with reporters at the AFA conference, Saltzman further explained the thinking behind these changes. “It’s a recognition that we’ve evolved from our historical origins in Air Force Space Command,” he said. Back when space was viewed as an uncontested domain, “responsibilities for training, sustainment and operations were bifurcated.” “We want to take those elements, pull them all together at the lowest level possible, have a commander that has unity of command around all four of those readiness elements,” Saltzman said. He said space electronic warfare and PNT were selected for the reorganization because these areas are currently not tied to any major acquisitions that would be disrupted by the changes in command structure. “These can be given to the integrated mission delta commander without breaking any big acquisitions,” Saltzman said. “And I wanted to make sure there was no risk in doing this,” he added. “This was the best way to learn some key lessons quickly, by picking those two deltas.” Saltzman said he does not expect the integrated delta structure to weaken the role of the Space Systems Command, which oversees the acquisition and sustainment of major programs. “I’m not worried that suddenly they won’t have anything to do,” he said of Space Systems Command. “There is no end to the work that needs to be done. This is a relatively small organizational shift.” Saltzman pointed out that “unity of command is a principle of war. And when you assign a commander to do something, accountability is very clear, resource utilization is very clear,” he added. “When it’s split across the seams, it’s much harder to hold people responsible.” “So that’s why I’m really comfortable with this,” Saltzman said. “If I don’t like the way something is working, I know exactly who to hold responsible and there’s value in that from a military perspective.”
Phase Four’s Maxwell Block 2 radio-frequency thruster has been demonstrated on a commercial satellite. “It’s in space and its actually working great,” Umair Siddiqui, Phase Four chief technology officer, told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. “No issues with that system.” Phase Four is not yet revealing the name of the satellite customer. Maxwell Block 2 draws on the heritage of Phase Four’s Block 1 thruster first demonstrated in orbit in 2021. The primary difference between Block 1 and Block 2 is the new thruster’s modularity. “Block 1 was packed into a tiny form factor,” Siddiqui said. “Block 2 has taken the components and basically turned them into a Mr. Potato Head of systems. In other words, we can separate the components.” In addition, Maxwell Block 2 is designed for mass manufacturing and “is higher performing than Block 1 without increasing input power,” Siddiqui said. “It’s designed to directly compete with Hall-effect thrusters.” In a vacuum chamber in Hawthorne, California, Phase Four is testing Maxwell Block 3. Each new Block is “an iteration on the core product we’ve been developing since 2018,” Siddiqui said. “As we go through iterations, we get performance improvements and operational improvements.” Maxwell Block 3 “has achieved the performance with krypton that’s equivalent thrust ISP [specific impulse] to a Hall-effect thruster,” Siddiqui said. “It’s the first time any cathodeless thruster has been able to achieve that.” Phase Four plans to begin delivering Block 3 to customers in June 2024. All Maxwell thrusters are designed to operate on either xenon or krypton propellant. In spite of higher xenon prices, Phase Four’s early customers chose xenon for their small satellites. Phase Four’s latest customers are opting for larger satellites with larger propellant tanks. “Now, they’re trending toward krypton, which is good for us because our thruster works better on krypton than it does on xenon,” Siddiqui said. “Now, they’re trending toward krypton, which is good for us because our thruster works better on krypton than it does on xenon,” Siddiqui said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat expects to decide whether to proceed with plans for a medium Earth orbit (MEO) constellation early next year after requesting proposals from nine satellite makers, an executive for the geostationary fleet operator said Sept. 12. The company expects to get responses back in October from a mix of traditional and startup manufacturers, chief financial officer Toby O’Brien told SpaceNews on the sidelines of Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris. “We’re continuing to work through the business case and funding profile” for an initial network of 18 MEO satellites, O’Brien said, and “we’re about six months away — roughly, give or take, from a final decision on the constellation.” The constellation could be funded from a portion of the $3.7 billion the operator is due in October for clearing C-band spectrum ahead of the Federal Communications Commission’s deadline, in addition to the roughly $1 billion already received in interim payments. Under commitments with lenders, O’Brien said Intelsat must spend half these clearing proceeds on paying down debt that stood at $7 billion when the operator emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. Some of the C-band clearing proceeds are also going toward financing five geostationary satellites Intelsat has on order that he said should all be in orbit by the end of 2026: IS-41 and IS-44 from Thales Alenia Space, IS-42 and IS-43 from Airbus, and the much smaller IS-45 coming from 3D printing specialist Swissto12. If Intelsat sticks to the plan to decide whether to pursue MEO satellites in early 2024, O’Brien said the company envisages deploying the constellation in 2027 for services at some point that year. Intelsat announced Sept. 12 it had invested in Google spin-off Aalyria, which is developing optical communications technology that O’Brien said its MEO network could use. He said the undisclosed financial commitment from Intelsat would help Aalyria accelerate the development of antennas for optical space-to-ground communications, which the venture plans to demonstrate next year with funding from the U.S. government. Multi-orbit opportunities Speaking on a World Satellite Business Week panel Sept. 12, Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial satellite at Northrop Grumman, described MEO as the next big opportunity for the industry. “I think the combination of reduced latency and higher resiliency is going to be a real opportunity in space,” he said, “and I know a number of operators are looking at how they exploit that space with the most efficiency and economic return.” Coming alongside Intelsat’s GEO network and the low Earth orbit (LEO) services to be provided in partnership with OneWeb, O’Brien said MEO satellites would help further differentiate the company’s products to serve emerging connectivity needs. The potential MEO expansion also comes after Intelsat achieved top-line growth for the first time in a decade in 2022, driven mainly by commercial aviation and government business. The company is projecting another year of growth for 2023. Intelsat had previously considered merging its GEO network with SES, which operates geostationary and MEO satellites — and is challenging the operator’s share of C-band proceeds. Merger talks broke down in June for reasons unrelated to any progress Intelsat has been making either operationally or financially, according to O’Brien, who said the companies were ultimately unable to “construct something that was mutually agreeable by both sides.” O’Brien also said Intelsat has no concerns about accessing OneWeb’s capacity as the company is on the verge of being sold to Eutelsat. Intelsat’s agreement with OneWeb does not cover a second-generation constellation that Eutelsat is jointly considering with the LEO operator for deployments as early as 2025.
PARIS – In six months, Portuguese startup NeuraSpace has gone from 25 to 250 satellites on its space traffic management platform. “For NeuraSpace, the ball is rolling,” Chiara Manfletti, NeuraSpace chief operating officer, told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. The latest customer is South Africa’s Dragonfly Aerospace. Dragonfly announced plans Sept. 11 to rely on NeuraSpace for conjunction analysis and maneuver suggestions for Dragonfly’s EOS SAT-1. EOS-SAT-1 is the first of seven satellites Dragonfly plans to launch to gather agriculture and forestry data. “For us to partner with Dragonfly, a truly commercial company, where they see added value in our product, this is fantastic,” Manfletti said. Dragonfly CEO Bryan Dean said in a statement, “The partnership between Dragonfly Aerospace and Neuraspace represents a crucial step forward in our commitment to sustainable space exploration. We are excited to leverage the Neuraspace STM platform to ensure the safety and increased operational efficiency and longevity of EOS SAT-1.” NeuraSpace, founded in 2020, offers satellite collision avoidance systems supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning. For space traffic management, “there isn’t a single source of data which is almighty,” Manfletti said. “You will only have great insight when you bring different sources of data together. That philosophy means that we’re always hungry for data that can give us an edge in resolving the pain of a customer.” NeuraSpace is “slowly but surely seeing how machine learning can bring benefits to advancing and automating processes, data science and data mining,” Manfletti said. Automation is another pillar of NeuraSpace’s business. “I strongly believe in moving towards autonomous spacecraft,” Manfletti said. “We want to optimize the use of resources and help satellites protect themselves without the human oversight 24/7.”
DLA Piper, an international law firm that advises space industry companies and investors, announced Sept. 12 it is expanding its legal practice focused on space. The firm’s new Space Exploration and Innovation Practice “is an umbrella practice for all of DLA Piper’s legal consulting with clients in the space sector; it formalizes its existing work in the sector into a one-stop shop for current and future clients,” a spokesperson said. Commercial space companies have increasingly more complex needs that require a holistic approach to providing legal services, said Christian Ford, a DLA Piper partner based in Houston who oversees the space practice. “Our team understands the challenges commercial space companies face every day in an industry marked by tremendous growth, rapid innovation, and regulatory uncertainty,” said Ford. Commercialization of space The rapid commercialization of space technologies creates challenges for companies that are not familiar with government regulations, intellectual property and contracting laws, he said. “It used to be that we had a small number of contractors that would really be the lifeline of the space industry. And that model has completely changed,” Ford added. The globalization of the industry also is fueling a demand for legal services to deal with cross-border issues, he said. Space industry supply chains, for example, are often multinational. The role of the commercial space industry in support of national security is another trend expected to grow, said Ford. “It used to be that the relationship between commercial and defense was much more limited,” he said. The U.S. government, for example, is increasingly relying on commercial space capabilities. “And so the relationship is getting more complex, certainly from a regulatory standpoint because of the expanding commercialization, and you see this globally.”
Arianespace will launch a small geostationary communication satellite for Intelsat on an Ariane 6 in 2026, a sign of a stable, but diminished, role for such satellites in the commercial launch market. Arianespace announced Sept. 12 it signed a contract with Intelsat to launch the IS-45 satellite in the first half of 2026. The satellite will fly with unnamed co-passengers on the more powerful version of the Ariane 6, the Ariane 64. Intelsat ordered IS-45 last November from Swissto12 , a Swiss company that has developed 3D-printing technologies for space systems. The one-ton satellite will carry a payload of 12 Ku-band transponders. The satellite is based on the HummingSat platform that Swissto12 developed with support from the European Space Agency. Arianespace and Intelsat noted that the IS-45 contract comes nearly 40 years after Arianespace conducted its first launch for Intelsat, placing the Intelsat 507 satellite into GEO in October 1983. The GEO satellite launch market has changed significantly over the four decades since Intelsat 507. Such satellites once formed the core of the commercial launch market, with 20 to 25 satellites a year on average being launched. That demand, though, has dropped in recent years amid the shift to broadband constellations in low Earth orbit. “It’s a huge change,” said Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, during a panel at Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 11. “You have less and less, and the satellites ordered are not as heavy as they used to be.” Launch companies say that the commercial GEO market remains important to them despite a decline in orders. “We see that market pretty stable at about 10 launches per year,” said Tory Bruno, chief executive of United Launch Alliance. Those satellites, he said, will increasingly be part of multi-orbit systems working with LEO constellations. “I think that market stays pretty stable.” “It’s still a significant part of what we do,” said Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX. “There’s aways been this narrative of GEO launches going away. I don’t see that.” However, the executives acknowledged that the bigger driver of launch demand is for broadband constellations. Bruno noted that the design of such constellations requires a steady pace of launches as old satellites are replaced on a rolling basis even after the system is completed. “With the megaconstellations in LEO, that is the dominant market by far.” “We need the constellations,” Israël said. “GEO is still here, but definitely constellations are the stronger engine now for growth.”
With sights set on the world’s most lucrative space and defense market, many overseas companies have set up shop in the United States. Notable successes include European firms like BAE Systems and Airbus, which have become prominent members of the U.S. industrial base. Following in their footsteps are a new crop of overseas space and intelligence companies seeking to fill U.S. government demand for cutting-edge commercial technologies. “Our goal is to move deeper and deeper into government work,” said Tyler Browder, CEO of Exotrail U.S. Browder runs the newly formed U.S. subsidiary of France-based Exotrail, a manufacturer of satellite propulsion systems and developer of orbital transfer vehicles known as space tugs. Exotrail, for years, has exported satellite thrusters and other hardware to U.S. customers. Still, the company decided to set roots in the United States to compete for government contracts requiring domestic production. “We’ve watched other European companies come to the United States. We studied what they’ve done, what’s worked,” said Browder. U.S. defense and national security agencies are sending a “powerful message” that they welcome innovation developed elsewhere, particularly from partner nations, said Brian Holt, a former U.S. Space Force procurement official and now head of Exotrail’s U.S. government business development. The U.S. chief of space operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman, has promoted the concept of “partnering to win,” Holt noted. “It’s the idea that space is seen from a global perspective, that the U.S. might not be able to meet all the demands, and that there are extremely capable partners out there that can provide things.” Also illustrating a more welcoming attitude toward non-U.S. firms is the Space Force’s Hyperspace Challenge technology accelerator, which this year is co-sponsored by the secretive Space Rapid Capabilities Office. The Hyperspace Challenge on its website says it “encourages non-U.S. organizations with relevant innovations to apply. We realize there can be significant challenges faced when the U.S. DoD works with non-U.S. companies, but our goal will be to overcome those challenges.” This is a sign of a remarkable “change in culture,” said Holt. Jerry Welsh, an industry expert who advises U.S. and foreign companies, said more space companies are U.S.-bound, not just to chase government contracts. Welsh previously ran the U.S. subsidiary of Iceye, a Finland-based radar satellite operator that supplies imagery and data analytics services to U.S. intelligence agencies. “Because of the proliferation of venture-backed global space companies, the term ‘foreign’ starts to lose relevance,” he said. “There are U.S. companies with non-U.S. investors and executives; non-U.S. companies that have a U.S. entity with U.S. citizens.” Welsh cautions space companies entering the U.S. government market to perform an objective assessment of their capabilities relative to U.S. agencies’ demand signals, operational needs, budgets and congressional support, he said. “Based on this assessment, they can then define a clear go-to-market strategy with execution and financial plans.” In general, the climate for foreign-owned companies has improved in recent years, Welsh said. Over the past year, the National Reconnaissance Office, a U.S. intelligence agency that has not typically worked with foreign firms, has signed multiple agreements with commercial remote sensing companies, including foreign firms with American subsidiaries. “These changes may seem subtle, but it feels like they have put out the welcome mat,” Welsh said. “I don’t think we would have seen that two or three years ago.” To do classified work, a company has to meet requirements set by the Defense Department’s National Industrial Security Program. A foreign-owned company has to undergo an extensive regulatory review conducted by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, known as FOCI mitigation, short for Foreign Ownership, Control or Influence. To pass this review, FOCI firms must establish a mitigation agreement to ensure that secret U.S. information is not compromised. “If the business plan includes FOCI mitigation, it’s best to start as early as possible as it is often the long pole in the tent,” Welsh said. BAE Systems, a U.K.-based firm that is one of the six largest suppliers to the U.S. Department of Defense, mitigated its foreign ownership through a so-called Special Security Agreement with the U.S. government. Airbus U.S. Space and Defense also operates under this type of agreement. A Special Security Agreement is the most commonly used FOCI mitigation instrument. Under this agreement, the foreign owner maintains control, but decisions are handled by a U.S. board of directors that sets policies to prevent unauthorized access by the parent company to classified or export-controlled information. Foreign control is turned over to a U.S. proxy holder or trustee under other mitigation vehicles, such as a proxy or a voting trust agreement. “I advise companies to assess the viability of their solution relative to U.S. government demand signals so that they don’t over-invest,” Welsh said. “A company may decide to focus solely on selling to U.S. commercial customers and partners, negating the need for FOCI mitigation.” Space Forge, a U.K.-based space firm developing reusable satellites for on-orbit manufacturing, announced plans to establish U.S. operations earlier this year. Andrew Parlock, managing director of Space Forge’s U.S. manufacturing operations, said the process of becoming a U.S. government contractor is not the same for every foreign firm. “Each company has to go through its own journey,” he said. Parlock, who previously was director of business operations at Iceye, said the U.S. government wants to work with “friendly nations, nations that are historic allies, to bring capability to the U.S.” . As one of the largest organizations to go through the process, BAE led the way to go through FOCI mitigation and create a separate U.S. entity, Parlock said. “Iceye has done it. Certainly, Space Forge is going to go down that path and make sure that we follow the process that the U.S. government has established, as amorphous and as gray as that process can be at times.” Ken Campbell, a former director of national security engagement at Maxar Technologies, now runs the U.S. arm of Israel-based Edgybees. Commercial and government organizations use Edgybees’ software to georeference satellite images and other data. Georeferencing means adding geographic information to an image to verify the location of an object of interest. Campbell said that Edgybees takes a raw image and aligns it with its exact position on Earth. Edgybees’ goal to penetrate the U.S. defense and intelligence market led the company to establish a domestic presence, and recently announced appointments to its U.S. board of directors, Campbell said. Campbell added that establishing relationships with U.S. government agencies and prime contractors requires a physical presence where decisions are made and contracts are awarded. That’s not possible “if you’re thousands of miles away.” “First, you send white papers and respond to requests for proposals,” he said. “But the final effort comes from personal interaction either with the prime contractors or directly with the customer. It’s hard to do that over a Zoom conference.” In the geospatial intelligence sector of the market where Edgybees competes, sometimes customers require company engineers and software developers to work at government locations, “so you have to have people in the U.S. to meet those needs,” Campbell said. Some agencies in the U.S. government have become increasingly open to working with foreign firms, he said. “They understand that when you have a ‘not built here’ mentality, you limit yourself, and there’s a lot of great technology that’s being built by overseas companies.” Campbell said DoD and the intelligence community can greatly benefit from the democratization of space. Space companies outside the United States are developing capabilities at increasingly lower prices, “and they have an opportunity to inject themselves into the competitive process,” he added. “You’re seeing this with SAR [synthetic aperture radar] satellite imaging in particular, and other forms of remote sensing.” Based in Belgium, Aerospacelab manufactures small satellites and sees the U.S. market as a significant growth opportunity. The company recently named Tina Ghataore as chief executive of Aerospacelab North America, the company’s newly formed U.S. subsidiary. Ghataore, three years ago, helped stand up U.S. operations for Germany’s Mynaric, a provider of laser communications terminals for satellites and other platforms. Mynaric is now a key supplier of terminals to defense contractors producing satellites for the U.S. military. Ghataore sees a similar path ahead for Aerospacelab, which is preparing to open a mega factory in Belgium and is eyeing U.S. commercial and government customers for its satellite buses and payloads. “The real traction on the smallsat side and the market demand has been coming from the United States,” Ghataore said. “And we think we can capitalize on all the investments that have already been made in Belgium.” Although there is abundant domestic production of smallsats today, Ghataore said there is room in the market for a couple of new players, given the demand signals coming from DoD, NASA and commercial firms. One of Aerospacelab’s first U.S. customers is Albedo, a remote-sensing startup planning to establish an optical and thermal imaging constellation in very-low Earth orbit. Ghataore said the company is still developing a strategy for its U.S. operations and has yet to decide whether it will need to pursue a FOCI mitigation agreement. She said that the path forward will be determined by the type of work and customers Aerospacelab pursues in the United States. “What I’m trying to do is take really small measured steps to look at the markets that can be penetrated first.” From a security standpoint, a key concern for both U.S. and European manufacturers is ensuring there are no “bad actors in our supply chains,” Ghataore noted. “And that’s going to get even more scrutiny as we work with the U.S.” Belgium is one of 23 countries with reciprocal defense procurement agreements with the United States, allowing DoD to treat these countries as domestic producers under the Buy American Act. The countries currently qualified under such agreements are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Many European suppliers can sell to the U.S. under these Buy American Act provisions, Ghataore said. However, certain DoD programs require domestic production, which would drive decisions on establishing a manufacturing facility in the U.S. Aerospacelab expects to ramp up operations over the next two years, she said. The plan is to be ready to fill a projected surge in demand for smallsats in the 2024 to 2025 timeframe. Welsh, the industry adviser, said he expects more overseas space companies to venture into the U.S. market as commercial and government programs move into the “next exciting phase of technology and innovation.” Earth observation remains a key target market for foreign firms, he said. “There has been sequential interest in commercial space companies providing RGB [red, green and blue] optical, SAR and hyperspectral imaging modes.” Emerging areas where the NRO is likely to invest include thermal and LiDAR (light detection and ranging), he added. “The U.S. government is ultimately interested in unique capabilities from commercial providers as long as they have met relevant security and regulatory requirements,” Welsh said. “Artificial perception barriers have existed at times,” he said. “But these seem to have decreased as foreign-based space companies brought new innovation, opportunities and jobs to the U.S.” Welsh also sees the nascent in-space services sector — including satellite services, transportation, situational awareness and logistics — as a major opportunity. Exotrail’s U.S. CEO Browder said the company expects its first major investment in the U.S. will be a facility to manufacture thrusters and also to integrate space tug vehicles so that U.S. customers won’t have to ship their satellites to Europe for integration and then back to the U.S. for launch. “We definitely see a lot of traction in the U.S.,” he said. This article originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
PARIS – Comtech Telecommunications, a company known for providing satellite and terrestrial communications equipment and services, announced plans Sept. 12 to provide government and commercial customers with communications networks established “in a matter of hours.” Through BRIDGE solutions, Comtech is offering “portable, adaptable, full-service communications networks” to help bridge gaps in satellite and terrestrial infrastructure, according to a Sept. 12 news release. BRIDGE solutions is intended “to meet the urgent needs” of “emergency service providers, remote communities, military operators and maritime customers.” (BRIDGE stands for blended, resilient, integrated, digital, global, end-to-end.) The “infrastructure, cloud and application agnostic” BRIDGE solutions “can continuously evolve over time to meet emerging government and commercial” demands, according to the news release published at World Satellite Business Week. BRIDGE solutions reveals an important shift underway at Comtech, a Melville, New York-based company that has acquired more than a dozen communications technology businesses over decades. Comtech is “finding that we can pull capability from across our enterprise and be the connective tissue between ecosystems that historically have been independent and now are converging together,” Ken Peterman, Comtech chairman, president and CEO, told SpaceNews. Hybrid networks that include satellites in various orbits are one example of convergence. In addition, Peterman pointed to the convergence of satellite and terrestrial networks. Further convergence of geospatial and satellite communications networks is on the way, he added. “We’re looking at the ability to seamlessly get information all the way to the edge, so that insight is available and actionable with as low latency as possible,” Peterman said. When Peterman became Comtech president and CEO a little more than a year ago, the company was comprised of “14 siloed businesses operating independently to a large degree on their own tools, processes and systems.” Since then, Comtech has merged the siloed business units, allowing them to share resources. “Bringing these 14 silo businesses together, reduces costs substantially and improves our efficiency,” Peterman said. “The second thing it does is enables us to operate collaboratively.” An engine for that collaboration is the Evoke innovation foundry established in 2022. There, Comtech’s “most entrepreneurial and innovative engineers” figure out how to bring together the company’s various technologies and capabilities to build new subsystems and systems, Peterman said. “In collaborative workshops, we identify the customer challenges and put our collective technologies to work to create a more comprehensive value proposition for that customer,” Peterman said. “We’re finding significant growth opportunities there.” Collaborative workshops often lead to pilot projects “where we demonstrate something so a customer can empirically assess how it increases their customer experience and how it improves their financial performance.” Peterman said. “We can move from there to actually tailoring a BRIDGE solution on a customer-by-customer basis.”
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said his department is comfortable working with SpaceX despite recent reports about Elon Musk restricting the use of the company’s Starlink satellite services in Ukraine. During a news conference Sept. 11 at the Air Space & Cyber conference, Kendall said he could not comment on reports — from news media and from Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson — that SpaceX’s boss thwarted Ukrainian forces by shutting off Starlink’s satellite network over Crimea — a territory occupied by Russia that Ukraine was fighting to reclaim. Kendall said he is not familiar with the terms of SpaceX’s agreement with Ukraine. But he said any company that signs a contract with DoD, including one run by a powerful billionaire, would be expected to comply with the terms of that contract. If DoD is going to rely on commercial space services from any company, during peacetime or wartime, it would expect those services to be available, he said. The U.S. Air Force and other DoD organizations have acquired Starlink internet services under various contracts and have not experienced problems, Kendall noted. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, SpaceX provided Starlink services at its own expense and through an agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Most recently, DoD has signed agreements with SpaceX and other satellite communications services providers to support Ukraine. Kendall said he has not seen those contracts but would expect them to be clear on what’s expected from providers. “The Department of Defense relies on enforceable and executable contracts,” said Kendall. “And whoever owns the company has to follow the contract.” Reliable launch provider While the Air Force is quite comfortable relying on SpaceX for launch services, said Kendall, “Starlink is a relatively new” product and the government is still learning about its capabilities. Being dependent on large and powerful companies is not unusual for DoD, Kendall noted. “We’re highly dependent on other companies like Lockheed Martin.” As a launch provider, SpaceX has been a “reliable competitor,” he said. “They’ve brought prices down … and their launches have been pretty reliable so far.” Today, only United Launch Alliance competes with SpaceX for national security launches. Kendall said he hopes to see other competitors like Blue Origin enter the market. He said Space Force procurement executive Frank Calvelli is working with Congress to finalize the details of the next national security space launch procurement , known as NSSL Phase 3. “We’re gonna have robust competition and pretty reliable capabilities,” said Kendall. “I’m not really concerned about that. But then again, business relationships are about executable, enforceable contracts. And I think we’re pretty good at writing contracts and enforcing our contracts.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The arrival of SpaceX’s broadband service has transformed satellite communications and what customers expect from other companies in the market, executives on a panel of legacy operators said Sept. 11. “The reality is Starlink has had a real impact on the market,” Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg told Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris. The low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network has transformed what customers expect from user terminals, Goldberg added, including what they look like, how much they should cost, and how much work they should be to set up. Starlink’s popularity is also lowering what customers expect to pay for connectivity, increasing demand for ubiquitous coverage, and pushing the industry away from traditionally long-term contract commitments. However, Goldberg said customers are calling for more competition in the market, which the Canadian geostationary operator hopes to provide in 2027 with recently funded plans for a LEO constellation. Industrializing and bringing down costs in the launch sector was one of SpaceX’s biggest innovations, Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said, and operators need to adapt to a similar shake-up in satellite connectivity. Eutelsat is closing in on buying OneWeb’s LEO network as it seeks to meet the growing demand it sees for lower latency connectivity from space. Berneke agreed that satellite connectivity is not a “winner takes all” market because of the need for sovereign and redundant networks. “On the other hand, I don’t think you’re going to have 10s or 20s,” she said. The spectrum these companies use is a finite resource distributed to first movers, meaning “it is going to be somewhat more painful to launch later with a lower priority.” Berneke said the rush to get other satellite broadband constellations to non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) to follow Starlink and OneWeb will help define the industry over the coming decade. “But we cannot do it without a supply chain that becomes super competitive with us,” Berneke warned, “and I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges that this industry needs to solve.” Price erosion Demand for connectivity is increasing but operators also need to be cautious about pricing pressure from a flood of capacity to meet it, according to Ruy Pinto, CEO of SES with satellites in GEO and medium Earth orbit. “[W]e as an industry have had any issue of underestimating the price erosion, and the amount of capacity and competition that is hitting us every year,” Pinto said. Instead of focusing head-to-head in areas with “almost predatory pricing,” he said SES is prioritizing regions where it can provide a differentiated service, such as through specialized government partnerships. “I don’t think that retreating into segments that are protected is an enduring answer,” said Mark Dankberg, CEO of U.S.-based geostationary operator Viasat, which recently acquired Inmarsat of the U.K. to expand globally. He said Viasat sees lots of opportunities built on heterogeneous fleets in GEO and NGSO. However, there are big questions about how much room there is in LEO and how those resources are shared, according to Dankberg, who said they can be partly solved by releasing more information on spectrum footprints and other details to help other operators and countries make more informed decisions. Space sustainability is becoming an increasingly important topic for all satellite operators as the number of satellites in NGSO soars, Eutelsat’s Berneke said. She called on the industry to come together to revise how companies should operate and share spectrum, rather than sit back and wait for regulators to step in on their behalf.
PARIS – Ball Aerospace won a $486.9 million contract to deliver a sounder for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Extended Observations satellite program. Under the cost-plus-award-fee contract awarded by NASA announced Sept. 11, Ball will build and deliver one GeoXO sounder, integrate it with the next-generation NOAA weather satellite and provide support for the first flight instrument. The contract includes options for additional sounders. “The anticipated period of performance for this contract includes support for 10 years of on-orbit operations and five years of on-orbit storage, for a total of 15 years for each flight instrument,” according to the NASA-NOAA news release. Ball’s work will be performed at the company’s facility in Boulder, Colorado, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The GeoXO Sounder, known as GXS, is a hyperspectral infrared instrument designed to detect infrared light and provide “real-time information about the vertical distribution of atmospheric moisture, temperature, and winds over the Western Hemisphere,” according to the news release. The National Weather Service expects GXS data to improve numerical weather prediction and short-term forecasts of convection and severe weather. GXS data also is likely to help the National Hurricane Center improve hurricane track and intensity forecasts. The GeoXO program, the follow-on to the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites – R Series program, is expected to be gathering data in the early 2030s. NOAA selected L3Harris in March to provide the imager instrument for the satellites under a $765.5 million contract. NOAA requested $417.4 million for GeoXO in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal. NOAA funds and manages the GeoXO program, operations and data products. NASA works with commercial partners to develop and build the instruments and spacecraft in addition to launching the satellites.
PARIS – The biggest question in the satellite communications market is the potential value of the direct-to-cellphone business. Given the number of people who lack reliable terrestrial network connectivity, the addressable market is worth “$100 billion or even more,” Euroconsult managing director Nathan de Ruiter said Sept. 11 at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. It’s unclear, though, how long it will take for the direct-to-cellphone market to develop given significant challenges in terms of device compatibility, spectrum availability and service affordability. Many of the people who live outside terrestrial networks have little disposable income. In spite of all that uncertainty, this is “clearly one of the key market opportunities for our sector,” de Ruiter said. In terms of current satellite communications opportunities, Euroconsult’s anticipates “exponential growth in global capacity,” de Ruiter said. Fixed satellite service capacity is expected to surge sevenfold, from 28 terabits per second in 2023 to 195 terabits per second in 2028. Nongeostationary orbit constellations like Starlink and Oneweb are expected to provide much of the additional capacity. Expanded supply will create downward pressure on pricing. Satellite service revenues are also climbing. Euroconsult expects the value of the global satellite services market to jump from $107 billion in 2022 to $123 billion by 2032. Specifically, Euroconsult anticipates data-services revenues nearly tripling, from $19 billion in 2022 to $53 billion in 2032. Video demand, meanwhile, is likely to dip about 20 percent from $88 billion to $70 billion. In spite of the generally optimistic forecast, Euroconsult sees turbulence ahead as a result of intense competition, a rapidly changing ecosystem and rising insurance costs. De Ruiter called the string of recent anomalies in geostationary orbit “unprecedented,” adding that problems experienced by the Astranis-built Arcturus satellite , Inmarsat 6 F2 and Viasat-3 Americas “clearly will impact the insurance market.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Thaicom has picked Airbus to deliver an Asia-focused spacecraft in 2027, putting the manufacturer ahead of the pack for geostationary communications satellite wins so far this year after leaving 2022 empty-handed. Airbus said Sept. 11 that Thaicom-10 would be the Thai operator’s first satellite with a software-defined payload, enabling the company to adjust capacity and coverage while in orbit to adapt to changes in demand. Eutelsat has agreed to lease half the Ku-band satellite’s capacity at 119.5 degrees East, which the French operator said would give it around 50 gigabits per second in extra capacity over Asia. The companies did not disclose contract terms for Thaicom-10 or their partnership. Speaking on a panel Sept. 11 during Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris, Thaicom CEO Patompob Suwansiri said Eutelsat’s capacity would be focused on maritime and aviation, while the Thai operator would focus on inland markets. He said the collaboration deal with Eutelsat was more than a year in the making and would provide the foundation for partnerships elsewhere. Commercial GEO satcoms tally The high throughput satellite marks the ninth order for Airbus’ recently introduced reconfigurable OneSat product line. Airbus also won an order for OneSat earlier this year from an undisclosed customer, Airbus Defence and Space spokesperson Ralph Heinrich said. Separately, Emirati fleet operator Yahsat signed a contract June 16 with Airbus to begin early work on two geostationary communications satellites: Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5, slated for launch in 2027 and 2028, respectively. The Authorization-To-Proceed (ATP) agreement covers system requirements review, design work, procurement activities for long-lead items, and other initial activities. The full procurement contract for these satellites is pending the finalization of a long-term deal to sell their services to the Emirati government. Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5 would be based on the manufacturer’s benchmark Eurostar Neo platform, Heinrich said, which uses a traditional “bent pipe” architecture that can be more efficient in areas where demand is more certain. In April, U.S.-based Dish Network ordered a geostationary satellite from Maxar Technologies to expand high-definition broadcast services over North America. Californian satellite manufacturing startup Astranis and Swissto12, a 3D printing venture based in Switzerland, have also announced contracts this year as part of a new breed of smaller, more regionally focused geostationary spacecraft. Astranis said March 14 that Mexican telco Apco Networks had ordered two satellites launching in 2024 and that UtilitySat, slated to launch with SpaceX before the end of this year, will partly serve as an initial replacement for Alaskan telco Pacific Dataport following the failure of its debut spacecraft. Viasat-owned Inmarsat ordered three small satellites from Swissto12 in May for a launch in 2026. Thales Alenia Space, Airbus’ European rival that won seven of last year’s orders , has not announced an order so far in 2023 for a commercial satellite communications spacecraft destined for geostationary orbit (GEO). Didier Radola, head of satcom programs at Airbus Defence and Space, told SpaceNews in February that the company hoped to capture as many as six of the roughly 15 GEOs he expected to be tendered in 2023.
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat has contracted 14 launches from SpaceX starting in mid-2026 to deploy its entire Lightspeed broadband constellation within a year, the Canadian satellite operator said Sept. 11. Each Falcon 9 rocket could carry up to 18 of the 750-kilogram low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites Canada’s MDA is building — or 252 in total, although the number per launch would vary depending on the orbital plane. Telesat ordered 198 satellites from MDA last month after announcing funding commitments for 156 of them, enough to provide initial multi-terabit polar and global services. The operator says the roughly $800 million needed to finance another 42 satellites to densify coverage and expand capacity could come from early Lightspeed revenues, or via incremental funding sources ahead of launching commercial LEO services in late 2027. Lightspeed will be deployed from SpaceX’s launch facilities in California and Florida, Telesat added, leveraging the company’s high launch cadence to deploy the satellites rapidly following funding and production delays. The operator also has agreements with Blue Origin and Relativity Space for launching LEO satellites with rockets still under development. “We continue to be in close contact with Blue Origin and believe they will become a valued launch provider,” Telesat spokesperson Lynette Simmons said, adding that it is important for the company to retain launch optionality. She said Telesat did not intend to use Relativity for the initial constellation deployment. Instead, Telesat would use the 3D printing specialist for single satellite launches to replace a satellite or add to the constellation. Mass manufacturing Telesat switched to MDA after supply chain issues caused more delays for a constellation it initially planned to start launching in 2020. Dan Goldberg, Telesat’s CEO, said in a recent interview with SpaceNews that he expects MDA will start producing one satellite a day for Lightspeed around this time next year. Speaking on a panel Sept. 11 during Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris, Goldberg said MDA is currently trying to procure 800 optical terminals for the constellation. “I think it’ll be the biggest order of optical terminals in history,” he said. Each Lightspeed satellite would have four optical terminals, enabling secure and resilient broadband connectivity focused on serving enterprise and government customers. Around $1.6 billion of the total $3.5 billion cost for an initial 156 Lightspeed satellites is being funded via Telesat equity, with the remaining coming from Canadian federal and provincial financing commitments.
Telesat finally has funds for a low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network after pivoting to smaller but equally capable satellites from MDA following production issues at Thales Alenia Space. MDA announced a contract Aug. 11 to deliver 198 satellites for Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation for launches starting in mid-2026 — six years later than the Canadian operator had originally planned to expand out of geostationary orbit (GEO). Telesat had held off picking a manufacturer until 2021 to get a better deal on parts, only for Thales Alenia Space to run into pandemic-related supply chain issues that derailed the project. MDA’s satellites would be about 75% smaller at 750 kilograms each. Telesat has said the $3.5 billion it has already lined up in equity and Canadian federal and provincial financing is enough for 156 of them, enabling initial polar and global services. Key to the cheaper satellite design is digital beam-forming array antennas that Telesat had initially deemed too immature for the constellation, which would also at least be partially deployed by Blue Origin and Relativity Space rockets that are still under development. As OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink seek to densify already operational LEO networks, and while Amazon prepares to begin deploying Project Kuiper around the same time as Lightspeed, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg talks to SpaceNews about the 50-year-old company’s attitude to risk as it races to get its LEO plans back on track. What are the next steps now you have the funding for a LEO constellation after all these years? We’re working intensively with MDA to launch the program and finalizing contracts with other vendors. We’ll make additional announcements around launch providers, ground segment providers, and things like that soon. We’re hiring a ton across the company and now have something much more concrete to speak with the customer community about. So it’s finally all about execution across all those different fronts. Does the plan call for more prototypes, or will the next launch for Lightspeed be full-scale satellites? The first launch will be the actual satellites, although maybe we’ll launch just a couple of them and do a bunch of in-orbit testing and whatnot before getting on a very active launch cadence to populate the constellation. When does MDA expect to kickstart mass production? They plan to be capable of producing two satellites a day, although it’s just one daily in your agreement. My expectation is mass production will probably be in the middle of the second half of 2025. You have previously talked about launch agreements with Blue Origin and Relativity Space. Is that still the plan? We have those arrangements in place, and we’ve got another announcement that’ll be coming as well [Telesat announced a contract with SpaceX Sep. 11 for 14 Falcon 9 launches , enough for deploying the entire constellation]. Rockets from the two you’ve announced [before SpaceX] are still in development. What are you hearing from them and others about whether the launch capacity will be there for Lightspeed? I’d say Blue Origin is the more meaningful of the two we’ve announced so far, and based on everything we’re seeing from them, I think New Glenn will be totally available for us when we start launching mid-2026. They have a different approach than some others out there, potentially, just in terms of how they move forward with their development, but they’re good. They’re doing all the right things, have very capable people, are well-financed, and their facilities are very advanced. To get up to speed, can MDA take advantage of any of the early work Thales might have done while you were waiting to close the financing — where were they with the project? We had done a lot of work with Thales, and they were trying to build prototypes and things. The reality, though, is not really. First off, MDA was always building the antenna, even when we were on the Thales path. The antenna they’re going to be building now is a digital beam-forming antenna. The one they were going to build before was analog. In addition to building the antenna, they’re also building the bus and the onboard processor, which will be their own design. So it’s not leveraging anything that Thales did. There was other work that Thales was doing on the original path, mostly around software development that’s customer-facing and software that relates to the operation of the system. I think we’ll certainly be able to leverage some of those things. COVID-19 didn’t help supply chains and production, but why was it so difficult to close the financing for the constellation on the Thales path? You’re right; COVID was a real kick in the teeth. It did two things: It adversely impacted schedule because of all the supply chain issues, and it adversely impacted the cost that we thought we were going to incur on the Thales path, just because of all the inflation that also came in the wake of COVID. It was less than two years ago that Thales informed us that the schedule and the [$5 billion] program cost that we had been talking about was something they were no longer going to be able to support. It then took six, seven months just to get an updated proposal. They had to go all the way back out to their supply chain, and it was tricky to get suppliers to hold up their hand and get firm, fixed prices because we were in this inflationary environment. We looked at different funding sources to fill that gap, including talking to some equity investors. In any event, I think we would have gotten there. We were making progress, but we were also in parallel exploring whether there was a more cost-effective way to move forward with the constellation, which was when we hit upon a really compelling alternative with MDA. That took sometime. We had to get our heads around whether the digital beam-forming antenna was ready for primetime. Telesat is pretty methodical and maybe not the most risk-embracing organization on the face of the Earth. We started late last year to really start to explore this MDA path, and it was eight months later that we announced something. So, maybe not light speed, but there was a lot of careful engineering work and review that we needed to do. Pandemics are tricky to predict but would you have done anything differently in hindsight? I don’t know. It’s always easy to look back and say, maybe we should have pivoted earlier. I’m not somebody who spends any time in my professional or personal life looking back with regrets. I’m just not wired that way. To be honest with you, I give us reasonably high marks for being resilient, innovative, and open to exploring alternative paths. We’re big believers in this enterprise, global broadband market that we seek to address with Lightspeed. In the industry, we were reasonably early in believing that LEO is the right solution. We attempted doing it with Thales — we have a high regard for them, and I think they were the right company at the time to partner up with to do it. For sure, we did not foresee a pandemic. But I also believe that life almost always works out the way it should, and things work out for the best, and I think that’s what happened here. By getting delayed, it allowed this other technology to develop to a point where it was, from our perspective, viable and the right path to get on. And it’s a much more cost-efficient path. I mean, it’s always the case if you wait, there’s going to be more advanced, more capable, maybe more affordable technology that’s out there to leverage. But we’re saving so much money here, and the business case as a result, is so much more compelling. Smaller satellites from MDA have shaved $2 billion off what you thought the constellation would cost, but the delay has affected your early LEO start. Is it now going to be harder to compete? I never thought that we were going to be a first mover. SpaceX and OneWeb were ahead of us. There’s that old line about how you can tell who the pioneers were. They’re the ones with the arrows in their backs. There are some risks to going first. If we had pulled the trigger and stayed on our original path, we would have come to market two years early or something like that, but in retrospect, with a solution that would have been less cost-efficient. Some other things have improved. User terminals, in particular flat panel, electronically steered user terminals, which are a key enabler to the [non-geo- stationary satellite] market, are more advanced. Hats off to SpaceX and how fast they’re moving. They’ve done a great job of demonstrating how transformative LEO satellite constellations can be. We haven’t seen exactly what Amazon’s constellation is capable of, but they’re pulling the curtain back more on it, and it looks like it will also be a really powerful solution. Both have fundamentally designed their constellations in the first order to serve the consumer market. They’re certainly also focused on the enterprise market, but they are different markets. The government and enterprise markets demand CIRs [committed information rate agreements], service level agreements (SLAs)… I think the customer community appreciates our heritage of being a business-to-business, enterprise-focused service provider. So we believe there’s going to be a big addressable market for us when we come to market in 2027. We only need a small share of it to be successful in terms of meeting our business plan objectives. Do I wish I could bring this capability to market next year? Yeah, we’d love that, but I still think we’re going to be very effective and the customer communities will embrace the solutions we’re bringing. Having an existing GEO fleet was going to be a differentiator. However, OneWeb looks set to merge with Eutelsat around the end of September also to offer multi-orbit services — how has that changed the competitive landscape? First off, the OneWeb-Eutelsat combination was not a surprise. We’ve both been big proponents of moving to LEO. I don’t think it changes the competitive landscape so much. Again, I think this is going to be a very big market. We can all be successful, just like we’ve all been successfully serving the GEO market over the last four or five decades. It’s been a highly competitive market, and the customers have benefited from that. Still, I think all the operators have been able to achieve attractive returns on their investment, create equity value for their shareholders, and do a good job serving the customers. You also need to get deployment deadline extensions from regulators to keep hold of your priority spectrum licenses. Where are you in that process? It’s at two levels. There’s the International Telecommunication Union level where we have a number of regulatory filings, and we’ve taken steps to try to preserve rights here. We just launched our LEO-3 satellite, which will support customer demonstrations as a primary mission but will also preserve some of our spectrum rights at the ITU level. And then there’s the market access that you need from each country that you’re trying to serve. We have authorizations from Canada, the U.S., and some other countries. Certainly, they have milestones associated with them, and we’ve been engaging with regulators to make sure that we can leverage our constellation when it’s available. I don’t expect anything on the regulatory side, either on the ITU or the more domestic market access level, that will prejudice our ability to meet our business plan. There will be some countries like there have always been where full, unfettered market access will be difficult. We’ve taken that into account when we put our financial projections together. I think the regulators are delighted to see Lightspeed moving forward. The regulators tend to want more entrants and competition to benefit their domestic users. So I think we will be in really good shape on that. Telesat is also an operator that’s well known to regulators all over the world. We’ve always done a good job of being a responsible operator of providing mission-critical services in all these different jurisdictions. MDA’s plans for the constellation hinge on digital beam-forming technology that Telesat previously considered but deemed too immature. What has changed? The biggest thing has been improvements in semiconductors that will underpin not only this digital beam-former but the onboard processor that’s integrated in. When we first considered the digital beam-former years ago, the chips were more power-consumptive and generated more heat, leading to thermal issues. The engineers felt it was stressing the spacecraft’s power and thermal budgets. So we dealt with that by moving to an analog beam-forming antenna, and by having two pairs of those antennas on each satellite, we could meet our coverage and capacity allocation objectives. What’s changed is now there’s a new generation of chips that generate less heat and consume less power. It means instead of needing two pairs of antennas — two to transmit and another two to receive, we only need one pair and will still have three times as many beams as we did on the older design. Lightspeed is using a new software-defined, configurable satellite design from MDA, and it’s going to at least be partly deployed using as-yet unproven rockets. It’s a comparatively risky venture for a company that has historically been pretty conservative. Is this just a symptom of all the transformation in the industry? I don’t think so. I’ll have to challenge your premise a little bit. Maybe it’s why things have taken us longer than they would take a company that is more willing to embrace unproven technologies. We’ve been all over every system, every subsystem, and on the payload on the bus of these new satellites. Not that it’s risk-free. We’ve never launched a satellite that’s been risk-free, but we think the risk that we’re taking on here is not disproportionate to the risks we’ve taken on some of our other programs. You really need to get deep in the weeds on the processor, the digital beam-forming antenna, the optical inter-satellite links, and on the different components of the bus. When you break it down like that, and you can break it down much more, we think this is not an extraordinary risk that we’re taking here. I’d say the same with the launch vehicles. By the time we launch on the New Glenn rocket, it will have flown. But I would say that if we’re going to be able to effectively meet the requirements of our customers and deliver an advanced, capable broadband experience, you need to go LEO. It’s very comfortable to stay in GEO, but we don’t believe that we can deliver a modern, high-quality enterprise broadband experience from there. We think you need to get close to the Earth and have a latency that’s sub 50 milliseconds. That pushes you to LEO and to a more distributed architecture. It also pushes you toward embracing beam-forming antennas, regenerative process payloads, and optical inter-satellite links so you have a highly capable, flexible, resilient, and efficient space-based network. We’ve been innovating throughout our 50 years. We started in C-band, went to Ku-band, and then went to Ka-band. I think we were the first to launch a multi-spot beam, Ka-band geostationary satellite. If we didn’t do this, we think that would be the risky thing for Telesat’s future. We wouldn’t be relevant to the kind of communications infrastructure that our customers are demanding nowadays. You have funding commitments for a 156-satellite constellation, enough for initial polar and global services to generate sufficient revenues to fund another 42 proposed satellites. How much do you need to generate to fund these extra satellites, and when do you expect to hit that goal? It’s about $800 million to fund the incremental satellites, launch vehicles, [and] we’d probably roll out some additional ground infrastructure at the same time, too. We’re going into service in 2027, and generating the cash flows we need won’t take long. It might be the case we secure some incremental funding between now and the time we even launch our first satellite, and we just pull the trigger and go directly to the 198. How would 198 satellites improve services versus 156? The initial 156 will give us a hugely capable, multi-terabit constellation, but getting up to 198 will give us some incremental capacity and densify the network. How has the split between the company’s broadcast and connectivity revenues changed over the years, and how do you see that evolving as Lightspeed comes online? Right now, about 50% of the revenues are from our principally DTH video business — that’s really mostly [from customers in] Canada and then Dish Network in the U.S. The other 50% are what we call enterprise services, but that’s really broadband connectivity for rural broadband, aero and maritime services, for the energy market, government customers, and those kinds of things. When I first came to Telesat [in 2006] we were probably two-thirds video and one-third broadband. Our DTH revenues were growing really quickly back about 12-15 years ago. Not only has that leveled off, but we’ve seen declines there as we’ve gotten renewals for some of our DTH satellite contracts at less capacity or lower rates. The video business is facing some decline because of cord-cutting, whereas the broadband business has been growing because people just want more broadband, and they want it everywhere. Certainly, with Lightspeed we think that trend will accelerate. Lightspeed is all about broadband connectivity. Some will be for video streaming, but it’ll be just a big broadband pipe. This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Correction: PierSight Space is based in Ahmedabad, India. PARIS – Techstars brought 12 startup to Los Angeles Sept. 11 to join the 2023 Techstars Space Accelerator. It’s Techstars’ first in-person Space Accelerator since 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted Techstars to conduct accelerators virtually in 2020 and 2021. Techstars ran a combined Aerospace and Defense Accelerator in Los Angeles in 2022. Unlike in 2019 when Techstars Accelerator companies spent 12 weeks in Los Angeles, the 2023 class will travel. Entrepreneurs will spend time in Los Angeles, Colorado and Washington, D.C. “LA is still an incredibly strong hub for our companies to build relationships,” Matt Kozlov, Techstars Los Angeles managing director, told SpaceNews . “But when we ran the program virtually, we found that we were able to bring in remarkable mentors and leaders from other locations. And we found they tended to be clustered in Colorado and D.C.” Los Angeles, Colorado and Washington, D.C. are primary hubs of U.S. leadership in commercial, civil and military aerospace and defense activity and investment, Kozlov said. “If I can help these 12 companies build relationships with people in those three key cities, the program will be even better,” Kozlov said. The 2023 Techstars Space Accelerator includes 11 U.S. and one Australian company. Techstars points to the success of its 2019 Space Accelerator. Participants in that class included Orbit Fab , Pixxel , Zeno Power Systems , Morpheus Space , Hydrosat and Solestial , companies that have attracted significant revenue and partnerships. 
The head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) says the agency will emphasize space sustainability as the number of satellites grows. In a talk Sept. 11 at Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week here, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, secretary-general of the ITU, said the growing risk of collisions between satellites and debris threatens the progress satellite systems are making at enhancing communications globally and closing the digital divide. “As orbital traffic increases and intensifies, so does the urgency to maintain a safe and also a clean space environment that will protect the trillions of dollars’ worth of assets,” she said. “We do need to prioritize sustainability of our shared space environment and resources, because what is at stake is progress toward bridging the digital divide.” She didn’t go into details about any efforts the ITU has planned for space sustainability. She noted the ITU and the European Space Agency had started a cooperative effort to better characterize and geolocate satellite interference. Despite the lack of specifics, executives with major satellite operators welcomed that commitment. “As an industry, we are seeing the topic of sustainability become even more important,” said Eva Berneke, chief executive of Eutelsat, during a panel at the conference, including cooperating with regulators on potential new rules to address those concerns. “We need to lean in, because otherwise, somebody else is going to do it for us.” “A big win would be to recognize that we need to share spectrum and we need to share space,” said Mark Dankberg, chief executive and chairman of Viasat. Even discussing the issue at the upcoming World Radiocommunication Congress (WRC), he said, would be “great progress.” Ruy Pinto, chief executive of SES, said he was concerned about some orbits becoming “unusable” because they are effectively monopolized by a single company, citing as an example SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. “If we don’t take the initiative to make sure we have access to orbits and access to spectrum, it’s going to bite us,” he said. “It’s more important than ever to get together.” Bogdan-Martin noted that her talk was the first time that the ITU had spoken at the conference despite the critical role the ITU plays in assigning spectrum and, increasingly, handling debates between satellite and terrestrial operators over some key spectrum bands. The speech comes a little more than two months before the next WRC, which will take place in Dubai from Nov. 20 to Dec. 15. Satellite spectrum will again be on the agenda, and Bogdan-Martin said she expected the WRC to result in new spectrum allocated for space services. “I’m very happy to tell you that, at that WRC, we do expect that more spectrum will be allocated to space services,” she said, but did not elaborate on specific proposals for additional spectrum. Satellite industry executives were more guarded about their prospects at WRC. “The satellite industry, by and large, has a good track record of cooperating around WRC events. We rally together,” said Pinto. Rallying together, Dankberg suggested, may not be sufficient. “The last WRC was space versus terrestrial. I don’t think it worked out that great for space, even though we see more and more demand for space services.”
Geost, a supplier of optical sensor payloads for military satellites, announced Sept. 11 it won a contract to produce eight payloads for missile-tracking satellites that Northrop Grumman is building for the U.S. Space Development Agency. The payloads — intended to detect threats in orbit — are for SDA’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer satellites projected to launch in 2025. Northrop Grumman in July 2022 won a $617 million contract to produce 14 Tracking Layer satellites. Geost, b ased in Tucson, Arizona , is a LightRidge Solutions company owned by the private equity firm ATL Partners. SDA, a U.S. Space Force organization , calls its layered network of satellites the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. It includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites that will transmit data collected by the Tracking Layer missile-detection and early-warning sensor satellites. Joshua Hartman, LightRidge Solutions chief growth and strategy officer, said the payloads are designed to “protect and defend the host asset while also providing threat characterization and warning across the satellite architecture. They support the survivability, and therefore resilience, of the assets and overall architecture during attacks.” The payloads, named Starlite, are the size of a soda can. They are a smaller and lower-cost version of those the company produces for large geostationary satellites, Hartman said. Under the contract with Northrop Grumman, Geost also will provide a ground system to operate Starlite payloads. “Using a separate ground station is the most cost-effective means of deploying the capability,” Hartman said. Congressionally mandated The company expects to get more orders for Starlite payloads after they are demonstrated on Tranche 1, he said. “The resiliency capability that Starlite provides was not initially planned to be included in the Space Development Agency Tranche 1 baseline,” Hartman said. “It is, however, included in the Tranche 2 baseline plans .” The addition of eight Starlite payloads in Tranche 1, he said, “was directed by the Defense Appropriations Committees and embraced by the SDA as a pathfinder effort after the Tranche 1 awards were made. Unfortunately, insufficient budget was added to install Starlite on all the Northrop Grumman satellites .” Hartman said Geost is expanding its manufacturing capacity. “We are building out several thousand square feet of production space in our Tucson facility for electro-optical infrared (EO/IR) payloads.”
Former White House space policy official Audrey Schaffer has joined Slingshot Aerospace, a space data analytics and tracking firm focused on spaceflight safety. Schaffer was named vice president of strategy and policy, Slingshot announced Sept. 11. Founded in 2017, Slingshot is based in El Segundo, California; and Austin, Texas. The company operates a global network of ground-based telescopes to track space objects, and provides space traffic control software used by satellite operators to coordinate satellite maneuvers and communicate with other operators to avert collisions. Schaffer previously worked as director of space policy at the White House National Security Council. She helped guide the U.S. initiative to establish an international ban on destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing that Vice President Kamala Harris announced in April 2022 . Prior to joining the White House, Schaffer was a Defense Department official, and led DoD efforts to establish in law the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. Schaffer also led a government-industry team that represented the United States in negotiating United Nations guidelines for space sustainability. At Slingshot, Schaffer will “advance policy that supports safe space operations and continues to drive the industry forward,” said Leslie Hildebrand, the company’s senior vice president of government business development and strategy. “Her extensive experience in national security space and space policy uniquely qualifies her to advance Slingshot’s vision of accelerating space sustainability,” said Hildebrand. In a statement, Schaffer said the growing number of objects in space and the “increasing complexity of space operations is creating a more unpredictable orbital operating environment for the satellites we rely on for our national security, economic prosperity, and daily lives.” “I joined Slingshot because I want to help ensure that space remains safe for future generations,” Schaffer said. 
Chris Emerson, former head of Airbus U.S. Space and Defense, has been named chairman of the board of All.Space, a British manufacturer of terminals used to communicate with satellites in orbit. All.Space was previously known as Isotropic Systems. The company was rebranded a year ago. Emerson’s appointment was announced Sept. 11. Emerson joins All.Space as the company prepares to start production of a new terminal — known as fifth-generation smart terminal — by the fourth quarter of 2023. The company previously forecast that the new terminal, designed to link cellular and satellite networks, would start production in late 2022. All.Space to date has raised more than $116 million. Emerson is a partner at Washington, D.C.-based AE Industrial Partners, one of the investors in All.Space. “All.Space is pioneering the next generation of satellite communications with our inventive smart terminal,” Emerson said in a news release. “Our technology will transform how individuals and organizations access and use satellite and cellular communications, enabling our customers to harness the power of every major network through one device.” The smart terminal promises “3G, 4G, and 5G cellular multi-network integration plug-and-play options,” said John Finney, founder and CEO of All.Space. He said the new terminal is undergoing performance and reliability tests. “Our initial market entry is dedicated to serving the needs of NATO and Five Eyes defense markets,” Finney said. The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tysons Corner, Virginia – September 8, 2023 – SpaceNews, the leader in space industry news coverage and analysis, is proud to announce the promotion of Paige McCullough to the position of Vice President of Business Development. Over her nearly 10-year career at SpaceNews, Paige has consistently demonstrated her commitment to driving business growth, fostering innovation, and nurturing her team. Her ascent from Business Development Director to Vice President of Business Development is a testament to her leadership, strategic vision, and dedication to the company’s mission. SpaceNews CEO, Andy Pemberton said, “Under Paige’s leadership, SpaceNews has expanded its client base and strengthened its existing partnerships, leading to increased revenue and client satisfaction. Her passion for space industry developments and her ability to translate that passion into client-centric solutions have made her an invaluable asset to the organization.” “Building and maintaining strong client relationships is not just about business; it’s about trust, understanding, and collaboration,” said Paige. “I look forward to continuing to serve our clients with excellence.” Paige’s promotion to Vice President of Business Development is also a recognition of her innovative thinking and her ability to drive the creation of new products and services that meet the evolving needs of the space industry. “SpaceNews has a rich history of delivering high-quality content and advertising solutions, and we must continually adapt to remain at the forefront of our field,” Paige explained. Paige will continue to play a pivotal role in SpaceNews’ mission to inform and inspire its audience, while also exploring new avenues for growth and innovation. About SpaceNews Founded in 1989, SpaceNews is the world’s largest space & trade media brand, available in both print and online. With some two million average monthly page views, 815,000 unique monthly visitors, 185,000 social media followers, and 25,000 newsletter subscribers SpaceNews is by far the most widely read trade media brand in space. See more at spacenews.com. Media Inquiries Andrew Pemberton, Chief Executive Officer, apemberton@spacenews.com, +1 (303) 532-6075 Paige McCullough, Vice President of Business Development, pmccullough@spacenews.com, +1 (571) 278-4090 SpaceNews, Inc.: 8609 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 110 PMB 1024, Tysons Corner, VA 22182 USA
Smallsat developer Open Cosmos has raised $50 million to expand the company and develop larger satellites and constellations focused on Earth observation. The company, based in the United Kingdom with offices in Spain and Portugal, announced Sept. 10 the Series B round. The round was led by ETF Partners, Trill Impact and A&G, three funds from “impact investors” that focus on companies that provide societal or environmental benefits. Several other investors also participated in the round. The funding will help the 70-person company grow internationally, including in Latin America, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific. It will allow it to expand its current satellite offerings, which have been cubesats, to larger spacecraft as well as constellations. The company is also developing an satellite data analytics platform called DataCosmos. “It is important for us as a business to work with investors that believe in our mission and align with our values to use technology to solve urgent global problems and we’re delighted to find that with ETF Partners, Trill Impact and A&G,” said Rafel Jorda Siquier, chief executive and founder of Open Cosmos, in a statement. “This investment will propel us forward, allowing us to accelerate our growth, expand our capabilities and continue offering cutting-edge solutions.” The company has launched several smallsats to date to support Earth observation, communications and navigation applications. Jorda Siquier said the company has five more satellites scheduled to launch through next March, all 6U or 12U cubesats with a range of Earth observation applications, from agriculture to disaster management. The funding, he said, will go help the company move into microsatellites. It will also support development of OpenConstellation, what the company calls a “mutualized satellite infrastructure” where companies share capacity on their satellites with others. “The OpenConstellation was created to enable organizations to share the data generated by satellites for improved access to information on our planet to drive sustainability and impact,” he said. “By sharing space assets, we are dramatically lowering costs and simplifying access to Earth observation data.” Open Cosmos argues it can stand out in the crowded Earth observation sector with “cost-effective end-to-end fully managed missions” for its customers, Jorda Siquier said. “We pride ourselves on agile development, can accommodate diverse applications, and foster global partnerships.” That argument won over investors who see benefits from the company’s approach to collecting Earth observation data. “Through their technological innovation, Open Cosmos has proven that space is a vital resource for the continued health and prosperity of our planet,” said Patrick Sheehan, managing partner of ETF Partners, in a statement. “Open Cosmos is a perfect match for our values and provides an exciting opportunity for profitable investment into a robust and growing market.” “Open Cosmos is a leader in providing multi-sensor space data at an affordable cost and we consider it a pioneer with creating an app store-like analytics offering,” said Toba Spiegel, investment manager at Trill Impact, in the statement. Before the Series B round, Open Cosmos had raised $7 million since its founding in 2015. The company said its revenues have doubled annually since 2020, but did not disclose specific figures. Jorda Siquier said the company has had positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization since 2021.
A National Reconnaissance Office mission flew to geostationary Earth orbit Sept. 10 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The rocket lifted off at 8:47 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch had been originally scheduled for August 29 but was delayed due to Hurricane Idalia. A second attempt on Sept. 9 was scrubbed due to a technical issue found during a pre-launch check. The NROL-107 mission, also known as SilentBarker, carried multiple sensor payloads for surveillance of objects in geostationary orbit. “It will not be looking at the ground. It will be looking at space,” said Chris Scolese, director of the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO did not reveal the exact number of payloads flying on this mission. Satellite tracker and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell on Sept. 11 identified two satellites deployed from the SilentBarker mission. SilentBarker was built jointly by the NRO and the U.S. Space Force. NROL-107 was only the second launch by ULA in 2023 and the Atlas 5’s first in nearly 10 months. The vehicle last flew in November when it launched an environmental satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The launch vehicle carrying NROL-107 was powered by a single-engine Centaur upper stage and five strap-on solid boosters. At the request of the NRO, ULA ended the launch webcast about three-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, following payload fairing jettison. Scolese in a statement Sunday afternoon said NROL-107 successfully reached orbit and will help “meet Department of Defense and intelligence community space protection needs.” ULA said only one more national security space mission remains for the Atlas 5, which has been in operation since 2002. Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, said the final Atlas 5 national security space mission will fly in 2024. After that, the company expects to start flying national security missions on the new Vulcan Centaur rocket . The remaining inventory of Atlas 5s has been set aside for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and for Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule. Surveillance of GEO orbit U.S. officials said SilentBarker will help to safeguard the country’s satellites from foreign threats, as Russian and Chinese satellites engage in disruptive maneuvers and follow other nations’ spacecraft in orbit. Scolese said Silent Barker “is going to provide us with unprecedented coverage of what’s going on in the geosynchronous belt,” more than 22,000 miles above Earth. Having more satellites in that region of space “will help us to understand the intentions of other countries, to see what they’re doing, to see if there’s any indications of threats,” he said. Most NRO space missions are classified but the intelligence community and the Pentagon decided to disclose the existence of SilentBarker in an effort to dissuade U.S. adversaries from carrying out nefarious activities. “The space domain, as we often say, is contested and congested,” Scolese said. “We want to let people know, to some extent, what our capabilities are.” Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of the Space Systems Command, said the goal is to deter aggression. “A huge element of deterrence is the ability for the adversary to know what we can and cannot see. So we actually want our competitors to know that we have eyes in GEO orbit,” Guetlein said. Scolese said a second SilentBarker mission is being planned and could launch by 2026. Guetlein said the Space Force today primarily relies on ground-based radar sensors to monitor the GEO belt. These sensors can only see objects larger than a basketball, and are not able to “maintain custody” of objects, or track them as they maneuver. “By moving the sensor into orbit with those objects, we can actually not only detect smaller objects but maintain custody of those objects,” he said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s U.K. subsidiary is partnering with Oxford Space Systems, a British satellite antenna specialist, to develop a 50% lighter high-speed communications terminal to improve the mobility of dismounted soldiers. The companies see the potential for a Ka-band satellite communications system that is 15 kilograms or less, Viasat UK managing director Hisham Awad told SpaceNews Sept. 8, with built-in storage enabling other essential equipment and supplies to fit more easily in a user’s pack. A typical military satellite communications terminal is generally moved in a hard shell with various parts, which Awad said can make the packed system weigh anywhere from 28 to 34 kilograms. However, weight is just one area of interest. The companies also aim to improve the total system volume once packed up and how easily users can transport it. A modern soldier often carries equipment that’s close to 70% of typical body weight, according to Awad, hampering mission effectiveness and increasing injury risk. In addition to helping reduce this overall transport burden, the companies aim to create a low-cost solution that would require less power compared with current military and commercial terminals. Awad stressed their research and development efforts are at a very early stage, and it is too soon to put a timeframe on development because they expect it to be a highly iterative and collaborative effort. The companies will initially focus on developing terminals connecting to Ka-band satellites in geostationary orbit. U.S.-based Viasat operates a combined fleet of 19 geostationary satellites following its recent acquisition of British operator Inmarsat. Oxford Space Systems specializes in developing deployable antennas, booms, and other structures for the space environment. The 10-year-old venture is also working with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, part of the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence, to create smaller terminals that would operate in C-band for lower bandwidth applications. Sean Sutcliffe, CEO of Oxford Space Systems, said its research efforts could bring its deployable space antenna capability for use on the ground for the first time. The company declined to give details about its work on C-band terminals with the British government. Previous C-band military terminals have not been used for satellite communications, Awad said, but have been part of a troposcatter communications system that uses the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect low-frequency signals over long distances. Two-thirds of Viasat’s satellite fleet provides connectivity services in Ka-band spectrum, which is increasingly being beamed from government and commercial satellites to enable high-speed broadband services. “As a result, the need for accessing this capacity through those networks is growing,” Awad said, “especially among mobile users who need to stay connected for their missions.” Viasat has previously developed terminals in partnership with other antenna makers to serve soldiers on the ground and across domains. Under the partnership with Oxford Space Systems, the operator would provide the network, terminal certification, radio frequency equipment, and system engineering support for the terminal. The technology could also benefit other users operating in austere environments, including disaster recovery and aid workers. Viasat’s U.K. subsidiary, which it had long before acquiring Inmarsat, mostly provides communications services to the British government, particularly around data security and information insurance. The subsidiary and Oxford Space Systems are part of the U.K.’s Harwell Space Cluster located in Harwell, England. The companies also plan to explore other areas of mutual interest following their research partnership.
Operating under a veil of secrecy reminiscent of a national security launch, Virgin Galactic performed its third commercial suborbital spaceflight Sept. 8 with three private astronauts on board. The company’s VSS Unity spaceplane, attached to its VMS Eve mothership aircraft, took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at 10:34 a.m. Eastern. Unity separated from the aircraft and reached a peak altitude of 88.6 kilometers before gliding back to a runway landing at the spaceport at 11:36 a.m. Eastern. The “Galactic 03” flight was the third commercial mission for Unity, after the Galactic 01 research mission June 29 and the Galactic 02 private astronaut flight Aug. 10 . It was also the fourth suborbital flight for Unity in a little more than three months, when including a test flight in late May . Galactic 03 was commanded by Nicola Pecile with Michael Masucci as pilot and Beth Moses, the company’s chief astronaut instructor, in the cabin. As with the company’s Galactic 02 flight, the vehicle also carried three private astronauts. However, unlike the previous two flights, the company did not disclose the identity of the private astronauts until after Unity landed. Traditionally, both government and private crewed missions, suborbital and orbital, flown from the U.S. have publicly named the full crews before launch, often weeks or months in advance. Virgin Galactic did not explain the secrecy surrounding the crew. The company did identify the private astronauts after landing as Ken Baxter, Timothy Nash and Adrian Reynard. Baxter is a Las Vegas real estate entrepreneur who claims to have purchased the first SpaceShipTwo ticket from Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson in 2004. Nash is an entrepreneur and adventurer from South Africa who purchased his ticket in 2006. Reynard is a British engineer who started a business a half-century ago building race cars. While the company did not identify the customers on board until after the flight, some of them has been talking about the flight in advance. Baxter, for example, has a website where he provided updates about his flight preparations. That website also describes him as “America’s First Space Tourist,” a designation usually assigned to Dennis Tito, who paid for a seat on a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station 22 years ago. Also unlike the two previous flights, Virgin Galactic did not provide a webcast of the Galactic 03 mission. Instead, it provided updates via social media, as it did on the May test flight. “It’s an honor to see our ‘Galactic 03’ crew realize their lifelong dreams of spaceflight as they inspire our manifest of Future Astronauts,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, using the company’s term for its customers. “Each successful flight shows how powerful and personally transformative space travel can be, and we look forward to scaling our operations and making space travel more accessible to people around the world.” The company said its next flight, Galactic 04, is planned for early October, continuing a monthly cadence of missions. Shares in Virgin Galactic closed down 2.1% in trading Sept. 8 at $2.29.
The Federal Aviation Administration has completed the mishap investigation in SpaceX’s first integrated Starship launch in April but is not ready yet to approve a second launch of the vehicle. In a Sept. 8 statement, the FAA said it completed the investigation into the April 20 launch of the Starship vehicle and its Super Heavy booster from the company’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The vehicle suffered several failures of Raptor engines in the booster during its ascent, later tumbling before being destroyed by a flight termination system four minutes after liftoff. The FAA said the report itself will not be released because it contains proprietary and export-controlled information. The agency said the report found “multiple root causes” for the mishap but did not identify any of them. SpaceX, in a separate statement, said that leaking propellant in the aft end of the Super Heavy booster created fires that severed connections with the primary flight computer. “This led to a loss of communications to the majority of booster engines and, ultimately, control of the vehicle,” the company said. The FAA, which oversaw the SpaceX-led investigation, noted the investigation identified 63 corrective actions SpaceX must complete before another launch. “Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices,” the FAA stated. SpaceX said it has added “leak mitigations” to the booster and improved testing, along with a “significantly expanded” fire suppression system in the booster’s engine bay. The company said it also improved the reliability of the autonomous flight termination system, which took longer to operate than expected on the April launch. The completion of the investigation does not mean the FAA has approved plans for another launch. “SpaceX must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and apply for and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch.” The FAA, in its letter to SpaceX informing the company that the mishap investigation was now closed, noted that the original Starship launch license covered only a single flight. SpaceX must apply for a license modification for additional launches, and as part of that process demonstrate it has implemented the corrective actions. It’s unclear exactly how much progress SpaceX has made on those corrective actions. In addition to the measures mentioned in its statement, the company has taken steps to mitigate damage to the pad, adding a water deluge system to prevent the thrust from the engines in the Super Heavy booster from damaging the concrete pad, as happened on the April launch. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said in June that the company made “well over a thousand” changes to the vehicle . That appeared to include changes beyond what was needed to respond to the mishap, such as switching to an approach called “hot staging” where the Starship upper stage will ignite its engines before separating from the Super Heavy booster, a move intended to boost payload performance. SpaceX said in the statement it made “a full suite of system performance upgrades unrelated to any issues observed during the first flight test,” such as the move to a hot-staging architecture. Other changes include an electronic thrust vector control system for the Raptor engines in Super Heavy that is more reliable and energy efficient than the original hydraulic system. SpaceX has been moving ahead with preparations for second integrated Starship/Super Heavy flight. It rolled out a Starship vehicle designated Ship 25 to the pad Sept. 5 and installed it on top of Booster 9, which had completed a static-fire test Aug. 25 . “Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval,” posted Musk. Neither SpaceX nor the FAA estimated how long it would take to get a license approved.
 Rubicon Space Systems won a series of contracts with a combined value of about $6 million to deliver ASCENT thrusters to NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory in 2024. “Collectively, these three awards represent NASA and AFRL’s immense interest and trust in Rubicon as a champion of ASCENT-based propulsion,” Daniel Cavender, Director of Rubicon, a division of Plasma Processes, told SpaceNews . “This also represents both organizations’ keen interest in advancing ASCENT.” ASCENT is a non-toxic propellant developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. Under a $5.1 million AFRL award, Alabama-based Rubicon will manufacture 10 one-newton thrusters and qualify the thrusters for spaceflight. In addition, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center awarded Rubicon a $630,000 contract to develop the chemical component of a dual-mode propulsion system for a NASA mission. Both the chemical and electric thrusters in the dual-mode system would draw ASCENT from a single tank. Dual-mode propulsion systems offer “the high-thrust benefit of the chemical side but also the high efficiency of the electric propulsion elements,” Cavender said. “People colloquially refer to dual-mode as the holy grail of propulsion.” Rubicon also is developing a 110-newton ASCENT thruster for NASA Marshall, under a $280,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase 3 award. That development campaign is important because 110 newtons is the “highest thrust class ASCENT-based thruster ordered to date,” Cavender said. AFRL began developing ASCENT in the 1990s. The propellant was first flight tested on NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission in 2019. Cavender, who was closely involved with that program as well as the ASCENT-fueled Lunar Flashlight, said ASCENT offers “performance and safety” that exceeds that of “hydrazine-based propulsion offerings. Still, determining the appropriate propellant for each mission remains “up to the user,” Cavender said. “What’s important to them?”
The Government Accountability Office called on NASA to be more transparent about the costs of the Space Launch System rocket, a vehicle senior agency officials acknowledged risked becoming “unaffordable.” In a Sept. 7 report delivered to the leadership of House and Senate appropriations subcommittees that fund NASA, the GAO criticized NASA for a lack of details on costs of the SLS now that the vehicle has completed development. NASA spent $11.8 billion to develop SLS, a cost that covered work though the Artemis 1 launch in November 2022. “NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program,” the report stated. “These ongoing production costs to support the SLS program for Artemis missions are not captured in a cost baseline, which limits transparency and efforts to monitor the program’s long-term affordability.” Those concerns are not new. The GAO noted as far back as 2014 that it recommended NASA establish cost and schedule baselines for subsequent Artemis missions that would use the initial Block 1 version of SLS. The agency has not done so, nor has it developed a total lifecycle cost estimate for SLS, a concern the GAO raised in 2017. NASA has provided five-year funding profiles for SLS in its budget requests, which include production and operations costs now that the vehicle has completed development. However, the GAO said those are not substitutes for formal cost and schedule baselines “and are poor tools to measure cost performance over time.” The GAO added that it is seeing signs of cost growth on the SLS even as it moved into production. It noted a contract includes nearly $2 billion for the costs of producing the SLS core stages for the Artemis 3 and 4 missions. “Based on our analysis of the contract, the cost to produce successive core stages is increasing over time,” the report stated, but did not quantify the increase. “Without a way to capture and monitor these production costs against a baseline, it will be difficult to measure any cost growth related to these efforts,” the GAO wrote. “We previously found that NASA’s approach to track costs through its budget submission was unlikely to provide the detail necessary to monitor the progress.” NASA is aware of the cost concerns with SLS. “Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions,” the GAO report stated, which also used the term “unaffordable.” NASA is taking steps towards addressing those costs by shifting to fixed-price contracts for elements of the SLS, shifting the risk of cost increases from the agency to the contractor. It is also considering in the long-term shifting to a services model, procuring SLS launch services from a company that would own and operate the SLS. The agency announced last year plans for a long-term Exploration Production and Operations Contract for SLS development . That contract would be with Deep Space Transport, a joint venture of Boeing and Northrop Grumman, and include up to 10 SLS launches. The goal of that contract, NASA officials said then, would be to reduce SLS production costs by as much as 50%. “NASA has made some progress toward implementing these strategies,” the GAO said of those and other efforts to control SLS costs, “but it is too early to fully evaluate their effect on cost.”
The European Union and the United Kingdom have reached a deal that will allow the UK to resume participation in the EU elements of the Copernicus Earth observation program. The European Commission and the UK government announced Sept. 7 that they had completed an agreement to permit the UK to be a part of Copernicus as well as the Horizon Europe research funding program. The UK had been cut out of both programs after it completed its exit from the EU in 2020. The announcement provided few details about how UK will be fully integrated back into Copernicus. “Information on the UK association to Copernicus will be uploaded shortly,” the EU’s Copernicus website stated. The UK government said that scientists in the country would regain access to data on Jan. 1, along with the ability of British companies to bid on contracts. “The association of the UK to Copernicus will enable the UK’s access to a state-of-the-art capacity to monitor the Earth and to its services,” the two governments said in a joint statement. “The UK’s association to Copernicus comes at a crucial moment,” the statement continued, “where the Copernicus space infrastructure and its information services will evolve further and their contribution to understanding and acting on environmental and climate change related challenges is more important than ever.” The deal resolves what had been awkward situation for Copernicus, a joint effort of the EU and the European Space Agency. While the UK left the European Union, it remained part of ESA, a separate organization, and contributed funding to ESA’s share of the program. However, the UK’s departure from the EU created a funding gap for Copernicus and also limited UK participation in missions. “The UK has a long history of expertise and innovation in Earth observation, so it is excellent news that we are going to continue our association in the EU part of Copernicus,” said Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, in a statement. “Participating in Copernicus will enable the UK space sector to continue to play a significant role in the development of critical missions that will enable us to monitor our planet more effectively and lead a global effort through the use of satellite data to find new solutions to the urgent challenge of climate change.” Neither government disclosed how much the UK would contribute to the EU’s portion of Copernicus. The European Commission said the UK would provide an average of nearly 2.6 billion euros ($2.8 billion) a year to the combination of Copernicus and Horizon Europe, a much larger program. In 2021, ESA said the UK contribution to the EU aspects of Copernicus was valued at 750 million euros over several years. The two government also announced in the statement that the deal will also give access to the EU’s Space Surveillance and Tracking, or EUSST, program, which provides space situational awareness services. It does not include the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation program.
The U.S. Space Force should overhaul its current approach to procuring commercial satellite communications services, the RAND Corp. recommends in a report published Sept. 6. RAND argues in the report that existing methods for procuring commercial satcom services inhibit the government from harnessing the full potential of commercial innovations. The Space Force, which acquires satellite services for the U.S. armed forces, has set a goal to rely on a “hybrid” network of commercial and military satcom systems so it can take advantage of emerging constellations in low, medium and geostationary orbits. But the way it buys services – under separate contracts with individual providers — does not provide the flexibility needed to create an integrated satcom enterprise, said the report. RAND is a nonpartisan think tank. The study was commissioned by the Space Force’s senior procurement executive Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. Satellite communications users from across the military services and DoD buy satcom services through the Space Force-run Commercial Satellite Communications Office, or CSCO. CSCO buys commercial services via a large number of disparate, short-term contracts, “many of which may provide overlapping capabilities, leading to inefficiencies,” said RAND. U.S. Space Command, which is responsible to manage the allocation of satcom services to military users, is “unable to maintain situational awareness of which commercial satcom resources DoD has access to, in which regions, and how much.” RAND suggested that, with a different procurement approach, military users have an opportunity to leverage growing commercial capacity “that will far exceed that of military satcom as providers continue to increase their capacity in different orbits at various frequencies.” “With abundant capacity and proper user equipment, commercial providers could provide rapid surge capabilities,” said RAND. Ground equipment problems The report also points out that military users mostly lack the necessary ground equipment to take advantage of diverse commercial services. To tap into commercial services from multiple orbits, military users need different antennas with separate terminals to access the various radio frequencies. To integrate services from LEO, MEO, and GEO may require multiple antennas. Integrating a commercial terminal onto a DoD host platform can be complex. Some military units and combatant commands are fielding multiband terminals and terminals that can be used with both commercial and military systems. But modernizing the entire DoD inventory will require a significant investment as DoD has more than 17,000 terminals of 135 different designs. RAND said CSCO is evaluating different acquisition strategies to consolidate requirements for enterprise contracts while also supporting one-on-one contracts. “We observed that accessing the commercial market in a more centralized way as a single buyer could result in greater influence on the market and better pricing,” said the report. “More importantly, enterprise contracts could provide better situational awareness and enable operational flexibility to dynamically shift resources among multiple providers, a capability that is needed to achieve assured connectivity in a contested environment.” RAND cautioned that making these shifts is likely to be met with some resistance “and user communities need to be assured that their requirements will be met.”
South Africa has formally joined the China-led ILRS project to establish a permanent moon base. Chinese Ambassador to South Africa, Chen Xiaodong, on behalf of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), and Humbulani Mudau, CEO of the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), signed Sept. 1 the Memorandum of Understanding between CNSA and SANSA on the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation (ILRS). CNSA announced the signing on its webpages Sept. 7. It follows bilateral agreements on official space cooperation penned Aug. 22 during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to South Africa, which also hosted the 2023 BRICS Summit. The agreement will see CNSA and SANSA carry out extensive cooperation in the demonstration, implementation, operation and application of the ILRS, as well as training and other areas. The ILRS project aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s. The initiative is seen as a China-led, parallel project and potential competitor to the NASA-led Artemis Program. China plans a series of robotic missions across the 2020s as precursors. These include the 2026 Chang’e-7 lunar south pole mission and 2028 Chang’e-8 in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission. Five major infrastructure missions using super heavy-lift launchers will be launched in the 2030s to construct the base. While initially robotic, it will later host astronauts. China’s human spaceflight agency stated this year it intends to land astronauts on the moon before 2023 . The Russian Luna 25 mission was nominally part of the initiative. However that lander crashed into the moon following an anomalous lunar orbit burn. China and Russia had previously presented a joint ILRS roadmap in 2021 in St. Petersburg. Beijing has however since apparently taken the role of lead of the project since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China is setting up an organization, named ILRSCO , to coordinate the international moon base initiative. China says it aims to complete the signing of agreements and MoUs with space agencies and organizations as founding members of ILRSCO by October this year. CNSA administrator Zhang Kejian and Gabriela Jimenez, Venezuela’s Vice President, signed a joint ILRS statement July 17. CNSA has this year signed joint statements on the ILRS with the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), Swiss firm nanoSPACE AG , and the Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA). Pakistan has also expressed its intent to join the ILRS. The Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), under the CNSA, said it was negotiating agreements with more than 10 further countries and organizations. The ILRSCO headquarters will be located in Deep Space Science City, in Hefei, Anhui province. It will include facilities focusing on design simulation, operation control, data processing, sample storage and research, and international training centers. The U.S.-led Artemis project has so far attracted 28 countries — most recently Argentina , India and Ecuador — to sign up to the Artemis Accords . The Accords are the political underpinning of the initiative.
Launch vehicle company Relativity Space is growing its footprint at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi by leasing an Apollo-era test stand to support development of its Terran R rocket. The company announced Sept. 7 that it signed an agreement with Stennis to lease the A-2 test stand at the center. Relativity will pay $2.76 million to lease the test stand for seven years, with an option to extend the lease an additional 10 years. The A-2 test stand was built in the 1960s for testing of the second stage of the Saturn 5 rocket, then used for Space Shuttle Main Engine tests through most of the shuttle program. It was mothballed nearly a decade ago after brief use testing the J-2X engine intended for the Ares rockets NASA had planned to develop for the Constellation program. Relativity said it will refurbish the stand to support vertical testing of the reusable first stage of its Terran R rocket, increasing the engine thrust it can support from 650,000 to 3.3 million pounds-force. The company said the stand will enable a faster pace of testing of the stage. “Exclusive access to these rare, national-asset facilities through partnership with NASA uniquely enables Relativity to develop a world-class launch vehicle,” Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, said in a statement. Relativity has been using other facilities at Stennis for several years, testing engines both for its original Terran 1 small launch vehicle and the larger Terran R. The company announced in October 2022 plans to build new test stands, office buildings and a vehicle hangar at Stennis. Relativity says it plans to invest $267 million overall on developing its facilities at Stennis, but did not disclose how much of that would go to the refurbishment of the A-2 test stand. The A-2 test stand adds 30 acres to its footprint at Stennis, which now totals 298 acres. The company is the largest commercial tenant at the center. “This increased footprint is a testament to Relativity’s continued progress in the commercial space arena,” said Rick Gilbrech, director of Stennis, in an agency statement. “It also is a testament to the value of NASA Stennis and our test complex infrastructure in supporting commercial space endeavors.” Relativity announced in April it was retiring its Terran 1 rocket after a single launch in March that failed to reach orbit so it could focus on the Terran R , a medium- to heavy-lift vehicle with a reusable first stage. The Terran R is scheduled to make its first launch as soon as 2026.
Redwire announced it successfully 3D-printed human tissue in microgravity, a step towards more ambitious biotech applications in space. The company said Sept. 7 that a human knee meniscus, printed on its 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) on the International Space Station, was now in the lab on Earth after returning on the Crew Dragon spacecraft that brought Crew-6 back to Earth Sept. 4. The meniscus was printed on the station in July. The experiment was performed with the Uniformed Services University, which is looking for improved treatments for injuries like meniscus tears that are common among service members. For Redwire, the experiment was a way to demonstrate the ability of the BFF to print tissues for broader applications. “For us, it’s a great target tissue to go after,” said Ken Savin, chief scientist at Redwire, in an interview. “It allows us to test out our ability to put cells into this type of system, to look at their viability and it’s, in a way, a jumping off point to other tissues that we’re going to we also investigate.” One particular area of interest is being able to produce human tissues for pharmaceutical applications, like model development. “Being able to develop any type of tissue that you want in space in the future has distinct advantages,” he said. “It will lead us down the path towards model development, tissue replacement therapy and, ultimately, organ replacement therapy as well.” That bioprinting can’t be done easily on Earth because of gravity. “Generally you have to add chemicals or some kind of structure or framework that allows you to print in that third dimension. Otherwise, it all settles into a puddle,” he explained. “By printing in space, things that are only slightly more viscous than water can be printed into three dimensions.” Redwire is planning another experiment for the BFF set to launch in November on a cargo Dragon mission that will involve printing cardiac tissue. That will test how it can print more sophisticated tissues, he said, including the ability of the cells to operate in rhythm. “It also leads to something that we do believe ultimately is of real significance,” he added. “I think heart tissue therapy is a big deal and one that we see value in delivering.” Savin said Redwire is seeing growing interest in doing experiments using the BFF or other facilities on the space station from the pharmaceutical community. “What I’m starting to see is that normal everyday scientists in America are submitting experiments to be done in space,” he said, including scientists that have not traditionally done microgravity research. “We can talk about those opportunities and try to make an experiment that will test out their hypothesis in space. It’s doable and it happens.”
Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital in 2024 plans to accelerate production at its factory in California, promising deliveries in 30 to 60 days, the company announced Sept. 7. The company is marketing this effort as a “responsive space initiative” to shorten production timelines, said Marc Bell, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Terran Orbital. “Today it takes us over a year to deliver a bus,” he said in a statement to SpaceNews . The 30-60 day service will be available in late 2024, he said. The company will rely on increased automation and robotics systems to speed up production, said Bell. “We are standardizing common components which can be stocked and are interchangeable depending on the bus configuration.” Terran Orbital is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, and its factory is in Irvine, California. The company says it manufactures 85% of all modules and components that go into a bus. Bell said production will be sped up for any of the seven standard satellite buses the company sells, which range between 14 and 1,000 kilograms. Customers will be able to get a standard satellite bus within 30 days and a complete satellite with integrated payloads within 60 days, Bell said. Pricing for the faster turnaround service hasn’t been set yet. “Everyone wants things right away so we expect a lot of demand,” he said. Partnering with payload suppliers Terran Orbital will partner with other firms that produce payloads such as electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral imaging; communications or other payloads, the company said. “The demand for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities is increasing much faster than satellite manufacturers can currently meet,” Bell said. “Our goal is to address this demand and improve the availability of ISR capabilities in critical regions.” The company hopes this initiative will attract both commercial and government customers. One of Terran Orbital’s main customers is Lockheed Martin, a strategic investor in the company and a supplier of satellites to the U.S. Space Development Agency. Lockheed Martin uses Terran Orbital’s buses for communications satellites it’s producing for SDA. “We learned a lot from the SDA programs on how to speed things up cost effectively,” Bell said. An expanded production facility in Irvine is scheduled to be in operation by summer 2024.
Japan sent a new X-ray space telescope into low Earth orbit and a first, small lunar lander on its way to the moon with a single launch late Wednesday. A Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-2A rocket in a figuration with a pair of SRB-A3 solid boosters lifted off from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center at 7:42 p.m. Eastern, Sept. 6, heading East over the Pacific Ocean. A previous launch attempt was scrubbed Aug. 27. The rocket carried within its 4-meter-diameter fairing the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and XRISM, a joint JAXA/NASA X-ray observatory with participation from the European Space Agency. XRISM separated from the second stage 14 minutes after liftoff, entering a roughly 550 x 500-kilometer orbit inclined by 31 degrees. The second stage performed an apogee-raising burn around 46 minutes after liftoff, with SLIM separating from the stage a minute later. SLIM won’t be taking a direct route to the moon. After a lunar transfer orbit burn, it will make a lunar flyby, heading into a wide loop away from the Earth-moon system and returning to enter lunar orbit in around four months’ time. This route allows for a smaller burn to enter lunar orbit, saving propellant and mass. SLIM will then orbit the moon for around a month before making its 20-minute descent and landing attempt, with the aim of demonstrating a lightweight landing capability with high accuracy. XRISM is a replacement for Japan’s Hitomi space science observatory, which was lost following an attitude control failure a month after its launch in 2016, resulting in the spacecraft breaking apart . The eight meters long, three-meter-diameter and 2,300-kilogram spacecraft carries a soft X-ray spectrometer and soft X-ray imager. The telescope will spend three years collecting high spectral resolution data of hot plasma clouds enveloping galaxies and extremely energetic cosmic phenomena such as supernovae and accreting supermassive black holes. Main goals of XRISM are studying how matter and energy move through galaxies and gaining insights into the evolution of the structure of the universe. XRISM’s “Resolve” X-ray microcalorimeter spectrometer was developed by a team led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It will operate at 273.1 degrees Celsius, cooled by liquid helium. This requirement limits the lifetime of the mission, though it may be extended by mechanical cooling. “We’ve been working to get an X-ray microcalorimeter camera in orbit since the 1990s,” Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told SpaceNews . “It will give us unprecedented detail on the physical state of the million-degree hot gas in clusters of galaxies and black hole accretion disks, including the composition of the gas and, using the Doppler effect, how fast it is moving. “Although XRISM won’t have the sharp vision (high spatial resolution) of Chandra or XMM, its high spectral resolution—like hyperspectral imagers on Earth observing satellites—will be a game changer. It’s also an important test of the calorimeter in advance of the next generation of high-spatial-resolution X-ray telescopes.” SLIM meanwhile aims to make Japan the fifth country to soft land on the moon. The launch comes just two weeks after India became the fourth nation with the successful Chandrayaan-3 mission landing near the south pole, as well as Russia’s Luna 25 lander which crashed into the moon following a failed orbital maneuver. The 200 kg dry mass lander aims to demonstrate a small, lightweight landing system and pinpoint landing technology. SLIM, also referred to as “Moon Sniper,” aims to set down within 100 meters of its target point using vision-based navigation. The lander carries observational data from the SELENE orbiter which will be compared to features detected during the autonomous descent and landing. This will greatly reduce the landing ellipsis, or region within which a probe is expected to land based, which is usually on the order of kilometers. The spacecraft will use a laser range finder, landing radar and navigation camera for the landing attempt, and carries two main 500N engines and 12 smaller engines. SLIM will also release two small probes, named Lunar Excursion Vehicles (LEV), immediately before landing to record the landing site and demonstrate autonomous exploration. The lander has five, crushable aluminum lattice legs which will help absorb the impact of landing. The design will help it land on a slope within Shioli crater at 25.2E, 13.3S on the moon’s near side. SLIM carries a multi-band camera and a spectroscopic camera to examine surface composition, as well as a passive laser retroreflector array. It will carry out these tasks until the onset of lunar night, bringing an end to the mission. The performance of SLIM landing technology will have relevance for a future mission. The joint Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and JAXA Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) is expected to launch later this decade. Japanese company ispace failed with a moon landing attempt with its HAKUTO-R M1 lunar lander earlier this year. Wednesday’s launch was one of the final missions for the H-2A, which is scheduled to be replaced by the new H3 rocket. That launcher’s first flight failed however earlier this year, bringing a delay of months to the SLIM/XRISM launch.
SAN FRANCISCO – SpaceChain, a Singapore startup with blockchain nodes in orbit, is rolling out a service that integrates artificial intelligence with Earth imagery. I-Sat, from SpaceChain’s U.S.-based SC Solutions, is designed to simplify the process of answering questions with Earth observation data. “AI is convenient. You type in your question, and you get the answer,” Ziheng Xiang, SpaceChain director of technology, told SpaceNews . “But most of the AI is not supported by real-time analysis and there’s nothing combining the AI component with the Earth intelligence.” Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT , I-Sat “generates an answer based on the natural language processing technology,” Xiang said. “But it also provides answers supported by real-time data analytics.” SC Solutions is inviting Earth-imagery providers and applications developers to join its platform. SC Solutions will parcel out payment to vendors with its blockchain technology, said SpaceChain CEO Cliff Beek. To demonstrate the merit of I-Sat, SC Solutions conducted pilot projects focused on paper, pulp and sugarcane production in Brazil. By applying AI to satellite imagery, I-Sat was able to provide customers with detailed information on vegetation health and soil moisture as well as recommendations for improving plant health. For the sugarcane plants, “we used optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar imagery and some open-source climate data,” Xiang said. “All of these packed into a machine-learning model provided high-precision prediction of the yield.” Mining is another promising application, Xiang said. Before pivoting toward Earth observation and AI, SpaceChain established blockchain payloads in space. Seven SpaceChain nodes on satellites and the International Space Station process, transmit and store data. To establish I-Sat, SC Solutions joined Nvidia’s Inception Program and Google for Startups, free resources for fledgling enterprises. SC Solutions also is forging ties with satellite imagery providers. “It’s very difficult for the average user to access Earth observation,” Beek said. “Our platform will add a layer of analytics to bring together data from multiple providers.” The company’s generative AI tool “allow us to interact with this chatbot so that the platform can provide the user with the accurate analysis and the explanation,” Xiang said. If a user queried the platform for information on water pollution in New York in 2022, for example, the language model would “analyze my question and the user with accurate information and the explanation,” Xiang said.
A NASA mission to a large metallic asteroid is on track to launch in October after more than a year of delays, but the mission faces a potential challenge to those plans beyond the agency’s control. At a Sept. 6 briefing, project officials said preparations were going well for the launch of the Psyche mission to the asteroid of the same name. The mission is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in a launch period that opens Oct. 5 and runs through Oct. 25. “One month out, we are in great shape,” said Laurie Leshin, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led development of the mission. The spacecraft is fully fueled with xenon used for its electric propulsion system and is ready to be integrated with the launch vehicle. The Falcon Heavy rocket is being prepared for launch, efforts that will include a static-fire test of the vehicle on the pad about one week before launch, said Serkan Bastug, mission manager in NASA’s Launch Services Program. After that test Psyche will be integrated with the vehicle. While officials said launch preparations are going well, one wildcard exists beyond the control of the project or the agency. The fiscal year will end Sept. 30 and Congress, still deliberating a series of appropriations bills for the next fiscal year, will need to pass a stopgap spending bill known as a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government after Sept. 30. Some Republican members of the House say they would oppose a CR unless it contains policy provisions that are unlikely to win passage in the Senate. If Congress fails to pass a CR, there would be at least a partial government shutdown that would affect many ongoing NASA missions. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said she would attempt to seek an exception to allow the Psyche mission to proceed. “We are, of course, monitoring that very, very closely,” she said of the threat of a shutdown. “In the past, NASA has been prepared to request a waiver for operations, essential mission and launch personnel to ensure that missions can meet their launch period, and we are certainly prepared to follow that same path here.” In a plan prepared by NASA in December 2018 , just before the last shutdown, the agency said it recognized as “excepted activities” operations of the International Space Station and other spacecraft already launched, as well as space launch hardware processing activities “necessary to prevent harm to life or property.” It added, though, that for missions that have not yet launched, “unfunded work will generally be suspended on that project.” Psyche was originally scheduled to launch last August but missed its launch window because of delays testing the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation and control software. That led to a broader review of institutional issues at JPL , including a lack of communication among teams and management insight into programs that contributed to Psyche’s delays. Those issues have been solved, but the cost of the mission has increased. At the time of its confirmation, Psyche had a cost estimate of $996.4 million. Glaze said that its new cost is about $1.2 billion. The delay will also push back Psyche’s arrival at the asteroid to 2029. “It is a long time, but we have plenty of science planning to do,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of Psyche at Arizona State University. Once at Psyche, the spacecraft will spend more than two years in a series of progressively lower orbits, studying the metallic asteroid with a suite of cameras, spectrometers and other instruments. Psyche will be the first solar system object made primarily of metal visited by a spacecraft, and scientists believe it will provide insights into the cores of terrestrial planets and of solar system formation. The mission has attracted public attention for another reason: a valuation of $10,000 quadrillion placed on the asteroid by Elkins-Tanton several years, a calculation based the mass of the asteroid and the value of metals like iron and nickel. “It’s false in every way,” she said of that value, which has been republished hundreds of times. There is no technology to bring Psyche, a main belt asteroid 280 kilometers across as its widest point, back to Earth, and even if it could, it would flood the markets and reduce the value of those metals to effectively zero. “Psyche is not ever going to make us rich, even though it’s made of metal,” she concluded.
ARLINGTON, Va. — Under a new strategy to counter China’s military buildup, the Pentagon is advocating the use of low-cost autonomous platforms that can be mass produced and deployed at sea, on land, in the air and in space. “This is about driving culture change just as much as technology change — so we can gain military advantage faster,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, said Sept. 6 at the DefenseNews annual conference. Hicks discussed DoD’s plan to field thousands of autonomous systems across all domains within the next 18 to 24 months. China’s advantage is “mass,” said Hicks. DoD will continue to invest in its traditional platforms but will counter with “mass of our own,” or large numbers of autonomous systems. DoD would field fleets of tiny drones and swarms of satellites that would be inexpensive to replace. “Imagine constellations of autonomous, attritable systems on orbit, flung into space scores at a time, numbering so many that it becomes impossible to eliminate or degrade them all,” she said. The strategy is to “leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Hicks said. Proliferated constellations Smart satellites that use AI to navigate, track and image objects are not a new technology. Hicks noted that DoD has already embraced the concept of proliferated constellations of large numbers of low-cost satellites. But the next step would be producing them in larger numbers. The same idea applies to aerial, maritime and ground autonomous systems, she said. “We’ve already seen the adoption of systems that are small, smart, cheap, and many. And we’re seeing it in space, hundreds of miles above our heads,” Hicks said. “For a long time, you could count our space capabilities by the handful. Satellites the size of school buses, that took decades to build and to buy, years to launch. The U.S. military’s Space Development Agency is building a government-owned proliferated constellation. DoD is also a major customer of Starlink, SpaceX’s massive internet in space. Hicks said these new commercial systems are helping the United States maintain an edge over China in the space race. “More and more, we’re also leveraging proliferated constellations of smaller, resilient, lower-cost satellites. Some are launched almost weekly, with dozens of payloads deployed each time,” she said. Because of the growth of commercial space, Hicks said, “the space race is now a space chase. And as DoD invests even more, America’s lead will only grow.” Attacking or disrupting a large network of satellites would be “a wasted effort, and a highly escalatory one at that. Not even worth contemplating, let alone trying,” she said.
MAG Aerospace is partnering with artificial intelligence specialist SAS to compete for U.S. Space Force data analytics contracts, the companies announced Sept. 6 Based in Fairfax, Virginia, MAG Aerospace is one of 18 vendors the Space Force selected in March for a five-year $900 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract overseen by the Space Systems Command. The IDIQ contract seeks new ways to employ data analytics tools to turn data collected by tracking radars and other sensors into useful intelligence and distribute it to users around the world. SAS, based in Cary, North Carolina, developed an AI platform called Viya that can be hosted in any cloud environment, said Grant Brooks, company vice president of public sector sales. “The Space Force wants data analytics, software services, AI and machine learning capabilities that can help decision makers analyze information coming out of the space domain,” Brooks said. With their cloud-based AI-based analytics, MAG Aerospace and SAS will seek to challenge Palantir, which has won a string of contracts for data-as-a-service. “Space Force is looking for diverse capabilities,” said Brooks. “They don’t want to be locked in.” Agencies are trying to be “as nimble as possible rather than tied to a proprietary capability and limited or restricted in how they can access or deploy their data assets,” he said. Not task orders have been issued yet MAG Aerospace’s senior vice president Vincent Mihalik said the company has previously partnered with SAS on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data integration projects for the U.S. military. Mihalik said companies expect the Space Systems Command to start issuing task orders under the IDIQ after Congress passes a 2024 budget. “As we understand the intent of the contract, the Space Force seeks to procure an enterprise data storage and data management platform with a scalable open architecture,” he said. “While the types of data products on this contract will vary, we are expecting to ingest a range of datasets, from space domain awareness to personnel readiness.” Brooks said the Space Force has a “tremendous need for internet-of-things analytics that can analyze massive amounts of sensor and other data in real-time.”
U.S. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman on Sept. 6 unveiled a new mission statement for the service — in an effort to more clearly communicate what the Space Force does and why it was created. The new mission statement — “Secure our nation’s interests in, from, and to space” — was crowdsourced from across the ranks of the Space Force. Saltzman in May put out a call for ideas from the force — after realizing that the original mission statement adopted when the Space Force was established in December 2019 was convoluted and difficult to communicate to the public and Congress. The previous mission statement said the “U.S. Space Force is responsible for organizing, training, and equipping Guardians to conduct global space operations that enhance the way our joint and coalition forces fight, while also offering decision makers military options to achieve national objectives.” A simpler statement Saltzman set out to formulate a new mission statement that was simpler and that did not sound like something written by a corporate marketing team. The use of the word “secure” in the new statement is meant to reflect the Space Force’s responsibility for the protection of U.S. space assets and also ensure all branches of the U.S. military and allies have access to satellite-based capabilities at all times. As the other military services, the Space Force is responsible for organizing, training and equipping forces. But officials have cautioned that, as a new branch, the Space Force needs to establish its brand and build an identity. The phrase “in, from, and to space” refers to the different functions of the Space Force. Saltzman has defined securing interests “in space” as the ability to dominate and counter adversaries’ use of anti-satellite weapons. Capabilities “from space” refers to satellite services the military relies upon, such as communications, navigation and missile warning. The protection of interests “to space” refers to providing assured access to orbit via launch vehicles and ground infrastructure. 
Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg became a household name in 2018 when her speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference touched off student strikes around the world. Thunberg singlehandedly drew so much attention to climate change that speakers wondered aloud at the Summit for Space Sustainability in June whether they needed a similarly impassioned advocate. “We saw what Greta Thunberg did for the climate change debate,” Rebecca Everden, space director in the U.K. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said at the New York event. “We need a Greta for space sustainability. If somebody out there wants to be Greta, please stand up.” It’s unlikely that the space sector will find anyone quite like Thunberg, who was 15 when she began weekly protests outside the Swedish parliament. Plus, Thunberg “is unusually sharp and articulate for her age and she focuses her message on our responsibility,” Luc Piquet, CEO of Swiss orbital debris removal startup ClearSpace, said by email. Still, there are young professionals in the space sector who are passionate about sustainability. “Sustainability of space itself and also sustainability of the planet,” said Charles Beames, chairman of the SmallSat Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy organization. They understand “that space is an environment we are building and there is a chance to do it the right way,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley said by email. “There is a lot of interest in the topics of space debris, safety, sustainability and the Kessler Syndrome. It does motivate people entering the workforce today.” Rebeca Griego, for example, was a high school student when she came across a five-minute video about space debris. “I was just amazed by it,” Griego said. “I was like, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this?’” Griego became focused on the space sector after learning as a high school freshman about Mexican-American astronaut José Hernández. Hernandez, a child of migrant farm workers like Griego, grew up in Stockton, California, a couple of hours from Griego’s Woodland, California, home. “That was my hook into thinking space was something I could do,” Griego said. Griego went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from California State University, Long Beach. During a 2020 internship at NASA Johnson Space Center’s Orbital Debris Program Office, Griego helped track space launches, satellite maneuvers and debris. That experience combined with independent research she performed as a McNair Scholar on orbital debris with California Polytechnic State University professor Kira Abercromby convinced her, “I can actually do something about the issue.” (The McNair scholars program prepares undergraduate students from low-income, first-generation and underrepresented backgrounds for Ph.D. programs.) Another internship with the Education Department in Washington, opened Griego’s eyes to the complexity of space sustainability. “It’s not just an engineering issue,” Griego said. “It’s so much more of the policy and the business case. We can put our heads together and work on a servicer that could help solve this issue. But it’s really closing that business case and then ensuring that we have the rules of the road and the laws to make sure that we’re moving in that more sustainable way.” Two weeks after graduating from Cal State Long Beach in 2021, Griego became a systems engineer at Astroscale U.S., where she is helping with assembly, integration and testing of Life Extension In-orbit, LEXI, and researching active debris removal opportunities. Griego also is working on a master’s degree in aviation and aerospace sustainability from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. “I still have so much to learn,” Griego said. “A lot of people have been working on the sustainability issue for a long time. My passion, though, continues. I don’t see myself working outside space sustainability.” Emily Cox, a ClearSpace systems and mechanical associate engineer, began thinking about space sustainability while writing a dissertation on spin-deployed drag sails in low-Earth orbit at England’s University of Manchester. “From that, I became interested in sustainability and the problem of space debris,” Cox said. Her interest led to an internship at ClearSpace and a master’s in astronautics and space engineering from Cranfield University in England. Cox now works on active debris removal projects, including ClearSpace-1, a European Space Agency-funded project to deorbit a Vega Secondary Payload Adapter, and Encore, a European vehicle to lengthen satellite lifespans. “At the moment, I’m working on developing a test for the capture system to make sure we don’t develop any more debris when we capture the client,” Cox said. Cox sees space sustainability as a multifaceted issue that encompasses terrestrial manufacturing, launch emissions and rocket pollution in the stratosphere. “It’s important to look not just at the sustainable use of space through active debris removal and in-orbit servicing, but to take sustainability to ground level,” Cox said. “We care about preserving our planet, making sure we are in balance with the environment and we’re not damaging it. That’s exactly why sustainability in spaces is important.” LeoLabs senior business analyst Erin Dale also underscores the connection between Earth and space sustainability. Earlier in her career, Dale’s work focused on the societal benefit of Earth observations. Satellite data was a key input, for instance, in a model Dale helped create to warn communities of impending malaria epidemics. At LeoLabs, a Silicon Valley company that operates a network of phased array radars to track objects in low-Earth orbit, Dale has a front-row view of the massive growth of space activity. From Jan. 1 to Aug. 15, 2023, around 1,800 spacecraft were sent into low-Earth orbit. For comparison, there were only 1,200 operational satellites in low-Earth orbit in 2019. “We’ve more than doubled that in less than eight months,” Dale said. LeoLabs offers services for satellite operators, insurers and regulators seeking to understand, for example, the probability of collision for specific orbits. “And on the remediation side, we identify dangerous objects and dangerous orbits in a quantifiable manner to help drive decision making,” Dale said. Warnings of potential collisions are particularly important, given the increase in space activity. At this “exponential knee in the curve,” it’s worth considering the lessons learned from managing Earth’s resources, said Dale, who earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering science at the University of Virginia and a master’s from George Mason University in environmental science and policy. Like fisheries and terrestrial mining, “space is a resource that needs to be managed and hopefully managed sustainably,” Dale said. “Can we also think about space as an equitable resource? Can we make space safer for operators and allow for more entities in space for generations to come?” Similar long-term concerns prompted Spanish attorney and economist Leonardo López Marcos and French Ph.D. student Yéléna Esslinger to establish the International Legal Center for Space Sustainability. The Paris-based Center, founded this year, plans to conduct webinars, seminars and conferences to raise awareness of sustainability issues ranging from space debris generation to uncontrolled reentries, space resource extraction and applying space technologies to protect Earth’s environment. “We are trying to create a forum to discuss these things,” López said. “We are going to try to increase awareness of space sustainability and convince policymakers to improve their regulations.” In addition, the Center will provide legal counsel for dispute settlement and litigation. “For instance, a university would come to us and say that a private company crashed one of its satellites or debris fragment into one of its satellites,” López said. “How can we ask them to take responsibility?” If sustainability is not addressed, space-related economic activity could be threatened, said López, who wrote bachelor’s and master’s degree theses on the economics of space mining. López earned a bachelor’s degree at University Charles III of Madrid, a master’s degrees in law and legal practice law from Valencian International University in Spain and a master’s in public international law at the University of Oslo in Norway. “Private investors and governments are not going to invest in space if there is no sustainability in space activities,” López said. The terrestrial economy also relies heavily on communications and other space-based services, said Zaria Serfontein, an Astroscale UK product strategy engineer. “Low-Earth orbit is such a great resource that we have access to,” Serfontein said. “It would be such a pity to not be able to use it 100 years from now.” Serfontein learned about space debris as an undergraduate studying aeronautical and astronautical engineering at Ireland’s University of Limerick. “One day we had a class on space debris, where they went through all the junk in space, how fast it’s traveling, how catastrophic it can be and the fact that we’re not doing enough to fix it right now,” Serfontein said. “That initially piqued my interest because there’s a big problem and if we don’t fix it, we’re not going to be able to do anything that we’re currently doing in space.” Serfontein went on to earn a master’s in aeronautics and space engineering and a Ph.D. from Britain’s Cranfield University. For Serfontein, the complexity of space sustainability makes the challenge all the more enticing. “As an engineer by trade, I want to solve problems,” Serfontein said. “This one involves geopolitics, technological challenges, having to raise funds and build a business around it, and making people do things that go against their monetary interest for the sake of being responsible.” Still, Serfontein remains optimistic. “It’s very difficult to quantify when sustainability is going to reach a point where if we don’t do something immediately, something bad is going to happen,” Serfontein said. “I would like to think that we’re starting early enough that we can prevent a catastrophic event from happening.” This article originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine .
The Space Development Agency on Sept. 5 released a solicitation for 54 satellites equipped with infrared sensors capable of tracking hypersonic missiles in all phases of flight. The satellites will be part of SDA’s Tranche 2 Tracking Layer, a network of satellites in low orbit 1,000 kilometers above Earth. Proposals are due Oct. 5. The agency plans to split the contract among an unspecified number of vendors. SDA has already acquired four Tranche 0 Tracking Layer satellites from SpaceX, and four from L3Harris. It ordered 14 Tranche 1 satellites from L3Harris, 14 from Northrop Grumman and seven from Raytheon Technologies. To date, only the SpaceX tracking satellites have been launched to orbit. DoD seeks a proliferated network SDA, a U.S. Space Force organization , calls its layered network of satellites the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. It includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites that will transmit data collected by the Tracking Layer missile-detection and early-warning sensor satellites. Space Force leaders said the Tracking Layer will help augment DoD’s current missile-warning satellites that are at much higher altitudes in geostationary Earth orbits. Officials said DoD will eventually stop buying geostationary satellites that on average take seven years to develop while China is moving to build new constellations at a rapid pace. “The Tranche 2 Tracking Layer prototyping effort will accelerate the capability to provide global, persistent indications, detection, warning, tracking, and identification of conventional and advanced missile threats, including hypersonic missile systems,” said SDA’s request for proposals. The request is for 54 satellites but more could be procured, based on available funding, said SDA. They will be deployed in six orbital planes as early as 2027. Each plane will be launched on a single national security space mission on either United Launch Alliance or SpaceX rockets. “The fully deployed Tracking Layer is estimated to include more than 100 space vehicles in low Earth orbit across multiple planes,” said SDA. Each satellite will have an infrared sensor payload, optical communications terminals; in addition to Ka-band and S-band communications payloads. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat has invested in French venture capital firm Karista’s space technology fund to strengthen ties with startups across Europe, the satellite operator said Sept. 5. The two-year-old fund has so far made early-stage investments ranging from one million to five million euros ($1.1 million to $5.4 million) in seven space-focused startups: About 30% of the 45 million euro funding pot has been deployed to date, Karista CEO Olivier Dubuisson told SpaceNews . The firm has a 2028 deadline to invest the rest. Eutelsat did not disclose how much it invested in the fund but said partnering with the VC firm would help drive more innovation at the 46-year-old geostationary fleet operator. The announcement comes as Eutelsat’s shareholders prepare to vote Sept. 28 on a merger with OneWeb, a British broadband startup with 634 satellites in low Earth orbit. Dubuisson said 21 investors are now participating in its space fund, including other corporates such as CMA CGM, a French shipping and logistics company, and financial institutions BPIFrance and Covea. French space agency CNES is the cornerstone investor of the fund and has an agreement with Karista that covers technical due diligence and assistance, purchasing of startup products or services, and access to major CNES suppliers. While Eutelsat has previously partnered with a global space technology fund run by U.K.-based Seraphim Space, Dubuisson said Karista is solely focused on Europe. “We think that Europe is the perfect playground for Spacetech investments,” he said via email. There are many investment opportunities in Europe at prices that are more reasonable than in the United States, he added. Karista and other VC firms hope adding more space investment capacity in Europe will help the region close the gap with the United States, where tech investors a decade ago helped usher in a flood of entrepreneurial startups to the industry. Thomas Baden, managing partner of Swiss private equity firm Neventa Capital, said in June there had been more space technology funding in Europe for the first half of the year than in all of 2022.
The European Space Agency and ArianeGroup announced a successful hot-fire test of the core stage of the Ariane 6 rocket, the first of two such tests before ESA is ready to set a date for the rocket’s inaugural launch. The test took place Sept. 5 on the launch pad at the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. A prototype of the Ariane 6 core stage was fueled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and its Vulcain 2.1 engine fired for four seconds, as planned. The test “is a major step towards qualification of Ariane 6, because we have notably validated all the operations needed to run a complete launch campaign,” said Martin Sion, chief executive of ArianeGroup, the prime contractor for Ariane 6, in a statement. The hot-fire test was previously scheduled for July, but stopped before reaching engine ignition. ESA later said the automated countdown was aborted “due to certain measurements exceeding preset limits,” and later called off because of a lack of liquid oxygen. “We had not enough time to do it and not enough oxygen in the tanks, so we decided to stop the chronology and to retry the complete ignition of the Vulcain during the next chronology,” said Carine Leveau, director of space transportation at the French space agency CNES, on the July attempt during a Sept. 4 ESA briefing. The test was rescheduled for Aug. 29 but called off again because of what ESA said at the time was a “technical issue affecting the control bench” that handles propellant loading and the automated countdown. Leveau said that there was no “clear technical issue” with the control bench, but that engineers needed more time be sure everything was ready for the test. “This completed Ariane 6 hot-fire test was essential in minimizing the potential for mishaps during the final launch sequence and ensuring its success. Step-by-step qualification of all the operations leading to the launch involves rigorously coordinated work by CNES, ArianeGroup and ESA,” said Philippe Baptiste, head of CNES, in a statement. This short-duration test will be followed by a second, scheduled for Oct. 3, where the Vulcain 2.1 engine will fire for 470 seconds. That is intended to support final qualification of the core stage for flight. At the Sept. 4 briefing, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said that after the conclusion of the long-duration test, the agency would be ready to set a target launch period for the first Ariane 6 . He declined to narrow down that range of dates for the launch other than to say that, if all goes well with upcoming tests, that launch will take place “not too late” in 2024. The rocket was once scheduled to perform its first launch in 2020. “We have a fantastic team working on this program,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, in an agency statement. “We can all feel it – we are taking the final steps towards entering into the Ariane 6 era.”
Terran Orbital unveiled a family of seven standard satellite buses Sept. 6. Fueled prior to launch, the new satellites will weigh between 14 and 1,000 kilograms. “The buses, featuring interchangeable components and modules, are payload agnostic. They can do communications, electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar,” Marc Bell, Terran Orbital co-founder, chairman and CEO, told SpaceNews. “The mission you choose will determine the bus size you use.” Terran Orbital, one of the companies that developed the cubesat standard, also supplies buses for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture through Lockheed Martin. “Standards are more important than ever,” Bell said, as organizations like the SDA develop constellations that require satellites from multiple vendors to work together. “With this announcement we are again setting the bar high with an industry-leading product line,” Bell said in a statement. “While we still offer fully custom platforms to meet unique specifications, we are creating new industry standards” to “drive down the cost of the satellite and increase their functionality using standard components that roll up into configurations that quickly and effectively satisfy the needs of the DoD and research customer alike.” Terran Orbital developed the new standards based on satellites the company has produced for civil, defense and commercial customers. The new product includes buses of various shapes and sizes.
The technical success of India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander mission could help not just India’s space program but also the country’s standing on the global stage, experts argue. The Indian space agency ISRO put the Vikram lander into sleep mode late Sept. 3 , shortly before nightfall at its landing site in the south polar regions of the moon. That came after ISRO powered down the Pragyan rover a day earlier. ISRO said it hopes that the lander can be powered back on in late September, after the two-week lunar night, although neither the lander nor the rover are equipped with systems to keep them warm in temperatures that could fall to as low as –190 degrees Celsius. While Chandrayaan-3 has produced only a modest amount of science, including a handful of images, spectra and other data released by ISRO since its Aug. 23 landing, the successful landing and operation of both Vikram and Pragyan could support future, more ambitious Indian lunar missions. ISRO hinted at that in one social media post about a final “hop” performed by the lander on Sept. 3, when the lander fired its engines to lift off the lunar surface by about 40 centimeters, landing about 30 to 40 centimeters from its original touchdown site. “Importance? This ‘kick-start’ enthuses future sample return and human missions!” ISRO stated. ISRO has not announced any formal plans for sample return or other more sophisticated missions. Currently, the only Indian mission formally announced after Chandrayaan-3 is the Lunar Polar Exploration Mission, or LUPEX, a joint mission with Japan that would send an Indian-developed lander back to the south polar region of the moon with a Japanese rover. LUPEX would launch no earlier than the mid-2020s. Outside experts expect India to pursue more ambitious missions that include sample return and resource utilization. “I believe India is interested in continuing to scale the moon for resources, the next time with a mission to detect helium-3, which has been a long-standing scientific focus of ISRO scientists and others from India’s astrophysics community,” said Namrata Goswami, a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University who studies India’s space program. Helium-3 has long been identified as a potential fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, although such reactors do not yet exist. “Moving forward, India would aim to develop the capacity for long-term lunar capabilities,” she added, including development of more sophisticated lunar technologies and, eventually, crewed lunar missions. That is one reason, she argued, India signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords in June as it is “aimed at building a lunar base and support a permanent presence.” Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Center for Security, Strategy & Technology at the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank, agreed that India foresees one day sending humans to the moon, but added there is no timetable for doing so. “The successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 has given hopes for India to do a crewed mission, but the timeline could also be a factor of India’s successful Gaganyaan mission slated for next year.” Gaganyaan is India’s effort at developing a human orbital spaceflight capability, with ISRO developing a crewed capsule that would be launched on the country’s LVM3 rocket. That program missed its original goal of launching Indian astronauts by the 75 th anniversary of the country’s independence in 2022 but is pushing ahead with a series of uncrewed tests before a crewed launch as soon as late 2024. Goswami said the success of Chandrayaan-3 should ensure continued backing for Gaganyaan. “The celebration and support that India’s general population offered for India’s moon mission landing means a mission like Gaganyaan, where India will build its indigenous capacity to send Indian citizens to LEO, will have societal support.” Chandrayaan-3 could also have geopolitical ramifications in the form of giving India “soft power” prestige enabling international cooperation. “The soft power aspects of India’s Chandrayaan-3 are significant,” said Rajagopalan, highlighting the capabilities of ISRO beyond lunar landing to areas like satellite launch. That, she said, “goes a long way in expanding India’s presence in the global commercial space market.” “All of this expands India’s broader strategic influence as well,” she added. Goswami providd a similar assessment. “Other nations would see India as a partner of choice as they aim to build their own space ecosystem on a limited budget,” she said. India has previously used its space capabilities along those lines, developing a “South Asia” communications and meteorology satellite that India offered capacity on to several neighboring south Asian countries. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Goswami said, “can now showcase India as a space power that can offer its space capabilities and know-how built on a frugal budget as a model to nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America as part of India’s foreign policy posture.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Vodafone plans to test beta services from Amazon’s planned Project Kuiper broadband constellation next year to extend the reach of its cellular networks in Europe and Africa. The companies said Sept. 5 they agreed on a partnership that would use Amazon’s envisioned network of 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit to bring 4G and 5G connectivity to areas where it would be too challenging or expensive to deploy terrestrial networks. Vodafone and Vodacom — the U.K.-based mobile giant’s majority-owned African subsidiary — said they could connect more rural and remote communities by using the Kuiper constellation to link widely dispersed cell towers. However, the companies did not disclose details about any commercial arrangement. An Amazon spokesperson said initial Project Kuiper service pilots would be available for Vodafone, Vodacom, and other enterprise customers by the end of 2024 after launching an unspecified number of satellites. It is the second partnership Project Kuiper has announced with a telco following a similar strategic collaboration with Verizon, which said two years ago it was exploring ways to use the satellites to extend connectivity services across the United States. Vodafone is one of Europe’s largest telcos and is either the biggest or second-biggest mobile operator in most of the 21 countries its companies directly operate in. Of these countries, 11 are in Europe and eight are in Africa through Vodacom. The telco also has partnership agreements with local operators in 46 countries to extend its reach beyond the companies it owns. Clock is ticking Amazon said it is preparing to launch two prototype satellites over the coming months ahead of deploying production satellites in 2024 that would be built in-house. KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 are slated to launch on one of United Launch Alliance’s remaining Atlas 5 rockets this fall, following delays with what was to be the debut flight of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket earlier this year. Amazon has spent billions to secure up to 92 launches for Project Kuiper, including nine Atlas 5 and 38 Vulcan rockets. The other two rockets under contract — Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn — are years behind schedule and a still unknown number of months from their maiden launches as Amazon races to meet its regulatory deployment deadlines. Half the constellation must be launched by July 2026 under Project Kuiper’s Federal Communications Commission license, and the other 1,618 satellites must be deployed before the end of 2029. Blue Origin is owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos and its Project Kuiper launch contract recently became the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, an Amazon shareholder. The plaintiffs argue that Amazon’s management acted in bad faith by awarding the bulk of the Kuiper launches to three unproven rockets without considering SpaceX despite its strong record, lower prices, and unmatched capacity.
Firefly Aerospace signed an agreement with L3Harris Technologies to launch three missions on Firefly’s Alpha rocket, the company announced Sept. 5. Firefly’s Alpha rocket — designed to lift more than 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit — operates from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. L3Harris’ space business builds satellites for DoD and the intelligence community. The agreement with Firefly is for three dedicated launches on the Alpha vehicle targeted for 2026. L3Harris won $225 million contract The three satellites are being designed and built by L3Harris under a $225 million U.S. government contract, a company spokesperson told SpaceNews . “These payloads will support the national security space mission,” the company said. “Firefly is honored to support the ongoing mission needs of L3Harris as they continue to deliver satellite systems that advance our national security,” Bill Weber, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said Sept. 5 in a news release. The three missions will launch from Firefly’s Space Launch Complex SLC-2 launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base. Weber said Firefly is ramping up Alpha production at its rocket manufacturing and test site in Briggs, Texas, to support government and commercial launches, and is expanding its facilities to support the ongoing development of a new medium launch vehicle projected to launch in 2025.
From inside Space Shuttle Discovery, astronauts watched Joe Allen inch toward Palapa B2, an Indonesian communications satellite stranded in low-Earth orbit by a failed kick motor. Allen stabbed the Stinger, a device NASA engineers created for this purpose, into the satellite’s engine nozzle. “With his cargo on a stick, Joe, the smallest male astronaut in the corps at five feet six inches, looked like the world’s strongest man grabbing hold of the 1,200-pound Palapa, as he slowly swung that satellite around, putting himself and his prize in just the right position for Anna,” Bloomberg News reporter Loren Grush writes in “ The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts .” Anna Fisher, an emergency room physician and one America’s first women astronauts, deftly maneuvered the Space Shuttle’s robotic arm to move Palapa B2 and Allen into the payload bay. Space history buffs may know that bringing Palapa B2 back to Earth posed further challenges, since the clamp to move the satellite inside the Shuttle was too small. Plus, during the same November 1984 Shuttle flight, astronauts had to repeat the complex procedure to retrieve the Westar 6 communications satellite. Whether or not you’re versed in Shuttle history, “The Six” is a compelling account of the extraordinary women in NASA’s 1978 astronaut class, the first to include anyone other than white males. Particularly remarkable are first-hand accounts of arduous survival training, and the often chauvinistic public and media attention the women received. A concerned citizen told Fisher, the first mother in space, “just how irresponsible she was being” for leaving her child. “It didn’t matter that plenty of fathers had been to space before,” Grush points out. Surgeon and pilot Rhea Seddon was described in Weight Watchers magazine as looking “like a college cheerleader — and one of the nicest and prettiest girls on sorority row.” A reporter asked astrophysicist Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a competitive tennis player, if she wept when faced with a problem during training exercises. “Sally’s face screamed what she couldn’t say out loud herself: You cannot be serious ,” Grush writes. “Trying her best to remain as collected as possible, she laughed, shook her head, and gave the best response she could think of: “Why doesn’t anyone ask Rick those same questions?” Ride’s reference to Frederick “Rick” Hauck, STS-7 pilot, engineer and retired U.S. Navy captain, drew a laugh from the crowd. Ride then offered a more serious reply. “I don’t think I react any different than anybody else on the crew does.” Grush paints vivid portraits of each woman, from their childhood fascination with science and space to their achievements before, during and after becoming astronauts. Shannon Lucid, a chemist and pilot who had three children when she joined NASA, flew on five Shuttle missions and spent six months aboard Russia’s Mir space station. Judy Resnik, an electrical engineer, pilot, classical pianist and the first Jewish-American astronaut, died in 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded soon after liftoff. Kathy Sullivan, a geologist, oceanographer and U.S. Naval Reserve officer, explored the depths of the world’s oceans and was the first American woman to conduct a spacewalk. Grush, the daughter of two NASA engineers, has reported on space and science for more than a decade. Her book details the myriad challenges the women faced, from ill-fitting spacesuits to scrutiny of their private lives. “The Six” is also a tale of perseverance. “The Six understood that as the first women, their every move was being scrutinized, more so than the performance of any of their male colleagues,” Grush writes. “They also realized that if one of them messed up, critics would pounce, using the failure as evidence that women weren’t fit for space.” Humor and pranks popular among certain spaceflight crews enliven the book, which also contains a heart-wrenching account of the Challenger tragedy. When Resnik’s colleagues learned what happened, “grief gripped their hearts and uncertainty hung heavy in the air,” Grush writes. “The scale of it was unimaginable for everyone. They hadn’t just lost one friend. Seven people were gone in an instant,” colleagues, friends “and one of the Six.” “The Six” offers the historical context for female astronauts including Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space in 1963, and Svetlana Savitskaya, who became the first woman to exit her space vehicle less than three months before Sullivan’s first spacewalk. As for Fisher claiming the title of first mother in space, “apparently, the Soviet Union did not have among its female cosmonauts a woman they could send up to steal that title,” Grush writes.
China’s Galactic Energy conducted its first sea launch early Wednesday, also marking a ninth successive successful launch for the commercial company. The Ceres-1 solid rocket lifted off from a transport erector launcher on a mobile sea platform off the coast of Haiyang, Shandong province, at 5:34 a.m. Eastern (0934 UTC) Sept. 5. Aboard were four satellites for Guodian Gaoke, a commercial firm constructing its Tianqi low-Earth orbit narrow-band Internet of Things constellation. The launch carried Tianqi satellites 21-24, with the spacecraft targeting an 800-kilometer-altitude orbit. The satellites are equipped with chemical propulsion systems allowing orbital maneuvers. Guodian Gaoke has 21 satellites in orbit and aims to complete the 38-satellite constellation in 2024. Galactic Energy dubbed the launch “The Little Mermaid” in a Rocket Lab-style mission naming. Ceres-1 has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). This was the first launch to 800 kilometers. China’s Eastern sea launch spaceport in Haiyang facilitated the launch. The mobile rocket launch barge designated DE FU 15002 was used for the launch. Haiyang has now supported launches of state-owned Long March 11 solid rockets and the spinoff Jielong-3 rocket. Another startup, Orienspace , is currently targeting December for its first ever launch, using Haiyang. Orienspace’s Gravity-1 consists of three solid stages and four side boosters. The rocket will have the capability to lift around 6,500 kilograms of payload to LEO, or 3,700 kilograms to 700-km SSO. Haiyang spaceport could support liquid launchers in the future and is part of a wider expansion of spaceports in China to help ease a bottleneck in access to space, and provide greater launch flexibility and redundancy . It could potentially reduce the risk from falling rocket debris associated with Chinese launches from inland spaceports. Tuesday’s Ceres-1 launch was a hot launch. Long March 11 launches from the Yellow Sea have been cold launches . Galactic Energy was founded in early 2018 by former employees of the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). With support of the national military-civil fusion strategy, the firm launched its first Ceres-1 solid rocket in November 2020. This made it only the second private Chinese launch firm to place a satellite in orbit, following iSpace in 2019. A single launch followed a year later , with a pair of launches performed in 2022. The company is now ramping up its launch rate, launching five times in 2023, including four since July 22 . The company is also preparing for the first launch of its Pallas-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher. The reusable two-stage Pallas-1 will be capable of carrying 5,000 kilograms to LEO or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO. It raised $200 million for reusable launch vehicle development in early 2022. Galactic Energy stated at the China Commercial Aerospace Forum in Wuhan in July this year that it is targeting Q3 next year for the Pallas-1 test flight. The company plans a first flight including recovery of the first stage using landing legs for 2025. Space Pioneer ( Tianlong-2 ) and Landspace ( Zhuque-2 ) earlier this year became the first Chinese commercial firms to reach orbit with liquid propellant rockets. These successes mark a jump in Chinese commercial payload capacity, as well as launch vehicle complexity. China’s commercial launch sector has also grown in terms of launch rate and diversity in 2023. Six firms — Galactic Energy, iSpace, Landspace, Space Pioneer and state-owned spinoffs CAS Space and Expace have all reached orbit this year. This group have already launched 11 times this year, surpassing the total of 10 missions accrued by Expace, CAS Space, China Rocket , Galactic Energy and iSpace (one failure) in 2022.
The European Space Agency plans to set a target launch period for the first Ariane 6 in October, with the hopes that vehicle can finally take flight “not too late” into 2024. At a Sept. 4 briefing, officials from ESA and other partners on the Ariane 6 said they should be able to announce a range of dates for the rocket’s inaugural launch after a pair of static-fire tests of the rocket’s core stage and its Vulcain 2.1 engine on the launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. The first of those tests, slated to last about four seconds, is scheduled for Sept. 5. That will be followed by a 470-second test on Oct. 3 that, if successful, will provide what ESA calls “flight-ready” qualification for the core stage. Those tests, said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, should allow the agency to set a target for the first launch, which ESA acknowledged last month had slipped to 2024. “We will then be in a position to define a launch period for Ariane 6, which we will announce to you after these series of tests have been conducted.” Aschbacher declined to speculate when asked if that first launch will take place in the first half of 2024 if those tests go as planned. “We are on a good track. We have stabilized the schedule. The tests are looking really good,” he said. “I think the chances, if everything goes perfect, are pretty good that it’s not too late in the next year, but there are still a lot of unknowns ahead of us.” Those tests have not always gone perfectly. The four-second static-fire test was originally scheduled for July, but scrubbed for technical issues as well as a lack of liquid oxygen as the countdown was delayed. That test was rescheduled for Aug. 29 but again postponed after what ESA described as a “technical issue affecting the control bench” that handles propellant loading and the automated countdown. At the briefing, Carine Leveau, director of space transportation at the French space agency CNES, said there was no “clear technical issue” that postponed the test. “We needed more time to be sure that everything was well-prepared, in particular concerning the control bench,” she said. “Today, everything is OK and clearly explained, so we are go to perform the chronology tomorrow.” The program, though, did celebrate a successful static-fire test of the Ariane 6’s Vinci upper stage engine Sept. 1 at a facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany, operated by the German aerospace agency DLR. The test, which also involved the upper stage’s auxiliary power unit, confirmed the upper stage’s performance on a nominal flight. “If that had been a flight, this phase of the flight would have been successful,” said Martin Sion, chief executive of ArianeGroup, prime contractor for the Ariane 6. A final static-fire test of the upper stage is planned for this fall, again at Lampoldshausen, to test the performance of the stage in “degraded” conditions and other mission profiles. “I don’t think there will be a difficulty to make this test in due time,” Sion said, noting that the test was needed to demonstrate the reliability of the vehicle. The successful upper stage test was proof of the “versatility of the Ariane 6,” including the ability to restart the upper stage, said Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace. “What has been demonstrated is very convincing for what we will have to do for our customers.” Arianespace has 28 Ariane 6 launches in its order book, with the largest single customer being Amazon, which ordered 18 launches for its Project Kuiper constellation. Amazon is facing a July 2026 deadline as part of its Federal Communications Commission license to launch half of its 3,236 satellites using the Ariane 6 along with Blue Origin’s New Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, none of which have yet to launch. “The dialogue with Amazon is an outstanding dialogue,” Israël said of discussions with the company on its launch plans. The cost of Ariane 6 development remains at approximately 4 billion euros ($4.3 billion). “At the moment the cost is contained,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation. That cost estimate, he added, includes 20% margin for contingencies that has not yet been exceeded. Sion, though, said that the delays in Ariane 6 “have created very significant costs borne by ArianeGroup,” but did not elaborate. While the Sept. 4 briefing was primarily devoted to the status of the Ariane 6, ESA did provide an update on the Vega C small launch vehicle, which has been grounded since a December 2022 launch failure. Its return-to-flight plans suffered a setback in June when the Zefiro 40 second-stage motor, the cause of the December launch failure, suffered an “anomaly” during a static-fire test . An independent inquiry board is continuing to investigate the anomaly, Aschbacher said, with its final report is expected before the end of September. “It’s too early now to say something on the root cause.” In the meantime, Arianespace is moving ahead with a launch of the original version of Vega, which does not use the Zefiro 40 motor. Arianespace announced Aug. 31 it has scheduled a Vega launch for Oct. 4 carrying the THEOS-2 Earth observation satellite for Thailand and the FORMOSAT-7R/Triton satellite for the Taiwanese Space Agency to collect radio occultation data for meteorology. The rocket will also carry 10 secondary payloads.
With its first 23 satellites in orbit, the U.S. Space Development Agency in the coming months will begin the demonstration phase of a data network in space designed to support military operations. SpaceX on Sept. 2 launched SDA’s second batch of satellites. The agency now has 19 communications satellites and four missile-tracking spacecraft in orbit. These make up the Tranche 0 portion of a projected network known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. “While the launch is very exciting news, it’s what we will demonstrate on orbit that really matters — the ability to provide the warfighter with tactical data links, beyond line of sight targeting, and the missile warning/missile tracking of advanced missiles,” SDA’s director Derek Tournear said in a statement following the second launch of Tranche 0 satellites. Two key goals for SDA will be to test the radio and optical communication payloads on the satellites that will make up the Transport Layer, an internet in space intended to move data from satellite to satellite, and provide links to military systems on the ground, at sea and in flight, so they can get data with minimum delay. “For the first time we’re going to demonstrate tactical data links from space,” Mike Eppolito, SDA’s program director for Tranche 0, told reporters Aug. 29. SDA’s satellites will be the space nodes of the military’s Link 16 network. This is a crucial requirement for the Transport Layer because all major U.S. military and NATO platforms are part of the Link 16 network — an encrypted tactical data protocol used to connect aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles so they can exchange data, including text, voice messages and imagery. Link 16 today is a line-of-sight network , and extending it into space would provide beyond line-of-sight connectivity. Of the 19 Transport Layer satellites now in orbit — 10 made by Lockheed Martin and nine made by York Space Systems — seven have Link 16 payloads. The remainder have S-band and Ka-band radios. All 19 satellites have two optical terminals each. Tests on hold due to licensing delays SDA had planned to start testing this summer the Link 16 payloads on York’s satellites launched in April. But tests are on hold pending frequency licensing approval from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. SDA also needs authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration to transmit Link 16 signals in national airspace over a test site at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The FAA has to ensure, for example, that Link 16 transmissions will not interfere with air traffic control radars. “The most notable milestone that we’re looking to hit near term is checking out the link 16 payloads,” Eppolito said, “We have some outstanding policy issues that are holding that up. As soon as we get approval, we plan to move forward with that checkout.” These delays were expected, he said. “Whenever you’re demonstrating new technology, there’s always going to be policy hurdles.” Eppolito pointed out that the eight York satellites launched in April have yet to start orbit-raising maneuvers, but that is not due to any performance issues. “There’s been a lot of questions about propulsion issues because we haven’t orbit-raised those satellites,” he said. “It was always our intent to get them on orbit, demonstrate everything at the insertion orbit and orbit-raise them later.” Lockheed Martin has a lot of experience working with Link 16 but operating that network in space comes with new challenges, said Joe Rickers, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for protected communications. “It comes down to getting a space-qualified product,” he said. Rickers said introducing a terrestrial-proven network in space brings significant improvements as it will “enable sensor-to-shooter targeting by connecting systems that include fighter aircraft and integrated air and missile defense networks.” To ensure SDA satellites from different vendors can communicate, the agency requires the use of optical terminals that comply with specified networking and communications standards. “Optically linked satellites is something that the commercial industry has done for a little bit of time now,” said SDA spokesperson Jennifer Elzea. “But it’s not something that the military has heavily relied upon because the market didn’t really support it until recently.” For DoD, the concept of a proliferated low Earth orbit constellation is new, she said. “So that’s something that SDA is demonstrating.” With regard to missile-tracking satellites, SDA in June reported that it received initial images from the first two infrared sensor satellites built by SpaceX that launched in April. Two additional SpaceX satellites launched Sept. 2. There are four more Tranche 0 missile-tracking satellites made by L3Harris that are projected to launch on a U.S. Space Force-Missile Defense Agency mission later this year. One Tranche 0 Transport Layer satellite made by York Space remains on the ground to serve as a software testbed. While Tranche 0 is a demonstration network, Tranche 1 will be the first operational portion of SDA’s proliferated constellation. Tranche 1 will include approximately 150 Transport and Tracking satellites, and are projected to launch in late 2024 and 2025.
Chinese space scientists have outlined a tentative roadmap for establishing a space resources utilization network stretching into the outer reaches of the solar system. Wang Wei, a scientist affiliated to CASC, China’s main space contractor, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is proposing a four-stage roadmap for a space resources utilization project which would, eventually, span the entire solar system by 2100. The initiative is titled Tiangong Kaiwu and takes its name from Ming Dynasty scientist Song Yingxing’s work, “The Exploitation of the Works of Nature.” It proposes developing strategic mineral resources, utilizing off-world water-ice for fuel, creating transport and supply nodes, and establishing a space resource development system. The proposal is not an approved government plan, but is an indication of some of the current thinking on long term visions for space exploration and exploitation in China. It envisions initially constructing water-ice resource development facilities on the moon. Water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen and used as propellant. These capabilities would be used to expand to near-Earth asteroids, Mars, main-belt asteroids and the moons of Jupiter. The project would establish supply routes and chains using gravitationally balanced nodes at Earth-Moon Lagrange point 1, Sun-Earth L1 and L2, Ceres and Sun-Jupiter L1. Tiangong Kaiwu would require massive resource infrastructure including supply stations, transportation routes, mining and processing stations. It would also demand a focus on access to space, the ability to make low-cost returns to Earth, breakthroughs in key technology. The overarching goal would be to develop a large-scale and commercial space resource development and utilization capabilities. “Just like the miracles created in the Great Age of Navigation, the ‘great space age’ with the use of space resources will … create the next miracles in the history of human development and bring new prosperity to human civilization,” Wang said, official industry publication China Space News reported , Aug. 31. Wang Wei presented the proposal at a Chinese Society of Astronautics (CSA) meeting in Beijing, Aug. 19, in a forum on “Exploring the Universe and Developing Space Resources.” This notion has stage goals of exploration, mining, and utilization with stage posts at 2035, 2050, 2075 and 2100. This will “promote the development and utilization of space resources in China to achieve leapfrogging style development,” Wang was reported as saying. The proposal is preliminary. It does not address matters such as budgets, hardware, technological and economic feasibility, legal issues regarding the Outer Space Treaty and the use of resources and other myriad issues. It is not the only notable statement on lunar and other resources. Earlier this year CASC’s Yang Mengfei called on China to seize never-to-be-repeated opportunities from lunar activities. “Now is the critical time for space infrastructure to expand to the Earth-moon system,” Yang said. In recent years senior CASC official Bao Weimin has made calls to establish a “ space economic zone ” between the Earth and the moon capable of generating $10 trillion a year for China by 2050. Other reports presented at the CSA event included the topics of human spaceflight engineering, the future direction of lunar resource development and utilization, thoughts on space science development strategy and results relating to space station experiments and lunar surface construction. More concretely, China plans to launch its Tianwen-2 mission in 2025 to collect samples from near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa. Its 2026 Chang’e-7 mission will target the lunar south pole and consist of an orbiter, lander, rover and “mini flying detector.” The latter spacecraft will look for the presence of water-ice. China is building a reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle which could facilitate space infrastructure missions. Chinese startups including Origin Space are engaged in plans for asteroid mining.
A Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down of the coast of Florida early Sept. 4, bringing back a crew from the United States, United Arab Emirates and Russia who spent six months on the International Space Station. The Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast from Jacksonville, Florida, at 12:17 a.m. Eastern, completing the Crew-6 mission. The spacecraft had undocked from the ISS at 7:05 a.m. Eastern Sept. 3. Onboard the spacecraft were NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, who served as commander and pilot, respectively, of Crew-6. Also on board were mission specialists Sultan Alneyadi of the UAE and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos. The four spent 186 days in space, starting with their launch March 2 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 . Their return was delayed two days to wait for favorable weather conditions in the splashdown zones, which had been affected by Hurricane Idalia. The reentry and splashdown went according to plan, NASA and SpaceX officials said during a briefing after splashdown. On the Crew-5 return in March , one of two drogue parachutes was slower to inflate than the other, a topic that was reviewed and cleared ahead of the Crew-7 launch Aug. 26 . “The chutes looked nominal, really great,” Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said at the briefing after splashdown. “We’re not tracking any anomalies or anything that looks out of character.” Endeavour, which completed its fourth flight with Crew-6, will be refurbished for use on Crew-8, scheduled for February 2024. The five-month turnaround is typical for Crew Dragon spacecraft, said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager. One area of focus will be propellant valves, he said, looking for any corrosion that was seen on a cargo Dragon mission launched in June. NASA has certified Crew Dragon for five flights, but SpaceX expects to be able to reuse each spacecraft up to 15 times. “All of the data so far continues to indicate that’s possible,” Reed said, although it will require “a certain amount of additional refurbishment” for the vehicles. Endeavour is one of four Crew Dragon spacecraft in operation. SpaceX is building a fifth vehicle that is expected to make its first flight in the near future. “That new capsule is coming along well,” Reed said. Its first mission “will be in the next couple of flights or so” but does not have a specific mission assigned to it yet.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander and rover have been set to sleep for the onset of lunar night, days after the country successfully launched its Aditya L1 solar mission. The historic Chandrayaan-3 mission lander Vikram set down near at 8:32 a.m. Eastern (1232 UTC) Aug. 23, making India only the fourth country to successfully land on the moon. Vikram was set to sleep at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Sunday, Sept. 3 (0230 UTC; 8 a.m. IST, Sept. 4) the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on X, formerly known as Twitter. Local sunset will occur Sept. 5. Vikram’s payloads were turned off, but with receivers remaining on, with ISRO hoping the spacecraft may reactivate following sunrise over the landing site, at 69.373° South, 32.319° East near crater Manzinus C, after sunrise in late September. The landing site—the first soft-landing in the vicinity of the lunar South Pole region—is now named Shiva Shakti Point. The site was spotted by the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, part of the 2019 mission that included the failure of India’s first lunar landing attempt. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the landing date of Aug. 23 will be celebrated as ‘National Space Day.’ The mission’s small, 26-kilogram rover, Pragyan, rolled out onto the moon from Vikram within hours of the landing. The first rover images were published Aug. 27 and in-situ measurements detected sulfur on the lunar surface. Images from the surface show long shadows near lunar noon, and the vertical solar array of the rover, indicative of operations at a high latitude on the moon. Pragyan was set to sleep after 10 days of activities, ISRO stated on Sept. 2. The rover accumulated a drive distance of 101.4 meters , according to the agency. Nilesh M. Desai, Director of the Space Applications Centre (SAC) said Sept.1 that the rover had been expected to move 300 to 350 meters. “We have moved around 65-70 meters. Our initial expectation was that we would move it around 30 meters a day. It moves five meters in one go and we wanted to move it six times a day. We have not been able to do it.” The spacecraft’s solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected Sept. 22. The mission completed and exceeded its primary missions. These were demonstration of a safe, soft lunar landing, demonstrating roving on the surface, and conducting in-situ scientific experiments. These include release of initial results from a lunar seismic activity payload on the Chandrayaan-3 lander. ISRO is however hoping one or both spacecraft reawaken following the next sunrise. Neither Vikram nor Pragyan carry radioisotope heater units often used on lunar missions to help keep spacecraft and their components warm to survive the deep cold of lunar night. China’s Chang’e-4 lunar far side mission recorded lunar nighttime temperatures of minus 190 degrees Celsius in 2019. Vikram also performed a propulsive hop, on Sept. 2 , ISRO tweeted. The lander was commanded to fire its engines and landed safely as expected around 30–40 centimeters away from its starting point, according to ISRO. Footage shows lunar dust kicked up as the 710-kilogram dry mass lander lifts off from the surface and apparent movement to a new resting place. The test echoes the hop by the U.S. Surveyor 6 mission in 1967 which marked the first lift off from another planetary body. India followed up its lunar landing feat with the successful launch of its first dedicated solar observatory. Aditya-L1 launched on Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C57) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, at 2:20 a.m. Eastern, (0620 UTC; 11.50 a.m. IST) Sept. 2. The spacecraft separated from the launch vehicle around 63 minutes into the flight. “Aditya L1 spacecraft has been injected in an elliptical orbit of 235 by 19,500 km which is intended, very precisely by PSLV,” ISRO Chairman S. Somanath said. Aditya-L1 is headed to its destination of Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, around which it will enter a halo orbit. The journey will require four Earth-bound orbital maneuvers before entering a transfer orbit. The voyage will take around 125 days. The 1480-kilogram spacecraft carries seven indigenously-developed scientific payloads to study the Sun while situated around 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth. These include an ultraviolet imaging telescope, soft and hard X-ray spectrometers, and a coronagraph for making observations of the Sun, and a pair of particle analyzers and a magnetometer for in-situ measurements. Science objectives include studying coronal heating, solar wind acceleration, Coronal Mass Ejections, dynamics of solar atmosphere and temperature anisotropy. — Edited Sept. 5 to correct dry mass of Vikram lander to 710 kg (previously stated as 626 kilograms (Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander dry mass)).
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Sept. 2 at 7:25 a.m. Pacific from Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carrying 13 U.S. military satellites. The mission to low Earth orbit was the second launch of the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 0 mesh network of military communications and missile tracking satellites. The first 10 satellites of Tranche 0 launched April 2 . SDA is a U.S. Space Force organization building a space data network — called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — that includes a transport layer and a missile-tracking sensor layer. The agency aims to deploy an internet in space that can move data from satellite to satellite, and pass information to military systems on the ground, at sea and in flight. This was SpaceX’s third attempt to launch the Tranche 0 mission. The launch had been scheduled for Aug. 31 but was called off during the pre-launch countdown due to a first-stage engine issue on the Falcon 9. A second attempt Sept. 1 was scrubbed minutes before the scheduled liftoff when a problem was discovered with a valve on the ground support equipment that needed additional troubleshooting. After separating from the second stage about two and a half minutes into the flight, the booster performed three engine burns and returned to Landing Zone 4 at Vandenberg about eight minutes after liftoff. As is customary with military launches, SpaceX did not provide views of the second stage or payload updates after booster separation. The 13 spacecraft of the Tranche 0 constellation launched on Saturday included 11 communications satellites — 10 made by Lockheed Martin and one made by York Space — and two missile-tracking sensor satellites made by SpaceX. There are four more Tranche 0 missile-tracking satellites made by L3Harris that are projected to launch on a U.S. Space Force-Missile Defense Agency mission later this year, to be flown also on a Falcon 9 under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract . The April 2 and Sept. 2 Tranche 0 launches were performed under a December 2020 $150 million contract SDA awarded to SpaceX. This was SpaceX’s 61st launch so far this year and 260th overall. The first-stage booster for this mission completed its 13th flight. SpaceX to date has recovered 222 first stages.
SAN FRANCISCO – Ball Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, Orbital Micro Systems and Spire Global won contracts, announced Aug. 31, to design microwave sounders for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Under the contracts awarded by NASA on behalf of NOAA, the four companies will conduct studies and design sounders for the Near-Earth Orbit Network , or NEON, NOAA’s next generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites, Colorado-based Ball and OMS , and Virginia-based Northrop Grumman each claimed $5 million firm-fixed-price contracts to design NOAA’s Sounder for Microwave-Based Applications (SMBA). The value of Virginia-based Spire’s contract was approximately $4.7 million. After the firms complete the 12-month studies, NASA and NOAA will decide whether to proceed with development and manufacturing of the sounder. If approved, SMBA would begin gathering data on NEON satellites in low-Earth orbit in 2030, according to the NASA news release. Microwave sounders provide key datasets for numerical weather models. NEON, the weather satellite constellation that succeeds the Joint Polar Satellite System, begins with a free-flying sounder and continue over decades with a series of small- to medium-sized satellites. NOAA leads the NEON mission and provides funding, technical requirements and post-launch operations. NASA manages satellite development and launch. Chuck Cash, Spire vice president of federal sales, said in a statement, “We’re proud to leverage Spire’s expertise in satellite technology to advance Earth observation and empower meteorologists, scientists and researchers with more precise insights into atmospheric properties.” OMS demonstrated its Global Environmental Monitoring System passive microwave sounder in orbit from 2019 to 2021. “GEMS1 operated on orbit successfully for 19 month before de-orbiting in April 2021. It is still the only commercial microwave sounder mission that has been flown to date,” Michael Hurowitz, OMS founder, CEO and chief technology officer, told SpaceNews by email. Ball is manufacturing two Weather System Follow-on Microwave satellites for the U.S. Space Force. Northrop Grumman is building the Electro-Optical Infrared Weather System prototype for the Space Force. Spire announced plans last year to equip its cubesats with microwave sounders from RAL Space, the British government’s national laboratory. This article was updated Sept. 1 with information on Orbital Micro Systems’ Global Environmental Monitoring System. 
 Space Tango , a Kentucky-based startup that conducts research and science experiments on the International Space Station, on Sept. 1 announced the appointment of S. Sita Sonty as its new chief executive officer. Sonty succeeds co-founder Twyman Clements, who will remain with the company as president. Clements said Sonty will help the company grow its business in “microgravity applications for hardware, software, materials science, biotech and medicine.” Sonty said Space Tango has “proven flight payload heritage, a dedicated customer base, and cutting-edge commercial use cases, which have the potential to revolutionize medicine and additive manufacturing in space.” Sonty previously led the space industry practice for the Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm; and was head of human spaceflight sales at SpaceX. Space Tango was founded in 2014 from a partnership between then graduate-student Clements and Kris Kimel, then CEO of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corp. They sought to simplify and increase access to space-based R&D and product development. The company is a commercial spinoff of Kentucky Space — a nonprofit consortium of universities, and public and private organizations — based in Lexington, Kentucky, with offices in Texas, Florida, California, and Washington, D.C. Through a NASA Space Act Agreement, Space Tango since 2017 has provided facilities on the International Space Station to support R&D and manufacturing.
Globalstar has contracted SpaceX to launch Apple-backed satellites in 2025 to replenish its low Earth orbit (LEO) connectivity constellation. The operator said in an Aug. 30 regulatory filing it will pay a total $64 million to launch the first set of satellites ordered last year from MDA, which is using Rocket Lab to supply chassis for the spacecraft. While the company did not give further details about the launch agreement, its $327 million contract with MDA covered 17 satellites for deliveries anticipated in 2025. The manufacturing contract also includes an option for up to nine additional satellites at $11.4 million each. Apple has agreed to reimburse Globalstar for 95% of the constellation, including manufacturing and launch costs. The smartphone giant is also lending Globalstar $252 million to help cover upfront costs. In return, Apple would use 85% of the new network’s capacity to upgrade satellite services launched last year for its latest iPhone, which can connect with one of Globalstar’s 24 existing satellites for emergency services when cell towers are out of reach. Globalstar would use the rest of the capacity for its legacy services, including connectivity for specialized satellite phones and for connecting monitoring and tracking devices. SpaceX is also looking to provide connectivity directly to mass market phones, using the Starlink broadband constellation it operates in LEO. The company is seeking regulatory permission in the United States for more spectrum that could be used for a mobile Starlink satellite service, notably including frequencies in the 1.6 GHz and 2.4 GHz spectrum bands used by Globalstar. Globalstar is also developing a separate business to lease out part of its spectrum for private terrestrial networks. Analysts including Mike Crawford of B. Riley see the operator’s Band 53 frequencies, part of S-band, as one of its highest-value assets as talks continue to with regulators and partners worldwide to unlock its potential. New CEO Globalstar announced Aug. 29 that David Kagan was retiring as CEO effective immediately to make way for Paul Jacobs, who founded wireless technology specialist XCOM Labs and is a former executive chair of Qualcomm, which builds chips for smartphones and other applications. Multiple former Qualcomm senior executives are also joining Globalstar, including a former chief technology officer and a former chief scientist for the chipmaker. In exchange for shares in Globalstar, the satellite operator has entered into a strategic perpetual licensing agreement with XCOM for exclusive access to all of its cellular technology and intellectual property. Globalstar is also getting exclusive access to XCOM’s peer-to-peer connectivity technologies, Crawford noted, which he said could have applications across cellular and satellite devices.
Lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines announced Aug. 31 it raised $20 million through a sale of stock as the company gears up for its first mission. The Houston-based company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it sold approximately 4.7 million shares to an unnamed institutional investor at $4.25 per share. The company said it would use the proceeds for “general corporate purposes and working capital needs.” In a statement, Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said the funding would help the company as it develops a series of lunar lander missions and begins work on a NASA contract, in partnership with KBR, to provide engineering services at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Work on that contract, which has a not-to-exceed value of $719 million over five years, is set to start in the fourth quarter. “This equity investment will help ensure a smooth transition and provide the working capital needed to execute for our customer on day 1,” Altemus said. In an Aug. 14 earnings call , Erik Sallee, chief financial officer of Intuitive Machines, argued that the company’s cash on hand — $39.1 million as of the end of the second quarter — along with revenue from the NASA contract and lunar lander projects would be sufficient, even as the company recorded an operating loss of $13.2 million in the quarter. “The cash on our balance sheet, plus the milestones we have on the books, should take us through,” he said. Intuitive Machines, he added, had a $50 million equity financing facility “which we can use opportunistically to provide further cushion, if needed.” The company said in the announcement of the $20 million stock sale that it no longer expected to use that equity financing facility. “We continue to be disciplined and opportunistic with capital,” Sallee said in the statement. “Given the timing of milestone-based payments, we elected to strengthen our balance sheet defensively, as we grow and execute on new programs.” In that earnings call, Intuitive Machines said it was withdrawing earlier guidance it provided on revenues and cash balance. Sallee blamed that on “delays on government acquisition timelines and U.S. federal budget uncertainty” and not the loss of any particular contract. Intuitive Machines is moving ahead with its first lander mission, IM-1, scheduled to launch as soon as Nov. 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 at the start of a six-day launch window. Two additional missions, IM-2 and IM-3, are scheduled to launch in 202.4 All three are carrying payloads for NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Shares in the company closed at $4.76, down 8.3%, in trading on Nasdaq Aug. 31.
Emerging trends in how China is utilizing and operating its Tiangong space station could impact how the country’s space program is viewed internationally. “The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) intention to allow civilian astronauts and nonstate-owned enterprise (SOE) companies to participate in the Chinese Space Station (CSS) are two trends that will probably change the global image of the Chinese space program,” according to a report from the Department of the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), published Aug. 28. The PLA’s China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) stated in 2016 that it intended to draw on civilians for CSS crews. This was recently realized as Gui Haichao flew to the CSS, or Tiangong (“Heavenly palace”), this year aboard Shenzhou-16 , making him the first of the civilians selected in China’s third and fourth batches of astronauts to reach orbit. “The decision’s impact on global perception, together with ongoing international astronaut selection, seems very likely to improve the PRC standing at least in its joint program with the United Nations, if not also with existing astronaut programs,” the report read. This could include the European Space Agency (ESA) reassessing its backing away from astronaut training exchanges with China, with the plan to send European astronauts to Tiangong later this decade. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher stated earlier this year, in response to a question from SpaceNews , that the agency had neither the budgetary nor political green light, nor intention, to participate in the Tiangong program. China began constructing the CSS in 2021 with the launch of the Tianhe core module . China used 10 further crew, cargo and module launches to complete the three-module, T-shaped orbital outpost by the end of 2022. CMSEO is now planning to launch an extension module and select the first international astronauts to visit Tiangong. Watching the development of how China uses Tiangong will reveal clues about possible international and commercial participation, the CASI article suggests. To this, another trend that could influence thinking and approaches towards China’s space station is nascent commercialization efforts, including announcing a call for commercial resupply proposals . “The CMSEO solicitation for non-SOE proposals for CSS resupply vehicles in May of 2023 will also directly impact the long-term development of the Chinese space program and global perception of it.” China’s next Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030) could reveal the types of companies competing for CSS contracts. These changes could bring a greater level of transparency and allow for better outside assessments. However, perceptions of how independent Chinese commercial companies are from state-owned entities and PLA influence over the space sector will be another factor. “A Chinese space program that starts to look more like other advanced programs with varied participation will propel plans the PRC has already put in place to include developed and developing countries in the CSS and the International Lunar Research Station.”This could also generate a response outside China, with Tiangong seen as a competitor to commercial ventures engaged in the ISS. At the same time both China and the U.S. are seeking to gain partners and support for their respective ILRS and Artemis lunar programs.
A pension fund has filed suit against the board of directors of Amazon, claiming they “acted in bad faith” in approving launch contracts for the Project Kuiper broadband constellation that awarded billions of dollars to Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The suit, a public version of which was filed with Delaware’s Court of Chancery Aug. 28, alleges that Amazon’s board and one of its committees spent “barely an hour” reviewing contracts with Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, whose Vulcan Centaur rocket uses engines from Blue Origin, before approving them in March 2022. Delaware Business Court Insider first reported the lawsuit . The suit is filed by the Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, an Amazon shareholder, and sheds new light on how Amazon selected Blue Origin and ULA, along with Arianespace, for contracts announced in April 2022 to launch the 3,236-satellite constellation . It also suggests that personal animus between Bezos and Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, prevented Amazon from considering SpaceX for those contracts. According to the suit, Amazon management informed the board’s audit committee in July 2020 it was considering Arianespace, Blue Origin, ULA and a fourth company whose name is redacted in the public version of the complaint for launch contracts. The committee, the suit stated, “did not take any steps to oversee the negotiation process or to insulate the process from conflicts of interest.” [emphasis in original] Bezos, at the time, was chief executive of Amazon and remains its largest shareholder, while also owning Blue Origin. The full board was briefed in November 2020 on plans for Project Kuiper, including its consideration of Blue Origin and ULA, among others, for launch contracts, which the suit said did not result in the board taking any action about potential conflicts of interest: “no guidelines, no oversight, and no expressions of concern.” While the identity of the fourth potential launch provider is not made public in the suit, it does state that Amazon’s board was informed SpaceX was not under consideration. That included not just the overall launch contracts but a smaller interim contract that Amazon announced in April 2021 for nine Atlas 5 launches from ULA . While the value of the Atlas launch contract is redacted in the suit, it argues that SpaceX’s list price for Falcon 9 launches was significantly less. By January 2022, Amazon management provided the board’s audit committee with summaries of the contracts it planned to sign with Blue Origin and ULA for Kuiper launches. The suit argues that the committee spent “no more than a few minutes” discussing the contracts, based on the length of the meeting and number of items on the agenda, before approving them and forwarding them to the full board of directors. The full board met in March 2022 to consider all three launch contracts. The suit claims the board received no expert review of the contracts or other information, including whether the final price was fair to Amazon and whether other launch providers were considered, beyond a 2.5-page summary of the proposed contracts. The board approved the contracts in a meeting lasting 40 minutes. The suit argues that the contracts are unfair to Amazon, in part because SpaceX was not even considered: “Despite being the launch provider with the most proven track record and the lowest prices in the industry, SpaceX was seemingly not considered by Amazon,” the complaint states. “By excluding SpaceX, Bezos and his management team minimized bid competition for the launch agreements and likely committed Amazon to spending hundreds of millions of dollars more than it would have otherwise had to.” Bezos, the suit concludes, was able to negotiate from both sides given his roles at Amazon and Blue Origin. “For a year and a half, Bezos was free to identify and negotiate with launch providers for Amazon, while also free to negotiate against Amazon on behalf of Blue Origin.” The suit strongly suggests that SpaceX was excluded from consideration from the Project Kuiper competition because of the rivalry between Bezos and Musk. A section of the 77-page complaint is devoted to outlining the history of the competition between the two billionaires and between SpaceX and Blue Origin, which included Blue Origin’s protest of a NASA lunar lander contract won by SpaceX in 2021. That section features screenshots of tweets from Musk appearing to taunt Bezos and Blue Origin. “Given their bitter track record, Bezos had every reason to exclude Musk’s SpaceX from the process entirely,” the suit states. “And Bezos, it must be assumed, could not swallow his pride to seek his bitter rival’s help to launch Amazon’s satellites.” The public version of complaint redacts many details about the launch contracts, including specific dollar values. It does state, though, that the combined contracts were “the second-largest capital expenditure in Amazon’s 25+ year history” after its $13.7 billion acquisition of grocer Whole Foods. Amazon’s second largest acquisition, of studio MGM in 2021, was valued at $8.5 billion. While the suit redacts the contract values, it does state that nearly 45% of their overall value goes to Blue Origin, either through the direct contract between Amazon and Blue Origin or ULA’s purchase of BE-4 engines from Blue Origin to satisfy its own Amazon launch contract. Amazon has spent about $1.7 billion on those three launch contracts to date, including $585 million directly to Blue Origin. None of the three companies have performed any launches under those contracts so far. The first launch of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur has slipped to no earlier than the fourth quarter of this year, while the first flights of Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn have been delayed to 2024. None of the three companies have said when those vehicles would start launching Kuiper satellites. Amazon announced Aug. 7 it would use one of the nine Atlas 5 launches it procured in 2021 to launch a pair of demonstration satellites as soon as late September. Those satellites were originally slated to launch on an RS1 rocket from ABL Space Systems, then moved to the inaugural Vulcan Centaur launch that it would have shared with Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. Amazon is facing a schedule crunch to launch its Kuiper satellites. Its Federal Communications Commission license requires the company to have half the constellation, or more than 1,600 satellites, in orbit by July 2026, and the full constellation in orbit by July 2029. An Amazon spokesperson did not answer specific questions about the suit in a statement to SpaceNews Aug. 31: “The claims in this lawsuit are completely without merit, and we look forward to showing that through the legal process.” The suit seeks unspecified damages and legal fees as well as “immediate disgorgement” of profits, benefits and other compensation the defendants received as a result of the contracts.
QinetiQ US, a defense contractor based in Lorton, Virginia, was awarded a $224 million contract to provide systems engineering and technical support to the Space Development Agency. SDA is an agency under the U.S. Space Force. It is building a mesh network in low Earth orbit — called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — projected to have hundreds of satellites . QinetiQ received a five-year contract for “management and professional services, acquisition support, and engineering and technical analysis needed to deliver the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture,” said a DoD contract announcement Aug. 30. DoD said the contract was a competitive acquisition and two offers were received. The company won what is known as a SETA contract, short for Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance. SETA contractors typically are hired to support major DoD acquisition programs to augment the government workforce. Avantus Federal acquired by QinetiQ The SDA contract was awarded to Avantus Federal, a government contractor that bid for the work before it was acquired by QinetiQ in November 2022. QinetiQ US is a subsidiary of QinetiQ Group, a defense and security firm headquartered in the United Kingdom. It acquired Avantus Federal for $590 million. At the time of the acquisition, Avantus Federal had approximately 1,150 employees with security clearances working for defense, intelligence and homeland security agencies. 
Israeli satcoms equipment maker SatixFy announced plans Aug. 31 to sell its satellite payload subsidiary to MDA as part of a $60 million strategic transaction with the Canadian space hardware specialist. MDA is spending $40 million to buy SatixFy Space Systems UK Ltd, a British developer of satellite payload systems and subsystems, including digital beam-forming antennas and onboard processors. The announcement comes weeks after MDA won a $1.6 billion contract to build 198 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for Telesat, a Canada-based operator of geostationary satellites. Telesat said it chose MDA to build its Lightspeed constellation partly because of its digital beam-forming array antenna technology, enabling the satellites to be smaller and cheaper than those previously under consideration with Thales Alenia Space. MDA CEO Mike Greenley said buying SatixFy’s digital payload division will help it expand next-generation satellite capabilities to meet growing customer demand. “This acquisition is a natural next step in solidifying and strengthening our market position,” Greenley said in a statement, “and addressing customer demand as we continue to capitalize on the growth in the [LEO] satellite communication market.” In addition to the Lightspeed contract, MDA recently announced a contract to build third-generation LEO satellites for Globalstar that Apple is supporting financially. As part of the SatifxFy deal, MDA also agreed to make $20 million in advanced payments for chips used in satellites and ground systems that SatixFy now intends to focus on. SatixFy is retaining intellectual property related to satellite payload chips following the sale, which the companies expect to close before the end of the year following regulatory and shareholder approvals. Nir Barkan, acting CEO of SatixFy, said the deal gives the company more opportunities to sell chips to payload designers, and paves the way to collaboration with MDA in other areas. SatixFy started trading on the New York Stock Exchange last year after merging with Endurance Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) with no prior revenue, to get more access to capital to expand its range of chips, antennas, terminals, and modems. The company’s strategy pivot comes roughly a year and a half after its cofounder and former CEO Yoel Gat died from cancer in April, a month after announcing plans for the SPAC merger.
NASA is making the final preparations to recover samples from an asteroid that a spacecraft will bring back to Earth in September. Teams conducted a dress rehearsal Aug. 30 of the recovery of the sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. In the test, a helicopter dropped a replica of the capsule from an altitude of more than 2,000 meters. The capsule descended under a parachute to land at the Utah Test and Training Range west of Salt Lake City, where personnel went through procedures to get the capsule ready for transport to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “We put our teams in the field, in the environment they’re going to be in, using the communications tools and the equipment they’re actually going to use on the day of recovery,” said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a briefing after the rehearsal. The rehearsal was part of final planning for the return of the actual OSIRIS-REx capsule, which will arrive early Sept. 24. The capsule is carrying an estimated 250 grams of material from the asteroid Bennu that the spacecraft collected during a “touch-and-go” collection process in October 2020 . The goal of the mission, whose full name is Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer, is to return those samples to Earth for analysis by scientists, who hope the material will offer new insights into the formation of the solar system. “Boy, is the science team excited to get that,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, of the samples. “We’re going back to the dawn of the solar system.” There are still several key milestones before those samples are in the labs of Lauretta and other scientists. The spacecraft is scheduled to perform a maneuver Sept. 10 that will line its trajectory up with the Utah Test and Training Range. Another maneuver a week later will further refine its trajectory, aiming for an elliptical region of 650 square kilometers within the range. “We have a relatively small area to fit in, but we’re highly confident we’ll hit that,” Burns said. A final go/no-go decision will come just a few hours before OSIRIS-REx releases the capsule at about 108,000 kilometers from the Earth. “We have a very long four hours from release until reentry,” said Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager at Lockheed Martin. The capsule will reenter at more than 43,000 kilometers per hour, slowing down during reentry and deployment of drogue and main parachutes to less than 20 kilometers per hour for landing, 13 minutes after reentry. The main OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will perform a “divert” maneuver about 20 minutes after releasing the capsule to avoid reentering itself. It will pass the Earth at a distance of 800 kilometers, putting it on a trajectory for an extended mission to visit the asteroid Apophis shortly after it makes a close flyby of Earth in 2029. If something goes wrong with the maneuvers setting up the reentry that might cause it to miss the landing ellipse or otherwise jeopardize safety of the capsule or people on the ground, NASA will not release the capsule, Burns said. In that case, OSIRIS-REx will swing by the Earth on a trajectory that will bring it back in two years to make another attempt. Mission teams are preparing for other problems that might come up during reentry and landing, including those that cause the capsule to crash into the ground at high speed. That is not unprecedented: NASA’s Genesis mission collected samples of the solar wind, but its parachutes failed to deploy on reentry, causing the capsule to crash in Utah upon its return in 2004. “We learned a lot from Genesis,” said Freund. “We are very confident that we have taken the lessons learned forward from Genesis into OSIRIS-REx.” However, she said that the team has trained for various contingencies if the capsule does not land intact to preserve as much of the sample as possible. If all goes well, though, analysis of the samples will begin almost immediately after the sample container is delivered to a clean room at a curation facility at JSC. Lauretta said an Oct. 11 press conference will discuss initial analysis of the samples, followed by presentations at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. Lauretta, who has been involved with OSIRIS-REx since the mission was proposed nearly two decades ago, said he will be part of the teams in Utah recovering the samples. “I wanted to personally be out there to greet these pieces of Bennu to our home planet, welcome them to the curation facility at Johnson Space Center and get them ready for the adventure we’re about to put them on.”
Chinese researchers have noted close approaches by U.S. GSSAP satellites to Chinese spacecraft in the geostationary belt, describing the activities as threats. A paper published in the Chinese journal Infrared and Laser Engineering earlier this year assessed the U.S. Air Force’s Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Programme (GSSAP) and its activities. The authors are affiliated to branches of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology under the China Academy of Space Technology. The study looks at two-line orbital elements from GSSAP satellites in recent years, combining these with the orbital information from Chinese satellites in the geostationary belt. The authors found 14 potential close approaches to Chinese spacecraft made by GSSAP satellites across 2020 and 2021. These rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) include both flybys and fly-arounds, with one incident—the approach of GSSAP-4 to Shijian-20 in May 2021—being as close as 9.54 kilometers. The data was found to closely match that in the Secure World Foundation’s Global Counterspace Report. The researchers presented simulated imagery at varying angles and distances, suggesting that an approach to within 10 kilometers of may be optimal for acquiring images of targeted space objects. The study concluded that, through close approaches and high-resolution fine imaging, details of the target would be clearly seen, presenting a serious threat to China’s high value assets in GEO. The activities described by the study are an increasingly common phenomenon, with the U.S., China and Russia all looking to surveil each others’ assets, in what has been described as an in-orbit Game of cat and mouse . The data from the Chinese study provides a new insight at events 36,000 kilometers above the Earth. “I think the simulation data is very useful because there’s not a lot of details on these types of activities in the public domain,” Brian Weeden, Secure World Foundation director of program planning, told SpaceNews . “The simulation provides more insight into both what is happening and also the national security implications of these activities.” But at the same time, the discussion cannot be only focused on GSSAP. “I don’t think it’s possible to only talk about the American GSSAP satellites without also talking about the very similar activities of the Russian Luch Olymp-K and Chinese SJ-17 satellites. This is really about a whole new category of space activities, not one specific satellite.” Luch is a satellite long known for its activities in GEO, while Shijian-17 launched in 2016 and carries a robotic arm. China launched a “space debris mitigation satellite” named Shijian-21 in 2021 which docked with and towed a dead Chinese satellite into a graveyard orbit, demonstrating dual-use capabilities. TJS-3 meanwhile is a Chinese GEO spacecraft making its own RPOs. The researchers’ claim of GSSAP to be a threat is limited in a sense, says Weeden, stating that these RPOs do not appear to present a physical threat to the satellites they visit, either through aggressive action or a high risk of collision. “However, I think countries do consider them to be intelligence threats as these types of close approaches can allow for imaging and other kinds of intelligence collection that was not previously possible, which in turn could reveal capabilities and limitations of sensitive national security satellites.” The issue of uncoordinated close approaches in GEO has generated a level of shared concern, says Weeden, noting that several countries have identified these as a pressing security issue, adding that the U.S., Russia and China have all cited each other’s RPO activities as potential threats and irresponsible behaviors in the discussions in the UN Open Ended Working Group on Space Threats over the last two years. “However, there have not been any proposals yet from those countries about what can be done to deal with those threats. It is very difficult to decide what “too close” means in the context of close approaches in space from a technical perspective, let alone come up with something that can get consensus. “I think we will eventually have to develop those proposals and reach that consensus, because this issue is only going to get worse with the increased geopolitical tensions on space security,” says Weeden.
Australian startup Spiral Blue is inviting developers and researchers to run custom code on its SE-1 space-based computer. After deploying its own machine-learning algorithms on SE-1, Spiral Blue issued a call Aug. 31 to people interested in sending code to space. Applications for the initiative, called Your Code in Space, can be as advanced as applying artificial intelligence to satellite imagery or as simple as creating a meme, Mei He, Spiral Blue business development officer, told SpaceNews . Spiral Blue will respond to proposals submitted through the company’s website with information on how, when and at what cost various codes could run on the SE-1 computer. “We are trying to make sure that it’s as accessible as possible to everyone including students and hobbyists,” He said. Spiral Blue’s SE-1 payload integrated with the Satellogic spacecraft launched in January on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Sydney-based Spiral Blue announced SE-1’s successful commissioning in April. Since then, Spiral Blue has tested its own machine-learning algorithms to crop clouds out of satellite imagery on SE-1. Vessel detection algorithms and customer code has also been tested. “It took us about five years to get our hardware working in orbit,” He said. “Now, we’re able to help others. We’ve done the hard work.” Spiral Blue suggests Your Code in Space applications like environmental monitoring, disaster response, agricultural insights, urban planning and wildlife conservation. Your Code in Space is “enabling companies to gain space heritage in a fraction of the traditional time by proving to be extremely effective at removing the barriers to running custom analytics in space,” Spiral Blue chief technology officer James Buttenshaw said in a statement. Henry Zhong, Spiral Blue head of AI, said in a statement, the company has “achieved our dual goal of making our satellite programmable, allowing third parties to run their own code on-board and drastically reducing data requirements by bringing down just useful insights.”
 Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space Systems announced Aug. 30 that they are standing by waiting for orders from the U.S. Space Force to prepare to launch a satellite on short notice . The companies were selected last year to conduct a demonstration of a rapid-response space mission to low Earth orbit known as Victus Nox. Although this mission has been promoted as a 24-hour call-up, it is being planned in multiple stages and the companies have spent months rehearsing and preparing. The intent of the demonstration is to help the Space Force and the space industry contractors figure out processes to accelerate the planning and execution of national security missions. Firefly and Millennium are now officially in a six-month “hot standby phase.” At any point during that time the Space Force will give the companies an alert notification, kicking off a 60-hour window to transport the payload to Firefly’s launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. conduct fueling operations and integrate it with the Alpha rocket’s payload adapter. Space Force officials will then issue Firefly a launch notice with the final orbit requirements. Firefly will then have 24 hours to update the trajectory and guidance software, encapsulate the payload, transport it to the pad, mate to Alpha, and stand ready to launch at the first available window. The payload is a small imaging satellite built by Millennium Space, a subsidiary of Boeing. It will fly on Firefly’s expendable Alpha small-satellite launcher. ‘Multiple rehearsals’ “We’ll be setting a new standard, proving nominal launch operations can be completed in a matter of hours rather than weeks to months,” said Bill Weber, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. Once the payload is deployed in low Earth orbit, Millennium will attempt to activate the satellite in less than 48 hours, and then begin to track and image objects in orbit. “What we’re doing with Victus Nox has never been done before,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Millennium Space Systems. In preparation for the mission, Firefly said, it manufactured and tested major vehicle components and engine, and conducted a static fire. Firefly and Millennium also completed multiple rehearsals in preparation for launch, which included packing and delivering a satellite mockup to Firefly’s integration facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base to practice launch operations within the prescribed 24 hours.
The European Space Agency says a test-firing of an Ariane 6 core stage has been postponed again, this time because of issues with ground equipment. In an Aug. 30 update, ESA said that a planned Aug. 29 firing of the core stage of an Ariane 6 on the pad at the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, was postponed because of what the agency described as a “technical issue affecting the control bench” that handles propellant loading and the automated countdown. That test, which will fire the Vulcain 2.1 engine for several seconds, has been rescheduled for Sept. 5. A longer test firing remains planned for Sept. 26, also at the spaceport. That short-duration test was previously planned for July, but postponed when time allocated for the test ran out. ESA later explained that the automated countdown was aborted “due to certain measurements exceeding preset limits.” The agency delayed the test to late August to give teams a two-week summer break and to perform repairs to a basin used for burning off excess hydrogen that was damaged by water. A separate test of the rocket’s upper-stage engine remains scheduled for as soon as Sept. 1 at a facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany. That test was postponed from late July because of software issues. ESA is also moving ahead with a media briefing on Sept. 4 to update those testing efforts and other preparations for the long-delayed first launch of the Ariane 6. ESA acknowledged earlier in the month that the inaugural launch had slipped to some time in 2024, but has not provided a more specific date.
Increasing demand but decreasing budgets are putting a strain on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), threatening its ability to provide communications for the agency’s science missions and Artemis lunar expeditions. While pressures on the DSN, a system of antennas located in Australia, California and Spain used primarily for communications with spacecraft beyond Earth orbit, have been growing for years, the Artemis 1 mission and the demands it placed on the network laid bare the challenges NASA will face in the future, officials warned. “When Artemis comes online, everybody else moves out of the way, and it’s an impact to all the science missions,” said Suzanne Dodd, director of the interplanetary network directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during an Aug. 29 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s science committee. In the case of last fall’s Artemis 1 mission, the Orion spacecraft itself took 903 hours of DSN time, while eight cubesats launches as secondary payloads took an additional 871 hours. Science missions that use the DSN lost 1,585 hours in the same period, including the James Webb Space Telescope, which lost 185 hours alone. NASA also deferred maintenance on the DSN during Artemis 1 to free up an additional 509 hours. Accommodating Artemis missions also involves scheduling challenges as date shift, something the DSN had to deal with on Artemis 1 because of its delays. “We either have to clear everybody off the network for that launch window or we struggle — and our experience with Artemis 1 was struggling with trying to move everybody around and shift it for the Artemis 1 launch date.” The amount of time used by the DSN on the cubesats took members of the science committee by surprise, and was a source of frustration for Dodd. “I’m not sure who thought it was a good idea” to put those cubesats on Artemis 1, she said. “I don’t think that’s a good use when your DSN is oversubscribed.” Much of the DSN time used for the cubesats was on what she called “search and rescue” operations when they ran into problems. She suggested NASA refrain from such efforts if future Artemis missions carry cubesats. “We probably spent a lot of time looking for these cubesats and things that didn’t work that, in the future, I would recommend that we don’t do,” she said. “If we don’t hear your signal, your mission’s over.” The DSN will continue to see spikes in demand from future Artemis missions as well as overall growth from an increasing number of other missions, many of which are commercial or government robotic lunar missions. “We’re nearly doubling the load on the DSN,” Dodd said. “The load is increasing and it’s very stressful to us.” That is compounded, Dodd said, by decreased budgets to operate the DSN. Its annual budget has fallen from $250 million in 2010 to $200 million today, with the budget projected to continue to decrease through the end of the decade. “Looking out to the 2030s, that really scares us on the DSN.” There have been several past reports that have warned of strains on the DSN. That included an audit of the DSN published July 12 by NASA’s Office of Inspector General. That report concluded that the network “is currently oversubscribed and will continue to be overburdened by the demands created by an increasing number of deep space missions,” and that efforts to enhance the DSN with new antennas is behind schedule and over budget. “These are all great and, I would say, very accurate lessons learned,” Dodd said of that report and others. “There’s no money coming to overturn those challenges.” She cited as an example an incident during the Artemis 1 mission when a system called a private cloud appliance failed at a DSN site in Goldstone, California, causing a 33-hour outage. The network developed a solution that she said was not “over the top” to prevent it from happening again. “We got no funding for that.” NASA is taking steps to address the demand on the DSN from Artemis missions, said Philip Baldwin, acting director of the network services division of NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program. He outlined at the meeting a four-point plan that includes upgrades of DSN antennas, installation of new set of 18-meter antennas called LEGS devoted to lunar exploration services, development of lunar communications and navigation relay services around the moon and increased international partnerships. However, he acknowledged that those steps alone, like the six-antenna LEGS network, will not solve all of DSN’s problems. “We’re talking about six antennas where we have a deficit of more than that.” Studies help NASA identify gaps in the DSN, Baldwin said, but officials need to carefully articulate what they need given constrained budgets. “We can’t overreach here. We can’t just say, let’s double the DSN budget,” he said, noting that NASA was not expecting additional funding for DSN because of a debt-ceiling agreement enacted in June that keeps non-defense discretionary spending, which includes NASA, at 2023 levels for fiscal year 2024. “We have reached a really critical point with the DSN’s aging infrastructure,” said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA’s astrophysics division, who has been involved in studies of the network, noting that challenges will continue even with upgrades like LEGS. “This scares us very much.” It also scared members of the science committee. “We’ve clearly gotten a five-alarm fire bell,” said one committee member, Marc Weiser of RPM Ventures. The DSN “is in a deep deficit, and I think the only way we’re going to get out of it is to spend the necessary resources not only to recover capacity but to increase capacity,” said Vint Cerf of Google, another committee member. Members of the committee spent part of the meeting proposing recommendations to NASA to address the DSN’s problems, and considered elevating the problem to the National Space Council. However, Ellen Williams, chair of the science committee, noted that any recommendations could not be formally transmitted to NASA until they were approved by the full NASA Advisory Council, which is not expected to meet before November.
The U.S. Space Force awarded Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) a $574.5 million contract to maintain ground-based radar sensors used for missile warning and space surveillance. The Pentagon announced the contract Aug. 29. SAIC, based in Reston, Virginia, was awarded a seven-year contract. The Space Systems Command said four competitive bids were received for this project. Worldwide network of radar sensors The Space Force operates a network of early warning radar sensors that are used to detect missile threats and to track objects in outer space. They include radar sites at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland; Clear Space Force Station, Alaska; Royal Air Force Fylingdales, United Kingdom; Beale Air Force Base, California; Cape Cod Space Force Station, Massachusetts; and Cavalier Space Force Station, North Dakota. The U.S. Air Force designed and built these sites during the Cold War primarily to detect and track intercontinental ballistic missiles and sea-launched ballistic missiles while also conducting general space surveillance and satellite tracking. The contract awarded to SAIC was previously held by Northrop Grumman which won a five-year contract in 2018 .
FALLS CHURCH, Va. — The 72 data-transport satellites that the Space Development Agency plans to launch to orbit in 2026 will be the most complex yet, and will carry communications payloads that have never been deployed in low Earth orbit, a senior agency official said Aug. 29. These satellites, which make up the Tranche 2 Transport Layer Beta portion of a U.S. military mesh network, have “new capabilities that we have not done before, including direct-to-weapon” communications, said Frank Turner, SDA’s technical director. Turner spoke at the ExecutiveBiz space technology conference. SDA split the $1.5 billion Tranche 2 Beta satellite order between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, companies that had previously won contracts for Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites. An organization under the U.S. Space Force, SDA is building a mesh network of military satellites in low Earth orbit — called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — that includes a data transport layer and a missile-tracking sensor layer. Six bids were received for the Tranche 2 Beta contracts. Turner said the agency would have preferred to select more vendors but had limited options because only experienced DoD contractors understand how to work with highly complex radios and waveforms required for military tactical communications. Turner said SDA wants to work with a broader base of prime contractors and does not favor “incumbents,” but few companies in the industry can handle the unique mission payloads of Tranche 2 Beta. These satellites have to be integrated with radios using the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) and S-band frequencies required by military and intelligence units in the field. Each satellite also has an Integrated Broadcast Service (IBS) payload. IBS is a legacy DoD network for transmitting tactical and strategic intelligence and targeting data from multiple sources. In space, IBS payloads operate from satellites in geosynchronous orbit like the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), developed by Lockheed Martin. With the Transport Layer, SDA will seek to provide the same service from low Earth orbit, which has never been done before, said Turner. “That’s not a trivial problem. It’s a very difficult problem.” These payloads are “capabilities the warfighter asked for,” he said. “They want direct-to-weapon connectivity to enable engagements.” The Beta satellites will attempt “extremely difficult” contacts with aircraft and missiles in flight, Turner added. Commercial-like approach As SDA builds DoD’s mesh network, the four-year-old agency is pursuing a commercial-like approach , relying on a broad base of suppliers of small satellites and laser communications terminals. Turner said the decision to select two incumbent providers for Tranche 2 Beta was not “made lightly, and was agonized over.” “There was a lot of discussion,” he said. “Because we really want to be able to expand our supplier base.” Turner said SDA officials are currently in conversations with military leaders about what capabilities would be needed in Tranche 3 of the Transport Layer. Meanwhile, the agency is preparing to launch its second batch of Tranche 0 satellites this week. In September 2024 it plans to start launching 126 Tranche 1 satellites. The Tranche 1 satellites, equipped with inter-satellite optical links, “are the infrastructure,” said Turner. “Tranche 1 is putting a basic capability in space.” With Tranche 2 is when “we will be able to support communications.”
Japanese startup GITAI has raised an additional $15 million to continue work on lunar robotics technologies, three months after raising $30 million. The company, with offices in Tokyo and Torrance, California, said Aug. 29 it raised the funding as a further extension of a Series B round. The company initially raised $17 million for that Series B round in 2021 and added $30 million to it in May . The new funding is a mix of debt and equity. MUFG Bank provided a $7 million loan while the rest came from investments by Green Co-Invest Investment Limited Partnership, Pacific Bays Capital and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital. Sho Nakanose, found and chief executive of GITAI, told SpaceNews the additional funding will ensure the company can continue development of space robotics systems while expanding its U.S. presence. “In light of recent financial market conditions, we have raised additional funds to ensure that we have sufficient funds for business expansion in the U.S. market over the longer term,” he said. The new funding, he said, will enable the company to expand its U.S. workforce and to increase cooperation with both government agencies and companies interested in its robotic technologies. GITAI has been working on a lunar rover and an “inchworm” robotic arm that could be used to construct infrastructure, such as solar arrays and antennas, on the moon. That has included tests of prototypes of those systems in the desert and, more recently, in a chamber filled with simulated lunar regolith. The company’s goal is to conduct a demonstration mission using that rover and robotic arm on the moon as soon as 2026. The company also plans to demonstrate a robotic arm on the International Space Station. Nakanose said that robotic arm has passed all its NASA safety tests and was handed over to the agency this month. It is currently scheduled to launch to the station on the NG-20 Cygnus cargo resupply mission in December. Once on the station, the arm will be mounted on the exterior of Nanoracks’ Bishop airlock module.
Microsoft announced Aug. 29 a five-year agreement to provide cloud-computing resources to Synthetaic , a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from space and air sensors. Wisconsin-based Synthetaic made news earlier this year after it used artificial intelligence and Planet Labs’ satellite imagery archive to independently track the Chinese spy balloon’s path across the United States before it was shot down. Synthetaic’s AI product — the Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) tool — was built on Microsoft Azure cloud. Under the new agreement, Microsoft will provide Synthetaic access to nearly 1 million hours of cloud compute resources, the company said. Processing more data Synthetaic will work with Microsoft Azure Space on “new solutions to process geospatial, static and video imagery for national security, disaster response, and environmental and sustainability operations,” said Corey Jaskolski, Synthetaic founder and CEO. “AI has the power to unlock an enormous amount of information and insights in the vast quantities of data collected by government and organizations around the world,” said Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft. “Through this partnership with Synthetaic, we are combining our latest advances in AI with their data analytics tools to help expand our understanding of our world,” Zander said. The RAIC data analysis tool will be made available to government agencies through the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud, the company said. “Agencies can leverage AI while meeting the high security and compliance standards necessary for sensitive government data.”
SAN FRANCISCO – SpiderOak announced the successful demonstration Aug 29 of OrbitSecure zero-trust cybersecurity software on the International Space Station. Working with Axiom Space and an Amazon Web Services edge computing device, SpiderOak securely transmitted operations traffic between ground networks and low-Earth orbit. Data sent to ISS was transmitted through NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay constellation. “What we’ve demonstrated involves a ton of different vendors and different moving parts,” Matthew Erickson, SpiderOak vice president solutions, told SpaceNews . “This is a mixed commercial-civil demonstration involving manned spaceflight with the ISS, relay networks through TDRS, as well as Axiom’s ground segment and the AWS compute on the ISS.” SpiderOak is undertaking a series of increasingly complex OrbitSecure demonstrations. In June, SpiderOak reported successful testing of OrbitSecure on a Ball Aerospace payload and Loft Orbital satellite. In comparison, the ISS demonstration “definitely turned up the difficulty and provided a more real scenario, which is also critical moving forward in the NewSpace economy,” Erickson said. “When you think about commercial LEO destinations that are going to replace the ISS, they’re going to be having different commercial workloads from different companies, different governmental workloads, space tourists. And they’re all going to be using a common set of infrastructure networks. So being able to demonstrate lightweight, software-defined, multi-domain security between all these moving parts protects national interests and corporate” intellectual property. Why will robust cybersecurity be essential for the commercial space stations of the future? “Commercial LEO destinations are being developed to host an array of industry, government and international customers for human spaceflight, in-space research and manufacturing, and space technology R&D and demonstrations,” Axiom Space said in a statement to SpaceNews . “Integrating robust cybersecurity within [Commercial LEO Destination] space systems is paramount to providing orbital infrastructure that guards human life, provides data and communications security, and guarantees protection of customer intellectual property, while preserving the capability to respond to evolving cyber threats.” OrbitSecure encrypts and stores data records in a digital ledger. Software that can be updated from the ground or in space defines who can access specific data records. If a hacker breaks the encryption, new encryption keys are issued automatically. “The future of space is undeniably software-defined,” John Moberly, SpiderOak senior vice president for space, said in a statement. “Our successful demonstration shows that it’s not just possible, but effective and secure to run containerized workloads in modern orchestrated environments with secure data channels from orbit to ground and vice versa.” In addition to commercial space stations, in-space manufacturing and space-based scientific research could profit from this type of technology, according to the SpiderOak news release. “SpiderOak’s innovative efforts contribute to reshaping the way we approach space networking,” Jason Aspiotis, Axiom Space director of in-space infrastructure and logistics, said in a statement. “The team’s successful demonstration of OrbitSecure technology is a significant step toward building secure, dynamic, and scalable space communications and data processing infrastructures.” SpiderOak Executive Chairman Charles Beames said in a statement that the ISS demonstration “represents a pivotal advancement toward a future where national security is maintained beyond the confines of our terrestrial defenses, reinforcing information assurance in an increasingly digitized and interconnected universe. We are paving the way to secure all space operations — military, commercial and civil spaceflight – and scale at the speed of need through remote software deployment.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Space logistics startup TransAstra won a NASA contract to manufacture a bag to capture orbital debris. Under the $850,000 Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research contract, TransAstra will build an inflatable capture bag and demonstrate on the ground how the device, which uses inflatable struts to open and close, would envelop a noncooperative object. Capture bag technology was invented at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Asteroid Redirect Mission , a plan to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid and transport it to cislunar orbit. TransAstra built a small capture bag in 2021 with NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts funding. The new TransAstra contract was awarded through NASA’s SBIR Ignite program, which supports early-stage technology with potential commercial applications. “We originally developed this small capture bag prototype to demonstrate asteroid mining in low-Earth orbit with a synthetic asteroid,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “But we subsequently realized this is the greatest thing ever for orbital debris cleanup.” Small capture bags could retrieve cubesats. Bigger bags could envelop spent rocket bodies, defunct geostationary communications satellites or 50,000-ton asteroids, Sercel said. Capture bags offer some advantages over other orbital debris cleanup methods. “It doesn’t require the target to have any fixture that you can grab onto,” Sercel said. “It does not require docking, which is a precision maneuver. You have to be precise enough to open the bag, get the bag around this thing and close the bag.” If the target object is spinning quickly, for example, the capture bag would “have to match its spin to a certain degree, our analysis suggests,” Sercel said. Rather than removing one piece of debris at a time, TransAstra proposes capturing multiple objects with a single bag. “If I have to fly out to an object, capture it, go to a short life orbit, then come back to my operational altitude, that requires a huge amount of propellant consumption,” Sercel said. “It’s better to capture multiple pieces of debris on a single mission.” A recent study completed by TransAstra and space infrastructure startup ThinkOrbital proposes transporting debris or defunct satellites to an on-orbit processing plant. Capturing, storing and reusing space hardware offered a six-fold cost reduction compared with the cost of transporting objects individually to a low enough altitude to quickly reenter Earth’s atmosphere. In addition, the reuse approach slashed propellant costs by 82 percent and trimmed 40 percent from the time needed to clear debris. “These results validate and underscore the potential of this approach to resolve one of space’s greatest and most urgent existential threats in a faster, easier and more economical and sustainable way,” Sebastian Asprella, ThinkOrbital co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “The implications for the advancement of space industrialization in light of these findings are profound.” TransAstra and Think Orbital propose launching capture bags in TransAstra Worker Bee spacecraft. After moving into the orbit of the targeted debris, the Worker Bee would transport the debris to ThinkOrbital’s ThinkPlatform. The proposed ThinkPlatform would be about 37 meters in diameter with a volume of 4,000 cubic meters. ThinkOrbital plans to equip the ThinkPlatform with tools for inspecting, repairing and recycling objects. “The powerful combination of these revolutionary technologies establishes an efficient ecosystem for immediately and continuously addressing our growing space debris problem,” Nicole Shumaker, TransAstra vice president of strategic partnerships, said in a statement. “Repeated trips to pick up orbital debris and transport it to Earth’s atmosphere for disposal require significant propellant and time. Recycling stations in space resolve this problem and transform what was previously a liability into an asset that not only mitigates orbital debris but opens up new possibilities for in-space manufacturing and construction.” TransAstra and ThinkOrbital’s conclusions are the result of a two-part study. Through extensive computer simulations, the companies compared the costs and the propellant mass required for disposal of debris at an orbital platform with the capture of debris objects for disposal in Earth’s atmosphere. TransAstra plans to refuel Worker Bee at the ThinkPlatform. The benefits of reusing debris remained consistent across varying debris masses and orbital altitudes, according to the news release. “This study demonstrates that we can and should be creatively rethinking the way we approach debris remediation,” Lee Rosen, ThinkOrbital co-founder and a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, said in a statement. “This is critical not only to the advancement of space exploration and industrialization, but to our national defense.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Benchmark Space Systems won a $2.81 million U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory contract to continue development and testing of thrusters running on Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic, ASCENT, fuel. The two-year award announced Aug. 29 was Benchmark’s second AFRL SPRINT award. AFRL issued a Broad Agency Announcement in 2019 called Space Propulsion Research and Innovation for Neutralizing Satellite Threats, known as SPRINT, seeking proposals of interest to AFRL’s Space Propulsion Research Branch. Under the new AFRL-funded program, Benchmark is building a 22 Newton thruster for ASCENT hot-fire demonstrations. In addition, Burlington, Vermont-based Benchmark will deliver a preliminary design of a 100 Newton thruster assembly in 2025. With funding from its first SPRINT award, Benchmark developed and demonstrated a prototype thruster that burns ASCENT fuel without a catalyst. The prototype thruster was a proof of concept and was not optimized for spaceflight. “In this phase, we’re designing a thruster that you can apply to an operational mission,” Jake Teufert, Benchmark chief technology officer, told SpaceNews . “Now, weight matters and longevity matters.” ASCENT was first launched in 2019 on NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission . NASA’s Lunar Flashlight, a cubesat launched in 2022 to observe water ice deposits on the moon, was also powered by ASCENT. “Years of work have been put into operationalizing ASCENT, a high-performance, storable monopropellant that has the opportunity to increase mission capability beyond what’s offered by hydrazine,” Teufert said. “With this contract, we’re taking ASCENT from lower-thrust demonstrators and scaling that up to where it’s addressable for every mission that the DoD currently performs” with hydrazine. Benchmark also is establishing an Advanced Propellants Group led by Michael Martin, a mechanical engineer with a PhD from Texas A&M University, to test a variety of nontoxic chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems. The new organization will “look at all these new monopropellants that are coming out and other bipropellants and develop both thrusters that can utilize them but also ways to modify existing propellants,” Martin said. “For instance, this thruster that we’re developing for AFRL has a potential to be used with other monopropellants that are currently available in Europe and Japan. You could end up having families of thrusters using the different monopropellants.” U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) prevent the export of ASCENT. The ability to use different propellants could pave the way to foreign sales of new Benchmark thrusters. Benchmark employs “non-toxic propulsion professionals who will open the door even wider for ASCENT usage, as we also explore bringing in other underutilized and promising green chemical, electric and hybrid technologies to power the space economy,” Martin said in a statement. Martin, who has worked with ASCENT for more than three years, said, “what I really liked about it is that I can wear a lab coat and gloves to work with this propellant. It’s also easy to store and transport.” In contrast working with hydrazine requires Self Contained Atmospheric Protection Ensemble or SCAPE suits. Teufert added that ASCENT will be “particularly powerful and important” for responsive space applications, where satellites may be stored on the ground or in an orbital warehouse. ASCENT “is a propellant you can load into the satellite that is sitting on a shelf ready to be integrated at a moment’s notice,” Teufert said. “You can’t do that with a hydrazine system.”
NASA has confirmed it is delaying the release of the call for proposals for the next New Frontiers planetary science mission, originally planned for this fall, to no earlier than 2026 because of budget issues. In a community announcement published Aug. 24, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) said the announcement of opportunity (AO) for the fifth New Frontiers mission would be delayed and that the potential list of missions eligible for selection could be altered. “Budget uncertainty in the Planetary Science Division (PSD) makes release of the AO in 2023 and subsequent selection of a new mission difficult,” the agency said in the announcement. “NASA SMD’s new target is no earlier than 2026 for the release of the final AO.” Until this summer, NASA had been working towards a release of the final AO for the New Frontiers mission in November. That included the release of a draft version of the AO in January to solicit feedback on its contents from the scientific community. By the summer, though, NASA slowed down those plans, citing uncertainty linked to a debt-ceiling agreement that keeps funding for non-defense discretionary agencies, like NASA, flat in fiscal year 2024 with a 1% increase in 2025. Agency leadership said in June that the agreement would mean NASA was unlikely to get the full $27.2 billion it requested for 2024, creating “challenges” for agency programs. At a NASA SMD town hall meeting July 27, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, warned a potential extended delay in the release of the New Frontiers AO . “If the planetary science funding levels that are anticipated as a result of this tight budget environment are actually realized over the next two or so years,” she said, “it is unlikely we’ll be able to solicit New Frontiers perhaps not before 2026.” That delay was made official with the release of the community announcement. The draft AO sought proposals for missions on six topics, as recommended by the planetary science decadal survey in 2011: a comet surface sample return, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, a sample return mission to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and a probe of Saturn’s atmosphere. The long delay, though, may cause NASA to change that list, based on guidance from the latest planetary science decadal survey published in 2022. That report did not recommend changes to the list of potential missions for the fifth New Frontiers competition, but did offer recommendations for the targets for the sixth and seventh missions, which the decadal anticipated being competed over the next decade. The decadal survey’s list for the sixth New Frontiers competition retained the comet surface sample return, lunar geophysical network and Saturn probe concepts, and added an orbiter and lander mission to a Centaur small body in the outer solar system, a Ceres sample return mission, a multiple flyby mission of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, an orbiter of Saturn’s moon Titan and a Venus in-situ explorer. In the community announcement, NASA said that it would ask the National Academies to review what potential mission concepts from the two lists should be included in the delayed AO. “This also provides an opportunity to update the science objectives for the mission themes based on the recently released planetary decadal survey,” the announcement added. The delay comes after many scientists had already started planning for proposed missions, including setting up partnerships and beginning work on spacecraft design and science goals. The draft AO had projected a proposal deadline of April 2024, five months after the release of the final AO. NASA planned to select several proposals at the end of 2024 for Phase A studies lasting to early 2026. NASA projected picking one of those finalists as the next New Frontiers mission in late 2026, launching between 2031 and 2034. The draft AO set a cost of $900 million to develop the mission, with an additional $300 million for operations. However, the decadal survey last year recommended increasing the cost cap for development and operations to $1.65 billion, plus an allowance of $30 million a year for “quiet cruise” operations for missions with long transit times. None of the cost caps included launch. NASA has selected four New Frontiers missions to date. Three have launched: the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the Juno mission orbiting Jupiter and OSIRIS-REx, which is returning samples from the asteroid Bennu in September. The fourth, the Dragonfly mission to Titan, is in development for launch in 2027.
Small satellite manufacturers Hera Systems and LeoStella are teaming up to compete for a large military contract to be awarded this fall by the U.S. Space Development Agency. The companies announced Aug. 28 they are partnering with an undisclosed prime contractor in a bid for the Space Development Agency (SDA) Tranche 2 Transport Layer Alpha, a procurement of 100 satellites to be split between two teams . SDA is building a large constellation called the P roliferated Warfighter Space Architecture that includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Hera Systems, headquartered in San Jose; and LeoStella, based in Tukwila, Washington, plan to jointly manufacture satellite buses for SDA and for other government and commercial customers. ‘Leoness’ satellite bus In the bid submitted to SDA in late July, Hera Systems and LeoStella are offering the Leoness satellite bus designed by Hera Systems, said Roger Roberts, CEO of Hera Systems. The Leoness bus was selected for the U.S. Space Force’s Tetra 5 in-orbit refueling experiment planned for 2025. LeoStella, co-owned by Thales Alenia Space and the geospatial intelligence firm BlackSky, has excess capacity at its factory and has been seeking opportunities in the defense market. “This collaboration allows us to jointly mitigate capacity and supply chain risks that other manufacturers face independently,” said Roberts. Tim Kienberger, CEO of LeoStella, said SDA needs a diversity of suppliers to meet an ambitious schedule to launch hundreds of satellites over the next several years. The agency is “really after price and schedule,” said Kienberger. “SDA wants to capture the pricing and efficiencies of the commercial marketplace.” Roberts said the partnership with LeoStella seeks to “address what we know are real challenges, supply chain challenges and schedule challenges” across the industry. Kienberger said the agreement with Hera Systems will allow LeoStella to continue to produce satellites for commercial customers and still meet SDA’s schedule if they win a contract from the agency.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying four people representing four different space agencies docked with the International Space Station Aug. 27, almost 30 hours after its launch from Florida. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance docked with the zenith port of the station’s Harmony module at 9:16 a.m. Eastern. While the docking took place nearly 45 minutes later than previously announced, NASA reported no issues with the spacecraft’s approach or docking with the station. Endurance launched Aug. 26 on the Crew-7 mission to the ISS , the seventh crew rotation mission by SpaceX under a commercial crew transportation contract with NASA. NASA’s original contract with SpaceX, awarded in 2014, included six operational missions but has since been extended twice and now covers 14 missions. Crew-7 is commanded by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, who is on her first flight to space. European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen, who flew to the ISS on a Soyuz in 2015 for a 10-day mission, is the pilot. Satoshi Furukawa of the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov are mission specialists. Furukawa flew a long-duration mission to the ISS in 2011 while Borisov is on his first trip to space. The four praised the performance of the Crew Dragon spacecraft in comments shortly after docking. “I have to keep reminding myself this is not just a dream,” Moghbeli said, thanking SpaceX teams for the training leading up to the launch. “It was just like a training session in Hawthorne, California,” where SpaceX is headquartered, added Furukawa. The four members of Crew-7 are slated to spend six months on the ISS. They will spend the next few days overlapping with their Crew-6 counterparts, who are wrapping up their own six-month stay on the ISS. The four people of Crew-6 — NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — are scheduled to depart the station on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour no earlier than Sept. 1, depending on weather at splashdown sites off the Florida coast.
A Falcon 9 launched a multinational crew to the International Space Station Aug. 26 after a one-day delay to check the spacecraft’s life support system. The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 3:27 a.m. Eastern on the Crew-7 mission for NASA. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage a little more than 12 minutes later. Endurance, with its crew of four, is scheduled to dock with the zenith port on the Harmony module of the ISS at 8:39 a.m. Eastern Aug. 27. That will kick off a roughly six-month stay on the station. The launch was scheduled for Aug. 25 but postponed several hours before the scheduled liftoff. NASA said that engineers needed more time to review a component of the Crew Dragon’s life support system, known as ECLSS. NASA did not initially state what that component was but later said it was valves in an air supply system. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the post-launch briefing that after discovering corroded valves in the propulsion system of a cargo Dragon in June, SpaceX “out of an abundance of caution” decided to review all valves on the spacecraft, including for life support and propulsion. The review was designed to check the “force margin,” or the ability of the valve to open and close. “It took a little bit more time to get through the ECLSS valves,” he said, which led to the one-day slip. “We said, let’s stand down for 24 hours and make sure we understand it before we go fly.” That review confirmed that the valves were working properly and required no changes. During the launch countdown, controllers reported a sensor issue that was cleared shortly before liftoff. At the post-launch briefing, officials said that sensors had detected trace amounts of nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO, from the Crew Dragon spacecraft that indicated a possible propellant leak. NTO is one of the two hypergolic propellants used by the spacecraft’s thrusters. Benji Reed, senior director of the human spaceflight program at SpaceX, said at the post-launch briefing that the levels of NTO detected were about 0.25 parts per million. Three engineers independently calculated what level of leak could cause that reading and all three came to the same conclusion. “The good news was that the number that we came up with was well within the range of what you might normally see.” That assessment, though, came down to the wire. “We were working the problem and we cleared it within the last two minutes of the count,” he said. Crew-7 is the first commercial crew flight to carry people from four different agencies. The mission is commanded by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli on her first flight to space. European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen is the pilot; he made a 10-day trip to the station on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2015. Satoshi Furukawa of the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov are mission specialists. Furukawa flew a long-duration mission to the ISS in 2011 while Borisov is on his first trip to space. That multinational lineup was simply how the crew assignments worked out, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, at a preflight briefing Aug. 21. “The way the timing worked out for this one with our integrated crew agreement that we have with Roscosmos, it was time for these other folks to fly,” he said. Stich said at that briefing that another milestone for Crew-7 is having a non-NASA astronaut, Mogensen, be a Crew Dragon pilot for the first time. “It’s a very big deal for us,” he said then. Such multinational crews will not always be the case. The next Crew Dragon mission to the ISS, Crew-8 launching in early 2024, will have three NASA astronauts and one Roscosmos cosmonaut. The arrival of Crew-7 will allow NASA to begin preparations for the return of the Crew-6 mission, which has been on the station for nearly six months. Montalbano said at the post-launch briefing that the agency was planning a five-day handover between Crew-6 and Crew-7 before Crew-6 departs on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour. That timing, though, will depend on weather at splashdown locations off the Florida coast, which could be affected by the expected formation of a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico in the next several days.
SAN FRANCISCO – With funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, MyRadar will develop and launch cubesats to validate technology for its future weather and environmental data constellation. MyRadar announced a $650,000 NOAA Phase 2 SBIR grant Aug. 18 for a pair of Orbital Wildfire Resilience cubesats. The cubesats, measuring 10 centimeters on a side, will be equipped with high-resolution optical cameras, thermal infrared imagers and near infrared hyperspectral imagers that observes 16 bands between 600 and 900 nanometers. “This spectral-band density allows us to characterize fuel loads and aerosol loading,” Sarvesh Garimella, chief scientist and chief technology officer for MyRadar and parent company Acme AtronOmatic, told SpaceNews . “It’s a multi-hazard approach because wildfires aren’t just the fires, they’re the particulate matter and the air-quality degradation. And the dry vegetation can change where and who is at risk. Getting accurate up-to-date maps of fuel is a big part of the mission as well.” With onboard artificial intelligence, the satellites will be “able to tell us what they see instead of having to show us what they see,” Garimella said. “A key benefit to that is it solves the bottleneck of downlinking a huge amount of data from a tiny little satellite.” To accommodate the size, weight, power and heat constraints of a 1u cubesat, MyRadar developed onboard AI that ramps up data collection when necessary. “We have a low-power, always-on system that is able to gather context information and decide whether it’s worth kicking on the full system and collecting the high-resolution, multi-sensor dataset for a wildfire event,” Garimella said. “The first mission is to have an onboard AI collect training data in the wildland-urban interface environment for the future constellation in an automated way.” My radar launched three PocketQube protypes in 2022 , precursors for the company’s Hyperspectral Orbital Remote Imaging Spectrometer (HORIS) constellation . Environmental data captured by the HORIS constellation will be paired with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create data-fusion products for the company’s government and commercial customers. MyRadar also intends to draw on data from the HORIS constellation to enhance its MyRadar weather app. MyRadar received FCC approval in 2022 to demonstrate technology for a constellation that ultimately could include 250 satellites or more. With processed data from the HORIS constellation, MyRadar intends to create products to monitor extreme weather, coral reefs, algal blooms, illegal fishing, national security and wildfires, according to the FCC license.
SpaceX says it successfully test-fired the booster for its next Starship launch, although that liftoff may still be weeks away. SpaceX fired the Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster designated Booster 9 in a static-fire test at its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas, at approximately 1:35 p.m. Eastern Aug. 25. SpaceX said it conducted a “full duration” firing, which appeared to last about five to six seconds. SpaceX later stated that all 33 engines successfully ignited , although two shut down prematurely. “Congratulations to the SpaceX team on this exciting milestone!” The company did not state if that performance was sufficient for it to proceed with a launch attempt, but it was better than an earlier test of the same booster Aug. 6. That test ended early, after the engines fired for less than three seconds, with four of the Raptors shutting down prematurely. If SpaceX is satisfied with the outcome of the test, it is likely one of the final technical milestones before it is ready for a second integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch. The first, April 20, failed four minutes after liftoff when several Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster shut down and vehicle later lost control and tumbled. SpaceX, however, will still need to receive Federal Aviation Administration approval for a launch, which includes modifications to its original Starship/Super Heavy launch license. SpaceX delivered a report into the April 20 failure to the FAA earlier in the month, but the agency must still approve it and assess whether SpaceX has made the necessary changes before approving a revised license. The FAA has not given a timeline for that process, but industry observers believe that could take several weeks. The company has already made several changes to the launch vehicle and the pad based on the experience from the April launch. The pad now has a water deluge system designed to prevent the damage the Raptor plume did to the pad, in the process sending sand and debris as far as 10 kilometers from the launch site. That deluge system was used in the two recent static-fire tests, although its effectiveness won’t be fully demonstrated until a launch because the engines were not fired at full thrust in the recent tests. The booster now has an interstage ring on top with vents. That is designed to accommodate a “hot-staging” approach that SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk revealed in June , where the engines of the Starship upper stage are ignited while still attached to the Super Heavy booster. Doing so, he said, can improve the vehicle’s performance by as much as 10%. Musk said in June that the company had made “well over a thousand” other changes to the vehicle that gave him increased confidence that the next launch will be successful. “I think the probability this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60%,” he said.
A new Inmarsat communications satellite has suffered an “unexpected anomaly,” the second in as many months for a Viasat-owned spacecraft that could create bigger headaches for the space insurance sector. Viasat, which completed its acquisition of Inmarsat in May , announced Aug. 24 that the Inmarsat-6 (I-6) F2 spacecraft encountered a problem with its power subsystem while raising its orbit after its February launch. The company didn’t elaborate on the nature of the problem or when it took place, but noted the similar I-6 F1 satellite, launched in late 2021, is working normally. “At this stage, Viasat and Airbus, the satellite’s manufacturer, are working to determine the root cause of the anomaly and assess whether the satellite will be able to perform its mission,” Viasat said in a statement. It added that Airbus Defence and Space considered this an “unprecedented event” as no previous Airbus-built spacecraft had suffered an in-orbit failure. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched I-6 F2 in February, placing it into a geostationary transfer orbit. The spacecraft was designed to use its electric propulsion system to go to its final geostationary orbit over the Atlantic. According to the U.S. Space Force’s Space-Track service, I-6 F2 was in an orbit of 23,061 by 48,126 kilometers with an inclination of 3.28 degrees, still well short of geostationary orbit. There has been no significant changes in its orbital parameters since mid-August. Viasat downplayed the significance of I-6 F2, noting that the satellite had yet to enter service so its loss would not disrupt any customers. “I-6 F2’s initial mission was essentially to provide spare L-band and four gigabits per second of additional Ka-band capacity, consistent with deploying and operating a resilient, redundant network,” Mark Dankberg, chief executive of Viasat, said in a statement. The announcement comes six weeks after Viasat acknowledged a problem deploying the main antenna on its ViaSat-3 Americas satellite , launched April 30. That antenna, previously described by the company as “exceptionally large” in order to provide consumer broadband services, was provided by a third-party supplier for the Boeing-built satellite. In an Aug. 9 earnings call, Dankberg said Viasat was not ready yet to declare ViaSat-3 Americas a total loss . The company was still determining how much performance it could get from the broadband payload, which was designed to provide 1 terabit per second of capacity. He said the company expected to determine a plan forward by its next earnings call in November. That could include building a replacement satellite or using one of two other ViaSat-3 satellites, yet to be launched, to replace ViaSat-3 Americas. If the company does declare ViaSat-3 Americas a total loss, that and I-6 F2 could deal a double whammy to the space insurance field. Insurers were already preparing for a claim of as large as $420 million from ViaSat-3 Americas. At the time, one insurer warned that the ViaSat-3 Americas claim could drive insurers from the market , reducing capacity and raising premiums for other companies. In an Aug. 25 research note, Louie DiPalma, analyst with investment firm William Blair, said Viasat had a $350 million policy on I-6 F2. Those claims, along with the redundancy from Viasat’s overall satellite fleet, would mitigate the near-term financial effect of the two satellite losses on Viasat. However, he added, “over the long term, Viasat and other industry participants will likely experience significant challenges with obtaining insurance for future satellite launches.” Shares of Viasat were down about 5% in trading Aug. 25 on the Nasdaq. The company is near its 52-week low, down nearly 50% from a high in early June.
 Sedaro, a startup that develops digital engineering software, won a Space Force contract to demonstrate the use of digital twins to design spacecraft. The $1.5 million contract announced Aug. 22 is a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 award under the Orbital Prime program run by the U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Robbie Robertson, co-founder and CEO of Sedaro, said the company will use its cloud-based digital engineering software to design prototype spacecraft for missions known as ISAM, short for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. Digital twins are models that replicate physical prototypes. The military is interested in using digital twins so buyers can tweak the design features of a satellite before they acquire actual hardware. Modeling ISAM scenarios For the 15-month project Sedaro is partnering with the academic organizations Space Dynamics Laboratory and Draper Labs. They will use Sedaro’s platform to model ISAM scenarios. Robertson said Space Dynamics and Draper “will provide user perspectives to inform the design of new features in Sedaro’s platform for modeling ISAM technology like robotic manipulators, cameras and sensors for targeting, docking mechanisms, and refueling ports.” “Our goal is to develop digital twin software that will accelerate and improve ISAM technology development and deployment — both commercially and for the U.S. Space Force,” said Robertson. One of the goals of the Orbital Prime program is to find ways to reduce physical prototyping and testing, and instead use digital tools that can be shared by developers and operators, he said. 
When a Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base June 12, it carried a broad cross-section of the overall smallsat industry. Transporter-8, SpaceX’s eighth dedicated rideshare mission, included 72 payloads for deployment into a sun-synchronous orbit. Several companies developing constellations had satellites on board, like radar imaging company Iceye, optical imaging company Satellogic and weather and tracking company Spire. Several smaller companies and organizations had spacecraft on board, as did aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which deployed four satellites for DARPA’s Blackjack program. Some of the customers on Transporter-8 were flying their first satellites, but none had an experience quite like Starfish Space. The startup was flying its Otter Pup spacecraft, to demonstrate satellite servicing technologies, as part of an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) developed by Launcher. However, Launcher’s OTV started spinning uncontrollably shortly after separation from the Falcon 9’s upper stage, an anomaly Launcher later blamed on software. Launcher deployed Otter Pup and its other payloads, but Starfish Space said it was struggling to recover control of the spacecraft. “Given the events experienced post-launch and the current state of the satellite, it is unlikely that Otter Pup will be able to continue with its mission,” the company said in a statement a couple weeks after the launch. “However, we will continue to try to save Otter Pup, and we are grateful for the continued support of our mission partners.” Such drama is, fortunately, the exception to the rule for rideshare launches, which have become increasingly routine. However, the industry itself is facing upheaval. As interest in smallsats grows, more companies have entered the market to arrange launches and provide additional services, like OTVs for “lastmile” delivery of rideshare customers to their destinations. Those companies are also finding it difficult to find alternative rides in a launch market where a single company — SpaceX — is dominant. Satellites have launched as secondary payloads for decades. For much of that time, however, those payloads were arranged on a one-off basis, hitching rides ad hoc on rockets with room to spare. Growing interest over the last 15 years in cubesats, often developed by universities or startups, led to the emergence of rideshare aggregators, companies that would serve as an intermediary between satellite developers looking for rides and launch service providers with excess capacity for sale. “The rideshare market continues to grow annually with increased demand from new commercial, academic and government customers, as well as from our long-term customers expanding their constellations,” said Jeanne Allarie, chief commercial officer of Exolaunch, a German company that provides rideshare launch services. But as the demand for rideshare launches grows, the customers for those launches are changing. Renato Panesi, chief commercial officer of Italian rideshare operator D-Orbit, says his customers fall into two broad categories. The biggest customers for his company are smallsat constellation developers looking to build out their systems. The other major group are startups, universities and governments looking to launch their first satellites. Those two customer sets are moving in different directions. The constellation market is not growing as fast as projected a few years ago, which D-Orbit suspects is due to a combination of supply chain issues affecting the satellite industry and challenges raising capital. In the other category, Panesi said the company has seen an increase in demand from regions like Latin America and the Middle East that are just starting to get involved in space operations. “That is a very good signal if we consider that one of the goals of the community is to democratize access to space.” The size of smallsats seeking rides is also changing. “Many of our cubesat customers are growing in size or even going to the microsat form factor to increase their capabilities and performance,” said Allarie. “Microsats are growing in mass and volume too, taking advantage of cost-efficient rideshare launches.” D-Orbit has also seen microsatellites get heavier, converging on a range of 120 to 150 kilograms. “It’s like mobile phones,” Panesi said. “They were big in the ’90s, and then they became smaller, only to become bigger but more powerful.” Customers are increasingly looking for more than just a port on a payload adapter. Several rideshare companies have developed or are working on OTVs that can provide “last-mile” delivery of satellites after deployment from the launch vehicle as well as accommodate hosted payloads. That includes D-Orbit, which has flown its ION vehicle 11 times. Those added capabilities bring with it additional complexity and challenges, as the Launcher OTV problem on Transporter-8 illustrated. Momentus ran into problems with its first Vigoride OTV launched last year but had more success with two vehicles launched this January and April. Those missions were not complete successes, though: Momentus said July 28 that two NASA cubesats carried on its Vigoride-6 tug in April were deployed in the wrong orbit, which it blamed on “human error in the mapping of a software command.” One of the pioneers of the modern rideshare industry was Spaceflight. The Seattle-based company had arranged launches for hundreds of smallsats on more than 50 launches, from Astra’s Rocket 3.3 to India’s PSLV and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. That included buying an entire Falcon 9 for its SSO-A dedicated rideshare mission in 2018, a forerunner to SpaceX’s own Transporter series of missions. It was a surprise to many in the industry, then, when Firefly Aerospace announced June 8 that it had acquired Spaceflight for an undisclosed sum. Firefly said it acquired Spaceflight to improve its ability to offer end-to-end space transportation services along with its Alpha launch vehicle and Space Utility Vehicle transfer vehicle. “With a high market demand for our on-orbit services and rapid response missions, this acquisition uniquely positions Firefly to respond immediately to our customers’ needs,” Bill Weber, chief executive of Firefly, said in a statement about its purchase of Spaceflight. Firefly said it would retain Spaceflight’s payload processing facility and its workforce. However, it no longer plans to continue Spaceflight’s main business of arranging rides on a variety of non-Firefly launch vehicles. “We’re currently assessing the needs of our combined customers to meet their mission requirements with Firefly’s launch vehicles,” Firefly spokesperson Risa Schnautz said. “Firefly will honor Spaceflight’s current contracts but will not be aggregating payloads on other launch vehicles moving forward.” Neither Firefly nor Spaceflight offered more details about the deal that effectively takes a major rideshare aggregator off the market. Some in the industry have speculated that Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa Co., the Japanese companies that bought Spaceflight in 2020, were no longer interested in investing in Spaceflight’s development of the Sherpa line of tugs. Spaceflight also had a strained relationship with SpaceX, with SpaceX informing rideshare customers in March 2022 it would no longer work with Spaceflight beyond missions already manifested. Other rideshare companies are still weighing the effects of Spaceflight’s exit. “Our pipeline is continuing to grow, but it’s not connected with Firefly’s acquisition of Spaceflight,” said Exolaunch’s Allarie. “This event hasn’t had an impact on our business.” “I think it’s too early to say,” said D-Orbit’s Panesi. He noted the two companies had collaborated in the past, with D-Orbit taking some Spaceflight customers when a Sherpa tug suffered a fuel leak and had to be taken off a Transporter launch. “It was amazing to work with them, and I hope we can continue to do so in the future.” A few years ago, rideshare launches seemed like they might become a thing of the past. The rise of small launch vehicles, with dozens in development, promised more frequent, tailored access to space for most smallsat developers, who would be able to get their satellites into their desired orbit when they needed to. In that scenario, only the most cost-conscious customers would stick with rideshare. It hasn’t worked out that way so far, though. The last year has been filled with delays, failures and bankruptcies. The first launches of ABL Space Systems’ RS1 and Relativity Space’s Terran 1 both failed earlier this year, with Relativity subsequently deciding to retire the Terran 1 to focus on the much larger Terran R. Astra retired the failure-prone Rocket 3.3 to work on the larger Rocket 4. Launcher halted plans to develop its own launch vehicle after being acquired by space station developer Vast. And, most spectacularly, Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, three months after a launch failure, with its assets auctioned off in May. For now, rideshare companies don’t see much competition from small launch vehicles. “Rocket Lab is the only company up and running providing recurring launches with Electron, and they have a limit in terms of capacity,” said Panesi. “All the other newcomers still have to demonstrate they can make it.” Rocket Lab, meanwhile, isn’t concerned about competition from rideshare providers. “What we find is that customers will send up a couple of spacecraft on a Transporter, do a mission demo, and when they actually need to build out their constellation to their desired orbits, that’s when they come and see us,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab. He said he was seeing far more “defections,” as he put it, from Transporter missions to Electron than the other way around. He added that his company was also picking customers from other small launch vehicle companies. Rideshares and small launch vehicles are also not mutually exclusive. Exolaunch arranged the launch of Telesat’s LEO 3 demonstration satellite on an Electron in July, a rideshare mission that also carried cubesats from NASA and Spire. D-Orbit signed a contract in 2022 with Isar Aerospace, a German company developing the Spectrum small launch vehicle. Panesi said that would give its customers greater flexibility in choosing their orbits. “We can decide when to launch. We can decide what orbit,” he said. “That improves the time to our target orbit.” While small launch vehicle companies have struggled to get their vehicles flying, those working on larger vehicles have not done much better. The combination of retirements of vehicles like the Ariane 5, delays in the development of Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur, and the withdrawal of Soyuz from the market has created a lack of capacity for commercial and government customers alike. That extends to rideshare aggregators as well. For many companies, Transporter missions, along with the occasional secondary payload opportunity on other Falcon 9 launches, are the only game in town for flying their payloads. “SpaceX is the only alternative if we think about recurrent flying,” D-Orbit’s Panesi said. “This is, I think, an issue for end users because they basically have to develop their business plans based on SpaceX’s offering. They launch only when SpaceX launches.” Rideshare companies are working to diversify their launch opportunities. D-Orbit launched its first mission on a Vega in 2020, and the company expects to launch future missions on the Vega-C. That vehicle, though, remains out of service after a launch failure in late 2022 and may not resume launches until 2024. Exolaunch, besides arranging the Telesat satellite on an Electron, also flew several secondary payloads on a PSLV launch in late July, and Allarie said the company was looking at vehicles like Ariane 6, Vega-C and Isar’s Spectrum in the future. However, the bulk of its smallsats fly on Transporter missions. Rideshare companies continue to use SpaceX not because it’s the only major option but also because, they say, it provides them a good service. “SpaceX has completely changed the paradigm of rideshare launches,” she said. “Rideshare launches have never been so reliable and affordable.” “The relationship is very good,” Panesi said. Customers like flying on Falcon 9 because its reliability results in lower insurance costs and because the Transporter missions fly on a regular schedule without significant delays. “SpaceX is perfect for our rideshare missions.” While SpaceX sells space on its Transporter missions to rideshare aggregators, it also sells directly to satellite operators, who presumably get better rates than if they went through an aggregator. Rideshare companies say they have not seen evidence of SpaceX poaching customers or otherwise undermining their businesses. Allarie said Exolaunch complemented SpaceX by handling the complexities of managing multiple customers. “SpaceX has been an ideal launch provider in all senses.” Rideshare companies can also provide opportunities on missions that are otherwise sold out. As of late July, SpaceX’s own rideshare website listed no openings for launching a single smallsat before mid-2025. Panesi expects the rideshare industry’s dependence on SpaceX to continue through next year. “I think the turning point will be the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025,” he said, as new vehicles enter service. That strong demand for launch services means that rideshare will continue to be an option for the foreseeable future, even amid the upheavals in the industry and the shifting launch options, as companies and organizations look for the best opportunities to fly their satellites. Even potential competitors in the small launch industry say rideshare options are here to stay. “If you don’t mind riding the bus to a particular orbit, that’s the best value thing you can do, so you should do that,” said Rocket Lab’s Beck of rideshare missions. “If that’s what’s required, then that’s filling a great market opportunity.” This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The world’s largest constellation operators are plotting considerably bigger second-generation satellites, joining a trend toward more sizable spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO). SpaceX operates by far the largest constellation by satellite count and mass after launching more than 4,000 Starlinks in four years. Most of the Starlinks deployed to date weighed between 200 and 300 kilograms ready for launch — already close to the 500-kilogram cut-off point for being considered a small satellite under some definitions (others set the upper limit at 1,200 kilograms). Starlink V2 satellites coming in at around 2,000 kilograms each would easily eclipse these, pushing SpaceX even further ahead of the historic title holder for the world’s largest constellation: Earth observation operator Planet with hundreds of satellites that are mostly in the region of 4 kilograms. SpaceX started deploying bigger V2 Mini Starlinks in February while the company waits on its heavy-lift Starship rocket to be able to launch full-scale Starlink V2s to improve broadband services. SpaceX has not released specifics about the V2 Mini but regulatory filings suggest they are around 800 kilograms. OneWeb has 634 broadband satellites in LEO and has said its second generation will be bulkier than the 150-kilogram spacecraft currently in its fleet, which recently became the world’s second-biggest by number, at around 500 kilograms each. Constellation operators will always prefer larger satellites for their second generation, according to Euroconsult principal adviser Maxime Puteaux, versus going smaller with the miniaturization of technology. Even if they have higher upfront costs, larger satellites promise better performance in payload size and design life, which should make it easier to cover this expense over the network’s lifespan. The main historical benefit of smaller satellites has been cheaper launch costs, Puteaux said, but this is becoming less relevant as launch prices come down across the board. Satellite operators seek to find the right balance between their costs and the useful capacity they can provide, whether through megabits per second (Mbps) of broadband or kilometer of imagery. Compared with high throughput satellite platforms in geostationary orbit (GEO-HTS), LEO systems typically have smaller coverage areas per satellite. This drives LEO operators to adopt flexible payload technologies to realize the latency advantage their systems have over GEO by being closer to the ground. These technologies include inter-satellite links and steerable or shapeable beams to maximize sellable capacity. “There has been an exponential progression in hardware capacity and throughput for HTS systems,” Puteaux added, with Starlink and OneWeb outpacing most GEO-HTS solutions in terms of Mbps per kilogram. By leveraging the benefits of miniaturization and economies of scale, these companies hope to decrease their cost per Mbps while increasing throughput per kilogram of satellite mass. Notably, Starlink’s first generation has reached congestion in specific beams, calling for more throughput and larger spacecraft that would also help make the most of Starship’s launch capacity and diameter. It remains challenging for LEO constellations to recoup investments over their operational lifetimes at current market prices for satellite connectivity, noted Emile de Rijk, founder and CEO of GEO satellite manufacturing startup Swissto12. “The unit economics of broadband LEO constellations is currently significantly higher than those of broadband GEO,” he said. To address this, LEO operators are geared toward a technical trade where more powerful and flexible payloads are put onto the next generation of broadband LEO constellations, enabling them to push out more throughput. Optical inter-satellite also help operators optimize ground segment costs, de Rijk added, because fewer ground stations are needed when information can be beamed from one satellite to the next. The cost per Mbps is typically lower as you go to larger and larger satellites, said Armand Musey, founder of advisory firm Summit Ridge Group, but it does not make sense to launch more capacity than can be sold. Given the positive market reception for Starlink, he said it is not surprising to see the company move toward more massive satellites to expand the market further. Musey said satellites, like most things, are easier the second time around. Second constellations benefit from greater technical manufacturing experience, improved regulatory understanding, and an existing market with distribution in place. He estimates manufacturing alone is a good 10-20% cheaper than the first time around, and is likely also faster and less risky. Supported by SpaceX Falcon 9 launches, Starlink’s deployment got a headstart on OneWeb, and its success in securing subscribers also helps pave the way for others to bet on larger spacecraft. Following multi-billion dollar contracts announced last year with multiple heavy-lift launch providers, analysts anticipate Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites to come in above 500 kilograms once operational models start launching late this year. Companies with deep pockets are less incentivized to reduce satellite mass to save costs. Euroconsult expects the total number of small satellite launches will peak in the next few years and start falling near the end of the decade. Despite ongoing technology miniaturization, Puteaux expects the quest for performance and the addition of sensors, thrusters, and hardware will result in steady growth in average small satellite mass — even among much smaller constellations. Companies that started out specializing in small satellites, including LeoStella, Terran Orbital, and NanoAvionics, have also been gradually moving toward larger spacecraft to accommodate this demand. LeoStella unveiled its largest satellite yet Aug. 6, called LS300, which can reach 500 kilograms when including its payload. Falling launch costs is the main driver pushing LeoStella and other LEO manufacturing specialists toward heavier satellites, its CEO Tim Kienberger said. With few rideshare opportunities available in the past, he said “a 500-kilogram mass to orbit used to be almost a dedicated launch,” costing anywhere from $100 million to $200 million. Making it cost-effective to launch larger LEO satellites with more functionalities also opens up new business models for the space industry. “Now we’re able to package more in that 500 kilograms,” he said, “which traditionally, even five years ago, would have cost three times as much — probably four times as much, and had less capability on that satellite.” Terran Orbital started off over a decade ago with 1U cubesats weighing less than 1.33 kilograms and has gradually expanded to larger spacecraft ever since. The biggest satellite the manufacturer has under construction is 800 kilograms, Terran Orbital CEO Marc Bell said, but he sees the LEO market settling at a sweet spot at around 500 kilograms. “It seems right now that with 500 kilograms you’re getting the biggest bang for the buck,” he said. LeoStella agrees, for the time being. Kienberger said rocket providers could one day significantly reduce launch costs for even heavier payloads to change the economics. “Five years ago, I would have said 300 kilograms is the sweet spot,” Kienberger said. Euroconsult also does not expect to see a size sweet spot settle any time soon. “I’m not convinced that 500 Kg fits all needs,” Puteaux added. While LEO satellites are getting bigger, spacecraft on the opposite end of the spectrum in GEO have been getting smaller with the emergence of manufacturers specializing in mini-GEO offerings. Swissto12 recently sold three dishwasher-sized satellites to Inmarsat, a GEO operator more akin to ordering school bus-sized giants with greater throughput. It’s difficult to compare trends in the size of broadband LEO satellites with those for GEO because the two are fundamentally uncorrelated, Swissto12’s de Rijk said. He said the rationale for taking a hit on capacity by going smaller and lighter in GEO is to greatly reduce costs — by between three to 10 times in Swissto12’s case, according de Rijk— as well as reducing time to market. This enables GEO operators and telecom providers to quickly spin up new regional services, he added, increment capacity on existing markets, and add gap-filling services that would not be economically viable using larger satellites. At the same time, small GEO satellites give smaller nation-states a more cost-effective option for their own dedicated satellite to provide secure and sovereign connectivity services. Although de Rijk sees a future for both GEO and non-GEOs, he pointed to how Starlink and other LEO broadband providers have yet to prove profitability with their current generation. Improving LEO broadband economics takes time, and it remains to be seen whether all these pieces can come together the second time around. This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The Defense Innovation Unit is seeking industry bids for a “tactically responsive space” mission where a launch provider would get only 24 hours’ notice to get a payload off the ground. In a solicitation posted Aug. 24 , DIU asks companies to submit proposals by Sept. 7 for a responsive space mission named Victus Haze. Companies selected for this mission would be responsible to deploy an imaging satellite to orbit to inspect a potential threat. DIU and the U.S. Space Force are funding this project to “address on-orbit threats to U.S. space systems with responsive end-to-end solutions,” said the request. “The U.S. Space Force is exploring the ability of commercial providers to rapidly deliver both launch and on-orbit operations infrastructure.” The Space Force in budget documents said it plans to spend $60 million over the next two years on tactically responsive space demonstrations. Separately from the mission it’s planning with DIU, the Space Force this month is starting a Small Business Innovation Research program focused on tactically responsive space. DIU, based in Silicon Valley, is a DoD organization created to bring commercial technologies into military programs. The Space Force this year plans to launch a responsive space mission called Victus Nox , where a small satellite built by Millennium Space will launch to orbit on a Firefly Aerospace rocket. Victus Nox and Victus Haze will seek to demonstrate U.S. capabilities to launch and start operating a satellite in days rather than the months and years it typically takes. “Our partnership with DIU provides the right ecosystem, expertise, and mission focus to execute the Victus Haze mission and establish a robust partnership with commercial providers,” said Maj. Jason Altenhofen, deputy for the Space Safari program office under the Space Systems Command. DIU became an early supporter of commercial launch startups which were selected to launch experimental DoD payloads. “We started a responsive launch program in 2017 with Space Systems Command to leverage low-cost, high-cadence launch,” said Steven Butow, the director of the space portfolio at DIU. Contract awards projected for fall 2023 DIU expects to award contracts for the Victus Haze mission in fall of 2023. The selected contractors would have 12 to 18 months to build and test the launch vehicle, satellite and ground segment. That would be followed by a “hot standby” phase during which the launch vehicle and satellite would be stored in preparation for a call-up to launch. Upon receiving a notice to launch, the companies would have just 24 hours to be ready to launch the satellite into the correct orbit. The final orbit will be provided with the notice to launch. The Space Force would expect the satellite to be ready for use within 48 hours of launch. 
Ahead of a final meeting of a United Nations working group on reducing space threats, members states of the European Union, but not the E.U. itself, have pledged not to conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite tests. In a document recently published by the U.N. Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Reducing Space Threats, a “joint contribution” by the E.U. included a commitment by its 27 member states not to perform such ASAT tests, which can generate significant amounts of debris. Breaking Defense first reported on the document. “The Member States of the European Union commit not to conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests,” states the E.U. in a passage bolded and underlined. The United States first announced in April 2022 its intent not to conduct such tests , five months after a Russian direct-ascent ASAT hit a defunct satellite and created nearly 1,800 pieces of tracked debris. Twelve countries followed the U.S., including five E.U. members: Austria, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. A U.N. General Assembly resolution encouraging countries to adopt similar bans won backing from 155 nations last December . “Concerned that the use of destructive ASAT systems might have widespread and irreversible impacts on the outer space environment, the Member States of the EU consider such commitment as an urgent and initial measure aimed at preventing damage to the outer space environment, while also contributing to the development of further measures for the prevention of an arms race in outer space,” the E.U. document stated. The European Union made no other formal announcement of that commitment, but an E.U. official confirmed that it applied to all 27 countries. “All EU Member States have taken the commitment not to conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests,” E.U. spokesman Peter Stano said in an Aug. 24 statement to SpaceNews. “They agreed to express this collectively in the joint EU contribution to the works of the Open-Ended Working Group on reducing space threats through norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors.” “The EU welcomes this joint commitment,” he added, noting that it did not apply to the European Union itself. “However, this not a commitment by the EU as this potential behavior would fall outside of the competences of the EU.” Despite the overwhelming support for a destructive ASAT testing ban in last December’s U.N. vote, advocates have continued to press individual countries to make formal commitments to refrain from such tests. In a talk at the Summit for Space Sustainability June 13 in New York, Audrey Schaffer, at the time director of space policy at the National Security Council, said that the U.N. resolution only encouraged countries to adopt a ban, and was not itself a commitment not to perform such tests. “To truly establish an internationally recognized norm banning destructive DA-ASAT missile testing, we need a critical mass of nations to actually make the commitment,” she said. “We have to continue the drumbeat of nations making commitments to this emerging international norm.” The OEWG is set to hold its fourth and final working session the week of Aug. 28 in Geneva. The intent of that session is to finalize recommended measures, like ASAT testing bans, to offer to the United Nations. In its document, the E.U. endorsed several norms of behavior that address topics from intentional activities that create space debris to those that impair space-based services. It also backed transparency in space activities, such as sharing information about space policies and providing prelaunch notifications. Many observers, though, are skeptical that working group members will be able to reach consensus on a final report with any substantial recommendations. A separate document submitted by Russia said that the OWEG report should endorse a legally binding treaty on preventing placement of weapons in space, an issue long advocated by Russia and China but opposed by the U.S. and many other Western nations.
The U.S. Space Force is kicking off a new initiative focused on the rapid deployment of satellites during conflicts or emergencies. From Aug. 30 through Sept. 28, companies can submit bids for the “Tactically Responsive Space Challenge” on the DoD Small Business Innovation Research portal. Selected proposals will receive “direct to Phase 2” Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contracts worth up to $1.7 million. The Space Force is looking for “capabilities to rapidly respond to any kind of on-orbit needs on operationally relevant timelines. And usually that means within about 24 hours or less,” said Lt. Col. MacKenzie Birchenough, Space Safari materiel leader at the Space Systems Command. Speaking on a webinar Aug. 24, Birchenough said the Space Force is hoping to get ideas from a broad range of companies in the launch, satellite, ground systems and space logistics sectors of the industry. Birchenough’s organization, Space Safari, last year funded a tactically responsive space experiment and awarded contracts to Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space to launch a space mission on 24 hours’ notice. That mission, called Victus Nox , has not yet launched. Looking for fresh ideas In announcing the kickoff of the Tactically Responsive Space Challenge, Birchenough said there is a need for comprehensive solutions beyond just buying launch services and payloads. In a tactically responsive scenario, for example, the U.S. would need to launch a small imaging satellite to inspect a potential adversary’s spacecraft. “It could be some type of threat response where the adversary launches something new into orbit and we want to go and characterize it in a very short timeline,” she said. Another scenario would be having to launch communications or imaging satellites to replace assets that were damaged during a conflict. “It’s really having the ability to have something on the ground and ready to launch at the time of need,” said Birchenough. “There’s a lot of different approaches.” The Space Force is open to nontraditional concepts such as having payloads readily available in warehouses on orbit. “We are extremely interested in capabilities that would be prepositioned on orbit and allow us to quickly respond that way, completely taking launch out of the equation,” she said. “The scope here is very large and we’re looking for things that would fill all of those different approaches across those different mission areas,” Birchenough added. The ‘Tactically Responsive Space Challenge’ will seek proposals under six different areas: The project is run by SpaceWERX , a Space Force technology-focused organization, and the Space Systems Command. SpaceWERX project manager Maj. Jareth Lamb said companies are encouraged to team up with others, and can bid for multiple awards in more than one of the six areas. Birchenough said the Space Force is looking for relatively mature technologies that can be prototyped over 15 months and fielded within two years.
The U.S. Justice Department has filed suit against SpaceX, alleging the company discriminated against asylum seekers and refugees in hiring. The department announced Aug. 24 that it filed a suit with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer in the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which handles cases related to immigration law, claiming that SpaceX discriminated against asylees — persons granted asylum — and refugees for several years. The Justice Department argues that SpaceX unlawfully denied employment to asylees and refugees based on the company’s interpretation of export control regulations that limit access to controlled items to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The suit includes several comments from SpaceX officials, including Chief Executive Elon Musk, stating that it could only hire citizens and “green card” holders in order to comply with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs launch vehicle and other space components. Those regulations often include severe penalties for any violations. However, the Justice Department noted that asylees and refugees are also considered “U.S. persons” under ITAR and other export control regulations, and can be treated like citizens and permanent residents in that they do not need authorization to handle export-controlled items. In addition, export control regulations do not include employment or hiring restrictions, the suit stated. “Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in a statement. “Our investigation also found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company.” It’s unclear how many people were affected by SpaceX’s hiring restrictions. The suit alleges that the discrimination against asylees and refugees dated back to at least September 2018 and lasted to at least May 2022, but the suit included statements from Musk and others at the company as far back as 2012 indicating it hired only citizens and permanent residents. The suit stated that SpaceX “repeatedly” rejected applicants who identified themselves as asylees or refugees, but did not give a number. The Justice Department asked the court to order SpaceX to change its hiring practices and provide “fair consideration” to applications it previously rejected, including hiring those who were qualified for employment. Those individuals would also be eligible for back pay with interest, while SpaceX could be forced to pay an “appropriate civil penalty.” SpaceX has not commented on the suit, but it appears to have already changed its hiring practices. Job listings, such as one for a launch engineer , now explicitly state that applicants have to be U.S. citizens, permanent residents, refugees or asylees. Other space companies use varying language, but with similar effect, in their job postings. Blue Origin states in its job postings, like one for a software engineer , that applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents “or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.” A United Launch Alliance job listing for a propulsion test engineer instead only mentions being a “protected individual” as an option other than being a citizen of permanent resident. That term is defined under federal law to include refugees and asylees. Relativity Space states in its job listings, such as one for a senior aerodynamics engineer , that applications must be U.S. persons. That is defined under federal law to include protected individuals. However, Rocket Lab states in job postings for its U.S. offices, like for a spacecraft mechanical design lead , that an “applicant must be a U.S. citizen as defined by ITAR.” But the regulation cited in the application instead defines a U.S. person, a more inclusive definition than U.S. citizen.
NASA is preparing for the release of a new decadal survey for space research that the agency hopes will provide guidance on research to pursue on the International Space Station and how to transition that to commercial successors. The National Academies announced Aug. 23 that it will release the decadal survey for biological and physical sciences research in space Sept. 12 at a public event in Washington. The document, titled “Thriving in Space,” will prioritize research in space biological and physical sciences over the next decade. The primary customer for the decadal survey is NASA, and the head of the agency division that manages that research said in a recent interview that she hopes the decadal provides clear guidance on the topics it should pursue in the next decade. “The ideal scenario coming out of his decadal would be very targeted priority focus areas,” said Lisa Carnell, director of the biological and physical sciences (BPS) division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “A decadal that has 101 priority areas doesn’t have a priority area.” Along with that focus, she said she’d like to see “decision rules” included in the decadal, similar to those incorporated into decadal surveys in other science fields but not in the previous BPS decadal. Those rules specify what should be reduced or eliminated if funding falls short of budget projections made in the decadal. The upcoming decadal covers research through 2032, past the planned retirement of the ISS in 2030. NASA is supporting several efforts to develop commercial stations that can serve as successors to the ISS, called commercial low Earth orbit destinations, or CLDs, by the agency. Carnell said that while she will look for guidance in the decadal on how to manage that transition, it may be difficult given the rapidly evolving commercial environment. “A question I have for the decadal and its sustainability over 10 years is that space has become so dynamic,” she said. “How will the recommendations be able to adapt to this evolving environment?” Her division has already been active in planning for a transition from the ISS to commercial platforms. That included a white paper earlier this year that outlined all the current and planned research capabilities of the ISS, which she said was intended to ensure the commercial station developers were fully informed about ISS research. “We wanted to give them the opportunity to see it all and see what their interests were in providing it.” The BPS division has also been trying to prepare for a new era of commercial research through a program called Commercially Enabled Rapid Space Science, or CERISS. The initiative, announced last year , could eventually involve flying scientists on private astronaut mission to the ISS to be able to conduct the research on the station rather than having NASA astronauts perform it. While a proposed budget increased needed for CERISS did not materialize for fiscal year 2023, delaying that effort , Carnell said it remains a long-term priority for her division. Such researchers, she said, would be analogous to payload specialists who flew on shuttle missions but were not full-time astronauts. “They’re moving forward,” she said of those efforts, if slowly. “We’ll see what the decadal comes out with.” Suborbital research, she said, could provide a step towards flying scientists on orbital flights. NASA’s Flight Opportunities program now allows researchers to fly with their experiments on commercial suborbital vehicles, and the agency’s Suborbital Crew, or SubC, program is exploring how to enable NASA civil servants to go on such flights, potentially as soon as next year. “Change is hard, but it also brings a lot of opportunity and excitement,” she said in general of new research opportunities enabled by commercial platforms. “There will be some growing pains, but I do think it’s going to be a huge benefit for NASA and for the space industry.” While the focus of BPS research has been on the ISS, Carnell said that another topic she will look for the decadal for guidance on is activities beyond LEO. The division is already planning for research on the lunar Gateway and on Artemis missions, including “getting close” to flying a tissue organ model experiment on an Artemis lunar lander. “The future of exploration demands that we go beyond LEO, so what I would really like to see them call out is what part of our portfolio should be dedicated to beyond LEO and how much we should remain doing in LEO,” she said of the decadal.
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Aug. 24 its second attempt to launch a spy satellite ended in failure due to an “error in the emergency blasting system” during the third-stage flight. The failed launch came about three months after the nation’s first attempt failed in May , when the new carrier rocket Chollima-1 crashed into the sea soon after liftoff. North Korea called the error “not a big issue in the aspect of the reliability of cascade engines and the system,” vowing to make another attempt in October, according to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The Chollima-1 rocket lifted off from a launch site in Tongchang-ri in North Pyongan Province at 2:40 p.m. Eastern Aug. 23 (or 3:50 a.m. Aug. 24 local time), the first day of the pre-announced week-long launch window , according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The rocket flew southward, carrying a military reconnaissance satellite, Malligyong-1. It travelled above international waters between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula and crashed into an undisclosed location east of the Philippines, according to South Korea’s military. It did not reveal the presumed crash sites of the rocket’s boosters, payload fairing and others. Japan’s defense ministry said the rocket appeared to have broken into multiple pieces and fell into the Yellow Sea west of the Korean Peninsula, the East China Sea southwest of the Korean Peninsula and the Pacific Ocean off the Philippines, according to Japanese broadcaster NHK . The ministry said the rocket appeared to have passed over Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture. There were no reports of casualties or property damage caused by the rocket. The South Korean military said a search operation is underway, in collaboration with the U.S. military, to recover debris of the rocket to determine the technologies applied to the rocket and satellite. They are brand-new, suggesting their capacity and other technical details are largely shrouded in mystery. In July, South Korea’s military said that recovered debris from the first launch indicated that technology applied to North Korea’s satellite was not yet sophisticated enough to fulfill reconnaissance objectives, even if it had been launched successfully. The launch has been condemned by South Korea, the United States and Japan. South Korea’s presidential office said the launch of the rocket violated U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban any launches by North Korea using ballistic technologies. Japan’s chief Cabinet secretary, Hirokazu Matsuno, called the North Korean launch a “ threat to peace and stability .” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said the United States strongly condemns the launch , adding that it involved technologies directly related to the North’s intercontinental ballistic missile program. Watson said Pyongyang must immediately cease its provocative actions and instead choose engagement.
Rocket Lab successfully reflew an engine on an Electron launch Aug. 23 as the company moves a step closer to reusing the entire rocket booster. The Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 7:45 p.m. Eastern. The “We Love the Nightlife” mission deployed a Capella Space radar imaging satellite into a 640-kilometer mid-inclination orbit 58 minutes after liftoff. The launch was originally scheduled for July 30 but scrubbed because of data from a sensor in one engine that indicated low igniter pressure. A second attempt on Aug. 6 was also scrubbed. Rocket Lab decided to replace the entire booster with one that the company had just completed. The new booster, unlike the original one, was designed for recovery. “The call was made to bring forward that recovery booster and swap the payload onto this Electron to tighten the turnaround to get back to the pad for Capella and accelerate our efforts to make Electron a reusable rocket at the exact same time,” Rocket Lab spokesperson Murielle Baker said during the launch webcast. The booster not only was designed for reuse but also, among its nine Rutherford engines, was one that had flown on an Electron launch in May 2022. The engine had gone through what Rocket Lab described as multiple full-duration hotfire tests to confirm it could be flown again. “The data is in, perfect performance from the reused engine and the stage,” Peter Beck, Rocket Lab chief executive, tweeted after the launch. During an Aug. 8 earnings call , Beck suggested that reflying a Rutherford engine, then scheduled for some time before the end of the year, was one of the final steps before the company is ready to reuse an entire booster. “From there we’ll schedule the first reflight of a full stage booster,” he said in the call, but did not offer a timeline for doing so beyond noting that additional improvements to support reusability were planned for the 45 th flight of the vehicle. This launch, the 40 th for the Electron, carried the first of Capella’s Acadia line of synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites . Those satellites will offer increased image resolution and quality, as well as improved communications for both tasking the satellites and downlinking imagery. The launch was the first of four Electron missions carrying Acadia satellites under a contract between Rocket Lab and Capella Space announced in February. Those launches will take place in “rapid succession,” the companies said then, but did not disclose a more specific schedule. This was the eighth Electron mission of 2023, including one launch of the suborbital version of Electron called HASTE. In the earnings call, Rocket Lab continued to forecast conducting 15 Electron launches this year. “I can’t believe we’re at flight 40. Honestly, it feels like flight 1 was just a few weeks ago,” Beck said in a video during the launch webcast. That first Electron launch took place in May 2017. “I can’t wait for 80 and beyond.”
Australian startup HEO, which uses space-based sensors to inspect and image objects in orbit, announced Aug. 23 it has completed an $8 million Series A funding round. Previously known as HEO Robotics, the company changed its name to just HEO to reflect its focus on commercial in-orbit inspection and space-based space situational awareness, the company’s co-founder and CEO William Crowe said during a presentation in Sydney, Australia. The funding round was led by Airtree Ventures, an Australian venture capital firm. Other investors include Salus VC, Y Combinator, In-Q-Tel, David Harding and Steve Baxter. HEO specializes in the burgeoning field of non-Earth imagery, or satellite-to-satellite imaging. Rather than operate its own inspector satellites, HEO relies on partner companies to host the company’s software platform on their imaging satellites. The company currently uses data collected by 39 space sensors from partner companies, including Satellogic and Axelspace . HEO leases time on partner companies’ imaging satellites and can task those 39 imagers to take pictures in order to characterize a space object. HEO’s customers include commercial satellite operators and government agencies that want to prevent their spacecraft from colliding with debris objects or keep watch of other hazards. Enrico Palermo, head of the Australian Space Agency, said HEO’s satellite inspection technology is “enhancing our understanding of space debris, satellite movements, and potential threats.” Crowe said HEO is doing business in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The company recently opened its first U.S. office in the Washington, D.C. area.
SAN FRANCISO – Sidus Space’s acquisition of Exo-Space marks an important milestone for crowdfunding platform Spaced Ventures — its first exit. “It’s a vindication of the concept of bringing in individual investors who see the value in early-stage companies before other people do,” Spaced Ventures CEO Aaron Burnett told SpaceNews . Exo-Space, a company that specializes in on-orbit edge processing software and hardware, was founded in Pasadena, California, in 2020. Exo-Space raised $208,722 on Spaced Ventures’ crowdfunding website. “The funding we got on Spaced Ventures was what carried us to where we are now,” said Exo-Space CEO Jeremy Allam. Prior to its acquisition by Sidus, announced Aug. 22, Exo-Space designed and built FeatherEdge, a platform that applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to Earth observation data. Exo-Space also booked a launch in November for an on-orbit demonstration of FeatherEdge. In the wake of the acquisition, Exo-Space co-founders will become Sidus employees. From the first meeting about a year ago, Exo-Space and Sidus “were so aligned it made sense for us to integrate our technology,” Allam said. “The more we talked, the more we realized that our goals of reducing space data latency were very aligned.” In addition, people from both companies were “willing to listen and learn” from one another, said Carol Craig, Sidus founder and CEO. Space-based edge processing , once considered for niche applications, is becoming increasingly popular. “When we were pitching this idea back in 2020, few other companies were trying to do edge computing in space,” Allam said. Now, Exodus Orbitals, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Ramon.Space and Spiral Blue are among the companies advertising space-based edge processing products and services. Sidus announced plans in 2022 to integrate Exo-Space’s artificial intelligence software on its 3D-printed satellite, LizzieSat, a multipurpose constellation designed to provide services for government and commercial customers. People who backed Exo-Space through Spaced Ventures are pleased with the return on their investments. Alex Fisher, an angel investor who has backed more than 35 space companies, said in a statement, “I spend a lot of time focused on angel investing in space companies, having made over 35 investments, but Exo-Space wasn’t on my radar until Spaced Ventures posted them on their space investing portal. Their heavy due diligence was obviously really valuable since it’s already led to an investing exit in such a short amount of time.” Kyle Hagge, a space investor and Morning Brew director of community, said in a statement that there are always risk involved in backing space startups, “so it’s amazing seeing a success story and return this early on!”
India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander successfully touched down on the moon Wednesday, making the country only the fourth to achieve the feat. The Chandrayaan-3 mission lander touched down in the vicinity of the lunar South Pole region at 8:32 a.m. Eastern (1232 UTC) Aug. 23 after a 19-minute powered descent from lunar orbit. India joins the United States, the former Soviet Union and China in successfully soft landing on the moon. Footage from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Mission Operations Complex showed jubilant scenes following the successful landing. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared moments after the landing that, “India is on the moon.” The Vikram lander touched down near a prime landing site at 69.37 degrees south latitude and 32.35 degrees east longitude, close to the crater Manzinus U. The descent was supported by ESA’s ESTRACK deep space tracking station in New Norcia, Australia. The landing was made at the highest latitude of any spacecraft to soft land on the moon. The success follows a failed attempt in 2019 with the Chandrayaan-2 mission lander. The landing also comes days after Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft suffered an issue during an orbital maneuver and smashed into the moon . The lander also carries Pragyan, a six-wheeled, 26-kilogram solar-powered rover which will seek to demonstrate roving operation on the lunar surface. Its rollout is expected within the next few hours. ISRO’s live coverage of the event began at 7:50 a.m. Eastern. The mission lander module began an automatic landing sequence at 8:14 a.m. having reached a designated point in its orbit. The spacecraft activated its throttleable engines and began its powered descent from an altitude of around 30 kilometers. The mission is chiefly a landing technology demonstrator, the lander and rover carry a number of payloads for in-situ science experiments. Vikram carries the Radio Anatomy of Moon Bound Hypersensitive ionosphere and Atmosphere and Langmuir Probe (RAMBHA-LP), a deployable Langmuir Probe to measure plasma density near the lunar surface, a probe to measure thermal properties of lunar surface down to a depth of 10 centimeters, an instrument for detecting lunar seismic Activity, and the passive Laser Retroreflector Array provided by NASA. Pragyan carries an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for assessing the chemical and mineralogical composition of the lunar surface. Both spacecraft will spend the remaining roughly 12 days of lunar sunlight carrying out activities and experiments. Neither are expected to survive the lunar nighttime, during which temperatures will drop to around minus 130 Celsius. Chandrayaan-3 launched July 14 on a LVM-3 heavy-lift rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre into an initial highly-elliptical Earth orbit, beginning a circuitous journey to the moon. It arrived in an elliptical lunar orbit Aug. 5, from which it began to trim its orbit to a roughly circular low lunar orbit in preparation for the landing attempt. ISRO chose the prime landing site using high-resolution photographs and data from Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Chandrayaan-2 landing attempt which suffered a hard landing in 2019 due to an accumulation of software errors . Chandrayaan-1, India’s first moon probe, launched in 2008 and spent a year in lunar orbit hunting for evidence of water molecules. It was then deliberately commanded to crash-land onto the lunar surface in 2009 . The mission comes amid renewed interest in the moon, particularly surrounding the lunar south pole and potential sources of water-ice. The Soviet Union’s Luna 9 was the first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft landing, in February 1966, and transmitting photographic images to Earth. The U.S. matched this feat with Surveyor in June that year, before landing astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in Mare Tranquillitatis in July 1969. China performed the first of its three soft landings in December 2013 with the Chang’e-3 lander and rover mission, before making the first lunar far side landing in January 2019. More countries and private entities could soon join this rarefied group. Japan is set to launch its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission on a H-IIA rocket at 8:34 p.m. Eastern Aug. 25 from Tanegashima Space Center. Intuitive Machines plans to launch its IM-1 on a Falcon 9 later this year as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program later this year, while Astrobotic Technology’s Mission One, also part of CLPS, could also launch before the end of the year on a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket. China plans to launch its Chang’e 6 spacecraft in 2024 to attempt to collect and return with the first samples from the lunar far side, while the U.S. plans further CLPS missions for 2024.
A payload adapter that is the target of a European debris cleanup mission may have itself been damaged by a debris impact. The European Space Agency said Aug. 22 that it was informed 12 days earlier by the U.S. Space Force’s 18 th Space Defense Squadron, responsible for space domain awareness activities, that it had identified several pieces of debris in the vicinity of a larger payload adapter called Vespa that has been in low Earth orbit since a Vega launch a decade ago. The new debris, ESA said, likely originated from Vespa after a collision with a piece of debris too small to be tracked. Follow-up tracking by the 18 th Space Defense Squadron as well as European facilities indicates that the payload adapter remains intact. ESA did not state how many pieces of debris from Vespa were bring tracked. The incident is ironic because the Vespa adapter is the target of an ESA-backed mission to remove it from orbit. ESA selected Swiss startup ClearSpace in 2020 to fly a mission that would grapple the 113-kilogram adapter and remove it from orbit, awarding it a contract worth 86 million euros ($93 million). That mission, called ClearSpace-1, passed a review at the end of 2022 that marked the end of its initial design phase. ClearSpace-1 is scheduled to launch in 2026 on a Vega C rocket. The company raised 26.7 million euros in January to support work on of the mission. ESA said in the statement that it was too soon to know if the debris impact would affect the ClearSpace-1 mission: “The development of the ClearSpace-1 mission will continue as planned while additional data on the event is collected. ESA and industrial partners are carefully evaluating the event’s impact on the mission.” That analysis, ESA added, would take several weeks to complete. ESA has made space safety, such as mitigating and remediating orbital debris, a priority. In July, ESA carried out an “assisted reentry” of an Earth science spacecraft, Aeolus , that lacked propellant needed to carry out a deliberate, targeted reentry at the end of its mission. That effort ensured the spacecraft reentered over uninhabited territory to avoid any risk to people on the ground from spacecraft debris that survived reentry. ESA unveiled plans for a “Zero Debris Charter” during the Paris Air Show in June with the support of three major European satellite manufacturers: Airbus Defence and Space, OHB and Thales Alenia Space. Details about the charter have yet to be published, but the goal is to prevent the creation of new debris in Earth orbit. “The principle is a very simple one,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher at the event announcing the charter. “The Zero Debris Charter is a principle where we would like to ensure that there is zero debris left behind in space.” ESA, though, has also contributed to the orbital debris problem. The defunct Envisat spacecraft was abandoned in low Earth orbit when it malfunctioned a decade after its launch in 2002. The large size of Envisat, which is predicted to remain in orbit for up to 150 years, makes it a potential source of debris from collisions like the one the Vespa adapter suffered. A 2020 study by a group of space sustainability experts ranked Envisat 21 st on a list of the 50 “statistically most concerning” debris objects in Earth orbit . Envisat was the highest-ranked satellite on the list, following a family of 20 Zenit rocket bodies all in similar orbits.
The billionaire backing a series of private astronaut missions with SpaceX says the first of those flights will likely be delayed to some time in 2024. In a recent interview with the CNBC Manifest Space podcast , Jared Isaacman said preparations were continuing for Polaris Dawn, the first of three missions of his Polaris program announced in early 2022. That mission will fly Isaacman and three others on a Crew Dragon spacecraft that will spend several days in low Earth orbit. “We’re making a lot of progress. We’re still hoping for the end of the year, but I suspect it will probably slip into the beginning of next year,” he said in the brief interview. “This should be expected. It’s a test and development program.” When Isaacman and SpaceX announced Polaris in February 2022 , they scheduled the Polaris Dawn mission for as soon as the fourth quarter of 2022. However, by last October the launch slipped to at least March 2023 , which the program attributed to readiness of the vehicle and training as well as the schedule of other Crew Dragon missions. In a talk at a conference in February, Isaacman said he expected Polaris Dawn to launch this summer . “We’re now just months away from flying,” he said then. The program has not provided any formal schedule updates about the mission since then, with the most recent update on the program’s website published in May. A delay beyond the end of this year would likely push Polaris Dawn later than the beginning of 2024. Axiom Space is planning its third private astronaut mission to the International Space Station in January 2024, followed as soon as a month later by NASA’s Crew-8 mission to the station, both using Crew Dragon spacecraft. While Polaris Dawn is not going to the ISS, availability of Crew Dragon spacecraft and other resources needed for crewed missions could delay Polaris Dawn to later in the year. Isaacman, in the podcast interview, suggested the delays were linked to the development of a new spacesuit required for a spacewalk, the first by a private astronaut mission, planned for Polaris Dawn. “We’ve had a little bit more free time this summer than we probably would have expected,” he said, which he attributed to the timing of spacesuit development and training. That effort “doesn’t always sync up, so we’ve had a little more free time with family and work this summer.” That new suit, billed as the first new spacesuit developed in the United States in four decades, is critical to future human activities on moon and Mars, he argued. “We’re going to need spacesuits that don’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars in order to do that. We’re pretty excited because the suit that we are testing out, the evolution of it someday could be very well worn by people that are walking on the moon or Mars.” However, it’s not clear when that SpaceX-developed spacesuit would next be used. NASA awarded contracts in June 2022 to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace for development of spacesuits to both replace those currently used on the ISS as well as for future Artemis lunar landing missions. While SpaceX’s Starship will be used for at least the Artemis 3 and 4 missions to land on the lunar surface, those missions will use spacesuits from Axiom or Collins. Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions in a program that will culminate in the first crewed launch of Starship. That final mission is “pretty far out there,” Isaacman said, noting that SpaceX still had a lot of progress to make on Starship before flying people on it. “Clearly it’s going to need a lot more launches and that design is going to have to evolve to the extent that it’s going to be safe for human spaceflight.” Since the announcement of the Polaris program, one option that has emerged for the second mission is a Crew Dragon flight to reboost the Hubble Space Telescope. Isaacman participated in a NASA briefing last September that announced an unfunded Space Act Agreement between NASA and SpaceX to study such a mission . NASA has not disclosed the outcome of that effort, but confirmed in May that the study was complete and that the agency was “internally evaluating the findings and working to determine next steps.” The agency also received eight responses to a separate request for information from companies developing satellite servicing technologies that could reboost Hubble. Isaacman said on the podcast that the ball was in NASA’s court about a Crew Dragon mission to Hubble. “There are obviously a lot of important things that being discussed right now at NASA, but hopefully they will get around to this proposal and perhaps we’ll have a pretty exciting Polaris 2 to follow,” he said. At a NASA Science Mission Directorate town hall meeting July 27, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said NASA was still evaluating options for raising Hubble’s orbit. “Part of that review means looking at the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope itself and how this would work,” he said, “and make sure the telescope itself remains safe during the process.” He did not state when that review would be completed.
Mynaric, a supplier of laser communications terminals, was selected by the Space Development Agency to design an optical ground station to transmit and receive data from satellites in low Earth orbit. The ground terminal will be used to demonstrate communications with the Space Development Agency’s mesh network of military satellites . SDA, an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a constellation of hundreds of satellites , each equipped with multiple laser communications terminals. SDA awarded Mynaric a two-year $3 million contract to design an optical ground terminal and demonstrate connections with space-based optical communications terminals. One of the challenges of optical communications is that it can be disrupted by atmospheric interference such as clouds. The ground terminal will include a large telescope and laser transmitter and receiver. It has to be interoperable with optical communication terminals on SDA’s satellites made by different suppliers. Mynaric supplies a portion of those terminals but SDA’s constellation — known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — also uses terminals from other manufacturers . All optical terminals installed on SDA satellites have to comply with technical specifications and standards issued by the agency. “The collaboration with the SDA marks a significant milestone in advancing laser communications technology and paves the way for enhanced connectivity in the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture,” said Joachim Horwath, chief technology officer at Mynaric. Tim Deaver, Mynaric’s vice president of U.S. government sales, said “delivering highly sensitive information and data to the ground is an important component of enabling data transfer between all domains.” Mynaric’s contract was a competitive award under SDA’s Systems, Technologies and Emerging Concepts (STEC) Broad Agency Announcement .
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is seeking information from the private sector on barriers encountered by commercial remote sensing data providers when doing business with the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. A request for information (RFI) published Aug. 21 asks companies to submit details about what obstacles they experience trying to sell products and services to intelligence and defense agencies. Responses are due Sept. 22. “Over the past decade, the commercial remote sensing industry has grown rapidly, and it continues to introduce new capabilities, improved imagery quality, and enhanced revisit rates,” the RFI says. Although it is the policy of the United States to eliminate impediments to the timely delivery of space capabilities and accelerate the use of commercial capabilities, the RFI says, “frequently commercial industry encounters challenges to working with the U.S. government and spending on commercial analytic products remains relatively small compared to spending on commercial satellite data.” The Director of National Intelligence, says the RFI, directed a study to examine ways to overcome barriers to use of commercial remote sensing, space-based data and analytic services in the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. The RFI is intended to identify specific challenges encountered by commercial providers of data — including imagery and signals — and analytic services. “Information provided in the responses may assist in the identification and understanding of systemic barriers to the use of commercial overhead data and analytic products and may help develop solutions and inform funding decisions.” Commercial remote sensing includes all forms of satellite imagery and also non-imagery derived geospatial information such as automated identification system (AIS) data, radio frequency-derived data and finished analytics and products. ‘Step in the right direction’ A white paper released last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued that intelligence and defense agencies are not taking advantage of commercial remote sensing innovation to the extent that they could. “The capabilities provided by commercial firms can be used to complement government space systems across a wide range of national security missions and fill in gaps in capabilities where the U.S. government has lagged,” the paper said. “The challenge for the military and intelligence community is understanding how to leverage commercial capabilities for military advantage.” Todd Harrison, a co-author of the paper and currently managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights, said the RFI issued by the ODNI “is a strong step in the right direction.” “They are asking all the right questions to better inform and recalibrate their approach to accessing commercial capabilities,” Harrison said. “It is also telling that this is coming from the intelligence community and not the military or the Space Force,” he added. “The IC is much farther along in accessing and utilizing commercial space capabilities than the military is, but the information they are collecting from industry in the RFI could certainly help the Space Force as it begins to get serious about leveraging commercial space remote sensing capabilities.” Harrison said the ODNI through this process may conclude that agencies need to provide contract on-ramp opportunities more frequently, and work with Congress to ease regulatory and licensing restrictions that are holding back U.S. companies. “Many of the commercial space capabilities that are of interest to the U.S. government are based on satellites with an expected lifetime of five years or less,” said Harrison. “If contract opportunities only occur every three years or so, and the licensing and ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] review process takes months or years to work through, that seriously impacts the ability of companies to effectively use the systems they are building.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Sidus Space announced the acquisition Aug. 22 of Exo-Space, a startup focused on space-based edge processing and artificial intelligence. Sidus acquired Pasadena, California-based Exo-Space to expand its “talent, technology and total addressable market,” Carol Craig, Sidus founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Along with sales contracts and existing AI technology, the transaction includes the acquisition of Exo-Space’s collective experience in AI and machine learning. Sidus, an outgrowth of Florida-based Craig Technologies, was founded in 2011 to provide space-related products and services. In 2021, the company began selling stock publicly. In February, Sidus had raised $5.2 million from stock sales to support LizzieSat, a multipurpose satellite constellation scheduled to begin launching later this year. Acquiring Exo-Space will allow Sidus to expand its Earth-observation and space-observation business, “by providing actionable solutions for our customers’ needs as opposed to just raw data,” Craig said. “The integration of Exo-Space EdgeAI technology with Sidus’ sensors provides significant value and transformative potential across various domains.” Sidus acquired Exo-Space’s assets through a combination of cash, stock options and performance bonus incentives. Exo-Space, founded in 2020, has developed but not yet flown FeatherEdge , a platform that applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to Earth observation data. “We caught them early in their trajectory,” Jared Novick, Sidus senior vice president of strategy and special projects, told SpaceNews . “If we waited, their evaluation would have gone very high in alignment with their true value.” Exo-Space brings Sidus “a current revenue stream of commercial and government contracts extending through 2025, as well as a pipeline of potential clients,” according to an Aug. 22 news release. “The deal is projected to have a positive impact on Sidus’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.” “Exo-Space’s combination of space-hardened hardware and resilient software made this an attractive acquisition in creation of value to both our customers and shareholders,” Novick said in a statement. “The concept of offering customers a special ‘rideshare’ opportunity with a software platform to upload, change and improve analytics of payloads onboard is a forward-thinking and innovative approach. This idea aligns with the increasing demand for flexibility and customization in satellite missions and data collection.” Exo-Space CEO Jeremy Allam said in a statement, “By joining the Sidus team and integrating our AI capabilities into LizzieSat, we can now better deliver the benefits of space-based AI to more customers and on a shorter timeline than was previously possible.” In 2022. Sidus awarded a contract to Exo-Space to integrate its artificial intelligence software technology on LizzieSat. “Then as we were building our satellites, we started looking at the opportunities,” Craig told SpaceNews. “ The space industry is changing and the smarter capabilities you have vertically, the more opportunity you have to capture more market.”
The U.S. Air Force awarded Umbra, a commercial operator of radar imaging satellites, a $1.25 million contract to demonstrate the capabilities of space-based radar sensors to track moving targets on the ground. Under the Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 contract, announced Aug. 22, the Air Force will work with Umbra on “space-based moving target indication.” Based in Santa Barbara, California, Umbra operates a constellation of six high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites. The use of radar satellites to track moving targets was identified as a top priority for the Department of the Air Force. The U.S. military for decades has relied on radar-equipped aircraft known as JSTARS — or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System — to discriminate targets against the ground clutter. Air Force and Space Force leaders in 2021 revealed plans to work with the U.S. intelligence community to pursue a space-based target tracking capability to replace JSTARS . These aircraft require large crews and are vulnerable to enemy air-defense missiles when flying over combat zones. “With the end of the JSTARS program, Umbra understands the national imperative to develop a multi-domain replacement capability with a strong space-based element,” said Jason Mallare, Umbra’s vice president of government programs and strategy. Mallare said Umbra intends to provide “affordable spacecraft and ground infrastructure.”
NASA and SpaceX are moving ahead with the launch of a seventh crew rotation mission to the International Space Station this week, remaining vigilant about crewed launches even as they become more routine. NASA said Aug. 21 it completed a flight readiness review for the Crew-7 mission, approving plans for a launch at 3:49 a.m. Eastern Aug. 25 from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A launch that day would set up a docking of the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance with the station at 2:02 a.m. Eastern Aug. 26. The Crew-7 mission is commanded by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli with European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen as pilot. Satoshi Furukawa, an astronaut from the Japanese space agency JAXA, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov will be mission specialists. The four will spend about six months on the station. Officials said at a briefing that they cleared all issues associated with the mission during the nearly seven-hour review. That included concerns about corrosion seen on isolation valves in a cargo Dragon spacecraft launched to the station in June. The corrosion prevented the valves from operating, but those valves, used only in the event of a propellant leak in a thruster, were not needed on that CRS-28 mission. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said SpaceX replaced some of the valve components on Endurance and that engineers have a “good rationale” for the remaining valves on the spacecraft. “We wanted to understand it very thoroughly, so we spent the last month or so looking at data,” he said, including testing and other analysis of valves by both SpaceX and NASA. The corrosion appears to be caused by propellant vapors leaking through seals and reacting with ambient moisture, creating acid. The materials used in the valves are designed to resist corrosion, he said, but with enough vapor and moisture some corrosion will develop. That drew parallels to Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which suffered severe corrosion of valves in its propulsion system that prevented the valves from operating. That postponed the launch of its second uncrewed test flight by more than nine months, from August 2021 to May 2022. The corrosion mechanism is “somewhat similar” between the two spacecraft, Stich said, although differences in materials result in different kinds of corrosion. “We learned quite a bit from the investigation we did on Starliner and it probably helped us to get to the root cause a little bit faster,” he said. That included the importance of having a purge system that removes vapors from the vicinity of the valves to prevent corrosion. “I think we’re learning a little bit about capsules and valves between the two different vehicles, Starliner and Dragon.” Stich said the review also resolved another minor issue seen during the return of another Crew Dragon spacecraft in March at the end of the Crew-5 mission, when one of the drogue parachutes inflated several seconds slower than the other. Separate work by NASA and SpaceX to model parachute dynamics led them to clear the issue, he said. Both Stich and Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said the valve and parachute analyses were examples of how they remained focused on safety for crewed missions even as such missions become more routine. Crew-7 will be SpaceX’s 11 th launch with astronauts on board, a figure that includes the Demo-2 test flight in 2020 and three private astronaut missions. “We know the importance of flying crew and the trust that the crew puts in us,” said Gerstenmaier, a former NASA official who led the agency’s human spaceflight activities for several years. “We treat that extremely seriously as a company.” That focus continues even as SpaceX’s overall launch activity grows. A Falcon 9 launch of 21 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California early Aug. 22 was the 54 th launch of that vehicle so far this year, and the 58 th launch for SpaceX overall, counting three Falcon Heavy launches and the Starship/Super Heavy test flight in April. That approaches the 61 launches that SpaceX conducted in all of 2022. “There’s an advantage of flying a lot,” Gerstenmaier said, including both a better understanding of the hardware and the ability to test changes on other launches before incorporating them on crewed missions. He noted that Starlink launches use a higher thrust profile, which provides more margin for crewed missions. Starlink launches “really help us out,” Stich said, by testing changes that can later be incorporated into crewed flights. “We can watch that new component or the change in the component, how it flies in the flight environment, and then come back and look at the data and get comfortable with it for a crewed flight.”
Eutelsat has scheduled a shareholder vote Sept. 28 to get the final approval needed to take over OneWeb after clearing all regulatory hurdles for the multi-orbit merger. The French operator of geostationary satellites is expected to complete its all-share deal for the British low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network shortly after the meeting, if at least two-thirds of Eutelsat’s shareholders vote in favor of the transaction. Top shareholders collectively holding 49.4% of Eutelsat as of March 31 have already voiced support for the plan, announced a year ago valuing OneWeb at $3.4 billion. OneWeb’s shareholders previously approved the merger. Eutelsat said it had secured all relevant regulatory clearances for the deal in an Aug. 21 news release to announce the shareholder meeting, including from foreign investment authorities. Unlike Viasat’s recent acquisition of British operator Inmarsat, which took a year and a half to complete , European regulators did not hold up the OneWeb deal to investigate concerns it could lead to higher prices for satellite services and reduced quality. Eutelsat already owns 23% of OneWeb after gradually building up an interest in the company, part of its expansion into connectivity services to counter a declining legacy satellite TV business. A combined fleet could use large geostationary satellites to provide more capacity to specific regions, while leveraging smaller LEO satellites for lower-latency services globally. OneWeb recently completed the deployment of its constellation and currently has 634 satellites in LEO, including spares and a technology demonstrator for its second generation. While OneWeb expects to begin providing full coverage from this constellation by the end of this year, the company is already working with Eutelsat on a $4 billion second-generation network slated to enter service by early 2028. OneWeb’s first-generation satellites were built by a Florida-based joint venture the British operator shares with Europe’s Airbus. A successful merger would pave the way to jointly devised growth plans, including the selection of a manufacturer for OneWeb’s second generation. It could also complicate Eutelsat’s hopes for a role in Europe’s planned 6 billion euro ($6.5 billion) multi-orbit connectivity constellation — called Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) — which the operator is bidding for in a consortium with other larger European space players. The British government has a stake in OneWeb after helping to rescue the venture from bankruptcy in 2020 and would retain priority voting rights following the merger. A top European Union commissioner has warned of a potential conflict of interest, given the United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union, although the French operator says OneWeb would be sufficiently ring-fenced if their merger does go ahead. Eutelsat said July 28 its push into connectivity will see the company return to growth next year after annual sales declined for the seventh year in a row.
The Space Development Agency announced Aug. 21 it awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to build and operate 72 satellites. The Space Development Agency (SDA), an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a mesh network of military satellites in low Earth orbit. The 72 satellites will make up a portion of SDA’s network known as Tranche 2 Transport Layer. SDA is building a large constellation called the proliferated warfighter space architecture that includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Northrop Grumman’s contract for 36 satellites is worth approximately $733 million. The agreement with Lockheed Martin, also for 36 satellites, is worth $816 million, SDA said. Transport Layer Tranche 2 “will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe,” the agency said. The 72 satellites ordered from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are the “Beta” portion of Tranche 2 Transport Layer. They will be deployed in orbital planes of 12 satellites each, with the first plane projected to launch in September 2026. SDA plans to acquire an additional 100 “Alpha” satellites for the Tranche 2 Transport Laser. Commercial-like model SDA uses a commercial-like model to acquire satellites, incrementally adding new technologies as they become available, in contrast to DoD’s traditional method of funding one large acquisition over many years. “We are now solidly in the procurement phase for Tranche 2 of the PWSA [proliferated warfighter space architecture] to support a 2026 delivery,” said Derek Tournear, SDA director. “Tranche 2 brings global persistence for all our capabilities in Tranche 1 and adds advanced tactical data links and future proliferated missions.” The Beta variant of the Tranche 2 Transport Layer vehicles are similar to the 126 Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites that SDA ordered last year from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and York Space. The Tranche 2 contracts make Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman the largest awardees of SDA satellite contracts. In February 2022 , SDA selected Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems to each produce 42 satellites for the Tranche 1 Transport Layer. Northrop Grumman in July 2022 also won a contract for 14 missile-tracking satellites for SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1. To date Lockheed Martin has won SDA contracts for 88 satellites and Northrop Grumman has won orders for 92 satellites. 
Axiom Space announced Aug. 21 that it has raised $350 million from Saudi Arabian and South Korean investors to continue development of a commercial space station. The Houston-based company said it raised a Series C round that was led by Aljazira Capital and Boryung Co., Ltd., along with what it called “an array of diverse backers” that include venture capital funds and strategic brand partners. “We are honored to team with investors like Aljazira Capital, Boryung and others, who are committed to realizing the Axiom Space vision,” said Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, in statement. “Together, we are working to serve innovators in medicine, materials science and on-orbit infrastructure who represent billions of dollars in demand over the coming decade.” Aljazira Capital is a Saudi investment company owned by Bank Al Jazira. Boryung is a South Korean pharmaceutical company that disclosed in December 2022 that it had invested $50 million into Axiom . In the statement announcing the new round, Axiom described Boryung as a “multi-round lead investor” in the company. “In line with the Saudi Vision 2030’s transformative approach, we acknowledge the need for technology toward the advancement of human life. To that end, we are excited to support Axiom Space along its journey of building for beyond,” said Naif AlMesned, chief executive and managing director of Aljazira Capital, in a statement. “We recognize the depth of human spaceflight knowledge and the level of space station construction and management experience at Axiom Space, as well as the sophistication of the company’s sales and business strategy,” Jay Kim, chairman of Boryung, said in the same statement. Axiom did not disclose specific plans for the new funding, but the company is actively working on a series of commercial modules it plans to start installing on the International Space Station by 2026. Those modules will later separate from the ISS and form the core of a standalone space station. As a precursor to those modules, Axiom has been flying a series of private astronaut missions to the ISS on SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. The second of those missions, Ax-2, went to the ISS in May and included two Saudi astronauts. The next, Ax-3, is planned for early 2024. Axiom, along with Collins Aerospace, won Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contracts from NASA in 2022 to develop spacesuits for use on the ISS and Artemis missions. Axiom has received $370 million in funded task orders for its contract to date, which the company said in its statement has a maximum value of $1.26 billion. Overall, Axiom said it has more than $2.2 billion in customer contracts but did not include details about those contracts beyond its NASA spacesuit award. The Series C round brings the total raised by Axiom to date to more than $505 million.
Sierra Space and Redwire are partnering on a biotech experiment platform that will be installed on a Sierra Space commercial space station module in what the companies call a first-of-its-kind arrangement. The two companies announced Aug. 21 that Redwire will provide a set of equipment that will be installed on a Sierra Space inflatable module known as Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE). That “pathfinder” module will be launched later this decade for commercial pharmaceutical and other biotech research. “The most significant industrial revolution is underway in space, as we build the first microgravity factories that will benefit humanity with breakthrough innovations and solutions to our toughest problems here on Earth,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. “In Redwire, we have a partner that has a proven history of innovation across in-space manufacturing and biotech facilities.” In an interview, Mike Gold, chief growth officer of Redwire, called the agreement the first of its kind. “For the first time, a private sector company has contracted with another private sector company for substantive microgravity research and development hardware for pharmaceutical development.” The hardware includes equipment that Redwire has previously developed for the International Space Station, such as the Advanced Space Experiment Processor, which hosts biotech experiments. A particular focus will be on crystallization experiments, using the microgravity environment to grow larger crystals that can then be studied to determine their structure for pharmaceutical applications. The companies did not disclose terms of the contract other than that Redwire will start delivering hardware in the fourth quarter of this year. Gold said that the companies will also partner on business development to identify customers for using the experiment platform. He said that Redwire has been in “constant communications” with pharmaceutical companies about use of those facilities. “We are taking their feedback in terms of what are the tough problems that they need to solve,” he said. “We are directly aligning ourselves with the needs from the pharmaceuticals.” That is a different approach, he added, from past efforts to attract biotech companies to research on the ISS or other platforms. “For far too long, we had the capability and then tried to sell it to the private sector. Now, we’re beginning with what do the pharmaceutical companies need, what do they want, and then we are focusing our research and development accordingly.” The companies did not state when the module carrying the experiment platform would launch. At an investor conference in June, Vice said that Sierra Space was planning a launch of a standalone LIFE module as a “pathfinder” for future commercial space stations as soon as the end of 2026. That would be used, he said, for commercial pharmaceutical and other biotech research. “There have been a number of breakthroughs in the biotech world utilizing the ISS that show we can do some very unique things,” he said then, noting that a pathfinder module would serve as “a revenue-generating space station that is focused around next-generation breakthroughs.” The pathfinder would also serve as risk reduction for Orbital Reef, a commercial space station being led by Sierra Space and Blue Origin. Redwire and Boeing are also involved in that effort, which is supported by one of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destination awards. Gold said he believed that microgravity biotech research could help counter the “billionaire playboy narrative” that has dominated coverage of the commercial space industry. “I hope that this agreement is an inflection point that will bring attention to what we are going to be able to do for humanity to benefit and improve life on Earth.”
Russia’s Luna-25 mission ended in failure after crashing into the moon, space agency Roscosmos has announced. A statement posted to the agency’s Telegram social media channel early Aug. 20 confirmed that an anomaly during an Aug. 19 maneuver to lower Luna-25’s orbit resulted in the spacecraft impacting the lunar surface. The spacecraft was scheduled to attempt a soft lunar landing Aug. 21, near Boguslawsky crater, located approximately 70 degrees south latitude in the vicinity of the south polar region of the moon. Roscosmos announced Aug. 19 that at 7:10 a.m. Eastern that day Luna-25 was instructed to fire its engines to send the spacecraft into a “pre-landing” orbit around the moon. The planned maneuver was anomalous, however. “An emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” according to a translation of the Roscosmos statement. The agency clarified Sunday that contact was lost with the spacecraft around 7:57 a.m. Eastern. Measures taken Aug. 19 and 20 to reestablish contact with Luna-25 were not successful, according to the Aug. 20 statement. A preliminary analysis revealed that a deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from those calculated resulted in the spacecraft colliding with the lunar surface, according to a machine translation of the statement. “A specially formed interdepartmental commission will deal with the issues of clarifying the reasons for the loss of Luna-25,” the statement read. The Luna-25 mission launched on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East Aug. 10. The mission had endured lengthy delays stemming from technical issues and resource constraints. It carried a number of science payloads but was mainly a technology demonstrator for future lunar landings later in the decade. That technology, stripped of a European navigation camera following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, could not be tested. The country’s previous lunar landing was Luna-24, a Soviet-era sample return mission, in 1976. The loss of Luna-25 is a blow to Russia’s own plans as well as wider cooperative efforts. The mission was also nominally part of the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). The Luna-25 launch was attended by Wu Yanhua, a senior official involved in China’s deep space exploration projects. A ILRS roadmap unveiled in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2021 noted that Russian super heavy-lift launch vehicles would share the burden of launching major pieces of infrastructure for the station in the 2030s. Observers have expressed doubts on Russia’s capabilities to contribute significantly to the project following its occupation of Ukraine. Luna-25 was being described in the media as being in a race with India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander to set down near the moon’s south polar region. Chandrayaan-3 successfully lowered its lunar orbit Aug. 19, setting it up for a landing attempt at a similar latitude to Luna 25. Chandrayaan-3’s landing is expected around 8.34 a.m. Eastern Aug. 23. A further mission, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) by Japan’s space agency JAXA, is scheduled for launch on a H-2A rocket Aug. 25. SLIM is a landing technology demonstrator aiming to make exploration more precise and economical. — Updated at 1:44 a.m. Eastern, Aug. 21, to amend translated statement.
Russia’s first lunar mission in nearly half a century suffered an “emergency situation” during an attempted maneuver Aug. 19, putting plans for a landing into question. In a brief statement posted to its channel on the social media service Telegram, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said that the Luna-25 spacecraft was commanded to perform a maneuver at 7:10 a.m. Eastern to place the spacecraft into a “pre-landing” orbit around the moon. However, during the planned maneuver “an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” according to a translation of the statement. “The management team is currently analyzing the situation.” Roscosmos did not disclose additional details about the problem or the maneuver the spacecraft was performing. It was not clear if the incident would affect plans for a landing by Luna-25, which was slated for Aug. 21. Roscosmos launched the long-delayed Luna-25 spacecraft on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East Aug. 10. The spacecraft performed a maneuver Aug. 16 to go into orbit around the moon that Roscosmos said was successful, although the agency did not disclose the parameters of that orbit. Luna-25 is Russia’s first mission to the moon since the Luna-24 sample return mission in 1976. The lander, weighing an estimated 1,750 kilograms at launch, carries a package of Russian scientific instruments weighing 30 kilograms. The targeted landing site is near the Boguslawsky crater at approximately 70 degrees south latitude in the south polar region of the moon. Development of Luna-25 suffered years of delays because of technical issues and constrained resources. The mission also lost a partnership with the European Space Agency, which planned to test a navigation camera system on the lander, after ESA severed ties with Roscosmos in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Luna-25 is one of two missions preparing for landings on the moon this month. India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, launched July 14, entered lunar orbit Aug. 5 . It is gearing up for a landing attempt, also in the south polar region of the moon, Aug. 23. A third lunar lander, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) by Japan’s space agency JAXA, is scheduled for launch Aug. 25 along with the XRISM X-ray astronomy observatory on an H-2A rocket. SLIM, intended to demonstrate precision landing technologies, will attempt a landing four to six months after launch near Shioli crater at 13 degrees south latitude on the moon.
Companies in the U.S. space industry are being increasingly targeted by foreign intelligence operations, U.S. intelligence agencies warn. “Foreign intelligence entities recognize the importance of the commercial space industry to the U.S. economy and national security, including the growing dependence of critical infrastructure on space-based assets,” said a bulletin published Aug. 18 by the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It’s generally known that China and Russia are among the leading foreign intelligence threats to the U.S. space industry, but other nations are also targeting this sector, a U.S. counterintelligence official said in a statement to SpaceNews . Some countries see U.S. space-related innovation and assets as potential threats as well as valuable opportunities to acquire vital technologies and expertise, the bulletin warned. Foreign intelligence agencies use cyberattacks, strategic investment — including joint ventures and acquisitions, and other techniques to gain access to the U.S. space industry, said the bulletin. Indicators that foreign intelligence operators might be targeting a U.S. business include unsolicited offers to establish joint ventures, attempts to recruit a company’s technical experts and provision of financial incentives in exchange for proprietary information. A company’s supply chain also is a target, the bulletin said. In January 2023, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Spacety Luxembourg , a Luxembourg-based satellite firm, for being owned or controlled by Spacety China. Treasury sanctioned Spacety China, the parent firm based in China, for supplying Russia’s Wagner Group with radar satellite imagery of Ukraine to support its combat operations. “We’re issuing the bulletin today because we anticipate growing threats to this burgeoning sector of the U.S. economy,” the counterintelligence official said.
Poland has become the second European Space Agency member state to reach an agreement to fly an astronaut on a private mission to the International Space Station. Axiom Space said Aug. 9 it signed an agreement with Poland, in cooperation with ESA, to fly an astronaut from that nation on a future mission to the ISS. The announcement did not disclose the identity of the astronaut or when that person would go to the station. “Cooperation with ESA and Axiom Space is an important step in the development of both the Polish space sector and science,” said Waldemar Buda, Poland’s minister of economic development and technology, in a statement. “A Polish astronaut will have the opportunity to test the most advanced Polish technologies.” At a June 29 briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council, the agency announced that Poland was increasing its subscription to agency programs by 295 million euros ($320 million) which included the flight of a Polish astronaut to the ISS, but did not disclose additional details about those plans. The most likely candidate for the flight is Sławosz Uznański, who was selected as a reserve astronaut by ESA last November and is the only Polish member of ESA’s astronaut corps. He was among 11 people ESA picked as reserve astronauts, who will not join the astronaut corps on a full-time basis but be available for selected flight opportunities. Another reserve astronaut, Marcus Wandt, was selected in June to fly on another Axiom Space mission to the ISS through an agreement involving Axiom, ESA and the Swedish National Space Agency first announced in April . Wandt is expected to fly on Axiom’s Ax-3 mission to the ISS in early 2024. “Poland will be the second ESA-sponsored nation to send an astronaut on a commercial human spaceflight mission, establishing a growing network of nations in Europe eager to explore the benefits of microgravity and positioning the region as pioneers of commercial space,” Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, said in a statement. The agreements by Poland and Sweden with Axiom Space are part of growing interest in human spaceflight in Europe. Walter Villadei, an Italian Air Force pilot who flew on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight in June, had previously trained as a backup for Axiom’s Ax-2 mission to the station in May and is expected to be named to a future Axiom mission. The Hungarian government announced last November it is spending $100 million for its own private astronaut mission to the ISS. Both the Italian and Hungarian efforts are taking place, for now, outside of ESA, but the agency sees them as signs of growing interest in human spaceflight in Europe. “Sweden, Poland and many others are now inspired by this ambition to go to space and have an astronaut flying into space,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said in an interview in July. “This momentum starts developing, and I can only say it’s nice to see.” That interest, he said, hay help spur efforts by ESA to establish a more ambitious European human spaceflight program, which could include development of its own crew transportation systems. The agency is currently studying options for such efforts, including their costs, in advance of a European Space Summit scheduled for November in Seville, Spain.
A Japanese company developing a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites is the latest to turn to Rocket Lab after the bankruptcy of rival launch company Virgin Orbit. Rocket Lab announced Aug. 17 that it signed a contract with Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space (iQPS) for a dedicated launch of its QPS-SAR-5 satellite on a Electron rocket. That launch, on a mission called “The Moon God Awakens”, is scheduled for September from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The satellite was originally to launch on Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket under a contract announced in May 2022. At the time of the contract announcement, QPS-SAR-5 was scheduled for launch in early 2023, but had not yet launched when Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April and later ceased operations. Neither company mentioned Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy directly in the announcement of the new contract, but did allude to it. “This is exactly the kind of mission Electron was designed for and has delivered on time and time again: a customer urgently seeking dedicated launch to a unique orbit on a rapid timeline,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in the statement. Shunsuke Onishi, chief executive of iQPS, noted “the delay due to status changes since our announcement of contract for QPS-SAR-5 in May last year” but did not directly mention the Virgin Orbit situation. “We highly appreciate Rocket Lab and our team for all their efforts in arranging this new launch contract as it is very meaningful for us to quickly deploy the satellites into orbit.” In addition to the delay launching QPS-SAR-5, iQPS lost two other satellites, QPS-SAR-3 and -4, when a Japanese Epsilon rocket failed to reach orbit during an October 2022 launch . The QPS-SAR-6 satellite did make it to orbit as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-8 rideshare mission in June. The company has long-term plans for a 36-satellite constellation capable of producing SAR imagery at resolutions sharper than 50 centimeters. The decision by iQPS to go with Rocket Lab comes after NorthStar Earth and Space, a Canadian company developing a constellation to collect space situational awareness data, announced in June it would launch its first set of four satellites on an Electron after previously signing a launch contract with Virgin Orbit. Rocket Lab has been the beneficiary of Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy because of the lack of options for dedicated smallsat launches as other companies face technical or financial struggles. “We’ve seen defections from all of the aspirational launch providers,” Beck said in an interview in July. “The industry is shaking out.” The iQPS contract is the ninth Electron launch the company has won this month. Rocket Lab announced Aug. 8 that it won a contract for five Electron launches of BlackSky’s Gen-3 imaging satellites starting in 2024. A week later, NASA awarded Rocket Lab a task order under the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract for two Electron launches of its PREFIRE Earth science cubesats in May 2024. Rocket Lab also announced a contract Aug. 8 for the suborbital version of Electron, called HASTE, for an undisclosed customer. Rocket Lab has not disclosed the value of any of those contracts but said in its Aug. 8 earnings call it had a target launch cost of $7.5 million for the Electron. The company also reiterated its forecast of 15 Electron launches this year, of which it has completed seven. Rocket Lab’s next launch, of a Capella Space SAR satellite, was postponed from late July and early August because of unusual data from an engine sensor. The launch is now scheduled for Aug. 23 in a four-hour window that opens at 7:30 p.m. Eastern.
True Anomaly, a startup based in Denver, opened a manufacturing facility where it plans to produce small satellites designed for surveillance and reconnaissance of objects in space. The company on Aug. 17 unveiled the 35,000 square-foot facility in Centennial, Colorado, True Anomaly designed a spacecraft called Jackal aimed at the U.S. military and intelligence market. The satellite, equipped with three cameras , will be capable of performing rendezvous and proximity operations, and servicing missions, the company said. The first two Jackals are scheduled to launch to low Earth orbit in early 2024 on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare. CEO Even Rogers said True Anomaly has obtained licenses from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for Jackal vehicles to perform in-space surveillance. NOAA, FCC licenses A commercial remote-sensing license from NOAA authorizes the company to conduct non-Earth imaging. The FCC authorized the company to conduct ground tests of Jackal transmitters and to demonstrate spacecraft-to-spacecraft rendezvous in close proximity with its two Jackal vehicles. The non-Earth imaging license includes radar, shortwave infrared, longwave infrared, and visible wide and narrow field of view imagery. “This variety of sensor phenomenology will enable Jackal to collect data even in poor lighting conditions such as when the spacecraft is in Earth’s shadow,” Rogers said. Rogers said obtaining these licenses are “significant milestones in True Anomaly’s mission to define the next generation of space security.” At the new facility, called GravityWorks, the company plans to produce more Jackal vehicles and other systems, said Rogers. “GravityWorks will be able to produce a fully-tested, mission-ready satellite every five days.”
SpaceX, Kuiper Government Solutions and Aalyria Technologies were selected for market-research studies on how commercial systems could add capacity to the military’s future low Earth orbit constellation. The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency announced Aug. 17 that the companies will conduct three-month studies. The agency said it wants to better understand the industry’s capabilities to provide “LEO backhaul” services. The agency is paying a total of $1.6 million to the three companies to conduct the studies. SpaceX operates the Starlink giant broadband constellation. Kuiper plans to start deploying Amazon’s broadband constellation over the next few years. Aalyria is a Google spinoff focused on network orchestration technologies for mesh communications networks. Commercial options to ‘add resilience’ SDA is building a layered network of satellites known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. It includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and early-warning sensor satellites. “The studies will examine connecting commercial or other existing LEO systems to the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture to provide further resiliency by quickly moving broadband data between edge and main networks worldwide,” SDA said. These studies on LEO backhaul capability will inform potential acquisitions of these services, said the agency. “SDA is interested in options that leverage, to the maximum extent possible, existing or planned commercial, optically-interconnected orbital mesh network and ground infrastructure.” The contracts were awarded under the Space Development Agency’s System, Technologies, and Emerging Capabilities (STEC) Broad Agency Announcement.
The U.S. Space Force intends to award Northrop Grumman a sole-source contract to develop two ground-based radar sites to track space objects. These would be the second and third sites of the Space Force’s planned network of sensors known as the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC). Northrop Grumman in February 2022 won a $341 million contract to develop the first DARC site in the Indo-Pacific region. The second and third are expected to be located in Europe and in the continental United States. The Space Systems Command in a “ special notice ” published Aug. 7 said it “intends to release a sole source RFP [request for proposal] to Northrop Grumman” to complete fielding of the second and third DARC sites. A sole-source RFP does not equate to a contract but would start the process of negotiating an agreement with the company. The government is allowed to issue sole-source contracts without a competitive bidding process in situations where only a single business can fulfill the requirements of a contract. The Space Force estimates the contract to be awarded in late 2023 or early 2024. DARC schedule Northrop Grumman announced in May 2023 that its DARC proposal passed a critical design review. The first site is expected to be completed by 2025. The Space Force notice said it expects the second site to be ready by 2028 and the third by 2029. “The DARC program is part of a larger effort of moving towards a resilient space enterprise in our nation’s space domain awareness capabilities able to deter aggression,” the Space Systems Command said. DARC’s primary focus will be tracking active satellites and debris in geosynchronous orbit. The procurement of the second and third sites are on a shorter timeline due to urgent needs for space domain awareness, said Space Systems Command. 
BAE Systems, a defense and security conglomerate based in the United Kingdom, announced Aug. 17 it intends to acquire Ball Aerospace for $5.5 billion. Ball Aerospace, based in Westminster, Colorado, is a manufacturer of spacecraft, components and other systems for military, civil and commercial space applications. The acquisition would give BAE Systems “strong growth potential in areas aligned with the U.S. intelligence community and Department of Defense’s highest priorities,” the company said in a statement . With $26 billion in annual revenues, BAE Systems has a significant U.S. presence. The U.S. government is now its largest customer. BAE’s U.S. subsidiary, headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, supports large DoD programs in air, land, sea and cyber warfare. In the military space sector, BAE has a large GPS user equipment business . “The proposed acquisition of Ball Aerospace is a unique opportunity,” said Charles Woodburn, chief Executive of BAE Systems. “It’s rare that a business of this quality, scale and complementary capabilities, with strong growth prospects and a close fit to our strategy, becomes available.” Workforce with security clearances Ball Aerospace’s $3 billion portfolio includes sensors, spacecraft , data services and components. Another $5 billion in Ball contracts booked were not yet added to the backlog, the company said in February. Ball has 5,200 employees, and more than 60% hold U.S. security clearances. Its military space business includes a contract to build satellites for the U.S. Space Force and the Space Development Agency . BAE said Ball Aerospace is “well positioned in highly attractive markets, military and civil space, missiles and munitions.” The acquisition is subject to customary regulatory approvals and conditions. BAE said the targeted completion date is in the first half of 2024. Vertical Research Partners, a financial advisory firm, said in a note to investors that news of the acquisition is no surprise as it had been rumored for the last couple of months, “Ball gives BAE significantly more exposure to the growing government space market,” VRP said. “The tricky part for BAE management remains ahead,” said the note from VRP. “Firstly we shall see what the regulatory response is from the U.S. Department of Justice, though the recent clearance of the Aerojet transaction bodes well.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Terran Orbital expects to get $180 million this year from Rivada Space as it prepares to build 300 satellites for the venture, even as plans to fund the full $2.4 billion manufacturing contract remain under wraps. It would be the first significant revenues Terran Orbital has gained from Rivada under a contract set to deliver most of the $2.6 billion in sales in the manufacturer’s pipeline, providing a major boost for a company that raised less than hoped in its stock market debut last year. Declan Ganley, CEO of U.S.-based wireless technology firm Rivada Networks, which owns Rivada Space, said in February it has funding commitments from existing and new investors for its proposed connectivity network. He said in June the company is in talks with the U.S. Ex-Im Bank for financial support. During Terran Orbital’s Aug. 15 earnings call, H.C. Wainwright & Co analyst Scott Buck said Rivada’s vagueness about its plans for financing the constellation has caused “investor hesitation around the contract.” “We’ve done extreme due diligence on their financials,” Terran Orbital CEO Marc Bell said during the call. “We can’t disclose [the] information we know,” Bell said, “but we are very much aware of who their funding is and how much it’s for, and where it’s coming from.” Rivada senior vice president for corporate communications Brian Carney declined to comment on its financing plans when contacted by SpaceNews , adding: “We remain confident we can meet our commitments to our suppliers.” In the earnings call, Bell pointed to Rivada’s recent success with international regulators to waive a requirement to deploy at least 10% of its proposed constellation by September. Rivada has not launched any satellites so far and its contracts with Terran Orbital and SpaceX do not call for launches to start until 2025. The venture has plans with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for 576 satellites in total, and half of these must be in orbit by mid-2026 under deployment rules tied to its spectrum licenses that remain in place following the 10% waiver. Terran Orbital’s manufacturing contract with Rivada includes an option to purchase an additional 300 satellites for the low Earth orbit (LEO) network. SPAC mistake Shares in Terran Orbital started trading on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2022 after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp, a public shell company that had $345 million in capital before the deal. However, Terran Orbital only received about $29 million from Tailwind Two’s cash-in-trust because many of the SPAC’s investors chose to get their money back instead of holding stock in the merged company. The level of investor redemptions has been high for multiple space companies that raised funds by merging with a SPAC in recent years. Terran Orbital raised $255 million in total proceeds from the SPAC merger when including a concurrent private investment in public equity PIPE, supported by companies including Lockheed Martin. Going down the SPAC route “was a big mistake,” Bell said during the Space Show podcast Aug. 11 . “[U]nfortunately the money that was there never materialized and we went public without the money that we expected.” Bell said Terran Orbitaly is on course to record positive EBITDA — Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization — for the first quarter of 2024, following the Rivada contract and a smaller deal with Lockheed Martin to deliver 10 satellites for the missile-tracking LEO constellation the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency is building with low-cost satellites procured from multiple commercial vendors. Terran Orbital recorded $32.2 million in revenue for the three months to the end of June 30, up 51% compared with the same period in 2022. But it recorded an adjusted EBITDA loss of $21.4 million for the quarter, compared with a loss of $14.8 million last year, as the company invests to ramp up production facilities. Time to ramp up Bell also said during Terran Orbital’s earning call that it had completed a systems requirements review for Rivada in July, marking the first step of a design phase that represents $460 million of the contract. The company plans to conduct the preliminary design review for Rivada’s 500-kilogram satellites before the end of the year in the final major step before production. There are orders for more than 370 satellites in Terran Orbital’s backlog, according to Bell. He said waiting customers will benefit from a newly operational facility in Irvine, California, that has increased manufacturing capacity from 10 to 20 satellites per month. Terran Orbital also aims to finish commissioning another facility in Irvine next year that would enable it to produce 42 satellites a month across the company, including solar panel and payload assemblies. With incoming cash from Rivada, Bell said the company does not expect to need to raise any more funds to scale up its business. He also said Terran Orbital anticipates about 80% of its $2.6 billion backlog will be converted into revenue in the next two and a half years.
Momentus recently cut its workforce by 30% as the cash-strapped company seeks to reduce its costs while looking for “strategic options” to raise funding. In an Aug. 14 earnings call about its second quarter financial results, Eric Williams, chief financial officer of Momentus, said that the company reduced its headcount, including both full-time employees and contractors, by 30% late in the second quarter. The move, he said, was designed to “substantially reduce our burn rate while retaining the talent we need to execute our key near-term initiatives.” He did not go into further details about the layoffs, including the staff affected. The company said in its 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Aug. 14 that it laid off 18 employees on July 3 “to enable us to help achieve a more cost-efficient organization necessary to increase the cash runway of the Company.” Williams said on the call that the company expected to start realizing those cost reductions in the third quarter, but did not quantify them. “We’re pushing on it fairly hard to be able to get as much runaway as we can out of that,” John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said of those cost reductions later in the call. Momentus reported a record quarterly revenue of $1.7 million in the second quarter, the first time it reported revenues of more than $1 million in a quarter. However, the company reported a net loss of $18.8 million and ended the quarter with $21.6 million of cash and equivalents on hand. As in the previous quarter , Momentus included a “going concern” warning in its financial results because of substantial doubt that it has sufficient funding to continue operations for the next 12 months. Williams acknowledged the warning in the call but noted the company was taking several steps, like the workforce reductions, to extend its cash. Momentus has also engaged Deutsche Bank as a financial advisor, which he said will help the company as it works “to raise additional capital while pursuing and evaluating strategic alternatives.” “It is clear that we’ve faced some headwinds in the recent risk-off environment in the market, and seen our stock price reflect that,” Rood said. The company’s shares have traded below $1 for six months, and the company is seeking shareholder approval later this month for a reverse split of between 1-for-30 and 1-for-50 to boost the stock price and avoid delisting from Nasdaq. The company’s shares closed at $0.31 Aug. 15. Despite the company’s financial difficulties, Rood was upbeat on the call, noting the company’s work flying its Vigoride tugs and a new satellite bus, the M-1000 , based on Vigoride that it is offering to the Space Development Agency (SDA) and other potential customers. Momentus separately announced Aug. 14 a Small Business Innovation Research award from SDA valued at nearly $750,000 to tailor the Vigoride tug for Defense Department applications. The contract has an option worth nearly $1.2 million for future work. “Momentus is pushing ahead on our growth path,” Rood insisted. “We have several promising near-term opportunities in our sweet spot. We are actively seeking new investors while considering the full range of strategic options.”
SkyWatch, a satellite data distributor based in Ontario, Canada, announced a new imagery product that combines radar and optical images. SkyWatch operates a platform called EarthCache that gives its customers access to commercial satellite data. The company said there is now a growing demand for integrated images that combine visually appealing pictures from optical satellites with data from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites that can see at night and through clouds. “At any given point in time, the majority of the Earth’s surface is experiencing atmospheric conditions that make optical capture challenging, if not impossible,” David Proulx, chief product officer at SkyWatch, said Aug. 16 in a news release. The new service allows EarthCache customers to capture a SAR image of the same area of interest of their optical capture and overlay the data. “One of the benefits of SAR is its ability to capture images under all weather conditions. When you’re trying to monitor and respond to critical events with satellite imagery, but it’s a cloudy day, that’s not very helpful,” said Proulx. New partnership with Umbra SkyWatch also announced it is providing SAR data from Umbra , a startup based in Santa Barbara, California, that operates a constellation of six radar satellites. “The addition of Umbra to our virtual constellation of over 400 satellites allows us to further enable our customers to solve complex problems,” said SkyWatch’s chief executive James Slifierz. Joe Morrison, vice president of commercial experience at Umbra, said SkyWatch was “one of the first companies to propel the Earth observation industry into the modern era of web-based, API-first tasking.”
Artificial intelligence startup Wallaroo Labs won a $1.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to continue the development of machine learning models for edge computers in orbit. The New York-based company, known as Wallaroo.ai, is partnered with New Mexico State University for the Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 2 contract, announced Aug. 15 . The team last year won a Phase 1 award . Wallaroo.ai created a software platform that helps businesses assess the performance of AI applications when deployed on edge computers. The contract was awarded by SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force , in support of the Orbital Prime program to develop technologies for space debris cleanup and other on-orbit services. Machine learning on orbit The Space Force said it needs AI and machine learning capabilities that can be deployed in the cloud and at the edge for missions in space. Edge computing is the practice of moving compute power physically closer to where data is generated, such as a sensor in space. Wallaroo.ai said it wants to demonstrate the deployment of machine learning models at the edge with radiation tolerant, commercially available integrated circuits. “The ability to deploy, manage, and maintain ML models at the edge, on-orbit, and within the constraints of available hardware, limited compute, limited power, in the hostile environment that is space is critical to the development of the space industry,” said Vid Jain, CEO of Wallaroo.ai. Machine learning on orbit, he said, “promises to transform automation in space by leveraging AI for robotics, refueling, and protecting satellites from space debris.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is kicking off a study to develop an “analytical framework” to guide development of integrated lunar infrastructure over the next decade. DARPA announced the 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10 , project Aug. 15, seeking ideas from both potential developers or lunar power, communications, navigation and other infrastructure as well as users of such capabilities. The agency plans to select a group that will then work together on “new integrated system-level solutions that span multiple services” and be commercially available by 2035, it said in a release. Michael Nayak, the DARPA program manager leading LunA-10, noted in an interview that many companies are working on various elements of that infrastructure in isolation. “We want to bring those companies in to LunA-10 and form sort of a consortium,” he said. The effort would look at ways of combining those concepts, with one example being a lunar power unit that also transmits communications and navigation signals. The study will also define a “commercial end state” for lunar infrastructure in 10 years. “This is the end state at which we have a self-sufficient lunar economy,” he said, allowing the project to work backwards from there to see what technology is needed to create that and identify gaps. He described the study as split “50-50” between technology and economics. “I do want to look at both: an engineering-rooted, financially closed analysis.” Such a study would appear to be within the mandate of NASA, which has been working on a detailed architecture for lunar and Martian exploration , the first phase of which it released in April. Nayak said DARPA was coordinating with NASA on this effort, describing LunA-10 as complementary to NASA architecture studies. “We set out to talk with NASA, figure out what they’re doing, figure out what their roadmap is, and then see if there are other complementary investments that we can make to significantly advance the state of the art that are sort of in line with your typical DARPA mission,” he said. He said he has been working directly with Niki Werkheiser, director of technology maturation in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, on planning for LunA-10 and tapping the agency’s expertise in relevant technologies. “Opportunities for technology maturation are key for development for lunar capabilities in order to meet the objectives of future lunar architectures,” Werkheiser said in the DARPA statement about the study. The benefit to DARPA for this lunar study is identifying technology that could have other national security applications. Nayak gave an example of developing advanced thermal management technologies, needed for power systems on the moon that might also provide communications and navigation services, that could be used elsewhere. “Framing problems like that is what I’m hoping the defense community can walk away with at the end of this,” he said. DARPA emphasized in the announcement that the study is “grounded” in Article 4 of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that the moon and other celestial bodies will be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and forbids the establishment of military bases and testing of weapons there. DARPA is soliciting three-page abstracts that are due Sept. 6. The agency will then request 10-page white papers and technical presentations from some of those who submitted abstracts, which will be due Sept. 25. DARPA plans to select those who will work on the study at the fall meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC), scheduled for Oct. 10–11 in Pittsburgh. Nayak said the goal of LunA-10 is to present an “80% product” of the study at the April 2024 meeting of LSIC, to show “some things that the community can go think about and show our work.” A final report is due in June 2024.
SAN FRANCISCO – The SmallSat Alliance celebrated the winners Aug. 15 of its first annual Collegiate Space Competition in Austin, Texas. First place went to a University of Texas team seeking to indirectly measure vegetation water content and predict nitrogen content. Data collected by the Soil moisture And Nitrogen Detection Satellite, known as SANDS, could be used to monitor plant growth, warn of droughts and measure soil salinity. In addition, mapsof SANDS data could reveal changing environmental conditions. “A lot of people don’t realize that microbes in healthy soil are a huge carbon sink,” SmallSat Alliance Chairman Charles Beames told SpaceNews. “They pull tons of carbon out of the air. Being able to detect nitrogen-deficient soils around the world could go a long way toward mapping areas and reclaiming healthy soil.” The SmallSat Alliance established the Collegiate Space Competition in 2022 to raise the profile of the entrepreneurial space sector and attract talent. “The prize winners took a holistic approach,” Beames said. “The teams of evaluators were impressed with the ability of these young people, who are clearly interested in engaging in the world and helping solve problems.” Another University of Texas team claimed second place for a plan to collect and store orbital debris. The Bio-friendly Recycling Operation of Orbital Material, known as BROOM, includes one satellite to gather debris and a second satellite to store it in bags for future recycling. Coming in third was North Carolina State University with its Rubble Attachment and Conveyance CubeSat. RACC is three-unit cubesat built with commercial components to capture orbital debris. A team from Liberty University won honorable mention for its CubeSat Solution for Space Debris. The proposed satellite would move in front of space debris and impact it, changing its orbit and causing it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within a year. SANDS contributors were Chan Mondole, Colin Madden, Melissa Sells, Nicholas Heard and Christopher Renfro. BROOM contributors include Aubrey Baker, Diana Segura Lerma, Madison Vaughan and Mauricio Martinez Elizondo. Jeshua Ray, Peter Zheng, Joshua Boyd, Caden Bjorndahl and Jordan Gonzaga proposed RACC. The Liberty University team included Brendan Riding, Sara Schweitzer and Joshua Velez.
As Astra shifts resources from launch vehicle development to spacecraft thruster production, the company is actively seeking strategic investors to provide longer-term support. As expected, Astra reported Aug. 14 revenue of $0.7 million in the second quarter and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $33.1 million. The company ended the quarter with $26.3 million of cash and equivalents on hand. The amounts were roughly in the middle of ranges provided by the company 10 days earlier when it announced a “strategic reallocation of its workforce,” transferring 50 people from its launch vehicle to its spacecraft propulsion units while laying off about 70 other employees. The company said that it had laid off a quarter of its workforce since the start of the third quarter in July. “Our priority is delivering on our commitments to customers, which requires ensuring that we have sufficient resources and an adequate financial runway to do so,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said of those moves in an earnings call. The layoffs will reduce expenses by more than $4 million a quarter starting in the fourth quarter, while the personnel transfers — some temporary and others permanent — will allow the company to increase production of its Astra Spacecraft Engine electric thrusters. The company delivered four such thrusters in the second quarter and forecasts delivering 8 to 12 in the third quarter to what Kemp said was “multiple” customers. Those moves, he acknowledged, will delay development of the company’s Rocket 4 vehicle, which Astra previously projected being ready for its first test flight before the end of 2023. Those test launches are now scheduled for some time in 2024, but Kemp did not provide a more specific schedule. “The timing of paid commercial launches currently scheduled for 2024 will continue to depend on the results of these test flights,” he added. The company’s financial runway is diminishing even as the company finds new sources of capital, such as a loan announced Aug. 4 that will provide Astra with $10.8 million and plans announced in July to sell up to $65 million in Astra stock in an “at-the-market” transaction . The company forecasted an adjusted EBITDA loss of $25 million to $29 million in the third quarter, ending the quarter with $15 million to $20 million of cash and equivalents on hand. One analyst on the call expressed frustration with those projections, asking Astra executives for the “upside” of the company’s plans. Kemp emphasized the backlog of orders for its thrusters, which Astra said Aug. 4 was valued at $77 million, as well as orders from the U.S. Space Force and the Defense Innovation Unit for the Rocket 4. However, he suggested the company’s efforts to focus on thruster production were intended to buy time for Astra as the company looks for new investors. The company said Aug. 4 it was working with PJT Partners, an investment bank, to identify “potential strategic investments in the Astra Spacecraft Engine business” that would bolster its finances. “We are actively focused on finding investors in these two businesses,” he said, noting that the company’s launch and spacecraft propulsion business lines are distinct and “in different phases of their development.” The loan and planned stock sale, he added, “gives us some time to look for great strategic investors that understand these businesses and want to invest in these businesses.” Kemp didn’t offer a timeframe for an update on those investment discussions when asked during the earnings call. “We understand that it’s a challenging capital markets environment,” he said. “All we can do is bring in cash and revenue from customers, delivering for our customers, and be as efficient as we can possibly be.”
The National Reconnaissance Office is soliciting proposals from commercial remote-sensing companies that use optical imaging satellites. In a Broad Agency Announcement titled “Commercial Electro-Optical Capabilities,” the NRO is seeking new and emerging types of imaging, beyond what is already included in the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer contracts the agency awarded last year to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky and Planet Labs . Technologies sought in the BAA issued Aug. 14 include nighttime imaging, non-Earth imaging, multispectral imaging, video and infrared imaging. The agency also wants to hear about new products that companies are developing. Proposals are due Aug. 28, and contracts will be awarded this fall. NRO Director Chris Scolese first disclosed in April the agency’s plan to select additional EO imaging vendors under the Strategic Commercial Enhancements BAA. Under this program, the NRO has signed agreements with several providers of commercial synthetic aperture radar, commercial radio-frequency and hyperspectral data. The Strategic Commercial Enhancements agreements are open to U.S. companies and foreign firms that have American subsidiaries. “The purpose of the broad area announcement is to allow us to see what’s out there,” Scolese said at the Space Symposium. Scolese noted that the NRO has access to significant commercial sources of imagery under the EOCL contracts but it’s now looking to capture the next wave of capabilities that have emerged in the industry in recent years. According to the BAA, “the government needs imagery products across the electro-optical spectrum, including but not limited to panchromatic imagery, multispectral imagery, nighttime imaging, non-Earth imaging, video, and spectrally diverse Imagery including short-wave infrared, mid-wave infrared and long-wave infrared.” Commercial non-Earth imagery, or the imaging of objects in space, is a nascent sector where companies like Maxar are hoping to capture new business. These new capabilities can now be offered commercially following changes in the licensing process announced earlier this month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA lifted previous imaging restrictions for certain imaging modes and for non-Earth imaging.
A geosynchronous surveillance satellite operated by the U.S. Space Force reached the end of its lifespan and was recently taken out of service. The satellite was part of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program known as GSSAP. The Space Systems Command confirmed that GSSAP Space Vehicle 2, in orbit since 2014, has been deactivated. “GSSAP 2 has run through the passivation and end of life checklist. It is now in a graveyard orbit,” Lt. Col. Greg Fertig, deputy program manager at the Space Systems Command’s GSSAP Program Office, said Aug. 14 in a statement to SpaceNews . GSSAP 2 was one of six satellites made by Northrop Grumman that the U.S. Air Force began to launch in 2014. The remaining five are still in service. The newest pair of GSSAPs launched in 2022 . The satellites are operated by Space Force units at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. The Space Operations Command announced Aug. 2 that GSSAP 2 was out of service. GSSAPs are deployed near geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth. The satellites are designed to be maneuverable and perform rendezvous and proximity operations to take close-up looks at other satellites or objects of interest. The Pentagon in 2014 decided to reveal the existence of the GSSAP program, which had been previously classified. The military’s top space commander at the time, Gen. John Hyten, said the declassification was “to make sure we send a message to the world that says: Anything you do in the geosynchronous orbit we will know about.” GSSAP limited by fuel supply The surveillance of the GEO belt is a top priority for the U.S. military, and GSSAP satellites are highly valuable assets used to keep tabs on adversaries, s aid Space Command’s deputy commander Lt. Gen. John Shaw. As more countries deploy assets in the GEO belt — some alleged to be inspector satellites tailing U.S. spacecraft — the demand for GSSAP has grown, Shaw said. Although the satellites carry enough fuel to operate for up to seven years, Shaw said maneuvers have to be carefully planned to minimize fuel consumption. The recently retired GSSAP 2 operated for more than eight years, exceeding its projected lifespan . Shaw has called on the Space Force to field refuelable satellites in the future so military operators can “ maneuver without regret .” In response to these concerns, the Space Systems Command is planning experiments and demonstrations of in-orbit satellite refueling. To keep up with the demand for GSSAP assets, the Space Force has ordered two more satellites from Northrop Grumman, Fertig said. These will be GSSAP vehicles 7 and 8. 
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NASA selected Rocket Lab to launch a pair of cubesats in 2024 to monitor energy entering and exiting the polar regions of the planet. NASA announced Aug. 14 it awarded a task order through its Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Rocket Lab for the launch of two 6U cubesats for the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment, or PREFIRE mission. The NASA announcement did not disclose the value of the task order. The agency stated in past awards done under VADR that the pricing is considered “proprietary” because the awards are competed in a closed environment, with only companies on the VADR contract eligible to bid on launches of taxpayer-funded missions. The announcement , though, was extraordinarily vague for even a VADR task order. It did not disclose the launch vehicle, number of launches or launch dates for the PREFIRE satellites. A separate announcement by Rocket Lab did state that the two satellites will be launched individually on Electron rockets from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand in May 2024. Rocket Lab did not disclose the value of the PREFIRE task order. However, the company said in an Aug. 8 earnings call that it had a target selling price for the Electron of $7.5 million this year. An earlier task order under VADR for two Electron launches of the TROPICS storm-monitoring cubesats had a value of $12.99 million, according to procurement databases. The company said that the requirements of the mission, including placement in 525-kilometer circular polar orbits with specific values for an orbital parameter known as local time of the ascending node, or LTAN, required dedicated Electron launches. Both satellites must also be launched closely together to carry out the mission, which the company demonstrated with the TROPICS launches a little more than two weeks apart in May . The two cubesats will measure energy entering and exiting the Earth, particularly in the polar regions where there is limited data. Each spacecraft carries a far-infrared spectrometer, derived from an instrument flown on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, to measure infrared fluxes between 5 and 54 microns. The mission’s website notes that the cubesats will provide the first measurements of far infrared (FIR) emissions, at wavelengths longer than 15 microns, which constitute the majority of energy emitted from polar regions. “It fills a major gap in our knowledge of the Arctic energy budget and the role of FIR radiation in Arctic warming, sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise,” it states. NASA selected PREFIRE in 2018 as part of its Earth Venture line of missions and instruments, with an estimated cost of $33 million. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is handling project management and instrument development for the mission, with Tristan L’Ecuyer of the University of Wisconsin serving as principal investigator.
Intuitive Machines offered a clearer projection of when its first lunar lander mission will launch while also giving a cloudier forecast of its finances. The company announced Aug. 14 as part of its second quarter financial results that its IM-1 lunar lander mission is slated for launch on a Falcon 9 during a six-day window that opens Nov. 15 at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. A backup launch window is available in December. During an earnings call, Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said the company was wrapping up testing of the Nova-C lander for IM-1 in advance of shipment to Cape Canaveral. “Today, our IM-1 lander is complete and will be prepared for delivery in September.” He cautioned, though, that the date was subject to availability of the Eastern Range and of LC-39A, which is used for crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station and Falcon Heavy launches. “With the congestion for launches using pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, we recognize that higher-priority missions are always possible,” he said. IM-1 is not only the first lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines but also potentially the first lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is complete but awaiting the readiness of its launcher, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. That rocket’s inaugural flight, with Peregrine as the prime payload, is planned for no earlier than the fourth quarter. IM-1 is the first of three lunar lander missions that the company has in development as part of CLPS. Altemus said the company is building the lander structure and integrating NASA payloads for the IM-2 mission. He did not give a projected launch date for IM-2, which was once expected to launch before the end of the year, several months after IM-1. He said the company is awaiting a decision on a proposal for another CLPS mission, designated CP-22 by NASA, to deliver a drill to the lunar south pole. However, he said the agency has delayed the award of that task order from the third quarter of 2023 to November. The company said schedule slips in contract awards like the CLPS task order was one reason the company was withdrawing earlier financial guidance it offered. The company had earlier forecast revenues of $174 million to $268 million for the year, ending 2023 with a cash balance of $49 million. Intuitive Machines reported $18 million in revenue in the second quarter, primarily from its CLPS work, down from $19.2 million in the same quarter of 2022. It had an operating loss of $13.2 million and ended the quarter with $39.1 million of cash. Erik Sallee, chief financial officer of Intuitive Machines, said on the call that “delays on government acquisition timelines and U.S. federal budget uncertainty” led the company to withdraw that guidance. He added it was not linked to any contract losses sustained by the company. “We haven’t lost anything that we previously had in our forecast,” he said. “It all shifted out to the right.” One of those delays was with a NASA engineering services contract called Omnibus Multidiscipline Engineering Services (OMES) III. Intuitive Machines teamed with KBR to win the contract, valued at up to $719 million over five years, in April. Another bidder, SAIC, filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office in May, delaying the start of that work . The GAO rejected the SAIC protest Aug. 8, allowing NASA to proceed with the OMES III contract award to KBR and Intuitive Machines. The value of OMES III was not included in the company’s backlog of $137.3 million it reported at the end of the second quarter, and Altemus said the company was projecting to start work on that engineering services contract in the fourth quarter. The company also is bidding on NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle contract to develop rovers to be offered as services for future Artemis crewed missions. Altemus said he expects NASA to make multiple awards under that program, potentially in the fourth quarter. While the company only has enough cash to last three quarters at its current rate of operating losses, Sallee said that money along with revenue should be sufficient. He added, though, that the company could tap a $50 million equity financing facility “to provide further cushion, if needed.”
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile has fully funded its first five commercial satellites slated to launch with SpaceX early next year after raising $115 million in debt, the low Earth orbit direct-to-device startup said Aug. 14. The financing is on top of the $64 million the Texas-based venture recently raised by selling equity, including from a $57 million discounted share sale in June to give it more breathing room ahead of plans to launch initial services by next summer. During the company’s earnings call, AST SpaceMobile chief financial officer Sean Wallace said it has also received multiple indications of interest from strategic investors that could help fund more of the satellites it is building in-house. “The size, complexity, and commercial and strategic nature of these negotiations requires significant time to complete,” Wallace said, “and may require certain regulatory approvals in order to close.” The funding talks come nearly two and a half years after AST SpaceMobile merged with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a deal that raised $417 million and propelled the six-year-old venture to the Nasdaq stock exchange. AST SpaceMobile needs around 90 BlueBird satellites for its planned 5G broadband service, CEO Abel Avellan said on the call, which would enable its terrestrial mobile network partners to keep subscribers connected beyond their cell towers. However, just five are needed for intermittent connectivity that the company said would suit government and commercial device monitoring applications. Avellan expects to start commercial services three months after launching its first batch of five commercial satellites on a Falcon 9 at some point in the first quarter of 2024. At around 1,500 kilograms each, these Block 1 satellites are 50% smaller than future BlueBird satellites following production delays and cost overruns — similar to the size of the BlueWalker 3 prototype that SpaceX launched in September. AST SpaceMobile singled out the United States as one of several attractive markets for initial services, although it is waiting for regulatory clearances there along with other direct-to-device startups such as Lynk Global of Virginia, which recently launched initial services in parts of the Cook Islands and Palau in the Pacific. “We do not see the [Federal Communications Commission] delaying our initial commercial services next year,” Avellan said. In addition to waiting on a framework from the FCC to regulate the emerging industry, AST SpaceMobile is also seeking permission to lease spectrum from its U.S. telecoms partner AT&T. The company added that its initial service with five satellites would not bring in enough revenues to fund future spacecraft or turn a profit. Avellan said the company has secured agreements with more than 40 mobile network operators worldwide to use its constellation, representing about 2.4 billion subscribers. AST SpaceMobile reported about $192 million in cash reserves at the end of June, which the venture said is sufficient for supporting costs over the next 12 months. The company recorded $38 million in adjusted operating expenses for the three months to June 30, and Wallace said he expects them to remain at around this level for at least two more quarters. Capital expenditures that have been averaging around $10 million to $15 million every three months are set to increase about 50% over this period, he added, as the company ramps up to producing six satellites a month. In addition, AST SpaceMobile expects to pay between $45 million and $50 million for launch services and related equipment in the three months ended Sep. 30.
LOGAN, Utah — NASA is developing a larger payload adapter for cubesats flying on the next version of the Space Launch System, although it’s unclear if upcoming SLS launches will carry any such secondary payloads. The inaugural flight of the SLS, the Artemis 1 mission that launched last November, carried 10 cubesats that were deployed after the release of the Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed test. NASA originally selected 13 cubesats to fly on Artemis 1 but three were not ready in time for payload integration in the fall of 2021. All 13 selected cubesats were 6U spacecraft measuring approximately 10 by 20 by 30 centimeters, which at the time of their selection several years before launch was close to the state of the art for such smallsats. “A 6U cubesat was huge back in those days,” said David Hitt of Jacobs Space Exploration Group during an Aug. 10 presentation at the 37 th Annual Conference on Small Satellites. However, cubesats have grown larger since then to add additional capabilities like propulsion or to accommodate more advanced payloads. “Clearly we’ve got to elevate our capabilities there,” he said. NASA has developed a new payload adapter for the Block 1B version of the SLS with the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage. That adapter, called the Nest, will have 15 payload mounting locations that can accommodate dispensers for 6U, 12U and 27U cubesats. Exactly what size satellites can be included on the adapter, though, is still a work in progress, Hitt said, and will depend on feedback from satellite developers. “Maybe 27U won’t make sense to people. Maybe there’s somewhere in that range between 12 and 27 that makes more sense.” The earliest the new Nest adapter would be used is the Artemis 5 launch, the second flight of the Block 1B version of the SLS scheduled for no earlier than 2029. There is currently no requirement to fly cubesats on the first Block 1B launch, Artemis 4 in 2028, he said. Whether the remaining two Block 1 SLS missions, Artemis 2 and 3, will carry cubesats is still to be determined, he said. “We’re currently having internal discussions with [NASA] Headquarters about the near-term opportunities, so we’re still finalizing that.” A paper accompanying the presentation noted that both Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 could carry cubesats. However, in the case of Artemis 2, both the upper stage and any secondary payloads released from it would be placed on a “high ballistic trajectory” that would put them on course for an Earth reentry within hours. Any cubesats deployed on Artemis 2, the paper stated, “would have an approximate eight-hour window to alter their trajectories, or they will follow the SLS upper stage on a high-altitude return trajectory.” The paper added that Artemis 3 will likely offer several “bus stops” for deploying secondary payloads like on Artemis 1, which will be determined after the flight path is finalized. It said that cubesats flying on Artemis 3, scheduled for launch no earlier than the end of 2025, could be selected as soon as late summer or early fall of this year, based on the payload mass allocation for that mission, suitability for the Artemis 3 flight path, and NASA science, technology and exploration goals, among other factors. The cubesats that flew on Artemis 1 had mixed results . Some reported partial or complete success, while many malfunctioned. Hitt noted in his presentation that, of the 10 cubesats on Artemis 1, eight did make contact after deployment and five at least partially achieved their mission goals. Among those five was BioSentinel, billed as the first cubesat to perform biological research in deep space. In a conference presentation Aug. 7, Matthew Napoli of NASA’s Ames Research Center said the spacecraft was continuing to transmit data on the radiation environment nine months after its launch, 21 million kilometers from Earth. But cells on board did not show signs of growth after launch, which he said was likely because they had expired during the long wait before launch. Another was LunaH-Map, a cubesat that was to go into orbit around the moon to look for water ice at the lunar poles. However, a stuck valve in the propulsion system on the cubesat prevented it from performing the maneuvers needed to reach that orbit . NASA announced Aug. 3 that the spacecraft has ceased operations after ending attempts to fix the faulty valve. LunaH-Map was able to demonstrate the performance of its key instrument, a neutron spectrometer, collecting data during a flyby of the moon shortly after launch last November. “We are thrilled that the LunaH-Map team was able to use this opportunity to demonstrate the capability of its neutron spectrometer in flight, even though the mission could not be completed as planned,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, which funded development of LunaH-Map, said in a statement.
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said Aug. 14 it is due for a $3.7 billion windfall late this year after becoming the latest satellite operator to clear C-band spectrum ahead of schedule for terrestrial 5G telcos in the United States. Weeks after launching its seventh and final C-band clearing satellite, the company said it had achieved certification for work to move broadcast customers into a narrower swath of the spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission set a deadline for satellite operators to clear the spectrum by December 2025, but offered them nearly $10 billion in incentive payments if they could make the frequencies available for telcos before Dec. 5, 2023. Intelsat was awarded about $1.2 billion after hitting an interim 2021 clearing milestone under the FCC’s transition plan, meaning the operator will receive nearly $5 billion in total incentive clearing payments. The proceeds come from the more than $81 billion the FCC raised from auctioning off C-band in 2020 to telcos such as Verizon, which spent $45 billion to snap up the largest share of the frequencies. The FCC is also separately reimbursing C-band incumbents for any replacement geostationary satellites they had to deploy to clear the spectrum. While Intelsat was able to compress and re-group C-band services within existing satellites, they were all reaching the end of their operational lives during the transition plan. Intelsat’s recently launched Galaxy-37 C-band replacement satellite is slated to come online later this year to replace Galaxy-13. Tom McNamara, senior vice president of commercial programs at Intelsat, who led its C-band clearing project, said the company finished clearing the frequencies and protecting ground earth stations from interfering with telcos in June. The company officially certified its clearing work July 12, which the FCC automatically validated Aug. 11 after 30 days without a challenge. Intelsat CEO Dave Wajsgras said half the proceeds will go toward paying down debt, which stood at $7 billion after the operator emerged from bankruptcy early last year. Wajsgras did not detail the various options he said the company is considering for the rest of the proceeds. C-band jackpot plans SES announced Aug. 10 that the FCC had validated all its work to clear C-band spectrum, enabling the operator to collect around $3 billion later this year on top of the roughly $1 billion secured from the 2021 interim milestone. SES ordered six satellites for its clearing strategy, deploying all but one of them over eight months to keep a spare on the ground. Plans for the proceeds also include paying down debt, SES CEO Ruy Pinto said , along with shareholder dividends and growth-orientated investments he did not specify. SES, which had recently considered merging with Intelsat , remains locked in a legal battle with the operator in an attempt to split their C-band proceeds equally. Both operators are registered in Luxembourg, although Intelsat’s administrative headquarters are in Virginia whereas SES is based in the European country. France-based Eutelsat, Canada’s Telesat, and Claro of Brazil are in line for smaller accelerated incentive payments. These operators hold much smaller chunks of C-band in the U.S. and did not need to order replacement spacecraft. Eutelsat said July 28 it expects to receive $382 million by the end of 2023 for its C-band clearing work, following $125 million in interim proceeds. Telesat also recently said it expects to get $260 million for the last phase of its C-band clearing efforts, following an $85 million interim payment, which will help fund its proposed low Earth orbit Lightspeed constellation. Claro declined to comment on its spectrum-clearing progress. The company was at one point slated to get around $14 million for meeting all the FCC’s accelerated clearing milestones.
The U.S. Space Force is tasked with keeping a watchful eye on foreign rivals’ activities in outer space, and avoiding surprise attacks. To accomplish these tasks the service can’t rely on existing technologies alone, and is turning to the private sector to fill critical gaps, officials said Aug. 12 during a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies podcast. Companies that can contribute innovations in threat identification, space awareness, on-orbit mobility and other areas related to space protection are urged to participate in the next Hyperspace Challenge scheduled for this fall, said Matt Fetrow, director of strategic communication for the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. The Space RCO, a Space Force agency responsible for providing technological solutions to military problems on a fast timeline, is co-sponsoring this year’s Hyperspace Challenge , an accelerator funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the SpaceWERX office. Whereas previous Hyperspace challenges were aimed at startups and small businesses trying to break into the defense market, the 2023 accelerator is seeking more mature technologies. “By partnering with the Space Rapid Capabilities Office we’ve opened the door to companies with existing, mature technologies that could streamline the design, development, and deployment of a solution within the next few years,” said AFRL. The Space RCO, located at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, decided to co-sponsor the fall cohort “in large part so we can better understand where the innovation is for awareness of space threats, what might be out there in the commercial industry that we could leverage in the future,” Fetrow said. “I’d like to encourage companies that are pursuing products and services that might in some way help us in space protection,” he said. Interested companies can sign up for a webinar scheduled for Aug. 16. The Space RCO is responsible for filling technology gaps identified by U.S. Space Command. The protection of U.S. satellites from electronic and physical attacks, and surveillance technologies to help discern bad actors in space are top priorities, said Fetrow. “For us the challenge as an acquisition organization looking to deliver capability is that it’s not always easy to figure out how you can take advantage of the products and services that companies might have,” he said. But increasingly there appears to be a “wealth of commercial services applicable to our current focus, which is protecting space assets,” he added. “We’re now seeing companies pursuing all sorts of things that are relevant like refueling, orbit servicing or awareness as a service and even some companies are now talking about offering protection services which is just amazing.” The Space RCO also hopes to hear from companies that might not be in the space industry but have technologies that could be adapted for space applications, Fetrow said. Technologies in the automotive industry, mobility solutions, manufacturing and even mining might have relevant applications for space, he added. “There is a lot of commercial innovation to get excited about,” he said. “What I am most intrigued by are on-orbit manufacturing capabilities being pursued by commercial, and also the pace at which they’re making progress in those areas,” Fetrow said. In a future where DoD wants to deploy highly maneuverable satellites, “I could see where those on-orbit servicing and manufacturing capabilities could really help the Space Force.” ‘A lot of gaps’ in space awareness Although the Space Force has vast sensor networks and classified systems to track enemy activities, there are still unfilled needs, said Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. “I see a lot of gaps in our space situational awareness capabilities,” he said. “So we have a long way to go.” There is a need for more terrestrial and in-orbit sensors, Felt said. “There’s a need for sensors in more locations like cislunar space .” And all that data, he added “has to be pulled together with data transport, and synthesized using appropriate tools such as AI and machine learning, and then presented to the operator.” Having precise and accurate intelligence on what’s happening in space is of topmost importance as the Pentagon plans for future conflicts where satellites might be targeted, said Maj. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence. Only a few years ago, space defense was not as high a priority as it is now, Gagnon said at a recent Space Force Association online forum. “Just five years ago, you really had to convince people that the adversary was planning to take the war to space, and that the adversary planned to try to disrupt, degrade and deny our satellite capabilities,” Gagnon said. Today, he added, “the Department of Defense has internalized that completely. And now the discussion is not about the number of satellites we need. The discussion is about how much of a reconstitution force should we be budgeting for? How do we make sure that what we have is resilient in combat? They are asking those questions to us.”
Earth observation satellites are bulking up. “Everyone’s moving to these bigger satellites because the cost and volume constraints have changed,” said James Mason, Planet senior vice president of space systems. “All of our customers are demanding different types of data, higher quality and lower latency.” Capella Space’s latest generation of Acadia synthetic aperture radar satellites are 50 percent larger than their predecessors. Moving from 112-kilogram Whitney to 165- to 187-kilogram Acadia makes no difference in terms of launch costs since Capella is purchasing a dedicated Rocket Lab Electron for each satellite. “Mass is not as important anymore,” said Christian Lenz, chief technology officer for San Francisco-based Capella. “Things like capacity, performance, [and] lifetime are all more important at this stage.” Customers for Capella’s SAR imagery and data, including government defense and intelligence agencies, are responsible for the satellite’s redesign. Acadia satellites are “tailored more precisely towards their needs,” Lenz said. Customers want high-resolution imagery and a high signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, they prefer Capella’s multi-look images that look less speckled because satellites focus on a location for tens of seconds. “Latency is another thing that is extremely important to a very important set of customers,” Lenz said. “There are some customers who need their images within 24 hours. There’s also a customer set that needs it within four hours. And an entire new customer set that needs it within 15 minutes.” To reduce latency, Capella is mounting Mynaric optical communications terminals on Acadia satellites. The terminals, which are compatible with the interoperability standard established by the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, “provide the promise of having latencies of under 15 minutes sometime in the future,” Lenz said. Acadia satellites also feature larger solar panels than Whitney and more batteries. Capella bought Electron launches to send Acadia satellites to mid-inclination orbits. Those orbits “give us faster revisit for the areas that people care about,” including the Asia-Pacific region, Lenz said. Planet is well known for gathering daily, moderate-resolution imagery of Earth’s land with a constellation of about 130 Dove and SuperDove cubesats. The San Francisco-based company also is known for rapidly updating cubesat designs. SuperDoves, which gather imagery in eight spectral bands versus four for Doves, were the 14th iteration of the design. The 17th version is now in the works. “We’ve spoken a lot over the years about agile aerospace and the transition from a more traditional satellite development model into this more agile, higher paced one,” Mason said. For Planet, that meant moving from an 11-megapixel camera to 29 megapixels to 47 megapixels as Doves evolved. Each new camera required additional power, better radios, improved hard drives and updates to Planet’s ground infrastructure. Planet’s in-house manufacturing extends from Doves to Pelican and Tanager, 100- to 200-kilogram satellites with a common bus. The larger bus “removes those hard constraints of trying to pack everything in this tiny box,” Mason said. “It allows us to build more reliable, modular systems because we’ve got a bit more space to work with. We’ve taken the best of what we’ve learned from the SkySats and SuperDoves, and we put that into a new satellite design that is more flexible, more agile, lower cost and higher performance.” Pelicans, scheduled to begin launching this year, will capture 30-centimeter Earth imagery. Tanager satellites with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory hyperspectral sensors are being built for Carbon Mapper, a public-private partnership focused on pinpointing, quantifying and tracking sources of methane and carbon dioxide. Satellogic, an agile aerospace proponent that builds satellites in Uruguay, equipped its latest Mark V with a more spacious hosted payload bay and improved downlink capabilities. Mark V, which began launching in 2022, obtains 80-centimeter multispectral resolution imagery compared with 99-centimeter for its predecessor. Mark V also observes a larger swath: 8 kilometers from a 520-kilometer orbit, compared with five kilometers for Mark IV. And a hyperspectral camera on Mark V provides 18-meter resolution imagery. “The Mark V is the cornerstone of Satellogic being able to remap the world monthly, weekly and then daily with higher resolution, larger swath and faster download capability,” said Matt Tirman, chief commercial officer for Satellogic North America. Mark V’s updated electronics did not have a significant impact on satellite size or cost. Each satellite costs satellite about $1 million to build and launch. “The real leap is going to be our NewSat in 18 to 24 months, which will be in a larger bus with a much higher resolution,” Tirman said. The 140 satellites in Spire Global’s constellation range in size from three to four, six and 16-unit cubesats. (Cubesats measure 10 centimeters on each side.) “Generally, our satellites are getting a little bit bigger,” said Joel Spark, Spire co-founder and chief satellite architect. The adoption of 16U cubesats was prompted by Spire’s Space Services customers whose applications sometimes required more power, data downlink capacity and volume than Spire could offer with 6U cubesats. Still, Spire does not make a sharp distinction between satellites gathering weather, maritime or aircraft tracking data for Spire products and Space Services satellites. In many cases, hardware and software for multiple customers fly on the same Spire satellites. When Spire was founded in 2012, the company manufactured its own cubesats because few companies could meet its needs. Now, it’s the rapid iteration cycle that keeps the Vienna, Virginia-based company manufacturing satellites in-house. “We’re constantly upgrading the technology both from a hardware perspective and a software perspective,” Spark said. “Customers want increasing volumes of data, and they generally want it more quickly.” To speed up communications, Spire is equipping satellites with both optical and radio-frequency intersatellite links. “We also preload our satellites with additional processing capability, more than we currently use,” Spark said. “By moving that data processing to the satellite, our customers have been able to do really incredible things.” For example, Spire’s internal and Space Services customers are improving sensor performance with artificial intelligence. AI also helps satellites work together to monitor objects or areas of interest. “It’s a brave new world in terms of people being able to use these sensors to do incredible things,” Spark said. This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
China launched what is thought to be the world’s first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite on Saturday. A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:36 p.m. Eastern (1736 UTC) Aug. 12. The Land Exploration-4 01 (Ludi Tance-4 (01)) satellite successfully entered geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC) announced within an hour of liftoff. Few details of the satellite were provided by CASC. However the group’s “blue book” outlining plans for 2023 released in January noted the launch of a “high-orbit 20-meter [resolution] SAR satellite.” The L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite will provide all-day, all-weather observation of China and surrounding areas, boosting the country’s disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities. The land observation satellite series and “high-orbit SAR technology” are listed in the country’s Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025). The plan includes establishing high and medium resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar constellations for a range of land, marine and atmospheric monitoring. The series is separate from the China High-resolution Earth Observation System ( CHEOS ), which consists of Gaofen (“high resolution”) satellites. China’s Gaofen-4 satellite is a GEO optical satellite. SAR at GEO, while providing much lower resolution than satellites in low Earth orbit, can provide constant coverage and imagery despite cloud cover. It is not yet known what orbital scheme the Land Exploration-4 (01) satellite will enter. An inclined GEO orbit would produce a “figure eight” ground track over the area of intended coverage. Chinese academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology have produced a study of various schemes, while others have published research into modified signal models for GEO SAR. The (01) designation suggests China could launch other SAR satellites into geosynchronous orbits. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.) The mission was followed early Monday by the launch of five automatic identification system (AIS) tracking satellites for HEAD Aerospace, which is affiliated to CASC. A Kuaizhou-1A light-lift solid rocket lifted off from Xichang at 1:32 a.m. Eastern (0532 UTC) Aug. 14, official industry outlet China Space News reported . The HEDE-3 A-E satellites join earlier satellites designed to obtain and transmit data for shipping and other maritime industries. The Kuaizhou-1A was provided by Expace, a spinoff from the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp., (CASIC), a giant state-owned defense contractor. The launches were China’s 35th and 36th orbital missions of 2023. CASC aims to launch around 70 times this year, while China’s commercial launch service providers are adding to Chinese activities. So far Galactic Energy, iSpace, Space Pioneer and Landspace, as well as state-owned commercial spinoffs CAS Space and Expace, have all reached orbit so far this year. Another, Orienspace, is targeting its first launch with the Gravity-1 solid rocket in December. 
Rocket Lab says a Virgin Orbit facility it acquired at a bankruptcy auction in May will allow the company to scale up production of its Neutron rocket in development. Rocket Lab placed a winning bid of $16.1 million for Virgin Orbit’s main production facility in Long Beach, California, just a few blocks from its own headquarters and factory in the city. The bid included the machinery and equipment in that facility. In an Aug. 8 earnings call, Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, described the deal as a cost-effective way to acquire the capability to scale up production of Neutron once that larger vehicle enters operations. “We estimate that the $16.1 million price paid for this would have represented around $100 million of value versus having to purchase new,” he said. “We believe this asset purchase enables significant savings for Neutron and supports future scaling as we work towards first launch.” Later in the call, he said the focus of the former Virgin Orbit facility will be on production of Archimedes engines for the Neutron, as well as composite components. “The Virgin Orbit acquisition is really a scaling enabler,” he said. “Where Virgin Orbit for us is really, really going to shine is on the backside of the project, where we need to start producing larger volumes of engines and even composite components and such.” Rocket Lab announced Neutron in 2021 as a medium-class reusable launch vehicle capable of placing up to 13,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The company is still refining the design, as evidenced by new illustrations recently released by the company that feature tweaks such as larger landing legs. The revised legs, Beck said in the call, are optimized for landings on barges at sea. The company also switched from a “Hungry Hippo” payload fairing that opened in four segments to a more conventional two-segment clamshell that he said simplified its design. “These design changes were actually made some months ago as part of our iterative testing analysis program and some direct customer feedback, but the artwork really just hadn’t kept up with pace with the real vehicle,” Beck said. Rocket Lab, he said, is making progress on various elements of Neutron. The company completed a qualification tank for the second stage ahead of cryogenic testing planned for this quarter. The first complete Archimedes qualification engine is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. Construction of the Neutron launch pad, called Launch Complex 3, at Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, is scheduled to begin this quarter. Beck noted that launching from Wallops “has significantly less congestion relative to the Cape and close proximity to key government customers.” When Rocket Lab announced Neutron, the company said the vehicle would make its first flight in 2024. Beck hedged a bit about those plans in the call. “We’re still working towards getting something on the pad by 2024,” he said, but stopped short of saying when the first launch would take place.
U.S. Space Force imagery specialists during a recent military exercise in South America helped locate illegal fishing boats and track other activities using commercial sensor satellites. The exercise showed how unclassified data from commercial satellites can be leveraged for maritime security and other military applications, 1st Lt. McKenna Medina, head of the Space Systems Command’s surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking team, said in a news release Aug. 10 . A team from Space Systems Command participated in the 2023 Resolute Sentinel exercise in Lima, Peru. Imagery and data analytics specialists from the United States, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, and the United Kingdom worked at Peru’s satellite imagery national operations center. The best part about commercial products is that they’re not classified, Medina said. “They give users the flexibility to share commercial data with international partners.” Need for timely data Despite a commercial boom of easily accessible satellite imagery — which allowed the U.S. government to openly release intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — DoD has struggled to incorporate these capabilities into military operations. The Space Systems Command this year established a commercial services office to help support U.S. combatant commanders who need timely data . The commercial office’s program to procure data from commercial satellites is called SRT, short for surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking. It also has been referred to as “tactical ISR” (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) but the Space Force changed the term to convey that the SRT program is not trying to replace the imagery support provided by the U.S. intelligence community. The Space Force plans to establish a unit within U.S. Southern Command, and the exercise served as a test for how future operations could be conducted with support from space assets, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Whitaker, Southern Command’s director of space forces. “Our hosts in Peru and Colombia gave us a world-class opportunity to test operational aspects of the future Space Forces Southern Component Field Command,” he said. Applications for commercial imagery Gen. Laura Richardson, head of U.S. Southern Command, said space-based data can help address challenges in the region like deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. “Those problems and others that present security challenges in Southern Command — including illegal mining and illegal logging operations — can be identified from space … and that information can be shared among partner nations in the region,” Richardson said Aug. 4 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies . During the exercise in Lima, U.S. and allies relied on satellite imagery to identify and locate a vessel suspected of illegally fishing in Peruvian waters. The suspected ships had turned off their radar and gone “ dark .” Satellite data also supported disaster planning by imaging a volcano in Colombia that showed signs of impending eruption. The Space Systems Command team captured commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data showing the conditions of the volcano in Colombia and compared it to data from a Peruvian volcano that had recently erupted. Capt. Benjamin Berezin, SSC deputy branch chief, said it was “eye-opening to see partner nation imagery applications because it gave the team’s analysts new avenues to work with partners.” Space Systems Command is trying to “showcase the benefit of commercial technology to combatant commands and partner nations,” said Col. Minpo Shiue, director of SSC’s Warfighter Integration Office. “We expect all combatant commands to seek out this capability,” he said. The SRT program office is planning a six-month pilot project to assess U.S. Africa Command’s needs for commercial sensing and analytics products. Commercial Space Office The Space Force leadership has made it a priority to take care of combatant commanders’ needs in a timely fashion, said Jeremy Leader, acting deputy director of the Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office. The SRT program is intended to collaborate with the intelligence community “whereas we may focus a lot more on that timeliness piece, versus the more strategic intelligence piece,” Leader said Aug. 8 at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance forum. “The big difference between SRT and ISR is really focusing on that timeliness piece,” he said. “As we push for those types of solutions to be able to collect things in a timely manner, the more commercial capabilities that we can bring into that fold, the better we can address the timeliness gap.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat has the funding to move forward with plans for a low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network after saving $2 billion by pivoting to smaller satellites from MDA following production delays at Thales Alenia Space, the Canadian operator said Aug. 11. MDA is building 198 satellites for Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation under a contract worth 2.1 billion Canadian dollars ($1.6 billion), with launches slated to start in the middle of 2026. Weighing 750 kilograms each, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said the satellites are 75% smaller than earlier versions planned by Thales Alenia Space, but would have the same performance by using digital beam-forming array antennas instead of the analog terminals MDA was due to supply as a subcontractor. Goldberg said Telesat has funding commitments for the 156 satellites it would need to provide initial polar and global services from late 2027. The extra 42 satellites to complete the constellation would be funded through revenues Telesat expects to gain from providing initial services to enterprise and government customers. Telesat expects the total cost for 156 satellites to be around $3.5 billion, when factoring in launches and other expenses, including the ground systems and user terminal technology that would also be used for the 42 follow-on satellites. Around $1.6 billion of this cost would be funded by Telesat equity, Goldberg said during the company’s earnings call, and $2 billion would come from Canadian federal and provincial financing. The operator also has “some hundreds of millions of dollars” in financing from an undisclosed vendor that he said was not MDA. The MDA contract includes options for an additional 100 satellites to expand the constellation to 298 satellites. Telesat initially planned to launch 298 satellites in 2020 for commercial services starting in 2021. However, the company held off picking a prime contractor until 2021 to get a better deal on parts, only for Europe’s Thales Alenia Space to run into pandemic-related supply chain issues that led to the constellation being downsized a year later to 198 satellites. “It’s been a long road, Goldberg said during the earnings call, “Covid and the supply chain constraints and inflation that Covid brought represented real obstacles.” Glenn Katz, Telesat’s chief commercial officer, told SpaceNews the company has contracted all the launch vehicles required to complete the 198-satellite constellation, but declined to disclose details. The company has previously announced plans to use rockets still under development by Blue Origin and Relativity Space. Design changes Goldberg said during the earnings call that Telesat had passed on an opportunity years ago to use MDA’s digital beam-forming technology because the technology was too immature. However, following further investment by MDA, “we came to the conclusion that it was now sufficiently mature,” he said “and that not only could we leverage it but that we had to, given the massive efficiencies it delivers.” Integrated with digital processors, he said the technology enables Telesat to triple the number of beams per satellite, while improving link performance and the overall efficiency of the planned network. While the old satellite design required each satellite to have two pairs of analog beam-forming antennas, he said only a single pair of digital antennas would be required to deliver Telesat’s capacity target. He said this enables the satellites to be smaller while enabling the same amount of performance for the constellation, around 10 terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity. The design life for each satellite also remains unchanged at 11 years. Telesat originally aimed to provide 15 Tbps with earlier plans for a 298-strong constellation. But while Telesat had announced it selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the constellation, the companies did not have a manufacturing contract in place. Telesat will instead be the anchor customer for MDA’s software-defined configurable satellite design, MDA CEO Mike Greenley said Aug. 11 during the company’s separate earnings call. Greenley said MDA’s high-volume manufacturing facilities in Montreal could churn out two satellites a day after getting up to speed, “helping dramatically to reduce production costs and schedules for our customers.” While Telesat is the inaugural customer for the company’s integrated digital satellite product, MDA vice president of corporate communications Amy Macleod said the foundational technologies have previously flown in space. It is MDA’s second contract for a LEO constellation in 18 months after Globalstar picked the company last year to build its Apple-backed third-generation satellites. Katz said Telesat has reached a spectrum coordination agreement with SpaceX’s Starlink LEO network for its revised constellation, and has another in place for the LEO satellites Amazon is planning for Project Kuiper. Spectrum coordination talks are ongoing with British LEO broadband operator OneWeb. Telesat’s LEO deployment delays mean the company will need to secure regulatory extensions to retain its priority Ka-band spectrum rights, and Katz said the company recently filed for one from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an affiliate of the United Nations. Government-funding commitments for Lightspeed are also subject to due diligence and the conclusion of definitive agreements that the company expects to wrap up later this year. The cash Telesat is injecting into the constellation includes nearly $350 million Canadian dollars it is due to get in December from clearing C-band spectrum in the United States for terrestrial 5G telcos. Financials Telesat is targeting a 30% return on investment from Lightspeed, which is seeking a slice of an enterprise and government connectivity market the company estimates would be worth about 200 billion dollars around 2025. The company reported revenues of 180 million Canadian dollars for the three months ended June 30, down 6% compared with the same period last year when adjusted for changes in foreign exchange rates. The decrease was partly driven by a reduction in revenues from one of Telesat’s satellite TV broadcast customers in North America. However, Telesat said an increase in revenue from LEO satellite-to-satellite communications work with NASA helped partially offset its overall sales decline. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, fell 8% to 139 million Canadian dollars. Rocket Lab l aunched the latest prototype for Lightspeed July 17 after LEO 1, which launched in 2018, ran out of fuel amid the constellation’s protracted delays.
The Pentagon, for decades, has spent the bulk of its massive space budget on traditional geostationary satellites. The four-year-old Space Development Agency (SDA) is working to break the mold with an ambitious plan to build a low-Earth orbit constellation by relying on a broad base of suppliers for commercially produced small satellites and laser communications terminals. “The move to proliferated LEO is highly disruptive to how the government procures satellites,” said James Faist, industry consultant and former U.S. Defense Department director of defense research and engineering for advanced capabilities. SDA calls its layered network of satellites the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. It includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and early-warning sensor satellites. Under the traditional defense contracting model, SDA’s constellation would have been awarded to one or two prime contractors. But in order to leverage the commercial satellite market, the agency is ordering satellites from multiple vendors and requiring manufacturers to make their spacecraft interoperable via optical links that adhere to common standards. “The architecture needs to be such that many providers can plug into it,” said Faist. “And that’s basically the SDA mantra.” To date, SDA has ordered 62 satellites from York Space Systems, four from SpaceX, 56 from Northrop Grumman, 52 from Lockheed Martin, 20 from L3Harris Technologies, seven from Raytheon Technologies and 10 from Ball Aerospace. York so far has delivered 10 satellites, eight of which launched to orbit April 2, along with two from SpaceX. Defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris are building SDA’s satellites using commercial buses from Terran Orbital, Airbus U.S. Space and Defense and Maxar Technologies, respectively. SpaceX and Raytheon Technologies are using in-house designs. For Ball Aerospace’s satellites, Loft Federal will supply the Longbow bus based on the design of the OneWeb satellite. “What SDA is doing is entirely a departure from how the DoD has historically acquired hardware,” said Chris Quilty, industry analyst and founder of the market research firm Quilty Space. “When I think about the implications, if you have a Transport Layer that’s effective and resilient, high throughput and low latency, what becomes the need for some of the traditional geostationary satellite programs that are the bread and butter of the primes?” he asked. The large geostationary satellites, to be sure, will not go away, Quilty added, because the government wants a hybrid architecture. “But I think this is the reason why the Lockheeds and Northrops have been so aggressive in chasing SDA programs. It’s because it’s going to cannibalize a lot of what they used to do.” Despite being a relatively small agency with about 200 people, SDA has had an outsize impact on the military space market. It is buying satellites under fixed-price contracts and recompeting Transport Layer and Tracking Layer spacecraft procurements every two years. This commercial-like model allows SDA to incrementally add new technologies as they become available, in contrast to DoD’s traditional method of funding one large acquisition over many years. “SDA will be key to rapidly delivering space capability to our warfighters,” said the Space Force’s senior acquisition executive Frank Calvelli. “I fully support their strategy, and we will maintain their structure and culture to let them continue to move fast and do what they do best.” By deploying the constellation in tranches of satellites every two years, said Quilty, “they are essentially implementing a spiral development process of getting to ‘good enough,’” instead of spending a decade developing technologies that may be outdated by the time they are fielded. Following DoD’s usual procurement process, it can take 10 years to field a satellite, SDA Director Derek Tournear said recently at the Potomac Officers Club’s Air Force Summit. At that pace, he said, the nation is looking at fighting a war with outdated technology. “You have to get the capabilities up there. You aren’t going to get the perfect capability on day one,” said Tournear. “You’re not even going to get everything that everyone wants on day one. The whole idea is that you have something up there and then continue to grow from there.” Originally established in 2019 with a mandate to enhance the military’s space capabilities, SDA initially faced staunch opposition from Air Force leaders and skepticism on Capitol Hill. The agency was part of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering until last October when it was realigned under the U.S. Space Force. Many in the space industry expected SDA’s proliferated LEO plan to get derailed by the DoD bureaucracy, Quilty said. “And lo and behold, they’ve actually relatively held their schedule in terms of the tranche contract awards. It’s pretty impressive.” A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on April 2 launched SDA’s first 10 satellites of the Tranche 0 portion of the constellation. Another Falcon 9 had been scheduled to launch 13 more Tranche 0 satellites in June — 10 made by Lockheed Martin and three by York Space — but the mission has been delayed to late August. This batch initially included 17 satellites but was reduced to 13 because L3Harris’ four satellites are behind schedule. SDA expects to launch them at a future date. The Tranche 0 satellites are what SDA calls a “warfighter immersion tranche” that will allow military users to experiment with the technology and better understand the capabilities of LEO satellites for missile tracking and data relay. Tranche 1 satellites are forecasted to launch in 2024 and 2025, including 126 satellites for the Transport Layer, and 35 for the Tracking Layer. There are currently open solicitations for 172 satellites for Tranche 2 of the Transport Layer and 54 for Tranche 2 of the Tracking Layer. Proposals for 72 Transport Layer Tranche 2 ‘Beta’ satellites were due May 23, and proposals for 100 Transport Layer Tranche 2 ‘Alpha’ satellites were due July 28. SDA also issued a draft solicitation for 54 Tracking Layer Tranche 2 satellites, and comments were due July 20. SDA plans to award Transport Layer Tranche 2 contracts later this year and Tracking Layer Tranche 2 contracts in 2024. “SDA capitalizes on a business model that values speed and lowers costs by harnessing commercial development to achieve a proliferated architecture and enhance resilience,” Tournear said. With strong DoD and congressional backing, SDA’s budget has soared from $125 million in its first year to about $4.6 billion in the Pentagon’s 2024 funding request, with an additional $23 billion projected from fiscal years 2025 through 2028. The agency has benefited from the Pentagon’s pivot to low-orbit missile warning and tracking systems to diversify the space architecture and increase resiliency, said analyst Sam Wilson of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy. “The plans for next-generation missile warning programs represent a fundamental shift for the department,” Wilson wrote in an Aerospace report in June. “For several decades, DoD has used a small number of systems in high orbit for missile warning,” said Wilson. The next-generation systems in lower orbits account for nearly 15 percent of the entire Space Force budget request in 2024. The Congressional Budget Office, in a report published in May, validated DoD’s adoption of a LEO architecture. “A potential advantage for constellations with many satellites is that their coverage and functionality might degrade more gradually compared with smaller constellations,” said CBO. “Further, damaged satellites could be replaced fairly quickly.” Tournear acknowledged that despite aggressive schedule targets, not everything has gone smoothly. The deployment of Tranche 0 satellites, initially targeted for late 2022, suffered setbacks due to supply chain problems and vendor performance issues. But he is nevertheless confident that SDA will be able to launch Tranche 1 satellites on a monthly cadence starting in the fall of 2024. The goal is to achieve global coverage, which SDA estimates will happen starting in 2026 when Tranche 2 satellites are in orbit. The Tracking Layer, said Tournear, will have “enough satellites to provide coverage for missile warning and missile tracking, and be able to provide updates and cues for radar systems, other overhead systems and weapons systems that are needed to engage incoming missiles.” The Transport Layer, meanwhile, will provide “backbone connectivity.” Data on incoming missiles would be transmitted across space via optical links and then to the ground via tactical data links, Tournear said at a National Security Space Association forum. “We will be able to pass a lot of situational awareness and other data that historically does not get transferred out of the theater [of operations] because there’s no tactical way to move that data in real time.” DoD’s LEO constellation also has created market demand for laser communications terminals. Each satellite will have anywhere from three to five optical links so they can talk to other satellites, airplanes, ships and ground stations. By requiring suppliers of laser terminals to comply with a common set of standards, SDA expects all its satellites to be interoperable. “This is a smart way for SDA to leverage this nascent industry,” Quilty said. During a recent visit to laser communications supplier Mynaric, Quilty witnessed how the company was testing one of its terminals to make sure it could pass data to terminals made by competitors Tesat and Skyloom. “They were validating that they actually work together, which is kind of cool to see.” The concept of using multiple satellite vendors to build an optical mesh network is innovative, although it has yet to be proven, said Quilty. “I think folks are finding out it is not easy. And they’ll eventually work through the issues.” “Everyone today is working under the assumption that everything in space will be optically linked, and eventually we’ll get there,” said Quilty. Another development to watch is whether laser terminal vendors can ramp up production quickly enough to meet SDA’s schedule, noted Andrew Penn, industry analyst and principal at the consulting firm Oliver Wyman. “None of the companies who are signing up to build these terminals have ever manufactured at this scale,” he said. “They’ve done one-off prototypes. The most established manufacturers have delivered over a dozen terminals, but with SDA we’re talking about hundreds, if not thousands.” SDA has set aggressive pricing goals, which can only be achieved if manufacturers can effectively produce satellites and optical terminals at a high rate, Penn said. The agency said it wants to pay at most $15 million per Transport Layer satellite, and $45 million to $50 million for each Tracking Layer satellite. Although these satellites cost less per unit than traditional military spacecraft, SDA will be under pressure to keep pricing as low as possible to offset the large number of satellites it needs to launch, not just to build the constellation but to recapitalize it, Penn pointed out. “The individual satellite price is cheap, but you need hundreds,” he said. “They’re quickly approaching the total price points of some of the constellations of larger satellites that they are trying to augment or replace.” If SDA meets its objectives, it will indeed be a disruptive force in military satellite procurements, Penn added. “If you can meet the same mission objective by giving one company $1 billion, or 10 companies $100 million each, I’ve got to think the latter is better for the broader industrial base,” he said. “When I look at the whole picture, it certainly seems like they are bringing a lot of good to the industry.” The Government Accountability Office in its annual report of DoD major programs published in June said SDA’s approach “will enable competition for new tranches and a stable market for sustainment.” But before it can realize these potential benefits, GAO said, SDA faces challenges with integrating a complex system of multiple vendors and segments into a proliferated constellation of hundreds of satellites. Penn said SDA “will continue to get scrutiny until we have functioning operational constellations, because at this point in time, the jury is still out.” “You can evaluate contracting methods, you can evaluate the impact on the industrial base. But at the end of the day, they have to deliver a mission. We don’t have that yet,” he added. Based on what SDA has done to date, “I am cautiously optimistic on what they’re looking to accomplish.” As with any large defense program, cost overruns are always a looming threat. “But I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that they will come close, if not meet their price targets, when industry starts mass producing, assuming requirements don’t change meaningfully from tranche to tranche, and that they are truly taking commodity buses off the line with minimal modifications.” Penn said SDA has every incentive to expand its pool of suppliers, drive competition among incumbent suppliers and provide “as much opportunity as possible for new companies.” “I think SDA’s expectation is that there will be new companies, and that is the only way they achieve the ecosystem they need,” he added. Tournear has insisted that SDA wants to attract new vendors and avoid becoming dependent on a small number of incumbent providers. There are companies in the small-satellite market that analysts are watching as potential competitors for future SDA awards. These include Boeing’s Millennium Space Systems, and startups like LeoStella and Apex. “If I were one of those guys, I absolutely would be chasing an SDA contract,” said Quilty. SDA is banking on increased commoditization and advancements in technology to enhance its constellation and keep prices down, Tournear said. “We look at it kind of like the iPhone model, where they pick a price that they think the market will bear, and they just keep adding capabilities as the technology matures.” With regard to the satellite market, “I have fears and hopes,” he said. “The fear is that I don’t want to see it get consolidated down to one or two commodity bus providers. I want to see a healthy market, which is why we open competition with every tranche and every layer.” His hope is that SDA can continue to buy satellites at stable price points but “add more capability.” Going forward, said Tournear, “we will be open and honest about what our plans are” so industry can invest accordingly if they want to win a portion of the architecture. “We need industry to watch what we’re doing.” His advice to new entrants to the SDA market: “Don’t ignore our schedules and the target prices that we’re putting out there. We’re pretty serious about that when we do our selections.” This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat is in the early stages of exploring how to use L-band spectrum from newly acquired Inmarsat to connect consumer devices directly from space, including potentially from small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). “We are still exploring what our roadmap and execution plan should be,” Viasat president Guru Gowrappan said in an interview Aug. 10, “but it’s an important priority.” Gowrappan said buying Inmarsat in May gave Viasat the largest global swathe of coordinated L-band spectrum, which he sees as a critical component for expanding in an emerging market for direct-to-device services. Smartphones launched earlier this year by British ruggedized handset maker Bullitt use Inmarsat’s existing satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) to send and receive text messages outside cellular coverage. However, most of the phones Inmarsat currently connects via L-band are specialized devices with bulky antennas. Many new ventures looking to realize a direct-to-device market that is being pioneered by Globalstar’s partnership with Apple are planning satellites in LEO, which promises lower latency services. Viasat chair and CEO Mark Dankberg said in February that the operator is considering direct-to-device services using satellites in geostationary and non-geostationary orbits, including by potentially partnering with another operator. Dankberg said during Viasat’s Aug. 9 earnings call that the company remains optimistic about the potential for direct-to-device services, and is working on addressing the market from multiple perspectives. A growing market for connecting standard consumer devices directly to satellites will also increase demand for more bespoke mobile terminals, he added, needed to support higher bandwidth applications. The direct-to-device market is “going to play out over several years,” according to Dankberg. Gowrappan declined to discuss the options Viasat is considering, but said the company is closely watching evolving smartphone chip standards that will be important for delivering higher bandwidth services from space. Viasat’s foray into direct-to-device comes as the company wrestles with an antenna failure that could ultimately sideline its recently launched ViaSat-3 Americas GEO broadband satellite. The “anomaly has our attention but it doesn’t define us,” Gowrappan said, pointing to how its Inmarsat acquisition has helped diversify the group’s offerings far beyond fixed broadband services. 
LOGAN, Utah — SpaceX is offering a second class of rideshare missions on its Falcon 9 rocket to serve customers seeking to go to mid-inclination orbits. During a presentation at the 37 th Annual Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 9, Jarrod McLachlan, director of rideshare sales at SpaceX, said the company will start launching a series of missions dubbed “Bandwagon” that will complement its existing Transporter line of rideshare missions. The Bandwagon missions will deliver payloads at altitudes of 550 to 605 kilometers and inclinations of approximately 45 degrees. “It’s a way of meeting the demand for the second most commonly asked orbit,” he said. Four Bandwagon missions are currently scheduled. According to SpaceX’s rideshare website , those missions are scheduled for April and November 2024 and February and May 2025. Those will be in addition to the Transporter missions that SpaceX has been flying since 2021, which have gone to sun-synchronous orbits. SpaceX also offers “traditional” rideshares where smallsats are flown as secondary payloads on launches going to a wide variety of orbits, including low Earth orbit, geostationary transfer orbit and translunar injection trajectories. SpaceX has become the leading provider of rideshare launches through Transporter and other launches. McLachlan said the company has flown 682 spacecraft to date through its rideshare program, with the vast majority — 664 — going to sun-synchronous orbits, which are in high demand for Earth observation and other applications. The company has evolved the program since its inception, including a change to a modular “rideshare plate” system for attaching payloads. The new system, he said, simplifies engineering for rideshare missions and increases volume available for payloads. The company currently charges $5,500 per kilogram of payload, but that price is increasing annually by $500 per kilogram. McLachlan said customers can lock in a lower price if they pay in full on contract signature, even if the mission is launching years later.
Updated 8:15 p.m. with comments from post-flight briefing. LOGAN, Utah — Virgin Galactic took its first private astronaut customers on a suborbital spaceflight Aug. 10, nearly two decades after it started selling tickets. Virgin’s VSS Unity spaceplane, attached to its VMS Eve mothership aircraft, took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at approximately 10:20 a.m. Eastern. Unity was released from Eve at 11:17 a.m. Eastern and fired its hybrid rocket motor. The vehicle reached a peak altitude of about 88.5 kilometers before gliding back to the spaceport, landing at 11:32 a.m. Eastern. The flight appeared to go as expected. “Today Virgin Galactic took another historic leap forward by flying our first private astronaut mission and demonstrating how our spaceflights will broaden access to space,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in a post-flight statement. The Galactic 02 mission was the second commercial spaceflight for Virgin Galactic after the Galactic 01 mission June 29 . That was a research flight for the Italian Air Force that carried three people from the Italian Air Force and Italy’s National Research Council, conducting more than a dozen instruments. Galactic 02 was the first flight to carry space tourists, who make up the largest part of the company’s customer base. The company started selling tickets in 2005 for flights on the SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane at an initial price of $200,000. That has increased to $450,000 today. One of the people on Galactic 02, Jon Goodwin, was among the first people to buy a ticket. Goodwin, now 80, represented Great Britain in the 1972 Summer Olympics and spent the following decades as an adventurer. He continued that even after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2014. The other two customers on the right are a mother and daughter, Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers, from Antigua and Barbuda. Schahaff won a contest run by the nonprofit organization Space For Humanity in 2021 for two seats on an early commercial SpaceShipTwo flight, and selected her daughter, Mayers, to accompany her. “Jon, Keisha and Ana each embody our fundamental belief that space is for everyone, and we are proud that today’s flight has inspired people and communities around the world,” Colglazier said in the statement. Goodwin, who noted at a post-flight briefing that he puchased his ticket in September 2005, said the flight was worth the nearly 18-year wait. “It was far more dramatic that I might have imagined it would be,” he said. “Without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.” Schahaff mentioned the support she and her daughter got from their country, as the first Caribbean women to go to space. “It’s such a beautiful feeling knowing that our nation is giving such great support,” she said. The fourth person in the cabin was Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut trainer, making her fourth suborbital spaceflight. Unity was commanded by CJ Sturckow with Kelly Latimer as pilot. Sturckow was on his fourth SpaceShipTwo flight after four space shuttle flights as a NASA astronaut, while Latimer was on her first spaceflight. Virgin Galactic executives said they expected to fly Unity on roughly a monthly basis for the foreseeable future. The company has a backlog of roughly 800 customers including some, like Goodwin, who signed up as far back as the mid-2000s. Those flights, though, will generate little revenue for Virgin Galactic, which forecasted earlier this month just $1 million in revenue in the current quarter and again in the fourth quarter of this year . That, company executives said, is linked to the lower ticket prices its early customers paid. The company is also, like on Galactic 02, flying only three customers with an employee filling the fourth seat. “When we look at the capacity of Unity and the ticket prices that we’re flying these days, you would expect to see for the near term about $600,000 per flight,” Colgazier said in an Aug. 1 earnings call. He said the company expects to add a fourth paying customer to Unity flights “as we move into 2024,” increasing the per-flight revenue to about $800,000. Virgin Galactic said its next flight, Galactic 03, is scheduled for September as it continues a monthly flight cadence.
The startup Scout Space in partnership with the Stanford University Space Rendezvous Laboratory won a $1.5 million contract to help the U.S. Space Force to characterize spacecraft and debris objects, the company said Aug. 10. Scout, founded in 2019, is developing technologies for on-orbit navigation and tracking. It won a Phase 2 Small Business Technology Transfer contract that requires companies to team up with academic or nonprofit institutions. The Space Force’s technology arm, SpaceWERX, awarded the contract as part of a project known as Orbital Prime that seeks to develop technologies for debris removal and in-space services. Scout and the Stanford University Space Rendezvous Laboratory, known as SLAB, won a Phase 1 STTR contract in August 2022 . SLAB is part of the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Refining data on space objects “The characterization of location, motion, and other data of objects in space for space domain awareness requires well-defined processes for processing sensor data,” said Scout’s co-founder and chief technology officer Sergio Gallucci. SLAB founder and director Simone D’Amico said the SpaceWERX project will help advance technologies for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. “The US Space Force and Scout are giving us a unique opportunity to reach flight readiness with spacecraft navigation technologies that would have normally taken several years to accomplish,” said D’Amico. SLAB is working to “deploy new machine learning algorithms for autonomous spacecraft navigation in actual space missions led by industry,” he added. For the Orbital Prime project, SpaceWERX last year selected 125 industry teams for the initial phase of the program, intended to promote commercial development of technologies for orbital debris cleanup and other space services.
Chinese commercial firm Galactic Energy achieved its seventh launch success from seven attempts early Thursday and is now set for a first sea-based mission. The seventh Ceres-1 solid rocket lifted off using a transporter erector launcher at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 12:03 a.m. Eastern, Aug. 10 (0403 UTC). Aboard were seven satellites for a variety of customers. The Beijing-based commercial firm is now preparing to make the first attempt by a Chinese commercial rocket company to launch from a mobile sea platform, a Galactic Energy representative told SpaceNews . The rocket will lift off from a platform off the coast of Haiyang, Shandong province, during a window starting Aug. 20 and running until the end of the month. So far only the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) and its affiliated China Rocket company have launched from the sea, using Long March 11 and Jielong-3 (“Smart Dragon-3”) solid rockets. Thursday’s launch carried Xiguang-1 (01), Star Pool-1B satellite, GeoSat Intelligent Emergency-1, and the Xi’an Hangtou -88, -96, -104 and -112 satellites. The satellites are expected to enter roughly 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbits. Xikuang-1 (01) is a 100-kilogram class hyperspectral satellite belonging to the Xikuang-1 series developed by Xi’an Zhongke Xikuang Aerospace Science and Technology Co., Ltd., or Xiopm Space. The satellite carries multiple payloads including a hyperspectral camera, infrared camera, panchromatic camera, on-board intelligent processing unit for a range of Earth observation uses. The four Xi’an Hangtou satellites are lightweight, low-power optical satellites focusing on assisting ecological sustainability in the Qinling region of Shaanxi, the province in which Xiopm Space is based. Star Pool 1B is a wide-view, integrated sensing satellite independently developed by Elliptical Space and Time (EllipSpace). The multi-payload satellite features inter-satellite/satellite-ground communication and navigation enhancement capabilities. The mission aims to verify miniaturization of payloads and the core technologies of the satellite of Star Pool Program and demonstrate its applications. The program envisions constructing a constellation or more than 100 “intelligent” satellites. Geosat Intelligent Emergency-1 is an “AI-centered satellite” with an intelligent operating system, which is jointly developed by Geosat 2 Space Technology (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. and Suzhou Tianxun Space Technology Co., Ltd. It is equipped with high-resolution array cameras, near-infrared cameras and IoT communications payloads, utilizing on-board intelligent processing technology. The Ceres-1 solid rocket has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to LEO or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Galactic Energy now moves to focus on its first sea launch of the Ceres-1. The sea launch will carry the satellites Tianqi 21-24 for Guodian Gaoke, a commercial firm constructing its Tianqi low-Earth orbit narrow-band Internet of Things constellation. The firm’s Tianqi-13 satellite took a Ceres-1 ride to orbit in January of this year. The upcoming sea launch attempt adds to a number of breakthroughs for China’s commercial launch sector in 2023. These include the first successful launch of a commercial liquid propellant rocket, a global first methane-powered rocket reaching orbit, and an increased launch rate. So far commercial firms Galactic Energy, iSpace, Space Pioneer and Landspace, as well as state-owned commercial spinoffs CAS Space and Expace, have all reached orbit so far this year. Another, Orienspace, is targeting its first launch with the Gravity-1 solid rocket in December. China is building commercial launch pads at Wenchang, Hainan island, to ease a bottleneck in access to spaceports. The sea launch facilities at Haiyang may also allow more commercial and liquid launchers in the future.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat is holding off on a contingency plan for ViaSat-3 Americas in the hope it could still get some capacity from the broadband satellite despite its defective antenna, the operator’s chair and CEO Mark Dankberg said Aug. 9. Engineers have been able to get end-to-end measurements showing the rest of the satellite is operating as expected or better, Dankberg said during the company’s earnings call. But while “the fact that we can communicate through it is hopeful,” he said more data is needed to determine whether Viasat will ultimately get little to no capacity from the satellite, or something closer to the 1 terabit per second (Tbps) it had been expecting. Viasat expects to have enough data by its next earnings announcement in November to move forward with one of the multiple contingency plans it has in the works to cover this wide range of potential scenarios. Options include building a replacement from scratch, buying capacity from other operators, and redeploying spacecraft from Viasat’s current fleet of 19 satellites. Viasat could also reallocate one of its two upcoming ViaSat-3 satellites to cover the Americas instead of elsewhere. Boeing is under contract to build all three ViaSat-3 satellites for payloads provided by Viasat. Dankberg did not name the antenna supplier for ViaSat-3 Americas but, according to a CBS News report citing a Viasat executive before the satellite’s launch April 30 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, it was supplied by Northrop Grumman’s Astro Aerospace. The second ViaSat-3 satellite was slated to launch on an Atlas 5 rocket from United Launch Alliance this fall to cover Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The third and final ViaSat-3 satellite targeting Asia Pacific (APAC) is due to launch half a year later. ViaSat-3 EMEA uses the same antenna as ViaSat-3 Americas, and Dankberg said changes to its launch schedule also depend on the corrective actions it takes. “It was pretty close to being able to launch when we had this antenna anomaly, he added. ViaSat-3 APAC uses a different antenna so its launch is unaffected. Financial hit Viasat said issues with ViaSat-3 Americas, which is insured, will mainly affect its performance in the U.S. fixed broadband market, representing only 13% of total revenues following its recent acquisition of British satellite operator Inmarsat. Dankberg said the operator expects to meet a backlog of demand it has from airline customers “at least for some period of time” with bandwidth from other satellites. While the company does not expect the anomaly on ViaSat-3 Americas to affect financial results for its fiscal year 2024 that ends March 30, 2025, it does anticipate an impact the following year. “We believe we will continue to grow in fiscal year 2025 as well,” Dankberg said, “but not to the same extent we would have without the anomaly.” Viasat reported $780 million in revenue for the three months to the end of June, up 36% compared to sales from continuing operations in the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, jumped 87% to $183 million. The results include Inmarsat’s one-month contribution of about $134 million in revenue and $72 million in adjusted EBITDA following its acquisition earlier this year.
LOGAN, Utah – Japanese launch startup Interstellar Technologies is preparing for a static fire test later this year that could pave the way for orbital launch of its Zero rocket in 2025. Zero, a vehicle designed to send nearly one metric ton to low-Earth orbit, will help meet demand for small satellite launch capacity “not only in Japan, but in the world,” Keiji Atsuta, Interstellar business development general manager, told SpaceNews. “We think that this rocket will change the market.” Interstellar developed and launched suborbital rockets before beginning work on an orbital rocket. The company’s Momo suborbital rocket has reached space three times. Initially, Interstellar engineers were designing an orbital rocket to loft 100 kilograms to low Earth orbit starting in 2020. After surveying the market and finding little demand for vehicles of that size, Interstellar began planning for a larger rocket. The 25-meter Zero with a 1.7-meter diameter is similar in size to the Rocket Lab Electron. Zero will launch from Japan’s Hokkaido Spaceport. “With this launchpad, we can launch to the east side or the south side,” Atsuta said. Interstellar plans to focus initially on meeting demand for small satellite launches from space agencies and universities in Asia, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to the suborbital rocket Momo and Zero, Interstellar plans to develop Deca, a large launch vehicle expected to begin flying in the 2030s. In July, Interstellar announced plans to fuel Zero with liquid biomethane, fuel produced from livestock manure. 
The National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and U.S. Space Command signed an agreement to improve threat intelligence sharing with commercial satellite operators. The agencies last month signed a Commercial Space Protection Tri-Seal Strategic Framework that is intended “to better enable protection of commercial remote sensing space assets vital to the intelligence collection mission,” said Peter Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. Muend discussed the agreement Aug. 8 during a forum hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. The framework is designed to ensure NRO-contracted commercial imagery providers are informed of emerging and imminent threats to their space assets, he said. “This helps them make informed collection operations decisions in their support of U.S. government and non-governmental customers.” “Space is getting more and more contested,” Muend said. Growing use of commercial satellites The U.S. intelligence community and DoD are increasingly reliant on commercial satellites for imagery and other critical data. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, commercial space companies have provided critical intelligence and communications services to Ukraine and its allies, and Russia’s military has threatened to target commercial systems. In this environment, it’s important for the government and industry to work together to protect assets, Muend said. The NRO is the U.S. intelligence agency responsible f o r developing, launching and operating the nation’s spy satellites. It is also the primary acquirer of commercial imagery for the federal government. NGA analyzes imagery and distributes intelligence to national security agencies. U.S. Space Command is responsible for military operations in the space domain. Government and industry to share intelligence The strategic framework focuses on three main areas: providing threat information to the commercial sector, establishing a process to investigate and respond to anomalies, and coordinating plans for data collection. “In terms of providing threat information, we’re looking to U.S. Space Command to be able to relay that information on behalf of the interagency, not only at the classified level, but all the way down to and including the unclassified level,” Muend said. Companies that are under contract with the NRO would be obligated to inform the government if they notice any nefarious activities such as electronic jamming or cyber intrusions. The information would be turned over to Space Command for further investigation and to recommend a response. Under the agreement, NGA also would be informed about potential hostile activities “to ensure that our collection strategies are well informed by the threat landscape,” said Muend. Agreement a ‘first step’ He said the strategic framework is a “first step” and will be further refined over time. “Space is definitely an extremely contested environment, and it’s only getting more so, not only for government systems operating in space, but for our commercial systems as well,” Muend said. “It goes without saying that the principal adversary actors in that domain are Russia and China.” To take advantage of emerging space industry innovation in remote sensing and imagery analytics, the NRO is building a hybrid architecture with data from commercial and government satellites analyzed side by side. Cyber attacks, he said, are the threats that “we most worry about.” 
TAMPA, Fla. — Small satellite operator Lynk Global has started initial direct-to-device services in a small part of the Cook Islands in its second commercial launch with a local telco. Phones on mobile operator Vodafone Cook Islands’ network can now periodically send and receive text messages via Lynk’s satellites around Manuae, an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean popular with tourists. Dan Dooley, Lynk’s chief commercial officer, said Aug. 9 that its service covers the stretch of water from Aitutaki, the country’s second-most populated island, to Manuae where there is no terrestrial wireless infrastructure. With just three satellites currently in low Earth orbit, Lynk’s initial service enables multiple texts while the spacecraft pass over the region a few times a day. The startup plans to launch three more one-meter-squared satellites this fall to improve its coverage and latency — and to be operating more than 50 of a proposed 5,000 satellites by the end of next year. Lynk ultimately plans to cover the roughly 2,000,000 square kilometers of exclusive economic zone that comprise the Cook Islands, which has a population of around 15,000 people, providing backup services in case natural disasters knock out ground networks. The Palau National Communications Corporation (PNCC), the largest telco in the Pacific island nation of Palau, became the first company in June to use Lynk’s satellites commercially. Lynk has said as many as four texts have been sent from a single user during one satellite overpass in Palau. More than 30 companies have signed agreements to use Lynk’s services, according to the Virginia-based venture, as it seeks to increase the density of its network and get regulatory approvals to expand globally.
LOGAN, Utah — The European Space Agency acknowledged Aug. 8 what most of the space industry had long expected: the first flight of the Ariane 6 will not happen this year. In a LinkedIn post , Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said that the inaugural flight of the long-delayed rocket had been rescheduled for some time next year after a series of engine tests planned in the coming weeks. “With this,” he wrote, ESA, vehicle prime contractor ArianeGroup, Arianespace and the French space agency CNES, “confirm that the inaugural launch is now targeted for 2024.” Since early this year Aschbacher and other ESA officials had declined to offer an updated schedule for the vehicle’s inaugural flight. The last formal update ESA provided was in October 2022, when the agency set a launch date of the fourth quarter of 2023 . ESA had declined to provide an update because officials said they wanted to see progress on a series of engine and other vehicle tests. One such test was an Ariane 6 countdown test in July at the spaceport in French Guiana. The vehicle was loaded with propellants and went through a simulated countdown to test launch procedures. That July 18 test was scheduled to conclude with a brief firing of the Vulcain 2.1 engine in the Ariane 6 core stage. However, ESA said in a July 25 statement that the firing could not take place “as time ran out.” In a more detailed statement Aug. 8, ESA said the automated countdown was aborted “due to certain measurements exceeding preset limits.” The firing was later abandoned because the length of the test led to a shortage of liquid oxygen propellant. That hot-firing has been rescheduled for Aug. 29. ESA said the gap between the tests allows for a two-week summer break for personnel and to make repairs in a basin used for burning off excess hydrogen that was damaged by water. A test of the upper-stage engine, at a facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany, was also postponed in late July because of software anomalies, ESA said. That test has been rescheduled for as soon as Sept. 1. Following those tests, ESA said there will be a long-duration static-fire test of the Vulcain 2.1 engine at the Kourou spaceport, tentatively scheduled for Sept. 26. Only after that test, the agency said, will it be ready to announce a launch date for the inaugural Ariane 5. “However,” the ESA statement added, “the inaugural flight is now scheduled for 2024.” The slip of the Ariane 6 debut to 2024 was widely anticipated. In an earnings call in May, executives with OHB, the German company that is a supplier to the Ariane 6, said they expected the rocket to make its first launch “early next year” but not before. That first Ariane 6 launch will carry a number of smallsat payloads, including a NASA-supported cubesat called Cubesat Radio Interferometry Experiment, or CURIE. A chart presented at a NASA smallsat town hall meeting during the 37 th Annual Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 7 stated that CURIE would launch on an Ariane 6 no earlier than April 1, 2024. Delays in the Ariane 6 have contributed to what Aschbacher has called a “launcher crisis.” Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket made its final launch July 5, while the Vega C rocket remains out of service after a launch failure in December 2022. Europe lost access to Russia’s Soyuz rocket, which launched from Kourou, after the invasion of Ukraine last year. That has temporarily left Europe without independent space access. Those issues led ESA to procure Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX for its Euclid space telescope, which successfully launched July 1, and the Hera asteroid mission in 2024. ESA also plans to acquire a Falcon 9 for its EarthCARE Earth science mission in 2024. ESA and the European Commission are weighing the use of Falcon 9 to launch Galileo navigation satellites.
TAMPA, Fla. — Dish Network is seeking permission to use 12 GHz spectrum for fixed terrestrial broadband in the United States, three months after regulators denied its plans for mobile services in the band following interference concerns from Starlink and other satellite operators. It would be easier to avoid interfering with other users of the band when services are provided to fixed locations and not customers on the move, Dish executive vice president of external and legislative affairs Jeff Blum said in an interview. “We know where the customers are,” Blum said, “unlike mobile where they can be anywhere — so it’s much easier to coordinate and share.” The satellite TV broadcaster, along with spectrum holding company RS Access, have licenses in the band that they are looking to upgrade to provide terrestrial 5G services. Dish had hoped to use frequencies between 12.2 and 12.7 GHz — part of the Ku-band — for a high-power, two-way mobile service to support the wireless network it is building across the United States with other spectrum. However, SpaceX’s Starlink and fellow non-geostationary satellite operator OneWeb, which use the frequencies to connect user terminals, warned this plan would severely disrupt their broadband networks. Dish’s satellite broadcast rival DirecTV, majority owned by U.S. telco AT&T, also said millions of its customers would suffer extensive harmful interference if the plan went ahead. Both Dish and DirecTV currently use frequencies in the band to provide linear TV programming. Dish, RS Access, and other members of the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition had argued that mobile services could coexist with other users of the spectrum. But following multiple competing interference studies, the Federal Communications Commission voted in May to deny their mobile plan. The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition submitted a regulatory filing to the FCC Aug. 9 that calls on the regulator to instead open up 12.2-12.7 GHz frequencies to high-powered, two-way fixed broadband services. The FCC has also proposed allowing flexible terrestrial wireless in nearby 12.7-13.25 GHz spectrum. Allowing more than 1,000 MHz of spectrum between 12.2 GHz and 13.25 GHz for terrestrial communications would enable “the U.S. to overtake several international competitors, including China, and propel the country back into a global leadership position in 5G competitiveness,” the coalition said in the filing. While Dish currently does not provide fixed broadband services, its sister company EchoStar does from a fleet of geostationary spacecraft. Dish and EchoStar announced plans Aug. 8 to merge their businesses to combine their terrestrial and space connectivity offerings. SpaceX, OneWeb, and DirecTV did not respond to requests for comment on plans to provide high-powered, two-way fixed broadband services in the 12 GHz band. Aug. 10 update: SpaceX , OneWeb , and DirecTV said they were concerned about the potential for interference by opening up the 12 GHz band to high-powered, two-way fixed broadband services in separate regulatory filings to the FCC. They called for thorough technical studies to show how planned services would not cause harmful interference.
LOGAN, Utah – DCubed, a German startup specializing in deployable satellite structures, plans to conduct an in-space manufacturing demonstration later this year. While 3D printers manufacture parts on the International Space Station, small satellites have not yet proven the ability to manufacture structural components in free space. “The first step is to go into space and show this is possible,” Thomas Sinn, DCubed CEO and founder, told SpaceNews in an interview at the Small Satellite Conference here. On Aug. 8, DCubed forged an agreement with Italian space logistics firm D-Orbit to launch the demonstration payload in the fourth quarter of 2023. D-Orbit’s ION will maneuver to deploy cubesats in their desired locations. “After this, we can operate the DCubed payload and record the video for them,” said Renato Panesi, D-Orbit founder and chief commercial officer. On orbit, DCubed plans to use an extrusion process to manufacture a 30-centimeter-long truss structure. “We will extrude a linear element, a tube, in one direction,” said DCubed engineer Michael Kringer. “We can also extrude other shapes.” While the initial demonstration is relatively simple, its goal is to prove the efficacy of in-space manufacturing. “We see the industry going into very high-power applications for small satellites,” Sinn said. “They want more power than they can get with conventional foldout solar arrays. Our idea is to make 5- to 10-kilowatt solar arrays with flexible photovoltaic blankets on a truss structure.” In addition, in-space manufacturing has important applications for deep space exploration. “We need to get independent of Earth-centered manufacturing,” Kringer said. “If we want to go to Mars, if we want to go to other bodies celestial bodies, we cannot bring every single component.” D-Orbit is also interested in on-orbit manufacturing. “This is a big milestone for us because in-space manufacturing is in our vision in the long term,” Panesi said. Overall, Sinn said there is “an urgent need for large structures in orbit to support an ecosystem providing services as diverse as internet from space, Internet of Things and Earth observation.”
LOGAN, Utah — A NASA lunar cubesat mission failed to go into orbit around the moon earlier this year when debris blocked propellant lines for the spacecraft’s thrusters. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory declared an end to the Lunar Flashlight mission May 12 , five months after its launch as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 that carried ispace’s HAKUTO-R M1 lunar lander. That decision came after months of efforts to troubleshoot problems with the spacecraft’s thrusters, which used a green propellant called ASCENT, that prevented it from performing maneuvers needed to go into orbit around the moon. In an Aug. 8 presentation at the 37 th Annual Small Satellite Conference here, Celeste Smith and Nathan Cheek of JPL said that problems with the thrusters became clear shortly after launch. Only one of the four thrusters, designated thruster four, was performing normally, and troubleshooting efforts failed to restore full thrust on the other three. Engineers developed a technique to perform trajectory correction maneuvers with a single thruster, rotating the spacecraft to prevent momentum buildup. That approach initially worked, but on the ninth such maneuver the thrust dropped to zero. “Thruster four was basically considered dead then, and we knew a lunar orbit was no longer possible,” Cheek said. Spacecraft controllers then attempted an alternative trajectory using thruster three, which was producing 25% of its rated thrust, to enable a series of lunar flybys rather than going into lunar orbit. That thruster, though, soon failed as well. Cheek said the mission then considered “high-risk options” to restore the thrusters, such as reversing the propellant pump to dislodge any debris blocking propellant lines. They also increased the pressure in another thruster to its rated limit, which initially worked. “During a repeat test, something went horribly wrong,” with a big drop in temperature and pressure that he said was likely caused by a ruptured propellant line. Engineers had long suspected that foreign object debris somewhere in the propulsion system caused the thruster problems. An investigation after the primary mission was over excluded alternative explanations. Smith said a likely source of the debris is titanium particles. Part of the propulsion system was additively manufactured, and sintered particles on the interior of propellant lines could have come loose from vibrations before and during launch, as well as pressurization cycles of the system. Cleaning of the lines and additional filters could have prevented the problem, but she noted the project had limited resources. The propulsion system “was designed, integrated and tested under extreme schedule pressure,” she said, because the mission was originally planned to launch as a secondary payload on the Space Launch System for the Artemis 1 mission. Despite the failure of Lunar Flashlight to enter orbit around the moon and carry out a science mission to look for water ice in permanently shadowed lunar craters, NASA considers other aspects of the mission successful. That includes demonstrations of the laser reflectometer science instrument as well as a new flight computer and upgraded radio. “Our Lunar Flashlight spacecraft unfortunately did not make it to the moon,” said Chris Baker, program executive for small spacecraft technology programs in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, during a NASA town hall meeting at the conference Aug. 7. “But we learned a lot from that mission.”
LOGAN, Utah — BlackSky, one of Rocket Lab’s biggest launch customers, has bought an additional five Electron launches for its next-generation imaging satellites. The companies announced Aug. 8 that BlackSky will purchase five Electron launches for missions starting in 2024 carrying its Gen-3 imaging satellites. Those launches will take place from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The companies did not disclose the value of the deal, although Rocket Lab has reported an average Electron launch price of $7.5 million. “With these launches BlackSky will replenish, replace and expand on-orbit capacity, introduce Gen-3 capabilities, and further enable BlackSky to meet the demands of the most time-dominant missions,” Brian O’Toole, chief executive of BlackSky, said in a statement. BlackSky announced plans for the Gen-3 satellites in 2022. The satellites are designed to produce images at resolutions as sharp as 35 centimeters. The company’s existing Gen-2 satellites provide imagery at a resolution of one meter. Rocket Lab has launched six missions carrying BlackSky satellites, most recently in March when an Electron launched the last two Gen-2 satellites . The new order makes BlackSky the biggest single customer for Electron launches. “After four years of launching for BlackSky, we’re delighted to continue our partnership with more dedicated launches on Electron,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a statement. “Building and maintaining a constellation requires precision deployment to unique orbits and a dependable launch schedule. We’re proud to deliver this dependable and tailored capability launch after launch, year after year.” The contract announcement coincided with Rocket Lab’s second quarter financial results. The company reported revenue of $62 million and a net loss of $45.9 million. That revenue included $22.5 million from three Electron launches in the quarter. Rocket Lab has performed seven Electron launches so far this year, including a launch of a suborbital version of the rocket called Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) in June. An eighth launch, of a Capella Space radar satellite, was scrubbed on July 30 and again on Aug. 6 because of data from an engine sensor. Beck said in an earning call that engineers were still studying “some unusual data” from that sensor but did not expect a lengthy delay. “We have a very straightforward path to resolution and we’ll reschedule the launch later this month.” Rocket Lab continues to forecast completing 15 Electron launches this year, both orbital and HASTE. The company expects to conduct four launches in the quarter, one of which, a rideshare mission for NASA, Spire and Telesat, took place July 17 . That launch also tested improvements in the Electron booster to aid in its recovery and future reuse. “The new system works exceptionally well, and Electron splashed down in the best condition we’ve seen it yet,” Beck said in the call. The booster splashed down 400 meters from the target, and a recovery boat reached the booster in 15 to 20 minutes. Beck said that about one of every three Electron boosters in production now is designed for recovery, with improvements planned on the Electrons slated for the vehicle’s 41 st and 45 th flights. The upcoming Capella launch is Electron’s 40 th flight. He said he did not foresee any additional changes in the booster for recovery and reuse after the 45 th flight. “Hopefully at that point it is just business as usual.” Rocket Lab has not set a date for reusing a full Electron booster. Beck said on the call that the company still plans to refly a single Rutherford engine on an Electron launch before the end of the year. “From there we’ll schedule the first reflight of a full stage booster,” he said.
TAMPA, Fla. — German startup Vyoma has ordered two pilot satellites for its proposed space debris-monitoring constellation from EnduroSat, the eight-year-old Bulgarian cubesat specialist. Luisa Buinhas, Vyoma co-founder and chief product officer, said Aug. 9 the spacecraft’s technical details are confidential but they would be based on a microsatellite platform between 50-500 kilograms. The plan is to launch the satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) around the end of 2024 and Vyoma expects to announce a launch provider soon. The satellites would use optical telescopes to track and catalog LEO objects larger than 10 centimeters, supplementing the space situational awareness (SSA) data Vyoma provides from third-party networks of ground-based sensors. These ground telescopes can observe LEO objects down to around six centimeters via dedicated tracking, depending on their position and under clear atmospheric conditions. However, Vyoma ultimately plans to keep tabs on objects as small as one centimeter, which currently cannot be tracked in LEO, by using satellites unaffected by Earth’s weather and able to work in a semi-autonomous surveillance mode. While the contract with EnduroSat only covers two spacecraft, Buinhas said three-year-old Vyoma aims to have a constellation of 12 satellites by 2026 under a phased deployment approach starting next year. The venture has raised more than 10 million euros ($11 million) for its plans, including an 8.5 million euro funding round announced in June that French aerospace giant Safran joined. As part of the investment, Safran’s electronics and defense subsidiary is looking into adding radiofrequency sensors and complementary optical telescopes to the constellation to improve its capabilities. EnduroSat deployed its first satellite in 2018 and says it has delivered more than 50 spacecraft to date. The Bulgarian manufacturer also recently raised $10 million in a Series A investment round to expand its operations globally. Similar to other small satellite specialists, EnduroSat offers a space-as-a-service business where it operates spacecraft on behalf of customers and their payloads. Vyoma declined to comment on whether it plans to use this arrangement from EnduroSat. Alexandria, Virginia-based Scout Space, Canada’s NorthStar Earth and Space, and Digantara have also recently announced early-stage funds for satellites promising to improve SSA in increasingly crowded orbits.
LOGAN, Utah — NASA has left the door open for changing the scope of Artemis 3, currently set to be the first crewed lunar landing of the program, if key elements suffer major delays. Speaking at an Aug. 8 briefing at the Kennedy Space Center, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said the Artemis 3 mission still has a formal launch date of December 2025 but that he was monitoring potential delays in hardware needed for the mission. “We may end up flying a different mission if that’s the case,” he said. “If we have these big slips out, we’ve looked at if can we do other missions.” Artemis 3 could also change based on the outcome of Artemis 2, he added. Asked later what a different mission might entail, Free pointed to the experience from the International Space Station program. “One thing we learned from ISS is to make sure we’re flexible so we keep human spaceflight viable,” he said, such as changing the assembly sequence of the station based on when hardware was available. “I think it’s incumbent upon us to do that,” he said. “We’re trying to look at all of the missions that we could fly to keep learning.” Free did not discuss what specifically might trigger changing Artemis 3. However, in a June presentation to a pair of National Academies committees, he expressed concern about the progress SpaceX was making on its Starship vehicle , including the lunar lander version that will be used on Artemis 3. He said then that Artemis 3 “probably” would slip to 2026 because of problems SpaceX has had on Starship. Free said at the KSC event that NASA received an “updated schedule” for Starship development from SpaceX during a briefing a couple weeks ago at the company’s Starbase test facility in Texas. He did not disclose the contents of that schedule but said that NASA would update its plans in the near future “after we have some time to digest it.” “My concern is the same because they haven’t launched,” he said of any changes in his views about Starship since the June meeting. The day-long meeting at Starbase offered what he described as “tremendous” insight into the work and their plans, while also giving NASA an opportunity to discuss how Starship fit into the overall Artemis architecture, such as interfaces between the vehicle and spacesuits that Axiom Space is developing for moonwalks. “When we come up with a date, December of 2025 or whatever that date might be, we want to have confidence for our teams that we all have a realistic path to get there,” he said, including ensuring there are sufficient margins in that schedule. The briefing coincided with a visit to KSC by the four-person Artemis 2 crew, who saw for the first time the Orion spacecraft that is being assembled for their mission. Free said that the launch of Artemis 2 remains officially scheduled for late November 2024. However, he said there is “a number of weeks of risk” to that date, with the Orion crew module assembly and testing the critical path on that schedule. “We’re really not working major issues right now,” he said of preparations for Artemis 2. “I think we’re on a good path.” NASA is also working to complete investigations into outstanding issues from the uncrewed Artemis 1 test flight last year, such as problems with electronics on the service module and the Orion capsule’s heat shield, which ablated more than expected on reentry. The heat shield “is definitely the biggest open issue” from Artemis 1, Free said. Engineers are still working to determine the root cause of the heat shield’s performance, including tests in an arcjet chamber that simulates reentry conditions. “We have some ideas on what that root cause might be,” he said, but didn’t discuss them. The commander of Artemis 2 endorsed that approach. “I know we will find the right solution,” NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman said. “We’re not going to launch until we know we’re ready, until our team knows the vehicle is ready. We will keep the pressure on, but so far all the right things are being done.”
LOGAN, Utah – The National Reconnaissance Office is eager to work with partners who are developing advanced technology for satellites and ground systems. “We’re eager to collaborate with industry and academia in advancing these capabilities and expanding our future architecture,” U.S. Space Force Col. Matt Allen, NRO Advanced Systems and Technology (AS&T) deputy director, said Aug. 8 at the Small Satellite Conference here. “Industry partners are crucial to our mission. As the marketplace continues to grow and competition intensifies and innovation accelerates, AS&T strategies are designed to capitalize on that and support our mission by speeding up the technology development and integration of enabling next-generation capabilities and exploring revolutionary and disruptive technologies.” In terms of evolutionary improvements, the NRO is “investing in radiation-tolerant and radiation-hardened microelectronics, which absolutely advantage the National Reconnaissance Office but also have advantages to the DOD, to civil space applications and to commercial applications,” Allen said. NRO is eager to identify materials that will reduce spacecraft mass or improve performance, “so that when it comes time for us to build our next-generation architectures, our program officers can work with industry, academia and other mission partners and labs to make sure that they’re ready for the mission,” Allen said. The NRO also is funding basic research that promises “to give us that undeniable advantage over our adversaries or give us that economic boost as a nation or give us an advantage to get our mission done better in a way that we never thought was possible,” Allen said. Within AS&T, NRO officials look for ways to accelerate the maturation and adoption of revolutionary technologies. AS&T works with “academic institutions, national labs, Department of Defense labs and international partners to do basic research, to cast a wide net to find some of those new technologies that allow us to do our mission better to provide intelligence,” Allen said. The NRO designs, builds, launches and operates spy satellites for the U.S. government. In recent years, the agency has supplemented its own intelligence-gathering capabilities with commercial satellite imagery and data. “NRO is building the largest and most capable overhead constellation in its history, with the number of satellites on orbit expected to quadruple by the end of the decade,” the agency said in an Aug. 8 news release. In the last decade, “the smallsat community has transformed space,” Allen said. “You’ve been able to pack more and more capability in smaller form factors.” That success has prompted the NRO to adopt a hybrid architecture designed to take advantage of the strengths of both the government and commercial sectors. “The architecture that we’re buying here must be flexible, adaptive, agile, interoperable,” Allen said. “The goal is to integrate commercial, allied and Defense Department capabilities with NRO’s own systems to expand our worldwide coverage and capacity, increase persistence, enhance resiliency, improve products at the pace of commercial advancements and assure routine and reliable access to space.”
TAMPA, Fla. — GHGSat has ordered another four 16U cubesats from Spire Global for a launch no earlier than 2024 to expand its greenhouse gas-monitoring constellation, the Canadian satellite operator announced Aug. 8. The satellites, each the size of 16 cubesats, are identical to the three GHGSat ordered from Spire last year for a launch in late 2023. GHGSat currently has nine satellites in low Earth orbit, built by the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) and are about the same size. The seven additional satellites from Spire will increase the frequency of the constellation’s observations and coverage as part of plans to monitor emissions daily from every industrial source, GHGSat said without elaborating. Spire and GHGSat declined to disclose the value of their expanded contract. The constellation uses gas-detection payloads from Switzerland-based ABB to track methane emissions from carbon-intensive industries such as oil and gas, coal mining, waste management, and agriculture. According to GHGSat, its services can help organizations detect methane leaks, quantify their emissions for regulators, and support strategies for reducing environmental harm. Vienna, Virginia-headquartered Spire is building satellites for GHGSat at manufacturing facilities in Scotland, United Kingdom. GHGSat said the contract demonstrates its growing commitment to the United Kingdom, where it announced a contract in June to share emissions data with the UK Space Agency for research and development purposes. Spire unveiled its 16U platform last year and it is currently the largest satellite offered by the company. Virgin Orbit was due to launch Spire’s first 16U cubesat — for Canadian space situational awareness venture NorthStar Earth and Space — in mid-2023 before collapsing into bankruptcy. Rocket Lab is now slated to launch NorthStar’s first four 16U satellites from Spire this fall on an Electron rocket. Spire operates satellites on behalf of its customers under its space-as-a-service business model to save them costs and other burdens, although the spacecraft for GHGSat would still be purpose-built for the Canadian firm’s payloads. In contrast, GHGSat fully owns the nine satellites it ordered from SFL. SFL director Robert Zee said Aug. 8 that GHGSat’s latest three satellites are performing well after launching in April on SpaceX’s Transporter-7 Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Other ventures plotting similar methane-monitoring satellite businesses include France-based Absolut Group and Satlantis of Spain. In December, Absolut Group ordered a 16U demo satellite from Lithuanian manufacturer NanoAvionics for a launch in early 2024 called Gen1, which would use sensors at very low temperatures to detect greenhouse gas leaks. SpaceNews senior staff writer Jeff Foust contributed to this article from Logan, Utah.
True Anomaly, a startup based in Denver, will install Redwire’s navigation and sensing cameras on two inspector satellites it plans to launch next year. True Anomaly developed a small satellite named Jackal, designed to chase down uncooperative objects and take pictures up close. The first two are scheduled to launch to low Earth orbit in early 2024 on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare. True Anomaly plans to market these vehicles to the U.S. government. Even Rogers, CEO of True Anomaly, said Aug. 8 that the company selected Redwire’s SpectraCam and SpectraTrac cameras for the Jackal vehicles. Rogers made the announcement at the Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. Each Jackal will have one SpectraCam for docking, navigation, inspection, and situational awareness; and two SpectraTrac star trackers. “The star trackers will work in concert with the cameras to provide spacecraft navigation and detection of objects of interest,” said Dean Bellamy, Redwire’s executive vice president for national security space. “The SpectraTrac algorithms were modified to allow True Anomaly to utilize the star trackers for space domain awareness applications,” he said. The SpectraCam has custom optics designed in partnership between True Anomaly and Redwire. “We look forward to continued engineering collaboration between Redwire and True Anomaly on future efforts,” Rogers said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Starfish Space has secured $1.8 million from the U.S. Air Force’s AFWERX technology accelerator to develop its satellite guidance software, the in-orbit servicing startup announced Aug. 8. The 18-month Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) will support work on Cephalopod, designed to enable a satellite to dock with another spacecraft using only electric propulsion, to mature the technology for supporting government and commercial servicing missions at scale. Starfish planned to test the software on its microwave-sized demonstrator Otter Pup, which was due to rendezvous with an SN3 space tug from rocket developer Launcher after launching together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission in June. However, Otter Pup was deployed earlier than planned, along with other payloads, after an anomaly on SN3’s attitude control system put the tug into a spin. Otter Pup also experienced high rates of rotation following its emergency deployment and Launcher later lost contact with SN3, making it unlikely that the mission could continue as planned. Ari Juster, who leads Starfish’s strategy and operations, told SpaceNews the Kent, Washington-based venture expects to provide an update on the mission in the coming weeks. Otter Pup “is still alive and we remain in communication with it,” Juster said, “though there are multiple challenges we are still working on,” including uncertainty around the satellite’s health given its rough deployment. “Each of these present hurdles we need to overcome to have a chance to pursue Otter Pup’s mission of performing the first-ever docking of two commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit,” he said Aug. 8 via email. Starfish has plans to follow Otter Pup up with full-scale Otter spacecraft, which are bigger than a mini-fridge and designed to extend the operational life of a satellite in geostationary orbit once docked. In low Earth orbit (LEO), Starfish plans to use Otter to dock with a defunct satellite, pull it into a de-orbit trajectory, and then detach and raise itself to remove other pieces of debris. Otter Pup fate Starfish had planned to use Otter Pup to demonstrate its rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (RPOD) technologies, including software for determining the relative position of a docking target and for planning trajectories. The software was capable of taking Otter Pup in from several kilometers away for docking without any human input, according to Starfish, although it had planned multiple time windows for humans to halt the trajectory sequence if needed. An earlier version of Cephalopod flew onboard Orbit Fab’s Tanker-001 Tenzing LEO refueling demo mission in 2021. A successful Otter Pup mission would have validated Cephalopod’s ability to support RPOD missions. However, Juster said there are still many potential tests Starfish could run Cephalopod through to help validate the technology that do not require Otter Pup to complete a full docking mission. Cephalopod’s development can also still continue terrestrially, regardless of Otter Pup’s status. “While the purpose of Otter Pup is to validate Starfish technology on-orbit, the actual development work, including ongoing testing of our software in simulation, happens here on Earth every day,” he added. Starfish announced in March that it had raised $14 million to develop its technology in a funding round led by insurance giant Munich Re’s venture capital arm.
An influential U.S. commission that advises Congress and the White House is soliciting proposals from companies that can produce an unclassified report on China’s remote sensing capabilities. The request for proposals , issued Aug. 8, seeks a report that assesses China’s objectives in remote sensing technologies, the state of the country’s remote sensing technology and its competitiveness. Proposals are due Sept. 8. The commission wants to “identify and assess Chinese investments in U.S. advanced remote sensor companies; and examine China’s use and development of advanced remote sensors for military purposes,” said the request. The United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, established in 2000, is an independent agency of the U.S. government that directly reports to Congress and the president. Congress created the commission to monitor and report on the national security implications of the U.S.-China economic relationship. Concerns about China’s growing investments The commission is investigating China’s advances in remote sensing as the nation continues to deploy more sophisticated imaging satellites and surveillance aircraft. Questions to be addressed in the report include to what extent China relies on U.S. or other countries’ components, software, and other technologies, and whether China or the United States have a “chokehold” on any key components. The commission wants the report to “identify any remote sensor technologies, components, intellectual property, other inputs or companies that China has acquired or may target for acquisition from U.S. and other foreign companies through legal or other means including cyber-enabled espionage.” Another topic of interest is how commercial remote sensing technologies support China’s People’s Liberation Army in areas like intelligence, surveillance, space domain awareness, and anti-submarine warfare.
LOGAN, Utah – The National Reconnaissance Office announced a contract Aug. 8 with Firefly Aerospace and Xtenti, a Texas-based space logistics startup, for a responsive space mission. The NRO mission, scheduled to launch on a Firefly Alpha launch vehicle in 2024, will demonstrate multiple on-orbit deployments with Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle and Xtenti’s Fantm-Ride small satellite dispenser. Elytra will deploy commercial rideshare payloads with Fantm-Ride, before performing an on-orbit maneuver. After the maneuver, Elytra will remain in orbit on standby, prepared to deploy U.S. government payloads on-demand. “Firefly is honored to support this critical mission that will further advance our nation’s responsive space capabilities and debut Firefly’s Elytra vehicle that’s filling a void in the on-orbit servicing market,” Firefly Aerospace CEO Bill Weber said in a statement. “As the first of many missions utilizing multiple Firefly vehicles, this operation will lay the groundwork for Firefly’s end-to-end mission services, proving our capabilities to rapidly launch, maneuver, and deploy satellites at a time and place of our customers’ choosing.” “Responsive delivery of space capabilities to orbit needs a paradigm shift, and Xtenti is excited to demonstrate two of FANTM-RiDE’s game-changing capabilities that enable responsive space,” dan Lim, Xtenti president and CEO said in a statement. “FANTM-RiDE not only enables rapid launch with its Rapid Rideshare Reconfiguration capability that eliminates slow and costly analytical barriers to fast payload hot-swaps, but it also enables on-orbit pre-positioning of payloads already stored on orbit for quick deployment on demand.”
LOGAN, Utah — The agency that regulates commercial remote sensing satellite systems has loosened restrictions imposed on many companies’ licenses, enabling them to provide higher-resolution imagery or other services. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Aug. 7 that it had modified “Tier 3” commercial remote sensing licenses for several companies, removing conditions that had been in place for up to three years. The conditions were part of a revision of the commercial remote sensing licensing system enacted in 2020 . That effort was intended to streamline the licensing process and reduce the amount of time license applications were reviewed by the government. That created three license tiers, including a Tier 3 for the most advanced systems. That tier gave NOAA the ability to include temporary restrictions on those licenses. “NOAA is fulfilling the commitment we made to industry in our 2020 regulations,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in a statement. “We said these temporary restrictions would last no more than three years, and three years later, we lifted them.” NOAA said it lifted 39 restrictions on an unspecified number of licenses. Those restrictions include a reduction of global imaging restrictions for certain imaging modes and removal of restrictions on non-Earth imaging and rapid revisit. It also removed all temporary conditions on X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. One of the companies that benefits from the removal of the conditions is SAR imaging company Umbra. The company announced Aug. 7 that, with the removal of the conditions, it can now offer SAR images to customers at a resolution of 16 centimeters, compared to no better than 25 centimeters under the old license conditions. “This means that we are finally able to offer customers the highest resolution images that our satellites are capable of capturing, setting the stage for even further expansion of products to customers,” said Gabe Dominocielo, Umbra’s co-founder and president, in a company statement. The removal of the temporary conditions is seen by both government and industry as a means to improve the competitiveness of U.S. remote sensing companies in the global market. “U.S. capabilities lead the world in this important market, and this licensing change will maintain that lead,” said Spinrad. “In the past, NOAA has taken a conservative approach to resolution limits for U.S. vendors following a long-held policy that a foreign vendor must provide a capability commercially before U.S. companies could field equivalent products,” tweeted Joe Morrison, a vice president at Umbra. “Now, they’re putting U.S. companies in the drivers’ seat again.” NOAA noted that a “small number” of Tier 3 restrictions are being retained for national security reasons at the request of the Secretary of Defense. NOAA did not specify what restrictions remain in place and on what licensees. As of the first quarter of 2023 , NOAA reported 23 Tier 3 licenses, a quarter of all active licenses. NOAA has issued 71 Tier 1 licenses for systems that provide data “substantially the same” as foreign systems and thus have no restrictions. There are no Tier 2 licenses for systems whose capabilities are the same as other NOAA-licensed systems. NOAA added in its announcement that the revised regulations have achieved one goal of reducing license processing time. The agency said it has reduced the average time to review a license from 48 days in 2020 to 14 days in 2023. The 2020 regulations set a 60-day deadline for reviewing license applications.
The Shanghai government has expressed backing for a broadband megaconstellation consisting of an initial 1,296 satellites. A Shanghai Municipal People’s Government press conference July 25 announced that a project known as “G60 Starlink” now envisions building a constellation of potentially more than 12,000 satellites. A first phase will see 1,296 satellites sent in orbit. The “G60 Starlink” broadband constellation is a separate project to China’s “Guowang” national satellite internet plan, commonly thought of as China’s answer to SpaceX’s Starlink. China’s government set up a state-owned enterprise in 2021 to oversee and coordinate the construction of the 13,000-satellite Guowang . G60 Starlink was previously geared towards developing an internet satellite cluster without an overt constellation plan. The project is centered in Shanghai’s Songjiang District and appears to offer an alternative to the national level Guowang plan. The G60 Starlink development has been quietly ongoing since 2016, and announced its cluster plans in 2021 . G60 refers to an expressway of the same name which runs through several cities in the Yangtze River Delta region. The project is part of a Science and Technology Innovation Valley initiative. A key first development phase of the project includes a satellite manufacturing center capable of producing 300 satellites per year. The facility is expected to enter service during 2023. It was also stated to lower the cost of a single satellite by 35 percent, though without specifying a reference point. A tweet by the account Megaconstellations suggests a request for coordination filed with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in April could correspond to the G60 Starlink plan. The documentation sets out plans for 36 polar orbital planes, each filled with 36 satellites, totaling 1,296 spacecraft. The satellites would operate in the Ku, Q and V bands. Both Guowang and G60 Starlink have both so far been opaque endeavors. If and how these two projects will be regulated, coordinated and, in the latter case, approved at the national level, is unknown to the outside. As noted by a recent post on SpaceRef , which delves into the possible intricacies of the situation, notes that the initiative is linked to the Chinese shareholders of the former KLEO Connect constellation project. That Chinese-European joint venture ended in acrimony and ongoing lawsuits. U.S. technology firm Rivada is planning to use the allocated frequencies for its own constellation after it acquired spectrum rights from Kleo’s majority Chinese shareholders. That move was enacted through separately buying a majority of Trion Space, a Liechtenstein shell company that controlled the filings. These were reassigned to Rivada from Trion earlier this year by the Liechtenstein regulator, a move confirmed by the ITU in June. This is however being disputed by KLEO’s Chinese shareholders and is being challenged . The July 25 report from the press conference by Shanghai Securities News says that experimental satellites have been launched and successfully networked. These likely refer to satellites earlier launched by KLEO Connect. Reports from the presser contained few details and did not outline a timeline for launching the G60 satellites. G60 Starlinks is also planning a tracking and control center for its project. The new satellite center also adds to a boom in Chinese small satellite capacity. These include facilities belonging to the state-owned China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp., and Innovation Academy for Microsatellites (IAMCAS) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Other entities with large, small satellite manufacturing centers include GalaxySpace and HKATG in Hong Kong. CAST and IAMCAS are understood to be involved in Guowang, while CASIC has its own commercial projects, namely the separate VLEO and Xingyun Internet of Things constellations. GalaxySpace launched its first stackable, flat-panel communications satellite July 27. The first batch of satellites for Guowang is expected to launch later this year , possibly on a Long March 5B rocket with a Yuanzheng-2 upper stage. China is also building new commercial launch pads on Hainan island to alleviate a bottleneck in access to launch. — Article edited Aug. 17 to note that relevant spectrum filings are controlled by Rivada. 
LOGAN, Utah — French space mobility company Exotrail has created two U.S. subsidiaries as part of efforts to serve a growing number of American customers. Exotrail announced Aug. 7 that it has created Exotrail U.S. Inc. and Exotrail U.S. Federal Inc. to serve the American market. Tyler Browder, co-founder and former chief executive of space software company Kubos, is chief executive of Exotrail U.S. The new subsidiaries are part of an expansion strategy for the French company funded by a $58 million Series B round it raised in February . The company offers a line of electric propulsion systems called spaceware as well as mission design and operations software. It is also developing spacedrop, a space logistics service that features a tug to deploy satellites to their desired orbits. David Henri, co-founder and chief product officer of Exotrail, said in an interview during the Small Satellite Conference that, in the near term, Exotrail U.S. will sell spaceware thrusters directly to U.S. customers to ease the challenges of exporting the thrusters from France to the U.S. It will also set up software services on U.S. cloud computing infrastructure. The two subsidiaries will serve different customers. “Exotrail U.S. is focused on commercial entities, helping them bring in technologies from France,” Browder said in an interview. “The federal one is exclusively focused on U.S. government work, whether civil or defense related.” Browder said that Exotrail is seeing stronger commercial and government demand for propulsion as smallsats move up in size from cubesats to microsats. There’s also growing interest in orbital transfer vehicles despite problem some companies have had developing and demonstrating them. “On the defense side we’re seeing pretty big signals,” said Brian Holt, director of U.S. government business development and partnerships for Exotrail U.S. “Exotrail is a one-stop shop from a space logistics perspective, so we’re positioned to support all those defense requirements.” In the next year, Exotrail plans to establish a production facility in the United States for its spaceware thrusters. It will also be an integration facility for spacedrop vehicles so that U.S. customers don’t need to ship their satellites to Europe for integration and then back to the U.S. for launch. “We’re looking for a city that makes the most sense for our customer base, our supply chain and our talent base,” Browder said. The company’s goal is to start production of spaceware thrusters from that U.S. site by the end of 2024. Those facilities will support a growing customer base. Henri said Exotrail already has customers such as Astro Digital, Starfish Space and York Space Systems, as well as others it has not announced. A third of Exotrail’s customer base is in North America, with another third in Europe and the remainder in Asia. “In the U.S. definitely we see a lot of traction,” he said, which the new subsidiaries will help foster by better supporting existing customers and attracting new U.S. customers. “We figured we didn’t need a U.S. presence to start,” he said, working contract relationships remotely. “We’re excited about what we will get with this U.S. presence and believe we can become a prime contractor for both commercial and government customers here in the U.S.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite TV broadcaster and terrestrial wireless operator Dish Network announced plans Aug. 8 to merge with EchoStar, its sister company focused on providing broadband services from space. Dish shareholders would own 69% of the combined group while EchoStar investors would hold the rest if their all-stock transaction clears regulatory approvals. The companies, both controlled by billionaire Charlie Ergen, expect to complete the merger later this year, creating a terrestrial and space connectivity giant that made a combined $4.5 billion in revenues for the three months ended June 30. The long-rumored deal comes as Dish’s financial resources come under strain as it invests heavily in deploying a 5G network across the United States while its legacy satellite TV business loses subscribers. In contrast, EchoStar had $1.9 billion in cash reserves as of June 30, and expects to significantly grow broadband subscribers following the successful launch of Jupiter-3 last month. However, EchoStar also faces mounting competition from SpaceX’s rapidly expanding Starlink broadband network and terrestrial telcos focused on rural subscribers. The “connectivity landscape is rapidly changing,” said EchoStar chief executive Hamid Akhavan, who would serve as CEO of the combined company. He said the merger would enable the group to provide a broader range of improved connectivity services by combining technology, spectrum, engineering, manufacturing, and network management resources. Ergen would be executive chair for the group once the transaction closes, and Dish CEO Erik Carlson would leave the company. The transaction would exchange each EchoStar share for 2.85 shares of Dish common stock, representing a 12.9% premium for EchoStar shareholders as of July 5 — the last full trading day before media speculation resurfaced about a potential merger. Dish was split from EchoStar in 2008 as part of its push to expand beyond satellite TV and into terrestrial mobile services and online streaming. 
The Space Development Agency announced plans to build a new satellite testing facility at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. This would expand the agency’s footprint at Grand Forks, one of two major U.S. sites selected for SDA’s satellite ground control operations. SDA, an agency under the U.S. Space Force, is working to deploy a mesh network in low Earth orbit projected to have hundreds of communications, data-relay and sensor satellites to support military users around the world. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and SDA Director Derek Tournear in a news release Aug. 7 said the new facility will be a 25,000 square-foot satellite test and checkout center, expected to be completed in 2026. SDA two years ago announced its two major satellite operations centers would be built at Grand Forks and at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. Hoeven, a member of the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee, said the Pentagon’s 2023 budget includes $4 million to start construction of the test and checkout facility. Congress in 2022 approved $18 million for the construction of the two operations centers. Hoeven noted that an additional $4 million is being proposed in the Senate’s version of the 2024 defense spending bill to continue construction of the new facility, and he expects another $4 million to be added in 2025. Contractors selected to build ground ops centers SDA last year awarded a $324.5 million contract to a team led by General Dynamics Mission Systems — along with Iridium Communications, KSAT, Emergent and Raytheon Technologies — to build and operate the ground control centers. “Development of our Tranche 1 Space Networking Operations Center is well underway,” Tournear said. “The addition of the SDA test and checkout center on the base will allow us to support near-continuous launch into the future.” 
LOGAN, Utah – ExoTerra Resources has demonstrated its first Halo Hall-effect thrusters in orbit on DARPA Blackjack satellites. The first ExoTerra Halo thruster lit on its first attempt in June. Now, three Blackjack Aces satellites manufactured by RTX subsidiary Blue Canyon Technologies have fired ExoTerra Halo thrusters. “We have attempted to fire three of them and three of them have fired,” ExoTerra CEO Mike VanWoerkom told SpaceNews . “It’s huge for the company to have the flight heritage and proof that the system works. It puts us in that next level of demonstrated performance.” ExoTerra custom-built the primary propulsion system for the Aces satellites. The ESPA-Grande size microsatellites, launched in June on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare flight, are testing optical intersatellite links and on-orbit data processing. The ExoTerra propulsion systems on the Aces microsatellites include Halo thrusters, propellant distribution components and power processing units. “The Halo system is performing nominally and providing thrust to maintain and raise the satellite’s orbit,” ExoTerra said in a news release. Xenon feeds the Halo thrusters on the Aces satellites. ExoTerra’s Halo thrusters work equally well with krypton, VanWoerkom said. “Working with BCT and DARPA on the Blackjack program has been a great experience,” VanWoerkom said in a statement. “We’re all very excited to finally have the thruster validated in space and are looking forward to providing propulsion for several more flights in the coming year.” ExoTerra, founded in 2011, designs, manufactures and tests electric propulsion elements for small satellites. 
LOGAN, Utah – Through the Slingshot 1 mission, the Aerospace Corp. has demonstrated how open standards and nonproprietary interfaces can help streamline satellite integration and operation. After more than a year of on-orbit operations, Slingshot “has been a huge success,” David Hinkley, Aerospace Slingshot payload operator, told SpaceNews. The 19 Slingshot payloads were developed independently and integrated in a couple of weeks prior to launch in July 2022 of the 12-unit cubesat on a Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket. Speedy integration was possible thanks to Handle, a modular plug-and-play interface that allows payloads to draw power from the satellite bus and to communicate with the satellite and other payloads. “It’s a peer-to-peer network where every payload can communicate,” said Alexander Utter, Slingshot command and data handling lead and principal investigator for Slingshot payload SatCat5. As Slingshot begins extended operations, Aerospace is using Slingshot’s plug-and-play architecture for additional missions and inviting satellite operators to consider adopting it. The Slingshot standard has not been endorsed by international standards organizations. Still, “we think it’s an advancement on the current state of the art,” Utter said. . After a little more than a year in orbit, Slingshot payloads continue to demonstrate autonomy, robotics and onboard processing. In addition, the satellite is equipped with a GPS transponder, a hydrogen peroxide thruster and a laser communications downlink. Slingshot’s common interface has allowed payloads to share resources. For example, Vertigo, a modular attitude control system that helps Slingshot point at ground targets, is accessing processing through Slingshot’s local area network. As a result, Vertigo does not need its own highly capable processor. Another novel payload on Slingshot focuses on machine learning for rendezvous and proximity operations. A camera onboard Slingshot observes a tiny cubesat replica attached to a deployable panel on the outside of the satellite. Observing the miniature satellite in various lighting conditions, orientations and against different backgrounds provides training data for machine learning algorithms.
LOGAN, Utah – In-space propulsion specialist Busek said that more than 100 of the company’s BHT-350 Hall-effect thrusters are operating in orbit on OneWeb communications satellites. Airbus OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture of OneWeb and Airbus Defence and Space, manufactures OneWeb communications satellites in Florida. Prior to the war in Ukraine, Airbus OneWeb Satellites purchased thrusters from Russia-based electric propulsion company EDB Fakel and Busek. When Western sanctions to penalize Russia for its invasion of Ukraine prevented OneWeb from buying Fakel thrusters, Busek increased production. “Busek has a strong record of developing and flying novel satellite propulsion technologies, however our manufacturing capability was largely unproven,” Peter Hruby, Busek vice president, told SpaceNews by email. “The recent on-orbit commissioning of these 100-plus plasma thrusters validates Busek’s supply chain, manufacturing, quality and test approaches. From here we’re adding more product into the manufacturing mix.” Natick, Massachusetts-based Busek announced the successful on-orbit commissioning of BHT-350 thrusters on 80 OneWeb satellites earlier this year. OneWeb is Busek’s largest customer for Hall-effect thrusters delivered and in orbit. “It was a major effort to get to this point and we’re thankful to the excellent teams at Airbus OneWeb Satellites, Airbus, and of course OneWeb,” Hruby said. Data obtained to date “shows all of the thrusters are operational, which is a great thing,” Hruby said. “We’re watching closely as they perform their intended roles of electric orbit-raising, collision avoidance, and station-keeping for the constellation.” The OneWeb order is one of the reasons Busek doubled production capacity last year. Busek is also producing 6-kilowatt Hall-effect thrusters for the NASA lunar Gateway Power and Propulsion Element being built by Maxar Technologies. 
LOGAN, Utah – Kongsberg Satellite Services announced Aug. 8 an automated ground network for small satellite constellations that includes Ka-band. Historically, only KSAT provided Ka-band antennas at ground sites for specific customers and their missions. Meanwhile, KSATlite, the company’s standard product for small satellite operators, was limited to S-band and X-band. After surveying customers, KSAT determined it was time to add Ka-band to the KSATlite network. “Now that we’ve seen there is a greater demand, we’ve added this additional capability within the KSATlite network,” Ruben Nunez, KSAT USA head of business development, told SpaceNews. KSAT is purchasing small-aperture tri-band antennas for KSATlite ground station locations. The antennas will provide S-band uplink and downlink, X-band downlink and Ka-band downlink. “Adding tri-band antennas at these selected sites around the world will further streamline operations, enhance resource allocation for optimal performance and ensure reliable and secure communication regardless of geographical constraints,” according to KSAT’s Aug. 8 news release. KSAT has rapidly expanded its network of antennas in recent years to keep up with growing data traffic. In June, the Norwegian company unveiled its 23rd ground station in Jeju, South Korea. “The launch of the KSATlite Ka-band network showcases our ability to provide seamless and versatile connectivity solutions to our customers, with exceptional reliability and unmatched performance”, Marte Indregard, KSAT chief commercial officer, said in a statement. This article was updated Aug. 9 with comments from Ruben Nunez, KSAT USA head of business development .
Rocket Factory Augsburg has secured fresh investment as it pushes towards a first orbit launch attempt from SaxaVord, Scotland. The German launch service provider has raised €30 million ($32.9 million) from global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., or KKR. The convertible debt investment comes as RFA works towards a first launch of its RFA ONE rocket. “The investment will facilitate RFA’s upcoming integrated first stage test and complete the company’s launch pad at SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, to eventually bring the RFA ONE microlauncher to the launchpad,” RFA said in a statement . That launch is now scheduled for Q2 2024. The company was previously aiming to conduct the test flight in late 2023 , according to comments in November 2022. The three-stage RFA One launcher uses a cluster of 9 kerosene-liquid oxygen staged combustion Helix engines on the first stage. It is designed to carry up to 1,300 kilograms into a 300-kilometer polar orbit. KKR will become a leading investor in RFA alongside the existing strategic investor OHB, according to the statement. In a related development, KKR has acquired a minority stake in German satellite maker OHB with the intent to take the company private. The plans to delist are centered on giving OHB more flexibility to take advantage of a burgeoning commercial satellite market, Reuters reported . KKR’s investment in RFA follows progress in a number of areas. RFA successfully conducted an upper stage hot fire test in May. In June the firm reached an agreement with the French space agency CNES to offer its launch services from the Kourou Space Center (CSG) in French Guiana. Launches from the ELM-Diamant launch complex at CSG are to commence from 2025. “KKR is excited to support RFA in its efforts to revolutionize access to space, which is crucial for emerging technologies that will shape our future,” Christian Ollig, Partner and Head of the DACH region at KKR, said in a statement. “The team’s exceptional track record of achieving technical milestones and their unwavering focus on cost leadership are precisely the right strategy for future success in the global marketplace. We look forward to supporting RFA on its growth path.” RFA says it offers “cost-effective and flexible launch services to space as global demand for access to space rises.” The company is one of a number of European launch startups developing small launchers. These include Munich-based Isar Aerospace , Skyrora and Orbex based in the United Kingdom, and PLD Space in Space. Isar Aerospace raised $165 million in March this year as it works towards launch of its Spectrum launcher. The companies are competing to reach orbit and secure customers as Europe suffers challenges in its ability to access space. The much-delayed Ariane 6 is now not expected to launch until early 2024 . The European Space Agency, CNES, Arianespace and ArianeGroup will hold a press briefing and question and answer session Sep. 4. 
LOGAN, Utah – Solar energy startup Solestial announced plans Aug. 2 to supply solar arrays for space tugs developed by Denver startup Atomos Space . Atomos plans to test a small Solestial photovoltaic panel on an orbital transfer vehicle demonstration set to launch on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare flight in early 2024. Solestial also will supply large solar blankets for two Atomos’ solar-electric OTVs slated to begin flying in late 2024 or early 2025. Atomos selected Solestial’s technology because of its performance and price. In terms of “kilowatts of output per kilogram of array, Solestial’s solution was really best in class,” Vanessa Clark, Atomos co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “We can get 20 kilowatts of solar arrays for less than 100 kilograms.” Atomos OTVs need large solar arrays to move commercial and government satellites “relatively quickly” from low-Earth to geostationary orbit and from geostationary transfer orbit to geostationary orbit, Clark said. “Those missions aren’t possible with the solar arrays that are available today or with chemical propulsion,” Clark said. “For our business, Solestials technology is certainly enabling and we’re excited about what it will enable for our customers too.” For Solestial, the Atomos contract is important validation from a customer with a demanding mission. Atomos “needs a gigantic solar array and also needs it to be really lightweight,” said Stan Herasimenka, Solestial co-founder and CEO. “We’re still validating the technology. Being an alpha customer takes a lot of trust in the team and technology.” Solestial is stress testing its technology on the ground. In addition, small solar panels have been shipped to multiple Solestial customers for on-orbit demonstrations. Earlier this year, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission validated Solestial’s claim that its silicon solar cells can effectively anneal (or cure) radiation damage under sunlight at 90 degrees Celsius. Both Atomos and Solestial participated in the 2019 Techstars accelerator, where the founders met. Solestial raised $10 million and Atomos raised $5 million in 2022.
LOGAN, Utah – Japanese startup Pale Blue announced a contract Aug. 7 to supply water vapor thrusters for South Korea’s Yonsei University. “With this contract we can expand our Asian connections and partnerships to collaborate more with India, Thailand and with other countries as well,” Emily Okuhara, Pale Blue manager of marketing and communications, told SpaceNews . Pale Blue, a University of Tokyo spinoff founded in 2020, will supply Yonsei University with water vapor propulsion systems for a pair of six-unit cubesats. The cubesats are designed for a formation flight experiment that includes an optical communications demonstration. “Our mission aims for demonstrating cutting-edge laser communication, orbital maneuvering and formation-keeping,” Sang-Young Park, a Yonsei University astronomy professor, said in a statement. “These thrusters perfectly meet our requirements and offer the advantage of being not only environmentally friendly, but also free from regulatory constraints.” Pale Blue proved its Resistojet thruster in orbit for the first time in March on a Sony Corp. Star Sphere satellite. Pale Blue plans to establish mass production of Resistojet thrusters to reduce the cost and lead time for potential customers in the United States, Europe and Asia, said Yuichi Nakagawa, Pale Blue co-founder and chief technology officer. In addition to the Resistojet thruster, Pale Blue is developing an Ion thruster and a Hybrid thruster. The company’s Ion Hall-effect thruster is likely to reach orbit for the first time in 2024 or 2025, Nakagawa said.
LOGAN, Utah — Boeing has delayed the first flight of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle with astronauts on board to no earlier than March 2024 as the company continues to work on issues with the spacecraft’s parachutes and wiring. Boeing and NASA officials said in an Aug. 7 media briefing that they are making good progress on those issues, which they revealed more than two months ago , but that they still have several more months of work to complete before the vehicle will be ready to carry NASA astronauts. One problem has been with “soft links” in the parachutes that were weaker than expected, preventing the overall parachute system from achieving the factor of safety required for crewed flights. “That has been redesigned by the team. They’re in the middle of testing that design,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said on the call. That testing will include a drop test scheduled for the latter half of November, said Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and program manager for Starliner. That test will also verify an updated overall design for the parachute that had been intended for the first operational flight of Starliner, but will be pulled forward for this Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. Stich said a single test of the parachute will be sufficient, compared to a series of drop tests for a revision of parachutes during development of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. “When we looked at the changes that we’re talking about, we felt like we only needed one test” to verify those changes, he said, which he described as much less significant than the earlier SpaceX parachute changes. “The design changes were, what I would say, minimal as opposed to what we had for Dragon, which was really a wholesale change in the canopy.” Technicians have also been removing a tape used on wiring harnesses called P-213 that is flammable in some environments. Stich said that entries in a NASA database were “a bit inconsistent” about the tape’s flammability that led to its use in environments where it could pose a hazard. Workers have removed about 85% of the tape in the upper part of the spacecraft. In the lower part of the spacecraft, some tape is hard to remove or could cause damage if its removed, said Nappi. Engineers have developed protective barriers and coatings, or can wrap the P-213 tape with acceptable tape, to mitigate the flammability hazard. “Based on the area, we’ll apply the right remediation technique.” Neither NASA nor Boeing announced a new launch date for the CFT mission, which will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station for a brief stay. Before the parachute and wiring tape problems were announced, NASA had been targeting a late July launch of the mission, which has already suffered extensive delays. Nappi said the critical path for getting Starliner ready for flight will be the parachute work. “Right now, based on the current plans, we’re anticipating that we’re going to be ready with the spacecraft in early March,” he said. That does not, he added, mean that the CFT launch will take place in March. He said Boeing will have to work with NASA on ISS schedules, as well as United Launch Alliance on Atlas 5 launch schedules, to set a date. “We’ll work that throughout the next several weeks and see where we can fit in, and then we’ll set a launch date.” Stich noted that March is typically when Roscosmos performs crew rotations using its Soyuz spacecraft, which could limit CFT opportunities that month. “We have not taken the vehicle readiness and mapped it into when we can find a date” that works with both the station and ULA, he said. “That’s really the next step.” The delay of CFT into at least the spring of 2024 could push back the first operational, or post-certification, mission to 2025. Stich said it was too early to determine when Starliner could fly that mission. He suggested that mission could fly around the end of 2024, although crew rotation missions on Crew Dragon spacecraft are currently launching in February and August. “We would like to fly it as soon as we can.” Boeing’s Nappi reiterated the company’s commitment to fly its contracted series of six post-certification missions, roughly once a year through late in the decade, even as the company’s losses on the Starliner program exceed $1 billion . The ISS is scheduled for retirement around 2030, but Nappi said there was time in that schedule to fit in the six flights by the end of the decade. “There’s no reason to change our plans.” NASA, meanwhile, emphasized its desire to have a second commercial crew provider, with Starliner alternating with Crew Dragon. “We’ve got plenty of flights for Boeing to go fly, and we’re in good shape,” Stich said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat said Aug. 7 it is partnering with a regional satellite operator in Thailand to order a high throughput geostationary telecoms spacecraft over Asia. The French fleet operator’s Asia subsidiary has agreed to lease half the capacity on the satellite over its lifetime from Space Tech Innovation Limited, which is controlled by Thailand’s Thaicom and is procuring the spacecraft. The companies plan for the satellite to be delivered in 2027 for a launch to 119.5 degrees East, where Eutelsat said it would give the French company around 50 gigabits per second (Gbps) in extra capacity over Asia. A software-defined payload on the satellite would enable the operators to adjust services in response to changing customer demands, the operators said in a news release that offered few other details. Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said in a statement that the satellite would be compatible with its multi-orbit growth strategy, including the low Earth orbit (LEO) services it expects to gain after getting regulatory approval to buy OneWeb this summer. Patompob Suwansiri, Thaicom’s CEO, added that the joint satellite also sets the operators up for expanding their partnership in the future to chase other growth opportunities. Thaicom currently owns two satellites after recently being forced to surrender two others to the Thai government following the end of a 30-year concession period. The Thai company’s expansion plans come as regional operators in Asia and elsewhere face increasing competition from OneWeb, SpaceX’s Starlink, and other sprawling LEO broadband networks in the pipeline. Amid a gradual decline in its legacy satellite TV business, Eutelsat is also under pressure to find cost-effective ways to fuel its pivot into connectivity services as it works through a takeover deal valuing OneWeb at $3.4 billion.
LOGAN, Utah — In-space transportation company Momentus is now offering a version of its Vigoride tug as a satellite bus for commercial and government customers. The company announced Aug. 2 that it was now offering customers a bus called the M-1000. The bus is similar to the Vigoride orbital transfer vehicle that Momentus has flown three times so far, but without the water-based propulsion system it uses for changing orbits. The bus emerged from limitations flying hosted payloads on Vigoride, which remain attached to the tug rather than deployed as satellites. Rob Schwarz, chief technology officer at Momentus, said in an interview that the company started gauging interest a year ago in hosted payloads on Vigoride, including from U.S. government agencies. “What we’re finding is that a lot of government customers don’t really want to borrow the bus and lease it, but instead they want to own it,” he said. “Also, in some cases, because of the sensitivity of the payloads they don’t want to share it with other users.” That led Momentus to instead consider a version of Vigoride that would be a satellite bus sold to customers instead of provided as a service. It uses many of the same subsystems, like avionics and power, as Vigoride. Changes include improved pointing and options for third-party chemical and electric propulsion systems. Schwarz said the M-1000 can accommodate between 350 and 800 kilograms of payload, depending on how the spacecraft is launched. It generates one kilowatt of orbit average power for the payload, with a peak of three kilowatts. Options like improved pointing and propulsion are offered through a modular approach to customize the bus for each customer. “The idea is to have all of these enhancements to the system that can be plugged in,” he said, like modifying a PC. “The goal is to get to a custom configuration of the spacecraft to the customer within a year.” Momentus has not signed any contracts for the M-1000 yet. The company did offer it to the Space Force’s Space Development Agency for its Tranche 2 Transport Layer Alpha program of 50 satellites. Those proposals were due to SDA in July. Schwarz said he expects to see both government and commercial interest in M-1000. Government customers would likely be more interested in the modularity aspects of the bus to support special services, he predicted, while commercial customers are attracted by the projected rapid production schedule. He said the M-1000 should also be competitive on price, but did not disclose specific pricing for the bus. Momentus plans to produce the M-1000 bus at the same facility where it builds Vigoride vehicles. That is sufficient for building up to 50 buses per year, and Schwarz said the company is exploring options for a dedicated factory if there is greater demand. Momentus continues to offer Vigoride tugs. The next tug, Vigoride-7, is scheduled to launch on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare mission in early 2024. The vehicle was scheduled to launch on Transporter-9 in October, but the company pushed the mission back so it can fly with “a fuller load of payloads for deployment in LEO with better mission economics,” the company said in a July 28 statement.
TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon plans to deploy its first pair of Project Kuiper prototypes this fall on an Atlas 5 from United Launch Alliance (ULA), the internet giant said Aug. 7 after switching rockets a second time to avoid mounting delays. The test satellites were slated to fly on the debut launch of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, which was recently pushed to the fourth quarter following its latest delay. Amazon had initially planned to deploy KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 by late last year with ABL Space Systems, before the rocket developer’s RS1 vehicle also suffered setbacks. The Project Kuiper prototypes could launch as soon as Sept. 26 on a dedicated Atlas 5, according to a Reuters report citing Amazon spokesperson James Watkins. Amazon has nine Atlas 5 and 38 Vulcan rockets on order from ULA as part of the multibillion-dollar launch contracts it has secured for Project Kuiper, including other vehicles under development by Arianespace and Blue Origin. The company plans to start launching commercial satellites next year amid impending regulatory deadlines for its proposed 3,236-strong low Earth orbit broadband constellation. Half the constellation must be deployed by July 2026 under rules tied to its Federal Communications Commission license, and the rest three years later. Amazon expects to open a 31,000-square-meter satellite processing facility in early 2025 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to help ramp up deployment. The company has secured up to 92 launches in total from ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin.
TAMPA, Fla. — NanoAvionics is preparing to ship a nanosatellite slated to launch this fall to study black holes and neutron stars from low Earth orbit, the Lithuanian manufacturer announced Aug. 7. The company provided its 6U satellite platform for the NinjaSat mission, and integrated it with a payload from Japanese research institute Riken that would track the X-ray photons these compact objects emit to explore how matter accretes to them. After launching on SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 Transporter rideshare mission, NinjaSat would spend two years in LEO observing persistently bright X-ray objects. Targets include Scorpius X-1, a binary star system with a fast-spinning neutron star that makes it one of the brightest X-ray objects trackable from near-Earth orbit. Riken, which is funding the mission, said NinjaSat will also follow up on observations of transient objects made by Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI), an X-ray camera mounted to the Japanese Experiment Module on the International Space Station. “NinjaSat allows high cadence monitoring and flexible operations for such transient sources,” Riken chief scientist Toru Tamagawa said, “which are of great value in time-domain astronomy, covertly targeting critical scientific results as a ninja.” Riken procured NinjaSat from Mitsui Bussan Aerospace (MBA), which facilitates access to the Japanese Experiment Module and brought NanoAvionics in as a subcontractor. MBA CEO Sadayuki Osugi said NinjaSat is the first satellite in a partnership with NanoAvionics that aims to use the Lithuanian company’s technology for other customers in the Japanese market. NinjaSat is designed to use two identical Gas Multiplier Counters for measuring individual radiation events, attached to each end of the side of the spacecraft pointed out to space. The spacecraft also has a pair of Radiation Belt Monitors to keep tabs on background particles, and a star tracker for positioning.
A communications satellite designed by Lockheed Martin for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency passed a critical design review, the company announced Aug. 7. Lockheed Martin will build 42 satellites for SDA’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer, a mesh network in low Earth orbit that will support U.S. military operations. The company in February 2022 won a $700 million contract to produce the satellites using buses made by Terran Orbital. The Tranche 1 Transport Layer of 126 satellites also will include spacecraft manufactured by Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems. The Transport Layer is the first major DoD program to use smaller, lower-cost satellites for global military communications and data relay. Kevin Huttenhoff, Lockheed Martin’s senior manager for space data transport, said the company worked with SDA to “thoroughly validate the Tranche 1 satellite and ground designs, to include supplier designs.” For the design review, Lockheed Martin 3D-printed a full-size replica of the Tranche 1 satellite. The critical design review also included an optical communications terminal interoperability test. All SDA satellites have optical terminals for in-space communications. SDA plans to start launching the Tranche 1 Transport Layer in late 2024. Lockheed Martin will assemble and test the satellites at a new facility designed for small-satellite production. Tranche 0 launch targeted for late August Under a separate $187.5 million contract SDA awarded in August 2020, Lockheed Martin built 10 satellites for the Tranche 0 Transport Layer. These 10 satellites — along with one from York Space and two missile-tracking satellites made by SpaceX — were scheduled to launch in June but are now projected to launch in late August, an SDA official told SpaceNews . The 13 satellites will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The SDA official said the launch was delayed to work out encryption security issues. “We had to work back and forth with the National Security Agency,” the official said. The NSA certifies the encryption systems used in DoD platforms. “We feel confident we’ve been able to resolve what is necessary and we’re progressing toward launch at the end of the month,” the official said. Huttenhoff said Lockheed Martin’s 10 satellites are “all wrapped up, ready to ship.”
LOGAN, Utah — A quartet of cubesats launched in May to monitor the development of tropical storm systems is working just in time to support monitoring of the Atlantic hurricane season. Four cubesats for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission launched on a pair of Rocket Lab Electron rockets May 7 and May 25 . The satellites have been undergoing tests of their main instruments, microwave radiometers to collect temperature and humidity data on tropical storms. Since the launches, the mission has been working to calibrate and validate the data from those instruments, said William Blackwell, principal investigator for TROPICS at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, during a presentation at the Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 5. “We’re in the throes of getting the constellation optimized for hurricane season,” he said, with data available to the general public within a couple months. Initial analysis of the data from the four satellites is promising, as well as observations from a prototype satellite, TROPICS Pathfinder, launched in 2021. “It’s working just like we hoped it would work,” he said of data from the older satellite. “We’ve got some really high-quality data of a lot of tropical cyclones.” Satellites have flown microwave instruments for decades, but typically on large satellites that can only revisit storms every several hours. The four-satellite TROPICS constellation, in orbits inclined at 33 degrees optimized for the tropical storm belt, can revisit weather systems every hour. “This is really a transformative mission,” he said, as an hourly revisit rate can better track the dynamics of storm systems as they form and evolve. “This is the first high-revisit-rate microwave observations of tropical cyclones that we’ve ever had.” In addition to the high frequency of observations, the TROPICS satellites provide high-quality data. Blackwell said the precipitation rain rate estimate derived from TROPICS Pathfinder data is better than state-of-the-art instruments on much larger spacecraft. The TROPICS constellation is the result of more than a decade of work to develop small microwave instruments that could fit on cubesats. That included several demonstration missions to test radiometers that operate in 12 bands but could still fit within a single cubesat unit, part of a 3U cubesat. The constellation overcame a setback in June 2022 when two cubesats were lost in an Astra Rocket 3.3 launch failure. After Astra withdrew Rocket 3.3 from the market, NASA awarded a contract to Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four satellites. NASA has not announced plans to build any additional TROPICS satellites but said that the mission can still achieve its science goals with four spacecraft. Blackwell said the TROPICS technology is now being transferred to the private sector. Tomorrow.io plans to use microwave radiometers based on TROPICS for its constellation of 18 cubesats that will collect weather data.
LOGAN, Utah – Frontgrade Technologies, a Veritas Capital company, announced the acquisition Aug. 7 of Aethercomm, a Carlsbad, California-based manufacturer of high-power amplifier modules and switches. “Our enabling superpower is providing turnkey solutions for a satellite provider that wants an RF payload for communications from spacecraft to the ground or spacecraft to spacecraft,” Tim Lynch, Frontgrade chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews. “We had a fair amount of the building blocks to provide that turnkey solution before. But the addition of Aethercomm gives us the amplification portion of the RF chain.” Colorado Springs-based Frontgrade supplies radiation-hardened electronics. Prior to the acquisition, Frontgrade offered no active RF components. Now, “we have the solution that makes the easy button more apparent and more feasible for our customer,” Lynch said. Aethercomm will operate as a new division, Frontgrade Aethercomm. Frontgrade was known as CAES Space Systems, the former electronics unit of British defense and aerospace contractor Cobham, before being purchased early this year by Veritas. “Aethercomm’s RF technologies have an excellent reputation for reliability and are very complementary to Frontgrade’s current portfolio of processing, power and propulsion solutions,” Mike Elias, Frontgrade president and CEO, said in a statement. “We look forward to integrating Aethercomm’s business capabilities and highly skilled team with Frontgrade.” Todd Thornton, Aethercomm founder and CEO, along with senior managers will remain with Frontgrade Aethercomm. “This strategic combination was made possible through the dedication of our team and enables Aethercomm to benefit from increased scale and investment in R&D and people to better serve our customers,” Thornton said in a statement. “By adding our active RF solutions to the existing Frontgrade platform, we will ensure that companies operating in the aerospace and defense sectors are equipped with an innovative and fully integrated product suite.” Correction: An earlier version of this article said the acquisition was announced in June. It was announced Aug. 7. 
LOGAN, Utah – Benchmark Space Systems intends to offer satellite operators the type of driver assistance popular in automobiles. On Aug. 7, Benchmark began demonstrating SmartAIM, Smart Advanced In-Space Mobility, at the SmallSat Conference here. SmartAIM is software embedded in Benchmark’s chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems that allows satellite operators to select among tiers of autonomous flight. “It’s an intelligent software layer that can take abstract commands like go to a desired orbital location and create maneuvers,” Chris Carella, Benchmark chief commercial officer, told SpaceNews. “It can control the engine for you. Or, you can tell it what you’d like your satellite to be doing and it can make that happen.” For example, SmartAIM can provide station-keeping, payload pointing, collision avoidance and maneuver planning. “We offer it at different levels of handoff of control,” Carella said. “The entry level would be more of an assist mode. But we have the ability to automatically take information about conjunctions and maneuver without human interaction. “ Autonomous operations are becoming increasingly popular as satellite constellations grow. While satellite operators can manually control a dozen satellites, constellations of hundreds of satellites require more autonomy. “Constellations are going to grow beyond what is feasible to manage in today’s manual methods,” Carella said. “We’re trying to streamline some of the simple operational tasks and some of the short-notice-warning tasks.” Benchmark plans to integrate Kayhan Space’s Pathfinder spaceflight safety service with the SmartAIM platform. If a satellite operator said, “There’s a conjunction on bird 72 on Friday,” SmartAIM could calculate the collision probability and determine the best course of action, Carella said. Through the new partnership, “Kayhan will directly inform SmartAIM when there’s a conjunction and we’ll handle it,” he added. Siamak Hesar, Kayhan co-founder and CEO, said in a statement that the company was “thrilled to partner with Benchmark” and “integrate with their SmartAIM intelligent propulsion solution to maximize safe and sustainable space operations.” Satellite operators establish the rules for addressing conjunctions. For instance, they can direct SmartAIM to optimize for propellant preservation, miss distance or electrical power preservation. “SmartAIM can make that decision, create commands and maneuver,” Carella said. “If that scares folks, they can have human-in-the-loop checkpoints.” SmartAIM’s design, development and testing was funded in part by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate. Satellites equipped with initial versions of SmartAIM for collision avoidance and station keeping are scheduled to launch in 2024. Additional operator assistance and autopilot functions will be offered in late 2024 and 2025. “Benchmark is in full production mode on propulsion systems for several government and commercial missions,” Carella said in a statement. “Operators are not just looking to Benchmark to provide propulsion hardware, but a full life cycle partnership and innovative bundled mobility solutions to maneuver safely and confidently through space.” Vermont-based Benchmark is known for producing nontoxic chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems. The company is fulfilling orders for dozens of Xantus electric metal plasma thrusters , according to an Aug. 7 news release. In addition, Benchmark is manufacturing hundreds of Lynx bi-propellant thrusters for low-Earth orbit and cislunar missions.
SAN FRANCISCO – Xenesis is preparing to install an optical communications hub for customers of Bartolomeo, Airbus’ external research platform on the International Space Station. “Airbus is working with Xenesis to provide broadband data downlink capability to its customers on the Bartolomeo space platform,” Manfred Jaumann, Airbus Defence and Space head of low-Earth orbit and suborbital programs, told SpaceNews by email. “This capability has been foreseen from the beginning of the platform development and would now be realized with the Xen-Hub terminal.” Illinois-based Xenesis plans to ship the Xen-Hub optical flight terminal to Airbus in November for launch on an ISS commercial resupply mission. After installation in February 2025 and testing, Xenesis will begin providing communications services by the end of the second quarter of 2025, said Xenesis CEO Mark LaPenna. Bartolomeo customers focused on Earth observation are “contributing to the need for broadband communications with the ground,” Jaumann said. “Airbus and Xen-Hub will provide the optical communication solution which will open up broadband data downlink capability on the ISS between many users in parallel.” The Bartolomeo mission is important for Xenesis because it’s “a full-blown commercial agreement with a prime contractor,” LaPenna said. Plus, “all ISS tenant agencies, companies and residents will benefit from using a 10 [gigabit per second] connection,” he added. Through Bartolomeo service, Xenesis intends to demonstrate optical communications technology for Intercessor, an optical mesh network for data backhaul. A miniature, unidirectional version of Xen-Hub “will allow small satellite builders and operators to utilize a 5 [gigabit per second] persistent link for live data transfer to one of three Xen-Hub equipped Intercessor satellite constellations,” LaPenna said. “A prime use case would be live imagery.” Optical communications could, for example, speed up data transfer for government agencies involved with border security including the Drug Enforcement Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and state national guards, allowing swift interdiction at any point of intrusion, LaPenna said. Airbus subsidiary Tesat announced plans in 2018 to work with the Institute for Communication and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center to establish a high-capacity optical terminal to speed up data transfer from ISS to the ground.
Lockheed Martin, a company that for decades has built schoolbus-sized spacecraft for the U.S. government, opened a new facility to assemble small satellites, which are now in higher demand. Lockheed Martin’s 20,000-square-foot factory is located at the company’s Waterton campus near Denver, Colorado. It has six parallel assembly lines and capacity to manufacture 180 small satellites per year, Kevin Huttenhoff, Lockheed Martin’s senior manager for space data transport, told SpaceNews . The first satellites to be made at the facility are for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency. SDA plans to build a mesh network of hundreds of data transport and missile-detection sensor satellites in low Earth orbit. Lockheed Martin in February 2022 won a $700 million contract to produce 42 communications satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 1. The company in November 2020 also won a $187.5 million contract to manufacture 10 Transport Layer Tranche 0 satellites that are scheduled to launch later this month. The Transport Layer Tranche 1 satellites — projected to launch in late 2024 — will be made at the new factory. The Tranche 0 satellites were assembled at a different facility where Lockheed Martin manufactures Global Positioning System (GPS) spacecraft. Huttenhoff said the smallsat factory’s capabilities include thermal cycle and electromagnetic chambers that can be scaled to build and test satellites of different sizes. Industry moving to smallsats Lockheed Martin decided to invest in a new factory in response to shifting demands, said Huttenhoff. “First and foremost, we see that, overall, the industry is going toward proliferated architectures,” he said. “Small satellites are becoming the preference across the industry over the large satellites. We’re hearing our government customers wanting to move away from some of the exquisite systems into smaller, more proliferated systems.” The smallsat facility can be configured to assemble classified satellites for DoD and the intelligence community, in parallel with commercial satellites or satellites for non-U.S. government customers, said Huttenhoff.
Plans for shifting research from the International Space Station to commercial space stations late this decade are still a work in progress, NASA and industry officials say. In sessions during the International Space Station Research and Development Conference, both NASA and companies said they were committed to a transition from the ISS to commercial stations by the end of the decade but that exactly how that process will work, for both NASA and its international partners, is still under discussion. “That’s a big part of what we’re doing in the next few years, trying to look at that transition from the ISS to these commercial LEO destinations,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, during a panel at the conference Aug. 3. He said that Robyn Gatens, director of the ISS at NASA Headquarters, has been meeting regularly with the partners, including earlier that week. Those discussions are examining “what can we do that going to help you, what could we do that’s going to hurt you,” he said. That will involve some kind of transition period as activities move over from ISS to commercial stations. NASA has previously discussed having roughly a two-year period, which would require at least one commercial station in service by 2028 to enable an ISS retirement in 2030. “It’s undefined right now,” Montalbano said of that transition. “We’re getting inputs from our partners. We want to figure out what’s going to be helpful, what’s not going to be helpful.” NASA is also working on the specific requirements it will levy on commercial space station providers. “Our team is working really hard on requirements right now,” said Angela Hart, manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program, at the conference Aug. 3. “In the next year this is our primary focus.” NASA plans to issue in the next few months a request for information seeking input on draft requirements. “We are looking for anyone and everyone’s comments,” she said. “We think getting that right set of requirements is what’s going to start us down the right path to success.” That effort will develop top-level safety and service requirements that provide companies with the flexibility to meet them in innovative ways without being overly prescriptive. “We need to be very clear what it is we want, but we need to not necessarily say how to go do that,” Hart said. That extends to how NASA verifies and validates meeting those requirements, she added. Companies that are working on commercial station designs through the CLD program said during another conference panel that NASA is doing a good job on the effort so far. “It’s wonderfully built with foresight and think it’s exactly what we need,” said Mike Lewis, chief innovation officer at Nanoracks, of the CLD program during an Aug. 2 conference panel. He said the program needs to ensure it incorporates the needs of all users and does so in a way that is compatible among multiple stations. “We need to make sure we’re building things that are compatible for everyone’s research so that when you’re building something, it can go to any of these places. That’s a critical detail.” One user of the ISS echoed that concern. “The capabilities that are being used on the ISS are, if I may, being underappreciated during this transition to the commercial platforms,” said Alain Berinstain, chief strategy officer at Space Tango, which provides research services on the ISS. “This capability that exists in small companies, that’s all complementary to each other, needs to also exist for NASA and other users when these commercial stations come online.” Rick Mastracchio, director of strategy and business development at Northrop Grumman Space Systems, said another issue is how international partners will participate on commercial stations. “We do need NASA and the government’s help on that.” He also cited regulatory and liability uncertainties for commercial space stations that need to be worked out. “We’ll get there, eventually,” he said, “but my biggest concern is that we have to get there in a reasonable amount of time. We cannot have a gap in low Earth orbit.”
TAMPA, Fla. — LeoStella announced details about its largest spacecraft yet Aug. 6 with plans to deliver its first two 500-kilogram-class satellites to a commercial radar constellation customer next summer. The company’s LS300 satellite bus can reach the length of a small yacht at 10 meters across and has more than double the mass of its LS200 predecessor, which part-owner BlackSky is using for its upcoming third-generation geospatial intelligence satellites. LS300 is also designed with solar array improvements for delivering one kilowatt of power, 25 times more than LS200 to perform more demanding missions. This power boost and LS300’s 250 kilograms of available payload space make it better suited for customers chasing Space Development Agency (SDA) contracts, LeoStella CEO Tim Kienberger said in an interview. He said LS300 can accommodate optical inter-satellite links and the radio frequency downlink and uplink capabilities that SDA, a U.S. Space Force organization, has identified as key capabilities as it plots a large military network in low Earth orbit. Other than BlackSky, which jointly owns the five-year-old manufacturer with Thales Alenia Space, the only other customer LeoStella has announced for any of its buses to date is condosat operator Loft Orbital, which chose LeoStella’s 60-kilogram LS100 bus. Of the 19 LeoStella satellite buses currently in LEO, 16 were built for BlackSky and three were for Loft Orbital. While Kienberger declined to disclose LS300’s first customer, he said interest is high for the larger offering, and “almost every opportunity we talk about seems to be LS300 platform based.” He said LS300 could also pave the way to building its first satellites dedicated to the communications market. LS300’s increase in power, enabled by solar panels that can spend more time facing the sun by protruding from the satellite instead of covering its surface, would give the spacecraft more on-orbit processing and data storage capabilities. LeoStella is not the only small satellite specialist moving toward larger spacecraft that can take advantage of declining launch costs, and the increasing availability of rocket rideshares, to meet demand for increasingly capable satellites. Other smallsat specialists, including Terran Orbital and NanoAvionics, have also been gradually increasing the size of their platforms after initially focusing on the smaller end of the smallsat market. The largest satellite Terran Orbital currently has under construction is 800 kilograms, CEO Marc Bell said, after gradually expanding its offering since starting out a decade ago with cubesats less than 1.33 kilograms. NanoAvionics recently started producing satellites with a total mass of around 220 kilograms, nearly double its MP42 platform that gained flight heritage April 2022 to mark the company’s expansion out of the 10-kilogram-and-under nanosatellite class.
India will make its second moon landing attempt in 18 days’ time after its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit Saturday. Chandrayaan-3 began a roughly 30-minute burn around 9:30 a.m. Eastern, seeing the spacecraft enter an elliptical lunar orbit, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) stated via social media. “MOX, ISTRAC, this is Chandrayaan-3. I am feeling lunar gravity,” ISRO Tweeted. “A retro-burning at the Perilune was commanded from the Mission Operations Complex (MOX), ISTRAC, Bengaluru.” The spacecraft will gradually alter its orbit with a burn to reduce apolune Sunday, Aug. 6. It will settle into a 100-kilometer-altitude, circular polar orbit on Aug. 17. From here, the Vikram lander will separate from the mission’s propulsion module and enter a 35 x 100-km orbit in preparation for landing. Final descent and the soft landing attempt is set for Aug. 23. The primary landing site is in the vicinity of the lunar South Pole region, located at 69.37 degrees south latitude and 32.35 degrees east longitude. No previous Moon mission has landed at a lower latitude. If successful, Chandrayaan-3 will make India only the fourth country in the world to achieve a lunar landing, joining the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China. Chandrayaan-3 launched July 14 on a LVM-3 heavy-lift rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre into an initial orbit similar to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, beginning a circuitous journey to the moon. The spacecraft performed five orbit-raising maneuvers across the following two weeks before making a successful translunar injection burn July 31 (UTC). European Space Tracking (ESTRACK) is providing ground station support for tracking the mission. ESTRACK has previously supported Chinese lunar missions. ISRO chose the prime landing site using high-resolution photographs and data from Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The mission is a follow-up to the Chandrayaan-2 landing attempt which experienced a hard landing in 2019 due to a software glitch . That mission carried an orbiter which is still in operation around the moon. ISRO says it has studied the lessons from 2019 and upgraded the software for Chandrayaan-3. The main mission objective is to demonstrate a safe landing on the lunar surface. Beyond this, the mission will seek to demonstrate surface operations through the small, 26-kilogram Pragyan rover and conduct in-situ science experiments. The 1,752-kilogram Vikram lander will deploy the six-wheeled Pragyan rover via a ramp. The solar-powered duo will carry out a set of scientific experiments for the duration of daytime at the landing site. One period of lunar daylight on the moon lasts for fourteen Earth days. Without radioisotope heater units the spacecraft are not expected to survive the deep cold of lunar nighttime. India’s first lunar mission, the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, launched in 2008. It spent a year in lunar orbit hunting for evidence of water molecules. It was then deliberately commanded to crash-land onto the lunar surface in 2009. The Chandrayaan-2 mission orbiter is still in orbit collecting science data.
Astra Space announced Aug. 4 it has laid off a quarter of its workforce and reassigned others from launch vehicle to satellite propulsion development as its cash reserves dwindle. In a series of statements, the company said it was making a “strategic reallocation of its workforce,” moving 50 engineers from development of its new Rocket 4 vehicle to production of its Astra Spacecraft Engine, while also laying off about 70 employees to reduce costs. “We are intensely focused on delivering on our commitments to our customers, which includes ensuring we have sufficient resources and an adequate financial runway to execute on our near-term opportunities,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said in a statement announcing the moves. The layoffs and reassignments, Astra said, will delay work on Rocket 4, but it did not estimate by how much. The company said in March that it was on track to carry out a first test flight of the larger rocket before the end of the year . “The Company’s ability to conduct paid commercial launches in 2024 and beyond will depend on the ultimate timing and success of the initial test launches which will in turn depend on the resources that the Company is able to devote to Launch Systems development in the coming quarters,” Astra stated in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission about the restructuring. In a May 15 earnings call, Kemp said Astra had no plans to end launch vehicle development in order to focus its remaining resources on spacecraft propulsion. “We believe in both of these businesses,” he said then. Astra has announced 278 orders to date of the Astra Spacecraft Engine, an electric thruster based on technology it acquired from startup Apollo Fusion in 2021. Those orders have an overall value of $77 million, and the company said it expects a “substantial majority” of those engines will be delivered by the end of 2024. However, the company has realized little revenue from those thrusters so far. Astra reported no revenue in the first quarter of 2023 and provisionally expects between $500,000 and $1 million in revenue in the second quarter. The company is scheduled to publish its second-quarter financials on Aug. 14. That lack of revenue is contributing to its cash burn. The company said it expects to report finishing the second quarter with $26 million to $26.5 million in cash and equivalents on hand. That is less than the $30 million to $33 million it forecasted in May, which the company blamed on delays on collecting receivables from unspecified government work and delays in receiving proceeds of a tax credit. Astra announced July 10 it would seek to sell up to $65 million in stock in an “at-the-market” offering , where shares are sold at the going market rate. Astra also stated then it would conduct a 1-for-15 reverse stock split in a bid to raise its stock price above $1 a share and avoid delisting from the Nasdaq exchange. The company separately announced Aug. 4 that it has secured a $12.5 million loan from an unnamed institutional investor. The company said the net proceeds of the loan, $10.8 million after fees and expenses, will go towards working capital and general company expenses. While Astra still plans to release earnings on Aug. 14, the company said it will hold a separate conference call Aug. 7 to “discuss recent events.” The Astra layoffs are just the latest involving space startups in recent months as they have struggled with finances and an investment climate that has cooled significantly in the last year. On Aug. 1, Earth imaging company Planet said it was laying off 117 employees, about 10% of its workforce. The company blamed the layoffs on an expansion of the company after it went public in late 2021 that resulted in “increased cost and complexity,” said Will Marshall, chief executive of Planet, in a statement . He also cited changes in the broader economy. “For both of these reasons, we are making changes to prioritize our attention on the highest ROI [return on investment] opportunities for our business and mission, while reinforcing our path to profitability,” he stated. Other space industry companies that have announced layoffs recently include engine developer Ursa Major Technologies, which laid off about a quarter of its 250 employees in June , and spacecraft propulsion company Benchmark Space Systems, which laid off 15% of its 118 workers in late June, shortly before raising a $33 million Series B round . Virgin Orbit laid off 675 employees , 85% of its workforce, in late March, shortly before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company later liquidated its assets at auction and laid off its remaining employees.
TAMPA, Fla. — Globalstar, the operator behind Apple’s satellite-enabled SOS app, posted a 50% year-on-year jump in quarterly sales Aug. 3 amid promising growth in its business for connecting remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Nearly half the $55 million Globalstar made in the three months ended June 30 came from wholesale capacity service revenues driven by Apple, which has been using its satellites for iPhone emergency messaging since November . However, $9 million — up 33% from the same period last year — came from a commercial IoT business that Globalstar hopes to expand with initial two-way services before the end of 2023. The IoT business currently relies on one-way connectivity for tracking and monitoring services in places where terrestrial networks are poor or non-existent. Adding two-way functionality would give customers command and control capabilities. Apple is helping Globalstar fund 17 satellites to replenish its low Earth orbit fleet, in return for taking 85% of their capacity for its emergency messaging needs. The remaining 15% would be enough to support a fifty-fold increase in commercial IoT subscribers, according to B. Riley analyst Mike Crawford. He said Globalstar should have no problem contracting a significant portion of this remnant capacity — particularly after introducing its two-way module. Half the infrastructure Globalstar needs for this two-way IoT service has already been installed across its gateways, CEO David Kagan said, with beta services set to begin with key customers later this year. The operator also said its next-generation satellites are on track for launches in 2025, as originally planned under contracts with MDA and Rocket Lab , and are about to enter critical design review. Raising earnings guidance Supply chain issues that had delayed production of Globalstar’s legacy Spot GPS and messaging devices have cleared up as of mid-April, Kagan said on the earnings call. While he said refilling retail chains is a drawn-out process, the company has also started amassing a six-month “safety stock” for all its products. Globalstar recorded a 4% year-on-year fall in Spot service revenues for the second quarter of 2023; however, Kagan expects subscriber numbers to accelerate this year. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, was up 86% to $27 million. The company now expects to record between $200 million and $230 million in revenue for 2023, which would be 35% and 55% more than 2022, respectively. It previously guided between $185 million and $230 million in total 2023 sales. These forecasts do not include revenue Globalstar hopes to make from leasing some of its spectrum for terrestrial use. Globalstar executive chair James Monroe said during the earnings call that he expects devices capable of using its Band 53 frequencies, part of S-band spectrum, to be in the hundreds of millions by this time next year as talks continue with terrestrial partners and regulators worldwide.
While the partners in the International Space Station have agreed to operate the station through at least the late 2020s, the extended use of the station still faces technical and budgetary challenges. During a panel session at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference Aug. 3, representatives of NASA and its three Western partners — Canada, Europe and Japan — hailed the confirmation of plans to extend space station operations through 2030. Canada was the last of the four to confirm that extension, doing so in March . “Our plan is that we’re going to go to the end of the decade,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager. “We’re not going to slow down and slide into the end of the decade. We’re running full steam to the end of 2030.” The mood was far different from the same conference a year earlier, where the start of the meeting coincided with comments by the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, that suggested that Russia might exit the partnership as soon as 2024 . He and other Russian officials later softened those comments, and in April Roscosmos announced it had committed to ISS operations to 2028 . Montalbano said the extension to 2028, and not 2030, was linked to Roscosmos’ planning cycles. “Roscosmos works in four-year increments, and the last one was 2024,” he said. “As we get closer to 2028, we’ll be working together with Roscosmos and all the international partners to see what makes sense.” The message that space agency officials and others at the conference was that the ISS was hitting its stride as a research platform. Frank De Winne, ISS program manager at the European Space Agency, said on the panel that a major step in enabling that usage was adding a fourth crew member to the U.S. operating segment, which includes Canada, Europe and Japan. That was possible once SpaceX’s Crew Dragon started crew rotation missions in 2020, ending reliance on Soyuz. “The bottleneck was crew time,” he said. “Stepping up to this fourth crew member doubled, or more than doubled, the amount of crew time that we could have on board the space station. That really helped us a lot.” However, in a separate talk at the conference Aug. 1, John Mulholland, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the ISS, said there are still pressures on ISS operations. “There is a huge backlog of R&D. We should look to maximize our ISS research and meet the growing demand,” he said. “The marginal cost of these investments will provide an overwhelming increase in our science returns.” While station operations are relatively mature, he said the ISS program needed at least flat, if not slightly increased, funding over the decade amid broader pressures on NASA’s budget. “Right now, the ISS is budgeted for perfection. The vast majority of the time, that is exactly what we see,” he said. “Robustness in funding ensures science throughput even if we have issues on a particular flight.” Besides support for research on the station, Mulholland said the agency needed money to build a deorbit vehicle. The agency requested $180 million for the vehicle, which will assist in a safe deorbit of the station at the end of its life, in its fiscal year 2024 budget request, and projected spending up to $1 billion on it over its development . “It must come with new funding or it will significantly impact the ability of ISS sustainment and research utilization,” he said. He also advocated for upgrades for one of the station’s biggest experiments, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). That upgrade will “double the science capability” of the instrument, installed on the station’s exterior in 2011 to study cosmic radiation, but will require what he described as “almost an entire cargo flight” to get the equipment to the station. Investments like that in the ISS will have to be weighed against plans to retire the station in 2030. That schedule assumes that one or more commercial space stations will be in operation by the late 2020s to enable an orderly transition from the ISS to those facilities. Montalbano, in his remarks, hinted at the ability to extend the ISS beyond 2030 if necessary. “We’ll be ready to go longer if that’s what the different agencies want us to do, but right now we’re planning to 2030,” he said, with such discussions likely later in the decade. “Do we go to 2030 or does it make sense to go longer? If so, we’ll work that together with all the different space agencies and their respective governments.”
NASA has selected Axiom Space to carry out the fourth in a series of private astronaut missions to the International Space Station in 2024. NASA announced Aug. 3 it selected the Houston-based company for the mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than August 2024. The four-person mission, flying on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, will spend up to two weeks docked to the station. NASA had previously selected Axiom for three private astronaut missions to the station. The Ax-1 mission went to the station in April 2022 , followed by Ax-2 in May 2023 . NASA selected Axiom for the third mission , Ax-3, in March, and the agency said at the time it was in negotiations with an unnamed company for the fourth mission. At the time of the announcement of Ax-3, NASA and Axiom Space said that mission was planned for as soon as November 2023. However, in a speech at the ISS Research and Development Conference Aug. 1, Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said the mission was now scheduled for early 2024. The agency tweeted Aug. 2 that a revised launch date of no earlier than January 2024 “allows for teams to collaborate on the integration of the mission’s scientific research priorities.” Neither NASA nor Axiom Space have announced who will fly on either Ax-3 or Ax-4. NASA regulations require private astronaut missions be commanded by former NASA astronauts with flight experience, leaving three seats available for paying customers. In January, Michael Suffredini, chief executive of Axiom, said he expected government-sponsored astronauts to be most of the customers of Ax-3 and Ax-4 . Axiom is using the private astronaut missions to gain experience ahead of installing its first commercial modules on the station as soon as late 2025. Those modules will form the core of a standalone space station the company plans to establish by the time the ISS is retired. “These missions are instrumental in expanding commercial space activities and access to space for individuals and nations around the world, as well as developing the knowledge and experience needed to normalize living and working in microgravity,” Suffredini said in a statement about the Ax-4 award. The private astronaut missions are part of NASA’s ISS transition strategy, supporting the development of commercial space stations that will succeed the ISS around 2030. Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA Headquarters, described the Ax-4 award in an agency statement as “another milestone in our efforts to transition low Earth orbit from primarily a government-sponsored activity to one where NASA is one of many customers.” That approach has the support of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, an independent safety committee. During an Aug. 3 public meeting, panel member Mark Sirangelo noted the Ax-2 mission completed a “full manifest of science, outreach and commercial activities” and was able to return more than 135 kilograms of cargo for NASA. “We think this whole mission seems to have gone considerably more smoothly” than the first mission, he said of Ax-2. “You can see very good progress in these private astronaut missions.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SES needs to conduct extra tests before launching its next pair of O3b mPower satellites, the operator said Aug. 3, to investigate a glitch that is sporadically tripping off power modules on its first four in medium Earth orbit. Newly appointed CEO Ruy Pinto said the issue is limited to some of the power modules onboard the four next-generation MEO satellites SpaceX launched two at a time in December and April. Pinto said all trip-offs were quickly resolved in a process he likened to flipping a circuit breaker, without impacting payload performance. “We’re not overly concerned,” he said during the company’s earnings call, “but we want to make sure that we have no … hiccups when we deploy these services.” The upcoming fifth and sixth O3b mPower satellites, part of 11 Boeing is building for the operator, were slated to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 by the end of June, but are now targeting a launch before the end of September. SpaceX is also slated to launch the seventh and eighth O3b mPower satellites this year. The first two O3b mPower satellites have reached their final positions in MEO, Pinto said, and the third and fourth are due to arrive at their target locations later this month. Only six O3b mPower satellites are needed for initial commercial services, which Pinto said remain on track to start before the end of 2023. The services aim to address growing demand for connectivity across markets including mobile backhaul, aviation, maritime, and government. Each satellite is designed to scale to multiple gigabits per second of throughput — around 10 times more than the operator’s first generation of 20 O3b satellites in MEO. SES also operates around 50 satellites in geostationary orbit for connectivity and broadcast customers. The company reported 987 million euros ($1.1 billion) in total revenues for the first half of 2023, down 1.2% year-on-year when adjusted for currency changes on a like-for-like basis. Revenue from the company’s networks business climbed 3.1% over the period to 501 million euros. However, video revenues that fell 5.2% to 486 million euros dragged the business down. SES and other satellite operators, including Eutelsat of France , are heavily investing in connectivity services amid a gradual decline in satellite TV. SES also announced it has successfully cleared a swathe of C-band spectrum that the Federal Communications Commission auctioned off to 5G telcos in the United States. The Luxembourg-based company expects to receive $3 billion (pre-tax) from the FCC by the end of 2023 for beating its Dec. 5 clearing deadline, on top of the $1 billion already secured for hitting an interim 2021 milestone . Pinto said during the company’s earnings call that a legal battle to equally split C-band proceeds with Intelsat, which is currently in line for nearly $5 billion in total FCC proceeds, is ongoing. He declined to specify how the operator planned to use its multibillion-dollar C-band windfall, but said options include paying down debt, shareholder dividends, and growth-orientated investments. Update: SES announced Aug. 10 that the FCC has validated the certification of all its accelerated C-band clearing and relocation activities.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said Aug. 3 he is launching an investigation into the Biden administration’s decision to keep U.S. Space Command’s headquarters in Colorado. President Biden earlier this week overturned the Trump administration’s recommendation to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. Rogers said he would fight back. His first move was to send a letter to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and to the head of U.S. Space Command Gen. James Dickinson, demanding transcripts of interviews and other documents related to Space Command’s basing decision, and threatening to subpoena these documents if they are not provided to the HASC. In a letter Aug. 3, Rogers claims Kendall and Dickinson have failed to respond to his committee’s repeated requests for these documents. “Your refusal to abide by the Committee’s repeated requests for documents and transcribed interviews can only be considered obfuscation and purposeful delay, highlighted by the fact that the basing decision was decided while the Committee’s requests are outstanding,” Rogers wrote. “It now appears you have something to hide,” Rogers said in the letter to Kendall and Dickinson. “If you fail to adequately respond, I will be forced to seek a subpoena for the relevant documents we have requested on multiple occasions, and to seek your compelled appearance,” he added. Rogers alleges that Trump’s selection of Huntsville as the preferred location of U.S. Space Command was done legitimately and that the Biden administration is reversing it for political reasons. DoD said July 31 that Biden’s decision was made in consultation with the Pentagon, the Air Force and U.S. Space Command, and that keeping the command in Colorado was deemed the right thing to do in order to avoid disruptions that would undermine “readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The last satellite Intelsat needs to claim nearly $5 billion in total C-band spectrum clearing proceeds is performing well after launching Aug. 3. on a Falcon 9, its manufacturer Maxar Technologies said. The Galaxy-37/Horizons-4 satellite started communicating with ground crews and successfully deployed solar arrays shortly after separating from the rocket, which launched at 1:00 a.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. It will take about three weeks for the chemically powered spacecraft to reach its 127 degrees West orbital position, Intelsat senior vice president of space systems Jean-Luc Froeliger told SpaceNews in an interview. The five-metric-ton satellite is slated to enter service around the end of September following final health checks upon reaching its geostationary parking slot. The spacecraft comprises two payloads: Galaxy-37 in C-band for Intelsat’s broadcast customers over the continental United States, and Horizons-4 that the operator partly owns with Japan’s JSAT International for Ku-band connectivity services over the Pacific Ocean and the United States. Froeliger said the six other satellites Intelsat has launched over the last 10 months for migrating broadcast customers into a narrower swath of C-band, enabling more frequencies to be used for terrestrial 5G services across the United States, are all in position and operating without issues. While there is still work to do on the ground to move customers and filter antennas, Galaxy 37’s deployment puts Intelsat on track to get a total of $4.9 billion from the Federal Communications Commission by vacating the frequencies by Dec. 5. Rival operator SES announced during Aug. 3 financial results that it had completed all its C-band clearing tasks after SpaceX launched its final two replacement spacecraft in March. SES is set for nearly $4 billion in total spectrum clearing proceeds from the FCC, although the operator remains locked in a long-running legal battle with Intelsat over how this windfall should be split. SES ordered six satellites in total for its clearing strategy, including one ground spare. All C-band replacement satellites and associated costs are being reimbursed by the FCC, which raised more than $80 billion from auctioning off the spectrum to telcos, including Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Milestone launch Because Galaxy-37 was not launched in pairs like Intelsat’s other replacement C-band spacecraft, which each had a mass of about 3.5 metric tons, SpaceX was able to place the satellite in a high-energy orbit, meaning it will not have to spend as much fuel to get into place. Froeliger said Intelsat should get three more years out of Galaxy-37 than the 15-year design life given to its other C-band replacements. That said, satellites routinely operate beyond their design life. Galaxy-13, which Galaxy-37 is due to replace, also had a 15-year design life but has been operating for 20 years. Boeing-built Galaxy-13 was Intelsat’s first C-band/Ku-band hybrid partnership with JSAT, which has a payload on the spacecraft called Horizon-1. Galaxy-37 was also launched on the 40th anniversary of Galaxy-1, ordered by a company that later became part of Intelsat. The operator uses the Galaxy brand for its satellites over North America that primarily serve media customers, and there are currently 18 of them in a fleet of more than 50 satellites. Counting the IS-40e communications satellite launched in April, Intelsat has deployed eight geostationary satellites in the past 10 months, which the company says sets a new record for the commercial satellite industry. Apart from an Arianespace Ariane 5 mission in December that deployed a pair of C-band replacements and a weather-tracking satellite for Europe, all these launches used Falcon 9s, underlining the dominance of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket. Froeliger said Intelsat launched 10 satellites throughout 1997 — six years before SpaceX would perform its first launch — but used a greater diversity of rockets to achieve this feat: Arianespace’s Ariane 4, Atlas 2 from Lockheed Martin, and Russia’s Proton.
Northrop Grumman is planning upgrades to its Cygnus cargo vehicle, such as increased payload capacity, to support both the International Space Station and future commercial space stations. In presentations at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference Aug. 2, company representatives outlined efforts to enhance the capabilities of the decade-old spacecraft to enable it to serve NASA and others in the coming decade. “We’re looking at what we have to do with the Cygnus spacecraft, what we have to do with the services that it provides,” said Rick Mastracchio, director of strategy and business development at Northrop Grumman Space Systems. “We’re trying to prepare and think way ahead on how do we start updating the vehicle, making sure we have a spacecraft that will be flying 10 years from now, 20 years from now.” Among those changes is increased payload capacity. The current version of the Cygnus can carry abut 3,750 kilograms of pressurized cargo to the station. An upgraded version in development will increase that to 5,000 kilograms, said Lucas Migliorini, cargo logistics development engineering manager at Northrop Grumman, in another conference presentation. The “Mission B” version of Cygnus stretches the payload module of the spacecraft by 1.5 meters to accommodate the additional cargo. That version of Cygnus is scheduled to make its first flight on the NG-23 cargo mission, currently planned for launch in mid-2025. It will also be the first launch of the new Antares 330 with increased payload performance to accommodate the larger Cygnus. Another change under consideration is how Cygnus attaches to the space station. The spacecraft is currently berthed to the station by Canadarm2 robotic arm, rather than actively dock to the station like SpaceX’s current version of the Dragon spacecraft. “Particularly for commercial space stations, a big focus right now is on docking,” Migliorini said. Berthing requires a robotic arm, and some commercial stations may not have a suitable robotic arm, at least in their initial configurations. Northrop is also emphasizing the ability of Cygnus to reboost the orbit of the ISS and potentially other stations. That has been tested on the ISS on previous Cygnus missions and will be demonstrated again on the NG-19 Cygnus, launched Aug. 1 and scheduled to arrive at the station early Aug. 4. “We like to be able to do a couple of these per mission,” Migliorini said of reboost maneuvers. Those reboosts are done using propellant not needed for the spacecraft’s arrival at the station. Northrop Grumman is leveraging Cygnus in other ways. The spacecraft is a key part of its proposed commercial space station, one of three that won funded Space Act Agreements in late 2021 through NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program for initial design work. The company received a separate unfunded Space Act Agreement in June for a “Persistent Platform” version of Cygnus designed to host uncrewed payloads that complements its station. “Our strategy is to utilize hardware that we have already been working on,” Mastracchio said, that includes both Cygnus and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module Northrop is building for the lunar Gateway. “We’re trying to reuse as much of that hardware as possible to keep additional non-recurring engineering costs low.” The company is offering Cygnus to other companies working on commercial space stations. “We’re talking to all the potential Commercial LEO Destination providers, all the commercial space station providers,” he said. Those discussions include determining what services that Cygnus offers the ISS that may not be needed for commercial stations as well as new services that Cygnus could offer those future stations. Cygnus made its first flight to the ISS on a demonstration mission in September 2013 and NG-19 is the 20 th Cygnus launched to date, including one lost in an Antares launch failure in October 2014. Migliorini said the company is studying doubling the current Cygnus production rate of two vehicles a year to meet the needs of commercial stations.
The United Arab Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt is ambitious. EMA will fly past six asteroids and rendezvous with a seventh, Justitia. Equally ambitious is EMA’s national goal. To strengthen the Emirates’ private space sector, more than half the work will be performed by UAE companies. Spearheading the EMA is Director Hoor Al Mazmi, who joined the UAE Space Agency in 2017 as a space science researcher. Al Mazmi earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University and a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Al Mazmi spoke with SpaceNews about the goals, challenges and importance of the EMA. What are your overall goals? The most important goals for this mission, for the UAE, are to develop capabilities in space science and engineering through the partnerships and to allow private companies in the UAE to develop their capabilities and test out their systems and their knowledge in order to be competitive globally. Why is this mission important overall? We have both science and space resource objectives. The science objective is to understand the origin and evolution of water-rich asteroids. This is important because this can tell us more about how we have water on Earth and where that water came from. There’s a theory that water came from an asteroid impact. Going to the main asteroid belt can tell us more about the origin of water for all terrestrial planets. The diverse set of asteroids that we’re visiting will give us more information about the water content of these asteroids. We will rendezvous with Justitia, which is the most important asteroid, scientifically, because it’s theorized that it migrated from the primordial Kuiper Belt. What are your goals for the UAE space sector? A big focus for the UAE Space Agency for the past couple of years was to develop the space private sector in the UAE. We’re using this mission as a way to develop the capabilities of startups and space companies within the UAE. We’re doing that through the lander. When our spacecraft reaches Justitia, it will deploy a lander on its surface. That lander will be handled by the private sector in the UAE. Has the UAE already selected the lander builders? We have two private companies that are involved with this project and we’ll have more in the future. Currently, we have 971Space and Sadeen Space working on this. They’re both startups. What is the schedule for this mission? The launch is planned for 2028. We have a Venus gravity assist, then also a Mars gravity assist and an Earth gravity assist before we get to our first asteroids. Then, we’ll be flying by six asteroids and rendezvousing with Justitia by 2034. What’s the most challenging part of all of this? From my perspective, the most complicated part is the navigation. Not being sure exactly where these asteroids are in space, being able to target them and fly by them, and have our instruments get the signs that we need. That’s going to be challenging, but we have a capable team working on the navigation system. Then, rendezvousing with Justitia and not missing it is also a challenging part. The other challenge would be to get as many people as we can involved. The main point of the mission is to develop capabilities and to get knowledge to the UAE and to build on the capabilities that were developed from the Emirates Mars Mission . If somebody is not in the space sector, why would they care about water-rich asteroids? Water is important for everyone. And our space-resources goals are going to enable future missions to get further in the solar system. Achieving our objectives of understanding how to get resources from asteroids in the main asteroid belt will allow future missions and humanity as a whole to advance further in our space exploration journey – to get further within the solar system and hopefully outside of the solar system. That’s the big objective. But then also, to get a better understanding of our solar system as a whole, how it evolved and how it became what it is that we see today. Are you referring to getting water from asteroids for future missions? Yes, that’s correct. That’s the beginning of the study for how we can potentially do that. Those are our space resource objectives. We won’t necessarily be able to do that at this point. Are all of the asteroids that you selected water-rich asteroids? Because they’re that diverse set of asteroids, they’re going to have different asteroid types and they will have varying amounts of water in them. Justitia is the one that’s most likely to have water ice underneath the surface because of its redness. Based on our understanding of the types of asteroids that we’re visiting, they have a potential for having water on them at varying amounts, but they wouldn’t necessarily all be water-rich. Did you select the seven because they provide a diverse range of asteroids? Yes. Chimaera, for example, is the biggest asteroid of its family. That could provide us with a lot of information about the Chimaera family as a whole in the asteroid belt. We also have Rockox, which is thought to be a combination of asteroid types. They’re all interesting in their own way. Some of them were selected because they’re easy targets along the way, and it would be interesting for us to look at them. The main reason for choosing asteroids that are part of asteroid families is because they’ll give us insights on the families as a whole. What do you think is going to be the impact of this mission for future science and technology research? The asteroid community is excited about this mission and excited about what it would mean for us to visit Justitia and understand why it is so red and whether or not its origin is the Kuiper Belt. There are theories of all objects in the main asteroid belt coming from somewhere else. That could change the fundamentals of planetary science and the understanding of the asteroid belt and where these asteroids came from and their diversity. How will EMA be important in the long term? EMA has put together a national team for the UAE that comes from different entities that are all working together to achieve this mission. We have engineers and scientists – people from different entities all working together on this mission to achieve it. That can give us a structure for future exploration missions. Especially since this is a capability development mission. We’ll learn a lot about how complicated missions like this can be successful and how people can work together from different countries and different entities to achieve something so complicated.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity selected four vendors to develop technologies and new approaches for tracking small debris objects in space. A-Tech, Advanced Space, SRI International, and West Virginia University Research Corporation won four-year contracts of undisclosed value for the Space Debris Identification and Tracking (SINTRA) program. The four vendors were selected through a competitive Broad Agency Announcement . IARPA, an agency under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Aug. 1 in a news release that the four companies will develop technologies and methods to detect, track and characterize miniature space debris. “Resulting technologies hold the potential to protect manned spacecraft and other valuable space assets from these compact threats, which are difficult to detect and track and can cause significant damage,” IARPA said. The agency said the goal of the SINTRA program is to fill gaps in current space debris-monitoring systems, which currently only track and monitor debris objects larger than four inches across. IARPA also is seeking ways to to improve existing small debris-tracking capabilities such as ground-based radar, tracking satellites and optical sensors. “Discovering new ways to understand the millions of man-made debris objects orbiting the Earth, especially since they are ever-increasing in number, has never been more critical to everyday life,” said Alexis Truitt, manager of the SINTRA program. IARPA said there are currently over 100 million debris objects greater than 1 millimeter (about one-third of an inch) in size orbiting the Earth. The Department of Defense only tracks and monitors debris greater than 10 centimeters in size using the U.S. Space Surveillance Network.
Innovative Rocket Technologies, known as iRocket, has signed an agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory to jointly develop and test rocket propulsion hardware. The New York-based startup, founded in 2018, develops rocket engines and plans to build a small launch vehicle. iRocket signed a four-year cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, with AFRL’s Rocket Propulsion Division, the company said Aug. 2. The CRADA includes use of an Air Force facility, equipment and AFRL expertise “to enable both sides to develop, build, test and transition U.S. rocket engines at a fast pace,” said Shawn Phillips, chief of AFRL’s Rocket Propulsion Division. “iRocket will have the opportunity to further advance and demonstrate their high thrust technology,” he said. “AFRL is very supportive of development efforts for rapid access to space to support Air Force and Space Force needs for 100% reusable rockets,” said Phillips. Space Force contract iRocket in June announced it won a U.S. Space Force contract to demonstrate a reusable rocket engine for small launch vehicles. Under the CRADA, the company plans to conduct propulsion, stage, and potentially grasshopper testing at Test Site 1-56 at the High Thrust Research Facility, located at Edwards Air Force Base, California. According to AFRL, the High Thrust Rocket Research facility is one of only four stands in the United States capable of 10 million pounds of thrust. “iRocket’s first milestone for the CRADA is to conduct a 120-180 second engine demo, showcasing 37,000 pounds of sea level thrust, within the next 12 to 14 months,” said iRocket CEO Asad Malik.
Voyager Space is joining forces with Airbus Defence and Space on a joint venture for the development of the Starlab commercial space station. The companies announced Aug. 2 the creation of a joint venture, also called Starlab, that will be responsible for the development and operation of the station. The joint venture builds upon an agreement announced in January where Voyager selected Airbus to provide technical support for the proposed station . “This transatlantic venture with footprints on both sides of the ocean aligns the interests of both ourselves and Voyager and our respective space agencies,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, head of space systems at Airbus, in a statement. “Together our teams are focused on creating an unmatched space destination both technologically and as a business operation.” The joint venture is an effort to create a long-term partnership between the companies for Starlab. “We have been working very well together as partners,” said Matthew Kuta, president of Voyager Space, in an interview. “It’s very important in the commercial world to have good long-term partnerships and less of a vendor transactional relationship, so we had discussions about forming the joint venture together.” Kuta declined to discuss financial details of the partnership, including the share of the joint venture held by each company. However, he noted that the joint venture will be U.S.-led, meaning that at least 51% of the company will be owned by U.S. entities like Voyager Space. Having a European company as part of the joint venture, though, could make it easier for European governments and organizations, like the European Space Agency, participate on Starlab. European officials have expressed hesitance about paying American companies for flying European astronauts, rather than the barter system used for International Space Station operations among the partner nations. “We have great relationships with ESA, but clearly Airbus much better relationships,” Kuta said. “It allows us to figure out how we can satisfy those customer demands more directly and successfully.” He added that he couldn’t speak for ESA’s plans after the retirement of the station, but since that agency has previously ruled out flying its astronauts on China’s Tiangong space station, its only option will be using commercial stations like Starlab. “By partnering with Airbus, we’ll be in a great position to help ESA figure out what works for them.” Voyager Space, through Nanoracks, received a $160 million Space Act Agreement from NASA in December 2021 to support initial design work on Starlab, one of three such awards NASA issued through its Commercial LEO Destinations initiative. The Starlab team recently completed a system requirements review for the station with NASA, which Kuta said went well. The focus of Starlab will be on research applications, rather than tourism. The station is designed to fit on a single launch, outfitted on the ground with all the research equipment needed for its customers. “All the things that ISS does is what we’re focused on being able to continue, but with more modern equipment, technologies and capabilities.” That research interest is coming from both government agencies and companies, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector. The companies are looking at ways to allow customers to start work on facilities they operate on the ISS today, like the Airbus Bartolomeo external payload facility and Nanoracks Bishop airlock, then shift that work to Starlab.
Even as Virgin Galactic enters regular commercial operations of its suborbital spaceplane, it is advising that those flights will generate only modest revenues for the near future. Virgin Galactic reported Aug. 1 revenue of $2 million in the second quarter of 2023. The company said that the revenue came from its first commercial SpaceShipTwo mission, “Galactic 01,” on June 29 , as well as membership fees from its private astronaut customers. Galactic 01, a research flight for the Italian Air Force, marked the long-awaited start of commercial operations of the company’s VSS Unity vehicle. Virgin Galactic plans to fly Unity on roughly a monthly cadence. The vehicle’s next mission, Galactic 02, is scheduled for Aug. 10 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The flight will be the first to carry the company’s private astronaut customers. Virgin Galactic announced July 17 that flight will include Jon Goodwin, Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers. Goodwin was one of the company’s early customers while Schahaff and Mayers won a 2021 contest for seats on an early SpaceShipTwo flight. “Galactic 02 is going to set the stage for a new era of suborbital human spaceflight that will dramatically broaden access to space for private individuals,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in an earnings call. However, while the company played up the significance of Galactic 02, it is downplaying the revenue that and future flights will generate for Virgin Galactic. The company is forecasting just $1 million in revenue in each of the next two quarters. Part of the reason for that, Colglazier said, is that about three-fourths of the 800 tickets sold so far were at prices of between $200,000 and $250,000 each. The company later raised prices to $450,000 each. In addition, while Unity’s cabin can accommodate four people, the company plans to fly only three paying customers on each flight initially, using the fourth seat for an astronaut trainer. In the case of Galactic 02, that is Beth Moses, the company’s chief astronaut instructor. “When we look at the capacity of Unity and the ticket prices that we’re flying these days, you would expect to see for the near term about $600,000 per flight,” he said. He said the company expects to add a fourth paying customer to Unity flights “as we move into 2024,” increasing the per-flight revenue to about $800,000. Research flights like Galactic 01 are more lucrative. Colglazier estimated those flights generate about $600,000 per seat equivalent. The company, though, has reserved only about 100 of its first 1,000 seats for research customers. Virgin Galactic has largely stopped ticket sales for the time being other than those it is offering through a travel agency, Virtuoso, to manage its customer backlog. Colglazier said the company will sell new tranches of tickets as it gets closer to the introduction of its Delta class of next-generation spaceplanes, currently planned for 2026. Virgin has not set ticket pricing for those future sales, but he said “we don’t expect that to be less” than the current price of $450,000. Colglazier also strongly suggested in the call that Virgin Galactic does not expect to fly VSS Imagine, a second suborbital spaceplane that the company had been developing. Virgin had deferred work on Imagine to prioritize company resources around both getting Unity into commercial service and development of the Delta class of vehicles. “We’ve kind of kept it as an option for us, and it’s going to remain as an option for us,” he said of Imagine, but indicated it would likely be used to support Delta-class development versus flying commercial missions. “It’s still here with us, and we have it secured and ready. But it’s likely going to be used in service of the Delta program.” The company reported a net loss of $134.4 million in the second quarter as it continues spending on Delta-class development. However, the company raised $241 million in a sale of stock in the quarter, giving the company $980 million in cash and equivalents on hand as of the end of the second quarter.
Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major announced Aug. 2 that it has received additional funding from America Makes to produce 3D printed engine hardware. America Makes, a DoD-funded institute based in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2021 awarded Ursa Major $3 million for the company’s 3D manufacturing lab. The new agreement is worth about $1.2 million. Ursa Major is a venture-funded maker of rocket engines for small and medium launch vehicles. The company manufactures engines in Berthoud, Colorado, and has a 3D printing manufacturing lab in Youngstown. America Makes is a public-private partnership established in 2012 to help accelerate U.S. industrial competitiveness through the adoption of additive manufacturing. Agreement extended until mid-2024 “Ursa Major and America Makes will continue their partnership through mid-2024 and transition from printing prototypes to printing production and engine qualification hardware,” said Brad Appel, Ursa Major’s chief technology officer. Using 3D printing, he said, “we can reduce the production and delivery cycle for combustion chambers from six months to one month.” Ursa Major said its rocket engines are more than 80 percent 3D printed by mass. At the Youngstown lab the company makes copper alloy-based engine components for space launch and hypersonic applications. The company said it is producing about 30 5,000-pound thrust Hadley engines a year for the U.S. Air Force and several commercial customers, including small launcher startup Phantom Space and Stratolaunch. The Air Force Research Laboratory is supporting the development of Arroway , a reusable liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine for medium and heavy launch vehicles, expected to hotfire in 2025. The engine was i ntroduced in August 2022 with the goal of supporting next-generation heavy launch.
A Cygnus cargo spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station after an Aug. 1 launch as part of NASA’s commitment to “full throttle” use of the station through the end of the decade. An Antares 230+ rocket lifted off at 8:31 p.m. Eastern from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, placing a Cygnus spacecraft into orbit. The Cygnus, named “S.S. Laurel Clark” after the astronaut who died on the STS-107 shuttle mission two decades ago, is scheduled to arrive at the station early Aug. 4. The NG-19 mission is carrying 3,785 kilograms of cargo. That includes 1,590 kilograms of crew supplies, 1,128 kilograms of scientific payloads and 948 kilograms of vehicle hardware. The spacecraft will remain at the station for at least three months before departing with trash to be disposed through destructive reentry. The launch was the final flight of the current version of the Antares rocket, designated Antares 230+ , which uses a first stage built by Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Building plant and RD-181 engines from Russian company NPO Energomash. Northrop Grumman announced nearly a year ago plans to develop a new first stage in partnership with Firefly Aerospace. That vehicle, called Antares 330, is now scheduled to make its debut in mid-2025. Northrop will continue to fly Cygnus missions while Antares 330 is in development using SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The first of three Cygnus missions launched on Falcon 9, NG-20, is scheduled for late this year. The NG-19 launch coincided with the International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC) here. Attendees cheered on the launch — literally — at NASA’s booth in the conference’s exhibit hall after the end of the first day of sessions. The research payloads on NG-19 are evidence, station officials said at the conference, of NASA’s commitment to fully utilize the station through its currently scheduled retirement in 2030. “Station’s top priority is science and research,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, in a speech at the conference. “We plan to fully utilize ISS all the way through the end of 2030. That means full throttle operations, science, research, technology development through the end of 2030.” That schedule holds as NASA works with industry to support development of commercial space stations that will ultimately succeed the ISS. NASA issued funded Space Act Agreements in late 2021 to teams led by Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Voyager Space to support initial design work on station concepts. A fourth company, Axiom Space, has an agreement with NASA to install commercial modules on the ISS as a precursor to a commercial station. The goal remains, she said, to enable a “seamless transition” from the ISS to those commercial stations at the end of the decade. Nagging doubts, though, remain about the ability of companies to have stations ready in time. “They will get there, but it will not be easy,” said John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for the ISS at Boeing, of commercial space station developers in remarks at the conference. Such stations, he said, “are the future of LEO following the ISS mission, and we need to allow them to follow their natural development cycle.” Boeing is a partner on Orbital Reef, one commercial station effort led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. That station is intended to be ready in a “baseline” configuration by the end of the decade with 90% of the volume of the ISS, said Liz Warren, director of research development at Blue Origin, during an ISSRDC presentation. Research will be a major focus of Orbital Reef, she said, along with tourism, manufacturing and other applications. “We’re deep in the design phase right now,” she said, including examining both the ability to support existing research facilities on the ISS and developing next-generation research capabilities. The NG-19 mission is directly supporting work on Orbital Reef, she said. Samples of the material Blue Origin plans to use for large windows in the station’s core module are going to the station on the Cygnus for an external experiment platform called the Materials ISS Experiment (MISSE) Flight Facility. “It will do some materials testing for us,” she said, including how the window material handles the temperature and radiation environment of space, “validating some of our ideas there.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Small satellite builder Astro Digital plans to add an Astroscale docking plate to upcoming spacecraft to make it easier for them to use in-orbit services being developed by Astroscale and others. The companies said July 31 the first docking plate would be attached to an undisclosed satellite later this year for a launch in the fourth quarter of 2024. It is the first time 10-year-old Astroscale has announced a commercial partnership for the hardware, as work continues to demonstrate how upcoming servicers could perform de-orbit and life-extension missions after latching onto the docking plate. Tokyo-based Astroscale declined to discuss further details about its partnership with Astro Digital, including how many satellites are in their agreement. Similar to other smallsat specialists, Santa Clara, California-based Astro Digital has been building increasingly larger spacecraft after initially focusing on the smallest cubesats. The company currently offers spacecraft ranging from 10 to 200 kilograms. Compatible with magnetic and mechanical capture methods, Astroscale’s circular docking plate is a little larger than a compact disc at 15 centimeters in diameter, and the hardware weighs less than 500 grams in total. Astroscale demonstrated how a servicer could latch onto an earlier version of the docking plate in 2021 during magnetic capture and release tests as part of ELSA-d, or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration, in low Earth orbit (LEO). First demo cut short ELSA-d’s 175-kilogram servicer later lost the use of half its thrusters in early 2022, forcing Astroscale to scrap plans to recapture and de-orbit the 17-kilogram client craft. Astroscale said in June it will attempt to lower the servicer’s orbit through a series of controlled burns over several months, aiming to burn it up in the atmosphere before the end of the year. Without any ability to maneuver, Astroscale expects the client satellite to naturally de-orbit over the next several years. In 2025, Astroscale plans to send a larger servicer to LEO with a mass of a few hundred kilograms to capture and de-orbit a defunct 150-kilogram OneWeb satellite, which has a compatible magnetic docking plate provided by U.S.-based Altius . The End of Life Services by Astroscale-multiple mission (ELSA-m), delayed from 2024, would be designed to capture multiple satellites of up to 800 kilograms in a single mission, although follow-on clients have not been announced. ELSA-m is being built by Astroscale’s U.K. subsidiary, supported by funds from the European Space Agency, UK Space Agency, and U.K.-based OneWeb. Under a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) contract, Astroscale plans to use a spacecraft launching on a Rocket Lab Electron later this year to inspect a discarded upper stage of a Japanese H2-A rocket. The Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan, or ADRAS-J, will attempt to demo proximity operations and image the debris, ahead of a potential follow-on mission to remove it with a servicer capable of grabbing objects without a docking plate. Astroscale has raised more than $376 million to date for a business hoping to make in-orbit servicing routine by the end of the decade. Its investors include Japanese satellite maker Mitsubishi Electric, which is looking into adding compatible docking plates to national security spacecraft. Other in-orbit servicing ventures include Northrop Grumman-owned SpaceLogistics of the United States, which is currently extending the life of two geostationary Intelsat satellites, and Swiss startup ClearSpace which plans to launch its first de-orbit demo mission in 2026 .
As the Senate advances a bill that would direct NASA to support missions to remove orbital debris, the agency is outlining the role it will take assisting the Commerce Department on a new space traffic coordination system. The Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Orbital Sustainability, or ORBITS, Act on a voice vote during an executive session July 27. A version of the bill made it through the Senate last year but was not taken up by the House. “The ORBITS Act is going to empower NASA to research, develop and demonstrate key technologies to remove the debris,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), lead sponsor of the bill, said in remarks at the session. “This bipartisan bill ensures that the United States remains the leader in responsible and sustainable uses of outer space.” The core of the bill would direct NASA to establish an active debris removal program. That would include funding research and development activities “with the intent to close commercial capability gaps and enable potential future remediation missions for such orbital debris,” the bill states. NASA would also fund a demonstration mission for debris removal and allow it and other agencies to procure debris removal services. The version of the ORBITS Act approved by the committee is different from the version introduced earlier this year. Among the changes is in a section that originally called on NASA to develop a prioritized list of orbital debris to remove. In the new version, that responsibility is given instead to the Commerce Department. The Commerce Department, through its Office of Space Commerce, is developing a space traffic coordination system called the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) that will take over civil space traffic management roles currently handled by the Defense Department. That involves taking in data from Defense Department and other sources and using it to provide warnings of potential close approaches to satellite operators. While the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) is leading TraCSS, NASA will have a role. In a July 28 video presentation to update work on TraCSS, officials from the office and from NASA explained that NASA will be responsible for one of three elements of TraCSS, called HORIZON, that will focus on research and development. “In this role, we will be creating an integrated development environment to provide OSC insight and guidance on the new space situational awareness data sources and services that could provide better coordination for space traffic,” said Sandra Connelly, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. She described HORIZON as a “sandbox” to advance research in space situational awareness and space traffic coordination, serving as a test environment to carry out that work without affecting the operational TraCSS system. NASA will work to set up HORIZON “as quickly as possible” and also start working with the research community on related activities to support TraCSS by the end of the year. HORIZON will also host a version of the main TraCSS system to allow for testing of new services, said Sandy Magnus, chief engineer for TraCSS at OSC. “We can do verification and validation in the appropriate environment to make sure new capabilities that we’re onboarding engage correctly and don’t break anything.” The other two elements, led by OSC, are OASIS, which will serve as the repository for space situational awareness data, and SKYLINE, which will provide the space traffic coordination application services, such as conjunction warnings. The focus on TraCSS currently is developing a system for what OSC calls “phase one,” which is focused on tracking objects in orbit. Magnus said in the video that will be followed by phase two, to provide launch collision avoidance, or COLA, notices, and phase three, tracking reentries. Phase one will itself be set up in steps in a “crawl, walk, run” manner, she said, with an initial capability ready by September 2024. “What we’ve planned is a very slow change from the commercial industry receiving data from the DOD over to TraCSS in a way that does not disturb current operations and allows everyone to get comfortable.” The initial version that will be ready by September 2024, dubbed Phase 1.0, will largely replicate what the Defense Department offers now. “Our approach is to do no harm,” she said, ingesting data and producing conjunction data messages. One change will be that TraCSS will do screening for conjunctions every four hours, twice as frequently as the Defense Department does today. TraCSS will also improve incorporation of satellite position data from satellite operators, enabling more accurate predictions of conjunctions. A Phase 1.1, Magnus said, will incorporate bug fixes. By early 2025, TraCSS will move into Phase 1.2, which will add data integrity monitoring. Phase 1.3, in the second quarter of 2025, will add what she called a “mission planning function” where the service would request additional tracking data for selected conjunctions that need higher quality data. By September 2025, Phase 1.4 will shift the conjunction analysis to a commercial provider and create a public interface for TraCSS. Magnus did not provide a schedule for the second and third phases, but stated that the office has been in discussions with the Federal Aviation Administration about its launch COLA needs in phase two. Reentry management will be more complicated, with coordination needed with the Defense Department and FAA, she said.
President Biden finally settled the drawn-out fight over the location of U.S. Space Command headquarters: It’s staying in Colorado Springs, and not moving to Huntsville, Alabama. Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder in a statement July 31 said Biden made the decision after considering the views of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other senior military officials. “Following a thorough and deliberate evaluation process, and after consultation with Secretary Austin and weighing the input of senior military leaders, President Biden notified the Department of Defense that he has selected Colorado Springs as the permanent location of the U.S. Space Command headquarters,” Ryder said. “Secretary Austin, Secretary of the Air Force Kendall, and U.S. Space Command commander Gen. James Dickinson all support the President’s decision,” Ryder noted. This announcement caps more than two years of bitter wrangling between congressional delegations. It all started in January 2021 when the Department of the Air Force in the final days of the Trump presidency recommended that Space Command, currently located at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, move to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Trump’s recommendation resulted in two separate independent reviews, and back-and-forth arguments between congressional representatives from both states. Space Command is responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. military and for protecting those assets from foreign threats. It was activated in August 2019 to oversee military operations in the space domain. Ryder said DoD supported keeping the command in Colorado to avoid disruptions that would undermine “readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period.” Fighting not over Colorado lawmakers on Monday hailed Biden’s decision. For more than two years they alleged that the Trump administration improperly influenced the decision and that the Air Force’s basing process did not take into account senior military officials’ concerns that the relocation would add years to Space Command efforts to reach full operational capability as soon as possible. “Today’s decision restores integrity to the Pentagon’s basing process and sends a strong message that national security and the readiness of our Armed Forces drive our military decisions,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said in a statement. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said that “after two investigations and rigorous review by the Department of Defense, the administration has made the decision that’s in our country’s best interest.” “I commend the Biden administration for prioritizing national security above political interests,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.). “This decision aligns with the best military advice of countless senior military leaders.” Alabama lawmakers are vowing to push back. “This fight is far from over,” said. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. “Huntsville, Alabama was chosen to be the headquarters of U.S. Space Command because it was the strongest location and investigations by the DoD IG and GAO have upheld this decision,” said Rogers. “Yet, the Biden administration decided to make Colorado Springs, Colorado, which came in fifth in the selection phase, the location of the headquarters for U.S. Space Command.” “I will continue to hold the Biden administration accountable for their egregious political meddling in our national security,” Rogers added. 
A Cygnus cargo spacecraft is set to launch to the International Space Station on the final flight of a version of an Antares rocket with Russian and Ukrainian components. NASA and Northrop Grumman completed a launch readiness review July 30 for the NG-19 mission, approving plans to launch the spacecraft on Aug. 1 at 8:31 p.m. Eastern from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia. Forecasts project an 80% chance of acceptable weather for the scheduled liftoff. The Cygnus is carrying nearly 3,750 kilograms of cargo to the station, including experiments, hardware and crew supplies. An on-time launch would allow the spacecraft to arrive at the station early Aug. 4 and remain there at least three months. This is the first Cygnus mission since the launch of NG-18 in November 2022. On that mission, one of two solar arrays on the Cygnus failed to deploy, but the spacecraft was able to carry out its mission with the single array. The solar array did not deploy because debris that lodged in the hinge of the array, preventing it from unfolding, said Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial space at Northrop Grumman, during a July 30 briefing. “There’s really no redesign of modifications required” to the spacecraft, he said. That debris came from acoustic blankets in the interstage portion of the Antares during stage separation. “It wasn’t a clean separation and we created some debris, and unfortunately a piece of the acoustic blanket became lodged in one of the Cygnus solar arrays,” said Kurt Eberly, director of space launch programs at Northrop Grumman. He said the company implemented unspecified corrective actions that have been reviewed by NASA ahead of the NG-19 launch. The NG-19 launch will be the last of the current version of the rocket, called Antares 230+. That version of the rocket uses a first stage manufactured by Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Building plant, with RD-181 engines from Russian company NPO Energomash. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, triggering sanctions that largely cut off Russia’s space industry from the West, Northrop Grumman said it had components for two more Antares launches, the NG-18 and -19 missions. In August 2022, Northrop announced it was partnering with Firefly Aerospace to develop a new version of the rocket , Antares 330, using a domestically manufactured first stage and engines. Eberly said the companies have completed critical design reviews (CDRs) for the structure of the first stage as well as Firefly’s Miranda engines that will power it. A system-level CDR is scheduled for September, and Firefly plans to start hot-fire tests of Miranda this fall. When Northrop and Firefly announced their partnership last August, they expected to start launching the Antares 330 by late 2024. That has now slipped to the summer of 2025, he said. While Antares 330 is in development, Northrop will launch three Cygnus missions on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. Despite the delay in the introduction of the new Antares, Eberly said Northrop doesn’t anticipate buying additional Falcon 9 launches. “We’re planning NG-20, -21 and -22 missions on Falcon 9, and then the plan is to return to Wallops” for NG-23 and beyond on Antares 330. The new first stage is more powerful than the existing one, increasing payload performance for the rocket from 8,120 kilograms for Cygnus ISS missions to 10,500 kilograms. “We think that opens the doors for other markets for us,” Eberly said. The Antares 330 also serves as a transition for a future rocket, currently known simply as the Medium Launch Vehicle, where the solid-fuel upper stage will be replaced by one using a version of the Miranda engine. That will further increase the vehicle’s payload capacity to 16,000 kilograms. “With that increased capability, coupled with the domestic supply chain, we think we’re going to be able to address other markets, including NASA civil and DOD markets, as well as commercial, in addition to cargo resupply,” he said.
KBR, a Defense Department and NASA contractor , won a $24.9 million contract to provide insights on the behavior of objects in nontraditional orbits. Under the five-year contract, awarded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, KBR will help the government gain a “better understanding of chaotic orbits in the XGEO domain,” according to a DoD announcement July 28. AFRL uses the term XGEO for outer space beyond geosynchronous orbit out to the Moon. The research work contract covers areas like N-body problems, or predicting the individual motions of a group of celestial objects interacting with each other gravitationally. The contract announcement says KBR will focus on space situational awareness in non-traditional orbits. Only one bid received The work is intended to support the “development of robust capabilities to better understand and predict motion, perform data association, initial orbit determination, and maneuver detection,” said the announcement. The contract awarded to KBR was a competitive acquisition but only one offer was received. KBR has several AFRL contracts to operate and maintain sensor sites and manage research projects on space domain awareness. The company last year won a $39.5 million contract to analyze the effects of natural and manufactured threats to spacecraft in orbit. AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate also is funding a flight experiment, called Or acle, to monitor deep space, far beyond Earth’s orbit. The lab in November awarded Advanced Space a $72 million contract to develop a spacecraft for the Oracle mission. 
The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved an $831 billion defense spending bill for fiscal year 2024 that recommends about $1 billion in cuts from the U.S. Space Force’s $30 billion request. The SAC said many of the recommended cuts are due to schedule and performance issues — concerns that also were raised by House appropriators last month in their version of the 2024 defense spending bill. The Biden administration requested $30.1 billion for the U.S. Space Force in fiscal year 2024. According to estimates from the consulting firm Velos, both the Senate And House appropriations committee bills propose just over $29 billion. The cuts in the SAC bill are spread across dozens of programs in the RDT&E (research, development, testing and engineering) and procurement accounts. The committee trimmed $356 million from RDT&E programs, and $679 million from procurement programs. In a report accompanying the bill, the SAC said that, despite these cuts, “the Committee continues its strong support to the Space Force through resourcing its top unfunded priorities, fully funding the Chief of Space Operations’ training initiatives and offering assistance in other key classified areas.” The recommended program adjustments, the committee said, “are non-prejudicial and based purely on the cost, schedule and performance factors that were presented to the committee.” The administration’s proposed 2024 budget is the Space Force’s largest ever. A boost for commercial space services Senate appropriators included several provisions in the defense bill that seek to encourage greater use of commercial space services. The SAC included $121.4 million for commercial satellite services, or $47.9 million more than the Space Force recommendation. The committee also added $40 million for a pilot program to demonstrate the use of commercial imaging satellites in support of military operations. “The Department of Defense will have to partially rely on new space capabilities that can fulfill traditional Title 10 intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and target tracking missions as a replacement for existing airborne assets,” the SAC said. Appropriators said the “commercial marketplace has matured to a place that can provide services directly to both the intelligence community and the Department of Defense … Receiving data in a tactically relevant timeline is essential to the success of a mission.” The SAC added $10 million for a demonstration of space-based monitoring over the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility. The funding will be used to “leverage commercially available space-based sensors to provide electro-optical, infrared, and synthetic aperture radar capabilities.”
Two crewed missions remain on track to launch to the International Space Station over the next month and a half after addressing technical issues that included a Soyuz coolant leak. At a July 25 briefing, NASA officials said they are planning the launch of the Crew-7 mission to the ISS no earlier than Aug. 17. That mission, on a Crew Dragon spacecraft, was scheduled for Aug. 15 but pushed back two days to allow sufficient time to change over Launch Complex 39A from Falcon Heavy to Falcon 9. At the time of the briefing, a Falcon Heavy was scheduled to launch July 26 carrying the Jupiter-3 communications satellite. That launch was delayed two days because of a technical issue, but successfully lifted off late July 28 . Neither NASA nor SpaceX have said if that slip will also further delay Crew-7. At the briefing, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said that if Crew-7 does not launch by Aug. 18, the only available launch opportunity before Aug. 25 would be Aug. 21 because of Progress cargo spacecraft operations at the station. Benji Reed, senior director for human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said preparations for Crew-7 were going well. He stated that, on the previous cargo Dragon mission, CRS-28 in June, there were problems with isolation valves in the spacecraft’s propulsion system that were stuck open. Those valves, used only if there is a thruster leak, were apparently corroded and remained open, although they were not needed. “We’re proactively inspecting isolation valves across all of the Dragon vehicles,” he said. The valves on the Crew-7 spacecraft are working normally, as well as those on the Crew-6 vehicle docked to the station. “We feel confident in the Crew-6 vehicle that is on station. We feel confident in the Crew-7 vehicle that is about to fly.” Crew-7 will be commanded by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, with European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen serving as pilot. Satoshi Furukawa of the Japanese space agency JAXA and Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos will be mission specialists. The four are expected to spend about 190 days on the station, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager. They will be followed by the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft, scheduled to launch Sept. 15. It will bring Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara to the station. O’Hara is scheduled to spend six months at the station, although Kononenko and Chub may spend a year there. The launch will be the first crewed Soyuz mission since Soyuz MS-22 in September 2022. That spacecraft suffered a coolant leak in December that led Roscosmos to decide to replace the spacecraft, launching an uncrewed Soyuz MS-23 in February and bringing back Soyuz MS-22 without a crew. Montalbano said that a Roscosmos investigation concluded there was not a defect with the Soyuz spacecraft that caused the leak, even though a Progress cargo spacecraft suffered a similar leak in February. Montalbano said he and Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, met with Roscosmos officials a week and a half earlier in Moscow. He said there was no evidence of changes in procedures, tooling or personnel that could have caused the Soyuz coolant leak. “Today, the conclusion of Roscosmos is that some type of external force,” like a micrometeoroid or orbital debris impact, caused the leak. “The NASA team has also looked at it, independent of the Russian team, and we also cannot find anything, based on the information we’ve been given by our Russian colleagues, of anything other than some type of external force or debris or something else like that.” Montalbano said preparations continue for a September launch, including training by O’Hara, who has planned to fly to the station in March before that Soyuz spacecraft was launched without a crew to replace Soyuz MS-22. He said that, after the delay, she did “flight following” of ISS activities with program managers, participating in meetings to see station operations from the “non-astronaut” perspective. “She’s ready to go,” he said.
SEOUL, South Korea — India successfully launched seven Singaporean satellites into low Earth orbit July 29 on its workhorse PSLV rocket. It was the nation’s sixth orbital launch of the year, which were all successful, and occurred two weeks after the launch of the Indian robotic lunar lander Chandrayaan-3 , which is flying toward the lunar south pole for a soft-landing attempt between Aug. 23 and 24. The four-stage PSLV rocket lifted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 10:01 p.m. Eastern as scheduled. Live footage showed the rocket soaring into the air with bright yellow exhaust shooting out of its first-stage engines. The launch proceeded as planned: the first stage booster separated about two minutes after liftoff. The separation of its payload fairing took place 73 seconds later, followed by the second stage 77 seconds later and the third stage 320 seconds later. The upper stage pushed the satellites to the intended orbit of 536 kilometers above the Earth and deployed them about 20 minutes after liftoff. “Congratulations, PSLV-C56 carrying seven satellites including the primary satellite DS-SAR and 6 co-passenger satellites have been successfully placed in the right orbit,” ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said soon after deployment. “I want to congratulate the customers sponsored by the government of Singapore for having this mission on board PSLV.” The director said the upper stage would be “brought back to a lower orbit of 300 kilometers” in the coming hours as part of efforts to reduce its lifespan in orbit. He said another PSLV launch is scheduled for early September, but did not provide further details. The launch was conducted by ISRO under a contract with New Space India Limited (NSIL), a commercial arm of the space agency. The primary payload was a 360-kilogram remote-sending satellite, named DS-SAR , which was developed in partnership with the Singapore government’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) and ST Engineering, a Singaporean tech company. The satellite carries a synthetic aperture radar developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). This enables DS-SAR to provide for all-weather day and night coverage, and is capable of imaging at 1-meter resolution at full polarimetry, according to Indian space agency ISRO . Once operational, the spacecraft will cater to the imagery needs of various Singapore government agencies and ST Engineering’s commercial customers. The six co-passengers were VELOX-AM, a technology demonstration microsatellite; ARCADE, an experimental satellite for atmospheric coupling and dynamics exploration; SCOOB-II, a nanosatellite flying a technology demonstrator payload; NuLIoN by NuSpace, an advanced nanosatellite enabling seamless IoT connectivity in both urban & remote locations; Galassia-2, a nanosatellite orbiting at low earth orbit; and ORB-12 STRIDER, a satellite developed under international collaboration. Meanwhile, Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander , launched July 14 , is sailing smoothly toward the lunar south pole after successfully executing its fifth and final Earth-bound orbit-raising maneuver July 25 . As of July 27, the spacecraft was in a 1,27,609 km x 236 km orbit around the Earth, preparing for its Aug. 1 Translunar Injection (TLI). If everything goes as planned, the spacecraft is scheduled to arrive in lunar orbit Aug. 5. Once in lunar orbit, the propulsion module will be jettisoned. The Vikram lander will begin an autonomous descent, expected on Aug. 23 or 24, to a targeted landing site near the lunar South Pole. The landing site is located at 69.37 degrees south latitude and 32.35 degrees east longitude. A successful landing will make India the fourth country in the world to achieve a lunar landing, following the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China. The mission would also be the first to land near the lunar south pole. No previous Moon mission has landed at a lower latitude.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched EchoStar’s more than nine metric ton Jupiter-3 spacecraft July 28 and successfully dropped off the world’s heaviest commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous transfer orbit. The Maxar Technologies-built satellite lifted off on a dedicated Falcon Heavy at 11:04 p.m. Eastern from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, separating from the rocket about three and a half hours later. Both Falcon Heavy side boosters landed at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station just over seven minutes after launch for reuse. They had supported two earlier Falcon Heavy missions, both for the U.S. Space Force: USSF-44 in November and USSF-67 early this year . The mission was delayed from July 26 to allow more time for vehicle checkouts after an abort was called with about a minute remaining in the countdown for reasons SpaceX did not detail. EchoStar’s Hughes Networks Systems subsidiary, which is set to provide Jupiter-3’s broadband services, confirmed the satellite has started sending and receiving its first signals post-launch, and that engineers had deployed its solar arrays. Jupiter-3 is set to double the capacity of the operator’s Jupiter fleet with an additional 500 gigabits per second, after reaching its 95 degrees west orbital slot and completing health checks the operator expects to wrap up in the fourth quarter. The broadband services would address rising demand over the Americas, where it has been losing subscribers as capacity constraints weigh on the business. EchoStar recently said Hughes broadband subscribers are using about 15% more bandwidth on average year-on-year amid intensifying competition in the market, including from SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. Jupiter-3 enables the company “to start growing again in our key markets where we’ve been hesitant to add new customers because of the capacity limitations,” EchoStar chief operating officer Paul Gaske said, “and it also allows us the opportunity to improve plans for our existing customers.” He said the company has a number of “pinch points” to address but its constraints are highest in the United States, where it intends to put the largest chunk of Jupiter-3’s capacity to work. Heavyweight champions EchoStar ordered Jupiter-3 (also called EchoStar-24) in 2017 from Space Systems Loral before it rebranded as Maxar Technologies, and had initially planned to launch it in 2021 before the pandemic led to production issues at Maxar and other satellite manufacturers. Maxar said Jupiter-3, at about the size of a standard school bus when antennas and solar panels stowed and with a wingspan of a Boeing 737 when fully deployed, is the largest spacecraft it has ever made. Jupiter-3 unseats Telesat’s Telstar-19 Vantage that launched in 2018 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 as the largest commercial communications satellite ever deployed. Maxar-built Telstar-19 Vantage had a launch mass of roughly seven metric tons. Heaviest commercial communication satellites Jupiter-3 was deployed on the third Falcon Heavy of 2023, coming after its April 30 launch for primary passenger ViaSat-3 Americas, a 5.6 metric ton satellite operated by EchoStar broadband rival Viasat that later suffered an antenna anomaly . Arcturus, the first satellite built by Astranis that was also on the flight with a mass of around 400 kilograms, suffered an unrelated post-launch issue that means it will not provide broadband over Alaska as planned. The mission for Jupiter-3 was Falcon Heavy’s seventh flight since its debut in 2018. It was SpaceX’s 51st launch mission so far this year.
Sierra Space won an Air Force contract to continue development of an engine that could be used in the upper stage of future launch vehicles. Colorado-based Sierra Space received a $22.6 million contract from the Air Force Test Center July 25 to mature the design of its VR35K-A engine. The contract will allow continued work on the engine, such as development of “flight-weight engine component design,” according to a Defense Department procurement notice. Sierra Space and, previously, Sierra Nevada Corporation, have been working on the VR35K-A engine design for several years with support from the Air Force Research Laboratory. That included completing a critical design review for the engine in August 2022. The engine, using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, is designed to produce 35,000 pounds-force of thrust. In a statement to SpaceNews, Sierra Space said the engine achieved “high thrust efficiency” during recent tests at a company facility in Wisconsin. “Compared with other upper-stage engines currently on the market, the VR35K-A provides more thrust and higher performance in a smaller package,” said Rusty Thomas, Sierra Space’s chief technology officer and vice president and general manager for the company’s Space Applications business sector. The company has previously outlined several advantages of the engine design, including its use of a fuel-rich staged combustion cycle for increased specific impulse, a measure of engine efficiency. The engine also uses thrust chamber assembly design called VORTEX for increased pressure in a smaller volume. “Once complete, the VR35K-A will allow our launch vehicle teammates and partners to deliver up to 30% more payload mass to orbit,” Thomas said. “It will drive technology across all propulsion products at Sierra Space, from our applications and destinations sectors to space transportation with our Dream Chaser spaceplane.” Sierra Space has not disclosed any customers for the VR35K-A engine. While intended for use on launch vehicle upper stages, companies designing or operating large launch vehicles today are either developing their own engines or are buying engines from other suppliers, as United Launch Alliance is with the RL10 engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne used on its Atlas, Delta and Vulcan vehicles. At an investor conference June 27, though, Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said the company was examining long-term options for developing propulsion systems that would allow Dream Chaser to reach orbit without relying on other companies’ launch vehicles. “We’re thinking about investigating the right technologies in thermal and propulsion and materials that allows us to potentially think about the staging options that would allow us, for the first time, have horizontal takeoff,” he said, but didn’t offer a schedule or other details about those plans.
United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said he has “a bunch of questions” about the latest changes announced by the Space Force for the procurement of national security space launch services. Speaking on the CNBC “Manifest Space with Morgan Brennan” podcast that aired July 27, Bruno was asked to comment on the Space Force’s decision to add a third heavy-lift launch provider in the next round of contracts, known as National Security Space Launch Phase 3. Currently ULA and SpaceX are the only NSSL launch providers. Due to concerns about growing commercial demand, the Space Force in a revised solicitation July 14 said it planned to select a third provider in NSSL Phase 3, creating an opportunity for a new entrant like Blue Origin which is developing a heavy rocket. Bruno has warned that large rockets will be in short supply over the next several years due to commercial demand. In that vein, Brennan asked Bruno whether he thought the updated NSSL strategy was a “smart move” or whether it would create “too much potential future competition in that market.” The global launch market will experience “real scarcity,” Bruno said. “It is becoming tighter” as commercial players like Amazon buy up the available rockets. But Bruno declined to say whether the Phase 3 strategy of adding a third provider is a solution to the scarcity problem. The latest RFP is ‘very different’ The first draft of the “Lane 2” portion of the Phase 3 procurement — which specified that two heavy-lift providers would be selected — was “a very thoughtful acquisition, very well done,” Bruno said. “This latest RFP draft update from just last week is very, very different,” he said. “It does have a provision to bring another provider into Lane 2 for a very limited number of missions.” Space Force officials “have talked about capacity being a motivation for that,” Bruno added. “We have a bunch of questions to make sure we really understand what they’re doing and trying to achieve.” After those questions get answered, Bruno told Brennan, “I’ll be able to tell you how we feel about all of that.” Only two companies today can launch heavy payloads Although the Space Force is seeking three domestic providers of heavy-lift launch, “there’s really only two now,” Bruno said. “Three awards is really addressing three bidders.” “In terms of a competitive landscape, it’s not competition if everybody wins,” he added. “So that’s the part we’re asking them about to make sure we understand.” A ULA spokesperson said in a statement to SpaceNews July 28 that Bruno “is reviewing the second draft” of the Phase 3 solicitation. 
Chris Kubasik, CEO of defense contractor L3Harris Technologies, on July 27 extended “a warm welcome to Aerojet’s team of over 5,000 employees who will soon become part of L3Harris.” After clearing regulatory approvals , L3Harris officially acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne, the last independent U.S. supplier of missile propulsion systems. Aerojet Rocketdyne, headquartered in El Segundo, California, makes rocket engines and propulsion systems for space vehicles, ballistic missiles and military tactical weapons. The completion of the $4.7 billion deal caps a period of uncertainty for Aerojet Rocketdyne that started in December 2020 when Lockheed Martin sought to buy it for $4.4 billion. That acquisition was blocked by the Federal Trade Commission. During an earnings call with analysts July 27, Kubasik said the takeover of Aerojet “represents a pivotal moment for both our company and the defense industry and is poised to generate shareholder value beyond initial expectations.” L3Harris will benefit from the demand for munitions fueled by the Ukraine war. The Defense Department in April announced it would provide Aerojet Rocketdyne $215.6 million to expand its rocket propulsion manufacturing facilities in order to speed up production of missiles for Ukraine. “Budgets are increasing for munitions, and the DoD has committed Defense Production Act funding for the expansion and modernization of Aerojet Rocketdyne’s operations,” said Kubasik. In its final social media post as an independent company, Aerojet Rocketdyne said: “We’re now part of L3Harris Technologies, where we’ll continue our innovations under its umbrella.” ‘Assurances to DoD’ The FTC last year blocked Lockheed Martin’s bid for Aerojet Rocketdyne, arguing that the combination would give Lockheed — a major supplier of tactical missiles — the ability to “cut off other defense contractors from the critical components they need to build competing missiles.” Kubasik said L3Harris plans to make Aerojet’s propulsion systems available to all DoD contractors. “We gave assurances to the DoD that we would be a merchant supplier of rocket motors and rocket engines,” he told analysts. “I can assure you we are highly motivated to sell rocket engines and rocket motors to anyone who wants to buy them within the rules globally.” The $215 million Defense Production Act funds, said Kubasik, will be spent to upgrade facilities and make munitions, “but there’s also money in there to digitize their engineering. So we’re quite excited about that.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat expects to return to growth next year as its pivot to connectivity starts to bear fruit, the French satellite operator said July 28 after a waning video business helped annual sales decline for the seventh year in a row. Total revenues fell to 1.31 billion euros ($1.4 billion) for the company’s fiscal year ending June 30, a 5.5% year-on-year drop when adjusted for currency changes on a like-for-like basis. Video revenues, representing about 62% of the operator’s business, were down by 8.3% to 705 million euros as sanctions against Russian and Iranian channels dragged on a market in gradual decline. Revenues from government services also dropped 7.2% year-on-year to 143 million euros. Meanwhile, Eutelsat’s mobile connectivity division was up nearly 29% to 110 million euros, driven by maritime customers as new connectivity-focused geostationary satellites come online. British low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband venture OneWeb is vital to Eutelsat’s connectivity growth story. Eva Berneke, Eutelsat’s CEO, said it is on track to take over OneWeb in September, subject to remaining regulatory approvals and a shareholder vote at the French company. OneWeb reached its $50 million revenue target at the end of June, Berneke said, as it prepares to offer global services after completing the deployment of its constellation earlier this year. However, she said Eutelsat is revising down the revenue projection for the combined group for the coming fiscal year by 2% following delays in the production and testing of OneWeb terminals. Eutelsat now forecasts between 1.32 billion and 1.42 billion euros in revenues from its operating verticals for the coming 12 months. It expects OneWeb to provide 125 million and 225 million euros of that. Excluding the effect of sanctions, Eutelsat said video revenue is set to suffer a mid-single-digit decline over the period, while mobile and fixed connectivity will see double-digit growth — also boosted by commercial traction from its recently launched Eutelsat 10B and Konnect VHTS geostationary satellites. The LEO operator has an order backlog of $900 million, according to Eutelsat, up $300 million from October but the same figure reported in May. Berneke said there is positive momentum in OneWeb’s backlog that is not included in this figure, including tests in remote islands around the United Kingdom and with the U.S. military. OneWeb has also switched focus to getting customers online instead of just building a pipeline of orders, she added. The combined group expects to record between 725 million and 825 million euros in adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, for the next fiscal year. That would be lower than the 826 million euros recorded for the 12 months to June 30, 2023 — also down 4.2% on the prior year — as Eutelsat and OneWeb invest in integrating their businesses. Berneke also said Eutelsat, as part of a group featuring Europe’s largest space companies , is preparing to submit a proposal for a role in the European Union’s proposed multi-orbit connectivity constellation next week. The deadline for the first round of proposals for Europe’s 6 billion euro IRIS² project, or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, is Aug. 7. Berneke said the consortium is preparing to submit final proposals before the end of this year after discussing its initial bid with Europe, which is expected to pick winning bidders in February.
Argentina signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords outlining best practices for space exploration, part of a recent surge of countries joining the agreement. Daniel Filmus, Argentina’s minister for science, technology and innovation, signed the Artemis Accords in a ceremony July 27 at Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential office in Buenos Aires. Argentine President Alberto Fernández attended the ceremony along with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Along with our fellow Artemis Accords signatories, the United States and Argentina are setting a standard for 21st century exploration and use of space,” Nelson said in a statement about the signing. The Accords, rolled out in 2020, outline best practices and norms of behavior for space activities, building upon the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements. They extend to additional topics, such as exchange of scientific data and utilization of space resources. “We are convinced that the Artemis Accords constitute a contribution to the development of space activities with peaceful purposes at a global level and that they will increase international cooperation with Argentina,” said Filmus in the NASA statement. Argentina is the 28 th country to sign the Accords and the fifth to do so in the last three months. The Czech Republic and Spain signed the document in May, followed by Ecuador and India in June. “The unprecedented momentum that the Accords are enjoying is a tribute to the global desire for norms of behavior in space,” said Mike Gold, chief growth officer at Redwire and a former NASA official who spearheaded development of the Artemis Accords in 2020. “This is vital not only for government activities, but for the private sector as well, since investors and operators benefit greatly from an environment in space that is peaceful, predictable and prosperous.” Signing the Accords, though, does not mean a country will be participating in the NASA-led Artemis lunar exploration campaign. “The Accords are how we’re going to operate and it’s really about how we’re going to conduct ourselves when we do the Artemis missions,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, during a panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Memorial Symposium July 19. “Folks who sign the Accords are stepping up and saying, ‘Yes, I want to operate in an open, transparent way.’” Countries that are cooperating on Artemis by providing hardware or expertise, he noted, are handled separately from the Accords though a series of agreements. “What we’re asking everyone to do is to take our objectives, compare them to yours,” he said, to look for areas that align, “and how that plays out to what you can contribute.” While Argentina joined the list of Artemis Accords signatories, one of the first countries to sign the document is expanding its cooperation with the United States in space. In a July 27 joint statement after a meeting at the White House between President Joe Biden and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the leaders of the two countries said they would work to enhance cooperation between the countries in space. “The United States and Italy commit to strengthen space cooperation, including through the creation of a ‘new space dialogue’ to promote industrial cooperation with government support,” the document stated. The document did not go into details about that space dialogue and what it will accomplish. The joint statement noted the countries welcomed “innovative new commercial space partnerships, including to advance human spaceflight,” specifically mentioning commercial space stations. Thales Alenia Space Italia is working with two American companies, Axiom Space and Northrop Grumman, developing commercial space stations. Three Italians flew as payload specialists on Virgin Galactic’s first commercial SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceflight in June. One of them, Italian Air Force Col. Walter Villadei, has trained with Axiom Space for a future commercial flight to the International Space Station. The statement added that the countries “recognize the importance of addressing space threats through norms, rules, and principles of responsible behaviors.” The Italian government announced in April it would not conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons tests , joining an initiative announced by Vice President Kamala Harris a year earlier.
The next competition for a NASA line of planetary science missions could suffer a multi-year delay because of constrained budgets, an agency official said July 27. NASA has planned to release the announcement of opportunity, or AO, for the fifth New Frontiers mission in November, after releasing a draft version for public comment early this year. The release of the final AO would have kicked off a competition ending with the selection of a mission in the fall of 2026 for launch in the early 2030s. However, after a debt-ceiling agreement enacted in early June that would keep non-defense discretionary spending at 2023 levels for fiscal year 2024 , NASA tapped the brakes on those plans. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at a June 21 meeting of the agency’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee that the release of the AO would likely be delayed beyond November as NASA evaluates the implications of the debt-ceiling deal. Glaze didn’t indicate then how long the delay would be, but at a July 27 town hall meeting by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, she stated the release of the AO could be pushed back potentially to 2026 depending on the funding available to her division. “If the planetary science funding levels that are anticipated as a result of this tight budget environment are actually realized over the next two or so years,” she warned, “it is unlikely we’ll be able to solicit New Frontiers perhaps not before 2026.” That decision, she said, was based on prioritization that focuses on continuing existing missions over starting new ones, as well as funding research and analysis. “The AOs are the things that really need to be pushed out in order to make sure we support the things that we’ve already committed to.” NASA, in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, requested $3.38 billion for planetary science programs. That did not include any money for the next New Frontiers mission, but it projected funding ramping up for it starting in fiscal year 2025 to cover studies of several mission concepts before selecting one for development in 2026. The Senate’s version of the fiscal year 2024 commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill, which funds NASA, would provide $2.68 billion for planetary science, $700 million below the request. The report accompanying the bill stated that appropriators were “pleased” with NASA’s plans to release the New Frontiers AO in the fall, but asked for more details on how NASA would implement the recommendations of the decadal survey with regards to both New Frontiers and a proposed Uranus flagship mission. The House has not released details about its CJS spending bill beyond providing only slightly more funding for science overall: $7.38 billion versus $7.34 billion in the Senate bill. The full House Appropriations Committee failed to mark up its CJS spending bill before leaving for summer recess July 28, meaning no action on the bill is expected until at least mid-September. New Frontiers is a line of competed planetary science missions larger than the Discovery class. The draft AO set a cost cap for mission development at $900 million, a figure that does not include launch, plus a $300 million cost cap for operations after launch. Unlike Discovery, which is open to a wide range of potential solar system destinations, New Frontiers restricts proposals to a set based on recommendations of the planetary science decadal survey. The draft AO limited proposals to six categories: a comet surface sample return, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, a sample return mission to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and a probe of Saturn’s atmosphere. However, Glaze said at the town hall meeting that those options could change if there is an extended delay in the AO’s release. In that case, she said she would ask the National Academies’ Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science for guidance on what mission themes should be included, incorporating recommendations from the planetary science decadal survey. “It would also provide an opportunity to update the science objectives for the mission themes” based on the decadal, she said. Other divisions are taking different approaches to new missions. The budget proposal would pause work on the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC) mission, a major priority for heliophysics, citing budget pressures from other science programs. “Pausing GDC was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” said Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science and former heliophysics division director, during the town hall. “But it was the right decision to make at the time.” She said work on GDC was continuing in the current fiscal year while the agency determines “what a pause can mean.” The astrophysics division, though, is moving ahead with plans for an AO for its first probe-class mission, modeled on New Frontiers in terms of both budget and restricted range of missions. Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said at the town hall he expected the final AO for that first probe mission, with a $1 billion cost cap and limited to far-infrared or X-ray telescopes, to be released “in a couple of weeks.”
Northrop Grumman said it took a $36 million charge on its contract to build a module for NASA’s lunar Gateway, citing changing mission requirements and broader economic issues. In the company’s fiscal second quarter financial results released July 27, the company announced an unfavorable estimate-at-completion adjustment of $36 million for its work on the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module, one of the first elements of the Gateway. The company blamed the charge on “evolving Lunar Gateway architecture and mission requirements combined with macroeconomic challenges” that caused cost growth on the program. Northrop received a $935 million fixed-price contract from NASA in July 2021 to build the module, which is based on the company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft. HALO will provide initial living accommodations on the Gateway and includes several docking ports for visiting Orion spacecraft and lunar landers as well as additional modules provided by international partners. In an earnings call, Kathy Warden, chief executive of Northrop Grumman, said earlier work on HALO to mature the design had been done on cost-plus contracts before the fixed-price contract two years ago to produce HALO. “We think that is best applied for commercial items or production programs with stable requirements and mature designs,” she said of fixed-price contracts. “As it’s turning out on the HALO program, the requirements are not as stable as we or the government anticipated, and we’re working with them to address that change management as we go forward.” Neither Warden nor the company elaborated on those changing requirements. The Gateway program has evolved significantly over the last several years, notably with NASA’s decision in 2020 to launch HALO and the Maxar-developed Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) together, rather than launching them separately and having them dock in lunar orbit. “Overall, it was a good decision. It really burns down a lot of risk,” said Rick Mastracchio, director of business development at Northrop Grumman Space systems, of the decision to launch PPE and HALO together. “Bolting them together on the ground certainly greatly reduces risk.” Speaking on a panel at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Memorial Symposium July 18, he noted that launching PPE and HALO together on a Falcon Heavy does present some challenges. “Putting the two vehicles on the one launch vehicle, mass became the top issue,” he said. “The team has been working on that for quite a while.” “We all understood that there were going to be technical challenges associated with this level of change,” said Chris Coker, Maxar vice president for the Power and Propulsion Element, on that panel. He credited NASA for encouraging the two companies to work together “as true partners” to best integrate their respective modules. Another challenge, Mastracchio said, is the lack of experience operating around the moon. “Building a permanent Gateway in cislunar space is a lot harder than it sounds,” he said. “We still have yet to understand the specifics of how to operate and design for cislunar space and the lunar surface.”
China has conducted a pair of orbital missions to launch a commercially developed flat-panel communications satellite and a new batch of spy satellites. A Long March 2D rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 4:02 p.m. Eastern, July 26. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) stated that the payload was a Yaogan-36 satellite. No further information on the payload was provided. The mission likely carries a trio of the classified spacecraft, joining four earlier groups of Yaogan-36 triplets in 500-kilometer-altitude orbits with inclinations of 35 degrees. The spacecraft are possible signal-intelligence satellites. China has five groups of Yaogan-35 satellites in similar orbits. It is unclear what capabilities distinguish the two designations. That mission followed the launch late July 22 of the first stackable, flat-panel communications satellite for Chinese commercial firm GalaxySpace. A Long March 2D was once again used, lifting off from Taiyuan spaceport in northern China at 10:50 p.m. Eastern. Also aboard were the Skysight AS-1, 2 and 3 satellites for Skysight Technology Co., Ltd. Lingxi-03 carries a multi-beam digital payload with a data capacity of tens of gigabits per second, according to GalaxySpace . It also uses a flexible solar panel with a thickness of one millimeter. Galaxy Space previously launched six test satellites in March 2022. The stackable satellite technology and other qualities of the new Lingxi-03 satellite will provide technical support for the rapid deployment of China’s low Earth orbit communications megaconstellation, GalaxySpace’s Hu Zhao told Chinese state media. The company will also accelerate the batch development of flat panel stackable satellites, and tackle core technologies such as phased array antennas for direct satellite-to-device communications and digital processing payloads, Zhu Zhengxian, chief technology officer of GalaxySpace, told Xinhua . China’s national plans for LEO comms is building a constellation named Guowang , consisting of up to 13,000 satellites. The first batch of satellites is expected to launch later this year . Skysight AS-1 is a synthetic aperture radar satellite built by CASC’s DFH Satellite Co., Ltd. The latter pair were built by GalaxySpace and carry optical and infrared remote sensing payloads respectively. The rideshare launch was facilitated by CASC’s China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC). The Long March 2D can carry more than 3,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, or 1,300 kg to a 645-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. The July 22 launch from Taiyuan also featured grid fins at the top of the first stage for helping to constrain the landing zone of the spent stage downrange. Three of China’s four national spaceports are located deep inland, meaning costly evacuation and recovery procedures are needed, and falling space debris occasionally falls within inhabited areas. The launches marked the 149th and 150th consecutive successful Long March launches, according to CASC. The run of successes stretches back to a Long March 3B failure in April 2020. That launch saw the loss of the Indonesian Palapa-N1 communications satellite. China has now launched a total of 480 Long March rockets, CASC says. The first, a Long March 1 rocket carrying DFH-1, launched from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert in 1970. CASC plans more than 60 launches this year, with the above launches marking 29 and 30 for 2023. Other actors could add a further 20 or more orbital missions in what appears to be a breakthrough year for China’s commercial launch sector. Firms CAS Space, iSpace, Expace, Space Pioneer and Landspace have all reached orbit so far in 2023. These include first commercial liquid propellant launch successes, achieved by Space Pioneer and Landspace.
L3Harris told investors July 26 that federal regulators will not challenge the company’s acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, clearing the way for the deal to close as early as July 28. “We were advised today that the Federal Trade Commission will not block our acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne; therefore, we are moving forward to close the transaction on or about July 28,” Christopher Kubasik, chair and chief executive of L3Harris, said in a letter to investors. $4.7 billion deal Defense contractor L3Harris in December announced a $4.7 billion bid to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, a manufacturer of rocket engines and propulsion systems for space vehicles, ballistic missiles and military tactical weapons. Kubasik previously said he expected the deal to go through because it’s not a vertical merger, and L3Harris does not compete with Aerojet Rocketdyne. “They make rocket motors and rocket engines and we do not. We are not a customer of theirs. They are not a customer of ours,” he said. Previous buyer blocked by FTC L3Harris moved to acquire Aerojet nearly two years after Lockheed Martin sought to buy the rocket engine maker in a $4.4 billion bid that was blocked by antitrust regulators. The FTC argued that Lockheed Martin — a major supplier of tactical missiles — should not own a provider of critical components needed to build competing missiles. L3Harris said the acquisition of Aerojet will give the company a greater footprint in civil space, strategic defense systems and precision munitions.
Kleos Space, a Luxembourg based startup that operates signals-intelligence satellites, has run out of cash and will file for bankruptcy. The company’s financier on July 25 informed Kleos Space that it will no longer extend additional credit, a spokesman for Kleos Space, Lou Weis, said July 26 in a statement to SpaceNews . Kleos Space’s financing has been run by Pure Asset Management , an Australian investment firm. Kleos Space today notified the Australian Securities Exchange it plans to file for bankruptcy after failing to raise more money. In a separate filing earlier this month, the company revealed it had problems with a couple of the satellites it had launched and had to write them off. Radio-frequency data collection Kleos Space launched three clusters of four satellites to detect radio-frequency signals and pinpoint their location. It has provided RF monitoring data to government and commercial customers, and was one of several vendors that last year signed agreements with the National Reconnaissance Office to provide RF data. After it was unable to secure funding, “the company’s board has had no alternative but to acknowledge that the Company is unable to meet its financial commitments as they fall due, and that there is no prospect of viable alternative financial accommodation,” Weis said. “Accordingly, it will petition the relevant commercial district court in Luxembourg for a bankruptcy adjudication,” he said. Kleos Space is preparing documentation to support the petition, which must be filed within 30 days. Weis said Kleos Space, despite its financial collapse, has “many things to be proud of. We developed and delivered new, highly disruptive technology that was helping to solve security challenges and also built a global customer base including numerous government agencies.” He said the company suffered a series of setbacks due to space launch delays, satellite development issues, and faced challenges accessing capital.
NASA and DARPA have selected Lockheed Martin to develop a spacecraft to demonstrate nuclear propulsion technologies in Earth orbit later this decade. The two government agencies announced July 26 that they had reached an agreement with Lockheed Martin to develop the spacecraft for the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program. NASA and DARPA announced in January that they would collaborate on DRACO to demonstrate nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) technologies that are of interest to both agencies. Lockheed is working with BWXT on the program, with BWXT providing the nuclear reactor for DRACO and providing its high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel. That reactor will heat up liquid hydrogen carried on the spacecraft, turning it into high-temperature gas that provides thrust. The agreement is structured as a milestone-based other transaction authority agreement with a total value of $499 million, said Tabitha Dodson, program manager for DRACO at DARPA, during a call with reporters. The costs are split evenly between NASA, responsible for the nuclear reactor, and DARPA, responsible for the spacecraft and regulatory approvals. The Space Force will provide the launch of the vehicle, planned for no later than 2027. Both Lockheed and BWXT are contributing their own funds to the program. Kirk Shireman, vice president of lunar exploration campaigns at Lockheed Martin, described his company’s investment into DRACO as “significant” but did not have a specific amount available. Similarly, Joe Miller, president of BWXT Advanced Technologies, said his company had been investing for several years on fuel development for the reactor, but also did not provide a specific amount. Both NASA and the Defense Department are interested in NTP because of its much higher efficiency: two to three times more than chemical propulsion, noted Anthony Calomino, NASA space nuclear technologies portfolio manager, in the call. For NASA that means potentially faster trips to Mars, while the military is interested in greater maneuverability in cislunar space. However, DRACO will be a very limited demonstration of NTP. “It’s a flying test stand, essentially,” said Dodson. After launched into an operational orbit, likely between 700 and 2,000 kilometers high, the spacecraft will not make any major maneuvers. Instead, the focus will be on the vehicle’s reactor and its use of HALEU fuel, which has not been used in nuclear reactors in space before. “This will be the primary focus of the DRACO demo, and the act of collecting data on the HALEU reactor will define mission success.” Officials did not disclose the thrust the DRACO engine will produce, although Calomino said it will have a specific impulse, a measure of efficiency, of about 700 seconds. That is significantly higher than even the best chemical engines although the design goal for NTP systems is 850 to 900 seconds. “For the DRACO mission, we’re right at the level where we can get that engineering relevance that we need for a better understanding for higher-thrust engines.” Those tests are easier to do in space than on Earth, which was done with earlier NTP programs like NASA’s NERVA a half-century ago. Calomino said NASA studied the feasibility of a ground test, which requires special infrastructure to prevent the engine’s exhaust from venting into the atmosphere, “and the costs of that are actually higher than what we’re estimating is going to be to conduct this test in space.” Dodson described the DRACO spacecraft as similar in size to a typical launch vehicle upper stage. It will be able to fit within standard launch vehicle payload fairings, with the Space Force using its National Security Space Launch contract to secure a launch of the vehicle on either a Falcon 9 or Vulcan Centaur from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Once in orbit, the DRACO mission will last only a couple months, limited by the supply of liquid hydrogen on board. “Keeping the hydrogen around is a big challenge, so we will want to expedite the checkout of the spacecraft and of the nuclear reactor,” Shireman said. However, both he and government officials left open the possibility of refueling DRACO to allow for continued tests. Dodson said DARPA has had discussions with the Space Force, which is interested in in-space refueling, to see if the spacecraft can be designed with a port to enable transfer of liquid hydrogen into it. Shireman noted that in-space liquid cryogenic propellant transfer has not been demonstrated yet, although that technology will be a key part of the design for Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander , for which Lockheed Martin is developing a “cislunar transporter” vehicle to refuel it. “In the end, I still think you still meet the propulsion demonstration even if can’t refuel it,” he said, “but I’d love to refuel it and keep it around and use it for years to come.”
The U.S. military is being challenged to counter China’s rapid advances in space technology, Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting told the Senate Armed Services Committee July 26. “Our top threat is the growing Chinese counter-space capabilities, both from reversible threats, like jamming, all the way up to direct-ascent anti-satellite and laser capabilities we’ve seen them testing,” Whiting said during a confirmation hearing. Currently the commander of the Space Force’s Space Operations Command, Whiting was nominated by President Biden for promotion to general and assignment as the next commander of U.S. Space Command. U.S. Space Command, located at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, is a military combatant command responsible for operations in outer space. During the confirmation hearing, Whiting said a key concern is China’s growing arsenal of anti-satellite weapons that it developed “after really studying the United States and how we leverage space for military advantage.” The Senate Armed Services Committee held a joint confirmation hearing for Whiting and for Lt. Gen. Gregory Guillot, nominated to be the next commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. In response to questions about China’s capabilities in space, Whiting said “it is our responsibility across the national security space enterprise, but certainly if confirmed at U.S. Space Command, to make sure that we can operate in the face of those threats that we now see.” Reliance on commercial space Whiting fielded questions from lawmakers about how the U.S. military intends to work with commercial space companies and provide protections for those assets. “That is a topic obviously that we’re focused on very, very keenly,” Whiting said. U.S. Space Command is tasked “to defend commercial space capabilities if directed. So we understand that importance and have put that hook into that mission,” he said. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the “growing importance of commercial space capability,” Whiting noted. “So we must continue to partner with those companies … so that if we do need to actively defend them, we have the communication avenues open to be able to do so.” Space Command expects satellites to be targeted by electronic jammers or by a direct physical attack on a spacecraft in orbit or a ground station, Whiting said. If confirmed, Whiting will replace Gen. James Dickinson. Although several members of the SASC indicated they intend to support Whiting’s promotion, military nominees have not been able to get confirmed by the Senate as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has placed a hold on general and flag officer nominations — to protest a DoD policy that covers certain abortion-related travel expenses for service members. Tuberville also is pressing DoD to move forward with the relocation of U.S. Space Command to Alabama. The basing decision for more than two years has been bogged down by political fights . Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) during the hearing called out Tuberville for preventing military leaders from getting promotions and assignments. “Senator Tuberville had some good questions for the two generals,” Kelly said. But Whiting’s and Guillot’s confirmation is “certainly in question because of Senator Tuberville’s holds on these promotions and these positions.”
Boeing took another loss on its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew program as the first crewed flight of that vehicle remains in limbo. In its fiscal second quarter financial results released July 26, the company said it took a $257 million loss on the Starliner program, citing the delay in the vehicle’s first flight with astronauts on board that Boeing and NASA announced June 1. That loss was the biggest single factor in a $527 million loss the company reported for its Defense, Space and Security business unit in the quarter. The loss is the latest financial setback for Boeing on the fixed-price contract. The company has previously recorded $883 million in charges against earnings linked to Starliner, including $195 million in the third quarter of 2022 . Those charges covered delays in the vehicle’s development and the cost to fly a second uncrewed test flight. “On Starliner, we’re in lockstep with our customer. We’ve prioritized safety, and we’re taking whatever time is required. We’re confident in that team and committed to getting it right,” said David Calhoun, president and chief executive of Boeing, in an earnings call. He did not elaborate on those efforts or estimate how much time is required. When NASA and Boeing announced the latest delay in the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for CST-100 Starliner at Boeing, said it was premature then to announce a new launch date, stating that the company needed “several days” to review the work needed to address parachute harness and wire tape issues that caused the delay. During a July 25 NASA briefing about the upcoming SpaceX Crew-7 mission to the International Space Station, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the Starliner program had “stepped back” to take a detailed look at all aspects of preparations for the crewed flight, a recommendation made by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel shortly before the latest problems . The program had found a new joint for use in the parachute system that would meet the required factor of safety that the existing component fell short of. “That joint is in testing right now and we’re in the middle of looking at that joint and figuring out how to get it into the chutes for flight,” he said. Others have been removing tape for wire harnesses in the spacecraft that tests showed to be flammable. Stich said engineers had found an alternative tape that is not flammable to use in its place. Stich, though, did not offer a revised schedule for the CFT mission, which will carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station for a brief stay. That launch had been scheduled for July 21 before the delay. “The work on Starliner is progressing well,” he said. “We need to step back a little bit and take a look at how all this work lines up. We’re not really ready to talk a launch opportunity yet.” Stich said the focus for now is resolving the technical issues. NASA and Boeing will meet “when the time is right and pick a launch target.”
A bill intended to reform satellite spectrum licensing regulations failed to pass the House July 25 after some members objected to provisions they claimed gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to regulate space safety. The House debated H.R. 1338 , the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act, under suspension of the rules, a procedure that limits debates and amendments but requires a two-thirds majority for passage. The bill, though, fell short of that threshold, with 250 votes in favor versus 163 votes against. One member voted present. The bill was intended to improve the licensing process for satellite systems at the FCC, a modernization that the bill’s advocates said was long overdue and necessary to ensure American competitiveness in the satellite communications market. It would have set time limits on the FCC’s review of satellite licenses and enabled expedited reviews of minor license modifications. The House Energy and Commerce Committee favorably reported the bill on a unanimous vote in March . However, the leadership of House Science Committee opposed the bill because of provisions regarding regulation of space debris and space traffic management. They pointed to language in the bill that directed the FCC to establish “specific, measurable, and technology-neutral performance objectives for space safety and orbital debris.” In a “Dear Colleague” letter circulated to House members ahead of the vote, the bipartisan leadership of the full committee and its space subcommittee argued that the FCC would be overstepping its authority by attempting to regulate space safety. “Congress has never explicitly granted FCC authority to regulate in these areas, and doing so now is a significant policy decision,” the letter stated, adding that the FCC also lacked expertise to do so. “Assigning FCC responsibility to both create these rules and assess an applicant’s compliance would divert resources from FCC’s primary mission of assessing the applicant’s spectrum use.” Backers of H.R. 1338 argued during debate about the bill that language added to it would prevent the FCC from becoming a space safety regulator. They noted the bill now included “rules of construction” that stated the bill did not give the FCC authority to provide space situational awareness data or to “establish requirements for or regulate space safety and orbital debris.” “The Energy and Commerce Committee wants to ensure that the FCC does not become a space traffic cop,” said Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), chair of that committee’s communications and technology subcommittee, citing the rules of construction added to the bill. “It does not expand the FCC’s jurisdiction over the space industry. Instead, it sets new rules of the road with respect to the licensing of electromagnetic spectrum,” said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking member of the House and Energy and Commerce Committee, saying later that he did not believe the bill impinged on the jurisdiction of the House Science Committee. The only member to speak against the bill in the floor debate was Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a former chair of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee. He noted that the bill would give the FCC the ability to “do its own thing” in regulating space safety even as efforts continue elsewhere in government focused on the Commerce Department. “For something as important as space safety and orbital debris, this is a troubling thought.” The current leadership of the House Science Committee did not get an opportunity to speak about the bill during that debate, although it appeared that Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), chair of the committee, was trying to be recognized at times. In a statement after the floor debate, but before the roll call vote, he said that he supported most elements of the bill other than the space safety provisions. “We absolutely should support the growing commercial space sector by seeking ways to streamline and quicken licensing processes for commercial space operations,” he stated. “However, this bill goes beyond that and also includes a significant and unprecedented grant of authority to the FCC” on space safety. The science committee also released a letter from three advocacy groups — the Space Frontier Foundation, Beyond Earth Institute and National Space Society — who were opposed to the space safety language in the bill. “We do not believe that the FCC has (or should have) authority to regulate space commerce generally, nor does it have the expertise to do so,” the letter, to the leadership of the energy and commerce committee, stated. The House did pass a second space-related spectrum bill July 25. H.R. 682 , the Launch Communications Act, would direct the FCC to set up regulations that would give access to several spectrum bands for launch vehicles communications. It would replace existing practices where launch providers seek temporary authorization for launch communications in those bands. The bill passed on a voice vote without any opposition during the brief floor debate. “No space launch should be threatened because approval for spectrum access is caught up in a bureaucratic delay,” Latta said.
TAMPA, Fla. — A Spire Global-led group has won European Space Agency funds to develop a satellite to demonstrate a civil aviation tracking constellation that would not rely on GPS, or any other global navigation satellite system (GNSS) vulnerable to interference. Most commercial aircraft must have an Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) transmitter that periodically sends out the location data they get from GNSS satellites. Modern air traffic surveillance systems augment this GNSS-supported ADS-B data to provide air traffic controllers with more precise flight information, such as U.S-based Aireon, which uses payloads on Iridium’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network. However, GNSS signals can be interfered with or spoofed, which Spire general manager for aviation Philip Plantholt said can lead to inaccuracies in tracking aircraft locations, ultimately impacting air traffic control operations. Recent incidents over the Baltic Sea amid Russia’s war in Ukraine have exemplified these potential risks. “Frequent GNSS jamming in the area has disrupted civilian air traffic,” Plantholt said, “necessitating rerouting that causes delays and increases fuel burn, resulting in higher emissions and costs.” He said even super-yachts employing GNSS jamming to evade paparazzi have inadvertently affected nearby air traffic operations. Spire, a U.S.-headquartered smallsat builder and operator, is designing an aviation surveillance system under a 16 million euro ($18 million) ESA contract announced July 25 that would be independent of GNSS. The Eurialo project envisages a system that would geolocate aircraft based on the slightly different times its low Earth orbit satellites pick up the radio frequency signal used to transmit ADS-B. There would be no need for any modifications, retrofits, or new systems to be installed on aircraft to use Eurialo, according to Spire. Spire’s three-year contract covers the development of the mission and system design, in addition to designing, deploying, and operating a demonstrator to prove its performance and critical technologies. Following initial design and demonstrator phases, there is the potential for Spire to be selected to build out the full constellation, which Plantholt said would involve a large number of satellites. Eurialo would be complementary to existing surveillance systems, he added, helping improve airspace-tracking resilience globally. The project is part of ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) program and is mainly funded through Germany’s space agency. Spire said it plans to open an office in Munich, Germany, as part of the contract after recently establishing a subsidiary in the country. European Satellite Services Provider (ESSP), a group of regional air navigation service providers that recently agreed to commercialize a separate ESA initiative for improving pilot communications, is also part of the Spire-led consortium. The France-based group was originally created in 2001 so local air navigation service providers could take part in the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) program, which Europe uses to augment and improve GPS services in the region. Eurialo would likely need to clear sizable regulatory hurdles to deploy commercial services based on emerging technology. Aireon’s services are highly regulated despite drawing from precise GNSS coordinates to guide real-time aircraft separation requirements.
The U.S. Space Force announced July 24 it selected 16 companies that will compete for low Earth orbit satellite services contracts. Under an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, vendors will compete for up to $900 million worth of task orders over the next 10 years. Each contractor is guaranteed $2,000. The 16 selected vendors are ARINC Inc.; Artel LLC; Capella Federal; BlackSky; SES Space & Defense; Hughes Network Systems; Inmarsat Government; KGS LLC; Intelsat General Communications; OneWeb; PAR Government; RiteNet Corp.; Satcom Direct Government Inc.; SpaceX; Trace Systems Inc.; and UltiSat Inc. Wide range of LEO-based services The contract for LEO-based satellite services is run by the Space Systems Command’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO). Task orders will be awarded for a wide range of services, including high-speed broadband, synthetic aperture radar imaging, space domain awareness; and alternative positioning, navigation and timing . CSCO is part of the Space Systems Command’s new commercial services marketplace known as the Commercial Space Office . ‘Multiple partner’ contracts This particular IDIQ is a “multiple partner/multiple award” contract model that requires vendors to team up. “This approach promises to deliver capabilities to the warfighter faster and at lower cost compared to traditional ‘one contract per mission’ partner/task order,” the Space Systems Command said. “This is a transformational strategy that will allow government and industry to partner more quickly and more broadly to take advantage of the rapid innovation that’s happening in the commercial satcom sector,” said Clare Hopper, head of the CSCO office. The vendors were competitively selected. The Space Systems Command said 25 proposals were received.
Companies working on nuclear and solar power systems for the moon are among the winners of NASA awards to advance their technologies for future use by NASA and commercial customers. NASA announced July 25 the selection of 11 awards through its Tipping Point program of space technology development. The awards, with a combined value of $150 million, are designed to advance promising technologies to the point where they are ready for flight. “By creating new opportunities for streamlined awards, we hope to push crucial technologies over the finish line so they can be used in future missions,” Prasun Desai, acting associate administrator for space technology at NASA, said in a statement. “These innovative partnerships will help advance capabilities that will enable sustainable exploration on the moon.” Among the winners is Astrobotic Technology, which received a $34.6 million Tipping Point award to develop technologies for its LunaGrid project to produce solar power and provide it to spacecraft on the lunar surface. The award covers the development of one of the company’s CubeRovers, the size of a six-unit cubesat, that will travel one kilometer from a lander, unspooling a cable. The lander’s solar arrays will then transmit one kilowatt of power to the rover. “This will be the first small-scale demonstration of power transmission on the surface of the moon,” John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, said in an interview of the effort, which the company calls LunaGrid-Lite. A big focus of LunaGrid-Lite will be to develop and demonstrate enabling technologies, such as cable deployment and high-voltage power transmission, which requires conversion between direct current and alternating current. “Even doing something and sounding as simple as DC-to-AC conversion is harder in space,” he said. “In a vacuum environment the DC-to-AC conversion doesn’t work with typical technologies used here on Earth, so that’s why we basically had to reinvent the wheel on how to do that.” Astrobotic is separately developing other technologies needed for LunaGrid, such as Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT) that is optimized to produce power at the polar regions of the moon where the sun is always low on the horizon. The LunaGrid-Lite project won’t use VSAT systems but instead the solar arrays on the lander. “There’s work and awards aligned with basically every part of this,” Thornton said of LunaGrid, including wireless charging. “The pieces and parts are coming together. So, from here it’s about proving that on a small scale, scaling up to a larger scale and then actually deploying it on the surface.” A team lead by Zeno Power won a $15 million Tipping Point award to develop a radioisotope power system for use on lunar missions, enabling such missions to continue operations through the two-week lunar night. The Project Harmonia effort includes as partners Blue Origin, Intuitive Machines, Sunpower Inc., the University of Dayton Research Institute and NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Marshall Space Flight Center. The project seeks to demonstrate a technology called a radioisotope Stirling generator that uses a Sterling engine, rather than thermocouples, to convert the heat of radioactive decay into electrical power. NASA has worked on Stirling engines for radioisotope power systems, which promise higher efficiency, but budget issues have halted those efforts within the agency. “We will be building upon a lot of this work that NASA Glenn and commercial entities have done and, for the first time, actually match the Stirling engine with a radioisotope source for use in space,” said Tyler Bernstein, chief executive and co-founder of Zeno Power, in an interview. The system will also demonstrate the use of an alternative isotope, americium-241, which is more readily available than the plutonium-238 conventionally used in radioisotope power systems. Americium produces less power per gram than plutonium, requiring more fuel to produce the same power, but is commercially available. The project will produce a power system that would be ready to flight on a future mission. Bernstein said it could be both the first use of americium-241 in a power system in space and the first flight of a radioisotope Stirling generator. Zeno Power won a U.S. Air Force contract in May to test a radioisotope power source on a satellite. That contract uses both a different technology, thermocouples, as well as a different isotope, strontium-90. Despite the differences, he said, “there’s a lot of synergies on the technology development, but also on the regulatory side and on the facility side.” The project takes its name from the Greek goddess of harmony. “We’re looking at harmony on the lunar surface: how we can bring different entities together and have sustainability, with systems that operate for years instead of days,” he said. Other winners include Blue Origin, which received a $34.7 million award to demonstrate the ability to produce solar cells using lunar materials. That will support progress on its Blue Alchemist project the company unveiled earlier this year, where it used lunar simulant material to produce solar cells in a terrestrial lab. Redwire won a $12.9 million award to also demonstrate using lunar regolith to create infrastructure on the moon. United Launch Alliance won a $25 million award to advance hypersonic decelerator technology tested on the LOFTID project last year for potential use to recover the engine section of its Vulcan booster. Varda Space Industries , a startup focused on space manufacturing , won a $1.9 million award to mature technologies used as a heat shield on its reentry capsules. Other winners include Big Metal Additive for hybrid metal additive manufacturing, Freedom Photonics for a lidar instrument, Lockheed Martin for in-space assembly technologies, ProtoInnovations for mobility control software and Psionic for a navigation lidar and terrain mapping system for use on lunar landers.
The Space Force is moving forward with plans to establish a commercial space reserve to ensure the U.S. military has access to commercial satellite services during conflicts. In a request for information issued July 24, the Space Systems Command asks contractors to submit comments by Aug. 11 on the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR) program. CASR is an initiative to establish agreements with companies to ensure services like satellite communication and remote sensing are prioritized for U.S. government use during national security emergencies. The initial thinking on CASR is to model it after the Air Force Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) program, where during crises the government calls upon commercial airlines to carry out transport missions. “The Space Force is actively investigating the viability of implementing a similar model for space capabilities under the CASR construct,” said the RFI. Government has to define ‘framework’ Col. Rich Kniseley, head of the Commercial Space Office, said the government wants to define a “CASR framework to ensure that the Space Force can leverage the capabilities of the commercial space industry to enhance the resilience, capacity, and effectiveness of its national security space architecture.” Commercial companies that want to be part of CASR would enter into voluntary pre-negotiated contractual arrangements. The Space Force and U.S. Space Command would “develop minimum requirements for CASR companies during peacetime, and minimum commitment of capability,” said the RFI. An issue that has to be sorted out is how U.S.-based foreign companies would participate in CASR. The U.S. military, noted the RFI, “acquires a significant percentage of commercial satellite communications support from U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-based parent corporations.” This creates a risk that those services may not be available during a conflict if foreign parent corporations terminate support based on government pressure or adversary coercion, the RFI said. “Risks must be assessed and mitigated, to the extent practicable.”
A startup that launched its first mission to test space manufacturing technologies last month is waiting on a Federal Aviation Administration license to be able to bring what it produced back to Earth. Varda Space Industries launched its first spacecraft, called W-Series 1, on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare mission June 12, to test the ability to produce crystals in microgravity. Those crystals would be brought back to Earth in a reentry capsule set to return as soon as July 17. However, Varda said July 20 it was delaying the capsule’s return as it works with “our government partners to ensure everyone is fully ready.” The company didn’t elaborate on those issues or estimate when it would be ready to return the capsule. In a July 24 interview, Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said the company was still working with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation for a reentry license for the spacecraft. That office, best known for licensing commercial launches, is also responsible for overseeing reentries by commercial spacecraft. A key issue, he said, is that Varda is the first to seek a reentry license under new FAA regulations known as Part 450. Those regulations were enacted by the FAA more than two years ago to streamline the launch and reentry licensing process. “I think a lot of the collaborations that we’ve had with the FAA have been trailblazing, and we recognize that, given we’re the first, we set the standard for what future Part 450 reentry looks like,” he said. Varda started discussions with the FAA in early 2021, shortly after the company’s founding. For the commercial launch industry, the Part 450 regulations have become an area of concern. Only a handful of Part 450 launch licenses have been issued to date as the FAA begins a transition to the new regulations, but those licenses have taken longer to complete than expected, in some cases missing a 180-day statutory deadline. Industry officials raised the issue at a July 13 hearing of the House Science Committee and at a July 11 meeting of an FAA advisory group, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee. “Part 450 is a new regulatory regime that obviously comes with challenges,” he said. “But we’re also excited to hopefully help set the standard for what this should look like on the reentry side of things.” Asparouhov said his company didn’t have a firm date for returning the 120-kilogram capsule but was making plans for a potential reentry in early to mid August. In addition to the FAA reentry license, Varda has to coordinate with the FAA’s air traffic organization on airspace closures and with the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range, where the capsule will land. There are no pressing technical issues that require the capsule to return by a specific deadline, but the company would like to bring the capsule back sooner rather than later. “There’s no reason why you’d want to add on risk by extending a mission beyond what it was designed for,” he said. “Our goal is to bring it home as quickly as possible given the positive business and technical implications for it.” During its time in orbit, the spacecraft tested the ability to produce crystals of a drug called ritonavir used to treat HIV/AIDS. Telemetry from the spacecraft indicates the experiment went as planned, but the company wants to get the crystals back to verify it did produce the expected crystals. Varda has “a lot of very eager customers” in the pharmaceutical industry interested in the results from this mission, Asparouhov said. The company will also sell data collected during the capsule’s return to Earth for government customers. “We are a startup and delaying day by day burns capital day by day,” he said. “I prefer to make progress in shorter periods of time.” The company is working on its second spacecraft that, like the first, will be manufactured by Rocket Lab using that company’s Photon bus. That spacecraft will launch on the Transporter-10 rideshare mission late this year or early next year. Future spacecraft will carry more sophisticated equipment for producing crystals for pharmaceutical applications. “This first mission on board had the equivalent of a toaster in terms of like pharma manufacturing capabilities. We definitely need to build the convection oven, the blender and the mixer, a ton more capabilities to satisfy our clients,” he said. “But we’re super happy that we managed to make a little bit of toast.”
A year after its launch, a privately owned, NASA-funded cubesat orbiting the moon continues to work well, providing data to support the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration efforts. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) spacecraft, owned by Colorado startup Advanced Space, started its journey to the moon last July after its launch on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. After overcoming communications and thruster problems, the spacecraft entered a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon in November . CAPSTONE has completed a six-month primary mission in that orbit and is now in an “enhanced” mission slated to last at least a year. “For us, the enhanced mission really just gets into focusing in on some more of the automation experiments and trying to collect more data,” Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Advanced Space, said in an interview. “We can try some new things. We can push the envelope.” The spacecraft has been working well, with only minor technical issues, since reaching the moon. “We got through a lot of challenges to get to the moon,” he said. “Once we got there, we settled into an operational cadence, which really helped inform a lot of the analysis that’s being done by the Gateway team at the Johnson Space Center and others to learn how to operate there.” NASA funded development of CAPSTONE to test the stability of NRHO, which will be used by the lunar Gateway that the agency and international partners will develop over the course of several Artemis missions. That’s included insights on how to conduct stationkeeping maneuvers to maintain the orbit and how to perform navigation. Cheetham described as “phenomenal” his company’s relationship with NASA’s Gateway program, which predates development of CAPSTONE. “The teamwork between analysis for Gateway and planning for CAPSTONE has been almost seamless,” he said, with an exchange of information that has both supported planning for Gateway and operations of CAPSTONE. “That back and forth has been like it’s almost one team.” Advanced Space has also used CAPSTONE to test autonomous navigation technologies. After several attempts, the spacecraft established a crosslink with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, testing the “CAPS” part of the mission’s name. They have also used a chip-scale atomic clock on the cubesat to determine its location using timing information from signals uplinked to it from ground stations. The experience from CAPSTONE will help Advanced Space on its next spacecraft mission called Oracle for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The company won a $72 million contract from AFRL in November 2022 to develop a smallsat, previously known as the Cislunar Highway Patrol System, to monitor cislunar space and demonstrate positioning and navigation techniques beyond Earth orbit. “We know what these systems can do and where they might have problems,” he said, allowing the company to focus on novel aspects of the mission. “We’ll really be able to put our attention on the new things that are different from CAPSTONE or the things that are potentially harder.” Advanced Space, besides operating CAPSTONE and developing Oracle, recently announced it is supporting ESCAPADE, a NASA smallsat mission to study the interaction of Mars with the solar wind, with mission design and navigation. It is also part of a team led by Draper that won a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services award to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. CAPSTONE, meanwhile, may operate well beyond the one-year enhanced mission. Cheetham said the main concern is the effects of radiation on the spacecraft’s electronics, particularly as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year activity cycle. Fault protection systems on the cubesat have recovered it from several radiation-induced upsets so far, but it’s uncertain how much of a total dose those systems can receive before they degrade. Propellant, he added, is not a concern. “We have plenty of delta-V margin and gotten efficient on how to deploy it,” he said. “As a mission led and managed by orbital mechanics, we have plenty of fuel. We will not run out of fuel on the program.”
In-space transportation services startup Impulse Space announced July 24 it has closed a $45 million Series A funding led by RTX Ventures , the venture capital arm of Raytheon Technologies. Impulse Space is led by rocket engine designer Tom Mueller, a founding employee of SpaceX. The startup develops orbital transportation vehicles. “With the support from RTX Ventures, Impulse Space continues on the path toward its mission to provide agile, economic logistics services in any orbit,” Mueller said in a news release. The company last year announced a $30 million seed funding round. Impulse Space seeks to provide “last mile” delivery services for satellites launched on rideshare missions such as those flown by SpaceX on its Falcon 9 rocket. Impulse Space said its upcoming missions include LEO Express-1, a geostationary orbit refueling mission and a mission to Mars . Developing larger vehicle The Series A funding will support the development of Impulse’s largest vehicle yet, called Helios. The company said the Helios kick stage enables direct to geostationary orbit missions, thus bypassing the need for a geostationary transfer orbit. “RTX Ventures invests in companies that we believe provide breakthrough technologies that disrupt aerospace, defense and commercial aviation sectors,” said Daniel Ateya, president and managing director of RTX Ventures. “Our investment will help Impulse Space accelerate their growth and fuel innovation within the space economy.” Other investors in the Series A funding round included Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Airbus Ventures and Space Capital.
Maxar Technologies announced July 24 that its new satellite bus designed for low Earth orbit constellations passed a critical design review. The company will produce 16 of the Maxar 300 series buses for L3Harris Technologies. Each bus is about the width of a conventional oven. These will be used to build missile-detecting sensor satellites for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer program. L3Harris in July won a $700 million contract from SDA to produce 14 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1, plus two additional satellites for a missile-tracking demonstration. Deliveries in early 2024 “We are on schedule to begin production of our platforms later this year with initial deliveries in early 2024,” said Chris Johnson, Maxar’s senior vice president and general manager for space. SDA plans to start launching the Tracking Layer Tranche 1 in 2025. Johnson said the Maxar 300 bus was designed to be able to launch eight satellites on a large rocket. “The dimensions help the SDA achieve its goals to significantly reduce size, weight, power and cost compared to traditional missile detection satellites.” The design review examined the structural design, power, attitude control and command and data handling, Maxar said. Maxar builds satellites at its factory in Palo Alto, California. SDA’s buses will be shipped to L3Harris’ assembly facility at Palm Bay, Florida. The company said the Maxar 300 bus is being offered in the commercial LEO market for communications and remote-sensing constellations, but it has not announced any new customers “We are discussing other SDA work with future tranches,” a spokesman told SpaceNews. 
Chinese space and defense contractor CASIC says it will begin building a constellation of 300 satellites in very-low Earth orbit late this year. The very-low Earth orbit (VLEO) constellation is to consist of 192 satellites by 2027 to provide users with space information services every half an hour and be expanded to 300 satellites by 2030, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) revealed at the China Commercial Aerospace Forum held in the city of Wuhan earlier this month. CASIC plans to launch its first of its planned VLEO verification satellites in December. The first satellite will be geared towards demonstrating and verifying key technologies including VLEO orbital flight, high resolution Earth imaging, intelligent processing, and direct data transmission to user terminals. VLEO refers to an altitude of 150 to 300 kilometers. At such low altitudes atmospheric drag means orbits are not stable and decay rapidly without regular use of propulsion to boost altitude. However satellites in such orbits could have advantages over those in traditional higher orbits. “The VLEO communications and sensing integrated constellation, taking the natural advantages of shorter distance, low latency and low path loss, forges a constellation and application system that is small but excellent, fast and intelligent, and requires a large quantity of satellites but is cheap,” CCTV quoted Zhang Nan, chief designer of the constellation at CASIC’s General Department of Space Engineering. The CASIC constellation will use intelligent algorithms, direct satellite-to-satellite and low latency satellite-to-Earth communications. “It’s space infrastructure that can offer users one-stop services covering sensing, transmission and computing,” Zhang said. CASIC is engaged in a range of space-related programs , including launch services, satellite production, an Internet of Things narrowband constellation and a spaceplane project. These projects are described as commercial and are separate from those of its sister giant state-owned conglomerate CASC, which is the country’s main space contractor for civil and military-related programs. Chinese commercial firm C-Space launched what was described as China’s first VLEO satellite July 22. Qiankun-1 flew on a Galactic Energy Ceres-1 solid rocket and will test hyperspectral, optical and image processing payloads. However it joined another payload in an initial 502 by 486-kilometer altitude inclined by 96 degrees, according to U.S. Space Force tracking data. Tomas Hrozensky, a senior research fellow at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told SpaceNews via email that China pursuing such capabilities and testing new systems was a natural progression. “The scale of the Chinese space programme and related political support favors and underpins a comprehensive capability development across a wide array of concepts. This can reasonably have a positive impact on innovation, including if multiple such avenues of action do not reach a successful end, due to whatever reason.” “The interest in VLEO fits the narrative of exploring and developing a breadth of initiatives, seeking to develop niche capabilities and expertise, which was already shown by China in other domains – in satellite applications, launchers, or exploration,” says Hrozensky. VLEO satellites could potentially have a number of benefits. “The available information suggests that VLEO can offer added value for both communications and remote sensing missions through impacts on technological features and functional characteristics that drive down the cost,” says Hrozensky. These include lower power demands, a lower radiation environment, smaller and less complex sensors, and lower requirements in terms of data transfer and launch requirements. “The underlying problem, as usual, lies in overcoming the various technical challenges in such a way that would make the desired activity reliable, safe, and profitable in case of commercial plans. For now, VLEO has not yet comprehensively passed such tests.” Global remote sensing capabilities including higher resolution, more frequent revisits, and faster transmission speeds were noted as key space infrastructure in China’s 14th Five Year Plan, covering the period 2021-2025, according to Science and Technology Daily. Elsewhere, VLEO concepts have emerged in the U.S. and Europe in recent years. American firms Skeyeon, Earth Observant and Albedo have raised money for VLEO satellite plans, while the European Union funded the “Discoverer” research program to investigate deploying Earth observation satellites in much lower altitudes than usual.
SAN FRANCISCO – German thermal satellite data startup constellr raised 17 million euros ($18.93) in seed funding. Karista led the round. Participants included Einstein Industries Ventures, FTTF, Lakestar, Vsquared, Amathaon Capital, Natural Ventures, OHB Ventures and EIT Food. With the latest funding, announced July 20, constellr plans to accelerate deployment of its 100-kilogram thermal imagery satellites and meet growing global demand . Constellr’s first thermal infrared imaging sensor traveled to the International Space Station in 2022 on a Northrop Grumman resupply mission. The first satellite in constellr’s operational constellation are scheduled to launch in 2024. “We only need four satellites to deliver daily imagery to any field on the globe,” Max Gulde, constellr CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews in a recent interview. “Then, it’s really a question of market demand.” Rather than focusing on imagery resolution, constellr is intent on providing accurate data. For agricultural applications, “it’s really about the repeatability and the sensitivity and the precision of the measurement,” Gulde said. Constellr was one of three companies awarded 5 million euro contracts from the European Commission and the European Space Agency to supply thermal data to complement observations collected through the Copernicus Earth-observation program. Prior to the recent fundraising announcement, constellr had raised about $14 million in venture capital and received an additional $14 million in grants. “We believe constellr’s approach to building the most precise layer of thermal imaging data will accelerate a paradigm shift in how the global agricultural sector adapts to the impacts of an evolving climate,” Gulde said in a statement. “Having the stamp of approval from both Karista, who will drive our French market entry, and Einstein, with their deep space industry expertise, alongside our existing top-tier investor base, is a huge step in validating our solution.” In April, constellr acquired ScanWorld, a Belgian hyperspectral satellite imagery and analytics startup. “Investing in constellr is a unique opportunity for us to be at the forefront of a [space technology] revolution that deeply transforms terrestrial industries, including agriculture and climate-related concerns,” Michael Thomas, Karista investment director, said in a statement. “Thanks to this additional fundraising and its unique management team execution capabilities, constellr will reinforce its leading position in Europe and accelerate and expand its commercial footprint globally, especially addressing substantial market demand from the US.” Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the size of constellr satellites. They are about 100-kilograms apiece. 
A NASA procurement document provides details about the plans of several companies that received unfunded Space Act Agreements for commercial space capabilities in June, as well as those who failed to make the cut. NASA selected seven companies June 15 for its Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities-2 (CCSC-2) initiative . Those companies will have access to NASA expertise and data, but not funding, to support development of commercial space capabilities. Among the companies selected for CCSC-2 agreements were Blue Origin, which appeared, in a NASA statement, to be working on a crewed spacecraft; and SpaceX, which offered to develop an “integrated low Earth orbit architecture” that used its Starship vehicle as a commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) destination, or space station. Neither the agency nor the companies provided additional details at the time NASA announced the awards. A source selection statement released by NASA earlier this month confirmed those plans. Blue Origin proposed an “interrelated LEO space transportation capability that utilizes its reusable Space Vehicle (SV), New Glenn launch vehicle, and other supporting elements.” The original assessment of Blue Origin’s proposals found weaknesses from a lack of details, although the document notes that the company was able to address most of them in a later due diligence phase. “I find that Blue Origin’s capability as a human space transportation provider is compelling, and the LEO economy at large would benefit from the vehicle once developed,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters and selection authority for the program, wrote in the document. The document also confirms that SpaceX is considering using Starship as a commercial space station. “In addition to applications beyond LEO, Starship could significantly impact crew & cargo transportation and could itself become a large Commercial LEO Destination,” the document stated. NASA’s original assessment raised issues about a lack of information about Starship’s capabilities as well as an uncertain schedule. A third company, Sierra Space, also proposed a crewed spacecraft in the form of the DC-200 version of its Dream Chaser vehicle and a “Pathfinder” station using its inflatable module technology called LIFE. Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a June 27 presentation that the company was preparing to launch a standalone pathfinder version of LIFE as soon as the end of 2026 for commercial applications such as biotech research. McAlister noted in the statement that one concern he had is that Sierra Space’s proposal could overlap with its work with Blue Origin on the Orbital Reef commercial space station, which received funding from NASA in late 2021 for initial development work. He wrote that he concluded there were “enough differences that I see value in providing support to the development of Sierra Space’s Pathfinder station and DC-200 crew transportation system.” Northrop Grumman, which also received funding from NASA for commercial space development, received a CCSC-2 agreement for a “Persistent Platform” for commercial research and manufacturing. The selection document describes that platform as a human-tended free-flyer that would support its crewed station. As with Sierra Space, McAlister said he was concerned about overlaps with the company’s crewed station, but concluded that it would be complementary. Two startups working on commercial space stations, ThinkOrbital and Vast, received CCSC-2 agreements despite some skepticism from the agency about those companies’ abilities to actually develop them. In the case of ThinkOrbital, McAlister wrote that he was particularly interested in the company’s plans to demonstrate in-space welding, which he saw as a key technology that could find widespread use. “While I am not convinced that ThinkOrbital is, at this point, a realistic option as a commercial destination provider, I believe it can achieve significant progress in its Construction Technologies for Space Applications (CONTESA) concept with the support NASA can provide through the CCSC2 Space Act agreement.” For Vast, he said NASA’s interest was in the company’s plans to demonstrate artificial gravity by spinning its modules. “The advantages of the proposed destination with artificial gravity, if Vast is successful, outweigh the risks of Vast’s lack of experience and the possibility that the artificial gravity may not be achieved,” he concluded. The seventh CCSC-2 award went to Special Aerospace Services for an in-space servicing technology called the Autonomous Maneuvering Unit. Such a technology, NASA concluded, could have benefits for the broader LEO economy by minimizing the need for astronauts to conduct spacewalks to maintain commercial space stations. Five other companies submitted CCSC-2 proposals that NASA rejected. Three of them were from companies working on space station concepts: Gravitics, Orbital Assembly (now Above: Orbital) and Space Villages (now Orbital Outpost.) NASA found weaknesses in both their technical and business approaches. The proposal from Space Villages, for example, “lacks clarity on the company’s legal status, its facilities, and the status of its major partners.” McAlister concluded that “ultimately, there were other destination capabilities that had stronger proposals.” The Ohio Aerospace Institute proposed to develop a commercial astronaut training facility. However, NASA concluded that there were significant weaknesses in its business approach and that the proposal sought the use of unspecified NASA equipment and facilities for training activities that are not available for non-NASA purposes. The final proposal came from Ernst and Young (EY), which did not plan to develop in-space capabilities but instead provide some kind of consulting and design services. NASA rejected that proposal, noting that the company’s proposal “significantly lacked clarity on what EY would do and for whom.”
Chinese startup Galactic Energy sent two satellites into orbit early Saturday with the company’s sixth consecutive successful launch. A Ceres-1 four-stage solid rocket lifted off using a transporter erector launcher at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 1:07 a.m. Eastern, July 22. Two satellites were aboard the flight codenamed “Lemon Tree.” Qiankun-1 is a very low Earth orbit (VLEO) satellite developed by Chinese firm C-Space . It carries test payloads for hyperspectral imagery, visible light cameras and intelligent image processors, according to a Galactic Energy statement . The spacecraft is China’s first VLEO satellite. The other passenger was the Xingshidai-16 hyperspectral remote sensing satellite for ADA Space . The commercial firm is a satellite operator which aims to use AI applications to optimize its remote sensing data. The mission is a notable moment for Galactic Energy. The company says it will now begin a period of high frequency launches, starting with a next launch Aug. 5. Liu Baiqi told Chinese media that the firm will pursue higher efficiency and reliability during the upcoming launch activity. It also expects to announce a new funding round in the near future. The firm aims to carry out 6-8 further Ceres-1 launches before the end of 2023. The July 22 launch used the third of a batch of 10 mass-produced Ceres-1 rockets. A first Ceres-1 launch from a sea platform could take place late in the year. China has in recent years established infrastructure near Haiyang in the eastern coastal province of Shandong to facilitate launches from the Yellow Sea. Both commercial and state-owned companies are launching solid rockets from the Yellow Sea, and are looking at liquid propellant rocket sea launches . Ceres-1 has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to LEO or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The company is also working on its two-stage Pallas-1 reusable kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher. Pallas-1 will be capable of carrying 5,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO. The company stated at the China Commercial Aerospace Forum in Wuhan earlier this month that it is targeting Q3 next year for the Pallas-1 test flight. A first flight including recovery of the first stage using landing legs is slated for 2025. A triple-core variant of the Pallas-1 is planned for as soon as 2026. That launcher will be capable of lifting 14,000 kg to LEO. Galactic Energy’s launch activity is part of a forecast surge in Chinese commercial launch in 2023. Further commercial firms iSpace, Expace, Space Pioneer and Landspace have reached orbit so far this year, with Orienspace aiming to conduct its first launch with the Gravity-1 solid rocket in the second half of 2023. Space Pioneers’ Tianlong-2 was the first liquid propellant launcher from Chinese firms to reach orbit, while Landspace became the first globally to achieve orbit with a methane-fueled launcher .
TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon announced plans July 21 to build a satellite processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, as it prepares to start launching 3,200 commercial Project Kuiper broadband satellites next year. The 31,000-square-meter facility Amazon expects to complete in 2024 at Kennedy’s runway-equipped Launch and Landing Facility will perform final preparations of Project Kuiper satellites shipped in from out of state for launch aboard Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance rockets. Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, together with Europe’s Arianespace, are expected to perform up to 92 Project Kuiper launches under a blockbuster launch deal announced in early 2022. Amazon said its production facilities in Kirkland, Washington, are on track to start churning out satellites by the end of the year to provide early low Earth orbit services to undisclosed enterprise customers in 2024. The company does not expect the integration facility to be operational before early 2025, indicating plans for a major ramp-up over the following 18 months in a race to meet regulatory deadlines. Amazon has to deploy half its constellation — or 1,618 satellites — by July 2026 under deployment rules tied to its Federal Communications Commission license, and the rest by July 2029. A Project Kuiper spokesperson declined to detail its deployment plan but said it is on course to meet the 2026 deadline, and will use a third-party payload processing facility until its own is fully commissioned. Avoiding delays Project Kuiper has spent billions of dollars to get firm commitments for 77 heavy-lift launch vehicles, with the majority set to fly out of Florida to benefit from the integration facility. But apart from nine ULA Atlas 5 vehicles, these missions rely on rockets that have yet to enter service amid development delays: ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and Ariane 6 from Arianespace. Amazon had initially aimed to launch its first two prototype satellites by the fourth quarter of 2022 with rocket developer ABL Space Systems, before switching to a Vulcan mission now slated for the fourth quarter of this year following a series of delays. While Project Kuiper is evaluating options, the spokesperson said it still plans to launch the prototypes on Vulcan’s debut. Amazon said in a news release that it is investing $120 million to build its Florida satellite processing facility, part of the more than $10 billion it has committed to Project Kuiper. The company is also applying for a spaceport grant from the Florida Department of Transportation to support the construction. Up to 50 new jobs would be created on the Space Coast as part of the investment, according to Amazon, joining its more than 1,400 Project Kuiper employees across the United States — primarily in Washington.
TAMPA, Fla. — The first Astranis-built satellite won’t be able to provide commercial broadband over Alaska for local telco Pacific Dataport because it can’t keep solar arrays pointed at the sun, the Californian manufacturer’s CEO John Gedmark said July 20. Despite the failure of both solar array drive assemblies on Arcturus, used to position solar panels that power the satellite, Astranis estimates it can get six to 12 hours a day of service from the spacecraft. While that is not enough to provide continuous broadband over Alaska as intended, Gedmark said the spacecraft could still be used as an in-orbit test bed or another alternative mission. He said fixing the component issue through software and hardware changes on other Astranis satellites in production should only delay its next batch of four satellites — known as Block 2 — by a couple of months. Among these Block 2 satellites Astranis still hopes to launch on a Falcon 9 before the end of the year is a previously undisclosed spacecraft called UtilitySat, which Gedmark said can serve as a partial Arcturus replacement until a dedicated satellite for Pacific Dataport can be launched in 2025. Gedmark said he is unwilling to give technical details about the component issue because it is one of a small portion of spacecraft parts it does not build in-house. He also declined to discuss the component’s provider, flight history, or whether the issue is covered by the insurance the company took out on the satellite, designed to provide 7.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput in Ka-band. Viasat’s 6,400-kilogram ViaSat-3 Americas satellite was Falcon Heavy’s primary passenger and has not been able to deploy a critical antenna needed to start its promised terabit broadband services. Gedmark said Astranis has not seen anything suggesting a connection between the two incidents. A third communications satellite on the Falcon Heavy mission, a smaller cubesat from Washington-based Gravity Space, has passed all health checks and is preparing to enter service in the coming weeks, its CEO Mark Thompson said. Arcturus backup UtilitySat is equipped with transponders in Ka, Ku, Q, and V band spectrum to serve a variety of mission needs and has customers lined up globally, Gedmark said, although it will now focus on providing connectivity over Alaska. The same size as a typical Astranis satellite at around 400 kilograms, and also with an eight-year design life, UtilitySat’s flexibility means it is not capable of the same level of throughput as a dedicated spacecraft from the manufacturer. Gedmark said Astranis plans to deploy a full replacement for Pacific Dataport in early 2025 under a commercial arrangement he declined to discuss. “That satellite will have significantly more capacity than Arcturus” was designed to have, he said, by “rolling in all the improvements we’ve done over just the last couple of years.” While replacing a traditional large geostationary satellite following an in-orbit anomaly would historically cost hundreds of millions of dollars and many years, he said Astranis satellites can be built faster and in higher quantities to mitigate any shortfall. U.S.-based mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu ordered two other satellites joining UtilitySat as part of Block 2, and cellular backhaul provider Andesat of Peru has bought the other. Astranis also plans to launch another five satellites as part of Block 3 next year on an undisclosed dedicated rocket. Customers for three of these have been disclosed so far: Two for Mexican telco Apco Networks and one for Orbits Corp , the satellite services arm of Philippine internet service provider HTechCorp. Gedmark said Astranis plans to have multiple UtilitySats on orbit at any given time, enabling the company to respond to unexpected surges or changes in connectivity demand.
In a summer of extreme weather events, NASA is emphasizing its role in studying the climate, efforts that face both fiscal headwinds and partisan divides. In a July 20 media briefing, NASA leadership highlighted the agency’s work in studying the climate and addressing climate change, efforts that range from Earth science missions to aeronautics research into sustainable aviation. “You think of NASA as a space agency. You think of NASA as an aeronautical research agency. NASA is also a climate agency,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the briefing. Officials discussed the various activities at the agency related to studying climate change and providing resources for other agencies and the general public. “At NASA, we provide end-to-end research about climate, from observations to models and applications to technology,” said Kate Calvin, NASA chief scientist and senior climate adviser. While NASA has long been involved in climate science and related activities, it has gained new prominence in the Biden administration, which has made climate change an administration-wide priority. Among other efforts, NASA opened last month an Earth Information Center at its headquarters building, a facility open to the public that shows real-time Earth science data from NASA and other satellites. Nelson said on the call that those data displays in the center will soon be available on the NASA website. The attention to climate science comes during a series of recent extreme events linked to climate change, such as heat waves in the United States and Europe, flooding in the northeastern U.S. and Canadian wildfires that filled skies thousands of kilometers away with smoke. Last month was the hottest June on record globally, noted Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading climate scientist. “We anticipate, with the understanding of what’s going on on a day-by-day basis, that July is likely to be the warmest absolute month on record,” he said. That warmth is increasing the chances that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, odds he set at 50/50 but others have estimated to be as high as 80%. “We anticipate that 2024 will be an even warmer year,” he added, because of a warm climate pattern known as El Niño that is just getting underway. That urgency to study the climate, though, risks colliding with new fiscal realities. Most of NASA’s climate-related work is funded through its Earth science division, which requested $2.47 billion in fiscal year 2024, a 12% increase from 2023. However, a bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee July 13 would provide NASA with $2.22 billion for Earth science, effectively flat funding from 2023. House appropriators have yet to disclose details about Earth science spending in its bill, but the overall amount allocated to science, $7.38 billion, is only $40 million more than the Senate bill. Some in the science community fear sharper cuts in Earth science in the House bill, particularly if it does not follow the Senate bill’s plan to cut spending on Mars Sample Return. That austerity is linked to budget caps enacted for the next two fiscal years as part of an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. “There is going to be less money,” Nelson acknowledged. He predicted that NASA’s overall budget for 2024 will fall somewhere between the Senate’s $25 billion and the House’s $25.4 billion. “There are many twists and turns before this final agreement,” he cautioned. He vowed to protect NASA’s climate activities from the brunt of any cuts. “We’re going to have the least possible effect on any climate science,” he said. “This is a huge priority for us. It’s a huge priority for me personally, having lived through this as the senator from Florida.” Nelson said the agreement to raise the debt ceiling and enact budget caps was a bipartisan one, and he has previously noted that support for the agency in Congress transcends traditional partisan divides. Climate science, though, may be an exception. A poll released July 20 by the Pew Research Center found that the overall public continues to consider climate science as a top priority of NASA. In that poll, 50% of respondents said that monitoring key parts of the Earth’s climate system should be a top priority, second only to planetary defense at 60% (respondents could select multiple top priorities.) That is similar to a 2018 poll by Pew where 63% of people thought climate science should be a top priority and 62% selected planetary defense. By contrast, in the new poll only 12% considered sending astronauts to the moon a top priority. However, that poll also revealed sharp partisan differences on the importance of climate science. While 50% of all respondents identified climate science as a top priority, 69% of Democrats thought it should be, versus only 30% of Republicans. That difference is far greater than for any of the other eight priorities included in the poll, most of which had partisan differences within the poll’s margin of error. That partisan gap also appears to be to be growing. The 2018 Pew survey found a 34-point gap between Republican and Democratic views on the importance of climate science at NASA, while the new poll has a 39-point gap.
Three months after rolling out the first phase of its architecture for human exploration of the moon and Mars, NASA is heading into a second phase that will focus on Mars. NASA released its first architecture definition document in April for its overall “Moon to Mars” campaign of human exploration. That 150-page document linked more than 60 objectives previously established by NASA for long-term exploration with its plans for the initial series of Artemis lunar missions, the first of four segments for the overall architecture. “We connected objectives to what we’re planning to do in our first four to five missions,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, during a panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Memorial Symposium July 19. “From my perspective, having that for that segment and then the remaining three allows us to really show strategy to implementation.” The agency is now preparing for the next round of the architecture concept review. Free said the agency recently completed a strategic analysis cycle for the next review, which will focus on the final segment, human missions to Mars. The review itself will take place in November. NASA has also been collecting feedback on that initial document. That included one-on-one meetings with companies and international partners as well as two workshops in June, one for international partners and the other for companies and academia. “The input was phenomenal,” he said. Some of the themes of the feedback included a desire to better understand priorities and where partners should invest to support the architecture. There was also feedback on the architecture development process itself that will be folded into the next round. “There are some parts of the architecture definition document that will be updated based on what we heard,” he said, but did not offer any specifics on those changes. Free said he believed the architecture would support the agency’s goal of having a robust approach to human space exploration that can withstand fiscal and political changes. “From my perspective, we set this process in place that, as it was intended, was supposed to survive administrations,” he said, offering options for future administrations. “It’s not about do you want to do it, it’s how much do you want to do?” The architecture can serve as an advocacy tool, he argued. “It also helps us explain what won’t get done when a budget cut comes,” he said, allowing supporters of those elements to then step up and explain why those missing elements are important. “My perspective is that we have to deliver. That’s how we keep our advocacy strong,” he added. “We have to deliver programs on time and on budget. That’s really hard.”
The Space Force is using a software platform developed by Anduril Industries to integrate data from a decades-old network of space surveillance sensors. DoD announced July 12 that Anduril won an $8 million contract extension to field its mesh networking software at Space Surveillance Network sites through December 2024. The software autonomously analyzes data from sensors and provides an integrated picture. The SSN is a collection of sensors dispersed across multiple sites worldwide first deployed in the late 1950s to provide early warnings of ballistic missile launches. The network has a mix of conventional radars, phased-array radars and telescopes for missile detection, and to track satellites and space debris. Creating a mesh network The Space Force so far has awarded Anduril $10.5 million in Small Business Innovation Research contracts for the company’s Lattice networking software that autonomously parses and integrates data from third-party sensors and data sources. Anduril, a defense technology startup founded in 2017, said it adapted the Lattice software for the space surveillance network and “transformed SSN sites from a legacy system of communication to a resilient, high speed and integrated operational mesh network.” The Lattice mesh networking technology has been used by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to build a “virtual wall” along the U.S. border with Mexico. The company last year won a nearly $1 billion contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command to use the Lattice platform to detect and track drone threats. 
Advocates of nuclear power systems for lunar exploration are calling on NASA to find ways to continue development amid fiscal challenges and competing priorities. NASA selected three teams in June 2022 for phase 1 studies of fission surface power systems , small nuclear reactors intended to support later phases of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign. The teams, led by Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse and IX, a joint venture of Intuitive Machines and X-Energy, received $5 million each for initial design studies. The focus of those efforts is to design a 40-kilowatt reactor that weighs no more than six metric tons and can operate for 10 years, said Lindsay Kaldon, Fission Surface Power (FSP) program manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, during a panel at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Memorial Symposium July 18. NASA also requires the use of high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, to address nuclear non-proliferation concerns. NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE), which partnered with NASA on the project, levied few other requirements on the companies. “We are able to get really innovative ideas from the three partnerships,” she said. “We’re able to see some out-of-the-box thinking.” The FSP program plans a second phase to turn one of the designs into flight-certified hardware. NASA has not set a date for releasing a request for proposals for that second phase. NASA is also working on its own government reference design in cooperation with DOE. The uncertainty about the schedule for the next phase of FSP has some in industry concerned. “We’ve got a lot of momentum right now in nuclear space,” said Vince Bilardo, an industry consultant supporting the IX team, citing not just the FSP work but various initiatives to develop nuclear thermal propulsion and nuclear electric propulsion. However, he said he was worried that “political realities” such as a divided Congress would make it difficult for NASA to move ahead with the next phase of FSP. “So, you’ve got at least two fiscal years of authorizations and appropriations in front of us here,” he said, “where it’s going to be potentially very difficult for NASA to secure a program new start for phase two of Fission Surface Power.” He estimated that phase of the program could cost a billion dollars over four to eight years. That program also has to compete with all of the other elements of Artemis for funding. “In that current environment, my take on that is it’s going to be a challenge for NASA to secure formal new start project authorizations for these different Artemis elements,” he said. He urged NASA to find ways to extend the phase one contracts to minimize any gaps between that work and the phase two competition. Doing so, he said, would avoid “a gap in coverage that causes us on the industry side to have to reassign our teams.” The agency should fund work on enabling technologies for fission power systems, Bilardo argued, which can be done in parallel to design studies because those technologies will be used in almost any design. “We know what these systems need to look like, and we know what the list of enabling technologies is,” he said. There may also be some synergies between fission surface power and designs for nuclear propulsion, such as power conversion for nuclear electric propulsion systems. He recommended that designs for 40-kilowatt surface reactors be scalable to 100 kilowatts or more, enabling use in nuclear propulsion. Despite the challenges, advocates of FSP see the technologies as essential for long-term lunar exploration because of the lunar night that lasts for two weeks. “You need something for the astronauts to do other than drive around on a rover for a couple weeks and then get back in the lander and go back home,” Bilardo said. “We want to go to stay this time.”
The European Space Agency is in the final stages of performing an “assisted reentry” of an Earth science spacecraft, an effort that will attempt to bring the satellite down over the ocean in a little more than a week. A series of maneuvers will lower the perigee of the Aeolus spacecraft to enable a reentry, projected over the Atlantic Ocean, on July 28. The maneuvers are intended to minimize any chance that debris from the spacecraft that survives reentry would land in populated areas. The first set of maneuvers is scheduled for July 24 and will lower the spacecraft’s perigee from 280 to 250 kilometers, said Isabel Rojo, Aeolus operations director, during a July 19 briefing. A second set of maneuvers on July 27 will further lower the perigee to 150 kilometers. A final maneuver on July 28 will lower the perigee to 120 kilometers. “After the execution of that last maneuver, the satellite is then expected to reenter within five hours,” she said. That last maneuver is timed to have reentry take place during a track the spacecraft’s sun-synchronous orbit takes over the Atlantic Ocean. Limitations of the spacecraft, though, mean that ESA can’t target a specific area for the reentry. “This spacecraft was designed and developed just before any guidelines came in place” mandating a controlled reentry, said Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Safety Office. That led to what the agency calls an “assisted reentry” approach, which lacks the precision of a controlled reentry but avoids an uncontrolled reentry. “It will further reduce the risk, which is already small, on the ground that is posed by the reentry,” ESA expects up to 20% of Aeolus, which weigh about 1,100 kilograms excluding propellant, to survive reentry. The agency said that the assisted reentry approach, if successful, would reduce the risk of debris hitting someone, already extremely small, by a factor of 42. Krag said this is the first time he is aware of any satellite operator attempting an assisted reentry. The closest comparison he offered is the reentry of NASA’s Skylab space station in 1979, where spaceflight controllers turned off gyros to make the spacecraft tumble in an effort to control the reentry location. ESA officials billed the assisted reentry as part of a broader commitment to space safety by the agency. That included an announcement during the Paris Air Show June 22 that ESA would work with several European satellite manufacturers on a “Zero Debris Charter” where signatories would commit, by 2030, to deorbiting their satellites at the end of their lives or hiring companies that provide active debris removal services to deorbit them. “I think ESA has always been a responsible actor and, with that action on Aeolus, we are demonstrating once more that we are willing to achieve anything, even with a space system that was not originally prepared for this,” Krag said. The reentry will mark the end of Aeolus, launched in 2018 on what was originally planned as a three-year mission to demonstrate the ability of a lidar to measure wind speeds globally. Science operations of Aeolus formally ended in April. “After almost five years, it has exceeded all the expectations and gone beyond what were the original objectives,” said Tommaso Parrinello, Aeolus mission manager. That included using Aeolus data in operational weather forecasting and filling in gaps in wind data when commercial airline traffic, also used to collect wind data, dropped significantly during the onset of the pandemic. At ESA’s November 2022 ministerial meeting, member states approved plans for a two-satellite follow-on mission, Aeolus 2, slated to launch at the end of the decade in cooperation with Eumetsat. “This decision taken last year is the most tangible and most solid demonstration of the value of the success of this mission, which perhaps was not obvious at the beginning,” he said. Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s director of Earth observation, said at the briefing that Aeolus was often called the “impossible mission” because of the many technical challenges it faced in development. “It’s a real success story.”
The U.S. Space Force last week announced plans to increase the number of providers in the national security launch program. Officials said July 19 the decision was driven by a projected growth in demand for satellite launches and concerns about a shortage of heavy-lift rockets later this decade. “The manifest is growing. So in Phase 3 we’re refining our strategy,” said Col. Douglas Pentecost, deputy program executive officer of assured access to space at the Space Systems Command. During a call with reporters, Pentecost said the next procurement of launch services, known as National Security Space Launch Phase 3, is intended to ensure the Space Force has access to launch supply at competitive pricing. Under the dual-lane NSSL strategy, the plan is to select multiple medium-lift rockets to launch lower-orbit missions, and three heavy-lift launch providers in an effort to reduce DoD’s dependence on SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Pentecost said the Space Force estimates it could launch as many as 88 missions in the 2027-2032 timeframe. “We looked at the market, we looked at the capacity,” he said. “We made the determination that in order to really ensure access to space, that adding a third provider into what we’re calling Lane 2 is what was good for the nation.” NSSL Phase 3 has a Lane 1 procurement aimed at smaller launchers that fly to lower orbits. Lane 2 requires heavy-lift launchers that can fly payloads to nine “reference orbits ” that include some of the most demanding DoD and intelligence agency missions. During the NSSL Phase 3 contract period there will be growing commercial demand for launch, fueled by mega-constellations like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Pentecost said. Another concern is what’s been happening in the small launch sector where companies that one day are “burning bright, then declare bankruptcy,” he said. “You never know.” The Phase 3 strategy is designed to “basically guarantee capacity” for national security launch and to secure competitive prices, he said. “We’re trying to lock down 80 to 90 missions that we’re looking to launch over the timeframe.” Third provider will get seven missions About 30 missions will be awarded under Lane 1, and 58 in Lane 2, said Pentecost. Of the 58 missions in Lane 2, seven — five GPS satellite launches to medium Earth orbit and two direct-to-geostationary orbit launches — are being set aside for a third provider. The highest scoring competitor in Lane 2 will get 60% of the other 51 missions, and the second-best score will get 40%. All three Lane 2 winners will be eligible for up to $100 million a year in funding to pay for military-unique requirements, such as having both East and West Coast launch sites, vertical integration facilities and giving the Space Force access to their commercial launch data. The Space Force initially planned to award five-year contracts to two Lane 2 providers but later realized it needed to support a third provider for national security and economic reasons. “We want to get the best pricing,” Pentecost said. “We didn’t want to necessarily pay for a third guy” but decided that by limiting the third provider to those specific seven missions, the Space Force could curtail the cost of the integration studies required for NSSL launch providers. Increased national security demand When the Space Force in February released its first draft solicitation for NSSL Phase 3 it was forecasting just 39 missions for Lane 2. Pentecost said the Space Force revised the forecast to 58 after further discussions with military space program offices and the National Reconnaissance Office. “We’re looking at what we think the future is going to look like,” he said. “We worked with the NRO on their future missions that are being developed and talked to other space vehicle program offices to understand what the next five years are going to look like.” The Space Systems Command plans to release a final request for bids in September and proposals will be due by year’s end. Contracts for single-missions under Lane 1 and five-year contracts for Lane 2 would be awarded in October 2024. New rockets in development Companies seeking to challenge current NSSL providers SpaceX and United Launch Alliance do not necessarily have to have operational rockets by the time contracts are awarded in 2024. Pentecost said a launch company with a new rocket in development can still be selected if it submits a credible plan showing its vehicle will be ready to fly by October 2026, Pentecost said. That is the start of fiscal year 2027 when Phase 3 missions have to be ordered. If any of the selected launch companies are not able to fly by that date, the missions will be reassigned to one of the other Lane 2 providers. A new entrant like Blue Origin, for example, could be awarded a Lane 2 contract on the assumption that its New Glenn rocket will be operational and certified by October 2026. If the vehicle is not ready, the Space Force will assign fiscal year 2027 missions to the other two providers until Blue Origin’s vehicle is certified. Missions will be assigned every year in October during the five-year contract.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said PlanetiQ won a $60 million NOAA contract to provide radio occultation weather data. The company has since said it won an $8 million task order under a multiple-vendor contract with a potential maximum value of $60 million. SAN FRANCISCO – PlanetiQ won an $8 million order to deliver daily weather data to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over six months. It was the first task order under a NOAA indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract awarded in March to PlanetiQ and Spire Global. The overall contract has a potential value of $60 million over five years. The $8 million contract was PlanetiQ’s first sale of operational radio occultation data for numerical weather models. In the past, Golden, Colorado-based PlanetiQ has delivered data to other government agencies for evaluation and testing. “This is a very big deal for us,” PlanetiQ CEO Ira Scharf told SpaceNews. “NOAA is obviously one of the biggest buyers of weather data in the world. It’s a tremendous credibility boost. It shows the quality of our data, the reliability of our data and the impact that data can have on weather forecasting.” PlanetiQ plans to establish a 20-satellite constellation. Two PlanetiQ satellites are in orbit and a third is scheduled to launch later this year. Several more” are on deck for 2024, Scharf said. PlanetiQ’s satellites are equipped with receivers to pick up signals from the U.S. Global Positioning System, Russia’s Glonass, Europe’s Galileo and China’s Beidou global navigation satellite systems. Atmospheric density, which bends the angle of the GNSS signals, can reveal temperature, pressure, humidity and electron density in the signal’s path. “Our state-of-the-art, next-generation radio occultation sensors, called Pyxis, are smaller, lighter and consume less power, but have nearly three times the data collection capability than any other system in operation today as we receive signals from all four world-wide GNSS constellations,” Rob Kursinski, PlanetiQ co-founder and chief scientist, said in a statement. Scharf added that the PlanetiQ data will help NOAA “significantly improve short and medium-range weather forecasts, and provide essential insights to enhance climate change research for the government, military and the private sector.” “PlanetiQ is very pleased to be selected by NOAA to support its global operational needs for GNSS-RO,” Chris McCormick, PlanetiQ co-founder and president, said in a statement. “We look forward to launching more spacecraft in the next 18 months to expand our global coverage and resolution to further support NOAA and international partners in weather forecasting and climate research.” Founded in 2015, PlanetiQ has raised more than $35 million to date, including $18.7 million in 2019. PlanetiQ established a radio occultation constellation after some of its competitors like Spire Global and GeoOptics, but company officials say the time was well spent since their receivers produce high-quality data at low cost. In addition to improving terrestrial weather forecasts, radio occultation data is useful for understanding space weather. NOAA awarded contracts last year to GeoOptics, PlanetiQ and Spire to provide space weather data as part of a pilot program to test the value of the commercial observations.
Hyperspace Challenge, a U.S. Space Force accelerator, is joining forces for the first time with the Space Force Rapid Capabilities Office to help make space assets more resilient. Through the upcoming Hyperspace Challenge the Space Force is exploring ways to help spacecraft fend off threats. “We need to be able to protect these assets from growing threats, and we need to do it quickly,” Matthew Fetrow, Space RCO communications manager, said in a statement. Traditional aerospace and defense companies as well as firms from the automotive, manufacturing, cybersecurity and other sectors are invited to apply. U.S. Space Force leaders and the latest U.S. military budget underscore the need to make space systems more resilient. Military, civil and commercial satellites face kinetic, cyber and laser threats. “In addition to companies already targeting the space market, we need to be partnering now with nonspace companies and researchers who can think creatively about the technologies they already use in their own fields that could have wider-reaching applications in space,” Fetrow said. “This is not necessarily your typical space cohort. We are interested in companies with advanced technologies that may or may not be operating in the space industry at all now.” Specifically, the Space RCO is interested in products to: Companies interested in participating in the accelerator are invited to submit initial interest forms by Aug. 15. The Space RCO and Hyperspace Challenge will share information on the application process during Aug. 16 and 18 webinars. Formal accelerator applications will be accepted from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8. Companies invited to participate in the Hyperspace Challenge will attend a two-day event in Albuquerque with Space RCO and Hyperspace Challenge partners. The Hyperspace Challenge is designed to help companies gain insight into the types of products and services sought by government space agencies. The Space RCO also “is looking to strengthen relationships with each participating company in order to understand how the Space Force can support their success in commercial markets and bring their innovations into government space missions,” Fetrow said. 
The potential failure of a Viasat broadband satellite could result in a massive claim and a “huge hit” for the space insurance sector, one insurer warns. Viasat announced July 12 that it had encountered an “unexpected event” during the deployment of the large reflector on its ViaSat-3 Americas satellite after its April 30 launch. The company did not provide more details about the problem but said it was working with the manufacturer of the reflector to try and resolve it. The reflector features wire mesh, highly reflective at Ka-band frequencies, supported by a structure of carbon fibers and graphite. The boom connecting the reflector to the spacecraft is a larger version of structures uses to deploy the sunshield on the James Webb Space Telescope, the company said in a blog post last September . Viasat has not provided any updates on the status of the reflector since the announcement and suggested it may wait until a quarterly earnings call scheduled for Aug. 9. If Viasat is unable to deploy the reflector, many in industry expect it to file an insurance claim worth as much as $420 million. The space insurance sector is closely monitoring the situation, said Amy Avjean, senior vice president and third party space liability leader at Marsh, during a panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Memorial Symposium July 17. “That could be a huge hit to the aerospace liability market in general,” she warned. A large claim could end up reducing capacity for other space insurance customers, she said. She noted, though, that a potential ViaSat-3 claim would pale in comparison to another challenge for the broader aerospace and aviation insurance market. Leased commercial aircraft stranded in Russia because of the war with Ukraine have resulted in $7 billion in claims, far larger than premiums for the overall sector. “If something happens at the $7 billion level, it’s going to be a huge hit to the aerospace market,” she said. Those claims are being litigated, a process that could take years. Avjean also discussed another emerging issue for the space insurance market: liability insurance for people flying on commercial spacecraft. “It’s an interesting challenge in the insurance industry,” she said. “The most that we’ve been able to obtain is $100 million in limited liability. I don’t know if that limit is sustainable going forward.” The field is still new with many uncertainties and nuances. “I think we get into some murky waters when we start talking about on-orbit liability and government astronauts,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that need to get litigated.” Avjean also suggested a lack of insight into the leading commercial human spaceflight provider, SpaceX. “One person is launching people into space and he’s doing a very good job of it, but he doesn’t use insurance so I don’t know what he’s doing.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat is preparing to resume demonstrations for its delayed low Earth orbit broadband constellation after Rocket Lab successfully launched the Canadian operator’s latest prototype satellite. The 30-kilogram LEO 3 spacecraft deployed solar arrays and passed initial health checks after launching July 17 on an Electron along with six smaller satellites , according to the operator. About two more weeks of tests are needed before LEO 3 can be put into operation, said Robert Zee, director of the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL), the Toronto small satellite specialist that built it for Telesat. LEO 1, the previous demonstrator for Telesat’s proposed Lightspeed network, launched in 2018 but recently ran out of fuel as negotiations to fully fund nearly 200 commercial satellites drag on. LEO 2 never made it to orbit. Built by SFL in partnership with Maxar Technologies, LEO 2 was one of 19 satellites lost in a 2017 Russian Soyuz launch failure. In its latest update, Telesat said it expects to start deploying full-size Lightspeed satellites around 2026, six years later than originally planned for a constellation that has also suffered pandemic-related supply chain issues at Thales Alenia Space. The operator declined to specify where it plans to resume testing terminals and modems with vendors once LEO 3 becomes operational to address interest from potential customers. LEO 1, a Ka-band satellite also known as Phase 1, had helped test planned services with partners including India’s Nelco, a communications provider under local conglomerate Tata. While Telesat director marketing and communications Lynette Simmons said the company has a backlog of vendor and customer tests to get through, she said it is up to them to publicize their demonstration campaign. The company expects LEO 3’s first testing campaigns will be in Asia, followed by Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Simmons added. Progress with LEO 3 could also help Telesat’s case for the deadline extensions it would need from regulators to deploy commercial satellites. International regulators recently relaxed deployment milestone rules for 576 satellites proposed by Rivada Space Networks, which said the pandemic had made it difficult to stick to schedule. SFL, part of Canada’s University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, said LEO 3 also has some upgrades over LEO 1, built by U.K.-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL). In addition to Ka-band, LEO 3 is designed to transmit and receive in Q-band and V-band spectrum, which could be useful for a second-generation Lightspeed network. Zee said the LEO 3 payload mission is expected to last five years. LEO 1 had a three-year design life, ultimately exceeding this by about two years before being decommissioned at the end of May.
Venezuela has formally joined the China-led International Lunar Research Station project. Venezuela becomes one of the first countries to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). The initiative is seen as a China-led, parallel project to the NASA-led Artemis Program. Zhang Kejian, administrator of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), and Gabriela Jimenez, Venezuela’s Vice President and Minister of Science and Technology, signed a joint statement on the ILRS July 17 via video. The joint declaration, named the “Memorandum of Cooperation between the China National Space Administration and the Bolivarian Space Agency of Venezuela on the International Lunar Research Station,” marks Venezuela’s formal entry into the ILRS program, CNSA stated . The two parties will carry out extensive and in-depth cooperation in the demonstration, engineering implementation, operation and application of the ILRS, including joint demonstration of scientific goals, joint design, and more, according to CNSA. China and Venezuela have established space cooperation, including the 2008 launch of the CASC-built VeneSat-1 communications satellite, as well as later remote sensing satellites in low Earth orbit. “The signing of the joint statement marks that the cooperation between the two sides has moved from near-Earth space to the moon and deep space,” according to CNSA. The ILRS project aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s with a series of stepping stone missions before the end of this decade. China plans a series of robotic missions across the 2020s as precursors, including the 2026 Chang’e-7 lunar south pole mission and 2028 Chang’e-8 in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission. China has also unveiled plans to put a pair of astronauts on the moon by 2030 . Venezuela will make its satellite control ground station infrastructure available for lunar missions, according to ABAE. It will also engage in collaborative design, technical and operational cooperation, and data management and exchange. “This represents a unique opportunity for mission planning, guidance and definition, as well as technology transfer and joint advances in lunar exploration,” said an ABAE statement . Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro greeted the development. “Venezuela goes to the Moon, who would have thought? We are the first to partner in the project to go to the Moon with the People’s Republic of China,” according to machine translation. Venezuela and China earlier sounded their intentions to partner up for the ILRS in late March. Marglad Bencomo, executive director of ABAE, visited China’s new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) and discussed cooperation. The South American nation becomes the first to formally sign up to the China-led ILRS initiative. China and Russia had previously presented a joint ILRS roadmap in 2021 in St. Petersburg. Beijing has however since taken the role of lead of the project and is setting up an organization , named ILRSCO, to coordinate the international moon base initiative. The organizations’ headquarters will be located in the Deep Space Science City, in Hefei in Anhui province, with centers focusing on design simulation, operation control, data processing, sample storage and research, and international training centers. CNSA has this year signed joint statements on the ILRS with the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), Swiss firm nanoSPACE AG , and the Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association ( ILOA ). Pakistan has also expressed its intent to join the ILRS. Last month DSEL said it was negotiating agreements with more than 10 other countries and organizations. The U.S.-led Artemis project has so far attracted 27 countries — most recently India — to sign up to the Artemis Accords, the political underpinning of the initiative. Victoria Samson, Washington Office director at the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews in April that Venezuela intending to join the ILRS indicates a trend in international space partnerships. “It does lend credence to a concern that I have that we’re seeing a bifurcation in lunar governance and approaches to lunar missions, where you are either Team Artemis or Team ILRS,” Sansom said. China aims to complete the signing of agreements and memorandums of understanding with space agencies and organizations for founding members of ILRSCO by October this year.
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket placed seven smallsats for three customers into orbit July 17 on a launch that also brought the company a step closer to reusing the rocket’s booster. The Electron lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 9:27 p.m. Eastern. The launch was scheduled for July 14 but postponed as the company made final preparations to both launch the rocket and recover the booster. After an initial burn of the rocket’s kick stage, it deployed four NASA Starling 6U cubesats and two Spire 3U cubesats into a 575-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. After two more burns, the kick stage deployed the final payload, Telesat’s LEO 3 satellite, into a 1,000-kilometer orbit an hour and 45 minutes after liftoff. The four Starling satellites will test the ability of spacecraft to operate autonomously as a swarm, flying in formation and maneuvering without commands from the ground. The two Spire satellites will join the company’s constellation of more than 100 spacecraft, carrying radio occultation payloads to collect weather data. LEO 3, the largest spacecraft on the launch, was built by the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory for Telesat . It will allow the Canadian satellite operator to continue tests for its future Lightspeed constellation it had been performing with another prototype satellite that is nearing the end of its life. The “Baby Come Back” mission also offered Rocket Lab another opportunity to test its efforts to recover and reuse the rocket’s first stage. The company made several modifications to the rocket and its recovery technique as it switched from earlier plans to capture the falling boosters in mid-air to allowing them to splash down in the ocean. The company’s webcast showed the booster retrieved by a ship shortly before deployment of the final satellite. “With this mission we’ve made big strides toward reusability with Electron and we are now closer than ever to relaunching a booster for the first time,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a statement. The company added that the recovered booster was in “great condition.” Beck, in an interview last week, declined to give a timeline for being able to reuse a booster beyond stating that the company will refly a Rutherford engine on an Electron launch later this year. During the company’s launch webcast, Wayne McIntosh, team lead for Electron reusability at Rocket Lab, suggested several more flight tests were planned before the company would consider reuse. “We’re introducing minor changes for flight 39. Forty-one will have a few more. Forty-five will be our ‘golden child,’ which is going to have all our sealing changes, and this is going to enable us to disposition the vehicle accurately for reuse,” he said. This launch was the 39 th flight of an Electron. The launch was the seventh this year for Rocket Lab, which includes six orbital launches and a launch last month of its suborbital variant , Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE), from Virginia. Beck said in the interview that the company was maintaining earlier projections of up to 15 Electron launches this year, which includes orbital missions and HASTE flights. The big challenge for the company’s flight rate, he said, has been customer readiness. “We would have liked to see more launches by now,” he said. “It’s fair to say we have a very busy season coming up here as customers push to right a little bit.” Rocket Lab is also seeing the effects of other changes in the market, such as the bankruptcy of Virgin Orbit. NorthStar Earth and Space, which had planned to launch its first space situational awareness satellites this summer with Virgin Orbit, signed a contract with Rocket Lab June 22 to launch its first four satellites this fall on an Electron. Beck said Rocket Lab has seen interest from customers who had previously planned to launch with other providers. The NASA Starling satellites, for example, were originally manifested to launch on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket. “We’ve seen defections from all of the aspirational launch providers,” he said, more this year than in prior years. That stems from delays by those companies as well as concerns about customers about being on an early flight. “The industry is shaking out.” “When we’re all young and growing up, we all had equal mission risk because we all had single-digit numbers of launches, and it was a level playing field,” he said. “I think it’s very difficult now to take that extra risk for the delta in cost.” Rocket Lab said its next Electron launch will take place by the end of the month, and that it will release details about the mission in the near future.
TAMPA, Fla. — Young space companies made more acquisitions than their older peers over the last 12 months, according to analysis from British investment firm Seraphim Space. Satellite maker York Space Systems , launcher Firefly Aerospace , defense contractor Anduril , and other “NewSpace” ventures formed the bulk of the 28 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) Seraphim tracked over the period. More established space firms and other companies have traditionally led M&A activity in the industry. However, Seraphim vice president Maureen Haverty said its data shows acquisitions are no longer reserved for the deep pockets of legacy space players. More acquisitions from companies founded in the last decade is a sign of the broader sector’s maturity, Haverty said, and come alongside an uptick in the number of acquisitions led by institutional private equity firms. Private equity firms are increasingly responsible for some of the largest transactions in the industry, such as Advent’s recently completed $6.4 billion deal for legacy satellite maker and operator Maxar Technologies. The rise of private equity investors suggests there are many undervalued businesses in the space industry that could be acquired at low cost, Haverty said, and then sold for profit once they ramp up revenues. “They clearly see the potential for further consolidation and are likely to drive some of this themselves,” she said. Space investment activity shows signs of potential recovery after declining last year amid economic uncertainty, according to Seraphim Space data for the first half of this year. While investments and mega-rounds have fallen from 2021 highs, Haverty said startup activity and later-stage funding are higher than ever for space technology companies — which Seraphim defines as space-dependent application firms, such as ride-hailing service Uber, in addition to rocket, satellite, and other more conventional space businesses. U.S.-based early-stage investor Space Capital also recently pointed to signs of a rebound for the space industry following its own research.
LightRidge Solutions, a company that owns space and airborne sensor businesses, announced July 17 it has acquired space electronics supplier Trident Systems. The value and terms of the deal were not disclosed. LightRidge is a portfolio company of ATL Partners, a private equity firm. Trident, based in Fairfax, Virginia, supplies space electronics, including radio-frequency processors, software-defined radios, on-board processors and data storage systems for national security space missions. Trident components used in Space Development Agency satellites Northrop Grumman in March selected Trident to provide processing and storage electronics for 14 missile-detecting satellites Northrop is producing for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency. Trident is LightRidge’s third acquisition since it was formed in 2021 as a holding company. Its portfolio includes Geost, a provider of space payloads, and Ophir Corp., a supplier of airborne laser radar systems. “Trident is well known for its highly reliable, resilient, and open-architecture space electronics,” said Bill Gattle, CEO of LightRidge. This acquisition, he said, will boost LightRidge’s national security space capabilities “and enable high-volume production and delivery under demanding schedule requirements.” ATL Partners, based in New York City, has invested in small to medium sized defense businesses with mature technologies that can be applied to national security missions and also adapted for commercial needs.
China is formalizing its plans to land a pair of astronauts on the surface of the moon before the end of the decade. A preliminary plan to put two astronauts on the moon for a short period to conduct scientific tasks and collect samples was presented by Zhang Hailian, deputy chief designer with the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), at the 9th China (International) Commercial Aerospace Forum in Wuhan, Hubei province, July 12. The mission envisions a crewed spacecraft and lander segments launching separately on a pair of under-development Long March 10 rockets. The crew spacecraft and landing stack will rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit ahead of a moon landing attempt. A new-generation crew spacecraft will have a mass of 26 tons and be capable of deep space flight and high-velocity atmospheric reentry. China has already carried out a full scale boilerplate flight test of a version of a new-gen spacecraft in a relatively high orbit. The landing segment will consist of a lander and a propulsion stage with a total mass of around 26 tons. The propulsion stage will be used for entering lunar orbit and descent towards the lunar surface. The lander will be capable of soft landing on the moon and returning the astronauts to lunar orbit. The lander will be equipped with four 7500N variable thrust engines. Zhang said the mission is very sensitive to mass constraints, meaning a lightweight design and integrated designs are necessary. “We also need to take advanced materials and structures to improve the structural efficiency and strictly control the weight,” Zhang said. A lunar rover will also be part of the mission profile. It will have a mass of 200 kilograms, accommodate two astronauts and have a range of 10 kilometers. A spacesuit is being developed for lunar surface operations with a working time of no less than eight hours, Zhang said. It will aid astronauts in walking, climbing, driving and operating machines on the moon. The Long March 10 will be a three-stage rocket with three, five-meter-diameter cores for its first stage. It will be capable of sending 27 tons of payload to trans-lunar injection. The test launch of the Long March 10A—a two-stage, low Earth orbit version of the larger rocket—is set for 2027. CASC recently reported progress on testing of the 130-ton-thrust kerosene-liquid oxygen engines for the rocket. CMSA additionally July 17 announced a call for proposals for science payloads to travel on the lunar lander. The call is open to research institutions, universities and high-tech enterprises. Proposals should focus on fields of study including lunar geology, physics, observation, space life sciences and in-situ resource utilization. The new details follow an announcement by the CMSA in May that China plans to land its astronauts on the moon for the first time by 2030. Senior lunar scientists have in the last couple of years claimed to state media that China would possess the capabilities to land crew on the moon before the end of the decade. China has long been working on the various components required for crewed lunar missions. THese include a new crew spacecraft, new launchers and a lunar lander . The mission aims at being more than a flags and footprints campaign. China is planning to build a moon base in the 2030s known as the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). China plans a series of robotic missions across the 2020s as precursors to the ILRS. These include the 2026 Chang’e-7 orbiter, lander, rover and “mini flying detector” lunar south pole mission. Chang’e-8, currently scheduled for launch around 2028, will be an in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission. China’s space activities have expanded greatly in recent years. The country has greatly increased its launch rate and completed an indigenous GNSS system and a crewed space station. A space white paper published in January 2022 stated that China will “continue studies and research on the plan for a human lunar landing… and research key technologies to lay a foundation for exploring and developing cislunar space.” Future plans include the ILRS and an unprecedented Mars sample return mission. The country however currently faces economic challenges which could dampen the growth on which these plans are predicated. NASA’s Mars sample return plans are currently facing scrutiny and concern over the status and cost of the mission.
A United Kingdom Parliament committee is calling on the government to revise its approach for licensing launches, warning it could fall behind international competitors if it fails to do so. The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee published a report July 14 that concluded that, based on the experience from the first orbital launch attempt from the U.K. in January, reforms are needed to streamline the process and avoid delays. “We recommend that the Government should convene all relevant bodies without delay to take steps now to improve the licensing system of UK satellite launch,” the report stated. That conclusion was based in large part on the delays securing a license from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for a Virgin Orbit launch from Spaceport Cornwall in January. The launch was planned for last fall but delayed until January because Virgin Orbit did not get a license from the CAA until mid-December . The CAA noted at the time that it issued the license 15 months after the start of the application process, “well within the expected timescales for these types of licences.” That launch failed to reach orbit , but the report said there was no evidence that the licensing process contributed to the failure. Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April and has liquidated its assets . Other companies are planning to launch from the U.K. and are working on obtaining launch licenses from the CAA. Some of those companies testified to the committee that, after a slow start, they are seeing improvements in the regulatory process. “We are pleased to hear that the regulatory experiences of the UK launch sector are moving in a positive direction, and we encourage the CAA to continue this trajectory,” the report stated. “However, more can be done to streamline the regulatory process to help ensure that the UK launch sector can reach its full potential.” Government officials, including George Freeman, the minister whose portfolio includes space, told the committee the government would review lessons learned from the Virgin Orbit licensing process and related topics. The committee backed that approach but said that the review must be done “at pace” and be completed by September. The committee offered some recommendations for launch licensing streamlining in the report based on testimony from several companies. Those recommendations focus on coordinating the various organizations involved in the licensing process, such as creating a “central portal” for companies to provide information at one time, rather than having to provide similar data, in different formats, to individual organizations. The report also warned that the reforms identified in the report “must be carried out urgently, and conclude by the end of this year, to avoid the UK losing its head start in launch.” “The UK has huge opportunities in the burgeoning space and satellite industry. But the sector is global and fast-paced, and to maintain our position the UK must act urgently to applies the lessons of the Cornwall disappointment to the regulatory system for satellite launch,” Greg Clark, chair of the committee, said in a statement. The CAA noted in a response to the report that it was already working on streamlining improvements identified by the committee. “We welcome the recommendations to further streamline and simplify the space licensing process and have made significant improvements already, with many more to come,” Tim Johnson, director of space regulation at the CAA, said in an agency statement. The committee also used the report to criticize more broadly the government’s attention to space matters. The report noted that a new National Space Council, an interagency body modeled on its U.S. counterpart, has yet to meet for the first time months after the government said it was reestablishing it. A report on a national position, navigation and timing (PNT) strategy originally slated for release in 2021 has yet to be published. “It is symptomatic of a disjointed approach to concrete policy and leadership for the UK’s space and satellite sector which now risks hampering its potential,” the committee said of the delayed PNT strategy.
As the House Science Committee considers a commercial space bill, industry officials advocated for key topics they believe should be included in that legislation. A July 13 hearing by the committee offered the industry an opportunity to weigh in on topics they believe should be included in a commercial space package that the committee is developing, from commercial human spaceflight safety to oversight of emerging space activities. Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), chair of the committee, said a theme of the legislation will be maintaining the competitiveness of the industry. “As this committee prepares to consider commercial space legislation, it’s imperative we keep U.S. international competitiveness at the top of our priorities,” he said in his opening statement. “Ensuring a robust commercial space sector is key to maintaining U.S. leadership in space and technology.” One of the top issues is extending the current restriction on the Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to regulate safety for people who fly on commercial spacecraft. That restriction, often called the “learning period” by industry, was included in a 2004 commercial space act with the intent of allowing companies to gain experience upon which regulations could then be based. The learning period was originally designed to last eight years but has been extended by subsequent legislation and is now due to expire Oct. 1 . Many in the commercial spaceflight industry have been lobbying Congress for another extension, citing the slow pace of progress that has limited the experience companies have gained. “CSF supports a multi-year extension of the learning period to enable key dialogues to continue between government and industry,” said Karina Drees, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF), at the hearing. “Allowing the learning period to end this year would lead to regulations that inadvertently freeze development before industry has had time to mature, harming safety and our nation’s competitiveness in the long term.” One key member, while not explicitly opposed to an extension of the learning period, did appear concerned about safety. “We have an obligation to ensure spaceflight safety,” said Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.), ranking member of the space subcommittee. Drees argued an end of the learning period would hinder safety. “If we start developing that regulatory environment too soon, before we have enough data, before we have enough knowledge of those individual vehicles, there is a long-term safety risk that something could go wrong.” “Instead of learning from our mistakes, we need to make sure we’re using science to not make mistakes in the first place,” Sorensen responded. Another priority for industry is establishing a “mission authorization” system for regulating commercial space activities not overseen by agencies today in order to comply with the Outer Space Treaty’s requirement for authorization and continuing supervision of space activities. While the National Space Council is developing a proposal for mission authorization, some witnesses said that responsibility should go to the Office of Space Commerce in the Commerce Department. “It’s similar to the way other countries have structured it, where they’re thinking about those activities in regards to their economic contribution and the potential for economic growth,” said Caryn Schenewerk, president of CS Consulting. Josef Koller, systems director for The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy, said a mission authorization system would also be important for human spaceflight, since any ability by the FAA to regulate commercial human spaceflight safety would be limited to launch and reentry. “Just like commercial aviation benefits from a single oversight agency, commercial human spaceflight would do the same,” he said. Jim Dunstan, general counsel for technology think tank TechFreedom, opposed giving that authority to other agencies like the FAA or Federal Communications Commission. While the FCC has expertise in spectrum, he argued, it lacked knowledge in other satellite issues. “To put more on their plate on areas they’re going to have to come up to speed on, I think is going to slow those activities down.” Other issues raised at the hearing included broader regulatory reform in areas such as launch and commercial remote sensing. Witnesses noted that while FAA enacted a “streamlined” set of launch licensing regulations, called Part 450, more than two years ago, industry is still struggling with aspects of the new rules. The FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) approved at a July 11 meeting a set of recommendations for the FAA to improve the Part 450 licensing process. “Those recommendations do call upon the FAA to address specific aspects of Part 450 that are proving problematic,” said Schenewerk, who chairs COMSTAC’s regulatory working group. Drees said the CSF also backed proposals to restore a spaceport infrastructure grant program for commercial launch sites, which was briefly funded from 2010 to 2012. That, she argued, would give spaceports access to grant funding to build up capabilities that could reduce the burden on federal launch sites. House members have not offered a schedule for introducing a commercial space bill or confirmed what it might include. Lucas was publicly neutral on the learning period issue, for example, saying only that Congress must determine if the current state of the industry required an extension. “Our legislation must be carefully written and executed to create a favorable environment here at home,” he said, “and prevent U.S. companies from turning to overseas destinations that promise speedy authorizations with minimal restrictions.”
The U.S. Space Force on July 13 released a revised draft solicitation for the next round of national security launch contracts, known as National Security Space Launch Phase 3. In a major departure from the first draft request for proposals released in February, the Space Force is increasing the number of heavy-lift launch providers it plans to select from two to three. NSSL Phase 3 is a multibillion-dollar procurement of launch services projected for 2025 through 2029. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won NSSL Phase 2 in 2020, and their current contracts will be recompeted. The Space Systems Command is seeking additional industry feedback prior to releasing the final RFPs later this year. Comments are due July 28. The revised draft RFP retains the two-lane contracting approach announced in the first draft. Lane 1 would cater to smaller launchers and will be open to any provider that has a proven flight record. But the Space Force is changing its strategy for Lane 2, the portion of NSSL that requires heavy-lift launchers that can fly payloads to nine “reference orbits ,” which include some of the most demanding missions. The Space Force initially planned to award five-year Lane 2 contracts to just two providers, an approach modeled after the Phase 2 agreements with ULA and SpaceX. The decision to add a third provider was made “based on industry feedback and the need to increase resiliency in the face of the pacing challenge from countries like China,” Col. Douglas Pentecost, deputy program executive officer for assured access to space, said July 14 in a news release. “We refined our strategy to fortify assured access to space by ensuring that the government has three launch providers capable of meeting all NSSL requirements by the end of Phase 3,” Pentecost said. The Space Force by adding a third provider is looking to increase “launch capacity, enable supply chain stability, increase resiliency through alternate launch sites and enhance affordability for the most stressing national security space missions,” he added. Lane 2 payloads demand higher performance launch systems, and have complex security and integration requirements, Pentecost said. The winners of Lane 2 submit fixed-price bids for launch services but are also eligible for “launch service support” funding, a subsidy to cover rocket development or infrastructure expenses unique to NSSL. Senate bill recommends a third provider The Senate Armed Services Committee in its version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act directs the Space Force to add a third provider in Lane 2 of NSSL Phase 3. The House version of the NDAA does not include this provision. The committee “establishes an additional lane (Lane 2A) two years into Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch acquisition program to allow for greater competition within the field,” said the bill. The SASC language reflects concerns from new entrant companies like Blue Origin that plan to introduce new rockets during the projected timeframe for Phase 3. Space Force and Air Force officials in the past pushed back on these proposals and insisted that only two providers were needed. Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, in a July 14 statement explained the thinking behind the revised strategy. “We must continue to outpace our adversaries and maintain the technological advantage we get as a nation by making our space architecture more resilient so it can be counted on during times of crisis and conflict,” he said. “This is the essence behind the NSSL Phase 3 acquisition strategy.” The final RFP is scheduled to be released in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023. Lane 1 awards are expected in the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, and Lane 2 awards in the fourth quarter.
House and Senate appropriators have drafted bills that would give NASA slightly less money in 2024 than it received in 2023, rather than the significant increase the administration requested. The Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill for fiscal year 2024 on a 28–1 vote during a July 13 markup. That bill funds NASA as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation, among other agencies. The committee had not released the text of the bill or accompanying report as of early July 14, but a bill summary by the committee stated it provided $25.0 billion for NASA. That is below the $25.384 billion the agency received in fiscal year 2023 and significantly less than the $27.185 billion the agency requested for 2024. That summary did not include a full breakout of funding for the agency in the bill, but it noted that NASA’s exploration programs would get $7.74 billion, less than the $7.97 billion requested for 2024 but more than the $7.47 billion those programs received in 2023. That amount, the summary stated, fully funded Orion, the Space Launch System and ground systems while providing “sufficient funding to continue progress on the Artemis Campaign Development,” including the Human Landing System awards to SpaceX and Blue Origin. In brief comments at the markup, senators said that exploration was their highest priority. The bill funds “the tools for NASA to return astronauts to the moon, including the first woman and person of color, and to maintain U.S. leadership in space,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), chair of the CJS appropriations subcommittee. “We were able to protect the most important national priority within NASA’s budget, at least in my view, which is to return humans to the moon and maintain our strategic advantage in space,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), ranking member of the CJS subcommittee. The bill summary also noted that NASA’s Earth science, astrophysics and heliophysics divisions would be funded at or slightly above 2023 levels. That included restoring a $54 million cut proposed for heliophysics in the 2024 budget request. The summary was silent on planetary science, but a draft of report language circulating online suggested strong concern by Senate appropriators about the status of Mars Sample Return (MSR). That draft allocated only $300 million for MSR, less than a third of the $949.3 million requested, citing delays and fiscal impacts on other NASA science programs. That comes amid NASA reviews that featured scenarios where the cost of MSR would be roughly double previous agency estimates. Moreover, that report draft directed NASA to provide the committee with a cost estimate of MSR that would fit in a cap of $5.3 billion, a level recommended by the planetary science decadal survey published last year. If NASA cannot, the draft stated, MSR would be canceled and its funds reallocated to other science mission as well as Artemis. House appropriators, meanwhile, published their CJS spending bill for fiscal year 2024 ahead of a July 14 subcommittee markup. That bill provides $25.367 billion for NASA in 2024, just under the 2023 spending level but again well below the request for 2024. The bill would provide full funding for all exploration programs, at $7.97 billion. Science would get $7.38 billion, $880 million below the request and $415 million less than what they received in 2023. The bill did not break out science spending by division. The funding in both the House and Senate bills are below the request in large part because of the debt ceiling deal reached at the end of May, where Congress and the White House agreed to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for capping non-defense discretionary funding , which includes NASA, at 2023 levels for 2024. Moran said at the markup that the budget caps affected NASA among other agencies. “They will have significant challenges in continuing all of their programs. I’m disappointed by that,” he said of NASA. “These deep and painful cuts were inevitable under the deal the Speaker [of the House] and the President cut.” “NASA will have a lot of work to do to figure out how to continue on the programs they are currently planning,” he added. NASA officials had acknowledged since the passage of the debt ceiling deal that the agency’s funding for 2024 would fall short of its request. “It’s really challenging right now when we look at where we ended up” after the deal, said NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana during a July 12 talk at the Future Space 2023 conference. “The president recommended $27.2 billion. We’re going to end up with less than that as we move forward,” he said. “It’s going to require some hard decisions on our part. It may move things out a little bit longer. It may mean some things have to be stopped.”
SEOUL, South Korea — India successfully launched a robotic lunar lander July 14, setting up the nation for its second attempt to soft-land on the moon. The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft lifted off on an LVM-3 heavy-lift rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 5:05 a.m. Eastern Friday as scheduled. Live footage showed the three-stage rocket with two strap-on side boosters soaring into the air with bright yellow exhaust shooting out of its first-stage engines. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) declared the launch a success shortly after the deployment. “Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards the moon,” said ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said soon after deployment. “Let us wish all the best for the Chandrayaan spacecraft for its journey toward the moon.” Chandrayaan-3, consisting of a propulsion module, Vikram lander and the small Pragyan rover, is now on a fuel-efficient, three-week-long journey which will see it continually raise its current elliptical Earth orbit and eventually perform a trans-lunar injection maneuver. It is scheduled to arrive in lunar orbit Aug. 5. Once in lunar orbit, the propulsion module will be jettisoned. The Vikram lander will begin an autonomous descent, expected on Aug. 23 or 24, to a targeted landing site near the lunar South Pole. The landing site is located at 69.37 degrees south latitude and 32.35 degrees east longitude. ISRO chose the prime landing site using high-resolution photographs and data from Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. A successful Chandrayaan-3 landing will make India the fourth country in the world to achieve a lunar landing, following the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China. The mission would also be the first to land near the lunar south pole. No previous Moon mission has landed at a lower latitude. The three main objectives of the mission are to safely land on the lunar surface, collect data and conduct a series of scientific experiments to learn more about the moon’s composition. The mission is a follow-up to the Chandrayaan-2 lunar landing attempt which failed in 2019 due to a software glitch . That mission carried an orbiter which is still in operation around the moon. Chandrayaan-1, India’s first moon probe, launched in 2008 and spent a year in lunar orbit hunting for evidence of water molecules. It was then deliberately commanded to crash-land onto the lunar surface in 2009 . Chandrayaan-3 was developed by ISRO and is a two-module configuration . The 2,148-kilogram propulsion module and a 1,752-kilogram lander named “Vikram” which also carries the 26-kilogram Pragyan rover. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover from injection orbit to 100 kilometers above the moon. Once on the site, the Vikram lander will deploy the six-wheeled Pragyan rover via a ramp. The solar-powered duo will carry out a set of scientific experiments for the duration of daytime at the landing site. One period of lunar daylight on the moon lasts for fourteen Earth days. Without radioisotope heater units the spacecraft are not expected to survive the deep cold of lunar nighttime. Vikram carries seven science payloads, including an instrument to measure the local plasma environment, an alpha particle X-Ray spectrometer and a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) module, and the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planetary Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and polarimetric measurements of earth from the lunar orbit. The lander will detect seismic activities to provide clues about the moon’s internal structure and measure the plasma density and its variations. It will also measure soil temperature about 10 centimeters beneath the lunar surface throughout the lunar day and contribute to lunar laser ranging studies using a NASA-contributed retroreflector aboard. Chandrayaan-3 is part of a wider, renewed international interest in the moon. The mission follows six moon landing attempts in the past decade. These include China’s Chang’e 3, 4 and 5 successful lunar landings and the unsuccessful Israeli Beresheet, Indian Chandrayaan-2 and Japanese Hakuto-R Mission 1 missions. Next month Roscosmos plans to launch its Luna 25 lander. This is expected to be followed shortly after by Japan’s launch of its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission. Intuitive Machines plans to launch its IM-1 on a Falcon 9 later this year as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services ( CLPS ) program later this year, while Astrobotic Technology’s Mission One , also part of CLPS, could also launch before the end of the year on a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket. SpaceNews correspondent Andrew Jones contributed from Helsinki, Finland.
SAN FRANCISCO – Maxar Technologies unveiled a platform to simplify and speed up access to high-resolution Earth imagery. The Maxar Geospatial Platform (MGP), demonstrated at the Esri User Conference in San Diego this week, offers access to archival and current imagery online and through an application programming interface. “It revolutionizes the way our customers can access and buy imagery,” Sid Dixit, Maxar vice president of engineering and product, told SpaceNews. “For example, using MGP Express, you can simply swipe through your credit card and purchase the imagery without having to call or email Maxar. It gets directly delivered to you.” In the future, MGP will allow customers to task satellites and tap into advanced analytics. Maxar announced three MGP products on July 10. For now, a select group of Maxar customers have access to MGP. “It will be available for broader adoption later this year,” Dixit said. Once tasking is available, an MGP customer focused on disaster relief could task Maxar’s constellation to obtain imagery in the wake of a hurricane or other event. “They can task a satellite to get the latest and greatest imagery, which will allow our customers to fulfill their use case right from their workflows and applications,” Dixit said. An international defense or intelligence agency could, for instance, tap into MGP analytics capabilities to count military object or to monitor various types of activity. Initially, MGP will offer access to Maxar Worldview satellites. Once Maxar Legion satellites are operational, imagery from that constellation also will be available through MGP. “MGP will enable experienced analysts, technical developers and occasional users of geospatial data to equally leverage Maxar data for mapping, monitoring and analysis in their workflows,” Dan Jablonsky, Maxar president and CEO, said in a statement.
United Launch Alliance is now planning a first launch of its Vulcan Centaur rocket in the fourth quarter after the company completes modifications to and testing of the upper stage. In a call with reporters July 13, Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said the changes to the Centaur upper stage stemmed from an investigation into a test mishap in March , where hydrogen leaked from a Centaur test article and ignited, damaging both the stage and the test rig. The company announced June 24 that it would delay the launch to make “minor reinforcements” to the Centaur . The mishap took place in the 15 th of a series of tests of what ULA calls the Centaur 5, a larger version of the Centaur 3 upper stage used on the Atlas launch vehicle. The hydrogen leak developed halfway through the test and grew over the course of four and a half minutes. The hydrogen collected in an enclosed space above the stage and found an ignition source before the test could be stopped. The investigation found that the leak originated in the forward dome of the tank, which is made of very thin stainless steel, near a door at the top of the structure. A very detailed finite element model of that part of the tank revealed a “stress riser,” or intensification of loads, because of the complicated geometry around that part of the dome. That had been missed in earlier, coarser analysis of the tank. In addition, the Centaur 5 uses a new laser welding technology, rather than arcwelding on earlier Centaurs, for seams in the tank dome. The strength of the laser welds is less than what had been expected from earlier tests. “The two things together — higher loads, somewhat lower strength in the welds — are what caused the crack to begin,” Bruno said. The amount of testing of that specific Centaur may have also contributed to the crack, he added. To correct the problem, ULA will add a layer of stainless steel around the door on the top of the dome and strips along the welds extending about 60 centimeters from it. “It’s not a very sophisticated or high-tech or high-risk action,” he said. “We simply need it to be just a little bit thicker.” The additional material will add about 135 kilograms of mass to the Centaur initially, but that increase will be cut in half on later ones. That will reduce the payload performance by the same amount, but Bruno said none of the upcoming Vulcan missions would be affected by that change given the requirements of those missions and vehicle margins. ULA is already incorporating those changes in a Centaur that was originally going to be used on the third Vulcan mission. That will instead be used for the inaugural Vulcan launch, Cert-1, while the Centaur that had already been shipped to Cape Canaveral and tested for that launch will be returned to ULA’s Decatur, Alabama, factory for modifications. The Centaur intended for the second launch will be converted into a test article to carry out the remaining tests needed to qualify it for Cert-1, while another Centaur will carry out a fuller range of tests needed to qualify the vehicle for all potential missions. “In terms of schedule, that means that we expect to fly in the fourth quarter of this year,” Bruno said. ULA is working with the primary customer of Cert-1, Astrobotic, to identify the windows in the fourth quarter that would be available for launching that company’s Peregrine lunar lander. ULA previously said only a few days were available each month for launching Peregrine. Cert-2, which would carry Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane on a mission to the International Space Station, would launch a few months after Cert-1 if that inaugural launch goes as planned. The success of both missions would certify it for national security missions under its National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract. The first such launch could take place as soon as the second quarter of 2024. Asked if that first national security launch would still be a mission designated USSF-106 , carrying the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 spacecraft, Bruno said there had been no changes to mission assignments. Bruno also addressed in the call a recent failure of a BE-4 engine intended for the Cert-2 mission during acceptance testing at a Blue Origin facility in West Texas. CNBC reported July 11 that the engine exploded 10 seconds into a static-fire test in late June. Both in comments on Twitter and in the call, Bruno played down the significance of the failure. The BE-4 engine design is already qualified, he said, and the failure took place during an acceptance test, or ATP, to confirm the workmanship of that specific engine. “ATP failures across the rocket are not uncommon,” he said. That is particularly true at the beginning of an engine program where automated thresholds for parameters like temperature and pressure that would trigger a shutdown are still being tuned. This particular engine, he said, did not pass its first acceptance test, and was back on the test stand after changes when it exploded. “In this case, it didn’t pass it in a dramatic fashion,” he said, likely because the test thresholds were set too high. “It wasn’t able to automatically shut the engine down before the engine had a burnthrough.” “This doesn’t indict the qualification at all,” he said, noting that BE-4 engines have more than 26,000 seconds of cumulative runtime. “We’re very confident in the design and the workmanship of the assets that have passed acceptance. This is not unexpected.” He added that the production rate of the BE-4 is high enough that the test failure will not delay upcoming Vulcan launches. Blue Origin and other suppliers, along with ULA itself, are working to increase production to meet a rate of 25 vehicles a year by mid-2025, an initiative he called “25 in ’25.” “I’m flattered by the attention we have now that a routine acceptance test was colorfully discussed on social media, but it really isn’t news,” he concluded.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of coordination among allies in the air, on land and at sea — and that collaboration should also apply to the space domain, the head of the U.S. Space Force told an audience of international military leaders. “Interoperable equipment, common communications and network infrastructure, these are the building blocks of successful multinational operations. If we ignore these lessons in space, space will be disconnected from the greater effort and operational effectiveness will suffer,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, U.S. chief of space operations, said July 13 in a speech at the 2023 Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference in London. “Certainly the situation in Ukraine has demonstrated the critical importance of timely coordination among partners,” Saltzman said. “To implement these lessons in space, we must collectively build tactics, techniques and procedures, just as we’ve done in every other domain,” he added. To defend the U.S. and allies’ space infrastructure from cyber attacks and other threats, said Saltzman, “we must collectively train like we fight. We must collectively operate together as a coalition … The bottom line is that international cooperation is absolutely essential to achieving a safe, stable, secure and sustainable space domain.” Military reliance on satellites The Ukraine conflict put on display military forces’ significant dependence on satellites, creating incentives to disrupt opponents’ access to space systems, Saltzman said. The U.S. and allies, he said, “must normalize how space operations are baked into joint and coalition planning.” Saltzman said he was impressed by NATO efforts to promote joint training for space operations. The alliance established the NATO Space Center at Allied Air Command headquarters in Ramstein, Germany. Earlier this year, NATO members signed off on the creation of the NATO Space Center of Excellence in Toulouse, France, dedicated to space defense. The center is co-located with the French Air Force Space Command and the Centre National d’études Spatiales (CNES). Saltzman noted that more nations are establishing organizations dedicated to space operations. “All our efforts, including the U.S. Space Force, are still nascent in this regard. We still have much to do to normalize space operations, tactics, techniques, procedures, and standards just as we have done in the other domains.” The Ukraine conflict “has made it clear that access to and use of space is fundamental to modern warfare. It is also clear that technology is a force enabler that must be supported by integrated training, and coalition operations,” he said. “Historically, space has been an area of unilateral action,” Saltzman added. “This must change. We need to work together as responsible actors to protect the safety and security of space. We need to improve cooperation, coordination, and opportunities for interoperability.” “We need to collectively sustain freedom of action in space, optimize our resources, enhance mission assurance and resilience, and most importantly, deter conflict,” Saltzman said. In his speech at the London conference, Saltzman laid out the tenets of a multifaceted strategy he rolled out in March called “competitive endurance” to guide Space Force plans to deter and combat adversaries.
Orbital Composites will space qualify technology to manufacture antennas in orbit under a $1.7 million U.S. Space Force contract announced July 13. The Small Business Innovation Research contract, awarded through the SpaceWERX Orbital Prime program, gives an important boost to the Campbell, California, startup’s plans for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing, Amolak Badesha, Orbital Composites co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “We’re talking about printing outside of the space station and printing much larger structures over time.” Working with partners Axiom Space, Northrop Grumman and the Southwest Research Institute, Orbital Composites will test robotic technology to 3D print antennas for satellite-based cellular broadband and kilometer-scale antennas for space-based solar power. The goal is to ensure the technology can withstand the temperature extremes and radiation of spaceflight, Badesha said. “This prestigious SBIR award, coupled with our partnerships with Axiom Space, Northrop Grumman, and SwRI, marks a crucial juncture in our journey,” Cole Nielsen, Orbital Composites founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Our Space Factories will leverage advanced robotics and autonomous systems to build high-performance antennas in space, reducing the cost” by more than 100-fold. In June, Orbital Composites announced plans to work with Michigan-based Virtus Solis Technologies to develop a megawatt-scale space-based solar power station. Axiom is currently conducting private astronaut flights to the International Space Station and developing space suits . The company’s long-term goal is establishing a private space station. Under the direct to phase 2 Orbital Prime contract, Orbital Composites and Axiom will design an in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing laboratory that resides outside the Axiom space station. In addition to antennas, elements of the Axiom space station could be 3D printed in the laboratory. “The future of the in-space economy relies on large-scale, in-space manufacturing and assembly,” Jason Aspiotis, Axiom director of in-space infrastructure and logistics, said in a statement. “The strategic partnership [with Orbital Composites] offers both companies a chance to accelerate their shared mission of advancing humanity’s presence in space.” Orbital Composites is working with SpaceLogistics, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, on geostationary applications for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. Space Logistics plans to launch its first Mission Robotic Vehicle in 2025. The MRV is equipped with robotic arms to install Mission Extension Pods on Optus and Intelsat communications satellites. “On the GEO side, we’re thinking about extending servicing and about in-space assembly,” Badesha said. SwRI will contribute software to ensure Orbital Composites’ in-space servicing, assembling and manufacturing technology can operate with a high degree of autonomy. “ISAM is incredibly important for the development and utilization of space,” says Branson Brockschmidt, SwRI senior robotics research engineer, said in a statement. “In partnering with Orbital Composites on this SpaceWERX Orbital Prime SBIR, we intend to design and test systems in vacuum and thermal conditions to advance robotic ISAM.” Orbital Composites plans to establish its first Space Factory in three to five years.
TAMPA, Fla. — South Korea’s Hanwha Systems, the OneWeb investor with plans for its own low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellation, has secured regulatory permission to operate as a satellite communications provider in the country. The approval from South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT enables Hanwha Systems to provide LEO internet services to businesses and government organizations, the company announced July 11. Hanwha Systems, the defense arm of South Korean conglomerate Hanwha, does not currently own a communications network. However, the company plans to provide broadband later this year via satellites operated by OneWeb, following a $300 million investment in the British company in August 2021. While French geostationary operator Eutelsat is seeking regulatory permission to buy out Hanwha Systems and other OneWeb investors, the South Korean firm said it also plans to provide parts for OneWeb’s second-generation — a sign of its long-term commitment to the venture. Hanwha Systems has also invested in two antenna makers in recent years to build out its space ambitions: U.S.-based Kymeta and Phasor Solutions of the United Kingdom. In 2021, Hanwha Systems unveiled plans to build and deploy 2,000 LEO satellites by the end of the decade, focusing on providing connectivity to urban cargo-delivery drones and passenger airplanes. The company did not provide an update on these plans in a news release announcing its registration as a communications business operator.
Viasat has encountered a problem deploying the main antenna on its new ViaSat-3 Americas satellite. The company said late Wednesday that “an unexpected event” took place during the deployment of the large reflector on the satellite after its April 30 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The company did not elaborate on the problem but said it was working with the reflector’s manufacturer to see if and how it can be fixed. “We’re disappointed by the recent developments,” Viasat chairman and CEO Mark Dankberg said in the July 12 news release. “We’re working closely with the reflector’s manufacturer to try to resolve the issue. We sincerely appreciate their focused efforts and commitment.” The problem does not affect current services provided by Viasat but does impact plans for new broadband services in North America that the spacecraft would have offered. Viasat said it is working on ways “to minimize the economic effect” of the problem, which could mean redeploying existing spacecraft or reallocating a future ViaSat-3 spacecraft. Shares in Viasat were down by more than 20% in pre-market trading July 13. Viasat ordered the first two ViaSat-3 spacecraft from Boeing in February 2016 . A third ViaSat-3 was ordered in February 2019 to extend coverage over the Asia-Pacific region. All three Boeing-built satellites were designed around Viasat-provided Ka-band payloads. The three-satellite ViaSat-3 system was designed to provide a combined 3 Terabits per second of throughput capacity, a 500% increase over Viasat’s existing fleet. The reflector can be seen in the Viasat animation embedded below:
 HawkEye 360, a commercial operator of remote-sensing satellites, announced July 13 it has raised $58 million in new funding. Based in Herndon, Virginia, the company uses radio-frequency data collected by satellites to geolocate electronic emissions and draw insights. “The funding will be used to develop new space systems and expand analytics that support high-value defense missions,” HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini said in a news release. The Series D-1 round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock with additional funding provided by Manhattan Venture Partners and existing investors including Insight Partners, NightDragon, Strategic Development Fund, Razor’s Edge, Alumni Ventures and Adage Capital. “We’ll use this funding to drive our next steps in innovation,” Serafini said. “It speaks volumes that these leading investment firms are confident in the future of RF geospatial intelligence as a critical defense technology.” New ‘Block 3’ satellites planned The company, founded in 2015, operates a constellation of 21 satellites that detect, characterize and geolocate radio frequency signals from emitters used for communication, navigation and security. The satellites fly in triangular “clusters” in low Earth orbit. The new funding will help accelerate the transition to a new Block 3 satellite architecture starting with Cluster 14, the company said. It also plans to increase investments in artificial intelligence, data fusion and multi-intelligence orchestration to better extract value from the large amount of RF data being collected. “Governments and commercial customers are asking for better intelligence and, with its full chain of control from orbit to analytics, Hawkeye 360 is leading the way for this new category of RF space-based data,” said Matt Singer, managing director of BlackRock. “HawkEye 360 has disrupted what used to be a static defense intelligence domain,” said Jared Carmel, managing partner and general partner of Manhattan Venture Partners. “
Rocket Lab’s next Electron launch will feature upgrades to the rocket that bring the company a step closer to being able to reuse its first stage. Rocket Lab’s “Baby Come Back” mission is scheduled for launch July 14 from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The rocket will place into orbit Telesat’s LEO 3 spacecraft, a technology demonstrator for its future Lightspeed constellation, as well as two Spire cubesats and NASA’s four-cubesat Starling mission to test technologies for future “swarm” missions. The Electron’s first stage will descend under a parachute and splash down to be recovered by a ship. The vehicle incorporates some minor design changes to support splashdown recovery after the company abandoned plans earlier in the year to do a mid-air recovery where a helicopter catches the stage as it descends under its parachute. “There are some internal vehicle changes to improve its ability to keep water out of the areas where we don’t want it,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, in an interview. “We’ve taken this next opportunity to improve the watertightness of the vehicle.” The company is also changing how it recovers the stage out of the water and onto a ship, using a two-point lifting method to move it onto the ship. That had not been a priority previously when the company was still focused on helicopter recovery, he said. “It makes it much simpler to recover and much less likely to damage the stage during recovery.” Rocket Lab also replaced the parachute on the stage with a lighter version. “We built a parachute optimized for aerocapture. Now that we don’t have to do that, we can take the opportunity to optimize the parachute for splashdown recovery,” he said. Those measures are all part of an effort with the ultimate goal of reusing the Electron first stage. In April, the company announced it would refly a single Rutherford engine on an Electron later this year , the first such engine reuse by the company. Beck said the company is taking a “methodical” approach to reusability, making incremental steps that get it closer to full reuse. “I’m sure we’ll learn something from this mission and we’ll probably make some tweaks again to the next one. We’re methodically walking step-by-step and taking the opportunity to get it right.” Rocket Lab does have a timeline to get to reusing an Electron booster, but Beck declined to disclose it. He added that while reusability was an “important economic lever” for the company, it was not an urgent requirement. The company has previously emphasized that reusability would allow it to increase launch activity without having to scale up its factory. “From a production standpoint, the factory can keep up,” he said. “It’s not an existential requirement that we have to have it, hence why we’re being pretty methodical about it.” Even after the company demonstrates reusability, he said many missions likely won’t feature recovery or reuse because of specific performance requirements. “The very nature of the missions that Electron gets requested to do means that we’ll never have full reusability,” he said.
NASA has canceled a mission to send a pair of smallsats to binary asteroids and will put the nearly completed spacecraft into storage for a potential future opportunity. NASA announced July 11 that it was concluding the Janus mission and planned to put the spacecraft into long-term storage. The mission, selected as part of the agency’s Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration, or SIMPLEx, program, had planned to send two identical smallsats to fly by different pairs of binary asteroids. Janus had been in limbo, though, after problems with the Psyche asteroid mission delayed its planned August 2022 launch. Janus was a rideshare payload on the Psyche mission, and the rescheduled launch of October 2023 would not allow Janus to reach its original targets . “Once we got taken off of Psyche, we were already pretty much over other than getting the spacecraft into storage,” said Dan Scheeres, principal investigator for Janus at the University of Colorado, during a July 12 meeting of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) advisory committee. NASA decided last November to remove Janus from the Psyche launch but did allow the project to study alternative missions using the spacecraft. The project examined several options and discussed them with agency officials at a NASA Headquarters meeting June 14. Among the options included sending the Janus spacecraft to Apophis, a near Earth asteroid that will make a very close flyby of Earth in April 2029. NASA has already approved a proposal to use the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, after it delivers samples from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth in September, to visit Apophis shortly after the 2029 flyby. The redirected Janus spacecraft, though, would be able to visit Apophis before the flyby. “If we really want to understand what happens to Apophis when it has its close Earth passage, you really need to have some ‘before’ images and models to compare with the after ones,” Scheeres said. The Janus team studied several other options, including flybys of binary or triple asteroids, that would allow the mission to perform science similar to the original mission. “There is a pretty rich set of possible targets that exist,” he said. However, in a June 28 memo, NASA’s planetary science division (PSD) elected not to pursue any of those alternative missions. “At this time the PSD budget does not allow for a commitment to be made for a new mission, even one that would utilize the completed Janus spacecrafts,” a portion of the memo, quoted by Scheeres in his talk, stated. The two spacecraft, now at a Lockheed Martin facility, will be placed into long-term storage at a NASA center later this year. That will effectively conclude the Janus project, he said. The spacecraft are effectively complete, he said, with a total cost including closeout activities of less than $49 million. NASA had placed a cost cap of $55 million each on missions selected through that round of the SIMPLEx program, which included Janus as well as the ESCAPADE Mars mission and Lunar Trailblazer. While the NASA memo left the door open to an alternative mission in the future, there is no formal mechanism to regularly review opportunities for using them, Scheeres said. “We would probably happily repropose something if given the opportunity,” he said. “I think some guidance from NASA would certainly be helpful since this is a situation that doesn’t crop up that often.” Attendees at the SBAG meeting expressed frustration with the fate of Janus being tied to problems with another mission, Psyche, beyond its control. But an agency official said at the meeting that was one of the risks inherent in the overall SIMPLEx program. “The point of SIMPLEx was to be able to do these high-risk missions with smallsats, and part of the risk is exactly what we had happen,” said Tom Statler, a program scientist in NASA’s planetary science division. How to recover from that, either for Janus specifically or for other smallsat missions that experience problems with rideshare launches, is an open question. “Having that as a broader discussion as part of the many lessons learned from SIMPLEx will be a helpful thing.”
President Biden on July 11 submitted to the U.S. Senate the nominations of two three-star Space Force leaders for promotion to four-star generals. Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the Space Force’s Space Operations Command; and Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, have been nominated to the rank of general and to receive a fourth star. Whiting is expected to become the next commander of U.S. Space Command, replacing Gen. James Dickinson . Guetlein is expected to become the next vice chief of space operations of the Space Force, replacing Gen. David “DT” Thompson . The nominations will be considered by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The White House also submitted the nomination of Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements, to a new assignment at the same rank. Garrant is expected to replace Guetlein as the commander of the Space Systems Command, based in Los Angeles. Block on military nominations If the Space Force nominations are approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee, it’s unclear when they will reach the Senate floor. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has placed a hold on general and flag officer nominations to protest a DoD policy that covers certain abortion-related travel expenses for service members. Tuberville said he will continue to block military nominations until the Pentagon changes the policy or it is passed through legislation. The Pentagon said as many as 265 general and flag officer nominations have been delayed in the Senate, affecting the smooth transition of leadership.
As India prepares to launch its second lunar lander mission, the fate of a second Israeli lander is in doubt after the organization developing it lost a major source of funding. India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to launch July 14 on a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 3, also known as LVM-3, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The spacecraft will gradually go from a geostationary transfer orbit to a low lunar orbit, from which Chandrayaan-3 will descend to the lunar surface. Chandrayaan-3 is similar to India’s first lunar lander flown as part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which crashed attempting a soft landing in September 2019 . Chandrayaan-3 incorporates several revisions, such as additional fuel, based on the investigation into the failed landing. That crash took place five months after Beresheet, a spacecraft originally developed by Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize, crashed attempting its own lunar landing . SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the spacecraft, later said the lander crashed because one of its inertial measurement units malfunctioned. SpaceIL announced its intent to pursue a second mission, called Beresheet 2. It would be significantly different from the original mission , with two smaller landers deployed from an orbiter. The mission had been slated to launch in 2025, a date confirmed in a January 2023 announcement of a joint statement of intent between the Israel Space Agency and NASA to cooperate on Beresheet 2. NASA agreed to provide an instrument and communications support for the mission. That schedule, and the mission itself, is now in question. Like the first mission, SpaceIL projected using philanthropic donations to fund Beresheet 2. However, in May a group of donors announced they were halting future payments to the project after spending $45 million, nearly half its estimated $100 million cost. In a statement representing the donors, Morris Kahn, a billionaire who also supported the original Beresheet mission, said the decision to halt future payments was not related to any problems with Beresheet 2. “These times obligate us to invest our resources and time in other philanthropic projects,” he stated. SpaceIL said at the time it would seek alternative funding to continue the mission, but has provided no updates on those efforts since then. The organization did not respond to questions July 10 about the status of Beresheet 2. In a June 27 presentation at the European Lunar Symposium , Dan Blumberg, chairman of the Israel Space Agency, said work on Beresheet 2 was continuing for now. “We want to do more than we did in the previous one,” he said, including enhanced opportunities for international cooperation. In addition to the NASA agreement, SpaceIL has an agreement with the German agency DLR, which will provide a navigation system for the lander. He also emphasized educational outreach for the mission. Students will have opportunities to control the orbiter during its two-year mission, selecting regions on the surface to photograph, he said. Blumberg hinted at SpaceIL’s financial problems in his brief talk, but did not go into details about funding for the mission. “There is a funding issue that we are still dealing with,” he said. “But we’re getting there.”
Chinese private rocket firm Landspace achieved a global first late Tuesday by reaching orbit with a methane-fueled rocket. The 49.5-meter-long Zhuque-2 lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 9:00 p.m. Eastern on July 11. Landspace and Chinese state media announced that the second Zhuque-2 reached orbit, making it the first methane-fueled globally to reach orbit. This was later verified by U.S. Space Force space tracking data, showing an object in a 431 by 461-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination of 97.3 degrees. The Zhuque-2 mission carried no payload and the rocket’s first stage was not recovered. An unconfirmed number of payloads were lost in the launcher’s first flight in December 2022. Zhuque-2 beats a range of other methalox rockets, including SpaceX’s Starship, the ULA Vulcan, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and Terran R from Relativity Space, in reaching orbit. These other launch vehicles will be much larger and feature much greater payload capacity. A methane-liquid oxygen propellant mix offers advantages in performance and reduces issues of soot formation and coking for purposes of reusability. The successful launch also makes Landspace the second private Chinese launch firm to reach orbit with a liquid propellant rocket. This follows the success of Space Pioneer with its Tianlong-2 rocket in April this year. Taken together, the achievements indicate a breakthrough and growing level of maturity in Chinese commercial space launch efforts. Landspace has already begun assembling its third Zhuque-2 (“Vermillion Bird-2”), indicating that another launch could come before the end of the year. Space Pioneer says it has multiple orders for launches for the Tianlong-2, and aims to launch the Falcon 9-class Tianlong-3 in the first half of 2024. Landspace CEO Zhang Changwu told Chinese language Global Times tabloid that the company could now begin mass-producing the Zhuque-2, having finalized and verified its design. Landspace’s Zhuque-2 is powered by gas generator engines producing 268 tons of thrust. Future Zhuque-2 launches with upgraded second stage engines will be capable of delivering a 6,000-kilogram payload capacity to a 200-kilometer low Earth orbit (LEO), or 4,000 kilograms to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), according to Landspace. The rocket has a diameter of 3.35 meters—the same as a number of national Long March rockets—and a take-off mass of 219 tons. The rocket is currently expendable but Landspace is working on a restartable version of the 80-ton-thrust TQ-12 engine which powers the Zhuque-2 first stage. Landspace is one of China’s first commercial rocket firms. It was established in 2015, soon after the Chinese government opened up parts of the space sector to private capital in late 2014, which is seen to be a reaction to developments in the U.S. It is also one of the best-funded Chinese launch firms, but the company’s journey to orbit has not been smooth. Its first launch, which took place in October 2018, used the smaller and simpler solid-propellant Zhuque-1. The mission ended in failure, and the company announced it would not repeat the attempt and instead focus on its methane-fueled Zhuque-2. The company has however built up infrastructure during this time. Landspace has set up an intelligent manufacturing base in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province and established a $1.5 billion medium and large-scale liquid rocket assembly and test plant at Jiaxing, also in Zhejiang. The company is now in a position to secure contracts for the Zhuque-2 but faces a field of competition. Other Chinese firms, including iSpace, Galactic Energy and Deep Blue Aerospace, are working on their own, reusable liquid propellant rockets. Space Pioneer and other later movers such as OrienSpace are developing larger rockets which are targeting contracts to launch batches of satellites for China’s national satellite internet megaconstellation project , named Guowang. China recently opened a call for space station commercial cargo proposals , further indicating that commercial firms will have a growing role to play in the country’s space sector. The Zhuque-2 launch was China’s 27th orbital mission of 2023, with a total of more than 70 launches planned from state-owned main space contractor CASC and commercial players . Landspace, Space Pioneer, Galactic Energy, iSpace and Expace have so far complemented national launches this year.
The latest U.S. military budget goes all-in on the notion that resilience will be a core feature of space programs. As evidence, the term surpasses 300 mentions in the Space Force’s 2024 budget documents. “It’s amazing how many times you see the word resiliency in the budget justification materials,” said analyst Sam Wilson of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy. The emphasis on resilience — or adaptability in the face of attacks — reflects the priorities set by the new chief of space operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. The running theme in the budget is the need to ensure U.S. access to space and shore up capabilities to compete with space powers like China and Russia. “China, our pacing challenge, is the most immediate threat in, to, and from space for which the Space Force must maintain technological advantage,” Saltzman said in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year. “Russia, while less capable, remains an acute threat that is developing asymmetric counter-space systems meant to neutralize American satellites,” said Saltzman. A push for resilience is part of a multifaceted strategy Saltzman rolled out in March called “competitive endurance” to guide Space Force plans to deter and combat adversaries. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David “DT” Thompson said the Space Force’s central responsibility is ensuring U.S. military forces and allies have access to satellite services. And that is why resilience is so critical, he said June 15 at the Defense One Tech Summit. “Ukraine showed that proliferation works. It leads to resilient architectures,” Thompson said, referring to Russia’s repelled attempts to jam SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellite service used by Ukrainian forces. The U.S. armed forces and allies today rely on a secure space infrastructure — for communications, early warnings of ballistic missile attacks and other services — that the Space Force provides from a relatively small number of geostationary satellites in harder to reach orbits. “And we have to continue to understand how to defend and protect those against counter-space attacks,” he said. “I think that’s probably the biggest concern right now,” Thompson said, “ensuring we have enough resilience in both proliferated constellations, and those small numbers of larger systems to be able to defend them.” A shift to proliferated constellations is already under way. The Space Development Agency — a procurement organization under the Space Force — is moving forward with a multibillion dollar plan to field a mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit for missile warning and for data transport. The agency in April launched its first batch of 10 satellites and announced plans to launch its next 13 spacecraft in late July. Proliferation and redundancy make the loss of a few satellites tolerable, said Thompson, and bolster deterrence because targeting them imposes increased cost on an adversary. This is how the Space Force plans to deal with China’s threats in the long term, he said. “We are in a long competition with China. They absolutely believe that.” “We can’t look at a finish line in this competition,” Thompson added. “We have to think what we need to do to compete for the next 10 to 50 years.” Space Force’s competitive endurance strategy has three tenets: avoid operational surprise, deny first-mover advantage, and conduct responsible counter-space campaigns that don’t create long-lasting debris in orbit. “If we get this right we will deter a crisis or conflict from extending into space,” Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations, cyber and nuclear, said in an interview. “But if needed, we will ensure space access for the joint force in a manner that maintains safety in the space domain for all responsible actors.” Avoiding unwelcome surprises in space requires continuous awareness of what adversaries are doing in orbit, she said. The U.S. wants to prevent a Pearl Harbor-style attack in space, which is why the Space Force is turning more attention to space domain awareness, Burt said. “I have to be able to attribute any actions that are nefarious; I have to track and maintain custody of things I consider threats, and provide indications and warnings to other people.” The second tenet , denying first mover advantage in space, is where resilient architectures play a central role, she explained. “If the enemy knows that attacking U.S. interests in space will require such a massive effort that it will become impractical or self-defeating, we will be deterring such actions in the first place,” she said. “It would be a case when the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” The final tenet , conducting responsible counter-space campaigns, is about the idea that, if American assets were threatened, the U.S. would respond appropriately and would try to minimize the creation of debris in orbit. “Polluting the domain is not what I want to do,” said Burt. There are ongoing discussions with allies about how operations could be conducted in a responsible manner, she said. The Space Force has been secretive about what technologies it might be developing to attack adversaries’ satellites without creating significant debris. “General Saltzman has publicly talked about deliveries that will come in the 2026 timeframe,” Burt said. “And I think that’s when you’re going to see us start to figure out how we’re going to message that.” China and Russia have adopted strategies based on disabling adversaries’ space communications and navigation systems, said Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific, a subordinate unit to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. It is stunning how fast China has modernized its space infrastructure to enable military capabilities like precision-guided missiles, Mastalir wrote in a June 14 article published by the Air University’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. “China has made unprecedented investments in its on-orbit capabilities over the past three years,” Mastalir noted. The U.S. military has been particularly wary of China’s secretive spaceplane — which has been described as a knockoff of the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B that can remain in orbit for years. China’s spaceplane has flown two long-endurance missions, and conducted proximity and capture maneuvers with a subsatellite, according to data from the commercial space-tracking firm LeoLabs. Mastalir pointed out that China deployed about 160 satellites in 2022, many of which will support military operations. By some estimates, China plans to launch 200 spacecraft in 2023. “While many strategists are rightly concerned about China’s and Russia’s fielding of anti-satellite weapons designed to degrade or destroy U.S. satellites in space, it is important to note that much of China’s space investment enables its long-range precision strike capability,” he wrote. Space Force leaders also worry that a breakdown in U.S.-China communication and an underlying distrust that goes both ways could lead to miscalculations. China’s lack of transparency about its own space activities makes it difficult to reduce those risks, Burt warned in May at a space policy conference hosted by Arizona State University. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cautioned June 1 that China’s reluctance to engage with U.S. defense leaders could result in “an incident that could very, very quickly spiral out of control.” More recently, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said the “biggest dynamic right now in our relationship with China with regard to space is a lack of communication and virtually zero transparency.” The absence of dialogue and interaction creates conditions for “miscommunication, misperception, misinterpretation, and then things could go wrong. And that can happen in any domain,” Shaw said June 14 at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability. U.S. Space Command traffic watchers at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California issue warnings of close approaches in orbit or potential collision to satellite operations and national agencies, including the Chinese government. But when warnings are sent to Chinese email addresses, Shaw said, “We never get a response. Never.” “Even the Russians know how to communicate with us,” Shaw said. “We don’t have anything like that with the Chinese and that’s the biggest hindrance to transparent operations.” Experts agree that space powers are most likely to attack rival satellites in a conflict through “non kinetic” means. Still, both China and Russia have demonstrated they can blow up satellites by striking them with kinetic weapons such as ground-based missiles. However, the United States needs to be more concerned about activities that fall below the threshold of an act of war but are damaging nonetheless, said Todd Harrison, aerospace industry analyst and managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights. Cyber and electronic jamming attacks are in the murky category of “gray zone” provocations that fall somewhere between low-intensity conflict and all-out war. These non-kinetic attacks could still do lasting damage to satellites and their ground systems. A satellite that can’t see, think or communicate is as good as dead. “It’s probably going to be in the ground segment that you’ve got to be the most worried about, but it could be on the space side as well as there are now lasers that can blind sensors,” Harrison said. “An adversary like China or others might think that they can get away with using that,” he said, “and could severely hamper our ability to sense and to communicate from space.” The U.S. military “historically has not really had a good response to gray zone activities” and that should concern the Space Force, said John Klein, a senior fellow and strategist at Falcon Research, and adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “We kind of let it happen with no repercussions,” Klein said. “It doesn’t have to be a military response. But the U.S. has to make it known it’s unacceptable behavior, and that there will be consequences.” It is notable, though, that the Space Force is openly talking about deterring China and about the importance of resilience in U.S. space networks, Klein said. He observed that space resilience is not a new concept, as the Pentagon for decades has studied the issue of how to reduce the vulnerability of U.S. satellites. “What is new is that the U.S. Space Force more specifically recognizes resilience as part of deterrence. It’s deterrence by denial of benefits,” Klein said. “It’s telling enemies that no matter what you do, it’s not going to matter. You’re not going to stop me.” A move to more diversified constellations is necessary but might still not be enough to deter China, warned Charles Galbreath, senior fellow for space power studies at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Mitchell Institute. “While the proliferated LEO approach garners a great deal of attention, it is not the only method the Space Force can employ to increase the resiliency of its architecture,” Galbreath, former deputy chief technology and innovation officer of the U.S. Space Force, said June 26 at a Mitchell Institute event. In a white paper titled “Building U.S. Space Force Counter-Space Capabilities,” Galbreath suggested the Space Force consider the “enduring military practice of deception to confuse adversaries and complicate their ability to target U.S. satellites.” For example, the U.S. could build satellite payloads or components in ways that would camouflage their functions. The Space Force also should expand its use of protection measures such as nuclear hardening and anti-jam systems, Galbreath said. Speaking June 12 at the Mitchell Institute, Thompson, the vice chief of space operations, recognized that deterrence may work in theory but not in practice. And if diplomacy and deterrence fail, the military has to prepare for the worstcase scenario. “This is where we’ve spent a lot of time working with the other services,” said Thompson, to make sure they understand their dependence on space assets and figure out how to ensure the Army, Navy and Air Force can continue operating if U.S. satellites were targeted. Other discussions on this subject are taking place with the private sector, as the Space Force tries to figure out contracting options to secure access to commercial space services during conflicts. Under an initiative known as Commercial Augmentation Space Reserves, the Space Force is looking at establishing agreements with companies to ensure that services like satellite communication and remote sensing are prioritized for U.S. government use during national security emergencies. The role of the private space sector in national security is significant, said Thompson. “When you think about proliferation and diversity, it’s not just the number of satellites, it’s also allies and commercial partners.” Even if the U.S. has superior space technology, a vibrant private space sector and more powerful weaponry, the reality is that rival nations have the means today to destroy satellites and create “devastating impacts on the environment that will be harmful to the use of space for decades and perhaps centuries to come,” Thompson said. “As we look at the proliferation of space capabilities, it will be increasingly difficult to deny some level of use of space to an adversary,” he added. While preparing for a protracted competition with rival powers, said Thompson, the Space Force has to make sure the U.S. government has accurate intelligence so diplomats and military leaders know what’s happening in the space domain. “If we’re operationally or strategically surprised, shame on us.” This article originally appeared in the July 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Astranis has sold a small broadband satellite launching to geostationary orbit next year to a telco in the Philippines looking for support from the country’s government, the Californian manufacturer announced July 11. Orbits Corp, the satellite services arm of Philippine internet service provider HTechCorp, plans to sell at least some of the capacity to the government to help connect up to two million people across 5,000 remote and rural communities in the archipelago. Only 11,000 of the country’s 42,000 local communities are covered by fiber, and the government has identified many of those left unconnected as Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDA). The Philippines has made connecting GIDA communities a major priority, Astranis CEO John Gedmark said, and the companies are seeking ways to help the government bring internet to areas where people make less than $5,000 a year on average. “Most of the internet penetration in the Philippines is confined to the metropolitan areas,” said Atty Augusto Baculio, a former legislator for the Philippines who now leads Orbits Corp. “Outside of that, going to the inner villages, over mountains, across islands — that’s when you have intermittent access to connectivity, or none at all.” The companies did not disclose government commitments or financial details about a satellite they say would be the first dedicated to providing internet services to the country. Last year, the Philippines permitted SpaceX to provide services from its global Starlink broadband network in low Earth orbit to help bridge the country’s digital divide. Astranis operates its satellites on behalf of customers, who lease the capacity over their eight-year lifetimes. At around 400 kilograms, the company’s dishwasher-sized satellites are smaller than typical geostationary spacecraft that weigh thousands of kilograms and are scaled for smaller, regional coverage. The satellite for the Philippines is one of five slated to launch together in 2024 on a dedicated rocket Astranis has not disclosed. A pair of satellites for Mexican telco Apco Networks is joining this mission, which Astranis calls Block 3, and customers for the other two remain undisclosed. Later this year, Astranis is slated to deploy four satellites on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 mission as part of Block 2. It has only revealed customers for three of these: two satellites for U.S.-based mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu and one for cellular backhaul provider Andesat of Peru. First deal following inaugural launch Eight-year-old Astranis launched its debut satellite April 30 as a secondary payload to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying the 6,400-kilogram ViaSat-3 broadband satellite to orbit. Called Arcturus, this inaugural satellite was sold to Alaska-based telco Pacific Dataport Inc., meaning Astranis has disclosed customers for seven of the 10 satellites it says are on order. Gedmark said May 24 that Arcturus was performing at speeds of around 9 gigabits per second (Gbps) in early tests, despite being specced for 7.5 Gbps. The company, which had expected at the time to have completed calibration and health checks by mid-June so the satellite could enter service, declined to give an update on its roll-out.
Vast Space has brought in a former NASA astronaut and SpaceX official to serve as an adviser for its plans to develop commercial space stations. Vast announced July 11 that it has appointed Garrett Reisman as a human spaceflight adviser. He will assist the company, which announced plans in May to develop a single-module station called Haven-1 as a precursor for future, larger space stations. Reisman joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1998 and spent three months on the International Space Station in 2008 as part of the Expedition 16 and 17 crews, and another 12 days on the STS-132 shuttle mission to the ISS in 2010. He retired from the astronaut corps in 2011 and worked for SpaceX for several years in various capacities, including director of space operations. He is currently a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California. In an interview, Reisman said a former SpaceX colleague, now working at Vast, reached out to him with a technical question. That led to discussions with Vast executives about assisting the company. “I got excited by what I saw, which was a really interesting company doing some really cool work,” he said. He said he is particularly interested in the ability of Vast’s space stations to spin and create artificial gravity. “We have a lot of data at zero G and tons of data at one G about what it does to the human body. We have no idea what happens in between,” he said. Those stations, he said, could help answer questions such as how much partial gravity is needed to prevent some of the deleterious effects of microgravity on human physiology. Max Haot, president of Vast, said the company was looking for someone intimately familiar with human spaceflight to assist its development of Haven-1. “The company had not yet gotten to the point where we had anyone with human spaceflight experience, who had gone to space,” he said. “I think it’s obvious to everyone that if you design a space station, you should have at least one, if not more, astronauts on board to help you with the process.” Reisman, he said, was an ideal fit because of both his NASA astronaut experience and work at SpaceX. Vast is working with SpaceX to launch Haven-1 and use Crew Dragon spacecraft to transport astronauts to the station. Reisman said he plans to focus on operations and safety. “I think those two things go hand-in-hand,” he said, to “make sure we hope for the best and plan for all possible outcomes.” Since Vast announced Haven-1 in May, the company has signed an agreement with Impulse Space to use thrusters from that company on the spacecraft. It was also one of seven companies that won unfunded NASA Space Act Agreements to support work on commercial space capabilities . “This is a great opportunity for us to build the relationship with NASA but also leverage a lot of their expertise,” Haot said of that agreement. It also includes “many technology milestones” to track its progress, he noted. Reisman, besides advising Vast, will continue as a senior adviser for SpaceX. He said that company had no issues with him also advising Vast since the two companies are working together. He also continues his teaching at USC, where he says he sees strong interest from students in careers in commercial human spaceflight. Some of his students have taken his class on human spaceflight out of a “vague interest” in the topic but have since gone on to pursue careers in the field. “In a way I’m very jealous because it’s such a wonderful time to be working in this industry,” he said. “Coming as an engineer straight out of college there’s so many opportunities now that I didn’t have when I was finishing up my education.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Muon Space will deliver space weather data to the U.S. Space Force under a $400,000 contract option announced July 11. Under the original $2.8 million contract with Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Weather Systems Branch and the Defense Innovation Unit awarded in 2022, Muon will deliver terrestrial weather products to the Air Force 557th Weather Wing from a space-based prototype microwave sensor. The option directs Muon to also monitor the ionosphere for the U.S. Space Force through September 2024. “Obviously solar activity influences the ionosphere,” Muon CEO Johnny Dyer told SpaceNews . “This is a really important measurement for users of RF communication systems.” The Department of Defense plans to evaluate data from Muon’s second satellite, MuSat-2, for operational weather forecasting, ionospheric modeling and climate change assessment. Data collected during the pilot program will be available for government-run Observing System Simulation Experiments or OSSEs. Government agencies conduct OSSEs to assess the impact of new datasets on forecasts and models. For example, the Air Force could simulate the impact of data gathered during the MuSat-2 pilot on numerical weather prediction. Pilot project data will be compatible with the USAF’s Weather Virtual Private Cloud. The latest contract option expands Muon’s customer base within the Defense Department. It also demonstrates the versatility of Muon’s software-defined instrument, Dyer said. “We’ll be delivering three different products using essentially the same instrument in orbit,” Dyer said. Muon will supply the Air Force with global soil moisture and sea surface wind measurements in addition to ionospheric data for the Space Force. Muon’s first satellite launched in June on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight is “outperforming our expectations,” Dyer said. “It’s been a fantastic first platform for us to have in space, and it is going to be a valuable asset as we continue to upgrade the software onboard.” MuSat-2, is scheduled to launch in February. While MuSat-2 shares the same spacecraft bus as MuSat-1, it will be equipped with Muon’s first software-defined sensor. “Muon Space is honored by the Air Force, Space Force and DIU’s belief in our capabilities to bring new insights to DoD weather and ionospheric models with new data to include soil moisture, ocean winds and total electron content. We’re excited to showcase the operational relevance of this commercial space dataset to the DoD,” Dyer said in a statement.
British investment firm Seraphim Space surveyed the Earth observation sector a few years ago, categorizing startups by sensor type. Analysts determined that firms focused on electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar were advancing rapidly. Thermal imagery startups were not. “Much to our surprise, it was the only sensor area that didn’t have any companies that had really progressed,” said Seraphim Space CEO Mark Boggett. “None of the companies had raised $10 million, let alone $100 million or $500 million like some of the other sensor areas.” All that is changing. Startups focused on gathering thermal imagery via satellite are attracting investment, making acquisitions and winning contracts. “It’s the next big thing in Earth observation,” said Anthony Baker, founder and CEO of Satellite Vu, a British Earth-observation startup. “No one has opened up the frontier on infrared.” The new businesses focused on thermal imagery vary widely. What the founders share is the conviction that startups can provide the type of data only expensive government satellites supplied in the past. Climate change is propelling much of the work. Venture capital firms are flocking to startups promising to track emissions or mitigate the impact of droughts, floods and forest fires. “There’s an urgency to do something,” said Max Gulde, CEO and co-founder of German startup constellr. “Having a thermal picture of our planet at an actionable resolution and frequency is something which is missing in our understanding of climate change. Suddenly, there’s a push for that.” Thermal imagery startups also are benefiting from recent declines in launch costs and technological advances. “When I started founding the company, everyone was explaining to me that the sensor we wanted to build was impossible,” said Thomas Grübler, CEO and co-founder of Munich-based OroraTech. “Now, it’s possible to shrink these big complex systems to smallsat and cubesat scale.” What’s more, founders have identified government and commercial customers willing to pay for thermal imagery. Farmers are buying data that help them irrigate crops without wasting water. And fire departments are eager for access to satellite images that reduce the need for dangerous aerial flights over wildfires. “It’s getting cheaper to build a specialist constellation that can perform certain tasks extremely well,” Gulde said. “Suddenly, you’re passing a threshold where people are willing to pay.” The European Commission and the European Space Agency awarded contracts in June to constellr, OroraTech and Spanish startup Aistech Space. The companies will supply thermal data to complement observations collected through the European Union Copernicus Earth-observation program. When Albedo, a Colorado startup, was founded in 2020, the business plan focused on collecting 10-centimeter-resolution optical imagery from telescopes in very low Earth orbit. The founders soon realized they could obtain longwave infrared imagery from the same satellites without much additional cost. “With the optical resolution, we can go from counting cars to identifying cars,” said Albedo founder and CEO Topher Haddad. “With thermal, you can see where a car probably just pulled out from a parking spot.” Plus, the combination of optical and thermal imagery helps observers distinguish hot tubs from pools or trampolines, and backyard dwelling units from sheds. Albedo has raised $58 million for refrigerator-size satellites scheduled to begin launching in 2025. Work on Albedo’s infrared technology is being funded by the U.S. Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center under a $1.25 million contract . Under another $1.25 million contract, the Air Force is working with Albedo to look for ways to integrate Albedo imagery tasking with government systems. Constellr is preparing to launch satellites in 2024 to gather thermal data for agricultural and environmental-monitoring applications. Since the company was founded in 2020, constellr has raised about $14 million in venture capital and received an additional $14 million in grants. Earlier this year, constellr acquired ScanWorld, a Belgian hyperspectral satellite imagery and analytics startup. With four shoebox-size satellites equipped with infrared sensors, constellr plans to gather daily imagery of agricultural fields around the world. By adding hyperspectral data, constellr can help farmers identify crop disease and manage fertilization schedules. Under the five-year, $5 million Copernicus contract announced in June, constellr will provide thermal imagery to thousands of European institutions. “We’ve been working with the European Space Agency for quite some time,” Gulde said. “Government support has been exceptional.” Washington-based Hydrosat has raised $35.6 million to obtain thermal data from space. Supporting sustainable agriculture and helping customers reduce carbon emissions are the company’s primary goals. Thermal data can pick up initial signs of drought two to four weeks before optical imagery shows a change in the color of vegetation, said Pieter Fossel, Hydrosat CEO and co-founder. In June, Hydrosat acquired IrriWatch , a Netherlands company that delivers daily climate, crop, soil and irrigation updates to farmers. “With IrriWatch, we can point to examples of how customers using this product, based on thermal satellite insights, are able to reduce water use,” Fossel said. “In a lot of parts of the world, reducing water use means less electricity for pumping that water out of the ground, less electricity for operating that mechanized center pivot irrigation system. And if the irrigation system is being run on diesel fuel, that’s a direct, measurable carbon reduction for the farm in addition to improvements in production, the boosting of yields and the reduction of water.” Hydrosat, founded in 2017, plans to launch its first two satellites next year to “deliver thermal infrared data as well as multispectral infrared data with higher resolution and greater revisit than what is available today,” Fossel said. “As a climate-oriented business, being able to have very tangible, measurable impacts is something that’s really important to us.” After being told thermal imagery could not possibly be captured with cubesats, OroraTech’s founders raised $22.4 million to prove naysayers wrong. The German startup demonstrated its first uncooled thermal infrared sensor on a Spire Global cubesat in 2022. “People told me I wouldn’t see anything with this camera,” Grübler said. “We see fires at comparable quality to the Visible Infrared Imaging Sensor. We also see temperature quite well.” OroraTech plans to collect global imagery every 30 minutes with a constellation of 96 satellites. The first eight satellites, built and operated by Spire Global under an agreement announced June 28, are slated to launch into a late-afternoon sun-synchronous orbit in 2024. “We want to understand the trends in temperature, whether it’s for urban heat, industrial activity or forest fires,” Grübler said. “We want to be the first one to not only know where the forest fire is but the intensity of the forest fire and how it will behave.” SatVu was founded in 2016 to gather high-resolution thermal imagery with 160-kilogram satellites. After raising 12.7 British pounds ($16 million) for satellites designed and manufactured with Surrey Satellite Technologies Ltd., SatVu launched its first spacecraft in June. A second satellite is slated to launch in 2024. SatVu’s eight-satellite constellation should be operating in a couple of years, Baker said. To date, 66 companies have committed 128 million pounds to SatVu’s Early Access Programme. SatVu customers who sign up for the Early Access Programme can task SatVu’s airborne sensor to collect thermal imagery and obtain discounts on future satellite-tasking orders. Defense and intelligence agencies may be SatVu’s first customers “because they already know what the data looks like,” Baker said. “They just don’t have a commercial data source they can share with allies.” Another potential application is industrial activity monitoring. “With infrared, you can see activity in a building,” Baker said. “If it’s dormant, it probably has no heat signature. If it’s an active factory, you can see which parts of the factory are operating.” Earlier this year, Spain’s Satlantis acquired a majority stake in SuperSharp, a British university spin-out developing unfolding space telescopes to obtain thermal infrared imagery. UK government agencies have provided initial funding for SuperSharp. The next milestone is to get to a space-rated version of our telescope, which we plan to do by the end of this year,” said Marco Gomez-Jenkins, SuperSharp co-founder and CEO. “After that, we’re focusing on testing our telescope in space by early 2025.” Satlantis, meanwhile, sells a variety of Earth observation payloads and manufactures satellites like Armenia’s Armsat-1, launched in 2022. Once SuperSharp’s infrared telescope is flight-proven, the company will begin selling foldable telescopes for microwave-size cubesats and developing a larger version of the telescope for higher-resolution imagery. One of the first startups to launch a thermal infrared imaging satellite was Aistech. The Spanish startup’s first cubesat equipped with a multi-spectral telescope to collect visible, near-infrared and thermal infrared imagery reached orbit in 2022. “Temperature is a unique data source that is key to understanding activity on the Earth’s surface and the changes that can occur,” Aistech founder Carles Franquesa told SpaceNews by email. “And for this, Aistech’s strategic plan involves deploying its space infrastructure to monitor these changes continuously and accurately.” Aistech is preparing to launch 20 Guardian thermal-imagery satellites into a constellation, scheduled to be completed in 2027, with applications including water management, forestry, environmental monitoring and maritime security. Two additional Guardians are set to launch in the second quarter of 2024. In June, Aistech was named a Copernicus Contribution Mission contract. “Becoming part of the select group of companies that provide data generated by their own constellation of satellites through the Copernicus Contributing Missions programme marks an important milestone for the company, since a reference client such as ESA validates that both the technology developed and the data generated by Aistech satellites will provide a new vision of the changes that occur on the Earth’s surface and a value to society facing new challenges on the planet,” Franquesa said. “ESA, through this program, is carrying out important work in promoting and developing new applications based on geospatial intelligence, which will allow a new generation of companies to provide new solutions to specific problems; and this entails an exponential growth in the need for new satellite data, and therefore a great development of the space thermal imaging market in the coming years.” This article originally appeared in the July 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
NASA awarded task orders to two companies already working on spacesuits for the International Space Station and Artemis missions to develop alternative versions of their suits. NASA announced July 10 that it issued task orders valued at $5 million each to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to begin design work on alternative versions of their suits already in development. Axiom’s task order begins work on a version of its suit for the ISS while Collins will begin design of a suit intended for moonwalks. NASA awarded contracts to the two companies in June 2022 through its Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services program to support development of new Artemis and ISS spacesuits. NASA would then acquire spacesuit services rather than the suits themselves, effectively renting them versus owning them. The contracts, though, required the companies to compete for specific task orders for spacesuit development. NASA awarded one task order to Axiom Space in September 2022 to develop an Artemis spacesuit, valued at $228.5 million. It awarded another to Collins Aerospace in December 2022 for an ISS spacesuit, valued at $97.2 million. The companies will use the new “crossover” task orders to adapt the suits they are developing for one application to the other. NASA said in a statement that, after completing initial design work, the agency will then consider exercising options for further suit development. Doing so, the agency said, provides redundancy by having a backup suit for both the ISS and Artemis missions. “Using this competitive approach we will enhance redundancy, expand future capabilities, and further invest in the space economy,” said Lara Kearney, manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at the Johnson Space Center. The awards may also more closely align with the companies’ plans. Axiom, which won the original task order for lunar spacesuits, is also developing a commercial space station that may require spacewalks either for maintenance or to serve customer requirements. Collins, which won the ISS suit task order last December, had earlier emphasized its work on lunar spacesuit designs. “We are excited to add our orbital spacesuits as an option for NASA,” Mark Greeley, EVA program manager at Axiom Space, said in a company statement. The company said work on a low Earth orbit version of its spacesuit is already underway. “Our next-generation spacesuit design is nearly 90% compatible with a lunar mission,” said Dave Romero, director of EVA and human space mobility systems at Collins, in a company statement. “This formal contract award will support continued efforts to modify our next-generation spacesuit, making it suitable to tasks on the moon.” Axiom said that the full value of this new task order, if all options are exercised, is $142 million over four years. Collins did not disclose the full value of its task order.
Faced with dwindling cash and a stock delisting, Astra Space announced plans July 10 to perform a reverse split of its stock and sell up to $65 million of it. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published after the markets closed, Astra said it had signed a sales agreement with Roth Capital Partners under which it will sell up to $65 million of its stock in an “at-the-market” offering, where shares are sold at the going market rate. Net proceeds from the stock sale, the company said, would go towards working capital and general corporate purposes. That includes development of its next-generation launch vehicle, Rocket 4, as well as continued production of its Astra Spacecraft Engine electric thrusters. The stock sale comes as the company was running low on cash. Astra reported having $62.7 million in cash as of the end of the first quarter , with a net loss of $44.9 million. The company reported no revenue in the first quarter. Astra executives said on an earnings call May 15 they projected ending the second quarter with $30 million to $33 million of cash remaining. The company was considering at the time both debt and equity options to raise additional cash to keep the company operating as it continues work on Rocket 4, which the company does not anticipate entering commercial service until some time in 2024. Astra also faced a potential delisting of its stock from the Nasdaq because its price had fallen below $1 per share. Astra was originally given 180 days by Nasdaq, starting in October 2022, to get its share price above $1 for at least 10 consecutive business days. The company won a 180-day extension on April 10. Astra said July 10 that its board had approved a plan for a 1-for-15 reverse stock split that will occur no later than Oct. 2. Under that plan, 15 shares of existing Astra stock will be exchanged for one new share of Astra stock. That will have the effect of boosting the share price but not the company’s overall market cap. Shareholders had approved a proposal at the company’s annual shareholder meeting June 8 to allow the board to enact a reverse split of between 1-for-5 and 1-for-15. Shares in Astra closed July 10 at 40.2 cents per share, which would be $6.03 after the reverse split. Those shares have fallen more than 97% in value from their peak in early July 2021, shortly after Astra completed its merger with Holicity, a special-purpose acquisition company, and started trading publicly on Nasdaq.
TAMPA, Fla. — Voyager Space is considering using India’s proposed Gaganyaan crewed spacecraft to serve the commercial space station it aims to be operating by the end of the decade. The Denver-based space technology provider announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) July 10 with India to explore using Gaganyaan, among other potential collaborations to deepen ties with the country’s space industry. The MoU paves the way to other partnerships across exploration, research, and commercial activities, Voyager chief revenue officer Clay Mowry said. India expects to perform Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight no earlier than 2025 following delays that have pushed out its schedule by at least three years. The MoU with India is Voyager’s first with a crewed spacecraft provider outside the United States, Mowry told SpaceNews . He said Voyager is working with multiple undisclosed providers to supply crew and cargo services for Starlab, which would use a standard docking system aiming to be compatible with various spacecraft. “We are targeting our single-launch configuration to be operational in 2028,” he added. India partnerships Gaganyaan would launch to low Earth orbit on a version of India’s heavy-lift Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 3. Voyager announced a separate MoU July 7 to explore launch and deployment opportunities for small satellites orbited by two smaller Indian rockets: The Small Satellite Launch Vehicle and Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or SSLV and PLSV. Voyager’s customers have previously flown payloads on two PLSV missions, according to the company, which said the deal further expands their access to space. The agreement also enables Voyager to study using space-qualified components from the recently created commercial arm of India’s space agency, covering spacecraft manufacturing, deployment, operations, and other areas of interest. Voyager offers a broad range of space technologies following a series of acquisitions since being founded four years ago, ranging from laser and radio frequency communications systems to mission-data transmitters and cameras. The company announced its latest acquisition March 13 in a deal for engineering company ZIN Technologies, known for microgravity research equipment that Voyager said would support plans for its Starlab space station. Under development in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Starlab is one of three commercial concepts in the running to help NASA transition from the aging International Space Station. In January, Voyager said Airbus is also providing technical design support and expertise for the project, potentially making it easier for European governments to use Starlab. Voyager’s partnerships in India come as the country relaxes regulatory rules over its commercial space sector and the involvement of foreign businesses. During Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the United States, the two countries also announced plans to create a strategic framework for human spaceflight cooperation by the end of the year. The plans include a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024 that has yet to be detailed. Efforts to galvanize India’s space industry also include plans by the Indian Space Research Organization to auction off SSLV to the private sector, reported the country’s Economic Times July 9 , citing an unnamed senior official at the space agency. Capable of carrying up to 500 kilograms to mid-inclination low Earth orbits, SSLV is designed to be cheaper and more flexible than its two larger Indian cousins for deploying small payloads. After failing to reach orbit in its August debut, SSLV’s second flight successfully placed three satellites into low Earth orbit in February.
SAN FRANCISCO – Benchmark Space Systems raised $33 million in a Series B funding round. With the money raised, Benchmark plans to shift its focus from propulsion system research and development to manufacturing and testing. News of the investment round came on the heels of layoffs by the Burlington, Vermont-based startup. “The fundraising process began months ago and is not directly related to our team realignment, which recently resulted in about a 15 percent reduction of our team of 118 people,” Benchmark CEO Ryan McDevitt told SpaceNews by email. “We’ve been strategizing about how to best scale to successfully execute on our next phase of development in tandem with the fundraising process, and believe we are very well positioned to meet the current and future needs and demands of commercial and government.” Benchmark has grown rapidly in the past couple of years due in part to its acquisition of Alameda Applied Science Corp.’s electric propulsion technologies. After acquiring the electric propulsion technology, Benchmark expanded its product line to include chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems. “ The funding provides the capital we need to deliver on a growing number of government and commercial contracts coming in for a wide range of non-toxic chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems,” McDevitt said. “Benchmark is quickly transitioning from research and development to a strong focus on production.” As Benchmark customers expand satellite production, Benchmark “is scaling up our assembly and testing capabilities,” McDevitt said. “Our refined strategy and capital raise will enable Benchmark to better address and meet the evolving demands and innovations required for successful commercial and government missions set to launch over the near term 12 to 24 months and longer-term projects throughout the next three to five years.”
LOS ANGELES – Artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear power are among the key technologies Lockheed Martin sees as important for future space missions. Through a project called Destination: Space 2050, Lockheed Martin executives are exploring, for example, how AI could assist scientific exploration of locations where communications with remote sensors would be disrupted by high latency. In that type of environment, “you really can’t interact with the robotic sensors,” David Lackner, Lockheed Martin senior manager strategy and business development, said during a June 28 webinar. “You have to have something that is super autonomous that can deal with unknown unknowns. We’ve got some really interesting causal autonomy tools that … allow the AI to be super smart about running into something that it hasn’t encountered before.” AI also has important applications for remote-sensing data, said Aura Roy, Lockheed Martin deputy program manager for Multi-slit Solar Explorer mission, known as MUSE. Data gathered by hundreds or thousands of satellites traveling in different orbits could provide a “vast amount of information which would be beyond the ability of any number of human operators to parse through,” Roy said. “The goal is to use AI to determine truly optimal and trusted decisions from that raw data,” which may not be intuituve. In the future, “we will need to rely on a AI to augment human decision makers at all levels of command with advanced AI data processing and course-of-action generation that will support all types of operations,” Roy said. In addition, Lockheed Martin’s Space 2050 report focuses on quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum remote sensing, technologies. “That computing infrastructure utilizing quantum will be there for us in the 2050 timeframe,” Lackner said. As a result, Lockheed Martin is developing “quantum algorithms to make use of quantum computers, quantum remote sensing and quantum communications,” Lackner said. “Specific space applications of quantum are going to be super enabling for what we want to do.” Advancements in power and propulsion, including nuclear technologies, “are going to be absolutely critical in terms of dramatically improving the types of missions that you can do and the types of science that you can collect,” said Kate Watts, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of Mission Strategy and Advanced Capabilities for Human and Scientific Exploration. “Think high-power generation, dramatically improved ISP related to propulsion, so you have more maneuverability” or the ability to reach distant locations more quickly. By 2050 more people will be traveling to low-Earth orbit as well as to the moon or Mars, which will create demand for habitats and vehicles to move around the lunar surface. “When you’re on other worlds, you need to be able to move around, modify things, change the surface as needed,” Watts said. “You need to give the crew autonomy to manage science with machines that have capability like they do here on Earth.” By 2050, “I think we’ll see regular commercial delivery services from the Earth to the moon and back for both cargo or people,” said Crescent Space CEO Joe Landon. Lockheed Martin established Crescent Space earlier this year to provide lunar communications and navigation services. On the lunar surface, crews will “be able to find, extract and process valuable resources to create fuel and to sustain life and support human operations,” Landon said. “Every space mission today has to be completely self sufficient, has to bring everything you need with you and account for every contingency,” Landon said. “So, even the smallest missions or capabilities end up being very complex and costly.” To achieve Lockheed Martin’s Space 2050 vision, new infrastructure including computational capacity in cislunar space will be needed. Providing access to lunar cloud computing would enable both governments and private actors to play a larger economic role in space. Instead of purchasing large assets and then having to maintain them, buyers would instead be able to buy capabilities as needed, Lackner said. Lockheed Martin selected 2050 as a goal for its technology report because that timeframe is long enough away “that we can truly develop disruptive technologies and disruptive capabilities,” said Nelson Pedreiro, vice president at Lockheed Martin’s Space Advanced Technology Center. 
It is not uncommon to be faced with a problem but struggle to find a solution. In the case of space sustainability, as low Earth orbit fills with both active satellites and debris, the challenge is as much coming up with a solution to deal with that congestion as it is determining who should do it. The rapid growth in the number of space objects, caused by the rise of satellite constellations as well as debris-generating events like anti-satellite tests and collisions, is testing the international governance model for space activities developed in the early years of the Space Age that many in the industry believe can no longer keep up. “More objects have been launched in the last 10 years than in the previous 50 combined,” noted Guy Ryder, undersecretary-general for policy at the United Nations, during a speech at the Summit for Space Sustainability by the Secure World Foundation (SWF) in New York June 13. That creates, he said, “boundless development opportunities and governance needs.” Space governance has been handled at the international level by the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), which now has 102 nations as members. In the 1960s, COPUOS helped guide the development of the Outer Space Treaty, the foundation of international space law, followed by several related agreements. However, the large size of COPUOS and its use of a consensus-based model — all nations must agree — can make progress slow or nonexistent. Attendees of the most recent COPUOS meeting in Vienna, which concluded in early June, noted that one agenda item known as “dark and quiet skies” to study the effects of satellite constellations on astronomy had widespread support but was dropped because of objections from one nation, Iran, which is opposed to constellations in general on sovereignty grounds. “It’s slow, it’s frustrating,” said Valda Vikmanis Keller, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Space Affairs, of COPUOS, during one panel at the Summit for Sustainability. But, she said, the discussions there were essential. “It’s the only way forward.” However, some are looking for alternative mechanisms to address those growing space sustainability concerns. That includes efforts both within the United Nations itself and among other governments and organizations, seeking binding agreements or simply widely adopted norms and guidelines as the population of satellites and debris continues to grow. One such effort is at the United Nations. It is beginning preparations for its Summit of the Future, a two-day meeting in New York in September 2024 where member nations will discuss key global issues. The U.N. calls it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance cooperation on critical challenges and address gaps in global governance.” The agenda of that meeting will include space. “We have a window of opportunity over the next 15 months,” Ryder said, “where we can accelerate space diplomacy and advance the governance issue.” The U.N. started planning for the Summit of the Future with the release of a policy paper in May on outer space governance. It highlighted as key topics space traffic coordination as well as space resource utilization and concerns about conflict in outer space. The report doesn’t offer specific solutions, but Ryder said the ultimate goal is to develop “one single united regime to facilitate data sharing, cooperation and continuity” in space traffic management and related issues. Those issues could be addressed individually, though, “if that path looks likelier to achieve results.” COPUOS will play a role in developing concepts to be considered at the Summit of the Future through its meetings next year, but it will not be the only mechanism. Portugal will host a conference in the spring of 2024 to develop proposals for consideration at the fall summit. Hugo André Costa, a member of the executive board of the Portuguese Space Agency, said at the SWF summit that the spring meeting will be preceded by two virtual workshops, one this October on technology issues and a second in March 2024 on policy issues. Those meetings will be open to representatives from industry, academia and governments. “This is the only way that we can prepare for the future,” he argued. Developing a global space government framework in just 15 months is an ambitious task. If it is successful, though, Ryder suggested that the framework that emerges might look different from existing approaches. One model, he said, might be existing treaties like the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. “All of this provides us with the confidence that the kinds of agreements concluded in the past are possible in the future, even in today’s admittedly challenging geopolitical climate.” “The notion is that we live in a rapidly changing world,” he said, looking for new approaches while maintaining existing mechanisms. “Let’s be honest: what worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow. That is not a recipe or a reason to jettison everything that has worked up until this point.” “But,” he added, “it can be a very strong reason to adapt, modify, improve what we have.” The international community has demonstrated it can move quickly on space sustainability issues. After Russia conducted an ASAT demonstration in November 2021, destroying a defunct Russian satellite and creating thousands of pieces of debris, the United States and others started pushing for mechanisms to halt any future such tests. U.S. officials said they didn’t expect Russia to perform a destructive direct-ascent (DA) ASAT test. “We were shocked. I’ll be honest with you, I was shocked,” said Audrey Schaffer, director of space policy at the National Security Council, during a talk at the Summit for Space Sustainability. “How could they do something so brazen, so reckless, and so clearly contrary to the safety, sustainability and security of an environment that so many of us depend upon?” Later at the summit, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said that the U.S. military suspected Russia was planning some sort of test. “They consider themselves the senior spacefaring nation,” he said, and thus expected Russia would do an “offset test” that fired a missile to deliberately miss the target. “They want to continue that tradition of being that senior, responsible spacefaring nation. I was wrong.” The Defense Department, he said, became “one of the earliest and biggest proponents” of what Vice President Kamala Harris announced the following April, that the U.S. would refrain from conducting similar ASAT tests and request other countries to do the same. That effort resulted in a U.N. General Assembly vote last December, just over a year after the Russian ASAT test, on a resolution regarding such a test ban. A total of 155 nations voted in favor of the resolution, while nine, including China and Russia, voted against it. Nine other nations, including India, abstained. “That kind of vote count indicates a very strong base of support,” Schaffer said but argued it was not enough. The resolution, she noted, was non-binding, simply encouraging countries to make such commitments. As of June 2023, 13 countries have done so. “To truly establish an internationally recognized norm banning destructive DAASAT missile testing, we need a critical mass of nations to actually make the commitment,” she said. That has been a slow process. Only three countries — Austria, Italy and the Netherlands — have formally committed not to conduct destructive ASAT tests since the U.N. vote. That slow progress, some suggested, may be due to domestic politics. “We understand that other states that voted for the resolution but have not yet joined the commitment need some time to thoroughly review the domestic effects,” said Hyerin Kim, second secretary in the disarmament and non-proliferation division of South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. South Korea announced its commitment to refrain from such tests last October. “Korea is also making efforts to raise awareness of the danger posed by ASAT testing.” “We had a great start out of the gate, but there’s more road ahead of us,” Schaffer said, urging conference attendees representing nations that had not made a commitment to consider doing so. And for those who have, “phone a friend and ask them to make the commitment too.” Other efforts to address space sustainability are proliferating. At the Summit for Space Sustainability, the World Economic Forum (WEF) announced a new set of guidelines for mitigating the growth of orbital debris. The document is the latest foray into space sustainability for the WEF, which previously led the development of a Space Sustainability Rating. Among the recommendations published by the WEF is to establish a success rate for “post-mission disposal,” or removal of satellites from orbit after the end of their missions, of 95% to 99%. That disposal, it added, should be done no later than five years after the end of a satellite’s life, versus earlier guidelines of 25 years. “We wanted to push the envelope a little bit on some of these concrete, specific targets,” said Nikolai Khlystov, lead for the WEF’s Future of Space initiative, at the conference. The document also calls for satellites to be maneuverable, preferably through onboard propulsion, when operating at altitudes above 375 kilometers, and for operators to agree to share orbital data. The WEF convinced 27 companies to endorse the guidelines, including several major satellite operators. Notably absent, though, were some planning or deploying large constellations, such as Amazon and SpaceX. Khlystov said the WEF worked with more than the 27 companies who signed the new guidelines. “If some actors didn’t sign on, I don’t think it’s a sign that they are against these standards,” he said. (An Amazon spokesperson later said that while the company helped craft those guidelines, it was not ready yet to endorse them as it assesses various other proposals.) Just over a week later, the European Space Agency and three European satellite manufacturers — Airbus Defence and Space, OHB and Thales Alenia Space — announced their intent to develop a “Zero Debris Charter” to mitigate the growth of orbital debris. The charter, announced during the Paris Air Show, doesn’t exist yet beyond the most general outlines. “The principle is a very simple one,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said at the announcement. “The Zero Debris Charter is a principle where we would like to ensure that there is zero debris left behind in space.” He compared it a national park, where visitors are expected not to leave behind any garbage. The goal is that, under the charter, satellite operators would be expected by 2030 to either deorbit their satellites on their own at the end of their lives or hire a company that offers active debris removal services to do so. ESA and the companies plan to refine the details and complete the text of the charter by the end of the year. What benefit the charter will have was not exactly clear at the announcement. All three companies participating have already endorsed the WEF’s guidelines, with some executives at the event praising that document for its specific requirements. Aschbacher suggested the charter could be incorporated into regulations so that governments agree to work only with those companies that agree to follow it. “We need to achieve a status where we demand that only data or information is bought from those satellite providers who are adhering to certain standards,” Aschbacher said. “The charter may be one vehicle for doing so.” Executives, though, were cautious about a solution to a worldwide problem that applied only to European companies. “It’s important that those regulations are worldwide,” said Hervé Derrey, chief executive of Thales Alenia Space. “If this is not applied to the rest of the world it will have no effect at the end. It will collectively fail. And, on top of that, European industry will not be on a level playing field with its competitors. That would be the worst situation.” “Only with a real international regulation will we get it under control,” said Lutz Bertling, an OHB board member. That, then, returns to the United Nations and its often slow efforts. Ryder, at the Summit for Space Sustainability, was careful to praise COPUOS for its work even while suggesting changes are in order. “We have a very solid record of achievement,” he said. “It’s a very solid platform from which to start.” “It’s very difficult to have 102 different ways of seeing the same thing,” Portugal’s Costa said, describing the long discussions at COPUOS meetings over things like wording of a single sentence in a statement all will accept. “You just need to have nerves of steel to wait until the very last moment when all the agreements are reached.” As low Earth orbit fills with satellites and debris, that very last moment for space sustainability may be rapidly approaching. This article originally appeared in the July 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
SAN FRANCISCO – Plasmos, the Los Angeles-based startup developing rocket engines, is pivoting to become an artificial intelligence-driven venture capital firm. Plasmos officially changed its business model in late May after struggling to attract investors and strategic partners due in part to the background of Plasmos CEO Ali Baghchehsara. Born in Iran, Baghchehsara moved to Germany as a teenager to earn a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. There, he worked for the German Aerospace Center DLR and Airbus, before moving to the United States in 2021 to pursue his dream of developing hybrid electric-chemical rocket engine. While Plasmos could address the business challenges startups commonly face, the political challenges seemed insurmountable, Baghchehsara said. “I saw where Plasmos will end,” Baghchehsara told SpaceNews. “If we are successful, I’ll have to deal with the U.S. government. And if I sell to the U.S. government it may become impossible for me to visit my family in Iran. I had to choose a path: company success or family.” Plasmos has raised about $275,000 in cash and $275,000 in in-kind contributions including 3D printing services . With remaining funds, Baghchehsara is establishing PlasmOS, an AI-driven venture capital firm. Unlike venture capital partners who base investment decisions on their knowledge, experience or instinct, PlasmOS will use AI to select promising startups. “We will use data to make almost instantaneous decisions, a quick yes or no on funding,” Baghchehsara said. As a space startup, Plasmos was developing a Space Truck , powered by the company’s dual-mode propulsion system. The Space Truck was designed to transport payloads in Earth orbit and to support in-space manufacturing, last-mile delivery, point-to-point transportation, on-orbit servicing and active debris removal.
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite TV broadcaster Dish Network is rumored to be considering recombining with internet-focused sister company EchoStar to strengthen its financial resources. The companies have engaged advisers to flesh out a potential deal, reported news publication Semafor July 6, citing people familiar with the matter. Dish and satellite fleet operator EchoStar — both controlled by billionaire Charlie Ergen — declined to comment on the speculation. A deal would need to navigate starkly contrasting financial standings following their split into separate companies and stocks back in 2008. Dish has been investing heavily to meet regulatory deployment deadlines for expanding a terrestrial 5G network across the United States, putting its balance sheet under strain as its core satellite TV business bleeds subscribers. Meanwhile, EchoStar is sitting on $1.7 billion in cash and is poised for subscriber and revenue growth from Jupiter 3, its long-awaited broadband satellite that Maxar recently delivered for a Falcon Heavy launch in the coming months. EchoStar sold underperforming broadcast satellite services assets to Dish in 2019, seemingly doubling down on the strategy to keep their businesses apart. Still, rumors about a potential recombination have periodically resurfaced in the market over the years, according to Raymond James analyst Ric Prentiss. Notably, EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan’s Feb. 17, 2022, employment offer letter includes a clause covering the possibility of Dish owning more than half of EchoStar’s voting stock. Prentiss said he was unsurprised to see the speculation resurface again because of how challenging it is to borrow money to finance Dish’s wireless plans in the current economic climate. A combination could also put perennial rumors to rest about another attempt to merge Dish with its satellite broadcast rival DirecTV, majority owned by U.S. telecoms giant AT&T. Earlier this year, Dish was also said to be one of a handful of U.S. companies in talks about selling wireless services through Amazon, according to reports including Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal . Citing people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg reported June 2 that Amazon was looking into offering a low-cost or free nationwide mobile service to Amazon Prime subscribers. Amazon, which is working toward providing initial broadband services next year from its proposed Project Kuiper satellite constellation, said in response that it was not currently planning to add wireless service to its Prime offering. Its package of Amazon Prime services includes online TV streaming, which has contributed to the decline of the satellite broadcast market.
As the European Space Agency continues to develop proposals for human space exploration efforts, more European countries are showing an interest in launching astronauts. At a June 29 briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher announced that Poland was subscribing an additional 295 million euros ($325 million) for agency programs, a figure that includes the cost of flying a Polish astronaut to the International Space Station on a commercial mission. That agreement, he said, was similar to one announced in April that involved ESA, the Swedish National Space Agency and Axiom Space that will fund the flight of a Swedish astronaut on an Axiom commercial flight to the ISS . ESA announced in June that Marcus Wandt, a Swedish Air Force pilot selected by ESA as a reserve astronaut in November 2022, would go on that mission. ESA has not announced when Wandt will fly. Anna Rathsman, director general of the Swedish National Space Agency and outgoing chair of the ESA Council, said at the briefing that the flight had to be coordinated among the various organizations involved, including NASA. “Sweden has been able to make very quickly decisions that allowed this flight to happen,” Aschbacher said. “In less than two months we have gone, I would say, from zero to signature of the agreements.” Wandt, he said, is already in Houston undergoing training for the flight. The earliest opportunity would be the Ax-3 mission, slated to fly to the ISS in late 2023 or early 2024. Axiom Space has not announced the crew for that mission. Other European countries have expressed an interest in flying short-duration missions to the ISS. Walter Villadei, an Italian Air Force pilot who flew on Virgin Galactic’s first commercial suborbital flight June 29 , also has trained with Axiom Space and was a backup on the Ax-2 mission to the station in May. Hungary’s foreign minister said at the ESA ministerial meeting in November 2022 that the country was spending $100 million on its own private astronaut to fly with Axiom . That activity comes as ESA is working on proposals for human spaceflight programs of its own. A report in March by an independent High-Level Advisory Group recommended ESA pursue the ability to launch its own astronauts , developing crewed spacecraft and potentially commercial space stations and lunar missions. In response, Aschbacher said in April that the agency was working on proposals to implement those recommendations . In a July 1 interview after the launch of ESA’s Euclid space telescope on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Aschbacher said the agency is continuing work on those proposals through the summer in preparation for a Space Summit of European nations in Seville, Spain, in November. Those efforts included a discussion during a side meeting of last week’s ESA Council meeting. “The discussion was very constructive, very positive, and there’s a lot of work that is being done right now by our teams, with industry and with the member states to establish scenarios and options of what Europe could be doing and should be doing, and what the price tag is attached to it,” he said. By September or October, he expected to have “more clarity” on the various options, which he said currently are too premature to discuss publicly. He did note that one requirement is that the proposals not take funding from other ESA programs. “That’s why I’m calling for the Space Summit because this engages the top leaders in Europe to really discuss what Europe should be doing, because these decisions need to be made there.” The interest by several ESA member states in private astronaut missions is a positive sign for the agency’s plans for human space exploration, he argued. “Sweden, Poland and many others are now inspired by this ambition to go to space and have an astronaut flying into space,” he said. “This momentum starts developing, and I can only say it’s nice to see.” Aschbacher added that he didn’t think that such short-term missions, funded in Sweden’s case as part of a public-private partnership, would detract from efforts to craft a long-term human spaceflight program at the agency. “They have certainly raised the appetite and the attention, but you cannot compare a 10-day mission with a six-month mission on the space station,” he said. “But it’s a new element that we can add to our portfolio.”
Chinese rocket firm Space Pioneer has secured C-round funding for its Tianlong-3 medium-lift reusable launch vehicle. Space Pioneer, full name Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd, announced the funding round July 5. The company’s first launch attempt in April saw the Tianlong-2 rocket make Space Pioneer the first Chinese commercial outfit to reach orbit with a liquid propellant launcher. The company has now raised a total of three billion Chinese yuan ($414 million) across 11 rounds since its establishment in 2018. In February the firm announced it had secured “B+” and “Pre-C” strategic funding rounds. A number of the leading investors are linked to the Chinese state. These include China International Capital Corporation (CICC), a partially state-owned investment vehicle, CCB International, belonging to the China Construction Bank Corporation, and CITIC Construction, the engineering and construction arm of Chinese state-owned CITIC Group, and Zhejiang University Lianchuang. Venture capital also plays a part in the funding. The new funds will be used for the development of the Tianlong-3 kerosene-liquid oxygen launch vehicle and its engine and the construction of a dedicated launch complex at the Jiuquan national spaceport. The funds will also go towards developing mass production capabilities and recruitment. The first launch of the Tianlong-3 rocket is currently scheduled for May 2024 . It is intended to be somewhat comparable to the Falcon 9. If successful, Space Pioneer claims it will be able to launch 30 times per year from 2025. Tianlong-3 (“Sky Dragon-3”) is a two-stage kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket with a reusable first stage. Space Pioneer’s webpages state that the rocket will be capable of lifting 17 tons of payload to low Earth orbit, or 14 tons to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. It will have a takeoff mass of 590 tons and produce 770 tons of thrust. The 71-meter-long Tianlong-3 will have a diameter of 3.8 meters. Previously, many commercial Chinese rockets used 2.25 or 3.35-meter-diameter stages, the dimensions as those of most Long March rockets. The Tianlong-3 is, according to Space Pioneer, tailor-made for launching satellites for China’s national communications megaconstellation. Tianlong-3 will provide “important strategic support for the country’s new satellite Internet infrastructure,” according to the July 5 statement. The planned 13,000-strong Guowang constellation is seen as China’s answer to Starlink. More recently established Chinese commercial launch companies including Space Pioneer and OrienSpace are opting to develop much larger launch vehicles than earlier movers, which have committed to launchers with payload capacities on the order of a few thousand kilograms. This shift has been initiated by the emergence of the possibility of contracts for Guowang and commercial cargo missions . Space Pioneer says it has already signed 10 orders for launches on the Tianlong-2. The company also has plans for a Tianlong-3H, a triple-core version in the same style as the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and the Tianlong-3M, a single core rocket tipped with a reusable spaceplane. Space Pioneer initially started out developing engines burning green monopropellant before changing direction. The firm also apparently scrapped development of the Tianlong-1 rocket. The firm has received sponsorship and investment from Zhangjiagang, a city in Jiangsu province on the Yangtze river. Space Pioneer is building rocket manufacturing facilities in the city and the Tianlong-2 launch also bore the name “Zhangjiagang.” Meanwhile, fellow Chinese commercial firm Landspace is gearing up for the second launch of its Zhuque-2 methane-liquid oxygen rocket from Jiuquan. Airspace closure notices indicate a launch window of 1:53 a.m. to 4:14 a.m. Eastern July 12. Beijing-based iSpace also recently tested engines for its Hyperbola-2 methalox launcher.
Europe, temporarily lacking its own access to space, plans to rely more on SpaceX to launch key science and navigation spacecraft while working to restore its launch capabilities. The successful final Ariane 5 launch July 5 means that Europe temporarily has no ability to launch payloads into orbit. The Ariane 5’s successor, Ariane 6, is still in development and appears increasingly unlikely to be ready for its inaugural launch before 2024. The Soyuz is no longer available in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Vega C remains grounded after a December 2022 launch failure, and its return to flight, previously planned for late this year, is facing delays after an anomaly during a static-fire test June 28 of that rocket’s Zefiro 40 motor . The original version of the Vega, which does not use the Zefiro 40, is scheduled to resume launches in September, but most launches on the Vega manifest are of the more powerful Vega C. European startups such as Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are working on small launch vehicles whose first flights could take place before the end of the year. But for larger payloads, there are few near-term options for European organizations. That situation led the European Space Agency to announce in October 2022 it was moving two missions to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 . The first of those, the Euclid astronomy mission, was set to launch on Soyuz but instead lifted off on a Falcon 9 July 1 from Cape Canaveral, Florida . The Hera asteroid mission will launch on a Falcon 9 in October 2024 after being originally manifested on Ariane 6. More European missions are likely to fly on Falcon 9. At a June 29 briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council, the agency announced that the Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer, or EarthCARE, mission that has been moved from Soyuz to Vega C last October would instead likely fly on Falcon 9 in the second quarter of 2024. While the announcement coincided with the news of the Zefiro 40 test anomaly, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the change was not directly linked to that but instead to the failed launch last December as well as changes in the size of EarthCARE that would have required modifications to the Vega C payload fairing to accommodate it. “With these two elements, I asked my inspector general to reassess the situation,” he said at the briefing. “The conclusion of this assessment by the inspector general was recommending to me that we should not fly with Vega C.” That was based on the earlier Vega C failure review, which recommended no changes to the configuration, like the payload fairing, on the initial series of Vega C launches. At the same briefing, ESA officials said they were also in discussions with SpaceX for the launch of up to four Galileo satellites on Falcon 9 vehicles. “We are moving ahead with negotiations to conclude hopefully soon with SpaceX,” said Javier Benedicto, ESA’s director of navigation. That is contingent on concluding the negotiations with SpaceX as well as securing approvals from the European Union and its security agreement with SpaceX. In a July 1 interview after the Euclid launch, Aschbacher said it will be up to the European Commission to decide when and how to launch those Galileo satellites. “We have provided all the technical information with regards to launcher compatibility, which the Commission has,” he said. “Now it’s up to them to make a decision.” He noted that Euclid was not the first time that ESA had used the Falcon 9. Sentinel-6A, also known as Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, was a joint U.S.-Europe Earth science mission launched on a Falcon 9 in November 2020. ESA astronauts have also flown on Crew Dragon missions. However, in those cases the launches were procured and overseen by NASA, not ESA. Aschbacher praised SpaceX for its role in launching Euclid. “SpaceX has been very proactive, very quick, very professional in providing this launch service. And I’m very happy now that this has been conducted successfully.” He reiterated past comments that the problems with Ariane 6 and Vega C and the loss of Soyuz had created a “launcher crisis” in Europe. “We are in a crisis and we should use the opportunity to convert this crisis into actions and changes that need to be adopted in order, in the future, to develop a robust launcher system for Europe,” he said, looking beyond Ariane 6 and Vega C. He also took the long view, expecting that this temporary gap in European launch capabilities will be forgotten in the long term, once Ariane 6 and Vega C are in regular operations. “Then this few months will be a blip,” he said. “Of course, now we are right in the midst of it and it’s difficult for everyone to accept the current situation. But you have to see this in the longer term.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A group founded by European air traffic controllers has signed a deal to bring improved airspace-tracking capabilities from Viasat’s constellation to market next year. The European Satellite Services Provider group, or ESSP, said July 6 it will be responsible for leading the commercialization of Iris, an air traffic modernization program the European Space Agency developed with Viasat’s recently acquired satellite operator Inmarsat. Iris — not to be confused with Europe’s proposed IRIS² connectivity constellation — promises to help aircraft fly more efficient routes by using Inmarsat’s L-band satellites to complement congested VHF data links. According to ESA, fitting aircraft with higher bandwidth Iris technology would give air traffic controllers more data to schedule landings in advance, minimize fuel consumption, and maximize airspace and airport capacity. Communications between pilots and controllers could also move from voice to text messages under the upgraded air traffic management (ATM) system, improving operational safety and efficiency. Iris forms a part of the Single European Sky’s Air Traffic Management Research master plan proposed in 2020 to create more environmentally sustainable and efficient flight paths. France-based ESSP was initially set up in 2001 so their air navigation shareholders could participate in the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service program, which Europe uses to augment and improve GPS services in the region. ESSP currently comprises the air navigation service providers of France, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. U.K.-based easyJet and ITA Airways of Italy are among the first airlines intending to operate early Iris services next year, according to ESSP.
Chinese commercial launch firm Landspace is set for a second attempt to reach orbit with its Zhuque-2 rocket July 12. The second Zhuque-2 methane-liquid oxygen rocket was rolled out to the pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert July 6, according to Chinese social media posts. Satellite imagery later confirmed the development. Earlier Chinese media reports indicate the launch is scheduled for July 12 Beijing time. If successful, Zhuque-2 (“Vermillion Bird-2”) will become the world’s first methalox launch vehicle to achieve orbit. A range of methalox rockets, including SpaceX’s Starship, the ULA Vulcan, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and Terran R from Relativity Space, are at various stages of development and testing. A successful Zhuque-2 flight would also make Landspace the second private Chinese rocket company to perform a successful launch with a liquid propellant rocket. Space Pioneer, full name Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd, became the first such company in April with the launch of its Tianlong-2 rocket . The upcoming launch comes almost seven months after the debut flight of the Zhuque-2, also from Jiuquan. That December 2022 launch ended in failure due to an issue with a liquid oxygen inlet pipe feeding four vernier thrusters on the rocket’s second stage. Zhuque-2 is powered by gas generator engines producing 268 tons of thrust. It is capable of delivering a 6,000-kilogram payload capacity to a 200-kilometer low Earth orbit (LEO), or 4,000 kilograms to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), according to Landspace. The rocket has a diameter of 3.35 meters—the same as a number of national Long March rockets—a total length of 49.5 meters and a take-off mass of 219 tons. The rocket is currently expendable but Landspace is working on a s tested a restartable version of the 80-ton-thrust TQ-12 engine which powers the Zhuque-2 first stage. The firm is also working on an improved second-stage engine which will not require vernier engines. This upgraded engine will not be present on the second Zhuque-2. Landspace is one of the earliest and best-funded of China’s emerging commercial launch firms. The company’s first launch took place four years ago with the much smaller and simpler solid-propellant Zhuque-1 and ended in failure . The Chinese government opened up parts of the space sector to private capital in late 2014, seen to be a reaction to developments in the U.S. This policy shift and subsequent policy support and guidance has been the catalyst for the emergence of hundreds of space-related companies engaged in a range of activities, including launch, satellite operation and manufacture, ground stations, downstream applications, and more. A number of commercial launch companies are now looking to China’s “ Guowang ” national satellite internet project as a potential source of contracts and revenue. China recently opened a call for space station commercial cargo proposals , further indicating that commercial firms will have a growing role to play in the country’s space sector. Landspace and other early movers in China’s commercial launch sector such as iSpace and Galactic Energy committed to plans to develop light-lift solid and liquid propellant rockets. Newer entrants such as Space Pioneer and Orienspace are moving directly towards medium-lift and heavier classes of launchers, likely informed by the emergence of the possible satellite internet and programs. A range of remote sensing constellations are also being designed and planned by a range of state and commercial actors, providing further opportunities for launch contracts.The first launch of China’s communications megaconstellation satellites is expected in the second half of the year, using a Long March rocket developed by China’s state-owned main space contractor, CASC.
In order to better keep tabs on adversaries, the U.S. military needs satellites that can actively maneuver in orbit, the deputy commander of U.S. Space Command said July 6. “The way we’ve been doing space operations since the dawn of the space age, we’ve been doing it wrong,” Lt. Gen. John Shaw said at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. Shaw specifically alluded to the military’s “neighborhood watch” satellites — known as GSSAP (Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program) — used to monitor the geostationary belt, where the Pentagon deploys its most valuable space assets. GSSAPs were built to last up to seven years but have a limited fuel supply, and maneuvers must be carefully planned to minimize fuel consumption. Shaw has raised the issue at several public appearances in recent months. At the Mitchell forum, he once again insisted that the current approach of deploying satellites in designated orbits and minimizing maneuvers does not work in the age of great power competition. He said Space Command is advocating for a new approach he described as “dynamic space operations,” in contrast to the current practice of minimizing maneuvers for fear of depleting a satellite’s fuel supply. “This could be the most fundamental doctrinal shift that we’re probably going to see in the next four to five years,” he said. Need maneuverable platforms Perhaps not all satellites have to be highly maneuverable, Shaw said. But surveillance and reconnaissance platforms need to be more mobile in order to better monitor adversaries’ activities. “We launch a platform into orbit, and we tend to leave it right in that orbit,” Shaw said. “But we’re coming to the realization that that is not going to be sufficient anymore.” Shaw said he recently spent time with GSSAP operators at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. Their feedback reinforced the need for change in how these assets are developed and deployed, he added. “GSSAP’s sole purpose is to move around the geosynchronous belt and to look at other platforms … And if there’s something that’s behaving suspiciously, we’ll look at that,” Shaw said. U.S. military satellites are operated to ensure they stay in service for many years or decades. “And so we are actually largely constrained by what we can do with those platforms,” he said. “I had a chance to sit down with operators a few weeks ago and spend a good amount of time understanding how they approach it.” They have to operate with significant constraints, said Shaw. “We can’t have those constraints in the future. And so we’re trying to articulate a requirement to the Space Force that we need to be able to have sustained space maneuver for those platforms.” Potential solutions It will be up to the Space Force to come up with solutions to this problem, Shaw said. Among the options being considered is to build satellites with refueling ports so they can take advantage of commercial refueling services . “If I could refuel GSSAP satellites once a month, we would be operating them completely differently than we do now. They’d be operating at maximum trust levels and delta V levels that are unlike anything we’re doing right now,” Shaw said. Another possible solution is to rely on low-cost small satellites that would be replaced more frequently. “I’ll get another one in two weeks because I’m going to fly the heck out of it. And it’s going to empty that gas tank in a hurry.” The goal is to “achieve surprise and initiative against an adversary in ways that I can’t today,” Shaw added. The Space Force is working to address these needs, he said. “We’ve asked for a demo by 2026 on how we would do sustained space maneuvers for a given platform.”
 HawkEye 360, a commercial operator of remote-sensing satellites, announced July 6 it was selected by the government of Australia to help detect illegal fishing activity using radio-frequency sensors. The company received a contract of undisclosed value from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for a pilot program in support of the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency. The agency, based in Honiara, Solomon Islands, was established in 1979 to help its 17 member countries manage their tuna fisheries and track illicit activities. HawkEye 360, headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, uses radio-frequency data analytics to geolocate electronic emissions and draw insights. Radio-frequency identification The company operates a constellation of 21 satellites that detect, characterize and geolocate radio frequency signals from emitters used for communication, navigation and security. HawkEye 360’s satellites fly in triangular formations in low Earth orbit. As a cluster passes over an area, each satellite observes signal waveforms and downlinks the data to a cloud system on the ground where it’s analyzed. Under the contract with Australia, HawkEye 360 will provide satellite RF maritime analytics and training through 2023, said Alex Fox, chief growth officer of HawkEye 360. “The Pacific Islands encompass a vast and highly trafficked region with rich fisheries resources that present complex challenges for maritime domain awareness,” he said. The Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency and its members will get data, analytics services and training support to identify illicit maritime activity within their waters, Fox said. By analyzing RF data, he added, HawkEye 360 can track maritime activity that is not detectable by Automatic Identification Systems ( AIS ).
One chapter in European access to space came to a close July 5 with the final launch of the Ariane 5, but the beginning of the next chapter faces additional delays. An Ariane 5 lifted off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 6 p.m. Eastern. The launch had been scheduled for June 16 but was postponed a day in advance after Arianespace concluded that three pyrotechnical transmission lines used for the separation of the rocket’s solid rocket boosters needed to be replaced . The company rescheduled the launch for July 4, only to delay it an additional day because of strong upper-level winds. As with so many Ariane 5 missions, this launch, designated VA261, carried two communications satellites destined for geostationary transfer orbit. Nearly 30 minutes after liftoff, the rocket deployed Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit, a spacecraft built by OHB for the German Space Agency on behalf of other German government agencies. The 3,400-kilogram satellite will test advanced communications technologies. About three and a half minutes later, the rocket deployed the other payload, the Syracuse 4B satellite for the French military. The 3,570-kilogram satellite was developed by a consortium of Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, using an Airbus Eurostar 3000 bus. “It is a success for ‘Team Europe’ tonight with this last and final Ariane 5,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said on the company’s webcast of the launch after confirmation of successful payload deployment. “Thanks for ArianeGroup, Arianespace and CNES. It was a wonderful launch, even if it is the last one,” said Gen. Michel Sayegh, director of space programs for the French armaments agency DGA during the launch webcast. The launch was the 117 th and final flight of the Ariane 5 over 27 years. The vehicle made its first, unsuccessful launch in June 1996, and suffered a partial failure on its second launch in October 1997 before an unqualified success on its third launch in October 1998. The rocket’s ability to carry two large geostationary communications satellites at once made it a key vehicle for many years in the commercial space industry during an era when geostationary communications satellites dominated the market. The European Space Agency also regularly used the rocket for several science missions as well as the launch of five Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station between 2008 and 2014. In perhaps the rocket’s highest-profile launch, it successfully launched the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA on Christmas Day 2021, delivering it on a trajectory so accurate it had the effect of significantly increasing the spacecraft’s lifetime by reducing the amount of propellant needed for trajectory correction maneuvers. “Ariane 5 is now over, and Ariane 5 has perfectly finished its work and really is now a legendary launcher,” Israël said. “But Ariane 6 is coming.” In the lead up to the final Ariane 5 launch, Arianespace has advertised a “spaceflight continuum,” of past and future rockets, but that continuum is not necessarily continuous. The Ariane 5 overlapped with the end of the Ariane 4 rocket, which made its last launch in 2003. ESA had originally planned for a similar overlap between the end of the Ariane 5 and the introduction of its successor, the Ariane 6. However, the development of Ariane 6 has been plagued by delays that have pushed out its first launch, once planned for 2020, by several years. In October 2022, ESA said it projected the first launch to take place in the fourth quarter of 2023 , but it is increasingly likely the launch will slip into 2024. Executives with OHB, a supplier on the Ariane 6 program, said in an earnings call in May that they expected the first Ariane 6 launch to take place in early 2024 , and no later than May 2024. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, said during the call. ESA and Arianespace have declined to provide an updated launch date for that inaugural mission. “Today it would be speculative to mention a launch date,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said during a press briefing June 29 after an ESA Council meeting in Stockholm. “We have to go through a number of technical milestones over the summer period but I promise, after the summer in September, we will indicate a period which is the target period for the Ariane 6.” Those milestones include a hot-fire test of the Ariane 6 upper stage scheduled for July at a test facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany, which will be followed by a second test in the fall to test its performance in what ESA calls “degraded cases.” Assembly of the first flight model of the Ariane 6 is planned to begin in November in French Guiana, according to an ESA update published June 8 .
TAMPA, Fla. — International regulators have waived a requirement for Rivada Space Networks to launch 10% of its proposed 576 satellites by September, boosting plans to fund the multibillion-dollar connectivity constellation. Rivada expects to start deploying commercial satellites in 2025 under contracts with manufacturer Terran Orbital and launcher SpaceX, easily missing the first deployment deadline under International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rules. However, Rivada announced July 5 that the ITU granted a waiver for this milestone after reviewing evidence of the funding, manufacturing, and launch contracts in place for its non-geostationary orbit network (NGSO). Amid a flood of applications for new NGSO constellations, the ITU adopted deployment milestone rules in late 2019 to help separate those truly planning to deploy satellites from others more interested in hoarding spectrum. Rivada’s waiver is a positive sign for others hoping for leniency as pandemic-related supply chain issues drag on the space industry, such as Canada’s Telesat, which continues to seek funds for an NGSO constellation running six years behind schedule. “A shortage of launch capacity and delays in technology development have been significant challenges to overcome in order to deploy these constellations in the stipulated timeframe,” said Rainer Schnepfleitner, director of Liechtenstein’s telecoms regulator, which licensed Rivada’s constellation. Two major deployment hurdles remain Rivada has two spectrum filings lodged with the ITU, an affiliate of the United Nations, each covering 288 satellites. The venture must deploy 50% of its total constellation, or 288 satellites, by mid-2026 under the second ITU deployment milestone that remains in place, or risk losing priority Ka-band spectrum. All 576 satellites must be deployed by mid-2028. Rivada head of corporate communications Brian Carney said the venture is also on track to launch four precursor satellites next year, which would test user terminals and networking protocols and not form part of the operational constellation. He said negotiations with debt providers are ongoing to fully fund the constellation, which includes a $2.4 billion contract announced in February with Florida-headquartered Terran Orbital to build the 500-kilogram satellites. Declan Ganley, CEO of U.S. wireless technology company Rivada Networks, the parent of Germany-based Rivada Space Networks, recently said the venture hopes to secure support from U.S. Ex-Im Bank , the country’s export credit agency. While the ITU required Rivada to show it has sufficient funding commitments for the constellation, it did not require the plans to be fully funded with money in the bank.
Large satellite constellations can unintentionally generate electromagnetic noise, creating an additional source of interference for radio astronomers. Astronomers announced July 5 that they detected radio emissions at relatively low frequencies from dozens of SpaceX Starlink satellites as they passed over a Dutch radio observatory. The emissions, at frequencies between 110 and 188 megahertz, are different from the deliberate transmissions from the satellites used to provide broadband internet access between 10.7 and 12.7 gigahertz. Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, astronomers detected emissions from 47 of 68 Starlink satellites they monitored. They detected several narrowband emissions at specific frequencies in that range, primarily from Starlink satellites in their operational orbits rather than those still in the process of raising their orbits after launch. They also detected broadband emissions over the entire range as well as one signal at 143.05 megahertz that was likely reflections from the French GRAVES space surveillance radar. The emissions, researchers said, likely come from electromagnetic interference from subsystems within the spacecraft. There are no international regulations regarding such emissions from spacecraft, in contrast to rules for terrestrial equipment. “This study represents the latest effort to better understand satellite constellations’ impact on radio astronomy,” said Federico Di Vruno, co-director of the International Astronomical Union’s Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference and lead author of the study being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics . Astronomers had theorized that such emissions could be detected, he noted in a statement. “Our observations confirm it is measurable.” It’s unclear what effect the electromagnetic interference emissions from Starlink satellites would have on radio astronomy, but astronomers noted that it spans one frequency range between 150.05 and 153 megahertz that is protected for radio astronomy by the International Telecommunication Union. The emissions do not violate any regulations, and astronomers noted that SpaceX has been willing to talk about ways to mitigate any interference. That includes design changes already made to its next generation of Starlink satellites that can reduce those emissions. However, astronomers said that similar emissions are likely from other satellite constellations, creating additional interference. “Our simulations show that the larger the constellation, the more important this effect becomes as the radiation from all satellites adds up,” said Benjamin Winkel of the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), a co-author on the study, in a statement. “This makes us not only worried about the existing constellations but even more about the planned ones, and also about the absence of clear regulation that protects the radio astronomy bands from unintended radiation,” he said. Astronomers have raised concerns for several years about the potential deleterious impact of satellite constellations on astronomy. That has included both the deliberate radio transmissions from such satellites as well as reflected sunlight that can interfere with optical observations. In January, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds several optical and radio astronomy observatories, announced a coordination agreement with SpaceX to mitigate the impacts of Starlink satellites on astronomy. That features efforts to reduce the brightness of Starlink satellites to least magnitude 7 as well as agreeing not to transmit while passing over major radio observatories. During a town hall session at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society June 5, NSF officials said a similar coordination agreement had been reached with OneWeb, with more details to be released in the near future. Astronomers involved in this study said they hope the detection of the electromagnetic interference emissions from the Starlink satellites will encourage other operators to take steps to mitigate similar emissions from their satellites. “We believe that the early recognition of this situation gives astronomy and large constellation operators an opportunity to work together on technical mitigations pro-actively, in parallel to the necessary discussions to develop suitable regulations,” said Gyula Józsa of MPIfR and Rhodes University in South Africa.
As two companies prepare to begin or resume commercial suborbital human spaceflights, they are facing uncertainty about how the safety of the people on those flights will be regulated. Virgin Galactic conducted its first commercial flight of its VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo vehicle June 29 , flying three Italian payload specialists on a research mission designated Galactic 01. The company plans to begin monthly flights of private astronauts on that vehicle as soon as early August. It joins Blue Origin, which started flying paying customers on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle in 2021. New Shepard has been grounded after an engine problem on a September 2022 payload-only flight, although Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said at a June 6 conference that the company would be ready to resume flights “within the next few weeks.” The company has not provided any further updates on flight plans. Both companies operate under a regulatory regime by the Federal Aviation Administration that focuses on the safety of the uninvolved public. Federal law sharply restricts the FAA’s ability to enact regulations for the safety of spaceflight participants on commercial vehicles. This restriction, called a “moratorium” by some in the field and a “learning period” by others, limits the FAA’s ability to enact such regulations to accidents that caused death or injury, or had the potential to cause death or injury. That restriction was included in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 and, at the time, was to last eight years, giving industry time to build up flight experience upon which regulations could be based. It has been extended several times and is now currently set to expire at the end of September. Many in industry have been lobbying for another extension, arguing that companies are only now beginning to fly vehicles on a routine basis, allowing them to develop that experience the restriction was designed to foster. “The issue of the learning period is, should the government be limited to only regulate if there is evidence requiring regulation or should they be allowed to regulate prospectively without data, without any specific reason to regulate?” said Jim Muncy of PoliSpace during a panel discussion on the topic by the Beyond Earth Institute in May. A report by the RAND Corporation in April, though, recommended that the current restrictions be allowed to expire this year . It concluded that doing so would allow the FAA and industry to move forward on developing regulations in gradual, coordinated process. “It doesn’t mean we’re recommending a large stockpile of regulations immediately. In fact, it’s just the opposite,” said Bruce McClintock, senior policy researcher at RAND, during the Beyond Earth webinar. “We would broadly call this expanding the learning period to include more tools and resources.” It’s unclear if the current restriction can be extended. The House and Senate have been working on their versions of reauthorization legislation for the FAA, but neither currently includes any language about the learning period. The House Science Committee is working on a separate commercial space bill that could address the issue. However, any bill faces long odds of passage before Oct. 1. “We have a divided Congress, so the ability to move an extension through may be a bit challenging this year,” said Caryn Schenewerk, president of CS Consulting who previously worked on regulatory issues for Relativity Space and SpaceX, during the webinar. Failure to achieve an extension, she said, may be less of an active decision by Congress than a side effect of broader debates between the Republican-led House and Democratic-led Senate. Should the restriction expire on Oct. 1, FAA officials have said they do not have a set of regulations ready to be enacted, but are looking at ways of cooperating with industry to shorten the development time for spaceflight participant safety rules. Mike Moses, president of spaceline missions and safety at Virgin Galactic, said in an interview after the Galactic 01 flight he has been encouraged about discussions his company, along with Blue Origin and SpaceX, have had with the FAA on how regulations could be developed. “The idea would be to take the data we’ve learned and use that to craft very specific, focused development areas,” he said, emphasizing the need for performance-based regulations given the different technical approaches those three companies are taking for human spaceflight. “One set of regulations just won’t apply to all.” He also played down any impact on the industry, or the debate on regulations, from the June 18 accident of a commercial deep-sea submersible, Titan, built and operated by OceanGate. That accident, which killed the five people on board, raised scrutiny about the level of regulation of that industry and parallels with commercial spaceflight, given both are forms of adventure tourism with similar clientele; one of the people killed on Titan, Hamish Harding, flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard in 2022. Moses said any comparison of that accident with commercial spaceflight is an “apples-to-oranges” one given that there is existing regulation of commercial spacecraft to protect the uninvolved public. “It certainly drives accountability. You’re not totally unsupervised,” he said. “It’s a very different thing in comparison to OceanGate.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A European mission to unravel some of the biggest mysteries in the universe is underway thanks to a launch from an American rocket. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off at 11:12 a.m. Eastern July 1 from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. The rocket deployed its payload, the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft, 41 minutes later after placing it on a trajectory to the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point. The rocket’s booster, on its second flight after launching the Ax-2 private astronaut mission in May, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. “It was really a fantastic launch,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher at a post-launch briefing. “This is a very important mission for the European Space Agency.” The two-ton Euclid spacecraft, built by Thales Alenia Space, will spend a month traveling to the L-2 point, 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth in the direction opposite the sun. Once there, it will undergo a two-month commissioning period before beginning its science mission. Carole Mundell, ESA’s director of science, said that commissioning work includes turning on the two main instruments on the spacecraft and calibrating the data, while also confirming the thermal stability of the system. “The optics are so precise we should have diffraction-limited images, so we want to make sure we are getting that quality of images and that our spectra are as we expect.” The 1.4-billion-euro ($1.5 billion) mission will spend six years conducting a detailed survey of one third of the sky using a visible camera and near-infrared spectrometer and photometer. Astronomers will use those observations of millions of galaxies to test the validity of various models for dark matter and dark energy, which together comprise 95% of the universe. Scientists involved with the mission are optimistic that Euclid’s observations will help them understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy. “It’s a really great time to be a cosmologist,” said Henk Hoekstra, a member of the 2,000-person Euclid Consortium of scientists and engineers who have worked on the mission, during a pre-launch briefing June 30. “The launch of Euclid really changes cosmology into the future.” Euclid will collect a massive amount of data: an estimated 170 petabytes (one petabyte is 1,000 terabytes) over its planned six-year mission. That will be augmented by complementary surveys by several ground-based telescopes. Nine data centers, eight in Europe and one in the United States, will archive the data. Although Euclid was developed for cosmology, project scientists say the data should be useful for a wide range of other studies, from objects in our solar system to the evolution of galaxies. “This dataset will be transformational across a huge range of astrophysics projects,” said Jason Rhodes, chair of the Euclid Consortium Board. “This is data that is going to be mined by astrophysicists for decades to come.” NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, under development for launch in 2027, will perform dark energy studies similar to Euclid. “It will be doing similar science but in a different way,” said Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, after the launch. She said the two missions should be complementary in much the same was as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter missions to study the sun. “The partnership with Euclid and Roman is going to unlock so much of our dark universe.” While NASA is a partner with ESA on Euclid, providing infrared detectors for one of its instruments, the launch took place from Florida because of a contract ESA signed with SpaceX. ESA turned to the Falcon 9 after losing access to the Soyuz rocket, originally selected to launch the mission, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. “We owe them a huge thanks. Without them our satellite would be sitting on the ground for two years,” Mike Healy, head of science projects at ESA, said of SpaceX before the launch. The first discussions with SpaceX were in May of 2022, he said, followed by feasibility studies and testing to ensure Euclid was compatible with the Falcon 9. While ESA announced in October its intent to launch Euclid and another mission, Hera, on the Falcon 9 , the agency did not sign a final contract with SpaceX until the end of January. “We had to squash what we normally do in three years into five months,” he said of the switch to the Falcon 9. That required dealing with a number of challenges ranging from technical issues of integrating the spacecraft with the rocket to dealing with U.S. export control policies. “I’m very happy with the relationship we have with SpaceX,” said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid project manager at ESA, before the launch. “They are incredibly skilled in problem solving. It’s a most valuable experience.”
After completing an upgrade to the International Space Station’s power system in June, NASA is moving ahead with plans to add two more solar arrays to the station. Boeing and Redwire announced June 28 that they signed a contract for a fourth pair of ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or IROSA, for the station. Redwire developed the array technology, known as ROSA, which uses solar arrays that are launched in a rolled-up form factor and then extend once in space. The companies had previously partnered on six IROSA arrays installed on the station starting in 2021. The third, and originally final, pair of IROSA arrays arrived at the station in early June on a SpaceX cargo Dragon spacecraft. NASA astronauts Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg installed them on two spacewalks June 9 and 15. The new arrays are designed to augment the station’s original solar arrays, which have degraded over the years. The IROSA are installed on top of arrays, partially shadowing them but providing a net increase in power. Each array generates more than 20 kilowatts of power. “The ability to augment that power is really important for us,” said Dina Contella, NASA ISS operations integration manager, during a June 1 briefing to preview those spacewalks. “The ability to bring our power up to normal levels and even a little higher for future research is really critical for the space station.” At that briefing, she said there was interest in installing a fourth IROSA pair. “We do have plans in place to try and build a fourth set of arrays, funding notwithstanding.” In a June 30 statement, NASA spokesperson Josh Finch said NASA and Boeing, the ISS prime contractor, “have a plan in place” for the fourth IROSA pair. Those arrays would be delivered to the station in late 2025 or early 2026. He said the contract modification for the new arrays was valued at a little more than $35 million. Redwire did not disclose the value of its contract with Boeing to provide the arrays. It saw the award as a validation of its overall ROSA technology, which was also used on NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test planetary defense spacecraft and will be incorporated on the Power and Propulsion Element for the lunar Gateway. “We are proud of the successful deployment of six IROSAs on the ISS to date, making it the gold standard for large-scale power generation with proven flight heritage,” said Peter Cannito, chief executive of Redwire, in a statement. “The six IROSAs installed on the ISS are innovative examples to support further utilization with technologies and systems that were not envisioned when the ISS was designed and built,” said John Mulholland, Boeing vice president and program manager for the ISS, in the statement.
A Chinese satellite manufacturer and constellation operator says it has successfully demonstrated space-to-ground high-speed laser communications which could help China break bottlenecks in getting data from space down to the ground. Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST) recently carried out the test with its Jilin-1 MF02A04 remote sensing satellite. The test was conducted in cooperation with the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Changguang Satellite Technology itself an offshoot from the state-owned Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Established in 2014, CGST now has 108 remote sensing satellites in orbit and aims to expand its Jilin-1 constellation to 300 satellites by 2025 . Chen Shanbo, chief designer of Jilin-1 MF02A04, said in a statement that the test was the first ultra-high-speed (10Gbps) for commercial applications in China, and signals numerous breakthroughs in key technologies. The connection speeds during the tests achieved 10 Gbps, far above the previous best of 1 Gbps using radio frequency transmissions. The AIR team told state media that a number of technologies were developed for the tests, including atmospheric channel prediction, task planning and scheduling, rapid capture, signal chain construction and adaptive optical correction of laser signals, and error-free transmission under complex atmospheric conditions. Jilin-1 satellites generally deliver panchromatic imagery with a resolution of between 0.50 and 0.75-meters. Other satellites in the constellation have video, multispectral, multipurpose, infrared and other capabilities. CGST published images delivered to Earth through the transmission tests. State media noted the breakthrough will improve the transmission capacity and security of China’s space information network. The breakthrough could enable China to increase its transmission rates as the number of planned low Earth orbit constellations grows . With the additional use of inter-satellite laser links, this could help China overcome some of the challenges of a relatively lower level of global ground station infrastructure. However, while the tests proved the accuracy required from narrow beam optical transmissions of data to the ground through the atmosphere, other aspects such as the development of economical optical terminals were not discussed in Chinese sources. In a related development CGST launched 41 new Jilin-1 satellites June 15. Among these were the Jilin-1 02A 01 and 02 satellites, based on a new satellite platform. The pair carry laser communication payloads which will be used to verify inter-satellite and satellite-ground high-speed communication technologies. Satellite ground segment providers around the globe are looking at the viability of satellite-to-ground optical communications, noting both challenges and opportunities . National space agencies and the U.S. Space Force have also been developing laser communications experiments and systems. NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 ( PTD-3 ) mission has demonstrated 200 Gbps downlink rates. In China, commercial companies such as Deep Link Communications and Laser Starcom, both established with core personnel formerly of CAS and other state-owned aerospace players, are developing inter-satellite and other space laser communication technology products.
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile is continuing to search for funds ahead of deploying commercial direct-to-device satellites next year after getting more breathing room with a $60 million discounted share sale. Some 12.5 million shares were sold June 27 at around $4.75 each, about 27% less than where they were trading before the sale announcement, topping up the company’s cash reserves to roughly $200 million. The Texas-based startup last announced a share sale in November to raise at least $75 million — a year and a half after getting around $417 million through its IPO — following manufacturing delays and cost overruns for the satellites it is building in-house. AST SpaceMobile said it is currently burning through cash at a rate of about $40 million every three months. In addition, the venture expects to use between $15 million and $25 million per quarter for non-launch-related capital expenditures, which it said may fluctuate over time. AST SpaceMobile also expects to pay around $45 million to $50 million over the next three months for launch and related services. “Given the substantial capital needs of our business and business plans, we are in discussions with various financing sources to enhance liquidity and may raise additional funds from such sources after completion of this offering,” AST SpaceMobile said in a regulatory filing. Potential funding options include debt and more sales of equity, including to strategic companies. AST SpaceMobile has a strong track record of attracting strategic investment, with investors to date including Japanese technology conglomerate Rakuten and Vodafone, the largest pan-European and African telecoms company. But in a regulatory filing to clarify statements an AST SpaceMobile executive gave financial news service MergerMarket, which reported June 12 that the venture was “racing forward” with potential strategic partners, the startup said it had not yet received commitments from any of them. AST SpaceMobile chief financial officer Sean Wallace said it has not “entered into any agreement with respect to financing from strategic partners and no such transaction with a strategic partner is imminent.” SpaceX is slated to launch AST SpaceMobile’s first five commercial satellites early next year, although it is unclear how quickly the venture could ramp up its business as it and others in the emerging direct-to-device market await regulatory clearances. AST SpaceMobile announced June 21 that multiple everyday smartphones had achieved 4G LTE download speeds during tests with BlueWalker 3, the company’s prototype that SpaceX launched to low Earth orbit in September. The venture announced its first BlueWalker 3-enabled first voice call with a standard smartphone April 25, helping send shares on an upward trajectory until recently. The shares are currently trading at around $4.70 on NASDAQ, down about 30% from where they were the day before AST SpaceMobile announced its latest share sale.
The Defense Innovation Unit is seeking proposals from commercial launch companies that can provide “responsive and precise point-to-point delivery of cargo to, from, and through space.” The solicitation, published June 30 , asks companies to submit proposals by July 17. DIU, a DoD agency created to bring commercially developed technology into military programs, is looking for commercial options to use space launch vehicles to move a “wide variety of cargo where it is needed, when it is needed.” Companies selected for this project will have to demonstrate autonomous cargo delivery in at least one of three modes: from Earth to a designated orbit, return from space to Earth to a precise point of recovery, and through space from one orbit to another. DIU said the goal is to assess the capabilities of commercial launch vehicles to support DoD in space logistics operations. Other military organizations also are looking at the use of rockets for responsive launch and cargo deliveries. A project to evaluate using rockets for point-to-point transportation is being pursued by the Air Force and the U.S. Transportation Command. The U.S. Space Force, meanwhile, is overseeing a “ responsive space ” initiative to assess how commercial rockets could be called up on short notice during national security emergencies. “The ability to rapidly re-constitute space-based capabilities or re-supply payloads or cargo at precise locations for time-sensitive logistics (in-space or terrestrially) is a critical but presently non-existent capability,” said DIU. With the emergence of in-space manufacturing and in-orbit activities requiring logistics support, “there is a need to deliver and return payloads and cargo accurately, safely and on-demand,” DIU said. Proposals should be based on mature technologies so bidders can “show key elements of a brassboard or flight-ready hardware within 90 days of award,” said DIU. The concept has to be “minimally viable and flight-ready within 24 months.”
A solid rocket motor for Europe’s Vega C rocket malfunctioned during a static-fire test June 28, likely pushing back the vehicle’s return to flight to 2024. In a June 29 statement, Avio, the Italian company that is the prime contractor for the Vega, said a Zefiro 40 motor experienced an anomaly during a test that was part of effort to requalify the motor after a launch failure last December. The static-fire test was intended to demonstrate the performance of new carbon-carbon material in the motor’s nozzle throat. Avio replaced that material after similar material from a Ukrainian supplier eroded, causing a loss of thrust during a December 2022 launch of the Vega C . That rocket uses the Zefiro 40 for its second stage. According to Avio, the new carbon-carbon material performed as expected. However, an unspecified anomaly took place 40 seconds into the firing. That caused a reduction of pressure in the motor before the 97-second firing ended. The company did not disclose additional details about the nature of the anomaly or loss of performance. “This aspect will require further investigation and testing activity to be conducted by Avio and the European Space Agency to ensure optimal performance conditions,” the company stated, adding that it would be days of weeks before the investigation into the anomaly is completed. “We have to see in detail what this anomaly will mean” for the Vega C, said Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, during a June 29 press conference after a meeting of the ESA Council in Stockholm. “This will have an impact because it was a very important milestone on our roadmap to the return to flight for Vega C.” The test was one of the key steps in the effort to return the Vega C to flight . Avio also said in March, when the investigation into the launch failure was completed, that it would carry out a broader review of the supply chain of the vehicle to look for any other potential issues. The Zefiro 40 is not used on the original version of Vega. Avio said it is proceeding with plans to resume Vega launches in September. Before the test incident, the Vega C was expected to make its next launch late this year carrying the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite that is part of the Copernicus program. This incident makes a return to flight for Vega C this year increasingly unlikely, but Avio did not comment on a new schedule. “The planning for the return to flight of Vega C is currently under evaluation, pending further analysis and investigation,” Avio said in the statement. At the ESA Council meeting, Aschbacher said that the council agreed with a recommendation from ESA’s inspector general to shift the launch of the EarthCARE spacecraft, an Earth science mission, from Vega C to Falcon 9. He said that was linked to both changes in the design of EarthCARE that would have required modifications to the Vega C payload fairing to accommodate it as well as the December 2022 launch failure. EarthCARE is scheduled for launch in 2024.
A European spacecraft is set to launch on a mission to help astronomers resolve an “embarrassing situation” in cosmology, although the launch itself is another kind of embarrassing situation for Europe. The European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft is ready to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff is scheduled for 11:11 a.m. Eastern July 1 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with favorable weather expected. Euclid features a telescope 1.2 meters across equipped with a camera operating at visible wavelengths and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer. The two-ton spacecraft will operate at the Earth-sun L-2 point also used by the James Webb Space Telescope 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, generating the largest and most accurate 3-D map of the universe to date. Astronomers hope that Euclid’s observations will shed light on two of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: the nature of both dark energy and dark matter that, combined, comprise 95% of the universe. “We’re starting from this embarrassing situation,” said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid project manager at ESA, during a June 23 pre-launch briefing. “Only 5% of all the universe is made of atoms and particles that we are all made of. All the rest, 95%, is made of other things that we don’t really know.” “Euclid should provide a decisive response on the nature of dark energy,” said Yannick Mellier, an astronomer at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and leader of the Euclid Consortium. Work on Euclid started a decade ago, with an industrial team led by Thales Alenia Space selected to build it. ESA previously planned to launch Euclid on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana, but was forced to find a new ride when Russia ended Soyuz operations from that European spaceport shortly after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With no other European launch vehicles available — the remaining Ariane 5 vehicles had been allocated to other missions and the debut of the Ariane 6 has suffered significant delays — ESA was forced to look elsewhere to launch the 1.4-billion-euro ($1.5 billion) mission. “We were left completely in nowhere land, without any launcher,” said Racca. “It was an incredibly tense period because, in front of us, was the prospect of having to store the spacecraft for two years or more.” In October 2022, ESA announced it selected SpaceX to launch Euclid on a Falcon 9 . Racca said ESA started studies in the summer of 2022 to see if Euclid was compatible with Falcon 9 after being designed for Soyuz. The contract was finalized in December. Paolo Musi, Euclid program manager at Thales Alenia Space, said that initial analysis showed no issues by switching to the Falcon 9, which was verified by subsequent testing. “We can launch in July because did not have to change any of the hardware.” While NASA is a partner on Euclid, providing infrared detectors for one of its instruments, ESA arranged the Falcon 9 launch directly with SpaceX. Officials declined at the pre-launch press conference to disclose the cost of the launch vehicle change, citing the commercial nature of the contract with SpaceX. “What we paid for SpaceX is commercial confidence,” Racca said. He said ESA had already spent “a lot of money” on the Soyuz launch when that contract was terminated. “We had quite some extra cost.” “It was a big relief to be able to go from Cape Canaveral instead of Kourou,” he added.
The Space Development Agency on June 28 released a final request f or proposals for its next procurement of 100 satellites as the agency continues to build out a military constellation in low Earth orbit. These 100 satellites, named Alpha, will be part of a mesh network known as Transport Layer Tranche 2. The Transport Layer Tranche 2 also includes 72 Beta satellites for which SDA already has requested bids . The procurement of 100 Alpha satellites will be split between two vendors. SDA issued a draft solicitation in May. The final proposals are due July 28. Each Alpha satellite will have at least three, or up to four optical communications terminals, a Ka-band and a Link 16 payload. These satellites also will be equipped with on-board command-and-control data processors and autonomous navigation payloads. Transport Layer Tranche 2 “will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe,” said SDA. SDA, an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a layered network of military satellites . The Transport Layer will serve as a tactical network to move data to users around the world, communicating classified data such as early warnings of missile launches. The overall constellation, which SDA calls the proliferated warfighter space architecture , includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Transport Layer Tranche 2 to launch in 2026 The agency already has acquired satellites for Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 of the Transport Layer and the Tracking Layer. The first launch of Tranche 0 satellites took place in April and a second Tranche 0 launch is targeted for late July. Tranche 1 is projected to launch in 2024 and Tranche 2 in 2026. The proliferated constellation is made up of small satellites supplied by multiple vendors, all interconnected via optical laser links. The Transport Layer Tranche 2 will be SDA’s largest procurement to date. SDA said Tranche 2, when deployed, will add enough nodes to the network to provide global coverage for U.S. military users. 
Firefly Aerospace signed an agreement with Lockheed Martin to launch a small satellite aboard Firefly’s Alpha vehicle. The agreement, announced June 29, is to launch a Lockheed Martin technology demonstration mission. Firefly did not disclose the estimated timeline for this launch. “We are working with Firefly because of their innovative performance in offering access to space for small payloads on Firefly Alpha,” said Dan Tenney, vice president of strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin Space. Lockheed Martin is developing a number of self-funded space experiments to demonstrate technologies for government customers. The company in 2021 signed an agreement to launch up to 58 payloads with ABL Space , a small-satellite launcher in which Lockheed Martin has made a strategic investment. ABL’s first launch attempt in January failed and the company has not yet announced when it will try to launch again. A Lockheed Martin spokesperson told SpaceNews the company continues to work with ABL. “We still have our agreement with ABL and are assisting with their return to flight. While ABL works toward their next flight, we have launch requirements to meet for our tech demos. We look forward to working with Firefly to meet those needs.” Two upcoming Alpha launches Firefly, founded in 2014, has launched its Alpha rocket twice from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The Alpha launch vehicle was designed to lift more than 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. Alpha’s first launch failed in September 2021 . The second launch in October 2022 reached orbit although the payloads were inserted into a lower orbit than planned and reentered Earth’s atmosphere after several days. The company is under contract to launch a Space Force mission called “Victus Nox ” sometime this summer, and a demonstration missions for NASA under the Venture Class Launch Services contract. “We have the infrastructure, technologies, systems, and a dedicated team in place to provide on-demand launch services for both government and commercial customers,” said Bill Weber, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. 
Updated 4:40 p.m. Eastern with post-flight comments . SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. — After nearly two decades of development, Virgin Galactic conducted its first commercial SpaceShipTwo suborbital flight June 29. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle VSS Unity, separated from its VMS Eve mothership aircraft at about 11:29 a.m. Eastern above cloudy skies in southern New Mexico. The vehicles took off from Spaceport America at 10:30 a.m. Eastern. Unity, flying a mission designated Galactic 01, fired its hybrid rocket motor for approximately 60 seconds. It reached a peak altitude of 85. 1 kilometers before gliding to a runway landing at the spaceport at 11:43 a.m. Eastern. “It was excellent,” Mike Moses, president of spaceline missions and safety at Virgin Galactic, said in an interview after the flight. “Everything was right down the middle.” The Galactic 01 mission was a research flight for the Italian Air Force and Italy’s National Research Council. Virgin Galactic and the Italian Air Force signed the contract for the flight in October 2019, agreeing to fly three Italian payload specialists on a dedicated research flight. The mission, called Virtute 1 by the Italian government , carried Col. Walter Villadei and Lt. Col. Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci of Italy’s National Research Council. The three planned to conduct 13 experiments during the mission, ranging from biomedical data collection to microgravity studies of fluid mechanics and combustion. In a press conference after the flight, the three Italians said they were pleased with the flight. “It was much better than expected,” Villadei, who commanded Virtute 1, said. He noted the crew was able to carry out all their planned experiments. Villadei, who has previously trained with Axiom Space for a commercial flight to the International Space Station and was a backup for that company’s Ax-2 mission in May, said he believed suborbital flights like this were a good stepping stone to orbital missions. “It is a good environment and opportunity to really test all the things that astronauts are supposed to do once they get to the ISS.” The research nature of the flight left them with only a little time to enjoy the flight. “The time to look outside the window was very short,” said Landolfi. “I had an opportunity to watch very quickly outside and it was beautiful.” Also on the flight was Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut trainer who previously flew on VSS Unity in 2021. He flew to monitor the research environment during the flight and “do a holistic evaluation of the research mission so that we can continually improve on the experience,” said Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, in a June 28 interview. VSS Unity was flown by Mike Masucci, making his fourth spaceflight, along with Nicola Pecile, a former Italian Air Force pilot who now works for Virgin and was on his first spaceflight. Company founder Richard Branson announced plans for Virgin Galactic in September 2004, just before SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize with a pair of suborbital flights from the Mojave Air and Space Port. Virgin Galactic would license SpaceShipOne’s technology from vehicle developer Scaled Composites and funder Paul Allen for a larger vehicle capable of carrying up to six passengers. At the time, Virgin Galactic contemplated beginning commercial service as soon as 2007. However, development of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, now called VMS Eve, and SpaceShipTwo took far longer than anticipated. The company also suffered the loss of the first SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Enterprise, in an October 2014 test flight accident that killed Scaled Composites pilot Mike Alsbury. The company appeared ready to begin commercial service in 2021 with the Unity 22 flight that July that carried Branson along with several Virgin Galactic employees. The Italian Air Force flight was scheduled for that fall, followed by a maintenance period for both VMS Eve and VSS Unity. However, Virgin decided in October 2021 to begin that maintenance period early and delayed the Italian flight. Virgin Galactic resumed test flights of VSS Unity this spring, including a May 25 flight called Unity 25 that was the vehicle’s first suborbital spaceflight since the Unity 22 mission. After Unity 25, the company said it was ready to begin commercial service with the Galactic 01 flight. At that time the company said it would follow Galactic 01 with a series of private astronaut missions on a monthly cadence, serving a backlog of about 800 people who have signed up to date. The first of those, Galactic 02, is scheduled for August. Moses said the company has plans laid out for monthly flights through the end of the year. That pace is driven primarily on the inspections of the vehicles between flights, a process that will be simpler and shorter for its future Delta-class spaceplanes the company is designing. “As we do it and we don’t find anything we’ll be able to reduce that a little bit and go a little faster,” he said. “But the reality is while we just have this one spaceship, flying once a month is a good cadence for us.” “This historic flight was our first commercial flight and our first dedicated commercial research mission, ushering in a new era of repeatable and reliable access to space for private passengers and researchers,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in a post-flight statement. He confirmed plans to begin private astronaut flights in August. The financial markets, though, were not impressed. Virgin Galactic shares closed down nearly 10.8% June 29, with most of the losses from trading after the flight.
China has delivered a set of satellites to Egypt as part of a program to develop the latter country’s capacity to assemble, integrate and test satellites. China delivered two satellite prototypes and one flight model to Egypt in March. Final assembly and testing were carried out at the Egyptian Space Agency’s satellite assembly and test center. A ceremony to mark the occasion was held by the agency June 25. The China-funded MisrSat II Satellite and AIT Centre implementation phase was initiated in 2019. The flight model will be transported to China for launch in the second half of this year. MisrSat II will have a resolution of around two meters and make an effective contribution to the Egypt Vision 2030 for sustainable development, according to Sherif Sedky, chief executive officer of the Egyptian Space Agency. The completion of the project will provide Egypt with the integrated capacity to assemble and test satellites, according to Chinese state media. “Through the development of the electric model and the mechanical thermal control model of satellites, especially when all the work was completed in Egypt’s assembly testing hall, we can see that Egypt is able to run all the tests on its assembly system, testing system, and large scale experimental system including mechanical system and thermal experiment system. It ensures Egypt can develop its future aerospace industry,” Cui Yufu, chief designer of MisrSat II satellite project, told CCTV. The partnership is different to many of China’s previous engagements with countries with limited space industry capacity. China has in recent years enacted a strategy of offering turnkey projects which include satellite manufacture and launch as well as possible financing mechanisms. The country has launched communications and other satellites for countries including Belarus, Laos, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nigeria. China earlier this year carried out a pair of launches to put the Horus-1 and -2 satellites in orbit for Egypt. This new project, noted as being part of China’s strategic Belt and Road Initiative, however sees transfer of technology and know-how to Egypt. “With this apparent shift from turnkey projects to the more technology and know-how transfer elements seen here, China may be emulating similar programs other countries have executed, such as the relationship between South Korea and the UAE that resulted in a similar trajectory of satellite development and knowledge exported from Korea to the UAE, or the numerous know-how and technology transfer projects between SSTL in the UK and several emerging space programmes,” says Ian Christensen, director of private sector programs at Secure World Foundation. China is looking to build bridges in a similar manner with new engagement with the United Arab Emirates, which has announced a number of ambitious missions. Space resources start-up Origin Space, the UAE’s National Space Science and Technology Centre and the University of Hong Kong signed letters of intent this year regarding establishing a space technology center in Abu Dhabi. Chinese entities have entered into other agreements with Gulf countries in the past year. “I think it’s important to look at this in context of China’s overall economic and diplomatic interests in Africa. China has clearly in recent years made a significant effort around building relationships throughout Africa as a source of infrastructure development funds and projects across multiple sectors,” Christensen said, regarding the project with Egypt. “The linkage of this Misr II satellite project to the Belt and Road Initiative can be seen as a direct indicator that the Government of China sees space and satellite technology as part of the suite of offerings it is able to bring to bear in building relationships in Africa. “In this regard, the project can be seen as part of broader competition for partnership and access to developing markets on the African continent.” In the context of space, the U.S. and China are both seeking partners for their respective Artemis and International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) moon initiatives. This month India became the 27th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, while China has been attracting partners and aims to formalize agreements with founding members of ILRS Cooperation Organization (ILRSCO) later this year.
The U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center awarded Raytheon Technologies a $625 million contract to produce nuclear-hardened satellite communications terminals. The 11-year contract, announced June 28, is for production of FAB-T terminals used to connect strategic bombers and reconnaissance aircraft with classified military communications satellites. This was a sole-source contract to Raytheon. The company since 2014 has been the Air Force’s primary contractor for FAB-T, short for Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-Sight Terminals. The new contract is for production and logistics support of an unspecified number of FAB-T terminals that will fly on U.S. Air Force B-52 strategic bombers and RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft. Development contract in 2020 The $625 million deal follows a $442.3 million contract the Air Force awarded Raytheon in 2020 to design and develop a FAB-T terminal for aircraft communications with the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) network of classified satellites. The Air Force is seeking to update decades-old B-52 bomber and RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft satcom terminals — designed to connect with legacy Milstar (Military Strategic and Tactical Relay) satellites — to the newer AEHF constellation. The B-52 and RC-135 are critical nodes in the U.S. nuclear command, control, and communications ( NC3 ) architecture. During a nuclear war, these strategic aircraft have to be able to receive orders from national command authorities. Program under scrutiny Now run by the U.S. Space Force, the FAB-T program was recently identified as one of the service’s most troubled procurements. A February 2023 report the Space Force’s senior acquisition executive Frank Calvelli submitted to Congress notes that FAB-T is more than a decade behind schedule. “The original FAB-T contractor failed to develop a suitable technical solution, resulting in over a decade of schedule delays against the original schedule baseline,” said the report. “As a result, in 2014 the program office re-competed the contract and awarded a new contract to a different vendor.” Boeing was the FAB-T prime contractor before the Air Force opted to go with Raytheon. Calvelli’s report said there were a number of issues that contributed to FAB-T’s problems, including “the original contractor inability to develop a suitable technical solution, government deficiency in selecting a contractor with the requisite skill set to develop the solution, integration delays due to aircraft platform availability, and operational test delays resulting from government’s lack of timely acquisition of relevant threat testing assets.”
SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. — Virgin Galactic is set to conduct its first commercial SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceflight June 29, one that will demonstrate the readiness of the vehicle for commercial operations as well as its role as a research platform. The company made final preparations June 28 for the Galactic 01 mission, the second suborbital flight of the company’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane in as many months. Virgin has billed the flight as the company’s long-delayed transition to commercial operations after an extended test campaign. Virgin Galactic is planning for a takeoff of its VMS Eve mothership aircraft with the VSS Unity spaceplane attached at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern June 29. Unity will separate from Eve nearly an hour later, igniting its hybrid rocket motor for its suborbital flight, then landing back at the spaceport. The Galactic 01 mission, Virgin Galactic’s first fully commercial flight, will carry three Italian payload specialists to perform a set of experiments. Walter Villadei and Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci of Italy’s National Research Council plan to conduct 13 experiments ranging from biomedical data collection to studies of combustion in microgravity during the flight. Accompanying them in the cabin will be Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor who was on the July 2021 flight of Unity that carried company founder Richard Branson. He will assess the research flight experience during this flight. While the bulk of Virgin Galactic’s business will be flying private astronauts — the company has about 800 people who have signed up for suborbital flights — it argues that research flights like Galactic 01 will be an important part of its business. “It’s perfect that this first commercial mission is a research mission. That shows that this is another lab environment that is producing science and technologies that we can invest into the people back on Earth,” said Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, in a June 28 interview. The company has flown research payloads on prior test flights, like those provided through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. That included work by Bandla herself on the July 2021 flight. This mission, though, is devoted to research with a test program developed by the Italian team. “It is a combination of everything that we have tested on our spaceflights to date,” she said. Bennett will be on board to monitor how the Italian payload specialists carry out their work. “He will look at how everyone’s moving around the cabin, conducting their research, and do a holistic evaluation of the research mission so that we can continually improve on the experience,” she said. Much of the training for research flights is the same as private astronaut flights. The key difference, Bandla said, is practicing the “choreography” of activities by the researchers during their brief flight, as well as working through the payload safety reviews for the experiments. As the company moves into regular operations, it plans to conduct research flights on a set schedule, mixed in among the private astronaut missions. “The goal is to have it at the same time each year so that researchers can time their grants and their proposals through whatever agency funds their research and have predictable and reliable access for their science,” she said. The emphasis, she added, is on having a steady cadence of flights, both for researchers looking to test experiments before flying them into orbit and for those for whom suborbital flights are sufficient. “The number one thing that we hear is we want repeatable and regular access to space,” she said of feedback from the research community.
TAMPA, Fla. — Germany’s OroraTech has ordered eight more thermal imaging satellites from Spire Global to expand its wildfire-monitoring constellation next year. Spire Global said June 28 it had signed a deal to build and operate the satellites, which are slated to launch in mid-2024 although the U.S.-based company has yet to pick a slot within its existing multi-launch-agreements. After announcing it had secured 15 million euros ($16 million) for its constellation plans in November, OroraTech CEO Thomas Grübler told SpaceNews that additional funding would be needed to build eight additional satellites. The satellites would be identical to FOREST-2 (Forest Observation and Recognition Experimental Smallsat Thermal Detector), a 6U spacecraft the size of six cubesats that SpaceX launched in a June 12 rideshare mission. FOREST-2’s thermal imager is designed to cover a width of 400 kilometers, four times OroraTech’s 15-month-old debut payload FOREST-1, among other improvements . OroraTech said that while FOREST-1 was intended to be a technology demonstrator for its thermal, mid-infrared and RGB cameras, it has been serving as an active fire monitoring instrument after exceeding expectations. The satellite is currently assisting Quebec’s fire agency as Canada experiences its most destructive wildfire season on record. According to OroraTech, eight additional satellites would give the venture sufficient coverage for monitoring wildfires in the afternoon, when most fires happen and when there is no coverage from publicly available satellites. The constellation would also help identify and track areas at risk of wildfires that are becoming increasingly prevalent as a result of climate change. Using Spire’s space-as-a-service business also enables the German venture to draw on the company’s global network of ground stations to downlink the data its constellation generates. Ultimately, OroraTech envisages a constellation in the next few years that would be big enough for a detection time of 30 minutes worldwide, using Spire’s ground network to alert customers within three minutes of detecting a wildfire. Spire and OroraTech are also working together on a Canadian Space Agency contract laying the groundwork for a publicly funded wildfire monitoring satellite.
The Spaceport Company, a startup developing floating launch pads for space rockets, is one of 17 companies selected to receive government funding this year under the National Security Innovation Capital program. The NSIC program , run by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, allocated $35 million in 2023 funding to 17 early-stage companies from different sectors of the tech industry, DIU said June 28. NSIC was established by Congress in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. The program was created in response to concerns that U.S. startups developing technologies with national security applications were having trouble securing capital from trusted U.S. sources — and were turning to foreign investors, risking the loss of their intellectual property to potential adversaries. “The lack of trusted capital delays the product development of U.S.-developed technologies, and leaves openings for capital from our adversaries to gain access,” DIU said in a news release. Sea-based space launch The Spaceport Company r ecently conducted a prototype demonstration of a sea-based launch platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The NSIC funding is for the “design and development of its first full platform for sea-based rocket launches,” DIU said. DoD views mobile launch pads that operate at sea as “one solution to the increasing congestion at major launch sites.” The Spaceport Company’s mobile solution, said DIU, “has the potential to enable more launches in more locations without incurring environmental risks to people or shore-based assets. NSIC funding will enable the company to build a full prototype and its first operational system.” The NSIC program has provided funding for several space industry ventures. In 2021 it awarded $2 million to Xplore , a startup focused on space infrastructure services. Earlier this year, the satellite-servicing startup Starfish Space received $3 million in NSIC funds, and the Earth observation startup Nuview got $2.75 million. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Above: Orbital is developing technology to provide energy for on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing with the support of two recent Small Business Innovation Research awards. Under a $75,000 U.S. Air Force contract announced in May, Above: Orbital is working with Ascent Solar Technologies on manufacturing thin-film solar photovoltaics in space. Above: Orbital also is developing rapidly deployable structures for space-based solar panels, communications antenna arrays and other large structures under a $1.7 million U.S. Space Force award announced in March. The awards highlight Above: Orbital’s commitment to making “commercial production a realistic, accessible and profitable enterprise,” Above: Orbital CEO Rhonda Stevenson told SpaceNews . “We’re not looking at doing more experimentation. We are now ready to go to that next level.” Above: Orbital is part of Above Space Development Corp., a Huntsville, Alabama-based startup previously known as Orbital Assembly Development Corp. The company changed its name in 2022 as its projects extended beyond assembling structures in orbit to include developing automated space platforms for defense and commercial applications. “We began to acquire a lot more skills and capabilities that didn’t just fit under the parameters of Orbital Assembly,” Stevenson said. Manufacturing thin-film solar photovoltaics terrestrially requires heavy equipment. “Probably 70 percent, 80 percent or more of the equipment weight is associated with creating a vacuum on the ground,” said Paul Warley Ascent Solar CEO. “We think we can get a lot of efficiencies through manufacturing this in space.” If on-orbit manufacturing of the thin film technology is possible, it could help orbital platforms fulfill their own energy needs. “We are looking for solutions to provide more power on orbit in a way that makes sense, is readily accessible and affordable,” Stevenson said. “Thin film is very lightweight and an affordable solar solution terrestrially. Being able to tap into that on orbit to complement other methodologies for an enhanced power supply is a critical piece in what on-orbit manufacturing needs to transition to a commercial enterprise.” The work Above: Orbital is performing under the $1.7 million SpaceWERX SBIR is complementary to the thin film manufacturing initiative. Above: Orbital is designing and developing prototype receivers for beamed energy in conjunction with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research Project , known as SSPIDR. “It’s a good time to develop energy solutions for on-orbit application,” Stevenson said. Through the two SBIR awards, Above: Orbital is “taking incremental steps to de-risk the overall effort of putting more platforms on orbit,” Stevenson said. “Energy is essential. It’s foundational to being able to provide more space in space.”
Innovative Rocket Technologies, known as iRocket, won a U.S. Space Force contract to demonstrate a reusable rocket engine for small launch vehicles. The $1.8 million agreement with the U.S. Space Systems Command is a Tactical Funding Increase, or TACFI, where the government and private investors split the cost 50/50. The New York-based startup, founded in 2018, develops rocket engines and plans to build a small launch vehicle. The 18-month TACFI contract, announced June 28, was awarded by AFWERX , a U.S. Air Force technology accelerator. “Under the contract, iRocket will further develop our highly reusable rocket engine,” said Asad Malik, founder and CEO. As part of the agreement, the company has to perform a full-duration static fire test for 120-180 seconds to demonstrate its engine, designed to produce 35,000-pounds of thrust, running on a combination of liquid oxygen (LOX) and methane fuel. The TACFI award follows a $1.5 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 contract awarded in 2020. “iRocket has a proprietary afterburning rocket engine that will be key in building a reusable small launch vehicle to lift 300 to 1,500 kilograms to orbit,” according to AFWERX. Malik said the company designed a 125-feet tall launch vehicle, called Shockwave, projected to launch in about five years. iRocket in 2022 closed a seed funding round led by Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm. Among its commercial customers is the space situational awareness startup Turion Space. The former commander of U.S. Transportation Command, retired Gen. Stephen Lyons , serves on iRocket’s board of directors.
LOS ANGELES – Ramon.Space has raised $26 million from Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group, the Abu Dhabi-based Strategic Development Fund and other investors. Grove Ventures, Deep Insight and UMC Capital, firms that have invested in Ramon.Space in the past, contributed additional funding. With the latest investment, Ramon.Space will expand production of computing technology designed to withstand the extreme temperatures, radiation, data transfer delays, and the size and power constraints of spaceflight. Facing growing demand, Ramon.Space has been looking in recent years for ways to build space computing infrastructure the way computing infrastructure is built for terrestrial markets: “high volume, high quality and high capacity,” Ramon.Space CEO Avi Shabtai told SpaceNews. “We were looking into finding a strategic partner who was interested in space as much as we were, and we found that to be Foxconn in Taiwan and Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn in charge of manufacturing,” Shabtai said. Under the partnership announced June 20 , Ramon.Space will develop and manufacture space computing products. Ingrasys will establish high-volume production, Shabtai said. The ability to manufacture radiation-resilient computing systems in high volume and in a cost-effective way will drive the expansion of the space computing market, Shabtai said. Increasingly, communications satellites are based on computing infrastructure rather than hardware tailor-made for a specific mission. “You can look at the communication satellites of tomorrow as computing systems that are implementing a satellite connectivity system,” Shabtai said. “The transition towards software-based computing systems will dominate all the next-generation communication, Earth-observation and, later on, data-centric satellites,” Shabtai said. Ingrasys CEO Benjamin Ting said in a statement, “Space computing is the foundation to leverage the infinite potential of space. We recognized that investing and partnering to manufacture Ramon.Space products was the perfect strategic move as they are the leader in this field.” Mohamed Musabah Al Mazrouei, Strategic Development Fund director of investments and portfolio management, said in a statement, “Our decision to invest in Ramon.Space is in perfect alignment with our strategic mandate, which emphasizes a focus on the space sector through private equity and venture capital. This venture capital investment not only enhances our portfolio, but also opens up potential avenues to seek synergies and foster partnerships, both within the UAE and globally.”
As Sierra Space continues to prepare for the first flight of its Dream Chaser vehicle, it is outlining long-term ambitions for both that vehicle and space station modules. Speaking at the Jeffries Space Summit online investor conference June 27, Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said the company was continuing to work towards a first launch of its cargo Dream Chaser vehicle as soon as December. That vehicle, he said, is going through final integration and testing work at the company’s Colorado factory. It remains scheduled to ship later this summer to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, the former Plum Brook Station, for thermal vacuum testing. From there it will go to the Kennedy Space Center for final launch preparations. He said he expected Dream Chaser to be fully integrated with its launch vehicle, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, in “the December timeframe” and launch in a window that extends into early February. That timing, though, is dependent on the readiness of the Vulcan rocket. ULA announced June 24 it needed to make a “minor reinforcement” to part of the Centaur upper stage , delaying its first launch for an unspecified period. The first Dream Chaser will launch on the second Vulcan, after the inaugural launch that carries payloads for Astrobotic, Amazon and Celestis. “We’re watching the Vulcan very carefully,” Vice acknowledged. “They’ve got to get up their first flight of Vulcan, turn the mission data analysis around and then we’re on the second flight.” That launch is the first of at least seven Sierra Space will perform for NASA to transport cargo to and from the International Space Station. He said the company is in talks with potential non-NASA U.S. government customers as well as unspecified customers interested in free-flying science missions. The company is also working on a second version that can carry both crew and cargo. Vice said that version will have 40% greater cargo capacity than the first version and can support a six-person crew. The ability of Dream Chaser to glide back to Earth in a runway landing, rather than splash down in the ocean, is a key selling point to customers, he argued. “We just think that landing at runways around the world is a huge differentiator: low-g landing back on a runway for both time-critical cargo and science, but also just the way people are going to want to fly back and land.” Vice hinted that the company has longer-term plans for Dream Chaser that could possibly allow it to end dependence on other companies’ launch vehicles. “We’re thinking about investigating the right technologies in thermal and propulsion and materials that allows us to potentially think about the staging options that would allow us, for the first time, have horizontal takeoff,” he said. He didn’t offer a schedule for developing that version of Dream Chaser. Vice, in the half-hour presentation, also emphasized the company’s work on an expandable space station module called Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE), with 330 cubic meters of volume in its initial version. The company has been developing LIFE to serve as part of its contribution to the Orbital Reef commercial space station project it is working with Blue Origin and others on. Before offering LIFE for Orbital Reef, though, the company is proposing to launch a standalone “pathfinder” version of LIFE as soon as the end of 2026. That module, he said, would be used for commercial applications, like pharmaceutical and other biotech research. “There have been a number of breakthroughs in the biotech world utilizing the ISS that show we can do some very unique things,” he said, which he believes form the basis of a commercial model for the LIFE module. Launching a pathfinder version of LIFE, he said, could reduce concerns about a post-ISS gap while demonstrating the value of the company’s technology. In addition, “it is a revenue-generating space station that is focused around next-generation breakthroughs.” That pathfinder, he said, would be used exclusively for commercial applications rather than serving NASA and other governments, which would be reserved for Orbital Reef. The pathfinder would be a “significant risk reduction” for Orbital Reef in both technology and business cases. In the presentation, Vice shared some financial details about privately held Sierra Space. According to a slide from his talk, the company recorded about $260 million in revenue in 2022, with more than $3 billion in active contracts. The company raised $1.4 billion in a Series A round in November 2021 and has about $3 billion in total company and customer investment to date. Sierra Space is a “revenue-generating, profit-generating company,” Vice said, but did not disclose how much profit it generated in 2022. The company has “a very strong balance sheet and long-term investors that give us the capital that allows us to invest in being a category winner.”
SES Space & Defense announced June 28 it won a five-year contract worth up to $134 million to provide X-band satellite communications services to the U.S. Department of Defense. The contract is a “global X-band blanket purchase agreement,” the first major defense deal awarded to SES’ U.S. subsidiary since it acquired DRS Global Enterprise Solutions last year. SES, headquartered in Luxembourg, operates a commercial fleet of more than 70 geosynchronous and medium Earth orbit satellites. In August 2022 it acquired DRS’s satcom integration business focused on multi-orbit communications networks and managed satcom services for U.S. government agencies. DoD will get services from GovSat-1 SES Space & Defense , based in Reston, Virginia, will supply DoD X-band communications provided by the GovSat-1 satellite, a joint venture between SES and the government of Luxembourg for secure military communications. The GovSat-1 satellite operates in the X-band and military Ka-band. X-band communications is primarily used by the military in land and maritime operations. For the X-band contract, SES said it is partnering with other undisclosed network integrators, satellite communications providers and teleport operators to ensure a “highly secure global terrestrial network.” The contract was awarded by the U.S. Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office, which is part of the Space Systems Command. “The U.S. Space Force established this contract as a mechanism to enable access to commercial X-band capacity globally for the DoD,” said SES Space & Defense President and CEO David Fields.
TAMPA, Fla. — Odin Space is preparing to start detecting tiny but potentially dangerous pieces of orbital debris in the coming weeks from a sensor on a recently launched space tug, according to the British startup’s cofounder and CEO James New. The venture announced June 27 that it had successfully powered up the demo sensor, integrated with D-Orbit’s small satellite-carrying ION orbital transfer vehicle that SpaceX launched earlier this month to low Earth orbit. The sensor’s sensitivity is cranked up high to detect background vibrations from the host satellite to test core systems, New said, but will be tuned for detecting surrounding debris as small as one-tenth of a millimeter. Sub-centimeter debris are too small to track with current systems but can pack enough kinetic energy to damage spacecraft they collide with in orbit. Odin aims to record and analyze the size, speed, and trajectory of tiny debris from the vibrations they generate as they perforate its sensor’s substrates. By launching hundreds of sensors on third-party satellites, the startup aims to build a dynamic, high-resolution map of the sub-centimeter debris environment. While the demo sensor is designed to operate for about two months of D-Orbit’s expected two-year mission life, New said future sensors would collect data for the lifetime of the host satellite. He said Odin is also working on upgrading its sensor technology to acquire more data and increase compatibility with a wider range of satellite formats. The venture plans to start launching next-generation sensors in 2024 and deploy more than 10 of them per year across LEO and geostationary orbit as hosted payloads. After securing more than $500,000 in pre-seed funding and grants from the U.K.’s space agency, New said the three-year-old company is getting ready to look for more investments to expand its customer base and deploy the first phase of this sensor network.
Chinese rocket firm Space Pioneer is planning to launch a rocket comparable to the SpaceX Falcon 9 next year. Liu Xinglong, chief designer of the Tianlong-3 launcher, said the company is targeting a test launch in May 2024, Shanghai Observer reported June 25. Tianlong-3 (“Sky Dragon-3”) is a two-stage kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket with a reusable first stage. Space Pioneer’s webpages state that the rocket will be capable of lifting 17 tons of payload to low Earth orbit, or 14 tons to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. In comparison the Falcon 9 Full Thrust can carry 22.8 tons to LEO when in expendable mode. The 71-meter-long Tianlong-3 will have a diameter of 3.8 meters. It will have a takeoff mass of 590 tons and produce 770 tons of thrust. The first launch will be expendable but, like the Falcon 9, the Tianlong-3 is designed to be reusable. The first stage will be powered by Tianhuo-12 variable thrust engines, each producing 110 tons of thrust. The first stage is designed to be reused up to 10 times. The rocket would offer China considerable new launch capacity, being second only to China’s Long March 5B in terms of launching payload to LEO, and being more versatile. The rocket would also, if qualified for reusability, provide China with reusable launch capability. Space Pioneer is one of the newer entrants into China’s commercial launch scene. Its plans to move straight to much larger launch vehicles than those in development by earlier movers reflect changes in the perceived opportunities for the commercial launch in the country. The company has stated that it is targeting launching batches of satellites for China’s Guowang LEO communications megaconstellation . The country’s main state-owned space contractor CASC is planning to ramp up production of its Long March 5B and Long March 8 rockets to get the Guowang project off the ground. Space Pioneer is also financially well backed. It announced Feb. 15 that it secured “B+ and “Pre-C” strategic funding rounds. The company says it has raised nearly 3 billion yuan ($438 million) in funding since its founding in 2018. A number of these investors are linked to the state. The firm also states plans for the Tianlong-3H, a triple-core version in the same style as the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and the Tianlong-3M, a single core rocket tipped with a reusable spaceplane. Space Pioneer announced itself as a major player with a debut launch in early April that made the firm the first Chinese commercial entity to reach orbit with a liquid propellant rocket. The Tianlong-2 rocket used 85-ton-thrust, YF-102 gas generator engines developed by CASC, rather than its own Tianhuo engines. Notably the propellant mix for the Tianlong-2 launch used rocket grade kerosene derived from coal, secured through cooperation with the 165 Institute of CASC’s Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology. China has rich coal resources but relatively limited oil reserves, making the use of coal for rocket fuel for the country’s burgeoning space industry attractive. CASC states that the development of the coal-derived rocket fuel is a national strategic initiative. It plans to build the capacity to produce an annual output of about 30,000 tons. Meanwhile Landspace, which in December conducted the first launch of a privately developed Chinese liquid propellant rocket, is preparing for a second launch of its methalox Zhuque-2. That launch from Jiuquan is expected next month. Landspace plans to make the rocket reusable. Other reusable Chinese commercial rockets are in development . Galactic Energy plans to test launch the Pallas-1 (5,000 kilograms to LEO, or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO) in 2024, while Deep Blue Aerospace is developing the smaller Nebula-1 rocket and iSpace is developing the methalox Hyperbola-2. Chinese commercial plans suggest launches for this year could more than double their rate over 2022. “If the planned launch tempo for 2023 is successful it might represent the opening of capability that would provide momentum to deployment of Chinese small satellite constellations,” Ian Christensen, director of private sector programs at the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews in February. This growth compliments a surge in launch rate from CASC, which plans more than 60 launches this year. The country conducted 19 launches in 2015, rising to 64 orbital missions in 2022 .
Spanish launch vehicle startup PLD Space has postponed a suborbital test flight to September after weather and a technical glitch scrubbed earlier launch attempts. The company announced June 27 that the launch of its Miura 1 rocket from a military base in southwestern Spain would be rescheduled for some time in September. The company cited “obligatory compliance” with a Spanish law and military directive that restrict such activities to prevent wildfires. PLD Space had planned to conduct the suborbital launch from the coastal facility operated by the government’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology in late May. However, it postponed a launch attempt May 31 in the hours before launch, blaming high upper-level winds that persisted for days. The company geared up for a second attempt early June 17 (June 16 U.S. time). The countdown reached zero and the vehicle’s first-stage engine ignited, only to immediately shut down. PLD Space later said it aborted the launch because not all of the umbilical cables attached to the rocket’s avionics bay separated as required. “Launching a rocket designed from scratch is a major challenge and we successfully completed 99.9% of all pre-launch procedures up to the countdown,” Raúl Torres, chief executive and co-founder of PLD Space, said in a statement about the launch delay. “The entire pre-launch phase was a resounding success, and we are very close to successfully launching Europe’s first reusable rocket.” Miura 1 is a suborbital vehicle whose single stage is designed to splash down under a parachute and be recovered. It can carry up to 100 kilograms of payload to an altitude of 150 kilometers. The vehicle is primarily a technology demonstrator for the company’s Miura 5 small launch vehicle, intended to place up to 500 kilograms into orbit starting as soon as 2025. “For every second Miura 1 is in the air, we will be learning and gathering data for the development of Miura 5,” Ezequiel Sanchez, executive president of PLD Space, said in a statement in May about the planned Miura 1 launch. While Miura 1 remained on the launch pad, PLD Space has been making other progress on Miura 5. The company announced June 21 it signed a binding contract with the French space agency CNES to use the former Diamant launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, for Miura 5. The company previously announced its intent to launch from Kourou. Under the agreement, CNES will be responsible for basic infrastructure like roads and utilities, while PLD Space will build its own launch facilities there. German launch vehicle developer Rocket Factory Augsburg also announced an agreement with CNES June 21 to use the Diamant site, which is intended to support multiple small launch vehicles. PLD Space separately announced June 14 an agreement with Arianespace to study “possible future cooperation” on space transportation. Arianespace signed a similar agreement with Orbex, a U.K.-based small launch vehicle developer, June 13. The agreements were somewhat surprising since Arianespace executives had previously expressed skepticism that there would be much demand for so-called “microlaunchers” like the Miura 5. It has focused its attention on the Vega C, with a substantially larger payload capacity than microlaunchers, and the far larger Ariane 6. Pablo Gallego, senior vice president of sales and customers at PLD Space, suggested in a statement about the Arianespace agreement that his company could complement Arianespace’s offerings with launches of multiple smallsats to specific orbits. “A potential collaboration could facilitate solutions highly demanded by our customers, providing the smallsat community with the assurance to get to any orbit at any time.”
The House Appropriations Committee last week approved a $826.4 billion spending bill for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2024, about $285 million above the Biden administration’s request. The bill, however, recommends nearly $1 billion in cuts from the U.S. Space Force’s $30 billion request. The HAC defense subcommittee, which in recent years has proposed increased spending for the Space Force, said the cuts recommended in its 2024 markup reflect concerns about programs’ performance and Space Force justifications. In a report accompanying the defense spending bill, the HAC-D notes that the Space Force’s $30 billion request is 15 percent higher than last year’s enacted level, “continuing a trend of double-digit growth over the past several years.” But despite these significant increases, the committee said, “the budget request continues to include serious shortfalls and disconnects.” The HAC-D calls out the Space Force for not budgeting funds for some programs over the five-year spending plan. Not providing long-term projections irks appropriators because it denies them visibility of total program costs, and puts the onus on Congress to add funds to keep programs going. The committee identified the following programs for not being funded over the five-year defense plan: “The Space Force should not count on continued double-digit topline budget increases to address future funding shortfalls or reduce acquisition risk,” said the HAC-D report. Cuts spread across several programs According to an analysis of the HAC-D bill by the consulting firm Velos, to make $1 billion in spending cuts, the committee trimmed a number of programs across the Space Force’s research, development and acquisition accounts. The largest share of the cuts are for classified programs, which are reduced from $7 billion to $6.4 billion. Communications satellites programs and GPS ground and space systems collectively were trimmed by about $200 million. The committee said it “remains very concerned about programs the Space Force has reported as its p oorest performing acquisitions.” These include: The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System (OCX) program, the Space Command and Control (Space C2) program, the Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-sight Terminals ( FAB-T ) for secure satellite communications, the GPS receivers known as Military GPS User Equipment Increment 1, and the Enterprise Ground Services (EGS) architecture intended to replace legacy ground stations. “OCX is nearly seven years late and not yet delivered. This is unacceptable and demands senior leader attention,” said the HAC-D. The committee also challenged the Space Force’s plans to eliminate a Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile-warning geostationary satellite. Next Gen OPIR “is a critical component of the strategic missile warning and nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) enterprise,” said the HAC-D. “The committee is troubled by the lack of analysis to support the proposal to cancel the GEO–3 spacecraft, especially given its importance to the NC3 mission.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Airmo, a German startup planning to obtain space-based measurements of greenhouse gas emissions, has raised 5.2 million euros ($5.7 million) in pre-seed funding, including investment and a European Space Agency contract. With the funding announced June 27, Airmo will launch the first of 12 satellites equipped with spectrometers and small light detection and ranging (lidar) instruments to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane. “Spectral data combined with LiDAR data result in much better atmospheric corrections,” Harriet von Kügelgen, Airmo chief commercial officer and co-founder, told SpaceNews by email. “Aerosols and wind patterns play a crucial role in the scattering and absorption of light, affecting the signal’s path and intensity. By integrating wind and aerosol data, it becomes possible to correct for these atmospheric effects more accurately, resulting in improved end data quality and more precise measurements of target greenhouse gasses.” Airmo, founded in 2022, plans to launch its first satellite equipped with a spectrometer and a micro-lidar in late 2024. ESA awarded Airmo a 3.7 million euro contract through the InCubed public-private partnership, managed by ESA’s Phi-lab. “We see a growing interest from the society and the investors on climate and sustainability,” Michele Castorina, who leads Phi-lab’s investment office, said in a statement. “Earth Observation will play a key role in this landscape.” Airmo is attempting “a disruptive approach to facilitate efficient monitoring in support of meeting emission goals and detect unnoticed leakages,” Castorina added. Findus Venture led Airmo’s investment round. Participants included Ananda Impact Ventures, Pi-Labs, E2MC, Antler and prominent European angel investors. Through the Paris climate agreement, 174 countries and the European Union committed in 2015 to undertake efforts to mitigate global warming. The global stocktake, a process of gathering national reports on climate action, is occurring for the first time this year. The Paris agreement set a goal to limit global warming to well below 2 and preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. “Achieving this goal requires precise and reliable data on emissions, especially of potent greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane,” according to the Airmo news release. 
Tysons Corner, Virginia USA — June 27, 2023 — Andrew Pemberton has been named Chief Executive Officer of SpaceNews, Inc., the world’s largest space-industry trade media brand. A SpaceNews board member since 2014, Pemberton added the title of Chief Marketing Officer in 2022 before moving to the new CEO role. He replaces longtime CEO Greg Thomas, who will transition to Chief Technology Officer. Pemberton has worked with SpaceNews owner and chairman Felix Magowan and CTO Greg Thomas in various roles since 2005, as Brand Director, Interactive Director, and Publisher, and most recently as CEO of Pocket Outdoor Media (rebranded as Outside, Inc.), the preeminent outdoor lifestyle media company. He was previously Vice President and Publisher at Online, Inc. (acquired by Information Today, Inc.), a B2B digital and event media company, and has launched several startups that have seen successful exits. Magowan explains the change: “With the huge growth in the space and satellite market, we are focused on exploring current and new products to make strategic enhancements to our existing and future news and engagement-focused media options. Andy is the most new-product-oriented entrepreneur I’ve worked with, so ideal for the changes we’re planning. He and Greg Thomas recently put together a complete overhaul and re-design of spacenews.com in six months, so that’s the speed of change we’re aiming for. It was Greg’s idea to become CTO, which was a natural given his experience at Apple, and to double-down on our digital expertise, which is the best-in-category.” Pemberton added, “SpaceNews, with some 815,000 monthly unique visitors, has by far the largest audience of space professionals of any dedicated space media brand worldwide, but we’re just scratching the surface of the information value we can deliver to space professionals and the promotional platform we offer to advertisers. Our objective is to enhance the already authoritative SpaceNews media brand with easy access solutions and the most relevant portfolio of news and information products in the industry.” About SpaceNews Founded in 1989 SpaceNews is the world’s largest space and trade media brand, available in both print and online. With some 2.2 million average monthly page views, 815,000 unique monthly visitors, 185,000 social media followers, and 25,000 newsletter subscribers, SpaceNews is by far the most widely read trade media brand in space. See more at spacenews.com. Media Inquiries Andrew Pemberton, Chief Executive Officer, apemberton@spacenews.com, +1 (303) 532-6075 Advertising, Sponsorships, and Partnerships Paige McCullough, Business Development Director, pmccullough@spacenews.com, +1 (571) 278-4090 Kamal Flucker, Business Development Manager, kflucker@spacenews.com, +1 (571) 402-5706 Tony Kingham, Sales Representative, tony.kingham@knmmedia.com, +44(0) 20 8144 5934 Emmanuel Archambaud, Sales Representative, earchambeaud@outlook.fr, +33 (6) 1103 9652 SpaceNews, Inc. 8609 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 110 PMB 1024, Tysons Corner, VA 22182 USA 
SAN FRANCISCO – D-Orbit will supply a small orbiting laboratory and test optical intersatellite links under the latest contracts awarded through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Under a 6 million euro ($6.54 million) contract announced June 22, D-Orbit will verify the performance of optical intersatellite links for an Earth observation constellation called IRIDE, or International Report for Innovative Defense of Earth . The low Earth orbit network includes imaging payloads to monitor Italy’s critical infrastructure, air quality and meteorological conditions. Italian startup Stellar Project is supplying laser communications technology to be tested onboard D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier. D-Orbit also won a contract with a value of approximately 4.8 million euros to work with the Italian Space Agency to establish the In-Orbit Space Lab. The space segment of the laboratory will be housed in an ION Satellite Carrier. Geospatial data company Planetek Italia, the prime contractor for the In-Orbit Space Lab, will integrate the ground and space segments, and supply software. Aiko, an Italian firm focused on spacecraft artificial intelligence, will handle automation and data processing. The In-Orbit Space Lab will have extensive on-orbit computing capability, Stefano Antonetti, D-Orbit vice president of business development and institutional sales, said in a statement. “Our ION Satellite Carrier has been designed to be a key element of such an infrastructure,” he added. Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, a billion-euro initiative to bolster the nation’s post-pandemic economy, has been a boon for space companies. D-Orbit alone has claimed four multimillion contracts through the initiative. “These contracts represent a great opportunity to take part in national projects that will mark historic milestones the space sector and cooperate with some of the most renown and innovative Italian companies in the industry,” D-Orbit said in a news release. In addition to the contracts announced June 22, D-Orbit won a 26 million euro contract to provide a synthetic aperture radar satellite and manage flight operations. The contract includes a 24 million euro option for a second SAR satellite. Italian radar technology company MetaSensing will manufacture the SAR sensor. D-Orbit is part of a consortium led by Thales Alenia Space that won a 235 million euro Italian Space Agency contract to conduct Italy’s first in-orbit servicing demonstration. Avio, Leonardo and Telespazio are members of the consortium. “We are very proud to work alongside companies of this caliber,” Renato Panesi, D-Orbit co-founder and chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “And we are truly looking forward to contributing to this historical milestone for the national space industry.” The in-orbit servicing mission includes two satellites and related ground infrastructure. The consortium plans to demonstrate satellite services ranging from inspection and repositioning to refueling and on-orbit assembly. D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier will be the target satellite for the demonstration mission. In addition to managing activities related to the target satellite, D-Orbit is in charge of the refueling system.
The European Space Agency and three European satellite manufacturers have announced plans to work together to develop “ambitious and meaningful targets” for dealing with orbital debris. At an event during the Paris Air Show June 22, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and executives with Airbus Defence and Space, OHB and Thales Alenia Space said they would jointly develop a “Zero Debris Charter” with the overarching goal of preventing the creation of new debris, particularly in low Earth orbit. “The principle is a very simple one,” he said. “The Zero Debris Charter is a principle where we would like to ensure that there is zero debris left behind in space.” Details backing that principle will be worked out by ESA and the companies later this year, according to an ESA statement. That included developing “ambitious and meaningful targets to be achieved by 2030” and including them in the text of the charter by the end of the year. Aschbacher said that goal is that, by 2030, those who agree to abide by the charter will deorbit their satellites at the end of their lives or contract with companies that provide active debris removal services to deorbit them. Executives at the event said they were increasingly worried that runaway growth of orbital debris, sometimes called the Kessler Syndrome, was already taking place in some congested orbits. “This keeps me awake at night because it is my business, it’s our business,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, head of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space. “It’s not acceptable.” Lutz Bertling, a member of the board of OHB, said he talked with an unidentified European astronaut who was concerned human spaceflight might not be feasible beyond the 2030s because of the risks posed by increasing debris. “Those are alarming words to me.” The charter, when it is developed, will be nonbinding, but advocates said they hope it could be incorporated in some way into future regulations. “We need to achieve a status where we demand that only data or information is bought from those satellite providers who are adhering to certain standards,” Aschbacher said. “The charter may be one vehicle for doing so.” The charter has parallels to another nonbinding instrument, a new set of debris mitigation recommendations published by the World Economic Forum June 13 . Those guidelines set new benchmarks for the success rates and timelines of post-mission disposal of satellites, among other recommendations, and were endorsed by 27 companies that include Airbus, OHB and Thales. “It is an interesting approach because there are specific recommendations,” said Hervé Derrey, chief executive of Thales Alenia Space, of that document. But he and others acknowledged that the charter is only a step towards eventual binding international regulations to minimize the creation of orbital debris. “Europe has to lead the way,” Derrey said, but added that without international rules a European-led charter will do little to solve the debris problem. “On top of that, European industry will not be on a level playing field with its competitors.” One issue with international regulation is the slow pace of its development, particularly within United Nations organizations. “This is certainly a big question, but we are absolutely at a stage were we do need some international regulation or international adherence,” Aschbacher said, noting that the charter’s own goal of zero-debris rules in place by the end of the decade might be too slow to some. “Some big nations, some big players, they simply don’t care,” Bertling said, not identifying any of the organizations that don’t care about debris mitigation policies. “Only with a real international regulation will we get it under control.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operator SES has another shot at getting a larger share of Intelsat’s C-band clearing cash after an appeals court made a judgment in its favor. Before Intelsat emerged from Chapter 11 last year to slash its debt load by more than half to $7 billion, SES petitioned its U.S. bankruptcy court without success to equally split the billions of dollars Intelsat and SES would reap from clearing C-band frequencies ahead of deadline. In the latest twist of a three-year legal saga between the satellite operators that just last week broke off merger talks , a federal appeals court said June 21 that the bankruptcy court had erred in rejecting SES’s claim. Judge Robert Payne, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, has sent the case back to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. At the heart of the dispute between SES and Intelsat is a broken agreement to equally share the $9 billion in proceeds they would get for clearing C-band for terrestrial telcos. According to Intelsat, this deal was nullified once the Federal Communications Commission opted in 2019 to sell C-band frequencies via a public auction, rather than a satellite operator-led private process. Bankruptcy Court Judge Keith Phillips sided with Intelsat Sept. 30, prompting SES to appeal after seeking $1.8 billion in compensation to cover damages from the broken agreement. Payne agreed with SES that the sharing pact should not have been construed as only applying to a privately run spectrum sale. SES declared the judgment as a “major appellate victory” in its ongoing legal battle against Intelsat. Intelsat said it disagreed with the appeal judge’s decision but did not believe it would change the ultimate ruling in this case. “Judge Phillips heard all of the evidence in the case as the trier of fact, and we remain confident that he will come to the same conclusion as he did in his original opinion on the merits of SES’s claims,” Intelsat said in a statement. SES and Intelsat are currently set to get $3.97 billion and $4.9 billion, respectively, in total incentive payments from the FCC if they can move customers and filter ground antennas in time for vacating the lower 300 MHz slice of C-band by Dec. 5. SES has already launched the five satellites it needs in geostationary orbit for its C-band clearing plan. Intelsat has one more to go, the Galaxy 37 satellite SpaceX is slated to launch in early August, after deploying six C-band replacements under its strategy. The costs for all these satellites are being reimbursed by the FCC, which raised more than $80 billion from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and other telcos from auctioning off the frequencies.
The United Kingdom will participate in a U.S. Space Command initiative focused on purchasing commercial space domain awareness data, the U.K. military space chief announced June 26. U.S. Space Command operates the so-called Joint Task Force-Space Defense Commercial Operations Cell (JCO) at Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The United Kingdom will stand up a JCO-U.K. cell and collaborate with the U.S. “I’m delighted that we can announce the stand-up of the national JCO-U.K. cell,” said Air Vice-Marshal Paul Alexander Godfrey, commander of the U.K. Space Command. JCO-U.S. was established in 2020 to augment the space-tracking capabilities of Space Command’s National Space Defense Center. The JCO buys data and analytics services from commercial companies. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office , the U.S. Space Force is planning to provide approximately $20 million to the JCO for commercial SSA data purchases in fiscal year 2023 and a total of approximately $110 million for fiscal years 2023 through 2027. Aiming for 24/7 operations “The stand-up of JCO-U.K. marks a step forward in building out our follow-the-sun model for 24/7 operations,” said U.S. Space Force Brig. Gen. Bythewood, JTF-SD commander. JCO-U.K. will assist in the JCO’s ‘follow-the-sun’ model, incorporating eight-hour operations shifts starting at local European time zones, allowing each cell to operate during normal business hours. Personnel from the JCO, Space Systems Command and the Air Force Research Laboratory helped establish U.S.-U.K. communications, network connectivity, access to commercial data and to space domain awareness analysis tools. “JCO-U.K. has been leading the charge into global commercial operations, and our lessons learned together will help us deploy new capabilities faster for our combined missions,” said Barb Golf, Space Systems Command’s strategic advisor for space domain awareness. 
Agile Space Industries raised $13 million to expand production and development of propulsion systems. The seed funding round, announced June 23, was led by Caruso Ventures. Participants included Lockheed Martin Ventures, Greater Colorado Venture Fund, CORI Innovation Fund and Greenline Ventures. Durango, Colorado-based Agile has raised more than $18 million to date. The investment by Lockheed Martin Ventures, made after Agile worked with Lockheed Martin on a number of projects, helps bolster Agile’s credibility, Agile CEO Chris Pearson told SpaceNews by email. “The credibility matters to both other blue chip space customers as well as the investment community. Being part of the Lockheed Martin Ventures family is already opening up some doors to customers and programs that we were not even aware of.” Agile Space Industries was established in 2019 when Agile Space Propulsion merged with Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test. In 2021, Agile acquired Pittsburgh-based Tronix3D and created Agile Additive. Agile also raised money through a seed round in 2020. With the latest funding, Agile plans to expand its metal additive manufacturing and chemical propulsion testing infrastructure, Pearson said. “In addition, we will be looking to accelerate some of our product development activities.” Agile is supplying thrusters for robotic lunar landers being built by Astrobotic Technology and Japan’s ispace . In April, Agile announced the qualification of its first product, the A110 thruster, for lunar landing. “Agile has started delivering flight hardware for lunar missions but we also are developing and delivering chemical propulsion solutions for other more traditional aerospace and defense customers,” Pearson said. “We have established a good degree of diversification between national security, civil and commercial space with some great opportunities” for “recurring business.” Chris Moran, Lockheed Martin Ventures vice president and general manager, said in a statement, “Our investment in Agile Space Industries underscores our commitment to the development of breakthrough technologies that bring us closer to discovering more of space.” Agile revenues have increased by more than 70 percent annually, according to the June 23 news release. “Our customers benefit from our novel designs that push performance while dramatically reducing development and qualification lead-times,” Pearson said in a statement. 
NASA has confirmed that one scenario for the cost of its Mars Sample Return (MSR) program is far higher than previous estimates, heightening concerns among scientists about its impacts on other missions. In a June 26 statement to SpaceNews, NASA said that one “highly speculative” estimate for the full cost of MSR was in the range of $8 billion to $9 billion. An independent review in 2020 estimated the cost of MSR at $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion, which itself was a significant increase over earlier estimates. Ars Technica first reported on the higher cost estimate for MSR June 23. “NASA evaluates a wide range of funding scenarios every year for its portfolio of missions as part of its annual budget process. Missions in formulation, such as Mars Sample Return, have more variables to consider, providing for a greater range of scenarios to evaluate — all scenarios are highly speculative,” the agency stated. “One included a lifecycle cost range of $8–9 billion, which included launch, operation, and closeout cost estimates.” NASA officials have been careful not to give any estimates of costs for MSR in recent presentations, stating that it will wait until a formal confirmation review for the program, scheduled for the fall, before providing an official cost and schedule baseline. That will come after a series of preliminary design reviews and a review by a second independent board led by Orlando Figueroa, a former director of NASA’s Mars exploration program. “We’re taking a very deliberate approach to confirmation. We’re trying to go back and make sure that we’ve put scrutiny on all of our technical plans and we’ve gotten scrutiny on the associated cost and schedule,” Jeff Gramling, MSR program director at NASA Headquarters, said in a June 7 presentation at a meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board and Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board. He called NASA’s decision to convene a second independent review before confirmation “unprecedented” and a sign of the emphasis the agency was putting on keeping MSR on track. “We’re taking this very seriously and we’re trying to make sure we have solid plans before we go to confirmation.” However, even before this estimate there were warning signs about cost growth on MSR. “Mars Sample Return costs are expected to increase beyond what is shown in the outyear profile in this budget,” the agency stated in its fiscal year 2024 budget request, which seeks $949.3 million for MSR. That budget proposal paused work on a heliophysics mission, the Geospace Dynamics Constellation, citing the “high budgetary requirements” of other missions like MSR. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, testifying before Senate appropriators in April, said he had been informed during a recent visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lead center for MSR, that the program would need an additional $250 million in both the current fiscal year and in 2024 . Other NASA officials have declined to confirm that budget increase. MSR cost growth was also a topic at a recent meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee, or PAC, a group of scientists that advises the agency on its planetary science initiatives. While not discussing specific figures, like the cost estimate of up to $9 billion, members were clearly concerned about the effects of any MSR cost growth on the overall portfolio of missions. “I get it that everybody is anxious about this. We’re all anxious about it,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, during a June 23 discussion with committee members, who were considering a recommendation regarding potential MSR cost growth. “We have existing policies and processes in place” if the costs of MSR do grow, particularly after its confirmation review, she said. However, there may be few options other than accept the cost increase or cancel MSR entirely. “There are not really any significant descopes available to us here,” Gramling said at the National Academies meeting, meaning things that could be dropped from the mission while allowing it to achieve its overall goal. One option, he said, would be to remove one of two helicopters that would pick up cached samples if Perseverance is not able to deliver samples directly to the Sample Retrieval Lander. That would likely not significantly change the cost of the overall MSR program. “NASA understands the importance of balancing science research, including objectives supported by the National Academies’ decadal survey, with fiscal responsibilities,” the agency said in its statement about the new cost estimate. The latest planetary science decadal survey endorsed MSR as a top priority among large missions, but recommended that NASA keep the cost of MSR to no more than 35% of the overall planetary science budget in any fiscal year. “It’s a good rule,” Glaze said of that 35% recommendation at the June 23 PAC meeting. “I support it.”
China’s main space contractor has conducted several successful high-altitude parachute deployment tests as part of plans to collect asteroid samples and deliver them safely to Earth. The Academy of Aerospace Solid Propulsion Technology (AASPT) under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) recently carried out a launch test in the Gobi Desert in Northwest China, CASC announced June 23. The test payload also carried a sample return device developed by the Beijing Institute of Space Machinery and Electronics (BISME) under the China Academy Of Space Technology (CAST), another major CASC subsidiary. The tests are for the Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return and comet rendezvous mission which is currently scheduled to lift off on a Long March 3B rocket in May 2025. The mission will target the near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, collecting samples and returning to Earth around 2.5 years after launch. The parachute will be used to slow the descent of a return capsule carrying a sample container after reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. CASC has developed parachutes for reenteries for its human spaceflight program, the Tianwen-1 Mars rover landing, and for the 2020 Chang’e-5 and upcoming Chang’e-6 lunar sample return missions. The country is also working on an unprecedented Mars sample return mission . Kamoʻoalewa is a quasi-satellite of Earth and roughly 40-100 meters in diameter. It is possibly a chunk of the moon blasted into space following an impact event. Tianwen-2 will use two techniques to sample the asteroid. These will be the touch-and-go approach used by both NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2, and an anchor-and-attach system featuring drills at the tips of landing legs. After delivering samples to Earth the spacecraft will use the approach to the planet for a gravitational slingshot maneuver to send it on its way to the main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS. The comet orbits between 1.94 and 2.44 astronomical units from the Sun and the spacecraft is expected to rendezvous with the body in the mid-2030s. China performed a similar maneuver in 2020 when delivering lunar samples to Earth with Chang’e-5. The service module for that mission used the return to Earth as flyby to embark on an extended mission to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1. CASC noted the construction of the Tianwen-2 spacecraft as a key goal in its 2023 plans , along with building the Chang’e-7 lunar south pole landing mission spacecraft. The Tianwen-2 spacecraft will carry a pair of circular, fan-like solar arrays to generate energy, similar in appearance to those of NASA’s Lucy mission spacecraft. It will also carry eight payloads for its science goals. China’s Tianwen missions are the country’s flagship deep space exploration missions. Tianwen-1 saw an orbiter and rover reach Mars in 2021, while Tianwen-3 will aim to collect samples from the Red Planet. Tianwen-4 will target the Jupiter system with a separate Uranus flyby. The latter mission is scheduled to launch around 2030.The Chinese Academy of Sciences is meanwhile considering a proposal to collect samples from E-type asteroid 1989 ML. China is also planning an asteroid deflection test for 2025.
Virgin Galactic plans to conduct its first fully commercial flight of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane on June 29, carrying three Italians who will conduct more than a dozen experiments. Virgin Galactic announced June 26 the date for its “Galactic 01” mission, flying from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The company had previously disclosed a window of June 27 to 30 for the flight. The flight is considered the first fully commercial mission by Virgin Galactic, although the company did generate small amounts of revenue by flying research payloads on earlier test flights. “Galactic 01 is our first commercial spaceflight and we’re honored to have been selected by the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council to support their first space research mission,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in a statement. “Virgin Galactic’s research missions will usher in a new era of repeatable and reliable access to space for government and research institutions for years to come.” The June 29 flight, called Virtute 1 by the Italian government, features three Italian payload specialists, commanded by Walter Villadei, a colonel in the Italian Air Force. He previously trained with NASA and Axiom Space for a commercial orbital spaceflight, becoming the backup pilot for the Ax-2 mission to the International Space Station that flew in May. Joining Villadei are Angelo Landolfi, an Italian Air Force lieutenant colonel and physician, and Pantaleone Carlucci, a researcher with Italy’s National Research Council. The three will carry out 13 experiments before, during and after the flight, measuring cosmic radiation, testing the effects of microgravity on fluids and combustion, and collecting medical data. Villadei will wear a “smart flight suit” that will gather biomedical data while testing a suit design intended to operate at up to 6 Gs. “We are flying payloads from multiple disciplines in one mission and are utilizing the entire flight profile to collect invaluable data,” Villadei said in a statement. Joining the Italians in the crew cabin is Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor who will assess the research flight experience. He flew on the SpaceShipTwo mission in July 2021 that carried company founder Richard Branson. The overall mission will be commanded by Virgin Galactic’s Mike Masucci, making his fourth flight. Nicola Pecile, a former Italian Air Force pilot who now works for Virgin, will be the pilot. Virgin Galactic signed a contract with the Italian Air Force for the mission in October 2019 , intending at the time to fly it as soon as late 2020 or early 2021. After Branson’s flight, Virgin Galactic planned to conduct the flight in the fall of 2021 before beginning a maintenance period for both SpaceShipTwo and its mothership aircraft, VMS Eve. However, the company postponed the flight in October 2021 , electing to carry out the maintenance first. Virgin resumed flights of its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VMS Unity, earlier this year. That included a May 25 suborbital test flight that was the first time Unity went to space since Branson’s flight. That flight carried Virgin Galactic employees as payload specialists. The company sees the flight as a way to highlight its ability to carry out research as an alternative market to space tourism. “This flight will showcase our distinctive spaceflight system, which allows researchers to fly with their experiments, and our capacity to offer regular access to space for the science and technology community,” said Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, in a statement. The bulk of Virgin Galactic’s business, though, will come from private astronauts paying up to $450,000 a ticket for the flight. The company has about 800 customers for those flights. Virgin said June 15 its first flight carrying private astronauts, Galactic 02, is tentatively scheduled for early August, with subsequent flights planned on a monthly basis. Many of those customers may end up flying on the company’s future Delta class of spaceplanes, designed for much higher flight rates. With the company’s negligible revenue to date and high operating losses, Virgin Galactic will need to raise substantial funding to develop the Delta-class vehicles. In a June 22 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Virgin Galactic said it had completed a sale of $300 million of stock it announced in August 2022. It also announced plans to sell an additional $400 million of stock, working with Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. The funds, Virgin stated, will be used “for development of its spaceship fleet and infrastructure to scale its commercial operations, and for general corporate purposes.” Shares in Virgin Galactic, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, fell 18.4% June 23, effectively giving up gains since the company announced its commercial spaceflight plans June 15.
Defense contractor Anduril Industries acquired Adranos, a manufacturer of solid rocket motors, the companies announced June 25. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2015, Adranos manufactures solid rocket motors in coastal Mississippi and last year opened a fuel-production facility in Indiana . The startup invented a proprietary aluminum-lithium alloy fuel called ALITEC to power solid rocket motors used in tactical missiles and space launch vehicles. “Through this acquisition, Anduril will become a merchant supplier of solid rocket motors to prime contractors delivering missiles, hypersonics and other propulsion systems for the Department of Defense’s most important programs,” Anduril said in a statement. Solid rocket motors is one sector of the defense industrial base where the Pentagon worries that there are not enough domestic sources. Currently only Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne are supplying solid rocket motors to DoD. Aerojet is in the process of being acquired by L3Harris Technologies. Anduril said its entrance to the market as a supplier “will bring more resources and competition to an industry facing heavy consolidation.” The company said it plans to invest in Adranos’s solid rocket complex production facility in Mississippi to increase production rates. ‘Need for greater competition’ “There is a clear need for greater competition and expanded supply in solid rocket motors for the United States and our allies,” said Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf. Adranos CEO Chris Stoker said the acquisition will help the company “rapidly mature our technology and scale our team and production capabilities to thousands of traditional and ALITEC solid rocket motors per year.” The ALITEC fuel has been tested on tactical missile-sized solid rocket motors under a program jointly funded by the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force. Adranos in 2019 said it conducted flight tests under an Army program, demonstrating that motors utilizing ALITEC fuel could increase the range of a missile system by nearly 40 percent. Anduril Industries, founded in 2017, is a defense technology specialist based in Costa Mesa, California. The company specializes in artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation. It developed drones and artificial intelligence software to help Ukrainian forces conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions. 
The Senate Armed Services Committee on June 23 advanced its version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by a vote of 24-1 after closed deliberations. The bill authorizes $844 billion for the Department of Defense, or $2 billion more than the Biden administration’s request. The committee on Friday released an executive summary of its version of the NDAA. The bill now heads to the Senate floor for consideration. Changes to NSSL Phase 3 The SASC strategic forces subcommittee included a provision to add more competitors to the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3, a multibillion-dollar procurement of launch services projected for 2025 through 2029. The committee “establishes an additional lane (Lane 2A) two years into Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch acquisition program to allow for greater competition within the field,” said the executive summary. This would change the rules that the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command set for the NSSL Phase 3 competition. According to a draft solicitation released earlier this year, there will be two separate contract types in NSSL Phase 3. Phase 3 Lane 1 will solicit bids for the more “risk tolerant” missions to low Earth orbit. NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 is modeled after the Phase 2 procurement that United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won in 2020. The Space Force will award five-year contracts to two launch providers capable of flying a full range of missions to the most demanding orbits. The SASC proposal to add a Lane 2A two years into the contract would help new entrant companies like Blue Origin that plan to introduce new rockets during the projected timeframe for Phase 3. The language is reminiscent of past efforts by the House Armed Services Committee to add a third provider to the NSSL Phase 2 contract. The Air Force at the time pushed back on these proposals and insisted that only two providers should be selected. Other space policy provisions in the SASC bill: 
SpaceX is changing the approach for separating the two stages of its Starship vehicle to increase payload performance before its next test flight, Elon Musk said June 24. In an online discussion with Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance on Twitter, the social media company Musk owns, he said that SpaceX had recently decided to switch to a “hot-staging” approach where the Starship upper stage will ignite its engines while still attached to the Super Heavy booster. “We made sort of a late-breaking change that’s really quite significant to the way that stage separation works,” Musk said, describing the switch to hot staging. “There’s a meaningful payload-to-orbit advantage with hot-staging that is conservatively about a 10% increase.” Hot-staging, which has been used on Russian launch vehicles for decades, involves igniting the engines on one stage while still attached to its lower stage. Musk said that, for Starship, most of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster would be turned off, but a few still firing, when the engines on the Starship upper stage are ignited. Doing so, he said, avoids the loss of thrust during traditional stage separation, where the lower stage shuts down first. Doing so requires some modifications to the Super Heavy booster. Musk said SpaceX is working on an extension to the top of the booster “that is almost all vents” to allow the exhaust from the upper stage to escape while still attached to the booster. SpaceX will also add shielding to the top of the booster to protect it from the exhaust. “This is the most risky thing, I think, for the next flight,” he said of the new stage separation technique. Besides the change in stage separation, Musk said SpaceX made a “tremendous number” of other changes to the vehicle, “well over a thousand.” He didn’t go into details about the changes, but did note the company was continuing work to upgrade the launch pad to avoid the damage caused by the first Starship launch April 20, such as a “steel sandwich” water deluge system. “We’re actually going for overkill on the steel sandwich and the concrete, so that should leave the base of the pad in much better shape than the last time.” SpaceX also made improvements to the Raptor engines, with Musk describing the vehicle launching in April as using a “hodgepodge” of engines built over time. The Raptors on the new vehicles include changes to the hot gas manifold in the engine to reduce fuel leakage. Those changes, he said, gave him more confidence in the success of the next launch. “I think the probability this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60%.” In an online conversation in late April , he estimated a “better than 50% chance” of success on the next launch. Musk did not commit to a specific launch date. “A lot of variables here that are outside of our control,” he said, an apparent reference to the Federal Aviation Administration launch licensing process. “We think, probably, the launch pad upgrades, and the booster and ship, are ready in about six weeks.” Musk, in that April conversation, said he expected to be ready to fly “in a couple months.” Earlier in the conversation, Musk declined to comment on recent rumors that SpaceX was considering spinning out its Starlink satellite broadband business and conducting an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in it. Fox Business reported June 21 that SpaceX investors anticipated a spinout and IPO of Starlink this year so that Musk could raise money for other ventures, like Twitter. Musk, asked about any plans for a Starlink IPO, declined to comment. “It would not be legal for me to speculate about a Starlink IPO,” he claimed. “I think it’s against regulations to talk with any kinds of specifics about a future public offering.” Musk has previously played down any talk about spinning out Starlink and taking it public. He said in 2020 he was “thinking about that zero” in order to focus on making the broadband service a technical and financial success. In an internal company meeting in June 2022, Musk said he did not know when SpaceX would take Starlink public, but estimated it would be at least three to four years .
The inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket faces new delays after the company said it needs to make “minor reinforcements” to part of the Centaur upper stage. In a brief statement early June 24, ULA said it would remove the Centaur upper stage that had been installed on the Vulcan booster at Cape Canaveral for that inaugural launch and ship it back to the company’s Decatur, Alabama, factory. The Vulcan booster will remain at the Cape, stored in a horizontal processing facility. The decision to destack the rocket came after ULA completed the investigation into an anomaly during a March 29 test of a Centaur at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Hydrogen leaked from the Centaur, accumulated inside the test stand and ignited, damaging the stage. ULA said in the statement it had identified the root cause of that incident and necessary corrective actions. “Centaur’s thin-walled pressure stabilized tanks require minor reinforcement at the top of the forward dome prior to flight. We plan to de-stack the Vulcan rocket and return the Centaur V to Decatur for modifications,” the company stated. The company said it has several Centaur stages at Decatur, one of which will be used to complete the qualification testing interrupted by the March incident. ULA did not disclose a schedule for completing that testing, modifying the Centaur or rescheduling the inaugural launch of Centaur, a mission called Cert-1 by the company. The company said it will host a media teleconference in the next few weeks to provide more details. In an interview in May , Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said that if the Centaur required no modifications he expected the Cert-1 launch to take place in early summer. If Centaur modifications are needed, that launch would be further delayed, “but I don’t expect it to get out of the year.” At the time of that interview, the last major test for Vulcan before its first launch was a static-fire test of the booster’s BE-4 engines on the pad, called the Flight Readiness Firing. That test took place June 7 , and in the new statement ULA said it completed the review of data from the firing and concluded “all test objectives were successfully achieved.” The Cert-1 launch, when it does take place, will carry as its primary payload Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. Also on the rocket will be two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation as well as a payload for space memorial company Celestis.
An orbital transfer vehicle that was part of a SpaceX rideshare mission malfunctioned shortly after deployment, putting into jeopardy a technology demonstration spacecraft for a satellite servicing startup. Among the payloads on SpaceX’s Transporter-8 rideshare mission, which launched on a Falcon 9 June 12 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California , was the Orbiter SN3 tug developed by Launcher. The vehicle caried several spacecraft intended to be deployed later. However, in a June 21 statement, Launcher said that when it first made contact with Orbiter SN3 within an hour of separation, the vehicle “was experiencing an anomaly” where its attitude control system was spinning the spacecraft. Controllers, concerned about losing power and propulsion, elected to immediately deploy all the smallsat payloads on board. That included Otter Pup, a technology demonstration spacecraft developed by Starfish Space to test satellite servicing technologies. In the planned mission, Otter Pup would have separated from the tug and then attempt to rendezvous with it. Launcher said it then attempted to restore control of Orbiter SN3, shutting down non-critical systems to preserve power. However, the spacecraft remained in a power-negative state and controllers lost contact with it after six more ground station passes. Starfish Space, meanwhile, has been working to get Otter Pup under control. The company said it was able to get into contact with the spacecraft three hours after deployment. “This transmission indicated that Otter Pup was power positive,” the company stated, “but that it was experiencing significant rotation induced from its emergency deployment from Orbiter.” Starfish says that it is able to communicate with Otter Pup and that the spacecraft is responding to commands. However, the company says it has to reduce Otter Pup’s rotation rate before moving forward with any operational mission for the spacecraft. “In the coming months, Starfish will work diligently to attempt to stabilize Otter Pup and verify the health of its systems,” the company stated. “Given the events experienced post-launch and the current state of the satellite, it is unlikely that Otter Pup will be able to continue with its mission. However, we will continue to try to save Otter Pup, and we are grateful for the continued support of our mission partners.” Even if Starfish can stabilize Otter Pup, the spacecraft won’t be able to go ahead with its original mission to rendezvous with Orbiter SN3 because of that spacecraft is no longer operating. The company didn’t state what alternative missions it can perform to test technology it plans to use on future satellite servicing vehicles. Launcher, in its own statement, said the root cause of the Orbiter problem appears to be with its software. “We have begun the implementation of corrective action to ensure this anomaly does not occur again on future missions and that the vehicle is more robust to this type of error,” it stated. The failure is the second in as many missions for the Orbiter tug. The first Orbiter, launched on Transporter-6 in January, failed when it could not get into the proper attitude after deployment so its solar cells could generate power , which it blamed on a fault with a GPS antenna used for orientation control. None of the smallsat payloads on that Orbiter were deployed. Between those two Orbiter missions, Launcher was acquired by Vast Space , a company developing commercial space stations. Launcher dropped plans to develop a small launch vehicle after the acquisition but said it would continue to work on Orbiter, flying it on several future Transporter missions. Launcher said it is still planning to fly Orbiter on three Transporter missions in 2024, starting with Transporter-10 in February 2024 that will carry Orbiter SN5. “We are grateful that our current partners and customers are continuing to join us on our next flight,” it stated.
TAMPA, Fla. — A mobile operator in the Pacific island nation of Palau is set to be the first to use Lynk Global’s direct-to-device satellites commercially to keep wireless customers connected outside terrestrial network coverage. The Palau National Communications Corporation (PNCC), the country’s largest telco, said June 21 the U.S.-based startup’s technology will enable periodic texting later in the month in the country’s southwest. PNCC customers would be able to send and receive texts with their existing phones up to three times a day across three of the four islands in Palau’s Sonsorol state, Lynk CEO Charles Miller said in an interview. These customers currently use radios on very high frequency (VHF) spectrum for communications in Sonsorol. Lynk currently has three small satellites in a low Earth orbit constellation it is seeking to expand to increase coverage and lower latency, ultimately enabling other connectivity services such as voice calls. Miller said the Virginia-based venture has secured funding to launch three more satellites this fall, and has funding commitments to deploy another six in January. The company aims to be operating more than 50 satellites by the end of 2024, and has plans for a constellation of around 5,000 satellites in total. For PNCC in Palau, Miller said this deployment plan would enable Lynk to expand satellite-enabled coverage over two more islands before the end of 2023, and then across Palau’s more than 300 islands and surrounding waters by March. In addition to helping PNCC fulfill its mandate for universal service to all of Palau, Miller said Lynk would also be able to provide backup services if a natural disaster knocks out the country’s ground network. PNCC is one of more than 30 companies that Lynk says have signed agreements with the satellite startup. According to Lynk, it has completed successful demonstrations of its technology in over 40 countries on seven continents to date. Lynk also needs additional regulatory approvals to operate in all the countries it is planning services, including the United States, which recently proposed a direct-to-device regulatory framework for the industry. Miller declined to comment on other countries where Lynk has market access, although the startup has announced plans to launch commercially in New Zealand this fall and in Canada earlier next year via partnerships with mobile operators. Lynk’s competitors in the emerging direct-to-device market include AST SpaceMobile, which plans to launch its first five commercial satellites early next year. AST SpaceMobile announced June 21 its engineers had achieved 4G LTE download speeds during tests earlier in the month of BlueWalker 3, its prototype in low Earth orbit. The Texas-based startup said it had achieved repeated successful download speeds above 10 megabits per second (Mbps) in Hawaii with multiple mass market smartphones. In April, AST SpaceMobile said it had made its first voice call with a standard smartphone using the test satellite.
SAN FRANCISCO – Space Leasing International, a new business formed by the multinational Libra Group, announced plans June 20 to acquire 21 ground stations to lease to RBC Signals. That may be just the beginning. SLI boasts a deal pipeline that includes satellites in orbit, satellites not yet launched, space launch pads and additional ground stations. “We see so much advancement in the space economy that we are intentionally pursuing transactions across the entirety of the field,” Phaedra Chrousos, Libra Group chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews. “We don’t want to close ourselves off to helping grow a part of the sector that doesn’t even exist yet.” After 45 years of leasing assets in shipping, aviation and other fields — including $15 billion in transportation transactions in the last 15 years — Libra Group formed SLI because executives said they see enormous potential for growth in the space sector. In the early days of aviation, companies tended to manufacture, own and operate aircraft. Now, it’s common for three different entities to take on those roles. “We believe that space economy is a nascent industry like the aviation industry once was,” Chrousos said. “Just like in aviation, over time there will be a bifurcation that splits the roles of the manufacturers, owners and operators. We aim to be a leading owner of these assets.” Initially, SLI is acquiring a ground station that RBC Signals is building in the Alaskan Arctic. Over the next three years, SLI will work with RBC Signals to construct or acquire 20 additional ground stations. The deal is “huge for RBC Signals” because many of the early-stage space companies that come to RBC Signals for satellite communications services don’t have enough funding to pay upfront for the equipment they need, said Christopher Richins, RBC Signals CEO and founder. “And right now, there aren’t a lot of traditional sources of financing for building ground station assets. This deal allows us to tell our customers we can buy the antennas they need.” For RBC Signals, identifying a reliable source of capital for its next 21 ground stations, frees the company to expand its business, for example, by establishing lunar communications capabilities, Richins said. SLI is moving into the space sector at a time when venture capital and private equity is becoming harder to attract. Space Capital reported in April that space investment for the first quarter of 2023 was down 53 percent compared with the first quarter of 2022. “While some large companies have no need at least in the short term for alternative ways to finance their assets, there is a large group of companies that can only finance themselves by selling equity,” said SLI CEO Alejandro Kerschen. “Those companies would certainly benefit from somebody else owning the asset. What we are doing is going to help that emerging, very innovative segment of the industry.” Libra Group and SLI have spoken with more than 30 space companies while preparing to enter the space sector. “We’ve found that the founders and CEOs we’ve spoken to so far have liked the idea of working with SLI to scale their manufacturing and acquire new assets without having to raise dilutive capital,” Chrousos said. “We believe SLI can accelerate a lot of these really innovative companies that would otherwise we need to go back to the market to get capital to move forward.” SLI is led by Alejandro Kerschen, whose resume includes stints at Citibank, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas and Atlantic Alliance Ltd., a corporate finance practice he managed for the last 20 years. Kerschen joined Libra Group in June to become SLI’s CEO. “We look at space assets as physical assets that could be owned by us and leased out in the same way Libra Group owns and leases other assets,” Kerschen said. “For example, look at what the telecom sector is doing, separating infrastructure towers from telecom companies. We see similarities to ground stations and satellite companies.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Ovzon will likely need another deadline extension to keep priority spectrum rights for Ovzon 3, the Swedish satcom service provider’s first broadband satellite now slated to launch no earlier than late 2023. The company said June 22 that Ovzon 3 will miss a July-September launch window because of final assembly and testing delays, in addition to work taking longer than expected to change launch providers from Arianespace to SpaceX. Ovzon 3 was already at risk of missing a Dec. 31 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) deadline to start providing services from its designated geostationary orbit slot if it was deployed late in the previous launch window. Because the Maxar Technologies-built satellite will rely on electric propulsion, it will take several months to climb to its slot at 59.7 degrees East after reaching geostationary transfer orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. Ovzon announced in February that it had switched launch providers after manufacturing delays caused Ovzon 3 to miss a ride on one of Arianespace’s last remaining Ariane 5 missions. A month later, Ovzon said the satellite’s Dec. 15, 2022, Bring into Use deadline had been extended a year by the ITU, a United Nations affiliate. Ovzon 3 was originally planned to launch in 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy before the company secured a more attractive deal with Arianespace and encountered manufacturing delays that have been attributed to pandemic-related supply chain issues. Systems-level dynamics tests that Maxar is due to start in early July will significantly reduce schedule risk and enable Ovzon to give a more accurate launch date, Ovzon said in a June 22 news release announcing the delay. Ovzon described these tests as the last major milestone for finalizing the spacecraft. “Maxar is in the final stages of integration and test on Ovzon 3 after addressing modifications related to the change of launch vehicle,” Maxar spokesperson Mark Lewis said in response to questions about the satellite’s latest delay. “Like Ovzon has said, we are working together to ensure the satellite is ready for launch as soon as possible.” Per Norén, Ovzon’s CEO, said in a statement that he does not anticipate any further lengthy delays for the program. “We are excited to be in this final phase and for the overall high quality of the satellite, but this is not the time for haste nor being overly optimistic about the importance of the remaining tasks,” he said. Ovzon’s current broadband business relies on leasing capacity from other satellite operators. Despite the delays, Norén said the operational and commercial model for its first satellite remains solid and is “more relevant today than ever.” Ovzon said the satellite’s latest delay would also not affect its current commercial activities. The company has previously said Ovzon-3’s manufacturing delays have increased the project’s overall cost by around $25 million.
Apex, a startup with plans to mass-manufacture satellite buses, has raised $16 million to fund development of its first large-scale factory. Apex announced June 22 it raised the Series A round, led by venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital. The company has raised more than $27 million to date, including a seed round it announced in October 2022 . The funds will be used for what the company calls Factory One, a 4,600-square-meter production facility in Los Angeles that the company will use to ramp up production of its Aries satellite bus. The company, building its first Aries spacecraft now, projects scaling up production to five in 2024, 20 in 2025 and as many as 100 in 2026. Ian Cinnamon, chief executive of Apex, said in an interview that the company was able to raise more money than originally planned for the Series A round because of strong investor interest. “We feel incredibly grateful that it was significantly oversubscribed, where we had a lot of investors that wanted to invest that, unfortunately, we just didn’t have room to bring them in.” He said the fundraising climate for space companies had changed in the last year because of both broader macroeonomic issues, like higher inflation and interest rates, as well as struggles among companies in the industry. That’s driving investors to companies with a near-term focus on products and services than can generate revenue, he argued. “In today’s climate, investors are really looking for companies that have clear paths to being able to produce revenue, and business models that not only would grow massively in the future but are solid business models in today’s market,” he said. “It’s things that are real businesses today that can grow in the future.” Apex is building its first Aries satellite, dubbed “Call to Adventure,” that it announced in April . That spacecraft remains on schedule to launch on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare mission in early 2024. That spacecraft will carry payloads for three customers: space refueling company Orbit Fab, autonomous satellite technology developer Ubotica and an unnamed “tier one” defense contractor. Cinnamon said he could not disclose that contractor other than to say it is a “household name.” That mission, he added, is now fully booked. He said Apex has strong interest among potential customers for this first flight, so was able to find three customers with sufficiently different missions that they could be accommodated on the same spacecraft without any conflicts. However, in the future the company plans to sell satellites to individual customers rather than host multiple customers on the same satellite, a model called “condosats” in the industry. “Part of the reason that we don’t want to continue doing condosats is that it’s not easy coordinating all those efforts,” he said. The announcement of the funding round and customers for its first mission came shortly after Apex rolled out a tool on its website to allow customers to configure satellites . The tool, similar to those used for ordering cars or computers, offers several options for power, communications and propulsion, and lists the price of that option. Cinnamon said the company is offering that configuration tool because it plans to offer a limited number of options for satellites, which he likened to the stock-keeping units, or SKUs, used in retail. Apex is also minimizing the amount of customization or non-recurring engineering (NRE) it offers customers. “If you’re not doing NRE and you have a set number of SKUs, that means we know exactly what our costs are, what our labor is,” he said, enabling “transparent” pricing of its satellite buses. “We believe that the industry deserves that transparent pricing and to cut through a lot of the back-and-forth that I think slows down the industry and hampers innovation.” He said that “thousands” had tried out the tool since it rolled it out earlier in the month, leading to inquiries from potential customers to confirm that the prices quoted online are accurate. He did not confirm if it led to any orders yet, but said the company has sold part of a second set of five satellites it is building in 2024.
Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital has signed an agreement with French aerospace giant Safran to explore U.S.-based production of satellite propulsion systems, the companies announced June 23. Under the agreement, Safran Electronics & Defense and Terran Orbital will investigate opportunities and prerequisites for the production of electric propulsion systems for satellites based on Safran’s PPSX00 plasma thruster. The PPSX00 is a hall effect plasma thruster , recently introduced by Safran for the low Earth orbit satellite market. “Plasma propulsion has become the go-to solution for satellite positioning, orbital transfer and stationkeeping, because it offers significant weight savings over conventional chemical propulsion,” Safran said. Terran Orbital makes small satellites in Irvine, California . One of its major customers is defense contractor Lockheed Martin, also a strategic investor in Terran Orbital. Safran and Terran Orbital “will undertake an in-depth analysis to determine the technical, industrial and economic prerequisites for a new U.S.-based production line for electric propulsion systems,” the companies said. The propulsion hardware would be made in Irvine. Marc Bell, Terran Orbital’s chairman and CEO, said the company decided to work with Safran because of its “immense flight heritage.” Safran is one of the largest defense contractors in Europe, “and their goal is to build their components here in the United States.” For Terran Orbital, this would be an opportunity to become more vertically integrated, Bell said. “Right now we build 85% of our components and modules in house, and we’re looking to get to 100%. And the two things we don’t build in house today are propulsion and radios.” Some of the company’s propulsion suppliers include Astra’s Apollo Fusion, Stellar Exploration and Phase Four. There is no specific timeline for the agreement with Safran, he said. “We’re looking at everything from joint ventures to licensing deals.” Jean-Marie Bétermier, senior vice president for space at Safran Electronics & Defense, said developing “effective and sustainable propulsion systems for satellites is a critical challenge worldwide, as increasingly stringent international regulations stipulate greater sustainability and resilience in spacecraft. requirements of LEO satellites.” “Our alliance with Terran Orbital will contribute to the emergence of a complementary source of supply for electric propulsion systems to meet the growing needs of the space industry,” he said. “A higher degree of spacecraft maneuverability is needed to avoid collisions, along with a system to deorbit LEO satellites at the end of their service life.” Safran says its PPSX00 plasma thrusters, rated at about one kilowatt of power, would fill these needs.
The governments of the United States and India have agreed to work more closely together in spaceflight, with India signing the Artemis Accords and the two countries planning for a joint mission of some kind to the International Space Station. The two countries disclosed those plans June 22 as part of a broader partnership between the countries announced during the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the United States. That visit featured a joint press conference at the White House with President Biden. That partnership included India becoming the 27 th nation to sign the Artemis Accords. “By taking the decision to join the Artemis Accords, we have taken a big leap forward in our space cooperation,” Modi, speaking through an interpreter, said at the press conference. “In fact, in short, for India and America partnership, even the sky is not the limit.” In a fact sheet distributed by the White House, the governments said they agreed that NASA and the Indian space agency ISRO would develop “a strategic framework for human spaceflight cooperation” by the end of the year. NASA had agreed early this year to provide “advanced training” for an Indian astronaut at the Johnson Space Center. The fact sheet added that the agencies had “a goal of launching a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024.” It was not clear what that would involve, although one industry source speculated it may involve NASA assisting ISRO in some way to fly an Indian astronaut on a private mission to the station. India is developing its own crewed spacecraft, Gaganyaan, but has fallen behind an original schedule set by Modi in 2018 to perform a crewed flight in 2022. That first crewed mission is now expected no earlier than 2025 after a series of uncrewed abort tests and orbital test flights. The agreement adds to existing cooperation with NASA in space projects, including the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth science mission. That spacecraft, using a radar provided by NASA on a spacecraft built by ISRO, is scheduled to launch early next year on an Indian rocket. A bigger milestone to many, though, was India aligning itself with NASA and other nations that have signed the Artemis Accords. India has taken pains in the past not to become too close to the U.S. or other Western nations, or to Russia, in space, electing to conduct a series of smaller cooperative efforts with many countries. Indian officials have also, in international meetings, expressed a preference for binding agreements created through formal processes rather that a non-binding agreement like the Accords. “India signing the Accords is a transformative moment for the Accords and the Artemis program,” Mike Gold, chief growth officer at Redwire Space and a former NASA official who spearheaded development of the Accords in 2020 while at the agency, told SpaceNews. He noted India has an existing program of lunar and Martian exploration, including the launch in July of Chandrayaan-3, the country’s second lunar lander. “By joining Artemis, India will be catapulted to the forefront of human space exploration, enjoying the benefits of the technologies and capabilities that will be developed through this singular journey of discovery,” he said. “Conversely, the Artemis program will benefit greatly from the India’s extraordinary capacity to innovate and conduct ambitious activities in an affordable fashion.” The announcement, while a major development for India’s space ambitions and for Artemis, was relatively low-key. Unlike many other countries, there was no formal signing ceremony for India, only the announcement that it had signed, and neither country released more details about their planned cooperation in human spaceflight. Neither NASA nor ISRO publicized the signing of the Accords or new cooperation in human spaceflight beyond a brief comment from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We look forward to all that we will accomplish here on Earth and in space, including our joint Earth science mission NISAR, and are especially grateful for India’s signing of the Artemis Accords,” he tweeted . “We can do more when we work together!”
Cybersecurity specialist SpiderOak reported successful on-orbit testing June 22 of its OrbitSecure software running on a Ball Aerospace payload. “This is the first time a zero-trust application has been performed in space,” Charles Beames, SpiderOak executive chairman, told SpaceNews. Zero-trust is important, Beames said, because it offers security at the data level. Each data record is encrypted and stored in a digital ledger. Only someone with the appropriate encryption key can access a specific record. What’s more, if a hacker breaks the encryption, the breach will be detected and new encryption keys will be issued immediately, Beames said. SpiderOak is demonstrating OrbitSecure on a Ball Aerospace payload sent into low-Earth orbit in January on a Loft Orbital satellite. The payload incorporates Ball’s Open Software System (BOSS) framework, which is designed for speedy data processing and on-orbit modification of applications. After the launch, SpiderOak worked closely with Ball to upload and demonstrate OrbitSecure software. While the testing continues, the “demonstration completes a major milestone” in showing the benefit of OrbitSecure for data security and resiliency, SpiderOak CEO Dave Pearah said in a statement. SpiderOak also has conducted extensive terrestrial testing of OrbitSecure with flatsat satellite testbeds from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Ball. Still, spaceflight testing is an important milestone. “Successfully operating any military system in an operationally relevant environment is always a big milestone,” retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, a member of SpiderOaks Space Advisory Board, said in a statement. “In the unforgiving environment of space, there is no stronger validation that a system is ready for deployment.” Jake Sauer, Ball Aerospace vice president and chief technologist, called the demonstration “a step towards fortifying the resilience of our space ecosystem.” The U.S. Space Force is requesting $700 million in the 2024 budget for cybersecurity . Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Space Force chief of space operations, told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee in March that the funding would be spent on cybersecurity software, hardware and training. 
Military satellite procurements for strategic defense and communications are drawing increased funding and congressional scrutiny. These are the largest satellite acquisitions planned by the U.S. Space Force over the next several years and “represent a fundamental departure from how DoD has historically carried out these critical missions,” says a new report by the Aerospace Corp. published June 22. A proposed budget of $30.3 billion for 2024 is the Space Force’s largest ever, nearly doubling the service’s first budget request four years ago. “The increase supports growth in next-generation nuclear command and control spacecraft, which will look much different than their predecessors, and reflects the administration’s push toward more space assets in lower orbits,” according to the report by analyst Sam Wilson, of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy. Some takeaways from the report: Space assets for nuclear command and control include missile warning infrared sensing spacecraft, as well as satellites that transmit messages to and from nuclear forces and between senior leaders in the event of a nuclear war. A new program called Evolved Strategic Satcom, and two families of missile-warning programs — Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared and Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking, collectively make up nearly half of the entire Space Force’s research and development budget through fiscal year 2028, Wilson points out. The ESS satcom program is a dedicated constellation for nuclear command and control. By contract, DoD today uses satellites for both strategic communications and tactical communications. “With the next-generation systems, this dual function of the satellites will go away,” writes Wilson. DoD’s next-generation missile warning programs also represent a fundamental shift for the department , he adds. “For several decades, DoD has used a small number of systems in high orbit for missile warning. For the next generation of programs, the department is beginning to pivot to an architecture with a larger number of assets in lower orbit.” The Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next Gen OPIR) and the Resilient Missile Warning and Missile Tracking (MW/MT) systems collectively make up for nearly $5 billion of the Space Force’s 2024 request. DoD in the 2024 budget is accelerating a pivot to lower orbit, adding funds for MW/MT in low and medium orbits, and cutting one of three previously planned Next Gen OPIR geostationary satellites. Wilson notes that Congress has been a strong supporter of the shift to lower orbits and has increased funding for the Space Development Agency that is leading these efforts. However, Congress has raised concerns about costs and criticized the Space Force for not providing sufficient information on the risks associated with the new architecture. House appropriators challenge Space Force plan During last week’s markup of the defense budget, the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee challenged DoD’s plans to eliminate a Next Gen OPIR satellite. Next Gen OPIR “is a critical component of the strategic missile warning and nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) enterprise,” said a HAC-D report accompanying its markup of the 2024 budget. “The Committee is troubled by the lack of analysis to support the proposal to cancel the GEO–3 spacecraft, especially given its importance to the NC3 mission.” The HAC-D “understands the Space Force is pivoting to more resilient, proliferated space architectures, and strongly supports those initiatives. Yet the Department of Defense has not addressed how these new architectures will meet the NC3 mission needs, and if not, how the NC3 mission needs will be met after the Next Gen OPIR program.” Appropriators direct DoD and the Department of the Air Force to report back with answers on these questions. The full House Appropriations Committee is marking up the defense spending bill June 22. 
NASA inaugurated a public center designed to highlight the information provided by its fleet of Earth science spacecraft, although future missions face budgetary challenges. NASA held a ribbon-cutting ceremony June 21 for the Earth Information Center, located in a previously vacant lobby on the ground floor of its headquarters building here. The center, which will be open to the public on weekdays starting June 26, features interactive displays and exhibits showing data collected by NASA and other civil government spacecraft on the atmosphere, oceans and land. “This vital, life-saving data is here, but do folks really know how to access it? That’s why we’re gathered here,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in remarks at the ceremony. Nelson said the center supports a mandate by the Biden administration to make such data more widely available. He described the inspiration for the center as NASA’s mission control centers that bring together all of a mission’s data into one place. “I said, why can’t we do this with all this information from all of our assets that are up there, bring it all together in a user-friendly way?” The center, he said, is part of a broader strategy to share NASA Earth science information with other agencies to aid in decision making. Several of those agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), participated in the event. “The Earth Information Center will play such a critical role in sharing environmental data with communities to help them make more informed decisions on future climate risks. This is a priority for FEMA,” said Erik Hooks, deputy administrator of FEMA. Another attendee of the event was Dwane Roth, a Kansas farmer who has been using NASA data to make better use of water to grow crops. “I never thought before, in my boots on the ground, that I’d be able to use satellites in space to help me make better decisions,” he said. Nelson, in an interview after the ceremony, called the opening of the center a “major first step” in his vision for it. It will be improved, he said, with data from several new missions that recently launches as well as long-term plans for the Earth System Observatory of missions recommended by the Earth science decadal survey five years ago. “It’s going to be just the most exquisite and complete information that Earthlings have ever had about what’s happening to our planet.” However, the future of the Earth System Observatory and other NASA science missions is in flux. NASA requested a 7% budget increase in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, but spending caps that were part of a debt-ceiling agreement called the Fiscal Responsibility Act enacted in early June limit overall non-defense discretionary spending at 2023 levels. “We recognize that it’s unlikely we will get the full request, and we know that’s going to create challenges for us in the future,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy told two National Academies committee June 7 . Those concerns have been exacerbated by spending allocations by the House Appropriations Committee that are significantly below 2023 levels. “While the Fiscal Responsibility Act set the topline spending limit, it does not require that we mark up our bills to that level,” Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), chair of the committee, said at a June 14 markup of subcommittee spending levels known as 302(b) allocations. “The debt ceiling bill set a ceiling, not a floor, for fiscal year 2024 bills.” That markup approved 302(b) allocations that include $58.7 billion for the overall commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill, which includes NASA, the Departments of Commerce and Justice and the National Science Foundation, among other agencies. That is 28% less than fiscal year 2023. House appropriators have not yet marked up a draft CJS spending bill, but the lower allocation suggests the potential for significant cuts. Even before the debt-ceiling deal, Nelson warned of challenges with spending on science missions in general, citing demands from Mars Sample Return . Nelson said he remained hopeful that Earth science and other missions would remain funded, but some might be delayed. “Depending on where the appropriations comes out, some science missions will have to be stretched out, but we will still get them done,” he said. “It’s wait and see what the final appropriation is.” He said he has not yet talked with appropriators regarding which missions should be prioritized. Others in the agency, though, are taking steps to prepare for possible delays. At a June 21 meeting of the Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said NASA would delay the release of a call for proposals for the next New Frontiers mission, which had been scheduled for November, citing uncertainty about the effects of the debt-ceiling deal. Delays for future Discovery missions are also likely, she added. Nelson said he hopes NASA could at least come close to the funding it received in fiscal year 2023, adding that the agency might consider asking Congress to fund some efforts though a supplemental spending bill. That included, he said, the $180 million NASA requested to start work on an International Space Station deorbit vehicle . “It’s the facts of life,” he said, arguing that the spending caps were better than having the nation go into default on its debt. “So, we’ll live with it, but some science missions will have to be stretched out.”
United Launch Alliance launched a classified National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite on a Delta 4 Heavy rocket June 22 at 5:18 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. It was ULA’s second attempt of this launch that had been previously scheduled for June 21 but was delayed, the company said, “due to an issue with a ground systems pneumatic valve.” About four minutes into flight, the outer boosters of the three-core Delta 4 Heavy separated. The second stage separated about two minutes later. At the request of the NRO, ULA ended the webcast nearly seven minutes into the flight after the nose fairing was jettisoned. NROL-68 is the Delta 4 Heavy’s 15th and penultimate launch before its expected retirement. The vehicle in 2022 flew its final mission from the West Coast. This mission was ULA’s first launch of 2023. The company in May 2019 received a U.S. Air Force contract to launch NROL-68. The Delta 4 Heavy configuration first launched in December 2004. Each of the Delta 4 Heavy’s common booster cores is powered by Aerojet Rocketdyone’s RS-68A main engines. The Delta cryogenic second stage is powered by an RL10C-2-1 engine. The rocket uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in all stages. “We had another successful launch for the NRO today,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a statement confirming the launch was successful. “The payload we’ve put into space today adds to the unique capability the NRO provides to keep us safe and out in front of the pacing challenges posed by our nation’s competitors.” ULA is under contract to launch one more NRO satellite on the Delta 4 Heavy in 2024 from Cape Canaveral. ULA then plans to retire the Delta 4 Heavy and replace it with the new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Lt. Col. Scott Carstetter, Atlas 5 and Delta 4 materiel leader at the Space Systems Command, noted that NROL-68 will be the first of four missions for ULA’s Atlas 5 and Delta 4 in the final year of Atlas/Delta operations.
The House Armed Services Committee in a late-night vote June 21 approved its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024 by a vote of 58-1 after a marathon markup session. Only Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) voted against the bill. More than 800 amendments were negotiated during the 17-hour markup. The annual defense policy bill now heads to the House floor. The committee approved the proposed bill from the HASC strategic forces subcommittee that includes several space policy provisions, such as requiring DoD to share threat intelligence with commercial satellite operators. It also approved language to establish a Space National Guard. Fight over U.S. Space Command relocation The contentious battle over the proposed relocation of U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama surfaced during the markup. One of the provisions in the proposed bill from HASC Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), known as the chairman’s mark , was challenged by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.). Lamborn sought to strip Rogers’ language that prevents U.S. Space Command from spending money on new or improved facilities at its current headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, until the Secretary of the Air Force delivers a report on the selection of a permanent location. Facing pushback from Rogers and other Alabama lawmakers, Lamborn withdrew his amendment. Other amendments adopted by HASC on space policy and programs Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) introduced a bill allowing the Space Force to charge commercial space companies for indirect costs associated with launch activities at government ranges. The provision allows the Space Force to charge commercial launch companies for indirect costs associated with launch operations such as infrastructure upgrades. The debate over how to fund spaceport improvements has gathered steam in recent years as commercial activities have ramped up at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Space Force officials have called on Congress to authorize the ranges to be operated like airports. Under current law, DoD is responsible for operating and maintaining the ranges and cannot accept private funding for infrastructure upgrades. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) directed the Space Force to provide a report on the “technical maturity, cost, benefits, and risks associated with fielding a high-power megawatt nuclear-electric power and propulsion asset in space.” Wilson’s amendment highlights the “need for satellite power systems that have significant maneuver capability … and that nuclear power is a technology that adversary nations are pursuing to address this.” “Recognizing that nuclear-electric power designs offer far greater propellent efficiency and electrical power than nuclear-thermal processes, the committee is concerned the Department has historically underinvested in this segment,” the amendment says. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Canada’s NorthStar Earth and Space has signed a multi-launch deal with Rocket Lab after Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy shattered plans to start deploying its space situational awareness (SSA) satellites this summer. Rocket Lab is contracted to launch the venture’s first four satellites this fall on an Electron rocket, NorthStar announced June 22. Spire Global is providing the satellites, each the size of 16 cubesats. NorthStar had planned to launch three satellites in its initial batch with Virgin Orbit, before the air-launch company fell into bankruptcy in April. Using larger capacity on Electron to deploy more satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) gives its SSA system greater coverage from the outset for early adopters, said NorthStar chief operating officer David Saint-Germain. “We were able to change a negative into a positive,” said Saint-Germain, who joined the company shortly before Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “It’s really a testament to the maturity of the industry that we were able to turn around so quickly to find another launcher,” he added, “I mean, this would have been impossible just a few years ago.” He said the agreement with Rocket Lab includes another two missions of four satellites that could start launching as early as next year. At least 12 satellites are needed to provide full commercial services from an SSA platform designed to track objects as small as five centimeters in LEO and 40 centimeters in geostationary orbit. NorthStar’s agreement with Spire includes options for up to 30 satellites, which would enable the SSA platform to track these objects more frequently. While the tracking frequency depends on the type of object and orbit, Saint-Germain said ultimately a LEO object could enter the field of view of its full fleet of space cameras multiple times per hour. “If there’s a collision happening in space and that generates a plume of debris, and you’re not tracking that debris often enough, you could end up hitting other [satellites] without having the time to move them,” he said. “So it’s really important to get that time down so that you have precision of tracking, and you can enter tactical mode — you can actually trigger behaviors that you can’t do if you’re seeing the object only once per day.” He said the company is exploring inter-satellite links and onboard processing capabilities to reduce the time it takes to relay tracking information back to customers on the ground. According to Saint-Germain, NorthStar’s optical satellites would be capable of capturing all objects going through their field of view simultaneously, contrary to ground telescopes tracking one object at a time. The SSA system is also designed to improve the tracking of unknown objects in near-Earth orbits. “When you’re doing things from the ground, it’s very hard to detect unknown objects because you have to know what you’re looking for in order to track it,” he said. “When you’re in space, it just crosses your field of view. So whatever is up there that we don’t know about, we’re going to see it and accumulate data on it in a way that’s never been done before.” NorthStar has yet to disclose the mix of commercial and government customers it says have signed up for a partial SSA service that would use its first four satellites. The venture announced it had secured $35 million in funding for its plans in early January. The emerging space-based SSA market has also recently seen funding deals for startups including Vyoma, Digantara , and Scout Space. Meanwhile, multiple aerospace companies have agreed to snap up Virgin Orbit’s assets out of bankruptcy, including Rocket Lab, which is buying the company’s main production facility in Long Beach, California. Saint-Germain said Rocket Lab is slated to deploy NorthStar’s initial batch of satellites from its launch site in New Zealand.
Ecuador joined the growing roster of countries backing the Artemis Accords for safe and sustainable space exploration June 21. In a ceremony at Ecuador’s embassy in Washington, Gustavo Manrique Miranda, Ecuador’s foreign affairs minister, sign the accords in the presence of officials with the U.S. State Department and NASA. Ecuador is the 26 th country to sign the Accords and the fourth in Latin America, after Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. “Signing the Artemis Accords sends a powerful message to the international community that the Ecuadorian government is committed to pursue cutting-edge efforts in technology and is open to innovation, investment, workforce development to promote sustainable growth, and international collaboration to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges,” said Ivonne Baki, Ecuador’s ambassador to the United States, in a statement. Ecuador does not have a major presence in space, although it does have a space agency established in 2007. One Ecuadorian company, Leviathan Space Industries, has been working to establish a spaceport in the country. The United States and others who have previously signed the Accords have made it a priority to attract more countries not traditionally seen as space players. In a recent interview , Jennifer Littlejohn, acting assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, said one working group of member countries, led by Brazil and Poland, was examining how to attract more emerging space nations and overcome any obstacles to them signing. “The real strength of the Accords is the diversity of the signatory group,” she said. “Although not every country may have the same long-term exploration goals, I think we are working with all signatory countries to find ways to participate meaningfully in the Accords conversation.” Karen Feldstein, the NASA associate administrator for international and interagency relations who represented the agency at the signing ceremony, offered a similar view. “Ecuador today adds its voice to a diverse and growing set of nations committed to the notion that humanity’s rapid expansion into space, toward the moon and destinations beyond, is peaceful, safe and in full accordance with international law,” she said. While the Artemis Accords are closely tied to the NASA-led Artemis lunar exploration campaign, signing the accords does not necessarily commit a country to participating in the effort. Advocates of the accords argue that they outline principles and best practices based on the Outer Space Treaty, a cornerstone of international space law. “The values that the United States wants to see develop on the moon and hopefully throughout all of outer space are the values that are reflected in the Artemis Accords,” said Emily Pierce, an attorney-adviser in the State Department, during a session of the Summit for Space Sustainability June 14 in New York. With several countries planning lunar missions, she said, “there was an urgent practical need to start to get countries on the same page regarding operational implementation of several key obligations of the Outer Space Treaty.” There are still issues that the Artemis Accords have not resolved, such as space resource utilization. That was deliberate, said Mike Gold, chief growth officer at Redwire and a former NASA official who spearheaded development of the Accords in 2020, in order to create a “big tent” of countries that can later resolve such sticking points. “The Accords are the beginning of a conversation,” he said on the conference panel, “not an ending.”
Mynaric will supply laser communications terminals for seven military satellites made by Raytheon Technologies, the company announced June 21. The optical communications terminals are for missile-tracking satellites that Raytheon is making under a $250 million contract from the Space Development Agency (SDA). These satellites will be part of SDA’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer , a network of 35 satellites that also includes 14 spacecraft made by Northrop Grumman and 14 made by L3Harris Technologies. They are projected to launch in 2025. Each satellite has a wide field-of-view infrared sensor, three optical communications terminals, and a Ka-band payload for communications. These satellites in low-Earth orbit are designed to detect, identify and track hypersonic weapons and other advanced missiles from their earliest stages of launch through interception. Deliveries projected in 2024 Mynaric will supply Condor Mk3 terminals to Raytheon, with deliveries expected in 2024. Last year Mynaric announced it will supply 42 Condor Mk3 terminals for Northrop Grumman’s 14 Tracking Layer satellites. The latest order from Raytheon gives Mynaric a dominant position as an optical terminals provider for SDA’s proliferated constellation. The company, headquartered in Munich, Germany, operates in the United States in Los Angeles, California, and Washington, D.C. L3Harris last year announced a strategic investment in Mynaric. In 2021 Mynaric established a strategic supplier relationship with Northrop Grumman.
Update: SES announced in a brief June 22 news release that discussions about a possible combination with Intelsat have ceased . WASHINGTON — Intelsat has ended talks about merging with rival satellite operator SES, a source close to the discussions confirmed. They had been negotiating a deal for at least three months that would have formed a group with around $4 billion in revenues, beefing up defenses as SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation expands into their satellite broadband markets. A transaction would have followed Viasat’s recently completed Inmarsat merger and another consolidation deal in the works between Eutelsat and OneWeb. However, SES and Intelsat were ultimately unable to see eye to eye about their potential combination. The operators are also at odds over the distribution of billions of dollars of C-band spectrum clearing proceeds. The source said Intelsat notified SES about its decision June 21. “Given the content of recent discussions — and the fact that the SES-aligned parties would not agree to certain business fundamentals important to Intelsat stakeholders — Intelsat concluded that a combination in fact would not create sufficient value compared to Intelsat going in a different strategic direction,” the person told SpaceNews . Bloomberg first broke the news about Intelsat’s withdrawal from the merger discussions in a June 21 report that cited sources. Publicly listed SES could not be reached for comment outside the company’s regular business hours in Luxembourg. “Intelsat engages in strategic conversations with potential partners on a regular basis, and we do not publicly comment on the content or outcome of those discussions,” said Clay McConnell, Intelsat senior vice president of corporate communications and marketing. McConnell added that Intelsat feels it is “well positioned as a market and strategy leader in the satellite communications industry” following its emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2022. Analysts have speculated that a difference of opinion around the merger talks could have contributed to the recent surprise and sudden resignation of SES CEO Steve Collar, who is leaving the company at the end of June — just a few weeks after announcing his departure. A combination would have likely faced significant regulatory scrutiny . 
 Scout Space , a startup developing technologies for space situational awareness, announced June 21 it has secured undisclosed funding from the venture capital firm Decisive Point and from government contractor Noblis. Noblis Ventures is the majority investor in Scout’s recently closed seed round led by Decisive Point, the company said. Scout Space said it could not disclose the value of the seed round. Other participating investors included VIPC and Fusion Fund. A Scout spokesperson said the company, based in Alexandria, Virginia, has raised about $5.5 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2019. Noblis, based in Reston, Virginia, is a federal contractor focused on science and technology. It was formed as a spinoff of the nonprofit MITRE Corp. Sensors for spacecraft navigation Scout developed a sensing payload that helps spacecraft in orbit see and understand the environment around them. The company has won Air Force and Space Force small business innovation research contracts . “Now more than ever, space-based situational awareness is critical to our national security and economy,” said Mile Corrigan, Noblis’ president and CEO. Eric Ingram, Scout’s co-founder and CEO, said the new round of investments signal “confidence in our vision and technological capabilities in the space situational awareness domain. Space-based sensing and software technologies are key to enabling spacecraft autonomy and national security.”
A new startup, Danti, came out of stealth June 21 with a search engine designed for users of geospatial data. Danti is among a growing number of startups that are riding the artificial intelligence wave . Its search engine relies on natural language models to help users of its search engine find relevant information about places on Earth. The Atlanta-based startup announced a $2.75 million pre-seed funding round led by Tech Square Ventures with participation from Radius Capital. Other investors include Philip Krim and Raven One Ventures, SpaceVC, Overline, Tareyton Ventures, Jordan Noone, Keith Masback and Jeff Crusey. “The funding will be used to accelerate development of Danti’s search engine technology for deployment with U.S. intelligence agencies and early commercial customers,” Jesse Kallman, founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . Users of the search engine, he said, can pose simple questions and get results drawn from data collected by satellites, aircraft, social media and other open sources. Kallman decided to name the company Danti after touring the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps created by Ignazio Danti. “I was completely blown away by how a mathematician and geographer in the 1500s was able to make highly accurate maps of Italy with the tools of the time.” NGA challenge The company recently won a $75,000 prize challenge from the National Security Innovation Network, sponsored by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The top prize was for an application that would allow non-expert users of geospatial data to quickly prioritize, analyze, and organize information into actionable intelligence. NGA is now a Danti customer, said Kallman. The company also is working with undisclosed commercial customers. “We are heavily focused on national security applications,” he said. Danti hired personnel with security clearances who previously worked at Palantir, Maxar, Airbus and Georgia Tech. “I’ve worked in the unmanned systems space. I’ve worked in space based Earth observation, in a number of different industries. And I’ve kind of seen the same problem over and over specifically when it comes to geospatial content: data overload,” Kallman said. Analysts are drowning in data and need simple tools to get their questions answered, he said. Another challenge is the significant level of expertise that is needed to make sense of geospatial data. NGA has a large workforce of analysts, but most organizations in government and commercial industries that work with geospatial data rely on small teams that source the content, analyze it and provide briefs. “If we can reduce the level of complexity required to use it and understand it, that’s already a big win, because that opens up the amount of folks within a given organization that can use the content,” he said. The U.S. military relies on NGA to provide intelligence analysis, but an engine like Danti’s could help forces deployed downrange get quick answers, Kallman added. “We’re encoding decades of geospatial experience into AI based tools that can translate user queries into something that a computer can actually execute a search against,” he said. Much of the AI investment in the geospatial data analytics industry is going into computer vision, object detection and other technologies to extract information out of an image. “What we’re doing is complementary, providing an ability to search data sets and ask questions.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Space Forge will flesh out its U.S. strategy with the help of Andrew Parlock, the U.K.-based startup’s new managing director for U.S. manufacturing operations. Before joining Space Forge, Parlock served as Iceye’s new business director. There, he helped the Finland-based startup attract U.S. defense and intelligence customers. Initially, Space Forge U.S. will focus on developing advanced material for semiconductor manufacturing and ForgeStar reusable satellites. ForgeStar is designed for on-orbit manufacturing and precision return of payloads to Earth for additional processing. “We’re going to have to build a whole value chain around spacecraft and advanced materials manufacturing with all due haste,” Parlock told SpaceNews. Parlock, who previously worked on space resiliency and advanced programs at Northrop Grumman, had little familiarity with Space Forge prior to meeting CEO Joshua Western. He was immediately intrigued, though, by the company’s breadth. Rather than simply focusing on small satellite research or novel satellite return technology, Space Forge combines those technologies with on-orbit materials processing. “It’s hard to step away from that kind of opportunity,” Parlock said. Space Forge announced plans in April to select a U.S. site for manufacturing ForgeStar satellites and payloads for U.S. customers. Parlock is based in Baltimore, Maryland. Space Forge has administrative offices in Washington, D.C.. The company has not yet selected a U.S. location for manufacturing, research and development, and other activities.
The Federal Aviation Administration has started to reduce the amount of airspace it closes for launches from Cape Canaveral as part of efforts to limit the impact of growing launch activity on commercial aviation. The FAA recently introduced a revised zone of restricted airspace around and extending offshore for many launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center. The revised zone keeps open airspace to the north of the spaceports that had previously been closed for all launches. By doing so, the FAA said in a June 15 statement, it keeps open a key arrival route for commercial flights from northeastern U.S. to airports in central Florida, notably Orlando International Airport and Tampa International Airport. For a typical launch, the original restriction would require up to three dozen flights to be rerouted, causing up to 300 cumulative minutes of delay. The revised airspace restriction will be used for launches on eastern or southern trajectories, the FAA said, based on risk analyses conducted for every launch. Launches that go on more northerly trajectories, such as missions to the International Space Station, will continue to use the larger zone. The move is part of broader efforts to address the conflicts between launches and commercial aviation, particularly in Florida’s congested airspace. In April, the FAA released a set of factors when considering whether to allow a launch to proceed or ask the launch company to identify alternative windows for the launch. Among those factors are the timing of the launch, particularly relative to holidays or other special events that cause increases in air traffic, and the duration of the launch window. “The FAA encourages commercial space operations to take place during nighttime hours (to the extent practicable) when other flight operations tend to be reduced,” the guidelines state. The document added that the FAA will prioritize missions for national security or otherwise in the national interest, as well as commercial launches carrying payloads. “The focus really is on Florida as we move forward,” said Duane Freer, manager of space operations for the FAA’s air traffic organization, during a May 15 meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). He noted 92% of launches that affect the national airspace system are from the Cape. One ongoing area of concern is launch scrubs. Freer said the FAA has been encouraging launch operators to inform air traffic control of scrubs as soon as possible, including before airspace closures go into effect. A separate effort is the Space Data Integrator (SDI), a tool to automate the distribution of data from launches and reentries to air traffic controllers, enabling more dynamic management of airspace and reducing the size and duration of airspace closures. Freer said at the COMSTAC meeting that full integration of launch and reentry data into air traffic management systems won’t be completed until 2028, citing “budgetary constraints.” He said he did not know how much additional funding would be needed to accelerate that schedule.
An Indian startup has raised $10 million to start development of commercial space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities that will include data from spacecraft. Bengaluru-based Digantara announced June 20 it raised the funding in a Series A1 round led by Peak XV Partners, a venture fund until recently known as Sequoia Capital India. Several other investors participated, including Kalaari Capital, which provided the company with $2.5 million in seed capital in 2021. Digantara is developing a system called the Space Mission Assurance Platform, or Space-MAP, to collect and analyze SSA data. Anirudh Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Digantara, told SpaceNews that the system currently uses data “from select agencies and commercial companies” that it analyzes to identify potential collision risks. The company is also establishing a groundbased optical SSA observatory in India. He said the company plans to use much of the new funding round to start work on smallsats equipped with electro-optical sensors to collect SSA data. The satellites, a combination of 6U and 12U cubesats, will be procured from an unnamed vendor, with Digantara developing the payloads. The first phase of that effort involves eight cubesats placed in low Earth orbits with high densities of objects. “These satellites will enhance our data collection capabilities and strengthen our Space Mission Assurance Platform,” he said. “These missions will enable us to further validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of our technology and services.” The funding will also support advancing the Space-MAP system itself. Sharma said the company is looking at other sources of data, including from star trackers on other spacecraft, to augment the platform. “The team at Digantara is working towards creating the most advanced SSA data collection infrastructure. We believe that this will lead to significant capability in the life cycle of managing satellites,” said Shailesh Lakhani, managing director of Peak XV Partners, in a statement about its investment in Digantara. Sharma said the 30-person company is already talking to investors about its next funding round, which he expects to raise within the next 15 months to support its “go-to-market strategy” and expansion plans. He did not disclose how much he is looking to raise in that future round.
German startup Vyoma said June 20 it has raised 8.5 million euros ($9.3 million) to develop space debris-monitoring satellites. French aerospace giant Safran, which will help develop the constellation, participated in the startup’s extended seed round through its venture capital arm alongside early-stage investors Happiness Capital of Hong Kong, Germany-based Atlantic Labs, and Portugal-based Faber Ventures. The three-year-old venture has now raised more than 10 million euros for a constellation of 12 satellites that it plans to start launching next year, Vyoma CEO and co-founder Stefan Frey told SpaceNews. He said Vyoma will announce a manufacturer for its first two microsatellites in the next few weeks, which would be launched together or via separate missions around the end of 2024, depending on the launch provider it picks. The two pilot satellites would be designed to focus on tracking and cataloging objects larger than 30 centimeters in low Earth orbit (LEO). They would supplement the space situational awareness (SSA) data Vyoma already offers through third-party networks of ground-based sensors. Under clear atmospheric conditions, Vyoma’s best-performing ground telescopes are currently capable of observing LEO objects down to around five to seven centimeters — depending on their position — via dedicated target tracking. Ultimately, the startup plans to be able to track so-far untrackable objects as small as one centimeter with a network of space-based cameras that, unlike ground-based telescopes, are unaffected by weather. According to Vyoma, the 10 additional satellites it plans to deploy in the 18 months following its first launch would also be capable of keeping tabs on objects in space under a semi-autonomous surveillance mode. Safran’s electronics and defense subsidiary, which is investigating the feasibility of adding radiofrequency sensors and laser rangefinders to improve Vyoma’s capabilities, is sharing complementary SSA data as part of its investment. Safran Reosc, the company’s optomechanical subsidiary, is also looking into developing an optical instrument for detecting objects smaller than two centimeters while in surveillance mode. The European Space Agency estimates there are around one million objects between one and 10 centimeters in space, which despite their size have the energy to cause unrepairable damage if they collide with satellites or other spacecraft. Investors pile into space-based SSA solutions Three other early-stage companies have announced investments so far this year to develop space-based businesses promising to improve SSA for increasingly congested orbits. On the same day as Vyoma’s announcement, Indian startup Digantara said it had raised $10 million in a Series A round led by venture fund Peak XV Partners to develop small satellites with electro-optical sensors to collect SSA data. Noblis, a nonprofit organization that provides science, technology, and strategy services to the U.S. government, said June 14 its venture arm had made an undisclosed strategic investment in Alexandria, Virginia-based space-tracking startup Scout Space. In early January, Canada’s NorthStar Earth and Space announced it had raised $35 million in a Series C funding round led by private equity firm Cartesian Capital for its proposed constellation.
SpaceLogistics, a satellite-servicing firm owned by Northrop Grumman, announced June 20 it has three confirmed orders for its Mission Extension Pods that will fly to orbit on servicing missions in 2025. Intelsat ordered the third and last pod available on the debut mission of the company’s new servicing spacecraft, called Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV). Australian communications satellite operator Optus was the first customer to sign up for the Mission Extension Pods, which are propulsion jet packs that add six years to the life of geostationary satellites. Intelsat in April said it purchased one of the pods, followed by today’s announcement that it ordered a second one. The MRV has two robotic arms developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA in 2020 signed an agreement with Northrop Grumman allowing the company to use the robotic payloads on the MRV in exchange for access to technology demonstrations and program data. The robotic arms will install the jet packs on Optus’ and Intelsat’s communications satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. The MRV is the successor to SpaceLogistics’ Mission Extension Vehicles (MEVs) that are currently docked with two Intelsat spacecraft providing life-extension services. Intelsat’s latest order for the MEP “completes the launch manifest for our first tranche of MEPs and underscores the demand for our services,” Rob Hauge, president of SpaceLogistics, said in a news release. MRV launched pushed to 2025 SpaceLogistics had previously projected a 2024 launch for the MRV. The company said June 20 that both the MRV and MEPs have completed their critical design reviews and are proceeding toward a planned 2025 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. “While this order wraps up our first launch, it’s just the beginning of the MEP product line with plans not just for commercial, but also government variants to meet their unique needs,” Hauge said.
True Anomaly, a startup developing technologies for the military space market, announced plans to provide digital and live training ranges as a service. Based in Centennial, Colorado, the company developed a digital infrastructure for virtual training as well as on-orbit hardware for live wargaming. The digital range and the on-orbit range will be offered to the U.S. Space Force for personnel training and for hardware testing, said True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers. Like the other military branches, the Space Force needs a “dedicated test and training range to prepare for real-world scenarios,” he said. The Space Force plans to spend up to $340 million on testing and training infrastructure. The organization overseeing these efforts, the Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), is briefing companies this week on a project called National Space Test and Training Complex , or NSTTC. STARCOM said the complex will include testbeds or virtualized environments that mimic the operation of satellites in orbit. In these environments, military personnel can learn how to control, maneuver and maintain satellites, and practice skills such as orbit determination, attitude control, payload operation and troubleshooting. The digital environments also would support the testing and evaluation of new satellite designs. Rogers said True Anomaly developed a “seamless environment in which to combine live space vehicles, ground system operations and digital models for efficient, safe, and repeatable test and training.” First two satellites to launch in 2024 The on-orbit range will use the company’s Jackal small satellites. The first two are scheduled to launch to low Earth orbit in February on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare. In the digital range, operators will be able to use virtual Jackal vehicles simulating adversary “red” and friendly “blue” assets, “This infrastructure on the ground will allow operators to sit down on consoles and interact with spacecraft models, fly out war games and training scenarios and test events and do tactics development without flying any physical satellites or interacting with the physical telescopes or radars,” Rogers said. “It’s a purely digital environment. But that digital environment also can connect to a live range” so Space Force units can interact with the Army, Navy and Air Force, said Rogers. The digital and live ranges will be offered as a service, he said, so the government only pays for the time it uses the assets. “We think the most capital efficient and speediest thing that the government can do is to procure this as a service model,” said Rogers. “We provide the infrastructure in the range, operators come to the range and they basically pay for the time they use the range.” The digital range was designed in a secure cloud environment and has multiple levels of security for different levels of users, he said. The infrastructure also allows for systems built by other companies to plug in. “The thing that the Department of Defense says loud and clear is that they want to avoid vendor lock,” Rogers said. “Which means that industry has to build open architectures with the expectation of being interoperable with potential competitors.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Orbital Composites, a California company focused on robotic additive manufacturing, is gaining traction in the emerging in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing sector thanks to government contracts and partnerships. The U.S. Space Force, Air Force and Navy have awarded six Small Business Innovation Research contracts to the Campbell, California, startup in the last two years. In connection with the SBIRs and separately, Orbital Composites has projects underway with Axiom Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. In 2015, Cole Nielsen, Orbital Composites founder and chief technology officer, started designing 3D printers for large aerospace structures like drones and satellites in his garage. Since then, the startup has kept a low profile in the space sector. “We were selling into the terrestrial market, while quietly working on the space side,” Amolak Badesha, Orbital Composites CEO, told SpaceNews . Still, as its name implies Orbital Composites was founded with the long-term goal of robotic in-space manufacturing. Executives are now eager to talk about space applications because their “technology has matured to the point where we’re credible,” Badesha said. “We have 3D printed parts that are a game-changer for space, defense and energy applications.” Plus, the company is riding tailwinds created by the rapid growth of the U.S. Space Force , increasing demand for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM), heightened concern about orbital debris and the satellite-to-smartphone boom. Orbital Composites participated in the 2021 Catalyst On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing Accelerator backed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate, the U.S. Space Force and corporate sponsors. Through the accelerator, Orbital Composites executives shared their goal of manufacturing antennas and other large structures with people from the Space Force, NASA and companies. “One of the best use cases for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing is antennas,” Badesha said. “The satellite to cellular broadband market needs big antennas. Imagine if you could start making antennas in space, unfurlable antennas at the cost of fixed antennas.” Under SBIR contracts, Orbital Composites is developing radiation tolerant satellites, technology to capture space debris, quantum antennas and robotic ISAM platforms. The company also is developing technology to 3D print thermal protection systems and rocket nozzles. At its core, Orbital Composites is a manufacturing business. “We hold the potential to become an aerospace and energy giant because our applications already span across these verticals,” Badesha said. “People forget, aerospace companies are built on top of advanced manufacturing.” On June 20, Orbital Composites announced a memorandum of understanding with Virtus Solis Technologies focused on a megawatt-scale commercial space-based solar power station. Under the agreement, Michigan-based Virtus will design core technologies. Orbital Composites will develop the necessary manufacturing processes and offer manufacturing-as-a-service to Virtus. “This partnership is a significant step towards providing clean, low-cost energy to our planet and unlocking the potential of cislunar space,” Virtus CEO John Bucknell said in a statement. “By combining our breakthrough technologies with Orbital Composites’ expertise, we aim to revolutionize space-based solar power and accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future.”
WASHINGTON – Ramon.Space announced a strategic partnership June 20 with Foxconn subsidiary Ingrasys aimed at high-volume production of satellite computing technology. Through the partnership, Ingrasys, a Foxconn Technology subsidiary based in Taiwan, will manufacture Ramon.Space computing products globally and establish “industry’s first high-volume production line” for space-resilient computing products, according to the news release. “I believe that this will disrupt the whole market because when we go to the customers, we’re coming together with a significant player in the electronic computing infrastructure world,” Ramon.Space CEO Avi Shabtai told SpaceNews. Demand for space computing technology is surging thanks to the increasing popularity of software-defined satellites, demand for greater on-orbit processing and space-based networks. “We see more and more demand for storage and computing systems,” Shabtai said. “One of the limitations is the ability to manufacture in high volume in a cost-effective way that will drive the expansion.” Ingrasys CEO Benjamin Ting said in a statement that the company is eager to begin manufacturing “space computing infrastructure” with Ramon.Space because of the “tremendous potential in space.” Shabtai said in a statement that Ramon.Space and Ingrasys intend to “build a strong foundation to expand and dominate the computing infrastructure market, paving the way for the next generation of space services and applications.” Ingrasys manufactures servers, storage devices and high-performance computer components. Ramon.Space, based in Israel and the United States, provides computing technology for spacecraft. In September, the company announced plans to provide computing technology for Israel’s Beresheet 2 lunar lander.
The chief executive of Boeing says his company is still committed to the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle despite the latest problems that have further delayed the program. In an interview on the “Check 6” podcast by Aviation Week published June 16, Dave Calhoun said that Boeing was not “shutting the door” on Starliner after the company postponed the first crewed flight of the vehicle that had been scheduled for late July. “We’re going to do whatever NASA asks us to do,” he said when asked about the program at the end of the podcast. “We do believe in it, and we believe there has to be more than one player.” NASA is currently relying on its other commercial crew partner, SpaceX, to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station on its Crew Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX has conducted 10 crewed launches over three years, seven for NASA and three fully commercial ones, including the Ax-2 flight to the station in May. Boeing had been preparing from its Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, the first flight of Starliner with astronauts on board, when it announced June 1 that it was postponing the launch . Recent reviews found issues with parts of the spacecraft’s parachute system as well as tape used in wire harnesses that is flammable. In that briefing, Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for CST-100 Starliner at Boeing, appeared to raise questions about the future of the overall Starliner effort, saying the company had been talking internally “about the future of Starliner and how we’re going to move forward.” He later clarified that meant long-term evaluations about building another spacecraft and shifting from the Atlas 5. There had not been “serious discussions” about terminating the program, he added. “We have definitely fallen behind in it,” Calhoun acknowledged in the podcast about Boeing’s work on Starliner compared to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. “Technically, we think we know what we’re doing. I think ultimately with every next successful launch, we’ll demonstrate that.” Neither NASA nor Boeing has provided an update on either the parachute or tape issues since the June 1 announcement. At that time, Nappi said he would not comment on how long the CFT mission would be delayed “until we spend the next several days understanding what we need to go do.” At a June 8 Space Transportation Association event here, Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said those reviews were still ongoing. “We’re trying to find the best opportunity,” he said, suggesting at the time it would take an additional one to two weeks. “We want to make sure Starliner launches when it’s ready.” Both Bowersox and Janet Petro, director of the Kennedy Space Center, said a rescheduled launch for the CFT mission would depend not just on the vehicle’s readiness but also the overall launch manifest. “Because there is such a heavy manifest, it always becomes a discussion between the various NASA programs and between the Space Force and their missions as to when we can fit it in,” she said. Boeing has not disclosed what additional costs it will incur from this latest delay. The company has recorded nearly $900 million in charges against earnings for the program from past problems and delays, raising questions about whether Starliner will ever break even. “We’re not shutting the door on it in any way, shape or form,” Calhoun said of Starliner. “We intend to do it — make money on it — but we’re going to let the market and our customer let that play out, and we’ll see what happens.” He appeared to deemphasize that part of Boeing’s overall space portfolio, highlighting instead its work on the Space Launch System and various defense program. “Low Earth orbit and building out a big presence in that world is not going to be our number one focus,” he said. Boeing is one of the partners on Orbital Reef, a commercial space station project led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space.
TAMPA, Fla. — Indonesia’s Satria-1 broadband satellite deployed its solar panels after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 to geosynchronous transfer orbit over the weekend, manufacturer Thales Alenia Space said June 19. It will take about five months for Indonesia’s first very high throughput (VHTS) satellite to reach its 146 degrees East orbital slot via onboard electric propulsion, according to a Thales Alenia Space spokesperson. Once it reaches its geostationary orbital slot late this year, Thales Alenia Space will need to conduct about three weeks of tests before Satria-1 (also known as Nusantara 3) can enter commercial service. The $545 million satellite is slated to start providing around 150 gigabits per second of capacity across the thousands of islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and surrounding areas, by early 2024. SpaceX launched the 4.6-metric-ton spacecraft June 18 at 6:21 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Satria-1 separated from Falcon 9 about 37 minutes later in a mission that also saw SpaceX return the rocket’s first-stage booster for reuse. PT Satelit Nusantara Tiga, an Indonesian consortium led by domestic operator Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN), is set to operate Satria-1 under a public-private partnership with the country’s government. The successful launch is a key milestone for Indonesia’s broadband ambitions. It comes after financing and pandemic-related manufacturing delays forced the government to seek deadline extensions from international regulators to bring the satellite into use. PSN is also in line to operate the geostationary Nusantara Lima satellite (also known as Nusantara 5), which Boeing is building for a SpaceX launch later this year. Meanwhile, Thales Alenia Space aims to deliver a broadband satellite in 2024 called Telkom 113 for Telkomsat, a subsidiary of Indonesian state-owned telecoms operator Telkom. Indonesia’s geography lends itself to satellite-based communications because of the operational and financial challenges of deploying terrestrial networks over a territory with more than 18,000 islands and islets — of which the government says 6,000 are inhabited. However, foreign low Earth orbit broadband operators, including SpaceX’s, Starlink are also chasing this market opportunity. Starlink is slated to be available in Indonesia in 2024, according to its availability map , following its commercial launch in the Philippines . 
LEYLAND, United Kingdom — China says a number of countries have committed to join its International Lunar Research Station moon base initiative. Russia, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO) have signed agreements to engage in the ILRS, with more than ten further countries and organizations currently negotiating agreements, according to a report by the state-owned Ta Kung Pao newspaper. Malaysia is one of the countries discussing terms of the project, according to the Kuala Lumpur-based China Press. Venezuela has also spoken positively to an invitation to join the ILRS. The ILRS project aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s with a series of stepping stone missions before the end of this decade. China announced in April that it was establishing the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organization (ILRSCO) to coordinate and manage the project. According to a recent presentation by the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) under the China National Space Administration (CNSA), China aims to complete the signing of agreements and memorandums of understanding with space agencies and organizations for founding members of ILRSCO by October this year. First signatories will enjoy more favorable terms and more rights as founding members, according to DSEL. The organizations’ headquarters will be located in the Deep Space Science City, in Hefei in Anhui province, with centers focusing on design simulation, operation control, data processing, sample storage and research, and international training centers. The centers will be named after Chinese names for the planets of the solar system. China aims to define ILRS task sharing and sign and approve intergovernmental agreements among founding countries of the ILRSCO before the end of 2024. Wu Weiren, director of DSEL, in April reiterated that all countries and organizations around the globe are welcome to join the ILRS. DSEL was founded in 2022 and acts as a contractor for lunar exploration and is engaged in the ILRS and international cooperation. “As with the United States’ Artemis programme, the devil is in the detail of the agreements between China and smaller partners or participants in their respective lunar projects, “ Bowen, an associate professor at the University of Leicester, told SpaceNews. “These are symbolic gestures today, whilst the actual contributions and returns in material, financial, political and human terms remain to be seen. The precedents both ILRS and Artemis may set for the future governance of the moon within the Outer Space Treaty (OST) framework make it increasingly attractive for many smaller states or emerging space powers to sign up to one or both lunar projects and have a say in the moon’s political future, and that of the OST’s implementation as the Moon gets busier.“ The ILRS base itself will be constructed in the 2030s by five planned missions. These will establish nuclear energy, communications, astronomical observation and other infrastructure for an initially robotic research station which will later host astronauts. A later stage will see ILRS used to validate technology and capabilities for a crewed mission to Mars, according to DSEL. The ILRS was first presented in 2021 as a joint project by China and Russia. It is now described as a project proposed by China and to be jointly built by many countries. The change follows Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China also envisions building a Queqiao constellation to provide communication, navigation and remote sensing services for its lunar and deep space exploration plans. China’s next step in its lunar exploration plans will be the launch of the Queqiao-2 lunar relay satellite early next year. This will be followed by the Chang’e-6 lunar far side sample return mission scheduled to launch in May 2024. Chang’e-7, consisting of an orbiter, lander, rover and hopping spacecraft designed to seek out water-ice in permanently shadowed craters, will launch in 2026 and target a landing site Shackleton crater. Chang’e-8 will launch two years and land nearby Chang’e-7, carrying a robot designed to test 3D printing bricks from lunar regolith. These missions will serve as a basis for the full ILRS project to follow in the 2030s. The ILRS project and ILRSCO are somewhat analogous to the U.S.-led Artemis program and its political underpinning, the Artemis Accords, to which 25 countries, most recently Spain , have signed up. The countries so far attracted by China are those with established ties with Beijing and its space endeavors. “Many of these countries are not surprisingly leaning towards the ILRS as they are already partnered with China in space projects or on other economic and technological fronts, and China’s leadership do not want ILRS to be seen as less internationally-oriented than Artemis,” says Bowen. The emergence of two separate, nascent moon projects within a tense geopolitical context suggests potential issues and friction as the future of lunar exploration unfolds. Yet, both may develop alongside each other. “Some of those states are also members of the Artemis Accords, which reminds us that since both projects are ostensibly exploratory and scientific in nature, we do not need to adopt a zero-sum mentality to the Artemis – ILRS situation on the Moon,” says Bowen. “However, as we have seen with the UAE, it fell foul of ITAR regulations when developing its contribution to the ILRS, meaning that members of both the ILRS and Artemis need to walk a fine line between the streams of both initiatives.” The UAE had signed an MoU to participate in the Chang’e-7 through a small rover, but it is reported that U.S. export control rules meant that components needed for the spacecraft could not be used, leading to the withdrawal of the UAE from the project.
The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency said it received initial images from its first missile-warning satellites launched April 2 to low Earth orbit. “First tracking sats, built by SpaceX, achieved first light: infrared images using wide-field-of-view sensors,” the agency said June 14 in a twitter post . The two tracking satellites were part of SDA’s first Tranche 0 launch, which also included eight data-transport satellites made by York Space Systems. SDA plans to build a proliferated low Earth orbit network of data-transport satellites and a constellation of infrared sensor satellites to provide a defense shield against Russian and Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The eight York satellites are “performing as expected,” SDA said, although one of them had an “assembly issue.” These transport satellites will remain in their initial orbit to conduct tests of their Link 16 data-communications terminals. “Will raise orbit once initial tactical comms testing is done,” said the agency. Second launch delayed SDA was expecting to launch the second batch of Tranche 0 satellites in late June but that mission is likely to be delayed by at least a month, the agency said. There are 13 satellites in SDA’s second launch. “We are targeting the second launch near the end of July,” an SDA official said in a statement June 16. “While we’ve experienced some delays, SDA is working collaboratively with partners to gather critical elements required for the remainder of Tranche 0 to perform its intended tactical data demonstrations,” the official said. The 13 satellites include 10 Lockheed Martin Transport satellites, two SpaceX Tracking satellites, and one York Transport satellite. Four L3Harris Tracking satellites that are also part of the Tranche 0 constellation will not launch with the other Tranche 0 satellites and are being moved to a future launch with other Missile Defense Agency sensor satellites.
SAN FRANCISCO – Finland’s Kuva Space won a 5 million euro ($5.47 million) European Commission contract to supply hyperspectral data to the Copernicus Contributing Mission program. Under the five-year contract announced June 19, Kuva Space will provide data for monitoring farms, forests, methane emissions, harmful algal blooms and other applications. “We are building a novel approach to spaceborne hyperspectral imaging and service delivery,” Tuomas Tikka, Kuva Space co-founder and chief technology officer, told SpaceNews by email. “We’re looking forward to evaluating our data and service capabilities together with the European Space Agency and Copernicus program experts in order to bring new high-quality insights to users around the globe to improve life on Earth.” Kuva Space, formerly called Reaktor Space Lab, launched cubesats in 2018 and 2021. Since then, Kuva Space has been working to improve the spatial resolution of its hyperspectral imagers for commercial applications. “Several test versions of the imager have been produced including an airborne demonstrator,” Tikka said. “We have also successfully developed and demonstrated our AI-based capabilities for hyperspectral data processing and analytics using hyperspectral data from scientific satellites.” Kuva Space plans to launch four microsatellites in 2024 and to deploy as many as 100 satellites by 2030. What makes Kuva unique, Tikka said, is its technology. “Minituarizing a spaceborne hyperspectral imager is definitely a challenge,” Tikka said. To address the challenge, Kuva Space developed a “tunable 2D-snapshot hyperspectral imager” that produces “high-quality hyperspectral data” and also for “application-optimized imaging modes” to improve data quality, Tikka said. To compete in the market, Kuva Space plans to “build and launch a much larger constellation than our competitors, and thus provide data and insights at a much larger scale and frequency to our customers,” Tikka said. “Our business model is based on providing up-to-date and constantly updating analytical insights with an unmatched price-point in Earth observation.” Kuva Space CEO Jarkko Antila said in a statement, “We look forward to closely collaborating with European Space Agency experts to validate our data quality and capabilities. This program represents a remarkable opportunity to help shape the high standard for hyperspectral data services within the EU and globally.” Copernicus is the European Union program aimed at providing continuous, global Earth observation. Copernicus Contributing Missions are selected through an extensive process that includes ESA evaluation. 
Operating under a veil of secrecy pierced only by the ignition of the rocket’s engines, Rocket Lab launched the first suborbital variant of its Electron vehicle June 17. The vehicle, called Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE), lifted off from Launch Complex 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, at 9:24 p.m. Eastern. Rocket Lab declared the launch a success in a statement nearly an hour and a half after liftoff. “100% mission success from tonight’s launch,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, tweeted after the flight. “A perfect flight of the nation’s newest hypersonic test platform HASTE.” Rocket Lab did not disclose the payload on HASTE or other details about the flight, including peak altitude and speed. The company did not announce the launch in advance and did not provide a webcast. The only advance notice came from airspace restrictions published by the Federal Aviation Administration as well as a tweet from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, which disclosed the launch period for a Rocket Lab launch but said the facility’s visitor center would be closed for public viewing. That level of secrecy is a far cry from previous orbital Electron launches from both Wallops and Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, which were publicized well in advance. Even missions for U.S. national security customers, such as the National Reconnaissance Office, were announced in advance and broadcast. Rocket Lab announced HASTE in April , making only minor modifications to the standard Electron, such as strengthened structures. The vehicle is designed to accommodate payloads of up to 700 kilograms for suborbital tests. Beck, in an interview just after the company announced HASTE, said he expected strong demand from the Defense Department for hypersonics testing and targets. “We can get exact trajectories at a cost and frequency but also an accuracy that’s never been available before,” he claimed. Because HASTE is similar to the standard Electron, Rocket Lab says it can get greater economies of scale for the vehicle. “The more vehicles we put through the factory, the cheaper they get,” Beck said in April. Rocket Lab plans to launch HASTE exclusively from Wallops. “Wallops, at its core, is a test and research range perfectly suited for these sorts of missions,” David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said in a post-launch statement. In a May 9 earnings call, Rocket Lab projected 15 Electron launches overall in 2023 , a figure that includes both orbital and HASTE missions. The company did not disclose the split between the two. This was the sixth Electron launch this year.
The Space Force awarded data analytics company Palantir $110.3 million in contract extensions for the company’s cloud-based data services. The Space Systems Command announced June 15 it has added one more year to Palantir’s existing contracts for data-as-a-service. Under a project called Warp Core, the Space Force since 2021 has used the company’s cloud platform and analytics services to aggregate large amounts of data from disparate sources. The one-year contract extensions include: Under these data-as-a-service contracts, the Space Force is transitioning legacy data stovepipes into the Warp Core data analytics platform. Warp Core is based on the Palantir Data platform that integrates and manages data from disparate sources. According to the Space Systems Command, Warp Core “provides a common data interface, and enables better data sharing, streamlining of manual reporting processes and decommissioning of legacy systems.” Industry analyst Louie DiPalma, from the William Blair market research firm, estimated that, before these latest contract extensions, Palantir has been awarded more than $195 million in contracts for the Warp Core project since it started in 2021 . DiPalma noted that the new contract extensions for Palantir, although significant, are not guaranteed to continue indefinitely as the Space Force recently added new vendors to its data-as-a-service program. According to DiPalma, “going forward, growing the long-term revenue for Palantir’s Space Force program is at risk because the Space Force in March added 17 other vendors to the $900 million IDIQ contract , and only extended Palantir for one year rather than a customary multi-year agreement.”
LOS ANGELES – The UK Space Agency has a direct message on space sustainability. “We’re going to stop making it worse. And we’re going to start making it better,” Julie Black, UK Space Agency director of missions and capability for discovery and sustainability, said June 13 at the Secure World Foundation’s Space Sustainability Summit. Toward that goal, the UK Space Agency is continuing to encourage and prioritize space sustainability , both domestically and internationally. “A cross-agency space sustainability program is designed to mitigate the risks caused by space debris and promote the responsible use of space through a combination of regulation, standards development technology development, and national and international missions,” Black said. For example, the UK divisions of Japan-based Astroscale and Switzerland-based ClearSpace are conducting design studies for a UK mission in 2026 to deorbit a piece of UK space debris. “Crucially, at the end of that mission, the service that will be refuelable and will be ready to be used again,” Black said. In 2028 the UK plans to send a satellite to repair, replenish or refuel a UK spacecraft. And by the end of the decade, the UK intends “to have developed orbital assembly or manufacturing, where we’re using the spacecraft previously launched to remove debris or perform the servicing mission,” Black said. Investing in companies working to address space sustainability through innovation is a UK Space Agency priority, Black said. For the first time, the UK is establishing a space surveillance and tracking service for UK-licensed satellite operators. The service will warn operators of potential collisions so they can maneuver as necessary. International partnerships with the European Space Agency and global organizations will help the UK achieve its space sustainability goals, Black said. The UK intends to “be a thought leader by championing change, but we just can’t do that alone,” Black said. “We’re here to work together as sustainability champions to take collective action now, to mitigate the effects reduce the burden on future generations and ultimately, to ensure the safe and responsible use of space.”
Members of the House Armed Services Committee in a report last week expressed support for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s use of commercial satellite data. They also asked NGA for details on its plans to integrate commercial data and services into “base programs of record.” “The committee notes that the domestic commercial satellite imagery industry continues to develop rapidly with new capabilities available from constellations of satellites dedicated to daily monitoring of the entire planet along with a growing domestic geospatial intelligence analytic industry,” said the report by the HASC strategic forces subcommittee. The congressional language reflects concerns by remote-sensing space companies that U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are not adopting commercial products and services at the pace and scale they hoped. Images collected by commercial Earth-watching satellite tracked the movement of troops after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and helped document the toll of the conflict. NGA was at the center of U.S. government efforts to tap commercial providers of satellite imagery to fill the demand. The conflict has been a prominent use case for commercial imaging satellites and their power to deliver crucial intelligence. But that has not translated into growing demand for imagery outside of the Ukraine crisis, noted David Gauthier, former director of NGA’s commercial and business operations Gauthier, who is now chief strategy officer at the consulting firm GXO Inc., said companies are concerned about the “lagging adoption” of commercial imagery and analytics services by U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. “What’s happening in Ukraine is special and it should be a benchmark for all other U.S. combatant commands in areas where the warfighter needs to operate with the benefit of open source intelligence and commercial remote sensing,” Gauthier told SpaceNews . “My take on this is that the commercial market developed capability faster than the government could react to it,” he added. “Investors put money in, and companies expect the government to purchase more imagery and other commercial data and services faster.” NGA and the National Reconnaissance Office are the industry’s top customers. The Space Force also has indicated interest in buying more commercial imagery and data analytics services. The NRO awarded large contracts to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky and Planet for electro-optical imagery. Commercial remote sensing from space has rapidly expanded into other phenomenologies, like synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio-frequency (RF) mapping and hyperspectral imaging. About 20 companies in the SAR, RF and hyperspectral imaging sectors have signed agreements with the NRO to conduct experiments. “These companies have small dollar study contracts, and they are all waiting in line for the big programs to deliver data to the U.S. government,” Gauthier said. “The NRO has done a good thing by getting out in keeping pace with industry on study contracts. But they’re not following it up with large programs,” he said. “So this is a huge concern for the industry that’s now out on a limb, that has created capacity believing there would be a way to sell that at scale. And so far, there’s nothing in the budget to show us that can happen.” The concern is notable in the SAR sector, considering that radar became the breakout remote-sensing technology of the Ukraine conflict because it can see through clouds. “Commercial SAR is making huge headways,” Gauthier said. “And we have study contracts for it, but there’s no significant budget in either the NRO or the Defense Department to actually put commercial SAR in at the scale that will be necessary to sustain our industrial base and to deliver it to the battlefield for mission effects.” Jason Mallare, vice president of government programs and strategy at Umbra, a commercial operator of SAR imaging satellites, said this nascent sector of the industry is reliant on government support. “The U.S. commercial SAR portion of the industrial base is at a critical tipping point and the U.S., as the world’s largest consumer of SAR data, has a need and an opportunity” to take advantage of domestic capabilities, Mallare said in a statement. “We are working closely with the NRO, NGA and the DoD to make sure the warfighter and taxpayer can benefit from the investment and technology that is presently available.” Startups need revenue Transitioning from research projects to revenue-generating contracts has been a challenge for startups in this sector, said John Serafini, CEO of HawkEye 360, a commercial provider of space-based RF data that works primarily with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. “I think the U.S. government writ large has gotten very good at early stage research, development, testing and evaluation engagements” with industry, Serafini said June 15 at the Defense One Tech Summit. “There are plenty of RDT&E programs out there” sponsored by agencies like the Defense Innovation Unit, AFWERX and In-Q-Tel, he said. “But sometimes they’re doing RDT&E projects for the sake of RDT&E projects,” Serafini said. “They’re not doing it for the sake of actually bringing it through the contracting process to deliver a fully embedded fielded capability to the warfighter.” Meanwhile, “young companies are desperately seeking access to revenue to showcase validation for investors,” he added. Small business innovation research contracts are not going to help companies survive, he added. “They’re not building fully tested, ready-to-go products that can go out to the warfighter and support the analysts.” Some pockets within the government, however, are getting “pretty good at understanding that transition paradigm,” Serafini said. “They come with transition partners before they start the RDT&E engagement, they come with transition money and earmarks ready so when the technology does successfully scale, they can build programs of record.” But that is usually the exception, not the rule, Serafini noted. Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager of Maxar Public Sector Earth Intelligence, said some government agencies have adopted “buy commercial first” approaches but changing the culture takes time. Speaking at the Defense One Tech Summit, Frazier said NGA is looking to expand the Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) program where commercial companies compete for data analytics task orders. Some military organizations are seeing the value of commercial data analytics, said Frazier. The Navy, for example, subscribes to Maxar’s vessel detection service. “They’re not buying pixels, they’re trying to understand illegal fishing activity and share insights with allies and coast guards.” Interest in commercial services is growing, he said, “but it just takes time to transition a mission that historically has been done in house.” NGA plans to start a new program , called Luno, that will be modeled after the EIM program but with a broader scope. The plan is to use commercial monitoring services to track global military and economic activity. Gauthier said he expects Luno to be a “substantial contract for commercial analytics services of many types.” “This is good for the remote sensing industry because they not only can sell imagery into the NRO, and potentially imagery into the Space Force, but then they can also sell analytics to the NGA, combatant commands or any warfighting element that needs answers instead of raw data.”
Updated at 10:30 p.m. Eastern with Firefly statement. WASHINGTON — Firefly Aerospace has agreed to buy Virgin Orbit’s remaining assets — inventory at two company production facilities — as part of Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy proceedings. In June 15 filings with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware overseeing Virgin Orbit’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, representatives of the companies said that Firefly agreed to buy the assets that has not been sold at auction in May for $3.8 million. The assets, designated Segment 5 in bankruptcy proceedings, are the inventory at Virgin Orbit’s two facilities in Long Beach, California. That includes engines and other components built or in production for the LauncherOne vehicles that Virgin Orbit manufactured there. It also includes two engines in storage at a Virgin Orbit test site in Mojave, California. That inventory was not sold at a May 22 auction that disposed of most of the rest of the company’s assets . In that auction, Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 and related equipment was acquired by Stratolaunch, the company’s main production facility in Long Beach was sold to Rocket Lab and the Mojave test site was purchased by Launcher. A liquidation company, Inliper Acquisition LLC, bought the machinery and equipment in a second Long Beach facility. At the time of the auction, Virgin Orbit said that it “deemed it in the best interests of the Debtors’ estates” not to sell the inventory at the Long Beach facilities. In one of the June 15 filings, a representative of Ducera Partners LLC, hired by Virgin Orbit to assist in the sale of the assets, said that Firefly made a bid for the inventory assets at the auction but at “a level that was not acceptable.” Negotiations continued after the auction with several parties, concluding with the $3.8 million offer from Firefly. The filings did not disclose the identities of the other parties involved in the discussions for the assets. It’s unclear what Firefly’s plans for those assets are. The company is developing its own launch vehicle, Alpha, which has flown twice; a third launch is expected in the near future for the U.S. Space Force. The company is also developing lunar landers called Blue Ghost and an orbital transfer vehicle called the Space Utility Vehicle. “Firefly strategically bid and purchased the Virgin Orbit inventory for the significant cost savings on common off-the-shelf components that we use in our product lines, and the benefit of eliminated supply chain lead-times associated with critical flight components,” Firefly Aerospace said in a statement late June 16. “Firefly will not be utilizing all of the inventory and plans to provide additional information to parties who may be interested in purchasing.”
NASA partnerships announced June 15 would support development of new commercial capabilities that include a Blue Origin crewed spacecraft and a Starship-derived space station from SpaceX. NASA announced the selection of seven companies for unfunded Space Act Agreements as part of its Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities-2 (CCSC-2) initiative. NASA will provide the selected companies with technical expertise, assessments and data to assist the companies in the development of new capabilities. “The companies can leverage NASA’s vast knowledge and experience, and the agency can be a customer for the capabilities included in the agreements in the future,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement about the selections. “Ultimately, these agreements will foster more competition for services and more providers for innovative space capabilities.” NASA is not providing any funding to the companies under the agreements. The agency said in the announcement that offering its expertise to the companies requires only “minimal government resources.” Among the companies receiving CCSC-2 agreements is Blue Origin. That company will use the agreement to work on an “integrated commercial space transportation capability that ensures safe, affordable, and high-frequency U.S. access to orbit for crew and other missions.” The statement provided no further details and Blue Origin did not immediately respond to questions about those plans. That statement suggests Blue Origin is working on a crewed spacecraft. The company started work on such a vehicle more than a decade ago with two funded Space Act Agreements in the initial phases of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program. Those awards supported initial designs of what the company called a “Space Vehicle,” a biconic design intended for launch initially on the Atlas 5. Blue Origin elected not to compete in later phases of the program. SpaceX received a CCSC-2 agreement to work on an “integrated low Earth orbit architecture” involving both its Dragon and Starship vehicles. “This architecture includes Starship as a transportation and in-space low-Earth orbit destination element supported by Super Heavy, Dragon, and Starlink,” the announcement stated. SpaceX has not previously discussed using Starship as a LEO destination, but others in the industry have suggested the large volume that Starship offers could make it an option as a commercial space station. “SpaceX’s Starship is so large and also so cost-effective that it could be a station itself,” said Chad Anderson, founder and managing capital of Space Capital, during a session of the Financial Times’ Investing in Space conference June 6. He suggested that it could disrupt business models for other commercial space stations. An example he gave was a hotel company outfitting the interior of Starship for customers. “They could launch a group of people and stay however long they want with the accommodations they want, and they could do it all for less than the cost of one seat to the space station today.” Other companies working on space stations also received CCSC-2 agreements. Sierra Space will work with NASA on its “commercial low Earth orbit ecosystem” that includes the Dream Chaser spacecraft and LIFE expandable modules. ThinkOrbital received an agreement to refine its plans for large in-space platforms for research, manufacturing and crewed applications. Vast will work with NASA to support its plans, announced in May, for the Haven-1 module and crewed missions to it. Other CCSC-2 awards went to Northrop Grumman for an autonomous spacecraft called “Persistent Platform”, based on its Cygnus vehicle, for commercial research and manaufacturing, and to Special Aerospace Services for an in-space servicing technology called the Autonomous Maneuvering Unit. The CCSC-2 agreements come nine years after the first such agreements NASA made with four companies. Final Fronter Design received an award to work on a pressure suit, Orbital ATK (now part of Northrop Grumman) received one for its Mission Extension Vehicle satellite servicing spacecraft, SpaceX for technologies needed for deep space missions that included methane-oxygen propulsion used on Starship, and United Launch Alliance for a variety of technologies for its Vulcan launch vehicle.
CesiumAstro, a startup that specializes in communications technologies for satellites and aircraft, won a U.S. Air Force contract to develop a phased array antenna for remotely piloted drones. The $3.6 million two-year agreement is a so-called Tactical Funding Increase where the government and private investors split the cost 50/50. CesiumAstro , based in Austin, Texas, announced June 16 it will develop an active electronically steered array (AESA) that will fly on an MQ-9 Reaper drone made by General Atomics. The terminal will connect the aircraft with Ka-band commercial broadband satellites in medium and low Earth orbits. In the demonstration, planned for 2025, a Reaper aircraft equipped with a low-profile AESA antenna will fly and stream live motion video relying on a commercial satellite network, Shey Sabripour, founder and CEO of CesiumAstro, told SpaceNews . Current military drones use dish antennas to communicate with geostationary orbit satellites. “DoD needs enhanced, higher throughput connectivity for airborne vehicles,” said Sabripour. “By switching drone satcom platforms to an AESA terminal, they will be able to connect to MEO and LEO orbits using commercial and military Ka-band frequencies.” CesiumAstro plans to use SES’ mPower MEO satellite communications for the demonstration. Ka-band LEO services being developed by Amazon’s Project Kuiper and Telesat are not expected to be available for the first demonstration but will be tested when available, he said. The terminal also will be able to connect drones to the future military constellation operated by the Space Force’s Space Development Agency, known as the Transport Layer LEO communications network. Separate demonstration with Airbus Wayne Phelps, director of business development at CesiumAstro and a former U.S. Marine Corps drone operator, said the AESA terminal being developed for the Air Force is slightly smaller than the one the company will demonstrate in 2024 on an Airbus commercial aircraft. Airbus Ventures is an investor in CesiumAstro. “An AESA terminal enables narrower beams, reducing the chance of detection by enemy forces,” said Phelps. The phased array also will give the Air Force access to high-capacity commercial broadband. Military drones that collect intelligence typically stream large quantities of data. “Our antenna will provide connectivity to MEO and LEO. We can track one satellite and move to another before you lose connectivity,” also known as make-before-break connectivity, said Phelps. General Atomics built a separate Ka-band radome right behind the original enclosure used for Ku-band terminals. “It’s going to be fairly plug and play,” said Phelps. Sabripour said the company hopes that the demonstration will lead to larger orders. He estimated the Air Force will need 500 to 2,000 new satcom terminals for drones over the next 10 years “They want to take advantage of new constellations coming online,” he said. “We want to turn this terminal into a commercially viable product on the market by 2025,” said Sabripour. “We are pursuing all the certifications and testing required for both the military and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Arianespace has postponed the final launch of the Ariane 5, potentially for several weeks, after discovering a potential problem with pyrotechnical systems on the rocket. Arianespace announced June 15 it was postponing the 117 th and final launch of the Ariane 5, which had been scheduled for June 16 from Kourou, French Guiana. A brief statement, made shortly after rollout of the rocket from its final assembly building to the launch pad was canceled, said only that there was “a risk to the redundancy of a critical function” on the rocket. In a briefing a few hours later, Pierre-Yves Tissier, chief technical officer at Arianespace, said that the company was informed June 9 of a “nonconformance” in pyrotechnical transmission lines like those used on the Ariane 5 during acceptance testing for another program. X-ray inspections of the Ariane 5 raised doubts about three lines on the vehicle, one used in the separation system for one of the two solid rocket boosters, and two in the “distancing” system used for the boosters. Both the separation and distancing systems have redundancies to ensure they operate, but Tissier said the company’s policy was to launch only with that redundancy intact. Arianespace then decided to test four lines with characteristics similar to the three suspect lines, with those tests taking place June 14 and 15. “Because these tests were not all successful, and therefore were not able to give us sufficient confidence on the reliability of the redundancies, it was decided not to go in flight and to replace these doubtful lines,” he said. Arianespace has not set a new launch date for the mission. Tissier said the company would provide an update in the last week of June about the progress in replacing the lines and planning for a new launch attempt. That suggests a delay of at least a few weeks, and perhaps longer. The launch, designated VA261 by Arianespace, is carrying two government communications satellites. One, Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit, was built by OHB for the German Space Agency, working in collaboration with other German government agencies. The spacecraft will test advanced communication satellite technologies, such as onboard processing. The other, Syracuse 4B, is a communications satellite built for the French military by a consortium of Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space. The launch, when it does occur, will mark the retirement of the Ariane 5. The vehicle made its first, unsuccessful launch in June 1996, and suffered a partial failure on its second launch in October 1997 before an unqualified success on its third launch in October 1998. For much of its career, the Ariane 5 was a major player in the commercial launch market, capable of launching two large geostationary communications satellites at a time. With the retirement of Ariane 5, Europe will be left temporarily without the ability to launch large satellites on its own rockets. Arianespace had expected to overlap the end of the Ariane 5 with the introduction of the Ariane 6, but that vehicle has suffered development delays that pushed back its first launch by several years. Arianespace and the European Space Agency have not announced a new projected date for the first Ariane 6 launch, but executives with OHB, which is a supplier for the program, said in May they now expected the first launch to take place in early 2024 . The Ariane 6 delays are exacerbated by a failure of the Vega C in December 2022 that has grounded that vehicle, as well as the withdrawal of the Soyuz rocket from French Guiana after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This has created what some in Europe have called a “launcher crisis” for the continent. “It is true that, for some months, we will not have independent access for Europe into space with our own rockets, but this is very temporary,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said June 5 during the Financial Times’ “Investing in Space” event. He noted Vega C should return to flight by the end of the year. “If, for a couple of months, there’s not a rocket available, it’s bad enough. I’m the first one to call this a crisis,” he said. “But this is not something permanent.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat told the Paris stock exchange June 15 it is selling its European retail broadband activities to “an experienced private operator” to return focus to wholesale services. The sale includes assets the French satellite operator bought just three years ago from European capacity reseller Bigblu Broadband, and covers retail activities in the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and Greece. Eutelsat’s brief announcement did not disclose the buyer and other financial details. Altogether, Eutelsat spokesperson Anita Baltagi said the activities generated annual revenues in the low double-digit range. The 2020 acquisition of U.K.-based Bigblu Broadband’s European business came with about 50,000 subscribers at the time. Eutelsat said the sale of its European retail broadband activities follows successes in a wholesale business strategy for its geostationary satellite services. The company pointed to major deals signed with Spanish satellite operator Hispasat and telecoms companies in France, Italy, and Switzerland for capacity on the Eutelsat Konnect satellite launched January 2020. The entry into service of Konnect VHTS in the second half of this year will further boost its wholesale business, according to Eutelsat, by bringing an extra 500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of Ka-band capacity over Europe to meet demand. Eutelsat’s sale bucks a trend in recent years that has seen satellite operators snap up service providers to get closer to their end customers, partly in response to industry uncertainty. Notable recent deals include Intelsat’s purchase in 2020 of Gogo’s commercial aviation business, and the sale of U.S. government satellite communications provider Leonardo DRS to SES in 2022. Inmarsat’s international network of distributors was also one of the drivers behind its recently completed sale to Viasat, which has historically sold its broadband services directly to customers. Eutelsat’s disposal also comes as it seeks regulatory approval to buy British low Earth orbit broadband operator OneWeb, which relies on a network of distributors to sell its connectivity services to customers. In addition to Europe, Eutelsat has a retail broadband presence in Africa that is not part of the deal.
Virgin Galactic announced June 15 that it plans to conduct the first commercial flight of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle in late June on a mission for the Italian Air Force. Virgin said its “Galactic 01” mission will take place between June 27 and June 30 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. That will carry three people from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of Italy under a contract Virgin Galactic signed with the Italian Air Force in 2019. The three will conduct microgravity research on the flight. That will be followed by Galactic 02 in early August. It will be the first to carry individuals who signed up for space tourism flights with the company, paying up to $450,000 per seat. Virgin Galactic says it will conduct SpaceShipTwo flights on a monthly basis thereafter. The upcoming commercial flights come after the company performed the Unity 25 test flight May 25 , the first powered flight of the vehicle in nearly two years. Two pilots and four company mission specialists were on the vehicle, named VSS Unity, going to a peak altitude of 87.2 kilometers before landing back at Spaceport America. The company said before the Unity 25 flight it was targeting late June for Galactic 01 assuming the test flight went as expected. The company did not release details about the performance of SpaceShipTwo on Unity 25, but noted in a statement that they approved plans for Galactic 01 after “routine analysis and vehicle inspections.” Virgin Galactic did not disclose who would fly VSS Unity or its mothership aircraft, VMS Eve, on either Galactic 01 or Galactic 02, nor who were the Italian researchers or private astronauts assigned to those flights. The company said that crew assignments would be announced in advance of each mission but was not more specific. The Unity 25 flight was not broadcast live by the company, which instead provided a handful of social media updates. The company said in an updated statement that the Galactic 01 and Galactic 02 flights will be webcast.
TAMPA, Fla. — Governments should consider requiring satellites over a certain altitude to be maneuverable to improve space sustainability, according to an executive for Amazon’s proposed Project Kuiper constellation. Kalpak Gude, Project Kuiper’s head of domestic regulatory affairs, urged governments June 14 to encourage more satellites to have “maneuverability-with-an-outcome capability” — either through regulations or best practice guidelines — as orbits become more congested. “I think looking at that and [determining] what altitude is that required, based on a lot of different factors out there, to ensure long-term sustainability … is an area that government should look at,” Gude said during the 5th Summit for Space Sustainability in New York. Project Kuiper is equipping the 3,200 broadband satellites it plans to start deploying by the end of this year to low Earth orbit (LEO) — at an altitude of around 600 kilometers — with active propulsion systems. The venture says hall-effect thrusters and a propulsion tank on each satellite would enable it to actively maintain a safe distance from other spacecraft in LEO and avoid debris, rather than rely on gravitational forces. Two prototypes slated to fly in the coming months on the inaugural flight of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket are designed in part to test the reliability of Project Kuiper’s propulsion system. A recommendation for satellites to be maneuverable when operating above 375 kilometers was part of sustainability guidelines the World Economic Forum (WEF) released June 13. The recommendations also covered orbital data sharing, financial incentives for sustainable missions, and a target to remove a satellite from LEO no more than five years after reaching the end of its operational life. Satellite operators Avanti Communications, EchoStar, GHGSat, OneWeb, Planet, and SES were among 27 companies that endorsed the guidelines on their release. Amazon and SpaceX, each developing constellations far exceeding all these companies by number of satellites, were not among the signatories. Amazon told SpaceNews it had helped develop WEF’s debris mitigation recommendations but is not yet ready to endorse them as it continues to assess these and other best practice guidelines. “We are still really in the early phases of learning about operations in LEO that maximize and really value safety,” Gude said during the sustainability summit. However, he said if governments adopt rules that leverage increasing academic and industry research , operators will be more than willing to come on board. Space companies are spending billions of dollars to deploy satellites, he said, and so “we are incredibly incentivized to control our own behavior and ensure safety” across spacecraft design, launch, operations, and ultimate de-orbit. “When you invest over $10 billion to build an infrastructure in space, you are not creating it in an environment where you think you are at risk because of bad behavior by yourself or others,” he told the conference. Representatives of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the U.K.’s space agency were also on the panel and were keen to stress the growing importance of sustainability in their domestic space regulations. Both countries are modernizing satellite regulations to keep up with the industry’s rapid evolution, including rules around emerging applications such as in-orbit servicing, with implications for businesses outside their borders. Ray Fielding, head of sustainability at the UK Space Agency, said satellite operators licensed in countries with less stringent sustainability requirements could find themselves restricted from providing services in the United Kingdom. Merissa Velez, chief of the FCC Space Bureau’s satellite programs and policy division, said it also looks at “the same information for applicants for U.S. market access as we do for those companies seeking to have a U.S. license.”
The former chief executive of Spaceflight has joined a major law firm to lead its efforts in supporting the commercial space industry. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati announced June 15 that Curt Blake had joined its Seattle office as senior of counsel as the firm starts a NewSpace industry group serving a growing number of clients in the industry. Blake was co-founder and chief executive of Spaceflight Inc., stepping down earlier this year . Spaceflight, which arranged launches of smallsats on a variety of rockets and developed the Sherpa line of orbital transfer vehicles, was acquired by Firefly Aerospace June 8. “I’m here to help kickstart and expand an already existing practice,” Blake said in an interview. Wilson Sonsini has several space companies as clients, including Astranis, BlackSky and Slingshot Aerospace. However, there had been no concerted effort to attract space companies and support them. He said he plans to combine his legal background — he has a law degree and held executive and legal roles at several technology companies before Spaceflight — with his experience running Spaceflight to help other space companies. That ranges from how to work with regulatory agencies to understanding the nuances of launch contracts. “Having been CEO and living through all the legal issues that came up, I’m pretty knowledgeable on the practical side of things,” he said. “My role is to bring in that practical knowledge from the client’s voice, but also helping with business development.” While Wilson Sonsini has won business with a number of space companies as part of its overall work in the technology sector, there had been no major effort before now to attract such companies as clients. Blake said his connections in the industry built up during his time at Spaceflight, working with launch providers and companies developing satellites that need launches, will be valuable. “You’d be talking to pretty much huge swathes of the industry,” he said of his time at Spaceflight, which he believes will help make connections for clients. “It’s really amazing to see how the NewSpace sector is very much alive with activity and potential,” said Craig Sherman, a partner at Wilson Sonsini who represents companies and investors in the space industry, in a statement about hiring Blake and establishing the new industry group. “With Curt’s background and the experience that others in the firm have amassed through their own prior space-related roles or client representation, this is an ideal opportunity for us to work more closely with the innovators and established companies leading the way forward in the NewSpace sector,” he said.
TAMPA, Fla. — SES said June 15 that Luxembourg has approved a program to carve out capacity from its O3b mPower medium Earth orbit (MEO) broadband network for the country and NATO allies. Luxembourg’s government is acquiring 195 million euros ($211 million) worth of O3b mPower capacity under the 10-year MEO Global Services (MGS) program, targeting defense, security, and disaster recovery missions. Capacity from the operator’s next-generation constellation is being made available for other sovereign government missions under a NATO contracting vehicle set up last year in partnership with the United States. The U.S. Space Force has allocated $59 million in its proposed 2024 budget to buy services from O3b mPower, which is slated to provide initial services this year following the launch of two more satellites. SpaceX had been slated to launch the fifth and sixth of 11 Boeing-built O3b mPower satellites from Florida in early June; however, Luxembourg-based SES said June 12 they were still undergoing tests at manufacturing facilities in El Segundo, California. Each O3b mPower satellite is designed to scale up to multiple gigabits per second of throughput, about 10 times more throughput than those in the 20-strong first-generation O3b constellation. Outgoing SES CEO Steve Collar described parliamentary approval for MGS as an important step in Luxembourg’s defense space strategy to bolster government satellite communications capabilities. Luxembourg Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense François Bausch said in February that the program would consolidate its position as a reliable partner in space, and help “reinforce Euro-Atlantic joint deterrence and defence” activities. Governments do not typically sign up for new constellations until they are in service and have truly proven capabilities. However, Luxembourg has a symbiotic relationship with publicly listed SES. They also have a public-private joint venture called GovSat that has its own satellite dedicated to governmental and institutional users.
Despite an overwhelming vote of support by the United Nations General Assembly six months ago, advocates of a moratorium on one type of anti-satellite tests say they are still working to get more countries to adopt it. The U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution in December 2022 encouraging countries not to conduct destructive direct-ascent (DA) ASAT tests. A total of 155 nations voted in favor of the resolution while nine, including China and Russia, voted against it. Nine other nations, including India, abstained. “That kind of vote count indicates a very strong base of support,” said Audrey Schaffer, director of space policy at the National Security Council, during a June 13 presentation at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability here. However, she noted that the resolution was non-binding. “It doesn’t commit states to the norm. It encourages states to make national commitments to this norm,” she said. “To truly establish an internationally recognized norm banning destructive DA-ASAT missile testing, we need a critical mass of nations to actually make the commitment.” So far, 13 nations have made that commitment, most recently Italy in April. “Our work in curtailing these irresponsible acts is not finished,” she said. “We have to continue the drumbeat of nations making commitments to this emerging international norm.” The United States was the first to commit to no longer conduct destructive DA-ASAT tests in April 2022 , five months after Russia conducted such a test, destroying the defunct Cosmos 1408 satellite and creating thousands of pieces of debris. Vice President Kamala Harris, who announced the ban, encouraged other nations to make similar commitments. The first to join the United States was Canada in May 2022 . “It is simple to recognize. It is easy to attribute. Given that it’s very detrimental, this was one of the top threats that needed to be addressed,” Maryse Ducharme, special advisor on space for Canada’s Department of National Defence, said of Canada’s decision to adopt the test ban, during a conference panel June 14. She agreed that more nations need to make similar commitments. That could, she said, lead to a legally binding international ban on such tests, which she said Canada would support. Hyerin Kim, second secretary in the disarmament and non-proliferation division of South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a June 14 conference speech that discussions like those held by a U.N.-chartered working group on reducing space threats helped create a “whole-of-government common understanding” on the dangers posed by destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests. South Korea formally committed not to conduct such tests in October 2022 . Kim said South Korea was pleased 155 nations voted in favor of the U.N. resolution in December. “We understand that other states that voted for the resolution but have not yet joined the commitment need some time to thoroughly review the domestic effects” of such a commitment, she said. “Korea is also making efforts to raise awareness of the danger posed by ASAT testing.” While some work to get more countries to commit not to conduct destructive DA-ASAT tests, others are looking to go further. “These are wonderful first steps, but we must do more as a community to work towards a ban on all ASATs,” said Mark Mozena, vice president of government affairs at Planet, which operates hundreds of satellites at risk from orbital debris, during a June 13 talk. He said an overall ban would address criticism that a moratorium does not hurt the United States, having previously tested ASATs. “We can push past this criticism by pushing for binding international agreements to ban all debris-creating activities and weapons and not just limit the testing of those systems,” he said. “We need to move to a prohibition and not a voluntary moratorium. Working towards an international prohibition to ban all use of kinetic ASATs is a worthwhile goal which will help protect space for generations.”
Amid the growing pains that come with being a new military branch, the U.S. Space Force is trying to establish its brand and build an identity. “The amount of work that we’ve done in three years is absolutely eye-watering to me, but we’re still trying to figure out how to navigate” within the large military bureaucracy, said Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of the U.S. Space Force for operations, cyber and nuclear. In an interview with SpaceNews , Burt said service leaders are being challenged on multiple fronts. As the smallest branch, the Space Force has a flatter structure and senior officers wear several hats. As a new organization less than four years old, the Space Force also wants to innovate, and has pushed changes in personnel policies, fitness tests and uniform design. The Space Force is responsible for organizing, training and equipping forces to conduct operations in the space domain, such as flying satellites and ensuring these assets are always available. The service today has more than 12,900 members, known as guardians. That includes about 8,409 uniformed military and 4,519 civilians. By comparison, the Space Force’s parent service, the U.S. Air Force, has about 328,820 active duty personnel and 152,231 civilians. Even within the strict rules and deeply rooted norms of the Defense Department, “we want to try to do things differently,” said Burt, “whether that be talent management, focus on diversity and inclusion, being a digital service and flattening the organization.” For this to work, Burt said, “we have to find that balance of doing things in a new way, but also being part of the joint force.” Uniforms, physical fitness tests An example is a move by the Space Force to reinvent the annual physical fitness tests required for military members. Instead it is using a holistic approach where guardians volunteer to share fitness assessment data from wearable trackers. Participants are exempted from taking the conventional Air Force fitness test for two years. “This is going very well,” Burt said. “It’s the idea that holistic health is not just about a once-a-year test. It’s about being healthy all the time.” “All the services are watching this,” she said. “Initially there was a little pushback but now it’s in a good place.” Another area where the Space Force has sought changes is women’s uniforms. The service was pilloried on social media in 2021 when a female guardian wore a prototype dress uniform with ill-fitting pants. In the Air Force all the uniforms were designed by men, said Burt. The Space Force now has a male designer for the male uniform and a female designer for the female uniform. Space Force Director of Staff Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno offered a sneak peak of the new dress uniform at the Space Symposium in April. The design specs and details of the Space Force female uniform are transferable to the Air Force, said Burt. “So I think in the end, the Air Force women’s uniforms are going to get better as a result of the work the Space Force is doing.” No problems recruiting so far While the Army and the Air Force face shortfalls in recruiting , the Space Force attracts more applicants than it has slots to fill. Officials said this is due to the Space Force’s small size and growing enthusiasm in the U.S. about space career opportunities. The Space Force brought in 564 new active-duty guardians in Fiscal Year 2022. “We’re very selective” both in the selection of officers and enlisted personnel, said Burt. Having a large pool of candidates also allows the Space Force to “build diversity and inclusion from the ground up, so the force reflects the population we are defending.” According to self-reported guardian racial demographics, the service is 63% White, 14% Hispanic or Latino and 7.5% Black or African American and 6.3% Asian. The remainder includes a mix of American Indian/Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and others. Personnel initiatives such as providing opportunities to get advanced degrees and exchange programs with the private sector are intended to help retain skilled people, Burt said. A concern going forward is losing guardians to the higher-paying private sector. Unlike in the larger military branches, younger officers in the Space Force have significant responsibilities because there are far fewer generals. In the Pentagon people have recognized that “I have colonels that I have to empower to send to meetings,” Burt said. “And they’re punching above their weight class and they’re doing great work,” she said. “They feel very empowered by the fact that they are given that level of responsibility.” Burt herself manages areas that in the Air Force are overseen by five different general officers: Operations and logistics, cybersecurity, wargaming, nuclear command and control. She is also one of the rare three-star female generals overseeing operations. “I tell you that often I’m the only woman at the table,” said Burt. That’s something she hopes will change as more female junior officers move up the ranks. “It’s still interesting how few female general officers are in this building.” New chief’s priorities The Space Force chief of space operations Gen. Chance Saltzman earlier this year rolled out a list of priorities , the first of which is to field “combat ready forces.” Having a skilled workforce versed in advanced technology is key to meeting this goal, Burt said. “We have to provide the most exquisite space capabilities we can to the joint force and defend those capabilities so that they can continue to deliver.” Saltzman also wants to define the “guardian spirit.” This means answering central questions such as “What do we expect of our guardians? And how do we evaluate talent and build talent based on our core values ?” The third priority, “partnering to win,” is about forging ties with foreign allies and with the commercial industry. Saltzman also wants the Space Force to become better known by the American public. “We all need to be spending time talking about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it,” said Burt. “Because it helps the American people understand where their tax dollars are going.” Most people are not aware of their reliance on satellites for routine daily activities like using GPS or trading stocks, and what could happen if satellites in orbit were taken out of service. “We need to talk about it as much as we can,” said Burt. According to a memo Saltzman issued June 8, “Our effectiveness as a military organization depends on an unassailable relationship with the society we serve.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $87 million in a Series E funding round to support its campaign to gather weather and climate data. Boston-based Tomorrow.io announced the news June 14 after launching its second satellite, R-2, on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare flight. Tomorrow.io’s $87M Series E round was led by Activate Capital. Joining the round were RTX Ventures, Seraphim Space and Chemonics. Existing Tomorrow.io investors, SquarePeg Capital, Canaan, ClearVision, JetBlue Ventures and Pitango, also provided funding. Tomorrow.io launched its first radar satellite, R-1, April 15. Since then, the company has confirmed that all systems including its space-based radar are functioning well. “This is the world’s first commercially built weather radar satellite,” Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews . “Only a handful of weather radar satellites have flown” and those were developed by NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA and the European Space Agency. Soon, Tomorrow.io will begin sharing radar data from R-1 and R-2. Tomorrow.io satellites equipped with microwave sounders are expected to begin launching in 2024. In addition to weather data, Tomorrow.io radar satellites will provide detailed information on ocean surface winds and sea surface heights. “Altimetry is a hidden capability of the instrument,” Goffer said. To date, Tomorrow.io has received more than $30 million in contracts from the Defense Department. In May, the company won $10.3 million in U.S. Space Force funding for two weather satellites. The money, awarded through the Defense Department’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program, will “augment the existing commercially-owned, managed, and sustained weather constellation to support weather data-as-a-service use by the military,” according to a May 22 news release . Tomorrow.io is also one of five companies that won contracts to demonstrate the integration of commercial data into the U.S. Air Force Weather Virtual Private Cloud. In terms of private capital, Tomorrow.io’s previous funding round, Series D, was completed in 2021 when the company was known as ClimaCell. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Muon Space, a Silicon Valley startup building a climate-monitoring constellation, sent its first satellite into orbit June 12 on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare flight. With the 70-kilogram satellite, Muon intends to demonstrate the technology stack developed since the startup was founded in 2021. “The first satellite launch is an important stepping stone for us to demonstrate that we can do things quickly with high performance and reliably,” Muon CEO Johnny Dyer told SpaceNews . “We’ve developed from scratch a very capable spacecraft platform as well as the infrastructure required to operate it on the ground.” In two launches scheduled for 2024, Muon plans to begin testing sensors the company is developing to provide sub-hourly global measurements. “We have a combination of sensors that can uniquely address some climate applications specifically,” Dyer said. “The constellation will collect a set of measurements at a sampling cadence and a temporal revisit cadence that is unprecedented. Measurements we’ll be making will be extremely impactful for flood and water issues.” Muon plans to launch its first-generation microwave instrument in February to gather weather data for the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit . In October 2024, Muon plans to launch at least one additional satellite with microwave and multispectral infrared instruments, Dyer said. “We are taking a very rapid, iterative approach to this,” Dyer said. “We think that flexibility is key to addressing a lot of these needs.” Dyer, former chief engineer for Skybox Imaging, founded Muon with Dan McCleese, former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory chief scientist, Pascal Stang, former Project Loon technology lead, Paul Day, Loft Orbital’s former chief product officer, and Reuben Rohrschneider, former Ball Aerospace principal mission systems and architecture engineer. In seed and Series A rounds, Muon has raised about $35 million to date. Muon also has established partnerships with key technology companies including Google and nonprofits like the Environmental Defense Fund. “We can’t be the expert on every application, but we can deeply partner with groups to understand where the needs and gaps are,” Dyer said. Muon is unique, Dyer said, in focusing on both science and engineering. “We think there’s a lot of value in finding first-order operational pain points that are being driven by things like climate and national security and building out the capabilities needed to solve those problems,” Dyer said. Correction: The list of founders has been corrected to include Pascal Stang, Project Loon’s technology lead. 
China has broken ground on a new launch pad dedicated to commercial solid rockets to help boost access to launch facilities. The new pad for solid rockets and its related infrastructure to provide power, test, and other facilities is expected to be finished within 180 days, China Space News, an official space sector outlet, reported June 14. The new project is part of the wider Hainan Commercial Launch Site for which two pads are currently under construction. One will be dedicated to kerolox launchers and another to methalox launch vehicles. The first launch of a liquid rocket from the commercial spaceport is expected in early 2024 . The new, third pad will provide a growing array of solid propellant launch vehicles with more options and opportunities to launch, amid apparent growing demand in China for launch capability. Together with sea launch facilities established at Haiyang on the coast of China’s eastern province of Shandong, the new launch pad will provide new opportunities for commercial companies to launch solid rockets. The new solid rockets and launch facilities will provide China overall with greater launch flexibility and redundancy . The new Hainan Commercial Launch Site is a joint venture between the Hainan provincial government, China’s main space contractor CASC and its sister state-owned space and defense giant CASIC, and China Satnet, the state-owned entity charged with managing the construction of China’s planned communications megaconstellation . State-owned and related spinoffs from CASC, CASIC and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as commercial and private companies including iSpace, Galactic Energy and Orienspace are engaged in launching and developing solid propellant launch vehicles. The Hainan Commercial Launch Site is located near the coastal Wenchang spaceport which opened in 2014 and hosts launches of China’s new, large kerosene-liquid oxygen rockets. The coastal location offers new possibilities in terms of transportation, whereas the dimensions of rockets delivered to China’ inland launch sites are constrained by the country’s rail network. Wenchang’s location at 19 degrees latitude also offers advantages in terms of lower fuel requirements for launches to some orbits. Wenchang spaceport and the inland sites at Jiuquan, Taiyuan and Xichang are administered by the People’s Liberation Army, with government and military-related missions prioritized. Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert currently hosts the vast majority of commercial launches, with new, supplemental facilities for solid and cryogenic propellant rockets. The new Hainan launch complexes are intended to provide greater and more flexible access to launch facilities for commercial launch activities. It is also expected to allow the Long March 8, a newer, kerolox medium-lift rocket, to increase its launch cadence. It currently uses the same pad at the national Wenchang spaceport as the Long March 7—used to launch Tianzhou cargo spacecraft to the Tiangong space station—and Long March 7A for launches to GTO, and thus its opportunities to launch are constrained. A plan to mass produce CASC’s Long March 8 is linked to China’s plans to launch its 13,000-satellite megaconstellation. The Hainan Commercial Launch Site is part of a plan to establish the island as a commercial space hub . It aims to attract space startups engaged in rocketry, satellite manufacturing and data application, while also seeking to engage in international cooperation.
SAN FRANCISCO – A Deloitte Space report released June 14 encourages companies in all industries to draft long-term space strategies. “In previous decades, a thoughtfully developed tech strategy became a competitive imperative,” according to the “xTech Futures: SpaceTech” report. “Similarly, over the coming decades, companies across all industries will increasingly need to consider whether a space strategy will be a key component of their future.” While many companies will continue to build and launch spacecraft, others will support the space sector or consume space-related products and services. “For many businesses, the space economy’s greatest value will come in the form of satellite communications, navigation and data,” the report noted. The Deloitte report describes space benefits hear, near and there. Here refers to terrestrial benefits. Near means in Earth orbit. There refers to deep space and its potential rewards including scientific advances, economic activity and natural resources. “Space is here today,” Brett Loubert, who leads Deloitte Space, told SpaceNews . “A lot of people look at the space industry and they concentrate very heavily on tourism or the most bombastic or splash-worthy parts of the industry.” In contrast, the Deloitte report underscores the increasing affordability of space launch and the widespread availability of space services. “From agriculture companies using satellite data to optimize crop yields to pharmaceutical companies using the advantages of microgravity to develop lifesaving solutions, we’ll demonstrate how industries can leapfrog to the next opportunity by leveraging space-based technology advances and providing products and services to the growing space industry,” the report said. Once commercial space stations begin operating, a company interested in on-orbit manufacturing or conducting research in microgravity would not need to build and launch its own space station. “Nor would it necessarily have to compete for space on a government space station,” Loubert said. “It could potentially go to a commercial provider and use their lab space on an as-a-service model,” he added. In the longer term, Deloitte anticipates a gold rush for space resources. The lunar regolith contains water and other valuable materials. The report noted, though, that countries still need to grapple with the question of regulating celestial resource extraction. Additional problems noted in the report include space debris and “the human problem,” the challenge of ensuring the physical and mental well-being of astronauts exposed to heightened levels of radiation and differing levels of gravity. “People evolved for life here on Earth, but the conditions we will encounter in space are completely alien,” the report noted. 
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released a new set of guidelines intended to reduce the creation of orbital debris with the support of some, but not all, major satellite operators. The Space Industry Debris Mitigation Recommendations document, released by the WEF June 13, outlines recommendations to avoid collisions that can create debris by limiting the lifetime of satellites in orbit after they have completed their missions and improving coordination among satellite operators. Among those recommendations is to establish a success rate for “post-mission disposal,” or removal of satellites from orbit after the end of their missions, to 95% to 99%. That disposal should be completed no more than five years after the end of each satellite’s mission. Current international guidelines, often incorporated into national law, set a post-mission disposal timeline of up to 25 years, although the U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted a new rule last September that will reduce it to five years for satellites that are licensed or obtain market access from the agency. Even with the 25-year guideline, compliance has been below 50% by some metrics. “We wanted to push the envelope a little bit on some of these concrete, specific targets,” said Nikolai Khlystov, lead for the WEF’s Future of Space initiative, during a panel at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability here June 13. It was intended, he said, to build on past work by the WEF, notably the development of the Space Sustainability Rating that assesses how satellite systems meet best practices for safe and sustainable space operations. Other recommendations in the document call for satellites to be maneuverable, preferably though onboard propulsion, when operating at altitudes above 375 kilometers. Satellite operators should answer “all reasonable and legitimate requests” for space traffic coordination from other operators and share orbital data. The document calls on governments to adopt the new post-mission disposal guidelines and mandate the use of active debris removal systems for space objects that cannot comply with them, once such systems are “practical and commercially affordable.” It also recommends increased investments in space situational awareness capabilities and encourages sharing of data on orbits of space objects. The audience for the document, Khlystov said, is as much stakeholders outside the industry as it is satellite operators. “You can take this document to policymakers, investors and other stakeholders and say this is where a significant part of the industry is at.” Twenty-seven companies endorsed the document at the time of its release. They include companies that operate large satellite constellations, such as OneWeb, Planet and Spire, as well as a mix of other established and emerging space companies. Among them is GHGSat, a Canadian company that has nine smallsats in orbit to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. “Even before engaging in this discussion, we needed to come up with new practices” on space sustainability, said Bryn Orth-Lashley, technical operations and service delivery manager at GHGSat, during the panel. “It wasn’t that much of an uphill climb.” He noted the company’s satellites do not have onboard propulsion but are able to maneuver by alternative means, such as differential drag, to comply with the guidelines. The company will continue to operate satellites after the end of their commercial missions, including performing avoidance maneuvers, until reentry. Some major companies, though, have not signed on. They include SpaceX, which operates by far the largest satellite constellation with its Starlink system, and Amazon, which is developing its Project Kuiper constellation. Even some satellite operators that have espoused the importance of space sustainability, like Viasat, are not included. Khlystov said the WEF undertook a “pretty comprehensive effort” to engage with as many satellite operators as possible. “If some actors didn’t sign on, I don’t think it’s a sign that they are against these standards,” he said, noting there was some “pretty significant input” from operators not included among the 27 signatories. “I was very encouraged by the process,” he continued. “We had very good discussions. Not everybody who was part of the discussions came on board, but they were all very engaged.”
A United Nations official says there is an opportunity over the next 15 months to improve how nations manage space activities to address emerging issues ranging from orbital debris to space resources. Speaking at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability here June 13, Guy Ryder, U.N. undersecretary-general for policy, said the organization was making efforts to address space diplomacy ahead of a September 2024 U.N. conference called Summit of the Future that will address broad challenges the world is facing. “We have a window of opportunity over the next 15 months,” he said, “where we can accelerate space diplomacy and advance the governance issue.” The U.N. released a policy paper in May on outer space governance, outlining several issues it wants to address. Among them are coordination issues for a rapidly growing population of space objects in general in Earth orbit, and more specifically increasing amounts of debris. “The most obvious and perhaps the most extraordinary change in recent years has been the sheer number of objects being launched into space,” Ryder said. “The fact that more objects have been launched in the last 10 years than in the previous 50 years combined offers, I think, boundless development opportunities and governance needs.” Those governance needs revolve around space traffic coordination, with limited progress to address that on a global scale. That puts the safety and sustainability of space at risk, he argued, which is exacerbated by the growth of debris, particularly from anti-satellite tests. Efforts to remove debris show promise, but he said that without international norms regarding such activities, “the use of these technologies can be a source both of tension and of conflict.” Other issues of concern revolve around the human exploration of the moon and utilization of space resources. He noted that while the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) has been examining space resource utilization, there is no agreement yet on how countries and companies can use those resources. Ryder offered no specific proposals to address those issues, but said meetings by COPUOS and other organizations over the next 15 months offered opportunities to develop proposals to address them ahead of the Summit of the Future, where space will be one of many agenda items. The goal, he said, is to develop a single unified governance framework that covers space traffic coordination, debris and resource management, as well as norms and rules to avoid armed conflict in outer space. However, he said the U.N. would be open to separate frameworks for each issue “if that path looks likelier to achieve results.” Ryder said efforts to develop governance mechanisms on the high seas, such as the U.N. Convention on the Law of Sea, offered a model for space. “All of this provides us with the confidence that the kinds of agreements concluded in the past are possible in the future, even in today’s admittedly challenging geopolitical climate.” Part of the coordination efforts leading up to the Summit of the Future will be a conference hosted by Portugal in the spring of 2024. That is intended to help develop proposals to be presented at the summit, said Hugo André Costa, member of the executive board of the Portuguese Space Agency, during another conference panel. There will be two virtual workshops ahead of the Portuguese conference, one in October on technology issues and a second in March 2024 on policy issues, to solicit ideas from governments, industry and academia. “This is the only way that we can prepare for the future,” he argued. There have been discussions about whether COPUOS, with more than 100 member nations operating on a consensus model where all nations need to agree, is suited for the current space environment. “It’s slow, it’s frustrating but ultimately it’s a slow, steady process,” said Valda Vikmanis Keller, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Space Affairs, saying the open discussions there remain essential. “It’s the only way forward.” “We need to continue work that is being done in COPUOS,” said Costa, including “difficult discussions” on these issues. “It’s through the difficult conversations and the difficult discussions that we’re going to have that we can support the work of COPUOS and move forward.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A lack of data and collaboration continues to hold back efforts to ensure a sustainable orbital environment, satellite operator executives said June 13. “We’re trying our best to advance the science and the awareness so that prudent policy decisions could be made by regulators and other influencers,” John Janka, Viasat’s chief officer of government and regulatory affairs, said during the 5th Summit for Space Sustainability in New York. Limited space resources are being consumed “at an alarming rate,” he warned, “and we could go from there being virtually no problem a few years ago to being at saturation by the end of this decade.” Janka did not name satellite broadband rival Starlink, which has more than 4,000 satellites in its rapidly expanding low Earth orbit constellation, but said Viasat is supporting the development of “carrying capacity” models to help regulators determine how many satellites are too many. After recently completing its acquisition of British operator Inmarsat, U.S.-based Viasat operates 19 satellites in geostationary orbit. Janka said improving modeling data would also be important for assessing the efficacy of various remediations and mitigations proposed to tackle the risk of debris-causing collisions, spectrum interference, and other orbital congestion concerns. “So rather than just accept blind faith that we should do the following to fix the problem in space, we’re looking for empirical models that let us take a proposition, run it through the model, and see if it really works,” he said. Models for assessing in-orbit collision risks have advanced significantly in the last few years, according to Janka, who said experts worldwide are beginning to converge on best practices in this area. However, he called for more input from astronomers to understand the impact of satellite light pollution on their measurements. Even less is known about the environmental impact of record numbers of satellites burning up in the atmosphere following the end of their operational lives. To improve its own sustainability credentials, Amber Ledgerwood, senior manager for social and environmental impact at SES, said the operator is working on “life cycle assessments” — methodologies for measuring the environmental impacts of a product through all stages of creation and distribution. Ledgerwood said SES is compiling data to assess the impact launching a satellite has across the manufacturing and launch segments, in addition to the space and ground segments. “I think starting there and starting to gather some data is a starting point,” she said, “but there could definitely be more collaboration around the metrics that we use as an industry” to paint a more accurate picture of the sector’s impact on the space and terrestrial environment. Although SES, Viasat, and a growing number of other space companies have started voluntarily reporting non-financial environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, there is currently no consensus in the industry on standards or the metrics they should track. Shareholders are increasingly asking publicly listed SES about its ESG metrics and goals, Ledgerwood added. “Generally speaking, it is a transformation journey,” she said, “and so they understand when we can give them an action plan versus an actual answer, but the expectation is that that will be different in the future, and we will need to be able to answer their questions.” SES is based in Luxembourg and faces more mandatory sustainability disclosures under Europe’s incoming Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is also working on rules for mandating certain climate-related disclosures for publicly listed companies in the United States. When it comes to space sustainability, Viasat’s Janka said: “Best practices are great but everyone’s not going to honor them, so we need something more than soft commitments — we need a little bit of a stick.” Developing orbital debris clean-up capabilities and improving space traffic management and situational awareness is important, he added, but more is needed to ensure a safe orbital environment.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on June 12 launched four satellites for a technology demonstration in low Earth orbit. The satellites flew to orbit on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare. They are part of the Blackjack experiment the agency started in 2017 to prove out the utility of commercial space technologies for military applications. Once envisioned as a 20-satellite constellation with different types of mission payloads, Blackjack has been reduced in scope and will only deploy four spacecraft. The vision DARPA laid out in 2017 for the Blackjack project — to show the Pentagon how it could harness the commercial space revolution — has been overtaken by events, as the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency already is on its way to deploy a LEO constellation for the Defense Department. The first Blackjack launch had been planned for 2021 but the schedule kept moving to the right due to supply chain problems. Blackjack program manager Stephen Forbes confirmed that DARPA does not expect to add more satellites to the experiment beyond the four that launched on Monday. “At this time, this is our only planned launch for Blackjack,” he said in a statement to SpaceNews . “The satellites will undergo several months of commissioning, followed by orbit raising, and then start demonstrations of interactions involving proliferated satellite architectures,” Forbes said. Blue Canyon buses, SEAKR and CACI payloads The four identical Blackjack satellites were built on commercial Saturn-class buses made by Blue Canyon, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies. DARPA in 2020 awarded Blue Canyon Technologies a $14.1 million contract to manufacture four satellites. The contract had options worth $99 million for up to 20 satellites. The Saturn-class small satellite buses can carry payloads of up to 200 kilograms. Each Blackjack satellite has a Pit Boss data processing node and a Storm King radio-frequency payload made by SEAKR Engineering, also a Raytheon subsidiary. There are four laser communications terminals on each satellite, supplied by CACI . “The goal is to demonstrate low-Earth orbit performance on par with current systems in geosynchronous orbit while the payloads meet size, weight, and power constraints of the commercial bus,” said Forbes.
Servicing satellites in orbit is a nascent segment of the space economy that the U.S. military has been watching mostly from the sidelines. The Space Force says it is now ready to get in the game. It is investing in early-stage technologies and laying out a strategy to buy commercial services to refuel and service satellites in geostationary orbit by the early 2030s. The military’s thinking about satellite servicing has changed from just a few years ago when space operators didn’t see a strong use case for in-orbit repairs and refueling. Now it’s viewed as a strategic advantage, said Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson. The Space Force considers satellite servicing and in-orbit logistics as “core capabilities” and is watching developments in the commercial industry, said Thompson. “We are ready to use the technology as soon as the market is there,” he said May 15 at a Space Force Association event. Meanwhile, “there is a whole bunch of design and analysis we have to do to figure out what makes sense.” Congress signaled support for these efforts, inserting $30 million in the 2023 Space Force budget for on-orbit servicing technologies. Thompson last year directed the Space Systems Command to use the funds to establish a program office and figure out a procurement strategy for satellite servicing. The new office is just starting to get off the ground, said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space at the Space Systems Command. Purdy said military space operators are sending a clear demand signal for in-orbit capabilities, and the goal is to create a dedicated budget line for these services. “It’s a little bit of the classic starter’s dilemma,” he told SpaceNews , noting that starting new programs in the Defense Department is notoriously cumbersome. Meanwhile, “there is a desire to have a refueling capability.” A strong case for satellite refueling has been laid out by Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command. At recent industry events, Shaw argued that the way DoD has acquired satellites for decades — without a capability to refuel in orbit — prevents operators from freely maneuvering spacecraft in response to threats. Shaw compared it to buying a car with a single tank of fuel and having to make it last for the entire lifetime of the vehicle. “We need to have on-orbit logistics and service capabilities,” Shaw said in a speech at the Space Symposium in April. Space Command, for example, operates “neighborhood watch” satellites known as GSSAP (Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program) to monitor the geostationary belt, where the military deploys its most valuable assets. GSSAPs were built to last for decades, but maneuvers must be carefully planned to minimize fuel consumption. “If I had the ability to refuel GSSAP regularly, do you think we would operate them like we do today? We would not,” Shaw said. “We would be zipping around the globe. We’d be trying to keep a potential adversary off balance.” Purdy said that message has been heard loud and clear. “We cannot do warfighting in the space domain if we have to measure every drop of fuel and decide whether you really want to do this mission if that means the satellite will run out of fuel two years early,” he said. Purdy assigned Col. Meredith Beg to lead the new Space Force office focused on space mobility and logistics. “Our goal is to ensure that we can deliver this capability that the combatant command is clamoring for,” Beg told SpaceNews . “We don’t have a defined budget yet. But we are working through the corporate process to establish what that needs to look like,” she said. Satellite servicing is part of the broader activity known as ISAM, for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. The Space Force is interested in ISAM, but its major focus is mobility and maneuver, said Beg. Refueling is the “near-term requirement.” These technologies also are being pursued by Space Force under the Orbital Prime program aimed at small businesses. Launched in 2021, Orbital Prime has awarded about 125 research and study contracts to teams of industry and academia. Outside the Space Force, other organizations funding in-orbit satellite servicing programs include the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit. But the most significant investment today is coming from the private sector, Beg noted. “We’re looking to leverage all that hard work and brainpower to actually deliver capabilities to our warfighters.” Of the $30 million Congress added in 2023, $26 million will be allocated to projects managed by the Space Enterprise Consortium, a Space Systems Command organization that works with startups and commercial space firms. In June, the SpEC consortium plans to request prototype proposals “to support the development of a robust commercial base capable of providing space mobility and logistics services.” SpEC, in a draft solicitation, noted that few commercial services are available. “However, multiple performers are working towards technology demonstration.” Proposals are sought in four areas: refueling, transportation, servicing and debris mitigation. The SpEC plans to award one or more contracts for projects that will be co-funded by the $26 million appropriated in the Space Force budget and $7.8 million from the winning contractors. Developing technologies under private-public partnerships allows the Space Force to influence commercial technology development. Beg said a long-term acquisition strategy for refueling and other in-orbit services is still to be mapped out. To help inform the procurement strategy for in-orbit refueling, the Space Force is funding experiments such as the $50 million Tetra-5, co-sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit. The Space Systems Command’s Innovation and Prototyping Directorate last summer awarded Orion Space Solutions a contract to develop three small satellites that will dock with a hydrazine depot in geostationary orbit supplied by the commercial startup Orbit Fab. The experiment is projected to launch in 2025. The head of the prototyping directorate, Col. Joseph Roth, said the Tetra-5 experiment, if successful, will help build confidence in the technology. “Colonel Beg and the rest of us are getting really strong signals from the warfighting units that they want to have on-orbit refueling capability and logistics,” said Roth. “It will take time to establish requirements and put in the budget, but it’s pretty exciting to see.” For years, Josh Davis, senior project engineer at the Aerospace Corp., has studied developments in space mobility and logistics. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2007 demonstrated in-orbit refueling in an experiment called Orbital Express. Although the project was successful, Davis noted, the military never transitioned the technology to an operational program because there was no actual need for it. The Air Force operated satellites in space for more than 50 years without refueling or in-space logistics capabilities, Davis said. Now that a need has been identified, the Space Force has to work through the Pentagon’s requirements process. “From a budgeting perspective, it’s very hard to stand up a new mission area,” he said. Transitioning to a satellite fleet that can be serviced in orbit, he said, also requires building next-generation spacecraft equipped with refueling ports compatible with available servicing vehicles. The good news for the Space Force, Davis said, is that the industry has advanced rapidly since Orbital Express. There are now commercial companies able to provide services, so the government doesn’t have to build unique systems. DARPA, in 2020, signed an agreement to share its satellite servicing technology with a commercial firm, Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics. The company now has two Mission Extension Vehicles in orbit docked with two Intelsat geostationary satellites that were running low on fuel, and will keep those satellites in service for about 15 years. Satellite operators Intelsat and Optus have ordered two of three fuel pods to be delivered by SpaceLogistics’ new Mission Robotic Vehicle, projected to launch in 2024 to extend the life of geostationary satellites by at least six years. The third customer has not yet been announced. Despite uncertainty about DoD funding for satellite servicing, the industry is making investments in anticipation of government demand, Davis said. He pointed to Shaw’s comments as a “very clear demand signal from the Space Force’s customer, U.S. Space Command.” For the satellite servicing industry to take off, Davis said, decisions will have to be made about hardware and software interfaces to make vehicles interoperable. “As we move forward, there is definitely a lot of interest in figuring out how we standardize the servicing features on our next generation of satellites,” he said. Volumes of standards have been developed for NASA programs such as the International Space Station, but those are not applicable to military satellites. The Space Force has a lot of work to do in this area, Davis said. It is unlikely that the industry will adopt the equivalent of a USB plug-and-play standard for spacecraft, at least in the foreseeable future, Davis added. “Eventually, I would love to get there.” Companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Astroscale, Orbit Fab and others are developing interfaces, and some may be more widely adopted than others. “Somebody is going to get the market first, and they’re going to get the lion’s share,” said Davis. He noted that the industry group known as CONFERS (Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations) will have an important role to play in this area. CONFERS was founded by DARPA in 2017 to help develop and promote industry-led standards for satellite servicing activities. The consortium has more than 50 member organizations from the U.S. and several other countries. Roth, the director of prototyping at Space Systems Command, said government and industry experiments will help test different interfaces “to see which works the best.” “We do keep our eye on the industrial base,” particularly on satellite refueling developments,” he said. “We’re just at the early stages of on-orbit refueling, and I’m glad we have a robust industrial base that’s actually exploring this for commercial use.” Roth said the Space Force is closely watching Northrop Grumman’s servicing vehicles and the company’s next-generation mission refueling pods. “We are definitely going after commercial opportunities,” he said. With an eye on the military satellite servicing market, Lockheed Martin in April 2022 released the technical specifications of a docking device — called Augmentation System Port Interface, or Aspin. Lockheed Martin hopes satellite manufacturers will adopt the standard in order to make satellites interoperable and easier to update on orbit with new technology. “We are definitely looking at that port,” Roth said. An attractive feature of Aspin, he said, is that it was designed to be compatible with Orbit Fab’s refueling port called Rafti — short for rapidly attachable fluid transfer interface. Lockheed Martin’s vice president of mission strategy Eric Brown said the Aspin port was designed to enable a broad range of services, including refueling satellites, recharging batteries or adding new payloads. “We’re seeing the demand signals coming from the right places, certainly for refueling,” Brown said. In addition to Aspin, the company is investing in rendezvous and proximity operations technology. Two Lockheed Martin cubesats conducted a demonstration in geostationary orbit in November, performing maneuvers in close proximity. In the experiment called Lockheed Martin’s In-space Upgrade Satellite System, or Linuss, one of the cubesats performed the role of servicing vehicle and the other served as the resident space object. Brown said Lockheed Martin is planning a new experiment to test the Aspin docking adapter in space. “We expect Aspin to be stock content on any satellite that we intend to propose to the U.S. government and allies,” Brown said. “And we expect that every satellite program that the Space Force procures is going to ask for the ability to be refueled.” Lockheed Martin, an investor in Orbit Fab, purposely designed Aspin to be interoperable with the Rafti port. But Aspin also will enable other capabilities such as snapping on a new processor to a satellite. One of the concepts envisioned for Aspin is to put the port on a small satellite carrying a new processor or sensor that would be launched to orbit and, under its own propulsion, dock with the client satellite. “The problem we have today is you design these satellites over the course of several years, and technology continues to evolve,” Brown said. Technologies like Aspin would allow the Space Force to update their satellites relatively quickly. Orbit Fab announced plans in 2022 to offer refueling services in geostationary orbit by 2025 at a price of $20 million for 100 kilograms of hydrazine. The company will deploy a depot and “shuttle” spacecraft to take fuel to satellites. Adam Harris, Orbit Fab’s vice president of business development, said the company continues to push these projects forward with private funding but also relies on government support. The company secured a $12 million U.S. Air Force Strategic Funding Increase — with $6 million coming from the Air Force and $6 million in matching private funds — to further develop its Rafti refueling port for compatibility with military satellites. The Rafti port has to be installed on the client satellite in order to receive fuel. Orbit Fab also is developing a grappling device for the fuel delivery vehicle that attaches to the Rafti port. In the Tetra-5 experiment, a small satellite will rendezvous and dock with Orbit Fab’s depot to get hydrazine. Orbit Fab on May 25 announced it selected Impulse Space’s orbital transfer vehicle as the hosting platform for the fuel depot. The OTV will supply power, communications, attitude control and propulsion for the fuel depot. The military’s seemingly growing appetite for refueling capabilities is “very exciting for us,” Harris said. “When Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or other companies build spacecraft, we talk to them about how you can integrate our refueling interface so that those spacecraft can be refillable,” he said. “We want to make that as easy as possible for all spacecraft manufacturers.” Space Command is telling the Space Force it wants refuelable satellites by 2030. Although that seems a long way off, planning for that future has to start now, Harris said. “When you know refueling is available, you can change the way you do business with spacecraft,” he said. “And you can make those maneuvers without regret.” This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The Air Force Research Laboratory has ordered a Viasat-3 space terminal that will be used to demonstrate communications services for low-Earth orbit spacecraft. Viasat will deliver a space-qualified Ka-band terminal that will be launched to orbit on a LEO satellite and serve as a data communications relay to the ViaSat-3 network. AFRL will use the terminal for high data rate LEO-to-GEO communications, said Lt. Col. David Johnson, head of the lab’s Integrated Experiments and Evaluations Division. Viasat received a $10 million task order from AFRL for the Viasat-3 space terminal, Johnson said in a statement to SpaceNews . The task order is part of a seven-year contract worth up to $50 million that AFRL awarded Viasat in 2020 for satellite communications technologies and services. Satellite operator Viasat on April 30 launched the first of three planned Viasat-3 Ka-band broadband satellites Data transfer via Viasat-3 LEO satellites that collect Earth observation data, for example, would use Viasat’s space relay service to send data through the Viasat-3 high-throughput satellite. “Having the persistent capability to communicate to LEO spacecraft by relaying through a constellation of spacecraft in geosynchronous Earth orbit can enable the ability to maintain almost near constant communication with those LEO spacecraft,” Johnson said. The relay service using the Viasat-3 satellite, “once proven, would enable reduced response time for mission-tasking or spacecraft anomalies and frees up bandwidth on government ground communications assets,” he said. AFRL’s project, Johnson said, is “focused on providing 24-7 persistent command and control capabilities to LEO spacecraft by utilizing GEO constellations that are always in view of ground stations.” Viasat in a June 7 news release said the AFRL mission will be the first pathfinder demonstration of the company’s space relay service expected to become available in late 2025. In addition to a Ka-band space relay payload, Viasat will provide engineering analysis, integration and test support for the on-orbit demonstration. Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems, said this “real-time space relay capability will offer an efficient method of moving LEO satellite data to the ground for operations.”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) on June 12 released his proposed bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, known as the chairman’s mark. The full committee will consider Rogers’ mark on June 21. Rogers in the bill adds another twist in the contentious battle over the proposed relocation of U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama. The move has been on hold pending DoD and Air Force reviews. The bill would prohibit U.S. Space Command from spending money on new or improved facilities at its current headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, “until the Secretary of the Air Force delivers a report on the selection of a permanent location.” Rogers also would restrict travel funds for Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall until the delivery of the report. Other space policy provisions in the chairman’s mark:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched several dozen smallsats on a dedicated rideshare mission June 12, with customers ranging from the U.S. Space Force to startups deploying their first satellites. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 5:35 p.m. Eastern on the Transporter-8 mission. The launch was the second of the day for SpaceX, after another Falcon 9 launched more than 14 hours earlier from Cape Canaveral carrying a batch of Starlink satellites. SpaceX said Transporter-8, the eighth in its line of dedicated smallsat rideshare missions, carried 72 payloads, a figure that includes orbital transfer vehicles with satellites that will be deployed later. The satellites were deployed in a 525-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit starting an hour after liftoff. The mission featured a mix of established and emerging satellite developers. Spire deployed three cubesats for collecting weather and tracking data, Iceye four radar imaging satellites and Satellogic four optical and hyperspectral imaging satellites. All three companies used the launch to add to their existing constellations. Several companies, though, were flying their first spacecraft on Transporter-8. That includes Varda Space Industries, which launched its W-Series 1 spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab. The spacecraft will test manufacturing of high-value products , like pharmaceuticals, in the space environment. Those products will be brought back to Earth in a return capsule on the spacecraft. Satellite Vu launches its first satellite, HotSat-1, to demonstrate thermal imaging technologies for its planned constellation . Muon Space, which is working a constellation of climate-monitoring satellites, flew its MuSat-1 on this launch. Turion Space launched its first spacecraft, Droid.001, to collect space situational awareness data . Starfish Space, which is developing satellite servicing technologies, launched its first prototype, Otter Pup , on Transporter-8. The spacecraft, carried on the Orbiter SN3 tug from Launcher, will separate from the tug and then attempt to rendezvous with it. Several other payloads are also on Orbiter SN3. D-Orbit has its latest ION tug on Transporter-8, but the company did not immediately disclose the payloads on that vehicle. In addition to companies flying their first satellites, another company flew its first propulsion system on another satellite. Australian company Neumann Space said its first Neumann Drive electric thruster, which uses a solid metal rod as fuel, was part of a satellite built by Skykraft, another Australian company developing a satellite constellation to support air traffic management services. “Today we have moved our work from the laboratory to space,” said Herve Astier, chief executive of Neumann Space, in a statement after the launch. “Flight heritage will enable us to provide greater detail about the operational performance of our product to customers and ultimately fill the gap existing in the market today.” The U.S. military used the Transporter-8 mission to launch several satellites. Four satellites for DARPA’s Blackjack program to test satellite constellation technologies were on the launch, as well as three satellites from the Space Force’s Space Systems Command that are part of the Defense Department’s Space Test Program. Two of the satellites, called Modular Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, are imaging cubesats, while the third, XVI, will test the use of Link-16 military communications in space. SpaceX has attracted significant demand for its Transporter missions, which offer launches three to four times a year at prices significantly less than dedicated launches on small launch vehicles. The company’s website, which lists available launch slots and prices, suggests its Transporter missions are fully booked until the second quarter of 2025. The launch itself was a milestone for SpaceX. The first stage, making its ninth flight, landed back at the launch site at Vandenberg. That was the 200 th landing of a Falcon booster to date.
A bill introduced in the House to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration includes a provision directing the agency to get involved in space traffic management, potentially duplicating ongoing work at the Commerce Department. The bipartisan leadership of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee introduced the FAA reauthorization bill June 9. The committee is scheduled to mark up the bill, advancing it to the full House, June 13. One section, 600 pages into a 773-page bill, is intended to address risks from orbital debris reentering and passing through airspace. The bill refers to such objects as “covered airborne debris,” which is defined in the legislation as human-made objects once in orbit that have reentered uncontrollably and pose “a potential risk to the safe flight of civil aircraft in air commerce.” The bill instructs the FAA to establish a program to track objects “that are potential sources of covered airborne debris” with a focus on identifying those about to reenter and could pose a risk to aircraft in airspace. That program would coordinate with the FAA’s air traffic control system to identify airspace that needs to be closed for a reentry. It would allow the FAA to establish its own space situational awareness (SSA) facilities and work with other federal agencies, companies or international organizations for data on such objects. While the focus of the bill is tracking debris to assess airspace risks, the bill does enable additional uses of the data the FAA collects. In particular, it directs the FAA to offer “a basic level of data, information, and services” at no charge. That includes maintaining a public catalog of space objects and “emergency conjunction notifications” of such objects. That would appear to duplicate at some level what the Commerce Department is currently developing to handle civil space traffic management responsibilities assigned to it under Space Policy Directive (SPD) 3 in June 2018. The department’s Office of Space Commerce is developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, that will use SSA data from multiple sources and provide basic services, like conjunction warnings, free of charge. The bill makes no mention of TraCSS or work being done by Commerce on space traffic management. The issue has not been the subject of hearings by the committee in this Congress. A committee spokesperson did not respond to questions June 12 about provisions in the bill. Industry officials say they believe the intent of the provision is focused on aviation safety, and not a broader space traffic management effort. There had been policy debates for years about whether the Commerce Department, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) or another agency should take over civil space traffic management responsibilities from the Defense Department. That debate continued until SPD-3, when the White House selected Commerce for that role , a decision supported by an independent study in 2020 by the National Academy of Public Administration requested by Congress. “It seems more like this is aimed at making sure the FAA/AST can fulfill its air safety mission” than reopening those debates, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation. However, “it does suggest that there is still some uncertainty about what data or services the Office of Space Commerce is going to provide to other federal agencies to support their own missions.” “The proposed language in the FAA reauthorization bill should be very narrowly focused on aircraft safety in the presence of hazards posed by reentering space objects, given that the role for STM has already been assigned to DoC,” said Dan Oltrogge, chief scientist for SSA company COMSPOC. “Apart from orbital and positional information concerning reentering objects that could be obtained from DoC, there is no need for FAA to maintain a separate catalog for on-orbit resident space objects or to generate emergency conjunction notifications for orbital objects, as these responsibilities are to be managed by DoC per SPD-3,” he added. The SSA section is the most substantive section in the bill related to space. Other sections of the report address minor issues regarding commercial space transportation statistics, spaceport reports and codifying an agreement between the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board on roles and responsibilities for commercial spaceflight accident investigations. The bill notably does not address the “learning period” that restricts the FAA’s ability to enact safety regulations for spaceflight participants; that restriction is set to expire Oct. 1.
Zero-Error Systems, a Singapore startup developing radiation-hardened integrated circuits, raised $7.5 million in a Series A investment round supported by Airbus Ventures. “With this $7.5 million, we are looking at growing our business presence in the U.S. and Europe, and building on our product line,” Hwai Lin Khor, ZES vice president for business development and strategy, told SpaceNews . ZES, a spinoff of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, was founded in 2019. The company’s radiation-hardened chips flew for the first time on three satellites launched in 2021 by Japan’s Kyushu Institute of Technology. While many space companies fly automotive or consumer-grade integrated chips and rely on shielding to reduce the impact of radiation, shielding only protects chips from total ionizing dose effects, Khor said. ZES patented technology to address another radiation-related issue, single event effects. “That problem can only be solved if the system itself is aware that the single event has happened and it powers off at the right time,” Khor said. “Once the radiation goes away, it turns back on again. Essentially, this is a simple concept like a circuit breaker.” With the new funding, ZES plans to expand in the U.S. market to encourage private space companies to adopt its technology. “We also are looking at Europe because we do have a strong connection with some of the prime contractors in the European region,” Khor said. ZES named only two of the investors that contributed to its Series A round: Airbus Ventures and the Dart Family Office, based in Singapore. “Airbus Ventures has a strong network to the satellite ecosystem, including satellite manufacturers and space agencies,” Khor said. “Airbus Ventures also has strong ties with some of the space contractors who are building payload systems.”
The House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee is proposing legislation that would require DoD to share threat intelligence with commercial satellite operators. This is one of several proposals in the subcommittee’s draft bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) and Ranking Member Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) released their proposal June 12 and scheduled a markup of the bill June 13. The draft bill: Sharing data with commercial operators “Commercial space providers that contract with the Department of Defense are vulnerable to physical and cyber threats; and the United States Space Command has established the commercial integration cell to aid in the integration and protection of United States satellites and to build awareness of threats,” the draft bill says. The U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command are directed to develop a plan to expand existing threat-sharing arrangements with commercial space operators tha are under contract with the Department of Defense. They also have to establish a process to regularly identify and evaluate commercial space situational awareness capabilities, including the extent to which commercial space situational awareness data could meet Space Force space situational awareness needs; and develop and implement a plan to integrate the unified data library into Space Force operational systems. Other provisions on space policy and programs In a report accompanying the NDAA proposal, the subcommittee included other space-related provisions. The National Reconnaissance Office has to submit a report on its planned acquisition strategy and schedule for commercial space-based remote sensing phenomenologies like synthetic-aperture radar, radio frequency and hyperspectral. The briefing should include an update on how commercial data is ingested in the NRO’s imagery distribution architecture. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has to submit a report identifying classified and unclassified data analytics tasks that may best be performed or augmented by commercial vendors. The Space Force has to provide the committee an update on the National Space Test and Training Complex , including plans to incorporate modeling and simulation in a multi-level security framework, and the full cost of the NSTTC. The Department of the Air Force is directed to report back on the status of the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 , an upcoming experiment to demonstrate space-based positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) to augment the Global Positioning System (GPS). The committee wants details on the Air Force’s plans to transition technologies demonstrated with NTS-3 to programs of record. The Space Development Agenc y has to submit a report on its use of multibeam active phased array antennas for its low Earth orbit Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. “The Space Development Agency should prioritize on-orbit capabilities that maximize communication flexibility and connection with a variety of ground terminals, including tactical terminals.” The Department of the Air Force has to provide an update on small business participation in the emerging activities of the Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office , including the current distribution of contract awards. “The briefing should also include an analysis of prime contractor subcontractor relations and any impacts to programs as a result of poor communication, data management, or technology integration.”
One of the largest U.S. arms makers, Lockheed Martin, is seeing growing demand for space technologies from U.S. military allies overseas. But selling to these customers is becoming more difficult for American companies due to policy and security barriers, a senior executive said. Some of the U.S. closest allies “have increased the pace of space acquisition tremendously over the last year,” Eric Brown, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for mission strategy and advanced capabilities, told SpaceNews . Many of these investments are in satellites, sensors and other technologies to protect assets in orbit, Brown said. Lockheed Martin and other U.S. firms have products to fill these demands but are running into roadblocks because of restrictions on the sale of U.S. space technologies to foreign allies, Brown said. The U.S. military has several cooperation and intelligence sharing agreements with allies but that collaboration doesn’t usually apply to acquisition programs, Brown said. “We’re at an unprecedented period of time in terms of allied demands and requirements for space capabilities that are sovereign,” he said. “We’re seeing greater collaboration among nations from a military and operational perspective. But frankly, policy and security are having a difficult time keeping pace,” he added. “It is a huge issue.” In conversations with allied military officials, Brown heard concerns that they’re not able to field systems that are interoperable with the U.S. which makes it difficult to work as a coalition. While substantive discussions are taking place among countries on space security and joint operations, “we’re talking about capabilities that our allies can’t actually procure from U.S. companies,” Brown said. Agreements have been signed to coordinate operations, “and now we need to extend that into acquisition so that we can jointly develop and collaborate on building those capabilities, not just talk about the capabilities we’d like to have in the future.” ‘Allied by design’ The office of international affairs at the Space Systems Command has advocated for the development of joint systems with allies, an initiative called “ allied by design .” “‘Allied by design’ encourages the development of integrated defense space systems and systems-of-systems from their inception,” according the Space Systems Command. Brown said these initiatives show “there’s a lot of energy, a lot of desire in the U.S. government” to work more closely with allies on space programs. The defense industry has to comply with International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, that restrict and control the export of defense and military technologies. In discussions about space systems, there are also many areas that are classified and only can be discussed with officials who have clearances. Brown said classification is “the most substantial issue precluding coordinated development of ‘protect and defend’ capabilities with our allies.” U.S. companies that typically work with allies under the Foreign Military Sales program work through the ITAR process but encounter a different set of obstacles with space systems, said Brown. Before an FMS sale is approved, U.S. industry engages with foreign governments for months or years to offer insights into the “art of the possible” and to refine the requested solution from allies to best meet their needs, Brown said. “In the case of space superiority capabilities, though, U.S. industry is frequently unable to have detailed discussions given the highly classified nature,” he said. Brown noted that he’s not advocating for lower security levels. “I am suggesting that we need the means — both in policy and infrastructure — to collaborate at appropriate classification levels with allies.” Lockheed Martin was recently selected as the “ preferred bidder ” in a multibillion-dollar Australian military project to build military communications satellites and supporting infrastructure. The company also is expanding its footprint in the U.K. space sector . These countries are actively seeking suppliers and collaboration with the U.S., said Brown. “However, the needed authorities for defense space acquisition collaboration are not yet as mature as they are for other domains.” The Space Systems Command’s international affairs office is working with allies and with private industry, but it’s unclear who has the authority to allow the sharing of specific information during discussions with allies, Brown added. “Seemingly no one can definitively identify who is empowered to say ‘yes’ below the 4-star level, but anyone can seemingly say ‘no.’ This decision authority factors into ITAR decisions as well.” International space programs The Space Systems Command has touted recent partnerships on international programs, such as deploying U.S. military communications payloads on Space Norway satellites, and U.S. space domain awareness payloads on Japanese navigation satellites . These programs are “excellent in building connections across allies,” Brown said. “But they are not quite to the point of true joint capabilities.” President Biden last month asked Congress to add Australia as a “domestic source” under the Defense Production Act. “That may be a first step toward achieving more substantive development of joint space capabilities,” Brown said. Countries like Australia and the U.K. are motivated to support their domestic industries, he said, but “lowering barriers to collaborating across industry allows the combined industrial base to propose capabilities that capitalize on each nations’ technological strengths rather than combining piecemeal capabilities.”
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is preparing to test a robotic prototype inspired by space agency plans to explore Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) is designed to move across Enceladus’ icy crust and slither into vents looking for signs of habitability. “EELS can go over a wide range of terrains from steep slopes to ice, snow, unconsolidated surfaces [like fluffy sand or soil] and also down into vents or moulins or crevasses,” said Matthew Robinson, EELS project manager. “It is a versatile robot in terms of its capabilities.” In September, JPL engineers will travel to Canada to test an EELS prototype at the Athabasca Glacier. Last fall, since the prototype was not yet finished, EELS developers lowered the sensor head into a glacial moulin to collect data for software simulation models. The three-years EELS technology development project was started in 2022 with internal Jet Propulsion Laboratory funding. Now that the EELS project is half over, “we’re beginning to talk to scientists and others at NASA about potential applications,” Robinson said. “We’re not limiting our sights to Enceladus.” Meanwhile, EELS hardware, software and sensor development continues. “EELS needs to sense the world around it with a combination of things like lidar [light detection and ranging], stereo cameras to do the mapping and also potentially force sensing, the sense of touch,” Robinson said. “If you’re moving down into a moulin, a crevasse, glacier or even a lava tube on the moon, the robot may need to push against the walls to steady itself.” EELS also will need to make sense of sensor data and determine its path autonomously. “There’s a possibility that you could teleoperate a robot like this on the moon, but certainly not for an outer world,” Robinson said. “Even for the moon, you would like to have a robot that that can take care of itself. If it’s exploring a cave on behalf of an astronaut, for instance, you want it to react to the environment with the knowledge that it has.” This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Steve Collar announced plans June 12 to step down as SES CEO at the end of the month after more than 20 years with the multi-orbit satellite operator. SES chief technology officer Ruy Pinto, a former chief operating officer at Inmarsat who joined SES in 2017, is taking the company’s reins until it can find a permanent successor. Luxembourg-based SES said in a news release that Collar is leaving to pursue other professional and personal endeavors — without elaborating. Despite his sudden departure, SES vice president of external communications Suzanne Ong said Collar plans to remain fully available to the company beyond June 30 to support a smooth transition. “He won’t be taking up a new position in the satellite industry any time soon,” Ong added via email. The operator’s share price fell more than 13% on the news in early trading. The shares are currently trading at around 5 euros, down about 40% from where they were a year ago. SES shares were trading above 12 euros in early 2020 before the pandemic disrupted financial markets and the demand for mobile connectivity in cruise and other industries. Collar became CEO of SES in 2018 after heading its connectivity-focused division, an increasingly important part of the company’s business amid a decline in satellite TV. He had previously served as CEO of O3b Networks, the medium Earth orbit (MEO) broadband operator that SES fully took over in 2016 to add lower latency services to its geostationary fleet. SES has more than 70 satellites across MEO and geostationary orbit. SES has been planning to deploy initial services this summer from its upgraded MEO network following an upcoming launch of two more O3b mPower satellites. Boeing was at one point preparing to ship the fifth and sixth of 11 O3b mPower satellites it is building for SES in May for a SpaceX launch in early June. However, Ong said the satellites are still at Boeing’s manufacturing facilities in El Segundo, California, so they can complete further tests before being sent to SpaceX’s launchpad in Florida. SES has not provided an updated launch window for the satellites. The first two O3b mPower satellites are undergoing testing and integration in MEO with the operator’s existing 20 first-generation O3b satellites, Ong said, while the second pair are still in their orbit-raising phase as expected following their April 28 launch. Each O3b mPower satellite is designed to scale up to multiple gigabits per second of throughput, roughly 10 times more than their predecessors. Separately, SES said it remains on track to claim around $3 billion in spectrum clearing proceeds in December after deploying all the satellites needed to migrate broadcast customers into a narrower swath of C-band. “It has been the greatest honour of my life to lead the incredible people at SES,” Collar said in a statement, adding that with mPower launching, “the company performing well and C-band all but delivered, the future is bright, and I wish the Board and everyone at SES every success.” Collar’s departure also comes amid early talks about potentially merging SES with rival Intelsat, following a spurt of satellite operator consolidation that saw Inmarsat complete its sale to Viasat May 30. SES recorded total revenues up 9.6% year-on-year to 490 million euros ($528 million) for the three months ending March 31, helped by sales from Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions (GES), a satcoms provider to the U.S. government acquired last year . Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, dropped 3.2% to 265 million euros.
An initiative to ensure the U.S. military has access to commercial space industry services during conflicts is gaining support inside the Pentagon, although the details are still being ironed out. “Every domain needs an industrial base” and that includes space, said Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, the Space Force’s deputy chief for operations, cyber and nuclear. A lesson from the war in Ukraine is that “you have to have the industrial base to produce the stuff and to sustain a fight. We need the same thing in space,” Burt said in an interview with SpaceNews . Under an initiative known as Commercial Augmentation Space Reserves, or CASR, the Space Force is looking at establishing agreements with companies to ensure services like satellite communication and remote sensing are prioritized for U.S. government use during national security emergencies. CASR has been described as the space equivalent of the civil reserve air fleet, or CRAF, a program the Pentagon conceived 70 years ago to gain access to commercial airlift capacity in an emergency. Burt cautioned that the CRAF analogy might be oversimplifying the problem. “Sometimes I worry that we are conflating commercial augmentation from a satellite perspective with airplanes,” she said. “They’re not the same. Not the same at all.” Civilian CRAF airplanes, for example, would not be sent into dangerous war zones whereas commercial satellites would be treated just like military satellites, Burt explained. “If you’re a commercial satellite, you’re in the war zone. I can’t separate in space what’s commercial, what’s coalition, what’s military. Because we’re all flying in Earth’s orbits,” she said. The Defense Department for decades has relied on commercial companies for space-based services. The CASR concept, however, is a “whole different discussion,” said Burt, as companies would be expected to support the government possibly at the expense of their commercial customers. “How do you buy surge?” she asked. Commercial providers have to balance the needs of many customers. “I want to make sure that we’re looking through all the lenses and the commercial guys need to have a voice on this.” Conversations with the industry The Space Systems Command’s newly established Commercial Space Office , is working on a plan for how the CASR initiative could be implemented. Col. Richard Kniseley, head of the commercial office, said a new round of meetings with industry executives is scheduled for July. “This has always been advertised as a partnership,” Kniseley told reporters June 6. The idea is to establish contractual relationships with companies that would voluntarily sign up, he said. “My vision is that they will be on contract even during peacetime.” Also part of the discussion is whether the government would indemnify contractors if their assets are damaged when used in support of the U.S. military. “We’re looking into it,” said Kniseley. “We haven’t yet made a determination.” Burt said she expects it will take some time to sort through all the legalities and scenarios. “But I think it’s important that we continue to keep talking because the commercial companies have a voice. Every commercial company looks at things differently. And I don’t think some people recognize that.” “It’s going to be a case by case, contract by contract discussion,” Burt said. “So I’m glad to hear they are meeting again in July. We just have to keep talking it out until we get to a contract vehicle or something that they’re happy with, and that we’re happy with.” Some companies may decide it’s not in their best interest to be part of CASR, “and that’s okay.”
A new State Department space policy framework is intended to align and guide ongoing work on space diplomacy by the department, including its work to support the Artemis Accords. The State Department published May 30 the Strategic Framework for Space Policy , a first-of-its-kind document that outlines the efforts by the department to use diplomacy to advance space policy goals and also use space to advance broader diplomatic aims. The document stemmed from discussions within the department on making sure its efforts were aligned with national space policy, including the space priorities framework published by the White House in December 2021. “We were trying to figure out how do we think more imaginatively in our approach to addressing all the lines of effort that we have within the department that are focused on space policy and space diplomacy specifically,” said Jennifer Littlejohn, acting assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, in a recent interview. “So, what we did in light of this increasing breadth and complexity of space diplomacy is we figured, let’s articulate space issues and the unique role that the department’s diplomacy can play,” she said, looking to support both international and interagency partners. The framework, she said, was less about setting up new activities but instead coordinating existing ones. “A lot of this was pulling together the lines of effort of things that we are already doing, but doing it in a more coherent, clear and purposeful way that is also transparent.” Littlejohn said the State Department took a high-level approach to the framework to make it flexible. “Space activities are moving so quickly, similar to a lot of other emerging technologies,” she explained. “You have to be prepared and able to innovate, and when you’re overly prescriptive, it’s very hard to change things or to move quickly or to do the things you need to do in order to be effective.” One specific effort cited in the framework is the Artemis Accords, which outline principles of responsible activity in space exploration. The United States and seven other countries signed the accords when they were introduced in October 2020. Spain became the 25 th signatory on May 30. The focus of Artemis Accords signatories this year has been on implementation of the document, Littlejohn said. One working group, led by the United States, is studying how to coordinate lunar surface activities. A second, co-chaired by Brazil and Poland, is examining how to engage emerging space nations and address obstacles to their participation in space exploration activities. NASA and the State Department continue to meet with prospective signatories, although she did not go into details about any ongoing discussions. “We’re seeing existing signatories and prospective countries conveying that there is a real interest in engaging in what I would say is meaningful conversation about safe, sustainable and responsible deep space exploration,” she said. “The real strength of the Accords is the diversity of the signatory group,” she said. “Although not every country may have the same long-term exploration goals, I think we are working with all signatory countries to find ways to participate meaningfully in the Accords conversation.”
From the first Artemis mission to deliver astronauts to the moon, currently scheduled for 2025, to later efforts to establish a sustained lunar presence, “there’s a vast array of uses for robots on the moon,” said Joshua Mehling, NASA principal technologist for robotics. In addition to moving people and equipment, robots are being developed to help NASA identify lunar resources and construct lunar landing pads. Terrestrial robots tend to perform jobs deemed too dull, dirty or dangerous for people. The same will be true on the moon. Astronauts traveling to the lunar surface could rely on robots to perform routine inspections, sift through the lunar regolith and travel into craters or lava tubes. “We have scenarios in which we would rather a robot do something than the crew because the crew’s time is more valuable spent elsewhere,” Mehling said. “The robots free up the crew for their top priorities.” When crews leave the moon to travel to the lunar Gateway space station or back to Earth, robots can continue to survey the lunar landscape and maintain lunar infrastructure. “There are a lot of opportunities to use robots both when the crew is there and when they’re not, because they’re a valuable extension of that human presence,” Mehling said. Communications challenges loom large for lunar robotics. “The remote nature of the lunar surface makes it difficult for direct control of robots by human operators on Earth,” Mehling said. “But at the same time, the nature of the tasks to be performed on the surface will require a high cadence of operation. That will necessitate new control paradigms and greater autonomy for our robots.” NASA centers are developing hardware and software for lunar robotics including remote control and autonomy features. “It’s not an either-or equation, where you have direct remote control or something is entirely autonomous,” Mehling said. “In fact, the sweet spot for lunar operations, certainly at the outset, is going to be a shared control or supervised autonomy.” Mehling likens it to driver assistance technologies for cars. The vehicles are not fully autonomous, but they include features like lane assistance and adaptive cruise control that make the driver’s job easier. At the same time, NASA centers are developing highly autonomous robots for future lunar missions. For instance, the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project includes three shoebox-size rovers, a multistatic ground-penetrating radar and a base station slated to travel to the moon on the third Intuitive Machines mission in 2024. “CADRE is a demonstration of multiple autonomous rovers and a base station working together as a team,” said Jean-Pierre de la Croix, Cadre principal investigator. “On every single experiment, we’re going to provide from the ground a high-level goal such as explore this area or do a distributed measurement along this path. Then, the robots will coordinate amongst themselves to do the individual tasks to achieve the high-level goal.” Subha Comandur, JPL CADRE project manager, said CADRE will “show for the first time that rovers can work as a team cooperatively and autonomously” while performing experiments on the moon. “It will change the way we do exploration,” Comandur added. In the future, instead of sending one large rover to explore the moon, “the question will become how many robots we send and what will they do together,” Comandur said. “The ground-penetrating radar is just one science instrument. You could have many more such applications. And these sorts of robots can take on hazardous or tedious tasks like drilling, collecting samples, processing them and searching for water and minerals.” Another demonstration of autonomy has been developed by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico. Robots, known as Swarmies, are equipped with webcams, GPS, Wi-Fi antennas and sensors to search for water. Like ants that cover a large area to look for food and water, Swarmies communicate their paths to the other Swarmies. “It’s difficult to manually control a large swarm of robots obviously,” Kurt Leucht, senior software engineer at the NASA Kennedy Space Center Swamp Works, said May 15 at the Space Tech Expo in Long Beach, California. “The system is designed to be fully autonomous. It requires no operator inputs once it’s started.” When water or other valuable in-situ resources are discovered, robotic excavators could collect it. Terrestrial mining equipment is far too heavy for spaceflight. As a result, NASA engineers are developing lightweight lunar excavators about the size of a go-kart. The wheeled excavators are equipped with hollow cylinders and scoops on both ends for collecting regolith. To dump the regolith, the excavators reverse the rotation of the cylinders. “It’s a simple yet very innovative design and it works well even in low gravity environments,” Leucht said. Temperature extremes pose another challenge for lunar robotics. To cope with the lunar night, which lasts about 14 Earth days and dips to minus 130 degrees Celsius, Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers developed the Cold Operable Lunar Deployable Arm. ColdArm is a 3D-printed titanium scoop equipped with features to measure soil properties. While it looks like robotic arms on Mars rovers, ColdArm functions at cryogenic temperatures without heaters. In contrast to the Mars missions which expend time and energy warming up robotic arms before they function, “we can operate ColdArm at any time of the day,” said Ryan McCormick, ColdArm principal investigator. “The moon gets a lot colder than even Mars. Especially in the polar regions or permanently shadowed regions, this technology can be very enabling.” ColdArm has been tested in a thermal vacuum chamber, where it functioned at a temperature of minus 173 Celsius. Next up is ColdArm vibration testing. “We’re looking for opportunities to fly to the moon potentially as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program,” McCormick said. In spite of the environmental challenges inherent in lunar operations, NASA sees promising applications for terrestrial robotics technology. “You can find a lot of analogies to manufacturing robots or exploration robots or warehousing robots here on Earth to the types of tasks we’ll be doing on the moon,” Mehling said. “NASA wants to provide an onramp for those types of technologies to their analogous tasks on the lunar surface. We think that partnership between robotic applications here on Earth and robotic applications on the moon will lead to faster development for the types of things we want to see long term.” This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
U.S. Space Force deputy chief of space operations Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt during a recent trip to Germany and the United Kingdom heard a consistent message from allies: They don’t expect the United States to bear all the costs of protecting satellites from cyber attacks and other threats. In an interview with SpaceNews , Burt said a growing number of spacefaring nations are looking to work with the United States on technologies and strategies to defend their assets from anti-satellite weapons, and are increasingly making their own investments in space defense systems. Burt, who is deputy chief for operations, cyber and nuclear, said the Space Force is ramping up efforts to work more closely with allies. This is a top priority of the chief of the Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman, who declared “ partner to win ” as one of the service’s ideals. In meetings with European allies, many of the conversations were about them ‘“not wanting to put the burden on the U.S.,” Burt said. “Other nations are having the same conversation. How are we all going to defend our capabilities against these threats? And how are we going to be mutually supportive of each other in the future?” Many countries have capabilities to contribute to joint defense efforts, Burt said. What remains to be seen is “how do we build things in line with our partners that are interoperable just as we do in every other domain?” Defending satellites has become a front-burner issue since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s communications infrastructure with missiles and cyberattacks on Viasat’s KA-SAT and SpaceX’s Starlink networks. Burt has suggested increased sharing of cyber threat information among allies, and even jointly buying or building cyber-defense systems. U.S. supporting NATO space center The Space Force plans to soon establish a unit within U.S. European Command, based at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.. The service already has set up components at U.S. Pacific Command , U.S. Forces Korea and U.S. Central Command . “We’re slowly building our next one in EUCOM,” said Burt. The final order is awaiting approval from the secretary of defense. “Hopefully that will come any day now,” she said. In meetings with U.S. and NATO commanders during her recent trip, Burt said many of the questions were about how the Space Force will support NATO, which operates a space defense center at NATO’s Allied Air Command in Ramstein. “They will be starting 24/7 operations this August,” said Burt. “Every country is providing capability into that center.” For the U.S. Space Force, “adding a service component right now is really timely, and it will continue to bring that dialogue with NATO and space even further,” Burt said. Restrictions on information sharing U.S. support of NATO’s space operations presents some challenges due to security restrictions that prevent the U.S. from sharing information about space systems and threats in orbit. Conversations on space defense are usually classified and the United States can discuss these issues at the secret level with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Although the U.S. has space partnerships with other nations, the most sensitive discussions are only held with the Five Eyes. Burt said the Space Force is “pushing hard” on policy changes that would allow more open conversations with allies outside the Five Eyes. “We have been working on this for years, on how we share information, and how we talk about operations,” she said. For example, the United States is a member of the Combined Space Operations alliance with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The Five Eyes rules don’t work in a NATO setting “when I can’t talk to France and Germany,” Burt said. The classification of information that would support NATO, she said, “is something we’ve got to do work on.” The same issues affect discussions with other allies in Asia like Japan and South Korea. “Spain is coming hard with their own space capabilities at the NATO Space Center,” said Burt. “Italy also is stepping up. So I think the NATO classification is going to be important.” This has been a concern for a long time, said Burt. “Security has always been a problem. And we continue to keep attacking it.” The Defense Department’s Special Access Program office has supported some Space Force initiatives to share information with allies, said Burt. Classifying a program as special access severely restricts who can access information. “I think they’re working hard at that level,” said Burt. But it’s also up to the Space Force to help identify what really needs to be special access or classified, “and get all of it, top to bottom, really scrubbed.” “We have the ability to control that as we control the data we create about space systems,” Burt said. “How do we make sure that we’re classifying things properly, and not overly classifying things.”
A bill introduced June 9 by a group of Republican House members would turn the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into an independent agency, but keep its commercial space responsibilities in the Commerce Department. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Act of 2023 , introduced by Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and 13 other Republican members, would formally establish NOAA into law and create it as an independent agency, rather than as part of the Commerce Department as it is today. Lucas, chair of the House Science Committee, has been pushing for months on an “organic act” for NOAA, noting that the agency was established by executive order in 1970 and never formally authorized by Congress. NOAA, among its other duties, operates satellites that collect data on terrestrial and space weather, and is also home to the Office of Space Commerce. “After years of complex organizational challenges, it’s time for NOAA to become an independent agency and reach its full potential,” Lucas said in a statement about the bill’s introduction. “The NOAA Organic Act not only gives NOAA formal statutory authority and authorizes its critical mission, but reduces bureaucratic inefficiencies, streamlines oversight efforts and refocuses core mission areas.” Lucas and other supporters of the bill have argued that turning NOAA into an independent agency, like NASA, would reduce bureaucracy. An at April hearing about the proposed legislation, three former heads of NOAA argued that having to coordinate activities with Commerce Department officials that often had little understanding of NOAA slowed down their work. Activities ranging from budget planning to “all-hands” emails “had to go through several different layers in the Department of Commerce, and it’s usually being reviewed by people that don’t really understand NOAA’s mission and don’t really have the scientific expertise,” said Neil Jacobs, who served as acting administrator of NOAA during part of the Trump administration. “To me it felt very unnecessary.” Tim Gallaudet, who was also acting NOAA administrator during part of the Trump administration, said at the hearing that, as part of NOAA, its funding can be transferred to other parts of the Commerce Department, such as a working fund for shared services. Past transfers to fund work on the census, conducted by the Commerce Department, affected weather satellite programs. “An independent NOAA is needed to address current and future challenges without an antiquated, tethered relationship with the Department of Commerce,” said Conrad Lautenbacher, who was NOAA administrator during the George W. Bush administration. Notably absent from that hearing were former NOAA administrators who served in Democratic administrations. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Science Committee, said that none were available to testify. No members of the committee at that hearing expressed opposition to making NOAA an independent agency, although some raised questions on issues from continuing its work in various topics to additional expense from having to create its own support staff instead of relying on Commerce Department capabilities. “There are arguments for both NOAA as an independent agency and for NOAA being a part of Commerce,” said Brent Blevins, majority staff director on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, during a June 7 meeting of two National Academies panels. “We recognize that pulling it out creates challenges, but we think the opportunities created by pulling it out far outweigh the downsides.” At the April 18 hearing, Lofgren asked for another hearing on the proposal “that would provide a perspective from another point of view so we can balance all viewpoints as we move forward.” There has not yet been another hearing on the topic. At a separate hearing May 11 about NOAA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, Lucas did not ask the current NOAA administrator, Rick Spinrad, about his views on NOAA becoming an independent agency, but did ask how much of his time was spent in meetings with Commerce Department officials on the budget proposal. “A lot,” Spinrad responded. He noted the split of his meetings within the Commerce Department versus outside the department on all topics was “50-50.” While the bill would transfer NOAA out of the Commerce Department into a separate agency, it would leave behind the Office of Space Commerce. That office, which handles regulation of commercial remote sensing satellite systems and is also creating a civil space traffic management capability, would remain in Commerce, with its director reporting directly to the Secretary of Commerce. “Commercial space is a rapidly developing industry. It will be a key component in the evolution of American competitiveness. It deserves the focus and leadership that can come from raising its profile with Commerce,” Lucas said at the April hearing. At that hearing, former NOAA leaders said that becoming an independent agency would help raise its own profile, noting that many people even within the Commerce Department don’t know what NOAA is or what it does. “I think NOAA is facing a big marketing and branding challenge. A lot of people don’t know what NOAA is,” Jacobs said. He recalled that Jim Bridenstine, administrator of NASA when Jacobs was acting head of NOAA, “found out my seven-year-old wore a NASA t-shirt to school, and was laughing at me because I was the head of NOAA.”
Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major confirmed on June 9 that it has laid off workers as it reorganizes the company. Ursa Major is a venture-funded maker of rocket engines for small and medium launch vehicles. The company was founded in 2015 and manufacturers engines in Berthoud, Colorado. The company has won several U.S. Air Force contracts to support the development of its liquid engine for hypersonic and small launch vehicles. CNBC reported on Friday that 27% of the company’s 250-employee workforce was laid off. A spokesperson for Ursa Major told SpaceNews the company could not confirm the number of layoffs but said the management is “reorganizing the company and realigning our workforce to better meet the needs of our national security customers.” “As part of this realignment, we made some necessary workforce reductions to reallocate and focus on our priorities,” the spokesperson said. “While we cannot discuss the number of reductions made as part of the reorganization, we do want to acknowledge contributions of every current and former Ursa Major professional.” No engine programs will be terminated as a result of this reorganization, the spokesperson said. Drop in venture investment Layoffs in the space industry have been expected as investment in the sector has fallen in recent quarters due to factors such as the rise in interest rates and the poor performance of some companies. A recent report by Space Capital calculated that $2.2 billion was invested in space companies in the first quarter of 2023, the lowest quarterly total by its metrics since 2015. Ursa Major CEO Joe Laurienti has said the company is producing about 30 Hadley engines a year for the U.S. Air Force and several commercial customers, including small launcher startup Phantom Space and Stratolaunch. The Air Force Research Laboratory is supporting the development of Arroway , a reusable liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine for medium and heavy launch vehicles, expected to hotfire in 2025. The engine was i ntroduced in August 2022 with the goal of supporting next-generation heavy launch. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium Communications is redoubling efforts to reverse U.S. regulatory approval for Ligado’s terrestrial wireless plans after Canada rejected the network following GPS interference concerns. Ligado had sought similar approval from Canada that it secured from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 2020 to deploy a 5G network using satellite L-band spectrum, including with restrictions designed to guard against interference. However, the Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) declined to approve the request May 31 following a public consultation. Of the 38 comments ISED’s consultation received, 36 expressed concerns about potential spectrum interference. The Canadian regulator said these concerns came from the aviation industry, GPS hardware manufacturers, communication hardware makers, surveying service providers, communication service providers, and government users. In a letter to the FCC published June 9 to officially submit ISED’s decision into the U.S. regulator’s records, Iridium regulatory vice president Kara Azocar said Canada’s denial adds more weight to calls to reverse its 2020 decision. “Three years after adoption of the Ligado Order, the interference risks identified by myriad affected stakeholders not only remain valid, but are now supported by concerns raised by Canadian regulators who have explored the issue as well,” Azocar told the FCC. The U.S. Defense Department has also objected to Ligado’s 2020 approval amid warnings that the network would disrupt services supporting national security, civil aviation, and other sectors. In April, Iridium joined 90 other organizations on the third anniversary of the order’s adoption to call on the Biden administration and Congress to reverse Ligado’s FCC approval. In its decision, Canada’s ISED said it expects further studies and negotiations would address potential interference, leaving the door open for a future request from Ligado to deploy terrestrial wireless services in the country. Ligado head of government affairs and public policy Ashley Durmer said that, while the company is disappointed that ISED is seeking additional study, it appreciated the regulator’s conclusion that this would help achieve consensus for its terrestrial wireless ambitions. “The FCC studied this band extensively for more than a decade and determined that it was ideal for 5G terrestrial services and can coexist with neighboring GPS and SATCOM services,” Durmer said via email. “We’re confident that, with additional time and technical data, ISED will reach the same conclusions, which underscore that these frequencies, like most spectrum bands, can – and should – be used for multiple uses.” She said Ligado was not surprised about Iridium’s letter to the FCC, describing it as “yet another effort to peddle a false narrative” around the company. “We’ve come to expect nothing less since it’s the same baseless strategy Iridium has used for years to try to keep Ligado out of the market,” Durmer added, “It’s a total waste of policymakers’ time and a distraction from the serious work that’s underway.” Canadian review Despite the FCC greenlight, Ligado’s terrestrial deployment has been on ice following a review released in September by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The congressionally-mandated NASEM review found Ligado’s planned deployment would likely interfere with some GPS signals and with Iridium ’s space-based communications services. However, the ruling from Canada’s ISED noted “there continues to be significant divergence of views between stakeholders in the U.S. process, even since the issuance of the FCC’s 2020 Order and Authorization, as well as in Canada based on the comments received.” About a third of respondents to ISED’s consultation said NASEM’s 78-page report had “pointed out potential discrepancies in the FCC’s 2020 Order and Authorization,” the regulator said. But according to Ligado, NASEM’s findings supported the FCC’s decision, and showed how the majority of GPS devices would not be affected by its terrestrial network in accordance with U.S. rules. Although Ligado disagreed with comments from most of the Canadian consultation’s respondents, the company expressed its willingness to the ISED to address their concerns. In the meantime, Durmer said the company remains focused on providing commercial satellite services directly to consumer smartphones and other devices later this year with Viasat and other partners .
SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s is closely tracking smoke from the Canadian wildfires moving June 9 from the Northeastern United States over the Atlantic Ocean. NOAA is tracing the movement of smoke with the Advanced Baseline Imager, the primary instrument on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-East (GOES-East) weather satellite. GOES-East observes the eastern United States and Canada, South America and the Atlantic Ocean from its longitude of 75 West. ABI makes observations every five minutes. Images tracing the smoke’s path are available on NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Services GeoColor website . Meanwhile, Aerosol Watch , from NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research, provides satellite imagery forecasters use to assess local air quality. On June 8, a storm over Eastern Canada began pushing smoke from more than 100 fires burning in Quebec south over the Mid-Atlantic and east over the Atlantic Ocean. “This is the worst event I can remember in terms of wildfires, certainly in the last 10 or 15 years for the eastern U.S.,” Amy Huff, senior research scientist at NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research, told SpaceNews. As long as drought conditions persist in many parts of the United States and Canada, though, “we’re going to see these wildfires both in the eastern U.S. and across the U.S. as well,” Huff added.
Requiring companies to add data about their environmental impact to financial accounts could greatly expand the market for space-based Earth monitoring services. Many businesses are already reporting this information as part of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures they are voluntarily making to attract community-conscious investors and customers. Mandatory disclosure rules in the United States and abroad could put this trend into a higher gear, accelerating demand for satellites that can better monitor a company’s links to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and other metrics that make up their ESG scorecards. However, the ESG movement also faces significant pushback that has ramped up in recent years from companies, industry-funded groups, and right-wing politicians and activists quick to decry a progressive corporate stance as “woke capitalism.” Space companies also face unique environmental challenges, ranging from the impact of their satellite launches to how they operate in congested orbits. A lack of regulation to date has led to a confusing mix of competing ESG standards that have reduced the movement to being just a “greenwashing” marketing ploy, according to critics. At the same time, some see rules that would fix this problem as government overreach. Opponents include SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who called ESG a scam last year after his electric car maker Tesla failed to make a stock index that tracks socially conscious companies. ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors,” Musk tweeted, joining a side in an increasingly polarized and charged debate. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) outlined plans in March 2021 to put ESG at the core of the U.S. financial market regulator’s agenda. The SEC proposed rules in March 2022 for mandating certain climate-related disclosures for publicly listed companies. However, as intense discussions wage on, the regulator is still working on issuing final regulations more than a year later. The proposed rules would require companies to detail greenhouse gas emissions, disclose information on the climate risks their business faces, and — most controversially — their expenses and investments to deal with climate-related issues. Republican lawmakers have threatened litigation for what they see as government overreach, and businesses have also expressed concerns about a lack of resources to keep close tabs on these metrics in a challenging economy. Robert Jackson, who served as an SEC commissioner between 2018 and 2020, told a webinar hosted by carbon accounting firm Watershed in April that he had learned the rules had been pushed back to at least this fall. The SEC declined to comment on the timing of its rule-making process. Europe is more advanced in this area and recently strengthened environmental reporting rules for large and listed companies under its Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Similar rules for smaller European companies are set to follow, although work is continuing to clarify standards for companies of all sizes. “Despite pushback, all signs suggest ESG is very much here to stay and the need for company ESG response and planning is certainly set to increase,” NSR research analyst Sarah Halpin said. Generally, customers and investors are increasingly attracted to socially conscious businesses despite a vocal backlash against “woke capitalism,” and Halpin said this will push more companies to engage in the ESG movement regardless of home country requirements. Justyna Kosianka, a senior remote sensing scientist at U.S.-based geospatial and analytics company Ursa Space Systems, pointed to sustained interest in satellite imagery that focuses on environmental topics, particularly illegal fishing, natural disaster response, oil spills, and deforestation. According to Kosianka, satellite-derived data provides unique benefits for measuring exposure to environmental risks that companies and governments cannot ignore, such as tracking emissions. “Obviously, some companies and governments want to hide their emissions,” she added, but with “satellite data growing so rapidly, it’s getting increasingly harder to hide.” Kosianka said she expects the appetite for quantifiable climate data will remain strong, regardless of U.S. regulatory action. While having rules in place would provide clarity and direction, she said the underlying need stems from a desire by companies to adjust and be prepared — or risk incurring enormous costs. “For the satellite industry, yes, we need to keep an eye on the regulatory framework, but we also need to remain focused on providing unique solutions.” Bogdan Gogulan, CEO of private equity firm NewSpace Capital, said data obtained from space is also increasingly valuable to keep governments from falling behind pledges they have made to tackle climate change. “We’re increasingly at risk of missing our climate targets,” Gogulan said, and “space applications are now key enablers to achieving Net Zero” — the concept of taking as much carbon from the atmosphere as that going in to address climate change. According to Gogulan, data obtained from space is critical to creating transparency and keeping countries accountable when it comes to ESG, in addition to individual companies and industries. “This creates a significant market opportunity, so we look to invest in companies where the underlying product is a game-changer for environmental performance,” he said. NewSpace Capital is an investor in Paris-based Kayrros, which analyses satellite imagery to support the United Nations and the International Energy Agency (IEA) in tackling methane emissions. The number of partnerships between satellite companies and non-space organizations has been rising as environmental issues climb political agendas. Last year, Earth observation operator Planet said it had agreed on a deal to help financial ratings firm Moody’s explore and address the growing demand for assessing and monitoring ESG risks. ESG’s rising prominence will also shine more light on how green space businesses are and the sustainability of the space environment itself, where there are growing concerns about orbital congestion and debris. More than two-thirds of 67 companies from across the space industry that NSR surveyed in January said they would likely need to report against some climate-related regulation in the next five years. ESG is often perceived to be focused on risks and mitigation, noted investment firm Seraphim Space CEO Mark Boggett, which has negative connotations and possibly explains some resistance to the trend. However, aided by satellite technology, Boggett pointed to how improving ESG scores can also help companies become more efficient and ultimately reduce their costs. “We believe that the negative perception of space from a launch and emissions perspective is far outweighed by the positive aspects that are delivered from space,” he added. As more data becomes available, Boggett said it would also be easier to show the benefits of improving ESG ratings, which should help build momentum for the trend. Alongside regulatory coordination, the space industry has an important role to play in delivering robust data to help dispel greenwashing concerns. This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A light-lift solid rocket sent an experimental “plate-like” stackable satellite into orbit late Thursday as the country looks to build its answer to Starlink. A Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket lifted off from a TEL into blue skies above the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 10:35 p.m. June 8. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) confirmed launch success a short time later. Aboard the flight was the Longjiang-3 experimental stackable communications satellite, jointly developed by a commercial satellite company and its parent entity, the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), in Northeast China. The Harbin Institute of Technology Satellite Technology Co., Ltd., or HITSat, said in a statement that Longjiang-3 will test communication technologies including signal regeneration and network slicing, and provide technical support for China’s satellite Internet construction. HITSat was established in December 2020 and is developing a number of small satellite platforms. The SATware-CS200 Ka-band satellite platform, on which Longjiang-3 is based, is capable of downlink speeds of 600 Mbps and 500 Mbps uplink. The platform has a mass of 120 kilograms with 40 kilograms of payload available. It has a design life of five years and uses electric propulsion. A render from HITSat indicates Longjiang-3 to be a flat panel design with a single, foldable solar array. The platform is designed for mass production, automatic assembly and stacked launches, according to HITSat. The configuration makes it similar to SpaceX Starlink satellites. HITSat is also developing other platforms specialized for hosting remote sensing and synthetic aperture radar payloads. A 2021 Chinese language article stated that HITSat has secured dozens of commercial satellite contracts. China is currently developing plans to build its own low Earth orbit satellite megaconstellation that would provide its own answer to Starlink. It would provide satellite internet infrastructure for China and potentially rival Starlink and other systems, while also positioning China as a provider of global infrastructure. Known as “Guowang,” or national network, the constellation is expected to eventually consist of 13,000 satellites , according to filings with the ITU. It is not known if HITSat will be involved in the project. CASC subsidiary CAST and Microsat under the Chinese Academy of Sciences are understood to be contracted to manufacture satellites for Guowang. Meanwhile, private firm GalaxySpace is expected to launch its first flat panel satellites with flexible solar arrays in the second half of 2023. The country has in recent years greatly increased its small sat production capabilities. China is at the same time looking to boost its launch capacity to get its Guowang satellites into orbit. Measures being taken include adapting the Long March 5B to use an upper stage to insert numerous satellites into orbit, ramping up production of the expendable Long March 8, and possibly leveraging the emerging commercial launch sector. The Kuaizhou-1A used for the Longjiang-3 launch consists of three solid stages and a liquid propellant upper stage. It is capable of carrying 200 kilograms of payload into a 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Thursday’s launch was the 20th of the Kuaizhou-1A. The mission suffered a roughly 11-week delay after a late March launch attempt was scrubbed. Expace, which operates Kuaizhou solid rockets for state-owned defense giant CASIC and its commercial space projects , is planning a total of seven launches of its Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11 rockets. Both vehicles had successful comebacks last year following failures. Commercial space firms Galactic Energy and iSpace have also launched solid rockets in the same class this year, with more planned. Overall, China’s commercial players could launch more than 20 times this year.HIT previously developed the Longjiang-1 and 2 small satellites that piggybacked on the launch of the Queqiao lunar relay satellite to support the Chang’e-4 lunar far side landing mission. The Longjiang satellite name comes from Heilongjiang (“Black Dragon river”), also known as the Amur river, which runs through the Chinese province of the same name, and of which Harbin is the capital.
NASA and congressional officials are still grappling with the implications of a debt-ceiling agreement that enacts spending caps, but acknowledged it likely means the agency will get less money than it requested for 2024. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, signed into law by President Biden June 3, suspends the debt ceiling through the end of 2024, allowing the government to continue to borrow money and thus avoiding a fiscal crisis. As part of the agreement to suspend the debt ceiling, the bill caps non-defense discretionary spending at 2023 levels for fiscal year 2024 and increases that cap by 1% for 2025. How those new spending caps will affect spending for individual agencies remains uncertain, since the cap is not an across-the-board measure. Appropriators will get allocations for each of 12 spending bills, such as the commerce, justice and science bill that includes NASA, and then determine how to distribute that funding among various agencies and departments. NASA requested $27.185 billion in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, a 7% increase over what it received in 2023. That full increase now appears unlikely with the new spending caps. “We do have to face the reality of the debt limit ceiling agreement and what might happen to our 2024 budget request,” said Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, during a June 7 joint meeting of the National Academies’ Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board. “We recognize that it’s unlikely we will get the full request, and we know that’s going to create challenges for us in the future.” She didn’t discuss specific challenges reduced spending will cause for NASA, but noted the agency will face “some hard decisions this year.” NASA had already faced some hard choices in the original budget proposal, such as delaying the start of a heliophysics mission, the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC), to accommodate growing costs for Mars Sample Return. Speaking to the Space Studies Board June 8, Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science and former director of the agency’s heliophysics division, which includes GDC, defended the decision to put that mission on hold. “Yes, it’s disappointing with the constraints that the GDC mission had to be put on hold, but I think it’s consistent with the priorities that were laid out in the decadal,” she said, referring to the most recent heliophysics decadal survey that prioritized research funding and smaller, competed missions. She said there were no underlying political messages in NASA’s decision to put GDC on hold or cut spending on technology development for the future Habitable Worlds Observatory astrophysics flagship mission while increasing spending on planetary and Earth science. “It’s easy to focus on what’s not in the budget, but there’s some really good stuff in there, too,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a political message in there. It’s just priorities.” Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, told a Space Transportation Association meeting June 8 it was too early to understand how the budget caps might affect his directorate, which supports the International Space Station, commercial cargo and crew, and future commercial space stations. “Even when you look where we’re at with the caps, it’s still a lot,” he said of the budget. “What we would cut now, I couldn’t tell you.” The implications of the spending caps are uncertain even in Congress. “What this means for NASA isn’t completely clear yet,” Pamela Whitney, minority staff director on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, said at the National Academies meeting June 7. She noted that allocations for individual appropriations bills had not been released yet. “I think it’s fair to say there will be stress,” she said, such as the ongoing concerns about budgets for science missions. “This will be challenging.”
A new Astroscale video shows how the End of Life Services by Astroscale-Multiple mission, ELSA-M, will capture and deorbit a OneWeb communications satellite. “ELSA-M will be the world’s first commercial removal of a client’s inactive spacecraft,” Alex Godfrey, Astroscale business development manager, told SpaceNews. In 2025, Astroscale plans to send ELSA-M into very low Earth orbit for commissioning. Next, the Astroscale satellite will move into a higher orbit to test its ability to latch onto a OneWeb satellite equipped with magnetic docking plates. “We work very closely with OneWeb,” Godfrey said. “We’ve done so in a public-private partnership on the ELSA-M program for the last five years. We’ll be removing a spacecraft that has failed that is part of their constellation.” ELSA-M is designed to capture multiple defunct satellites . “To make the price of doing this reasonable enough that the business can really take off, we have to be able to remove multiple items with one spacecraft,” Godfrey said. “We go up, grab our first client, bring it down and then release it. Then, we have to go back up and grab another.” Astroscale is building and preparing to operate ELSA-M in its U.K. facility. Funding for the mission is being provided by the U.K. Space Agency, the European Space Agency and OneWeb. Astroscale demonstrated its ability to latch onto a docking plate in low Earth orbit in 2021 during capture and release tests as part of End of Life Services by Astroscale-Demonstration, ELSA-D, mission. 
The Government Accountability Office in its annual assessment of Pentagon procurements provided an update on the Space Force’s satellite programs and found a few red flags. The watchdog agency in the report released June 8 examined 101 of the Pentagon’s largest programs. With regard to satellite procurements, it warned that the geostationary missile-warning spacecraft known as Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) “must overcome numerous challenges before its first planned launch in 2025.” Next-Gen OPIR, made by Lockheed Martin, was planned as a three-satellite constellation to be launched between 2025 and 2028. The Space Force also plans to buy two Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites from Northrop Grumman. GAO said the estimated cost to date of developing the geostationary satellites has exceeded $6 billion. The program’s large price tag and schedule delays also have been a concern of Space Force leaders who noted that in the future DoD will transition to a proliferated architecture of smaller satellites. Next-Gen OPIR program officials confirmed to GAO “that the delivery of the main mission payload is the primary driver of schedule and technical risk to the program. Delays in delivery of the payload prototype increase the risk that the integration activities planned for the first GEO will not complete in time for the scheduled first launch in 2025.” Each payload developer — Ball Aerospace, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Technologies — is “working to overcome supply chain issues that could delay payload deliveries,” said GAO. “Additionally, the complex integration of a novel payload and a modified spacecraft continue to present significant risk to the launch schedule.” The ground system planned for Next-Gen OPIR, said GAO “will not be fully complete in time to support the first Next Gen OPIR satellite launch.” Integration challenges for SDA’s constellation GAO for the first time analyzed the Space Development Agency’s planned architecture of satellites in low Earth orbit. The agency, which is now part of the U.S. Space Force, is procuring a mesh network of satellites, called Transport Layer, to move data to users around the world. These satellites will relay early warnings of missile launches detected by a Tracking Layer of sensor satellites. GAO noted that a novel approach adopted by the Space Development Agency (SDA) to build the constellation — integrating satellites from multiple manufacturers — promises rewards but also comes with risks. “It anticipates that this approach will enable competition for new tranches and a stable market for sustainment,” said GAO. “Prior to realizing those potential benefits, however, SDA faces challenges with integrating a complex system of multiple vendors and segments into a proliferated constellation of hundreds of satellites, intended to be enhanced every two years.” GAO estimated that SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1 of 28 satellites will cost about $2.6 billion; and the Transport Layer Tranche 1 with 138 satellites will cost about $3.3 billion. “According to program officials, T1TL faces a complex integration for its planned space vehicles into a constellation that will be enhanced every two years. However, they introduced standards into the marketplace to help facilitate this integration,” said GAO.
TAMPA, Fla. — Indian satellite communications provider Nelco has invested around $121,000 in a network equipment startup based in Mumbai, India, to bolster its services amid a growing competitive threat from international players. Nelco said in a stock exchange filing that it had bought an initial stake of just over 9% in Piscis Networks, a two-year-old manufacturer of routers designed to make communications infrastructure more efficient. Piscis specializes in network management technology called SD-WAN — software-defined networking in a wide area network, which Nelco said June 7 would help improve the performance, security, and reliability of its communications services. Nelco, part of the Tata Group conglomerate that generated $128 billion in revenues last year, can increase its stake to 30% under the deal. Founded by technology entrepreneur Mandar Lokegaonkar in July 2021, Piscis recorded sales of about 9.8 million rupees ($119,000) in its latest fiscal year. Nelco CEO PJ Nath said taking minority ownership of Piscis would enable the company to provide more integrated services in the country’s evolving satellite communications market. India released a long-awaited policy in April that established new guidelines and rules for its space ecosystem. The policy aims to give private companies more regulatory clarity for operating in the country, particularly for non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) operators. Foreign operators including SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, and SES have been eagerly awaiting the policy to help pave the way for their push into the country’s market. The Indian government is still debating foreign investment rules that were expected to be a part of its space policy. Nelco has been helping Telesat test its proposed NGSO constellation in India. This article was updated June 9 with the correct currency conversions for Nelco’s investment and Piscis’ revenues.
The U.S. Space Force launch procurement office on June 8 announced an additional 12 missions assigned to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract. The 12 missions are projected to start launching in 2025. SpaceX was assigned five Space Development Agency (SDA) launches to low Earth orbit and a U.S. Space Force classified mission, USSF-31. SDA is building a large constellation of communications and missile-tracking sensor satellites that will be launched in batches. ULA was assigned two SDA launches; two National Reconnaissance Office missions, NROL-64 and NROL-83; the eighth Global Positioning System GPS 3; and the U.S. Space Force USSF-114 classified mission. The Space Systems Command’s program executive office for assured access to space, which oversees the NSSL program, in 2020 awarded ULA and SpaceX five-year contracts to launch as many as 40 missions. ULA won 60% of the missions and SpaceX 40%. To date, only one NSSL mission under the Phase 2 contract has been launched: the USSF-67 mission flown by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in January . SpaceX also launched a mission in April for the Space Development Agency but that was purchased as a commercial launch contract, not under NSSL. Waiting for Vulcan ULA was expected to launch its first NSSL Phase 2 mission later this year but that now appears unlikely as the company’s Vulcan Centaur rocket has yet to perform its first flight. Vulcan has to launch two successful orbital missions to get certified for NSSL. On June 7 ULA completed Vulcan Centaur’s static-fire test , one of the final milestones before the vehicle’s first launch. To date, ULA has been assigned 15 missions and SpaceX 12 missions under the Phase 2 contract. “ULA and SpaceX continue to provide outstanding launch services with their reliable and innovative launch systems, and we are confident in their ability to maintain the unprecedented 100 percent program success for the NSSL missions assigned for launch in Fiscal Year 2025.” said Col. Chad Melone, chief of the launch procurement and integration division at Space Systems Command. GAO’s take on NSSL In a report released June 8 , the Government Accountability Office noted that the NSSL program office continues to order launch services from ULA and SpaceX amid concerns about Vulcan’s delays. “ULA delayed the first certification flight of the Vulcan launch system … to accommodate challenges with the BE-4 engine and a delayed commercial payload, nearly two years later than originally planned,” said GAO. “In the event that Vulcan is unavailable for future missions, program officials stated that the Phase 2 contract allows for the ability to reassign missions to the other provider.”
For most of NASA’s history, it dealt with only one space station at a time: the space station. A half-century ago, that space station was Skylab, giving the agency its first experience with long-duration spaceflight. In the 1980s, it became the proposed Space Station Freedom, which evolved in the 1990s into the International Space Station once Russia joined the effort. The ISS, its oldest modules now nearly 25 years old, is slated to operate through the end of the decade. The agency and the space industry, though, are preparing for a future that may involve multiple space stations operated commercially. NASA is currently supporting four such efforts, while others are making plans for commercial stations of their own. Yet, it’s not clear how many stations can be supported by the demand from NASA and other customers or if that demand will emerge in time, given the limited lifetime of the ISS. The latest entrant in the commercial space station race is a startup called Vast. The company, funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb, revealed plans in September 2022 to build large space stations that could spin, generating artificial gravity. Vast, though, offered few details about those plans or other company activities other than a February acquisition of Launcher, a small launch vehicle company whose technology Vast planned to use on those future space stations. In May, Vast announced its first space station. Haven-1 will be a single module that can launch on a Falcon 9. It will support visits by four-person crews on SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, spending up to a month at a time at the station. Vast announced an agreement with SpaceX both for the launch of Haven-1, slated for as soon as August 2025, and a Crew Dragon mission there called Vast-1. The contract includes an option for a second such mission. Vast still plans large rotating space stations but sees Haven-1 as a way to gain experience and get ahead of competitors. “We believe that it’s more important that we demonstrate that we can have the first but also a full space station system in orbit,” Max Haot, who joined Vast as president when the company acquired Launcher, said in an interview. Vast’s schedule would put it ahead of Axiom Space, which plans to launch its first commercial module to the ISS in late 2025. Haot acknowledged that his company’s schedule was ambitious but that the simplicity of its approach, including leveraging Crew Dragon systems to support crews when docked to Haven-1, made that schedule feasible. He was also skeptical of Axiom’s schedule, noting the company hasn’t yet announced launch plans for its initial module. Getting Haven-1 launched early would also, he said, give the company a leg up on the next phase of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program to support development of commercial stations. Vast has not yet started when NASA selected teams led by Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Voyager Space in late 2021 for funded Space Act Agreements to assist in the initial design work on their stations. (Axiom has a separate agreement, announced in early 2020, giving it access to a port on the ISS for attaching its commercial modules.) The next phase of the CLD program, where NASA will fund certification of those stations for use by agency astronauts, will be a full and open competition, not limited to those who won earlier awards. “We see NASA as our biggest opportunity,” he said, and Vast plans to bid on the next CLD competition, scheduled around the time Haven-1 enters service. “Haven-1 is all about it, to some extent. It’s saying we’re not going to send you renders or prototypes in a warehouse. We have flight hardware.” Haot said Haven-1 is fully funded but did not disclose how much the Vast expected it to cost. McCaleb, with an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion, has stated he plans to fund at least the initial phases of Vast’s operations on his own. In a May 24 court filing as part of Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy proceedings — Vast bought Virgin Orbit’s test facility in Mojave, California, for engine development work — McCaleb said he has committed to providing up to $300 million for Vast. “To date, I have solely funded the enterprise and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” he stated. Other companies are planning to get into the space station market. Gravitics, a startup that has, so far, kept a low profile, is working on large space station modules. A design it calls StarMax would offer 400 cubic meters of volume — about 40% of the entire ISS — in a rigid design 7.6 meters in diameter. The company has started testing prototypes of StarMax but has not disclosed long-term development plans or schedules. Another startup, Above Space (until recently known as Orbital Assembly), has talked for several years about developing large rotating space stations, but has shown little public progress in either technology or fundraising. The company did secure a $1.7 million U.S. Space Force contract in March to work on technologies for deployable structures. As in many emerging fields, the companies involved are pursuing a wide range of technical approaches for their stations. Northrop Grumman, for example, plans to develop space station modules that leverage its experience with the Cygnus cargo spacecraft and HALO module for the lunar Gateway. Axiom Space plans to convert a shuttle-era multipurpose logistics module (MPLM) used to carry cargo to the station into a research and lab module. Sierra Space, which is working with Blue Origin on the Orbital Reef space station, is developing inflatable modules, a technology pioneered by now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace and demonstrated on the ISS. Sierra Space is testing versions of its Large Inflatable Flexible Environment (LIFE) modules that initially will each have about one-third the pressurized volume of the ISS. “We looked at how we can accelerate the affordability of space,” said Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, of the company’s focus on inflatable modules. He said that technology is far more scalable that traditional approaches to meet the needs of future customers, like companies planning to do research or manufacturing in orbit. “The only way you ever get the economics to work is with large inflatables,” he argued, enabling space stations to be operational after just a few launches. With traditional structures, he said, “you’re back to building space stations the way the ISS was.” During the 38th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Sierra Space used part of its large exhibit to show off LIFE, including plans for larger versions. A third generation of LIFE could have more volume than the entire ISS once inflated, yet still fit within the payload fairing of a vehicle like New Glenn or Starship. “It’s the same basic technology,” Vice said. NASA sees the emergence of more companies pursuing space stations as a validation of its strategy to transition from the ISS to commercial stations. “To see other companies now entering the fray, using their own funding and aren’t necessarily looking for NASA financial assistance at this point, is a very positive development,” said Phil McAlister, director of the commercial space division in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, during a meeting of a NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meeting a few days after Vast’s announcement of Haven-1. The companies that have won CLD awards are making good progress on their designs, he said. There have been some issues, such as when Voyager Space switched from its original partner, Lockheed Martin, to Airbus, but he noted that the company has been doing well since that change. “I’m very pleased with the performance of the providers.” The biggest challenge for those companies is likely not going to be technical, but instead economic. Both NASA and the companies involved acknowledge it’s unclear how big of a market there is beyond NASA for commercial stations from other governments, companies or space tourists, creating uncertainty about how many companies can close their business cases. “There’s no one business case” for commercial stations in general, McAlister said. The different companies working with NASA on the CLD program are taking different approaches, he explained, with Northrop emphasizing government astronauts, Voyager Space focusing on research, while Blue Origin and Sierra Space paying more attention than the others on tourism. Axiom, meanwhile, was devoting similar attention to all three markets. One thing is clear, he added. “They are all going to need non-NASA business to close their business cases.” Companies acknowledge uncertainty about the sources of demand for commercial space stations and their size. “I don’t fundamentally believe there is a market yet,” said Tejpaul Bhatia, chief revenue officer of Axiom Space, during a Space Symposium panel in April. His company is, for now, going after “low-hanging fruit” from individual countries and companies that have expressed interest. “Is there a market? I think that is what we are all racing to figure out,” he said. “It’s not racing to see who develops the first commercial space station. The question is, is it sustainable from a business standpoint?” “Nobody really knows how fast this market is going to grow,” said another panelist, Brent Sherwood, senior vice president for advanced programs development at Blue Origin. He argued that the company was covering its bases with a “mixed-use business park” approach to Orbital Reef that can accommodate a variety of potential customers. Other companies are making more focused bets on where that market will be. “Our goal is not to be everything for everyone,” said Marshall Smith, vice president of exploration at Voyager Space, during the panel. The focus of his company’s Starlab is, for now, on research, citing the demand from NASA and other prospective customers. It will have the same space for payloads as the ISS in just 40% of the volume. “Let’s see how the market develops,” he said. “As we move forward and markets develop, the next one may be more focused on tourism or manufacturing.” But neither the companies developing stations nor NASA have the luxury of patience to see how those markets develop. NASA wants at least one commercial station in service by 2028 to enable a gradual transition from the ISS, set to be retired in 2030. “That’s an aggressive schedule,” Sherwood acknowledged, but one that was necessary. “The number one objective is the avoidance of a gap.” A post-ISS gap would be more significant than the post-shuttle one, he argued, when NASA could still get its astronauts to the ISS by paying the Russians. “If we have a gap this time, there is no partner,” he said. “From a geopolitical perspective, it is fundamental to Western society and the promulgation of democracy and capitalistic principles that we do not abandon LEO for human spaceflight.” That might mean more NASA funding to support space station development. Smith noted that the CLD program started before broader economic changes, like rising interest rates, that made it more difficult for companies to raise funding. “That may mean there needs to be more public engagement to keep this on track.” NASA has, so far, not signaled any plans to increase spending on CLD beyond its current budget projections. McAlister told the NAC committee that NASA was focused on securing the proposed sharp increase in funding from $224 million in 2023 to more than $400 million by 2027. He admitted that having at least one commercial station operating by the end of 2028 to enable that two-year handover from the ISS is a “very aggressive” goal. He said NASA did have some flexibility in that it didn’t necessarily need two years to transition from the ISS, and having multiple companies working on stations offered some redundancy. “We’re going to have to monitor the health of the ISS and the speed at which the commercial destinations become reality,” he said. “We don’t have everything figured out on commercial LEO.” Vast’s Haot said that while his company is committed to developing Haven-1, its future plans — the company released a roadmap showing plans for building larger modules designed for SpaceX’s Starship that could form spinning stations — will depend on what happens with the next NASA CLD competition. “It all depends on the state of the low Earth orbit economy,” he said, including the emergence of commercial applications that can close the business case for a large space station without help from NASA. “It’s hard to tell at this point.” This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Firefly Aerospace announced June 8 it has acquired Spaceflight Inc., adding its satellite transportation services to its portfolio of launch vehicles and spacecraft. In a statement announcing the acquisition, Firefly said acquiring Spaceflight would help it offer “end-to-end” space transportation services, which includes the Alpha launch vehicle, Blue Ghost lunar lander and Space Utility Vehicle transfer vehicle. “This acquisition is the result of Firefly’s business plan to strengthen the company though organic growth in addition to accelerating its capabilities with strategic acquisitions,” Bill Weber, chief executive of Firefly, said in a statement. The companies did not disclose the terms of the acquisition. Firefly spokesperson Risa Schnautz told SpaceNews that the deal has already closed. Spaceflight has been owned by a 50/50 partnership of Japanese companies Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa Co. for three years , after parent company Spaceflight Industries spun off its rideshare launch business as Spaceflight Inc. In February it hired Tiphaine Louradour, former president of International Launch Services, as its new chief executive . Spaceflight Inc. was known as a leader in arranging launches of small satellites on small launch vehicles or as secondary payloads on larger launch vehicles, deploying more than 460 payloads. Spaceflight had also developed its own series of orbital transfer vehicles called Sherpa, using a mix of chemical and electric propulsion systems. Spaceflight has worked with a wide range of launch providers, although at one point it ran afoul of one of its largest partners, SpaceX . However, Firefly said that Spaceflight’s services will, going forward, be used only with Firefly’s vehicles. “We’re currently assessing the needs of our combined customers to meet their mission requirements with Firefly’s launch vehicles,” Schnautz said. “Firefly will honor Spaceflight’s current contracts but will not be aggregating payloads on other launch vehicles moving forward.” “With a high market demand for our on-orbit services and rapid response missions, this acquisition uniquely positions Firefly to respond immediately to our customers’ needs,” Weber said in the statement. Firefly plans to retain Spaceflight’s Bellevue, Washington, payload processing facility, using it to manufacture orbital transfer vehicles. Spaceflight’s entire workforce — about 90 employees, according to its LinkedIn page — will join Firefly. Schnautz said Firefly will “be assessing talent and roles and responsibilities in the coming months.” AE Industrial Partners (AEI) acquired Firefly Aerospace in 2022 after Max Polyakov, the Ukrainian entrepreneur who acquired the assets of the former Firefly Space Systems out of bankruptcy in 2017, was forced by the federal government to divest his stake. AEI led a $75 million round in Firefly in March 2022 and brought in Weber as chief executive in September. Firefly is preparing for the third launch of its Alpha rocket as part of a tactically responsive launch demonstration for the Space Force , carrying a satellite called Victus Nox. Part of the demonstration will require calling up the rocket for launch in just 24 hours. Firefly announced a partnership with Northrop Grumman in August 2022 to develop a new first stage for Northrop’s Antares rocket , using engines Firefly is developing. The companies plan to offer that vehicle, designated MLV, to the Space Force for its National Security Space Launch Phase 3 competition . The company has secured two NASA awards through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for lunar lander missions using its Blue Ghost lander. The first is scheduled for 2024 and the second, awarded to Firefly in March , will deploy a spacecraft in lunar orbit and land on the far side of the moon in 2026.
The Space Development Agency awarded a $64 million contract to Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) to develop a software applications factory for the agency’s low Earth orbit constellation. The contract, announced June 8, is for the agency’s BMC3 application factory, short for Battle Management Command, Control and Communications. BMC3 is the on-orbit data processing and computing system for the Transport Layer of communications satellites that the Space Development Agency (SDA) plans to deploy over the next several years. SAIC will not build an actual factory but a cloud-based development process to design, test and update software applications using a repeatable path. The system also has to provide extra layers of cybersecurity to protect classified information. The BMC3 software applications will be developed by multiple vendors. LEO layered architecture SDA, an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a layered network of military satellites . The Transport Layer will serve as a tactical network to move data to users around the world, communicating classified data such as early warnings of missile launches. The constellation, which SDA calls the proliferated warfighter space architecture , includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Michael LaRouche, president of SAIC’s national security and space sector, said the company’s cloud-based solution “will deliver software through a DevSecOps process to a constellation of hundreds of low Earth orbit satellites.” This approach “weaves together command and control, secure cloud and space systems integration,” he said in a news release. To support time-sensitive operations, he said, BMC3 software applications will process data on orbit and manage the dissemination of data to users. The applications factory also has to be able to quickly test and integrate upgraded software on satellites. SAIC has to provide a so-called “secure interoperable middleware” layer to protect software from cyber intrusions. SDA requires the contractor to “establish software development capabilities to securely and rapidly field mission applications developed by BMC3 ecosystem participants in support of Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) objectives.” JADC2 is the Defense Department’s strategy to connect weapons systems and platforms so they can operate as a seamless network. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Hydrosat, a Washington-based thermal data and analytics company, announced the acquisition June 8 of IrriWatch, a Netherlands company that delivers daily climate, crop, soil and irrigation updates to farmers in 62 countries. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. Hydrosat plans to begin gathering thermal and multispectral infrared data via satellite next year. At its core, though, HydroSat is not a space company but a climate-technology company, Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel told SpaceNews . “With this IrriWatch platform, we’re able to make on-the-ground impacts around climate metrics for the first time,” Fossel said. “We can point to examples of how customers using this product based on thermal satellite insights are able to reduce water use. And in a lot of parts of the world, reducing water use means less electricity for pumping water out of the ground and operating mechanized center pivot irrigation systems.” Hydrosat President Royce Dalby said in a statement, “Hydrosat’s research on farms over three continents has demonstrated that by using thermal imagery to guide irrigation decisions, growers can increase crop yields by as much as 50 percent while consuming 25 percent less water.” IrriWatch was founded in 2019 by Wim Bastiaanssen, an expert on remote sensing and water resource management. The company feeds imagery and data, much of it provided by thermal sensors on government satellites, into proprietary algorithms to gauge leaf and soil temperatures, soil moisture content, water consumption and agricultural production. IrriWatch also measures leaf nitrogen content to improve fertilizer management, provides carbon sequestration analysis and delivers “hyper-local” weather forecasts to farmers every morning, Bastiaanssen said. When Hydrosat thermal data begins flowing into the IrriWatch platform, “I will have more frequent, better quality thermal pictures,” Bastiaanssen said. “With that, I can do better calculations.” Bastiaanssen also is enthusiastic about working with Hydrosat’s marketing, communications and client-satisfaction personnel. “I do not have the budget to hire those kinds of people,” Bastiaanssen said. “We’ll have a very strong field staff to be really connected to the end user.” That connection is vital, Bastiaanssen said, because farmers need data and guidance. “You can have a fantastic soil-moisture product, but if the farmer is not looking at it or is interpreting it the wrong way, you fail,” Bastiaanssen said. “We absolutely need to guide farmers, guide irrigators and guide the whole supply chain in the agricultural sector.” Hydrosat announced $20 million in investments and government grants in April. “Hydrosat’s acquisition of IrriWatch marks a significant milestone in the continued growth of our company and enables us to accelerate the delivery of real solutions that fulfill our mission to increase global food production with less water,” Fossel said in a statement. Hydrosat was founded in 2017 to provide thermal data as well as products for data customers. “Water stress in agriculture and water stress as it relates to climate change is so close to our core vision and mission as a company that it’s always been our intent to build out those solutions,” Fossel said. “With IrriWatch, we have an opportunity to do that alongside a really phenomenal team and a great founder who has spent his entire career working with thermal infrared data and applying it to to agriculture.” In addition, both Hydrosat and IrriWatch “share a common vision of delivering geospatial-based insights to the agriculture community to help farmers grow more food with less water,” Fossel said.
SAN FRANCISCO – Earth observation startup Albedo is expanding its staff and facilities in Colorado. In preparation for launching its first satellite into very low Earth orbit to collect high resolution optical and thermal imagery in 2025, Albedo is hiring. “We’ve gone from the low 20s at the beginning of the year to over 40 and we’re still growing,” Albedo CEO Topher Haddad told SpaceNews. Albedo announced the opening June 8 of a Broomfield, Colorado, facility large enough to build three to four satellites simultaneously. “Having a dedicated facility to build, assemble, integrate and test our satellites will give us more fine-grained control over our production schedule and the operational leverage to react faster to any and all challenges we may face,” Haddad said in a statement. Albedo, founded in 2020, raised $48 million in a Series A funding round in 2022. The company has won two Small Business Innovation Research contracts valued at a $1.25 million apiece. “I’m excited to see the tremendous progress that Albedo is making towards their quest to provide rapid delivery and accessibility to the highest resolution satellite imagery to date,” retired Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and a member of Albedo’s strategic advisory board, said in a statement. “The use cases for this type of capability are limitless and will greatly benefit humanity.” Albedo plans to gather visible imagery with a resolution of 10 centimeters per pixel and thermal infrared imagery with a resolution of two meters per pixel. To make thermal imagery easier to analyze, Albedo will “sharpen” it by combining it with the visual imagery of the same location. “There’s a lot of demand for the imagery that the satellites will collect,” Haddad said. “Once we have six satellites, we’ll have daily revisit. That will be a big milestone for the constellation.” Albedo also unveiled a new website June 8.
NASA has growing concerns that the lunar lander version of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle will not be ready in time for the Artemis 3 mission in late 2025, given the amount of work needed to get the vehicle ready. Speaking at a joint meeting of the National Academies’ Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board June 7, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said Artemis 3, which would feature the first human landing on the moon in more than half a century, was in danger of being delayed from December 2025 to some time in 2026. Free said NASA’s concern is the number of launches of Starship that SpaceX has to carry out to be ready for Artemis 3. Each Starship lander mission requires launching the Starship lander itself as well as several “tanker” Starships to fuel the lander in Earth orbit before it goes to the moon. Before Artemis 3, SpaceX will carry out an uncrewed Starship lunar landing, and also must demonstrate cryogenic fluid transfer in Earth orbit. “That’s a lot of launches to get those missions done,” Free said. “They have a significant number of launches to go, and that, of course, gives me concern about the December of 2025 date” for Artemis 3. He reiterated those schedule concerns later in the meeting when asked about the schedule for Artemis 3. “With the difficulties that SpaceX has had, I think that’s really concerning,” he said. “You can think about that slipping probably into ’26.” He didn’t elaborate on the “difficulties” that SpaceX has encountered, but the company’s Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle is currently grounded after its first integrated launch April 20 . The vehicle suffered several engine failures in flight and was destroyed by its flight termination system four minutes after liftoff. NASA has personnel involved in the investigation of the launch, and Free said he had just met with a Federal Aviation Administration official about it. “They’re doing everything they can, but they look at the launch license for the next mission,” he said of the FAA. “What I tried to convey to him is our big picture of everything that’s going to take to get to that human lander.” Neither the FAA nor SpaceX has provided public updates on the status of that investigation or when the company might be cleared to make another launch attempt. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said in an April 29 online discussion that the company could be ready in as soon as a “couple months,” but that schedule appears unlikely based on visible progress at the company’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. Regarding development of the lunar lander version of Starship, Free said that SpaceX and NASA have delayed a critical design review of the vehicle until after the company performs a cryogenic refueling demonstration in Earth orbit. The company provided NASA with an updated schedule last week, details of which he did not disclose, that the agency is reviewing. “I get a lot of questions, ‘Will you make the date?’ Well, they need to get flying before we can get any kind of assessment,” he concluded. He said he was confident that SpaceX would ultimately deliver the Starship lander, and noted that the fixed-price structure of the Human Landing System award shields NASA from additional costs. “But, the fact is, if they’re not flying on the time they’ve said, it does us no good to have a firm fixed price contract other than we’re not paying more.”
United Launch Alliance carried out a static-fire test of its Vulcan Centaur rocket June 7, one of the final milestones before the vehicle’s first launch. A Vulcan rocket fired its two BE-4 engines in a static-fire test called the Flight Readiness Firing (FRF) at 9:05 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41. The engine start sequence started at T-4.88 seconds, ULA said in a statement an hour after the test, with the engines throttling up to their target level for two seconds before shutting down, concluding the six-second test. The test appeared to go as planned. “Nominal run,” Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, tweeted moments after the test. “This is a huge milestone. This is as close as you can come to launching a rocket without actually launching the rocket,” Mark Peller, vice president of Vulcan development at ULA, said on a company webcast shortly after the test. The test exercised all the vehicle and ground systems up through ignition of the engines, stopping just before releasing the rocket. “It’s our last major milestone on the path to launch,” he said. “So, a big accomplishment.” ULA planned to carry out the FRF May 25. However, the company called off the test several hours in advance after detecting a “delayed response” in the ignition system for the booster’s engines. ULA rolled the vehicle back to the Vertical Integration Facility to correct the problem, although the company did not disclose further details. In February, Bruno said the FRF would be the final major test milestone before the launch of the rocket on its inaugural flight, called Cert-1. After the test, the rocket will be rolled back to the VIF for final preparations, including integration of its payload, before returning to the pad for launch. However, there was an incident in late March during testing of a Centaur upper stage at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Hydrogen leaked from the structural test article and ignited, creating a fireball. Bruno said in a May 16 interview that the company was still investigating the source of the leak and what corrective actions, if any, were needed to fix it. If ULA determines no changes are needed to the upper stage, the Cert-1 launch could take place later in the summer. That would slip to later in the year if ULA decides it needs to make modifications to the Centaur. An additional factor is that the primary payload for the Cert-1 launch, the Peregrine lunar lander by Astrobotic, had launch windows open for about four to five days a month. ULA will also have to work around other Atlas launches at the pad, although one potential conflict, the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, has slipped from late July because of spacecraft issues. Other payloads on Cert-1 are the first two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation, as well as a payload for space memorial company Celestis.
SAN FRANCISCO – Nuview, a startup planning to establish a constellation of light detection and ranging (lidar) satellites, announced investments from U.S. and European venture capital funds as well as actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio. “We see a lot of opportunity in collaborating with Mr. DiCaprio over the next several years in raising awareness both at the national level and with groups like the United Nations and the World Bank,” Clint Graumann, Nuview CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews . Orlando, Florida-based Nuview is not yet disclosing how much money it has raised. TechCrunch reported June 6 that the startup has raised $15 million to date , including $12 million in an ongoing Series A round. Participants in The Series A round, led by MaC Venture Capital, include Broom Ventures, Cortado Ventures, Florida Funders, Industrious, Liquid2 and Veto Capital. Since Nuview, founded in 2021, emerged from stealth mode in May, the company has revealed a $2.75 million contract from National Security Innovation Capital, an organization established in 2021 in the Defense Innovation Unit to support early-stage startups developing dual-use technology. In addition, Nuview has $1.1 billion in early adopter agreements promising customers speedy access to geospatial data gathered by its planned constellation of 20 dishwasher-size satellites, Graumann said. Nuview plans to launch a Space Proof of Concept Satellite, called Mr. Spoc, in a little more than two years. The satellite will provide data to Nuview early adopters. “After that, we are going to launch 20 commercial satellites, five at a time,” Graumann said. To date, lidar data has been gathered by airborne platforms and government satellites like NASA’s IceSat-2 launched in 2018 . In recent years, a key sensor Nuview plans to fly was declassified. “When you combine that with some of our proprietary technology around wide-area monitoring, that gives us some unique capabilities,” Graumann said. Paul McManamon, Nuview chief science officer and former chief scientist for the Air Force Research Lab’s Sensors Directorate, has applied for or been granted more than two dozen patents, many related to optics and photonics. Jack Hild, former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deputy director of source operations, is a Nuview senior advisor. Nuview’s chief technology officer, Patrick Baker, has worked extensively with aircraft-based lidar. “We picked one of the harder challenges that you can pick for Earth observation, but we hired the best people in the business to do it,” Graumann said. After years of working with geospatial data providers and customers through TerraMetric, a consulting firm Graumann also leads, he co-founded Nuview to satisfy widespread demand for lidar. “No matter what type of dataset we were working with, whether it was optical, radar, thermal or hyperspectral, the customers always mentioned lidar,” Graumann said. “They said, ‘If we could get lidar data as the foundation for what we’re building, everything would be better.’” Lidar is popular because of its precision. “Every collection with lidar is in 3D natively,” Graumann said. “It enables us to see through a canopy of trees to get a 3D rendering of what’s beneath. You can create surface models at the top of the canopy as well as terrain models of what’s below in one collection.” And Nuview’s lidar will offer centimeter-level accuracy, Graumann said. While lidar data is often collected by aircraft, Graumann has observed “pent up demand for lidar data” of places that are “challenging to fly a plane over.” Earth observation data has important environmental applications. Leonardo DiCaprio established a nonprofit foundation in 1998 to support organizations protecting wildlife, preserving threatened ecosystems and addressing climate change. Nuview expects its data products to encourage “good stewardship of land use,” Graumann said, related to “carbon monitoring forestry and agriculture.” When Nuview was looking for someone to help the company raise awareness of the climate applications for its technology, Graumann contacted DiCaprio’s staff. DiCaprio “wanted to see how lidar can be used for for climate science and environmental purposes,” Graumann said. “We put all that together and it worked out really well.”
In its new role overseeing the nation’s network of missile-defense sensors, U.S. Space Command plans to make more efficient use of these assets, officials said June 7. Gordon White, Space Command’s deputy chief of global sensor management, said the recent realignment of responsibilities approved by President Biden in April is significant because it puts one command in charge of the sensors that track missiles and also threats in outer space. During a call with reporters, White and Col. Mark Cobos, deputy commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, sought to clarify confusion over last week’s announcement that Space Command is taking over new missile defense responsibilities. Space Command, they stressed, is not getting in the business of responding to missile strikes or shooting them down. That remains the responsibility of regional military commands if an attack happens overseas, or of U.S. Northern Command if the United States were targeted. What is changing is the oversight and management of sensors used to detect missile launches and track vehicles in flight. ‘Convergence of space and missile defense’ Previously U.S. Strategic Command managed the sea-based and ground-based radar systems used for missile defense, and Space Command was in charge of the missile-warning satellites. Under the new arrangement, Space Command is the overall sensor manager, which allows it to prioritize assets so they can also be used to track space debris and rival nations’ satellites. “We’re seeing a convergence between a lot of aspects of the missile defense and space missions,” Cobos said. In the coming years and decades, DoD will deploy dozens of sensor satellites in low and medium Earth orbits to track hypersonic missiles, he said. As adversaries advance the technology and develop more sophisticated weapons, the U.S. will need to better integrate its sensor data to characterize these fast-moving vehicles. “We’re seeing in the operating environment a little bit of a shift. I call it the evolution of warfare,” said Cobos. “U.S. defense systems have caused a proliferation in missile technology that is getting more advanced, more maneuverable.” White said Space Command will seek “better integration and fuzed data for better characterization of threats. This helps all theaters defend their areas.” “A lot of the sensors we use for space are the same as missile defense and missile warning. A lot of that is coming together, which creates a unique harmony for the commander of U.S. Space command to be able to oversee the planning for all that,” he said. “This will drive some unity in the way we approach those missions.” Sensors needed for space domain awareness The Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense (JFCC IMD), which now reports to Space Command, runs an operations center at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. Rather than having to route information through Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, it now sends it directly to Space Command’s joint operations center at Peterson Space Force Base, near Schriever. “This helps harmonize operations, especially as missiles fly through space, which is Space Command’s area of responsibility,” Cobos said. Sensors at sea, on the ground and in space support missile defense, and the theater commands operate them at regional level. But with Space Command in charge, there will be “major efficiencies in how those sensors are used when somebody is not shooting a missile at the U.S.,” Cobos said. “About 99.9 percent of the time they will be doing space domain awareness.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The European Space Agency launched a demonstration project June 6 to show how artificial intelligence could use satellite data to help certify organic cotton farms in India to prevent fraud. The project aims to train software from German technology firm Marple to use imagery from ESA satellites, mainly two polar-orbiting Sentinel-2 spacecraft, to detect cotton fields across the country and automatically classify them by their cultivation method. Marple piloted this capability with ESA two years ago in Uzbekistan, where they said the software distinguished between organic and conventional cotton with 98% accuracy. The India demonstration will be conducted in partnership with Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), a non-profit organization behind a voluntary global standard for the industry. GOTS project manager Jeffrey Thimm said training the artificial intelligence in India, where climatic conditions are more diverse and the prevalence of small fields and intercropping make distinguishing organic cotton more complex, is important to improve the software’s accuracy. The software is designed to draw from a spectrum of sensors that provide data on vegetation, water, and soil — as well as indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a measure of the health and density of vegetation. The first results from India are expected before the end of the year and GOTS plans to use them to improve yield estimates. According to GOTS, the project would also help find cotton fields with traditional and ecologically friendly farming practices that make them potential candidates for organic certification, particularly smaller farms operating under the radar. Fields certified as organic that are found to have failed to meet the criteria would be flagged for investigation before their cotton is harvested. “Part of the problem is that no one really knows the degree to which fraudulent business practices have preyed upon the organic sector,” Thimm said. There is also no reliable data source on the number of organic cotton farms in India, he added, making it difficult to know how much organic cotton is actually being cultivated and from where. ESA is co-financing the India project under its Business Applications and Space Solutions (BASS) program with GOTS. They have injected around 500,000 euros ($535,000) into the demonstration.
A Chinese commercial launch firm conducted its second orbital mission Wednesday, sending a reported record 26 satellites into orbit. The second Lijian-1 solid rocket developed by CAS Space lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 12:10 a.m. Eastern June 7. Aboard were the Shiyan-24A and Shiyan-24B experimental satellites. The other payloads were described as technological demonstrations and commercial remote-sensing by Chinese state media reports . The 26 payloads aboard the flight surpass the previous national record of 22 satellites launched by the much larger Long March 8 rocket in February 2022. Shiyan series satellites are often classified and understood to be used to test new technologies and payloads for Chinese space systems. These are usually developed and launched by CASC, China’s main, state-owned space contractor. The June 7 launch indicates CAS Space was awarded a contract for national and defense launches, whereas the vast majority of commercial Chinese launches carry commercial payloads. Other payloads known to be on the flight included Xi’an Hangtou-8 for Xi’an Aerospace Investment, and Xingshidai-16 and Tianyi-26 for commercial satellite firms ADA Space and Spacety respectively. Also aboard was Fucheng-1 , an interferometric imaging synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing satellite for the six-satellite Mianyang constellation. CAS Space, sometimes referred to as Zhongke Aerospace, is a commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The firm has plans for a series of solid and reusable liquid propellant rockets for launch services and space tourism. The company announced in April that it had secured $87 million in C round funding. The main backers were investment vehicles linked to CAS. The Wednesday mission was the second launch of the Lijian-1, just under a year after the first, in July 2022 . The rocket has a take-off weight of 135 tons, a total length of 30 meters, a core stage diameter of 2.65 meters, a fairing diameter of 2.65 meters and can carry 1,500 kilogram of payload into a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A recent presentation revealed that the Lijian-1 uses SP70 solid rocket motors from CASC. The second Lijian-1 rocket, also known as ZK-1A or Kinetica-1, was the first produced at new facilities in Nansha District in the southern city of Guangzhou. Shikong Tansuo, a space arm of automaker Geely Technology Group, has also settled in Nansha, following a 2021 move by the local government to attract space companies at all stages of the supply chain to the area. Lijian-1 was briefly the largest operational solid launch vehicle in China until the sea launch of the Jielong-3 in December last year. CAS earlier this year tested vertical rocket landings with a jet-powered prototype as part of efforts to develop reusable rockets. The launch was China’s 22nd orbital mission overall in 2023. CASC plans more than 60 launches this year, while commercial actors could add a further 20 or more orbital missions, according to announced plans.
Satellite manufacturer York Space Systems announced June 7 it has acquired Emergent Space Technologies, a small business that develops flight software and engineering tools for space missions. York, based in Denver, did not disclose the value of the acquisition. Emergent, founded in 2001, is based in Laurel, Maryland; and Austin, Texas. The transaction has cleared regulatory reviews and the merger is now complete, said York’s CEO Dirk Wallinger. “Emergent’s nationally recognized software engineering processes will enhance York’s mission solution designs for DoD, civil, and intelligence community programs,” Wallinger said. The acquisition gives York access to proprietary flight and ground software products that Emergent developed under government contracts with U.S. defense agencies, the intelligence community and NASA. “Their core capabilities and value are definitely the flight software, ground software simulation capabilities, along with guidance, navigation and control,” Wallinger said. The acquisition brings into York Space key technologies needed to build next-generation constellations, he said. “Ultimately, the future of satellite technology is all about software. So it made a ton of sense for them to join our team.” Emergent in recent years won multiple contracts from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency for modeling, simulations and digital engineering. York is one of the agency’s prime contractors building satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer , a mesh communications network . Among the critical technologies driving space systems today are for constellation management and constellation autonomy, which requires being able to quickly upgrade software, Wallinger said. “What we’re hearing across the board, from the government, for sure, but also on the commercial side is that we need to move more quickly and we need to have things in orbit.” “With the rapid commoditization of satellite hardware, the country’s competitive advantage in space is in the mission software, smart networks, and edge processing,” said Charles Beames, chairman of York Space. George Davis, CEO and founder of Emergent, said the company is “thrilled to take this next step” by merging with York. 
After a recent downturn, there are signs of a rebound in space investment, but analysts and investors see a new focus on smaller, more selective rounds. Investment in the space sector has fallen in recent quarters due to factors such as the rise in interest rates and the poor performance of some companies in the sector. A recent report by Space Capital calculated that $2.2 billion was invested in space companies in the first quarter of 2023, the lowest quarterly total by its metrics since 2015. However, speakers at the recent Financial Times’ “Investing in Space” event said there are signs of a rebound. “It seems like the tide may have turned,” said Chad Anderson, founder and managing partner of Space Capital. “We see definitely a recovery in the space technology market in terms of funding,” said Thomas Felix Baden, managing partner and co-founder of Neventa Capital. He noted his data showed that, in Europe, there has been more investment so far in 2023 than in all of 2022. Vaibhav Lohiya, managing director and global head of space banking at Deutsche Bank Securities, agreed that there was more funding available for space companies now after a pullback early last year. But, he added, that investment was changing. “Investors are starting to get more selective,” he said, with more interest in backing “category leaders” that can offer near-term returns rather than “moonshot opportunities.” Rounds are getting smaller, he added. “I think the big change that you’ve seen in the last two years is that we went from an environment where people thought we had plenty of capital,” said Christian Lesueur, managing director and global head of TMT investment banking at UBS. That allowed businesses to embark on capital-intensive projects with the expectation they could raise more money quickly. “Today, I think we’re in a very different environment,” he said, with companies expected to show a better path to profitability. “If you’re going to raise capital and say that you need to raise capital again in 12 months, that is a very hard task today.” Tied to that selectivity is more scrutiny of the companies seeking funding. “The sentiment has really changed from one where investors were investing with very little diligence 12 or 24 months ago to really digging in,” said Marc Robbins, director at Barclays Corporate and Investment Bank. “There is a crop of companies that were invested in during the recent hype cycle that are not performing to expectations,” said Steve Jacobs, venture partner and chief product officer at Lakestar, a European venture fund. Anderson said that reflects first-time investments by some venture funds into space companies, particularly at the peak of investment in 2021. “There was a lot of irrational dollars coming in and not a lot of diligence being done, and a lot of questionable companies being funded.” That reaction is also linked to companies that went public in the last two years through mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. That provided companies in space and other sectors a new source of capital. However, many of the companies that used SPACs have performed poorly in public markets, including the bankruptcy of Virgin Orbit. Anderson argued many of the companies that went public through SPACs were not ready to do so. “These companies weren’t pre-profit,” he said. “A lot of them weren’t even pre-revenue. Many of them were pre-product. So, we saw many of them fail out in the open, in the public eye.” Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and an early investor in Planet and SpaceX, said many SPAC deals were what traditionally would have been private venture rounds. “Those don’t necessarily end so well.” Some companies have done better going public in more traditional ways, such as an initial public offering (IPO) by Japanese lunar lander company ispace on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in April. The company’s stock has rebounded after a sharp drop when its first lander mission crashed on the moon weeks after going public. That was the first IPO of a space company in Japan, said Atsushi Mizushima, partner at Nishimura & Asahi. “People start to believe that the space industry is growing,” he said of the Japanese market. “It had a very good influence on the capital market.” Anderson said he expected a shakeout in the industry to continue for “some time,” with more failures by companies or even investment funds. “It’s causing some short-term pain for some companies, but in the long run it’s probably going to be really healthy.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Apogeo Space, an Italian venture with plans for nearly 100 tiny satellites for connecting remote monitoring devices, said June 5 it had signed a deal to deploy nine picosatellites next year with an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) from Momentus. The satellites are due to launch on a Vigoride tug slated to join the SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-10 rideshare mission in February to low Earth orbit. Momentus declined to disclose other customer details about the mission. The California-based company is currently preparing for Vigoride-7, its fourth OTV launch that is slated to join a Falcon 9 rideshare in October. Apogeo’s first batch of nine operational satellites is set to fly on this October mission, according to CEO Guido Parissenti, using an OTV from Italy-based D-Orbit. While the eight-year-old connectivity venture has a multi-launch agreement with D-Orbit, Parissenti said it is in talks with multiple launch providers over plans to deploy a total 96 satellites built in-house by 2027. Apogeo used a Russian Soyuz 2.1 rocket to launch its first Flexible Experimental Embedded Satellite (FEES) demonstrator in 2021. A second test satellite (FEES2) was deployed from the International Space Station in early 2022 after being delivered by SpaceX. These two demonstrators had a volume of 10 x 10 x 3 centimeters and a mass of 300 grams. The operational satellites would be 1/3U, or a third of the size of a 10 x 10 x 10-centimeter cubesat. Using very high frequency (VHF) band spectrum, Apogeo plans to use its network of tiny satellites to connect low-power, battery-powered devices outside of terrestrial network coverage. The low bandwidth services would seek to meet demand for data monitoring applications in the agriculture, oil & gas, and wildlife industries in particular. A network of 20 satellites would be enough to retrieve data from devices anywhere on the globe with a maximum 30-minute wait time, according to Apogeo, and the full constellation would enable continuous coverage. The plans are similar to a network of picosatellites that Spanish startup FOSSA Systems is deploying , which is also using OTVs to deliver spacecraft to fine-tuned orbits. Alongside small public financing for conducting feasibility studies, Parissenti said Apogeo has raised around five million euros ($5.4 million) for its plans to date, largely through an investment from Italian early-stage investment fund Primo Space. Previously known as GP Advanced Projects, Apogeo was founded in 2015 as a space consultancy firm before pivoting to plans for its own constellation a year later.
CHANTILLY, Va. — With a ceremonial ribbon cutting, the Space Systems Command on June 6 marked the opening of its new office and conference center dedicated to doing business with the commercial space industry. The command named the facility COSMIC, short for Commercial Space Marketplace for Innovation and Collaboration. The Space Systems Command, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, oversees the majority of military space acquisitions programs. The new workspace in Northern Virginia will serve as the headquarters for the command’s new Commercial Space Office. In remarks at the grand opening, Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, head of Space Systems Command, said COSMIC is a recognition of the critical role that commercial space technologies play in maintaining a competitive edge in modern warfare and national security. The sleek facility has 10,000 square feet of conference space and offices for unclassified gatherings. The Air Force Research Laboratory and the nonprofit Virginia Tech Applied Research Corp. are partners sharing the facility. Guetlein said that soon after the command established a Commercial Services Office last year — later rebranded as Commercial Space Office — he told its director to seek a location in Chantilly because of its proximity to the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other government organizations that work with commercial space firms. “We needed a place where we could collaborate, a place where we didn’t have to fight through a lot of security to get to have conversations,” said Guetlein. The Commercial Space Office, or COMSO, is led by Col. Richard Kniseley, who is based in Los Angeles. There will be a small permanent staff in Chantilly, mostly responsible for administration and contracts. COMSO is an umbrella organization for units that already existed, including the Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO), the Space Domain Awareness Marketplace, the SSC Front Door, SpaceWERX and the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve program ( CASR ). ‘All in the same fight’ Guetlein noted that the military for decades has worked closely with the private space industry but the environment is changing as DoD becomes more dependent on commercial systems. He alluded to the conflict in Ukraine where commercial satellite networks were targeted and are still under threat. “The thing that has really changed in the space environment is that we’re all in the exact same fight at the exact same time,” he said. “We’re all on the adversary’s threat list. They’ve declared every single one of us a target. Whether you are a government civil ally or even our commercial partners,” Guetlein added. “We’re all operating in the exact same environment subject to the exact same physics trying to vie for the exact same spectrum allocation. So we are all in this together.” The CASR commercial augmentation initiative will look at ways to partner with commercial space companies so their services can be accessed during national security emergencies. One option is to create the space equivalent of the civil reserve air fleet , or CRAF, a program the Pentagon conceived 70 years ago to gain access to commercial airlift capacity in emergencies. COMSO plans to hold another round of discussions with industry executives in July to figure out the way forward. “We need to make sure that we can rely on our partners to be there during a crisis,” said Guetlein. “Commercial partners have proven they are dedicated to being there during times of conflict. And commercial innovation is accelerating to a point where they are an absolutely incredible capability,” he said. “This is absolutely the right time to build new partnerships. ‘Where’s the money?’ Guetlein noted that there is still skepticism in the space industry about government promises to spend more money on commercial products and services. “The one question I always get from industry every single time is ‘where’s the money?” he said. The Space Systems Command estimated it currently spends about $4 billion a year on commercial space services, mostly on satellite communications and data from commercial satellites. The goal is to create a dedicated budget line for commercial services “to get better visibility into where those efforts are … and more importantly, so that we can be transparent with industry on where we are invested.” Demand for commercial tech During a meeting with reporters June 6, Kniseley said his office is working on several efforts to attract commercial vendors and create a demand from military users. The biggest piece will continue to be satellite communications, with about $850 million in commercial contracts projected per year across DoD. COMSO wants to expand online marketplaces, said Kniseley, similar to the one that already exists for space domain awareness data. The SDA marketplace now has 11 vendors offering commercial data on space objects and traffic in orbit. Companies have complained , however, that the marketplace does not generate significant revenue and that the Space Force is not fully taking advantage of commercial capabilities. Kniseley said his office is working with U.S. Space Command to help build the SDA marketplace and integrate commercial data so it’s useful to operational commanders. A new marketplace was recently introduced for surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking (STR). This includes electro-optical and radar satellite imagery, and data analysis, although the specifics are still being hashed out with the NRO and NGA, the intelligence agencies that oversee procurement of imagery and analytics. In recent weeks, U.S. Africa Command reached out to COMSO for help to pinpoint the origin of a chemical spill that was affecting hundreds of fishermen in Guinea, West Africa. “With commercial SRT data, we actually necked down the suspected culprits from 350 ships down to five. And we think we’ve already found who that culprit was,” said Kniseley. In the SRT marketplace, he said, “we’ll work with the NRO on commercial imagery, but there are other vendors out there that aren’t necessarily on contract with the NRO that fill a different mission area,” he said. “I’m looking at this more from a tactical standpoint and less from a strategic standpoint, because we’re going to have to get quicker responses out to the tactical edge.” Some new areas where the Space Force is considering buying commercial services include positioning, navigation and timing that does not rely on GPS, and weather data in support of military operations. Guetlein mentioned another potential marketplace is for data analytics focused on infrared satellite sensors. There is already significant work going on in that area at the Space Systems Command’s Tools Applications and Processing (TAP) lab in Boulder, Colorado, he said, where government analysts, private contractors and university researchers use artificial intelligence to analyze data from the military’s missile-warning satellites. The data is being applied not just for national defense uses but also for natural disaster response, fire fighting and other applications. “We’re going to stand up a similar lab in Colorado Springs for space domain awareness and a similar lab for surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking to expose all of that data at the unclassified level,” said Guetlein.
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb launched a free trial offer for maritime customers June 6 after bringing its low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network online over a larger swathe of the northern hemisphere. The British operator said its network is now fully operational down to 35 degrees latitude, encompassing much of Europe and the upper United States, after being confined to the 50th parallel and above since late 2021 as it built out the constellation. While OneWeb now has enough satellites for global services with 634 spacecraft in LEO, including a technology demonstrator for a second-generation system, it expects to finalize the ground stations needed for worldwide coverage by the end of this year. The company’s “try before you buy” deal for maritime lasts 45 days, OneWeb said, facilitated by its network of distribution partners. Financial costs for enterprise-grade OneWeb maritime services that advertise speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) were not disclosed. Maritime connectivity prices for SpaceX’s Starlink LEO constellation, which has been busy adding customers for global coverage touting download speeds of up to 220 Mbps, start at $250 a month — and a one-time $2,500 fee for hardware that includes an antenna built in-house. U.S.-based Kymeta and Intellian of South Korea are providing the antennas for OneWeb’s maritime services. The maritime service announcement came a day after the operator said it is expanding a distribution partnership with Hughes Network Systems, a OneWeb investor via parent company EchoStar, to provide global inflight connectivity (IFC) once its LEO services are available for airlines next year. Hughes, which already provides IFC services via geostationary satellites, has developed an electronically steered antenna for the partnership designed to connect a plane to satellites in LEO and geostationary orbit (GEO). Depending on customer needs, the companies plan to offer airlines a LEO-only solution or a hybrid LEO and GEO service. OneWeb’s offering for enterprises and governments also includes fixed and mobile land-based connectivity services. Hughes engineered OneWeb’s gateways and is a distribution partner for the operator’s fixed satellite services in the United States and India. The company also distributes OneWeb’s connectivity solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Rivada Space Networks is hoping to secure support from the U.S. Ex-Im Bank to finance a multibillion-dollar satellite constellation whose future also depends on an impending decision by international regulators. Rivada announced in February a $2.4 billion contract with Terran Orbital to build a 300-satellite constellation to provide connectivity services. It subsequently signed a contract with SpaceX for 12 Falcon 9 launches to deploy those satellites. Declan Ganley, chief executive of Rivada, said in February that the company has “funding commitments” from existing shareholders and new investors for the new constellation, but did not disclose how much funding it had secured or who the new investors were. Speaking at the Financial Times’ “Investing in Space” event June 5, Ganley said the company planned to seek financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States to support the project. “We will be using quite a lot of debt in this project,” he said. “We are in discussions with U.S. Ex-Im Bank.” Ex-Im is eligible to finance the system because Rivada Space Networks is based in Germany, although the parent Rivada company is American. “Ex-Im financing and debt is extremely competitively priced, and I would say that is one element that gives us a bit of an edge,” he said. He did not disclose a timetable for obtaining the financing. Ex-Im was, a decade ago, involved in financing several space projects, primarily the manufacturing and launch of commercial geostationary communications satellites. Those efforts stopped in 2015 when the bank’s authorization lapsed, which, along with a lack of a board quorum, prevented it from approving deals larger than $10 million. Congress restored the board’s quorum and passed a seven-year reauthorization in 2019, allowing it to resume financing of large deals . Ganley declined to disclose the cost of the system or even the value of the SpaceX launch contract. SpaceX’s current list price for the Falcon 9 is $67 million, giving the contract a potential value of $804 million, although such multi-launch contracts often provide discounts. He said the company has investors, “some of whom are very well known,” but declined to identify them. “We’re a private company so we don’t have to disclose these things and tell our competitors what we’re doing.” Uncertainty about Rivada’s financing has raised questions about its ability to finance its Terran Orbital manufacturing contract. Terran Orbital said in a May 15 earnings call that it had received the first milestone payments from Rivada for that contract, but did not disclose the amount. “We have an NDA [non-disclosure agreement] with them and we have to respect that,” Marc Bell, chief executive of Terran Orbital, said in the call. “They want to be in control of a lot of different things, including their capital source.” Another source of uncertainty is Rivada’s spectrum filings with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that cover 576 satellites. Those ITU filings requires Rivada to deploy 10% of its full constellation by this September, a milestone the company acknowledges it cannot meet. Rivada is seeking a waiver to that milestone requirement that the ITU is slated to consider at a meeting in late June and early July. Ganley said he was confident that the company would be granted the waiver because it has satellite and launch contracts in place. Regulators in Lichtenstein, where Rivada’s constellation is licensed, placed additional requirements to demonstrate it had funding, he stated. “We’re very confident we’re in good shape with that.”
Blue Origin expects to be ready to resume launches of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle in the next few weeks as it completes its recovery from an in-flight anomaly nine months ago. Speaking at the Financial Times’ “Investing in Space” event June 6, Blue Origin Chief Executive Bob Smith said the company was on the verge of resuming New Shepard launches, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. New Shepard has been grounded since a failure during a September 2022 payload-only flight designated NS-23 . Blue Origin said in March there was a structural failure in the vehicle’s BE-3PM engine nozzle caused by temperatures that exceeded its design. The nozzle failure caused the crew capsule’s abort motor to fire, sending it to a safe parachute landing, while the propulsion module was destroyed. “We knew very soon after the event what exactly happened,” Smith said, saying that the company has been “working through with the FAA on the process by which we go back to flight.” In the company’s March announcement, Blue Origin said it expected to resume flights “soon” starting with a reflight of the NS-23 mission, but was not more specific about the schedule. The FAA said then it needed to review Blue Origin’s plans before allowing those flights to resume. “We’re now dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s to get through that, as well as getting our system ready to go fly again,” Smith said. “New Shepard, from that standpoint, should be ready to go fly within the next few weeks.” The mishap and the hiatus in launches has not affected demand for space tourism flights on the vehicle, with new customers having signed up in the last nine months. “People saw a very safe system,” he said, with “a real abort scenario where the capsule came down fine and was ready to go the next day.” New Glenn and other business Smith was less forthcoming about the schedule for the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch vehicle, which was once projected to fly in 2020. “If you want to know what the launch date is for New Glenn, I can give you one but it’s going to be wrong,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s going to arrive early or arrive late.” He said the company has flight hardware for the vehicle coming together, as well as preparations of its launch pad at Cape Canaveral. The vehicle’s BE-4 engines are one of the larger “pacing items” for the launch, he noted. The New Glenn manifest for the first few years is full, Smith said, but did not disclose how many launches are on that manifest. It includes 12 launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation announced in April 2022 , with an option for up to 15 more. Smith described Blue Origin as a company that shifted upon his arrival as CEO in 2017 from a research and development mindset to a more commercial focus with several lines of business. That includes New Shepard and New Glenn, as well as the BE-4 engines it produces both for New Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. The company also won a $3.4 billion NASA award May 19 to develop a second lunar lander for the Artemis lunar exploration campaign and is partnered with Sierra Space and other companies on the Orbital Reef commercial space station project. “When I joined Blue, we had very, very little revenue,” he said. “Now we have hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue as well as billions of dollars in orders, so we’re in a very good position.” The New Shepard business line has “good overall margins,” he said, but did not elaborate. He acknowledged a tension between profitability and investment, particularly for what he described as “capital-intensive” projects like launch vehicles. “It will always be a balance of how much you want to invest versus how much you want to make this self-sustaining.” Blue Origin has long relied on investment from its founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos. Several years ago, Bezos said he was putting $1 billion a year into Blue Origin. Smith declined to provide updated figures other than to say that Bezos is making “significant” investments into the company. As for a timeline for profitability for Blue Origin, said, Smith, “it goes back to how much Jeff wants to invest.”
An independent review has concluded NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission is back on track for a launch this October after software problems, exacerbated by institutional issues at JPL, delayed its launch last year. NASA released June 5 a report by the independent review board (IRB) commissioned by the agency last year after Psyche missed two launch windows in 2022 because of delays in the development and testing of flight software. That board concluded last fall that Psyche had suffered from software development programs but also broader issues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory , including a strained workforce and poor internal communications. The new report assessed how both the mission and JPL had implemented recommendations the board made in its earlier report, concluding that both had made major progress. “The IRB believes the response to our Psyche project and JPL institution findings and recommendations to be excellent,” Tom Young, chair of the IRB, said in a call with reporters. “We believe that Psyche is on a positive course for an October 2023 launch.” For Psyche, that work involved reorganizing the project around the remaining work ahead of launch and bringing in experienced leadership, said Laurie Leshin, director of JPL. The project is now “nearly through” all the remaining software testing. With 18 weeks remaining before launch, preparations are going well, with seven weeks of schedule margin. “The project, I’m pleased to report, is green across the board, and on track for our October launch,” she said. The delay does come at some additional cost to NASA, which officials on the call said is still being assessed. A May 31 report by the Government Accountability Office assessing major NASA projects noted that the cost of Psyche, projected at just under $1 billion at the time of its confirmation in 2019, has grown to nearly $1.13 billion as of January 2023. The report added that new estimate was under review because of potentially higher operations costs linked to a longer travel time caused by the delay. JPL, meanwhile, has been working on other recommendations related to workforce and communications that have been in progress for months . That includes a new hybrid work policy that requires most people to work on site three days a week. The lab has improved hiring and retention efforts, bringing in what Leshin called “hundreds” of experienced employees, more than 50 of which are people who previously worked at JPL and decided to come back. “We’ve overcome our workforce issues, our missions are staffed and we are much stronger today,” she said. The lessons from Psyche are being applied to other missions at JPL. Leshin said that the Europa Clipper mission, under development for an October 2024 launch to study the icy moon of Jupiter, underwent a reorganization like that for Psyche to focus on the remaining work. One recommendation that the independent review board found inadequate was improving the standing review board (SRB) process, an outside board for missions like Psyche designed to find issues like those Psyche encountered and communicate them to project and NASA leadership. The timing of the SRB reviews did not allow them to effectively catch the issues that delayed the mission, the independent panel concluded. Young said an SRB can be “an extraordinarily credible project management tool” provided it has the right people and meets frequently enough to timely identify problems. “It’s something that needed a lot of attention” for mission in general, and not just Psyche, he concluded. He said NASA agreed that the SRB process needs to be strengthened, and it is a work in progress. “I have high expectations that we are going to get this SRB process under control so we really can count on it to be a check and a balance on flight projects.” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, agreed that the SRB process can be improved. “The intent here is to take the findings and really overhaul, or re-look at, the SRB processes across all of NASA.” There are no plans to do “full-up” reviews of other centers working on NASA science missions, said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for science, given the time and effort involved. “What we are doing is we’re making a very concerted effort to ensure that all of the lessons learned and best practices are being openly passed to all of the other centers,” she said. Fox, who took the job in February , said she was pleased with the progress to get Psyche back on track and to improve JPL. “We certainly don’t feel that we can rest or even believe that the issues have gone away or will go away,” she said. “What we really feel here is that we’ve started to change, and this change must continue.”
SAN FRANCISCO – EOS Data Analytics is acquiring imagery from the first satellite in the Silicon Valley company’s agriculture-focused constellation. The satellite, built by Dragonfly Aerospace of South Africa, also served as the first on-orbit propulsion demonstration by Ukrainian startup Space Electric Thruster Systems. EOSDA, Dragonfly and Space Electric Thruster Systems (SETS) are part of the Noosphere space group, established in 2015 by international entrepreneur Max Polyakov to create an integrated space business . Another Noosphere Ventures company, Flight Control Propulsion , oversaw 3D printing of components and the satellite structure for EOS Sat-1. “This is truly an international effort by private companies that have one single leadership,” Artiom Anisimov, EOSDA CEO and Noosphere Ventures Partners president, told SpaceNews . By the end of June, EOSDA expects to begin selling EOS Sat-1 imagery commercially and offering priority tasking for customers in the United States, Canada, Southeast Asia and Australia. Imagery and analytics combined in products aimed at the agriculture market will be available in July, said Rim Elijah, EOSDA vice president of sales. EOSDA, which started as a software company, designed its constellation and sensors to provide reliable crop-classification and yield-prediction tools for agriculture and forestry. Dragonfly “built the satellite with the bands that are lacking in the market,” Anisimov said. “When we combine them with what’s already out there, we have this unique product offering. With AI modeling, everybody who has access to the same data will have very similar models. Once you have your proprietary dataset that makes all the difference in the world.” EOSDA’s goal is to provide predictive modeling and recommendations to farmers. “Customers want to know why things are happening and what should be done,” Elijah said. “Are problems as a result of pests, disease, fungus, climate change or bad practices from the farmers themselves?” EOSDA also is preparing to feed data from EOS Sat-1 into EOSDA LandViewer, an online source for current and historical imagery that extends beyond the agriculture sector to serve markets like real estate and defense. SETS, founded in Dnipro in 2016, is establishing a European site for final assembly of its Hall-effect thrusters, which fired for the first time on EOS Sat-1. “We waited until we got this flight heritage to make the next move,” SETS CEO Viktor Serbin told SpaceNews . “Now we will work for the expansion of the company.” SETS has developed two propulsion systems. Both feature Hall-effect thrusters, but SETS’ proprietary cathodes and power processing units have made the technology “a little bit more efficient,” Serbin said. “In the space industry, each percent of efficiency is important.” EOS Sat-1 is relying on SETS Hall-effect thrusters for orbit maintenance and eventual deorbit. Obtaining consistent Earth imaging for high-precision agricultural applications requires reliable and efficient propulsion, Serbin said. In the future SETS plans to sell off-the-shelf and bespoke propulsion systems “to become a part of the worldwide market for propulsion systems,” Serbin said. EOS Sat-1 was launched Jan. 3 on the SpaceX Transporter-6 rideshare flight. The company intends to launch two more satellites per year until the seven-satellite constellation is completed. “We’re exploring ways to attract third-party capital to accelerate the deployment,” Anisimov said.
The U.S. Space Force awarded L3Harris Technologies a $29 million contract to design a sensor payload that can track hypersonic missiles from medium Earth orbit. The contract, announced June 5, positions L3Harris as a possible third vendor in the program known as MTC Epoch 1, short for missile warning, missile tracking, missile track custody. The Space Force has already selected Millennium Space Systems and Raytheon Technologies to design sensors for MTC Epoch 1. Missile-detection satellites in medium orbits will be part of the United States’ layered missile defense system that currently includes ground, sea-based and space sensors. The Space Development Agency and Missile Defense Agency are responsible for the low Earth orbit layer. L3Harris is under contract to produce low Earth orbit missile-tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency . “Adding a third vendor reduces risk and non-recurring engineering not only for Epoch 1, but for future Epochs as well,” said Col. Heather Bogstie, senior materiel leader for resilient missile warning, tracking and defense at Space Systems Command. One-year OTA contract The Space Systems Command said the agreement with L3Harris was funded by a congressional add-on. Under the one-year “Other Transaction” agreement, L3Harris will design a sensor payload and, if successful, the Space Systems Command will have the option to purchase up to three payloads and satellites. Bogstie said both Millennium Space Systems and Raytheon are on contract for “one initial satellite each with the option to quickly acquire up to three additional satellites pending proven and matured designs.” Parsons last month was awarded a $55 million contract for the Epoch 1 ground system. The planned constellation of at least six satellites will be deployed in medium Earth orbit starting in late 2026.
Digital twins for years have been hyped as the next big thing in the space industry. While the technology is still evolving, companies in this sector see a growing demand for digital engineering tools to design complex satellite networks. “We’re finally at this transition point, from being a buzzword and experiencing a lot of cynicism, to something that people see a real need for,” said Robbie Robertson, co-founder and CEO of Sedaro, a startup that develops digital engineering software focused on space systems. The company, based in Arlington, Virginia, was founded in 2016. It has won nearly $3 million in small business research awards from the Defense Department and NASA, and has also raised venture capital. The scale and complexity of satellite constellations make digital twins a necessity, said Robertson. The problem, especially for military programs, is that they have been sold legacy digital design tools rebranded as digital twins, he said. In the planning and designing of large satellite constellations, “when you connect the virtual and the physical, you can manage complexity to the degree that humans can’t manage it,” he said. Digital twins are gaining traction in military satellite programs as DoD plans the next generation of space systems, Robertson said. Sedaro’s software, he said, is used by the Pentagon’s requirements organization that oversees major systems acquisitions. A digital twin of a missile tracking satellite network, for example, helps decision makers tweak requirements before they acquire the satellites. The Space Force is using a digital twin to plan an experiment called Tetra 5 , to refuel satellites in orbit. “This is an example of a program that requires the delivery of a digital twin along with the physical system,” said Robertson. AI platform for digital engineering Military space programs also are target customers for a digital engineering startup called Istari , backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and run by former Pentagon procurement official Will Roper. Roper, Istari’s founder and CEO, said the development of military aircraft, satellites and other systems could be made faster and cheaper if platforms could be designed, tested and even certified through modeling and simulation. That is not possible today, he said, as military procurement programs rely on a mishmash of models and simulations from different contractors that don’t play together in an integrated digital environment. Istari’s AI platform would serve as a common operating system for models and simulations. The idea is to allow any model to plug and play regardless of who owns them. The Space Force could really benefit from this technology, Roper said. A satellite operator, for example, would train on the same model that the engineer is designing on. This would be a true digital thread, allowing engineers to constantly update and improve their designs with real-time data from the users. A ‘true’ digital twin Robertson said customers often are overwhelmed by the marketing buzzwords and the multiple definitions of digital twin . The way he explains it is as a “a high-fidelity virtual representation of the physical system that exists throughout its entire lifecycle, up to the point where the behavior of the orbiting system and its twin are perfectly synchronized.” Sedaro in April launched an updated version of its cloud-based digital engineering tool that it hopes will convince skeptics that the technology is not just another overhyped trend. “A lot of people have been disappointed in where we are with digital engineering for space systems,” he said. That’s understandable, “since we haven’t used software to enable a dramatic improvement in the complexity and quality of hardware technologies.” DoD satellite programs for years have relied on a messy combination of in-house and decades-old commercial software products to design their own digital twins. These legacy technologies, said Robertson, cannot be scaled to the large satellite constellations the military is planning for the future, such as the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit architecture . Digital engineering to plan constellation In its latest solicitation for communications satellites , the Space Development Agency is asking contractors to submit digital representations of their satellites so the agency can build models. “They didn’t specifically call for digital twins” but they are moving in that direction, said Robertson. “There’s a lot of knobs you can turn on what digital twins might mean for that particular organization.” For DoD, having digital twins of operational satellites “is really the most exciting future application of this technology,” he said. Traditionally people think of an engineering simulation as a design tool “before you have hardware, before you have a physical system,” he added. “But the way that digital twins will primarily be used is for operations, simulating the system at really high fidelity so that you can optimize how you’re using it, find vulnerabilities from a military perspective and do predictive maintenance, which is how digital twins are used a lot in other industries.” Digital engineering platforms, to be viable in the defense market, have to be interoperable environments, much like the internet, so DoD is not dependent on a single vendor, he said. Organizations like SDA that buy satellites from different manufacturers don’t want to have to pay millions of dollars for incompatible models and software tools. Within the Space Force, there is a push to introduce digital technologies into every aspect of their operations, and that will include digital engineering, said Robertson. What that actually means at the user level is still unclear, he said. “The leadership is saying we’re gonna be a digital service, but they’re relying on legacy providers of bespoke software tools.” Under a new program called National Space Test and Training Complex , the Space Force will seek industry pitches on a number of technologies, including digital engineering. “There’s all these digital engineering ecosystems and toolsets getting stood up, including digital twin stuff,” said Robertson. “But there’s not a clear winner.” Tough decisions lie ahead in this area, he said, “They’ve got all these overlapping, redundant efforts. So which one’s going to be the operational cloud ecosystem?” The Space Systems Command in April announced plans to launch a digital engineering “ecosystem platform to help the U.S. Space Force and its mission partners stay ahead of the threats.” The digital platform, expected to be completed in 2025, “will help to integrate existing digital engineering efforts across the USSF ecosystem.”
A Falcon 9 launched a cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station on a mission emphasizing station hardware and supplies over science. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 11:47 a.m. Eastern June 5. The Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage 12 minutes after liftoff, a few minutes after the Falcon 9 first stage landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The launch of the mission, designated CRS-28 and part of SpaceX’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA, was scheduled for June 3 but postponed because of poor weather at the launch site and to provide more time to complete vehicle preparation. A June 4 launch opportunity was called off because of poor weather for the booster landing. SpaceX continues to use droneship landings for cargo Dragon missions even as it shifts to landings back at Cape Canaveral for crewed launches, starting with the Ax-2 private astronaut mission May 21 . SpaceX officials then that they had found sufficient additional performance in the Falcon 9 to enable landings back at the Cape for Crew Dragon launches. “For every CRS mission we’ll evaluate the mission’s mass needs and performance needs and the performance of the vehicle against opportunities to return to the launch site,” said Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, during a June 2 prelaunch briefing. The CRS-28 mission is carrying about 3,300 kilograms of cargo to the station, and is scheduled to dock at about 5:50 a.m. Eastern June 6. Its biggest payload is a third pair of ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or IROSA, that will augment the station’s ability to generate power. Those arrays will be installed during a pair of spacewalks currently scheduled for June 9 and 15. Those arrays will join four IROSA arrays installed on other spacewalks, completing the planned upgrade of the station’s power system. At a June 1 briefing, Dina Contella, NASA ISS operations integration manager, said the agency is considering a fourth pair of IROSA arrays, but needed to identify funding for them. Cygnus delays In addition to the solar arrays, the Dragon is delivering nearly 1,110 kilograms of crew supplies, 490 kilograms of vehicle hardware and 266 kilograms of science. That is far less science that past cargo Dragon missions: the CRS-27 mission in March carried about 975 kilograms of science investigations, compared to 745 kilograms of supplies and 440 kilograms of vehicle hardware. At a May 30 briefing about science on the mission, Kirt Costello, NASA ISS chief scientist, said that more supplies were flown on CRS-28 because of delays in the next Cygnus cargo mission, NG-19, by Northrop Grumman. “It’s also making up for the delays that we had in our NG Cygnus vehicle arriving at the station, so we’re sending up lots of extra logistics, crew supplies, for the crew to keep them going throughout the end of the year,” he said. That Cygnus mission, once planned to launch in the spring, has slipped to later in the summer, although NASA officials have not announced a launch date yet for that spacecraft. “Our Northrop Grumman partners have been working to go determine when the vehicle is ready to fly,” said Phil Dempsey, NASA ISS transportation integration manager, at the June 2 briefing. “That one just wasn’t quite ready for the earlier opportunity.” The previous Cygnus mission, NG-18, launched in November. It successfully arrived at the ISS and carried out its mission despite the failure of one of its two solar arrays to deploy after launch . Northrop said at the time that an acoustic blanket from its Antares launch vehicle lodged in the array mechanism and kept it from deploying, but neither NASA nor Northrop have disclosed additional information about the incident. Asked if the readiness issue had to do with the Cygnus or the Antares, Dempsey said it was “a little bit of both.” The primary issue, he said, was understanding the “launch anomaly” on NG-18 and making sure it does not happen again on NG-19. “It’s really making sure that we have a completely healthy vehicle, from the launch vehicle and the Cygnus vehicle both.” He added that there are “other things that the Northrop Grumman team is working and communicating with NASA on” for NG-19, but did not disclose those other issues. NG-19 will be the last launch of the current version of Antares, which uses a Russian RD-181 engine in its Ukrainian-built first stage. Northrop announced last August a partnership with Firefly Aerospace to produce a new first stage, using engines under development by Firefly. Northrop will launch several Cygnus missions on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets until the new version of Antares is ready. CRS-28 science Despite the limited room on the Dragon for science, Costello said at the May 30 briefing that there is still a “very good mix” of biological science, Earth science and technology demonstration payloads on the mission. Among them are experiments to study plant growth in space and observing upward-directed lightning in thunderstorms. The spacecraft is also carrying five cubesats built by Canadian universities and sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency. Among them is ESSENCE, a cubesat that will monitor thawing permafrost in arctic regions, and Iris, which will expose a set of minerals to space and train a camera on them to monitor how they are affected by the space environment. CRS-28 will remain docked to the ISS for about three weeks. There are no plans to extend the spacecraft’s stay at the ISS, officials said at the June 2 briefing, even though delays in the launch of Boeing’ CST-100 Starliner on a crewed test flight have eliminate the urgency of freeing up a docking port for that mission. Costello said NASA is looking ahead to the CRS-29 cargo Dragon mission at the end of the summer along with the delayed NG-19 Cygnus. Those missions, he said, will be “bringing up a big collection of science that we’ve been accumulating on the ground, ready to go.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s $6.2 billion Inmarsat acquisition has created a satellite communications behemoth with revenues that would rival other geostationary operators even after their potential consolidation deals. Inmarsat is set to help U.S.-based Viasat generate $4.5 billion in revenue for the 12 months to March 31 after its sale wrapped up last week , according to William Blair analyst Louis DiPalma, nearly 60% more than its $2.8 billion forecast without the British operator. The companies have previously operated under different fiscal financial years but recorded around $4 billion in total revenues for 2022, although Viasat has since also sold off a tactical data business that had generated about $400 million in annual sales. Meanwhile, Intelsat and SES, the world’s largest geostationary orbit (GEO) operators by number of satellites, are in talks about creating a merged company that would generate around $4 billion in combined revenues. And GEO fleet operator Eutelsat has said it should nearly double annual sales in five years to around $2 billion if its merger with low Earth orbit (LEO) venture OneWeb gets approved this summer. All these companies are likely eclipsed in revenues by privately held SpaceX, which pulls in billions for its launch business as the company rapidly expands its Starlink LEO broadband constellation. Combining satellite fleets DiPalma forecasts the enlarged Viasat will post $1.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, for the 12 months to March 31, versus $549 million without Inmarsat. The combined company has 19 satellites in its fleet — when counting the Anik F2 under a lifetime lease from Canada’s Telesat — and around 8,000 employees. Inmarsat provided 13 of these satellites and roughly 1,800 employees. SES has more than 70 satellites across geostationary and medium Earth orbit, while Intelsat has over 50 in GEO. Eutelsat has 38 GEO satellites in orbit, and OneWeb has 634 spacecraft in LEO, including a technology demonstrator that launched in May. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation easily overshadows all these operators combined with more than 4,000 satellites in LEO. While all of Viasat and Inmarsat’s satellites are in geostationary orbit, Inmarsat has two payloads on order that are slated to launch to highly elliptical orbit later this year for coverage over the globe’s northernmost latitudes. Inmarsat also has plans for a network in LEO, which Viasat has also been exploring . Despite announcing plans to merge a year and a half ago, Viasat and Inmarsat have spent little time comparing internal plans as they waited to clear regulatory approvals, Inmarsat chief technology officer Peter Hadinger said in an interview earlier this year . The operators officially closed their acquisition May 30 but have not yet set a date for when they expect to complete their integration process. The merger, and other operator consolidation deals in the works or under consideration, come amid a growing threat to GEO business models from LEO. Starlink has been taking subscribers away from Viasat’s residential broadband business, DiPalma noted, and competition is set to intensify as Amazon prepares to launch initial services from its proposed $10 billion constellation next year.
The top Republican members of two oversight committees have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review a major new weather satellite program. In a June 1 letter, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), the chairman of the House Science Committee, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, requested the review of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Extended Operations, or GeoXO, program of next-generation weather satellites, citing concerns about cost overruns and delays. GeoXO is the successor to the ongoing GOES-R line of geostationary weather satellites that will ensure continuity of observations as well as new capabilities. NOAA projects spending $19.6 billion over the life of the six-satellite GeoXO program, extending to the middle of the century, nearly double what it spent on GOES-R. In their letter , Lucas and Cruz did not cite any specific issues with GeoXO but instead noted prior cost and schedule problems with GOES-R. “The delays and budget overruns in the GOES-R program make it all the more important to ensure that GeoXO is well-managed, as any problems will be magnified by the greater complexity and cost of GeoXO,” they wrote. They asked that the GAO examine if NOAA has followed “best practices and statutory guidance” in setting cost estimates for GeoXO, review the design and development of the program, assess NOAA’s strategies to stay on cost and schedule, and look at how NOAA has incorporated lessons learned from GOES-R. The GeoXO program is still in its early phases. NOAA selected L3Harris in March to provide the imager instrument for the satellites under a $765.5 million contract. NOAA plans to select a provider for a new sounder instrument later in the year. NOAA requested $417.4 million for GeoXO in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal. The program received $285 million in fiscal year 2023, far less than the $653.8 million it requested. Appropriators said the funding they provided would be sufficient to complete formulation studies and award the imager contract. “NOAA’s current constellation has proven its worth and will continue to do so for another decade. However, NOAA must concurrently invest in the next generation of environmental satellites with the needs of all of our communities in mind,” Rick Spinrad, NOAA administrator, said in his opening statement at a House Science Committee hearing May 11 about his agency’s budget proposal, noting that the funding for GeoXO and other future satellite programs would “ensure critical data continuity” from existing systems and add new capabilities. Spinrad also said at the hearing that he was working to create a “rigorous acquisition strategy and structure” at NOAA, one that, for weather satellite programs, will continue to rely on NASA for handing procurements of satellites and instruments. “While these appear to be positive steps,” Lucas and Cruz said that effort in their letter to the GAO, “it is unclear if this new process will be successful.”
The United Arab Emirates has released new details about its planned mission to the main asteroid belt, one that is similar to an ongoing NASA mission. The UAE Space Agency said its Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) is scheduled to launch in March 2028, flying by six asteroids in the main asteroid belt before arriving at a seventh asteroid in 2034. “EMA is a key component of the UAE National Space Strategy and has one overriding goal: the creation of viable and rewarding employment opportunities for young Emiratis for generations to come,” Sarah Al Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency, said in a statement. The EMA spacecraft, called MBR Explorer after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the UAE, will weigh nearly 2,300 kilograms at launch and carry four instruments from American and Italian partners. The agency said that more than 50% of the “overall contracted mission” will be developed by UAE companies, but listed only satellite operator Yahsat in the announcement. The UAE Space Agency had previously stated it planned to develop an asteroid mission as a successor to the $200 million Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), a Mars orbiter also known as Hope that launched in 2020 and remains operational today. The May 29 announcement provided the most details to date about the planned mission and its partners. Notaby absent from the announcement, though, was the estimated cost of EMA. A spokesperson representing the UAE Space Agency did not respond to questions about the mission, including its cost. The MBR Explorer spacecraft bears a resemblance to NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, launched in October 2021 on a mission to fly by two main belt asteroids and several Trojan asteroids that lead and follow Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. The Lucy mission has a total cost, including launch and operations, of nearly $1 billion. That similarity includes the use of large circular solar panels to provide power. Lucy’s arrays, 7.3 meters in diameter and built by Northrop Grumman, give the spacecraft a length of nearly 16 meters. The UAE Space Agency did not disclose the size of the arrays or their manufacturer, but noted that when deployed the spacecraft will be 16 meters long. EMA will have a narrow launch period of just three weeks in March 2028 to carry out the mission. It will fly by Venus in July 2028 and Earth in May 2029 before going by the main belt asteroids Westerwald, Chimaera and Rockox between February 2030 and January 2031. A Mars gravity assist in September 2031 would set up three more asteroid flybys, of 2000 VA28, 1998 RC76 and 1999 SG6, between July 2032 and August 2033. The mission will conclude by rendezvousing with a seventh main belt asteroid, Justitia, in October 2034. It will remain there at least through May 2035, when it will release a lander to touch down on the surface. The UAE Space Agency said the lander will come from “an Emirati private space sector startup” but did not disclose the name of that company or other details about the lander. The mission has several scientific objectives, with the primary one to study the origin and evolution of water-rich asteroids. Planetary scientists suspect that Justitia, which is unusually red, may have formed in the outer solar system and later migrated into the main belt. “As with EMM, novel science and an open contribution of our science data to the global community without embargo are important aspects of EMA,” said Hoor Al Mazmi, leader of the science team of EMA, in a statement. The mission will work with several universities and organizations in the UAE and elsewhere. The University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmopsheric and Space Physics will be the “knowledge transfer partner” on EMA, a role it also had with the Hope Mars orbiter where it supported assembly and testing of the spacecraft. The UAE Space Agency said it has not selected a launch provider for the mission.
Military satellites acquired under fixed-price contracts get high praise in a report submitted to Congress by the Department of the Air Force. Two Space Force satellite programs — the Global Positioning System Follow-on (GPS 3F) and the Weather System Follow-on (WSF) — were identified in the report as “high performing,” in part because they were acquired under fixed-price contracts. Space Force procurement chief Frank Calvelli has advocated the use of fixed-price contracts for virtually all satellite procurements. He has been critical of traditional military “cost plus” acquisitions where the government reimburses all of the costs associated with a project, plus a negotiated profit fee. “The GPS 3F program used a fixed-price incentive fee contract with incentives for meeting schedule targets,” Calvelli wrote in the report, the contents of which were first published May 31 by Inside Defense . Calvelli, who is assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, is required by the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act to submit an annual assessment of space acquisition programs. The February 2023 report includes a list of the top five and the worst five performing programs, based on criteria “consistent with best acquisition practices.” The GPS 3F program is one of the Space Force’s largest satellite procurements. Up to 22 satellites are being produced by Lockheed Martin under a 2018 agreement worth $7.2 billion. In the report, Cavelli said the contract included “pre-priced options leveraging economies of scale, reducing unit costs by approximately $100 million per satellite when purchasing more than one satellite at a time.” On the Weather System Follow-on (WSF), the report said it “met cost and schedule baselines through building upon previous flight-proven designs, leveraging long-standing civil and international partnerships, and negotiating a firm fixed price contract with a proven vendor.” The Space Force has bought two WSF microwave sensing satellites from Ball Aerospace, each estimated to cost about $500 million. The other three programs Calvelli identified as high performing are the Enhanced Polar System recapitalization (EPS-R) , the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 and the Space Based Infrared System Block Buy (SBIRS GEO 5-6). Lowest performing programs The five lowest performers include long-troubled programs that for years have been flagged by the Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs for schedule setbacks and cost overruns. The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System (OCX) program “has experienced numerous cost overruns and schedule delays against its original program baseline,” the report said. “The underlying causes of poor performance are the contractor’s incomplete understanding of the tull scope of stringent cybersecurity requirements, and the government’s deficiency in effectively communicating these requirements upfront.” The Space Command and Control (Space C2) program — intended to replace the aging Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) — “has not met its schedule commitment to deliver a new Space Domain Awareness C2 capability that allows for the decommissioning of the SPADOC legacy system.” The poor performance, the report said, is due to “resources not being aligned to priorities, lack of sufficient systems engineering expertise, lack of understanding of external dependencies impacting development, and poorly defined relationships with user and test communities. The Space Force has implemented “corrective actions” and has begun delivery of the Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS) program to replace SPADOC. The Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-sight Terminals ( FAB-T ) for secure satellite communications have experienced “over a decade of schedule delays against the original schedule,” the report said. The Space Force is working to address “obsolescence issues and platform specific requirements.” The GPS receivers known as Military GPS User Equipment Increment 1 program “have experienced cost overruns and schedule delays” due to software development setbacks, said the report. The program is being restructured from cost-plus to firm-fixed-price to “levy more cost growth accountability on the contractor.” The Enterprise Ground Services (EGS) — a ground systems architecture intended to replace legacy ground stations for military satellites — last year was identified by the Space Force as problematic. Calvelli’s report said the program suffers from “unstable definitions of responsibilities between EGS and mission partners … and insufficient resources to support multiple mission partners simultaneously.” The Space Force is looking at options to restructure the program or seek a commercial provider that can more efficiently deliver those services.
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth $80.3 million to conduct communications experiments using multiple commercial space internet services. Under a program called Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet ( DEUCSI ), AFRL is working with defense contractors and commercial satcom providers to figure out how to integrate commercial space internet services with military platforms and weapon systems. Under the four-year contract, announced June 2, Northrop Grumman will connect military platforms — such as aircraft and ground vehicles — with commercial space internet constellations that operate in geostationary, medium and low-Earth orbits. AFRL started the DEUCSI in 2017 The Air Force established the program in an effort to demonstrate the utility of commercial satcom services. One of the goals is to connect satcom services from multiple providers into a seamless network, accessed via common user terminals. Several defense contractors and commercial satcom providers have won DEUCSI contracts since the program started in 2017, According to the announcement, Northrop Grumman’s award was a sole-source contract not open to competitive bids.
Hyperspectral imaging startup Pixxel raised $36 million in a Series B funding round led by Google. Pixxel announced June 1 the Series B round, which included Google as well as existing investors Radical Ventures, Lightspeed, Blume Ventures, grow x , Sparta and Athera. The company, which did not disclose the valuation of the round, has now raised $71 million. The company, with offices in the United States and India, is working on a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites. It launched its first pathfinder satellites in 2022 and is planning a constellation of 24 satellites it expects to deploy by 2025. “With this round of funding, we are even closer now to realizing our mission of building a health monitor for the planet and empowering people around the world to make informed decisions about our collective well-being,” Awais Ahmed, chief executive and co-founder of Pixxel, said in a statement. The funding will go towards development of that constellation as well as an analytics platform called Aurora that the company says will use artificial intelligence technologies to produce useful information products to customers. Pixxel seeks to tap into growing interesting in hyperspectral data, which provides much greater spectral information but has long has a reputation for being difficult to work with. Pixxel is one of six companies that signed agreements with the National Reconnaissance Office in March for that agency’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements program for hyperspectral imagery. Under the agreements, NRO will assess the company’s technical and business plans, and later procure hyperspectral data for demonstrations. Google did not comment on its investment in Pixxel, but an industry source said the funding came through the Google for India Digitalisation Fund. That fund, established in 2020 , set aside about $10 billion to invest in Indian companies, including those building new products and services relevant for Indian needs, supporting digital transformation efforts, and leveraging technology and artificial intelligence for health, education and agriculture. The size of Google’s investment in Pixxel was not disclosed, but would be a small fraction of an earlier investment it made in the Earth imaging industry. In 2014, Google paid an estimated $500 million to acquire Skybox Imaging, which was developing a constellation of high-resolution imaging smallsats. Google rebranded Skybox as Terra Bella, but later divested it, transferring it to Planet.
NASA and Boeing will further delay the first crewed launch of the company’s CST-100 Starliner, which had been scheduled for July, to address two newly discovered issues with the spacecraft. At a briefing June 1 announced on little more than an hour’s notice, officials said they were standing down from preparations for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) of the spacecraft, with two NASA astronauts on board, which had been scheduled for as soon as July 21. They set no new date for the test flight to the International Space Station. One issue is with components in the parachutes called soft links. Those components had a lower load limit than previously expected, decreasing the overall factor of safety in the parachute system “pretty significantly,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for CST-100 Starliner at Boeing. The second issue is with tape used to wrap wire harnesses in the spacecraft that tests have shown is flammable. That tape, he said, is used “quite extensively” on Starliner. Both concerns were highlighted as “emerging issues” in a May 26 NASA statement that was otherwise positive about the prospects for a July launch of the CFT mission. Nappi said subsequent studies of both the parachutes and the wiring issues, which had been found only recently during final certification work, led Boeing to conclude they should halt preparations for the launch. That decision, he said, went to Boeing leadership all the way to Chief Executive Dave Calhoun. “Boeing unanimously decided that this is something that we needed to correct,” Nappi said. “We decided to stand down the preparations for the CFT mission in order to correct the problems.” That decision, and the notification of NASA, took place earlier in the day. Nappi declined to say how long these issues will delay the mission. He said the company needed five to seven days to study what needs to be done and schedules for completing that work. Asked later in the call if a launch of CFT later this year was feasible, he said it was but that it was premature to consider any new launch dates for it. “I certainly don’t want to commit to any dates or timeframes until we spend the next several days understanding what we need to go do.” Both the parachute soft links and wiring tape were used on the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 uncrewed test flight in May 2022 without incident. The soft link issue, officials said, would only be a concern if one of the three main parachutes failed, putting additional loads on the other two, while the flammable tape would have required what Nappi called “multiple failures” elsewhere in the spacecraft. NASA backed Boeing’s decision to delay CFT. “We applaud Mark for deciding to stand down and we support that decision 100%,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager. He added that agency leadership, up to Administrator Bill Nelson, supported the decision. The delay is the latest in a series of setbacks for Starliner that include a flawed initial OFT test flight in December 2019 and stuck valves that delayed the OFT-2 reflight by nearly 10 months. In March, NASA and Boeing said they were delaying the CFT mission from April to July to give teams more time to complete certification work. NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), at a public meeting May 25, expressed skepticism that the agency and Boeing could complete the certification work in time for a July launch . It called on the agency to bring in an independent panel, perhaps from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC), to perform what Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, called a “deep look” at the remaining work. Stich said that the agency is accepting that recommendation through having NESC engineers embedded in teams throughout the Starliner program. Those engineers will brief a panel organized by NASA’s Office of the Chief Engineer. A similar process, he said, is used on other programs. “That’s what we plan to use to fulfill what the ASAP is requesting, which I think is an excellent request,” he said. This latest delay comes two days after the third anniversary of the launch SpaceX’s equivalent to CFT, the Demo-2 mission of its Crew Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX has now launched 10 crewed missions for NASA and private customers, most recently the Ax-2 private astronaut mission in May. Stich emphasized that NASA is still expecting Boeing to bring Starliner into service. “NASA desperately needs a second provider,” he said, providing redundancy. “We support Boeing and we’re doing everything we can during the investigation of each of these issues, and try to get to flight as soon as we can, when it’s safe to do so.” Nappi, when asked if Boeing had considered abandoning Starliner, initially offered an ambiguous response. “We’ve been talking about the future of Starliner and how we’re going to move forward,” he said. He later clarified that was referring to long-term decisions about whether to build another Starliner vehicle to support higher flight rates and when to transition from the Atlas 5 launch vehicle that will be used for initial Starliner missions. Asked later if there had been any discussions within the company about dropping Starliner, he said there had been “not serious discussions.” Stich said that he had seen progress at Boeing since the earlier problems with Starliner. “I have seen a tremendous change in the Boeing culture since the first Orbital Flight Test,” he said. He said the work leading to CFT had been “very thorough and comprehensive” and that it was uncovering design issues made years ago. “My view is that the safety culture has always been strong,” said Nappi moments later, explaining that the reason issues were just now being found was “a certain sense of optimism” in earlier phases of spacecraft design. “The process is catching these things, and we’ll continue to do these thorough reviews, catch things, talk about them and fix them.”
A ground station developed by Northrop Grumman for missile warning satellites has passed a preliminary design review, the company announced June 1. The terminal, known as Relay Ground Station-Asia (RGS-A), was funded by the U.S. Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific under a five-year $99.6 million contract. Northrop Grumman is developing the ground station in Boulder, Colorado, where the company last year opened a 23,680-square-foot facility . RGS-A will serve as a communications relay station to forward signals between different satellite networks that detect missile launches. It will allow Navy ballistic missile ships, for example, to receive early warnings from existing infrared sensor satellites and from next-generation systems that have yet to be launched to orbit. Ground station to be deployed in Guam The completion of the design review “is the next step in delivering much-needed new capabilities to the Pacific region,” Aaron Dann, vice president of strategic force programs at Northrop Grumman, said in a statement. NIWC Pacific ordered the ground station to ensure users are able to receive data from the current Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellites and the future Next-Generation Overhead Infrared constellation that will have a new ground system known as FORGE (Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution). “A cornerstone of the FORGE architecture includes developing relay ground stations capable of supporting existing and new satellite constellations with the ability to handle changes in bandwidth and availability,” Dann said. RGS-A is projected to have six antennas, and will be deployed in Guam in late 2025, according to Northrop Grumman. The antennas will be remotely monitored and operated from the United States.
Updated June 2 with additional information on Orion’s EWS prototype WASHINGTON — The Space Force is considering options to acquire small polar-orbiting weather satellites that could launch as early as 2026. Under a program called EWS, short for Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) Weather Systems, the Space Force last year selected two companies to develop prototype spacecraft and demonstrate them in orbit. One of the demonstrators, made by Orion Space Solutions, launched to orbit in January , but the cubesat did not separate from the launch vehicle, according to the Space Systems Command . The company is building another cubesat to be launched in early 2024. The other prototype, developed by General Atomics, is projected to launch in 2025 . The command’s office that oversees the EWS program is now doing market research as it weighs options to acquire future satellites. It posted a request for information last month seeking to “identify industry sources capable of providing a spacecraft bus and integration support for a low Earth orbit, polar-orbiting, sun-synchronous weather sensor being developed to meet space-based environmental monitoring requirements.” The idea is to build EWS satellites using existing sensors developed by Orion and General Atomics, said Lt. Col. Joseph Maguadog, materiel leader and program manager for EWS at the Space Systems Command’s environmental and tactical surveillance acquisition delta. Number of satellites and deployment timeline TBD Maguadog said in a statement to SpaceNews that no decisions have been made yet on how many satellites will be acquired or exactly when. EWS is needed to fill a gap in weather coverage as the military’s decades-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites are running out of fuel and projected to be out of service by 2026. The EWS satellites will collect imagery of cloud cover and other weather data used by the U.S. military and allies to plan flight routes, combat search and rescue and other missions. In a future procurement, the Space Force would select a satellite manufacturer to supply a bus, integrate a “government furnished” weather imaging sensor and provide post-launch support services. The sensor is projected to weigh no more than 160 kilograms. Maguadog said the EWS sensors developed by Orion Space and General Atomics “are promising and are the basis for the government furnished sensor.” According to the request for information, the Space Force intends to acquire one or more EWS satellites between fiscal years 2026 and 2028. The selected contractor would be responsible for ground systems support and data distribution through a government cloud platform. More satellites could be acquired in future years to cover other sun-synchronous polar orbits and improve global refresh rate. Maguadog said the recent request for information is “for market research to ensure we are continually considering any new advancements available with our industry partners.”
The Department of the Air Force selected Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen as the next commander of Space Launch Delta 45, the Space Force unit that oversees launch operations in the Eastern Range. Panzenhagen will replace Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy who also serves as program executive officer for assured access to space under the Space Systems Command. Purdy, who assumed command of Space Launch Delta 45 at Patrick Space Force Base, Florida, in January 2021, will be moving to the Pentagon to become military deputy to Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. Calvelli’s current military deputy is Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney. Praise from Calvelli Panzenhagen’s most recent assignments were as senior military assistant to the undersecretary of the Air Force, and senior material leader of the Integrated Ground Enterprise Directorate at the National Reconnaissance Office. The change of command is currently scheduled for June 30. In a message distributed to the Space Force acquisition staff earlier this week, Calvelli congratulated Panzenhagen and Purdy. Calvelli noted that Purdy during his tenure as head of Space Launch Delta 45 oversaw the launch of 17 national security space missions. He also credited Purdy for leading “ Spaceport of the Future ” initiatives, and securing over $1 billion in funding for infrastructure upgrades.
SAN FRANCISCO – Boston-based startup Fortify raised $12.5 million from investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures and Raytheon Technologies’ RTX Ventures. It was the first time the two companies invested in the same startup funding round. With the additional funding, Fortify plans to accelerate development of its Digital Composite Manufacturing platform, which prints composite materials designed down to the nanoscale for high performance, Karlo Delos Reyes, Fortify co-founder and chief customer officer, told SpaceNews by email. Fortify technology additively manufactures components for a variety of applications like satellites and cell towers. Fortify specializes, for example, in printing lenses to improve the performance of satellite antennas, Reyes said. Fortify customers include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, In-Q-Tel, the U.S. Energy Department and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. “We are thrilled to have Lockheed Martin Ventures and RTX Ventures as strategic investors in this funding round,” Fortify CEO Lawrence Gant said in a statement. “Their expertise and global reach in the aerospace and defense industries will be invaluable in helping us to continue to innovate and scale our Digital Composite Manufacturing platform.” Fortify announced a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin in December. “Lockheed Martin Ventures’ continued investment in Fortify underpins the strategic advantage the company can bring to the defense industrial base,” Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, said in a statement. “We believe Fortify has the potential to deliver tailored solutions not only to the aerospace and defense industry, but a range of sectors that can benefit from their platforms.” Daniel Ateya, RTX Ventures president, said in a statement that Fortify “has demonstrated an innovative and laser-focused vision that should advance additive manufacturing capabilities to the next level. Their DCM platform aligns with our commitment to investing in cutting-edge technologies that can deliver significant value to our customers and partners.” Additional Fortify investors include Accel, Cota Capital, Neotribe, Prelude, Mainspring and Ocean Azul. Fortify raised $20 million in a Series B funding round in 2021. Clarification: Lockheed Martin Ventures and RTX Ventures made separate investments in Fortify’s investment round .
Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser took a step closer to its long-awaited first flight by powering up its systems in a key test. The company announced May 31 that it had powered up the spaceplane in its assembly facility for the first time, feeding electrical power into the vehicle that, in space, would be generated by its solar panels and turning on flight computers and other components. “This is a milestone that points to the future and is a key moment in a long journey for Dream Chaser,” said Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, in a statement about the test. The test comes as the company prepares to ship the first Dream Chaser, called Tenacity, to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, the former Plum Brook Station. There, the spacecraft will go through thermal vacuum tests before shipping to Cape Canaveral for final launch preparations. Sierra Space did not disclose a schedule for those milestones in the announcement of the powering up test. Speaking during a panel at the 38 th Space Symposium in April, Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, said Dream Chaser would ship to the test facility “in the July timeframe.” She said the vehicle would be tested there for a few months before shipping to Florida. “We should be ready to go by the end of this year,” she said of launch plans for Dream Chaser. That schedule will depend not just on the readiness of Dream Chaser but also the manifest of missions going to the International Space Station as well as the status of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. Dream Chaser is slated to launch on the second Vulcan mission, after a launch of an Astrobotic lunar lander that has slipped to later this summer because of launch vehicle testing issues. In preparation for that launch, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli and JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa recently trained on Dream Chaser systems, including how to transfer cargo between the spacecraft and the ISS. Moghbeli and Furukawa are assigned to the Crew-7 mission, scheduled to launch to the station as soon as mid-August, remaining there through February 2024. Dream Chaser will initially be used to transport cargo to and from the ISS through a Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. Sierra Space, though, is planning other applications for the vehicle, including a crewed version. That DC-200 variant will be a little bit larger and have a slightly different outer mold line, Kavanadi said at the conference. In preparation for those future crewed flights, Sierra Space is planning to select its own professional astronaut corps. “We will do that upon the first successful landing of Dream Chaser,” she said, with an initial group of 12 to 15 people. Those astronauts will be trained at a facility the company is establishing in Florida, which will also be used to train researchers and other private astronauts planning to go to Orbital Reef, the commercial space station Sierra Space is developing in partnership with Blue Origin and several other companies.
The Department of the Air Force announced May 31 it selected Patrick Space Force Base, Florida, as the preferred location for the headquarters of the Space Training and Readiness Command and Space Delta 10. Space Delta 10 is the unit responsible for doctrine and wargaming. The Space Training and Readiness Command , known as STARCOM, is one of three U.S. Space Force field commands, responsible for the development, education and training of space professionals. It also oversees pace warfighting doctrine and tactics, and the operational test and evaluation of Space Force systems. Patrick Space Force Base is home to Space Launch Delta 45, the unit that manages the Eastern Range, including Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center. Other units to be based in New Mexico and Colorado The Air Force selected Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, as the preferred location for Space Delta 11, and Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado, as the preferred location for Space Delta 12. Space Delta 11 is responsible for training ranges and aggressor squadrons that serve as enemy units during wargames and exercises. Space Delta 12 is responsible for the testing and evaluation of Space Force systems. The Air Force also announced that Space Delta 15, a space defense and intelligence unit activated in March 2023, is expected to be permanently based at Schriever Space Force Base, along with the new 75th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Squadron. The Space Operations Command plans to activate the 75th ISR Squadron in late 2023. The 74th ISR Squadron, activated in November 2022, will be based at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. “The Department of the Air Force’s decision to host Space Delta 15 and the two ISR squadrons came after conducting thorough site surveys which assessed the location’s ability to facilitate the missions and infrastructure capacity while accounting for community support, environmental factors and cost,” the department said in a statement. “The decision to host STARCOM HQ and the three deltas at their respective bases came after conducting site surveys at each location to assess their ability to facilitate the mission and infrastructure capacity, while accounting for community support, environmental factors, and cost.” The Department of the Air Force will conduct environmental impact analyses at each base, which are expected to be completed later this year before final decisions are made. Reaction from lawmakers Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in a tweet said the decision to base STARCOM at Patrick is a “major victory for Florida.” Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said the new Space Force units to be based in Colorado bring more than 500 guardians to the state.“Colorado Springs continues to prove itself as the premier location for our nation’s space defense operations,” Lamborn said in a statement. 
U.S. Space Command has officially been assigned new responsibilities for managing the network of sensors that protect the United States from missile strikes, a job previously held by U.S. Strategic Command. “The President of the United States approved and directed the implementation of the 2022 Unified Command Plan Apr. 25, 2023,” Space Command said May 31. The plan directs the transfer of missile defense responsibilities from the U.S. Strategic Command commander to the U.S. Space Command commander. A key role in missile defense is to detect launches of potential threats such as North Korean ballistic missiles, and provide early warning. This realignment gives Space Command a larger footprint in U.S. national security. U.S. Space Command, currently headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, was activated in August 2019 to oversee military operations in the space domain. Gen. James Dickinson, who has led Space Command since 2020, previously ran the U.S. Army’s missile defense organization and has advocated for closer integration of space and missile defense assets and operations. Dickinson has argued that sensors used for space domain awareness and missile defense, such as Army and Navy radars, Space Force surveillance systems and commercial assets would be more effective as an integrated network. Changes follow ‘comprehensive study’ The transfer of responsibilities follows a “comprehensive study on the roles, responsibilities and authorities associated with the missile defense enterprise and represents an alignment to the 2022 Missile Defense Review,” Dickinson said May 31 in a statement. “Integration of systems and fighting doctrine is critical to modern warfare,” he added. “By bringing the three mission areas of missile warning, missile defense and space domain awareness under one command as the global sensor manager, Space Command can more effectively integrate and fuse the sensor data for rapid detection, characterization, tracking and dissemination to ensure theaters can defeat any threat.” Space Command will oversee the management of missile defense assets, coordinate training exercises and cooperation with allies. Under the new plan, Space Command will absorb Strategic Command’s missile defense component, known as the Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense (JFCC IMD), run by Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler. The JFCC IMD is an influential organization located at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado, that includes Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Space and Air Force personnel, as well as U.S. government civilians and contractors. The JFCC IMD advocates for investments in new capabilities and works directly with the Missile Defense Agency. Meanwhile, U.S. Strategic Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command will continue to perform threat warning assessments in support of missile defense. Gen. Anthony Cotton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, said he is “confident that this UCP better supports our integrated deterrence framework in safeguarding our nation.” 
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said May 31 that its first spy satellite launch ended in failure after the carrier rocket’s second stage malfunctioned. Despite the failure, the launch triggered international condemnation because a satellite launch by the nuclear-armed North violates U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban the country from conducting any launch based on ballistic technology. The White House called the launch a “brazen violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions” in a May 30 statement . The rocket, named Chollima-1, crashed into the sea nearly 200 kilometers west of South Korea’s southwestern island of Eocheong, after lifting off from a launch site in Tongchang-ri in North Pyongan Province at 5:29 p.m. Eastern May 30, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The flight lasted about six minutes, it added. The rocket flew southward, carrying the North’s first military reconnaissance satellite, Malligyong-1. The rocket and the satellite are brand-new, suggesting their capacity and other technical details are shrouded in mystery. But some information is expected to emerge as the South Korean military recovered parts of the launch vehicle near the crash site, where the exclusive economic zones of China and South Korea meet. The military shared pictures of debris pulled from the water, including a large cylindrical object tethered to a buoy. About one hour after the rocket lifted off, the South Korean military announced that the rocket “fell into the waters after an abnormal flight.” It was followed by the North’s official announcement of the launch failure. The rocket plunged into the sea “after losing thrust due to the abnormal starting of the second-stage engine after the separation of the first stage during the normal flight,” said North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The agency said the failure could be blamed for “the low reliability and stability of the new-type engine system applied to carrier rocket Chollima-1 and the unstable character of the fuel used.” It did not provide further details. The KCNA said the National Aerospace Development Administration (NADA) would investigate the “serious defects” and take action to overcome them before conducting a second launch as soon as possible. The May 31 flight was the North’s sixth satellite launch attempt and the first since 2016, according to a report issued in November 2022 by the Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS). North Korea has two satellites in orbit — KMS ​​3-2 and KMS-4 — launched in 2012 and 2016, respectively, although they are non-functional, according to Voice of America . Denouncing the launch, the White House said President Joe Biden and his security team are assessing the situation in coordination with the allies and partners. “The United States strongly condemns the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for its launch using ballistic missile technology, which is a brazen violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, raises tensions, and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region and beyond,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in the May 30 statement . DPRK is the North’s official name. In a separate release , the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command stressed the “ironclad” security commitment to South Korea and Japan, saying it will continue to monitor the situation. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “strongly” condemned the launch and reiterated his call for the North to cease such acts and to “swiftly” resume dialogue for peace, his spokesperson said in a statement. The top nuclear envoys of South Korea, the United States and Japan held three-way phone talks and also “strongly condemned” the launch, saying that it cannot be justified in any way, according to South Korea’s foreign ministry .
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said May 31 it closed the acquisition of Inmarsat it announced a year and a half ago after clearing all regulatory hurdles to consolidate the satellite operators. Mark Dankberg, Viasat’s chair and CEO, is taking the same roles for the combined company. Former Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri and chair Andy Sukawaty are becoming board directors at Viasat to represent the private equity group that owned the British satellite operator. The corporate headquarters of the combined group is based at Viasat’s HQ in Carlsbad, California. Inmarsat’s base in London is the group’s global international business headquarters. Viasat spokesperson Deb Green said further decisions are ongoing around the group’s organizational structure and the integration of people, processes, and systems. “There is no set deadline for completion and in an industry as dynamic as ours, the process of adaptation and change will be on-going,” Green said via email. Regulators in Europe and the United Kingdom had heavily scrutinized the merger, focusing mainly on concerns it could lead to higher prices for Wi-Fi on planes and reduced quality. Following lengthy investigations, regulators ruled that established players and newer market entrants such as SpaceX’s Starlink would place sufficient competitive pressure on the enlarged group. Viasat and Inmarsat have 19 in-orbit satellites across Ka-, L- and S- band spectrum to provide connectivity and safety services across maritime, aviation, government, and consumer markets. Their merger announcement sparked additional consolidation plans as operators look to bolster their defenses amid a growing competitive threat from Starlink in the satellite broadband market. Eutelsat announced plans to buy OneWeb in November 2022 and hopes to complete its merger this summer. SES and Intelsat confirmed March 29 they were in talks about merging , although they have not provided a meaningful update since then. The financials Inmarsat’s shareholders are getting $551 million in cash from the deal and shares representing 37.6% of Viasat’s common stock. The cash portion of the transaction was reduced from $850 million after Inmarsat paid a $299 million special dividend to its shareholders in April 2022. Viasat said it drew down on about $1.35 billion of its committed financing package to support the deal, which also includes the assumption of debt.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico late May 30, concluding Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom safely splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Florida, at 11:05 p.m. Eastern. Recovery crews quickly got the spacecraft on a SpaceX vessel and helped the four-person crew out. The spacecraft undocked from the ISS 12 hours earlier, concluding an eight-day stay at the station on the Ax-2 mission. The spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 May 21 and docked with the station less than 16 hours later. “That was a phenomenal ride. We really enjoyed all of it,” said Peggy Whitson, the former NASA astronaut and current director of human space flight at Axiom Space who commanded Ax-2, shortly after splashdown. With Ax-2, Whitson extended her record for most time in space by an American astronaut to approximately 675 days. Joining Whitson on Ax-2 were John Shoffner, a private astronaut who served as pilot for the mission, and two mission specialist astronauts from Saudi Arabia, Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. Those two were selected by the Saudi Space Commission in February for the mission under an agreement the commission signed with Axiom Space in September 2022. The Ax-2 crew had a compressed schedule of activities on the station. The mission was originally scheduled to spend 10 days at the ISS but was shortened to eight to keep a cargo Dragon mission on schedule to launch June 3. The Ax-2 launch had slipped from early May because of delays in a Falcon Heavy launch that used the same Kennedy Space Center launch pad as Ax-2. The mission, which incorporated lessons learned from the Ax-1 private astronaut mission to the ISS in April 2022, appeared to go smoothly. The crew conducted a set of science and technology demonstration experiments while performing educational outreach activities, particularly for Saudi students. “It’s been a very busy time up there,” said Kirt Costello, NASA ISS chief scientist, during a May 30 briefing about payloads flying on the next cargo Dragon mission. He said the Ax-2 crew performed 27 experiments while on the station, working with other ISS astronauts. “We are waiting for all the results to come back down,” including samples that were on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Ax-2 was the second of four private astronaut missions Axiom Space currently plans to fly to the ISS as a prelude to installing a series of commercial modules on the ISS. Those modules will eventually separate from the ISS to form the core of a standalone commercial station when the ISS is retired. The next mission, Ax-3, is planned for no earlier than late this year, also on a Crew Dragon. Axiom Space has not disclosed the crew for that mission but, during the joint Axiom/SpaceX webcast of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, the hosts revealed that Ax-3 will be commanded by Michael López-Alegría, the former NASA astronaut who also commanded Ax-1 last year.
China is looking to greatly expand its satellite launch capacity by mass producing a medium-lift rocket to help build a communications megaconstellation. China is developing its plans to deploy a 13,000-satellite low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband megaconstellation, sometimes referred to as “Guowang,” or national network, to rival Starlink and other Western ventures. The country’s military has claimed that SpaceX has intended for Starlink to be used for military purposes in the wake of Ukraine’s defense against the invasion of Russia. China is expected to launch the first satellites for Guowang later this year , but currently lacks the capacity to build out the entire constellation in a timely manner. Now, China is building production and testing facilities as well as new launch pads at Wenchang spaceport on Hainan island to enable a much greater launch cadence for new rockets. The Long March 8 set a national record of 22 satellites on a single launch in February 2022 as a commercial carpooling test. But it also verified its use for launching batches of satellites. “To put it simply, we have hammered out a ‘carpooling’ solution to launch many small satellites in one successful launch mission ,” Xiao Yun, chief commander of the Long March 8 rocket program, told CCTV ahead of the launch. The launch can now be seen as an early move as part of a concerted effort to get China’s megaconstellation project off the ground. The South China Morning Post last week reported progress on pulse production and assembly facilities near Wenchang. This will eventually have an annual output of 50 Long March 8 rockets. Meanwhile, work continues on the new pads at Wenchang and is expected to host first launches next year . A Xi’an-based facility is also ramping up production of the YF-100 kerosene-liquid oxygen engines which power many of China’s newer rockets, including the Long March 8. A plan to scale up the use of the Long March 8 has long been hinted at. Pan Aihua, chief engineer at the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told state media in 2022 that China is, “accelerating its satellite project, which means a sharp increase in the number of satellites to be launched in the future, and the modified model of the Long March 8 carrier rocket will be of great significance in improving the launch efficiency.” The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) is also considering a larger version of the Long March 8, referred to as the 8G. It would use a pair of upgraded hydrolox engines on a widened second stage, allowing an increase in payload capacity to SSO (6,400 kilograms) and a larger 5.2-meter-diameter fairing for encapsulating greater numbers of satellites. Researchers have also looked at launching the Long March 8 from sea launch facilities at Haiyang, on China’s eastern coast, to ease launch congestion. CASC, the country’s main space contractor, was planning to use the Long March 8 as a test bed for reusability, but such plans have not been noted in recent times. Instead, the approach may rely on mass production of the low-cost, expendable medium-lift Long March 8. A Long March 5B is being modified for a first launch of a cluster of satellites to low Earth orbit, having fulfilled its main role of launching modules to construct China’s Tiangong space station. The Long March 5B can deliver up to 25 tons to LEO, but mass producing the 53.7-meter-long, five-meter-diameter rocket is challenging. The Long March 8 will provide another avenue. CASC subsidiary CAST and Microsat under the Chinese Academy of Sciences are understood to be contracted to manufacture satellites for Guowang. Meanwhile, private firm Galaxyspace is expected to launch its first flat panel antenna satellites with flexible solar arrays in the second half of the year. The satellites, which would be stackable in a similar fashion as SpaceX Starlink satellites, could be part of the Guowang project. China’s commercial launch companies have also noted the possibility of gaining contracts to launch satellites for Guowang, indicating that the country is looking to leverage its commercial sector to get the project in orbit. The state-owned enterprise managing the Guowang project is meanwhile undergoing inspection by a top government body. It is unclear what the development involves or why it was triggered, or if the process is a more routine ideological procedure or result in punitive measures.
Spain is the latest European nation to sign the Artemis Accords, a central element of a new American strategic framework for space diplomacy. In a May 30 ceremony in Madrid, Spanish government officials signed the Accords, which outline principles for safe and responsible space exploration. Spain is the 25 th country to sign the Accords and the second this month, after the Czech Republic May 3 . “As the newest member of the Artemis Accords family, Spain will safeguard our shared ideals by helping ensure that humanity’s rapid expansion into space is done peacefully, safely and transparently,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended the ceremony, said in a statement. Unlike the Czech Republic signing, which took place at NASA Headquarters with a week’s advance notice, NASA did not announce the planned signing or Nelson’s trip in advance. “Space is an example of international collaboration and a priority for our country’s vision,” Spanish President Pedro Sánchez said in the statement. “We are witnessing a commitment by the Government of Spain to a key sector that generates opportunities and high-quality employment, which is a priority and strategic area, essential to help and protect our society.” Spain has for years been a major contributor to the European Space Agency, but recently has worked to bolster its space presence. The government announced it would establish a national space agency, the Agencia Espacial Española, in 2021, and the agency became operational earlier this year. It is also working to support a growing space industry, such as PLD Space, a launch vehicle startup planning a suborbital launch of a prototype rocket as soon as May 31. Spain is the eighth ESA member state, and seventh member of the European Union, to sign the Accords. Most major ESA members are now signatories to the Accords, with the notable exception of Germany. “The Artemis Accords reaching 25 signatories in such a short amount of time demonstrates the robust global support for norms of behavior in space,” Mike Gold, a former NASA official who spearheaded the development of the Accords in 2020 and is now chief growth officer at Redwire, told SpaceNews. He added he hopes the signing will encourage Germany in particular to sign on. “This latest signing ceremony, occurring so quickly after the Czech Republic signed, demonstrates the momentum that Administrator Nelson and his team have generated in Europe for the Accords,” he said, “and I hope that Germany and many other countries will also commit to implementing the Outer Space Treaty and other international agreements by signing the Accords in the not-too-distant future.” Space diplomacy framework The signing ceremony took place the same day as the U.S. State Department released a document called the Strategic Framework for Space Policy , a new white paper that outlined the roles that space can play in diplomacy and vice versa. “As near Earth space gets more crowded, the Framework will help maintain the rules-based international order and foster cooperation for long-term sustainability, commercialization, exploration and space utilization,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. The document is based on existing national space policy, including the most recent update in 2020 as well as the Biden administration’s space policy framework document published in 2021. It cites challenges posed by competitors, namely China and Russia, but also opportunities for international partnership. “U.S. leadership in space exploration and utilization is among the U.S. government’s most valuable soft power tools and presents strategic opportunities to promote academic and research partnerships, scientific engagement, as well as for public diplomacy to increase awareness among and influence audiences outside the United States on U.S. space diplomacy,” the document states. One pillar of the framework is “diplomacy for space,” or using international cooperation to advance space policy goals such as a “rules-based international order” for space activities. That specifically includes the Artemis Accords, which the framework describes as a “convening function” for discussions on global space goverance. “The Artemis Accords are a centerpiece of the United States’ civil space diplomacy,” the document states. “By signing the Artemis Accords, States commit to carrying out activities in the civil exploration and use of outer space in a manner that is both responsible and sustainable.” Other elements of that pillar include space security through advancing norms and rules of behavior, as well as helping support the growth of the space industry by promoting U.S. space regulatory practices. A second pillar seeks to advance “space for diplomacy,” using space cooperation to advance American foreign and national security policy goals. Examples of that mentioned in the document are sharing Earth observation data for applications like disaster response and climate change, and using space-based images “to build U.S. credibility and counter false narratives and disinformation.” A third pillar seeks to provide State Department personnel with the tools and knowledge needed to support space diplomacy. One example of that work mentioned in the document is to create “public diplomacy toolkits to help translate U.S. leadership in outer space exploration and establish a greater appreciation of the U.S. commitment to transparency, open science, and innovation.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat plans to launch another low Earth orbit (LEO) prototype satellite in the coming months to continue tests after an aging demonstrator for its delayed broadband constellation ran out of fuel. The Canadian geostationary satellite operator announced May 30 that it had ordered a microsatellite called LEO 3 from Space Flight Laboratory (SFL), part of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS). SFL has already integrated a communications payload for the 30-kilogram satellite and completed vibration and electromagnetic compatibility tests, Telesat said in the news release. The operator ordered LEO 3 in August 2021, Telesat chief technology officer Dave Wendling told SpaceNews , to ensure tests for its proposed Lightspeed constellation could continue after its first operational demonstrator LEO 1 expired. Wendling said Telesat is in the process of shutting down LEO 1, expected to burn up in the atmosphere in the coming years in accordance with regulatory rules. Built by U.K.-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), LEO 1 has been helping Telesat test plans for a Ka-band network of nearly 200 satellites since launching in January 2018. Another prototype satellite called LEO 2, built by SFL in partnership with Space Systems Loral (now owned by Maxar Technologies), was one of 19 satellites lost in a 2017 Russian Soyuz launch failure. Wendling said Telesat would announce a launch provider it has selected for LEO 3 very soon. Unlike LEO 1, he said LEO 3 would be able to transmit and receive in Q-band and V-band spectrum in addition to Ka-band, potentially setting Telesat up for a second-generation constellation if its first comes to fruition. Telesat recently said it expects to start deploying Lightspeed satellites around 2026 , six years later than originally planned, amid ongoing talks to fully fund a constellation set to be built by Thales Alenia Space. The delays mean Telesat needs to secure regulatory extensions to retain the network’s priority Ka-band spectrum rights. Update: Rocket Lab announced May 31 it won a contract to launch LEO 3 on an Electron rocket in the third quarter of this year.
A deep-space radar developed by Northrop Grumman for the U.S. Space Force passed a critical design review, the company announced May 30. Northrop Grumman said it also completed a software demonstration of the Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability program known as DARC. The company last year won a $341 million contract to develop a radar site to track active satellites and debris in geosynchronous orbit. The radar will be located in the Indo-Pacific region, and Northrop Grumman is expected to deliver a prototype by late 2025 or early 2026. This will be the first of three planned ground-based radar sites. The other two will be in Europe and the continental United States. “DARC will be the first to provide an all-weather, at all times capability in support of the space domain awareness mission that’s critical to national and global security,” said Pablo Pezzimenti, vice president of integrated national systems at Northrop Grumman. Following the completion of the critical design review, he said, “the program now turns its focus to the factory acceptance testing of key subsystems starting later this year.” “DARC will deliver an all-weather, 24/7 capability to monitor the rapidly evolving geosynchronous orbital environment,” the company said. The new radar is intended to augment the military’s space surveillance network as an additional sensor to monitor deep space objects, eventually providing full global coverage. Plans for sites 2 and 3 The Space Force on May 16 issued a “ sources sought” announcement in preparation for a future procurement of DARC site 2 in Europe and site 3 in the continental United States. This next procurement will be on a shorter timeline due to urgent needs for space domain awareness, said the Space Systems Command in the announcement. “It is imperative that Site 2 (EUCOM) be operational no later than October 2027 and Site 3 (CONUS) be operational no later than October 2028.” To support these dates, the anticipated award for both sites is expected later this year or in early 2024. “The government is conducting this market research,” said the Space Systems Command, “to determine if there are other sources besides the DARC Site 1 incumbent Northrop Grumman that could successfully perform and meet rapid fielding requirements for DARC Sites 2 and 3.”
Greg Kuperman, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Strategic Technology Office, worries that innovations emerging from the commercial space industry will never reach potential customers in the U.S. military. A key reason for that, Kuperman told SpaceNews , is that discussions about next-generation technologies, particularly in the space sector, quickly veer into classified territory, and many commercial businesses developing these technologies don’t have security clearances. An example is the sector of the industry developing compact satellite antennas, he said. Much of the leading-edge technology is coming from commercial businesses and startups that DoD never hears about. “The innovators who are good at seeing the problems and coming up with clever solutions are kind of left on the outside looking in,” he said. Kuperman, who has worked on classified defense programs for more than 15 years, is looking to attract more space businesses to work with DARPA. He currently oversees a program trying to develop low-cost optical satellite terminals, and a separate project seeking innovation in space sensors for low Earth orbit. Satellite antennas — including design, materials and manufacturing techniques — that can increase performance at less weight and cost are a key area of interest for DARPA, he said. “But in order to actually appropriately say what the problem is, I need to have a conversation at the classified level.” In conversations with people in the industry, Kuperman found that many of the innovators developing technologies of interest to DARPA don’t have clearances. “This happened so many times that I was just like, ‘This is ridiculous.’” ‘Bridges’ initiative In an effort to fix this problem, Kuperman’s office launched an initiative called Bridges to help companies get security clearances to work on defense contracts. “We want to bring innovators into a space where we can actually begin talking with them,” he said. Bridges is short for “Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems.” Across national security agencies, he said, “there’s a huge recognition that we need to work with small businesses. But the piece that no one’s really gone after is the clearance piece,” Bridges is trying to “solve that valley of death with respect to clearances and getting the folks from the commercial side into the cleared conversations.” White papers on next-generation satellites antennas are due June 9 . Kuperman said DARPA will select the most promising concepts and will help selected bidders apply for clearances so they can work with the agency and with potential military customers. DARPA will set up a consortium that will help companies eligible to bid for U.S. defense contracts to apply for clearances needed to work on classified programs, known as DD Form 254 . The agency is partnering with MITRE Corp, a federally funded nonprofit that will provide consortium members access to classified office space, computers and telephones at locations in Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. “We’re going to invite proposals from companies by topic area,” said Kuperman. Future topic areas beyond space Satellite antenna designs was chosen as the first topic because it’s an area “where we’re seeing kind of a generational leap in technology that has not yet penetrated the defense market.” Of particular interest are next-generation antennas to communicate with low Earth orbit satellites. “If you think that you are moving way past the current state of the art, we want to hear from you,” said Kuperman. DARPA, for example, wants to attract companies working on ultra-slim metamaterial antenna arrays, said Kuperman. The commercial industry has invested in this technology, which has broad applications for satellite communications but has not been exploited for military systems. “I’ve been very impressed with commercial developments in metamaterial antenna arrays,” Kuperman said. Metamaterials are materials engineered to have properties not found in naturally occurring materials. They promise smaller, lighter, better performing miniature antennas with increased performance, said Kuperman. “They offer the possibility of being 10 to 100 times cheaper and 10 to 100 times lower power.” For the military, this means “I can proliferate these and do things that I’ve never thought I could do before.” Companies like SpaceX and Kymeta produce widely used flat satcom antennas “but no one has demonstrated that at the size and scale that DoD needs for air and space applications,” said Kuperman. “There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done there.” For the next-generation antenna project, he said, “we’re also bringing in our partners across the DoD from the Air Force, the Army, from Special Operations Forces, the Navy so they can come in and discuss their problems at the appropriate classified levels.”
Conversion of shuttle-era solid rocket boosters and engines for use on the Space Launch System has cost NASA billions more and taken years longer than originally planned, the agency’s inspector general concluded. In a May 25 report , NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) stated that contracts that date back to the Constellation program more than 15 years ago have suffered about $6 billion in cost increases related to both changes in scope of the contracts as well as technical issues. Those contracts have also experienced more than six years of delays. The contracts cover work by Northrop Grumman to develop and produce five-segment solid rocket boosters for the SLS based on the four-segment boosters used on the shuttle, and work by Aerojet Rocketdyne to adapt Space Shuttle Main Engines, also known as the RS-25, for the SLS core stage. The contracts, covering development and production of the boosters and engines, originally had a combined value of $7 billion over 14 years. The cost-plus contracts are now worth at least $13.1 billion over 25 years, of which $8.6 billion has been spent to date. The OIG reported that the overruns have the effect of increasing the cost of a single SLS mission through Artemis 4 by $144 million, to $4.2 billion each. A key factor in the overruns was an underestimation of the difficulty of adapting shuttle-era hardware for the SLS. “While the RS-25 is a highly mature system, significant technical upgrades are required before it can be installed on the SLS due to the rocket’s increased technical complexity,” the report stated, ranging from increased heat that required additional information to other system modifications to increase the flow of propellants to the engines. Aerojet also had to design a new engine controller unit, which contains the electronics for operating the RS-25, because parts for the original unit were no longer available. However, the report found that Aerojet’s plans for the unit “lacked a comprehensive understanding of controller design requirements and an agreed-upon scope of work, which resulted in significant technical issues culminating in increased costs and expanded schedule.” The solid rocket booster also has significant overruns, particularly with its propellant liner and insulation, a new component that replaced an asbestos-based insulation used on shuttle-era boosters. That work started as a $4.4 million contract modification in 2011, but Northrop ultimately charged NASA $253 million for the work, including $28.5 million in award fees. NASA contracting officers objected to paying the award fee, denying two requests by Northrop for the fee. The OIG report noted that agency officials then appeared to go around standard procedures by convening an “independent assessment team” of former NASA employees, who recommended the agency pay the award fee. The report called that effort a “significant and continuous disregard for Agency regulations and official processes.” NASA eventually agreed to pay Northrop $24.5 million. That incident was just one of several examples of procurement shortfalls cited by the OIG report. It noted that only a handful of employees work on the booster and engine contracts, with limited supervisory review. It also took nearly 500 days to finalize one booster contract, outside of the guidance to do so within 180 days. Despite that delay, procurement lawyers were given only six hours to review a 1,500-page contract, “likely contributing to unidentified omissions of required clauses and lack of a fully-defined scope of work.” The report noted that NASA is attempting to reduce costs for both future SLS boosters and the restart of RS-25 engine production. It cautioned, though, that “NASA’s efforts likely will fall short of its expected savings given the continuing impact of efforts to restart RS-25 engine production and manage the complexity of upgrading and integrating heritage components.” OIG offered eight recommendations to NASA to address booster and engine contract issues, such as shifting to fixed-price contracts for new RS-25 engines. NASA accepted, partially or completely, all the recommendations, but noted that it had already examined the RS-25 engine production issue and concluded that, given the work needed to restart production lines, a cost-plus contract was the better contracting approach. The NASA response was unusually critical of OIG’s overall assessment. Agency officials “are concerned that the foregoing report offers an incomplete view of the program’s decision-making regarding its boosters and engines elements and that the information in the report is presented without the context that would have rendered it more accurate,” stated a NASA response signed by Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, and Karla Smith Jackson, assistant administrator for the office of procurement. “As a result, the directorate and the program do not concur with, nor endorse, the facts as presented in the body of the report.” OIG stood by the findings of its report. “We take issue with this summary characterization and are disappointed that in its formal response the Agency failed to specify the facts in the report with which it disagrees,” the report states.
A crew of three astronauts including the first Chinese civilian astronaut has arrived at the Tiangong space station. A Long March 2F rocket carrying the Shenzhou-16 spacecraft lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 9:31 p.m. Eastern May 29. Rendezvous and docking with a radial Tiangong docking port was completed at 4:29 a.m. May 30, China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, confirmed . Commander Jing Haipeng, embarking on his fourth visit to space, spaceflight engineer Zhu Yangzhu and payload specialist and Beihang University professor Gui Haichao—the first Chinese civilian in space—make up the crew of the six-month-long Shenzhou-16 mission. Zhu and Gui are the first individuals to fly to space from a third selection round of Chinese astronauts chosen in 2020. The successful launch of the mission also means that, briefly, there are 17 astronauts in orbit for the first time. The four-person Axiom-2 mission is due to undock from the larger International Space Station later May 30. At time of reporting six Chinese astronauts, five Americans, three Russians, two Saudis, and one Emarati astronaut were in orbit. In December 2021, 19 people were in space when the six-person crew of Blue Origin NS-19 briefly crossed the Karman line and joined crews aboard the ISS and Tiangong in space. Jing, Zhu and Gui will be greeted aboard the Tiangong space station by the Shenzhou-15 crew. Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu have been aboard Tiangong since November, conducting science experiments, outreach events and a national record of four extravehicular activities. The arrival of Shenzhou-16 marks the start of Tiangong’s second crew handover, and will briefly see six astronauts aboard the orbital outpost. The Shenzhou-15 crew are expected to land around 6:30 p.m. Eastern June 3, according to airspace closure notices. The mission has been hailed as one of major significance for China. “China’s space station has entered the application and development stage. Our ability today to produce Shenzhou spacecraft is no longer the same as before,” He Yu, chief commander of crewed spaceship systems at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), told CCTV. “Shenzhou-16 is the first of this batch of six crewed spacecraft we plan to build. After 30 years’ efforts, our capabilities in design, production, carrying out experiments including organizing large-scale field experiments, have all seen qualitative leaps.” Other CAST officials stated that more than 100 technical improvements and upgrades have been made over the previous Shenzhou spacecraft, including the greater use of domestically made components. Diao Weihe, chief electricity designer of crewed spacecraft systems at CAST, said further plans for improved safety and reliability were in the works. The Shenzhou-16 astronauts will conduct a range of on-orbit tests and experiments in various fields, including quantum phenomena, high-precision space time-frequency systems, the verification of general relativity, and the origins of life. The crew will also conduct spacewalks and carry out maintenance, live lectures from space and other operational activities. Huang Weifen, the chief designer of the astronaut system of China’s human spaceflight program, also noted adaptations in astronaut training specifically designed to prepare payload specialists for space. China launched the Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft to Tiangong May 10 to deliver supplies, science experiments and equipment and propellant to support the Shenzhou-16 mission. The country aims to keep Tiangong constantly occupied and operational in orbit for at least ten years. It is also looking to expand the space station with a “multi-functional module.” The module would allow China to further expand the size of the space station and enhance its capacity, according to officials. CMSA also recently announced a call for commercial solutions for delivering cargo to Tiangong. Other commercial and potential tourist activity is being considered.
China’s human spaceflight agency has stated its goal to land astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade. “Recently, the moon landing phase of China’s crewed lunar exploration program has started. The main goal is to send Chinese astronauts to land on the moon for the first time by 2030,” Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), told media at a press conference at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center May 29. “Focusing on this goal, the CMSA has started planning, research and construction work on the basis of previous key technical breakthroughs and solution verifications,” Lin said. “This includes the development of a new generation manned carrier rocket, namely the Long March 10 launch vehicle, a new generation crew spacecraft, a lunar lander, a moon suit and other spaceflight products. The construction of a new launch site and tests on related launch facilities are also underway.” As previously reported, China has been quietly working on a lunar lander for a number of years and this year unveiled an apparent model of the spacecraft. A low Earth orbit variant of the rocket newly designated the Long March 10, based on the five-meter-diameter Long March 5, is expected to have a test flight in 2027. A pair of three-stage, triple-core Long March 10 variants for trans-lunar injection (27 tons to TLI) will be used to launch the landing stack and crewed segments of the lunar landing mission. China has already carried out a full scale boiler plate test of the new-gen spacecraft. China’s coastal Wenchang spaceport is currently being expanded to host commercial launches, and will also be the site for the in-development Long March 10 and the larger Long March 9 rocket. CMSA also announced May 29 a call for plans for a lunar crew rover, potentially using a commercial development model. The Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, northeast China, recently unveiled a lunar simulation chamber to assist preparations for future lunar exploration. “The goal also includes carrying out lunar scientific exploration and related technological experiments, mastering key technologies such as Earth-Moon crewed round-trips, lunar surface short-term stays, and human-robot joint exploration as well as completing multiple missions such as landing, roving, sampling, researching and returning, so as to form an independent crewed lunar exploration capability,” said Lin. The press conference was held ahead of the launch of the Shenzhou-16 crewed mission to the Tiangong space station. Launch is set for 9:31 p.m. Eastern May 29. The crew will be greeted aboard Tiangong by the outgoing Shenzhou-15 crew, which has been in orbit since November. The crewed landing plan noted by Lin is for two astronauts to conduct a six-hour stay on the lunar surface, with another crew member remaining aboard a service module in lunar orbit. The short term stay however is linked to a longer term project. The International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) is a Chinese-led initiative which aims to construct a permanent, initially robotic moon base in the 2030s. China is currently attracting members to join an organization established to coordinate the effort, which amounts to a parallel development to the U.S.-led Artemis Program and Artemis Accords. China’s government has yet to openly and officially approve the crewed landing project, likely because the timeline lies beyond the scope of the current Five-year Plan (2021-2025). However a space white paper published in January 2022 stated that China will “continue studies and research on the plan for a human lunar landing… and research key technologies to lay a foundation for exploring and developing cislunar space.”
NASA and Boeing said May 26 they are still working towards a July launch of the CST-100 Starliner on a crewed test flight despite “emerging issues” and concerns raised by a safety panel. In a statement issued just before the close of business ahead of a holiday weekend, the two organizations said they completed a “checkpoint review” May 25 of preparations for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than July 21. Two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will fly on CFT to the International Space Station on the short test flight, the first crewed flight of the spacecraft. NASA and Boeing said they have now completed 95% of the certification work needed for CFT. They have also addressed all the anomalies from the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission, an uncrewed test flight of Starliner to the ISS one year ago. “We are taking a methodical approach to the first crewed flight of Starliner incorporating all of the lessons learned from the various in-depth testing campaigns,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said in a statement. “In addition to the closeout of ongoing work, the team remains vigilant on tracking new technical issues as we complete certification for crewed flight.” That statement mentioned “emerging issues that need a path to closure” before NASA and Boeing decide to fuel the spacecraft in June for a July launch. Boeing officials said earlier this year they decided to fuel the spacecraft only within 60 days of launch as a measure to mitigate any fuel leaks that could corrode valves, an issue that delayed an August 2021 launch attempt for OFT-2. Among the issues is swapping out a valve in the thermal control system in the spacecraft’s service module, which was reducing flow in one of two redundant loops that cool the vehicle’s avionics. The valve replacement will take about a week, NASA and Boeing said, and should not affect the CFT launch schedule. Engineers are also evaluating whether tape used on wiring could pose a flammability risk. Although that tape is commonly used on other spacecraft, they are evaluating if it is acceptable for crewed flight. The organizations said that assessment should be done before the decision to fuel the spacecraft. Another system being reviewed is Starliner’s parachutes. NASA and Boeing said they are reassessing margins in the parachutes, including the “overall efficiency” of joints in that system, to ensure they achieve the required safety factors for a crewed spacecraft. The statement came a day after a public meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) where the committee’s chair, Patricia Sanders, raised concerns about the ability to complete work, such as parachute certification, in time to meet the planned July 21 launch . “It is imperative that NASA not succumb to pressure, even unconsciously, to get CFT launched without adequately addressing all the remaining impediments to certification,” she said, recommending that NASA bring in an independent group, such as the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, “to take a deep look at the items on the path to closure.” The NASA/Boeing statement did not mention the ASAP meeting. However, it did address one issue Sanders raised about the spacecraft’s batteries. The organizations said they had approved the batteries for use on CFT “based on additional testing and analysis” with a proposal to upgrade the batteries on future missions. Stich, in the statement, said the agency and company had made progress since late March, when they announced the certification work would push the CFT launch from April to July . “If you look back two months ago at the work we had ahead of us, it’s almost all complete,” he said. “The combined team is resilient and resolute in their goal of flying crew on Starliner as soon as it is safe to do so.” However, he did not rule out a slip from the current July launch date. “If a schedule adjustment needs to be made in the future, then we will certainly do that as we have done before. We will only fly when we are ready.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the Badr-8 TV broadcast and telecoms satellite May 27 for Saudi Arabia-based fleet operator Arabsat, equipped with a jamming-resistant optical communications payload demonstrator. The 4,500-kilogram satellite lifted off at 12:30 a.m. Eastern on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and separated from the rocket in geosynchronous transfer orbit about 37 minutes later. The rocket’s reusable first stage used a drone ship to make its 14th landing following the mission, delayed from May 24 because of poor weather conditions. Airbus Defence and Space, which built Badr-8 based on its Eurostar Neo platform, declared the launch successful several hours later. It will take several more months for the 17-kilowatt satellite to use all-electric propulsion to reach its 26 degrees east orbital slot, where it would replace Arabsat’s 15-year-old Badr-6 satellite. Operating at the end of its 15-year design life, Badr-6 showed its age in February after a thruster issue led to a temporary outage. Badr-8 is designed to replace and expand Arabsat’s C-band and Ku-band capacity across Europe, Middle East, Africa, and central Asia over its 15-year design life. The satellite also carries an experimental photonics feeder link called Teleo, which Airbus developed with support from France’s space agency. According to Airbus, Teleo is designed to provide space to ground optical communications at gigabit speeds. Optical communications are more robust against signal jamming compared with conventional radio frequency technology, Airbus said, and the demonstrator is set to play a key role in expanding the manufacturer’s capabilities in this area. Arabsat’s fleet comprises 10 satellites across four orbital positions. The company announced its latest satellite order last year, picking Airbus’ European rival Thales Alenia Space to build Arabsat 7A to replace Arabsat 5A, which launched in 2010 with 15 years of expected operational life.
The Space Development Agency is preparing to launch at least 13 satellites in late June, the agency’s director Derek Tournear said May 26. This will be SDA’s second launch of Tranche 0 satellites for its proliferated low Earth orbit constellation. Tranche 0 is a 28-satellite demonstration constellation. The first 10 spacecraft — eight communications satellites made by York Space and two missile-detection satellites made by SpaceX — launched April 2 on a SpaceX Falcon 9. SDA initially planned to launch all 18 remaining in June but made some late changes to the manifest, Tournear said in an interview with SpaceNews . The upcoming mission — scheduled to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in late June from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California — is now projected to launch 11 communications satellites (10 made by Lockheed Martin and one made by York Space) and two missile-tracking satellites made by SpaceX. There were two Tranche 0 York satellites on the manifest but one is likely to be kept on the ground so SDA can use it for software tests, said Tournear. Four L3Harris Tranche 0 satellites were scheduled to launch but were taken off the manifest due to production delays, he said. The four satellites will fly to orbit on a separate mission planned by the Missile Defense Agency. MDA is preparing to launch two prototypes — one made by L3Harris and the other by Northrop Grumman — for its Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS). SDA, which is part of the U.S. Space Force, and MDA, a Defense Department agency, are collaborating closely on missile tracking and missile defense architectures, said Tournear. MDA agreed to deploy L3Harris’ wide field-of-view satellites made for SDA in the same orbit as the HBTSS medium field-of-view missile defense satellites. This will help both agencies figure out how they will integrate future sensor networks, said Tournear. The new plan turned out to be a “win win,” he said. “Once MDA agreed that we could put our L3Harris satellites on their launch, it became a very easy choice.” MDA has not yet announced a launch date for the HBTSS mission. SDA’s first 10 satellites in good health Of the 10 satellites launched April 2, both SpaceX tracking satellites have reached the intended orbit about 1,000 kilometers above Earth. “We will be able to get tracking data very shortly,” said Tournear. “We have to make sure we have the payloads and the software in place to be able to do the tracking mission.” The eight York satellites haven’t performed their orbit raising yet because SDA needs extra time to test the Link 16 payloads onboard those satellites, he said. Link 16 is a data exchange and radio communications network widely used by the U.S. military and NATO allies. Once the York satellites complete their orbit raising, SDA will test the inter-satellite laser communications links, which requires more separation between the satellites. “Our plan is to have everything tested, checked out and ready to do initial mission demonstrations in late June. early July,” said Tournear. The Tranche 0 satellites are what SDA calls a “warfighter immersion tranche” that will give military users an opportunity to experiment with the technology and better understand the capabilities of LEO satellites for missile tracking and for data relay. Following the Tranche 0 deployment, SDA plans to launch dozens more satellites on a monthly cadence starting with Tranche 1 in late 2024. The Tracking Layer is envisioned as a global network of sensors that will provide a defense shield against Russian and Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The data collected by missile-tracking satellites will be sent via optical links to the Transport Layer . That would ensure that if a missile threat is detected, its location and trajectory data can be transmitted securely through space and downlinked to military command centers. SpaceX’s final Tracking Layer satellites Tournear said the four tracking satellites made by SpaceX for Tranche 0 are likely to be the company’s last. SpaceX did not bid for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1 contract, which was won by L3Harris and Northrop Grumman. To meet SDA’s required satellite orbit at 1,000 kilometers, SpaceX built the four satellites using a customized bus, not the one the company mass-produces for its Starlink internet constellation, Tournear said. To track hypersonic missiles in all phases of flight, DoD determined that satellites 1,000 kilometers above Earth will be better positioned to see these targets. SpaceX informed SDA it did not bid for Tranche 1 because the requirements could not be met with the Starlink bus, said Tournear, However, “we’re working with them to see how they can participate in the future.” SDA is seeking input from LEO internet companies like SpaceX, Amazon and others on how they might provide a low-Earth orbit “backhaul” capability to support military data transport. “We are looking for how commercial providers could augment the overall Defense Department space data transport layer and have a seamless integration with the SDA data transport layer,” said Tournear. “So there’s certainly activities like that that are going on.” SDA’s vision is to deploy “translator satellites” that would allow SDA spacecraft to talk to commercial remote-sensing and communications providers. “We are looking for ideas from companies on how they could tie their company’s offerings into the transport layer,” he said, “so that we can have multiple different pathways to get low latency, tactical data link, and also be able to augment or back that up with commercial systems.”
BAE Systems won a $7 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop AI tools to automate the tracking of data collected by military satellites. The company on May 25 announced it will work with AI specialists OmniTeq and AIMdyn on the DARPA project, known as Oversight . DARPA also selected Apogee Research, and Systems & Technology Research for the initial phase of the program. “Traditional space intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) collection can be siloed and labor intensive,” DARPA said . Current reliance on individual ground station operators “significantly increases latency and minimizes tactical utility of satellite sensor data,” said Lael Rudd, program manager for Oversight at DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. As the Space Force and the Space Development Agency prepare to deploy large constellations of sensor satellites, he said, they will need tools to autonomously track targets of interest. DARPA’s Oversight program will pursue AI-enabled software that autonomously maintains constant “custody” of a large number of targets tracked by satellites. The three companies selected for the 15-month Phase 1 of Oversight will define tracking requirements, resource needs and interfaces between technologies in development. Under Phase 2, the software will transition to in-orbit spacecraft. Software to transition to SDA satellites John Grimes, director of small satellites at BAE Systems’ FAST Labs, said the company’s track custody software will be applicable to multiple types of sensors, including electro-optical and radio-frequency. If BAE is selected for Phase 2 and beyond, the software could be deployed on Space Development Agency sensor satellites that track hypersonic missiles, said Grimes. Grimes described a hypothetical scenario for how autonomous target custody would work. A satellite, for example, detects a signal from a vessel that is unexpected as it’s in a controlled ocean region. The onboard system updates the other satellites in the network and prioritizes that vessel for custody. Immediately, an electro-optical satellite passing overhead takes an image and IDs the vessel as a fishing vessel. That location and ID are then sent to a nearby Coast Guard ship for investigation.
A software glitch kept a lunar lander from properly determining its altitude, leading to a crash on its landing attempt last month, Japanese company ispace announced May 26. The Tokyo-based company said its investigation into the failed landing of its HAKUTO-R M1 lander April 25 concluded that the onboard computer disregarded altitude information from a laser rangefinder on the lander as it passed over a crater rim, leading the lander to conclude it was on the surface when it was still five kilometers above it. During an online briefing, ispace executives said the landing was going as planned through its initial phases. The altitude, as calculated by an inertial measurement unit, had converged with measurements from the laser rangefinder. The readings diverged, though, once the lander passed over the rim of Atlas Crater as it approached its landing site within it, with the measured altitude increasing by three kilometers. Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, said that the onboard computer was not programmed to expect that change and ignored the data from the laser rangefinder on the assumption that the instrument had malfunctioned. That was a deliberate choice, he said, “to make our control system more robust against a sensor hardware failure.” The sensor had not failed, though, and accurately showed the lander was still about five kilometers above the surface when the lander’s computer believed it was on the surface. The lander continued to descend at a slow rate of about one meter per second under its thrusters until it exhausted its propellant. The lander then went into freefall, crashing into the surface at a speed of more than 100 meters per second. An image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft, released May 23 , revealed the impact site and what appear to be several pieces of debris from the spacecraft. That impact zone was just outside the predicted landing site within Atlas Crater, although Ujiie declined to say specifically how far from its planned location the lander crashed. A factor in the crash, he said, was a change in landing sites made after the mission completed its critical design review in February 2021. The mission was originally to land in Lacus Somniorum, a basaltic plain with few craters. That change, he suggested, was not sufficiently tested before launch. The company changed the landing site “to maximize the benefit of the mission,” he said, for both the company and its payload customers. “This is a payload transportation business, and we need to maximize the payload service.” The lander used software developed by Draper, but Ujiie said ispace accepted blame for the failure, linking it to requirements ispace levied on the software. Besides their relationship on software for the lander, ispace’s U.S. subsidiary is designing a lander for a Draper-led lander mission for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Other aspects of the lander performed as expected despite the software flaw. Ujiie said the lander’s guidance and control systems worked properly throughout the landing, and the spacecraft maintained communications until the moment it crashed on the surface. That performance gives ispace confidence in the prospects for its second lander, M2, under development. “With this more extended performance, I believe can be successful in the next challenge,” he said. That second lander remains on schedule for launch in 2024, said Takeshi Hakamada, chief executive of ispace. The software changes also will not have a “significant” increase in the cost of that mission. Because the M1 lander did not complete its final mission milestones, he said ispace would lose about 100 million yen ($710,000) in revenue from the payload customers on the mission, a figure that would not alter the company’s financial forecasts for its current fiscal year, which runs through March 2024. The failure also was not expected to affect sales for future missions or the company’s long-term outlook. The company did have a first-of-its-kind insurance for the landing from Mitsui Sumitomo. Hakamada said ispace was still in discussions about its claim on that policy. He declined to say how much the company expected to receive from that insurance policy but said it was not reflected in its financial forecasts. The company, he said, has a “sustainable business model” that includes capital from its initial public offering of shares in April as well as a bank loan to support work on M2 and subsequent missions. “People say this is a landing or not, zero or one,” he said, a binary assessment he rejected. The lander achieved 8 of 10 milestones, from pre-launch preparations through maneuvers in lunar orbit, achievements the company plans to build upon for future missions. “We are very proud of what we have accomplished so far,” he said. “We are prepared to face challenges and make every effort to improve.”
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded L3Harris Technologies a contract worth $80.8 million to conduct communications experiments using multiple commercial space internet services. Under a program called Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet ( DEUCSI ), AFRL is working with defense contractors and commercial satcom providers to figure out how to integrate commercial space internet services with military platforms and weapon systems. Over the three-year contract, announced May 25, L3Harris will attempt to connect military platforms — such as aircraft and ground vehicles — with commercial space internet constellations that operate in geostationary, medium and low-Earth orbits. The idea is to merge services from multiple satcom providers into a seamless network. L3Harris will test how communications services from different constellations can be accessed using common user terminals. According to the announcement, AFRL sought competitive bids for this contract but L3Harris was the only offer received. AFRL started DEUCSI in 2017 Since the DEUCSI program started in 2017, several companies have won contracts, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Ball Aerospace, SES, Iridium and SpaceX. AFRL said the program will look at ways the military can take advantage of commercial space internet networks. One of the goals is to “quickly and effectively switch among commercial space internet services in different frequency bands to access favorable spectrum,” said AFRL . “In some cases, it may be advantageous to access multiple constellations simultaneously and split traffic between them.” Military satcom users, said AFRL, want “flexibility in communications paths while minimizing deployment of constellation-specific hardware.” For military aircraft, for example, the Air Force requires satellite communications services that are globally available and provide high data rates in any area without major hardware configuration changes. AFRL wants to ensure communications are constantly available and persistent “n spite of potential outages or degradations that may affect any individual constellation.”
SpaceX will have spent $5 billion or more on its Starship vehicle and launch infrastructure by the end of this year, according to court filings and comments by the company’s chief executive. SpaceX filed a motion with federal district court in the District of Columbia May 19, asking to be added as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by several environmental and Native American groups against the Federal Aviation Administration May 1. That suit alleges the FAA improperly carried out an environmental review of SpaceX Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. In the company’s filing, known as a motion to intervene, SpaceX argued that it was affected by the suit, which seeks to revoke the existing launch license the FAA issued for Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches from Boca Chica by claiming the FAA violated environmental law and regulations in the licensing process. If the plaintiffs win the case, SpaceX stated, “the FAA’s decision could be set aside, and further licensing of the Starship/Super Heavy Program could be significantly delayed, causing severe injury to SpaceX’s business.” To make that argument, the company included a statement from Bret Johnsen, chief financial officer at SpaceX. He said that, if the plaintiffs win, the company’s ability to generate revenue from Starship launches for both NASA and commercial customers “would be substantially delayed and jeopardized.” He specifically noted that since a 2014 “record of decision” by the FAA, allowing SpaceX to develop launch facilities at Boca Chica (originally for the Falcon family of launch vehicles), “SpaceX has invested more than $3 billion into developing the Boca Chica launch facility and Starship/Super Heavy launch system.” The statement did not break out the investment between the launch vehicle itself and infrastructure. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, in an April 29 online discussion on Twitter , the social media network he also owns, estimated that the company would spend about $2 billion on Starship this year. “It’ll probably be a couple billion dollars this year, two billion dollars-ish, all in on Starship,” he said, adding that he did not expect to have to raise funding to finance that work. He also said in that conversation that he expected Starship to launch four to five more times this year and “would be surprised” if the company didn’t achieve orbit by the end of the year. That schedule, though, depends on both the technical progress SpaceX makes in repairing the damaged launch pad and getting the next vehicle ready for flight — Musk is known for making aspirational schedules — as well as the outcome of the suit. Johnsen, in his statement, outlined details of the consequences of any delay in launches caused by the suit. That includes nearly $1 billion in milestone payments on its NASA Human Landing System award linked to the first orbital launch and subsequent steps, which include demonstration of in-space propellant transfer, an uncrewed lunar landing and crewed landing. Neither the agency nor SpaceX have previously outlined the schedule of milestone payments on its $2.9 billion award for Starship lander development for the Artemis 3 mission. He also stated that SpaceX has invested billions into its Starlink satellite broadband constellation, and would be harmed if it cannot launch its larger “V2” satellites that require Starship. He said “hundreds of thousands of people” have placed deposits for service but are waiting until those larger satellites can be launched to have sufficient capacity to serve them. On a smaller scale, he said that SpaceX offered Starship/Super Heavy to NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract for smallsat launches. The company estimated VADR to generate at least $10 million in annual revenue for the company, a small fraction of a single commercial Falcon 9 launch. The SpaceX motion to intervene is one of the few updates since the suit was filed. The court set a July 1 deadline for a “responsive pleading” from the FAA.
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched a second pair of NASA storm-tracking cubesats late May 25, six years and three dozen flights after the company’s first orbital launch attempt. The Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 11:46 p.m. Eastern. It deployed its payload of two NASA Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) cubesats into a 550-kilometer orbit inclined at 30 degrees. The two satellites join two others in the four-satellite TROPICS constellation that Rocket Lab launched May 7 . The 3U cubesats carry microwave radiometers that NASA scientists will use to monitor the formation of tropical storms, collecting data at an hourly cadence. TROPICS originally had six satellites, but the first two were lost in the failure of an Astra Rocket 3.3 in June 2022. Astra subsequently retired that rocket, and NASA selected Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four satellites on two Electron vehicles. That was done using the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract through a task order in November 2022 valued at $12.99 million. NASA sought to have the satellites launched in the second quarter of the year so that they would be in service by the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this summer. “Electron was developed for exactly these kinds of missions – to deploy spacecraft reliably and on rapid timelines to precise and bespoke orbits, so we’re proud to have delivered that for NASA across both TROPICS launches and meet the deadline for getting TROPICS to orbit in time for the 2023 storm season,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a company statement. Rocket Lab originally planned to launch the spacecraft from its new Launch Complex 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia, but announced in April it would move the launches to New Zealand to ensure they could be launched in time. The company didn’t elaborate on the issues that would have prevented a timely launch from Virginia, but said in a May 9 earnings call that it was preparing for a launch of a new variant of Electron, called Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE), from Virginia for a hypersonics test. The second TROPICS launch was the 37 th launch overall for the Electron, and took place almost exactly six years after the first Electron launch. The company has emerged as a leader in the dynamic, volatile small launch vehicle sector, one that has seen dozens of companies develop vehicles. It has also seen notable failures, including Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy and sale of its assets . Rocket Lab was one of the companies that acquired Virgin Orbit assets, in the form of Virgin Orbit’s main manufacturing facility in Long Beach, California, and its equipment and machinery. The launch was the fifth this year by Rocket Lab. The company said in its earnings call earlier in the month it projected up to 15 Electron launches this year, which include both orbital missions and HASTE flights. It did not disclose the split between Electron and HASTE missions.
The chair of a NASA safety panel urged the agency not to rush into a crewed test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle, calling for an independent “deep look” at technical issues with the spacecraft. Speaking at a May 25 public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, chair of the committee, expressed skepticism that NASA and Boeing will be able to close known issues with Starliner in time for a launch currently scheduled for as soon as July 21. “There remains a long line of NASA processes still ahead to determine launch readiness” for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, the first crewed flight of the spacecraft with two NASA astronauts on board. “That should not be flown until safety risks can either be mitigated or accepted, eyes wide open, with an appropriately compelling technical rationale.” She noted the projected launch date, but added it was simply an “opportunity in the launch schedule” and manifest of planned missions to the station. The current launch date for CFT would fit between a cargo Dragon mission, slated to depart the ISS in early July, and the Crew-7 Crew Dragon mission planned for launch in mid-August. That date, she said, is “not necessarily an acknowledgment of readiness to conduct that flight test.” When NASA and Boeing announced March 29 the July launch date for CFT , a three-month slip, officials said it would give them more time to complete certification of the spacecraft, notably its parachutes. The delay would also allow them to check avionics systems in the spacecraft after finding a logic error in one unit. Parachute certification remains a “pacing item” for the launch, Sanders said, but also brought up several other issues, some of which she said were only recently revealed through analysis of data products as part of the certification process. She mentioned specific open risks of ongoing integrated software testing as well as battery sidewall rupture concerns, a risk accepted “for the interim only.” “It is imperative that NASA not succumb to pressure, even unconsciously, to get CFT launched without adequately addressing all the remaining impediments to certification,” she said, adding that any decision to accept risk for the short-duration CFT flight should not justify accepting it for later operational flights lasting up to six months. “Given the number of remaining challenges to certification of Starliner, we strongly encourage NASA to step back and take a measured look at the remaining body of work with respect to flying CFT,” she concluded, arguing that the agency should bring in an independent team, such as from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, “to take a deep look at the items on the path to closure.” Neither Boeing nor NASA have provided many updates on the status of preparations for the CFT mission. A Boeing website devoted to Starliner updates was last updated with the March announcement of the new July launch date. At a May 16 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee, Phil McAlister, director of the commercial space division in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, reiterated the planned CFT launch date of no earlier than July 21. “We’ve made a lot of good progress over the last three or four months on the hardware. I think the hardware is in good shape,” he said. However, he said that certification work continued on the vehicle and was the pacing item for CFT. Parachute verification was the “long pole” in completing that work, with more parachute testing planned before the mission. “That could potentially affect the date of the flight,” he said. “At this point, if the tests go nominally, we should have plenty of time to make the July 21 date. But, you never know. That’s why we do these tests.”
Orbit Fab announced May 25 it selected an orbital vehicle made by Impulse Space to host a fuel depot for an in-orbit refueling demonstration funded by the U.S. military. A startup planning to offer in-orbit refueling services, Orbit Fab will seek to refuel the U.S. Space Force Tetra-5 spacecraft with up to 50 kilograms of hydrazine. The demonstration, planned for 2025, was funded by the Space Force and the Defense Innovation Unit. The Space Force last year awarded Orion Space Solutions a $50 million contract for the Tetra-5 experiment. Three satellites will be stationed in geostationary orbit (GEO) where Impulse Space’s Mira orbital service vehicle will serve as a hosting platform for Orbit Fab’s fuel depot. “This demonstration will pave the way for future commercial orbital refueling services, as well as additional collaborative opportunities and missions between Orbit Fab and Impulse Space,” said Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space. Trying to build in-space economy The Tetra-5 satellites and the fuel depot will use Orbit Fab’s refueling port known as RAFTI, or Rapidly Attachable Fuel Transfer Interface. Impulse Space will provide hosting services such as power, communications, attitude control and propulsion for the fuel depot. The Tetra spacecraft will rendezvous and dock with the depot. The collaboration with the startup Impulse Space “brings us one step closer to a robust in-space economy supported by a network of fuel depots and fuel shuttles in geosynchronous orbit,” said Adam Harris, Orbit Fab’s chief commercial officer. Orbit Fab last year announced plans to start offering hydrazine for satellites in geostationary orbit as soon as 2025 using a depot and “fuel shuttle” spacecraft. “Establishing a future where companies know in advance the availability and price of fuel will permit them to build their satellites without having to exchange operational capabilities for longer lifetimes,” said Harris. Impulse Space in January announced plans to launch its first orbital transfer vehicle on the SpaceX Transporter-9 rideshare mission scheduled to fly later this year. The company will offer the Mira platform for in-space transportation services.
Kleos Space announced a partnership May 23 with General Atomics Commonwealth Computer Research aimed at making it easier for analysts to derive insights from radio frequency data. While a few nations possess the expertise to draw insights from the global RF signals Kleos monitors with a 12-satellite constellation, “what we found is that most RF is quite hard to work with if you’re not familiar with this sort of data,” Andy Bowyer, Kleos co-founder and partnerships head, told SpaceNews, at the GEOINT Symposium. As a result, Kleos is creating new RF data products for General Atomics’ Optix cloud-based data processing and analytics platform. “If you can use Google Maps, you can operate Optix and gain much more insight with regard to what’s going on around your borders, coastlines and wherever else,” Bowyer said. “Because we’re a data provider, this opens up our marketplace to a wider group of people.” In addition, General Atomics, a company that already provides RF data captured by drones in its catalog of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance products, will become a value-added reseller for Kleos’ data products. In the future, a Kleos satellite could identify suspicious activity, like piracy or illegal fishing, prompting a drone to fly over for closer inspection. “We can say there’s some activity here and the drone can be better tasked from a tipping and queueing perspective,” Bowyer said. Joel Morgan, General Atomics Commonwealth Computer Research vice president of commercial and international programs, said in a statement, “By integrating Kleos’ data and intelligence products into our offerings, we enhance our ability to provide comprehensive and customized intelligence outputs to our customers.”
Northrop Grumman won a $45.5 million contract to launch a small weather satellite in 2025, the U.S. Space Force announced May 25. The company’s Minotaur 4 rocket will launch a payload called Electro-Optical Infrared (EO/IR) Weather System (EWS) prototype that will demonstrate commercial weather imaging technologies for military use. The launch contract was a task order awarded by the U.S. Space Force’s Orbital Services Program-4. OSP-4 is run by the Space Systems Command’s Small Launch and Targets Division at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracting vehicle for the acquisition of launch services for payloads over 400 pounds. The EWS weather satellite is a prototype made by General Atomics that will go to low Earth orbit for a three-year demonstration. The mission was designated USSF-261S-A. “The EWS prototype will prove out new EO/IR sensor technology to provide operational quality data to the DoD weather community and inform development of a more cost-effective and proliferated operational architecture,” the Space Systems Command said. The Space Systems Command in January launched another EWS prototype, a cubesat made by Orion Space Solutions. That one flew to orbit on the SpaceX Transporter-6 rideshare for a one-year demonstration. Project seeks to fill demand for weather data The EWS demonstrations are an effort to fill a Defense Department need for weather data as the military’s decades-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites are running out of fuel and projected to be out of service by 2026. Congress for years has pressed DoD to find alternatives to DMSP and consider commercial options. The U.S. military and allies rely on weather data from satellites to plan military operators such as flight routes, combat search and rescue, maritime surface tracking efforts, enemy missile observation and intelligence collection.
Updated at 3 p.m. Eastern with post-flight statement. WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle flew to space for the first time in nearly two years May 25 on what the company projected to be the vehicle’s final test flight before commencing commercial operations. Virgin Galactic’s “mothership” aircraft, VMS Eve, took off from the runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico at 11:15 a.m. Eastern. The takeoff occurred more than an hour behind a schedule provided by the company the day before, but the company did not disclose the reason for the delay. Virgin Galactic released VSS Unity at 12:23 p.m. Eastern. The spaceplane appeared to perform a nominal burn of its hybrid rocket engine before descending to a runway landing back at Spaceport America nearly 15 minutes later. Virgin Galactic said the vehicle reached a peak altitude of 87.2 kilometers — above the 50-mile altitude used by U.S. government agencies for awarding astronaut wings, but below the 100-kilometer Kármán line — and top speed of Mach 2.94. The flight, called Unity 25 by the company, was the first powered flight of SpaceShipTwo since July 2021, when the vehicle flew six people, including company founder Richard Branson. Both Unity and Eve went into extended maintenance periods after that flight and resumed test flights earlier this year, with Unity making a glide flight April 26. “The ‘Unity 25’ mission was a fantastic achievement for everyone at Virgin Galactic,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic. “Witnessing our inspiring crew’s pure joy upon landing, I have complete confidence in the unique astronaut experience we have built for our customers.” Unity 25 was commanded by Mike Masucci with CJ Sturckow as pilot. Four company employees flew as mission specialists on the vehicle to test the flight experience ahead of commercial flights: Jamila Gilbert, Christopher Huie, Luke Mays and Beth Moses. The flight was the first trip to space for Gilbert, Huie and Mays, and the third for Moses and Masucci. Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut, flew on four shuttle missions, with Unity 25 his third suborbital flight. “Looking down at our beautiful planet from space, something that so few humans have experienced, was such a humbling, awe-inspiring, and reverent experience,” said Huie in a company statement. “As one of the first 20 Black people who have gone to space, I hope that I can inspire the next generation of astronauts who look like me to set their goals high and break down the mental and institutional barriers that have held people of color back. “It is hard to put into words what this experience was like, but I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.” said Gilbert. The company did not host media for the launch at Spaceport America or provide a livestream of the mission, instead giving limited updates on social media. That stood in stark contrast to the previous suborbital flight of the vehicle in July 2021, with live broadcasts of the flight and large crowds of media and invited guests at the spaceport to witness the event. It also was a different approach from the other provider of crewed suborbital launches, Blue Origin. That company has webcasted all of its crewed New Shepard launches as well as many of its uncrewed launches. That included the most recent New Shepard launch in September 2022, a payload-only mission that suffered a failure of its main engine. The crew capsule successfully separated and parachuted to a safe landing, which the company broadcast. Virgin Galactic said before the flight that Unity 25 would be its final test before beginning commercial service. Its first commercial flight, called “Galactic 01”, is scheduled for as soon as late June carrying three mission specialists on a dedicated research flight for the Italian Air Force. Colglazier, in the post-flight statement, confirmed that schedule for Galactic 01. Company executives said on a May 9 earnings call that it planned to fly Unity on “regular intervals” after Galactic 01, primarily carrying private astronauts.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat has secured all regulatory clearances needed to buy British satellite operator Inmarsat after getting unconditional approval from the European Commission May 25. The companies said they expect to complete the transaction by the end of May, transforming U.S.-based Viasat into a global connectivity provider across multiple spectrum bands . Europe’s in-depth investigation into the merger focused on its potential to reduce competition for providing Wi-Fi on planes over the region. Despite being major inflight connectivity (IFC) providers, the European Commission found their position in the market would “remain moderate” following the merger. Sizable competitors and new entrants such as Starlink and OneWeb are also likely to exert sufficient competitive pressure on the merged group, the European Commission said in a news release , in a nascent market that is rapidly growing. The U.K.’s competition watchdog came to a similar conclusion when it gave unconditional approval May 9. Unconditional approvals for the deal mean the operators do not need to divest assets or restructure the transaction in other ways to pass regulatory scrutiny. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said May 19 it had approved the deal, which now just needs to pass through customary closing conditions in the coming week. The transaction was worth $7.3 billion in a mix of cash, debt, and Viasat shares when it was announced November 2021 but is now worth around $5.8 billion following a stock decline. A $2.3 billion debt package to finance the deal is set to expire late this month, Raymond James analyst Ric Prentiss said, meaning any additional delay would have led to significantly higher interest rates for the transaction. May 26 update: Rajeev Suri announced he would step down as CEO of Inmarsat following the transaction to join Viasat’s board of directors. Inmarsat chair Andrew Sukawaty will also step down from his role to become a Viasat board director.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s KSLV-2 rocket put seven satellites, including one equipped with synthetic aperture radar, into sun-synchronous orbit May 25, although an eighth cubesat is believed to have not deployed properly. The rocket lifted off at the planned time of 5:24 a.m. Eastern from the Naro Space Center. Live footage showed the 47.2-meter rocket, emblazoned with South Korea’s flag, soaring into the air with bright yellow flames shooting out of its engines. It was the third launch of the kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled three-stage rocket since its partially successful debut in October 2021 . The second launch in June 2022 successfully put a 1.3-ton dummy payload and a 162-kilogram performance test satellite into low Earth orbit. Despite the setback with one cubesat, science minister Lee Jong-ho referred to the launch as “successful” in a televised press conference held about 90 minutes after liftoff. “It would take some time to know what happened” to the cubesat, he said. The minister said the primary payload, named NEXTSat-2 , had exchanged signals with a ground station in Antarctica and the six others are expected to follow suit in the coming hours. “Following the success of the second launch last year, we reaffirmed the rocket’s performance and reliability,” the minister said. President Yoon Suk-yeol hailed the launch as a “significant milestone,” signifying South Korea’s emergence as a major space power, according to the presidential office. The first-stage booster, powered by a cluster of four KRE-075 engines, separated about two minutes after liftoff. The separation of its payload fairing took place 109 seconds later, followed by the second stage booster with a single KRE-075 engine 38 seconds later, according to the science ministry. The third stage, with a KRE-007 engine, pushed the payload to the intended orbit of 550 kilometers above the Earth and started deploying the satellites about 13 minutes after liftoff. The primary payload was NEXTSat-2, a 180-kilogram technology demonstration satellite developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). It hosts a set of scientific payloads, including a KAIST-developed synthetic aperture radar that can produce imagery with five-meter resolution and a swath width of 40 kilometers. The six smaller satellites successfully deployed are JLC-101-v1-2, a four-kilogram Earth-observation technology demonstration cubesat; Lumir-T1, a 10-kilogram cosmic radiation monitoring cubesat; KSAT3U, a six-kilogram earth observation and weather monitoring cubesat; and three 6U cubesats for the SNIPE constellation, developed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. The troubled cubesat is the fourth satellite of that constellation, designed to orbit in formation to identify temporal and spatial variations of small-scale plasma structures in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. It is not known yet if the trouble would affect the constellation’s performance. The launch was initially scheduled for May 24, but was delayed by one day due to a technical glitch. South Korea plans to conduct three more KSLV-2 launches through 2027 to improve the rocket’s technical reliability. Meanwhile, South Korea is developing a next-generation launch vehicle, KSLV-3. The kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled two-stage vehicle is expected to debut in 2030. Its first stage will have a cluster of five 100-ton-thrust multi-stage combustion cycle engines, and the upper stage with two 10-ton-thrust multi-stage combustion cycle engines. The two engines and rocket hardware will be developed by the state-funded Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) in collaboration with an industry partner that will be selected by September. The KSLV-3 will be capable of delivering up to 10 tons of payload to low Earth orbit; 7 tons to sun-synchronous orbit; 3.7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit; and 1.8 tons to lunar transfer orbit. South Korea plans to launch a domestically developed robotic lunar lander on KSLV-3 by 2032.
The first components for a new mobile launch platform for NASA’s Space Launch System, which has suffered extensive cost and schedule overruns, have arrived at the Kennedy Space Center. Bechtel, the prime contractor for the Mobile Launcher 2 (ML-2), said May 25 that the first steel components for the structure arrived at KSC earlier this month. The steel trusses, manufactured for Bechtel by Paxton & Vierling Steel in Iowa, will be part of the foundation of the base of the structure. NASA awarded a contract to Bechtel in 2019 to design and build ML-2, which will be used by the Block 1B version of the SLS. That version of the rocket, with a more powerful Exploration Upper Stage, is taller than the current Block 1 version and requires a new structure to support it. That cost-plus contract was originally valued at $383 million, with delivery of ML-2 scheduled for March 2023. However, the development of the structure has suffered serious delays and cost overruns. An audit by NASA’s Office of Inspector General in June 2022 concluded that the structure would cost up to $1.5 billion and not be completed until late 2027. Those problems prompted unusually strong public criticism of the project by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. He told Senate appropriators in May 2022 that the problems with ML-2 were evidence that cost-plus contracts, where contractors are reimbursed for their costs plus a fee, were a “plague” on the agency. “Because Bechtel underbid on a cost-plus contract in order to, what appears, to get it,” he said of the ML-2 contract, “they couldn’t perform. And NASA is stuck.” Bechtel has kept a low profile through that criticism of ML-2, but there have been signs of progress, including completion of a critical design review for the project. “The success of the completed Integrated Critical Design Review (ICDR) and now our first steel delivery are two recent milestones that reflect the team’s dedication and drive,” said Felice Presti, project manager at Bechtel, in a company statement. “We remain committed to our mission of permanently changing the landscape at Kennedy and supporting the proud history and legacy of our customer, NASA.” NASA has also been more complimentary about ML-2 recently. “This last six months of performance on the Bechtel side, I’ve been very, very pleased with the progress they’ve made,” said Amit Kshatriya, director of NASA’s Moon to Mars program office, during a May 15 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee. He noted the recent completion of the ICDR and impending shipment of the first steel components for it. That would allow tower construction to begin by the end of the summer. Artemis 4, the first launch of the SLS Block 1B and thus the first use of ML-2, is currently scheduled for the fall of 2028, according to a NASA Artemis mission manifest published in March.
ST LOUIS – Iceye unveiled a new imaging mode that distinguishes human-made from natural objects and highlights moving vehicles. For Dwell, the synthetic aperture radar imaging mode Iceye announced May 22 at the GEOINT Symposium here, satellites focus on an area for 25-seconds. Iceye’s traditional imagery is derived from 10-second views. Iceye developed Dwell to help analysts quickly distinguish buildings and vehicles from forests, fields, ice and water. In a grassy field, the reflections of the microwave pulses off the ground will be similar throughout the field of view. “But if it’s a car or a building, the way that it reflects the microwave pulses will be very different,” Eric Jensen, Iceye U.S. CEO, told SpaceNews . “The algorithm basically says the glinting off this thing is much different in different locations. That’s a good candidate for a man-made thing.” Iceye uses bright colors to highlight built objects In Dwell imagery. In spite of increasing reliance on machines to analyze satellite imagery and data, human analysts continue to play an important role. As a result, Iceye wants to make it easier for people without extensive experience with radar imagery to quickly make sense of it, Jensen said. Focusing on an area for 25 seconds also increases image acuity and clarity, Jensen said, making Dwell useful for experienced analysts too. In addition, Dwell imagery is useful for detecting tanks or equipment hidden under trees, Jensen said. “The chances that the microwaves make their way through the foliage and bounce back off the tank are much greater,” he added. John Cartwright, ICEYE data product head, said in a statement that Dwell will help people “better understand and characterize what is happening and changing on the ground in all lighting and weather conditions.” 
Two companies are preparing for a 2026 launch of what they believe will be the first commercial robotic Mars lander mission, the start of what the companies plan to be a regular series of such missions. Impulse Space and Relativity Space announced last July plans for the lander mission , with Impulse leading development of the lander itself and Relativity providing the launch on its Terran R rocket in development. At the time they were proposing to launch the mission in the next window for Mars missions in late 2024. However, in a presentation at the recent Humans to Mars Summit, executives with the two companies said the mission is now scheduled for launch in 2026. They did not disclose the reason for the delay, but Relativity Space announced in April that a redesigned version of the Terran R rocket will make its debut in 2026 , two years later than previously planned. While the launch of the first Mars mission may have slipped, the companies said at the conference that they are committed to flying a series of such commercial lander missions, creating what Josh Brost, senior vice president of revenue operations at Relativity, called a “constant supply chain to Mars.” That means flying missions at every launch opportunity, roughly two years apart. “We will take advantage of the window every 2.2 years and take at least one mission up,” said Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space. He said the companies would offer a catalog of different payload options, “and that catalog will drive the missions we actually do.” They argued that having a frequent series of missions will enable new and lower cost science, including the ability to refly payloads. “By making transport to Mars more affordable, you open up that iteration loop that can lead to advancements that just could not have been envisioned previously,” said Brost. Matsumori added they have also seen interest from commercial customers, such as those flying payloads for marketing purposes. The companies have not disclosed any customers yet or the pricing for payloads on the lander. The companies have also shared few technical details about the lander, but noted they plan to leverage designs and technologies developed for NASA’s InSight Mars lander, such as its heat shield. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Brost said. “Doing a clean-sheet design of a lander is an insane, monumental engineering feat.” Impulse is making progress on the propulsion needed for the lander. The company announced May 10 it completed qualification testing of Saiph, a five-pounds-force thruster, for use on its first mission to low Earth orbit slated to launch in October. That thruster will also handle maneuvers of the Mars lander during its cruise to the planet, Matsumori said. Impulse is also working on Rigel, which will produce 180 pounds-force of thrust, that will be used for landing on Mars. “The number one thing that all space vehicles start with is propulsion systems, and that is a challenge that we feel pretty comfortable with,” he said. The companies see NASA as one potential customer of those landers. “We hope that our own government, NASA, can take advantage of what we’re doing,” Matsumori said, “so that they don’t worry about the transport, but about the science itself.” NASA has expressed an interest in eventually buying commercial services for Mars science missions. A draft robotic Mars exploration strategy released by NASA in March opened the door to acquire services for Mars science missions in a manner analogous to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program of robotic lunar lander missions. “There is no shortage of companies that have interest,” Eric Ianson, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said during a March 30 presentation about the strategy. “The real question is, do they have the capability to be able to do that job?” The companies said they want to demonstrate with their lander mission that there are companies both interested in and able to take on Mars missions. “Our long-term vision has been to be one of the companies that makes a permanent presence on Mars possible,” Brost said. That’s been a goal long associated with SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, who frequently talks about making humanity multiplanetary. “In the last several years, there’s really been one loud commercial voice talking about Mars,” Brost said, alluding to SpaceX. “But for Mars to really happen and be affordable and sustainable and all of those things, it doesn’t take one company. It takes dozens or hundreds. You need lots of different people working on different parts of the problem set.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Fleet Space Technologies has raised around $33 million in a Series C round to expand its satellite-based mineral exploration services. The funding round valued the eight-year-old Australian venture at more than $350 million Australian dollars ($232 million), Fleet Space said in a May 24 news release, doubling its valuation since 2021. Australasian venture capital firm and existing investor Blackbird led the Series C round. Fleet Space said the funds would primarily support the expansion of its Exosphere mineral prospecting business, particularly into North America. ExoSphere uses low-power ground sensors distributed in areas of interest that send seismic data to customers via Fleet Space’s low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, which currently comprises seven satellites. This satellite-enabled ambient noise tomography system can map out 3D subsurface models in a matter of days, according to Fleet Space chief marketing officer Chloé Leclerc, compared with conventional techniques that often take weeks or even months — particularly for solutions gathering data that can only be accessed following a collection period. ExoSphere has secured more than 30 customers since launching commercially in March 2022, including Rio Tinto, Barrick Gold Corporation, Core Lithium, and Gold Fields. Fleet Space was formed with aspirations to connect a broader range of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with as many as 140 satellites. Leclerc said the venture has since decided to focus on growing its mineral exploration business globally with a smaller constellation of more powerful and capable satellites. While Leclerc did not disclose further details about its revised constellation plans, she said its next launch is slated for 2024 in a year Fleet Space aims to deploy four satellites. Fleet Space has not entirely shifted away from seeking to serve customers outside of mineral exploration. The venture announced April 20 that it had secured a contract from Australia’s Defence Space Command, worth 6.4 million Australian dollars ($4.2 million), to develop a LEO network focused on tactical communications. Other investors in Fleet Space’s Series C funding round include Grok Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Hostplus, TelstraSuper Bondi Partners / The 1941 Fund, and Pavilion Capital.
ST. LOUIS — The geospatial intelligence companies BlackSky and Spire Global announced May 24 they are offering a new global monitoring service that tracks ships via satellites. The “ maritime custody service ” uses radio frequency emissions to automatically task imagery, detect and classify vessels, and continuously monitor change, the companies said. The service combines data from Spire’s radio-frequency monitoring satellites that detect emissions from ships and locate dark vessels that manipulate their reported position in order to conceal nefarious activities. The system automatically tips BlackSky’s satellites to collect imagery. BlackSky’s Spectra AI cloud-based platform analyzes the electro-optical images using artificial intelligence to detect vessels, estimate cargo and monitor change over time. The maritime tracking service also relies on synthetic aperture radar from third-party satellites to supplement visible imagery, as only SAR can peer through clouds and darkness. Spire satellites track vessels emitting automatic identification system (AIS) data, spoofed AIS signals and other types of very high frequency (VHF) signals. 270,000 vessels can be tracked The companies said they are able to track as many as 270,000 vessels worldwide in open water, along rivers and canals, and while docked at port. Monitoring global maritime activity is critical to safeguarding national security, identifying illicit ship-to-ship transfers, intercepting smugglers or sanctions evasion, and tracking illegal fishing in restricted areas, said Iain Goodridge, senior director of radio frequency geolocation products at Spire. “The ability to identify, locate and continue to monitor ships, especially those that are spoofing their location, is becoming increasingly important as dark shipping activity continues to impact the global economy, the environment and the safety of people,” he said. The data can be used, for example, to anticipate the impact of port congestion and shipping delays on global and regional supply chains. Patrick O’Neil, chief innovation officer at BlackSky, said the service was designed to provide timely insights with minimal latency across the tasking, collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination process.
TAMPA, Fla. — Japanese space robotics venture GITAI said May 24 it has raised 4 billion yen ($29 million) to accelerate technology development and its U.S. expansion plans. Tokyo-based early-stage investor Global Brain led the funding round, an extension of a Series B round that raised around $17 million in 2021. GITAI founder and CEO Sho Nakanose said the funds would support efforts to develop a lunar rover and a two-meter-long Inchworm robotic arm. The rover recently passed various tests corresponding to Level 4 of NASA’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL), GITAI announced March 24. In a simulated lunar environment near the western edge of the Mojave Desert in California, the venture said it used two rovers and two Inchworms in March to emulate tasks needed to build a base on the moon and explore its surface. The demonstrations included excavation, solar panel and antenna installation, welding, towing an inflatable module, and changing one of the rover’s tires. GITAI said more than half of the components used for these demonstrations have already passed vibration, radiation, and other environmental tests in a simulated space environment. The venture’s Inchworm robotic arm has reached TRL 5, Nakanose told SpaceNews . He said most of the components on Inchworm are similar to GITAI’s 1.5-meter-long S2 robotic arm system, which the venture hopes to upgrade from TRL 6 to TRL 7 with an upcoming demonstration outside the International Space Station . If S2 passes NASA’s final safety review in June, GITAI plans to hand S2 over to NASA for transport to the ISS on a Cygnus cargo mission in December. The GITAI lunar rover is slated to reach TRL 6 by the end of 2024 through various ground tests, according to Nakanose. He said the venture is in talks with several U.S. launch companies for a 2026 demonstration mission on the lunar surface, where its rover would attempt to assemble a communication antenna and solar panels, enabling it to reach TRL 7 or higher in what could potentially be a commercial mission. U.S. growth strategy GITAI plans to use a portion of the Series B proceeds to expand into larger engineering and flight model manufacturing facilities in Los Angeles. The venture currently employs about 20 people at nearby Torrance, California, where the seven-year-old company opened its U.S. headquarters in June 2022. GITAI also employs around 20 people in Japan. Nakanose said the venture expects to add 30 more employees in the U.S. this year, followed by an additional 50 people by the end of 2024. The international expansion plan comes after GITAI said in December that it had secured its first purchase order from an undisclosed U.S.-based company. Other customers include the Japanese government and Tokyo-based multinational Toyota .
ST LOUIS – A U.S. missile-warning satellite completed a major review, keeping the spacecraft on track for launch in 2028. Northrop Grumman announced May 24 that the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) polar satellite passed its preliminary design review earlier this month. Preliminary design review “is the first milestone that demonstrates the maturity of the system to meet the mission,” Alex Fax, Northrop Grumman vice president of Next-Gen OPIR polar program, told SpaceNews. “It’s significant that we got there on time, per an accelerated schedule, so we can get the spacecraft delivered on time.” Northrop Grumman won a $2.37 billion contract in 2020 to develop two Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites with infrared sensors to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles for the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command. The spacecraft will travel “in highly elliptical polar orbits, which gives them full-time visibility of the Northern Hemisphere,” Fax said. With the preliminary design review completed, Northrop Grumman will begin manufacturing and procuring key spacecraft components ahead of the critical design review scheduled for May 2024. Northrop Grumman is supplying its Eagle-3 spacecraft and communications payloads for the Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites. Northrop Grumman also is working with Ball Aerospace to develop the infrared payload. “A key feature of that payload is that it’s effectively the same payload that is being produced for the Next-Gen [OPIR] GEO program,” Fax said. The Space Force Next-Gen OPIR program includes five satellites: two polar satellites from Northrop Grumman and three geosynchronous satellites being produced by Lockheed Martin under a $4.9 billion contract awarded in 2021. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are developing sensor payloads for the Lockheed Martin-built OPIR geosynchronous satellites. The Northrop Grumman-Ball Aerospace infrared payload already completed preliminary and critical design reviews for the Next-Gen OPIR geosynchronous program. Given the maturity of the payload, the preliminary design review for Next-Gen OPIR polar was an important milestone “to verify that we’re able to leverage this payload that was designed for both polar and GEO orbits,” said Aaron Dann, Northrop Grumman vice president for strategic force programs. The Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites are designed to identify the infrared heat signatures of incoming missiles and transmit that information to the ground through a resilient, secure communications system. “Because we’re in a polar orbit, looking over the Northern Hemisphere, we have continental U.S. in full-time view, which limits our dependency on overseas ground sites,” Fax said. 
TAMPA, Fla. — The first Astranis-built satellite has reached geostationary orbit over Alaska and completed a key end-to-end payload test following its Falcon Heavy launch at the end of April, the Californian manufacturer announced May 24. The 400-kilogram Arcturus satellite reached its 163 degrees West orbital slot about a week after launching as a secondary payload to the 6,400-kilogram ViaSat-3 spacecraft, Astranis CEO and cofounder John Gedmark said in an interview. Core functions including the telecoms satellite’s software-defined radio are working as expected, Gedmark said, after Arcturus successfully connected to a gateway in Utah and beamed its first signals to remote user terminals in Alaska. “It is the biggest milestone that we have hit as a company yet in our seven-year history,” he said. Early test results show payload performance at speeds of around 9 gigabits per second (Gbps), he added, despite being specced for 7.5 Gbps. However, Astranis still needs to finalize calibration and wrap up more minor health checks before the satellite can be put into service for Pacific Dataport Inc. (PDI), a telco based in Alaska, which Gedmark expects will be completed by mid-June. Astranis is operating Arcturus and has a contract to lease its capacity to PDI over the satellite’s seven-year design life. Similar capacity deals have been secured with customers for nine other satellites that slated for deployment over the next two years, according to Gedmark. These satellites have design improvements enabling them to provide more capacity and have an extra year of design life . The company has so far only announced customers for five of these nine satellites: Mexican telco Apco Networks , U.S.-based mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu , and cellular backhaul provider Andesat of Peru. Gedmark said Astranis expects to book more than $1 billion in revenue from these nine satellites over their eight-year lifetimes. Earlier this month, British satellite operator Inmarsat said it had ordered three satellites from 3D printing specialist Swissto12 that are around 900 kilograms each. Although heavier than Astranis satellites, the Swiss manufacturer’s Hummingsat platform still weighs about five times less than an average conventional geostationary satellite, offering a cheaper alternative for operators with business plans that do not require as much capacity. Swissto12’s first commercial satellite is slated to launch in 2025 in a mission for Intelsat. Viasat expects its first of three Viasat-3 satellites, each designed to provide more than 1,000 Gbps of capacity, will be ready to enter service at 88.9 degrees West over the Americas in mid-summer following the Falcon Heavy launch. The U.S.-based broadband operator recently said it is on track to clear all the regulatory hurdles in the way of plans to buy Inmarsat by the end of May.
ST. LOUIS — Commercial imaging satellites and change detection analysis have emerged as powerful tools increasingly employed by national security agencies. But the potential of this technology has yet to be exploited for U.S. homeland defense, officials said May 23. There are still technological barriers to the adoption of novel commercial geospatial technologies, including a shortage of skilled analysts, Tom Madigan, senior requirements officer at the Department of Homeland Security, said at the GEOINT 2023 symposium. Madigan oversees satellite imagery collection for DHS and previously worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He said there is growing interest in using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in areas like border security, response to natural disasters and protection of critical infrastructure such as power grids, transportation networks and communication systems. DHS also sees a demand for tools that use artificial intelligence and machine learning for data analytics from a multitude of sources, including satellites, drones and ground sensors. Madigan said DHS is eyeing emerging commercial global monitoring services in domestic emergencies, to rapidly assess the extent of damage, identifying areas most in need of assistance and facilitating the deployment of resources. “A major challenge is the testing and dissemination of a lot of these commercial systems,” he said, especially at the state and local levels. “There are some real hiccups,” Madigan added, “once an area has been identified that requires collection to where it gets tasked and then ultimately gets collected and processed and downlinked.” The processes create delays and that can be problematic during emergencies, he said. Appetite for SAR DHS wants to take advantage of more widely available commercial SAR data, Madigan said. Radar satellites can peer through darkness, clouds, bad weather, smoke and other conditions that impair electro optical imaging satellites. The combination of SAR and change detection analysis could be very effective in hurricane response, he said. “With flood detection type products, you know where the water levels are. That’s huge.” DHS gets significant support from NGA, said Madigan. The challenge with SAR is that it “requires a lot of expertise in exploiting,” he said. “So that’s where things like change detection analytics and value added type production really comes in handy to inform state and local personnel, especially in search and rescue response operations.” The U.S. Coast Guard, an agency under DHS, is starting to use vessel and aircraft type detection technologies “that were completely new for us for a lot of applications such as tracking illegal and unregulated fishing,” he said. “We have tested some algorithms and validated some of the commercial imagery.” Madigan’s office is keeping an eye on the commercial geospatial industry, he said. “I’m personally excited to see all the competition in the commercial marketplace, whether it’s resolution, sensor diversity,” he added. “ Hyperspectral I think will be a really exciting technology when that becomes available to us and we can especially apply those to things such as critical infrastructure.” DHS has partnerships with the energy sectors to provide security of pipeline facilities and chemical infrastructure. During major public events, Madigan’s office works with state and local officials to manage the deployment of overhead sensors, “to ensure that we have periodic refreshed satellite imagery of those locations.” The combination of satellite imagery with GIS (geographic information system) data sets, he said, is “really a powerful tool for planning, everything from canine teams and explosive detection teams venue security and screening and all sorts of stuff that are behind the scenes for events.” Border security applications Also speaking at GEOINT, assistant chief at U.S. Border Patrol headquarters Dan Steadman said there are needs for commercial geospatial technology for border security. Steadman said Border Patrol agents rely on mobile devices to get data. Most devices run so-called Team Awareness Kits known as TAKs to tap geospatial, navigation and situational awareness data. A key challenge for TAK users is that they often have to rely on off-grid communications. Units are equipped with goTenna mobile radios, he said, but connectivity is difficult in many areas near the Southern border. Offline precision mapping is an area where Border Patrol agents face challenges. “Offline mapping capabilities, that’s big,” Steadman said. “We need updated satellite imagery, and that’s something that we don’t always have.” TAKs run on many types of mobile operating systems, and could benefit from more access to satellite imagery to help keep track of agents on the ground, said Steadman. “We’d like to see predictive analysis,” said Steadman, for example, that looks at border patrol mission patterns to help assess effectiveness and assess where resources should be allocated. Government agencies don’t necessarily know where to find these technologies, he said. “Our organization is dependent on industry to come to us and say, Hey, we have a solution for this problem.” Sometimes people in the law enforcement and security business believe that big-brother technologies seen in movies and TV shows have real-life equivalents, he noted. “They’re assuming that you can zoom in with a satellite and read a license plate. That’s one of the biggest questions we always get when we’re trying to just explain resolution expectations, and how often you can see a collection and keep eyes on target all the time.”
British Earth observation startup Satellite Vu raised 12.7 million British pounds ($15.8 million) for its thermal-imaging satellite constellation. Molten Ventures, an existing Satellite Vu investor, led the Series A-2 investment round announced May 24. Other previous Satellite Vu investors participated including Seraphim Space Investment Trust, A/O Proptech, Lockheed Martin, Ridgeline Ventures, Earth Sciences Foundation and Stellar Ventures. Satellite Vu plans to launch its first satellite in June on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight. “We wanted to get this funding round done before launch,” Anthony Baker, Satellite Vu founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “If we have a successful launch in June or not, we have enough runway, 12 months, to keep going.” If the launch is successful Satellite Vu is likely raise money for a Series B round later this year for construction of additional satellites. Satellite Vu was founded in 2016 to gather high-resolution thermal imagery from space. To date, 66 companies have committed 128 million pounds to Satellite Vu’s Early Access Programme (EAP). EAP customers can task Satellite Vu’s airborne sensor and obtain discounts on satellite imagery orders. “We are proud to have such meaningful support from our existing investors,” Camilla Taylor, Satellite Vu chief financial officer, said in a statement. “It shows that we are on the right track, both to building an economically sustainable business and tackling the climate crisis.” Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. is building Satellite Vu’s first two 160-kilogram satellites to gather imagery with a resolution of 3.5 meters per pixel. With a planned constellation of eight satellites, Satellite Vu will be able to revisit sites multiple times per day, Baker said. Satelilte Vu’s thermal imagery has many potential applications. Defense and intelligence agencies already are familiar with thermal data “they just don’t have a commercial source of imagery which they can share with allies,” Baker said. Thermal imagery reveals industrial activity and has important climate applications, showing, for example, “which buildings are losing heat and need to be retrofitted,” Baker said. Molten Ventures led Satellite Vu’s latest funding round because the company’s “unique technology tackles key climate issues, and we’re impressed with their commercial progress,” George Chalmers, head of Molton Ventures Climate-Tech, said in a statement. “Their $160 million in early commitments is a stellar model of pre-launch sales for deep-tech companies, which other climate-tech firms could emulate.” Patrick McCall, Seraphim Space venture partner, said in a statement, “Satellite Vu stands out as a trailblazing commercial enterprise at the forefront of harnessing space and data to” address climate change. 
ST. LOUIS — The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is planning a new procurement of commercial services to monitor activities from space. “We’re preparing for commercial advancements in analytics through our upcoming Luno contract,” NGA’s director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said May 22 at the GEOINT 2023 symposium. Luno is the follow-on to NGA’s economic indicator monitoring (EIM) contract that the agency started in 2021. Nearly $30 million in task orders were awarded to five vendors. An additional $60 million is projected to be spent on task orders over five years. In preparation for the Luno contract, NGA solicited comments from the industry earlier this year. EIM sought commercial geospatial data and analytics services to improve the U.S. government’s insights on economic activity, adversaries’ military capabilities and trends around the world, such as the flow of raw materials, agricultural products, fuels and vehicles. Luno will address a broader range of topics and will focus on the timeliness of the intelligence, Whitworth said. “We see automated 3D mapping, autonomous vehicles can already capture and process 3D data in real time. And they’ve set mass market expectations.” According to NGA’s request for information, Luno seeks “unclassified computer vision capabilities to include object detection, object classification, object segmentation, pattern detection, broad area search, area monitoring and feature mapping that will augment existing unclassified and classified capabilities and data sources.” The data provided by Luno contracts has to “integrate directly into analytic workflows for operational use,” said NGA. Data from multiple sources Whitworth said the U.S. intelligence community wants fully analyzed data from multiple sources. “We believe industry’s ability to self organize into multi-sourced consortiums will provide never before seen opportunities,” he said. “Unclassified services will deliver enriched data and maintain custody of activity of interest.” So-called “custody services” also will be sought under Luno. “These can provide defense, civil and intelligence customers with reliable periodic updates of the position and disposition of objects and activity throughout time and space,” Whitworth said. The Luno contract will attempt to address industry concerns that government procurements of commercial data prescribe what the solution should be, rather than let companies come up with options. “We envision tasking for the insights we desire, and letting industry provide us with the best mix of sources and analytics required to deliver the insight,” said Whitworth. “Instead of us buying different analytical services and combining them ourselves. industry will do that themselves.” “We also see consortiums of companies able to tip and cue to maintain custody of high interest activity objects over time,” he added. “There will be a shift from buying analysis as a service to buying commercial orchestration as a service.” Luno is ‘the next step’ James Griffith, NGA’s director of source operations and management, told reporters May 22 that EIM projects are still in progress and the agency has not yet rolled out a procurement strategy for Luno. EIM is a multi-vendor contract. NGA in 2021 selected five vendors to compete for awards: BAE Systems, Ball Aerospace, BlackSky, Continental Mapping Consultants and Royce Geospatial Consultants. Griffith said NGA views the EIM program as a pilot for how to acquire commercial services. “Luno is the next step, which will be a more comprehensive vehicle.” “Part of our charter relative to commercial is not just identifying and assessing new capabilities and then exposing them to the community,” Griffith said. “It’s also then being able to agilely deliver them so that they are operationally relevant. And Luno is our vehicle to do that.” Luno is being designed to “define a bunch of different areas where we’re interested in using commercial imagery and computer vision to support U.S. government operations,” he said. An example might be data for humanitarian assistance operations in support of USAID.
Updated May 24 with Rocket Lab statement. WASHINGTON — Three aerospace companies submitted winning bids at a bankruptcy auction for most of the assets of launch company Virgin Orbit, ending any chance that company could return to flight under new ownership. In a May 23 filing with federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, Virgin Orbit announced that Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch, and Vast made the winning bids for separate segments of the company’s assets, including manufacturing facilities and its Boeing 747 aircraft. Rocket Lab bid $16.1 million for the lease on Virgin Orbit’s main production facility in Long Beach, California, along with machinery and equipment there. Rocket Lab has its headquarters and a production facility just a couple blocks away in Long Beach. Rocket Lab said in a statement that it will use the facility to support development of its Neutron rocket. It noted it was not acquiring any of the Virgin Orbit’s launch technology. “With Neutron’s design and development well-advanced, this transaction represents a capital expenditure savings opportunity to augment our production capability to bring Neutron to the launch pad quickly to serve our customers and their future success,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in the statement. Launcher, a launch vehicle company acquired by space station developer Vast in February , bid $2.7 million for Virgin Orbit’s lease on a test site in Mojave, California, along with machinery, equipment and inventory there. While Launcher discontinued plans to build a launch vehicle after the acquisition, it said it would continue work on the E-2 rocket engine it had been developing for it, planning to offer it to other customers. The bankruptcy auction also accepted the $17 million “stalking horse” bid from Stratolaunch for Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 and related equipment. That bid, announced May 16, served as a minimum for the value of the overall auction. Stratolaunch currently operates its custom-designed Roc aircraft that it uses as a launch platform for hypersonic vehicles it is developing. That 747, called “Cosmic Girl” by Virgin Orbit, took a long flight the day before the auction , flying from the Long Beach airport up the West Coast to Seattle, then heading east and south back to Long Beach. On the return leg of the trip it flew a maneuver similar to that used on LauncherOne launches, going into a “racetrack” loop and then pulling up. The company did not disclose the reason for the five-hour flight. The auction results rule out any attempt to keep the company intact and bring it out of bankruptcy under new ownership. Virgin Orbit said May 9 it had heard from “multiple” parties who were interested in buying the entire company and resuming launch operations. It did not identify any of those parties, which were among more than 30 “indications of interest” in the company’s assets it fielded. It was not clear if any of those parties submitted bids. The filing noted it selected no “next-highest bidders” who would be eligible to buy those assets if deals with the winning bidders fell through. Virgin Orbit said in a May 23 statement that it would cease operations after completing the sale of the assets. It noted that the bankruptcy sale was the result of “a rigorous and competitive auction which maximizes value for the estate and minimizes the remaining duration of the Company’s restructuring.” Sales of two other segments of Virgin Orbit assets have yet to be finalized. Machinery and equipment in another Virgin Orbit facility in Long Beach have been provisionally sold to Inliper Acquisition LLC, a liquidation company, for $650,000, pending completion of sales documentation. Another asset, the inventory at the two Long Beach facilities, was not sold at auction. The filing stated that the company “deemed it in the best interests of the Debtors’ estates” not to sell those assets at this time. That includes several LauncherOne rockets in various stages of production. A court hearing on the outcome of the auction is scheduled for May 24. The company did not state its plans for the remaining assets. “Virgin Orbit’s legacy in the space industry will forever be remembered,” the company stated. “Its groundbreaking technologies, relentless pursuit of excellence, and unwavering commitment to advancing the frontiers of air launch have left an indelible mark on the industry.” Few companies are pursuing air-launch systems for orbital missions.
ST LOUIS – U.S. defense and intelligence agencies need to forge even closer ties with the commercial sector to address national security threats, Chris Scolese, National Reconnaissance Office director, said May 23 at the GEOINT Symposium here. In recent years, the NRO has established relationships and developed contracting mechanisms to speed up access to innovative commercial technology. To improve those relationships, the NRO needs “to pay a lot more attention to what’s going on” in the commercial sector, Scolese said. In addition, government and industry need “to communicate much more effectively and clearly to each other,” he added. That message was underscored by Jim Cooper, former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. The commercial sector is the U.S. government’s “only hope” for remaining at the forefront of global competition, Cooper said, because “all the innovation comes from industry.” Historically, U.S. government agencies developed space systems “10, 20 or 30 years ahead of any possible adversary,” Cooper said. “That’s what we need again. Today, we’re primarily seen as a funding source.” With the help of the commercial sector, the U.S. has been able to remain ahead of potential adversaries, “but it’s becoming more and more challenging,” Scolese said. “China in particular is experimenting a lot, is innovating and is requiring the whole community to continue to look for new ideas and to continue to expand our capabilities.” Establishing the U.S. Space Force was one step in the right direction, said Cooper, one of the original proponents for a U.S. military space branch. Cooper, who has been critical in the past of the slow pace of Space Force acquisitions, said the service is “making progress, but we still have a long, long way to go.”
ST. LOUIS — Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major announced May 23 it won a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory contract to support the development of two of the company’s rocket engines. The Colorado-based company said it could not disclose the value of the agreement but said it is an “eight-figure” contract,, larger than a previous $3.6 million Air Force contract it received last year for development of Ursa Major’s Hadley engine for small launch vehicles. The new contract funds development of the company’s Draper engine for hypersonic vehicles and its 200,000-pound thrust Arroway engine for larger rockets. “Under the contract, Ursa Major will build and test a prototype of its new Draper engine for hypersonics, and further develop its 200,000-pound thrust Arroway engine for space launch,” the company said. Shawn Phillips, chief of AFRL’s rocket propulsion division, said Ursa Major “continues to be an important partner to AFRL as we build hypersonics capabilities and remove America’s dependence on foreign propulsion systems for launch.” The Draper engine is a 4,000-pound-thrust closed cycle hydrogen peroxide engine designed for hypersonic applications. Because its propellant is storable, the engine can provide rapid-response capabilities, founder and CEO Joe Laurienti said. Ursa Major plans to build a dedicated test stand for Draper and plans to hotfire the engine within 12 months. “The United States faces a gap in hypersonic capabilities,” he said. The Draper engine has the storable characteristics of a solid motor but with the higher performance and maneuverability of a liquid engine, Laurienti said. “Those qualities allow it to better simulate hypersonic threats as a target vehicle.” The engine would be used to build target vehicles simulating hypersonic missile threats. Arroway engine AFRL is also supporting the development of Arroway, a reusable liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine for medium and heavy launch vehicles, expected to hotfire in 2025. The engine was i ntroduced in August 2022 with the goal os supporting next-generation heavy launch. Ursa Major designs, manufacturers and tests engines in Berthoud, Colorado. Many of its components are 3D printed. 
Updated May 24 to clarify role of Evolution Space. WASHINGTON — Two companies have demonstrated the ability to conduct launches from a floating platform in U.S. territorial waters, a concept that could help address congestion at terrestrial launch sites. The Spaceport Company announced May 23 it hosted four sounding rocket launches with the support of Evolution Space on May 22 from a platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The launches were part of a proof-of-concept test of the ability to conduct launches from an offshore platform. “This demonstration provided numerous lessons which will be incorporated into our next project: building a sea-based spaceport capable of orbital operations,” Tom Marotta, chief executive and founder of The Spaceport Company, said in a statement. The launches, the company said, were intended to exercise the procedures needed to conduct an orbital launch from such a platform. That included getting approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Coast Guard, clearing airspace and waters to allow for a safe launch and remotely launching the rocket. The companies did not disclose the specific location of the launches. The FAA did have airspace closures in place May 22 for “space operations” in a small area of the Gulf of Mexico just south of Gulfport, Mississippi, an area where such airspace closures typically do not take place. The launches used propulsion systems supplied by Evolution Space, a Mojave, California-based company working on solid-propellant launch vehicles for defense and space applications. The company conducted its first launch that passed the 100-kilometer Kármán Line April 22 from the California desert, reaching a peak altitude of 124.5 kilometers. “We’re proud and grateful to be involved in what The Spaceport Company is doing,” Steve Heller, chief executive and founder of Evolution Space, said in a company statement. The company later said that the rockets were provided by Rick Maschek, an experienced small rocket builder and launch operator who was brought in by The Spaceport Company. The Spaceport Company plans to develop floating launch platforms based on a ship design called a liftboat . The platform can sail to a designed location and then extend legs to anchor itself to the seafloor and raise the platform out of the water. The launch platforms would not require any land-based infrastructure and would be easier to develop and operate than traditional launch sites on land. That includes facilities like Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the neighboring Kennedy Space Center, which have seen growing launch activity that is straining the range’s infrastructure. “It’s a lot easier to build more ships to meet more launch demand than it is to go find 100 acres on the coast somewhere,” Marotta said at a conference in February. Those platforms would be able to accommodate small launch vehicles with payload capacities of up to about one ton to low Earth orbit. Marotta said in February the company was working on a funding round to support work on those platforms that he said would be helped by both the demonstration launches and partnerships with launch providers. The company announced in April a partnership with Vaya Space, a small launch vehicle developer previously known as Rocket Crafters, to host launches of that company’s vehicles as soon as 2025. Floating launch platforms have been used on a larger scale, notably by the former multinational Sea Launch venture, which launched Zenit-3SL rockets from a converted oil rig on the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX has also considered using offshore platforms for its Starship vehicle, but the company said in February it was scrapping two oil rigs it had planned to convert into launch pads after concluding they were not the right platforms.
ST LOUIS – Hyperspectral startup Orbital Sidekick is acquiring imagery from its first two satellites launched in April on the SpaceX Transporter-7 rideshare flight. “We recently acquired first light, which was very exciting,” Katie Corcoran, OSK vice president of government affairs, said May 22 at the GEOINT Symposium here. “We have two healthy payloads on orbit right now.” Another OSK satellite is scheduled to travel to low-Earth orbit in June. Two more are slated to fly in October. And the sixth OSK satellite will launch in February 2024, Corcoran told SpaceNews . OSK’s six-satellite Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite constellation, or GHOSt, will provide frequent revisits, viewing some sites on a daily basis. GHOSt will provide hyperspectral imagery with a resolution of 8.3 meters per pixel and panchromatic imagery of 3.1 meters per pixel. Hyperspectral data has many potential applications. To date, OSK has focused largely on energy and government markets. On the government side, OSK is working with the U.S. Air Force , U.S. Space Force, National Reconnaissance Office , U.S. Geological Survey, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and In-Q-Tel . In the energy sector, OSK serves as the technology partner for the intelligent Pipeline Integrity Program , a consortium focused on technologies to prevent and detect pipeline leaks. OSK recently began working with the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Imaging Science. “We’re looking to expand our partnerships, especially in the research community, and we’ll soon have a firehose of hyperspectral data available to our end users,” Corcoran said. “Our partnership priority right now is on researchers at colleges and universities or at nonprofit research labs.” Toward that goal, OSK is asking researchers to provide input. “Tell us about your work; just the high points to get us up to speed,” OSK wrote on its website , LinkedIn and Twitter . “Which types of OSK support are most compelling for you and for your professional network, and why?”
L3Harris Technologies announced a contract May 22 from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to provide technology to help characterize and predict human mobility. Under the IARPA contract in support of the Hidden Activity Signal and Trajectory Anomaly Characterization (HAYSTAC) program, L3Harris will conduct modeling and simulation studies aimed at generating and analyzing human activities based on data obtained by satellites, GPS, Bluetooth and other sources. By simulating human activity in various locations and cultures, the technology could support disaster relief efforts. Automobile GPS data could be analyzed, for example, to detect anomalies caused by a bridge collapse and trigger an autonomous response. L3Harris has developed modeling and simulation analysis capabilities for four decades. In recent years, the company has used that expertise to “understand and analyze big data,” said Ed Zoiss, L3Harris Space and Airborne Systems president, said in a statement. “Our world-class research team also includes small business and academic experts who are poised to make breakthroughs in developing a system to characterize and predict human mobility.” Working with partners, L3Harris “will use simulated information to develop complex models mirroring realistic human behavior and social networks,” according to the L3Harris news release . The models will show, for example, how people routinely move through the world and interact with one another. Through this technology, the intelligence community and the Department of Defense seek to identify subtle anomalies that may be important to agencies responding to conflicts, humanitarian crises or natural disasters. “While bringing HAYSTAC to fruition will be a multi-year process, once it’s complete we’ll have reframed how we look at activity in the world,” Jack Cooper, IARPA HAYSTAC program manager, said in a statement. “And it won’t be a static concept of where things are on a map, but a dynamic one based on how they’re moving and what’s out of the ordinary.” IARPA established the HAYSTAC program in 2022 to fund basic research and development of “novel capabilities that produce large-scale microsimulations of fine-grained human movement and create AI reasoning engines capable of both identifying abnormal movement trajectories and generating normal ones,” according to the HAYSTAC broad agency announcement . Phase one of the HAYSTAC program is scheduled to end in late 2024. Subsequent phases of the program are expected to conclude in 2026.
ST. LOUIS — The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is working with NASA to develop a positioning and navigation system to guide visitors around the surface of the moon “as accurately and as safely as GPS does on Earth,” NGA’s director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said May 22. In a keynote speech at the GEOINT 2023 symposium, Whitworth said NGA’s new project to develop a lunar reference system is part of the agency’s broader goal to support civil and military space operations. He noted that NGA’s predecessor, the Defense Mapping Agency , mapped the moon ahead of the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s. “Today, we’re working with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command to develop a lunar geodetic system,” said Whitworth. NGA also plans to support planetary exploration beyond the moon, he said. “The lunar geodetic system is likely to be the first of many celestial body reference systems NGA will be tasked with in the years ahead.” ‘A big deal” Whitworth said the agency views the lunar geodetic system as a scientific and technical challenge that will take years to reach fruition. “It’s a big deal,” he said. “We realized that we needed something that was the lunar equivalent of WGS 84.” The World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84) is a three-dimensional coordinate reference frame for establishing latitude, longitude and heights for navigation and positioning. It’s a global geodetic reference system for the Earth used for mapping, charting, geopositioning and navigation. “And we’re not going to rush to failure on this one,” he said. “We’re actually taking the right amount of time both with ourselves and academia and other communities to ensure that we do it right.” Companies in the private sector today are working on lunar communications and navigation technologies based on NASA’s LunaNet architecture. But a lunar reference system comparable to WGS 84 is “something that does not exist today,” said James Griffith, NGA’s director of source operations and management. “We are still doing the science to try to understand it,” Griffith said May 22 at a news conference at GEOINT. “We are working with many of our colleagues across the scientific community, and working very closely with NASA to understand how do you build this reference frame and then how do you make it a repeatable process?” The gravitational environment on the moon, where there is no atmosphere, creates a different set of challenges for navigation, he noted. “We know the types of data we need to collect, but we don’t necessarily know how to collect it in that type of environment.” “Our tools aren’t built for that,” said Griffith. “And so we have a lot of exploratory work to do.” Just like WGS 84 required collaboration among many agencies, “I believe the same is going to happen here,” he said. “This is truly breaking ground in science.” New focus on space Whitworth also identified space domain awareness — or intelligence about objects in space — as an area where NGA wants to play a larger role. “And make no mistake, distinguishing friendly from unfriendly behavior in space has become particularly important to us,” he said. To build expertise in space domain awareness, NGA wants to have more Space Command and Space Force representatives working at the agency “I’ve talked to the chief of space operations of the Space Force, as well as the Space Command commander and the director of the NRO about these proposed changes to make sure that it was consistent with their vision as well,” said Whitworth. “And it was, and so when you think about what we do, we distinguish enemy, adversarial behavior from friendly behavior,” he said. “That’s one of our chief responsibilities and that has to apply in space and there’s not necessarily a large workforce dedicated to that outside of NGA.” Whitworth said NGA would help to augment existing Space Force and Space Command efforts to monitor space objects and identify potential threats using intelligence collected by imaging satellites.
ST LOUIS – Commercial satellite imagery is helping NATO address its need for persistent monitoring in spite of cost, technical and licensing issues. “NATO is not all that wealthy and the price for commercial satellite imagery is pretty high,” Paul Bowman, who leads the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance cell for NATO’s Battlefield Intelligence Collection and Exploitation Systems, said May 22 at the GEOINT Symposium here. “There’s a limit to how much NATO is going to be able to invest in that.” Bowman said he’s hopeful that prices for commercial satellite imagery and analytics will decrease as the number of satellite and analytics providers grows. “We’ve done a lot of experimentation with some AI solutions to speed up the analysis process, but they’re really expensive,” Bowman said. “Some of the really good ones cost a lot of money. We’re hoping that also becomes more affordable.” In addition, NATO seeks to acquire satellite imagery through the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space . NATO is asking its members to contribute funding and satellite data to establish a virtual constellation called Aquila. The goal is to affordably speed up data collection, sharing and analysis among NATO Allies and with the NATO command structure. Varied end-user licensing agreements also pose challenges for NATO. Since NATO does not possess its own intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites, “it’s absolutely necessary to be able to collaborate and share all that data,” Bowman said. During a NATO military exercise, Unified Vision 2020, four companies provided satellite imagery. “Every one of them had a different end-user license agreement,” Bowman said. In order to ensure the various datasets would only be shared with the appropriate parties, NATO established separate servers. “I know everybody has their own interests, but hopefully there will be some kind of convergence on end-user license agreements that makes it easier to use in a coalition environment,” Bowman said. Technical difficulties are less of a problem. But the more that data adheres to widely accepted standards, the easier it is to share, Bowman said. During an upcoming NATO exercise involving 18 nations, for example, individual nations will be gathering, sharing, processing, exploiting and sharing data. “Without those standards, all of the nations cannot share,” Bowman said.
ST LOUIS – OneWeb announced six finalists May 22 for its annual Innovation Challenge. The finalists selected by the London-based broadband communications company are: More than 70 competitors from 25 countries participated in OneWeb’s Innovation Challenge 2022, called Connectivity and Beyond! Through the competition, conducted with European Space Agency, OneWeb invited people to identify products and services to “unleash the potential in OneWeb’s global communications network to serve future generations,” according to the news release. Massimiliano Ladovaz, OneWeb’s chief technical officer, said in a statement, “Huge congratulations to the seven Industrial category finalists announced today. They join a growing list of organizations with access to OneWeb’s resources to collaborate and grow within our innovation community. On behalf of OneWeb, I want to make a special mention to everyone who took part – the calibre of the entries was high and we will continue to engage with many other participants as we go forward.” OneWeb has 633 first-generation broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit. The company needs only 588 to provide global coverage. The remaining satellites serve as in-orbit backups.
ST. LOUIS — Umbra won a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to demonstrate novel collection techniques using synthetic aperture radar satellites, the company announced May 22. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development arm, awarded Umbra a cost-sharing agreement under a new program called Digital Radar Image Formation Technology (DRIFT). The agency allocated $4.5 million for the one-year project. Umbra, a startup based in Santa Barbara, California, operates a constellation of six high-resolution SAR satellites, and is scheduled to launch two more later this year on the SpaceX Transporter 9 rideshare mission. U.S. government interest in commercial SAR imaging has grown significantly over the past year, Todd Master, Umbra’s chief operating officer, told SpaceNews . The DRIFT program seeks to demonstrate advanced imaging capabilities enabled by at least two SAR satellites flown in formation. DARPA last year also awarded contracts to Jacobs, Northrop Grumman and PredaSAR . Radar imaging emerged as a breakout remote-sensing capability of the war in Ukraine where optical satellites are impaired by dense cloud cover and weather conditions. Umbra under the DARPA contract will demonstrate a technique known as bistatic collection. Monostatic SAR imaging is done with a single radar that has the transmitter and receiver collocated. Bistatic imaging uses two radars, one that transmits and receives, and the other that only receives. “We plan to build out the remainder of our constellation with pairs of satellites flying in tight formation to support bistatic collection and other combined operations that provide unique phenomenology,” he said. Umbra was licensed to deploy 32 satellites. SAR data more accessible At the 2023 GEOINT symposium, “you’re seeing a much bigger SAR footprint” due to commercial advances, Master noted. “Keep in mind that the commercial SAR industry in the United States has really only been around for a few years,” he said. “Everybody’s seeing is sort of like a new emerging technology” although Europe and Canada pioneered it much earlier. What’s changed is that the data was prohibitively expensive and not really widely available. DARPA wants to experiment with collection modes, Master said, making small system modifications in the satellites and collection techniques that commercial companies are working on. Another commercial SAR company, Capella Space, announced last month it demonstrated bistatic collection, which the company said, can help to avoid interference from radar jamming and to enable moving target indication techniques. “Bistatic SAR improves object imaging by capturing images from different angles which provides more information about the shape of the object,” which could have significant utility in military operations, Capella said. “A bistatic imaging geometry can enable radars to image structures specifically designed to reduce the more common monostatic radar signature, such as stealth aircraft.”
ST. LOUIS — Synthetaic, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from space and air sensors, announced May 22 that former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Robert Cardillo has joined its board of directors. The Wisconsin-based company made headlines earlier this year when its founder Corey Jaskolski used Planet Labs’ satellite imagery archive to trace the path of the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the United States. Cardillo is chairman of the board of Planet Labs Federal. As a board member of Synthetaic, he will help the company build its defense and intelligence business. “There is more geospatial imagery available than ever before” but knowing how to extract meaningful insights from that data remains a challenge , Cardillo told SpaceNews . Synthetaic was able to quickly mine Planet’s archive with a tool called RAIC, short for Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, which analyzes unsupervised data. Unlike most AI systems, it doesn’t require pre-trained models or extensive image labeling. “When you can automatically and near instantly search planetary-scale datasets, the possibilities are endless,” said Cardillo. Jaskolski came up with a way to use algorithms that “truly scale because they don’t require the traditional approach of hundreds, if not thousands of hours of training to teach the computer what to go find,” he said. Cardillo said Jaskolski alerted him that he had found the Chinese balloon in Planet’s imagery archive over South Carolina where the U.S. military shot it down. “I told him that’s awesome,” Cardillo said. “Finding it over South Carolina is cool. But being able to turn the clock back and go back in time, that would be really amazing,” he added. “It was timely. It was relevant.” Jaskolski said the RAIC tool is not perfect every time, but “it learns as it goes. It is an iterative process,” he said. “It’s a human-machine collaboration.” “If you start a RAIC search from scratch, as you get more and more positive hits, you nudge it in the right direction and it improves.” Planet’s partnerships with AI startups Planet Labs on May 22 announced it signed an official partnership with Synthetaic that gives Planet’s customers access to the RAIC tool. “Through this partnership, customers are now able to obtain Synthetaic RAIC object detection analytics on top of a defined area of interest within Planet data. The companies also plan to develop a combined offering that aims to enable additional alerting capabilities when change occurs or specific objects are detected within focus areas,” Planet said in a statement. Planet also announced a new partnership with Deajeon, South Korea-based startup SI Analytics, which applies AI-powered Super Resolution and GeoAI Analytics, Object Detection/Segmentation algorithms, to satellite imagery in order to enhance the resolution to analyze changes and abnormalities for the areas of interest.
 ST. LOUIS — Impact Observatory unveiled an early access program May 22 for IO Monitor, a global mapping and monitoring product. For $1 per square kilometer customers can obtain access to IO Monitor, which pairs artificial intelligence with satellite imagery to classify land use and land cover. The minimum order size is 5 square kilometers. The low price will encourage people to start monitoring their hometowns, neighborhoods or farms as well as a nature preserve or recreational area they plan to visit, Steve Brumby, Impact Observatory CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews by email. “Impact Observatory is excited to bring AI analysis and automation to help our users understand our changing world at unprecedented speed and scale,” Brumby said. “Our maps of change help users answer quantitative questions about the status and trends of lands they care about. How much new urban expansion has happened near my town? How much forest has been lost to wildfires in the watershed serving my farm or forest?” Customers can subscribe to the IO Monitor through an online store. “This fundamentally changes how quickly and easily people can understand the world and the threats and opportunities revealed by satellites observing the world every day,” Brumby said. “This early access program will allow our team to optimize our order, payment and delivery processes, and enable users to provide feedback on our maps and what they would like to monitor next. We expect to roll out a series of improvements to the store and to our maps over the coming months.” The current maximum size for online orders is 15,000 square kilometers. Orders larger than that are handled by the Impact Observatory sales staff. In addition to its online store, Impact Observatory will offer access to the IO Monitor through Esri, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Brumby said. The IO Monitor early access program will last for a few months as the company seeks customer feedback. “Landowners and decision makers in governments and industry have been used to trying to make decisions with maps that might be years old, so the first learning opportunity for us is to see what types of changes people are most interested in now that they can have a ‘living’ map of their world,” Brumby said. “Over time, we’re going to expand the number of land use and land cover categories, and options for higher-resolution maps using commercial satellite imagery that will enable our users to understand the world in new ways.” Ten-meter resolution data from the European Space Agency Copernicus constellation currently feeds Impact Observatory maps.
China conducted a pair of launches last week to replenish its Beidou navigation system and send science and radar tech test satellites into orbit. A Long March 2C rocket lifted off at 4 a.m. Eastern May 21 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Aboard were the Macau Science Satellite 1A and 1B, designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field, and the Luojia-2 (01), a Ka-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) test satellite for Wuhan University. Macau Science Satellite 1A carries payloads for measuring the Earth’s magnetic field while 1B features high-energy particle detectors and solar X-ray instruments. The pair will provide complementary observations to those made by ESA’s Swarm satellites and the Sino-Italian seismo-electromagnetic satellite, Zhangheng-1. The satellites will also monitor the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), a weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field which impacts the operations of spacecraft. The platform for satellite 1A was developed by DFH Satellite under the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the main satellite-making arm of China’s main space contractor, CASC, while 1B was developed by Northwestern Polytechnical University. The payloads were developed by the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST). Luojia-2 (01) is testing multi-angle and video radar imaging, with a highest resolution of 0.5 meters in spotlight imaging mode. It will also test signal enhancement and integration of remote sensing imaging, meteorological detection and water conservancy applications, according to Chinese media reports . It continues a surge in SAR developments in China. The 353-kilogram Luojia-2 was developed by Wuhan University. The first satellite, Luojia-1, launched in June 2018 and had a mass of 20 kilograms. The launch of the satellites was facilitated by the China Great Wall Industry Corp. (CGWIC), another CASC subsidiary, which is authorized to provide commercial launch services, as well as satellites and engage in international space cooperation. Prior to this, a Long March 3B lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 10:49 p.m. Eastern, May 16. Aboard was the 56th satellite for China’s Beidou navigation and positioning system, and is headed for geostationary orbit. It is the first backup satellite for the Beidou system, which was completed in 2020. The new satellite is part of an overall aim to improve the system’s availability, stability, short message communication capacity and positioning precision. The launches were China’s 19th and 20th of 2023 so far. CASC plans more than 60 launches this year, while commercial actors could add more than 20 orbital missions , according to announced plans. A Long March 2F rocket was rolled out at Jiuquan May 22 ahead of launch of the Shenzhou-16 crewed mission. That launch to the Tiangong space station could take place as soon as May 27. China earlier this month sent the Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft to Tiangong to provide supplies, propellant, science experiments and equipment to Tiangong. Commercial company Landspace also recently delivered its second Zhuque-2 methalox to Jiuquan.
ST. LOUIS — Space launch operations at Cape Canaveral, the nation’s busiest spaceport, were recently replicated in a digital 3D “metaverse” that merged virtual and physical worlds. The demonstration, funded by the Space Force’s Spaceport Integration Office, simulated launches using real-world telemetry data from commercial rockets and Maxar’s high-resolution satellite imagery of Cape Canaveral. The data was merged using Cesium visualization software, Unreal Engine’s computer graphics game engine and NVIDIA’s Omniverse collaboration platform. The spaceport simulation is an example of how the military can take advantage of metaverse technology, Jennifer Arnold, head of NVIDIA’s federal business, said May 21 at the GEOINT 2023 symposium. Space Launch Delta 45, the unit that oversees the Florida space launch ranges, will use the technology to help plan future operations in the face of growing congestion and increased launch rates. The Space Force, for example, will need to predict demands on the range’s resources and plan upgrades to the communications infrastructure and the sensor network. The Space Force’s Chief Technology & Innovation Office has advocated for the use of metaverse technologies for training and learning about the space environment. Cape Canaveral’s digital twin combined Maxar’s enhanced 3D imagery with actual rocket telemetry data provided by SLD 45, said Arnold. “So we launched a rocket and we were able to tell geospatially what was within that domain and within that area, taking in direct sensor feeds.” The Space Force established the Spaceport Integration Office in July to help improve coordination. The demonstration, which officials discussed in a webinar in April , was also a test case for the merging and exchange of data. Cesium provided a plug-in for Unreal Engine and for Maxar’s geospatial data. The physical data from SLD 45 was merged with NVIDIA’s visualization engine. The engine uses the standard known as Universal Scene Description, a framework for the exchange of 3D computer graphics data, originally created by the Pixar movie studio. The spaceport imagery came from Maxar’s 3D digital twin of the Earth it developed for the U.S. Army for immersive training. ‘We need to stop saying metaverse’ The metaverse is mostly associated with entertainment and gaming, although it has real utility for national security, said David Sracic, technical lead at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division. Sracic oversees the development of decision support software for undersea warfare. This requires advanced mapping technology, weather models and other data so sailors position the ship and sensors to execute the mission successfully, he said May 21 at GEOINT. “Underpinning all of that is new technology which arguably says metaverse,” he said. But trying to get funding in the Pentagon’s budget for metaverse technology can be problematic, he said. “Our national defense strategy doesn’t ask for a metaverse. So how do you advocate for budgets?” “We need to stop saying metaverse,” Sracic said. “Part of it is a vocabulary challenge … People ask why are you building a video game?”
Updated 8:15 p.m. Eastern with comments from post-launch press conference. WASHINGTON — Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission is on its way to the International Space Station after a launch May 21. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 5:37 p.m. Eastern. The Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-person Ax-2 crew separated from the rocket’s upper stage 12 minutes after liftoff. The Dragon spacecraft, named Freedom, is scheduled to dock with the station at about 9:16 a.m. Eastern May 22. The spacecraft will remain there for eight days before returning with its four-person crew. SpaceX dealt with a minor technical issue during the countdown involving a leak in a valve in the attitude control system of the Falcon 9 booster, used to orient the booster for landing. Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said at a post-launch briefing that engineers determined the leak would not impair operations of the booster and went ahead with the launch. The booster landed successfully at Cape Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1. Ax-2 is commanded by Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who holds the U.S. record for longest cumulative time in space at 665 days. She is currently director of human space flight at Axiom. John Shoffner, a private astronaut who trained as a backup for Axiom’s Ax-1 mission in 2022, serves as pilot for Ax-2. The two mission specialists on board are Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi, two Saudi astronauts selected by the Saudi Space Commission in February to fly on the mission under an agreement signed with Axiom Space in September 2022. Alqarni and Barnawi are the second and third Saudi citizens to go to space, after Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who flew as a payload specialist on a space shuttle mission in 1985. Barnawi is the first female Saudi astronaut. The Ax-2 mission was scheduled to spend 10 days at the ISS, but delays in the launch caused by a postponed Falcon Heavy launch led Axiom Space and NASA to agree to shorten the mission by two days to fit it into a crowded manifest of missions going to the station. Derek Hassmann, chief of mission integration and operations at Axiom Space, said at a May 15 briefing that the company prioritized research activities planned for the mission but dropped some lower priority outreach and other activities. However, the Saudi astronauts still plan to carry out a “whole series of media events” during their time on the station, he said, including a series of sessions with students. Even before the mission was shortened, the crew had a crowded schedule. The astronauts will carry out more than 20 experiments in topics ranging from life sciences to in-space manufacturing. Axiom has its own technology demonstrations as well to support its plans to develop commercial modules it will add to the ISS as a precursor for a standalone space station. “We have an absolutely jam-packed mission,” Lucie Low, chief scientist at Axiom, said during a briefing about the science planned for the mission in April. The company aggregated the experiments from the Saudi Space Commission and other partners, then worked to fit those projects into available crew time and ISS resources. “We basically play a massive game of very complicated four-dimensional Jenga.” The company did incorporate lessons from Ax-1, where the four-person crew was overloaded with tasks. The Ax-2 crew adjusted the training for the mission, increasing work in some areas and decreasing it in others. “We need to go back to more of a short-duration training style, more like how we trained for shuttle flights,” Whitson said at a May 16 briefing, “focusing on the areas where we need the most experience with.” She noted her schedule is “a lot less constrained” than Michael López-Alegría, who commanded Ax-1 last year. “I’ll be available to help the crewmembers a lot more as they need assistance, which will primarily just be the first day or two,” she said. “Once they get their space legs under them, I know these guys are going to be extremely competent.” Ax-2 is the tenth crewed flight by SpaceX in a little less than three years, starting with the Demo-2 commercial crew test flight for NASA in May 2020. Since then SpaceX has launched six crew rotation missions to the ISS as well as Ax-1. It also launched Inspiration4, a private astronaut mission in 2021 that spent three days in space without docking with the ISS. “It’s kind of hard to believe,” Reed said at the post-launch briefing of the 10 crewed launches SpaceX has now performed. “It is certainly what I had hoped we would be able to do.” He declined to speculate on long-term plans other than to note SpaceX’s ultimate ambitions to make humanity multiplanetary. SpaceX is scheduled to launch up to three more crewed missions this year: the Crew-7 mission for NASA, Polaris Dawn private astronaut mission and Axiom’s Ax-3 mission, which is tentatively scheduled for late this year. While NASA approved the Ax-3 mission in March , Axiom has not yet disclosed the crew for it.
As NASA faces both short-term and long-term uncertainty about its funding, the agency is turning to its most powerful advocates: its astronauts. The four members of the Artemis 2 crew, named in April , were in Washington last week, spending parts of two days meeting with members of Congress. The three Americans and one Canadian assigned to the mission, slated to be the first crew flight to go to the moon in more than half a century, reported a warm reception from their meetings. “This has taken decades of their leadership, bipartisan leadership to get us to where we are today,” Reid Wiseman, commander of Artemis 2, said during a briefing May 17 at the Canadian Embassy after one day of meetings. “That was really our message, thanks for a couple of decades of great leadership and thanks for the decades to come to keep Artemis going.” “Folks are cheering us on and telling us how they’re going to support us and they’re going to make sure that we can keep doing the things that we’re doing,” said Victor Glover, pilot of Artemis 2, during a May 18 press conference outside the Capitol. “They know how important the decisions and the debates that are happening right now are to the future sustainability of that vision and execution of that vision.” Those decisions and debates revolve around concerns about potential across-the-board spending cuts in the next fiscal year. Congressional leaders are continuing negotiations with the White House on a spending deal that could involve cuts sought by the Republican leadership in the House in exchange for agreeing to increase the debt ceiling. Those discussions face a June 1 deadline to avoid a government default. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson previously warned that the most severe cuts could jeopardize the ability of the agency to carry out future Artemis missions along with other NASA priorities. Nelson, in a March 19 letter to the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, said a potential 22% cut “would have devastating and potentially unrecoverable impacts” on the agency and would force NASA to “significantly restructure or terminate” elements of Artemis, including missions beyond Artemis 4. Nelson has reiterated those concerns in the weeks since, including at the Capitol Hill event, expressing hopes for both a resolution of the debt ceiling debate and avoiding a long-term continuing resolution (CR) when the new fiscal year starts Oct. 1. “The kinds of cuts that you have seen talked about would be devastating to NASA, to our programs and, indeed, this… crew that is taking us back to the moon after half a century,” he cautioned. Speaking to the human exploration and operations committee of the NASA Advisory Council May 15, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, noted the challenges of starting a fiscal year on a CR. “If we’re trying to grow our budget to launch more stuff and we’re on a CR, it’s our budget from last year, so we can’t grow,” he said. “We can’t start new programs under a CR without an exception.” There are issues beyond 2024 as well. The 2024 budget proposal projected spending on exploration programs to increase from nearly $8 billion sought in 2024 to more than $8.6 billion in 2028. That increase comes from increases in work on Artemis lunar landers and other lunar capabilities, as spending on Orion and the Space Launch System is flat or declines. “We do have that increasing budget that you see over the five-year horizon,” Free said of the budget at the committee meeting. “If we’re going to fly every year, we need the budget to do that.” He hedged, though, when asked if that request was sufficient. “There’s always going to be differences” between NASA’s own plans and the administration’s request, he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get all the dollars we think we need, but our job is to implement what the president would like to put forward and then whatever Congress eventually appropriates for it.” “A lot of the program managers are here in the room,” he added, “and I’m sure they’d tell you they need more than this to execute.” He praised what Nelson, a former senator, did to secure most of what NASA requested in fiscal year 2023. “He definitely went to bat for the agency.” The agency also has on Capitol Hill former astronaut Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). While Kelly does not serve on committees that either fund or authorize NASA, he said at the May 18 press conference he does “get a lot of questions” from his colleagues on space topics, illustrating varying levels of expertise. “My experience is that they’ve been incredibly supportive,” he said of fellow members of Congress, arguing that the agency still had broad bipartisan support. “NASA is the Dolly Parton of government agencies. Everybody loves Dolly Parton.”
Vancouver-based EarthDaily Analytics is offering access to the French-Israeli Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro-Satellite mission, called VENµS, through Amazon Web Services. The VENµS imagery, captured twice per day in 12 visible and near infrared spectral bands, is similar to the scientific-grade data quality EDA plans to capture with its own constellation. In 2024, EDA will begin obtaining imagery of 98% of the Earth’s landmass in 22 spectral bands with its 10-satellite EarthDaily Constellation, according to the May 15 news release. In addition to visible and near infrared observations, EDA will gather shortwave infrared and thermal imagery with a native resolution of five meters per pixel and processed resolution of 3.5 meters per pixel. EDA was formed by Antarctica Capital in 2021 after the private equity firm bought parts of UrtheCast. In 2022, EDA selected Loft Orbital to build, launch and operate the EarthDaily Constellation on its behalf. VENµS was launched by the French Space Agency CNES and Israel Space Agency in 2017 to acquire Earth imagery every one to two days at a spatial resolution of 4-to 5-meters.
Finland-based Iceye announced an agreement May 17 to develop a five-satellite constellation for Bayanat, a United Arab Emirates geospatial analysis firm, and Emirati fleet operator Yahsat. The first Iceye-built Emirati synthetic aperture radar satellites is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2024. Iceye also is providing the ground segment. “The partnership between Bayanat and Iceye, in collaboration with Yahsat, will drive the development of a sovereign EO [Earth-observation] ecosystem which will enable us to provide cutting-edge solutions, whilst contributing to skill development, scientific advancements and sustained economic growth,” Bayanat CEO Hasan AlHosani said in a statement. “We are excited to be at the forefront of this dynamic and rapidly evolving field and looking forward to developing a commercial space program in the UAE.” Prior to the launch, Iceye will provide Bayanat with access to Iceye’s own constellation “so Bayanat can start utilizing radar satellite imagery for the benefit of the public and private sector customers in the UAE,” Rafal Modrzewski, Iceye CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. In addition to satellites and ground services, Iceye will provide Bayanat with computers, antennas and software associated with the operations of a mission control center. In contrast to electro-optical imaging satellites, SAR satellites can capture images during the day, at night and in all weather conditions. With the data collected, Bayanat intends to produce maps, detect change, perform geospatial analytics and develop artificial intelligence algorithms. Yahsat is joining forces with Bayanat and Iceye as part of its campaign “to strengthen the UAE’s leadership in the space sector in MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region,” Yahsat Group CEO Ali Al Hashemi said in a statement.
ST. LOUIS — The data analytics firm Royce Geo used imagery from Planet Labs and vessel-tracking information from Spire satellites to uncover illicit oil trading by Russian tankers around the globe. The analysis published May 16 also found that more tankers coming from Russian ports are now heading towards Chinese export destinations. Using artificial intelligence techniques to extract ships and classify tankers within satellite images, the company was able to explain how Russia continues to export oil and natural gas products while most nations have imposed sanctions and price caps. Another analytics and AI company, Windward, combined vessel tracking data with Planet imagery to report on the alleged laundering of Ukrainian grain by Russian dark vessels. These are examples of how Planet works with partners to “get value out of our data,” Kevin Weil, Planet’s president of product and business, told SpaceNews . “We have hundreds of satellites in space. We image the whole planet every day. So we have this history of the world that is basically recording anything that has changed over the past almost seven years,” Weil said. Satellites owned by private companies like Planet have played an unexpectedly important role in the war in Ukraine, demonstrating the capabilities of commercial satellites to deliver crucial intelligence . The industry, however, worries that much of the value of the data collected by satellites and archived daily remains untapped. “I think Planet’s is the most underutilized dataset in the world,” Weil said. Planet is working with Microsoft to create a so-called PlanetGPT using AI to make satellite data more accessible by indexing it, and making it searchable and conversational, Weil said. “One of the reasons I’m excited about that is it’s for the first time we’re able to not just build individual models to extract what’s happening in the world, but potentially build a more general model that we’ll be able to query with natural language and more quickly get answers across a variety of scenarios,” he said. Becoming an information company Planet last quarter reported significant growth in revenue . Going forward, the company is reshaping itself to be more than an Earth observation firm and become a data and information provider, said Robert Cardillo, chairman of the board of Planet Federal. Cardillo, a former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), oversees the government arm of Planet Labs. His message to customers is “tell us what insights you want and let us figure out how to provide it.” Planet last year won a $146 million contract from the National Reconnaissance Office to supply electro-optical imagery. The company is working to expand its reach in the government market, Cardillo said. Planet has signed a number of cooperative research and development agreements, known as CRADAs, with government agencies to explore ways to extract insights from Planet’s archive. NGA and other defense agencies are gaining more confidence in commercial data but there are still “structural inhibitors” that slow down the adoption of commercial solutions, Cardillo said. Some agencies still don’t trust commercial data but “I’m really optimistic,” he said. “This is an interactive system. Commercial industry sometimes pushes, and sometimes the government is in the lead because of their capabilities, but I’m just really pleased with the interactions.” Discussions about what the future holds for the geospatial intelligence industry will take place this week at the GEOINT 2023 symposium held in downtown St. Louis, not far from where NGA is building a new campus known as NGA West. NGA commercial Initatives James Griffith, director of commercial operations at NGA, said the agency is looking for better ways to take advantage of private sector innovation. The agency, for example, is using data and analytics services from commercial providers under the Economic Indicator Monitoring, or EIM program , where companies compete for task orders to monitor global activity and deliver insights on economic trends. The first round of contracts was worth $29 million and the next will grow to $60 million thanks to a congressional add-on. “In five to 10 years, data is not going to be our problem. There is so much data. What I’m hoping to see and we’re trying to encourage is the development of more analytics services, things that make sense of that data for users who are not specialists,” Griffith said in April at Planet’s users conference in Washington, D.C. As part of NGA’s intelligence support to the Defense Department, he said, “we’re required to monitor thousands of airfields every single month. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a service that did that monitoring for us that was reliable, and as part of the service, they provide an alert that something’s changed?” “Those are the kinds of services that I think would be of real value to the community,” Griffith said, “and the data already exists.” Cardillo, an early proponent of the EIM program when he ran NGA, agreed that there should be better ways for the government to tap commercial capabilities. Once an agency decides what information it wants, he said, “we get the algorithm tuned and, working with the archive, we can provide weekly or daily reports.” Planet teamed with Microsoft to assess building damage in Ukraine caused by the war. Weil said the key was to train the models to identify different objects like schools, hospitals and military installations. “It took us a month or so to do the first analysis in Ukraine,” said Weil. “And then when the earthquake happened in Turkey, it took us two days because we had refined the models and we had the processes in place,” he said. “This is the kind of thing that EIM is going after. It’s a training ground and then you automate and iterate and move much faster in the future.” To help unlock more applications and uses of archival data, Planet launched a startup program offering discounted access to Planet data for research, product development and prototyping. Weil said the company wants to democratize access to satellite data and reduce technical barriers.
ST. LOUIS — Satellite operator Umbra and data analytics specialist Ursa Space announced a strategic partnership to pursue more advanced applications of synthetic aperture radar imagery. SAR satellites can peer through darkness, clouds, bad weather, smoke and other conditions that impair electro optical imaging satellites. Umbra, a startup based in Santa Barbara, California, operates a constellation of six SAR satellites. Ursa Space , based in Ithaca, New York, analyzes data collected by a large network of commercial partners. Joe Morrison, Umbra’s vice president of commercial experience, told SpaceNews that the companies under the new agreement will collaborate on new ways to exploit SAR data for insights and intelligence. Morrison said Umbra was especially impressed by Ursa’s work using SAR data to measure global oil supplies. The Oil Storage Product is a service that provides customers data on global oil inventories. Ursa uses a proprietary algorithm to turn radar satellite imagery into oil storage measurements. “It’s a very interesting product,” said Morrison. Like other satellite operators in the remote sensing industry, Umbra is looking for new avenues and applications for its data. One way to do that is to remove roadblocks to data distribution and ease access to imagery archive, he said, particularly for SAR data that is not as mainstream as optical imagery. Morrison said Umbra is “growing the amount of data that we’re collecting” and is eyeing opportunities to use that data to track oil production, for maritime domain awareness, and flood analytics. Ursa on May 19 published a new report on its use of SAR data to track Chinese small boats deployed in the South China Sea as an unconventional maritime militia. The area is notoriously cloudy, making it difficult to obtain frequent optical collections. Umbra’s customers often ask for specific data solutions or insights but the company doesn’t do analytics, said Morrison. “Ursa is our customer, we sell them data, and oftentimes we find ourselves referring business to them.” Ursa also helped Umbra to figure out new techniques for tasking sensors, “and that helped us improve the way that we operate our satellites,” he said. “Space is cool. Satellites are cool, but the bigger story is the “real world impacts that this data has.” Partnership with Maxar Morrison said Umbra is also bullish about its recent agreement with Maxar Technologies, announced in February . Maxar will get dedicated capacity on two Umbra satellites. At the GEOINT 2023 symposium this week in downtown St. Louis, there is a large Maxar optical image on display at Umbra’s booth, and an Umbra SAR image at Maxar’s booth. “Our partnership is indicative of the reality that it’s not about whether you need SAR or optical, but that you need a solution,” said Morrison. “And the best solutions are often combining multiple sensors.” While Maxar is known for its high-resolution optical imagery, “a lot of people don’t realize that they’re one of the most capable SAR analytics companies in the world,” he said. The companies plan to start offering joint products later this year. “One of the things I’m most excited about is combining SAR with precision 3D data,” said Morrison. Maxar uses 3D and elevation models to create immersive maps. “With SAR images you get radar shadows and distortions,” he said. “When you project that on a high resolution terrain elevation model, it looks like a video game.” For applications like damage assessment or emergency response, said Morrison, the imagery is much more compelling and easier to understand. 
Three U.S. government agencies are undertaking studies to examine the safety issues associated with a new generation of launch vehicles that use liquid oxygen and methane propellants. At a May 15 meeting of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Group (COMSTAC), FAA officials described efforts that are underway to understand the explosive effects of that propellant combination in the event of a launch accident. That propellant combination has been used on two launches of American vehicles to date: Relativity Space’s Terran 1 on March 22 and SpaceX’s Starship April 20 . It will also be used on engines that will power Relativity’s larger Terran R as well as Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. Companies are attracted to liquid oxygen (LOX) and methane since it offers a higher specific impulse, a measure of efficiency, and burns cleaner than LOX and kerosene, noted Brian Rushforth, the manager of the innovation division in the FAA’s commercial space transportation office. But, there’s little information about the explosive potential of that propellant combination. “We just don’t know the yield of the explosive enough from the FAA perspective, so that’s why we’re conducting experiments,” he said at the COMSTAC meeting. The concern is that both LOX and methane are miscible, meaning that they readily mix together, increasing its explosive potential. Understanding that explosive potential, he said, will support FAA work on public safety, such as establishing hazard areas and refining calculations of the maximum probable loss that launch providers need to insure against. The FAA has set up a test stand at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. A crane 43 meters tall will be used to drop stainless steel containers containing mixtures of LOX and methane. A series of tests is planned to start in June on three-week intervals to measure the explosive power of that propellant combination. A second phase, tentatively scheduled for next year, will conduct similar tests with varying velocities. He said the data from those tests will be shared with other government agencies, such as NASA and the U.S. Space Force, along with launch vehicle developers. That study is separate from one that NASA and the Space Force are working on discussed at a May 16 meeting of the human exploration and operations committee of the NASA Advisory Council. That work, agency officials said, is focused on range issues, including the effect of LOX/methane launches on operations at other pads. “It’s really to try and understand what, if any, mitigations we need to do for some of the adjacent launch pads,” said Tonya McNair, deputy associate administrator for management in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. That work is being funded through NASA’s Launch Services Program, with some cost-sharing with the Space Force. At the COMSTAC meeting, Rushforth said there is some coordination between the FAA and NASA/Space Force studies to avoid gaps and overlap. He noted that NASA will use the same tower for LOX/methane tests after the FAA completes its first phase of its test campaign. He said that, for now, the FAA is taking a conservative approach in its safety analyses. “We don’t have a solid feel for the TNT equivalent of LOX/methane, so there is a degree of conservatism that we’ve introduced,” he said. “The hope is that, when we validate this, if we are being too conservative we can lessen the requirements.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched a technology demonstration satellite for OneWeb’s second-generation broadband constellation May 20, along with spares for the British firm’s current low Earth orbit (LEO) network and another that U.S.-based Iridium Communications operates. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying a total 21 spacecraft lifted off 9:16 a.m. Eastern amid heavy fog at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a polar trajectory to the south. All five Iridium spares were deployed an hour later, followed by 16 OneWeb satellites that separated in pairs. The rocket’s first-stage booster successfully landed on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean for reuse following its eleventh flight. OneWeb and Iridium separately confirmed contact with all their satellites following the mission, which was postponed by a day for reasons SpaceX did not disclose. OneWeb now has 633 first-generation satellites in LEO, although it only needs 588 to provide global coverage, with the rest serving as in-orbit backups. The satellites that pushed OneWeb passed the 588-satellite mark launched March 25 and the company recently said it is on track to launch global commercial services by January. The satellites were built by prime contractor Airbus OneWeb Satellites, a Florida-based joint venture the operator shares with Airbus. Iridium picked Europe’s Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for its Iridium NEXT connectivity constellation that comprises 66 operational satellites in LEO. SpaceX launched all these satellites between 2017 and 2019, in addition to nine in-orbit spares. The May 20 mission launched five of the six spare satellites Iridium had been keeping in storage for at least four years. Iridium has not detailed any plans to deploy its final ground spare. OneWeb’s Gen2 One of the satellites launched for OneWeb, JoeySat, is designed to test capabilities for a second-generation constellation the company has said could start deployments as soon as 2025. One of several new technologies on JoeySat is the capability to remotely direct beams and signal strength , according to OneWeb, enabling the satellite to increase capacity at higher usage areas in response to spikes in demand. Israel-based SatixFy built JoeySat’s payload, supported by funds from the European Space Agency and UK Space Agency, for assembly by Airbus OneWeb Satellites. JoeySat uses the same satellite platform as OneWeb’s 150-kilogram Gen 1 spacecraft. French geostationary fleet operator Eutelsat, which is seeking regulatory approvals to buy OneWeb, said May 11 that the Gen 2 satellites would be bulkier than Gen 1 and able to provide three to five times more capacity. The companies also expect only to need a constellation of around 300 Gen 2 satellites, partly because they could leverage Eutelsat’s network in geostationary orbit over high-demand areas. Eutelsat and OneWeb have not yet picked a manufacturer for the Gen 2 satellites.
NASA selected Blue Origin to develop a second Artemis lunar lander because of technical strengths such as an aggressive schedule of test flights as well as its lower cost. In a source selection statement published shortly after NASA announced it picked Blue Origin for the Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) award May 19 , the agency explained how it selected that company’s proposal over a competing bid by Dynetics. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, served as the source selection official for the competition and wrote in the statement that he agreed with the agency’s analysis of the proposals. “This analysis leads me to the conclusion that Blue Origin’s proposal is the most advantageous to the Agency across all evaluation factors, and it aligns with the objectives of the solicitation,” he wrote in the statement, signed May 8. Several aspects of Blue Origin’s proposal for its Blue Moon lander stood out to him. Among them was Blue Origin’s plans for a series of missions to test its lander technology before the required uncrewed test flight of the lander. The statement specifically mentions “pathfinder lander missions” in 2024 and 2025 that would mature key elements that currently have low technology readiness levels (TRLs) before the uncrewed test. “I find this aspect of the proposal to be compelling — it is a forward-thinking solution to mature key low-TRL technologies allowing for incorporation for any changes into the final design,” Free wrote. He added that “there is no financial impact to NASA because the pathfinder missions are being funded by Blue Origin.” The statement does not mention which technologies would be demonstrated on those pathfinder missions. During the NASA briefing, John Couluris, Blue Origin program manager, said the company planned “a number of test launches and landings,” details of which would be disclosed later. Those would involve a “Mark 1” version of the lander “to prove technologies for these future landers, before crew members even step inside,” he said. Blue Moon would not carry people until the Artemis 5 mission. Before Artemis 5, Blue Origin will carry out an uncrewed landing with the same version of the lander that will carry people. Free noted that while NASA only required companies to carry out a landing for the Uncrewed Flight Test (UFT) that demonstrated precision landing capabilities, Blue Origin is carrying out a full test of the lander, including life support systems, and the ability to launch back to the near-rectilinear halo orbit. “I find that using a fully matured crewed lander configuration for the UFT is another compelling aspect of the technical proposal — it is a significant strength that is highly advantageous to NASA because it will decrease risk to the crewed demonstration mission,” he wrote. The source selection statement also identified as significant strengths in the proposal “excess capabilities” in the lander that allow it to carry out additional missions, as well as a business approach that includes a significant investment and “a strong commitment to future cost reductions.” Couluris said at the briefing that the company would contribute significantly more to the development of Blue Moon than NASA’s $3.4 billion. However, NASA did identify two weaknesses in Blue Origin’s proposal. One involves its communications system, which had a risk of not meeting agency requirements for continuous communications. The other is the company’s Integrated Master Schedule, which Free wrote “contains numerous conflicts and omissions.” The Dynetics proposal won strengths for offering excess capabilities, like Blue Origin, for other classes of landing missions, and for a business approach that envisions other customers and missions for its lander architecture. “Dynetics’ business approach is flexible in the concepts presented and aligns with continuing to build the commercial space economy,” Free stated. NASA, though, raised concerns about whether the Dynetics lander would meet all the requirements, noting some confusion between two different landers mentioned in the proposal. “I am highly concerned with this proposed approach and consider these flaws to be a significant weakness because I am unclear which capabilities will be demonstrated on the CDM,” or Crew Demonstration Mission, Free wrote, citing it as a significant weakness. Another significant weakness is that Dynetics proposed maturing eight major technologies on a single test flight in 2027, nine months before the review for the CDM. That approach, he warned, “allows very little opportunity to impact the CDM lander build and operation should the need for design or operational changes arise while maintaining schedule.” The statement did not disclose the price Dynetics offered for the lander, but the statement noted it was “substantially higher” than Blue Origin’s proposal. In a statement to SpaceNews, Dynetics and its parent company, Leidos, appeared to accept the outcome of the competition and showed no sign it would file a protest. Both Blue Origin and Dynetics had protested the selection of SpaceX for the original Human Landing System award, but had that rejected by the Government Accountability Office. “Helping NASA with the inspiring efforts to return to the moon will remain a priority for Leidos. The Artemis missions require multiple partners to achieve success, and our Leidos-Dynetics team is committed to continuing to assist on these critical missions,” the company said, citing work on several projects and plans to bid on a Lunar Terrain Vehicle rover for later Artemis missions.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) is wading into the contentious battle over the proposed relocation of U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama. Rogers on May 19 released a letter he sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall requesting that they preserve all documentation concerning the selection of the command’s headquarters location. Space Command is currently based at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. In the letter Rogers questioned “continued delays due to apparent politically motivated interference from the Biden administration.” “The Air Force’s deleterious actions concerning the selection of a location for Space Command headquarters require the Committee to now seek document preservation in this matter,” Rogers wrote. Rogers had largely stayed out of the fray over the past two years as Colorado lawmakers fought to reverse former president Trump’s decision to relocate Space Command’s headquarters from Colorado to Alabama. The story took a turn last week with reports that the White House would halt plans to move the command to Alabama due to concerns about the state’s restrictive abortion law . Rogers said “moving expeditiously to locate Space Command headquarters at Redstone Arsenal is in our country’s best national security interests.” Colorado pushback Meanwhile, Colorado lawmakers have continued to push the administration to reverse the move and keep Space Command in Colorado Springs for national security reasons. Space Command is responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. military and for protecting those assets from foreign threats. “I think that they are seriously reevaluating the decision to make sure that they have all facts considered,” Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) told SpaceNews May 11. “So I view the delay as a good thing. It shows that they’re serious about making the decision.” Lamborn said Space Command is just months away from reaching full-staffing levels, known as a “full operational capability.” Moving to a new state, building a new facility and getting all the infrastructure in place, “that’s disruptive,” he said. “And the people that are doing the mission are not excited. I’m hearing that a lot behind the scenes, both from people in the defense industry and from people in the service.” Kendall repeatedly has been questioned by lawmakers at recent congressional hearings but said the decision was still being reviewed and he expected to brief Austin on his recommendation. The fight started soon after the Air Force proposed in the final days of the Trump presidency that Space Command be relocated from Colorado to Alabama. The recommendation resulted in two separate independent reviews, and back-and-forth arguments between congressional representatives from both states. Colorado lawmakers alleged that the Trump administration improperly influenced the decision and that the Air Force’s basing process did not take into account senior military officials’ concerns that the relocation would add years to Space Command efforts to reach full operational capability as soon as possible. Rogers noted in the May 19 letter that the Federal Records Act requires agencies to preserve all documentation regarding policies, decisions, procedures, and transactions.” The Government Accountability Office at Lamborn’s request conducted a review of the basing decision and concluded in a June 2022 report that the process largely followed guidelines directed by the secretary of defense. But GAO also identified “significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility.” Although the Air Force documented the general rationale for selecting Alabama’s Redstone Arsenal in memorandums and documents, GAO noted, “there was no consensus among the officials we interviewed regarding who ultimately made the decision to name Redstone Arsenal as the preferred location for U.S. Space Command headquarters, including the role of the then President in making the decision.”
NASA has selected Blue Origin to develop a lunar lander to transport astronauts on Artemis missions starting at the end of the decade. At an event at NASA Headquarters May 19, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency chose a team led by Blue Origin, with participation from Boeing, Draper and Lockheed Martin, among others, to develop a lander called Blue Moon that will join already under development by SpaceX to transport astronauts between the lunar Gateway and the surface of the moon. The value of the fixed-price award is $3.4 billion. John Couluris, Blue Origin program manager for the effort, said at the briefing that the company plans to invest “well north” of that amount to develop the lander. The contract includes a demonstration landing on Artemis 5, currently scheduled for no earlier than late 2029, as well as an uncrewed test flight of the lander about one year earlier. Artemis 5 will be the third crewed landing of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign, after the Artemis 3 and 4 missions that will use SpaceX’s Starship. Blue Origin was one of two bidders, with a team led by Dynetics submitting the other bid. NASA officials at the briefing did not disclose the rationale for selecting Blue Origin over Dynetics, saying it will be released in a separate source selection statement. The Blue Moon lander is a revised version of earlier designs released by the company. The lander is 16 meters tall and designed to fit inside the seven-meter payload fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. It has a dry mass of 16 metric tons, and more than 45 metric tons when filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants. Keeping those cryogenic propellants from boiling off is a key enabling technology for Blue Moon. “This is a great example of the public-private partnership we have with NASA,” Couluris said. The company has been funding internally “zero-boiloff” technology for some time, such as a cryocooler that operates at a temperature of 20 kelvins. “We want to make hydrogen a storable propellant,” he said. “If you can make hydrogen storable, then you can do a number of things.” That includes, he said, extracting hydrogen and oxygen from lunar resources to fuel landers. Besides the version designed to carry astronauts, Blue Origin is planning a cargo version of the lander. It will be able to transport up to 20 metric tons to the lunar surface and be able to return to lunar orbit, or 30 metric tons on one-way missions. Blue Origin is working with Lockheed Martin, which will build a “cislunar transporter” spacecraft, carrying propellant from low Earth orbit to the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon where the lander is located. That vehicle will refuel the lander, which is designed to be used on multiple lander missions. There are several other members of what Blue Origin calls its “National Team” for the lander. Draper will provide guidance, navigation and control systems as well as training and simulation. Astrobotic will handle cargo accommodations, Honeybee Robotics will provide cargo offloading capabilities and Boeing will contribute the docking system. “We’ve got a strong group of very motivated, very humble yet proud people,” Couluris said, including those who worked on the company’s original lander proposal. “The feeling is absolutely fantastic. I’m proud of this team, across the entire National Team.” Path to selecting Blue Moon NASA announced the Sustaining Lunar Development effort in March 2022 to support work on a second lander, joining SpaceX’s Starship that the agency selected in April 2021 for its Human Landing System (HLS) program. Blue Origin and Dynetics, the two losing bidders in that competition, protested the award to the Government Accountability Office but had their protest rejected. Blue Origin later filed suit in the Court of Federal Claims, but lost the case. NASA since when it announced SLD that the initiative was an effort to ensure competition in the overall HLS effort, addressing concerns raised by some members of Congress. “I promised competition, so here it is,” Nelson said at the time. SpaceX was excluded from the SLD competition because of its existing HLS award, but NASA exercised what it called Option B in that award for a second mission that will demonstrate the greater performance required for SLD. NASA formally exercised that option in November, valued at $1.15 billion , bringing the total value of SpaceX’s HLS work to more than $4 billion. After a Dec. 6 deadline for SLD proposals, both Blue Origin and Dynetics announced they were bidding . Blue Origin’s “National Team” included Lockheed Martin and Draper, who were part of Blue Origin’s original HLS bid. Northrop Grumman, who was part of the original Blue Origin bid, instead joined the team led by Dynetics. Neither Blue Origin nor Dynetics disclosed details about their proposals at the time, although Dynetics released an illustration of its lander that looked similar to its earlier design. Both companies had received funding from NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Appendix N effort in September 2021 to mature technologies such as engines for their landers. Both SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon will eventually compete for missions after Artemis 5 under services contracts, an arrangement similar to what NASA uses for cargo and crew missions to the space station. At the announcement, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said the agency was just starting planning for how it will acquire landers for those later missions.
TAMPA, Fla. — U.S. regulators voted May 18 to protect Starlink’s access to 12 GHz spectrum, which Dish Network had hoped to use for terrestrial 5G in a plan SpaceX warned would deny its satellite broadband network to most Americans. Federal Communications Commission commissioners unanimously approved a proposal to preserve frequencies for satellite services between 12.2 and 12.7 GHz, part of the Ku-band spectrum that Starlink, OneWeb and other satellite operators use to connect user terminals. Dish Network had sought permission to use the spectrum to operate a high-power, two-way mobile service across the United States. A battle that pitted the satellite TV broadcaster and terrestrial telcos against satellite operators had produced competing studies over the years on the plan’s potential to disrupt space-based communications. Dish Network’s satellite broadcast rival DirecTV, majority owned by U.S. telecoms giant AT&T, had said millions of its customers would suffer extensive harmful interference if the plan went ahead. Based on the studies filed to date, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said its engineers concluded that the 5G network would cause too much interference when deployed throughout the country. “I would have welcomed a path forward that allowed both services to thrive,” Starks said in a statement. “But for now, it’s time to adapt.” While the FCC declined to authorize two-way, high-powered terrestrial mobile services in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band, the regulator proposed positioning 12.7-13.25 GHz frequencies to support flexible terrestrial wireless use, including future 6G wireless services. “We’re proposing specific rules to lift 550 megahertz of underused spectrum off the ground while protecting or transitioning incumbents and fully exploring sharing-based alternatives,” Starks said. Although many details of this plan remain undecided, he and FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel called on Congress to restore a lapsed authority to hold an auction for potentially distributing the frequencies. Dish Network has wireless frequencies in other bands after investing more than $30 billion in spectrum licenses for its 5G network, which must be capable of serving 70% of the U.S. population by June under FCC buildout rules. The company recently said it had started construction on more than 18,000 5G cell sites as of March 31, and only around 16,000 of them need to be fully powered and connected to reach the milestone next month. The network met an FCC deadline last June for covering 20% of the U.S. population, according to Dish Network.
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat has ordered three small geostationary satellites from 3D printing specialist Swissto12 for a launch in 2026 to fortify its L-band safety services, the British operator announced May 19. The identical satellites will be based on the Swiss manufacturer’s dishwasher-sized HummingSat platform, which secured its first customer in November in a mission for Intelsat slated for 2025. Developed with European Space Agency funds, HummingSat is much smaller than conventional geostationary communications satellites about the size of a school bus. Swissto12 says this enables its satellites to be three times cheaper than their larger cousins, although with reduced capacity because they have less room for transponders and power. The companies did not disclose the expected performance of the satellites, which form what Inmarsat said will be its eighth-generation of spacecraft, or I-8. Mark Dickinson, Inmarsat’s deputy chief technology officer and vice president for its space segment, said I-8 would add an extra layer of resilience and flexibility to its global safety services. L-band safety services from Inmarsat’s current four-satellite ELERA constellation include tracking and emergency communications for ships and aircraft. The U.K.-based company’s network is used by around 1.6 million seafarers and over 200 airlines. I-8’s transponders will also feed into Inmarsat’s Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) services, which the operator says enables coastguards, air traffic controllers, and other users to increase the accuracy of GPS from 5-10 meters to as little as 10 centimeters. Strengthening safety Working alongside two hybrid L-band and Ka-band I-6 satellites that launched in December 2021 and February 2023, respectively, Dickinson said I-8 would secure its safety services well into the 2040s. L-band services from the first I-6 satellite are due to be fully deployed over the Asia Pacific region later this year, followed by the second in early 2024 for covering Europe, Africa, and much of the Americas. In April, Inmarsat’s L-band services over Asia Pacific suffered an outage following a partial loss of power on its aging I-4 F1 satellite. While the operator said it has since restored maritime and aviation safety capabilities on the 18-year-old satellite, work continues to recover all services for L-band phone users in the region. Dickinson declined to disclose financial details about its triple satellite order but said it marks “a significant commitment to securing the future of Inmarsat’s L-band services.” The satellites are small enough to be deployed on a single rocket, he said, although the company has yet to pick a launch provider. Inmarsat has five more payloads in the pipeline for deployment by 2025: three from Airbus for the operator’s Global Xpress Ka-band broadband network in geostationary orbit, and two hosted payloads Northrop Grumman is building for highly elliptical orbit, which would extend the network over the globe’s northernmost latitudes. The operator is also considering adding satellites in low Earth orbit to its fleet. Record financials Inmarsat reported a 16% year-on-year rise in revenues to $403 million for the three months ended March 31, driven by growth across all four of its business units: aviation, maritime, government, and enterprise. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, jumped 32% to $259 million. Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri said May 17 these were the strongest quarterly financial results in the 44-year-old company’s history, showing robust underlying growth despite a boost from one-off equipment orders, government contracts, and favorable currency movements. Suri said the quarterly results are likely its last as an independent company as U.S.-based satellite operator Viasat expects to complete its acquisition of the British firm in the next few weeks. After getting unconditional approval from the U.K.’s competition watchdog May 9, and from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission May 19, the transaction just needs the green light from Europe. Viasat also reported strong results May 17, following the $2 billion sale late last year of its tactical data communications business. The U.S. broadband operator reported quarterly revenue from continuing operations up 10% year-on-year to $666 million, which it said was primarily driven by a 34% rise in product revenue. Adjusted EBITDA climbed 21% to $124 million, driven by higher sales from its government systems and commercial aviation businesses, and lower research and development expenses.
With increasing activity pushing Florida’s launch sites to their limits, the Space Force is studying ways to move some of that activity elsewhere, including to California. In a presentation to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) May 15, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, whose roles include director of the Eastern Range and director of launch and range operations for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, noted the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral are nearing capacity. “The Eastern Range is almost done doing everything it can do,” he said. That has included allocating three unused launch pads in March to four companies developing small launch vehicles , with a second round planned for larger vehicles. “When that’s done, we’re going to be very, very close to out of pads on the Eastern Range.” When that is complete, there will be limited options, he suggested. Additional launch sites at the neighboring Kennedy Space Center could be built, but that would require working with NASA. He added he was working with Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island to support additional launches there, “but even they’ll be tapped out eventually.” That could open the door to more creative solutions. Purdy noted the Space Force studied the ability to conduct launches to polar orbits, traditionally flown from the Western Range at Vandenberg Space Force Base, from Florida. “It turns out you can,” he said, with SpaceX launching several Falcon 9 missions to polar orbits in recent years from Florida. “So we did the reverse: can you launch East Coast missions off the West Coast, from Vandenberg? Fascinatingly, you can,” he said. Such launches had traditionally been ruled out because of trajectories that would take vehicles over land. He didn’t elaborate on the analysis in his presentation, but said it “opened the door” for long-term discussions about eventually conducting launches to lower-inclination orbits from Vandenberg. “As we continue to hone safety analyses for the ranges, and as some particular launch providers have got a large number of successful launches, we’ve been able to narrow the boxes more and more,” he said, referring to exclusion zones for launches. That combination of reduced exclusion zones and improved vehicle track records, along with what Purdy described as a willingness to launch “with a couple boats in the water and perhaps a [general aviation] aircraft or two in the broad area,” could enable launches from Vandenberg on eastern trajectories. “That possibility starts to be intriguing, so I would encourage a national-level conversation to start the groundwork of what that would look like.” Range and pad infrastructure is just one constraint on launch activity. He said the service needed to add more payload processing capacity at both Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg and was looking at options like establishing commercial payload processing facilities on Cape property. “We can prove definitively that if we don’t set these plans in motion on the Eastern and Western Ranges, we will run out of payload processing capability for DoD missions alone.” A third issue is personnel. “People remains our biggest issue. At some point, we are going to run out of people and time to support commercial launch on the Eastern and Western Ranges,” he said. That includes security, emergency and engineering personnel needed to support each launch. “That’s sustainable up to a number. We don’t know what that number is, but we have some guesstimates,” he said. “But at some point we break because we run out of people.” Staffing levels are set by the requirements to support DoD activities, which are about 10 launches per year. “We’re not prepared or manned to support launch rates of 90,” he said, the estimated number of launches on the Eastern Range in 2023. “I project we’re going to be in the multiple hundreds here on a couple years.” The Defense Department has offered a legislative proposal to create a “port authority” model for launch operations on the Eastern and Western Ranges, allowing the Space Force to charge commercial users range fees to recoup its costs. Purdy said that would include an “open books” approach so that customers could see how the fees they pay are being spent to support range activities. “But if we don’t have the ability to bring in that income to run a spaceport properly,” he warned, “we’ll just simply run out of the ability to support launches.”
Spanish launch startup PLD Space plans to conduct a suborbital launch before the end of the month to test technologies for its small orbital launch vehicle. PLD Space said May 18 that it conducted a static-fire test a day earlier of its Miura 1 rocket on the pad at El Arenosillo, a site on the coast in southwestern Spain operated by the government’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA). In the test, the rocket fired its engine for five seconds to confirm it was working as intended. The test clears the way for a suborbital launch of Miura 1 in a window approved by INTA that runs through May 31. The company said it could not disclose a specific launch date, citing security, weather, and the “dynamics involved in the launch operations.” It said that, once it sets a date after completing an INTA flight review, it will announce it up to 48 hours in advance. Miura 1 is principally a technology demonstrator for Miura 5, a small launch vehicle the company is developing capable of placing up to 500 kilograms into orbit starting as soon as 2025. “The objective of this first flight of the Miura 1 SN1 technology demonstrator will be to gather as much information as possible to further validate much of the design and technology that will later be transferred and integrated into Miura 5,” Raul Torres, co-founder and chief executive of PLD Space, said in a statement. The company has not announced specific goals, such as altitude or flight time, for the Miura 1 launch. The company’s website says the rocket is capable of going up to 150 kilometers on a 12-minute flight. “In this experimental flight, our definition of success is that the rocket should be as far away from the launch pad as possible,” Ezequiel Sanchez, executive president of PLD Space, said in the statement. “For every second Miura 1 is in the air, we will be learning and gathering data for the development of Miura 5.” PLD Space is one of several European companies working on small launch vehicles. Some of those companies are planning their first orbital launches as soon as late this year, ahead of PLD Space. That’s fine with the company. “For us, it’s not super important to be the first one in Europe to launch a rocket into space,” said Raúl Verdú, PLD Space’s chief business development officer, at a conference in February . “Our vision is to have the best success rate in the next decade, because that will make the difference.” PLD Space has raised 60 million euros ($65 million) to date. The company said in March it was working on a Series C round of 150 million euros that will support development of the Miura 5 and beginning of commercial operations.
The U.S. Space Force announced May 17 it has delivered the second of two payloads to be hosted on Japanese satellites under an agreement the United States signed with Japan in 2020. The two U.S. payloads are optical sensors developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. They will be hosted on Japan’s geostationary Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) satellites. The first payload was delivered earlier this year. These payloads will augment the Space Force’s space domain awareness capabilities, the Space Systems Command said in a news release. QZSS, commonly referred to as the Japanese GPS, is a satellite navigation system operating from inclined, elliptical geosynchronous orbits. It was developed by the Japanese government to augment Global Positioning System coverage in the Asia-Pacific region. There are currently three QZSS operational satellites, and three more are projected to launch in the next two years, QZS-5, QZS-6 and QZS-7. The U.S. payloads will be hosted on vehicles 6 and 7. Launch schedule uncertain The launch dates for QZS-6 and QZS-7 have not yet been announced. They were projected to launch in 2024 but that appears unlikely after the recent failure of the inaugural launch of Japan’s H3 rocket . QZS-5 was scheduled to launch on H3 in 2023. Space Systems Command said the partnership with Japan exemplifies U.S. efforts to work more closely with allies. “Our ability to pivot our space domain awareness architecture effectively depends on collaborative efforts with our allies and partners,” said F Schnell, director of the Space Systems Command’s Space Domain Awareness Acquisition Delta at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado.
Zeno Power Systems was awarded a $30 million contract to build a radioisotope-powered satellite for the U.S. Air Force by 2025. The four-year contract is a “strategic funding increase” agreement that provides $15 million in government funds, matched by $15 million from private investors, the company’s co-founder and chief executive Tyler Bernstein told SpaceNews . Zeno, a startup founded in 2018, develops radioisotope power systems (RPS), a type of nuclear energy technology that converts the heat from decaying nuclear materials directly into electricity. Bernstein said the company designed an RPS concept for small satellites with the goal of making the technology more accessible. NASA for decades has used RPS to power deep-space probes but the technology has not been commercialized due to cost and high regulatory hurdles. Zeno’s RPS is smaller and uses lower-materials. Bernstein expects the system to clear regulatory hurdles and be approved for launch in 2025, taking advantage of a more streamlined U.S. government review process for nuclear-powered space missions. The company pitched the RPS idea to the Air Force Research Laboratory in 2019 and won several small business innovation research contracts. The STRATFI agreement was signed in August 2022. Bernstein called the STRATFI deal a “key validation” of RPS as a viable technology to power military spacecraft. To fund its share of the project, the company will draw from its $20 million in Series A venture capital raised last year. The military wants satellites that can maneuver without having to worry about running out of fuel, Bernstein said. RPS would support that goal. Lt. Col. Thomas Nix, U.S. Space Force project manager at AFRL, said the technology would “enable constant maneuverability between different orbits, unlocking new capabilities for the Department of Defense.” Satellites would have “always on” power for years at a time, Nix said. How RPS works Bernstein cautioned that RPS should not be confused with nuclear electric propulsion that relies on fission reactors. “We are not a fission reactor. We’re a radioisotope source,” he said. RPS is more akin to a nuclear battery that uses the heat generated by the decay of a radioactive isotope to produce electricity. “It’s really hot rocks in a box,” said Bernstein. Radioisotopes decay over decades and produce heat. Zeno developed a method to capture that heat and convert it to electricity using a solid state device called thermoelectric generator. The difference in temperature between the hot interior and the cold vacuum in space creates electricity. A small device the size of a shoebox generates electricity for decades, Bernstein said. A key feature of Zeno’s system is that it does not rely on plutonium. NASA’s planetary missions use RPS fueled by plutonium 238 isotope, which is in short supply and not commercially available. The Department of Energy produces only enough plutonium 238 to support key NASA missions. The Air Force in the past has used the isotope strontium-90 as a power source but its applications were limited due to its large mass and low efficiency. Zeno’s RPS uses strontium isotope with a novel design that results in a lighter weight heat source. Bernstein said the company is exploring the use of other isotopes in the future. The first demonstration of Zeno’s RPS heat source will take place this summer at a Department of Energy lab. Regulatory hurdles The deployment of a satellite powered by small nuclear batteries typically would face enormous regulatory obstacles but the approval process was made easier by a 2019 executive order from the Trump administration that overhauled the launch approval process for space nuclear systems. Before that policy change, there had been only one process to approve launches of any spacecraft with nuclear power systems, regardless of its makeup and size. The 2019 order established a three-tier system for reviewing payloads carrying nuclear power systems based on the amount of radioactive material on board and the probability of certain radiation exposure levels in the event of an accident. The approval process also looks at de-orbiting procedures at the end of the mission life. Spacecraft that fall in the first two tiers can be approved by their sponsoring agency and an interagency panel, and only the highest-risk third tier missions require presidential authorization. Bernstein said the lower-tier missions can now work through the Federal Aviation Administration, “for the first time allowing a commercial entity to launch a nuclear power system spacecraft into space.” Zeno is pursuing launch approval as a tier-one mission. Earlier this year, Zeno’s payload review application was accepted for review by the FAA, said Bernstein, and a launch approval could come as early as 2025. The company’s focus is to qualify RPS for small satellites that the Space Force would deploy, but commercial applications also are envisioned. “We see opportunities in the lunar space economy,” Bernstein said. “Right now all the landers that are going to the lunar surface are going to operate for 14 days during the lunar day and freeze during the lunar night.” “We are at the dawn of the commercial space nuclear era,” he said. RPS would provide enough heat and power so landers can operate for years and “enable a sustainable lunar economy in the future.” How it started Zeno Power today has 25 employees based in Seattle and in the Washington, D.C. area. The other co-founders are Jonathan Segal, who is chief operating officer; and Jacob Matthews, chief technology officer. The three met at Vanderbilt University where Bernstein and Segal were undergraduates. Matthews was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point working on a master’s degree in mechanical engineering focused on RPS technology for space. “We got together and started pursuing this back in 2018,” Bernstein said. Zeno’s vice president of strategic partnerships, Tim Frazier, previously ran the Department of Energy’s RPS program and helped build NASA’s Cassini and New Horizons missions. Another executive at the company, Lindsey Boles, is a former director of engineering at TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design and development company founded by tech billionaire Bill Gates. 
SpiderOak, a firm that specializes in cybersecurity for space systems, announced new strategic investors. The new investors are Accenture Ventures, Raytheon Technologies’ RTX Ventures, and Stellar Ventures, the companies announced May 18, although they did not disclose the value of the agreements. The strategic investments by these firms are separate from the $16.4 million Series C funding round that SpiderOak announced in January. “This investment will accelerate SpiderOak’s deployment of zero-trust, end-to-end data security solutions for commercial and government customers operating in space,” SpiderOak’s CEO Dave Pearah said in a statement. The company, founded in 2007, developed a cybersecurity system called OrbitSecure used to protect satellites and ground infrastructure. About half of SpiderOak’s business is from government contracts. Accenture executive Tom Patterson said the company invested in the OrbitSecure technology to “help our clients with the expertise and software needed to achieve a zero-trust approach to space-based cybersecurity.” Accenture provides professional services business in the space sector, focused on satellite communications, ground station as-a-service, remote IoT device-to-satellite data and Earth observation data. Space systems used for national security are “very much at risk from cyber threats,” said Daniel Ateya, president and managing director of RTX Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Raytheon Technologies. “We see our investment in SpiderOak as a key enabler in helping our clients maintain, secure and resilient data communication and storage in these highly contested environments from ground to LEO to cislunar,” said Ateya. Celeste Ford, managing director of Stellar Ventures , said SpiderOak is “uniquely positioned to address this growing need with their zero-trust approach at the data level to assure users of the most secure systems operations.”
The British government, which helped buy OneWeb out of bankruptcy three years ago, has no plans to do the same with launch company Virgin Orbit, a government minister said May 17. George Freeman, minister for science, innovation and technology in the U.K. government, told a Parliament committee that the government had “taken a close interest” in Virgin Orbit, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States April 4, but had no plans to acquire the company. “We’re not sitting here thinking of making a major acquisition, and acquiring and developing a U.K. sovereign launch capability,” he said when asked if the government would seek to ensure that the company was not broken up as part of the Chapter 11 restructuring process. Virgin Orbit conducted the first orbital launch attempt from U.K. soil in January with a flight out of Spaceport Cornwall in England. However, a problem with the upper stage engine on the company’s LauncherOne rocket prevented it from reaching orbit. The company’s license from the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority remains valid, but it is unclear if that would remain the case if the company is acquired as part of the bankruptcy process. Freeman, asked about that at the hearing, deferred that to the Department for Transport, reiterating that the government was not pursuing a deal for Virgin Orbit. “As minister for the space industry here, we stand ready to support a specific proposal that looks sustainable — financially sustainable and commercially sustainable — but we’re not looking or in the business of making a major U.K. investment in acquiring a platform that hasn’t worked,” he said. While the Virgin Orbit launch from Cornwall failed, the company had recorded four consecutive successful launches before that failure. Virgin Orbit is nearing the end of a bankruptcy sale process , with final bids due May 19. If the company receives more than one qualified bid, it will hold an auction May 22, with a hearing about the winning bid in federal bankruptcy court May 24. In a May 16 court filing, Virgin Orbit announced a “stalking horse” bid agreement with Stratolaunch, who would buy Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 aircraft and related equipment for $17 million. That agreement effectively sets a minimum price for the auction, but allows others to offer higher bids for the aircraft, other assets or the entire company. In the filing, Virgin Orbit said that Ducera Partners LLC, a company retained to help market its assets, had reached out to 204 potential bidders. Virgin Orbit previously said it had received more than 30 “indications of interest” that includes some who were interested in keeping Virgin Orbit operating. Virgin Orbit conducted “multiple rounds of negotiations” with Stratolaunch to secure the stalking horse bid agreement. Stratolaunch has not commented publicly on its bid for Virgin Orbit’s aircraft. Stratolaunch has its own larger custom-built aircraft, dubbed Roc, which it originally created to serve as an air-launch platform. The company now plans to use Roc as a platform for launching hypersonic test vehicles it is developing, and conduced an unpowered drop test of one, Talon TA-0, on May 13 off the California coast. Virgin Orbit executives had previously discussed using its LauncherOne system for applications other than satellite launch, including for hypersonics work or targets for missile defense tests. Threading the needle on IRIS² Three years ago, the U.K. government did decide to help take a space company out of bankruptcy when it partnered with Indian telecom company Bharti Global to buy OneWeb for $1 billion . That broadband constellation provider had filed for Chapter 11 in March 2020. French satellite operator Eutelsat is now working to close a deal to acquire OneWeb for $3.4 billion. That acquisition is expected to be completed this summer , Eva Berneke, chief executive of Eutelsat, said in a May 11 earnings call. The U.K. government will retain priority voting rights, a so-called “golden share,” in OneWeb after the acquisition. That could complicate any role the system might play in the European Union’s Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) constellation. Eutelsat is part of a consortium bidding on the system, but the United Kingdom is no longer part of the E.U. “OneWeb’s future direction is obviously a matter for OneWeb. It’s a business, subject to commercial freedom,” Freeman said at the hearing, but added he was “delighted” that the government had its golden share in the company. “We do view our shareholding in OneWeb as a major lever for our commercial space strategy,” he said, with discussions underway with both the European Space Agency and the European Union. “We believe there’s a very significant win-win here if OneWeb decides, through the Eutelsat acquisition, that they want to be and can be part of the IRIS² system.” “We would certainly want to make sure that, through our golden share, we have a significant piece of the manufacturing here in the U.K. and potentially launch here in the U.K.,” he said. Berneke said in the earnings call that the OneWeb merger deal includes a clause that would remove British government control out of a part of OneWeb’s second-generation constellation.
TAMPA, Fla. — Climate data startup Amini has raised $2 million for a satellite constellation to gather more Africa-focused environmental information. European climate technology fund Pale Blue Dot led the pre-seed funding round, Amini announced May 18, supporting a six-month-old venture currently using public satellite data to provide intelligence for smallholder farmers on the continent. Amini’s aggregation and analytics software taps into European Space Agency Sentinel and NASA Landsat data to deliver information on drought, flood, soil, and crop health. Kate Kallot, Amini’s CEO with a background in artificial intelligence technology, said she founded the startup in December after realizing a significant gap in African-specific environmental data during the United Nations’ latest climate change conference. Although incorporated in Delaware, Kallot said all eight Amini employees are based in Nairobi, Kenya, where it plans to more than double in size this year. “The digital infrastructure we take for granted in other parts of the world, including [satellite] constellations, are not designed for Africa,” Kallot said via email. Landsat’s resolution is sufficient for providing intelligence for U.S. mega-farms with a single crop, she said, but is not optimized for much smaller farms in Africa with multiple crop varieties and different topologies. “It’s a different context,” she said, and “when you get out of densely populated areas — Africa becomes dark with some of these providers.” While Planet and other private small satellite operators target this market, Kallot said Amini aims to provide solutions that would be more affordable for customers in the region. The company is not ready to discuss details about this proposed constellation, including when it could deploy its first satellite. Climate business boost Africa has about 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land, according to the African Development Bank; however, countries across the continent collectively only account for 3% of global GDP. Amini says a lack of reliable and trustworthy agricultural data is partly to blame for this disparity because it hampers business decisions and capital allocation. The company said its first customers have come from the agricultural insurance market, where Amini’s analytics platform is helping to improve coverage solutions for the sector. As more multinational companies seek precise measurements of their carbon footprint, and the ability to report their environmental impact to investors and customers, Amini also sees a growing business opportunity in helping to monitor supply chains. Other early-stage investors in the company’s pre-seed round include Superorganism, RaliCap, W3i, and Emurgo Kepple Ventures.
The U.S. Space Force awarded Parsons a $55 million contract to develop a ground system for a network of missile-warning satellites in medium Earth orbit. The ground system is for a constellation of six satellites that the Space Force plans to field in MEO in 2026 to detect and track hypersonic missiles. Millennium Space Systems and Raytheon Technologies are developing the satellites. “Parsons will provide integrated ground and operations solutions for the MTC Epoch 1 program,” the Space Systems Command said May 16 in a news release. MTC is short for missile warning, missile tracking, missile track custody. “We will collect and seamlessly integrate our MEO data into the existing missile warning architecture, providing the warfighter with accurate data to defeat both traditional and emerging missile threats,” said Col. Heather Bogstie, senior materiel leader at Space Systems Command. She said the Epoch 1 satellites will deliver “high-fidelity overhead persistent infrared solutions capable of defending against traditional missile threats, as well as fast-moving and dim targets like hypersonic ballistic missiles.” Satellites to launch in 2026 The plan is to launch at least six MTC Epoch 1 missile-warning satellites by late 2026, said Lt. Col. Raydon “Ray” Imbo, materiel leader for MEO ground systems. Although satellites are made by two different vendors, the constellation will be managed as a single system, he said. A MEO space operations center will be located in Colorado. Parsons has previously developed several ground systems for U.S. military satellites. Col. Heather Bogstie, senior materiel leader, Space Systems Command’s Resilient Missile Warning, Tracking, and Defense Acquisition Delta. In a statement to SpaceNews , Bogstie said both Millennium Space Systems and Raytheon are on contract for “one initial satellite each with the option to quickly acquire up to three additional satellites pending proven and matured designs. Our space and ground efforts are moving in parallel. The ground system is being designed to support at least six satellites in Epoch 1.”
The Defense Department has adopted a set of rules for responsible space operations amid growing concerns that rival nations are deploying weapons that could destroy U.S. satellites. One of those rules is to openly communicate about U.S. military space activities to prevent misunderstandings and miscalculations. However, China’s lack of transparency about its own space activities makes it difficult to reduce those risks, Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of the U.S. Space Force for operations, cyber and nuclear, said May 17. Speaking at a space policy conference hosted by Arizona State University, Burt said a lack of communication between the U.S. and China hurts efforts to manage space traffic and prevent mishaps as each side can misinterpret the other’s intentions. Before being named deputy chief of space operations, Burt led the U.S. Space Command’s space-tracking organization at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. In that job, Burt said, she experienced first-hand the consequences of not having open lines of communications with China, a rising space power that now operates its own space station in orbit. “At the Combined Force Space Component at Vandenberg, the two things that we care most about are the souls that are on orbit, not only on the International Space Station, but also the taikonauts that are on the Chinese space station,” Burt said. ‘We get no response’ U.S. Space Command crews at Vandenberg issue warnings of close approaches in orbit or potential collision to satellite operations and national agencies, including the Chinese government. But when a warning is sent out that could affect the Chinese space station, Burt said, “we get no response, no thank you, no have a nice day. Nothing.” This is a case when “we are trying to communicate and that is not what is wanted,” she said. A breakdown in communication and an underlying distrust that goes both ways could lead to miscalculations and even conflict, Burt noted. “Let’s be honest. If the Chinese called me and told me to move a satellite, I would say thank you … but I would also double check that in fact that is a threat to me before I moved it,” Burt added. “I would trust but verify.” When it comes to the security of the space domain, open communications is key, she said. “We may not all agree. That’s okay. But if at least we’re talking, I think that is important.” An example cited by U.S. officials of China’s lack of transparency was China’s deployment in late 2021 of the Shijian-21 spacecraft that docked with a defunct satellite and towed it to a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt. Revelations that China had that capability raised alarms that it could be used as a weapon . If China communicated what it’s doing in space, there would be better awareness and less chance of misunderstandings, Burt said. The United States, by contrast, openly discusses its use of Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) inspector satellites that provide space situational awareness, she said. “We’ve said what our capabilities are. If you are honest and say what things are and have patterns of life that indicate they are what they are, then it’s an everyday operation,” Burt said. “But when something acts out of the ordinary, that’s where you’re operationally surprised,” Burt said. “If she’s acting differently, what is wrong? Does she have an anomaly? Is she in fact not what she said she was?” Pentagon concerns about lack of engagement The concerns raised by Burt also were expressed by a senior Pentagon official at an April 18 House Armed Services Committee hearing on the U.S. military posture in the Indo-Pacific region. Jedidiah Royal, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said the lack of communication is raising the risk of an unintended conflict. “We have seen the PRC demonstrate a concerning lack of interest in the important lines of communication that underpin a stable defense relationship between our countries,” Royal said in prepared testimony. The Department of Defense “believes strongly in maintaining open lines of communication between Washington and Beijing to ensure competition does not veer into conflict,” he said. Royal noted that immediately after the U.S. military took down China’s high-altitude balloon in February, DoD submitted a request for a call between the U.S. defense secretary and China’s minister of defense. “Unfortunately, the PRC declined our request. This was not far from the first time that the PRC has declined invitations to communicate from the Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or other Department officials.”
Republican senators used a hearing on NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal to criticize the agency’s role in topics like climate change and social issues they argued were a distraction to its efforts to return humans to the moon. During the 90-minute hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee May 16, senators raised few issues with the substance of the agency’s $27.2 billion budget proposal for fiscal year 2024. Instead, top Republicans on the committee targeted items on the periphery, from plans to replace the agency’s fleet of motor vehicles with electric vehicles to investments in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. “I do worry sometimes that we may be losing focus on what makes America the preeminent spacefaring nation,” claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), ranking member of the committee. He cited development of an equity action plan by NASA and regulations that NASA, along with the Defense Department and General Services Administration, to have contractors identify their greenhouse gas emissions. “Rather than helping us win the space race, the proposed rule would ensure that NASA could do less exploration and less science for more taxpayer dollars,” he said. He added that he and fellow Republican senators were dissatisfied with the response from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson to a letter they had about the proposed rule. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), ranking member of the committee’s space subcommittee, made similar arguments. “I strongly disagree with this administration’s obsession with misguided, woke policies related to climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion,” he said, arguing they were a diversion from a human return to the moon. “We must be laser-like focused on our approach.” The two senators claimed that such policies risked politicizing NASA, which has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. Nelson, testifying before the committee, reiterated his longstanding desire to keep NASA a “nonpartisan” agency. He added, though, that he did not necessarily agree with their claims. “The reality, Sen. Cruz — and you know I love you — is the fact that we have political differences,” he said. “But I can guarantee you that NASA is being run in a nonpartisan way.” Nelson declined to engage on some of the other criticisms about climate change and DEI policies beyond noting that the rulemaking on the greenhouse gas regulations is still in progress. Echoing comments from past hearings, he agreed with them that NASA is racing China to the moon, and warned that if China got to the lunar south pole before NASA, it might claim water ice resources there. Other Republican senators at the hearing did not echo those criticisms, focusing their questions on topics such as aeronautics, space nuclear propulsion and, in the case of former committee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), investments in NASA’s Stennis Space Center in his state. Multiyear NASA authorization The chair of the committee, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), reiterated at the hearing her desire for a new NASA authorization. She announced in February that she wanted to enact a multiyear authorization just a year after a NASA authorization was included in the CHIPS and Science Act. “It is my goal to complete another NASA bill this Congress, this time with a multiyear authorization that will help ensure that the nation’s leading space and aeronautic research agency has stable, predictable funding that it needs to succeed,” she said. That would be the first multiyear authorization for NASA since 2010. Nelson, who as a senator spearheaded the passage of that 2010 authorization act, endorsed a multiyear authorization, saying it would provide stability for both the agency and industry. “I would welcome a multiyear approach,” he said. “I think a five-year authorization bill would be very, very well received in the aerospace community.”
United Launch Alliance expects to conduct a static-fire test of its Vulcan Centaur rocket in several days, but the timing of the vehicle’s first launch will depend on the outcome of an ongoing investigation of a test anomaly. ULA rolled the Vulcan rocket from the pad at Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, back to its Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) building on May 15. The vehicle had been on the pad for several days to conduct a tanking test and practice countdown. Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said in a May 15 tweet that the company needed to “adjust a handful of parameters and set points” for the vehicle before performing what the company calls the Flight Readiness Firing (FRF), a static-fire test of the booster’s BE-4 engines on the pad. That work would be done while the rocket is back in the VIF. In a May 16 interview after a speech at the Humans to Mars Summit here, Bruno said that work involved a combination of minor adjustments to both pad infrastructure and the vehicle. The former includes adjusting set points in a hydraulics system and changing the rate of liquid oxygen flowing into the rocket to top off tanks after recycling the countdown. Those adjustments, he said, could be done in software. On the booster, he said there was an issue during the pad tests with flowing gas through spark torch igniters used to ignite the BE-4 engines. The gas is intended to make sure that the igniters are dry and can light, but the timing was off. That could involve some combination of adjustments on the rocket and ground infrastructure. “There’s nothing wrong with the engines,” he added. “We’ve lit the engines a zillion times on the test stand at Blue,” a reference to test stands by engine manufacturer Blue Origin. That work is done more easily inside the VIF, he said, where there is protection from the weather and where work can continue when other range operations might cause a halt to work on the pad. Once those fixes are complete, Bruno said the vehicle will roll back out to the pad for the FRF. “It’ll be a few days,” he said of the timing of the test, which will depend on both when the work is complete and getting approval from the range for test, which is required since it is considered an “energetic” event. Assuming there are no problems with that firing, the last major obstacle before launch is completing an investigation into a March 29 incident during testing of the Centaur upper stage . Hydrogen leaked from the structural test article and ignited, creating a fireball. Bruno said the investigation was delayed because it took time to remove equipment on top of the Centaur, such as a payload adapter and mass simulators for the payload and payload fairing. Only in the last week and a half was ULA able to get access to the dome section of the Centaur where the leak was located. Engineers have isolated a small region on that dome where they believe the leak came from, as well as the likely ignition source. “I’m pretty confident that we’re going to find the leak, and once we find the leak we’ll know if we have to take corrective action or not on the flight vehicle,” he said. If ULA doesn’t need to modify the Centaur, that would allow the Cert-1 launch to take place in early summer, he said. “If we do, it could take longer, but I don’t expect it to get out of the year.” Complicating launch scheduling is the requirement for the primary payload, the Peregrine lunar lander from Astrobotic, which has a launch window that is open only for about four to five days per month. Before the Centaur test anomaly, ULA had been working towards a May 4 launch , which Bruno said in February was the start of a window about four days long. “In the big picture, it’s a steel pressure vessel and it had a leak,” he said. “We’re going to understand it and we’re going to fix it. It’s not like other things that go wrong on rockets like engines that blow up. It’s just a piece of structure. We’ll fix it.”
For the third consecutive year, bipartisan legislation will be moving through the House and Senate aiming to establish a Space National Guard as a reserve component of the U.S. Space Force. The legislative push, led by lawmakers from Colorado, California and Florida, has encountered stern opposition from the White House Office of Management and Budget which argues that a Space National Guard will introduce additional costs and unnecessary bureaucracy into the system. A new version of the Space National Guard bill introduced this month by House members from Colorado Jason Crow (D) and Doug Lamborn (R) aims to counter OMB’s case by establishing space units in only seven states and Guam. That’s all that’s needed to ensure that approximately 1,000 Air National Guard members who support the Space Force can continue to do so without major disruption, Lamborn told SpaceNews . The bill named the Space National Guard Establishment Act is “our attempt to get around the argument that it has a big price tag,” Lamborn said. “We don’t think that’s true. So this is an attempt to prove that.” The case against a Space National Guard was bolstered by a 2020 report from the Congressional Budget Office that estimated it would cost anywhere from $100 million to $900 million, assuming every U.S. state and territory established their own space guard units. Those estimates also factored new buildings and a significant growth in staff at the National Guard Bureau. Guard proponents insist that’s an unfair and inaccurate cost estimate based on false assumptions. They note that outside of the seven states — Colorado, California, Hawaii, Alaska, New York, Ohio, Florida — and Guam, there are no plans to expand in any other state, and that would require separate authorization from Congress anyway. They also point out that the Guard has not asked for any new buildings. A separate Space National Guard Establishment Act proposed by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was introduced in February. This would be the senators’ third attempt to pass a space guard bill, and Colorado lawmakers’ second consecutive effort. Compared to a year ago, said Lamborn, “I think more people are coming around to the need for a Space National Guard, especially if we adopt our proposed legislation that concentrates on only eight states. So it’s not a national transition for everyone at the same time.” The Crow-Lamborn bill is expected to be included in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act. The fate of the Feinstein-Rubio bill is more uncertain as the Senate has not supported it in years past. “Saying that the cost is prohibitive is no longer a strong argument now that we’ve narrowed it down,” said Lamborn. Space Force staying neutral The political fight over the space guard has put the U.S. Space Force in a tough spot. After the Space Force was established in December 2019, Congress asked the Department of the Air Force for a recommendation on how to organize its reserve components. The Department of the Air Force drafted a report in March 2021 that recommended establishing a Space National Guard “with minimal or no new cost” and transferring the units performing space duties under the Air National Guard. That report was never formally submitted to Congress due to OMB’s opposition, according to several congressional sources who spoke with SpaceNews . Over the past two years, former Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall argued for alternative approaches , such as consolidating active duty and reserve components and allowing some members to work part-time. But they did not propose establishing a Space National Guard. The current Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman has only spoken in broad terms about this issue, highlighting the importance of the skills that those Guard units possess. In response to questions about Saltzman’s position, a spokesperson told SpaceNews that the Department of the Air Force is “still evaluating the best future disposition of current Air National Guard space units. General Saltzman always emphasizes that the capabilities that are in the Guard are critical, and we need to find a way to maintain them.” Guard units in limbo Col. Michael Bruno, chief of staff for the Colorado National Guard Joint Staff, told SpaceNews that the uncertainty about the future of the Air National Guard’s space units has hurt morale and undermined recruiting. “This needs to be solved,” he said. “There’s going to be a breaking point coming up sooner or later. Things can’t continue down this path.” When the Space Force was established, active duty space units were moved out of the Air Force and placed in the Space Force, but no corresponding move was made to create a Space Force National Guard component. Bruno explained that the roughly 1,000 members of the Air National Guard who perform space operations duties — such as controlling communications and missile warning satellites, and electronic warfare systems — are now “orphans” as they are technically under the Air Force but the Air Force is no longer in charge of space missions. The Space Force is now building its own culture, it has its own basic training and personnel regulations, Bruno noted. “But our folks are orphaned. They are supporting space missions but they still fall under the Air National Guard.” If Congress doesn’t establish a Space National Guard, the probable outcome is that the Air Force will stop funding these units because they are not aligned with the air service. Transferring the Air National Guard’s space professionals to a Space National Guard would correct that misalignment, Bruno said. He noted that the Air Force recently relocated the Guard’s space unit stationed in Guam to Hawaii, so Guam will not have a unit that would move to the Space National Guard if it’s established. CBO cost estimate ‘misinformed’ Guard officials have estimated that reassigning the space units from the Air National Guard to the Space National Guard would cost no more than $250,000, said Bruno. “CBO was at best misinformed,” he said. The only expenses would be to make name tapes for the uniforms, change signs at bases and make unit patches, said Bruno. “It could literally be done on a drill weekend.” There is another issue that nobody is talking about, he said, which is the potential cost and time it would take to train new people to carry out the duties performed today by guardsmen if their units are deactivated. “If we take the missions out of the guard, there is a capability gap,” Bruno said. The Air National Guard, for example, has 60% of the deployable space electromagnetic warfare units that support U.S. combatant commands around the world, said Bruno. “They are continually deployed.” “If that goes away, rebuilding that squadron of 80 people to the same skill and knowledge levels would take seven to 10 years,” he said. It’s important to remember that Guard units have a federal mission but also support their states, he said. If the space units are not moved to the Space National Guard, the Air Force likely will convert those jobs to air-focused positions. And it is doubtful, Bruno added, that many members will give up their status under the Air National Guard to join the Space Force as an active-duty member. “The great thing about the guard is we are trained, organized and equipped to fight our nation’s war as reserves to our active duty counterparts,” Bruno noted. “But we also work in our communities to respond to crises like natural disasters, search and rescue and health emergencies like the covid pandemic.” Bruno said the clock is ticking. “The unknown factor is creeping into the morale and psyche of our members.”
TAMPA, Fla. — British cybersecurity software developer Arqit has hired financial adviser Silverpeak to sell its space division following interest from potential buyers, according to a source close to the process. The division’s assets include a quantum encryption satellite Redwire is building that is partly funded by the European Space Agency, the person told SpaceNews , along with patents, intellectual property, commercial contracts worth more than $65 million, and a team of around 40 engineers. Arqit, which is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange and due to report financial results May 17, and Silverpeak declined to comment. Arqit announced plans in December to sell its partially built satellite after pivoting to a terrestrial method for distributing symmetric encryption keys capable of resisting attacks from quantum computers. Distributing these keys via ground networks would be cheaper and less risky than deploying a space-based platform, although quantum communications using fiber optic cables have a limited range compared with satellites better suited for covering vast distances. Despite the technology’s infancy, Arqit says it continues to see demand for quantum encryption satellites from government and other customers that prefer not to send traffic across international cables. Quantum-resistant cryptography is set to be a key component of IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite), Europe’s planned 6 billion euro ($6.5 billion) secure connectivity constellation. The European Space Agency recently tasked a group led by operator SES to develop and operate a satellite in 2024 to validate quantum key distribution (QKD) technology. SES said May 11 that the QKD payload for the group’s Eagle-1 satellite would be developed by Germany’s Tesat-Spacecom, a manufacturer of terminals for optical communications satellites. Technologies being developed for quantum networking are seen as synergistic with the space-based optical communications market, where commercial interest is growing amid rising costs and demand for radio frequency spectrum. Before deciding to sell its partially built quantum encryption satellite, Arqit had lined up a 2024 launch with Virgin Orbit, which is searching for a new owner after collapsing into bankruptcy earlier this year. Like Arqit, Virgin Orbit listed shares publicly following a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a financial tool offering a fast-track to stock markets. A SPAC merger requires less rigorous due diligence than a traditional stock market listing, leaving them open to overly optimistic growth projections in the search for investor support. Multiple law firms have announced class action lawsuits over Arqit’s business projections, including one filed May 6 by Rosen Law Firm at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (1:22-cv-02604, Glick v. Arqit Quantum Inc. et al.). Arqit disclosed in its last financial update Dec. 14 that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had also launched a “fact-finding inquiry” into the company’s 2021 SPAC merger, which Virgin Orbit had also invested in . May 17 update: Arqit said in its earnings update that it is the largest unsecured creditor identified to date in Virgin Orbit’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy process with a $10 million claim. Arqit recorded $2.6 million in total income for the six months ended March 31, primarily from funds provided by the European Space Agency, compared with $12.3 million for the corresponding prior year period. The company’s operating loss was $34.6 million, compared with a $14.3 million loss for the six months to March 31, 2022.
China’s human spaceflight agency is seeking to foster a commercial, low-cost transportation system to deliver cargo to and from its Tiangong space station. The China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced May 16 that it is seeking to reduce the cost and enhance the flexibility of sending supplies to Tiangong through exploring the development of commercial space models. The program echoes NASA’s own Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, which awarded contracts in late 2008 to Orbital Sciences Corp. and SpaceX, and saw the first cargo flights to the International Space Station in 2012. That program played a role in the development of the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo spacecraft, as well as the Antares and the Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Antares launcher and Cygnus spacecraft. Requirements stated in the CMSEO call include being capable of sending not less than 1,800 kilograms to low Earth orbit, with a pressurized volume of at least seven cubic meters. The spacecraft should be capable of remaining docked in orbit for at least three months, while offering a price of no more than 120 million yuan (US$17.2 million) per 1,000 kilograms delivered. The spacecraft also needs to be capable of controlled reentry and be able to dispose of more than 2,000 kilograms of waste on reentry. Proposals include plans for the launch segment and applications will need to be submitted by a deadline of July 15. The call for proposals is open to entities established at least three years prior, with requisite personnel and facilities. China completed the basic structure of its three-module Tiangong space station in late 2022. China currently uses 14-ton Tianzhou spacecraft launched by Long March 7 rockets to resupply its space station. One Tianzhou is expected to launch every eight months to keep the outpost stocked with supplies for crew, science equipment and experiments, and propellant for maintaining Tiangong’s orbit. Such a move to foster synergies and innovation from China’s nascent commercial space sector could provide impetus to and advantages for the country’s wider space ambitions. Tomas Hrozensky, a senior research fellow at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told SpaceNews via email that the CMSEO proposal is a clear indication that China is seeking to replicate the approach which yielded NASA a major success. “Arguably in the U.S. case, the increasing adoption of market-inspired practices by public actors in the past couple of decades, in particular the clear shift to purchasing services instead of contracting the private sector to develop solutions based on more traditional cost-plus contracts, has grown in breadth and depth, indicating positive outcomes for the public sector,” Hrozensky wrote. “By more actively embracing commercial participation, China appears to confirm the increasingly recognized benefits of such an approach in stimulating technological innovation in their space industry, and through this also enhancing their space capabilities at large.” Hrozensky also noted that commercial entities bring fresh perspectives, flexibility, and a relentless drive for efficiency that can lead to unexpected and rapid advance, citing the innovation boom witnessed in the U.S. following NASA’s CRS program. The paradigm shift toward a commercial and competitive space environment in the Chinese context is also very interesting as it may also be hinting at some limitations of the state-run space programme, Hrozensky added. CMSA made an earlier, similar call for in January 2021, with the stated aim of building a “flexible, efficient, diverse, and low-cost cargo transportation system.” Main requirements for cargo delivery include a payload capacity of 1-4 tons, possibility for removing and deorbiting station waste to prevent space debris, and transportation costs to be inline with international levels. Those earlier requirements have now been further constrained. The call notably signaled that China was open to commercial space station projects. Firms such as AZSpace have since emerged stating plans to develop reusable cargo capabilities, while commercial launch companies from then on stated Tiangong to be a potential source of contracts. AZSpace aims to launch its B300 reusable cargo spacecraft in June, according to a recent statement . The spacecraft will be capable of carrying 300 kilograms of payload to orbit and back. While well below the criteria for the new call, the spacecraft could demonstrate that such capabilities can be developed in the commercial sector to meet the requirements of the scheme. China aims to keep its space station permanently occupied for at least a decade. CMSEO is also looking at expanding Tiangong with a multi-functional module, and looking at opening it to various commercial purposes including tourism. NASA meanwhile recently proposed extending existing contracts to transport cargo to and from the ISS through the anticipated end of the station in 2030.
Two startups that went public through SPAC mergers say they are pressing ahead with plans despite warnings that they are running perilously low on cash. In recent regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, launch vehicle and satellite propulsion developer Astra and in-space transportation company Momentus both included “going concern” warnings. Those warnings state that, based on available cash and the rate at which the companies are spending it, there is “substantial doubt” each company can remain operating for the next year. Momentus, in its first quarter financial results released May 11, reported a net loss of $20.8 million and revenue of just $22,000. The company had cash and equivalents of $39 million on hand as of the end of the quarter. In an earnings call, company executives acknowledged the going concern warning but played it down. “Momentus has already taken proactive steps to extend our cash runway and in addition have evaluated our strategic business plan to identify the best course of action in clearing this going concern analysis,” said Eric Williams, chief financial officer. He notes the company was taking steps to both increase revenues through new business as well as reducing expenses. “We expect this plan will improve our liquidity and strengthen our balance sheet to allow the company to operate well into 2024,” he said. “In addition, we continue to explore and evaluate opportunities to raise additional funds and further strengthen our balance sheet.” He did not elaborate on those efforts to raise additional funding, which could be through additional stock sales or debt. The company’s shares closed down nearly 10% May 15 at 34.45 cents. Despite the going concern warning, the company emphasized it was proceeding with a series of missions of its Vigoride tug. Vigoride-5, which demonstrated it could raise its orbit slightly with its propulsion system , also recently deployed its single satellite payload, a cubesat for Singapore-based Qosmosys, and is now operating a space solar power hosted payload for Caltech. John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said the Vigoride-6 tug launched in April will also release four commercial satellites onboard “in the coming days” before changing its orbit for the deployment of two NASA cubesats scheduled in July. Momentus plans to fly its next tug on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 mission launching in October. It also has reservations on the Transporter-10, -11 and -12 missions in 2024, the last of which came from a contract the company announced May 12. That covers missions through October 2024, the company said. Rood said he is optimistic the company will find more customers for those later missions, and is making changes to allow for the inclusion of “sensitive and classified” U.S. government payloads on Vigoride missions in 2024. “We think these government customers can ultimately grow to represent a major portion of our business and as we increase in scale, we anticipate this will help unlock additional operating leverage and stability in our revenue,” he said. Astra released its first quarter financial results May 15, reporting a net loss of $44.9 million and no revenue. The company ended the quarter with $62.7 million in cash and equivalents. Astra executives, like the Momentus counterparts, emphasized they were taking steps to reduce cash burn rates while looking for additional funding. “The unique thing about this business is that it has several levers that we think help us continue to improve our cash runway,” said Axel Martinez, chief financial officer of Astra, in the company’s earnings call. The company reported no revenue in the quarter because it is continuing to develop its new Rocket 4 launch vehicle and did not deliver any of its Astra Spacecraft Engine electric thrusters in the quarter. The company was focused in the first quarter on setting up a new high-volume production line for those thrusters in a separate facility in Sunnyvale, California, which opened in late March. Martinez said he expected the company to start delivering thrusters late in the quarter, but warned those deliveries could slip into the third quarter. “We do not expect to recognize significant revenue from spacecraft engines delivered in Q2.” The company, for the first time, forecasted cash remaining in guidance for the second quarter, projecting ending the quarter with $30 million to $33 million on hand. That assumes no financing activities that could raise funding for the company, Martinez noted. He said the company had received “various indications of interest” regarding both debt and equity financing and is considering several options, but did not disclose a schedule for those efforts. Asked by an analyst if the company would consider abandoning its launch business to “triage” remaining capital by focusing on satellite propulsion, Chief Executive Chris Kemp was adamant that Astra would continue both launch vehicle and spacecraft thruster work. “We believe in both of these businesses,” he said. Shares in Astra closed up 6% May 15 at 38.9 cents, but fell slightly in after-market trading when the company released its financial results. Both Astra and Momentus went public in 2021 through mergers with special purpose acquisition companies. Other companies that went public through that route have also suffered financial problems because of high cash burn rates, compounded in many cases by SPAC deals that raised less money than anticipated. Those companies include Virgin Orbit, which was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April when it ran out of cash and could not raise additional funding.
SpaceX and Axiom Space will have only two opportunities this month to launch a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station before having to wait potentially several months before getting another shot. At a May 15 briefing, officials from the two companies as well as NASA announced they had completed a flight readiness review for the Ax-2 mission to the station, giving their approval to proceed with a May 21 launch. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled for 5:37 p.m. Eastern that day, setting up a docking May 22 at 9:30 a.m. Eastern. That is the first of two launch opportunities for the mission, with a backup launch date May 22. NASA officials said on the call that if the mission doesn’t launch by May 22, they would have to wait until after one or more other missions scheduled to launch to the station. “If we don’t get off by the 22nd, we’ll stand down with the Axiom 2 mission and turn our focus to the SpaceX-28 mission,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, referring to a cargo Dragon mission currently scheduled to launch June 3. “Axiom, NASA and SpaceX will get together and look for the next best opportunity.” That next best opportunity could be months away. The current ISS manifest calls for the SpaceX cargo mission launching June 3 and remaining at the station about a month. It will be followed by the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which Montalbano said remains on track for a July 21 launch. The next crew rotation mission, Crew-7, is slated for later this summer, he added. The organizations will also have to work around use of Launch Complex 39A for other missions. That pad is the only one that can support both Dragon missions as well as Falcon Heavy launches. Current manifests call for a Falcon Heavy launch for the U.S. Space Force in July, another for EchoStar’s Jupiter-3 communications satellite in August, and NASA’s Psyche mission in October, which has a narrow launch window to reach its asteroid destination. Delays in another Falcon Heavy launch created the scheduled crunch for Ax-2. A Falcon Heavy launched Viasat’s ViaSat-3 Americas satellite April 30 after nearly two weeks of delays caused by poor weather and technical issues. That delayed Ax-2, which had been scheduled to launch May 8 . The delay will also condense the Ax-2 mission. Axiom Space originally planned to have the Dragon docked to the ISS for 10 days, but at the May 21 briefing officials disclosed that it had been shortened to eight days. “In order to make the mission fit within the flow of activities that ISS has lined up, we made the joint decision to reduce the docked time to eight days,” said Derek Hassmann, chief of mission integration and operations at Axiom Space. He said the company went through the activities planned for the mission and prioritized them, elevating research the four-person crew planned to conduct. “In the end, there was no impact to the research objectives,” he said. “There was some media outreach and other things that we wanted to do but weren’t a high priority that were dropped.” He noted later in the briefing, though, that the two astronauts from Saudi Arabia on Ax-2, Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi, still had a “whole series of media events” scheduled during the flight, particularly with students. They will be joined on the mission by commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut, and John Shoffner, an American private astronaut who will serve as pilot of Ax-2. There are no technical issues that would preclude a May 21 launch, said Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX. The schedule calls for a “dry dress” rehearsal with the crew on May 19, followed by a static-fire test of the Falcon 9. The launch will be the first crewed mission to attempt a booster landing back at Cape Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1, the former Launch Complex 13, rather than on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. “That was made available because we have a little bit of extra Falcon performance,” he said. That is preferred to a droneship landing since it removes weather conditions at the droneship as a launch constraint and makes it easier to get the booster ready for its next launch. That extra performance emerged from the experience of launching Starlink satellites. “We’ve always had this kind of capability before. We just weren’t sure we would always get the performance,” he explained. “The number of Falcon flights we’ve flown have allowed us to say that performance is available and can be used where it’s needed to be used.” Returning the booster to the Cape will be standard on all future crewed launches, he added.
ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Space Force sees growing support from Congress for its plans to build large constellations in low Earth orbit and other priorities the service laid out in its 2024 budget request, the vice chief of space operations said May 15. “We just finished defending our budget on the Hill and it’s been well received,” Gen. David Thompson said at an industry event organized by the Space Force Association. “ We are not really seeing any significant pushback,” on Capitol Hill or inside the Pentagon with regard to what the Space Force is trying to accomplish, Thompson said. The Space Force’s proposed $30 billion budget in 2024, which DoD characterized as its “largest space budget ever,” is nearly $4 billion above last year’s appropriations. The Space Force was established as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces in December 2019 . Initially many on Capitol Hill questioned whether a new military service was really needed but that debate has been settled, Thompson said. “I have not heard these questions or comments in a very long time,” he added, “In fact, what I hear now, almost routinely is: ‘I don’t think I was a big fan when it started but I think you guys are doing alright.’” But the Space Force can’t take this support for granted, Thomson said. “We’ve grown so quickly in terms of budget capability, now we have to make sure that we’re making smart investments with all of that money.” LEO satellites a top priority Thompson identified low Earth orbit satellite networks and training systems for satellite operators as the Space Force’s highest priorities in the 2024 budget. “We continue to push hard in the direction, first of all, of resilient and proliferated architectures,” he said. LEO and medium Earth orbit constellations are now in development to help defend U.S. forces from hypersonic missile attacks and for transmitting data in space. The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office also are jointly developing a proliferated LEO constellation to track moving targets from space. The conflict in Ukraine has shown that “LEO is the right answer,” said Thompson. “It’s resilient under attack,” he said. “I don’t think it takes a space expert to have watched what has unfolded in Ukraine to see the value, benefit and resilience of commercial constellations.” He noted that space-based communications and data relay will continue to get significant investment. “I’ll just tell you to continue to watch this space in 2025 and beyond. This is a tremendous growth area.” DoD has embraced the idea that networks of low-orbiting satellites in space will be essential to fight wars in the future, he said. There is a need for “sensors passing data to decision makers, passing data to firing units, passing data to weapons in flight, and for continuing to get updates over hundreds and thousands of square miles.” “In order to fight like that, you’re gonna have to have an incredible network in space,” Thompson said. Due to the wide availability of commercial space systems, he said, “We’re on the way to a future where you should expect that, generally speaking, you’re going to be observed and sensed and monitored and tracked from space pretty much everywhere all the time.” Education and training Thompson also highlighted the Space Force’s plans to spend $340 million on a digital infrastructure for training satellite operators and testing the performance of new hardware. The service is funding a program called National Space Test and Training Complex. Thompson said this is a critical effort to ensure Space Force guardians are “trained and prepared to fight … and that means an operational test and training infrastructure unlike what we’ve had in the past.” Space Force units need sophisticated training systems like the ones used by the Army, Navy and Air Force, with “true threat replication, live, simulated and virtual thinking adversaries,” said Thompson.
TAMPA, Fla. — Italy’s space agency has awarded local companies 235 million euros ($256 million) in pandemic relief funds for an in-orbit servicing demo in 2026, the group’s leader Thales Alenia Space announced May 15. Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales of France and Leonardo of Italy, said the group is contracted to design, develop, and qualify a spacecraft capable of performing a range of autonomous robotic operations on satellites in low Earth orbit. The company did not disclose details about the 2026 mission, but said the servicer would have a dexterous robotic arm and test capabilities that include refueling, component repair or replacement, orbital transfer, and atmospheric reentry. The servicer will be launched with a target satellite, said Maria Antonietta Perino, director of space economy exploration at Thales Alenia Space, and both will be fitted with an interface for a refueling mission. Perino said the servicer would also be designed to serve larger satellites that it would capture with its robotic arm. Leonardo is providing the robotic arm, developed with SAB Aerospace, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, and the Italian Institute of Technology. Spaceflight services company Telespazio and rocket builder Avio are also part of the consortium, along with D-Orbit, the space tug specialist that completed its first commercial mission in late 2020. Massimo Comparini, senior executive vice president of observation, exploration, and navigation at Thales Alenia Space, said the mission would highlight how established players could combine their skills and experience with more agile emerging space companies. “By working together they will generate synergies that ensure the future viability of the space sector,” Comparini said, “while also developing all-Italian technologies to support the growth of the country’s space industry.” Telespazio is responsible for the mission’s ground segment, with support from Altec, a joint venture between Thales Alenia Space and Italy’s space agency. Avio is in charge of orbital support and developing a propulsion module for the servicer, which would be based on a custom platform developed by Thales Alenia Space. D-Orbit is managing activities related to the target satellite platform, which would be based on its ION orbital transfer vehicle, and is also overseeing the development of a refueling system that could transfer fluid from the servicer to the target satellite. The Italian government has allotted about 2 billion euros ($2.2bn) in total for its space industry under the country’s National Plan for Recovery and Resilience to boost its post-pandemic economy. A 1.1 billion euro chunk of these funds has been earmarked for developing an Earth observation constellation called IRIDE, or International Report for Innovative Defense of Earth. This article was updated May 16 with comments from Thales Alenia Space about the mission.
NASA has ended the mission of a cubesat intended to go into orbit around the moon but which was unable to do so because of problems with its propulsion system. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced May 12 the end of the Lunar Flashlight mission, five months after its launch. The spacecraft was unable to go into its planned polar orbit around the moon because its propulsion system could not produce the required thrust. Engineers spent several months trying to troubleshoot the problem, identified shortly after its December 2022 launch. They suspected that debris of some kind was blocking propellant lines, reducing the amount of propellant reaching the thrusters. NASA said May 5 that they were making one final effort to clear the obstructions by increasing fuel pump pressures “far beyond” operational limits while opening and closing valves. That technique, tried on one of the spacecraft’s four thrusters, had shown some success, “inconsistently producing some increased levels of thrust.” However, those efforts weren’t enough to keep the spacecraft in the vicinity of the moon, leading JPL to bring the mission to an end. Mission planners had, by that point, ruled out placing the spacecraft into a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, but hoped to be able to place it into a distant Earth orbit that allowed for monthly flybys of the moon. How the debris got into the propulsion system is not clear. In a recent interview , Daniel Cavender, who was the project manager for the cubesat’s propulsion system at NASA and is now director of Rubicon Space Systems, a division of Plasma Processes LLC that is commercializing that propulsion system, noted the constraints imposed by the 6U cubesat design limited engineers’ ability to put filters into the system. “Because of the size constraints, we could not put filters everywhere. So, we relied heavily on precision cleaning, inspections and contamination controls. But there was a process slip at some point,” he said. The data from the cubesat, he noted, was consistent with ground tests of thrusters with debris in their propellant lines. Lunar Flashlight was the first spacecraft to go beyond Earth orbit to use a non-toxic “green” propellant called Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic, or ASCENT, developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Cavender noted that the thrusters worked well until the debris problem starved them of propellant, calling it a “significant validation in space.” NASA emphasized other technologies that Lunar Flashlight successfully tested. They included a new flight computer called Sphinx that can operate at low power levels and survive the radiation environment of deep space, and an upgraded radio called Iris. “Technology demonstrations are, by their nature, higher risk and high reward, and they’re essential for NASA to test and learn,” Christopher Baker, program executive for small spacecraft technology in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement announcing the end of the mission. “Lunar Flashlight was highly successful from the standpoint of being a testbed for new systems that had never flown in space before.” Lunar Flashlight also had a science mission, using a laser reflectometer instrument to look for water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon. While the spacecraft won’t be able to collect any science, it did test the instrument and confirmed it was working as expected. “It’s disappointing for the science team, and for the whole Lunar Flashlight team, that we won’t be able to use our laser reflectometer to make measurements at the moon,” Barbara Cohen, principal investigator for the mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. She added, though, that the mission “collected a lot of in-flight performance data” on the instrument that could be used on designs for similar instruments on future missions. Lunar Flashlight was originally manifested on Artemis 1, the first launch of the Space Launch System rocket, along with 12 other cubesats. However, a switch in the design of the propulsion system caused the spacecraft to mission a deadline of the fall of 2021 to be integrated on the SLS. NASA instead flew it as a secondary payload on the Falcon 9 launch of the HAKUTO-R M1 lander from Japanese company ispace, which lifted off less than a month after Artemis 1. Several of the 10 cubesats launched on Artemis 1 also suffered technical problems that prevented them from carrying out their missions. At a May 1 workshop , Craig Hardgrove, principal investigator for the LunaH-Map cubesat, said his team was still trying to resolve a problem with its electric propulsion system. He said then that if they could not free a stuck valve in that system by the end of May, they would likely wind down operations. JPL said that Lunar Flashlight will make a flyby of Earth May 17 at an altitude of 65,000 kilometers and then head into deep space. Since other systems on the spacecraft continue to operate despite the propulsion problem, “NASA is weighing options for the future of the spacecraft.”
A radar antenna on a newly-launched European mission to Jupiter has finally deployed after weeks of effort to loosen a stuck pin. The European Space Agency said May 12 that controllers had successfully deployed the 16-meter-long antenna on its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission. The antenna was supposed to deploy in the first week after its April 13 launch, but had extended only a third of its intended length as of late April. Engineers suspected that a pin used to hold the antenna in its stowed configuration for launch had not separated as planned. They planned a series of measures to shake the spacecraft through a thruster firing, then orient the spacecraft so the antenna was in sunlight and would warm up, as ways to loosen the pin. While those efforts showed some signs of progress, the antenna did not deploy until controllers fired a non-explosive actuator in the jammed bracket. The shock of the firing loosened the pin enough for the antenna to unfold. Another actuator fired later to complete the antenna’s deployment. The antenna is part of an instrument called the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), one of 10 on JUICE. RIME is designed to probe below the surfaces of the large icy moons of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to depths of up to nine kilometers. The timeline for the troubleshooting effort for RIME’s antenna matched what Olivier Witasse, project scientist for JUICE, said at a May 3 meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG). “Don’t expect news until the end of next week” on deployment efforts, he advised at the meeting after discussing the plans to shake and warm the antenna. “We cross our fingers for good news for our radar team.” JUICE will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, a year after NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, slated to launch in October 2024. Europa Clipper has its own radar instrument, called Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON), that also features deployable booms. Tim Larson, deputy project manager for Europa Clipper at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at the May 3 OPAG meeting that the project had been following the RIME antenna issue. The RIME antennas use a “very different design and deployment” than REASON, but he said the hold-down mechanisms for RIME might be similar to those used by Clipper’s solar arrays. “We are looking into it and making sure we understand the details, and seeing whether or not it has any impact on us,” he said.
Two companies have disclosed details about how they could raise the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA evaluates that and other concepts offered to the agency. Astroscale and Momentus said May 9 that they submitted a response to a NASA request for information (RFI) issued in December 2022 seeking concepts from industry about how they could raise the orbit of Hubble, has been slowly descending since the last shuttle servicing mission in 2009. The two companies proposed working together to attach a vehicle to the telescope and raise its orbit. Their concept involved using technologies Astroscale is developing to dock with and extend the life of satellites and orbital transfer vehicles from Momentus. In the proposal, a Momentus orbital service vehicle, launched on a small launch vehicle, would approach Hubble, attaching to it with Astroscale’s technology. The vehicle would boost Hubble’s orbit, currently at an altitude of about 527 kilometers, by 50 kilometers before undocking. The vehicle could then be used to remove orbital debris in orbits approaching Hubble. “We found our product suites to be synergistic in support of a major NASA mission,” John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said in the statement announcing the concept. “I am thrilled that we collaborated to offer NASA a very cost-effective way to continue to operate this billion-dollar scientific investment by leveraging new robotic in-space servicing technology.” Astroscale is already developing all the elements needed to carry out such a reboost, but a company spokesperson said they decided to work together “because we recognize that this is an opportunity to bolster the in-space servicing ecosystem on a larger scale by providing NASA a commercially viable, all-American small business solution.” The partnership, the company added, would also reduce schedule risk and allow the companies to share costs. NASA, in the RFI, said it expected any companies that it might later select to reboost Hubble to do so “on a no-exchange-of-funds basis.” NASA would not procure a reboost mission but said the mission could be a demonstration of satellite servicing capabilities that might attract other, paying commercial or government customers. A NASA spokesperson told SpaceNews May 12 that the agency received eight responses to the RFI, which are currently being reviewed. It did not disclose who submitted the responses, and Astroscale and Momentus are the only companies that have publicized their response. NASA emphasized that the RFI is simply an effort to help the agency determine whether and how to reboost Hubble’s orbit. “The responses to the RFI are not proposals, but rather information for the government to consider as it determines any next steps.” NASA issued the RFI nearly three months after it announced it signed a Space Act Agreement with SpaceX to study a Hubble reboost mission using a Crew Dragon spacecraft. That proposed mission could be part of the Polaris program of private astronaut missions funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who participated in the September 2022 briefing that announced the study. Neither NASA nor SpaceX have released details about the study, which was set to conclude nearly six months after it started. A NASA spokesperson confirmed May 12 that the study was now complete. “The feasibility study has concluded, and NASA is now internally evaluating the findings and working to determine next steps.” Hubble remains in good condition and is in high demand among astronomers. The spacecraft’s orbit is gradually decaying because of atmospheric drag, and NASA previously estimated a 50% chance it would reenter by 2037. The studies about raising the orbit of Hubble come amid a burst of activity in satellite servicing in industry, ranging from efforts to extend the lives of geostationary orbit communications satellites to refueling and repairing spacecraft. There is also growing interest in removing debris and performing controlled reentries of defunct satellites. “The Hubble’s need for a reboost should be an important wake-up call as to why the space industry needs dynamic and responsive in-space infrastructure, and in this case, to extend opportunities to explore our universe,” Ron Lopez, president and managing director of Astroscale U.S., said in the statement announcing Astroscale’s work with Momentus. “The proliferation of in-space servicing and assembly allows us to reimagine how our investments are managed in space; it is the foundation on which the new space age is being built.”
Virgin Orbit has extended the deadline for bids as part of its bankruptcy auction process that the company says has attracted interest from dozens of potential bidders. In a May 12 filing with federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, Virgin Orbit said the company, with the agreement of other major parties in the case, has agreed to extend the deadline for final bids by four days, from May 15 to May 19. The company also postponed the deadline to notify bidders that their bids are considered qualified from May 17 to May 21. If there are more than one qualified bids for Virgin Orbit or its assets, a bankruptcy auction will take place. That action has been delayed from May 18 to May 22. A court hearing on the sale, though, remains scheduled for May 24. The company, in the filing, did not give a reason for the extension, noting only that the bidding procedures gave the company the ability to extend those deadlines “in their reasonable discretion” and with appropriate consultation. The court approved the bankruptcy sale plan May 1 . Virgin Orbit sought an “expedited” sale of the company, arguing that it would attract interest from both those who considered investing in the company before its April 4 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as well as new bidders. Virgin Orbit said May 9 that it had received more than 30 “indications of interest” in the company. It did not identify any of them, but noted that “multiple” parties were interested in buying the entire company, keeping it operating and retaining current employees “in an integrated enterprise.” “I’m pleased with the number and quality of the indications of interest we’ve received, which we believe reflects the innovative ideas and hard work the team has put into the development of this unique system,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to work with those who have expressed interest and other parties as we approach the final bid deadline.” In the hopes that the company will remain in business under new ownership, a minimal staff of about 100 employees has continued preparations for the next LauncherOne launch, which could take place later this year. Virgin Orbit said April 19 it had completed the investigation into its previous, failed LauncherOne mission in January , confirming earlier accounts that a dislodged fuel filter caused a premature shutdown of the rocket’s upper stage engine. A new owner, though, would have to address more fundamental issues that led to the Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy filing. That includes high operating costs and a low launch rate — just two launches a year in 2021 and 2022 — that resulted in severe operating losses, depleting cash reserves. There is no guarantee that the winning bidder would seek to continue the company’s operations. Bidders could instead propose to purchase some subset of the company’s assets, like its Boeing 747 aircraft, if that maximizes the value of the deal for creditors.
The Space Development Agency is planning a new procurement of 100 satellites to continue to build out a military constellation in low Earth orbit. In a May 11 draft solicitation , the agency laid out its requirements for 100 “Alpha” satellites that will be part of a mesh network known as Transport Layer Tranche 2. The Transport Layer Tranche 2 also includes 72 “Beta” satellites for which SDA already has requested bids . The procurement of 100 Alpha satellites will be split between two vendors. Each Alpha satellite will have three optical communications terminals, Ka-band and Link 16 payloads . These satellites will be part of a “communications network that will provide resilient, low-latency, high throughput data transfer to and from any location on the globe,” said SDA. SDA, an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a layered network of military satellites . The Transport Layer will serve as a tactical network to move data to users around the world, communicating classified data such as early warnings of missile launches. The constellation, which SDA calls the proliferated warfighter space architecture , includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Transport Layer Tranche 2 to launch in 2026 The agency already has acquired satellites for Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 of the Transport Layer and the Tracking Layer. The first launch of Tranche 0 satellites took place in April. Tranche 1 is projected to launch in 2024 and Tranche 2 in 2026. The proliferated constellation is made up of small satellites supplied by multiple vendors, all interconnected via optical laser links. The Transport Layer Tranche 2 will be SDA’s largest procurement to date. SDA said Tranche 2, when deployed, will add enough nodes to the network to provide global coverage for U.S. military users. 
TAMPA, Fla. — A shrinking broadcast business led to another drop in revenues for Eutelsat as the French satellite operator edges closer to merging with OneWeb, the low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation set to boost its shift into connectivity services. Eutelsat posted 272 million euros ($295 million) in total revenues for the three months ended March 31, down 7.5% year-on-year when adjusted for currency changes on a like-for-like basis. Broadcast sales fell 10.6% to 157 million euros as sanctions against Russian and Iranian channels added more challenges in a gradually declining satellite TV market. Revenues for its smaller government services business also fell 13.4% to 31 million euros, which Eutelsat said was partly due to a decline in U.S. Department of Defense contract renewals that it expects to improve later this year. However, fixed broadband and mobile connectivity sales climbed 7.3% and 23% to 18.5 million euros and 26.9 million euros, respectively, sustaining positive momentum ahead of two new high throughput geostationary satellites set to enter service in the second half of 2023. OneWeb update Eutelsat has been investing heavily in connectivity services as part of a growth strategy that saw it announce plans last year to merge its geostationary network with U.K.-based OneWeb’s LEO constellation. The merger is on track to complete this summer, Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said during a May 11 earnings call with analysts, pending regulatory approvals and a shareholder vote. The commercial arm of India’s space agency launched the final batch of satellites OneWeb needs to provide commercial broadband services globally in March, which Berneke said fully de-risked the project. She said 22 ground network portals had been for the constellation, and another 18 are on track to be installed by the end of this year to enable global commercial services by January 2024. OneWeb’s network currently represents around 450 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity, mainly limited to the upper region of the northern hemisphere, and is slated to reach 1,300 Gbps after bringing global coverage online. While Eutelsat expects OneWeb to have generated only $50 million in revenues for the 12 months to June 30, Berneke said the LEO operator has an order backlog of $900 million — up $300 million from October. OneWeb has signed deals with 53 distributor partners to date and is seeking to expand this to 75 this year. According to Berneke, the LEO operator could also help Eutelsat play a role in IRIS², Europe’s proposed multi-orbit broadband constellation also known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. Eutelsat announced May 2 it had partnered with other established space companies to jointly bid to develop the 6 billion euro ($6.6 billion) project. The British government will continue to hold priority voting rights in OneWeb following the Eutelsat merger, complicating its plan to join Europe’s sovereign network post-Brexit. However, Berneke said their merger deal includes a clause enabling Eutelsat to carve British government control out of a part of OneWeb’s second-generation constellation. Work is set to begin next year on OneWeb Gen 2, which Berneke said would have three to five times more capacity than Gen 1 and use fewer but bulkier satellites. By leveraging the French operator’s geostationary network in high-demand areas, Eutelsat expects Gen 2 would be a constellation of around 300 satellites, roughly half the number of 150-kilogram satellites in OneWeb’s Gen 1 system.
Intuitive Machines says its first lunar lander mission has slipped into the third quarter of this year as pursues a wider range of business opportunities. In a May 11 earnings call, the first for the company since it went public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger in February , Chief Executive Steve Altemus said that the company’s Nova-C lander being completed for its IM-1 mission would be “at the launch pad and preparing for liftoff” in mid to late third quarter. The company announced in February plans for a June landing at Malapert A , a crater near the south pole of the moon. That date was a slip from a previously scheduled March launch, which the company said was linked to NASA’s decision to move the landing site to Malapert A. Altemus said the company made “significant progress” in testing of the lander in recent months, such as structural tests to confirm the vehicle could handle the stresses of launch and cryogenic tanking demonstrations. “We have some functional testing” still to do on the lander, he said, but did not elaborate on the nature of those tests or their schedule ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 launch. The new schedule “is a little bit of movement from initial expectations,” he acknowledged, and could affect the schedule of its second mission, IM-2, which had been set for the fall. The IM-1 mission is carrying payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under a task order awarded in May 2019 . At that time, IM-1 was scheduled to land in July 2021. The task order was originally valued at $77 million but, after several modifications that include the change in landing site, now has a total value of $116.3 million, according to federal contracting databases. The company is racing with Astrobotic, which also received an initial CLPS task order in 2019, to be the first American company to land on the moon. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander was scheduled to launch this month on the first Vulcan Centaur, but United Launch Alliance delayed that launch because of an anomaly during testing of a Centaur upper stage in March. ULA said this week it is “protecting” a summer launch of Vulcan as it resumes pad tests of the rocket. Other business While Intuitive Machines is best known for its lunar landers, the company is branching out into other areas. The company partnered with KBR to win a NASA engineering services contract called Omnibus Multidiscipline Engineering Services (OMES) III April 18. The contract has a maximum value of $719 million over five years. The OMES III contract is the largest single contract that Intuitive Machines has won, Altemus said in the call. He argued that the contract would help it grow its “orbital services” business line that will ultimately include satellite servicing and debris removal. “This win is of strategic importance, allowing us to support NASA in designing, developing and demonstrating critical technology required to support the emerging orbital servicing market.” A NASA release about the contract described it as providing “multidiscipline engineering services” that support “spaceflight, airborne, and ground system hardware and software, including development and validation of new technologies to enable future space and science missions.” The release does not specifically mention satellite servicing or related technologies beyond noting the contract involves work with the center’s In-space Services projects division, among others. The start of the OMES III contract is on hold, though, after another bidder, SAIC, filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office on May 8. GAO has an Aug. 16 deadline to rule on the protest. Altemus played down the protest, noting historical success rates for such bid protests of less than 10%. “We have high confidence in our value offering to the government,” he said, adding that he did not know the details of SAIC’s protest. “We’re confident that, once we get through this 100-day protest period for the GAO, the award will stand.” Intuitive Machines submitted a proposal in March for a NASA competition to provide commercial services for its Near Space Network, which handles communications for missions in orbit and at distances of up to two million kilometers from Earth. That includes spacecraft that would serve as communications relays in Earth orbit and around the moon. NASA is expected to make multiple contract awards in the third quarter. Intuitive Machines is partnering with Raytheon, which Altemus said provides “the solutions and the heft that we might need for more enterprise-class systems.” Intuitive Machines has plans to develop its own constellation of lunar data relay satellites to support its landers and other missions, and believes it is ahead of competitors like Lockheed Martin subsidiary Crescent Space Services, which announced plans for a similar constellation in March . The company will also lead a team called “Moon Racer” that will bid on NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) competition for a crewed lunar rover. That team includes Northrop Grumman, Boeing, AVL, Michelin and Roush. NASA is expected to release the LTV call for proposals later this month. Northrop Grumman announced plans for the rover in November 2021 , with it as the lead and Intuitive Machines providing the lander that delivered the rover. Altemus did not disclose why it was now the prime on the team. Several other companies, such as teams led by Lockheed Martin, Leidos and Astrolab, are likely to submit bids. Intuitive Machines reported $18.2 million in revenue in the quarter compared to $18.5 million in the first quarter of 2022. The company’s work on its three NASA CLPS task orders provided two-thirds of its revenue in the quarter. The company reported an operating loss of $14 million in the quarter compared to $4.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. That loss included $2.8 million in one-time costs associated with the SPAC merger. The company is projecting $168 million to $274 million in revenue for 2023, and Erik Sallee, chief financial officer, said the company should report positive quarterly earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) by the fourth quarter.
A Space Force office created to work with the commercial space industry is opening up a new facility in Chantilly, Virginia. Col. Richard Kniseley, head of the Commercial Space Office at Space Systems Command, said May 11 the location was chosen for its proximity to other government agencies that also work with the commercial space industry. “We wanted to be close to the intelligence community, NASA, and the Space Development Agency,” Kniseley said on a webcast hosted by the National Security Space Association. The commercial services office, known as COMSO, will oversee the procurement of satellite-based services from the private sector such as communications, imagery and weather data. It also will absorb other organizations that work with the commercial space industry, including SpaceWERX , the Space Domain Awareness data marketplace, the SSC Front Door initiative and a new program that is looking at ways the space industry could support the military during conflicts. The Chantilly facility will be a “commercial collaboration center,” said Kniseley. The grand opening is planned for June 7 when the office will host an industry day focused on space-based navigation, positioning and timing services. Kniseley said there is a “huge appetite” for commercial space services but it will take some time to work through bureaucratic and budgeting hurdles in order to fund these services. Most of the funding for commercial services today is for satellite-based communications and space domain awareness data. Emerging areas of interest, he said, include space-based PNT that is not reliant on GPS, weather data and space-based data transport. Services get a small share of Space Force funding Industry analyst Mike Tierney, head of legislative affairs at the National Security Space Association, noted that the companies in the space sector may have set expectations too high when it comes to Space Force procurement of services. Spending on commercial space domain awareness data, for example, is about $18 million in the 2024 budget, compared to hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted for government-owned systems. There is a disconnect between industry’s expectations and the budget reality, he said May 9. “The COMSO office has an opportunity to clarify” what it realistically plans to buy, said Tierney. “And if we can get alignment in terms of expectations, I think we’d have a lot better dialogue between commercial and government about where the right areas are.” Todd Harrison, managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights, said the Space Force needs to “show us their plan for how they’re going to fully leverage commercial space.” Speaking May 9 at an NSSA webinar, said the industry has heard “a lot of talk” from the government and now wants to see more specifics. “Where could the Space Force be leveraging commercial space services? There’s all kinds of electro optical imagery, space-based radar, radio-frequency sensing, on-orbit servicing of satellites, you can go down the list,” said Harrison. “And I don’t really see much of a plan at all. And most importantly, I don’t see it in the budget request.” “Commercial services don’t work for everything,” he said. “But where appropriate, we should see that in the budget. We should see real funding streams. And for the most part, we’re not seeing that,” Harrison said. “The commercial space office has got a lot of work to do to catch up.” There is a risk, said Harrison, that if the government doesn’t support some of these services, companies may not survive and “the Space Force could lose this opportunity to leverage what a lot of private capital has already invested in.”
United Launch Alliance plans to resume tanking tests of its Vulcan Centaur rocket and test fire its main engines as early as next week, the company announced May 11 . “Vulcan is in position atop SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to undergo a full launch day rehearsal tomorrow and flight readiness firing test of its main engines planned for next week,” ULA said. ULA rolled the rocket on Thursday to Space Launch Complex 41 in preparation for tests. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno in tweets on Wednesday said Vulcan was returning to tanking tests although the investigation of a Centaur upper-stage testing anomaly that occurred on March 29 has not yet been completed. Before the upper-stage incident, ULA had announced a May 4 target date for Vulcan’s first launch, known as Cert-1. Targeting summer launch Bruno on Wednesday said ULA plans to livestream the flight-readiness test firing of the BE-4 main engines. The test fire is expected to last about six seconds, he said. “A short burn, but a very long time to be on the pad.” ULA has not provided a new target launch date for Vulcan. “With success here, and a resolution of the Centaur V ground test anomaly, we are projecting for a Vulcan Cert-1 launch this summer,” Bruno wrote. Cert-1 is the first of two certification launches that Vulcan must complete to be able to fly national security launch missions for the U.S. Space Force. The debut launch will carry Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and a payload for space memorial company Celestis.
TAMPA, Fla. — AT&T requested regulatory permission May 10 to lease AST SpaceMobile the wireless spectrum the venture needs to connect smartphones in the United States to its planned constellation. Their agreement includes substantially all of AT&T’s low-band frequencies, which satellites AST SpaceMobile plans to start deploying next year would use to close the telco’s coverage gaps across the country. The companies need Federal Communications Commission approval for wireless transmissions between a phone and a satellite. AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski said this could come with a permit for their spectrum leasing arrangement. This approval could also come under a rulemaking process for “Supplemental Coverage from Space” that the FCC proposed March 17 . Both approaches to authorization were encouraged by the FCC in their public hearing on this topic last month, Wisniewski noted. AST SpaceMobile also has a request pending with the FCC for permission to transmit V-band frequencies from its proposed low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to gateways for backhaul. In partnership with AT&T and Japanese telco Rakuten, AST SpaceMobile made its first voice call April 20 using an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone and its BlueWalker 3 test satellite. AT&T said in the May 10 FCC regulatory filing that tests with BlueWalker 3 are continuing with an aim to demonstrate the satellite’s ability to deliver communications at “speeds typically used in 5G settings.” AST SpaceMobile plans to launch its first five commercial satellites in the first quarter of 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Called Block 1, these satellites are roughly the same size as the 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker 3. They are due to be followed later in 2024 by 20 Block 2 satellites that would be 50% larger than those in Block 1. AT&T did not detail when services from its AST SpaceMobile partnership could be commercially deployed across the United States. AST SpaceMobile has said its Block 2 batch is needed to provide coverage to the most commercially attractive markets. Virginia-based Lynk Global, which is also seeking permission to provide direct-to-device commercial services in the U.S. and has three operational satellites in LEO, has not yet disclosed a spectrum partner in the country. SpaceX last year said it would use spectrum from T-Mobile to directly connect standard smartphones to upgraded satellites in its Starlink LEO constellation. Other space companies are pursuing direct-to-device businesses using frequencies already approved for mobile satellite services, such as Globalstar, which started supporting an SOS application for Apple’s latest iPhones last year.
SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded a contract to L3Harris Technologies to continue providing ground services for the current generation of geostationary weather satellites. The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity Geostationary Ground Sustainment Services contract has a maximum value of approximately $275.2 million. Under the contract announced May 11, L3Harris will handle communications with the NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-R Series, data processing and information distribution. In addition, L3Harris will monitor satellite health and safety, while sending commands to the spacecraft and instruments onboard. L3Harris has been the prime contractor and systems integrator for the GOES-R ground segment since 2009 when the company won a 10-year, $736 million NOAA contract. One year later, L3Harris won a $130 million NOAA contract to develop the GOES-R ground segment antenna. In 2019, NOAA awarded L3Harris a $284 million contract to modernize the GOES-R ground infrastructure. Work under the latest NOAA contract, which runs through May 10, 2028, will be carried out through a series of task orders. NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service is focused on leveraging technology to increase the capability while reducing the cost of ground systems. A recent study of ground system requirements determined that a more cost-effective ground architecture would be essential to enabling NOAA to expand the number of satellites and data sources it relies upon. The Geostationary Ground Sustainment Services contract “will improve the ground system’s capabilities, reliability, and robustness; leverage technology advancements; and reduce life-cycle costs,” according to a May 11 NOAA news release. GOES-R satellites provide imagery and data on Earth’s weather, oceans and environment in addition to mapping the location of lightning and monitoring space weather. Three NOAA GOES-R satellites are in orbit with a fourth scheduled to launch in 2024. NASA builds and launches GOES-R satellites. NOAA operates the spacecraft and distributes satellite imagery and data to people around the world. 
A key Ariane 6 supplier expects the rocket to make its first launch within a year, but ruled out any chance the vehicle could fly before the end of 2023. In a May 10 earnings call, executives with German aerospace company OHB predicted that the rocket will make its long-delayed debut within the first several months of 2024, the strongest indication yet by those involved with the rocket’s development that it will not be ready for launch before the end of this year. “It’s not yet launched, but we hope that it will launch in the early part of next year,” said Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, of Ariane 6 during a presentation about the company’s first quarter financial results. A subsidiary of OHB, MT Aerospace, produces tanks and structures for the rocket. Later in the call, he estimated the rocket was no more than a year away from that inaugural flight. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” he said. “I think we are within a year of the first launch and that is psychologically very important.” Fuchs didn’t offer a more precise date of the launch, stating that “is not for us to publish” at this time. “I’m just more and more confident that it will be in the early part of next year, so within a year I’m pretty sure that we will do it.” His comments are the strongest statement yet that an Ariane 6 launch in 2023 was no longer feasible. The European Space Agency said in October 2022 it was projecting a first launch of the rocket, once expected in 2020, in the fourth quarter of 2023 . However, neither ESA nor prime contractor ArianeGroup have provided recent updates on that schedule or confirmed that they were still targeting a launch before the end of the year, amid rampant speculation that the launch was slipping into 2024. In an April 17 interview during the 38 th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher declined to give an updated schedule for the first Ariane 6 launch , citing ongoing test activities in several areas, such as a hotfire test expected in early July. Once that hotfire test is complete, he said, the Ariane 6 partners should know enough “that we can then make a much better prediction of the maiden flight date.” IRIS² role OHB is part of the consortium that announced May 2 it is bidding on the European Union’s Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite , or IRIS², multi-orbit satellite constellation. That consortium includes many major European satellite operators and manufacturers. Lutz Bertling, chief strategy and development officer of OHB, said in the earnings call that he was aware informally of proposals only by that consortium and a few other companies bidding on their own. “We can hardly imagine that they would be eligible,” he said of those other bidders, with the European Commission expected to announce in mid-May who is eligible to proceed. The May 2 announcement did not disclose the roles of the individual companies in the “open consortium.” Bertling said OHB had preliminary agreements with other members of the consortium on roles and responsibilities, but would not disclose them until after the European Commission releases the final invitation to tender. That was in part, he said, because that final invitation could change some of those details. “We are very satisfied. We reached what we wanted to reach,” he said. “I think the positioning that we have is quite a good one, and if it all goes through like it is, it will be shaping for OHB’s future, in a positive sense.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat now expects to start deploying satellites for Lightspeed around 2026, six years later than originally planned as talks to fund the low Earth orbit broadband constellation drag on. CEO Dan Goldberg said May 11 the Canadian geostationary satellite operator would give a more definitive deployment timeframe once it secures all of Lightspeed’s funding, including a sizable chunk expected to come from France’s export credit agency. Telesat has so far lined up about $3 billion for the project via internal resources and Canadian government funding, which was about two-thirds of the budget before inflation and supply chain issues added at least $250 million in costs last year. Speaking during the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts, Goldberg said inflationary pressures have since stabilized but he did not give an update on Lightspeed costs or launch agreements for the nearly 200 satellites to be built by Europe’s Thales Alenia Space. Telesat has previously said it plans to use rockets still under development by Blue Origin and Relativity Space to deploy the constellation. Telesat also needs to secure regulatory extensions to retain Lightspeed’s priority Ka-band spectrum rights following the delay. Chief LEO architect to retire Goldberg said plans by Lightspeed system development vice president Erwin Hudson to retire at the end of June do not affect the company’s ability to progress with the program. Hudson joined Telesat in 2017 to lead development of the LEO constellation, projected at the time to launch in 2020 for commercial services starting in 2021. Telesat held off picking a manufacturer until 2021 to get a better deal on parts , only for Thales Alenia Space to run into pandemic-related supply chain issues that led to them downsizing the proposed constellation a year later. Hudson had delayed retirement longer than Telesat had anticipated, Goldberg said, and will likely continue advising the company beyond June. Broadcast business drags on financials Telesat’s revenues fell 5% to 183 million Canadian dollars ($136 million) for the three months ended March 31, compared with the same period last year when adjusted for changes in foreign exchange rates. The drop was mainly due to broadcast customers buying less capacity from Telesat’s satellites after renewing their contracts. More sales of connectivity equipment to the Canadian government and services to aviation and maritime customers helped offset the decline in its broadcast business. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, decreased 8% to 139 million Canadian dollars.
China’s secretive spaceplane may have performed multiple recaptures of an object it released into orbit during its recently completed second flight as part of on-orbit testing. Private firm Leolabs, which provides space situational awareness data through its global network of radars for tracking objects in low Earth orbit, said its analysis found evidence of what appeared to be at least two and possibly three capture/docking operations with a co-orbiting object. China’s clandestine spaceplane launched Aug. 4, 2022, embarking on its second flight, two years after its first, four-day-long mission . The second flight ended with a horizontal landing May 10, after 276 days in orbit. China has released very little information about the project, but clues indicate the spacecraft is somewhat similar to the Boeing X-37B. U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron tracking data revealed an object in a closely-matching orbit to the spaceplane Oct. 31, 2022 (NORAD ID 54218 (2022-093J COSPAR ID)). This companion subsatellite was then used in a series of rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) with the spacecraft, according to Leolabs. “Analyzing data from our global radar network, we’ve determined that the Test Spacecraft2 has propulsive capability and engaged in proximity operations with Object J, including what appeared to be at least two and possibly three capture/docking operations,” a Leolabs statement said. Leolabs’ assessment of on-orbit activities highlights three periods of RPO. One period, between Nov. 25 and Dec. 24 last year, shows that the two spacecraft were either docked or spaced very closely, with a possible docking performed on Nov. 25 or 26. A second docking was noted as taking place Jan. 10, 2023, in a second phase of operations. A later phase, between Feb. 20 and March 29, was similar to the previous and “featured what appeared to be apparent forced separation, followed by rendezvous and formation flying. 54218 [companion satellite] was once again observed to maneuver independently of the parent craft.” Leolabs notes that, on a minimum of five occasions, the companion satellite demonstrated what appeared to be independent propulsive capabilities. The spaceplane’s operations will likely gain attention outside of China, particularly with regards to docking and capture operations and the possible uses of such capabilities. “Based on what we do know, it seems like the Chinese and American spaceplane programs are being used in very similar fashions – primarily as testbeds for new technologies and capability demonstrations. It’s hard to tell for sure what technologies or capabilities exactly, as both governments are pretty secretive about the details,” Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews via email. “What I find fascinating is the perceptions surrounding each program. When the X-37B started flying, it generated a lot of concern from the Chinese about the potential for it to be used as a weapon, a concern they’ve mentioned in recent multilateral discussions on space security. “Likewise, I expect that these latest reports on the Chinese spaceplane are likely to cause a lot of concern in the US, despite it being pretty similar to capabilities the U.S. is also developing.” A statement from the spaceplane’s maker, CASC, released after the May 10 landing claimed that the project “will provide a more convenient and inexpensive way to access space for the peaceful use of space in the future.” “We know the X-37B has also deployed several subsatellites on previous missions, but there isn’t the public tracking data to be able to tell if it did RPOs or not,” Weeden wrote. The spacecraft landed at Lop Nur military base in Xinjiang May 8. Leolabs states that their observation data indicated the landing window to be likely between 0018 and 0020 UTC. CASC’s reusable spaceplane project last year acquired national level funding from the Natural Science Foundation of China. Leolabs previously highlighted that the spaceplane made a large change to its orbit in April, likely in preparation for the spacecraft to land. The mission was used by the company to test its capabilities. “This event tested LeoLabs object tracking and maneuver detection and characterization capabilities, proving that we can provide critical intelligence on the behaviors and activities of HIOs thanks to our continuous, real-time operations,” Leolabs said in a statement.
TAMPA, Fla. — EchoStar said its long-awaited Jupiter 3 satellite should be ready for a Falcon Heavy launch in August, although its deployment faces further delays if a higher priority government project takes this window. The 500 gigabit-per-second Americas-focused satellite, originally slated to launch in 2021 before production delays at Maxar Technologies, is needed to relieve broadband capacity constraints that have led to subscriber losses for the operator. Broadband subscribers at EchoStar’s service provider subsidiary Hughes fell 51,000 over the three months ended March 31 to about 1.18 million, the company reported May 9. Existing U.S. subscribers are using about 15% more bandwidth on average year-on-year, compounding the operator’s capacity woes as fierce competition also takes a toll on consumer subscriber levels. EchoStar said a strategy to allocate existing capacity to more profitable consumer areas and enterprise customers helped temper subscriber levels in Latin America. Still, consolidated revenue fell 12.3% year-over-year to $439.6 million for the first quarter of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, dropped 18.6% to $135 million. Incoming capacity to the rescue EchoStar said it expects Maxar to ship Jupiter 3 to its Florida launch site in June. Although SpaceX has reserved an August launch slot, the operator warned this remains “subject to preemption by certain higher-priority government launches.” SpaceX is projected to use a Falcon Heavy to launch the Space Force’s unspecified USSF-52 mission in July. A Falcon Heavy is also lined up to launch NASA’s Psyche asteroid exploration mission in October . Both missions have suffered delays amid payload readiness and range scheduling issues. Delivering Jupiter 3 in June would save Maxar from making additional payments to EchoStar under a compensation plan agreed last year because of the production delays. The Ka-band satellite, which would more than double the capacity of Jupiter 2 that launched in 2017, is slated to enter commercial service in the final three months of 2023. Other growth avenues EchoStar is continuing to search for investment opportunities with the $1.7 billion cash it has in reserve. In February, the company ordered 28 small satellites from Astro Digital for an S-band constellation called Lyra that it expects to start launching next year for connecting remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices. EchoStar said it is also in the design and engineering phase for a larger connectivity constellation of hundreds of satellites for deployment over the second half of this decade. While EchoStar said May 9 it is too early to discuss details about this constellation, the company said it would offer higher bandwidth 5G services amid its push into providing connectivity directly to devices.
Redwire reported record revenue in the first quarter as the space technology company gets closer to profitability. Redwire reported after the markets closed May 9 revenue of $57.6 million in the first quarter, a record for the company. That is a 7.3% increase from the fourth quarter and a 75.3% improvement over the first quarter of 2022. Part of that jump in year-over-year revenue came from the acquisition of Space NV, a Belgian developer of smallsats and related components, from Qinetiq in October. Even when the contribution from Space NV is removed, though, Redwire’s revenue increased by 37.9% from the same quarter a year ago. The company reported a net loss of $7.3 million in the quarter, an improvement of $10 million from the first quarter of 2022. For the first time since going public in 2021, Redwire reported positive adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $4.3 million in the quarter, a $9 million improvement from the first quarter of 2022. “Achieving positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time as a public company is an important milestone,” said Peter Cannito, chief executive of Redwire, in a May 10 earnings call. “Redwire’s path to profitability continued successfully in this quarter,” Jonathan Baliff, chief financial officer, said on the call. He cited a “steady march” of financial improvement in the form of adjusted EBITDA that has improved each quarter since the beginning of 2022. The revenue increase, he said came across all its major lines of business and among national security, civil and commercial customers. The biggest increase came from commercial customers, with revenue increasing nearly 130% from the first quarter of 2022. Cannito did not point to any specific programs that contributed significantly to revenue growth, instead highlighting work that ranged from developing new solar panels for the International Space Station to sun sensors built by Redwire on a GPS satellite launched in January. The company affirmed previous guidance of revenues of between $220 million and $250 million for all of 2023. That would be a 46% increase over 2022 at the midpoint of that range. Redwire did not forecast adjusted EBITDA or profitability for the year in the call, but Cannito said that adjusted EBITDA might vary in later quarters depending on timing of internal research and development investments, known as IRAD. “There’s a lot of demand out there in the marketplace that we don’t want to miss out on if it requires some sort IRAD investment,” he said, predicting that adjusted EBITDA will depend on “throttling up or down IRAD based on the opportunities that are presented throughout the year.”
An upgraded Tianzhou cargo spacecraft docked at China’s Tiangong space station Wednesday ahead of a new crewed mission to the orbital outpost. A Long March 7 rocket lifted off from the coastal Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 9:22 a.m. Eastern, May 10. The rocket inserted the Tianzhou-6 spacecraft into its planned low Earth orbit around 20 minutes later. Docking at the Tiangong space station’s aft docking port occurred at 5:16 p.m., completing the rendezvous and docking process nearly eight hours after launch, according to China’s human spaceflight agency. The Tianzhou-6 spacecraft carries supplies for astronauts, science payloads and propellant for the space station and features improvements over the previous five spacecraft. Its pressurized volume has been increased by 20 percent, from 18.1 to 22.5 cubic meters, with its cargo capacity rising to 7.4 tons, up from 6.9 tons. The spacecraft’s mass at liftoff has also increased by 500 kilograms to around 14 tons. Tianzhou-6 carries supplies to last a crew of three for 280 days. Also aboard are 714 kilograms of science experiments in the areas of space life science and biotechnology, microgravity fluid physics and combustion science, space material science, and space application technology tests, Lv Congmin, deputy chief designer of the Tiangong’s application system, told CCTV. A further 160 kilograms are dedicated xenon ion thruster components, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), China’s main space contractor. Tianzhou-6 also carries 1.7 tons of propellant, of which 700 kilograms will be transferred to Tiangong for maintaining its orbit. China completed construction of the three-module Tiangong in late 2022. Tianzhou-6 is the first mission of the operational phase of Tiangong. The country aims to keep the station permanently occupied for at least a decade, with crews of the three astronauts spending six months aboard at a time. The Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft, launched in November 2022, undocked from Tiangong on May 5, making way for the arrival of Tianzhou-6. Tianzhou-5 will dock at Tiangong’s forward port following the departure of the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft later this month. The Shenzhou-15 crew have almost completed their six-month-long mission and will greet the Shenzhou-16 astronauts aboard Tiangong in the new future. Shenzhou-16 will launch from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert on a Long March 2F in coming weeks, according to earlier schedules. The expansion in capacity of Tianzhou-6 means China will need to launch a Tianzhou mission once every eight months, instead of every six months, as previously. The flight was the seventh of the 53.1-meters-long Long March 7, which was designed specifically to launch Tianzhou cargo spacecraft. A variant with an added third stage is used for missions to geostationary transfer orbit. The rocket was provided by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), while the spacecraft was designed and manufactured by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). Both are major entities under the aegis of CASC. CASC aims to launch a national record of more than 60 orbital flights in 2023. CASC is also working on expanding Tiangong with a “multi-functional module.” The module would allow China to further expand the size of the space station and enhance its capacity, according to officials.
Space station startup Vast has announced plans to launch what it bills as the first commercial space station as soon a 2025, a free-flying module that will be visited by Crew Dragon missions. Vast announced May 10 it had signed a contract with SpaceX for the Falcon 9 launch of a module called Haven-1, scheduled for no earlier than August 2025. That will be followed by a Crew Dragon mission called Vast-1 that will transport four astronauts to the module for a stay of up to 30 days. Haven-1 is a precursor for much larger space stations Vast is proposing to develop that would be launched with SpaceX’s Starship. “We believe that it’s more important that we demonstrate that we can have the first but also a full space station system in orbit,” said Max Haot, president of Vast, in an interview. Haot joined Vast in February when it acquired his space transportation startup, Launcher . The module, as currently designed, is 10.1 meters long and 3.8 meters in diameter, sized to fit inside a standard Falcon 9 payload fairing. The 14-ton module will provide 70 cubic meters of pressurized volume and 15 kilowatts of power. The module has a docking port at one end and a large window at the other. The module would be launched with the payloads and consumables needed by the visiting crew. He said the focus of the design was simplicity so it could be developed quickly and safely. That includes keeping Dragon active while docked to Haven-1, making use of its life support systems. “We are divide-and-conquering the life support system between us so that we can do it quickly.” Vast, which had disclosed few details about its space station plans before this announcement, is just starting to market the facility to potential customers. International space agencies represent the largest potential market, Haot said. Others include individuals and companies interested in conducting research or in-space manufacturing. The company has not yet built any hardware for the module but is working on prototypes of the structure at its Long Beach, California, headquarters, which includes a 11,100-square-meter manufacturing facility. Some key subsystems, such as avionics and propulsion, will be based on versions it is flying on Orbiter space tugs originally developed by Launcher and which Vast plans to continue flying. He argued the schedule that calls for launching Haven-1 as soon as August 2025 is ambitious but feasible, and that SpaceX supports it. “We both believe that it can and will happen in that timeline.” If Vast is successful, it would jump ahead of rivals that have NASA support for developing commercial space stations intended to succeed the International Space Station by the end of the decade. Three teams, led by Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Voyager Space, won funded Space Act Agreements from NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, in late 2021 to support design work on commercial stations. A fourth company, Axiom Space, has an agreement with NASA to install commercial modules on the ISS as a precursor to a commercial station. Vast would like Haven-1 around the time that Axiom expects to add its first commercial module to the ISS. Haot said he believes the simplicity of a free-flying module will win out over the complexities involved with a module that is part of the ISS, including working with the station’s various partners. “If it’s very complicated and there’s a lot of requirements and you don’t have the flight manifested, we think we will beat it,” he said. Vast had not been founded at the time of the original NASA CLD competition, but Haot said competing in later phases of that program is a priority. “We see NASA as our biggest opportunity, as our largest customer,” he said. Having Haven-1 in operation, he said, would give Vast an advantage over competitors yet to fly. “We’re not going to send you renders or prototypes in a warehouse. We have flight hardware.” The contract with SpaceX covers one Crew Dragon mission to Haven-1 with an option for a second. Haot said the module is designed for up to four missions of as long as 30 days each. Haven-1 is a stepping stone to the company’s long-term vision of large stations that can rotate, generating artificial gravity. Its product roadmap includes a “spinning stick” space station 100 meters long made of modules seven meters in diameter launched on Starship, capable of hosting 40 people. That station would be developed by the 2030s. “You can’t really go from zero to building a Starship-sized thing that can hold 40 people,” said Jed McCaleb, founder and chief executive of Vast who is funding the company’s development. “You need to take incremental steps and this is one that seems very doable.” He said the company might consider building a second Haven module depending on market demand and progress on the larger modules. “It also depends on Starship’s timeline,” he added. “If it’s ready sooner, then we will definitely target that.”
Space Force officials are fleshing out the details of a future digital infrastructure for training satellite operators and testing the performance of new hardware. Military training for operations in the space domain can only be done in virtual environments so planning the digital infrastructure has become a top priority, said Maj. Gen. Shawn Bratton, commander of the Space Training and Readiness Command, known as STARCOM. “In space you don’t have the ability to carve out a piece of real estate for testing and training purposes, so we had to think little bit differently on how we do these activities to increase the readiness of the force but also be safe and professional in our operations in the space domain,” Bratton said May 10 at a Mitchell Institute forum. STARCOM, based in Colorado Springs, will host an Industry Day June 22-23 to brief companies on its plans to build this infrastructure under a program called National Space Test and Training Complex. “There are some areas where we absolutely need help from the industry,” Bratton said. The Space Force wants testbeds or virtualized environments that mimic the operation of satellites in orbit. In these environments, military personnel can learn how to control, maneuver and maintain satellites, and practice skills such as orbit determination, attitude control, payload operation and troubleshooting. The digital environments also would support the testing and evaluation of new satellite designs. Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said at a recent congressional hearing that the Space Force is requesting $340 million in its 2024 budget for an “operational testing and training infrastructure.” “We’ve got a lot of study to do to make sure we’re building the right kind of ranges, the right kind of simulators,” Saltzman told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. At an event last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies , Saltzman voiced support for the National Space Test and Training Complex, known as NSTTC. “We’ve got to train. We’ve got to have the ranges. We’ve got to develop our tactics, test them and simulate them,” he said. “And that means that I’ve got to build new infrastructure.” Saltzman wants operators to gain more advanced skills in orbital maneuvers, rendezvous and docking procedures and cybersecurity. Digital environments in the NSTTC would replicate satellites’ behavior and response to commands, and allow units to practice mission scenarios in different operational conditions. The commander of Space Operations Command Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, told reporters last month at the Space Symposium that current training tools are not adequate to prepare units for a “contested” space environment where U.S. satellites could come under attack. Current exercises, typically tabletop discussions, are not enough to provide realistic training for operators that have to fight sophisticated threats, he said. More sensors needed to gather test data Bratton said some training ranges already exist for electronic warfare . “We’ve done some live activities both on orbit as well as in the electromagnetic spectrum.” “But the NSTTC is not a physical piece of real estate that we own,” he said. “It’s the simulated on-orbit capabilities, the ground sensors, and then the infrastructure that ties it all together for command and control and gathering data, which is particularly important for the test enterprise.” The NSTTC will be structured with several components focused on electromagnetic warfare, orbital warfare, cyber warfare and the overarching architecture that connects it all, “We haven’t quite cracked the code on that completely,” Bratton said. “We have some simulation capability. I think that’s an area where we need more help. We have a vision of where we want to go broadly, but we’re going to need industry help, particularly on the testing side.” The testing environment the Space Force envisions “will require additional sensor capability to be able to observe activities on orbit,” said Bratton. “We’ve got lots of sensors now doing space domain awareness but more will need to be dedicated for test activities,” he added. “And so I think there’s some gaps there, and we’ll walk through all that at the Industry Day.”
SAN FRANCISCO – European satellite-as-a-service startup EnduroSat raised $10 million in a Series A investment round. The round was led by Luxembourg-based Ceecat Capital. Additional funding was provided by Freigeist Capital of Germany. “The investment will enable EnduroSat to scale its operations and address a wider satellite market,” Raycho Raychev, EnduroSat founder and CEO, told SpaceNews by email. EnduroSat plans, for example, to invest in improving its satellite technology and expand its constellation-as-a-service product line, Raychev added. With the additional funding, the company also plans to expand its 130-person workforce. EnduroSat was founded in Bulgaria in 2015. The company’s main research and development facility remains in Sofia, Bulgaria. Business operations are conducted at offices in Luxembourg, Italy, Germany and France. In April, a nanosatellite built by EnduroSat in partnership with the Kenyan Space Agency and SayariLabs launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight from Vandenberg Space Force base in California. The satellite, called Taifa-1, was equipped with a hyperspectral camera to provide data to Kenya’s agricultural industry. “We are truly excited to work on a global scale and to join forces with new industry players in every region of the planet,” Raychev said. “We are honored to partner with customers in Asia, Africa, South America, the European Union and the United States.” EnduroSat seeks offer small and medium-size enterprises, nonprofits and research organizations with “a chance to participate in space missions and leverage space data in a significantly better and more tangible way,” Raychev added. Ceecat Capital partner Anthony Stalker, said in a statement, “We are excited to be partnering with Raycho and EnduroSat on their journey to be a global leader in this new chapter of the growth of the space industry. EnduroSat is emerging as a leading player in the fast-growing small satellite market, building on the untapped talent pool of highly skilled and educated scientists and engineers in Bulgaria.” Raychev said he was looking forward to working with Ceecat Capital because the company has “demonstrated a true work ethic, understanding and enthusiasm for what we are trying to build and an amazing experience to help us get to the next level.”
As other companies suffer technical or financial setbacks, Rocket Lab says it believes it is the leader in the small launch market with little competition. In a May 9 earnings call to discuss its first quarter financial results, Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said it was seeing increased business for its Electron vehicles given problems other small launch vehicle operators have encountered. “At a time when we’re seeing many small launch companies fail to service the market, we’re continuing to deliver successful missions for our customers,” he said. “We’re experiencing a correlated increase in launch bookings for Electron in 2023 and beyond from new and returning customers across government and commercial sectors.” Rocket Lab used the earnings release to announce a new, although minor, contract. NASA signed a contract with the company to launch a constellation of four cubesats called Starling to test autonomous swarm technologies in low Earth orbit. The satellites will be part of a commercial rideshare mission launching in the third quarter. Neither the company nor NASA disclosed the value of the contract. “They were previously manifested on a different launch vehicle but, due to long delays and continued uncertainty, they have been remanifested on Electron,” Beck said. He did not disclose the vehicle, but Starling was previously scheduled to launch on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket under its NASA Venture Class Launch Services demonstration contract. He hinted at the broader struggles in the small launch vehicle sector in his remarks. “Even today, Electron is the only U.S. small launch vehicle to successfully deliver satellites in orbit in all of 2023,” he said. That is reference to launch failures by ABL Space Systems, Relativity Space and Virgin Orbit. Those failures, which caused Relativity to exit the small launch market to focus on a larger vehicle and helped push Virgin Orbit into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, led Beck to conclude there was not much competition for Rocket Lab among Western small launch vehicle developers. “On small launch, my personal view is that it’s pretty tough to enter that market at this point,” he argued. “We’ve seen a failure of a lot of small launch vehicles or a failure to deliver over the years and even more recently in more dramatic ways.” He said the small launch market was a “nice little niche market” for the company. “Electron will probably continue do well there, and I’m not sure that I really see too many small launch vehicles coming on line in the future.” Rocket Lab has carried out four Electron launches so far this year, including one May 7 that placed two NASA TROPICS cubesats into orbit . The next launch will take place within the next two weeks, carrying the second and final part of TROPICS cubesats. The company predicts conducting 15 Electron launches this year, a figure that includes both satellite launches and a suborbital variant called the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) it announced last month . The first HASTE vehicle is undergoing “final preparations” for launch from Launch Complex 2 in Virginia, Beck said. He did not disclose the split between the number of HASTE and orbital Electron launches. The company reported $19.6 million in launch revenue in the first quarter from three Electron launches, but expects $23 million in launch revenue in the second quarter, also from three launches. Adam Spice, chief financial officer for Rocket Lab, said the company expect the average selling price for Electron missions “to trend towards our standard pricing” through the year. Beck noted that HASTE missions will typically have a higher price than a standard orbital mission, which he said is linked to extra mission assurance and other analysis. HASTE launches will all take place from Launch Complex 2, which require the company to pay range fees to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility that are factored into prices. Spice said that Rocket Lab is planning 20 Electron launches in 2024, with a launch rate increasing to six a quarter in the final quarter of 2024. He declined to give longer-term guidance on Electron launches. The company is continuing work on the larger Neutron rocket, with Beck showing off progress on vehicle structures, engine development, software and infrastructure, but offering no updates on its overall development schedule. Beck echoed comments from others in the industry that there is a “crunch” coming in the larger end of the launch market as megaconstellations like Amazon’s Project Kuiper buy up available capacity, particularly in the latter half of the decade. “Our whole approach here and philosophy is to bring Neutron on line right at the peak of that crunch,” he said. “We think that vehicle will do well.”
As Virgin Galactic prepares to finally begin commercial flights, the company is providing new details about how its next generation of vehicles can put the company on a path to profitability. In a May 9 earnings call, company executives said they were on track to perform the first spaceflight in nearly two years by its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, VSS Unity, in late May from Spaceport America in New Mexico. That flight, designated Unity 25, is intended to be a final test before beginning commercial flights. Virgin Galactic announced May 8 the crew of company employees who will go on the flight. Mike Masucci will be the commander of the flight with CJ Sturckow as pilot. The vehicle will also carry four company mission specialists: Jamila Gilbert, Christopher Huie, Luke Mays and Beth Moses. The company is moving ahead with the powered flight, the first since July 2021, after a successful glide flight by VSS Unity on April 26 . “We were very pleased with the way both our ships performed,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in the call, referring to both VSS Unity and its mothership aircraft, VMS Eve, that carried it aloft. “The flight provided the necessary data to clear the vehicles for our next mission, Unity 25.” He said later in the call the company wasn’t planning any changes to the vehicles after the glide flight. “We’ve cleared ourselves to move forward,” he said. “At this point, this is pretty much dialed in to the technical operations team moving through their procedures.” The company has not announced a specific date for the flight other than late May. Colglazier said in the call they were “two and a half weeks away or so” from the flight. If Unity 25 is successful, Virgin Galactic expects to conduct its first commercial flight, called Galactic 01, in late June. That will be a dedicated research flight for the Italian Air Force under a contract announced in 2019. Colglazier said commercial flights, carrying both private astronauts and research payloads, would follow on “regular intervals.” The company previously said they expected to be able to fly VSS Unity about once a month. Delta-class financials Virgin Galactic used much of the earnings call to talk not about the upcoming Unity 25 flight but development of its Delta class of next-generation suborbital spaceplanes. The company provided new details about the economics of those vehicles. “The Delta class will be the driver of revenue growth and profitability for the company,” said Doug Ahrens, chief financial officer, on the call. “We expect very attractive margins from the operation of our six-seat Delta class vehicles.” With a ticket price of at least $450,000 per customer, Virgin Galactic expects to generate a minimum of $2.7 million in revenue per flight. The operating costs per flight are about $400,000, which include the costs of flying both the spaceplane and its mothership as well as training and hospitality costs for its astronauts. The company projects the amortized cost of each Delta-class spaceplane at $100,000 to $120,000 per flight, based on a production cost of $50 million to $60 million and estimated lifetime of 500 flights. If those numbers hold, Ahrens said that would result in healthy profit margins. With a flight rate of once per week, each Delta-class vehicle would pay for itself in about six months, he projected. “With such attractive economics associated with the Delta class, we remain laser-focused on the production of the program,” he said. However, it will be several years before Virgin Galactic will be able to reap those benefits. Colglazier said the company is spending this year finalizing the design of the vehicle, which will have the same outer mold line as Unity but with changes to its composite structure and upgrades to other systems, like avionics. That will make the vehicle lighter and faster to turn around between flights. The company expects to start assembling the first Delta-class vehicles at a new factory near Phoenix in 2024, with test flights in 2025. Commercial service with the first Delta-class vehicles is projected to start in 2026. Executives said they were watching their cash flow to ensure they have enough money to get there. The company reported a net loss of $159.4 million in the first quarter with only negligible revenue. The company’s net loss was $93 million in the first quarter of 2022, with increased research and development costs for its Delta-class vehicle a key factor in the steeper loss. Virgin Galactic is taking steps to reduce its cash burn. The end of overhaul work on VMS Eve and VSS Unity will reduce some spending. The company is also pushing back work on new mothership aircraft that will be used with the Delta-class spaceplanes, delaying expenditures on them by about a year. Colglazier said they concluded that VMS Eve would be sufficient to handle the test flight campaign for the Delta-class vehicles in 2025, meaning that the new aircraft would not be needed until those spaceplanes begin commercial service in 2026. “We’re quite happy with how Eve came through the modification program,” he said, and has the capacity to both support Unity commercial flights and Delta-class test flights in 2025. Deferring work on the future motherships enables “a more consistent cash burn going through the next couple years.” The company ended the quarter with $874 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities on hand. “Clearly, the current economic environment demands operational flexibility,” Ahrens said, calling moves like delaying work on the future motherships “effective levers that can be employed to manage costs.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Brightline said May 8 it has become the first passenger rail company to offer Starlink satellite broadband, which it plans to deploy on a total 10 trains connecting cities across parts of Florida this summer. The complimentary service is available on five trains connecting Miami and West Palm Beach in south Florida, Brightline said in a news release, and will be added to five more trains for extending operations to Orlando in central Florida. Brightline did not detail broadband speeds in the announcement, but said SpaceX’s low Earth orbit constellation would enable streaming, online gaming, video calls, and other high data rate activities even in the most rural areas. “We’re excited to work with Brightline and provide Starlink to their entire fleet,” SpaceX vice president of Starlink commercial sales Jonathan Hofeller said, “which will enable all of Brightline’s passengers to access high-speed, low-latency internet that is critical in our modern age.” It is the latest expansion into a new customer segment for SpaceX since it secured regulatory permission June 30 to connect moving vehicles to Starlink. Since starting out with a focus on residential consumers more than two years ago, Starlink has expanded into enterprise, government, aviation, maritime, and the market for recreational vehicles. U.S.-based semi-private charter company JSX, the first air carrier to announce plans to adopt Starlink last year, said May 8 it has now installed the service across its entire active fleet of 40 Embraer jets. The jet service provider has an agreement to equip Starlink on up to 100 aircraft. SpaceX recently said Starlink has more than 1.5 million customers in total worldwide. According to data maintained by astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell, there are currently around 4,000 Starlink satellites in operation as SpaceX continues to expand the constellation aggressively.
Small launch vehicle developer Orbex says that it has started construction on its launch site in northern Scotland, but remains guarded about when it plans to start launching from there. Orbex announced May 5 that it had started construction of Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland. The facility will host launches of Orbex’s Prime launch vehicle that the company is developing in Scotland. It is designed to handle up to 12 launches a year. Jacobs, the U.S.-based engineering company, is serving as the prime contractor for the construction of the launch site. The company also invested in a Series C round in October 2022 that raised 40.4 million pounds ($51 million) for Orbex. “We are looking forward to fulfilling our role as prime constructor for the spaceport, including design, procurement and management of the local supply chain, as well as providing operations support and engineering services,” Andy White, vice president of nuclear decommissioning, energy, security and technology at Jacobs, said in a statement. Notably absent from the announcement, though, was any schedule for completing construction of the launch site or its first launch. The company, though a spokesperson, declined to answer questions over several days about when the launch site would be completed or when the company would conduct its first launch there. Work on Sutherland Spaceport, previously known as Space Hub Sutherland, is years behind schedule. The U.K. Space Agency selected the site as its preferred location for a vertical launch facility in July 2018 , to be used by both Orbex and Lockheed Martin starting in the early 2020s. However, in 2020 Lockheed announced that it would instead conduct a “U.K. Pathfinder” launch, using a vehicle provided by American startup ABL Space Systems, from SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands, leaving Orbex as the sole user of the Sutherland site. Construction of the Sutherland Spaceport was also slowed by years of work needed to get environmental and other regulatory approvals, including legal challenges. However, in November 2022 Orbex said had secured the agreements , including a lease from Scottish development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise, needed to build the launch site. Chris Larmour, chief executive of Orbex, said then that construction would start “imminently” and be finished some time in 2023. Orbex did not disclose why there was a six-month gap between signing the agreements and the start of construction. Larmour unexpectedly resigned from the company April 14 , saying he felt that he had taken Orbex as far as he could “and it’s time now to step away and let others lead Orbex to the next level.” Kristian von Bengtson, Orbex’s chief development officer, has been serving as interim chief executive since Larmour’s resignation. The company has provided few updates on the development of Prime since it unveiled a full-scale prototype of the small launch vehicle nearly a year ago . The company said then that the prototype would be used for integrated testing, including countdown dress rehearsals, ahead of a first launch then scheduled for as soon as late 2022. The spaceport construction announcement provided no news on the status of that testing or a date for a first launch. “In preparation for the first launch, Orbex is performing a wide variety of integration tests, as well as testing launch procedures including rollout, strongback deployment and fueling procedures,” it said in the statement, similar what the company had stated a year ago. Orbex did announce that it had secured an additional 3 million pounds from the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to support spaceport development. The funding is part of the authority’s efforts to mitigate the economic impacts of the closure of a nuclear power station in the region. That funding is in addition to 9 million pounds from Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish government and 2.55 million pounds the U.K. Space Agency awarded the project in 2018. Neither Orbex nor the other organizations have disclosed the total cost of the spaceport project, although Larmour said in November 2022 said the company expected to spend more than 20 million pounds over three years building and operating the spaceport.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s plan to buy London-based Inmarsat has just regulators left to clear in the United States and Europe after getting unconditional approval from the United Kingdom. The U.K.’s competition watchdog said May 9 that although the two satellite operators compete closely, particularly to provide Wi-Fi on planes, their merged company would face sufficient competition from established and emerging players. The satellite communications market is also rapidly evolving, said Richard Feasey, who chaired the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) investigation into the deal. Attracted by increasing demand for connectivity in the air and other areas terrestrial networks cannot reach, lower latency broadband constellations from SpaceX and OneWeb are adding new competitive pressures on Viasat, Inmarsat, and other legacy geostationary satellite networks. Panasonic and Intelsat, two established inflight connectivity providers, also recently partnered with OneWeb to complement the services they offer from geostationary orbit. OneWeb deployed the remaining satellites in March needed to provide global coverage later this year, and SpaceX said May 5 it has more than 1.5 million customers for Starlink as it continues to expand its constellation rapidly. “All the evidence has shown that the sector will continue to grow as the demand for satellite connectivity increases,” Feasey said in a statement. “After carefully scrutinising the deal, we are now satisfied that, following the merger, these developments will ensure that both airlines and their UK customers will continue to benefit from strong competition.” The CMA launched its in-depth investigation into the deal in October, known as Phase 2 in the U.K., after a Phase 1 review identified concerns that it could lead to more expensive and poorer quality Wi-Fi for plane passengers. Under Phase 2, the CMA considers whether it is more likely than not that a deal will substantially lessen competition. The regulator provisionally cleared Viasat’s Inmarsat takeover March 1, subject to a public consultation, following a four-month investigation that included analyzing internal documents from the merging companies and their competitors. The CMA’s final ruling bodes well for a separate merger review the European Commission kicked off Feb. 13, also prompted by concerns over the deal’s impact on the inflight Wi-Fi market. The European Commission has said it expects to make its decision by June 29. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved the deal last year; however, the merger still requires a green light from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The satellite operators had hoped to complete the deal by March 8 before it became the subject of in-depth regulatory investigations. They did not give an updated timeline for closing the transaction, worth $7.3 billion when it was announced in November 2021 through a mix of cash and shares.
Former Texas congressman William “Mac” Thornbery, who led the House Armed Services Committee, has joined the board of advisers of CesiumAstro, a company that specializes in communications technologies for satellites and aircraft. Thornberry will advise CesiumAstro, based in Austin, Texas, on national security issues and on ways to “better support the intelligence community and Department of Defense,” the company said May 9 in a statement. CesiumAstro is seeking to add more government customers for its active phased array communications terminals. Thornberry chaired the HASC from 2015 until 2019 and served as the committee’s ranking Republican until he retired from Congress in January 2021. While in Congress, he advocated for Pentagon procurement reforms to lower barriers to startups and small businesses that develop technologies with military utility. CesiumAstro’s board of advisers also includes former NASA administrators and former undersecretary of defense Mike Griffin, and former deputy undersecretary of defense Lisa Porter. HawkEye 360 names new advisors Thornberry is also on the advisory board of HawkEye 360, a provider of space-based radio frequency (RF) data and analytics. The company on May 9 announced it is adding four new advisers , bringing the total number of advisory board members to 22. The four new members are former U.S. lawmaker Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), retired general John Abizaid, former deputy undersecretary of defense Kari Bingen and conservation scientist M. Sanjayan.
SAN FRANCISCO – Orbital Outpost X, a Silicon Valley space technology startup formerly called Space Villages, received a $5 million convertible note from Space Infrastructures Ventures of the Netherlands. With the loan, which will become an equity investment in the startup’s Series A round, OOX will continue to develop components, systems and subsystems for commercial space stations. Launch costs have fallen in recent years, but it remains expensive to conduct experiments or perform manufacturing in orbit, Adolfo Nemirovsky, OOX founder and president, told SpaceNews . “We need to still work on reducing the cost of space operations to make the economy work,” Nemirovsky said. “We are focusing on these areas to reduce the costs.” A sister company backed by Space Infrastructures Ventures, Space Villages of the Netherlands, is conducting a study for the European Space Agency on a a commercial space station in low-Earth orbit called Orbital Outpost 1. ESA awarded the 200,000 euro ($219,150) contract to Space Infrastructures Ventures in February. “We are planning a modular infrastructure, which starts from very little and scales up based on market demand,” said Jose Alonso, Space Infrastructures Ventures president and founder. “We are applying a number of disruptive technologies which will help reduce significantly the costs of the modules by an order of magnitude.” Space Infrastructure Ventures is investing in U.S. and European startups as part of its goal to deploy a commercial space station by the end of decade. The Orbital Outpost 1 space station will be tended by robots and human crews. It will include habitation modules and orbital logistic vehicles to fetch payloads sent to low-Earth orbit and bring them to the space station, Alonso said. “This is a long-term plan for actual colonization of LEO,” Alonso said. “Our plans are to have more than 100 humans in a space. “When you scale up to have a lot of people and a lot of activity, this is when the business plan starts to work.” While Space Infrastructures Ventures focuses on the big picture, OOX is developing component technologies. For example, OOX won a $175,000 NASA Small Business Technology Transfer award last year to merge virtual and augmented reality to train astronauts to work with space instruments, tools, vehicles and structures. OOX also is developing a universal interface to transfer fluids, electricity and data between space station modules. And the company is working on a space-rated water electrolyzer to provide pressurized hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, fuel cells and life support. Each of the technologies has terrestrial and space applications. “Hopefully the space economy will take off in the next 10 years or so,” Nemirovsky said. “But if it takes longer, the investors want to know the money they invest is building high-value companies. All the component technologies have intrinsic value besides the space economy.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new weather satellite campaign begins with a free-flying sounder and continues over decades with launches of small to medium-sized satellites. “It’s not going to be, if things work out the way we expect, large satellites but multiple small satellites,” said Steve Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services. NOAA is drafting plans for the successor to the Joint Polar Satellite System, the latest generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites. The new program, called Near Earth Orbit Network or NEON, will overlap with JPSS. When JPSS ends around 2038, NEON will continue as one of NOAA’s primary initiatives for gathering data for weather forecasting, environmental observation, climate monitoring and public safety. NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service is adopting a portfolio approach to data gathering. Groups within NESDIS will focus on observational areas: lowEarth orbit, geostationary orbit and space weather. The low-Earth orbit program kicks off with QuickSounder. NOAA plans to launch an Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder engineering development unit refurbished by manufacturer Northrop Grumman on a commercial satellite bus. NOAA is working with NASA to select a company to integrate the ATMS engineering development unit with the bus, fly it on a small launch vehicle and operate it for three years. The contract will include two single-year options to extend the QuickSounder mission. Unlike traditional NOAA programs that often come together over a decade, QuickSounder is expected to launch within three years and immediately begin supplying data to National Weather Service models. “We want to show we can launch assets when and where they are most needed,” Tim Walsh, NOAA Joint Polar Satellite System program director, told SpaceNews . JPSS satellites fly in an early afternoon sun-synchronous orbit. In contrast, QuickSounder will fly in a terminator orbit. “Data from different orbital locations gives our users, the National Weather Service and many others, a better global snapshot for their numerical weather prediction modeling,” Walsh said. NOAA’s next-generation microwave sounder, the Sounder for Microwave-Based Applications, is expected to launch around 2030. Through a program called NEON Series One, NOAA will launch new microwave and infrared sounders, which supply critical data for weather models, on common buses. “Those are the first two instruments that we will be developing under the NEON program,” Walsh said. “We’re going to build a number of these infrared and microwave sounders. They will fly on the first series of spacecraft.” How many satellites? “We should know roughly how many orbital planes, how many instruments per orbit and what their launch cadence will be by the end of the fiscal year,” Walsh said. For a program like GeoXO, NOAA defined the requirements for all the instruments up front. NEON, in contrast, is a loosely coupled program. NOAA can carry out various projects to test sensors, satellite buses, acquisition and launch strategies as the agency charts its course. Scientists will determine which sensors fly on NEON Series Two. Like JPSS, NEON Series Two satellites may be equipped with instruments like the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite and Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite “or something different perhaps, like a scatterometer,” Walsh said. “The nice thing about the NEON program is it allows us to iterate with our scientists to find those measurements that are most useful to weather prediction.” NOAA’s 2024 budget proposal seeks $342.4 million in fiscal year 2024 for the Polar Weather Satellites program, which includes JPSS. That program received $183.5 million in 2023 after NOAA requested $350.2 million. The requested funding would allow NOAA to continue work on the JPSS-3 and -4 satellites, currently scheduled for launch in late 2027 and late 2032, respectively. However, at a March meeting of a committee of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Volz said the agency was considering swapping the order of those launches to allow more testing of a NASA instrument called Libera to measure solar radiation reflected by the Earth and thermal radiation emitted by it. Libera will be hosted on JPSS-3. This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
NASA is proposing a hybrid contract approach for procuring a vehicle to help deorbit the International Space Station at the end of the decade, combining elements of cost-plus and fixed-price contracts. NASA released a draft request for proposals (RFP) May 4 for what the agency calls the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), a spacecraft that would dock to the station and perform a controlled reentry of it. NASA is seeking feedback on the draft through the end of the month before releasing a final RFP this summer. One notable aspect of the draft RFP is the use of what NASA calls a “hybrid” contract structure. NASA proposes to start with a cost-plus contract, where the contractor is compensated for its costs plus an incentive fee, for the design of the deorbit vehicle through critical design review. Production of the vehicle and other activities will be covered by a fixed-price contract. The agency didn’t elaborate on its choice of this hybrid approach in the draft RFP or related documents. The agency said it is seeking feedback on aspects of that approach, including the “exit criteria” for going from the cost-plus to the fixed-price phases of the contract. NASA requested $180 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal in March to start work on the deorbit vehicle, which the agency says will offer redundancy to earlier plans to use Russian Progress cargo vehicles to deorbit the station at the end of its life. Kathy Lueders, at the time NASA associate administrator for space operations, said during the rollout of the budget proposal that NASA anticipated spending “a little bit short of about $1 billion” on the deorbit vehicle. “We’re hoping to get a better price than that” when industry submits its proposals, she added. The publicly available documents don’t go into details about the technical specifications for the deorbit vehicle. However, the agency said there were no major changes to its plans since the release of a request for information (RFI) last November. NASA said then it anticipated launching the deorbit vehicle about one year before reentry, docking to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module. The vehicle would primarily operate during the final days before reentry, once the station’s orbit has decayed to an altitude of 220 kilometers. The vehicle would perform one or more “shaping” burns to lower the orbit’s perigee to 160 kilometers, followed by a final deorbit burn. At the time of that RFI, NASA was considering options to procure the deorbit vehicle as a service. However, NASA now intends to take ownership of the deorbit vehicle and manage its operations. NASA will separately procure a medium-class launch of the deorbit vehicle, although the agency is asking companies in the draft RFP if their vehicles would be compatible with that class of launch. Some in industry had seen the proposed deorbit vehicle as an opportunity to develop or demonstrate commercial systems for deorbiting or servicing spacecraft. However, the decision not to pursue a services approach, as well as specific technical requirements for deorbiting the ISS such as the ability to operate even after suffering two failures, made that less feasible. NASA sees the deorbit vehicle as a one-off design intended exclusively for deorbiting the station. “NASA wants to emphasize that safety and reliability are paramount in the USDV requirements to ensure the safe decommissioning of the ISS,” it stated in the cover letter accompanying the draft RFP. “This emphasis should be approached with the recognition that it will be a single-use vehicle.” NASA is currently planning to operate the ISS to 2030. The other partners have also agreed to that timeline with the exception of Russia, which recently announced it would remain on the station to 2028 . The draft RFP indicates some flexibility in the timing of the station’s deorbit. NASA is asking prospective bidders if it is feasible to deliver the completed deorbit vehicle by September 2027 to be launched as soon as January 2028, a “contingency” launch date. The draft RFP also includes options to extend the contract, set to run to March 2031, to as late as September 2035, suggesting NASA is reserving the ability to extend the ISS beyond 2030. NASA says it expects to release the final RFP on or around July 12, with proposals due Aug. 28. It anticipates making a contract award in early January 2024.
TAMPA, Fla. — ClearSpace has signed a contract with Arianespace to launch its first debris de-orbit mission on Europe’s Vega C rocket in the second half 2026, the Swiss startup announced May 9. Luc Piguet, ClearSpace co-founder and CEO, said its 700-kilogram servicer is slated to lift off from French Guiana to low Earth orbit (LEO) as a secondary passenger to a larger payload that has yet to be selected. Vega C can launch about 2,300 kilograms to a reference 700-kilometer polar orbit. ClearSpace-1 needs a co-passenger that is compatible with its trip toward a spent upper stage of an earlier version of Vega, left in an 800-kilometer by 660-kilometer altitude gradual disposal orbit following a 2013 launch, which the servicer will attempt to capture with four articulated arms. Under a 110 million euro ($121 million) European Space Agency contract, ClearSpace will then attempt a controlled reentry to burn up the servicer and 112-kilogram Vega Secondary Payload Adapter (VESPA) in the atmosphere. Piguet said the ESA contract required ClearSpace to fly with Europe’s flagship launch service provider Arianespace for this mission. Germany-based Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are developing rockets promising price and lift performance that could have justified a dedicated launch of a specific orbital injection, he said, but both are still working toward maiden flights. Vega C successfully performed its maiden flight in July; however, the rocket has been grounded since its second mission failed to reach orbit in December. Europe plans to return Vega C to flight before the end of this year after pinning the launch failure on an eroded nozzle component . ClearSpace recently started procuring parts from subcontractors after completing an initial design phase for the ClearSpace-1 mission. Piguet said he expects to start building the servicer next year for integration in 2025. He said ClearSpace could look to raise a Series B funding round next year to further diversify its capital sources after recently securing about $29 million in a Series A round. ClearSpace-1 also has a sponsorship deal with Swiss luxury watchmaker Omega. While Piguet said ESA-backed funding serves as a valuable endorsement, it comes with commercial development constraints, including geographical limits on where ClearSpace can spend the money. ClearSpace announced the creation of a U.S.-based subsidiary April 17, called ClearSpace Today, Inc., to mark its first expansion outside of Europe. “Our objective is to start having missions in the U.S., too,” Piguet said, because “if we want to be serious about in-orbit servicing and move on from 2026-2027 … we have to get there with a pipeline of missions that are in progress.” ClearSpace aims “to be able to launch every year to have a recurring [business] case,” he added, which is needed to “scale up toward commercial operations.” Piguet said he expects the U.K. to pick either ClearSpace or Japan-based in-orbit servicing rival Astroscale early next year for a British mission to remove two spacecraft from LEO in 2026. ClearSpace is also seeking co-funding from ESA for a mission to extend the life of a geostationary Intelsat satellite before it runs out of fuel around 2026-2028.
The U.S. Space Force is reviewing bids from satellite manufacturers competing to produce and integrate experiments for the Space Test Program. Vendors could be selected as early as December for the Space Test Experiments Platform (STEP) 2.0., Lt. Col. Jonathan Shea, head of the DoD Space Test Program at the Space Systems Command, said May 8 during a conference call with reporters. The STP office last week issued a revised draft request for proposals for the STEP 2.0 contract and is seeking comments from vendors by May 19. The plan is to procure “commercially developed spacecraft with demonstrated flight heritage to host DoD-sponsored payloads over the next 10 years,” he said. STEP 2.0 will be an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract. Vendors picked for the IDIQ will compete for orders that will include building a spacecraft, integrate payloads with launch vehicles and provide ground support for on-orbit operations. The first task order to be awarded will be for STP Sat-8, a 12U cubesat projected to launch in 2025. Shea said the STEP 2.0 program is looking to take advantage of lower-cost commercial buses in order to bundle as many smallsat experiments as possible into a single platform. “With STEP 2.0, the idea is that we’re going to try to buy what we can and not have to modify,” he said. “We want to get as many folks who have proven flight demonstration on buses into a kind of a consortium that we’re able to leverage.” Col. Joseph Roth, director of innovation and prototyping at the Space Systems Command, said he expects several commercial bus manufacturers to compete under the IDIQ. Northrop Grumman makes the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA or LDPE, which the Space Force used to deploy experiments. Roth said “any fully qualified bus that has actually flown in the space environment for 365 days can compete for the STEP 2.0 contract, whether it’s Northrop Grumman, Millennium Space, Blue Canyon Technologies, any of the bus providers that have on-orbit heritage.” “STEP 2.0 is seeking to procure a range of small spacecraft ranging in size from a 6U to a Multi-Manifest Design Specification (MMDS) Class 2 spacecraft to host DoD-sponsored space experiments,” the Space Systems Command said. MMDS Class 2 is a broad category of satellite platform that includes ring-shaped buses. STP relies heavily on ISS Shea said the STP program is seeing a large demand from agencies that are building experiments and need help getting them to orbit. This year, at least 60 candidate experiments — a mix of government, academia and private industry projects — are being considered by the DoD space experiments review board. The STP program, established in 1965, on average has sent to orbit 10 to 15 experiments a year and is heavily dependent on NASA to deploy payloads from the International Space Station. The STP program also relies on the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program to fly experiments as rideshares on NSSL missions. It also uses the Space Force small launch program that awards STP missions under an multi-vendor contract known as OSP-4. With more experiments seeking rides and limited funding, “we look for someone who’s just got some excess capacity we can use and we will start playing matchmaker,” said Shea. Shea said he sees increasing interest in cislunar space experiments and hopes to team up with NASA’s Artemis program to coordinate opportunities. NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the ISS program office “do the majority of the heavy lifting so a lot of our experiments can get a subsidized ride to the ISS,” he said. This is much less costly than getting experiments into space through other means. The majority of experiments today are flown either from the ISS or on SpaceX Transporter rideshares, said Shea. If the ISS ceases to operate as projected in 2030 , that could be “pretty existential” for future STP experiments. “Anything that wants to go around 400 kilometers circular, we got a great deal for you,” he added. “When you start talking about more exquisite orbits, like sun-synchronous orbits, higher low Earth orbits, highly elliptical orbits, or especially geostationary or cislunar, “then those opportunities start to decrease dramatically for STP.”
Ball Aerospace is growing rapidly. The backlog for the Westminster, Colorado, company’s portfolio, which includes sensors, spacecraft, data services and components, jumped 20 percent between 2021 and 2022 to reach $3 billion. Another $5 billion in Ball contracts booked were not yet added to the backlog, the company reported in February. Jake Sauer, in his newly created role as Ball’s vice president and chief technologist, is identifying the critical technologies that underpin Ball’s work for NASA, the Defense Department, intelligence agencies, military services and commercial customers around the world. Sauer, who previously served as vice president and general manager of Ball’s Tactical Solutions business, joined Ball in 2012. Before that, Sauer worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory. Sauer earned undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from Germany’s University of Cologne as well as a master’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in quantum computing and control from the Georgia Institute of Technology. What is in your portfolio? Ball has some core businesses that are underpinned by core technologies. We see convergence between government and commercial customers in certain areas, also convergence among government customers. A good example of the military convergence would be Joint All-Domain Command and Control. JADC2 needs the ability to join up the sensors across domains and cue them to shooters, potentially across domains. It’s no longer just a single service problem. We’re undergoing a transformation as the customers change. Part of this is rearchitecting systems. In many cases, the users don’t care which platform the data comes from. Yet in years past, different organizations would have platform-specific software and platform-specific interfaces. As the missions start to converge, we have to rearchitect many of the products so they can converge too. It makes sense to have the ability to look at these critical future technologies across all of the businesses. That’s where I’m focusing. Why was the chief technologist position created? There were examples in the company of where we modernized product architectures and software. We want that to be unified. Another reason is we want to focus our investments in a few key areas that will have the biggest impact. The new cross-domain capabilities, products and product architectures are big and complicated. We want to make a few choices and do a good job. Are you more selective because Ball Aerospace is not as large as Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman? We have to be more selective because we compete with those groups; we work for them and with them, and occasionally, they work for us. We’ve grown so much over the past few years. The way we’ve been successful is by carefully selecting a few things and then doing the very best job to have a higher chance of success. Where will you focus your investments? First and foremost will be modeling and simulation. The value of modeling is the ability to make a decision based on the modeling output. A model that’s easy to run and doesn’t have to be adapted too much can give you a lot of information. Then there’s the talent, the people that think through the problems. No tool will replace the thoughtfulness that goes into a solid analysis that tees up courses of actions for key decisionmakers. In a future where Ball has capabilities and systems and products that operate in a new way, we would like to have a really good way to imagine how that works. We want to do that across all domains with a unified modeling and simulation effort. Where else are you focusing? Ball Aerospace has contracts and a backlog that will last for many years. There are certain things that we won’t change. But as we introduce new products and new programs, we are going to be introducing new architectures. In a few key areas of the business, we’ve rearchitected systems to have processing capability where we didn’t have processing capability before, we call it edge processing. If it’s a camera or a communication system, or a transmitter, it may have limited resources. If you wait for a long feedback loop to point the camera, you might not be good at tracking something that happens to be very fast. It turns out, the sensor can do that on its own. The exciting thing about edge processing is that not only can we come up with ways to enable sensors to do more with limited resources, but we can give other sensors that capability too. In a recent example, we’re integrating third-party algorithms to run at the edge. When they need heavy compute, they can draw on the cloud. When something needs very little latency, they process it at the edge. Any other focus areas? I would like to optimize some of our processes to increase the pace of discovery, particularly at the system and the system-of-systems level. In the future, I see us having certain product architectures that are almost always running and doing things. We would get to try new ideas by plugging in a new type of hardware or trying a new type of algorithm that allows you to use the sensor or the data in a different way. Then you would get that feedback as you’re developing, as you’re designing, as you’re creating and as you’re dreaming. The trick here is to enable groups to be able to work at a faster pace and still work together, of course, but also to work towards different goals, different customer needs and in different domains. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
SAN FRANCISCO – Daniel Cavender has worked extensively with ASCENT, the non-toxic propellant developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. When ASCENT, short for Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic, was first flown on NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission , Cavender was the assistant chief engineer for the NASA Technology Demonstration Missions program office overseeing the program. Cavender was also the project manager for the ASCENT-fueled propulsion system on NASA’s Lunar Flashlight, a cubesat designed to observe water ice deposits on the moon that failed to reach lunar orbit . After leaving NASA last year, Cavender moved to the private sector to encourage the adoption of ASCENT. Cavender is the director of Rubicon Space Systems, a division of Plasma Processes LLC, a Huntsville, Alabama, company that specializes in high-temperature materials. Lunar Flashlight experienced problems with its propulsion system. Do you know what happened? I don’t want to get out in front of my NASA colleagues on this, but we are confident that the problem did not originate with the thrusters. We and NASA have reason to believe this was a Foreign Object Debris [FOD] issue, unfortunately. A cubesat sized chemical propulsion system has all the challenges that a large one does. And because it is so small, it is more sensitive to FOD. Because of the size constraints, we could not put filters everywhere. So, we relied heavily on precision cleaning, inspections and contamination controls. But there was a process slip at some point. We’ve seen examples in thruster testing of what FOD does to the valves or to a thruster. The data and behavior of Lunar Flashlight was right in line with what we’d seen from ground testing. Aside from the problem, what can you say about the Lunar Flashlight propulsion system? We developed that entire propulsion system from paper to product in 20 months during the COVID-19 pandemic. The whole team at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Georgia Tech gave so much of themselves to make it happen. Everyone involved was rightfully proud of the accomplishment. While Lunar Flashlight fell short of the moon, it still did a lot of ASCENT propulsion technology validation. For Rubicon’s part, we were extremely proud of the thruster. It was originally qualified for .5 kilograms of throughput. We ended up doing a delta qualification to get it up to three kilograms. That is more than 17 hours of firing time. One pulse was 101 minutes long. Even though some of the Lunar Flashlight thrusters were not working well, they all worked well initially. One of the thrusters achieved over 10 hours of firing time, until it too was starved for fuel. To us, that was significant validation in space. What brought you to Rubicon Space Systems? Plasma Processes built the thrusters for Lunar Flashlight and did some other NASA and Air Force-related ASCENT thruster work. When they were bought by a private equity group, the board of directors asked me over to talk about the technology. I gave them the rundown because I was the NASA Green Propulsion Working Group chair. I laid out a strategy for how the company could build both ASCENT thrusters and propulsion systems. They liked the vision and asked if I wanted to come over and make it happen. I thought, “I’ve spent five or six years trying to develop the technology, maybe I’ve got a chance here to go and actually try to infuse it too.” So, I left NASA, and we started Rubicon Space Systems, a division of Plasma Processes. We felt the name was necessary to distinguish it as a unique business unit from the rest of the company. Even though we only have a handful of people that work in the propulsion division, we have reach back to a company with nearly 60 people. We build all the critical parts in house: the catalysts, the chambers, the injectors. We are not just focused on the thrusters, but also on the cubesat and small satellite propulsion systems that would use those thrusters. Will ASCENT ever replace hydrazine? No, I don’t believe it will. It is an alternative. We encourage everyone to look at their mission trades and do what is important for them. We know payload safety review panels look more favorably on lower hazard technologies. For some people ASCENT may be the difference between being able to get a ride-share opportunity. For others it may be about heritage or known high reliability. Good engineering must come first. I see cubesats and small satellites as being the way to continue to build ASCENT heritage over time because of the usually higher risk tolerance posture. Then, after we’ve got a good foothold in the market hopefully others will begin to take notice. Is Rubicon selling ASCENT-fueled thrusters and propulsion systems? Our team has achieved flight heritage on our 0.1N thruster, and we’re close to completing the first low-rate production run. We have orders for one-newton and five-newton thrusters with government customers for deliveries beginning in the first quarter of 2024. We just sold our first propulsion system as well, which is exciting. We are developing larger propulsion systems, and a new 110-newton thruster. There definitely is an appetite in the market for ASCENT propulsion.
Maxar Technologies is set to deliver in early 2024 the first of 16 satellite buses ordered by L3Harris for a military constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) run by the U.S. Space Development Agency. L3Harris is the first customer for Maxar’s newly designed small satellite bus, tailored for the megaconstellation market. The bus is now offered to other defense contractors competing for SDA satellite contracts. Maxar President and CEO Daniel Jablonsky said the company is trying to seize a crucial opportunity created by SDA’s large LEO constellation — which includes a Transport Layer of satellite for communications and a Tracking Layer for missile detection. The satellite bus selected by L3Harris for SDA’s Tracking Layer is the smallest of the Maxar line, designed for proliferated constellations that require faster production rates. “We’re pretty nascent on the defense side right now, but we’re coming up the chain fast,” Jablonsky told SpaceNews April 20. L3Harris in July won a $700 million contract from SDA to produce 14 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1, plus two additional satellites for a missile-tracking demonstration. All 16 satellites are projected to launch in mid-2025. “It’s a growing market opportunity for us,” said Jablonsky. “Budgets for defense applications are going up around the world. And they’re particularly going up for robust space capabilities.” The contract with L3Harris marks a major milestone for Maxar. Only five years ago, the company was exploring options to sell or even shut down its commercial spacecraft manufacturing business due to dwindling orders for geostationary communications satellites. Instead, Maxar restructured its business to focus on smaller satellites and government sales. Maxar, in 2021, unsuccessfully bid for an SDA satellite contract as a prime contractor and filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office. The protest led SDA to change its contracting approach from traditional procurements to a more flexible contracting mechanism known as Other Transaction Authority, which requires large defense contractors to team up with commercial players. In the two years since, Maxar shifted its focus to hardware manufacturing and has sought teaming arrangements with prime contractors. “We’re very proud of the partnership we have with L3Harris,” said Jablonsky. Maxar is also in discussions with other defense firms. “We’re a commercial company, and we’re very happy to work with the primes.” Since the rollout of the LEO bus platform, he said, “people are excited about the capability, and we’re getting inbound requests for proposals.” Joe Foust, Maxar’s vice president of proliferated low Earth orbit constellations, told SpaceNews the company spent the past two years developing the small satellite bus for the LEO market in hopes of competing more aggressively in the commercial and national security sectors. The buses, made at Maxar’s satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, will be shipped to L3Harris’ assembly facility at Palm Bay, Florida. After the first delivery in early 2024, Maxar will start producing buses at a rate of approximately two per month, Foust said. Foust said Maxar’s small bus is being offered in the commercial LEO market primarily for communications constellations. “The 250-1,000 kilogram bus can support payloads anywhere from 200 to about 500 kilograms,” he said. Supply chain problems, some caused by the COVID pandemic, slowed down Maxar’s satellite deliveries over the past two years, Foust noted, but now the company is working to prevent such delays going forward. As soon as the contract with L3Harris was signed in August, “we were ready to place those orders pretty quickly,” said Foust. “So we got all our long-lead items on contract within a month or two.” Maxar plans to extensively test the new bus in its lab before the first one is shipped to L3Harris, said Foust. “We’ll go through a very rigorous test campaign to make sure it works as a space vehicle.” Because of its modular design with standard components, he said, production can scale up pretty rapidly. The plan to diversify Maxar’s satellite business includes its mid-size bus, originally designed for its WorldView Legion high-resolution Earth imaging constellation. Jablonsky said the company rebranded its buses into three lines. The smaller bus it sold to L3Harris is the Maxar 300 series. The WorldView Legion bus is the Maxar 500, and the large buses used for geostationary communications satellites are the Maxar 1300 line. A smaller version of the 1300 bus was selected in 2018 by Swedish broadband operator Ovzon. Maxar is now actively marketing the 500 bus used on WorldView Legion for remote-sensing applications. Jablonsky said the platform is best suited to carry a sensor package for electro-optical or radar imaging. “Lots of other things can be put on that bus.” On the geostationary satellite front, there are still hopeful signs for Maxar, even though the market has lost ground to LEO constellations. A U.S. Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction helped Maxar secure an order from Intelsat in 2020 for four GEO satellites. Intelsat and other operators have to clear the C-band spectrum for cellular 5G networks to qualify for billions of dollars in FCC incentive payments. While the C-band auction created an artificial bump in the market, other orders have been placed by satellite broadcasters. SiriusXM last year bought two GEO satellites from Maxar to expand its radio broadcasting constellation. And last month the Dish Network placed a GEO bus order to expand its broadcast services over North America. “The GEO customers that we have continue to have business cases,” said Jablonsky. “There are certain things that are very efficiently done from GEO, and broadcasting I don’t think is going anywhere, anytime soon.” The 1300 series platform, he noted, is being applied to other uses besides geostationary satellites. An example is NASA’s Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), a spacecraft designed to provide electrical power for future elements of the agency’s lunar Gateway outpost in deep space. The launch of the Gateway mission is currently targeted for 2024. “There’s all these ecosystems on the civil side that I think are very interesting,” Jablonsky said. This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
After a C-band clearing shopping spree that saw Intelsat and SES order a combined 13 of the 18 geostationary satellites ordered in 2020, satcom operators worldwide bought just 11 GEOs in 2022 — down from 12 in 2021. And the competition this year is off to a slow start. Just three contracts for commercial GEO communications satellites had been announced as of late April, including two to be built by Californian startup Astranis that are part of a new breed of smaller, more regionally focused geostationary spacecraft. Industry veteran Maxar Technologies secured the other contract with an order from its long-term client Dish Network. Maxar is basing the TV broadcaster’s next satellite on its 1300 series platform, which with a mass of up to 6,800 kilograms, is about 17 times heavier than an Astranis satellite. One manufacturer hoping for a larger pool of orders for more conventionally large satellites this year is Airbus. According to Euroconsult research, Airbus’ strong performance in recent years culminated in 2019 when it won 40% of the 10 GEOs ordered; however, it left the arena empty-handed in 2022. Didier Radola, head of satcom programs at Airbus Defence and Space, told SpaceNews in February that it hoped to get back on track this year by capturing as many as six of the 15 or so GEOs he expects to be tendered in 2023. Standing in its way is Thales Alenia Space, Airbus’ main competitor in Europe. The joint venture of French multinational Thales Group and Italian aerospace contractor Leonardo shows no signs of letting up in the increasingly competitive GEO market after winning seven of last year’s 11 orders. Maxar and Boeing, which are both based in the U.S. and picked up one and two GEO orders in 2022, respectively, are also hungry for more contracts this year. Competition wasn’t always as brutal. GEO builders used to vie for 15 to 20 large orders annually. But amid the uncertainty caused by the rise of non-geostationary constellations and, more recently, the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers have been competing for a smaller pool of contracts for half a decade now — ignoring the one-time bonanza of government-stimulated C-band satellites in 2020. The Federal Communications Commission is covering all the costs of those satellites, which operators need to clear part of their C-band in the United States for Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and other 5G telcos that won the frequencies in an auction that raised more than $80 billion. Last year’s GEO order performance shows “signs of market recovery that began in previous years appear to be more cautious than hoped,” Euroconsult principal adviser Maxime Puteaux warned. Orders placed in 2022 were mainly made to replace aging satellites that are reaching the end of their typical 15-year design lives, he said, rather than for a significant expansion strategy. Astranis and other new players offering much smaller GEO satellites that are cheaper and more flexible, albeit with less capacity than their larger cousins, are also distorting the market for legacy manufacturers. Intelsat, which has ordered large satellites from Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, and other established manufacturers, last year became 3D printing specialist Swissto12’s first customer for a dishwasher-sized satellite, about a tenth the size of a conventional GEO. Radola pinned Airbus’ 2022 no-show on aggressive competition from players battling over slim pickings in the GEO market. While he expects slightly more orders up for grabs this year, he said Airbus has also been busy finding operational efficiencies to increase its competitiveness, including work to get “closer to our suppliers in order to be positioned to better monitor them.” Manufacturers will need to have more than just the best or cheapest product to be successful this year as supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic continue to delay satellite projects, according to Radola. “What will be a differentiator in the coming months will be the capacity for the industry to deliver on time,” he said. “We see how it is today — nobody is able to deliver on time,” he added, “and the delays are significant.” In November, Echostar said it is being compensated by Maxar following production issues for its Jupiter 3 satellite, which has seen its launch move from 2021 to later this year in one of the industry’s most recent high-profile delays. And despite Airbus’ lack of fresh GEO contracts, the company said it still “has a significant GEO backlog” and managed to secure orders for nearly 60 low Earth orbit (LEO) platforms last year. Marc-Henri Serre, senior vice president of telecoms at Thales Alenia Space, only expects roughly 10 to 12 GEO communications satellites to be ordered in 2023, and annually in the near term. While he said the market is too unpredictable to give a clear forecast for the number of orders it expects to win 2023, the company stressed it is not under capacity and is continually chasing new contracts. Thales Alenia Space is also focusing on operational efficiencies this year, and has been sending employees to supplier sites to monitor and assist with complicated development tasks. The manufacturer has suffered its share of satellite production delays in recent years, including for Telesat’s LEO constellation, which remains on ice while the Canadian operator attempts to finalize its funding. In addition to supply chain challenges and scarce GEO demand that is putting “some pressure on prices,” Euroconsult’s Puteaux said Airbus’ and Thales Alenia Space’s growth strategies also face technological risks. A good portion of their recent contract wins is for newly developed software-defined satellites that can be reprogrammed in orbit. “Now both companies need to deliver to customers,” he said, “and one needs to keep in mind the extreme complexity of fully software-defined satellites and” the risks associated with demonstrating first generations. Thales Alenia Space and Airbus are also increasingly bumping heads for satellite manufacturing contracts beyond GEO. Both hope to play a leading role in developing IRIS² — or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite — Europe’s 6 billion euro ($6.5 billion) multi-orbit sovereign connectivity constellation currently seeking proposals. And as OneWeb wraps up the deployment of first-generation satellites built via a joint venture the LEO broadband operator shares with Airbus, Thales Alenia Space is getting ready to make a move for follow-on business. “We all know that OneWeb is preparing its second generation,” Serre said, “so we are [also] positioned for this constellation, and we have other projects in which we are working” on. This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Momentus announced May 8 that it has successfully demonstrated the propulsion system on its Vigoride space tug, raising the vehicle’s orbit. The company said that the Microwave Electrothermal Thruster (MET) on its Vigoride-5 vehicle, successfully test-fired in March , has since fired more than 35 times of varying durations. That has been sufficient to counteract drag and raise the vehicle’s orbit. “This initial orbital raise was a key goal of our Vigoride-5 mission and the MET’s performance has exceeded our expectations,” Rob Schwarz, chief technology officer of Momentus, said in a statement. “We have now operated the MET successfully in space at full power across the range of durations for firing that we plan to use operationally to deliver satellites to precise, custom orbits and to provide in-space infrastructure services like hosted payloads.” The MET, which vaporizes water with microwaves to generate thrust, has fired for more than 140 minutes cumulatively, in burns ranging from 30 seconds to six minutes each. The company said that those burns raised the orbit of Vigoride-5 by more than three kilometers when taking atmospheric drag into account. According to tracking data, Vigoride-5 is in an orbit at an average altitude of 524.3 kilometers as of late May 7, about two kilometers higher than it was in early April, when the maneuvers started. The vehicle’s orbit had been gradually decaying since its launch in early January on the SpaceX Transporter-6 smallsat rideshare mission , descending about five kilometers before the maneuvers started. The test of the MET is a major milestone for Momentus, which is relying on the technology to propel its tugs that will deliver satellites to their desired orbits. Technical problems with its first tug, Vigoride-3, launched nearly a year ago, kept the company from testing the MET on that vehicle. Vigoride-5 is carrying a single smallsat, for Singapore-based Qosmosys, that it will release, although the companies have not disclosed the planned orbit for that spacecraft. The tug will also operate a hosted payload from Caltech to demonstrate space-based solar power technologies for several months. Momentus has since launched a third vehicle, Vigoride-6, on SpaceX’s Transporter-7 mission April 15 . That tug, carrying a pair of NASA cubesats among several other payloads, is still going through post-launch commissioning. The company argues that the MET can operate at higher efficiencies than chemical propulsion systems while generating more thrust than typical electric propulsion systems. Using water avoids the cost and handling issues associated with other propellants and creates the potential, in the long term, to refuel MET-powered spacecraft with water extracted from the moon or asteroids. The Vigoride-5 announcement comes ahead of the release of the company’s quarterly earnings, scheduled for after the markets close May 11. The company reported a net loss of $91.3 million in 2022 but said in a March 7 earnings call it had sufficient reserves to meet its needs for the next year.
SEOUL, South Korea — The United States has agreed with the Philippines to strengthen cooperation on space situational awareness and space-based maritime domain awareness in the latest series of actions Washington has taken to strengthen ties with Asia-Pacific countries to counter China. The two countries also agreed to hold the first U.S.-Philippines Civil Space Dialogue this year to boost bilateral space cooperation. These are part of a broader set of security, economic, technological, and educational cooperation agreements reached during the May 1 summit between President Joe Biden and Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. at the White House. “The United States and the Philippines will strengthen bilateral cooperation on space situational awareness and the use of space for maritime domain awareness, including through the first-ever U.S.-Philippines Civil Space Dialogue,” the White House said in a May 1 statement . It did not tell when the space dialogue would occur and other details. The statement added that the two countries would collaborate on using space-based technology in a range of areas, including disaster management, emergency response, healthcare, mapping of resources, and pollution monitoring. In a joint statement , the two leaders said they would “prioritize and strengthen bilateral space cooperation,” with details to be discussed in the upcoming Civil Space Dialogue. The two leaders also agreed to strengthen cooperation on the Landsat Program , including the possibility for the Philippines to download imagery directly from Landsat satellites to its ground stations. The Landsat Program is a NASA/USGS-backed mission whose first satellite, Landsat 1, was launched in 1972 , and represents the longest continuously acquired space-based global record of the Earth’s surface. The most recent satellite for the mission, Landsat 9 , was launched in September 2021 on an Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. In a May 5 speech at a forum in Washington, the Philippine leader said such bilateral cooperation will help “establish our own geospatial database and equip us to move towards strengthening science-based policy-making in our country.” He also expressed hope that his country would conduct joint research with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and join NASA’s Asia Air Quality Program . The Philippines is the latest Asian country the U.S. has agreed to expand cooperation in space, particularly in space situational awareness, a critical capability to ensure peaceful and sustainable use of outer space. On April 26, Biden had a summit with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol at the White House, during which the two leaders agreed to advance bilateral space situational awareness cooperation. The two countries also agreed to enhance cooperation on other space activities, ranging from lunar exploration to Earth science . Japan is Washington’s key partner in Asia. The two nations have signed a series of agreements to support their respective space activities, ranging from space situational awareness to space exploration to lunar exploration . 
China’s secretive reusable spaceplane completed its second mission Monday, landing after 276 days in orbit. China state media and the spacecraft’s maker, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), announced the spacecraft had landed late May 8 Beijing time. The apparently successful mission was stated to be an important breakthrough in the country’s research on reusable spacecraft technology. No images, landing time nor location were revealed by the terse announcements. The project will provide a more convenient and inexpensive way to access space for the peaceful use of space in the future, according to the statement. The reusable test spacecraft launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert Aug. 4 (UTC), 2022. The spacecraft released an object into orbit, U.S. Space Force tracking data revealed late last year. The small satellite operated in very close proximity to the spaceplane. This apparent second flight on the secretive spacecraft differs from its first mission in 2020. That flight saw the spaceplane orbit for four days in a 331 by 347-kilometer orbit inclined by 50 degrees. The just completed mission lasted 276 days, with the spacecraft entering an initial 346 by 593 kilometer orbit inclined by 50 degrees, then circularizing the orbit to 597 by 608 kilometers. The spacecraft performed numerous small and much larger orbital maneuvers during its flight, with adjustments in recent weeks made in preparation for landing. The landing is likely to have taken place at the Lop Nur military base in Xinjiang. Information on the spacecraft’s orbit suggests an orbital track over the facility around 0020 UTC provided the opportunity for landing, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and tracker of spaceflight activities. An image from an Umbra synthetic aperture radar satellite suggests recent activity at the Lop Nur site. China has released little information about the project. The size and mass of the spacecraft is however constrained by the use of the Long March 2F rocket, which can carry just over 8 tons to low Earth orbit. Clues as to the dimensions and shape of the craft appeared shortly after launch when apparent images of the payload fairing for the mission appeared online. The spacecraft appears to be related to the development of an orbital segment of a fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit space transportation system. A suborbital segment—featuring a vertical takeoff and horizontal landing—had a second flight in September 2022. CASC’s reusable spaceplane project last year acquired national level funding from the Natural Science Foundation of China. CASIC, a sister giant defense and space contractor, is working on its own spaceplane, named Tengyun . Meanwhile a commercial firm named Space Transportation raised more than $46.3 million for its hypersonic spaceplane plans in 2021. A number of Chinese rocket companies have also created presentations including small spaceplanes launching atop concepts for liquid rockets. China has been seeking to boost its access to space in a range of ways in recent years, including fostering a commercial space sector which now features a range of operational solid and in-development reusable liquid propellant reusable launch vehicles. CASC, the country’s main space contractor, is meanwhile developing new, super heavy-lift reusable launch vehicles which enable the country to attempt to land astronauts on the moon and an eventually fully-reusable rocket for conducting large scale space infrastructure missions.
A Rocket Lab Electron launched a pair of NASA cubesats designed to monitor the development of tropical storms, 11 months after the first satellites in the constellation were lost when a different rocket failed. The Electron lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 9 p.m. Eastern May 7. The rocket’s kick stage deployed the two Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) cubesats about 35 minutes after liftoff, although that was not confirmed until a ground station pass 20 minutes later. The Electron placed the 3U cubesats into a 550-kilometer orbit at an inclination of 32 degrees. The kick stage, normally used on Electron launches to circularize the orbit, performed the inclination change needed for the payloads. A second Electron will launch two more TROPICS cubesats about two weeks later. The four-satellite system will be able to monitor tropical storm development using a microwave radiometer on each satellite that can collect temperature and water vapor profiles. With four satellites, TROPICS will be able to get hourly updates that can aid in monitoring the formation of hurricanes and other tropical weather systems. “We’ll be getting data we’ve never had before, which is this ability to look in the microwave wavelength region in the storms with hourly cadence to look at the storm as it forms and intensifies,” said William Blackwell, TROPICS principal investigator at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, during an April 28 media call. “We hope to improve our understanding of the basic processes that drive the storms and ultimately improve our ability to forecast the track and intensity.” TROPICS was originally a six-satellite constellation. The first two satellites were launched on an Astra Rocket 3.3 in June 2022 as part of a three-launch contract valued at nearly $8 million, but failed to reach orbit when the rocket’s upper stage ran out of kerosene fuel and shut down prematurely. Astra subsequently retired the Rocket 3.3, forcing NASA to find a new way to launch the remaining four satellites. The agency selected Rocket Lab in November 2022 to launch them on two dedicated Electron launches from the company’s new Launch Complex 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia. NASA made the award under its Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract, issuing Rocket Lab a task order valued at $12.99 million. Rocket Lab said April 10 that it would move the two TROPICS launches from Virginia to New Zealand. “The timeline in which we could get the spacecraft launched out of Virginia didn’t correlate with the timeline that was required to get these spacecraft in orbit for the storm season,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in the media call. He didn’t elaborate on the issues that kept the launches from taking place on schedule from Virginia. NASA officials said they were fine with the change in launch sites. “We’re largely launch site agnostic,” said Bradley Smith, director of launch services in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “As long as the launch provider can meet the mission requirements, it’s their choice where they want to go.” Beck said the change in launch sites came at no additional cost to NASA. Ben Kim, program executive in NASA’s Earth science division, said there was some extra logistics and paperwork to get the TROPICS satellites to New Zealand, but that they were minor. The TROPICS mission manager at the launch site “is probably having the worst time because I keep calling and messaging him in the middle of the night, forgetting about the time difference.” Provided the second launch is successful, NASA expects to have the four-satellite system in operation by the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this summer. Having four instead of the originally planned six “does make a difference,” Blackwell said, with revisit times 10 to 15 minutes longer than if there were six. “We’re still better than our requirement of 60 minutes with only four satellites.”
LAUREL, Md. — A proposed cut of nearly 20% in the budget for NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2024 could force changes to the mission or its schedule, a top project official said May 3. NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal requested $327.7 million for Dragonfly, a rotorcraft that would land on Titan and then fly through the moon’s dense atmosphere, going to various locations to study the building blocks of life. Dragonfly is scheduled for launch in 2027, landing on Titan in 2034. The budget proposal reflects an 18.1% reduction from the $400.1 million Dragonfly received in fiscal year 2023. NASA’s budget document says only the agency “updated the budget profile to reflect updated estimates for a launch readiness date of June 2027.” Speaking at a meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) here May 3, Zibi Turtle, principal investigator for Dragonfly at the Applied Physics Lab, said the fiscal year 2024 proposal affects plans for the mission. “The NASA budget request for FY24 would fund Dragonfly at a level that is below what we estimate is necessary over our profile,” she said. She did not specify how much of a difference there is between the request and the mission’s profile, but said the project is looking at options on how to address that shortfall. “We are still in that process of evaluating cost and schedule options moving forward.” Dragonfly completed its preliminary design review in early March, which Turtle said went well. The mission is preparing for a confirmation review, where NASA will set a formal cost estimate and launch date for the project, in the early fall, and she noted that evaluation of cost and schedule options would be part of planning for the confirmation review. The proposed cut has gotten the attention of members of Congress. In back-to-back hearings in April, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson about the proposed cut. The Applied Physics Lab, which is leading Dragonfly, is based in Maryland. “Everything I know from the experts is that it doesn’t compute. You can’t cut by 20% and still remain on target,” Van Hollen said in a Senate appropriations hearing April 18 . Nelson said in both hearings that the cut would not delay Dragonfly’s 2027 launch. “We are still planning on launching Dragonfly in ’27. That has not changed,” Nelson told Ruppersberger at a House appropriations hearing April 19 . “Right now, there is not any plan for a cut in fiscal year ’24.” Earlier at the OPAG meeting, other NASA officials attempted to explain the reduced funding for the mission as part of the variability of the overall appropriations process. “It’s kind of a moving target,” said Henry Throop, a program scientist in NASA’s planetary science division, May 2. “This is enough for continued development of the mission.” “The budget process doesn’t provide certainty,” said Curt Niebur, lead scientist for flight programs in NASA’s planetary science division, but he emphasized that NASA supported the mission. “Dragonfly has had a rough road programmatically,” he said, a reference to issues such as a one-year delay in the launch NASA announced in 2020 to cover costs outside the mission itself, such as the effect of the pandemic on other planetary missions. “There’s a commitment to traveling that rough road at all levels, from the project on up.” Dealing with operations costs The pandemic has been one key factor in rising costs of planetary missions in general. Another, Niebur said at the OPAG meeting May 2, was growing costs of operating missions once they are launched. He said that planetary missions are overrunning their estimated costs for operations, known as Phase E in NASA programmatic parlance, by an average of 52% over their original proposals. “We have a big Phase E problem.” Missions have argued that they can’t provide updated estimates for operations costs until a review called Key Decision Point E, within a few months of launch. He suggested that puts NASA in a bind, since by that time the spacecraft is completed and ready for launch. “What do you think the chances are that we say no to that, when we’re two months from launch?” he said. “That is devastating our ability to plan ahead.” The problems with increased operations costs across the board, Niebur said. “Every planetary mission has a Phase E upper,” or increase, he said. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is starting study to look at cost growth in operations of planetary and other missions. He placed much of the blame for the operations cost increases on those proposing missions, for failing to look at performance of earlier missions as well as rejecting proposals to place a cap on Phase E costs on future missions. “We seem unable, unwilling, reluctant to look back at past performance and use that to guide our missions for the future,” he said. “That ends now.”
U.S. defense contractor SAIC announced May 5 it will partner with European manufacturer GomSpace to develop small satellites for U.S. government agencies, commercial firms and universities. The companies signed a memorandum of understanding April 18 at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. SAIC signed a similar agreement last year with small satellite startup Rogue Space Systems. Based in Reston, Virginia, SAIC is looking to grow its space business integrating commercial satellite buses and payloads at a newly expanded research-and-development facility in Charleston, South Carolina. The company is standing up a space systems development center within the 300,000 square foot facility in order to perform payload, cubesat, smallsat and launch rideshare integration. Companies to offer space hardware, software and services David Ray, senior vice president of SAIC’s space business unit, said in a statement May 5 that the agreement with GomSpace is “another important step in SAIC’s strategy to leverage its heritage and deep technical expertise in legacy space systems development into a leadership position in the new space economy.” At the Charleston facility, SAIC, Rogue Space and GomSpace North America — a subsidiary of Denmark-based GomSpace Group AB — will build cubesats and smallsats for space domain awareness, autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, and in-orbit servicing, the company said. SAIC will be GomSpace’s U.S.-based licensed product distributor, services reseller, and space vehicle and mission integrator. In addition to fully integrated spacecraft, the companies plan to also offer software products, spacecraft components, in-orbit services and mission operations.
Pentagon officials have called attention to DoD’s need to access commercial space industry services. However, very little of the Space Force’s budget is being allocated to these types of services, a space industry and budget analyst said May 2. Commercial space services — enabled by increasingly capable small satellites and cheaper access to orbit — include imagery, space surveillance, weather data, broadband communications and others that could be procured as an alternative to traditional acquisitions. What the Space Force budget shows is that, other than satellite communications , very few technologies today are bought as services, analyst Mike Tierney, head of legislative affairs at the National Security Space Association, said at a briefing on Capitol Hill. The Pentagon’s funding proposal for fiscal year 2024 seeks $30 billion for the U.S. Space Force, which DoD called its largest ever space budget . Most of that funding is for the development and procurement of next-generation satellite constellations and other systems that the government owns and operates. Tierney said it’s difficult to quantify spending on commercial space services because there is no separate funding line for that. He estimates it is only a small fraction of overall spending. “It’s a fair question, and definitely a question I get a lot,” said Tierney. “I’m always looking inside of these buckets for commercial activity that meets the expectations of what the industry thinks a commercial capability is,” he said. “But we’re talking about really a fraction of the totality of that $30 billion.” Tierney said there is a mismatch between the industry’s expectations of DoD as a customer of commercial space services and the actual dollars that are being spent on these emerging technologies. “There remains a disconnect between what industry wants and believes the department should be doing relative to commercial space investments,” Tierney said. “And I think there will continue to be that friction between what the industry wants and what the government is willing to let go.” Tierney said one of the government’s reservations about commercial systems is network security. “Every time you bring up commercial services in these conversations, that is often a concern,” he added. The use of commercial services will likely grow over time,“but there’s still a way to go from what I think the industry is looking for.” Space Force office to buy commercial services The Space Systems Command based in Los Angeles last year stood up a Commercial Services Office — recently rebranded as the Commercial Space Office — in the Washington D.C. area. The office, run by Col. Richard Kniseley , materiel leader at Space Systems Command, was created to figure out what services could be bought from the private sector to supplement or replace government-owned systems. But making that transition could take years until procurement cycles and DoD’s budget process catch up with users’ demands, said the acting deputy director of the Commercial Space Office Jeremy Leader. Speaking last month at an AFCEA Los Angeles event, Leader said there are sectors of the space industry developing technologies of interest to the government but for which a commercial market does not yet exist. An example of that is on-orbit satellite services and alternatives to GPS navigation, he said. “DoD will have to be an anchor tenant for a while until a commercial market emerges … The intent is to help create those markets.” He said the establishment of a Commercial Space Office was in response to the emergence of “companies and capabilities that we hadn’t seen before.” Most of the commercial space office’s efforts now are on contracting for satellite communications and for space domain awareness data. There are still obstacles to buying services that are mostly bureaucratic. “Some of them are of our own making,” said Leader. “We actually want to put our money where our mouth is. It just takes a little bit longer with the budget cycles.” Not much will change until “we bake these commercial capabilities into our force designs, and into our budgets. It needs to be part of the baseline,” he said. Once there is a budget line item for a commercial service, Leader added, it will be “very clear for industry and for the program executive officers to be able to execute.” “If folks don’t have their own dedicated line item for commercial capabilities within their mission area, it makes it kind of convoluted to try to find where that commercial money is actually available,” he noted. “So even if I talk to a PEO who’s willing to do some things commercially, it’s hard to get that message if you can’t point to a line item in the budget.”
Updated 1:15 p.m. Eastern with BlackSky comment. WASHINGTON — BlackSky is requesting permission to operate two of its satellites in lower orbits as the spacecraft are running out of propellant. The company filed a request for special temporary authority (STA) with the Federal Communications Commission April 28, asking the FCC to allow the company to continue operations of its Global 7 and Global 8 imaging satellites below the originally authorized lower limit of 385 kilometers. The company is requesting permission to operate the satellites at altitudes as low as 340 kilometers. Much of the publicly available request is redacted, including a section under the heading “Emergency”. However, several passages in the document refer to refer to the spacecraft running out of the propellant needed to maintain their orbits. The company said it is asking that the STA, initially lasting for 30 days for each satellite, “commence from the point in time that, due to the anticipated loss of remaining propellant, each such satellite is not able to be maintained at or above 385 kilometers.” Elsewhere, the document notes that the extension of operations will not affect plans for post-mission disposal of the satellites through uncontrolled reentries. “BlackSky’s orbital debris mitigation plan is, and has always been, that the satellites will descend to the earth by force of gravity after exhaustion of propulsion capability,” the company stated. “Since the operational missions of the satellites will be extended for short periods after the loss of propulsion, the post-mission orbital lifetime of the satellites will be commensurately shortened.” The company said it set 385 kilometers as the minimum altitude of operations for the satellites based on the expectation that atmospheric drag and other forces on the satellites would reach the limit of “operational stability” for them. However, the satellites have not shown any signs of reaching those limits, it noted. “Taking into account this operational experience and BlackSky’s engineering analysis based upon this experience, BlackSky is confident that it can operate the satellites as they descend below 385 kilometers while maintaining necessary stability at least until its satellites reach the new requested minimum altitude of 340 kilometers,” it stated. The unredacted portions of the request provide no details about why the spacecraft are running out of propellant, although it appears to be earlier than expected. The two spacecraft launched as rideshare payloads on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Starlink mission in August 2020, and the STA notes the spacecraft have a three-year design life. According to the space tracking service Celestrak, the average orbital altitude of Global-7 has been declining since the beginning of the year, when it was at nearly 400 kilometers, with a steeper decline starting in early March, taking it to 389 kilometers as of May 4. The altitude for Global-8 has been going up in the last two months, from 388 kilometers at the beginning of March to 393 kilometers as of May 4. However, there has been a longer-term trend of declining altitudes dating back to June 2022, when it was at an altitude of 406 kilometers. The company said in the STA, which is still pending at the FCC, that it is coordinating with other government agencies to ensure the operations of the two satellites in lower orbits do not cause any communications interference with other satellites. It is also seeking to amend its commercial remote sensing license issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to allow imaging at altitudes below 385 kilometers. “The system is designed with significant reserve and redundant capacity to eliminate impacts of any individual satellites that, as expected, will come in or out of service over time,” Lyn Chassagne, vice president of marketing at BlackSky, said in a statement to SpaceNews May 5. “With respect to the FCC filing, we will occasionally raise or lower altitudes of individual satellites as part of normal course of operations which can extend mission life, deliver increased performance, or support maintenance operations.” The company, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has not made any other regulatory filings about the satellites. BlackSky is scheduled to release its first quarter financial results on May 10 before the markets open.
TAMPA, Fla. — The last pair of satellites SES needs to provide upgraded broadband services from medium Earth orbit (MEO) have completed tests ahead of an early June launch, SES said during financial results May 4. Boeing is preparing to ship the fifth and sixth O3b mPower satellites this month to Florida for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9, SES CEO Steve Collar said, putting the operator on track to deploy initial services late in the third quarter of 2023. The first pair were launched in December on a Falcon 9 and are still undergoing on-orbit health checks. The second pair launched on a Falcon 9 on April 28 and are several months away from climbing to their final MEO positions with onboard all-electric propulsion. Boeing is under contract to build 11 O3b mPower satellites in total, each designed to scale up to multiple gigabits per second of throughput — roughly 10 times more than the original O3b constellation. Only six are needed to for O3b mPower to provide commercial service, and Collar said SES could provide beta services with just two or four satellites for customers comfortable with service gaps. Bringing O3b mPower to market is one of two main priorities for the operator this year, Collar said, following satellite production issues that derailed original plans to begin deploying the constellation in 2021. The other priority is vacating U.S. C-band spectrum that the FCC auctioned off to 5G wireless operators. SES stands to reap a $3 billion windfall if it meets a Dec. 5 deadline for clearing the spectrum by migrating broadcast customers to five new geostationary satellites funded by the auction’s proceeds. The last two satellites in SES’s plan to relocate affected customers to a smaller swath of C-band launched March 17 on a Falcon 9. SES said it has moved more than 95% of these satellite transmissions to date, and has installed over 90% of the filters that ground antennas need to avoid interfering with the 5G services. Robust results SES’s financial results reflected an ongoing decline in satellite TV, and the growing importance of connectivity services for operators in this market. The Luxembourg-based satellite operator recorded 242 million euros ($267 million) in video revenue for the three months ending March 31, down 8.3% compared with the same period in 2022. However, revenue for its networks division climbed 2.9% to 248 million euros. Declines in the operator’s government and fixed data businesses in this division were offset by a 14.4% rise in revenue in mobile services. SES reported total revenues for the quarter up 9.6% year-on-year to 490 million euros, boosted by sales from Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions (GES), a satcoms provider to the U.S. government acquired last year . Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, declined 3.2% to 265 million euros. While Collar said it was too early to give an update on merger talks with rival satellite operator Intelsat March 29, he reiterated his view that consolidation is broadly a good thing for the industry. But “at the end of the day it has to make sense for the companies involved,” he added. Collar said it is also too early to discuss investments SES might make as part of a partnership announced May 2 to bid for a role in developing IRIS², Europe’s proposed multi-orbit connectivity constellation also known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. IRIS² will likely first seek to leverage existing space assets before deploying new infrastructure designed to be fully operational in 2027. However, Collar said SES does not see a need to set aside any capacity from O3b mPower for this.
LAUREL, Md. — NASA and the science team for a spacecraft in the outer reaches of the solar system are locked in a dispute about the future of that mission and the science it can perform. The uncertainty about the future of the New Horizons mission started last year when NASA reviewed a proposal from the mission’s science team for a second extended mission. The spacecraft, launched in 2006, flew by Pluto in 2015 and the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in early 2019, and will continue to traverse the Kuiper Belt through 2028. The project team had proposed a multidisciplinary science mission for New Horizons, conducing a mix of astrophysics, heliophysics and planetary science research. The focus is “only things that can be done by dint of being at that great distance or in the Kuiper Belt,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, at a meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) here May 3. NASA, as part of the planetary science senior review that considered proposals from New Horizons and other spacecraft seeking extended missions, only approved funding for two years, rather than three as requested. The agency elected to fund New Horizons through fiscal year 2024 as part of the planetary science division, then have the mission compete in a separate senior review for the heliophysics division for fiscal year 2025 and beyond. The agency’s rationale was that the planetary science that New Horizons could do was less compelling than astrophysics and heliophysics. The senior review gave the overall proposal a score of “excellent/very good”, the second-highest possible score, but the planetary portion was rated “very good/good”, two levels lower. “The proposed Kuiper belt object (KBO) studies are unlikely to dramatically improve the state of knowledge,” the senior review report stated. New Horizons would be able to observe several KBOs at a distance, and at viewing angles not possible from the Earth, but the report concluded that those observations would not be competitive with ground-based observations. “We think that this is shortsighted,” Stern said. “It was the only mission ever sent and the only mission planned to study the Kuiper Belt, and we’re still there.” He said that while the mission was invited to submit a proposal to the heliophysics senior review, it has decided not to do so. His concern was that New Horizons would become an “infrastructure” mission for heliophysics without a dedicated science team but instead teams that run the spacecraft’s instruments. “I dub them ‘zombie’ teams.” “Writing a proposal to walk the plank, if you will, writing a proposal for the entire science team to be disbanded, did not look like something that we wanted to do,” Stern said. “We were afraid that the proposal would be accepted.” That puts the future of New Horizons after fiscal year 2024 in limbo. “We are in a quandary. I don’t know what we’re going to do about it,” said Curt Niebur, lead scientist for flight programs in NASA’s planetary science division, at the OPAG meeting. NASA had hoped the mission would accept the senior review outcome. “That path is broken.” He acknowledges, though, there had been a “miscommunication” on NASA’s part about the ability of New Horizons to do planetary science, particularly if scientists find a Kuiper Belt object in range of the spacecraft for a close flyby. “Should a KBO be found, yes, let’s talk about it. Let’s see if it’s reachable,” he said. “Let’s continue the search and we’ll take that up at the time that we find it.” However, another KBO flyby appears unlikely. “It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem. We’re looking,” he said, efforts that have included upgrading an instrument on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to better look for targets. “The odds are against us.” That search, he argued, would become impossible if NASA’s plans for New Horizon go forward. “I doubt we’ll get any telescope time in 2024 because the planetary portion of the mission is ending,” he said, as observatories decide to allocate telescope time to others. In March, NASA issued a request for information for a potential “New Horizons Interstellar Mission” that would continue the mission after fiscal year 2024. It sought ideas for heliophysics and other science the mission could do in 2025 through 2027 “to gauge the level of interest of the wider science community in pursuing the next phase of science leadership for the mission” and the costs to do so. The document stated that “mission operations would be terminated at the end of the second extended mission” at the end of fiscal year 2024, but both Niebur and Stern emphasized at the OPAG meeting that there are no plans by NASA to turn off the spacecraft. “The senior review did not suggest that the mission be truncated,” Niebur said. “NASA is not suggesting we turn off New Horizons.” “NASA is not planning to turn the spacecraft off, simply to terminate the planetary mission and to dismiss the planetary team,” Stern said. While NASA’s planetary programs have struggled with cost issues, from potential increasing costs for Mars Sample Return to the delay in the Psyche launch that has pushed back the VERITAS Venus mission by three years , New Horizons takes up a minute part of the overall planetary budget. NASA requested $9.7 million for the mission in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, less than 0.3% of the overall planetary science budget of $3.38 billion. “We need to finish the Kuiper Belt,” Stern said, “We finally got a spacecraft here. We’re going to leave the Kuiper Belt in a few years. Why so impatient over pennies out of the planetary budget?” Some at the OPAG meeting suggested that a solution would require some improved cooperation among NASA’s science divisions, including perhaps a more equitable sharing of mission costs. “Meritorious science can be achieved in heliophysics, astrophysics and planetary science but science optimization will require creative problem solving and cross-divisional leadership,” the senior review report stated. “The longer you explore space, the more cross-divisional it becomes,” said Pontus Brandt of the Applied Physics Lab, who joined the New Horizons science team last year to support heliophysics studies. “Nature doesn’t really care about divisions and we need to figure out how to support that.”
Lockheed Martin announced May 4 it is consolidating several businesses focused on space into three sectors: Commercial civil space, national security space, and strategic and missile defense. “With an eye toward the future and building on our current business momentum, these changes position us to deliver end-to-end solutions for today’s mission demands and well into the future,” said Robert Lightfoot , executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space. Lightfoot in a news release said the changes are in response to emerging requirements. “As space capabilities continue to be a critical enabler within the battlespace and global economy, the industry is seeing significant movement in customer requirements, a renewed competitive environment, and a shift in the pace and urgency to address emerging threats.” During the reorganization, Johnathon Caldwell, vice president and general manager of military space; and Stacy Kubicek, vice president and general manager of mission solutions, will remain in their current roles and serve as strategic advisors to Demaree on the creation and shaping of the new national security space organization. Lockheed Martin Space plans to also stand up a product center focused on “driving affordability and marketability of Lockheed Martin Space products for internal and external customers,” the company said. This product center will be led by Mike Patton, a former GE executive who previously ran Lockheed Martin space operations. Lockheed Martin, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, had $66 billion in sales in 2022. The company reported in January that its space backlog is nearly $30 billion.
CesiumAstro, a company that specializes in communications technologies for satellites and aircraft, will supply electronic phased-array payloads for seven U.S. military satellites built by Raytheon Technologies. Raytheon is producing missile-detection sensor satellites for a low Earth orbit constellation that’s being acquired by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency. CesiumAstro , based in Austin, Texas, announced May 4 it will provide Ka-band radio-frequency payloads to be integrated in the seven satellites that will be part of SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1. The Tracking Layer will be connected via optical links in space with a Transport Layer mesh communications network. SDA earlier this year awarded Raytheon a $250 million contract for the seven satellites, to be delivered in 2025. CesiumAstro’s founder and CEO Shey Sabripour told SpaceNews the agreement with Raytheon marks a major milestone for the company as it validates its approach to commoditizing phased array technologies that traditionally have been highly customized and costly. Antenna design ‘not bespoke’ Sabripour founded CesiumAstro in 2017 after a three-decade career at Lockheed Martin and Firefly Aerospace. The venture-funded startup has about 140 employees and to date has raised more than $90 million. For SDA’s satellites, the company will provide the Vireo active electronically scanned array (AESA) RF communications payload, developed for commercial and defense applications. The multi-beam communications antenna, because it’s electronically steered, would allow SDA to more easily allocate Ka-band satellite capacity to users around the world, Sabripour said. That’s a major upgrade from legacy, single-beam systems that are optimized for connecting to single, static ground stations. “You want to steer the beam to where the users are,” he said. CesiumAstro is offering its electronic phased-array payload to other defense contractors planning to compete for SDA satellite procurements, Sabripour said. He noted that the nation’s major defense firms for decades have developed advanced phased array technologies but most products are highly customized and too expensive for commercial use. “We have designed a system that is not bespoke,” he said. “It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases to design a custom phased array for a ship, an aircraft or a satellite. We wanted to build a software-defined system that can be scaled to different platforms and put together like Lego bricks.” When Raytheon receives its payloads, “they will come right out of the box and they can hook it up to their satellites without having to have a team of PhDs who know how to use this,” said Sabripour. Developing L-band antenna CesiumAstro recently won a $5 million contract from SDA to develop an active electronically scanned array antenna that can support the military’s Link 16 tactical data network. The Link 16 network has been used for decades by the U.S. military and allies to securely share data. The line-of-sight network was never extended into space until SDA decided to add Link 16 payloads to its Transport Layer satellites. The Air Force also plans to demonstrate Link 16 from space in an upcoming experiment. Sabripour said the company plans to deliver a prototype antenna to SDA by summer or fall 2024. “SDA believes that active phased arrays provide the capability they need for the future,” he said. 
TAMPA, Fla. — British investment firm Seraphim Space announced May 4 the nine space startups taking part in its latest accelerator program, which aims to help them raise funds despite a challenging macroeconomic outlook. Companies joining Seraphim’s eleventh accelerator are the most geographically diverse in the program’s five-year history, the investor said, ranging from a Lithuanian optical communications specialist to a satellite startup focusing on improving connectivity across Africa. The 11-week program kicked off April 4 and is designed to help young businesses refine their corporate pitches, connect with mentors, and ultimately broaden Seraphim’s pool of potential investments. According to Seraphim, the program has so far helped 81 startups raise more than $270 million from 80 venture capitalists. Recent funding successes from previous accelerator participants include $10 million raised by German space-based water monitoring startup Constellr in November, and the $5 million secured by Array Labs in October for a constellation that would gather global 3D imagery. Seraphim participated in both fundraising rounds through its publicly listed Seraphim Space Investment Trust, along with other investors. Members of Seraphim’s eleventh bi-annual accelerator program, which is being run jointly by its U.K.-based Seraphim Space Accelerator and Generation Space, its U.S. arm based in San Francisco, are: Early-stage space investments declined last year as investors became increasingly conservative amid high inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain issues, and other economic pressures. However, Seraphim recently said it sees signs of rising investor confidence as growth capital returns to the industry. “Despite a turbulent macroeconomic outlook, the space sector remains resilient,” Seraphim managing partner Rob Desborough said in a news release announcing its latest accelerator program. In addition to the United Kingdom and the United States, Seraphim is seeking to establish a presence in Singapore to focus on the Asia Pacific region.
The Czech Republic became the 24th country to sign the Artemis Accords May 3, growing Europe’s presence in the U.S.-led agreement. In a brief ceremony at NASA Headquarters, Jan Lipavský, minister of foreign affairs for the Czech Republic, formally signed the accords in the presence of officials from NASA and the U.S. State Department. Representatives of several other countries who previously signed the Artemis Accords also attended. “I see this as a historic signature, not only because it opens up a new opportunity for cooperation between Czechia and the United States as well as other partners,” he said. “It also marks our dedication to peaceful, transparent and responsible conduct for space exploration.” Neither U.S. nor Czech officials announced specific plans to cooperate on the Artemis lunar exploration campaign as a result of signing the accords, but suggested the signing opened the door for future discussions. Miloslav Stašek, Czech ambassador to the United States, said he hoped the agreement would start cooperation with NASA and other partners. “We are preparing several missions from the Czech Republic to the U.S. to explore how we can work closer,” he said. The country, while a minor space player, has a long history in spaceflight. Vladimír Remek was the first Czech person to go to space on a Soyuz mission in 1978, representing the former country of Czechoslovakia, also becoming the first person not from the United States or former Soviet Union to travel into space. The country has specialized in several space science fields. The Czech Republic joined the European Space Agency as a full member in 2008. Prague is the home of the European Union Agency for the Space Programme, or EUSPA, the E.U. entity responsible for the Copernicus system of Earth observation satellites and the Galileo satellite navigation network. The country is the seventh ESA member and sixth E.U. nation to sign the accords. Lipavský noted there are more than 100 companies and organizations involved in space efforts in the country, with more than 50 startups established in the last six years. “The Czechia space ecosystem as a lot to offer,” he said. “We believe this signature will kickstart the development of institutional and industrial cooperation within the Artemis community as well as directly between Czechia and the U.S.” U.S. officials emphasized the signing as evidence of growing support for the underlying principles of the accords, which seek to build upon the Outer Space Treaty and related agreements to support what officials say are key tenets of safe and sustainable space exploration. The Artemis Accords “encourage cooperation and responsible behavior in space,” said Acting Assistant Secretary of State Jennifer R. Littlejohn, who added they “stand at the center of our civil space diplomatic efforts.” “We wanted to set a set of principles, and these principles are quite commonsense,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. “We are united by the possibilities of deep space exploration together.” With this signing, 24 countries have joined the Artemis Accords, which started with a core group of eight countries in October 2020 . Before the Czech Republic, the African nations of Rwanda and Nigeria were the most recent to sign the accords in December 2022. After the formal signing ceremony, Nelson and Lipavský exchanged gifts. Nelson provided a signed photo from the recent Artemis 1 mission, showing the Orion spacecraft with the moon and Earth in the background. Lipavský gave a copy of a spaceflight drawing made by a Czech Jewish boy in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Another copy of that drawing was flown on the ill-fated STS-107 shuttle mission in 2003 by Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. The drawing, he said, was a reminder of the horrors of the war but also “the dreams of the exploration of space.”
The $6.4 billion buyout of Maxar Technologies is complete and the company is now officially private. Its stock ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the company announced May 3. Maxar, based in Westminster, Colorado, operates a fleet of high-resolution imaging satellites and manufacturers satellites in Palo Alto, California, The company was acquired for $53 per share by the U.S. private equity firm Advent International and minority investor British Columbia Investment Management Corp. in a deal announced in December. “With the closing of the transaction, Maxar will remain a U.S.-controlled, owned and operated company,” the company said. Maxar’s common stock will also be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange. Maxar started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2017. It officially became a U.S. corporation in 2020 when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA. MDA in 2012 had purchased the Palo Alto-based satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral and in 2017 acquired the Westminster-based Earth-imaging firm DigitalGlobe. The combined companies were rebranded Maxar Technologies. The company’s origin goes back to 1957. Western Development Laboratories, a division of Philco, was the first building block of what would eventually become Maxar. Western Development Laboratories launched its first communications satellite in 1960. The following year, Philco was purchased by Ford Motor Co. The combined Philco-Ford became Space Systems Loral in 1990.
LONG BEACH, Calif. – NASA selected five organizations to conduct studies of coronagraphs to fly on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s future space weather satellites. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, EO Vista, the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Raytheon Intelligence & Space and Southwest Research Institute won $800,000 contracts to perform definition-phase studies of the coronagraph destined for the NOAA Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 mission. The eight-month contracts include $400,000 options to continue the coronagraph studies for an additional four months. With information derived from the studies, NOAA plans to establish requirements for the coronagraph, which the agency plans to launch on the Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 mission. The coronagraphs are designed to supply NOAA with imagery of the sun’s corona. The imagery helps forecasters detect and characterize coronal mass ejections. NASA plans to award coronagraph development contracts on behalf of NOAA in 2024. Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 is a successor to the Space Weather Follow-On mission that is scheduled to travel to Lagrange 1 in 2025 on NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration probe. The Space Weather Next program was established to ensure NOAA has a continual supply of solar imagery and data into the 2030s. In its 2024 budget request , NOAA is asking Congress to provide $225 million for the Space Weather Next program, an increase of $73.4 million from the $151.6 million appropriated in 2023.
The U.S. Space Force selected Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to develop competing ground systems for a next-generation space communications network that can survive a nuclear attack. Each company won a $30 million contract to develop prototypes of a ground system for the Evolved Strategic Satcom (ESS) program, the Space Systems Command announced May 2. ESS is a classified satcom system designed to operate in the event of a nuclear war. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are developing competing satellite designs. The Pentagon plans to spend $6.5 billion on the ESS program over the next five years. The ESS satellites are intended to augment and eventually replace the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) network of nuclear-hardened geostationary satellites made by Lockheed Martin. Northrop Grumman developed the AEHF XDR (Extreme Data Rate) payload. The ESS satellites and ground systems will be part of the nation’s nuclear communications architecture that allows the president, through the military chain of command, to command and control strategic bombers, ballistic submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Lockheed Martin’s team that will develop one of the ground systems includes Stratagem, Integrity-Communications-Solutions, Infinity and BAE Systems. Raytheon’s team includes Dell, Seed Innovations, Infinity, Kratos, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Communications, Parsons, Polaris Alpha, Quantum Research, Koverse, Caliola Engineering, Kythera, Northstrat Inc., Optimal, RKF Engineering and Ascension Engineering. Each team will have 18 months to demonstrate the prototypes and the Space Systems Command plans to select one for further development.
LAUREL, Md. — NASA may not have enough plutonium available to power a mission to Uranus recommended by the latest decadal survey until the latter half of the 2030s. In a May 2 presentation at a meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group here, an agency official says NASA is working with the Department of Energy to ensure it has sufficient plutonium-238 for missions projected to launch through the end of the decade. That isotope is used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to produce electrical power and radioisotope heating units (RHUs) to keep spacecraft warm. “We are ensuring with the Department of Energy that we can make our mission commitments,” said Len Dudzinski, program executive for radioisotope power systems at NASA Headquarters, at the meeting. That includes a single Multi-Mission RTG (MMRTG) and up to 24 RHUs for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, launching in 2027. NASA is also providing 40 RHUs as part of its contribution to the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, slated for launch in 2028. NASA is reserving two MMRTGs and 20 RHUs for potential use on a New Frontiers mission the agency plans to request proposals for late this year for launch in the early 2030s. Those missions are supported by increased production of plutonium-238. Dudzinski said NASA and the Department of Energy are more than halfway to a “constant rate production” goal of 1.5 kilograms of the isotope a year, and expect to reach that goal in 2026. “The Department of Energy has said that they can meet our current planning set and current expected launch dates with their current plans for production,” he said. Those plans, though, do not include Uranus Orbiter and Probe, a mission that was the top-ranked large mission in last year’s planetary science decadal survey. That report recommended NASA start work on the mission as soon as fiscal year 2024 to support a launch in 2031 or 2032, enabling a trajectory that would get the spacecraft to the planet in 13 years. That schedule is not supported by the current production of plutonium, Dudzinski said. “The decadal survey plan for a 2031 or 2032 launch is, I think, not achievable from the constant rate production plan right now,” he said. The mission, as currently proposed, would require three units of a new Next-Gen RTG design under development by NASA, which each use twice the plutonium of an MMRTG. It might be possible, he said, to launch the Uranus mission on that schedule if it required only a single Next-Gen RTG and if the selected New Frontiers mission did not require MMRTGs. “That plutonium becomes available to fuel a Next-Gen RTG and launch that early.” A more realistic schedule for having RTGs available for the Uranus mission, he suggested, would be the mid to late 2030s. While the decadal survey recommended an early 2030s launch of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, broader funding constraints may keep NASA from pursuing that even if access to RTGs was not an issue. The decadal recommended NASA start work on the mission in fiscal year 2024, but the agency’s 2024 budget request released in March said that the agency now planned to begin formulation studies of the mission in 2025. There are launch opportunities for the mission later in the 2030s, but those require a more circuitous trajectory with travel times of about 15 years. Other missions being considered may need RTGs, such as Endurance-A, a lunar rover mission to the south polar regions of the moon also endorsed by the decadal survey. Endurance-A would collect samples over a long traverse and deliver them to an Artemis lunar lander mission for return to Earth. Dudzinski said that NASA is still studying both solar power and RTG options for the mission, with the latter requiring a Next-Gen RTG that would otherwise be available for the Uranus mission. The decadal survey recommended that NASA consider increasing production of plutonium-238 beyond 1.5 kilograms a year “to enable a robust exploration program at the recommended launch cadence.” A report in March by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) warned of risks of achieving that 1.5-kilogram annual production rate and a lack of “funding flexibility” to increase production above that rate. “If the demand does increase beyond our current mission planning set, we may need to increase the production throughput at the Department of Energy,” Dudzinski said. The department, he said, is working on a white paper to outline options for doing so, including costs and schedules. The OIG report also criticized the agency for failure to develop new radioisotope power systems that could offer increased efficiency and thus reduce the amount of plutonium needed. In the last decade NASA has shelved work on two systems, the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG) and Enhanced MMRTG, that offered improved efficiency or lifetime over the existing MMRTG. The agency’s current focus is on the Next-Gen RTG, an updated version of an older design known as GPHS. A prototype called Mod-0 is scheduled to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2024, Dudzinski said. The Mod-1 design, which would be offered for the Uranus, Endurance-A and later missions, will go through a preliminary design review in 2024 with the first Mod-1 ready for fueling in the late 2020s. The OIG report, though, warned of potential cost and schedule risks to Mod-1 development, including challenges starting up the production line and “a significant risk of parts obsolescence.” He said the agency is working on those issues, particularly with producing thermocouples needed for the RTGs. There had been plans for a Mod-2 version of Next-Gen RTG with improved thermoelectric technologies for converting the heat produced by the plutonium into electricity. That version is being deemphasized, he said. “The thermoelectric technology for Mod-2 is not deemed mature to be considered for a 2030s availability. We’re focusing on the success of Mod-1.” NASA had also been working on an alternative technology, called the Dynamic Radioisotope Power System, building on earlier work on ASRG. It could produce as much power as a Next-Gen RTG but use less plutonium than an MMRTG. NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, though, proposes ending work on that project because of funding constraints elsewhere in NASA’s planetary science division. “The technology has matured a long way since ASRG,” Dudzinski said. “The technology has matured and we are ready to proceed with flight development, but the division can’t afford that.”
On April 3, NASA revealed the crew of Artemis 2, the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft that is slated for launch as soon as late 2024. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will be the first humans to go to the vicinity of the moon since the Apollo 17 landing in 1972, flying around the moon on the 10-day mission. Glover, the pilot for Artemis 2, joined the astronaut corps a decade ago after serving as a naval aviator. He flew to the International Space Station on the Crew-1 mission in late 2020, spending nearly six months there. At the time NASA selected him for the mission, he was in a management role in the astronaut office. A few hours after the crew announcement event, Glover sat down with SpaceNews to talk about the experience of being named to the mission and what’s next. A condensed version of the interview follows. When did you find you were going on Artemis 2? On Tuesday, March 7. The chief astronaut set up meetings with all of us at the same time, and each one had a different title. We were all supposed to meet at crew quarters, the astronaut quarantine facility. I was coming from a luncheon with my staff. Christina thought it was a virtual meeting, so she was at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. Reid had something else due to his retirement from the Navy. So we were all different places, and we’re late. When we got there, not only was our boss there, but our boss’s boss, so we all feel terrible. After a little bit, Norm [Knight, director of flight operations] says to us, “How would you feel about flying on Artemis 2?” It was a profound moment, a shocking moment. It’s a humbling but important thing to be a part of. When do you start training for the mission? Training starts in June. We’ll start suit fittings actually next week, but training starts in earnest in June. There’s also not just training but, because this is the first crewed flight, there’s still plenty of development work. We’ve got engineering evaluations, verification events that we still have to for Orion and even some of the ground systems. We have a lot of work to do. Is there any part of the mission you’re particularly looking forward to? Splashdown. Every moment on a space mission can turn into a critical thing, so splashdown is the first time we get to really exhale. But as a human being, I’m really excited about this journey I get to take with these three other people representing this amazing Astronaut Office, which represents our country and humanity. In this next two or three years of training, I’m just looking forward to every moment — the training, the testing, the interviews — because there’s so much excitement about this moment. Has it sunk in yet that you’re going to be part of the first crew to go beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century? No. I’m the assigned crew branch chief. The folks that are on the space station right now like Frank Rubio, Crew-6, the cosmonauts up there, the folks that are training to launch very soon and the folks that just got back, those are all part of my branch’s mission. That’s such a rewarding but very busy job that I really haven’t had time to switch gears. I’m glad we have until June because over the next couple of months, as I transition to the new person who’s replacing me, I need to give myself time to transition. I mean, it’s not just flipping a switch. What was your family’s reaction? I was in California and my daughter is in college there, so we drove down to where she was. I had the chance to get my whole family together and tell them — my wife already knew, but I got to tell my kids all together at least. I was blown away by how excited they were. They’re all in. Do you have any regrets that, because you’re going around the moon on Artemis 2, you won’t get to walk on the moon on Artemis 3? No regrets. The best mission is always the next thing smokin’ and so the chance to fly on this is amazing. Being on this mission, meaning that I’m not going to fly on Artemis 3, doesn’t make me feel bad. When I showed up at NASA, there was no lunar lander program. I had made peace with the fact that going into low Earth orbit for six months is the mission, and I’m happy to do the mission. This opportunity is a gift. Artemis 3 will be a gift for someone else, but I’m really happy with this gift right now. This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A cubesat launched as a secondary payload on Artemis 1 may end its operations at the end of the month unless it can get its propulsion system working. The LunaH-Map spacecraft was one of 10 cubesats launched as secondary payloads on the inaugural flight of the Space Launch System last November. The spacecraft had planned to use an ion propulsion system on the 6U cubesat to perform a maneuver as it flew by the moon days later, ultimately allowing it to go into orbit. That thruster, though, failed to fire because of what engineers believe is a stuck valve. In a presentation at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference May 1, Craig Hardgrove, principal investigator for the mission at Arizona State University, said the project had anticipated problems with it given the long delay between the spacecraft’s delivery to NASA in mid-2021 and its November 2022 launch. “We had informed NASA that this propulsion system was not built to withstand a long launch delay, longer than four or five months,” he said, but there was no way to access the cubesat once the Orion spacecraft was mated to the stage adapter where the cubesats were mounted in the fall of 2021. The thruster, a BIT-3 from Busek, uses iodine as propellant, and Hardgrove said engineers expected that iodine may have vaporized during the long wait, getting into valves. They used heaters to try to free the valve, but those efforts were unsuccessful both before the lunar flyby and in the months after. “As far as we can tell, that valve is very, very stuck.” Those efforts are continuing, but he said time is running out to try and get LunaH-Map’s thrusters working. “If we cannot ignite the system, we are likely to end operations at the end of May.” As something of a last-ditch effort to open the valve, controllers are raising the temperature of the overall propulsion system to vaporize more iodine and build up the pressure. “At some point, we may burst through the valve, which could be good or could be very bad,” he said. “It’s really all we have left to try at this point.” The propulsion system is the only spacecraft system not working, Hardgrove said. “If we didn’t have to wait over a year, I think we would at least have had a chance at conducting our full science mission.” That mission involved going into an orbit that would take the spacecraft close to the lunar south pole, using a neutron spectrometer to map the presence of hydrogen linked to water ice deposits there. He noted the mission did test the spectrometer during the November lunar flyby at higher altitudes. LunaH-Map was one of 10 cubesats launched on Artemis 1, many of which suffered varying degrees of technical problems . They ranged from the propulsion system problems on LunaH-Map to spacecraft that were never heard from after deployment from the SLS or lost contact shortly afterwards. “For some of these missions on Artemis 1, we had to abandon the mission,” said Dan Grebow, a former JPL engineer now at mission design and navigation firm Nabla Zero Labs, during a panel discussion at the conference. He gave the example of NEA Scout, a cubesat that was designed to deploy a solar sail and go to a near Earth asteroid, but was never heard from after launch. He said the project gave up after not hearing from it, rather than continue to seek Deep Space Network time that could instead be used by other missions. “At some point, you need to know when to let go.” Hardgrove, also on the panel, defended the cubesat missions flown on Artemis 1. “Characterizing any of them as a failure is not fair,” he said. “They’ve all developed a substantial amount of technology.” “Many of these missions came very close to being successful,” he said. “Throwing the whole thing out is not fair.”
There were few major surprises when NASA rolled out a detailed architecture for human exploration of the moon and Mars at the 38th Space Symposium April 18. The 150-page document largely reinforced plans for the initial series of Artemis missions to the moon using the Space Launch System, Orion, Gateway, Human Landing System and other programs in development for years. “The Architecture Concept Review details plans for early human exploration of the moon’s south pole,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in a conference speech announcing the architecture. “It provides more definition for plans through Artemis 4 and sets the stage for the first crewed missions to Mars.” However, the architecture represents a fundamental change in how NASA plans its exploration programs. The Architecture Concept Review document and supporting white papers are intended to tie long-term objectives for human exploration to current and future programs. That’s intended to provide coherence and — NASA hopes — durability against inevitable technical and political challenges that will allow Artemis to continue when past efforts have failed. “It’s a pivot to a new kind of approach, a new methodology,” said Kurt “Spuds” Vogel, director of space architectures at NASA and one of the people leading the development of the new architecture. He described work on the architecture in a talk April 24 at a meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC), a group of companies and organizations working on technologies for lunar exploration. Vogel came to NASA in mid-2021 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the request of Melroy, a former DARPA deputy director. He recalled Melroy asking him to come to NASA to provide “another set of eyes” on the agency’s plans. He saw an opportunity to get out of the cycles of past efforts to return humans to the moon and go on to Mars that started with great fanfare but fell apart within a few years. “This has been a 30-plus-year ride,” he said, going back to President George H.W. Bush’s announcement of the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989 and its resurrection 15 years later by his son’s 2004 Vision for Space Exploration speech and the “Apollo on steroids” Constellation program that followed. “We’ve been on this roller coaster, and one of the big dips in that roller coaster ride is when Constellation got canceled,” he said. “There’s a lot of PTSD that everyone experienced from that, both inside the agency and our partners.” NASA then switched to a “capabilities-based” approach of developing programs, like the Space Launch System and Orion, without a broader architecture. Now it was time, Vogel and others at NASA believed, to develop a more comprehensive architecture into which those programs and others could fit. That would show policymakers and international partners that NASA had a rigorous plan. It would also provide guidance within the agency. Without that architecture, “everyone tells their own story, where the thing they’re working on is the most important,” he said. “They’ve got their own vision of how it fits.” That creates confusion inside and outside NASA. “We want to get out of this cycle,” he concluded. Throughout the development of the architecture, NASA repeated two phrases. One is what Melroy called the overarching goal or “bumper sticker” of the effort: “Create a blueprint for sustained human presence and exploration throughout the solar system.” The second is one that defined the overall process: “Architect from the right and execute from the left.” That meant starting from the goal and working backward to develop the plans and programs needed to achieve the goal, then carrying them out. That process publicly started last May when NASA released a set of 50 objectives for achieving that goal in science, transportation, infrastructure and operations. NASA took public feedback on those objectives and held workshops with both industry and international partners, resulting in a revised, expanded list of 63 objectives Melroy announced at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last September. NASA then took each objective and broke it down into “characteristics and needs,” or the features or products needed to achieve those goals. Those are then further decomposed into functions needed to achieve those characteristics and needs, as well as use cases that describe how those functions are used. Those functions and use cases can then be grouped together to identify similar features and “sub-architectures” in areas like transportation and habitation. “We broke down the objectives that are tied to human lunar return into characteristics, needs, use cases, functions and requirements,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in an interview shortly before the release of the architecture document. “We’ve connected the big-picture agency strategy to these near-term missions.” The intent, he said, was to link all the objectives to individual programs. “In our documentation, you’ll actually be able to see in the appendices the breakdowns from objectives to specific parts of the mission and elements of the architecture.” For example, one of the objects is to “develop cislunar systems that crew can routinely operate to and from lunar orbit and the lunar surface for extended durations.” NASA broke that down into five characteristics and needs for transporting crew and cargo from Earth to lunar orbit and from orbit to the surface. That, in turn, became six use cases, like “crew transport between cislunar space and lunar surface,” and 17 functions that ranged from stacking and integrating launch vehicles to recovering crew and cargo after splashdown. The report focused on the first phase of the overall moon-to-Mars effort, “human lunar return, “ which included missions through Artemis 4. NASA found nearly 40 use cases and more than 50 functions relevant to the objectives tied to those missions, then examined which program or programs were fulfilling them. Fortunately for NASA, those use cases and functions match up with the existing programs in development for the early Artemis missions. Only three, all related to crew training, were not allocated to any specific program, which NASA said in the report reflected the nature of how the human systems sub-architecture was defined, and not any actual gap in planning for those missions. Along with the main architecture document, NASA released several white papers going into detail about specific aspects of the architecture. One, for example, discussed why NASA selected the near-rectilinear halo orbit for the Gateway and compared that orbit against alternative orbits. “They’re very important to me personally,” Melroy, a former space shuttle commander, said of the white papers in an April 25 talk at the LSIC meeting. It reflected the experience from the years when Melroy, an Air Force combat veteran who’s also worked for the FAA and Lockheed Martin, was not at NASA. “I often took a look at the agency and said, ‘Why are we doing that?’” The papers, she said, helped explain the technical trades the agency made when choosing parts of the architecture. The architecture document is intended to be a living document. Melroy said NASA will solicit feedback on it with workshops this summer. “The objectives will stay with us, but we know that the architecture is going to evolve,” she said, reflecting new technologies and new capabilities. The goal is to hold the next architecture concept review in November, holding them annually to refine and extend the architecture. “It’s a very tight turnaround for us to get to November, but that’s what is going to align us with the budget,” she said. The future reviews will look further out. This document focused on human lunar return, only the first of four phases of the overall exploration campaign. More advanced lunar exploration, called “foundational exploration” and “sustained lunar evolution,” will go through a similar process of converting objectives into functions and use cases, identifying programs that can achieve them or gaps that need to be filled with new capabilities. A fourth phase is devoted to initial human missions to Mars. Even as that work gears up, NASA is rethinking some aspects of later Artemis missions. NASA originally talked about establishing a single “Artemis Base Camp” on the moon, building up infrastructure like rovers and habitats there. Free, though, said at Space Symposium that NASA is instead thinking of creating a few smaller bases because of changing lighting conditions at the south pole, where missing a launch window for a particular site might delay a mission there by months. Multiple sites could also improve science. “We could maybe have two or three sites to go to that help our science diversity,” he said. Those trades will come later. “NASA has positioned this strategy for longevity and success,” Melroy said in her Space Symposium speech. “This is a critical milestone for us in our moon-to-Mars strategy. We feel very aligned with our partners. We want to continue to stay that way.” This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory cubesat equipped with a Link 16 tactical communications radio will launch to low Earth orbit as early as June on the SpaceX Transporter 8 rideshare. The long-delayed experiment, named XVI, will demonstrate “improved communication with the allied Link-16 community,” a spokesperson for AFRL told SpaceNews . “The knowledge gained from the XVI experiment will inform future U.S. space architectures and acquisitions.” Viasat built the satellite for AFRL under a $10 million contract awarded in 2019. The company used a 12U cubesat bus made by Blue Canyon Technologies, a Link 16 payload made by Viasat and an L-band antenna made by Redwire. Viasat recently sold its Link 16 business to L3Harris Technologies. The U.S. military is interested in deploying Link 16 nodes in space to extend the network’s reach. Link 16 is an encrypted tactical data protocol used in military radios to connect aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles so they can exchange data, including text, voice messages and imagery. Link 16 is a line-of-sight network, and extending it into space would provide beyond line-of-sight connectivity. The XVI cubesat was projected to launch in 2020 but was delayed by supply chain problems. The experiment will support the Space Force’s Space Development Agency’s low Earth constellation which is deploying data transport satellites equipped with Link 16 communications payloads . This will allow SDA’s data-relay satellites to talk to platforms in the air, ground and sea via a the Link 16 network.
LeoStella, a manufacturer of small satellites, is pursuing U.S. defense sales amid a production slowdown at its factory in Washington state near Seattle. A large military constellation in low Earth orbit now being built by the Space Development Agency is a main target of opportunity, LeoStella’s chief executive Tim Kienberger told SpaceNews . SDA, an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a mesh network of military satellites in low Earth orbit. The network includes a Transport Layer of communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection satellites that SDA also is deploying as part of the military’s planned LEO architecture. LeoStella is in discussions with multiple defense contractors about using the company’s new satellite bus in future bids for SDA contracts, he said. Kienberger, a veteran aerospace executive, was named CEO of LeoStella in January. He previously worked on classified space programs at Boeing and L3Harris. “I’m trying to help this team achieve new things,” he said. LeoStella, formed in 2018, is co-owned by Thales Alenia Space and the geospatial intelligence company BlackSky. The company’s 22,000 square-foot factory can produce up to 40 satellites a year — and can be expanded to make as many as 60 — but is projecting to only deliver seven satellites this year, said Kienberger. “We’re currently under capacity,” he said. The company is now transitioning from BlackSky’s second-generation to third-generation imaging satellites, and is gearing up to start producing a new 300-kilogram satellite bus, named LS300, for an undisclosed commercial customer. The bus would also fit the SDA requirements, he said. BlackSky used the smaller 100-kilogram LS100 bus for its first-generation satellites and the larger LS200 for its second and third generation satellites. A major hurdle that LeoStella is trying to overcome, Kienberger said, is its relative lack of visibility within the industry. He noted that 19 satellite buses built by LeoStella have been launched to orbit, including 16 for BlackSky’s Earth observation constellation and three for satellites made by Loft Orbital . “We are continuing to spread the word of our offerings,” said Kienberger. To fill current excess capability, he added, LeoStella has reached out to competitors that have production backlogs and offered “bus manufacture for hire,” but nobody has agreed to any deals yet. Discussions with defense contractors Kienberger said he expects to sign agreements with prime contractors in the near future to supply buses for SDA satellites. There is now an open solicitation for the first 72 communications satellites of SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 2 . “We are talking to a number of companies, both traditional defense firms and new space,” he said. “They all want to pursue SDA Tranche 2. We definitely have our targets set on that.” Kienberger said LeoStella today is in a better position to compete for SDA deals than a couple of years ago when it was ramping up production of BlackSky’s second-generation satellites. Commercial suppliers are being encouraged by SDA to team up with defense contractors, said Kienberger. “SDA’s priorities are schedule and price points,” which suits commercial models. “A benefit for SDA is that we’re under capacity so we can meet the schedule.” He said LeoStella buses have 80% common components, which allows 20% for customization. SDA has been able to buy at much lower prices than traditional military spacecraft — about $15 million each for the Transport Layer satellites — by relying on commercial products. “If you price yourself appropriately, SDA is a great opportunity,” Kienberger said. SDA has already acquired 20 satellites for Tranche 0 of the Transport Layer and eight for Tranche 0 of the Tracking Layer. It has ordered 126 satellites for Transport Tranche 1, and 35 satellites for Tracking Layer Tranche 1. In advance of the procurement of Tracking Layer Tranche 2, expected in 2024,, the agency is currently soliciting industry comments. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Europe’s largest space companies have banded together to bid for a role in the European Union’s proposed multi-orbit connectivity constellation. The group is led by satellite operators Eutelsat, SES, and Hispasat; and satellite makers Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space. Satellite operator Hisdesat, spaceflight services company Telespazio, aerospace giant Thales, small satellite manufacturing specialist OHB, and terrestrial telcos Deutsche Telekom and Orange are also part of the group. The companies invited smaller businesses, including startups, to join what they described as an “open consortium” in a May 2 announcement that was light on details. Europe issued a request for competing bids in March to develop IRIS², or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, after approving plans to fund 40% of the 6 billion euro ($6.6 billion) project. Commercial companies are expected to cover the rest of the cost for a constellation projected to provide global coverage by 2027. Under measures designed to encourage smaller businesses to participate in IRIS², successful bidders must subcontract out at least 30% of contracts above 10 million euros via a competitive tender process. IRIS², which would complement satellites Europe has in geostationary orbit (GEO) and use quantum cryptography to protect communications, comes amid the growing dominance of U.S.-based Starlink’s broadband network in low Earth orbit (LEO) — and Chinese plans for a rival megaconstellation . The newly created consortium of established space firms said their integrated team would seek to foster collaboration among all European space players. The companies leading the consortium were part of an earlier study group the European Commission chose in 2020 to explore the feasibility of a sovereign constellation, which also included launch services provider Arianespace. The competitive tender for IRIS² is open to companies bidding collectively, and initial proposals are due this summer. However, the inclusion of Eutelsat in the group could cause headaches for European officials as the French GEO fleet operator seeks to merge this year with OneWeb, a LEO broadband operator partly owned by the British government. The U.K. will continue to hold a share in OneWeb through priority voting rights if the deal passes regulatory scrutiny. While Eutelsat has said OneWeb would be sufficiently ring-fenced within the enlarged group, a top European Union commissioner has previously warned of a potential conflict of interest post-Brexit.
A federal bankruptcy court has approved plans to conduct a sale of Virgin Orbit’s assets this month that could result in either new ownership for the launch provider or its dissolution. During a May 1 hearing, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware approved an order setting up bidding procedures for the sale of the company’s assets. Virgin Orbit had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with the court April 4 . The order sets of a swift timeline for the sale of the company. Potential bidders have until May 4 to submit non-binding indications of interest, with formal bids due May 15. If that process results in more than one qualified bid, an auction will take place May 18. A hearing on the sale is scheduled for May 24 in bankruptcy court. That schedule is similar to what the company proposed in filings with the court last month. It sought what it called an “expedited” sale that would attract interest from both those who considered investing in the company before the Chapter 11 filings and new bidders. “We continue to make important progress and remain focused on positioning the company to complete our sale process to the benefit of all stakeholders,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in a statement last month. “We remain committed to working with our investors and creditors throughout this process to achieve an optimal outcome for everyone.” For some, like Hart, that optimal outcome would be a sale of the entire company to a new owner who would continue operations. Virgin Orbit, with a minimal staff of about 100 employees after the company laid off most of its workforce in late March, is continuing preparations for a LauncherOne return to flight later this year. The company said April 19 that it had completed the investigation into the failed LauncherOne mission in January , confirming that a dislodged fuel filter caused the rocket’s upper stage to shut down prematurely. However, bidders could instead propose to purchase some subset of the company’s assets, like its Boeing 747 aircraft, if that maximizes the value of the deal for creditors. That would effectively break up the company. The hearing also approved a final order for debtor-in-possession financing to keep Virgin Orbit operating at a reduced level during the Chapter 11 process. That provides the company with up to $74.1 million in loans.
Several environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration May 1, arguing that the agency improperly carried out an environmental review of SpaceX Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. The suit , filed in federal district court, seeks to revoke the FAA’s launch license for Starship launches from Boca Chica and declare that an environmental review done as part of that process violated the National Environmental Policy Act. That review, completed In June 2022, allowed SpaceX to conduct launches provided it carried out prescribed mitigations. The lawsuit argues that the FAA failed to fully assess the impacts on the environment from launches, as well as launch failures, by the Starship/Super Heavy vehicle, citing the April 20 first integrated launch of that vehicle as an example. Thrust from the booster tore apart much of the concrete base of the pad, sending debris flying and creating a plume of sand and dust. The suit adds that the FAA also did not take into account extended closures of the highway that leads to both the Starbase site and the neighboring public beach, which the groups argue is counter to Texas state laws that guarantees free access to such beaches. It also argues that the agency did not adequately examine alternatives to launching from Boca Chica, such as launching from the Kennedy Space Center. “Federal officials should defend vulnerable wildlife and frontline communities, not give a pass to corporate interests that want to use treasured coastal landscapes as a dumping ground for space waste,” said Jared Margolis, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the suit. Other organizations joining the center in the lawsuit are the American Bird Conservancy, Surfrider Foundation, Save RGV and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc., an organization which represents local Native American groups. The FAA and its acting administrator, Billy Nolen, are listed as defendants, but not SpaceX. The suit cited the April 20 launch, which it noted ended in “a fiery explosion of the rocket just after liftoff.” The rocket’s flight termination system destroyed the rocket about four minutes after liftoff, when the vehicle was at an altitude of more than 30 kilometers above the Gulf of Mexico east of the launch site, with no reports of rocket debris falling back to the pad. That launch was one of several “anomalies” during testing at the Starbase site that has included crashes by earlier Starship prototype and exploding vehicles, scattering debris. The April 20 launch did cause damage to the launch site itself, “spewing chunks of concrete and metal, as well as ash and sand, over a large area,” the complaint stated, including nearby habitats used by protected migratory bird species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in an April 26 statement that its assessment of the damage from the launch found debris scattered over 385 acres of SpaceX property as well as the neighboring Boca Chica State Park. The plume from the launch deposited sand-like material more than 10 kilometers to the northwest. There was also evidence of a 3.5-acre wildfire caused by the launch in the vicinity of the pad. However, the agency said it had found no evidence of birds or other wildlife killed by the launch. A photo included in an American Bird Conservancy statement about the lawsuit showed a nest of eggs that appeared to have been burned, but the organization did not state when the photo was taken or what species of bird the eggs belonged to. In an April 29 audio chat on Twitter , SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said the debris and plume were unanticipated, based on the results of previous tests that showed only modest erosion of the concrete pad. “If we had expected to dig a hole, we would not have flown,” he said. He noted the debris was “basically sand and rocks,” although particulate material can cause respiratory problems. Musk said in that conversation that SpaceX was taking measures to prevent similar launch pad damage and creating of debris on future launches, such as installing a water deluge system. He said the company could be ready to fly again within a couple of months, although the FAA will need to sign off on those plans. The license it awarded SpaceX was originally valid for a single launch and would have to be amended by the agency before SpaceX could launch again. That process could take place even as the federal courts take up the case, a months-long process. The plaintiffs did not announce plans to seek an injunction halting launches while the case is considered. “At what point do we say ‘Space exploration is great, but we need to save habitats here on Earth as a top priority?’” said Mike Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy, in the statement announcing the suit. “For the sake of future generations, let’s protect the healthy habitats we have left instead of treating them as wasteplaces for pollution and fuselage.”
Leaders of the House Armed Services Committee are raising concerns about the Defense Department’s plan to procure space launch services beginning in 2025. They are questioning whether the proposed strategy, known as National Security Space Launch Phase 3, gives new entrants a fair opportunity to compete for contracts. The Space Force in February released a draft solicitation for NSSL Phase 3 launch contracts to be awarded in 2025. The procurement was divided into two tracks: Lane 1 is a multi-vendor competition aimed at medium-size rockets that would fly less-demanding missions. Lane 2 would select two launch providers that fly medium and heavy rockets to any of the orbits where the military and intelligence agencies deploy satellites. During a House Armed Services Committee hearing April 27, ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) noted that the Space Force plans to select two providers to fly as many as 40 missions projected for Lane 2 and that those two companies will get extra government funding not available to Lane 1 competitors. “As we talked about yesterday when we met … if you get into one of those contracts for those first 39 launches, you get support money to make sure you’re meeting those more difficult national security missions,” Smith told the chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman. Lane 2 companies are eligible for “launch service support” funding, a subsidy to cover rocket development or infrastructure expenses unique to NSSL. Additionally, Lane 2 winners qualify for annual incentive fees of up to $20 million and also would be allowed to compete for Lane 1 missions. Smith suggested that this approach would favor established NSSL Phase 2 providers United Launch Alliance and SpaceX, and could discourage emerging commercial startups from investing in new rockets that could challenge incumbents. “We would like to have as many providers capable of doing that as possible,” said Smith. “So I hope you’ll consider that as you’re finalizing the plan to make sure we maximize the competition in that way.” Similar debate in NSSL Phase 2 Smith’s comments recall the debate that preceded the NSSL Phase 2 procurement in 2019 when Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin — headquartered in Smith’s home state — was pushing the Air Force to allow a third launch provider. Blue Origin is developing a heavy rocket called New Glenn that did not make the cut in Phase 2 and is expected to compete again in Phase 3. “Competition is really important,” Smith told Saltzman at last week’s hearing. “Just 15 years ago we had just one launch provider. Now there are multiple that are trying to get in. I just want to really emphasize the importance of trying to make sure that there is as much competition as possible.” Saltzman defended the Phase 3 strategy. “I think the idea of two lanes for space launch providers is a solid way of both protecting the access to space for our most heavily mission assured missions, our lowest risk tolerant missions, while opening up an avenue for highly competitive emerging providers.” “We have to thread the needle a little bit,” said Saltzman, “because we have to have assured access for national security launches, but we want to maximize competition for those emerging providers. I think a two-lane approach is a nice balance of those competing requirements.” Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), who chairs the HASC strategic forces subcommittee, asked Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to discuss the merits of a two-lane procurement. Kendall said he supports the two-lane approach and revealed that the strategy was conceived by Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. “I approved the acquisition strategy that Frank Calvelli came up with,” Kendall told Lamborn. “I thought it was really balanced. It allows us to bring new entrants in early, fluidly, but it also gives us assured access for the higher risk missions.” Following the release of the draft solicitation seeking feedback from the industry, Kendall said about 2,000 comments have been received. Calvelli is reviewing those comments “and he’s open to other ideas on the draft,” he added. Kendall cautioned that allowing more than two providers in Lane 2 would drive up costs. “There are some costs associated with having an additional competitor there. And you lose some of the economies of scale if you do that, but he [Calvelli] will take a look at that and see if it makes sense.” ‘Open dialogue with industry’ Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space at the Space Systems Command, told reporters April 18 that a revised Phase 3 draft request for proposals will be issued this summer. More comments will be solicited before the final RFP is released later this year, Purdy said at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “We maintain a really good open dialogue with industry,” he said. “There will be some minor changes. But we think structurally the two-lane approach is sound. Most people seem to favor that.” Based on discussions with launch providers, Purdy said, “there will be some minor wording changes to help make things flow better. Currently, though, the plan is not to modify the major structural components.” He said Lane 1 is “really designed to get after the new market and new technology and capabilities out there … Lane 2 is about putting our flag out to make sure that we have critical launch capability.” Purdy explained that a priority in Lane 2 contracts is to “ block buy ” heavy launchers that are projected to be in high demand and tight supply in the coming years. Amazon’s procurement of heavy launch services for its Project Kuiper internet constellation “revealed that we’re kind of running out of launch,” said Purdy. “So Lane 2 is designed to block buy, or block that piece out to make sure that we’ve got it.” In Lane 1, Purdy said, “we want the commercial pricing.” With regard to concerns that Lane 2 providers would be able to compete in Lane 1 and “clean up by under bidding,” he said there are provisions to address that. There would be rules, for example, to prevent one single company from winning multiple consecutive awards, he said, “to make sure that we have some diversity in the marketplace, we want to make sure that we’ve got multiple providers.”
A radar antenna on a European mission to Jupiter has yet to fully deploy after launch, although project officials say they still have plenty of options to fix the problem. The European Space Agency said April 28 that the radar instrument on the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft had not fully deployed its 16-meter antenna as expected in the week after its April 13 launch. The antenna, extending from either side of the spacecraft, was only about a third of its intended length. Engineers suspect that a pin in the antenna is stuck, keeping the antenna stowed. “In this case, it is thought that just a matter of millimeters could make the difference to set the rest of the radar free,” the agency said in a statement. ESA is considering other measures to deploy the antenna. An upcoming engine burn will shake the spacecraft, potentially freeing the pin. The spacecraft will also rotate so that the antenna, currently in shadow, will move into sunlight and warm up. The radar instrument, called Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), is one of 10 instruments on JUICE. It is designed to probe into the icy surfaces of Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to a depth of nine kilometers. Development of RIME was led by the University of Trento in Italy, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory contributing components for the instrument. RIME is based on radar instruments flown on two Mars missions, ESA’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Many of the RIME team members worked on those two missions. The problem with RIME is the only major issue reported during the commissioning phase of JUICE, which is set to last two months. Other many systems, including the deployment of a 10.6-meter magnetometer boom, have taken place without incident. JUICE, which will arrive in the Jupiter system in 2031, is one of ESA’s flagship science missions. “It is really a fantastic mission. It is ESA’s most complex mission this decade in terms of space science missions,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said in an interview during the 38 th Space Symposium, days after the launch of JUICE.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the Americas-focused ViaSat-3 broadband satellite on a Falcon Heavy rocket April 30 following delays partly caused by severe weather that included lightning and tornado warnings. The Falcon Heavy lifted off 8:26 p.m. Eastern from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, toward geostationary orbit (GEO) in the rocket’s sixth flight since its debut in 2018. Both side boosters separated from the core stage just over three minutes after lift-off. The boosters had previously supported nine earlier missions in total, however, SpaceX decided not to attempt to recover them this time to improve the rocket’s performance. The primary roughly 6,000-kilogram ViaSat-3 Americas payload was deployed around four hours and 32 minutes after lift-off, followed by two rideshare payloads: Arcturus, the first broadband satellite built by Californian venture Astranis at under 400 kilograms, and a cubesat from Washington-based Gravity Space with a communications payload. The mission had at one point been scheduled for April 18 but was delayed for undisclosed reasons to April 26 following a static-fire test. SpaceX then delayed the April 26 launch by a day to complete data reviews. However, severe weather April 27 disrupted that mission. Lightning struck the tower at the Falcon Heavy’s LC-39A launchpad during the storm, prompting SpaceX engineers to conduct checks on the rocket, its payloads, and ground systems. SpaceX aborted another launch attempt April 28 at T-minus 59 seconds for reasons it did not disclose. With severe weather conditions forecast again for April 29, the mission was bumped to April 30. Long time coming The delays were part of a long-running series of setbacks for Viasat, which had originally planned to deploy the first of three ViaSat-3 satellites in 2019 — before being caught up in production and supply chain issues compounded by the pandemic. There were payload, satellite integration, and launch delays, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg told SpaceNews in an interview, “but the single biggest contributor was COVID-19,” which also led to a shortage of skilled workers . Contact was established with ViaSat-3 Americas about 15 minutes after lift-off, Viasat announced, and the satellite will attempt to deploy its solar arrays over the coming days. Dankberg said it will take close to three weeks for ViaSat-3 Americas to reach its final GEO position at 88.9 degrees West, and then another two to three months to complete health checks ahead of entering commercial service. Viasat developed the payload for each ViaSat-3 internally and is using a chassis from Boeing based on the manufacturer’s 702 satellite platform. Each Viasat-3 is designed to provide more than 1,000 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity, roughly three times more than Viasat provides over the Americas with the ViaSat-2 satellite launched in 2017. The second ViaSat-3 is being designed for coverage over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The third and final ViaSat-3 would cover Asia. Dankberg said the second ViaSat-3 is currently undergoing final integration and tests at Boeing’s facilities ahead of a launch this fall on an Atlas 5 from United Launch Alliance. “The third one is just about to be shipped to Boeing for integration,” he added, “and we expect that to launch a little over a year from now.” Viasat had a contract to launch its third ViaSat-3 on Ariane 6, Arianespace’s next-generation launch vehicle. However, Dankberg said the operator is seeking to order a different launch vehicle following delays to get Ariane 6 into service . In addition to adding a significant amount of capacity, the first ViaSat-3 satellite would enable the company to extend its reach over the Americas. “One of the really striking, immediate advantages with ViaSat-3, once we bring that into service, will be covering air routes to Hawaii,” Dankberg said. He said the satellite would also enable Viasat to expand services out of Brazil to cover all of South America for the first time. Hitching a ride Astranis has secured a deal to lease the 10 Gbps of capacity on Arcturus to Pacific Dataport Inc. (PDI), a U.S.-based telco planning to use it for internet services across Alaska over the satellite’s seven-year lifetime. The Californian venture plans to launch a batch of four more satellites on a dedicated Falcon 9 mission in late summer. Mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu is leasing capacity on two of these satellites, Peru-based cellular backhaul provider Andesat has an agreement for another, and Astranis said the fourth satellite has a customer that it will announce later. Mexican telco Apco Networks said March 14 it has ordered two satellites from Astranis for a third batch of spacecraft that the manufacturer aims to launch on an undisclosed rocket next year. Astranis recently raised more than $200 million for its expansion plans in an equity and debt deal led by the growth fund of U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said the first integrated test flight of his company’s Starship vehicle met his expectations despite a cascading series of engine failures and other malfunctions that eventually caused the rocket to lose control. Musk, speaking in a subscriber-only chat April 29 on Twitter, the social media company he acquired last year, predicted that the company would be ready to make another launch attempt in about two months with a greater chance of reaching space. “The outcome was roughly sort of what I expected and maybe slightly exceeded my expectations,” he said. Those expectations, he said, were that the vehicle would get clear of the pad and get “significant” data during the flight, including through maximum dynamic pressure or max-Q. “Overall, I actually feel like that was a great flight.” Musk offered a recap of the flight, noting that problems began immediately at liftoff when 3 of the 33 Raptor engines in the vehicle’s Super Heavy booster either failed to start or aborted during startup. “Those engines did not explode, but the system didn’t think they were healthy enough to bring them to full thrust.” He added that the 30 working engines was the minimum needed for liftoff, causing a distinct lean to the vehicle as it cleared the pad. At T+27 seconds, a Raptor designated engine 19 lost communications at the same time that “some kind of energetic event” broke off part of the heat shield around that engine and three others. At that point there were “visible fires” coming from the aft end of the rocket, he said. At T+62 seconds, there was additional heat shield damage around another Raptor, engine 30, although that engine continued to operate. At T+85 seconds, “things really hit the fan,” he said, with the loss of communication with another engine. “Roughly from this point onwards, we lose thrust vector control of the rocket,” he said, meaning it could no longer steer. It was not clear what caused the engine failures, but Musk said it did not appear to be damage from the “rock tornado” of debris from the concrete pad created by the thrust of the engines at liftoff. “Weirdly, we do not see evidence of the rock tornado actually damaging engines or heat shields in a material way,” he said. “It may have, but we have not yet seen evidence of that.” SpaceX made no attempt to separate the Starship upper stage from the Super Heavy vehicle as it tumbled in later stages of flight. Musk said while controllers initiated the flight termination system, it took much longer than expected, about 40 seconds, for explosives to rupture the vehicle’s tanks. Requalifying that flight termination system will be the long-lead item for the next launch, he predicted, with the next vehicle and a repaired pad likely ready in six to eight weeks. “Hopefully, we’ll be ready to fly again in a couple months.” Musk played down the damage to the pad itself, including concrete debris scattered over nearly 400 acres around the pad and a plume that deposited a sand-like material more than 10 kilometers away. “The debris was basically sand and rocks,” he said, “but we don’t want to do that again.” Changes to the pad include placing a water-jacketed “steel sandwich” below the launch mount. “You have what’s basically a massive super strong steel showerhead pointing up,” he said, with that water deluge system mitigating dust and debris. SpaceX had been working on that device before the launch but it was not ready in time. “If we had expected to dig a hole, we would not have flown,” Musk said. Data from the static fire test in February, when 31 of 33 Raptor engines fired at 50% of their rated thrust, caused “fairly modest erosion” of Fondag, the heavy-duty concrete used on the pad. “We thought it would be fine for one launch.” He said SpaceX will also be replacing damaged tanks in the tank farm at the pad that were already set to be swapped out with vacuum-jacketed versions. The launch tower itself suffered no “meaningful” damage, he added. The next launch will use a Super Heavy booster called Booster 9, but he said the company had not decided which of the Starship upper stages will fly. “The engines on Booster 9, which is next, are much newer and more consistent, and with significant reliability improvements,” he said, along with improved shielding. “I think we’ll see a much more robust engine situation with Booster 9.” He was optimistic that the second launch will get at least through stage separation. “Our goal for the next flight is make it to staging and hopefully succeed in staging and get to orbit,” he said. “I think we’ve got a decent shot of getting to orbit on the next flight.” He said later in the nearly hour-long conversation that he gave a “better than 50% chance of reaching orbit” on the next launch. That launch, though, will be a repeat of the flight profile of the original flight, a “nearly orbital” trajectory that would have Starship splash down off the coast of Hawaii 90 minutes after liftoff, short of one complete orbit. Musk estimated SpaceX will attempt four to five Starship launches this year. “I would be surprised if we exit this year without getting to orbit,” he said, giving the company an “80%-plus probability” of doing so, increasing to nearly 100% within 12 months. He said the company will spend about $2 billion this year on Starship, which he argued the company can support without raising outside funding. “Once again, excitement is guaranteed,” Musk said of the next launch. “Success is not.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched a second pair of O3b mPower satellites April 28 for SES, which is now just one launch away from bringing its next-generation broadband constellation in medium Earth orbit (MEO) online. The satellites lifted off at 6:12 p.m. Eastern on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, after clearing threats of poor weather that delayed a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch at the Cape yesterday. The Falcon 9’s first-stage booster, which had previously supported a crewed flight to the International Space Station, also successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean shortly following the launch for reuse. SES confirmed it successfully made contact with both satellites post-launch. It will now take several more months for the two satellites to independently reach their final positions in MEO by using their onboard all-electric propulsion. The first pair of O3b mPower satellites that SpaceX launched Dec. 16 have since reached their target positions, according to SES, although they still need to complete health checks before entering service. There are 11 Boeing-built satellites in the initial O3b mPower system, all with SpaceX launch contracts, but SES said it needs just six to start providing services that promise 10 times more throughput than its current MEO constellation. SpaceX is slated to launch another pair of satellites before the end of June, which would keep SES on track to begin commercial O3b mPower services in the third quarter of this year. Each O3b mPower satellite is designed to scale from tens of megabits per second of throughput to multiple gigabits per second, roughly 10 times more than its first generation of 20 O3b satellites in MEO. Customers that have signed up for O3b mPower so far include cloud provider Microsoft, cruise operator Princess Cruises, and telcos Claro Brasil, Vodafone Cook Islands, CNT Ecuador, and Orange of France. The government of Luxembourg, where SES is based, announced plans in February to acquire capacity from O3b mPower in a 10-year deal valued at 195 million euros ($215 million), subject to parliamentary approval. Weather forecasts had at one point projected just a 20% chance of good conditions for SpaceX’s April 28 O3b mPower launch. SpaceX was due to make another attempt at launching ViaSat-3 Americas with a Falcon Heavy from a nearby launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 8:26 p.m. Eastern April 28, at the end of a 57-minute window, but aborted the launch at T-minus 59 seconds for reasons it did not disclose. SpaceX said its next launch opportunity for this mission is April 29 at 8:26 p.m. Eastern. The mission also includes two rideshare payloads: a communications cubesat from Washington-based Gravity Space and the first broadband satellite built by Astranis of California. Update: SpaceX ultimately launched this Falcon Heavy mission April 30 .
Chinese rocket startup Orienspace is moving towards a debut launch from a sea platform in the. The Gravity-1 rocket will launch from a mobile sea platform developed as part of sea launch facilities developed at Haiyang in Shandong province during the second half of 2023, CEO Yao Song said in a mid-April meeting with provincial government leaders. Earlier announcements point to a fourth quarter launch. Orienspace has already secured orders for the launch of hundreds of satellites and been shortlisted in plans for a number of satellite constellations, Yao stated. Gravity-1 consists of three solid stages and four side boosters. The rocket will have the capability to lift around 6,500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), or 3,700 kilograms to 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). It will be China’s and the world’s most capable all-solid orbital launch vehicle. Gravity-1 will also have the greatest lift capacity of operational rockets in China’s budding commercial space sector so far. Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-2—China’s first privately-operated liquid propellant rocket to reach orbit—set the current commercial record earlier this month . Tianlong-2 is capable of carrying 2,000 kilograms to LEO. Orienspace, founded in 2020, has moved fast. Though following a pattern of first developing a solid rocket laid down by the earliest private launch startups in China, the size of the first vehicle is much greater, reflecting changes in the market and potential customers. The company has been very active so far in 2023, including raising $47 million in funding, it announced in January. Orienspace previously raised $59.9 million last May . Orienspace signed a contract with Changguang Satellite Technology Co. Ltd., (CGST) April 17 for the launch of a number of Jilin-1 Gaofen-05 series spacecraft. The series will be the fourth generation of remote sensing satellite for CGST, a remote sensing satellite manufacturer and operator, spun off from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics under the sprawling Chinese Academy of Sciences. Six months ago CGST announced that it planned to expand its under-construction Jilin-1 constellation from a planned total of 138 satellites to 300. The move also requires greater access to launch. Orienspace signed a strategic cooperation agreement April 22 with Aerospace Hongtu, under Piesat Information Technology Co. Ltd. Aerospace Hongtu is building a synthetic aperture radar satellite constellation and recently saw four of its satellites reach orbit aboard a Long March 2D. Orienspace has more ambitious plans beyond Gravity-1. Gravity-2 will have a liquid core stage and solid boosters, giving a payload capacity of 15.5 tons to LEO, 10.9 to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), or 5.8 tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). Orienspace recently tested the gas generator for its 100-ton-thrust Yuanli-85 engine for the rocket. The company is aiming for a test flight in 2025. Gravity-3 will have a center core and a similarly sized booster either side. It will be able to carry 30.6 tons to LEO, or 8 tons to lunar transfer orbit, according to the company. The kerosene-liquid oxygen core stages will also be reusable. The inaugural launch is currently slated for 2027. More immediately, Orienspace’s Medium and Large-scale Launch Vehicle Assembly Integration Test Center is expected to come online mid-year. It will eventually be capable of producing a total of 20 medium and large launch vehicles per year. Gravity-1 is one of a number of commercial launchers set to fly this year. Commercial launch providers could potentially add more than 20 launches year. These add to plans by the country’s main contractor to launch more than 60 times this year.
The U.S. Air Force Navigation Technology Satellite-3 — a flight experiment seven years in the making — is undergoing final tests ahead of a projected 2024 launch. A lot is riding on this project. The $250 million experiment led by the Air Force Research Laboratory aims to deliver novel technologies for space-based positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). It’s also seen as a test case for the management of the so-called PNT enterprise, which includes the satellites, the ground system and the receivers that allow users to talk to the satellites. “In fiscal year 2024, we will launch and begin testing of the Navigation Technology Satellite 3, an end-to-end space-based prototype across space, ground, and user equipment segments to improve resiliency in contested environments against jamming and spoofing,” Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said April 26 in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. In this case, “end to end” means the program is equally focused on the ground, space and user segments. The Air Force wants NTS-3 to serve as a model for how to avoid the problems experienced in the Global Positioning System program that for years has come under fire for the management of the ground segment and user equipment procurements. The GPS next-generation ground system known as OCX was characterized by Calvelli as a “troubled program which is years late and significantly overrun on costs.” Meanwhile, delays in the development of modern GPS receivers, according to the Government Accountability Office , have prevented military users from taking advantage of the more secure jam-resistant signals broadcast by GPS 3 satellites. Calvelli has said that the problems experienced by GPS and other military satellites programs led him to write a list of “ space acquisition tenets ,” one of which is to “deliver ground before launch.” NTS-3 will seek to demonstrate next-generation technologies not only in the satellite but also in the ground segment and signal-receiver devices, said Arlen Biersgreen, the NTS-3 program manager at AFRL. Biersgreen in a recent interview said the satellite and ground control system are in the final integration and test campaign. The project has garnered high-level attention, Biersgreen said. In the past several months he has briefed officials from the Air Force, Space Force and the Department of Transportation. Many of the questions he gets, Biersgreen added, are about the potential of NTS-3 to add a layer of resilience to the nation’s PNT capabilities. Focus on space and ground The satellite, built by L3Harris, will operate for one year in a near-geosynchronous orbit and will broadcast navigation signals from its phased array antenna, which can electronically steer signals to a desired region without physically moving the satellite. Biersgreen said a digital reprogrammable PNT signal generator allows new signal updates after launch so it can counter interference. It also has new features designed to defeat spoofing. The ground control system, developed by Parsons Corp., will be operated at AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate headquarters at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Ed Baron, senior vice president of Parsons’ space mission solutions, said compatibility testing with the satellite will be completed this summer. Unlike other DoD space programs, the NTS-3 ground system development started before the satellite was built, Baron said. Parsons won the contract in 2017 and L3Harris received the satellite contract in 2018 . AFRL will use commercial ground antennas to increase opportunities for contact time with the satellite while reducing dependence on strained government antennas, Baron said. Biersgreen said the software-defined radio technology used in the receivers will give operators on the ground access to NTS-3 and also GPS signals, as well as additional anti-jam and anti-spoof protections. The technologies demonstrated in NTS-3 are expected to transition to military PNT satellites that could serve as backup to GPS. Ensuring access to space-based PNT has become a growing priority since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where jammers were deployed by Russian forces to disrupt GPS signals. In addition to denying GPS through electronic jamming attacks, foreign militaries can also target U.S. military GPS users with falsified PNT data, a technique known as spoofing. The Air Force designated NTS-3 as one of its so-called vanguard programs that promise to provide “superior advantages in the battlefield.” “GPS is going to continue to be the gold standard, but we need to provide additional options,” Biersgreen said. Launch date still uncertain NTS-3 is scheduled for launch on USSF-106, a national security space mission assigned to United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. The 1,250-kilogram satellite will ride as a secondary payload. That mission has been projected to launch in late 2023 but is likely to slip to 2024 due to delays caused by a Centaur upper stage anomaly that is still being investigated. Vulcan has to complete two flights before it can be certified to fly USSF-106. A spokesman for the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command said the USSF-106 launch date “and any associated impacts due to the recent Centaur 5 test anomaly are currently under review. Any updates or new planning dates will be determined after the ULA investigation is complete.”
Astra Space and Exotrail have won orders for satellite electric propulsion systems as they work to scale up production of those products. Astra announced April 27 it won an order for five of its Astra Spacecraft Engines from Apex, a company developing a line of standardized smallsats. The companies did not disclose the terms of the contract but Astra said it would start delivering the engines later this year. “The Astra Spacecraft Engine has the flight heritage and the performance we need to deliver our satellite platforms to customers on schedule,” Max Benassi, chief technology officer of Apex, said in a statement. Apex announced April 4 it expects to launch its first Aries satellite in early 2024 , with plans to produce such satellites in volume over time for government and commercial customers. Astra is supplying the electric propulsion systems to Apex in a form called the Spacecraft Propulsion Kit. That kit splits the overall propulsion system into separate components for customization by customers. Astra announced the Spacecraft Propulsion Kit at its Spacetech Day event April 25 at the company’s Alameda, California, headquarters. “We’re adopting the way dev kits have transformed the software industry,” said Margo de Naray, general manager for the Astra Spacecraft Engine, at the event. “We’re providing the support and tools to accelerate spacecraft development at scale.” She said at the event that Astra had sold the first five kits “last night,” but did not disclose the customer at the time. As of the end of March, Astra had orders for 278 of the Hall effect thrusters, with nine of them on satellites in orbit. To meet demand, Astra recently opened a 5,600-square-meter facility in Sunnyvale, California, to produce the engines that de Naray said will have an ultimate capacity of more than 500 thrusters a year. The Astra Spacecraft Engine was originally developed by a propulsion startup, Apollo Fusion, that Astra acquired in 2021 . Astra purchased it as part of efforts to become vertically integrated to build satellites as well as launch vehicles. However, the thrusters have become a primary source of revenue for the company in recent quarters as it put its satellite constellation plans on hold and retired its Rocket 3.3 vehicle in favor of the larger Rocket 4 that is still in development. Those thrusters “turned out to be an incredible surprise for us,” said Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, at the Spacetech Day event. “We started selling spacecraft engines, and then we sold more spacecraft engines.” “This has turned out to be an important revenue stream for the company. As we start to ship these spacecraft engines, it allows Astra to have two different pillars of growth,” he said, alongside launch services. “And, the spacecraft engines give us visibility into the satellites that are coming out.” The Astra deal came one day after French propulsion company Exotrail announced it won an order for its spaceware Hall effect thruster from South Korean satellite manufacturer Satrec Initiative. The system will be used on an Earth observation satellite for the South Korean government. The spaceware thruster comes in several configuration, and Exotrail said it sold a “micro XL” version that uses 150 watts of power and produces seven millinewtons of thrust. “We are extremely thankful to Satrec Initiative for this mark of confidence, emphasizing the fact that our spaceware product is a true asset for the constellation market, notably for Earth observation satellites,” Jean-Luc Maria, chief executive of Exotrail, said in a statement. Exotrail raised $58 million in a Series B round in February to fund the company’s expansion plans. That funding would support increased production of spaceware thruster systems as well as work on an orbital transfer vehicle. The company said the funding would also enable expansion into the U.S. and Asian markets.
TAMPA, Fla. — Spaceport Cornwall, which provided the runway for Virgin Orbit’s failed launch from the U.K. in January, opened a new operations facility April 27 to attract more businesses in the wake of its flagship customer’s bankruptcy. According to Spaceport Cornwall, part of the Cornwall Airport Newquay in southwestern England, 10 organizations ranging from satellite operators to software providers are interested in moving into the Space Systems Operations Facility (SSOF) in the coming weeks. They are Avanti Communications, Goonhilly, KISPE, D-Orbit, Exobotics, Expleo, Geospatial Ventures, Satellite Applications Catapult, Space Skills Alliance, and Intelligent AI. The SSOF houses a clean room, making Spaceport Cornwall the only site in the U.K. where a satellite could be built, integrated, and launched. The building sits alongside the Space Systems Integration Facility that Virgin Orbit had used to integrate satellites into its LauncherOne air-launch system, which failed to reach orbit Jan. 9 in the first-ever orbital mission from British soil. Three months later, U.S.-based Virgin Orbit collapsed into Chapter 11 restructuring as it struggled to pay its bills, despite previously completing four successful consecutive launches from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California between January 2021 and July 2022. “Over the last 18 months going into the [U.K.] launch campaign, we were intrinsically linked with Virgin Orbit, and everybody saw us as one,” Spaceport Cornwall head Melissa Quinn told SpaceNews in an interview. “And so when we saw what happened with Virgin Orbit, everybody just assumed that the same happened to us. But actually, the project was always intended to be multi-user, and to be a wider cluster. While launch “was definitely a catalyst and magnet to attract business to the site,” she said it was always meant to be “the cherry on top of all the other activity that we’re doing.” Virgin Orbit had also only planned to launch once or twice a year from Spaceport Cornwall in the near term, she said. That leaves a lot of room for other companies to take advantage of the first-of-its-kind spaceport license Spaceport Cornwall secured in November. However, Quinn said U.S.-based Sierra Nevada Corporation, Canada’s Space Engine Systems, and other launch companies looking to use its site are still years away from operations. Despite its financial troubles, she said that makes it likely that LauncherOne will be behind the next launch out of Spaceport Cornwall. Virgin Orbit said April 19 that it could return LauncherOne to flight this year after pinning the January failure on a dislodged fuel filter. The company hopes to complete a sale of its business in May. Spaceport Cornwall’s operations and integration facilities are part of a £5.6 million ($7 million) government-funded project to drive inward investment to the region.
China National Space Administration will soon set up an organization to oversee and coordinate the China-led International Lunar Research Station. Wu Weiren, Director General of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), said during an exploration conference April 25 that the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organization (ILRSCO) would soon be established to coordinate and manage the construction of the ILRS moon base. Founding members are expected to sign the agreement on ILRSCO before June. CNSA and the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO) signed a joint statement on ILRS cooperation as part of the opening ceremony of DSEL’s first International Conference on Deep Space Exploration in Hefei, Anhui province on April 25. APSCO members include China, Bangladesh, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand. Wu noted that CNSA has signed cooperation agreements or letters of intent with a number of countries and international bodies, including Russia, Argentina, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil since unveiling the first ILRS road map 2021, South China Morning Post reported . The project is being opened to countries and organizations worldwide, according to Wu. “We welcome the participation of developed countries such as the United States and European countries. We also hope that BRICS countries and some underdeveloped African countries will join us,” Wu told CCTV ahead of China’s national space day on April 24. State media Global Times reported that more than 10 countries are currently negotiating the agreement. Venezuela is understood to be close to signing an agreement on the ILRS. The ILRS project and ILRSCO are somewhat analogous to the U.S.-led Artemis program and its political underpinning, the Artemis Accords, to which 23 countries have signed up. Notably Russia had been stated to be a joint partner in the ILRS when unveiled in 2021 . However, overt mentions of Russia have been missing from Chinese statements of the plan following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The next steps in China’s lunar exploration plans were also laid out in full this week. The next mission is to be the launch of the Queqiao-2 lunar relay satellite early next year. It will support the Chang’-6 sample return mission scheduled to launch in May 2024. That mission aims to be the first ever to deliver to Earth samples collected from the lunar far side. It will target the southern area of Apollo basin. Queqiao-2 is an upgrade on the earlier Queqiao satellite currently supporting the Chang’e-4 lunar far side lander and rover. The new spacecraft will also act as a communications relay for the Chang’e-7 and 8 missions to the lunar south pole. Chang’e-7 includes an orbiter, lander, rover and hopping spacecraft designed to seek out water-ice in permanently shadowed craters. The mission will launch in 2026 and target a landing site at 88.8 degrees South, 123.4° East at Shackleton crater. Chang’e-8, launching in 2028, will include a robot designed to test 3D printing bricks from lunar regolith. It will serve as a basis for the full ILRS project to follow in the 2030s. ILRS presently consists of five planned missions to set up nuclear energy, communications, astronomical observation and other infrastructure for a robotic research station which will, when completed, host astronauts. The project will require the development of five major infrastructures, DSEL’s Wu Yanhua and former CNSA deputy director said during a keynote speech on April 25. These include an Earth-moon Transportation System , a lunar surface long-term operation System, lunar surface transportation and science research facilities. An upgraded version of the ILRS is envisioned to be completed by 2050. Wu Weiren said that China will, without doubt, be capable of landing astronauts on the moon before 2030. The country is currently working on the required hardware to realize a crewed lunar landing. The Queqiao-2 satellite will be part of a larger Queqiao (meaning “magpie bridge,” referencing a story from Chinese mythology) constellation. It will provide communication, navigation and remote sensing support for future crewed lunar landings and potentially robotic missions to deep space. Last month a senior Chinese space official called for the speeding up of China’s efforts to build lunar infrastructure or miss a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to secure its global role in lunar exploration.
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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a House committee that SpaceX’s truncated Starship test flight was not a major setback in plans to use that vehicle to land astronauts on the moon as soon as 2025. Testifying before the House Science Committee April 27 about the agency’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, Nelson said SpaceX expects to be ready to make another Starship launch attempt in as little as two months. “The explosion, that’s not a big downer,” he said of the April 20 test flight of the integrated Starship/Super Heavy vehicle from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, test site . The vehicle, which suffered several failed engines, started tumbling a few minutes after liftoff and was destroyed by its flight termination system four minutes into what was planned to be a 90-minute suborbital flight. He explained SpaceX’s “hardware-rich” approach to vehicle development, with several Starship and Super Heavy vehicles in production. “That’s their modus operandi. They launch, and if something goes wrong, they figure out what it is, go back, and they launch it again.” Nelson said NASA has been in contact with SpaceX and expects the company to be able to launch again soon. “As of today, SpaceX is still saying that they think it will take about at least two months to rebuild the launch pad and, concurrently, about two months to have their second vehicle ready to launch.” SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk has publicly offered similar schedules. However, the ability for SpaceX to launch again depends not just on launch pad repairs and assembly of the next vehicle but also completion of an investigation into the April 20 launch and approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which issued the launch license for the flight. NASA is closely watching progress on Starship because it selected that vehicle for its Human Landing System (HLS) program two years ago. NASA will use a lunar lander variant of Starship to carry astronauts to the lunar surface on the Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 missions under awards worth a combined $4 billion. The vehicle will also be eligible to compete for landings on later missions. Asked by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), about the confidence in schedules for upcoming missions, Nelson said he expects Artemis 2 to launch in “the end of 2024” with Artemis 3 following about a year later. A mission manifest published by NASA in March showed Artemis 2 launching in November 2024 and Artemis 3 in December 2025. “I’m fairly confident, but there are still a lot of things that have to be done,” he said of the schedule for those missions. That same manifest pushed Artemis 4 out a year from 2027 to September 2028. Nelson said the driving factor for that slip was development of the Exploration Upper Stage for the Block 1B version of the Space Launch System being built by Boeing. “Some additional funding could help remedy part of that,” he suggested. Democratic members of the committee asked Nelson about the effects of potential budget cuts should an overall spending plan like that narrowly approved by the House April 26, intended to reduce discretionary spending to lower budget deficits, go into effect. Such a plan, those members argued, could reduce NASA’s budget by up to 22%. “It would be a disaster. We would be delayed,” Nelson said. The same would be true, he added, if Congress passes a full-year continuing resolution, keeping funding at fiscal year 2023 levels rather than the proposed 7% increase for 2024. “That’s not going to be good, either.” Such cuts, he said, would rule out any effort to move Artemis 4 back to 2027. It would also push out Artemis 5, which will use a lander developed by a second provider that NASA is preparing to select this summer, joining SpaceX. “Without any additional funding, you’re looking ’29, ’30, ’31,” he said. Artemis 5 is currently projected for 2029. Nelson said he was eager to select a second provider, subtly criticizing NASA’s decision before he joined the agency to select only SpaceX for the HLS program, a decision driven by the available funding and SpaceX’s bid that was far less than its competitors. “We don’t want to leave all of our eggs in the one basket of a SpaceX lander. We want to have another lander.” That was a relief to the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) “I must say, when I saw that rocket blow up, I thought, thank God there’s no people on board. Sometimes the lowest bidder is not always the best choice.”
The Russian government has agreed to continue participation in the International Space Station to at least 2028, the last partner to agree to an extension of the station’s operations. NASA said April 27 that Russia had confirmed it will support the station through 2028. The other partners — NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — had previously agreed to keep the station going beyond 2024 to 2030. Roscosmos announced April 25 that Yuri Borisov, head of the agency, had sent letters to the leaders of the other space agencies involved in ISS, informing that that the Russian government had agreed to an extension. “The ISS program is the largest and most successful international project in the field of space, and I am glad that such a unique laboratory will continue its work and will contribute to the realization of the most daring ideas of mankind in space exploration,” he said in translated remarks published by Roscosmos on social media. “The International Space Station is an incredible partnership with a common goal to advance science and exploration,” said Robyn Gatens, director of the ISS division at NASA Headquarters, in a NASA statement. “Extending our time aboard this amazing platform allows us to reap the benefits of more than two decades of experiments and technology demonstrations, as well as continue to materialize even greater discovery to come.” Russia’s future on the station had been uncertain as Roscosmos discussed plans to develop its own national space station in the latter half of the 2020s. Borisov, shortly after being named head of Roscosmos in July 2022, said that Russia would leave the partnership “after 2024,” which many interpreted to mean immediately after 2024. Borisov soon softened those remarks , saying that Russia would leave at some time after 2024 . He, though, was skeptical that Russia would be involved through 2030, the date set by NASA and accepted by other partners, citing a lack of research it needed to perform on the station and the health of some of the station’s aging modules. Others at Roscosmos offered similar remarks. “‘After 2024’ could mean 2025, 2028 or 2030,” said Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human space flight programs at Roscosmos, at a NASA briefing in August . “The decision about the termination of the program will be based on the technical condition of the station and assessment of outcomes.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson did not mention the Russian statement in testimony before the House Science Committee April 27 about the agency’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, but did emphasize, as he has repeatedly done since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, that a good working relationship continues with Roscosmos. “We built it together and we have to operate it together,” he said of the U.S.-Russian partnership on the station. “That goes on today without a hitch.” The partnership continues, he said later in the hearing, despite technical issues such as coolant leaks on Soyuz and Progress spacecraft while docked to the station. “We think they are on top of it,” he said. “I can’t tell you if that’s a design issue or if it was a production issue.” He added that NASA, working with Roscosmos, “had pretty well ruled out” that it was caused by a micrometeoroid impact, Russia’s initial explanation for the Soyuz leak in December. “There has not been a problem of transparency between the two of us,” he said of the space station relationship. “We built the station together. We operate it together. Both the astronauts and the cosmonauts know we have to continue to work together for the safety of the crew.” The cooperation, he said, requires an extension of a long-standing waiver to sanctions imposed by the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA) so that NASA can provide funding to Russia. That waiver was initially linked to payments for Soyuz seats NASA purchased from Roscosmos, but today seats between the agencies are bartered with commercial crew vehicles now in operation. Nelson did not directly address a question about the need for another INKSNA extension posed by Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) at the hearing, but again emphasized the need for integrated crews on Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles so that NASA and Roscosmos are guaranteed a presence on the station.
China’s Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology is marketing reusable rocket engines to speed up development of China’s commercial space sector. Three engines are being marketed, including the YF-102 kerosene-liquid oxygen gas generator engine, which uses 3D printing techniques and the vacuum-optimized YF-102V. The third is the reusable YF-209 methane-liquid oxygen, 80-ton-thrust engine. The latter is still in development, with hot fire testing being carried out in February. The YF-102 engines have already been used in flight. Three YF-102 engines powered the first stage of the Tianlong-2 rocket developed by private company Space Pioneer. The first flight of the rocket , in April, was the first Chinese commercial liquid propellant rocket to send a payload into orbit. AALPT is a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-owned space and defense giant and the country’s main space contractor. AALPT said the engines are designed to be low-cost and suitable for mass production. The academy is building a production line capable of delivering 300 of the engines per year. “We can see that its construction is relatively simple, the number of components is small, a large number of mature material systems are used, and 3D printing technology is used,” Liu Shang, a chief designer at AALPT told CCTV regarding the YF-102. The development can be seen as a strategic move to boost China’s supply chains and access space. “I might see this development as an attempt to increase the pace at which additional Chinese launch options are available in the domestic supply chain,” Ian Christensen, director of private sector programs at the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews . “The most recent CASC Blue Book anticipated a higher number of Chinese launches, and spacecraft to be launched, than in prior years. This move may be an indication that this increase is expected to continue in future years, and that there might be an under supply in launch capacity,” Christensen said. CASC declared its intentions to surpass 60 launches this year, carrying more than 200 spacecraft. “Increasing commercial firms’ access to mature engines could be a way to hasten the introduction of more launch supply in coming years, allowing CASC to achieve satellite production and deployment plans.” Commercial launchers may be involved in China’s national broadband megaconstellation plans . China’s commercial space launch providers are together planning more than 20 launches this year, more than double that of 2022. A large number of these planned launches are solid rocket launches from Expace and CAS Space which are spinoffs from the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) respectively. The latter uses SP70 solid rocket motors from CASC for its Lijian-1, or Kinetica-1, rockets, according to a recent presentation. Landspace meanwhile is preparing for its second launch of the Zhuque-2 methalox rocket which failed to reach orbit with its debut flight in December 2022. Landspace has, as with a number of other companies, developed its own engines. Dedicated commercial rocket engine developers are also active in China. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Spanish Earth observation satellite provider Satlantis has bought a majority stake in British university spin-out SuperSharp to expand into the thermal imaging market. SuperSharp is developing a foldable thermal infrared telescope that would enable satellites as small as 12U, or the size of 12 cubesats, to provide images with a 6-meter ground sampling distance. The technology promises four times better resolution per unit cost compared with satellites currently on the market, according to Satlantis business development manager Ignacio Mares. He said the undisclosed investment from Satlantis gives SuperSharp the financial and industrial resources needed to deploy an in-orbit demonstrator in 2025, using a satellite platform and launch provider it has yet to secure. Spun out from University of Cambridge in 2017, SuperSharp employs seven people and will remain an independent company following the investment, under a deal that recently secured British government approval. Satlantis employs around 80 people, including about 10 at its U.S.-based subsidiary. The Spanish company builds Earth observation payloads that it sells separately or as part of a whole satellite by using subcontractors to provide the spacecraft chassis. The manufacturer’s first whole satellite under this arrangement, Armsat-1 for the government of Armenia — the country’s first dedicated satellite — launched last year. Satlantis produces the majority of a satellite under this arrangement before securing a customer so it can support a quick turnaround, Mares told SpaceNews , and it has another four missions in the pipeline for 2023-2024. He said the first of these will be a methane-detection satellite called GEISAT, slated to launch on a SpaceX rideshare mission in June for undisclosed customers. Satlantis currently develops Earth imaging payloads using high-resolution visible (VIS), near infrared (NIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum. Adding SuperSharp’s technology to its product mix enables Satlantis to offer payloads across a full spectrum of imaging solutions from the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to long-wave infrared (LWIR). Satlantis recently posted 11.6 million euros ($13 million) in revenues for 2022, which it said was a record for the 10-year-old company.
SAN FRANCISCO –New Hampshire startup Light Steering Technologies won a $1.25 million U.S. Air Force contract for angular pointing technology with small satellite applications. Through the contract with AFWERX, the Air Force organization focused on innovation, LST aims to advance the Technology Readiness Level, or technological maturity, of its Multi-Axis Scanner. LST’s Multi-Axis Scanner is a patented magnetic joint for gimbal-like capability. “What’s compelling about the technology is we are minimizing the moving mass,” Aaron Castillo, LST senior vice president of business development and program management, told SpaceNews . “This is achieved by actuating a mirror instead of the entire satellite bus or using a traditional gimbal mechanism.” Potential applications include sensing, laser communications, directed energy and additive manufacturing, Castillo said. Vlad Krylov, LST president and chief technology officer, was granted a patent in 2020 for a laterally unconstrained magnetic joint designed to attach a flat mirror or other payload to a surface with three linear actuators. Since the space industry tends to be risk-averse, one of the biggest challenges for LST has been convincing potential customers that its technology will work as well in orbit as it does on the ground. “We’re on a journey to advance the technology readiness by bringing the Multi-Axis Scanner into the equivalent environments of space,” Castillo said. The thermal vacuum and vibration testing LST will perform under the AFWERX contract will provide “major risk mitigation,” Castillo said. Castillo, who worked in program management at L3Harris Technologies and Northrop Grumman before joining LST, met Krylov both men worked at Elbit Systems of America.
Raytheon Technologies last month won a $250 million contract to build seven missile-detection satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency. David Broadbent, president of space and command-and-control systems at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, said the company is working to deliver the seven satellites by 2025 but plans to pursue a different strategy in future SDA satellite procurements. Rather than compete as a prime contractor offering fully integrated satellites, Raytheon wants to shift to a merchant supplier role, providing satellite buses and payloads to other prime contractors. “Being in a mission prime position hasn’t yielded the results that we were looking for, and we’re now focused on a merchant strategy,” he told SpaceNews . Raytheon has traditionally been a prime contractor that integrates subsystems from other companies. But Broadbent argues that approach has not helped the company win satellite contracts and take advantage of innovative space products made by its subsidiaries Blue Canyon Technologies and SEAKR Engineering . Blue Canyon and SEAKR manufacture satellite buses and space electronics, respectively. SDA’s Tracking Layer The seven satellites Raytheon is building will be part of SDA’s Tracking Layer, a military network in low Earth orbit designed to track ballistic and hypersonic missiles launched by foreign adversaries. Before getting this order, Raytheon had previously competed for SDA contracts, largely unsuccessfully, Broadbent noted. The $250 million award Raytheon got in February for SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1 only materialized because the agency got an unplanned funding boost from Congress in the 2023 budget. Two contractors for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1 — L3Harris and Northrop Grumman — already had been selected last summer and each won contracts for 14 satellites. Raytheon competed in 2020 and 2021 for Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 contracts. The company in 2020 filed a protest , unsuccessfully challenging the Tranche 0 decision. “Unfortunately that alienated us from SDA for quite some time,” said Broadbent. In the Tranche 1 competition, Raytheon scored third highest out of five bidders, he said, so when SDA got additional funds, it decided to award Raytheon seven satellites, half of what the top two winners got. SDA was especially interested in the wide-field-of-view infrared sensor that Raytheon developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Blackjack program under a $37 million contract awarded in 2020. “It’s a unique payload in that it has a single aperture that can perform both the missile detect and the track mission,” Broadbent said. “The configuration is suited to the polar mission.” During the recent Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Broadbent met with several defense contractors that are shopping for satellite buses and other components for SDA’s future satellite competitions. Blue Canyon’s X-SAT Saturn bus., he said, could be used both for SDA’s Tracking Layer or for the Transport Layer of communications satellites. Raytheon’s wide-field-of-view payload and communications systems developed by SEAKR also would be offered to prime contractors, said Broadbent. “We are making a very deliberate pivot,” he said. “I think we can optimize our chances of success by acting as a merchant vendor or subcontractor and looking for partnerships with other credible space primes,” he added. “And that’s kind of where we are at the moment.” A different way of doing business SDA’s approach to buying satellites from multiple prime contractors under fixed-price contracts is “revolutionizing space acquisitions,” Broadbent said. The agency has been a “huge disrupter,” he said. “Let’s call it what it is,” Broadbent added. “Raytheon and many of our traditional defense primes were constructed around sole source classified cost-plus businesses, and five to seven-year acquisition cycles.” Those markets no longer exist, he said. “So we’ve had to take a very hard look at ourselves … and drive to a far more efficient model of producing capabilities.” Raytheon Technologies more broadly had to reorganize after absorbing new businesses through mergers and acquisitions. Broadbent said. “We found ourselves in a situation where we had an incredible amount of mission and product capability, but we had to simplify it.” Blue Canyon and SEAKR Engineering brought into the company a “culture and an atmosphere of innovation that we’re really trying to leverage” as Raytheon competes for SDA opportunities, he added. The wide-field-of-view infrared sensor developed for DARPA is 95% complete, Broadbent said, but DARPA decided to not put the payload on its Blackjack satellites so the sensor will be provided to SDA as “government furnished equipment.” DARPA plans to launch later this year four Blackjack satellites built on Blue Canyon buses and equipped with SEAKR radio-frequency communications payloads. This mission is a “credibility milestone for us,” he said. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Earth observation startup Albedo announced a $1.25 million contract April 27 to provide the National Air and Space Intelligence Center with thermal infrared imagery for nighttime applications. With funding from the Small Business Innovation Research contract awarded by AFWERX, the U.S. Air Force innovation arm, Albedo, based in Austin, Texas, and Denver, “will mature our infrared imager technology through aerial flights and lab work,” Albedo CEO Topher Haddad told SpaceNews by email. “The work will be critical in ensuring our capability is compatible with U.S. Government needs and demonstrating relevant use cases.” Albedo plans to operate satellites in very low Earth orbit to gather visible imagery with a resolution of 10 centimeters per pixel and thermal infrared imagery with a resolution of two meters per pixel. To make thermal imagery easier to analyze, Albedo will “sharpen” it by combining it with the visual imagery of the same location. “While our native two-meter long-wave infrared is valuable on its own for certain use cases, combining it with simultaneously collected 10-centimeter optical imagery gives it an additional boost in resolution, increasing the insights that can be gained,” Haddad said. The contract announced April 27 was the second $1.25 million Air Force SBIR contract awarded to Albedo in the last year. Under the previous award, the Air Force is analyzing Albedo’s imagery collection capabilities to determine the best way to integrate Albedo imagery tasking with government systems. “Nighttime commercial imagery is currently limited to synthetic aperture radar,” Joseph Rouge, U.S. Space Force deputy director for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said in a statement. “High-resolution thermal infrared will provide a new commercial remote sensing solution for the U.S. Space Force.” Rouge added, “Nighttime thermal infrared imaging can help our intelligence analysts, warfighters, decision makers, and field operators solve complex emerging threats day and night.” The National Air and Space Intelligence Center is co-located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base with the National Space Intelligence Center. “The intelligence community faces an increasing number of complex questions and issues that require innovative solutions for collecting and analyzing data,” Randall Bostick, NASIC principal intelligence analyst, said in a statement. “It is critical that we leverage advances in satellite technology to meet our evolving mission needs in the coming years.” Albedo raised $48 million in a Series A funding round in 2022. 
TAMPA, Fla. — An Italian Earth observation project funded by pandemic relief euros has ordered at least 34 satellites and a pair of Vega launches in recent months. More than 47 Italian companies have secured contracts for the 1.1 billion euro ($1.2 billion) IRIDE constellation, or International Report for Innovative Defense of Earth, as part of the Italian government’s National Plan for Recovery and Resilience. The low Earth orbit network would use optical, radar, and other imaging payloads to monitor Italy’s critical infrastructure, air quality, and meteorological conditions. Arianespace has a contract from the European Space Agency, acting on behalf of the Italian government, for two Vega C rockets to start launching IRIDE satellites in late 2025, with an option for a third to complete the constellation in 2026. Italy-based Avio is the prime contractor for Vega launch vehicles. The satellite makers ESA has awarded IRIDE satellite manufacturing contracts to Italy-based teams led by Thales Alena Space, Argotec, Sitael, OHB, and space logistics company D-Orbit perhaps best known for its last-mile space tug services. Thales Alena Space said March 27 it won IRIDE contracts from ESA for six small satellites with synthetic aperture radars (SAR) and one based on optical technology. The contracts are worth 141 million euros for all seven satellites. They also include options for another four SAR satellites and an extra optical satellite that altogether would bring in an additional 94 million euros. Thales Alenia Space said each SAR and optical satellite would weigh about 170 kilograms and be based on its modular NIMBUS (New Italian Micro Bus) platform. OHB Italy and Argotec announced their IRIDE contract wins in December for a total 22 multispectral satellites worth a combined 68 million euros. The contracts signed by OHB and Argotec include options for an additional 12 and 15 satellites, respectively, for an extra 58 million euros combined. D-Orbit announced April 5 it had secured a 26 million euro contract to build a SAR satellite for IRIDE, which would be based on the ION Satellite Carrier orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) it builds in-house. Italian technology developer MetaSensing is supplying the radar for this satellite. D-Orbit’s contract includes a 24 million euro option for an additional SAR satellite. A decision on a second satellite “should be made by the end of this year,” a D-Orbit spokesperson said, “depending on the performance of the work” on its first IRIDE satellite. The company declined to discuss specifications for the Earth observation satellite but said it expects to release more details about the project in a few months. Sitael has a contract for four hyperspectral IRIDE satellites in a deal covering options for another two spacecraft that “may host a payload yet to be selected by ESA,” ESA IRIDE program manager Guido Levrini told SpaceNews . Italian multinational aerospace company Leonardo is providing the instruments for Sitael, which is basing the satellites on its 200-kilogram all-electric satellite platform Platino. Altogether, that puts IRIDE at 34 commissioned satellites with options for 35 more. “In addition, nothing prevents us (budget and schedule permitting) to add satellites through extensions of the scope of the current contracts,” Levrini said via email. Space tug D-Orbit’s business primarily revolves around an OTV delivery service that it first demonstrated in 2020. “ION is an OTV, but it is also a satellite platform which can carry out in-orbit experiments, accommodate edge computing applications and space cloud services,” said Stefano Antonetti, D-Orbit’s vice president of business development and institutional sales. The company says it has transported around 100 payloads in orbit over eight missions to date, including 73 satellites deployed from ION and additional payloads hosted onboard the spacecraft. This is also not the first time the company has secured a contract to develop a standalone satellite. The company is prime contractor for a 10 million euro SAR satellite project secured in 2019 called NOCTUA Landscape Monitoring, which aims to keep tabs on infrastructure in Italy’s northern Lombardia region for government agencies and residents. MetaSensing is also part of the consortium for this project. D-Orbit’s first satellite, a spacecraft the size of three cubesats, was launched in 2017 to validate the company’s propulsive technologies.
China is planning to make a fully reusable version of a rocket designed to launch infrastructure and deep space missions. Presentations at events marking China’s national space day in the city of Hefei, Anhui province this week reveal that plans for the Long March 9 rocket include developing an apparently Starship-inspired fully reusable version. China is now targeting 2033 for first flights of a three-stage Long March rocket powered by numerous full flow staged combustion methane engines on the first stage, capable of carrying 50 tons to lunar transfer orbit, or 35 tons when the first stage is recovered. The rocket is being developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). The initial version will be 114 meters long, have a mass at liftoff of 4,400 tons and generate 6,100 tons of thrust. This will be followed by a two-stage variant capable of carrying 150 tons of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), or 100 tons when landing the first stage. A fully reusable, 80 tons to LEO variant will be the ultimate objective, expected to fly in the 2040s. The presentations followed just days after the first integrated launch of SpaceX’s Starship , which ended with the flight being terminated minutes later. Engineers from CALT yesterday published a preliminary analysis of that flight. China had previously aimed to debut an expendable Long March 9 rocket using 500-ton-thrust kerosene-liquid oxygen engines around 2028-2030. However the Long March 9 project has evolved in the last couple of years from an initial expendable, more traditional Long March-style rocket kerosene-fueled rocket featuring a 10-meter-diameter core and four 5-meter-diameter boosters presented in the early 2010s, to a single stick versions powered variously by kerosene or methane engines. CALT announced late last year that plans for an expendable version had been scrapped and that the structural design had been finalized. Now, CALT appears to be sticking with methane-liquid oxygen propellant, with two and three-stage variants, with the ultimate goal being a Starship-like fully reusable version in the 2040s. The change in direction means delays in acquiring the rocket’s capabilities, which could delay the country’s planned International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) project. China is also developing the Long March 10 which could have a first flight around 2027 and could, with a pair of launches, be able to send a crew to the lunar surface before the end of the decade . The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the other rocket-designing arm of China’s main space contractor, CASC, has also pitched large, reusable methane-powered rocket designs. The future Long March 9 has been touted as useful for launching components for a space-based solar power station in geostationary orbit. Reusable super heavy-lift rockets could make the related launch costs much more manageable, while still needing to solve a range of technical, engineering and financial issues surrounding such a venture.
SpaceX’s Starship launch scattered debris over hundreds of acres and created a small brush fire, but did not kill any wildlife, according to a federal agency. In an April 26 statement to SpaceNews, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it documented impacts from the April 20 Starship integrated test flight that lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas, to the neighboring Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. That documentation started after the highway leading to both the launch site and refuge, closed due to what the agency called “launch pad safety concerns,” opened two days after the flight. The biggest impact was debris from the launch pad that was damaged by the thrust from the Super Heavy booster. “Impacts from the launch include numerous large concrete chunks, stainless steel sheets, metal and other objects hurled thousands of feet away” from the pad, the Fish and Wildlife Service states. It also cited “a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site.” Residents of Port Isabel, Texas, a town northwest of the launch site, reported finding a fine layer of sand-like material after the launch. No debris was found on lands belonging to the refuge itself, but the agency said debris was spread out over 385 acres belonging to SpaceX and Boca Chica State Park. A fire covering 3.5 acres also started south of the pad on state park land, but the Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t state what caused the fire or how long it burned. There was no evidence, though, that the launch and debris it created harmed wildlife. “At this time, no dead birds or wildlife have been found on refuge-owned or managed lands,” the agency said. The damage to the pad was evident in images taken by photographers after the launch. They showed significant damage to the launch mount, the stool-like structure on which the vehicle stands, and the concrete pad underneath. SpaceX has not released any details about the damage to the pad. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted April 21 that the thrust from the engines “may have shattered the concrete, rather than simply eroding it.” That damage was not seen during a Feb. 9 static-fire test , he said, because the engines were fired at only half their thrust. He added that the company had been working on a “massive water-cooled steel plate” that would go under the launch mount and serve as a kind of flame diverter. The pad lacks a frame trench or other diverter system commonly used on launch pads to channel exhaust away from the pad. Musk said the plate wasn’t ready in time but that the company thought, based on static-fire data, that the pad could survive the launch intact. “Looks like we can be ready to launch again in 1 to 2 months,” Musk said, although he is known for aspirational schedules. It’s not clear that repairs to the pad will be the pacing item for the next Starship launch attempt. SpaceX must still investigate the cause of the launch failure and make modifications to the next vehicles in development. That investigation will require a review and approval by the Federal Aviation Administration before it either issues a new launch license to SpaceX or modifies the existing one that was originally valid for a single launch. Also uncertain is what additional environmental reviews or assessments may be required because of the damage from the Starship launch. The FAA completed an environmental review for Starship launches in June 2022 that set more than 75 conditions on SpaceX, which include a range of activities to be carried out before or after a launch or mishap.
The Defense Department is considering ways to partner with commercial space companies so their services can be accessed during national security emergencies, DoD space policy chief John Plumb told lawmakers April 26. Plumb, who is assistant secretary of defense for space policy, testified at a House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee hearing on national security space issues. He said there are ongoing conversations about an initiative led by the U.S. Space Force called “commercial augmentation space reserves.” This is a new project looking at whether it makes sense to create the space equivalent of the civil reserve air fleet, or CRAF, a program the Pentagon conceived 70 years ago to gain access to commercial airlift capacity in emergencies. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) asked Plumb if the idea of a CRAF-like program for space was being seriously considered and when Congress might see a concrete plan. “I fully agree we need to be able to access commercial space partners and their capacity and bandwidth,” Plumb said, although the specifics have yet to be determined. “I will say that the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense have charged all of us to work on that,” Plumb said. That includes the Space Systems Command, the National Reconnaissance Office and DoD’s policy office. Plumb told Waltz it will take a few months to come up with a strategy and report back to Congress with a “coherent story as to where we are in each of these pieces and how they’re coming together.” He said an initiative to work with commercial space is “very important and I think this is the right time to make sure we’re doing it right.” The Space Systems Command has been in talks with private companies about a commercial reserves program that would include satellite manufacturers, launch vehicle operators, remote sensing companies and other sectors of the space industry the government would need to mobilize during a crisis. Lawmakers to get briefed on space acquisition programs The chairman of the strategic forces subcommittee Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo) and the ranking member Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) plan to visit the Space Systems Command in Los Angeles on Monday. Lamborn said he and Moulton expect to hear from command leaders more details about the commercial reserve initiative and to get updates on procurement programs. Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, told Lamborn that the Space Force is carrying out a strategy Calvelli introduced last year to expedite the procurement of next-generation systems. “I think you’re going to be very impressed when you visit SSC,” Calvelli said. “They have really stepped up their game,” particularly in missile-warning satellites, he said. “They’ve taken to the nine tenets that I put out back in October, they are looking at going smaller with their systems, they are looking at going faster, they understand the direction we want to head in.” Moulton said acquisition programs is one area the committee will “watch closely.” “In addition to the pattern of large satellite programs being late and over budget, the ground system architecture still frequently comes as an afterthought,” said Moulton. “We have been notified yet again of delays to the Next-Generation Operational Ground Control Segment, the modern, cybersecure ground system to operate the GPS satellites.” OCX was supposed to be delivered in 2016 for $3.9 billion, he noted. Seven years later, and almost double that cost, “we are still waiting.” ‘Overclassification’ concerns, DoD report overdue Lamborn asked Plumb for an update on a congressionally mandated report that DoD is supposed to deliver recommending what space space programs could be “reclassified” so more information can be shared with allies. The overclassification of space often contributes to inefficiencies and slower processes, said Lamborn. “Two years ago, we asked your office to report back after looking at highly classified space programs to see what, if anything, could be reclassified. We are still waiting for that report.” Overclassification, said Lamborn, “I believe is impeding the department’s progress on space, specifically making it more challenging to collaborate with our allies and partners.” Moulton made a similar point. “The classification of space inhibits both our ability to advocate for increasing investment and expand collaboration with our allies and partners.” Plumb said the report should be finalized in the next few months. “Working with allies and partners is absolutely essential in this security environment,” he said. “On space in particular, the inability to share some classified information with highly capable allies is slowing us down and we’re working on it.” Plumb pointed out that some classified information is exchanged with key allies. “But the question is, can we share more, especially for operationally relevant needs to be able to do combined space operations.”
Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane flew freely for the first time in nearly two years April 26 on a glide flight that prepares the company for powered flights and commercial service. The company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, VSS Unity, was carried aloft by the VMS Eve mothership aircraft flying out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. Unity released from the plane at 9:47 a.m. Eastern at an altitude of 14,300 meters and glided to a runway landing back at the spaceport nine minutes later. Virgin Galactic pilots CJ Sturckow and Nicola Pecile were at the controls of VSS Unity during the test flight, while company pilots Kelly Latimer and Jameel Janjua were flying VMS Eve. The flight was the first for Unity since its July 2021 suborbital spaceflight that carried Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and other company employees. Both Unity and Eve had undergone extensive overhauls since that flight, including upgrades to enable higher flight rates. Eve, which returned to Virgin’s Mojave, California, factory for the overhaul, flew back to Spaceport America Feb. 27 . “Releasing Unity for a glide flight today is one of the final steps towards commercial spaceline operations,” Mike Moses, president of spaceline missions and safety at Virgin Galactic, said in a statement after the flight. “The data from this validation flight will clear the way for our return to space and, ultimately, lead to the launch of commercial service.” The next step for Virgin Galactic will be a powered test flight of VSS Unity with four company mission specialists joining two pilots on the flight “to assess the customer experience and ground-based training,” the company said. Virgin did not disclose a date for that flight but said it will analyze the data from this glide flight over the “coming weeks” before clearing Unity for a suborbital spaceflight. That schedule, the company added, would keep Virgin Galactic on track to begin commercial service later in the second quarter. That first commercial flight will be a dedicated research flight for the Italian Air Force under a contract signed in 2019, carrying three Italian mission specialists who will conduct experiments during the suborbital flight. Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in an earnings call Feb. 28 that he anticipated flying Unity once a month, but added it may take some time to achieve that flight rate. “There’s nothing specifically in our way of being at a monthly cadence. I think it’s just shaking out the operation and learning how to turn the ship on a consistent basis.” Virgin Galactic has about 800 private astronauts signed up for flights, representing about $208 million in revenue, the company has said in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Many of those customers may end up flying on the future Delta-class suborbital vehicles Virgin is developing and expects to start flying in 2026. The company has another suborbital vehicle, VSS Imagine, in development that was originally intended to be part of a line of vehicles called SpaceShipIII. Colglazier said in the earnings call that work on Imagine had been put on hold to focus both on getting Unity and Eve flying again as well as ramping up production of the Delta-class vehicles. He said once both those efforts were in good shape “we’ll come pick up Imagine and see where we want to go.” The Unity glide flight came one day after Virgin Galactic announced changes to its board of directors. The company said April 25 that it added Raymond Mabus, Jr. and Diana Strandberg to the board. Mabus is a former secretary of the navy and governor of Mississippi while Strandberg is a former executive with Dodge & Cox, a privately owned investment manager. Evan Lovell, who has been on the board since 2019, became chair of the board as part of the changes. Lovell, chief investment officer for Virgin Group, had been acting chair of the board since February 2022. Two current board members, Adam Bain and George Mattson, will step down from the board at the end of their current terms and not run for reelection at the company’s next annual meeting.
China aims to construct an array of telescopes in deep space to search for habitable planets orbiting other stars. The Miyin project envisions sending four light-collecting telescopes and a beam combiner to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. Flying in formation, the spacecraft will use interferometric techniques to provide high angular resolution mid-infrared observations to directly image and characterize exoplanets around stars up to 65 light-years away. The main objective would be to detect potentially habitable terrestrial planets orbiting Sun-like stars in our neighborhood within the Milky Way. The project is still in the development phase, but current plans map out on-orbit technology demonstrations in 2024, followed by interferometry experiments conducted aboard the Tiangong space station a year later. A prototype of the array would then launch around 2027, before building the five-spacecraft system at L2 in 2030. A further four spacecraft could be added to the array in a second mission phase beyond 2030. An earlier published journal paper suggests the telescopes and central beam combiner will operate at distances of between 40 and 300 meters from each other. The array will be capable of a spatial resolution of 0.01 arcseconds for systems up to 20 parsecs away. The concept was presented at an event related to China’s national space day celebrations in Hefei, Anhui province. The event has been held annually since 2016, and was for the anniversary of the launch of the country’s first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, on April 24, 1970. If approved and deployed, the project would be of great scientific value, according to Sarah Casewell, research fellow and lecturer at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. “The proposed spatial resolution of 0.01 arcseconds is comparable or better than NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is likely to have a six-meter-diameter mirror and a coronagraph to image exoplanets in the habitable zones of 100 stars within 25 parsecs,” Casewell told SpaceNews . Systems comprising multiple space telescopes have been proposed previously, including NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder and ESA’s Darwin concepts. NASA is considering an $11 billion project named the Habitable Worlds Observatory which would launch in the 2040s and operate in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared bands. “This multi-spacecraft concept I think is unique within planned exoplanet missions right now, and will be complementary to JWST and Habitable Worlds, which has a similar spatial resolution but is likely to have a coronagraph or star shade for high contrast imaging.” The Miyin mission would also be used to observe other targets such as protoplanetary disks and active galactic nuclei and a range of celestial bodies within our solar system. The project is a reflection of growing Chinese interest in the study of exoplanets. The design of the mission is being led by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The project, if approved following on-orbit testing, will pose numerous technical challenges surrounding formation flying and interferometry aspects of the mission. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is meanwhile assessing a pair of proposals for exoplanet-seeking space observatory missions under its Strategic Priority Program on Space Science . These are the Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey ( CHES ) and Earth 2.0 ( ET ) missions. CHES would use astrometry, the same technique used by ESA’s Gaia star-mapping space telescope, while ET would use the transit method to monitor 1.2 million dwarf stars.
The United States and South Korea signed an agreement April 25 to enhance cooperation on space activities ranging from lunar exploration to Earth science, while providing few specific about those efforts. The agreement, formally called the Joint Statement of Intent for Cooperation on Space Exploration and Science, was signed during a visit by South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to the United States that included a tour of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Neither government released the text of the agreement, but a White House official, speaking on background, said it would cover activities in “areas of mutual interest” such as lunar science, Earth science and other space science activities, as well as space communications and navigation. The agreement “will serve as a springboard for taking space cooperation between our two allies to the next level of a space alliance,” Yoon, speaking through a translator, said in brief remarks after the Goddard tour April 25. The two countries are currently cooperating on South Korea’s first lunar mission, an orbiter called Danuri . That spacecraft carries a NASA-funded instrument, ShadowCam, to take images in permanently shadowed regions of craters at the lunar poles to look for evidence of water ice and other volatiles. Vice President Kamala Harris said at the Goddard event that cooperation could expand to missions to the lunar surface. “South Korea will soon fly payloads through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program,” she said, but offered no other details about that partnership. In the CLPS program, NASA purchases payload space on commercial lunar landers that can also carry payloads from other commercial or government customers. In remarks April 25 at the meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium, Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said NASA was encouraging international partners to work directly with CLPS providers rather than have NASA arrange those payloads. When NASA works with nations to fly payloads on CLPS missions, he said, “it actually takes away some of those potential non-NASA-sourced payloads” that could generate revenue for those companies. “That has an impact on the lunar economy overall, so we’re starting to encourage private entities as well as international partners to go direct to our vendors.” Another area of cooperation that Harris highlighted in her remarks was Earth science. NASA recently launched Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO), a hosted payload on an Intelsat communications satellite that will monitor air pollution over much of North America. TEMPO, built by Ball Aerospace, is similar to an instrument also built by Ball on a South Korean spacecraft, taking the same measurements over East Asia. Harris said she would like to provide similar monitoring for the Southern Hemisphere, specifically Africa and South America. “This cannot be a global initiative if any nations around the world are excluded,” she said, announcing she was directing the National Space Council to expand that network. She didn’t elaborate on how the council, an interagency group, would do so. Yoon emphasized the efforts he was leading to build up South Korea’s space sector, including creating a national space agency called KASA and long-term ambitions for lunar and Mars exploration. “With KASA on the way, cooperation between KASA and NASA down the road will be the driving force behind forging a strong space alliance,” he said. That will start with what he called a “bilateral communication platform” to support joint projects and personnel exchanges.
X-Bow Systems, an Albuquerque, N.M., solid propulsion startup, announced a $60 million U.S. Air Force Strategic Funding Increase, or STRATFI, agreement. To Jason Hundley, X-Bow CEO and founder, the STRATFI agreement “is a very good signal from AFWERX that a new approach to solid rocket motors can be looked at as real, viable and competitive in aerospace applications in the near term.” AFWERX, the Air Force innovation arm, established the STRATFI program in 2021 to provide small businesses with $3 million to $15 million to help bridge the valley of death between technology development and commercial adoption. X-Bow, founded in 2017, emerged from stealth in 2022 with plans to disrupt the solid rocket motor business in part through additive manufacturing. “Our manufacturing technology is definitely one big discriminator for us because it lowers the operational costs and the capital infrastructure costs for scalable solid rocket motor solutions,” Hundley said. “We also are taking a unique and modular approach to the design and manufacturing of systems. It’s not just an individual motor for an individual application, but a platform approach to offer multiple motor solutions in suborbital testing and potentially tactically responsive small launch applications.” The STRATFI award will extend XBow’s work with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The company will “produce a whole bunch of solid rocket motors using our technology to show that it’s just as good as the old technology,” Hundley said. “It allows us to build a series of test data. The award allows us to look at the qualification of our technology to compete with these multibillion-dollar businesses that get hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government to upgrade facilities and maintain their production capacities.” Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems are the country’s primary suppliers of military solid rocket motors. L3Harris Technologies plans to acquire Aerojet for $4.7 billion, pending regulatory approval. X-Bow raised $27 million in a Series A funding round one year ago. To qualify for STRATFI awards, companies need private funding, government contracts and commercial applications for their technology. Applications for X-Bow’s technology range from missiles to automobile airbags. “We’re currently focused on the aerospace side, but our manufacturing technology would be just as useful in the automotive sector once we get it mature,” Hundley said. “There are in-space solid rocket motor applications as well, separation systems and deorbit motors.” X-Bow is one of 11 companies selected by the U.S. Space Force to compete for Orbital Services Program-4 launch contracts throughout the decade.
Lunar lander developer Astrobotic announced April 25 it will launch a third mission to the moon in 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Astrobotic said the mission, which currently is not part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program of commercial lunar landers, will be able to carry hundreds of kilograms of customer payloads to a site near the south pole of the moon. “The NASA Artemis program is a major effort to establish a U.S. presence at the lunar south pole, and at the same time, international customers are also lining up,” John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, said in a statement announcing its selection of Falon Heavy for the unnamed mission. “With all this rising interest, we felt now is the time to announce our next commercial mission to deliver hundreds of kilograms of payload to the lunar south pole.” The company said that, in addition to carrying payloads to the lunar surface on the lander, it will offer satellite deployments for customers seeking to place spacecraft into cislunar space. The mission “is going to be utilizing most of the capacity on the Falcon Heavy,” said Michael Provenzano, director of lunar surface systems at Astrobotic, during a panel discussion April 25 at the spring meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC). “It’s going to be a large mission.” Astrobotic currently offers two landers: Peregrine, capable of carrying up to 120 kilograms of payloads, and Griffin, with a payload capacity of 500 kilograms. Peregrine will fly on Astrobotic’s first mission, scheduled for no earlier than this summer on the inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. It is carrying payloads for NASA through the CLPS program as well as for other customers, and is intended to land near a region called the Gruithuisen Domes on the northeast edge of Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, on the western part of the moon’s near side. Griffin will fly Astrobotic’s second mission, carrying NASA’s VIPER rover to look for ice deposits at the lunar south pole, also through CLPS. That mission will launch on a Falcon Heavy in late 2024 . Astrobotic did not identify any customers who have signed up for this third mission, including NASA. The company does not currently have a CLPS award associated with this mission. Under the CLPS program, NASA buys payload space on commercial lunar landers, which in some cases can be the entire lander mission. That is intended to provide researchers with low-cost access to the moon while also stimulating the development of commercial capabilities. “Ultimately, NASA does not want to be the prime customer for all of these deliveries, and we would consider ourselves to be successful when we start to see several of these vendors actually landing on the moon without NASA payloads,” said Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during the LSIC panel. Another lunar lander developer, Intuitive Machines, has three lander missions on its books, all part of CLPS. The first of those, IM-1, is scheduled to launch as soon as June on a Falcon 9. Ben Bussey, chief scientist at Intuitive Machines, said on the panel that the company is close to finalizing a lander mission, called IMC-1, without any NASA payloads. None of the companies involved with CLPS, though, has yet to land a spacecraft on the moon, a challenge highlighted by the unsuccessful landing of HAKUTO-R M1 , a lunar lander by Japanese company ispace, which took place while the panel was in progress. “We congratulate the @ispace_inc team on accomplishing a significant number of milestones on their way to today’s landing attempt,” Astrobotic tweeted after the failed ispace landing. “We hope everyone recognizes-today is not the day to shy away from pursuing the lunar frontier, but a chance to learn from adversity and push forward.”
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile announced April 25 it made the first voice call last week with a standard smartphone using its BlueWalker 3 test satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO). An unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22 using mobile spectrum from AT&T directly connected to the satellite April 20 from Midland, Texas, for a brief chat with an iPhone user in Japan using local operator Rakuten’s network. Test calls have since been made both indoors and outdoors, AT&T head of global roaming Suja John told SpaceNews , and at various lengths up to several minutes. The companies have not disclosed any details about the performance of these tests, which they said are continuing as part of plans to offer broadband services including voice, text, data, and video for phone users outside terrestrial coverage. “The successful demonstration of voice capabilities is a step on the path to cellular broadband capabilities,” John said. “Additional testing and measurements on the smartphone uplink and downlink signal strength have confirmed the ability to support cellular broadband speeds and 4G LTE / 5G waveforms.” AST SpaceMobile said the Texas-based venture has also conducted initial compatibility tests on other smartphones and devices with the prototype satellite, including exchanging the SIM and network information needed to support direct-to-device services. Abel Avellan, AST SpaceMobile’s CEO, said the voice tests marked “the most significant milestone to date” for the company following the launch in September of BlueWalker 3 and its colossal 64-square-meter phased array antenna. In a March 31 financial update, AST SpaceMobile said a SpaceX launch for its first five commercial satellites had slipped into early next year after suffering further manufacturing delays and cost overruns. The company has a test license from the Federal Communications Commission to use cellular frequencies for connecting to phones in Texas and Hawaii — and then spectrum in Q and V bands to direct the traffic back to gateways on the ground. However, AST SpaceMobile still needs regulatory permission to provide commercial services from its proposed constellation. John said AT&T is participating in an ongoing rule-making process at the FCC for a framework proposed March 17 for regulating the use of terrestrial wireless spectrum from space. AST SpaceMobile, plans to present its satellite test data as part of its FCC application process. “We plan to offer service commercially through our collaboration with AST SpaceMobile once the service is commercially viable and the parties agree on commercial terms,” John said. AST SpaceMobile says it has similar agreements with other telcos worldwide that have about two billion subscribers altogether. Virginia-based Lynk Global is also seeking permission to provide commercial services in an emerging direct-to-device market attracting startups and established satellite operators. Lynk currently has three satellites in LEO and plans to deploy at least another three before the end of this year for initially lower-bandwidth services, including text messaging and emergency alerts. After sending its first text message to a standard smartphone from space in early 2020, Lynk says it has amassed contracts with nearly 30 carriers worldwide and is currently testing its capabilities in more than a dozen countries.
SpaceX is getting a second launch pad on the West Coast after gaining approval to lease Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, a historic site previously occupied by United Launch Alliance. Space Launch Delta 30, the Space Force unit that manages the West Coast launch ranges, announced April 24 that SpaceX will use the pad to launch Falcon rockets. SpaceX is expanding operations at Vandenberg – it has leased SLC-4 since 2015 — following a period of extraordinary growth fueled by commercial launch demand and the deployment of its Starlink internet mega-constellation. SLC-6 would be SpaceX’s fifth launch site in the United States. Besides SLC-4 at Vandenberg, it has two launch pads in Florida and one at Starbase in south Texas. The company launched 61 orbital missions in 2022, nearly doubling its previous single-year record of 31 launches set in 2021. It has set a goal of 100 launches for 2023. The enormous SLC-6 launch site went up for grabs after the final flight of ULA’s Delta 4 Heavy on Sept. 24 . ULA will consolidate West Coast launch operations for its new vehicle Vulcan Centaur at SLC-3, where Atlas 5 lifted off f or the last time in November. “This is an exciting time for Vandenberg Space Force Base,” said Col. Robert Long, commander of Space Launch Delta 30. “This agreement will add to the rich history of SLC-6 and builds on the already strong partnership with SpaceX.” SCL-6 was originally built in the 1960s to launch the Air Force’s never-flown Manned Orbital Laboratory. It was repurposed in the 1980s as a dedicated launch and landing site for military space shuttle missions. But Air Force mothballed the California site without ever conducting a West Coast shuttle launch. It reactivated the site in the 1990s for a handful of Lockheed Martin Athena launches and turned it over to ULA in 2006 for the Delta 4 program. Northrop Grumman in 2019 announced it planned to use SLC-6 to launch the Omega solid rocket that it was developing for the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 competition. But the company discontinued the program after losing out to ULA and SpaceX for the NSSL Phase 2 contracts. U.S. launch ranges in transition In an interview last week at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Long said there were “many interested parties” competing for the SLC-6 lease. He said the Space Force looks at many different factors when allocating launch facilities to commercial providers. “Anytime you take a launch site and you tie that up for years or decades, you want to make sure the government is getting value out of that launch property. And so we go through that entire assessment and then make a decision on who comes next.” Col. James Horne, deputy director of launch and range operations at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, said partnerships with commercial launch providers are a matter of national security because the military relies on these companies for access to space. Both the East Coast and West Coast launch ranges are taking significant steps to accommodate commercial growth, he told SpaceNews . The Florida ranges at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center are projecting 92 orbital launches in 2023, compared to 57 in 2022. At Vandenberg, launches are expected to double from 19 last year to nearly 40 in 2023. “We benefit from the innovation in the commercial industry,” said Horne. Col Mark Shoemaker, vice commander of the Space Launch Delta 45 unit that oversees Cape Canaveral, noted that launch cadence is one way the United States and China compete as space powers. The United States in 2021 for the first time was outpaced by China which launched 55 space missions, compared to 43 by the U.S. “It’s all about space access,” Shoemaker said in an interview. “And there’s no space access without the spaceports, and what we’re doing is enabling the nation’s capacity in space, whether it’s for national security, civil or commercial.” As the owners of the launch ranges, “we need to stay ahead of this wave of need from the industry, and we need to do it from a military and national security perspective, but we need to do that in partnership with our commercial companies,” Long said. Conversations with launch executives at the recent Space Symposium “confirmed that the tempo is not going to decrease anytime in the near future,” Long added. And those forecasts strongly shape the Space Force’s launch pad allocation strategies. Horne noted that the Pentagon’s proposed five-year budget for fiscal years 2024-2028 has $1 billion worth of investments in federal spaceport infrastructure. “We’re ramping up,” he said. At the Cape , particularly, there is “limited real estate,” Horne said, so the Space Force continuously works with the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA and other agencies to figure out ways to squeeze in more launch opportunities. Shoemaker pointed out that the ranges typically approve a much larger number of launches than actually take place. “It’s because the satellites are not ready for many of the launches we’re ready to support.” The Space Force, meanwhile, has advocated for a commercial business model that would allow the ranges to operate more like airports or seaports, Horne noted. This would help support growth initiatives the industry has asked for. By law, DoD pays to operate and maintain the ranges and cannot accept private funding for infrastructure upgrades. Horne said the Space Force is open to other business models as long as they don’t impact the competitiveness of the U.S. industry. Some of these reforms are being considered by Congress and would require new legislation. “We want to be able to launch 300 missions a year” between the East and West ranges, Horne said, as long as it can be done without compromising safety. “We will do what we need for national security purposes and still maximize the opportunity for commercial industry.”
Updated 8:15 p.m. Eastern with ispace statement. WASHINGTON — Controllers lost contact with a lunar lander developed by a Japanese company moments before its scheduled touchdown, making it likely the spacecraft crashed during its final descent. The HAKUTO-R M1 lunar lander, developed by Tokyo-based ispace, was scheduled to land at 12:40 p.m. Eastern April 25 in the vicinity of Atlas Crater on the moon. The lander was in communications with controllers during its powered descent, based on telemetry displayed on the company’s webcast. However, that telemetry appeared to switch from live data to a simulation less than 30 seconds before landing, when the spacecraft was still about 80 meters above the surface, traveling at more than 30 kilometers per hour. There was no confirmation of the landing itself or any signals from the lander after touchdown. More than 25 minutes after the scheduled touchdown, the company appeared to acknowledge that the landing had failed. “At this moment, we have not been able to confirm a successful landing on the lunar surface,” said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace. He said controllers had been in contact with the spacecraft until the “very end” of the landing process. “However, now we’ve lost the communication,” he said. “So, we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface.” In a statement issued about six hours later, ispace said that, during the lander’s final approach to the surface, “estimated remaining propellant reached at the lower threshold and shortly afterward the descent speed rapidly increased,” suggesting that the lander ran out of propellant, causing its engines to shut down prematurely. Controllers then lost contact with the lander. “Based on this, it has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the Moon’s surface,” the company stated. “For Mission 1, it has been determined that Success 9 of the Mission 1 Milestones, successfully landing on the Moon and establishing communications, is no longer achievable.” Months-long journey The lander was carrying a set of payloads for both companies and governments. Among them is Rashid, a small lunar rover developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in the United Arab Emirates, and a “transformable lunar robot” the size of a baseball from Japan’s space agency JAXA. Other payloads include cameras and technology demonstrations. The lander launched on a Falcon 9 Dec. 11 , placing it on a low-energy ballistic trajectory that took it as far as 1.4 million kilometers from the Earth before returning to the vicinity of the moon, going into an elliptical orbit around the moon March 20 . After achieving its initial orbit of 100 by 6,000 kilometers, the spacecraft maneuvered to lower its orbit, reaching a circular orbit at an altitude of 100 kilometers by April 14 . Around that time, ispace announced plans for the April 25 landing attempt. The company reported only minor issues with the spacecraft during its transit to the moon. “We have been operating our lander as well as expected so far, without any critical issues,” Hakamada said during a Feb. 27 briefing. There had been anomalies with the lander’s thermal control system and computers, but the company said it was able to resolve those problems. The company is working on a second lander, M2, similar in design to M1 that is scheduled for launch in late 2024. It will carry a set of customer payloads as well as a “micro rover” that ispace developed. That rover will collect a regolith sample that will be transferred to NASA under a 2020 contract awarded to ispace’s European subsidiary. Company officials said in February that they did not anticipate making significant changes in the design of M2, having already incorporated lessons learned from the development of the M1 lander into M2. The company’s U.S. subsidiary is working on a larger lander, Series 2, for a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission led by Draper scheduled for 2025. Hakamada, in the post-landing comments, said the data collected during the M1 landing attempt would be helpful for those two future missions. “That’s why we built a sustainable business model to continue our effort for the future missions.” “Although we do not expect to complete the lunar landing at this time, we believe that we have fully accomplished the significance of this mission, having acquired a great deal of data and experience by being able to execute the landing phase,” Hakamada said in the later statement. “What is important is to feed this knowledge and learning back to Mission 2 and beyond so that we can make the most of this experience.” “As a fellow Japanese space enthusiast, I am proud of ispace’s challenge and respect the efforts of everyone involved. ispace will analyze the data obtained from this mission and use it as a foundation for the next mission,” Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of the Japanese space agency JAXA, said in the ispace statement. Since the launch of M1, shares in ispace started trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market , an exchanged reserved for smaller, higher-risk companies. The shares started trading April 13 at 254 yen ($1.90) and soared in subsequent days. Shares closed April 25, before the landing, at 1,990 yen.
SAN FRANCISCO – Geospatial data analytics company Hydrosat announced $20 million in recent government grants and investment for its campaign to measure water stress in plants and other indicators of climate change. Statkraft Ventures led the funding round. Participants included Blue Bear Capital, Hartree Partners, OTB Ventures, Freeflow Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Techstars, Santa Barbara Venture Partners, Expon Capital and Hemisphere Ventures. The funding Hydrosat announced April 25 includes $5 million in government grants and $15 million in Series A investment. Hydrosat announced one of the grants, a $1.2 million U.S. Air Force award to investigate national security applications for thermal infrared data, earlier this year. With the new funding, Hydrosat will build two satellites, expand its staff and “bring a new commercial data fusion and analytics product to market,” Pieter Fossel, Hydrosat co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews by email. Hydrosat’s first two satellite missions are scheduled to launch in early 2024. “Climate change is humanity’s most pressing issue, and Hydrosat is addressing it head-on with satellite data,” Fossel said in a statement. “The societal need for insights on water stress and climate are only growing, and that drives a significant market need for space-based insights.” Extreme weather events like droughts, wildfires, storms and flooding are becoming increasingly frequent. The United States experienced 18 weather and climate disasters with price tags of $1 billion or more in 2022. “Having recently expanded our investment scope to include climate tech, we are happy to announce Hydrosat as our first investment in this space,” Alexander Kueppers, Statkraft Ventures managing director, said in a statement. “Hydrosat will significantly improve insights and decision-making for those in charge by combining high-resolution thermal imagery with advanced analytics. The company’s technology enables the optimization of irrigation, fertilizer usage, wildfire and drought prediction, water resource management and urban heat mapping capabilities.” Vaughn Blake, Blue Bear Capital partner, called cost-effective thermal infrared imagery “one of the holy grails for effective land management, efficient and responsible agricultural development, and precision climate analytics.” Hydrosat has raised $35 million since the company was founded in 2017.
Quantum Space is accelerating work on a transfer vehicle designed to take payloads to both geostationary orbit and cislunar space to support growing demand from commercial and government customers. The Rockville, Maryland-based company, established last year to develop spacecraft called Scouts to provide services such as space domain awareness and communications between the Earth and moon, planned to deliver those spacecraft using a tug called Ranger. The company initially proposed to start flying Ranger in late 2025. Steve Jurczyk, president and chief executive of Quantum Space, said in an interview the company was seeing greater interest in Ranger. “We somewhat accelerated the development plans for Ranger,” he said in an interview, with a first flight now planned earlier in 2025. That demand is coming from customers looking to transport spacecraft to both GEO and cislunar space. Ranger is designed to place more than 1.5 metric tons into GEO and more than 2.5 metric tons into cislunar space, and features four ports for attaching spacecraft weighing up to 500 kilograms each. “Ranger is a key part of our future to deliver Scouts,” said Phil Bracken, chief strategy officer of Quantum Space. “We assumed that other customers would like to use this service as well, and as we’ve started conversations with customers we have seen that demand signal.” He said the design of Ranger is based first on what the company needs for its Scout vehicles. That includes a “high-thrust” propulsion system to reduce travel times either to GEO or cislunar destinations, something he said is of interest to other customers. “You don’t want to spend months and months spiraling out.” In the near term, there is more interest in going to GEO, with a mix of government and commercial customers. Jurczyk said current interest in cislunar missions is coming from governments but expects that commercial demand will grow over time. Work on Ranger is still in its initial phases as the company prepares for a preliminary design review, as well as ordering long-lead items. The company is also securing an integration and test facility in the Washington, DC, suburbs to produce both Ranger and Scout spacecraft. “Our nominal plan is two vehicles per year right now,” Bracken said of production plans for Ranger, “but that can be adjusted to increase capacity as needed.” The company is continuing development of its first Scout spacecraft, QS-1, that it announced in October . That spacecraft is carrying a space situational awareness payload provided by GEOST that Jurczyk said is nearing its critical design review. QS-1 is set to launch in late 2024. Work on both Scout and Ranger is supported by a $15 million Series A round Quantum Space raised in December . Jurczyk said the company is working to raise an additional round of funding this year to continue work on both spacecraft. That fundraising is more difficult than last year, which he attributed to broader economic issues like bank failures and high interest rates than issues specific to the space industry, like Virgin Orbit’s recent bankruptcy filing. “Raising capital has gotten more challenging.”
A delayed launch of commercial satellites on a Falcon Heavy could upend the schedule of flights to the International Space Station, including a private astronaut mission that was scheduled for early May. During an April 24 briefing about an upcoming ISS spacewalk, a NASA official said the Ax-2 mission to the station by Axiom Space, which had been scheduled for as soon as May 8, would likely be pushed back. “We’re trying to determine the best launch date right now for the Axiom mission,” said Dina Contella, operations integration manager for the ISS at NASA. “We’re currently just looking at what our options are.” She said later in the briefing that the review is linked to delays in the Falcon Heavy launch of the ViaSat-3 Americas and Astranis Arcturus satellites from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The launch, previously scheduled for April 18, was delayed to April 26 by SpaceX several days after a static-fire test of the rocket’s three boosters. The company did not disclose the reason for the delay. That pad is also used for Falcon 9 cargo and crew missions to the ISS, but requires some work to change over from Falcon Heavy to crewed Falcon 9 launches. “We will be having to figure out a new launch date for Axiom based on the turnaround of the pad,” Contella said. She said NASA was in discussions with SpaceX and Axiom Space about a new launch date, which could be announced in the next few days. There is limited flexibility for rescheduling Ax-2, a 10-day mission to the ISS on a Crew Dragon that will carry four private astronauts, including two from Saudi Arabia. A cargo mission, SpaceX CRS-28, is currently scheduled to launch June 3, and Contella said that NASA would like to keep that cargo mission on schedule. “We’re trying to, if we can, leave SpaceX CRS-28 on June 3,” she said. That mission is carrying another pair of new solar arrays for the station that will be installed on two spacewalks. NASA wants to complete those spacewalks by early July, when the station enters a “high beta” period with extended illumination of the station. “If we can complete that whole mission before the high beta, that would be preferred.” It’s unclear what will happen if Ax-2 cannot be rescheduled for the CRS-28 cargo mission. Shortly after CRS-28 is the Crew Flight Test mission of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, currently scheduled for July 21, followed in mid-August by Crew-7, a Crew Dragon mission for NASA. The agency confirmed the dates for those two later launches April 14 in a manifest that also includes Crew-8 in February 2024 and Starliner-1 in mid-2024. Contella added that NASA is also hoping to launch another Cygnus mission, NG-19, to the station some time this summer. The NG-18 Cygnus was unberthed by the station’s robotic arm and released April 21, later reentering. Cygnus, though, uses a different port than the two docking ports for Dragon, Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft, giving NASA more schedule flexibility. The April 28 spacewalk, by NASA astronaut Steve Bowen and UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, will do some preparatory work for those upcoming solar array spacewalks, including installing cables and fixing insulation “that’s not exactly in the right configuration,” Contella said. They will set up equipment during their spacewalk “so the June spacewalks can go off as planned.” Bowen and Alneyadi will also retrieve a large S-band antenna, taking it inside the station so it can be returned to Earth for refurbishment. The spacewalk will be the first by Alneyadi or any Emirati astronaut and the eighth by Bowen. Those activities will take place as engineers continue to review data from coolant leaks suffered in December by a Soyuz spacecraft and in February by a Progress spacecraft, both while docked to the station. “We don’t have any new news to report” on the Roscosmos investigation into the leaks, she said, including whether the two leaks had a common cause. “They are investigating and we are closely working with them.”
Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major announced April 24 that Astra Space selected the company’s Hadley liquid engine to power the upper stage of its new Rocket 4 launch vehicle. Ursa Major is a Colorado-based manufacturer of liquid engines for small space launchers and hypersonic vehicles. The company said it is producing about 30 Hadley engines a year for the U.S. Air Force and several commercial customers, including small launcher startup Phantom Space and Stratolaunch. “The Ursa Major-Astra partnership marks an important industry milestone in outsourcing propulsion to unlock growth and innovation for launch providers and their customers,” said Joe Laurienti, founder and CEO of Ursa Major. “We’re excited to be a part of Astra’s Launch System 2 and the company’s next chapter of success.” Astra developing Rocket 4 Astra, a small satellite launch company based in Alameda, California, is developing the Rocket 4 vehicle after it discontinued a smaller version called Rocket 3.3. The company last week won a U.S. Space Force contract to launch experimental payloads. Astra said it expects the first test flights for Rocket 4 to begin in late 2023. Astra’s upper stage will use the vacuum variant of Hadley, an oxygen-rich staged combustion engine fueled by liquid kerosene. Ursa Major said the vacuum variant of Hadley provides 6,500 pounds of thrust, compared to Hadley’s sea-level configuration, which provides 5,000 pounds of thrust. Ursa Major last year won a U.S. Air Force $3.6 million contract to support the development and flight-qualification of the Hadley engine.
U.S. military space watchers and space traffic managers face a daunting workload due to increasing congestion and threats in orbit. The Space Force is investing in new sensors and technologies to better characterize objects in orbit, but is not taking full advantage of commercially available data and services, says a new report by the Government Accountability Office. GAO in a congressionally mandated report released April 24 said DoD lacks a consistent process to evaluate commercial data and tools for space situational awareness. The Space Force has a Unified Data Library (UDL) — a cloud-based data repository — to consolidate commercial and U.S. government SSA data, but many of the military’s systems used to track space objects are not compatible with data in the UDL, the report said. “While there has been periodic evaluation and use of some commercial capabilities, these efforts have been limited,” said GAO. “Establishing a process to regularly identify and evaluate commercial SSA capabilities … could enhance DoD’s ability to conduct this important national security mission.” GAO said the Space Force should develop a plan to integrate the UDL into Space Force operational systems, to ensure operators have access to the full suite of DoD and commercial data Benefits of commercial data One of the benefits of using commercial data is that some U.S. companies have space-tracking sensors in locations where DoD does not due to political or security concerns. This is a concern particularly in the Southern Hemisphere where DoD has limited sensor coverage, said GAO. The report pointed out that most of DoD’s ground-based radars can only track objects larger than 10 centimeters in diameter in low Earth orbit, and objects about 1 meter in diameter in geostationary Earth orbit. Some commercial sensors, meanwhile, can track objects as small as 2 centimeters in diameter. While the SSA industry is growing, it faces a number of challenges, GAO noted. A key issue is the significant uncertainty about the future size and stability of the SSA market. “Part of this uncertainty stems from the fact that the U.S. government provides much of its SSA data to the public for free, and SSA providers must add additional value beyond that which is provided by the government.” Commercial companies, further, view the government as an “anchor” customer, the report said, so continuing uncertainty about government SSA funding could cause stagnation in the fielding of commercial capabilities or even drive companies or services out of the market. GAO noted that the Space Force requested funding to buy commercial data in its budget request for the first time in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Approximately $20 million was budgeted in 2023 for commercial SSA data purchases and a total of about $110 million for fiscal years 2023 through 2027. 
COLORADO SPRINGS – It would cost a little under $4 million to retrieve the 24-kilogram Thor Altair rocket body from low-Earth orbit. The price tag for nabbing NASA’s defunct Cosmic Background Explorer, weighing in at 2245 kilograms, is $62.5 million, according to a deck of cards Kall Morris Inc. handed out at the 38th Space Symposium. KMI, a Michigan-based startup focused on space debris remediation, printed cards to show prices the company will charge for grabbing space junk. Each of the 52 cards shows a U.S.-owned object along with its mass, launch date and North American Aerospace Defense Command catalog number. In spite of growing concern about space debris, there is a lack of information on what it would cost to begin solving the problem, Troy Morris, KMI co-founder and director of operations, told SpaceNews . KMI is working to prove its technology can remove debris from orbit. Testing on the ground has been conducted with funding from the Space Force’s Orbital Prime program. In addition, KMI plans to conduct a 2024 International Space Station demonstration of its mechanically articulated end effector on an Astrobee, one of NASA’s free-flying robots. “Inside the ISS, we’ll prove out the mechanism to nondestructively capture debris and then release it again,” Troy Morris said. “We can do iterative testing with the crew.” Austin Morris, KMI co-founder and engineering director, and Troy’s brother, said, “We can change out the face plates for the capture object, swap out with different materials and different surface geometries to give us a wide range of testing and demonstrations.” To determine the prices for capturing specific objects in orbit, KMI “looked at the cost of our spacecraft, the cost of the missions, where these objects are located and the mass of the objects,” Troy Morris said. “All of that information combined gives us an idea of how much would it cost to retrieve an object.” KMI also is advertising its capability to retrieve multiple objects. “If there are multiple smaller-cost objects that add up to $14 million, we can get those multiple objects with a single spacecraft,” Troy Morris said.
Emerging direct-to-smartphone capabilities are breathing new life into the mobile satellite services (MSS) industry. For decades, Inmarsat and other satellite operators in this industry have been confined to providing services to specialized handsets with bulky antennas. However, technological breakthroughs and work to standardize space and terrestrial communications promise to help break them free of niche products to serve mass-market smartphones and other devices. It is still early days for the direct-to-device market. Services that have been launched so far and those on the near horizon are limited to low-bandwidth applications such as emergency messaging. But the future shape of this market is still being determined as startups also seek to take it on with dedicated constellations. For 44-year-old Inmarsat, direct-to-device is just one transformational opportunity to work through as the British company is in the middle of being sold to U.S.-based Viasat. Both Viasat and Inmarsat operate communications satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). Most of the players chasing the direct-to-device opportunity are in low Earth orbit (LEO), including Globalstar which has enabled an SOS feature on Apple’s latest iPhone in certain regions since November. Satellites in LEO can provide lower latency connections than GEO because they are closer to Earth. As part of a multi-orbit constellation announced in 2021 called Orchestra, Inmarsat is considering satellites in LEO to bolster its global network as Starlink, OneWeb, and other LEO operators chase its connectivity markets. Inmarsat also plans to add two payloads in highly elliptical orbit to the mix later this year for coverage over the globe’s northernmost latitudes. Inmarsat chief technology officer Peter Hadinger, who joined the operator in 2011 and has spent more than four decades in the space industry, spoke to SpaceNews following last month’s launch of Inmarsat-6 F2 about plans to expand in the evolving MSS market. Inmarsat-6 F2, a twin of Inmarsat-6 F1 that launched in December 2021, promises improved services in L-band spectrum the operator uses for MSS services to handheld devices. The satellite also carries a Ka-band payload for providing high-speed broadband to larger terminals. What do you make of all the activity going on in the direct-to-device market? I’ve been in this industry for a very long time. I’ve seen the cycles, and I must say it’s been quite a long time since mobile satellite services were front and center of the business. There was a flurry of mobile satellite systems toward the end of the 90s — Iridium, Globalstar, and others that came along and then disappeared — and then it got sort of set to this little kids’ table and disappeared at conferences altogether for a while. Now it’s back, largely spurred by this direct-to-device capability. There are a number of different pathways to direct-to-device. Some people are using mobile network operator spectrum and others are using satellite spectrum. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. For us, we’ve been doing direct-to-device for ages [with satellite L-band spectrum], although when people talk about direct-to-device they usually mean direct-to-cellphone. There, it’s really just a matter of whether the cellphone tunes the proper frequency band. We have some partners like Bullitt and others who are building phones to speak in our L-band, and they’re using narrowband waveforms like NB-IoT to do that. The big question then is how much bandwidth do you need and do you need to build a purpose-built fleet to do that? We’re not yet convinced that is the case, but we have been approached by everybody because we have spectrum. Our challenge, and it’s a good problem to have, is our spectrum is largely being used. Unlike some who have spectrum that was pretty fallow. So it’s not just something where we can say ‘oh yeah, sure, let’s repurpose it.’ And you have to ask if the value of wideband spectrum is going to return the same as a lot of narrowband spectrum. I’ve often said that people will pay a lot more per bit for the first bits of connectivity than they will for the millionth bit of connectivity. People talk about climbing mountains and doing FaceTime from the top of wherever, and the millions of bits it takes to do that, versus the 100 bits it might take to say ‘my car is broken down, I’m here, come get me.’ That takes fewer bits to do, but they’re probably more valuable bits. We’ve spoken with everybody and we’re open to working with people who want to develop those kinds of things but, from an internal investment, I think we’re really focused on the narrowband market. Iridium has partnered with Qualcomm to provide direct-to-device services. Have you been approached by chipset developers? We can’t say who because of NDAs, but you can imagine the players that have spoken to us — everybody is kind of out there feeling the market out. A number of people are starting things, but, in many ways, they’re taking careful baby steps to see if this is going to develop into something. It is a very expensive proposition to go to something that would be wideband. There are some that have staked their companies on this and others that are just sort of dabbling around the edges. If you take a look, most systems are going to be starting off in the narrowband end of things because that’s where a fairly certain market is. The cost to deliver goes up radically as your bandwidth increases. It’s not clear if the revenue follows that same trend line. The recently launched I-6 F1 and I-6 F2 satellites effectively double the amount of Inmarsat’s usable L-band capacity. Would that enable Inmarsat to deliver higher bandwidth direct-to-device services on top of narrowband? Yes and no. Most of the increase in capability brought in by them is going to be improving the performance of our own wideband satcoms devices. These are not handheld phones. They’re shipboard terminals, airplane terminals, and so forth. So it’s not really about having extra spectrum to do direct-to-device as much as it is improving services on these terminals. However, depending on the nature of the partner, they may wish to deploy something different. We’ve seen statements by Viasat that they’re interested in it. They may have ideas to bring to the table as well. There’s also a debate over about whether these services are best delivered from GEO, or from LEO satellites like Inmarsat has been considering for Orchestra. The GEOs are very efficient from an operational standpoint. You can put up a long-lived asset that’s up there for 15-20 years. You’re not having to replenish them continuously. You can really target the capacity you have on a GEO to the places where it’s needed at a given point in time. Spacecraft are power limited, fundamentally, and you can take the power on a GEO spacecraft and have it in the east in the morning and the west in the evening, or where the hotspots are — it’s considerably different than a LEO where that power may be over water in the deep ocean for a considerable portion of its orbit, therefore unusable. But LEOs also have advantages. We have done some experiments in LEO and we have filings in lots of different bands. We have the luxury of being able to sit back and watch some of these markets mature. Inmarsat has had increased profits over the last two years, exceeding the industry in terms of revenue and EBITDA growth. It’s a healthy business so we’re in no rush to somehow change that radically. We’re investing to essentially mature the different options that are out there. We said back when we introduced the Orchestra program that we’d make investments of $100 million through 2026 in LEO. That goes into maturing some of the new terminal technologies, some of the terrestrial technologies that we’re investing in, as well as the things we need to do to prepare for these options. We don’t have a need for additional capacity and capabilities in the network until the end of the decade. We can afford to play a longer game and watch the industry consolidation, which we’re 100% convinced needs to happen in the current environment, and let that play out and then take our strengths in the market and put them where they’d best be used. When do you think you’ll decide on a LEO strategy? Inmarsat-7 will be deploying and coming into service in 2025, and we’ll be ready to shift investment and focus at that point for the capacity we may need by the end of the decade. From a big investment question standpoint, that’s the timeline. Does it make sense in the interim to partner with somebody? Maybe. Would that partnership last a long time? Possibly. Across the board people do recognize the value that Inmarsat brings to any relationship, just in terms of our understanding of mobility markets as the largest mobility player, and the market access, the relationships, the multi-spectrum bands — all the rest of it. It’s a good time to be in this business as mobility is coming back into vogue. It’s nice to be able to talk about so much more these days. We’ve just been in the background, quietly doing our business for quite some time, and making good money out of it. While Inmarsat has historically used L-band for voice and messaging, the spectrum is increasingly finding uses for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices — how has that market grown for your company? We’re a big supplier to a lot of IoT markets today. Because we do that primarily indirectly, through partnerships and so forth, we don’t track and report the number of IoT devices that we have on the network, but it’s in the millions. Viasat mainly sells directly to consumers. Could Inmarsat’s distribution strategy change if it is successfully sold to Viasat? They’ve been able to go direct to consumers because it’s been a business based in the United States. I think when they go internationally, they’ll find that partnerships are not only desirable but in some cases necessary because you need an in-country presence to have market access and so on. Part of the advantage of [Viasat] buying Inmarsat is we’ve already got these relationships, partnerships, and market access. One of the things Viasat bring, however, is technology. They are fundamentally a hardware vendor that has increasingly gotten into services with time. So they bring considerable technology to this that will complement our assets. I still expect in the hardware sense that we’re going to work with the best of breed in the market. We have a number of long-standing hardware partners. We’ve yet to have the opportunity to spend much time comparing notes. It’s a long-distance courtship in some sense, but I think each of us will have things to learn from the other as we get into the things we may or may not know about each other’s internal plans. We’ll get there. We’ve still got a few regulators to convince [to approve the deal] but I think our arguments have been pretty [compelling] when it comes to the profound changes that are happening in the market. Especially the introduction of the LEOs. Having OneWeb, Starlink, etc., come in has really changed the nature of the market. It’s no longer GEO A versus GEO B. It’s GEOs versus the LEOs. For us, the consolidation that the market has needed for some time is sped up by this dynamic. And these LEOs are coming with billions of dollars of investments. The cost of developing and quite frankly sustaining a LEO network is massive. Take Starlink’s 30,000 spacecraft, give them five-year lifetimes, and you’re launching 6,000 spacecraft a year just to keep it in business. Even if you’re launching 60 of them on a Starship — you know, the larger, future style — that’s still 100 launches a year. Two launches a week of Starship. This is just a phenomenal amount of investment. This is why it’s a good business for people with lots of money to spend, and they’re certainly taking some pretty big bets. It may be the right thing for us to partner with somebody like that to do it, but they’re really addressing markets that are largely different from ours. Our markets are not so big in mobility that you can afford to do that size of a constellation. You don’t need it from a capacity perspective. The things we’ve put together conceptually are much more modest in size, but specifically designed to address mobility compared to fixed residential customers. And they are very different markets with different kinds of requirements. You have a high degree of expectation for certainty, as opposed to best efforts. This article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
After years of delays, Maxar Technologies is preparing for the first launch this summer of its next-generation imaging satellites WorldView Legion. “We’ve got everything we need at this point” to get the first pair of WorldView Legion high-resolution imaging satellites to orbit, the company’s president and CEO Daniel Jablonsky told SpaceNews April 20 at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The Earth-observation satellites, equipped with Raytheon-made imaging payload s — are scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Maxar plans to send six WorldView Legions into sun-synchronous and mid-inclination orbits on three separate Falcon 9 rockets. The WorldView Legion constellation is years behind schedule due to hardware supplier problems and other setbacks , including delays in the delivery of the imaging instruments, production shutdowns during the covid pandemic and a shortage of Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft used to transport spacecraft from the factory to the launch site. Jablonsky said the new technology in the Legion satellites also caused additional delays. “It’s a first of its kind, complicated space program,” he said. “It’s a very exquisite type of technology.” As the launch date nears, he said, “it’s been more about finalizing all of the preflight checks, completing the flight software and getting all of our last testing before we go downrange and put them on a rocket.” Two more Legions planned Maxar meanwhile is preparing to finalize a deal to be acquired by the private-equity firm Advent International. The company’s shareholders approved the $6.4 billion acquisition April 19. The six-satellite Legion constellation is key to the future of the company’s Earth intelligence division which currently relies on three legacy WorldView and one GeoEye optical imaging satellites. Jablonsky said the company’s investors have agreed to move forward with the production of two additional WorldView Legion satellites due to the growing demand for imagery fueled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The seventh and eighth Legions will be “substantially along the same technology lines” as the six already built, but will have some upgrades, he said. “Even in the current class of satellites, we continue to make upgrades from the first two, and we’ll continue to do that where we see opportunities for improvement during the engineering cycle,” he said. In preparation for the development of the future Legion satellites, said Jablonsky, “we’ve already got long-lead time parts on order, especially the optics packages that take longer.” “We are seeing a lot of demand,” he said. During last week’s Space Symposium, said Jablonsky, the first question from every customer was when the new satellites will be available. Maxar is the U.S. government’s primary provider of commercial electro-optical imagery. The company last year won a $3.2 billion contract from the National Reconnaissance Office to supply imagery and mapping services over the next decade. New types of remote sensing Governments and commercial customers are increasingly relying on space-based data to make decisions, Jablonsky said. The war in Ukraine created an appetite not just for optical imagery but for other sensing phenomenologies such as synthetic aperture radar — to see through clouds — and radio-frequency mapping for the detection of electronic jammers. Maxar in recent months has moved to expand in both the SAR and RF markets. The company in February announced a deal with SAR startup Umbra to get dedicated access to the company’s radar imaging constellation. Maxar also acquired radio-frequency mapping startup Aurora Insight, a year after it made a strategic investment in the company. Jablonsky would not comment on any other planned acquisitions but said these recent efforts are indicators of Maxar’s business strategy with regard to Earth imaging. The company in recent years also added 3D imaging and machine-learning technologies to its portfolio with the acquisitions of Vricon and Wovenware. “As you’ve seen from my track record, we’ve had a heavy acquisition strategy, even during the turnaround phase of the company,” said Jablonsky. “Especially as we generate good returns on the business, that gives us an opportunity to invest back in the business, either technologies that we create inside or companies we might buy,” he added. “We never talk publicly about what they are, but we are always pleased to announce them once they occur.”
Virgin Orbit says it is moving ahead with plans to return its LauncherOne rocket to flight later this year even though there is no certainty the company will emerge from bankruptcy. The company announced April 19 that it completed an investigation into the failure of its previous LauncherOne mission Jan. 9. On that flight, the rocket’s second stage engine shut down prematurely, preventing the stage and its payloads from reaching orbit. Virgin Orbit said that tests confirmed that the root cause of the failure was a fuel filter that dislodged in the propulsion system and made its way into the Newton 4 engine. Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said at a conference in February that the fuel filter was the likely cause of the launch failure . A series of ground tests at Mojave Air and Space Port in California “recreated flight conditions and demonstrated the dislodging and subsequent travel of the filter into the Newton-4 engine,” it stated. Those tests also confirmed the performance of a redesigned fuel filter intended to prevent the problem from reoccurring, although the company did not elaborate on the changes in the filter’s design. “All potentially credible scenarios were investigated. The modified design, that has now been verified through test, has been incorporated into the company’s next rocket which is planned for flight from Mojave Air and Space Port later this year,” the company stated. Those tests continued even after Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy April 4 . The company retained about 100 employees to continue work on both the investigation and vehicle preparations after laying off about 675 people in late March , just before the Chapter 11 filing. In a separate statement April 19, the company said it was moving ahead with a proposed sale of the company as part of the bankruptcy restructuring, filing a plan and disclosure document with federal bankruptcy court. That includes a schedule similar to what the company proposed earlier in the month , such as a May 4 deadline for bidders to formally declare their interest in the company and make final bids by May 14. “We continue to make important progress and remain focused on positioning the company to complete our sale process to the benefit of all stakeholders,” Hart said in the statement. “We remain committed to working with our investors and creditors throughout this process to achieve an optimal outcome for everyone.” There is no guarantee, though, that the bidding process will result in someone buying the whole company and continuing operations, since bidders can instead propose to buy specific assets. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) April 17, the company said it would continue “reduced rate operations” while in Chapter 11. That includes final preparations of its next LauncherOne vehicle, which it described as “more than approximately 90% complete.” If the Chapter 11 process allows Virgin Orbit to restructure, “we would seek to conduct our next launch before the end of 2023, with a customer that is currently on contract for that launch.” The company has not disclosed the customer for that launch. Virgin Orbit would also increase its workforce to about 275 employees, or a little more than a third of its workforce before the March layoffs, by the end of 2023. “Thereafter in 2024, we would seek to increase our launch rate.” The company struggled to increase its launch rate since its first successful launch in January 2021. The company conducted two launches in 2021 and, after announcing plans for as many as six launches in 2022, finished the year with only two. Virgin Orbit recorded $33.1 million in revenue in 2022, according to the SEC filing, up from $7.4 million in 2021 because of the higher value of the launches it conducted. However, the cost of those activities more than doubled from 2021 to $85.7 million, which the company attributed to “additional provisions for contract losses booked on future launches, manufacturing variances, and inventory adjustments.” Selling, general and administrative expenses also increased significantly in 2022, which the company was linked to increased personnel-related expenses. The company reported a net loss of $191.1 million in 2022, compared to $157.3 million in 2021 and $121.7 million in 2020. If Virgin Orbit does emerge in a restructured form from Chapter 11, it will likely do so under a new name. As part of the debtor-in-possession financing it arranged with Virgin Investments Ltd. to allow the company to continue operations under Chapter 11, it signed a “termination and debrand agreement” that requires it to phase out use of Virgin-associated trademarks and logos. The agreement allows Virgin Orbit to retain the name and trademarks until after the company is sold or other Chapter 11 plan is approved.
China is sharpening the details of its Tianwen-3 mission to collect samples from Mars and deliver them to Earth. New mission details and defined objectives were revealed in presentations made at the International Conference of Deep Space Sciences in Hefei, Anhui province, April 22. The mission will use a pair of Long March 5 rockets to send two separate spacecraft stacks towards the Red Planet around 2030 with the goal of collecting and returning 500 grams of samples. The mission objectives include searching for evidence for life on Mars, understanding environmental and climate evolution of the Red Planet and its potential past habitability. The two Long March 5 launches will carry a lander and ascent vehicle and an orbiter and return module respectively. Entry, descent and landing will build on technology used for the Zhurong rover landing as part of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission. Sampling will, as with China’s 2020 Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission, use a lander-based robotic arm to collect surface samples and a drill to collect material from up to two meters below the surface. In a new development, the landing segment will also have limited capacity to collect samples close to the landing site, using either a six-legged crawling robot or an Ingenuity-like helicopter. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) unveiled a prototype of the latter in 2021. Collected samples will be sent into Mars orbit using a two-stage ascent vehicle. It will consist of a solid first stage and liquid propellant upper stage with a total mass of at least 360 kilograms. The ascent vehicle will then dock with the orbiter and return module, with docking assisted by a robotic arm. Collected materials will then be transferred to the return module for the return to Earth. The vague timeline for launch suggests, but does not confirm, a slip from a previously stated 2028 launch timetable. A mission profile for China’s Mars sample return presented in June 2022 targeted launch in late 2028 with samples delivered to Earth in July 2031. The 2028 timeline would see samples delivered to Earth before the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission. The mission likewise targets delivering around 500 grams of Martian samples to Earth. Landing site selection is being conducted with invited input from international teams. Engineering constraints mean the landing will take place between 17 and 30 degrees north latitude, due to energy and lighting requirements. The landing ellipsis will be 50 by 20 kilometers. Prospective sites required to have an elevation of at least 3,000 meters below the zero-elevation level, or the equivalent to sea level on Earth. This provides the lander with more atmosphere to move through to slow its descent onto the Martian surface. Site selection will also be balanced by science objectives. The chosen site will need to be considered of astrobiological relevance, with Martian terrain older than 3.5 billion years being prioritized. Environments suitable for the emergence of life and its preservation such as sedimentary or hydrothermal systems, evidence of past aqueous activity and geological diversity were noted as key priorities. The The mission will also adhere to the highest standards of planetary protection protocols, according to the presentations. Liu Jizhong of the director of China’s Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center under the CNSA, and Hou Zengqian of the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences delivered the presentations in Hefei, which were later shared on Chinese social media.
Astra Space won a task order worth $11.5 million to launch experimental payloads for the Defense Department’s Space Test Program. Astra, a small satellite launch company based in Alameda, California, was awarded the contract under the U.S. Space Force’s Orbital Services Program OSP-4 , the Space Systems Command announced April 21. The OSP-4 program is run by the Space Systems Command’s Small Launch and Targets Division at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The mission, named STP-S29B, is scheduled to fly in April 2025 on Astra’s new launch vehicle called Astra 4. It will carry an ESPA-class space vehicle and rideshare cubesats. The STP-S29 mission was divided into two launches and awarded to two different providers. STP-S29A was awarded last year to Northrop Grumman, The company won a $29.9 million task order to launch the mission in September 2024 on a Minotaur 4 small launch vehicle. STP-S29B, awarded to Astra, is a “complex mission that will conduct scientific experiments and technology demonstrations with the goal of advancing DoD’s space capabilities,” said Col. Justin Beltz, chief of the Small Launch and Targets Division. Higher mission assurance Astra was pre-qualified for the OSP-4 program in August 2021. OSP-4 is an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracting vehicle for rapid acquisition of launch services. Vendors compete for individual orders, and have to be able to launch payloads larger than 400 pounds to any orbit within 12 to 24 months from contract award. The award to Astra “reflects the tremendous promise industry is bringing to the table with systems like Rocket 4. We look forward to working with Astra to make this launch a success,” said Beltz. The STP-S29B mission is a Category 2 mission assurance launch, which requires additional certifications and an independent risk assessment. “STP-S29B demands a higher level of mission assurance than previous Astra launches and therefore represents a significant increase in Astra’s coordination with the Space Force to perform a launch designed for mission success,” said Thomas Williams, senior director of federal sales at Astra. Astra is targeting the first launch of its Rocket 4 vehicle before the end of the year. It is a new vehicle the company designed to carry heavier payloads than the previous Astra Rocket 3.3 . Astra discontinued the development of Rocket 3.3 after it failed to deploy two NASA Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) satellites in June 2022.
The U.S. Space Force in its 2024 budget allocated $59 million to buy satellite communications services from SES’ new broadband constellation in medium Earth orbit known as O3b mPower. The purchase was made under a NATO contracting vehicle established last year for countries to acquire commercial satcom services. Both the U.S. and Luxembourg have agreed to buy mPower satcom services under NATO’s Global Commercially Contracted Satellite Communications. Under the agreement, a portion of the O3b mPower constellation will be assigned to the U.S. and Luxembourg for defense and security uses. SES is a global satellite operator headquartered in Luxembourg. The services to the U.S. military are provided by the company’s U.S. subsidiary SES Space & Defense, based in Reston, Virginia. This procurement of satcom services is “an example of what we’re doing with international partners and with commercial industry,” Lt. Gen. Phillip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements, told SpaceNews in a recent interview. Access to commercial satcom services from all available orbits is important for resiliency, he said. “It gives us diversity, high throughput, low-latency satcom.” DoD for years has been a customer of SES’ O3b constellation in medium Earth orbit (MEO) but this is the company’s first military contract for the next-generation mPower satellites. The first two of 11 planned mPower satellites launched to orbit in December on a SpaceX rocket. SES says each will provide 10 times more throughput than the legacy O3b satellites. Jay Icard, senior vice president of SES Space & Defense, told SpaceNews that current U.S. military users of the O3b satcom service will be able to access mPower from their existing ground terminals. U.S. seeks more partnerships DoD’s purchase of mPower satcom services was first announced in February by Deanna Ryals, director of international affairs at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command. In a speech at the GovSatcom conference in Luxembourg, Ryals said her office had been in discussions for some time with Luxembourg’s ministry of defense about setting up a partnership that would serve as a model for other countries to join. “We’re going into a future that’s focused on hybrid architectures, resiliency and combined warfighting capabilities,” Ryals said. The U.S. Space Force, she said, is “building a hybrid architecture that includes our commercial partners and our international partners’ national sovereign systems.” The MEO layer in the architecture, she said, will be called “DoD mPower.” “This is the future,” Ryals added. “All of our future architectures are going to look like this … a combination of DoD purpose built, our allies’ national sovereign systems, and commercial capabilities.” Agreements for polar satcom With regard to government-owned satcom systems, she said, the U.S. is interested in partnering with allies that are investing in sovereign national systems such as Australia and the United Kingdom . “We’re trying to figure out how do we work together from the beginning, and how do we take advantage of the capabilities each is building?” Ryals said. “Canada will be building another Polar Satellite Communication project later in the 2020s. We’re looking at how we collaborate for the high north. Norway is looking at their follow-on system,” she said. “These are systems in areas where the United States doesn’t have to go it alone anymore.” The U.S. Space Force, meanwhile, is seeking partners for government-owned communications satellites, including the newest Wideband Global Satcom WGS-12 that Congress funded in the 2023 defense budget. The WGS constellation, with 10 satellites in orbit and one scheduled to launch in 2025, already has multiple international partners, Ryals added. “WGS-12 is now real. We’re actively working with our international partners to figure out how do we do this again.” The Space Force also is eyeing international partners for its future Protected Tactical Satcom constellation, Ryals said. An issue that gets in the way of partnerships are U.S. restrictions on the sharing of information with foreign nationals, she said. “One of the biggest challenges that we have had to date working with our allies and partners, and often with our commercial industry, is the ability to share information.” Documents related to space programs, for example, are stamped “ NoForn ” so they can’t be shared. Ryals said the Space Force wants to move to a “YesForn” policy that would allow exchanges with allies and partners. “The United States Department of Defense is working on new policies and strategies to remove those barriers to information sharing,” he said. “and you will see those changes this year.”
The U.S. Space Force in 2025 plans to start replacing decades-old parabolic satellite dishes with electronic phased array antennas developed by BlueHalo. The company’s CEO Jonathan Moneymaker said the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) is the first customer for a new phased array antenna the company developed for the military and commercial markets. Based in Arlington, Virginia, BlueHalo last year won a $1.4 billion contract from the RCO to update 12 military ground stations with modern systems. The company, founded in 2019 , specializes in space-based communications, directed energy and missile defense technologies. The Space RCO, a procurement agency under the Space Force, selected the antenna for the Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource program, or SCAR . This is an eight-year program to modernize the Satellite Control Network (SCN) of ground terminals that track U.S. military and intelligence satellites in geostationary Earth orbit. Moneymaker said the mobile electronically steered antenna, called Badger, is now in development and will be manufactured at a new facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. BlueHalo’s main subcontractor for the SCAR program is Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, which is providing a software-based ground control system called OpenSpace. The SCAR contract is a so-called Other Transaction Authority agreement where the government and the contractor agree to co-invest in a new technology. The Badger product uses a proprietary multi-band software defined antenna technology. Decades-old ground stations The military’s satellite control network has 19 parabolic antennas at seven locations around the world. The technology is outdated and more capacity is needed to keep with the growing number of satellites, a recent Government Accountability Office report noted. The existing antennas can only track one satellite at a time. Moneymaker said the Badger antenna will be able to maintain simultaneous contact with up to 20 satellites. Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of the Space Operations Command that operates these ground stations, called the SCN a “venerable network that’s been around for decades and is doing fantastic work for us today.” But he said he agreed with the GAO’s findings that more work is needed to sustain the aging ground stations, Whiting told reporters April 19 at the Space Symposium. Whiting pointed out that about half of the military’s geostationary satellites have their own dedicated ground stations and antennas, so not all national security satellites are dependent on the SCN. “There’s a plethora of various antenna capabilities that we can use,” he said. He said the Space Force is watching the SCAR program and looks forward to the new phased array antennas.
A Swedish astronaut may fly to the International Space Station on a commercial mission within the next year under an agreement signed this week. The letter of intent, signed by the Swedish National Space Agency, European Space Agency and Axiom Space, would allow an ESA astronaut, most likely from Sweden, to go to the station on an Axiom commercial mission lasting about 10 days. Under the three-way agreement, the Swedish National Space Agency would negotiate directly with Axiom for the flight on a future private astronaut mission. ESA would be the “crew provider” for the mission, signing an agreement with Axiom to define and implement the mission and assigning an ESA astronaut to it. “The ESA astronaut policy was developed for exactly these opportunities, flying on commercial flights in partnership as we transition Europe’s access to space and diversify the space market,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said in a statement about the agreement, signed during the 38 th Space Symposium. ESA and Axiom Space, in separate statements, said only that the person flying on the mission would be an ESA astronaut. However, in its own statement , the Swedish National Space Agency said the astronaut would be Swedish. “A Swedish astronaut is a source of inspiration for an entire population and an ambassador for Sweden. Through what will be Sweden’s second astronaut, we are strengthening our position in the global space arena,” Anna Rathsman, director general of the agency and chair of the ESA Council, said in a translated statement. One astronaut representing Sweden has flown to space to date. Christer Fuglesang, who was selected by ESA for its astronaut corps in 1992, flew on two shuttle missions, STS-116 in 2006 and STS-128 in 2009. NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, who flew on a long-duration ISS mission in 2019-2020, also has Swedish citizenship from her Swedish mother. None of the active ESA astronauts today are Swedish. In the new ESA astronaut class announced in November 2022, one Swede, Marcus Wandt, was selected as a “reserve” astronaut. Such astronauts would remain in their current jobs but receive basic training to prepare for any future flight opportunities. The statement from the Swedish National Space Agency added that it was its intention to fly the astronaut within a year, pending selection through a formal process. The agency said it is working with the Swedish Space Corporation and the Swedish armed forces for the mission, along with Swedish companies Saab and FAM. Sweden would not be the first ESA member planning to fly an astronaut commercially through Axiom. Italy has been working with Axiom Space since 2018 and expects to fly an astronaut on the Ax-3 mission, set to fly to the ISS as soon as late this year. “Axiom Space’s partnership with the Swedish National Space Agency and ESA symbolizes our efforts to work with countries and organizations around the world to expand the commercial space domain,” Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom, said in a company statement. Axiom announced April 17 a new initiative, called the Axiom Space Access Program , to serve governments interested in conducting research in space or flying astronauts. The company did not state in its announcement if the agreement with Sweden and ESA was considered part of that program.
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat has restored maritime and aviation safety capabilities on its I-4 F1 satellite over Asia Pacific but is still trying to recover services for L-band phones that have been down for nearly a week. All services on the spacecraft have been restored following the outage except for its Global Satellite Phone Service (GSPS), an Inmarsat spokesperson said April 21, although work continues on “optimizing performance and addressing some specific residual issues.” The operator declined to detail these residual issues but said safety services that include its maritime distress signal business Inmarsat C “are operating normally” on the 18-year-old spacecraft, serving East Asia and the Pacific region. I-4 F1 suffered a partial loss of power April 16 that “invoked automatic procedures on the satellite that led to the suspension of services,” according to the company. Maritime safety services were immediately transferred to a contingency satellite elsewhere in the operator’s fleet during the outage, in compliance with rules overseen by the International Mobile Satellite Organization. These maritime services were transferred back after I-4 F1 was recovered April 18, the same day Inmarsat restored connectivity for aviation customers. While engineers are still investigating the root cause of the power issue, Inmarsat has ruled out space debris or anything malicious, such as a cyber attack. The satellite was built by EADS Astrium, now Airbus Defense and Space, and was launched in 2005 with an initial 13-year design life. The Airbus-built I-6 F1 satellite that launched in December 2021 is slated to replace many of I-4 F1’s L-band services “in the coming months,” Inmarsat said. Inmarsat has not said how many partners or customers have been affected by its I-4 F1 issues. 
Government officials say satellite operators need to take greater responsibility for safe operations of their spacecraft in increasingly congested orbits. Speaking during a session of the 38 th Space Symposium here April 20, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said companies and organizations will need to be better able to responsibly operate their satellites given the growing number of satellites from various constellations. “Not all operators are operating at the same level of competence,” he said, based in part on their level of experience. “We have to have a serious dialogue about operator responsibility.” DalBello drew parallels to air traffic management, where pilots require different licenses for flying a small private plane versus a commercial jetliner. “As we look forward to the future, I think we need to ask serious questions about what new responsibilities will come both for the government but also for the operators themselves, in terms of certification, in terms of capability, in terms of the commitment they make to safety and the overarching goal of space sustainability.” His office is leading efforts to establish a civil space traffic management (STM) capability, taking over from the Defense Department. However, that will primarily involve collecting and analyzing space situational awareness data and providing warnings of potential conjunctions to satellite operators, but not compelling those operators to maneuver to avoid collisions. One of the largest government satellite operators said it supports responsible space operations. “We intend to be very much active in being responsible operators in space,” said Travis Langster, principal director for space and missile defense policy at the Defense Department, on the same panel. The DoD currently provides that civil space traffic management capability but also lacks regulatory authority. “We’re not a regulator, like the Department of Commerce,” he said. One part of that effort is greater insight into how companies are maneuvering their satellites. “We have to move to a world where there’s more transparency in what commercial operators are doing,” DalBello said. “They need to share their location information. They need to share their maneuver information. We should be able to reshare that information.” The Commerce and Defense Departments are collaborating on the transition of civil STM capabilities to Commerce. DalBello said his office has the goal of establishing an initial capability in the third quarter of 2024. There will be, he added, some overlap with what the DoD current provides, like its Space Track service. “That’s going to be a gradual transition. Our goal and our commitment to the community is that we’re not going to just turn things off that you’re relying on,” he said. “There will probably be a period where we’re operating two systems in parallel. DoD will want to get comfortable with our level of competence in doing this, and then slowly they’ll start turning things off.” Both said they are working well together on this transition. “Our teams meet weekly,” Langster said. “We’re looking forward to taking the next steps. It is fairly technical right now, but I think we’re on a very good path forward.” Langster reiterated past comments by Defense Department officials about their desire to hand over civil STM to Commerce. “Inherently, the DoD is a military organization, and that means inherently there are constraints” like security and procedures, he said. The Office of Space Commerce, meanwhile, is working to refine its civil STM plans, such as what constitutes “basic” services it will offer for free to all satellite operators and what more advanced services will be left to companies to offer. The office held a webinar April 12 where it reviewed the responses it received to a recent request for information on the topic. That revealed that while there was widespread agreement among both spacecraft operators and commercial providers of space situational awareness (SSA) services of what the office considered to be basic services, there was less agreement among what should be considered advanced. “The concern is that there is a commercial SSA industry that exists,” DalBello said. “The government wants to provide a free safety service but, on the other hand, the government doesn’t want to put people out of business.” He suggested that, eventually, the government could step back from space traffic management and hand more of this to the commercial sector. “STM will just be one of the costs of flying a commercial satellite fleet. There will be a series of qualified operators and you maybe just pick one for your particular system, and the government’s role could actually get quite small as we look out a decade or maybe two decades.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – A LeoLabs maneuver-detection dashboard displayed at the 38 th Space Symposium tracked the location of about 30 Chinese, Iranian and Russian spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The dashboard showed, for example, an experimental Chinese spaceplane that had lowered its altitude in the last two weeks from about 600 kilometers to about 300 kilometers. “We believe this spacecraft is getting ready to reenter,” Kohei Fujimoto, director of LeoLabs Japan, told SpaceNews . Whenever one of the Chinese, Iranian or Russian spacecraft maneuvered and then passed over one of LeoLabs’ six radar sites around the world, the dashboard highlighted the move, estimated its timing and displayed the spacecrat’s new orbital parameters. “If you’re unaware of maneuvers, they can catch you by surprise,” said Dan Ceperley, LeoLabs CEO and co-founder . “But most of them are routine. If you get out in advance of it and you’re not surprised, that’s where we can drive sustainability and deterrence. If there are no surprises, that takes down the likelihood of conflict and debris-generating activities in space.” LeoLabs tracks objects in low-Earth orbit with phased array radars in Alaska, Australia , Portugal’s Azores archipelago , New Zealand , Texas and Costa Rica . An additional radar in Argentina is scheduled to come online this year. In addition, LeoLabs has developed software to sifts through the radar data to map low-Earth orbit and provide, what Ceperley calls, “space behavior awareness at scale.” The population of operational satellites in low-Earth orbit is growing rapidly. “Now, there’s close to 7,000 and we should hit that 10,000-satellite mark this year,” Ceperley said. To prevent on-orbit collisions, “everything has to scale, including space domain awareness and space traffic management,” he added. LeoLabs processes the radar data quickly thanks in part to cloud computing. “You can process the data at scale because we’re working in the cloud,” Ceperley said. “It’s very straightforward to scale up as the number of satellites grows.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he supports continuing current restrictions on the agency’s ability to work with China in spaceflight as he warns of a “space race” between the countries. Nelson told members of the House Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice and science subcommittee at an April 19 hearing about NASA’s proposed fiscal year 2024 budget that he felt the so-called “Wolf Amendment,” which sharply restricts bilateral cooperation between NASA and Chinese organizations, should be maintained. “I think the Wolf Amendment, as it’s written, is adequate,” he said when asked by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) if it should be strengthened. “I think the Wolf Amendment is sufficient for where it is right now.” The amendment, included in annual appropriations bills since 2011, does allow NASA to cooperate in limited circumstances provided there is a security review and congressional notification. Nelson gave one example of that cooperation in discussions two years ago regarding “deconfliction” of the orbits of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter with NASA spacecraft orbiting the planet . He showed little desire, though, to expand cooperation, citing a lack of transparency in actions like recent Long March 5B launches that left core stages in orbits that resulted in uncontrolled reentries. “I would hope that China, the Chinese government, would finally come to realize that they’ve got to be more open and transparent about all of their stuff falling back to Earth and that we could cooperate together,” he said. He also reiterated comments about competition with China in space exploration. “Not the same as Apollo, but we’re in a space race with China,” he said when asked by the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), if there was a space race between the U.S. and China. “China has, in the last 10 years, established a very successful human space program,” Nelson said, describing development of China’s space station and long-term plans for human missions to the moon. “So, is that a space race? Yes, sir, I believe it is.” He added, though, that NASA was not returning to the moon simply to beat China there. “But there are other reasons that we go to the moon, because we’re going to Mars,” he said, describing how future human lunar missions will test technologies and operations needed for later missions to Mars. Yet, later in the hearing, he said NASA and its partners needed to get to the lunar south polar region, thought to harbor deposits of water ice, before China arrived and claimed them. “We need to protect our interests going to a very critical part of the moon’s surface,” he said when asked about past comments along those lines by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) “If you let China get there first,” Nelson warned, “what’s to stop them from saying, ‘We’re here, this is our area, you stay out.’ That’s why I think it’s important for us to get there on an international mission and establish the rules of the road.” Slowdown warning There was little criticism, or critical questioning, of Nelson by members of the subcommittee during the hearing. Instead, many members used the hearing to ask how broader political and economic issues could affect NASA. The hearing took place the same day as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced legislation to increase the debt ceiling that would also reduce federal discretionary spending to 2022 levels. Several Democratic members of the committee asked Nelson how that would affect NASA. “A 22% cut or a continuing resolution that would leave the funding at the ’23 level would cause a slowdown of programs at NASA across the board,” Nelson told Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), ranking member of the subcommittee. The 22% figure was one estimate of the potential cut to non-defense discretionary spending if the reduction to 2022 levels excluded defense programs. NASA had outlined the potential impacts of such a cut in a letter in March to the top Democrat on the full committee , Rep. Rose DeLauro (D-Conn.) Nelson said in that letter that a 22% cut “would have devastating and potentially unrecoverable impacts” to NASA programs, delaying or canceling many science and exploration missions. The House hearing took place one day after a hearing by its Senate counterpart, where members worried about the impact on science programs from cost growth in Mars Sample Return . That topic did not come up in the House hearing until near the end, when Ruppersberger asked about perceived budget cuts and potential delays in the Dragonfly mission to Titan. “We are still planning on launching Dragonfly in ’27. That has not changed,” Nelson said. “Right now, there is not any plan for a cut in fiscal year ’24.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules April 20 governing how operators in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) share spectrum amid an unprecedented flood of proposed satellites. In the first item taken up by the regulator’s recently established Space Bureau, the rules clarify how operators awarded fixed-satellite service NGSO licenses in different FCC application processing rounds must avoid interfering with each other. Operators approved in later processing rounds must coordinate with — or show how they will protect — their predecessors under the new measures. However, to encourage innovation and support market entrants, these protections for a first-mover will be phased out 10 years after the first NGSO FSS system receives a license in a subsequent processing round. “Now the first movers will enjoy the advantage they’ve earned by daring to think big and take on that risk, but they won’t be able to hold on to that regulatory privilege forever,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “This will open our skies to more competition.” Later-round systems must submit interference analysis based on a degraded throughput methodology, which is based on a system-level perspective that considers nuances such as weather. The regulator is seeking public comments on the “appropriate values and assumptions” to be used under this methodology, and the interference thresholds that NGSO FSS systems approved in later rounds must adhere to. For all NGSO FSS licensees, the FCC has also introduced measures to encourage them to coordinate their systems “in good faith,“ including information-sharing. “Under our old framework, there was an incentive to refuse to coordinate with your competitor and block them from entering the marketplace,” Rosenworcel said. “Today we fix that. We clarify that it is the responsibility of all parties to coordinate in good faith and to exchange the information with each other that is necessary to ensure the shared spectrum resources used by satellite systems can accommodate new innovation and new ideas.” The reform follows a petition to clarify or revise spectrum rules from SpaceX, which secured a license for its in-service Starlink NGSO constellation in the FCC’s 2016 NGSO FSS processing round. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment on the new rules. Julie Zoller, head of global regulatory affairs for Amazon’s proposed Project Kuiper NGSO system, described the revised rules as “an important step” for fostering more innovation and competition between operators. “While there is more work to do, we are pleased that the Commission is modernizing its rules and prioritizing pro-competition reforms for the space sector,” Zoller said in a LinkedIn post. Amazon secured a license for Project Kuiper in the FCC’s 2020 processing round. The FCC, which officially established its Space Bureau April 11 with the task of modernizing space regulations, recently said it is working through applications for more than 60,000 new satellites.
U.S. Space Command and the Australian Defence Space Command on April 20 signed an enhanced space cooperation memorandum of understanding. The MOU was signed at the Space Symposium by Gen. James Dickinson, head of U.S. Space Command; and Royal Australian Air Force Air Vice-Marshal Catherine Roberts, commander of the Australian Defence Space Command. The non-legally binding agreement “deepens military cooperation in the space domain,” the commands said in a statement. “Through these cooperative efforts, the U.S. and Australia will continue to improve coordination and interoperability to maintain freedom of action in space, optimize resources, and enhance mission assurance and resilience.” Italian officer assigned to U.S. Space Command U.S. Space Command also announced a new agreement with the Italian Defence General Staff that assigns an Italian liaison officer to U.S. Space Command, based in Colorado Springs. Dickinson and Italian Air Force Brig. Gen. Davide Cipelletti, chief of the space policy office of the Italian Defence General Staff, also signed the agreement at the Space Symposium. “In order to strengthen the U.S.-Italian military partnership in the space domain, the liaison officer will provide Italian armed forces expertise and insights to U.S. Space Command, facilitate communications among Italian and U.S. space units, support U.S.- Italy space-related partnership opportunities, and perform tasks that are mutually beneficial for the U.S.-Italian defense cooperation,” Space Command said. “The Italian liaison officer will serve as the national representative for all aspects of U.S.-Italy cooperation with regard to the military use of space, and share insight and recommendations to improve bilateral and multilateral relationships.” Agreement with Peru U.S. Space Command also inked a new agreement with the Peruvian National Commission on Aerospace Research and Development (CONIDA), and the Peruvian Air Force. This was a space situational awareness data sharing agreement signed by Dickinson and Lt. Gen. Carlos Enrique Chávez Cateriano, Peruvian Air Force chief of staff, and Peruvian Air Force Maj. Gen. José Antonio García Morgan, CONIDA director. This agreement, too, was signed at the Space Symposium. The U.S.-led data sharing program “enhances the safety, stability, security, and sustainability of spaceflight for all,” said U.S. Space Command. The command has established 170 space situational awareness sharing agreements with partners from the commercial sector, academia, and foreign and intergovernmental agencies that share views about responsible behaviors in space.
The Space Systems Command , a Los Angeles-based organization responsible for developing and buying space technologies for the U.S. military, is rebranding the commercial services office it established a year ago. The commercial services office, based in the Washington, D.C. area, was created to oversee the procurement of satellite-based services from the private sector such as communications, imagery and weather data. The office is being renamed Commercial Space Office, or COMSO. It will absorb the commercial services office and other organizations that work with the commercial space industry, including SpaceWERX , the Space Domain Awareness data marketplace, the SSC Front Door initiative and a new program that is looking at ways the space industry could support the military during conflicts. Brig. Gen. Jason Cothern, deputy commander of Space Systems Command, said it makes sense to bring all these different organizations under one roof to help improve the government’s access to commercial technology and, conversely, make it easier for companies to seek contracting opportunities. “We realized we needed to reimagine our commercial services office,” Cothern told reporters April 18 at the Space Symposium. New COMSO leader named Col. Richard Kniseley, a senior materiel leader at Space Systems Command, has been named head of the commercial space office. He told SpaceNews that the consolidation of commercially-based activities allows the command to better “get after commercial capability.” Because COMSO does not have the status of a program executive office (PEO) with its own procurement authority, it is being aligned with the space sensing PEO run by Col. Brian Denaro. “My PEO authority will actually be under Col. Denaro,” Kniseley said. “But I will be coordinating with the other PEOs who manage other mission areas.” To fund procurements of commercial space services for military users, COMSO will establish a working capital fund, he said. This is a funding mechanism that allows military customers from any branch to pay for private-sector services Kniseley said it’s important for the command to start assessing what space technologies need to be developed by the government and which could be purchased from the commercial market. The head of Space Force procurement, assistant secretary for acquisition Frank Calvelli, “has been asking the PEOs to really do an assessment of what is inherently government and what can we start moving more towards commercial,” said Kniseley. These assessments will be discussed by a so-called “ program integration council ” led by senior Space Force and intelligence agency officials, Kniseley said. These assessments will help determine whether resources should be reallocated from traditional acquisitions to commercial services, Kniseley said. He noted that in order for COMSO to be a success, “there will have to be a carveout of commercial to allow me to go after what we need. Without that, it’s going to be a negotiation with the PEOs.” “There is commercial capability that’s available right now that we could get into the warfighters’ hands,” he said. “We need to start doing that in peacetime and integrating it into the architecture so that they will be able to exercise in war games and utilize it.” Most of the commercial space services the Space Force buys today are for satellite communications. Kniseley said there is a demand for other types of services such as satellite imagery in support of battlefield operations, weather data, space domain awareness, and alternative forms of navigation that don’t depend on GPS. “I see a lot of growth areas that I want to get after, especially with space domain awareness and tactical ISR that I’m really honing in on,” he said. “Obviously I need to work with our other agencies so we’re not duplicating work.” ‘Commercial strategy’ in the works Kniseley said the COMSO reorganization is intended to support a high-level strategy for the integration of commercial space services into military systems and operations. This strategy is led by Chief Strategy and Resourcing Officer, Lt. Gen. Phillip Garrant. In a recent interview, Garrant said his office is “working on a strategy and policy for commercial space services, so not just satellite communications, but anything commercial space.” This plan is being informed by a Defense Science Board study on commercial space directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu. “They are going to finish their study this summer,” said Garrant. “We are deliberately waiting for their results, so they can inform us.” The Space Force leadership, he said, “asked us to take a very holistic look of what’s inherently governmental. And what’s commercial. The intent isn’t to outsource everything, but where we can, are there things that can be contracted or should be contracted?” Compared to the other branches of the military, Garrant said, “there are advantages for us in leveraging commercial, as we’re a relatively small force.” So where it makes sense, Garrant said, “using commercial lets us reprioritize guardians on the most important missions. This is an enabler for us too, it’s not just commercial for commercial sake.” And from a national security perspective, he added, “the entanglement gives us a lot of resiliency, because it complicates the adversary’s calculus. There’s plenty of good reasons to do this.”
Numbers can be deceiving, and budget numbers especially so. When the White House released its 2024 budget proposal March 9, it included $27.2 billion for NASA, 7.1% more than what the agency received for 2023. It appeared to be a sign of strong support for the agency on the heels of successes like the launch of Artemis 1 and the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope. “This budget request reflects the administration’s confidence in NASA and its faith in the world’s finest workforce,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a brief “State of NASA” speech the day the budget came out. However, neither the White House nor NASA noted that the increase came at a time of high post-pandemic inflation. While a 7% increase looks good on paper, in reality, it is a flat budget that roughly keeps up with inflation. As the agency released more details about the budget, more warning signs appeared. Cost growth and delays, particularly in science missions, have heightened concerns in the space community that the agency doesn’t have enough resources to do everything on its plate and on its current schedule. Those stresses are perhaps most evident in the budget for NASA’s planetary science programs. The 2024 proposal offers $3.38 billion, an increase of $180 million over 2023, a far cry from the $1.34 billion budget planetary science had a decade ago. But as scientists investigated the detailed budget proposal NASA released March 13, two numbers stood out: $1.5 million and $949.3 million. The former was the proposed budget for the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission, and the latter was the budget for Mars Sample Return. The $1.5 million for VERITAS was not necessarily a surprise. NASA announced in November 2022 that it was delaying that Discovery-class Venus orbiter mission, previously scheduled to launch by 2028, to no earlier than 2031. That was to free up personnel and other resources at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is leading work on VERITAS, for other missions after an independent review into the delayed Psyche mission found broader institutional issues at the lab. What was more concerning to scientists, though, was that the future “outyears” projections in the budget kept VERITAS funding flat at $1.5 million a year — enough to sustain the mission’s science team but little else — through 2028. That suggested an indefinite delay, if not an outright cancellation. “That’s functionally a soft cancellation,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. His organization has started a petition asking Congress to restore enough funding for VERITAS to enable a launch in 2029. The detailed budget came out as planetary scientists gathered near Houston for the annual Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC). During a NASA town hall session, many expressed their opposition to the VERITAS budget, concerned it set a dangerous precedent. Among those speaking at the town hall was Sue Smrekar, principal investigator for VERITAS. “This mission that was on track is being effectively martyred for all those missions that are going over budget,” she said. “The reason that so many in the community are outraged by this are these facts, that a mission that was on track is contingent on Earth science missions and all kinds of things that have nothing to do with us.” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at the town hall that the restart of VERITAS depended on several factors, including progress made by JPL to resolve its institutional issues as well as completion of two major missions, Europa Clipper and the NISAR Earth science mission, that require extensive resources at JPL. Another factor, she said, would be finding the budget for it. In the months since VERITAS was delayed, NASA had polled the planetary science community: would they prefer continuing with VERITAS, or proceeding with a new competition for a Discovery mission? The implication was that there would not be money for both. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of VERITAS. “It would be very upsetting to miss the Discovery call, but if they’re implying that they would defund VERITAS in order to fund the Discovery call, that’s even less acceptable,” said Bruce Banerdt of JPL, who led the InSight Mars lander mission, also part of the Discovery program, during a meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group in February. Glaze said that message came through loud and clear. “I really applaud the whole community for standing behind a selected Discovery mission. I think that’s exactly what we should be doing,” she told a committee of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board March 28. But, she warned, “there is a very real possibility” that NASA will have to delay the next Discovery competition, which is currently projected for 2025. “The bottom line is that there has been significant stress on the planetary budget. Its resiliency has been pretty much all but exhausted,” she said. “Something was going to have to give at some point.” The other number that stood out in the planetary budget, $949.3 million, was for Mars Sample Return (MSR). That was a nearly 20% increase from what NASA projected last year needing for MSR in 2024. Moreover, the budget proposal warned of more cost increases to come. “Mars Sample Return costs are expected to increase beyond what is shown in the outyear profile in this budget,” the proposal stated. That could mean cuts elsewhere in the science program, it warned. What those costs are, though, aren’t clear. MSR has yet to go through its confirmation review, where NASA sets cost and schedule commitments. That review is scheduled for the fall, and for now agency officials are declining to offer overall cost estimates for the program. “I don’t think I’m in a position right now to give you cost data because we’re still working it through our processes,” Jeff Gramling, NASA MSR director, said during another town hall at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference. However, the expected increases are affecting other NASA science programs. In the 2024 budget request, NASA announced it would “pause” development of the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC), a constellation of six satellites to study the interaction of the upper atmosphere with the magnetosphere and the sun, to compensate for increased MSR costs. NASA had already selected instruments for GDC in anticipation of a launch by 2029. “This is the hardest decision I had to make,” said Nicola Fox, new associate administrator for science at NASA, during an agency town hall meeting March 20. Fox was previously director of NASA’s heliophysics division, which included GDC. She committed to restarting work on the mission but didn’t say when that could happen. “We will assess what a pause looks like for that mission and get it back on track as soon as possible.” Glaze offered similar commitments for VERITAS, noting the $1.5 million budget line was a placeholder added to the budget at the last minute, and that the delay in VERITAS had nothing to do with the costs of MSR. She said at the Space Studies Board meeting that she was waiting for a budget proposal from the VERITAS project to support a 2031 launch that would be incorporated into planning for the 2025 budget. But Smrekar, speaking at the same Space Studies Board committee meeting, said she was still hoping to win funding to enable a 2029 launch of VERITAS, earliest date now possible. That would require $8 million in 2023 and $20 million in 2024. A 2029 launch, she argued, would help minimize the total cost of the mission and better support two other Venus missions, NASA’s DAVINCI and ESA’s EnVision, launching by the early 2030s. But that requires getting the funding stripped from the mission in the 2024 budget proposal from elsewhere in the agency. “Honestly,” she acknowledged, “that seems to me to be the biggest hurdle.” The fiscal year 2024 budget proposal contained little in the way of new initiatives. An exception to that was $180 million requested by NASA to start work on a deorbit tug for the International Space Station. NASA’s earlier plans, including an ISS transition plan it published in early 2022, projected using Russian Progress spacecraft to perform a controlled deorbit of the station at the end of the decade, ensuring it reentered over an unpopulated region of the South Pacific. However, in August 2022, the agency issued a request for information to industry to gauge its capabilities to build a tug, saying it could provide “more robust capabilities” to deorbit the station. “We’re always looking for redundancy,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said of the tug in a call with reporters about the 2024 budget proposal, noting that Progress spacecraft are still expected to be used to help deorbit the station. “We are also developing this U.S. capability as a way to have redundancy and be able to better aid the targeting of the vehicle and the safe return of the vehicle, especially as we’re adding more modules.” The $180 million would “give us a healthy start” to work on the tug, she said, with a projected total cost approaching $1 billion depending on what industry proposes. “We’re hoping to get a better price than that.” The same budget proposal includes $228.4 million for Commercial LEO Development (CLD), the program to support development of commercial space stations that succeed the ISS. That program received $224 million in 2023. Some in industry have privately expressed disappointment with that, arguing NASA needs to accelerate its investment in CLD to ensure commercial stations are ready by the end of the decade. They also worry about the mixed message the budget proposal sends by proposing nearly as much money for a spacecraft to deorbit the ISS as it offers the station’s successors. “That tells you, maybe, the relative importance and priority of trying to develop this tug for these geopolitical motivations and the potential role of the Russians in the future of the ISS,” Dreier said of the funding of the tug and CLD. Deorbiting the station itself is a missed opportunity, some believe, seeing the ISS as a resource. “As technology matures, certainly in the next decade we’re going to get to the point where we’re going to be able to reuse and recycle a lot of these materials,” said Ron Lopez, president and managing director of Astroscale U.S., during a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference. “Instead of letting it burn up and lose all of that economic value, you take it to a foundry in space” and break it down into raw materials, he suggested. NASA, though, has already ruled out either boosting the station into a higher storage orbit or somehow recycling it. Raising the station’s orbit would require dozens of cargo vehicles, while the station is too complex to repurpose modules safely. “Alternate concepts were evaluated and determined not to be feasible,” NASA said in a December presentation about its plans for a deorbit module. The release of the budget proposal kicks off a long process of congressional hearings and markups of spending bills. That will be particularly difficult this year with split control of Congress: Democrats retained control of the Senate but Republicans are now in the majority in the House. “There is peril ahead,” said Jean Toal Eisen, vice president of corporate strategy at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and a former Senate appropriations staffer. That includes an ongoing debate about raising the debt ceiling that may spread into the appropriations process. “There is a strong desire to cut discretionary spending, particularly domestic discretionary spending, on the part of many House Republicans,” she said. “That provides peril for NASA as a whole.” NASA has outlined what a worst-case scenario would look like. In a March 19 letter to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Nelson said that cutting overall federal spending to 2022 levels, but limiting the cuts to domestic discretionary programs like NASA as some in the House have suggested, would force the agency to slash its budget by 22% from 2023 levels. Such a cut “would have devastating and potentially unrecoverable impacts upon the objectives that the President and Congress have set for NASA,” Nelson warned in the letter. That would include delaying or canceling several science missions, including Mars Sample Return and the Earth System Observatory program, as well as deferring lunar missions beyond Artemis 4 and laying off 4,000 personnel. Even if that scenario is unlikely, the agency is going into a different appropriations environment. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), long a dominant force on the Senate Appropriations Committee who looked out for interests at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has retired. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), who had been the ranking member on the House appropriations subcommittee that funded NASA, chose to become chairman of another subcommittee this year. None of the top members of the House or Senate appropriations committees have NASA centers in their districts or states; the closest is Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, but her Fort Worth-area district is far from Houston’s Johnson Space Center. “NASA has enjoyed an unprecedented, steady growth in appropriations since 2013,” Dreier noted. “That’s what I’m not sure about going forward without that parochial state-level interest.” There are some smaller parochial interests. The University of New Hampshire is involved with many of NASA’s heliophysics missions, which leads Toal Eisen to believe that the proposed cut in heliophysics, including pausing GDC, will not go over well with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), chair of the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA. “It is not smart to do things like cut the thing that you think is the chair’s highest priority,” she said. “They’re just going to put that back in and take the money from something that you cared about.” Despite the congressional uncertainties, NASA remains upbeat about the proposal. “I think it really shows the faith that the administration in what NASA is doing and where we’re going,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said during a talk at the National Academies’ Space Science Week event March 28. But securing that budget and its 7% increase is key for the agency’s future. “NASA cannot execute this successful program absent a 7% minimum increase,” Dreier said. “Anything less and you’re going to have serious downstream consequences.” This article originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Updated 3 p.m. Eastern with additional details and reactions. COLORADO SPRINGS — SpaceX’s first integrated Starship vehicle lifted off on a long-anticipated test flight April 20, only to tumble and break apart minutes later. The Starship vehicle lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase test site at Boca Chica, Texas, at 9:33 a.m. Eastern. The liftoff took place after a brief hold at T-40 seconds to clear final issues pressuring the rocket’s propellant tanks. Starship slowly lifted off from the pad and ascended. Several of the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster appeared not to be firing in video shown on SpaceX’s webcast a little more than a minute after liftoff. Data displayed on the webcast showed that, at T+15 seconds, three Raptor engines, two in a fixed outer ring and one in a center section capable of gimballing, were not working. A third engine in the outer ring shut down at T+40 seconds, followed by another 20 seconds later. By T+100 seconds, six engines were not operating, although one was restored a few seconds later. According to the timeline provided by the company, the Raptor engines in Super Heavy were supposed to shut down at T+2:49, followed second later by the separation of the Starship upper stage and ignition of its six Raptor engines. Instead, the combined Starship/Super Heavy stack started to tumble as the engines in Super Heavy continued to fire. “This does not appear to be a nominal situation,” said SpaceX’s John Insprucker in the webcast. At T+4:00, the vehicle broke apart when controllers activated the flight termination system on both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. Despite the failure, SpaceX employees watching the launch at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters cheered, celebrating the progress made on the flight. In a later update, SpaceX said the vehicle reached an altitude of 39 kilometers before the engine failures caused the rocket to lose altitude and tumble. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship,” the company stated. The company stressed both before and immediately after launch that this flight was a test designed to collect data to improve the design of the vehicle. “This was a development test. This was the first test flight of Starship,” said Insprucker. “The goal was to gather the data and, as we said, clear the pad and get ready to go again.” This test flight was not designed to reach orbit but instead send Starship on a long suborbital trajectory, splashing down near Hawaii 90 minutes after liftoff. Neither Starship nor Super Heavy, which would splash down in the Gulf of Mexico offshore from Boca Chica, would be recovered. SpaceX has several other Starship and Super Heavy vehicles in various stages of development. They have already incorporated some design changes from work on this vehicle. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted shortly after the flight. Reactions Despite the loss of the vehicle, SpaceX won praise from government officials and other organizations for getting Starship off the pad. “Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s first integrated flight test!” tweeted NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test—and beyond.” Nelson had mentioned the upcoming launch at an April 19 hearing on NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal by a House appropriations subcommittee. “That is the beginning of that commercial partner linking up with us in lunar orbit on Artemis 3,” he said, a reference to Starship’s role as a lunar lander for that mission. Asked by the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), why SpaceX was launching from Texas rather than Cape Canaveral, Nelson said that the agency expected SpaceX to “probably” do five launches from there before shifting to a launch pad the company is building for Starship at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A. “Once they get through and get some experience, then they will bring that rocket to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center” Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, also praised SpaceX. “Liftoff IS an incredible success! Great lessons learned,” he tweeted . “I am confident that SpaceX will quickly resolve issues and get back to the launchpad soon.” “This flight is an important milestone and much will be learned from the engineering data,” Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a former NASA official, said in a statement. “With Starship, SpaceX is taking bold steps that are helping us accelerate the future of humans living and working off our planet. Flight tests and taking risks will lead to this future.”
NASA announced April 19 the creation of a new organization devoted to advancing technologies for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM). NASA said the Consortium for Space Mobility and ISAM Capabilities , COSMIC, will start work this fall to coordinate work among companies and organizations regarding technologies related to servicing and repairing spacecraft in space. “Our goal for COSMIC is to accelerate the universal adoption of ISAM capabilities to develop the next generation of space architectures and make ISAM a routine part of the space enterprise,” said Jim Reuter, NASA associate administrator for space technology, during a panel at the 38 th Space Symposium here where he announced the formation of COSMIC. NASA is following the guidance from a national ISAM implementation plan released in December by the White House, intended to provide specific guidance to government agencies to carry out a national ISAM strategy released a year ago. That plan directed NASA to establish a national consortium “to improve communication between government, industry, and academia” in the field. COSMIC will have several focus areas, ranging from research and development of ISAM technologies to incorporating those technologies into missions. Officials with NASA and the Aerospace Corporation, which is managing COSMIC for NASA, say they want to address gaps in ISAM technologies and provide organizations considering adopting servicing capabilities more information about them. “Our long-term vision is that we want to make ISAM part of long-term space architectures and mission life cycles,” said Greg Richardson, executive director for COSMIC at Aerospace. “We want to make it so that there are routine aspects to this in terms of acquisition, technology development and mission operations.” “We have to make it such that the decision makers that decide to adopt ISAM or not have the data they need to be able to make those decisions. Does that data exist today? I don’t think it does,” said Trudy Kortes, technology demonstrations director in NASA’s Space Technologies Mission Directorate. Richardson said it was important to have both developers of ISAM technologies as well as users of those technologies as part of COSMIC. That includes companies, universities and government agencies. The kickoff meeting of COSMIC is scheduled for the fall. COSMIC will be distinct from another industry group, CONFERS, which DARPA helped establish as the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations and is now a standalone organization. CONFERS is supporting the development of satellite servicing standards, while COSMIC will work on ISAM technologies. “We’re really focused on not duplicating what they’re doing,” Kortes said, with any standards work related to ISAM handed off to that organization. Another difference is that NASA plans to fund COSMIC for the foreseeable future and won’t require participating organizations to pay membership fees, which she said is intended to avoid “consortium fatigue.” Reuter compared COSMIC to the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium, which NASA established to coordinate research on technologies needed for lunar surface exploration. “The objective of that is to really get a community together sharing information, sharing ideas and understanding better what’s going on,” he said. “It’s worked fantastic there and we’re really anxious to do it here.” “I think it is really important to bring the community together, especially around something as important as ISAM,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy of COSMIC during the Space Symposium panel.
Firefly Aerospace says its future medium rocket it is developing with Northrop Grumman will be ready to compete in the next round of U.S. national security launch contracts. The medium-lift rocket, projected to launch in 2025, is being designed to “support the requirements of the U.S. Space Force NSSL Phase 3,” Firefly said in a statement. The National Security Space Launch Phase 3 will be different from the Phase 2 launch procurement won by United Launch Alliance and SpaceX in 2020. The Space Force is dividing Phase 3 into two “lanes .” Lane 1 will seek bids for less demanding missions to low Earth orbit and is geared to attract new entrants like Rocket Lab, Firefly, Relativity Space and other small launch specialists working to bring medium rockets to market. Firefly expects its two-stage medium vehicle, projected to lift 16,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, to be able to challenge Rocket Lab’s Neutron’s and Relativity Space’s Terran-R, both also new vehicles expected to compete in NSSL Phase 3. The partnership with Northrop Grumman , first announced in August, was established to build an all-American version of Northrop’s Antares rocket that uses the Russian RD-181 engine. After the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s exit from the global market, Northrop Grumman announced it would build the Antares 330 with a first stage powered by seven Firefly-made Miranda engines. Both companies also agreed to cooperate on the new medium rocket that will be offered for NSSL Phase 3. Firefly calls it “Next Generation Medium-Lift Vehicle,” or MLV, and is targeting its first flight in 2025. The company said in a statement to SpaceNews that it has built development hardware and testing is underway for the MLV’s propellant tank ahead of a structure critical design review planned in May. Firefly says it has developed multiple chamber and turbopump parts for the MLV Miranda engines. The first Miranda hot fire is planned for this summer. The MLV’s first stage has seven Miranda engines and the upper stage one. The company announced last week it is expanding its facilities in Briggs, Texas, to accommodate MLV manufacturing and testing, with two new test stands under construction. “These new buildings and test stands will be operational by the end of this summer,” a Firefly spokesperson said. New entrants in NSSL Phase 3 The Space Force expects to start awarding NSSL Phase 3 contracts to launch providers in 2025 for missions that would start launching in 2027. The Lane 1 competition will be structured as indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts awarded to multiple vendors, essentially pre-qualifying them to bid for firm orders down the road. Only U.S. companies can compete. To pre-qualify for the IDIQ, “the challenging part is you have to have a credible design,” said Randy Kendall, vice president of launch and architecture operations at the Aerospace Corp. Aerospace is a nonprofit that provides technical advice to the U.S. government, as well as engineering and support services for the national security space launch program. Kendall told SpaceNews that he expects only a handful of new entrants will qualify. “Companies have to have a credible plan to have their first launch within 12 months of when they on-ramp,” he said. “We’re not going to have a ton of people get on-ramped” because it’s a high bar to get pre-qualified, Kendall said. “There’s probably going to be only a small handful in the near term.” Given the uncertainties of when new rockets will be ready, the Space Force is allowing heavy-lift launch providers that win the Lane 2 contracts to compete for the less-demanding Lane 1 missions.
Investment activity is picking up again for young space companies as growth-stage capital returns following market uncertainty in 2022, according to investors on an April 18 Space Symposium panel. The “space industry is thriving at the moment,” Seraphim Space CEO Mark Boggett said, pointing to the venture capital firm’s research showing a record 25 growth rounds in the three months to the end of March. However, he said these growth rounds — Series B, Series C, Series D, and beyond — remain smaller in value than previously seen in the industry. When excluding mega-deals, Seraphim data shows the average growth-stage round size was $38 million in the first quarter of 2023, compared with north of $60 million as recently as the second quarter of 2022. While Boggett said the volume of new companies coming to the space industry is increasing quarter-on-quarter despite challenging macroeconomic conditions, “the one area where we have a weakness in this market is around growth capital.” It’s an area that suffered a “setback during the course of the last 12-18 months,” he said, as public investors that were becoming more interested in space as a growth market lost out amid the hype surrounding a spate of companies that went public via merging with a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company. The poor share performance of these high-profile space companies is also dragging on the valuations of other companies in the industry. Space companies are not being treated differently than “deep tech” firms that also went public via a SPAC, Boggett said, but the sector has seen a “huge amount of interest that has now gone wrong to some extent. “And what we now have to do is we’ve got to rebuild the confidence of these growth stage investors to bring them back into the market,” he added, “so that these companies that are being created, that provide all of these amazing capabilities, are going to be able to grow and scale and thrive.” Boggett said he is confident the industry will get there, not least because of the huge defense budgets across the world that he expects will drive significant revenues through many of these businesses. “It’s the revenues and the growth in those revenues that are going to attract the growth investors,” he said, adding that sovereign investors and climate-focused funds are also becoming an increasingly important source of capital for space companies. Pete Cannito, CEO of space infrastructure consolidator Redwire, which has shares currently trading at around $3 after going public via a SPAC merger in 2021 at $10, stressed the need for investors to understand that investing in space “is a long game.” “It’s been a very dynamic couple of years,” Cannito said, “but this is not a declining market. Space is more important than ever, in the civil domain, in the national security domain, and in a commercial domain.” The space economy is also rapidly maturing, said Laurence Vigeant-Langlois, a managing director at private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which she said will increasingly attract more institutional investors.
Rocket Lab will use a previously flown engine on an upcoming Electron launch as the company moves closer to reusing the rocket’s entire first stage. Rocket Lab announced April 19 that it will use a Rutherford engine originally flown on a May 2022 Electron launch, whose booster was recovered, on another Electron launch scheduled for the third quarter of 2023. The launch will mark the first time Rocket Lab has reflown an engine. “We really wanted to get an engine back on the vehicle quickly,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview during the 38 th Space Symposium. “The engine is the hardest thing to recertify for flight.” The third quarter launch is the earliest opportunity to do so since the vehicles planned for launch this quarter have already been assembled. The company decided to integrate the engine after putting recovered engines through a “huge barrage” of testing to requalify them, he said. “We got to the point where that’s done and we’re very happy with it, so it’s time to put one in production.” He said nearly every Electron booster now being produced will have some components that have previously flown. That gets the company closer to the long-term goal of refurbishing and reflying an entire booster. Beck, though, declined to estimate when he felt the company would reuse a booster. Rocket Lab also confirmed that it will no longer attempt mid-air recoveries of the boosters as part of their reusability effort. The company made two such attempts last year but was unable to catch the booster. Instead, the company will recover the boosters from the ocean after splashdown, something Beck said in February the company was leaning towards doing . “We were always afraid of getting it wet,” he said, which led them to try the helicopter approach. “We were surprised when we pulled the first one out how good it was.” The company has since made what he described as some tweaks to the booster design “to ensure the bits that we don’t want to get wet don’t get wet.” Beck said Rocket Lab is still planning as many as 15 Electron launches this year. The next two will carry NASA TROPICS cubesats on missions scheduled for the end of April and mid-May. The company recently moved those launches from Virginia to New Zealand . Suborbital Electron Rocket Lab is also offering a suborbital version of Electron for hypersonics research. The company announced the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) vehicle April 17, which will make its first launch later this quarter from Wallops Island, Virginia, for an undisclosed customer. HASTE is very similar to the Electrons used for orbital launches. The vehicle has some minor changes, such as a modified kick stage and strengthened structures, that allows it to fly suborbital payloads weighing up to 700 kilograms. “But apart from that, it’s a standard Electron,” Beck said. Rocket Lab sees strong interest in HASTE for hypersonics testing and targets from Defense Department agencies. “We can get exact trajectories at a cost and frequency but also an accuracy that’s never been available before,” he said. The company has not set a flight rate for HASTE yet. Beck said the company would likely fly a couple “to ease our way in” and then determine how to best meet demand. “It’s great for the orbital business as well,” he added. “The more vehicles we put through the factory, the cheaper they get.”
The chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman called on the service to embrace challenges and opportunities created by the rapid commercialization and militarization of the space domain. “I fundamentally believe we are now at the precipice of a new era in space,” Saltzman said April 19 in a keynote speech at the Space Symposium. Saltzman assumed command of the Space Force in November . Since taking office, he has championed cultural changes in the service, including new ways to recruit talent and work with the private sector . “The Space Force, our industry partners, our allies, our interagency teammates must collectively pivot to new ways of doing business to keep up with the new operating environment,” he said. Although the Space Force is only three years old, it was carved out of the former Air Force Space Command and inherited the culture and ways of doing business from the first space age that started in the late 1950s and was shaped by the geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. “I’m convinced that old methods, old mindsets are not going to be effective in addressing these new challenges,” said Saltzman. Now the Space Force has to quickly adapt to new realities, notably the threats posed by technologies that China and Russia have developed to target U.S. satellites. Over many years, the Chinese and the Russians have watched how dependent the U.S. military has become on satellites for every aspect of operations and would likely try to disrupt U.S. space systems during a conflict. Threats to satellites In the last 15 years, Saltzman said, “we are seeing an incredibly sophisticated array of threats , including traditional satcom jammers and GPS jammers to even more destabilizing direct ascent anti-satellite weapons across multiple orbital regimes.” “We’re seeing on-orbit grapplers , pursuit satellites, nesting dolls , directed energy weapons, cyber attacks,” he added. “And it’s not just threats against our on-orbit systems. It’s the use of systems by our competitors creating threats to the joint force and other domains.” The United States and allied forces must “contend with space-enabled attacks on our forces in air, land and sea,” said Saltzman. In this new era, he said, “space is far more contested; U.S. access to space capabilities is not a given. This new era of space is far more congested and will challenge our ability to maintain situational awareness and operate safely in the domain.” The rapid commercialization of space, access to satellite and launch services from the open market means U.S. adversaries can innovate relatively quickly and compete with the United States. That democratization of space is a reality that the U.S. military has yet to adjust to, Saltzman noted. “We’re now seeing investments in space mobility and logistics, refueling, life extension programs, proliferated low Earth orbit, internet satellites and more,” he said. “As this all unfolds, it is imperative that we understand that our traditional ways of addressing challenges must be evaluated.” Empowering young leaders Saltzman said it’s important for current leaders to empower younger officers and allow them to innovate. “A contested, congested domain is their normal, and they wonder why the institutions are holding on to old methods and mindsets,” he said, referring to junior leaders. He encouraged young officers and enlisted personnel in the audience to “question existing ways of doing business.’ “We must pivot,” Saltzman said. “This is an imperative for the collective national security space enterprise, our industry partners and our allies. The old ways of doing business are too slow, too late to need, and too behind the times to meet the challenges we face.”He said some changes already are underway, including funding in the 2024 budget for proliferated LEO constellations and next-generation satellite communications systems. “We are building assets that are more survivable for this new era.”
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall earlier this month submitted a legislative proposal to allow selected programs in the Pentagon’s budget to get started before Congress passes the final appropriations bill. Speaking April 19 at the Space Symposium, Kendall said it is “troubling” that the U.S. Air Force and Space Force have not been able to start critical programs to compete with China because of the lagging budget process. “Our posture now is that we’re waiting for the Congress,” Kendall said. ‘Operational imperatives’ Since taking office two years ago, Kendall has warned about China’s advances in military and space technologies and the possibility that they could surpass the United States. In a list of “ operational imperatives ” for the 2024 budget Kendall called for investments in areas like hypersonic weapons, autonomous aircraft, cybersecurity and resilient satellite constellations. Kendall said the Department of the Air Force nearly two years ago completed the analysis to justify funding in the 2024 defense budget for at least 20 new programs. But none of those projects can start until Congress passes a spending bill, which is not likely to happen for several months. In the meantime, “we’re in waiting mode,” he said. “We’re waiting for Congress to authorize new starts and appropriate funding.” The priority programs Kendall wants to start or accelerate — including new missile-warning satellites, remote sensing satellites to track moving targets and hypersonic vehicles — are on hold for several months or even a full year if there’s gridlock and the government is funded by temporary measures. Under continuing resolution funding, new programs can’t be started. Kendall’s legislative proposal — which was approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget before it was submitted to Congress April 12 — would allow these programs to start before funding is fully appropriated. “This would not be very expensive,” he said. It would allow the Air Force and Space Force to get a head start. “Hopefully Congress will approve this,” Kendall said. The legislative proposal “gives the department some authority to initiate a program, if we are surprised technologically, without waiting for congressional approval,” he said. “This is a limited authority that would allow us to go through the preliminary design review phase to design, do performance trade offs, systems engineering, maybe do some risk reduction.” This will require some flexibility on the part of the Congress, he noted. “I’ve tried to bring a great sense of urgency to the department. I think I’ve succeeded in that. I think we’ve got people mobilized, if you will, to respond to the challenges that we face. Now we need to move forward as quickly as possible.” “It’s a minimum amount of authority Congress has to give up for a big return,” Kendall said. War with China a risk Shaping these discussions is the possibility of a military conflict with China, which Kendall said is not “inevitable” and would likely not start intentionally. “But it’s not impossible,” he said. “The danger is increasing over time.” A “miscalculation” in space could escalate to a broader conflict, he said. “China views space as an operational domain where it wants to dominate,” said Kendall. It is developing terrestrial and orbital anti-satellite weapons and is not concerned about creating debris or whether they lead to strategic instability, he added. “China’s lack of concern about space norms is worrisome and creates a risk of miscalculation,” Kendall said. This is a troubling scenario because a war that extends into space is uncharted territory, said Kendall. “If deterrence fails we will all have a lot to learn.”
Leidos is working with the racing company NASCAR to develop a lunar rover they will offer for an upcoming NASA competition. Leidos unveiled its design April 18 for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) that can accommodate two astronauts for excursions on the lunar surface starting with the Artemis 5 mission in the late 2020s. The rover could be used autonomously as well when not needed by astronauts. “We’re about to enter a new moon race, except we’re going to enter a moon race with a partner that is really good at going fast, NASCAR,” said Steve Cook, president of Leidos Dynetics Group, during an event at the Leidos exhibit at 38 th Space Symposium where the company revealed a full-scale prototype of the rover. Leidos executives said they chose to partner with NASCAR on the LTV design for technical and business reasons. “Their deep experience and capability in developing high performance vehicles in harsh environments is something that obviously can help us a great deal as we engineer this vehicle,” said Jonathan Pettus, senior vice president for aerospace, defense and civil operations at Dynetics. He cited as one example NASCAR’s work on a new race car design with design principles, like fast and agile maintenance, that is also useful for a lunar rover. Another reason for the partnership is commercialization. Industry expects NASA to follow a services model for the LTV project, procuring the rover as a service rather than a more conventional contract to acquire a rover. That could allow the company to offer the rover to other users or even seek sponsorships. “NASCAR is very good at connecting sponsors, and we are excited about what that may mean in terms of our commercial plans for the future and how we can leverage their expertise,” Pettus said. “We think there’s a lot of opportunity there.” “The last couple of months we’ve getting to know the Leidos Dynetics team really well,” said Pete Jung, NASCAR senior vice president and chief marketing officer, saying it helped the organization look ahead as it celebrates its 75 th anniversary. “Another thing that gets us excited is how our organizations are aligned in terms of philosophies and commitments to sustainability and equality.” The team working on the LTV design includes companies with both automotive and aerospace experience. They include Roush Industries, Collins Aerospace, Motiv Space Systems and Moog, among others. Pettus said they are designing the rover to accommodate a wide range of payloads, providing them with power, communications and thermal control. “We’ve gotten feedback from a variety of potential commercial and academic partners around payload needs, so we’ve tried to address that as we’ve designed the vehicle.” Leidos is one of several companies that have announced plans to propose LTV designs to NASA. Lockheed Martin announced plans in 2021 to work with General Motors on a rover, while Northrop Grumman is working with companies such as Intuitive Machines and Michelin to create a rover. Startup Astrolab plans to offer its Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover it is developing for robotic and human missions. NASA, in procurement filings, says it expects to issue a final request for proposal for LTV no later than May 26, with a contract award anticipated in late November.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Ongoing fighting in Ukraine continues to underscore the importance of combining military, civil and commercial space capabilities, international military space leaders said April 18 at the Space Symposium. Ukraine has been able to fend off Russian forces with the help of space-based weather data, communications, GPS, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said Lt. Gen. Eric Kenny, Royal Canadian Air Force commander. Even the surface-to-air missiles Canada donated to Ukraine depend on space systems like GPS and satellite communications, he added. At the outset of the war, commercial satellite imagery played a critical role in helping Ukraine and its allies counter Russian propaganda, said Air Vice-Marshal Paul Godfrey, commander of the U.K. Space Command. When Russia claimed that Ukrainians killed their fellow civilians in the town of Bucha, Maxar Technologies’ unclassified time-stamped satellite imagery appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world in April 2022 to prove the claim wrong. “We were able to fend off that false narrative,” Godfrey said. “Do not underestimate the deterrent effect that that had on the Russians.” The war in Ukraine showed that commercial “entities can provide cost-effective and scalable solutions that meet some of NATO’s intelligence requirements,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Julazadeh, deputy chief of staff for capability development in NATO’s Allied Command Transformation headquarters. Because those contributions are so apparent, the war also “reinforced our need to protect and defend” commercial space assets, said Kelli Seybolt, U.S. Air Force deputy undersecretary for international affairs. At the outset of the war, Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s communications infrastructure with missiles and cyberattacks on Viasat’s KA-SAT and SpaceX’s Starlink networks. “So, it was significant for us to see how a proliferated LEO constellation could bring communications back,” said Godfrey. “One of the more interesting things here, and it’s well documented on Twitter by Elon himself, is the cyber-jamming attacks against Starlink throughout this and how resilient they have been as well. That is really something that we’re looking at and trying to understand.” The U.S. Space Force, meanwhile, is focused on the cybersecurity of its own networks as well as working “with our allies and partners to defend our shared networks as we go forward in a coalition engagement,” said Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, Space Force deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear. For example, the Space Force is considering “how are we sharing cyber threat information across the coalition and the partnership so that we’re all looking at ways to creatively exploit the capabilities that we have to defend against cyber,” Burt said. Potential solutions include jointly buying or building unique cyber-defense systems,” she added. Panelists cited specific civil and commercial space systems that have proven valuable in supporting Ukraine. The Canadian government worked with MDA to supply data from the Canadian Space Agency’s three-satellite Radarsat Constellation Mission “to show the Ukrainians where the Russians were advancing and to help with their targeting,” Kenny said. Another Canadian company, Telesat, provided critical communications, he added. “It shows the close relationship we need to have with industry as we move forward,” Kenny said. Gen. Hiroaki Uchikura, Japan Air Self- Defense Force chief of staff, said one of Japan’s takeaways from the war is the need to “promote the utilization of private and commercial satellites by strengthening government-private cooperation.”
Aerospace Corp.’s commercial space office, established to facilitate connections between startups and government technology buyers, is seeing a surge in activity. With a downturn in venture capital, a growing number of companies are turning to the government for opportunities, Aerospace CEO Steve Isakowitz told SpaceNews . Aerospace is a federally-funded nonprofit based in El Segundo, California, that provides technical guidance and advice to military and civil space agencies. In light of a somewhat cooled-off space economy, “more and more we’re finding that companies that had been raising rounds of funding are now looking much more to the government as an important customer,” he said. As a result, Aerospace’s Commercial Space Futures office, created approximately one year ago, has been inundated with an increased workload. The office serves in a go-between role, assisting the U.S. Space Force and other agencies in identifying potential commercial solutions that align with national needs. It also conducts due diligence assessments of companies interested in working with the government and provides guidance to startups on how to navigate the intricate regulatory environment. Companies interested in working with the Space Force send email queries through SSCFrontDoor@spaceforce.mil. The Aerospace commercial office is part of a team that handles those inquiries. Additionally, Isakowitz said he personally gets a lot of calls and emails requesting assistance “on a whole range of matters.” Small businesses and startups are asking for help on regulatory issues and evaluating their products. They also are looking to “better understand what it is the Space Force or the intelligence community are looking for,” he said. “We have so many requests,” he said. “You don’t want to say no to anybody, but there’s only so much we can do.” Opportunities for DoD to capture tech The space economy in 2022 saw private investment decline by 58% after a record $47 billion invested in 2021, according to Space Capital, a market research firm. The economic climate, while not great for venture-funded startups, is a “great opportunity for the government to try to leverage what’s happening out there” and tap valuable technologies, Isakowitz said. DoD and the Space Force have created a large ecosystem of organizations that fund research and prototyping projects, including the Defense Innovation Unit , SpaceWERX , AFWERX and the Space Enterprise Consortium . These organizations want to work with new entrants in the industry, he said. That is driving Aerospace’s workload doing due diligence on these companies, he said. “The government is constantly asking questions.” Program offices want to know if technologies being pitched to the government are more than just a PowerPoint slide. Beyond the technical maturity of a product and the financial health of the company, the government also asks for a review of companies’ cybersecurity practices and supply chains. Concerns about launch sector Isakowitz, who previously led the commercial spaceflight company Virgin Galactic , said recent financial trouble experienced by launch services provider Virgin Orbit is a reminder of why DoD wants a diversity of suppliers. The small launch sector is especially volatile and there are always risks that a supplier could go out of business, he said. Aerospace for years has promoted the use of standard interfaces for small satellites and cubesats so they are compatible with different launch systems. “You want to have that assured access to space and be able to move your satellites across multiple providers,” said Isakowitz.
NASA’s effort to return samples from Mars could require $250 million more than currently planned over the next two years, putting more pressure on the agency’s overall science portfolio. Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice and science subcommittee April 18, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he had recently been informed that the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program would need $250 million more in the current 2023 fiscal year and 2024 to stay on track. “I was just out there,” Nelson said, referring to a recent visit to the Jet Propulsion Lab, the lead center for MSR, “and they’re saying they want an additional $250 million in this year — meaning in this year, existing, 2023 — and 2024.” He did not discuss the specific issues that prompted the need for additional money. MSR received $822.3 million in the fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill and the agency requested $949.3 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, but warned in that document that costs for the program could grow beyond 2024. Any additional money for MSR in 2023 would require reprogramming money from elsewhere in the agency, a process that requires congressional approval through an operating plan. NASA has not yet published an operating plan for fiscal year 2023. Nelson was responding to a question from the subcommittee’s chair, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who was concerned about the effects MSR was having on other parts of NASA’s science budget. In its 2024 budget proposal, NASA said it was delaying work on a heliophysics mission, the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC), and slowing work on technology development for a future astrophysics flagship mission, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, because of cost growth in MSR. “Some of those costs are not going to be avoided, and we’re going to have to make choices,” Nelson said, suggesting that MSR itself might be delayed. “You can get it done, but it may not be done right on the time we’re hoping it would be done. If you stretch it out over a longer period of time, you can get the problem done.” NASA is gearing up for a second independent review of MSR. NASA announced April 13 it selected Orlando Figueroa, a former NASA official who once led NASA’s Mars exploration program, as chair of the independent review board that will convene this summer to review the status of MSR before a confirmation review this fall that will set formal cost and schedule targets for the program. Jeff Gramling, MSR director at NASA Headquarters, said at an April 12 meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group that the independent committee would likely work for six to eight weeks in the summer, just before the overall MSR preliminary design review. As at other recent events, Gramling declined to estimate the cost of MSR, noting the upcoming confirmation review. He made no mention of any additional near-term funding needed for the program. The budget pressures on NASA’s science budget could extend to another mission, the Dragonfly spacecraft in development to go to Saturn’s moon Titan. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said he was worried about Dragonfly after the 2024 budget request offered $327.7 for the mission, compared to $400.1 million it received in 2023. NASA’s 2023 budget proposal projected spending $317.8 million on Dragonfly in 2024. Van Hollen interpreted the 2024 request as a cut to Dragonfly that could delay its launch, even though NASA says it remains on schedule. “Everything I know from the experts is that it doesn’t compute. You can’t cut by 20% and still remain on target,” he said. He added he was “troubled” by the state of MSR even as Dragonfly passed its recent preliminary design review. Nelson said that Dragonfly remained on schedule for a 2027 launch and that the agency would have a better understanding of progress on that mission later this year. However, he stated several times that, despite a record budget of $8.26 billion for science proposed for the agency, tough decisions about missions were necessary. “In the largest science budget ever, you can’t fit 10 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack,” he said. Speaking at the 38 th Space Symposium April 18, Nicola Fox, the agency’s new associate administrator for science, also acknowledged budget pressures. As the former director of NASA’s heliophysics division, she acknowledged delaying GDC was particularly difficult. “But it’s the right thing to do,” she said, because it is still in its early phases of development. Fox, who became associate administrator in late February, said the rollout of the fiscal year 2024 budget proposal made her acquainted quickly with the budget issues in the overall science portfolio. “I got a question the other day, ‘What are you doing to familiarize yourself with challenges?’ Well, I got the budget.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – Space Forge announced plans April 19 to expand its U.S. presence to include manufacturing. The Cardiff, Wales-based startup focused on fabricating high-value materials in space is looking for a U.S. location for manufacturing ForgeStar satellites and payloads for U.S. customers. “We are engaged in conversations with multiple states to identify the best location to our new US HQ,” Tarek Waked, Space Forge board member and investor, said by email. Among potential U.S. customers, Space Forge sees strong interest in on-orbit semiconductor manufacturing. “We’ve had a lot of taps on the shoulder from both government and commercial players that are interested in our core capabilities,” Space Forge CEO Joshua Western told SpaceNews . The combination of the war in Ukraine, U.S. passage of the CHIPS Act and reshoring initiatives “is leading to a surge in sovereign and allied semiconductor capability,” Western said. “We’ve seen a strengthening of Five Eyes and the AUKUS Alliance . We’re positioning ourselves well across those allied partners to be able to deliver.” Waked, founding partner of Type One Ventures , added in a statement, “Space Forge’s move to the U.S. couldn’t have come at a better moment, what with the CHIPs Act and NASA’s enthusiasm for in-space manufacturing. The team’s efforts on the ForgeStar platform are paving the way for an ‘above shore’ capability, which is super cool.” Space Forge raised $10.2 million in 2021 for its plan to operate ForgeStar, a reusable satellite designed for on-orbit manufacturing and precision return of payloads to Earth. The company intends to take advantage of microgravity, extreme temperatures and the vacuum of space to produce materials that are more pure and have fewer defects than materials produced on Earth. To prevent defects from occurring during the journey back to Earth, ForgeStar will “effectively float from orbit to the ground much more gently than your traditional ablative capsule,” Western said. Space Forge intends to manufacture semiconductors, alloys and biological materials in orbit. “We occasionally will be flying ancillary payloads as well,” Western said. “They might be doing space domain awareness, space weather, sensing or material science for spacecraft structures.” Space Forge lost its first satellite, ForgeStar-0, on the Virgin Orbit launch from the U.K. that failed in January. An upgraded version, ForgeStar-1A, is scheduled to launch later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight. ForgeStar-1A will demonstrate Space Forge’s in-space manufacturing capability and gather safety data, Western said. “We’ll be demonstrating a lot of the safety case around being able to return these sorts of platforms to not just North America, but also to Europe and other return locations that we’re looking to establish in both hemispheres,” Western said. 
The head of the U.S. Space Force launch program office, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, said he has been briefed by United Launch Alliance on an anomaly experienced last month during testing of the Centaur upper stage of ULA’s new rocket Vulcan Centaur. But he said it’s too early to predict what long-term impacts further delays of Vulcan’s debut launch might have on the national security launch program. “Yes, we’re tracking the ULA Centaur upper stage issue. It’s still under investigation. Obviously we’re closely following that,” Purdy told reporters April 18 at the Space Symposium. Purdy is the commander of Space Launch Delta 45 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and program executive officer for assured access to space. Before the March 29 incident, first reported by Ars Technica , ULA had announced a May 4 target date for Vulcan’s first launch, known as Cert-1. Perhaps a June or July launch ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno in a Twitter post April 14 said it now looks like Vulcan will not be ready until at least June or July . Vulcan needs to complete two orbital missions successfully in order to get certified to launch U.S. military and intelligence satellites under the National Security Space Launch program. “Our hope is that we can find the way to continue to pursue the Cert-1 launch, which would be great,” Purdy said. “And then it just becomes a more of a long term fleet kind of a discussion. That’s our hope. The data will drive us into that decision or not.” Bruno in a Twitter post April 13 showed a video of a fireball igniting during tests of a structural article of the Centaur upper stage of its Vulcan rocket at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. A leak caused hydrogen to accumulate inside the test rig, Bruno wrote. “H2 accumulated inside the rig. Found an ignition source. Burned fast. Over pressure caved in our forward dome and damaged the rig.” On March 29 he said a hardware anomaly occurred during qualification testing of a Centaur 5 structural article. “This is why we thoroughly & rigorously exercise every possible condition on the ground before flight. Investigation is underway. Vulcan will fly when complete,” Bruno wrote. He said the company has not yet determined if the problem was the test article or the ground system. Vulcan already is years behind schedule due to delays in the development and testing of the Blue Origin BE-4 engine that powers the vehicle’s first stage. Vulcan needed to launch national security missions The Space Force was expecting Vulcan to launch its first national security mission in late 2023 but that now appears unlikely. The vehicle was selected in 2020 to launch 60% of national security missions over five years. SpaceX won the other 40%. Randy Kendall, vice president of launch and architecture operations at the Aerospace Corp., told SpaceNews that depending on the outcome of the investigation, the Space Force would chart several paths to deal with the potential delays. Aerospace is a nonprofit that provides technical advice to the U.S. government, as well as engineering and support services for the national security space launch program. Kendall said he could not comment on the specifics of the Centaur anomaly. “The good news is that BE-4 testing and qualification has come along really well,” he said. “I don’t anticipate they’re going to have any challenges getting off the launch pad this year.” Under the terms of the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract won by ULA and SpaceX, Kendall said, if one of the providers is unable to perform a mission, the Space Force could choose to delay the mission or ask the other provider to step in. 
COLORADO SPRINGS – The National Reconnaissance Office is casting a wide net in its latest bid for commercial Earth observation. Innovative electro-optical capabilities will be the subject of the fourth focus area of the Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement. In a request for proposals scheduled to be released in the fall, NRO will invite U.S. companies and foreign-owned companies with U.S. subsidiaries to share information on new sensors, innovative ways of processing data and constellations. “There are not specific things that we’re looking for,” NRO Director Christopher Scolese said April 18 at the Space Symposium here. Instead, NRO wants “to see what’s out there for people or organizations that are interested in working with us and to give them the opportunity to see what we do in more detail. Then, we can determine collectively if we see a mutual benefit and how to make that happen in the future,” he added. The NRO began issuing Broad Agency Announcements in 2021 for Earth-observation products and services. Previous BAA’s focused on synthetic aperture radar , hyperspectral and radio-frequency data . The NRO also acquires electro-optical imagery for U.S. intelligence, defense and federal civil agencies through contracts awarded in 2022 to BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet. “We do have electro-optical systems out there today,” Scolese said. “They’re doing very well and we’re going to continue to go off and use those. We’re looking for the next step.”
A drop in space company valuations could open the door to more transactions in the industry, according to an April 17 Space Symposium panel on the outlook for deals, as long as they can navigate increasing regulatory scrutiny. “There were a lot of deals that we haven’t participated in over the last five years because the companies were overvalued,” said Megan Crawford, co-founder of venture capital firm SpaceFund. “I like to refer to this as the magic space sprinkles,” she said, “you add space, or AI, or blockchain to the name of your company and all of a sudden the valuation goes up by 100x.” She said this issue was compounded by a spurt of early-stage space companies that went public in recent years by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), often with lofty business projections despite a lack of current revenues. Their high-profile valuations helped raise price tags across the rest of the industry, however, the vast majority of early-stage companies that merged with a SPAC have since significantly underperformed in the public market. “On the public side, I think there’s a lot of blowback from public equity investors about the newspace sector,” said Matt Kuta, chief operating officer at industry consolidator Voyager Space. He said “a lot of institutional investors have lost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and that then trickles down to the folks that are looking to allocate private capital.” The poor trading performance of space companies that went public via a SPAC, coupled with high inflation and other macroeconomic challenges, are weighing on valuations as investors become more conservative in general. The hype that had been inflating space valuations is “starting to fade,” Crawford said, “and we’re starting to see deals that are a lot more in line with what we think are the real valuations of a lot of these … companies that we think were highly over-valued over the last couple of years.” However, the panel also pointed to an increasingly tough regulatory environment standing in the way of acquisitions in the space industry. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews certain foreign investments in American companies, “remains a huge concern, as well as anti-trust” obstacles, said Sameer Garg, managing director and head of space investment banking at New York-based Citi. “We’re seeing that all across the board,” Garg said. Regulatory concerns are now “really front and center” of conversations Citi has with clients early on in a merger and acquisition (M&A) process, “as opposed to something that you typically pick up in the second round of diligence,” he said. But while Garg expects increasing regulatory scrutiny will impact both private and public transactions, he said the underlying M&A environment continues to be constructive for deal-making.
NASA has released new details on the initial phases of its architecture to return humans to the moon as a step towards eventual missions to Mars. Speaking at the 38 th Space Symposium April 18, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy rolled out a 150-page document describing its plans for the initial series of Artemis missions to the moon and how they fit into a set of more than 60 objectives for its long-term plans for human missions to the moon and Mars. “The architecture concept review details plans for early human exploration of the moon’s south pole,” she said. “It provides more definition for plans through Artemis 4 and sets the stage for the first crewed missions to Mars.” The document describes how the various programs in development fit together to carry out those missions, such as the Space Launch System, Orion, Gateway and Human Landing System. Those programs are linked to specific objectives, functions and use cases for those missions. Along with the architecture document, NASA released several white papers to explain aspects of the architecture, such as the use of the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon and the Gateway that will operate in it. “I think they provide a very succinct description of why we’re doing what we’re doing, and especially how the Artemis missions to the moon are going to reduce the risk for future Mars missions,” Melroy said of the white papers. The document extends, at a higher level, to future phases of Artemis with sustained lunar exploration and later human missions to Mars. “We’re going to learn a lot on the way so we’re not ready to talk about sustained presence yet on Mars,” she explained, “but we have the shape there.” Other NASA officials have noted tweaks to earlier plans for later phases of Artemis, such as a shift from a single “base camp” at the lunar south pole to several sites that could be visited on later Artemis missions. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said at an April 17 briefing that, because of changing lighting conditions at the south pole, missing a launch window for a particular site might delay a mission there by months. “We could maybe have two or three sites to go to that help our science diversity,” he said. The architecture was developed internally at NASA, but Melroy said there will be opportunities for industry and international partners to provide input. “We identified some areas for collaboration,” she said, although the architecture doesn’t spell out specific procurement plans. “It does help show where we are and where we’re headed, and we know how important that is for our industry and international partners.” Melroy said that NASA plans forums this summer where those commercial and international partners will be able to offer feedback on the architecture, as well as workshops organized by professional societies. That feedback will assist NASA’s next round of architecture development, which will be done on annual cycles starting in November to work on later missions. “NASA has positioned this strategy for longevity and success,” she said. “This is a critical milestone for us in our moon-to-Mars strategy. We feel very aligned with our partners. We want to continue to stay that way.”
Dish Network said April 18 it has ordered a satellite from Maxar Technologies to expand high-definition broadcast services over North America. The ES XXV satellite is expected to be ready for launch to geostationary orbit (GEO) “within the next few years,” Dish Network spokesperson Ted Wietecha said. A launch provider was not announced. The satellite will be based on the Maxar 1300 series platform, the largest in the manufacturer’s product line with a mass of up to 6800 kilograms Wietecha said ES XXV would also “provide greater flexibility” across its fleet of seven satellites. The company currently also leases capacity from four satellites for a broadcast service covering the United States and Puerto Rico. The satellite comes amid a secular decline in the satellite TV industry amid a shift toward online streaming services, where Dish Network also provides services in a highly competitive market. The company recorded 9.75 million net pay-TV subscribers at the end of 2022, comprising 7.42 million for its DISH TV satellite broadcast business and 2.33 million for its SLING TV streaming service, which was a 268,000 decline compared with the prior year. ES XXV is also the first GEO contract Maxar has announced this year in a market that has declined amid the rise of constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO). Maxar secured contracts for two GEO satellites in 2022 in a year that only saw 11 orders, according to Euroconsult research, a far cry from the 15-20 that used to be ordered annually. Chris Johnson, Maxar’s senior vice president and general manager of space, said the “GEO market remains important” for the company in a statement that accompanied its announcement. Meanwhile, the company has been gaining traction for its LEO-focused Maxar 300 series, the manufacturer’s smallest and most modular bus. In August, Maxar said it was selected by L3Harris to build 14 missile-detection satellites based on the platform for the U.S. Space Development Agency.
Sierra Space and ILC Dover announced April 18 they will cooperate on the development of inflatable space station modules and spacesuits. Under the partnership, ILC Dover will be the exclusive partner in providing soft goods for Sierra Space’s Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) modules it is developing for commercial space stations. Sierra Space also plans to offer versions of LIFE modules for lunar and Mars applications. Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in an interview during the 38 th Space Symposium that the company is working on a series of progressively larger LIFE modules, including versions that will have more habitable volume than the entire International Space Station. The company is also developed ways to integrate windows into inflatable habitats, and will conduct tests of an engineering model of a module with windows in the summer. “We didn’t want to go to space and be inside of the habitat but not able to see the Earth,” he said. The discussion with ILC Dover on supporting work on LIFE led to cooperation about spacesuit development. “We got into really deep technical conversations about their heritage in spacesuits,” Vice said, which led to expanding their partnership to include spacesuits. “We want to work together to create the world’s best suit.” The companies have not disclosed design details about their planned suits, which include versions for use both inside spacecraft and for spacewalks. Vice said that the companies want to address some of the problems with earlier suit designs. “If you talk to astronauts, there are significant areas of discomfort and significant areas of distraction because of that,” he explained. That suit concept, he said, would allow it to be seamlessly integrated with the crewed version of Dream Chaser the company is developing. “When you’re integrated into Dream Chaser, you automatically connect to the systems on board,” he said. “It’s not about just designing another suit but instead to think about the problem differently.” Sierra Space is currently working on two cargo Dream Chasers, the first of which will ship in July to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio for thermal vacuum, acoustics and vibration testing, then go to the Kennedy Space Center in November for launch on a Vulcan Centaur. The second-generation Dream Chasers will follow, with both cargo and crew versions. They will support the company’s commercial space station development, working with Blue Origin and others on the Orbital Reef station. Vice said he is seeing the strongest demand for the commercial space stations from the biotechnology sector. “We see our first space station being almost fully dedicated to biotech,” citing $280 billion spent annually on pharmaceutical research and development. “It will be dedicated to research and formulation of new drugs, and we see tremendous pent-up demand for it.” He added that the company anticipated hosting tourism on its stations, but did not see it as a priority. “We’ll be in that business, but we really think space is for everyone,” he said. “It’s not a billionaire playground. It is a place to benefit millions of people, and it really drives our behavior.”
U.S. Space Command, a military combatant command responsible for operations in outer space, is seeking more funding and resources from the Pentagon to defend the nation’s spacecraft and fill growing demands for satellite services, the head of the command Gen. James Dickinson said April 18. “The command is putting out demand signals,” he said in a keynote speech at the 38th Space Symposium. The development of so-called “initial capabilities documents,” or ICDs, has been a priority for the command since it was established in 2019, Dickinson said. Those documents lay out the “requirements and the capabilities that we need not only today, but in the future.” The ICDs are extensively reviewed by the Pentagon’s joint chiefs of staff and have to be validated so funding can be requested and justified in DoD budget proposals. This is a complex task, Dickinson said, as they have to take into account global military needs for satellite services like communications, GPS navigation and early warnings of missile launches. These requirements documents also are shaped by security concerns driven by the proliferation of anti-satellite weapons. U.S. Space Command has to ensure DoD has access to all these services uninterrupted, said Dickinson. So far Space Command has submitted four ICDs and more are in the works, he said. The four documents focus on requirements for space domain awareness , space combat power, joint space command and control, and a joint space communications layer. The ICDs are “critical,” Dickinson said. “In order to get the funding, in order for the services to provide capabilities to us, they need to understand what our requirements are.” Ukraine war demands Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the demand for space services has soared, he said. As part of the United States’ support of NATO’s operations, Space Command has increased satellite communications services, said Dickinson. “We’ve provided more than an additional gigabyte of data to support communications across the European continent.” Since the beginning of the conflict, he said, Space Command has also provided more than 11,000 indications and warnings of missile launches to NATO allies and other partners. “We now have our first ever integrated plan for defending critical space assets and delivering space capabilities to the rest of the joint force,” he said. Having an integrated plan is significant, he said, because it formalizes the process for synchronizing operations with the Pentagon’s other combatant commands during contingencies. For example, it’s important for Space Command to coordinate operations with U.S. Cyber Command to make sure space assets and ground systems are protected. Command growing, more allied agreements U.S. Space Command is currently based at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Dickinson said the command is close to reaching its staffing goals, with more than 1,200 military personnel and civilians assigned to it. That includes several members of allied military forces. Much larger workforces are located at Space Command’s operational field units at Schriever Space Force Base , Colorado; and at Vandenberg Space Force Base , California. At these locations, military leaders work with foreign allies, civilians and private contractors monitoring space objects and identifying potential threats. International collaboration is essential for space security because no one country can handle the enormous demand for data and intelligence about the space domain, he said. U.S. Space Command has signed 169 space situational awareness data sharing agreements. Of those, 33 are with nations and international organizations, 129 with commercial companies and seven with universities. Separately the command has signed “ enhanced space cooperation ” agreements with the U.S. closest allies, the United Kingdom and Canada. On April 20, the command will announce a new enhanced space cooperation pact with Australia.
Axiom Space has introduced a new program to allow countries to create human spaceflight programs without needing to develop their own infrastructure or other capabilities. The Axiom Space Access Program, announced April 17, offers countries a tiered approach to conducting research on the International Space Station or Axiom’s future commercial space station, as well as flying their own astronauts. The program is effectively a “space program in a box,” said Tejpaul Bhatia, chief revenue officer at Axiom, in an interview during the 38 th Space Symposium. “The real key is that turnkey access at affordable, sustainable and predictable rates.” In the base tier, Axiom provides countries with advice and insight, and gives those countries priority access on upcoming missions. The second tier enables research and development activities by counties. The third tier offers human spaceflight missions on a regular basis. A fourth tier offers countries the ability to co-develop parts of Axiom’s station. The first country to join the program is Azerbaijan, which will work with Axiom on satellite solutions and inspiring students to pursue space research and development activities. New Zealand and Uzbekistan are also participating, as well as Rakia Mission, an Israeli space education and research organization involved with the Ax-1 private astronaut mission to the ISS a year ago. Italy is another nation working with Axiom through a partnership that dates back to 2018. An Italian astronaut is slated to fly on Axiom’s Ax-3 mission to the ISS, currently scheduled for late 2023. Two astronauts from Saudi Arabia are flying on the Ax-2 mission in May. “Everything to date has been very a la carte with the customers, and it’s built off the old model of cost per kilogram,” Bhatia said. “Now we’re trying to build long-term relationships with them.” Governments make up one part of the overall customer base Axiom foresees for its commercial ISS modules and future space station. “There’s a limited set of customers, you know who the buyers are and they have budgets,” he said. Private astronauts make up the second part of the market. “They want to go. They find us,” he said. “It’s not about convincing them they should go. It’s about how you get them to go.” The third, and potentially biggest, part of the market is corporations. “That’s the future of Axiom, where the value really gets created, like the internet,” Bhatia said. The challenge there is convincing companies that they can conduct research and development in space that will be profitable. “There’s a big jump from the science experiments that have been done in space and reports on the potential return to a CEO of a Fortune 100 company being able to go out to Wall Street analysts and say, ‘I’m going to make this big investment,” he said. The key is convincing companies that space offers an “internet moment” for their industries. “It’s still experimental, it’s still emotional,” he said. One way to open those commercial markets, he suggested, is to find company executives who are personally passionate about space and willing to take a chance on space research. “As soon as that hits,” he said, “everyone in that sector is going to want to do it.”
Update: Inmarsat said in a later April 18 statement that it had successfully transferred maritime safety services to a “contingency satellite” it did not disclose “immediately following the incident.” The company said it expects to bring its Inmarsat Classic Aero services online soon, and will then a focus on “the restoration of other services.” COLORADO SPRINGS — An aging Inmarsat satellite that pilots use to keep in touch with air traffic control beyond the range of very high frequency (VHF) ground radars is experiencing a prolonged outage. “There has been a technical issue with Inmarsat’s I-4 F1 satellite, which provides L-band services in the AsiaPacific region,” a spokesperson for the British operator said April 18 via email. “Recovery procedures to restore services have begun and during this process Inmarsat will be providing updates to partners and customers impacted.” The company did not provide other details about the incident, which started April 16, including how many partners and customers are affected. Pilots are being advised to communicate with air traffic control using legacy high frequency (HF) radio technology over areas terrestrial VHF is unable to reach, mainly oceanic regions. The maritime and agricultural industries also rely on I-4 F1’s L-band for communications services in the region. Germany-based Inmarsat service provider m-cramer Satellitenservices described the issue as “a full service outage” that is affecting all the satellite’s L-band services. “Due to the nature of the problem and the complexity of the recovery procedure, Inmarsat expect this to be an extended outage,” the German company said April 18. An update is expected from Inmarsat at 1 p.m. Eastern April 18, m-cramer Satellitenservices added. Built by EADS Astrium, now Airbus Defense and Space, I-4 F1 has been operating beyond an initial 13-year design life since its launch in 2005. The satellite is due to be replaced by I-6 F1, which has a hybrid L- and Ka-band payload and launched toward geostationary orbit in December 2021 . Although I-6 F1’s Ka-band payload has since started service, the L-band payload is not expected to come online until the third quarter of this year.
Northrop Grumman completed a critical design review of a Space Development Agency communications satellite in 13 months, a fraction of the time required for traditional space programs. “It’s paradigm changing for programs that have this type of capability,” Blake Bullock, vice president for Northrop Grumman’s Communication Systems business unit, told SpaceNews. “For a more standard military communications satellite program, you’re typically looking at multiple years to get to a critical design review.” Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems won SDA contracts in early 2022 to deliver 42 satellites apiece by 2024 for the Space Development Agency’s Transport Layer Tranche 1, a global communications network in low-Earth orbit. In addition, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris are supplying SDA with 14 missile-tracking satellites apiece. Northrop Grumman also is responsible for providing the ground system for the Tracking and Transport constellations. To meet the challenge of building 58 satellites in less than three years, Northrop Grumman is relying on its own expertise and that of industry partners. Airbus U.S. Space & Defense is supplying Northrop Grumman with 42 buses for the Tranche 1 communications satellites. Mynaric is supplying optical terminals for the 14 Tranche 1 missile-tracking satellites. “Partnerships are a key part of why we are able to move at a different pace,” Bullock said. Louis Christen, Northrop Grumman Proliferated Space Operating Unit director, added, “We’ve done laser communications for decades and we’re extremely capable in it, but Mynaric has a niche in this high-production, lower-cost-target range.” To produce satellites quickly for SDA, Northrop Grumman “streamline processes as well, finding the right balance of verification and the right level of design rigor to allow us to move forward,” Christen said. Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named the Tranche 1 Transport Layer awardees. 
The European Space Agency is preparing for a space summit this fall to win support for a new human spaceflight initiative as well as a new launch strategy. In an April 17 interview, Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said the agency is working on developing plans to present to ESA and European Union member states at the second European space summit, scheduled for November in Seville, Spain. ESA will seek to win political support, although not funding, for future human spaceflight programs as recommended by a high-level advisory group in a report released March 23. That report, “Revolution Space,” called on Europe to embark on an ambitious effort to develop its own human spaceflight capabilities, including launching astronauts to low Earth orbit and even the moon. “It’s really a political summit on the way forward for Europe and what ESA should be doing to implement it,” Aschbacher said. “I expect a political decision on the European approach to human and robotic spaceflight.” To prepare the summit, he said ESA is working on “use cases” for European human spaceflight infrastructure in orbit and on the moon. That will lead to scenarios for implementing those use cases, including high-level architectures and cost estimates. “We will develop scenarios for the decision makers, and they will tell us, based on those scenarios, what they want us to do and how they want us to proceed,” he said. That political decision will not immediately provide funding for ESA to implement those scenarios, but guide planning ahead of ESA’s next ministerial council meeting in late 2025 where member states will commit to funding specific programs, including potential human spaceflight initiatives. “There is a lot of work that will need to be done” ahead of the 2025 ministerial council meeting, or CM25, he said. ESA does have a small amount of funding available to support that planning. “With moderate investments, you can prepare well. CM25 will be a key milestone.” Aschbacher said he was pleasantly surprised by the Revolution Space report. The advisory group consisted almost entirely of people without space industry experience, ranging from a former NATO secretary general to an artist. “They really developed a very clear picture,” he said, of where Europe stood in human spaceflight and what it should do. “It was very surprising for me — a very positive surprise — that this comes out in the report in clear, strong language.” “Europe cannot stay out of this,” he said of human spaceflight. “Quite the opposite: Europe has to reinforce its effort and be very bold in engaging in this.” Launch strategy The space summit will cover issues in addition to human spaceflight, such as the role space can play in addressing climate change. It will also address a European launch strategy that goes beyond development of the Ariane 6 and Vega C vehicles. “It’s really the larger picture of how Europe wants to establish itself in access to space,” he said. That includes support for “microlaunchers” or small launch vehicles being developed by several European companies as well as a longer-term evaluation of space access. “It’s clear that the current situation needs a deeper reflection on the launcher sector in Europe,” he said, including how to achieve guaranteed access to space for Europe. That discussion comes amid delays in the introduction of the Ariane 6 and efforts to return Vega C to flight after a launch failure in December. He said work is in progress to have the Vega C launch again by the end of the year after implementing changes such as a new nozzle insert that was the cause of the December failure. Aschbacher declined to give a target date for the first Ariane 6 launch, which ESA said last fall would take place no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2023 after extensive development delays. Work is proceeding in several areas, including a hotfire test planned for early July. He said he was working with the industrial partners on the Ariane 6 project to offer a regular series of public updates on the progress towards that first launch. By the time of the hotfire test in July, he said, the Ariane 6 partners should know enough “that we can then make a much better prediction of the maiden flight date.”
Amazon Web Services said April 18 it picked 14 U.S. and European startups to join its third annual space accelerator program kicking off in May to boost ventures with solutions for improving space sustainability. The four-week program provides technical and business support for early-stage space companies looking to develop their businesses using the cloud. Each participant is eligible for up to $100,000 worth of technical services from Amazon’s cloud subsidiary. The event will culminate July 19 in a demonstration day in San Francisco. This is the first time AWS has called for applications with proposals for addressing a specific theme, according to AWS director of aerospace and satellite Clint Crosier, although he said space sustainability is a broad area of focus. “Therefore, we were mindful to consider a broad definition of the term — anything addressing the safe, prosperous, and sustainable future in space; as well as using space insights to address sustainability challenges here on Earth,” Crosier said via email. The winning startups this year are developing businesses across areas including environmental monitoring, aerospace manufacturing, propulsion, satellite operations, and space logistics. The AWS Space Accelerator 2023 participants are: A total 34 startups have participated in the AWS Space Accelerator over the last three years, including this latest cohort.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Export control rules promised in 2019, when the U.S. State Department Directorate of Defense Trade Controls and the U.S. Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security announced plans to revise the U.S. Munitions List, are likely to be published by the end of the year. The updated rules for launch vehicles, spacecraft and related articles “is still in the works,” Jason Kim, acting chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce, said April 17 during a Space Symposium regulatory panel. One important topic that is likely to be addressed by the new rules is in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM). Startups and established companies are rapidly developing spacecraft to extend the life of other satellites, repair mechanical issues or remove them from orbit at the end of missions. In April 2022, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy released a national ISAM strategy with goals for supporting the development of technologies and services ranging from refueling and repairing satellites to building new spacecraft in orbit. Under existing rules, ISAM activities face stringent export controls. “In general, if you want to sell this capability to a commercial partner that’s not in the United States, you’re going to need an export license to have that interaction with the other company’s spacecraft because there’s going to be an exchange of technical information about designs and engineering to ensure that you can interact with that other spacecraft,” Kim said. To share technical information, ISAM companies will need licenses under existing International Traffic in Arms Regulations. “That’s a cumbersome process,” Kim said. “There’s a fee. There’s a registration process.” And it can take a long time. “It would be much better and much easier for industry if all that can be done at Commerce under the Export Administration Regulation system, which is a lot more business-friendly,” Kim said. Although the comment period for the 2019 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ended years ago, Kim suggested people interested in the subject share their comments and concerns with the State Department. “Just because the docket has closed, doesn’t mean they’re not going to accept your comments,” Kim said. “They will still accept your inputs and consider them.”
Efforts to streamline and accelerate space licensing procedures to keep up with rapid innovation are bearing fruit, according to a Space Symposium panel of regulators. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now takes just 15 days to issue a commercial remote sensing license, said Glenn Tallia, the regulator’s chief legal counsel for weather, space services and research. That’s down from 50 to 100 days before NOAA streamlined regulations in 2020 and is “almost embarrassingly short,” Tallia quipped. However, “it’s not because it’s a rubber stamp,” Talia added, but the result of standardizing how different companies and capabilities are treated in the application process. Julie Kearney, chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s recently created Space Bureau, said the regulator hopes to introduce streamlined rules for satellite applications “really soon” after closing a comment period. The FCC recently said it is wading through applications for more than 60,000 new satellites as demand soars for constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO). Kearney also stressed that work to accelerate licensing regimes comes alongside a simultaneous focus on sustainability. She pointed to how the regulator adopted rules in September that would shorten the time operators must remove defunct LEO satellites from 25 to five years, although this item is “in a little bit of a holding pattern” while it clears administrative issues. Jason Kim, acting chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce, said he had hoped new export control rules for spacecraft and launch vehicles would be announced before the Space Symposium. Kim now expects the new rules, which the State Department is still reviewing, to be released by the end of the year. Julie Zoller, head of global regulatory affairs for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation, welcomed the progress U.S. regulators are making to streamline their licensing regimes. Space is a global business, she said during the panel, and “other countries and regions follow our lead — and so whatever we do well, those benefits extend to others, whatever we don’t get right, those problems magnify.”
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said it might be time for the Defense Department to start more open discussions about the national security challenges the United States faces in the space domain. “There are things having to do with threats from near-peer adversaries that the public needs to know about,” Lamborn told SpaceNews . Lamborn chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee which oversees missile defense, national security space and nuclear weapons programs. The “overclassification” of military space programs and policy discussions has been a concern on Capitol Hill for some time, Lamborn noted. It’s a priority for HASC chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) because classification restricts the committee’s ability to share information with colleagues across the House and Senate, Lamborn said. “We’re just trying to raise awareness on the issue,” he said. A key problem is what some officials consider overuse of the “noforn” label on documents meaning they cannot be shared with foreign governments even if they are close allies. “Our foreign partners can’t work on joint projects with us,” Lamborn said. In conversations with Space Force officials and other leaders, Lamborn has tried to convey to them that the public and Congress at large should be better informed about the national security risks posed by rival powers that are deploying anti-satellite weapons. If the U.S. military were denied access to satellite services, the consequences would be severe, officials have warned . But not a lot of details are provided on the nature of these threats due to classification. “The public and my colleagues in Congress who are not on the armed services committees need to know the seriousness of the threats,” he said. That would also help them understand why DoD is spending billions of dollars on programs to counter these threats. The HASC is not ready to put forth specific legislation or language on this but “we keep telling them ‘let’s not overclassify,’” Lamborn said. “We’re tracking this really closely, and it’s something that we’re going to make a priority.” Space Force ‘making progress’ on procurement reforms Lamborn said he is optimistic about the work being done by the Space Force to streamline and accelerate space acquisitions to stay ahead of adversaries like China. But more change needs to happen, he said. In meetings with space industry firms at the 38th Space Symposium, Lamborn said he heard concerns from companies about the military procurement system being stuck in its ways . Space Force leaders, including senior procurement executive Frank Calvelli, have briefed the strategic forces subcommittee on new initiatives to bring more innovation into space programs, Lamborn said. “I think he’s off to a great start on what he’s doing,” he said of Calvelli. “We’re watching closely to make sure things are on track.” Calvelli has proposed a faster approach to buying satellites , using commercial products and procuring them under fixed-price contracts. Lamborn said he is willing to give the Space Force some time to implement this plan and show results. “I think we’re making progress with space acquisition, I think it’s still early in the game but some good things are happening,” he said. “We’re ready to jump in with legislation if needed.” Lamborn said he had no updates on what the Department of the Air Force is doing with regard to the location of U.S. Space Command, which is currently based in Colorado Springs. He and other lawmakers from the state have pushed back on the decision by the Trump administration to relocate the command to Huntsville, Alabama. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the final basing decision is still under review.
The U.S. Space Force is facing a new challenge in its role to safeguard the country’s satellites from foreign threats, as Russian and Chinese satellites engage in disruptive maneuvers and follow other nations’ spacecraft in orbit. Military leaders have raised concerns about the “ cat-and-mouse” games they claim are being played, which has resulted in confusion and potential security risks. To counter this, the Space Force is increasing funding for ground and space-based sensors to gain a better understanding of the situation in orbit. “It’s a genuine concern. Physics absolutely makes it hard,” said Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements. “Space domain awareness is a really critical part of our investment,” said Garrant. Space domain awareness is the term used by the military for the ability to track and identify objects in orbit. “It’s not just tracking and monitoring but also characterizing what type of spacecraft it is and anticipating its behavior,” he told SpaceNews last week at the Pentagon. Garrant said the Space Force budget request for fiscal year 2024 includes $584 million for space-tracking programs, $100 million more than what was allocated in 2023. The budget funds ground-based radar, optical telescopes and surveillance satellites in orbit, as well as space-tracking data from private companies. Focus on GEO belt Most of the spending on space domain awareness is focused on geosynchronous orbit, where the military stations its most valuable satellites. The largest space-tracking programs funded in the 2024 include the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC), a planned network of radar sites in three locations around the world. The Space Force also continues to fund upgrades to its telescopes known as the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System . “The upgraded system will discover currently undetectable space threats, reduce an adversary’s tactical surprise and deliver the data required to support accurate, timely, actionable space domain awareness,” the Space Force said in budget justification documents. The Space Force in its budget documents said it aims to provide a “global capability to positively ID an adversary committing an orbital attack.” Garrant said the Space Force is working with the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. intelligence agency that builds spy satellites, to increase coverage of the geostationary belt. The Space Force operates a constellation known as the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP). Two new GSSAP satellites launched to orbit in January 2022 on an Atlas 5 rocket. Separately, the Space Force and the NRO have worked together on a new satellite to augment the Space-Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) spacecraft launched in 2010. A jointly funded satellite built by the NRO, called SilentBarker, is scheduled to launch later this year on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. Demands from U.S. Space Command U.S. Space Command, the organization that oversees joint-military operations in the space domain, has openly advocated for more spending in space-tracking and capabilities to identify threats. Garrant said the challenge for U.S. Space Command is that data updates today are not frequent enough to be able to keep up with maneuvering Chinese or Russian satellites. “If we can have a bigger network, and a bigger architecture, that gives us better revisit, better custody, and maybe we can make some assumptions about what an object is doing,” he said. Launching surveillance satellites on demand In another effort to provide more timely intelligence, the Space Force plans to launch small surveillance satellites to orbit under a program known as “responsive space,” using commercial launch vehicles to launch a mission on 24 hours’ notice. This will be attempted as early as May with a mission called Victus Nox . A small satellite carrying an optical imaging sensor will launch on a Firefly small launcher. Victus Nox is an example of “how we get after it quickly,” Garrant said. If a sensor detects an object moving in unusual ways, the Space Force could rapidly deploy a small satellite to do further inspection, he said. “Responsive launch could be an avenue to do that.”
A pair of Lockheed Martin cubesats that flew to geostationary Earth orbit in November performed maneuvers in close proximity and demonstrated other technologies for in-orbit servicing operations, company officials said April 17. The Linuss experiment — short for Lockheed Martin’s In-space Upgrade Satellite System — went to orbit on the USSF-44 national security mission launched by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The two cubesats, each the size of a toaster, were deployed 300 kilometers above geostationary orbit from a ring-shaped secondary payload that carried multiple smallsats. They were released three days apart about 750 kilometers away from each other and a month later they were navigating within 400 meters of each other, Karla Brown, Linuss program manager, told reporters during a news conference at Lockheed Martin’s technology center at the Catalyst Campus. One of the cubesats performed the role of servicing vehicle and the other was the resident space object. She said she expects the satellites to come even closer, to about 200 meters as the experiment continues. The more significant goal that was accomplished was proving AI algorithms that would be needed to perform a space servicing mission, Brown said. Plans to develop servicing vehicles Lockheed Martin has long-term plans to develop servicing vehicles for the commercial and government markets, she added. “Our future vehicles will be able to dock with either a cooperative or uncooperative satellite and do any required upgrades or servicing.” These servicing missions would include in-orbit refueling, software upgrades and other ways to extend the life of satellites, Brown said. “The maneuvering technology and the software could be applied to any size mission,” Brown said. “The success of Linuss was really testing out the algorithms necessary to do that maneuvering.” The experiment also helped to demonstrate a new ground system that uses S-band communications to command and control the company’s LM 50 small line of satellites that it’s building with bus manufacturer Terran Orbital. “Our vehicles are still flying. And so we hope to continue the demonstration to get even closer and continue to prove out those algorithms,” Brown said. Other goals of the experiment were to test space domain awareness cameras and support risk reduction of a docking port called Augmentation System Port Interface ( ASPIN ) that Lockheed Martin is trying to commercialize. Docking devices are used by servicing vehicles to refuel another satellite or attach a new sensor, In a statement to SpaceNews , David Barnhart, technology director for the Linuss program, described the project as a “risk reduction for Lockheed Martin’s entry into on-orbit servicing and upgrades. Linuss proved out the flight software and complex algorithms required to support future docking activities.” The next step, he said is to “actually fly and use the ASPIN docking adapter in the space environment.” Company-funded projects Linuss is one of several space projects that Lockheed Martin is funding to prove out technologies that the company hopes to transition to defense and civil space government programs, said Dan Tenney, vice president of strategy and business development. Lockheed Martin has invested in a new mid-size bus , that it’s marketing for military, civil or commercial uses. Tenney said the bus recently completed electromagnetic interference and electromagnetic compatibility testing, and is about to complete thermal vacuum testing. Later this year, Lockheed Martin plans to launch three small satellites — two Pony Express 2 satellites and a TacSat (tactical intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications satellite) — to serve as test platforms for military networks that are trying to connect air, ground, naval and space systems. Another self-funded project is a service called Parsec, a network of satellites in lunar orbit to support other spacecraft around the moon or on the surface. Tenney said the plan is to offer communications and navigation services for government and commercial lunar missions. Lockheed Martin first announced this new service March 28 with the creation of a subsidiary called Crescent Space Services. The first satellites are projected to launch in 2025.
The U.S. Space Force is considering a variety of ways to rapidly respond to changing threats. One option is storing a satellite like Victus Nox, the satellite Millennium Space Systems is supplying for the Tactically Responsive Space-3 mission, on the ground. On-orbit satellite spares are another possibility. “Then also we always have the option to purchase commercial data or commercial assets at the time of need,” Space Force Lt. Col. MacKenzie Birchenough, Space Safari materiel leader, said April 12 during a news briefing at Millennium headquarters in El Segundo, California. “We’re definitely still looking into all of the different options.” Rather than embracing one approach, the Space Force is likely to adopt them all to meet its goals for Tactically Responsive Space, which the military service defines as the capability to respond to on-orbit needs on operationally relevant timelines. “Depending on what the mission is, it might make more sense to use one versus the other,” Birchenough said. Through the Tactically Responsive Space-3 mission, for example, the Space Force is preparing to launch a Millennium-built satellite on a Firefly Aerospace rocket. “The ability to launch into a specific orbit provides some extra benefits that having something stored on orbit might not,” Birchenough said. “Working very closely with our commercial partners obviously provides a lot of advantages too.” One of the keys to close cooperation with industry will be contracting. In a time of crisis, military leaders will need flexible contracting mechanisms that allow them to rapidly acquire whatever they need. That approach is preferable to establishing depots to store dozens of satellites on the ground or having a launch vehicle waiting on a pad, Birchenough said. Still, the Space Force might purchase some minimal number of satellites that could be launched quickly, Birchenough added. For launch vehicles, the Space Safari office is considering contracts that would allow companies to “build some extra capacity into their production lines so that there’s one [rocket] that can be ready,” Birchenough said. “If we don’t need it, they can launch it for one of their commercial missions. Then another one would be available.”
At some point during the next six months, the U.S. Space Force will conduct an important test of its ability to rapidly respond to world events. When a group of Space Force leaders says, “Go,” Millennium Space Systems and the Space Systems Command’s Space Safari program office will have 60 hours to transport the Victus Nox small satellite to Vandenberg Space Force Base and integrate it with a Firefly Aerospace rocket. Sometime after that, again the timing is unclear, Space Force leaders will give orders for Victus Nox, to be prepared to launch within 24 hours. “Those are incredibly challenging timelines,” Space Force Lt. Col. MacKenzie Birchenough, Space Safari materiel leader, said April 12 during a news briefing at Millennium in El Segundo, California. “We intentionally are trying to push the limits.” Tactically Responsive Space, which the Space Force defines as the capability to respond to on-orbit needs on operationally relevant timelines, is not a new idea. For more than a decade, military and congressional leaders have looked for ways to develop and launch satellites quickly in response to military threats or intelligence demands. What’s new is that current technology is bringing that goal within reach. Millennium is one of several companies rapidly producing small satellites. Meanwhile, startups are developing, and some are flying, small rockets. “The state of technology and how industry works these days is what’s allowing us to make it a reality,” Birchenough said. The prior mission, Tactically Responsive Launch-2, focused on slashing the timeline for sending a satellite aloft. While the Space Force succeeded in sending a satellite to orbit in 21 days, “one of the big takeaways was that it is much more than just about launch,” Birchenough said. “More focus needs to go into the specific SV [space vehicle] development and getting the ground approvals ahead of time. There’s a lot of things that happen behind the scenes to put together a space mission.” Normally, military agencies spend several years drafting requirements for new satellites, acquiring them, establishing the ground infrastructure, obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals and preparing for launch. “Oftentimes you know your launch date, or pretty close to it, months, if not more ahead of time,” Birchenough said. “We are definitely shrinking things very drastically from basically months to years down to days to months.” Victus Nox is the space segment of the Tactically Responsive Space-3 mission, known as TacRS-3. The Space Force awarded contracts in August to Millennium, a Boeing company, to produce Victus Nox and Firefly to launch the spacecraft. Millennium has nearly finished building and testing the Victus Nox satellite. Work on the satellite could be completed in a matter of months because Millennium was “founded in 2001 to do fast paced national security missions,” said Millennium CEO Jason Kim. “We are truly end-to-end,” Kim said. “We have an active satellite production line.” Millennium also produces 22 satellite components in-house, which comprise about 80 percent of the company’s satellites, and runs Mission Operations Centers. “We’ve operated several constellations and single spacecraft as well,” Kim said. “All those things combined enabled us to deliver the space vehicle and the ground portion.” Still, Victus Nox poses challenges. Another TacRS-3 goal is commissioning the new satellite within 48 hours of launch. “It doesn’t do us much good to get something on orbit quick if we can’t use it very fast as well,” Birchenough said. Millennium plans to rehearse many elements of the TacRS-3 mission. “We’re going to be executing what’s called a dry run or a dress rehearsal to essentially stress test our interfaces,” said Andrew Chau, Millennium’s Victus Nox program manager. Rehearsals will cover transporting the satellite to the Vandenberg payload processing facility, fueling, charging batteries, conducting baseline functional testing of the spacecraft and handing it off to Firefly. Millennium and Firefly also plan to simulate the launch phase, including transporting Victus Nox to the launch pad. It’s not yet clear how the Victus Nox satellite will travel north 300 kilometers from El Segundo to Vandenberg. It may fly on a C-17 military transport jet. “You don’t necessarily need a C-17 to fly from Los Angeles to Vandenberg,” Birchenough said. “But we wanted to test out that ability so that if in the future we needed to fly it to the Cape [Canaveral] or to some other location, we know that we can do that.”
Updated 6:40 p.m. with new April 20 launch date. COLORADO SPRINGS — SpaceX called off the first attempt to launch its integrated Starship vehicle from Texas April 17 because of a valve problem. SpaceX announced it was scrubbing the launch of its Starship vehicle and Super Heavy booster from its Starbase test site at Boca Chica, Texas, less than 10 minutes before the scheduled 9:20 a.m. Eastern liftoff, after reporting a pressurization issue with the booster. “A pressurant valve appears to be frozen, so unless it starts operating soon, no launch today,” Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, tweeted moments before SpaceX announced the scrub. The company had reported no other major issues with the vehicle, and weather was acceptable. The company continued with the countdown until the T-40 second mark, finishing propellant loading and using the launch attempt as a wet dress rehearsal. Commentators on the SpaceX webcast said it would be a minimum of 48 hours before they could make another launch attempt. “Learned a lot today, now offloading propellant, retrying in a few days,” Musk tweeted after the scrub. SpaceX announced late April 17 that they were planning the next launch attempt no earlier than April 20, between 9:28 and 10:30 a.m. Eastern. The launch would be the first flight of the integrated Starship/Super Heavy vehicle after several low-altitude test flights of Starship prototypes and static-fire tests of Super Heavy. The vehicle would fly a “nearly orbital” trajectory, reaching a peak altitude of about 235 kilometers. Starship would splash down in the Pacific near Hawaii and Super Heavy in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast from Boca Chica; neither vehicle will be recovered. SpaceX pressed ahead with its launch plans after getting an FAA launch license late April 14 for the test flight . An FAA official said last week that the agency spent more than 500 days reviewing the launch license application, which SpaceX amended several times, in part because of the size and complexity of the vehicle. That is the longest the agency has spent reviewing any commercial launch license application. During an online discussion April 16 for paying subscribers of Twitter, the social media network he acquired last year, Musk kept expectations low for the launch. “This is a very risky flight. This is not something that is a sure thing at all,” he said. His main concern was that the rocket would explode at or immediately after liftoff, damaging the launch pad. “It would probably take us several months to rebuild the launch pad,” he said of that scenario. “So, my top hope is please, may fate smile upon us and we clear the launch pad before anything goes wrong.” “Maybe the second one will be or maybe the third one will be, but tomorrow probably will not be successful, if by success one means reaching orbit,” he said. “If we get any information that allows us to improve the design of upcoming builds of Starship, then it is a success.”
Orbit Fab, a startup developing in-space satellite refueling services, has raised $28.5 million to accelerate work on its first missions. The Colorado-based company announced the Series A funding round April 17 led by 8090 Industries. Others participating in the round include Stride Capital, Industrious Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Tribe Capital, Good Growth Capital and Massive Capital Partners. Orbit Fab will use the funding to accelerate work on its first missions to provide satellite refueling services. It will also ramp up production of its RAFTI port for spacecraft, which is designed to enable on-orbit refueling. “This is going to let us accelerate the deployment of refueling systems,” Daniel Faber, chief executive of Orbit Fab, said in an interview. “This is what the Series A is about. We’ve seen demand. We have four launches booked, and we need to keep up with that.” Orbit Fab announced in October that 8090 Industries had invested , but the company declined at the time to specify the size of the investment. Faber said that investment was part of this Series A round. 8090 Industries invests in “category-leading industrial giants of tomorrow” and is affiliated with the Ozmen family that founded Sierra Nevada Corporation and its space spinoff, Sierra Space. “We’re excited about the experience they have with industrial companies, and that’s where we see Orbit Fab,” he said. “Their experience of building a company of the scale that we want to build here is super important to us.” That view is shared by Orbit Fab’s investors. “The emerging space economy cannot grow without adequate refueling infrastructure. Orbit Fab is now executing on a compelling business model to provide mission critical refueling gasses in space,” said Steve Angel, chairman of industrial gas company Linde plc and an advisor at Industrious Ventures, in a statement. Faber described the Series A as an “up round,” or one that increased the overall valuation of the company, which is now at just over $100 million. In addition to the Series A funding, Orbit Fab has secured contracts with military organizations including the Defense Innovation Unit and SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the Space Force, worth $21 million for three missions to demonstrate proximity operations and to refuel spacecraft. The first of those missions scheduled to launch in early 2024. Orbit Fab also has a contract with Astroscale to refuel its Life Extension In-Orbit (LEXI) servicing spacecraft in geostationary orbit. Demand for refueling is primarily for hydrazine and xenon, the most common fuels for chemical and electric propulsion systems, respectively, Faber said. There is also some interest in non-toxic “green” propellants, particularly in Europe where hydrazine is being phased out. To meet the growing demand, Orbit Fab has doubled its workforce to 60 employees in the last year, and plans to hire 25 more with the new funding. Most of those employees are in its Colorado headquarters, with a small office in the United Kingdom. There is a growing interest in satellite refueling, which Faber likened to reusable launch. “If you’ve got a rocket company and your rockets aren’t reusable, you’re not in the game,” he said. “The same is going to become true for satellites. If you have a satellite and you can’t extend its mission or move in a dynamic way in orbit, you’re as good as gone.” “Fundamentally, our business isn’t too complicated: we build fuel, we launch fuel, we sell fuel,” he said. “We want to become the industrial gas supplier in orbit. Orbit Fab is effectively the Linde of space.”
TrustPoint Inc., a startup developing a cubesat-based global navigation satellite system, launched its first satellite April 15 on the SpaceX Transporter-7 rideshare flight. For Leesburg, Virginia-based TrustPoint, the launch was the culmination of years of work aimed at proving that a highly accurate position, navigation and timing source can be contained in a cubesat. “As far as we’re aware, this is the first commercially funded, purpose-built PNT microsatellite,” Patrick Shannon, TrustPoint co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. TrustPoint raised $2 million in 2021 for its campaign to establish a proliferated constellation in low-Earth orbit to offer global PNT data “at a fraction of the cost of a single GPS block three satellites,” Shannon said. “The team has been working to develop our core technologies, taking them from concept to prototype to demonstration and tests. This mission has been the focal point for that effort.” With the first mission, called It’s About Time, TrustPoint will focus on testing, calibration and optimization of its payload technology. After commissioning, TrustPoint will take control of the satellite and operate it through a series of tests and demonstrations. TrustPoint has not revealed the size of the cubesat nor the satellite manufacturer. Maverick Space Systems, a launch services provider and rideshare aggregator, supported the TrustPoint launch. TrustPoint, like other startups developing positioning, navigation and timing technology don’t intend to replace GPS, but are responding to U.S. government calls for backup or complementary technologies. “ With this mission, we are expediting the impact of commercial technologies and innovation cycles on the world of timing and navigation, arguably one of the most far reaching and critical satellite services today,” Shannon said in a statement. The small satellite manufacturing ecosystem coupled with the affordability and availability of launches is allowing TrustPoint to rapidly and affordably demonstrate its PNT concept, said Chris DeMay, TrustPoint co-founder and chief operations officer. “I don’t know that we could have done this a decade ago even. The timing is right. The demand is there,” DeMay added. Shannon said that TrustPoint was able “to initiate a contract and deliver a spacecraft ready for launch in under 10 months.” TrustPoint has won Small Business Innovation Research contracts from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force. “The contracts support us financially, but even more importantly they allow us to have conversations with the right people,” DeMay said. U.S. military officials cite GPS interference and jamming as a growing concern. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. Space Force chief of space operations, discussed the threat posed by Chinese electronic warfare jammers targeting GPS satellites in March while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re here to help solve the problem,” DeMay said.
SpaceX launched more than 50 satellites early April 15 on the latest in a series of dedicated Falcon 9 smallsat rideshare missions. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the Transporter-7 mission at 2:48 a.m. Eastern, after several days of weather-related delays. The upper stage reached orbit a little more than eight minutes later, shortly after the first stage landed back at the launch site. Most of the payloads were deployed starting an hour after liftoff, following a second burn of the upper stage. Those payloads were released over a span of about 20 minutes. The upper stage then performed two more maneuvers before deploying the final, and largest, payload, the 800-kilogram IMECE imaging satellite built by Turkish research institute Tübitak Uzay 2 hours and 35 minutes after liftoff. This launch, the 23 rd Falcon 9 mission of the year, did have some novelties. It was the first Falcon 9 launch to use a shorter nozzle on the rocket’s upper-stage engine. Company representatives said on the launch webcast that they will use the shorter nozzle, which saves money, on launches that do not need as much performance, but retain the longer nozzle for higher-performance missions. That affected the landing of the booster. Falcon 9 missions have previously used three engines on its entry burn and a single engine for landing. On this flight, though, the booster reversed that, firing a single engine for the entry burn but three for landing, an approach SpaceX has previously used for landings of Falcon Heavy side boosters but not for the Falcon 9. The launch carried 51 payloads, SpaceX said, although it did not release a full list of the satellites on board. This was the first in SpaceX’s series of Transporter dedicated smallsat rideshare missions to launch from Vandenberg, after the first six launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Several companies used the launch to augment existing constellations of satellites. Satellogic had four imaging satellites onboard while GHGSat had three satellites for greenhouse gas monitoring. HawkEye 360 launched its seventh cluster of three satellites for radiofrequency (RF) monitoring and Unseenlabs launched its BRO-9 satellite, also for RF monitoring. Umbra launched another synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite. Spire had three satellites on the launch, but only one was for its own network for collecting weather, maritime and aviation tracking data. Two others were from its space services business: one for Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology equipped with a hyperspectral camera and a sensor for measuring soil moisture, while the ADLER-2 satellite for the Austrian Space Forum and Findus Venture GmbH will characterize the debris environment of low Earth orbit and study atmospheric aerosols. Orbital Sidekick launched the first two satellites of its six-satellite Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite, or GHOSt, constellation to provide hyperspectral imagery. Sateliot, a Spanish company working on satellite-based internet of things services, launched a satellite called The GroundBreaker that it says is the first to be able to communicate directly with devices using 5G standards. AstroForge, a startup with long-term plans for asteroid mining, launched a small satellite that will test its ability to refine metals from asteroid materials in orbit. Transporter-7 also carried two orbital transfer vehicles, ION SCV-010 for D-Orbit and Vigoride-6 for Momentus. ION SCV-010 carries several cubesats, including two for Kepler Communications, while Vigoride-6 carries NASA’s two Low-Latitude Ionosphere/Thermosphere Enhancements in Density (LLITED) cubesats among other payloads. SpaceX says that demand for Transporter missions remains high even as the company has increased prices: a 200-kilogram satellite that would have cost $1 million to launch at the beginning of 2022 now costs $1.3 million. “We feel like we’re positioned to provide high value to our customers,” Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, said of the company’s overall pricing strategy during a panel at the Satellite 2015 conference March 15. “I don’t feel like we’re giving up any competitive edge.” Developers of small launch vehicles say that, even with higher SpaceX rideshare prices, it is difficult to compete with them . “I think the fact is they’ve suppressed prices in the market. I think the fact is they’ve taken a lot of volume off of the market,” Adam Spice, chief financial officer of Rocket Lab, said of SpaceX Transporter missions during the SmallSat Symposium in February. For customers, though, Transporter missions have been attractive for more than their cost. “The Transporter model, rideshare without a primary customer so you know you can launch on time, is infinitely valuable for business in many ways,” said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, chief executive of Loft Orbital, in a recent interview. “The reliability and the price point that SpaceX has driven has been fantastic.”
The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a launch license to SpaceX to the first integrated test flight of the company’s Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle, scheduled for no earlier than April 17. The FAA announced late April 14 that it issued the license for the launch from the company’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. A launch window for the flight opens at 8 a.m. Eastern April 17 and runs through 10:30 a.m. Eastern, with backup opportunities April 18 through 22. Anticipation for the license had been growing in recent days as SpaceX said it completed all preparations for the launch. The FAA issued a temporary flight restriction early April 14 for the April 17 launch window, followed later in the day by a similar restriction April 18. “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the FAA said in a brief statement announcing the license. That license is valid for five years, although it currently only covers the upcoming launch. On the flight, a Starship vehicle, atop a Super Heavy booster, will lift off from Boca Chica. The Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines will shut down 2 minutes and 49 seconds into flight, followed three seconds later by stage separation. The booster will later perform boostback and landing burns for a “landing” on the water in the Gulf of Mexico but will not be recovered. The Starship upper stage will fire its engines until 9 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff. That will place the vehicle on a “nearly orbital” trajectory, an FAA official said on background, reaching a peak altitude of about 235 kilometers before reentering. It will splash down near Hawaii about 90 minutes after liftoff and, like the Super Heavy booster, not be recovered. The award of the license concludes an extended review process. The FAA official said the agency spent more than 500 days reviewing the application, which SpaceX amended several times during that process. That is the longest the agency has spent on a single launch license application. That official noted that extended time was also due to the complexity of the application and the size of the vehicle, the largest ever to seek a commercial launch license. That created, the official said, a strain on the resources available on the agency to both review that application and work on other license applications. The FAA concluded an environmental review of Starship launches from Boca Chica in June 2022 , allowing such launches to proceed but requiring SpaceX to carry out more than 75 mitigations to address concerns raised by the review. The FAA official said those mitigations were a mix of things SpaceX needed to do before the first launch as well as other, ongoing activities and those that take place after launch or in the event of a mishap. The agency hasn’t disclosed how many mitigations fell into each category. The FAA official acknowledged that, this being the first flight of the combined Starship and Super Heavy, there is a higher risk of a mishap. First launches by ABL Space Systems’ RS1 rocket in January and Relativity Space’s Terran 1 in March, both licensed by the FAA, ended in failure. “The FAA is responsible for protecting the public during commercial space transportation launch and reentry operations,” the FAA stated. “We carefully analyzed the public safety risks during every stage of the mission and required SpaceX to mitigate those risks.” The FAA will also take several airspace integration measures to keep aircraft out of restricted airspace. That includes using “triggers” during launch preparations, such as fueling of the rocket, to warn aircraft that the launch is approaching and to avoid the restricted airspace. The FAA will also institute what it called “time-based procedures” for the launch, rerouting only those aircraft directly affected by launch activities, something the FAA does for launches from Florida. The launch will also use the FAA’s Space Data Integrator, which takes live telemetry from the rocket and uses that to alert controllers when airspace can be reopened. That can minimize the time that airspace needs to be closed for a launch.
The chief executive of European small launch vehicle developer Orbex stepped down April 14 so that company can go to the “next level” ahead of its first launch. Orbex said that Chris Larmour, who led the company since its founding in 2015, was leaving the company “to allow a focus on new goals,” according to a company statement. “I’m immensely proud of what the entire team has accomplished over the last seven years, and glad to be leaving Orbex in good shape, with deep pockets and a clear path to first launches,” Larmour said in the company statement. “But I feel I have taken it as far as I can personally, and it’s time now to step away and let others lead Orbex to the next level.” The company didn’t give any more specific reasons for Larmour’s departure, including whether he voluntarily stepped down or was asked to resign. “We’re preparing for the next stage of the company’s growth and the focus is shifting to broader strategic goals over the next decade,” Bart Markus, chairman of the board of directors, said in the statement. “Chris has been a key part of all our successes to date, and leaves the company in a strong position. We’re grateful for all his energy and commitment and wish him well on his next venture.” The company said in a later statement that Kristian Von Bengtson, the company’s chief development officer, would serve as interim CEO while a search is underway for a permanent replacement. Orbex is building a small launch vehicle called Prime designed to place up to 180 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The company unveiled a prototype of the rocket in May 2022 for testing near its Forres, Scotland, headquarters but has yet to attempt a first launch of the rocket. Prime will launch from Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland. Orbex announced in November 2022 that it signed an agreement with Scottish development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise for a 10-acre site where it will build the launch pad , capable of hosting up to 12 launches a year. Larmour said at the time that construction of the pad would begin “imminently” but there have been few updates from the company in recent months on construction progress. The spaceport agreement came weeks after the company raised 40.4 million pounds ($50.2 million) in a Series C round led by the Scottish National Investment Bank. At the time, the company said it was performing “a wide variety of integration tests” of Prime ahead of a first launch scheduled for some time in 2023. Orbex is one of several companies trying to be the first to conduct an orbital launch from Western Europe. U.S.-based Virgin Orbit attempted such a launch in January with its LauncherOne air-launch system, flying out of Spaceport Cornwall in England, but an upper stage malfunction prevented the payload from reaching orbit. Another company based in the United Kingdom, Skyrora, is developing an orbital launch vehicle designed to launch from SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands as soon as later this year. A suborbital test flight from Iceland failed shortly after liftoff in October 2022. German company Rocket Factory Augsburg is working on its RFA One rocket designed to place up to 1,300 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit, with a first launch planned from SaxaVord as soon as the end of this year. Another German company, Isar Aerospace, is preparing for a first launch of its Spectrum rocket from Andøya, Norway, later this year. Isar raised $165 million in a Series C round , backed by several European investors, March 28.
The Defense Department has agreed to provide Aerojet Rocketdyne $215.6 million to expand its rocket propulsion manufacturing facilities in order to speed up production of missiles for Ukraine, the Pentagon announced April 14. Aerojet Rocketdyne, headquartered in El Segundo, California, makes rocket engines and propulsion systems for space vehicles, ballistic missiles and military tactical weapons. The agreement was announced by DoD’s Office of Manufacturing Capability Expansion and Investment Prioritization (MCEIP), which manages the department’s strategic investments in industrial base capabilities under the Defense Production Act . The contract with Aerojet was funded by the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act that Congress passed last year to help Ukraine repel the Russian invasion that started in February 2022. Aerojet will use the funds to expand and modernize facilities in Camden, Arkansas; Huntsville, Alabama; and Orange County, Virginia, where the company manufactures rocket propulsion systems. The company will “modernize manufacturing processes at the company’s facilities, consolidate production lines, purchase equipment, build systems to process data, and increase production and delivery speed for Javelins, Stingers, and the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS),” said DoD. The U.S. has provided Javelins, Stingers and GMLRS rockets to Ukraine. “The modernization of Aerojet Rocketdyne facilities will benefit DoD as it replenishes its ammunition supplies,” DoD noted. Restocking Ukraine’s dwindling ammunition supplies has been a challenge for the U.S. and allies. The GMLRS GPS-guided artillery rockets propelled by solid-fuel rocket motors have been especially in high demand and DoD has asked suppliers to speed up production. The U.S. Army’s GMLRS rockets, made by Lockheed Martin, are fired from mobile launchers known as HIMARS, which have been successful in hitting Russian supply lines and command posts. Investment in facilities and skilled labor DoD’s industrial base office is “moving forward with appropriate urgency to support strategic industrial sectors crucial to protecting national security,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in the April 14 announcement. The investment in Aerojet will “modernize rocket propellant and motor production in the United States, in addition to creating technical and skilled labor jobs at multiple domestic facilities,” she said. Aerojet Rocketdyne in March announced it was working to “improve its processes to deliver advanced solid rocket motors to Lockheed Martin to power the Army’s GMLRS.” The company produces the composite case motors for the GMLRS Insensitive Munitions Propulsion System variant, and is the sole producer of the steel-case solid rocket motors for the GMLRS variant used by many U.S. allies. “The GMLRS has been used to great effect by Ukrainian forces in their fight to defend their nation,” Aerojet said in a March 23 news release . Aerojet, one of only two major U.S. defense producers of solid rocket motors, in the process of being acquired by L3Harris Technologies pending regulatory approval. 
An Ariane 5 successfully launched a European spacecraft on an eight-year journey to Jupiter April 14 on the penultimate flight of the venerable rocket. The Ariane 5 lifted off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 8:14 a.m. Eastern after weather scrubbed a launch attempt the previous day. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, spacecraft separated from the Ariane upper stage 26 minutes after liftoff. Controllers made contract with JUICE about 40 minutes after liftoff and, a half-hour later, deployed its two large solar arrays with a total area of 85 square meters that will generate power for the six-ton spacecraft. The acquisition of signals from JUICE took place a little later than expected, although still within the nominal window for doing so. Solar array deployment took place a little earlier than expected. Jean-Marc Nasr, head of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, explained at a post-launch briefing that the array deployment took place earlier because the sun acquisition by spacecraft systems was precise. “It is a sign of a perfect mission,” he said. The launch starts an eight-year journey for JUICE to reach Jupiter and three of its largest moons . The Airbus-built spacecraft will perform several gravity-assist flybys to reach Jupiter, starting with a joint flyby of the Earth and the moon in August 2024. Additional Earth flybys are scheduled for September 2026 and January 2029, along with a Venus flyby in August 2025. JUICE will enter orbit around Jupiter in July 2031, performing 35 flybys of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to characterize their surfaces and subterranean oceans, including determining if they are habitable. JUICE will go into orbit around Ganymede in December 2034 through the end of its mission, currently planned for September 2035. “I think this is something that Europe can be extremely proud of,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said at the post-launch briefing. “This is a mission that is answering questions of science that are burning to all of us.” JUICE, with an estimated total cost of 1.5 billion euros ($1.65 billion), will attempt to answer those questions with a suite of 10 instruments, one of which was contributed by NASA. The Japanese space agency JAXA and Israel Space Agency are also partners on the mission, contributing parts of other instruments. The launch was the sixth Ariane 5 flight to carry ESA missions, a total that includes the December 2021 launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope that features significant ESA contributions. It was the 116 th Ariane 5 launch overall, dating back to 1996. Only one more Ariane 5 flight remains, a launch tentatively scheduled in late June of two European government communications satellites, France’s Syracuse 4B and Germany’s Heinrich Hertz. “I think it’s a wonderful symbol to have made this one with ESA and the very last for Germany and France,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said at the post-launch briefing. The Ariane 5 is being replaced by the Ariane 6, whose first flight has been delayed by several years. The most recent date announced by ESA for the inaugural Ariane 6 flight is late 2023, amid speculation it could slip again into 2024. Aschbacher did not give a new estimate for the debut of the Ariane 6. “We are working very hard and doing everything to get it on the launch pad as quick as we can,” he said. “We have to go through some decisive milestones in the next couple of weeks, but certainly we are on a good track.” “I feel a bit sad that this wonderful rocket is going out of service,” he said of the Ariane 5, but added that Ariane 6 “will be an equally good launcher.”
As more nations seek to explore the vast expanse of space, there is increasing competition and congestion in orbit, according to two new reports released April 14. The Secure World Foundation (SWF) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published their annual assessments of global anti-satellite weapons, which are based on open-source information. Numerous nations are actively pursuing space and cyber technologies that could be weaponized, these reports point out, and many see space as a domain for future conflicts. Global investments in so-called “counter space” technologies — including ground-based and orbital weapons capable of destroying or disabling satellites in orbit — continue despite a widespread recognition that a conflict in space would have catastrophic consequences and jeopardize all nations’ ability to access and utilize space for peaceful purposes. The space domain is “undergoing a significant and rapid transformation. The number of objects in space continues to soar, the value of the global space economy is at an all-time high, and, unfortunately, the threat to the domain is real and concerning today,” the former four-star chief of the U.S. Space Force John Raymond wrote in CSIS’ Space Threat Assessment 2023. The U.S. military, Raymond noted, faces “significant threats” due to China’s and Russia’s advances in militarizing space technologies. “Over the past year and a half, there has been regular testing and use of reversible non-destructive capabilities as well as a destructive test that created a debris field, jeopardizing safe operations and indicating that the domain will continue to become more contested,” he added. The CSIS report, for example, highlights Russia’s advances in electronic jamming to deny access to the U.S. Global Positioning System satellites. “Russia has been installing jammers capable of denying GPS,” the report said. ‘More congestion and competition’ In the SWF report, authors Brian Weeden and Victoria Samson said the space domain is “undergoing a significant set of changes as a growing number of countries and commercial actors are getting involved in space, resulting in more innovation and benefits on Earth, but also more congestion and competition.” From a security perspective, they noted, “an increasing number of countries are looking to use space to enhance their military capabilities and national security. The growing use of, and reliance on, space for national security has also led more countries to look at developing their own counter space capabilities that can be used to deceive, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy space systems.” The existence of space weapons is not new, but the circumstances surrounding them are, said the SWF report. “Today there are increased incentives for development, and potential use, of offensive counter space capabilities. There are also greater potential consequences from their widespread use that could have global repercussions well beyond the military, as huge parts of the global economy and society are increasingly reliant on space applications.”
In the fiercely competitive space launch industry, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX have established themselves as the reigning providers of U.S. national security launch services, leaving little room for potential rivals to challenge their dominance. However, with the Space Force’s latest strategy to procure future launch services, new doors of opportunity may finally open for up-and-coming contenders. “Our strategy shows a lot of confidence in the commercial sector,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space at the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command. In a bid to expand the military’s capabilities for putting payloads in space, Purdy’s office in February rolled out a draft solicitation for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3, a multibillion-dollar procurement of launch services projected for 2025 through 2029. The goal is to procure reliable launch services for traditional military and intelligence heavy-lift missions while seeking smaller, medium-size rockets to deploy the Pentagon’s new proliferated constellation in low Earth orbit. The forthcoming Phase 3 procurement also addresses criticism that surfaced four years ago when the Air Force formulated the NSSL Phase 2 plan. Lawmakers and industry players at the time expressed reservations about the strategy, alleging that it stifled fair competition. While NSSL Phase 2 was a single competition limited to launch providers that could fly the full range of missions, the Space Force will seek bids under two separate contract types in Phase 3. NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 will solicit bids for the more “risk tolerant” missions to low Earth orbit. NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 is modeled after the Phase 2 procurement that ULA and SpaceX won in 2020. The Space Force will award five-year contracts to two launch providers capable of flying a full range of missions to the most demanding orbits. These two providers will share 40 missions, with the top scorer winning 24 and the other 16 — a 60/40 split. In Lane 1, as many as 30 missions will be competitively awarded between 2025 and 2029. There’s an option to extend the contract period until 2034 to accommodate new vehicles that may need more time to complete development. The Lane 1 procurement is geared to attract companies like Rocket Lab, ABL Space, Firefly, Relativity Space and other small launch specialists working to bring larger rockets to market. “They’re going after those medium-class launches. And they’re getting venture capital to do it,” Purdy told SpaceNews. Lane 1 will be structured as indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts awarded to multiple vendors, essentially pre-qualifying them to bid for firm orders down the road. The Space Force will issue annual calls for new entrants to “on ramp” into Lane 1 by submitting their plans for technical review. A rocket doesn’t need to have flown to be eligible for Lane 1. Contenders still 12 to 36 months from their first launch can qualify for a Lane 1 IDIQ contract by acing the Space Force’s review. However, Lane 1 companies will need to fly at least one mission to orbit before the Space Force will award them a firm order for a launch. The Space Force anticipates that at least some of the companies it lets into the IDIQ pool won’t have met the one-launch requirement for winning firm orders for Lane 1 missions as they arise. If no new entrants qualify for Lane 1 missions puts out for bids, Purdy said Space Force would turn to its Lane 2 providers to fly those missions. “We structured Lane 1 so if for some reason none of them show up, the winners of Lane 2 can go clean up on Lane 1,” Purdy said. The Pentagon’s 2024 budget request includes $2.1 billion for 10 NSSL missions, with 30 more missions worth $8.4 billion forecast for 2025 to 2028. In a separate funding line, the Pentagon is budgeting $529 million in 2024 to launch five batches of satellites to low Earth orbit for the Space Development Agency (SDA), with an additional 11 missions worth $1.4 billion planned from 2025 to 2028. SDA, an agency that is part of the Space Force, is building the Pentagon’s largest-ever constellations of missile-tracking and data transport satellites. SDA’s launches — currently assigned to ULA and SpaceX under the NSSL Phase 2 contract — are likely to be competed in Lane 1, said Col. Doug Pentecost, Space Force deputy program executive officer for assured access to space. Of the expected new entrants in Phase 3, Rocket Lab has been the most outspoken about its NSSL ambitions. A dominant player in the small launch industry, Rocket Lab is developing a reusable medium rocket, Neutron, designed to carry payloads of up to 13,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said this payload capacity puts Neutron in “the sweet spot” for Phase 3 Lane 1 missions and enables it to compete in the commercial and government markets with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Another rocket company, Relativity Space, plans to be a contender in Lane 1 with its future 3D-printed Terran R vehicle, designed to lift 23,500 kilograms to low Earth orbit. “Relativity looks forward to competing for NSSL Phase 3 awards,” the company’s co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis said in a statement to SpaceNews. “We’re confident that Terran R is uniquely positioned to fill the gap between existing launch systems at an appreciable cost savings,” he added. Relativity on March 22 attempted the first launch of its small Terran 1 vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket got off the ground and demonstrated the integrity of 3D-printed space hardware but failed to reach orbit. Ellis said the launch “proved Relativity’s 3D-printed rocket technologies that will enable our next vehicle, Terran R.” Relativity had planned a first launch of Terran R in 2024 but the company on April 12 announced the vehicle is being redesigned and is now targeting 2026 for the vehicle’s first launch . ABL Space and Firefly, small launcher operators mentioned by Space Force officials as potential Lane 1 competitors, did not respond to questions from SpaceNews on whether they plan to compete in NSSL Phase 3. Following the release of the Phase 3 draft solicitation, some companies have expressed concerns that allowing Lane 2 providers to bid for Lane 1 missions puts the new entrants at a competitive disadvantage. Fledgling companies in Lane 1 would be up against ULA and SpaceX, who naturally benefit by being incumbents and, if selected in Lane 2, would get additional government funding unavailable to Lane 1 competitors. In fixed-price bids for Lane 1 missions, for example, a new entrant will have to absorb the costs of “mission assurance,” which are engineering and design reviews the government requires to assess the risk that a mission flown by that vehicle could fail. The winners of Lane 2 also submit fixed-price bids, but their costs are partially covered by the government. Lane 2 companies are eligible for “launch service support” funding, a subsidy to cover rocket development or infrastructure expenses unique to NSSL. Lane 2 winners also qualify for annual incentive fees of up to $20 million. Relativity CEO Ellis suggested the two-lane structure as currently laid out would make it hard for emerging launch companies to challenge incumbents. “The Space Force has taken a promising step in the right direction by opening up Lane 1 to new entrants,” he said in the statement. “In order to maximize the government’s access to the best performing and most cost-effective vehicles,” Ellis said, “both new entrants and incumbent providers should be able to bid for all missions they are capable of performing.” “A truly open competition,” he said, “would allow new providers to introduce new technology faster, and ensure downward pressure on national security launch costs.” Col. Chad Melone, senior materiel leader for mission solutions at the Space Systems Command, said the government would assess the risk profile of each competitor based on a “tiered mission assurance” scale. That means that the higher the value of the payloads, the higher the mission assurance level the government expects the launch company to meet. The concept of tiered mission assurance and how it will be implemented is still unclear to many in the industry, said Richard French, senior director of business development and strategy at Rocket Lab. “Where the mission assurance knob is going to be set to be able to offer a fixed price, commercial service in Lane 1 is an open question,” French said March 15 at the Satellite 2023 conference in Washington. He said Rocket Lab provided feedback to the government following the release of the Phase 3 draft RFP. “And the biggest question is what is the market going to look like for Lane 1?” he said. “And I think this is a big debate within the department.” “Of course, we’d love to see the Space Development Agency manifest be allocated to Lane 1 and to have the right kind of payloads to create those opportunities,” French said. Todd Harrison, managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights, characterized the Phase 3 two-lane approach as good in theory, although the devil will be in the details. If Lane 1 does not create real competition that gives new entrants a fair chance, the Space Force risks continuing its dependence on just two providers, Harrison said. The Air Force, in the previous NSSL Phase 2 procurement, considered bids from ULA, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman. After losing Phase 2, Northrop Grumman terminated its Omega rocket program. Blue Origin is still pressing forward with its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, although it lost the government funding it was getting during the Phase 2 competition. Leading up to the selection of Phase 2 providers, Blue Origin and its backers in Congress unsuccessfully lobbied the Air Force to select three suppliers. In 2019, Blue Origin filed a legal protest arguing that the NSSL selection criteria stacked the cards in favor of established companies. The Government Accountability Office rejected that claim. The RAND Corp., a government-funded think tank, in a 2020 study, made the case that the Air Force should support three NSSL launch providers to shore up the U.S. industrial base. Blue Origin’s long-delayed heavy rocket New Glenn, at least on paper, “looks like a great vehicle that could challenge ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon rockets,” said Marco Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group, a market research firm. With a reusable first stage powered by seven Blue Origin-made BE-4 engines, “it would be one of the more powerful rockets,” he said. So far, the company has been mum about its plans for Phase 3 or when New Glenn will fly. “It’s anyone’s guess,” Caceres said. “They’re years behind schedule.” Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s vice president of commercial orbital, astronaut and international sales, said at the Satellite 2023 conference that New Glenn is “making fantastic progress, and we’re going to fly when we’re ready.” With regard to NSSL, Cornell said, “We don’t comment on what we’re bidding for.” Pentecost, the Space Force deputy program executive officer, said Feb. 24 that the government continues to work with Blue Origin on a plan to certify New Glenn for NSSL after it completes three commercial flights. The Space Force in November announced a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Blue Origin that does not provide government funding but supports “certification activities.” From October 2018 through December 2020, the Air Force paid $255 million for New Glenn development costs in exchange for access to the vehicle’s engineering data. The original six-year agreement worth $500 million was terminated after Blue Origin was eliminated from NSSL Phase 2. An unexpected wild card in Phase 3 is Boeing, which hinted it would offer the enormously expensive Space Launch System rocket for NSSL missions. The SLS launched NASA’s Artemis 1 mission in late 2022 on an uncrewed test flight around the moon and is anticipated to fly Artemis 2 in late 2024 with astronauts on board. Boeing said in a statement the SLS’s deep space capability “can be an asset for the NSSL Phase 3 contract.” The cost of SLS, estimated at about $2 billion per mission, makes it unlikely it would ever be considered for NSSL, said Caceres. “In no universe does that make any sense,” he said. “That rocket is old technology.” He noted that the Air Force and ULA decided to part ways with the Delta 4 Heavy rocket because of its price tag, which ranges from about $350 million to $400 million per mission. “If you wanted a giant rocket, you could just stick with Delta 4.” A looming concern for the Space Force is that the vehicle selected to fly 60% of NSSL Phase 2 missions — ULA’s Vulcan Centaur — is years behind schedule and has yet to perform its first launch. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno tweeted April 14 the company is targeting a June or July debut launch for Vulcan following a Centaur upper stage anomaly that caused an explosion during testing March 29. He said that separate qualification testing of the Blue Origin BE-4 engines that power Vulcan’s first stage are “perhaps a little bit more than halfway” complete. “That is likely to be the pacing item.” Vulcan must complete two orbital flights before it’s certified for national security launches. ULA already shifted the first NSSL Phase 2 mission assigned to Vulcan to its legacy vehicle, the Atlas 5. The Space Force expects Vulcan to fly its first NSSL Phase 2 mission before year’s end, Pentecost said. After the May “Cert-1” launch, the plan was to fly a Sierra Space Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station as the “Cert-2” launch. ULA confirmed on March 24 that Dream Chaser may not be ready until late 2023, so it’s prepared to use a mass simulator as an alternative. The company said it is on track to launch Vulcan’s first NSSL mission in the fourth quarter of 2023. The Pentagon invested nearly $1 billion in the development of Vulcan and is counting on it to end its reliance on the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine that powers ULA’s Atlas 5. Congress in 2016 directed the Pentagon to stop using launch vehicles powered by Russian engines and only allowed DoD to award contracts for Atlas 5 launches through 2022. The Space Force could be in a serious bind if Vulcan is further delayed, said Caceres. “The only options in the near term are Atlas 5, but that’s on its way out, and SpaceX, which has a full manifest of customers.” Concerning Phase 3, Bruno said the Space Force could face a supply crunch as launch providers are bracing for a surge of commercial business between 2024 and 2027. That’s the period when Amazon will be launching its Project Kuiper internet constellation. In the largest single purchase of commercial launch services, Amazon signed deals for 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and ULA last year. Amazon plans to start launching satellites in the first half of 2024. “There is now, for the first time in 30 years, a global shortage of launch capacity,” said Bruno. That is partly due to Amazon’s contracts but also the withdrawal of Russian vehicles from the commercial launch market after the invasion of Ukraine. ULA’s Vulcan will launch 38 missions for Amazon, putting the company in a situation where it’s never been before, juggling the needs of a large commercial customer and those of the NSSL program. “The government has become a minority purchaser of launch,” Bruno said. A potential consequence of that, he said, is that “they’re going to have trouble getting on the manifests and having the flexibility they are accustomed to.” Caceres said ULA’s main challenge in Phase 3 will be SpaceX. He noted that SpaceX was not happy that it only won 40% of Phase 2 missions and is likely to compete aggressively so it gets 60% in Phase 3, he added. “Hopefully, ULA can make Vulcan partially reusable and bring down the price to be more competitive with the Falcon vehicles.” The industry landscape going into Phase 3, with ULA and SpaceX firmly in command of NSSL, is not exactly good news for the Space Force, which could benefit from having a third heavy launch provider, Caceres said. Another competitor would help bring down costs, he said. That proved to be the case when ULA had to start competing against SpaceX. ULA, a joint venture formed in 2006 when the Pentagon ordered Boeing and Lockheed Martin to merge their launch business, enjoyed nearly a decade as the sole provider of national security launches. It wasn’t until 2014 when Elon Musk sued the Air Force over a proposed sole-source ULA block buy that SpaceX was allowed to compete for missions under what was then called the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Phase 1A program. The Air Force later changed the name EELV to NSSL. ULA back then was far more expensive than SpaceX. However, in NSSL Phase 2 SpaceX prices have gone up and are closer to ULA’s prices. Under EELV Phase 1A, for example, the Air Force in 2019 awarded three missions to ULA for an average of $147.2 million per launch and three missions to SpaceX for an average of $99 million per launch. Under NSSL Phase 2, the Space Systems Command has ordered nine missions from ULA for $1.1 billion — or $122 million per launch on average —and six from SpaceX for $774 million, or $129 million per launch on average. “The more competition there is, the better for us,” the chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told reporters March 7. Since the days when the Air Force only had one provider, the “progress across the industry base has been really impressive,” he said. “I will say that going into NSSL Phase 3, I’m excited because there are so many more people vying for launches in support of the Space Force, in support of national security.” “Do I think there’s enough competition?” Saltzman asked. “I always want more, and that’s why we’re trying to set up this Phase 3 to be as fair and as open as possible so we can attract as many vendors as we can.” This article originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat has ordered one of three fuel pods Northrop Grumman’s in-orbit servicing subsidiary is launching in late 2024 to extend the life of one of its geostationary satellites by at least six years, the operator announced April 13. The company is still deciding which of the more than 50 satellites in its fleet will be equipped with a Mission Extension Pod (MEP) from SpaceLogistics, which plans to install it in 2026 using a Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) servicer with a robotic arm. There is “a short list [of candidate satellites] but we haven’t decided,” Intelsat senior vice president of space systems Jean-Luc Froeliger said. “We have a few years to make the decision.” The 3,000-kilogram MRV — the successor to the pair of SpaceLogistics Mission Extension Vehicles (MEVs) launched since 2019 to extend the lives of two Intelsat satellite s that were running low on fuel — is slated to launch to geostationary transfer orbit along with three 400-kilogram MEPs on a SpaceX launch vehicle. After the MRV and pods all make separate climbs to GEO orbit using onboard solar-electric thrusters, the MRV will capture the three pods and transport them to satellites needing fuel. One of the three pods is intended for Australian satellite operator Optus , announced last year as SpaceLogistics’ first customer for the Mission Extension Pod service. If all goes to plan, the Mission Robotic Vehicle will install a pod on Optus D3 satellite in 2025. SpaceLogistics has not announced a customer for the third fuel pod, but the company’s president, Rob Hauge, said it is as good as sold. “We are finalizing negotiations for a third MEP, “which will complete the first launch manifest,” Hauge said. The company expects to install as many as 30 MEPs over MRV’s 10-year operational life. Early last year, SpaceLogistics said six companies had signed term sheets to buy MEPs for a service it says is suitable for GEO satellites with a mass of around 2,000 kilograms. The MEP propulsion “jetpack” service is designed to be more efficient and cheaper than the MEVs launched in 2019 and 2020 to give two Intelsat satellites fuel for another five years. SpaceLogistics vice president Joe Anderson said the company is transitioning from MEV to a “lower-cost life-extension approach” using robotics to “expand our market potential” for in-orbit services. Prices have not been disclosed for MEV or MEP. Intelsat is the first and currently only satellite operator that has employed commercial life extension services.
In an experiment last fall near Virginia’s coast, a team of engineers used commercial hardware, software and satellite data to show the U.S. Navy how it could quickly turn information from satellites into useful intelligence. The Office of Naval Research sponsored the experiment to identify readily available technologies that could help U.S. Southern Command to detect and identify illegal drug-trafficking boats that turn off their lights at night and do not emit radio signals. Royce Geospatial Consultants, a geospatial data analytics company, pitched the Navy the idea of using floating acoustic sensors to tip and cue imaging satellites. It deployed a network of acoustic sensors on small buoys that detected noise signatures off drug running vessels. The vessels’ tracks were sent via Iridium satellite links to the company’s AI platform that automates satellite imagery collection based on what assets are available at the time they’re needed. For the Navy experiment, it tasked Planet’s electro-optical and Iceye synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to capture images of the moving vessels. Using imagery analytics software, Royce Geo identified the location of the vessels and sent these reports to the Navy’s command center, the company’s CEO Dave Sterling said in an interview. “The total time from acoustic detection to vessel report was about 30 minutes,” Sterling said. He noted that naval units at Southern Command rely on a limited supply of maritime patrol aircraft to chase narcotraffickers, and want to take advantage of commercial Earth monitoring satellites and artificial intelligence to do this job more efficiently. There are increasingly more commercial Earth observation satellites so the tipping and cueing are critical to make the best use of these assets, Sterling said. Military commanders, he said, want to leverage this technology to track and monitor fast moving objects. Navy to continue experiments The Office of Naval Research said the vessel-identification experiment is one of many that are being funded to “solve warfighter problems … and ultimately help protect the United States from illicit drug trafficking.” Sterling said Royce Geo won a contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center to continue these experiments into next year in support of the Navy’s Joint Interagency Task Force South which is responsible for interdiction of illicit trafficking. The company is working with other customers in the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army that are looking for ways to exploit commercial sources of intelligence but don’t always know how, Sterling said. “The problem is that you have a tremendous amount of information that you have to parse through from the commercial space layer to really figure out what is possible in terms of getting after your targets if you’re a military commander.” “If I’m chasing a target, what assets are truly in the area that I can effectively get after?” Sterling added. That is a question many military leaders want answered.
As Japanese company ispace prepares to land on the moon for the first time, its stock is taking off on a Japanese exchange. The Tokyo-based company announced April 14 that it had lowered its HAKUTO-R M1 lander into its final orbit around the moon before landing. The spacecraft, which arrived at the moon March 21 in an orbit ranging between 100 and 6,000 kilometers, has now circularized that orbit at 100 kilometers. That orbit is the eighth of 10 milestones that ispace set for the mission, starting with preparations for its December 2022 launch. The ninth milestone is the landing itself, followed by “steady state” post-landing operations. The announcement that the lander was now in its final orbit came two days after the company set a date for the landing: April 25 at approximately 12:40 p.m. Eastern. That landing is scheduled for the end of an hour-long descent that starts with a braking burn by the lander’s main engine. The company said that it has backup landing opportunities on April 26, May 1 and May 3, but did not give specific times for those later dates. “What we have accomplished so far is already a great achievement, and we are already applying lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, said in an April 12 statement. “The stage is set. I am looking forward to witnessing this historic day, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial lunar missions.” The announcements come as ispace’s stock started trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, an exchanged reserved for smaller, higher-risk companies. The company announced plans to go public on the exchange March 8 . Shares in ispace, priced at 254 yen ($1.91) per share, skyrocketed in trading April 13, closing at 1,201 yen. The stock closed April 14 at 1,501 yen, giving the company a market cap of 120.7 billion yen ($909.8 million). The company did not disclose how much it raised in the initial public offering. In earlier filings, ispace said it would sell about 24.7 million shares, which it later raised to 26.5 million shares, with an option to sell an additional 1.24 million shares. As part of the process of going public, ispace released financial details showing increased sales but also growing losses. The company reported 823 million yen in sales through the first three quarters of the fiscal year that ended March 31, compared to 674 million yen in the fiscal year that ended in March 2022. However, ispace reported a loss of 9.72 billion yen in the first three quarters of the most recent fiscal year, versus a a loss of 4.06 billion yen in the fiscal year that ended in March 2022. The company reported net assets of negative 554 million yen as of the third quarter of its most recent fiscal year.
HawkEye 360 and Maxar Technologies have been awarded contract extensions by the National Reconnaissance Office for commercial radio-frequency (RF) data. The NRO also awarded similar contracts to Kleos Space and Spire Global. All four companies last year were selected for cooperative agreements that give the NRO access to their business operations and help the agency understand the quality of commercially available data. RF signals monitoring from space is an emerging sector of the remote sensing industry that uses low-orbiting satellites to track ships, vehicles, electronic jammers or any devices that emit radio frequency signals. HawkEye 360 and Maxar’s Aurora Insight were awarded “stage two” two-year contract options under the NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement program. The NRO builds and operates surveillance and reconnaissance satellites for the U.S. government and in recent years has expanded its agreements with private companies in an effort to leverage commercial investments in remote sensing. HawkEye 360, based in Herndon, Virginia, is a geospatial analytics company that operates satellites that collect radio frequency signal location data. The company said in a tweet April 12 that the NRO awarded the stage 2 contract in February. “This award allows us to quickly scale RF data to meet U.S. government mission needs.” Maxar Technologies, an Earth imaging company based in Westminster, Colorado, started a new RF data business after acquiring Aurora Insight , a Denver startup that deploys RF sensors at fixed sites, on vehicles, aircraft and on satellites to measure the RF environment. It has already launched two cubesats and plans to launch a third cubesat later this year as part of Maxar. “The stage 2 option provides Maxar the opportunity to demonstrate real-world performance of its commercial RF constellation to support U.S. government missions,” the company said April 13. 
As space technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, the role of commercial industry in national defense has become a hot topic, the chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said April 13. Saltzman spoke at the Explore 2023 conference hosted by the satellite imagery provider Planet in a fireside chat with the company’s chief strategist Robert Cardillo. Many within the Space Force are asking how the military can take advantage of the latest innovations from the private sector while also meeting their specific requirements, Saltzman said. He noted that finding the right balance is no easy task. The Space Force’s partnership with the commercial industry “is one of the most important relationships that we have to make sure we get right,” Saltzman said. But he acknowledged that buzzwords are thrown out in military procurement and it’s not often clear what they mean. “What exactly is commercial augmentation that can kind of roll off the tongue?” he asked. Saltzman was referring to programs where the Space Force is considering using private-sector capabilities for additional resilience, for example. Companies in the space industry manufacture hardware and many provide services like data from satellites, but it all gets lumped together as commercial capabilities. he added. “Are we talking about the traditional acquisition relationship where the commercial sector builds a satellite and we buy it and we fly? Or are we talking about commercial services more like the way the launch industry provides a service? Are we talking about data? Are we talking about outsourcing functions like collision avoidance in space?” Need ‘hardcore analysis’ The Space Force has more work to do “clearly identifying the various ways that commercial capabilities can augment and then doing the real hardcore analysis on what is an inherently military function for the Space Force? What’s a governmental function? And what can we leverage partners to perform for us?” Saltzman said. That might seem straightforward, he said, “but you really start asking the questions, it really is more complicated than that.” The Space Force needs to gain better insight “so we can make the right kinds of decisions to get the right kinds of services, like data augmentation,” he said. “That’s kind of what we’re focused on.” Cardillo said companies in the business of providing data from space would like to see the government put to use the analytics and insights that data can provide. “This room is filled with people that are thinking constantly about upgrading their technology, solutions and approaches in ways that advance their competitiveness, because that’s how the market works,” Cardillo said. Saltzman said the industry should continue to “push the envelope.” “It keeps opening our eyes up to other possibilities and then it’s our job in the government to say how do we take advantage of that?” he said. “There is no question that we are rethinking all of the models associated with acquisition and procurement.”
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s homegrown KSLV-2 rocket is slated to launch May 24, carrying a 180-kilogram technology demonstration satellite and seven cubesats. The mission, announced this week by South Korea’s science ministry, comes 11 months after the KSLV-2’s first successful satellite launch and 19 months after its partially successful debut . If everything goes as planned, the kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled rocket will lift off May 24 from South Korea’s Naro Space Center at 6:24 p.m. local time or 5:24 a.m. Eastern. An eight-day launch window for the mission closes May 31, according to an April 11 statement from the science ministry, which manages the nation’s civil space programs. KSLV-2 can send up to 1.9 tons of payload to a 700-kilometer low Earth orbit , with a cluster of four KRE-075 engines in the first-stage booster, a KRE-075 engine in the second stage, and a KRE-007 engine in the third stage. South Korea plans to conduct four more launches, including the upcoming one, through 2027 to improve the rocket’s technical reliability. In its October 2021 debut, KSLV-2 reached its intended 700-kilometer altitude, but the rocket’s third-stage engine shut down early, releasing its 1,500-kilogram dummy payload at less than orbital speed. The anomaly was later blamed on improperly anchored helium tanks inside the upper stage. KSLV-2’s second launch fared better, putting a performance test satellite and four smaller student satellites into low Earth orbit in June 2022 . “The rocket’s third launch is very meaningful as it marks the first trial to launch working-level satellites,” said Oh Tae-seog, vice science minister, in the statement. KSLV-2 will carry eight satellites on the upcoming launch. The primary payload is NEXTSat 2 , a 180-kilogram technology demonstration satellite developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The seven other satellites, all manufactured domestically, are: a 4-kilogram Earth-observation technology demonstration cubesat JLC-101-v1-2; a 10-kilogram cosmic radiation monitoring cubesat Lumir-T1; a 6-kilogram earth observation and weather monitoring cubesat KSAT3U; and SNIPE, a constellation consisting of four 6U cubesats to identify temporal and spatial variation of small-scale plasma structures in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. The satellites’ deployment will begin about 13 minutes after liftoff to ensure their operation at the target altitude of 550 kilometers, according to the ministry. Meanwhile, South Korea is developing a next-generation launch vehicle, KSLV-3 . The kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled two-stage vehicle is expected to debut in 2030. Its first stage will have a cluster of five 100-ton thrust multi-stage combustion cycle engines, and the upper stage with two 10-ton thrust multi-stage combustion cycle engines. The two engines and rocket hardware will be developed by the state-funded Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) in collaboration with an industry partner that will be selected by September. The KSLV-3 will be capable of delivering up to 10 tons of payload to low Earth orbit; 7 tons to sun-synchronous orbit; 3.7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit; and 1.8 tons to lunar transfer orbit. South Korea plans to launch a domestically developed robotic lunar lander on KSLV-3 by 2032.
SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is soliciting proposals for research and development on microwave weather sensors, ground systems and technology to reduce interference from 5G networks. Three Broad Agency Announcements released April 13 reveal some of the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) priorities as the agency prepares to update its weather and climate-monitoring constellations. Microwave sensors with simultaneous imaging and sounding capabilities are one priority. NOAA’s intends to determine “whether or not it is feasible to develop a microwave sensor that could have both imaging and sounding capabilities simultaneously,” according to the BAA . “The studies will also look to evaluate the value and impact of such a sensor on Numerical Weather Prediction and extreme weather monitoring and prediction.” NOAA also is interested in funding “studies and demonstrations of new technologies and novel concepts that support reimagining NESDIS’s future approach to its ground operations,” according to another BAA . In a recent study, NESDIS determined that it needs to overhaul its ground system architecture to support additional satellites and data sources. “The current ground operational architecture does not scale economically and would begin to absorb a larger fraction of the projected overall budget,” the BAA noted. “The strategic goal of NESDIS is to ensure that NOAA can support the anticipated increase in the number of operational satellites and other data streams of environmental observations in the 2030+ timeframe.” Finally, NOAA released a BAA seeking ground-based, suborbital and space-based solutions to help solve the vexing problem of interference caused by terrestrial communications networks . “As new telecommunication services, such as 5G, satellite or broadband-aviation uplinks in millimeter wave bands or future 6G are implemented … , there are potential interference risks to microwave passive sensors, to include operational microwave sensors used by the NOAA Global Numerical Weather Prediction and other environmental prediction systems,” according to the BAA . “Therefore, the objective of the study will be the generation, assessment and delivery to NOAA of a study report that provides detailed information on the identification of passive band interfering or corrupting emissions, characterizations of those interfering or corrupting emissions, reduction of the impact of those interfering or corrupting emissions, associated risks, processes and modifications needed to implement this capability on an international basis.
A new version of the U.S. military’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite unveiled by Boeing on April 13 has a new payload that the company designed under a U.S. Space Force contract. Boeing in 2019 received a $605 million contract to build the WGS-11, the 11th satellite in the WGS geostationary constellation that provides communications services to the U.S. military and allies. Separately Boeing in 2020 won a $191 million contract to develop a Protect Tactical Satcom payload that the Space Force is considering including in future military communications satellites. Boeing and Northrop Grumman both are developing competing PTS prototype payloads that will be evaluated in on-orbit demonstrations in 2025. Rather than deploy the PTS prototype payload on a dedicated satellite, Boeing decided to host it aboard the WGS-11 satellite which is scheduled to launch in 2024 on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket. “The Boeing PTS- Prototype payload hosted on WGS-11 is an exciting leap forward for new warfighter capabilities,” Charlotte Gerhart, Space Systems Command’s tactical satcom division chief, said in a statement. The PTS jam-resistant payloads operate a military waveform called PTW, for Protected Tactical Waveform. Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt, senior director for global sales and marketing for Boeing satellites, said adding the PTS payload to the WGS-11 satellite significantly increases its capacity. “It’s a single asset that’s double the capacity of any of the 10 WGS birds that have previously flown,” said Eberhardt. “And you’re now providing an additional layer of anti jam protection.” WGS users have access to X-band and military ka-band communications. Only those users that have secure PTW modems will be able to tap into the new payload, he said. WGS-11 is built on the 702X medium-size satellite bus Boeing introduced in 2019 for the commercial and government markets. Commercial satcom operator SES selected the bus to build its 11-satellite O3b mPower constellation in medium Earth orbit. Eberhardt said Boeing is in discussions with other potential customers. “I won’t get into the specifics but we certainly have multiple bids and proposals in,” he said. A much larger version of the bus, called 702MP+, was custom-designed for the Viasat-3 high-capacity satcom constellation. Boeing to submit proposal for WGS-12 Congress in the 2023 defense budget added $442 million for a new WGS satellite, WGS-12. Eberhardt said the Space Force wants it to be a copy of WGS-11. “We have a request for proposals,” he said. “We have been asked for a clone of F11. And so we’re in the middle of writing that proposal.” After the proposal is submitted, he said, “we’ll go into negotiations with the government.”
Draper has completed the first milestones of a NASA award to perform the first commercial landing on the far side of the moon in 2025. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Draper said April 13 that it has completed a mission architecture and requirements review and payload interface preliminary design review for its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission to deliver payloads to the lunar farside. The Draper-led team won the $73 million CLPS award, formally designated CP-12 by NASA, in July 2022 for the mission to land in Schrödinger Basin near the lunar south pole. The team includes General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, ispace US and Systima, a division of Karman Space & Defense. The focus of those early milestones has been how the mission will accommodate the set of science payloads NASA selected for the mission, which include seismometers, a subsurface heat flow probe and instruments to study electromagnetic conditions. “We went through our plans for execution on the program, how we were going to accommodate the payloads into the lander design and the mission operations design,” said Alan Campbell, senior program manager at Draper, in an interview. He said the Draper-led team remains on schedule for a 2025 launch. “We’re very happy with the progress that we’ve made thus far and we’ve hit everything on time.” Pete Paceley, acting vice president of space systems at Draper, said they’ve enjoyed good cooperation with NASA. “We’re finding that, with the science teams and their NASA coordinators, it’s been going very smoothly.” The lander, called SERIES-2, is being designed by ispace U.S., the American subsidiary of Japanese lunar lander developer ispace. Systima will be responsible for assembly, integration and testing of the lander, while General Atomics handles integration and testing of the payloads. Work is underway on some elements of the lander, like tanks and engines, Campbell said. The team is also finalizing the selection of a launch vehicle for the mission. The Draper team is the fifth to receive a NASA CLPS award, after Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines and Masten Space Systems, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in mid-2022. The team is much less vertically integrated than those other providers, which are building their own landers and handling payload integration themselves. “Subcontracting and making sure everything’s tied up with the supply chain appropriately has been a little bit more of a challenge than it has been for some other folks,” he said. “There’s a lot of coordination that’s required and a lot of different things that we have to go through, but we’re making a lot of good progress.” One supply chain issue specific for this mission is linked to its farside landing. Draper plans to launch two small relay satellites with the lander to provide communications links between the lander and Earth. Campbell noted there is strong demand for satellite buses of that size for Space Force and other military programs. Draper is procuring the satellites from Blue Canyon Technologies, but he said it was something Draper is keeping a “close eye” on. The mission has room to accommodate more than the NASA CLPS payload. Campbell said Draper is in talks to fly commercial and other government payloads on the mission, although nothing has been formally manifested yet. The Draper CLPS milestones come as two other providers, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, are nearing launch. Astrobotic is set to launch its Peregrine mission as soon as May 4, pending the status of its Vulcan Centaur rocket, while Intuitive Machine’s IM-1 lander is planned to launch on a Falcon 9 in June. “We wish them the best for success. A rising tide lifts all boats in this particular industry,” Campbell said. “We’re really going to hoping that these teams succeed so that we’ll be able to continue to do this.”
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – Millennium Space Systems announced the handoff April 13 of the Tetra-1 small satellite to the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command for the start of mission operations. The experimental satellite designed to perform a variety of missions launched in November on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Since then, all satellite components and subsystems have been checked out in a high geostationary orbit called super GEO. “Tetra-1 has helped us learn about small satellites’ potential to operate in super GEO,” Capt. JeanCarlo Vasquez, SSC’s Tetra-1 deputy program manager, said in a statement. “Due to Tetra-1’s maneuverability, it has enabled us to experiment and train with various tactics, techniques and procedures. Thus, allowing our program office and operators to identify what roles small satellites can potentially play in future USSF Missions. Furthermore, Tetra-1’s robustness permitted SSC to work with Space Delta 11 in Space Training and Readiness Command and perform maneuvers dedicated solely to a live on-orbit training campaign, known as ‘Scarlet Star.’” Space Delta 11 supports the U.S. Space Force by providing realistic testing and training in environments designed to simulate current threats. Geosynchronous satellites operate at altitudes of about 35,786 meters. When those satellites are no longer in service, they often raise their orbits by 300 kilometers or more to reach a graveyard orbit. Super GEO satellites operate at around 38,000 kilometers, a location that poses both “known and unknown challenges,” according to the Millennium news release. “We developed new operations tools to ease the planning for actions like station changes and planning and executing on-orbit maneuvering,” Mike Todaro, Millennium vice president of mission operations and integration, said in a statement. “This is particularly important for super GEO, where if you’re not mission capable, you’re considered in the graveyard.” Millennium, a Boeing subsidiary, and SSC have said little about what missions Tetra-1 will test. Super GEO, though, would be an excellent vantage point for space domain awareness given the prevalence of counterspace activity in the geostationary belt and the critical role of satellites in military operations. “When Guardians work on Tetra-1, they’ll learn new ways of doing things that were previously done on much larger satellites,” Todaro said in a statement. “Because Tetra-1 is smaller, more agile and maneuverable, you have different options. It’s like the difference between maneuvering a speed boat versus a cruise ship.” Small satellites also pose challenges. As a result, Millennium delivered the Tetra-1 spacecraft and ground software to SSC to operate independently. In addition, Millennium provided training, simulation and confidence-building tools specifically designed for small satellite operations. “Actions for what you want the satellite to do are taken more deliberately because it has a smaller power system,” Todaro said. “And operators must manage consumables differently compared to a larger satellite, all of which requires training beyond just having classroom knowledge – it takes hands-on experience.” The Tetra-1 satellite was designed and built rapidly. Millennium delivered the Tetra-1 satellite to SSC 13 months after winning the award through the SSC Space Enterprise Consortium’s other transaction authority, Millennium CEO Jason Kim said during an April 12 press briefing. Correction: Tetra-1 is a small satellite. An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Tetra-1 as a microsatellite.
The head of a NASA Mars mission flying on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket says he is confident the vehicle will be ready in time for a launch next year. NASA announced Feb. 9 that it selected Blue Origin to launch the agency’s two Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft to Mars in 2024 to study the planet’s magnetosphere. NASA did not announce the value of the task order, awarded through the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR), but procurement databases later showed it was worth $20 million. The spacecraft will launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch vehicle, which has yet to make its first flight after once being slated to start launches in 2020. The company has not set a date for the first New Glenn launch or stated where ESCAPADE will fit into that vehicle’s manifest. “It will be an early New Glenn mission and we’re going to be ready,” Ariane Cornell, vice president of commercial orbital, astronaut and international sales at Blue Origin, said of ESCAPADE’s place on its manifest during a panel discussion at the Satellite 2023 conference March 14 . The principal investigator for ESCAPADE, Rob Lillis of the University of California Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory, also expects New Glenn to be ready for next year’s launch. “It hasn’t launched yet and we are concerned about that,” he said during a presentation at an April 11 meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group. “But, having seen the Blue Origin facility at Cape Canaveral, I was much less concerned after seeing all the work they’ve done. I’m confident they will likely be ready for the launch of ESCAPADE.” In his presentation, he said the current launch window for the mission is Aug. 6 through 15 of 2024. However, he later tweeted that the window “is approximate and provisional” and that options for the mission’s trajectory are still being studied. The spacecraft take a somewhat circuitous route to Mars. The launch will place the spacecraft into an Earth orbit with a period of about 1.6 days. “NASA didn’t promise us a ride to Mars and asked us to be as flexible as possible,” he explained. After launch, the spacecraft will boost themselves into higher Earth orbits before performing a maneuver to go to Mars. The spacecraft arrive at Mars in September 2025 and start their one-year science mission in April 2026. Each ESCAPADE spacecraft, being built by Rocket Lab, weighs 550 kilograms, of which 350 kilograms is fuel. “The spacecraft started off a lot lighter, but as developments continued, they just got heavier and heavier,” Lillis said. That was in part to accommodate a wide range of potential launch loads given uncertainty about which vehicle would launch the mission. That uncertainty, he said, affected many other aspects of spacecraft design, from their thermal environment to telemetry requirements. “There’s a million different things that get harder when you don’t know how you’re getting to where you’re going,” he said. “It’s been a huge pain.” Since NASA selected New Glenn to launch ESCAPADE, he said he’s had 15 meetings with Blue Origin. “They’ve been very responsive.” The launch vehicle selection process, handled by NASA’s Launch Services Program, was “a learning experience for everybody,” Lillis said. ESCAPADE is one of the first missions to use the VADR contract, after NASA selected Rocket Lab for two Electron launches of Earth science cubesats last November. He confirmed the $20 million price for the New Glenn, which is “massively oversized” for ESCAPADE. “It’s a new company trying to get into the market,” he said of Blue Origin. “They were able to bid what they knew the price was going to be, regardless of the cost to them.” NASA selected ESCAPADE in 2019 as one of three missions in its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program. All three experienced problems finding rides, with ESCAPADE forced to redesign its mission after being removed as a rideshare on the launch of the Psyche asteroid because of changes in the trajectory of that larger spacecraft. Janus, another SIMPLEx mission that was to ride with Psyche, is now in limbo after the Psyche mission was delayed to October 2023, with no guarantee the twin spacecraft, designed to study binary asteroids, will ever fly. A third SIMPLEx mission, Lunar Trailblazer, was originally set to launch as a rideshare on the IMAP mission in 2025, but NASA moved it to the second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, IM-2, current planned to launch in late 2023.
TAMPA, Fla. — Canadian small satellite operator Kepler Communications said April 13 it has raised $92 million to start deploying an optical data-relay constellation next year. Early-stage investor IA Ventures led the Series C round, which brings the total amount Kepler has raised by selling equity to more than $200 million. The company currently operates 19 satellites in sun-synchronous orbits that provide low-data-rate connectivity for devices out of range of terrestrial networks. Two more are onboard a D-Orbit orbital transfer vehicle awaiting a Falcon 9 ride-share launch SpaceX has scheduled for April 14. Most of the satellites in this constellation are the size of six cubesats, a standard form factor measuring 10 centimeters on each side. Satellites for the company’s data relay network will be an order of magnitude bigger and weigh over 100 kilograms, Kepler CEO Mina Mitry told SpaceNews , and be placed along two near-orthogonal planes in sun-synchronous orbits to enable continuous communications with low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. According to Kepler, the data relay network would provide real-time connectivity for LEO satellites that can currently only relay information when passing over approved ground stations. Mitry said the network would adhere to optical communications standards developed by the Space Development Agency and use SDA-compatible optical user terminals. The operator plans to launch prototype satellites for the data relay network this fall to test, validate, and demonstrate the technology. The plan is to begin deploying the first plane of data relay satellites in 2024 for initial services by early 2025 from what it is calling The Kepler Network. He said Kepler “will announce some of our launch plans in the near future.” Kepler has previously outlined plans for 140 satellites in total. “Our plans for both constellations are scalable,” Mitry said, and while “we are focused on building out our new optical data relay constellation, our existing constellation will be maintained and augmented as needed to meet the needs of our customers.” Kepler currently builds its satellites in-house and Mitry said the company is “actively expanding our ability to meet future needs, ensuring our satellites are built on an optimal timeline.” The Kepler Network marks a shift away from earlier plans for a data relay constellation the company had called Aether that would have primarily used S-band for inter-satellite links. Although Kepler has decided to instead prioritize optical technology, Mitry said there are still plans to provide data relay services in S-band from the network. Other investors that supported the company’s Series C round included Costanoa Ventures, Canaan Partners, Tribe Capital, and BDC Capital’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund.
Relativity Space has decided to retire its Terran 1 small launch vehicle after a single flight that failed to reach orbit, focusing its resources on a revised version of its larger Terran R rocket. Relativity said April 12 that, less than a month after the first launch of its Terran 1 rocket , which suffered a malfunction of its upper stage engine, the company was setting that vehicle aside to work on the Terran R rocket the company announced in 2021 . “Building on momentum from Terran 1’s development and flight, Relativity is shifting its focus to design, development, and production of its next generation Terran R launch vehicle,” the company said in a series of tweets . That launch, a test flight that carried no payload, did achieve some key test milestones, including a successful burn of the rocket’s first stage, powered by methane and liquid oxygen. The rocket’s 3D-printed structure also survived peak forces on it during ascent, called Max-Q, demonstrating that manufacturing approach was suitable for launch vehicles. “Our first chapter as a company was to prove to the world 3D-printed rockets were viable. We just did that with Terran 1. Our second chapter is to build the next great launch company with Terran R,” Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, said in a company statement. In comments before the March 22 launch , Ellis suggested that the company might move on to the Terran R even if the Terran 1 launch failed. “Medium-heavy lift is clearly where the biggest market opportunity is for the remaining decade, with a massive launch shortage in this payload class underway,” he said then. He said then that, in the event of a Terran 1 failure, he would ask customers if they wanted Relativity to fix those problems and fly Terran 1 again. “Or, would [they] like us to solve the remaining rocket science problems on the vehicle they are actually most interested in, Terran R?” To address that market opportunity, Relativity announced the Terran R in 2021 at the same time it raised $650 million, its largest and most recent funding round. However, the design of that vehicle has changed in the nearly two years since that announcement. The biggest change is a move away from full reusability. Ellis said in 2021 that it was the company’s intent to reuse all of Terran R, including its upper stage and payload fairings. “There won’t be a part that’s not reusable on the vehicle,” he said then, which he argued was possible with the use of 3D-printing technologies and “exotic” alloys. However, the new Terran R design is a somewhat more conventional approach where only the first stage is recovered by landing on a ship downrange from the launch site, like SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 and other vehicles in development, such as Blue Origin’s New Glenn. That first stage, powered by 13 of the company’s Aeon R methane/liquid oxygen engines it is developing, is intended to be flown at least 20 times. Relativity made no mention of reusing the upper stage, which will use a single vacuum-optimized Aeon R engine, or the vehicle’s payload fairings. The design changes also increase payload performance. While Relativity originally said Terran R could launch more than 20,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit, the company now says that it can place 23,500 kilograms into LEO if the first stage is recovered and 33,500 kilograms if the first stage is expended. It can also insert payloads of up to 5,500 kilograms into geostationary transfer orbit while recovering the first stage. When Relativity announced the Terran R in 2021, it planned a first launch of the vehicle in 2024, a date the company published on its web site as recently as last month. The company is now targeting 2026 for the vehicle’s first launch from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 16, also used for the Terran 1 launch. It was not clear how that delay might affect business for the rocket. The company had boasted of $1.65 billion in launch contracts but had identified few of its customers. One of those customers was OneWeb, which said last year it signed a contract for multiple Terran R launches of its second-generation satellites. “We are thrilled to see the progress made by our friends at Relativity,” said Massimiliano Ladovaz, chief technology officer of OneWeb, in a Relativity statement. “We can’t wait to see them push on to the next evolutionary step in bringing the Terran R to market.” Terran 1 investigation update While Relativity no longer plans to launch the Terran 1, it is continuing to investigate the failure of the vehicle’s single flight. In a statement quixotically released only as a series of images , the company said the main valves for the upper-stage Aeon Vac engine opened slower than expected. That affected the timing of propellant reaching the engine’s thrust chamber assembly and gas generator during engine startup. The engine’s oxygen pump did not generate pressure during startup, which the company said “is consistent with a vapor bubble being present at the pump inlet.” That kept the gas generator from starting and kept the engine from reaching full power. That investigation is ongoing. “Respecting its relationship with pertinent external parties, including the FAA, Relativity intends to deliver a comprehensive official report at the conclusion of its investigation,” the company stated. It did not offer a schedule for doing so. Completing an investigation even after retiring a launch vehicle is not unprecedented. Astra recently concluded the investigation into its last failed Rocket 3.3 launch in June 2022, months after announcing it was scrapping that vehicle to focus on the larger Rocket 4. It’s unclear what Relativity will do with the handful of customers it had for the Terran 1. That included NASA, which awarded the company a Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) Demo 2 contract in December 2020 for a single Terran 1 launch. A NASA spokesperson was not able to immediately answer questions April 12 about the status of the VCLS Demo 2 award after Relativity’s announcement it would no longer fly Terran 1. Another customer was Iridium, which had a contract for up to six Terran 1 launches of replacement satellites. However, Iridium announced a contract with SpaceX in September 2022 to launch five of those six remaining spares , leaving Relativity with at most a single launch. Matt Desch, chief executive of Iridium, congratulated Relativity for launching Terran 1. “We applaud their transition now to completing Terran R, which is better aligned with industry’s anticipated future launch requirements,” he said in the Relativity statement. Relativity’s Ellis was once bullish on demand for the smaller Terran 1, which was designed to place up to 1,250 kilograms into LEO. “We see almost insatiable demand for that vehicle right now,” he said in 2021 of Terran 1. He now views Terran 1 differently. “Terran 1 was like a concept car, redefining the boundaries of what is possible by developing many valuable brand-new technologies well ahead of their time,” he said in the company statement. “Terran R is the mass-market, huge demand product that will be amazing precisely because it brings those ‘concept car’ developments into full maturity.”
Executives at Planet’s annual conference April 12 spoke enthusiastically about the power of satellite imagery in addressing some of the world’s most pressing issues and responding to fast-moving global events. The capabilities of Earth imaging constellations can be of great use to the U.S. military, which requires constant eyes on the battlefield. However, the way in which commercial imagery is procured by the government does not necessarily support military commanders’ needs for timely intelligence, officials said during a panel session at Planet’s users conference Explore 2023. U.S. Space Force officials said they are working with the intelligence community to try to streamline the process of delivering commercial imagery and provide means to rapidly analyze the data to commanders on the ground. Brock Edwards, director of business development at Planet, noted that DoD imagery users increasingly emphasize “what we call the low latency requirements.” These are scenarios when a military unit needs information on “operational tactical timelines in order to make a decision.” Col. Eric Felt, director of architecture integration at the U.S. Space Force procurement office, said the service is working to “take advantage of the opportunities that are being created by commercial innovation and get these new technologies to the warfighter as quickly as we can.” But it’s not going to happen quickly, he said. “Our basic strategy is to embrace commercial as an integral element of every space architecture,” Felt said. “But in the DOD, you will not be shocked to hear that we do not move that fast most of the time.” “It’s not just the acquisition process,” he said. “It’s the budgeting process. It’s the requirements process. There’s a whole bunch of people in the building that you have to get to agree on your way forward. So we are never going to innovate as fast as the commercial sector,” Felt said. Edwards said DoD “will potentially have to lean forward a little bit to commercial because commercial is postured and ready to support,” he added. “This is a partnership. Both sides need to lean forward to understand what their constraints are.” “We’ve got some work to do,” said Jeremy Leader, director of the Space Force’s Commercial Services Office , a new organization established a year ago to connect the military with commercial space services providers. Leader said the Space Force is working with the intelligence community to figure out better ways to support battlefield operations. The National Reconnaissance Office has awarded sizable imagery contracts to commercial companies, including Planet , but military users have also sought their own contracts with companies so they can directly task satellites and get imagery faster. “You can never buy enough time when you’re a combatant commander,” Leader said. “So I’ve been less focused on buying the imagery from these companies and more focused on the tasking platforms that we need to put in place with the combatant commands.” The idea would be to create a marketplace where providers make their data available, he said. “The combatant commands would submit a tasking and it just automatically tasks any of the satellites that are available.” Ukraine war showed value of commercial imagery When it comes to procuring commercial satellite imagery, one of the problems is the complicated procurement process, the Government Accountability Office said in a report last year. GAO noted the widespread use of commercial remote sensing data since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The intelligence community and DoD, however, continue to employ a potentially fragmented, slow, and cumbersome approach to incorporating these commercial capabilities into intelligence and defense operations,” the watchdog agency said. Defense and intelligence agencies have not come up with and “effective approach to scale emerging commercial capabilities into operational support contracts in a timely manner,” GAO said. The Space Force in 2021 was designated as the integrator for joint service requirements of space technologies, GAO noted. “However, there is no guidance that addresses organizational roles and responsibilities across the IC and DoD related to commercial satellite imagery.” ‘Warfighters need data’ These same issues were discussed last week at at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Forum. “Reconnaissance from space has become ubiquitous,” said Kevin Chilton, a retired Air Force general and chairman of the Mitchell Institute. “And yet I hear frustrations from some commercial providers” because military commands don’t have funding to buy imagery directly from the industry. “Warfighters need this data,” Chilton said April 5. “The National Reconnaissance Office’s collectors have different priorities, different speed of delivery requirements.” The regional military commanders should not have to compete for commercial imagery funding against national requirements, Chilton said. “A policy fight is looming, I think. Who’s going to control these assets that are going to be essential for victory in the various combatant commands?”
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat and Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek announced plans April 12 to jointly develop technologies needed to enable more mass market devices to connect directly to the British satellite operator’s network. The companies said they are significantly expanding a three-year partnership that culminated in February with the release of Android smartphones from ruggedized handset maker Bullitt, which is offering satellite-enabled text messages with their technology via service provider Skylo. In addition to covering “joint technology innovation,” an Inmarsat spokesperson said the expanded partnership covers “the commercial deployment of satellite-enabled devices, for example in smartphones, [Internet of Things (IoT)] devices or cars.” Satellite services would include two-way text messaging, emergency communications, device tracking and monitoring for devices without terrestrial network coverage. Inmarsat does “not have a specific deadline” for when satellite-enabled devices could be commercially deployed as a result of their partnership. “Right now, our focus is on working with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to bring these capabilities to end users,” the spokesperson said via email. “In the case of smart phones, for example, MNOs would determine how that satellite connectivity is sold to their customers.” The deal comes just months after Iridium unveiled chipmaker Qualcomm as the partner behind plans to connect Android smartphones and other devices to its constellation this year. In November, Apple launched a satellite-enabled SOS service using Globalstar’s network for iPhone 14. Unlike Iridium and Globalstar, which operate in low Earth orbit (LEO), Inmarsat’s satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) appear fixed in the sky relative to users on Earth. Inmarsat chief commercial and digital officer Jat Brainch said this means Inmarsat can enable two-way communications without complex “aiming” of the device, although Iridium and Globalstar have a latency advantage because LEO satellites are much closer to Earth than GEO.
Companies are striving to reduce the complexity of the satellite ground segment. Through packaged services, partnerships and APIs, ground segment providers aim to make communicating with satellites as easy as possible. That does not mean that operators can wait until the last minute to consider data delivery. “We’ve had experiences with customers who are about to launch satellites, and they have not figured out how they’ll bring the data down,” said Jai Dialani, Leaf Space USA managing director. “That’s quite dangerous because you cannot launch until you know how you’re getting your data down.” Startups need government approval to launch satellites. In addition, ground station providers need licenses for every new satellite their network serves. Obtaining those licenses takes anywhere from months to more than a year. “Much of the process is out of our control when we hand off licensing paperwork to jurisdictions and bureaucratic processes around the world,” said Dan Adams, KSAT USA CEO. “In some geographic locations, it takes a long time.” Every country has its own licensing requirements. “Some are easy, some are complex, and some are impossible to deal with,” Dialani said. Acquiring licenses to retrieve data in the United States, Singapore and Japan can be time-consuming and expensive. Australian requirements are much tougher than those of New Zealand. Some European nations have far more onerous rules than others. But despite this complex environment, it’s “fairly common” for satellite buyers to bring in the ground segment late in their regulatory process, according to John Williams, vice president of Viasat’s Real Time Earth (RTE) ground station network. “This is not a new phenomenon,” Williams said, “it’s been going on for some time, and as we’ve entered this newspace era in the last few years, we’re bumping into it more.” The majority of culprits are young commercial companies that are more focused on developing their payloads than what it takes to operate them. Most of the constellation companies have taken a somewhat casual attitude to the ground segment for their gateways, according to Robert Bell, executive director of the World Teleport Association. “My personal suspicion is that it’s because they come from Silicon Valley culture, where the assumption is that the internet provides everything needed on the ground,” Bell said. “One operator of multiple teleports told me of multiple inquiries for gateways in the middle of vast desert regions, where no company has existing infrastructure, and the constellation companies were surprised that it all had to be built. “Another operator talked about seeing ‘gateways’ that are just a few motorized antennas in a parking lot, with no security and no power or connectivity backups.” But commercial satellite companies are not the only procrastinators when it comes to the ground segment. Williams spoke of a government customer launching in June that had not yet made a regulatory filing his company needs to license a site the government agency intends to use. They were focused on getting the satellite up, and the filings they needed for the ground segment “slipped through the radar,” he said. Given enough time, ground station operators are adept at navigating bureaucratic processes and obtaining the necessary approvals. “Even if they come late, folks are going to put in that extra effort to try to satisfy the customer and get them on board and get them ready for launch,” Williams said. “It’s just more of a rush then. It’s more difficult and lots of stress on both sides.” While efforts are being made to speed up regulatory machines worldwide, ground segment providers say they are only seeing incremental change. Ground segment providers suggest potential customers approach them anywhere from a year to 18 months before launching satellites. Adams said 12 months provides enough margin because KSAT “should be in a position of signing contracts six months out.” Christopher Richins, RBC Signals co-founder and CEO, recommends startups consider the ground segment even earlier. “We recommend people start 18 months beforehand to make sure that they’ve got sufficient time. And there’s no penalty for doing it earlier,” Richins said. “Having a well-architected, thoughtful communication architecture is a critical piece of a space mission. Getting that wrong can have significant implications to the technical success of the mission and the commercial success.” For example, a company that considers how customers will use the data provided by their satellites and how much the customers are likely to pay for the data will be in a better position to decide exactly what communications services are necessary, Richins said. “If you wait until the very end, you’re basically stuck with whatever kind of base capability your satellite design allows,” Richins said. “Then you have to fit your commercial and technical operations within that capability.” Ground segment experts also suggested that companies preparing to launch satellites with unusual waveforms, modulation schemes, data rate requirements, or communications spectrum approaches meet with ground segment providers years before launch. “We had a customer come in recently and talk to us and they wanted to do really, really high speed,” Viasat’s Williams said, “six to seven gigabits kind of speed. Well, none of the data providers can really do that yet.” The customer had to go back to the drawing board and scale down their plans to the one gigabit per second range. Customers are making “design choices to build their spacecraft and if they make decisions based upon a set of requirements they think will work, rather than confirming they work, they’re headed for disaster,” Williams said. KSAT’s Adams said he understands the urge to try something new. “We’re an industry of engineers,” Adams said. “But businesses like KSAT are built around delivering at scale, which means we are delivering solutions that the preponderance of users in the market want. Edge cases result in complexity and cost and barriers to entry for some users.” Atlas Space Operations invites customers to confirm that their satellite radios can communicate with modems at established ground stations. “When someone comes to us and says, ‘Hey can you work with this particular satellite radio, we can say yes, thumbs up,” said Brad Bode, Atlas chief technology officer and chief information officer. “Conduct that verification process early so that you don’t design yourself into a hole.” Like many companies, French Earth observation startup Promethee focused initially on the satellite. “At first glance, the satellite seems much more complex than the ground segment, but in fact the opposite is true,” Promethee President Olivier Piepsz, said by email. “The ground segment is very complex from a functional point of view, especially the mission aspects. Since 2022, we put a lot of energy on the ground segment.” In contrast, Hydrosat, a Washington-based geospatial data and analytics startup, began by considering the ground segment. “Everybody loves to focus on satellites and launch events because they are tangible, and they are exciting,” Pieter Fossel, Hydrosat co-founder and CEO, said by email. “However, if you think about the satellite business from the perspective of the product and the customer, the product is data and that data inevitably will flow through the ground segment in order to reach the customer. Therefore, the ground segment is tremendously important, because ultimately raw satellite data needs to be downlinked, processed, stored and transported.” Denver-based Earth observation startup Albedo also considered the ground segment early. “Two of our first five engineering hires were for our ground segment team,” Topher Haddad, Albedo co-founder and CEO, said by email. “To build a user experience that solves customer problems, the space, ground and customer-facing software need to be architected and built in parallel.” Plus, Albedo employees carried the scars of previous “projects that were too focused on the space segment, and missed the parallel potential of their ground segment to unlock capabilities,” Haddad said. Efforts to standardize ground and space networks could one day foster a more collaborative environment where “by definition, they would work together” from the outset, according to ST Engineering iDirect chief technology officer Frederik Simoens. Satellites operating under standardized configurations could be more easily matched up with ground systems. In the past, “basically any ground system could work” with simple satellites that just received a signal from the ground and sent it back. Today, satellites typically manipulate these signals, changing and routing beams as needed and generally playing a more active role in communications infrastructure. “Now you really need to integrate space and ground and you need to match them well together,” Simoens said. “But I think the solution to that, longer term, is to standardize how all of this is done. Then it will be easier again to decouple them.” But “we’re not there yet,” he concedes. And even if the space industry can agree on technical standards to improve collaboration, it does little to streamline bureaucratic procedures. This article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Slingshot Aerospace, a space tracking and data analytics company, announced April 12 it is expanding its network of ground-based optical telescopes to increase coverage of low Earth orbit. The company currently operates about 150 optical sensors at more than 20 sites around the world. By the end of 2023, Slingshot expects to deploy about 80 more telescopes. These autonomous sensors will be added to existing sites and at two new Southern Hemisphere sites Slingshot plans to build. Slingshot’s co-founder and CEO Melanie Stricklan said there is growing commercial and governmental demand for space situational awareness of low Earth orbit (LEO). Much of that demand today is met by radar sensors but there is also a need for more detailed data captured by optical sensors. The rapid proliferation of active satellites and space junk in lower orbits is alarming and requires more eyes on target, she said. “LEO is really at a crossroads,” Stricklan told SpaceNews . “It’s home to over 90% of all satellites launched since 1957.” There are about 6,500 operational satellites in orbit today, she said, “and we can expect between 60,000 and 150,000 by the end of the decade.” Optical adds context to radar data Optical telescopes that use visible or infrared light to observe objects in space augment the coverage provided by radar, Stricklan said. Radar tracks an object’s distance and location while angular and brightness data from optical sensors provides additional context, she said, such as how the object is moving. Slingshot acquired its network of telescopes when it bought Numerica’s space-tracking business last year. Numerica’s day-night telescopes traditionally had been used to track satellites in geostationary orbit and were modified to also track objects in LEO. Stricklan said the company will soon announce the location of its two new Southern Hemisphere space-tracking sites.
Europe’s first mission to Jupiter is ready to launch on the next to last flight of the Ariane 5 on April 13. The Ariane 5 rocket, carrying the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, spacecraft rolled out to the pad at Kourou, French Guiana, on April 11. Liftoff is scheduled for 8:15 a.m. Eastern April 13 in an instantaneous launch window. The launch will start a long journey for the six-ton spacecraft. It will perform several gravity-assist flybys of the Earth and Venus between August 2024 and January 2029 before arriving at Jupiter in mid-2031. Once at Jupiter, it will conduct 35 flybys of the large moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto before going into orbit around Ganymede, the solar system’s largest moon. “The main goal is to understand whether there are habitable environments among those icy moons,” said Olivier Witasse, JUICE project scientist at ESA, in an April 6 briefing. “We will characterize in particular the liquid water oceans which are inside the icy moons.” JUICE will carry out those observations with a suite of 10 science instruments of which one, an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph, is provided by NASA. Several other instruments include contributions from NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA and the Israel Space Agency. JUICE will be joined by NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch in October 2024 and arrive at Jupiter in 2030. That spacecraft will conduct dozens of flybys of Europa to study the potential for life on that icy moon. It will be “very fantastic” to have both Europa Clipper and JUICE operating at the same time in the Jovian system, Witasse said. “The two missions are very complementary,” with the potential of joint observations. One example is planned flybys of Europa by the two spacecraft just four hours apart. JUICE will focus more on Ganymede, entering orbit around the moon in late 2034 and remaining there through the end of the mission, currently planned for September 2035. That orbit will be at an altitude of 500 kilometers, but if there is sufficient fuel left on the spacecraft, he said the spacecraft could lower its orbit to 200 kilometers. JUICE ultimately will crash onto the surface of Ganymede. “With the current knowledge of Ganymede, we can crash on the surface” without violating planetary protection guidelines to prevent harmful contamination. “We have shown that we cannot contaminate any subsurface ocean even if we crash on the surface.” The launch is the sixth flight of the Ariane 5 to carry ESA science missions. The rocket has previously launched the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, Rosetta comet mission, Herschel and Planck observatories, the BepiColombo mission to Mercury and, most recently, the James Webb Space Telescope, a NASA-led mission with European contributions. Preparations for the JUICE launch have been similar to Ariane 5 missions with the exception of enhanced cleanliness requirements, according to Veronique Loisel, JUICE project director at Arianespace. That is similar to launches of imaging satellites, she said, but with additional contamination monitoring also used for the launch of JWST. The launch is also the penultimate flight for the Ariane 5. The vehicle is scheduled to make its final launch in late June, carrying the Syracuse 4B military communications satellite for France and the Heinrich Hertz communications satellite for the German government. “Is it routine? Never. Is it of special significance? Yes,” said Ruedeger Albat, head of the Ariane 5 program at ESA, of the final launches of the rocket. For those final launches there is a reinforced qualification monitoring and verification program, he said, but otherwise operations are kept as close to normal as possible. He compared those final launches to an airline pilot’s final flight before retirement. “He will fly with much attention but stick as much as possible to nominal operations.”
In an effort to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of U.S. military services, the Space Force will propose a new plan to acquire high-capacity satellite communications. Senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are set to be briefed on this plan in the coming weeks, said Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements “We are working through the wideband satellite communications force design, and we’re going to brief that to the JROC sometime before early May,” Garrant told SpaceNews . If the plan goes forward, it will inform the Pentagon’s 2025 budget proposal. The JROC is the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, a panel led by the four-star vice chiefs of each military service. They review and validate proposed acquisition programs based on whether they align with the military’s strategic goals. One of the responsibilities of the chief of the U.S. Space Force is to serve as the “force design architect for space,” Garrant explained. That means the Space Force has to consider the needs of the entire joint force when developing procurement plans for satellites and commercial space services. A Space Force organization known as SWAC, short for Space Warfighting Analysis Center, is in charge of studying these needs and recommending a plan for how to meet them. “This is what we will brief the JROC: How is Space Force going to provide wideband communications to the joint force?” Garrant said. “That’s one of our major responsibilities as a new service. So we work very closely with the other services to make sure we incorporate their requirements so our force design is informed by all the services and not just us,” he said. Wideband communications refers to satellites that provide high-speed data communications that allow for the transmission of large amounts of data, such as video and high-resolution images. Growing needs across DoD Garrant said the SWAC’s study looked at the rising demands for high-speed communications across the military services and DoD’s regional commands around the world. The needs are especially acute in remote areas where terrestrial infrastructure is limited. The military also has dramatically increased the use of bandwidth-intensive applications such as video streaming, remote sensing and remotely operated aerial vehicles. The wideband communications proposal will include a mix of DoD, commercial and allied nations’ satellite systems, Garrant said. “It covers Protected Tactical Satcom, and what comes after WGS.” Protected Tactical Satcom is an ongoing program to develop jam-resistant communications payloads. WGS, short for Wideband Global Satcom , provides services to the U.S. military and allies. The Space Force has to take into account specific satcom needs such as those of the Navy. Naval forces, for example, require access to certain frequencies that operate in tough atmospheric conditions. Garrant said filling DoD’s diverse demands will require a mix of systems that operate in different orbits and provide different levels of security. Commercial companies, he said, were invited by the SWAC to provide input for the wideband study. The Space Force budget funds satellite procurements but it’s up to each of the services to pay for commercial services and for the ground terminals required to talk to satellites. “We may develop a standard terminal but the services are going to have to procure the terminals themselves for their platforms,” Garrant said. Commercial satcom options When it comes to satcom services, Space Force is trying to take advantage of the industry’s new capabilities in high-throughput communications, said David Micha, president of Intelsat General Communications. The company is the U.S.-based subsidiary of the global satellite operator Intelsat and provides satcom services to DoD, NASA and other agencies. With regard to the SWAC study, Micha said in an interview, the industry sees the Space Force “really trying to make a wholehearted attempt to integrate commercial satellite offerings in with their current warfighting infrastructure.” “They want the global coverage, the resiliency and cyber hardening that have been put into commercial satellites,” he said. The U.S. Army has seen a massive growth in demand for high data-rate communications, Micha said, and plans to start a pilot program this summer to evaluate commercial services. The Space Force wants to work with multiple providers and with a mix of government and commercial networks because they need access to every orbit and every radio-frequency band, Micha said. “They want the ability to connect anywhere in the world. They want the low latency of low Earth orbit satellites, but when LEO is not working, they can move over to geosynchronous satellites.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The Federal Communications Commission established a standalone Space Bureau April 11 to be led by Julie Kearney, a law and policy veteran tasked with spearheading its efforts to modernize satellite regulations. Before joining the FCC as a special counsel in February, Kearney spent decades at private legal practices and telecoms companies, including balloon-based venture Loon where she headed communications regulation and policy until internet giant Alphabet scrapped the project in 2021. During a ceremony in Washington to officially launch the Space Bureau, Kearney said her first priority is “modernizing regulations to match our new realities,” including faster processing times in response to unprecedented demand for new satellites. Falling costs to build and launch increasingly powerful spacecraft have led to applications for more than 60,000 new satellites before the FCC, mostly in low Earth orbit (LEO). Kearney said the regulator is “wrapping up comment cycles for expedited processing of applications,” adding that it is “simultaneously focusing on space orbital debris and space safety.” In September, the FCC adopted rules to shorten the time operators must remove expired LEO satellites as part of sweeping changes to how it regulates the industry. Kearney also pointed to rules proposed March 17 over the use of terrestrial wireless spectrum from space for connecting smartphones, and a vote April 20 to revise spectrum-sharing regulations for satellites. Sharper space focus The Space Bureau was carved out of the FCC’s International Bureau to help the regulator handle its increasing workload in the industry. The restructuring effectively splits the International Bureau into two units: the Space Bureau and the Office of International Affairs (OIA) that will handle the FCC’s work with foreign and international regulatory authorities more generally. Ethan Lucarelli, who most recently served as legal advisor to FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel on wireless and international policy issues, was appointed OIA chief. Rosenworcel proposed the reorganization Nov. 3 and the regulator unanimously voted to approve it just two months later. The reorganization will be officially complete once a formal notice has been published in the Federal Register. “There are now so many new technologies in the space industry, so many new applications pending before this agency, and so many more innovations on the horizon,” Rosenworcel said during the April 11 ceremony, “but I don’t think this agency can keep doing things the old way and thrive in the new.” Kearney also said the Space Bureau will seek to be more transparent about its work, which will include more outreach to other government bodies and the companies it regulates, but she did not provide further details. The regulator’s decision to impose a five-year deadline for de-orbing LEO satellites, down from 25 years, drew criticism from leaders of the House Science Committee who questioned its authority in September to make such sweeping changes. 
Starting with just six engineers in October 2018, the team behind Amazon’s proposed Project Kuiper satellite constellation has grown to more than 1,400 people as it prepares to launch beta broadband services from space next year. The company plans to start churning out production satellites soon after deploying its first pair of prototypes in May, with launches for its 3,200-satellite Ka-band low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation slated to kick off in the first half of 2024. Although far behind LEO broadband frontrunners Starlink and OneWeb, which are providing services in Ku-band, Project Kuiper is looking to leverage Amazon’s mass-manufacturing and logistical prowess to give it an edge over the competition. David Limp, who is head of devices at Amazon that range from smart speakers to tablet computers, recently unveiled three Project Kuiper user terminals as part of this game plan. Its standard terminal for residential customers is around the size of an LP record cover and promises speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Starlink currently advertises download speeds of up to 100 Mbps under its standard residential service plan. For the enterprise and government market, which OneWeb specializes in, Amazon has developed a larger terminal promising speeds up to 1 gigabits per second. And on the smaller end, Amazon unveiled an ultra-compact terminal about the size of its Kindle ebook reader that would enable speeds up to 100 Mbps. Limp issued a call for partners and customers after showcasing the antennas March 14 during the Satellite 2023 conference in Washington. “[W]e haven’t been able to say this for the last four years, but [you] can kind of consider us open for business,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to get these satellites up into the sky, but the technology is kind of vetted out enough that we’re pretty confident.” Project Kuiper also benefits from Amazon’s colossal financial firepower. The internet retailing giant has committed $10 billion to get the constellation online, and a sizable chunk of this helped Project Kuiper secure the largest-ever commercial launch deal last year for up to 83 rockets. The agreement comprises Vulcan rockets from United Launch Alliance (ULA), Ariane 6 from Arianespace, and New Glenn from Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. None of these launch vehicles have debuted yet. Indeed, Project Kuiper’s prototype satellites have hitched a ride on what would be Vulcan’s maiden flight. The launch package is in addition to the nine Atlas 5 launches that Amazon previously bought from ULA. SpaceNews sat down with Limp alongside Rajeev Badyal and Naveen Kachroo, respectively head of technology and business development at Project Kuiper, to learn more. How many satellites do you plan to build before the end of 2023? Rajeev Badyal: We’ll have several done, and by some point next year we’ll be able to build three to five satellites per day. Do you know which rocket will be the first to launch these production satellites? Badyal: We have an idea, but you know these things can dynamically change. If we’re ready even sooner than we anticipate, we might go with a different rocket than what we currently intend to use. David Limp: It’ll most likely be Atlas 5. We have those first nine because they’re a proven vehicle, they’re flying, and have high reliability. It’s not the perfect long-term vehicle, but it gives us a great backstop of a rocket that’s available. How many satellites could go on a single Atlas 5, or any other rocket you plan to use? Limp: It depends. Each rocket has a different situation. There are a lot of variables: What orbit are we going to? What inclination? There’s not a one-size answer for that, but the purpose of going with medium-large and large rockets is you can get a substantial number on each one of them. It’s not going to be a dozen or two dozen — it has to be significantly more than that, and it’ll vary from rocket to rocket. You have 77 launches planned with options for 15 additional New Glenn rockets to cover most of the constellation. When do you need to start booking the rest? Limp: It again depends. What is the final mass of the satellite? What is the actual performance of some of these new rockets that haven’t launched yet? If New Glenn comes out and it’s better then we’ll get more satellites per launch. I’m not trying to be too cagey with the answer, it’s just there are a lot of variables. We made conservative estimates to buy enough heavy-lift launch capacity to ensure we could get the vast majority of the constellation up. Did we undershoot or overshoot that by a little bit? That’s all within the error bars right now. You’re building and operating your own broadband satellites, like SpaceX, but unlike them you technically don’t have an in-house launch provider. How important is vertical integration? Limp: We treat Blue Origin like any other launch provider and I think our ability to have competition in launch is good for us. It gives us the ability to get the best rockets for our needs. I think [SpaceX’s] Falcon 9 is an amazing vehicle. It just wasn’t the right vehicle for our constellation. Part of me wishes it was. But as for vertical integration on the satellite itself, we very much believe that makes us more nimble. I think it’s a big advantage. Badyal: It means we can iterate fast and it gives us the ability to upgrade over time. Naveen Kachroo: At the end of the day we’re going to be a network. If you think about all the pieces of the puzzle to deliver the network: the customer terminals, satellites, ground stations, the back-end networking, and you think about the service the customer buys, what you really want to do is manage that experience for them. If you design that in-house with a vision in mind from day one, you don’t have to stitch together a network with something from the industry here and something there to try to create that network experience. How many satellites do you need in orbit to provide initial services to large enterprise customers in the second half of 2024? Badyal: Low hundreds. Limp: It depends on the customer. There are some that might be able to do something with even lower numbers than that, and there are some that’ll have to wait for higher numbers. In the early days, we’ll probably serve less end-consumers and more enterprise-like things. When the constellation fills out in various latitudes, there’ll be a great consumer proposition in addition to that. And adding more satellites would densify the coverage? Kachroo: It adds a few things. Starting with a few hundred satellites, further deployments would fill in gaps so you can get continuous availability of the service. You need to make sure the customer terminal on the ground can see another satellite and do an instantaneous handoff. But as well as covering gaps so customers don’t get any intermittent outages, deploying more satellites also increases capacity. What kind of customer could make do with intermittent services? Kachroo: There are a number of enterprise customers today that are really desperate for connectivity. They’re even willing to live with a few minutes of outages, just as one example. So for those customers, something is better than nothing. They’re really excited just to just kick the tires with us even before we have continuous service availability. These are areas where not even SpaceX’s Starlink is providing services? Kachroo: I think they look at us as another viable option, and potentially a different type of service. Our terminals have a really competitive advantage from a size, weight, and performance standpoint. You’ve said your standard, mid-sized terminal will cost less than $400 to produce — how does that compare with Starlink terminals that are marketed to consumers with price tags starting at $599? Limp: I don’t know how much their build materials are but I know how much they’re charging customers, and it’s significantly higher than what we’re talking about for build materials. I don’t know if that’s because they can price it at that or if they have costs around that. Starlink is using Ku-band for their spectrum and it’s a more complicated design. It’s bigger and has a motor. As soon as you put a motor in anything — and by the way Amazon has products that we’ve shipped with motors — it adds a lot of complexity in the design. I won’t speak for Starlink, but for our team we’re striving for simplicity in the design. Simplicity brings you three things: generally lower cost, generally a better customer experience, and almost always higher reliability. A lot of companies talk about a minimal viable product. We don’t use that at Amazon. We use minimal lovable product — what would you take away and it’s still lovable? Should I assume Amazon will subsidize these terminals like we’ve seen SpaceX do for Starlink? Limp: I don’t think we have to decide that right now. I think there’ll be different business models for different customers and geographies. The only thing I can guarantee, because it’s true of how we price everything at Amazon, is that it will be affordable. Will all three terminals be ready by the time you launch initial services next year? Badyal: We’re developing them all but we haven’t decided how to roll them out yet. In addition to producing 3-5 satellites a day, Amazon is going to need to build millions of these terminals — how many do you expect to get out the door daily? Limp: Like all things, there’ll be a ramp up to a production level, but I’m not as worried about that. With satellites, you’re trying to take the manufacturing of consumer electronics and bring it to something that hasn’t been there before, which is aerospace. So you want to vertically integrate — we’re building our own chip, working on our own solar panels and things like that. Once we have the design right on the terminal, it’s effectively traditional consumer electronics manufacturing. And you know, while we sat here in this meeting, tens of thousands of Amazon devices have been produced. We’re at scale. I’m not saying it’s easy, but we have teams who know how to do this. Amazon has committed $10 billion to Project Kuiper — how far does that get you and do you think you’ll need to inject more cash at some point? Limp: We’ll have to see how the launches go and how customers react. Like a lot of things at Amazon we are tactically impatient and strategically patient. We believe strategically, in the long term, customers are going to love this, and we’re going to provide a great need around the world in terms of broadband. It’s always hard to tell how quickly that happens because we have to get the product right and we have to get it done on time. On the other side of the fence, we’re running as fast as we can to get the things we need to get done so that we can start hearing from customers. I often say the easiest product you will ever build is the 1.0 because customers don’t tell you anything. After that, customers are divinely discontent, and you will never catch up to what they want. When I got my first book from Amazon I think it took seven days to deliver. If I got something in seven days right now, I would be upset about it because the new normal is one or two days. Tomorrow it will be two hours and then it’ll be 30 minutes via drone. Customers are always pushing us and that’s how it should be, and I think the same thing will be true here. We’ll launch, we’ll hear from customers, there’ll be a moving target and we’ll continue to make this better. We’ll build a minimal lovable thing for the first product, but it’ll get better and better over time. So it’s possible customer revenues will mean Amazon doesn’t have to invest more money into Project Kuiper? We are a for-profit business. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have a [trajectory] that builds a profitable business. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. This article originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — A second pair of O3b mPower satellites for upgrading SES’ medium Earth orbit (MEO) broadband network are due to arrive at their SpaceX launchpad in Florida this week, Boeing announced April 11. The satellites set off via truck last week from Boeing’s manufacturing facilities in El Segundo, California, Boeing Satellite Systems International president Ryan Reid said. He declined to provide specific timings because of security concerns. SpaceX is slated to launch the pair on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral “in the coming weeks,” SES chief technology officer Ruy Pinto said in a news release. The first two of 11 O3b mPower satellites Boeing is building for SES launched on a Falcon 9 in December . Pinto said these initial satellites are “currently undergoing rigorous testing” as they continue to use onboard electric propulsion to reach their target destinations in MEO. Each O3b mPower satellite is designed to scale from tens of megabits per second of throughput to multiple gigabits per second, roughly 10 times more than the first-generation of 20 Thales Alenia Space-built O3b satellites SES currently operates in MEO. Pinto said early indications from its test program show O3b mPower will “more than fulfill the expectations of our customers.” SES only needs six O3b mPower satellites in equatorial MEO to provide initial global services from the next-generation network, which is based on Boeing’s BSS-702X satellite platform Keeping to schedule The fifth and sixth O3b mPower satellites are currently in final integration and testing stages in California, according to Boeing, ahead of a SpaceX launch slated for before the end of June. SES had hoped to begin deploying O3b mPower in 2021 before pandemic-related production issues helped delay initial services to late 2023. The latest deployment delay was announced during SES’ Feb. 27 financial results, when the operator said launches for the second and third pairs of O3b mPower satellites had slipped from the first quarter to the second quarter of 2023. Despite the slow start and recent delays, Boeing said it has started hitting a stride with O3b mPower production as efforts to improve manufacturing and testing efficiencies start to take effect. The company said its differentiated supply chain and a leaner, more automated production process had enabled it to reduce bus module build times by 50%, with a similar improvement also achieved for payload integration and testing operations. “The efficiencies we introduced brought bus integration down from months to weeks,” Reid told SpaceNews via email. “A traditional integration and test program for a satellite with this power and performance, with this scale, would typically take 9-12 months.” SpaceX is slated to launch a fourth pair of O3b mPower satellites before the end of this year. The final three satellites are due to be launched on a single Falcon 9 mission in 2024 to complete the constellation.
Virgin Orbit is proposing a rapid sale of the company or its assets in bankruptcy, hoping to conclude the process before the end of May. In a motion filed with federal bankruptcy court in Delaware April 7, Virgin Orbit provided a schedule for an “expedited” sale of the launch company through a bidding process that would solicit bids in early May, concluding with an auction on May 18. Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy April 4 after failing to raise money needed to continue operations. The company had, days earlier, laid off about 85% of its workforce as its cash reserves dwindled. The company said in the filing that it hopes to attract other interest in the company than before that Chapter 11 filing, including those interested in only some of its assets rather than the entire company. It is working with Ducera Partners LLC, an investment banker, to help market the company and its assets. Ducera, it stated in the filing, has “already begun the postpetition marketing process in connection with the filing of these Chapter 11 Cases, contacting all parties from the prepetition process as well as additional potential purchasers, including those who may be interested in only a subset of the Assets.” That ongoing marketing effort “will include a broader universe of potential buyers than the prepetition process,” the company added. Other filings made as part of the bankruptcy case show that Virgin Orbit had been struggling financially since the completion of its SPAC merger at the end of 2021, which netted the company far less money than expected when most of the SPAC shareholders redeemed their stock. Virgin Orbit received only $67.8 million in SPAC proceeds versus the potential total of $382 million. “Since the de-SPAC, the Company has pursued a broad range of strategic transactions designed to address its continuing liquidity needs,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in an affidavit filed as part of the Chapter 11 proceedings. That included working with Goldman Sachs in early 2022, shortly after the completion of the SPAC merger, to either raise capital or pursue a sale of the company. Virgin Orbit “received responses from several parties potentially interested in participating in varying transactions,” Hart stated, but could not complete a deal. The company’s Jan. 9 LauncherOne failure resulted in “negative publicity and further challenges in identifying a buyer or capital source,” he added. Hart noted that the company “received one indication of interest with respect to a sale from a potential buyer, and one indication of interest with respect to a structured financing transaction,” but that both efforts ended shortly before the Chapter 11 filing. He did not disclose the parties Virgin Orbit had been in talks with, but one is Texas investor Matthew Brown, who publicly said he was planning to buy the company in late March. That deal fell through, reportedly because of concerns about his ability to follow through on a transaction of up to $200 million. Virgin Orbit shares continue to be traded on the Nasdaq since the Chapter 11 filing, closing April 10 at 16.75 cents. The company said after the close of trading that it has been informed by Nasdaq that, because of the Chapter 11 filing and a lack of a Form 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, trading of its shares would be suspended effective at the opening of business April 13 as part of the delisting process. Virgin Orbit said it would appeal the delisting effort but added that would not affect the upcoming suspension of trading.
Rocket Lab has shifted a pair of Electron launches of NASA storm-monitoring cubesats from Virginia to New Zealand, avoiding a potential conflict with another launch. Rocket Lab announced April 10 that a pair of Electron launches of NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) satellites, previously planned to take place from the company’s Launch Complex (LC) 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, will instead fly from LC-1 in New Zealand. The first launch, dubbed “Rocket Like a Hurricane” by the company, is scheduled for no earlier than April 30. The second, called “Coming to a Storm Near You,” is scheduled for May 15. Each launch will carry two TROPICS cubesats. Rocket Lab said the change is intended to ensure that the satellites are launched in time to be in service when the 2023 North Atlantic hurricane season begins this summer. Each TROPICS cubesat carries a passive microwave spectrometer that will provide temperature and humidity measurements to help monitor the development of tropical storm systems. “With the 2023 hurricane season fast approaching, time is of the essence for these missions,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a company statement. “Because we operate three launch pads across two countries, we can constantly assess the launch manifest and adapt launch schedules and locations based on customer and mission requirements.” The company did not disclose why the launches could not take place from LC-2 as originally planned other than that the shift to New Zealand would ensure they would launch in the second quarter. However, the change does avoid a potential conflict with a Northrop Grumman Antares launch of a Cygnus cargo mission to the International Space Station. That launch is tentatively scheduled for early May from Pad-0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops; Rocket Lab’s LC-2, also called Pad-0C, is right next to Pad-0A. NASA opted for dedicated launches of TROPICS cubesats on small launch vehicles, rather than flying them as rideshares on larger vehicles, because of the mission’s specific orbital requirements. The original TROPICS constellation consisted of six cubesats in three orbital places at an inclination of 30 degrees and altitude of 550 kilometers, spaced out to maximize the temporal resolution of the constellation. NASA picked Astra to launch TROPICS on three of its Rocket 3.3 vehicles, in a contract valued at about $8 million, but the first two TROPICS satellites were lost in a June 2022 launch failure from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Astra announced two months later it was retiring the Rocket 3.3 so it could focus on the larger Rocket 4 vehicle. Rocket Lab won a task order under NASA’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract in November 2022 to launch the remaining four TROPICS cubesats from Wallops. Neither NASA nor Rocket Lab disclosed the value of that task order, but federal procurement databases showed it was valued at $12.99 million. Additional conflicts between Antares and Electron launches are unlikely for the foreseeable future. The upcoming Antares launch is the last of the current version of the rocket, which uses a Ukrainian-built first stage with Russian engines. Northrop announced a partnership with Firefly Aerospace in August 2022 to develop a new first stage for Antares, but added it would launch at least three Cygnus missions, through 2024, on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from Florida.
China has selected near-Earth object 2019 VL5 for a combined asteroid deflection and observation test to launch 2025. The mission will use a Long March 3B rocket and carry both an impactor and observer spacecraft, according to a presentation by Chen Qi from China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory at the 8th IAA Planetary Defense Conference in Vienna, Austria, last week. The two spacecraft will separate into different trajectories after launch. Notably, the observer spacecraft will reach the asteroid first for initial observations and evaluating its topography. The impactor will smash into the roughly 30-meter-diameter 2019 VL5 with relative velocity of 6.4 kilometers per second, with the aim of altering the asteroid’s velocity by around five centimeters per second. The observer spacecraft will then evaluate the asteroid after the impact, according to a mission profile presented at the conference. It will carry optical, radar and laser remote sensing payloads and a dust and particle analyzer for assessing the target. The mission profile states that the observer spacecraft will use a high-resolution camera to observe the ejecta from the impact while in a 30 km orbit perpendicular to the path of the impactor. The small asteroid will also be observed during annual observation windows in October and November ground-based telescopes and the Xuntian space telescope, which is set to launch into a similar orbit as the Tiangong space station around the end of 2024. The mission combines elements of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor mission and the European Space Agency’s Hera, which will later observe the DART target system. NASA launched DART in November 2021. The DART spacecraft impacted the asteroid Dimorphos, a satellite of the larger Didymos, Sept. 26, 2022. It was found to have altered the orbit of Dimorphos, marking a success for the world’s first planetary defense asteroid deflection demonstration. ESA’s Hera mission will observe Didymos and Dimorphos later this decade to more finely determine the effects of the DART collision. The Chinese test will impact a much smaller, less massive asteroid, but launch both impactor and observer in a single launch. China’s test is part of a wide planetary defense plan being devised by the country to counter the threats posed by near Earth asteroids, including an asteroid detection and early warning system. Planetary defense was noted as a key area of research in China’s most recent space white paper , released in early 2022. Breakthroughs on multiple key technologies have been made, including high-speed impact deflection modeling simulations, according to Chen. Chen also stated that all nations are welcome to participate in the program. Earlier reports noted that the mission was initially targeting asteroid 2020 PN1 and launching in 2026. Like the previous target, 2019 VL5 is an Aten-class asteroid, a group of objects that cross the orbit of Earth but have an orbital period less than one year. 2020 PN1 is now a backup target, with other potential targets noted should the mission need to launch in 2026 or 2027. Targets for the test were selected based on a series of principles. These include avoiding objects considered a risk before or after an impact, with an orbital inclination less than five degrees, relatively high magnitudes for viewing and multiple observation opportunities, potential science value and launch windows between 2025-2027.
The ground terminals used to operate U.S. military and intelligence satellites are running out of capacity and in dire need of upgrades, warns a new report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO auditors spent more than a year investigating the state of the Satellite Control Network, operated by the U.S. Space Force. The network of 19 parabolic antennas, first established in 1959, is distributed across seven locations around the world. The SCN is facing “obsolescence challenges and potential capacity gaps as DoD and other agencies launch more satellite systems that will rely on the network,” says GAO in the report released April 10. Study directed by Congress The study of the SCN was mandated by Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. GAO wrote a similar report a decade ago warning about the need for a long-term sustainment plan for SCN. There is a need for more capacity, the new report says, as annual SCN-supported satellite launches have tripled since 2012. The SCN is primarily used to support launches and early operations for satellites, track and control satellites; and provide emergency support for tumbling or lost satellites. To deal with the capacity crunch , the Space Force is looking at ways to augment the SCN with commercial capacity and with other government agencies’ antennas. The Space Force also plans to acquire 12 new, higher-capacity antennas, an effort known as Satellite Communication Augmentation Resource, or SCAR. The first prototype is expected in 2025. Users trying to conserve capacity In the meantime, the Space Force has requested SCN users to reduce non-critical contacts with satellites, GAO says. Officials told auditors that some SCN sites lack spare parts and face increasing costs to maintain aging systems. The Space Force signed an agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to use some of the agency’s excess capacity. According to GAO, the Space Force plans to upgrade and use five NOAA antennas to augment contacts for five satellite systems. The Air Force in 2016 awarded Braxton Science and Technology Group a small business innovation research contract to figure out how to augment the military satellite control network with commercial antennas, a program called Commercial Augmentation Services (CAS). But currently no SCN supported satellites are using CAS due to cybersecurity issues, according to GAO. The current CAS contract with Braxton, which is now part of Parsons Corp., ends in August 2023. The Space Force is planning a follow-on competitive contract that may include development work for commercial antennas. Phased array antennas to increase capacity The $1.4 billion SCAR program, meanwhile, will acquire phased-array antennas to significantly increase SCN capacity. Each antenna is designed to make contacts from 18 to 20 different satellites at the same time rather than one at a time as with current parabolic SCN antennas. Space Force officials told GAO that maintaining and operating SCAR will be less expensive than the current configuration because the phased-array systems have no moving parts. GAO says the estimated per-minute rate of the SCAR antennas will be $1.60, a sharp reduction from the current SCN cost of $8.75 per minute. By comparison, the NOAA antennas cost $16.50 per minute. The Space Rapid Capabilities Office, an independent agency under the Space Force, last year awarded defense contractor BlueHalo an eight-year contract to supply and install the new antennas. The first SCAR prototype is scheduled to be delivered by summer 2025. GAO says more antennas will be supplied between 2026 and 2030.
As Canada celebrates its first astronaut to go to the moon, it is starting a new project that could eventually enable a Canadian to walk on the lunar surface. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is among the members of the Artemis 2 crew announced April 3. Hansen, who will be making his first spaceflight, is slated to be the first non-American to travel to the vicinity of the moon when the mission launches as soon as late 2024. Canada secured the seat on Artemis 2, as well as a later, unspecified Artemis mission to the lunar Gateway, from NASA in 2020 in exchange for providing the Canadarm3 robotic arm system for the Gateway. “It is not lost on any of us that the United States could choose to go back to the moon by themselves,” Hansen said in remarks at the ceremony where he and the other Artemis 2 astronauts were announced. “All of Canada is grateful for that global mindset and that leadership.” He also credited Canada’s “can-do attitude” for the opportunity to fly on Artemis. “Thousands of Canadians have risen to that challenge to bring real value to that international partnership.” François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s minister for innovation, science and industry, also emphasized that partnership at the event. ‘This is more than just about going back to the moon,” he said. “This is about investing in the future.” “What’s most amazing for us is that Canada has a seat at the table,” he said in a later call with reporters. “This time we’re not going to watch history, we’re going to write history.” Canada may be looking to get a bigger seat at that table. In the Canadian federal budget released March 28 , the government announced its intent to spend $1.2 billion Canadian ($900 million) over 13 years, starting in 2024, to develop a “lunar utility vehicle” to support human exploration of the moon. “Looking forward, humanity is returning to the moon,” the government stated in its budget announcement. “Canada intends to join these efforts by contributing a robotic lunar utility vehicle to perform key activities in support of human lunar exploration.” The government, including the Canadian Space Agency, has disclosed few other details about the proposed vehicle. The announcement, though, has been welcomed by Canadian industry. “The $1.2 billion investment towards a Canadian lunar utility vehicle sends a loud and important signal to the global commercial and government space community that Canada is open for business and intends to aggressively compete to secure our share of this advanced tech innovation market and the high-quality jobs it will create,” Mike Greenley, chief executive of MDA, said in a statement after the release of the budget. Some have speculated that, by developing such a vehicle, Canada could offer it to NASA in exchange for additional seats on Artemis missions, including those landing on the moon. The European Space Agency, for example, recently backed development of a cargo lunar lander called Argonaut with the expectation that it will be able to offer it to NASA in exchange for additional seats on Artemis missions. Asked about that possibility in the call, Champagne did not directly address it, but emphasized the strategic nature of Canada’s cooperation with the United States on Artemis. “We’re going to design, build and operate these rovers on the moon, and I can think of a number of dividends for Canadian companies” for doing so, he said. “I think we have a privileged seat at the table with NASA,” he said. “Thanks to the work of the agency, we have inserted ourselves into the strategic supply chain and I think it bodes well for the future.”
A new report recommends that current restrictions on the Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to regulate safety for people flying on commercial spacecraft be allowed to expire later this year. The report by the RAND Corporation, prepared for Congress and released April 3, concluded that despite limited progress on establishing voluntary industry safety standards, the FAA and industry were now ready to start the process of developing formal safety standards for those participating in commercial spaceflight. A provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 established a moratorium, often called a “learning period” in industry, on the FAA’s ability to enact safety regulations for spaceflight participants. That limits the ability of the FAA to enact safety regulations except in cases of accidents that caused deaths or serious injuries, or events that posed a high risk of deaths or serious injuries. That learning period was originally intended to expire in 2012 but was extended in subsequent legislation because of a lack of commercial human spaceflight activity that could serve as an experience base upon which to build regulations. The most recent extension, in 2015, moved the expiration of the learning period to Oct. 1. It also called on the FAA to hire an independent organization to produce a report on the progress the industry was making on voluntary standards as well as “key industry metrics” to assess the readiness of the industry for regulations. The RAND report, developed to meet that requirement in the 2015 law, recommended no further extensions of the learning period. “This is to say that we recommend that the moratorium set to expire on October 1, 2023, should expire on that date, but it will be important to ensure that the FAA is appropriately resourced to engage in these activities,” the report stated. That recommendation came despite a lack of progress on voluntary standards and key industry metrics. While standards development organizations like ASTM International and ISO have published 20 standards related to commercial spaceflight, the RAND report noted that “companies have yet to clearly or consistently adopt them in a manner that can be confirmed or verified publicly.” A diversity of technical approaches also hinders the development and implementation of standards. The report also found that while the FAA had developed key industry indicators to assess readiness for adopting safety regulations, there were no goals for those indicators to determine when it was time to implement regulations. “It is, therefore, difficult to assess whether there has been progress toward meeting key industry metrics when there are not clear targets that could be met,” the report concluded. Despite that lack of progress on standards or metrics, the RAND report nonetheless concluded that allowing the learning period to expire this year was the best approach. Doing so, it argued, would allow FAA and industry to start the process of developing safety regulations in a gradual manner and avoid a rush to regulate imposed by Congress should a high-profile accident take place while the learning period is still in effect. It also recommended additional resources for the FAA to support that regulatory process, but did not quantify an increase in the budget for or personnel assigned to its Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST. The report noted that it’s unlikely that AST would immediately publish regulations once the learning period expires, something that agency officials have emphasized. “We are now in what we call a regulatory preparation period where we’re trying to prepare ourselves for the eventuality of having further oversight of the industry,” Kelvin Coleman, associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said in a speech at the recent Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado. He said after the speech that those efforts were along several lines, including preparing to establish a formal aerospace rulemaking committee as well as encouraging further development of industry standards. “We don’t have, ready to go in a file cabinet somewhere, a volume of recommendations we’re ready to roll out,” he said. The preparations, he said, are intended to shorten a rulemaking process that can take, on average, about five years. Industry is more cautious about regulations. “I don’t feel like anyone is really ready to understand what regulations are going to look like,” said Karina Drees, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, at the same conference. She said she expected to work with both AST and Congress “on what we would want to provide as a solution.” A potential extension or modification of the learning period could be considered as part of an overall reauthorization for the FAA this year. Some in the field expect some kind of learning period extension. “It’s my expectation, based on looking at the world, that this moratorium will be extended,” said Chris Gerace, manager of NASA’s Suborbital Crew (SubC) program that is considering flying civil servants on commercial suborbital vehicles, during a panel later at the conference. He noted NASA held no position on the learning period and that any extension was up to Congress. Tim Bulk, chief technical officer of Special Aerospace Services, a company supporting NASA on the SubC program, held a similar view based on the limited resources at the FAA. “They’re definitely going to be resource constrained,” he said, impairing its ability to develop regulations. “The moratorium is going to be extended, I believe.”
Northrop Grumman is developing a geostationary communications satellite that will compete against a Boeing design in a military procurement estimated to be worth $2.4 billion. Boeing and Northrop Grumman were selected in 2020 by the U.S. Space Force to develop Protected Tactical Satcom prototype payloads, known as PTS. Both payloads passed government design reviews and were cleared for on-orbit demonstrations planned in 2025. Blake Bullock, vice president of communication systems at Northrop Grumman’s Strategic Space Systems Division, said the company’s PTS payload will fly on dedicated spacecraft built on an ESPAStar-HP satellite bus. This is a larger version of the company’s ESPAStar commercial bus optimized for operation in geostationary orbit. Boeing’s PTS prototype will launch as a hosted payload on the Space Force’s Wideband Global Satcom WGS-11 satellite that Boeing is developing under a 2019 contract. The company plans to deliver the satellite in 2024 . Bullock said Northrop Grumman’s satellite will launch to orbit on a national security space mission aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket. “The program is on track for a 2025 launch,” she said in a statement to SpaceNews. Competition to continue for several years According to DoD budget documents, the U.S. Space Force could select one or both companies to produce additional payloads. Whichever PTS version is selected will become the military’s next-generation secure communications satellites, intended to supplement the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellites that are used for classified-level communications. PTS seeks to provide “uninterrupted communications even in the presence of sophisticated jamming threats,” Bullock said. Northrop Grumman decided to build an independent satellite instead of a hosted payload to give the government more flexible launch options, she said. The ring-shaped ESPAStar-HP can be manufactured faster than traditional military satellites and launched in batches, Bullock said. “Our solution works both as a free flyer or hosted on any bus with the necessary space, weight and power to support the payload.” DoD is requesting $360 million for the PTS program in fiscal year 2024, and estimates to spend up to $2.4 billion by 2028. In budget justification documents, DoD said it expects two PTS prototype payloads to be “available for launch in fiscal year 2025 as payloads on Boeing’s WGS-11 (hosted) and Northrop Grumman’s ESPAStar-HP satellites (free-flyer).” After both PTS versions are evaluated, the Space Force could decide to support either hosted or free-flyer configurations for launch in fiscal years 2028 and 2029. 
As preparations for the Artemis 2 mission ramp up, NASA has established a congressionally mandated office to oversee planning for that and future missions to the moon. NASA announced March 30 it had created the Moon to Mars Program Office within the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. The office will focus on integrating the various programs underway as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign, from Orion and the Space Launch System to the Gateway, lunar landers and spacesuits. Congress directed NASA to establish the office in a NASA authorization enacted last year as part of the CHIPS and Science Act. It stemmed from concerns within Congress and among NASA advisers that there was no single person overseeing all the programs that made up Artemis. The office is led by Amit Kshatriya, previously acting deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development. “It’s important to know what it is and it’s important to know what it isn’t,” he said of the new position in an interview at the Johnson Space Center after the Artemis 2 crew announcement April 3. The managers of the various programs, he explained, are still doing the same jobs. “This is primarily a realignment of the roles and responsibilities at headquarters,” he said. That work was already underway before the passage of the authorization act to ensure “consistent integration” among the programs. “What we’re hoping to achieve is accelerate a little bit that headquarters reorganization and eliminate some duplication of effort in certain areas.” “I think what it really allows us to do is have that single focal point that’s worried about our near-term missions,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said of the office in an interview. “I’ve really tried to focus that office to say that your job is to work on [Artemis] 2 through 5.” That role, he noted, had been his responsibility before creating the office. “I think it gives us that single point that everybody can go to,” he said. “He can track and worry about those missions every day.” Kshatriya said his focus “first and foremost” is on Artemis 2. “There are lessons learned from Artemis 1 we have to make sure we incorporate,” he said, as well as completion of the SLS and Orion vehicles and work on ground systems needed for the mission. “The next mission up is 100% my priority, to make sure that none of this realignment that we’re doing impacts that.” Part of the office’s work, though, it to look ahead. “One of the things we were charged with in the Moon to Mars office was to make sure that the tech developments and the mission modes we’re picking were commensurate with potential future Mars-grade activities,” he said. That ranges from testing closed-loop life support systems to development of the Gateway. “We’ve been doing that in every investment we’ve been making,” he said, “but tying it together and bringing that to the front of the exploration program in terms of the messaging and the kind of philosophy I think is in front of us still.” “The way we’ve implemented what Congress had asked us to do I think will turn out to be very good,” Free said.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX successfully launched Intelsat’s IS-40e communications satellite April 7, which will help the operator meet growing demand for connectivity on planes while also carrying its first hosted payload for NASA. The satellite deployed solar arrays and is receiving and sending signals in geosynchronous transfer orbit following its 12:30 a.m. Eastern launch, its manufacturer Maxar Technologies confirmed. The first stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket that lifted IS-40e off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, also successfully landed on a drone ship for later reuse. It will take three weeks for the satellite to use onboard chemical propulsion to reach its final orbital slot at 91 degrees West over North America, Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat’s senior vice president of space systems, told SpaceNews in an interview. “This is a big satellite with a lot of connectivity,” Froeliger said, and it will likely take another three weeks to check out all its systems to begin operations by the end of May. Equipped with Ku- and Ka-band capacity, the satellite weighed around six metric tons at launch and is designed to have roughly eight kilowatts of power. Hosting NASA IS-40e also carries NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) hosted payload, touted to be the first instrument to monitor air pollution across North America from geostationary orbit. While Intelsat’s satellites have carried hosted payloads for other government agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Froeliger said this is the first time it has secured such a deal with NASA. Hosting payloads on commercial satellites enables government agencies to avoid the cost of building dedicated spacecraft, while also helping the operator fund its expenses. However, these arrangements are often fraught with logistical and other challenges . IS-40e’s primary mission is to provide connectivity for planes, boats, and land vehicles on the move over North America, with a particular focus on serving the commercial aviation market. Other applications include cellular backhaul and rapid response connectivity missions for natural disasters. “This is our first real high throughput satellite over North America,” Froeliger said. IS-40e’s ultimate location along the equator would make Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the closest city in the United States to the satellite. Intelsat previously covered a narrower swath of the United States with the Boeing-built IS-29e at 50 degrees West, but that satellite was declared a total loss in 2019 after suffering a fuel leak. Intelsat has been busy securing deals with other satellite operators in the region in its search for more capacity to serve the mobility market, including Spain-based Hispasat and Eutelsat of France . “Third-party satellites are nice when you don’t have your own solution, or if your own solution is late,” Froeliger said, “but having your own solution is the way to go.” Intelsat has one last satellite to launch this year: Galaxy 37, the final spacecraft in the operator’s strategy to be eligible for nearly $5 billion in C-band spectrum clearing proceeds. SpaceX is slated to launch Galaxy 37 this summer. In addition to C-band, the satellite has a Ku-band payload for meeting high-speed broadband needs over North America.
SpaceX offered its strongest signals yet that it is nearing the first full-scale launch of its Starship vehicle, now expected for later this month. The company tweeted April 6 that it was planning a launch rehearsal for the vehicle, now fully stacked on the pad at its Starbase facility at Boca Chica, Texas, next week. That will be followed by the first launch attempt about a week later. Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive, later confusingly tweeted that the vehicle is “ready to launch next week.” However, neither the company nor the Federal Aviation Administration appears to be planning for a launch the week of April 10. In an Operations Plan Advisory document by the FAA, used to support flight planning, the agency lists a first launch date of April 17 for the Starship flight, with backup dates of April 18 through 21. All the dates have the same window from 8 to 11:05 a.m. Eastern. There had been speculation that SpaceX would attempt to launch Starship earlier. A maritime warning notice suggested a launch between April 6 and 12, while the FAA planning document earlier this week listed a launch April 10 with backup days of April 11 and 12. Those plans are dependent on both the technical readiness of the vehicle as well as the issuance of a launch license from the FAA. Both SpaceX and Musk noted those schedules were pending “regulatory approval,” and the FAA said the inclusion of the Starship dates on its planning documents did not imply a launch license has been issued. The last major testing milestone for the launch was a static-fire test of the Super Heavy booster Feb. 9. While only 31 of the 33 Raptor engines in the booster fired, the company deemed the test a success. Gary Henry, senior advisor for national security space solutions at SpaceX, said at a conference Feb. 21 that the static-fire test was the “last box to check” before launch, which he estimated at the time to take place “in the next month or so.” “We’re so close” to that launch, said Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX during a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference March 15. “We’re waiting on our FAA license so that we can announce our launch date.” The company had referred to the test as the first orbital flight demonstration of Starship, although current plans do not call for the vehicle to complete one orbit. Instead, the Starship upper stage will splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. It’s unclear if Starship will actually enter orbit, then immediately perform a deorbit burn to splash down, or if instead it is a long suborbital flight. SpaceX, in its tweet about the upcoming launch, referred to the mission as the “first integrated flight test” of Starship without explicitly calling it an orbital launch attempt.
Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, commanded by a former NASA astronaut and including two Saudi astronauts, is scheduled to launch as soon as May 8. Axiom announced April 6 that its Ax-2 mission to the station, flying on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, is scheduled for launch no earlier than 10:43 p.m. Eastern May 8. A launch that day would set up a docking at the station at 11:40 a.m. Eastern May 10. The four-person Ax-2 crew will spend 10 days at the station conducting research and educational outreach activities, helping Axiom Space build up experience for commercial modules it plans to add to the station as precursors to a standalone space station late this decade. It builds upon Ax-1, Axiom’s first private astronaut mission that launched one year ago . “We had some 200 or so lessons learned” from that first mission, said Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, during an April 6 briefing. “We followed through and made adjustments to how we plan, how we train and how we will ultimately fly the mission.” “We felt like the training needed to be improved and increased in certain areas and decreased in other areas,” said Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who is Axiom’s director of human space flight and commander of Ax-2. That included additional simulations that she said have been effective in training for the mission. John Shoffner, an Axiom customer, will be pilot on Ax-2. “He has decades of flight experience and amazing engineering know-how that makes him perfect for the role,” Whitson said of him. The two mission specialists on Ax-2 are Saudi astronauts Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni, named to the mission Feb. 12 by the Saudi Space Commission . They will be the second and third Saudis to go to space; Barnawi will be the first Saudi woman to go to space. Barnawi and Alqarni will conduct 11 microgravity research experiments and three outreach activities during the mission, said Mishaal Ashemimry, microgravity research lead at the Saudi Space Agency, during the call. The outreach activities will engage with 12,000 students in 47 locations in Saudi Arabia. She described the mission as the first in a series for a “sustainable” human spaceflight program in Saudi Arabia, “meaning that we have a constant flow of astronauts going to do research” in space. That includes eventual long-duration missions where Saudi astronauts would spend up to six months in space to conduct microgravity research, although she did not offer a timeline for that program. “It’s supposed to be perpetual, sustainable,” she said of the initiative. “In doing so, we will train many astronauts. We will engage with a lot of local entities to do research. We will enhance our partnerships with international research entities on collaborative work for microgravity research.” Axiom sees Ax-2 as part of continuing efforts to build up experience for its eventual commercial space station. It signed a mission order with NASA March 14 for a third private astronaut mission, Ax-3 , scheduled for as soon as November. Axiom has not announced who will fly that mission. “Ax-2 is similar to Ax-1 from the standpoint of how we are practicing the process of working with our partners and becoming more and more efficient,” Suffredini said. “You do a number of these flights, you figure out what you can do better next time, and then you make the changes and go do the flight.” The company plans to do as many as two private astronaut missions a year through the launch of its first commercial space station module, currently planned for late 2025. At that point “we’ll have a little more access and flexibility, and at that point we’ll start to increase our tempo a little bit.” A second module will follow in 2026, which will allow Axiom to host up to eight people at a time with multiple ports for visiting vehicles. In late 2026 or 2027 a research and science module will be added. “All of these flights are stepwise approaches to growing the economy in low Earth orbit and taking advantage of the work that’s gone on on the ISS for the last 20 years and the following decade or so,” Suffredini said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is once again requesting a significant budget increase for future weather satellite programs after Congress cut its funding request for 2023. In its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, recently posted online , NOAA requested $417.4 million for the Geostationary Extended Observations, or GeoXO, program of next-generation geostationary weather satellites. That program received $285 million in the fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill in December. NOAA had requested much more funding for GeoXO in 2023: $653.8 million. In the omnibus bill, Congress said the smaller amount would be sufficient to complete ongoing formulation studies and award a development contract for an imager. NOAA selected L3Harris to provide that imager March 13 in a contract valued at $765.5 million. NOAA plans to award a contract for a sounder instrument later this year. It said the funding it requested for 2024 would allow it to award contracts for the remaining instruments and the spacecraft themselves. GeoXO is NOAA’s largest satellite program ever, with an estimated total lifecycle cost of $19.6 billion . That covers development of six satellites and their operations through the middle of the century. NOAA received $301 million for the ongoing GOES-R series of geostationary weather satellites. It requested $276 million for the program in 2024, a planned reduction as the last of the four satellites in that program, GOES-U, is prepared for launch in April 2024. The agency is also seeking additional funding for polar orbiting weather satellites. The proposal requests $342.4 million in fiscal year 2024 for the Polar Weather Satellites program, which includes the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) series of satellites. That program received $183.5 million in 2023 after NOAA requested $350.2 million. The funding would allow NOAA to continue work on the JPSS-3 and -4 satellites, currently scheduled for launch in late 2027 and late 2032, respectively. However, at a March 28 meeting of a committee of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Steve Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services, said the agency was considering swapping the order of those launches. That would allow more testing of a NASA instrument called Libera to measure solar radiation reflected by the Earth and thermal radiation emitted by it. Libera will be hosted on JPSS-3. “We are talking about switching the timing on the launch dates to enable better testing of Libera prior to launch,” he said. The successor to JPSS, formerly called LEO Weather Satellites in the NOAA budget, is now known as Near Earth Orbit Network (NEON). “It’s not going to be, if things work out the way we expect, large satellites but multiple small satellites,” Volz said. NOAA is requesting $133.6 million for NEON, up from the $96.4 million it received in 2023, to support work on a pathfinder mission called QuickSounder. “Before we jump into a whole new architecture approach for building an essential function for the nation, we’ve got to test it out, and we’re testing it out with QuickSounder,” he said. That mission will demonstrate not only technologies but also the ability to develop spacecraft in three years, a fraction of traditional larger programs. In space weather, NOAA is requesting $97.2 million for the Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) program, a planned decrease from the $136.2 million it received in 2023 as the SWFO-L1 spacecraft is prepared for launch as a rideshare on NASA’s IMAP mission in 2025 and a compact coronagraph instrument is flown on GOES-U. NOAA is seeking an increase of $73.4 million for the Space Weather Next program, from $151.6 million in 2023 to $225 million in 2024. That would include a new satellite to succeed SWFO-L1 and an instrument flying on a European Space Agency spacecraft, Vigil, that would operate from the Earth-sun L-5 Lagrange point. NOAA also hosts the Office of Space Commerce, which received $70 million of a requested $87 million in fiscal year 2023 to fund work on space traffic management, primarily a data repository now called the Traffic Coordination Space System (TraCSS). NOAA is requesting $88 million for the office in 2024 to continue development of TraCSS, with a goal of achieving initial operating capability by late 2024.
TAMPA, Fla. — U.S.-based Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) said April 6 it has started trialing Starlink ahead of plans to potentially deploy the satellite broadband service across eight cruise ships this year. The company is testing the low Earth orbit (LEO) network on Norwegian Breakaway, one of 29 ships in a fleet it plans to expand to 37 vessels over the next five years. Three of these new additions are slated to enter service this year — Vista, Norwegian Viva, and Seven Seas Grandeur — and NCL said they could all be equipped with Starlink terminals if trials are successful. “A comprehensive rollout plan is under development and details regarding timeline and availability on specific ships will be communicated once finalized,” NCL said in a news release. Royal Caribbean Group said it had become the first cruise liner to adopt Starlink Aug. 30, just months after SpaceX received regulatory permission to connect boats, aircraft, and other moving vehicles to its LEO constellation. SpaceX has been busy signing up other companies to its maritime service since then, including Carnival, the world’s largest cruise company with nearly 100 ships. According to Starlink’s website, it is able to provide connectivity “to the vast majority of the Earth’s oceans and seas.” Prices for its maritime services start at $1,000 month and a $2,500 one-time hardware cost for up to 220 megabits per second download speeds. Starlink’s maritime expansion adds more competition in a market seen as an important source of growth for satellite operators including SES, which says it serves five out of the six major cruise operators, although some customers are using multiple connectivity providers for redundancy — at least for now. 
Thule Air Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland where Space Force units conduct missile warning operations, has been renamed Pituffik Space Base. Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman at the renaming ceremony April 6 said the new name acknowledges the “rich cultural heritage of Greenland and its people and how important they are to the sustainment of this installation against the harsh environment north of the Arctic Circle.” Pituffik (pronounced bee-doo-FEEK) is the traditional Greenlandic name of the region where the base is located. The U.S. military’s northernmost installation, Pituffik is located approximately 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the northwestern coast of Greenland. Saltzman noted that the United States views the Arctic region as one of strategic power competition in light of Russia’s significant presence and efforts by China to expand its influence there. Also at the ceremony were Greenlandic Minister for Foreign Affairs, Business, and Trade Vivian Motzfeldt and U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark Alan Leventhal. “With the decision to rename Thule, the U.S. has demonstrated its respect to the friendship between us, recognizing cultural heritage, and the history of the base,” said Motzfeldt. Space Force units at Pituffik The base, built in 1951, is home to DoD’s northernmost deepwater port and has a 10,000-foot runway. It is operated by the 821st Space Base Group, a unit of Space Base Delta 1 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Pituffik Space Base also hosts the 12th Space Warning Squadron, which is part Space Delta 4, headquartered at Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado. The 23rd Space Operations Squadron, Detachment 1, part of Space Delta 6, based at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado, also is based at Pituffik. These units operate a network of early warning of ballistic missile launches. They also provide telemetry, tracking and command-and-control of U.S. and allied government satellites.
True Anomaly, a startup based in Denver, is building two small satellites that it plans to launch into orbit later this year. One of the spacecraft will attempt to chase down an “uncooperative” object and take pictures up close. This is the type of technology that the U.S. military needs to compete with rival powers in space, True Anomaly’s CEO and co-founder Even Rogers told SpaceNews . The startup, formed a year ago to focus on the national security market, announced April 6 it has raised $30 million in pre-seed, seed, and Series A funding. It built a 35,000 square foot factory where it’s producing the Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle. The first two spacecraft are scheduled to launch this fall on SpaceX’s Transporter 9 rideshare. Rogers, a former U.S. Air Force satellite and ground systems operator, said the company will pursue DoD contracts for these orbital vehicles and plans to scale up production. He said the Jackal was designed to fill gaps in the military’s capabilities to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in orbit, a specialty known as space domain awareness. The company also develops digital tools for building models for space wargaming and training. He pitched investors the idea that the U.S. Space Force needs an “industrial partner” solely focused on producing technologies to defend assets in orbit. The DoD currently relies on large defense contractors to meet these needs, Rogers said, but the military could benefit from more specialized providers. U.S. needs satellites for tactical maneuvers The challenge for the Space Force, he said, is that the United States faces an “asymmetric” disadvantage as rival powers like Russia and China deploy maneuvering satellites, some armed with space weapons that could threaten U.S. systems. U.S. satellites were not designed to maneuver in orbit “ without regret ” because they have to conserve fuel. Rogers said the Jackal vehicles could be deployed to help identify potential threats. Rogers noted that a growing number of companies in the commercial space industry operate sensors and analyze data to support space traffic management functions. However, he said, “nobody has mastered the technology and the concepts of operations that are necessary to do characterization and inspection at scale.” Jackal, a 275-kilogram spacecraft built on a commercial satellite bus, was designed for “uncooperative” rendezvous and proximity operations, he said. A lot of vehicles perform cooperative rendezvous and proximity operations such as docking with other spacecraft. But uncooperative RPO is a much harder problem that hasn’t been solved yet, he said. “Doing that safely and autonomously is a capability and craft that the Space Force needs to be able to master.” Rogers said having a vehicle that can chase uncooperative spacecraft and take pictures would help the U.S. hold China and Russia accountable for aggressive actions in space and possibly deter such behavior.
Loft Orbital has ordered an additional 15 satellite buses from Airbus OneWeb Satellites to meet growing demand for its standardized space platforms. Loft Orbital said April 6 that it ordered the buses, which it calls Longbow, from Airbus OneWeb Satellites, the joint venture of Airbus Defence and Space and OneWeb. The satellites will be produced at the Airbus OneWeb Satellites facility in Florida adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center. The Longbow bus is based on the design of the bus used for OneWeb satellites. “We made a number of modifications to that platform to be able to accommodate a number of higher resolution, higher stability optical missions, and be able to have a longer lifetime,” said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, chief executive of Loft Orbital, in an interview. That design, he noted, is different from the Arrow bus that Airbus markets and is produced at the same factory. Loft Orbital ordered more than 15 of the same Longbow buses from Airbus OneWeb Satellites in January 2022 . He said the semi-automated production line at that Florida factory enables those satellites to be produced in large numbers quickly to support customers planning larger constellations. Loft Orbital has previously ordered satellites from LeoStella as well as Raytheon and another company that Vaujour declined to disclose. He said the company will continue to work with multiple satellite bus suppliers rather than pursue economies of scale by consolidating orders with a single supplier. “We’ve been very fortunate to work with Airbus. We see them as a true partner,” he said. “We also intend to order from others in the future.” That fits into the company’s approach of providing an “abstraction layer” for customers, handling the technical details of both the space and ground segment. “We can fly any payloads on any satellite bus using any ground segment network deployed on any cloud,” he said. “This is important when you have either technical needs that are better addressed by one satellite than another or when there are non-technical needs” such as regulatory of geopolitical issues. The company is seeing strong interest in that approach. Vaujour said he thought the initial order of more than 15 Longbow buses would last “quite a long time” but those were sold out in six months. That includes a contract with EarthDaily Analytics in January 2022 to build and operate a 10-satellite Earth observation constellation , which is the largest single deal Loft has announced to date. The demand is coming from a variety of customers, such as government agencies, traditional space companies and startups. Those customers, he said, want data from their payloads but won’t want to deal with all the technical details of building and operating satellites. “That’s why we brand Loft as an infrastructure company, because what we do is let customers focus on deploying their mission in space.” That approach requires Loft to maintain an inventory of satellite buses and components, which has allowed it to avoid delays because of supply chain issues endemic in the space industry today. “We ordered parts way before we have customers,” he said. “We’re seeing the same issues, but the main difference is for us suppliers are not on the critical path.” Loft Orbital now has more than 150 employees, Vaujour said, and has been expanding facilities to be able to produce more satellites. The company raised $140 million in late 2021, which he said is sufficient to meet its current plans. “We’ve been fortunate to hire exceptional people. We have all the capital we need. We have the customers. It’s really just about executing now.”
China has invited Venezuela to join its lunar research station project as the country works to gain partners for the endeavor. Venezuela would be the first country to join China and Russia in the International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ), which is planned to be constructed in the early 2030s using super heavy-lift launch vehicles. The launches will follow smaller, precursor missions later this decade. Marglad Bencomo, executive director of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), visited China’s new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) March 30 to discuss cooperation and exchanges. She was met by Wu Yanhua, former deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and now executive vice chairman of DSEL. The two sides exchanged in-depth views on international cooperation in the field of deep space exploration, according to a DSEL statement . Bencomo said that Venezuela was willing to sign a China-Venezuela Memorandum of Understanding as soon as possible to jointly promote the construction of international lunar research stations, according to the DSEL statement. ABAE has been invited to attend an international forum hosted by DSEL during China’s national “space day,” held annually on April 24 since 2016, potentially providing a platform for signing an MOU. China and Russia presented a roadmap for the joint ILRS in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2021 and opened the project to interested parties. The pair, led by China, are seeking to build partnerships parallel to the NASA-led Artemis Program. So far 23 countries have signed up to the United States’ Artemis Accords, the diplomatic underpinning of the Artemis project. “On one hand, it doesn’t surprise me as China and Venezuela have years of cooperating in space,” Victoria Samson, Washington Office director at the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews . Samson notes that China has built and launched Venezuela’s handful of satellites in recent years. “Given the discrepancy in the two countries’ space capabilities, I think that Venezuela’s participation in the ILRS is largely symbolic,” says Samson, who also notes that there are questions regarding what real contributions Russia will be able to make. The potential signing of an MOU also highlights a perceived trend in international space partnerships. “It does lend credence to a concern that I have that we’re seeing a bifurcation in lunar governance and approaches to lunar missions, where you are either Team Artemis or Team ILRS. “I don’t think that’s helpful and it may end up leading to an unnecessarily competitive spirit for lunar missions, complicating an already complicated environment,” Samson says. DSEL April 6 published a statement with details of a visit by Carlos Moura, president of the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB), which also discussed ILRS cooperation. Wu stated hopes of participation of BRICS countries and Latin American countries in the project. Brazil is a signatory to the Artemis Accords. China faces apparent challenges in attracting partners to the ILRS. Officials presented opportunities to participate in its future deep space and lunar missions at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris in September 2022. Russia’s role in the project was not mentioned , with Moscow facing international isolation in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Reports also indicate that an MOU between China and the United Arab Emirates to fly a small rover on China’s Chang’e-7 lunar south pole landing mission was scuppered by complications arising due to ITAR export regulations. That mission is expected to fly in 2026. China is developing a pair of super heavy-lift launch vehicles capable of launching major infrastructure missions and sending astronauts to the moon. The Long March 9 project has recently changed to incorporate reusability into the design, potentially delaying the debut launch. The newly-designated Long March 10 is expected to have its test launch in 2027. A pair of Long March 10 launches will be capable of putting a pair of astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade , according to officials.At the same time, officials within China’s space industry are proposing that the country seize what is seen as a one-off opportunity to establish international lunar infrastructure. — Edited at 6.27 a.m. Eastern, April 6, with statement from DSEL on visit of Brazilian space agency representatives.
The upcoming launch of a NASA Earth science instrument on a commercial communications satellite illustrates the promise of, but also the problems with, hosted payloads. A SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off at 12:30 a.m. Eastern April 7 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, placing the Intelsat 40e satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit. There is a 90% chance of acceptable weather for the launch, the 23 rd of the year by SpaceX. Intelsat 40e, built by Maxar, carries a NASA hosted payload called Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO). The instrument, produced by Ball Aerospace, is designed to measure concentrations of atmospheric pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone and formaldehyde across the continental United States as well as portions of Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. “TEMPO, from GEO, will for the first time provide hourly data on air pollution,” said Xiong Liu, TEMPO deputy principal investigator at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, during a call with reporters April 5. Spacecraft in low Earth orbit can provide measurements only once per day for a given area as they pass overhead, usually at the same time each day. TEMPO will also provide that data at a much higher resolution: “down to the neighborhood scale,” said Karen St. Germain, NASA Earth science division director. Those involved with the project emphasized the benefits of flying TEMPO as a hosted payload rather than as a standalone satellite. “The TEMPO program really is a win-win-win for the major entitles involved,” said Aaron Abell, TEMPO project manager at Maxar. “It allows unused capacity on Maxar’s heritage satellite design be leveraged for government missions. This reduces the cost of access to space for the government as well as reduces the cost for Intelsat as they’re compensated for their support of the TEMPO mission.” When NASA selected TEMPO for development in 2012, there was widespread enthusiasm in both government and industry about hosted payloads. A steady stream of commercial GEO satellites, at the time averaging 20 to 25 per year, appeared to offer plentiful rides for communications, Earth observation and other payloads. However, few such payloads have flown. The U.S. Air Force allowed a contract vehicle for flying hosted payloads, called HoPS, to expire in 2019 because of a lack of military payloads seeking rides. At the same time, a sharp downturn in the GEO communications satellite market reduced the supply of satellites that might accommodate payloads. That latter issue affected a NASA project called GeoCarb, which the agency originally selected to fly as a hosted payload on a GEO satellite through SES Government Solutions. However, in February 2022, NASA announced it would instead look to fly GeoCarb on its own satellite after concluding there were no available satellites that could host the payload for launch by the end of 2024. In November, NASA announced it would cancel GeoCarb because of cost overruns. “There have not been as many as originally predicted,” acknowledged Kevin Daugherty, TEMPO project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center, of hosted payloads. “However, some of the things that we’ve learned from TEMPO is how to work with our commercial partners and commercial practices.” One issue he and others involved in the project mentioned was lining up schedules for payload development with those for the host satellites. “One of main reasons why some of those hosted payload opportunities don’t mature is schedule risk,” said Jean-Luc Froeliger, senior vice president of space systems at Intelsat. “For a commercial operator, schedule is extremely important. A satellite has to be built quickly. It has to be launched and in service as fast as possible.” Abell cited a “myriad of details” for finding a host that include schedule as well as finding a satellite technically able to accommodate a payload and located in the right part of geostationary orbit. “It’s multiple factors that made TEMPO work,” he said, “but also complicate the process.” TEMPO was able to mitigate the schedule risks associated with hosted payloads because the instrument was already built by the time that NASA selected Maxar to host it in 2019. “It has helped us fit into the commercial timeline for spacecraft development that moves at a very rapid rate,” Daugherty said. But TEMPO itself has experienced years of delays. When selected in 2012, NASA anticipated launching it in 2017. Daugherty said technical issues in the instrument’s development caused an eight-month delay. The instrument then went into storage for one and half to two years while NASA looked for a host for it. After a couple of solicitations resulted in no bids, NASA finally worked out a contract with Maxar and Intelsat. Development of the spacecraft was delayed by covid-related issues, he added. The instrument itself cost a little more than $90 million, he said. The overall mission cost is $210 million when including the cost of integrating and hosting TEMPO on the satellite, along with support engineering and management expenses. Commissioning of TEMPO is scheduled to begin in late May or early June, once Intelsat 40e reaches geostationary orbit, with science observations starting in October. The instrument has a 20-month prime mission but Daugherty said that the TEMPO is similar to another instrument also built by Ball on a South Korean satellite that has been operating for three years, suggesting TEMPO could also operate significantly longer.
ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. military’s ambitious plan to deploy a mega-constellation of satellites took a key step forward with the launch of the Space Development Agency’s first 10 satellites. Three days after the April 2 launch, the director of the agency Derek Tournear said SDA has established communication with all 10 satellites. “That’s pretty amazing,” he said on Wednesday at the Mitchell Institute Spacepower Security Forum. This was the first launch of a projected mesh network of hundreds of small satellites in low Earth orbit known as the proliferated warfighter space architecture . It includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. The successful launch of Tranche 0 satellites took place 27 months after SDA, an agency under the U.S. Space Force, ordered the satellites, drawing praise from senior officials. That delivery timeline is rarely seen in space acquisitions, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said at the Mitchell Institute conference. “For those that have been around the business for a while, 27 months is extremely fast,” he said. SDA is gearing up to launch 18 more Tranche 0 satellites in June. But the real ramp-up begins next year when Tranche 1 launches are scheduled to get under way. A total of 161 satellites are expected to be delivered over the next 18 months, including 126 for the Transport Layer and 35 for the Tracking Layer . “Starting in September 2024, we are planning one launch per month for the next year,” Tournear said. “I’m pretty excited about that.” Tranche 1 satellites, currently being produced by multiple bus and sensor manufacturers, will undergo design reviews later this month, Tournear said. The Pentagon has allocated $700 million in 2023 and $500 million in 2024 to fund a total of 12 SDA launches. Hundreds more satellites coming SDA meanwhile is preparing to issue a solicitation for the next contracts for Tranche 2 satellites, which would launch starting in 2026. A draft solicitation was published March 1 . This will be SDA’s largest procurement to date, with 216 satellites projected for the Tranche 2 Transport Layer and roughly 54 for the Tracking Layer, although Tournear said the final number of tracking satellites has not yet been determined. What’s significant about Tranche 2 is that it will add enough nodes to the network to provide global coverage. “We are going to build on what we’ve done to essentially make the entire architecture globally persistent,” Tournear said. When Tranche 1 is deployed, DoD will be able to concentrate coverage over some regions of the world but not on the entire globe. “With Tranche 2 we will not need to make those trades,” Tournear said. A model for how to ‘go fast’ In a memo April 5 circulated to the entire acquisition workforce, Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, highlighted the 27-month timeline achieved by SDA. “Three years or less from contract start to launch – a simple formula to go fast in space acquisition,” Calvelli wrote. Echoing guidance he issued last year , Calvelli said the Space Force should leverage commercial products, rely on smaller satellites and buy under fixed-price contracts, which is what SDA does. “Previously building large satellites with long development cycles on cost-plus contract contracts made sense but that time has passed,” Calvelli said. “To meet the pacing threat we are transforming from the few ‘big juicy targets’ of the past to a more proliferated and resilient architecture that can be counted on during times of crisis and conflict,” he added. “Drive contract scope to three years or less from start to launch.” This formula, Calvelli insisted, “can be applied to all systems and all orbits.”
ARLINGTON, Va. — A cybersecurity expert from the private sector was recently commissioned into the U.S. Space Force as a lieutenant colonel even though he never attended a military service academy or completed ROTC in college. This is an example of “innovative recruitment practices” the Space Force is implementing to attract needed talent, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said in a speech April 5 at the Mitchell Institute Spacepower Security Forum. As the smallest branch of the U.S. military with a high demand for technical expertise, the Space Force has embraced unconventional ways to attract and retain people in key career fields, Saltzman said. The Space Force last year introduced the “ constructive service credit program ” that allows experienced professionals in the fields of cybersecurity and intelligence to directly commission into the Space Force at ranks appropriate to their years of experience, he explained. Part-time service Another proposed new initiative is to allow full-time guardians to serve part-time instead of having to create a dedicated reserve force. The idea is to have an active-duty force with full-time and part-time members, an idea opposed by some lawmakers who have advocated for the establishment of a Space National Guard . The Space Force’s preferred approach has not been officially greenlighted by Congress but Saltzman is optimistic. “One of the things that I’m very excited about is our efforts to integrate space reserve personnel,” he said. “With congressional support we will start integrating the Air Force Reserve space elements into the Space Force as a single component.” He said the proposed talent management system would allow guardians to transfer between full-time and part-time duty status to pursue opportunities outside military service and subsequently return to full-time duty without barriers to reentry, or detriment to their career. “This will strengthen our recruiting and retention efforts by providing unique flexible career paths,” Saltzman said. “And we look forward to working with Congress and our advocacy groups on this important initiative.” An emphasis on talent management and tapping into the creativity of young leaders is one of the themes highlighted in the new Space Force Handbook that Saltzman released April 3. The Space Force has to embrace modern talent management processes, he said. “The size and requirements of the Space Force present unique recruiting challenges.” Bring innovation into space operations During recent tours of Space Force bases in the U.S. and overseas, Saltzman said one of the top concerns among service members is that they need better tools, training and flexibility to accomplish increasingly demanding tasks. Units that track space objects and are responsible for space traffic monitoring, for example, worry that they can’t keep up with the demand. The Space Force is now tracking approximately 48,000 objects in space, and projections show the numbers are just going to get bigger. “What they ask me is how do we keep up?” Saltzman said. “What can we do to help accelerate our training? How can we inform the requirements to develop the type of systems that we need to keep pace? That’s the concern I think that I hear from the field.”
Dawn Aerospace completed its first series of rocket-powered flights last week. Mk-II Aurora, a scaled down version of the spaceplane Dawn is developing for commercial operations, took to the skies March 29, 30 and 31 from New Zealand’s Gentanner Aerodrome. The initial test campaign validated key flight systems and demonstrated the benefit of rapid reusability, Dawn CEO Stefan Powell told SpaceNews . During the first flight, the Mk-II Aurora consumed more fuel than anticipated due to a leak in the propellant system. The next day, Dawn engineers removed the Mk-II Aurora engine, took out the oxidizer tank and found the leak. “It was reasonably trivial to fix that, put it back together and fly again,” Powell said. “That speaks to just how different this concept is than a regular rocket. Not only would you have not gotten the vehicle back, but you wouldn’t have been able to execute a repair and show that it works in the same day.” Dawn, a space transportation company based in New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United States, is funding spaceplane development with revenue from sales of small satellite propulsion systems, government grants and investment. Dawn raised $20 million late last year. Prior to testing the recent testing campaign, Dawn flew Mk-II Aurora with jet engines. The company announced certification March 24 from the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority to begin rocket-powered flights. Dawn’s goal is to operate the Mk-II Aurora like an airplane with multiple daily flights taking off and landing on runways. “To have demonstrated rapid reusability in the first tests is proof of our core philosophy, and confirmation that rocket-powered vehicles can be operated just like commercial jet aircraft,” Powell said in a statement. “This fact allows us to rapidly test now, but in the future, it will completely revolutionize the economics of space access.” Rather than striving for speed or altitude on early flights, Dawn is taking an iterative approach to flight testing. The Mk-II is designed to reach an altitude of 20 kilometers. During initial flight tests, the vehicle flew to roughly 2,000 meters and traveled at a maximum speed of 315 kilometers per hour. “We should get the limits of the Mk-II sometimes this year,” Powell said. “Then we’ll move on to the next version of this aircraft.” The next version, Mk-III, is a two-stage spaceplane with an expendable second stage. “The Mk-II demonstrates the technology,” Powell said. “We’ll size the payload of the Mk-III to make sense for the market.”
An updated version of a space safety document endorsed by more than two dozen organizations includes “rules of the road” for avoiding collisions between space objects. The updated “Best Practices for the Sustainability of Space Operations” document, published by the Space Safety Coalition (SSC) April 4, is a major revision of the guide for satellite operators to minimize the risks of collisions in orbit. One of the biggest changes in the document is the inclusion of rules of the road for coordinating maneuvers between objects. The report describes five classes of objects — nonmaneuverable, minimally maneuverable, maneuverable, objects with automated collision avoidance and crewed spacecraft — and outlines rules they should follow when a collision avoidance maneuver involving two of them is required. In general, maneuvers are prioritized in favor of more sophisticated spacecraft unless other arrangements are in place. For example, in an encounter between a maneuverable spacecraft and one with automated collision avoidance, the latter will maneuver. Special coordination may be needed in cases of encounters between two spacecraft in the same category. The rules outlined in the report stemmed from interest among governments in establishing similar binding rules in national regulations. “They want to come up with rules of the road, but they’re not actually flying the satellites, so they don’t have that keen insight on what rules of the road would work, at least commercially,” said Dan Oltrogge, founder and administrator of the Space Safety Coalition, in an interview. He noted that many commercial satellite operators coordinate with one other, and the rules laid out in the document are based on that experience. “We came up with this approach to have something that we could build upon, but had the essential elements.” The rules are modeled to a degree on maritime “give way” rules, where smaller, more maneuverable boats would move to avoid larger ships that cannot change course as quickly. One difference, he noted, is that it can be harder to tell when a spacecraft has maneuvered, since data on its orbit may not be updated quickly. The rules are not intended to replace coordination among operators. “We could make all the rules of the road we want, but unless we emphasize coordination, first and foremost, we’re missing the boat,” Oltrogge said. The rules of the road are not the only changes to the document. It specifically calls on satellite operators to avoid intentional fragmentation, which stemmed from the Russian anti-satellite weapons test in 2021. “There’s a lot of strong feelings of avoiding intentional fragmentation via collision, explosion or just released debris objects,” he said. It references updated international guidelines and standards regarding space sustainability and debris mitigation, as well as cybersecurity to prevent unauthorized access. There are updated guidelines for disposing of spacecraft at the end of their missions, including increased reliability for such efforts and the timing for “passivation” of spacecraft to prevent debris-generating explosions. As of the release of the updated version, 27 companies and organizations had endorsed the document. It includes major GEO satellite operators Inmarsat, Intelsat and SES as well as LEO satellite operators Iridium and Planet. “These best practices clearly set aspirational targets to encourage all space actors to advance towards a safer, more responsible and sustainable use of space,” said Charles Law, senior manager of flight dynamics at SES, in a statement. “Importantly, these best practices seek to stop intentional collisions and fragmentations, and it is encouraging to see a framework to coordinate between maneuverable satellites and to exchange orbit information.” Oltrogge noted the older version of the guidelines had been endorsed by 60 organizations, and that the SSC was working to get them and others to sign on to the new version. “I know a number of operators who are actively reviewing and probably will be signing on very shortly,” he said. He described the report as a living document that will continue to change. “I may take a little breather,” he said, “but the space environment is evolving so fast that we really cannot afford to take much of a breather.”
Apple executive Doug Beck has been named as the next director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the Defense Department announced April 4. DIU, based in Silicon Valley, was established in 2015 to tap technologies from the commercial market for military applications. In recent years DIU has invested in several space projects, including satellite communications , space logistics and servicing, cislunar space operations, geospatial imaging and other technologies. The agency was an early advocate of the use of commercial rockets to launch military payloads. A U.S. Navy veteran, Beck is currently vice president of Apple, Inc., and has been with the company since 2009. He has led Apple’s businesses in Northeast Asia and the Americas, and most recently ran Apple’s worldwide education, health and government business. Beck is a captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve and served in combat operations from 2006 through 2007 in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Action Ribbon, and Presidential Unit Citation. He previously worked with DIU when he founded the agency’s joint reserve component. For the past eight years Beck has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for a New American Security and of the Advisory Board for Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. DIU realigned As head of DIU, “Beck will oversee efforts to accelerate the department’s adoption of commercial technology throughout the military and also serve as a senior advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense on technology innovation, competition and strategic impact,” DoD said in a statement. DoD also announced a realignment of DIU. Instead of functioning as a defense agency under the office of the undersecretary of defense, the director of DIU will report directly to the secretary of defense. “DIU’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of commercial technology at speed and scale, and these changes will further enable it to effectively execute this critical mission,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Beck replaces Michael Brown, who left DIU in September 2022 to join the venture firm Shield Capital.
Small satellite manufacturer Apex will launch its first satellite next year as a demonstration of its capabilities as it prepares for large-scale production. Apex announced April 4 that its first Aries satellite will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission, scheduled for launch no earlier than January 2024. The satellite mission, dubbed “Call to Adventure” by the company, will carry multiple payloads for a set of undisclosed customers. The mission is principally a technology demonstration for Apex, testing the performance of the 200-kilogram Aries satellite. “We want to be able to test out certain maneuvers and do some higher risk operations once we’re in space,” said Ian Cinnamon, chief executive of the company, in an interview. The customers, he said, are those interested in buying full spacecraft from Apex and have signed what he called “multimillion-dollar contracts” for the mission. “After our paying customers are done utilizing the spacecraft for their needs, we are able to use the spacecraft as an in-space testbed” and gain flight heritage on key subsystems before going into full-scale production. Apex announced in October its plans for mass manufacturing of small satellites , raising a $7.5 million seed round. The company added funding after that announcement, Cinnamon said, increasing it to $10 million. The company currently projects producing five Aries spacecraft in 2024, increasing to 20 in 2025 and 100 in 2026. The company’s goal is to produce a standardized bus that can be built in volume and support different customers without costly customization. “The whole mentality of our company is shifting to this productized approach where we’re not doing custom NRE [non-recurring engineering] for each end customer,” he said. “We’ve designed it such that we don’t have to change anything on the spacecraft if a different customer wants a different configuration package.” Apex has not disclosed customers for the Aries satellite, but Cinnamon said the company has had talks with both government and commercial customers. Commercial interest, he said, includes using those satellites for imaging and communications as well as applications related to orbital transfer vehicles. Government customers, notably in national security, are interested in satellites that can be built rapidly. The company has plans for two larger satellites: Nova, weighing 500 kilograms, and Comet, weighing 1,000 kilograms. Half the mass of those spacecraft, as well as the smaller Aries, is devoted to payload and fuel, with the other half the bus itself. “Almost all of the interest in the market today is for that 200-kilogram vehicle,” he said, with some interest in the larger Nova bus. “The market is just not there right now for the vehicles larger than that, but over time I do believe it’ll start to get a little bit bigger.” The biggest challenge for Apex’s plans, he said, is industry-wide supply chain problems. “There’s massive supply chain issues, and one of the things that is very important to us is understanding how we mitigate those supply chain issues very early on.” To address those issues, the company has ordered components not just for the first Aries satellite but the next several it plans to construct. “Our whole mentality is to move faster,” he said. “Even ahead of securing the next several years of customers, we’re already purchasing those components and beginning production.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A thruster issue was behind a temporary outage of Arabsat’s aging Badr-6 broadcast satellite in February, according to an executive for the Saudi Arabia-based operator. The satellite’s payload was shut off for “a few hours” Feb. 6 to preserve power and fuel at its geostationary orbital slot covering the Middle East, North Africa and parts of southern Europe, Arabsat chief strategy officer Abdulhadi Alhassani told SpaceNews . However, Alhassani said customers noticed minimal disruption because engineers quickly transferred them to other satellites Arabsat operates at 26 degrees east. “The services were all recovered in no time,” he said, adding that Badr-6 has since returned to service and is “healthy” even as the spacecraft nears the end of its 15-year design life following its July 2008 launch. Badr-6 is based on the Eurostar 2000+ platform developed by Astrium Satellites, now Airbus Defence and Space, which declined to comment. Also known as Arabsat 4AR, it has 24 C-band and 20 Ku-band transponders for primarily providing video broadcasting services, in addition to supporting telephony and data transmissions. Even though Badr-6 has been restored, Alhassani said Arabsat had not returned all customers that were moved to other satellites because of an incoming replacement satellite. SpaceX is slated to launch Badr-8 in May on a Falcon 9 to replace and expand Arabsat’s C-band and Ku-band capacity at 26 degrees east. “We did not want to transit customers and then, in one year’s time, bring them back again,” he said. Badr-8 is based on Airbus’ Eurostar Neo platform, which unlike chemically powered Badr-6 has an all-electric propulsion system that also means it would take four to five months to reach its final orbital slot post-launch. While the cause of Badr-6’s thruster issue is still under investigation, Alhassani said he was not too surprised to see it run into a problem. “Satellites toward the end of their lifetime start needing a knee or hip replacement,” he said. He said Badr-6, like all seven satellites Arabsat is currently operating, has in-orbit insurance but declined to discuss whether the operator planned to make a claim. Badr-8 will also carry an experimental photonics feeder link from Airbus called Teleo, designed to demonstrate optical communications that the manufacturer said makes it “highly robust against jamming.”
Launch company Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy April 4, having failed to achieve financial orbit after burning through more than $1 billion. The company said it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the District of Delaware as part of efforts to sell the company, after failing to line up financing to sustain the company in recent weeks. That led the company to lay off about 85% of its 800-person workforce March 30 . “While we have taken great efforts to address our financial position and secure additional financing, we ultimately must do what is best for the business,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in a statement about the filing. That involves, Virgin Orbit stated, a “swift conclusion to its sale process in order to provide clarity on the future of the Company to its customers, vendors, and employees.” That includes trying to find a buyer for the company rather than just selling off its assets. “We believe that the cutting-edge launch technology that this team has created will have wide appeal to buyers as we continue in the process to sell the company. At this stage, we believe that the Chapter 11 process represents the best path forward to identify and finalize an efficient and value-maximizing sale,” Hart said. The company reported in its bankruptcy filing $243 million in total assets and $153.5 million in debts. Its largest creditors include several who have paid customer deposits, such as Arqit, iQPS and the U.S. Space Force. Virgin Orbit has secured $31.6 million in debtor-in-possession financing from Virgin Investments Limited (VIL), the investment arm of the Virgin Group. VIL had provided $60 million in loans between November and February as the company’s cash reserves diminished, and an additional $10.7 million March 30 to cover much of the severance and related costs of its layoffs. In its Chapter 11 filing, the company says it tried to find “various alternative financing options” to stabilize the business but found no other options. Other potential investors raised concerns that included lack of familiarity with the launch industry and broader market conditions, such as volatility in the banking sector. The filing comes a day after Virgin Orbit, whose stock is traded on the Nasdaq, informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it would not be able to file an annual report known as Form 10-K in time. “Based on currently available information, management anticipates that it will be disclosing in the Form 10-K that the Company’s liquidity condition raises substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern for at least twelve months from the expected issuance date of the Form 10-K,” the company said in its SEC filing. In the filing, the company said it expected that Form 10-K would show that the company generated $33.1 million in revenue in 2022 but recorded a net loss of $191.2 million. The company had $51.2 million in cash and equivalents on hand as of the end of 2022. The company had been in danger of running out of cash for months as filings showed declining reserves amid steady losses. Those problems were exacerbated by the Jan. 9 failure of its LauncherOne rocket on what was to be the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom, with the company’s plane flying out of Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England. LauncherOne started as a project within another Virgin company, Virgin Galactic. Unveiled in 2012, LauncherOne was originally designed to make use of the same WhiteKnightTwo aircraft used by Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. The company scaled up the rocket and, in 2015, announced it acquired a Boeing 747 from the airline Virgin Atlantic to serve as the vehicle’s launch platform. In 2017, Virgin Galactic spun off the LauncherOne effort into a new company, Virgin Orbit , hiring Hart, a longtime Boeing executive, to run the company. The company was gearing up at the time for a first launch in 2018. That launch slipped, though, until 2020, and failed to reach orbit. The company did successfully place satellites into orbit on its second launch in January 2021. However, the company struggled to increase its launch rate, which it needed to generate revenue to cover the high costs of operating the overall system. The company performed one more launch in 2021 and two in 2022 before the failed U.K. launch in January. In its April 3 SEC filing, Virgin Orbit said it has an accumulated deficit over the company’s history of $1.01 billion.
TAMPA, Fla. — Thuraya is providing Swiss small satellite operator Astrocast a $17.5 million financial lifeline in a deal that marks the Emirati company’s first investment in a low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation. The companies said April 3 they had agreed on terms for a convertible loan that Thuraya could later turn into shares in cash-strapped Astrocast, which saw plans to raise money for its constellation on the stock market fall apart last year. Astrocast currently operates 18 satellites and is looking to expand its fleet to improve connectivity services for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Thuraya, the mobile satellite services subsidiary of geostationary orbit (GEO) operator Yahsat, provides the L-band spectrum that Astrocast uses to connect IoT devices for tracking, monitoring, and other applications in remote locations. The companies entered into a four-year technical cooperation agreement for the spectrum in 2019, and said they are currently exploring ways to extend this deal for another four years as part of the investment. Yahsat CEO Ali Al Hashemi said the operators are seeking “ways to expand our service offering across GEO and LEO” in a satellite IoT market forecasted to generate more than $6 billion in cumulative revenues over the next four years. Astrocast recorded 287,000 Swiss Francs ($313,000) in revenues for the six months to the end of June 2022 in its latest financial results, after launching initial commercial services earlier that year. The company is due to publish financial results May 26 for the rest of 2022. Capital for growth Astrocast trades shares on Norway’s Euronext Growth Oslo stock market and was seeking to raise funds via a secondary listing in France last year before running into volatile financial markets. The company had said in May it needed to raise 43 million Swiss Francs by the end of 2022 to keep its expansion plans on track. Before shelving the secondary listing, these plans included having 20 satellites in LEO by the end 2022, 40 in 2023, and a constellation of 100 satellites by 2025. The failure to list shares on France’s Euronext Growth Paris junior stock market also derailed plans to buy Dutch remote monitoring specialist Hiber , which would have supported Astrocast’s expansion into the Americas to provide global services. Although Astrocast has not ruled out a secondary public listing, the company has been busy discussing alternative funding options with existing and potential partners. The Swiss operator said Feb. 15 it has secured convertible loans from existing shareholders worth 7.4 million Swiss Francs to support its operations. W11 Capital Management, an investment firm with ties to Astrocast board member Jon Cholak, also bought treasury shares in the operator March 17 worth about 411,000 Swiss Francs.
Lockheed Martin was selected as the “preferred bidder” for a multibillion-dollar Australian military project to build military communications satellites and supporting infrastructure. The Australian Defence Force on April 3 announced Lockheed Martin as the preferred bidder. This means the company is not actually receiving a contract award but was selected to move into the next phase of negotiations with the Australian government. Multiple teams spearheaded by major defense contractors for the past two years have been vying for the so-called Defence Joint Project 9102. JP9102 is billed as one of Australia’s largest space infrastructure projects. It requires a prime contractor to work with Australian businesses. Bids for the first phase of the project opened in April 2021 and closed in January 2022. Lockheed Martin said it was the only company selected to move into the next phase “to refine our offer based on their requirements,” a spokesperson told SpaceNews . According to Australian media reports, the ADF is interested in buying at least two geostationary communications satellites and wants a sovereign military satcom capability. Currently Australia’s defense forces rely on commercial satellite services and on the U.S. Wideband Global Satcom constellation. Air Vice-Marshal David Scheul, head of Australia’s Air Defence and Space Systems Division, said the project will deliver the country’s “first sovereign-controlled satellite communication system over the Indo-Pacific ocean regions.” Prime has to work with local companies Lockheed Martin edged out competing teams led by Airbus, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Australia’s largest satellite operator Optus . “We are proud to be selected as the preferred bidder to deliver this critical capability to the Australian Defence Force,” said Warren McDonald, chief executive of Lockheed Martin Australia and New Zealand. Lockheed Martin for decades has been the primary contractor for the Pentagon’s classified communications satellites . McDonald said a “significant amount of the content for Lockheed Martin’s proposed JP9102 solution will be via Australian small and medium enterprises and that the company is committed to knowledge sharing and technology transfer.” The Australian companies that partnered with Lockheed Martin include Inovor Technologies, EM Solutions, AV-Comm, Linfox, Shoal Group, Ronson Gears, Calytrix Technologies, Conscia, Clearbox Systems, DXC and Blacktree Technology. Lockheed Martin said it also teamed up with the government of Victoria state in southeast Australia to establish Victoria as the engineering and technical hub for JP9102, promising to create more than 200 advanced space industry jobs in the state.
Kleos Space and Spire Global have been awarded contract extensions by the National Reconnaissance Office for commercial radio-frequency (RF) data, the companies announced April 3. Kleos and Spire are global companies with U.S. headquarters in Denver and San Francisco, respectively. They were among six companies the NRO selected last year for cooperative agreements that give the agency access to the companies’ business plans and help the agency understand the quality of commercially available data. RF-signals monitoring from space is an emerging sector of the remote sensing industry that uses low-orbiting satellites to track ships, vehicles, electronic jammers or any devices that emit radio frequency signals. Kleos operates three clusters of four satellites to detect RF signals and pinpoint their location. Spire operates a constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites that monitor radio-frequency signals, including 40 satellites with geolocation capabilities that can track GPS jamming events. NRO ‘commercial enhancements’ Both companies were awarded “stage two” two-year contract options under the NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement program. The NRO builds and operates surveillance and reconnaissance satellites for the U.S. government and in recent years has expanded its agreements with private companies in an effort to leverage commercial investments in remote sensing. The stage one contracts focused on modeling and simulations of companies’ data collection capabilities. “Under stage two, Kleos is demonstrating the accuracy of its radio frequency geolocation data over land and water and end-to-end latency of its overall architecture,” the company said in a statement. This phase of the contract “emphasizes tasking, data collection, and direct delivery of data to end users,” said Kleos. “The NRO also exercised an option for future purchases of Kleos data and products.” Spire said the NRO under the stage two contract will “continue to evaluate how commercial RF will be integrated into its overhead architecture.” “The NRO has continued to show its commitment to innovation by recognizing the value of RF data in providing situational awareness and strengthening global security,” said Chuck Cash, Spire’s vice president of federal sales.
Updated 6:15 p.m. Eastern with comments from post-event interviews. HOUSTON — NASA announced April 3 the three Americans and one Canadian who will be on the crew of the Artemis 2 mission, the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century. During a ceremony at Ellington Airport near the Johnson Space Center here, NASA announced that Artemis 2 will be commanded by Reid Wiseman, with Victor Glover as pilot. Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be mission specialists. Wiseman, a former chief astronaut, flew to the International Space Station for a 165-day mission in 2014. Glover flew on the Crew-1 commercial crew mission to the ISS in late 2020 for a six-month mission. Koch spent nearly a year in space on the ISS from March 2019 to February 2020. Hansen, one of four active Canadian astronauts, will be making his first flight. “The mission to the moon will launch four pioneers, but it will carry more than astronauts,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the event, just before introducing the crew. “Artemis 2 will carry the hopes of millions of people around the world.” The four were selected by Joe Acaba, NASA’s current chief astronaut, and Norm Knight, director of flight operations at JSC, under the oversight of Vanessa Wyche, director of the center. Officials did not elaborate at the event on the process by which they selected the four, beyond previously plans to have one Canadian among the four-person crew in exchange for Canadian contributions to the lunar Gateway. “ A profound moment “ In an interview after the announcement, Glover said he and the other crew members were informed they would be on the mission at a meeting nearly a month ago. “It was a profound moment,” he said. “I think all of us have a strong sense of duty, and realize this is a very important piece, but a very small piece of a much bigger project.” While some activities related to the mission, like pressure suit fittings, will take place soon, training for the mission itself won’t begin until June. That training will also include support for development work for Orion ahead of the mission, the first crewed flight of the spacecraft. “We have a lot of work to do.” That training will involve a lot of time in Orion spacecraft simulators, said Matt Ramsey, Artemis 2 mission development manager, in an interview. They will also train in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a large pool at JSC, with a Orion crew module mockup, as well as launch-related training at the Kennedy Space Center. Mission timeline Artemis 2 is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than November 2024 on the second flight of the Space Launch System. It will be the first time either the SLS or the Orion spacecraft have carried astronauts. The SLS will place the Orion spacecraft into an elliptical Earth orbit, remaining there for about a day to allow astronauts to test the spacecraft and confirm its life support systems and other key subsystems are performing well. The spacecraft will also perform a proximity operations or “prox ops” demonstration by maneuvering in the vicinity of the SLS’s Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage. “You get a full day to check out all your subsystems before you hit go to TLI,” or translunar injection, Ramsey said of that initial Earth orbit. “If at any point you have issues, you have the opportunity to come back very quickly.” Once the tests are complete, the Orion will fire its main engine to place the spacecraft on a free return trajectory around the moon. The spacecraft will swing around the moon without going into orbit around it, heading back to Earth to splash down in the Pacific. The full mission is scheduled to last about 10 days. The three “driving principles” for Artemis 2, he said, is crew safety and survival, vehicle survival and mission success. The mission success principle, he said, features testing out the spacecraft subsystems, including in emergency and off-nominal conditions. There are additional flight test objectives the mission will attempt to carry out if time permits to help reduce risk for later missions. The acceptance of risk on Artemis 2 will be different from Artemis 1 because of the presence of that four-person crew. On Artemis 1 “we pushed the edge of the performance envelope. We’re not going to do that for Artemis 2,” said Amit Kshatriya, head of NASA’s new Moon to Mars Program Office, in an interview. Having Orion remain in orbit for a day to check out systems before heading to the moon is an example of that strategy, he said. “We’re not doing anything that needlessly puts more risk onto the crew.” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said NASA is still going through the lessons learned from the Artemis 1 mission, but felt confident enough in the outcome of that mission to name the Artemis 2 crew and have them start training. “I think that’s a that’s a great sign that we feel confident that we can trust human lives to this vehicle.” The critical path for Artemis 2 is completing the Orion crew module, which will have crew displays and life support systems not needed for the uncrewed Artemis 1 flight. Free said there have been some supply chain issues with components of the life support system, but NASA and Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin have been working around those delays by changing the order of work on the module, “trying to do as much as we can while we’re waiting on parts.” “Really happy with this gift” Artemis 2 is slated to be the first crewed mission to go beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17, the final Apollo lunar landing mission in December 1972. Nine Apollo missions went to the moon between 1968 and 1972, carrying three men each. That included three people who each flew on two Apollo lunar missions, for a total of 24 individuals — all American — who have traveled to the moon. Hansen will be the first non-American to go around the Moon. “We would not be here without the friendship and close partnership between our two nations,” said François-Philippe Champagne, the Canadian minister of innovation, science and industry, at the crew announcement event. “This is more than just about going back to the moon. This is about investing in the future. This is about possibilities.” “It is not lost on any of us that the United States could choose to go back to the moon by themselves,” Hansen said at the event. “All of Canada is grateful.” Artemis 2 is a precursor to Artemis 3, which will attempt the first crewed landing on the Moon since Apollo 17. On that mission, a four-person crew will fly on Orion and enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit. Orion will dock with a Starship lunar lander that will take two astronauts to the lunar surface, spending nearly a week there before returning to Orion for the trip home. Artemis 3 is scheduled to launch no earlier than December 2025, pending development of both the Starship lunar lander by SpaceX and new lunar spacesuits by Axiom Space. Glover said that he doesn’t mind that, by going on Artemis 2, he will miss out on an opportunity to walk on the moon on Artemis 3. “The chance to fly on this is amazing,” he said. “Artemis 2 is a gift. Artemis 3 will be a gift for someone else. But I’m really happy with this gift right now.” Not starting training until June, he added, will give him time not only to transition from his current work in the astronaut office but also letting this crew assignment sink in. He said his family is excited about his assignment, and the crew and their families got to speak by phone with President Joe Biden the day before the public announcement. “He talked about how important this is for all of humanity,” Glover said of that call. “He talked about how important this is to uplift all of humanity.” “It is an honor,” he said of the opportunity to go to the moon. “It’s mind blowing.”
The space infrastructure firm Redwire in a planned demonstration later this year will install ExoAnalytic Solutions’ space-tracking software on a navigation camera aboard a satellite in orbit. The company is pitching this technology to the military as a security camera that could be installed on satellites to monitor potential hazards. Machine-vision cameras like the one developed by Redwire are used by spacecraft to navigate and maneuver in proximity to other objects. The company will update the camera with space-tracking algorithms so it can serve as a surveillance camera for satellites, said Dean Bellamy, the company’s executive vice president for national security space. “We want to upload the same technology that ExoAnalytic is using for their telescopes on the ground and put it on our camera,” he told SpaceNews . ExoAnalytic is a commercial space monitoring company that operates more than 300 telescopes worldwide. The vision camera technology was developed by Deep Space Systems, a company that in 2020 became part of Redwire . Technology to be tested on Starfish vehicle The demonstration is part of an agreement with Starfish Space , a satellite-servicing startup that is using Redwire’s computer-vision camera in an upcoming demonstration mission. Starfish’s servicing prototype vehicle, called Otter Pup, will ride to low Earth orbit on a Launcher Orbiter space tug that will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled in June. The Otter Pup aided by the palm-sized camera will attempt to rendezvous and dock with the Orbiter in a rehearsal of a satellite life-extension mission. After that task is completed, Redwire will upload ExoAnalytic’s space-tracking algorithms to the camera and try to operate it as a space domain awareness sensor. The sensor will perform star tracking and space object detection, Bellamy said. The camera has on-board processing and storage for two catalogs, one for stars and one for resident space objects. Two cameras for 360-degree coverage The camera paired with ExoAnalytic’s software, a product Redwire named Cerebro, would give satellite manufacturers the option to replace star trackers and just use two cameras to provide 360-degree local proximity awareness and attitude control, Bellamy said. The ephemeris data collected in orbit on the trajectory of resident space objects, he said, could be ingested into the U.S. Space Force’s repository known as the unified data library. “If you put the cameras on every Space Force mission that goes up,” Bellamy said, “you’d put a safety bubble around every satellite so you would know what’s happening, and you have attribution, characterization, indications and warning if somebody gets close.” Bellamy did not disclose the price of the Cerebro sensor. He said Redwire estimated that each camera, depending on the configuration, should cost less than 1% of the average price of a satellite in a proliferated constellation. A version of Redwire’s navigation camera, developed under contract to Lockheed Martin, flew around the moon on NASA’s Orion lunar spacecraft for the Artemis 1 mission.
SEOUL, South Korea – Japan has delayed the launch of a H-2A rocket planned for May to no earlier than August in the wake of the failed inaugural flight of H3 rocket. The Japanese space agency JAXA announced the delay March 31 , saying it is “difficult to start the preparation for the [H-2A] launch this month, because an investigation of the H3 launch failure is underway.” The H3 and H-2A rockets share many components, particularly in t heir upper stage engines . The H3 upper stage uses an engine designated LE-5B-3, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), which is similar to the LE-5B engine used on the existing H-2A rocket. An interim investigation report suggests a problem with the electrical system on H3’s upper stage that prevented the engine from igniting. And this has put launches of the H-2A on hold while the investigation continues. JAXA’s decision will leave two Japanese space missions grounded for several more months. The affected H-2A rocket was supposed to lift off from the Tanegashima Space Center, carrying the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission ( XRISM ), an X-ray astronomy spacecraft, and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon ( SLIM ), a lunar lander. XRISM is a replacement for Astro-H, or Hitomi, a Japanese X-ray observatory that failed within weeks of its 2016 launch. The new X-ray observatory features contributions from NASA and the European Space Agency. SLIM is a lunar lander, primarily intended to be a demonstration of precision landing technologies. The spacecraft will carry a multi-band camera scientists hope to use to study compositions of rocks around the landing site. The space agency said for the H-2A rocket to meet its May launch date, the fueling process for the SLIM lander must begin in March, but it is “difficult” to do so due to the investigation of H3 failure. JAXA said August is seen as the next launch window for the mission, considering the moon’s orbit. But it could be delayed further, should the H3 investigation drag on, according to the agency.
Space Pioneer has become the first Chinese private launch firm to achieve orbit with a liquid propellant rocket. The Tianlong-2 (“Sky Dragon-2”) lifted off from a transport erector launcher at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 4:48 a.m. Eastern, April 2, sending a small remote sensing experiment satellite into orbit. U.S. Space Force tracking cataloged the Ai Taikong Kexue (“love space science”) satellite in a 478 by 496-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination of 97.4 degrees. The satellite was developed by Hunan Hangsheng Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. The launch means Space Pioneer—full name Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd—becomes the first private company to reach orbit with its first launch. The three-stage Tianlong-2 is capable of carrying 2,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 1,500 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The rocket used coal-derived kerosene instead of the fuel refined from oil, according to Space Pioneer. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), China’s state-owned main space contractor, recently approved the coal-derived kerosene for use in launches. The successful liquid propellant launch marks a major milestone in the development of China’s commercial space sector, the dawn of which occurred in late 2014 with a government policy change. 2023 could see more than 20 launches of private and commercially-developed rockets. New commercial launchers coming on line could help provide China with greater launch capacity, more flexibility and participate in national projects including the Tiangong space station and deployment of a national broadband megaconstellation . Before launch Tianlong-2 was understood to have used 85-ton-thrust, YF-102 gas generator engines incorporating 3D-printed developed by CASC. This was confirmed April 3 by CASC’s liquid propulsion academy. The three first stage YF-102 were arranged in a triangular arrangement. Tianlong-2 also has a diameter of 3.35 meters, as with many of CASC’s Long March series rockets. The firm thanked the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND), the government body overseeing the space sector, CASC and its sister defense giant CASIC in a press statement . Space Pioneer announced Feb. 15 that it recently secured “B+ and “Pre-C” strategic funding rounds. The company says it has now raised nearly 3 billion yuan ($438 million) in funding since its founding in 2018. A number of investors are linked to the state. Major investors include China International Capital Corporation (CICC), a partially state-owned investment vehicle, CCB International, belonging to the China Construction Bank Corporation, and CITIC Construction, the engineering and construction arm of Chinese state-owned CITIC Group, Zhejiang University Lianchuang, as well as venture capital investment. The firm has also received sponsorship and investment from Zhangjiagang, a city in Jiangsu province on the Yangtze river. Space Pioneer is building rocket manufacturing facilities in the city and the Tianlong-2 launch also bore the name “Zhangjiagang.” Funds raised in the two recent rounds are to be used for the development of the larger Tianlong-3 launcher and its rocket engines, construction of requisite launch facilities, and attracting talent. Space Pioneer says it is developing its own staged-combustion kerolox engines. Tianlong-3 will be a two-stage kerolox rocket with a reusable first stage. A Space Pioneer press release says the rocket will be capable of lifting 15 tons of payload to LEO and is targeting launching batches of up to 60 satellites per launch for China’s Guowang LEO communications megaconstellation. CASC’s Long March 5B is currently understood to be the main launcher for the project. The company is targeting a first launch of Tianlong-3 in early 2024. It plans to ramp up to a planned cadence of more than 12 launches per year from 2025. Curiously, Space Pioneer initially started out developing engines burning green monopropellant before changing direction. The firm also apparently scrapped development of the Tianlong-1 rocket. The firm is competing with a number of other Chinese private and commercial launch firms. Rocket startups including iSpace, Galactic Energy, OneSpace and Landspace have attempted light-lift, solid rocket launches, with iSpace and Galactic Energy proving successful with at least one launch. All bar OneSpace are developing liquid propellant rockets designed for eventual reusability. Other players including Orienspace and Rocket Pi are likewise competing in this arena. Landspace last week announced it had completed the final assembly of its second Zhuque-2 methane-LOX rocket. It will seek to improve on the first launch from December, which failed following an issue with vernier thrusters on the rocket’s upper stage. Spinoffs from giant state-owned enterprises CASC ( China Rocket ), CASIC ( Expace ) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS Space ) have also succeeded with solid orbital launches. Space Pioneer and another recently emerging company, Orienspace , are moving directly towards medium-lift and heavier classes of launchers. Earlier-established Chinese commercial firms looked to first develop lighter solid and liquid propellant rockets. These trends appear to reflect early entrants initially looking to launch small satellites for private customers, being the apparent market, whereas China has more recently indicated that private firms can participate in launching both the national “satellite internet” project and sending cargo to the Tiangong space station.
A new NASA policy makes it unlikely future missions will be named after individuals in response to the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. A NASA Policy Directive (NPD), dated December 2022, lists updated requirements for naming NASA facilities or projects. It replaces a policy for naming major NASA projects that dated back to 2000. The new policy got little attention until Mark Clampin, NASA astrophysics director, mentioned it during a meeting of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee March 29. He brought it up in response to a request by the committee from its previous meeting for a briefing on the agency’s “mission naming and memorialization policy” in light of the JWST naming controversy. “The bottom line that we do now have an NPD that tells us how to name programs, and who lies in the chain of responsibility for making those decisions,” Clampin said at the meeting, without going into details about the details of the policy. The biggest difference in the new policy is language that explicitly discourages naming missions after individuals. “Where possible, limit the practice of naming projects, missions, instruments, etc., after individuals,” it states. “Instead use the theme of unity, inspiration, or the accomplishments of a person as the primary criterion for a project or mission name.” “Except in extraordinary circumstances will names of individuals be considered and, only in more rare circumstances, may individuals who are still living receive consideration,” the policy adds. In those circumstances, the use of a person’s name “should be based on their contributions to America, NASA, and humanity, and therefore be so extraordinary that any other form of recognition by the Agency would be considered inadequate.” The change comes after controversy about naming the James Webb Space Telescope, the agency’s latest flagship astrophysics mission, after Webb, a NASA administrator during the 1960s. Many astronomers opposed the name in recent years, citing allegations that Webb, at NASA and previously at the State Department, fired LGBTQ+ employees. NASA conducted a historical review and, in a final report released in November , concluded there was no evidence to substantiate those claims against Webb. That conclusion left some scientists dissatisfied, including several who led the effort to get the telescope renamed. “Ultimately, Webb has at best a complicated legacy,” they said in a statement after the release of the historical report. “His activities did not earn him a $10 billion monument.” Other individuals, regardless of their legacies, are unlikely to gain a monument in the form of a NASA mission. The agency had routinely named astrophysics missions after astronomers, including the original “Great Observatories” missions: Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope. NASA’s next flagship space telescope, originally called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, was renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in 2020 after NASA astronomer Nancy Grace Roman. Such practices have been less common in NASA’s other science divisions. A handful of NASA planetary science missions have been named after historic scientists or explorers, including the Cassini mission to Saturn, Galileo mission to Jupiter and Magellan mission to Venus. Most recent missions, though, have had more generic names or acronyms. NASA used student contests, for example, to select the names of Mars rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance. Earth science and heliophysics missions have also generally used generic names or acronyms. An exception was NASA’s announcement in 2017 that it would rename the Solar Probe Plus mission the Parker Solar Probe after space scientist Eugene Parker. That marked the first time NASA named a mission after a living scientist. (Parker died in March 2022.) Another change to the naming policy is the requirement that an agency historian be involved “early in any consideration process with responsibility of providing a verifiable review of any individual whose name is being considered.” That historical analysis, the policy states, “will include a human capital review to ensure diversity, unity, inclusion, and inspiration are considered.” While acronyms are commonplace for NASA missions, the policy states that acronyms should be “avoided in selecting names except where the acronym is descriptive and easily pronounced.” A similar provision was in the earlier policy.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off April 2 at 10:29 a.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carrying 10 military satellites, including two built by SpaceX. The mission to low Earth orbit is the first launch of a new military communications and missile tracking constellation built by the Space Development Agency (SDA), a U.S. Space Force organization created to accelerate the use of commercial space technologies in military systems. SpaceX first attempted to launch this mission March 30 but the launch was aborted three seconds before liftoff. The company said the automatic abort was triggered by one of the first-stage engines. SDA said the launch was pushed off another couple of days to “investigate technical issues with the launch vehicle.” The launch on Sunday was Tranche 0 of SDA’s proliferated low Earth orbit constellation. These were the first 10 of 28 data-transport and missile-tracking satellites that make up Tranche 0. This was SpaceX’s 22nd launch of 2023. The first-stage booster for this mission had previously launched a batch of Starlink internet satellites. After separating from the second stage about two and a half minutes into the flight, the booster performed three engine burns and returned to Landing Zone 4 at the launch site about eight minutes after liftoff. This was SpaceX’s 183rd successful recovery of a first-stage booster. At SDA’s request, SpaceX did not provide views of the second stage or payload updates after booster separation. The satellites were placed into two orbital planes 1,000 kilometers above Earth. This was the first of two dedicated launches to be performed by SpaceX under a December 2020 $150 million contract awarded by SDA for Tranche 0 satellites. The remaining 18 satellites are projected to launch in June. SDA declares mission success “This is a major accomplishment for SDA and for the whole Department of Defense,” the agency’s director Derek Tournear said in a statement after the launch. The Tranche 0 mission launched on Sunday included eight data-transport satellites made by York Space Systems that will be part of a mesh communications network known as Transport Layer, and two infrared sensor satellites made by SpaceX and Leidos that detect and track missiles in flight. These will be part of the Tracking Layer. The Tracking Layer is envisioned as a global network of eyes in the sky designed to provide a defense shield against Russian and Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The data collected by missile-tracking satellites will be sent via optical links to the Transport Layer . That would ensure that if a missile threat is detected, its location and trajectory data can be transmitted securely through space and downlinked to military command centers. The 10 satellites now in orbit will undergo several months of tests and checkout of the buses and payloads. A ‘proliferated architecture’ SDA plans to build a network of hundreds of interconnected satellites, an approach it calls a “ proliferated architecture ” relying on low-cost satellites in large numbers to deliver critical services. DoD typically has favored smaller constellations of costlier, more complex satellites. To track hypersonic missiles in all phases of flight, DoD determined that satellites in low orbit 1,000 kilometers above Earth would be better positioned to see these targets, as opposed to the existing geostationary satellites stationed 37,000 kilometers above Earth. Space Force leaders have endorsed the idea of a proliferated constellation as a more resilient system that would be harder for adversaries to disrupt during a conflict. If China were to consider targeting U.S. satellites, “a proliferated constellation makes it a much tougher proposition for them to execute against,” said Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman. “Satellite constellations must be proliferated, disaggregated and distributed,” he told lawmakers March 14. “The Space Development Agency’s proliferated warfighter space architecture provides a prime example of those efforts.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The launch of the first commercial satellites in AST SpaceMobile’s cellphone-compatible broadband constellation has slipped into 2024, the company said March 31 as it disclosed rising costs for developing the network. AST SpaceMobile had planned to launch the first five BlueBird satellites it is building in-house on a SpaceX Falcon 9 before the end of this year, already about six months behind schedule because of supply chain issues. These satellites, known as Block 1, are now slated to launch in the first quarter of 2024 to low Earth orbit, where they would provide connectivity for smartphones outside cellular coverage in partnership with mobile network operators (MNOs). The Block 1 satellites are 50% smaller than originally planned to speed up development, about the same size and weight as the company’s 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker-3 prototype satellite that launched in November. The Texas-based company said it is actively talking with several launch providers to begin deploying 20 full-sized BlueBird satellites in Block 2 later in 2024. Although AST SpaceMobile expects to start generating revenues after deploying Block 1, it said in a regulatory filing that Block 2 will also be needed to “provide coverage to the most commercially attractive MNO markets.” The company has previously said it needs 110 BlueBirds in LEO to reach substantial global mobile coverage. AST SpaceMobile raised around $417 million for its plans in April 2021 when it became a public company by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). However, the company said in the regulatory filing it needs to raise between $550 million and $650 million to develop, build, and launch all 20 of its Block 2 satellites. Rising costs AST SpaceMobile said in August that the cost for each Block 2 satellite had increased by about 14% to $16 million as inflation and rising supply chain prices weighed on the company. In the March 31 regulatory filing, it said costs had risen to between $16 million and $18 million per Block 2 satellite. “The cost of the satellite configuration has increased due to the impacts of inflation, supply chain disruptions, design changes, and increase in the cost of electronic components, launch costs and other aspects of our design and assembly activities,” AST SpaceMobile stated. The company said it has enough cash to fund the Block 1 satellites, estimated to cost between $100 million and $110 million in total, and for its operations over the next 12 months. However, it is exploring multiple routes to raise additional capital, including taking on debt, issuing equity, and securing funds from export credit agencies. While AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan said BlueWalker 3 has validated the company’s network architecture, and proven its ability to deliver 4G and 5G speeds, he said tests are not yet complete. The company plans to announce the results of these tests at a future date in conjunction with MNO partners, Avellan added. AST SpaceMobile recorded $239.3 million in cash reserves at the end of 2022. Total operating expenses increased by $61.3 million to $152.9 million for 2022, compared with $91.6 million for 2021.
Lunar rover developer Astrolab has signed an agreement with SpaceX to transport its first rover to the moon on a future Starship flight. Astrolab said it has arranged to fly the Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover it is developing as a payload on a Starship lunar lander mission scheduled for as soon as mid-2026. The companies did not disclose the value of the agreement, which Astrolab says is the first commercial contract SpaceX has signed for lunar cargo delivery. Jaret Matthews, founder and chief executive of Astrolab, said in an interview that the mission, which will include 1,000 kilograms of customer payloads, will be the first flight of the FLEX rover. It will be a rideshare payload on a Starship mission landing somewhere in the south polar region of the moon. “Because our rover can traverse up to a couple thousand kilometers in a given year, we’re less sensitive to exactly where we land,” he said. “’It is definitely optimized for the south polar region because that’s fundamentally where we think that the bulk of the activity is going to be.” Astrolab has not disclosed specific customers for the mission, but he said they have a variety of planned applications, from resource utilization to data. “We are taking care of the core functions of mobility, navigation, communication and power, and that allows them to really focus on whatever they want to specifically achieve,” he said, adding that Astrolab expects to announce details about its customers in the coming months. The company unveiled its plans for FLEX a year ago after performing tests of a prototype in the California desert. The design is now at about the preliminary design review stage of maturity, Matthews said, with a particular focus on a robotic arm for the rover that has six degrees of freedom for deploying instruments or other payloads. He emphasized the benefits the rover’s modular design provides to potential customers. “This modular concept allows us to have adaptive utility,” he said. “You land new implements or new cargo over time, and it refreshes, it renews what you can do with the platform. That’s our big differentiator.” Astrolab is preparing to offer FLEX to NASA for the agency’s upcoming Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) competition. NASA is expected to issue a call for proposals by May for the LTV, which will be used by astronauts on missions starting with Artemis 5 in the late 2020s as well as be able to be controlled robotically between human landings. “We’re excited about that program It’s well aligned with what we’re doing,” Matthews said. “We are certainly going to throw our hat in the ring.” He added that he hopes that NASA pursues a services model for the LTV program, much as it has done with the Human Landing System landers. Astrolab now has more than 20 full-time employees along with strategic partnerships that he said allows the company “to punch well above our weight” particularly for the upcoming LTV competition, where major aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have announced plans to offer rovers to NASA. “That’s going to allow us to be first to market with this service.” Astrolab has not disclosed how much money it has raised, but Matthews raised the possibility of being able to fund development of FLEX through customer contracts. “We’re hoping that that revenue stream will allow us to execute on this plan, perhaps without necessarily have to raise,” he said. But, he added, “to the extent that investors are interested in what we’re doing, we’re more than happy to talk to them.”
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea will spend 874.2 billion won ($674 million) on space programs this year to expand its domestic space industry, develop a next-generation launch vehicle, and bolster space defense capabilities. It is a 19.5 percent increase from the previous year , and the most South Korea has ever budgeted for space. Details of the budget, approved by the National Assembly in December, were announced following a March 31 meeting of space experts presided over by the vice science minister. The meeting reviewed all space-related budgets that are scattered across government organizations. President Yoon Suk-yeol hinted at a sharp budget increase in a Nov. 28 speech , in which he promised to double the government’s space budget in the next five years and funnel at least 100 trillion won ($76.8 billion) into the space sector by 2045. “In the future, countries with a space vision will lead the world’s economy and will be able to solve the problems that humanity is currently facing,” President Yoon said in the speech. The double-digit hike marks “the first step toward the near-term goal of having a 1.5 trillion won [space] budget by 2027,” An Hyoung-joon, a research fellow at Science and Technology Policy Institute, a state-funded think tank, told SpaceNews , referring to the 4 th revision of the Basic Plan for Promotion of Space Development , a five-year plan that covers from 2023 through 2027. “To get there, the budget should be expanded by 15~20 percent every year.” The lion’s share of the budget, or 586.2 billion won ($450 million), will be used to expand the space industry. It will focus on developing civil satellites, including the nation’s own satellite navigation system , that would be applied to commercial products and services for non-space sectors. “To develop more civil satellites would help create new markets,” the science ministry said in a March 30 statement . While 48.7 billion won was set aside to advance integrated control of civil satellites, the government will spend 12 billion won on localization of satellite parts and components. The second-biggest slice of the budget, or 148 billion won ($113.6 million), will go primarily to developing a next-generation carrier rocket that will succeed the current workhorse, KSLV-2. The new rocket KSLV-3, expected to debut in 2030, is designed to be a kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled two-stage vehicle. Its first stage will have a cluster of five 100-ton thrust multi-stage combustion cycle engines, and the upper stage with two 10-ton thrust multi-stage combustion cycle engines. The two engines and rocket hardware will be developed by the state-funded Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), in collaboration with a private partner that will be selected by September. The KSLV-3 will be capable of delivering up to 10 tons of payload to low Earth orbit; 7 tons to sun-synchronous orbit; 3.7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit; and 1.8 tons to lunar transfer orbit. South Korea plans to launch a domestically developed robotic lunar lander on KSLV-3 by 2032. Nearly 95.4 billion won ($73.1 million) is allocated to space defense. It is part of a broader space defense strategy that will cost 1.42 trillion won ($1.09 billion) through 2030. Under the strategy, the Korean military will launch an undisclosed number of satellites to ensure “close and constant” monitoring of military activities on and around the Korean Peninsula. Meanwhile, the science ministry said March 30 that the third launch of KSLV-2 rocket is due between mid-May and late June. The exact date will be announced in April, the ministry added. The rocket’s second launch took place June 21 last year, putting a performance test satellite and four university satellites into low Earth orbit. In the upcoming flight, the rocket will carry eight satellites , including NEXTSat-2 as the primary payload and SNIPE , a constellation consisting of four 6U CubeSats to identify temporal and spatial variation of small-scale plasma structures in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. The SNIPE was initially set to launch last year on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but it was remanifested to KSLV-2 due to sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine.
Astra is still planning to conduct a first launch of its Rocket 4 vehicle before the end of the year as it scales up production of spacecraft electric propulsion systems. Astra said in a March 30 earnings call that it was making steady progress on the new vehicle, development of which it accelerated in August when the company announced it was retiring the smaller Rocket 3.3 vehicle after its latest failure. “We continue to expect test flights for Rocket 4 to begin in the latter part of 2023, and continue to remain on track with our key development milestones leading up to our first flight,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said on the call. Those milestones, he said, include completing qualification of the upper stage engine and a full-duration static-fire test of the first stage engine. The company has also conducted testing of the vehicle’s propellant tanks and work on the production line for the vehicle. Rocket 4 is significantly larger than Rocket 3.3, with a planned payload capacity of up to 600 kilograms to mid-inclination orbits. Kemp said it will incorporate lessons learned from Rocket 3.3, which failed to reach orbit in three out of five launches. That included its final launch in June 2022, a mission called TROPICS-1, which an investigation completed March 1 concluded was caused by a fuel leak in the upper stage engine . “Rocket 4 incorporates key architectural decisions that we believe address the causes of the TROPICS-1 mishap while building on the heritage of flight-proven elements of the Rocket 3 series,” Kemp said. He acknowledged the risks, though, inherent with the first launches of new rockets. “We’ve been humbled by the challenges both Astra and organizations across the world have faced in the last year with their rocket programs,” he said. That includes failures on first launches of ABL Space Systems’s RS1 rocket in January and Relativity Space’s Terran-1 rocket March 22. He described plans for two test flights, called Alpha and Bravo, of the new rocket, “and learning as much as we can from those.” Astra would then shift into customer launches as soon as possible, he said. “We think that demonstrating reliability will unlock a lot of potential given the new 600-kilogram capacity and price point where we’ll be offering that service.” Kemp emphasized a new commitment to reliability for the company, which he said stemmed from feedback from both customers and shareholders. That included process and organizational changes at the company, such as a new mission assurance organization within the company and addition of quality control reviews on product development. “We set a new tone at the top on the criticality of reliability.” Besides development of Rocket 4, Astra is working to scale up production of its Astra Spacecraft Engine electric thruster. The company recently opened a new production facility dedicated to those thrusters, which he said will be able to manufacture nearly 500 units a year. The company has won orders for 278 Astra Spacecraft Engines to date, with a total contracted value of $77 million. Kemp said most of those engines will be delivered in 2023 and 2024, but didn’t offer specific guidance on the number of engine deliveries and their value. The company reported an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $36.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, and a full year adjusted EBITDA loss of $173.9 million. The company projected an adjusted EBITDA loss of $37 million to $41 million for the first quarter of 2023. The company ended the year with $102.8 million in cash reserves, which would be exhausted later this year given its current rate of quarterly losses. “We continue to evaluate various sources of capital as we carefully manage our financial runway,” said Axel Martinez, chief financial officer of Astra, in the earnings call. He said the company expects to hear back from Nasdaq by about April 5 on its request for a 180-day extension to avoid delisting from the exchange because of a share price that remains below $1. “We’re not aware of any reason why our application will not be approved,” he said of the extension. Shares in Astra closed at 48.5 cents March 30, just before the release of its financial results.
In-space transportation company Momentus announced March 31 it has successfully started tests of the propulsion system on its Vigoride tug launched earlier this year. The company said it completed an initial test sequence of the Microwave Electrothermal Thruster (MET) on its Vigoride-5 vehicle launched in January on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 rideshare mission. The MET uses microwaves to turn water into plasma to generate thrust. Momentus provided few technical details about the performance of the thrusters in those tests, but company executives said in an interview that the thrusters performed as expected. “All the telemetry looks just like it did on the ground for all the ground tests, so everything looks good,” said Rob Schwarz, chief technology officer. He described the tests as running the thruster at full power in short bursts. The company will ramp up the length of the tests ahead of Vigoride-5’s first major maneuver, to circularize its orbit for the deployment of a cubesat by Singapore-based Qosmosys. That maneuver will take place over the next couple of weeks, said John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, although he cautioned that schedule is subject to change. “The whole Vigoride-5 mission is a demonstration mission. The primary objective is to demonstrate the performance and learn from how it’s performing,” he said. “We’re not going to rush things.” Vigoride-5 will then remain in that orbit for at least six months for tests of a hosted payload from Caltech to demonstrate space-based solar power technologies. Rood said those in-orbit demonstrations could be extended for up to two years, after which Vigoride-5 will use its thruster to lower its orbit. Those tests come as Momentus prepares to launch its next vehicle, Vigoride-6, on SpaceX’s Transporter-7 rideshare mission in April. Vigoride-6 has the same MET thruster design, which is also being incorporated onto Vigoride-7 launching in the fall. Vigoride-6 will deploy two cubesats for NASA’s Low-Latitude Ionosphere/Thermosphere Enhancements in Density (LLITED) mission to study conditions in the upper atmosphere, which Schwarz said will require the vehicle to perform a “pretty big” inclination change using its thrusters. “It’s going to be a pretty substantial fraction of the full capability of the Vigoride bus to take them to where they need to go.” Momentus is working on a new generation of the MET system that will increase the efficiency of the engine and potentially extend its lifetime as the company develops versions of Vigoride that can be refueled and reused in orbit. “But this engine is pretty well suited for our uses now,” he said. The MET test was the culmination of overall testing and commissioning of Vigoride-5. “The MET is the last thing in the commissioning chain because it relies on everything upstream of it,” Schwarz said. “When it finally happened, it was a huge moment, even bigger than the launch day.” Rood recalled cheers in the control room as telemetry from the thruster test arrived. “I was happier for the team than I was for the overall event,” he said. “Some of them are young people and they’re just thrilled by the experience. Some of the old guys like me are pretty thrilled, too.”
China conducted a pair of launches across Thursday and Friday, sending interferometric synthetic aperture radar and reconnaissance satellites in orbit. A Long March 2D rocket lifted off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 6:50 a.m. Eastern, March 30, carrying four PIESAT-1 constellation satellites. The satellites are named PIESAT-1 (A-01) and PIESAT-1-B (01 through 03). The four X-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) satellites will orbit in a hub and spoke formation, with PIESAT-1 (A-01) as the hub. The satellites are intended to map global non-polar regions at a scale of 1:50,000 and were developed by private satellite developer GalaxySpace for Piesat Information Technology Co. Ltd. The launch was facilitated by the China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC), a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). CASC’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) provided the Long March 2D rocket. Ground station services were provided by Chinese commercial space firm Emposat. The launch was China’s 13th launch of the year and the seventh in March. The mission is also part of a wider surge of Chinese commercial and state-owned efforts to establish SAR satellite constellations. Spacety is working with the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group (CETC) to develop a 96-satellite SAR constellation. Spacety was recently sanctioned by the U.S. for allegedly supplying Russian’s Wagner Group with SAR imagery to support its operations in Ukraine. Beijing Smart Satellite Space Technology Co., Ltd., is working with an institute of CETC to develop its own satellites. China’s 14th launch of the year followed a day later. A Long March 4C rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 2:27 a.m. Eastern, March 31. Little is known about the satellite. Chinese state media reports used the standard language used to describe Yaogan satellites. Yaogan-34 (04) will be used for national land surveying, urban planning, road network designing, crop yield estimation, disaster prevention and mitigation, according to China Daily . The classified nature of the Yaogan (meaning “remote sensing”) missions and their respective orbits lead Western analysts to believe the series is military in nature, providing a range of reconnaissance capabilities. The first Yaogan-34 satellite was launched in 2021, with the (02) and (03) satellites joining it in orbit through separate launches in 2022. The earlier Yaogan-34 series satellites are in 1,120 by 1,050-kilometer orbits inclined by 63 degrees. The orbit closely matches that of three sets of Yaogan-31 designation satellite triplets. CASC is planning more than 60 launches in 2023. Various Chinese commercial companies plan to add 20 or more launches to the overall figure. Commercial firm Space Pioneer has its Tianlong-2 rocket on the pad at Jiuquan, but the launch has slipped into April, according to latest airspace closure notices. The launch could be the first Chinese commercial liquid propellant rocket to reach orbit. Landspace announced March 31 that its second Zhuque-2 methalox rocket has completed final assembly, following the failure of the first rocket in December.
A top Chinese space official has called for the country to speed up its plans to develop lunar infrastructure or miss out on a never-to-be-repeated opportunity. Yang Mengfei of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, proposed in early March that China seize the opportunity to build lunar infrastructure using capabilities the countries already possess. “Now is the critical time for space infrastructure to expand to the Earth-moon system,” Yang said, according to a CASC statement . “At present, the United States, Europe, and Japan have proposed relevant plans for Earth-moon space infrastructure, but they have not yet entered the stage of on-orbit construction,” Yang said. “For our country, it is now a key opportunity to seize the opportunity and lead the Earth-moon space industrial market. It will have a great impact and far-reaching significance.” Yang stressed that in terms of the industrial market, China faces a critical moment and an opportunity that will “never come again”. Yang stated that China has, “not clearly put forward a unified plan for the development of Earth-moon system infrastructure,” noting weaknesses in top-level planning, resources and developing the nation’s aerospace industry. He suggests China seize the opportunity to carry out the Earth-Moon space infrastructure planning as soon as possible, including communication, navigation, monitoring and other services, cultivating new pillar industries and building a China-led international cooperation platform. This would contribute to China’s national strength, and promote a community for a shared future of humanity, according to CASC. The statement noted that the moon offers “rich material resources and unique environmental resources” and that its development and utilization will greatly promote the “national economy and people’s livelihood, and will become a new pillar of the national economy in the future,” according to machine translation. Yang, who is chief commander and chief designer of the Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission, was making the proposal as a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee during the country’s annual political sessions in Beijing in early March. The CPPCC serves as an advisory body to the central government. The moon is becoming a focal point for space faring nations’ plans for exploration, science and potentially competition over resources, according to observers, with China already active. China is the only nation to have soft-landed on the moon in the 21st Century, including a first-ever landing on the far side with the aid of a relay satellite. It has also revealed plans and sought partners for an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in partnership with Russia in the 2030s. The United States is meanwhile leading a group of space actors through the Artemis program and the Artemis Accords, to which 23 countries have signed up. In a further illustration of the new and diverse interest in the moon, a commercial Japanese lander is currently in lunar orbit , preparing for a landing attempt around late April. China has already completed major lunar exploration, high-resolution Earth observation, Beidou positioning and navigation and space station projects. These have laid a good foundation in terms of management, technology, materials and talent for subsequent, large-scale Earth-moon exploration and development, according to Yang. The government has approved plans for the multi-spacecraft Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 lunar south pole missions for the coming years. These include landers, rovers, orbiters, water-ice-hunting hopping craft, in-situ resource utilization tests and support from relay satellites. The missions are precursors to the ILRS. China however faces a series of challenges when planning and building its lunar infrastructure. CASC’s Long March 9 super heavy-lift launcher—which would enable major space and lunar infrastructure missions—is being redesigned in order to be reusable . This however will likely delay the debut flight of the rocket into the 2030s. In the diplomatic arena, it is reported that cooperation with the United Arab Emirates to send a small rover on the Chang’e-7 mission has fallen through due to complications posed by the U.S. government’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Its main partner Russia meanwhile faces widespread international isolation in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, which could severely impact the country’s space sector through sanctions, supply chains and deterioration of budgets and willing partners. Yang’s proposal is not the first time a CASC official has made a call for a lunar megaproject. In recent years CASC’s Bao Weimin has called for the creation of an Earth-moon space economic zone , claiming that it could create $10 trillion in annual economic benefit for China by 2050. Yang’s proposal will, as part of the CPPCC process, be one of thousands made this year across all areas. Previously, space officials Ye Peijian and Wu Weiren have proposed Mars missions and the setting up of a national laboratory for deep space exploration when members of the CPPCC. These were realized in the Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover mission which launched in 2020 and the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), established in 2022. The Earth-moon system proposition is however on the order of a megaproject and requires vast resources.
Virgin Orbit announced late March 30 it was laying off the vast majority of its employees after failing to raise additional funding, putting the launch company’s future in jeopardy. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing , Virgin Orbit announced it was laying off approximately 675 employees, or 85% of its workforce. The company said the layoff was necessary “to reduce expenses in light of the Company’s inability to secure meaningful funding.” The company, which operates the LauncherOne air-launch system, had furloughed most employees March 15 as part of a pause in operations as it sought to raise money. A week later it brought back a small number of employees to continue preparations for the next LauncherOne mission from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. At the time Virgin Orbit brought back those employees, it was in discussions with Matthew Brown, a Texas venture capital investor who claimed to have invested in more than 13 space-related companies, although he was not a familiar name in the industry. Brown said in an interview with CNBC March 23 he was in “final discussions” with Virgin Orbit that he expected to close within a day. That investment was reported to be worth up to $200 million. However, the deal fell through several days later. Virgin Orbit worked to find another investor but, as of March 30, no deals were imminent. Virgin Orbit had been heading towards a cash flow crisis for months as it burned through its remaining cash reserves. The company, in its most recent earnings call Nov. 7 , ended the third quarter with $71 million in cash on hand and an operating loss of $50.5 million in the quarter. The company subsequently raised $60 million in four separate debt financings from Virgin Investments Limited (VIL), the investment arm of Virgin Group. Those deals came with interest rates as high as 12% and gave VIL “first-priority security interest” to Virgin Orbit’s assets, including its Boeing 747 aircraft. Virgin Orbit’s financial problems were exacerbated by the failure of its most recent LauncherOne mission Jan. 9, which the company ultimately blamed on a fuel filter that came loose in the rocket’s upper stage , leading to a premature shutdown of the engine. When the company announced the employee furloughs, it said it was nearly done with the investigation and had its next rocket in the final stages of integration and testing. In the latest SEC filing, Virgin Orbit said it raised an additional $10.7 million from VIL, again at a 12% interest rate. While the company said the proceeds of previous loans would go to working capital, it said in this filing that the money would go towards employee severance and other layoff-related expenses, which it estimated to be $15 million.
Maxar, an Earth imaging company, is looking to build a new business imaging objects in space. The company predicts a burgeoning market for high-resolution images of objects in orbit amid growing congestion and security concerns, said Tony Frazier, Maxar’s executive vice president and general manager of public sector Earth intelligence. The company last year announced the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) approved a modification to the company’s remote-sensing license so it can use its Earth imaging satellites to take pictures of objects in space and sell them commercially. The license applies to Maxar’s four current satellites and its WorldView Legion constellation that has not yet launched . Frazier told SpaceNews the company is in discussions with the U.S. Space Force and other agencies that could use this data to identify potential threats and monitor suspicious activity in space. “Our conversations with the DoD are about how we can extend our satellite imaging beyond the terrestrial domain into the space domain,” he said. “We can turn our satellites up in space and do high-resolution characterization of low Earth orbit objects,” Frazier said. This type of imagery also would support space traffic management and spaceflight safety in the increasingly congested lower orbits where there will be tens of thousands of satellites in the not too distant future. Many will be internet satellites operated by SpaceX and Amazon , but there will also be as many as 13,000 Chinese satellites. As part of its $3.2 billion contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, Maxar is providing non-Earth imaging to the agency and now the company is seeking to add DoD customers. “We’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to scale that up to support broader DoD missions in space, situational awareness, space domain awareness for both U.S. and allied partners,” said Frazier. The company’s WorldView satellites would collect high-resolution images of other spacecraft and send them to the Space Force’s data repository known as the unified data library , he said. This data library also will support the civilian space traffic management system being developed by the Office of Space Commerce. “A number of these capabilities were done with just government sensors in the past and so the fact that you can leverage commercial to address these missions is a game changer,” he said. The Space Force has been working with several commercial companies that provide space domain awareness data but has yet to establish a procurement vehicle to purchase commercial services. Much of the demand for this data comes from U.S. Space Command which currently monitors 48,000 objects in orbit as part of its space traffic management responsibilities and also for national security. Frazier said he expects a “large requirement” for space domain awareness data from commercial sources that, unlike images from classified government satellites, can be shared with allies.
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat remains committed to developing its Lightspeed low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellation despite ongoing delays to cover the project’s rising costs, CEO Dan Goldberg said March 29. The Canadian company, an operator of more than a dozen geostationary satellites, had hoped to know where it stood with investors and France’s export credit agency for fully financing Lightspeed before the end of 2022. “Unfortunately, we’re not there yet,” Goldberg said during Telesat’s financial results call. “That said, we continue to make progress with the various parties we’re engaged with, and we remain optimistic that we’re going to secure the financing we need to move forward with the program, recognizing, of course, that there’s no assurance that we’ll ultimately get there.” He declined to give an updated timeframe for financing the project’s nearly 200 satellites. Telesat has so far lined up about $3 billion of financing for Lightspeed through existing financial resources and funding from the Canadian government. That represented about two-thirds of Lightspeed’s total budget before inflation and supply chain issues at prime manufacturer Thales Alenia Space pushed costs up by at least $250 million. Deployment delays Pandemic-related manufacturing issues have also pushed out Lightspeed’s service debut to at least 2026, Telesat said in May 2022 during its last update on the constellation’s deployment schedule. Goldberg did not discuss launches during the financial results call. Telesat has previously outlined early agreements with Blue Origin and Relativity Space to deploy the constellation — neither of them is yet in service. The deployment delays also mean Telesat will need to obtain extensions from regulators to keep hold of its priority Ka-band spectrum rights. Goldberg declined to comment on the regulatory process, but said he is “pretty confident that when we’re ready to move forward with Lightspeed, we’re going to have the regulatory rights we need around the world to provide the services that we need to provide.” Despite delays that have pulled Lightspeed further behind rivals Starlink and OneWeb, and potentially put it in the same timeframe as Amazon’s Project Kuiper roll-out, he said Lightspeed’s “original investment thesis is totally intact.” Goldberg said “if anything, I’m just more and more convinced of that” as he pointed to how Starlink has been used to maintain communications during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Lightspeed has also already secured “something like” 750 million Canadian dollars ($555 million) in customer commitments. GEO limbo Telesat has decided not to order any replacement geostationary satellites this year while it works to get Lightspeed into production. In a regulatory filing, the company said it intends to provide service continuity for customers on some of its geostationary by moving them to the Lightspeed constellation. “Given that the entry into service of our Lightspeed constellation has been delayed, we may be unable to provide many of our customers on satellites nearing their end of life with continuity of service,” Telesat disclosed in the regulatory filing. “If we are unable to provide continuity of service to our customers by extending the life of such satellites, providing alternate capacity on other satellites, including our Lightspeed constellation, our revenue would decline.” Telesat reported 759 million Canadian dollars in revenue for 2022, which was stable compared to 2021 but down 2% when adjusted for foreign exchange rates. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, fell 5% to 568 million Canadian dollars — or down 8% when accounting for foreign exchange rates. Telesat said it expects to invest between 40 million and 70 million Canadian dollars this year on Lightspeed, although this could increase if it finalizes the project’s financing and construction program. 
A major Chinese state-owned defense contractor is preparing to launch the first satellite for a very low Earth orbit constellation. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) told Chinese state media in early March that its first satellite for a constellation of very-low Earth orbit (VLEO) satellites will launch in September. VLEO satellites orbit at altitudes of between 150 to 300 kilometers, much lower than most satellites. These lower altitudes require propulsion to counter the relatively rapid decay of a satellite’s orbit due to much higher atmospheric drag, but offer cost and performance incentives in the form of reduced power needs for data transmission, lower-latency data transfer, lower solar power-generation requirements, and higher resolution observation. The first CASIC VLEO satellite will seek to demonstrate and verify key technologies including “ultra-low orbit flight technology”, high-resolution ground imaging technology, onboard intelligent processing and data transmission technology, according to the Chinese language Science and Technology Daily. Details such as the planned lifetime of the satellites, size of the constellation and launch cadence were not revealed. CASIC is a sister state-owned space and defense contractor to CASC, China’s main space contractor responsible for the vast majority of the country’s civil and military space endeavors. The conglomerate however has a role to play and has sought to expand its footprint in recent years with a number of what it terms commercial plans for LEO broadband and narrowband constellations and its Kuaizhou solid rocket series. CASIC has a satellite and rocket manufacturing base in Wuhan and is also working on the “Tengyun” reusable space plane. CASIC, via its launcher operator arm, Expace, plans a total of 8-10 launches of its Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11 rockets in 2023. VLEO concepts have emerged in the U.S. and Europe in recent years. American firms Skeyeon, Earth Observant and Albedo have raised money for VLEO satellite plans, while the European Union funded the “Discoverer” research program to investigate deploying Earth observation satellites in much lower altitudes than usual. For China, global remote sensing capabilities including higher resolution, more frequent revisits, and faster transmission speeds were noted as key space infrastructure in China’s 14th Five Year Plan, covering the period 2021-2025, according to Science and Technology Daily. In a possibly related development, the Tianxing-1 satellite (NORAD 52902), launched on a Kuaizhou-1A rocket in June 2022, reentered the atmosphere March 29, according to U.S. Space Force space tracking. The satellite maintained an orbit of around 300 kilometers before its orbit continually decayed over the past month. The satellite was developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as part of a plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan. It also carried data acquisition and optoelectronic payloads for CASIC as part of technical verification tests.
NASA has unveiled a draft strategy for long-term robotic exploration of Mars that emphasizes low-cost missions and potential commercial partnerships. At a meeting of two committees of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board March 29, Eric Ianson, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, outlined a plan for a steady cadence of missions after Mars Sample Return that would advance science and refresh the infrastructure needed to support other missions. “We wanted to look two decades into the future as far as what are the things that we can do to create equally dramatic and profound science” as Mars Sample Return, he said. “What we’re proposing to do here is to do it at lower cost and a higher cadence of missions.” That strategy, called “Exploring Mars Together” by NASA, is intended to create what Ianson called a “sustainable” series of missions to Mars after the remaining elements of Mars Sample Return, the NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander and European-led Earth Return Orbiter, launch in the late 2020s. NASA currently has no other robotic Mars missions in development other than ESCAPADE, a smallsat mission scheduled to launch in late 2024. “Historically we’ve had peaks and valleys in the Mars program. When we talk about sustainable, it’s something that can be constant throughout,” he said. “We want to try and maintain missions on a regular cadence.” That means launching relatively low-cost missions during every opportunity, which opens about once every two years. An “aspirational” timeline Ianson showed at the meeting had the first such mission launching in the early 2030s, moving into that regular cadence by the middle of the decade. Those low-cost missions would come in between $100 million and $300 million each, he projected, with the option to fly a single mission costing $300 million or multiple smaller missions with the same total cost. “It provides a good opportunity for the proposing community to get really creative,” he said. Those competitively selected missions, he suggested, could draw on experience from commercial partnerships such as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program or commercial cargo and crew development. That regular series of smaller missions would be supplemented by medium-class missions similar in size to the New Frontiers line of planetary science missions. An example of such a mission would be Mars Life Explorer, a lander focused on astrobiology that was recommended by last year’s planetary science decadal survey. There would also be smaller payloads that could fly as missions of opportunity on international or commercial missions. Those missions would support three broad science themes. One would be continued search for signs of life, such as biosignatures and other evidence of habitability. A second would inform future human missions to Mars, including analysis of ice deposits or characterizing potential health hazards. A third would study other aspects of a “dynamic Mars” such as geology and climate. Another element of the strategy is to strength an aging infrastructure of orbiters that provide communications and imagery. “In particular, we are quite concerned about our Mars relay network,” he said, the set of science orbiters also tasked with relaying communications from spacecraft on the surface. The notional timeline he presented included a spacecraft with a high-resolution camera and relay payload launching in the early 2030s. That infrastructure work could provide opportunities for commercial partnerships, he suggested. “That’s one of the things that we’re going to explore: how do we find these win-win solutions where we can get science but it’s also benefiting the things that they’re looking to do,” he said of such partnerships. “There is no shortage of companies that have interest. The real question is, do they have the capability to be able to do that job?” There are no specific budget numbers tied to the plan beyond the figures given for low-cost missions. Ianson said the draft plan is not reflected in NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, which includes a line for “Mars Future Missions” but is devoted to development of a facility for hosting Mars samples and NASA’s support for ESA’s ExoMars mission. The agency will be looking for feedback on the plan from the science community, such as at an upcoming meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, to refine the strategy.
NASA and Boeing have pushed back the first crewed launch of the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft with astronauts on board until at least late July because of certification paperwork that has taken longer than expected to complete. In a call with reporters March 29, officials said they had rescheduled the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission to no earlier than July 21. The announcement came six days after NASA said that CFT would not take place by the end of April , as previously scheduled, but offered few details why. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said most of the work needed to prepare the CFT mission for launch to the International Space Station will be done by April. An exception, he said, is certification work on the capsule’s parachutes. “There’s no issues or concerns with the parachute system,” he said. “It’s just a matter of going through all that data and looking at the data and making sure we’re ready to go fly safely.” The parachutes are installed on the spacecraft, but Stich said one more ground test is planned of an element of the parachute system, a parachute that removes the cover on the top of the spacecraft to expose the rest of the parachute deployment system. That test is designed to confirm that it can operate as planned in what he described as the “highest possible regime” during an abort. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Starliner at Boeing, said the delay in that parachute certification work was the fault of both the company and NASA. “It took longer for us to get the product over to NASA, and it’s taken a little bit longer for NASA to review it with us,” he said. Officials did not discuss any potential issues with certification paperwork during a Feb. 17 briefing, when they expressed confidence in launching CFT by the end of April . Stich said at the time that they have completed 80% of the preparations for the mission and neither he nor Nappi raised issues like the certification work as a challenge to that schedule. “Perhaps we were a little optimistic on those reviews of those products in setting the April timeframe,” Stich said. “We knew that April was a good time to go fly” given the schedule of other crew and cargo missions to the station. When it became clear they would not be ready for an April launch, NASA and Boeing considered options for a May launch, but concluded it did not work well. A SpaceX cargo Dragon mission is scheduled to launch to the station in June, occupying the docking port Starliner would use. “We came to the conclusion that the July window would be best,” he said. That revised schedule will also allow engineers more time to check out avionics systems on the vehicle after finding a logic error in a “black box” unit called an integrated propulsion controller. “We want to make sure that condition doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Nappi said. The extra testing will make sure “we’ve really wrung out the system for crewed flight,” Stich said. “We want to go look at the whole system to make sure we’re ready to go fly.” The July 21 date is not finalized and will depend on working out a range conflict with a U.S. Space Force mission also planned to launch around that time on another Atlas 5. “We’ll have to go work with the Space Force and ULA to see the readiness of our vehicle and the readiness of their vehicle and whether we get that slot,” Stich said. He did not identify the conflicting mission, but a classified mission designated USSF-51 is scheduled to launch as soon as June according to current manifests. Soyuz update The Starliner briefing took place a day after the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which suffered a coolant leak in December , undocked from the station without a crew and landed in Kazakhstan. Immediately after the landing there were reports that temperatures in the capsule rose to 50 degrees Celsius, which would have endangered the health of anyone on board. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said he had heard those reports, but they did not match up with other data from the spacecraft. “We have a number of questions open with our Russian colleagues to better understand that,” he said. He declined to say what temperatures he had heard the capsule experienced. He estimated it would take two to three weeks to review the data from the Soyuz return, working with Roscosmos. “There’s so many questions on this that trying to speculate isn’t going to help anything.” Once engineers understand what happened with Soyuz MS-22, he said, “that’s when we’ll decide as a joint team, between NASA and Roscosmos to return crew members.” He added the Soyuz MS-23, launched without a crew in February to replace Soyuz MS-22 , is working normally. Montalbano said that the current schedule calls for Soyuz MS-23 to return Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and American astronaut Frank Rubio to Earth on Sept. 27. If that schedule holds, the three will have spent 371 days in space on their mission, which for Rubio will set a record for longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut.
SAN FRANCISCO – Rosotics will begin deliveries later this year of new type of 3D printer for large aerospace structures. Traditional 3D printers rely on high-power lasers to heat metal wire or feedstock. Rosotics heats the feedstock with a magnetic field in the 3D printer nozzle. “You get the same end result without the laser in that process,” Christian LaRosa, Rosotics co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “That helps efficiency enormously. We are powering the Mantis using a single cord going into a 240-volt power outlet.” Mesa, Arizona-based Rosotics plans to begin delivering the Mantis in the third quarter of 2023 to customers who place $95,000 deposits and sign hardware-as-a-service contracts. After delivery, Rosotics “will install, maintain and upgrade your hardware over time without any cost to you,” LaRosa said. While the Mantis can be configured for various tasks, the starting point is a one printhead to additively manufacture aluminum or steel structures ranging in size from 1.5 to 8 meters in diameter. Rosotics unveiled the Mantis prototype March 24, one day after Relativity conducted its first launch of the 3D-printed Terran 1 rocket . “Relativity has developed this capability of 3D printing a launch vehicle for Relativity,” LaRosa said. “We’ve been focused on creating a new form of metal additive that will reduce the difficulty in getting 3D printing implemented in a field like aerospace.” Jim Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Tucson, Arizona-based Phantom Space, said Rosotics printers could prove useful to launch vehicle manufacturers. Rosotics will need to prove the Mantis’ printed parts “have consistent metallurgical properties,” Cantrell said. “But it looks promising.” 
Updated April 2: The mission launched April 2 at 10:29 a.m. Eastern . SpaceX scrubbed launch March 30. Abort called three seconds before planned liftoff WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency, formed inside the Pentagon in 2019 to help accelerate the use of commercial space technology, is preparing to launch on March 30 its inaugural fleet of 10 satellites. The launch of SDA’s Tranche 0 satellites — scheduled to lift off Thursday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California — marks the beginning of the deployment of what the agency calls a “ proliferated warfighter space architecture .” “This is a pretty exciting time,” SDA Director Director Derek Tournear told reporters March 29. “The Space Development Agency was established just over four years ago this month, and tomorrow will be our first launch.” SDA in October was transferred from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the U.S. Space Force. By the standards of Pentagon procurements, getting satellites to orbit within three years of ordering them and during a global pandemic would be a remarkable accomplishment for the young agency. SDA has adopted a fast-track approach to build a large missile-warning and data-transport constellation in low Earth orbit. SpaceX launch to polar orbit The Tranche 0 satellites will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to a polar orbit at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers and deployed in two orbital planes. The mission will carry eight data-transport satellites made by York Space Systems that will be part of a mesh communications network known as Transport Layer, and two infrared sensor satellites made by SpaceX and Leidos to detect and track hypersonic missiles in flight. This launch was originally targeted for December but was delayed due to an anomaly in York’s satellites. York Space Systems won a $94 million contract in August 2020 to build 10 satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 0. The two remaining satellites will launch in June. SpaceX in October 2020 won a $149 million contract to build four Tracking Layer satellites. The two remaining will launch in June as well. The Tranche 0 satellites will be operated from ground stations run by the Naval Research Laboratory A new model for satellite procurements SDA’s program director for Tranche 0 Mike Eppolito told reporters on Wednesday that getting to this point was challenging due to supply chain problems experienced across the entire space industry during the covid pandemic. What helped was that “our contracts office is incredibly fast,” he said. “Our finance office is incredibly fast at getting money out the door to solve problems.” Frank Calvelli, the Space Force’s top procurement official who oversees SDA, has championed the agency’s approach to buying small satellites under fixed-price contracts from multiple vendors. The Transport Layer satellites are estimated to cost about $15 million each, and the Tracking Layer satellites about $40 million each. Speaking earlier this year about SDA’s Tranche 0 launch, Calvelli said that once the agency demonstrates it can deliver capabilities to DoD, it will serve as a model for other programs. “I think once we have that success, we’ll see this methodology take off like gangbusters,” he said. 
Planet announced plans March 29 to acquire Sinergise Labs, a Slovenian startup known for making Earth-observation data accessible through cloud-based APIs. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. “By reducing the complexity of analysis and insights extraction, as well as the cost of EO data storage, Planet aims to continue expanding into new vertical markets with products and applications where EO data is highly relevant such as agriculture, civil government, insurance, financial markets and sustainable supply chain management,” according to the news release. Integrating Planet data with Sinergise’s Sentinel Hub, a cloud-based API that offers access to imagery from Europe’s Sentinel, the U.S. Landsat and other satellite datasets, “will meaningfully accelerate our Earth Data Platform plans, in particular by lowering barriers to access for EO data expanding the market, and by allowing partners to quickly and easily build applications,” Will Marshall, Planet CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “Furthermore, this acquisition underscores our strong commitment to investing in Europe, and building and enabling the downstream market ecosystem there.” Planet and Sinergise have worked together since 2016 when Sinergise began reselling Planet satellite data. The partnership was extended in 2021 as Planet and Sinergise joined forces to supply Earth-observation data to Slovenia’s Agency for Agricultural Markets and Rural Development. “We are thrilled to integrate our technologies to together build a powerful Earth Data Platform to unlock the full potential for EO data,” Sinergise co-founder Grega Milcinski said in a statement. “Partnering with Planet over the years has inspired us to accelerate the adoption of EO driven applications at scale.” Planet established its European presence in 2015 with the acquisition of Berlin-based BlackBridge and its RapidEye Earth-observation constellation. San Francisco-based Planet extended its European footprint with its 2021 purchase of VanderSat , a Dutch company that gathers data on soil moisture, land surface temperature and other Earth-surface conditions. Sinergise is Planet’s six acquisition. In addition to BlackBridge and VanderSat, Planet acquired Salo Sciences earlier this year, Boundless Spatial in 2019 and Terra Bella in 2017. Planet’s acquisition of Sinergise is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2023.
TAMPA, Fla. — SES confirmed March 29 it is in talks about potentially merging with rival satellite operator Intelsat. “At this stage, there can be no certainty that a transaction would materialise,” SES said in a brief statement. Both companies have previously acknowledged paying close attention to a wave of consolidation sweeping across their industry. This year, Viasat and Eutelsat hope to gain regulatory approvals to acquire Inmarsat and OneWeb, respectively, to bolster their businesses amid rising competition from SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. Since Viasat announced its deal for Inmarsat in November 2021, both SES and Intelsat have routinely faced questions about whether they could also merge to strengthen competition, but neither have directly addressed any talks until now. The Financial Times reported in August that SES and Intelsat were engaged in active merger talks. According to a Bloomberg report published shortly before SES’ March 29 announcement, a deal between the two operators could be finalized in a matter of few weeks, combining the more than 70 satellites SES has across geostationary and medium Earth orbit with Intelsat’s more than 50 geostationary satellites. However, a merger would need to clear multiple regulatory obstacles and navigate the interests of Luxembourg’s government, which controls about a third of the voting rights in SES. Publicly listed SES declined to comment beyond its confirmation that it has “engaged in discussions regarding a possible combination with Intelsat.” Asked to comment on the announcement, Clay McConnell, Intelsat senior vice president of corporate communications and marketing, said: “We do not comment on rumors and speculation.” A merged group would generate more than $4 billion in combined revenues. Intelsat and SES are also set to receive nearly $9 billion in combined proceeds for clearing C-band spectrum for terrestrial cellular operators , although they have been locked in a long-running legal battle over how this windfall should be split.
SEOUL, South Korea — Israel launched the latest in a series of Ofek reconnaissance satellites March 28 on the country’s Shavit rocket. The solid-fueled rocket lifted off from Israel’s Palmachim Airbase on the Mediterranean coast at 7:10 p.m. Eastern and placed the Ofek-13 satellite into orbit. Israel’s defense ministry said the spacecraft carries a synthetic aperture radar payload with “advanced capabilities.” The ministry said the launch was successful, and Ofek-13 had completed initial tests after entering orbit. Ofek-13 is the first spy satellite Israel has launched in nearly three years, following the electro-optical Ofek-16 launched in July 2020. State-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), which manufactured Ofek-13, said the satellite is the “most advanced of its kind with unique radar observation capabilities,” enabling intelligence collection regardless of the weather. In a March 29 statement issued by the prime minister’s office, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant called the launch of Ofek-13 “yet another important example of the Israeli defense establishment’s groundbreaking innovation.” He said Israel will “continue to enhance its capabilities in every dimension in the face of various challenges.” The March 28 launch was the latest in a series of actions Israel has taken to enhance its space defense capability amid escalating tensions with Iran. In January , Israel’s Air Force said it will launch a space defense-dedicated unit called Space Administration, which will initially be commanded by a lieutenant colonel. The unit will “explore ways for Israel to use space,” according to the Jewish News Syndicate . 
SAN FRANCISCO – Impact Observatory, a company that applies artificial intelligence to satellite imagery for mapping and monitoring, raised $5.9 million in seed funding. With the funding announced March 29, Washington-based Impact Observatory is introducing a commercial space-based monitoring service. “We are offering people the ability to take out a subscription for persistent monitoring for anywhere in the world,” Steve Brumby, Impact Observatory CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. To date, Impact Observatory has produced annually updated global maps as digital public goods, or freely available digital tools. That work will continue. In addition, nonprofit organizations will have access to Impact Observatory monitoring products at discounted prices. Esri is the only seed round investor Impact Observatory is naming. Impact Observatory maps and monitoring tools are available to Esri customers. Impact Observatory also works with Microsoft’s Planetary Computer and AWS SageMaker. Ten-meter resolution data from the European Space Agency Copernicus constellation currently feeds Impact Observatory maps. “We can run deep-learning algorithms faster than the satellite constellations can collect” data,” Brumby said. As a result, Impact Observatory can “produce essentially a living map of the world,” he added. In the future, Impact Observatory may bring in data from other satellite operators. “We are actually talking to a number of commercial space companies at the moment to take this capability and apply it at higher spatial resolution and also apply it to all-weather sensors from synthetic aperture radar constellations,” Brumby said. The Copernicus constellation supplies global imagery every five days. With the addition of Landsat data, Impact Observatory maps could be updated every two and half days. Commercial datasets could lead to daily mapping and monitoring, Brumby said. Brumby, a former co-founder of Descartes Labs and member of the U.S. Interior Department Landsat Advisory Group, established Impact Observatory in 2020 with Sam Hyde, former senior program manager in National Geographic’s Geographic Visualization Lab.
The failure of Japan’s H3 rocket on its inaugural flight in March could delay several science missions, including two scheduled to launch on another rocket. The first flight of the H3 rocket failed to reach orbit March 7 when the rocket’s upper-stage engine failed to ignite. Launch controllers triggered a self-destruct system on destroying the rocket and its payload, the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 (ALOS-3) Earth observation satellite. Neither the Japanese space agency JAXA nor launch vehicle manufacturer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) have released details about the investigation and progress on finding the root cause. Some reports have suggested a problem with the electrical system on the upper stage that prevented the engine from igniting. The H3 upper stage uses an engine designated LE-5B-3 developed by MHI and similar to the LE-5B engine used on the existing H-2A rocket. That is putting launches of the H-2A on hold while the investigation continues. That may delay the upcoming launch of two science missions sharing an H-2A. The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), an X-ray astronomy spacecraft, and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), a lunar lander, were scheduled to launch together as soon as May on an H-2A. That launch date is in doubt, said Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences, during a panel discussion at the National Academies’ Space Science Week event March 28. “The schedule might have to be shifted, the details of which I don’t know,” he said. XRISM is a replacement for Astro-H, or Hitomi, a Japanese X-ray observatory launched in 2016 that malfunctioned shortly after launch when it spun out of control. The new X-ray observatory features contributions from NASA and the European Space Agency. SLIM is a lunar lander primarily intended to be a demonstration of precision landing technologies. The spacecraft will carry a multi-band camera scientists hope to use to study compositions of rocks around the landing site. “Once we establish these technologies, we will deploy a post-SLIM series of landing missions, and that will constitute our contribution to Artemis,” the NASA-led lunar exploration campaign, he said. He said he had hoped to hear “good news” about the status of the launch of XRISM and SLIM last week, but did not. “I’m sorry, but I cannot be too positive about this.” The spacecraft themselves are ready for launch, he added. Even if the H-2A is cleared to return to flight in the near future, it remains uncertain how long the H3 rocket will be grounded. That could affect a third mission. Martian Moons eXploration (MMX). That spacecraft will travel to Mars to study its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. It will collect samples from the surface of Phobos for return to Earth. MMX is currently scheduled for launch in late 2024 on an H3, the next launch window in the series that opens approximately every 26 months for Mars missions. Fujimoto suggested the H3 failure makes that schedule uncertain. “To be honest, I really don’t know what is going to happen to this timeline,” he said.
Lockheed Martin is establishing a new company that will offer communications and navigation services for what it foresees to be a growing number of government and commercial lunar missions. Lockheed announced March 28 the creation of Crescent Space Services LLC, a subsidiary that will offer a service called Parsec, a network of satellites in lunar orbit to support other spacecraft around the moon or on the surface. Parsec will use satellites designed and built by Lockheed Martin, using a bus called Curio it developed for NASA’s Janus and Lunar Trailblazer smallsat missions. The first satellites are projected to launch in 2025. Crescent Space Services will own and operate the satellites, marketing their services to customers. “We wanted to find a way where Lockheed Martin, which traditionally is a technology development and manufacturing company, could really focus on what it’s good at, and then create something new, a new business, that could be an owner and operator of assets,” said Joe Landon, chief executive of Crescent, in an interview. The company can provide services with a single satellite, although he said it will start with two and can add more if needed to meet demand. That demand will come from a mix of commercial, NASA and other government missions to the moon. Landon said the company estimated more than 100 missions going to the moon over the next decade. Many of them will need communications or navigation services. That is particularly the case, he noted, for missions going to the south polar region, where lines of sight to the Earth can be obstructed, or the lunar farside, where relays are required. There are various proposals for lunar communications satellites. Some companies developing landers for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, like Draper and Intuitive Machines, have announced plans to send relay satellites to support their landers. The European Space Agency is working on a program called Moonlight to provide lunar communications and navigation services. The first satellite for Moonlight, a spacecraft called Lunar Pathfinder being built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., will launch in 2026 as part of a CLPS mission awarded to Firefly Aerospace March 14 . Landon said he expected Parsec to be compliant with LunaNet, a concept advanced by NASA for interoperable networks at the moon for communications and navigation, and cooperate with other systems planned by companies or governments. “We’re building a telecom network. We’d like to be able to enable roaming for our customers on other systems and have folks roam onto our network.” The technology needed for Parsec is “well in hand,” he said, using the Curio bus and Lockheed’s experience with communications and navigation payloads for other spacecraft. The company has filed license applications with the Federal Communication Commission for the Parsec system. One application covers the satellites themselves while a second, filed earlier this month, would cover communications with various user terminals on the surface. That is breaking new ground with the FCC, he said, but is an area where Crescent can leverage the regulatory expertise of Lockheed Martin. Landon, who was previously vice president of advanced programs development for Lockheed Martin Space, leads a company of about 10 people that will grow “a little bit” this year, he said. “We’re really focused on communications and navigation because we think that is what NASA and other customers will need first,” he said. “It’s the common denominator: all lunar missions need communications links and navigation services, so that’s our focus.” He said the company is considering other services that Crescent could provide in the long term. “We’re setting up Crescent as a platform to offer other lunar infrastructure services,” which could include power or mobility. That could also extend beyond the moon. “If we’re a lunar communications provider and have a lunar network, I think we would be well positioned to build a Mars communications network if that was needed some day.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Mobile satcom services provider Ovzon said March 28 it has secured a deadline extension enabling it to keep priority spectrum rights for its first broadband satellite, as long as it launches early enough in a July-September window SpaceX has set for the mission. International regulators gave the Swedish company until the end of the year to start providing services in geostationary orbit from Ovzon 3, which was originally slated to launch in 2021 before manufacturing delays at Maxar Technologies. Once launched, it would take Ovzon 3 several months to reach its orbital slot at 59.7 degrees East using onboard electric propulsion. “A launch occurring late in the announced [launch] window may require additional approvals,” Ovzon said in a news release. The previous ‘Bring into Use’ deadline for Ovzon 3 under rules governed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an affiliate of the United Nations, was Dec. 15, 2022. Ovzon had originally lined up a 2021 SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch for Ovzon 3 before switching to an Ariane 5 after getting a better deal from Arianespace . However, the company said Feb. 3 that it moved Ovzon 3 back to SpaceX , this time for a Falcon 9 launch, after additional manufacturing delays caused it to miss out on one of Arianespace’s last few Ariane 5 missions. According to Ovzon, which currently provides broadband services by leasing capacity from other satellite operators, Maxar’s supply chain woes have increased the overall cost of its inaugural satellite project by about $25 million. To help cover these rising costs, the company recently sold shares worth about $19 million and increased a $60 million line of credit to $65 million. Ovzon also recently disclosed its 2022 financials are taking a hit of about 34 million Swedish krona ($3.3 million) after one of its customers fell behind on contracted payments. Per Norén, Ovzon’s CEO, said in a statement that Italian distributor Gomedia Satcom ran into “more severe financial difficulties than previously assessed,” prompting Ovzon to delay the publication of its annual financial results by about a week to March 30. Despite including the loss in the upcoming accounts, Norén said Ovzon has agreed a repayment plan and secured a “pledge of assets” held by the Italian company.
The head of the U.S. Space Force told lawmakers March 28 that the service is investing heavily in cybersecurity for satellite ground systems in response to increasing threats. The need for greater protection has intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which saw satellite systems targeted in cyberattacks , Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. The Space Force’s $30 billion budget request for fiscal year 2024 includes $700 million to “enhance the cyber defense of our critical networks associated with space operations,” said Saltzman. “There’s no question that space is going to be central to effective operations in the future,” he said. Russia’s electronic and cyber attacks in the early days of the invasion were a wakeup call, he said. Saltzman did not provide details of what cybersecurity capabilities are being funded in the 2024 request. He said the Space Force is investing in software and hardware, but also in training for operators. Ground systems are the weak link Upgrading cyber defenses has been a challenge for space programs due to larger problems the Pentagon has historically experienced with software developments, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said at the appropriations hearing. A glaring example is the ground control system the Air Force started developing years ago for the Global Positioning System satellite constellation. Known as OCX, the system has been plagued by delays in part due to cybersecurity features that were inserted into the program and were not originally designed in the software. Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) noted that the most troubled Space Force programs happen to be ground systems. “Can you explain why the ground systems are so hard to deliver and what can we do about it?” he asked Kendall. “There’s a tendency in space programs to emphasize the satellite payload over the ground stations. And ground stations are almost always very software intensive,” Kendall said. “And we tend to have a problem with software programs in general across the Department of Defense,” he added. In the case of OCX, for example, “cybersecurity has gotten more stringent over time and that’s added a layer of complexity,” said Kendall. “If you don’t design for that upfront, and you come in and you try to overlay it later on as you’re going through the design, it’s much more difficult.” Kendall said the head of Space Force acquisitions Frank Calvelli has been aware of this problem since taking office last year and has called for a new approach to the development of ground systems. In a “ space acquisition tenets ” memo Calvelli circulated last fall, one of his directives is to “deliver ground before launch, and nsure ground systems are completed and ready for operations before launching a new capability.”
The Department of the Air Force has received no official communication from the White House regarding the relocation of U.S. Space Command’s headquarters, Secretary Frank Kendall told lawmakers March 28. The contentious issue of where Space Command’s headquarters will be permanently located came up during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committe’s defense subcommittee. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) asked Kendall to address a report by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that the White House is likely to reverse the Trump administration’s decision to relocate Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. Citing anonymous sources, Ignatius wrote that the White House “fears the transfer would disrupt operations at a time when space is increasingly important to the military,” an argument that also was made by Pentagon officials. “There are rumors that the president will overturn the decision,” Aderholt said to Kendall. “What is your recommendation to the president? And why would the president overturn that decision?” Kendall said he had “no indication that the president is going to do anything with regard to that decision.” He noted that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “delegated it to me and that’s where it stays.” In a move that sparked a protracted political battle, the Air Force proposed in January 2021 that Space Command be relocated from its current location in Colorado to Alabama. The recommendation resulted in two separate independent reviews, and back-and-forth arguments between congressional representatives from both states. Kendall declined to say when he expects a final outcome. He said that further analysis is still underway, and refrained from revealing what he might recommend. “I haven’t made a recommendation. I haven’t made a decision. We’re still in the process of doing some analysis,” Kendall told Aderholt. Question of ‘operational capability’ A central point of contention is whether the Air Force’s initial recommendation to select Huntsville took into account concerns from senior military leaders about the disruption a move could cause. These officials told investigators that renovating existing Space Command facilities at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, would allow the command to reach “full operational capability” faster than constructing a brand-new building in Huntsville and relocating a workforce of about 1,500 people. Kendall said “operational capability and mission performance is one of the fundamental things we look at in every basing decision … So the analysis we’ve been doing has taken all that into account.”
China is preparing to launch its first satellites for a national low Earth orbit broadband megaconstellation to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink. A Long March 5B rocket will be equipped with a Yuanzheng-2 second stage for the first time and launched from the coastal Wenchang spaceport in the second half of the year. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, stated in early March that the new Long March 5B and upper stage configuration would be used to launch satellites for a LEO satellite network. China is developing its plans to deploy a 13,000-satellite low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband megaconstellation, sometimes referred to as “Guowang,” or national network, to rival Starlink and other Western ventures. The project will have ramifications for international competition to secure customers for satellite communications, international infrastructure, space debris and for the use of, and coordination in, LEO. It may also have implications for commercial space development in China. The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a major subsidiary of CASC, and the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites (IAMCAS) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are understood to be two entities contracted to manufacture satellites for Guowang. IAMCAS is expected to deliver its first 30 satellites for the project by the end of the year. Other and potentially commercial setups could also be involved in the project. China has greatly increased its small satellite manufacturing capacity in recent years, with a number of entities each now capable of producing hundreds of satellites per year. Other actors include GalaxySpace and the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). The former launched six LEO communications test satellites last year. CASC’s main rocket-making arm is meanwhile preparing the Long March 5B rocket for a “high-density launch stage to meet the country’s needs for large-scale and rapid access to space.” This includes ramping up production of required kerosene-liquid oxygen engines for the launch vehicle’s side boosters. The Long March 5B rocket was earlier used to send the country’s three modules directly into orbit to construct the Tiangong space station. The upper stage would instead allow for multiple satellites to be injected into various orbits. The earlier launches saw the 30-meter-long, roughly 23-ton dry mass first stages make high-profile, uncontrolled reentries after reaching orbital velocity. It is possible but unknown if the use of YZ-2 upper stage will allow for the first stage to remain suborbital land within a targeted drop zone. The State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) published a notice on the management of civil space launch projects in early March. It states that the last stage of a launch vehicle should be deorbited according to regulations after taking passivation and other measures. Satellites and spacecraft should be actively deorbited when their design life expires according to their license, the points of the notice state. A number of Chinese commercial launch companies have meanwhile stated their aim to secure contracts to launch satellites for the Guowang project. This has apparently been reflected in newer companies looking to build medium and large launch vehicles earlier in their development. The earliest commercial launch companies emerging in China after a 2014 national policy shift first looked to develop light-lift launchers targeting contracts from other private and commercial companies looking to reach space. China now appears to be looking to Guowang and the newly-completed Tiangong space station to provide opportunities for commercial space firms. Globally, megaconstellations appear set to be an issue of strong competition and contention in the near future. U.S. space internet companies have expressed concerns over the potential competitive threat from a Chinese LEO constellation with strong government backing. A report published in December by the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated that the development means the United States “could lose its competitive edge.” Its deployment could mean that western operators find it more difficult to compete internationally, particularly in countries with political ties to China. China’s military has meanwhile claimed that SpaceX has intended for Starlink to be used for military purposes in the wake of Ukraine’s defense against the invasion of Russia. CASC’s chairman Wu Yansheng said late last year that he believes the U.S. to be restarting great power competition. He claims the U.S. is seeking to seize strategic resources including specific orbits, locations and radio frequencies.
German launch vehicle developer Isar Aerospace announced March 28 it raised $165 million to scale up production of its Spectrum rocket scheduled to make its first flight later this year. The Munich-based company said it raised the Series C round from a group of European investors that included 7-Industries Holding, Bayern Kapital via its Scale Up Fund Bavaria, Earlybird Venture Capital, HV Capital, Lakestar, Lombard Odier Investment Managers, Porsche Automobil Holding SE (Porsche SE), UVC Partners and Vsquared Ventures. HV Capital and Porsche SE will take seats on Isar’s board as part of the funding round. The funding was the first Isar Aerospace raised since adding $75 million to its Series B round in July 2021 . The company has raised more than $330 million to date. Isar did not disclose the valuation of the company in this round, but David Kownator, chief financial officer of Isar, said in a statement that it was an increase from the previous round. “The strong interest and commitment from our international investors signals their confidence in our vision and technological capabilities,” Daniel Metzler, co-founder and chief executive of Isar, said in a statement. “This financing round marks another important step on our journey to orbit.” The company says the funding will go towards final development of its Spectrum rocket, capable of placing up to 1,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit. It will also support efforts to scale up production of the rocket. Spectrum is in final phases of development, with a first launch scheduled for the second half of this year from a launch site in Andøya, Norway. Company officials said at the Satellite 2023 conference earlier this month that work included completing qualification testing of the Aquila engine that powers the rocket, including 124 hotfire tests at its test site in Esrange, Sweden, 11 of which were in one day. The company is also manufacturing flight hardware and completing work on launch site infrastructure. The funding ensures the company has enough runway to get through development and into operations. At the time of the conference, executives said the funding they had was enough to get beyond the first launch with margin in the event of a launch failure. That is important because similar vehicles suffered failures on their inaugural launches. Three American companies that have developed vehicles with payload capacities similar to Spectrum all failed to reach orbit on their first launches. Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha failed on its first launch in September 2021 but reached orbit on its second launch a little more than a year later. ABL Space Systems’ RS1 rocket malfunctioned shortly after liftoff on its first flight in January, while Relativity Space’s Terran 1 failed on its inaugural launch March 22 when its upper-stage engine shut down immediately after ignition. The funding will also support efforts by the company to scale up production of Spectrum, making extensive use of automation and additive manufacturing technologies. That includes plans for up to four launches in 2024, with a capacity in its current factory to produce up to eight rockets a year. Isar has plans for a second factory that would ultimately be able to produce up to one rocket a week. “We’ve seen the industry thinking much, much bigger, especially when it comes to constellation deployment,” Metzler said during a conference panel March 14. “We set out to think how we can automate a lot of the manufacturing, how can we make it scalable.” That requires vertical integration, he said, with most of the rocket’s components produced in-house. The company has signed up several customers, with the first two flights allocated to payloads from the German space agency DLR and European Space Agency through an initiative called “Boost!” to support development of commercial small launch vehicles. Isar has announced several commercial customers, including a Jan. 25 agreement with American launch aggregator Spaceflight Inc. for one dedicated Spectrum launch and an option for a second. While many dozens of companies are pursuing small launch vehicles, he said on the panel he was confident there was room for Isar’s Spectrum. Most of those companies, he said, exist only on paper, with little funding and hardware. “There’s only actually a few that have shown significant progress.” “I think you will always have different players in different geographies,” he said. “There’s definitely not going to be 100 rocket companies commercially succeeding, I think.” As Isar Aerospace raises its funding round, the largest so far this year for any space company, another launch vehicle operator continues to struggle. Virgin Orbit announced March 15 it paused operations and furloughed most of its staff as it attempted to raise more money to return its LauncherOne vehicle to flight. Virgin Orbit said March 22 it was bringing some employees back to continue preparations for that next LauncherOne mission as it attempted to finalize a reported $200 million investment from Matthew Brown Companies, a Texas-based venture capital firm. However, industry sources said the company has postponed plans to bring back more employees when that deal fell through.
Several military allies of the United States in the Middle East have expressed interest in creating their own space forces, and have sought advice from the U.S. on how to accomplish this goal, Col. Christopher Putman, commander of U.S. Space Forces Central, said March 27. “We have a lot of nations that see space as the critical combat enabler that it is and can be, and they’re coming to us for advice on how to stand up a space force, and what does that look like?” Putnam said at an event hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association. Putnam runs a component of the U.S. Space Force that reports to U.S. Central Command, based at McDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida. Central Command oversees U.S. military operations in the region stretching from Northeast Africa across the Middle East to Central and South Asia. The Space Force component was activated in December . Putnam recently returned from Qatar, where U.S. Central Command conducted its first “space forum” at Al Udeid Air Base, with space warfare professionals from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia and other nations. “We graduated the first Space 100 cadre in the Saudi Air Force,” he said. Space 100 is a fundamental space education course taught at the unclassified level. The course provides an introductory education level of space systems and how they are used to support global joint military operations. While the U.S. Space Force is eager to assist its allies, he said, there is a significant challenge: a lot of the information about U.S. space systems is classified and resides in classified computers. Teaching Space 100 at the unclassified level “was a significant lift,” he said. “So going forward, so that we can actually have fruitful conversations and work together, the answer may rely on the commercial side.” “If we buy commercial, off the shelf systems with our partners, we avoid a lot of those security classifications. roadblocks that have inhibited us in the past,” he said. “Saudi Arabia is just one example.” Since the U.S. Space Force stood up a component at Central Command, he said, “we have had a lot of requests from partner nations.” They are trying to decide, for example, whether they need a dedicated space force, how to integrate space with their air force or defense departments. “We will talk with each nation, we will have those discussions to help them figure out what looks right for them,” said Putnam. “Ultimately, if we all work together, it is a win for them, and it’s a win for us going forward.” The chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, has emphasized partnerships with allies as one of the service’s top priorities. “To do this, we will eliminate barriers to collaboration,” he wrote in a memo .
Kathy Lueders, the NASA official who oversees the International Space Station and commercial cargo and crew programs, will retire from the agency at the end of April and be succeeded by her deputy. NASA announced March 27 that Lueders would retire after more than three decades at the agency, most recently as associate administrator for space operations. Ken Bowersox, who is deputy associate administrator for space operations, will take over that post effective May 1. Lueders had worked for more than two decades on the shuttle and ISS programs when she became manager of the commercial crew program in 2013 as the agency was preparing to select companies to develop the vehicles that would transport astronauts to and from the station. She remained in the role through the successful launch of SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission, with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board, in May 2020. In June 2020, NASA named Lueders as its next associate administrator for human exploration and operations , responsible for all NASA human spaceflight efforts, including the Artemis lunar exploration campaign. She took the job less than a month after Doug Loverro resigned from the agency amid claims he violated procurement regulations during the selection process for a first round of Human Landing System awards. She held that position until September 2021, when NASA split the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) into two . Lueders retained the space operations part of it, overseeing the ISS, commercial cargo and crew programs, and ancillary efforts like space communications and navigation. The Space Operations Mission Directorate is also home to NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program to foster development of commercial space stations to succeed the ISS. NASA moved the exploration related programs into a new Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, led by Jim Free, a former director of the Glenn Research Center. The various programs associated with Artemis, as well as advanced planning for eventual human missions to Mars, are in that directorate. “Kathy is a tremendous public servant and a trailblazer, not only serving as the first woman to head space operations for NASA and the first woman to manage our human spaceflight program, but also championing a new way of doing business in low Earth orbit,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement announcing her retirement. “The public-private commercial model Kathy and her team helped pioneer will return humanity to the Moon and prepare us for our next giant leap: the first crewed missions to Mars.” Others outside the agency praised her work. “I have been impressed by her deep technical knowledge throughout, her strong decision making, and her kindness and support as a friend,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, who stepped down as associate administrator for science at NASA at the end of 2022. Without her, he added, “I actually doubt there would be a Commercial Crew program, which has changed how we go to space, and will surely result in much science impact.” “She was the perfect NASA leader at the right time,” said Abhi Tripathi, a former mission director at SpaceX who is currently director of mission operations at the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “It’s hard to imagine how different SpaceX’s trajectory would have been without her as its main interface.” Bowersox, who will take over for Lueders on May 1, has been deputy associate administrator for space operations, and before that human exploration and operations, for several years. He served as acting associate administrator for human exploration and operations after the resignation of Loverro in 2020 and for several months in 2019 when NASA reassigned Bill Gerstenmaier, longtime associate administrator for human exploration and operations, to a special adviser position. Bowersox is a former naval aviator and astronaut who flew four shuttle missions from 1992 to 1997 and a long-duration ISS mission, launching on a shuttle in 2002 and returning on a Soyuz in 2003 after the Columbia accident grounded the shuttle program. He was vice president of astronaut safety and mission assurance at SpaceX from 2009 to 2011 and later served as chair of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee before returning to NASA. “Ken has been instrumental to advancing NASA’s goals and missions in low Earth orbit and beyond, and I know Space Operations will be in good hands under his leadership,” Nelson said in a statement.
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb is turning its attention to finalizing ground stations after launching a final batch of satellites needed to provide broadband services globally, executive chair Sunil Mittal said March 27. Mittal said the British operator has rolled out “most of the critical ground stations” required to launch commercially across all markets it has permission to serve. More ground stations are due to come online in the several months it will take OneWeb’s latest batch of satellites to enter service after their launch March 25. “I am hopeful that — barring maybe a handful of ground stations in places like St Helena and Seychelles, which have a lot of difficulties in putting up ground stations — everything else will be done,” he said during a media briefing. OneWeb is set to generate “hundreds of millions of dollars” from international enterprise and government customers over the next 12 months, according to Mittal. Milestone launch OneWeb said it had successfully contacted all 36 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) after they lifted off at 11:30 p.m Eastern aboard a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 3, or LVM3, from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. New Space India Limited (NSIL), the commercial arm of India’s space agency, conducted the launch to expand OneWeb’s constellation to 618 satellites. Most of the satellites OneWeb has in LEO have already reached their final orbital positions using onboard propulsion, Mittal said. The rest are expected to be in place “in the coming weeks and months.” Although OneWeb still needs to finish constructing ground stations, Mittal said its latest launch was the last “critical part” of OneWeb’s business strategy, and “signals the completion of our space program” for having enough satellites in LEO for global coverage. OneWeb is currently only providing services commercially in regions north of 50-degrees latitude, which he said are bringing in about several million dollars of revenue a month. The company’s global constellation has 1.2 terabytes per second of usable capacity, he added, which if sold at current rates would generate more than $1 billion of revenue. How fast OneWeb can reach this point remains to be seen, he said, as regulatory hurdles also remain left to clear in countries such as India. Global expansion OneWeb only needs 588 of its 648 proposed satellites operating in LEO to provide global services, and any satellites launched beyond that point would serve as backups. SpaceX is contracted to launch an as yet undetermined number of spare satellites for OneWeb in a rideshare mission Mittal said is slated for May or June. SpaceX has launched a total 120 satellites for OneWeb over three Falcon 9 missions since December. Its third and final dedicated mission for OneWeb launched March 9 out of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The first mission in NSIL’s two-launch contract for OneWeb deployed 36 satellites Oct. 22 with an LVM3 from India, which also signaled the resumption of the operator’s launch campaign. Arianespace had previously planned to deploy OneWeb’s remaining satellites with Soyuz rockets before this contract was scrapped following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The launch disruption set the company back eight to nine months and several hundred million dollars, according to Mittal. He said OneWeb had also expected Russia to be a sizable market for its broadband services before the war. Serving the country is now off the table along with China, North Korea, and “a few other hotspots in the world.” However, he said the company continues to see significant demand from enterprise and government customers elsewhere. Small and lightweight user terminals that only recently became commercially available will also help accelerate revenues, he added. And while SpaceX’s Starlink LEO broadband constellation “is a serious player in this market,” Mittal claims OneWeb has an advantage for serving enterprise customers, such as cellular backhaul providers, because its business is not orientated around a consumer-focused growth strategy. The next generation Revenues from OneWeb’s global constellation will help support a second-generation LEO constellation estimated to cost $4 billion that is being jointly developed with Eutelsat, a French operator of geostationary satellites that is seeking regulatory approvals to buy the British company. Eutelsat trades publicly on the Euronext Paris stock exchange and Mittal said the companies aim to decide a deal in “the coming months” to raise money by listing shares in OneWeb in the United Kingdom. Last month, Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said she expects a request for proposals to build OneWeb’s second-generation constellation to be released before the end of June for launches that could start as early as 2025.
A tight launch market, coupled with high inflation, has driven up launch prices in the last year, putting a squeeze on customers. At the recent Satellite 2023 conference, industry officials said they saw evidence of growing prices in the last year. Growing demand along with a constrained near-term supply that some have dubbed a “global shortage” is a factor, they say, along with inflation that has remained historically high for more than a year. Prices of individual commercial launch orders have traditionally not been disclosed, a practice that continues today. SpaceX does publish list prices for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, which the company raised by 8% a year ago because of what it said was inflation. Prices of individual contracts, however, can vary. At the same time it raised its dedicated launch prices, SpaceX also increased the prices of its rideshare launch services by 10%, from $1 million for a 200-kilogram satellite to $1.1 million. Earlier this year, the company appeared to hike prices again: according to a tool on its website for finding and booking rides , the cost of a 200-kilogram satellite was now $1.3 million, with the earliest flight opportunity in the second quarter of 2025. Companies that do business with SpaceX’s rideshare program confirm they are seeing higher prices. “We are seeing increased pricing from launch service providers,” said John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, during a Satellite 2023 panel March 14. The company has a contract with SpaceX for several launches of its Vigoride tug, including one scheduled for early April on SpaceX’s Transporter-7 rideshare mission. He said Momentus is locked into lower prices under its existing SpaceX contract for its next few launches. “But beginning in 2024 you’re going to see users like ourselves pay a higher price,” he said. “They’re still lower priced than other launch service providers by a significant margin.” Momentus has “strategic partnerships” with other launch companies, he said, including some emerging providers he did not identify that have not yet raised their prices. “I think a lot of what their pricing is based on getting entry-level participation with their services.” Tiphaine Louradour, new chief executive of Spaceflight, which has also flown payloads on SpaceX rideshare missions, said there was strong demand for launches to mid-inclination and higher inclination orbits. “Some of the prices are increasing,” she said. She looked to competition from new launch vehicles as key to stemming that price growth. “That will help on that price element.” During a separate conference panel March 15, Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, stated that the price increase last year was caused only by inflation. “It was overdue,” he said, as the company has not raised its published launch prices previously to adjust for inflation. “That doesn’t actually even cover the increase in our cost,” he said, noting far greater cost increases for some items, like helium used to pressurize propellant tanks. He denied that the increase had anything to do with SpaceX’s position in the market as one of the few launch providers with capacity on its manifest in the near term. “We are making adjustments just to keep up with our own costs,” he said. “In terms of performance, reliability, the low cost of insurance and the cadence that we provide, we feel like we’re positioned to provide high value to our customers.” Rood said that at least some of the higher launch costs borne by Momentus will be passed on to its customers. However, he was optimistic prices will decline in the longer term because of both increased competition and the impacts of SpaceX’s own Starship vehicle, touted as offering a far lower cost per kilogram of payload. “I think the long-term trend will be lower launch prices, lower cost per kilogram,” he said, “but we may see in the near term some adjustments upward.”
Companies in the satellite remote sensing industry such as Maxar, Planet and BlackSky are working to expand their offerings beyond optical imagery, looking to capture a broader spectrum of data from space. All three companies are dominant in optical satellite imaging that uses visible light or near-infrared light to capture pictures of the Earth’s surface from space. They are now expanding into novel sensor phenomenologies — such as radar, radio frequency and hyperspectral — in response to growing demand for more intricate multi-sensor intelligence. “What we’re seeing is larger companies that are acquiring different pieces of the puzzle to put together an integrated solution,” said David Gauthier, former director of commercial and business operations at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Gauthier is chief strategy officer at the consulting firm GXO Inc. and recently joined the board of advisors of the hyperspectral imagery startup Orbital Sidekick. The aggregation of optical imagery with other forms of satellite data is a powerful capability that helps to gain deeper insights, Gauthier told SpaceNews . The demand for synthetic aperture radar imagery, for example, was accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the need for sensors that could penetrate thick clouds. While electro-optical images are the most visually compelling, the conflict showcased the value of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites that can see at night and through the weather. Maxar’s strategic moves Maxar Technologies, which operates a constellation of high-resolution optical imaging satellites, has moved to expand its SAR and RF capabilities. The company in February announced a deal with SAR startup Umbra to get dedicated access to the company’s radar imaging constellation. Maxar also recently acquired radio-frequency mapping startup Aurora Insight, a year after it made a strategic investment in the company. Radio-frequency data is used to identify the location of ships at sea or the source of hostile electronic jamming, for example, based on real-world measurements of the RF environment. On March 14 Maxar announced a new “ RF Solutions ” business line to provide “detailed information and insights on spectral activity, and thus into human activity.” BlackSky and Planet pursue hyperspectral imagery Gauthier noted that two other players in the optical imaging industry — BlackSky and Planet — were among six companies that last week won study contracts from the National Reconnaissance Office to assess their capabilities in hyperspectral satellite imagery. BlackSky and Planet are “signaling that they expect to have a hyperspectral system in their fleet, when today they don’t,” he said. In a news release, BlackSky said its current geospatial intelligence platform combines electro-optical, SAR and radio frequency data and analytics. “Hyperspectral capabilities are a natural extension,” the company said. Hyperspectral sensors capture data across numerous spectral bands and can offer more detailed and precise information about objects based on material makeup. For example, these sensors can identify artificial versus real vegetation, decoy equipment and hazardous materials. BlackSky does not currently have hyperspectral satellites but under the NRO contract plans to “demonstrate technical capabilities via modeling and simulation and validate business and cybersecurity concepts of operation.” Planet in September announced plans for a hyperspectral constellation, named Tanager, in partnership with the nonprofit Carbon Mapper Coalition . The company said the agreement with the NRO will allow the agency to evaluate Planet’s future capabilities to detect greenhouse gas emissions and other applications that leverage hyperspectral space sensors. Large companies diversify Maxar, Planet and BlackSky last year won the NRO’s l argest ever procurement contracts for commercial electro-optical imagery, “so they have the funds to expand and go multi-phenomenology in what they can offer,” Gauthier said. By contrast, Orbital Sidekick and other startups that won NRO agreements are focused on providing a niche capability and “maybe, could even be more cost effective at doing the one thing,” Gauthier said. Most startup companies, he said, “especially those trying to launch satellites, are thinking about their tech hardware first and not thinking about selling analytics or selling multiple phenomenology data to the end user.” Orbital Sidekick said it plans to launch its first six-satellite hyperspectral constellation during 2023. There’s room in the market both for specialists in a particular sensor phenomenology and for larger players that can provide a more integrated service, said Gauthier. “In my former role as a government buyer, it was easier for me to sign one contract with a fusion analytics provider that has already done the work to have business relationships with multiple imaging companies,” he said. “They have a core team of analytic expertise and software developers, and then they’re selling you the subscription to the insights that we need.”
The Space Systems Command announced March 24 it has selected 18 vendors to provide data analytics and software services to help decision makers analyze information about the space domain. The companies are Agility Consulting, August Schell Enterprises, Avantus Federal, BAE Systems, Bluestaq, C3 AI, Enlighten IT Consulting, Ernst & Young, Kinetica, MAG Aerospace., Map Large, Meroxa.io, NT Concepts, Oracle America, Palantir, Raft, Royce Geospatial Consultants and World Wide Technology These vendors will compete for $900 million worth of task orders under an indefinite delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract over the next five years. IDIQ is a flexible type of contract that doesn’t require the government to list the exact quantities of the product or services it needs and allows agencies to adjust their requirements over the life of the contract. This IDIQ contract is in support of the Space C2 (command and control) program that the U.S. Air Force started in 2018 to integrate and analyze space domain awareness data from multiple sources for more accurate and faster monitoring of outer space. Faster analytics The Space Systems Command’s Space C2 office for the past two years has been working to transition data stovepipes into a commercial data analytics platform developed by Palantir . The platform, named Warp Core, was designed to enable better data sharing. Space Force operators who monitor and track objects in orbit for decades have relied on legacy datasets for information on space objects and manually organize it in Excel spreadsheets. The new data- as-a-service platform automates that entire process. Warp Core was activated in October 2021. The vendors under the IDIQ contract will work with the Warp Core platform and provide “capabilities that require the aggregation of massive amounts of data from disparate sources and systems,” said the Space Systems Command. The Warp Core data platform is part of the ATLAS system, short for Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis . The Space Force is fielding ATLAS, which was developed by L3Harris, to replace the aging SPADOC, or Space Defense Operations Center. This comes after many years of unsuccessful efforts to modernize outdated space tracking and domain awareness systems.
The Canadian government formally committed March 24 to an extension of the International Space Station to 2030, joining other Western partners but not Russia. As part of a summit meeting in Ottawa between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden, the two governments confirmed that Canada would participate in the ISS through 2030 as part of a renewed commitment to space exploration that includes contributions to the NASA-led lunar Gateway. “Prime Minister Trudeau agreed to extend Canada’s commitment to the International Space Station (ISS) and support science on the Lunar Gateway,” the Canadian government said in a statement outlining overall cooperation between the two countries. “Our country’s continued participation in ISS and Lunar Gateway cement Canada’s global leadership in robotics in space and on Earth.” The White House announced at the end of 2021 its intent to extend ISS operations through 2030. Since then, the U.S. has been working with its major partners to confirm their participation in the station beyond the previously agreed-to date of 2024. The Japanese government formally agreed to the extension in November 2022 , followed shortly thereafter by the European Space Agency at its ministerial meeting . Canada was expected to also agree to an extension, with timing the only issue. “No one would have expected Canada to make a decision before the U.S. or even ESA or Roscosmos,” one Canadian Space Agency official, Christian Lange, said at a January 2022 conference . The White House announcement, he said then, would allow the agency “to propose options and come to a decision in a timely manner” but gave no timeline for doing so. “The United States strongly welcomed Canada’s decision to support the extension of operation of the International Space Station through 2030,” the White House said at the end of a fact sheet . With the Canadian announcement, Russia is the only ISS partner that has not agreed to an extension to 2030. Last July, Yuri Borisov, new head of Roscosmos, said that Russia would leave the ISS partnership after 2024 . Officials later clarified that meant some time after 2024 , not necessarily immediately after 2024. In February, a Roscosmos council approved a plan to extend Russian operations on the station to 2028 . The agency said it would then prepare documents to get formal approval from the Russian government for that extension. The U.S. and Canada also promoted the impending announcement of the crew of Artemis 2, the first flight of the Orion spacecraft to carry astronauts. The four-person crew will be announced at an event in Houston April 3. One of the four will be Canadian as part of an agreement NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced in late 2020 regarding Canada’s contribution to the Gateway. In exchange for providing the Canadarm3 robotic arm for the Gateway, Canada got a seat on Artemis 2 as well as a future, unspecified mission to the Gateway. Biden mentioned the Artemis 2 announcement in a speech March 24 to the Canadian Parliament. “In just a few days, NASA is going to announce an international team of astronauts who will crew the Artemis 2 mission. The first human voyage to the moon since the Apollo mission ended more than 50 years ago will consist of three Americans and one Canadian,” he noted. “Together we’ll return to the moon.”
Blue Origin says it is preparing to resume flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle after completing an investigation into a failed launch last September. Blue Origin announced March 24 that its investigation into the NS-23 launch concluded that the nozzle in the BE-3PM engine in the rocket’s propulsion module suffered a structural failure that caused a thrust misalignment. That triggered the abort motor in the vehicle’s crew capsule, taking it away from the propulsion module. The capsule, which carried payloads but no people on the Sept. 12 flight , landed safely under parachutes. The propulsion module, called Tail 3 by the company, shut down the BE-3PM engine after the nozzle failure, and crashed within a predicted area at the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas. A mishap investigation team organized by Blue Origin recovered “all critical flight hardware” within days of the mishap. That investigation found evidence structural fatigue failure in the engine nozzle, which it linked to temperatures that exceeded its design. “Forensic evaluation of the recovered nozzle fragments also showed clear evidence of thermal damage and hot streaks resulting from increased operating temperatures,” the company stated. “The fatigue location on the flight nozzle is aligned with a persistent hot streak identified during the investigation.” Ground tests of the engine found that its flight configuration was running hotter than expected. Investigators concluded “design changes made to the engine’s boundary layer cooling system accounted for an increase in nozzle heating and explained the hot streaks present.” The company did not elaborate on the nature of the design changes. Blue Origin said that it is making design changes to the combustion chamber of the BE-3PM and its operating parameters. Additional, unspecified design changes to the nozzle also improved its structural performance. The company said it would resume flights of New Shepard “soon” starting with the reflight of the payload-only NS-23 mission. It was not more specific about the schedule and did not state when it would resume crewed flights. The company had said little about the investigation in the six months since the mishap. “We will get to the bottom of it,” said Gary Lai, chief architect of New Shepard at Blue Origin, during a talk at a suborbital research conference Feb. 28 . “I can’t talk about specific timelines or plans for when we will resolve that situation other than to say that we fully intend to be back in business as soon as we are ready.” “We are still closing out the investigation. We’re working very closely with the FAA,” said Ariane Cornell, vice president of commercial orbital, astronaut and international sales at Blue Origin, during a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference March 15. “We’re going into very deep, deep detail on that.” She said that the company was planning to return New Shepard to flight “by the end of this year,” but was not more specific. She noted that escape system on the vehicle worked “perfectly” on NS-23, a point the company emphasized in its statement about the investigation: “The Crew Capsule escape system worked as designed, bringing the capsule and its payloads to a safe landing at Launch Site One with no damage.” Cornell noted the company had not lost any customers for its crewed flights since the mishap. “Demand continues to be strong,” she said. “We continue to have customers signing up for New Shepard. Some of those even asked to fly an ‘escape’ mission because it seemed so exciting. We have politely declined.”
ABL Space Systems, a California-based launch startup, announced March 24 it has secured a $60 million contract from the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Air Force that also includes matching funds from private investors, a type of agreement known as strategic funding increase, or STRATFI . The contract is for ground and flight demonstrations in “ tactically responsive space ,” an initiative championed by Congress to tap commercial rockets for rapid-response missions that could be needed if military satellites are targeted in a conflict. ABL’s agreement includes $30 million in government funding and $30 million in matching funds from the company’s investors. Under the contract ABL, will seek to demonstrate “operational flexibility for low-cost launches supporting tactically responsive space,” the company said. Small launcher RS1 ABL developed a small launch vehicle called RS1 capable of placing up to 1,350 kilograms into low Earth orbit. It attempted its first launch Jan. 10 from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island but the mission failed . The company has not yet announced when it make its next launch attempt. The company views the U.S. military as a key customer that could benefit from the company’s mobile infrastructure for responsive launch missions. The RS1 vehicle uses a containerized ground system that allows it to launch from sites with minimal infrastructure. The company is one of four small-launch startups that recently were assigned historic launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. ABL got Space Launch Complex 15, which was used for Titan 1 and 2 launches in the 1960s. The company will temporarily conduct launches from SLC-46, a pad that has been used by several other vehicles. ABL has raised several hundred million dollars from venture capital firms, including $200 million in October 2021 in a round that valued the company at $2.4 billion . Lockheed Martin is both a strategic investor and a major customer, having signed a contract in April 2021 for as many as 58 RS1 launches through the end of decade. It also selected the RS1 to perform its “U.K. Pathfinder” launch from the SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands later in 2023 .
For the world’s busiest spaceport, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. The combination of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center hosted 57 launches in 2022, more than any other launch range in the world and more launches than any other country except China. Those launches spanned the gamut from the Space Launch System and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to Astra’s Rocket 3.3 small launch vehicle. That surge in activity — Cape Canaveral hosted 31 launches in 2021 — has created a palpable sense of excitement about an industry finally showing the growth that had long been predicted. “We haven’t seen this kind of space activity since the 1960s,” said Col. James Horne, deputy director of launch and range operations for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command. Horne, speaking at the Feb. 20 annual summit of the Global Spaceport Alliance, an association of spaceports and related companies, said he was amazed at what was going on at the Cape today. “I’ve been in the launch business for 18 years and I’ve never seen this kind of activity,” he said. “It’s unbelievable when you drive around Cape Canaveral today.” That growth is projected to continue. Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, the Space Force unit that oversees the Eastern Range, said the service was projecting 92 launches from the range in 2023, nearly triple the activity just two years earlier. “Everyone knows that launches are increasing,” he said at the Space Mobility conference in Orlando Feb. 21. “What’s shocking is how fast they’re increasing.” That growth is not limited to the Cape. Purdy said that Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, which hosted 11 launches in 2021 and 19 in 2022, could support 42 launches this year. “That’s insane.” He acknowledged that launch activity rarely meets projections, but the growth trajectory was clear. In a later panel at the conference, Col. Mark Shoemaker, vice commander of Space Launch Delta 45, estimated “80-ish” launches from the Cape in 2023. “A lot of us thought that would be unobtainable a few years ago,” he said. That surge in launch activity brings with it challenges. Traditionally, companies and government agencies have focused on issues like licensing or access to airspace for launches. But at the series of events that marked Commercial Space Week in Orlando in February, a bigger and more fundamental issue emerged: the infrastructure at spaceports, especially at the Cape, to handle increased launches. “Congestion is becoming a huge challenge for us,” Horne said. “All of our mechanisms that we use to manage this business area are starting to show strains.” For now, the level of launch activity at the Cape remains manageable. Shoemaker said that in the last 12 months, Space Launch Delta 45 received 329 requests for launch dates on the Eastern Range, of which it approved 238. That led to 58 launches and 11 scrubs for weather or technical issues. “Very few times is it the weather that is causing the delay and only one time did the FAA, on the air side, say they couldn’t approve a launch,” he said, with customer issues accounting for most of the delays. “From a spaceport perspective, we are enabling whatever the customer wants to have done.” But warning signs are emerging. One is that the Cape is effectively full. “Today, every single pad we have on the Cape is occupied by somebody or multiple somebodies,” Horne said during a panel at the SpaceCom conference Feb. 22. “There’s massive congestion, tons of construction going on.” “A limiting factor is the environment,” said Janet Petro, director of the Kennedy Space Center, at Space Mobility. While her center sprawls over 144,000 acres, only 7,500 acres are “developable,” she said, with the rest set aside as wildlife refuge. Trying to expand the property that could be developed, such as for additional launch sites, would be difficult, she suggested. The infrastructure to support those launch sites, such as power, commodities and roads, is aging. “We’re talking about 1960s infrastructure that we operate on today,” Horne said. “There’s billions of dollars of infrastructure investment that your federal ranges need.” Those concerns are not theoretical. Petro described a challenge the center faced supporting the Falcon Heavy launch of USSF-67, a national security mission, from Launch Complex 39A in January. Delays in the launch of Artemis 1 from the center, which finally lifted off last November, had postponed planned maintenance of facilities run by a contractor, Air Liquide, which provided commodities like gaseous nitrogen needed to support the launch. The lead engineer for Air Liquide, Petro recalled, “was getting really nervous about maintenance, safety and risks associated with the system going down, that was going to impact this national security mission.” Ultimately, SpaceX brought in its own equipment to provide gaseous nitrogen to support the launch. “It was a great example of how, with the high ops tempo, we’re going to have to start thinking about things like all of the systems that support launch that need maintenance,” she said. Those issues extend to mundane, yet important, services like the power grid and sewer lines. “You wouldn’t consider them part of a launch campaign,” said Thomas Engler, who leads the center planning and development directorate at KSC, “but those things are critical.” He noted on a SpaceCom panel that the center was already trying to juggle growing power demands at the center. That included “carving out” part of the grid that serves Exploration Park, the commercial development just outside the center’s gates, so that a local utility could set up a substation to meet the needs of Blue Origin’s New Glenn manufacturing facility there. The grid may soon hit the breaking point, though. SpaceX is building a Starship launch pad at Launch Complex 39A, its launch tower already overshadowing the existing Falcon pad. “Potentially, as they start to evolve that pad, we cannot supply the power to 39A for Starship at some point,” he warned. “It just gets overwhelmed.” Even something as seemingly simple as maintaining a road is difficult. “Our roads are not adequate to support how we transport things back and forth across KSC and the Cape,” Horne said. Some bridges can’t be used, he added, because they can’t support the loads of vehicles transporting rockets or spacecraft. “We frankly don’t have a lot of mechanisms to move fast on any of that,” he said. He described one bit of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand where the Space Force worked with Space Florida, the state space development agency, to lease a road to Space Florida and had it handle a widening project for it, then returned it to service. “If I had to do that the old-fashioned way, it would have taken me 20 years.” That, he said, was because of the slow pace of military construction projects in general. He noted work had only recently started at nearby Patrick Space Force Base for a new entrance gate, even though it had been on the books to be built for more than 15 years. “We can’t operate like that anymore.” A common refrain from both NASA and Space Force officials is that the current approach to maintaining and upgrading launch infrastructure at the Cape, which dates from the early Space Age when government was the primary customer, no longer worked when launch activity was dominated by the commercial sector. “We are not allowed to take commercial partners’ money and invest it in our infrastructure,” Petro said. “It’s preventing us from really supporting the entire industry, commercial and government, as they operate on our center.” Similarly, she noted NASA could not include commercial needs when contracting for services like commodities. “We’re not getting the benefit of volume discounts and so forth that you would probably be able to leverage if we were to include those requirements in our contacts.” Horne offered a similar message. “We have outmoded legislative authorities and funding mechanisms,” he said. That includes the “excess capacity” approach where federal ranges support commercial launches only when not being used for government activities, even as commercial launches dominate the use of the ranges. “It’s completely the opposite of the dynamic we’re operating in today.” Another challenge is a lack of funding dedicated to spaceport infrastructure. “Traditionally, our country has provided some kind of federal financial support for infrastructure for all of our modes of transportation,” said George Nield, former FAA associate administrator for space transportation, at Space Mobility. All modes, he noted, but space. “That’s something we need to fix.” For several years, industry advocated for FAA spaceport infrastructure grants, modeled on those the agency provides to airports. However, there’s been little progress on securing funding for such grants. At the Global Spaceport Alliance meeting, Kelvin Coleman, current FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said that issue is a topic for a new National Spaceport Interagency Working Group. That group, established last June, includes the FAA, NASA, Defense Department and other agencies. “They’re going to come up with a set of recommendations,” he said of the committee. “A lot of the burden is being carried by the federal ranges, and they’re not getting all that they need in order to keep up with demand.” Coleman said that, ultimately, it will be an issue for the National Space Council, given the various federal agencies involved. He said that the FAA presented the issue of spaceport funding to the council already, but was told to first have the working group take it up and offer some recommendations. “As we get down the road and come up with some really strong recommendations, I know it will get the attention of the National Space Council.” Increased funding for spaceport infrastructure is only part of the long-term solution for Cape Canaveral’s infrastructure problems. With land limited and demand growing, some have suggested it’s time for the development of multi-user launch pads shared by several companies. Horne says that, for now, there’s little interest in doing so among launch providers. “Not a single launch service provider wants to do that,” he said. “It will be interesting to see, when they start stepping all over each other, how that changes.” An exception to that is Mark Lester, chief operating officer of Phantom Space and who formerly ran the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska launch site on Kodiak Island. He said at SpaceCom his company is open to sharing launch pads with other companies, showing off designs of proposed facilities at Vandenberg that could be used both by Phantom’s small vehicles under development as well as other vehicles in the same performance class. He compared it to airlines sharing a gate at an airport. “At the end of the day, all I care about, and my stakeholders care about, is that I get access to the orbits my customers need when we need it.” KSC’s Engler, though, suggested rockets may not be standardized enough for a common pad to make sense. “As long as each individual company designs its own individual interface to a launch pad, we’re not going to be able to be successful in sharing this infrastructure,” he said. Another alternative is to move launch pads offshore. A startup, The Spaceport Company, pitched its plans to develop mobile offshore launch platforms that could be used by small launch vehicles. The platforms, based on an existing ship design called a liftboat, would travel from a port to locations in U.S. territorial waters, then anchor themselves to the seafloor to host a launch. “It’s scalable,” Tom Marotta, founder and chief executive of the company, said at SpaceCom. “It’s a lot easier to build more ships to meet more launch demand than it is to go find 100 acres on the coast somewhere.” His company is planning a demonstration of the system in May, launching four sounding rockets from a modified ship in the Gulf of Mexico. The company plans to announce relationships with launch companies in the near future as it works to raise money to start work on the first launch platforms. Launches could simply move to other terrestrial spaceports, like Rocket Lab’s growing presence at Virginia’s Wallops Island, which has a pad for Electron launches and will host the company’s larger Neutron rocket. But for orbital launches there are few other options today, or for the foreseeable future, given the expense and regulatory difficulty in establishing new spaceports for vertically launched orbital rockets. If the industry continues to grow, moving to other launch sites may only be a temporary fix. “Our goal is to squeeze all of the efficiencies out of the Cape and elsewhere,” said Dale Ketcham, vice president of government and community relations at Space Florida. “Florida is dealing with issues today that every other spaceport in the world is going to have to deal with eventually.” This article originally appeared as “Cape congestion: The world’s most active launch site is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success” in the March 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
An agreement for a United Arab Emirates’ rover to fly on China’s Chang’e-7 lunar mission has apparently been hit by U.S. export control rules. China and the UAE signed a memorandum of understanding in September 2022 for the Rashid II rover to fly on lander of the multi-spacecraft Chang’e-7 mission. However, that agreement has fallen foul of the U.S. government’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), according to a report from the South China Morning Post, citing anonymous sources. ITAR prohibits the sale or export of a list of components, technologies and software classified as defense-related on grounds of national security issues. The rules apply to all US citizens and businesses, as well as foreign companies and individuals that have access to items of U.S.-origin designated under ITAR. Conversely, the UAE’s Rashid I rover recently entered lunar orbit aboard a Japanese commercial moon lander. The HAKUTO-R Mission 1 launched in December on a SpaceX Falcon 9. The export control rules aim to restrict access of certain actors including China to sensitive U.S.-made components, impacting China’s role in the international launch market and impacting cooperation. Components developed to be ITAR-free have allowed entities in China and Europe to collaborate, while China has also looked to deliver turnkey space solutions—providing launch, spacecraft, ground support and so on—to lesser developed nations in order to avoid the barriers of ITAR. The regulations have also been perceived to hit U.S. companies which have also been cautious of violating sometimes nebulous ITAR controls. Rumors that the partnership had ended had appeared on Chinese social media in recent weeks. No official comment has been made. China recently worked to grow cooperation with emerging space nations including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates . The development, if confirmed, would be a blow to China’s efforts to attract partners for its lunar exploration plans. China is working towards constructing an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s, with the Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 missions touted as a basic model for the plan. Further complicating the issue is Russia’s founding participation in the ILRS project. Chinese officials presented opportunities for international participation on Chang’e-7 and other lunar and deep space missions at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris last September. The officials did so however without mentioning Russia as a partner, with the country facing international isolation in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. Opportunities to join Chang’e-7 were reiterated at meetings of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in February this year, with 10 kilograms of payload available on the Chang’e-7 lander, with a further 15 kg aboard the orbiter. The loss of the Rashid II rover means a further 10 kilograms will be once again available on the lander. Also at the meetings Chinese officials revealed that it had pre-selected landing areas at Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole and the nearby Shoemaker crater, downselecting from a wider range of earlier potential sites. The specific landing site was still to be determined. NASA is also considering landing sites at Shackleton for the Artemis 3 mission. China and NASA had previously identified a number of overlapping potential landing sites . China is set to launch a relay satellite in 2024 to support the upcoming Chang’e-6 lunar far side sample return and Chang’e-7 lunar south pole landing missions.
An advisory committee called on the European Space Agency to develop a comprehensive human spaceflight program using a more commercial approach. The report by the High-Level Advisory Group, released by ESA March 23, called on the agency to develop autonomy in human spaceflight, including crewed spacecraft and a commercial space station as well as the ability to conduct a human lunar landing within a decade, but offered little guidance on budgets for doing so. “Europe should establish autonomy in Earth orbit, on the Moon and beyond with human and robotic capabilities complementing each other,” the report stated. That included “a European Commercial LEO Station, Cargo and Crew Capabilities for the Gateway and the Moon, and sustained presence on the lunar surface.” “Now it’s really time to step up and jump to another level,” said Stefania Giannini, former Italian education and research minister and a member of the advisory group, during a briefing. “It’s about European autonomy. This is the main key objective we are highlighting in the report that should be achieved through bold political will and investment.” The report raised the concern that, by not investing in human spaceflight, Europe ran the risk of missing out on major new markets that would instead be captured by the United States and China, drawing parallels to other fields, like the internet and artificial intelligence. “Given examples in other technology domains, the potential cost of inaction would far outweigh the necessary investment to secure European autonomy in space,” the report stated. “Historically, a passive approach in Europe led to the creation of foreign market dominance, even in technology sectors where Europe was initially well positioned.” Another member of the advisory group, Cedric O, former secretary of state for the digital sector in France, said he was not sure that space economy would “explode” in the near future but that Europe needed to invest, just in case. “It is not fully certain, from my point of view, there will be a huge revolution, but the fact is, if there is a huge revolution, and let’s assume that the Americans and Chinese are betting on that huge revolution, then it’s going to be a huge problem if Europe is not part of that,” he said. “We don’t want to be left behind in terms of the economic and geostrategic implications.” The report said that Europe should “significantly increase the level of public investment” in human spaceflight but did not give specific figures. However, it emphasized the need for ESA to work with the private sector through public-private partnerships like those NASA used for its commercial cargo and crew programs. “Rather than designing, developing and operating space infrastructure a commercially-oriented procurement policy needs to be adopted,” the report stated. In such a scenario, ESA would develop requirements for key systems like a crewed spacecraft “and encourage the private sector to propose the most innovative and cost-efficient solution.” At the briefing, O said that how ESA spent the money was more important that getting more funding, citing the development of launch services by SpaceX that, with support from NASA through commercial partnerships, eroded Europe’s once-dominant position in the global launch market. “There is not a revolution in the amount of money that is spent. The big game-changer is the emergence of the NewSpace sector,” he said. “If we go on with the same procurement policies, if we go on with the same constraints that we have today, if we go on with monopolies, if we go with hampering the emergence of NewSpace actors, we won’t make it no matter what the budget is.” He reiterated that point later in the briefing. “The overall efficiency of the euros that are spent today is very poor,” he said. ESA established the advisory group last year after a space summit what included both ESA and European Union member states. The group’s members included former politicians as well as scientists, explorers and businesspeople. Only one person, Anna Rathsman, chair of the ESA Council, was from the space industry. “I was a little worried at the beginning because they are not space experts,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, at the briefing. “You never know what comes out.” He said he was pleased with the report, which will support planning by the agency to potentially pursue human spaceflight capabilities. “There is still a lot of work to be done. It starts with making the case, identifying scenarios and options,” he said. Those plans will be discussed at a second space summit scheduled for November in Seville, Spain. “The money spent in ESA today is really well spent,” he said, responding to O’s comments, but agreed that changes were needed to carry out a new human spaceflight effort. “If Europe engages in this space revolution, then we have to change completely the way how we procure and interact with industry.” That could include reconsidering ESA’s longstanding “geo-return” policy, where countries get contracts awarded at levels roughly equal to the funding they provide for ESA programs. That approach has been criticized by some in Europe for making ESA programs inflexible and noncompetitive. In a recent essay , Aschabacher proposed modifying that approach to what he described as a “fair contribution” approach, which he described as linked to “the outcome of the industrial competitions and to the actual share gained by its industry in these competitions.” At the briefing, though, he said he was not considering doing away with geo-return altogether, arguing it was key to the increased funding ESA won at its latest ministerial meeting, called CM22, last November. “Geo-return is not a poison,” he said. “It’s serving us extremely well. We wouldn’t have gotten 17 billion at CM22 without geo-return.”
Rocket Lab launched a pair of BlackSky imaging satellites March 24 on a launch that was also a test of its ability to recover and reuse boosters. The Electron rocket lifted off at 5:14 a.m. Eastern from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. Weather postponed the launch two days, while concerns about an ongoing geomagnetic storm caused the launch to slip by nearly 90 minutes. The rocket’s kick stage deployed its payload of two Gen-2 imaging satellites for BlackSky about 55 minutes after liftoff. The satellites were placed in circular orbits at an altitude of about 450 kilometers and an inclination of 42 degrees. The launch was the third this year for Rocket Lab and second in as many weeks, after an Electron launch from Virginia carrying two Capella Space radar satellites March 16 . The company projects conducting up to 15 Electron launches this year. On this launch, Rocket Lab planned to have the rocket’s first stage splash down in the ocean, where it would be recovered by a ship. During the launch webcast, the company confirmed that the stage deployed its parachute and splashed down, but had not provided an update on recovery efforts. The company will use this mission to see if boosters that do splash down can be refurbished for reuse. If that is the case, the company will do away with earlier plans to perform mid-air recoveries of boosters using a helicopter, which the company unsuccessfully attempted on two launches last year. “Pending this outcome of testing and analysis of the stage, the mission may move us towards sticking with marine recovery altogether and introduce significant savings to the whole operation,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said during a Feb. 28 earnings call . That would save money involved with helicopter recoveries, but he suggested that would be offset by additional work to waterproof the booster and refurbish it. However, doing away with the helicopter would allow the company to recover the booster on up to 70% of its launches, versus 50% with the helicopter. “So, financially it’s kind of the same, but we get to actually reuse more vehicles,” he said on the call. For BlackSky, the launch placed into orbit likely the last of its Gen-2 series of imaging satellites. The satellites will replace two of the company’s first satellites launched in 2018 and nearing the end of their lives, according to Brian O’Toole, chief executive of BlackSky, in a March 7 earnings call. “Those, we expect, will be our last two Gen-2s,” he said. The company does have some spare satellites, he noted, but the company has not decided whether they will launch any of them. BlackSky is moving on to its Gen-3 series of satellites , which will provide imagery with a resolution as sharp as 50 centimeters. O’Toole said on the earnings call that BlackSky now expects to start launching those satellites in 2024. BlackSky reported earnings of $65.4 million in 2022, an increase of 92% over 2021, and projected revenues of $90–96 million in 2023. The company, though, had an operating loss of $86.5 million for the year. The company, which ended the year with $75 million of cash and cash equivalents on hand, announced at the same time it reported its financial results that it raised $29.5 million in a private placement. “It gives us sufficient capital for the foreseeable future,” Henry Dubois, chief financial officer of BlackSky, said on the earnings call. He noted the company projected positive adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the fourth quarter of 2023. “So, we believe that we’re in good shape to get our Gen-3s up.”
The first flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle with astronauts on board, previously scheduled for late April, has been delayed, likely until the summer. In a tweet March 23, Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said that Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission had been delayed to some time after the launch of Axiom Space’s Ax-2 private astronaut mission to the International Space Station in early May. Lueders said the delay in the launch of CFT, which had been planned for the later half of April, would allow teams to “assess readiness and complete verification work” but did not offer additional details about the delay, or why it was announced now. She said further details would come after the revised schedule was finalized. It was not clear what triggered the announcement, with no details provided by NASA or Boeing. Industry sources said that pre-flight checkouts and other work, such as software testing, had taken longer than planned, but were unaware of any specific development that prompted the NASA announcement. At a Feb. 17 briefing , NASA and Boeing officials said work was on schedule for a launch in mid to late April. At the time, the next major milestone was fueling of the spacecraft, which officials said they wanted to do within 60 days of the scheduled launch to mitigate any leaks that could corrode valves, a problem that delayed the vehicle’s second uncrewed test flight by more than 10 months. That fueling was scheduled to take place in early March. However, neither the company nor the agency had announced that fueling had taken place, and agency officials hedged about the schedule when asked about progress on the mission. “We are in the middle of final preps for the CFT flight, in the middle of closing out all of the certification work,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said in a March 11 briefing after the splashdown of the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. That included the “final phases” of flight software testing, he said. He noted that he and others in the commercial crew program had been focused on the launch of the SpaceX Crew-6 mission and return of Crew-5, and that he was not up-to-date on the progress Boeing was making on CFT. “We really need to step back here in March and take a look at where we’re at and determine what the next steps are,” he said. “Right now we’re targeting a no-earlier-than launch date of the end of April.” Phil Dempsey, NASA ISS transportation integration manager, offered a similar schedule at a March 13 briefing ahead of a SpaceX cargo Dragon launch to the station. NASA and Boeing “were talking over the readiness of the vehicle,” he said. “There is a handful of open work that is still being assessed. The current timing is no earlier than the end of April, April 30 right now, but that is under review at the moment based on the readiness of the vehicle.” NASA and Boeing had not provided updates on the status of the CFT mission since those briefings. There had been no other updates regarding preparations for the mission. That included the status of the Atlas 5 launch vehicle that will launch Starliner. A launch in late April would have put it in conflict with the inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, currently scheduled for as soon as May 4. Vulcan and Atlas use the same launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and ULA has been conducting tests of the Vulcan rocket on that pad. It has not shared updates on the status of the Atlas 5 used for Starliner. During a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference March 15, Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said he was still confident that Vulcan would be ready for launch in May, based on tests on the pad and qualification tests of the vehicle’s BE-4 engines. CFT will fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the station for a mission scheduled to last eight days. It is the final flight test before NASA certifies the vehicle for use in ISS crew rotation missions starting no sooner than early 2024.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson claims proposed spending reductions for fiscal year 2024 could have “devastating and potentially unrecoverable” effects on NASA programs, delaying or canceling many missions. In a March 19 letter to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Nelson outlined the effects on NASA of two budget-cutting scenarios being considered by House Republican leadership. DeLauro published the letter this week along with similar letters she requested from other federal agencies. One scenario considered rolling back discretionary spending across the board to fiscal year 2022 levels, which for NASA would mean $24 billion, $1.4 billion less than what NASA received in 2023. A second scenario proposed exempting defense spending from that cut, requiring deeper reductions for non-defense discretionary agencies. NASA estimated in that scenario its budget would be cut by 22% from 2023 levels to about $19.8 billion. “To fund NASA at such a level in FY 2024,” Nelson wrote in the letter of the latter scenario, “would have devastating and potentially unrecoverable impacts upon the objectives that the President and Congress have set for NASA, and weaken our Nation’s position as a global leader in exploration, science, technology innovation, and discovery.” That cut, according to documents provided in the letter, would “significantly restructure or terminate” various elements of Artemis 4, including the upgraded version of the Space Launch System and lunar Gateway elements. That would, NASA stated, “threaten [the] ability to fly Artemis IV and defer lunar exploration beyond Artemis IV .” [emphasis in original] The cut in science would delay or cancel several missions in development, including Mars Sample Return, the DAVINCI mission to Venus and the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. Up to three missions in the Earth System Observatory program of Earth science missions would be canceled, with delays to the Roman Space Telescope, future astrophysics missions and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, among others. Other changes would be a reduced number of International Space Station cargo missions and delays for both an ISS deorbit module and development of commercial successors to the station. The agency estimated that the cuts would require laying off 4,000 center and contractor personnel across the agency’s programs. The other scenario, with NASA funding cut to 2022 levels, had less severe effects. It would “substantially delay” Artemis 4 and also cancel a procurement for a second Artemis lunar lander. It would delay Mars Sample Return, DAVINCI and Dragonfly and cancel one Earth System Observatory mission, while delaying three others. The ISS deorbit tug and commercial space stations would also be delayed, with at least 1,000 center and contractor personnel laid off. The document did not state how NASA came with the proposed delays and cancellations or the individual value of each. The letter contains one notable error: in the scenario with the larger cuts, the letter lists the same amount for the budgets of science, space technology and space operations of $6.1 billion. Under that scenario, science would be cut to $6.1 billion but space technology would have only $935 million and space operations $3.3 billion. DeLauro requested the spending cut plans from NASA and other federal agencies in January after comments by the new Republican leadership of the House that they would seek to cut spending to fiscal year 2022 letters. They disclosed few details about the plan, including uncertainty about whether defense spending would be included, prompting her to request both scenarios from the agencies. House appropriators have just started hearings on fiscal year 2024 budget proposals from the agencies, but have not yet scheduled one for NASA.
Relativity Space’s first Terran 1 rocket successfully got off the launch pad March 22 but failed to reach orbit because of an upper stage malfunction. The Terran 1 rocket lifted off at 11:25 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight dubbed “Good Luck, Have Fun” by the company. Liftoff was delayed by nearly 90 minutes because of upper-level winds as well as a boat that strayed into restricted waters. The rocket’s first stage, powered by nine Aeon 1 methane-fueled engines, appeared to operate as planned, passing through the region of maximum dynamic pressure known as “Max-Q” 80 seconds after liftoff. Getting through Max-Q was a major goal for this launch to demonstrate the integrity of the rocket’s 3D-printed structure. Stage separation took place 2 minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, and the rocket’s single Aeon Vacuum upper stage engine ignited. However, footage from a camera on the stage showed the plume flickering seconds after ignition, and telemetry on the company’s webcast of the launch indicated the vehicle was slowing. Mission control declared an anomaly with the upper stage five minutes after liftoff, but didn’t immediately disclose additional details about the failure. Despite failing to reach orbit, the company was pleased with the performance of the earlier phases of flight. Before the launch the company emphasized that simply getting through Max-Q would be a major milestone. “This will essentially prove the viability of using additive manufacturing tech to produce products that fly,” wrote Tim Ellis, chief executive and co-founder of Relativity, in a series of tweets before the first launch attempt. The rocket did not carry a satellite payload, only a small 3D-printed component from the company’s first printer. “Although we didn’t reach orbit, we significantly exceeded our key objectives for this first launch, and that objective was to gather data at Max-Q, one of the most demanding phases of flight, and achieve stage separation,” said Arwa Tizani Kelly, technical program manager for test and launch at Relativity, during the webcast. “Today’s flight data will be invaluable to our team as we look to further improve our rockets, including Terran R.” Terran R is a much larger, fully reusable launch vehicle that Relativity is developing for a first launch as soon as 2024. Terran 1, which can place up to 1,250 kilograms into orbit, is a technology pathfinder for Terran R, with a payload capacity of about 20,000 kilograms. Relativity scrubbed its first Terran 1 launch attempt March 8 because of a problem with ground systems that were unable to get liquid oxygen propellant in the rocket’s upper stage to the right temperature. The company tried again three days later only to abort two countdowns during a three-hour window, one because of a sensor reading just 0.5 seconds before liftoff and the other because of a drop in fuel pressure in the upper stage at T-45 seconds. The company was able to correct both problems but had to work around airspace limitations on the Eastern Range during the busy spring break travel season. Moving from an afternoon launch window, used for the first two launch attempts, to one at night reduced airspace conflicts. Relativity did not announce plans before the launch when, or even if, they would perform another Terran 1 launch. Before the first launch attempt, Ellis suggested the company might skip ahead to Terran R even if the launch failed, depending on the feedback the company got from its customers. “Do they want us to continue down the path of producing more Terran 1’s to solve for those issues on this vehicle? Or, would like us to solve the remaining rocket science problems on the vehicle they are actually most interested in, Terran R?”
The first set of larger second-generation Starlink satellites is experiencing problems that could require SpaceX to deorbit at least some of them. In a March 22 tweet , SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said there were “some issues” with the set of Starlink satellites launched Feb. 27 , confirming industry speculation over the last several days based on the changing orbits of the spacecraft. “Lot of new technology in Starlink V2, so we’re experiencing some issues, as expected,” he wrote. “Some sats will be deorbited, others will be tested thoroughly before raising altitude above Space Station.” The 21 satellites, collectively known as Group 6-1 , started raising their orbits a couple days after being deployed into orbits nearly 370 kilometers high. However, the satellites halted their orbit raising a few days later, maintaining orbits at altitudes of about 380 kilometers. The International Space Station is an orbit between 415 and 420 kilometers high. Starting around March 15, their orbital altitude started to decrease at varying rates: most gradually, but at least two more steeply, descending to about 365 kilometers. All 21 remain in orbit, but that unusual behavior prompted speculation of problems with the satellites. The tweet by Musk was the first comment by him or SpaceX confirming problems with the satellites, although neither he nor the company have elaborated on what those problems are. The Group 6-1 satellites are the first of what SpaceX calls “V2 Mini” versions of Starlink satellites. They are significantly larger than the first-generation Starlink satellites that SpaceX has launched more than 4,000 of to date. The spacecraft feature improved phased-array antennas and use of E-band frequencies for backhaul that gives each satellite four times the capacity of earlier spacecraft. They also have new higher-performance electric thrusters that use argon, rather than krypton, propellant to reduce costs. SpaceX hasn’t released specifics about the V2 Mini satellites, but a design called “F9-2” in filings the company made with the Federal Communications Commission as part of its application for the second-generation constellation describes a spacecraft with a mass of 800 kilograms and a pair of solar arrays 12.8 meters long. First-generation satellites weigh about 300 kilograms and have a single array eight meters long. As the name suggests, the V2 Mini spacecraft are scaled-down versions of the ultimate V2 Starlink satellites, which will weigh about 2,000 kilograms each with solar arrays 20 meters long. Those spacecraft will launch on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, while the V2 Mini spacecraft are small enough to be launched on Falcon 9 rockets. The FCC partially authorized SpaceX’s second-generation, or Gen2, Starlink constellation in December , allowing the company to launch 7,500 of its proposed 30,000 satellites into orbits ranging from 525 to 535 kilometers. SpaceX has since launched four sets of “Group 5” satellites into Gen2 orbits authorized by the FCC, but those appear to be effectively identical to earlier Starlink satellites. Another Group 5 launch is scheduled for as soon as March 24 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A second set of V2 Mini satellites, Group 6-2, is scheduled to launch no earlier than March 30, also from Cape Canaveral, but it is uncertain if the issues with the V2 Mini satellites in orbit will delay that launch.
Avio is moving ahead with efforts to develop a larger methane-fueled rocket engine and a prototype small launch vehicle with more than $300 million in funding from the Italian government. Avio announced March 13 it formally signed contracts with the Italian government, working through the European Space Agency, for a combined 285.3 million euros ($308 million) for the two projects. The contracts, funded by Italy’s pandemic relief stimulus efforts, were first announced last summer . One project, called HTE and awarded 103.7 million euros, will go towards development of an engine that uses liquid oxygen and methane propellants. It will be a larger version of the M10 engine that Axio is currently working on that will be used on the upper stage of the future Vega E rocket. That M60 engine, with six times the thrust of the M10, will use technologies similar to those on SpaceX’s Raptor engine. “It’s challenging from a design and technology standpoint, but if it proves successful it delivers a much higher specific impulse, so it is much more efficient,” said Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio, in an interview. Avio is one of only two European companies actively working on methane-oxygen engines, alongside ArianeGroup and its Prometheus engine. While Prometheus is still in its design phase, the M10 engine has completed 24 ground tests with 1,300 seconds of run time, he said. The other project. called STS, received 181.6 million euros in funding for development of a prototype small launch vehicle using methane-oxygen engines. “What we want to do with this is demonstrate that our liquid oxygen-methane technology flies well and performs as expected in microgravity conditions,” Ranzo said. It will also demonstrate composite cryogenic propellant tanks and software-driven avionics. The vehicle is intended to be ready for a first launch in 2026. It will likely use a version of the M10 engine, he said, and carry a payload of about 200 kilograms to low Earth orbit. “The purpose is technology demonstration, not so much delivery to orbit,” he said, noting that a larger prototype would be more expensive to develop. Ranzo said that Avio would consider developing a commercial version of that vehicle with a larger capacity. “It’s a difficult market segment,” he said of the small launch vehicle or “microlauncher” industry. The Vega C, which can place about two metric tons into orbit, is in what he called a “sweet spot” of the market, launching government and commercial Earth observational satellites. “We will size the product to make sure that we can address this market well.” While that future vehicle may not compete head-to-head with smaller microlaunchers, he noted that Avio had one advantage over them, in that the money provided by the Italian government fully funds development of both the new engine and the prototype rocket. “We think we are in a pretty good position for success,” he said. That funding “is way more than what any other European company has so far gathered for similar purposes.” Returning Vega C to flight Ranzo said that Avio is working to implement the findings of an independent review into the December 2022 Vega C launch failure . That investigation concluded March 3 that a piece of the nozzle of the rocket’s Zefiro-40 second stage motor, called a throat insert, eroded more than expected, causing a loss of thrust. That work includes preparations for a static-fire test of a Zefiro-40 with a new throat insert scheduled for late May or early June. He said Avio is currently testing the new carbon-carbon throat insert material, produced by ArianeGroup, to ensure it has the proper performance. If those tests are successful, Vega C could return to flight by the end of the year carrying the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite for the ESA/European Commission Copernicus program. Ranzo said that Avio will start stacking an original Vega vehicle on the launch pad in French Guiana by the end of June for a launch in late July or August. Arianespace has yet to disclose the customers for the launch other than saying at a March 3 briefing that it will carry two primary payloads and several smaller rideshares. He said he remained confident in Vega despite last year’s Vega C failure as well as two earlier failures of the Vega. “The reality is that the Vega C, while it retains the same name as the Vega, is a completely different rocket,” he said. A failure on an early launch of the Vega C, he argued, is “somewhat within normal” expectations for new vehicles. Demand for the Vega C remains strong, including a contract announced March 14 for up to three launches of an Italian constellation of imaging satellites that, like the work Avio is doing on methane engines and a prototype small launcher, is backed by the country’s pandemic stimulus fund. The current backlog fills the Vega manifest through 2027 at the vehicle’s anticipated flight rate, he said. “Now we’re really focusing on execution to make sure we deliver on these commitments.”
The National Reconnaissance Office has signed five-year agreements with six commercial providers of hyperspectral satellite imagery, the agency announced March 22. The selected companies — BlackSky Technology , HyperSat , Orbital Sidekick , Pixxel , Planet and Xplore — are a mix of established remote-sensing industry firms and startups. Under these agreements, the NRO will first assess the companies’ technical capabilities as well as their business and cybersecurity plans. At a later stage, it will examine their on-orbit assets and procure data for demonstrations.Contracts with companies that don’t yet have operational constellations give the NRO access to their modeling and simulations until they are able to start delivering actual data. The six vendors were selected under the NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements program created to help the agency understand the capabilities of the commercial remote sensing industry. The SCE program is open to both U.S. and foreign-owned U.S. commercial firms. These awards follow six study contracts for commercial radio frequency remote sensing awarded in September 2022 , and five commercial radar contracts in January 2022. Hyperspectral sensors provide data across multiple spectral bands to enable analysts to detect phenomena in colors that typically can’t be seen by the human eye. The technology has government and commercial applications and the NRO has for years expressed interest in using the data. A number of hyperspectral imaging startups have emerged in recent years. Earth observation companies in this sector of the industry have historically struggled to find compelling uses for hyperspectral data, which has traditionally focused on defense. Companies said demand has been growing in the agriculture, mining, climate, oil and gas sectors. The NRO in 2019 awarded its first commercial hyperspectral imaging study contract to startup HySpecIQ.
A small set of Virgin Orbit employees will return to work after a week-long furlough as the company attempts to raise money to remain solvent. In a brief filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission early March 22, the company announced an “incremental resumption” of operations effective March 23. Most company employees, though, will remain on furlough until at least March 27. The company “will initiate an incremental resumption of its operations beginning on Thursday, March 23, 2023, to work on preparations for its next mission,” it stated. “The operational pause for the remainder of its workforce is expected to continue through March 26, 2023. The Company is planning for a further resumption of operations on March 27, 2023.” Virgin Orbit announced March 15 it would begin an “operational pause” the next day , furloughing nearly all its estimated 750 employees. That pause was intended to give the company time as it “conducts discussions with potential funding sources and explores strategic opportunities,” it stated in an SEC filing. Virgin Orbit was dealing with financial problems exacerbated by the Jan. 9 failure of its LauncherOne rocket on the company’s first mission from the United Kingdom. The company said when it announced the pause in operations that the investigation into the failure was “nearly complete.” Virgin Orbit previously said it traced the failure to a dislodged fuel filter in the rocket’s upper stage . The company did not disclose how many employees would return to work. Industry sources said it would be a relatively small number of people involved with working on the next LauncherOne rocket. Virgin Orbit said in its SEC filing last week that the rocket was in the “final stages of integration and test” after making changes to correct the fuel filter problem. Virgin Orbit did not provide an update in its latest SEC filing about efforts to raise new funding. The company “does not currently intend to disclose further developments with respect to these discussions, unless and until its Board of Directors approves a specific transaction or other course of action requiring disclosure,” it stated. However, Reuters reported March 22 that the company is in talks with venture fund Matthew Brown Companies to raise up to $200 million through a private share placement. That deal could close as soon as March 24. Matthew Brown Companies describes itself as a Texas-based venture capital firm “investing agnostically across emerging ventures and markets.” Those investments have included space: according to Crunchbase , which tracks startups and investments, Matthew Brown Companies has participated in funding rounds and secondary share sales of SpaceX, and also was part of a Series C round raised by small launch vehicle developer Astra in 2019. Astra, like Virgin Orbit, subsequently went public though a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital is planning another expansion of its factory in Southern California to accommodate an anticipated increase in government and commercial orders. During a March 21 earnings call, Marc Bell, chief executive of Terran Orbital, said the company would lease an additional 8,700 square meters of manufacturing space in Irvine, California. The factory, just beginning construction, would include a high bay 11 meters tall for assembling larger spacecraft. The facility is on top of a 5,600-square-meter expansion the company announced last year in Irvine. The company said in October it would expand its California facilities rather than build a large factory in Florida, concluding the California expansion would allow it to scale production faster than building a factory on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center. That expansion, Bell said, is nearly complete and is scheduled to come on line in April. Once up and running, it will be able to produce up to 250 satellites a year. The larger factory announced in the call will be devoted to integration and testing of satellites, with the company’s other facilities reoriented to produce components. “This optimization will enhance the efficiency and capacity of our entire production system,” Bell said. “When fully ramped, this addition has the potential to raise our satellite capacity to multiples of our prior 250-per-year target.” That factory will be commissioned in 2024, he added. That expansion is in anticipation of future business. Terran Orbital produced 19 satellites in 2022, a record for the company but only a small fraction of the capacity it is about to open. Current work includes a set of 42 satellite buses for Lockheed Martin for its Transport Layer Tranche 1 contract with the Space Development Agency (SDA). Bell said he expected SDA to award Tranche 2 contracts later this year. Terran Orbital announced Feb. 22 that it won a $2.4 billion contract to produce 300 satellites for Rivada Space Networks for the first half of Rivada’s broadband constellation. That contract, he said, includes an option for another 300 satellites. Those satellites will each weigh about 500 kilograms. “We expect progress on this program to accelerate throughout 2023 and 2024, with deliveries concentrated in 2025 and 2026,” he said. Rivada faces an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) deadline of mid-2026 to deploy half of its 576 satellites, with the remainder in orbit by mid-2028. While the contract appears to be a major boost to Terran Orbital’s fortunes, the company said little about how it would affect the company’s finances. That included not providing guidance for 2023 revenue or earnings “until the first phase of the Rivada program has commenced and progressed sufficiently to permit us to have a good sense of our projected results,” Bell said. The company was also not adding the Rivada contract to its backlog, which stood at $170.8 million at the end of 2022. “We are still evaluating how we want to present the Rivada contract,” said Gary Hobart, chief financial officer of Terran Orbital. Bell deflected questions on Rivada’s finances but said Terran Orbital received an initial payment to start work on the project. Rivada executives said last month that they had the financing in place for the constellation but declined to identify its investors. Bell added that he believed the ITU would grant Rivada a waiver to a milestone that would require the company to launch 10% of its constellation by September. Once that is granted “then it’s full speed ahead” on producing the satellites, he said. The contract announcement, though, has opened doors for other potential business. “What Rivada did for us as a business is that it gave us credibility in the marketplace that we can build large satellites,” he said. That included recent meetings with unnamed companies planning similar constellations. “People are viewing us very differently, very credibly.” Terran Orbital reported $94.2 million in revenue in 2022, a record for the company. However, it also reported a net loss of $164 million and negative adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $69.5 million compared to negative adjusted EBITDA of $26.1 million in 2021. The company, which raised $100 million from Lockheed Martin in October, had $93.6 million in cash on hand as of the end of 2022. The company acknowledged that it would need to raise additional funding through debt or equity to carry out its business plan, “which may not be available to us when needed or on terms that we deem to be favorable,” it stated in its earnings release.
The U.S. Air Force plans to use startup Varda Space Industries’ reentry capsules as hypersonic flight test platforms, the company’s cofounder Delian Asparouhov told SpaceNews . Varda has been raising venture funds to send to orbit 120-kilogram “factory” satellites to make products in zero-gravity and return them to Earth in a reentry capsule. The Air Force would use the capsule as a platform to test the performance of components and materials at hypersonic speeds. Asparouhov, who is also president of Varda Space, said the company in January secured $60 million in “strategic funding increase,” a type of agreement known as STRATFI . Under these agreements, the U.S. Air Force and other government agencies commit to financing a project and private investors put in matching funds. The agreement is to evaluate the use of Varda’s reentry capsules — where the company plans to bring back to Earth pharmaceutical products and other items manufactured on orbit — as a test platform for components the Air Force intends to use in future hypersonic missiles and aircraft. Government and private funds The $60 million agreement includes $15 million from Air Force and NASA customers, $15 million from the AFWERX organization that sponsors the STRATFI program, and $30 million in private funding from Varda’s venture investors. Varda Space, based in Torrance, California, plans to manufacture a range of products in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit, including pharmaceuticals and optical fiber. Asparouhov said the first demonstration mission is scheduled to launch in June on SpaceX’s Transporter 8 rideshare. The company plans to demonstrate “ melt-cool drug production capabilities .” The manufacturing spacecraft are built on Rocket Lab Photon buses. In addition to the bus used for the June mission, Varda has purchased three additional Photon buses to build more satellites, said Asparouhov. The Air Force is not flying a test payload on Varda’s first mission, he said. The company will share this mission’s flight data with the Air Force and expects the Air Force’s first payload to fly in 2024. Air Force awarded study contract in 2021 The STRATFI contract comes two years after the Air Force awarded Varda a $443,000 Small Business Innovation Research contract to study the company’s reentry capsule as a more economical alternative to traditional flight testing. During reentry, the capsule enters the atmosphere at Mach 25 and experiences temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun. “Unfortunately, modern dedicated hypersonic flight test programs can cost over $100 million per flight and adapting additional sensors to qualified or crewed reentry vehicles for flight testing introduces unacceptable risks,” said the SBIR award justification. Varda is designing a reentry vehicle for its commercial business that can be leveraged for material testing, the Air Force said.
A lunar lander developed by Japanese company ispace has entered orbit around the moon, setting up a lunar landing attempt by the end of April. Tokyo-based ispace said that its HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander entered orbit at 9:24 p.m. Eastern March 20 after a burn by its main engine lasting several minutes. The company did not disclose the parameters of the orbit but said that the maneuver was a success. HAKUTO-R Mission 1 launched in December on a SpaceX Falcon 9, going into a low-energy trajectory that took it 1.4 million kilometers from the Earth before swinging back to rendezvous with the moon. The company said in a Feb. 27 update it expected to enter orbit around the moon in the latter half of March but did not announce a specific date for the orbital insertion maneuver. Entering orbit is the seventh of 10 milestones ispace set for the mission that started with launch preparations. The final three milestones are completing “orbital control maneuvers,” the landing itself and going into a steady state of activities after landing. Company officials said in February that the mission was going well even as engineers dealt with minor issues, such as higher than expected spacecraft temperatures and an onboard computer that rebooted multiple times. “We have experienced several anomalies, but we have already solved those issues,” said Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace. The spacecraft will attempt a landing in Atlas Crater, located on the edge of Mare Frigoris in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon, around the end of April. The company said March 21 it would announce a specific landing date in the near future. Mission 1 is carrying a set of customer payloads from companies and organizations, such as a small rover called Rashid developed by the United Arab Emirates. The company is working on a second lander, Mission 2, that is similar in design to the spacecraft now in lunar orbit. It is scheduled to launch in 2024 carrying another set of customer payloads as well as a “micro rover” ispace has developed. Mission 3 will use a larger lander developed by ispace’s U.S. subsidiary in partnership with Draper, which won a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services award last July to fly payloads to the lunar farside. A successful landing would make ispace the first private entity to touch down on the moon and only the fourth organization overall, after the governments of the former Soviet Union, United States and China. As it prepares to land on the moon, ispace is also preparing to go public. The company announced March 8 it will list its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market April 12. The company will announce pricing for those shares April 3. It had raised nearly $200 million through several private rounds.
NASA’s plan to spend up to $1 billion on a tug to deorbit the International Space Station is a missed opportunity to instead repurpose or recycle the station, some in industry argue. NASA announced plans as part of its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal this month to develop the tug to help deorbit the station at the end of its life in 2030 . NASA is seeking $180 million in 2024 to start work on the tug, and anticipates spending as much as $1 billion to build it. The agency had made clear that it and the other partners would deorbit the station at the end of its life, ensuring that debris that survives reentry falls in an uninhabited region of the South Pacific Ocean to avoid the risk of damage or casualties. NASA previously expected that it would use multiple Progress cargo spacecraft to handle the deorbiting, but said at a March 13 event about the budget proposal it chose to develop the tug to provide redundancy in those plans. For some in industry, though, spending as much as $1 billion to bring down the station sends the wrong message and is also a missed opportunity to instead repurpose elements of the station, recycling material that could be used for other commercial applications. “As technology matures, certainly in the next decade we’re going to get to the point where we’re going to be able to reuse and recycle a lot of these materials,” said Ron Lopez, president and managing director of Astroscale U.S., a company working on satellite servicing and debris removal technologies. “Instead of letting it burn up and lose all of that economic value, you take it to a foundry in space” and break it down into raw materials, he said during a Satellite 2023 panel March 16. That sounds like science fiction, he acknowledged, but he noted Astroscale recently won a Small Business Innovative Research award from the U.S. Space Force, in partnership with CisLunar Industries, to test technologies for repurposing debris into materials like propellant. “The right thing to do is to bring it down,” said another panelist, Robert Hauge, president of satellite servicing company SpaceLogistics. However, he saw benefits of finding ways to repurpose at least parts of the ISS. He suggested that NASA and other partners make awards to multiple companies to test ways to recycle ISS components. “It would send a demand signal to industry that the entire world sees that this is important,” he said, “but it would also fund industry and bring more into this business, which now gives the government and commercial industry options.” That international partnership will make any such agreement a challenge, said John Klein, a professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “There’s a lot of sunk cost in there. It would be a shame not to use what we can.” NASA has not discussed any consideration of repurposing elements of the ISS before the station is deorbited. However, during a panel discussion last October at an event by the Beyond Earth Institute, Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, ruled out an idea of boosting the ISS into a higher orbit to preserve it for future use or simply as a heritage site. “When we did the calculations, it took 30 or 40 Progresses” to boost the ISS into a higher orbit, she said. “To us, it’s really about making sure that you can’t have it in a position where it’s going to cause a hazard.” “I wish we could keep station up there forever, but unfortunately we’re fighting the laws of physics here,” she said. “It will be a very sad day.” Costs and benefits of debris removal The Satellite 2023 panel also addressed a recent NASA report that performed a cost-benefit analysis of orbital debris removal . That study found that that costs borne by operators to deal with debris, such as analyzing potential collisions and performing maneuvers, was relatively modest and dominated by government rather than commercial operators. “We spend a lot of money to make sure we’re safe,” countered John Guiney, senior vice president of satellite and network operations at OneWeb. That includes, he said, extensive coordination with SpaceX and its Starlink satellite constellation. “I know they put a lot of time and money into their autonomous systems” for collision avoidance. He noted earlier in the panel that OneWeb gets an average of 53,000 conjunction data messages a day from the Space Force about potential close approaches. That results in six to eight maneuvers day by the constellation. “We spend a lot of time and money to ensure that we don’t have a collision.” That report found the systems that provided the shortest return on investment were ground- and space-based lasers to deorbit small debris between 1 and 10 centimeters across, as well as technologies to nudge larger debris to avoid collisions. “The challenge with a lot of small pieces of debris is that not only is that technology not quite there, but there are no commercial companies that I know of that are investing in the development of that technology,” argued Lopez. By comparison, several companies are working on technologies to deal with larger debris. Klein said the report did a good job attempting to estimate costs associated with debris. “What’s the solution going to look like for a complex problem? It’s probably going to be a complex solution,” he said. “It’s probably going to be a range of different options to take care of it.”
The U.S. Space Force in budget documents submitted to Congress last week is seeking $60 million over the next two years for a program known as tactically responsive space . This is the first DoD budget that requests funding for tactically responsive space. The program to date has been funded by congressional add-ons, and defense committees for years have asked DoD to create a dedicated budget line. Small satellite launch companies have actively lobbied for funding for responsive space, which would go to small launch providers that don’t require conventional launch facilities. Tactically responsive space is an initiative to demonstrate the capabilities of commercial launch vehicles to deploy small satellites on short notice. This type of service would be used during a conflict to replace a damaged satellite or augment existing constellations. Military officials said having access to responsive launch would give the U.S. additional resilience in case adversaries attempt to shoot down DoD or commercial satellites providing services to the military. The Space Force budget proposal includes $30 million for tactically responsive space in fiscal year 2024 and $30 million in fiscal year 2025. Congressional advocacy Congress has inserted $115 million into the defense budget over the past three years for tactically responsive space demonstrations. Congressional advocates have argued the program is needed as world events have shown the strategic value of satellites, making them more attractive targets. A demonstration of responsive space took place in 2021 when the Space Force flew the Tactically Responsive Launch-2 (TacRL-2) mission on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. An upcoming Tactically Responsive Launch-3 mission known as Victus Nox is expected to fly as early as May. A contract for this demonstration was awarded in September to launch services provider Firefly Aerospace and satellite manufacturer Millennium Space. They have approximately eight months to prepare and then they will be on standby. The Space Force will give Firefly 24 hours’ notice to get ready to launch. The goal of Victus Nox — Latin for ‘conquer the night’ — is to demonstrate fast turnaround launch operations and to help planners figure out the front-end processes leading up to the launch. According to budget documents, the program will “continue maturing, demonstrating, and stressing end-to-end tactically responsive space solutions based on lessons learned and identified pain points from the Victus Nox demonstration.”
SAN FRANCISCO – The U.S. Space Force awarded a $1.6 million contract to a team led by Southern California startup Arkisys to demonstrate robotic satellite assembly. Under a SpaceWERX Small Business Innovation Research contract, Arkisys, Novawurks, Motiv Space Systems, Qediq, iBoss and Texas A&M University will demonstrate how they would assemble a three-axis stabilized satellite with the robotic arm on the Arkisys Port Module. “This effort expands the overall services we have created to include the ability to utilize the robotic arm on top of the Port Module to assemble a separable space platform and then release it in orbit,” Dave Barnhart, Arkisys CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. The satellite to be assembled on the ground will be comprised of at least three Novawurks Slegos, box-shaped modules that provide capabilities like pointing, information processing and data storage. The Arkisys-led team also is likely to attach a camera or other payload to prove the utility of the new spacecraft. “Through the unique SBIR process from U.S. Space Force and SpaceWERX, we will address using resources in space to create new platforms or modify them on the fly,” Talbot Jaeger, Novawurks chief technology officer, said in a statement. “The Port will demonstrate a platform that can create a space system from parts into an operational element.” Through the demonstration, the Arkisys-led team will “prove the fidelity of the robotic connections, the interfaces and the controls,” Barnhart said. In addition, the demonstration will identify issues to be resolved. For example, operation of a robotic arm imparts momentum on a space platform. Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station will help the Arkisys-led team figure out how to keep the platform stable. “The ability to assemble a functional satellite off of another platform is something that will open up not just Earth-orbit markets and on-the-fly changes to existing satellites, but on-demand satellites for lunar or Martian exploration,” Robert Ambrose, director of space and robotics Initiatives at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, said in a statement. “This is incredibly exciting for us as we are developing platforms to validate and demonstrate higher fidelity robotics on orbit, to build, assemble, repair and operate .” For the demonstration, iBoss Space of Germany and Novawurks will supply the hardware and software interfaces. Motiv is providing the robotic arm. Qediq is helping Arkisys develop and build the Applique , a universal interface adapter to connect spacecraft payloads. Arkisys was founded in 2014 to develop the Port, a platform in low-Earth orbit for prototyping, testing, assembly and integration. The Port also is designed to serve as a destination for orbital transfer vehicles.
ATL Partners, a private equity firm, announced March 20 it has formed a new holding company called LightRidge Solutions to oversee a portfolio of space and airborne sensors businesses. LightRidge will absorb space sensor provider Geost Inc. — which ATL Partners acquired in 2021 — and Ophir Corp., a company that develops airborne laser radar technology and was acquired by ATL Partners in November 2022. The chief executive of LightRidge is Bill Gattle, a veteran space industry executive and former president of L3Harris’ space division. Portfolio of air and space sensors Geost, based in Tucson, Arizona , develops space situational awareness payloads for DoD and U.S. intelligence agencies. The company in 2021 won two U.S. Space Force contracts worth $38 million to develop an optical sensor payload for satellites in geostationary orbit. Ophir Corp., based in Littleton Colorado, uses laser radar (known as lidar) for airborne and ground-based sensors used by the U.S. military and commercial businesses. “This portfolio is fundamentally a domain awareness protection business,” said Gattle. He said the combination of these businesses under LightRidge brings “scale, operating synergies and access to capital as we realize a vision of providing affordable yet small, powerful and increasingly autonomous sensors, space electronics, and intelligence and surveillance solutions.” The creation of LightRidge, he said, is an indicator of private equity’s interest in space and defense. ATL Partners, based in New York City, has sought small to medium sized businesses with mature technologies that can be applied to national security missions and also adapted for commercial needs, Gattle said. The power competition with China and DoD’s growing appetite for space technologies, he added, are driving demand for sensors and payloads that can be rapidly integrated and deployed. Strategic acquisitions When ATL Partners acquired Geost, “we started a process of building an enterprise that provides mission critical domain protection and awareness solutions,” said Mike Kramer, LightRidge Solutions chairman and partner at ATL. “We are thrilled to work closely with Bill Gattle and his talented management team as we drive growth in the portfolio and look for highly strategic acquisitions,” said Kramer.
Even as the space industry complains of a shortage of launch capacity, SpaceX said it has room to increase an already surging pace of launches. In sessions at the recent Satellite 2023 conference, launch vehicle providers noted that a combination of growing demand, particularly from satellite constellations, and a bottleneck in launch supply was affecting the market, making it difficult to find launches and driving up prices. “Almost every company that we talk to is worried about medium to heavy lift,” said Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, during one conference panel March 14. Relativity is gearing up for another attempt for the inaugural launch its Terran 1 small launch vehicle, now scheduled for as soon as March 22. That rocket intended to be a precursor for the larger Terran R. The timeframe of concern, he argued, is between 2024 and 2027. “You have a lot of people that are trying to hit specific deadlines to getting spacecraft to orbit,” he said, “and you have Amazon Kuiper buying up a lot of capacity at prices that I’m sure were well above the most competitive in the commercial space.” Amazon acquired up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance last April to deploy its Kuiper constellation. “There is now, for the first time in 30 years, a global shortage of launch capacity,” said Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, during another conference panel March 15. That shortage, he said, stems from the rise of megaconstellations as well as the withdrawal of Russian vehicles from the commercial launch market after the invasion of Ukraine. “Now we’re in a state of shortage that’s going to last about a decade.” That shortage is also linked to the delayed introduction of new vehicles, like ULA’s Vulcan Centaur. Bruno said that the company was still planning a first launch of Vulcan as soon as May 4 as testing of the vehicle continues. Separate qualification testing of the BE-4 engines that power the first stage, he noted, is “perhaps a little bit more than halfway” complete. “That is likely to be the pacing item” for the launch, he said. A successful first launch, he said, would be followed by a second certification launch at least a couple of months later. “Then, after that, we’ll ramp up to eventually flying every two weeks.” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said the company was still working to perform a first launch of the Ariane 6 before the end of the year. But, he cautioned, “we still have some risk and some obstacles to overcome.” Several efforts are going in parallel leading up to that first launch, from combined tests of the vehicle and launch infrastructure in French Guiana to qualification of various vehicle components. “We will see how things are going to progress,” he said. “Things are under control. We have passed very important milestones.” Schedules are less certain for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. “We’re making fantastic progress and we’re going to fly when we’re ready,” said Ariane Cornell, vice president of commercial orbital, astronaut and international sales at Blue Origin. However, she declined to give a date for that first launch. The company does have one launch date on its manifest: it won a NASA award Feb. 9 for the launch of the agency’s ESCAPDE Mars smallsat mission on New Glenn , scheduled for late 2024. “It will be an early New Glenn mission and we’re going to be ready,” she said. “Hitting our stride” SpaceX, meanwhile, is continuing to launch at a rapid clip. The company performed two launches a little more than four hours apart March 17, launching a set of Starlink satellites on one Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California followed by two SES communications satellites on another Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. SpaceX has conducted 19 launches so far this year and company is sticking with a goal of 100 launches this year, up from 61 in 2022 and 31 in 2021. “It’s definitely a challenge that we are up to,” said Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX. He cited the company’s three active launch pads in Florida and California and a “fully mature” reusability effort for that increase in launch rate. “Everything is really dialed in at this point,” he said. “We’re hitting our stride in terms of being able to deliver on that cadence.” He suggested that the company could continue to increase its launch rate to meet demand. “In terms of scaling from 100 to 200 launches, we have the hardware, we have the infrastructure, we can scale the staffing,” he said. “There isn’t any reason we can’t keep going. It’s just a matter of market needs and how fast Starship develops.” That includes increasing how often Falcon 9 boosters are reused. “The vehicle is capable of way more than 10 flights,” he said, with some boosters having flown up to 15 missions. “It’s being really smart about making investments on the testing and qualification side. We will incrementally increase the number of launches if market conditions require it.” SpaceX has its own new launch vehicle in development, Starship. “We’re so close” to its first launch, with a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration one of the last milestones before the company announces a launch date. “That should be happening very shortly.” Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, said in a March 16 tweet that the company would be ready to launch Starship “in a few weeks” but that the launch date would then depend on when it gets an FAA launch license. “Assuming that takes a few weeks, first launch attempt will be near end of third week of April,” he wrote, after previously predicting first launches in February and March.
Updated March 21 to correct MSR funding and impact of VERITAS. WASHINGTON — NASA’s effort to return samples from Mars is facing increasing costs that is putting pressure not just on other planetary science missions but also a major heliophysics mission. NASA, in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, requested $949.3 million for Mars Sample Return (MSR), the program that will send missions to Mars to take samples collected by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth. MSR is a joint effort with the European Space Agency, with NASA leading work on a lander and ESA an orbiter. That funding is not only a significant increase from the $822.3 million appropriated for MSR in fiscal year 2023, but also a 19% increase from the $800 million NASA projected last year spending on the program in fiscal year 2024. “The budget supports increased requirements in [fiscal year] 2024 to ensure the project continues to make progress towards confirmation and support the earliest feasible launch date,” NASA stated in its full budget request. NASA’s budget documents also warned that costs will continue to grow. The 2024 request made no changes to future “outyears” projections from last year’s proposal, projecting spending $700 million in fiscal year 2025, $600 million in 2026 and $612.1 million in 2027. The new budget proposal also projected spending $627.6 million in 2028. “Mars Sample Return costs are expected to increase beyond what is shown in the outyear profile in this budget,” NASA stated in the proposal. “To address this budget challenge, NASA will have to either reduce funding for other activities within the Science Program or descope elements of the Mars Sample Return mission.” That could include removing one of the two sample retrieval helicopters added to the MSR mission concept last year, the document noted. During a March 13 briefing about the budget proposal, NASA officials provided few details about what is driving those increased costs. Nicola Fox, the new associate administrator for science, said the agency was working through a series of preliminary design reviews (PDRs) for MSR this year before formally confirming the mission. Agency officials also said little about cost growth during a town hall meeting about MSR at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference March 16. Jeff Gramling, MSR director at NASA Headquarters, said he expected the series of PDRs of elements of the overall campaign to conclude with a system-level PDR in September. That would be followed by a confirmation review as soon as October. That review, known in agency parlance as Key Decision Point C, is also where NASA sets formal cost and schedule commitments for programs. NASA has not offered an official cost estimate yet for MSR and, asked during the town hall meeting for a “ballpark” estimate, Gramling declined to give one. “I don’t think I’m in a position right now to give you cost data because we’re still working it through our processes,” he said. That effort includes “grassroots” cost estimates coming through the various reviews as well as a separate independent review planned before the system-level PDR. However, Mars Sample Return is affecting other agency science programs. NASA cited in its budget request the need “to rebalance work at JPL to ensure that sufficient workforce is available to support high-priority missions in development and formulation” that included MSR as well as Europa Clipper and Psyche as a reason for delaying the VERITAS Venus mission last fall, putting the future of that mission in jeopardy . Those effects go beyond NASA’s planetary programs. In the fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, NASA said it seeks to suspend work on a major heliophysics mission, the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC). That mission, a recommendation of the 2013 heliophysics decadal survey, would fly a set of six spacecraft that would study the interaction of the upper atmosphere with the magnetosphere and the sun. NASA had already selected instruments for the mission through a competition and solicited proposals for the six spacecraft . Those proposals were due Feb. 10, with NASA expected to make an award in October to support a launch no later than 2029. “The Budget proposes to pause GDC development, as continuing development would have required a significant increase in funding at a time when other space science missions, such as the Mars Sample Return mission, also have high budgetary requirements,” NASA said in its budget documents. NASA is seeking only $10 million for the mission, compared to the $49.4 million anticipated for GDC in 2024 from last year’s budget proposal. The 2024 request keeps GDC funding at $10 million in 2025 and 2026, then zeroes it out. The delay of GDC is a major factor in an overall reduction in heliophysics in the budget, from $805 million it received in 2023 to a request of $750.9 million in 2024. That could be an issue in the Senate, where the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA is chaired by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), whose home state is involved in many heliophysics missions. “It is not smart to do things like cut the thing that you think is the chair’s highest priority,” said Jean Toal Eisen, vice president of corporate strategy at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and a former Senate appropriations staffer, during a March 16 webinar by the Aerospace Industries Association. “They’re just going to put that back in and take the money from something that you cared about.” The warnings in the budget proposal for cost increases in MSR “is not a great place to be,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, at the same webinar. It increases the risk, he said, of the sample retrieval lander missing its 2028 launch window. “It’s going to be a tough appropriations process to get the money it needs now to keep on that schedule.” The planetary science decadal survey published in April 2022 endorsed continued work on Mars Sample Return. However, it recommended that if costs increased at least 20% above a projection of $5.3 billion that report adopted, or if costs in any year exceeded 35% of NASA’s overall planetary science budget, the agency should ask the White House and Congress for additional funding to ensure MSR does not “undermine the long-term programmatic balance of the planetary portfolio.” Using the projections in the NASA budget proposal and going back to when MSR became a standalone program in fiscal year 2021, the agency projects spending at least $5.2 billion on MSR through 2028, a total that will grow from both anticipated cost increases through 2028 and spending needed for MSR after 2028 through the planned return of samples in 2033. “I think it’s a relatively brittle budget,” Dreier said of the overall NASA budget proposal. “If any one of these programs, or Artemis itself, really goes astray in terms of blowing its schedule or budget, you’re going to see some serious downstream consequences within the agency.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Satellogic, the South American company known for high-resolution multispectral imagery, is selling Earth-observation satellites for $10 million or less. Satellogic’s new Space Systems product is designed to appeal to customers eager to establish or expand their space capabilities rather than simply buying imagery. “Space agencies around the world want access to this kind of satellite for their own uses, be that civil, research or defensive and intelligence,” Matt Tirman, Satellogic chief commercial officer, told SpaceNews . “We’ve seen huge demand for it.” Satellogic is offering delivery in orbit within three months of an order for the company’s dishwasher-size satellites. For other customers, Satellogic is offering to transfer intellectual property. “They want us to come in and advise them on setting up an assembly, integration and test facilities,” Tirman said. Satellogic is not subject to U.S. export controls like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and customers do not need National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration licenses for Earth imagery since the company is not based in the United States. “Not falling under ITAR and NOAA licensing is a huge value proposition for us and for the market as well,” Tirman said. Satellogic, founded in 2010, operates a constellation of 30 Earth-observation satellites. By the end of the year, Satellogic will have more than 40 satellites supplying customers with Earth imagery, analytics and satellite tasking, Tirman said. At the core of Satellogic’s business is the company’s ability “to build at scale very high quality smallsats for not very much money” compared with traditional Earth-observation satellites, Tirman said. In the last two years, Satellogic has seen growing demand for satellites, especially among emerging space programs in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, Tirman said. As a result, Satellogic established its Space Systems arm in January.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the last two satellites March 17 that SES needs to claim C-band spectrum clearing proceeds worth nearly $4 billion in total. The operator said it has successfully made contact with SES-18 and SES-19 after they were dropped off in geosynchronous transfer orbit by a Falcon 9, which lifted off 7:38 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida The rocket’s first-stage booster also successfully landed on SpaceX’s droneship in the Atlantic Ocean for reuse following its sixth flight. Earlier in the day, a Falcon 9 launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, deployed 52 satellites in low Earth orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. Ahead of schedule SES said SES-18 and SES-19, built by Northrop Grumman, are due to start services in June after using onboard hydrazine-fueled propulsion to reach their geostationary orbital slots. SES-18 is set to replace the operator’s aging SES-3 satellite at 103 degrees west. SES-19 is heading to 135 degrees west to join the SES-22 satellite that SpaceX launched last year. SES-22 was the first to launch of six satellites SES ordered to help migrate broadcast customers into a narrower swath of C-band so more frequencies can be used for terrestrial 5G services in the United States. United Launch Alliance launched two other satellites for the operator’s C-band clearing strategy in October on an Atlas 5 rocket: SES-20 and SES-21. The sixth C-band satellite SES ordered under this plan is being used as a ground spare. All costs related to the C-band clearing are eligible for reimbursement, using proceeds the Federal Communications Commission raised in 2021 from auctioning off the frequencies to wireless operators. SES also stands to get $3.97 billion in total incentive payments from the FCC if it can move customers and filter antennas on the ground in time for clearing the frequencies by Dec. 5. The operator said its C-band clearing activities are currently running ahead of schedule. Intelsat also holds a sizable chunk of C-band in the United States and has ordered seven satellites for its clearing plan, with none serving as ground spares. SpaceX is slated to launch Intelsat-37, the final satellite left to launch in this spectrum-clearing strategy, on a dedicated Falcon 9 in June. Intelsat is in line to get $4.9 billion in total proceeds if it can meet the FCC’s deadline in December, although SES is challenging its share of this windfall. SES and Intelsat have already unlocked more than $2 billion in combined proceeds by hitting the FCC’s initial incentive payment milestone in 2021.
Budget pressures in NASA’s planetary science program could force the agency to choose between continuing a mission to Venus that has already been delayed or requesting proposals for a future mission. NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, released March 13, included $3.383 billion for planetary science, a 5.7% increase from what Congress appropriated for 2022. The agency, in the rollout of the budget, emphasized the funding included in the proposal for major planetary missions like Mars Sample Return and Europa Clipper. However, the proposal included only $1.5 million for the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission, a Venus orbiter selected by NASA in 2021 as one of two Discovery missions. NASA had projected spending $56.7 million on VERITAS in 2024 in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal. NASA announced in November 2022 that it was delaying VERITAS by at least three years in response to the findings on an independent review board into the problems with the Psyche mission, which missed its 2022 launch because of delays in testing software for that asteroid mission. The independent review found institutional issues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads both Psyche and VERITAS, that prompted NASA to delay VERITAS to allow JPL to correct those problems while focusing on other missions. The $1.5 million offered for VERITAS in the 2024 budget proposal is intended to allow the mission’s science team to continue work. The future “outyears” budget projections for VERITAS, though, keep the mission at $1.5 million a year through fiscal year 2028, in effect indefinitely delaying the mission. “That’s functionally a soft cancellation,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, during a March 16 webinar about the budget proposal organized by the Aerospace Industries Association. “That goes to show that there’s a lot of pressures, particularly within the planetary budget.” At a NASA town hall meeting during the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC) March 14, Lori Glaze, director of the planetary science division at NASA Headquarters, defended the decision to postpone VERITAS. “We looked across the board at a bunch of different options, and the VERITAS delay was the one that we picked. There were no good options here,” she said. She said there were three criteria for restarting VERITAS as soon as 2025. One is to secure the funding needed for the mission, while a second is for JPL to show progress implementing recommendations from the independent review of the Psyche delay, something that JPL’s director, Laurie Leshin, said at a recent advisory committee meeting that the lab was doing . A third factor, according to Glaze, was for JPL to successfully launch both Europa Clipper and the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth science mission, another mission where JPL is playing a leading role. Any delays in either, she said, would tie up personnel and resources needed for VERITAS. During the town hall, scientists criticized NASA for delaying VERITAS. Among those who spoke was Suzanne Smrekar, principal investigator for VERITAS, who said that the budget would require JPL to disband an experienced engineering team working on its design. “This mission that was on track is being effectively martyred for all those missions that are going over budget,” she said. “The reason that so many in the community are outraged by this are these facts, that a mission that was on track is contingent on Earth science missions and all kinds of things that have nothing to do with us.” Glaze indicated that, even if VERITAS clears those hurdles, there is no guarantee the mission will continue. She suggested NASA may be forced to choose whether to continue VERITAS or hold a competition for the next Discovery-class mission, currently scheduled for fiscal year 2025. “I’ve asked the community to provide feedback on priorities related to the next Discovery calls and support of the selected mission, VERITAS,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of great support from the community to restart VERITAS, even if that means not holding the next Discovery call.” At a Feb. 27 meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, members discussed a question provided from NASA Headquarters asking if they supported restarting VERITAS versus a new Discovery mission. Most appeared to support VERITAS if NASA had to choose between them. “It would be very upsetting to miss the Discovery call, but if they’re implying that they would defund VERITAS in order to fund the Discovery call, that’s even less acceptable,” said Bruce Banerdt of JPL, who was principal investigator on another Discovery mission, the InSight Mars lander. Glaze said she got similar comments from the overall planetary science community supporting continuing VERITAS versus another Discovery mission. “We heard from the community. We’re going to look at where we are and see what we can support,” she said. She justified the delay because of broader issues, like the effects of the pandemic, supply chain challenges and increased operations costs, that she estimated were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as the JPL-specific problems. “That was the decision that was made, to delay a mission at JPL to not only free up the resources but also to free up the bandwidth to deal with the whole issues across JPL.” The Discovery budget problem also affects a line of smallsat missions. While Glaze and others at NASA have expressed support for Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx), the fiscal year 2024 budget request said that NASA plans to solicit only one SIMPLEx mission in the coming years, with a draft announcement of opportunity in fiscal year 2024. That mission, with a cost cap of $85 million, would fly with the DAVINCI Venus mission in 2030. NASA selected three SIMPLEx missions in 2019 at a cost cap of $55 million each, although the three missions have run into cost overruns or other problems. That includes the Janus asteroid mission, which lost its ride because of the Psyche delay. Glaze said that the project is looking at alternative missions the twin smallsats could carry out. “If they find something that looks compelling, we told them that our door is open.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat has acquired a “significant amount” of capacity from the recently launched Amazonas Nexus satellite to meet demand for connectivity over the Americas, an executive for the company told SpaceNews . Gerry Collins, Intelsat’s director of product management and networks, said the company is leasing the satellite’s high-throughput Ku-band capacity from Spanish operator Hispasat for customers across the United States, Brazil, and North Atlantic Ocean. “We don’t discuss specific terms of our contracts, but we are calling the satellite Intelsat 46 (IS-46), which means we are making a long-term commitment [for] our customers,” he said. Much of the capacity will be used for providing Wi-Fi to commercial airlines flying over the Americas and on transatlantic flights. However, he said IS-46 would also be used for other connectivity services Intelsat provides on land and at sea. Amazonas Nexus launched Feb. 6 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 toward geostationary orbit to support Hispasat’s expansion into the Americas. Intelsat already uses several of its own satellites to provide connectivity in the region, and plans to increase its coverage there with the IS-40e satellite that SpaceX is slated to launch in April on a Falcon 9. Satellite partners Intelsat has been looking to expand its use of leased satellites since emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early last year. The company announced last week it had signed a multi-million dollar deal for additional Eutelsat capacity, including from OneWeb’s low Earth orbit network that is being sold to the French geostationary satellite operator. “We no longer see ourselves as purely as a satellite operator,” Collins said, “we see ourselves as a satellite service provider on a global basis to multiple verticals.” He said Intelsat is exploring more “opportunities to expand our inventory over key growth regions without needing to necessarily build and launch it by ourselves.” This “allows us to serve our customers without having to commit large amounts of capital.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission unveiled its proposed framework March 17 for regulating the use of terrestrial wireless spectrum from space for connecting smartphones beyond the reach of cell towers. The framework would establish ground rules for SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile, Lynk Global, and other satellite companies seeking permission to provide direct-to-device services with spectrum from terrestrial mobile partners. A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the framework was approved by all four of the FCC’s commissioners March 16. “There are challenges with access to airwaves, frequencies that are not all globally aligned, possibilities for interference that must be managed, and standards work that could help grow these capabilities,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “But what is clear is that with the growing interest in the possibilities of convergence of satellite and terrestrial services, an ad-hoc, case-by-case approach to these new ventures is not enough.” The regulator said it will initiate a 30-day public comment period once the NPRM is published in the Federal Register at an undefined date, with reply comments due 30 days after that. An initial draft of the NPRM for what the FCC calls “Supplemental Coverage from Space” (SCS) was initially circulated Feb. 23. This initial draft proposed to limit direct-to-device SCS services to spectrum bands where a single mobile operator has contiguous rights, and to exclude the 700 MHz band that AT&T uses to connect first responders under its FirstNet service. AT&T, which has partnered with satellite direct-to-device startup AST SpaceMobile, said this was “ unnecessarily restrictive ” and called on the FCC to expand the framework. While the latest version of the NPRM still focuses on large areas of contiguous spectrum, it was revised to also account for other possibilities. The spectrum AT&T uses for FirstNet is also now being contemplated as potentially part of the framework. Moving with speed FCC commissioner Nathan Simington said March 16 that, while it is important to perfect a new regulatory model for this emerging market, it must not get in the way of approving direct-to-device applications that the regulator is already processing. “The FCC must ensure those waiver applications move forward at a rapid clip to avoid thwarting business plans and future innovation,” Simington said. AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski described the framework as “a really good first step,” and said he is encouraged by the FCC’s intentions to “move with speed.” Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller also welcomed the proposed framework. “This FCC action sets the path for Lynk to acquire landing rights in the US via a mobile network operator,” Miller said via email. SpaceX, which has partnered with T-Mobile in the United States and Salt in Switzerland, recently outlined plans to start testing direct-to-device services this year.
In a vote of confidence for a troubled launch vehicle, Arianespace won a contract from the Italian government for up to three Vega C launches of an Earth observation constellation. Arianespace announced March 14 it signed a contract with the European Space Agency, acting on behalf of the Italian government, for launching the IRIDE constellation of imaging satellites. The contract includes two firm Vega C launches, starting in late 2025, with an option for a third. The IRIDE constellation, funded by the Italian government, will include 36 satellites built by a consortium of Italian companies that will be equipped with a range of imaging payloads, including optical and radar. The constellation is named after the Italian word for iris. The value of the launch contract was not disclosed. The overall IRIDE system, including satellites, launch and ground systems, is estimated at 1.3 billion euros ($1.38 billion) and is funded by Italy’s National Plan for Recovery and Resilience, or PNRR, an initiative by the Italian government to help the country recover from the pandemic. The announcement is the first contract for the Vega C announced since the completion of the investigation into the December 2022 launch failure on the vehicle’s second mission, destroying two Airbus imaging satellites. That investigation concluded that a carbon-carbon component of the nozzle of the rocket’s second stage solid-fuel motor degraded after ignition, causing a loss of thrust that doomed the rocket. With this contract “ESA repays the trust of the Italian government while confirming its confidence in Arianespace and in the Vega C launch system,” said Simonetta Cheli, director of Earth observation at ESA, in a statement. ESA is supporting the Italian government on the development of IRIDE. During a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference here March 15, Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, confirmed plans announced earlier in the month to return the Vega C to flight by the end of the year with launch of the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite for Europe’s Copernicus program. That will be preceded by a launch of the original Vega vehicle, likely by late summer. “We are very mobilized with our partners to make sure that Vega will be a success,” he said, referring to a team that includes Avio, the prime contractor for Vega, as well as ESA. With this contract, he noted that Vega C’s backlog was now at 15 launches. He added that there were “commercial negotiations ongoing” for the vehicle as well with unidentified customers. The launch contract was one of the few revealed during the conference, which traditionally had served as a stage for announcing major satellite and launch deals. Colorado-based EOI Space, formerly known as Earth Observant Inc., announced March 14 it extended an earlier contract with SpaceX for rideshare launches of its Stingray constellation of imaging satellites. EOI Space said that it will now launch its first six Stingray satellites, designed to operate in very low Earth orbits to improve imaging resolution, on Transporter rideshare missions starting in 2024. The company said last September it would launch its first satellite in 2023 on a Transporter mission. “Demand for rapid transmissions of higher-resolution Earth imagery has skyrocketed in recent years,” said Christopher Thein, chief executive of EOI Space, in a statement. “We’re proud to be pioneering our first satellites through SpaceX’s renowned rideshare program.” EOI plans to ultimately launch a 60-satellite constellation, but has not disclosed plans or schedules for deployment of that complete constellation.
China added its initially civilian Gaofen Earth observation series Friday with the launch of the classified optical geostationary Gaofen-13 (02) satellite. A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from the hill-surrounded Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 4:33 a.m. Eastern, March 17. The launch successfully sent the Gaofen-13 (02) satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), announced . The payload was only revealed after launch, with speculation that the Long March 3B would carry a ChinaSat communications or Beidou navigation satellite. CASC provided no details of the satellite’s capabilities, stating only that the optical remote sensing satellite is a high-orbit, high-resolution Earth observation technology satellite with great significance to the development of China’s space technology. The mission patch features a galloping horse behind a Long March 3B rocket. The Gaofen-13 (02) (gaofen means high resolution) satellite is nominally part of the civilian China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS). Land surveys, crop yield estimation, environmental governance, meteorological early warning and forecasting, as well as comprehensive disaster prevention and mitigation are noted as the main uses of the satellite, according to Chinese state media. The first Gaofen-13 satellite was launched in October 2020, also using a Long March 3B rocket. The pair are thought to be more capable versions of the Gaofen-4 geostationary optical satellite launched in December 2015. Gaofen-4 has a reported ground resolution of 50 meters. China also stated earlier in the year that it planned to launch a 20-meter-resolution synthetic aperture radar satellite to geostationary orbit in 2023. (CHEOS) was approved in 2010 and was initially planned to consist of seven Gaofen satellites and a near space and airborne system and a ground segment, according to China National Space Administration (CNSA) presentations to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). While details have been published of the Gaofen 1 through 7 satellites, those designed Gaofen-8 remain classified, indicating military customers. China has so far launched four Gaofen-11 satellites from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China using Long March 4B rockets. Earlier reports indicate these satellites belong to the classified segment of China’s Gaofen series, with the capability to return optical imagery at a resolution of around 10 centimeters . CHEOS comprise optical, multispectral, hyperspectral and synthetic aperture radar satellites. A CHEOS near space segment comprising airships, air flight platforms, and airborne Earth observation instruments and data processing system was however also included in the plan to augment its capabilities and data collection, though little information has been published on this aspect. The balloon and other platforms are to carry three types of earth payloads, including optical, laser and synthetic aperture radar (SAR). These were to be capable of providing images with a spatial resolution of better than 0.1 meters, and a spectral resolution of better than 1 nanometer. Notably this is much higher than the 1 meter spatial resolution intended to be provided by the Gaofen satellites. The balloons would also allow surveillance for longer periods of time than the few minutes it takes a satellite in LEO to pass overhead. An undeclared Chinese high altitude surveillance balloon was detected in U.S. airspace earlier this year. Reports followed of a variety of high-altitude surveillance balloons in countries across five continents , suggesting balloons have been widely deployed for data collection. The New York Times reported Feb. 13 that in 2019 an airship was sent around the world, including across North America. That near-space vehicle was, according to sources linked within the story, developed as part of CHEOS.
Rocket Lab launched its second Electron rocket from Virginia March 16, placing two Capella Space radar imaging satellites into orbit. The Electron lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 2 at Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, at 6:38 p.m. Eastern. Poor weather conditions delayed the launch from its original date of March 11. The Electron was carrying two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites built and operated by Capella Space on a mission called “Stronger Together” by Rocket Lab. The kick stage delivered the 100-kilogram satellites into a 600-kilometer circular orbit at an inclination of 44 degrees, deploying them nearly 58 minutes after liftoff. The launch was the second this year for Rocket Lab, after a Jan. 24 launch carrying three HawkEye 360 satellites that provide radio-frequency monitoring services. That launch was also the first by the company from its Virginia launch site. Rocket Lab expects to conduct up to 15 Electron launches this year from both Virginia and its original launch site in New Zealand, up from nine in 2022. “We’re really working to hit our stride with Electron,” said Richard French, director of business development and strategy for Rocket Lab’s space systems unit, during a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference here March 15. The company has a strong manifest for Electron, he said, giving as one example a new multi-launch contract signed with Capella Space Feb. 28. Rocket Lab will launch four Electrons in “rapid succession,” according to the announcement, each carrying one satellite of Capella’s new Acadia series of SAR spacecraft. The contract, separate from the one for the Stronger Together mission, calls for the launches to start in the second half of 2023. While Rocket Lab is working on the larger Neutron rocket, slated to debut as soon as 2024, French said there were no plans for Neutron to replace Electron. “Electron is not going anywhere,” he said. “We think Electron is a very important capability. We have a strong manifest with increasing demand.” The next Electron launch is scheduled to take place later in March from New Zealand. That launch, called “The Beat Goes On” by Rocket Lab, will carry two optical imaging satellites for BlackSky under a multi-launch contract arranged through Spaceflight.
NASA has approved plans by Axiom Space to fly a third private astronaut mission to the International Space Station as soon as November, although with no details yet about who will go on the flight. NASA announced March 14 it signed a “mission order” with Axiom for the mission, designated Ax-3 by the company. Launch is scheduled as soon as November, a date that will depend in part on the traffic of other vehicles heading to and from the station. NASA solicited proposals for a third and fourth private astronaut mission in September 2022 , after previously selecting Axiom for the Ax-1 mission that went to the ISS in April 2022 and Ax-2, scheduled for launch as soon as May. In its announcement about Ax-3, NASA said it would announce plans for the fourth private astronaut mission, planned for 2024, after completion of negotiations with an unspecified company. Axiom was the only company to bid on the second private astronaut mission, according to NASA source selection statements published last August . Both Axiom and a second company, Shuttle IO Technologies, bid on NASA’s original request for a third private astronaut mission in 2021, but the agency rejected both given low ratings from the review process. NASA did not disclose how many companies submitted proposals in this new solicitation for the third mission. The announcement of Ax-3 disclosed few details about the mission other than it will spend 14 days at the ISS, slightly longer than the planned 10 days of Ax-2. The mission, like Ax-1 and -2, will use a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Axiom Space did not disclose the crew for Ax-3 in the announcement. Like the previous two missions, it will be commanded by a former NASA astronaut with flight experience, a requirement NASA enacted after Ax-1. NASA said in the announcement that the formal announcement of the crew will come only after it is approved by NASA and the other ISS partners. While Axiom Space had named the commander and pilot of Ax-2 — Peggy Whitson and John Shoffner — in 2021, the other two crew members, Saudi astronauts Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni, were not named until Feb. 12 . Axiom executives previously said that government-sponsored astronauts, like the two Saudis, would make up the bulk of customers on its upcoming private astronaut missions . “I expect that Ax-3 will be largely a country customer kind of flight with our professional astronaut,” said Michael Suffredini, chief executive of Axiom, in a call with reporters in January. He added that will be repeated on Ax-4. “I think that, between those two flights, maybe one private individual will fly.” Axiom hopes to continue flying private astronaut missions to the ISS as it develops a series of commercial modules it will attach to the station, which will serve as the core of a standalone space station after the retirement of the station. “Our desire is to fly two missions a year,” Michael López-Alegría, the former NASA astronaut who commanded Ax-1 for Axiom, said in a Feb. 26 speech at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado. He noted in that speech that NASA had picked Axiom for both the third and fourth private astronaut missions, although the company was still in contract negotiations with NASA on them. Once Axiom has its modules on the ISS, which will include its own docking port, the company will have more freedom to fly crews to them without having to compete for private astronaut mission opportunities, which NASA has currently capped at two a year. “We’ll still have to go through NASA and will still have to comply with the ISS program rules,” López-Alegría said, “but I feel like we’ll have a little bit more leeway to do whatever we want.”
Among the many new products unveiled this week at the Satellite 2023 convention were mobile communications terminals capable of talking to military and commercial satellites. Intellian Technologies rolled out a new terminal it developed with the U.S. Navy that provides simultaneous connectivity with commercial Ka-band satellites and with the military Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) constellation used by the U.S. and several allied nations. Another manufacturer, All.Space , announced it delivered a new flat panel terminal to satellite operator SES that can simultaneously connect to spacecraft in multiple orbits. SES plans to offer it to both commercial and DoD users. Another sector of the industry focused on network management and control systems is working on software that would allow military users to tap into a variety of satcom providers as well as WGS and other military satellites. “We’ve been working to enable a hybrid architecture,” said David Meadows, vice president of Network Innovations U.S. Meadows and other executives at the Satellite 2023 conference said the industry is trying to support DoD’s vision of a seamless military-commercial satcom architecture, an effort that has been underway for several years. A key project intended to enable a hybrid network is the U.S. Space Force-led Enterprise Management and Control ( EM&C) system , which aims to provide military users with flexible satcom options so if one service is interfered with, they can switch to another. Meadows’ company Network Innovations is developing a satellite communication service provider registry (SPR) prototype, or a catalog of military and commercial terminals and services to support the EM&C project. “Enterprise satcom management and control I think it’s going to be critical as we look to stitch together all the different service provider networks,” Mike Dean, chief of DoD satcom, said March 14 during a panel discussion at the Satellite conference. In the latest DoD satcom policy, said Dean, “we try to not make distinction between commercial and military or even international partner services.” The catalog of terminals and services being developed under the EM&C program is going to provide a “better picture for the operational managers as they manage their capabilities,” said Dean. DoD wants to work with a large population of commercial satcom providers, he said. “The more the merrier, it builds resilience,” Dean added. “And the real benefit, at least as I look across the enterprise, is that commercial services are innovating on such a faster cycle than what we can do internally.” Dean’s office recently published a “reference architecture” to help industry and government program offices figure out how to integrate systems. Diversity means more complexity Meadows said hybrid networks benefit the military as they “create disruption for our adversaries in their attempts to impede us or compromise our locations.” However, “diversity and abundance comes at a cost. And I think that cost is complexity,” he said. The challenge is to use autonomous systems as much as possible to make it simple for users in the field. Military leaders often remind satcom contractors that the “operators at the tactical edge don’t wear white coats and don’t have PhDs. So we want to be able to enable them to access a multiplicity of satellite services to provide them resilience and redundancy, and deal with congestion with just a couple of mouse clicks.” Meadows said the EM&C architecture is being designed to interoperate with any commercial provider, but the devil will be in the details. “We want to enable all potential service providers … LEO, MEO, GEO, all frequency bands, different waveforms,” and connect systems with current terminals as much as possible, he said. A closed architecture like SpaceX’s Starlink, however, requires using the company’s terminals. “A key thing that we’ve been looking at is how do we future proof the system design” so new systems can be integrated as they come online, Meadows said. Satcom managed services In parallel with the satcom enterprise effort, the U.S. Space Force’s commercial services office is looking to buy so-called satcom as a managed servic e, an approach preferred by many satellite operators. Under managed satcom services, instead of leasing capacity from commercial satellites, military customers get a guaranteed data rate based on their needs and location. Craig Miller, president of satellite operator Viasat Government Systems, said DoD would be better off using managed satcom services in order to take advantage of the latest technology. “All of the modern networks are operated as managed services versus transponders that are leased,” he said. Services from the newest constellations are provided as managed services “where you don’t buy transponders, you buy bits per second, or you buy a certain data rate,” he said. “And really, that’s a much better value for consumers.” If the president’s Air Force One buys a managed service with 100 megabits per second, “you always get that data rate. And we guarantee that data rate. But if you don’t use it, it’s not wasted capacity.” “All the new systems are managed services,” Miller said. “And that’s how DOD needs to learn how to buy.” He said the Marine Corps and the Army have started pilot programs to evaluate managed satcom services from Viasat and other companies. “So we’re starting to see movement in that direction. And that’s the way of the future for how you buy commercial.”
Intersatellite optical links, or laser crosslinks, are poised to transform space communication by improving data transmissions speed and reliability. While widespread use of laser crosslinks direct data transmission between satellites could reduce reliance on ground stations, there’s no getting around the ground for the data that needs to get down. Ground network architectures will change, not go away. “When I put on my technical hat, the idea that a lot of data will come down in certain regions because you’ll have intersatellite links makes sense,” said Brad Bode, Atlas Space Operations chief technology officer and chief information officer. “However, the business side of me asks how long this is going to take?” For the moment, the satellite ground segment sector is booming as more and more satellites enter service. In 2022, a record 180 orbital launches worldwide lofted nearly 2,500 payloads, up from 1,829 in 2021, according to data compiled by astrophysicist and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell. To keep up with growing demand for satellite command and control, and data downlink services, companies are installing radio frequency antennas at new and existing sites, and forging alliances. RBC Signals reported record revenues in 2022. Annual earnings are climbing by double digits for Italy’s Leaf Space. And Norway’s Kongsberg Satellite Services continues expanding its 280-antenna network. “Satellites communicating with each other through intersatellite links is all well and good if that data is needed in space,” said Christopher Richins, RBC Signals co-founder and CEO. “But as long as decisions are being made on the ground or information is being required on the ground, ground stations will be needed.” Is it possible that in the future companies might need fewer ground stations because so much data is transferred through optical intersatellite links? Yes. “Data relay systems of any kind should reduce the need for site diversity, eventually,” says Caleb Henry, Quilty Analytics research director. “But they’re not at all going to eliminate the need for ground stations.” A few major constellations with extensive funding, like SpaceX Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and the Pentagon’s Space Development agency, are rapidly adopting intersatellite links. Other satellite operators are moving more slowly. About a year ago, moves by the Space Development Agency and others made it seem like “we were on the precipice of a full-on shift to optical crosslinks being the norm,” Henry said. “What we have learned this year is that the traction towards laser crosslinks is still moving kind of slow outside of SDA, SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. Other small satellite operators are still struggling chiefly with managing the size, weight and power of optical terminals.” Optical terminal manufacturers have no doubt change is on the horizon. “One of the greatest advantages of optical communications technology is its ability to transfer large amounts of data quickly and securely,” Tina Ghataore, Mynaric chief commercial officer, said by email. “While the adoption of optical communications in space applications is still in its infancy, the sheer number of satellite launches planned in the coming years will speed up the adoption of the technology. These satellites will need to have functional optical communications terminals to create the intersatellite links and transfer large volumes of data.” Ground segment providers see something of a chicken-and-egg problem. Widespread adoption of optical intersatellite links by small satellite operators will encourage mass manufacturing and lead to decreased size, reduced cost and further adoption. Until the terminals have significant spaceflight heritage, though, small satellite operators may be wary of the technology, said Dan Adams, KSAT USA CEO. Earth observation companies designing their future constellations, for example, “may or may not be comfortable designing in the intersatellite link solution until they see that that solution is mature,” he added. Even if the change is not imminent, ground segment providers have thought extensively about how intersatellite links will affect their operations. Satellite gateways may be consolidated at fewer sites, reducing the capital investment needed to maintain a ground network. And remote sites might become less important. “Right now, stations in the Arctic, Antarctica or other remote areas don’t have good coverage for backhaul,” Dialani said. “The data has to be stored in the ground station and sent bit by bit over VSAT backhaul.” With intersatellite links, a satellite over Antarctica could beam data to a satellite over Australia for downlink where fiber connections are plentiful. That does not mean, though, that demand for Antarctic downlinks will disappear. “We have customers that are willing to pay more to get data down at Antarctica because it provides an operational benefit,” Adams said. While there may be some change in the geographic distribution of ground stations, “data still has to fit into the pipe between the satellite and the ground station,” Richins said. “And that pipe is limited. You’re still going to want to have many ground stations for resiliency and for overall throughput. With data volumes rising, it will take everything we have to bring all the data down in a low latency way that that makes sense.” Optical ground terminals will be part of the equation. “We are a few years away from the mass adoption of optical communications ground terminals,” Ghataore said. “However, we are ready to demonstrate the technology for customers that wish to explore it further.” Firms known for handling the satellite ground segment plan to establish alliances with optical and RF data-relay companies. “RBC Signals is not a ground station company, RBC signals is a communication-as-a-service company, which means we use satellites when we need them, we use intersatellite links” like Inmarsat’s Data Relay Service, Richins said. “As more capacity comes online, we’ll offer it to our customers.” Likewise, KSAT sees intersatellite links “as both a huge opportunity and potentially a threat,” Adams said. As the satellite communications market grows, KSAT has adopted a “network-of-networks” approach with its legacy ground station network, KSATlite, and partnerships with AWS Ground Station and Microsoft’s Azure Orbital. “We also see that expanding into nodes in orbit, where the whole solution set can expand,” Adams said. “Whether you’re ingesting your data on orbit or at the antenna on the ground, it is all about getting data in a dynamic way back to the user’s mission operations center. It’s about optimizing the data flows, whether it’s across a terrestrial network of fiber and antennas, or through an on-orbit ingest point down through the antenna and across the network.” This article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Satellite broadband customers are increasingly demanding shorter-term contracts to hold out for better prices in a market set for a flood of low Earth orbit (LEO) capacity, according to executives of regional satellite operators. While Starlink and OneWeb are still working on expanding their LEO constellations globally, operators of satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) said March 14 they already see an impact on their businesses. Customers are increasingly pushing GEO operators for contracts they can renew annually where previously they were expected to sign five-year deals, Amit Somani, CEO of United Arab Emirates-based ABS, said during the Satellite 2023 conference here. Customers see LEO constellations touting terabits of capacity and they “think there is an overwhelming oversupply of capacity that’s coming to the market,” said Abdulhadi Alhassani, chief strategy officer of Saudi Arabia-based Arabsat But not all of this capacity “is actually useable capacity,” Alhassani said, because of the time LEO satellites spend over oceans and other unpopulated areas as they roam across Earth, compared to GEO satellites stationed in fixed locations to provide continual coverage of populated regions. “That’s putting a lot of pressure on us when we negotiate contracts with customers,” he said. The attention and investments the LEO industry has been getting in recent years compared with GEO are also affecting the industry, added Kyle Whitehill, CEO of U.K.-based Avanti Communications. “So I think if you’re a GEO operator trying to fund a new satellite constellation, it’s way tougher now than it used to be,” Whitehill said. However, the LEO constellations — and Starlink in particular — have helped raise the profile of the entire satellite industry, which the executives said is helping to attract more business for their services in general. Shorter-term contracts can also lead to more revenues, Somani of ABS quipped, because these customers forgo the discounts they would get with longer-term orders.
NASA and Axiom Space unveiled a prototype of the spacesuits that astronauts will wear on Artemis missions to the moon. At an event in Houston March 15, Axiom revealed the design of the suit, called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), it will provide to NASA for missions starting with Artemis 3 in the mid-2020s. The suits will be worn by astronauts during their excursions on the lunar surface. NASA awarded Axiom a $228.5 million task order last September to develop the suit after awarding both Axiom and Collins Aerospace contracts last June to provide suits for both Artemis missions and International Space Station spacewalks. The contracts are service agreements, like those NASA uses for space station crew and cargo missions, with the companies retaining ownership of the suits as well as the ability to offer them to other customers. “It’s a huge deal to be selected to provide to lunar surface suits for NASA’s Artemis program,” said Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom, at the event. “We’re pleased that humanity’s next steps on the moon are going to be in an Axiom spacesuit.” At the time of the task order award, neither NASA nor Axiom disclosed details or even illustrations of the suit design. The company cited proprietary designs and ongoing competitions as reasons for not disclosing details about the design then. The AxEMU suit revealed at the Houston event leverages designs NASA developed for its Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit concept, a spacesuit the agency worked on internally before designing to shift to procuring suits as a service. Those designs are a significant departure from the suits currently used on International Space Station spacewalks or Apollo missions. That includes a “rear entry” design for the suit, explained Russell Ralston, deputy program manager for extravehicular activity at Axiom, during the event. A hatch in the back of the suit opens up and the astronaut slides into the suit. It’s possible for an astronaut to get into the suit on their own, closing the hatch behind them. The suit features a large clear helmet bubble for enhanced fields of view, with lights and camera integrated into it. The suit is designed for improved mobility on the lunar surface compared to Apollo suits, and can fit a much wider range of astronauts. “This is a great example of what innovation can do,” said Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut with extensive spacewalking experience who now works for Axiom Space and will command the company’s upcoming Ax-2 mission to the ISS. “This is going to be much more flexible suit. The range of motion is really going to improve the astronaut’s ability to do all the tasks they’re going to do when out exploring on the lunar surface.” One challenge for the suit design is dealing with lunar dust that can stick to materials and degrade joints and seals. “Dust is going to be a pretty tricky problem to deal with,” Ralston said. That includes ways to prevent dust from adhering to the suit in the first place, and then, when dust dues stick to it, keep it from coming off when the astronauts go back inside their lunar lander. While the suit is Axiom’s own design, it makes extensive use of the earlier NASA work. “We have provided all of that technology, all of the drawings, all of the data, all of the test results for the community,” Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said of that earlier suit work. “We’re happy to have all of that expertise,” Suffredini said. He estimated about half of the AxEMU design will be based on that NASA work and the other the company’s own designs. The design unveiled at the event is not identical to what Artemis astronauts will wear. The company elected to put a customized cover layer, black with blue and orange accents, on the suit for this event “to conceal the suit’s proprietary design,” the company explained. The actual suit will have a white outer layer to reflect sunlight. Axiom is best known for private astronaut missions to the ISS and plans to add commercial modules to the station as a precursor to its own commercial space station. Mark Greeley, program manager for extravehicular activity at Axiom, said the company will use a similar design for suits it plans to develop for space station spacewalks, with differences in elements like boots and gloves. “The base configuration is very close for lunar or LEO,” he said.
SEOUL, South Korea — Northrop Grumman and Japanese heavy-industry manufacturer IHI Corporation have signed a memorandum of understanding March 15 to develop “small, highly maneuverable satellites and other solutions” that will help bolster Japan’s space domain awareness capabilities, particularly for geosynchronous orbit. The two companies said their collaboration was to achieve Japan’s goal of reinforcing its space domain awareness capabilities and related infrastructure, which is stipulated in Japan’s National Defense Strategy , released Dec. 16, 2022. “In order to respond to threats to the stable use of space, MOD/SDF will develop ground and space-based surveillance capabilities, build-up a Space Domain Awareness (SDA) structure, and bolster the resiliency of our space assets to enable the continuation of missions in response to various situations,” reads the strategy. MOD and SDF refer to Japan’s Ministry of Defense and Self-Defense Forces, respectively. The signing ceremony for the deal, held on the sidelines of a local defense and security trade show called DSEI Japan, was attended by a director general of Japan’s defense ministry, and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel. While much of the information about the satellites and solutions the companies will jointly develop remains undisclosed, IHI said in a March 15 statement the satellites will “utilize existing Northrop Grumman satellite buses.” According to Nikkei Asia , the jointly developed satellites will be able to approach suspicious satellites, take images and send the images to the ground for analysis. “While some satellites move in GEO in a friendly manner, there are also more satellites that move around suspiciously,” IHI said in the statement. “For this reason, Japan’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy of December 2022 call for strengthening SDA and stipulate the need for SDA satellites, both from the perspective of ensuring sustainable economic activity as well as national security.” IHI vice president Fumiharu Namiki expressed worries about “a rise in military surveillance efforts from other countries, which is becoming a national security threat.” He noted that efforts are needed to “characterize suspicious satellites to understand the threat.” Northrop Grumman vice president Troy Brashear welcomed the deal, saying the pair will “rapidly work together towards an affordable and effective SDA solution for Japan. The Northrop-IHI deal is the latest in a series of efforts Japan has made to reinforce its space defense capabilities. In January , Japan launched a classified radar reconnaissance satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit aboard the nation’s workhorse, H2A. The satellite, named IGS Radar-7, is tasked to monitor North Korea’s military activities. On top of this, the nation’s Air Self-Defense Force is moving to add space to its operational domain . The United States is a key supporter of Japan’s endeavor to bolster space defense capabilities. The two countries have worked together on a range of space security issues. In January , the two nations agreed to strengthen cooperation on space capabilities, in which Washington decided to extend its security umbrella into outer space to protect Japanese satellites. In December 2020 , the U.S. Space Force and Japan’s Office of National Space Policy agreed to launch two U.S. space sensor payloads for space domain awareness on Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, a constellation used for regional navigation. The first of two sensors were delivered to Japan in January . The first sensor will fly on QZS-6 and the second on QZS-7, currently projected to launch in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Benchmark Space Systems announced contracts to sell around two dozen metal plasma thrusters based on technology the Burlington, Vermont-based startup acquired last year . “These booking are for applications on larger satellites,” Chris Carella, Benchmark chief commercial officer, told SpaceNews at the Satellite 2023 conference here. “It validates the use of this technology for precision maneuvers.” Benchmark manufactured high-test peroxide chemical thrusters before acquiring Alameda Applied Science Corp.’s electric propulsion technology. Now, Benchmark offers chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems. Docking is one applications for Benchmark’s hybrid propulsion customers. A satellite would use chemical propulsion to catch up to its docking target and then rely on the metal plasma thruster to fine-tune maneuvers covering the last few inches, Carella said. “You have different thrust levels for different operations,” he added. Since acquiring Alameda Applied Science Corp.’s electric propulsion technologies, Benchmark has tested the metal plasma thrusters with various metals propellants. Benchmark also has conducted hot-fire tests of its two newton Lynx bi-propellant thruster, which engineers are now working to qualify for spaceflight. “We’re going to build 200 of those Lynx thrusters this year and deliver close to 50 engines with those thrusters,” Carella said. Ryan McDevitt, Benchmark Space Systems CEO, said in a statement, “Benchmark is seeing huge demand for our chemical and hybrid propulsion systems for a variety of missions and maneuvers, including a significant increase in the number of collision avoidance moves satellite operators must make due to growing traffic in busy orbits.” With production picking up, Benchmark has reorganized its executive leadership. Benchmark co-founder Matt Shea moved into the role of chief product officer. Wesley Grove, the former senior operations manager, was named chief operations officer. Jake Teufert, Benchmark’s new chief technology officer, previously served as chief engineer. Carella, who led Benchmark business development and strategy, became the chief commercial officer. And former Redwire executive Kevin DiMarzio is Benchmark’s new business development director. 
Updated March 16 with SEC filing. WASHINGTON — Launch vehicle company Virgin Orbit has paused its operations and furloughed its staff for at least a week as it deals with financial issues. In a statement late March 15, the company said it was instituting an “operational pause” across the company, which includes furloughing staff. CNBC first reported on the halt in its operations. “Virgin Orbit is initiating a company-wide operational pause, effective March 16, 2023, and anticipates providing an update on go-forward operations in the coming weeks,” a company spokesperson told SpaceNews. A company source, speaking on background, said employees were told to expect an update in about a week on the company’s future plans as it deals with what was described as a cash flow issue. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission March 16, Virgin Orbit said it expected the operational pause to continue to March 21 as it “conducts discussions with potential funding sources and explores strategic opportunities.” The company added that there is “no assurance that these discussions will result in any transaction.” Virgin Orbit suffered a technical setback Jan. 9 when its first LauncherOne mission from the United Kingdom failed to reach orbit . That failure, which came after four consecutive successes of the air-launch system, has been linked to a filter in a fuel line in rocket’s upper stage fuel that dislodged , leading to a malfunction of the stage’s engine and preventing it from reaching orbit. The company said March 15 that the investigation into that failure “is nearly complete and our next production rocket with the needed modification incorporated is in final stages of integration and test.” Virgin Orbit was also facing financial challenges. In its last quarterly earnings report in November 2022 , it reported $71 million of cash on hand as of the end of the third quarter, with an operating loss of $50.5 million that quarter. The company has not released updated financial results since then or announced a schedule for doing so. The company has raised $60 million in four tranches from Virgin Investments Limited (VIL) since November, all in the form of loans with interest rates as high as 12%. The most recent funding, $5 million, came Feb. 28. The loans are secured by Virgin Orbit’s assets , giving VIL “first-priority security interest” to those assets, including its Boeing 747 aircraft. The company has said little publicly about those loans, other than confirming statements in the Securities and Exchange Commission filings that the funds would go towards working capital. Virgin Orbit was scheduled to appear on a panel March 14 at the Satellite 2023 conference here on the topic of launch options for smallsats. The company did not appear and panel organizers did not explain the company’s absence.
Voyager Space has acquired engineering company ZIN Technologies to help build up expertise needed for its Starlab commercial space station. Voyager announced March 13 it acquired Cleveland-based ZIN Technologies for an undisclosed sum. ZIN is known for microgravity research equipment it has flown on the Space Shuttle, International Space station and other platforms, as well as other spaceflight hardware. “They’re very experienced, especially in the space station realm,” said Matthew Kuta, president and chief operating officer of Voyager, in an interview. That includes more than 50% of the research hardware on the station as well as safety and health monitoring equipment. “There’s really no other company in the world that has the same space station heritage and credibility.” That experience, he said, will translate well to Voyager’s plans for the Starlab commercial space station. Voyager is one of three companies that received NASA awards in late 2021 to begin design work on commercial space stations that the agency hopes to have ready by late this decade to allow it to transition from the ISS. Buying the company, he said, allows Voyager to bring ZIN’s expertise within the company rather simply working with them as a supplier. “We were working with them anyways on Starlab,” he said. “It’s a way for us to de-risk our supply chain because we brought that in-house.” In the press release announcing the acquisition, Voyager the deal the largest it has done since 2020. Kuta clarified that referred to the size of the company, as ZIN has about 250 to 300 employees. Work on Starlab is proceeding well, he said. Voyager announced in January that it signed a new partnership with Airbus Defence and Space to provide technical expertise for Starlab . Airbus supplanted Lockheed Martin as the main partner with Voyager on the project. “They are our base partner,” he said of Airbus, but added that there would still be a role for Lockheed in the project as supplier. “The core two partners are Voyager and Airbus.” He said Voyager saw significant demand for Starlab from NASA as well as current Western ISS partners. “The business case is not something we’re too concerned about,” he said. Voyager Space has built itself up through a series of acquisitions starting in late 2019 that included Altius Space Machines, Nanoracks, Pioneer Astronautics, Space Micro, The Launch Company and Valley Tech Systems. Space Micro was Voyager’s most recent acquisition before ZIN , in November 2022. Kuta said Voyager would consider additional acquisitions to enhance its capabilities needed for Starlab. “What we’re really focused on here is seeing what is the most efficient and expeditious way to get from where we’re at to Starlab in orbit,” which would be a mix of internal development and subcontracting. “There are a few companies that might make sense for us to acquire,” he said, adding that any such acquisitions would not likely take place before the second half of the year.
OQ Technology of Luxembourg, which raised $13 million in September to build out a narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) constellation, ordered three additional satellites from Kongsberg NanoAvionics. NanoAvionics has built three satellites for OQ Technology to date, two of which are already in orbit. The launch of the third — the European Space Agency-backed MACSAT — is on hold following the December failure of an Arianespace-operated Vega C rocket carrying a pair of commercial imaging satellites for Airbus. “MACSAT was supposed to be launched on Vega-C in March 2023, which, following the December incident with the loss of the Vega-C VV22 mission, has been postponed. Arianespace and ESA were investigating the issue and we are waiting to know when it will be launched,” OQ Technology’s founder and CEO, Omar Qaise, said in a March 15 statement to SpaceNews . “However, with the recent announcement from ESA about the investigation outcome and way forward, we are very confident MACSAT will fly this year.” Investigators pinned the launch failure on eroded nozzle component in the Vega C’s Zefiro-40 solid-fuel second stage but Ukraine’s space agency criticized the March 3 findings as “premature.” ESA said several unnamed payloads would launch before the end of summer on an older Vega rocket unaffected by the problem. Vega C is scheduled to return to flight by the end of the year, launching the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite for the European Union’s Copernicus Earth-observation program. Under the three-satellite order announced this week, NanoAvioncs will build Tiger-4, Tiger-7 and Tiger-8 around 5G NB-IoT payloads provided by OQ Technology. NanoAvionics said the three 6U cubesats will be built at a new facility in Vilnius, Lithuania, and will have electric onboard propulsion for deployment, formation flying and end-of-life disposal. “These three nanosatellites will allow us to grow our constellation, expand our global coverage, and enter new markets,” Qaise said in a statement. NanoAvionics CEO and founder Vytenis J. Buzas called the contract “a testament to the great working relationship we have built with OQ Technology over the last few years.” He attributed the repeat business to NanoAvionics’ “level of standardisation, automation, and experience with communications missions.” Neither company would disclose the contract’s value or discuss launch plans for any of the remaining satellites besides the Vega-manifested MACSAT. OQ Technology has put up three Tiger nanosatellites since 2018. The company said in a March 13 news release it expects to have 10 satellites on orbit by late 2023 or early 2024. “[A]ll remaining satellite launches are planned for this year with the final ones, pending launch conditions, to possibly go into orbit in early 2024,” it said. OQ Technology’s constellation currently includes: • Tiger-1 , a 6U cubesat built by Denmark’s GomSpace and launched in February 2018 on a Chinese Long March 2D rocket. • Tiger-2 , a 6U cubesat built by NanoAvionics and launched in June 2021 aboard SpaceX’s second Falcon 9 dedicated rideshare mission. • Tiger-3 , a 6U cubesat built by NanoAvionics and launched in April 2022 aboard SpaceX’s fourth Falcon 9 dedicated rideshare mission. In addition the Tiger-4, Tiger-7 and Tiger-8 nanosatellites just ordered from NanoAvionics and the already-built MACSAT awaiting the resumption of Vega launches, OQ Technology a pair of 6U cubesats, Tiger-5 and Tiger-6, on order with Denmark-based Space Inventor. OQ Technology is also partnering with the United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre on the development of a 12U modular satellite platform called PHI-Demo, short for Payload Hosting Initiative demonstration. PHI-Demo will carry an OQ Technology communications payload that stores and forwards data collected from IoT devices. PHI-Demo partner SteamJet Space Systems of Birmingham, England, will supply the satellite’s water-based propulsion system. “The PHI mission represents a major enabler for us in expanding our global satellite 5G coverage and also business in the [Middle East and North Africa] region,” Qaise said in a January 2022 announcement .
Danish startup Quadsat said March 15 it has raised 9 million euros ($9.6 million) to expand a business that uses drones as stand-ins for satellites to test and calibrate antennas on the ground. The Series A round was led by British early-stage investor IQ Capital, Quadsat CEO Joakim Espeland said on the sidelines of the Satellite 2023 conference here. IQ Capital is a new investor for Quadsat, which says its quadcopters fitted with custom radio-frequency (RF) payloads can verify ground segments more efficiently outside laboratory conditions. Espeland said all the startup’s existing investors also participated in the latest funding round, including U.K.-based venture capital firm Seraphim Space, Danish state-backed fund Vækstfonden, and angel investors Torben Frigaard Rasmussen and Helge Munk. Quadsat has now raised 12.5 million euros from venture capital since it was founded in 2017, or 16 million euros when including government grants. The funds will help accelerate the production of the venture’s ready-to-fly antenna testing kits and enable them to cover different frequency bands. Customers can independently use these kits today for antennas operating in X -and Ku-band; however, Ka-band and other frequencies currently require an onsite Quadsat engineer. Quadsat is also seeking to expand its drone-based testing services to other ground-based RF systems, such as radars used on navy ships. Navy ships today must sail to specific locations to test their RF systems and there is only a handful of these in the European region, Espeland said. This can be “quite expensive if you’re Denmark and you have ships there or in Greenland,” he said, where there are no suitable sites. “We’re offering a substitution model where we come to the ship instead of the ship coming” to a testing site. Quadsat has already tested its service with the Royal Danish Navy and hopes to expand to other countries in Europe and elsewhere. Satellite operators that have used Quadsat drones to test antennas include Eutelsat and SES in geostationary orbit (GEO) and OneWeb in low Earth orbit. Earlier this month, an antenna verification framework used by GEO operators announced it would start accepting ground station measurements from drones, which Espeland said will help Quadsat expand its operations internationally.
China launched a new classified satellite Wednesday as part of an apparent space systems development test program. A Long March 11 solid rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 7:41 a.m. Eastern, March 15, rising into the dusk above the Gobi Desert. The state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced within an hour of launch that the payload, designated Shiyan-19, had successfully entered its intended, near-polar orbit. No details regarding the satellite were provided by CASC nor Chinese state media. Xinhua stated that the “experiment satellite will primarily be used for land resource surveys, urban planning, disaster prevention and mitigation, and other missions.” The Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering (509th institute) of the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) developed the satellite. SAST stated that the mission uses a platform developed to provide low-cost miniaturized, lightweight, and high-functional density satellites. SAST itself is a major space launch vehicle and satellite maker under CASC. Shiyan are understood to be a series of test satellites, with the first launched in 2004. Shiyan satellite numbers are often non-sequential and sent into a variety of orbits. They have been developed by a range of entities, including China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) and SAST. An analysis of publicly available information by the China Aerospace Studies Institute suggests that Shiyan series satellites play an early role in the space systems development process. “China has used this series to pilot multiple new technologies on one satellite bus specifically to develop a platform for efficient payload integration, as well as to determine the applicability of the payloads,” the analysis reads. China’s Shiyan-10 satellite launched in September 2021 was initially reported by CASC to be stranded in geosynchronous transfer orbit after abnormal function of the satellite. It was later It was later tracked by U.S. Space Force in a highly elliptical 1,880 by 38,881 kilometer altitude orbit with an inclination of 63.6 degrees. The large alteration to its earlier orbital inclination, putting it into a Molniya orbit. Shiyan-10 (02) launched in late December last year and has similar orbital parameters but with a different right ascension of the ascending node, increasing the time that one of the pair of Shiyan-10 satellites is visible over the northern hemisphere. The launch of Shiyan-19 was Chin’s 10th of 2023, in which CASC aims to launch more than 60 times. CASC has separately launched the Horus-1 and Horus-2 remote sensing satellites for Egypt and the Tianhui-6 A and B pair of mapping satellites since launching the Zhongxing-26 HTS communications satellite Feb. 23. The Long March 11 most recently launched the Shiyan-21 satellite from Xichang in southwest China. The rocket can also launch from a mobile sea platform . CASC appears to be increasing its production of the 20.8-meter-long, four-stage rocket, with its manufacturer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), stating it can now produce 10 Long March 11 rockets per year. It is also expected to launch an international payload in 2023, according to state media. Commercial and state-owned spinoff actors have declared plans which, in aggregate, amount to more than 20 further launches. The Tianlong-2 rocket is expected to make its attempt to become the first liquid propellant rocket from this diverse grouping to reach orbit before the end of March.
The U.S. Space Force chief of space operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman in congressional testimony March 14 singled out China as the “most immediate threat” as it continues to weaponize its space technology. Among the most concerning of China’s technologies, he said, are ground-based lasers designed to disrupt and degrade satellite sensors, electronic warfare jammers targeting GPS and communications satellites, and anti-satellite missiles. China is “likely pursuing anti-satellite systems able to destroy satellites in geosynchronous orbit,” Saltzman said in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. “They are testing on-orbit satellite systems which could be weaponized as they have already shown the capability to physically control and move other satellites.” Strategic forces subcommittee member Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) during a hearing pressed Saltzman to elaborate on what might unfold in space in a conflict with a rival power. The Chinese and the Russians over many years have watched how dependent the U.S. military has become on satellites for every aspect of operations, Saltzman said. “So if they can blind us, if they can interfere with those capabilities, or God forbid, destroy them completely. they know that will diminish our advantages.” “I can see interfering, I can see blinding, I can see some of those gray area kinds of attacks on our capabilities to try and put us behind the eight ball,” he added. Can the Space Force defend? Several members of the subcommittee, which oversees military space funding, sought insight from Saltzman on whether the Biden administration’s 2024 budget request funds needed systems to counter China. Can the Space Force defend against these anti-satellite threats? asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) Saltzman laid out the Space Force’s plan to transition from its current dependence on geostationary satellites to proliferated networks of smaller satellites in low and medium Earth orbits. China has “grappling satellites” that could pull U.S. spacecraft out of orbit, he said. That’s a problem for the U.S. that relies on “less than maneuverable older legacy satellites.” A proliferated constellation makes it a “much tougher proposition for them to execute against.” A topic of debate with regard to space and national security is the blurring line between defensive and offensive weapons, an issue complicated by the fact that many space technologies have dual commercial and military applications. “We want to make sure that you’re getting the right policies that don’t restrict your offensive abilities. Do you feel like you have the right policies in place to both protect and attack if necessary?” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) asked Saltzman. Saltzman said he had no complaints. “I can assure you there are no policies that prevent us from exploring a full spectrum of operations,” he added. “It’s just about doing the work, establishing what I would call an understanding of what the capabilities can and can’t do. And then we test and we learn from our experiences.” The chairman of the subcommittee Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) wondered if the U.S. is moving fast enough to counter Russia’s and China’s anti-satellite technology. “As fast as we can go,” said Saltzman. He compared it to the challenge of converting the merchant marine fleet into the U.S. Navy, he added. “We’ve got a little bit of ways to go before we can take our legacy platforms that we’ve got so much utility out of and so much capability from, and convert them to providing the same or better capabilities in a contested domain,” he said. “And we’ll have to make that transition as rapidly as possible.” More training needed Saltzman said the Space Force’s 2024 budget proposal includes about $340 million for an “operational testing and training infrastructure” that is needed to prepare service members for the future battlefield. “I think that’s sufficient for this year because we’ve got a lot of study to do to make sure we’re building the right kind of ranges, the right kind of simulators, and we’re learning as we go,” said Saltzman. Another priority is improving U.S. intelligence on space threats in order to avoid surprises, he said. “That’s the space domain awareness tenet, and we are investing heavily in new sensors. We’re investing in capabilities with our allies and partners.” The key is not just to collect data but to “rapidly turn it into operational decisions,” he said. “I think we have good software investments.” In response to senators’ questions on the Chinese spy balloon, Saltzman made it clear that is not a primary focus of the Space Force. The area where high-altitude balloons fly is often referred to as “near space,” said Saltzman. “But I like to call it ‘far air.’” International norms for space King asked Satzman if there’s any realistic chance that the Chinese and the Russians will come to the table with regard to norms for space . “Unfortunately the norms that they talk about are not ones that we would support,” said Saltzman. “This is a battle of narratives over international norms. Tuberville raised the space industry’s concerns about the growing space debris problem . He said companies come by his office regularly to pitch debris-removal solutions they think the U.S. government should buy. Saltzman said the Space Force is not ready to commit to any one specific debris-cleanup approach and is primarily focused on preventing the creation of more debris. “I haven’t seen demonstrated capabilities,” he said. “It’s one thing to have a pitch that says we can do something that’s another to have a demonstrated capability,” Debris removal today “isn’t my number one challenge, but if somebody feels like they can demonstrate a capability, cleaning up debris is an important concept.” Saltzman in a prepared statement said the Space Force currently tracks approximately 47,900 objects in space, a 16% growth in objects from 2021 to 2022. Of those objects, 7,100 are active payloads, a 37% increase from 2021 to 2022, he said. “Expended rocket bodies, inactive satellites and debris further congest the environment.”
NASA selected Firefly Aerospace to land payloads on the far side of the moon and to place a European satellite into lunar orbit. NASA announced March 14 it awarded a $112 million task order through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to Texas-based Firefly Aerospace for a 2026 mission to the moon using the company’s Blue Ghost lander. Unlike previous CLPS missions, which have focused solely on delivering payloads to the lunar surface, the Blue Ghost 2 mission will also place a satellite into lunar orbit for NASA. (Some earlier missions with CLPS awards will also carry satellites, but not as explicit elements of the CLPS award.) The mission will deliver the Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft, built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. for the European Space Agency, which will serve as a communications relay for other spacecraft on or around the moon. ESA and NASA announced in June 2022 that they would cooperate on Lunar Pathfinder . NASA would provide a launch of Lunar Pathfinder using CLPS and, in turn, be able to use the spacecraft for communications. The Blue Ghost lander will then deliver to the far side of the moon the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) payload developed by a partnership that includes NASA, the University of California Berkeley and the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. LUSEE-Night will take advantage of the radio-quiet conditions on the lunar farside to perform radio astronomy observations of the early universe. The lander will also carry for NASA a new communications terminal to support LUSEE-Night and to commission Lunar Pathfinder. Firefly said in a statement that the spacecraft will be able to carry other payloads for additional government and commercial customers. The award is the second that Firefly has received through CLPS. Its first CLPS mission, awarded in 2021 , is scheduled to launch in 2024, landing in the Mare Crisium region of the near side of the moon. It will carry 10 NASA payloads as well as two commercial payloads. Firefly said the Blue Ghost 2 mission will use both a transfer stage and the lander, enabling it to both deliver Lunar Pathfinder into orbit and land on the moon. That system could be used for other applications, from interplanetary missions to lunar sample return. “This mission will debut Firefly’s unique two-stage Blue Ghost spacecraft, offering NASA and other customers multiple deployment options as we collectively build the infrastructure for ongoing lunar operations and planetary exploration,” Bill Weber, chief executive of Firefly, said in a statement about the award. The award to Firefly is the ninth overall in the CLPS program, spread across five companies. Intuitive Machines has won three CLPS task orders, with its first mission, IM-1, scheduled to launch later this year. Astrobotic has won two, including its Peregrine lander scheduled to launch in May on the first Vulcan Centaur rocket and a 2024 mission to deliver NASA’s VIPER lunar rover. Draper won a task order for the first farside CLPS mission, launching in 2025. A ninth task order was awarded to Masten Space Systems in 2020, but its status remains uncertain after Masten filed for bankruptcy last year and had most of its assets acquired by Astrobotic. NASA started the CLPS program several years ago to enable low-cost access to the moon for lunar science and technology demonstration payloads. Agency officials emphasized a “shots-on-goal” philosophy for CLPS, with the expectation that not all missions will be successful. Getting the first missions off the ground to attempt those shots on goal has taken longer than expected. The initial CLPS awards, made in 2019, projected launches by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines in 2021. “We’ve been looking at that in terms of trying to understand what really drove that and how that might change our planning for the future,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during a panel at the Goddard Memorial Symposium March 8. Scientists who plan to fly payloads on CLPS missions remain upbeat about its prospects to open up the moon for enhanced exploration. “The CLPS program is going to open doors for us to do lunar science all across the lunar surface,” said Rachel Klima, director of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium at the Applied Physics Laboratory, on that panel. She noted that while NASA’s planning for Artemis will focus on establishing a “base camp” in the south polar region of the moon, CLPS missions can visit the rest of the lunar surface. “It drives great science. It drives competition among the different providers and hopefully builds this new economy, driving technical development and innovations that we can use on Earth as well.”
A SpaceX cargo Dragon spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station carrying supplies and experiments after a launch March 14. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. The Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage about 12 minutes after liftoff and is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 7:52 a.m. Eastern March 16. The spacecraft, flying the SpX-27 cargo mission under SpaceX’s Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract with NASA, is carrying 2,852 kilograms of cargo, more than 40% of which is science experiments for the station. Those payloads include studies of the effects of microgravity on heart tissue, tests of carbon dioxide removal techniques and one experiment to expose bacteria and spores to the space environment. The Dragon is also carrying supplies for the crew and station hardware. The Dragon will spend about a month docked to the station before returning to Earth with completed science experiments and other hardware. The mission is the third flight of this cargo Dragon, which previously flew the SpX-22 and SpX-24 mission. The Falcon booster, which landed on a droneship in the Atlantic, completed its seventh mission. While NASA has previously discussed certifying boosters for up to five launches for crewed missions, there is no firm limit for cargo missions. “It’s based on the assessment of the health of the booster and to meet the requirements of a government mission,” said Phil Dempsey, NASA ISS transportation integration manager, during a pre-launch briefing March 13. The launch of SpX-27 came just days after the docking port that spacecraft will use was freed up by the departure of the Crew-5 mission, which undocked from the station March 11 and splashed down later that day . It’s the latest in what NASA officials have described as a busy sequence of missions to the station, although the schedule of some of those upcoming missions is uncertain. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft currently at the station is scheduled to leave this spring, concluding the NG-18 mission, while the NG-19 Cygnus would launch soon thereafter. The timing of both the NG-18 departure and NG-19 launch “is still being worked out,” Dempsey said before the Dragon launch. While earlier schedules had indicated a launch in April of NG-19, Dempsey would only say that the NG-18 departure would take place some time in the next one to two months. The NG-19 launch would take place later in the spring. “There’s readiness that’s being worked between Northrop Grumman and NASA to understand when the vehicle is ready,” he said. Also in flux is the launch of the first crewed mission of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner to the ISS. At a mid-February briefing, NASA and Boeing officials said they were planning a launch in mid to late April , but at the SpX-27 briefing, Dempsey said the current planned launch date was no earlier than the end of April. “There’s handful of open work that’s still being assessed,” he said. The current launch date of the end of April “is under review at the moment based on the readiness of the vehicle.”
WASHINGTON – Kayhan Space has upgraded its space traffic management platform to help satellite operators coordinate collision avoidance. In contrast to Kayhan’s Pathfinder 1.0, which assesses conjunction risk and recommends maneuvers for individual constellations, Pathfinder 2.0 is designed to help satellite operators avoid one another. “Operators can set preferences for how and when they want to maneuver based on their own operating constraints,” Matthew Shouppe, Kayhan’s new chief commercial officer, told SpaceNews . “Our system will allow them to pre-coordinate their preferences, before the event even happens.” To bring as many operators as possible onto its platform, Kayhan offers a free product called Essentials. Eighteen to 20 customers flying roughly 500 satellites have signed up for Kayhan’s free and paid products, said Araz Feyzi, Kayhan co-founder and chief technology officer. In 2022, launch vehicle providers sent nearly 2,500 payloads to orbit, compared with 1,829 in 2021, according to data compiled by astrophysicist and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell. As constellations grow, companies are turning increasingly to automated, rather than manual, operations. If two satellites conduct autonomous maneuvers without communicating, they risk increasing the odds of a collision by maneuvering into each other. NASA and SpaceX are investigating the issue through the coordination of SpaceX Starlink and NASA’s Starling satellite swarm demonstration. In the past, satellite operators notified of conjunctions by the U.S. Air Force attempted to contact each other via phone and email. Kayhan’s Coordinated Optimal Avoidance Maneuvers approaches the problem through the online platform, Shouppe said. While collision avoidance can be automated by Pathfinder 2.0, satellite operators can opt to manually override the recommendations. Pathfinder 2.0 also provides a historical record. “Our system will have a record of the interactions between the two operators,” Shouppe said. If the Federal Communications Commission, for example, has a question about how parties reacted to a conjunction warning, “we can pull up the record,” he added. 
Mexican telco Apco Networks said March 14 it has ordered two small satellites from Astranis for a launch toward geostationary orbit (GEO) next year. The satellites are part of a third batch of satellites Astranis plans to launch together on an undisclosed dedicated rocket, Astranis CEO and cofounder John Gedmark told SpaceNews at the Satellite 2023 conference here. Astranis would operate the satellites on behalf of Apco Networks, which Gedmark said are Mexico’s first dedicated high-throughput Ka-band satellites. Apco Networks currently leases satellite capacity from third-party GEO operators to provide connectivity to consumer, enterprise, and government customers in Mexico. “These two dedicated Astranis satellites will allow us to provide reliable connectivity countrywide,” Apco Networks CEO Orlando Castillo said in a statement. Ramping up Alaska-focused Arcturus, the first commercial satellite built by Astranis and the only spacecraft in its first batch, is slated to launch next month on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying Viasat’s inaugural ViaSat-3 as its primary customer. A second batch of four Astranis satellites is slated to ride on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 mission in late summer. Two of these are for mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu , one is for Peru-based cellular backhaul provider Andesat , and the fourth is for a customer Astranis has yet to announce. Gedmark said the company also has customers for other satellites joining its third batch that he declined to discuss. At under 400 kilograms, each Astranis satellite is much smaller than a traditional GEO communications satellite that typically weighs thousands of kilograms, and is scaled to provide smaller geographies with targeted bandwidth at lower costs. Satellites in Astranis’ second and third batches include a gimbal in their electric propulsion system that gives them an extra year of operational life compared to Arcturus, which is designed to operate for seven years. There is no significant leap in performance between the Californian startup’s second and third batches of satellites, according to Gedmark.
The biggest known cyberattack of the Ukraine war happened more than a year ago when Russian hackers targeted satellite modems and knocked Viasat’s KA-SAT customers offline in Ukraine and other parts of Europe. Viasat, a global communications firm based in Carlsbad, California, recently introduced a new threat-detection tool that can be applied to its entire global network, Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems, told SpaceNews on the sidelines of the Satellite 2023 conference. “Unfortunately this capability was not deployed on KA-SAT at the event that happened in 2022 ,” Miller said, although the development of this service began long before the KA-SAT event. The new service uses a “zero-trust approach” for network threat detection, the said. Unlike traditional cybersecurity techniques that focus on perimeter defense and access control, a zero-trust architecture assumes all devices are potential threats. “We’re always looking at behavioral patterns,” Miller said. “Does it look different than normal? Does that look like a malicious thing? And we’re often able to find things that would be considered zero-day attacks.” Viasat developed this tool under the Enhanced Cybersecurity Services program run by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA created the program to help U.S. businesses and critical infrastructure organizations reinforce their capabilities to identify malicious threats by leveraging classified threat intelligence. Viasat also uses its own threat intelligence. Since the new tool started to get deployed across Viasat’s network, “we’re starting to get some very interesting data,” Miller said. “It’s hard to say categorically that this has stopped a cyber attack, but we have caught things and stopped things that potentially wouldn’t have been stopped by other tools.” Protecting a global commercial network with a million users can be harder than defending DoD networks that restrict access, Miller explained. Government agencies “have total control of the population that’s allowed to come onto the network,” whereas a satellite internet provider like Viasat has to deal with the reality that ‘anyone with 50 bucks a month and good credit can come on our network. And in the developing world, anyone with a couple of bucks a month is welcome to come on to our network.” The whole network is “exposed all the time,” he said. The zero-trust approach assumes that an attacker has a way into the network and “prevents them from doing anything malicious or moving laterally within the network.” Viasat created machine-learning algorithms that were trained against data collected from its own network. “You get a pretty good sample of all the malicious effects and malicious data patterns that are out there.” “Our algorithms have advanced to a point where we have our own set of proprietary threat indicators that detect a lot of things that can’t be detected by commercially available tools,” Miller said. “And in some cases, we detect things that even the NSA and DHS threat intelligence feeds don’t detect.” Zero-trust architectures are now the preferred approach to defend not just commercial but military networks, Sam Visner, technical fellow at MITRE Corp. and vice chair of the Space ISAC , said March 13 at the Satellite conference. “All of these systems are essential to our national interests, as we’ve seen in this war in Ukraine,” said Visner. He said DoD is looking to deploy zero-trust cybersecurity as part of a broader plan to rely on “hybrid” networks of commercial and government satellites. “As you saw at the beginning of the war, some of the principal attacks against were against the commercial systems on which the military depends,” he said. “Systems that have been built by the private sector are therefore subject to the same threats as military systems and require the same mitigation.”
Despite the near-term shakeup caused by a bank failure and broader economic pressures, investors expect funding of space companies to rebound in 2023. Speaking on a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference here March 13, Mark Boggett, chief executive of Seraphim Space, said that his fund estimated investment in the industry dropped by 25% in 2022 over 2021, but that funding would return to 2021 levels this year. “Despite where we are with the macroeconomic environment, my expectation is that we will be back up to 2021 levels this year,” he said. Seraphim found that $12.1 billion was invested in the space sector in 2021 — a record — versus $8.9 billion in 2022. Boggett said that resurgence came from several factors including growing military spending that creates more demand for space-related capabilities as well as climate and sustainability initiatives. He also cited sovereign wealth funds that have increased investment in space. “I think you’re going to see some huge projects, really ambitious projects, that will be announced over the course of this year that will take that total sum invested up to that high from 2021,” he predicted. The industry, though, is dealing with near-term fallout from the March 10 closure of Silicon Valley Bank, which was used by many space startups. While companies were able to restore access to their accounts there March 13 after the federal government stepped in, investors said it will have somewhat longer-term effects on industry financing. Some of the effects are what Boggett and others on the panel described as tactical. “Speaking to our portfolio companies, each of them are now looking to build at least two other banking relationships so their money is spread across three banks,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see that focus around a single bank and that level of risk again.” Matt O’Connell, operating partner at Data Collective Venture Capital, predicted a “flight to quality” as a lingering impact of SVB’s closure. “Even though people have access to their deposits, it sent a chill through the community,” he said, predicting more consolidation among space companies. “Not every company is going to be able to raise money.” “Any kind of dislocation makes people more conservative,” he said. “That will last for a while, but quality companies will still raise capital.” Like Boggett, he expected defense spending to support the business cases for many companies, spurring investment in them. “If you’re doing defense or intel, global unhappiness is probably good for business, in a sad sort of way.” Panelists agreed that the industry’s use of special purpose acquisition corporations (SPACs) to go public in the last two years had run its course, at least for the foreseeable future. “They served their purpose. They proved that space companies could have exits,” said Celeste Ford, managing director of Stellar Ventures. Boggett said that the SPAC market was “frozen,” but was encouraged by funding that companies that had gone public through them had subsequently raised through private investment rounds called PIPEs. “That’s a trend that we’re going to continue to see.” He predicted that, should SPACs return, it will not be used by early-stage companies like those that went public through them in the last two years. “The companies are going to be much more mature than the types of space companies that were SPACing two years ago.” “SPACs will happen again in a smarter, better way,” Ford predicted. “You may not see it soon.”
Although still weeks out from launching its first pair of prototype satellites, Amazon unveiled user terminals March 14 for a planned 3,200-satellite broadband constellation it expects will start providing beta services from low Earth orbit next year. The company showcased three engineering antenna models for its Project Kuiper network at the Satellite 2023 conference here that are sized for different applications. Amazon did not say how much these other two terminals would cost to produce. The company has not announced pricing for the Kuiper service or user hardware. The terminals would be powered by a baseband chip Amazon designed called Prometheus, which the company said would enable them to handle traffic from thousands of customers simultaneously per satellite. By using the chip in its proposed satellites and gateway antennas, Amazon senior vice president of devices and services David Limp said each Project Kuiper spacecraft would be able to process up to 1 terabit per second of traffic. “Prometheus is an amazing chip,” Limp said, giving Amazon the processing power of “a typical kind of 5G base station, we have the power of the modem that’s in your 5G phone, and we have the power of the most powerful backhaul system … and that’s all combined in this one little ASIC,” or application specific integrated circuit. Limp said designing the chips in-house enabled Amazon to acquire them at one-tenth what they would cost on the market. Amazon expects to launch the first two prototypes for the constellation in “early May” on the inaugural flight of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket. However, Limp said Amazon already has enough data to start building operational satellites and expects to have made “multiple” spacecraft by the end of this year for launches starting in the first half of 2024. The company expects to start providing beta services to “large customers” later in 2024 in certain regions, Limp added. Ultimately, he said Amazon plans to produce 3-5 satellites daily as it races to meet a regulatory deadline to have half its proposed constellation of 3,236 satellites in LEO by mid-2026. Amazon has secured up to 92 launches with ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin to deploy the satellites. The blockbuster launch deal was announced last April during the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 
WASHINGTON – Companies with a history of manufacturing large geostationary satellites have succeeded in diversifying their product lines to attract new customers. “We are not on the precipice of change; The entire business has changed,” Cyrus Dhalla, Northrop Grumman Tactical Space Systems Division senior vice president and general manager, said March 13 during a manufacturing panel at the Satellite 2023 conference here. Gone are the days of 20 annual orders for large geostationary communications satellites. Now, there may be “10, 12, 13, 14” orders per year, said Claude Rousseau, NSR research director and panel moderator. As a result, satellite manufacturers have expanded their businesses to supplying small and medium-size satellites to commercial and government customers. Government customers include “many nations now requiring sovereign space capability,” said Johnathon Caldwell, Lockheed Martin military space vice president and general manager. Lockheed Martin now produces more small satellites annually than large satellites, Caldwell said. Caldwell agreed that commonality is an important aspect of small satellite manufacturing. “But it’s also driven by the investments in a bunch of small suppliers,” he added. One of the firms Lockheed Martin is backing is Terran Orbital, the Florida company that won a $2.4 billion contract to supply satellites for Rivada Space Networks. Noting the speedy timeline for manufacturing 300 Rivada satellites , Caldwell said, “I have high confidence they’re going to step up under this contract. They’re going to execute.” Terran Orbital’s ability to scale up small satellite manufacturing will help Lockheed Martin supply customers with satellites at “a radically reduced price point,” Caldwell said. While massive satellites carry higher price tags, small satellites are proving profitable for Airbus largely due to standardization, said Jean-Marc Nasr, Airbus Defence and Space executive vice president of space systems. Airbus is selling its Arrow 450 produced by Airbus OneWeb Satellites to various customers including Northrop Grumman . “We see potential sales of 500 to 1,000 in the next five years,” Nasr said. Building large satellites to meet an individual customer’s requirements is a risky business compared with mass manufacturing small satellites, Nasr said. To keep costs in line, “master your supply chain,” Nasr said. Continually question your make-or-buy decisions. If other companies can produce parts or components better than you can, “sign long term deals with them,” he added. Thales Alenia supplies small satellites through its joint venture with BlackSky. “This market is driven by telecommunications, but also by Earth observation,” said Hervé Derrey, Thales Alenia Space CEO. Derrey emphasized that large geostationary satellites remain important. Certain telecommunications missions would be challenging and expensive to perform with satellites in low or medium-Earth orbit, he added. U.S. government customers have clearly expressed their desire to rely less on large satellites. “They’re going to continue buying some capabilities in GEO,” Dhalla said. “We are seeing orders for much smaller satellites.” Even satellites once considered mid-size, like Northrop Grumman’s GEOStar platform, looked big to a recent factory visitor. “Time has really changed hasn’t it, when you look at something that was considered small five to 10 years ago” and someone comments on how big it is, Dhalla said. In the face of myriad market opportunities, Maxar Technologies will “leverage the commercial go-fast mentality” to meet customer demands for speedy satellite manufacturing, said Chris Johnson, Maxar Space senior vice president and general manager. In terms of software-defined satellites, Maxar is taking a different approach from some of its competitors. “There’s another place that we can go to add value to a certain portion of the market, just like we had value proposition in the GEO market before,” Johnson said. “We are going to leverage a different price point.”
The U.S. Defense Department’s head of space acquisitions circulated a memo last fall calling for the Pentagon to embrace a faster, more commercial approach to building satellites. At the top of Frank Calvelli’s “ Space Acquisition Tenets ” list is to pivot away from billion-dollar behemoths that take a decade to build in favor of smaller spacecraft that can be delivered in under three years. Most space systems the U.S. military needs — for communications, space domain awareness, missile detection and tracking, navigation, weather observation and other applications — can be made faster, cheaper and more resilient by relying on larger numbers of smaller, shorter-lived satellites, said Calvelli, who is assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. The chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman has championed this shift. “We’re in a new era,” he said Feb. 22 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Launch costs are coming down. Small satellite technology is enabling us to think about larger constellations,” said Saltzman. “And larger constellations allow us to think about a launch cycle where we can refresh our on-orbit technology faster.” Amid this push for change, Congress enacted a 2023 defense appropriations bill in late December earmarking $442 million for a wideband communications satellite that the Pentagon did not request. It was a repeat of what happened in 2018 when Congress inserted $600 million for communications satellites that were not budgeted by DoD. The procurement arm of the Space Force, the Space Systems Command, on Feb. 7 confirmed the funding added by Congress in the 2023 budget will pay for a geosynchronous Wideband Global Satcom (WGS), a satellite that Boeing has manufactured for nearly two decades and recently redesigned with a new payload and security features. “This was quite remarkable because nobody saw it coming,” industry consultant Mike Tierney, head of legislative affairs for the National Security Space Association, said of the WGS earmark. He pointed out that none of the preceding defense committee markups of the 2023 spending bill included the add-on. Lawmakers partially offset the $442 million plus-up by cutting $150 million from next-generation communications satellite programs. Congress, to be sure, has supported the Space Force’s transition to a proliferated architecture of smaller satellites led by the Space Development Agency, and the last-minute funding for WGS should not be interpreted as a rejection of that vision, Tierney said. Calvelli’s message “is resonating,” he added, but it will take years to rebalance a space architecture dominated by large, bespoke satellites the Air Force acquired over decades. Meanwhile, “we are starting to see inflections in acquisition strategy,” he said. Charles Beames, the executive chairman of Denver-based smallsat specialist York Space Systems and head of the SmallSat Alliance advocacy group, said lobbying by large defense contractors usually drives these types of large earmarks. Boeing declined to comment on the 2023 budget add-on and referred all questions to the Space Systems Command. Beames, a former principal director for space and intelligence systems at the Pentagon, said there is “always horse-trading and give-and-take” in large defense appropriations. Although DoD did not request a WGS, he said, getting this funding will help fill well-known military needs for satellite-based communications. The “G” in WGS originally stood for gapfiller. The Air Force in 2001 awarded Boeing a contract to develop WGS as an interim solution to bridge a gap until the arrival of a new Transformational Satellite Communications System (TSAT). Like the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System program that collapsed around the same time under the weight of its interagency requirements, TSAT was intended as a secure, high-capacity global communications network for the DoD, NASA and the intelligence community. Plagued by cost overruns and delays, TSAT was terminated in 2009. “That was a multibillion-dollar trainwreck,” Beames said. By the time the Pentagon canceled TSAT, the Air Force had already launched three WGS satellites and Boeing was under contract to produce three more, including one funded by the Australian government as part of a 2007 agreement to gain access to the constellation. WGS over time assumed a central role in U.S. and allied military wideband communications and more international partners have joined the program under various agreements. The Air Force also turned to commercial satcom services to supplement military satellites but it never came up with a WGS replacement that satisfied Congress. The WGS constellation by 2019 was up to 10 satellites and Congress inserted two more. The one funded in 2018, WGS-11, is scheduled to be delivered to the Space Force in 2024. With regard to the latest WGS addition, said Beames, “what Congress did is not perfect, but compared to other things that go on, it doesn’t hurt my head too much.” He argued, however, that a procurement this size should have been opened to competitive bids instead of going to Boeing as a sole-source contract. The SmallSat Alliance, which represents small satellite manufacturers and launch providers, is stepping up advocacy on Capitol Hill, “but we can’t afford the high power lobbyists,” he said. “We’re able to move the ball down the field a little bit every year with some funding for demonstrations and stuff like that.” Beames said Calvelli in recent months has visited many smallsat manufacturers to “kick the tires and see what’s real.” He has seen the factories and how fast they can crank out satellites for a fraction of the cost of bespoke systems, he said, “and I think a lot of that is reflected in his tenets.” The poster child for Calvelli’s acquisition mantra is the constellation now being acquired by the Space Development Agency . SDA projects to spend several billion dollars on a proliferated mesh network in low Earth orbit that uses commercially produced small satellites to track enemy missiles and relay the data on their location to military commanders on the ground. SDA was formed inside the Pentagon in 2019 to help accelerate the adoption of commercial space technology and was transferred to the U.S. Space Force in October. Since 2020, it has ordered hundreds of small satellites for the relay network and a missile-tracking layer, with the first batch projected to launch in late March. The agency has benefited from significant congressional add-ons. Tierney estimated SDA got $750 million above its budget requests in 2022 and 2023 to accelerate the deployment of missile-tracking satellites. Congress is coming around to Calvelli’s way of thinking, said Tierney. “Two or three cycles ago when the Space Development Agency was first being proposed, there was a lot of skepticism about where it fit into the broader space architecture. But that skepticism, I think, is long dead now.” The complexity of military satellite systems calls for a nuanced approach, which is why Congress has added funds for two additional WGS satellites while also supporting SDA’s vision of small satellites, said a congressional source speaking on condition of anonymity. Just weeks before retiring in November, former chief of space operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond warned that the transition to a small satellite architecture must be seamless “You can’t tell the world I’m going to turn off GPS, or turn off missile warning and we’ll be back to you in about 10 years with new stuff,” Raymond said. Missile warning satellites are the largest part of the Space Force’s procurement budget, absorbing more than $4 billion in 2023. The bulk of the funding is for Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) geostationary satellites the Air Force ordered in 2018 from Lockheed Martin to provide early warning of enemy missile launches. But long-term budget projections show a gradual decline in funding for large missile-warning satellites as the Space Force ramps up the missile-tracking layer in LEO and a medium-orbit layer that is now in development. Congress is not going to pull the plug on big-ticket programs like Next-Gen OPIR, even though lawmakers support what SDA is doing, the congressional source said. “Missile warning is a no-fail mission, and SDA really hasn’t launched anything of significance yet, or proven its capability.” With a mission like missile warning, “you can’t have any false positives when you’re going to wake up the president to say we’re under attack. You have to be absolutely certain,” the source said. “It’s not a situation where you can say ‘this SDA stuff looks good, let’s go with it and cancel the legacy program.’” The large aerospace prime contractors that for decades have dominated the military satellite market started diversifying in anticipation of DoD’s shift to smaller satellites. In 2018, Boeing acquired Millennium Space, a smallsat builder founded in 2001 in El Segundo, California. In 2020, Raytheon absorbed Blue Canyon Technologies, a Colorado-based smallsat manufacturer founded in 2008 that drove a lot of new developments in smallsat technologies. In 2022, Lockheed Martin made a $100 million strategic investment in Terran Orbital, a Florida-based company building satellite buses for the Space Development Agency as a Lockheed subcontractor. Separately from its Terran Orbital investment, Lockheed Martin in recent years has rolled out a family of small, medium and large satellite buses to position itself to fill the gamut of military requirements. “There are missions that drive you towards higher power and larger satellites, but increasingly there are definitely opportunities to go towards more distributed constellations that take advantage of smaller satellites, as we’ve seen with SDA,” said Eric Brown, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for mission strategy and advanced capabilities. Michael Corriea, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for overhead infrared sensors, said the current missile-warning satellites the Pentagon is buying have to be large to meet the government’s requirements. The 4,500-kilogram Space Based Infrared (SBIRS) GEO-6 satellite that launched last August is equipped with roughly 500 kilograms of infrared sensors — a payload mass heavier than most smallsats at launch. “Could the same set of requirements be put on a small platform? The answer is no,” Correia said. “But you can most certainly build missile warning satellites on a smaller platform and adjust the requirements for the architecture in terms of the number of sensors on orbit,” he said. “You could build satellites of any size, quite frankly, based on architectural parameters.” Millennium Space CEO Jason Kim said the industry is postured for a “hybrid architecture that includes both large and small.” This is new for the Department of Defense, he noted. “Back 20-plus years ago when we were founded, small satellites were not a common architecture.” Small satellites have become more reliable and more capable, he said, but physics sometimes demands larger platforms. “It’s all just a balance of cost, schedule, performance and risk,” Kim said. There is significant private investment in small satellite technologies, “and what we hear from Calvelli is that he wants to leverage those investments,” he added. Buying a WGS satellite is not necessarily inconsistent with Calvelli’s plan because it is mature technology and not a new development, Kim argued. The Space Systems Command said the new WGS-12 will be “built to print,” which means Boeing will build another copy using the existing design. This article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Executives seeking new businesses from connecting satellites directly to standard smartphones are divided over how quickly this market could grow. Regulatory challenges, potential spectrum interference, customer demand, and the need to fund and deploy constellations capable of voice and other high-bandwidth services are big question marks for this emerging market, according to Matt Desch, CEO of satellite operator Iridium Communications. “This is an industry that’s going to take 15 years to roll out,” Desch said March 13 during a panel at the Satellite 2023 conference here. Iridium recently announced a partnership with chipmaker Qualcomm to bring two-way messaging to Android smartphones and other devices slated for release in the second half of 2023. Similar to SOS services Apple launched on its latest iPhone models in November via Globalstar’s constellation, direct-to-device services supported by Iridium would use existing satellites and spectrum already approved for mobile satellite services. In another approach, companies such as Lynk Global are looking to develop constellations from scratch that would repurpose spectrum from mobile network operator partners. Lynk currently has three satellites in low Earth orbit and is seeking funds to deploy 1,000 of them by 2025, which the Virginia-based startup has said would be enough for voice services near the equator. “If you have a timeline of 10-15 years you’re going to miss the boat,” Lynk CEO Charles Miller said during the panel. When SpaceX announced a partnership in August to use spectrum from mobile operator T-Mobile for direct-to-device services in the United States, the company said it could launch initial services starting with text messaging as early as 2024. Jonathan Hofeller, vice president of commercial sales for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation, declined to be pinned down on the timing of its direct-to-device plans, including when future higher-bandwidth services could be rolled out. “We’re definitely wrong,” Hofeller said, “we just don’t know how wrong we are.” However, he said SpaceX expects to “learn a lot by doing — not necessarily by overanalyzing,” and by working closely with terrestrial wireless partners. While these telcos “might take some convincing,” he said ultimately customers worldwide want the ability to use their mobile devices where there is little or no cellular coverage. Switzerland-based mobile operator Salt announced March 1 that it is also working with Starlink on a direct-to-device service to extend the reach of its network. Hofeller said SpaceX plans to start testing direct-to-smartphone services this year and expects to benefit from its ability to iterate and deploy satellites very quickly. SpaceX has launched more than 4,000 satellites for Starlink and is currently building six satellites and thousands of user terminals a day for the constellation, he said. The “V2 Mini” version of the Starlink satellite that SpaceX started launching in February also has “four times the capacity of our previous generation.” SpaceX’s plans to deploy larger, more powerful Starlink satellites are tied to regulatory approval and successful tests of the Starship heavy launch vehicle it is developing at Boca Chica, Texas.
NASA is projecting spending nearly $1 billion on a tug to deorbit the International Space Station at the end of the decade to provide redundancy for safely disposing of the station. NASA released additional details March 13 about its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal. An outline of the proposal, published by the White House March 9, requested $27.2 billion for the agency , a 7.1% increase from 2023 that roughly keeps pace with inflation. One of the biggest new initiatives in the budget is the ISS deorbit tug, which would be used to perform the final lowering of the station’s orbit to ensure it reenters over the South Pacific. NASA first indicated its plans for the tug in a request for information last August , but offered few specifics about the vehicle in the budget request. The $180 million NASA is requesting for the tug “gives us a healthy start” for the project, said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, in a media teleconference about the budget. While budget documents did not include a spending profile for the project, Lueders said the agency came up with a cost estimate “a little bit short of about $1 billion.” The exact amount, she said, will depend on what proposals the agency receives from industry from an upcoming request for proposals (RFP). “Our goal is to go out with an RFP,” she said. “We’re hoping to get a better price than that.” NASA has earlier planned to use cargo spacecraft, particularly Russia’s Progress, to deorbit the station. In its request for information last year, the agency said it concluded “additional spacecraft may provide more robust capabilities for deorbit” and decided to ask industry for its concepts. “We’re always looking for redundancy,” Lueders said, with NASA continuing to work with Roscosmos on using Progress vehicles for deorbiting. “We are also developing this U.S. capability as a way to have redundancy and be able to better aid the targeting of the vehicle and the safe return of the vehicle, especially as we’re adding more modules.” The tug was one of the few new projects in the budget request, which primarily continues previously announced science, exploration and technology efforts. The budget proposal also supports NASA’s role in the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission, providing components like thrusters, radioactive heating units and launch services needed for ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover after ESA terminated cooperation with Roscosmos a year ago. The budget documents did not spell out funding for ExoMars, but Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said the budget proposal includes $30 million in fiscal year 2024 for ExoMars. She added the agency is still working to determine the full cost of its contributions. Artemis gap The budget presentation included an updated schedule for the Artemis campaign of lunar exploration. That included a November 2024 date for Artemis 2, the first crewed Space Launch System/Orion mission, a date NASA officials gave in a March 7 briefing about the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission . That schedule shows a December 2025 launch date for Artemis 3, which will include the first human lunar landing of Artemis using SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander and spacesuits being developed by Axiom Space. “We’re still pressing to make Artemis 3 in 2025 and proceed on from there,” Bob Cabana, NASA associate administrator, said at the briefing. However, Artemis 4, previously projected for 2027, had slipped to September 2028 in the new manifest. That will also feature a lunar landing using Starship as well as use of the lunar Gateway. It will also be the first launch of the upgraded Block 1B version of SLS with additional payload capacity, which on that mission will be used to deliver the I-Hab habitation module to the Gateway. NASA officials at the briefing did not discuss the Artemis 4 slip, but Cabana mentioned the complexity of the mission. “We’re doing our very best to keep it on schedule,” he said. “Yes, it slipped a little bit, but there’s a lot that has to come together for Artemis 4, between the enhanced upper stage, the Gateway, Gateway logistics, the second mobile launcher. All of that has to work.”
L3Harris Technologies won a $765.5 million NASA contract to develop the imager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Extended Observations satellite program. The cost-plus-award-fee contract for the GeoXO imager, known as GXI, covers development of two flight instruments and includes options for additional imagers. The contract also covers 10 years of on-orbit operations and five years of on-orbit storage. GXI, a multi-channel, passive imaging radiometer, will gather high-resolution visible and infrared imagery for monitoring weather, oceans, and the environment in the Western Hemisphere. GXI will provide data on a variety of topics including cloud formation, atmospheric conditions, land surface temperature, smoke, dust, volcanic ash plumes, aerosols, air quality and vegetative health. GeoXO, NOAA’s successor to the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series, includes three satellites. One over the Eastern United States, another over the West and a third in the middle. The Eastern and Western satellites will be equipped with GXI. L3Harris also manufactures the Advanced Baseline Imager for the GOES-R series. GXI “will provide advanced visible and infrared imagery, more precise observations and improved water vapor measurements” thanks in part to the addition of two spectral bands and enhanced spatial resolution, according to an L3Harris news release. “We’re honored to continue our role with NASA and NOAA as a key provider of geostationary capabilities by adding relevant mission value to our nation’s next-generation weather architecture,” Ed Zoiss, L3Harris Space and Airborne Systems president, said in a statement. The $19.6 billion budget for six GeoXO satellites, operations and support over 30 years was approved in December. NOAA and NASA will jointly oversee the development, launch, testing and operation of the GeoXO satellites.
With several GPS satellites in storage awaiting launch opportunities, the U.S. Space Force decided to press pause on new orders, the top Air Force budget official said March 13. The Space Force in last year’s budget was projecting to order two Global Positioning System GPS 3F satellites from Lockheed Martin, but they were removed from the 2024 budget because they’re not needed, Maj. Gen. Michael Greiner, deputy assistant secretary for budget for the Department of the Air Force, said at a Pentagon news conference. “We have a strong, healthy GPS constellation, and we have a little bit of a backlog with launch capability,” said Greiner. “So we think this was a low-risk move to help free up resources.” He said the Space Force reallocated that funding to its missile-warning constellations, which are getting a big increase in the 2024 budget. Based on the most recent order of GPS 3F satellites, each costs about $250 million. Four GPS 3 satellites are awaiting launch As Greiner noted, the Space Force has purchased more GPS satellites than it’s been able to launch to orbit. Lockheed Martin last month delivered the 10th and final GPS 3 satellite made under a 2008 contract. Of the 10 satellites built, six have been launched, and the other four are being stored at a Lockheed Martin facility in Waterton, Colorado, awaiting launch opportunities. GPS 3 is a modernized version of the U.S. military’s Global Positioning System satellites that broadcast positioning, navigation and timing signals. Lockheed Martin is now producing a more advanced version, the GPS 3F. The company in 2018 was awarded a contract worth $7.2 billion for up to 22 GPS 3F satellites. Ten have been ordered so far. Although it’s not requesting new satellites, the Pentagon’s 2024 budget does include significant funding for the GPS ground system and for receivers, or user equipment. According to DoD budget documents , it is seeking about $1.2 billion for the so-called GPS Enterprise: $980 million for research, development and testing; and nearly $280 million for procurement. The 2024 budget request for the GPS Enterprise funds the following: 
Space startups breathed a collective sigh of relief after the U.S. government moved to protect all deposits placed with the Silicon Valley Bank. “We’d been panicking all weekend,” said Mark Boggett, CEO of U.K.-based venture capital firm Seraphim Space. When A third of the Seraphim Space portfolio companies had funds locked in SVB accounts. Before the U.S. government stepped in, only funds up to $250,000 were protected, via the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Launch companies Rocket Lab and Astra Space, which are not in the Seraphim Space portfolio, were among the most high-profile space firms exposed to SVB’s collapse . Because they are public companies, Rocket Lab and Astra had to report funds at risk through SVB’s collapse as material events. Dozens of private space companies were also affected. While they also spent the weekend scrambling to understand the impact of SVB’s failure on their deposits and investments, they were not forced to disclose those concerns. “Now nobody is going to lose any money,” Boggett said. “And as of today, everyone has got access to their bank accounts.” Meanwhile, SVB’s subsidiary in the United Kingdom is being sold to London-headquartered bank HSBC in a deal that would safeguard deposits. “SVB UK customers can continue to bank as usual, safe in the knowledge that their deposits are backed by the strength, safety and security of HSBC,” HSBC CEO Noel Quinn said in a statement. SVB reported total deposits of about $175 billion at the end of December. HSBC announced March 13 that it was taking over SVB UK deposits of about 6.7 billion pounds ($8.2 billion). Boggett praised how quickly governments and financial institutions were able to step in to placate markets. “It had to be fast because otherwise there is contagion,” he said, and “we would have been facing a 2008 financial crisis.” “It’s a major risk that nobody had in their sights,” Boggett added.
President Biden’s $842 billion budget request for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2024 includes $30 billion for the U.S. Space Force, the largest funding request to date for the military space branch. The $30 billion request is $3.7 billion more than what Congress enacted for the Space Force in 2023 . “The largest space budget ever,” DoD said in budget documents released March 13 on the Biden administration’s funding request for the coming fiscal year that begins Oct 1. The proposed budget “procures and modernizes capabilities to secure the use of space in the face of increasing threats to U.S. national security space systems,” the Pentagon said in budget documents. Most of the increase proposed for the Space Force is for the development and procurement of missile-warning satellites, and for launch services. The Space Force’s $30 billion budget request includes: Big increase for LEO satellites, space launch The heftiest increase is in the RDT&E account. Funding for low and medium orbit missile-tracking satellites nearly doubles from $1.2 billion in 2023 to $2.3 billion in 2024. The Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit data relay constellation gets $2.1 billion, or more than double the 2023 funding. Meanwhile, the Space Force eliminated one of three geostationary Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) that it planned to buy. “The Department has assessed the third satellite vehicle is not required,” said DoD budget documents, as the current constellation of Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellites continues “positive performance.” In the procurement category, “this year it’s all about launch,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Greiner, deputy assistant secretary for budget. DoD is seeking $2.6 billion for launch services for 15 missions, compared to last year’s appropriations of $1.7 billion for 10 missions. The $2.6 billion for launch includes $2.1 billion for 10 National Security Space Launch (NSSL) traditional geostationary and medium orbit missions, and five launches for the Space Development Agency’s LEO constellation. The NSSL and SDA launches are reported in separate budget lines at the request of Congress, Greiner said. ‘We have to make a transformation’ Frank Kendall, the top civilian leader of the Air Force and Space Force, said the 2024 budget is “focused on trying to stay ahead of the threat.” “What we’re most concerned about is the pacing challenge from China and their military modernization program,” Kendall told reporters. “You’ve been hearing me speak about this ad nauseam for the last couple of years.” In response to this challenge, said Kendall, “we have to make a transformation to next-generation capabilities. And it’s a journey,” he said. “Time is our greatest concern. We did a lot of work over the past year to analyze those problems and look at various ways to try to address them.” Specifically in the space domain, said Kendall, the 2024 budget begins a transition to a more diversified satellite architecture. Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, has directed the use of smaller satellites that can be built faster and cheaper than traditional large satellites. “We’re moving in that direction,” Kendall said. The Space Development Agency’s missile warning and data transport constellations “are the two obvious examples,” he said. Meanwhile, “we’re still sorting out what our future is going to be in programs like GPS and some of the other communication systems.” The Space Force is “benefiting from what’s happened in the commercial world, because a number of commercial companies for business reasons are going to less expensive designs,” he said. This means “more proliferated, more affordable architectures that are also more resilient.” Space Force budgets have steadily risen since the service was established three years ago. Its first budget in fiscal year 2021 was $15.3 billion, and it grew to $18 billion in 2022. It jumped to $26.3 billion in 2023 due to internal funds transfers from the Space Development Agency and the Air Force, plus a congressional add-on . 
WASHINGTON – Aalyria, the company marketing technology developed by Google parent Alphabet, announced an agreement March 13 with Rivada Space Networks. Rivada will use Spacetime, Aalyria’s network orchestration technology, in its planned low-Earth orbit communications constellation. Spacetime is designed to ensure reliable, secure communications by continuously analyzing possible data paths. “Rivada’s first-of-its-kind constellation is exactly the type of next-generation connectivity system Spacetime was designed to advance,” Aalyria CEO Chris Taylor said in a statement. “We built Spacetime to dynamically route communications across anything that flies or moves, on Earth or in space, to expand connectivity to people, places and things that were previously thought unconnectable. We’re excited to add Rivada to our roster of world-class partners and look forward to working with them in the coming years.” Rivada Space Networks has secured launches and financing for its plan to deploy 300 satellites by mid-2026 to meet a regulatory deadline. The German company, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Rivada Networks, selected Terran Orbital to build its satellites under a $2.4 billion contract. Livermore, California-based Aalyria emerged from stealth mode in September. In addition to the Spacetime, Aalyria is marketing Tightbeam terminals to transfer optical communications through Earth’s atmosphere. Another Spacetime demonstration is planned by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. DIU plans to link commercial and government satellites with global, high-speed, secure data connections through the Hybrid Space Architecture project. Organizations participating in the Hybrid Space Architecture project will rely on Aalyria’s Spacetime application programming interface to specify data rates and latency requirements for data passing through ground stations and satellite-relay networks. “They’re going to ask our system to create network transport dynamically,” Brian Barritt, Aalyria executive vice president and chief technology officer, told SpaceNews in a recent interview. Google and Alphabet used Spacetime internally for nearly a decade. The software platform handled communications for Project Loon deployments in Peru, Puerto Rico and Kenya.
WASHINGTON – LeoLabs announced plans March 13 to enhance tracking of space objects over the Southern Hemisphere with a new radar in Argentina. The S-band radar, scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, will be located on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. “The Southern Hemisphere has not been well covered for space safety and space domain awareness,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told SpaceNews. “There are a lot of conjunctions close to the North Pole and the South Pole. This radar will make a very meaningful improvement in the tracking of those conjunctions.” Currently, LeoLabs tracks objects in low-Earth orbit with phased array radars in Alaska, Australia , Portugal’s Azores archipelago , New Zealand , Texas and Costa Rica . The proliferation of satellites and debris traveling over Earth’s poles is creating high-risk conjunctions, particularly at latitudes of more than 60 degrees. Adding a radar in Argentina will help LeoLabs obtain multiple daily views of individual space objects. “It’s that ability to check in frequently on the satellites that enables us to drive space safety,” Ceperley said. “In the Northern Hemisphere, we have the Alaska radar site. It’s harder to find sites close to Antarctica.” Tierra del Fuego is about 4,700 kilometers from Antarctica. When LeoLabs was established, its founders intended to track satellites and debris with radars at six international sites. Argentina marks the seventh in a network now expected to include 24 sites. “The goal to go out to 24 sites is a recognition that the space industry is dramatically scaling,” Ceperley said. “That’s why we’re going to keep going with more sites.” In addition, LeoLabs’ latest radars are designed to spot objects as small as 2 centimeters across. “There’s a lot of untracked debris,” Ceperley said. “We want to expand the LEO catalog to include smaller and smaller debris.” “It’s a privilege to build this radar site in Argentina and contribute to this country’s history of space exploration and stewardship,” Ceperley said in a statement. “We are committed to our partners in Argentina and are eager to help support the space industry here and in South America more broadly.” Jorge Argüello, Argentina’s U.S. ambassador, said in a statement, “Our space sector is highly valued and the interaction of LeoLabs experts with our engineers has been virtuous and enriching. It is very important to address the issue of sustainability in the space sector, and this radar contributes to that regard.” 
WASHINGTON – CesiumAstro, a company known for supplying phased array antennas for satellites, is entering the in-flight connectivity market with demonstrations on Airbus airplanes and helicopters. The March 13 announcement brings Cesium one step closer to its goal of “supplying phased arrays for everything that’s mobile,” including aircraft, ships and autonomous vehicles, Shey Sabripour, Cesium founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We’ve got this growing demand for throughput and the piece that needs to be continuously revolutionized is the way we use the spectrum and connect everything. That’s why I have believed in phase arrays for a couple of decades and wanted to build a company around it.” Austin, Texas-based Cesium invested for years in developing in-flight connectivity products before being selected by Airbus, along with a couple of competitors, to demonstrate the performance of its flat-panel terminals. Cesium will deliver the multi-beam, active phased-array antennas to Airbus in May for tests likely to occur later this year. “I appreciate everything that Airbus has done for us as the first customer,” including mounting the Cesium terminal on aircraft and testing them, Sabripour said. “Of course, we’re going to market this to other commercial aircraft providers as well.” Cesium has another contract, not yet announced, to demonstrate the Ka-band terminal on a drone for a U.S. government agency. The flight demonstrations for Airbus and the unnamed government customer will help Cesium collect the data the company needs to reach its goal of obtaining FAA certification for its in-flight connectivity terminal in early 2025, Sabripour said. Cesium’s IFC terminals are designed to fit aircraft of all sizes. “It’s a very modular tile-like architecture,” Sabripour said. “We can make it very big for a certain type of aircraft and very small for a drone.” Sabripour founded Cesium in 2017 in a quest to make phased arrays ubiquitous. Initially, the company focused on space applications. Saturn Satellite Networks announced plans last year to buy Cesium antennas for its $500 million Space Broadband Networks-1 program. Recently, the startup announced a contract from the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency to develop active electronically scanned array antennas compatible with the Link 16 tactical data network.
LAUREL, Md. — A NASA study concluded that some methods of removing orbital debris could pay for themselves within a decade by reducing the costs and risks borne by satellite operators. The study , released March 10 by NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy, examined the costs of several approaches to removing both large and small debris and the benefits they offered to satellite operators by reducing the number of avoidance maneuvers and losses of satellites damaged or destroyed by debris collisions. NASA billed the report as the most rigorous cost-benefit analysis to date of orbital debris remediation, noting that debris removal analyses had largely focused on emphasizing sustainability and “moral responsibility” for doing so. “Given the substantial upfront expenditures required to develop and deploy remediation capabilities and the potential delay in receiving benefits, these motivations do not appear to be sufficient to incentivize immediate action,” the report stated. The analysis, which looked at both the cost of establishing various approaches to removing debris as well as the costs incurred by satellite operators from debris, found the most effective approaches involved ground- and space-based lasers to remove large amounts of small debris between 1 and 10 centimeters across. Both laser systems would create benefits that exceed their costs within a decade. The other effective approaches involved “just-in-time collision avoidance” involving the largest debris objects, using rockets or lasers to nudge such debris to avoid collisions with satellites or other debris. Such approaches could have net benefits almost immediately, or no more than a few decades in a worst-case assessment. Other approaches included in the study could take much longer to realize a net benefit. Reentry of larger debris objects could break even in as little as 20 to 25 years, but in worst-case scenarios might take close to a century to yield benefits. The study found similar timeframes for “sweeper” spacecraft that would physically remove small debris. It also examined recycling debris by turning it into propellant, but found breakeven times of a few decades, in part because of large upfront research and development costs for the technology. The report acknowledged one problem with using lasers to remove debris is the perception that such systems could also be used as weapons. The study concluded that the power of debris-removal lasers would be too low, by a factor of 1,000, to be effective as a weapon against active satellites, “though perceptions may be harder to navigate.” One interesting finding of the report is the relatively small costs that debris imposes on satellite operators today. The model NASA developed for the report, which was limited to U.S. operators, estimated annual costs on such operators of only $58 million a year, a figure dominated by military as well as civil operational satellites, like Landsat and polar-orbiting weather satellites. “We found that most satellite operators do not incur much cost from conjunction assessments or collision avoidance maneuvers,” said Bhavya Lal, NASA associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy, in a speech at the American Astronautical Society’s Goddard Memorial Symposium March 10 that coincided with the release of the report. “The key takeaway here is that the risk to satellite operators need not increase at the same rate as orbital debris increases.” That didn’t mean, though, that remediation approaches like those NASA studies should not be considered, she argued. “Conventional wisdom has been that prevention is more valuable than cure, that debris mitigation is more critical than remediation,” she said, but warned those efforts to mitigate the creation of new debris will likely see diminishing returns in the coming decades. ‘The challenge is to assess the effectiveness of mitigation, tracking, characterization and remediation in a way that enables apples-to-apples comparisons among risk reduction technologies,” she said. “With such information, we can understand the most effective portfolio of risk reduction.” Lal said that NASA planned to organize a roundtable among various stakeholders to get feedback on the study before starting a second phase that will improve the model and incorporate even smaller debris.
Updated 11:15 p.m. Eastern after post-splashdown briefing. WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the Florida coast March 11, returning four people from the International Space Station after more than five months in space. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance splashed down at the primary landing location west of Tampa, Florida, at 9:02 p.m. Eastern. The splashdown took place nearly 19 hours after the spacecraft undocked from the station. The splashdown marked the end of the 157-day Crew-5 mission that started with an Oct. 5 launch on a Falcon 9 . NASA astronaut Nicole Mann commanded the mission, with fellow NASA astronaut Josh Cassada serving as pilot. JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina were mission specialists on Crew-5. Endruance departed the station eight days after the arrival of another Crew Dragon, Endeavour, on the Crew-6 mission. It delivered to the station NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. They will remain on the station for about six months, when they are relieved by the Crew-7 mission, which will also use the Endurance spacecraft. SpaceX will conduct two commercial Crew Dragon missions before Crew-7. The Ax-2 mission for Axiom Space is tentatively scheduled for May, going to the ISS for about 10 days. It will feature former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson as commander and John Shoffner, a customer, as pilot along with Saudi astronauts Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni. Polaris Dawn, a Crew Dragon mission that is part of billionaire Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Program of private astronaut missions, is expected to launch in the summer , Isaacman said Feb. 23. Isaacman will command the mission with Scott “Kidd” Poteet as pilot and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon as mission specialists. The five-day mission will not dock with the ISS but instead conduct other tasks, including the first spacewalk from a Crew Dragon. Upcoming missions NASA and SpaceX will now turn their attention to the next Dragon cargo mission, SpX-27. That mission, carrying more than 2,700 kilograms of cargo, is scheduled to launch March 14 at 8:30 p.m. Eastern from the Kennedy Space Center. The next crewed mission to the station is scheduled to be the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle, with two NASA astronauts on board. At a post-splashdown briefing, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said that mission, the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was scheduled for no earlier than the end of April. “We really need to step back here in March and take a look at where we’re at and then determine what the next steps are,” he said, noting work was ongoing to complete certification work and final software testing. The uncrewed Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft is scheduled to undock from the station March 28. That spacecraft, which brought two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut to the station in September, suffered a damaged radiator in December that caused it to lose coolant. Roscosmos launched a new, uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, in February to replace Soyuz MS-22. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said at the briefing that while the damaged radiator does not return to Earth, controllers will collect data on the temperature and humidity conditions inside the capsule during its return to Earth. He said that Russian engineers are investigating the possibility that it, along with a Progress cargo spacecraft that suffered a similar loss of coolant in February, had a manufacturing defect. “Did something change in the production of these vehicles?” he said, calling such a review “exactly what we would do on our side.” He added NASA still believed that Soyuz MS-23 could safely return crew home from the station in September, according to current station manifests. “We’re confident in that. Confidence is good, but we’re always looking.”
Relativity Space scrubbed a launch of its Terran 1 rocket March 11 after two last-minute aborts for technical issues. A first launch attempt during a three-hour window was aborted at 2:42 p.m. Eastern, at T-0.5 seconds. The rocket’s nine Aeon 1 engines had already ignited when the abort was called. Relativity said on its launch webcast that the abort was triggered by a violation of launch commit criteria, but was not more specific. It later tweeted that a “a corner case in the stage separation automation” a few seconds before scheduled liftoff caused the abort. The company recycled for a second launch attempt at 4 p.m. Eastern, at the end of the launch window at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 16. That countdown halted at about T-45 seconds, scrubbing the launch for the day. The company later said the abort was caused by fuel pressure in the upper stage that dropped too low. The March 11 scrub came after propellant temperature issues postponed an initial launch attempt March 8 . The company said during the March 11 webcast that a faulty ground valve, since fixed, caused the problem during the earlier launch attempt. The company did not report any propellant temperature issues in the latest attempt. Relativity has not announced a new launch date for the mission, which it calls “Good Luck, Have Fun.” The company explained it waited three days between launch attempts to condition the liquid natural gas it uses as fuel for the rocket. That is primarily methane, but includes some butane, ethane and propane, according to Arwa Tizani Kelly, technical program manager for test and launch at Relativity, during the webcast. Methane boils off faster than the other compounds. “If we were to offload and then reload those same propellants after a scrub, our methane composition would be off,” she said. “Instead, we bring in fresh propellants, and the fuel then needs some time to level off to the right compound mix before we make another launch attempt.” This is the first mission for Terran 1, a rocket that Relativity manufactured primarily using 3D-printing technologies. The mission does not carry a payload and is primarily a technology demonstration of the vehicle, including testing if those additive manufacturing techniques are suitable for a launch vehicle. Tim Ellis, chief executive and co-founder of Relativity, tweeted before the first launch attempt that he hopes the launch at least gets through maximum dynamic pressure, or Max-Q, about 80 seconds after liftoff, when stresses on the vehicle peak. “But the key inflection in my mind is surpassing Max-Q,” he wrote. “We have already proven on the ground what we hope to prove in-flight – that when dynamic pressures and stresses on the vehicle are highest, 3D printed structures can withstand these forces. This will essentially prove the viability of using additive manufacturing tech to produce products that fly.” Terran 1 is also testing technologies for its larger, reusable Terran R rocket. The company has $1.65 billion in launch contracts from several customers, including OneWeb, for that vehicle, which could start launching as soon as 2024. The Terran 1 launch was one of two scheduled for March 11, neither of which took place. Rocket Lab postponed a launch of its Electron rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia, earlier in the day, citing strong upper-level winds. The company has not announced a new date for the “Stronger Together” mission carrying two Capella Space radar satellites. The company has airspace restrictions for the launch daily through March 17.
VICTORIA, British Columbia – Canada’s Department of National Defence is moving ahead with a new microsatellite project for space domain awareness. The Redwing satellite will monitor objects in congested orbits and will be able to record and transmit tracking data from anywhere in its orbit, according to the department. Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand announced March 9 that a contract worth $15.8 million Canadian dollars ($11.3 million) has been awarded to Magellan Aerospace of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Magellan is the prime contractor who will lead a team to design, build and operate the Redwing microsatellite hosting a suite of optical sensors. “It is critical that we are aware of what’s happening in the space domain, so that we can monitor adversaries, support our allies, and safeguard our interests,” Anand told retired and serving military officers at the Conference of Defence Associations in Ottawa. “When launched in late 2026, this research and development satellite system will identify and help to reduce risks to Canada’s space infrastructure from space debris and human-caused interference.” Redwing will transmit its information to ground stations that will be located in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, and Happy Valley Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador. The design phase is expected to be complete by fall 2024 with the microsatellite built and tested by 2026. Redwing will operate from 2027 to 2033. The research and development microsatellite will perform space domain awareness observations of Earth-orbiting space objects in low-earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit and near Cislunar altitudes, according to National Defence. Redwing will use autonomous tracking algorithms to monitor space objects performing unexpected maneuvers, said department spokesman Dan Le Bouthillier. The department’s defense scientist will direct the satellite operations with Royal Canadian Air Force support through 3 Canadian Space Division. Canadian military members will be involved in Redwing satellite orbital changes to develop proficiency in safe space operations, such as altitude station keeping, and space debris avoidance, Le Bouthillier added. Magellan’s Winnipeg facility has already produced the platforms, or buses, for a variety of spacecraft including CASSIOPE and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission satellite.
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat said March 9 it has signed a multi-million euro deal to provide more satellite capacity to Intelsat, including from OneWeb’s low Earth orbit (LEO) network the French operator is acquiring. The seven-year agreement will help Intelsat enhance connectivity services it already provides over Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific with its own fleet of satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). The contract expands a deal Eutelsat reached in 2019 with Gogo Commercial Aviation, the inflight connectivity provider Intelsat later acquired, for capacity on Eutelsat 10B that SpaceX launched in November. Eutelsat 10B is slated to enter service from GEO by the middle of 2023. Eutelsat said the expanded agreement includes capacity from two more GEO satellites: Eutelsat 172B launched in 2017 and Flexsat that was recently ordered for services starting in 2026. The agreement also includes LEO capacity that would enable Intelsat to provide integrated multi-orbit connectivity services “in the air, at sea, or on the ground,” Eutelsat and OneWeb executives said in a joint statement. OneWeb’s network is currently only available in a handful of countries across the upper part of the northern hemisphere. The British broadband operator expects to provide global commercial services by early next year following a launch of satellites slated for later this month out of India. Financial details about the capacity agreement were not disclosed. Intelsat’s nimble growth strategy In August, Intelsat announced a global distribution deal with OneWeb for providing multi-orbit connectivity services to airlines. The GEO operator’s third-party capacity deals are part of a cost-saving growth strategy following its emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early last year. This strategy also saw Intelsat order a satellite from 3D printing specialist Swissto12 in November that is one-tenth the size of a conventional GEO communications spacecraft. For Eutelsat, their agreement underlines the value of its proposed combination with OneWeb and its push out of a declining broadcast business into high-growth connectivity markets. Eutelsat recently said it expects to complete its OneWeb acquisition in the second or third quarter of this year, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.
SAN FRANCISCO – Space companies and investors are reacting to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a financial institution many relied on for investment, loans and traditional banking services. Rocket Lab reported an aggregate balance with Silicon Valley Bank “of approximately $38 million, which is approximately 7.9 percent of the Company’s total cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities as of December 31, 2022,” in a March 10 report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. AstraSpace said in March 13 Securities and Exchange Commission filing that 15 percent of its cash was held at Silicon Valley Bank, along with letters of credit. Astra added that it is “working expeditiously to open deposit accounts with new banking partners to diversify its banking relationships.” In addition to providing installment loans and revolving credit lines for space companies and other high-tech firms, Silicon Valley Bank was known for its work with early-stage startups. “They know the typical ins and outs of those companies compared to traditional banks, who may not understand the situations of companies starting out,” said a space industry consultant who asked not to be identified. BlackSky, Planet, Redwire and Space Perspective also received investment or borrowed money from Silicon Valley Bank. Astra, Planet, Redwire and Rocket Lab repaid those loans when they went public through mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, according to annual 10-K SEC reports. Still, many space companies have deposited revenue and investment in Silicon Valley Bank accounts for years. Some company CEOs are telling investors they are confident the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will ensure their access to funds beyond the $250,000 limit. Privately, some entrepreneurs expressed less confidence. “It’s a very serious situation,” said a space sector entrepreneur who asked not to be identified. “Our balance is suddenly only $450. There has been no communication from SVB even after the event became known. Our primary SVB liaison, who has been very attentive in the past, is unreachable by any means. It’s appalling.” The company in question maintained a balance below the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit, but “I don’t know when or how I will really regain access or how any of the [Know Your Client] regulatory processes will be coordinated, which is critical for international aerospace work,” the entrepreneur said by email. “I can only imagine the state of mind for startups that had their equity fundraising or revenue monies in SVB. That’s likely well over the outdated $250,000 FDIC limit. How will they even make payroll this week, much less, carry-on operations?” Overall, Silicon Valley Bank’s forced closure by the regulators won’t “affect the space ecosystem in the long run but it could heavily affect some startups’ cash flow in the near terms as they struggle to get their assets out,” Negar Feher, former Momentus Space vice president of business development, said by email. The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation announced the closure March 10 of Silicon Valley Bank and the appointment of the FDIC as receiver. All account holders “will have full access to their insured deposits no later than Monday morning, March 13, 2023,” according to the announcement.
The U.S. Space Force is allocating three launch complexes at Cape Canaveral, including one used for several NASA Mercury missions six decades ago, to four small launch vehicle startups as the service tries to keep up with growing launch demand. Space Launch Delta 45, which operates the Eastern Range, announced late March 7 it assigned three sites at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to four startups, only one of which has attempted an orbital launch so far. Space Launch Complex 15, which was used for Titan 1 and 2 launches in the 1960s, will go to ABL Space Systems, which made its first, unsuccessful orbital launch attempt in January from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The company said in a tweet that it will temporarily conduct launches of its RS1 rocket from SLC-46, a pad that has been used by several vehicles, including Astra’s Rocket 3.3, on a short-term basis while it renovates SLC-15. The Space Force assigned SLC-14 to Stoke Space, a company that is developing a fully reusable launch vehicle. The launch complex was used for Atlas launches from 1957 through 1966, and was the site where John Glenn launched on Mercury-Atlas 6 in February 1962, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. Three subsequent Mercury missions also launched from the pad. “Needless to say, this is incredibly humbling,” Andy Lapsa, chief executive of Stoke Space, said . “We will work tirelessly to make his legacy, our country, and our world proud.” SLC-13, the Space Force announced, would go to two small launch vehicle developers, Phantom Space and Vaya Space (formerly known as Rocket Crafters.) Both companies are working on small launch vehicles. The assignment of SLC-13 raised questions because that facility, used for Atlas launches from the late 1950s through the late 1970s, is now operated by SpaceX. That company built two landing pads there, called Landing Zones 1 and 2, for landings of Falcon boosters. That included a Falcon 9 launch of OneWeb satellites March 9 . A spokesperson for Space Launch Delta 45 referred questions March 10 about SpaceX’s continued use of the launch complex to the company. SpaceX did not respond to questions March 8 about its future use of SLC-13; the company rarely responds to media inquiries. None of the four companies have disclosed details about what infrastructure they plan to build at the launch sites and when they expect to start using them. ABL Space Systems, for example, has minimized the ground equipment it needs for its RS1 rocket, designing it to fit into shipping containers for transportability. Space Launch Delta 45 said it made the assignments through an initiative called the Launch Pad Allocation Strategy, which it said is designed for “maximizing opportunities” for commercial launch providers at the Cape and for increasing the launch capacity of the Eastern Range. The growing pace of activity at the Eastern Range, which includes Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and neighboring NASA Kennedy Space Center, has put a strain on infrastructure, including available launch pads. “Today, every single pad we have on the Cape is occupied by somebody or multiple somebodies,” said Col. James Horne, deputy director of operations for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, during a panel at the SpaceCom conference in Orlando Feb. 22. “There’s massive congestion, tons of construction going on.” Asked during the panel if the Space Force was looking at opening up historic pads, like SLC-14, for new users, Horne said it was, but he did not elaborate on that effort. A Space Force spokesperson said the four companies selected for the pads were “already accepted programs” on the Eastern Range, having been reviewed for safety considerations as well as financial and technological capabilities. The service also issued a request for information last September to identify additional potential users, but that effort did not find any eligible companies. Space Launch Delta 45 said it may consider future rounds of the Launch Pad Allocation Strategy that could include support for larger launch vehicles “after further operational analysis.”
In-space transportation company Momentus is gearing up for a key test of one orbital transfer vehicle as it ships another for launch next month. In a March 7 earnings call, John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said the company’s Vigoride-5 tug, launched in January, was in good condition as it went through a “deliberate commissioning process” in orbit. The tug carries a single smallsat for Singapore-based Qosmosys as well as a hosted payload from Caltech to test technologies for space-based solar power. That testing has gone better than for Momentus’s first vehicle, Vigoride-3. That spacecraft experienced communications problems and a solar array that failed to deploy after its May 2022 launch, but was able to deploy most of the satellites it carried . “Vigoride-5 remains in good health, and the vehicle’s power and thermal systems continue to be within nominal ranges,” Rood said. The next major milestone is to test the spacecraft’s propulsion system, which uses microwaves to heat liquid water into stream to generate thrust. Tests of the microwave electrothermal thruster system will begin in the “coming weeks,” he said, but did not give a more specific schedule. Even as on-orbit tests of Vigoride-5 continue, Momentus completed work on its next tug, Vigoride-6. The company announced March 8 that it shipped the tug to Vandenberg Space Force Base for integration on the SpaceX Transporter-7 dedicated rideshare mission, scheduled for launch in April. Vigoride-6 will deploy two cubesats for NASA’s Low-Latitude Ionosphere/Thermosphere Enhancements in Density (LLITED) mission to study conditions in the upper atmosphere, as well as payloads for several commercial and academic customers. The tug will also test a new solar array system called Tape Spring Solar Array (TASSA) that Vigoride developed with the goal of reducing costs and production times. Rood reported production of Vigoride-6 went more smoothly than its predecessors, with 45% fewer non-conformances on the new tug versus Vigoride-5 that took less time to resolve. “All of this gives us increased confidence in the reliability” of Vigoride, he said. “We expect to see continued productivity gains during the production of our next vehicle, Vigoride-7.” Vigoride-7 is scheduled to launch in October on the Transporter-9 mission. In addition to customer payloads, Momentus plans to test rendezvous and proximity operations technology on that mission, which the company says will support the ability of future vehicles to refuel and be reused. The company is hoping that the success of those Vigoride tugs will drum up more business. “As we generate more flight heritage and as we get further into our development cycle, we’re seeing growing interest from commercial customers as well as government customers,” Rood said. He noted “significant opportunities” from NASA and the Defense Department, including the Space Development Agency and DARPA. However, the company has yet to secure contracts with them beyond the LLITED cubesats flying on Vigoride-6. “It’s a long-cycle business with the government, so we don’t have any contracts to announce today,” he said. “We’re optimistic about the future.” The company reported a backlog of $33 million in both firm contracts and options as of the end of 2022, down from $43 million as of the end of October 2022. Dennis Mahoney, interim chief financial officer, said the decrease reflected options for future missions that had expired, but did not disclose how much of the current backlog represented firm contracts versus options. Momentus reported only $299,000 in revenue in 2022, with a net loss of $91.3 million. The company had $61.1 million of cash on hand as of the end of 2022. Mahoney said the company had “sufficient liquidity” to meet its needs for the next 12 months, noting that the monthly cash burn rate declined over the course of 2022. Momentus announced Feb. 23 it raised $10 million from an unnamed institutional investor. That money went to make the final payment to its Russian co-founders, Mikhail Kokorich and Lev Khasis, as part of a share divestment agreement announced in 2021 to resolve national security concerns about the company. The company announced the same day it settled a class-action lawsuit filed regarding the company’s merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Momentus public. Momentus will pay $8.5 million to settle the suit, of which at least $4 million will come from insurance. “We’re very pleased to have that behind us,” Rood said of the lawsuit on the earnings call.
Chinese research institutes are working to construct a quantum communications network using satellites in low and medium-to-high Earth orbits. Pan Jianwei, a scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and a member of the member of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), made the comments in an interview with media March 4 on the sidelines of China’s annual political sessions in Beijing. “We are cooperating with the National Space Science Center to develop a medium-to-high Earth orbit satellite. In the future, the combination of high orbit satellites and low Earth orbit satellites will build a wide-area quantum communication network,” Pan said, according to Yicai Global. The network would use elements of quantum mechanics for encryption and secure transmission of information. The plan builds on breakthroughs made by China’s 2016 Quantum Science Satellite, also known as Mozi, or Micius. The mission, led by Pan, carried out experiments in quantum key distribution (QKD), quantum entanglement distribution and quantum teleportation. Reports of Pan’s comments did not provide further details of the planned network, but earlier publications provide insight. A first step will see three or five small satellites focused on QKD—generating entangled particles for use as quantum keys—with masses under 100 kilograms. These will be sent into sun-synchronous orbits (SSO) at altitudes of 800 kilometers, according to a 2022 paper authored by Pan and others at CAS and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). LEO satellites would provide links between cities, while satellites in higher orbits would allow intercontinental quantum communication. CAS, USTC and others collaborated on the Jinan-1 satellite launched in 2022 on a Lijian-1 rocket, operated by a launch spinoff from CAS. The satellite is the apparent first test QKD satellite for the LEO network and demonstrated a miniaturization of key technologies. The initial higher orbit satellite, earlier referred to as the “MEO-to-GEO satellite”, will allow for longer duration tests, as satellites in LEO or SSO pass overhead in a matter of minutes. It will carry a 600 mm diameter telescope for photon transmission. The higher orbit satellites will allow the creation of a global, all-day quantum communication network. China has also been building compact ground stations for the network. This has so far allowed demonstrations of quantum communications between the Mozi satellite and the cities of Beijing, Jinan, Weihai, Lijiang and Mohe. China in recent years included quantum communications and quantum computing in a list of technological megaprojects for breakthroughs by 2030 and has been noted as a strategic emerging industry. The European Space Agency is also looking to develop a quantum communications network, while governments including the U.S. and United Kingdom are also collaborating in this area.The 2016 Mozi mission was developed by CAS and its NSSC institute as part of a first round of Chinese space science missions. Second and third rounds of missions are now being developed and considered by CAS.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX deployed 40 more satellites for OneWeb March 9 in its third and final dedicated mission for the British broadband operator, which is now just one launch away from having enough spacecraft to provide global services. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the satellites lifted off at 2:13 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. OneWeb said it has made contact with each satellite after all of them had successfully separated from the rocket in low Earth orbit (LEO) about 90 minutes after lift-off. The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage successfully returned to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s nearby Landing Zone 1. SpaceX has previously used the booster for 12 other missions, including seven for Starlink, its own LEO broadband constellation. OneWeb’s latest launch will give the company 582 of the 588 satellites it needs in LEO to provide global coverage once the 40 new satellites reach final orbital destinations over the coming months via onboard propulsion. After launching initial commercial services limited to the upper parts of the northern hemisphere in 2021, the operator’s connectivity network is still only available to enterprise and government customers in Alaska, Canada, the United Kingdom, Greenland and the wider Arctic area. Satellites launched late last year for expanding services into the southern hemisphere, and densifying coverage elsewhere, have yet to reach their final orbital destinations. An additional 36 satellites are due to launch this month from India on a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 3 rocket operated by New Space India Limited (NSIL), the commercial arm of India’s space agency. That launch stands to leave OneWeb with 618 satellites in LEO, and the 30 it does not need for global coverage would serve as in-orbit spares. The operator is authorized to deploy 648 satellites in total for this constellation, and SpaceX is also due to launch an undefined number of spare OneWeb satellites on a Falcon 9 shared with other operators by late summer. Dedicated Falcon 9 rockets have been used to launch two other batches of 40 satellites for OneWeb, one in December and another in January . NSIL deployed 36 satellites for OneWeb in October from India with a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 3 rocket, or LVM3, in its first and so far only mission for the company. OneWeb turned to SpaceX and NSIL last year after scrapping its Soyuz launch contract with Arianespace following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The operator had once hoped to complete its constellation by the end of 2022 but now expects global coverage to be fully operational by January 2024. OneWeb’s latest successful launch also provides a boost for Eutelsat, the French geostationary satellite operator seeking regulatory permission to buy the company to fuel its multi-orbit growth strategy. 
The Biden administration on March 9 unveiled its proposed spending plan for fiscal year 2024 that includes $842 billion for the Defense Department — an increase of $26 billion or 3.2 percent above what Congress enacted in 2023. The White House released only a summary of the budget proposal, with no details on what funding is being allocated to military space programs. More specifics will be released March 13. A running theme in the summary document is that increased defense spending is needed to compete with China. The White House said the 2024 budget “increases space resilience,” a top priority of Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. In a speech March 7 at the Air Warfare Symposium in Colorado, Kendall said the Air Force and Space Force in the 2024 budget continue to make investments in next-generation systems to counter China. The White House in the budget summary said space is “vital to U.S. national security and integral to modern warfare.” The 2024 budget “maintains America’s advantage by improving the resilience of U.S. space architectures, such as in space sensing and communications, to bolster deterrence and increase survivability during hostilities,” said the document. “The budget prioritizes China as America’s pacing challenge in line with the 2022 National Defense Strategy,” the White House said. The proposal “supports investments to accelerate critical weapons and munitions production lines; develop capabilities like long-range strike, undersea, hypersonic, and autonomous systems; and increase resiliency of our space architectures.” Analysts predict military space funding in 2024 will continue an upward trend seen in recent years.
SpaceX’s decision to limit Ukrainian troops’ use of the company’s satellite internet is a cautionary tale for the U.S. military as it grows its reliance on commercial services, the head of U.S. Space Command Gen. James Dickinson told lawmakers March 9. The issue was raised by Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He questioned SpaceX’s actions to prevent Ukraine’s military from using the company’s Starlink service to control drones in the war against Russia. The success of Starlink in providing internet services in Ukraine “demonstrates how commercial space capabilities can play a significant role in our modern high intensity conflicts,” said Dickinson. However, SpaceX’s decision to curtail services highlights the “importance of shared understanding between commercial service providers and their customers and users,” he said. There has to be clear guidelines laid out upfront when the military uses commercial services during war, Dickinson said. This applies to any type of service, he said, not just those from the space industry. SpaceX objected to ‘weaponization’ SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell said last month that the company did not intend for Starlink to be “weaponized.” SpaceX has provided Starlink services in Ukraine at its own expense and through an agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), not under a Defense Department contract. Kelly said he was “personally disappointed to see discontinuation of full services at such a critical time for Ukraine’s self defense.” He then asked Dickinson what implications this has for U.S. Space Command as it “deepens its partnership with industry and foreign partners.” “How are you approaching the agreements with industry on military use of commercial capabilities?” Kelly asked. “And how are we going to ensure that DoD and our partners will have all the capabilities available throughout the range of military operations?” Dickinson said these questions are being examined under a new commercial space reserve program led by the U.S. Space Force. “They are actually looking at how we make sure during times of conflict that if we’re relying on commercial companies for certain services, that they’ll be available to us.” The initiative, called Commercial Augmentation Space Reserves, is a timely effort that U.S. Space Command supports, he said. “We need that, especially as we leverage the commercial industry to provide additional capabilities to us.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee unanimously approved five space-related bills March 8, including legislation seeking to modernize regulations for satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). They were among 13 bills approved in the communications and technology subcommittee’s markup session, some with amendments. The bills must now be approved by the full committee before they can go to the House floor for a vote. Headlining the markup session were a pair of bills co-sponsored by the top Republican and Democrat on the full House Energy and Commerce committee — the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act and Secure Space Act – which would reform regulations at the Federal Communications Commission. They come as the FCC establishes a dedicated space bureau to handle its increasing work in the industry. Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act (HR 1338) Led by House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy Rodgers (R-Wash.), and co-sponsored by Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), this bill would give the FCC defined deadlines for processing satellite license applications. These deadlines include a one-year limit for the regulator to decide whether to approve applications for new satellites regardless of orbit — although this could be extended under extraordinary circumstances or for national security reviews. The bill touches upon a broad range of other industry issues, including space sustainability and satellite spectrum sharing. “This is the first legislation in decades to update our laws governing how satellites are licensed by the FCC,” Rodgers said. It would require the FCC to “modernize its rules to encourage operators to base their operations in the United States,” she said, “and incentivize operators to be responsible stewards of space and spectrum in a global marketplace.” These changes “will help U.S. companies compete globally and help us stay ahead of our adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party who seek to overtake our lead,” Rodgers said. The Secure Space Act (HR 675) This bill, led by Pallone and co-sponsored by Rodgers, would prohibit the FCC from granting satellite licenses to foreign entities the U.S. deems a threat to national security or domestic supply chains. It builds on the Secure Equipment Act that became law in 2021 to ban the FCC from authorizing communications equipment from entities such as Chinese vendors Huwaei and ZTE. “China has demonstrated it will stop at nothing to surveil Americans with tools like high altitude balloons and TikTok,” Rodgers said. “We must not let them do the same with satellite communications networks.” Rodgers introduced an amendment to ensure the restrictions apply to geostationary satellite systems in addition to those in NGSO, which Pallone approved. Launch Communications Act (HR 682) This bill would streamline the process for accessing certain spectrum for performing commercial spacecraft launches and reentries. There were 57 launches out of Florida last year and 87 are expected in 2023, according to Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.), who co-sponsored the bill. If access to spectrum is not streamlined, “we could see launchers start to stack up and limit the growth that we could have in an amazing field,” he said. The bill was approved after an amendment introduced by co-sponsor Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.) to ensure it applies to both federal and private launch sites. Precision Agriculture Satellite Connectivity Act (HR 1339) The FCC would be compelled to review rule changes that could help promote space-based communications for the agriculture market under this bill . Satellite technology “plays a key role in connecting equipment or sensors in the field,” said co-sponsor Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), and “Earth observation technology can also help farmers image their land” and make decisions that “lower the cost of inputs like fertilizer and water.” Latta, who also chaired the subcommittee, said the bill “is a good step forward” to help farmers increase productivity and produce higher yields while minimizing operating costs. Advanced, Local Emergency Response Telecommunications Parity Act (HR 1353) This bill would facilitate the use of satellites as providers of connectivity for emergency services in areas hit by natural disasters or otherwise lacking wireless communications. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) said the legislation would help more providers of emergency connectivity services partner with terrestrial communications providers to improve access to emergency networks. “It’s critical that we in Congress and the FCC keep up with the pace of these evolving technologies and ensure our constituents have uninhibited access to critical services like 911 and emergency alerts,” she said.
Updated 7:20 p.m. Eastern with Nelson comments. WASHINGTON — The White House is proposing a $27.2 billion budget for NASA in fiscal year 2024 that would include increased funding for Artemis and starting work on a tug to deorbit the International Space Station. The Biden administration’s budget framework , released March 9, proposed increasing NASA’s budget by 7% from the nearly $25.4 billion the agency received in fiscal year 2023, roughly keeping pace with inflation. The document provided only high-level details about the budget, with NASA’s full budget proposal to be released March 13. “This budget request reflects the administration’s confidence in NASA and its faith in the world’s finest workforce,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a brief “State of NASA” speech broadcast March 9 a few hours after the release of the budget. The White House highlighted several aspects of the proposal, including an increase in funding for exploration. The proposal includes $8.1 billion for exploration, an increase of more than half a billion dollars from 2023. The proposal “fully funds the rockets, crew vehicle, lunar landers, space suits, and other systems needed to fly astronauts around the Moon” on Artemis 2, scheduled for late 2024, and later Artemis landing missions. Nelson announced in his speech that the agency would announce the four-person crew of Artemis 2 on April 3. Three of the four will be NASA astronauts and the fourth will be from Canada, part of a previous agreement regarding Canada’s contributions to the lunar Gateway. The budget includes $949 million for Mars Sample Return, the campaign of missions to return samples the Perseverance rover has collected on Mars. NASA projected spending $800 million on Mars Sample Return in 2024 in its 2023 budget proposal. The proposal, the White House document adds, “also supports NASA’s contribution toward U.S. collaboration with the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover mission” but does not specify the amount. ESA sought support from NASA to fly its Rosalind Franklin rover after severing ties with Russia last year, including thrusters for the lander, radioisotope heating units for the rover and launch services. The White House is requesting $2.5 billion for Earth science in the budget, similar to what NASA projected spending in 2024 in its fiscal year 2023 request. That would include support for the next Landsat spacecraft and the Earth System Observatory series of missions. The administration included a new initiative in the budget proposal, seeking $180 million to start work on a deorbit tug for the ISS. “Rather than relying on Russian systems that may not be able to accomplish this task, the Budget provides $180 million to initiate development of a new space tug that may also be useful for other space transportation missions,” it stated. In August 2022, NASA requested information from industry on its concepts for an ISS deorbit tug after previously planning to use Progress spacecraft for a controlled reentry. That tug would dock to the station about a year before reentry, placing the station into an elliptical orbit before performing a final reentry burn. A smaller initiative included in the budget document is $39 million to study orbital debris. “NASA has a key role to play in better understanding the worsening debris environment in orbit around the planet and supporting the development of innovative approaches to help protect satellites and reduce the risk posed by space debris,” the budget document stated. The document provided few other details about the proposal, other than $1.39 billion for space technology and support for aeronautics and STEM education.
Tesat-Spacecom, a Germany-based manufacturer of optical terminals for communications satellites, announced March 9 it is establishing a U.S. subsidiary to support military and commercial programs. Tesat-Spacecom is an independent subsidiary of Airbus Defense & Space. The U.S. subsidiary, named Tesat Government, is organized under Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, and will be able to support classified work, the company said. Tesat plans to start manufacturing optical terminals in Merritt Island, Florida, in late 2023. The company last year revealed plans to expand its footprint in the United States due to growing military demand for laser links. Tesat has several contracts with spacecraft manufacturers building satellites for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency . The Space Development Agency (SDA) is building a mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit to serve as a data transport layer for the U.S. military. Each satellite will have anywhere from three to five laser links so they can talk to other satellites, airplanes, ships and ground stations. SDA is buying satellites from multiple manufacturers and all their satellites have to be interoperable. The agency said it is using optical systems because they provide much higher transmission data rates than traditional radio-frequency links and are harder to intercept. A network of laser-link satellites also reduces the dependence on ground stations and extends coverage to remote areas where ground stations are not available. Tesat Government will deliver “American-made optical communication terminals for the U.S. security-restricted market,” the company’s CEO Thomas Reinartz said in a statement. “In the past years, we have seen a growing demand for optical communication technologies not only from our commercial customers but also from governments,” he said. “In order to meet the U.S. government’s demand and comply with all national security restrictions and classified prospects, we decided to form Tesat Government.”
Japanese lunar exploration company ispace plans to list its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange next month, just before the company attempts its first landing on the moon. Tokyo-based ispace announced March 8 it won approval to list shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, reserved for smaller, higher-risk companies. Shares will start trading on the exchange April 12. According to a filing with the exchange , ispace plans to offer about 24.7 million shares, out of 78.6 million issued, in the initial public offering (IPO). The company will set the price of those shares on April 3. “Through this new listing, ispace seeks to commence dialogues with as many global investors in the stock market as possible and request their participation in this infrastructure construction project,” ispace said in a statement about the listing, referring to its long-term goal of establishing a “unified ecosystem” between the Earth and moon. The listing would take place just before ispace’s first lander, HAKUTO-R Mission 1, attempts a landing on the moon. At a Feb. 27 briefing , company executives said the spacecraft would land at Atlas Crater, located on the edge of Mare Frigoris in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon, around the end of April. The spacecraft is scheduled to enter orbit around the moon in late March. Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, deflected a question at that briefing about the possibility of going public. “We are always looking for multiple ways to raise funds to support our future missions,” he said. “An IPO is one solution for that.” The company has raised nearly $200 million in several private rounds, including a $46 million Series C round in August 2021. In the exchange filing, ispace reported having 93 million yen ($0.7 million) in capital as of March 8. The plan by ispace to go public comes after another lunar lander developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that closed Feb. 13. That raised $55 million from capital provided by an affiliate of the SPAC sponsor and company founders, rather than from proceeds of the SPAC itself. Shares in Intuitive Machines, trading on the Nasdaq exchange, soared in the first days after the SPAC merger closed. The company’s shares closed Feb. 22 at nearly $82 after trading at one point during the day at $136. It was not clear what drove the sharp increase, as the company made no major announcements during that time. “We are pleased with the interest in Intuitive Machines as we embark on life as a public company and continue to work tirelessly to deliver on our commitments to our customers and shareholders,” company spokesman Josh Marshall said Feb. 17, adding that the company is “focused on execution” after completing the SPAC merger. Intuitive Machines’s stock price has tumbled since that Feb. 22 peak, though. Shares closed March 8 at $10.26, down 18.3% for the day and bringing the price back to just below where it was Feb. 13.
Relativity Space will wait at least three days before making its next attempt to launch its Terran 1 rocket after propellant temperature issues scrubbed its first launch attempt March 8. Relativity was counting down to the inaugural launch of its Terran 1 rocket from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 16 when an automated abort was triggered at T-70 seconds at about 2:45 p.m. Eastern. The three-hour launch window opened at 1 p.m. Eastern but the company had pushed back the launch to provide more time to get the rocket’s propellants at the right temperatures. The abort, the company said, was triggered by liquid oxygen temperatures in the rocket’s upper stage that were out of limits. The company reset for another launch attempt at 3:45 p.m. Eastern, but scrubbed the launch for the day more than 20 minutes before the scheduled liftoff. The company said later it scrubbed the launch “due to exceeding launch commit criteria limits for propellant thermal conditions on stage 2.” It later rescheduled the launch for March 11, again in a three-hour window that opens at 1 p.m. Eastern. The three-day slip, the company explained, is because of time needed to prepare the rocket’s fuel, methane. “When using liquid natural gas, the methane needs time to get to the right concentration. This is why our next attempt will be a few days from now,” the company tweeted . If successful, Terran 1 would be the first rocket to reach orbit that uses methane fuel. A privately developed Chinese rocket that uses methane fuel, Landspace’s Zhuque-2, launched in December but failed to reach orbit . Both SpaceX’s Starship and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur use methane fuel and are slated to make their first orbital launch attempts within the next two months. Relativity, though, has tempered expectations about the first Terran 1 launch. The mission, called “Good Luck, Have Fun,” is not carrying any satellite payloads. Instead, it will place into a roughly 200-kilometer orbit the upper stage, which contains inside its nose cone a metal ring that was the first 3D-printed component produced by the company. Tim Ellis, co-founder and chief executive of Relativity, said in a series of tweets March 7 that a key aspect of the flight will be to demonstrate that the rocket, which is 85% by mass made of 3D-printed components, can handle the rigors of launch. That includes surviving “Max-Q”, or maximum dynamic pressure, on the rocket a little more than a minute after liftoff. “But the key inflection in my mind is surpassing Max-Q, about 80 seconds into flight,” he wrote. “This will essentially prove the viability of using additive manufacturing tech to produce products that fly.” The company has tested the ability of Terran 1 to survive those conditions in ground testing, he noted, “but in flight of course is the most visceral proof.” Terran 1, capable of placing about 1,250 kilograms into orbit, is the latest entry into the small launch vehicle market, but it is also a precursor for the Terran R, a much larger vehicle intended to be fully reusable, unlike the expendable Terran 1. “Medium-heavy lift is clearly where the biggest market opportunity is for the remaining decade, with a massive launch shortage in this payload class underway,” Ellis wrote. He suggested the company might shift immediately to the Terran R should Terran 1’s first launch fail, depending on the cause of the failure and the input Relativity gets from its customers. “Do they want us to continue down the path of producing more Terran 1’s to solve for those issues on this vehicle? Or, would like us to solve the remaining rocket science problems on the vehicle they are actually most interested in, Terran R?”
The fast growth of China’s commercial space industry is helping the country progress toward its goal of edging out the United States in space, the U.S. intelligence community said in a report released March 8 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The congressionally mandated “ Annual Threat Assessment ” report highlights China’s space capabilities as one element of the country’s larger quest for global dominance. China is “steadily progressing toward its goal of becoming a world-class space leader,” the report said, and reiterates what previous intelligence assessments have said about China seeking to match or surpass the United States in space by 2045. Space activities are designed to advance China’s global standing and “strengthen its attempts to erode U.S. influence across military, technological, economic and diplomatic spheres,” the report said. China’s commercial space sector, which includes many state-owned companies, “is growing quickly and is on pace to become a major global competitor by 2030,” said the intelligence assessment. On the military side, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is taking a page from the U.S. military playbook and adding space services — such as satellite reconnaissance and positioning, navigation, and timing — and satellite communications into its weapons and command-and-control systems, said the report. The goal is to “erode the U.S. military’s information advantage.” In preparation for future military campaigns, the country is developing both destructive and nondestructive ground- and space-based weapons to target U.S. satellites, said the intelligence report. China also has conducted orbital technology demonstrations. The U.S. intelligence community doesn’t see those as actual weapons tests but “they prove China’s ability to operate future space-based counterspace weapons.” On Russia, U.S. analysts said it remains a “key space competitor,” but it may have difficulty achieving long-term space goals because of the effects of international sanctions and export controls following the invasion of Ukraine, domestic space-sector problems, and increasingly strained competition for program resources within Russia. 
In the current era of great power competition, the main goals of the U.S. Defense Department are to modernize military forces and forge alliances with partners in order to deter China. In the space domain, the plan is to be in a state of “perpetual competition,” said Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force. Saltzman, who assumed command of the Space Force in November, spoke about the security challenges in the space domain March 7 at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. Saltzman said China is developing “remarkable capabilities on orbit,” and in response, the U.S. has to figure out how to protect its space assets while also deterring rivals from launching attacks that could make outer space unusable for human activities. “Unlike in other domains, our concept for domain control in space cannot rely on overwhelming destructive force,” said Saltzman. The likely scenario will be “perpetual competition” in order to maintain stability, he said, “neither driving our adversaries towards disrupting the space domain nor towards desperation.” Because space is a global domain, victory is not defined in traditional terms. “If you do this right, you never fight,” he said. It’s a balancing act, Saltzman said, as the U.S. wants “space superiority when necessary while also maintaining the safety, stability and long-term sustainability of the space domain.” Resilience needed A centerpiece of the U.S. strategy is to deter China from taking aim at the Pentagon’s most valuable geostationary satellites located in fixed positions 22,000 miles above the Earth’s equator. DoD relies on these satellites for critical communications and early warning of missile launches. Due to their fixed location, “that predictability and lack of relative motion to the ground makes them particularly vulnerable to direct attack,” Saltzman said. To offset that weakness, the Space Force plans to augment geostationary systems with distributed networks of satellites in different orbits. What that says to adversaries is “listen, even if you could attack that one, why would you want to escalate that way when there’s so many other capabilities?” That is what resilience in space means, he added. “If you complicate targeting, you get resiliency, you raise the threshold for attack, which equates to deterrence.” Over the next several years, the Space Force will diversify and add networks of satellites in low and medium orbits. “So it’s the idea of going to smaller satellites and proliferating our missions across multiple larger constellations that really gives us a more resilient architecture,” said Saltzman. Space Command: ‘We’re under threat’ China’s and Russia’s advances in space lasers, on-orbit proximity sensors and other technologies are worrisome for the United States, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said March 6 at the Air Warfare Symposium. “We’re under threat in the space domain,” said Shaw. “If I were on the General Staff of Russia, or if I was serving in the PLA [China’s People’s Liberation Army] I would be advising the leadership to go after the space capabilities of the United States.” The U.S. relies on satellites “to project power across the planet and they’re not all that well defended. So we should not be surprised that we’re under threat,” Shaw said. “We have to completely rethink how we do our space architectures,” he said. “We’re probably gonna have to be more nimble.” A shift to smaller and cheaper “commoditized” satellites is one way to do that “so we’re always replenishing those platforms on a regular basis,” said Shaw. Another option is to make geostationary satellites refuelable so the military can move them if necessary and not have to worry about depleting their limited fuel supply. China is watching The U.S. military is likely to be more successful at deterring China by integrating its air, ground, sea and space systems, said Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific. The unit was established in November under U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, a large combatant command based in Hawaii and responsible for operations in the Asia-Pacific region. “No one synchronizes across all domains better than the United States,” Mastalir said March 8 at the Air Warfare Symposium. “We continue to demonstrate that every day in the Indo Pacific and the PRC sees this on a daily basis,” he said. “That is an incredible deterrent.” China has put up a lot of satellites just within the last five to six years, he said. “There’s a lot of capability on orbit.” Most of China’s newer constellations are surveillance systems “designed to find, track and target U.S. forces and allied forces,” he said. For the United States, “just having the assets isn’t enough,” Mastalir said. “You really have to string that all together in order to present a credible combat capability.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Starfish Space has raised $14 million for its planned satellite life extension and debris removal service in a funding round led by insurance giant Munich Re’s venture capital arm, the startup announced March 8. The Kent, Washington-based startup founded by former Blue Origin and NASA engineers in 2019 has now raised more than $21 million to develop Otter, an all-electric servicing spacecraft slightly bigger than a mini-fridge. This summer, SpaceX plans to launch a microwave-sized demonstrator for Starfish that will attempt to dock with another test spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO). After getting dropped off at an initial altitude by an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) from small rocket developer Launcher, Starfish’s Otter Pup demonstrator will attempt to rejoin the space tug using electric propulsion and an electrostatic capture mechanism. Launcher’s first and latest OTV failed shortly after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket in January. Starfish flight tested the rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking software it will use for this mission in 2021 during Orbit Fab’s spacecraft LEO refueling demo . Starfish sees growing demand for life extension services in the geostationary orbit (GEO) market, which Northrop Grumman is also targeting with much larger spacecraft currently attached to two Intelsat satellites. Once docked, the Otter would use its onboard propulsion to extend the lifetime of a GEO satellite by helping to keep it in its orbital slot for several additional years. GEO satellites are typically designed to have enough fuel to operate for 15 years. The startup’s planned LEO debris removal service would work in a similar fashion, Starfish strategy and operations lead Ari Juster told SpaceNews via email. “Once docked, instead of maintaining the satellite in its station, the Otter pulls the satellite down close enough to the Earth where it will quickly de-orbit from there,” Juster said. “Once the desired altitude is reached, the Otter detaches from the client satellite and boosts itself back up to LEO to conduct further servicing missions. A single Otter is designed to accomplish multiple LEO deorbit missions over its lifetime.” He said the Otter as a platform is being designed to perform both missions with limited modifications, although each Otter vehicle would focus on serving customers in either GEO or LEO. Juster said funds from the Series A round help accelerate work on its first commercial Otter vehicles, whereas earlier funds primarily supported the Otter Pup mission and developing core software and hardware technologies. “Broadly speaking, we expect the first launch of a commercial Otter could take place within the next couple of years in line with significant customer demand we are receiving,” he said. The venture plans to add 10-15 employees to its current team of 26 full-time staff by the end of the year across a range of software, hardware, and business development disciplines. Munich Re invested in the newly closed Series A round via Munich Re Ventures, its venture capital arm, which has also invested in Orbit Fab. Last year, Munich Re Ventures also led a 5.5 million euro ($5.8 million) funding round for Okapi, which is developing space traffic management software to help satellite operators reduce maneuvers to save fuel . Munich Re is one of the world’s biggest insurance providers, and covers assets that include satellites facing a growing threat of colliding with debris in crowded orbits. “In-orbit servicing such as active debris removal and life extension of satellites will play a key role in enabling a sustainable infrastructure in space,” Stephanie Deml, head of aviation and space at Munich Re, said in a recent blog post . “We are keen to contribute to the success of these missions by developing bespoke risk transfer solutions.” Toyota Ventures, the venture capital arm of Japanese automaker Toyota, also participated in Starfish’s Series A, along with existing investors PSL Ventures, NFX, and MaC VC. Despite challenging macroeconomic conditions, startups with solutions for removing orbital debris have been a bright spot for early-stage space investments this year. Japan’s Astroscale announced Feb. 27 it had raised $76 million in a Series G funding round, bringing the total raised to date for its in-orbit servicing plans to more than $376 million. A month earlier, Swiss debris-removal startup ClearSpace said it had raised about $29 million in a Series A round, bringing its total to around $140 million.
Shield Capital, a venture firm that invests in defense and space startups, announced that retired U.S. Air Force general David Goldfein has joined its national security advisory board. Goldfein, who was chief of staff of the Air Force from 2016 to 2020, will advise investors and entrepreneurs trying to match commercial technologies with national security needs. San Francisco-based Shield Capital, led by former Pentagon and Defense Innovation Unit officials, has a portfolio of companies focused on artificial intelligence, autonomy, cybersecurity and space. Its space ventures include remote sensing companies HawkEye 360 and Albedo . “As we are seeing in the Ukraine conflict, commercial technology is becoming even more important in advancing national security. Our military can leverage this technology to modernize capabilities and save taxpayer dollars,” said Shield Capital partner Michael Brown. Defense and space contractor L3Harris is a strategic investor in Shield Capital. Raj Shah, managing partner at Shield Capital, said Goldfein brings expertise in “integrating new capabilities across information dominance, cyber security and space operations in the Department of Defense, and will provide critical insights to Shield companies.” Goldfein also serves as a senior advisor to the private equity firm Blackstone . In a statement, he said Shield Capital is “funding the innovation that will matter to tomorrow’s fight.” On what advice he would give to a space startup, Goldfein said he tells entrepreneurs to think about how technology can solve problems. “There were two playbooks industry used with me in my former role as chief of staff of the Air Force,” he said. “Most often, they would get in the door with a retired three- or four-star who brought a business development person with a stack of 20+ slides to show me some new technology they hoped I was interested in.” “This never worked and wasted my time and theirs,” Goldfein said. Others, meanwhile, came in with actual solutions to problems and invested in technology that addressed specific needs, he said. “This worked 100% of the time and often resulted in contracts. The moral of the story? Do your homework and bring real solutions, not just cool tech.”
The International Space Station adjusted its orbit March 6 to avoid a close approach by an imaging satellite operated by Satellogic, the latest evidence of growing congestion in low Earth orbit. NASA said in a March 6 blog post that the Progress MS-22 spacecraft docked to the station fired its thrusters for a little more than six minutes, raising the station’s orbit to move out of the way of what the agency called an Earth observation satellite. According to Roscosmos, the maneuver, lasting 375.8 seconds, changed the station’s velocity by 0.7 meters per second. NASA spokesperson Sandra Jones told SpaceNews March 7 that the spacecraft would have approached within about 2.7 kilometers of the station without the maneuver. About 20 minutes before the scheduled maneuver controllers received a “green update” about the close approach, meaning there was no risk to the station, but decided to proceed with the maneuver since the Progress’s thrusters were already enabled. She did not identify the satellite involved in the close approach to the station other than an “Argentine earth observation satellite launched in 2020.” Other sources said the satellite was ÑuSat-17, also called NewSat-17, one of 10 satellites launched in November 2020 by Satellogic , headquartered in Buenos Aires. A Satellogic spokesperson said late March 7 it received a conjunction data message, or CDM, from the 18 th Space Defense Squadron, the Space Force unit that handles space situational awareness activities, about this close approach. However, the company says it was not contacted by NASA about the conjunction. Jones said that NASA does not generally talk with individual operators about close approaches to the ISS, instead coordinating with U.S. Space Command. “NASA does not communicate with satellite or debris owners regarding maneuvering their objects because NASA’s responsibility is to ensure the International Space Station remains a safe distance away from conjunctions whenever possible.” Satellogic says that it routinely screens the CDMs it receives and, depending on the probability of a collision, “we either proactively maneuver or coordinate with the other satellite operator to minimize the risk.” The company added that the NewSat satellites can maneuver “as long as they have propellant,” but it was not immediately clear if NewSat-17 was able to do so. The orbit of NewSat-17 and the other nine satellites launched in 2020 have been gradually decaying, and are now crossing the orbital altitude of the ISS. That is an increasing concern for ISS operations as it and other Earth observation satellites typically operate in higher sun-synchronous orbits that will decay if not actively deorbited at the end of the missions. The ISS had conducted at least 32 maneuvers to avoid conjunctions with debris as of December 2022, according to data from the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office . That included two maneuvers in June and November 2022 to avoid debris from the November 2021 Russian anti-satellite weapon demonstration that destroyed the Cosmos 1408 satellite. The March 6 maneuver, NASA said, will not affect upcoming spacecraft going to and from the station. A Crew Dragon spacecraft to conclude the Crew-5 mission to the station is scheduled to undock as soon as March 9. A cargo Dragon spacecraft is set to launch to the station no earlier than March 14.
An ongoing review of data from the Artemis 1 mission has turned up no issues that would delay the crewed Artemis 2 mission scheduled for launch late next year. In a March 7 briefing, NASA managers said that analysis of data from the Space Launch System, Orion spacecraft and ground systems had found only minor issues that can be addressed ahead of Artemis 2. The biggest issue, and one not previously disclosed, was with the heat shield on the Orion crew capsule. Howard Hu, Orion program manager at NASA, said that material on the heat shield had ablated differently than what engineers expected from ground tests and computer models. “We had more liberation of the charred material during reentry than we had expected,” he said. Engineers are just beginning detailed analysis of the heat shield to determine why it behaved differently than expected. However, he said the difference in performance was not a safety issue. “We have a significant amount of margin left over” in the form of untouched or “virgin” Avcoat, the ablative material used on the heat shield. “I don’t believe we reached any limits. From a margin perspective, certainly it took more of the Avcoat off than we had expected.” Hu said work is continuing on an issue with the power system on Orion’s service module called a latching current limiter, which opened without being commanded two dozen times during the Artemis 1. Controller closed the limiters without any adverse impact on the spacecraft’s power system. The European Space Agency and Airbus, the prime contractor for the service module, are planning a test at the end of the month to better understand what caused the uncommanded events, such as electromagnetic interference. If those tests don’t find a root cause, he said controllers on the ground, or astronauts inside Orion, can continue to manually close the limiters on future missions. A software update could also address the problem. Ground systems engineers are fixing damage to the mobile launcher from the SLS launch. “There are a few things that did receive more damage than we expected,” said Shawn Quinn, who succeeded Mike Bolger as manager of the Exploration Ground Systems program after the Artemis 1 mission. That damage includes pneumatic lines corroded by residue from the solid rocket boosters; he said a problem with a gaseous nitrogen system delayed the supply of water meant to wash that residue away. The elevators in the mobile launcher tower were also knocked out of commission, but one is now back in service. Some work after the Dec. 11 splashdown, notably the removal of avionics units from the Artemis 1 Orion capsule to be refurbished and reinstalled on the Artemis 2 Orion, took place ahead of schedule. That is unlikely to change the planned launch of Artemis 2, currently set for late November 2024. “I don’t think it helps us move it in,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said of the Artemis 2 schedule. “We will certainly look for ways we can build margin in our schedule. That’s how we look at it.” That schedule anticipates shipping the SLS core stage from the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to the Kennedy Space Center in June or July, said John Honeycutt, NASA SLS program manager, a date “well in advance” of when it’s needed. Other SLS components are either at KSC or ready to be shipped when needed. Hu said that he anticipates mating the Orion crew module with the service module in late June. By the first quarter of 2024 workers will start stacking the combined SLS/Orion vehicle, Quinn said, to support a late 2024 launch. Free said NASA still expects to have the next mission, Artemis 3, launch about a year after Artemis 2, but noted it will depend on the progress of other elements, namely SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander and new spacesuits under development by Axiom Space. “Our plan has always been 12 months, but there are significant developments that have to occur,” he said. “That’s just the nature of trying to land people on the moon.”
Rocket Lab’s chief executive Peter Beck is candid about his company’s role in reshaping the U.S. government’s approach to buying launch services. “We’re very happy with the outcome,” Beck says of the recent draft solicitation for the next round of national security space launch contracts. Unlike the previous National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 procurement, future Phase 3 contracts will allow emerging players to compete head-to-head against incumbents. “That’s what we were certainly promoting to occur,” Beck tells SpaceNews . The Space Systems Command last month released two draft requests for proposals for NSSL Phase 3. The dual-lane approach is intended to allow commercial companies like Rocket Lab and others to compete. Lane 1 is for lower-end launch missions, and Lane 2 is for the most demanding heavy-lift launches that currently are flown by United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Beck says Lane 1 is “the sweet spot” for Rocket Lab’s Neutron, a new medium-size reusable launch vehicle the company plans to start flying in late 2024 and position to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for commercial mega-constellation deployments. The vehicle also was designed with NSSL in mind. At least 30 missions are projected for Lane 1 from fiscal years 2025 to 2034. These would be more “risk tolerant,” the Space Force said, and fly to lower orbits. “We were obviously lobbying for this change and we felt that this would be a good approach,” says Beck. “It’s always good to have your customer be part of the development program informing you of their needs.” Beck expects Rocket Lab will not only have to compete against new players like Relativity Space and Blue Origin, but also against Phase 2 incumbents ULA and SpaceX. The Space Force will allow certified heavy-lift launch vehicles eligible for Lane 2 to also compete for Lane 1 missions. SpaceX conceivably could out-muscle Lane 1 competitors with aggressive pricing but Beck hopes the government will take other factors into account when selecting providers. “Price is important, but I think in the spirit of this whole concept of making sure there’s more than just two providers, I think the government will probably look upon that as a strategic industrial base decision,” Beck says. “If you want to foster and grow a wider industrial base, you may need to make some decisions not based only on price.” No ‘paper rockets’ A key requirement for Lane 1 competitors is to have accomplished a successful mission to orbit, something that Rocket Lab also pushed for. “We were very pleased to see that in there,” Beck says. “We didn’t want to see a contract mechanism where paper rockets could compete.” He notes that some DoD and NASA small-launch contract vehicles allow companies that don’t have actual rockets to submit bids “and there’s no distinction between a paper rocket and a real rocket … You see folks that put proposals together that on paper look very compelling but the rocket doesn’t actually exist.” For years, “there was always a sense of frustration that we have to compete against these unproven paper rockets. So we’re very happy to see that we don’t have to do that in this next NSSL.” Developing a rocket is ‘painful’ Rocket Lab is investing approximately $250 million in the development of Neutron. The Space Force is pitching in $24 million to help develop the upper stage. Beck says first-stage tanks already are being prototyped in undisclosed locations. Development work is taking place at Wallops, Virginia; at NASA’s Stennis Center in Mississippi; in Long Beach, California; in New Zealand and other locations. “Old aerospace would go and build a giant factory, and then start working on the rocket,” he says. “We start working on the rocket and then add the factory as required, hence the reason why we’ve got some tanks being built in some areas and some tanks being built in others.” Rocket Lab meanwhile is “pushing some dirt” on Neutron’s future launch pad at Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, where the company recently started launching its small Electron rocket . Launching from Wallops will allow Neutron to compete for NSSL missions to sun synchronous orbits and mid-inclination, which typically would be launched from Vandenberg, California, he adds. “Lane 1 is pad agnostic, which we’re pleased to see as well.” “Building a new rocket is a very painful exercise,” Beck says. “I wouldn’t have bothered going down that road if we didn’t think we can be competitive against Falcon 9.”
Boeing completed a demonstration of a U.S. military ground system designed to protect satellite communications from jamming attacks, the company announced March 7. In the demonstration of the Protected Tactical Enterprise Service (PTES), Boeing integrated anti-jam software and hardware with the existing military satcom architecture. The company developed the PTES under a $383 million U.S. Air Force contract awarded in 2018. Held at the Joint Satellite Engineering Center at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, the recent demonstration “is a significant step forward,” said Charlotte Gerhart, Space Systems Command’s tactical satcom acquisition delta chief. “The ability to augment the current wideband constellation combined with the potential to introduce resilience will greatly enhance our ability to stay connected in contested environments,” Gerhart said in a statement. Engineers tested PTES over an on-orbit operational commercial satellite, Boeing said. “We were able to do an end-to-end test of all the components and prove operational capabilities for PTES over the air using an on-orbit satellite,” said Troy Dawson, the company’s vice president of government satellite systems. “By augmenting current systems with PTES, which is designed to be forward and backward compatible with government and commercial systems, the U.S. DoD and its allies are able to meet the challenges of an evolving battlefield,” Dawson said. The U.S. Space Force initially plans to deploy the PTES as the ground system for the U.S. government’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) fleet. Boeing is the primary contractor for WGS and has produced 11 satellites to date. Congress in the 2023 budget added funds for a 12th satellite . Boeing said PTES is on track to be fielded in 2024. The company under a separate Space Force contract is developing a jam-resistant satellite communications payload — called the Protected Tactical Satcom Prototype , or PTS-P — expected to launch in 2024 for an on-orbit demonstration. 
TAMPA, Fla. — An antenna verification framework used by geostationary satellite operators has started accepting ground station measurements from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Danish drone venture Quadsat said March 6. Quadsat said the Satellite Operators Minimum Antenna Performance (SOMAP) group, set up a decade ago to provide guidance for antenna makers, has concluded drones are an acceptable way to test new products. The six-year-old company has developed quadcopters that can be integrated with custom radio-frequency payloads it says enable antennas to be tested and calibrated more efficiently outside laboratory conditions. Quadsat’s pseudo-satellites have also been used to test OneWeb’s low Earth orbit network. SOMAP was founded by Intelsat, SES, Inmarsat, AsiaSat, and Eutelsat — which is in the middle of buying OneWeb to create a multi-orbit network. Eutelsat and SES have previously used Quadsat drones to test antennas. In addition to standardizing minimum antenna testing and performance requirements, SOMAP helps manufacturers validate the data they provide operators via product datasheets. Joakim Espeland, Quadsat’s CEO, said being SOMAP-compliant will help the company expand services globally to accelerate the deployment of increasingly complex antennas and reduce their risk of interference. The venture launched a productized version of its verification system in November that enables customers to use the technology without a Quadsat engineer on site.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is making progress addressing institutional problems that led to the delay of an asteroid mission, the lab’s director says. Speaking at a meeting last week of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Laurie Leshin, who took over as director of JPL last May , said she is seeing progress in efforts to implement several recommendations made by an independent panel last fall that examined the delay in the Psyche mission. That independent review, commissioned after software testing issues caused the Psyche mission to miss its launch last year, found what the panel’s chairman, Tom Young, called “broader institutional issues” at JPL linked to a heavy workload of missions and exacerbated by the pandemic. Among those issues was a shift to remote or hybrid work during the pandemic. “The hybrid work environment was a really big one,” Leshin said, noting it affected the “informal safety net” created when staff is on site and can walk around, helping identify issues that may not show up in more formal meetings. “We have changed our policy around remote work,” she said at the Feb. 27 meeting. “I had 5,000 JPLers on lab last Wednesday, so we are back.” Another issue has been hiring and retention. The review noted that JPL had to compete with the growing demand for engineers from aerospace companies, causing a loss of expertise as lab personnel took more lucrative jobs in industry. “Those hiring and retention issues have really subsided,” she said, stating that 41 JPL employees who had left the lab had returned in the last six months. “The grass is maybe not always as green as people would anticipate it is.” JPL is also making progress on several other issues, including with management at the lab and governance by Caltech, which runs JPL for NASA. “All of that leadership, both at the project level, directorate level and at the lab level, have changed now since the major issues were there,” she said. “We have a significantly higher level of engagement.” The lab is still working to handle its workload, which includes two flagship-level missions, Europa Clipper and Mars Sample Return, as well as Psyche and smaller missions. Psyche remains on schedule for a revised October 2023 launch, Leshin said. “It is fully on track for that launch. We are watching it extremely closely.” NASA Headquarters is also closely watching the progress on Psyche. “We had some issues with staff availability at JPL, and JPL and the project, as well as Headquarters, are closely monitoring that situation,” said Joan Salute, associate director of NASA’s planetary science division, during a Feb. 28 meeting of the agency’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee. “Psyche has been fully staffed for a while now, but we keep our ears open in case that changes.” The delay in Psyche’s launch, along with the findings of the independent review, led NASA to delay the launch of a Venus mission being led by JPL, VERITAS, by three years. It also caused NASA to remove Janus, a smallsat asteroid mission that was to launch with Psyche; J anus is looking at alternative missions the spacecraft can perform . Salute said NASA is also closely monitoring work on Europa Clipper, which is scheduled to launch in October 2024. The mission remains on schedule, she said, although it has had to revise its assembly schedule several times based on the timing of instruments to be installed on the spacecraft. Leshin said JPL planned to brief Young’s committee in April to provide an update on the lab’s implementation of its recommendations. That will be followed by a more comprehensive response, which she said could help other parts of the agency and even industry as they try to find a new post-pandemic normal range of operations. “This isn’t just a JPL challenge,” she said. “Everybody’s feeling it.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Japan’s brand-new H3 rocket was destroyed on its March 7 inaugural flight after the vehicle’s second-stage engine failed to ignite. This marked a major setback for the nation’s years-long efforts to develop a more capable and cost-effective alternative to the nation’s current workhorse, H-2A. “A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 a.m. (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission,” the Japanese space agency JAXA announced , confirming the engine failure. It did not share further details. This ill-fated launch came after a series of delays, including one last month in which JAXA aborted the rocket’s first launch attempt moments before liftoff , citing an anomaly in side-mounted solid rocket boosters, which the agency later said stemmed from a problem with the electrical system that supplies power to the main engine . Fixing the problem, the agency initially set the rocket’s second launch attempt for March 6, and it was delayed by one day due to unfavorable weather conditions . The H3 lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center at 10:37 a.m. (JST) as scheduled, or 8:37 p.m. March 6 Eastern, carrying Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 (ALOS-3), a 3-ton optical imaging satellite, built by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. Live footage showed the 63-meter expendable rocket soaring up into the sky with bright yellow flames spewed from two side-mounted solid rocket boosters. The side boosters were jettisoned about two minutes after liftoff and stage separation took place about five minutes after liftoff, according to telemetry. However, the second-stage engine’s ignition was not confirmed and the its velocity was seen declining as the rocket’s altitude reached about 620 kilometers. JAXA then announced that the rocket was ordered to self-destruct. The troubled second stage was powered by a single LE-5B-3 hydrogen-fueled engine, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). It is an improved version of the LE-5B engine flown on the H-2A rocket. MHI remains silent on the accident. Japan’s science minister Keiko Nagaoka said the outcome was “extremely regrettable” and apologized for “failing to meet the expectations of the public and related parties,” according to Kyodo News . The minister said a task force established at her ministry will work with JAXA to determine what caused the failure “as promptly and thoroughly as possible.” H3 was co-developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at a cost of 200 billion yen (about $1.5 billion), as a successor to H-2A, which is due to retire after its 50th launch. H-2A has conducted 46 launches to date . Japan’s journey to develop H3 was long and winding. JAXA began developing H3 in partnership with MHI in 2014. It is meant to replace H-2A that has been operational since August 2001 with a new one with “high flexibility, high reliability, and high cost-performance.” The rocket’s inaugural launch was originally scheduled for March 2021, but was pushed back by around two years due to issues with the newly developed LE-9 first-stage engine . The problems were first uncovered during qualifications testing in May 2020, which included cracked turbine blades in the LE-9’s turbopump assembly and a hole seared into its combustion chamber wall. To fix these, JAXA and MHI had to redesign the engine’s fuel turbopump and apply those same changes to the engine’s oxygen turbopump. There are four variants of the H3 rocket, each in a unique configuration of LE-9 engines and side-mounted solid rocket boosters. All four versions use a second stage is powered a single LE-5B-3 engine. Depending on the version of the rocket, it can place a payload of at least 4 tons into a sun synchronous orbit (SSO), with a maximum capacity of 6.5 tons into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). It is a significant improvement from H-2A’s capacity of 3.8 tons to SSO and 4 tons to GTO . Future upgrades could make it possible for the rocket to deliver cargo to the moon, including the planned lunar Gateway that NASA is pursuing in cooperation with JAXA, the European Space Agency and others.
Updated March 7 with ESA comments. WASHINGTON — The Ukrainian government claims that European investigators were “premature” in concluding that a component from a Ukrainian company was the blame for the failed Vega C launch last December. In a March 6 statement , the State Space Agency of Ukraine took issue with the findings of an investigation published by the European Space Agency three days earlier , arguing that it “casts a shadow over the reputation of the space industry of Ukraine.” That investigation into the failed Dec. 20 launch of the Vega C concluded that a component called a throat insert in the nozzle of the rocket’s second-stage Zefiro-40 motor eroded more than expected. That caused a drop in pressure and loss of thrust in the second stage that doomed the launch. The throat insert, made of carbon-carbon material intended to withstand high temperatures, was produced by Ukrainian company Yuzhnoye. Testing of that material during the investigation found higher porosity not detected in earlier testing. That investigation concluded the Yuzhnoye component could no longer be used on the Zefiro-40, and Avio, the prime contractor for the Vega, announced it would instead use one produced by ArianeGroup. The State Space Agency of Ukraine stated that it “believes that the presented conclusions remain to be premature and may still require further investigation to identify if there could be additional factors that led to the failure of Vega C.” It noted that the components supplied by Yuzhnoye “were completely compliant with the requirements imposed.” At the March 3 briefing about the investigation, officials acknowledged the issue was with how the inserts were tested. “The acceptance criteria were not the right ones,” said Giovanni Colangelo, ESA inspector general and a co-chair of the independent investigation board. The issue was not seen in ground tests of the Zefiro-40, or on Vega C’s inaugural launch last July, because the components exceeded requirements, whereas the throat insert used on the failed launch was “exactly in line with specification,” he said. “Ukrainian specialists who participated in a certain part of investigation which they were granted access to, provided their considerations and suggestions that objectively did not find reflection in the conclusions of the Independent Enquiry Commission,” the Ukrainian space agency stated. It asked ESA and the companies involved “to perform additional analysis and considerations that would take into account other potential factors as well as suggestions diligently proposed by the Ukrainian experts.” It did not elaborate on the suggestions it said those Ukrainian experts offered. It added that the findings of the investigation “unfortunately leaves no grounds for further discussions and casts a shadow over the reputation of the space industry of Ukraine.” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said March 7 that the investigation was not meant to criticize Ukraine. “The conclusions that the committee found are not a means to place blame on Ukraine or on the integrity of the Ukrainian space industry, an industry that has been gaining much deserved clout in recent years,” he tweeted . “More than ever, ESA is determined to pursue its cooperation with Ukraine, and stands with the Ukrainian people.” The space industry, like other sectors of the Ukrainian economy, has suffered significantly since Russia’s invasion more than a year ago. Factories have been targets of attack while supply chains have been disrupted. “Even under conditions of the war the Ukrainian space industry continues to treasure its image of the reliable partner in the world space market and makes every effort to support it with timely delivery of the services and products of the high quality to our international partners,” the State Space Agency of Ukraine stated. In the briefing, Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio, said the problem with the throat insert was not linked to the war, since it was manufactured before the invasion. However, he suggested earlier production challenges linked to the pandemic could have been an issue. The throat insert is not the only Ukrainian component on the Vega C. The rocket’s liquid-propellant AVUM upper stage uses an engine produced by Yuzhmash, and after the invasion European officials said they were working to stockpile the engine and consider alternatives if the supply of the engine was cut off. However, Ranzo said Avio has not had any issues getting the AVUM engines. “During the war period, AVUM deliveries have continued as planned, so for this I can only thank the Ukrainian supplier for their commitment under a very, very difficult situation.” Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of space transportation, said the agency was working to rely less on suppliers outside of the agency’s member states for Vega. “We have significantly increased the European content” on the rocket, finding European suppliers for components such as tanks and thrusters that had come from the United States and Russia. The goal, he said, was to “make a good European product based on European industrial suppliers.”
In the procurement of space launch services, DoD has come a long way from a decade ago when SpaceX sued the Air Force to be allowed to compete for national security launches. The Space Force now plans to open up the next round of launch procurements to a broad range of commercial players. But in other sectors of the space industry, many emerging technologies from startups don’t stand much of a chance to be part of a DoD program due to institutional and cultural barriers, said Jordan Noone, co-founder and general partner of Embedded Ventures, a Los Angeles-based firm that invests in aerospace and defense startups. Amid the infusion of venture capital into the space industry, U.S. defense officials have called for faster adoption of commercial technology in military programs. But that is not likely to happen in the short run due to ingrained barriers in the military procurement system, said Noone, a co-founder of Relativity Space. He formed Embedded Ventures in 2020 with co-founder Jenna Bryant. Those hurdles persist even though DoD and the Department of the Air Force have created several organizations — the Defense Innovation Unit , AFWERX and SpaceWERX — specifically to work with startups These entities mentor startups and fund research and development projects but are disconnected from the Space Systems Command’s procurement offices that manage major programs, Noone said in an interview. DIU, AFWERX and SpaceWERX operate almost completely independently and that makes it difficult for emerging technologies to migrate to so-called programs of record. A key obstacle for startups is that DoD procurements ask for “prescriptive solutions,” meaning that they dictate specific components or subsystems, he said. That prevents many commercial companies from competing because they are optimized for “performance based” contracts that reward the most innovative solutions. Cooperative agreement with Space Force With these concerns in mind, Embedded Ventures in 2021 signed a five-year agreement with SpaceWERX to facilitate dialogue. One of the goals of this partnership is to figure out the “commercial integration” problem, Noone said. If a technology is not in a program of record with a budget line item, “that is an Achilles heel to the entire commercial integration effort where we put years of effort and nothing comes out of it.” The cooperative agreement so far has been helpful to enable these discussions, Noone said. But the reality is that the large program offices “still live behind the firewall that even SpaceWERX has not been able to break through terribly effectively.” Embedded Ventures in January announced its inaugural $100 million fund intended to back companies with dual-use commercial and national security applications. To date the fund has announced investments in Akash Systems Inc., Chromatic 3D Materials, Inversion Space, KittyCAD, Slingshot Aerospace and Skyryse. Companies and investors need more than virtue signaling, he said. Meanwhile, the U.S. national security sector is missing out on opportunities to integrate innovative technologies. To help build its relationship with DoD, Noone hired Mandy Vaughn as operating partner of Embedded Ventures. Vaughn, CEO and founder of the consulting firm GXO Inc., is the former president of Virgin Orbit subsidiary VOX Space and serves on the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Committee. Vaughn told SpaceNews that she is seeing inklings of change in the space procurement enterprise although not as fast as VCs would like. “Part of the problem is just legacy,” she said. “It’s a lot of inertia. And the major systems and programs of record haven’t changed for a really long time.” Program managers are not necessarily incentivized to bring in cutting-edge innovation, he said. Their duty is to “deliver cost, schedule and performance on those programs of record, which are tied to a congressional budget line.” Under the cooperative agreement, said Vaughn, “what we’re trying to do is also educate the program executives” so they better understand the maturity of commercial technologies and figure out ways to insert them into programs as they go along. Many of the top leaders of the Space Force and Space Systems Command are advocating for the adoption of venture-funded technology, she said. They are telling buyers to think less about “programs of record” and more about “mission areas” that could be accomplished with commercial products or services. “But that’s a long process,” Vaughn said. “It’s all still pretty formative.” An example is a new Space Force initiative to use commercial space transportation systems and on-orbit logistics to support military operations. That would include using rockets to deliver cargo, using space tugs to deliver satellites to nontraditional orbits and on-orbit tankers to refuel satellites. “This is awesome,” Vaughn said. “But where’s the budget wedge to help close the story, and the demand signal to help calibrate the investor community?”
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — A NASA program originally intended to fly astronauts on commercial suborbital vehicles has evolved into a broader effort to enable flights by agency personnel and supporting the nascent industry. At the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in March 2020, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced a new effort, later called Suborbital Crew or SubC, to allow NASA astronauts to fly on commercial suborbital vehicles for training or to conduct research. The effort would be analogous to the Commercial Crew program to develop vehicles to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. That would require, he said then, a certification process of some kind for suborbital vehicles, likely a subset of requirements NASA had established for commercial orbital vehicles. NASA followed that up with a request for information on the qualification process in June 2020 , but there had been few updates on SubC since then. At the 2023 edition of the conference last week, the manager of SubC at NASA said the emphasis of the effort had changed. “Our name is a little bit of a misnomer these days,” said Chris Gerace. “One tends to think this is about flying our NASA crew in space. It’s much broader than that.” He said that NASA was no longer focusing on using SubC to fly astronauts for training or research. “The original intent was to provide training opportunities for our astronaut corps. These vehicles don’t really meet those needs,” he said. “The astronaut corps flies in pressure suits. Any kind of training they have they really want to have in pressure suits. They felt these vehicles, which did not incorporate pressure suits, did not fit those needs.” NASA astronauts wear pressure suits during dynamic phases of flight on commercial crew vehicles, including launch, reentry and docking and undocking from the station, but do not wear them for other phases of flight. Neither Blue Origin nor Virgin Galactic, the two companies that operate commercial suborbital vehicles capable of carrying people, require those on board to wear pressure suits. Instead, SubC is focused now on enabling flights by NASA civil servants, such as scientists and engineers conducting research, on suborbital vehicles. Gerace, though, said that SubC has broader goals. “Flying NASA civil servants is really not the primary objective,” he said. “It’s really this industry, human spaceflight, wherever it takes place, and furthering that and ensuring that it is both viable and safe.” He and others argued that NASA allowing its personnel to fly on suborbital vehicles would be an endorsement of their safety that would help companies. “If I was offering a system and had the ability to say that NASA is flying their researchers on our system, that would be a huge marketing benefit,” said Tim Bulk, chief technical officer of Special Aerospace Services, which is supporting the SubC project. He added it could have other benefits, such as with insurers. NASA has also changed the approach of how it will determine commercial suborbital vehicles are safe enough for agency personnel. Rather than a formal certification process, like on commercial crew orbital vehicles, NASA will use a “safety case” approach where companies will explain how their vehicles are safe and the agency confirms that. “It’s up to them to be able to describe why they’re safe, and what we’re doing within SubC, to a large extent, is a validation of that claim,” Gerace said. “NASA brings in its experts and validates that case.” SubC is currently working with both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic on “deep dives” into aspects of those companies’ vehicles: the escape system on Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle and the propulsion system on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. NASA is also supporting the ongoing investigation into the anomaly in Blue Origin’s most recent New Shepard flight last September. Gerace said those deep-dive studies will continue through the end of the year and into early 2024, but did not otherwise indicate when NASA might be prepared to allow its civil servants to fly on commercial suborbital vehicles. He also didn’t rule our eventually flying astronauts on commercial suborbital vehicles. “When they looked at their training needs, they’ve been flying astronauts to space for decades without any suborbital pre-training, so they felt that their training approach was sufficient as is,” he said of the astronaut office. That might change, he suggested, as more civilian researchers get a chance to fly. “The experience of a suborbital flight may be very beneficial prior to going on station for six months. Things may change as we get commercial LEO destinations flying.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Lonestar Data Holdings raised $5 million in seed funding for its plan to establish lunar data centers. Scout Ventures led the round. Participants included Seldor Capital, 2 Future Holding, The Veteran Fund, Irongate Capital, Atypical Ventures and KittyHawk Ventures. “We are thrilled to have completed this successful seed round and are sincerely grateful for the support and vision of our investors,” Lonestar CEO Chris Stott said in a statement. St. Petersburg, Florida-based Lonestar is preparing to send a proof-of-concept data center to the moon later this year on Intuitive Machines’ second lunar mission, IM-2. Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission is scheduled to launch in June on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. IM-2 is slated to follow later this year. NASA is providing funding through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program for Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Draper and Firefly Aerospace to deliver payloads to the moon. CLPS is part of the space agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program. Lonestar’s initial data center, the size of a hardback novel, will be followed by a series of larger data centers offering data storage and edge processing. An early market for Lonestar will be disaster recovery as a service for terrestrial customers, Stott said in December during a New York Space Business Roundtable discussion. “The moon is a fantastic platform for this,” Stott said. “There is no climate, no climate change and access to renewable energy. You can build out amazing equipment up there.” Brad Harrison, Scout Ventures founder and managing partner, said in a statement, “We believe that expanding the world’s economy to encompass the moon, which happens to be the Earth’s most stable satellite, is the next whitespace in the new space economy. Data security and storage will be a necessary part of leading the new generation of lunar exploration.” While Lonestar is not focused on lunar exploration, the startup would not have been able to close its business case without the Artemis and CLPS programs, Stott said. “NASA has created an incredible marketplace for access to earth’s largest satellite,” he added. Lonestar also intends to offer data storage and processing for commercial, government and academic lunar missions.
NASA is proposing extending three existing contracts to transport cargo to and from the International Space Station through the anticipated end of the station in 2030, rather than recompete them. In a March 2 procurement notice , NASA said it intended to issue sole-source extensions of its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contracts with Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space and SpaceX. Those extensions would cover missions from January 2027 through December 2030. NASA has previously announced its intent to end the ISS program and transition to commercial space stations by 2030. NASA did not state in the notice why it was extending the contracts rather than holding a new competition. The notice gives companies proposing to offer alternative cargo vehicles until March 17 to provide NASA with information about their capabilities so that NASA can decide whether to hold an open competition or issue the extensions. NASA awarded those three companies CRS-2 contracts in 2016 to provide cargo delivery as a successor to the original CRS contracts to Orbital Sciences (now part of Northrop) and SpaceX. Each company was guaranteed at least six missions under the contract, with the ability for NASA to order more. In March 2022, NASA announced it had ordered six additional missions each from Northrop and SpaceX , bringing the total ordered to date to 14 from Northrop and 15 from SpaceX. NASA has formally ordered only three Dream Chaser missions from Sierra Space, although the company says it will fly at least seven missions under its CRS-2 contract, the first of which is scheduled for later this year on the second Vulcan Centaur launch. NASA did not disclose the value of those additional missions, stating at the time that pricing information on those contracts is “contractor confidential data.” According to procurement databases, NASA has obligated about $2.2 billion to date to Northrop, $1.1 billion to Sierra Space and $2.35 billion to SpaceX. It’s unclear if any company would be interested in bidding on a new CRS competition, given the short duration of the contract. Boeing offered a version of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle in the original CRS-2 competition, but NASA did not consider it in the final phase of proposal evaluations . Lockheed Martin also submitted a CRS-2 proposal but NASA determined it was not in the “competitive range” for the program and dropped it earlier in the evaluation phase. Both Northrop and SpaceX are preparing for their next cargo missions to the ISS in the coming weeks. At a March 2 briefing after the launch of the Crew-6 commercial crew mission, Dina Contella, NASA ISS operations integration manager, said NASA was planning a mid-March launch of the next cargo Dragon mission, SpX-27, a date that will depend on the departure of the Crew-5 Crew Dragon spacecraft from the station, freeing up the docking port the cargo Dragon will use. She said that will be followed by the departure of the NG-18 Cygnus spacecraft, which has been at the station since November , and the launch of the NG-19 Cygnus tentatively scheduled for April. The NG-19 launch will be the last of the current version of the Antares rocket as Northrop works with Firefly Aerospace on a new version that does away with the Ukrainian-built first stage and Russian engines. While that new Antares vehicle is in development, Northrop plans to launch three Cygnus spacecraft on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
NASA is working with the Russian government to update an agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on the next two SpaceX crew rotation missions to the International Space Station. In comments at a March 2 briefing after the launch of the Crew-6 briefing, Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said negotiations were in progress to update an existing agreement with Roscosmos to add the Crew-7 mission to the station, scheduled to launch this fall. The original seat barter agreement between the agencies, finalized in July 2022 , exchanged one Soyuz seat per year for one Crew Dragon seat. When the agreement was announced, NASA said cosmonauts Anna Kikina and Andrey Fedyaev would fly on Crew-5 and Crew-6 respectively, but did not name assignments for later missions. At a briefing Jan. 25 , Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said discussions about Crew-7 in the fall were in progress. “We’re not finalized yet on the fall, but we’re continuing to work in that direction,” he said. Lueders said after the launch of Crew-6 that an update to that agreement to include Crew-7 was in progress. “We’re working that through the Russian government and then back through, obviously, our side to get final agreement,” she said. “That’s our goal, to get this to be able to support integrated crews.” Such “integrated crews,” where there is one American astronaut on each Soyuz launch and one Russian cosmonaut on each commercial crew launch, is intended to ensure operations of the station should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be unavailable for an extended period. “With the addition of the Crew-7 agreement we would have coverage for Crew-7 and Crew-8,” the following Crew Dragon rotation mission planned for 2024, Lueders said. The agreement does not cover flights by Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle, which has not yet flown astronauts. That vehicle’s Crew Flight Test, which will carry two NASA astronauts to the station, is scheduled for the latter half of April , NASA and Boeing officials said in February. That would allow crew rotation missions, also called post-certification missions (PCMs), to begin in 2024. “At some point, when we have gone through our Crew Flight Test with Boeing and an initial PCM-1 mission, we would be looking at also adding Boeing to an integrated crew agreement,” Lueders said. “We would like to continue that every single crew rotation mission has integrated crew on it.” While the negotiations for adding Crew-7 to the seat barter agreement continue, Roscosmos is preparing for it to be approved. In a March 1 post on its Telegram social media account, it announced that Konstantin Borisov would be part of Crew-7 mission and Alexander Grebenkin would fly on Crew-8. The post added that Crew-8 would launch in the first half of 2024, suggesting Roscosmos expects it to take place before the first Starliner crew rotation mission.
The U.S. Defense Department on March 3 released updated guidelines for safe and responsible space operations. These guidelines were issued Feb. 9 by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a memo that lays out five “tenets of responsible behavior in space.” Austin first released the tenets in July 2021 . The update reflects recommendations from U.S. Space Command and includes specific behaviors for each of the five tenets. U.S. Space Command said the list of behaviors was developed in consultation with the military services, DoD leaders, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of State and the National Security Council staff. The guidelines apply to military operations, not commercial or civil space activities. U.S. military trying to be more transparent DoD released the guidelines to provide “transparency about U.S. military space activities in order to reduce the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation,” U.S. Space Command said. “We are not asking other nations to adopt internal DoD guidance.” DoD’s tenets “should be viewed as complementary to other U.S. government department and agency efforts,” the command said. The U.S. government follows a number of policies and protocols with regard to orbital debris and safety of space operations , including the United States Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices, the United Nations Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines, and most recently a U.S. commitment not to conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said March 2 it is partnering with Ligado Networks to break into the emerging market for providing satellite services directly to consumer smartphones and other devices. While Viasat is best known for satellites that provide broadband in Ka-band spectrum, the operator has used L-band from Ligado’s SkyTerra-1 geostationary satellite since 2014 to deliver less bandwidth-heavy services over North America. These mobile satellite services include connectivity for monitoring and tracking Internet of Things (IoT) devices and other machines requiring external antennas. By also partnering with San Francisco-based venture Skylo on SkyTerra-1, which has developed technology enabling standard consumer devices to connect with geostationary satellites, the operators plan to expand these services across the “consumer smartphone, automotive, and defense” markets. “We are planning to support services in the coming months,” a Viasat spokesperson told SpaceNews . “The SkyTerra MSS satellite is in service and ready to go, as is the Skylo platform. The next step is to integrate the two so that we can conduct testing over the air and to start supporting the service to ensure that the end-to-end solution is optimized and commercially ready to go.” As with the Globalstar-enabled SOS feature Apple launched in November for its latest iPhone, and the capabilities other operators plan to launch in 2023, these services will initially be limited to low-bandwidth applications such as simple two-way messaging. “The partners aim to bring smartphone messaging, wearable connectivity, and IoT services enabling cellular devices to connect seamlessly via satellite rapidly to some of the world’s most attractive markets,” Viasat, Ligado, and Skylo said in a joint news release. “Longer term, we believe space-based networks can help scale these applications by substantially increasing network data rates and capacity; increasing service convenience and availability; and reducing costs,” Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said in an accompanying statement. The companies did not provide more details about the non-binding Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) they have signed with each other. They do not appear to cover the MSAT-2 satellite that Ligado primarily operates as a backup for SkyTerra-1. Ligado also has a third satellite called SkyTerra-2, a replica of SkyTerra-1, which is fully constructed but remains in storage for future commercial services. Dankberg said Feb. 8 that Viasat is considering direct-to-smartphone services using satellites in geostationary and non-geostationary orbits. The U.S.-based operator hopes the partnership with Ligado and Skylo will jumpstart its entry into the direct-to-device market as it seeks to expand its satellite connectivity services globally with its upcoming ViaSat-3 constellation and plans to buy Inmarsat of the United Kingdom. Viasat is working through regulatory approvals to buy Inmarsat, which has a global constellation of geostationary L-band satellites and is considering plans for LEO. British ruggedized handset maker Bullitt recently unveiled Android smartphones that can connect to L-band satellites operated by Inmarsat, and other geostationary operators, in partnership with Skylo and Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. Inmarsat also leases L-band spectrum to Ligado. Inmarsat launched legal action against Ligado Dec. 15 over missed payments under this contract; however, it withdrew the lawsuit just weeks later for reasons it did not disclose. Ligado’s payment issues came after plans to put its L-band spectrum into use terrestrially for a 5G network in the United States were put on hold following concerns it could disrupt GPS systems. Ligado announced Feb. 23 it is pooling its satellite spectrum with Omnispace, a startup developing plans for a global non-geostationary connectivity constellation using S-band spectrum, to target direct-to-smartphone opportunities specifically. 
Europe plans to return the Vega C rocket to flight by the end of the year after concluding an eroded nozzle component caused the failure of its previous launch last December. The European Space Agency announced March 3 it had completed an independent investigation into the failed Dec. 20 launch of the Vega C on the VV21 mission , which experienced a loss of thrust from its Zefiro-40 solid-fuel second stage. The failure resulted in the loss of two Pléiades Neo imaging satellites for Airbus Defence and Space. The investigation concluded that a component in the motor called a throat insert, made of carbon-carbon material designed to withstand high temperatures, suffered “thermo-mechanical over-erosion” during the launch. That insert regulates the flow of exhaust through the nozzle, and as it eroded the chamber pressure dropped, causing thrust to decrease. By 207 seconds after liftoff, or a little more than a minute after the second stage ignited, acceleration of the vehicle became “quasi-null” and put the rocket on a ballistic trajectory, said Pierre-Yves Tissier, chief technical officer of Arianespace and co-chair of the independent investigation, in a briefing about the report. A fault tree analysis led investigators to rule out other causes of the failure. The erosion of the insert, he said, was linked to higher porosity of the carbon-carbon material, confirmed in other testing of the material but not detected earlier. “The acceptance criteria established for this material were not able to detect such a weakness,” he said. Avio procured the throat insert from a Ukrainian company, Yuzhnoye. Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio, said the company went with Yuzhnoye during the design phase of Vega C in 2015 to 2017 after concluding that other European suppliers could not provide the material in required quantities “on the schedule compatible with the development program” of the rocket. The flaw, he said, was not directly linked to disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago because they were manufactured before the war. He suggested that lockdowns linked to the pandemic might have been a factor, though. The erosion was not seen in the Zefiro-40 motor used on the inaugural Vega C launch last July, or in two earlier qualification firings. “The acceptance criteria were not the right ones,” said Giovanni Colangelo, ESA inspector general and the other co-chair of the investigation. In those earlier firings of the motor, the materials exceeded requirements. “The one for VV21 was exactly in line with specification, so were not as good as the previous one, so that is the reason why there was a failure,” he said. The investigation concluded that the Yuzhnoye material can no longer be used on the Zefiro-40 motor. It will be replaced with a carbon-carbon throat insert from ArianeGroup, which already produces similar components for motors used on other Vega stages. Ranzo said that Avio had already purchased several such throat inserts from ArianeGroup last year as a hedge against potential supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine. “We have secured the next several flights by having procured this strategic stock several months ago,” he said, adding that Avio was looking at longer-term options for the component from ArianeGroup or others. ESA said that additional analysis and testing of the Zefiro-40 is planned for the coming months, allowing a return to flight of the Vega C tentatively scheduled for late this year. The payload for that mission will be the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite. “Sentinel-1C is indeed a very precious payload,” acknowledged Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general. That satellite will replace Sentinel-1B, whose radar payload failed last year . “We are putting measures in place which are very robust and we have confidence this will all succeed.” The Zefiro-40 problem does not affect the original Vega rocket, which uses a different motor in its second stage that does not have a throat insert from Yuzhnoye. ESA plans a launch of that rocket, one of two remaining of that version, before the end of the summer. Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said that Vega launch will carry two primary payloads and several smallsat rideshares. “We will give more information on these passengers in a few weeks,” he said. In addition to fixing the problem with the Zefiro-40, there will be a broader assessment of the vehicle’s supply chain to look for other potential quality issues. “We will try to improve substantially the monitoring of the performance and supply chain management activities,” Ranzo said. Both ESA and Arianespace leadership expressed some frustration with the Vega program, noting that the VV21 failure was the third in eight flights of the Vega and Vega C. They are also dealing with delays with the development of the Ariane 6 that have pushed its first launch back to at least late 2023, as well as the loss of the Soyuz rocket after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We are in a crisis,” Aschbacher said. “For me, this is really a moment where we need to reflect deeply how to regain independent access to space for Europe.”
An investigation into a failed Astra launch last June concluded that a complex series of events caused a fuel leak that kept the rocket’s upper stage from reaching orbit. In a March 1 statement, Astra said it received a letter from the Federal Aviation Administration formally concluding the investigation into the June 2022 launch of its Rocket 3.3 vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida . The rocket’s upper stage shut down prematurely, keeping its payload of two NASA TROPICS cubesats from reaching orbit. The company said that the upper stage ran out of kerosene fuel early, shutting down the engine while only at 80% of orbital velocity. Engineers concluded there was a combustion wall burn-through in the upper stage engine 18 seconds after ignition. That burn-through allowed fuel, used in the engine’s regenerative cooling system, to leak. The investigation blamed the burn-through on a partial blockage in the engine’s fuel injector, which slowed the rate fuel passed through cooling channels and made it hotter, to the point where some fuel boiled and reduced its ability to cool the chamber. Extensive testing ruled out both solid debris and helium gas as the source of the blockage. That left gaseous fuel as the likely source. That had not been seen in ground tests of the engine, but Astra concluded several factors, such as limitations of ground tests of the upper-stage engine, meant that it was possible for the fuel to get warmer than expected. That left the engine with “thin margins” for keeping the fuel from boiling. “Given this thin margin, small factors — like the warm sunny weather in Cape Canaveral on the day of launch, which meant the fuel was slightly warmer than in prior flights – helped to tip the fuel over into a boiling regime on the TROPICS-1 mission,” the company wrote in a statement by Andrew Griggs, head of mission assurance at Astra, and Adam London, chief technical officer. A contributing factor, Astra said, was an eroded thermal barrier coating in the combustion chamber. That erosion was noticed before the launch but engineers concluded at the time that it was acceptable given its location in the chamber. Instead, the investigation found the need for that coating was greater than originally believed based on limits of testing. The TROPICS mission was the last flight of the Rocket 3.3 vehicle. The company announced in August it was retiring the vehicle to focus company resources on the Rocket 4, a larger vehicle whose first test launch could be before the end of the year. “Rocket 4 incorporates key architectural choices (most notably, a different upper stage engine design and a different fuel) that completely eliminate the causes of this mishap,” Griggs and London wrote. The company has made other changes to the engine intended to avoid other potential failure modes, like solid debris or helium gas blockage of the injector. They said the company also looked at ways for “improving our processes, systems, and culture to increase the reliability” of Rocket 4. Examples of those improvements are an updated design review process and a “test-like-you-fly” qualification process. They concluded they are “confident we now have the right team and systems in place to make Rocket 4 a success.”
The White House on March 2 released a national cybersecurity strategy that points at Russian and Chinese hackers as major threats to U.S. terrestrial and space networks. “We face a complex threat environment, with state and non-state actors developing and executing novel campaigns to threaten our interests,” the White House said . The Biden administration is releasing an updated cybersecurity plan a year after Russia demonstrated cyber warfare capabilities during its invasion of Ukraine, including attacks against satellite networks . The new document replaces the Trump administration’s 2018 cybersecurity strategy but the White House will continue to move forward with the implementation of Space Policy Directive 5 , a plan focused on the protection of space systems issued by the previous administration in September 2020. The Biden administration “remains committed to enhancing the security and resilience of U.S. space systems, including by implementing Space Policy Directive 5 ‘Cyber Security Principles for Space Systems.”” says the strategy. Space Policy Directive (SPD) 5 was billed as the first comprehensive government policy related to cybersecurity for satellites and related systems. Experts have warned that space systems are coming under increasing attacks because of their role as critical infrastructure and providers of essential services. DoD using commercial space systems for added resilience Winston Beauchamp, deputy chief information officer for the Department of the Air Force, said the military over the past decade has boosted the cybersecurity of space networks by relying on a diversity of government and commercial systems. Speaking March 2 on a virtual forum hosted by the SmallSat Alliance, Beauchamp said one of the trends in space systems is “diversity as a resilience enabler.” A former deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space, Beauchamp said the military expects its space systems to be the targets of cyber attacks because of their critical role. In past conflicts, “we demonstrated to our adversaries exactly what we could do with high end space capabilities and how it was a huge enabler to our combat operations,” he said. The Air Force “looked at every single mission area and at ways to improve the resilience of each architecture whether it was missile warning, satellite communications, position, navigation and timing, you name it, pretty much everything but weather had to have a resilience plan associated with it.” The basic approach to resilience is to rely on a diversity of systems which makes it “virtually impossible for an adversary to deny us the ability to communicate everywhere all the time,” said Beauchamp. “They may be able to deny or degrade somewhere, sometime, temporarily, but they can’t do it on a regular basis because of the fact that we’ve taken our government assets and supplemented to a great degree, with the systems that industry has put up.” Having that added resilience “gives us the ability to operate with confidence in certain areas of the world where we perhaps could not before,” Beauchamp said. 
A pair of Chinese astronauts conducted their second extravehicular activity in recent days, with China for the first time providing no advance indication nor details of the event. China’s human spaceflight agency CMSA announced March 2 that Shenzhou-15 mission astronauts Fei Junlong and Zhang Lu had “recently” carried out a spacewalk outside the Tiangong space station. The activity was supported by crewmate Deng Qingming from within Tiangong and teams on the ground. No further details were provided, beyond Fei and Zhang using the Wentian science module airlock for egress and ingress. Rumors on Chinese social media had suggested an EVA was taking place Feb. 28. The secrecy surrounding the spacewalk is in contrast to previous Tiangong EVAs, for which CMSA has issued albeit vague notices that such activities would take place in the near future. Space space authorities issued reports on timings of key EVA events and listed tasks for the first Shenzhou-15 spacewalk just three weeks ago, Feb. 9. Chinese state media have previously provided video footage of EVAs. It is unclear why CMSA has not published details of the latest action. The agency is overseen by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and as such has traditionally closely guarded even basic information about its astronaut corps. The lack of transparency may be seen by other space actors as troublesome. “The Chinese authorities are not doing themselves any favors by not providing much transparency about their crewed spaceflight operations,” Bleddyn Bowen, an associate professor specializing in space policy and military uses of outer space at the University of Leicester, told SpaceNews . “If they want to be seen as a more normal space power, everyday crewed spaceflight operations — which have little to no security and military importance — can be more openly reported and talked about. “The Chinese authorities also need to get more used to talking honestly about delays and unforeseen challenges as some other space powers have done.” Astrophysicist and spaceflight observer Jonathan McDowell concurred, noting that even the Soviets always gave start time and duration for their spacewalks. “There is no sensible reason for China to be so secretive,” McDowell said via email. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated at the International Astronautical Congress in September last year that a lack of transparency was an issue regarding China’s space activities. China is undergoing a reshuffle of key government positions ahead of its annual parliamentary session, the National People’s Congress, which opens on Sunday. Sensitivity to upcoming changes could play a role in secrecy in this instance. Information about China’s human spaceflight activities are however often closely guarded. Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut in space and a deputy chief designer at CMSA, recently told Chinese state media that two crews and backups had been chosen for the Shenzhou-16 and Shenzhou-17 missions due to launch in May and November respectively. No names were provided, however, in contrast to more open and transparent practices around the world. China typically only reveals the identities of the crews a day ahead of launch at carefully staged press conferences. Individuals recruited in a third astronaut selection round in 2020 have also yet to be revealed. The new astronauts may have now completed basic training and be available for selection for upcoming missions. The new recruits for the first time include engineers and payload specialists, whereas earlier rounds were solely drawn from air force pilots. A fourth selection round got underway late last year. China is also preparing to expand its Tiangong outpost and has begun a process to select the first international astronauts to visit the space station. In broader terms, China does publish once-every-five-year white papers which outline civilian plans and priorities for the years ahead. Meanwhile on Mars, China’s Zhurong rover was expected to resume activities in Utopia Planitia in December, following a period of hibernation during winter time in the northern hemisphere. Space authorities have yet to provide an update on the status of the rover after its expected reactivation around spring equinox. Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter confirm however that the rover has not moved in months and may have accumulated a covering of Martian dust, inhibiting Zhurong’s power and heat generation.
The Space Development Agency awarded Raytheon Technologies a $250 million contract to build seven missile-tracking satellites for the agency’s low Earth orbit constellation, the company announced March 2. The seven satellites will be part of SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1, a U.S. Defense Department constellation of infrared-sensing satellites intended to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles launched by foreign adversaries. In addition to Raytheon’s seven satellites, the Tracking Layer Tranche 1 will have 14 made by Northrop Grumman and 14 made by L3Harris. Raytheon’s satellites will become the fifth plane of the constellation. SDA originally planned to only have 28 satellites in Tranche 1 but was able to add seven more after Congress increased the agency’s 2023 budget by $250 million specifically to pay for missile-tracking satellites. Satellites requested by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Defense appropriators said they added funds in response to an urgent request from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to accelerate the deployment of missile-tracking sensors over the region. Congress last year added $500 million to SDA’s budget for the Tracking Layer, and the agency moved up the first launch of Tranche 1 from the original 2026 target to 2025. The award to Raytheon is significant for the company that originally bid for a Tracking Layer contract in 2020 but lost out to other competitors, and later lost a bid protest . Raytheon said the seven satellites under this new contract will be built on Saturn-class microsatellite buses made by its subsidiary Blue Canyon Technologies. The sensor is a wide-field-of-view overhead persistent infrared instrument developed by Raytheon, and the electronics payload is from another Raytheon subsidiary, SEAKR Engineering. The $250 million contract also includes ground operations and support services. “Developing a resilient and affordable proliferated satellite constellation in low Earth orbit will improve our ability to track emerging threats like hypersonic missiles,” said Dave Broadbent, president of space & C2 at Raytheon Intelligence & Space.
CesiumAstro won a $5 million contract from the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency to develop active electronically scanned array antennas compatible with the Link 16 tactical data network. The Austin-based startup specializing in phased array technology announced the award March 2. “Once completed, this antenna will be the only multi-beam, active phased array Link 16 solution available to support U.S. and allied military forces’ common operating picture across the global battlespace, a true gamechanger for the future of reliable and vast data transfer in high-threat environments,” according to the CesiumAstro news release. CesiumAstro’s flat panel active electronically scanned array antennas employ multiple beams to connect satellites with “dispersed users simultaneously, disseminating critical information to the warfighter faster,” the news release said. The software-defined CesiumAstro antennas can be reprogrammed rapidly to adapt to changing circumstances. “This award spotlights the upcoming advancements in national security made possible by software-defined active phased array antennas,” Shey Sabripour, CesiumAstro founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Providing SDA with a multi-beam array increases architecture flexibility and capacity for enhanced theater coverage.” Link 16, an encrypted, jam-resistant, high-speed radio frequency, is widely used aboard U.S. military and NATO aircraft, ground vehicles and vessels. In recent years, the SDA and U.S. military services have begun buying Link 16-compatible satellite antennas. In June, Florida-based space infrastructure company Redwire and MDA of Canada announced contracts to produce 42 Link 16 antennas apiece. MDA is supplying steerable Ka-band and Link 16 antennas to Lockheed Martin for SDA Transport Layer Tranche 1 satellites. Redwire did not disclose the antenna customer. The CesiumAstro award is not related to the SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 1 satellites. Instead, the new antennas are destined for future Tranche programs, according to a CesiumAstro spokesperson. L3Harris Technologies announced plans in October to acquire Viasat’s Link 16 business for $1.96 billion.
A Crew Dragon spacecraft is headed towards the International Space Station three days after a technical problem scrubbed its first launch attempt. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 12:34 a.m. Eastern March 2. The rocket placed the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour into orbit on the Crew-6 mission, with four people from the United States, Russia and United Arab Emirates on board. The launch took place on the second attempt. SpaceX scrubbed the first launch attempt Feb. 27 a little more than two minutes before the scheduled 1:45 a.m. Eastern liftoff after reporting an issue with the flow of triethylaluminum triethylborane (TEA-TEB), a chemical combination used to ignite the rocket’s engines. “At the end of the day, we couldn’t be absolutely sure that we had enough TEA-TEB, enough of this ignition fluid, bled up to the interface of the rocket to make sure that we would get that consistent, exactly timed ignition that we need across all nine engines, so we scrubbed the launch,” said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, at a post-launch briefing. NASA announced March 1 that it approved plans for the second attempt after reviewing the TEA-TEB problem. The agency said controllers saw an “unusual data signature” regarding the flow of TEA-TEB into a catch tank that turned out to be caused by a clogged filter in a ground system. Replacing the filter and purging the lines with nitrogen gas resolved the problem. Reed said there is a regular schedule for changing the TEA-TEB filters, but maintenance on the system may have introduced some air into the system. The mixture of air and ignition fluid caused more oxidization that clogged the filter. The system worked as designed on the second launch attempt. There was also a minor issue with the Dragon spacecraft after it reached orbit. The spacecraft opens its nose cone shortly after going into orbit, exposing its docking port. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said one sensor for the hooks that hold the nose cone closed malfunctioned, although the nose cone opened as expected. “We’ll have no problems with docking.” Reed said the faulty sensor was one of 36 limit switches, indicating the nose cone wasn’t opening even though it was. As a precaution, the system switched the hooks to backup motor windings, which opened the nose cone normally, and he said controllers will likely ignore that sensor going forward. “At this point in time, we don’t foresee any issue and we see no elevated risk to the crew for docking or, after six months, when it comes time to close that nose cone again” for the trip home, he said. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with ISS at 1:17 a.m. Eastern March 3. It will deliver NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, who serve as mission commander and pilot, respectively, of Crew-6, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi. It is the first flight for all but Bowen, who flew on three shuttle missions between 2008 and 2011. The four are scheduled to stay on the ISS for about six months. The four-person Crew-5 mission — NASA’s Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA’s Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos’s Anna Kikina — will return home from the ISS on their Crew Dragon spacecraft several days after the arrival of Crew-6. That departure could be as soon as March 8 or 9, Stich said, depending on weather conditions at splashdown locations off the Florida coast. The Crew-6 launch took place four years, almost to the hour, after the first Crew Dragon launch on the uncrewed Demo-1 mission. Crew-6 is the ninth crewed flight of the spacecraft, including six crew rotation missions, the Demo-2 test flight and Ax-1 and Inspiration4 private astronaut missions. “It’s just a little hard to believe that we’re on our sixth crew rotation mission in just four years,” Stich said. NASA and SpaceX, he said, have gotten into a rhythm of such flights, although each is unique. “It never is easy and it’s never really routine. They’re each different. They each have their challenges.”
The technology race to connect cellphones to satellite networks has not gone unnoticed by the Defense Department. “That capability is exciting to us,” Clare Grason, head of the Pentagon’s commercial satellite communications office, said Feb. 28. Emerging communications services that connect phones directly to satellites are attractive to military users that operate in locations where there is no cellular network connectivity, Grason said during a FedInsider webinar. “This would enable the DoD to equip warfighters with smaller, lighter, more capable and inexpensive communication devices,” she said. “Some of the architectures will enable existing smartphones to seamlessly communicate with satellites using cellular spectrum.” Grason’s office, known as CSCO, is working on a solicitation for direct-to-device satellite communications services to be released later this year. “This is something for the industry to keep their eyes open for,” she said. The CSCO is also seeking feedback from military users. “We’re in the market research stage,” Grason said. A number of companies have entered the direct-to-cell race, including Iridium , Lynk Global , AST SpaceMobile , Samsung , Globalstar and others. Contracts coming for PLEO and micro GEO Grason said DoD is looking to diversify the types of satellite communications services it buys from the private sector. As early as May, the CSCO plans to award contracts for satcom services provided by low Earth orbit internet companies . Multiple bids were received in November, said Grason. “We are wrapping up the source selection.” LEO satcom is a departure from the traditional geosynchronous (GEO) communications satellite services. Grason said military users are demanding low-latency, broadband services from the likes of OneWeb, SpaceX and Amazon. DoD will still continue to rely on GEO services, said Grason. “LEO is great but I don’t think it is the most important regime. I think all orbits have important attributes that the DoD needs to take advantage of.” There is also growing interest in satcom services that use small GEO satellites, such as those offered by Astranis . “That’s one of the innovations taking place in GEO,” Grason said. “Micro-GEO is one-tenth the size of traditional GEO birds and we are seeing those as having an advantage for the DoD, and we want to set up contract vehicles to access the capabilities.” She said her office is making an effort to work with as broad a sector of the market as possible. “A lot of times the inhibitor to taking advantage of what the commercial marketplace has to offer is the bureaucracy,” he said. “CSCO is trying to take that burden away by having very flexible contract vehicles ready to go.” Military satcom vs commercial Grason said DoD will always own and operate its own communication satellites but that capacity is limited and often restricted to “priority” users, whereas commercial services are accessible for any military customer able to pay for them. Military satcom is subject to a “prioritization scheme,” she said. “Missions that are toward the bottom of that hierarchy, they don’t simply have access to capability when they may need it. By contrast, commercial satcom is pay to play. If you have funding and there is an availability in the commercial sector, we can facilitate a deal for you.” Grason said commercial companies offer managed services that give customers autonomy over how the network is operated. “That arrangement has been very attractive, particularly for the customers who don’t quite have the rank on that prioritization scheme,” she said. DoD continues to buy a substantial amount of “transponded” capacity under leasing arrangements with commercial satcom operators, “but over time, that approach will lessen as commercial industry will not be selling access to their systems by the megahertz,” Grason said. Newer systems like SpaceX’s Starlink do not lease capacity but provide full services under agreements similar to what DoD currently has with Iridium . “How you buy it is going to help determine how efficient you are in using what you have acquired,” she added. The U.S. Army is now reviewing proposals for managed satcom services and will conduct a pilot program, said Grason. “Based on the outcome of that pilot program, the intent is to issue an enduring long-term contract based on the satcom-as-a-service model.” She said service packages can be tailored based on needs and budget constraints. Before they can compete for a DoD contract, commercial satcom providers are vetted in a number ways, including their cybersecurity practices and supply chain. “We scrutinize their financial reporting, we thoroughly investigate the condition of their supplier base, what trade sanctions perhaps are being levied on them or their network, and really a host of other commercial concerns,” said Grason. “These are all things that we weigh pretty heavily when doing business with what is essentially a multinational global supplier base.”
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — Rocket Lab is reconsidering the use of mid-air recovery of Electron boosters as part of its efforts to reuse the vehicle. In comments during a Feb. 28 earnings call, Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said the company was weighing recovering stages from the ocean and refurbishing them for launch rather than catching a stage with a helicopter, something that the company attempted twice, unsuccessfully, last year. In the second attempt last November, Rocket Lab called off the helicopter catch because of a momentary loss of telemetry from the booster . The company instead allow the stage to splash down in the ocean, where a boat recovered it and returned it to Rocket Lab’s facilities. “This turned out to be quite a happy turn of events,” he said on the call. “Electron survived an ocean recovery in remarkably good condition, and in a lot of cases its components actually pass requalification for flight.” He said the company is planning an ocean recovery on an upcoming flight after incorporating additional waterproofing into the vehicle “Pending this outcome of testing and analysis of the stage, the mission may move us towards sticking with marine recovery altogether and introduce significant savings to the whole operation.” “In 2022 we proved that it was possible to rendezvous with a returning stage mid-air and get it on the helicopter hook,” Beck said, referring to the first recovery attempt where the stag was snagged by the helicopter but released moments later , “but if we can save ourselves the extra step by just plucking out in water we will.” He said later that the cost was “neutral” between mid-air and ocean recovery: the additional work to waterproof the booster and refurbish it was offset by not needing to operate a helicopter. However, Beck estimated that it can perform helicopter recovery on about 50% of Electron launches, but that increases to 60-70% for water recovery. “What the water landing does enable us to do is recover more vehicles because we don’t have the constraints of the operations of the helicopter,” he said. “So, financially it’s kind of the same, but we get to actually reuse more vehicles.” Capella contract and upcoming launches Rocket Lab separately announced Feb. 28 a contract with Capella Space for four Electron launches of that company’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites. Each launch will carry a single satellite of Capella’s new Acadia series of satellites. Those launches will begin in the second half of 2023 from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, although Rocket Lab said it has the option to move launches to Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia. “The latest multi-launch deal with Capella Space further to meet our leadership position as the trusted small launch provider of choice for constellation operators,” Beck said in the earnings call. “We’ve now launched and signed deals with some of the most prominent constellations and operators globally, demonstrating the value that Electron provides to these customers by offering reliable and flexible launch to tailored orbits.” The new contract is in addition to an Electron launch for Capella scheduled for March from Launch Complex 2, carrying two Whitney-series satellites. That launch will take place within days of another Electron launch from Launch Complex 1 with two BlackSky Gen2 imaging satellites. Rocket Lab did not disclose specific dates for the two launches, but there are airspace restrictions in place for a launch from Wallops between March 11 and 17. Those launches will come after Rocket Lab’s first launch of the year, its inaugural mission from Launch Complex 2 in January . The three launches will account for $19 million in projected revenue in the first quarter, part of overall projections of $51-54 million in revenue for Rocket Lab in the quarter. Those launches will set the company up for as many as 15 launches in 2023. “With the targeted three launches in the first quarter, I think we’re in great shape to get to that 15 number,” Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer, said. Demand is higher, but he cautioned that the “school of hard knocks” taught the company of the risks of customer slips. “We’ve risk adjusted the numbers, so we think 15 is the right number for the year given where we’re at and given the likelihood that some programs could push to the right,” he said. That demand, Beck added, meant that the company was not seeing pricing pressure on Electron launches. “Electron pricing has never gone down. It’s only ever gone up.” That will continue, Spice predicted, as other small launch vehicle developers drop out of the market. “I think it’s just a matter of time before kind of the natural selection process really leads us down to a point where launch for Electron becomes more expensive, not less expensive,” he said.
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K. provisionally cleared Viasat’s plan to buy London-based Inmarsat March 1 after finding the deal would not substantially reduce competition for providing Wi-Fi on planes. The approval by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is subject to a public consultation, and the deal also still needs to clear a separate in-depth investigation that Europe launched Feb. 13 into its impact on inflight connectivity (IFC) competition. While the geostationary satellite operators compete closely in the IFC market, the U.K.’s competition watchdog said they face “significant competition” in coming years from Starlink, OneWeb, and other emerging players in low Earth orbit. Established IFC providers Intelsat and Panasonic are also investing in IFC, the CMA found, and have partnered with OneWeb to boost their capabilities. Meanwhile, Starlink recently won its first contract with a European airline, airBaltic, as SpaceX continues to rapidly expand the constellation with additional satellites. “This is an evolving and rapidly expanding sector, in which there have been significant developments even during the course of our 4-month investigation,” said Richard Feasey, who chaired the CMA’s investigation. “We see this continuing as demand for satellite connectivity increases.” The consultation deadline for responding to CMA’s provisional ruling is March 21. The watchdog’s final report is due March 30. The European Commission expects to make its decision on the transaction by June 29. In a joint statement, Viasat and Inmarsat hailed the U.K.’s provisional ruling as “an important milestone in the regulatory process” for a deal they announced back in November 2021 . They said the decision “acknowledges the strong evidence of the highly competitive nature of the global market for satellite communications which includes numerous providers, including well-established companies and well-funded new entrants.” However, the in-depth competition investigations have likely dashed Viasat’s initial hopes of completing the deal by March 8. U.S.-based Viasat also still needs regulatory approval in the United States to complete the deal.
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — Virgin Galactic is in the final phases of returning its suborbital spaceplane to commercial service as it ramps up development of a next-generation vehicle. In a Feb. 28 earnings call to discuss the company’s 2022 fourth quarter and full year financial results, Virgin Galactic Chief Executive Michael Colglazier said commercial flights of its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, are slated to begin in the second quarter, a schedule the company has kept in recent months after previous extensive delays. The call took place one day after VMS Eve, the “mothership” aircraft originally called WhiteKnightTwo, flew from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California to Spaceport America in New Mexico. VMS Eve had been in Mojave since October 2021 for an extensive overhaul that included replacing the pylon to which the spaceplane was attached as well as the aircraft’s horizontal stabilizers. “All this comprehensive work on Eve took longer than we originally planned.” Colglazier acknowledged. “We have now completed our enhancements, and I am incredibly appreciative of our team for the long hours that they put in to return these ships to flight.” VSS Unity remained at Spaceport America during the overhaul of VMS Eve, and the company says both vehicles are now ready for a series of test flights from the spaceport, which will include both a glide flight and a powered test flight of VSS Unity, the latter with Virgin Galactic personnel on board. That would be the first flight of the vehicle under rocket power since the July 2021 suborbital flight that carried company founder Richard Branson and several other company employees. “Following successful completion and verification of the analysis for those missions and consistent with our recent outlook regarding the flight schedule, we expect to commence commercial service in Q2,” he said. That first commercial flight will be for the Italian Air Force. Three mission specialists will go on the vehicle, said Sirisha Bandla, vice president for government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, during a Feb. 27 talk at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference here. They will do a mix of experiments, including some each person will wear as well as those they will oversee in payload racks and other experiments that will operate autonomously. “They’ve really taken advantage of the entire mission and are doing quite a few different things,” she said. The company will then move into flying its backlog of about 800 private astronauts along with additional research flights. Virgin Galactic foresees flying VSS Unity once a month, but Colglazier said it would take the company a little time to get into that regular cadence. “We see a path to be on a monthly cadence in reasonable short order,” he said on the call. “There’s nothing specifically in our way of being at a monthly cadence, I think it’s just shaking out the operation and learning how to turn the ship on a consistent basis.” He described getting VSS Unity flying regularly “priority one” for Virgin Galactic. Its second priority is to build a next generation of vehicles, its Delta-class spaceplanes and a new line of motherships. The company made several announcements last year about partnerships to produce the new vehicles, including a factory in the Phoenix area where it will build the Delta-class vehicles. Colglazier said that this year “is now focused on completing designs for both the next generation motherships and Delta spaceships, building the required tooling and beginning the parts fabrication for the ships.” Those vehicles are slated to enter commercial service in 2026. Left in limbo, though, is VSS Imagine, the company’s next suborbital spaceplane. The company said in November that it was slowing work on the vehicle to focus on getting VMS Eve and VSS Unity back to flight while starting development of its next-generation vehicles. Colglazier offered no updates on the plans for VSS Imagine in the latest earnings call saying its development was in “idle capacity” currently. “We’re going to make sure we have both of those aforementioned scopes of work dialed in and well in hand,” he said of returning to flight and next-generation vehicle work, “and when that happens, we’ll come pick up Imagine and see where we want to go.” Virgin Galactic reported revenue of $2.3 million for 2022, with a net loss of $500 million. The company had negative free cash flow of $135 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 and projected similar negative free cash flow for the first quarter of 2023. Doug Ahrens, chief financial officer, said on the call that Virgin Galactic has “pretty significant” ability to adjust spending if needed to reduce those losses. “We’d rather not do that, because we see great returns on these investments, and we want to invest in the vehicles and expansion,” he said. “But we could if we needed to and spend less on the infrastructure and the fleet development.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Globalstar said Feb. 28 that Apple is lending the company $252 million to help cover upfront costs for replenishing its low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation. Apple is providing the funds as a prepayment for using the network to upgrade satellite services launched last year for its latest iPhone, which can connect with one of Globalstar’s existing 24 satellites in LEO for emergency services outside cellular coverage. Globalstar picked MDA and Rocket Lab in February 2022 to supply an initial 17 satellites for launch by the end of 2025 in a contract worth $327 million. The contract includes an option for up to nine additional satellites at $11.4 million each. The satellite operator intends to fund any upfront costs not covered by Apple’s prepayment with its own cash. Apple has already agreed to reimburse Globalstar for 95% of the constellation; however, it previously required the satellite operator first to raise third-party financing to fund the manufacturing contract. Removing the need to raise this financing amid challenging macroeconomic conditions clears a significant degree of uncertainty for Globalstar’s constellation plans. Last year, the operator sought to extend payment deadlines under its manufacturing contract as rising interest rates made closing the financing difficult. Globalstar’s shares jumped more than 10% on the news. In a regulatory filing with the Securities Exchange Commission, the company said it expects the prepayment to be recouped in installments beginning no later than the third quarter of 2025. Globalstar is allocating 85% of the capacity on its next-generation constellation to Apple. The operator plans to continue offering legacy services including connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the remaining 15%. Apple has not said how it could use Globalstar’s new satellites to improve satellite-enabled features. The company is currently offering its satellite-enabled SOS capability on iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro for free for two years.
The Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or Space ISAC, is forming a group to focus on the security threats the United States could face in cislunar space outside Earth orbit. “Cislunar space is of growing interest to the world with the launch of the Artemis Accords,” the Space ISAC said Feb. 28. Based in Colorado Springs, the nonprofit Space ISAC was founded in 2019 to facilitate collaboration across the space industry to prepare for and respond to cyberattacks and other threats. Under the new initiative, called cislunar affinity group, experts will identify challenges, recommend solutions “and define the broader role of government in cislunar space,” said the Space ISAC. “The idea with this group is to provide a collaborative platform to known cislunar stakeholders, as well as potential stakeholders. There are many actors, while not yet actively involved, that are expressing interest and recognizing that they will have a role to play in cislunar space and the return to the moon,” said Gabrielle Hedrick, aerospace engineer at MITRE Corp., a corporate member of the Space ISAC. “We also intend to raise awareness on the need for solutions in cislunar space in communities not traditionally turned towards cislunar, like cybersecurity and the information sharing of vulnerabilities, incidents, and threats,” said Hedrick. Most current activities in cislunar space are led by NASA, the European Space Agency and Japan. Interest is growing among other nations, including China, India, Russia and the United Arab Emirates which are planning missions beyond Earth orbit. That region of space also is of interest to the Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community as countries seek access to lunar resources and stake out areas of jurisdiction. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate plans to launch an experiment in 2025 to track objects in cislunar space. Sensors used by the military for space domain awareness were designed to track satellites in Earth orbits, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer, and not for cislunar space which extends out 385,000 kilometers and has different orbital trajectories. Scientists have pointed out that most activities in cislunar space are largely unmonitored and only self-reported . The Space ISAC said the cislunar affinity group will work with companies currently involved in establishing sustained presence on the moon and with government agencies to “exchange ideas, and identify needs and gaps in cislunar space.” The goal is to “close the gap between government and commercial companies who are already on their way to the moon.” Space ISAC founding members include Kratos, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, MITRE, SES, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Parsons, Purdue University, the Space Dynamics Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, The Aerospace Corporation, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Microsoft, and L3Harris.
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — Nearly six months after an in-flight anomaly on a New Shepard suborbital mission, Blue Origin says it is still investigating the mishap and has no firm schedule for resuming launches. Speaking at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference here Feb. 28, Gary Lai, chief architect for New Shepard at Blue Origin, said the company was continuing to investigate the Sept. 12 uncrewed mission, designated NS-23. On that flight, the crew capsule, which had experiments but no people on board, fired its launch escape motor about a minute after liftoff from the company’s West Texas test site. The company has provided few updates about the status of the investigation since the incident and has not estimated either when the investigation would be complete or when New Shepard flights would resume. “We are investigating that anomaly now, the cause of it,” he said after a talk about New Shepard at the conference. “We will get to the bottom of it. I can’t talk about specific timelines or plans for when we will resolve that situation other than to say that we fully intend to be back in business as soon as we are ready.” The abort system on the crew capsule, he later said, operated as designed. There had been reports that payloads in the capsule experienced accelerations of up to 15 times the force of gravity, as least briefly, as the capsule flew away from the propulsion module and parachuted to a safe landing. “I can tell you with certainty that the acceleration environment that we experienced was exactly what we predicted. It was exactly as the astronauts were trained for,” he said, noting there was a difference between transient accelerations like shocks and sustained accelerations. “Everything went according to plan.” Future of New Shepard payload flights The NS-23 mission was the 12 th New Shepard flight that carried research payloads, either as a dedicated research flight or as part of the New Shepard vehicle testing program. Those flights have carried more than 100 commercial payloads, he said. Such dedicated payload flights will be less prominent going forward. “We expect that in the near future, the coming year, suborbital tourism will dominate our flights,” he said, predicting that Blue Origin will support “about a couple” dedicated payload missions a year, the same as it has, even as the number of private astronaut flights grows. The company is offering new research opportunities. That includes flying payloads on New Shepard’s propulsion module, something he said can be done on both research and tourism flights. While there is less room on the propulsion module for payloads, he said there will be an option to allow payloads to be exposed for sampling the atmosphere or even deploy instruments. Another new option will be a reduced gravity flight, where the crew capsule is spun after deployment to create lunar gravity conditions for a few minutes. Blue Origin is under contract from NASA for a such a flight tentatively planned for later this year. Blue Origin is looking at options for human-tended experiments, he said, such as replacing seats with experiment racks. It is also working with NASA about flying government researchers and astronauts through the agency’s Suborbital Crew program. The company is separately studying upgrades to New Shepard, although Lai said the changes would focus on operations. “The customers probably won’t see a huge difference,” he said, with Blue Origin instead working to reduce the turnaround time between flights. “That has always been the ultimate objective for New Shepard, to learn how to make spaceflight routine.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Lux Semiconductors, a microelectronics startup with U.S. Air Force and Space Force awards, raised $2.3 million in seed funding. Ultratech Capital Partners led the seed round. AIN Ventures, Hemisphere Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures participated. With the latest investment, New York-based Lux Semiconductors will continue development and commercialization of the company’s “System-on-Foil” process for improving microelectronics performance. Initially, Lux Semiconductors’ proprietary method for integrating computer chips won funding from the Energy Department and National Science Foundation. “Over the past couple years, government interest has been primarily from the Department of Defense and in particular the Air Force and the Space Force,” Shane McMahon, Lux Semiconductors co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . Lux Semiconductors has won two Small Business Innovation Research contracts from the Air Force and one from the Space Force. In addition, NextFlex, a consortium funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory to encourage U.S. manufacturing of flexible hybrid electronics , is funding a company project. For decades, integrated circuit performance improved as companies devised ways to shrink transistors. Improvements in packaging chips close together can also improve performance. “Our System-on-Foil technology is particularly good for millimeter wave and radio frequency communications payloads,” McMahon said. Lux Semiconductors is working with Lockheed Martin Space and other prime contractors to demonstrate the benefits of flexible or conformal electronics packaging. By wrapping electronics around an aircraft or spacecraft, “you reduce the integration complexity and save a lot of volume inside,” McMahon said. “Maintaining a secure supply of semiconductors is critical to Lockheed Martin’s supply chain that enables our customers’ national security missions,” Chris Moran, Lockheed Martin Ventures vice president and general manager, said in a statement. “Lockheed Martin has been clear in our support to expand America’s vital semiconductor industry and this investment in Lux Semiconductors demonstrates our commitment to domestic supply capabilities that are in line with our larger 21st century security vision.” Building up domestic semiconductor capability is of strategic importance to the United States, Ultratech founder Damian Perl said in a statement. “The significant commercial potential of this technology is also compelling and we look forward to assisting Lux deliver their unique capability across a broad set of applications,” Perl added. Lux Semiconductors has completed its first prototype, a metal substrate with high-density copper interconnects. In 2023, the company plans to move into a commercial semiconductor fabrication plant in 2023. “We’ll also be running prototypes for a number of customers according to their designs,” McMahon said. Lux Semiconductors participated in the Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator in 2020. 
China is planning to expand its Tiangong space station with a multi-functional module to enhance its capabilities. China completed the construction of the three-module Tiangong space station last November, realizing a plan first approved in 1992. The operational phase of the station began with a first crew handover late last year. China plans to keep Tiangong permanently inhabited for at least a decade with crews of three spending six months at a time in orbit. Already though, new plans are emerging. “We will launch the expansion module of the space station at an appropriate time to further expand the size of the space station and enhance its capacity,” Ji Qiming, assistant to director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO), told CCTV Feb. 24. The expansion module appears to have superseded earlier an apparent plan to send up duplicates of the existing three, roughly 20-metric-ton modules. The multi-functional expansion module will host six docking ports and turn the T-shaped Tiangong into a cross-shaped configuration. The added ports will provide redundancy and allow more spacecraft to dock at Tiangong than present. This would also help facilitate plans to allow commercial spacecraft and tourist visits to the orbital outpost. Ji discussed the expansion plan with Chinese state media at an exhibition to mark three decades of China’s human spaceflight program. He also revealed progress on China’s plans to land astronauts around the end of the decade. Tianhe, the space station core module, was the first piece of the station to be launched back in April 2021. It provides the main propulsion and life support systems and crew quarters for the astronauts on Tiangong and carries a docking hub to facilitate the arrival of spacecraft and further modules. Images from facilities at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the maker of China’s space station modules, suggested that backup or engineering models had been developed and could be readied for use in orbit. The smaller, multi-functional module resembles some outward design features of Tianhe but would not require all of the core module’s systems and capabilities to be replicated. Its docking ports would however still allow for the arrival of new experiment modules to expand further. The country will also launch a co-orbiting optical telescope module, named Xuntian, in 2024. It will be capable of docking with Tiangong for repairs, maintenance, refueling and upgrades. In an adjacent development, CMSEO officials revealed that it is preparing for international visits to Tiangong. “We are about to start selecting international astronauts to send to our space station and carry out scientific experiments together,” Chen Shanguang, a deputy chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told CCTV. “Coming to China’s space station and taking a Chinese rocket to space requires familiarity with China’s spacecraft. This may have to wait until they arrive in China so that our instructors can train them,” Chen said. The move is part of China’s plans to use Tiangong to boost its international space cooperation and soft power. Many countries have proposed sending astronauts to visit Tiangong, according to Chen, who did not name specific states. The European Space Agency will not be sending its astronauts, however, despite earlier training exchanges with China. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in January that the agency had neither the budget nor the political green light for participating in the Chinese space station. Meanwhile experiments selected by a joint program between the CMSA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) could begin flying to Tiangong this year.
SEOUL, South Korea — Japan’s space agency JAXA said Feb. 28 it had selected two astronaut candidates as part of efforts to support the NASA-led Artemis lunar exploration program. It was the first time JAXA has chosen astronaut candidates since 2009 when the agency picked two candidates for International Space Station missions. The two latest candidates are Makoto Suwa, 46, a disaster prevention specialist at the World Bank, and Ayu Yoneda, 28, a surgeon at the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center. They will join JAXA on April 1 for two years of training, the agency said in a Feb. 28 statement . Yoneda is the youngest candidate selected, while Suwa is the oldest candidate selected, according to Kyodo News . “I was happy, surprised and felt determined by a sense of responsibility and duty,” Yoneda said in Japanese at a livestreamed press conference in Tokyo, according to Kyodo. “I’m interested in seeing how the Earth looks from the Moon during an eclipse.” Joining online from Washington, Suwa said, “I felt a great sense of responsibility when notified.” Suwa previously worked on a Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers program in Rwanda and for the World Meteorological Organization, and has worked at the World Bank since 2014. Yoneda graduated from the University of Tokyo’s graduate school of medicine in 2019. Once officially certified as astronauts, the pair would have the opportunity to join missions to the International Space Station and participate in the Artemis program. Japan joined the program in 2019 , with the goal of being the second country in the world to land an astronaut on the moon, following the United States. NASA and the Japanese government signed an agreement in November finalizing Japan’s contributions to the lunar Gateway that also confirmed Japan would participate in the International Space Station through 2030. As part of the agreement, NASA will fly a JAXA astronaut to the Gateway on a future Artemis mission. At that time, Japan’s science and technology minister said the country would seek to land a Japanese astronaut on the moon “by the latter half of the 2020s.” In January, Washington reaffirmed its commitment to landing a Japanese astronaut on the moon. At the signing ceremony of a bilateral space cooperation framework agreement at NASA headquarters, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the agreement will “strengthen our partnership in areas like research on space technology and transportation, robotic lunar surface missions, climate-related missions and our shared ambition to see a Japanese astronaut on the lunar surface.” JAXA’s selection process began in April 2022 following an 10-week window for accepting applications. A total of 4,127 people applied , with eight men and two women making it to the final round of tests in January through February this year.
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — SpaceX launched the first set of upgraded Starlink satellites for its second-generation constellation Feb. 27, featuring increased capacity and new technologies. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:13 p.m. Eastern. The company postponed the launch by nearly five hours because of what it called a “space weather concern” linked to a recent geomagnetic storm. The rocket deployed its payload, a set of Starlink satellites called Group 6-1, a little more than an hour after liftoff, following a second burn by the rocket’s upper stage to place them into orbit at altitudes of 365 to 372 kilometers. The rocket’s booster, on its third flight, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The 21 satellites of Group 6-1 were the first of what SpaceX called the “V2 Mini” version of the Starlink satellite. The spacecraft are significantly larger and more powerful than the first-generation Starlink satellites, but smaller than the full-scale second-generation Starlink satellites that will launch on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. “They represent a step forward in Starlink capability,” SpaceX tweeted Feb. 26 in a brief thread describing the V2 Mini spacecraft. That includes improved phased-array antennas and the use of E-band frequencies for backhaul that the company says provides four times the capacity of first-generation satellites. The V2 Mini satellites also have new Hall effect thrusters that use argon, rather than krypton, as propellant. The thrusters produce 170 millinewtons of thrust using 4.2 kilowatts of power, the company stated, with a specific impulse — a measure of efficiency — of 2,500 seconds. That is 2.4 times the thrust, and 1.5 times the specific impulse, of earlier Starlink thrusters. SpaceX’s use of krypton on its original electric thrusters was itself innovative as such thrusters had predominately used xenon, which is far more expensive. Argon, though, is far more plentiful, and less expensive, which SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk suggested was a reason for the change. “The transition to argon was tricky, but necessary, as krypton is too rare,” he tweeted in response to a comment by Tom Mueller, a former vice president of propulsion at SpaceX. SpaceX did not disclose the size or mass of the V2 Mini satellites. However, in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission as part of its license application for its second-generation constellation, it listed an “F9-2” design of the satellite with two solar arrays 12.8 meters long and a mass of 800 kilograms, consistent with the V2 Mini. First-generation Starlink satellites, by comparison, had a single solar array eight meters long and weighed about 300 kilograms. The larger size of the V2 Mini has raised worries among astronomers they may be brighter and cause more interference with their observations. SpaceX said in a document that the new satellites will incorporate technologies such as dielectric mirror film to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and low-reflectivity black paint. “So, while our V2 Mini satellites are larger than earlier versions, we’re still expecting them to be as dark or darker once the full range of mitigations are implemented and the satellites reach their operational orbit,” the company wrote. While the Group 6-1 satellites are arguably the first second-generation Starlink satellites, they are not the first satellites for its second-generation, or Gen2, constellation that was partially authorized by the FCC in December . The company has performed four Group 5 launches from late December through Feb. 12, each carrying more than 50 satellites for orbits authorized for the Gen2 constellation. Those satellites are likely the “F9-1” design mentioned in its FCC filing, effectively identical to the first-generation satellites. The full-fledged second-generation satellites are far larger, weighing about 2,000 kilograms with solar arrays 20 meters long, as described by the company in that FCC filing. SpaceX will use Starship to launch those satellites. “We have a few that are waiting very patiently to be launched on Starship,” Gary Henry, senior advisor for national security space solutions at SpaceX, said of those larger second-generation Starlink satellites in a Feb. 21 panel discussion at the Space Mobility conference .
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — Japanese lunar lander developer ispace said Feb. 27 that its first mission remains on track to attempt a landing in two months as it makes progress on its next two missions. The company’s HAKUTO-R Mission 1 spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 Dec. 11 . The launch placed the spacecraft on a low-energy trajectory that took the spacecraft nearly 1.4 million kilometers from Earth by Jan. 20 before swinging back, and it is currently about 900,000 kilometers away. In a media briefing, ispace executives said the Mission 1 lander is in good condition ahead of plans to enter orbit around the moon in the latter half of March and attempt a landing in Atlas Crater, located on the edge of Mare Frigoris in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon, around the end of April. “Our first flight to the moon is going very well,” said Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace. That included completing the first 5 of 10 mission milestones, from launch to stable operations in deep space. “We have been operating our lander as well as expected so far, without any critical issues,” said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace. “It does not mean that there have been no challenges.” Controllers have dealt with several minor problems with the spacecraft, Ujiie explained. That included spacecraft temperatures higher than expected, although still within acceptable ranges, as well as what the company called an “unexpected communication instability” shortly after deployment. One onboard computer has rebooted multiple times, but that has not affected spacecraft operations because of redundant systems. “We have experienced several anomalies, but we have already solved those issues,” he said. Flight controllers have also learned about how to manage the spacecraft. “I have been very pleased working with the team and how they have operated under pressure,” he said. “We are gaining extremely valuable experience and leaning a significant amount about ourselves and our lander.” The Mission 1 lander is scheduled to perform a lunar orbital insertion maneuver in late March, followed by a landing by the end of April. Ujiie declined to give specific dates for either milestone. While Mission 1 is ongoing, ispace is working on two future missions. The Mission 2 lander, scheduled for launch in 2024, will carry a set of customer payloads as well as a “micro rover” that ispace developed. That rover will collect a regolith sample that will be transferred to NASA under a 2020 contract awarded to ispace’s European subsidiary. A structural thermal model of the Mission 2 lander is being assembled at a Japan Air Lines facility at Narita International Airport in Japan. That will be followed by construction of portions of the flight model in Germany starting in April. The Mission 2 lander will be similar in design to Mission 1. “We don’t have any significant differences between Mission 1 and Mission 2,” said Ujiie, noting ispace already incorporated lessons learned from the development of the first lander into the second. Mission 3 will be developed by ispace U.S., the company’s American subsidiary, supporting Draper, which won a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) award for the farside landing mission last July . That Series 2 lander will be larger than the Mission 1 and 2 spacecraft with increased payload capacity and a modular design. In addition to the NASA CLPS payload, ispace is in discussions with several companies to fly commercial payloads on Mission 3, including AstronetX, ArkEdge Space, Aviv Labs and Cesium Astro. There are no binding contracts yet with those customers, Hakamada said, but argued there was a “strong willingness” to complete such deals. “We look forward to finalizing these service agreements as soon as possible.” The company is in line to be the first private mission to land on the moon if Mission 1 touches down safely in April. The privately funded Israeli lander Beresheet crashed attempting a landing in 2019. Two American companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, plan to launch their first lander missions later this spring. Hakamada said it was a “great honor” to potentially be the first company to land on the moon, but emphasized it was not about just the ongoing mission. “Ispace is not a company to execute only one mission. Ispace is a company to offer a series of missions to answer customers’ continuous demand.”
The U.S. Army has extended its contract with Maxar Technologies to provide 3D geospatial data used to create immersive digital environments, the company announced Feb. 27. Maxar was awarded Phase 3b of the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain (OWT) contract originally awarded in 2019 to Vricon, a company Maxar acquired in 2020. Vricon uses data from Maxar’s imaging satellites to make 3D mapping products. The three phases of the One World Terrain prototype project are worth $94.7 million. Under the project, Maxar’s 3D digital twin of the Earth is used to develop highly accurate immersive training environments for the U.S. Army and maps for autonomous vehicle navigation. “The evolution of One World Terrain shows how 3D terrain and information services are becoming essential tools for planning and decision-making not just for the U.S. Army but for a wide range of military, civil and commercial institutions,” said Tony Frazier, Maxar’s executive vice president and general manager for public sector Earth intelligence. Phase 3a in 2022 work focused on improving the fidelity of the 3D terrain data and refining the automation processes to generate realistic terrain derived from Maxar’s satellite imagery, the company said. In Phase 3b, expected to last a year, Maxar will work with open-source geospatial data to improve the Army’s prototype system and evaluate the use of data collected by small unmanned aerial vehicles. A key goal for the geospatial industry is to deliver accurate global representations of the Earth as a reference foundation, Maxar said. The company last week announced the launch of SYNTH3D , a high-performance, geotypical 3D representation of the entire planet for gaming, simulation, entertainment, virtual reality, smart cities and metaverse.Developed through a partnership between Maxar and blackshark.ai , SYNTH3D allows developers and creators to simulate and visualize 3D environments representative of real-world locations where aesthetics and performance are key to commercial applications.
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — NASA has selected the head of its heliophysics division as its new associate administrator for science, responsible for a $7.8 billion portfolio of more than 100 missions. NASA announced Feb. 27 it selected Nicola Fox as the new associate administrator for science, effective immediately. Sandra Connelly, deputy associate administrator for science, had been serving as acting associate administrator since the departure at the end of December of Thomas Zurbuchen. Fox had been director of the Science Mission Directorate’s heliophysics division since 2018. She was previously chief scientist for heliophysics at the Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission. Fox is the second woman to hold that position after former astronaut Mary Cleave, who was associate administrator for science from 2004 to 2007. “As the director of our heliophysics division, Nicky was instrumental in expanding the impacts and awareness of NASA’s solar exploration missions and I look forward to working with her as she brings her talents, expertise and passion to her new role,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement announcing the appointment. He also thanked Connelly for “an incredible job keeping the mission moving forward” in her acting associate administrator role. The associate administrator of science oversees NASA’s overall science activities, which includes missions and research in astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary science. NASA also recently transferred biological and physics sciences research done on the International Space Station to the Science Mission Directorate. Those programs received nearly $7.8 billion in the fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill enacted in December. The appointment of Fox ends a temporary reshuffling of personnel in the Science Mission Directorate, a domino effect of Connelly serving as acting associate administrator. At a Feb. 27 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Tiffany Morgan, deputy director of the Mars Exploration Program, said that with Fox’s appointment, those personnel had returned to their previous positions. That includes Eric Ianson, deputy director of the planetary science division who was acting deputy associate administrator for science. He said later at the MEPAG that he did not expect any additional changes in staffing for the Science Mission Directorate other than hiring a replacement for Fox as heliophysics division director.
A U.S. Space Force mission carrying a navigation satellite to geostationary Earth orbit has been confirmed as the first national security launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. “USSF-106 is the first planned National Security Space mission for Vulcan,” Col. Doug Pentecost, Space Systems Command’s deputy program executive officer for assured access to space, told SpaceNews via email. USSF-106 will carry the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), an experiment funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory and billed as the future GPS . NTS-3, made by L3Harris, will broadcast positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals from geostationary Earth orbit. It will seek to demonstrate next-generation PNT technologies for the U.S. military and provide an alternative to GPS. AFRL had previously said NTS-3 would launch on Vulcan but the Space Force now confirmed this will be Vulcan’s first national security launch. ULA’s chief executive Tory Bruno told reporters last week that he expects Vulcan to be certified for national security launch later this year after the vehicle completes two commercial missions. Vulcan is years behind schedule due to delays in the development and qualification of the Blue Origin BE-4 engines that power the vehicle’s first stage. The vehicle’s long-awaited debut flight, scheduled for May 4 , will carry Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and a payload for space memorial company Celestis. Its second mission will be to fly Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser space plane to the International Space Station. Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space, told SpaceNews last week at the Space Mobility conference in Orlando, that he remains optimistic that Vulcan can finally start flying national security missions by year’s end. The Space Force in 2020 selected Vulcan to launch 60% of the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 missions over the next several years. The other winner of Phase 2, SpaceX, in January launched its first mission of the Phase 2 contract. Because of Vulcan’s development delays, the first mission awarded to ULA that would have been flown by Vulcan — USSF-51 — was moved to an Atlas 5 . The Space Force has not yet announced a launch date for USSF-51. The Space Force has a vested interest in Vulcan’s success as it funded nearly $1 billion in development costs. The rocket also is of strategic importance to the United States because it replaces ULA’s Atlas 5 in the national security launch fleet. The Atlas 5 has to be phased out because it uses the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine. Purdy said Vulcan’s progress is being watched closely because the Space Force depends on it for assured access to space and because of the urgency to end U.S. dependence on the RD-180. He said he is also happy to see ULA winning commercial orders for Vulcan . “This means I’m able to leverage the launch commercial industry,” said Purdy. “I’m really hopeful for that future.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Astroscale said Feb. 27 it has raised $76 million from investors including satellite maker Mitsubishi Electric, which plans to add docking plates to Japanese national security spacecraft to make them compatible with the debris removal venture’s servicers. Japan-based Astroscale has now raised more than $376 million since it was founded a decade ago for a business aiming to make on-orbit servicing routine by 2030. The funds “will significantly contribute to further innovative technology development, global expansion and increased capacity to meet the growing demand,” Astroscale CEO and founder Nobu Okada said in a statement. Mitsubishi Electric invested $25 million in the Series G round. The companies agreed to jointly develop and build satellite chassis with standardized magnetic plates that servicers could use to move or de-orbit them more easily when they have reached the end of their missions. They did not provide further details about their collaboration. Astroscale demonstrated how its servicers could latch onto a docking plate in low Earth orbit (LEO) in 2021 during capture and release tests as part of ELSA-d, or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration. Despite the 175-kilogram servicer losing half its thrusters last year , Astroscale says ELSA-d is still due to culminate in the servicer de-orbiting its 17-kilogram client craft at some point. Astroscale spokesperson Dave Hebert said the venture will “have more to share in the coming months” about ELSA-d’s de-orbit timeframe. Funding boost Other new investors included billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who became the first private Japanese citizen to visit the International Space Station in December 2021 after launching on a Russian Soyuz rocket. Maezawa said he invested $23 million in Astroscale’s Series G round to help “protect the future of space travel” from a growing threat of space debris as orbits become increasingly crowded. The billionaire has plans to travel around the moon with an eclectic group of people on a future launch of SpaceX’s Starship, which has yet to attempt its first orbital launch. Other investors in the round also came from Japan, comprising Mitsubishi Electric’s parent company, investment bank Mitsubishi UFJ, financial firm FEL Corporation, and the state-owned Development Bank of Japan. On-orbit servicing milestones Astroscale next plans to use a spacecraft launching on Rocket Lab Electron early this year to inspect a discarded upper stage of a Japanese H2-A rocket. Under a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) contract, the Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J) will attempt to demonstrate proximity operations and obtain images of the debris. Astroscale is competing for the second phase of this JAXA program to remove the debris with a servicing spacecraft capable of capturing an object without a docking plate. Next year, Astroscale is planning to remove a yet-to-be-announced defunct satellite from LEO as part of the End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-multiple mission, or ELSA-m, in partnership with British operator OneWeb and the space agencies of the U.K. and Europe. ELSA-m will likely attempt to remove a OneWeb satellite as part of this mission. An Astroscale executive last year said most of the satellites in OneWeb’s constellation are equipped with compatible docking plates. As part of efforts to ramp up for these missions, Astroscale said it has expanded its team by more than 60% since its $109 million Series F funding round in late 2021 to over 400 people. Astroscale has facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel and expects to open up a global headquarters facility in Tokyo, Japan, later this year.
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — A last-minute problem with a rocket ignition system halted a Falcon 9 launch of a NASA commercial crew mission Feb. 27, delaying the launch by at least three days. Launch controllers halted the countdown for the launch of the Crew-6 mission about two and a half minutes before its scheduled 1:45 a.m. Eastern liftoff because of a problem with the ignition system, which uses a chemical combination called triethylaluminum triethylborane, or TEA-TEB. The launch director informed the four-person crew in the Crew Dragon of the issue a few minutes earlier. In a statement two hours after the scrub, NASA said controllers halted the launch “to investigate an issue preventing data from confirming a full load” of TEA-TEB. SpaceX noted in a tweet that it was a ground system issue. “I’m proud of the NASA and SpaceX teams’ focus and dedication to keeping Crew-6 safe,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement about the scrub. “Human spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor and, as always, we will fly when we are ready.” This was the first scrub for technical issues in a SpaceX human spaceflight launch. Crew-6 is the ninth such mission for SpaceX, after the Demo-2 test flight, five International Space Station crew rotation missions and the Inspiration4 and Ax-1 private astronaut missions. While a backup launch opportunity exists Feb. 28, NASA said it and SpaceX would not attempt a launch that day because of poor weather conditions. At a pre-launch briefing Feb. 25, Mike McAleenan, launch weather officer for the U.S. Space Force 45th Weather Squadron, said that conditions at the launch site would remain good, but there would be high winds and wave conditions along the ascent corridor up the East Coast. “The weather is not looking good at all for that particular opportunity,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, of a Feb. 28 launch at that briefing. NASA previously said it would skip a March 1 launch because of an unfavorable trajectory. The next three opportunities start March 2, and NASA said it selected 12:34 a.m. Eastern March 2 as the next launch attempt pending resolution of the TEA-TEB issue. Stich said at the briefing it was too early to forecast weather conditions for the early March attempts. Crew-6 is transporting NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, who will serve as mission commander and pilot, respectively. Also on Crew-6 are mission specialists Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos and Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi. The four will spend about six months on the station. The Crew-6 scrub is not affecting plans for two other SpaceX Falcon 9 launches scheduled for Feb. 27. One Falcon 9 is slated to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:38 p.m. Eastern, followed less than an hour later by another Falcon 9 launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2:31 p.m. Eastern. Both rockets are carrying Starlink satellites, although the Florida launch is carrying the first “V2 Mini” Starlink satellites: larger spacecraft that SpaceX says have four times the capacity than previous Starlink satellites. The Florida launch carries 21 V2 Mini satellites that will go into orbits authorized by the Federal Communications Commission for its Gen2 system, while the Vandenberg launch will carry 51 first-generation Starlink satellites.
China has revealed a concept for a lunar lander it hopes will put astronauts on the moon around the end of the decade. A model of the Chinese lunar lander was unveiled at an exhibition to mark three decades of China’s human spaceflight program Feb. 24 at the National Museum of China in Beijing. The model shows that China is working on a staged descent concept, which differs from the Apollo landings. A propulsion stage will be used for most of the descent, before the lander segment completes a powered descent and soft landing on the lunar surface. The propulsion stage will be designed to make a separate, hard landing while needing to mitigate the potential dangers of debris. The lander will also act as the ascent vehicle to take the crew back into lunar orbit and dock with a waiting crew spacecraft. Details on the model show thrusters, a stowed lunar rover, docking mechanisms, a crew hatch and a ladder for astronauts to descend to surface, antennae and other equipment. The lander is part of a plan to take two astronauts to the lunar surface by around 2030 , according to previously announced plans by Chinese space authorities. Meanwhile, work on other key elements continues. “We have made breakthroughs in key technologies for the new-generation crew carrier rocket, the new-generation crew spacecraft, the lunar lander and the spacesuit for landing on the moon,” Ji Qiming, assistant to director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO), told CCTV Feb. 24 China is already working on a new-generation crew launch vehicle to launch a new-generation crew spacecraft. The latter has a boilerplate test mission in 2020. It will be partially reusable and larger and more capable than China’s current Shenzhou crew spacecraft. The new launcher will come in low Earth orbit and triple-core lunar configurations. Its developer CASC is targeting a test flight of the LEO version in 2027. The launcher has also now gained the designation of Long March 10, according to information presented alongside its model at the exhibition. “An implementation plan for the lunar landing stage with Chinese characteristics has taken shape. This year, we will fully implement our research and construction tasks for the lunar landing phase as scheduled,” Ji added. The initial landing mission is intended to be a short-term stay on the order of a few hours. The crewed lunar landing capabilities are however part of a grander plan for a permanent lunar habitat. “At the same time, we will also carry out a series of preliminary studies on the long-term stay of astronauts on the lunar surface, and the development and utilization of lunar resources, so as to lay a technical foundation for future lunar exploration missions of the Chinese people,” Ji said. China in 2021 formally announced a plan for an International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) to be constructed in the 2030s. It will initially be robotic then made suitable for long-term habitation by crew. The ILRS project includes Russia as a key partner. However China did not mention Russia during a presentation of its lunar plans at a major international space conference last fall. Russia faces isolation from the international community over its invasion of Ukraine. China last year stated it was scrapping plans for an expendable Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket for lunar and other space infrastructure and replacing it with a reusable version . This will likely see the test flight delayed into the 2030s, also impacting the schedule for the ILRS. China’s crewed lunar landing plan is not formally approved by the Chinese government, but this is likely as its time frame is beyond the scope of the current national Five-year plan. A space white paper published in January 2022 stated that China will “continue studies and research on the plan for a human lunar landing… and research key technologies to lay a foundation for exploring and developing cislunar space.”
A startup is proposing one solution to the increasing congestion at major launch sites: build mobile launch pads that operate at sea. The Spaceport Company is planning to demonstrate a sea-based launch platform in May, conducting four sounding rocket launches from a modified ship in the Gulf of Mexico. “That will help us prove out our logistical, operational and regulatory procedures,” said Tom Marotta, founder and chief executive of the company, during a panel at the SpaceCom conference Feb. 23. Those tests will be a precursor to developing a full-scale sea-based platform, based on a ship design called a liftboat. That ship can sail to a location and lower legs to anchor itself on the seafloor. The boat can then lift itself out of the water and serve a launch platform. The advantage of The Spaceport Company’s concept is that it doesn’t rely on any fixed infrastructure on land: all the resources needed for a launch are on the ship, and the rockets that launch from it would use autonomous flight termination systems that do not require radars or other tracking assets. “What we’re really doing is building a new type of spaceport,” he said. “We’re building a high-cadence, responsive spaceport to solve the problem of spaceport congestion.” Growing launch activity at Cape Canaveral is threatening to cause problems for launch companies as the pace of activity stresses infrastructure there. New spaceports, designed particularly for small launch vehicles, have run into problems. A proposed spaceport in Camden County, Georgia, took years to secure a license from the Federal Aviation Administration, but in a referendum last year county voters blocked the acquisition of land for the site, a decision recently upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court. “It’s scalable,” Marotta said of the sea-based approach. “It’s a lot easier to build more ships to meet more launch demand than it is to go find 100 acres on the coast somewhere.” The initial sea-based platforms the company proposes would operate several kilometers offshore, remaining in U.S. territorial waters at depths up to 60 meters. “We can operate up and down the entire East Coast,” he said, based at any major industrial port. It would host small launch vehicles in size up to Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha, which can place about one ton into orbit. Unlike ground-based commercial launch sites, The Spaceport Company’s sea-based platforms would not need an FAA spaceport license known as Part 420. “It comes down to how we define a spaceport, which is a fixed location on Earth, and his moves,” said Pam Underwood, director of the FAA’s Office of Spaceports, on the panel. Both she and Marotta, though, said safety issues would be captured in the separate launch license for the vehicle launching from that platform. “We still meet the same safety criteria as a site with a Part 420 license. It’s just captured entirely under the vehicle license,” he said. “We are just as safe and just as sustainable.” Sea-based launch is not a new idea. The multinational Sea Launch venture conducted dozens of launches of the Zenit-3SL rocket using a converted oil rig before being sidelined by financial and geopolitical problems. More recently, China has demonstrated the use of converted ships as launch platforms for small vehicles. SpaceX acquired two oil rigs it renamed Phobos and Deimos with the intent to convert them into offshore launch platforms for its Starship vehicle. However, earlier in the month Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, revealed that the company sold the rigs after concluding they were “not the right platform” for them, but added that the company likely, in the long term, will use sea-based platforms for the vehicle. Marotta said The Spaceport Company will soon announce “deepening partnerships” with launch providers. It has a memorandum of understanding with Virginia Space, which operates the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, to study how the company’s platforms could be used to augment the spaceport’s existing launch facilities. He said he hopes those partnerships along with the demonstration launches in May will help it raise money to build the platforms, which could be ready to enter service as soon as 2025. “It’s a non-trivial amount of money,” he said of the funding his company is trying to raise, but was not more specific.
An uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft launched to replace a damaged Soyuz arrived at the International Space Station Feb. 25. The Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft docked with the station’s Poisk module at 7:58 p.m. Eastern, a few minutes ahead of schedule. The spacecraft had launched two days earlier on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Instead of a crew, it carried about 430 kilograms of cargo to the station. Soyuz MS-23 was originally to launch a replacement crew of two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut to the station in March. Those plans changed after the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the station experienced a coolant leak in mid-December that Roscosmos later concluded made it infeasible for it to return the crew to Earth as originally planned. Roscosmos and NASA announced in January that Soyuz MS-23 would launch without a crew in February . It would replace Soyuz MS-22, which will return to Earth without a crew in March. That will keep the original Soyuz MS-22 crew of Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Frank Rubio on the station for several additional months. Roscosmos said Feb. 25 they expected the trio, originally set to return on Soyuz MS-22 in March after six months on the station, to instead come back in September on Soyuz MS-23. Roscosmos blamed the Soyuz MS-22 leak on a micrometeoroid impact, a finding that NASA accepted in January when the agencies announced their decision to launch Soyuz MS-23 without a crew. However, another coolant leak on the Progress MS-21 cargo spacecraft docked to the station Feb. 11 prompted new questions about that explanation, particularly after Roscosmos said “external influences” appeared to cause the Progress leak. “It’s still an ongoing assessment. They’re still taking a really close look at all of the information they have on spacecraft to try and understand if there’s any common cause or anything else that could have been a causal factor in having those two radiator panels leak,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, at a briefing a few hours after the docking to discuss the upcoming Crew-6 mission to the station. She added that Roscosmos was sharing information with NASA. That investigation is limited to telemetry from the spacecraft and external observations by cameras on the ISS, since the service module of the Progress and Soyuz spacecraft, where the leaks occurred, does not return to Earth. “When you have a situation like that, it tends to take a bit longer to assess and look through everything.”
U.S. Space Force officials will sit down with industry executives in Los Angeles this week to discuss the fine points of the upcoming national security space launch procurement. Companies expect to hear details about the Space Force’s plan to attract new launch providers to compete for as many as 70 missions projected for the 2025-2034 timeframe. “It’s going to be exciting,” Col. Douglas Pentecost, deputy program executive officer for assured access to space, told reporters Feb. 24. The Space Force on Feb. 16 released two draft requests for proposals for the dual-track National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3. One is for lower-end launch missions, and the other for the most demanding heavy-lift launches. Following this week’s meetings with the industry, a second draft RFP will be issued in May, and a final one this summer. The Space Force then will spend about a year evaluating bids. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX in 2020 won the NSSL Phase 2 five-year contracts to fly about 35 missions. For Phase 3 the Space Force projects anywhere from 60 to 70 missions. About 30 of those will be less demanding “Lane 1” launches that could be performed by emerging launch providers flying medium-size vehicles. The other 40 in “Lane 2” would be heavy-lift missions to high orbits carrying the most sensitive military and intelligence satellites. Commercial vs military demands Launch companies in the coming years will be busy deploying commercial mega constellations but the Space Force is not worried about a predicted shortage of supply , Pentecost said. Much of the available launch supply in the near term was gobbled up by Amazon ’s space internet Projet Kuiper which is procuring 83 launches on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Arianespace’s Ariane 6. Although NSSL launch providers are contractually obligated to prioritize national security missions, the Space Force tries to be flexible, Pentecost said. “We have a really good partnership with our launch service providers,” he said. “They know we actually take priority. And we can bump a commercial payload. But we don’t want to do that because we know we’re leveraging their commercial business. And so we work together with industry and with NASA to make sure that nobody is getting impacted.” “We have never really had a problem arranging our schedule and the commercial schedule,” he said. There are plans to increase launch capacity at Cape Canaveral on the East Coast and at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the West Coast, which will help speed up cadence. Taking risks on new providers Lane 1 will essentially be a wide and open competition. To be eligible, a company does not have to be fully certified as an NSSL provider but has to have a vehicle that’s already flown to orbit, said Col. Chad Melone, senior materiel leader for mission solutions for the Space Force’s space acquisition delta. “That is to make sure that we’re not awarding contracts to paper rockets,” he said. Companies that are transitioning from small to medium launchers, for example, are talking about launching tens of metric tons, and presumably could compete to deploy a plane of small satellites to low Earth orbit for the Space Development Agency. When bids come in for Lane 1, the NSSL program will work with SDA or other customers launching small satellites to low Earth orbit and assess the risk of flying on a newly developed vehicle. “SDA is probably a great example because they have a proliferated constellation” and the agency plans to launch dozens of satellites every year, said Melone. Commercial proliferated constellations is what drives the launch demand now, Melone said. “We’ve talked very extensively with the companies and the investors and what we heard is that several companies are chasing after commercial demand for deploying entire planes of those proliferated constellations.” The government does not know when these companies will be ready and has yet to learn the specifics of their launch systems so the Lane 1 contract allows for “tiered mission assurance,” said Melone, and their risk profile will be based on the maturity of their technology and other factors. “Lane 1 really stems from a warfighter need as the architecture is transitioning from single high-value assets to more proliferated constellations,” he said. “We think that Lane 1 provides resiliency through diversity of systems.”
Commercial space issues, including supporting emerging markets and regulating them, emerged as major priorities at a meeting of a National Space Council advisory group. The Users’ Advisory Group (UAG) of the council met Feb. 23 for the first time since the White House announced a new membership roster for the group in December. The meeting was largely focused on planning by the UAG and its six subcommittees on topics ranging from national security to education. Those discussions, as well as testimony it received from current and former government officials, suggested that commercial space topics will be a major focus for the committee as it looks at the industry’s growing capabilities and the problems it faces. “What we don’t talk about enough, significantly and in detail, is the relationship between the U.S. Space Force and all of national security space and the commercial sector,” said Gen. David D. Thompson, vice chief of space operations for the Space Force, in remarks to the committee. He devoted most of his comments to the UAG on that interplay between the national security and commercial sectors in space, from launch to new capabilities like in-space servicing. “We are seeing what is truly an explosion of commercial services and capabilities that we’re trying to leverage rapidly, perhaps not rapidly enough,” he said. Thompson was followed by Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, who discussed the “transformational” role of the International Space Station in stimulating commercial space activities like cargo and crew transportation. Transitioning from the ISS to commercial stations, though, presents new challenges. “We are very well aware that the lack of an agency with on-orbit authority to act as a regulator is a future barrier to commercial low Earth orbit space stations,” she said, a role she said was not for NASA. “We cannot be responsible for all activities on a commercial space station, and I hope the UAG will take an active interest in this issue.” “I feel like my work has already been done for me, between the comments of Gen. Thompson and Deputy Administrator Melroy,” said Rich DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, who also testified before the UAG. He focused on the office’s work developing a civil space traffic management system as well as its potential role in mission authorization of other commercial space activities. “We’ve got a bunch of stuff coming at us,” he said. “The regulatory regime isn’t really set up to handle all that yet.” He separated a near-term problem of setting up a mission authorization regime with a long-term issue of how to “reimagine regulation” to make it less cumbersome, something he said might take a generation to achieve. Some of the UAG subcommittees said they planned to address commercial space issues in the work plans they discussed later at the meeting. “We’re at a high point with ever-increasing opportunities for commerce and there’s a need for regulations to help industry,” said Lance Bush, president and chief executive of the Challenger Center and chair of the UAG’s exploration and discovery subcommittee. That included, he said, intellectual property protections for commercial activities on space stations. Eric Fanning, president and chief executive of the Aerospace Industries Association, said his subcommittee on economic development and the industrial base would tackle a range of commercial space issues, from international trade and support small businesses to addressing supply chain issues and space sustainability. The subcommittees didn’t give timelines for their analyses of these and other issues, and the meeting concluded without announcing a schedule for the next meeting. The UAG meeting wrapped up earlier than originally announced so that some members of the committee could go to another, unspecified event. A White House official, speaking on background, said later in the day that UAG members met with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is chair of the National Space Council, for a discussion about the UAG meeting. The White House confirmed that in a statement late in the day, stating that Harris “laid out her vision for the work of the UAG and thanked members for their leadership and service.”
TAMPA, Fla. — British ruggedized handset maker Bullitt unveiled its first satellite-enabled smartphones Feb. 24 that can send and receive text messages outside cellular coverage. The company’s Caterpillar-branded Cat S75 model geared for markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa is available for pre-order at prices starting at 599 euros ($634). Prices for Motorola Defy 2 , which Bullitt said would be available from certain operators across North America, Latin America, and Canada from April, start at $599. Both Android phones feature a 6.6-inch display and the ability to connect to geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites in addition to terrestrial 5G networks without needing an external antenna, thanks to hardware from Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek . The smartphones are designed to seek a GEO link if they fail to connect via cellular or Wi-Fi networks. Recipients of texts sent via space would need to have installed Bullitt’s proprietary satellite messaging app — available for Android and iPhone users — to reply. The service is facilitated by Silicon Valley startup Skylo and its partnerships with GEO operators, including Inmarsat, to use their satellites for a separate business specializing in connecting remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Tim Shepherd, Bullitt’s senior director for applications and product marketing, said these satellite services will be available for its customers in Europe and North America by the end of March. Availability in Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and Africa is slated to follow by mid-2023. Satellite-enabled messages would initially be limited to 140 bytes in size, Shepherd told SpaceNews , equating to 140 characters in most languages. He said users could share their location, but gifs, images, and voice services would require more bandwidth. “Getting from reliable two-way text-based messaging over satellite to freer voice and data use, is mainly a question of bandwidth availability,” he said via email. “As new satellites are launched, and importantly standards evolve to include higher data throughput over a satellite connection … Bullitt, and likely other services, will be able to adapt our platform components to enable the provision of voice and heavier data-consuming services to users.” The small print Sending or receiving messages via satellites requires a subscription that costs $4.99 per month for Motorola Defy 2 and €4.99 per month for Cat S75. Bullitt said the subscription would come with a free trial of an SOS service that uses emergency response centers run by FocusPoint International — similar to the satellite-enabled emergency services Apple currently offers for free with its latest iPhone. Apple’s satellite services are limited to SOS and use Globalstar’s satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), which are closer to Earth than GEO satellites and unlike them are constantly moving across the sky. This means iPhone 14 users must first be guided with an app to lock onto a Globalstar satellite before transmitting a message that can take about 15 seconds to send. With a clear view of the sky, Shepherd said it typically takes 20 seconds for one of its smartphones to make an initial GEO connection. ”Messages sent over Bullitt Satellite Messenger typically take around 30 seconds to send, from a satellite connected phone to a device with an IP connection,” he added. “This includes an in-built 5-second wait in which the app waits to see if the user will send another message in quick succession that can be sent within the same packet, with the intent to save the user money through efficient use of their messaging data allowance.” Bullitt is part of a surge of companies seeking to forge a place in the fledgling direct-to-device market, including Samsung Electronics, which announced an upgraded chip today to enable its smartphones to connect with satellites. Some ventures, including Lynk Global and AST SpaceMobile, are developing constellations from scratch to enter the market, while others such as Iridium Communications seek to leverage their existing satellite networks. Iridium has partnered with U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm to enable its satellites to connect with Android smartphones and other devices, with initial products slated for release in the second half of 2023 . Bullitt also plans to launch a “pocket-friendly” Bluetooth dongle via international retailers in the second quarter of 2022 called the Motorola Defy Satellite Link to enable any Android phone or iPhone to connect to its satellite messaging services. The company said the cost for just the device in the United States would start at $99.
A launch tower for commercial launches will be completed by the end of the year near China’s coastal Wenchang spaceport and begin hosting regular missions in 2024. Construction and commissioning of the first launch station at Hainan Commercial Launch Site will be completed by the end of this year, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) stated Jan. 29. Construction began in July 2022 and the facility will include service structures, launch pads, water spray systems, lightning protection towers, and rocket transfer equipment. The first launch will likely be of a Long March 8 rocket developed by CASC for commercial missions and rideshares. A second pad is also planned for Hainan Commercial Launch Site, located on the southern island province of Hainan. Together the new launch facilities are expected to be able to host launch vehicles powered by fuels including kerosene, methane and more. The construction of the new commercial site will help facilitate the continued growth in Chinese launch activities, especially for launchers developed by commercial rocket firms, whose activity could double in 2023 . Firms including Expace, Landspace, iSpace, Galactic Energy, Space Pioneer, Deep Blue Aerospace, Orienspace and Rocket Pi are all looking to reach orbit this year or next. It will also ease congestion at the established inland spaceports at Jiuquan, Taiyuan and Xichang, and existing pads at Wenchang. CASC’s Xi’an-based Sixth Academy is also ramping up production of the YF-100 kerosene-liquid oxygen engines which power many of China’s newer Long March rockets. 80 engines are expected to be delivered this year, up from 60 in 2022, allowing a wider use of these rockets. Wenchang has already been at the center of an expansion of Chinese launch plans and capabilities. The Wenchang Satellite Launch Center opened in 2014 and allowed China to launch new, larger, cryogenic rockets capable of sending 22-metric-ton space station modules to orbit. It also hosted launches of a lunar sample return mission and the country’s first interplanetary expedition, Tianwen-1 . Its activities are now beginning to expand. “In the near future, Wenchang will see its launch frequency go from between six to eight times a year, to 20 or 30 times a year,” Zhong Wen’an, chief engineer of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center which oversees Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, told CCTV Dec. 31. The Long March 5B rocket could this year begin launching stacks of satellites for China’s planned low Earth orbit communications megaconstellation, named Guowang . The new launch facilities are being constructed as China’s nascent commercial space sector begins to establish itself, following a 2014 government policy shift to open sections of activity to private investment. The activity is also part of a wider initiative for a Wenchang International Aerospace City which will also include rocket assembly and satellite research and development plants, and , satellite data and application services. Subsidiaries from CASC, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and commercial launch companies iSpace and Deep Blue Aerospace have already signed contracts to establish a presence in the city. The latter pair are developing reusable liquid launchers. Wenchang will continue to play a leading role in China’s evolving and expanding plans for space as the host for planned crewed lunar missions. Zhong Wen’an said in December that Wenchang will be expanded to facilitate the launch of human moon landing missions. CASC is developing a crew launcher for lunar missions that is expected to have a LEO test launch around 2026 . A pair of the full, triple-core, three-stage rockets could support a short-term human lunar landing mission before 2030 . The giant state-owned space and defense contractor is also developing the super heavy-lift Long March 9 to launch lunar infrastructure from Wenchang. CASC last year revealed that it had scrapped plans for an expendable version of the 100-meter-plus-long rocket and was shifting to a reusable design , likely delaying its test launch into the 2030s. Wenchang is also playing a role in the popularization of space in China. While operated by the People’s Liberation Army, as with China’s far less-accessible inland sites, Wenchang spaceport’s location near pubic beaches means thousands of spectators turn out to watch launches. 
SEOUL, South Korea — Samsung Electronics said Feb. 23 it had secured a new standardized 5G non-terrestrial network (NTN) modem that enables direct smartphone-satellite communications in locations where there is no cellular network connectivity. Samsung plans to integrate this modem into its own Exynos chip , which is used in many Samsung smartphones, except for the current flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy S23. This will “accelerate the commercialization of 5G satellite communications and pave the way for the 6G-driven Internet of Everything (IoE) era,” the Korean tech giant said in a statement . “This milestone builds on our rich legacy in wireless communications technologies, following the introduction of the industry’s first commercial 4G LTE modem in 2009 and the industry’s first 5G modem in 2018,” said Kim Min-goo, Samsung vice president of communication processor development, in the statement. “Samsung aims to take the lead in advancing hybrid terrestrial-NTN communications ecosystems around the world in preparation for the arrival of 6G.” The statement focused largely on explaining technologies applied and the modem’s function — but nothing about satellites that are another essential infrastructure for off-grid connectivity. Samsung is the latest smartphone maker jumping on the direct-to-cell bandwagon. Apple launched direct phone-satellite connectivity in September , relying on Globalstar’s satellite network to provide emergency communications where cellular service is unavailable. Apple first made this technology available in the United States and Canada, expanding it later to France, Germany, Ireland, and the U.K. China’s Huawei is another smartphone maker that has joined the race, leveraging China’s space-based Beidou navigation constellation. Satellite operators don’t miss out on this. In August 2022, SpaceX unveiled plans to provide direct-to-cell services for emergency assistance and beyond in partnership with U.S. mobile operator T-Mobile. U.S.-based startups Lynk Global and AST SpaceMobile have a similar direct-to-cell strategy. Spanish startup Sateliot recently said satellite technology it is developing for small internet of things (IoT) devices could also be used to send and receive SMS messages from a regular handset. In January, chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership with Iridium to bring satellite communication to Android phones powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
NASA anticipates starting work later this year on the first cargo mission for the lunar Gateway, three years after awarding SpaceX a contract for such missions. NASA selected SpaceX in March 2020 for its first Gateway Logistics Services contract to transport cargo to and from the lunar Gateway. SpaceX will develop a version of its Dragon cargo spacecraft, called Dragon XL, that would launch on a Falcon Heavy to deliver several tons of cargo to Gateway and remove trash. However, there had been little public progress on that effort since the 2020 announcement. A NASA official said a year after the contract award that it had delayed a formal authorization to proceed (ATP) on the first mission as the agency evaluated the overall plans for the Artemis program and when that mission would be needed. The lack of information since then, though, prompted speculation that the program might be in jeopardy. Speaking on a panel at the SpaceCom conference here Feb. 22, NASA’s Mark Wiese, manager of deep space logistics for the Gateway program, said the agency had waited to start work on the first logistics mission as it focused on other aspects of Gateway. “If you look at the overall Artemis architecture, logistics is the shortest pole in the tent from a development standpoint,” he explained. The contract has a four-year lead time for the first mission, but he suggested SpaceX might be ready faster than that. “We purposely delayed that, turning it on, to make sure we’re not spending money and throwing resources where it doesn’t need to be thrown,” he said, while working on other aspects of Artemis. The first Artemis mission to use the Gateway will be Artemis 4, currently scheduled for 2027. That means that NASA is preparing to give the go-ahead for that first logistics mission needed to support Artemis 4 this year. “We’re looking forward to ATP’ing that mission this year to enable that 2027 first crewed mission.” Wiese said later that the NASA has been working with SpaceX on a series of studies to refine the Dragon XL design and examine cargo configurations and other capabilities that could be enabled by the spacecraft. He confirmed that SpaceX will use Dragon XL for those initial missions, but left the door open for using the company’s Starship vehicle for cargo delivery in the future. “We are all for enabling evolution,” he said. “We talked to them about Starship evolution and how it all worked together, but we’re not there yet because it’s still in a development phase.” NASA also envisions expanding the overall Gateway Logistics Services contract to add more providers. He noted NASA issued a request for information last year to understand emerging industry capabilities, such as new launch vehicles. “We want that. It’s just a matter of funding,” he said of adding providers. “We’ve got to get out first mission turned on and get a funding stream going so we can justify an on-ramp.”
The first launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket is now scheduled for no earlier than May 4, a date the company says is based on remaining tests of the rocket and its main engines as well as launch windows for its primary payload. In a call with reporters Feb. 23, ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno announced the date for the long-awaited inaugural flight of the rocket as the company gears up for a series of tests of the rocket at Space Launch Complex 41. The launch will carry Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and a payload for space memorial company Celestis. “We are now targeting the fourth of May so we plan our manifest around that and be ready to fly that payload when it comes in,” Bruno said. ULA will have a window of about four days to conduct the launch. Several factors led ULA to select that date. One is the mission requirements of Peregrine, the primary payload on the launch, which has a window of only a few days each month to fly its trajectory to the moon. A second is a series of tests of the Vulcan Centaur rocket, currently in the vertical integration facility adjacent to the pad. Bruno said the rocket will roll out to the pad “a few days from now” for tanking tests followed by at least one wet dress rehearsal where the vehicle is fully loaded with propellants and goes through a practice countdown, stopping just before engine ignition. That will followed by what ULA calls a flight readiness firing, a wet dress rehearsal that ends with a firing of the BE-4 engines in the booster at about 70% of rated thrust for 3.5 seconds. “That is more than adequate for us to understand all of those systems,” he said. After the flight readiness firing, the rocket will return to the integration facility for payload integration, then be rolled back to the pad for launch. In parallel, ULA and Blue Origin are finishing the formal qualification of the BE-4 engine, which Bruno described as the “pacing item” for the launch. “It’s taking a little bit longer than anticipated.” He revealed that, in a qualification test of one of two engines, the liquid oxygen pump had about 5% higher performance than expected or seen on other engines. “When the performance of your hardware has even a small shift that you didn’t expect, sometimes that is telling us that there could be something else going on in the system that is potentially of greater concern.” ULA and Blue Origin decided to take the engine off the test stand and disassemble it. Engineers concluded that the higher performance was just “unit-to-unit variation” and not a problem with the engine itself, Bruno said. “Now we’re satisfied and will resume testing shortly with the other engine,” he said. That would allow qualification tests to conclude in time for a launch as soon as mid-April. However, Peregrine’s launch window in April is earlier in the month, hence the decision to set the May 4 launch date for Vulcan. That’s schedule depends on not just testing of the Vulcan and qualification of the BE-4 but the delivery of Peregrine and other payloads. Bruno expressed confidence that all three customers will deliver their payloads in time for that May launch. Astrobotic, he disclosed, just completed testing of Peregrine at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and will return it to the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters for final preparations before shipping to Cape Canaveral. “I’m not concerned about them,” he said of Astrobotic. “I feel very confident they will be ready to go.” Similarly, he expected both Amazon and Celestis to deliver their payloads in time for a May launch. “I believe that we will have all three of our payloads there and ready to go.” The Vulcan launch date is very close to another critical ULA mission, the Atlas 5 launch of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on its first crewed flight. Boeing and NASA officials announced Feb. 17 that t hey were on track to have the vehicle ready for launch in mid to late April . With the May 4 launch date set for Vulcan, ULA can now sort out other launches on its manifest. “By declaring that now, it allows us to work with all the other customers on the manifest, understand where their spacecraft are and get everybody scheduled so there are fewer disruptions,” he said. However, he said it’s too soon to determine how missions like Starliner would be affected. ULA had previously projected the first Vulcan launch for the first quarter of the year. The slip, Bruno argued, should not adversely affect plans to certify the vehicle for its first national security launch in the fourth quarter, a schedule that requires ULA to both perform this launch and a second carrying Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft. “Are we frustrated? No. We’re being careful and we’re being thoughtful to make sure we have a successful mission,” he said. “We want very much to get this right, and waiting a few weeks for the first launch does not impact any of those other schedules. We have plenty of time to do this. We’re going to do this the right way.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Ligado Networks and Omnispace announced plans Feb. 23 to pool their satellite spectrum to boost the text, voice, and data services they aim to provide directly to standard smartphones and other devices. Ligado runs a communications network from geostationary orbit that government and enterprise customers across North America access via specialized terminals, and Omnispace is developing plans for a global non-geostationary connectivity constellation. Both have previously outlined plans to enter an emerging direct-to-device (D2D) market amid efforts to standardize satellite and terrestrial mobile services. Some satellite companies plan to use spectrum from mobile operator partners to connect devices outside cellular coverage. Others, such as Ligado and Omnispace, see advantages of using mobile satellite spectrum already licensed to connect devices on the ground from space. Their partnership would combine parts of Ligado’s L-band spectrum in the U.S. and Canada with the S-band spectrum Omnispace has across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific to expand their international capabilities. The companies said in a news release their agreement also paves the way for developing multi-band, multi-orbit D2D solutions. For consumer smartphones, these solutions would include two-way voice, messaging, and data capabilities they say would go beyond the emergency texting services provided by D2D pioneer Apple under its partnership with satellite operator Globalstar. “In many ways, this spectrum combination is the last missing piece to unlocking the full promise and potential of direct-to-device connectivity and creates the necessary foundation for an exceptional voice, text and data experience,” Omnispace CEO Ram Viswanathan said in a statement. “Together with Ligado, we will bring the spectrum and technology to deliver a game-changing solution directly from space to a variety of devices that could benefit billions of mobile subscribers worldwide.” The companies did not provide a timeframe and declined to elaborate on a news release that was thin on details. “We suspect the best way for the companies to maximize the value of their spectrum portfolio and constellation is via a neutral-host model,” New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin said, enabling them to partner with multiple terrestrial network operators worldwide. “The satellite network could operate as an overlay network for terrestrial networks that are geographically limited and mostly operate within single countries,” Chaplin said. “The D2D network could sell capacity to terrestrial network operators or split revenues that the terrestrial operators collect for D2D services.” Chaplin also noted that their spectrum partnership does not have a global portfolio, suggesting they might be open to partnering with another satellite operator with licenses in Europe. Inmarsat, Echostar, and Thuraya all have some combination of S-band and L-band spectrum in Europe, he added. D2D provides Ligado with an important growth opportunity after plans to beam L-band spectrum terrestrially for a 5G network in the United States were put on hold following GPS interference concerns . 
TAMPA, Fla. — Rivada Space Networks has secured the launches and financing it needs to deploy 300 satellites by a mid-2026 regulatory deadline, an executive said Feb. 23 a day after announcing a manufacturer for the constellation. The German venture, a subsidiary of U.S.-based wireless technology company Rivada Networks, said Feb. 22 that Florida-headquartered Terran Orbital would build the 500-kilogram satellites under a $2.4 billion contract. “We have funding commitments from both existing shareholders in Rivada and some new investors, which are sufficient to meet our obligations,” Rivada Networks chair and CEO Declan Ganley told SpaceNews in an interview. The financing covers the manufacturing contract and a launch announcement “coming up very soon,” he said, “and so those commitments are good for the foreseeable future.” He declined to provide more details on the launch plan or name the investors backing its space-based communications project, except to say they are not government organizations. “They are investors that saw the phenomenal commercial opportunity to invest in Rivada with all of the potential commercial upside that this offers them for a return on their investment,” Ganley added. Terran Orbital hopes to have the first four satellites ready for a launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) as early as 2025. The manufacturer must deliver 144 satellites before the end of March 2026, according to a regulatory filing on its agreement with Rivada, and the rest by the end of June 2026. “Performance under the Agreement will be split into a developmental phase, with amounts billed on a time and materials basis, and a firm fixed price production phase,” Terran Orbital said in the Feb. 21 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Rivada has spectrum licenses covering 576 proposed Ka-band satellites, and the contract includes an option for Terran Orbital to build the remaining spacecraft needed to complete the constellation. Impending deadlines Rivada has two spectrum filings lodged with the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations affiliate that regulates satellite spectrum rights globally, and each cover 288 satellites. To avoid losing these spectrum rights under the ITU’s constellation milestone rules, Rivada must deploy 50% of the satellites in these filings by mid-2026 and the rest by mid-2028. The contract for 300 satellites satisfies the 50% milestone and leaves 12 satellites to be kept on the ground as spares, Rivada Space Networks chief strategy officer Diederik Kelder said. “So, for instance, if we ship our satellites to the launch site and a satellite falls off the ship, we [still] ensure that we have sufficient satellites on the launch pad to fulfill that milestone,” Kelder said. The ITU adopted constellation deployment milestones in late 2019 to rein in a surge of proposed LEO satellites. The rules also require Rivada to deploy 10% of its full constellation — 56 satellites — by September this year. However, Kelder said Rivada is eligible for a waiver under this initial milestone partly because its spectrum filings were processed before the rules took effect in 2019. He said Rivada aims to submit a waiver request before the next ITU processing period between March and June. “There’s very specific rules or regulations laid out to obtain a waiver,” he added, “we are fully convinced that we will comply with all those rules for the waiver — the contract that we just announced is part of that.” Rivada acquired the spectrum filings in early 2022 in a deal that became embroiled in a shareholder dispute with investors that had also been looking to use the frequencies. While there are still lawsuits outstanding, Ganley said these issues remain separated “from anything to do with these filings” and do not impact its proposed constellation. 
China’s response to Starlink and OneWeb first became apparent in 2020 in filings for just under 13,000 satellites with the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva. Beijng followed up by designating “satellite internet” a national “new infrastructure” project and establishing the high-level, state-owned China Satellite Network Group in 2021 to oversee the constellation project known as “Guowang.” News regarding the progress of Guowang has been limited since then. The group signed an agreement with the government of Shanghai to foster the development of commercial space activities and set up two companies in the city of Chongqing as part of the project. Guowang supersedes two earlier and much smaller LEO communications constellations named Hongyan and Hongyun, planned by China’s main space contractor CASC and its sister defense giant CASIC respectively. It also meant there was no room for similar plans proposed by Chinese commercial space companies. However, the indications are that China’s emerging commercial space firms will have a large role in the project, both in manufacturing satellites and launching them to orbit. In March last year, Beijing-based private firm Galaxy Space launched six stackable V-band satellites on a Long March 2C rocket. According to Chinese state media, the mission proves that, “China has built up the low-cost, batch development and networking operation capabilities of satellites, all factors necessary to build a satellite internet mega-constellation.” Chinese private launch service providers have also begun noting the Guowang national satellite internet project as a potential source of revenue in news releases, suggesting that they will help provide additional launch capacity beyond that of CASC to build the constellation. This would provide emerging firms with important early revenue while also aiding national plans. CASC is also looking at adapting the Long March 5B , capable of sending 25 metric tons of payload to LEO, for launching large batches of satellites for constellations. China is planning another domestic record for launches this year. The country also has new commercial small satellite manufacturing capacity coming online, meaning 2023 could provide a much stronger indication of what Guowang will look like. Elsewhere CASIC, which has set up subsidies to run space projects for commercial revenue, will also be looking to get back on track with its Xingyun narrowband Internet of Things (IoT) constellation of 80 satellites. In 2022, operator Expace recovered from earlier failures of its Kuaizhou solid rockets to conduct successful return-to-flight missions, paving the way for new Xingyun satellites to be sent into orbit this year. Changguang Satellite Technology will continue to deploy remote sensing satellites for its under-construction commercial Jilin-1 constellation. The firm stated in November that it was expanding Jilin-1 from a planned 138 satellites to 300. Other commercial entities, including ADA Space, HKATG and the recently sanctioned Spacety are also expected to continue sending their satellites into space in 2023 for respective IoT, remote sensing and synthetic aperture radar constellations as China’s commercial space sector continues to grow. This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A billionaire-backed series of private astronaut missions is now planning its first launch this summer that will include the first spacewalk on a commercial spaceflight. Jared Isaacman, who led the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission that flew himself and three others for three days on a Crew Dragon in 2021, announced the Polaris Program a year ago . The program is a series of missions that will start using Crew Dragon and culminate with the first crewed Starship flight. At the time of the announcement, the first mission, Polaris Dawn, was scheduled for as soon as the fourth quarter of 2022, but has slipped into 2023 in part because of additional time needed for training for the mission as well as schedules for other SpaceX missions. Polaris Dawn is now scheduled to launch this summer, Isaacman said at the SpaceCom conference here Feb. 23. “We’re now just months away from flying.” The highlight of Polaris Dawn will be a spacewalk, or EVA, the first from a Crew Dragon spacecraft or from any commercial mission. Because Crew Dragon does not have an airlock, the entire cabin will be depressurized, so all four people on board will be suited up. “As far as I’m concerned, all four crew members are doing an EVA,” he said. Two of the four will exit the spacecraft while the other two support them from inside. The spacewalk will last about two hours, he estimated, from the time the cabin air is vented to when it is repressurized again. “We’ll see how much time we have outside the vehicle. We have a whole test protocol to go through so we can learn as much as we can about the suits.” SpaceX has developed the suits that the Polaris Dawn crew members will wear. Neither the company nor Isaacman have disclosed details about their design, but he said that the ability to leave a spacecraft is critical for long-term plans for making humanity multiplanetary, SpaceX’s stated goal. The knowledge of how to do spacewalks is currently limited to a few government space agencies, he argued, but needs to spread and also become more affordable. “From SpaceX’s perspective, building suits that don’t cost a lot of money, as the current generation of suits do, and can be mass produced for hundreds or thousands of people someday, is very important,” he said. The suit will be based on the pressure suit SpaceX uses for Crew Dragon missions to protect astronauts from cabin depressurization. “That was a last line of defense. How do we build from here to something that is now primarily designed to be exposed?” he said. Those changes involve insulation, protection from micrometeroids and additional redundancy, among other upgrades. The spacewalk is only one goal of the five-day mission. Polaris Dawn will start by temporarily raising the apogee of the spacecraft’s orbit to about 1,400 kilometers, the highest altitude for a crewed spacecraft since the last Apollo lunar mission a half-century ago. That will start about nine orbits after launch, keeping the spacecraft at the higher orbit “just long enough to get the data we need” for experiments linked to the radiation environment, Isaacman said. Polaris Dawn will also test communications through the Starlink constellation, to see if that system can take over communications handled through traditional ground stations or NASA’s TDRS satellite network. There will be other experiments that the crew will conduct during the flight as well. “We’re going to learn a lot,” he said of the spacesuit testing, “and we’re going to build on it for, ideally, our second missions and those that follow.” When Isaacman announced Polaris a year ago, plans for the second mission were unclear. In September, NASA announced it had started a study with SpaceX to look at potentially using Crew Dragon to reboost the Hubble Space Telescope . Isaacman was at the briefing that announced the study and suggested that reboost mission, which might also include servicing of some kind, could be the second Polaris mission. Isaacman said at SpaceCom that there was little information he could reveal about the ongoing study. “There’s been tons of progress on it. There’s a lot of enthusiasm,” he said. “From my perspective, it certainty builds off of Polaris Dawn. There are a lot of things we are going to do on that mission and, if they’re successful, I could certainly see us building upon it for a mission like this.” NASA has not provided updates on the progress of the study, although in December it released a request for information about other options to reboost Hubble . The third Polaris mission will be the first crewed flight of Starship. Isaacman said he didn’t have special insights into the first orbital launch attempt of the vehicle, although a company official said Feb. 22 they were proceeding towards a launch in March , pending a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. He said he didn’t know how long after the first successful orbital launch before SpaceX would be ready to fly people on the vehicle. “They have a constellation to build out with the next generation of Starlinks,” along with other satellite customers, he said. “When they’re ready, they’ll be ready.”
China sent the Zhongxing-26 communications satellite into orbit Feb. 23, marking the resumption orbital launches following a pause for Chinese New Year. A Long March 3B rocket lifted off at 6:49 a.m. Eastern (1149 UTC) from Xichang, southwest China, successfully sending Zhongxing-26 (ChinaSat-26) into geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed launch success within the hour. Zhongxing-26 is based on the DFH-4E satellite bus and uses chemical and electric propulsion. It is China’s first satellite providing more than 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) and was developed by CASC’s China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). CAST states the satellite is equipped with 94 Ka-band user beams. This is 3.5 times more than the 26-beam, 20 Gbps, Dongfanghong-3B-based Zhongxing-16 launched in 2017. That satellite has been supplying connectivity to aviation passengers such as Sichuan Airlines’ Airbus A320 flights using Viasat in-flight connectivity equipment. Operator China Satcom describes the satellite as an important piece of national space infrastructure and helping to meet national requirements for connectivity. Zhongxing-26 will mainly provide broadband access for fixed terminals and aviation in shipbourne users in China and surrounding areas from 125 degrees East in the geostationary belt. The overall cost was 2.3 billion yuan ($333 million) according to a feasibility study. The launch was China’s first since Jan. 15, following which activities paused for Chinese New Year. It is the fifth Long March launch this calendar year, with CASC planning more than 60 launches in 2023. Various Chinese commercial companies plan to add 20 or more launches to the overall figure. The mission is the first launch of the 56-meter-high Long March 3B in 2023. The three-stage rocket has four boosters and uses a hypergolic mix of hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide with a liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen third stage. The launcher is the workhorse for Chinese launches to GTO. Launching from inland at Xichang, the rocket has been the cause of numerous debris incidents downrange. The Long March 7A, touted as a greener, new-generation launcher using kerosene-liquid oxygen and launching from the coast at Wenchang, is yet to ramp up its launch rate to replace the aging Long March 3B. It most recently launched a pair of classified satellites Jan. 9.
Relativity Space announced Feb. 22 it will attempt the first launch of its Terran 1 rocket as soon as March 8 after securing a launch license and skipping a planned final test. The company announced it received a Federal Aviation Administration launch license for its first Terran 1 mission. With the license in hand, the company says it is targeting a launch of the rocket March 8 between 1 and 4 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission, called “Good Luck, Have Fun” by the company, is a test flight of the rocket. While Terran 1 is designed to place up to 1,250 kilograms into low Earth orbit, the inaugural launch is not carrying any customer payloads. The license comes after a series of tests of both stages of the rocket, manufactured largely using 3D printing. Relativity had planned to cap off that test campaign by firing the first-stage engines of the full vehicle on the pad. The FAA license for the launch included a “stage one hotfire” as part of the pre-launch operations covered by the license. However, a company spokesperson told SpaceNews that Relativity had decided not to conduct that static-fire test. The overall test campaign had “burned down risk significantly” and gave the company confidence in proceeding with a launch without another hotfire of the first stage. The spokesperson added the company had to balance the risk of proceeding with the launch and conducting more tests that add wear and tear on the vehicle, and that the company had decided to accept the higher risk of an abort on its first launch attempt. Terran 1, while designed to serve the small satellite market, is also a technology pathfinder for the larger, fully reusable Terran R rocket that Relativity is also developing. The company says it has a launch backlog worth more than $1.2 billion for that vehicle, including an agreement last June with OneWeb to launch some of that company’s second-generation satellites. Tim Ellis, chief executive and co-founder of Relativity, tweeted Feb. 22 that he recalled that his mentor when starting up the company, technology entrepreneur Sam Altman, “told us we were absolutely crazy for trying to simultaneously invent a brand new manufacturing technology and an orbital rocket, which is already super hard.” “Now we are on the launch pad almost ready to go with the world’s first 3D printed rocket,” he continued. “It’s been a truly wild ride to get to this point, and certainly way harder than I ever imagined going into it – but all the feels from me and our team as we embark on this historic launch.”
ORLANDO, Fla. — Israeli geospatial analytics firm Asterra is considering ordering its own satellite as it struggles to compete with government agencies for images, an executive said Feb. 22. Speaking on a SpaceCom conference panel here, chief technology officer Lauren Guy said Asterra has been resisting its own spacecraft since he co-founded the company five years ago. “As a data company, I don’t want to own hardware,” Guy said, because it is much easier and cheaper to task a publicly available satellite and provide solutions from its data. “But capacity is an issue,” he said. “We work mainly with governmental space agencies and [they] don’t care about commercial companies. They don’t care about SLAs [service level agreements],” he added, and “for me it was very surprising.” Asterra’s analytical solutions are based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data sourced from three satellites: Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2, and the Saocom 1A and 1B radar spacecraft that Argentina operates jointly with Italy. Its offering includes tools for inspecting soil moisture near canal levees and flood defenses. However, Guy said the priorities of space agencies lie elsewhere, such as border defense needs that have been growing in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, leaving little room for Asterra’s commercial growth ambitions. For instance, he said Asterra has solutions for detecting oil and gas leaks but the company cannot bring them to market because they require daily images. “We have to fight for every acquisition,” he told SpaceNews on the conference’s sidelines, “not with other commercial companies, but with space agencies that want to use the satellite.” He said Asterra is in “advanced talks” about ordering a satellite that could be deployed in 2025 or 2026. “We came to the conclusion that we have to hold our own destiny and to hold our own future,” he said, “because otherwise, we won’t scale.” California-based hyperspectral imaging startup Orbital Sidekick came to the same conclusion, its CEO and co-founder Dan Katz said during the same panel. With access to space increasing and small satellite costs falling, Katz said “we don’t need to raise $500 million to launch satellites anymore. You can launch satellites relatively affordably, and then you can get access to your own capacity [without] competing.” He said latency is also a big issue for the Earth observation industry. “If you’re a pipeline operator, you want to know as soon as possible if your line is leaking, or if there’s a security threat, so not being beholden to third-party data providers is critical.”
Despite its successes last year, the leadership of NASA warns that the coming year could be more challenging as it fights to preserve its budget on Capitol Hill. Speaking at the SpaceCom conference here Feb. 22, Bob Cabana, NASA associate administrator, said securing funding to support future Artemis missions and other agency priorities may be difficult given proposals in Congress to reduce overall federal spending. “I think this year is going to be even more challenging for us” than 2022, he said, citing “what we have to accomplish in order to set our course for the future and ensure that we are successful.” NASA got nearly $25.4 billion in the fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill enacted in December, an increase of 5.6% from the $24 billion it received in 2022. Cabana called that increase “outstanding” but cautioned, “I think we’re going to have some challenges.” Those difficulties, said Alicia Brown, associate administrator for NASA’s office of legislative and intergovernmental affairs, come from proposals by the new Republican leadership in the House to cut spending for fiscal year 2024, such as going back to fiscal year 2022 levels. “It is going to be a tough couple of years for us,” she said at SpaceCom, citing those budget-cutting proposals. “We’re concerned about how it affects human spaceflight and Artemis, but it’s going to affect all of our programs.” She said NASA was particularly worried about how it would affect later missions in the Artemis program. “What we can do right now in this fiscal year is ensure that there is not a big gap between Artemis 3, our first landing, and Artemis 4, our first Gateway mission.” NASA’s current plans envision Artemis 3 launching as soon as 2025, followed by Artemis 4 in 2027. Those schedules depend on the development of several new or upgraded capabilities, including SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander for Artemis 3 and, for Artemis 4, both the first Gateway elements as well as the Block 1B version of the Space Launch System. “We, and hopefully our partners, are going to spend a lot of time on the Hill talking about why it’s important, maybe in the context of what countries like China are doing, and why Congress needs to make those investments now in us to ensure that we’ve got a strong, steady cadence of lunar landings,” Brown said. NASA, in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, requested $26 billion in 2023. That proposal included a projected budget of $26.5 billion in 2024, increasing to $28.1 billion in 2027. The White House is expected to release its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal March 9. Regulatory challenges Cabana and Brown said they are closely watching developments regarding regulation of the commercial space industry. While NASA is not a regulator, it is increasingly relying on industry for many capabilities, including transporting astronauts and, eventually, using commercial space stations. “Commercial LEO destinations, I think, is going to be a huge challenge,” Cabana said. He cited NASA’s work with Axiom Space on private astronaut missions to the International Space Station as a way to learn how to work commercial partners on space stations. Those proposed stations face their own challenges in regulatory oversight, with no agency having clear authority to regulate them and provide the authorization and continuing supervision required by the Outer Space Treaty. “It’s going to be an interesting year in D.C. for commercial space setting up the regulatory framework going forward,” Brown said. One near-term milestone is the impending expiration of current restrictions on the Federal Aviation Administration to enact safety regulations for spaceflight participants, a “learning period” that has been in place since 2004 and extended several times. “That’s a big thing that the FAA and Congress are looking at,” she said. “It has ripple effects throughout industry.” While the FAA can’t currently regulate safety of commercial spaceflight participants, NASA does have the ability to impose requirements on companies flying NASA astronauts and supporting the ISS. Cabana suggested those have become de facto regulations for non-NASA commercial space activities. “When they are off on their own, NASA doesn’t have anything to do with that,” he said of such missions. “But when you look at how SpaceX operates those missions, they follow the same procedures that NASA has helped them put into place for our missions.” “I think we’re laying the groundwork on what needs to get done, and as we license, eventually, these commercial LEO destinations, we’ll see what comes out from a regulatory point of view,” he continued. “There’s a lot of work that’s going to need to get done between now and then.” Those stations will also need some kind of “mission authorization” to comply with the Outer Space Treaty that the National Space Council is currently studying . In a separate presentation at SpaceCom, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said he expects a proposal for mission authorization to soon emerge from that effort. “I think they’re pretty close to wrapping it up.” He said he supported a “light touch” regulatory approach to avoid burdening companies and emerging new space markets. “The first thing we do hear from industry is, be careful with what you do with regulation,” he said, promoting an approach to provide the minimum regulations needed for safety and upholding international obligations. “We are mindful of that.” The White House mission authorization proposal that emerges from the ongoing effort will not be the end of the process. “There will be a broader dialog with Congress on this,” he said, providing legal authorities and other requirements. “Ultimately, they will play a key role in all of this.”
As SpaceX prepares to attempt Starship’s first orbital flight , the company is contemplating military applications for the super-heavy launch vehicle. Starship holds the potential to become a mobility platform for the U.S. military, said Gary Henry, senior advisor for national security space solutions at SpaceX. Speaking Feb. 21 at the Space Mobility conference, Henry said the experience SpaceX will gain launching Starlink satellites on Starship and developing the vehicle for NASA’s Artemis program will help the U.S. military better understand how to employ it for cargo delivery and other missions. Henry, a former Boeing executive and U.S. Air Force officer, is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory on potential concepts for using rockets for point-to-point cargo delivery under a $102 million five-year contract awarded in 2020. Other space companies have signed agreements with U.S. Transportation Command to explore rocket cargo concepts but only SpaceX has won a large contract. Greg Spanjers, program manager for rocket cargo at AFRL, said the military envisions a future when it could be cheaper to send cargo via rocket than by transport aircraft. In a national security or humanitarian crisis, a launch vehicle would fly from Cape Canaveral, for example, and either land on an austere field to deliver cargo or airdrop it. For the rocket cargo program to be viable, Spanjers said, DoD expects to use launch providers that fly frequently so they can offer competitive pricing. “To make this a success, we need a very high launch rate, and we need to have systems that reenter and that can bring a high down mass,” he added. With regard to Starship, Henry said, SpaceX is forecasting mass to orbit costs falling from $2,000 a kilogram to $200 a kilogram, or even lower, he said. “If Elon gets his way, you’re at $20 per kilogram.” “The cost element of this is going to be pretty compelling, and it’ll happen soon,” Henry said. Col. James Horne, deputy director of operations at U.S. Space Systems Command, said there are “compelling use cases” for shipping cargo around the world on rockets. “When you think about the situation in the Indo-Pacific Command area of operations, there’s a tyranny of distance issue where you’ve got a vast desert of water … and you have island chains like we saw in World War II.” That area “presents unique challenges from a mobility perspective that I think applications like rocket cargo could really help solve,” said Horne. Horne said he could not discuss specific scenarios that are being looked at, but he said the military could face transportation challenges “that cannot be solved by ships or airplanes today.” If rocket cargo moves forward and the technology matures, the Space Force would take the lead in managing the program and procuring services, he said. “We’re already starting to actively plan for a program standup in the 2026 timeframe.” On-orbit infrastructure Henry said Starship’s lunar landing architecture could support the U.S. military by providing on-orbit infrastructure for logistics and refueling. For NASA’s moon program , SpaceX would launch a Starship to low Earth orbit to serve as a fuel depot for other vehicles that would be traveling to and from the lunar surface. That infrastructure could be leveraged for national security, he said. There are ongoing discussions about “on orbit commodities to enable things like dynamic space operations and ‘maneuver without regret.’” These are terms used by U.S. Space Command to describe its vision for military operations in the space domain. Dynamic space operations is the ability to maneuver satellites and move payloads across different orbits, something that is not possible today because satellites don’t carry enough fuel and were not built to be refueled. Lt. Gen. John Shaw during a talk at the Space Mobility conference, said the U.S. military cannot maneuver satellites “without regret” because it has to conserve precious fuel. He said that complicates the nation’s ability to compete in space with rival powers that have maneuvering satellites. Henry said the Starship human landing system is on a path to support NASA, and not far into the future “we as a nation are going to have a capability that will fundamentally change the way we can protect and defend the space realm. And we are very excited about the prospects of being able to contribute to that discussion.” Horne said the military is “going to need that infrastructure on orbit, not just for cargo, storage and movement, but for a lot of other applications. We’re gonna need gas tanks in the future. We may even have places where we are manufacturing things,” he added. “We’re going to find military-unique ways to use that from a national security perspective.”
Ambitious plans from China for a global broadband network could hamper Western constellation operators seeking to maximize their international subscriber numbers. While finer details about these plans remain under wraps, they come amid China’s aggressive pursuit for more international infrastructure under its colossal Belt and Road initiative, which seeks to capitalize on the country’s economic strength to play a higher profile role in global affairs. To date, state-owned satellite operator China Satcom has made little impact on the world stage and has primarily focused on serving domestic needs from geostationary orbit (GEO). The operator has capacity across south and southeast Asia — and over the Middle East and Africa in partnership with Belarus — but has little international business other than in a few select markets, such as Indonesia. China’s international satellite communications presence is set to change in the next five to 10 years as the country deploys a global network in low Earth orbit (LEO). A Chinese LEO constellation with strong government backing could make it harder for western operators to compete internationally, particularly in countries with deep political ties to China. Belarus, Pakistan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Laos, and other counties that have previously bought GEO satellites from China “might be more likely to lean towards a Chinese constellation for government projects,” said Blaine Curcio, a senior affiliate consultant for Euroconsult. These countries could also be more inclined to award landing rights to a Chinese constellation over Western alternatives. While they might have been small markets anyway for the likes of U.S.- based Starlink and OneWeb of the U.K., countries that could allow both Western and Chinese constellations pose more interesting questions for the future shape of the industry. “This would include Indonesia,” Curcio added, “where the population/market is big enough for the government to negotiate favorable landing right terms with constellations, especially if there are multiple options.” Malaysia could also be in this group, along with Brazil, Argentina, and most large African countries. China itself remains largely closed off to foreign satellite broadband providers. The Chinese government’s firm grip on information channels aside, the country is already well-served by one of the world’s most developed terrestrial communications networks. Curcio estimates most non-Chinese satellite operators get less than 1% of any global revenues from China, and 0% in most cases. Starlink and OneWeb have already said they have no plans to serve China with the constellations they are developing. Up to now, the only operators outside mainland China that have done much business in the country have been Inmarsat of the U.K., Thailand’s Thaicom, and Hong Kong-based APT Satellite and AsiaSat. And the more strategically important satellite communications become — for keeping autonomous vehicles connected, for instance, or just keeping up with the West — the more analysts expect China to emphasize having its own domestic capabilities. A similar situation played out three decades ago with the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, China’s alternative to GPS, Curcio noted. There will still be niche opportunities for foreign satellite companies seen as leaders in non-sensitive sectors, he added, such as in inflight connectivity, where U.S.-based GEO operator Viasat recently secured a key regulatory milestone. In partnership with China Satcom, Viasat said Jan. 10 it got clearance that would enable it to install connectivity equipment on more than 75% of domestic planes in China. But for other types of user terminals and satellite applications, Chinese service providers and manufacturers are closing the gap with the west. “I could imagine there still being demand in China for certain high-end, cutting-edge technology, but this creates an issue because any technology that would be so cutting-edge is likely subject to export restrictions,” Curcio said. India is set to unseat China this year as the world’s most populous country, according to the United Nations. India and China have populations of around 1.4 billion people, more than four times the United States, offering huge subscriber potential for connectivity players — although disposable incomes vary wildly within these markets. And unlike China, India has been making great strides to open up its space industry to foreign companies as part of a push for more outside investment. These efforts began with carving out commercial functions from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the country’s space agency, to streamline them under more business-friendly organizations. IN-SPACe, or the Indian National Space Promotion Authorization Centre, is now in charge of regulating private sector initiatives in India’s space industry. And NSIL (NewSpace India Limited) was created to be ISRO’s commercial arm for handling functions such as leasing capacity from other satellite operators. Foreign satellite operators have occasionally been allowed to lease capacity temporarily to India’s government when the country cannot meet demand with domestically operated satellites, but only under onerous terms that have turned off investors. A burdensome and uncertain regulatory environment has made India “a difficult market” for foreign space companies, Analysys Mason senior analyst Vivek Prasad said. However, he expects a new space policy that would mark the culmination of efforts to bring in more foreign space players will be finalized in the first quarter of 2023. “The market expectation is that it will offer a level playing field to the private players,” Prasad added. Starlink, OneWeb, and other western satellite operators have been lining up to meet demand for more broadband in the country as it eases protectionist measures. OneWeb recently got “in-principle approval” for setting up a gateway in India, spokesperson Katie Dowd said, after getting other clearances for its LEO broadband constellation. She said OneWeb is “eagerly awaiting” the new satcoms policy as a stepping stone to the final approval it needs to provide services in India. However, its network can currently only provide partial coverage there until more satellites are launched. While momentum behind this policy has been picking up after two years of deliberations, Euroconsult senior affiliate consultant Gagan Agrawal cautioned that orbital slot and frequency rights remain contentious topics. Even still, the country’s trajectory remains firmly toward more international collaboration in satellite communications. In 2021, U.K.-based Inmarsat said BSNL, an Indian state-owned telco, got all the licenses needed to deliver broadband to aviation, maritime, and government customers in the country by using the British operator’s satellites. BSNL was also cleared a year later to use a gateway installed in India to connect Inmarsat’s satellites to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. More “Western players are expected to provide capacity into the Indian market in the short term,” Agrawal added. While recent Sino-Indian border skirmishes have not been doing the Belt and Road initiative any favors in India, these Western operators will be hoping their foothold is strong enough to withstand any competitive push from China’s constellation down the line. This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
SAN FRANCISCO —Terran Orbital Corp. announced a $2.4 billion contract to build 300 satellites for Rivada Space Networks. Under the contract announced Feb. 22, Terran Orbital will design, build and deploy 288 satellites in low-Earth orbit. In addition, Terran Orbital will build 12 satellite spares. “I think this is the largest smallsat contract ever awarded in history,” Marc Bell, Terran Orbital CEO, co-founder and chairman, told SpaceNews. Rivada Space Networks is a subsidiary of Rivada Networks, Inc., a U.S.-based wireless technology company with patents related to spectrum sharing and wireless communications technologies. Terran Orbital, through its subsidiary Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, will act as the prime contractor for the satellites with a mass of approximately 500 kilograms apiece. In addition to building the satellites, Terran Orbital will develop portions of the ground segment. Rivada plans to begin deploying its constellation as early as 2025, pending regulatory approval. “Terran Orbital is thrilled to form this new partnership with Rivada Space Networks,” Bell said in a statement. “Our partnership will show why Terran Orbital continues to be a satellite manufacturer of choice for aerospace and defense companies worldwide. We are ecstatic to work alongside Rivada and look forward to building out their LEO constellation.” Declan Ganley, Rivada Networks chairman and CEO, said in a statement, “We at Rivada see Terran Orbital as a kindred spirit of sorts. We are delighted to have the opportunity to bring this project to fruition with them.” In the last two years, Terran Orbital became a publicly traded company and pivoted away from cubesat manufacturing to offer 150 to 500 kilogram satellites for government customers. While the Rivada Space Networks contract may seem like a departure from Terran Orbital’s move towards government customers, government agencies may be the eventual customers for the new communications constellation, said a space industry executive. 
Capella Space, a company that operates a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites, is partnering with data analytics firms to help increase access to SAR imagery, the company announced Feb. 22. SAR is a specialized form of remote sensing that has seen growing demand as SAR satellites can capture images at night, through cloud cover and rain — conditions that impair traditional optical satellites. The first three companies to join Capella’s analytics partner program are Woolpert, an geospatial intelligence and strategic consulting firm; Kayrros, a global energy and environmental geoanalytics company; and Floodbase, a company that uses geospatial data to generate flood maps in real-time. The analytics partner program was created due to “increasing global demand for geospatial products and solutions that leverage the power of SAR,” Payam Banazadeh, founder and CEO of Capella Space, said in a statement. “While many organizations can benefit from information derived from SAR data, they often lack the tools to analyze and interpret the data at scale,” he said. “This new program will fill this gap by empowering partners to develop AI-powered geospatial solutions for a wide range of industry verticals. ’ Banazadeh said the need for Earth observation data is increasing with the growth and intensity of global geopolitical, commercial and environmental challenges. SAR is especially useful, he said, as more than 75% of the Earth is covered by clouds or darkness at any given time. Capella said access to sufficient volumes of training data is a challenge for developers seeking to build solutions with commercial satellite imagery. The company is looking to “remove those barriers by opening its archive for partners.” Jon Downey, senior vice president of Woolpert, said this program “is going to make it possible for us to unlock a wide range of new and exciting use cases for our customers. “SAR is an important tool in the toolbox for our parametric flood insurance solution,” said Bessie Schwarz, CEO of Floodbase. 
NASA has delayed the launch of a commercial crew mission to the International Space Station by a day to give SpaceX additional time to complete work on the vehicle. At a briefing after a flight readiness review for the Crew-6 mission Feb. 21, NASA announced it has rescheduled the launch of the Crew Dragon spacecraft to Feb. 27 at 1:45 a.m. Eastern. The Falcon 9 launch of the spacecraft had been planned for Feb. 26. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the agency and SpaceX were “a little bit behind” on the work needed to prepare the mission for launch. That included additional thermal analysis of panels on the exterior of Dragon and testing of composite overwrapped pressure vessels in the Falcon 9. He added NASA was also analyzing data from all Falcon 9 launches, citing a Starlink mission earlier in the month where there was “a little bit of evidence of combustion” in an engine bay on the booster. That booster was on its twelfth mission, while the Falcon 9 booster flying Crew-6 will be making its first launch. “We’ve still got a little bit of work, as Steve described, to go ahead and take a look at some of the hardware that came back,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president of build and flight reliability. “I don’t think those things are going to be a concern for the crewed flight but we don’t take things for granted. We want to make sure they’re really ready.” If the launch slips again, there is another launch opportunity Feb. 28 at 1:22 a.m. Eastern, followed by three opportunities March 2 through 4. Stich said it was still too early to forecast weather for the launch but cautioned there may be “some challenges” with weather conditions at abort landing sites along the East Coast. Crew-6 will deliver NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, who will be commander and pilot, respectively, of the mission. Also on Crew-6 are Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi. The four will stay on the station for about six months, while the crew of the Crew-5 mission that has been on the station since October — Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, Koichi Wakata and Anna Kikina — will return to Earth about five days after the Crew-6 arrival. Progress investigation continues The Crew-6 mission is not affected by the ongoing investigation into a coolant leak suffered Feb. 11 by the Progress MS-21 spacecraft that was docked to the station at the time. The spacecraft undocked from the station as planned Feb. 17 and reentered a day later. Roscosmos announced Feb. 21 that imagery of the Progress taken during its departure from the station showed a hole 12 millimeters in diameter in the spacecraft’s radiator, from which coolant leaked. In a statement posted on the agency’s Telegram social media account, it blamed the hole on “external influences” that it said were similar the leak experienced by the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft in December. Roscosmos earlier blamed the Soyuz leak on a micrometeoroid impact. At the Crew-6 briefing, Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said NASA was studying the Progress images in parallel with Roscosmos. “The Russians are continuing to take a very close look at both the Soyuz and the Progress coolant leaks,” she said, forming a commission to analyze the incidents. “They’re looking at everything from ground, launch through on orbit in terms of causal factors to try to understand that.” She said NASA had not talked with Roscosmos about their initial assessment of the Progress damage, but noted that “external influences” did not necessarily mean a micrometeoroid or orbital debris impact. “I think what they’re really trying to understand is, are there any signs or signatures that somewhere along the spacecraft’s journey, whether it’s launch or launch vehicle separation, there is some other external influence or damage that could have occurred that could have been a factor there,” she said, adding that NASA had not seen any indication of an increase in the micrometeoroid environment at the station. NASA’s own review of the imagery was focused on identifying the location of the coolant leak, Weigel explained. The coolant, which she described as being very viscous, was still clinging to the vehicle as a “shadowed and glossy area” in those images, as well as a darker area NASA interpreted as the hole the coolant leaked from. Gerstenmaier said that NASA, as a precaution, performed an inspection of the exterior of the Crew-5 Crew Dragon docked to the station and found no evidence of damage from micrometeoroids or orbital debris. “That used to be a nice to have,” he said of the inspection. “We’ve now made it an official flight rule, so it will get done every time.” He added Crew Dragon has two separate radiator loops, providing redundancy if one is damaged. Roscosmos is moving ahead with plans to launch the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on an uncrewed mission to the ISS to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22. Its launch on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket is scheduled for Feb. 23 at 7:24 p.m Eastern. It will dock with the station two days later. Weigel said that Roscosmos has inspected the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft “and they’re not seeing any issues with the vehicle so they’re pressing ahead with their launch preparations.”
In its latest strategy to procure launch services, the U.S. Space Force is taking a calculated risk that new players in the industry will deliver on their ambitious plans. “What we’ve heard from small launch companies was they wanted an opportunity to compete, they wanted an opportunity to play,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space at the Space Systems Command, said Feb. 21. The newly released a draft request for proposals for National Security Space Launch Phase 3 contracts was heavily influenced by new players in the launch industry that want a seat at the table and are investing in launch systems the government wants to leverage, Purdy told SpaceNews at the Space Mobility conference. The draft solicitation lays out a dual-track approach for the next NSSL round of contracts to be awarded in 2024. The first one, called Lane 1, allows “on-ramps” for newer launch companies that would have been left out if the Space Force had stuck with the NSSL Phase 2 approach that only selected two providers — United Launch Alliance and SpaceX — for five-year contracts. In Phase 3, companies like Blue Origin that are developing new heavy vehicles, and those working on medium-size launchers like Rocket Lab, Relativity Space , and Firefly Aerospace, will be able to compete for missions on a case-by-case basis. Lane 2 of the Phase 3 procurement will mirror the Phase 2 approach by awarding a fixed number of missions to two heavy-launch providers capable of meeting the most demanding requirements. Purdy said he met with executives from several companies that strongly argued for the “on-ramp” approach. There are no guarantees these new vehicles will be ready or able to launch when Phase 3 missions start in 2027, but Purdy said the door should be left open. “I want them to be successful,” he said. If these new vehicles come to fruition, “I want to leverage that.” The Phase 3 procurement gives companies the opportunity to compete but also protects the government by allowing the two heavy-launch providers that win Lane 2 to take over Lane 1 missions if the newer providers are not ready. “We structured it so that hey, if for some reason none of them show up, the two winners in Lane 2 will then just go clean up on Lane 1,” Purdy said. Lane 1 missions presumably would be suited for medium-size vehicles like Rocket Lab’s Neutron , designed to lift 8,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit while recovering the first stage, or up to 15,000 kilograms if the first stage is expended. The company said it views the Space Force as a key customer for this vehicle. Purdy said he is aware of the economic uncertainty surrounding the small launch industry that faces price pressures from SpaceX’s rideshares and challenges accessing capital, but that has not deterred the Space Force in its Phase 3 procurement. “We questioned them,” he said. “We asked them, what size rocket are you building? How are you building the future? What are you getting your venture capital to do?” Purdy added, “and they gave us their business plans.” Companies shared their roadmaps to expand into the medium-class market, “with solid business plans and venture capital,” Purdy said. “Based on that, we’re saying, okay, you could compete for some of our missions. That’s how we came up with the Lane 1 piece. It provides them an incentive to go build.” These companies have assured the government that they’re getting venture capital to do this, Purdy said. “And we’re taking them at their word,” he added. “We will look to make sure they have a fighting chance, and then we’ll see where it goes.”
SpaceX’s static-fire test of nearly all the engines in its Starship booster earlier this month was “the last box to check” before the vehicle’s first orbital launch attempt, likely some time in March, a company official said Feb. 21. Speaking on a panel at the Space Mobility conference here about “rocket cargo” delivery, Gary Henry, senior advisor for national security space solutions at SpaceX, said both the Super Heavy booster and its launch pad were in good shape after the Feb. 9 test , clearing the way for an orbital launch that is still pending a Federal Aviation Administration launch license. “We had a successful hot fire, and that was really the last box to check,” he said. “The vehicle is in good shape. The pad is in good shape.” Only 31 of the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster fired. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted just after the test that one engine was commanded off just before ignition and a second shut down early. He later said that the engines ran at 50% of their rated thrust. That led to speculation that SpaceX would need to perform a second static-fire test to get all 33 engines, or to run them at higher thrust levels. Henry, though, suggested that SpaceX was not planning another such test before an orbital launch attempt. “Pretty much all of the prerequisites to supporting an orbital demonstration attempt here in the next month or so look good,” he said. The company still needs to obtain an FAA launch license before attempting the launch. “We hope to secure that license in the very near future,” he said, setting up a launch attempt “probably in the month of March.” Once SpaceX performs that orbital launch demonstration, Henry said the company is ready to move ahead rapidly with operational Starship launches. “We very, very quickly converge on a system that we can operationalize,” he said, starting with launches of second-generation Starlink satellites. “We have a few that are waiting very patiently to be launched on Starship.” Those initial Starlink launches will serve as a test program, he explained, refining the launch and recovery of the two stages of Starship. “Somewhere in that journey that will be happening this year, we’re going to make a major pivot to the next piece of the Human Landing System architecture,” he said, by demonstrating the orbital depot needed for on-orbit refueling of the lunar lander version of Starship. That will provide additional experience testing Starship through the tankers that will fly to deliver propellant to the depot. “The nice thing about tankers is that they’ve got to reenter as well,” he said. “We’ve created this rubric, in the next year or two, where we will be able to do a lot of experimentation on that thermal protection system that will allow successful reentry of Starship.” Starship, Henry argued later in the panel, will sharply drive down launch costs. “We are on the cusp of seeing an opportunity of mass to orbit go from $2,000 a kilogram to $200 a kilogram,” he said. In the long term, costs could further decline to the point where the propellant is the largest factor in the per-launch marginal cost. “If Elon gets his way,” he said, “you’re at $20 per kilogram.”
The U.S. Space Force is looking for ways to support future military operations with nontraditional space transportation systems and on-orbit logistics, the head of the national security launch program said Feb. 21. The idea is to tap commercially available space vehicles and logistics services to fill the needs of military combatant commanders, said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space at the Space Systems Command. Purdy’s office oversees the procurement of national security space launch services and he also runs the East Coast space launch ranges. He said the military can benefit from commercial capabilities to deliver cargo via rockets, deploy satellites to nontraditional orbits and refuel satellites to extend their operational life. To promote this concept and strike up conversations with the private sector, the Space Systems Command hosted a “Space Mobility” conference Feb. 21 that drew about 1,100 executives from the space industry. “It’s hard to describe how fast we’ve matured and come along on the rocket cargo concepts and on-orbit maneuver and servicing and things like that,” Purdy told SpaceNews . “Just two years ago, we weren’t even talking about or thinking about this,” he said. “And now we’re actually having a conference about it. We have to rapidly get after commercial capability,” he added. “It’s going to be an amazing future.” A number of space launch companies over the past few years have signed agreements with the U.S. Transportation Command, the organization that oversees global military logistics operations, to explore “ rocket cargo ” concepts to transport equipment across Earth via space. Now the Space Force wants to figure out how to buy these nontraditional services. He said the Space Force traditionally has focused on launching payloads to orbit “but we didn’t really look at the end-to-end logistics piece.” The Pentagon spends more than a billion dollars a year on launch services but it’s still too early to project what it might spend on rocket cargo deliveries or on-orbit services. Purdy said it will take some time to complete the analysis needed to justify budget requests, but in the meantime the goal is to send a message to the private sector that there will be a market. “I would project that in the future there’s probably some kind of a separate line for this that’s different than launch,” he said. “But we have to do our homework to go justify all that stuff, do your analysis and prove in a combative budget session.” There are commercial companies spending private capital to develop these types of services “so I’m not spending government money to do what they’re doing themselves,” Purdy said. “The question is how do I leverage that?” and build an acquisition organization to deliver that capability,” he added. “So that’s what we’re trying to do with rocket cargo and on-orbit services.” The Space Force also wants to talk to companies developing commercial space stations for NASA. These will be multi-use orbiting space stations and there might be a national security application that hasn’t yet been thought about, Purdy said. Satellite refueling Refueling services for military satellites could grow into a sizeable market as the United States needs maneuverable spacecraft, Purdy said. U.S. Space Command, responsible for ensuring the safety of the nation’s satellites, has warned that U.S. spacecraft are increasingly at a disadvantage because operators have to minimize maneuvers in order to preserve fuel. Space Command has been asking for refuelable satellite for years and it is now finalizing “actual requirements language and documents,” he said. The command is essentially saying the U.S. “cannot do warfighting in the space domain with satellites that have to last 15 years so we have to measure every drop of fuel … That’s a horrible place to put the warfighters in.” Purdy pointed out recent comments by Lt. Gen. John Shaw , deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, highlighting U.S. satellites’ lack of mobility. “We don’t build a ship or a tank or an aircraft and say you’re going to operate this for the next 15 or 20 years and you need to plan your fueling and all your operations based on the fact that you’re never going to refuel these ever again.” The Space Force will be closely watching NASA’s planned On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) mission to robotically refuel Landsat 7, a satellite that wasn’t designed to be serviced. In this mission planned for 2025, NASA is “basically going to punch a hole in the fuel tank and try to fuel it,” said Purdy. “I’m super interested in that, obviously, because if that’s successful, we can prove that technology and go refuel a bunch of our satellites.” The other side of the equation is building the next generation of satellites so they’re easily refueled. The next step in that area will be to agree on a standard so the industry can build interoperable refueling hardware. Purdy said the Space Systems Command’s systems integration office is currently studying that issue. Rocket cargo Purdy said he is in discussions with U.S. Transportation Command on forming a Space Force “sustainment operations and logistics” component to support the rocket cargo program, both for suborbital and orbital point-to-point cargo delivery. “We absolutely would buy this as a service,” Purdy said. “We have no plans to go lay down billions of dollars to build out spaceports and launch pads and go buy these kinds of rockets,” he added. “Our desire is that commercial industry gets to a point where they can responsibly deliver military goods and logistics.” Right now SpaceX — which won a major contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory — is the leading contender “but there are other companies looking at that as well,” he said. SpaceX has said it plans to launch 200 to 300 times a year in the future, a number that got Purdy’s attention. “If they’re going to do that, the cost of launch is getting pretty negligible at that point, and that’s really intriguing,” he said. “From a rocket cargo perspective, the cost could end up being lower than delivering cargo on a military C-17 aircraft.” 
TAMPA, Fla. — ClearSpace has started procuring spacecraft parts for its inaugural debris de-orbit mission in 2026, the Swiss startup said after announcing Feb. 21 it had cleared its first major program review. The venture said it passed the European Space Agency’s Key Performance Gate 1 (KPG1) milestone at the end of 2022, or phase 1, to conclude the initial design phase for its servicer. Muriel Richard-Noca, ClearSpace’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said it achieved the milestone after prototype tests in October at an ESA technology center in the Netherlands validated “the soundness of our concepts.” ClearSpace has not provided specific details about these proof-of-concept tests or the servicer’s design. Richard-Noca said the phase 1 process involved identifying and assessing technical risks in addition to finalizing its plan to rendezvous, capture, and de-orbit debris with a spacecraft equipped with four articulated arms. Under a 110 million euro ($117 million) contract secured from ESA in 2020, ClearSpace aims to use the servicer’s robotic arms to capture a spent upper stage from a 2013 Vega launch. After catching the 112-kilogram piece of debris in low Earth orbit (LEO), the 500-kilogram servicer is designed to attempt a controlled re-entry that would burn up the payload and the servicer in the atmosphere. With the procurement of parts from subcontractors to manufacture flight models currently underway, Richard-Noca expects work to integrate the servicer to begin next year. ClearSpace is also competing with Japan-based Astroscale for a UK Space Agency contract to remove two as-yet-unidentified spacecraft from LEO in 2026. Richard-Noca expects the U.K. will pick a winner for this mission early next year. ClearSpace and Astroscale hope these and other government-funded missions will help pave the way to commercial services for de-orbiting hazardous debris.
At the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle in January, many astronomers celebrated while getting down to work. The conference, one of the biggest for the field, was the first since the James Webb Space Telescope formally started science operations last July after completing six months of post-launch commissioning. The celebrations came from the performance of JWST. After decades of development and anticipation — and plenty of worrying — project scientists confirmed that the space telescope was meeting, and often far exceeding, expectations. “Basically, it’s nothing but good news,” said Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a speech that opened the conference Jan. 9. “It really is better than we expected across the board.” That ranges from the sensitivity of its instruments to JWST’s lifetime, now expected to be at least 20 years based on the amount of propellant on board. The scientific fruits of those capabilities were on display at the conference as well, as astronomers discussed how they used JWST to study galaxies in the early universe and to confirm the discovery of an exoplanet. Astronomers attended a town hall session, once used to provide updates on the development of the observatory, to instead learn how to prepare proposals for the next round of JWST observations, called Cycle 2, that will begin this summer. But even as astronomers took a “victory lap,” in the words of one NASA official, about JWST, some were looking beyond that space telescope. They hoped to capitalize on the success of, and enthusiasm surrounding, JWST to build support for a future line of large space telescopes and accelerate their development. The latest astrophysics decadal survey, called Astro2020 and published in November 2021, recommended that NASA pursue development of a space telescope six meters across that operates in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared. The telescope, with an estimated cost of $11 billion, would launch in the early 2040s. Astro2020 came out as NASA and astronomers were focused on the impending launch of JWST. With that space telescope now in operation, they have turned their attention back to the decadal and the next steps in turning that concept into a mission. One of the first steps was to give that telescope, unnamed in the decadal survey, a moniker. Last fall, NASA quietly started referring to that telescope as the “Habitable Worlds Observatory,” using the term in presentations and congressional testimony. “We basically had to start using something because we’ve been having a lot of discussions with our stakeholders,” said Mark Clampin, who took over as director of NASA’s astrophysics division last August, during an agency town hall session at the AAS conference. The designation — a working name for now — is intended to reflect the telescope’s mission to study potentially habitable exoplanets while also serving as a general-purpose observatory for astrophysics, he explained. (It was also, some astronomers noted, an improvement over the designation NASA has been using: IROUV, an acronym for infrared, optical and ultraviolet.) Beyond the name, though, there are few details about the Habitable Worlds Observatory, including even a notional illustration of it. The telescope endorsed by Astro2020 was not one of the four concepts that NASA funded studies of; it instead falls between the larger LUVOIR telescope, whose primary mirror is between 8 and 16 meters across, and the smaller HabEx, four meters across. However, Clampin offered a glimpse at the approach he planned to take for the observatory, offering a set of tenets to guide its development that he said would explain “how do we build it, and how do we convince people who are going to be our stakeholders and allow us to build it, that we know what we’re doing,” he said. First and foremost, he said, was to build the telescope to a fixed schedule. NASA would set a launch date for the mission and make that a “Level 1” requirement alongside scientific ones, an approach he compared to planetary missions with limited launch windows. “We mature the technologies and then we set the schedule,” he said. Doing so, he argued, would help constrain its cost and allow NASA to move on to other flagship missions more quickly. Tied to that was a second tenet was to evolve existing technologies and limit investment in brand-new ones that are far less mature. He cited as an example the segmented mirror design of JWST, which he suggested would likely be adopted for Habitable Worlds Observatory. A key instrument for the telescope will be a coronagraph that blocks starlight, allowing direct observations of exoplanets orbiting it; it will be based on one built for the Roman Space Telescope to be launched later this decade. “It shows that we’re focused. It shows that we’re building on NASA investments,” he said. A third tenet is that NASA will design the telescope to take advantage of the capabilities of new large launch vehicles. That could make it easier and less expensive to develop since it would not need to fold up as tightly to fit inside something like Starship or the Space Launch System. “We would be insane not to use them,” he said. “Big fairings on big rockets give you flexibility. They allow you to not be constrained by mass or volume, both of which are big issues.” Even before the release of Astro2020, engineers studied how concepts like the bigger LUVOIR could fit inside Starship or SLS. A fourth tenet is to design Habitable Worlds Observatory to be serviced. “There’s a veritable gold rush of commercial companies looking to do robotic servicing,” Clampin said, that NASA can take advantage of. That servicing would extend to upgrading the telescope’s instruments, allowing NASA to work around some of the schedule and technology challenges the mission faces. “We don’t necessarily have to hit all of the science goals the first time,” he said. Having robust science margins was the fifth tenet that Clampin described, which he said addresses some of the uncertainty about achieving science goals. Among them is a figure called “eta Earth,” or the average number of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of a star, a key factor in determining how well the telescope can meet its goals of characterizing such planets. Estimates of eta Earth vary widely, said Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at Caltech, in a talk at the AAS conference. That affects the design of the telescope: the smaller eta Earth is, the fewer planets a telescope of a certain size would likely be able to study. “It would really be fabulous for a lot of people’s blood pressure to know this number a little bit better,” she said. A flexible design for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, Clampin said, could also relieve that pressure. “Not locking ourselves into an aperture size too early is fundamental,” he said, another argument for using segmented mirrors that can be added or removed as needed in the design phase. The final tenet that Clampin discussed at the town hall meeting was to fully mature new technologies needed for the observatory before moving into development. That was a recommendation from Astro2020, which called on NASA to establish a technology development program for both Habitable Worlds Observatory and future X-ray and far-infrared flagship telescopes. NASA, in response, established a Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program, or GOMAP, last year. The first stage of the program, largely to set up the overall effort, has been completed, said Julie Crooke, GOMAP program executive at NASA Headquarters, during a side meeting at the AAS conference. NASA is gearing up for the second stage of GOMAP, which will conduct a concept maturation study for Habitable Worlds Observatory. That will examine the various science, technology and architecture possibilities for the telescope. “We really want to look at the whole option space,” she said. That study will be done by an independent team of 20 to 30 scientists and engineers, supported by independent consultants with expertise in cost modeling and scheduling. The study would begin later this year and run through September 2024. The third stage of GOMAP, after the completion of the concept maturation study, is what NASA calls an “evolved pre-Phase A” study for Habitable Worlds Observatory. That will further refine the design of the telescope and mature key technologies needed for it so that formal work on the mission can start as soon as 2029. NASA wants to move “as swiftly as possible” through the design and technology development work for the observatory, she said, but cautioned the timeline she presented was notional. “It’s dependent on the funding that NASA receives.” As GOMAP moves into that third stage, it will also look at the technologies needed for future flagships: the X-ray telescope based on a concept called the Lynx X-ray Observatory studied for Astro2020, and a far-infrared telescope based on another Astro2020 concept, the Origins Space Telescope. “We’ll move forward as expeditiously as possible for the Habitable Worlds Observatory while also laying the groundwork for the other future great observatories,” Crooke promised. Many astronomers have rallied behind a concept they call the New Great Observatories, which includes the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the later far-infrared and X-ray telescopes also endorsed by the decadal survey. They compare it to NASA’s original Great Observatories, which included the Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope. Just as the original Great Observatories worked mostly in parallel (Compton was deorbited a few years before Spitzer launched), astronomers want the three New Great Observatories in operation simultaneously, allowing them to work together to make breakthroughs in fields like searching for habitable exoplanets. “The habitability of a given planet is impacted by the X-ray and far-ultraviolet spectrum and activity of its star,” said Christiansen. “The Habitable Worlds Observatory can only succeed in its mission if we also have contemporaneous X-ray and far-ultraviolet capabilities at the same time.” She spoke at a workshop during the AAS conference where a standing-room-only crowd heard about the prospects of accelerating work on the New Great Observatories. A grassroots coalition sought to build support for speeding up work on the telescopes, something they acknowledged would require significant funding increases for NASA’s astrophysics programs. Jason Tumlinson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, presented some funding profiles at the meeting. One profile would allow Habitable Worlds Observatory, costing $11 billion, to launch in 2041, with the X-ray and far-infrared telescopes to follow in 2047 and 2051. (The order of those two future missions is not important, most astronomers believe.) “This is what we want, but it’s not soon enough,” he said. Even that assessment was optimistic to some. “If we take the decadal on its face, it’s worth noting the last of the Great Observatories will complete and launch in 2065,” estimated Jonathan Arenberg, chief mission architect for science robotic exploration at Northrop Grumman. “Needless to say, that’s too damn slow.” An alternative budget profile offered by Tumlinson would allow Habitable Worlds Observatory to launch in 2035, with the other two following in 2040 and 2045. The catch? It assumes NASA’s astrophysics budget, currently about $1.5 billion a year, grows to $2.5 billion annually. “This is a budget that will execute a program that we all want, and it can be done,” he said, noting that increased budget is less than the current annual budget for planetary science at NASA. Arenberg, who worked on Chandra and JWST, saw opportunities to make the design and construction of those telescopes more efficient. “Our current development paradigm could, at best, be described as pre-industrial or artisanal,” he said. He advocated for developing all three missions as a single program (and, presumably, with a single contractor), maximizing reuse of technology and personnel that could cut costs and reduce development times. One organizer of the workshop was Grant Tremblay, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and something of an evangelist for the New Great Observatories. At the start of the meeting, he outlined all the factors working against the concept, from constrained budgets and a renewed focus on human spaceflight to inflation and geopolitical instability. But, he argued, all those challenges also existed in the 1980s, when astronomers advocated and eventually won funding for the original Great Observatories. He hopes that NASA’s recent successes, including with JWST, can build momentum for the New Great Observatories. “This has been one of the most triumphant two years in recent NASA history,” he said. What those successes had in common, he argued, were advocates who fought for their projects in good times and bad. The New Great Observatories will need that same advocacy, he told the packed room. “This is three decades. We have a long road ahead of us,” he said. “We are not just pursuing one observatory. We’re pursuing a fleet, starting with the Habitable Worlds Observatory.” This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that China’s Zhurong rover remains stationary on the Red Planet as China remains silent on the status of its spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured images of the rover on March 11, 2022, a second on Sept. 8, 2022 and finally Feb. 7, 2023. The images were published Feb. 21 by the HiRISE Operations Center The images show that the solar-powered Zhurong—which landed in May 2021—has not moved since at least September 2022. It had entered a planned hibernation state in May 2022 to ride out the low solar radiation levels of winter in Mars’s Utopia Planitia region. Zhurong was expected to autonomously resume activities around December, around the time of Spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, when temperatures and light levels reached levels allowing the rover’s battery and solar arrays to generate sufficient electrical power. However Chinese space authorities have not provided an update on the status of the rover. The South China Morning Post reported Jan. 7, citing sources that do not wish to be named, that the mission team was yet to receive a signal from Zhurong. The progression of the HiRISE images suggest that Zhurong may have accumulated a covering of Martian dust on its surface. This could impact the function of both its solar arrays and the pair of “windows” which allow a chemical called n-undecane to store heat energy during the day and release it during the night. Zhurong does not carry a radioisotope heater unit—which are used by the country’s Yutu lunar rovers—instead using systems including n-undecane for heating and a coating of aerogel for insulation. NASA’s Spirit rover in 2005 fortuitously encountered a dust devil that cleaned the solar panels of the spacecraft, improving its power generation. Such phenomena, along with improving solar radiation levels as summer approaches in the northern hemisphere, mean there could still be some hope of Zhurong reactivating. MRO/HiRISE has previously imaged Zhurong on the surface, showing its landing area and shown tracks matching those of Chinese Zhurong drive maps. Zhurong is part of the successful Tianwen-1 mission which launched in July 2020 as China’s first independent interplanetary exploration expedition. The mission put the Tianwen-1 spacecraft in orbit around Mars and later saw Zhurong land in Utopia Planitia after a campaign to image and assess the target landing area. Tianwen-1 saw China join the U.S., Soviet Union/Russia, the European Space Agency, India and the United Arab Emirates in successfully putting a spacecraft into orbit around Mars. The Zhurong rover made China the second country to successfully operate a rover on the Red Planet. Zhurong had a primary mission lifetime of three Earth months but operated for just over one Earth year on the Martian surface before entering hibernation. It traveled at least 1,921 meters south from its landing site. It had achieved its primary science objectives and was seeking out geomorphologic targets such as mud volcanoes during its extended mission. Meanwhile the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which entered orbit around Mars two years ago Feb. 10, was operating well as of Jan. 10 according to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), having also completed its primary science objectives. Chinese state media published articles to mark the anniversary of the orbital insertion but did not touch on the current status of Zhurong. Tianwen-1 is expected to conduct aerobraking tests as part of preparation for a Mars sample return mission potentially launching later this decade.
Vast, a startup developing artificial-gravity space stations, announced Feb. 21 that it acquired launch services company Launcher, using its technology to further space station plans while ending developing of a small launch vehicle. Vast announced it acquired Launcher for an undisclosed amount. The two companies, which currently have separate facilities in Southern California, will move into a new facility in Long Beach, California, this summer that Vast announced it January it would relocate to. Launcher’s workforce of about 80 people will join Vast’s 40 employees in the combined company. Max Haot, founder and chief executive of Launcher, will become president of Vast. Jed McCaleb, founder and chief executive of Vast, said in an interview that discussions with Haot started about nine months ago. “I was immediately impressed with what they did on a scrappy budget,” he said. “It became apparent to me we would be a stronger company together.” Haot said in the interview the discussions first focused on securing an investment in Launcher. It later became clear, though, that an acquisition made sense. “We could be a really great option to help them go to the next level,” he said. “It removed a lot of risk for us for fundraising.” The companies signed the acquisition deal in November, which closed earlier in the month. The combined company will continue development of Orbiter, the orbital transfer vehicle that Launcher developed. The first Launcher flew on the Transporter-6 rideshare mission in January but malfunctioned shortly after deployment when a GPS antenna problem kept it from orienting itself to generate power from its solar panels. The company plays to fly additional Orbiters on two Transporter missions later this year. Those Transporter missions will continue to serve customers seeking hosted payload or satellite deployment services, but will also support Vast’s space station plans. That includes flying technologies being developed by Vast for use on the stations, such as thrusters and life support systems, as well as various subsystems of Orbiter itself that Haot said will evolve over time for use on space stations. Vast will also continue development of the E-2 rocket engine that Launcher had been working on for use on its Launcher Light rocket. Haot expects there to be demand for a high-performance engine like the E-2, which he claims has the highest performance kerosene turbopump developed in the United States. “Companies are suffering from a lack of engine performance to achieve their advertised payload,” he said. The E-2 engine, he argued, “it is becoming more relevant, not less, which is why we see significant value in trying to complete and sell it.” However, Vast will not continue with Launcher Light. “We have to focus,” Haot said. Vast announced plans in September to develop large rotating space stations that would generate artificial gravity, but has disclosed few details about its plans. Haot, who as president will oversee work on those stations, said the company would release a “more concrete plan” in the near future. “There will be many stepping stones.” McCaleb, a cryptocurrency billionaire, is self-funding Vast through its initial phases of development. “I want to keep it self-funded until we have a station in space and a clear path to revenue,” he said. “I don’t want to be in a situation where I am beholden to investors.” He has not announced how much he plans to invest, but said in the interview it would be on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Federal Aviation Administration forecasts that commercial launches it licenses could more than double in the next several years, putting an additional strain on the handful of spaceports that host them. The forecast was included in a National Spaceports Policy report that the FAA submitted to Congress earlier in the month. The report, required by a provision of the 2018 FAA reauthorization act, was designed to evaluate space transportation needs and propose policies for supporting spaceport development. The report noted that there were 74 FAA-licensed commercial space operations in fiscal year 2022, which includes both launches and reentries. That total is dominated by launches, with 69 in 2022 versus five reentries. The forecast included in the report projected a sharp increase in licensed operations, growing from a range of 53 to 92 in fiscal year 2023 to a range of 59 to 186 in 2026, the final year of the forecast. The report does not break out launches and reentries, but historically launches have dominated the total, with the only reentries by a handful of commercial cargo and crew vehicles. The report does not discuss the methodology of the forecast but notes the growing launch activity is driven by demand linked to large satellite constellations. “Based on announced plans for the launch of several large constellations of satellites and the existence of a number of launch vehicle development programs, the level of activity is likely to continue to grow for the foreseeable future,” the report stated. The FAA has, in recent years, underestimated actual commercial space activity. In fiscal year 2022, it predicted between 45 and 68 licensed operations. In fiscal year 2021, it predicted between 36 and 44 licensed operations; there were 64. The report, recently published on the FAA’s website, was released with little fanfare. Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, mentioned the report in a talk Feb. 20 at the annual summit of the Global Spaceport Alliance here. “We certainly see 2023 as a year of opportunity for spaceports,” he said to an audience of spaceport operators and companies that support spaceport development. He noted that the FAA’s Office of Spaceports, created by the 2018 reauthorization, has been working with federal and other officials “to identify current challenges that might hinder your success while also planning for the space ecosystem of the future.” One challenge in the report is that, even with the growth in the number of licensed spaceports, launch activity remains clustered in a few locations, including Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and neighboring Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The report noted that federal ranges like those accounted for 50 of 69 licensed launches in fiscal year 2022, or 83% of all FAA-licensed launches taking place from the United States when excluding FAA-licensed launches of Rocket Lab’s Electron from New Zealand. “Demand now exceeds supply,” said Col. James T. Horne, III, deputy director of launch and range operations for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, at the summit. “All of the mechanisms that we use to manage this business are starting to show the strains and the limitations in our ability to maximize United States and our allies’ access to space.” The FAA report attributes the concentration of launches at federal ranges to two factors. One is the limited availability of other launch sites that can accommodate vertical launches, which account for the vast majority of launches. The other is a requirement in federal law that federal infrastructure be offered for commercial use at a “direct cost” that is, the report stated, “significantly cheaper than the rates commercial sites are typically able to offer.” The Space Force is working to address the growing demand for launch through an initiative called Spaceport of the Future, formerly Range of the Future. That includes several initiatives from mandating the use of autonomous flight safety systems and thus reducing the required range assets for tracking launches to addressing how to fund infrastructure improvements. “We’re looking at how do we overhaul and retool the way we operate every day, and think more like an airport, because that’s where we’re headed,” Horne said, foreseeing a day where a range could host multiple launches a day. “We have to get after how we can accommodate that kind of throughput in our spaceports.” The FAA and the Space Force, among other agencies, are part of a National Spaceport Interagency Working Group established last June. The working group has a mission “to address optimal utilization of U.S. spaceport infrastructure,” Coleman said. It is looking at challenges that include infrastructure, access to airspace and adequate radio-frequency spectrum. The group is working on a national spaceport strategy, with a draft in development, Horne said, incorporating comments from spaceports and launch operators. “We’re making a lot of progress.”
When a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched a national security mission to geostationary Earth orbit Jan. 15, the Space Force revealed that three of the payloads onboard were developed by one of its most secretive agencies, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. The announcement was unusual as the Space RCO, based at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, operates under the radar and rarely advertises what it does. Kelly Hammett, director of the Space RCO, said the decision to publicize the satellites on the USSF-67 mission is part of a broader effort to start shedding the office’s cloak of secrecy. “We’re going to be a little bit more open about what we do,” he told SpaceNews in a recent interview. Before taking over as head of the Space RCO seven months ago, Hammett ran the directed energy division of the Air Force Research Laboratory. One of his goals for the space agency is to boost its visibility on Capitol Hill and work with a wider swath of the space industry. That is hard to do “if people don’t know we exist or what we do,” he said. The office is one of three acquisition organizations within the Space Force, along with the Space Development Agency and the much larger Space Systems Command. Congress established the Space RCO in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. Its main backer in Congress was Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M). Heinrich for years had been critical of the Air Force for not supporting the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office at Kirtland Air Force Base. The ORS Office was established in 2007 to handle fast-response space systems and smaller satellites but the Air Force by 2013 stopped funding the office so it could fold its activities into its main space procurement shop in Los Angeles, the Space and Missile Systems Center. Congress nevertheless kept adding money for ORS for several years and Heinrich ultimately pushed to create a separate organization for rapid space acquisitions that would be independent and physically separated from the Space and Missile Systems Center, which is now the Space Systems Command. And the Space RCO was born. Heinrich and other lawmakers at the time also complained that the Air Force’s procurement bureaucracy was not agile enough to respond to challenges posed by rival space powers threatening to target U.S. systems with anti-satellite weapons. Space RCO was modeled after the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, established in 2003. Working mostly behind the scenes, the Air Force RCO led the development of the X-37B uncrewed reusable spaceplane and the B-21 long-range strike bomber. The Space RCO’s workforce of about 200 people includes 80 government civilian and military officers. The rest are support contractors. Like its Air Force counterpart, the Space RCO operates very differently than most military procurement shops, with far more autonomy and congressionally delegated authorities to allocate resources. The agency does not disclose its annual funding, but Hammett said he expects budgets and workload to grow as the Pentagon pumps more money into space programs to compete with China. Most RCO projects are funded by the Space Force’s classified budget, which has soared in recent years — from $3.7 billion in 2021 to $6.5 billion in 2023, according to estimates from the aerospace consulting firm Velos. “It’s a very dynamic environment,” Hammett said. “The demand signal is growing for space systems, services and capabilities. If you watch what happened in the budget over the last couple years, the Space Force budget is just skyrocketing because of this demand signal, and a big chunk of that demand signal is coming to us.” U.S. Space Command, responsible for military operations in the space domain, can go directly to the Space RCO to fill an urgent need. The command’s requests are approved by the RCO board of directors and don’t have to go through the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s onerous requirements-vetting process that most programs endure. The Space RCO board of directors includes the Secretary of the Air Force, the Chief of Space Operations, the commander of U.S. Space Command and the undersecretaries of defense for research and acquisition. Congress also gave the RCO discretion to pay for projects from a consolidated appropriations line. “There’s no magic formula for rapid acquisition,” Hammett said. “It’s using all the tools in the toolkit.” It helps that “all my money comes in one pot so I can shift it between programs based on execution and needs. I don’t need congressional approval to reprogram funds in a year of execution. That flexibility is key,” he added. Space RCO can award contracts of up to $1 billion with minimum red tape. “We don’t have to go to the Pentagon or to the service acquisition executive to get approval below that,” Hammett said. “It’s another thing that lets us go fast.” Hammett said these authorities allow projects to move much faster than traditional programs, but the agency’s culture is also a major factor. As a relatively small organization, there are fewer layers of approvals than in a typical major DoD acquisition program office. These exemptions from Pentagon red tape, whether enacted by Congress or granted by the Defense Department, are not taken for granted, said Hammett. “If we misuse any of those authorities, they will be taken away from us.” Hammett noted that the three Space RCO smallsats launched on USSF-67 are not experiments but operational satellites supporting military activities. Two carry space situational awareness sensors, and the other has an encryption payload to protect uplink and downlink satellite communications. “The technologies aboard these satellites will be leveraged by the Space Force and probably will proliferate to other systems,” Hammett said. He noted that the payloads were produced and delivered in less than three years, which is breakneck speed by military procurement standards. Besides the USSF-67 payloads, there are few other projects Space RCO has publicly discussed. One is SCAR, short for Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource, an effort to modernize the military’s aging network of satellite antennas with electronically steerable phased arrays. Space RCO last year awarded defense contractor BlueHalo a $1.4 billion eight-year deal to replace outdated analog antennas with new phased arrays. SCAR resulted from an urgent request by U.S. Space Command to increase the capacity of the military’s Satellite Control Network to command and control military satellites. “We have a huge proliferation of new payloads going into orbit, and we need more communications capabilities from the ground,” said Hammett. Another project run by the Space RCO is a ground-systems architecture to operate military satellites known as GC3, for Ground Command, Control and Communications. Ball Aerospace and Booz Allen Hamilton are the primary contractors. “This is a program that we’re starting to talk a little bit more about,” Hammett said. It began as a procurement of ground systems for RCO satellites but has evolved into a more ambitious effort to develop a common platform that could be used by any military satellite. The Space Systems Command runs a similar program called Enterprise Ground Services, or EGS. There are ongoing discussions “about unifying the ground software efforts in the EGS program and our GC3 program,” said Hammett. The goal is to “try to latch those up and provide a more common look and feel for the operator.” Across the Space Force, there is a “proliferation of all these new systems, each with different user interfaces,” he said. Supporting multiple ground-control systems is costly, which is why the Air Force started the EGS program years ago. “We’ll be working with Space Systems Command to see how we move this into the modern age,” said Hammett. To get feedback from users before new systems are acquired, the RCO is working with the Space Force’s Space Operations Command. This is the command responsible for training and equipping Space Force Guardians, so their input is important, said Hammett. “They are going to help us make sure they can operate the system” before it’s too late to make changes, he added. “We’re addressing their concerns.” Several other projects are underway at Space RCO that Hammett could not discuss. And more are coming, he said. “We’re already close to running out of desks,” he said. “I don’t want to get too big, but we have been working on a potential military construction project at Kirtland Air Force Base to get a bigger facility.” Hammett said Space RCO is looking to leverage commercial space technology. However, the highly classified nature of most of the agency’s projects creates barriers for companies that don’t have the required clearances or secure facilities. “We are aware that there are emerging companies” developing technologies that could meet military needs, he said. A team of “tech scouts” regularly attends industry events and conferences. “They don’t always broadcast a lot. But they’re paying attention to what’s emerging.” At unclassified industry gatherings, Hammett said, “we talk about what we can, and we’re going to be talking about more … We want new entrants to tell us what their capabilities are.” Of particular interest are technologies to automate the operation of satellites and constellations, Hammett said. “We see SpaceX deploy the Starlink constellation 60 satellites at a time, and they have onboard automation,” he said. “I’ll say that’s probably the one thing that is the most exciting to me that we’re seeing in commercial systems.” Unlike military satellite operators, “the SpaceX guys don’t have a bunch of antennas all over the world driving their satellites. They fly autonomously. And that’s certainly a technology that we would want to leverage in the future, and there are other companies doing that too.” The Space Force’s new space acquisition executive Frank Calvelli is a strong advocate of rapid procurement and the use of commercial technologies, which is encouraging to hear, said Hammett. “He’s trying to move the needle,” he said. “I think he has really brought some much-needed focus and discipline.” A lot of what Space RCO does is uniquely military, said Hammett. “But there are commercially available mature solutions, and we just need to understand the maturity of the solutions. That drives our acquisition strategies.” A push to accelerate acquisitions is welcome by U.S. Space Command, which has a growing list of technologies it needs to protect satellites and make U.S. systems more resilient, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said Jan. 24. The dialogue between the command and the Department of the Air Force’s procurement organizations “is better than it’s ever been,” he said at the National Security Space Association’s Defense and Intelligence Conference. “We communicate regularly about where we think we’re going and what are the capabilities we think we need,” he said. “And we see them trying to respond.” “Calvelli wants to move faster, deliver more capability and resilience, and that’s exactly what we need to do our mission,” Shaw said. On the performance so far of the Space Force acquisition enterprise, Shaw added, “They are delivering things, and I expect even more.” This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
When the Pentagon was ordered to evacuate U.S. troops and civilians from Afghanistan in 2021, the military’s transportation command called up the nation’s commercial airlines to help with the evacuation. This was a rare instance when DoD activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) , a program set up by the U.S. government with commercial airlines to augment airlift capacity during emergencies. The U.S. Space Force is looking at how to establish similar arrangements with commercial space companies that manufacture satellites, operate launch vehicles and provide services like satellite-based communications and Earth imagery. The thinking is that if a conflict with a rival power like China broke out, the U.S. military would need help from the private sector to protect American space assets and augment DoD’s existing satellite-based services. “We are talking about how we’re going to expand our commercial partnerships during peacetime to ensure we have access to commercial capabilities during times of crisis or conflict,” said Col. Rich Kniseley, chief of enterprise requirements at the Space Systems Command’s space systems integration office. The Space Systems Command, the procurement arm of the Space Force, calls this initiative the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserves, or CASR. “There are still a lot of things we need to figure out,” Kniseley told SpaceNews . Early conversations took place Feb. 9 and 10 at a forum hosted by Space Systems Command and the Space Force Association in Arlington, Virginia. Kniseley said 84 companies signed up to participate. Many details would need to be fleshed out, he said, including policies, statutes, contracting methods and technical issues. The Space Systems Command also is looking at what it would cost to implement a CASR program, and what costs the private sector would agree to absorb as part of a partnership. Kniseley said a funding proposal is in the works for fiscal year 2025. “We want to start drawing out the framework for CASR for how we’re going to take those critical commercial capabilities and operate during a fight,” Kniseley said. “And this could be in the form of a surge capacity similar to how they work with CRAF.” The Space Force, for example, is looking at how it might work with small satellite producers and launch services providers on fast-turnaround missions under a program called Tactically Responsive Space. The CASR program would tap into existing space services, said Kniseley. “There are so many commercial capabilities out there, from satellite communications to space domain awareness, and commercial imagery, that we would look to partner with.” Any public-private collaboration, he said, would take commercial interests into account. Under China’s central planning system, by contrast, the government directs the activities of private companies to meet national objectives. “In order for us to be successful in a China fight, it is going to be based on the partnerships that we have with our allies as well as industry,” Kniseley added. When the next crisis will happen is impossible to predict so it’s best to make these agreements with industry during peacetime “so we’re ready to go before we get into a conflict.” Kniseley said companies in the space industry are eager to support this effort. “That was evident at the forum,” he said. “But we do need to be realistic that there will need to be an economic investment in these companies that join the CASR model.” As seen during the current war in Ukraine, “the fight is not going to be only with military space capabilities. It is going to be a joint fight with our commercial partners, and with our international allies,” he said. “A space model like CRAF has been in discussion for years, even before the Ukraine war, but what I think Ukraine highlighted is that commercial industry is very much invested in what we’re doing here in the Space Force to support the warfighter.” ‘Entirely new model’ Ian Eishen, director of global public sector at Aalyria Technologies, attended the CASR forum and is encouraged by the government’s efforts to bring new space companies into the program, he told SpaceNews . Aalyria, a startup developing atmospheric laser communications terminals and software to manage networks, is participating in the Defense Innovation Unit’s hybrid network project and is looking to expand its reach in the defense market, Eishen said. “CASR is an entirely new model. They brought us in to help them design what this could look like,” he said. Although the CRAF approach is a good starting point, space is not the same as airlift, he added, so more work is needed to refine the concept. For a communications technology startup, the goal is to provide options to the government so it is not completely dependent on bespoke systems, said Eishen. The question then is “how do we exercise that on a regular basis?” he added. “We’re excited to see what they come back with. The action item for the government is to come back and let us know what they need us to do. And they’ve got a massive amount of partners that are ready to help them.” Tom Barton, co-founder and CEO of another space startup, Antaris, also participated in the CASR forum. He said the company’s cloud platform could support satellite manufacturers helping the government ramp up production during a crisis. The company’s software is used to design, test and operate spacecraft, Barton said in an email to SpaceNews . “Our advanced simulation can also be used for scenario planning before real-world needs arise.” As far as contracting agreements, “I think there are a range of options the U.S. government could consider with new space players like ourselves accustomed to working with subscription and service models that meet the needs and urgency of customers on a case-by-case basis.”
Scientists at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC and visiting Chinese counterparts conducted a series of spacecraft-rocket integration tests for a joint mission. The Solar wind-Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission is a joint mission of ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Teams conducted docking, satellite separation and impact tests with a prototype of the SMILE satellite developed by the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the CAS (IAMCAS) and the payload adapter for the mission’s Vega-C rocket at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), CAS stated Feb. 13. It is the first time a Chinese team has conducted such tests at ESA facilities. Last year Airbus sent a structural thermal model of the payload module to Shanghai for integration with the IAMCAS platform and qualification of the satellite. SMILE is a Sino-European joint mission expected to be launched in April 2025, according to CAS’s National Space Science Center (NSSC). SMILE was last year slated for launch in November 2024, following a number of delays to the project. The three-year mission will study the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere and knock-on effects in the ionosphere, as well as phenomena such as coronal mass ejections. It will operate in a highly inclined, highly elliptical orbit around Earth which will take it a third of the way to the Moon at apogee. The mission was selected in 2015 from 13 joint Sino-European proposals . SMILE originally targeted launch on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in 2021, but has faced a number of delays. “SMILE was very early on in 2016 intended for launch in 2021. Following initial studies and programmatic arrangements for the mission, the launch date was revised to be towards end-2023 to mid-2024 on the basis of which it was adopted by the ESA Science Programme Committee (SPC) in 2019,” David Agnolon, SMILE project manager, told SpaceNews via email. “Following a number of technical difficulties and programmatic evolutions, among which a significant impact due to Covid, the development faced a one-year delay. The mission is on-track for launch in 2025, which will be confirmed at the Critical Design Review foreseen to take place mid-2023.” CAS provides the propulsion and service modules, satellite bus and takes charge of mission operations for the mission, while also providing Chinese-developed instruments. ESA will provide the payload module, launcher, AIT facilities. SMILE will carrying the SXI (Soft X-ray Imager) featuring Lobster-Eye optics and the SWCX (Solar Wind Charge eXchange) X-ray imager. The spacecraft have a wet mass of around 2,200 kg. The collaborative project builds on earlier cooperation on the Double Star mission in the early 2000s and ESA participation in CAS’s first round of missions under the Strategic Priority Program on Space Science in the mid 2010s. Exchanges between China and ESA with a view to sending European astronauts to China’s Tiangong space station later this decade have, however, stalled , ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said last month. SMILE may not be the only project to be realized from the joint ESA-CAS workshops which led to the selection of SMILE. Chinese teams have gone on to conduct studies on some of the proposals including the Discovering the Sky at the Longest Wavelength ( DSL ) mission. DSL proposes to send an array of 10 small satellites into lunar orbit, using the moon as a shield from Earth interference to study faint signals from the early universe. It is now one of 13 candidates for acceptance under CAS’s “ New Horizons ” program.
SAN FRANCISCO – NearSpace Launch, an Indiana company known for robotically assembling ThinSats , is unveiling a new Black Box for autonomous satellite tracking and data relay. “Operators want to keep connected to their satellite to get critical health and safety data,” Matthew Voss, NSL chief operating officer, told SpaceNews . “Even over the polar regions or the ocean, you can always connect to your satellites.” Interest in Black Boxes is growing. Launch aggregators help dozens of cubesats and microsatellites travel together as secondary payloads on rocket rideshare missions. Once in orbit, it is sometimes difficult to identify individual satellites deployed from the same launch vehicle, particularly if onboard batteries or radios fail. Universities, NASA, the Defense Department and companies have purchased and flown more than 180 NSL EyeStar radios to transmit data between satellites and the ground through the Globalstar and Iridium communications constellations. Going forward, EyeStar radios will connect through Iridium Next satellites. NSL’s new Black Box augments the EyeStar radio with GPS tracking plus sensors to keep tabs on satellite health and safety. The latest self-powered Black Box comes in four sizes and relays data through Iridium. “The Black Box is so small we can attach it to the outside of an ESPA ring,” Voss said. “We have even attached it to cubesats for several universities.” With funding from the U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, NSL developed software that turns GPS data collected by the Black Box into ephemeris and two-line element data. The Black Box transmits the location data to the U.S. Space Command’s 18th Space Defense squadron. NSL plans to launch the new Black Box with GPS and sensors in June as part of the Train-Rapid on Orbit Payload F2 mission. Under a SpaceWERX Small Business Technology Transfer award, NSL also is integrated the Black Box with deorbit technology and space weather sensors. In 2022, NSL showed its EyeStar radio could transmit data via satellites. NSL launched the Globalstar Experiment and Risk Reduction Satellite in January 2022 on a Virgin Galactic LauncherOne. In March 2022, NSL’s S4 Crossover flew on the Astra Rocket 3. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NSL’s Train Rapid On Orbit Payload 3 to orbit in May. The S4 Crossover and TROOP-3 radios sent data through Iridium satellites. “We were able to prove that the radios could even work when a satellite is in a tumble,” Voss said. “You still get your critical data down.” To keep up with demand for satellites and components, NSL moved into a new facility in Upland, Indiana, in 2022.
With one commercial space traffic coordination pilot project successfully completed, the Office of Space Commerce is considering ways to do a similar project in the more challenging environment of low Earth orbit. Speaking at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 8, Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce within NOAA, said the office had just completed a two-month project to test the ability to perform space situational awareness in medium and geostationary Earth orbits using only commercial data. The office, working with the Defense Department, awarded contracts in December to COMSPOC Corp., ExoAnalytic Solutions, Kayhan Space, KBR, NorthStar Earth & Space Inc., Slingshot Aerospace and the Space Data Association for the pilot. It also used data from five contracts the office awarded in September for commercial space situational awareness (SSA) data. DalBello stated that while the office was still analyzing the results of the pilot, it appeared to go well. “I’m highly confident that we will have done very well,” he said. “The initial results look really good.” The goal, he noted, was to do at least as well as what is offered by the 18 th Space Defense Squadron, which currently provides space traffic coordination services. “We wanted to do SSA in GEO with no government data and just answer the question, could we do it?” he said. “I think the answer will be yes.” The office is now looking at options for doing a similar pilot program in LEO. That will be more challenging, he argued, given both the limited data available in LEO and the more congested environment there. “The difference between GEO and LEO is the difference between living in the country and living in downtown D.C.,” he said. GEO is less crowded, with a smaller number of larger satellites, whereas LEO features many more objects in various orbits. “It’s just a dramatic difference.” Another difference is the available data. “We don’t have the depth of coverage we need” in LEO, he said, with fewer commercial providers. “We’d like better resolution than we currently have in LEO.” Those factors will weigh on any plans by the Office of Space Commerce to do a similar space traffic coordination commercial pilot in LEO. “I’m sure we will do something. Whether it will be a pilot like we did in GEO I’m not 100% sure, but we are going to be doing a focused investigation with the LEO players.” DalBello also called for greater international coordination, giving as one example a formal relationship with the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EUSST) partnership, which is building up an independent SSA capability in Europe . “It’s absolutely essential that there be an open dialogue on this kind of information.” Those discussions are increasingly important as more capabilities emerge, with the Defense Department no longer the single source of SSA information. “We have a major task ahead of us to make sure we have a way to understand what other people are saying,” he said. “We are literally creating a Tower of Babel today, so the U.S. is trying to do the best we can to find a forward on this.” He singled out China as one country that, for now, is not cooperating with the United States and others on SSA. “We have an environment today where the Chinese aren’t playing,” he said. “They’re a major space operator, but they’re not sharing in any meaningful way data on where they are or what their satellites are doing.” “That wouldn’t work in air traffic control and it’s not going to work in space traffic control,” he added. “We need all responsible operators at the table.” ORBITS Act reintroduced As the Office of Space Commerce works on space traffic coordination, several senators have reintroduced a bill that would address related issues, including active debris removal. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) announced Feb. 16 that he had introduced the Orbital Sustainability, or ORBITS, Act. Joining him as co-sponsors were Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) The new ORBITS Act is similar to a previous version that Hickenlooper and others introduced last September and which passed the Senate in December by unanimous consent . However, the House did not take it up before Congress adjourned, requiring senators to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress. The bill directs NASA to publish a list of the orbital debris objects “that pose the greatest immediate risk to the safety and sustainability of orbiting satellites and on-orbit activities” and authorizes NASA to establish a debris removal demonstration program. The bill would allow government agencies to procure commercial debris removal services, update existing debris mitigation standard practices and develop new practices for space traffic coordination. “It’s time for major spring cleaning to protect our space operations from the dangerous threat of debris,” Hickenlooper said in the statement. He introduced the bill last year when he served as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, and reintroduced it even though he is not leading the subcommittee in the new Congress. “Just last month, two Russian satellites came within 20 feet of colliding, which would have littered space with even more debris,” said Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, referring to a Jan. 27 incident identified by LeoLabs where the Cosmos 2361 spacecraft and an SL-8 rocket body came within an estimated six meters of each other. “This bill will jumpstart the technology development needed to remove the most dangerous junk before it knocks out a satellite – or worse, a NASA mission.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —SpaceX launched a satellite for Inmarsat Feb. 17 that gives the operator more capacity for partnerships in an emerging direct-to-device market. A Falcon 9 carrying the British company’s Inmarsat-6 F2 (I-6 F2) satellite lifted off 10:59 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. I-6 F2 separated from the rocket about 32 minutes later, and will use onboard electric propulsion to get to its geostationary orbit slot over the Atlantic Ocean over the next several months. As is now typical for a Falcon 9 mission, the rocket’s first stage successfully landed shortly after launch for reuse. The booster has previously supported a crewed flight to the International Space Station and the launch of a GPS 3 satellite. Earlier in the day, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to take 51 satellites for its broadband constellation to low Earth orbit (LEO). Inmarsat said I-6 F2 is slated to enter service in 2024 following rigorous in-orbit tests. Network expansion The satellite is identical to the Inmarsat-6 F1 (I-6 F1) that is due to start operations from a geostationary slot over the Indian Ocean early this year, following its December 2021 launch by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Both Airbus-built satellites are equipped with a hybrid Ka-band and L-band payload to primarily provide mobile connectivity services across maritime, aviation, and government markets. I-6 F1’s Ka-band capacity will target demand for high-speed connectivity in Southeast Asia, Inmarsat chief technology officer Peter Hadinger said Feb. 18, while I-6 F2’s Ka-band beams will address hotspots over the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hadinger, each satellite also doubles the amount of usable L-band capacity in their coverage area that Inmarsat currently provides with its eight-satellite global ELERA network. This step-up in capacity will primarily support the voice and messaging services Inmarsat already enables via specialized handsets with bulky antennas, as well as its business for connecting remote tracking and monitoring devices. But as Iridium progresses with plans to use its L-band for connecting mass market devices, and other operators flock to the direct-to-device opportunity, Hadinger said I-6 F1 and I-6 F2 could also help unlock more partnership opportunities for Inmarsat in this area. “It certainly gives us longevity,” he said, referring to how each satellite is designed to operate for more than 15 years. “And by giving us additional efficiency in the spectrum, it does improve the number of options we have in terms of lining up with any of these particular direct-to-device” initiatives. British handset maker Bullitt recently said it had developed a smartphone that can use Inmarsat’s network outside of cellular coverage to provide narrowband services that include text messages . “The big question then is how much bandwidth do you need [and] do you need to build a purpose-built fleet to do that?” Hadinger said. “We’re not yet convinced that that is the case, but we have been approached by everybody because we have spectrum.” Inmarsat is currently also considering plans for a LEO constellation that could ultimately support direct-to-device connectivity. 
Russia is moving ahead with the uncrewed launch of a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station after the post-undocking inspection of a Progress cargo spacecraft failed to show damage from a coolant leak. Roscosmos announced Feb. 18 that the council of designers at RSC Energia has recommended the Soyuz-2.1a launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft take place at 7:32 p.m. Eastern Feb. 23. That would set up the spacecraft to dock with the station two days later, shortly before the arrival of the SpaceX Crew-6 mission currently scheduled to launch early Feb. 26. Soyuz MS-23 is launching without a crew because of a coolant leak in the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft in December that led Roscosmos to conclude the spacecraft could not safely return its three-person crew . Soyuz MS-23 will replace Soyuz MS-22, and that damaged spacecraft will return to Earth without a crew. The launch decision, Roscosmos said, came after an inspection of the radiator on Soyuz MS-23 while being prepared for launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Those inspections revealed no damage to it. The announcement came after the Progress MS-21 cargo vehicle undocked from the station late Feb. 17. That spacecraft also suffered a coolant leak Feb. 11 , prompting Roscosmos to delay the Soyuz MS-23 launch from Feb. 19 in order to investigate the problem. Roscosmos initially said that the Soyuz MS-23 launch could be delayed to early March, but didn’t explain in its latest announcement why it moved it back up to February. After undocking, cosmonauts on the station sent commands to rotate the Progress spacecraft about 180 degrees “so that we can get additional visual inspections and documentation of where the coolant leak occurred,” said Jeff Arend, manager of NASA’s ISS systems engineering and integration office, during a Feb. 17 briefing about the upcoming Boeing CST-100 Starliner crewed mission to the station. High-resolution video broadcast during the undocking, though, failed to show any obvious signs of damage like that seen on Soyuz MS-22. While Roscosmos planned to deorbit Progress just one orbit after undocking, it delayed those plans while it studied data it received. Roscosmos announced early Feb. 18 that it would proceed with deorbiting Progress, with reentry over the South Pacific scheduled for 10:57 p.m. Eastern. It earlier stated that inspections did not reveal any damage to the spacecraft, and had even considered redocking Progress to the station for additional studies. Arend noted that the Progress undocking had been scheduled since late December and was not affected by the coolant leak. That coolant system regulates temperatures for the spacecraft’s avionics, and he said even without it the spacecraft should be able to operate normally for its deorbiting. “Our Russian colleagues have done assessments of how long they can operate that vehicle without cooling, and we’re well within limits,” he said. “We think all of the avionics will operate as planned and there has been no impact to the propulsion system at all.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A search for companies to build OneWeb’s second-generation constellation could kick off by summer, French satellite operator Eutelsat said Feb. 17 as it closes in on buying the British venture. A request for proposals will “most likely” be issued in the three months to the end of June, Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said during financial results, enabling launches to start in 2025 or 2026 for a low Earth orbit (LEO) network estimated to cost $4 billion. The companies previously said they have reserved launch options to cover most of Gen 2’s needs, including new rockets being developed by Arianespace, Blue Origin, and Relativity Space. Replenishment plans for OneWeb’s current generation of 648 proposed satellites only extend the constellation’s lifespan to 2027 or 2028, Berneke added. While Gen 2 specifications have not been finalized, the next-generation constellation is expected to enable faster speeds and denser coverage with far more satellites. OneWeb has so far deployed 542 satellites. SpaceX and India’s space agency are each planning to launch a batch of satellites around the end of this month and early March, Berneke said, giving OneWeb global coverage once they become fully operational by January 2024. Meanwhile, she said the French geostationary satellite operator is making good progress in getting the final regulatory approvals it needs in France and the United States to buy OneWeb under a merger deal announced last year . Unlike U.S.-based Viasat’s plan to buy British operator Inmarsat, Eutelsat and OneWeb’s deal was not flagged by Europe for an investigation into how their merger could reduce competition in the market for satellite services. “I think we haven’t had any questions on a regulatory level that were not perfectly normal,” Berneke said. “We don’t have an overlap between OneWeb’s market today and Eutelsat. We’re in different orbits and we don’t have competing capacities.” However, she highlighted “a need to fully understand the satellite market, given that especially the constellation market is fairly new to regulators.” Eutelsat expects to wrap up its OneWeb deal in the second or third quarter of this year, assuming Eutelsat’s shareholders also vote to approve the transaction. Connectivity pivot OneWeb was a bright spot in financial results that were once again dragged down by business in a declining market for satellite TV. Eutelsat recorded 574 million euros ($614 million) in total revenues for the six months to the end of December 2022, down 6.1% compared with the same period in 2021 when adjusted for currency changes on a like-for-like basis. In contrast, fixed broadband revenues increased 17% to 37 million euros while sales of mobile connectivity services jumped 33% to 56 million euros. Government revenues plummeted 20% to 67 million euros following U.S. Department of Defense non-renewals. However, sales from broadcast activities representing 58% of Eutelsat’s total revenue fell 6.7% to 339 million euros. Sanctions on Russian and Iranian channels are compounding Eutelsat’s broadcast woes, and the company expects they will cause a “slight deterioration” in revenues for the six months to the end of June as they start to bite. In addition to buying OneWeb, Eutelsat has been heavily investing in geostationary communication satellites as part of its pivot toward connectivity services. Two of the four satellites launched for Eutelsat in the second half of 2022 focus on broadband markets: Konnect VHTS and Eutelsat 10B. Eutelsat said it is seeing strong take-up of these satellites as it projects a return to profitability in its next fiscal financial year that starts July 1. Connectivity sales now represents 30% of revenue from all its operating verticals revenues, Berneke said, versus 25% four years ago. However, a side effect of Eutelsat’s connectivity push is a reduction in longer-term contracts that are more typical with broadcast customers. Eutelsat said its backlog of revenues stood at 3.7 billion euros at the end of 2022, compared with 4.2 billion the previous year. The backlog does not yet include managed services, Berneke noted, adding that the company is looking into a way to include this in its accounts. Eutelsat’s connectivity pivot also puts the company in a better position for contributing to IRIS², Europe’s proposed multi-orbit secure connectivity constellation that recently got the regulatory go-ahead. Berneke expects Europe will issue a tender for developing the constellation in mid-March. She said there “are a lot of discussions going on left, right, and center in the European space industry” to strike partnerships that could support the constellation. “I think satellite operators are all very interested to be involved,” she said, and Eutelsat “certainly hope to be part of consortiums where you also see satellite operators. “But I think your guess is as good as mine in terms of what Europe will be coming out with” in the coming weeks. Eutelsat recorded 419 million euros in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization for the six months to the end of December, down 3.8% compared with the same period in 2021.
SAN FRANCISCO – Peraton won a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contract with a potential value of nearly $400 million to provide ground services for polar-orbiting weather satellites. Under the Low Earth Orbit Ground Sustainment Services contract announced Feb. 17, Herndon, Virginia-based Peraton will support and maintain the Joint Polar Satellite System Common Ground Services. JPSS CGS offers communications links for satellites operated by NOAA as well as the agency’s U.S. government and international partners. The maximum potential value of the NOAA contract, which includes a base period of five years and three 12-month options, is $399.3 million. Peraton’s work will be performed at its own facilities and NOAA facilities across the country. Work under the contract is scheduled to begin March 1. NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System gathers and distributes environmental data. The JPSS fleet includes Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership mission, launched in 2011, NOAA-20, launched in 2017, and NOAA-21, launched in 2022 . NOAA plans to complete the JPSS fleet with satellites slated for launch in 2028 and 2032. Peraton expanded its role in the space sector with its 2019 acquisition of Solers , a software developer, cloud services and satellite ground systems provider based in Arlington, Virginia.
Preparations for the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle to the International Space Station remain on schedule for a launch in mid to late April, company and NASA officials said Feb. 17. The Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the station on an eight-day mission, launching from Cape Canaveral and landing at White Sands, New Mexico. The mission, following a successful uncrewed flight to the ISS last May, is intended to be the final major test of the vehicle before NASA certifies it for use on ISS crew rotation missions. In a call with reporters, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the NASA and Boeing teams have completed about 80% of the work needed for the mission. He described the next major milestone as a decision in early March to fuel the Starliner spacecraft, which Boeing wants to do within 60 days of launch. That 60-day window is one measure of several Boeing took to reduce the risk that fuel would react with ambient moisture and corrode valves in Starliner’s propulsion system, which delayed an attempted August 2021 test flight . “We are much more confident today with the mitigation that we put in place with the purge system and the sealing of the connectors,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Starliner at Boeing. He called that 60-day window a “guideline” and has asked engineers to look at the possibility of going longer. Those efforts, also used for last year’s OFT-2 uncrewed test flight, are intended to be short-term measures. “It worked really nicely” on that earlier mission, he said, with an “enhanced” version of that approach developed for CFT. A long-term fix, in the form of a redesign of the propulsion system , is in process. That could be used on the first post-certification, or operational, Starliner mission, and no later than the second, he said. NASA and Boeing are also wrapping up resolutions to issues with Starliner encountered during OFT-2. According to Nappi, the only outstanding major issue is the failure of Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters in the Starliner service module during that mission. Since the service module is jettisoned for reentry, engineers have had to narrow down potential root causes from telemetry and tests rather than inspection of the hardware. “When we got down close to closing that fault tree, we recognized with NASA that we wanted to do a little bit of additional testing,” he said. Those tests took place earlier in the month and Boeing is now working with NASA to review the results, which he projected should be done by early March. One challenge for the mission is a busy schedule of missions using the two docking ports that can support commercial crew vehicles. SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission is scheduled to launch Feb. 26, arriving at the ISS a day later. The Crew-5 Crew Dragon vehicle would undock around March 5, Stich, said. That docking port will then be used by a cargo Dragon mission, SpaceX CRS-27, that will arrive around March 12 and depart a month later, freeing it up for the Starliner CFT mission. “There’s a swim lane that we’re going to watch very carefully relative to the traffic” at the station, Stich said. That is complicated by the fact that Starliner, for this mission, can only use the forward docking port. “We’ll have to watch weather delays and things like that to see where we end up relative to having a window to go launch CFT.” A further complication is that United Launch Alliance, whose Atlas 5 will launch Starliner, is also preparing for the inaugural launch of its Vulcan Centaur rocket around the same time. “We’ve been in very close contact with them,” Nappi said. “We still feel that the mid April to late April time slot is good for us. It balances with the ULA priorities.” He added there would need to be further discussions with ULA if the CFT launch slipped beyond early May. NASA officials on the call also addressed risk perception issues about the Starliner mission. During a Feb. 9 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, noted that NASA’s commercial crew program had different views of risks associated with the mission than the ISS and flight operations programs. She compared it to similar debates during development of Crew Dragon about “load-and-go” fueling of the Falcon 9 rocket and its use of composite overwrapped pressure vessels. “Given that there are differing views among the NASA communities about crew risks for the Boeing vehicle, we are very interested in learning more about the overall process for adjudicating those risks,” she said. That included, she said, what risks would be accepted for the CFT mission versus future post-certification missions. Stich noted that the commercial crew and ISS programs have different risk systems. For the commercial crew program, the risk focus is on launch and landing, while at the station the spacecraft is quiescent. The ISS program, though, focuses on risks associated with the spacecraft while at the station, like the reliability of its batteries. “We work lockstep with the [commercial crew program] office and their requirements are very comparable to our requirements,” said Jeff Arend, manager of the ISS program’s systems engineering and integration office, adding that he was looking forward to the Starliner mission. “We’re very excited to see them show up.”
A popular public website that tracks activities on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) has been taken offline for what NASA calls a “cybersecurity review” linked to future Artemis missions. NASA’s long-running DSN Now website provided a graphical presentation of activities at the DSN’s three sites in Australia, California and Spain. The site provided realtime information about what antennas at each site were transmitting to or receiving data from missions across the solar system, illustrating the level of activity of the network and sometimes providing insights about the status of missions before formal announcements. However, the DSN Now site has been offline since early in the month. Initially, visitors were greeted with a message that the site was “undergoing maintenance” but provided no other information, including when it would return to service. “NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is in the process of performing updates on the Deep Space Network Now website,” an updated message now states. “The Deep Space Network Now website is not available during this period, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” An employee of the DSN site near Canberra, Australia, tweeted Feb. 13 that DSN Now was offline because of a review to assess the “sensitivity” of the data it provided, adding it was unclear how long that review would take. In a Feb. 16 statement to SpaceNews, JPL said that the agency was performing a “preemptive cyber security review” of the data provided by DSN Now, which it said was triggered by the network’s support for future crewed Artemis missions. “NASA and the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are in the process of conducting a preemptive cyber security review of the real-time data provided on the Deep Space Network Now website as the agency prepares to support communications and navigation needs for crewed Artemis missions to the Moon using the Deep Space Network,” JPL stated. It said DSN Now would remain offline while the review is in progress, but did not estimate how long that would take. NASA made extensive use of the DSN on the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission late last year. One industry source, speaking on background, said NASA may be concerned that DSN Now revealed information about communications with Artemis that could enable eavesdropping on or even jamming of communications with crewed Orion spacecraft. Other crewed NASA missions, including the International Space Station and commercial crew vehicles, do not use the DSN and the networks they use don’t have similar public-facing tools. The use of the DSN by Artemis 1 affected other major users of the network, such as the James Webb Space Telescope . “When Artemis was up, we had to scrap our plans for a week and move in observations with very low data rates” to compensate for reduced time on the DSN, said Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a town hall session about the space telescope at a conference in January. In a presentation to NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee in December, Philip Baldwin, network operations manager for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation Program, warned that demand for DSN time from both science missions and Artemis would far exceed DSN capacity later in the decade and into the 2030s. “The human spaceflight exploration missions will be demanding as we try to account for those spikes” in demand, he said. NASA is looking at ways to enhance DSN capabilities without creating an “overbuilt” network with too much capacity. That could also include using other antennas not part of the DSN as well as making use of data relay assets at the moon and Mars, perhaps incorporating optical communications.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced Feb. 17 it is seeking to fine SpaceX $175,000 for failing to provide collision avoidance data before a Falcon 9 launch last year. The FAA said it informed SpaceX of the planned fine for not submitting launch collision analysis trajectory data at least seven days before the launch of 53 Starlink satellites on a mission designated Starlink 4-27, which launched on a Falcon 9 Aug. 19 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Under federal launch license regulations , a launch operator like SpaceX must submit data at least seven days before a launch that shows that the probability of a collision between a launched object and any satellite or tracked piece of orbital debris is no more than 1 in 100,000, or otherwise maintain a sufficient distance from those satellites and debris. That threshold increases to 1 in 1,000,000 for potential collisions with crewed vehicles, with larger standoff distances. According to the FAA, SpaceX did not submit that information in advance of the Starlink 4-27 mission. It was not clear why SpaceX did not provide that information for this launch. SpaceX did not immediately respond to questions about the proposed fine; the company rarely acknowledges media inquiries. Because SpaceX failed to provide that information, it is subject to a fine that under federal statute is capped at $262,666 after adjusting for inflation. “After reviewing all of the information contained in our investigative file, we propose to assess a civil penalty in the amount of $175,000,” the FAA stated in its letter to SpaceX. The FAA offered to meet with SpaceX in an “informal conference” to discuss the proposed fine and allow the company to submit information for consideration. SpaceX has up to 30 days to decide whether to participate in such a meeting or other, unspecified alternatives. Collision avoidance has become a problem for the FAA and launch providers given both the growing rate of launches and increasing numbers of satellites and debris in orbit. SpaceX alone conducted 61 launches in 2022, a record for the company. For some launches, there are days when the collision avoidance standoff distances can’t be met. “With the congestion that we have, with the packed density of some of our orbits, you just can’t hit it” on some days, Steph Earle, space policy and outreach branch manager at the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, said during a panel discussion at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 8. That’s particularly true of new launch operators that don’t have the experience with their vehicles needed to use the probability calculations, he added. “They want to launch and they get their collision avoidance very late in the process, maybe a week before, two weeks before,” he said, “only to find out that it is packed and there’s no open window.” He said there may be new technologies that can ease those problems but that broader changes in how to deal with collision avoidance may be needed. “We can’t use the same type of paradigms that we used before.”
Days after a Chinese spy balloon was shot down by the U.S. military off the coast of South Carolina, AI startup Synthetaic backtracked the balloon’s trajectory across the continental United States using Earth imaging data from Planet Labs satellites. Synthetaic founder Corey Jaskolski said this is a novel way to use commercial satellite imagery to track aerial vehicles that might not be seen by radar or by ground observers. It’s also another way to exploit open-source data to independently confirm where the Chinese balloon or other objects came from, he said. “The map we put together overlays our sightings and all the social media reports of where the balloon was.” With the aid of an AI image recognition tool, Jaskolski on Feb. 11 found the balloon in Planet’s satellite data relatively quickly, he told SpaceNews Feb. 17. He first saw the balloon in the satellite data over the Atlantic about two hours before an Air Force fighter jet took it down Feb. 4. “We then started tracing backwards across the United States and got a total of four hits: two in South Carolina, one in Missouri, and one in Canada.” “The hit that we got in Canada was over snow and ice, and we were still able to pick up the balloon,” he said. “We were able to take measurements from the pixels and validate it was about 148 feet in diameter and flying at 58,000 feet. Once we had those calculations, we knew for sure it was the balloon. As soon as we found it, we had a signature that we could use in RAIC and we could start working our way backwards.” RAIC is the company’s AI tool — short for Rapid Automatic Image Categorization. It’s different from most AI systems, he said, because it doesn’t require pre-trained models or extensive image labeling, and quickly analyzes unsupervised data. “All of the AI being developed today is data hungry,” said Jaskolski, an MIT engineer and explorer who founded Synthetaic in 2019 . “Feeding AI with high-quality labeled data is expensive and time-consuming, and the number one thing keeping us from applying AI more widely and more efficiently,” he added. “In a national security emergency, spending months labeling data is not really a luxury we have.” The company has worked with the nonprofit Climate TRACE to identify the location of concentrated animal feeding operations, and with National Geographic to help track rare species endangered by poaching. Jaskolski said this AI system can be set up for daily monitoring to track any aerial objects, and he’s not aware of any government programs that have been doing this from space. President Biden on Feb. 16 said he ordered the U.S. military to shoot down three aerial objects last weekend “out of an abundance of caution” and the objects turned out to be harmless. The ability to trace these objects to their place of origin would help answer a lot of questions, Jaskolski said. “If it was launched from the corporate headquarters of a weather company, that would suggest it was a weather balloon. If it was launched from a military base, it would likely be something else.” A tool like RAIC runs on geospatial data, full motion video and imagery, he added, “and it allows people to answer questions like this really, really quickly.” The balloon incident is interesting and the problem du jour, Jaskolski said, but other situations may come up “where we will not have a pre-trained AI model for” and there will not be enough time to train analysts. Synthetaic has not yet completely traced the spy balloon’s trajectory to the point of origin. “We are currently running RAIC across more satellite image data over Alaska and Asia, but we have not yet gone beyond tracing it back to the northwestern-most point on the map in Canada, just north of Spokane, Washington,” he said. According to U.S. intelligence officials , the balloon’s home base was near China’s south coast. Others said it originated in Central China. And China admitted it was theirs , Jaskolski said, “but with RAIC we hope to verify its exact origin soon.”
Most of the people who converged on the Kennedy Space Center in mid-November for the third Artemis 1 launch attempt were focused on the giant Space Launch System rocket standing at Launch Complex 39B and the Orion spacecraft on top. Craig Hardgrove was thinking about something much smaller. Hardgrove, a professor at Arizona State University, is principal investigator for LunaH-Map, one of 10 cubesats that hitched a ride on SLS as secondary payloads. The six-unit (6U) cubesat carried a neutron spectrometer designed to map water ice concentrations at the moon’s south pole. In the months leading up to the launch, he had been quietly raising concerns about the health of LunaH-Map. The spacecraft was delivered in mid-2021 and installed on the rocket that fall, after which there was no ability to recharge its batteries. As the Artemis 1 launch slipped from early 2022 to late in the year, he worried that the batteries were discharging, keeping the spacecraft from operating immediately after deployment. At the KSC press site hours before liftoff, he was cautiously optimistic about LunaH-Map. Ground tests of batteries like those on the cubesat showed a low discharge rate, suggesting they should still have plenty of charge left. Even if the batteries were depleted, he said the spacecraft’s solar panels could charge them up enough to get the spacecraft ready for a key maneuver days after launch. He was right not to be concerned about the cubesat’s batteries. “Our batteries were at 70% state of charge when we got our first piece of telemetry,” he said in a talk about LunaH-Map at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) a month after launch. “It was in line with our very optimistic predictions about where our batteries might be.” The problem instead was with the cubesat’s propulsion system, an electric thruster called BIT-3 from Busek that uses solid iodine as propellant. The thruster did not operate as expected in the days after launch, causing the spacecraft to miss its primary opportunity to maneuver into orbit around the moon. Hardgrove said telemetry from LunaH-Map suggested that a valve in the thruster was partially stuck closed. “The sticking is something that we knew about,” he said, suggesting it came from the long wait for the launch. “We didn’t really want to wait around for a year, but we had no choice.” Engineers think that heating the valve may free it up. If that happens by mid-January, he said, LunaH-Map can maneuver into an alternative trajectory that would allow it to enter orbit around the moon in about a year. The experience of LunaH-Map is emblematic of the challenges facing deep space smallsats. Spacecraft developers hoped the experience from building cubesats and other smallsats for Earth orbit could translate into more technically demanding missions to the moon and beyond. An early success was NASA’s twin Mars Cube One, or MarCO, cubesats that accompanied the InSight mission to Mars in 2018 and relayed telemetry from InSight as it landed. More than half of the cubesats launched on Artemis 1, though, suffered problems after launch that, at a minimum, jeopardized their missions. The problems affected cubesats built by both space agencies and startups, and had little technically in common. One of the most ambitious cubesats on Artemis 1 was OMOTENASHI, a contrived acronym for “Outstanding Moon Exploration Technologies Demonstrated by Nano Semi-Hard Impactor.” Developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA, OMOTENASHI was designed to land a small probe, weighing less than a kilogram, on the moon using a solid rocket motor and an airbag. However, controllers struggled to establish communications with OMOTENASHI after separation as the spacecraft had problems with attitude control and power. They could not correct the problems in time to perform the maneuver needed for the landing. NASA’s NEA Scout also had lofty goals: the 6U cubesat would deploy an 86-square-meter solar sail, allowing it to maneuver to a small near-Earth asteroid and collect high-resolution images. NEA Scout, though, failed to make contact with controllers after launch. Controllers even sent commands to NEA Scout to deploy its solar sail, hoping it might be seen by telescopes on the ground, but there was no evidence the sail deployed. Cubesats not nearly as complex as NEA Scout and OMOTENASHI had problems as well. The NASA-funded Cubesat to Study Solar Particles, or CuSP, returned telemetry for an hour shortly after its deployment but has not been heard from since. Ominously, the last data from the spacecraft showed a temperature spike in one of its batteries. Lunar IceCube, another NASA-funded cubesat to orbit the moon and look for water ice, made contact with controllers shortly after deployment. However, in a Nov. 29 update, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that the mission team was “continuing its attempts to communicate with the CubeSat so that it can be placed into its science orbit in the coming days.” NASA has not provided an update since then, and the mission’s principal investigator at Morehead State University did not respond to a request for comment. Lockheed Martin’s LunIR spacecraft was designed to just fly by the moon, demonstrating an infrared sensor. However, the company said in December that an “unexpected issue with our radio signal” kept the spacecraft from conducting any observations during the flyby. Nonetheless, Lockheed called the mission a successful technology demonstration by proving that an infrared sensor and cryocooler could be packaged into a 6U cubesat. At the opposite end of the business spectrum from Lockheed Martin is Miles Space, a startup whose Team Miles cubesat was also on Artemis 1. The company won a slot on the launch through a NASA Centennial Challenges competition to test propulsion and communications technology. Wes Faler, chief executive of Miles Space, said that cubesat appears to be tumbling and is slightly off its planned trajectory. Ground stations are getting only fragments of individual data packets from the spacecraft as its transmitter goes in and out of view. “We’re working on software to assemble a data packet from the fragments, a process akin to sequencing a genome from DNA fragments,” he said in early January. “That’s going to take a while.” LunaH-Map was funded by NASA’s planetary science division through a program called Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration, or SIMPLEx. It was one of two cubesat missions selected in 2015 for development. The other original SIMPLEx mission was the CubeSat Particle Aggregation and Collision Experiment (Q-PACE), which would study how small particles collide and form larger particles in microgravity to help scientists understand the formation of solar systems. Q-PACE was placed into low Earth orbit on Virgin Orbit’s first successful LauncherOne mission in January 2021, but the cubesat never made contact with the ground. Even before either of those missions launched, NASA moved on to a second round of the SIMPLEx program, focusing on larger smallsat missions. The agency selected for development three missions in 2019: the Janus mission to fly by binary asteroids, the Lunar Trailblazer lunar orbiter to search for water ice, and Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE), a mission to study the interaction of the solar wind with Mars. Each mission had a $55 million cost cap. All three suffered problems, some beyond their control. Original plans called for both EscaPADE and Janus to fly as secondary payloads on Psyche, a Discovery-class mission to the metallic main belt asteroid of the same name. A change in mission design for Psyche caused by switching from a Falcon 9 to a Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, though, meant that the mission could no longer drop off EscaPADE during a Mars flyby as originally planned. EscaPADE has since redesigned its mission, using Photon satellite buses from Rocket Lab, and could launch as soon as 2024. However, NASA has yet to announce how it plans to launch EscaPADE. Janus, meanwhile, is in limbo after software development problems with Psyche caused it to miss its August 2022 launch window. While Psyche has been rescheduled for launch in October 2023, that opportunity does not offer Janus any trajectories that would allow it to fly by binary asteroids of interest. It’s unclear when or if Janus will fly. “I don’t have another ride for Janus,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at a town hall during the AGU Fall Meeting in December. She added there were previously undisclosed issues with the propulsion system on Janus. “The certainty with which we could execute the mission is in question,” she said. She didn’t elaborate on the problems with Janus, and Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft, didn’t provide details about the issue. Glaze said she’s allowing the team to use their remaining funding to look at alternative missions that could be performed with the Janus spacecraft, but offered no guarantees. “They could come back to us with a new proposed plan, but at this point it would be a new mission.” Lunar Trailblazer had a very different problem: the lunar orbiter was, at one point, on track to be ready for launch at the end of 2022, but its original launch as a secondary payload on NASA’s IMAP space science mission had slipped to early 2025. In June 2022, NASA announced it secured an alternative ride for the spacecraft as a secondary payload on IM-2, the second commercial lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines scheduled for launch as soon as mid-2023. The spacecraft itself, though, faced cost overruns after the spacecraft’s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, determined it required additional engineering and design work. NASA subjected the mission to a review and, in November, decided to proceed with it at a revised cost of $72 million, more than 30% over its original cost cap. Despite the struggles with the SIMPLEx missions and the Artemis 1 cubesats, smallsats have had some successes beyond Earth orbit. A second JAXA cubesat on Artemis 1, EQUULEUS (for Equilibrium Lunar-Earth point 6U Spacecraft), successfully flew by the moon and tested a water-based propulsion system that placed the spacecraft on a low-energy trajectory to the Earth-moon L-2 Lagrange point. NASA’s BioSentinel cubesat was tumbling after deployment. Still, controllers were able to stabilize the spacecraft and maintain contact with it as it flew by the moon to study the effects of radiation on microorganisms. ArgoMoon, a technology demonstration cubesat built by Italian company Argotec for the Italian space agency ASI, took images of the Earth and moon after deployment. However, the company said it needed more time than originally planned to commission the spacecraft. That success came after another Argotec-built cubesat, LICIACube, deployed from NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft and returned images of DART’s collision with Dimorphos, a moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, in September. LICIACube exceeded expectations. “NASA was expecting to get a couple pictures” from LICIACube, said David Avino, chief executive of Argotec, in an interview in November. “We had 627 pictures taken by our spacecraft.” He hopes the success of the two cubesat missions will generate more demand for its smallsats for both Earth orbit and deep space missions. “We want to have something that will not be cheap but will be reliable,” he said. “The main keyword is reliability. That means something that will allow our satellites to last up to five years, even in deep space.” Even before launch, those who worked on the Artemis 1 cubesats knew that many of their satellites might malfunction. In an April 2022 report from a workshop on deep space smallsats, they compared their efforts to the early development of cubesats, when missions had high failure rates as designers struggled with the technical and cost limitations of such spacecraft. Among the report’s recommendations was to shift from the 6U form factor used for the Artemis 1 cubesats to something larger, like 12U, to make it easier to accommodate components and dissipate heat. It also called for improvements in technologies for key subsystems, like attitude control and communications, and changes for how cubesats are accommodated as rideshares. “Most of the reference development teams believe that many of the development issues discussed in this paper could be alleviated by using universally applicable solutions in ‘next generation’ cubesat mission architectures for deep space,” the report concluded. That could include cubesats hitching rides on later Artemis missions. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a webinar by the New York Space Business Roundtable Dec. 21 that NASA was preparing to fly cubesats on Artemis 2 and 3, the next two SLS launches. Glaze said at the AGU Fall Meeting that, despite the challenges faced by some of its SIMPLEx missions, she would like to do more. The only difficulty is getting funding for them. “I love the SIMPLEx program, and I can’t wait to offer it again,” she said. “But I need some budget.” Hardgrove, meanwhile, retained that cautious optimism about LunaH-Map he had before its launch. He noted in December that other spacecraft systems were working well, including testing its neutron spectrometer instrument as the cubesat flew past the moon. If its thruster is not fixed by mid-January, it may still be possible for the spacecraft to carry out an alternative mission, like an asteroid flyby, if it is restored later. “We’re not dead. We’re doing great,” he said. “I think we’re hopefully going to ignite our propulsion system soon.” This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
SEOUL, South Korea — Japan’s space agency JAXA aborted the long-awaited first launch of H3 rocket Feb. 16, when the rocket’s side boosters failed to ignite after main engine start. It was the latest in a series of setbacks for Japan’s years-long efforts to develop a more capable and cost-effective alternative to the nation’s current workhorse, H-2A. Live footage showed the 63-meter expendable rocket, decorated with Japan’s national flag on the core stage with two strap-on side boosters attached, standing idle at the seafront launch pad of Tanegashima Space Center when the countdown was over. “The main engine was ignited, but side boosters were not,” said the range control center, shortly after the rocket’s pre-announced launch window of 8:37-8:44 p.m. Eastern. “It is expected that it would probably take longer to examine the situation. The status of launch vehicle Test Flight No.1 will be announced to all launch operators as soon as it will be confirmed.” JAXA also left a short notice on its website : “Further information will be updated on the JAXA website.” The agency didn’t elaborate on what happened. It’s also not known yet how the agency will examine the issue — after rolling back the rocket to the hangar or at the launch pad. The planned launch was initially targeted for Feb. 14 , but bad weather caused a two-day delay. Aboard the rocket was Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 (ALOS-3), a 3-ton optical imaging satellite, built by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, which will follow in the footsteps of the original Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS). ALOS was launched in 2006 onboard an H2A and declared dead in orbit in April 2011. ALOS-2 is still operating after being launched in May 2014. Japan’s journey to develop H3 was long and winding. JAXA began developing H3 in partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in 2014. It is meant to replace H-2A that has been operational since August 2001 with a new one with “ high flexibility, high reliability, and high cost-performance .” The rocket’s inaugural launch was originally scheduled for March 2021 , but was pushed back by around two years due to issues with the newly developed LE-9 first-stage engine . The problems were first uncovered during qualifications testing in May 2020 , which included cracked turbine blades in the LE-9’s turbopump assembly and a hole seared into its combustion chamber wall. To fix these, JAXA and MHI had to redesign the engine’s fuel turbopump and apply those same changes to the engine’s oxygen turbopump. There are four variants of the H3 rocket, each in a unique configuration of LE-9 engines and side-mounted solid rocket boosters. The rocket can fly with zero, two, or four strap-on boosters and either two or three LE-9 first-stage engines in order to carry a wider range of payloads to a wider range of orbits. Depending on the version of the rocket, it can place a payload of at least 4 tons into a sun synchronous orbit (SSO), with a maximum capacity of 6.5 tons into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). It’s a significant improvement from H-2A’s capacity of 3.8 tons to SSO and 4 tons to GTO . Future upgrades could make it possible for the rocket to deliver cargo to the moon, including the planned lunar Gateway that NASA is pursuing in cooperation with JAXA, the European Space Agency and others. The H3 rocket’s LE-9 is not only a more powerful engine than H-2A’s LE-7. It also employs a novel design, called an expander bleed cycle, that Mitsubishi was the first to introduce with its LE-5A upper stage engine. In addition, the H3 stands to be the first rocket to use an expander bleed cycle engine for its first stage, a design choice meant to yield higher engine thrust at the expense of efficiency. On the price front, the launch cost of the H3 is reportedly around $50 million , half that of the H-2A. Meanwhile, Japan has launched one orbital mission so far this year: a H-2A successfully delivered Japan’s IGS Radar 7 surveillance satellite to orbit on Jan. 25.
Launch services startup Launcher said its first orbital transfer vehicle failed shortly after deployment on a launch last month, but that it will fly upgraded versions of the vehicle later this year. In a Feb. 16 statement, Launcher said its Orbiter SN1 vehicle malfunctioned shortly after deployment from a Falcon 9 rocket on the Transporter-6 rideshare mission Jan. 3 when it could not properly orient itself so that its solar cells could generate power. The vehicle communicated with a ground station on its first scheduled pass after deployment while on battery power. “We also communicated with the vehicle for the duration of expected battery life,” the company said. However, the Hawthorne, California-based company said the spacecraft could not get into the proper attitude so that its solar cells could generate power, which it blamed on “an orientation control issue caused by a fault in our GPS antenna system.” That, in turn, kept Orbiter from deploying its satellite payloads. “While achieving many internal mission objectives in the development of our Orbiter spacecraft and collecting critical data from the successful on-orbit operation, unfortunately, we failed to deploy our customer payloads,” the company stated. Launcher announced development of Orbiter in 2021 to move satellites to their desired orbits after launch. The company designed Orbiter for use on both rideshare launches like SpaceX’s Transporter line of missions as well as on its own small launch vehicle, Launcher Light, that it is developing. The company said in May 2022 it had six customers for Orbiter SN1 that planned to deploy satellites and four others who had hosted payloads that would remain on the vehicle. In a company statement in December , though, it listed only eight total customers for the mission, including four previously announced that would deploy satellites and two with hosted payloads. Launcher stated it had been in “constant communication” with those customers throughout the efforts to recover Orbiter SN1. “We have committed to accommodations beyond our contractual requirements to our customers on this mission.” The company says it will make several modifications to future Orbiter vehicles, including an improved GPS subsystem and software changes to prevent a similar problem from occurring again. Launcher is updating its guidance, navigation and control software for Orbiter with a “robust” safe mode feature and incorporating an improved battery with double the capacity. The company will also add a backup spacecraft separation system. Launcher announced plans to fly two Orbiter vehicles later this year on the SpaceX Transporter-8 and -9 missions, currently scheduled launch in June and October. The company did not disclose what customers it has for those missions. Orbiter is one of several transfer vehicles under development by companies to provide “last-mile” delivery services for smallsats, offering some of the flexibility in orbit provided by dedicated launches at prices closer to what is offered on rideshare missions. Launcher is not the first company to also experience problems with such vehicles. Momentus launched its first Vigoride tug on a Transporter mission in May 2022, but that vehicle experienced problems with communications and a solar array that failed to deploy. The company was able to deploy most, but not all, of the smallsats it carried on board . Momentus launched its second vehicle, Vigoride-5, on the same Transporter-6 mission that carried Orbiter SN1. Momentus said Feb. 6 that Vigoride-5, which carried one smallsat and one hosted payload, has operated as expected since its launch. The company “is continuing to fully commission the vehicle in preparation for further on-orbit operations,” it stated.
The U.S. Space Force on Feb. 16 released its procurement strategy for the next national security launch services contracts expected to be awarded in 2024. The Space Systems Command issued two draft requests for proposals for National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3. This is a “dual-lane acquisition approach” that marks a departure from the previous NSSL Phase 2 procurement and is intended to create more opportunities for emerging launch providers. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won Phase 2 in 2020, and their current contracts will be re-competed. The Space Systems Command will consider feedback from the industry before it issues a final solicitation for NSSL Phase 3 later this year. The command will host an “industry day” briefing Feb. 28-March 1 in Los Angeles. In order to win the NSSL Phase 2 contracts, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance had to demonstrate their vehicles can fly payloads to nine “reference orbits” which requires medium and heavy launch vehicles. The strategy for Phase 3 is less rigid. Under the “dual lane” approach, companies that can’t fly to all orbits can compete for less demanding missions. This approach has been advocated by companies like Blue Origin and Rocket Lab. NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2
A NASA safety panel, while congratulating the agency on a successful Artemis 1 mission, said it was worried about the agency’s safety culture and workforce as it prepares for the first crewed Artemis flight. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, in its annual report issued earlier this month, praised NASA for a successful Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight in late 2022. The mission, featuring the first launch of the Space Launch System rocket, sent the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon and back, splashing down three and a half weeks after liftoff. “The historic launch and landing of Artemis I is a clear success,” the panel wrote in its report. “The mission was a tremendous milestone for NASA and represents years of focus and preparation by the overall NASA and supporting contractor workforce.” However, later in the report the panel raised questions about the agency’s overall safety culture, particularly as it applies to the Artemis series of missions. “The Panel is concerned that NASA’s concerted attention to a healthy safety culture may have diminished, leaving NASA vulnerable to the same flaws that contributed to previous failures. This concern was heightened by the circumstances surrounding NASA’s decision to scrub the Artemis I launch in early September,” it stated. That was a reference to a problem during the second attempt to launch the Artemis 1 mission Sept. 3. NASA officials said at the time an “inadvertent overpressurization” of a liquid hydrogen line damaged a seal , causing a large leak of liquid hydrogen that scrubbed the launch. They speculated that human error caused the overpressurization. In its report, ASAP said a “manual command error” from the launch control center caused the leak. “A command error in a critical system is a serious condition that, in this case, could have put the vehicle and the launch pad at risk,” it stated. “The Panel has learned that this error was communicated in real time to the Launch Director, and then subsequently in internal and public forums, in a manner that was not up to the expectations set by the CAIB or by the recent ‘organizational silence’ training program.” The report did not go into specifics about how the error communications failed to meet expectations. It called the incident an “important — but missed — opportunity” to demonstrate key behaviors, like ensuring it is safe for people to come forward when they make a mistake and that people can offer risk-related information “without fear of recrimination.” “Whether this case example represents one unique moment of mere inattentiveness or a deep and pervasive weakness, it serves to remind NASA of the critical need to attend closely to the fundamental tenets of a healthy safety culture,” ASAP stated in the report. ASAP also raised concerns about the agency’s workforce, including those involved with the Artemis missions. The long gap between Artemis 1 and Artemis 2, expected to launch no sooner than late 2024, could result in a loss of expertise, the panel warned. “Of particular concern to the Panel is the potential for a significant reduction in the size and experience level of the workforce following the completion of the Artemis I mission. There have been reports that a sizable number of experienced workers may be retiring after Artemis I, impacting the resident knowledge base remaining to execute Artemis II,” the ASAP report stated. The panel noted that “irregular cadence” of Artemis missions, and the changing nature of each mission, will pose a challenge even for an experienced workforce. “In every respect, each Artemis mission will be properly characterized as a test mission,” it stated. “Every Artemis mission will be wholly unique for the foreseeable future.” At the panel’s most recent public meeting Feb. 9, shortly after the release of the report, committee members did not elaborate on the concerns in the report, but did reiterate their praise for the successful Artemis 1 mission. “The preparation, execution and post-flight assessment of Artemis 1 is a great first step for the Artemis program,” William Bray, a member of ASAP, said. “It provides a great deal of learning and build up of important muscle memory that will be necessary for the execution and success of future flights as well as the overall long-term program.” The team working on Artemis 2, he added, was building off the success of Artemis 1. “The panel looks forward to seeing that continued rigor, discipline and focus applied to that flight.” Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, offered a cautionary note. “When there is a potential for schedule pressure, we will continue to be vigilant relative to that schedule pressure not causing unwise or unsafe decisions relative to performance and safety and add risk of a different kind to the program.”
The Biden administration in its budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 is likely to seek a significant increase for the U.S. Space Force, the National Security Space Association’s head of legislative affairs Mike Tierney said Feb. 16. The White House is expected to release the president’s federal budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 on March 9. Tierney during an online forum said he has not seen any actual numbers but “things are starting to trickle out in the rumor mill.” “What we’re hearing is another substantial increase for the Space Force in the ‘24 request,” he added. Tierney, a veteran budget analyst, predicts the increase could be anywhere from $3 billion to $6 billion above what was requested in fiscal year 2023. Funding for military space programs — including the Space Force and other space programs across DoD — grew from $17.7 billion in 2021 to $21.8 billion in 2022, Tierney said. In fiscal year 2023, the Pentagon requested $26.9 billion and Congress upped it to $28.5 billion “We’re seeing rapid growth in just a matter of three fiscal cycles,” he added. “That really demonstrates Congress’s commitment to resourcing the entity [the Space Force] that they created.” It is reasonable to predict that Congress will continue to support larger space budgets due to concerns about Russian and Chinese anti-satellite weapons and a realization that U.S. space systems are vulnerable, Tierney noted. At the same time, lawmakers are not going to sign blank checks, he said. In the 2023 legislation, “we saw really significant oversight provisions in both the authorization and appropriations bills that effectively say: ‘we’re here to support you, Space Force and DoD, but we need you to start showing your work a little more thoroughly.” The ongoing uproar over China’s spy balloon, he said, should not have a direct effect on space budgets but “at the optics and macro level” it helps draw attention to China as a national security challenge. The balloon incident “in and of itself I don’t think is going to be a mover” because the threat posed by balloons is not comparable to what is happening in space, Tierney said. “Balloons are the least of Congress’s concerns relative to what they’re hearing about the threat environment” in space and other domains. However, he said, this could ignite a debate on whether the U.S. should think about developing more sophisticated stratospheric capabilities.
The U.S. Space Force accepted delivery of the 10th and final GPS 3 satellite made by Lockheed Martin under a 2008 contract. Of the 10 satellites built, six have been launched and four are stored at a Lockheed Martin facility in Waterton, Colorado, awaiting launch opportunities. In a statement Feb. 16, the Space Systems Command said it declared the 10th satellite “available for launch.” GPS 3 is a modernized version of the U.S. military’s Global Positioning System satellites that broadcast positioning, navigation and timing signals. Compared to earlier generations, the GPS 3 satellites provide military users extra protection from jamming attacks and a more advanced L1C signal for civilian users that is interoperable with Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites. “The completion of the 10th, and final, GPS 3 space vehicle is a significant milestone for GPS modernization,” said Scott Thomas, GPS 3 program manager at the Space Systems Command. Thomas noted the GPS program supports “U.S. national security needs for our warfighters and for more than four billion users worldwide.” The production of GPS 3 has not been without setbacks. Lockheed Martin beat Boeing in 2008 in a high-stakes competition to build GPS 3. The program later ran into technical problems with the main payload and production fell behind schedule. The first GPS 3 satellite, originally projected to launch in 2014, launched in 2018. The second one launched in 2019, the third and fourth in 2020, the fifth in 2021 and the sixth launched last month. Five of these launches were on SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicles, and one on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. No date has been announced for the launch of the seventh GPS 3, which was assigned to ULA’s new rocket Vulcan Centaur. Lockheed Martin is now producing a more advanced version of the GPS 3, called GPS 3F. The company’s dominance of the GPS program led its only competitor, Boeing, to bow out of the competition to built the GPS 3F. Lockheed Martin in 2018 was awarded a contract worth $7.2 billion for up to 22 GPS 3F satellites. Ten have been ordered so far.
Commercial launch firm Space Pioneer announced new funding this week and will soon take a shot at becoming China’s first such company to reach orbit with a liquid propellant rocket. Space Pioneer, full name Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd., announced Feb. 15 that it recently secured “B+ and “Pre-C” strategic funding rounds. The company says it has now raised nearly 3 billion yuan ($438 million) in funding since its founding in 2018. The company is also preparing for the upcoming launch of the Tianlong-2 kerosene-liquid oxygen medium-lift launcher from Jiuquan. A recent Chinese news report stated the launch would take place from Jiuquan spaceport, northwest China, in the first quarter of this year. Space Pioneer conducted a wet dress rehearsal with the rocket at a site near Tianjin last month before transporting it to Jiuquan. The Tianlong-2 is capable of carrying 2,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 1,500 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). It features a 3.35-meter-diameter core, as with many Long March series rockets. If successful, the launch would make Space Pioneer China’s first privately-funded company to reach orbit with a liquid propellant rocket, following a failed launch attempt of Landspace’s methane-liquid oxygen Zhuque-2 in December. The company reaching the pad also reflects the progress and growth of a Chinese commercial space sector over the past decade, with a range of companies planning more than 20 launches in 2023. A post on Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo suggests the engines powering the Tianlong-2 are YF-102 open cycle kerolox engines developed by China’s state-owned main space contractor CASC. The engines are manufactured utilizing 3D printing techniques. Tianlong-2 uses three engines in a triangular configuration. Space Pioneer is already looking ahead to its next launch vehicle however. Funds raised in the two recent rounds are to be used for the development of the larger Tianlong-3 launcher and its rocket engines, construction of requisite launch facilities, and attracting talent. Tianlong-3 will be a two-stage kerolox rocket with a reusable first stage. A Space Pioneer press release says the rocket will be capable of lifting 15 tons of payload to LEO and is targeting launching batches of up to 60 satellites per launch for China’s Guowang LEO communications megaconstellation. The company is targeting a first launch in early 2024, ramping up to a planned cadence of more than 12 launches per year from 2025. The firm also plans a TL-3H version, which uses three cores in a similar fashion to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. It would be capable of carrying 68 tons to LEO. The TL-3M features a reusable spaceplane. Space Pioneer and another recently emerging company, Orienspace , are moving directly towards medium-lift and heavier classes of launchers, whereas numerous earlier-established Chinese commercial firms looked to first develop lighter solid and liquid propellant rockets. These trends appear to reflect early entrants initially looking to launch small satellites for private customers, being the apparent market, whereas China has more recently indicated that private firms can participate in launching both the national “satellite internet” project and sending cargo to the Tiangong space station. Space Pioneer initially started out developing engines burning green propellant before changing direction. The firm also apparently scrapped development of the Tianlong-1 rocket.
The carrier aircraft for Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane made its first flight in more than a year Feb. 15 as the company moves one step closer to beginning commercial service. The airplane, VMS Eve, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, flying for more than two and a half hours before landing back at the airport. The plane reached altitudes of up to 12,650 meters during the flight, according to flight tracking data. The flight was the first for VMS Eve since it flew to Mojave from Spaceport America in New Mexico in October 2021. Virgin Galactic performed an extensive overhaul of the plane while in Mojave, including replacing the center pylon where the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane is attached. The company did not disclose the results of the flight, but did publish an interview with Kelly Latimer, its senior flight test director. She said the “functional check flight” would test the modifications to the plane, including testing how the new launch pylon worked at altitude after a cold soak. “It’s a standard practice in the aviation industry and is always a key step after maintenance or modifications are performed on the aircraft,” she said of the test flight. “We check everything on the ground and then again in flight, during different maneuvers at different altitudes and temperatures, especially extremely cold temps.” Virgin Galactic did not state if additional test flights of the plane are planned in Mojave. The plane was built by Scaled Composites in Mojave for Virgin Galactic and unveiled in 2008. It was known as WhiteKnightTwo for most of its career, although Virgin Galactic now refers to the plane as VMS Eve. In Virgin Galactic’s most recent earnings call in November , Michael Colglazier, chief executive of the company, said VMS Eve would return to Spaceport America shortly after the test flight, which at the time was scheduled for early January. It will be reunited with the VSS Unity, the company’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, to begin a series of test flights that will include an unpowered glide flight and a powered suborbital flight with company personnel on board. Those flights will be the first for Unity since a July 2021 suborbital flight that carried company founder Richard Branson and several other Virgin Galactic employees. That will be followed by a research flight for the Italian Air Force under a contract signed in 2019. The company said in January that it remained on schedule to begin commercial flights in the second quarter, first with the Italian Air Force flight and then space tourist flights. Shares in Virgin Galactic closed up 13.6% in trading Feb. 15. The company announced Feb. 13 it will release its fourth quarter and full year financial results for 2022 on Feb. 28.
Boeing has opened the production facility where it will build a new upper stage for an upgraded version of the Space Launch System. The company held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Feb. 13 at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans for what it calls the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) Gray Box, a portion of the sprawling building there where the company will build that upper stage. The “Gray Box” name comes from a previous use of that part of the building, said John Shannon, mission area vice president for Boeing Exploration Systems, in an interview after the event. Lockheed Martin used that area to produce liquid natural gas tanks, cordoned off from the rest of the facility with dark gray walls and curtains to keep dust from that work from getting into other parts of the building. “It just got the nickname the Gray Box.” The renovated Gray Box facility, now a pristine white, is home to equipment that will be used to manufacture the EUS. That stage will be used on the Block 1B version of the SLS that will enter service with the Artemis 4 mission in the latter part of the decade. After completing welding tests, Boeing will produce an EUS structural test article that will then be tested at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Steve Snell, Boeing EUS program manager, said that structural test article should be done in the first half of 2024. That will be followed by the first flight version of the EUS, which will undergo static-fire tests at the Stennis Space Center like the Green Run test performed on the first SLS core stage. Those tests will use versions of the Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engine designed to operate at sea level. At least two firings of the stage are planned. “It’s to demonstrate that we can restart the engine after it’s been fired,” Snell said. The second firing would take place the same day. The opening of the EUS Gray Box is part of broader changes that Boeing is making in the production of the SLS core stage and upper stage. In December, NASA and Boeing announced they should shift some core stage assembly work from Michoud to the Kennedy Space Center, taking advantage of underutilized KSC properties like the Space Station Processing Facility and one bay of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Those changes, Shannon said, were driven by a NASA request to be able to produce two SLS core stages and Exploration Upper Stages a year. “To do two a year, we just couldn’t do it in the footprint that we had,” he said. Moving some work to KSC, such as outfitting of the engine module and integrating it with the rest of the core stage, freed up space in Michoud for increased core stage production. “We reran our factory model and we could get to two a year.” Those changes will take effect with the SLS being built for Artemis 3, with the engine section for that vehicle shipped to KSC in December. At the time of the ribbon-cutting ceremony workers were preparing to install the engine section onto the core stage for the Artemis 2 SLS, which is scheduled to be completed in May. NASA’s current plans call for using only one SLS a year through at least the end of the decade. Shannon, though, said there is interest from others in the heavy-lift rocket. “Since Artemis 1 we’ve gotten a lot of interest from a lot of different places,” he said, such as unnamed “other government agencies” interested its payload performance. However, he said he expected SLS, regardless of the customer, to be used for missions beyond Earth orbit. “It’s really a deep space vehicle. I would never compete SLS for a low Earth orbit activity.” Among those looking forward to the EUS is NASA astronaut Stan Love. Speaking at the EUS Gray Box ceremony, he said the astronaut office appreciated the fact that the EUS was designed from the beginning to be human rated and not have that human rating “stapled on” as is the case with the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, the upper stage based on the one built for the Delta 4 that used on the current Block 1 version of the SLS. That includes more control of the stage during flight, particularly in abort scenarios. “We’re really looking forward to EUS,” he said. “A lot of capability in there and safety is built it. It’s part of the way we like to operate spacecraft, which is not to be a dumb payload sitting on top.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Europe’s ambitions for a sovereign connectivity constellation are now in the hands of industry, the European Parliament said Feb. 14 after voting to approve the 6 billion euro ($6.4 billion) plan. A plenary session to adopt regulation needed to develop IRIS², or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, received 603 votes in favor and just six against. There were 39 abstentions. The Council of the European Union “will be adopting the text soon,” the European Parliament said in a news release, clearing the way for manufacturers to submit bids to build, launch, and deploy the multi-orbit network by 2027. Initial services are slated to begin by 2025 to complement communications assets Europe already has in geostationary orbit. Europe announced a funding agreement Nov. 17 for half the project’s cost, with the rest covered by the private sector. IRIS² comes in response to U.S.-based Starlink’s growing dominance in low Earth orbit communications, and a need to protect infrastructure against increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats. “The Russian military aggression against Ukraine has demonstrated how crucial space-based sovereign and secure communication services are in case of conflict,” said Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market. Government applications include border surveillance, supporting the distribution of humanitarian aid, and protecting key sites such as European Union embassies. The constellation is also intended to facilitate commercial services that would fill gaps in broadband access over parts of Europe and Africa. European companies of all sizes will be invited to develop IRIS², including startups that are set to build 30% of the constellation.
The Defense Department’s space policy office is drafting a congressionally mandated report explaining how the U.S. will defend satellites in orbit. DoD has a top-secret space defense strategy but Congress wants an unclassified version that explains to the public the threats facing U.S. satellites and what can be done in response. “We’ll be writing that unclassified report,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said Feb. 14 at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. Plumb said his office is responding to congressional language in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act directing DoD and the director of national intelligence to “make publicly available a strategy regarding defending and protecting on-orbit satellites.” Although congressional defense and intelligence committees have access to the classified strategy and have been briefed on DoD’s plans with regard to space, they want a releasable version that lays out some level of detail and helps make the case for space funding. “There are ongoing conversations with staff,” Plumb added. “They are asking for an ability to talk at an unclassified level about the need to invest in space,” he said. “We’re working on it.” Plumb said the unclassified strategy will lay out the threats posed by Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons. These countries see the U.S. military’s reliance on space and the disruptive impact that disabling satellites would have on U.S. operations, he said. The strategy also will highlight the importance of space as a “national economic driver.” The U.S. continues to advocate for “norms of responsible behavior” in outer space, said Plumb, but the military also will move forward with the development of new constellations to add resilience to current systems. He noted that resilience is not one-dimensional and requires investments in space and ground systems. “There’s a lot of pieces to it.” “We need to defend our systems if deterrence fails,” he said. The U.S. also needs intelligence and space domain awareness capabilities to be able to attribute hostile acts. Role of commercial space industry Plumb said the DoD heavily relies on the private space industry but declined to comment on possible initiatives — driven by the war in Ukraine — to compensate contractors if their satellites are destroyed or damaged during conflicts. “We leave that for the lawyers in the White House to decide,” he said. For the Department of Defense, “this is new terrain, kind of a new frontier.” Plumb said the integration of commercial systems into military networks is “absolutely key” and that issue is being led by the head of Space Force acquisition Frank Calvelli . “We have had conversations with Calvelli and he’s out in front leading on this,” Plumb said. Space Force strategy guidance The Space Force’s office of strategy and resourcing in an internal guidance document said the strategic competition in space will require the Space Force to field resilient constellations and also work closely with allies and commercial partners. According to the Space Force’s “strategy note,” a copy of which was obtained by SpaceNews :
The $6.4 billion acquisition of Maxar Technologies by the private equity firm Advent International remains on track to close in mid-2023 following completion of a 60-day “go shop” period when other offers could have been considered. The agreement with Advent International was announced Dec. 16, 2022 . During the 60-day “go shop” period that expired Feb. 14, Maxar and its financial advisor J.P. Morgan Securities held discussions with 36 potential buyers “but did not receive any competing acquisition proposals,” Maxar announced Feb. 15. The acquisition still has to be officially approved by Maxar stockholders. Maxar said the deal cleared a U.S. antitrust review at the end of January. Headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, Maxar operates four high-resolution imaging satellites and is the primary supplier of commercial satellite imagery to the U.S. government. The company also manufactures satellites in Palo Alto, California. The completion of Advent’s acquisition in a timely manner is key to Maxar as it looks to accelerate the deployment of new satellites. Amid growing demand for satellite imagery, Maxar has been eager to launch its new WorldView Legion high-resolution optical imaging satellites that have been in production for years and delayed by supply chain problems, the pandemic and other issues. The first two are expected to launch this year. When the deal with Advent was announced, Maxar’s president and CEO Daniel Jablonsky said that going private would help Maxar move faster and get WorldView Legion on orbit. The company on Feb. 14 announced an agreement to secure access to radar imaging satellites from startup Umbra. 
NASA has released additional details about how it plans to use commercial space stations after the retirement of the International Space Station as some in industry seek to accelerate NASA’s support for them. NASA published two white papers Feb. 13 as part of a request for information (RFI) for its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations effort to support development of commercial stations. The documents provide new details about how NASA expects to work with companies operating those stations and the agency’s needs to conduct research there. One white paper lists NASA’s anticipated resource needs for those stations, including crew time, power and volume, broken out for each of the major agency programs anticipated to use commercial stations. Companies had been seeking more details about NASA requirements to assist in the planning of their stations. “The utilization document is critically important because it contains a vetted and quantified list of potential utilization needs to help guide industry size and outfit their concepts,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement accompanying the RFI. He added that while NASA doesn’t expect commercial stations to provide all the capabilities identified, the agency wanted to give companies “an idea of the type, and scope, of equipment and facilities we have used on station in the past and what we might need in the future.” Overall, including resources expected to be reserved for a successor to the ISS National Laboratory, NASA expects to require 3,000 to 4,000 hours of crew time a year, which NASA expects to provide through having two astronauts on a commercial station. The agency stated, though, that it is open to having private astronaut carry out some of the research activities. NASA says it expects to conduct 130 to 230 experiments a year, using up to 24 cubic meters of storage. It anticipates internal experiments and equipment needing 42 kilowatts of power, while five to eight external locations for experiments would need an additional five to eight kilowatts. NASA anticipates needed to transfer 5,000 kilograms of cargo up to commercial stations and return 2,000 kilograms of cargo. The second white paper outlines the concept of operations NASA envisions for its use of commercial space stations. The 40-page document described in detail what it expects from such stations in terms of capabilities, resources and operations, as well as what oversight the agency anticipates having. The document notes, as one example, that it will not require commercial space stations to have an airlock and be able to support spacewalks. It adds, though, that such capabilities can be valuable for repairing and retrieving external payloads and that, without them, commercial providers should offer alternatives for installing external payloads. NASA expects its astronauts on commercial space stations will work alongside commercial astronauts, including those employed by the station’s owner. Those commercial astronauts, NASA envisions, will be primarily responsible for station maintenance, but NASA said it expects some sharing of those tasks, noting “crew cohesion can be negatively affected” if they are not shared. The two documents, NASA said in the RFI, are intended to help companies as they work on their commercial space station concepts and “maintain open communications with the private sector.” NASA is currently working with four companies that have proposed commercial stations. Three teams, led by Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, won funded Space Act Agreements in late 2021 through the Commercial LEO Destinations program to work on their station concepts. Axiom Space has a separate agreement with NASA to allow it to install commercial modules on the ISS that will be the precursor for a standalone commercial station. One executive, though, said that NASA needs to narrow down that list. “We’re concerned that, with four competitors in game for very much longer, we’re just diluting what is only a nascent market, if there is a market,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, chief government and external relations officer at Axiom Space, during a panel at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 9. That dilution, she argued, would ultimately delay the development of commercial stations. “We’re worried that, without very clear milestones for downselect and consolidation, we’re actually going to extend the period of time it takes to get thigs on low Earth orbit after ISS,” she said. “We have some concerns about that approach.” That comes as China operates its Tiangong space station and solicits payloads from other countries, including through the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. “We’ve already got U.S. folks who are running companies interested in LEO who have been losing customers to the Chinese space station,” she said. However, Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, gave no indication on the panel that NASA would accelerate any plans to downselect to a smaller number of station providers. “I appreciate Mary Lynne’s comments,” she said, but added that the agency was still trying to understand how it can use commercial stations to meet its exploration and research needs currently served by the ISS. “We still need to know how to do commercial LEO destinations,” she said, including technical and regulatory issues. “This is really the time where we need to be listening.”
Virgin Orbit provided additional details about the likely cause of its LauncherOne failure last month but didn’t estimate when the vehicle will be ready to return to flight. In a Feb. 14 statement, the company elaborated on comments made a week earlier by its chief executive, Dan Hart, who said at the SmallSat Symposium Feb. 7 that a filter in the rocket’s second stage propulsion system dislodged “and caused mischief downstream” that led to a premature shutdown of the engine before the rocket reached orbit. Virgin Orbit said that the fuel filter for the second-stage NewtonFour engine had been dislodged from its normal position. The fuel pump downstream of that filter “operated at a degraded efficiency level,” reducing the amount of fuel reaching the engine. That, in turn, caused the engine to operate at a higher temperature than it was rated for. The company said that components “downstream and in the vicinity” of the overheated engine malfunctioned, which led to the premature shutdown of the engine. In the statement, Virgin Orbit noted that the investigation into the Jan. 9 launch failure is ongoing. “All potentially credible scenarios, including the one described above, are being investigated,” the company stated. “Numerous tests are underway to support the investigation and help lead to definitive conclusions.” The company did not disclose when it expected that investigation to be complete, or when it would be ready to attempt another launch. It said that “all credible causes of the failure will be addressed” before the next launch, which will take place from Mojave Air and Space Port in California for an unidentified commercial customer. “Our investigation is not yet complete; the team is hard at work and we’ll pursue the cause and contributors to wherever the system analysis takes us,” Hart said in the statement. “However, with many clear clues from extensive data assessment now understood, we are modifying our next rocket with a more robust filter and we are looking broadly to assure that all credible contributors to mission failure are rooted out and addressed.” The company, publicly traded on Nasdaq, has not announced when it will release its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2022 and the full year. Shares in Virgin Orbit closed down nearly 2% at $1.58 Feb. 14, but rose in after-hours trading after the company released the statement on the status of the failure investigation.
Cobham Satcom will supply as many as 170 terminals to Inmarsat for the U.S. Navy Military Sealift Command, the company said. Inmarsat Government last year won a $578 million 10-year contract to maintain and operate the command’s communications infrastructure, including satellite systems, teleports and terrestrial services. Inmarsat also will upgrade the command’s ship-based communications systems from Ku-band to Ka-band provided by the company’s new Global Xpress satellites. Inmarsat Government, based in Reston, Virginia, is a subsidiary of British communications satellite operator Inmarsat. Cobham, an established supplier of terminals across the satellite industry, will provide Sailor XTR broadband satellite internet terminals for the Military Sealift Command contract. These terminals were designed for maritime platforms, the company said. The Military Sealift Command is responsible for the Navy’s replenishment and military transport ships, and provides transportation for all branches of the U.S. military and civilian agencies. Inmarsat Government was awarded the MSC wideband services contract in August 2022 by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The company announced Feb. 7 it will replace existing Ku-band user terminals on MSC vessels with 1-meter Sailor 1000 XTR and 0.6-meter Sailor 600 XTR Ka-band terminals. Cobham said these terminals operate across multiple orbits so they will be able to support Inmarsat’s geostationary and highly elliptical orbit satellites, ensuring access over the Arctic region. Inmarsat Government in October 2022 also won a 10-year contract worth $980 million from the Defense Information Systems Agency to provide broadband satellite and terrestrial communications services to the U.S. Navy. Inmarsat is expected to be acquired by global satellite operator Viasat but the $7.3 billion deal has been held up by regulatory reviews. The European Commission is currently evaluating the merger. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s plan to buy Inmarsat faces more delays after Europe launched an in-depth probe Feb. 13 into whether it would reduce competition for providing Wi-Fi on planes. Europe’s investigation aims to ensure the deal “does not lead to higher prices and lesser quality” inflight connectivity (IFC) services on flights in Europe, said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy. IFC is a “nascent and growing market in Europe,” Vestager said, and the two geostationary satellite operators currently “compete head to head to serve European airlines.” U.S.-based Viasat announced plans in November 2021 to use a mix of cash and shares to buy British rival Inmarsat. The deal was worth around $7 billion before a decline Viasat’s share price wiped off more than a billion dollars. The European Commission expects to decide on the transaction by June 29. Europe’s concerns echo those raised by the U.K.’s competition watchdog, which launched a separate investigation Oct. 14 with a March 30 deadline. Raymond James analyst Ric Prentiss said it “now feels even more likely” that the deal would close beyond the company’s original May 8 projection for completing the transaction — if it is successful. Assessing a fledgling market The Europe Commission said European airlines have few alternatives to Inmarsat and Viasat for IFC services, a market with high regulatory and technological barriers to entry. However, the European Commission also acknowledged the industry “is undergoing a transition” as Starlink, OneWeb, and other operators in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) enter or plan to launch services in the IFC market. “The Commission plans to further investigate whether those new players are likely to exert sufficient competitive pressure on the merged entity in the near future,” the European Commission said in a Feb. 13 news release. Viasat and Inmarsat say NGSO services are set to transform the state of play in the IFC market. They also point to strong existing competition in geostationary orbit from Intelsat and Panasonic in the long-haul IFC market. In a short statement Feb. 13, Inmarsat said it remains confident combining with Viasat “will strengthen competition in the growing satellite communications market.” Shares of Viasat stock closed slighty higher Feb. 13 at $31.38 despite the Europe Commission opening the in-depth probe. However, Viasat shares are down more than 50% from a $67 close prior to the acquisition’s Nov. 8, 2021, announcement. 
SpaceX has abandoned efforts to convert two oil rigs into launch platforms for its Starship vehicle, but the company still believes that offshore launch platforms will be part of its long-term plans. In 2020, SpaceX acquired two oil rigs, which it subsequently named Phobos and Deimos after the two moons of Mars. The company planned to convert the rigs into offshore launch platforms that would be used for its Starship vehicles. “SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth,” tweeted SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk in June 2020, shortly after job postings for “offshore operations engineers” were posted on SpaceX’s website. Phobos has been at the port of Pascagoula, Mississippi, since January 2021, while Deimos arrived there in March 2022. Both were there to be refitted as launch platforms, but there has been little noticeable activity on either vessel for months. Recent shipping manifests published by the port show that both are scheduled to leave the port in the next month. Deimos is scheduled to depart Feb. 20 while Phobos will leave March 12. The manifests do not list their destinations. However, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told reporters after a presentation at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 8 that the company had sold the rigs after concluding they were not suited to serving as launch platforms. “We bought them. We sold them. They were not the right platform,” she said. She didn’t disclose when SpaceX sold the rigs or to whom. Shotwell said the company needed to first start launching Starship and better understand that vehicle before building offshore launch platforms. “We really need to fly this vehicle to understand it, to get to know this machine, and then we’ll figure out how we’re going to launch it.” She said she expected offshore platforms to eventually play a role to support an extraordinarily high launch cadence. “We have designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it,” she said in the conference presentation. “We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.” She didn’t elaborate in the presentation where those launches would take place. The company’s current Starship launch pad at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, is limited in the number of orbital launches it can host by an FAA environmental review and state regulations for access to a nearby beach. The company is building another Starship launch site at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, but it’s unclear how many launches that site, as well as an increasingly active Eastern Range, can handle. “We’ll have many pads” to support that high launch rate, she later told reporters. “I think we’ll have a lot of sea-based platforms as well. We have to see how this ship goes.”
As the Pentagon continues to r ecover the remnants of the Chinese spy balloon shot down Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina, the Biden administration is forming an interagency group to investigate these aerial surveillance objects and study options for their detection and analysis. One of those options would be to “tune” the U.S. military’s space surveillance sensors to help detect high-altitude aerial surveillance platforms in the upper layer of the atmosphere, John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said Feb. 14. Speaking at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event, Plumb said his office has participated in multi-agency discussions on the implications of China deploying spy balloons over U.S. airspace. “Obviously the U.S. government’s been focused on this issue for a couple of weeks now, including myself,” he said. The balloon incident led the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to alter the detection parameters of its radar tracking sensors inside U.S. and Canadian airspace so this past weekend it was able to identify small objects that traditionally it would not track. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said “slow-moving, high-altitude objects, even as large as the Chinese spy balloon, which was the size of three school buses, are difficult to track by radar.” Speaking with reporters Feb. 13 , Kirby said NORAD is adjusting its radar tracking methods. Plumb explained there is “sensor overlap” in the military’s network of conventional radars, phased-array radars and telescopes that are used for air defense, missile defense and space domain awareness. The systems that provide space domain awareness “can also be tuned, of course, to look at the stratosphere,” he said. The military’s collection of sensors is called the Space Surveillance Network, with systems dispersed across multiple sites worldwide. NORAD first deployed these sensors during the Cold War as an early warning system to detect ballistic missiles. “How to tune those, or understand how to use the information coming back from them to get better awareness of that domain, is definitely part of the solution” to the detection of high-altitude balloons, Plumb added. When sensors are multi-use, he said, the challenge is “figuring out the right balance of resources” across different parts of the sensor network. “That is really an important piece going forward.” Mitchell Institute chair Kevin Chilton, a retired U.S. Air Force general, noted that until the recent discovery of the Chinese balloon, that section of the higher atmosphere was not getting much attention. “There wasn’t a lot going on there. So maybe our focus was a little lower in the atmosphere, and now we have to pay attention,” Chilton told Plumb. Plumb pointed out that U.S. military radars are trained for cruise missile threats, and the balloon problem is not just a Department of Defense issue. “The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is supposed to regulate our airspace and the airspace keeps going up past commercial jets,” Plumb added. “And so I think this kind of growing awareness of this problem is going to be part of this conversation.”
Russia has delayed the launch of an uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, intended to replace a damaged spacecraft there, to investigate damage to a second spacecraft there. In comments posted Feb. 13 on the Telegram social media account of the Russian space agency Roscosmos , Yuri Borisov, head of the agency, said the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft that had been scheduled for late Feb. 19 (Feb. 20 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome) would be delayed until early March. The delay, he said, would give investigators time to study a coolant leak in the Progress MS-21 cargo spacecraft reported Feb. 11 . That leak is similar to one that the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft suffered in December. The earlier leak led Roscosmos, in conjunction with NASA and other ISS partners, to decide in January to launch Soyuz MS-23 without a crew . It will replace Soyuz MS-22, which will return to Earth without a crew. That will ensure that the crew that flew to the ISS on Soyuz MS-22 — Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio — have a safe means of returning home, but will extend their stay on the ISS by several months. In January, Roscosmos blamed the Soyuz coolant leak on a micrometeoroid impact, an explanation that NASA publicly accepted then. However, the similar Progress leak has created new doubts about that explanation. Roscosmos released Feb. 13 the first close-up image of the location of the Soyuz leak, taken by a camera on the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The image showed a small hole at the center of a discoloration on the white surface of that region of the spacecraft. The images, Roscosmos argued, were proof that the hole was “external damage” to the spacecraft. Roscosmos said Feb. 14 that a similar inspection would be carried out of the Progress MS-22 leak . The agency didn’t provide additional details about the investigation or the potential cause of the leak. The delay in Soyuz MS-23’s launch will likely push it back until after a crew exchange on the station. NASA is scheduled to launch the Crew-6 mission to the station Feb. 26. It will deliver to the station NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev to the station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. They will replace NASA’s Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA’s Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos’s Anna Kikina, who will return to Earth on the Crew-5 Crew Dragon several days after the Crew-6 arrival. NASA said Feb. 13 that the crew of the upcoming Crew-6 mission entered pre-launch quarantine Feb. 12, and that launch remained scheduled for Feb. 26.
WASHINGTON – Astranis Space Technologies won a $4.5 million contract to integrate a U.S. military communications waveform on one of the company’s satellite communications payloads, the company announced Feb. 14 Under a two-year Small Business Innovation Research Phase 3 contract awarded by the U.S. Space Force, Astranis will integrate the Protected Tactical Waveform on a commercial communications payload. The contract has options worth an additional $6 million for an on-orbit demonstration, Astranis CEO John Gedmark told SpaceNews . The waveform known as PTW is a specific type of networking software used by the military to transmit voice and data. The U.S. Air Force developed the PTW a decade ago to add increased security to satellite-based communications. The waveform over the years has been integrated on both military and commercial satellites. Astranis, a San Francisco-based startup , makes small geostationary satellites aimed at users that want dedicated coverage over a specific region. The company has been pursuing opportunities in the defense market as the military seeks to take advantage of emerging commercial technologies. Astranis’ small GEO satellites — ranging from 350 to 400 kilograms — can be repurposed relatively quickly from one region to another based on the customer needs, Gedmark said. He said the company got the Space Force contract just six weeks after the head of U.S. Space Systems Command, Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, visited the Astranis factory in San Francisco and heard about the potential military applications for micro-GEO communications satellites. Gedmark said he hopes the PTW demonstration, if successful, will convince Space Systems Command to order “a sizable number of these satellites in GEO and those would be dedicated assets for the Space Force.” Astranis sees this project “as a stepping stone towards what certainly could be a sizable program in the future,” he added. The company’s first satellite is projected to launch in the coming weeks as a secondary payload alongside the Viasat-3 broadband satellite on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Astranis’ first satellite, named Arcturus , will provide internet services over Alaska . Astranis purchased a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 launch to deploy four more small GEO satellites some time over the coming year.Two are for inflight connectivity provider Anuvu , one for Peru’s telecommunications service Andesat and the fourth customer has not yet been announced. 
Maxar has signed a contract with satellite imagery startup Umbra to get dedicated access to the company’s radar imaging constellation, the companies announced Feb. 14. The partnership will allow Maxar to directly task Umbra’s satellites and integrate synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data into its portfolio of Earth intelligence products and services, Tony Frazier, head of Maxar’s public sector Earth intelligence, told SpaceNews . SAR is a specialized form of remote sensing that has been in growing demand since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine . SAR satellites can capture images at night, through cloud cover, smoke and rain — conditions that impair traditional optical satellites like those operated by Maxar. Maxar has agreements with third-party SAR providers , including Capella Space and Iceye, but it chose Umbra for a dedicated partnership because the company’s high-resolution SAR better complements Maxar’s high-resolution optical imagery, Frazier said. “Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, we’ve seen a high demand for multi source capabilities,” he said. “And especially a demand for integrating high resolution SAR with our optical capabilities.” Combined optical-SAR products will be available in the second quarter of 2023 and will be fully integrated by 2024, Frazier said. The agreement with Umbra is non-exclusive and expected to extend over several years, he said. “We will be able to task their satellites and get the data to our customers on rapid timelines.” Umbra, based in Santa Barbara , California, has five satellites in orbit. Under the contract, Maxar will have assured access to the next two, satellites six and seven. Umbra said it plans to launch a total of 24 satellites. Headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, Maxar operates four high-resolution imaging satellites and is the primary supplier of commercial satellite imagery to the U.S. government. The company was recently acquired by a private equity firm and is preparing to launch the first two of six planned WorldView Legion high-resolution optical imaging satellites. David Langan, Umbra’s co-founder and CEO, said his company is “thrilled to partner with Maxar and to be chosen as their first ever SAR dedicated access partner.” The agreement will “energize commercial SAR utilization worldwide and support Umbra’s ambitions of building and growing a robust commercial business case,” said Gabe Dominocielo, Umbra’s co-founder and president. Umbra in the future plans to offer radio frequency (RF) sensing, and will use its SAR satellites to passively scan for RF activity. Frazier said the companies are “having conversations about ways to integrate future capabilities, and we do see a lot of opportunity to look at multiple sources of data.” Intelligence agencies and military commands increasingly require multi-source intelligence to track developments and trends in different regions of the world, he said, and “they need the data regardless of whether it’s sunny or cloudy over a location.”
Updated Feb. 16 with NASA comment on revised IM-1 landing site. WASHINGTON — Commercial lunar lander company Intuitive Machines has completed its merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), raising far less money than originally anticipated. Intuitive Machines said Feb. 13 it had closed its merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that trades on the Nasdaq. The merged company, retaining the Intuitive Machines name, will trade on the Nasdaq starting Feb. 14 under the ticker symbol LUNR. The companies announced the merger in September 2022 , long after the mania surrounding SPACs has cooled both in the space industry and the overall market. Inflection Point had $301 million of cash in trust, and the companies said they had arranged an additional $55 million in investment from the SPAC’s sponsors and a founder of Intuitive Machines, along with $50 million CF Principal Investments LLC, an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald & Company. In an investor presentation linked to the merger announcement, the companies anticipated having more than $330 million in cash after transaction expenses. However, in the Feb. 13 announcement that the merger had closed, the companies announced only $55 million of “committed capital from an affiliate of its sponsor and company founders.” The companies did not mention any proceeds of the SPAC itself, which could have been depleted by redemptions, where SPAC shareholders request their money back rather than hold stock in the merged company. Inflection Point shareholders voted in favor of the merger at a Feb. 8 meeting. However, more than 30% of shareholders voted against the merger and related provisions, an unusually high number for a SPAC transaction. Despite raising less money than anticipated, company executives said the deal will help Intuitive Machines continue development of a series of commercial lunar landers and related infrastructure, like communications satellites in lunar orbit. “This merger accelerates and strengthens Intuitive Machines’ strategic plan to help expedite a thriving commercial ecosystem for space for the benefit of human civilization,” Kam Ghaffarian, executive chairman of Intuitive Machines, said in the statement announcing the completion of the merger. “With our launch into the public sphere through Inflection Point, we have reached new heights financially and opened the doors for even greater exploration and innovation for the progress of humanity,” Steve Altemus, president and chief executive of the company, said in the statement. In the September 2022 investor presentation, Intuitive Machines projected $102 million in revenue for 2022, up from $73 million recorded in 2021. The company forecast accelerating growth, with $759 million in revenue in 2024 as it carried out lander missions and offered new space products and services. The company, though, estimated an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $14 million for 2022, with that loss increasing to $46 million in 2023 before the company broke even in 2024. The announcement comes a week after Intuitive Machines said its initial lunar lander mission, IM-1, would go to the south polar region of the moon , rather than in Oceanus Procellarum. That mission is now scheduled to land in late June, after previously planning a launch in the first quarter. That mission is carrying payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under an award NASA made in 2019. Intuitive Machines said that the change in landing site would increase the value of the award, originally $77 million, but deferred questions on the value to NASA. NASA spokesman Josh Handal said Feb. 15 that the agency is still in the procurement process about the revised landing site and could not comment on details about it until the contract modification is formally completed.
TAMPA, Fla. — Canadian launch startup SpaceRyde has filed for bankruptcy just months after noise complaints put an end to rocket engine tests. The five-year-old company, which had been developing a rocket that would use a stratospheric balloon as its first stage, filed for bankruptcy Feb. 10 and named Deloitte as trustee to handle its affairs. SpaceRyde had raised about $10 million from a mix of early-stage investors and government awards, but needed more funds ahead of a goal to start commercial launches in 2024 with a 20-meter-tall rocket. The plan was to charge customers $250,000 for delivering payloads under 25 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) using SpaceRyde’s three-stage rocket Ryder rocket, which would fire engines after a balloon took it above most of the Earth’s atmosphere. In addition to cubesats, the company had said Ryder could accommodate 100-kilogram to 150-kilogram satellites for a maximum launch cost of $1 million. The venture had planned to launch test payloads to sub-orbit and LEO this year before commercial flights. Planned customers included Qosmosys, a Singaporean venture planning satellite racing games , and a subsidiary of Dutch cubesat maker Innovative Solutions In Space. Further out, SpaceRyde also had plans to fly a demonstration mission at the end of 2024 to around the moon and back to expand its business. It is a challenging market for space startups as tough macroeconomic conditions weigh on their access to capital. Small launch startups, in particular, have to grapple with high up-front costs in a market where SpaceX is seeking to grow its dominance by lowering prices . For SpaceRyde CEO Sohrab Haghighat, who co-founded the startup with his wife Saharnaz Safari, it had an even bigger hurdle to clear. “Our issue was not lack of interest,” Haghighat said, adding that the startup had “a perfectly-placed product and price.” Instead, the company ran into a testing roadblock last year that Haghighat described as “one of the biggest issues — perhaps the biggest issue we had.” He declined to provide more details. The Trent Hills municipality of Ontario asked SpaceRyde to stop engine tests from a lot in the region Oct. 7 after their noise brought attention to how an industrial application was operating on rurally zoned land. When SpaceRyde bought the land, “the understanding at the time was it would be a temporary operation that focused on supporting the business of testing balloon technology to deliver satellites into orbit,” Trent Hills mayor Bob Crate said during a Sept. 13 council meeting. A petition started last year to stop SpaceRyde rocket engine tests it says can be “ heard for many miles ” has received more than 800 signatures. The Trent Hills municipality said SpaceRyde can continue tests if it gets approval for a new planning application with the correct zoning. “To date, no planning application has been received by the Municipality proposing any change in use for the site,” the municipality said in a Feb. 9 update. The municipality also said there had been no rocket engine tests at the site since it asked SpaceRyde to stop them. This article was updated Feb. 14 with more details about community complaints against SpaceRyde’s tests. 
The government of Saudi Arabia has announced the two astronauts who will fly to the International Space Station this spring on a private astronaut mission by Axiom Space. The Saudi Space Commission said Feb. 12 that Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni will be part of the Ax-2 mission to the ISS scheduled for launch no earlier than May on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. They will join the mission’s commander, former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, and a customer, John Shoffner, for the mission scheduled to spend 10 days at the station. Barnawi and Alqarni will be the second and third Saudi citizens to go to space, after Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who flew as a payload specialist on a space shuttle mission in 1985. Barnawi will be the first female Saudi astronaut. Alqarni is a 31-year-old fighter pilot in the Saudi air force and Barnawi is a 33-year-old cancer researcher. The two will conduct 14 biomedical and physics experiments during their time on the station, the Saudi Space Commission said, but didn’t go into details about plans for their mission. The Saudi Space Commission said two other astronauts, Mariam Fardous and Ali Alghamdi, will train as backups for the mission. All four astronauts are part of a new astronaut program announced by the Saudi space agency last September. That September announcement coincided with an agreement between the Saudi government and Axiom Space to fly two astronauts on a future mission . That announcement did not disclose when they would fly, although there was speculation at the time they could be on Ax-2, which had two open spots on its four-person crew. A NASA official confirmed at a November meeting of an agency advisory committee that the Saudi astronauts would fly on Ax-2 , and that they had started training. NASA did not disclose their identities then, or in a Jan. 20 statement that announced that the ISS partners had approved the full crew for Ax-2. “We work very hard to meet their needs, and they have chosen to wait a little while to announce their crew,” Michael Suffredini, chief executive of Axiom, said of the then-undisclosed customer for those two Ax-2 seats at a Jan. 30 media briefing . “I think in the next week or two there will be an announcement of the specific individuals.” Ax-2 will take place a little more than a year after Ax-1, the company’s first private astronaut mission that sent four people to the ISS for what became a 17-day mission. “Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station cements our mission of expanding access to space worldwide and supporting the growth of the low Earth orbit economy as we build Axiom Station,” Suffredini said in a Feb. 13 statement about the Ax-2 crew. “Ax-2 moves Axiom Space one step closer toward the realization of a commercial space station in low Earth orbit and enables us to build on the legacy and achievements of the ISS, leveraging the benefits of microgravity to better life on Earth.” Ax-2 is a second in a series of private astronaut missions Axiom has planned to the ISS ahead of installing a series of commercial modules to the station. Those modules will serve as the core of a standalone space station, separating from the ISS before the ISS is retired around 2030. While Ax-1 flew three private citizens, along with Axiom employee and former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, future missions will follow the lead of Ax-2 of primarily flying government astronauts. Suffredini said at the briefing last month he expected only one private individual among the crews of Ax-3 and -4. “I’m honored to be heading back to the ISS for the fourth time, leading this talented Ax-2 crew on their first mission,” said Whitson in a company statement. She flew three long-duration ISS missions as a NASA astronaut and holds the U.S. record for cumulative time in space at more than 660 days. “This is a strong and cohesive team determined to conduct meaningful scientific research in space and inspire a new generation about the benefits of microgravity.”
Orbit Logic, a developer of mission planning and scheduling software for satellite ground systems, has been acquired by aerospace and defense engineering contractor Boecore, the companies announced Feb. 13. Boecore, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, provides systems engineering, cybersecurity and software services to the Defense Department and contractors in the defense, space and missile defense sectors. The company in January 2022 was acquired by Enlightenment Capital, a private equity firm based in the Washington, D.C. area, Enlightenment Capital principal Thomas Young said the acquisition of Orbit Logic will help Boecore expand its footprint in the space sector. “Orbit Logic has developed a powerful suite of software tools that enable mission success in the space sector,” he said Orbit Logic, founded in 2000, is based in Greenbelt, Maryland. The value of the acquisition was not disclosed. The company “has a proven ability to develop and deliver advanced software products to its space customers,” said Tom Dickson, president of Boecore. Alex Herz, co-founder and president of Orbit Logic, said the combination will “make our combined solutions more impactful to the space and defense communities.” Orbit Logic developed the SpyMeSat mobile and web-based app that gives users on-demand access to commercial satellite imagery. The company last year was selected by Northrop Grumman to develop sensor-planning software for the U.S. Space Force’s Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) space surveillance radar.
Launches conducted by commercial Chinese launch service providers could more than double those attempted last year, according to firms’ plans for 2023. The more than 20 launches now planned by commercial launch service providers would notably eclipse the total number of orbital launches conducted by China in 2017, demonstrating the rapid growth in Chinese launch capacity and cadence in recent years. The development could provide momentum to deployment of Chinese commercial small satellite constellations and have implications internationally for space traffic management. China conducted a national record 64 launches in 2022, with 54 of these accounted for by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). Other actors, namely Expace, Landspace, iSpace and Galactic Energy contributed 10 more, including a pair of launch failures. CASC has declared its intentions to surpass 60 launches this year, but the companies above and a handful of new entrants are planning more than 20 launches of their own. Galactic Energy performed a fifth successful Ceres-1 launch from its fifth attempt early January, establishing itself as a leading player in the sector. It now plans a total of 8-10 launches of the light-lift solid rocket in this year. This number includes one or two launches in the second half of the year from a mobile sea platform in the Sea Yellow using infrastructure established at Haiyang, Shandong province. The Ceres-1 rocket has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The firm’s Pallas-1 reusable kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher (5,000 kg to LEO, 3,000 kg to 700-km SSO) will have its test launch in 2024. More immediately Space Pioneer (Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd) could become the first Chinese commercial launch firm to reach orbit with a liquid propellant launch vehicle. The Tianlong-2 kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket is now expected to launch from Jiuquan in Q1. Curiously, the firm had initially stated it was developing a rocket using HCP liquid engines, using what it called a ‘next-generation’ green, ambient temperature propellant. Expace , which operates Kuaizhou solid rockets for state-owned defense giant CASIC and its commercial space projects, is planning seven launches of its Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11 rockets. Both vehicles had successful comebacks last year following failures. Landspace, one of the early movers, made the world’s first orbital launch attempt of a methane-fueled launcher in December. The Zhuque-2 suffered an issue with vernier engines on its second stage, seeing the loss of the payload. However the company was already engaged in assembly and testing of the second Zhuque-2 before the failure and could make a relatively swift return to the pad, depending on how investigations into the failure and requisite fixes proceed. The third Zhuque-2 will use an upgraded Tianque engine without vernier engines. Another entrant, iSpace, could return to the pad with its Hyperbola-1 solid rocket. The Beijing-based firm has however suffered three consecutive failures since becoming the first Chinese private launch service provider to send a satellite into orbit in 2019 . iSpace is expected to conduct vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) tests this year for its reusable methalox Hyperbola-2 rocket. One of a pair of the most recent Chinese launch startups, Orienspace, aims to conduct its first launch with the Gravity-1 solid rocket in the second half of 2023 using a mobile sea platform. Notably the firm says the rocket will have a payload capacity to LEO of 6.5 metric tons, making it by far the world’s largest all-solid launch vehicle. The firm is aiming to ramp up to 10 flights of Gravity-1 across 2024-2025, while also developing new launchers. Another new player, Rocket Pi , could launch their Darwin-1 methalox launcher this year though the timeline for this first launch is not clear. CAS Space, a spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, plans to launch three PR-1 (Lijian-1) solid rockets, following the success of its first launch in July last year. The company, also known as Zhongke Aerospace, recently outlined its longer term launch vehicle plans, including a number of familiar designs. China Rocket, which falls under the aegis of CASC, will also be in action. It will perform more launches of its Jielong-3 rocket in 2023, which debuted with a sea launch in 2022. The role which this new launch capability might play could be largely restricted to domestic contracts, with international export regulations limiting the sending of satellites to China for launch. “I don’t expect these Chinese commercial launchers to have a large effect on the international satellite launch market in the near or medium term future. In my view they are primarily targeting domestic Chinese markets or customers,” Ian Christensen, director of private sector programs at the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews . Christensen says these firms likely will be targeting providing launch services for the many private aerospace constellations under development in China, such as those by GalaxySpace, Changguang Satellite’s Jilin-1 constellation, Guodian Gaoke, MinoSpace and more. “If the planned launch tempo for 2023 is successful it might represent the opening of capability that would provide momentum to deployment of Chinese small satellite constellations.” This would however have some international repercussions, such as in the realm of space traffic management. “It would represent an increase in operators and satellites in a LEO environment which is already becoming more complex, and would thus place greater emphasis on the need for both sharing of space safety data and for satellite operator coordination channels between the U.S. and China,” says Christensen. The emergence of Chinese commercial space companies began in late 2014 when the country opened portions of the space sector to private capital, largely in response to the developments observed in the United States, exemplified by companies such as SpaceX and Planet. This move has spurred the creation of hundreds of space-related companies engaged in a range of activities, including launch, satellite operation and manufacture, ground stations, downstream applications, and more. The Chinese government has since enacted further measures to foster its commercial space sector, including policy support and guidance and a military-civil fusion national strategy which allows technologies to move between approved entities.
Despite concerns about the viability of many new launch vehicle developers, many in the industry say those vehicles are needed as demand for launch outstrips supply. During a panel at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Feb. 9, spacecraft developers and launch integrators said that, even with the predictions of “bloodletting” among small launch companies because of technical and financial challenges, new vehicles are needed to meet growing demand. “There are not enough launch companies. There are not enough launch vehicles available to fill that demand,” said Tom Choi, chief executive of Saturn Satellite Networks, a company developing a network of small geostationary satellites. He said he based that conclusion on projections that the size of the low Earth orbit satellite industry would grow by a factor of 10 in the next decade, to $30 to 50 billion. “I would highly encourage people who are thinking about launch vehicles or people who are already making launch systems to continue to develop their systems,” he said. Those vehicles don’t need to be large, he added, suggesting those with capacities as small as 500 kilograms would be sufficient. Companies that arrange launch services for smallsats agreed. “A healthy launch industry is super important and that means a diversification of launch opportunities,” said Curt Blake, the outgoing chief executive of Spaceflight. “Right now it’s a little bit thin. It would be very good to have a lot of folks out there.” He said Spaceflight has worked with new launch vehicle providers to help them out through mechanisms like letters of intent. “We can definitively do with more opportunities for launch. We have more demand than we have supply.” “Launch is constrained,” said John Conafay, co-founder and chief executive of Integrate Space, a startup developing mission management software systems. Growing demand can’t be met by large rockets or a single provider alone, he argued. “We need diversity, just like any market, to thrive.” The comments came two days after another panel at the conference where companies in the small launch business predicted a shakeout caused in part by price pressure from SpaceX rideshare launch services that kept other companies from making money. “I think we’re at the beginning of the bloodletting of aspirational launch companies,” predicted Adam Spice, chief financial officer of Rocket Lab. The one small launch vehicle developer on this panel was relieved by the comments calling for more launch services. “I’m happy to hear that,” quipped Raúl Verdú, chief business development officer of PLD Space, a Spanish launch vehicle developer. “My investors will be super happy.” He said PLD Space was six to eight weeks away from the first launch of Miura 1, a suborbital demonstrator. The company was working to close a new “big” investment round while preparing to sign the first binding contracts for launching satellites with its Miura 5 small launch vehicle. PLD Space, he acknowledged, won’t be the first European company to develop a small launch vehicle, with several others preparing for first launches as soon as later this year. “For us, it’s not super important to be the first one in Europe to launch a rocket into space,” he said. “Our vision is to have the best success rate in the next decade, because that will make the difference.” “We don’t want to be a low-cost company,” Verdú added. “If you fly with PLD Space, you fly with a premium company, because we are investing a lot in product assurance.” Success, he said, involves finding the right niche in the market. “We complement the environment,” he said. “PLD Space is a small company today. Our ambition is high, but we need to go step by step.”
PALO ALTO, Calif. – Plasmos revealed plans to offer in-space transportation and to return payloads to Earth with a Space Truck. The Space Truck, powered by Plasmos’ dual-mode propulsion system, will transport payloads to altitudes as high as 1,400 kilometers “to enable in-space manufacturing, last-mile delivery, point-to-point transportation, on-orbit servicing and active debris removal,” Plasmos CEO Ali Baghchehsara said Feb. 9 during Plasmos’ unveiling of the Space Truck. Various configurations of the 3D-printed Space Truck will travel to low-Earth orbit as secondary payloads on launch vehicle ESPA rings. (ESPA is short for Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Secondary Payload Adapter.) In the Flatbed configuration, the Space Truck can accommodate one 400-kilogram satellite. In the Musketeer configuration, the Space Truck has room for four 75-kilogram satellites and a six-kilogram payload that could remain in space or return to Earth. For on-orbit servicing, Plasmos plans to offer the AAA Truck with robotic arms, satellite refueling and spacecraft maintenance gear. Plasmos also will offer precision reentry, landing payloads in a one square kilometer area, Baghchehsara said. Plasmos’ plans to conduct its first technology demonstration flight in January 2024 has captured the attention of potential customers and partners including the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which identifies commercial technology with military applications, and on-orbit refueling business Orbit Fab. Ryan Weed, DIU program manager, lauded Plasmos’ innovative propulsion system, which combines elements of chemical and electric propulsion. “From the Defense Department’s perspective, we are interested in operating in space,” Weed said during the Plasmos event. “That no longer means just operating in low Earth orbit. That means we need propulsion systems that can perform an order of magnitude or more better than our current propulsion systems. These hybrid propulsion systems and the spacecraft they enable would be a huge game-changer for how we operate spacecraft in the Defense Department and in the civil world.” Orbit Fab CEO Daniel Faber added that the capability to offer return transportation for space cargo is “fundamental” to development of a robust in-space infrastructure. Negar Feher, former Momentus vice president of business development, said companies like Plasmos will help enable a future in-space economy with reliable transportation and powered by renewable and sustainable resources. Jackie Space, co-founder and senior advisor at BMNT, a national security focused consulting firm, said Plasmos has made impressive progress since the company was founded in 2021. Velo3D, a metal additive manufacturing startup known for its work with SpaceX and other launch providers, printed Plasmos’ first Space Truck . “You typically do not see a full hardware print from a seed-stage startup,” Space said. On its demonstration flight, Plasmos is offering transportation for RebelSat, a cubesat built by students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to test a cold-gas aerospike thruster.
The National Space Council is continuing work on a proposed framework for regulating commercial space activities that is being watched closely by both industry and Congress. In a speech at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 9, Chirag Parikh, executive secretary of the council, said work was continuing on a proposal for what’s known as “mission authorization” for commercial space activities not currently regulated by other agencies. Such authorization and continuing supervision is required under Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty. That includes, he said, reviewing feedback the council received from the private sector in a series of “listening sessions” late last year. “We have received a tremendous amount,” he said, citing the diversity of responses not just from companies in the industry but also insurers and investors. “It is definitely an issue that we are taking seriously.” The feedback has revealed several broad issues, Parikh said. One, he said, is the need for a “clear, flexible, predictable” regulatory environment to ensure U.S. companies remain a leader globally. A second issue is what he described as “the need for defined roles and responsibilities, as opposed to what some people call the nebulousness of authorization for some of these types of missions.” A final issue is a focus on space sustainability given the growing numbers of satellites and debris in orbit. “That needs to be considered as we move forward, as we think about the future applications of space.” At the most recent National Space Council meeting in September, Vice President Kamala Harris, who serves as chair of the council, called for proposals for the authorization and supervision of “commercial novel space activities,” a month after a speech where she criticized outdated regulations. Those proposals are due in March, but it is not clear how soon after that the White House will release a mission authorization policy. Those plans are of interest to both companies and Congress. “One of the things that I think we’re collectively worried about is regulatory uncertainty,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, chief government and external relations officer at Axiom Space, a commercial space station developer., during a panel later in the conference. “The whole issue of how is it that all of that is going to be managed on orbit for commercial entities is an ongoing concern,” she said of mission authorization. “It’s one that we need to come to a resolution on in the United States.” That extends to Congress, where both the House and Senate are considering legislation to address mission authorization. “I’m looking forward to what the administration puts forward as to which agency can accomplish this, which agency is going to have the right resources to make sure that we don’t end up slowing the entire process,” said Richard-Duane Chambers, a staff member on the Senate Commerce Committee, during a conference panel. Tom Hammond, senior policy adviser on the House Science Committee, recalled a similar effort in response to a provision in the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, as well as a House bill that addressed the mission authorization issue. “We’ll look at it,” he said of the ongoing White House effort, “but it kind of is déjà vu if they come back with the exact same proposal that they did in 2016.” Users’ Advisory Group to meet Parikh’s speech coincided with an announcement in the Federal Register of the first meeting of the council’s reconstituted Users’ Advisory Group (UAG). The meeting is scheduled for Feb. 23 in Washington. The meeting is the first since the White House announced a new roster for the UAG in December . The committee is chaired by retired Air Force general Les Lyles, who also chairs the NASA Advisory Council. He is one of seven previous members of the UAG retained by the White House for the new 30-member committee. Parikh emphasized the “diversity” of the UAG, which in the past some had criticized for focusing too much on the aerospace industry. The new committee included users of space products and services, such as the agriculture industry and climate scientists, and representatives of large and small companies. The UAG will have six subcommittees: exploration and discovery, economic development and the industrial base, climate and societal benefits, data and emerging technology, education and diversity, and national security. The upcoming meeting, he said, will discuss work plans for those subcommittees. “The UAG is a very important function. It is a very important capability to provide us with input.”
A Progress cargo spacecraft docked to the International Space Station experienced a coolant leak Feb. 11, the second such incident involving a Russian spacecraft at the station in less than two months. The Russian space agency Roscosmos reported a “depressurization” in the Progress MS-21 spacecraft shortly after another cargo spacecraft, Progress MS-22, docked with the station at 3:45 a.m. Eastern. The agency didn’t elaborate on the depressurization in a statement posted on its Telegram social media account, but said there was no threat to the crew. Other, unofficial accounts said the depressurization referred to the spacecraft’s coolant loop. NASA, in a statement several hours later, confirmed the problem was with the coolant system on the Progress spacecraft, designated Progress 82 by the agency. “The hatches between the Progress 82 and the station are open, and temperatures and pressures aboard the station are all normal,” NASA stated, adding that the leak is being investigated and there are no other issues with ISS operations. Progress MS-21 launched to the station last October delivering fuel, water and other cargo. It is scheduled to undock from the station Feb. 17 and destructively reenter. That departure is currently not affected by the coolant leak. This incident took place nearly two months after the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the station suffered a coolant leak. Roscosmos blamed that leak on a micrometeoroid impact , an explanation that NASA, at least publicly, accepted. “Everything does point to a micrometeoroid impact,” Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said at a Jan. 11 briefing about the Soyuz leak. “Nothing was off-nominal in the manufacturing of the vehicle.” Soyuz MS-22 launched to the ISS last September, a little more than a month before the Progress MS-21 launch. Russian officials haven’t elaborated on the nature of the Progress coolant leak or speculated on a cause. The Soyuz spacecraft leak led Roscosmos, in concurrence with ISS partners, to launch the next Soyuz spacecraft to the station without a crew. Soyuz MS-23 is scheduled to launch Feb. 20, docking with the station two days later. Soyuz MS-22 will later return to Earth without a crew. That will extend the stay of the Soyuz MS-22 crew, Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, by several months. The three were scheduled to return in Soyuz MS-22 in March, but will instead return home likely in the fall on Soyuz MS-23 after the launch of a new crew on Soyuz MS-24. While Roscosmos blamed the Soyuz MS-22 leak on an unlucky micrometeoroid strike, Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human spaceflight programs at Roscosmos, said that technicians “double-checked, triple-checked” the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft as a precaution. “We don’t have any issues with the next Soyuz,” he said at the Jan. 11 briefing.
One NASA-funded lunar cubesat has recovered from a communications glitch while engineers are developing backup plans for another cubesat that has suffered a propulsion problem. NASA announced Feb. 8 that controllers had restored the ability to send commands to the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat. That cubesat, operated by Colorado-based Advanced Space for NASA, has been orbiting the moon since November in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, the same orbit planned for the lunar Gateway. The spacecraft had been unable to receive commands since Jan. 26, although it was otherwise functioning and transmitting telemetry back to Earth. The onboard computer rebooted Feb. 6 when triggered by a command-loss timer, restoring two-way communications. NASA did not disclose what kept the spacecraft from receiving commands. Other than the communications issue, CAPSTONE has been working well since arriving at the moon, completing more than 12 orbits. The spacecraft has only had to perform maneuvers twice to maintain its orbit, compared to expectations that such maneuvers would be required every orbit. In addition to testing the stability of the near-rectilinear halo orbit, satellite operators attempted a test of its autonomous positioning system with another spacecraft in lunar orbit, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). In that Jan. 18 crosslink test, LRO received a signal from CAPSTONE, but CAPSTONE did not collect ranging measurements from the returned signal required for the navigation measurements. Additional crosslink tests are planned. The CAPSTONE team has worked through several issues since the spacecraft’s launch in June, including a communications outage shortly after separation from its Lunar Photon kick stage and an attitude control problem caused by a malfunctioning thruster in September. Spacecraft engineers were able to overcome those problems, leading to a successful orbital insertion in November . “We’ve learned a tremendous amount with just a small, 12U cubesat on the way to the moon that is informing other programs,” said Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Advanced Space, during a panel at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 9. Another lunar-bound cubesat, though, is still struggling with a propulsion problem. NASA’s Lunar Flashlight cubesat launched Dec. 9 as a secondary payload on the Falcon 9 launch of a commercial lunar lander by Japanese company ispace. A month later, NASA reported that the cubesat’s thrusters were underperforming , which threatened the spacecraft’s ability to enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit. NASA said Feb. 8 that efforts to fix the problem, including using one fully functioning thruster to adjust its trajectory, were unsuccessful. NASA said that one thruster suffered a “rapid loss of performance” after a series of maneuvers, leading engineers to conclude that the spacecraft does not have the ability to enter lunar orbit. The mission team will try an alternative approach to achieve the science goals of the mission, which involve flying over the south pole of the moon and using lasers to look for evidence of water ice deposits there. Engineers will attempt to maneuver the spacecraft into a very high Earth orbit that will allow flybys of the south pole of the moon once a month. Those flybys could begin as soon as June. Other systems on Lunar Flashlight are working well, NASA said. That included recent tests of its laser reflectometer instrument.
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat says it is still considering deploying a low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of its own despite comments to the contrary by one of its executives this week. Speaking Feb. 8 at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Inmarsat vice president of corporate development, Larry Paul, said the British satellite operator does not “have the balance sheet to build our own LEO network.” “[B]ut quite frankly there’s no need to,” Paul said, because “there’s going be so much capacity in the market in a few years” from potential partners “and prices will be dropping.” While Inmarsat “took a hard look at building our own, becoming a major investor in others,” he said “it just doesn’t make sense at this point” for the company to make that kind of investment. He said Inmarsat “is going to partner with a LEO operator — maybe more than one.” A spokesman for the company, however, told SpaceNews the next day that Inmarsat has not ruled out ordering LEO satellites for Orchestra, a proposed global mobile connectivity network combining terrestrial 5G with connectivity delivered from an ensemble of geostationary and non-geostationary orbiting satellites. “Both partnering for or building the LEO dimension of that network have always been and continue to be options under consideration,” Inmarsat spokesperson Jonathan Sinnatt said Feb. 9 via email. “ Ultimately, the goal is to ensure the best possible solution for our partners and customers.” It remains to be seen whether Viasat’s planned Inmarsat acquisition could deliver significant changes to the British operator’s business strategy. Viasat operates a broadband network from GEO. Buying Inmarsat would give the Carlsbad, California-based operator a global distribution network for its increasingly international ambitions. However, Viasat has historically sold its services directly to customers whereas Inmarsat has relied on a network of distributors, Deutsche Bank investment banker Pawel Skonieczka noted Feb. 8 on an earlier SmallSat Symposium panel. Skonieczka said “it will be interesting to see how those differences are resolved as the company integrates.” Viasat’s acquisition of Inmarsat is subject to regulatory approvals that include clearance from the U.K.’s competition watchdog, which has a March 30 statuary deadline for making a decision on the deal. Mark Dankberg, Viasat’s CEO, also outlined plans during a SmallSat Symposium keynote speech Feb. 8 to buy satellites at “standardized cubesat-type form factors” for providing services that include direct-to-smartphone connectivity.
SEOUL, South Korea — India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) put three satellites into low Earth orbit Feb. 9, in the nation’s first orbital launch this year. It was the rocket’s second flight and first successful one. The inaugural launch in August suffered an anomaly in the rocket’s kick stage, resulting in a velocity shortfall. Indian scientists traced an unexpectedly strong shock that took place during the separation of the second stage as the key cause of the malfunction and replaced the rocket’s stage separation system with one that produces less shock. The three-stage SSLV, capable of sending up to 500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit, lifted off at 10:48 p.m. Eastern, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, carrying a trio of satellites. The primary payload, EOS-07, was a 156-kilogram Earth observation satellite for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and the two smaller spacecraft that hitched a ride were the Janus-1 6U cubesat for U.S. company Antaris and the 8U cubesat AzaadiSAT-2 developed by Indian students, according to an ISRO mission description . Live footage showed the 34-meter rocket, decorated with India’s national flag, soaring into the air. The flight proceeded as planned — the first stage separation took place 128 seconds after liftoff, the second stage separation at 386 seconds and the third stage separation at 675 seconds. The rocket’s kick stage, called the Velocity Trimming Module (VTM), deployed the satellites one by one between 808 and 923 seconds after liftoff. “Congratulations to the space community of India. So, we have a new launch vehicle, small satellite launch vehicle SSLV,” said ISRO chairman S. Somanath in a livestreamed post-launch speech . He noted that the three satellites had been put into 450 kilometers circular orbit “very accurately.” ISRO developed SSLV with the aim of providing cheaper and more flexible access to space, compared to its two operational vehicles, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). To that end, SSLV was designed to be configured with a simple modular interface, and the vehicle’s assembly can be done horizontally and vertically. The Feb. 9 flight was India’s first space launch of 2023, with ISRO planning at least three launches in the first quarter . Coming up next is the launch of 36 communications satellites for British company OneWeb in March on a GSLV Mark 3 rocket. It would be the second and last launch of OneWeb satellites on an Indian rocket under a contract signed in April between OneWeb and New Space India Limited, ISRO’s commercial arm. ISRO said the third planned mission will use Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).
The chair of the Senate Commerce Committee says she will push for a multiyear NASA authorization bill, mirroring plans by her House counterpart. In a Feb. 10 speech at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said a multiyear authorization was needed even though Congress included a NASA authorization act in the CHIPS and Science Act, a broad science and technology bill, that was enacted last year. “In the CHIPS and Science bill, we authorized many NASA programs, including Artemis, but we need to have a multiyear authorization now to continue our investments into the future and give a clear understanding of the direction that Congress would like to see,” she said. Cantwell said her committee will hold a series of space-related hearings in the coming months. Among the topics of those hearings will be support for new technology development, oversight and guidance of NASA programs and more effective ways to integrate space launches into the National Airspace System. She did not discuss any specific provisions she would like to see in a new NASA authorization bill. Her call for a new NASA authorization bill mirrors plans by the House Science Committee. That committee’s new chairman, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), has also said he wants a new NASA authorization. An authorization and oversight plan for the committee approved by members at an organizational meeting Feb. 8 includes a NASA authorization as a priority. “During the 117th Congress, the CHIPS and Science Act included a narrower section authorizing certain NASA activities, however the language did not include any authorizations of appropriations for any program,” the plan stated. “During the 118th Congress, the Committee will engage in a comprehensive review of each directorate at NASA and will develop a comprehensive NASA authorization, including recommended funding levels.” “The CHIPS and Science Act included a NASA authorization bill, but it was pretty pared back,” said Tom Hammond, senior policy adviser to Lucas on the House Science Committee, during a panel discussion at the FAA conference after Cantwell’s speech. “There was a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor that we made significant progress on but which we just couldn’t get over the finish line that we could probably pick up and move forward.” A NASA authorization act could be one of several bills that cover civil and commercial space activities. In a speech at the conference Feb. 9 , Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said he would look to using the annual National Defense Authorization Act as well as an upcoming FAA reauthorization as vehicles for passing launch-related provisions. “We can financially support the development of new launch vehicles and new launch sites and find ways to streamline the permitting and approval process for these launch facilities,” he said. “We can also work to improve airspace management to make it easier to find launch windows and to do it without disrupting commercial aviation.” Hammond said on the panel that the House Science Committee may also consider a standalone commercial space bill. That bill could address a range of issues, from the “learning period” set to expire this September that limits the FAA’s ability to regulate safety of spaceflight participants on commercial vehicles, to improving space situational awareness. The Senate Commerce Committee and House Science Committee have slowly been organizing their membership, including who will serve on subcommittees that deal with space. The House Science Committee announced Feb. 9 that the space subcommittee will be chaired by Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), who has been the ranking member of the subcommittee in the previous Congress. Babin’s district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The ranking member of the space subcommittee will be Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.), a freshman member of Congress and former meteorologist. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who chaired the space subcommittee in the previous Congress when Democrats held the majority, did not return to the science committee in this Congress. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) will chair the Senate Commerce Committee’s space and science subcommittee. Sinema, who left the Democratic party late last year but continues to caucus with them, replaces Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), who will chair a subcommittee for consumer protection. The ranking member of the full committee, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), has not announced who will be the ranking member of the space subcommittee, a position held in the previous Congress by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.)
Updated 2:20 p.m. with contract value. WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has won its first NASA award for its New Glenn rocket, with the agency selecting the large rocket to launch a pair of Martian smallsats. NASA announced Feb. 9 it selected New Glenn for the launch of the two Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft. The rocket will launch ESCAPADE in late 2024, with the spacecraft entering orbit around Mars 11 months later. The award, a task order under NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract, is the first NASA has issued for New Glenn, the large rocket Blue Origin has been working on for several years but has yet to launch. Blue Origin has previously won business from several commercial customers, including Amazon, which awarded the company a contract last April for 12 launches of Project Kuiper satellites , with an option for 15 more. “ESCAPADE follows a long tradition of NASA Mars science and exploration missions, and we’re thrilled NASA’s Launch Services Program has selected New Glenn to launch the instruments that will study Mars’s magnetosphere,” said Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, in a company statement. Neither NASA nor Blue Origin provided additional details about the award. The company did not respond to questions about the award, including whether the launch would be a dedicated mission or if the ESCAPADE spacecraft will fly as rideshare payloads on another mission. Each ESCAPADE spacecraft weighs about 120 kilograms, excluding propellant, according to a 2022 conference paper about the mission . That suggests that New Glenn, designed to place up to 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit, is significantly oversized to launch ESCAPADE as a dedicated mission. The company also did not disclose the value of the launch award. In another VADR award in November to Rocket Lab, for the launch of four TROPICS cubesats designed to monitor tropical weather systems, NASA declined to disclose the contract value because VADR task orders “are competed in a closed environment and as such are considered proprietary.” Government procurement databases later listed the value of the award at $12.99 million, with about $2.6 million obligated to date. According to the same government procurement database Feb. 10, the Blue Origin award for launching ESCAPADE is valued at $20 million, with $6 million obligated to date. NASA selected ESCAPADE in 2019 as one of three missions in its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, cost-capped at $55 million each. NASA envisioned launching all three as rideshares on other missions, with ESCAPADE and the Janus asteroid mission originally manifested as secondary payloads on the launch of the Psyche asteroid mission, while the Lunar Trailblazer mission would share a launch with the IMAP space science mission. However, NASA removed ESCAPADE from the Psyche launch in 2020 after concluding that a change in that mission’s trajectory, linked to a change in launch vehicles from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, would not allow ESCAPADE to go into Mars orbit as originally designed. That put the ESCAPADE mission in jeopardy. In 2021, Rocket Lab announced it would develop redesigned versions of the spacecraft for launch in 2024, and the mission passed a review later that year allowing it to proceed into full-scale development. Other SIMPLEx missions have run into rideshare launch challenges. The delay of Psyche’s launch from August 2022 to October 2023 meant that Janus could no longer reach its planned asteroids. Janus was formally removed from the Psyche launch last November and the mission’s principal investigator said Jan. 25 his team is looking for alternative missions for the twin spacecraft , which are nearly complete. NASA last year moved the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft from the IMAP launch, which is scheduled for early 2025, to IM-2, the second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines scheduled for the second half of 2023. That change in launch, along with technical issues with the spacecraft, pushed up the cost of Lunar Trailblazer to $72 million . According to the conference publication, ESCAPADE has a total cost of $78.5 million, a figure that includes launch and project reserves.
TAMPA, Fla. — Large defense companies are itching to buy space assets as part of the market is on the verge of a shake-out, executives discussing deal-making in the industry said Feb. 8. Phillip Ingle, a managing director in Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division, highlighted large “appetite for the big primes to get their hands on attractive space assets” during the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. U.S. Department of Defense budgets orientated “towards space are growing much more healthfully than other parts of the defense budget,” Ingle said, encouraging primes “to grow their space businesses because that’s where a lot of the growth is.” Defense giants Raytheon and L3 Harris have set up venture capital arms in recent years to capture emerging technology, he noted, following the steps of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. L3 Harris also announced plans in December to buy space hardware maker Aerojet Rocketdyne in one of the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector’s largest deals of the year. Three of the acquisitions announced last year in the A&D market worth more than a billion dollars are space-related. The other two are Maxar Technologies and CAES Space Systems — now called Frontgrade Technologies — which were sold to private equity in deals highlighting strong interest from financial institutions in the sector. Defense stocks outperformed the broader stock market in 2022, buoyed by Russia’s war in Ukraine. This is in stark contrast to the poor share performance of young space companies from a range of markets that recently went public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which analysts believe will help push them to the deal table. Space firms trading shares following SPAC deals include launchers Astra, Virgin Orbit, and Rocket Lab; satellite operators BlackSky, Spire, AST SpaceMobile, Satellogic, and Planet; spacecraft maker Terran Orbital; space tourism firm Virgin Galactic; space infrastructure consolidator Redwire; and orbital transfer vehicle specialist Momentus. Acquisition targets Space businesses with strong government links and a robust earnings outlook are prime acquisition targets for defense primes, Ingle said. But companies with strong cashflows are hard to come by in the space industry, quipped Armand Musey, president of the Summit Ridge Group consultancy. “I think if we added up the cash flows of all the companies that are here at this conference we probably have a negative number,” Musey said. The small satellite industry is “dominated by a lot of startups who are generally in need of funding,” he added. However, cash flow, revenue, and profits are only part of the equation that investors look for, Deutsche Bank investment banker Pawel Skonieczka said. “If a company is developing technology that is deemed critical, whether to DoD or to the industry in general … [this also impacts] appetite of others to either invest or engage in” mergers and acquisitions. SPAC shake-out The dozen or so space companies that have listed shares via SPACs pose a mixed bag for investors. Some have “very interesting business models” that have been funded, Ingle said, while others will need to access capital to proceed with their plans. Whether these space firms are acquired or fall to the wayside, he said: “I don’t think there’ll be a dozen companies in … 12 to 24 months.” Sunil Nagaraj, managing partner at early-stage investor Ubiquity Ventures, said “it seems like about half will be still public in about a year, I think.” Bright spots The panelists said space companies building businesses around software would be more attractive to buyers than those focusing on capital-intensive hardware. These companies can “hit cash flow breakeven usually fairly quickly,” Musey said. “I think related to that would be ground segment infrastructure,” he added. “That’s going to become increasingly important over time, particularly for the big constellations.” Although capital intensive, he said the significant demand in the space industry for more launch capacity could also be a deal-driver. “So I think there will be people who … look at some of the startup launch providers and say, ‘who can we really put money into and get going?’ And I think some of the big primes might be interested in going down that road.”
SpaceX fired nearly all of the engines in the booster of its Starship launch vehicle in a ground test Feb. 9, one of the last technical milestones before the vehicle’s first orbital launch attempt. The Super Heavy booster ignited its engines at about 4:14 p.m. Eastern at the company’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The engines fired for nearly 15 seconds, with both the booster and launch infrastructure appearing intact after the test. SpaceX said that the test ran for the full intended duration. The test was designed to fire all 33 Raptors in the booster. However, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted immediately after the test that controllers turned off one engine just before the test and another stopped itself during the test. “But still enough engines to reach orbit!” he declared. Company officials had previously said a full 33-engine static-fire test was the final major test for the vehicle before the first orbital launch attempt. “It’s really the final ground test that we can do before we light ’em up and go,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 8, when she announced the scheduled test . Shotwell said at the conference that if the test went well, the company would be ready to make an orbital launch attempt in about a month. That schedule will depend not just on the technical readiness of the vehicle but also receiving an FAA launch license. “I think we’ll be ready to fly right at the timeframe that we get the license,” Shotwell predicted in comments to reporters after her conference presentation. Starship is essential to both SpaceX’s plans to deploy its next-generation Starship system as well as for NASA, which will use a lunar lander version of Starship for landing astronauts on the moon on the Artemis 3 mission through the Human Landing System (HLS) program. The two are linked, said Nick Cummings, director of civil space advanced development at SpaceX, during another panel at the FAA conference Feb. 9, noting that initial Starship missions will launch Starlink satellites. “I think we should all think about those as Artemis launches,” he said of Starship launches carrying Starlink satellites. “Critically, what we’re doing is developing the reliability and reusability that we need to support the HLS mission and, more broadly, the sustainable expansion of humanity to the moon and then Mars.” Shotwell, in her conference presentation, suggested Starship might fly 100 or more times before it carries people, although she later told reporters that was more of a goal than a requirement. “I would love to do hundreds before. I think that would be a great goal and it’s quite possible that we could do that,” she said. She acknowledged there is no guarantee the first orbital launch will be a success, but that the company was ready to make repeated attempts. “We will go for a test flight and we will learn from the test flight and we will do more test flights,” she told reporters. “The real goal is to not blow up the launch pad. That is success.”
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said Feb. 9 the United States is being challenged in space by rival powers and the commercial space industry has a key role to play in ensuring the U.S. can compete successfully. In a keynote speech at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference, Kelly highlighted the accomplishments of the U.S. commercial space industry but also cautioned that it should not rest on its laurels. Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities, which focuses on the competitive threats posed by adversaries like China and Russia. “As we look at the challenges that we’re going to face in the years ahead, your success is critical to the success of our country,” he told a large audience of space executives. “But this success is no by no means guaranteed.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, “has had devastating consequences around the world and poses an acute threat to the future of our international partnerships. Since the end of the Cold War, space exploration has been defined by a collaboration between the U.S. and Russia and other countries. But Putin’s unchecked aggression has made this collaboration much more difficult.” Things the U.S. space industry for decades took for granted, like supply chains for rocket engines and access to launch infrastructure, are at risk, he added. “And at the same time, we’re seeing adversaries like China make historic progress in space due to unprecedented government intervention.” To compete with China, the United States needs more launch providers and capabilities. The federal government, for its part, should support the development of new launch vehicles, new launch sites and “find ways to streamline the permitting and approval process for these large facilities … and we can continue to explore new contracting tools to help newer entrants bring launch vehicles to market faster.” “But we also need commercial launch providers to step up to the plate, to increase the pace of launch vehicle production, bring new launch vehicles to market faster and embrace renewed competition, not stifle it,” Kelly said. The nation also needs the private sector to help tackle supply chain security, he said. “Our commercial launch capabilities are too critical for our national and economic security to rely on supply chains that go across an ocean.” The CHIPS and Science Act that Congress passed last year will help bring back to the U.S. the production of microelectronics and also included provisions that support next generation space research and exploration. But onshoring critical capabilities is a responsibility that the private industry should take up as well, Kelly said. “It’s essential that everyone in this industry proactively identifies vulnerabilities along their supply chains and make targeted investments that protect your company.” Both the government and the industry also have a “collective responsibility” to ensure safe space operations, “especially given the ongoing geopolitical challenges that we face and the rising threats.” Rival countries are using cyber tools, artificial intelligence and other technologies to target U.S. space infrastructure both on the ground and in orbit, he said. “Don’t underestimate this. It is going to get a lot harder … Everyone operating in this industry has to build these risks into your standard business practices.”
By requiring suppliers of laser terminals to comply with a common set of standards, the U.S. Space Development Agency has helped propel the industry forward, executives said Feb. 8 at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. The Space Development Agency (SDA), an arm of the U.S. Space Force, is building a mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit to serve as a data transport layer for the U.S. military. Each satellite will have anywhere from three to five laser links so they can talk to other satellites, airplanes, ships and ground stations. The agency in 2021 issued a set of technical specifications that optical terminal manufacturers have to comply with in order to compete for SDA contracts. SDA is buying satellites from multiple manufacturers and all their satellites have to be interoperable. SDA’s move to set standards and force suppliers to coalesce around them has been game changing for the industry, said Sven Rettig, chief commercial officer of Tesat Spacecom, a Germany-based manufacturer of optical terminals that is expanding its U.S. operations to support SDA satellite suppliers. Laser terminals use optical technologies to route data traffic. They provide much higher transmission data rates than traditional radio-frequency links and are harder to intercept. A network of laser-link satellites also reduces the dependence on ground stations and extends coverage to remote areas where ground stations are not available. Before SDA entered the picture, the optical communications industry was waiting for commercial constellations to set standards but “that never happened,” said Rettig. “To be very honest, we wouldn’t be where we are if SDA hadn’t had this initiative.” As soon as the agency started planning its constellation and buying satellites in 2020, it identified laser intersatellite links as one of the most critical technologies to enable the desired proliferated LEO network. More competitors emerging Besides Tesat, other manufacturers jumped into the SDA market for optical intersatellite links, including Mynaric, Skyloom, CACI and others. For SDA’s constellations, laser terminals must be able to communicate at speeds of 2.5 gigabits per second, although vendors say their newest terminals can achieve 10 gigabits per second, and some up to 100. Tina Ghataore, chief commercial officer of Mynaric, agreed that SDA has played a central role shaping the market. The company, headquartered in Germany, has established U.S. operations and signed a strategic supplier agreement with Northorp Grumman. “SDA went out there and said optical intersatellite links are an essential technology to support our warfighter needs,” she said. “And they went a step further, developing a standard by which all of us have to communicate, so this way you can really get to a scalable product and the government isn’t tied to just one entity.” Campbell Marshall, chief operating officer of California-based Skyloom, said the commercial industry needs to follow suit with regard to standards. “There’s going to have to be some thought leadership and coming to terms amongst the commercial producers and operators in terms of what our standards are gonna look like.” The market today is still trying to decide if it’s going to be “VHS or Beta,” he said . For the SDA terminals, Skyloom partnered with Honeywell. “If you want to avoid vendor lock, which I think most customers do, there’s going to have to be standards for interoperability,” Marshall said. “SDA is demanding it.” Dave Pechner, vice president of SA Photonics, a Florida-based company owned by CACI International , said optical communications is not just important for communications but to deliver positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) data. SDA’s transport satellites will use optical links to be able to calculate position and time across the constellation and pass that down to ground users, Pechner said. “From a government point of view that seems almost as important as the communications link.” Separately from the SDA program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working with the private sector on an effort to develop a standard, low-cost laser terminal to connect government and commercial constellations in low Earth orbit. The project is called Space-BACN , short for space-based adaptive communications node.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Boeing and Millennium Space Systems executives are convinced that the whole created by the 2018 merger of the two companies has proven greater than the sum of its parts. “There’s a handful of programs that we won that we would not have been able to win by ourselves and Boeing wouldn’t have been able to win by themselves,” Millennium CEO Jason Kim said Feb. 9 at the SmallSat Symposium here. “We’re executing on those programs and there’s more to come.” Kim and Ryan Reid, president of Boeing Satellite Systems International, declined to offer program examples, which means that they are probably in the national security space realm where Millennium is focused . Millennium and Firefly Space Transport Services won contracts from the U.S. Space Systems Command in 2022 to perform a Tactically Responsive Space mission , part of a U.S. Space Force effort to speed up the timeline for launching payloads. Millennium and Raytheon Technologies are developing satellites for a U.S. Space Force missile-warning constellation . In November, Millennium’s Tetra-1 small satellite launched to geostationary orbit to test new Space Force missions. More than four years after Boeing completed its acquisition of Millennium , industry observers have generally praised the merger for allowing Millennium to retain some of its unique attributes. “What makes Millennium unique is the entrepreneurial spirit,” Kim said in a recent interview. “It’s a culture of speed. It’s in our DNA. Millennium combines the best of commercial and traditional aerospace to deliver high performance small satellites faster and more affordably.” Boeing approached the acquisition of Millennium carefully. “What made Millennium special was their ability to rapidly deliver to customers satellites in a range of sizes and orbits that we didn’t have,” Michelle Parker, Boeing Defense, Space and Security vice president for Space Mission Systems, said in a recent interview. “We love that entrepreneurial spirit. It really wouldn’t do us much good to acquire them and then crush that spirit. We were very thoughtful about that.” Since the acquisition, Millennium has shared with Boeing its expertise in rapid prototyping. “Like commercial companies, we use agile processes and we tech refresh our products relentlessly,” Kim said. “We also use commercial software development practices and the latest commercial dual-use technologies.” Boeing has helped Millennium with model-based engineering, additive manufacturing and establishing a factory to produce small satellites. For example, Boeing has helped Millennium qualify a printed metal satellite bus that offers cost, time and mass savings. “That’s one technology that I’m really excited about working with Ryan and with the rest of Boeing on,” Kim said. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Lithuania-based NanoAvionics said Feb. 9 it has doubled its small satellite production space to meet the needs of constellation operators. A new 1,200-square meter manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility is fully operational in Vilnius, Lithuania, next door to company headquarters that also houses production capacity. NanoAvionics can now build up to a few hundred identical satellites simultaneously — depending on their complexity, CEO Vytenis Buzas told SpaceNews . The company worked on 66 small satellites throughout 2022, Buzas said, and shipped 16 of them to customers. “The new facility was built on the knowledge and experience gained through manufacturing nearly 2,000 subsystems for more than 120 satellite missions globally,” he added. NanoAvionics employs more than 250 people across offices in Lithuania, the United Kingdom and the United States., and plans to add another 100 this year to ramp up operations. The transformation is part of a multimillion-dollar investment plan from Norway’s Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, which bought a majority stake in the company last year. Ramping up NanoAvionics was created as a university spin-off in 2014 and the manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing space inside its HQ was built for “a different market situation” and smaller orders, Buzas said. “Those customer orders were for pilot and demonstration missions which required a higher level of customization and more non-recurring engineering hours,” he added. “The new facility got mainly built for constellation missions requiring identical satellites. It is a step based on our customer’s demands and sales pipeline, as well as close collaboration and communication with our customers.” In addition to producing satellites ranging from about 10 to 220 kilograms, the company said its larger facility will support the development of new products. NanoAvionics is also considering adding an extra 800 square meters of usable space to the facility at a later date. Buzas expects NanoAvionics to be in a position to expand the facility “in a few years,” although the company is also looking into other scaling options. “We have always been customer demand and market driven and are not expanding for the sake of expansion,” he said via email. NanoAvionics also has assembly, integration, and testing areas at facilities in Basingstoke, U.K., and Columbia, Illinois. Buzas expects to announce a U.S.-focused development update “in a few weeks.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Gaining access to AWS Ground Stations is enabling Atlas Space Operations to dramatically expand its network, Atlas chief technology officer and co-founder Brad Bode told SpaceNews . Atlas, a ground software as a service company based in Michigan, is gaining access to 11 ground antennas sites through the AWS Solution Provider Program . Atlas already operates 13 ground stations around the world. Atlas joined the AWS Solution Provider Program after an extensive review process. “They looked at our architecture, validated it and gave us the thumbs up to resell their product,” Bode said Feb. 8 at the SmallSat Symposium here. For Atlas customers, the additional antennas will provide flexibility, Bode said. “When you realize that another ground station would be a better solution or you launch more satellites and need more services, you can expand easily because it’s all behind one single software interface,” he added. Atlas provides customers with ground services through its Freedom software, which offers updates on satellite operations and scheduling for communications passes as well as providing access for telemetry, tracking and command. AWS entered the ground station business in 2018 with a focus on helping Earth-observation constellations move data directly from satellites into the AWS cloud for processing and storage. Correction: Atlas currently operates 13 ground stations.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – OHB subsidiary LuxSpace plans to fly DcubeD actuators and other hosted payloads on its upcoming Triton-X Genesis mission. Through Triton-X Genesis, slated to travel to low-Earth orbit later this year on a Momentus Vigoride orbital transfer vehicle, LuxSpace intends to validate key components of its Triton-X small satellite platform. Launching hosted payloads on Triton-X Genesis “is actually a model that would be interesting to repeat because the economics are good,” LuxSpace CEO Edgar Milic told SpaceNews. Triton-X, a multi-mission satellite with extensive onboard processing, will have a mass of 50 to 250 kilograms. The European Space Agency provided funding for Triton-X through the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems program. In late 2022, the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich announced plans to buy a LuxSpace Triton-X Heavy satellite for Seranis, a small satellite mission with 15 experiments. Seranis, which stands for Seamless Radio Access Network for Internet of Space, includes technology demonstrations related to 6G mobile communications, laser communication and the Internet of Things. DcubeD, based in Bavaria, Germany, provides release actuators and deployables for small satellite applications. LuxSpace was established in Luxembourg in 2004 by OHB SE of Germany. LuxSpace manufactures small satellites and offers space-based applications and services.
SpaceX’s president said that Ukraine used Starlink services provided to the country for offensive purposes in its war against Russia, an application the company didn’t intend to support when it enabled service in the country. Speaking at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference here Feb. 8, Gwynne Shotwell described Ukraine’s use of the Starlink broadband satellite communication system for weapons systems like drones as an “unintentional” effect of donating services and terminals to the country after Russia’s invasion nearly a year ago. “We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom,” she said. “It was never intended to be weaponized, but the Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.” She didn’t elaborate in the conference talk on how Ukraine had weaponized Starlink. In a later conversation with reporters, though, she referred to reports that the Ukrainian military was using Starlink to control drones used in attacks on Russian forces. SpaceX was providing Ukraine with Starlink services, she said, for humanitarian applications. Even some generic military communications were also acceptable. “We know the military is using them for comms and that’s OK. But our intent was never to have them use it for offensive purposes.” A general commercial agreement, like one any Starlink user signs, limits its use for offensive purposes, she said, but acknowledged SpaceX had not given the issue of how it might be used much thought when it started providing Starlink to Ukraine shortly after the invasion. “We didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about it,” she said. “But we learned pretty quickly.” Shotwell said SpaceX has since taken steps to limit Starlink’s use in supporting offensive military operations. “There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that,” she said, declining to elaborate. “There are things that we can do and have done.” Last fall, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk raised the possibility of ending the company’s donations of Starlink services to Ukraine , citing the financial burden on the company, unless the Defense Department stepped in to cover those costs. Musk then backtracked , saying the company would continue offering the service “even though Starlink is still losing money and other companies are getting billions.” Shotwell told reporters she led efforts to get Pentagon funding for Starlink services in Ukraine. “I was the one that asked the Pentagon to fund this. It was not an Elon thing,” she said. “We stopped interacting with the Pentagon on the existing capability.” While Musk said in October that Starlink was losing money, Shotwell offered a more upbeat assessment. “This year Starlink will make money,” she said, noting that the company’s Falcon launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, and other unspecified work, already makes money. “We actually had a cashflow positive quarter last year, excluding launch. This year, they’re paying for their own launches, and they will still make money,” she said. She said cash flow from operations pays for development, supplemented as needed by outside investment. Tackling both Starlink and the Starship launch vehicle at the same time, she argued, drives that need for outside investment. “If we had done Starlink and then Starship, or Starship and then Starlink, we probably could have funded them through customer contracts and revenue from Falcon and Dragon. But you do both of them at the same time it’s a lot of money every year.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The Federal Communications Commission approved Amazon’s plan Feb. 8 to deploy and operate 3,236 broadband satellites, subject to conditions that include measures for avoiding collisions in low Earth orbit (LEO). Amazon got initial FCC clearance for its Ka-band Project Kuiper constellation in 2020 on the condition that it secured regulatory approval for an updated orbital debris mitigation plan. The FCC said its conditional approval of this mitigation plan allows “Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world.” The conditions include semi-annual reports that Kuiper must give the FCC to detail the collision avoidance maneuvers its satellites have made, whether any have lost the ability to steer away from objects, and other debris risk indicators. In the order, the FCC also requires Kuiper to ensure plans to de-orbit satellites after their seven-year mission keep inhabitable space stations in addition to the International Space Station in mind. Kuiper’s post-mission disposal plan involves lowering the perigee of the satellite to about 350 kilometers, where the company says a denser atmosphere would result in drag that would see it decay from orbit within a year. “Kuiper states that once perigee lowering is completed, remaining propellant will be used to lower apogee and to conduct collision avoidance until the remaining propellant is exhausted,” the FCC said, “or until the point in which apogee is less than the altitude of the International Space Station” at around 400 kilometers. The satellite would then use remaining propellant to further reduce apogee and vent any residual propellent. “Kuiper further states that [it] has allocated sufficient propellant to conduct collision avoidance maneuvers until the apogee is decreased below 400 kilometers,” the FCC added, but “given the ongoing and persistent operations of inhabitable space stations generally, such as [China’s] Tiangong space station, we condition the authorization to require that such space stations be taken into account.” This means “Kuiper must ensure that sufficient propellant is available for its satellites to continue to maintain collision avoidance capabilities and utilize other remaining fuel to lower the apogee below any inhabitable space stations.” Kuiper also has to provide regular updates on efforts to avoid interfering with astronomical observations and impacting the launch and reentry opportunities of missions with tight launch windows. Kuiper’s proposed constellation is spread across three orbital shells at altitudes of 590 kilometers, 610 kilometers, and 630 kilometers above Earth. The FCC grant comes a few months after SpaceX got conditional approval to launch up to a quarter of the proposed 30,000 LEO satellites in its second-generation Starlink broadband constellation. That approval gave SpaceX permission to deploy satellites at 525 kilometers, 530 kilometers, and 535 kilometers. Starlink’s first generation operates around 550 kilometers. SpaceX had called on the FCC to limit Kuiper’s approval to only 578 satellites in its 630-kilometer orbital shell, and defer a decision on the rest of the constellation, which the regulator rejected. The FCC also shot down an attempt to add the “object years” limit to Kuiper that came with Starlink’s Gen2 approval in December. If the total remaining orbital lifetime of any failed Starlink Gen2 satellites exceeds 100 years, SpaceX would need to stop deploying additional satellites pending an FCC investigation. The FCC said SpaceX had already launched thousands of Starlink satellites when it imposed this condition on the company, which also had actual satellite failure data that the regulator could use to inform this monitoring approach. “As Kuiper has not started deploying or operating its constellation, we find it is not … necessary to impose such a condition at this time,” the order stated. “Once Kuiper begins launching and subsequently operating its constellation, we will reassess the need to add a similar condition at a later date.” United Launch Alliance is slated to launch Kuiper’s first two prototype satellites in the coming months on the inaugural flight of its Vulcan Centaur rocket. Amazon has secured up to 92 launches with ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin for Kuiper under contracts worth several billion dollars. This article was updated Feb. 8 with more details about Kuiper’s space station avoidance requirement
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat is exploring hybrid narrowband direct-to-smartphone services using satellites in geostationary and non-geostationary orbits, CEO Mark Dankberg said Feb. 8. There is “plenty that can be done both at GEO as well as at non-GEO,” Dankberg said while addressing the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, and “what we’re really looking at is a harmonized system between the two.” During Viasat’s financial results call Feb. 7, Dankberg said the GEO broadband operator is open to partnering with low Earth orbit (LEO) companies, including arch-rival SpaceX. “Personally, we don’t rule out partnering with anybody,” he said in response to an analyst question about allying with SpaceX, “but I think we’ve shown that we can really add value in the space architectures more than we could just in lease fees for spectrum as an example — but, we never say never.” Viasat is closing in on its acquisition of British GEO broadband and narrowband operator Inmarsat, which has global L-band spectrum rights and has been developing plans to provide services from LEO. Dankberg told the SmallSat Symposium that while Viasat made its mulit-billion dollar offer for Inmarsat because of its international broadband presence, its direct-to-smartphone narrowband capabilities are increasingly compelling. He said “one of the biggest potential markets is direct-to-device,” which is “going to have a big influence, both positive and negative, when it comes to … the self-interest of nations.” Advances in technology and telecoms protocol standardization are making it easier to communicate to and from orbit without large antennas or specialized phones. “It’s possible to control that,” Dankberg said, “but when any cell phone in the world, or smartwatch … within your borders can connect to a space system directly, that is not consistent with the self-interest of quite a few nations in the world.” As direct-to-smartphone efforts pick up and capabilities advance beyond emergency messaging, he sees other knock-on effects across the rest of the space industry. These include more mass being put into orbit, increasing the threat of debris-causing collisions threatening the viability of space operations for all operators. Small LEO satellites have been getting larger to improve their capabilities as launch economics improve, Dankberg noted. He pointed to how SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites have increased from about 250 kilograms to the 2,000-kilogram range to add new capabilities, such as direct-to-smartphone services, into its second-generation broadband constellation. Viasat believes “you do not need very large satellites to accomplish missions in space,” Dankberg said, and is focusing on improving payload integration to save space. “We’re looking at standardized cubesat-type form factors that we think we can buy that will create a vibrant ecosystem,” he added, “to allow many new entrants into these into these systems.” Viasat is still waiting on regulatory approvals from the United Kingdom and European to buy Inmarsat after announcing the deal in November 2021. The statuary deadline for the U.K.’s competition watchdog to decide on the deal is March 30, Raymond James analyst Ric Prentiss said in a recent investor note, and “then the last remaining hurdle would be the European Commission which could potentially elongate the timeline.” Viasat, which recently completed the $2 billion sale of its tactical data communications business, reported $651 million in revenue from continuing operations in the three months to the end of December, up 4% year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, declined 15% to $139 million. The operator also disclosed an extra few weeks of delays for its debut next-generation ViaSat-3 satellite, designed to add significant amounts of capacity over the Americas, which is now slated for a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch in the week of April 8. The second ViaSat-3, covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa, is counting down to a September launch on one of United Launch Alliance’s last Atlas launches.
SpaceX will attempt a static-fire test of all 33 engines in its Starship booster as soon as Feb. 9, a test that could allow the company to attempt an orbital launch a month later. Speaking at the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference here Feb. 8, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, announced the impending test, the final major technical milestone before the vehicle’s first orbital launch attempt. “Tomorrow is a big day for SpaceX. We are going to attempt a 33-engine static fire booster test for Starship,” she said. “It’s really the final ground test that we can do before we light ‘em up and go.” The company had been hinting that the test was approaching for some time. Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president for build and flight reliability, said at a conference Jan. 27 that the test could take place the following week , although he warned “We still have a lot of work in front of us to get there and it’s not easy.” A successful test, she said, could set the company up for that orbital launch attempt soon. “That first flight test is going to be really exciting. It’s going to happen in the next month or so.” The static-fire test will be the first time all 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster are fired for the first time. The most engines that have ignited at once in a booster is 14, which resulted in some pad damage. Shotwell told reporters after her talk that she believed changes the company made will prevent pad damage from the upcoming more powerful test. “I don’t expect the pad to have the same issues that we had during the 14-engine static fire,” she said. “We’ve done some work on the pad.” She didn’t elaborate on the changes. An orbital flight test will require an FAA launch license that is still pending, which includes implementing at least some of the mitigations identified by the FAA in an environmental review published in June for Starship launches from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, test site. “We’ve been working all the mitigations since we got it,” she said of the environmental review, including working with state and federal agencies. As for the license, “I think we’ll be ready to fly right at the timeframe that we get the license.” Starship is essential to SpaceX’s long-term plans, from deploying a second generation of its Starlink constellation to landing NASA astronauts on the moon as part of the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign. It is also designed for a very high production and flight rate, a point Shotwell emphasized in her presentation. “We have Starship be as much like aircraft operations as we can possibly can get it,” she said. “We want to talk about dozens of launches per day, if not hundreds of launches a day.” She said she expected Starship to fly at least 100 times before it carries people for the first time, a challenge as the company prepares a lunar lander version of Starship for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, currently scheduled for as soon as 2025. In her later conversation with reporters, she called that 100-flight milestone a “great goal” but suggested it was not a requirement. “I would love to do hundreds before. I think that would be a great goal and it’s quite possible that we could do that,” she said. She noted the company has a goal of 100 Falcon launches this year. “If we can do 100 flights of Falcon this year, I’d love to be able to do 100 flights of Starship next year. I don’t think we will do 100 flights of Starship next year, but maybe 2025 we will do 100 flights.” First, she said, SpaceX needed to get Starship to orbit as soon as it can. “We will go for a test flight and we will learn from the test flight and we will do more test flights,” she said. “The real goal is to not blow up the launch pad. That is success.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Space startups will need to step up their fundraising efforts if they want to raise money this year from increasingly meticulous investors, according to a panel of early-stage space investment firms. A “dosage of reality” is trickling through the space industry, AE Industrial Partners vice president Tyler Letarte told the SmallSat Symposium Feb. 7 in Mountain View, California. “For a number of months in 2021, people saw some home-run deals,” Letarte said, “people saw some early investors be very successful, and you started seeing some new money come into that market. “You also had new entrants, people raising capital, bringing big promises to those new investors.” However, despite investment giants such as Morgan Stanley forecasting stellar growth for the space economy on its way to a $1 trillion market in 2040, “a number of those businesses” ultimately did not hit near-term revenue projections. Space industry investment plummeted from a $47 billion peak in 2021 to $20 billion in 2022, according to analysis from early-stage investor Space Capital. Investment firms pulled back in 2021 after not realizing the upside they thought they had, Letarte said, and “you’re starting to see a smarter, more patient, more skeptical investor” in their wake. Space companies are “having to really develop a business model” to secure funding deals in this environment and “show that they have customers, revenue” from commercial and government sources. “People know what to look for, I think, a little bit better now,” he added, “and as a result, you’re going to see some companies really struggle to raise capital, and those that adjust and shift and have a true business model win in 2023.” Mike Collett, managing partner at Promus Ventures, said the surge of different types of publicly traded space firms in recent years has also laid bare the metrics that investors use to value companies. “And so you can actually go and see what an [Earth observation] company would look like,” Collett said, “you can see what a launch company looks like. You can see service businesses and what the market is valuing those at.” Collett said these young companies are currently not valued as highly as non-space assets in adjacent markets because of worries about the lack of cash on their balance sheets. To succeed in this environment, Collett said companies need to show a deep understanding of where their revenues will come from. “Founders no longer can just get away with some crazy story,” he said, meaning venture capital funding rounds are taking “much longer” to finalize. But while funding gets more challenging, all panelists expect plenty of opportunities for deal-making this year. Xiaoming Yin, senior investment manager at Lockheed Martin Ventures, said her firm is seeking to deploy more capital after recently doubling the size of its fund to $400 million. She said space startups are also becoming “a little bit more creative in raising money” outside the traditional venture capital route. Many of the companies Lockheed has invested in are considering Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts from the U.S. government, she said, to give them more time to raise larger funding rounds. A lot of them — especially in the U.K., Canada, and Australia — are also looking to take advantage of trade deals U.S. defense contractors have that oblige them “to give back to the local startup communities” for products sold to foreign governments. And while overall investment was down in 2021, Seraphim Space managing partner James Bruegger said its research points to “record levels” of activity “in terms of volume of deals being done quarter on quarter throughout the year” at the earliest funding stage — depending on how a space company is defined. There was “an absolute bifurcation in the market during 2022,” according to Bruegger, between later-stage businesses facing tougher conditions and younger companies. “And, anecdotally, we see businesses that are raising in later stage almost exclusively being from existing syndicates, rather than new investors,” he said. “Whereas in the earliest stages, a continued influx of both return investors and new venture funds that are looking for high-outcome, early-stage companies.” While there is “a healthy dose of realism” in the industry, Seraphim remains “overall pretty optimistic about the prospects for high-quality, early-stage businesses.” That does not mean “2023 is going to be a particularly joyous year,” Bruegger added. But businesses that can come out the other side of any downturn are typically the ones that go on to achieve “the greatest successes.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Space startups often make the mistake of waiting too long to establish the ground infrastructure to support their satellites. “Consider the ground segment as an inherent part of the spacecraft [regulatory] filing,” Jai Dialani, Leaf Space USA managing director, said Feb. 8 at the SmallSat Symposium here. “Do not treat it as something that you have to consider down the road.” In some cases, startups approach ground segment providers one month before launching their first satellites. In that case, it’s often impossible to help because “we have to obtain licenses for their spacecraft at our ground stations in different parts of the world,” Dialani said. “Every regulator works differently. They have different timelines and different levels of complexity.” Christopher Richins, RBC Signals founder and CEO, added that planning ahead gives satellite operators additional flexibility in their ground segments. “One of the things that we encourage our customers to do is to license multiple ground stations so that they have backup and flexibility available,” Richins said. “We have multiple ground stations and multiple antennas in a region. We may license multiple ground stations and antennas for a certain customer, so they have the ability to move if there is increased demand or to back something up if there’s an outage.” The regulatory side of establishing a constellation is “the long pole in the tent,” added Chris Stott, ManSat executive chairman, who advised startups to begin speaking with ground segment providers as soon as possible. Once the ground segment is established, antenna suppliers and ground station operators can support customers around the world. “Being able to be able to take care of products wherever they happen to land is really critical,” said Pam Lugos, CPI Satcom Products vice president of business development for satcom products. 
While demand for launches of smallsats is higher than ever, industry officials warned that price pressures and lack of access to capital could cause many companies to go out of business in the near future. Executives with several launch companies said during a panel at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Feb. 7 that they are seeing strong demand for launch services but are struggling to make money as competition, particularly from SpaceX, drives down prices. “I’ve been in the space business now for almost 30 years,” said Marino Fragnito, senior vice president and head of the Vega business unit at Arianespace. “I have never seen so much business. I have never seen so much demand for launches.” However, he said it was currently difficult for his company and others to make money launching small satellites. “If we talk about 50 kilograms, 100 kilograms, this kind of satellite size, this is the size of the Transporter missions,” he said, referring to the series of SpaceX Falcon 9 dedicated rideshare launches. “The reference price is the Transporter price. With that price, nobody will make money.” SpaceX currently charges $275,000 to launch a 50-kilogram smallsat to sun-synchronous orbit on a Transporter mission, far less than list prices for many dedicated smallsat launch vehicles. Those launches, taking place three to four times a year, can carry 100 or more satellites each. Adam Spice, chief financial officer of Rocket Lab, agreed. “I think the fact is they’ve suppressed prices in the market. I think the fact is they’ve taken a lot of volume off of the market,” he said of Transporter missions. “That’s a reset that really wasn’t there in the model even only a few years ago.” He said launch companies need to adapt by attracting more government business, which is less price sensitive and often has requirements that drive them to dedicated launches. He added that some commercial customers that fly initially on rideshare missions will shift to dedicated launches over time as they deploy operational constellations. “What’s happening is that commercial companies are growing more mature in terms of small satellites and small constellations,” said Dan Hart, chief executive and president of Virgin Orbit. “That overlaps to a fair degree with some of the needs of the national security community.” Bill Weber, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said his company’s Alpha rocket is attracting interest from customers who don’t feel like Transporter missions are a good fit. “They are saying, ‘Transporter does not work for our mission set,’” he said. But some admitted they underestimated the cost and complexity of developing small launch vehicles. “I think there has to be a reflection of factoring in that delivering a reliable and regular launch service is expensive,” said Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio, prime contractor of the Vega series of rockets. “Pricing needs to take this into account. There is no easy solution to finding a lower price launch service.” Spice said that Rocket Lab had underestimated what it would take to develop and operate its Electron. “I’ve been with Rocket Lab now for about five years, and five years ago we had a certain idea of what it would take to operate the company and operate at a certain cadence, and we were just wildly off,” he said. He added he saw an “abnormally” high rate of failures of small launch vehicles in recent months, an apparent reference to recent failures by Vega C, Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne and ABL Space Systems’s RS1. “I don’t think it’s necessarily all that unpredictable when you think about the challenges that have been placed in front of these companies.” The combination of pricing pressures from SpaceX, technical issues and limited access to capital will, Spice predicted, lead to a reckoning in the burgeoning small launch market. “You have a very strong muting function that SpaceX is providing to the small launch market, which I think ultimately will force survival of the fittest,” he said. “I think there will be a lot fewer players out there in a few years than there are today.” That will particularly affect early-stage companies that need to raise capital that is difficult to do now given the current state of the market. “It takes capital to grow, and capital is really, really hard to come by,” he said. “People underestimate how difficult the launch business really is,” he said. “I think we’re at the beginning of the bloodletting of aspirational launch companies.” Weber offered a similar assessment, focusing on limited launch infrastructure like launch pads, comparing it to gates at an airport. “If you are a blueprint launch company right now, and you do not have real estate but you have what you believe is a good idea, you got to get that to market quick because the available space will be taken up by those with presence.” Fragnito said that, despite those various challenges, the demand for launches made him more optimistic about the overall sector than previously. “I’m much more positive than a few years ago on the fact that more companies can survive,” he said. “The ones that will be able to operate successfully a launch system can survive because there is a lot of demand.”
The chief executive of Firefly Aerospace Bill Weber said Feb. 7 the company is preparing to launch its first mission for the U.S. Space Force in May. The mission will attempt to demonstrate industry capabilities to send a payload to orbit on 24 hours’ notice. Firefly in September won a $17.6 million contract to launch a Millennium Space small satellite to low Earth orbit, a so-called Tactically Responsive Space mission that is part of a broader effort by the U.S. Space Force to accelerate the timeline for deploying payloads to orbit. Speaking at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Weber said the company views the upcoming mission as an opportunity to show it can provide reliable and predictable launch services not just to the military but to all customers. “Responsive space is not just a government mission,” Weber said. “Predictability, full rate production, dependability, schedule, that’s what we’re trying to weave into the business.” Firefly’s expendable Alpha small launcher made its first launch attempt in September 2021 but the vehicle did not reach orbit as one of the first stage engines failed during ascent. A second test flight in October 2022 successfully reached orbit although the satellites were deployed in lower orbits than originally planned. Small launchers face tough market The Space Force’s Tactically Responsive Space program is viewed as a potential lifeline for small vehicles that are facing lagging demand in the commercial sector in large part due to the popularity of SpaceX’s big-rocket rideshares. Weber said there is still a demand for dedicated vehicles to reach specific orbits and Firefly is not competing for the same customers that are buying rides on SpaceX’s Transporter missions. Virgin Orbit’s chief executive Dan Hart said his company intends to compete for Tactically Responsive Space and other national security missions. “The idea of how to acquire space capabilities for national security is changing” due to the geopolitical environment, Hart said at the symposium. Traditionally the military plans its satellite launches years or decades in advance. But with satellites now considered military targets, there will be times when the military might need a satellite launched immediately to replace damaged assets. “That’s a new idea,” Hart said, and DoD needs the launch infrastructure to support that. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne is an air-launched rocket that deploys from a modified Boeing 747 carrier aircraft at high altitude. The vehicle flew four successful missions but its latest launch from the United Kingdom Jan. 9 failed to reach orbit . Adam Spice, chief financial officer of Rocket Lab, said the company considers the U.S. government the main customer for its Electron small launch vehicle. “In order for companies to be viable and healthy, you’ve got to look outside of those science experiments, the one offs, you really got to start building a solid base of recurring launches, which is really today largely government.” Today, he added, “I think it’s very important to have a strong government relations function in the company.”
Virgin Orbit’s chief executive said Feb. 7 that a problem with a relatively inexpensive part may be linked to the failure of the company’s latest launch last month. Speaking on a panel at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Dan Hart said it was still premature to formally declare the root cause of the failed Jan. 9 flight of the company’s LauncherOne rocket on the “Start Me Up” mission from Spaceport Cornwall in England. However, he said while that investigation continues, evidence was pointing to a component in the rocket’s second stage engine. “Everything points to, right now, a filter that was clearly there when we assembled the rocket but was not there as the second stage engine started, meaning it was dislodged and caused mischief downstream,” he said. He didn’t go into details about that component, other than to say that it was not an expensive item. “This is like a $100 part that took us out.” Hart said the company would no longer use that filter and was “looking broadly” at other potential fixes. He did not disclose a timeframe for completing the investigation, which is being overseen jointly by the U.K.’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Virgin Orbit, though, is preparing its next LauncherOne rocket for a flight that will take place from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, which hosted all the previous LauncherOne missions before last month’s U.K. launch. “We’re in integration for our next flight and looking forward to flying from Mojave over the coming weeks.” Hart did not discuss the financial status of the company amid concerns about available cash. The company has raised $55 million in debt since November from Virgin Investments Limited , the investment arm of Virgin Group, but its recent cash burn rate suggests it could run out of funds as soon as the second quarter. Publicly, he was upbeat about the company’s future plans. “For us, it’s about ramping this year. We see a market that continues to develop,” he said. “We will see demand grow and we need to grow with it.” Vega C investigation update Virgin Orbit was not the only company on the panel that has suffered a recent launch failure. Avio is the prime contractor for the Vega C rocket, which failed to reach orbit on a Dec. 20 launch , destroying two Pléiades Neo imaging satellites for Airbus Defence and Space. Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio, said he could not comment on the investigation, led by Arianespace and the European Space Agency, since it is still in progress. “It will be released very soon, though.” He confirmed, though, that the failure was linked to the rocket’s second stage, which is different from the second stage on the original Vega rocket. That could allow the Vega to return to flight first while modifications are made to the Vega C. “The former version of the rocket is unaffected by this accident,” he said. “In 2023, we need to come back to flight with Vega C. We do have the luxury of using the previous version of the rocket as well to fulfill the market demand.”
The U.S. Space Force will use funds that Congress added to the 2023 defense budget to buy a wideband communications satellite made by Boeing, a spokesperson confirmed Feb. 7. The new geostationary satellite, to be named WGS-12, will be the 12th of the Wideband Global Satcom constellation that provides communications services to the U.S. military and allies. The Space Force did not request funding for a wideband satellite in the 2023 budget but Congress nevertheless added $442 million, an action reminiscent of the 2018 defense appropriations bill when Congress inserted $600 million for WGS-11. “The $442 million was added to the WGS program element to procure a WGS-12, which will be a build-to-print of WGS-11,” a Space Systems Command spokesperson told SpaceNews via email. The 2023 appropriations bill did not specifically direct the Space Force to buy another WGS satellite although it is implied. It directs the service to “procure a protected wideband satellite to provide resilient, jam resistant tactical communications to support warfighter needs.” Defense appropriations for years have raised concerns about a shortage of satellite communications capacity for military users, particularly those who need high levels of security. Under a Space Force contract, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are developing next-generation military communications payloads known as protected tactical satcom, or PTS. According to sources, lawmakers were concerned the PTS program would take too long to develop and field, which prompted the decision to add funds for a wideband satellite. The $442 million will pay for the satellite and does not cover launch costs. Defense appropriators asked the Space Force to report back on how it plans to fund the launch. The Space Force said last year it was negotiating a cost-sharing agreement with international users of the WGS constellation to fund the launch of WGS-11. Presumably a similar agreement would be pursued for WGS-12. The WGS constellation supports the militaries of Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Norway. The U.S. also has a separate bilateral agreement with Australia. Two new partner nations are in discussions to join the coalition but their identities have not yet been disclosed. Boeing is building WGS-11 at its factory in El Segundo, California. The Space Force awarded the company a $605 million contract in October 2019. Boeing said it plans to deliver the satellite in 2024. Boeing has been the WGS prime contractor since 2001. The first satellite was launched in 2007.
NASA is still working to refine an architecture for the next phases of its Artemis lunar exploration campaign which it now expects to roll out in April. Speaking at a Space Transportation Association luncheon here Feb. 7, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said there is still unfinished work from an architecture concept review held by the agency the week of Jan. 23 at the Kennedy Space Center to examine how to achieve a series of objectives for exploration of the moon and Mars that the agency developed last year. “We came out of that week and our success criteria were not as green as we had gone into, which I’m good with because that means we pushed the boundaries a little bit,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on the issues left unresolved from the review. NASA now plans to reconvene the participants of that review later this month, followed by taking the finalized architecture to the agency’s executive council in mid-March. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy will discuss the outcome of that effort at the Space Symposium conference a month later in Colorado Springs. After that, he said NASA would release “one of the volumes” of the architecture definition document. That will focus on Artemis 2 through 5, a series of missions to the moon that will run through late this decade. Artemis 2 will be the first crewed Orion mission, taking astronauts to the moon. Artemis 3 will feature the first Artemis crewed landing, while Artemis 4 and 5 will include both crewed landings and assembly of elements of the lunar Gateway. There will be less detail about later Artemis missions. “The detail will vary,” he said. “We don’t want to lock in [Artemis] 6 through 10 right now. That’d be foolish. We’re trying to take it in chunks.” NASA plans to conduct architecture concept reviews annually, with the next scheduled for November. That upcoming review, he said, will have a “heavier Mars focus” including how later Artemis missions will align with long-term plans for human Mars missions. Among those who participated in the architecture concept review was Jody Singer, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center. She said at the luncheon she appreciated knowing what skills and resources she needed for Marshall to support later Artemis missions to ensure the “viability” of the center. “We’re applauding the opportunity not only to know what we need to know through Artemis 5, but also, as we go forward with this, understanding what’s for the future,” she said. “It shows not only the opportunities that are out there but also the skills and what we need to maintain and prioritize.” New program office Free also addressed a requirement in the NASA authorization act passed last year that directed NASA to create a “Moon to Mars Program Office” within the agency. That office would be responsible for the major programs of Artemis, including the Space Launch System, Orion, Exploration Ground Systems, lunar Gateway, Human Landing System and spacesuits. The office would be led by a director reporting to Free. While the authorization act required NASA to create the office within 120 days of the bill’s enactment in July 2022, Free said that work was still in progress, The agency had first sent its plan for the office to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and, after revisions, to key congressional committees. “We’ve briefed everyone on the structure. We’re just waiting to hear back,” he said. “We can’t move out until we get that approval from the committees.” Free said he’s told those working on Artemis not to focus on the creation of the new office. “This is their second reorganization in 18 months and I don’t want anyone to get distracted from flying humans safely,” he said, a reference to NASA’s decision in the fall of 2021 to split the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate into the Space Operations Mission Directorate and Free’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. “We’re just mission-focused right now,” he said, adding he believed the new office would “overlay very nicely” with existing programs. “I effectively was the moon-to-Mars program manager before this. We’ll have somebody else in that role now. But I’m hoping within the next couple of months, we will be able to do that.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Executives with plans to connect satellites directly to smartphones sparred at the SmallSat Symposium Feb. 7 over which spectrum strategy will lead to success in this emerging market. At one end of the discussion, satellite operators such as Iridium Communications seek to use their existing spectrum resources to connect with upgraded smartphone models. On the other, companies including Lynk Global are developing constellations from scratch that would use frequencies from cellular partners to reach the billions of smartphones already in consumer pockets. Each strategy has pros and cons, and companies on the SmallSat Symposium’s direct-to-device panel in Mountain View, California, touted various nuances for their specific approach. For Coral Faradjian, Iridium’s director of legal and regulatory, using spectrum already approved to be beamed from space to the ground significantly decreases the time it takes to launch commercially. By leveraging an existing constellation of 66 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) in partnership with U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm, Iridium expects its technology to be rolled out on new Android smartphones in the second half of this year. Iridium expects early global services to include emergency messaging for phone users outside of cellular networks, similar to the capability Apple launched on Globalstar’s LEO network in November for its latest iPhone — currently covering the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. In partnership with Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, British handset maker Bullit also plans to release a smartphone this year that could send and receive texts globally via existing satellites in geostationary orbit. Although there is “incredible value in the innovation that smaller entities bring,” Faradjian said Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek allied with existing network providers “purely because this is a marathon.” She said “teaching yourself how to swim once the event has started, while your competitors are completing those events, and moving on to the next gate in the cycle, is going to be incredibly challenging.” Startups face challenges to raise money for their constellations this year, she added, “because the business sell is going to be harder and harder when you’re up against comments like … Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple are off the market.” George Giagtzoglou, vice president of strategy at Omnispace, outlined plans during the panel to deploy satellites using spectrum rights acquired from defunct operator ICO Global for a direct-to-smartphone service. He said even SpaceX, which has plans to use cellular spectrum from T-Mobile to provide direct-to-smartphone services in the United States, is seeking satellite spectrum to support ambitions in this market. However, not all mobile users can afford the latest handset models to remain connected beyond the reach of cell towers, Lynk co-founder and chief technology officer Tyghe Speide said. Lynk currently has three satellites in LEO as it works on a ground station and the regulatory milestones in the way of launching initial messaging services from April. While Iridium and Globalstar are currently in a better position to offer lower-latency direct-to-smartphone services requiring dense satellite coverage, such as voice, Speidel argued that handsets are still the missing piece of the puzzle in their business plans. “We’re building a system that’s backward compatible with all five billion phones,” he said. “That’s incredibly powerful. All these other new phones, not only will they be more expensive, but they have to get made and they have to get sent out into the market — and I think it’s unclear who’s going to really buy those and what their price sensitivity will be.” Despite the launch of satellite-enabled iPhone 14 models, Apple’s quarterly iPhone sales declined for the first time since 2020 for the three months to the end of December as production issues weighed on the company. Speidel also does not believe Lynk and others looking to repurpose cellular spectrum for use in space will run into any regulatory issues down the line. “I mean, what’s a couple hundred kilometers among friends when it’s … still a cell tower” in space, he said, adding that regulators have “been very supportive” of Lynk’s plans and analysis showing they do not interfere with other networks.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Internet-of-things startup Sateliot announced an agreement Feb. 7 with Sentrisense, an Argentine company focused on power line maintenance, to offer satellite connectivity for electric grid sensors. The new service will allow Sentrisense to monitor sensors attached to electric towers or power lines, modify the amperage and quickly identify broken wires, fires or other dangerous conditions. “The massive connectivity between 5G satellites and the sensors will allow far more accurate predictions on wear and tear analysis, and alert to the presence of fallen trees or ice on the lines,” Sateliot CEO Jaume Sanpera said in a statement. In addition, data from the sensors will help Sentrisense determine wire inclination and each wire’s distance from the ground “with an affordable connection of just $1 per month per device,” he added. Traditionally, Sentrisense devices have relayed data through cellphone towers. Under the new agreement, Sateliot will offer Sentrisense service beyond the reach of cell towers. Sentrisense monitors electric wires in the United States, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Spain and Sweden. “This connectivity agreement will allow Sentrisense Line guard sensors to connect anywhere in the world, even in remote locations,” Sentrisense CEO Sebastán Cerone said in a statement. “The electric grid, the largest engineering feat of humankind right now, is by definition is an analog asset, and we are fully digitizing it. We want to turn the grid … into a smart tool, able to predict fires and other weather and environmental hazards.” In addition to relaying data on the condition of the wires, Sentrisense devices report ambient weather conditions like humidity, temperature, wind direction and speed. These reports will help increase the resilience of the electric grid by informing operators of heat waves or blizzard conditions, according to the news release.
More than 6,000 satellites are orbiting the Earth and 33,000 are projected to launch over the next decade. There are also tens of thousands of inactive objects, or space junk, requiring satellites today to have to maneuver through crowded debris fields. But the space industry does not expect its growth to be dampened by congestion or by a doom-and-gloom narrative , executives said Feb. 7 at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. During a panel discussion, executives said they expect that a combination of new technologies, policies and business incentives to minimize debris creation will propel the industry forward despite congestion, hazards in orbit, and the lack of global rules for sustainable space operations. “Last year was an interesting inflection point, when we started to see more satellite operators willing to pay for space traffic management services,” said Dan Ceperley, founder and CEO of LeoLabs, a U.S. company that uses ground-based radars to track objects in low Earth orbit. Space internet companies like SpaceX, Amazon and others, as well as the growing remote sensing industry, are investing billions of dollars in constellations, most in low Earth orbit. “And so they are quite conscious of the fact that if they lose satellites, and especially if they lose entire orbits, their business plans start to really get hurt,” Ceperley said. More demand for propulsion, autonomous tech Companies also are willing to spend more money on propulsion technology to ensure their satellites can dodge obstacles and deorbit themselves when they’re no longer needed, said Toku Sakai, chief operating officer of Pale Blue, a Japanese company that develops propulsion systems that use water as propellant. “We are seeing a lot of commercial demand,” said Sakai. “Much of it is driven by regulatory requirements … But there’s also commercial self interest in essentially making sure that they’re able to send up a constellation of satellites that can avoid collisions, that can deorbit on time, and so without spending an insane amount of money.” Charlie McGillis, vice president of Los Angeles-based Slingshot Aerospace, said the company has seen interest spike in its space traffic control software known as Beacon . Satellite operators that sign up for the service receive urgent collision alerts so they’re able to coordinate satellite maneuvers and communicate with other operators in high-risk situations. Slingshot is offering Beacon for free, and the company is positioning the platform to support the emerging Department of Commerce’s space traffic management office. The Office of Space Commerce is currently evaluating commercial technologies to provide civil space traffic management services, such as warnings of potential collisions, a function currently performed by the Defense Department. Ceperley said it was encouraging to see the Office of Space Commerce receive a large budget “in addition to the mandate to take over the space traffic management mission in the U.S.” The Department of Defense has provided a “great advisory service, but it’s not empowered as a regulator to enforce any changes,” Ceperley said. Another trend in the industry that is helping manage congestion is the use of automated tools to operate satellites and new transportation services that can deliver spacecraft to less-congested orbits, said David Henri, founder and chief product officer of Exotrail, a space logistics company based in France. The company on Feb. 7 announced a $58 million fundraising round to scale up production of electric thrusters and expand efforts to provide in-space transportation services. Since he founded the company in 2017, Henri said, he has seen “a big difference in how operators are dealing with space debris.” Customers are investing in technologies for collision avoidance and situational awareness, he said. And they are using more advanced mission software to autonomously plan operations and minimize risk. McGillis said the future is likely to follow the SpaceX Starlink model of autonomous operations with satellites doing their own conjunction avoidance maneuvers. “I think in the future there will be more of that,” she said. “It will be like going down Interstate 405 and seeing no drivers. You’ll have self-driving cars, and no more accidents because it just flows so nicely.” In space, said McGillis, “I think we can get to that, and I won’t call it Nirvana, but it will be almost Nirvana in space, where we can have autonomous capability and congestion isn’t such a problem.” Clare Martin, executive vice president of Astroscale, a space logistics company based in Japan and the U.S., said the industry is increasingly motivated to ensure the sustainability of the space environment. Astroscale offers active debris-removal services, which the industry expects governments to pay for. However, companies are willing to invest in capabilities to prevent further debris creation. “Commercial operators are actually actively engaged in behaving responsibly and sustainably and working with companies like ourselves to move things forward in the right direction,” Martin said. On the government side, she said, “the conversation in the U.S. has really picked up over the last year or two which is very, very positive.” Abandoned rockets pose big hazards Ceperley argued that the biggest danger to satellites in orbit is not other satellites but inactive rocket upper stages that have accumulated over decades. “Unfortunately, abandoned rocket bodies continue to be a problem in this day and age,” he said. Last year, LeoLabs identified about 50 rocket bodies discarded in low Earth orbit. “They’re quite massive,” he said. “In a sense, they’re ticking time bombs. So when they get hit, or if they break up, they can release a very large amount of debris.” People tend to blame the mega constellations for the debris problem, said Ceperley. “I think the mega constellations are the victims of the environment. They’re the ones that have to maneuver around debris that was left in space decades earlier.” The removal of these upper stages should be a priority, said Martin, because a single object could explode and create thousands more pieces of junk, “which would be much harder to remediate.” “We all know that everyone on this planet is absolutely reliant on space services now,” she said. “That should be a huge motivator to help us actually address the problem now, rather than just focus on the doom and gloom aspect that we’ve not done a great job looking after the environment.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Small satellite manufacturers should prepare for the emergence of rideshare flights on the SpaceX Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy launch vehicle, according to panelists speaking Feb. 7 at the SmallSat Symposium here. “If you are not preparing for how you’re going to launch your product on Starship and how you’re going to change your business model to work with Starship, you are going to be in trouble,” said Abhishek Tripathi, mission operations director at the University of California, Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory. SpaceX conducted a wet dress rehearsal, a fueling test of its fully stacked Starship launch vehicle, Jan. 23, indicating the company is closing in on its first orbital launch attempt. Another key milestone, the the static-fire test of Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster, occurred Feb. 9. Tripathi, a former SpaceX Dragon flight reliability director, noted his potential bias, but advised companies to reorient their businesses to take advantage of what are expected to be relatively inexpensive rideshare flights. “If that means that I need to partner with a space tug to get to my final orbit, okay,” Tripathi said. “Let me go and talk to a bunch of space tech companies.” SpaceX shook up the market in 2021 when it launched the first Falcon 9 Transporter rideshare flight. “When the first Transporter mission started going, the number of smallsats launched on small launchers just fell off a cliff,” said Fletcher Franklin, BryceTech senior program manager. Still, it’s too soon to dismiss the small launch vehicle sector. “I see the small launchers still proving out capacity,” Franklin said. Certainly, companies with a lot of tenacity will keep driving the small launch activity for several years,” he added. At the same time, Shalini Bhatia, Deloitte Consulting principal, said “Growth in services provided by smallsats hyperscales with manufacturing and high-capacity launch.” It’s also too soon to anticipate Starship’s impact on the launch market because of questions related to pricing. “The best defense of smallsat launch capability might be monopolist prices,” said Ward Hanson, Stanford University lecturer in economics. “If SpaceX prices Starship capacity at some constant relationship to costs, then [small launch operators] will be in a world of hurt.” The history of pricing by companies enjoying monopolies shows, though, that prices often diverge from costs. For example, “the IBM 360 was a jump for the computer industry like Starship is for space,” Hanson said. “Capability doesn’t mean that the customers get all the benefits. IBM didn’t pass along all benefits.” Hanson suggested that at some point a government agency could push SpaceX to sell or lease Starship to other companies to operate. “I think that’s highly unlikely,” said Sita Sonty, Boston Consulting Group partner and associate director. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Anuvu said Feb. 7 it is leasing ground infrastructure from Canadian satellite operator Telesat for a geostationary constellation it expects to start deploying this year. The U.S.-based mobile connectivity specialist said Telesat is installing new antennas at teleports in Ontario and Alberta, Canada, for controlling up to eight small satellites it plans to deploy for serving growing demand for Wi-Fi on boats, aircraft, and remote locations. Astranis, a Californian company that specializes in small geostationary spacecraft, is on track to deliver Anuvu’s first two satellites for a mid-2023 launch aboard a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, according to Anuvu, enabling the company to begin commercial services before the end of this year. The first two satellites, designed to cover North America and the Caribbean, should have launched by now, according to the schedule Anuvu announced for the project in late 2021 after emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection . Anuvu has still not moved forward with options for another six satellites from Astranis, more than a year and a half after unveiling plans for its own constellation. Each under 400 kilograms, the proposed satellites aim to complement the capacity Anuvu leases in the region and worldwide from operators of larger geostationary spacecraft, including Telesat, that typically weigh thousands of kilograms. Astranis satellites also have digital payloads that would give Anuvu more flexibility to respond to changes in connectivity demand than with the capacity it buys from other operators. While Astranis operates the satellites it builds under its business model, it leases customers their capacity via long-term agreements that include the ability move bandwidth where it is needed. A sharp decline in aviation and maritime demand amid pandemic-related travel restrictions helped push Anuvu into bankruptcy in July 2020, when it was known as Global Eagle Entertainment. Anuvu said Jan. 17 it has also secured a deal to resell broadband from SpaceX’s Starlink constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) to maritime customers to diversify its offering. U.S.-based telco Pacific Dataport Inc’s Arcturus satellite, the first commercial spacecraft built by Astranis, is slated to join a delayed SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch early this year as a secondary payload to Viasat’s inaugural ViaSat-3 satellite. Expanded Telesat partnership Telesat is installing new nine-meter Ku-band and 9.2-meter Ka-band antennas at its flagship teleport in Allan Park, Ontario, under the deal with Anuvu, and at a backup site in Calgary, Alberta. “The newly-built, state-of-the-art antennas at diverse locations within Canada allow us to maximize the capacity available to our U.S. and Caribbean customers,” Anuvu vice president of networks Tim Southard said in a statement, “reducing latency with shorter paths to the Internet and offering increased network resiliency.” Anuvu said its tracking antennas in Allan Park would be next to the landing station the Canadian operator is developing for Telesat Lightspeed, its proposed LEO broadband constellation, offering additional synergies for its multi-orbit strategy. Anuvu expanded a capacity leasing deal with Telesat last year that uses terminals designed to be forward-compatible with Lightspeed. However, cost overruns and production issues have delayed Telesat’s LEO commercial services until at least 2026 — and the operator has not yet given an update on ambitions to finalize the constellation’s multi-billion dollar funding before the end of 2022.
French space services company Exotrail announced Feb. 7 it has raised $58 million to scale up production of electric thrusters and expand efforts to provide in-space transportation services. Exotrail said its Series B round was led by Bpifrance, the French public investment bank; Eurazeo, a European venture capital firm; and CELAD, a software engineering company. All of the company’s investors from previous rounds also participated in the Series B round. The company says it will use the funding to scale up production of its existing spaceware line of electric propulsion systems and its spacestudio mission design software. It also plans to introduce a new line of operations software called spacetower as well as previously announced plans for a space logistics service called spacedrop. Exotrail refers to the combination of that software, propulsion and transportation services mobilityhub. “This series B round validates our comprehensive and logistics-driven approach to space mobility,” Jean-Luc Maria, chief executive and co-founder of Exotrail, said in a statement. “We are now ready to accelerate our efforts in positioning our mobilityhub as the world reference for effectively moving assets in space.” Exotrail announced in November a contract with Isar Aerospace for multiple launches of an orbital transfer vehicle it is developing called spacevan that is part of the spacedrop service. The vehicle, using Exotrail’s electric thrusters, will transport payloads to their designed orbits after launch on Isar’s Spectrum rocket. In an interview in September, David Henri, co-founder and chief product officer of Exotrail, said that a focus on space logistics service like spacedrop had been in the company’s plans from the beginning, even as it focused initially on propulsion and software. “People know us mostly for propulsion, but we’ve been doing more than that from the beginning,” he said. Using electric propulsion, he argued, was essential to providing the in-space transportation services, like orbital plane changes and transfers to geostationary orbit. Exotrail said its Series B round was oversubscribed, which it credited to “triple-digit” revenue growth, although the company did not disclose specific revenue figures. The company has 90 employees and plans to hire 70 more over the next year as it expands into the U.S. and Asian markets.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Kongsberg Satellite Services is significantly expanding its satellite communications network by installing new antennas and by forging alliances with commercial partners. “KSAT’s expansion through investment in additional internal and external capacity is driven by continued strong demand, primarily in low-Earth orbit,” Dan Adams, KSAT USA head, told SpaceNews by email. “While the commercial market is the leading driver of growth in volume on our network, we also see stable growth in the government sector.” Four new antennas are being built in Antarctica at the KSAT Troll station, the commercial ground station serving spacecraft in polar orbit. KSAT also is enhancing U.S. coverage with new ground stations in Hawaii, Alaska and in the continental United States, in the Southeast. The new U.S. capacity “is driven by direct customer interest in communication links to and from the United States,” Adams said. In addition to the 270 antennas KSAT owns and operates, KSAT has established relationships with ground service providers including Microsoft’s Azure Orbital , AWS Ground Station, through its Solution Provider Program, and Comtech Korea. “This hybrid ‘Network of Networks’ approach allows us to provide near global coverage and fill any gaps in our global map using capacity from our partners’ network of sites,” Nina Soleng, KSAT communications director, said by email. “A key element of this network is that all sites and apertures are accessed via a common API, regardless of whether the customer is accessing one of the organic KSAT sites or one of the partner’s sites.” KSAT’s expanding network is designed to serve new entrants and veteran satellite operators. “As our customers explore new business models and develop new solutions with their products, they demand new capabilities,” Adams said. “These requirements are diverse.” Satellite operators are seek reduced latency between contacts with their spacecraft, Adams said. “At the same time, we see increased need for Ka-band by commercial market users with missions requiring high-bandwidth communications,” he added.
Updated Feb. 16 with NASA comment. WASHINGTON — Intuitive Machines is moving the landing site for its first lunar lander mission to the south polar region of the moon, a decision that will generate more revenue for the company but could delay the lander’s launch. Intuitive Machines announced Feb. 6 that its IM-1 lander mission had been moved to the south polar region of the moon. The company had previously planned to land the spacecraft in a valley in Oceanus Procellarum , or the Ocean of Storms, citing flat terrain that was preferred for the landing and abundant sunlight throughout the two-week lunar day. The company said in a statement that it worked with NASA to identify a new landing site to support the Artemis lunar exploration campaign, which plans to land crewed missions near the south pole as soon as 2025 where astronauts can access potential water ice deposits. “Redirecting Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission landing site is a testament to our collective commitment to supporting NASA’s Artemis program and advancing lunar exploration for the benefit of humanity,” Steve Altemus, president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in the statement. The announcement did not disclose a specific landing site, but company spokesperson Josh Marshall told SpaceNews that the new landing site is at Malapert A, a crater near the south pole previously identified as a potential landing site for lunar expeditions. He confirmed that NASA requested the change in the landing site. The lander is carrying payloads for NASA through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The company won a task order in May 2019 for the mission, originally valued at $77 million. Intuitive Machines said in its announcement that the change in landing sites “is expected to positively impact Intuitive Machines’ backlog,” but didn’t elaborate. Marshall said that NASA is increasing the value of the CLPS task order to accommodate the change, but deferred questions about the revised dollar value to NASA. NASA spokesperson Josh Handal said Feb. 15 that NASA started discussions with Intuitive Machines last fall about a potential change in the IM-1 landing site, and later asked for a formal proposal from the company to change the landing site to a specific region. He said that because the procurement process is ongoing, the agency could not discuss additional details about the change until the contract modification is completed. The company announcement also stated that the landing is now planned for late June. That appears to be a slip from previous announcements that targeted a launch in the first quarter of 2023, including a NASA presentation in December that, like a recent change in the landing site for Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander , featured the new IM-1 landing site. Marshall declined to state if the launch had been delayed, saying only that the company was “actively working” on a revised trajectory analysis. Intuitive Machines had previously emphasized that its landers would fly relatively direct trajectories to the moon that would allow them to arrive in just three to six days, including a tweet by the company earlier this month . The announcement of the new landing site comes as Intuitive Machines prepares to complete its merger, announced in September , with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Inflection Point Acquisition Corporation. The SPAC’s shareholders are scheduled to vote Feb. 8 on the merger, one of the final steps before the deal is completed. Once the merger is closed, Intuitive Machines will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol LUNR.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX successfully launched the Amazonas Nexus telecoms satellite Feb. 6, which will fuel Spanish operator Hispasat’s Americas expansion while carrying a payload for the U.S. Space Force. Amazonas Nexus lifted off on a Falcon 9 at 8:32 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, after being delayed a day because of poor weather conditions. The satellite separated from the rocket about 36 minutes later to begin its journey to geostationary orbit over the next few months using onboard electric propulsion. Signal acquisition was successfully achieved at 9.26 p.m. Eastern, according to Hispasat spokesperson Víctor Inchausti. Just over eight minutes after lift-off, the Falcon 9’s first stage landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean for reuse. SpaceX had previously used the booster to launch the SES-22 broadcast satellite , a lunar lander for ispace , and three Starlink broadband missions. It marked SpaceX’s 170th landing of an orbital class rocket, including Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. Amazonas Nexus is due to replace and expand the capacity of Hispasat’s Amazonas 2 satellite at 61 degrees west, covering the Americas, Greenland, and North Atlantic transportation routes. Built by Europe’s Thales Alenia Space, Amazonas Nexus is designed to primarily provide high-throughput Ku-band capacity to Hispasat’s aviation, maritime, and rural broadband customers. The 4,500-kilogram satellite uses Ka-band feeder links for telemetry and control. Also onboard is a high-bandwidth protected communications transponder for the Space Force called Pathfinder 2. The hosted payload is the third Pathfinder mission designed to use existing commercial technologies to provide wideband alternatives for the Space Force’s satellite communications needs. Hispasat, Thales, communications provider Hunter Communications, and secure network systems integrator Artel — which led the project — secured a contract for the payload in 2020. Charlotte Gerhart, chief of Tactical SATCOM Acquisition Delta at Space Systems Command, the Space Force body overseeing the procurement of new technology, said the mission demonstrates a “high degree of partnership between military and commercial” acquisition. “Pathfinder 2 satisfies warfighter requirements by procuring commercially provided pre-launch transponders and securing bandwidth at a lower total ownership cost,” Gerhart said in a statement. Hispasat is also looking to use Amazonas Nexus to expand its presence in sustainability projects after investing in Spain’s largest reforestation project.
TAMPA, Fla. — EchoStar Corporation, a U.S. operator with around $1.6 billion in cash, is preparing to disrupt the market for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices after ordering satellites it needs for global services next year. The company said last week it had placed an order with California-based Astro Digital for 28 satellites, which would use S-band frequencies from low Earth orbit (LEO) to connect monitoring and tracking sensors beyond terrestrial networks. The satellites would use a low-power telecoms protocol called LoRa (long range) that is designed for low-cost, battery-powered devices. Last year, EchoStar launched a LoRa connectivity network across Europe using S-band from one of its existing satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO), EchoStar 21, which the operator says would interoperate seamlessly with its proposed LEO satellites. The LEO constellation, operated under the company’s Australia-based EchoStar Global subsidiary, would effectively expand its S-band coverage to compete with rival IoT networks internationally. According to Northern Sky Research analysts, annual revenues for the small satellite IoT market are set to reach around $1 billion by the end of 2030 as more companies digitize their operations. Multiple startups have been created in recent years to serve this demand with small LEO satellites that are typically cheaper than their larger GEO cousins, including FOSSA Systems and Sateliot of Spain, Switzerland’s Astrocast, and Australia-based Myriota. SpaceX is also pursuing this opportunity via seven-year-old U.S. venture Swarm, which it bought in 2021. EchoStar’s global S-band network would support IoT, machine-to-machine communications, and “other data services,” EchoStar said in a Feb. 1 news release that was light on details. EchoStar spokesperson Sharyn Nerenberg said the company expects to launch an initial service globally in 2024 after deploying its first batch of satellites. “Follow-on launches will further densify the system and enhance its performance,” Nerenberg said Feb. 6. She said EchoStar is in talks with multiple launch providers and expects “to sign a launch contract soon” for the constellation. “We have clear visibility to launch vehicle capacity and do not see the availability of launchers as a limiting factor,” she added. Raymond James analyst estimates EchoStar will spend between $100 million and $200 million over several years for the entire constellation. That’s small change for a company that reported around half a billion dollars in revenue for the three months to the end of September. Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, now a part of Terran Orbital, built three test nanosatellites for EchoStar’s S-band constellation. However, only its third satellite successfully reached orbit in 2021. The first two suffered propulsion anomalies after launching on separate rideshare flights in 2020. In addition to IoT connectivity, the operator uses S-band on EchoStar 21 in GEO to provide voice services across Europe and parts of Africa and the Middle East. Hamid Akhavan, who became EchoStar’s CEO last year, said in a statement that the proposed LEO network would serve as a stepping stone toward “a global non-terrestrial 5G network.” He did not define the capabilities of this 5G network, but said the company is working on ways to integrate them with mobile solutions provided by terrestrial telcos.
WASHINGTON – U.S. defense contractor CACI International announced Feb. 6 it signed an agreement with the U.S. Army to collaborate on the development of space sensors and payloads for positioning, navigation and timing. The company, based in Reston, Virginia, signed a five-year cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center, located in Huntsville, Alabama. The agreement is to “further the development of advanced payload technologies, space sensor applications, and resilient positioning, navigation and timing (PNT),” said Todd Probert, CACI’s president of national security and innovative solutions. The CRADA will give the Army access to the technology CACI plans to launch in an upcoming demonstration mission . The company developed two payloads — one for PNT and the other for tactical signals intelligence — that will fly to low Earth orbit on a York Space satellite bus scheduled to launch no earlier than April on the SpaceX Transporter 7 rideshare. “The payload has completed all of its ground testing. It’s ready to go,” said Probert. The PNT payload, called “time-focused PNT,” will demonstrate GPS-independent Earth-space time synchronization. The technology is intended to “contribute to GPS resiliency, and provide augmentation in GPS-denied or degraded environments,” the company said. The tactical signals intelligence payload will demonstrate the ability to collect, geolocate, demodulate and decode digital mobile radio signals. “The Army expressed interest in participating in the program to evaluate these technologies for military use,” the company said. The PNT technology would serve as a back-up to GPS or as an alternative when GPS is unavailable. This technology is of interest to the Army as soldiers and weapons systems are highly dependent on PNT signals from space and need other options in case GPS signals are jammed. Probert said CACI’s satellite demonstration was funded by several customers he could not disclose and he expects the Army to become a user of the company’s PNT and signals intelligence payloads. “We’re very hopeful and that’s why we spent the time and effort to get this CRADA in place.” If the demonstration is successful, Probert said, there are a number of ways these payloads could be deployed either on government or commercial satellites. Under the agreement, CACI also will work with the Army on laser communications, laser sensing, artificial intelligence and secure communication.
SAN FRANCISCO – In-space propulsion specialist Busek revealed its role in helping OneWeb recover from the sudden loss of Fakel satellite thrusters after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Natick, Massachusetts-based Busek announced Feb. 6 the successful on-orbit commissioning of its BHT-350 Hall-effect thrusters on 80 OneWeb satellites launched in December and January on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. The new OneWeb communications satellites rely on Busek thrusters for orbit-raising, station-keeping, collision avoidance and de-orbit at the conclusion of each satellite’s mission. “We have been going gangbusters since our phone started ringing in late February,” Peter Hruby, Busek vice president, told SpaceNews. Airbus OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture of OneWeb and Airbus Defence and Space, manufactures OneWeb communications satellites in Florida. Prior to the war in Ukraine, Airbus OneWeb Satellites purchased thrusters from Russia-based electric propulsion company EDB Fakel and Busek. When Western sanctions to penalize Russia for its invasion of Ukraine prevented OneWeb from buying Fakel thrusters, Busek increased production. “We ramped-up our manufacturing and supply chain to begin double-digit thruster deliveries within a few months of order,” Busek President Vlad Hruby said in a statement. “We’re at a production rate of over 20 thrusters per month with 100 percent hot-fire acceptance testing.” Busek has the necessary infrastructure including vacuum facilities and diagnostic equipment to “not just build thrusters in that quantity, but also test them,” Peter Hruby said. The OneWeb order is one of the reasons Busek doubled its production capacity . “And we’re planning to triple that capacity to meet certain near-term programs,” Vlad Hruby added. The OneWeb satellites launched in December and January also are providing flight heritage for Busek’s BHT-350 solar electric propulsion systems. The BHT-350 is compatible with xenon and krypton propellants. Busek also is developing a solid-propellant thruster. In addition to Busek is producing 6-kilowatt Hall-effect thrusters for the NASA lunar Gateway Power and Propulsion Element being built by Maxar Technologies.
World View, the stratospheric ballooning company that announced plans to go public last month, is emphasizing remote sensing, and not tourism, as its primary market for the next several years. The company, which said Jan. 13 it would go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Leo Holdings Corp. II , filed an investor presentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission Feb. 3 that provided new information about its finances and business plans. In the presentation, the company described how it believed its balloon platform, called a “stratollite,” could compete against satellites and aerial platforms in providing high-resolution imagery for extended periods. That capability, it stated in the presentation, fills a “key gap” in the market. “World View has demonstrated 45 days of persistent imaging over areas of interest with 5-7cm GSD (ground sampling distance) versus 30cm from satellites,” it stated. The company says it also offers infrared imaging and is working on a radar payload. Throughout the presentation, the company emphasized the potential opportunity it sees in the remote sensing market, estimating a global market worth $23 billion by 2027 in sectors ranging from energy to national security. It plans to provide both dedicated balloon flights for those customers as well as “subscriptions,” where the company operates balloons and sells data to multiple customers. “World View is a premier remote sensing company,” stated the title of one slide in the presentation, citing a “large and growing remote sensing market opportunity.” That opportunity largely remains a potential one for World View. It did not disclose details about its finances in the SPAC announcement last month, but said in the investor presentation it conducted only four balloon flights in 2022, with total revenue of $3 million. World View expects both the number of flights and revenue to grow substantially in the next few years, reaching $89 million in revenue from 65 flights in 2025. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) will break even in 2024 according to its projections, reaching $36.5 million in 2025. The company, which projects $17 million in revenue for 2023 and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $11.6 million, said it has a sales backlog of $7.6 million for 2023. World View didn’t elaborate on that backlog but noted a strategic partnership with Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) where SNC will buy a minimum number of flights annually over five years, with the 2023 minimum set at $5 million. World View, founded a decade ago to provide stratospheric balloon flights for tourists, only to pivot to uncrewed stratollites, announced in October 2021 it would resume development of what it calls the Explorer Space Capsule that can carry 10 people for flights lasting up to 12 hours. When it announced its SPAC merger, the company said more than 1,200 customers had made deposits. However, while the company has talked about starting flights as soon as 2024, there is little mention of its space tourism plans in the presentation. Tourism, along with research flights and development of remote sensing analytics capabilities, are mentioned as “future applications” in an appendix at the end of the presentation, with no discussion of when the flights would begin or how much revenue they will generate. In the presentation, World View says its SPAC merger will provide the company with up to about $90 million in cash. It projects getting up to $47 million from the proceeds of the SPAC, assuming no redemptions; many SPAC mergers have high redemption rates as shareholders seek their money back rather than hold stock in the merged company. Another $75 million will come from a separate, concurrent investment called a PIPE. However, $7 million of the proceeds will go to repaying World View debt while approximately $25 million will be spent on merger expenses and fees. Existing World View shareholders will own 52% of the merged company, with the SPAC sponsors owning 21% and the PIPE investors 17%. The remaining 10% will be owned by the current SPAC shareholders.
U.S. and Indian officials agreed this week to expand civil space cooperation, including training Indian astronauts and flying payloads on commercial lunar landers. In meetings this week in Washington, held with little public fanfare, the United States and India agreed to expanded cooperation in civil space and laid the groundwork for potential new efforts. In a White House statement Jan. 31, the countries announced they would arrange for training of an Indian astronaut at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. They did not disclose when the training would take place or what the “advanced training” would entail. India has relied on Russia for astronaut training, sending several Indian Air Force pilots to the Star City cosmonaut training center for training in 2020. That training was part of India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight program that includes development by the Indian space agency ISRO of a crewed spacecraft that would launch on a version of its GSLV Mark 3 rocket. In 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the Gaganyaan program would place Indian astronauts into orbit by August 2022, the 75 th anniversary of the country’s independence. However, that first crewed launch has slipped to at least 2024 as ISRO gears up for a series of abort tests and uncrewed orbital test flights starting in the coming months. The White House also announced that NASA and ISRO will work together to identify cooperation on NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, where NASA purchases flights of research payloads on commercial lunar landers. NASA and ISRO will convene a meeting of companies that have CLPS contracts with Indian aerospace companies within the next year. As soon as this summer, ISRO is expected to launch Chandrayaan-3, its second lunar lander mission. The lunar lander that was part of Chandrayaan-2 crashed while attempting a landing in 2019, although the orbiter is operating. ISRO is also collaborating with the Japanese space agency JAXA on a future lunar lander mission, called Lunar Polar Exploration or LUPEX, projected to launch later in the decade. The meetings this week also sought to expand commercial space activities between the companies. The White House announced a new initiative between the Commerce Department and India’s Department of Space that “will foster U.S.-India commercial space engagement and enable growth and partnerships between U.S. and Indian commercial space sectors.” India has started efforts to build up a commercial space industry in the country, with initiatives to support startups and give them access to ISRO facilities. Those startups include Skyroot Aerospace, which conducted a suborbital launch of its Vikram-S rocket in November from India’s main spaceport as a precursor to its Vikram 1 small launch vehicle, and Pixxel, which is developing a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites. American companies, particularly communications and geospatial service providers, are looking to expand into India, but have long complained of regulatory challenges for doing so. SpaceX, for example, has been working since late 2021 to secure permission to offer its Starlink broadband service in the country. However, that service is still “pending regulatory approval,” according to a SpaceX map showing availability of Starlink globally . The biggest cooperation between the United States and India in civil space currently is the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth science mission, which features a jointly-developed SAR payload that will be integrated onto an Indian-built satellite and launched by India in 2024. Indian officials who met with American counterparts in Washington, including ISRO Chairman S. Somanath, later went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to see the NISAR payload, which is scheduled to be shipped to India in February. The White House stated that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will travel to India in a reciprocal visit later in the year.
The White House on Feb. 3 announced the appointment of new members to President Biden’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. Among the newly selected members of the NSTAC are Johnathon Caldwell, vice president of military space at Lockheed Martin, and Mark Dankberg, chairman and CEO of telecommunications satellite operator Viasat. The NSTAC, chaired by Microsoft vice president Scott Charney, has a total of 30 presidentially appointed industry executives who advise the White House on the security, reliability and preparedness of the nation’s critical communications and information infrastructure. The committee was created in 1982 by an executive order signed by President Ronald Reagan. The board serves as a liaison between government agencies and the private sector. Since its inception, the panel has focused on national security issues such as network security, global infrastructure resiliency, infrastructure interdependencies and international incident management.
TAMPA, Fla. — Ovzon said Feb. 3 the launch of its first satellite has been pushed out by at least another five months after manufacturing delays forced it to swap out Arianespace for SpaceX. The Swedish broadband provider had hoped to piggyback Ovzon 3 on one of Arianespace’s last few Ariane 5 rockets between December and February, after missing out on a slot earlier in 2022 because of Maxar Technologies’ supply chain issues. At around 1,500 kilograms, Ovzon 3 is smaller than traditional GEO communications satellites and could have joined an Ariane 5 with one or even two existing passengers. However, Maxar has run into additional delays to finalize the satellite, Ovzon said in a news release, and Arianespace was unable to accommodate the schedule change. Shifting to a SpaceX Falcon 9 means Ovzon 3 is now looking at a launch between July and September this year from Cape Canaveral, Florida. While Ovzon does not expect the delay to impact its current business commitments, the company said it is set to increase the overall cost of the project by about $25 million. “While we are clearly disappointed in the continued delays in production of the satellite, we remain perfectly confident with the market demand of Ovzon 3,” Ovzon CEO Per Norén said in a statement, pointing to “increasing demand from current and new customers” for the geostationary satellite. Ovzon said it has enlarged an existing $60 million loan facility by $5 million to help cover increasing costs. Several major shareholders are also interested in taking part in a 200 million Swedish krona ($19 million) share sale, according to the company. Maxar’s delays in delivering the Jupiter 3 broadband satellite to EchoStar recently led to a multi-million dollar compensation package for the U.S. operator. Ovzon currently provides broadband services by leasing capacity from other satellite operators. Alongside the delay announcement, the company published preliminary financial results for the three months to the end of December. The results show net sales for the fourth quarter of 2022 increased to 101 million Swedish krona, compared with 73 million Swedish krona for the corresponding period in 2021. The company also recorded an operating loss of nine million Swedish krona for the quarter, an improvement on the 29 million Swedish krona loss posted for the period last year. “We renewed contracts with our core customers, won contracts with new customers and expanded into new geographical markets,” Norén said. The company plans to publish its full financial report for the quarter Feb. 21.
TAMPA, Fla. — Sidus Space said Feb. 2 it has raised $5.2 million from the stock market to support LizzieSat, a multipurpose constellation it expects to start deploying in low Earth orbit this year. The company sold shares on NASDAQ for $0.30 each, a steep discount to their $5 initial offering price in December 2021 after declining for much of the year. Proceeds will help expand manufacturing capabilities, sales and marketing efforts, and cover operational costs as production ramps up toward as many as 100 small satellites over the next two years. Sidus has now raised about $24 million from the stock market after being borne out of Craig Technologies, a Florida-based government contractor founded in 1999. Less than a year after getting $15 million from its initial public offering, the company entered into a stock purchase agreement Aug. 10 enabling it to raise up to $30 million of additional equity as needed. About $3.5 million was raised under that agreement in the three months to the end of September, Sidus said during its latest financial results announcement Nov. 14. The company recorded $1.32 million in revenue for the three months to Sept. 30, up from $500,000 for the corresponding period in 2021, and had $4.4 million in cash at the end of September. It said total operating expenses reached $3.7 million for the third quarter of 2022, compared with just over $9,000 for the same period the previous year. Ramping up Sidus said Nov. 14 it is in talks with “numerous potential customers, including domestic and international government agencies,” to host payloads and provide data from its proposed constellation. These include NASA and Mission Helios, a blockchain company. Sidus expects to deploy its first 100-kilogram LizzieSat satellites this year from the International Space Station and via SpaceX rideshare missions. The company, which declined to provide a narrower launch window, has a five-launch agreement with SpaceX. Superyacht surveillance Sidus has plans to use LizzieSat for a space-based maritime surveillance and tracking system developed in partnership with Capital C, a superyacht designer. According to Sidus, imagery and radio frequency sensors on LizzieSats could help monitor hazards, including piracy, changes in ocean currents, debris, and oil spills. Under a Memorandum of Understanding between the two companies, Sidus will assist in developing, delivering, and maintaining these monitoring capabilities for Capital C’s future fleet of superyachts. Capital C said the maritime surveillance network is part of Project Terra, a fleet of “Sustainable Passenger Expedition Yachts” announced Sept. 29 for small island developing states and in emerging markets. The project involves yachts in various configurations from 150 meters up to 250 meters in size. By using Sidus’ space-based monitoring solutions, Capital C said these vessels could use fuel more efficiently to reduce emissions. Capital C did not give a timeframe for Project Terra and said more details will be “announced in due course.” Sidus said LizzieSat aims to take advantage of a shift away from static and low-frequency satellite imaging and geospatial solutions “toward on-demand access of real-time geospatial intelligence.”
Space transportation services provider Spaceflight Inc. has hired the former president of International Launch Services as its new chief executive. Spaceflight announced Feb. 2 that Tiphaine Louradour has joined the company as chief executive to help the company expand its business providing rideshare launch services for smallsats, including through its Sherpa line of orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs). “My goal in leading this organization is to build on its ground-breaking achievements and expand the launch and on-orbit service offerings beyond LEO,” Louradour said in a statement. “I’m very much looking forward to working with the team, as well as its customers and partners, to continue to evolve Spaceflight and especially its Sherpa OTV program, into its next phase of growth.” Spaceflight has flown several Sherpa vehicles, including its first with a chemical propulsion system, Sherpa-LTC2, last fall . The company is developing a version called Sherpa-ES with more powerful chemical propulsion to enable transport throughout cislunar space. Louradour succeeds Curt Blake, who had been president and chief executive of the company since 2013. “I’ve long been impressed with Tiphaine and the timing is ideal to make a change,” he said in the statement. “I couldn’t be more excited about the road ahead for Spaceflight.” After supporting the transition, Blake will consult for the space group at Mitsui and Co., a Japanese company that, with Yamasa Co., acquired Spaceflight Inc. in 2020 . He will also provide legal and strategic counsel for other space companies, Spaceflight said. The announcement came two days after ILS announced that Louradour was leaving the company after nearly three years as president. The company, headquartered in Northern Virginia, did not disclose the reason for her departure. ILS, established in the 1990s as a joint venture of Lockheed Martin, Khrunichev and Energia to jointly market the Atlas and Proton rockets commercially, had over time become a Khrunichev-owned company focused on selling Proton and Angara launches to Western customers. Changes in the market, including a shift away from geostationary communications satellites and the introduction of new vehicles, sharply reduced demand for those rockets. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago, it became effectively impossible to offer Russian vehicles to Western companies. “Being a U.S. company, we have to, and we do, remain fully compliant with all U.S. laws and regulations regarding import and export. We are also compliant with the State Department licensing requirements,” Louradour said during a panel discussion at World Satellite Business Week in September. “Opportunities may be there, but we have to evaluate that through that filter.” She said that, despite the geopolitical tensions, she remained hopeful ILS could reenter the market, noting that neither the American nor Russian governments had moved to halt the company’s operations. “We believe that they recognize the venture still has value in the ties and the relationships between the countries, and that it has merit and purpose to continue.”
NASA and Astrobotic have changed the landing site for the company’s first lunar lander mission shortly before its scheduled launch, moving the mission to a location of greater scientific interest. NASA announced Feb. 2 the Astrobotic’s Peregrine mission, flying payloads for the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and other customers, will now attempt a landing near a region called the Gruithuisen Domes on the northeast edge of Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, on the western part of the moon’s near side. Astrobotic had originally targeted a region called Lacus Mortis, a basaltic plain on the northeastern side of the near side of the moon, based on the projected performance of the lander and a desire for a relatively safe landing area. That was the landing location identified when NASA awarded one of the first CLPS task orders to Astrobotic for the mission in May 2019. “However, as NASA’s Artemis activities mature, it became evident the agency could increase the scientific value of the NASA payloads if they were delivered to a different location,” the agency said in a statement announcing the landing site change. NASA is planning to send an instrument suite called Lunar-VISE to the Gruithuisen Domes on a future CLPS mission to study that region to understand why they appear to be rich in silica. Sending Peregrine to a region near the Gruithuisen Domes, NASA stated, “will present complementary and meaningful data to Lunar-VISE without introducing additional risk to the lander.” There had been signs that NASA was planning a change in Peregrine’s landing site. In a presentation to NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee Dec. 6, Joel Kearns, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, showed a map of CLPS landing locations that showed Peregrine landing near Gruithuisen Domes. The announcement did not provide an update on the anticipated launch date of Peregrine on the inaugural flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. Astrobotic said Jan. 25 it had completed testing of the lander and was awaiting the “green light” from ULA to ship the spacecraft to Cape Canaveral for pre-launch processing. The rocket itself arrived at Cape Canaveral last month and ULA is preparing it for tests leading up to the launch.
China is to construct new ground station facilities to its Zhongshan research base in Antarctica to support satellite data acquisition. Official space industry newspaper China Space News reported Feb. 2 that a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), a giant state-owned defense and space contractor, won a bid to construct a ocean observation satellite ground system. The project is being overseen by the National Satellite Ocean Application Service (NSOAS) and is stated to be part of a long-term marine economic development plan. Renders of the 43.95 million yuan ($6.52 million) project show four radome-covered antennas at Zhongshan in East Antarctica. It is unknown if these are new and additional to antennas already established at the base. The antennas will assist data acquisition from Chinese satellites that orbit in polar and near-polar orbits. Satellites in these orbits are visible near the poles multiple times a day, allowing more frequent opportunities for downlink than with stations at lower latitudes. China has already launched eight Haiyang series ocean observation satellites into sun-synchronous orbits between 2002 and 2021, and plans more in the coming years. The first new-generation Haiyang-3 satellite is scheduled for launch this year, according the China’s main space contractor, CASC. The spread of Chinese ground stations internationally has led to concerns , particularly over construction in South America. That network, while having clear civilian uses, could be used to spy on, monitor and potentially even target U.S. and other nations’ spacecraft, according to an October 2022 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The new planned construction at Zhongshang station, at 69 degrees south, could fuel concerns that China would be able to receive remote sensing, weather, surveillance and other data that could be used for military purposes faster than previously. Other countries with research stations in Antarctica also have ground stations, including the U.S. and Japan, while commercial ground stations have also been established. Ground stations are key infrastructure required to operate spacecraft, facilitating the exchange of data and commands. Their importance means they are likely to be another area of contest for opposing space powers. Geopolitical and geographical barriers mean Chinese access to ground station support is at times limited. The Sweden Space Corporation (SSC) stated in 2020 that it would no longer renew contracts to assist China with its ground stations. China’s launch rate has risen dramatically over recent years, increasing China’s need for ground station support infrastructure. The country conducted 19 orbital launches in 2015, but last year attempted 64 launches, sending more than 180 satellites into orbit. This year CASC alone plans more than 60 launches carrying over 200 spacecraft. China frequently uses “Yuanwang” tracking ships to support rocket launches. The European Space Agency has previously assisted major lunar and deep space expiration missions with its ground stations. Chinese commercial space firms such Emposat have begun offering services, with facilities in across China and international stations in France, Azerbaijan, South America, Africa, South East Asia and Samoa.
Hydrosat won a $1.2 million Air Force contract to investigate uses of thermal infrared data for national security applications, the company announced Feb. 2. Based in Washington, D.C., Hydrosat is a startup founded in 2017 that analyzes data from satellites to study the planet’s environmental conditions. The contract was awarded by AFWERX, an Air Force organization that works with startups. The customer for the data is the National Air and Space Intelligence Center ( NASIC ), based at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Air Force uses thermal data, for example, for flight planning and for surveying landing zones for helicopters. Hydrosat developed an analytics platform that uses surface temperature data collected daily by NASA’s MODIS and Landsat satellites to help understand the effects of climate change or natural disasters. The technology is used in the agriculture industry to forecast crop yields and optimize irrigation. Under the AFWERX contract, “we’re able to deliver our thermal infrared remote sensing data to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center to adapt to its unique requirements and needs,” Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel said. The company plans to launch its own constellation of 16 thermal infrared satellites in low Earth orbit but has not released a timeline for the deployment. Hydrosat said in 2021 it planned to launch its first small satellite mission VanZyl-1 in 2022 but the spacecraft has not yet launched. A spokesperson said the company has not yet announced a new target launch date. In July 2022, Hydrosat secured a license from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration for its thermal imaging satellites. The constellation of infrared sensing satellites will continuously collect surface temperature data that the company plans to sell as a subscription analytics product. The future constellation, Hydrosat said, will provide “higher resolution and faster repeat cycle, providing better and more up-to-date information for flight planners.” The company designed its products primarily for the agriculture industry, “yet its capabilities are also aligned with Air Force needs.”
The nascent U.S. campaign to monitor emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other potent greenhouse gases will require important contributions from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and dozens of other public and private organizations. In recent years, the United States has lagged behind Europe, Japan and China in developing space-based infrastructure for measuring and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration, which set a goal of slashing emissions by 50 percent by 2030, based on 2005 levels, is taking steps to remedy that. In January 2022, the Biden administration established the Greenhouse Gas Monitoring and Measurement Interagency Working Group, led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of Management and Budget and the White House Climate Policy Office. The working group coordinates efforts by federal agencies to identify and employ tools and data systems to measure and monitor atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions and the removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Establishing a robust measuring system won’t be easy. Current estimates of greenhouse gas levels rely heavily on observations made by ground-based and airborne sensors coupled with industry estimates. How many tons of coal and barrels of oil, for example, were consumed in a month? In recent years, satellite sensors have proven their ability to contribute global observations of greenhouse gas emissions and reveal fluctuations in greenhouse gases stemming from human and natural sources. For instance, satellites showed striking changes in atmospheric pollutants prompted by COVID-19 lockdowns. Combining the ground, air and space measurements is “important to seeing the holistic picture,” said Karen St. Germain, NASA Earth Science Division director. In addition, a comprehensive tally of greenhouse gases emissions requires “a coordinated mechanism to bring together federal, state, local, philanthropic, commercial and academic capabilities to provide high-quality transparent data and information at spatial and temporal scales that meet user and decision-maker needs,” St. Germain said. Still, figuring out how agencies can work together to forge a common understanding of greenhouse gas levels based on these varied datasets is “an area of scientific and technical inquiry and work right now,” St. Germain said. The working group has drafted a strategy for creating an integrated U.S. greenhouse gas monitoring and information system. The strategy includes near-term steps and demonstration projects by federal agencies. Now, the working group is preparing to seek public comment on its draft strategy and public help in identifying “significant gaps or omissions as well as opportunities for federal agencies to partner with external entities on the framework,” St. Germain said. NASA has a long history of publicly sharing observations of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases obtained with airborne instruments and field campaigns. Space agency researchers also have developed innovative instruments and techniques to measure carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. With the second Orbiting Carbon Observatory launched in 2014, NASA observes the geographical distribution of carbon dioxide sources and the sinks, like oceans and forests, that absorb and store the chemical compound. A third Orbiting Carbon Observatory remains mounted to the exterior of the International Space Station. Later this year, instead of being released to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere as expected when OCO-3 launched in 2019, the 500-kilogram instrument will be moved to an ISS storage module while a technology demonstration takes its place on the space station platform. When that six-month technology demonstration is completed, NASA will move OCO-3 outside to continue gathering data. “We’re working with the team right now to make sure that we can bring OCO-3 back and keep it operating,” said David Crisp, principal investigator for the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions. NASA’s decision to extend the OCO-3 mission was due, in part, to the cancellation last year of the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory. When that decision was announced in November, NASA officials also pledged to prioritize a greenhouse gas mission for the Earth System Explorers line of competed Earth science missions. With GeoCarb, NASA planned to observe atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane concentrations over most of North and South America. The GeoCarb mission ran into a series of cost and technical obstacles after NASA could not find a commercial communications satellite to accommodate the hosted payload. As part of its work to monitor greenhouse gases, NASA also is evaluating data provided by GHGSat, a Canadian company that tracks methane emissions with six satellites, as part of the agency’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition program. And another NASA instrument, the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation on the space station, an instrument designed to identify minerals in desert dust, has shown it can also detect significant methane plumes. NASA is focused on making its own observations “more accessible and just as importantly combining the observations with other sources of data to make the user experience easier and more efficient,” St. Germain said. “We are enhancing existing greenhouse gas data products and working in the interagency, intergovernmental and also with private sector partners to co-develop and increase the adoption of these kinds of applications.” Similarly, multiple NOAA programs contribute to global understanding of greenhouse gas concentrations. NOAA instruments, like the Crosstrack Infrared Sounder on the Joint Polar Satellite System, reveal greenhouse gas concentrations in the troposphere. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research shares information on carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and dozens of trace gases detected in air samples collected by NOAA’s global greenhouse gas network. And NOAA sensors track ocean acidification caused by absorbed carbon dioxide. In addition, NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research is developing a system to validate greenhouse gas observations made by NOAA partners. “Our role is to provide that data source and make sure that regardless of where it comes from, it’s actually a trusted source of data,” Mitch Goldberg, chief scientist for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, said at the American Meteorological Society meeting in January. “A trusted source of data means that you understand the underpinning science and also provide the stewardship and the validation of those products.” For example, NOAA is offering to help validate and characterize greenhouse gas measurements obtained by GHGSat and similar ventures, “so we have a common understanding of the database for greenhouse gas observations,” Stephen Volz, NOAA Satellite and Information Service assistant administrator, said at the AMS meeting. “We do not yet have in our portfolio a NOAA greenhouse gas monitoring mission for atmospheric composition.” It’s too soon to say whether a federal agency will eventually be tasked with overseeing atmospheric greenhouse gas monitoring. Crisp, who retired from NASA in 2022 and works with international agencies coordinating global campaigns to track greenhouse gas, thinks NOAA is the most likely candidate. “NOAA is an operational agency set up to deliver operational products to support U.S. policy,” Crisp said. “NOAA would need the resources to put together the operational systems to carry on the operation of the satellites and deliver their [data] products to users.” The European Commission is spending approximately 2 billion euros on the three-satellite Copernicus Carbon Dioxide Monitoring mission, known as CO2M. Likewise, NOAA or another U.S. government agency would need a budget of about $2 billion over 10 years to establish an operational greenhouse gas monitoring system, Crisp said. While that cost is high, “wouldn’t it be nice to have a measurement system as we get deeper and deeper into climate change,” Crisp asked. Even if the money were promised today, it would take the United States approximately five years to develop and deploy a constellation to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, Crisp said. This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — European startup The Exploration Company said Feb. 1 it has raised 40.5 million euros ($44 million) to develop reusable orbital vehicles for flying goods and people to space. The Series A funding will help finance a series of tests and demonstrations the startup hopes to kick off late this year on the inaugural launch of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. Hélène Huby, The Exploration Company’s co-founder and CEO, said Ariane 6 is slated to launch a small reentry demonstrator for the startup called Bikini that is around 40 kilograms and 60 centimeters in diameter. The Exploration Company hopes to gather data from this mission to test thermal protections, an onboard computer developed in-house, and validate the shape of larger capsules. The startup has booked a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission next year that Huby said will carry a larger 1,600-kilogram, 2.5-meter demonstration capsule. This capsule would have propulsion and a parachute for a more controlled reentry after taking payloads for clients, including European space agencies, on a brief trip in low Earth orbit. In 2026, Huby said the startup plans to launch a full-sized version of its Nyx orbital vehicle, measuring four meters in diameter with a mass of 8,000 kilograms. The capsule would be designed to spend several months in orbit, she told SpaceNews , to demonstrate the capability to perform precise operations ahead of a plan to dock with the International Space Station in 2027. A full-sized Nyx would be able to send 4,000 kilograms to orbit for up to six months, and bring 2,600 kilograms back down for 20,000 euros per kilogram. The startup also has later plans for missions to the moon, and one day to use its vehicles for crewed missions. Before co-founding The Exploration Company in July 2021, Huby was vice president at Airbus Defence and Space for the European Service Module serving as the main propulsion system for Orion, the spacecraft NASA is designing to send humans to the moon. She sees strong near-term demand for a European capability for space station transportation, in addition to facilitating microgravity missions such as those Europe’s Thales Alenia Space is also targeting with its proposed REV1 vehicle. The ISS and China’s Tiangong are currently the only space stations in orbit. Huby expects there will be three additional private space stations within the next five years, and by the end of this decade about five to seven space stations orbiting the Earth. Getting The Exploration Company’s first flight completed in 2023 is an important stepping stone for the startup; however, the Ariane 6 has already faced multiple delays. Huby said Bikini received an award last year from the European Space Agency “to fly almost free on Ariane 6,” but the company is looking for alternative options to ensure a flight this year. “We have several on the table,” she added, and will select one of them by the end of March. Swedish early-stage investor EQT Ventures and Red River West of France led The Exploration Company’s funding round, which Huby said brings the total amount raised to date to 47.3 million euros for the 18-month-old company. Other investors that joined its latest funding round include Promus Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Vsquared, Omnes Capital, July Fund, Partech, Possible Ventures, Habert Dassault Finance, Schlumberger, and Sista Fund. This article was updated Feb. 2 with correct specifications for The Exploration Company’s second demonstrator and to specify the total amount the startup has now raised.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) says it has identified and corrected the problem that doomed the first flight of a small launch vehicle as it gears up for a second attempt. ISRO said Feb. 1 that an investigation into the failed inaugural launch of its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) last August concluded that an unexpectedly strong shock during separation of the second stage saturated accelerometers in the rocket’s guidance system, triggering a “salvage mode” that ended up placing its payload into an unacceptably low orbit. The SSLV’s inertial navigation system uses six accelerometers that, at the time of second stage separation, measured vibrations that where both stronger and lasted longer than expected from ground testing. That briefly saturated the accelerometers and caused the guidance system to assume that they had malfunctioned. In fact, the accelerometers were not damaged, ISRO stated, and functioned normally for the rest of the flight. The guidance system then initiated a salvage mode to attempt to place the payloads into orbit without using data from the accelerometers. That included open-loop guidance of the rocket’s third stage without using feedback from those accelerometers. A kick stage called the Velocity Trimming Module (VTM) was not ignited, ISRO said, “since it could be a deterrent to the success of salvage option in some cases.” That resulted in a velocity shortfall of 56 meters per second along with a loss in pointing accuracy at the time of payload separation, the agency said. The payload, the EOS-02 Earth observation satellite and the student-built AzaadiSAT smallsat, ended up in an orbit with a perigee of only 75.7 kilometers. That orbit caused them to reenter “immediately,” ISRO concluded. ISRO outlined several corrective actions to prevent a similar problem from repeating. It is changing the stage separation system to one already used for the third stage that produces less shock. It is also shifting to a “more realistic approach” to handling accelerometer data in the guidance system, including waiting longer before concluding the accelerometers have malfunctioned and triggering the salvage mode. That salvage mode will shift to closed-loop guidance using data from NavIC, India’s regional satellite navigation system. ISRO said that with those measures in place, it is ready to attempt a second SSLV launch. The SSLV-D2 mission will carry the EOS-07 Earth observation satellite and two smallsat secondary payloads. The launch could take place as soon as next week, although ISRO said only that the launch is scheduled for the first quarter.
Virgin Orbit said Feb. 1 it raised $10 million from another Virgin affiliate, a move that provides only a short-term fix to its financial difficulties. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the launch provider said it raised $10 million in the form of a senior secured convertible note from Virgin Investments Limited (VIL), the investment arm of the Virgin Group., on Jan. 30 Virgin Orbit said it would use the proceeds as working capital for the company. This is the third time in as many months that Virgin Orbit raised modest amounts of funding from VIL. In November, Virgin Orbit raised $25 million in the form of a senior unsecured convertible note from VIL, followed Dec. 19 by $20 million in a senior secured convertible note. The notes are debt, the first two at interest rates of 6% and the latest at 12%, that can be converted into Virgin Orbit shares under certain conditions. The notes, now including the initial unsecured one in November, are secured by Virgin Orbit’s assets, giving VIL “first-priority security interest” to those assets, including its Boeing 747 aircraft. If Virgin Orbit defaults on the notes, it stated in its SEC filing, “VIL is entitled to, among other things, foreclose on the assets that are the subject of the security interest.” Virgin Orbit did not disclose additional details about this latest funding, including why it raised this amount at this time. A company spokesperson, asked about the funding, referred back to the SEC filing. The company has been facing a cash crunch for some time given ongoing losses and dwindling cash reserves. In its most recent financial results, Virgin Orbit reported an operating loss of $50.5 million in the third quarter and $149.5 million for the first nine months of 2022. The company reported ending the third quarter with $71 million of cash on hand. Even with the money raised from VIL, its current rate of losses could put the company at risk of running out of cash as soon as the second quarter unless it can secure additional funding. Those problems are exacerbated by a failure on Virgin Orbit’s most recent LauncherOne mission Jan. 9, its first launch from the United Kingdom. The company said Jan. 12 that the rocket’s upper stage suffered an unspecified anomaly that caused a premature shutdown , preventing the vehicle from reaching orbit. Virgin Orbit has not provided any updates on the status of the investigation or return-to-flight plans since its Jan. 12 statement. The U.K.’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration are jointly overseeing the investigation.
TAMPA, Fla. — Remote communications provider Galaxy Broadband said Feb. 1 it is buying capacity from OneWeb for $50 million in a multi-year deal to offer low Earth orbit broadband services to more sites across Canada. The agreement enables Galaxy to expand into the northern territory of Nunavut — a sparsely populated region of northern Canada about three times larger than Texas — where it plans to connect 25 communities before the end of this year. Galaxy became one of OneWeb’s first distribution partners in September 2021 and has already deployed the British operator’s services to more than 75 sites across Canada. Between 30 and 800 users have been connected at each of these sites, according to OneWeb. “Ultimately the aim is to connect thousands of locations and things,” Howard Stanley, vice president for OneWeb’s commercial business in the Americas, said via email. “This will ideally include the majority of communities in Nunavut; as well as businesses, schools and homes nationally. It could be tens or hundreds of thousands of people in various contexts.” Stanley declined to discuss financial details about its deal with Galaxy, which uses a mix of terrestrial and satellite technologies to meet the connectivity needs of remote communities and enterprises, including mining. He said OneWeb launched commercial services in Canada in April and has more than 100 sites active in the country. The operator’s coverage is currently limited to the upper reaches of Canada while it waits to deploy the 46 satellites it needs to provide global service. “We are able to deliver connectivity to the majority of Canada particularly to Northern Canada where broadband options are nonexistent and there are many satellite only communities,” Stanley said. “With our final two launches, we will able to extend connectivity to the southern border of Western Canada, while covering Southern Ontario and Quebec, and the entirety of the Maritime Provinces.” Galaxy’s website promises OneWeb-enabled terminal download speeds of up to 150 megabits per second for Canada’s remotest regions.
Few would deny that NASA had a very good 2022. The year started with the successful deployment and commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope, which by the middle of the year was ready to take its first science images that stunned even astronomers who spent years working on the mission. Near the end of the year, the Space Launch System finally lifted off on its inaugural flight, sending the Orion spacecraft around the moon on a nearly flawless uncrewed mission. In between, the DART spacecraft slammed into an asteroid, demonstrating a way to protect the planet from an impact. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a video that 2022 “will go down in the history books as one of the most accomplished years in all of NASA’s history.” That might be a bit of a stretch — 1969 would like to have a word — but last year certainly was one of the best in recent memory. The successes of 2022 naturally prompt a question: what will NASA do for an encore in 2023? The hard reality for NASA is that the new year lacks many of the high-profile milestones of the past year, yet is essential for the agency’s plans for the years to come. There will be, for example, no launch of the SLS in 2023: its next flight, on the Artemis 2 mission, is likely no earlier than late 2024. While the James Webb Space Telescope will continue cranking out images in 2023, the biggest science mission to launch in the next year is Psyche, whose launch slipped from 2022 because of software testing delays and which won’t arrive at its destination, the asteroid of the same name, until 2029. Nelson’s comments about 2022 came in a video previewing what the agency had in store in 2023. “So much to look forward to in ’23,” he said. The three-minute video had to dig deep, though, to identify highlights for the coming year, including awarding a services contract for a lunar rover for later Artemis missions and unveiling a prototype of a spacesuit for those future Artemis moonwalks. Awarding a contract and revealing a spacesuit aren’t nearly as exciting as, say, deploying a giant space telescope or launching a monster rocket, but they are essential to NASA’s long-term plans to return humans to the moon. That is, in many respects, a central theme for NASA in 2023: laying the groundwork for Artemis missions launching in 2024 and beyond. Early in 2023, for example, NASA will name the four astronauts who will fly on Artemis 2, the first crewed Orion mission that will go around the moon. By June, the agency will select a second crewed lunar lander developer for Artemis missions starting late this decade. The first Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions, by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, are scheduled to launch this year, carrying NASA payloads to the surface of the moon and, in one case, a smallsat lunar orbiter to search for water ice at the poles. Perhaps the biggest milestone of the coming year for Artemis was something not included in the NASA video: the first orbital launch of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. Starship is a commercial venture, but it is also critical for NASA’s plans to land humans on the moon as soon as 2025. NASA has awarded SpaceX more than $4 billion to develop lunar lander versions of Starship that will be flown on Artemis 3 and 4. A successful launch will provide NASA reassurances that Starship lunar lander development is on track, while continued delays, or explosive setbacks, will raise doubts about NASA’s plans. There will be other non-Artemis milestones for NASA in 2023, including the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and the return of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft with samples from the asteroid Bennu. The biggest measure of success for NASA in the next year, though, is how well its activities position the agency for Artemis missions that can make 2024, 2025 and beyond the most accomplished years in all of NASA’s history. Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. His Foust Forward column appears in every issue of the magazine. This column ran in the January 2023 issue.
Hours before the successful launch of the Artemis 1 mission, NASA made other news about its efforts to return humans to the moon. The agency said that it was modifying its Human Landing System contract with SpaceX to add a second lunar landing demonstration. That effort, called “Option B” by NASA, would include upgrades to the Starship lander to support later, longer-duration Artemis missions. The announcement was not a surprise since NASA stated in March its intent to exercise Option B while, in parallel, running a competition to select another company to develop a second lander. What was surprising, though, was what was not included in the Option B announcement: the value of the award. It turns out the omission was an oversight: within a couple hours, NASA updated the press release to note that the award was worth $1.15 billion. But, in other cases, NASA is less willing to disclose the value of contract awards as it moves to more commercial models of doing business. A week after the Option B award, NASA announced it selected Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four satellites of a cubesat constellation called TROPICS, designed to monitor the development of tropical weather systems. NASA originally selected Astra to launch those satellites, giving the company a $7.95 million contract for three launches of its Rocket 3.3 vehicle. But after the first launch carrying two TROPICS cubesats failed, Astra retired Rocket 3.3, forcing NASA to select a new launch provider for the other four satellites. Rocket Lab said it would perform two dedicated launches of its Electron rocket from its new launch complex in Virginia for TROPICS, but the announcement did not disclose the value of the award. NASA has traditionally released the value of new launch contracts. Neither NASA nor Rocket Lab, when contacted, would disclose the value of the launch deal, each offering identical statements: “Pricing provided in response to launch service task orders under VADR are competed in a closed environment and as such are considered proprietary to the indefinite-delivery/ indefinite-quantity contract.” VADR is short for Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare, a contract NASA awarded in January to a dozen companies (a thirteenth, Firefly Aerospace, was added later). The award was designed to make it easier for the agency to procure launches for some missions, particularly those willing to accept higher levels of risk. A byproduct, though, appears to be a lack of insight into why NASA selects companies for those missions and how much it’s paying. The Rocket Lab example is not an isolated case. Two days later, NASA announced that it awarded four VADR task orders to Phantom Space to launch cubesats no earlier than 2024. NASA again did not disclose the value of the award. Phantom Space, whose Daytona rocket remains in development, said it would launch cubesats on the second and fourth launches of that rocket under the task orders but did not disclose any other details. (The company, perhaps living up to its name, ghosted a reporter who asked about the value of the award.) Opacity in launch prices is nothing new in the commercial market. Even SpaceX, which broke with convention years ago by publishing launch prices for its Falcon rockets, will vary what it charges from customer to customer based on terms of the deal. However, when it comes to government missions, there has long been an expectation of openness because of the nature of government contracting. Streamlined procurement is certainly welcomed, but it should not come at the expense of transparency. Not knowing how much NASA spends for a launch or why it picked a particular provider sets an unfortunate precedent that could become more frequent as NASA increasingly adopts commercial practices. One day, NASA might issue a press release about a lunar lander award and the omission of a price mentioned in it would not be an oversight. Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. His Foust Forward column appears in every issue of the magazine. This column ran in the December 2022 issue.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has selected Arianespace’s Vega C rocket to launch a multipurpose imaging satellite, KOMPSAT-6 , that has remained grounded due to sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine. South Korea’s vice minister for science, Oh Tae-seog, announced Feb. 1 that Vega-C was selected for the launch following international bidding. In December, South Korea formally revoked a Russian contract for what was supposed to be a late 2022 launch of KOMPSAT-6 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia aboard an Angara rocket, according to the vice minister. He didn’t explain whether the Korean government would seek Russian compensation for the delay. No new date has been set for KOMPSAT-6’s launch. Vega C suffered a launch failure in December while attempting its first commercial flight following a successful July debut. Arianespace and the European Space Agency established an independent commission to investigate the Dec. 20 failure. “We will decide details after the investigation is over,” Oh said. KOMPSAT-6 is South Korea’s second satellite equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), following KOMPSAT-5 , launched in August 2013 on a Dnepr-1 launch vehicle from Dombarovsky, Russia. Once in orbit, KOMPSAT-6 will monitor the Earth from about 505 kilometers above the Earth’s surface at a resolution of 0.5 meters per pixel for five years. While the satellite bus was developed by the state-funded Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), its payload was made by domestic aerospace manufacturer LIG Nex1 under the technical assistance of Airbus Defence and Space. There are two other Korean satellite missions whose launch has been delayed by the anti-Russia sanctions: CAS500-2 remote sensing satellite and SNIPE , a constellation consisting of four 6U CubeSats to identify temporal and spatial variation of small scale plasma structures in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. CAS500-2 was supposed to launch in the first half of 2022 on a Soyuz rocket from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and SNIPE in the first half of last year on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome. While the SNIPE was decided in October last year to launch on South Korea’s KSLV-2 rocket, expected in May, CAS500-2 is expected to fly on an overseas launch vehicle. “We will host an international bidding in March to select a launch vehicle that will carry CAS500-2, hopefully in the first half of next year,” the vice minister said. Meanwhile, firefighters extinguished a fire at Naro Space Center, the only civilian rocket launch site here, during a test of a turbopump that feeds propellants to rocket engines, the science ministry said Jan. 1. The fire broke out in the afternoon and was extinguished in about 70 minutes, the ministry said. “Some testing equipment was affected by the fire, but no casualties have been reported,” Roh Hyung-il, a KARI spokesman, told SpaceNews . He said the ill-fated test was not related to the planned third launch of KSLV-2 rocket in May.
The Space Development Agency is planning a new procurement of 72 satellites to continue to build out a military constellation in low Earth orbit. In a Jan. 31 draft solicitation , the agency seeks input from vendors interested in bidding for 72 satellites and supporting ground systems that will make up a portion of a planned 216-satellite Tranche 2 Transport Layer. Responses are due March 1. The Space Development Agency (SDA), an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a layered network of military satellites . The Transport Layer will serve as a tactical network to move data to users around the world, communicating classified data such as early warnings of missile launches. The agency already has acquired satellites for Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 of the Transport Layer. The new solicitation is for 72 Tranche 2 Beta satellites. The first launch of Tranche 0 satellites is scheduled for March . Tranche 1 would launch in 2024 and Tranche 2 in 2026. The proliferated constellation is made up of relatively small, mass-producible satellites supplied by multiple vendors, all interconnected in orbit via optical laser links. SDA said the Tranche 2 Transport Layer satellites will be similar to those currently being developed by York Space, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for the Tranche 1 Transport Layer The Beta version of the Tranche 2 satellites will have three optical communications terminals, a Ka-band communications payload, a data routing payload, a navigation payload, an S-band backup control system, and will support two military classified communications networks: the Integrated Broadcast Service and TACSATCOM. The 72 Beta satellites will be divided into six orbital planes, to be awarded to multiple vendors, said SDA. It asks vendors to submit proposals for two of the orbital planes, with the associated ground operations support.
Axiom Space says the customers for its upcoming private astronaut missions to the International Space Station are dominated by governments rather than individuals. In a call with reporters Jan. 30, Axiom Space executives said they were “pretty heavy into training” the crew for the Ax-2, the company’s second mission to the station, tentatively scheduled to launch in May. That includes training at station-related facilities in Japan and Europe, as well as at the Johnson Space Center and SpaceX’s headquarters in California for the Crew Dragon spacecraft the mission will use. That mission will be commanded by Peggy Whitson, an Axiom employee and former NASA astronaut, with an Axiom customer, John Shoffner, serving as pilot. While NASA announced Jan. 20 that the ISS partners had approved the full four-person crew for Ax-2, neither the agency nor Axiom have yet revealed the names of the other two people flying on the mission. That is the decision of the customer, said Michael Suffredini, chief executive of Axiom. “We work very hard to meet their needs, and they have chosen to wait a little while to announce their crew,” he said. “I think in the next week or two there will be an announcement of the specific individuals.” The two are widely believed to be astronauts from Saudi Arabia as part of an agreement that the Saudi Space Commission signed with Axiom Space in September 2022. A NASA official speaking at an advisory committee meeting in November said the candidate Saudi astronauts had started training for the mission . Axiom Space has not announced customers for missions beyond Ax-2, but Suffredini said upcoming missions would primarily have governments, rather than individuals, as customers. “I expect that Ax-3 will be largely a country customer kind of flight with our professional astronaut,” he said, which will be repeated on Ax-4. “I think that, between those two flights, maybe one private individual will fly.” He did not disclose which countries might fly astronauts on those missions, although he said later than Ax-4 may include a country that has previously flown to the station. Axiom Space announced in September an agreement with the Turkish Space Agency to fly a Turkish astronaut on a future Axiom mission but did not disclose a schedule. At the European Space Agency ministerial conference in November, Hungary’s foreign minister said the country was working to select an astronaut to fly to the ISS on an Axiom mission in late 2024 or early 2025. Axiom still requires formal NASA approval for missions beyond Ax-2. NASA requested proposals in September for two private astronaut missions flying between late 2023 and the end of 2024. Suffredini said he expects NASA to announce its plans for those missions soon. Those future missions will have to comply with a NASA requirement announced last August that private astronaut missions be commanded by a former NASA astronaut with flight experience . Axiom had already announced Whitson as commander of Ax-2, and its first private astronaut mission to the station, Ax-1 in April 2022, was led by another former astronaut, Michael López-Alegría. While Axiom officials had suggested before Ax-1 that later missions might fly customers only, Suffredini said the company agreed with NASA about having a professional astronaut on board. “We agree that on short-duration flights, particularly with astronauts who have not been trained as professional astronauts, that is the right way to fly,” he said. He declined to say if Axiom would hire additional former NASA astronauts beyond López-Alegría and Whitson for missions beyond Ax-2. “We will have the right professional astronauts available to fly the flights that require it.” During a panel discussion Jan. 31 at the 18th Ilan Ramon International Space Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, that included all four Ax-1 astronauts, López-Alegría said his flight opportunity came after he joined Axiom to support its efforts to develop a private space station. “When we started looking for clients, they expressed an interest that they wanted somebody along who had been there before, and NASA said the same thing,” he recalled of planning for the first private astronaut mission. “When we looked around the room, I was the only one who fit that description.” One of his Ax-1 crewmates, Mark Pathy, suggested on the panel that López-Alegría would fly again on a future private astronaut mission. “We’re all keen to go back to space. We’re all jealous of Mike that he’s going back.”
The two men who flew on the first NASA commercial crew mission to the International Space Station in 2020 received a rarely awarded medal from the White House Jan. 31. During a brief ceremony, Vice President Kamala Harris awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to former NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in recognition of their flight on the Demo-2 Crew Dragon mission to the station in 2020, the first crewed orbital spaceflight from the United States since the retirement of the shuttle in 2011. She credited Behnken and Hurley not just for flying the mission but for years of work leading up to it, advising SpaceX as it developed the spacecraft. “Together, Bob and Doug, and the SpaceX team, worked for years to design a new crew capsule,” she said. “Every part of the capsule, from flight controls and emergency procedures to computer displays and cockpit layout, all of that was shaped by Bob and Doug’s decades of knowhow.” The successful two-month Demo-2 mission allowed NASA to begin a series of regular crew rotation flights on Crew Dragon, ending reliance on Russia’s Soyuz vehicle for accessing the station. “Bob and Doug together have written the first page of a new chapter in the history of American spaceflight,” Harris said. “Through their ingenuity and bravery, they have helped rebuild America’s bridge to low Earth orbit and to the International Space Station.” While Harris serves as chair of the National Space Council, which oversees interagency coordination of space policy, she didn’t address other space issues in her remarks beyond a passing reference to NASA’s Artemis campaign of lunar exploration. Neither Behnken nor Hurley spoke during the public ceremony. The award took some in the space community by surprise in part because the award is so rare. The last time an astronaut received the medal was Robert Crippen, best known as the pilot of the first shuttle mission, in 2006. NASA announced that Behnken and Hurley would receive the medal less than 24 hours before the ceremony, and neither the agency nor the White House offered details on why they received the award now or if the White House anticipated making additional awards. Despite the name, Congress is not involved in the award of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. Congress passed a law in 1969 authorizing the president to award a medal by that name “to any astronaut who in the performance of his duties has distinguished himself by exceptionalIy meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of the Nation and of mankind.” Formal nominations for the award are made by the NASA administrator to the president. While the law creating the medal passed in 1969, the first medals were not awarded until 1978 by President Jimmy Carter. Six astronauts, including the first American in space, Alan Shepard; the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn; and the first human to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, received medals then. Seventeen of the now 30 awardees were posthumous: the three astronauts who died on Apollo 1 and the seven each lost on Challenger and Columbia. President George W. Bush awarded the medal most frequently, although 14 of his 16 recipients were the crews of Challenger and Columbia. The other two awardees were Crippen and Bill Shepherd, the first American to fly a long-duration mission on the ISS. Several famous astronauts have not received the award, including Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins. While Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, received the medal in 1995, his crew mates, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, did not. Both Behnken and Hurley left the astronaut corps after the Demo-2 mission. Hurley retired from NASA in July 2021 and is now director for business development for Northrop Grumman’s propulsion systems business unit. Behnken retired from NASA in November 2022 and joined Lockheed Martin’s space division as director of technology acceleration.
Threats to U.S. satellites are becoming more complex and unpredictable, which will require new ways of training and preparing for a possible conflict, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. chief of space operations, said Jan. 31. Saltzman assumed command of the Space Force in November and recently announced his priorities for the coming year, one of which is to field “combat ready forces.” That means “we have to be resilient, we have to be ready, and we have to be combat credible,” Saltzman told reporters at the Pentagon. He noted that one of the takeaways so far from the war in Ukraine is that space systems are increasingly essential to military operations, and that satellites and the ground systems used to control them are being targeted. The challenge for the U.S. military is that its satellites are vulnerable, and Space Force operators have not been trained for this new era of anti-satellite warfare. The Space Force is moving to modernize its constellations to be more resilient against threats but having advanced systems doesn’t ensure a ready force, said Saltzman. “The personnel have to be trained. We have to have operational concepts, we have to have tactics that are validated, the operators have to practice those tactics. We need intelligence to underpin how we’re going to use those systems.” Saltzman said there is funding in the 2024 budget for these initiatives. “I can’t give you the specific numbers yet. But we are investing in developing what I’m loosely calling an ‘operational test and training infrastructure.’” he said. The training and testing infrastructure includes virtual simulators, training ranges and digital twin environments to test equipment in a realistic setting, he said. In Ukraine there have been widely reported incidents of cyber attacks against satellite-based communications systems and electronic jamming of GPS navigation signals. But the Space Force has to be prepared to respond to a wider range of scenarios, including the most “stressing” ones likely to be posed by China, he said. “I want to have a lot of flexible options against all the threats, regardless of what is asked of us.” Saltzman said he supports efforts by Space Force procurement organizations to accelerate innovation in satellites and ground systems. But he said a priority also will be “high fidelity simulators, a virtual training environment, having the range infrastructure to practice this capability, we have to buy all that equipment as well. And we have to buy it quickly.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Hyperspectral imaging startup Orbital Sidekick raised $10 million in an investment round led by Energy Innovation Capital. “This round is a massive validation of our technology from the energy industry,” Dan Katz, Orbital Sidekick CEO and co-founder told SpaceNews by email. “We’re looking forward to helping our customers use the insights from our intelligence platform to minimize their emissions, meet regulatory requirements and reduce their carbon footprints as part of our collective transition to more sustainable energy systems.” Energy companies Williams and ONEOK, the University of Minnesota Endowment, 11.2 Capital, Syndicate 708 and In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s strategic investor participated in the funding round. Williams and ONEOK are Orbital Sidekick customers. 11.2 Capital, Syndicate 708 and In-Q-Tel also participated in Orbital Sidekick’s Series A round announced in 2021. The additional funding comes as Orbital Sidekick prepares to launch its six-satellite Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite constellation, known as GHOSt. “Our first two GHOSt satellites are slated to launch this spring aboard a SpaceX Rideshare (Transporter-7), with the broader goal of having a six-satellite GHOSt constellation in orbit by the end of 2023,” Katz said. Katz called GHOSt “the most advanced hyperspectral imaging satellites that exist today, capturing over 500 bands of light with 20x greater sensitivity than traditional monitoring.” To meet growing demand for hyperspectral data, Orbital Sidekick intends to “expand the GHOSt constellation to at least 14 satellites and continue growing from there,” Katz said. “The big-picture goal is to have the ability to map every square inch of the globe multiple times a week.” With GHOSt imagery, Orbital Sidekick customers can observe critical infrastructure like gas and oil pipelines to detect leaks, contamination and other events. Orbital Sidekick data and imagery will help companies “minimize emissions, exceed regulatory requirements and reduce their carbon footprints,” according to the Jan. 31 news release. Orbital Sidekick launched its first satellite in 2021. Data from the company’s satellites feeds into Orbital Sidekick’s Sigma platform. Customers have used Sigma “to monitor over 12,000 miles of pipelines and flag 100 suspected methane leaks, 200 suspected liquid hydrocarbon leaks” in addition to other noteworthy incidents, according to the news release.
A Chinese space launch company has outlined its plans for a series of solid and reusable rockets for launch services and space tourism and opened a new industrial base. CAS Space held an opening ceremony Jan. 10 for the first phase of its CAS Space Industrial Base rocket manufacturing facility in Nansha district of the southern city of Guangzhou. The base will be capable of an output of 30 rockets per year, according to the firm. Final assembly and testing of the company’s second Lijian-1 solid rocket is underway at the facility, targeting a May launch from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. The first Lijian-1 rocket successfully launched six satellites into orbit in July last year. CAS Space plans three Lijian-1 launches in 2023 and the rocket has recently been approved for launch from a mobile sea platform using facilities at Haiyang in Shandong province. Shikong Tansuo, a space arm of automaker Geely Technology Group, has also settled in Nansha, following a 2021 move by the local government to attract space companies at all stages of the supply chain to the area. CAS Space, sometimes referred to as Zhongke Aerospace, is a commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It is developing a series of launchers known as Lijian, or PR, rockets, including reusable liquid propellant launchers. A presentation of the series Jan.10 shows lighter solid rockets, shifting to reusable launchers and a rocket for suborbital tourism. The firm is also aiming to have its rockets be selected as backup for cargo transportation to China’s Tiangong space station. The designs have been noted online for their apparent resemblance to the SpaceX Falcon 9, the triple-core Falcon Heavy and the Blue Origin New Shepard crew capsule . The Lijian-1 rocket also has similarities with the Jielong-3 rocket developed by CASC. CAS previously flew only sounding rockets before a 2014 opening of the Chinese space sector to other sources of capital. The largest and most capable planned rocket is the Lijian-3/PR-3 heavy lift rocket, able to send 13.8 tons to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit in expendable mode or 10.5 tons to the same orbit when the boosters are recovered for reuse, according to a presentation at the 9th China (International) Commercial Aerospace Forum in late December. The 50-meter-long rocket will have three, 3.8-meter-diameter core stages, no apparent second stage, and be powered by Xuanyuan gas generator kerosene-liquid oxygen engines. CAS Space is targeting 2026 for an inaugural launch. The company revealed Jan. 10 that it already has a number of launch contracts signed worth US$237 million. The contracts are with seven customers for launching 200 satellites with a total mass of 40 metric tons. Customers include Beijing-based low Earth orbit communications satellite maker Commsat . CAS Space raised $31 million in 2021 but leading investors were CITIC Juxin, ultimately owned by state-owned investment company CITIC Group Corporation, Zhongke Chuangxing, an accelerator fund set up by CAS, and Yuexiu Industrial Investment, another state-owned investment vehicle, operating in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. While the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) launches almost all of China’s civilian and military missions, CAS Space joins another major state-owned giant spinoff, Expace, in fighting for commercial contracts. It also faces competition from other emerging Chinese commercial launch service providers including Galactic Energy, Landspace, iSpace, Deep Blue Aerospace, Space Pioneer, Orienspace and Rocket Pi. 
Xplore, a startup based in Redmond, Washington, announced Jan. 31 it was granted a remote-sensing license from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for the company’s first mission to low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch its first Xcraft small satellite in the fourth quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. The NOAA license “allows us to bring to market powerful multi-sensor capabilities that will let customers observe and understand our planet and the surrounding space environment,” said Lisa Rich, Xplore founder and chief operating officer. The Department of Commerce through NOAA licenses the operation of private remote-sensing space systems under the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992. The Xcraft will carry multiple sensors for Earth observation, space domain awareness and astronomy, Rich said. The payloads will offer hyperspectral imaging data, high-resolution video and ultraviolet data products, she added. “Advanced data products will be offered by fusing data generated by our diverse sets of imagers.” Xplore said its hyperspectral imagery will be offered at 2-meter and 5-meter resolution. The company’s main business is data as a service. It announced in February that it has raised $16.2 million since it was founded in 2018. A year ago Xplore announced an agreement with Orbital Astronautics to launch a remote-sensing payload on OrbAstro’s ORB-6 platform but that mission suffered delays. Xplore said it could not comment on the status of the OrbAstro mission. The company’s long-term plan is to build a constellation of 12 Xcraft platforms carrying eight primary instruments. Rich said the constellation “has been designed but at this time we are not disclosing information on the capacity, orbits or deployment timeline.”
Capella Space has formed a new subsidiary, Capella Federal, focused on the defense market. The company announced Jan. 31 it will offer “increased Earth observation access to select U.S. defense customers.” Capella Space is a commercial operator of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites. SAR is a specialized form of remote sensing that has seen growing demand since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because SAR satellites can capture images at night, through cloud cover and rain — conditions that impair traditional optical satellites. Capella Federal will provide imagery exclusively to government customers and its analysts will work in classified facilities. Eric Traupe, a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and former assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was named head of Capella Federal. Traupe retired from the CIA in September and joined Capella earlier this month. The company also announced new members of its government advisory board, including former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and retired Army lieutenant general Robert Ashley, and Clayton Hutmacher, former director of operations of U.S. Special Operation Command. Existing board members include former deputy assistant decretary of defense for space policy Doug Loverro, former deputy undersecretary of defense Gil Klinger, and former NRO director Jeffrey Harris. Capella Space, which recently closed a $60 million funding round, has signed agreements with the National Reconnaissance Office , and has won contracts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Space Force. The company wants to further expand its reach in the national security market. “With Capella’s technology, government agencies can gather data and images of Earth in any weather, any time of day or night,” said Capella Space CEO and founder Payam Banazadeh. In the wake of the Ukraine crisis, “we’ve seen significant demand from our U.S. government customers to utilize Capella’s SAR capabilities,” said Banazadeh. Targeting ‘radar commercial layer’ contract In an interview with SpaceNews , Traupe said the goal of Capella Federal is to position the company to “really cater to government clients in a more classified context, in a way that we weren’t able to do just as Capella Space.” Traupe said he expects the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to start laying the groundwork for a potentially large procurement of commercial SAR imagery, or a “radar commercial layer,” the equivalent of the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) procurement where the NRO last year selected Maxar, Planet Labs and BlackSky to provide commercial optical imagery for the next 10 years. “The RCL is a key area of focus for us in 2023,” said Traupe. The NGA is currently analyzing the requirements in preparation for a solicitation planned for later this year, “and hopefully it’ll be awarded sometime in 2024,” he said. “So this is a golden opportunity for us.” Most of the Capella Federal workforce is located in the Washington, D.C. area, “which affords us direct connectivity with government clients,” said Traupe. The company has secured “SCIF” office space, a term for U.S. government-accredited facilities for sharing of sensitive compartmented information.
NASA has effectively reached full utilization of the International Space Station given limitations on crew time and the ability to get cargo to and from the station, an agency official said Jan. 30. Speaking at a meeting of a National Academies committee working on the decadal survey for biological and physical sciences in space, Kirt Costello, NASA ISS chief scientist, said that the agency had reached the limits of its share of station resources to do research. “As we get into this discussion of what is full utilization, I will tell you that I believe that we are already there,” he said. “We have maximized the capabilities of station not only to do research but to sustain the utilization resources we have.” For much of the station’s history, the limitation for doing research on the station has been available crew time. However, he said that has become less of a problem after the introduction of commercial crew vehicles that allow NASA to support four astronauts on the U.S. segment of the station, rather than three, providing more crew time. Getting cargo to and from the station has become a bigger issue. Costello said that is reflected in limitations in carrying large cargo in what are dubbed “Big Bags” larger than the standard cargo transfer bag, as well as “conditioned stowage” for materials like biological samples that require being kept in a freezer or cooler. Cargo vehicles currently supporting the station don’t have room for more research payload, particularly those that require the bulky Big Bags or conditioned stowage. “We are flying everything full,” he said, with the only question being whether a vehicle first reaches its maximum cargo volume or mass. “Either by mass or by volume, we fill those vehicles completely.” The station itself is crowded, with Costello showing images in his presentation of “enhanced stowage” on the station, with cargo bags lining passageways in the station because there is no other place in station modules to place them. That also affects utilization. “To get at equipment for research, for some of our investigations, the crew has to wade through this stowage and find the right bags,” he said. “We’re currently seeing enhanced amounts of crew time being added to crew activities just to retrieve stowage.” Costello said that NASA is counting on the introduction of new vehicles to help, including the first flights of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser cargo vehicle and Japan’s HTV-X, an upgraded version of its HTV cargo vehicle, as well as Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle. “We’re waiting on three new vehicles to be able to provide us that same crew and cargo servicing capabilities that we’ve seen over the last three and a half years.” If NASA wants to increase utilization, he said the agency and its researchers will need to rethink their approaches. That includes doing more analysis on the station itself, rather than sending samples down to Earth for study. That is particularly important, he said, since there is far less capability to send cargo down to Earth than to transport cargo up to the station. He also said researchers need to minimize “round-trip iterations” where research equipment is sent up to the station, then returned and modified for a future mission to the station. “In other words, don’t fly a great big item and then have to return it to do your next experiment,” he said. “If we can minimize those Big Bag accommodations needing to fly up and down and then back up again, we can help everyone out.” The study, he noted, addressed only the resources for NASA’s share of ISS resources. Half of the U.S. segment is allocated to the ISS National Laboratory, run by CASIS. Costello said a study is ongoing looking at national laboratory resource utilization.
The House Science Committee scored a bipartisan victory Jan. 30 with the passage of a minor commercial remote sensing bill even before the committee’s first meeting of the new Congress. The House passed by voice vote H.R. 290, the Commercial Remote Sensing Amendment Act of 2023, after only a brief discussion on the House floor. The bill was introduced earlier in the month by Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), chairman of the committee, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the committee. The bill reinstates a provision of a 2015 bill that requires the Commerce Department to send an annual report to Congress on the status of commercial remote sensing license applications and related actions. That provision expired in 2020, and the new bill reinstates it through 2030. The bill also formally requires the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which handles commercial remote sensing applications, to review applications in 60 days rather than 120 days. The new timeframe matches current NOAA regulations. “H.R. 290 is a no-nonsense bipartisan bill that will help ensure that the U.S. remains the global leader in the commercial remote sensing industry,” Lucas said on the House floor, noting that a similar bill passed the House in the last Congress but was not taken up by the Senate. “Congress needs to ensure that the United States remains at the cutting edge of this industry, and that’s why it’s important that we have the transparency and insight we need to oversee the licensing and regulation of private remote sensing systems,” Lofgren said on the House floor. “I’m pleased that Chairman Lucas and I can kick off our work this session by continuing the science committee’s strong tradition of bipartisan work.” The bill passed the House before even the first meeting by the full committee. The committee is still organizing, with Democrats naming its members assigned to the committee only Jan. 27, a little more than a week after Republicans announced their roster. There will be significant changes to the committee from the previous Congress that only in part are linked to the change in party control. Lucas, the ranking member of the full committee in the previous Congress, was named chairman as expected. Lofgren takes over as the top Democrat after the retirement of former Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), who chaired the committee the previous four years. The committee has not announced assignments to its subcommittees, including space. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who chaired the space subcommittee in the previous Congress, was not included among the Democrats assigned to the science committee in this Congress. Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), top Republican on the subcommittee in the last Congress, is returning to the committee. Most of the attention that the committee has received since the new Congress convened at the start of the month has revolved around a new and controversial member of the House. Among the Republicans assigned to the House Science Committee Jan. 18 was Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who is accused of lying extensively about his background during his campaign last fall as well as potential campaign finance violations.
Lockheed Martin plans to launch the first demonstration mission of its new LM 400 mid-sized satellite bus in 2023, the company announced Jan. 31 The first demonstration bus will kick off a “regular series of self-funded on-orbit LM 400 technology demonstration missions,” the company said. The 2023 mission will carry a Lockheed Martin narrowband communications electronically steered array payload. A second demonstrator projected to fly in 2024 will be a synthetic aperture radar payload. The demonstration missions are intended to show the bus’ performance in low, medium and geostationary orbits. Lockheed Martin will produce these satellites at a new 3.5 million square-foot facility in Denver. The LM 400 is aimed at the defense market, particularly for remote sensing, communications and persistent surveillance applications. Raytheon selected the bus to build missile-tracking satellites for the U.S. Space Force, the first of which would launch in 2026. The size of an average home refrigerator, the LM 400 can be adapted for higher power and larger payloads and packaged to enable multiple satellites per launch, said Matt Mahlman, director of strategy and capture at Lockheed Martin Space. 
 “Our goal is to accelerate the technical maturity of our satellites and advanced payloads, as well as showcase how new capabilities can be delivered quickly to customers,” he said. The company is not yet announcing which launch provider will fly these demonstration missions. Lockheed Martin in 2021 signed a contract with ABL Space Systems to launch as many as 58 missions on ABL’s RS1 rocket through 2029. Lockheed Martin is also a strategic investor in ABL. ABL’s first launch failed earlier this month and it’s unclear when it will make another attempt. A Lockheed Martin spokesman told SpaceNews that the company is “ committed to supporting our launch partner ABL and are excited for their next flight opportunity. With regard to the LM 400 tech demo, we will announce our launch plans as soon as we have passed full testing of the system.”
LeoLabs announced the commissioning Jan. 30 of its West Australian Space Radar to improve tracking of satellites and debris in low-Earth orbit. LeoLabs tracks more than 20,000 space objects with 10 phased array radars at sites in Alaska, Australia , the Azores archipelago , New Zealand , Texas and Costa Rica . The two individual radars that comprise LeoLabs’ West Australian Space Radar will bolster the company’s ability to track objects in medium- and high-inclination low-Earth orbits as they pass over the Southern Hemisphere, LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told SpaceNews. LeoLabs began scanning the skies over the Southern Hemisphere in 2019 with the two radars that make up the Kiwi Space Radar . Now, LeoLabs has four S-band radars operating in the Southern Hemisphere, improving the firm’s ability to spot debris too small to be tracked by conventional means but large enough to damage or destroy spacecraft, Ceperley said. “We’re extremely excited to increase our coverage of the Southern Hemisphere because it’s essentially half the globe that is not well covered,” Ceperley said. “Trying to improve the safety situation has been a major focus of ours.” Much of the world’s space-tracking infrastructure is a remnant of the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union established facilities in the Northern Hemisphere to watch for missiles traveling over the North Pole. By comparison, the Southern Hemisphere has few space-tracking radars or optical telescopes. Frequent observation of space objects is important to refining each object’s orbit, spotting maneuvers and identifying potential collisions. Since LeoLabs’ radar network is designed specifically for space traffic management, enhancing coverage of the Southern Hemisphere remains a priority, Ceperley said. LeoLabs’ West Australian Space Radar, like the company’s S-band radars operating in Costa Rica and the Azores archipelago, off Portugal’s Atlantic coast, can detect track objects as small as 2 centimeters in diameter. LeoLabs employees in Australia will be responsible for Pacific daytime global radar operations, orbital analytics and providing ongoing observation and analysis of regional activities in low-Earth orbit. “Considering the strategic importance of the region, LeoLabs will continue to make investments that align with the decades of partnership and collaboration between Australia and the United States, as well as other Indo-Pacific countries,” according to a LeoLabs news release. LeoLabs began building the West Australian Space Radar in April, finished construction in November and conducted testing in December. “There is data flowing from the radar now,” Ceperley said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat’s latest geostationary telecoms satellite has arrived at its Florida launch site after a three-day journey from Airbus’ testing facilities in France. An Airbus Beluga plane carrying the 5,500-kilogram Inmarsat-6 F2 (I-6 F2) satellite landed at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 27, Airbus Space Systems spokesperson Jeremy Close said, following refueling stops in Canada and Virginia. It is the second time a Beluga has flown a large satellite across the Atlantic to Florida since Airbus announced its outsized freight transportation service early last year. Companies typically use Ukrainian Antonov aircraft to ship large spacecraft overseas — or boats that take weeks longer; however, these planes have been in short supply since Russia invaded Ukraine. Airbus last used Beluga to ship the Hotbird 13F satellite it built for Eutelsat from France to Florida in October, marking the plane’s first trip to the U.S. since delivering a module for the International Space Station in 2009. SpaceX is slated to launch I-6 F2 on a Falcon 9 in the middle of February toward an orbital slot covering the Americas. The satellite is identical to the Airbus-built Inmarsat-6 F1 (I-6 F2) that Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries launched in late 2021 toward a geostationary orbit above the Indian Ocean. Both satellites have a hybrid L- and Ka-band payload for providing mobile connectivity services to maritime, aviation, and government customers. I-6 F1 used its onboard electric propulsion to climb to a geostationary testing location in summer 2022, Airbus said in a Jan. 30 news release, and is slated to enter service early this year. It will also take time for I-6 F2 to reach its orbital slot post-launch and complete tests before entering service, which Airbus expects to occur in early 2024.
A startup with plans to mine asteroids for metals says it will launch its first two missions this year, including one that will fly by a near Earth asteroid. AstroForge announced Jan. 24 that it will launch a cubesat into low Earth orbit in April to test its refinery technologies. That will be followed in October by a larger spacecraft that will go by a near Earth asteroid, collecting data about its composition, including the presence of platinum-group metals, or PGMs. The 6U cubesat, called Brokkr-1, was built by U.K. company OrbAstro and is scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-7 rideshare mission. Matt Gialich, co-founder and chief executive of AstroForge, said in an interview that the spacecraft “is essentially ready to be put on the rocket.” Brokkr-1 will test technology the company has developed to extract metals from asteroid materials. The payload, which takes up two-thirds of the volume of the cubesat, will attempt to vaporize “asteroid-like” material carried inside and sort out metals from other constituents. The second mission, Brokkr-2, is also build by OrbAstro, using a larger 100-kilogram bus. It will launch as a secondary payload on IM-2, the second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, on a Falcon 9. AstroForge said the launch is scheduled for October although Intuitive Machines said only that it is planned for the second half of the year. Brokkr-2 will fly by a small near Earth asteroid, collecting data that AstroForge says will allow it to determine if the asteroid is metallic. “They’re going to be able to tell us if this is an M-type asteroid that we expect to see or nor,” Gialich said, including understanding what the surface of the asteroid is like to prepare for future missions. “That’s probably the most fundamental thing. We need to land on this asteroid and be able to determine what those PGMs are,” he said. Brokkr-2 won’t land on the asteroid, but instead fly by at a distance of about one kilometer. He declined to name the asteroid that the company has selected for this mission, saying the company considered that information proprietary. “I don’t think we’ll ever release the asteroids we’re going to publicly,” he said. “We don’t really see a need to release the name of it, so why incur risk by releasing the name of it?” The company did disclose that the asteroid they selected is less than 100 meters in diameter. Jose Acain, co-founder and chief technology officer of AstroForge, said it would take about 11 months to reach the asteroid. The overall mission will last two years, with spacecraft testing continuing after the flyby to simulate a projected round-trip mission. If the IM-2 launch slips, Acain said there are backup launch opportunities that extend into April 2024 that would allow them to reach the asteroid. That flexibility is important to the company, since if they find a promising asteroid they need the ability to go back to mine it. “We want to make sure is that, if we go to an asteroid and we prove these things out, that we can go back to the asteroid on subsequent flights,” Gialich said. “If we prove there’s PGMs, it’d be stupid if we couldn’t go back again.” The first two missions are funded by a $13 million seed round that AstroForge raised in May 2022 . The company has stayed small, Gialich said, with about 15 employees. It has outsourced much of the work on the missions to companies like OrbAstro while it focuses on the development of instruments and its refining technology. “We’re going to need to raise a little bit more capital in order to get all the way to the mining mission,” he said. He declined to say how much money the company thought it needed beyond it being “totally reasonable” even in a market where there is less capital available. He added the company has not generated any revenue and did not expect to do so before actually mining an asteroid. That was a deliberate choice, he said, to set the company apart from past asteroid mining ventures such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries that he believes got distracted by looking for nearer-term revenue opportunities in other fields, like Earth observation or satellite components. “We are a company that is 100% mission-driven on mining an asteroid and there are no intermediate revenue streams,” he said. “We either mine an asteroid or we fail.”
NASA officials met last week to review its overall exploration architecture, although it was unclear exactly what they agreed to and when they will make it public. Agency leaders met at the Kennedy Space Center for what NASA calls the Architecture Concept Review, a meeting linked to the development of 63 objectives for its lunar and Mars exploration plans released in September. “Today is the start of NASA’s Architecture Concept Review, where we’ll gain concurrence on our Moon to Mars architecture amongst our colleagues, enabling us to work toward the same plan,” tweeted Catherine Koerner, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, on the first day of the meeting Jan. 23. NASA officials had previously discussed developing an architecture designed to achieve those objectives. “We have a founding principle to architect from the right and execute from the left,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said during a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in September where the agency released the updated list of objectives. That meant, she explained, developing an architecture to meet a desired goal and use that to guide work on existing programs. Koerner provided several updates over three days about the review, but focused on the process rather than its contents. “Yesterday and today, we worked on resolving comments to the document from our colleagues – again coming to consensus to ensure we are recommending an architecture that follows what we want to achieve at the Moon and Mars that everyone can see themselves in,” she tweeted Jan. 25. The document she was referring to was the Architecture Definition Document, which she described as one that linked the exploration objectives “with functions needed and use cases.” Other NASA officials mentioned the review and document development in other settings. The document will “completely define what this architecture is going to look like, how we evolve it,” said Debbie Korth, Orion deputy program manager at the Johnson Space Center, during a panel discussion at the AIAA SciTech Forum Jan. 23. That evolution, she said, would go from early Artemis landing missions, where two astronauts will spend up to six and a half days on the lunar surface, to later, more advanced missions “for proving out the things that we would want to do when we go to Mars.” At a Jan. 25 briefing about the upcoming Crew-6 commercial crew mission to the International Space Station, Kathy Lueders, associate administrator for space operations, noted she participated in part of the review. “I’m sure there’s going to be lots of opportunities within NASA and our international partners to be future collaboration as we’re making these really critical steps to go to moon and to prepare ourselves to go to Mars,” she said. However, she didn’t go into any details about the meeting or its outcome. “I don’t want to give any spoiler alerts to further news that Jim Free will be bringing out over the next few months,” she said, referring to the agency’s associate administrator for exploration systems development. Other NASA officials offered few insights about both the outcome of the review and when it might be shared with the public. Korth said that there will “very soon” be public documents to discuss the architecture and how they support the objectives. That review will happen annually, she added, to incorporate new developments. “This isn’t a one-and-done architecture review.” However, she and other NASA officials on the conference panel said they didn’t know when any documents linked to the architecture review will be made public. “They’re poring through the comments. It depends on how much they get through this week and what’s left to get resolved,” she said. “We still have more updates to make to the document before we release it publicly, but this review was a critical step to getting a baseline architecture,” Koerner tweeted .
European officials say they’re making progress to achieve “strategic autonomy” in space traffic management by building up both capabilities and policy. During a session at the 15th European Space Conference Jan. 25, representatives from the European Commission, European Space Agency and industry said they were making progress in building up European abilities in space situational awareness (SSA) and space traffic management (STM), reducing reliance on the United States. “There’s a high political awareness on the need to achieve strategic autonomy on SSA and STM in Europe,” said Pascal Faucher, chair of the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EUSST) partnership. EUSST is a group of 15 E.U. member states that have agreed to combine national capabilities to improve efforts to track space objects and provide warnings of potential collisions. It opened its collision avoidance service worldwide as of the beginning of the year. The EUSST grew to 15 members in November from just seven. The previous seven members of the consortium — France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain — were joined by Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Latvia, the Netherlands and Sweden. “Member states in the partnership are investing more and more, at the national level, on SSA capabilities,” he said. “We see a proliferation of national investment plans that invest a lot on SSA.” Most of those national capabilities come from defense capabilities. Faucher said that about 95% of the SSA data in the EUSST system comes from military sensors. The partnership, though, is looking to buy commercial data. “We consider that commercial sensors are strategic for us. They also contribute to reinforce our strategic autonomy, and what we would like to do is rely more and more on this vibrant and energized commercial industry and startup ecosystem in Europe.” The E.U. held a “startup forum” devoted to SSA last November, with more than 200 participants. That led to three working groups that will help craft future calls for commercial data. One challenge for EUSST and related efforts is funding. “We are lacking budget,” Faucher said. “We need to be smart and exploit synergies at maximum between civil and defense.” The multiannual financial framework (MFF) agreement that funds E.U. space activities from 2021 to 2027 provides 442 million euros shared by SSA activities as well as government satellite communications, or GOVSATCOM. That is a small fraction of the funding allocated to two flagship E.U. space programs, the Galileo satellite navigation constellation and Copernicus Earth observation system. “The budget in this MFF for STM/SSA is not the biggest one of the space program,” said Christoph Kautz, deputy director for innovation and outreach for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space. “Now, with the increasing importance of SSA and STM, I’m hopeful that the next MFF will be positive for this policy domain.” In the meantime, Kautz said the E.U. was moving forward on a new space law that will feature provisions related to STM and space sustainability. That will include “rules of the road” regarding collision avoidance as well as limiting the creation of debris. He didn’t give a timeline for enacting the law, but noted that the commission was just starting work on an impact assessment that is required before the law can be considered. Plans for improved European STM capabilities and regulations are welcomes by users. “What I heard from the commission and the EUSST consortium is music to my ears,” said Rolf Densing, ESA director of operations. “We have always been relying on data we get from the U.S., collision avoidance data. It’s good to hear today that there’s actually progress being made.” He said ESA could become a customer for European companies providing SSA services. “It might be a good idea to use public funding to enable such companies to provide commercial services. ESA, I’m sure, would be happy and proud to be an anchor customer to them.” One European STM company, though, said that having government organizations as anchor customers is not enough. “There will be no ecosystem if we do not have private companies involved,” said Chiara Manfletti, chief operating officer of NeuraSpace. “We need private companies to go out and create the commercial market that today does not exist.” She cited as an example the partnership of her company with Ienai Space and Endurosat announced earlier in the month to demonstrate collision avoidance technologies . She said she was looking forward to efforts by the EUSST partnership to improve SSA capabilities in Europe. “I want to stop relying on CDMs coming from the U.S.,” she said, referring to conjunction data messages that warn of potential close approaches. “Today this is what we ingest to be able to provide services to our customers. I want to ingest CDMs coming from EUSST.”
The Commerce Department has outlined the services it proposes to offer free of charge to satellite operators from the space traffic management system it is developing. In a request for information (RFI) published Jan. 26 , the department’s Office of Space Commerce listed what services it anticipates offering through a “basic” space safety service and those more advanced services that will not be included. The Office of Space Commerce plans to provide those services through a system called the Traffic Management System for Space (TraCSS), previously known as the open architecture data repository. The office is developing TraCSS to eventually take over providing civil space traffic management services, such as warnings of potential collisions, from the Defense Department as outlined in Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018. The RFI lists 14 services that the office expects to offer through TraCSS as part of the free basic service to satellite operators. They include warnings of potential collisions, launch collision avoidance screenings and forecasting object reentries. Many of those services are provided by the Defense Department now, although the RFI indicates that it will offer additional or improved services beyond what is currently available. One example is what the Office of Space Commerce calls “more advanced approaches” for calculating the probability of a collision based on the dynamics of each close approach. The RFI lists nine additional services that it does not plan to include in the basic service. That includes combining data from multiple providers into a “single, higher-fidelity product” for calculating potential conjunctions, satellite breakup detecting and tracking, and providing optimized recommendations for satellite maneuvers to avoid conjunctions. The Office of Space Commerce outlined its TraCSS plans to get feedback from both satellite operators and companies that provide commercial space traffic management services. The RFI will be open for comments through Feb. 27. The office is seeking input on whether the proposed basic service meets or exceeds what the Defense Department offers now, and if it should include additional capabilities. It also asks if the proposed basic service would adversely affect companies providing commercial services. While Space Policy Directive 3 directed the Commerce Department to provide a basic space traffic management service at no charge, it did not define what constituted basic. “That line is a little murky,” Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said of the difference between basic and advanced services in a talk at the AMOS Conference in September . “We don’t want to compete with young companies. On the other hand, we do want to provide a forward-leaning, technologically superior product to what they’re receiving today.” He noted in that speech that the feedback he had received from satellite operators is that they wanted his office to improve upon what the Defense Department provides. “The central message that we’re getting from the commercial sector is, ‘Richard, if all you’re going to do is give us what we’re already getting from the Defense Department, we think that’s not enough,’” he said. The Office of Space Commerce is working to establish TraCSS as low Earth orbit becomes more congested. The latest incident took place Jan. 27 according to LeoLabs , a company that provides space situational awareness services through a network of radars tracking objects in LEO. The company said that two defunct objects, the Cosmos 2361 spacecraft and an SL-8 rocket body, nearly collided at an altitude of 984 kilometers. LeoLabs estimated the distance of closest approach at just six meters, with an error margin of a few tens of meters. “Had the SL-8 rocket body and Cosmos 2361 collided, it likely would’ve resulted in thousands of new debris fragments that would have persisted for decades,” the company stated. Because both objects were defunct, there was no ability for them to avoid a collision even if given advance notice by a government or commercial space traffic management system. “It’s imperative that we not only focus on collision avoidance but also debris mitigation and debris remediation,” LeoLabs stated. “This requires investing in debris removal technologies and missions.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk Global is close to completing a ground station in Hawaii as part of plans to connect its growing constellation of small satellites to standard smartphones this spring. The Ka-band ground station is needed to route cellular signals Lynk’s satellites pick up from low Earth orbit (LEO) back to a mobile operator partner’s terrestrial network. It is the first of dozens of ground stations the venture plans to deploy worldwide to reduce latency and improve the resiliency of its network, which would enable telcos to keep customers connected outside cellular coverage. “We’re in the middle of building it and we think we’ll get it built in February and test it out,” Lynk CEO Charles Miller said in an interview, “and that’ll be in line to support our commercial service.” Lynk currently has three of its pizza-boxed shaped commercial satellites in orbit and has Federal Communications Commission permission to operate 10 of them in LEO. However, while Lynk has testing licenses in more than 20 countries, the company requires a mobile operator partner to request and secure landing rights from their local regulator before commercial services can start. And although Lynk has demonstrated satellite links with mobile operators for sending and receiving data, Miller said it still needs to test services across the various interconnections embedded within nationwide telecoms infrastructure. Demonstrations to date have also been limited to the S-band antennas on Lynk’s satellites while its Ka-band ground station is under construction. Higher frequency Ka-band spectrum enables faster connections than S-band, Miller said, “but technically it’s the same technology, except it’s a different feeder link.” Putting aside the potential for technical hiccups with Lynk’s new ground station and interconnection demonstrations, he said the venture is on track to start facilitating text messaging, emergency alerts, and other basic connectivity services commercially from April. According to Miller, landing rights for mobile operator partners is the easy part. “We’re confident they’ll get it,” he said, “we’ve been rolling up all this testing data proving we’re doing [this] without causing harmful interference in a country — so it’s just what’s next in line.” Funding expansion Virginia-based Lynk hopes to deploy three more satellites in late spring around the time of its planned commercial debut. Depending on their latitude, Miller said six satellites would be enough for users to send and receive text messages around nine times a day. Around 300 satellites would enable a continuous service near the Canadian border — needed for supporting voice calls, although this would eat into the network’s capacity for other services — while about 1,000 would be required for a continuous connection near the equator. SpaceX launched Lynk’s latest two satellites in Jan. 3 with a deployer mechanism the startup developed that it says could deploy six at a time. Miller said the company is searching for funds to book SpaceX again for its next batch of three satellites. “If somebody came in quickly and wanted to invest to fund the next three satellites to go from three to six, we’re open to that,” he said, adding that the company is talking “to a few investors” about this. In parallel, Lynk is “deep in negotiations” with “four major investors” about a much larger funding round. “Three of these are strategic partners,” Miller said. Lynk is not the only company seeking a piece of an emerging market that was thrown into the spotlight last year with the launch of Apple’s satellite-enabled iPhone 14. Some, like Lynk, plan to connect unmodified smartphones already in circulation, while others are developing chipsets for new handset models. Satellite operator Iridium unveiled its highly anticipated entry into the market Jan. 5 in a partnership with chipmaker Qualcomm. They expect Android smartphones capable of connecting to Iridium’s constellation to be released in the second half of this year.
SpaceX could attempt a long-awaited static-fire test of all 33 Raptor engines in its Super Heavy booster as soon as next week, one of the final technical milestones before an orbital launch attempt, a company executive said Jan. 27. Speaking on a panel at the AIAA SciTech Forum, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability, said the company was preparing for the test at its Starbase test site at Boca Chica, Texas. “If things go well, maybe next week we’ll have a 33-engine static fire,” he said. “We still have a lot of work in front of us to get there and it’s not easy.” He didn’t elaborate on the work remaining before the test and the panel, devoted to examining the relationship of science fiction with aerospace, did not return to the topic. However, the company was starting to get ready for the static fire after a Jan. 23 test called a wet dress rehearsal where both the Super Heavy booster, called Booster 7, and the Starship upper stage, named Ship 24, were loaded with propellants and taken through a practice countdown. SpaceX destacked the Starship from the Super Heavy Jan. 25, a move that the company said was part of preparations for the static fire. “Launch and catch tower destacked Ship 24 from Booster 7 on the orbital pad today ahead of the Booster’s static fire test,” the company tweeted . According to Cameron County, Texas, where Boca Chica is located, there are road closures planned for Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 on the highway leading to Starbase, although the county did not disclose the reason for the closures other than “non-flight testing.” It is not uncommon, though, for such closures to be canceled on short notice depending on SpaceX’s plans. A closure planned for Jan. 30 was canceled Jan. 27. Both the company and NASA, which is monitoring Starship test activities given the vehicle’s use in the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign, had identified both the wet dress rehearsal and the 33-engine static-fire test as two major remaining milestones before the vehicle is ready, at least technically, for an orbital launch. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration before it can conduct a launch. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted earlier in the month that he thought the company could be ready for an orbital launch as soon as late February, with March “highly likely.” However, SpaceX has missed past schedule estimates he has offered on Starship’s first orbital flight. First launches of new vehicle are inherently risky, a concern magnified by the sheer scale of Starship. Gerstenmaier, while not directly addressing the specific risks of a Starship launch on the panel, noted that all launches carry some degree of risk. “Every launch has a high risk associated with it. I don’t fear the failure, but what are we going to learn from this launch and are we taking this risk for a certain benefit?” he said. “So, I trade that benefit of what we’re going to get out of this activity versus the cost of doing the activity, and what is the potential for learning.” Starship is essential not just for NASA’s plans to return humans to the Moon but also SpaceX’s deployment its second-generation Starlink constellation and, ultimately, sending humans to Mars. “We’re going to try and take that vision, that future vision we’ve seen in science fiction,” Gerstenmaier said, “and we’re going to try to turn it into reality.”
L3Harris announced Jan. 26 it delivered the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3) to the U.S. Air Force and the spacecraft is now undergoing final tests in preparation for a planned launch in late 2023 . NTS-3 is an experiment funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory that will broadcast positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals from geostationary Earth orbit. The goal is to demonstrate next-generation PNT technologies for the U.S. military and provide an alternative to GPS. The satellite is now going through a series of tests at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and will soon head to the Air Force’s Benefield Anechoic Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, California, for radio frequency testing. This will be the first radio frequency tests of the new PNT signals to be demonstrated by NTS-3, AFRL said Jan. 26 in a news release. The 1,250-kilogram satellite was built by L3Harris under a $84 million contract awarded in 2018 by AFRL. The Air Force plans to launch it on the USSF-106 mission , projected to be the first national security launch by United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket. AFRL and MITRE Corp. developed a reprogrammable software-defined receiver that will allow users to receive both legacy GPS and the new NTS-3 signals. Parsons Corp. is developing the ground system. Once in orbit, NTS-3 will operate independently of GPS. AFRL said the new signal technology and advanced waveforms will make it more difficult for adversaries to jam or spoof. The Air Force designated it a “ Vanguard ” program which gives it greater visibility and attention. L3Harris built NTS-3 on a Northrop Grumman ESPAStar commercial bus. If the experiment is successful, the Air Force may decide to transition some of the NTS-3 payload and signal processing technology to GPS, and might also consider buying more satellites to augment the GPS constellation, which is deployed in medium Earth orbit. About 20 NTS-3 satellites would be needed to provide global PNT coverage, the Air Force estimated. 
Christopher Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris Technologies, said Jan. 27 regulators continue to review the company’s proposed $4.7 billion acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne and expects the merger to close in 2023. L3Harris, headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, is a global defense and aerospace firm with more than $17 billion in annual revenue. In December it announced an agreement to buy Aerojet Rocketdyne, a California-based manufacturer of rocket engines and propulsion systems for space vehicles, ballistic missiles and military tactical weapons. During a fourth-quarter earnings cal l, Kubasik said the company has been answering questions from Federal Trade Commission antitrust regulators. He said L3Harris executives have met with Pentagon officials to address questions on the acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne and its potential impact on defense programs. Kubasik did not comment on a recent letter sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to block the transaction. The FTC last year blocked Lockheed Martin’s proposed $4.4 billion bid for Aerojet Rocketdyne, arguing that the combination would give Lockheed — a major supplier of tactical missiles — the ability to “cut off other defense contractors from the critical components they need to build competing missiles.” L3Harris said it does not expect to face these same challenges because the combination with Aerojet would be a “ horizontal move ” rather than a vertical integration of a missile manufacturer and a key supplier of propulsion systems. If the acquisition is approved, Kubasik said, there are no plans to close major facilities but he estimates about $50 million in overhead cost savings during the first year. “We both have offices in D.C. We both have offices in Huntsville. There’s some low hanging fruit there,” he said. This would be L3Harris’ second of two back-to-back acquisitions. Earlier this month the company closed a nearly $2 billion purchase of Viasat’s tactical data links business. “We got TDL done in 92 days, and the integration is already underway, so we can focus on getting Aerojet Rocketdyne approved, and then start the integration,” said Kubasik. “I don’t foresee us doing any acquisitions for a couple of years, as you would imagine,” he told analysts. “There’s some non-core assets that we’re going to sell, and we’re going to use those proceeds to bring down our debt over the next few years.”
The U.S. has sanctioned a Chinese small satellite manufacturer for allegedly supplying Russia’s Wagner Group with radar satellite imagery of Ukraine to support its combat operations. Changsha Tianyi Space Science and Technology Research Institute, also known as Spacety, and its Luxembourg-based subsidiary are among a number of entities hit by sanctions as part of a move against the private paramilitary organization Wagner Group. The Treasury Department announced sanctions targeting Wagner Group Jan. 26, designating it as a transnational criminal organization. Spacety provided synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery orders of locations in Ukraine to Terra Tech, a Russia-based technology firm, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. “These images were gathered in order to enable Wagner combat operations in Ukraine,” the statement reads. “Today’s expanded sanctions on Wagner, as well as new sanctions on their associates and other companies enabling the Russian military complex, will further impede Putin’s ability to arm and equip his war machine,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen said in a statement . Spacety manufactures small satellites and is based in Changsha, Hunan province, with offices in Beijing and Luxembourg. It was founded in 2016 by former employees of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is also working with the 38th institute of the giant state-owned enterprise China Electronics Technology Group (CETC) to build a 96-satellite “ Tianxian ” SAR constellation. Spacety has so far launched two small C-band SAR imagery satellites, namely Hisea-1 in December 2020 and Chaohu-1 in February 2022, the latter for the Tianxian project. Its latest satellite, Beiyou-1 (BUPT-1), was launched Jan. 15 and developed for the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and also carried science payloads for the academic Tiange astrophysics project. Spacety has been looking to work with companies all around the world, even considering launching on Indian rockets to allow it to work with partners restricted from flying on Chinese launchers. China and Russia have developed closer relations in recent years. China has attempted to act in a neutral role following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and previous reports suggest it has been adhering to U.S. and European sanctions imposed on Russia. China last year omitted any mention of Russia when presenting its lunar exploration plans as open for cooperation at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris, despite Russia being a partner in the planned International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project. China has raised concerns over the use of U.S. commercial satellite constellations in the Ukraine conflict, including communications via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites but also imagery from companies such as Maxar. The People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China’s military forces, ran a commentary ( Chinese ) in April 2022, noting that companies such as Maxar and Black Sky provided satellite imagery of Russian troop movements to Ukraine. The commentary claims the U.S. has in recent years been “promoting the construction of so-called ‘space resilience’, attempting to blur the boundary between military and civilian spheres,” bringing commercial entities and the general public into the space arms race in order to strengthen its dominant position in space.
As NASA prepares to launch another commercial crew mission with a Russian cosmonaut on board, the agency says it has yet to work out an agreement with Roscosmos on future crew swaps. At a Jan. 25 briefing, agency officials said they are moving ahead with plans to launch the Crew-6 Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station on Feb. 26 at 2:07 a.m. Eastern. The spacecraft will deliver to the station NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. Fedyaev will be the second Russian cosmonaut to fly on Crew Dragon, after Anna Kikina, who launched on Crew-5 in October 2022 and will return from the station in early March. Those flights were enabled by a seat barter agreement completed in July 2022 that also allowed American astronauts to fly on Soyuz spacecraft. NASA had long sought what it called “integrated crews” on visiting vehicles to ensure that there would be both Americans and Russians on the station in the event either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles were unavailable for an extended period. At the time of the announcement, NASA said the agreement covered the flights of Kikina and Fedyaev on Crew Dragon and NASA astronauts Frank Rubio and Loral O’Hara on Soyuz. Rubio launched on Soyuz MS-22 in September 2022, but damage to that spacecraft in December will extend his stay , along with his two Russian crewmates, as Roscosmos will replace it with an uncrewed Soyuz MS-23 launching Feb. 20. That will delay the flight of O’Hara, who had been originally scheduled to launch in March with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, likely until the fall on Soyus MS-24. However, NASA managers said the agency has not finalized plans yet for future integrated crews. “Right now we’re still working with Roscosmos on the swap in the fall of this year,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager. “We’re not finalized yet on the fall, but we’re continuing to work in that direction.” He and others said they want to continue to exchange seats between Soyuz and commercial crew missions. “Integrated crew, and that integrated crew strategy and planning, helped us really be able to work on having the most robust strategy possible” to deal with the Soyuz MS-22 problem, said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations. At a separate briefing Jan. 25, Bowen, commander of Crew-6, endorsed continued use of integrated crews. “I think it’s an advantage for all of us.” Busy mission Crew-6 is scheduled to spend six months at the ISS. A full schedule of research activities is planned, as well as spacewalks near the end of their stay to install a final set of new solar panels for the station. Crew-6 will also see a high cadence of visiting vehicles. That will start, Montalbano said, with a cargo Dragon mission, SpaceX CRS-27, scheduled to launch about 12 days after Crew-6, a schedule Montalbano said could slip if there are delays in the return of Crew-5. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo mission, NG-19, will follow in early April. That will be followed by two crewed missions making short-term visits. The crewed flight test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, with NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, is currently scheduled to launch in mid-April. The Starliner crew capsule was mated to its service module last week in Florida. “We’re really looking forward” to Starliner, said Bowen. Having two companies able to transport astronauts to the station “will change the way we look how we fly to space.” Later in the second quarter will feature a visit by Ax-2, the second private astronaut mission by Axiom Space. NASA said Jan. 20 that it and the other ISS partners had approved the crew for that mission, which will be commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson with an Axiom customer, John Shoffner, serving as pilot. The NASA statement did not disclose the other two people flying on Ax-2, stating only that those two mission specialists “will be announced later.” They are widely believed to be astronauts from Saudi Arabia under a deal Axiom Space and the Saudi Space Commission announced in September 2022 . A NASA official confirmed at a November committee meeting that Saudi astronauts would fly on Ax-2 and had already started training . Bowen said he and the Crew-6 crew had talked with Whitson and Shoffner about the upcoming Ax-2 mission. “We think it’s going to be a great opportunity, a great flight when they get to visit,” he said. The Ax-2 mission will spend about a week at the station. “They have a great plan for their mission and we’ll do what we can to support them.” Another SpaceX cargo Dragon will follow Ax-2, delivering solar arrays. Hoburg said it will take two or three spacewalks to install that final pair of arrays that will boost the station’s power. “We’re going to be busy,” Bowen said. “We’re going to be tired, but it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
TAMPA, Fla. — After recently investing in Spain’s largest reforestation project, Madrid-based operator Hispasat hopes to use a satellite SpaceX is launching next month to support other sustainability projects across Latin America. Hispasat announced last week it had bought a 10.85% stake in Sylvestris, a sustainability-focused subsidiary of Spanish energy and petrochemical company Repsol. Sylvestris’ Green Engine project seeks to offset carbon dioxide emissions produced by industrials such as Repsol — and Spanish power company Red Eléctrica which owns Hispasat — by reforesting burned or wasted land. While financial details of the investment were not disclosed, Hispasat chief strategy and transformation officer Ana Molina said it is “a multi-million” dollar deal that reinforces the operator’s commitment to Spain’s rural areas. Hispasat launched a 100 megabit per second wholesale broadband service throughout the Spanish territory as part of this drive in 2021, Molina said. Through Green Engine, the operator aims to provide connectivity and solutions for monitoring remote environments outside terrestrial networks, including measuring the carbon that trees absorb and protecting them from fires. Green Engine “also represents a great opportunity to be at the state-of-the-art in the development of solutions applied to these environments,” Molina added, which “can be exported to other similar projects and to other regions.” SpaceX is slated to launch Hispasat’s latest geostationary satellite, the 4,500-kilogram Thales Alenia Space-built Amazonas Nexus, Feb. 5 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Molina said the Ku-band spacecraft, which also has Ka-band feeder links for telemetry and control, is designed to offer “advanced connectivity services” over both American continents, Greenland, and North Atlantic transportation routes. Using broadband and narrowband, Hispasat said the satellite could support a mix of sensor devices for monitoring remote forests, including surveillance cameras. “Therefore, throughout its lifetime it will be able to offer [sustainability-focused] services in regions of interest to Repsol or Hispasat, such as Latin America,” she said. The majority of Hispasat’s revenues come from the Americas, mainly Latin America, where the company is also seeing growing demand from government and commercial aviation customers. Hispasat’s push into sustainability projects is part of a strategy forged after its 2019 sale to Red Eléctrica to become a satellite solutions provider, instead of just a capacity wholesaler. The strategy in 2021 saw Hispasat take over the management and signal transport business of Media Networks Latin America, a multimedia-focused subsidiary of Spanish telco Telefónica that uses Hispasat’s satellites to provide TV services. In 2022, Hispasat snapped up Spain-based managed services provider AXESS Networks to bolster solutions for corporate customers in Latin America. Hispasat also last year purchased the fifth of its Brazil-based Hispamar subsidiary that it didn’t already own in another push into the region, which is becoming increasingly competitive as multiple operators plot their own satellites to meet growing demand for connectivity.
A NASA asteroid smallsat mission that lost its original ride to space is considering alternative missions while also accommodating performance issues with its propulsion system. Janus was originally designed to fly two smallsats that would then fly by separate binary asteroid missions. The mission, part of a NASA planetary smallsat program called Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration, or SIMPLEx, was set to launch as a secondary payload on the Falcon Heavy launch of Psyche in 2022. However, the delay of Psyche’s launch to October 2023 meant that Janus could not fly its original trajectory to reach its original targets or others of scientific interest. NASA announced Nov. 18 that it had removed Janus from the Psyche launch to allow the mission to explore possible alternative missions. At a Jan. 25 meeting of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group, Dan Scheeres, principal investigator for Janus at the University of Colorado, said Psyche’s new trajectory with the 2023 launch was unsuitable for Janus. The spacecraft would end up going well into the main asteroid belt, sharply reducing the power available from its solar arrays. “This new launch would send our spacecraft beyond their operating envelopes in a matter of months,” he said. “Within five months, we wouldn’t have enough power to do anything. So, basically, we’d be a brick in less than five months.” When that became clear, the mission asked NASA to be demanifested from the Psyche mission, which he said NASA approved on Nov. 17. “Suddenly, we don’t have a launch,” he said. “Suddenly, everything we were designed to do is not nominally achievable.” The spacecraft, which Scheeres described as being nearly complete and tested, are being placed in storage while the project team considers alternative missions. One intriguing possibility is to send one or both Janus spacecraft to Apophis before that near Earth asteroid makes a close approach to the Earth in April 2029. That asteroid is also the target of the extended mission for OSIRIS-REx, which will fly by Earth after returning samples from the asteroid Bennu in September, allowing it to rendezvous with Apophis shortly after the asteroid goes by Earth. He said NASA appears interested in that alternative mission, and the mission is looking for potential rideshare launch opportunities that would enable it. Janus could launch as late as early 2028 and arrive at Apophis before its April 2029 Earth flyby. The mission is also dealing with an issue with the propulsion system used on the spacecraft. In presentations to NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee and at a town hall session during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in December, Lori Glaze, NASA planetary science division director, mentioned unspecified problems with the propulsion system that had not previously been disclosed. She suggested those issues could have prevented Janus from carrying out its original mission or restrict alternative missions. “The certainty with which we could execute the mission is in question,” she said at the AGU town hall. “The risk posture for SIMPLEx missions like Janus is that they are high-risk and low-cost, with the intention of proving out new technologies. For smallsats in particular, there are few flight-proven propulsion systems currently available,” Lockheed Martin spokesperson Lauren Duda told SpaceNews. “In Janus’ case, the full performance envelope of Janus’ novel electric propulsion system could not be verified in ground testing.” Scheeres said that Janus changed its propulsion system between proposal submission and selection when it became clear to the team that the original vendor could not deliver. The project switched vendors and passed a series of reviews, including a critical design review, with the new thruster. He did not identify the companies that provided either the original propulsion system or the new one. Those reviews did not address all the concerns about the new thruster, and the project developed a test program for it that featured a goal of firing the thruster for 2,000 hours in a test chamber. The test stopped after 1,350 hours because of what he described as “specific issues with the test setup and operation” and not necessarily because of a problem with the thruster itself. He said that NASA instructed the Janus project that any alternative missions for Janus will have to address the potentially limited lifetime of the thruster. Potential trajectories for an Apophis flyby include those that fit within the thruster’s tested lifetime. Glaze said in December that she instructed the Janus team to use the funding left from its original award to look at alternative missions, but it was unclear how much NASA would be willing to spend on a different mission. The SIMPLEx awards NASA made in 2019 for Janus and two other smallsats, EscaPADE and Lunar Trailblazer, had cost caps of $55 million, although Lunar Trailblazer’s cost has grown by more than 30% since then because of changes in launch vehicles and other spacecraft issues. Scheeres, despite the difficulties, remained optimistic about launching Janus on an alternative mission. “We’re not dead yet,” he said.
The U.S. has sanctioned a Chinese small satellite manufacturer for allegedly supplying Russia’s Wagner Group with radar satellite imagery of Ukraine to support its combat operations. Changsha Tianyi Space Science and Technology Research Institute, also known as Spacety, and its Luxembourg-based subsidiary are among a number of entities hit by sanctions as part of a move against the private paramilitary organization Wagner Group. The Treasury Department announced sanctions targeting Wagner Group Jan. 26, designating it as a transnational criminal organization. Spacety provided synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery orders of locations in Ukraine to Terra Tech, a Russia-based technology firm, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. “These images were gathered in order to enable Wagner combat operations in Ukraine,” the statement reads. “Today’s expanded sanctions on Wagner, as well as new sanctions on their associates and other companies enabling the Russian military complex, will further impede Putin’s ability to arm and equip his war machine,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen said in a statement . Spacety manufactures small satellites and is based in Changsha, Hunan province, with offices in Beijing and Luxembourg. It was founded in 2016 by former employees of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is also working with the 38th institute of the giant state-owned enterprise China Electronics Technology Group (CETC) to build a 96-satellite “ Tianxian ” SAR constellation. Spacety has so far launched two small C-band SAR imagery satellites, namely Hisea-1 in December 2020 and Chaohu-1 in February 2022, the latter for the Tianxian project. Its latest satellite, Beiyou-1 (BUPT-1), was launched Jan. 15 and developed for the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and also carried science payloads for the academic Tiange astrophysics project. Spacety has been looking to work with companies all around the world, even considering launching on Indian rockets to allow it to work with partners restricted from flying on Chinese launchers. China and Russia have developed closer relations in recent years. China has attempted to act in a neutral role following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and previous reports suggest it has been adhering to U.S. and European sanctions imposed on Russia. China last year omitted any mention of Russia when presenting its lunar exploration plans as open for cooperation at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris, despite Russia being a partner in the planned International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project. China has raised concerns over the use of U.S. commercial satellite constellations in the Ukraine conflict, including communications via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites but also imagery from companies such as Maxar. The People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China’s military forces, ran a commentary ( Chinese ) in April 2022, noting that companies such as Maxar and Black Sky provided satellite imagery of Russian troop movements to Ukraine. The commentary claims the U.S. has in recent years been “promoting the construction of so-called ‘space resilience’, attempting to blur the boundary between military and civilian spheres,” bringing commercial entities and the general public into the space arms race in order to strengthen its dominant position in space.
Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and urged him to reverse the Air Force’s decision to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters, the senators said in a joint statement Jan. 26. “We met with Secretary Austin today and agreed with DoD that politics should have no role in the Space Command basing decision process,” they said in the statement. The meeting took place three days after Bennet voted against confirming Brendan Owens as assistant secretary of defense for energy and installations because Austin repeatedly ignored his request for a meeting about the Space Command basing decision. In a tweet Jan. 23, Bennet said he would “consider holds on other Pentagon nominees until a meeting takes place.” The senators did not disclose what was discussed with Austin or whether Austin is even considering overruling the Air Force’s decision made in the final days of the Trump administration to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. A DoD official told SpaceNews Jan. 26 that the department “is engaging” with Colorado lawmakers but did not provide details on what is being discussed. The basing decision has become a drawn-out political battle. Immediately after former Air Force secretary Barbara Barrett announced the selection of Redstone Arsenal as the future home of U.S. Space Command, pushback began from Colorado lawmakers, who requested that the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General review the decision-making process. Neither the GAO nor the OIG found anything improper with the decision process. An environmental assessment by the Department of the Air Force said the proposed relocation would have “no significant impacts on the human or natural environment.” Austin two years ago said he stood behind the Air Force’s decision. Bennet and Hickenlooper, both Democrats, told Austin that he should review the circumstances of the basing decision. “Over the last two years, investigations revealed that senior military leaders identified Peterson Space Force Base as their top choice for Space Command’s headquarters because it will reach full operational capability faster than any other location, cost less, and minimize attrition and disruption to the mission,” they said in the Jan. 26 statement. “Instead, President Trump put politics first with his abrupt decision to send U.S. Space Command to Alabama.” The relocation would affect about 1,450 personnel assigned to U.S. Space Command headquarters, as well as several hundred support contractors. The proposed headquarters would consist of approximately 464,000 square feet of office space and 402,000 square feet of vehicle parking. The United States first stood up Space Command in 1985 but merged it with U.S. Strategic Command in 2002. It was reactivated in August 2019 and provisionally located at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, pending a permanent basing decision by the Department of the Air Force. “In the face of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s saber rattling in the Pacific, national security cannot just be one of many criteria. It has to be the central priority,” the senators said. “We expressed these concerns to Secretary Austin today, and reiterated that in the best interest of our national security, Space Command must remain in Colorado.”
CHANTILLY, Va. — There is continuing interest in what role, if any, the U.S. Space Force will play in support of NASA in cislunar space or across the lunar surface. Those discussions are worth having but the service for now needs to keep its focus firmly on Earth, building the next generation of satellites for U.S. military operations, the Space Force’s top acquisition executive Frank Calvelli said Jan. 24. “I think we need to stay focused on our current missions and get those done really well,” he said at the National Security Space Association’s defense and intelligence conference. Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, oversees the Space Force’s procurement programs. “There’s been talk of what our role in cislunar space is,” he said. “That’s an important talk down the road but right now what’s important is tackling our core mission areas, and making sure the architecture is resilient, making sure the architecture is integrated so that [U.S. military operators] can use it effectively.” Integration of space systems with air, ground and maritime platforms has emerged as a major challenge for the Space Force as military forces grow more dependent on satellites for critical operations. Connecting space and terrestrial systems is what gives forces a critical advantage, Calvelli said. Calvelli identified satellite-based communications, space domain awareness, precision navigation and timing, missile warning and tracking as “core mission areas” that the Space Force has to invest in and move forward. “We have really got to take our core mission areas and transform them,” he said. His remarks are in line with comments made last year by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at an industry conference where he said going to the moon is not currently on the list of national security priorities. “I don’t see a lot of interest from a defense perspective,” Kendall said, noting that the United States today faces big space security challenges within Earth’s orbit. Calvelli’s emphasis on providing capabilities for military operations also is reflected in the recent decision to rename the Space Development Agency’s planned network of military satellites in low Earth orbit. The agency’s constellation previously named “National Defense Space Architecture” was rebranded as the “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.” Calvelli said the term “national defense” was too broad and he wanted the name to reflect SDA’s focus on providing space-based capabilities for U.S. warfighters. Experiments planned in cislunar space The Air Force, nevertheless, is supporting an experiment to study the cislunar region of outer space. The Air Force Research Laboratory plans to launch a demonstration mission to deep space in 2025 to detect and track objects near the moon that cannot be viewed optically from Earth or from satellites in traditional orbits. Within the Space Force, some argue that the service needs to prepare for possible operations in cislunar space in the next decade, particularly if China or Russia move to establish a presence on the moon to exploit material and energy resources. “The United States and China are currently leading competing multi-nation efforts to send robotics and humans to the Lunar South Pole,” wrote Captain Tyler Bates, a planner at the Space Force’s Space Operations Command.​ “Helium-3, iron, titanium, thorium, uranium, potassium, and rare earth elements also exist in significant concentrations across the lunar surface,” Bates wrote in an article published last year in the Department of the Air Force’s Journal of Strategic Airpower & Spacepower. “The United States should not cede access to this emerging economic zone of activity to nations notorious for claiming territory and resources by force or threat of force such as Russia or China,” Bates argued. To provide security in the lunar region, the Space Force would have to deploy “enabling capabilities including satellite communications, position, navigation, and timing, space domain awareness, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance space systems.”
NASA has added another asteroid flyby to its Lucy mission later this year that will provide a test of its capabilities for future encounters. NASA announced Jan. 25 that the spacecraft will fly by the small main-belt asteroid 1999 VD57 on Nov. 1. The project selected that asteroid after one scientist collaborating on the mission, Raphael Marschall of France’s Nice Observatory, compared the spacecraft’s trajectory to the orbits of 500,000 asteroids. Lucy’s current trajectory will take the spacecraft as close at 64,000 kilometers to the asteroid. The spacecraft will perform a series of maneuvers starting in May to adjust its trajectory so that it will instead pass 450 kilometers from the asteroid. Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute, said at a Jan. 25 meeting of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group that the mission team has given 1999 VD57 the provisional name of Dinkinesh. That is the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil after which the NASA mission is named. The name is pending formal approval by the International Astronomical Union. Dinkinesh is a S-type asteroid, he said, with a diameter of no more than 800 meters and comparable in size to Bennu, the near Earth asteroid visited by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. It would be the smallest main-belt asteroid that a spacecraft has flown by. While the flyby will collect images and other data about the asteroid, that is not the primary reason for the close approach. “This is a risk mitigation exercise,” Levison said, focusing on the “terminal tracking system” the spacecraft will use to lock on to the asteroid as it approaches, maximizing the data its instruments collect. That system has some heritage from past missions but has never been tested in space before. “We decided that it is beneficial to test it out as soon as we can,” he said. The flyby of Dinkinesh is in addition to another main-belt asteroid, 52246 Donaldjohanson, that it will fly by in 2025. Lucy will then fly by several Trojan asteroids at Jupiter’s distance from the sun between 2027 and 2033. The Dinkinesh flyby will also test how well it can point at a target given that one of its two large circular solar arrays has not latched into place. “We’re not exactly sure, given that the solar array is not latched, of the pointing stability characteristics of the spacecraft, so this will also help us determine that,” he said. NASA announced Jan. 19 that it was suspending efforts to fully deploy that solar array after the most recent deployment attempt in December showed only “minimal levels” of progress. The array, the agency said, was nearly fully deployed and appeared to be stable, but did not rule out additional efforts to lock it into place late next year, when the spacecraft makes another Earth flyby. Levison said that, in the December attempt, there were signs that the array was tensioning, which he said was a positive sign. “It makes us really quite confident that it is safe to fly the mission as-is,” he said. 
While Congress provided more funding than NASA requested for an asteroid mission, agency officials said it will not prevent a two-year slip in its launch. The fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill enacted in December directed NASA to spend no less than $90 million on the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to detect near Earth asteroids as part of NASA’s planetary defense efforts. NASA had requested only $39.9 million for the mission in its budget request, far less than previously projected, and said it would delay the mission’s launch from 2026 to 2028. At a Jan. 24 meeting of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said that while the additional funding was helpful, it would not allow NASA to avoid that delay. “They had a really tough budget for 2023, but, luckily, the appropriations for NEO Surveyor actually gave them an extra $50 million,” she said. “It’s not enough to put them back on schedule for a 2026 launch. We’re still looking at 2028, officially, but it’s a huge help in getting that team moving forward.” Congress passed the spending bill weeks after the mission passed a confirmation review , formally known as Key Decision Point C, allowing it to go into its next phase of development. That review formally set a target launch date of no later than June 2028 and a cost estimate of $1.2 billion. “We’re past confirmation and into Phase C,” Amy Mainzer, survey director for NEO Surveyor, said in a separate presentation at the SBAG meeting Jan. 24. “It’s really great to be able to say that.” She said that the mission is currently working towards a launch in September 2027, nine months ahead of its formal requirement. The project is making good progress on the infrared camera that the spacecraft will use to detect near Earth objects, with a goal of finding two-thirds of such asteroids at least 140 meters across in five years. Mainzer briefly addressed the budget issues NEO Surveyor faced. That included not just the cut in NASA’s 2023 budget request but also the agency’s decision in June 2022 to rescind $33 million of the $143 million appropriated in fiscal year 2022, redirecting that funding to other projects. By the end of August 2022, NASA told the project to plan to have $80-90 million in fiscal year 2023 based on the progress of congressional appropriations. “We did suffer some budget cuts, it’s true, but we’re moving on,” she said. “We did manage to make very good use of the funds that we have available this year.” Both Glaze and Mainzer addressed at the SBAG meeting another concern about the mission: its increased cost. NEO Surveyor is a version of a mission concept called NEOCam that was a finalist in NASA’s Discovery program of low-cost planet science missions, and as recently as 2019 was projected to cost no more than $600 million. The new $1.2 billion cost estimate took some in the planetary science community by surprise. “I will take ownership for that because of the delays that we put in place and some of the budget challenges that we imposed on the mission,” said Glaze. The two-year delay, she noted, addressed budget pressures in the near term but increased the mission’s overall cost by stretching it out. Mainzer looked at the big picture, noting the mission’s goal of identifying any asteroids that might pose a serious impact risk to the Earth. “This is a problem we know how to solve. How many global problems do we know how to solve that are of the order of $1 billion?” she said. “It’s an important thing to do.”
Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican representing Colorado Springs, was named chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. HASC Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), on Jan. 25 announced the committee’s seven subcommittee chairs for the 118th Congress. The strategic forces subcommittee oversees missile defense, national security space and Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs. Lamborn told SpaceNews that he has laid out several key priorities the strategic forces subcommittee will focus on this year. One is hypersonic weapons, including DoD’s development of offensive hypersonic missiles and defenses against enemies’ hypersonic weapons. “We really need to catch up with hypersonics,” said Lamborn. “China and to some extent Russia are far ahead of us … and I am not convinced that the Biden Administration has a well thought out plan to address the Chinese threat.” A second priority is Space Force acquisitions of next-generation technologies. “We need to streamline space acquisition,” he said. “A major thrust for why the Space Force was created was to streamline space acquisition and make sure the right investments are made in advanced space capabilities.” Also on Lamborn’s watch list is the Space Force’s procurement of national security launch services and efforts to develop responsive launch capabilities. “The bottom line is we need to have a robust capacity to get our assets into space every time the need arises,” he said. “So we’ll continue giving a lot of attention to that.” Lamborn said he has met several times with the new chief of the U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman. “We’re definitely working together,” he said. The subcommittee will continue to investigate options to establish a reserve component for the Space Force, which has been a “thorny issue” for the past two years, he said. “We certainly will keep looking at it.” On missile defense, Lamborn said, the focus will be on ensuring the U.S. is protected from North Korea’s long-range ballistic missiles. 
ESA’s director general says the agency does not have the budgetary capacity or the political intention to send its astronauts to China’s space station. “We are very busy supporting and ensuring our commitments and activities on the International Space Station where we have a number of international partners working together,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in response to a question from SpaceNews during an annual press briefing in Paris on Monday. “For the moment we have neither the budgetary nor the political, let’s say, green light or intention to engage in a second space station; that is participating on the Chinese space station,” Aschbacher said. ESA and China had earlier been working towards a potential visit of European astronauts to Tiangong. ESA Astronauts Samantha Cristoforetti and Matthias Maurer participated in sea survival training with 16 Chinese counterparts off the coastal city of Yantai in 2017 and had been developing Chinese language skills. A year earlier Chinese astronaut Ye Guangfu participated in ESA’s Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behavior and performance Skills (CAVES) astronaut training course. The exchanges were part of plans to eventually see European astronauts fly to China’s space station later in the 2020s. Those plans appear to have cooled in recent years, without official updates on the status of the relationship. China launched its first space station module in 2021 and completed the three-module outpost in late 2022. Officials with China’s human spaceflight agency have said they have received interest in international astronauts flying to Tiangong. ESA and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) discussed plans in a video in April 2021. The two agencies have recently cooperated at the level of ground station support for China’s Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission and communications test for the Mars Zhurong rover, have working groups in the field of Earth observation and an ESA-funded instrument will fly on Chang’e-6. Aschbacher did not address another question regarding potential ESA involvement in China’s planned International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ), a project the country established in collaboration with Russia. An ESA official participated in a Chinese-led session at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in September 2022 focused on international cooperation prospects for China’s lunar and deep space exploration activities. Russia was not mentioned during the event, hinting at the geopolitical complexities of international cooperation following the invasion of Ukraine. China has been looking to expand its international space cooperation and diplomatic footprint, with cooperation noted as a major focus in a once-every-five-year white paper released in January 2022. China last month said it would explore possibilities with an intergovernmental group formed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. HKATG of Hong Kong, a commercial space firm with links to Huawei, earlier this month announced it had reached an agreement with Djibouti on the Horn of Africa to build seven launch pads and testing facilities.
TAMPA, Fla. — U.S.-based launch services provider Spaceflight said Jan. 25 it has booked a dedicated launch in 2026 from Isar Aerospace, the German rocket developer aiming to perform the first test flight of its Spectrum vehicle this year. The mission is slated to lift off from Isar’s launchpad in Andøya, Norway, to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Their agreement also includes an option for an additional dedicated launch in 2025, which Isar chief commercial officer Stella Guillen told SpaceNews could also use a launchpad it is developing at the Guiana Space Center near Kourou, French Guiana. Spaceflight, Isar’s first U.S.-based customer, brokers ride-sharing opportunities for small satellites and has a suite of Sherpa space tugs to deliver them to fine-tuned orbits post-rocket-separation. Spectrum can carry a Sherpa orbital transfer vehicle (OTV), Spaceflight said, but a decision on whether it will be used will be made closer to launch. Multiple launch providers have helped Spaceflight facilitate missions for its customers, although so far only SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets have flown Sherpas. After SpaceX severed ties with the company last year , Spaceflight announced an agreement in August to launch its OTVs on Arianespace’s Vega launch vehicles, including its next-generation Vega C rocket. However, the need to probe Vega C’s launch failure in December has raised the prospect that Europe could be left — temporarily — without its own access to space by this summer. “We’ve seen an increased demand for flexible and affordable launch options around the globe, but especially for our European-based customers,” Spaceflight CEO Curt Blake said in a statement. Guillen said tests of its two-stage Spectrum launch vehicle “are progressing well” ahead of its first flight in the second half of 2023. Isar’s first and second missions aim to carry European payloads that were selected as part of a competition run by German space agency DLR. Five European institutions from Germany, Norway, and Slovenia were picked to launch a total seven small satellites on the inaugural flight. Spectrum’s second mission, which Guillen said could take place less than six months later, is slated to deploy 19 spacecraft from six institutional groups and four businesses across Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Spain. Both missions would carry about 150 kilograms of payload — including satellites and their deployers — to polar orbits. Spectrum is designed to deliver up to 700 kilograms to SSO and up to 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. “ After we will have successfully conducted a test flight, we are planning to ramp-up the launch cadence up to 10 launches per year in the short and middle term,” Guillen said via email. “In the long term we are working towards performing 30-40 launches per year.” Space logistics company D-Orbit hopes to fly its OTV on one of the first commercial flights after Isar’s initial two missions. The Italian company signed a deal last year to be the primary customer for an upcoming Spectrum launch to SSO. Exotrail, a French company also developing OTVs, has an agreement for multiple Spectrum missions between 2024 and 2029. Spaceflight said it has until April 2024 to take up Isar’s 2025 launch option.
Astrobotic Technologies said that it has completed testing of its Peregrine lunar lander and it ready to ship it to Cape Canaveral for launch. The company announced Jan. 25 that it completed thermal vacuum testing of its first Peregrine lander, wrapping up acceptance testing for the spacecraft. The company had previously performed electromagnetic interference testing of the lander. “Peregrine Mission One’s flight acceptance campaign was completed on schedule and exceeded expectations,” Sharad Bhaskaran, mission director for the lander, said in a company statement. “These tests ultimately proved the quality of Peregrine’s design and workmanship over the full assembly and integration campaign.” The lander, having completed testing, is back at the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters, where it will be on public display at the Moonshot Museum located there until it gets the “green light” from United Launch Alliance to send the spacecraft to Cape Canaveral for prelaunch processing. Peregrine is the primary payload on the inaugural launch of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. Neither Astrobotic nor ULA have announced a formal launch date for the mission. The rocket’s booster and Centaur upper stage arrived at Cape Canaveral on the company’s RocketShip vessel Jan. 21 from the ULA factory in Decatur, Alabama. The components were transported from the ship to ULA facilities at the Cape the next day. ULA is planning a series of tests of the hardware and associated ground systems at the Cape in the coming weeks, including a wet dress rehearsal where the rocket is filled with propellants and goes through a practice countdown. Once those tests are complete, the company plans to add payloads to the rocket and go into final launch preparations. In addition to Peregrine, the inaugural Vulcan launch, called Cert-1 by ULA, will carry two demo satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation. Those will be deployed into low Earth orbit while Peregrine is placed on a trajectory to the moon.
Rocket Lab performed its long-awaited first Electron launch from Virginia Jan. 24, placing three HawkEye 360 satellites into orbit. The Electron rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, at 6 p.m. Eastern. The two-stage Electron placed a kick stage into orbit a little more than nine minutes after liftoff. That kick stage, after a circularization burn, deployed its payloads about an hour after liftoff, although confirmation of that deployment was delayed by more than a half-hour because of a ground station problem. Electron carried three satellites for HawkEye 360, the Herndon, Virginia-based company that offers radio-frequency (RF) intelligence services. The “Cluster 6” satellites, deployed into a 550-kilometer orbit at an inclination of 40.5 degrees, will join the company’s constellation to locate and monitor terrestrial RF sources. The mission, called “Virginia Is For Launch Lovers” by Rocket Lab, was the company’s first launch from LC-2. The company’s previous 32 Electron launches took place from its Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. Rocket Lab had been working for years to set a U.S. launch site to support government and other customers who wanted to launch domestically. The company broke ground on LC-2 in October 2018 and declared the site complete in December 2019 , with plans at that time to conduct the first launch by mid-2020. However, delays in the certification of NASA-developed autonomous flight termination software pushed back that launch by years. The NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU) was finally certified in October 2022 and handed over to Rocket Lab, which integrated it into a system it called Pegasus on the Electron. Rocket Lab had planned to conduct the launch in December, but was delayed by several issues, from poor weather to range-related paperwork involving NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration that took longer to resolve than expected. The paperwork issue was particularly frustrating to Rocket Lab since it cropped up just days before a scheduled launch. “This is the first time and there’s always going to be some teething issues,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a mid-December interview. “I guess we’re just frustrated that these teething issues didn’t happen six months ago. It happened literally days before we were ready to launch.” The launch is the first of the year for Rocket Lab, which said in a November earnings call it was planning approximately 14 Electron launches in 2023 after conducting nine in 2022. The company projected that four to six of those launches would take place from Wallops, including two launches in the spring to deploy NASA’s four Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) cubesats under a task order NASA announced in November. Beck said in December that customer preference is a major factor in determining what launch site to use. HawkEye 360, for example, specifically chose to launch from Wallops since it is also based in Virginia. U.S. government agencies are also likely to use Wallops for their Electron launches. However, he said LC-1 in New Zealand would likely host most Electron launches, since the company has full control of the launch range there.
CHANTILLY, Va. — Space powers are playing cat-and-mouse games in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles above Earth. In the last few years , Russian and Chinese reconnaissance satellites have maneuvered to get a closer look at U.S. military satellites that provide critical services like early warning, intelligence and surveillance. This is a growing problem for U.S. Space Command, responsible for ensuring the safety of the nation’s satellites. A key concern is that U.S. surveillance satellites that monitor potentially hostile activities are increasingly at a disadvantage because of their limited maneuverability, said Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command. The military’s geosynchronous space situational awareness platforms ideally should be able to “maneuver without regret,” Shaw said Jan. 24 at the National Security Space Association’s defense and intelligence conference. Shaw compared a U.S. military geostationary satellite to an RVs that is sold with a full tank of gas but cannot be refilled once the fuel is consumed. “That would severely limit your options when you plan your travel,” he said. DoD’s geosynchronous satellites designed decades ago were intended to remain static and perform minimum maneuvers to preserve fuel. But now that rival nations are circling around, “we’d like to move around and look at many things in the geosynchronous sphere as much as we possibly can,” Shaw said. Not having freedom to maneuver is “constraining us in a significant way. And it’s not enabling us to do dynamic space operations the way we’d like.” Shaw said Space Command has been putting a lot of thought into this issue and is drafting requirements for future satellites to be developed by the U.S. Space Force. Some solutions already are in the works, such as deploying refueling stations in space and on-orbit servicing vehicles. Another way to address the problem is by making cheaper “commoditized” satellites that can be deployed more frequently than traditional big-ticket satellites, an initiative advocated by the head of Space Force acquisitions Frank Calvelli. “We have this new kind of requirement emerging that we hadn’t really thought through before,” Shaw said. U.S. systems ‘increasingly vulnerable’ Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said the power competition in space will only intensify, and the United States has to prepare for the possibility of anti-satellite weapon attacks. “We are not the only nation that understands the vital importance of space,” he said at the NSSA conference. “The expansion of global space services has placed more assets in orbit, which is now exponentially multiplied when we factor in our allies and competitors,” he said. “Alarmingly, we know that China and Russia are developing common space capabilities including multiple-attack options designed to deliver a whole spectrum of effects: some reversible, but some that would inflict permanent damage.” As these nations improve their space asset tracking systems, Moultrie added, “we are increasingly vulnerable in this domain.” “In order to stay ahead of our competitors and remain the undisputed leader in space,” said Moultrie, “we must modernize our architecture, both in space and on the ground to become faster, more agile, and just as importantly, more resilient.” He noted that DoD is planning a diversified space architecture that includes large and small government-owned and commercial satellites in multiple orbits. 
CHANTILLY, Va. — The era of massive satellites needs to be in the rear view mirror for the Department of Defense, the head of military space acquisitions told government and industry executives Jan. 24. Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, since taking office has been insistent that reforms are needed in satellite procurements, including the transition to smaller satellites that can be built and launched within a three-year period, compared to a decade or longer for traditional large satellites. Calvelli spoke at the National Security Space Association’s defense and intelligence conference in a fireside chat with former DoD official Doug Loverro. Echoing points he made in previous public appearances , Calvelli called for DoD to break from the past and embrace more agile ways to buy satellites in order to make U.S. systems more resilient to threats. Most space-based systems the U.S. military needs — for communications, space domain awareness, missile detection and tracking, navigation, weather and other applications — can be accomplished using small satellites, Calvelli said. “We are transforming from what’s been called ‘big juicy targets’ of the past to a more proliferated and more resilient architecture that can be counted on during times of crisis and conflict,” he said. Using commercially available satellite buses and components, DoD can build smaller spacecraft for operations in low, medium or geostationary Earth orbits, Calvelli said. “I see us building small everywhere, regardless of whether it’s LEO MEO or GEO.” Calvelli made the case that the traditional “big structures with lots of payloads on them” can be broken down into smaller satellites which would be harder for an enemy to target. That concept, also known as “disaggregation,” was advocated by some Air Force officials a decade ago but was largely rejected in favor of big satellites that, although expensive, can operate in orbit for decades. In light of recent advances in anti-satellite weapons developed by China and Russia, the Pentagon has to pivot to more resilient systems, Calvelli stressed. “I do believe that we can break apart the big behemoths in GEO and break them into smaller bite-sized chunks which is going to diversify the architecture and protect us more.” ‘Do not design new buses’ Since taking office seven months ago, Calvelli has noticed that Space Force program offices tend to design bespoke satellite buses, another practice that he wants to end. “If you need some new tech, that’s okay. But keep that development focused on the payload. Do not create new buses,” he said. There are plenty of commercially available buses to choose from, he said. “We love building new buses. We love building new bus components. We love doing new things that are already out there,” he said. “If you need to do some tech development, keep it minimal.” NRO ‘more demanding’ than DoD Before joining DoD, Calvelli spent more than three decades working on space programs at the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO builds large satellites but also has embraced smallsats built with commercial components. Calvelli said there are aspects of the NRO’s procurement culture that DoD should emulate, such as holding contractors more accountable. “I think the NRO is a much more demanding customer when dealing with industry,” he said. NRO program managers, for example, deal with problems hands-on rather than delegate to prime contractors, he said. “If there’s a problem with a subcontract or a supplier, the NRO program managers aren’t afraid to get on a plane and go to the lowest level possible.” In DoD, “we tend to rely more on the primes to do that. And we know sometimes the primes really don’t do that,” said Calvelli. “The NRO seems to be a much more demanding customer, which I really, really like and I’m trying to change that culture at the Pentagon.” A few years ago, there was growing frustration at the NRO about what Calvelli called “un-executable contracts” where contractors promised technologies they couldn’t deliver and programs were chronically late and over budget. As a result, he said, “we put out guidance where we started really evaluating cost and schedule realism” as part of the criteria for selecting proposals. Calvelli said he will “try to institutionalize doing a similar thing” at DoD.
NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will cooperate on the development and flight demonstration of a nuclear propulsion system with applications for both national security and space exploration. During a special session of the AIAA SciTech Forum Jan. 24, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the two agencies would work together on DARPA’s existing Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program to demonstrate nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), a technology that offers more efficient propulsion than conventional chemical rockets. “NASA will partner with our longtime partner, DARPA, to develop and demonstrate advanced nuclear thermal propulsion,” Nelson said in brief remarks at the conference. “Our goal is to launch and demonstrate a successful nuclear thermal engine as soon as 2027.” The partnership is governed by a non-reimbursable agreement signed by the two agencies earlier this month. NASA will be responsible for the development of the nuclear engine, with DARPA handling integration of that propulsion system into a spacecraft and launching it. “We’ve been focused on structuring with clear lines of responsibility,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy on a panel after Nelson’s announcement. NASA had been cooperating on DRACO at a lower level before this announcement. “The bottom line is that we have really strong communication,” said DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins on the panel. The teams at both agencies “will adapt as needed” over the course of the program. Neither DARPA nor NASA have disclosed details about the DRACO demonstration mission itself, using a spacecraft called X-NTRV in the agreement. Melroy said on the panel that the vehicle would operate in orbit at an altitude of at least 700 kilometers, and perhaps as high as 2,000 kilometers, to ensure that any radioactive materials would have decayed to acceptable levels before reentry. The two agencies had been separately pursuing NTP projects. DARPA started DRACO with three Phase 1 awards in April 2021 to teams led by Blue Origin, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin to work on preliminary designs of reactors and spacecraft. In May 2022, DARPA announced it was soliciting proposals for DRACO Phases 2 and 3 to develop and test the engine and perform a flight demonstration, then planned for fiscal year 2026. DARPA had not selected an awardee at the time of the NASA partnership, but Tompkins said an award could come in “a couple of months.” NASA has also been working on NTP technologies, including awards in July 2021 in cooperation with the Department of Energy to teams led by BWX Technologies, General Atomics and Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies. Those contracts, valued at $5 million each for one year, covered NTP reactor design. NASA has been pushed by Congress to invest in NTP, with appropriations bills setting aside funding for such work at levels often far above what the agency requested. NASA leadership, though, has embraced that technology more recently as critical to future human missions to Mars, a finding from a February 2021 National Academies study that called on NASA to pursue “aggressive” development of nuclear propulsion so that it would be available for a human Mars mission in the late 2030s. “The key thing is that this will allow us to evaluate the opportunity to move faster,” Melroy said of NTP, referring to its potential to shorten travel times to and from Mars because of its higher efficiency. “If we have swifter trips for humans, they are safer trips.” DARPA, and the broader national security community, is interested in NTP because of the much greater maneuverability that it offers, Tompkins said. Asked about what kinds of maneuverability, she responded, “all of the above.” DARPA has previously discussed using the technology for operations in cislunar space between the Earth and moon, an area of increasing national security interest. “Our goals are not in conflict,” Tompkins added. “We are very much looking for the same thing.”
While gloomy economic forecasts spell trouble for early-stage space firms in 2023, analysts say the industry as a whole should largely prove resilient to any downturn. Space businesses are more agile than ever in responding to changing market conditions, and governments worldwide are expected to continue underpinning growth for many of them, even as private funding sources dry up. However, even those able to weather harsh financial climates will face operational challenges and dampened growth prospects this year. 2022 was marred by economic uncertainty. Soaring inflation, supply chain disruption, energy price hikes, and other headwinds contributed to an unstable and uneven recovery for markets still battling the lingering effects of COVID-19. And forecasters are painting another year of uncertainty for 2023 as the pandemic and ongoing war in Ukraine cloud the outlook. In the U.S., which is easily the largest player in the space economy, signs of economic growth are complicated by sky-high inflation and extremely low consumer confidence. After a series of interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve to slow down the country’s runaway economy and keep the prices of goods in check, inflation has fallen from a 40-year high of 9% in June to around 7% in November — still far short of the Fed’s 2% target. Lower inflation would be good news for consumers; however, successive interest rate rises in the U.S. and elsewhere could push the macroeconomy closer to a global recession. Even if the U.S. manages to scrape through without entering a recession — technically two consecutive three-month periods of negative gross domestic product (GDP) — businesses will have to grapple with a constrained and challenging economic environment. During an economic crisis, or when interest rates are rising, investors tend to pull out of riskier projects and focus on profitable or cash-generating businesses — which “is not the case for a number of companies in the space industry today,” notes Miguel Ouellette, a principal advisor at Euroconsult. And like in other industries, small and recent businesses in the space sector are more exposed to macroeconomic declines than more established companies. The cost of borrowing money is deeply tied to how young companies are valued, and Ouellette expects their projects to be under threat if interest rates stay high. It is “highly likely” early-stage investment rounds for these companies in 2023 will be fewer in number and smaller in size than in previous years. According to Analysys Mason research director Brad Grady, pre-revenue startups are already having challenges, “especially those with overtly optimistic business plans requiring significant technology development” to create new markets with unproven business models. “Any pre or early revenue company with a high cash burn rate looking to raise money is worried right now,” Grady says, “it doesn’t matter if the company is a launch company, an antenna manufacturer,” or one just providing space-related services. There was a noticeable drop in the number of growth stage funding rounds for the space sector in the second half of 2022 and the capital they were able to raise. The challenges young space companies face can also be seen in the poor stock performance of those that listed via merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, as they trade well below their initial public offering (IPO) price. Companies developing capital-intensive, hardware-heavy business models are probably more exposed to economic slumps than firms focusing on software, according to Grady. Likewise, purely commercial space businesses are more vulnerable to a downturn than companies with an extensive pipeline of government opportunities. Not only do governments offer a more robust source of funding to private players and academia, but they also act as customers of services for several commercial initiatives. The war in Ukraine has only increased demand from governments for Earth observation, cybersecurity, and other defense-related applications championed by the space industry. China’s space advances are also encouraging governments to bolster these capabilities. Meanwhile, the increasing political importance globally of finding ways to tackle climate change is expected to be another boon for space-based technology. In stark contrast to the share prices of young space companies that went public via a SPAC, traditional space firms in the aerospace and defense sector outperformed the broader stock market in 2022. “Theoretically, when the global economy is going under uncertain times, governments tend to allocate their resources to their core functions, which sometimes lead to budgets cuts or delays for many projects,” Euroconsult’s Ouellette says. “But when it comes to global government funding within the space sector, it grew by 8% between 2020 and 2021, which indicates a certain resilience for space projects.” This growth rate could have potentially been even higher if it wasn’t for COVID-19, according to Ouellette, underlining how government stimuli and investments – or sound and flexible policies — can mitigate macroeconomic uncertainties for the private sector. Despite economic conditions that might slow the industry’s growth, Euroconsult expects the global space economy to grow nearly 75% by 2030 to reach $642 billion. That’s partly due to how quickly the U.S. economy has historically bounced back after a recession. The pandemic clogged supply chains, disrupted workforces, hampered travel, and weighed heavily on the space industry’s commercial expansion. However, it also helped accelerate the sector’s transition toward more digital solutions that save costs and makes businesses more nimble and responsive to customer demands. Efforts to virtualize ground segment hardware, for example, are helping satellite operators operate their networks remotely via third-party data centers, reducing costs while increasing their efficiency and compatibility with other cloud-based services. Phil Smith, a senior space analyst at BryceTech, believes the space industry’s capacity for reinvention is a key lesson for charting how it could respond to a macroeconomic shock. In just 60 years the industry has evolved from being confined to just two governments to consisting of a plethora of players, including over 60 countries and tens of thousands of companies. Over the decades, the industry has seen recoveries from downturns following Apollo and the Space Shuttle, commercialization following the collapse of the Soviet Union — something that effectively ended during the later Putin era, and the resurrection of low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellations from a “before-their-time” collapse in the late 1990s. The industry has recently also revisited reusability and mass production capabilities that were often talked about before, sometimes pursued, but only now proving successful commercially. “This capacity for reinvention is bolstered by a greater number of players across the globe, a situation that promotes competition, striving for excellence, and many innovative approaches to problems,” Smith adds. The proliferation of LEO broadband networks, and the commercial space industry’s general push into connectivity markets, also pose new opportunities and challenges. As more systems are digitized across all industries, Grady notes how connectivity and technology are becoming “fundamental building blocks of value in far more sectors than ever before.” Boosted by the progress made in 2022 to standardize and integrate satellite and terrestrial communications, space-based data has also never been more available in volume and price. “Digitalization is far more advanced across more levels of the space-value chain which is helping drive down unit economics and time to market,” Grady says. However, there are downsides to space becoming “less weird from the rest of the global economy,” he adds, such as the highly public cyberattacks seen amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. “The more the industry moves to adopt terrestrial practices, the more it will see terrestrial problems impacting the sector,” Grady predicts. COVID-19 showed how a wider uptake of space-based services could be a drag on the industry in markets once considered robust against terrestrial market trends, like inflight connectivity, where demand plummeted as travel restrictions came into force. Much will depend on decisions made this year by central banks, the output of global GDP, and the impacts of geopolitical tensions that can serve as a double-edged sword for the industry’s growth trajectory. Aside from business failures, challenging financial environments can lead to more mergers and acquisitions, which can improve business prospects but also dramatically change the state of play. Deal activity is already in full swing with multibillion-dollar acquisitions coming in right at the end of 2022 for Maxar Technologies and Aerojet Rocketdyne. More huge acquisitions are expected this year — particularly by large space companies seeking capabilities complementary to their own as price tags fall for many businesses. Economic headwinds could also push more companies to buy out suppliers and partners to save costs and reap operational synergies by reducing intermediaries. This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Asking for any budget increase is never easy for a space agency. Seeking a large increase — say, 25% — is particularly difficult. Doing so amid economic and geopolitical upheavals seems like pure folly. Yet, that is exactly what the European Space Agency is doing. When representatives of its 22 member states meet in Paris in November, they will consider a proposal to increase ESA programs’ spending by 25% over the next three years. That increase is not only despite the ongoing effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Europe’s space programs and the broader economy; it is, in some respects, a response to it. In recent weeks, Josef Aschbacher, the director general of ESA, has discussed the importance of an “ambitious” package of programs to present at the ministerial council meeting in November. “The circumstances are very challenging,” he said in an interview in August at the Kennedy Space Center, just before the first Artemis 1 launch attempt. “There is a huge crisis in Europe and, therefore, Europe looks very closely at how to invest and where to invest.” Space, he argued, is a place for Europe to invest, given its strategic importance. “The ministerial will really focus on strengthening the space sector and being a strong partner,” he said. “This is at the core of what we are putting together right now.” However, he offered few quantitative details about what ESA would request at the ministerial until a speech he gave at World Satellite Business Week in Paris on Sept. 12. He announced there that ESA would seek more than 18 billion euros ($18 billion) for the next three years, tweeting after the speech the more specific figure of 18.7 billion euros. That would represent a more than 25% increase from the 14.5 billion euros the agency secured at the previous ministerial meeting in 2019. “I’m putting together a very ambitious package despite the current situation, despite the economic difficulties we have, because I firmly believe that, if we are not doing that, we will make a huge mistake in Europe,” he said at the That increase also represents a change in strategy for ESA. For years, he acknowledged, Europe had become dependent to a degree on Russia, particularly in launch. Europe extensively used Soyuz for launching everything from Galileo navigation satellites to science missions. ESA also worked closely with Russia on the ExoMars mission to send its Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars, a mission that, before the invasion of Ukraine, was to launch in September. Aschbacher noted in his Paris speech that, had it not been for that invasion, he would likely instead be at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the launch. Instead, those ties were broken swiftly in the weeks after Russia’s invasion, a “painful experience” that left ExoMars and other missions stranded. “You realize, especially in Europe, how dependent we are in space on Russia,” he said. Aschbacher said that realization of dependence on Russia will factor into the proposals the agency will include in its ministerial package that “is resilient, increases our independence and strengthens our European space sector overall to make sure that we can do what we need to do.” He offered few details about specific proposals the agency would include in the ministerial but indicated launch would be one priority. “Access to space is mandatory,” he said. “This is a top priority for us.” That includes the long-delayed Ariane 6, whose first flight has now slipped to 2023, as well as the Vega C, which made its debut in July. He also mentioned the new wave of small “microlaunchers” being commercially developed in Europe and slated to make their first orbital launches next year. There remain nagging doubts, though, that Ariane 6 and Vega C will be viable over the long term against growing competition from reusable vehicles, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starship, as well as Blue Origin’s New Glenn and others. There are industry expectations ESA will support early-stage work on new technologies to enable future reusable vehicles. At the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris on Sept. 18, ArianeGroup unveiled a concept called the Smart Upper Stage for Innovative Exploration, or Susie. This would be a reusable upper stage that could be flown first on the Ariane 64 and on later reusable vehicles. Susie would be a combination of upper stage and spacecraft that could carry cargo or even crew to orbit, returning for a powered vertical landing. Susie has been an internal project at ArianeGroup for the last two years, said Morena Bernardini, head of strategy and innovation at ArianeGroup, in an interview. The company unveiled Susie at the IAC in part to raise interest in the project ahead of the ESA ministerial. “This is a proposal that we as an industry make to the member states that we would like them to adopt to start the initial development phases,” Bernardini said. She did not disclose how much funding ArianeGroup is looking for but said that if funded at the ministerial, a technology demonstrator could be ready by 2025. An operational cargo vehicle could enter service by 2030, followed by a crewed version “immediately after.” “It can always be accelerated,” she said of that schedule, “but it means that we really have to have the political decision in Europe to do this.” This is a new paragraph written directly in WordPress. This is another new paragraph. Does Gutenberg treat this is a separate block? Another priority for ESA at the upcoming ministerial is exploration. The agency is already a key partner of NASA on the Artemis lunar exploration effort, providing the service module for the Orion spacecraft and two parts of the lunar Gateway, a habitation module and a refueling element. Aschbacher said at KSC that he would be seeking a 50% increase in exploration funding for the ministerial. That would allow continued work on the Gateway modules and extend the existing agreement to produce Orion spacecraft. It would also allow ESA to pursue new programs that could be integrated into Artemis. One proposal, Moonlight, would establish a satellite network around the moon to provide communications and navigation services. Another, the European Large Logistics Lander or EL3, would develop a robotic lander capable of delivering 1.5 tons of cargo to the lunar surface, either for science missions or to support crewed Artemis missions. The lander “would give Europe an autonomous ability to land on the moon, but also allow us to contribute more deeply to longer-term exploration programs,” said David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, during a panel discussion at IAC. If funded, those programs could help ESA become more tightly integrated into the NASA-led Artemis effort, including securing opportunities for European astronauts to walk on the moon. ESA’s existing cooperation with NASA yielded three seats on future Artemis missions. Two will likely be on Artemis 4 and 5, missions that will deliver the European modules to the Gateway. The third has not been assigned, but Aschbacher said he is lobbying for that to be on a landing mission. “What I’m asking NASA very clearly is that Europe wishes to have a European astronaut footprint on the moon before the end of this decade.” During IAC, Aschbacher and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson signed a joint statement on lunar cooperation. The agencies did not release details about that agreement, but NASA said in a statement that it “highlighted ongoing discussions on future collaboration on the moon.” One uncertainty is how enthusiastic European governments will be to spend money on sending astronauts to the moon later in the decade, given ongoing struggles and competing priorities. Aschbacher was optimistic. “Europe is very excited, but maybe not everyone realizes Europe is playing such a strong role in this historic mission,” he said ahead of the first Artemis 1 launch attempt. “This is my job to make sure that people understand there’s European participation.” One of the astronauts that could represent Europe on a future Artemis mission agreed. “There’s been a very positive trend towards human spaceflight in Europe recently, in no small part because of what we’ve been able to achieve with the ISS,” said ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who has flown two long-duration ISS missions. He thinks there’s interest in Europe for missions to the moon because of a new generation not alive during Apollo and the bigger role partners like Europe have in Artemis. “It speaks to people in Europe,” he said. “They’ll be hugely excited to see a European on the moon one day.” Aschbacher said in August that he hoped the Artemis 1 mission would help build support for ESA’s exploration initiatives ahead of the ministerial. “This mission is crucial because this shows that this works,” he said of cooperation. “This is a real project that is flying to the moon and back. It couldn’t be any clearer than to deliver this message through the mission.” At the time, though, he expected the Artemis 1 mission to be complete, from liftoff to splashdown, well before the ministerial conference. But two launch scrubs and other issues, including a hurricane that forced NASA to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, have kept Artemis 1 on the ground. While NASA officials have not ruled out a launch in late October, a more likely opportunity is in a window that opens Nov. 12, just 10 days before ministers meet in Paris to decide how to fund those exploration plans. ESA’s planning will culminate in the two-day ministerial meeting in Paris, with debates and negotiations largely behind closed doors about what programs will be funded by what nations and at what levels. ESA got some encouragement about its plans at the IAC when French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, in a speech at the conference’s opening ceremony, said the country planned to increase space spending by 25% over the next three years to more than 9 billion euros. That amount covers all French space activities, and she didn’t discuss how much of that might go towards French contributions to ESA programs. “It’s very good news,” Philippe Baptiste, president of CNES, said of the budget increase at an IAC press conference. “We have to decide which fraction of this nine billion is dedicated to ESA and which part of it is dedicated to other kinds of programs.” Borne said one priority would be support for launch vehicle development, long a priority for France, something Baptiste endorsed. “There is no European strategy in space if we don’t have European access to space,” said Baptiste. ESA will also be watching Germany’s priorities closely. “I think it’s important for Europe to have big projects that show that we are engaged with space,” said Anna Christmann, coordinator for aerospace policy in the German government. She cited EL3 as one example of such a project, along with the European Union’s satellite constellation plans. “But we’ll have to see what is possible this year.” In a session about the upcoming ministerial at IAC, Aschbacher defended the 25% increase as needed for Europe to keep pace with the United States and China and grow commercial capabilities. “The word ‘ambition’ may sound a bit negative,” he said. “What we are aiming at doing is making sure we are not thrown out of the race.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Thales Alenia Space has signed a contract to develop quantum technologies in another push by the European Space Agency (ESA) to use the behavior of subatomic particles to make communications more secure. The European satellite maker said Jan. 23 it is leading a consortium called TeQuantS, which aims to develop technologies needed to demonstrate quantum communication links from space in three years. By using the entanglement properties of photons, these links are intended to be more secure than conventional networks because any attempt to intercept them would change their state. Terrestrial quantum communication networks using fiber optic cables are limited to about 150 kilometers, according to Thales, and satellites are better suited for using these capabilities over longer distances. According to Chinese state media, the Micius satellite China launched in 2016 was the first quantum-enabled spacecraft. NASA and startups including Singapore’s SpeQtral are also exploring space-based quantum capabilities to protect communications from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, such as by quantum computers. The overall contract ESA awarded TeQuantS is worth around 10 million euros ($11 million), said Mathias Vanden Bossche, director of research, technology and product policy at Thales Alenia Space. That covers a first phase lasting 12 months, Bossche told SpaceNews via email, to start technology qualifications that could lead to a potential demonstration in 2026. It is part of ESA’s multi-pronged approach to advance quantum communications technology, notably under a framework called EuroQCI (European Quantum Communication Infrastructure.) Two groups have secured contracts under the EuroQCI framework to study quantum communication architectures: One led by Airbus and another by German telco Deutsche Telekom. EuroQCI covers many projects ranging from ground to space segments. The main objective is to define the overall architecture of quantum-based networks and set up terrestrial test beds. TeQuantS is focusing on technology developments for the space segment, Bossche said, and targets a wider scope than EuroQCI. And unlike an ESA project led by satellite operator SES aiming to develop a satellite to test the distribution of quantum encryption keys for cryptography, he said TeQuantS will also study ways to connect quantum computers and quantum sensors in a multipurpose network. While quantum key distribution (QKD) is important for security, he said generic networks will need to be able to support the many applications and greater performance promised by quantum information networking “These generic networks are the real at-stake and challenge of quantum communications,” Bossche added. “Overall, the Thales Alenia Space project is the first project that addresses quantum information networks in space.” The TeQuantS consortium comprises Airbus, seven smaller firms and startups, and two research laboratories.
A startup has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to further development of a software system to make it easier for companies to operate satellite constellations. Quindar announced Jan. 24 it raised the $2.5 million seed round from Y Combinator, FCVC, Soma Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures. The company had recently participated in Y Combinator, the well-known Silicon Valley startup accelerator. Nate Hamet, co-founder and chief executive of Quindar, said the funding would allow the company to hire more engineers to support its key product, a software-as-a-service system that can handle most aspects of the design and operation of satellite constellations, saving companies the time and money they would ordinarily have to spend to develop their own control systems. Hamet and his five co-founders met while working at OneWeb, where they helped develop that broadband megaconstellation’s operations systems. “It takes years. It costs a lot of money,” he said, leading them to consider offering a software platform that can handle satellite operations as a service, modeled on Amazon Web Services and similar platforms. Doing so can allow companies to speed development of their systems. “If we can enable startups to remove a year or two that they would have to do some of this development and integration that gives them the opportunity to focus on their value proposition,” he said. Quindar’s software can support the design and testing of satellite constellations, as well as operations of satellites once launched. That includes working with ground station providers to arrange communication passes and performing incident monitoring on satellites. Hamet said the software is designed to scale to support very large constellations as well as multiple fleets of satellites by the same company. The company has not disclosed pricing, but he said it offers a discount to startups yet to launch their first satellite, and that pricing does not scale linearly as the constellation grows. Quindar has several customers, which he said the company will announce in the coming weeks. The company has focused on startups, but is building its software to meet federal cybersecurity standards to be able to later also serve government users. Going through Y Combinator helped the company refine its approach to the software. “We got into Y Combinator with an idea,” he said. “We weren’t business-minded, and we quickly realized that although we have operated satellites before, and we have designed the systems and the ground software to operate those satellites, that it’s our customers that we need to focus on, their current pain points.” That also helped them attract investors for their seed round. Hamet said the round was oversubscribed. “We can stay pretty lean” as a software company, he said. The company is “remote-first,” he said, meeting in person quarterly, with additional benefits to support its staff working from home. That funding will also be useful as the company looks at potentially tight capital markets in the near future. “Especially in these markets, it also means that we have a pretty good runway to get the product started and to be able to grow the team as we grow our business,” he said, estimating that the funding would support the company into 2025.
SpaceX conducted a fueling test of its full Starship launch vehicle Jan. 23, taking the vehicle one step closer to its first orbital launch attempt. The fully stacked Starship vehicle, consisting of a Super Heavy booster designated Booster 7 and a Starship upper stage named Ship 24, was filled with liquid oxygen and methane propellants during the test at SpaceX’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The test, called a wet dress rehearsal, simulates a countdown without firing the vehicle’s engines. SpaceX disclosed few details about the test while it was in progress, although observers could see frost accumulating on the vehicle as it was filled with cryogenic propellants. Only after the wet dress rehearsal was complete did SpaceX confirm that it took place. “Starship completed its first full flight-like wet dress rehearsal at Starbase today,” the company tweeted late Jan. 23, noting that the vehicle was loaded with more than 4.5 million kilograms of propellant. “Today’s test will help verify a full launch countdown sequence, as well as the performance of Starship and the orbital pad for flight-like operations.” The wet dress rehearsal was one of the final milestones for the vehicle before the company was ready to attempt an orbital launch. Another is a static-fire test of all 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster, something SpaceX has yet to attempt. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted earlier in the month that the company could be ready for that launch as soon as late February, with a launch in March “highly likely.” However, the company has missed past schedules for Starship launch readiness. That first Starship orbital launch attempt is a critical event not just for SpaceX, which is counting on Starship to further reduce launch costs and increase launch rates, but also for NASA. The agency has provided SpaceX with more than $4 billion in awards through its Human Landing System (HLS) program to develop versions of Starship to land astronauts on the moon for its Artemis lunar exploration campaign. The agency is closely following SpaceX’s Starship tests. “I’m just thoroughly impressed by the scale of these pictures and what the vehicle looks like in an integrated stack,” said Ryan Joyce of NASA’s Langley Research Center, who is working on HLS, during a panel discussion Jan. 23 at the AIAA SciTech Forum, showing several images of Starship development. “We are literally trying to launch skyscrapers here.” NASA’s insight into Starship development includes having astronauts visit to ensure that the vehicle can be safely operated by them. “This is ultimately a vehicle that needs to be operated by the astronauts,” he said. “If you don’t have the conversations with astronauts, as crew members and operators of the spacecraft, during the design phase, you might get far enough along with your design before you find your vehicle is inoperable.” As SpaceX conducts Starship tests at Boca Chica, it is constructing a new Starship launch facility on the grounds of Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The tower for that launch pad now overshadows the existing pad used for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. “It’s very exciting to see the progress being made at SpaceX facilities right now, including at KSC where they’re building a second orbital launch capability,” he said. NASA’s HLS awards leave it up to SpaceX to conduct its lunar lander launches either from KSC or Boca Chica, he noted.
SAN FRANCISCO – Charter Space, a London startup offering program management software for satellite missions, is the product of sheer frustration. While managing a satellite mission for Anchor Orbital, a former U.K. startup developing electrodynamic tethers, Yuk Chi Chan, Charter co-founder and CEO, found himself “stymied and bogged down by inefficient tooling and processes” at every turn. “It took me so long to get anything done, that ultimately that company died,” Chan told SpaceNews. To prevent other startups from succumbing to similar fates, Chan, a former Singapore Army Engineers logistics officer, co-founded Charter in late 2021 with Yukun Yin, a software engineer and former Singapore Army combat engineer, who worked for Credit Suisse. Yin also serves as Charter’s chief technology officer. “We streamline workflows and processes, automate manual tasks, and provide communications and information-sharing tools that enable teams to work more effectively amongst themselves and with external stakeholder partners that are participating in the same mission,” Chan said. “The ultimate objective is to allow engineering teams to refocus their efforts on the stuff that they have been trained to do, that they are excited to do, which is build. It also reduces the likelihood and incidence rate of errors by human mistake and oversight, thus reducing overall time to orbit and cutting down on operational expenditure.” Charter, one of six space companies that participated in the fall 2022 Techstars Aerospace and Defense Accelerator , has 11 employees. The company has raised $1.2 million in venture funding from TechStars, 7percent Ventures and other investors. In 2023, Charter plans to establish an office in Los Angeles, “thanks to all the wonderful opportunities that Techstars has afforded us,” Chan said. The space sector has made tremendous strides in improving hardware in the last decade. “We haven’t seen a corresponding advancement in terms of software that you use to manage those processes,” Chan said. “A large part of the industry is still using Excel and Doors, [software] that has been around for decades. And in many cases, we don’t even use software, we use pen and paper and whiteboards.” After serving as a battalion staff officer in Singapore, Chan moved to the United Kingdom to attend Durham University law school, where he specialized in space law. He was then recruited to manage the supply chain, oversee compliance and manage programs for Anchor Orbital. “It was my responsibility to get this tech demonstration mission into orbit because we were developing a station-keeping device,” Chan said. “I was unsuccessful in my role. Part of that was partly due to my own inexperience. But another large part was because things move so slowly. I couldn’t fail fast enough to learn better.” After Anchor collapsed, Chan began interviewing friends in the space sector. “I asked about program management, communications and everything outside of engineering,” Chan said. “They started telling me stories that sounded very similar to my own experiences. At the end of all these interviews, I would pitch them this hazy idea for an integrated system where everything lives, works and plays in a single pane of glass and everything plugs into it.” Now, Charter is conducting design pilots with prospective customers. “We sit down with engineering teams, program managers or whoever would be using our software and we show them what we’ve built and what we are going to build,” Chan said. “We gather feedback on both ends.” With that feedback, Charter’s product and design staffs update the software. Then the process starts anew, “so we can build something that is useful that people want,” Chan said. Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the investment firms that backed Charter Space. 
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K. announced 50 million British pounds ($62 million) in funding Jan. 23 for projects that could boost the country’s satellite communications industry. The UK Space Agency said the funding pot is open to a wide range of projects, including new satellite constellations and the ground systems that support them. The deadline for expressions of interest is March 1. Following a presentation process to pitch ideas, the UK Space Agency expects to announce winning projects sometime this summer. “This funding will help UK companies that have the right expertise and ambition to become global players in this market,” UK Space Agency CEO Paul Bate said in a statement, “and lead on ground-breaking technologies that will enhance the wider UK space sector, create jobs and generate further investment. The funding is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Advanced Research in Telecommunications Services program, or ARTES. In November, the British government committed 190 million British pounds to participate in international telecommunications missions under ESA, which is independent of the European Union that the U.K. is no longer part of following Brexit. The U.K. committed a total 1.8 billion British pounds to participate in ESA programs over the next five years. British Science Minister George Freeman said investing in space programs will help drive growth and improve the resiliency of the U.K.’s economy post-Brexit. While the U.K. has only earmarked 50 million British pounds for satellite communications, the space agency said further funding is available if viable proposals exceed supply.
The Space Development Agency is renaming its planned network of military satellites “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture,” the agency announced Jan. 23. SDA, a former Defense Department agency that is now part of the U.S. Space Force, previously used the name “National Defense Space Architecture” to describe a low Earth orbit constellation of small satellites scheduled to start launching in March. The layered architecture planned by SDA will serve as a tactical network to move data to users around the world. A Transport Layer will communicate early warnings of missile launches and the location of those missiles detected by a Tracking Layer of sensor satellites. The rebranding “does not reflect any change to the mission,” an SDA spokesperson told SpaceNews . The Defense Department established SDA in 2019 to accelerate the procurement of space capabilities and tap into the innovation of the commercial sector. The agency said the new name better captures SDA’s focus on delivering “needed space-based capabilities to the joint warfighter to support terrestrial missions through development, fielding, and operation of a proliferated low Earth orbit constellation of satellites.” The constellation’s original name “did not accurately convey its current scope and purpose,” said SDA. The agency “will continue to quickly deliver needed space-based capabilities to the joint warfighter to support terrestrial missions through development, fielding and operation of the PWSA.” SDA works with a “warfighter council” of military leaders who inform the design and features of the Transport Layer and the Tracking Layer. “We want to make sure that we address our customers,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said . The agency has grown to about 220 employees, including civilians, military and contractors. It’s headquartered in the Pentagon but its two satellite operations centers will be at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, and Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions who oversees SDA, has been a champion of SDA’s business model and procurement strategy. The agency buys increments of satellites in “tranches” every two years from multiple suppliers. “SDA will be key to rapidly delivering space capability to our warfighters,” Calvelli said .
The European Space Agency is grappling with multiple issues that could leave Europe temporarily without its own access to space by this summer. In a Jan. 23 press briefing, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said that space transportation issues, including the December failure of a Vega C and the delayed introduction of the Ariane 6, are among his biggest problems entering the new year “This is something that, let me just be very clear with you, is one of the biggest challenges we have in Europe today,” he said of space transportation. That is a combination of the Vega failure and Ariane 6 delays, along with the loss of the Soyuz rocket last year as fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the impending retirement of the Ariane 5, slated to make its final launch in June. “As of the middle of this year, we do not have guaranteed access to space for Europe by European launchers, and this is a huge problem for all of us,” he said. “We need to really work on this to get back to guarantee access to space for Europe again.” He said the investigation into the Dec. 20 Vega C launch failure is ongoing. He and other ESA officials at the briefing provided no new technical information about the failure, continuing to state that the failure was linked to the rocket’s second stage. The investigation is expected to wrap up in the second half of February, Aschbacher said. ESA has not estimated how long it will take to return the Vega C to flight. However, because the second stage of the Vega C is different from the stage used on the original Vega, it may be possible to resume Vega flights first, said Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA director of space transportation. Arianespace previously said there were two Vega launches remaining on its backlog, with about dozen more using the newer Vega C. Aschbacher said it was a “top priority” to return the Vega C to flight as soon as possible, “but under the right conditions,” noting two previous failures of the Vega before the December Vega C failure. “It requires a deep analysis of some of the quality aspects and we will look into this very seriously.” As ESA investigates the Vega C failure, it is entering the final stages of testing of the Ariane 6. That includes a Jan. 20 hot-fire test of the rocket’s Vinci upper-stage engine at a facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany. That test lasted for more than 900 seconds and tested both the engine and the upper stage’s auxiliary power unit. “It allowed us to fully test in nominal conditions the new upper stage,” Neuenschwander said. Future tests, he said, will examine the stage performance in “degraded” conditions. Tests are also continuing at the launch site to test the integration of the launch vehicle with ground equipment. Electrical tests are underway now with tests of fluid connections scheduled for March. That will be followed by hot-fire tests of the Vulcain 2.1 engine used in the first stage of the Ariane 6. ESA said last fall it was targeting an inaugural Ariane 6 launch in the fourth quarter of 2023. Aschbacher stuck to that schedule at the briefing but said it was too early to provide a more precise launch date. As ESA deals with the Vega C and Ariane 6, the agency is also considering ways to support commercial development of small launch vehicles in Europe. Aschbacher said he asked the agency’s space transportation directorate to look into potential competitions to fly ESA payloads on those rockets, making awards even before the first launch of the vehicles. He said that ESA would continue to wait until a vehicle has made one successful flight before launching satellites on them but could sign contracts for those launches earlier for two reasons. “First of all, it would really accelerate the development on their side,” he said, “but also to give them reassurance that they have an anchor customer who is ready to fly with them.” Europe also continues to deal with the loss of the Soyuz rocket. It led ESA in October to announce it would launch its Euclid astrophysics mission, originally intended to launch on Soyuz, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 instead. That launch is scheduled for the third quarter of this year, Aschbacher said, likely in July. There have been reports that Russia and France have been negotiating the return of Soyuz boosters in French Guiana, perhaps in exchange for the 36 OneWeb satellites that have been in storage in Baikonur since Russia canceled their Soyuz launch in March 2022. There are “two and a half” Soyuz boosters in French Guiana, Neuenschwander said. Aschbacher declined to comment on the reports of a potential swap of Soyuz boosters for OneWeb satellites, calling it an issue for the Russian and French governments. With Soyuz no longer launching from French Guiana, one issue is what to do with the Soyuz launch site, which was funded by European governments. Neuenschwander said one option is to convert it into a launch site for small launch vehicles. Alternatively, he said it could simply be used as a storage area.
SAN FRANCISCO – Satellite megaconstellations could pose a threat to the spectrum that meteorologists are eager to protect from radio frequency interference. At the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in Denver, meteorologists and spectrum experts expressed concern about proposals for SpaceX’s second-generation Starlink broadband constellations and acknowledged that other proposed megaconstellations could create interference as well. SpaceX has asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for a license to transmit signals from gateway stations to nearly 30,000 Starlink second-generation satellites in the 81 to 86 gigahertz band. “The sheer number of potential gateway uplink stations around the world could contribute to adjacent band contamination and further due diligence would be needed,” said David Lubar, Aerospace Corp. senior project leader, said at the AMS meeting. “We do not know if their out-of-band emissions will be an area of concern.” Meteorologists pick up faint signals indicating humidity over land in the 86 to 92 gigahertz band, adjacent to the bands Starlink has proposed for uplinks. It’s not yet clear whether the Starlink uplinks would pose any danger to the meteorological observations, but weather forecasts rely on passive radiometers to pick up faint signals to identify water vapor, precipitation and atmospheric temperature in various spectral bands. “These bands are established by the fundamental laws of physics,” Tony McNally, principal scientist in the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Research Department, said at the AMS meeting. Complicating the matter is the fact that “the signals that we are looking for with our passive satellites are much smaller than the interference patterns created by some of the other uses of the spectrum,” McNally added. “I would liken it to trying to gaze up at the stars at night when someone puts an incredibly bright flashlight in your eyes.” Meteorologists sought protection for unwanted emissions in the 81-86 gigahertz band at the 2019 World Radiocommunications Conference in Egypt. At the time, the International Telecommunications Union body of delegates declined to take up the matter. As a result, the FCC has no current regulations that would limit SpaceX’s use of the band. “Any new international rules are unlikely to be enacted until after 2027,” Lubar said. This is just one example of the whack-a-mole predicament meteorologists face in trying to safeguard atmospheric measurements and weather-data relays from RF interference. Another potential problem relates to the passive measurements meteorologists make from 50.2 to 50.4 gigahertz. Careful observation of that band reveals temperatures at various levels of the atmosphere. That data, paired with humidity measurements in the 180 to 184 gigahertz band, are key elements of weather forecasts. Existing regulations protect the 50.2 to 50.4 gigahertz band from interference, but the signals are so weak they could be drowned out by noise emitted in adjacent bands. “These systems in space are measuring extremely sensitive bits of energy,” said Beau Backus, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory senior spectrum manager. “That makes it essential that this be in protected areas.” Tens of thousands of satellites are expected to launch in the next decade. Many satellite operators are proposing transmitting data to spacecraft in bands immediately above and below the 50.2 to 50.4 gigahertz band. “The industry is moving faster than our scientific development,” Michael Farrar, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction at National Weather Service, said at the AMS meeting. “This problem is going to accelerate. We should build a process that can rapidly respond to these scenarios.” The American Meteorological Society’s RF Allocation Committee also is concerned about potential interference in the 23 to 24 gigahertz band, where the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Joint Polar Satellite System collects passive measurements of atmospheric water vapor. Those observations combined with data from other active and passive sensors on U.S. and international satellites help meteorologists predict storm tracks and rainfall levels. “Our systems are making very good use of combinations of channels,” McNally said. “The problem with it is that if you then have a losing battle [to protect] one channel, you can effectively wipe out the value of channels which are not contaminated because you don’t have this corroborating piece of evidence from the channel that you’ve lost. The quality of forecasts that we enjoy in our society are a result of this very sophisticated multichannel usage in data simulation systems.”
If it was easier to raise money, Plasmos might have a dedicated facility for testing rocket engines. Instead, the propulsion startup rented a speedboat restoration shop east of Los Angeles. There, “we managed to test something, and it was successful,” said Plasmos CEO Ali Baghchehsara. “We managed to create plasma in the engine and got high ionization using air.” After years of sky-high valuations and investor competition for shares of promising space startups, high interest rates and the threat of recession have made investors cautious. In response to a lack of new funding sources, space startups are cutting back on hiring, reducing travel and giving up leased office space. “Entrepreneurship is always a little bit of survival of the fittest,” said Jason Chen, founder and CEO of VentureScope, a McLean, Virginia, consulting and venture investment firm that works with entrepreneurs. “This economy definitely tightens the belt a little bit, making teams operate more lean.” Ukrainian startup Promin Aerospace trimmed its staff and doubled down on engineering in 2022. “We currently have 13 full-time employees. Ten of those are on the engineering team in Dnipro, and three are on the administrative team,” said Promin CEO Misha Rudominski. “We had 16 employees before the war. We had an office manager and a communications person. We were building the team for future growth.” Instead of preparing for expansion, a popular approach in 2020 and 2021, startups now focus on extending their burn rate, meaning slowing down the pace of spending. Investors, meanwhile, are encouraging founders to “zero in and focus on their core competencies, whatever is their unique value proposition,” said Chen, a founder of four startups. For Lunargistics, a Woodland, Texas startup that offers mission guidance, launch integration and other space services, the economic downturn has meant fewer trips to conferences. “It’s successful and enlightening to meet everyone in an industry in which I and @lunargistics are newcomers, but now’s the time to deliver,” Logan Ryan Golema, Lunargistics founder, chairman and CEO, tweeted in November. For some early-stage companies, government contracts or financing programs serve as lifelines. Matt Kozlov, manager director of the TechStars Los Angeles accelerator, said the most important advice he’s giving startups right now is “to relentlessly track, apply for, and win government contracts and grants whenever possible.” The Defense Department, Energy Department, National Science Foundation, NASA and other government agencies are “a great source of capital, non-dilutive funding opportunities” plus “phenomenal early validations of both a company’s technical viability and the potential interest” of government customers, Kozlov said by email. After winning a government contract, a founder said, “It means we don’t have to lay people off, and we can keep building the new things that we want to build.” Entrepreneurs, who enthusiastically share news of technological achievements and fundraising success, are far less eager to discuss financial woes and layoffs. When promised they would not be quoted by name, though, they speak freely about the stark differences between 2021, a banner year for space investment, and 2022. “There’s no question that the funding environment is tight right now,” said a startup founder. “We’ve been seeing that across the industry.” Another founder said, “Entrepreneurs who raised money just three or four months before us, raised crazy amounts of money on crazy valuations right off the bat.” The reduction in angel, corporate and venture capital dollars flowing into the space sector is making perseverance particularly difficult for startups needing significant funding before generating revenue. SpaceLink was forced to wind down operations after its parent company, Australia’s Electro Optic Systems Holdings Ltd., came up empty in its search for outside investors willing to provide $70 million in the near term and $250 million overall for SpaceLink’s planned data-relay constellation in medium-Earth orbit. While medium-Earth orbit is a great vantage point for communicating with satellites in low-Earth orbit, “getting equipment, satellites and launch capability to MEO does lead to some capital-intensive pre-revenue spending,” said SpaceLink CEO Dave Bettinger. Other entrepreneurial companies have continued to operate while scaling back capital-intensive projects. In December, British cybersecurity software developer Arqit scrapped plans for a space-based quantum encryption network, citing the cost and risk compared with establishing a terrestrial network. In October, small satellite specialist Terran Orbital canceled plans for its own synthetic aperture radar constellation, opting instead to build SAR satellites and sell them directly to commercial and government customers. It’s impossible to predict how long the current investment climate will last. Space Capital noted nearly $300 billion of dry powder, investment dollars remaining on the sidelines, in its third quarter report released in October. “We are still waiting for the floodgates to open,” Space Capital said, as VCs shift from pure momentum investing to a greater focus on diligence and price control. Until the floodgates open, founders of early-stage startups like Los Angeles-based Plasmos are finding inexpensive workarounds. “Given the constraints of fundraising in the market, we have done things scrappy and low cost,” Baghchehsara said. Plasmos has few employees, and the startup’s technology, which combines elements of chemical and electric propulsion, doesn’t fit common propulsion testing facilities. To make do, Baghchehsara found a welder to build a rocket test stand by advertising on Craigslist. One of the people who responded introduced Baghchehsara to GT Performance Engineering, a marine services specialist in Upland, California. One weekend, “I started carefully using their expensive machines,” Baghchehsara said. “That same weekend, we fired the engine because these people were extremely knowledgeable in machining.” Even though GT Performance Engineering employees had never worked on rocket engines, they were eager to help Plasmos conduct tests. “They call me the boom guy,” Baghchehsara said. “Everyone comes around and helps me out.” This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine
Updated Jan. 25 to include Elbit/Elop contribution to the mission. WASHINGTON — The United States and Israel are finalizing an agreement that would see NASA contribute to an upcoming Israeli astrophysics mission. The focus of the agreement, which could be signed as soon as later this month, involves a mission called Ultrasat under development by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science with support from the Israel Space Agency and German research center DESY. As part of the agreement, NASA would provide the launch of Ultrasat, which will operate in geostationary orbit. NASA will likely arrange to fly Ultrasat as a secondary payload on a commercial GEO launch, said James Rhoads, NASA project scientist for Ultrasat, during a session of the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society Jan. 11. Ultrasat will carry an ultraviolet telescope with a wide field of view. That wide field of view along with high sensitivity in the near-ultraviolet are the key characteristics that set Ultrasat apart from other ultraviolet astronomy missions, said Eli Waxman, principal investigator for Ultrasat at the Weizmann Institute of Science, during the session. The spacecraft is being built by Israel Aerospace Industries, with DESY providing the ultraviolet camera and Elbit/Elop the telescope. The spacecraft has a total mass of about 1,100 kilograms, more than half of which is propellant to take the spacecraft from a geostationary transfer orbit to its final location in GEO at 4 degrees west. Ultrasat has a three-year prime mission, but Waxman said it will carry enough propellant to operate for six. He said development of the spacecraft is on schedule for a launch in the first quarter of 2026. Ultrasat has two primary goals. One is to look for ultraviolet signatures from gravitational-wave events, such as mergers involving neutron stars. The second is to study supernova explosions. Those goals match well with NASA’s own research priorities. “Ultrasat and NASA’s science goals are well-aligned,” Rhoads said, citing broad science themes from the Astro2020 decadal survey that range from stellar and galactic astrophysics to gravitational waves. “There are Ultrasat contributions to all of these areas anticipated.” Of particular interest is Ultrasat’s role in time domain and multimessenger astrophysics, or TDAMM, an emerging field that combines observations at various wavelengths of light with detections of gravitational waves or particles. Astro2020 emphasized the importance of TDAMM for addressing key scientific questions. “Ultrasat really shows the value of international coordination when we talk about how we’re going to achieve our Astro2020 TDAMM goals, meeting the recommendations that were made by the decadal survey,” said Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, at the session. In addition to providing the launch of Ultrasat, NASA will also fund participating scientists on the mission and establish a U.S.-based science archive. The agency hasn’t disclosed the value of its contribution to the mission, although Waxman said the overall cost of Ultrasat, including launch, was about $110 million. Rhoads said he expected final signatures of the agreement regarding NASA’s role on Ultrasat in the next one to months. However, at a Jan. 17 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, one committee member, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said NASA anticipated the agreement will be signed later this month.
The availability of a new GPS navigation signal for civilian users is creating market opportunities in so-called satellite-based augmentation systems — known as SBAS — that countries around the world are developing or upgrading to support transportation and other industries, said Andre Trotter, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of navigation systems. Six GPS 3 satellites that broadcast the L1C signal have been launched since 2018, the most recent one last week . GPS 3 is a modernized version of the U.S. military’s Global Positioning System satellites that broadcast positioning, navigation and timing signals. Compared to earlier generations, the GPS 3 satellites provide military users extra protection from jamming attacks but one of its most significant features is the L1C signal for civilian users that is interoperable with Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites. Lockheed Martin has built 10 GPS 3 satellites under a 2008 contract from the U.S. Air Force, and will produce at least 10 more GPS 3F , a more advanced version. “The company developed what it calls a 2nd generation SBAS that takes advantage of both GPS L1/L5 and Galileo E1/E5 signals to provide more accurate navigation and positioning, and reduce dependence on any one system,” Trotter told SpaceNews . Lockheed Martin in September won a $1.18 billion 19-year contract to develop and operate the Southern Positioning Augmentation Network (SouthPAN) for the governments of Australia and New Zealand . The system is expected to be operational by 2028. “There is a significant amount of testing that must go on in order for the signals to be certified for different types of use, whether that be safety-of-life or commercial aircraft operations,” Trotter said. Lockheed Martin’s SBAS broadcasts on two frequencies to augment signals from GPS and Galileo. “We are currently broadcasting the dual-frequency multiple constellation SBAS signal as part of SouthPAN,” Trotter said. “As additional GPS 3 and GPS 3F satellites are launched, service will improve even further.” Winning the SouthPAN contract “could lead to more opportunities, as we have the ability to expand this enabling technology globally,” he said. “We are having discussions with other potential international customers. We also expect that more benefits will be realized as we bring in users and learn about new applications of the technology.” The SouthPAN system, for example, will improve accuracy from the current 5 to 10 meters, to about 10 centimeters, he said. More precise navigation and positioning data, Trotter said, is in high demand for commercial aviation, precision agriculture, maritime tracking, and the operation of drones and unmanned vehicles. The U.S. SBAS is known as the Wide Area Augmentation System ( WAAS ). Europe’s is called EGNOS, or European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service. Several countries have implemented SBAS systems, including Japan and India, and more are in development. In the SouthPAN system, an SBAS payload is hosted on an Inmarsat geostationary Earth orbit communications satellite, which rebroadcasts the augmentation messages to user receivers. Lockheed Martin operates a tracking, telemetry and control ground station in Uralla, New South Wales. Spain-based GMV will develop SouthPAN’s data processing and control centers.
NASA is suspending efforts, at least until late next year, to try to fully deploy a solar array on its Lucy spacecraft, citing diminishing returns as the spacecraft heads away from the sun. In a statement quietly posted on NASA’s website Jan. 19, the agency said the latest effort to latch one of two solar arrays on Lucy, more than a month earlier, failed to complete the deployment of the circular array and lock it into place. That effort, NASA said, “produced only small movement in the solar array.” The mission has been working to fully deploy the solar array since shortly after its launch in October 2021 . While one of the arrays, 7.3 meters in diameter, unfolded and latched into place as designed, the other did not. Engineers spent months diagnosing the problem, concluding a loss in tension in a lanyard used to deploy the array kept it from fully unfolding and latching into place . NASA has played down the problem, noting that engineers believe the array is almost completely unfolded and appears to be stable. That was based on the array’s performance during a gravity-assist flyby of the Earth Oct. 16, when it passed less than 400 kilometers above the Earth, through the tenuous upper reaches of the atmosphere, with no issues. However, spacecraft controllers have attempted since that flyby to try to complete the array’s deployment and lock into place. One attempt Nov. 7 “deployed the wing incrementally forward,” NASA said, but controllers also noticed a small vibration in the array, which engineers concluded was the result of an interaction between the motor and the structural modes of the array. After adjusting the motor, NASA tried again Dec. 13, but noticed that progress had “decreased to minimal levels,” which engineers concluded was due to the dropping temperatures as Lucy moves further from the sun. “NASA’s Lucy mission team has decided to suspend further solar array deployment activities,” the agency said in its latest statement. “The team determined that operating the mission with the solar array in the current unlatched state carries an acceptable level of risk and further deployment activities are unlikely to be beneficial at this time.” The agency has not ruled out another attempt to lock the array, but not until the spacecraft makes its next close approach to the Earth in late 2024, warming it enough to make progress more likely. Those plans will also depend on the stability of the array during the first maneuver by the spacecraft’s main engine in February 2024. Even if the array does not fully unfold and latch, NASA said that the array, 98% deployed, can generate enough power for the spacecraft to complete its mission, flying by one main belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids at Jupiter’s distance from the sun. Those flybys will take place between 2025 and 2033.
TAMPA, Fla. — The satellite behind Europe’s next flagship space mission is ready to be sent to French Guiana for an April launch to explore three of Jupiter’s largest icy moons, manufacturer Airbus announced Jan. 20. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) has been undergoing final assembly and testing for nearly a year and a half in France with Airbus, which was selected as prime contractor back in 2015. Final preparations included the integration of a huge 85-square-meter solar array, developed by Germany’s Azur Space, to ensure the spacecraft has enough power 740 million kilometers away from the sun. Airbus is set to ship JUICE in early February to Arianespace’s launchpad in Kourou, French Guiana, where it is slated to launch on one of the last two remaining Ariane 5 rockets before Ariane 6’s debut in late 2023. It took nearly 500 Airbus employees and more than 80 companies across Europe to get the spacecraft ready for its journey to the Jupiter system, said Cyril Cavel, JUICE’s project manager at Airbus Defense and Space. It would take the 6,200-kilogram spacecraft around eight years to reach Jupiter’s orbit in July 2031 following a series of gravity-assist flybys in the inner solar system. JUICE is equipped with 10 instruments to study magnetic fields in the Jupiter system and potentially ocean-bearing moons Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto — including cameras, an ice-penetrating radar, a radio-science experiment, and sensors for measuring altitude and other data. The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to use JUICE to peer below icy moon surfaces to investigate their potential habitability for microbial life. Following nearly three and a half years performing flybys of Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto while orbiting Jupiter, the spacecraft is due to enter orbit around Ganymede in December 2034 for a closer look at the largest moon in the solar system. After concluding a mission estimated to cost around 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion), ESA anticipates JUICE will ultimately crash into Ganymede in late 2035 after running out of the fuel needed to maintain its orbit around the moon. Meanwhile, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, slated to launch next year but due to be inserted into Jupiter’s orbit in 2030 shortly before JUICE, aims to focus on investigating whether Europa has the ingredients necessary for life. This article was updated Jan. 22 with the correct size of JUICE’s solar arrays
The Canadian government announced plans Jan. 20 to set up a regulatory framework to allow commercial launches from the country as part of an effort to expand Canada’s space industry. In a briefing at the headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) outside Montréal, officials with Transport Canada, CSA and Canadian industry announced a two-phase approach to licensing commercial launches in the country, In an interim phase, expected to last three years, the government will review requests to conduct commercial launches on a case-by-case basis. Those applications will be reviewed to ensure they are “safe, secure and environmentally sustainable,” Transport Canada said in a statement, using existing laws and regulations. During that interim period, Transport Canada will work with other government agencies to develop a formal licensing framework for commercial launches. That will include an interagency review process to check that proposed launches comply with domestic law and international treaties. Officials didn’t indicate if new legislation will be required to establish that framework. “We want to position Canada as a leader in commercial space launches,” said Omar Alghabra, the minister of transport, at the event. He and others described launch as a missing piece in the country’s overall space industry that, when established, would provide a complete range of capabilities that includes satellite manufacturing and space services. The government of the United Kingdom has made similar arguments as it sought to establish a network of spaceports in the country for launching small satellites. “Enabling commercial launch from Canada will allow our sector to capture a share of the growing global space launch market,” said CSA President Lisa Campbell. “Space launch will increase Canada’s domestic capability and cover the full life cycle of space missions.” “This is an important piece to have an end-to-end space sector,” said Brian Gallant, chief executive of Space Canada, an industry group. “We believe that there are Canadian companies that will be interested in launching here, but also international ones.” “For many years, Canadian satellites have launched from sites in other countries, and it’s time for us to start launching them right here at home,” said Alghabra, who predicted that the first launches from Canada would take place during that three-year interim period. The most prominent Canadian launch company is Maritime Launch Services (MLS), which has been working for several years to establish a spaceport in Nova Scotia that would host launches of Ukrainian-built Cyclone-4M rockets and potentially other launch vehicles. MLS finally started construction of the spaceport late last year after securing environmental and other approvals. “Breaking ground on Spaceport Nova Scotia was a clear signal to the global space sector that Canada would soon have global launch capabilities, and satellite companies from around the world have since signaled their strong demand to launch from Nova Scotia,” Stephen Matier, chief executive of MLS, said in a statement. He said MLS has “satellite client multi-launch term sheets” but did not disclose specific contracts. Several other Canadian companies, including C6 Launch Systems, Reaction Dynamics and SpaceRyde, have been working on smallsat launch systems that could operate from Canada or elsewhere. Those companies likely would need Canadian government approval regardless of launch location to comply with the oversight requirements of the Outer Space Treaty. Alghabra said Transport Canada has received inquiries about launching from Canada from companies in several countries, such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and South Korea. He did not name any specific companies. “We know that there’s an appetite, domestically and internationally, to launch from Canada, and today’s announcement is a strong signal to invite those who are interested to come on in to take advantage of the advantages that Canada has,” he said. Canada has not hosted an orbital launch, although Churchill, Manitoba, was the site of sounding rocket launches from the 1950s through the 1980s. In the 1990s, a private venture proposed turning the site into a commercial spaceport, called SpacePort Canada, that would host suborbital and orbital launches, but conducted only a single sounding rocket launch. Transport Canada has previously granted permissions for a commercial launch. In October 2004, the agency approved an application from a Canadian venture, The da Vinci Project, for two crewed launches of its balloon-born reusable suborbital vehicle from Saskatchewan. The da Vinci Project was competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first team to conduct two crewed suborbital launches to an altitude of at least 100 kilometers within two weeks. The launches by The da Vinci Project never took place. Shortly before Transport Canada issued its approval, The da Vinci Project announced it would not be ready in time for a launch in October. Scaled Composites flew the second of two prize-qualifying missions of its SpaceShipOne vehicle on Oct. 4, 2004, to win the competition.
The head of the European Space agency says he hopes to have a “zero debris” policy for European spacecraft in place in the next few years, an approach he says he would like to see expanded globally. Speaking during a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 19, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said he was in discussions with the agency’s member states about a policy that would require satellites to be deorbited immediately after the end of their missions. “We want to establish a zero debris policy, which means if you bring a spacecraft into orbit you have to remove it,” he said. “This policy should be in place in a couple of years.” Aschbacher has previously discussed setting up such a policy, with a goal of having it in place by the end of the decade. “By 2030, we aim to consistently and reliably remove all European satellites from valuable orbits around Earth immediately after they cease operation,” he said in a video in June 2022 . In his remarks in Davos, he suggested that the zero debris policy be expanded beyond Europe. “I’m working now with my governments in Europe, and hopefully this will be adopted universally because we need to protect our orbits for our own safety and the safety of spacecraft and astronauts.” Current international guidelines, adopted by many countries, require only that satellites be deorbited no more than 25 years after the end of their mission. There has been discussion about shortening that timeframe, including an order approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in September 2022 that will require spacecraft licensed by that agency or seeking U.S. market access to deorbit within five years. Aschbacher cited efforts to clean up orbital debris funded by ESA, including ClearSpace-1, a mission that will deorbit a Vega payload adapter left in low Earth orbit. ClearSpace, the Swiss startup which won the ESA contract for that mission, raised $29 million Jan. 19 to advance work on the spacecraft for launch in 2026. Shedding light on Solaris In addition to discussing space debris and ESA’s other space exploration activities, Aschbacher highlighted a new agency effort to study the technological and economic feasibility of space-based solar power. ESA secured 60 million euros ($65 million) at its ministerial council meeting in November for Solaris , which will conduct a feasibility study of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth. “Solaris is something quite amazing,” Aschbacher said. Space-based solar power, he said, could address concerns about both climate change and energy independence, he suggested, if it is feasible. “It’s very futuristic,” he acknowledged. “If it works — and I really put a big ‘if’ in the room here — if it works, it would be a huge improvement for climate change but also energy autonomy.” He said that if the Solaris study does reach a favorable conclusion about the feasibility of space-based solar power, he would be willing to move ahead with a demonstration program of some kind. “This we will find out in two to three years, and then I could come with a major proposal.” Other companies and organizations have also shown a renewed interest in space-based solar power, a concept that dates back more than a half-century. Northrop Grumman announced in December it had completed ground tests of technology for space-based solar power it plans to demonstrate in space in 2025 through a contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory. A privately funded project by the California Institute of Technology to test similar technologies launched Jan. 3 as a hosted payload on the Vigoride 5 tug by Momentus. In May 2022, a NASA official said the agency’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy had started a short-term study to reevaluate the feasibility of space-based solar power and determine to what degree, if any, the agency should support new work on the topic. At the time, NASA planned to have the study completed by September, but as of January the agency has not published the report.
It is largely business as usual on the International Space Station as NASA adapts its current activities and future plans to Russia’s decision to replace a damaged Soyuz spacecraft docked there. NASA astronaut Nicole Mann and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata will conduct a spacewalk Jan. 20 to install a mounting bracket for a new solar array that will be delivered to the station on a future cargo mission. The spacewalk, the first by either astronaut, is scheduled to last six and a half to seven hours. The spacewalk is a sign that activities on the space station are continuing largely unaffected by the damage sustained by the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked there Dec. 14 that Roscosmos and NASA have attributed to a micrometeoroid hit. The incident damaged a spacecraft radiator and caused a coolant leak. The two agencies announced Jan. 11 that they concluded the spacecraft could not safely return to Earth its three-person crew of Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio. Instead, a new Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, will be sent to the station without a crew to replace Soyuz MS-22, which will return to Earth, also uncrewed. On Jan. 18, astronauts moved Rubio’s custom-fitted seat liner from Soyuz MS-22 to the Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station. In the event of an emergency that required the crew to evacuate, Rubio would return on the Crew Dragon while Prokopyev and Petelin left on Soyuz MS-22. “We think that will take out some of the heat load that’s in the Soyuz spacecraft and will help the overall posture for us,” Dina Contella, operations integration manager for the ISS program at NASA, during an Jan. 17 briefing about the upcoming spacewalk. That move of Rubio’s seat into the Crew Dragon is only a temporary measure. After Soyuz MS-23 arrives at the station, his seat liner, along with those for Prokopyev and Petelin, will be transferred into Soyuz MS-23. Soyuz MS-23 is scheduled to launch Feb. 20, docking with the station two days later. The launch of Soyuz MS-23 will delay slightly the Crew-6 Crew Dragon launch. At a Jan. 11 briefing, NASA said it would take up to a couple weeks to revise the schedule for both that mission and other flights to the station in the near future. Contella said at the spacewalk briefing that Crew-6 was scheduled to launch in mid to late February, with the Crew-5 Crew Dragon returning a few days later. The Crew-6 mission includes astronaut Sultan Alneyadi from the United Arab Emirates. The UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre announced Jan. 19 that the Crew-6 mission was scheduled for launch no earlier than Feb. 26, about a week later than previously planned. Contella said that Crew-6 will be followed by a cargo Dragon mission, CRS-27, in March. That will in turn be followed by a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, NG-19, although she did not state when it would launch. NG-19 will be the last Cygnus spacecraft to launch on the current version of the Antares rocket as Northrop Grumman works with Firefly Aerospace on a new first stage of the vehicle. The decision to replace Soyuz MS-22 with Soyuz MS-23 means that Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio will extend their stay on the ISS. The three originally were scheduled to return to Earth in March but will stay up to six more months. Contella said they will likely return in late September, about a year after arriving. “We’re looking at the exact timing of that, but at this point, that would be when the vehicle would be planned to come home.” The Soyuz coolant leak took place as Prokopyev and Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk, which was called off as a result and has not yet been rescheduled. “Our Russian colleagues are working on their forward plans for spacewalks at this point,” she said.
Terran Orbital’s decision not to build a large satellite factory in Florida is only a minor setback for the state’s efforts to grow the space industry’s presence in the state and to expand beyond launch, according to one official. In a recent call with reporters, Frank DiBello, president and chief executive of Space Florida, the state space development agency, said he was seeing a growing backlog of potential aerospace investment opportunities for his organization. “Space Florida is busy,” he said, stating that the organization was evaluating about 150 projects that it has qualified through a due-diligence process, three times as many as were under consideration before the pandemic. “It is a reflection of both the industry growth as well as the capital that is flowing into the marketplace.” Not all those opportunities have panned out. In September 2021, Terran Orbital announced it would build a large satellite factory adjacent to Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility , the former Shuttle Landing Facility runway at the Kennedy Space Center. Space Florida helped arrange financing for the project, which Terran Orbital said would create 2,100 jobs by the end of 2025. However, a little more than a year later, Terran Orbital announced it was no longer pursuing the Florida factory . It said it would instead expand existing facilities in California that it argued could be completed faster, enabling it to ramp up production of satellite buses it is providing to Lockheed Martin for a Space Development Agency (SDA) contract. “I fully understand that they had incredible schedule pressures” because of their SDA work, DiBello said. “They had no choice but to expand their facilities in California in order to be able to get to market and get to the delivery requirements they have under that contract.” He added Space Florida remained in touch with Terran Orbital about future projects the company might undertake in the state. DiBello said the property that had been planned for the Terran Orbital factory was “coveted” by others. “We will have no trouble finding uses for it, and in fact we have several companies that we’re actively working with now to locate out at the Launch and Landing Facility.” He declined to discuss specifics about the companies interested in using that property. “They’ll be involved in space activity and, we hope, enablers for a lot of the space economy,” he said. Space Florida has a specific interest in what he described as “next-generation space platform companies” that would help other space companies. “That’s what we want to see happening: broadening our base of opportunity for other companies to get to low Earth orbit and to bring value back.” He said that, as the number of opportunities grows, Space Florida is making its due-diligence efforts more rigorous, citing the “irrational exuberance” associated with the wave of companies going public through mergers with special purpose acquisition corporations (SPACs) since early 2021. Many of those companies have faltered since going public as they fell short of ambitious growth projections. That includes Terran Orbital, whose stock has fallen from about $10 per share when its SPAC merger closed in March 2022 to less than $2 per share now. “Taking a company public is a serious initiative, and then you have to perform and meet your numbers,” DiBello said. “What we are seeing is a more cautious due diligence over a longer evaluation period to get to financing, as well as more reasonable approaches to valuations.” He said that, despite the problems with SPACs, there was still plenty of capital available for space companies, particularly those that can demonstrate “real revenues and real sales” in the market. “I expect the capital markets, which are flush, will continue to draw a lot of interest. It’s just going to be conservative and take a longer time.”
A Chinese launch startup has performed hot fire tests as part of development of a planned reusable stainless-steel rocket apparently inspired by SpaceX’s Starship. Space Epoch recently performed a series of tests of a 4.2-meter-diameter stainless steel propellant tank combined with a Longyun-70 methane-liquid oxygen engine developed by engine maker Jiuzhou Yunjian. The tests took place at Jiuzhou Yunjian’s test site in Anhui Province. The tests are part of Beijing-based Space Epoch earlier revealed plans to develop a 64-meter-tall stainless steel launcher capable of lifting 6.5 tons to a 1,100-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit. The launcher will be able to be reused up to 20 times. The static fire tests included ignition and restart tests and ignition with low levels of propellant. The combined breakthrough of stainless steel storage tanks and liquid oxygen methane technology has laid a solid foundation for subsequent rocket flight tests, Jiuzhou Yunjian said in a statement . SpaceX is meanwhile edging towards its first orbital launch attempt of the 120-meter-high, 9-meter-diameter Starship at its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. As well as being inspired by SpaceX in terms of the combination of stainless steel tanks and methane-LOX engines, Space Epoch is also using an iterative approach, using a style akin to the SN/serial number designations for Starship development. XZH-1 D1 was used for the recent combined system test. XZH-1 D2 will be used for a first suborbital sea splashdown recovery test during 2023. Space Epoch is a most recent new entrant into China’s nascent commercial launch sector and has big ambitions. It secured an undisclosed amount of angel round of funding in August last year and later conducted pressure tests on 3-meter-diameter and 4-meter-diameter thin-walled stainless steel tanks. Its press releases state that it is determined to become the leader of China’s interplanetary transportation system and contribute to the country’s national space infrastructure and requirement for increased launch capacity. The firm also says it is targeting markets including point-to-point transportation, space tourism, space station construction, deep space exploration and planetary defense . Jiuzhou Yunjian is a rocket engine startup founded in 2017 and was earlier selected by new Chinese launch startup Rocket Pi to power its Darwin-1 rocket, which could launch as soon as this year. The state-owned Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), a major subsidiary of China’s main space contractor CASC, is apparently considering using Jiuzhou Yunjian’s reusable 70-ton-thrust open cycle Longyun engines for its own potential answer to the Starship challenge. CASC’s other major rocket-making arm, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), has also presented a concept for a launcher drawing on the vision of Starship. China’s first methane-LOX rocket and first commercial-developed liquid launcher, Zhuque-2, had a test flight last month. It failed to reach orbit following an issue with its second stage vernier engines.
Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, in a memo outlining his priorities said the service should pursue stronger partnerships with allies. “To do this, we will eliminate barriers to collaboration,” he wrote in the memo released Jan. 18 . Partnerships are one of three main priorities Saltzman identified. The others are to deploy “combat-ready forces” and to “amplify the guardian spirit.” Saltzman said obstacles to collaboration with allies include “traditional barriers like over classification and incompatible systems,” which the Space Force will need to address through policy changes. But policy changes alone are not the answer, he added. “The best way to build partnerships is through direct collaboration that is mutually beneficial.” The Space Force will encourage guardians to pursue “foreign exchanges, deployments to industry, university partnerships, reverse industry days, security cooperation initiatives, and shared PME [professional military education] opportunities.” Closer collaboration with allies also was discussed in space procurement guidelines issued in October by the head of Space Force acquisitions Frank Calvelli, who urged program managers to “avoid SAPs and over-classifying.” SAP, or Special Access Programs, is a specific category that imposes tight restrictions on information sharing and “hinders our ability to integrate space capabilities across other domains … and can hinder getting ideas from a broader pool of industry, and future sharing with allies,” Calvelli wrote. These concerns also were raised by Congress . The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act directs DoD to examine all Space Force programs to determine if the level of classification of any of these programs could be changed to a lower level or declassified entirely.
HawkEye 360 will provide data collected by its radio-frequency mapping satellites to Slingshot Aerospace for a threat-detection system the company is developing for the U.S. Space Force. Under the agreement announced Jan. 19, Slingshot will use data from HawkEye 360’s satellites to identify potential jamming attacks or other threats that would interfere with GPS signals . Radio frequency interference has been a long-time problem for the military, exacerbated by the proliferation of electronic devices designed to disrupt GPS and other satellite signals. The data from HawkEye 360’s satellites would “provide insight into how to detect early signs of nefarious RF activity,” the company said. HawkEye 360’s constellation detects, characterizes and geolocates RF signals from a broad range of electronic emitters used for communications and navigation. In 2021 Slingshot Aerospace won a $2 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to develop an analytics tool that uses telemetry data from commercial satellites in low Earth orbit to identify potential sources of electronic interference on the ground. Slingshot’s cloud platform analyzes data from satellites in low Earth orbit to detect and locate RF interference that could endanger the safe operation of U.S. satellites. Slingshot last year signed a similar agreement with Spire Global to use data from the company’s satellites. “Slingshot Aerospace is excited to add HawkEye 360 to our world-class roster of data providers. This partnership allows us to significantly improve our ability to capture, process, and characterize the RF signal environment into relevant and timely insights for U.S. government space operators,” said Alonso Segura, the company’s senior director of government programs.
SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s next generation of geostationary weather satellites will significantly improve weather forecasting thanks to the addition of a hyperspectral infrared sounder. That was the consensus at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in Denver, where scientists, program managers and industry executives discussed the benefits of adding data from a Geostationary Extended Orbits (GeoXO) Sounders to the other observations that feed weather models. “With our hyperspectral infrared sounder, we’ll start collecting very frequent temperature and humidity data to help improve numerical weather prediction, nowcasting and localized forecasts,” said Joel McCorkel, GeoXO project scientist. (Nowcasting describes weather conditions in the next few hours like hail, high winds and flash floods.) NOAA flies two sounders in low-Earth orbit, the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder, built by Northrop Grumman, and the L3Harris Cross Track Infrared Sounder, in the Joint Polar Satellite System constellation. Previous generations of NOAA geostationary weather satellites also carried sounders, but the instrument was dropped from plans for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series due to cost and technical concerns . Without a sounder in the GOES-R constellations, the National Weather Service relies on data from weather balloon radiosondes and instruments in polar orbit to feed weather models. Radiosondes provide information twice a day, but most of the readings are taken over land rather than oceans, said Timothy Schmit, a research scientist in the NOAA National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service Advanced Satellite Products Branch. Polar orbiters offer global coverage but don’t help forecasters monitor rapidly evolving weather conditions as well as a geostationary satellites, he added. Simulations to evaluate the benefits of the new GeoXO Sounder, known as GXS, show significant improvement in forecasting the path of storms as well as their intensity, Schmit said. “Geostationary sounders help predicted what is about to happen,” Rob Mitrevski, L3Harris Spectral Solutions vice president and general manager, told SpaceNews. As a result communities in the path of a natural disaster have more time for evacuation or other activities to mitigate the impact, he added. GeoXO is NOAA’s largest procurement in history . The $19.6 billion GeoXO budget approved in December covers six satellites, operations and support extending from 2022 to 2052. NOAA plans to position satellites over the East and West Coasts, like the current GOES-R constellation, plus a third central satellite. The sounder and an atmospheric composition instrument are destined for the central satellite. NOAA plans to launch its first GeoXO satellite in 2032. The sounder satellite is slated to follow in 2035. In addition to the sounder, NOAA’s GeoXO constellation will include instruments to provide visual and infrared imagery for weather and climate applications, observations of lightning, atmospheric composition and ocean color.
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat said Jan. 19 it retired a satellite last week that had helped Europe transition from analog to digital television two decades ago. After operating more than five years beyond its 15-year design life, the Eutelsat 5 West A satellite was moved to a graveyard orbit some 400 kilometers above the geostationary arc. The satellite’s propulsion system was then depressurized and its electrical equipment passivated per French law and international Space Traffic Management recommendations, according to the Paris-based operator. At 4:57 a.m. Eastern Jan. 13, Eutelsat said it turned off the satellite’s telemetry transmitter to deactivate all remaining radio frequency sources. Eutelsat 5 West A was a “disruptive satellite for the Group,” the operator said in a news release, having played a key role in the transition to higher definition, more interference-resistant digital programming — notably in France in the early 2000s. The satellite was originally built by Alcatel Alenia Space — now Thales Alenia Space — for a joint venture called Stellat, which was majority owned by the French telecoms giant now known as Orange. Eutelsat bought the Eutelsat 5 West A satellite shortly after its launch in July 2002 and operated it at 5 degrees west for its entire operational life. The Eutelsat 5 West B satellite that launched in 2019 was supposed to relieve Eutelsat 5 West A of its duties. However, the Northrop Grumman-built satellite suffered a power failure that cut its capacity by nearly half. Eutelsat 5 West A was put in a fuel-saving inclined orbit in 2019, which prolonged its life but limited the types of services it could provide, while customers were progressively offloaded to Eutelsat 5 West B and other satellites in the operator’s fleet. Toward the end of its mission, Eutelsat 5 West A was mostly providing maritime connectivity.
Now that SpaceX has established itself as a leading provider of U.S. national security launches, it is seeking a bigger share of the defense market with a new product line called Starshield. SpaceX quietly unveiled Starshield last month offering defense and intelligence agencies custom-built spacecraft, sensors, and secure communications services leveraging SpaceX’s investment in its Starlink network of broadband satellites. Like other commercial players, SpaceX is eyeing opportunities fueled by the United States’ “great-power competition” with China and Russia. A U.S. national defense strategy document the Pentagon released in October calls China a “pacing challenge” that threatens to surpass the United States in defense and space technologies. To win this race, DoD intends to tap commercial innovation. “We have in the United States by far the most resilient commercial space enterprise anywhere in the world. The Chinese know that, and we’re going to lean into that,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Dec. 8 at an Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “We’re going to make sure we’re working closely with the commercial sector and leveraging all that commercial space capability.” Russia’s war in Ukraine cast a powerful spotlight on the space industry, notably on the value of imaging satellites and on SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink. The system — with well over 3,000 satellites in orbit and thousands more to come — demonstrated resilience against jamming and showed the strength of this kind of proliferated architecture. “This wasn’t available before,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said Dec. 14 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ukraine is the first major conflict, he noted, where commercial space technology has come into play in a significant way. The integration of commercial space into military operations is “the way of the future,” Plumb said. “It’s pretty clear now that the department doesn’t have to build its own constellation for every mission set to introduce resilience.” Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, in a Nov. 21 memo said the Pentagon anticipates greater dependence on the space industry and directed the Defense Science Board to recommend steps DoD should take to ensure it has access to commercial sources. “Because of the rapidly improving commercial space capabilities, a comprehensive plan for using commercial space systems in the context of classified U.S. space capabilities is needed,” said the memo. SpaceX has not shared many details about its Starshield product line and the company did not respond to questions from SpaceNews about the initiative. SpaceX’s website describes Starshield as a “secured satellite network for government entities” with an “initial focus” on direct delivery of processed Earth observation data, secure global communications enabled by inter-satellite laser links, and satellite buses for hosting “the most demanding customer payload missions.” The company also highlights its existing relationships with the U.S. military and the intelligence community, as well as know-how gained in commercial Starlink operations. Starlink’s ability to operate in Ukraine with little to no disruptions did not go unnoticed by the Pentagon. Bloomberg reported Dec. 20 that SpaceX sent 22,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine since the war began in February, including replacements for units destroyed in combat. A Ukrainian government official told Bloomberg the country will request 10,000 more. Starshield presumably would offer customized Starlink satellites and terminals that DoD could own or lease, said Todd Harrison, defense budget analyst and managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights. “I think SpaceX is prepared to use the expertise and manufacturing prowess it has developed from its Starlink business, mass producing pretty sophisticated satellites,” Harrison said. National security space is now one of the fastest growing areas of the DoD budget, and commercial players like SpaceX “have been preparing for some time to fill a demand in the defense market,” he noted. The 2023 spending bill Congress passed Dec. 23 to fund the government through Sept. 30 added $69.3 billion for DoD above what the Pentagon requested. The defense increase includes $1.7 billion for Space Force programs. SpaceX’s original approach was to sell Starlink communications as a commercial service to DoD, Harrison said, “but think they’re finding that that’s harder than they thought” and there are also lucrative opportunities in selling customized satellites leveraging their existing production lines. Starshield is drawing from SpaceX’s experience as a satellite supplier for the Space Force’s Space Development Agency. SDA is procuring satellites to build a Transport Layer in low Earth orbit, a mesh network that will move data collected by a Tracking Layer of missile-detection satellites. Under a 2020 contract, SpaceX teamed with Leidos Corp. to build four Tracking Layer satellites that are projected to launch in March. With a hot production line pumping out an estimated 120 Starlink satellites per month, said Harrison, “why not just double down on that and build government-unique satellites if that’s what they want?” Combining its manufacturing might and expertise building military satellites, he said, “SpaceX can use that to break into this market and probably out-compete a lot of the traditional primes.” Andrew Penn, space industry analyst and principal at the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, sees Starshield as a “logical next step for SpaceX to leverage its mass manufacturing of satellites and terminals — one you could argue it has already taken through its SDA and related national security work.” SpaceX is essentially telling government buyers it is prepared to establish a separate business unit to handle built-to-order satellites for defense and intelligence customers, Penn noted. “The company will be better positioned to serve the military with its second-generation Starlink satellite buses, which promise to be larger and capable of hosting payloads with higher power requirements.” Considering how fast the company builds satellites, Penn said, “there is an opportunity for DoD to take advantage of a hot manufacturing line to realize meaningful cost savings compared to more traditional bespoke acquisitions.” The head of Space Force acquisitions Frank Calvelli said DoD has to move quickly to take advantage of commercially available technologies, and pivot away from traditional development programs that are perennially behind schedule and over budget. “There’s a lot of pressure on the Department to go faster in space acquisition,” Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, said Dec. 15 at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event. “Speed in space acquisition is a very simple formula,” Calvelli said. “You build smaller satellites, you use existing technology and reduce non-recurring engineering. You take advantage of commercial capabilities and you execute.” These comments are an acknowledgment that the U.S. military “is going to have to embrace a new model” for procuring space systems, said Even Rogers, a former U.S. Air Force space operations officer and currently the CEO of True Anomaly, a new venture-backed space startup. “The Space Force needs to partner with companies like SpaceX and whoever can provide fully integrated mission solutions, not just an algorithm or a singular spacecraft,” said Rogers. DoD prime contractors, he said, are “really good at big and expensive programs that are sort of the backbone to security infrastructure and deterrence. What they’re not good at is very quick iteration to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.” At the same time, commercial space companies face a tough financial environment and need national security customers, he said. “Defense is where the big growth is going to be because of the strategic competition with Russia and China. What the DoD wants is defense technologies at the innovation rate of commercial technologies. That’s the Holy Grail.” Trae Stephens, a principal at Founders Fund, whose investments include SpaceX, said venture capitalists “are thinking about fundraising very differently than they were in 2020 and 2021.” “Before, we kind of were complacent because we thought the world was this perfectly safe place … and all the real money to be made was in consumer and internet products. And I think Ukraine has woken people up,” Stephens said Dec. 3 on The Burn Bag national security and foreign policy podcast. “With everything that we’re seeing internationally, not only with Ukraine, but also what’s going on in Iran, what’s going on in North Korea, the potential threat to Taiwan,” he said, “I think everyone’s kind of coming back to the drawing board and saying, if we’re going to invest in things that matter, that are strategic, that are mission-oriented, there’s a real opportunity here.” What SpaceX has done with Starlink is to visibly demonstrate how commercial space technology serves national security applications, said Peter Arment, aerospace and defense industry analyst at Baird investment bank. “This helps SpaceX obviously but also helps the entire industry attract investment,” he said. “The defense spending space is sort of a rising tide at the moment.” Before anyone had ever heard of Starshield, other companies in the space industry started making moves to be better positioned to compete in the national security arena. Commercial launch provider and satellite manufacturer Rocket Lab on Dec. 1 announced it is establishing a U.S.-based subsidiary for defense and intelligence work, including classified programs. The new business, called Rocket Lab National Security, will have “close engagement with U.S. government customers to understand their mission requirements, which may be dedicated rapid call-up launch, satellite design, build and integration, spacecraft operations or all of the above,” Rocket Lab spokesperson Murielle Baker said in a statement. Tess Hatch, vice president of Bessemer Venture Partners, a Rocket Lab investor, said the mood has shifted from a year ago “when investors in boardrooms were pounding our fists on the table saying ‘growth at all cost.’” Defense customers can be “a little lumpy and unpredictable. However, there are massive potential contracts,” Hatch said Dec. 6 at the TechCrunch Space conference. “With markets down and maybe commercial needing to push a little more throttle, the diversity of the customer base is so important,” Hatch said. “The government is extra helpful for space companies right now when the commercial side isn’t as efficient.” Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital shifted gears in late 2022 to better address military customers, canceling plans to build a commercial remote-sensing constellation and instead focus on producing space hardware for NASA, DoD and for Terran Orbital’s strategic investor Lockheed Martin. HawkEye 360, a commercial firm that uses satellites to monitor radio-frequency emissions, decided to focus almost entirely on the national security market for signals intelligence. This sector “has always been the purview of the big defense industrial base entities like Lockheed, Northrop and Raytheon that build very expensive spacecraft to do exquisite things,” HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini said Nov. 17 at the Baird defense investment conference. To compete against traditional defense contractors, Serafini said the company moved to hire more workers with security clearances, and invested in security-cleared infrastructure and accounting systems. Like other remote sensing industry players, HawkEye 360 gained attention during the Ukraine war. “We’ve performed over 1,000 individual missions over Ukraine, and it’s given us bona fides that we can then go take to other places where we’re required, in particular Asia Pacific with the rise of China,” Serafini said in September at a Gabelli Funds investors conference. DoD’s attitude toward commercial firms and startups “has definitely shifted,” said Serafini. “Has it shifted all the way where everyone’s totally embracing commercial capabilities that are unclassified? No. But you have to find a middle ground.” The market’s emphasis on profitability will drive companies to tailor products to government needs, he said. “For too long startup companies were run by 20-something-year-old people spending money like drunken sailors, and we know that doesn’t work out in the long term. What you need is discipline to develop products that customers truly care about.” In the satellite communications sector, commercial operator SES in March acquired Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, a network integrator and manager of satcom services for DoD and other government agencies. With the $450 million acquisition, SES will have a stronger presence in the national security sector. The combination of the satellite operator’s U.S. subsidiary and DRS GES was recently rebranded as SES Space & Defense to “reflect the organization’s new positioning and expanded offering serving the needs of the U.S. government customers,” the company said. The value of commercial satellites, meanwhile, have put private-sector assets directly in the line of fire. Russian officials made that clear as they saw the essential role of Starlink communications services in support of Ukraine. These threats have compelled the Pentagon to consider options to compensate commercial companies if their satellites are damaged while supporting the U.S. military in a conflict. This is a striking reminder of how far private players have moved into domains that previously only belonged to governments, said Casey Dreier, chief policy adviser for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration. Starlink is the poster child of this trend, he said Dec. 13. A private company being seen as a valid target in warfare “crystallizes how all-encompassing and integrated space is to all sorts of things that we take for granted in the current world order.” This is raising tough questions for dual-use companies “that are being cross-pressured by different needs,” said Dreier. “When the U.S. government is just one customer of many, do you make a full commitment to the U.S. government to serve exactly their needs in ways that we may not have fully considered?” SpaceX, for example, could find itself in a sticky geopolitical situation if China invaded Taiwan, said Dreier, given Elon Musk’s dual role as head of SpaceX and CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla, which has significant operations in China. The United States, which is committed to the defense of Taiwan, would rely on DoD contractors, including SpaceX, to support those efforts. This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
SAN FRANCISCO – Last year was rough for many space startups. Overall investment dropped 58 percent from its $47.4 billion peak in 2021 to $20.1 billion in 2022. Still, Chad Anderson, Space Capital managing partner, thinks the downturn will make the sector more resilient. “We see the shift away from momentum investing and back to a focus on fundamentals as a net positive for the space economy, since it will reward quality companies and discipline those that have weaker fundamentals and are struggling to execute,” Anderson said by email. Over the longer term, the shift in investment philosophy will help streamline the sector, “thereby reducing competition and allowing strong companies to thrive,” Anderson said. “This will make the space economy stronger, more efficient and more resilient.” Space Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, published its Space Investment Quarterly Jan. 19 for the fourth quarter of 2022. The report notes that early-stage startups fared better than later-stage and growth companies. One exception was SpaceX, which raised $2 billion in 2022, or 32 percent of the total 2022 private investment in space infrastructure. SpaceX was also in the minority because it raised capital in both 2021 and 2022. Only 38 percent of the space infrastructure companies that raised capital in 2021 sought additional funding in 2022. SpaceX is such an outlier that it’s sometimes tempting to consider the annual investment picture without the launch giant. Without SpaceX, though, “you wouldn’t really have a viable infrastructure layer to speak of,” Anderson said. “SpaceX is largely responsible for creating the space economy as we know it today and it clearly dominates the launch industry. We can’t talk about infrastructure without considering SpaceX and this is not going to change anytime soon. In fact, it’s only going to become more integral to the space economy once Starship comes online. Starship promises to revolutionize launch, but it will also create massive opportunity – and disruption – across many other industries including stations, lunar, on-orbit manufacturing, and debris clean-up.” Over the last decade investors bet $272.3 billion on 1,791 space companies. The totals include hardware and software firms that work with space data as well as companies that use data from space assets in their products or services. Looking ahead, Space Capital expects 2023 to be a difficult year for startups as investors remain selective. “Many investors, who view space as primarily infrastructure, view space as a higher risk asset class,” Anderson said. “So, they will be much more selective in how they invest.” That trend will force pre-revenue companies and firms with questionable business models to “reckon with market forces, but there is a general risk here of throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” Anderson said. “It’s important for investors to understand that quality companies with strong fundamentals, particularly those with government, defense and intelligence use-cases, like satellite communications and Earth imaging, have strong growth prospects throughout 2023 and beyond.” Venture capital firms have more than $200 billion in pent-up capital, but it will take several years to deploy the money since massive rounds remain rare, Anderson added. In 2023, government spending will be increasingly important to the space economy, according to the Space Capital report. “It is our view that space companies with government and defense applications will be best positioned to weather the tougher economic climate,” Anderson said. “National Security Space is now one of the fastest growing areas of the Department of Defense budget. The $26.3 billion 2023 budget for the U.S. Space Force tops NASA’s $25.4 billion budget. “Strategic competition with China will be a significant driver of US government spending in multiple areas of the space economy, from launch and satellites to low-Earth orbit logistics,” Anderson said. “However, one area where it will have an outsized influence is in the lunar industry. These commercial operations are high-cost, high-risk and with a long-term path to profitability, so without government support they would not be viable.” The Artemis program is benefiting from the U.S. government’s determination to beat China to areas of the moon with resources like water-ice deposits. “For this reason, while lunar might otherwise be a riskier category with the potential for wavering government support, we see this as a promising nascent industry with reliable growth prospects this year and the foreseeable future, due to the China factor,” Anderson added. Space Capital is an investor in Astrobotic and Lunar Outpost, two firms preparing to conduct robotic lunar missions in 2023. Investment in emerging industries dipped 63 percent in 2022 compared with 2021. Still, 2021 was a record for private investment in commercial space stations, lunar transport, debris mitigation, on-orbit servicing, in-space manufacturing and mining, and 2022 was the sector’s second best year. “We broke out the Emerging Industries for the first time in our Space Investment Quarterly this year, which shows that $3.3 billion has been invested over the past decade, with nearly half of that total invested in 2021 alone,” Anderson said. “This record level of investment was driven by venture capital firms, many of whom were investing in the category for the first time. Unfortunately, a lot of bad deals got done in the peak of market mania, and those companies are now struggling in this market environment. Overall, we expect the macro market environment will continue to disproportionately affect funding for these capital-intensive companies, operating in limited new markets, for the foreseeable future.”
The co-chair of the most recent Earth science decadal survey warned that NASA faces “difficult choices” between continuing current missions and starting new missions given limited funding. At a Jan. 17 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, Waleed Abdalati, a member of the council and former NASA chief scientist, said several factors have resulted in a budget crunch for the agency’s Earth science program and that the decadal survey’s advice for dealing with funding problems has largely been exhausted. “It’s pretty clear that the resources are not and will not be available to fully implement the intended program,” he said. “The options are delaying planned missions or terminating extended missions.” He identified several factors that are causing that challenge. They include supply chain and workforce problems linked to the pandemic, a fiscal year 2023 spending bill that reduced Earth science by more than $200 million from the agency’s request, and the prospect of a long-term continuing resolution in fiscal year 2024 that would lock in spending at 2023 levels. His comments come as NASA prepares for a senior review of extended Earth science missions later this year that will examine the scientific productivity of about 15 missions, some in operation for more than 20 years, and balance that against the cost to keep them running. NASA officials have already warned that they likely will not have the funding to extend all of them. “The senior review is not going to be an easy one this year,” said Julie Robinson, deputy director of NASA’s Earth science division, during a town hall at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December . “We don’t have the money in the budget to extend every mission that comes to the senior review.” At the same time, NASA is planning to ramp up work on a series of missions called the Earth System Observatory that would implement the major “designated observables” recommended by the decadal survey. An independent review last fall, co-chaired by Abdalati along with another former NASA official, Geoff Yoder, warned of cost growth on the biggest of those missions, the Atmosphere Observing System . “There’s a tension, though, between what do you do that is new versus what do you sustain that is already flying,” Abdalati said. Abdalati was a co-chair of the decadal survey, released five years ago, that recommended those designated observables and other missions. Anticipating the potential for budget issues, the decadal included several “decision rules” to guide NASA. They included delaying missions or reducing the number of competed missions. Those options, he said, have been exhausted. “NASA has exercised all of these options and the resource challenges still remain,” he said. Additional options could involve further delays of the Earth System Observatory missions or smaller competitive missions as well as terminating current missions. Another option, he suggested, would be to accept higher risk on new missions to reduce their cost, but he warned that approach has drawbacks. “From a climate perspective, the cost of not succeeding, of taking on those additional risks, are very high, because you lose time. You don’t just lose a measurement, you lose time, much needed time.” Abdalati said the National Academies is preparing for a midterm review of the Earth science decadal that could offer NASA additional recommendations on how to balance that report’s recommendations with current missions given available funding. “But, at the end of the day, it’s pretty clear that not everything can be done, and there is going to need to be an assessment of what does not get done now.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Swiss startup ClearSpace said Jan. 19 it has raised about $29 million to support its first space debris removal mission in 2026. Europe-focused early-stage investor OTB Ventures led the Series A financing round along with Swisscom Ventures, the investment arm of Switzerland-based telco Swisscom. The government-backed Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) also participated in the round, and ClearSpace said it is establishing an operational presence in Luxembourg as a result. ClearSpace has now raised about 130 million euros ($140 million) from commercial and government sources to develop its capabilities, according to co-founder and CEO Luc Piguet. The bulk of these funds come from ClearSpace-1, a 110 million-euro space debris removal mission secured from the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2020. This mission will see the ClearSpace use a spacecraft with four articulated arms to de-orbit part of a Vega rocket from low Earth orbit (LEO). “ClearSpace-1 is baselined to be launched on a Vega-C launcher,” Piguet told SpaceNews . ClearSpace is on the UK Space Agency’s shortlist for a separate mission to remove two spacecraft from LEO in 2026. Japan-based in-orbit servicing startup Astroscale is the other contender for this contract. In November, ClearSpace announced plans to extend the life of an Intelsat satellite before it runs out of fuel in geostationary orbit around 2026-2028. Albeit not profitable yet, Durgnat said the startup “is already booking revenues from missions such as ClearSpace-1 and sponsorship.” Swiss luxury watchmaker Omega is sponsoring ClearSpace-1. Durgnat said ClearSpace expects to start booking commercial revenues sometime between 2026 and 2028. ClearSpace, Astroscale, and others see growing demand for services that can reduce the debris that is threatening operations in increasingly congested near-Earth orbits. There are 32,480 pieces of debris orbiting the Earth that are big enough to be tracked, according to ESA, and more than 130 million objects ranging in size from 1 millimeter that are currently untrackable. Fundraising in a challenging economy Financing has “become more tricky” in the current economic climate and deals are taking longer to close as increasingly risk-averse investors conduct more due diligence, noted David Ford, a partner at British financial services firm Silverpeak that advised ClearSpace on the funding round. Valuations have also come down in the absence of “me-too capital that drove up valuations unrealistically before,” Ford told SpaceNews via email. However, the “intelligent money” that remains comes from investors with more patience and understanding of how long it can take to get a return from companies in the space market. These investors are reserving capital for follow-on fundraising activity, Ford added, “they expect that five years or so should give enough time for both the economy to get ‘back on track’ and also for significant revenues to start to flow, to prove the opportunity and business models.” Lakestar, In-Q-Tel, Happiness Capital, and 600 T Space Investments also participated in ClearSpace’s Series A funding round. Other space-related ventures that have successfully closed early-stage fundraising deals recently include NorthStar Earth and Space , Capella Space , and SpiderOak .
A budget shortfall has caused NASA to scale back plans for a project that would support sending scientists to the International Space Station to conduct research. NASA sought funding in fiscal year 2023 for Commercially Enabled Rapid Space Science, or CERISS , intended ultimately to allow scientists to fly on private astronaut missions to the ISS or future commercial space stations to conduct “hyper-specialized” research more effectively than if done by a professional astronaut. Craig Kundrot, director of NASA’s biological and physical sciences division, said at a July meeting of a National Academies committee that having scientists conduct research in space would be far more efficient, predicting “a factor of 10-fold increase in speed of research, and even 100-fold.” CERISS depended on securing a budget increase for his division, which received $82.5 million in fiscal year 2022 and requested $100.4 million in fiscal year 2023. NASA planned to spend less than $10 million on CERISS in 2023 but expected it to grow to about $25 million by 2028, enabling scientist flights to the ISS to begin as soon as 2026. However, in a Jan. 18 town hall meeting by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, he said those plans had changed. His division received only $85 million in an omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2023 enacted in December. When accounting for inflation, that amount is slightly less than what the division received in 2022. “Our commercial initiative to work with industry to increase the pace of research 10- to 100-fold in low Earth orbit is dialing back to just do analysis and planning this year,” he said, blaming it on the budget cut. “We will not be releasing calls for contracts or grants, but we will be planning for the future.” NASA has kept open two requests for information (RFIs) related to CERISS. One, released in July , sought information on commercial capabilities to support crew-tended research in low Earth orbit. The other, published Nov. 29 , asked the scientific community about its interest in conducting research in LEO on private astronaut missions. Both included the possibility of testing research hardware and techniques on crewed suborbital flights. The RFIs are open through March 31. Kundrot said in July that the responses to the RFIs would support future solicitations for grants to develop and test research hardware and analysis capabilities. At the town hall meeting, he did not elaborate on the future planning NASA will conduct for CERISS in lieu of solicitations. Kundrot, who is retiring from the agency at the end of the month, said that the budget shortfall will affect other programs in his division. Proposals for research in two topics, titled Quantum Science and Thriving in Deep Space, will be selected, but the awards themselves not made until fiscal year 2024.
ABL Space Systems says a power failure, possibly linked to a fire in the first stage of its RS1 rocket, caused the inaugural launch of the vehicle to fail last week. In a statement posted to social media Jan. 18, ABL Space Systems provided a detailed timeline of the first flight of the RS1 small launch vehicle Jan. 10 from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island. The company initially said that the launch failed when its nine first stage engine shut down simultaneously after liftoff, causing the vehicle to fall back to the pad and explode In its new statement, ABL said the that at T+10.87 seconds, “Stage 1 suffered a complete loss of power.” That deenergized propellant valves, causing the nine E2 engines to shut down at an altitude of only 232 meters. The rocket, deprived of thrust, coasted upward for 2.63 seconds before falling, hitting the ground less than 20 meters from where it lifted off. At the time of impact the rocket still had about 95% of its propellant on board, “creating an energetic explosion and overpressure wave that caused damage to nearby equipment and facilities.” That damage included the launch mount for the rocket as well as tanks, communications equipment, and a fabric hangar containing integration equipment. ABL said all the debris was contained within a pre-designated hazard zone, and no people were in the area at the time of impact. The company is still investigating the launch failure with oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed the commercial launch. The company said it is looking at data that suggests there may have been a fire in the engine bay, including “off-nominal pressure spikes and rises in temperature” a few seconds after liftoff as well as visual evidence of fire or smoke. “Shortly before the power loss, a handful of sensors began dropping out sequentially. This evidence suggests that an unwanted fire spread to our avionics system, causing a system-wide failure,” the company stated. ABL added that if the investigation fails to identify a single root cause for the failure, it will examine all “undesirable conditions” that could have contributed to the failure in some way and determine how to best address them. The company did not give a timeline for completing the investigation and preparing for a second launch attempt. It did state that it has completed both stages for the second RS1 rocket, which are ready for testing, and it will repair the damaged pad while the investigation continues. “Pending the results of our anomaly investigation, we’ll be prepared to share more on the expected timeline for these efforts.” ABL has raised several hundred million dollars from venture capital firms, including $200 million in October 2021 in a round that valued the company at $2.4 billion . Lockheed Martin is both a strategic investor and a major customer, having signed a contract in April 2021 for as many as 58 RS1 launches through the end of decade. It also selected the RS1 to perform its “U.K. Pathfinder” launch from the SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands later in 2023 .
TAMPA, Fla. — Mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu said Jan. 17 it has signed a deal to resell Starlink services as plans to use a rival constellation proposed by Telesat remain uncertain. Anuvu said it has permission to resell broadband from SpaceX’s low Earth orbit (LEO) network to maritime customers, complementing the services it already provides in this and other markets from geostationary orbit (GEO). Los Angeles-headquartered Anuvu leases capacity from dozens of GEO satellites to provide Wi-Fi on boats, aircraft, and remote locations worldwide. Around the middle of this year, SpaceX is slated to launch the first two small GEO satellites for Anuvu’s dedicated constellation. Anuvu ordered the satellite from Astranis in 2021 four months after emerging from bankruptcy protection . The dedicated satellites are part of an expansion plan that in February 2022 saw Anuvu sign “the largest yet in a series of satellite capacity deals” with Telesat, a Canadian company with a fleet of GEO satellites. Their agreement covered capacity on GEO satellites using terminals designed to be forward-compatible with the Canadian operator’s proposed Lightspeed LEO constellation. Mike Pigott, Anuvu’s executive vice president for connectivity, described the agreement at the time as “ setting the stage for LEO connectivity with Telesat Lightspeed.” However, Telesat’s LEO plans are beset by cost overruns and delays that have pushed any commercial service launch to at least 2026. Telesat said last year that it expected to finalize funding for the constellation of nearly 200 satellites around the end of 2022, enabling Europe’s Thales Alenia Space to kick-start full-scale production. Asked for an update, Telesat told SpaceNews Jan. 18 that the operator is “not issuing any new public statements at this time.” Anuvu said its deal with Telesat only covered GEO capacity and “did not cover an agreement for capacity on the future Lightspeed constellation.” The company added: “As one of the largest buyers and integrators of satellite capacity, Anuvu maintains close contacts with Telesat, SpaceX, Amazon, and Eutelsat/OneWeb about their LEO constellation development work.” Anuvu said in a Jan. 17 news release that it has been helping its cruise, energy, and yacht customers install Starlink antennas since SpaceX expanded services beyond residential and enterprise markets to the maritime industry in July. “Customers who buy Starlink from Anuvu get our expertise and customer support without any strings attached,” Erik Carlsen, Anuvu senior vice president of maritime, energy and government, said in a statement. These extra services include Anuvu’s suite of network-management tools that the company said customers are not required to use. SpaceX is increasingly turning to resellers to help expand Starlink’s reach as it seeks a critical mass of subscribers. Starlink’s growing reseller base includes remote communications provider Speedcast, which like Anuvu also emerged from bankruptcy restructuring in 2021 after being hit hard by COVID-19 travel restrictions the previous year.
As Frank Calvelli nears his first year as head of military space acquisitions, he is optimistic that his push for speed and agility in procurement programs is starting to resonate. In addition to long-term reforms, there are more pressing concerns on his mind, including upcoming satellite launches and the release of a new procurement strategy for national security launch services, Calvelli said Jan. 18. Speaking at a GovConWire panel session with Lockheed Martin’s executive vice president Robert Lightfoot, Calvelli said his “ space acquisition tenets ” — that emphasize buying small satellites and commercially available technologies under fixed-price contracts — have been well received across the Space Force’s procurement organizations and he is hopeful that they will drive change in programs going forward. Calvelli serves as the Department of the Air Force’s first assistant secretary for space acquisitions and integration, a new position mandated by Congress . Since taking office, he has been a champion of the Space Development Agency , an organization formed inside the Pentagon in 2019 to help accelerate the use of commercial space technology and is now part of the U.S. Space Force. SDA is building a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit using fixed-price contracts and agile methods advocated by Calvelli. But there are still skeptics who are not convinced the Pentagon should embrace this approach at the expense of traditional big-ticket satellite developments. So successfully launching SDA’s first 28 satellites in March and June has become a top concern for Calvelli, as any setbacks would give ammunition to critics. “March is big for us, it’s our first launch of Tranche 0 , and getting those up there and those systems working is going to be really key,” he said. “And I think once we have that success, we’ll see this methodology take off like gangbusters.” “Seeing that SDA launch in March and those satellites work, I will start to get more sleep when that happens,” Calvelli said. “And then a second launch in June, that’s gonna be really key.” Also keeping Calvelli up at night is the development of a new procurement strategy for the next national security launch services contracts expected to be awarded in 2024. “National Security Space Launch Phase 3 is going to be really an important acquisition that’s going to be coming up in the next year,” he said. Calvelli described the procurement strategy as a “key thing that I have lost some sleep over, and I hope not to lose any more.” With regard to national security space launch, Calvelli in December said he was closely watching the progress of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket, a long-delayed vehicle that DoD depends on to launch critical missions over the next several years. ULA is now forecasting Vulcan’s first launch for the first quarter of 2023. Also weighing on Calvelli are several troubled programs that he wants to push forward. “We’re talking about programs that are years behind schedule, and we need to get those programs over the finish line,” he said. “We really truly have to go faster. So yeah, I’ll probably lose sleep for a little bit.”
NASA’s inspector general says that the agency needs to do a better job coordinating international partnerships in its Artemis lunar exploration campaign and overcoming obstacles like export control. A report released Jan. 17 by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) found strong international interest in Artemis, which NASA can use to reduce the overall cost of the effort to return humans to the moon. That interest, they said, is evident in the contributions countries are making to Artemis missions as well as the 23 nations that have signed the Artemis Accords outlining best practices for sustainable space exploration. “Given the scientific and exploration potential that the Moon and Mars hold, NASA’s Artemis campaign has drawn significant interest from space agencies around the world,” the report stated. It noted that, as of October 2022, NASA had signed 54 Artemis-related agreements with other space agencies and governments. Twenty-three of those were with the European Space Agency and the Japanese space agency JAXA, while the rest were with 14 other countries. However, the report said that coordination of those agreements was done on an ad hoc basis without any “overarching strategy” to manage requirements and expectations. “The lack of a coordinated approach makes it difficult for NASA to manage expectations regarding an international partner’s potential contribution and creates confusion about what they should contribute,” OIG concluded. The report contrasted that management with the International Space Station program, which has a detailed structure of panels and boards to coordinate the roles of the international partners, managed by an intergovernmental agreement or IGA. While the space station IGA is being used to manage contributions to the lunar Gateway, both NASA and partners agree that this agreement can’t be extended to additional Artemis activities. One major challenge to international cooperation highlighted in the report is export control. The OIG reported that implementation of U.S. export controls “routinely limit NASA’s Artemis collaborations with international partners and inhibit future collaborations.” One example is that export control regulations make it difficult for astronauts from NASA partners to participate in Artemis-related projects unless formally assigned to a mission. The report noted that JAXA has not sent an astronaut to the Johnson Space Center to prepare for Gateway missions because of limited access to data even though Gateway is a multinational program with Japanese contributions. NASA is also hindered by a confusing web of different export control regulations governing components that fall under the Export Administration Regulation (EAR) overseen by the Commerce Department and the more restrictive International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) overseen by the State Department. In one example, both the European Service Module for the Orion spacecraft and an adapter to connect it to Orion’s crew module are separately classified to fall under EAR. But, when the service module and adapter are combined, the hardware then falls under ITAR. Despite these challenges, the OIG report concluded there were cost benefits to international partnerships on Artemis, citing an Aerospace Corporation study that found that NASA projects with international contributions experienced less cost growth than those without such partnerships. The report concluded that NASA should do more to take advantage of cost-sharing, finding that only 6% of the costs of the first three Artemis missions will fall on international partners, versus 25% of costs to run the U.S. segment of the ISS. “With NASA’s current budget profile projecting $93 billion in Artemis costs between fiscal years 2012 and 2025, more effective international partner participation and cost management strategies would better position NASA to achieve its long-term Artemis objectives.” The report made 10 recommendations to NASA on ways to improve coordination with international partners on Artemis, including export control changes. NASA accepted all of them other than one calling for “a detailed gap analysis and cost estimate” for missions beyond Artemis 4, saying in a response included in the report that the overall Artemis effort was not “bounded in such a way to accommodate conducting a defensible cost estimate on a multi-decade campaign.” OIG released the report the same day as a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, which includes international collaboration as one of its “priority focus areas.” Committee members did not discuss the report at the meeting and generally praised NASA for its efforts to bring in international partners to Artemis. “The goal of Artemis is to be the largest coalition of space partners in history,” said Kay Bailey Hutchison, a former senator and U.S. ambassador to NATO. “All of the work that is being done is going to make that a reality.” UAE Gateway role The OIG report also appeared to indirectly confirm a role for the United Arab Emirates in the lunar Gateway. NASA officials have said for months that they are in discussions with an unnamed country to provide an airlock module for the Gateway, a contribution originally assigned to Russia before that country elected not to participate in the effort. A report in December by The National , a UAE publication, stated that Boeing was “actively working” with the UAE government on the design of an airlock for the Gateway. Neither NASA nor the UAE government have confirmed those discussions. The OIG report also stated that NASA was in talks with an unnamed “international partner” to provide an airlock module for the Gateway for launch in the late 2020s. In another table in the report listing various international partnerships, the UAE Space Agency is identified as offering “potential contributions” to the Gateway, a designation given to no other agency. In a report appendix, the UAE Space Agency listed “airlock production” as an emerging capability.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 18 lifted off at 7:24 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, carrying a U.S. Space Force GPS satellite. The Falcon 9 launched the Lockheed Martin-built GPS 3 SV-06 — the 6th of the newest version of the satellite known as GPS 3. The GPS constellation of 31 satellites operated by the U.S. Space Force provides positioning, navigation and timing signals to military and civilian users. GPS satellites operate in medium Earth orbit at an altitude of 12,550 miles. The launch of SV-06 was SpaceX’s fifth GPS mission, its second national security space launch of 2023 and Falcon 9’s 196th flight. The first stage booster supporting this mission previously launched Crew-5 astronauts to the International Space Station. Approximately two and a half minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage separated. Following separation, the first stage landed on the “A Shortfall of Gravitas” drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. The second stage performed two engine burns to inject the GPS satellite into the intended orbit one hour and 29 minutes after liftoff. SpaceX in a tweet confirmed the satellite deployment was successful. SpaceX had previously launched four GPS 3 satellites under contracts awarded in 2016 and 2018 . The first launch was on Dec. 23, 2018, the second and third on June 30 and Nov. 5, 2020, and the fourth on June 17, 2021. After five launches on Falcon 9, next GPS satellite will fly on Vulcan The next GPS satellite due for launch, SV-07, will fly to orbit on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket . ULA received the task order in May 2022 under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 agreement which splits national security missions 60/40 between ULA and SpaceX. Based on the timing of the award and Vulcan’s still uncertain schedule, SV-07 will launch in 2024 at the earliest. ULA said Vulcan will be ready to perform its debut launch mid-2023 and the vehicle has to complete two successful commercial missions to be certified for NSSL launches. The first mission awarded to ULA that would have been flown by Vulcan, USSF-51, was changed to an Atlas 5 to keep the mission on schedule. According to the current plan, Vulcan’s first NSSL missions would be USSF-106, USSF-87 and GPS SV-07.
China will launch its Queqiao-2 communications relay satellite in 2024 to support upcoming robotic landing missions at the lunar south pole and far side of the moon. Wang Qiong of the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center under the China National Space Administration (CNSA) told press Jan. 17 that Queqiao-2 would launch in early 2024, ahead of the Chang’e-6 mission which is currently scheduled to launch in late 2024 or early 2025. Chinese language Science and Technology Daily reports that Queqiao-2 will be an upgrade of the first Queqiao satellite, launched in 2018 to Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 to support the 2019 Chang’e-4 lunar far side lander and rover mission. The first Queqiao satellite is stated to be coming towards the end of its lifetime. Queqiao-2, which means “Magpie Bridge-2” and is taken from Chinese mythology, will enter a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) to support Chang’e-6, according to the report, rather than the more positionally stable halo orbit around E-M L2 at around 65,000 kilometers beyond the moon. Chang’e-6 mission is likely to conduct its landing, sampling and ascent vehicle liftoff stages of the mission in around 48 hours, likely during an opportune time during Queqiao-2’s orbit. China is understood to have used the service module from its first lunar sample return mission, the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission, to test out DRO during extended mission activities. Chang’e-6 will target a crater inside the massive, ancient South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin on the far side of the moon. An SPA sample return mission has been noted in the U.S. as high priority planetary science and one that could provide fresh insight into the early eras of the solar system. Queqiao-2 will act as a communications relay between teams on the ground and lunar far side. A relay is required as that hemisphere of the moon never faces Earth due to tidal locking. The satellite and its 4.2-meter-diameter parabolic antenna will also serve the Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 missions to the lunar south pole as part of China’s growing lunar ambitions . This will likely require Queqiao-2 to change its orbit, with an inclined highly elliptical frozen orbit the possible choice, according to earlier reports . This orbit would allow communication links for over 8 hours of a roughly 12-hour-period orbit. Chang’e-7 will launch around 2026 and consist of an orbiter, lander, rover and “mini flying detector,” to study the lunar topography, material composition and environment, with the latter spacecraft to look for the presence of water-ice, while Chang’e-8, targeted for launch around 2028, will be an in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission. The infrastructure launched as part of these missions will serve as a basis to support China’s larger International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) initiative. Chinese space actors have a number of concepts for supporting the country’s lunar exploration activities, including a lunar communications and navigation constellation , along with studies of orbits for optimal coverage.
Rocket Lab sees the U.S. military as a potential customer of the company’s future medium-lift rocket, Neutron. But unless the Defense Department changes its requirements for launch providers, new entrants like Rocket Lab will be unable to compete for contracts, the company’s CEO Peter Beck said Jan. 17. Speaking on a webcast hosted by the investment banking firm Canaccord Genuity, Beck said Rocket Lab is on an aggressive schedule to complete the development of Neutron for a 2024 debut. The reusable rocket’s main target customers will be commercial operators building large constellations but the company also hopes to compete for national security missions. Although DoD invested more than $24 million in the development of Neutron’s upper stage, its rules for national security launch providers ensure that the only eligible competitors are companies that fly heavy rockets. In order to win the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contracts, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance had to demonstrate their vehicles can fly payloads to nine “reference orbits” which requires medium and heavy launch vehicles. The Space Force is now contemplating a new strategy for NSSL Phase 3 that would be more flexible, perhaps allowing companies that can’t fly to all orbits to compete for less demanding missions. Beck said Rocket Lab would be happy to bid Neutron for medium-lift launches but the company would not invest in a heavy launcher if that’s what it took to win an NSSL contract. “I’d love to see a Phase 3 environment where Neutron is on board,” he said. “I think that would offer the nation the most amount of flexibility, the most robust launch access and quite frankly, the lowest price.” Neutron was designed to lift 8,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit while recovering the first stage, or up to 15,000 kilograms if the first stage is expended. Rocket Lab is building a Neutron factory in Accomack County, Virginia, next to the Wallops Flight Facility, where it will soon start launching its small rocket Electron and where it plans to launch Neutron. Beck said DoD should reconsider its requirements for launch providers given the current market conditions. The cost of meeting government requirements is too high for commercial companies, he said, considering the small number of NSSL launches that are projected. “The big dog on on the street is no longer the government, the big dog on the street are the large, really well funded commercial entities that are looking to build constellations,” said Beck. If competing for Phase 3 requires building a fleet of vehicles to cover all NSSL payload requirements, “in our case we would have to build a Neutron heavy,” Beck said. “That would be a very difficult commercial decision because you need to spend like a billion dollars to play in that game.” A company is not going to spend a billion dollars to chase a handful of NSSL launches “when there’s commercial constellations that are looking to acquire years of your capability,” he said. “What I hope happens in Phase 3 is that the government realizes there’s actually a variety of vehicles out there that will be super useful for the nation’s national security.” A tough road ahead for Neutron Beck said he’s confident about Neutron’s development so far but recent launch failures are a reminder of the difficulties not only of bringing a new vehicle to market but also of flying it reliably and consistently. “It’s been a tough couple of months for launch vehicles,” he said, citing recent failures by a Chinese launcher , Europe’s Vega C , Virgin Orbit and ABL Space . “The reality is that it’s really hard to build a small launch vehicle and launch it, and it’s even harder to do it over and over and over again.” Rocket Lab and Electron, he said “have proven ourselves and we’re going strong … but it’s easy to get excited and deliver a vehicle to the pad, but that’s when the work really starts.” Beck said Neutron is on a compressed timeline, “and we’ve simplified the problems as far as we can. But at the end of the day it is a rocket development program. And I’m sure there’ll be things that come up and hit us in the face, but at this point we’re holding our ground.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Spanish startup FOSSA Systems, which operates a constellation for connecting low-power monitoring devices, hopes to move pilot projects to full-blown commercial services this year by adding more capable satellites to its fleet. The three-year-old company currently has 13 picosatellites in low Earth orbit. Julián Fernández, CEO of FOSSA (Free Open Source Software and Aerospace), said pilot customers in the logistics and oil and gas sectors have helped the company make $1 million in revenue to date. The constellation uses Long-Range radio (LoRa), a low-power wide area network protocol used by most internet of things (IoT) devices, to provide basic connectivity for monitoring and tracking purposes outside of terrestrial networks. However, he said the network currently operates with a small set of reception channels that limit the applications it can support. FOSSA’s next-generation satellites will be larger and have “a drastic increase in performance that allows our commercial service to be put into place,” he said. These satellites will have a new form factor Fernández declined to disclose that would boost the network’s capabilities, although FOSSA plans to stick to specializing in low-bandwidth solutions for the time being. Whereas the constellation currently can serve half a million devices per day, FOSSA aims “to increase that by nearly an order of magnitude,” Fernández said, “so the intention is to really increase our total throughput — not speed-wise, but device-wise.” With 13 satellites in sun-synchronous orbits, he said FOSSA can provide solutions with a latency of around 10 hours. The company aims to deploy a constellation of 80 satellites by the end of 2024 to reduce latency to near-realtime. Constellation expansion FOSSA announced Jan. 12 that it had booked two space tugs from Momentus to start deploying next-generation satellites this year. The first of two Vigoride tugs carrying an unspecified number of FOSSA satellites is due to launch with Transporter-8, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission slated for no earlier than June 2023. Momentus said it expects to deploy the follow-on Vigoride on a later SpaceX Transporter mission. While FOSSA has not yet determined the number of satellites joining these two missions, Fernández said it could “enter the double-digit area.” The orbital transfer vehicle operator has also secured “additional customers” for the first of these two missions, Momentus spokesperson Jessica Pieczonka said. Fernández said FOSSA is talking to other launch service providers and brokers as it seeks to deploy as many as 67 satellites in less than two years. He said the startup is in the middle of a series A funding round to support these plans after raising about $1 million from commercial and government sources. Falling costs for increasingly powerful small satellites have encouraged dozens of other space players to seek a share of the burgeoning market for connecting internet of things (IoT) devices. They include Swarm, which SpaceX snapped up in 2021 in a rare acquisition for Elon Musk’s satellite launch and services provider. Despite a growing threat from deep-pocketed competitors, Fernández believes there are “still huge gaps” in the market for other players. “I think it’s also going to be a game of not who provides the best tech, but who better integrates with the end customers and has a better go-to-market approach,” he said. He said FOSSA expects to double its team of 24 people before the end of the year to help ramp up its operations.
Raytheon Intelligence & Space announced Jan. 17 it won a four-year, $8.7 million contract to develop mission planning software for the U.S. Air Force rocket cargo program . The company will design a planning tool that would allow the Air Force to coordinate a rocket cargo mission. The Air Force’s rocket cargo project is studying the possible use of commercial space launch vehicles to transport humanitarian aid and other cargo payloads around the world. Several commercial space firms have signed agreements with the U.S. military to share data and conduct simulations. A division of Raytheon based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Raytheon BBN will identify and develop rocket cargo workflows and processes, and design human-machine interfaces, the company said. It will also propose ways to coordinate operations between government and commercial organizations. “The tool we create must enable the Air Force to plan, coordinate and conduct a rocket cargo mission within hours,” said Beth DePass, Raytheon BBN principal investigator for the project. “At its core, this is a logistics challenge of epic proportions. Although the cargo would initially be pre-packaged and stored at the launch site for rapid loading, there are still tremendous challenges with how the DoD will safely load, launch, and deliver under very tight timing constraints,” she said. Challenges include weather conditions, launch approvals and many other variables, said DePass. Raytheon BBN has developed other logistics and planning tools for the Department of Defense for aerial delivery of mission cargo and humanitarian aid.
The U.S. Space Force announced Jan. 17 it has delivered the first of two space sensor payloads scheduled to fly on Japan’s navigation satellites. Japan’s Office of National Space Policy in 2020 inked an agreement with the U.S. Space Force to host two optical sensor payloads on Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) constellation. The first sensor will fly on QZS-6 and the second on QZS-7, currently projected to launch in 2023 and 2024, respectively. QZSS, commonly referred to as the Japanese GPS, is a positioning system composed mainly of satellites in quasi-zenith orbits. The new satellites that will host U.S. payloads will be in geostationary orbits, a key location that would allow the United States to monitor critical assets in the GEO belt. The optical sensors were developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory under a 2019 agreement with the U.S. Air Force. The lab is working with the Japanese National Space Policy Secretariat and Mitsubishi Electric Company to integrate the sensors on QZS-6 and QZS-7. The two launches will expand the QZSS constellation to a total of seven satellites. “The delivery of the first payload represents an important milestone,” said Lt. Col. Brian Fredrickson, program manager at U.S. Space Systems Command. “While a lot of work remains, I’m happy to report that we’re on track to meet our commitments.” MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Space Force personnel “will mobilize to Japan to support the integration and test efforts with their Japanese partners until completion of the launch of both QZSS host satellites,” he said. The payload was transported on a military aircraft operated by Air Mobility Command from Hanscom Air Force Base’s 66th Air Base Wing in Massachusetts to Yokota Air Base’s 374th Airlift Wing in Japan. Space Systems Command said the partnership with Japan “will set the stage for future collaborations.” 
China’s state-owned and commercial space sector actors are planning a total of more than 70 launches across 2023 as the country’s space activities continue to expand. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor and maker of the Long March rocket series, will again aim for more than 50 launches this year, according to an announcement from an early January meeting . China launched 64 times in 2022. Combined launch plans of CASC and commercial actors could see the country top 70 launches this year from three inland spaceports, the coastal Wenchang spaceport and the Haiyang spaceport facilitating sea launches . Among CASC’s major launches will be two Shenzhou crewed missions to the Tiangong space station and a supporting pair of Tianzhou cargo spacecraft. It will also carry out a range of civil, military, science and commercial missions. The Long March 6C—a variant of the new Long March 6A minus its solid side boosters—will have its first launch this year. The Long March 5 will be in action again, having last flown in 2020 to launch Tianwen-1 to Mars and the Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission. Its manufacturer, CASC’s China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), did not reveal what the flight would entail. The low Earth orbit (LEO) version of the rocket, the Long March 5B, will likewise fly again, having launched three space station modules across the past two years. It could carry the Xuntian space telescope to co-orbit with Tiangong late in the year, perform a test launch for sending large numbers of satellites into LEO for the country’s communication megaconstellation plan , or launch a new test of China’s new-generation crew spacecraft. The latter is designed to increase crew carrying capacity to LEO, while a larger, 21-metric-ton version will be used for future crewed lunar missions . The older hypergolic Long March 2, 3 and 4 series rockets are expected to be active regularly, as will the newer, kerosene-liquid oxygen Long March 7, 7A and 8 rockets. CASC recently announced a new production line for kerolox engines. The solid Long March 11 and Jielong-3 will also launch, both from land and sea. A failure of one of the mainstay rockets could greatly impact China’s launch rate in 2023. The last Long March failure occurred in April 2020. China is expected to grow its Earth observation and reconnaissance capabilities further, continuing a high rate of launches of Yaogan and Gaofen satellites, while also launching replacement satellites for the Beidou GNSS constellation. Communications, meteorological and ocean observations satellites will also be part of the manifest. Science missions will notably include the Einstein Probe in November and the Sino-French Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) in mid-2023. CASC’s sister state-owned defense contractor, CASIC, and its subsidiary Expace are planning numerous launches of its solid Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11 solid rockets following the pair both returning to flight last year. The launchers will likely carry satellites for CASIC’s Xingyun Internet of Things constellation and mainly commercial payloads. CAS Space, an offshoot of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will follow up the debut success of its Lijian-1 (ZK-1A) solid rocket with more launches this year. The first will target May. Galactic Energy completed its first launch of the year in early January and, following a string of five successes from five attempts, is looking to launch 8-10 Ceres-1 solid rockets this year, including a possible inaugural sea launch in the second half of the year. Its kerolox Pallas-1 rocket is now expected to have its test flight in 2024. The firm could help CAS spinoff CGST construct its Jilin-1 Earth observation constellation after launching five such satellites in November. CGST announced last fall that it intends to double the size of the constellation to 300 satellites by 2025. Landspace could attempt a second launch of its Zhuque-2 methane-LOX launcher, after an issue with second stage vernier thrusters brought about the failure of the first launch last month. Competitor iSpace could also return to the pad, working towards a test launch of the Hyperbola-2 reusable methalox launcher. It is unknown if the Hyperbola-1 solid rocket will be seen again, following three consecutive failures . Space Pioneer is expected to attempt its first launch this year with the Tianlong-2 kerolox rocket, as part of a trend of commercial Chinese liquid launchers moving towards test flights. Deep Blue Aerospace plans to build on a kilometer-level hop test conducted last year with a 100-kilometer-altitude test in 2023. Other newer entrants, Orienspace and Rocket Pi , could launch their respective Gravity-1 solid rocket and Darwin-1 methalox launcher this year also.
Swedish and European officials inaugurated what they called mainland Europe’s first orbital launch site Jan. 13, but it’s unclear who will launch from the facility and when. During a brief ceremony at the Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden attended by the king and the prime minister of Sweden as well as the president of the European Commission, the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) declared a new orbital launch facility at the site, which has long hosted sounding rocket launches, is ready to accommodate customers. “With Spaceport Esrange, E.U. gets a strategic asset which provides independent access to space,” said Anna Kinberg Batra, chair of the board of SSC. “This will be instrumental for reaching the E.U. and U.N. sustainability goals as well as strategies within security and defense.” Those views, particularly the importance of space to European security nearly a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, were echoed by other attendees. “The current geopolitical situation, not least, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has demonstrated how important it is that the European Union has access to space,” said Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. “It’s a big moment for Europe. It’s a big moment for Europe’s space industry. The first orbital launch site on the European mainland,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. “This spaceport offers an independent European gateway to space.” Europe already has independent access to space through the spaceport in French Guiana operated by the French space agency CNES, which hosts Ariane and Vega launches. That spaceport is also renovating a pad to support multiple small launch vehicles. Officials said little about the orbital launch site itself or prospective users of it. The site features a launch vehicle integration facility and three pads. One pad is for suborbital rockets and “microlaunchers” capable of placing up to 300 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), while a second pad will be used for launcher vehicles that could put up to 1,200 kilograms into SSO. A third pad is reserved for testing of reusable vehicles. SSC said the first user of the site will be Themis, a reusable launch vehicle demonstrator being developed by ArianeGroup with support from the European Space Agency to test vertical takeoff and landing technologies. Those launches could begin later this year. However, ArianeGroup, in a roadmap of Themis development , said tests at Esrange would be limited to low-altitude “hop” tests going only a few tens of meters high. Future higher-altitude tests would take place in French Guiana. At the event, officials highlighted the presence of Isar Aerospace, a German company developing the Spectrum small launch vehicle. Isar conducts engine tests at Esrange, but in its own statement the company said it has no plans to conduct orbital launches there. The first launch of Spectrum is scheduled for later this year from Andøya Spaceport in Norway. Another German launch vehicle developer, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), also performs tests at Esrange. RFA announced Jan. 11 it will conduct the first orbital launch of its RFA One rocket at the end of the year from SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands north of Scotland. RFA noted in its announcement it has exclusive access to one pad at SaxaVord, a multi-user site, with the pad and launch stool that will host the rocket completed at the end of last year. “The RFA launch pad is therefore the first for vertical orbital rocket launches in the UK and mainland Europe,” the company stated. SSC said in a statement that it expects the first orbital launch from Esrange to take place around the end of the year, but did not disclose who would conduct it. “SSC are in advanced discussions with several potential rocket partners for future orbital launches from Spaceport Esrange,” it stated.
SAN FRANCISCO – CesiumAstro, an Austin-based startup specializing in phased array technology, has acquired TXMission, a U.K. company that develops software-defined radios and modems. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. “This enables us to deliver complete end-to-end software-defined phased array systems for our customers that’s all in-house,” Shey Sabripour, CesiumAstro founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We can serve more customers as a one-stop shop.” The acquisition also extends CesiumAstro’s presence into new markets. While CesiumAstro has focused primarly on supplying active phased array communications technology for satellites and aircraft, TXMission (pronounced Trans-mission) offers modems and software-defined radios for drones, high-altitude platforms, satellites, aircraft and ground stations, Sabripour said. In addition, the acquisition extends CesiumAstro’s “reach into the U.K. and to the rest of the continent,” Sabripour said. London-based CesiumAstro UK Ltd. was incorporated in August. The British company currently has about five employees, but Sabripour expects the staff to double by the end of the year. “This is a big deal for us,” Sabripour said. “Even though it seems like [TXMission is] a small company, they have impressive backgrounds in digital signal processing software and hardware. It’s a nucleus that I want to attract talent around.” Sabripour founded CesiumAstro in 2017 after spending nearly 24 years at Lockheed Martin. TXMission was established in 2018. CesiumAstro, with offices in Austin, Broomfield, Colorado, and El Segundo, California, has expanded rapidly as it attracted customers, including Saturn Satellite Networks , and investors. “We are delighted to join CesiumAstro,” Gianni Nannetti, TXMission CEO and vice president of engineering, said in a statement. “This is a mutually beneficial opportunity allowing us to grow our team, expand our capabilities, and continue building high-performance communications systems for our customers.”
The war in Ukraine has made the world aware of the geopolitical, social and military impacts of satellite imagery. At the same time, the space industry is introducing new capabilities for “very high resolution imagery” that will make commercial spy satellites even more powerful, says a Jan. 16 report by the research and consulting firm Quilty Analytics . “We are witnessing a transformation in the domain of very high resolution imagery,” the report says. “Established operators are launching next-generation fleets – improving their imaging capacity, pointing accuracy and revisit rates.” Meanwhile, new players that started out with low-resolution satellites “are scaling up to increasingly sharper resolutions once thought unobtainable by small satellites.” These advances will benefit “demanding customers” that also have large budgets such as U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, says Quilty Analytics. Besides Ukraine, “tinderbox regions” like Taiwan and North Korea are fueling government demand for regular imagery in the event conflict starts, the report says. “Defense customers have the highest standards for resolution, latency and tasking, and are often willing to pay a premium for such features.” A combination of fleet upgrades by incumbent operators and new satellites from emerging players will result in a ninefold increase in very high resolution satellites by 2028, or more than 100 satellites in orbit. Most of the future satellites are small, and their imaging capacity will be limited, but their sheer numbers will result in much more rapid revisits, the study says. Quilty defines very high resolution as spacecraft with a native imaging capability of 50 centimeters or sharper. Resolution refers to how much surface is represented by a single pixel in an image. A 30-centimeter picture, for example, covers a 30×30 centimeter swath of the Earth. Native imaging capability means it does not require additional software processing to enhance the image. The study identifies four established global players in very high resolution imagery: Airbus , Imagesat International , Maxar Technologies and SI Imaging Services . Emerging players mentioned in the study include BlackSky , Planet and Satellogic . A new sector of the industry, meanwhile, is looking to deploy satellites closer to Earth than existing constellations, in so-called very low Earth orbits below 400 kilometers. Quilty says this “presents opportunities to obtain some of the sharpest commercial imagery resolutions of 10 to 35 centimeters.” None of these satellites are yet in orbit and could be deployed in the next several years by three startups — Albedo , Earth Observant and Skeyeon .
NASA is preparing to move into the next stage of planning for a future large space telescope that may take two decades to launch, building on lessons learned from past missions. In sessions of the recent 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, NASA officials outlined their approach to developing what the agency now calls the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a 6.5-meter space telescope operating at ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths that was the top recommendation for a future large space mission in the Astro2020 decadal survey published in November 2021 . Specifically, the decadal called on NASA to establish a technology development program to support both the Habitable Worlds Observatory as well as two future large space telescopes operating at far-infrared and X-ray wavelengths, often collectively called the New Great Observatories. NASA responded by creating the Great Observatory Technology Maturation Program, or GOMAP, last year. At a NASA town hall session during the conference Jan. 9, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said the first of three stages of GOMAP is now nearly complete. That first stage was largely an organizational one, establishing plans and policies for the overall program. The second phase of GOMAP will soon start by establishing a Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) that will mature the concept for the Habitable Worlds Observatory. “The first thing they’re really going to be looking at is what are the science trades for this mission,” he said, which include both searches for potentially habitable exoplanets as well as other general astrophysics. A “dear colleague” letter soliciting nominations to serve on START will go out in a couple weeks, said Julie Crooke, program executive for GOMAP at NASA Headquarters, during a separate conference session the same day. The team will look at various options for the design of the mission and make recommendations to NASA for how to proceed, she said. “We really want to look at the whole option space.” Crooke said she wants to attract a broad cross-section of people from science and engineering communities to START, with about 20 to 30 people on the committee. They will be augmented by independent consultants that will provide expertise in cost modeling and scheduling. A schedule she presented at the session showed the GOMAP stage two work running through fiscal year 2024. A phase three would follow through fiscal year 2028, performing work that would prepare Habitable Worlds Observatory to enter Phase A of development in fiscal year 2029. NASA wants to move “as swiftly as possible” through the design and technology development work for the observatory, she said, but cautioned the timeline she presented was notional. “It’s dependent on the funding that NASA receives.” Clampin said at the town hall meeting that development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory will be guided by six principles. The first is to build it to a schedule, rather than letting the mission stretch out because of technology or science requirements. “We are going to treat the mission like a planetary mission that has a launch window,” he said. Doing so, he said, will help constrain costs while accelerating work on the next observatories. Other principles include evolving technologies previously demonstrated, such as the segmented mirrors for the James Webb Space Telescope and a coronagraph instrument being developed for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope; using next-generation launch vehicles with increased payload mass and volume; and making the telescope compatible with satellite servicing technologies so it can be refurbished and upgraded. Two other principles are robust scientific and technical margins for its design and maturing key technologies before going into full-scale development. That approach would support getting the Habitable Worlds Observatory ready for launch by the early 2040s. However, some scientists want NASA to move faster, not just to get the mission launched sooner but also to accelerate the development of the far-infrared and X-ray missions that are also part of the New Great Observatories. During another conference session Jan. 11, Jason Tumlinson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, showed one long-term budget projection that had the Habitable Worlds Observatory launching in 2041, with the far-infrared and X-ray missions following in 2047 and 2051. “I think this is too slow,” he said. “This is want we want, but it’s not soon enough.” He showed an alternative budget projection that moved up Habitable Worlds Observatory to 2035, with the next two missions following in 2040 and 2045. Doing so, he argued, could be done by increasing NASA’s astrophysics budget, currently about $1.5 billion a year, to $2.5 billion annually later in the 2020s. “This is achievable if we want it,” he said. “It’s actually achievable if our community bands together and not just asks for it, but demands it.”
The United States and Japan signed an agreement Jan. 13 to enable further cooperation between the two countries in space exploration, but without announcing any new initiatives. During a brief ceremony at NASA Headquarters attended by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other officials, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed the framework agreement with his Japanese counterpart, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. “The U.S.-Japan space cooperation has entered a new era with the Artemis project, and many projects, including lunar activities, are already in the works by Japanese and U.S. astronauts,” Kishida said through a translator at the ceremony. “I strongly hope that this agreement will robustly promote our space cooperation even further and also further expand the field of cooperation under the Japan-U.S. alliance.” Neither the U.S. nor the Japanese governments released the text of the agreement itself, titled “Framework Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of the United States of America for Cooperation in Space Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, For Peaceful Purposes.” NASA, in a statement about the agreement, described it as covering “a broad swath of joint activities between the countries,” such as aeronautics, space science and exploration. The United States and Canada signed an agreement with a similar name — Framework Agreement Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America for Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes — in 2009. That agreement established what it described as an “overall legal framework to facilitate the conclusion of implementing arrangements for cooperation” between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. “The Framework Agreement that we’re about to sign will take our cooperation to new heights,” Blinken said at the ceremony. “It’ll strengthen our partnership in areas like research on space technology and transportation, robotic lunar surface missions, climate-related missions and our shared ambition to see a Japanese astronaut on the lunar surface.” Hayashi said he expected the agreement to cover future cooperation between the two countries on Artemis, including Japanese plans to develop a pressurized rover for later missions. “With the conclusion of this agreement between our two countries, numerous cooperative projects,” he said, “will be conducted efficiently.” None of the officials at the event announced any specific new cooperative projects enabled by the agreement. NASA and the Japanese government signed an agreement in November finalizing Japan’s contributions to the lunar Gateway that also confirmed Japan would participate in the International Space Station through 2030. As part of the agreement, NASA will fly a Japanese astronaut to the Gateway on a future Artemis mission. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the ceremony that he and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy would travel to Japan in February “to grow the bond between NASA and JAXA.” He did not elaborate on his plans for that trip.
Updated Jan. 16 with Space Systems Command announcement of successful mission WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off Jan. 15 at 5:56 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, carrying the U.S. Space Force USSF-67 mission to geostationary Earth orbit. USSF-67 was the Space Force’s first national security mission of 2023 and marked Falcon Heavy’s fifth flight since its 2018 debut, as well as its second national security space launch following the Nov. 1 launch of USSF-44 . About two and a half minutes after liftoff, both side boosters separated. The second stage separated from the core stage just over four minutes after liftoff. Both side boosters landed back at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. These landings marked SpaceX’s 163rd and 164th successful booster recoveries. They will be refurbished for future national security space missions. The expendable center core was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean and was not recovered as the mission’s performance requirements did not allow enough fuel to return the stage back to Earth. SpaceX ended the live webcast after the booster landings and did not show views of the second stage or the payload at U.S. government request. About six hours after liftoff, the Space Systems Command confirmed the mission was successful. “We had another fantastic launch today on a Falcon Heavy,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a news release. The primary payload was the U.S. Space Force’s Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM (CBAS)-2 communications satellite, used to rela y data from existing satellites. The second spacecraft was the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA , or LDPE-3A, made by Northrop Grumman, a bus carrying five small military payloads Two of the five are U.S. Space Systems Command smallsats. One called Catcher, is a prototype space domain awareness sensor. The other, named WASSAT, is a prototype wide-area sensor to track other spacecraft and debris objects in geosynchronous orbit. The other three smallsat payloads were developed by the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, a Space Force organization that performs mostly classified projects. Space RCO spokesperson Matt Fetrow said two of the payloads are operational prototypes for space situational awareness missions and the third one is a data-encryption payload to secure space-to-ground data transmissions. “Space RCO began working with SSC to identify launch opportunities for these payloads back in 2019,” Fetrow said. The LDPE bus was “a great solution,” he said. “I t’s really hard to find a great ride like this.” The Falcon Heavy’s first stage is made up of three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, with 27 engines powering the first stage and one engine in the second stage. SpaceX received a $316 million contract in August 2020 to launch USSF-67.
Engineers are troubleshooting thruster problems on a cubesat launched last month to search for water ice at the moon, the latest in a series of technical issues among small satellites recently launched to the moon and beyond. In a Jan. 12 update, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that three of four thrusters on the Lunar Flashlight cubesat were underperforming, or producing less thrust than expected. One explanation, JPL said, was that there are obstructions in lines feeding propellant to the thrusters, reducing the amount of propellant reaching the thrusters and thus the thrust they produce. Spacecraft controllers are planning to operate the thrusters for longer periods, hoping that will help clear any obstructions. If the thrusters’ performance can’t be restored, project managers are considering alternative approaches that would allow the spacecraft to reach the moon and carry out its mission. The spacecraft will need to start daily maneuvers in February to be able to enter orbit around the moon in about four months. Lunar Flashlight is designed to go into a near-rectilinear halo orbit, similar to that used by the CAPSTONE cubesat that arrived at the moon in November and the future lunar Gateway. The orbit will take the cubesat as close as 15 kilometers above the surface at the south pole, where it to use lasers to look for water ice that may exist on the surface. The cubesat’s propulsion system uses a “green” propellant called Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic (ASCENT), formerly known as AF-M315E. The propellant was successfully demonstrated on NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission launched in 2019, but Lunar Flashlight is the first time ASCENT has been used on a mission beyond Earth orbit. A change in propulsion systems for Lunar Flashlight during its development to one provided by the Georgia Institute of Technology caused the cubesat to miss its original launch opportunity as a secondary payload on the inaugural Space Launch System mission, Artemis 1 . The cubesats had to be delivered to NASA to be installed on the rocket by the fall of 2021, and Lunar Flashlight’s propulsion system was not ready in time. NASA instead procured a rideshare launch opportunity, ultimately launching the spacecraft on a Falcon 9 Dec. 11 along with the Hakuto-R lunar lander from Japanese company ispace. Artemis 1 launched Nov. 16 with 10 cubesat secondary payloads. More than half of them have experienced significant problems during launch. One example is LunaH-Map, a NASA-funded cubesat also designed to go into orbit to look for water ice. It has suffered a problem with a stuck valve in its electric thruster that is jeopardizing its ability to go into lunar orbit. The mission’s principal investigator, Craig Hardgrove, said in mid-December that engineers thought that heating the valve would allow it to open and restore the thruster to normal operations . The mission has until mid-January to fix the thruster to enable the spacecraft to go into orbit around the moon, after which he said will instead look at opportunities to perform an asteroid flyby. Several other cubesats have either reported problems or have failed to communicate at all with Earth. There is no obvious technical issue linking the problems with the cubesats.
TAMPA, Fla. — Five Earth observation satellites from Japan’s Axelspace are helping NorthStar Earth and Space keep tabs on orbits ahead of the Canadian firm’s proposed Space Situational Awareness (SSA) constellation. An onboard software update has enabled the satellites to collect SSA data as they periodically travel across the dark side of the planet in low Earth orbit (LEO), the companies announced Jan. 11. During these dark periods, when the satellites are not needed for Axelspace’s imagery customers, their cameras can be pointed away from the Earth to snap objects above them. Each 100-kilogram GRUS satellite built by Axelspace for its AxelGlobe constellation is equipped “with strong attitude control functionality to respond flexibly to diverse imaging needs,” Axelspace CEO Yuya Nakamura said. The satellites can collect data on LEO objects above their own operational altitude of 585 kilometers, NorthStar said, in addition to medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO). The companies did not provide further details about AxelGlobe’s ability to monitor near-Earth orbits, including the size of the objects it can track and how often data can be collected. According to NorthStar, the companies did not need to seek regulatory permission to allow Axelspace to point its cameras up as well as down. The satellites were designed to capture greyscale imagery of Earth at a 2.5 meter resolution, the minimum discernible distance between two separate objects on the ground. Onboard sensors can also capture color photographs of Earth, including near-infrared, with five-meter resolution. Mitigating potential delays NorthStar recently raised $35 million for plans to deploy a constellation of 24 satellites for tracking objects as small as one centimeter in LEO, about seven centimeters in MEO, and in the region of 40-50 centimeters in GEO. The first three satellites, built by Spire Global, were slated to launch in the middle of 2023 with Virgin Orbit. However, Virgin Orbit suffered a launch failure Jan. 9, raising the prospect of delays for NorthStar as investigators probe an anomaly that prematurely shut down the rocket’s upper stage. Combining existing sensor data from AxelGlobe with NorthStar’s proprietary algorithms “is an extremely efficient means to improve the quality of commercial SSA services available to operators,” NorthStar CEO Stewart Bain said. NorthStar is “working with clients while assessing” SSA data from Axelspace, he added, as the company builds out services ahead of launching its first satellites. This data is being integrated with SSA information sourced from other partnerships, including one NorthStar announced in 2019 with ExoAnalytic Solutions, a U.S. company using a network of ground-based telescopes to track satellites and space debris. Commandeering EO spacecraft Repurposing Earth imaging satellites to capture data on near-Earth orbits is not unheard of in the space industry. High Earth Orbit Robotics, an Australian startup, is compiling a gallery of in-orbit inspections through partnerships with Earth observation operators. NorthStar says its partnership with Axelspace is for SSA orbit determination rather than images for inspection purposes. NorthStar is not processing resolved images, the company added, and associates observed space objects to known identities using other metrics and characteristics than observed physical features, such as their general shape.
The U.S. Space Force is likely to change how it selects providers of national security launch services and how it awards contracts, a program official told SpaceNews . The changes would affect the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 procurement. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won the Phase 2 competition in 2020, and their current contracts will be re-competed in 2024. NSSL acquires launch services for heavy and medium lift class national security satellites. The Phase 3 procurement strategy is still being finalized and will be released in a draft solicitation expected in the second quarter of 2023, Col. Douglas Pentecost, deputy director of the Space Force’s launch enterprise, said Jan. 13 in an email. Compared to Phase 2, where only ULA and SpaceX were selected to launch all national security missions over five years, Phase 3 would create “on ramps” for other players to compete. “The NSSL Phase 3 acquisition strategy is still in development but seeks to meet warfighter requirements while optimally exploiting ongoing advancements in the United States’ ever-growing commercial launch market to best combat the pacing challenge,” Pentecost said. “A dual-lane contracting approach is being considered,” he said. One would be an IDIQ contract, short for indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity “with an unlimited number of providers.” An IDIQ contract would allow the government to purchase launch services on an as-needed basis without committing to a specific amount. Pentecost said this vehicle would be used for less complex NSSL launches where there is likely to be more competitors. “This allows annual on-ramping of new capabilities for the less stressing NSSL missions.” The second lane would be like Phase 2, or an indefinite delivery requirements contract with two selected providers for the more demanding NSSL missions. Launch providers will be briefed on the details after the draft request for proposals is released, said Pentecost. “This will provide an opportunity for potential vendors to submit clarifying questions which will inform the final NSSL Phase 3 RFP planned for summer 2023.” The dual-lane approach would satisfy congressional concerns about DoD restricting competition. “Some analysts have questioned the Space Force’s decision to award only two launch services contracts in NSSL Phase 2,” noted the Congressional Research Service in a report . If the Space Force decided to continue working with only two providers in Phase 3, said CRS, “Congress could consider directing the Space Force to select more than two launch providers in Phase 3, directing the Space Force to examine alternative procurement models.”
World View, a company that is developing stratospheric balloon platforms as an alternative to spacecraft for research and tourism, announced Jan. 13 it will go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger. World View said it will merge with Leo Holdings Corp. II, a SPAC on the New York Stock Exchange, in a deal that would value the company at $350 million. The companies said they expect the deal to close in the second quarter of the year. Bloomberg first reported the impending deal Jan. 12. World View would receive up to $121 million in gross proceeds from the SPAC, assuming there are no redemptions by shareholders. However, many SPAC deals have seen high redemption rates, where SPAC shareholders ask for their money back rather than participate in the merged company, reducing the proceeds. The companies said in the announcement that the gross proceeds may be accompanied by up to $75 million in additional financing, but the announcement offered no further details about the proposed financing. It is not uncommon for SPAC deals to be accompanied by a private investment round. World View says it will use the funding from the SPAC deal to expand its business developing stratospheric platforms that can complement, or compete with, satellites. The company has conducted more than 120 stratospheric flights, working with a variety of companies and government agencies. “Today’s announcement represents a major milestone in World View’s business model,” Ryan Hartman, president and chief executive of World View, said in the statement. “This merger with Leo allows us to scale our demonstrated expertise and strong foundation of strategic partnerships to meet the growing market demand for data and analytics from the stratosphere.” World View was founded a decade ago to provide stratospheric tourist flights, offering views meant to emulate those from space. The company later pivoted to uncrewed balloon platforms it called “stratollites” that could carry communications, imaging or research payloads for applications that traditionally used either satellites or aircraft. In October 2021, World View announced it would return to the tourism business , developing a balloon system and pressurized cabin to take up to 10 people to altitudes of about 30 kilometers for flights lasting 6 to 12 hours. The company says 1,200 people have reserved seats on those flights, with a ticket cost of $50,000, although the company has not disclosed how much revenue it has collected from those reservations. World View provided little financial information as part of the SPAC announcement. Unlike some similar deals involving space or space-adjacent companies, there was no conference call to discuss the merger, and they did not release an investor presentation with financial details or projections. Hartman said in October 2021, when the company announced its tourism plans, that the company was fully funded for the initial stage of development of the tourism system but did not disclose its anticipated cost. World View’s last announced financing before the SPAC deal was a $26.5 million Series C round in 2018 . The SPAC deal comes days after supervisors in Pima County, Arizona, approved a new lease agreement with the company for its headquarters. The county built the $14 million facility as part of an economic incentive package for the company, but a state court ruled, in a suit brought by a third party, it violated a “gift clause” provision in the state constitution. According to local media , World View stopped paying rent on the facility while awaiting a new lease and was $400,000 behind in lease payments, but agreed to pay it back in the new lease agreement. As part of the lease, the company agreed to have at least 90 full-time employees working there this year, with a long-term goal of 125. The original lease agreement required the company to ultimately employ 400 people there.
SpaceX and its chief executive, Elon Musk, say the first orbital launch attempt of its Starship vehicle is approaching, but the company must first overcome both technical and regulatory obstacles. SpaceX tweeted Jan. 12 that it was moving ahead with a final series of tests of its Starship vehicle and Super Heavy booster at its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The company installed a Starship vehicle called Ship 24 on top of a Super Heavy booster designated Booster 7 on the launch pad there Jan. 9. Those tests, the company said, include a “full stack” wet dress rehearsal of the combined vehicle. That would be followed by a static-fire test of all 33 Raptor engines on Booster 7, the first time all those engines have fired simultaneously. Those tests would clear the way for an orbital launch attempt from a technical standpoint. SpaceX did not estimate when that launch could take place other than the “weeks ahead.” Musk, though, has been more forthcoming. “We have a real shot at late February. March launch attempt appears highly likely,” he tweeted Jan. 7, responding to a person who cited a South Texas publication that claimed the launch was planned for the end of January. However, SpaceX has missed several past estimates, by both Musk and others, regarding the schedule for the first Starship orbital launch. At an event in February 2022, with a fully stacked Starship as a backdrop, Musk estimated the vehicle would be ready to fly in “a couple months.” At an advisory committee meeting in late October, a NASA official said he expected Starship to be ready for launch as soon as early December , after completing a wet dress rehearsal of the full vehicle and a 33-engine static-fire test of the booster. NASA is closely following the progress of Starship as it plans to use a version of the vehicle as a lunar lander for Artemis missions. SpaceX has received two NASA awards with a combined value of more than $4 billion to develop those landers. It’s not clear why SpaceX missed both Musk’s forecast in February or the more recent NASA estimate. The company did suffer one notable testing setback in July when propellants underneath a Super Heavy booster ignited during a test, damaging the booster. In addition to major technical milestones, SpaceX also needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for an orbital Starship launch. The FAA completed an environmental review in June , allowing Starship orbital launches to proceed from Boca Chica but requiring the company to implement more than 75 measures to mitigate environmental effects. Neither SpaceX nor the FAA have provided updates on the progress of implementing those mitigations or the status of a Starship launch license. However, the FAA, in statement to SpaceNews Jan. 12, said not all of the measures need to be completed before issuing a launch license. “The timeframe for SpaceX to implement the more than 75 FAA required environmental mitigations for its Starship/Super Heavy program varies,” the agency said. “For example, some measures must be completed prior to launch while others are designed to occur during post-launch activities or following a mishap event. The FAA will ensure SpaceX complies with all required mitigations.”
As Virgin Galactic moves closer to resuming flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, the company is reorganizing its leadership and parting ways with a senior executive. Virgin Galactic announced Jan. 12 that it was creating a “streamlined” management structure as it prepared to begin long-delayed commercial operations this year. As part of that change, Swami Iyer, president of aerospace systems at Virgin Galactic, was leaving that position effective immediately, but would stay as an adviser until March 3. Iyer, a former Air Force test pilot, joined Virgin Galactic in February 2021 after working for several aerospace and defense companies. He was responsible for the teams building the company’s new suborbital vehicles and carrier aircraft. “With the completion of the enhancement program for our mothership at hand, our streamlined leadership structure will help propel the business forward as we prepare for commercial spaceline operations,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive Virgin Galactic, said in a statement. “Swami has been instrumental in establishing our future production strategy and in leading the work to prepare our initial ships for commercial flight, and we are incredibly grateful for his contribution.” Under the company’s new leadership structure, Mike Moses will serve as president of spaceline missions and safety. Moses has been at the company since 2011 in various positions overseeing flight and mission operations. Mike Moore, a former senior vice president for technical operations at Delta Airlines who joined Virgin Galactic in 2022, is the executive vice president for spaceline technical operations. Steve Justice, who joined the company at the same time as Iyer after a long career at Lockheed Martin, moved into the position of senior vice president of spaceline programs and engineering. The leadership restructuring comes almost 18 months after SpaceShipTwo’s last flight in July 2021, which took company founder Richard Branson on a flight beyond the 80-kilometer boundary the company and U.S. government agencies define as space. Shortly after the flight Virgin Galactic announced that both the VSS Unity spaceplane and its WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, VMS Eve, would enter an extended maintenance period that ended up stretching through 2022. The company said in the announcement of the reorganization that it remained on schedule to begin commercial fights of VSS Unity in the second quarter of 2023. The company, in its most recent earnings call in November , said it was delaying work on its next spaceplane, VSS Imagine, so it could prioritize resources to get Unity flying. According to the company, work on VMS Eve, at a Virgin Galactic facility in Mojave, California, is complete and the plane will begin ground tests next week. That will be followed by flight tests and then flying the plane back to Spaceport America in New Mexico, where it will be reunited with VSS Unity for a final series of tests, including powered suborbital flights. The company did not give a schedule beyond the start of ground tests. In the November earnings call, company executives said they expected VMS Eve to return to flight in early January.
Before they attacked Ukraine, Russia’s armed forces were viewed as one of the most powerful in the world. But the conflict exposed that as a myth. The lesson for the U.S. Space Force is that whenever it has to fight the next conflict, it can’t be caught unprepared, said Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. chief of space operations. The U.S. military has the world’s most advanced satellites and hardware but space forces for decades have operated in a relatively benign environment, Saltzman noted, and have not trained for a potential conflict where satellites could become military targets. “An observation from Ukraine is you’ve got on paper, a very capable Russian military, but they didn’t necessarily have the training, they didn’t necessarily have the operational concepts for multi-domain operations,” Saltzman said on a Space Force Association webcast that aired Jan. 12. Sometimes leaders focus on the weapon systems “and miss the fact that if you don’t have trained personnel, operational concepts and the tactics to execute with the weapon systems against the thinking adversary, that you only have half the equation,” he said. “The Russians didn’t have C2 [command and control] structures and sustainment capability. And they’re coming up a little short,” Saltzman said. In the Space Force, “we have to make sure that not only do we have the systems to do the mission, but that our operators have the training, the experience, and we have validated tactics that actually enable those capabilities.” To train for space warfare, operators will require a mix of live and virtual training ranges, he said. Space Force units will need to practice electronic warfare, operations against GPS jamming and how to maneuver satellites. Most of the current training infrastructure was inherited from the Air Force and the Space Force has to invest in updated capabilities. “We have to build the infrastructure and the processes and procedures to make sure [Space Force guardians] have got what they need, whether it’s a test and training infrastructure, simulators that can replicate adversary threats and the interactions you would get with multiple units working together to solve operational challenges,” he said. “All of that needs to take place before we get into an actual conflict so that our operators are fully ready. And that’s really the priority that I’m going after.” For example, he said, guardians will have to practice tactics to “control the space domain so that we can do what we want to do with our space assets, achieve the effects that we want to achieve, while denying the adversary the ability to use their space capabilities” to target U.S. forces. “So we have to have the operational concepts for how we are going to do that. What are those techniques, procedures, and then you have to practice it … What I want to do is make sure we have the skills and the experience on day one of the conflict.”
The National Science Foundation has reached an agreement with SpaceX to mitigate the effects of the company’s second-generation Starlink satellites on astronomy, even as another organization goes to court to block the constellation’s deployment. NSF, which funds operations of several major observatories, announced Jan. 10 that is had completed an astronomy coordination agreement with SpaceX regarding its Gen2 Starlink constellation. The Federal Communications Commission granted a license Dec. 2 to allow SpaceX to deploy a quarter of that 30,000-satellite system while deferring consideration of the rest of the constellation. That coordination agreement was a condition of the Gen2 FCC license, said Richard Green, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who has led efforts to address how satellite constellations could interfere with astronomy. “That’s what we wanted them to do, and that’s what they did,” he said during a session on satellite constellations at the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Jan. 10. He noted SpaceX had voluntarily worked with the NSF on that agreement just before the FCC issued the license. As part of that agreement, SpaceX said it would continue to work to dim its satellites to no brighter than the 7th magnitude, making them invisible to the naked eye and reducing, but not eliminating, their effect on sensitive astronomical instruments. SpaceX also agreed not to transmit when their satellites pass over major radio observatories. SpaceX also agreed to remove its satellites from a database called the “Laser Clearinghouse” that is used by astronomers to determine when they have to turn off lasers used as artificial guide stars for adaptive optics systems. Such lasers can dazzle or damage optics on satellites. SpaceX determined the lasers posed no risk to the spacecraft, and NSF said that by removing the satellites from the database, astronomers will be saved “multiple closures” as Starlink satellites pass overhead. The agreement is voluntary, since beyond the FCC requirement for such an agreement in the Gen2 Starlink license there is no law or policy requiring SpaceX or other satellite operators to mitigate the effects of their constellation on astronomy. “Policy is slow,” Green said. “The progress that we make in the short term relies entirely on the voluntary cooperation with industry, for which SpaceX has really been a leader in showing the way for other corporations.” Starlink is not the only constellation astronomers are worried about. The launch in September of BlueWalker 3, a technology demonstration satellite for AST SpaceMobile’s constellation of direct-to-smartphone satellites has raised concerns, in part because of its large antenna made the spacecraft very bright . “We’ve had conversations with the company,” said Connie Walker, co-director of the International Astronomical Union’s Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference, at the AAS session. “AST SpaceMobile is very amenable to trying some mitigation solutions.” One organization, though, is going to court to block Starlink’s deployment. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) filed an appeal of FCC’s order licensing the Starlink Gen 2 system with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Dec. 29. The organization, which represents astronomers concerned about the effects of light pollution on the night sky, argued the FCC failed to follow environmental law in approving the constellation. “It is unprecedented for IDA to resort to the court system to resolve disputes. But in this case, we felt compelled to act,” the organization said in a Jan. 6 statement. Given the size of Starlink and other planned constellations by other companies, “it is critical that federal agencies responsible for making decisions on the future of the night sky – an essential element of the human environment – follow existing laws.” IDA argues in a court filing that its members “face a series of harms” from the FCC’s decision to award the Starlink license, including adverse impacts on amateur and professional astronomy and “a diminishment in the enjoyment of the dark sky.” The basis for its appeal is that the FCC violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by awarding the license. The FCC stated in its order that it concluded an environmental review under NEPA for Starlink’s effects on astronomy was not warranted because SpaceX’s mitigation efforts, including the NSF coordination agreement, were sufficient. Charles Mudd, the lawyer representing the IDA in its appeal of FCC’s license, said at the AAS conference session that interpretations of NEPA and corresponding regulations are broad enough to include effects from satellites. “There are definitions that would implicitly include regulating Earth’s orbital space as part of the environment,” he said. The IDA is not the first organization to challenge an FCC Starlink license. Viasat appealed an earlier FCC order amending SpaceX’s first-generation Starlink license, allowing more satellites in lower orbits, on the grounds that FCC failed to follow NEPA. A federal court dismissed the appeal in August , ruling that Viasat lacked standing to appeal. Mudd said that others are also appealing the FCC license for Starlink Gen2, and that the various cases will be consolidated. According to court filings, Dish Network appealed the FCC license Jan. 3 on the grounds that the Gen2 Starlink satellites would create “unacceptable interference” for Dish’s direct-to-home satellite television signals in the 12-gigahertz band.
DENVER – The U.S. Space Force is holding discussions with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about replacing a geostationary weather satellite over the Indian Ocean. In 2020, the U.S. Air Force began collecting weather imagery with the former GOES-13, a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite NOAA launched in 2006 and retired in 2018. That satellite, renamed Electro-Optical Infrared Weather System-Geostationary (EWS-G), provides imagery in support of U.S. Central Command. “We currently are using where we’re calling EWS-G1, which is covering the Indian Ocean today,” Lt. Col. Joseph L. Maguadog, who direct the Electro-Optical and Infrared Weather System program, said Jan. 9 at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting here. “And we’re in discussions with our NOAA partners about utilizing another GOES satellite to succeed that first capability.” While those discussions continue, efforts are underway to update other elements of the military weather satellite fleet. A cubesat built by Orion Space Solutions to gather weather imagery launched Jan. 3 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight. The U.S. Space Force plans to evaluate the cubesat’s performance over the next year as one element of its Electro-optical and infrared Weather Satellite (EWS) program. “We look at it as more of a high-risk, high-reward prototype that we’re hoping might inform the type of capability we use in the long term,” Maguadog said. Through the EWS program, the Space Force also is preparing to gather imagery with a small satellite built by General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems equipped with an imaging sensor developed by EO Vista. “We believe that satellite will provide the necessary user capability as soon as we get it up there,” Maguadog said. The Space Force plans to launch two Weather System Follow-on-Microwave (WSF-M) satellites built by Ball Aerospace to provide information on ocean surface winds, tropical cyclone intensity and space weather. The first WSF-M is scheduled for launch in January 2024. The second satellite, ordered in November , is slated to launch in 2028. Ball has completed construction of the WSF-M spacecraft bus and the satellite’s Microwave Imager (MWI) instrument, the company announced Jan. 10. The next step is space vehicle assembly, integration and testing. “The nearly simultaneous completion of the spacecraft bus and instrument testing mark a significant milestone for the WSF-M program,” Hope Damphousse, Ball Aerospace vice president for strategic operations, said in a statement. “We are moving forward with spacecraft integration of the MWI sensor, along with a government-furnished Energetic Charged Particle sensor, which will be followed by a suite of space vehicle performance and environmental tests.”
DENVER – Cybersecurity specialist SpiderOak raised $16.4 million in a Series C investment round led by Empyrean Technology Solutions, a space technology platform affiliated with Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm. Method Capital and OCA Ventures participated in the round. “Today, space-based assets are mission essential in all civil and military operations and rapidly becoming mission critical for all national and corporate infrastructure,” Charles Beams, SpiderOak executive chairman, said in a statement. “The Space Force and the space industry consensus is that a cyber-attack is the most likely and most damaging threat to these assets.” SpiderOak has quickly raised its profile in the space sector by winning U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research contracts for OrbitSecure, an off-the-shelf product designed to enhance satellite and constellation cybersecurity. “Space is a demanding environment in many ways and SpiderOak’s proven zero-trust solution, using its patented distributed ledger technology, is well positioned to address these cyber threats head-on,” said Beames, a former Defense Department principal director for space and intelligence systems. With funding from the investment round, SpiderOak plans to complete on-orbit testing and obtain flight heritage for its second-generation space product, OrbitSecure 2.0. In addition, SpiderOak is moving its headquarters from Chicago to Reston, Virginia, and establishing a space cybersecurity laboratory. In the new laboratory, SpiderOak will provide for hardware-in-the-loop qualification testing. “SpiderOak brings a wealth of industry experience in cybersecurity solutions to national security, an area we are already heavily invested in,” Matt Norton, Madison Dearborn Partners managing director, said in a statement. “Their proven track record in developing commercial zero-trust technology is backed by a substantial patent portfolio.” SpiderOak CEO Dave Pearah, said in a statement that the company’s software is “backwards compatible with legacy space systems, to allow current on orbit systems to take the step to much higher cybersecurity protections.”
Virgin Orbit says its first LauncherOne mission from the United Kingdom failed to reach orbit Jan. 9 when an anomaly caused a premature shutdown of the rocket’s upper stage. In a Jan. 12 statement, Virgin Orbit provided a few new details about the failed “Start Me Up” mission from England’s Spaceport Cornwall , which attempted to place nine satellites into orbit. The failure was the first for LauncherOne since an inaugural demonstration mission in 2020. According to the company, the initial phases of the launch, including the rocket’s deployment from its Boeing 747 aircraft and first stage burn, went as planned. The rocket’s second stage then separated and ignited its NewtonFour engine, followed by payload fairing separation. “Later in the mission, at an altitude of approximately 180 km, the upper stage experienced an anomaly. This anomaly prematurely ended the first burn of the upper stage,” the company stated. The company did not disclose additional details about the anomaly. Observers had speculated that some sort of issue with the upper stage caused the failure, although issues with the telemetry displayed during the launch webcast, such as spurious data, made it difficult to narrow down the nature of the problem or its timing. The company did not explain why it initially announced during the launch that the upper stage had reached orbit, a claim it retracted nearly a half-hour later. Virgin Orbit has started a formal investigation led by Chad Foerster, its chief engineer and vice president of technology, and Jim Sponnick, a former vice president of Atlas and Delta programs at United Launch Alliance. The company did not estimate how long that investigation will take. “Upon identifying the anomaly, our team immediately moved into a pre-planned investigation mode,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in the statement. Given the company’s experience with the vehicle and “ample telemetry data” from the flight, “I am confident that root cause and corrective actions will be determined in an efficient and timely manner.” Virgin Orbit said LauncherOne’s return to flight will take place from Mojave Air and Space Port in California, which had hosted all five previous missions before this launch. The rocket for that mission is going through final integration and checkout. The company said it expects to return to Spaceport Cornwall for future launches, “and is in active discussions with key government and commercial stakeholders in the U.K. to start planning mission opportunities for as soon as later this year.” Hart, at a Jan. 8 pre-launch briefing , offered a similar timeline but with caveats. “I’m not sure that will happen, but it’s not out of the question,” he said then of a second LauncherOne mission from Cornwall before the end of the year. A swift and successful return to flight is critical for Virgin Orbit, which was losing a significant amount of money even before the failure as it struggled to increase its launch rate. The company ended its fiscal third quarter with $71 million in cash and negative free cash flow of $52.5 million, although the company has since raised $45 million in two separate tranches from Virgin Group and its investment arm. Shares in Virgin Orbit fell 14% on the Nasdaq exchange Jan. 10, the first day after the failure, but rebounded slightly Jan. 11. The company’s shares are still trading near its low since going public a little more than a year ago in a SPAC merger.
Capella Space has raised $60 million to allow the company to accelerate the deployment of its constellation and meet growing demand for its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery. The company announced Jan. 10 it raised the growth equity financing from the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund. That fund was established last year by Thomas Tull, a billionaire former entertainment industry executive, to invest in technologies he felt critical for the country’s competitiveness. “Technological competitiveness is vital to our country’s future,” Tull said in a statement about the investment. “Capella’s cutting-edge SAR technology allows us to have accurate, real-time information about what is happening on our planet, enabling decision-makers to more quickly make critical decisions about pressing geopolitical challenges.” “Thomas is looking for companies that are dual-use: they’re important for national security and governments but they also have applicability in the commercial world,” said Payam Banazadeh, chief executive of Capella, in an interview Jan. 11. “He really believes in SAR and it becoming more and more important for national security.” The funding, he said, will allow the company to scale up the development and launch of the Acadia line of SAR satellites, with improved image resolution and quality, that it announced in August . He said Capella is planning “many” launches of Acadia satellites this year but declined to provide a more specific estimate. It also has two more of the older Whitney class of satellites to launch. “We’re growing the team across all the departments — engineering, sales, marketing — to be able to move faster and cater to the demand that we’re seeing,” he said. “It’s going to enable us to be able to pick up on the big spike of demand that’s coming our way.” That demand has been driven in part by the war in Ukraine, which Banazadeh said has demonstrated the value of SAR imagery that can be collected day and night and in all weather conditions. “What Ukraine has done is that it’s shown to other customers that SAR is a critical tool,” he said. “We’re seeing demand coming from everywhere, not just Ukraine.” Capella has emphasized working with governments. Banazadeh said a majority of the company’s business is from government customers, with a majority of that coming from U.S. government agencies. That comes from a product-market fit between what Capella’s satellites can provide and the needs of government customers, an urgency those customers have for SAR imagery and supply constraints. “They want more of it. They don’t have enough of it,” he said of such imagery. He said the company, whose annual revenues tripled in 2022, foresees continued strong growth from government customers, while demand from commercial customers grows at a slower pace. “Commercial growth is going to lag but it’s going, at some point, to pick up,” he said. “We’re just being realistic on where the commercial market is for SAR relative to the government market.” The 200-person company added about 80 to 90 people last year, Banazadeh said, and plans similar growth in 2023. He said the company has found it hard to find talented people “across the board” from satellite engineering to sales but that the company’s approach to hiring has worked well do far. Capella’s new funding round comes less than nine months after it raised a $97 million Series C round . Banazadeh described this new funding round as “opportunistic” given interest from U.S. Innovative Technology Fund as well as uncertainty about market in the near future. “I think anyone who can raise capital in this market should, and they should probably raise more than they think they need,” he said. “Having a full war chest for a couple of years and making sure that you’re ready for whatever that’s going to come is going to be important.” He said the company would continue to look for opportunities to raise more money that allows it invest in efforts like its new satellites that can accelerate revenue growth. “There’s a lot of capital out there that needs to be deployed in the right places. We have a lot of plans, we have a lot of a lot of things that we can do to grow even faster,” he said. 
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall last year rolled out a list of high-priority technologies , including space systems, where the Pentagon intends to pump more funding in order to stay ahead of China. These planned investments offer an unprecedented opportunity to “go after and harness commercial innovation from the space industry,” Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture and integration, said Jan. 11. “I have never in my 25 years of service seen the department move so much money so fast toward priorities that the secretary laid out. That’s exciting,” Felt said at the “State of the Space Industrial Base” webinar hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association. Felt said his boss, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and integration Frank Calvelli, is pushing the message across the Space Force that staying ahead technologically is not just about spending more but spending smarter. Part of that strategy is avoiding costly government development programs and tapping commercially available technologies. “What’s so exciting to the Space Force and the space acquisition community about all this commercial innovation is that we can use it to maintain our technology lead, and deter conflict with our competitors,” said Felt. With regard to space systems, “we see solutions that are going to help us get after that problem and really deliver the kinds of capabilities that our warfighters need.” Felt noted that how the Pentagon spends its space dollars can have a significant impact on the health of the industry. “The things that we do in space acquisition can be super helpful to our industrial base or super harmful to our industrial base,” he said, as a healthy space sector is important for national security and for the economy. Calvelli has been insistent about the need for speed in acquisitions, and that goes along with the idea of using more commercial technologies, and building smaller satellites, said Felt. “His formula for going faster in acquisition starts with smaller systems, and that includes buying more commercial systems … That is a big thrust of what we’re doing,” he added. These rules were l aid out by Calvelli in an Oct. 31 memo that procurement offices are “now figuring out how to implement,” said Felt. Following this new direction, he said, “I think will be very healthy for the Space Force and healthy for the industry as well.” ‘We need to invest properly’ Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, said DoD needs to spend wisely on commercial products and services, and that means awarding “meaningful contracts” that benefit the government and the private sector. “What we really want is a strong commercial space industrial base that supports not just the military but our economic security, and our exploration efforts with NASA,” Butow said at the NDIA webinar. “Prototyping, experimentation and validation of space capabilities is an area that traditionally has been underfunded,” he said. “It’s getting better. But if we want to have robust capabilities, we really need to make sure that we’re investing properly in research and development, to include prototyping activities that we do with commercial companies that are doing really interesting things to give the U.S. a competitive advantage in space.” “The next thing is meaningful contracts,” he said. “That extends to not just procurement of widgets, but services. Services contracts are not normally done in the Department of Defense. But most of the interesting things that are going to be offered in space are going to be available as commercial services. And we really need the U.S. Space Force to be the executive agent for the entire department to make a wide variety of services available.” Need metrics of success A concern for DoD in the great power competition with China is how to measure success, warned Richard “Doc” Klodnicki, president and CEO of the consulting firm Aereti Inc. When experts try to handicap the space race, too much emphasis is placed on the number of space launches , or on how many exploration vehicles and satellites each country sends to orbit, Klodnicki noted. “I would caution against focusing on what China is doing versus what it is we want to do,” he said. “I’m not so sure that number of launches is always the right metric.” If satellites are being launched to replace existing assets, “that’s not innovation, that’s operations, maintenance and sustainment,” he said. “I think we need to start looking at what are the metrics of interest that we’re using, and how are we then moving those forward.” The U.S. needs to figure out what success means “without regard to what China’s doing, but rather with regard to what the United States and its allied partners want to accomplish, and that will force China to have to follow too.”
DENVER – While Congress and the Biden Administration recognize the potential threat posed by space weather, the United States needs to improve its ability to monitor and model the phenomenon. “We’ve got a good team working together these days, but we’ve still got a long ways to go,” James Spann, NASA Heliophysics Division space weather lead, said Jan. 10 at the American Meteorological Society meeting here. The United States needs “a robust fleet of operational satellites that are making the right observations that feed the models that the forecasters can use,” Spann said during a Space Weather Town Hall. In recent years, government agencies and Congress, recognizing the growing importance of monitoring space weather as the nation becomes increasingly dependent on satellite services, have established working groups and interagency panels and drafted space weather action plans. “Every critical infrastructure sector could be affected by space weather, either directly or indirectly,” said Mona Harrington, who leads the National Risk Management Center in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. As a result, one of the National Risk Management Center’s “highest priorities is working with our partners to understand and reduce the risks to infrastructure from extreme and potentially catastrophic space weather events,” Harrington added. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is preparing to enhance its monitoring capability by sending the Space Weather Follow-On being built by Ball Aerospace to Lagrange Point 1 in 2024. Additional missions, part of the Space Weather Next program, are scheduled to launch in 2029, 2030, 2035 and 2037. “This is the beginning of the space weather era for NOAA as an operational agency,” said Steve Volz, NOAA Satellite and Information Service assistant administrator. NOAA’s National Satellite Data and Information Service recently established a space weather office, a move that indicates the space weather mission deserves “parity in terms of the importance of the observations” with terrestrial weather and climate, Volz said. The National Weather Service also received money in the 2023 budget to establish a space weather prediction testbed. The testbed will be “ bringing together not only the operational forecasters but researchers, developers and end users, so that people can be in a shared space to explore and evaluate where things are working and where they’re not,” said Mary Erickson, National Weather Service deputy director. Still, researchers need to determine what additional observations would improve space weather forecasts. “What is the next thing that we need to observe and how do we model that,” Spann asked. “We need to continually evolve because we’re never going to get to the point where we’ve got it figured out. That’s not going to happen.” Aside from the technical issues, communications regarding space weather remains a challenge. A survey conducted by the National Weather Service office in Seattle found that fewer than 5 percent of respondents had any plans related to space weather and more than 30 percent had never heard of space weather. The Biden Administration is well aware of challenges related to space weather education and warnings. “We are refining our strategic communications messaging for extreme space weather events to ensure that United States is prepared and that we speak with one voice and we’re able to minimize the impact of disinformation or misinformation,” said Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Office of Science Technology Policy assistant director of space policy.
TAMPA, Fla. — The European Investment Bank (EIB) said Jan. 11 it is lending SES 300 million euros ($323 million) as part of efforts to increase the competitiveness of Europe’s space industry. The size of the seven-year loan, which the satellite operator said was secured “on attractive financial terms,” is the largest the European Union’s lending arm has provided a Luxembourg-based company in its 65-year history. The scale of the financing “demonstrates how strategically important the space sector is for the EIB and the European Union,” EIB vice president Kris Peeters said. The investment bank “shares the same goals as the European Commission to make European companies like SES successful and even more competitive,” Peeters added, because space “will only become more important in the future.” The debt will support SES investments in three previously announced broadcast and broadband satellites: ASTRA 1P, ASTRA 1Q, and SES-26. The financing covers “slightly below 50% of the overall costs of the entire program” for these three satellites, SES vice president of external communications Suzanne Ong told SpaceNews . EIB investment rules prohibit the bank from financing more than 50% of the cost of a program. Europe’s Thales Alenia Space is building all three satellites for launches to geostationary orbit next year. ASTRA 1P and ASTRA 1Q, ordered in 2021 , are Ku-band satellites designed to replace aging broadcast spacecraft at 19.2 degrees East, where SES serves major broadcasters across Germany, France, and Spain. ASTRA 1Q has a software-defined communications payload which means it could be reprogrammed while in orbit to serve data markets if needed. SES-26, also a software-defined satellite, was ordered last year to provide content and connectivity services with Ku and C-band frequencies from 57 degrees East, covering Europe, Africa, and Asia. EIB said its financing is in line with the European Commission’s goal for all households in Europe to have access to at least 100 megabits per second of internet connectivity by 2025. SES hopes to play a role in Europe’s $6 billion plans to deploy a multi-orbit connectivity constellation called IRIS² by 2027, which would help expand internet access while bolstering communications security for government needs. In September, the European Space Agency (ESA) picked SES to lead the development of Eagle-1, a satellite aiming to demonstrate quantum encryption technology that could support IRIS², or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. Europe’s efforts to beef up its space sector come amid calls from European space officials for more sovereign capabilities to keep up with China, the U.S. , and other non-EU nations. ESA member states agreed in November to provide the agency with 16.9 billion euros for the next three years — a 16.6% increase over the three-year budget set in 2019 before accounting for inflation, although less than what the agency sought . Peeters said EIB has “had discussions with ESA [and the] European Commission to see what we can do also in the future, more than ever before, to stimulate the European space sector.” Other space projects EIB has supported in recent years include a 200 million-euro loan for French operator Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS broadband satellite, and 100 million euros in financing for Europe’s next-generation Ariane 6 launch vehicle program.
DENVER – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is taking stock of its dependence on specific bands of the radio frequency spectrum and looking for ways to mitigate the impact of interference or government sales. Michael Morgan, Commerce Department assistant secretary for environmental observation and prediction, leads NOAA’s effort to determine the agency’s spectrum requirements. Once that survey is completed, NOAA will be in a better position to communicate with other government agencies the consequences of any decision to sell spectrum, said Steve Volz, NOAA Satellite and Information Service assistant administrator, said Jan. 11 at the American Meteorological Society meeting here. “It is an ongoing challenge,” Volz said. “We expect to have to fight for maintenance of spectrum. But at the same time, we realize we’re not going to win every fight.” As a result, NOAA is looking for ways to mitigate the impact of interference or sales on key areas of the agency’s RF spectrum. NOAA is looking, for example, at ways to make satellite sensors more resilient to the loss of particular spectral bands. NOAA is interested in working with companies to conduct pilot projects related to RF interference, “especially in the 1675 bandwidth area,” said Kathyrn Shonz, acting director of NOAA’s Office of Satellite Ground Systems. At the same time, NOAA officials are meeting with their counterparts in the Defense Department and National Telecommunications and Information Administration to consider various ways to disseminate data other than direct broadcasting from meteorological satellites. “There’s a lot of discussion about direct broadcast,” Shonz said. “Should we be sharing the data via the internet as a primary mechanism?” Spectrum concerns came up frequently at the AMS annual meeting. Meteorologists, still stinging from their losing battle to stop the Federal Communications Commission from auctioning off spectrum during the Trump Administration, anticipate many more competing claims for spectrum. “I always get a little a little nervous when the S word is brought up,” said Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Office of Science Technology Policy assistant director of space policy, said Jan. 9 during a Space Weather Town Hall. In addition to growing demands for spectrum from terrestrial communications, satellite constellations are claiming spectrum. “We were living in an unprecedented era where we are seeing a lot of applications for licenses to do a lot of things in space,” Uzo-Okoro said. In spite of the dramatic increase in demand, “there are a lot of people working hard in the executive branch, legislative branch and across the federal government to ensure that the space weather and Earth observation communities have the protections of their spectrum for science exploration to continue,” Uzo-Okoro said.
Updated 2:30 p.m. Eastern after NASA/Roscosmos briefing. SEATTLE — Russia will launch a Soyuz spacecraft without a crew to the International Space Station in February after concluding a damaged Soyuz spacecraft docked there cannot safely return its crew to Earth. In a statement Jan. 11, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft will launch to the ISS without a crew Feb. 20. It will replace the Soyuz MS-22 currently docked at the station, which will return to Earth uncrewed. Soyuz MS-22 suffered a coolant leak Dec. 14 as Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk. The spacewalk was called off as coolant spewed from the leak for hours. During a call with reporters, NASA and Roscosmos officials said that a Russian state commission concluded that, because of the lost coolant, the spacecraft’s radiator could no longer cool the spacecraft on its own. During the spacecraft’s return to Earth, temperatures inside the spacecraft could rise to more than 40 degrees Celsius with high humidity, said Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human spaceflight programs at Roscosmos. “The main problem to land the current Soyuz with a crew would be the thermal condition because we lost heat rejection capability,” he said. “The crew may overheat with high temperature and high humidity.” Under the revised plan, Soyuz MS-23 will launch Feb. 20 without a crew but with some cargo. After docking with the station, the crew will spend one to two weeks transferring equipment, like customized seat liners, from Soyuz MS-22 to MS-23, while placing in Soyuz MS-22 other cargo that can be returned to Earth that is not sensitive to overheating. Soyuz MS-22 will then undock and attempt a landing back in Kazakhstan in automated mode. Soyuz MS-23 was previously scheduled to launch in March to send Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara to the station. Under the new plan, Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio will remain on the ISS until later this year. Krikalev said it was premature to estimate how long their stay on the ISS will be extended beyond “several” months. “What will be the exact date we will send replacements for them is not decided yet,” he said, and noted later that no future missions had been canceled, only delayed. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said that NASA will review its schedule of upcoming missions, including the Crew-6 Crew Dragon mission scheduled to launch in February, in light of the change in Russian plans. He said it would be a “couple of weeks” before the agency decided how that schedule might change, but added there would be no changes to the crew for Crew-6. Krikalev and Montalbano said they are looking at options of what to do if an emergency required an evacuation of the ISS before Soyuz MS-23 arrived. That could include flying one or more Soyuz crewmembers on the Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the ISS in place of cargo. The rest could return on Soyuz MS-22, with less of a risk of overheating because of the recued crew size. “SpaceX has been extremely responsive to this request,” Montalbano said of studies on accommodating additional personnel on the Crew Dragon. “All this is only for an emergency, only if we have to evacuate ISS. That’s not the nominal plan.” Krikalev said an investigation concluded that the hole in the radiator was most likely caused by a tiny micrometeoroid hitting the spacecraft at about seven kilometers per second. Ground tests confirmed that hypothesis, he said, adding that it was unlikely to be an orbital debris impact because of the high relative speed of the impact meant that the object would have been traveling too fast to be in a stable orbit. Montalbano agreed. “Everything does point to a micrometeoroid impact,” he said, although an impact linked to the Geminid meteor shower was ruled out based on the location of the impact versus the director of the shower. “Nothing was off-nominal in the manufacturing of the vehicle.” Krikalev said that while a design flaw does not appear to be the cause of the hole, technicians “double-checked, triple-checked” the radiator on Soyuz MS-23 as a precaution. “We don’t have any issues with the next Soyuz.” Engineers also ruled out attempting to repair Soyuz MS-22 in orbit. Krikalev said the Soyuz was not in a location that spacewalking cosmonauts could easily reach, and that attempting to refill the radiator with coolant and fixing the hole would be difficult and risky for spacewalkers. “There’s much less risk to just replace the vehicle.” Krikalev and Montalbano said that they have been in regular contact with the ISS crew to inform them about the status and outcome of the investigation, and that Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio were all in good health and able to handle and extended stay. “I may have to fly some more ice cream to reward them,” Montalbano said.
Updated 7:20 a.m. Eastern Jan. 11 with additional details about the failure. SEATTLE — The first flight of ABL Space Systems’ RS1 rocket failed to reach orbit Jan. 10, the second loss of a commercial small launch vehicle in 24 hours. The company announced it would attempt the launch of RS1 from the Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska (PSCA) on Kodiak Island at 6:27 p.m. Eastern. The company was not webcasting the launch, instead offering updates via social media. The company announced more than 20 minutes after the scheduled liftoff that the launch had failed. “After liftoff, RS1 experienced an anomaly and shut down prematurely,” the company tweeted. “The team is working through our anomaly response procedures in coordination with PSCA and the FAA.” The company said in subsequent updates that the nine engines in its first stage shut down simultaneously after liftoff, causing the vehicle to fall back to the pad and explode. The company did not disclose when after liftoff the shutdown took place or the altitude the rocket reached. The explosion damaged the launch facility but no personnel were injured. “This is not the outcome we were hoping for today, but one that we prepared for,” the company said. RS1 is a small launch vehicle that ABL had been developing, capable of placing up to 1,350 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The two-stage vehicle has nine of its E2 engines in its first stage and one vacuum-optimized E2 engine in the upper stage, using kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants. The vehicle is designed to launch from facilities with minimal infrastructure. On the inaugural launch, the RS1 was carrying two smallsats for OmniTeq. The mission was designed to demonstrate OmniTeq’s Equalizer deployer as well as test its VariSat high-frequency radio payload. The failure came after several scrubbed launch attempts in November and December. The company halted its first launch attempt Nov. 14 a half-hour before liftoff because of a valve failure in the pressurization system in the rocket’s lower stage fuel tank. A second attempt Nov. 17 made it to T-1.8 seconds before stopping because of low pressure in half its gas generators when attempting ignition of the first stage. The company concluded that it had not properly conditioned the liquid oxygen in the vehicle. A third attempt Nov. 21 was aborted at T-1.75 seconds because of low pressure in the system used to ignite the engine, using a substance called TEA-TEB. “This one was close,” the company said in a later recap posted on its website , as the pressure was just below the threshold for halting the launch. “If we had been just 0.3% less conservative, RS1 would have flown that day.” ABL scrubbed a fourth attempt Dec. 8 at T-6 minutes for what the company later explained as “unexpected electrical interference” in the rocket’s avionics. That interference, the company said, was seen only when the vehicle was loaded with propellant. ABL has raised several hundred million dollars from venture capital firms, with Lockheed Martin as both a strategic investor and a major customer. Lockheed signed a contract in April 2021 for as many as 58 RS1 launches through the end of decade and also selected the RS1 to perform its “U.K. Pathfinder” launch from the SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands later in 2023. The RS1 failure took place almost exactly 24 hours after Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket suffered an unexplained anomaly during its “Start Me Up” mission from Spaceport Cornwall in England. That problem took place while the second stage was firing, but the company has not provided additional details about the failure. That failure took place on LauncherOne’s sixth mission, and after four consecutive successes. It is also the fourth launch failure in less than one month. A Vega C rocket suffered a malfunction on its second launch Dec. 20 . Arianespace and the European Space Agency are jointly investigating that failure, and have provided no updates since a briefing the day after the accident. Zhuque-2, a rocket developed by Chinese private launch company Landspace, malfunctioned on its inaugural launch Dec. 14 . Zhuque-2 was attempting to be the first launch vehicle using methane as fuel to reach orbit.
DENVER – High demand for space weather data is prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to consider revising the schedule for its geostationary weather satellite fleet. NOAA officials are discussing the possibility of moving the final satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series, GOES-U, into operations soon after it launches to provide imagery and data from the Compact Coronagraph. “Nothing has been decided yet, but the main motivation for putting GOES-U into operation is the Compact Chronograph, a new space weather instrument we’ll be carrying,” said Pam Sullivan. “Folks are anxious to have that data.” If NOAA decides not to make any changes, GOES-U would not move into service immediately because NOAA would continue to rely on GOES-T, the current GOES West satellite launched in 2022, and GOES-R, the current GOES East launched in 2016. The Compact Coronagraph is designed to provide imagery of the solar corona in addition to detecting and characterizing coronal mass ejections. Demand for Compact Coronagraph imagery is strong because U.S. and European space-weather satellites are not expected to last much longer . The joint NASA and European Space Agency Solar and Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO), sent to Lagrange Point 1 since 1995, is likely to stop providing imagery of coronal mass ejections by 2025. And NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer, sent to Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1 in 1997, is expected to run out of propellant around 2024. The Naval Research Laboratory built the Compact Coronagraph as part of NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On program. Additional Compact Coronagraphs will fly on the NASA-NOAA Space Weather Follow On and on the European Space Agency space weather program L5 Vigil mission. Although the GOES-U launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is more than a year away, NOAA has completed instrument integration and thermal and vacuum testing. “We are on track for the launch in April 2024,” Sullivan said.
TAMPA, Fla. — CAES Space Systems, a supplier of radiation-hardened electronics, rebranded as Frontgrade Technologies Jan. 10 after being sold to private equity firm Veritas Capital. Veritas announced plans to buy the company in October for an undisclosed sum from CAES, the former electronics unit of British defense and aerospace contractor Cobham. Frontgrade comprises all the space-related assets that were part of CAES, which continues to serve a mix of other commercial and defense markets. Advent International, the private equity firm that recently announced $6.4 billion plans to buy satellite maker and imagery provider Maxar Technologies, bought CAES in 2020 for about $5 billion. Both Maxar and Frontgrade are based in Colorado. Veritas sees opportunities to expand Frontgrade’s business in the U.S. national security market as a standalone company. Recent programs in Frontgrade’s more than 60 years of flight heritage include Dubai’s Rashid Rover, which is on its way to the moon as part of the HAKUTO-R lunar exploration program. Frontgrade provided a microprocessor that will be used to control four cameras onboard the Rashid Rover after it reaches the lunar surface. The company also provides electronic solutions for defense, healthcare, and industrial applications.
DENVER – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is embarking on its largest procurement ever: the $19.6 billion Geostationary Extended Observations program. The budget for the GeoXO program, approved in December, covers six satellites, operations and support extending from 2022 to 2052. GeoXO is NOAA’s successor to the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series. Unlike the GOES-R constellation’s two-satellite architecture, though, GeoXO includes three satellites: one perched over the Eastern United States, another over the West and a third in the middle. While NOAA prepares to launch the final satellite in the GOES-R series in 2024, the agency is moving full steam ahead with the GeoXO. In December, the Commerce Department approved baseline requirements, cost and schedule for the GeoXO program, Pam Sullivan, GeoXO program director, said Jan. 10 at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting here. Later this month, NOAA plans to award contracts for GeoXO imagers and begin soliciting proposals for GeoXO sounders, Sullivan added. In addition to improving upon GOES-R’s visible and infrared imagery and lightning mapping capabilities, GeoXO satellites will provide nighttime imagery, hyperspectral sounding and extensive information on ocean and atmospheric conditions. “Data from GeoXO will contribute to weather forecast models and drive short-term weather forecasts and severe weather warnings,” NOAA said in a news release. “GeoXO will also detect and monitor environmental hazards like wildfires, smoke, dust, volcanic ash, drought, and flooding, providing advanced warning to decision-makers.” Unlike in low Earth orbit where it makes sense to separate instruments on smaller spacecraft and spread out the constellation, an approach known as disaggregation, the GeoXO program will continue to group multiple instruments together. “Because you’re staring from geostationary orbit, there’s no point in having 10 satellites in the same spot staring,” said Steve Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services. Prior to the Commerce Department’s approval of the GeoXO program to move into its implementation phase, NASA awarded contracts for GeoXO studies. (NASA oversees GeoXO satellite development. NOAA provides the funding, program management and operations.) Lockheed Martin and Maxar won $5 million contracts in July to define the GeoXO spacecraft concept, mature related technologies and shed light on GeoXO satellite performance, risk, cost and schedule. NASA awarded Ball Aerospace and Raytheon contracts in May, each valued at about $5 million, to perform definition-phase studies of the GeoXO atmospheric composition instrument. Ball Aerospace and L3Harris won NASA contracts in 2021 worth approximately $8 million apiece to help define the GeoXO satellite sounders. Raytheon and L3Harris also won contracts in 2021 valued at about $6 million each to conduct studies of the GeoXO imager. NOAA launched the third of three satellites in the GOES-R series in March 2022. That satellite, which quickly moved into position as GOES West, is keeping taps on the Western United States, Mexico, Central America and the Pacific Ocean.
Cognitive Space, a startup based in Houston, Texas, announced Jan. 10 the appointment of Keith Masback as an independent board member. Masback is a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency official and former president and CEO of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. He is now an angel investor with a broad portfolio of companies, including Cognitive Space. Cognitive Space develops artificial intelligence software tools to manage remote-sensing constellations and schedule satellite operations. The company has been working with the Air Force Research Laboratory to apply this technology to the operation of a hybrid architecture of government and commercial remote-sensing satellites. As an independent board member, Masback would provide impartial advice advice and counsel. Guy de Carufel, founder and CEO of Cognitive Space, said Masback has been an advisor to the company for the past two years. Masback told SpaceNews he expects Cognitive Space to grow its business as both commercial and government satellite operators need better tools to manage their constellations more efficiently. “There’s plenty of traction on the commercial side and we’re seeing interest from the Air Force and others,” he said. “Everybody throws around the term ‘hybrid architecture,’” he said. “There’s an art to that to be sure, but there’s also science, and that’s the part that Cognitive Space fills in.” The demand for space-based remote sensing fueled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not slowing down, he said. “Companies have all seen an infusion of cash through the requirements generated by what’s going on in Europe, and increased concern with respect to Taiwan.” Regardless of how the Ukraine crisis is ultimately resolved, “this has changed the nature of the application of space based technologies forever,” said Masback. Meanwhile, the economic climate means companies in the space industry have to adjust their expectations as investors are more demanding. “This is not the middle of 2021,” he said. “The environment has changed, the bar has been raised and the requirements are different.” In today’s Darwinian reality, “companies have to demonstrate they can meet requirements and have mature technology.”
 Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) on Jan. 10 was officially selected to serve as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in the 118th Congress. Rogers had served as the committee’s ranking Republican in the 117th Congress. He is the first congressman from Alabama to chair the HASC. “I am honored to have been selected by my House Republican colleagues to serve as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee,” Rogers said in a statement. “Our nation faces unprecedented threats from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. In order to deter these threats and remain the most feared force in the world, we must ensure that our military focuses on lethality and capability.” Rogers for years has been a central player in national security space. As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee, he and then ranking Democrat Jim Cooper (Tenn.) led efforts to create a separate military branch for space. Rogers and Cooper wrote the language to establish a Space Corps under the Department of the Air Force in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. Their bill was defeated at the time but it was resurrected in the 2020 NDAA when Congress established the U.S. Space Force. As the ranking member of HASC, Rogers advocated for bigger defense budgets to position the United States to compete with rising powers like China. As chairman he faces a challenging political environment with Republicans divided over spending priorities, with factions within the party pushing for defense cuts. Challenges ahead “Chairman Rogers’ top challenge this year will be to ensure that the defense budget positions the U.S. to not just compete but win against an increasingly capable and aggressive China, even while Russia continues its illegal aggression in Ukraine,” Rogers’ former aide Sarah Mineiro told SpaceNews . Mineiro, former staff director of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee and now senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said HASC will have to prioritize investments in “everything from enlisted personnel to high-end weaponry, and doing that in the context of downard pressure on the defense budget will be difficult.” Issues like supply chain security, innovation in defense programs, and access to critical minerals “all require the attention of multiple national security focused committees which has been challenging in the past, but may present new opportunities for Chairman Rogers,” said Mineiro. Space will remain a high priority, she said. “Part of the reason the Space Force was created was because Chairman Rogers tangibly understood how space-based capabilities underpinned operations in all other domains. I believe that he will continue to focus on space and the Space Force albeit through a different lens at the full committee.” Rogers likely will “work very closely with the leadership of the Strategic Forces subcommittee to finally drive real meaningful reform for space requirements and acquisitions,” said Mineiro. “But I would also anticipate that Chairman Rogers is eager to see this sort of change across the Department of Defense.” The HASC for years has worked in a bipartisan manner drafting the annual defense authorization bills, and that should continue under Rogers, Mineiro said. “He has worked with committee members on both sides of the aisle and quite frankly across Congress to fulfill the core mission of the HASC to authorize and provide oversight of the Department of Defense. Every member of the committee and staff take that mission with the seriousness it deserves.”
Six months after the release of the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers and NASA officials say the observatory continues to exceed expectations while providing lessons for future space telescopes. Talks and other presentations at the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) here Jan. 9 highlighted both the science produced by JWST since it started regular operations last summer as well as the status of the telescope itself. The conference, the largest annual gathering of astronomers, was the first since the July 12 release of the first science images that generated worldwide headlines. It came after years of conferences where astronomers instead heard about the potential of the telescope, as well as its delays and technical problems. “At this AAS, we’re really taking a victory lap and celebrating JWST,” said Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, during an agency town hall meeting at the conference. There was, project officials said, a lot to celebrate. The telescope continues to meet or exceed its specifications on aspects ranging from sensitivity and stability to resolution. “It really is better than we expected across the board,” Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a plenary talk at the conference. There have been a few minor issues with the telescope, notably micrometeoroid impacts on its mirrors. One such impact, in May 2021, was significantly larger than expected and is now thought to be an impact that happens only once every five years. There have been 21 impacts to date. “All together they’ve had only a very small effect” on the quality of images, said Jonathan Gardner, deputy senior project scientist for JWST at NASA Goddard, at a separate town hall meeting about the mission. To mitigate the risk of future impacts, JWST will change how it observes later this year when a new round of observations, called Cycle 2, begins. The mission will implement an “avoidance zone” where the flux of micrometeoroids, in the direction of the spacecraft’s motion, is the greatest, and not point the mirrors in that direction. “We can always go back at a different time and look at the same part of the sky,” he said. Gardner said spacecraft controllers had resolved a concern with one mode of the spacecraft’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) when a mechanism showed increased friction. Controllers now use a different movement pattern for the affected grating wheel that is working well. A software fault in an attitude control system triggered a safe mode Dec. 7, caused by what he called an “unusual sequence of events” that has since been resolved. That was the only safe mode since science operations began. Astronomers and engineers are still testing the limits of JWST’s capabilities. The spacecraft was designed to be able to track moving objects, like bodies in the solar system, at a rate of up to 30 milliarcseconds per second. (There are 3.6 million milliarcseconds in a degree.) However, for observations of the near Earth asteroid Didymos during the collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft with the asteroid’s moon Dimorphos in September 2022, JWST was able to track the asteroid at nearly four times that rate, 110 milliarcseconds per second. The only other issue with JWST is an external one. Controllers use the Deep Space Network (DSN) to communicate with the spacecraft, downloading an average of 57 gigabytes of data per day. JWST uses the DSN eight hours out of every 24, but Rigby said at the JWST town hall that there some challenges using the DSN, which can be oversubscribed by other missions, including the recent Artemis 1 Orion test flight. “When Artemis was up, we had to scrap our plans for a week and move in observations with very low data rates” to compensate for the limited DSN time, she said. That could be an issue on future Artemis missions, she added, since those missions will have priority on the DSN. In her plenary, she credited JWST’s performance to the efforts of thousands of people involved in its development. “JWST is artisanal. It’s really made by hand,” she said. “That science performance, better than expectations, is because of a tremendous amount of work by 20,000 people around the world.” NASA is starting to fold in lessons learned from JWST’s development into future missions, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the name NASA is giving to a large space telescope recommended by the Astro2020 decadal survey in 2021 to operate at near-infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. Clampin said that the Habitable Worlds Observatory will leverage the segmented mirror technology used for JWST. It will also likely feature a design change to address the micrometeoroid impacts seen by JWST, whose primary mirror is exposed. “We need to have a telescope in a tube.”
This article was edited Jan. 11 to add details about SpaceX’s fourth mission for OneWeb and update the timing for the next Starlink launch. TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb is now just two launches away from being able to provide broadband globally after SpaceX sent its latest batch of satellites to orbit Jan. 9. The British operator has confirmed contact with all 40 satellites that launched aboard a Falcon 9 at 11:50 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Shortly after lift-off, delayed a day to give more time for pre-launch processing , the rocket’s first stage successfully landed at Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zone 1 for reuse. SpaceX had previously used the booster to launch NASA’s CRS-26 cargo run to the International Space Station in November. OneWeb said it now has 542 of 648 satellites in its proposed low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, although its latest batch and another that SpaceX launched in December are still making their way to their final destinations to start operations. It will take about 100 days from launch for both batches of satellites to be ready to start providing services, according to OneWeb. The operator said it is currently providing connectivity solutions via distribution partners in Alaska, Canada, the United Kingdom, Greenland and the wider Arctic area. The latest satellites will help extend its reach into Southern Europe, the United States, North Africa, the Middle East, Japan, Australia, and India. OneWeb has said it only needs 588 satellites to provide global, high-speed broadband in places it has regulatory approval to operate. The remaining 60 spacecraft will serve as a mix of in-orbit and ground spares. SpaceX and New Space India Limited (NSIL), the commercial arm of India’s space agency, are slated to perform one launch each early this year to enable OneWeb to provide global coverage. OneWeb last year ordered three and two launches from SpaceX and NSIL, respectively, to deploy the satellites needed to reach global coverage, after suspending a contract with Arianespace to achieve this via Russian Soyuz rockets amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. NSIL launched 36 satellites for OneWeb Oct. 22 with a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3 rocket, also designated LVM3. SpaceX kicked off its launch campaign for OneWeb Dec. 8 by sending 40 satellites to LEO on a Falcon 9. OneWeb spokesperson Katie Dowd said SpaceX is also slated to launch an undefined number of spare OneWeb satellites in a rideshare mission by late summer. “ This is the only spare launch at this time, ” Dowd told SpaceNews via email. SpaceX had been due to launch a batch of satellites for its rival Starlink broadband constellation about 35 minutes before its latest OneWeb mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. However, SpaceX rescheduled this mission to Jan. 11 following bad weather, and then later pushed the launch out to Jan. 15 at 11:18 A.M. Eastern for “ constellation optimization ” and to allow more time for pre-launch checkouts. SpaceX has launched more than 3,600 Starlink satellites to date as the company fills out the network’s global reach . The company has the approval to launch 4,408 first-generation Starlink satellites, and 7,500 of the nearly 30,000 satellites in its proposed second-generation constellation. At the end of last year, a Falcon 9 launched the first Starlink satellites going to orbits authorized for SpaceX’s second-generation system. However, with 54 satellites on that mission, they do not appear to be the larger versions of the Starlink spacecraft that have been proposed for its second-generation network.
DENVER – Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast is taking the helm of Skycorp Inc., a California company with plans to transform space logistics in Earth orbit, cislunar orbit and on the lunar surface. Skycorp was founded in 1998 by Dennis Wingo, an aerospace and computer engineer with multiple patents including one for extending the life of spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems purchased the patent and the intellectual property underpins the company’s Mission Extension Vehicle . ­­ After serving as an advisor to many space companies since retiring from the Air Force in 2019, why is Kwast becoming Skycorp’s CEO? “Because I want to be at the right place at the right time in history to do the right thing,” Kwast told SpaceNews . “As we watch this tidal wave of commercialization coming to us, Dennis is the Henry Ford of the space age.” Kwast sees extraordinary promise in space-based solar power, asteroid mining and in-space manufacturing and assembly to help solve many of Earth’s intractable problems. “Space is the pathway for humanity to have prosperity, health and security across cultural lines, across nation-state lines,” Kwast said. “It is how humanity expands the pie and lets everybody uplift the human condition. It is that powerful.” Wingo shares that vision and calls Kwast “an exceptional leader” who can help the Skycorp and the United States move in that direction. Kwast, a fighter pilot with extensive combat experience, earned an astronautical engineering degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy. He spent 33 years in the Air Force, led Air University and the Air Education and Training Command, and was an early advocate of the U.S. Space Force . “Steve Kwast, as much as anyone alive, understands that the key to a prosperous future for humanity lies in space and that our company vision will contribute greatly to that end,” Wingo told SpaceNews . A fundamental element of the auspicious future Wingo and Kwast envision is logistics and Skycorp “is going to change the cost of logistics in the space economy,” Kwast said. Skycorp is “going to capture all of these capabilities that have been incubated in the space industrial base and put them together in a way nobody else is thinking about, systemically and holistically,” Kwast said. For example, Skycorp’s Orbital Logistics Vehicle is designed to be launched in pieces and assembled at the International Space Station. As a result, the finished structure will not need to withstand the vibration and G forces of a rocket launch. Kwast also points to Skycorp’s recent success in NASA and Defense Department contract awards as proof of Wingo’s genius and the Skycorp’s prowess. The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and NASA are funding space station testing of the intelligent Space Systems Interface, a USB-like cable to extend spacecraft power and communications capacity to payloads, developed by Germany’s iBoss GmbH and Skycorp. Skycorp won the grand prize in NASA’s 2021 Centennial Challenge “for its innovative system of power cells and intelligent interfaces for storing and distributing power through the lunar month’s extreme light and temperature changes,” according to a NASA news release. In the ongoing Centennial prize competition, the Watts on the Moon Challenge, Skycorp was one of seven teams that were awarded $200,000 apiece and selected to compete in the second round to develop and test their power transmission and energy storage technologies. “Skycorp has novel ideas about how to bring energy to the logistics of lunar operations,” Kwast said.
DENVER – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will need to bring innovative commercial technologies into its satellite ground systems to ingest, process and disseminate the massive volume of data expected to be generated by future government, commercial and international partner satellites. NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) studied future ground system requirements and determined “that if we continue to add more capacity, incorporate more data sources and more satellites with the current approach, it will be difficult for the government to accomplish its mission at the same level in the next 20 to 30 years,” Raad Saleh, who leads the NESDIS Ground Enterprise Study for NOAA’s Office of System Architecture and Advanced Planning, said Jan. 9 at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting here. In fact, NOAA would “far exceed the funds available” if the agency carried out plans to expand its constellation through 2042 without changing its ground architecture strategy, said Michael Morgan, Commerce Department assistant secretary for environmental observation and prediction. NOAA currently develops a unique ground system for each mission, an approach that threatens to become prohibitively expensive as the constellation expands, Morgan added. In the future, NOAA will look to the private sector for “new breakthrough and disruptive technologies” like artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing and digital twin as the agency transitions to an enterprise ground architecture to support its next generation of satellite observing systems, Saleh said. Space industry officials on the AMS panel welcomed the new approach. “Private industry has been rapidly and cost effectively implementing capabilities in the ground enterprise areas in response to market forces,” said Robert Smith, Northrop Grumman senior staff systems engineer. “Whether in cloud-hosting, ground station as a service, flexible antenna as a service, sensor payloads, rapid launch capabilities, satellite operations, data processing, and data access and dissemination, this is a good time to leverage private industry investments and deployment of these technologies.” Other technology with promise for making satellite constellations more efficient are onboard processing, intersatellite links and data analysis with robust object-detection and feature-extraction algorithms, said Kumar Navulur, Maxar Technologies senior director of strategic initiatives. Still, NOAA will face challenges in this transition to more reliance on the commercial sector, while ensuring that data integrity, security and quality does not suffer. Instead of filling three-ring binders with requirements for new systems, NOAA may need to write service-level agreements for future systems, said Jack Maguire, general manager of the Aerospace Corp. Civil Space Programs Operations Division. The European Space Agency also is moving toward an enterprise ground system and increasing reliance on the private sector. Instead of establishing discrete ground systems for each mission as it did in the past, ESA has created a reference architecture based on common mission needs. “Now we have a collection of products which we consider generic enough to support all the missions that are part of our portfolio,” said Mauro Pecchioli, director of the European Space Agency’s Multi-Mission Infrastructure Program. “These products are made available also to European industry to be used for programs which are not funded by ESA, which means we have created the basis for European industry to become competitive for non-institutionally funded programs.”
Updated 7 a.m. Eastern Jan. 10 with Virgin Orbit statement. SEATTLE — Virgin Orbit’s first launch from the United Kingdom failed to reach orbit Jan. 9, dealing a high-profile setback to a company that has been struggling financially. Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 aircraft took off from Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England at about 5:02 p.m. Eastern on the company’s “Start Me Up” mission, the sixth LauncherOne mission for the company but the first to fly from a location other than Mojave Air and Space Port. The aircraft flew to its designated drop location over the Atlantic Ocean off the southern coast of Ireland and released the LauncherOne rocket at approximately 6:11 p.m. Eastern. While telemetry during the live webcast of the launch was unreliable, reporting what appeared to be spurious speed and altitude figures at times, the company reported seven minutes later that the rocket’s upper stage and payloads had reached orbit. “LauncherOne has once again successfully reached Earth orbit!” the company announced in a tweet it later deleted. “Our mission isn’t over yet, but our congratulations to the people of the UK! This is already the first-ever orbital mission from British soil – an enormous achievement by @spacegovuk and their partners in government!” The launch then appeared to be in a coast phase before a second burn of the upper stage’s NewtonFour engine, followed by payload deployment. But nearly a half-hour after the announcement of reaching orbit, the company suddenly revealed the launch had instead failed. “We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information,” the company announced. The company provided no other information about the anomaly, including at what state of flight it took place and why the company incorrectly reported reaching orbit. It did confirm that that the Boeing 747 had landed safely back at Spaceport Cornwall. In a statement early Jan. 10, Virgin Orbit said the anomaly took place during the flight of the second stage of the rocket when traveling at 17,700 kilometers per hour, less than two-thirds of orbital velocity, but offered no other details about the problem. “The first-time nature of this mission added layers of complexity that our team professionally managed through; however, in the end a technical failure appears to have prevented us from delivering the final orbit,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in the statement. The Start Me Up mission carried nine small satellites that the rocket was to deploy into a sun-synchronous orbit at about 555 kilometers altitude. The launch was procured by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, with the primary payload a pair of cubesats called Prometheus-2 built by the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) of the U.K. Ministry of Defence. Other payloads on the launch were a pair of cubesats called CIRCE developed by DSTL and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; a navigation technology demonstration cubesat called DOVER built by Open Cosmos; ForgeStar-0, the first satellite for Space Forge, a space manufacturing startup based in Wales; IOD-3 AMBER, the first in a constellation of maritime domain awareness satellites for U.K. company Horizon Technologies; the STORK-6 imaging cubesat for Polish company SatRevolution; and AMAN, the first cubesat for the government of Oman. The mission had a high profile because it was the first orbital launch attempt to take place from the United Kingdom, part of a strategy by the British government to develop an “end-to-end” space industry. The launch attracted a large crowd to the spaceport, even though there was little to see beyond an aircraft taking off at night. “Incredible work has gone into the UK’s first ever launch of an orbital satellite tonight. Good luck to the entire team,” tweeted U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hours before the launch. “We have shown the UK is capable of launching into orbit, but the launch was not successful in reaching the required orbit,” Matt Archer, director of commercial spaceflight at the U.K. Space Agency, said in Virgin Orbit’s statement about the failure. “Despite this, the project has succeeded in creating a horizontal launch capability at Spaceport Cornwall, and we remain committed to becoming the leading provider of commercial small satellite launch in Europe by 2030, with vertical launches planned from Scotland.” The launch comes after four consecutive successful launches of LauncherOne, all from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, between January 2021 and July 2022. The company’s first LauncherOne launch, in May 2020, failed to reach orbit when the rocket’s first-stage engine shut down shortly after ignition. The failure comes at a precarious time for Virgin Orbit, which has struggled to increase its launch rate and generate revenue. The company, i n a Nov. 7 earnings call , reported it closed the third quarter with $71 million in cash, after reporting negative free cash flow of $52.5 million. The company raised $25 million from Virgin Group in early November and another $20 million from Virgin Investments Limited, an investment arm of the Virgin Group, Dec. 20. In that Nov. 7 earnings call, the company said it would at least double its launch rate in 2023, at a time when the company was expecting to perform three launches in 2022. The company ended 2022 with only two launches after pushing back the Start Me Up mission to January.
TAMPA, Fla. — Three young European space companies said Jan. 9 they have teamed up to test a collision avoidance system on a small satellite this year in low Earth orbit (LEO). The partners plan to use data from Portuguese space traffic management (STM) company Neuraspace to guide electric thrusters developed by Spain’s Ienai Space on a cubesat built by Endurosat, based in Bulgaria. The satellite, the size of 12 cubesats, is due to hitch a ride on the second launch of Germany-based Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket, which is slated to debut earlier in 2023. Once in orbit, the thrusters would be able to respond to simulated and real collision warnings and maneuvering suggestions from Neuraspace’s STM platform. The amount of conjunction alerts in critical orbits has soared five times in recent years as record numbers of satellites are sent around the Earth, Neuraspace director Chiara Manfletti said in an interview. That has led to “a nine-fold effort going into looking at maneuvers — whether a conjunction is really going to happen or not.” Neuraspace’s machine-learning algorithms pool space-tracking data from commercial partnerships and publicly available sources to lower this burden on operators and reduce unnecessary maneuvers. The company secured its first commercial contract Dec. 29 with an undisclosed customer, according to Manfletti. She said Neuraspace has seven other pilot customers that are “going to be putting up something like 400-plus” satellites in total over the next couple of years. Most of them are constellation builders in LEO for applications including Earth observation and telecommunications. “We are demonstrating our capabilities as we speak,” she added, “but we want to improve our maneuvering strategies and this is what this mission is going to enable us to do.” While Neuraspace currently uses human operators on Earth to facilitate the guidance its artificial intelligence produces, the company ultimately plans to integrate its software onboard satellites for autonomous maneuverability. By marrying Neuraspace’s brains with the muscle provided by Ienai’s thrusters, the companies hope to one day overcome the computing and power limitations that hold back automatic collision-avoidance maneuvers on small satellites. Improving the quality and scope of space-tracking data will also be necessary, as will building up trust with operators. “You first have to build trust with an operator and the owner of the satellite [that] you’re not going to do anything crazy with it,” Manfletti said. “But if there’s that trust, there is an option in our [current, terrestrial-based] workflow where the command can be uploaded to the spacecraft automatically, or interface directly with whatever operation software that they use.” Despite SpaceX’s use of electric thrusters to steer Starlink satellites clear of debris from Russia’s anti-satellite test in 2021, Ienai CEO Daniel Pérez said there’s also “still a question on the industry” of whether the propulsion technology “can actually perform in cases of collision avoidance.” The mission is part of other thruster demonstrations Ienai is planning in 2023 on increasingly larger satellites following its first in-orbit demonstration last year. Other EnduroSat customer payloads will also be on the mission, according to the Bulgarian manufacturer, which deployed its first satellite in 2018.
DENVER – NASA Marshall Space Flight Center is working with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Alabama, Huntsville, on Cubespark, a proposed constellation of six cubesats to map lightning. Cubespark cubesats, equipped with high-resolution optical imagers and VHF sensors, would “map not only the lightning flash locations, but map the full structure of the lightning deep within convective clouds,” Jackson Remington of the Universities Space Research Association said Jan. 9 at the American Meteorological Society conference here. Cubespark is designed to measure the global distribution of lightning, help explain the relationship between lightning and severe weather, and monitor lightning-produced nitrogen oxides, which have an impact on air quality. Lightning data currently comes from a variety of sources including terrestrial sensors and the Geostationary Lightning Mappers on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series. In low Earth orbit, a Lightning Image Sensor (LIS) designed by scientists at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and manufactured at NASA Marshall has been making observations since it was installed on the International Space Station in 2017. “It’s important to point out that low-Earth orbit lightning observations are at risk,” Remington said. LIS is scheduled to stop gathering data from the space station later this year “and there’s no planned successor of a day-night lightning imager” in low-Earth orbit, Remington said. “So, we really need to get these up there,” he added. In simulations, the Cubespark constellation was able to pinpoint the location of lightning to within one to two kilometers over a 300- to 600-kilometer swath from the tropics to high latitudes, Remington said. NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office is supporting the Cubespark concept through its Instrument Incubator Program.
DENVER – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared the newest satellite in its geostationary fleet, GOES-18, operational Jan. 4 and designated it GOES West. With that designation, the satellite launched in March took over for GOES-17 as one of NOAA’s two primary geostationary satellites. GOES West observes weather and climate conditions over the western United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, Mexico, Central America and the Pacific Ocean. GOES-17 will move to an orbit over the central United States to serve as a backup for GOES East and GOES West. Usually, GOES satellites spend about six months in their initial geostationary orbital slots before moving into position as GOES East or GOES West. For GOES-18, NOAA began moving the satellite in May, two months after launch, and quickly began sharing data from GOES-18 instruments with the National Weather Service and other data users as soon as each instrument was calibrated and the data was validated.. NOAA accelerated the timeline for making GOES-18 part of its operational fleet because of problems with the cooling system for GOES-17’s Advanced Baseline Imager. Working together, representatives from NASA, NOAA and industry were able to mitigate the impact of the cooling system deficiency, but the steps taken shortened the satellite’s anticipated lifespan. To lessen the impact of GOES-17’s ABI problem, NOAA shared imagery from the GOES-18 ABI with GOES West data customers from Aug. 1 to Sept. 8 and from Oct. 13 to Nov. 16. “This allowed forecasters to utilize GOES-18 imagery during the height of the Pacific hurricane season,” NOAA said in a Jan. 9 news release. The primary instrument on GOES-18, the third satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series, is the Advanced Baseline Imager built by L3Harris. The new GOES West, like its predecessor, also is equipped with the Geostationary Lightning Mapper and the Solar Ultraviolet Imager built by Lockheed Martin, the Extreme X-Ray and Irradiance Sensors from the University of Colorado, Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the Space Environment In-Situ Suite from Assurance Technology Corp. and two magnetometers provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. GOES-U, the final satellite in the GOES-R series, is scheduled to launch in 2024.
Daniel Porras, a f ormer executive at the Secure World Foundation, has joined Rogue Space, a startup developing small satellites for in-orbit services. Porras will be Rogue’s director of space sustainability policy and advocate for standards and best practices from the standpoint of small businesses, the company said Jan. 9. “Rogue believes that space activities should be conducted in a safe, sustainable and commercially viable manner,” CEO Jeromy Grimmett said in a statement. Based in Laconia, New Hampshire, Rogue is seeking venture funding to build out a fleet of satellite-servicing and debris-removal smallsats for commercial and government customers. The company is one of dozens of small businesses that won research contracts from the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX organization for a program known as Orbital Prime . Rogue said its SBIR awards for Orbital Prime are collectively worth $2.75 million . The company also signed a partnership with defense contractor SAIC to build space-servicing and surveillance satellites. Porras told SpaceNews that the in-space servicing industry is challenged by unclear norms and standards and that startups should have a seat at the table when policies are being decided. “We need to find better ways to regulate how we handle these novel space activities,” he said. “There are a lot of UN discussions, multilateral dialogues, regional dialogues going on about what should be the best practices for space activities” and meanwhile startups are trying to test and demonstrate technologies. Grimmett said it’s “important for startups’ voices to be heard with respect to policy and ensure there’s an ongoing dialogue between the people who are coming up with the rules and the people who are actually having to use the rules.” The regulatory environment regarding in-space activities is challenging for everyone but especially for small businesses and startups, said Chris Hearsey, head of government and regulatory affairs at Rogue. “What we’re concerned about is shared by many other startups in this space, he said. “Because we are engaging in such new and novel space activities. Playing within this new economy is very challenging, from regulations to standards to just be able to get the business up and running.” Rogue is planning to launch three cubesats this year to demonstrate satellite-inspection, rendezvous and proximity technologies for the Orbital Prime program. The cubesats are scheduled to launch later this year on SpaceX’s Transporter-8 and Transporter-9 rideshares. 
The two spacecraft making up China’s first interplanetary mission are both suffering issues, with the rover potentially lost on the surface after winter hibernation. The Zhurong Mars rover has been hibernating on the Martian surface since May 18 last year and was expected to resume activity in December, around the time of the Spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. However no announcement of establishing contact with the rover has been made. The South China Morning Post reported Jan. 7, citing sources that do not wish to be named, that teams on Earth have yet to receive a signal from Zhurong. The Zhurong rover landed in Mars’s Utopia Planitia region in May 2021 but entered a period of hibernation to ride out winter, when both temperatures and solar radiation levels are too low for the solar-powered rover to operate. The rover was expected to autonomously resume activities once it can generate sufficient energy from solar power and when temperatures reach around minus 15 degrees Celsius. Zhurong entered hibernation when local temperatures were around minus 20 degrees, according to the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, after the autumn equinox in late February. Conditions should already by more favorable following the Spring equinox on Dec. 26. Mars has an axial tilt of around 25 degrees, meaning it has has similar seasonal variations to Earth during its orbit around the sun. While there has so far been no official comment, the rover may have been impacted by sand storms in the area, which could reduce the levels of energy generation. The Tianwen-1 orbiter noted storms around the landing area in March and April 2021. Zhurong has active means of removing dust from its four butterfly wing solar arrays, but would be unable to perform this operation while hibernating. The arrays also have an anti-dust coating and can tilt to maximize light collection. Zhurong had a primary mission lifetime of three Earth months but operated for just over one Earth year in Utopia Planitia, traveling at least 1,921 meters south from its landing site. It was seeking out geomorphologic targets such as mud volcanoes during its extended mission. The rover has returned detailed insights into the local layered subsurface with its ground-penetrating radar and discovered evidence of relatively recent aqueous activity in the area. The rover landing was also used by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson as a warning to Congress as to China’s competitive threat to American leadership in human spaceflight. Meanwhile the Tianwen-1 orbiter has been tasked with assessing the area and attempting to contact the rover. Teams are however also having trouble receiving data from the orbiter, according to SCMP. Radio amateurs have also noted issues with attempts for ground stations to lock onto the orbiter. https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1612299189169565696 Tianwen-1 was scheduled to conduct aerobraking tests late last year as part of preparation for a Mars sample return mission potentially launching later this decade. It is unknown if the tests have been conducted and potentially impacted the orbiter. Chinese space authorities have yet to comment on the situation. The Tianwen-1 orbiter was initially used to assess the pre-selected landing zones for Zhurong. It was then used primarily as a communications relay for Zhurong during the rover’s primary mission phase, before then switching to focus more on its own science objectives. It completed a mapping of the Martian surface with a medium-resolution camera by June 2022, and also completed its assigned goals for its six science payloads. China launched its Tianwen-1 mission to Mars in July 2020 with the combination of the Tianwen-1 orbiter and Zhurong rover entering Mars orbit in February 2021. Both Tianwen-1 and Zhurong had entered a standby mode in 2021 when the Earth and Mars were orbiting at opposite sides of the sun, causing a communications blackout . China plans to launch the Tianwen-2 joint near-Earth asteroid sample-return and main belt comet rendezvous mission around 2025. 
China conducted its first two launches of 2023 over the weekend, sending three classified payloads into geosynchronous transfer orbit and five commercial satellites into sun-synchronous orbits. A Long March 7A lifted off from the coastal Wenchang spaceport at 5:00 p.m. Eastern, Jan. 8, with unofficial, amateur video footage showing the rocket lifting off despite rain. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed launch success around 30 minutes later. The main payload sent into geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) was revealed to be the Shijian-23 satellite developed by Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), a major CASC subsidiary. The Shijian-23 satellite is mainly used for scientific experiments and technical verification. Two smaller payloads, Shiyan-22A and Shiyan-22B, were also onboard and will be used for in-orbit verification tests of new technologies such as space environment monitoring, according to Chinese state media. The launch was the fifth of the Long March 7A, a three-stage version of the standard Long March 7 used to launch cargo missions to the Tiangong space station. It was also the fourth consecutive successful launch of the rocket, following the failure of the first launch in 2020. The Long March 7A is a 60.1-meter-long, 3.35-meter-diameter kerosene and liquid oxygen launch vehicle with four side boosters, capable of delivering up to 7 metric tons of payload to GTO. The rocket could replace the older, hypergolic Long March 3B, which launches from the inland Xichang spaceport in southwest China. By launching from the coast, the Long March 7A avoids the cost and hazards of the inland 3B launches, which have seen spent boosters fall on inhabited areas , and also has the advantage of launching from a lower latitude. CASC’s China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the rocket manufacturer, stated Sunday that it is currently able to produce 4-6 Long March 7A rockets per year, and up to 8-10 by 2025, suggesting the Long March 3B will remain active for years to come. Sunday’s mission used a 4.2-meter-diameter fairing but CASC is also working on replacing the 3.0-meter-diameter YF-74 hydrolox engine with a 3.35-meter YF-75D engine on the Long March 7A third stage, allowing it to support a 5.2-meter-diameter fairing,. CASC stated last week that it again plans to launch more than 50 times this year. Last year it launched 53 Long March rockets and a Jielong-3 solid rocket from the Yellow Sea. China’s second launch of the year followed early Monday, with a Ceres-1 commercial solid rocket from private firm Galactic Energy lifting off from Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert in northwest China at 12:04 a.m., Jan. 9. The company announced launch success within the hour, marking the firm’s fifth success from five launches. The first Ceres-1 launched in November 2020. Five satellites were sent into sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), namely the Tianmu-1 01 and 02 meteorological satellites, a “Science and Technology-1” remote sensing satellite, Tianqi-13 for Guodian Gaoke and its Tianqi low-Earth orbit narrow-band Internet of Things constellation, and a small satellite for science outreach named for Nantong Middle School. Galactic Energy is now looking to ramp up its production and delivery rate and plans 8-10 launches of the Ceres-1 in 2023. The Ceres-1 rocket has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to LEO or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude SSO. The company is also working on its Pallas-1 reusable kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher. Pallas-1 will be capable of lofting 5,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO. Last year Galactic Energy said a test launch could come as soon as during the first half of 2023, but the latest press release states only that development of the launcher will be continued during the year.
Virgin Orbit is set to perform the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom as soon as Jan. 9, a milestone officials hailed as the start of a new era for the country’s space industry. At a Jan. 8 briefing at Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England, Virgin Orbit said they were in final preparations for the “Start Me Up” mission, set to take off from the spaceport as soon as 5:16 p.m. Eastern Jan. 9. Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 aircraft will fly to a drop point off the southern coast of Ireland and deploy the LauncherOne rocket about an hour after takeoff. Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said at the briefing that the company was still monitoring the vehicle and the weather, but did not mention any specific issue that could postpone the launch. “Right now everything is green,” he said. “We’re going to proceed cautiously on this flight. We’re in different airspace than we’ve flown before. Our pilots are ready, but we want to make sure we give them every opportunity for a successful mission.” The Start Me Up mission will place nine payloads into a sun-synchronous orbit for government and commercial customers. They include the U.K. Ministry of Defence, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Polish satellite developer SatRevolution, U.K. companies Horizon Technologies and Space Forge, and the government of Oman. The National Reconnaissance Office procured the launch as a task order on a streamlined launch contract it has with the company. The launch is the sixth for Virgin Orbit, with the previous five having taken off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California. “From the operation of the system, it’s essentially the same,” Hart said of operating from Cornwall versus Mojave. “A little different weather than Mojave, but otherwise the team is turning the wrenches the same way.” The launch will be the first orbital launch from U.K. soil, which the British government heralds as a key step in growing the country’s space industry. “We are absolutely fantastic at designing satellites and building satellites,” said Ian Annett, deputy chief executive of the U.K. Space Agency. Having launches from the U.K., he said, “fills that end-to-end capability.” Supporting the air-launch Virgin Orbit system required only modest changes to Cornwall Airport Newquay, home of Spaceport Cornwall. “We could have launched potentially the day after we were announced from a facilities perspective,” said Melissa Thorpe, head of Spaceport Cornwall. The spaceport has made some investments to “future-proof” it, she said. That included building a satellite integration facility that can be used by other companies when Virgin Orbit is not operating there. Another building will open soon next to it to host other space companies. “It’s full, and we haven’t even opened it yet. That’s how excited people are.” Spaceport Cornwall is one of several launch facilities either proposed or in development in the United Kingdom, including Space Hub Sutherland in northern Scotland that will host launches by Orbex and SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands that will support launches by companies such as ABL Space Systems and Skyrora. Annett said he was not concerned that there may be an oversupply of U.K. launch facilities. “The market is changing rapidly. There is a strong demand for microlaunchers to get small satellites into low Earth orbit,” he said. “There’s more than enough in terms of a demand signal for us to respond to.” “We can demonstrate that we will be Europe’s principal launch operator,” he said of the upcoming Virgin Orbit launch. “This is not one shot and then go away again. We need to make sure that we can work together and demonstrate we can launch the right missions and be competitive.” Hart said that Virgin Orbit expected to fly again from Cornwall after the Start Me Up mission, but suggested the next launch from the spaceport might slip to 2024. “We would like to be back, if we could, before the end of the year,” he said. “I’m not sure that will happen, but it’s not out of the question.” When Virgin Orbit will return to Cornwall will depend on payloads that want to launch from there, Hart said. “It starts with a payload, but there are a number of ideas percolating, working with the U.K. Space Agency and the rest of the community. We would like to start a rhythm.” Virgin Orbit has not disclosed its launch plans for 2023 beyond the Start Me Up mission, but executives said in an earnings call in November they wanted to at least double its launch rate in 2022. The company, at the time of the call, expected conducting three launches in 2022 but ended the year with only two. At the start of 2022, the company projected performing six launches in the year, two of which from Spaceport Cornwall.
SpaceX is aiming to launch Falcon Heavy’s second national security mission for the U.S. Space Force on Jan. 12 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The U.S. Space Systems Command said it plans to release details of the launch window 72 hours before scheduled liftoff. The mission, named USSF-67, comes on the heels of USSF-44, which flew to geostationary Earth orbit on Nov. 1 and marked Falcon Heavy’s first national security launch. A picture posted by SpaceX on Jan. 7 — showing Falcon Heavy’s three Falcon 9 cores — confirms the company is readying for an upcoming launch. “ Falcon Heavy in the hangar at Launch Complex 39A,” the company said on Twitter. SpaceX received a $316 million contract in August 2020 to launch USSF-67 Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters that were recovered after USSF-44 will be reused for USSF-67. SpaceX will attempt to land both boosters at Cape Canaveral’s Landing Zones 1 and 2. The center core will not be recovered. The mission will carry two payloads: the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM (CBAS)-2 and a Long Duration Propulsive ESPA ring, a spacecraft that can carry up to six small satellites. The Space Systems Command describes CBAS-2 as a military communications satellite that provides “communications relay capabilities to support our senior leaders and combatant commanders by augmenting existing military satellite communications capabilities.” Specific capabilities and features are classified. CBAS-1, made by Boeing, was launched to geostationary orbit in 2018 on the AFSPC-11 mission aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The other payload, LDPE-3A, will be the third launch of this version of the ESPA ring designed by Northrop Grumman. The first one launched in December 2021 on a Space Test Program STP-3 mission aboard an Atlas 5. The second launch was on USSF-44. The Space Systems Command said LDPE-3A was built with an ESPAStar, which is similar to an ESPA ring but with added propulsion, power and avionics so it can operate as a fully functioning satellite. “LDPE provides an affordable path to space for both hosted and separable payloads.” Lt. Col. Michael Rupp, head of the LDPE program at Space Systems Command, said Dec. 6 that the command was on track to “launch two satellites within 70 days of one another, which is fantastic from a program perspective.”
Updated Jan. 9 7 a.m. Eastern with reentry. WASHINGTON — A defunct NASA satellite, launched nearly four decades ago, reentered late Jan. 8 with a very small risk to people on the ground. NASA said Jan. 6 that the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) satellite, launched in 1984 and shut down in 2005, will reenter Jan. 8. At the time, NASA estimated a reentry at 6:40 p.m. Eastern, plus or minus 17 hours, based on data from the U.S. Space Force. The Space Force’s Space Track service updated that prediction late Jan. 6, with a new reentry time of 11:25 p.m. Eastern plus or minus 10 hours. The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies estimated a reentry at 10:49 p.m. Eastern plus or minus 13 hours, based on data as of early Jan. 6. Space Track provided a final estimated reentry time of 11:04 p.m. Eastern Jan. 8, off the coast of Alaska near the Aleutian Islands. Most of the 2,450-kilogram satellite will burn up on reentry, NASA said in its statement, but some components will likely survive and reach the surface. The odds that debris would harm anyone on the ground is 1 in 9,400, the agency estimated. ERBS launched on the space shuttle Challenger in October 1984 to study the balance between energy the Earth absorbed from the sun and energy it radiated away, as well as to monitor ozone in the stratosphere. Intended to operate for two years, ERBS was finally retired in 2005. NASA launched ERBS before the agency’s first orbital debris mitigation guidelines in the 1990s. Current U.S. government orbital debris mitigation standard practices, last updated in 2019 , call for satellites in low Earth orbit to be deorbited no more than 25 years after the end of their mission, which ERBS will meet. However, ERBS does not meet another aspect of the guidelines, limiting the risk of casualties from falling debris to no greater than 1 in 10,000. There has been a long-running discussion about reducing the post-mission disposal lifetime limit from 25 years to as little as 5 years to minimize risks of collisions that could create debris. A National Orbital Debris Implementation Plan , published by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy in July 2022, directed NASA and several other agencies to reevaluate existing mitigation guidelines, “specifically the potential benefits and cost in reducing the deorbit timelines.” In September 2022, the Federal Communications Commission approved an order requiring commercial satellites that apply for FCC licenses or seek U.S. market access after September 2024 to deorbit their satellites no more than five years after the end of their missions. That rule applies that satellites that end their lives at altitudes of 2,000 kilometers or less.
Five senators are asking the White House to add at least $300 million in the next budget proposal for NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support priorities from the astrophysics decadal survey. The Dec. 21 letter, released Jan. 5 by one of the signatories, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) , asked the directors of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to include “specific, increased funding” for NASA and NSF astrophysics programs in the fiscal year 2024 budget request under development. That budget is will be released as soon as early February. The senators asked for at least $150 million in additional funding for NSF astronomical sciences to support design work for new observatories. They also asked for $150 million for NASA astrophysics to fund technology development for future space telescopes. The additional funding, the senators said, is needed to implement recommendations of the astrophysics decadal survey, known as Astro2020, published in November 2021 . That report recommended NASA pursue a technology maturation program for a series of flagship space telescope missions, starting with a large ultraviolet, visible and infrared telescope. It also backed NSF support for two large ground-based telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), along with the Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLT) radio observatory. The senators argued that the additional funding will help keep the United States the “global leader” in astronomy amid competition from other countries. “Astro2020 prioritizes investment to enable and realize major observatories, priorities that will maintain and strengthen our Nation’s leadership over our adversaries and competitors in this vital area of science,” they wrote. Joining Luján in signing the letter are Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) Maryland hosts NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, which would play key roles in future space telescope development. New Mexico is home to the Very Large Array and would host the core of the ngVLA. Hawaii’s Maunakea is the proposed home for TMT, although protests and legal disputes have held up construction. The fiscal year 2024 budget requests for NASA and NSF will be the first fully informed by Astro2020. By the time the final report was released in November 2021, work on the fiscal year 2023 budget proposals was already well underway for release in early 2022, with only limited ability to incorporate recommendations from the report. NASA, for example, requested terminating funding for the SOFIA airborne observatory in its fiscal year 2023 proposal, citing a recommendation to do so in Astro2020. Both agencies are taking steps to implement the recommendations of Astro2020 within existing budgets and programs. At a Dec. 2 meeting of the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said the agency was formulating a Great Observatories Technology and Maturation Program, or GOMAP, as recommended by Astro2020. “I’m taking a very deliberate, strategic approach to how we do this next large flagship mission,” the large ultraviolet-visible-infrared telescope, he said, which has the current working name of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. “We are currently working on a plan to implement GOMAP, the mission and technology maturation program, and also how we do this observatory.” Clampin didn’t go into details about either GOMAP or Habitable Worlds Observatory at the meeting, beyond saying the focus of the observatory “from day one” will be on schedule and its science goals. He said he would provide more details about those plans at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle Jan. 8-12. At the same committee meeting Dec. 1, Debra Fischer, division director for astronomy at NSF, said her agency was still examining how to implement the Astro2020 recommendations, particular for the large observatories it recommended. Because those discussions were ongoing at the time, she said she could not discuss details about those plans. “Navigating these projects, because they are so expensive, to me feels like taking a very large ship and navigating it through a very narrow channel where we really don’t know if the water is deep enough,” she said. “For all of these projects, there are probably a hundred reasons why they might fail at some point. I’m going to make sure that it’s nothing that happens in the astronomy division that slows them down.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium unveiled chip maker Qualcomm Jan. 5 as the partner behind plans to connect smartphones to its satellite constellation this year. U.S.-based Qualcomm has developed a product called Snapdragon Satellite, which it said can be added to Android smartphones and other devices to support two-way communications via Iridium satellites. Potential uses include emergency SOS services, SMS texts, and other low-bandwidth messaging applications in areas outside terrestrial networks and where Iridium’s global constellation is licensed to operate. Any emergency messages would be routed through response teams run by Garmin, a GPS technology specialist and longtime Iridium partner. Jordan Hassin, Iridium’s executive director of communication, acknowledged widespread speculation in the run-up to the announcement about South Korean smartphone maker Samsung being its direct-to-smartphone partner. At one point Iridium was also rumored to be working with Apple, which in September announced a partnership with Iridium’s rival Globalstar for services currently limited to SOS . However, rather than partnering with a specific smartphone vendor, Hassin said Iridium chose to team up with Qualcomm to enable its technology in multiple smartphone brands that run Android, the most popular operating system for mobile phones. In addition to supporting hardware development, Qualcomm has an agreement to sell the service to companies on Iridium’s behalf. Qualcomm’s chipsets are already commonly used in Samsung, Motorola, and other smartphone brands worldwide. To connect to Iridium’s 66-strong constellation in low Earth orbit, smartphone makers would need to integrate the latest generation of a Qualcomm chipset that is geared toward premium phones. Hassin said “several” Android customers are already integrating Snapdragon Satellite, with the first products expected to be released in the second half of 2023. In a media briefing, Iridium CEO Matt Desch said it is still “being worked out” how and if smartphone customers would be charged for using its satellite-enabled services. Apple has said it will offer satellite-enabled SOS services on its range of iPhone 14 smartphones for free for two years. Francesco Grilli, vice president of product management at Qualcomm Technologies, told the briefing the company successfully demonstrated Snapdragon Satellite Jan. 4 in Las Vegas as part of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). He said the company was able to send basic text messages in an average of three seconds with a smartphone during the demo. While the service will initially target smartphones, the companies said they are considering expanding to other devices, including laptops, tablets, vehicles, and small Internet of Things machines. Desch said the company could also consider upgrading its capabilities to add higher bandwidth services later, in line with other businesses that are also looking to enter the direct-to-smartphone market. “We certainly have aspirations to go well beyond where we are today,” he said. In addition to Apple and Globalstar, other companies seeking to provide direct-to-smartphone services from LEO include SpaceX in partnership with T-Mobile, AST SpaceMobile, Lynk Global, and Sateliot. In July, Qualcomm announced plans with Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson and French aerospace company Thales to demonstrate 5G on smartphones via LEO satellites. However, Grilli said these plans are still in the research and development phase, and any commercial services would require spectrum and hundreds of new satellites to become a reality. He said it is unlikely Qualcomm’s venture with Ericsson and Thales would “see any product before 2026 at the earliest,” and that is optimistic.
After technical and licensing delays, Virgin Orbit is gearing up for its first launch from the United Kingdom as soon as Jan. 9. A maritime navigation warning issued Jan. 4 identified a zone for hazardous operations for “rocket launching” off the coast of Ireland late Jan. 9, with a backup date of Jan. 18. The zone is consistent with the drop zone for Virgin Orbit’s “Start Me Up” LauncherOne mission flying out of Spaceport Cornwall in England. Virgin Orbit spokesperson Allison Patch confirmed to SpaceNews that the navigation warning was for the upcoming launch, but said the company was not yet ready to formally announce a launch date for the mission. “All launch partners are currently working towards launch fairly soon,” she said, with a confirmation of the company’s launch plans expected in the coming days. A separate marine notice issued by Ireland’s Department of Transport Jan. 4 listed a similar hazard area explicitly linked to the Virgin Orbit launch. In addition to the Jan. 9 and 18 launch dates, the Irish notice including potential launches on Jan. 13, 15, 19 and 20. The hazard notices are in the event of a launch mishap involving the air-launched LauncherOne system. “Where the launch attempt proceeds as planned, no debris will enter the marine hazard area,” the Irish notice stated. “However, there is a low probability for the vehicle to produce dangerous debris if a mishap were to occur.” Virgin Orbit had planned to conduct the Start Me Up mission last fall, flying its Boeing 747 aircraft, launch vehicle and related systems to Spaceport Cornwall in October. At one point, the company targeted a mid-December launch, only to postpone the launch days later , citing “additional technical work” on the launch system and a pending launch license from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). The CAA awarded that launch license to Virgin Orbit Dec. 21 , clearing the final regulatory hurdles for the launch. “At this time, all of Virgin Orbit’s systems are green for launch,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in a Dec. 22 statement. The company reported that both the vehicle and its payloads were in “good condition” to launch, but said only that a launch date would be set in the “coming weeks.” The Start Me Up mission will place into orbit seven payloads from a variety of customers, including the U.K. Ministry of Defence, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the first satellite for the government of Oman.
Impulse Space announced Jan. 4 it will launch its first orbital transfer vehicle late this year on a SpaceX rideshare mission. Impulse Space said its LEO Express-1 mission, using a transfer vehicle it is developing called Mira, is manifested for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission currently scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter of 2023. LEO Express-1 will carry a primary payload for an undisclosed customer. Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said in an interview that the mission can accommodate additional payloads, like cubesats. The mission profile is still being finalized, but he said the vehicle, after making some initial deployments, may raise its orbit, then lower it to demonstrate operations in what’s known as very low Earth orbit, around 300 kilometers. The performance of Mira depends on how much payload it is carrying, but he estimated that the vehicle can provide about 1,000 meters per second of delta-v, or change in velocity, with a payload of 300 kilograms. Its propulsion system, using storable propellants, has been extensively tested, with more than 1,000 seconds of runtime, while other elements of the vehicle are in various stages of design and manufacturing. Impulse Space plans additional missions in 2024, he said. The company will take advantage of future SpaceX Transporter missions as well as opportunities on other vehicles like Relativity Space’s Terran. Matsumori said the company is seeing growing demand for in-space transportation services. “The market for customers for either LEO transfers or other orbit transfers is developing at about the same pace as the in-space transportation capabilities are developing,” he said. “In the last three months, we’ve seen many more customers than we did in the prior six months.” The number of options for in-space transportation services is also growing. On the Transporter-6 mission SpaceX launched Jan. 3 , D-Orbit flew two of its ION satellite carriers that will deploy nine cubesats and support three hosted payloads. Momentus flew Vigoride-5, its second transfer vehicle carrying one cubesat and one hosted payload. Launcher flew its first Orbiter vehicle, with eight customers on board. Matsumori said that Impulse Space plans to stand out from competitors based on performance. “Most everyone out there has fairly low delta-v’s for the mass they’re carrying,” he said. “We’re pretty much on the high end of the capabilities of the vehicles.” Mira is the first in a series of vehicles Impulse Space is developing, with future vehicles capable of placing payloads into geostationary transfer orbits or direct insertions into geostationary orbit. “In-space is an infrastructure of capabilities, just like on Earth,” he said. “We have pickups, we have larger vans, and then we have 18-wheelers to be able to do logistics on Earth. Space is going to be no different.”
Airbus Defence and Space is joining a commercial space station project led by Voyager Space, a move that could potentially make it easier for European governments to use the station after the retirement of the International Space Station. Denver-based Voyager Space announced Jan. 4 a partnership with Airbus on its Starlab commercial space station project. Airbus will provide “technical design support and expertise” for Starlab, the companies said, but did not disclose additional details about the partnership or financial terms. Voyager Space announced plans for Starlab in October 2021 working with Lockheed Martin. Starlab, as described at the time, would feature in inflatable module, docking node and bus, capable of hosting up to four astronauts at a time. Voyager Space, through its subsidiary Nanoracks, won one of three NASA Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development, or CLD, awards from NASA in December 2021 . The $160 million Space Act Agreement is intended to support design work on Starlab as NASA prepares to transition from the ISS to commercial space stations by the end of the decade. That transition will also involve NASA’s international partners on the ISS, something that both Airbus and Voyager Space officials alluded to in the announcement of their partnership. “Working with Airbus we will expand Starlab’s ecosystem to serve the European Space Agency (ESA) and its member state space agencies to continue their microgravity research in LEO,” Dylan Taylor, chairman and chief executive of Voyager Space, said in the announcement. “This collaboration is an important step in making Starlab a reality, providing a foundation for long-lasting European and American leadership in space,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, executive vice president of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, in the same statement. ISS partners have pondered how they will make use of commercial space stations run by American companies. Current ISS arrangements, where space agencies barter for services, are unlikely to apply to commercial facilities, where agencies may have to work directly with the station’s operator rather than through NASA. “We need to find ways to work together, certainly in other ways than we did before,” said Peter Gräf, director of applications and science at the German space agency DLR, during a panel discussion at the AIAA ASCEND conference in October . “There are a lot of options available and the main players are in heavy discussions on that.” Direct payments from European governments to American companies for use of commercial space stations could be politically problematic. “The taxpayers in Europe don’t want to pay directly to private American companies,” said Nicolas Maubert, space counselor at the French Embassy in the U.S. and representative of the French space agency CNES in the U.S., at the conference panel. Those concerns may be alleviated, though, if companies from Europe and other ISS partners are involved with the stations. ESA officials, who are beginning work on their post-ISS plans, are aware of those concerns. “Shall we pay directly to commercial providers in the U.S.? We can, of course, but that is euros directly supporting U.S. industry. Is that something Europe wants to do, that our member states want to do?” said Frank De Winne, head of ESA’s European Astronaut Center, in an interview during ESA’s ministerial council meeting in Paris in November. How ESA will deal with commercial space stations is something the agency will study leading up to its next ministerial council meeting in 2025, but he said one option would be for ESA to fund development of a European crewed vehicle that could service those stations. “If we talk to the commercial providers today, to the CLDs that are being funded by NASA, they all tell us the same thing: they are interested in transportation,” he said. “For them to keep their costs low on transportation, they want competition. It’s as simple as that.” Airbus is not the first European company to be involved in a commercial space station project. Thales Alenia Space is building modules for Axiom Space that will initially be installed on the ISS but eventually be detached to form a commercial space station.
China is aiming to expand the use of its coastal Wenchang spaceport to both allow a greater overall launch rate and establish new facilities needed for crewed lunar missions. The Wenchang Satellite Launch Center was completed in 2014 and has since allowed China to launch its new generation kerolox and cryogenic rockets. These have in turn enabled the country to launch interplanetary and lunar missions and construct and supply its Tiangong space station. Now though the spaceport is being expanded to additionally facilitate commercial launches and the growth of China’s commercial space sector and, eventually, launch a new-generational crew launch vehicle and the super heavy-lift Long March 9 rocket. The development is an apparent part of long term plans for China to upgrade its overall space capabilities. “In the near future, Wenchang will see its launch frequency go from between six to eight times a year, to 20 or 30 times a year,” Zhong Wen’an, chief engineer of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center which oversees Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, told CCTV Dec. 31. “This is not only a change in quantity but also one in quality. We are also going to add more sites for [the launch of] human moon-landing missions, heavy rockets and commercial ones.” Zhong said. The crew launcher is expected to have a test launch around 2026, and a pair of the rockets could support a short-term human lunar landing mission before 2030 . The Long March 9 is planned for use in construction of China’s ILRS lunar base plan and other space infrastructure projects, including space-based solar power plans. More immediately however, progress on the commercial launch site can be seen from both aerial and satellite imagery . Wenchang has already attracted a number of launch and other space-related companies to establish facilities in the area. China has three inland spaceports at Jiuquan in the northwest, Xichang in the southwest and Taiyuan in north China. Jiuquan has recently been expanded to facilitate both launches of commercial solid rockets and new methane-liquid oxygen rockets . The country has also begun launching from mobile platforms from the Yellow Sea, supported by infrastructure developed near Haiyang, Shandong province. Wenchang however has a number of advantages, including the lowest latitude of any of China’s spaceports. It is also accessible by sea, allowing large diameter rocket components to be delivered there. China’s inland launch sites are limited in the size of rocket they can launch due to a reliance on the national railway system and its capacities. They also create debris issues downrange due to falling spent rocket stages. China’s largest rockets, the Long March 5 and 5B, launch from Wenchang. These launch vehicles have allowed China to launch its first interplanetary mission, Tianwen-1, a first lunar sample return mission, and launch the roughly 22-ton modules that make up the Tiangong space station.
The U.S. Space Systems Command on Jan. 3 launched a cubesat intended to demonstrate commercial weather imaging technologies for military use. The Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) Weather Systems (EWS) demonstration launched on the SpaceX Transporter-6 rideshare that deployed more than 110 small satellites. Over a planned one-year demonstration, the Space Force wants to assess the capabilities of an imaging cubesat made by Orion Space Solutions to provide timely weather imagery data from low Earth orbit. This is a priority for the Defense Department that needs to fill a gap in weather coverage as the military’s decades-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites are running out of fuel and projected to be out of service between 2023 and 2026. Congress for years pressed the Air Force, and now the Space Force, to find alternatives to DMSP and consider commercial options. The launch of Orion’s prototype cubesat “satisfies the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act congressional mandate to launch a weather EO/IR pathfinder prototype by fiscal year 2023,” the Space Systems Command said in a statement. “The program expects the first transmittal of data early in the new year.” Another EO/IR weather prototype is being developed by General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems for delivery in 2025. Both demonstration satellites will collect weather imaging and cloud characterization data from low polar orbits. The EWS cubesat demonstration shows the Space Systems Command’s “commitment to working with non-traditional partners to broaden the competitive industrial base,” said Lt. Col. Joe Maguadog, EWS materiel leader and program manager. “This demonstration will inform our transition toward a more affordable, scalable and resilient EO/IR weather constellation.” Orion Space Solutions and General Atomics were chosen following a three-way competition with Raytheon Technologies for the Electro-Optical/Infrared Weather System (EWS) program. Orion Space Solutions (previously known as Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates), is based in Louisville, Colorado, The U.S. military and allies rely on weather data from satellites to plan military operators such as flight routes, combat search and rescue, maritime surface tracking efforts, enemy missile observation and intelligence collection. The Space Force also is exploring the possibility of buying weather data as a service as an alternative to buying and operating satellites. 
Jan. 5 update: Iridium announced Jan.5 that U.S.-based chipmaker Qualcomm is its direct-to-smartphone partner TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium has entered into a service provider agreement with a company widely expected to be Samsung to connect its satellites to smartphones. The U.S.-based satellite operator said it is due to be paid royalties, development and network usage fees from the deal in a Dec. 30 regulatory filing that provided no financial details or timings. “To protect each company’s investment in this newly developed technology, the overall arrangements include substantial recoupment payments from each company for commercializing a similar capability,” Iridium said. The announcement comes after Iridium said in July that it had signed a development contract with a company to enable its satellite technology in smartphones. Iridium said both agreements are still contingent upon successfully developing the technology. Samsung plans to use Iridium’s constellation to bring satellite connectivity to its range of Galaxy S23 range of smartphones this year, South Korean media publication ETNews reported Nov. 24. Unlike the direct-to-smartphone service Apple launched Nov. 15 with Iridium’s rival Globalstar, ETNews said Samsung’s service would extend beyond basic SOS messaging to enable texts and low-resolution images to be sent outside terrestrial networks. While Iridium and South Korea-based Samsung have declined to comment on the ETNews report, Lee Seung-gwan, a senior executive at Samsung Electronics’ communications team, said a “smartphone-satellite connection is something we should pursue, obviously.” The partnership would make sense for Iridium following Apple’s Globalstar tie-up, according to William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma, who expects the Galaxy S23 line-up to be released in February. Globalstar’s willingness to allocate 85% of its satellite network to Apple helped seal its deal with the company behind one of the world’s most successful smartphones. But that level of commitment was not feasible for Iridium, DiPalma said in a note to investors Nov. 25, because thousands of blue chip customers including the U.S. Department of Defense currently rely on its network. Even still, Iridium’s $3 billion 66-strong constellation is “considered significantly more advanced” than Globalstar’s network of 24 satellites, he said. “In our view, the Iridium smartphone functionality will be more expansive than the Apple-GlobalStar iPhone14 partnership,” he added. During Iridium’s latest earnings call Oct. 20, CEO Matt Desch hinted that “you can do a lot more than just push an emergency button” with a smartphone connected to a satellite. Apple has kept its future direct-to-smartphone plans close to its chest as it invests $450 million to upgrade Globalstar’s network. Meanwhile, other established and startup satellite companies are preparing to offer more than just basic emergency messaging when they launch their direct-to-smartphone services in the coming years. Texas-based AST SpaceMobile is preparing to start deploying operational satellites from late 2023 to bring 5G connectivity directly to smartphones . Samsung Next, Samsung’s investment arm, was an early investor in AST SpaceMobile. DiPalma expects an Iridium partnership with Samsung would contribute $20 million in revenues in its first year, although “that estimate may be conservative.” SpaceNews correspondent Park Si-soo contributed to this story from Seoul, South Korea.
After a record-setting year of launch activity in 2022, SpaceX kicked off the new year Jan. 3 with a Falcon 9 launch of more than 110 smallsats. The Falcon 9 lifted off on the Transporter-6 dedicated smallsat rideshare mission at 9:56 a.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. The rocket’s first stage, making its 15th flight, landed back at the Cape’s Landing Zone 1 eight and a half minutes after liftoff. The rocket’s upper stage started releasing its 114 payloads into sun-synchronous orbit nearly an hour after liftoff, a process involving 82 individual deployments that took more than a half-hour to complete. SpaceX was able to confirm 77 of the deployments in real time. The largest single customer on the launch, in terms of number of satellites, was Planet, which had 36 of its SuperDove imaging satellites on board. Planet has now launched more than 500 satellites, mostly cubesats like the SuperDoves. Some of the other major payloads on Transporter-6 included: Several of the payloads on Transporter-6 are orbital transfer vehicles that will later deploy satellites. They include two ION vehicles from D-Orbit, the second Vigoride tug from Momentus and Launcher’s first Orbiter vehicle. Transporter-6 is the sixth in a series of smallsat rideshare missions by SpaceX, which performed the first two Transporter missions in 2021 and three in 2022. The company said in August that it continues to see strong demand for the services despite the rise in small launch vehicles that offer dedicated launch options for smallsats. All of SpaceX’s Transporter missions for 2023 are full, the company said then, although last-minute opportunities may arise. A record 2022 Transporter-6 was the first orbital launch globally in 2023. It comes after a record 2022, when there were 186 orbital launch attempts, 40 more than 2021. A total of 179 launches were successful, compared to 136 in 2021. Orbital launch activity has doubled in just the last five years. In 2017 there were 86 successful orbital launches in 90 attempts. SpaceX is responsible for much of that growth, having gone from 18 launches in 2017 to 61 in 2022, while Chinese launches increased from 18 in 2017 to 64 in 2022. With the exception of New Zealand, which went from the first Rocket Lab Electron launch in 2017 to nine in 2022, other countries saw flat or reduced launch activity over the last five years. That includes Europe, which went from 11 launches in 2017 to 6 in 2022, and Japan, which had seven launches in 2017 but only a single, unsuccessful Epsilon launch in 2022. SpaceX, whose 61 launches in 2022 were nearly double the 31 launches it conducted in 2021, will attempt to set another launch record in 2023. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has suggested the company will attempt as many as 100 launches in 2023, a total that likely include its Starship vehicle, whose first orbital launch is expected some time this year.
As Satellogic prepares to launch its latest imaging satellites, the company has slashed revenue projections, resulting in layoffs and delays in construction of a new factory. Four NewSat satellites, built by Satellogic, are among the 114 payloads to be launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 dedicated smallsat rideshare mission. That mission is scheduled to launch Jan. 3 at 9:56 a.m. Eastern on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Satellogic signed a contract with SpaceX in May 2022 to launch 68 satellites on an unspecified number of launches. The four satellites will join 26 currently in operation by Satellogic that provide high-resolution imagery. The company, in a business update Dec. 15 , said it expected to launch 18 to 21 satellites in 2023, giving it enough satellites to map the Earth every two weeks. That business update, which included the company’s financial results from the first half of 2022, showed revenue lagging earlier projections. The company recorded $2.4 million in revenue in the first half of the year, primarily from two unnamed customers, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Satellogic said in its business update it was projecting revenues of $6-8 million for all of 2022, and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $55-60 million. By contrast, in an analyst day presentation in November 2021 , part of going public through a SPAC merger, Satellogic projected revenue of $47 million for 2022 and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million. Emiliano Kargieman, chief executive of Satellogic, acknowledged he was “disappointed” with the revenue from the first half of the year, but remained optimistic about the company’s long-term trajectory, citing an increase in demand for its imagery seen in the second half of the year. “Our bookings and current pipeline support continued strong growth into 2023,” he said in a Dec. 15 earnings call. The company, which in November 2021 projected revenues of $132 million in 2023, growing to $787 million in 2025, now projects $30-50 million in revenues in 2023, increasing to $140-200 million in 2025. Satellogic projects an adjusted EDBITA loss of $20-35 million in 2023, reaching breakeven in 2024 and growing to positive $35-90 million in 2025. Kargieman said the company now has a better idea of the sales cycle for its imagery and other products. “After another year of talking to customers, we’re extremely confident in the numbers that we’re guiding for next year,” he said. The diminished revenues have forced the company to cut costs. That included laying off 18% of its workforce in the third quarter, reducing its staff to about 380 people. Rick Dunn, Satellogic’s chief financial officer, said the number of employees would remain “more or less flat” in 2023. The company has also scaled back the growth of its constellation. In that November 2021 presentation, Satellogic projected having 111 satellites in orbit in 2023. The company will instead end 2023 with no more than 47 satellites, although Kargieman said in the call that some of the 10 satellites it launched in October 2020 could be retired by the end of 2023 as they reach the end of their three-year design life. With those reduced projections, Satellogic has delayed completion of a new high-throughput satellite manufacturing facility it planned to open in 2022 in the Netherlands. That factory, which Satellogic said in late 2021 would be fully operational by the start of 2023 , was designed to produce 25 satellites a quarter. Kargieman said the company’s existing factory in Uruguay can produce 24 satellites a year, sufficient for its near-term needs. “Going forward, we can continue to grow that capacity,” he said, increasing it potentially by a factor of two or three. The Dutch factory will go into service when the company is ready to scale up the constellation to the 300 satellites needed for daily remapping of the Earth. “The exact timing is yet to be defined.” Satellogic is now offering to sell satellites, rather than just imagery, to customers. Dunn projected that at least 25% of the company’s revenues in 2023 would come from this new “space systems” business line, although weighted towards the second half of the year. The rest of the company’s revenues will continue to come from imagery sales as well as its “constellation as a service” or dedicated satellite constellation business line, where governments and other organizations pay to gain priority access to Satellogic’s constellation over a designated area. One example Kargieman cited was an agreement with the government of Albania announced in September to provide imagery over its territory. The three-year deal is worth $6 million and includes naming two NewSat satellites launching on Transporter-6 Albania-1 and -2. Satellogic announced Dec. 13 a letter of intent with the Mexican space agency AEM for a similar constellation-as-a-service agreement, but the company did not disclose when the contract would be finalized or its anticipated value. However, the Indian space agency ISRO announced Dec. 30 that it met with AEM officials, who asked ISRO for assistance in building and launching a remote sensing satellite. Satellogic, which raised $168 million when its SPAC merger closed in January 2022, projected having $78-82 million of cash on hand at the end of 2022. That is enough, Kargieman said, to get the company to breakeven in 2024. “We don’t require additional financing,” he said. “We’re really in control of how much we spend and how much we invest into our future business, so we don’t expect to be raising additional financing.”
China is aiming to grow cooperation with emerging space nations including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Space was named as one of a number of priority areas for the next three to five years during the first China-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit held in Riyadh earlier this month. “China stands ready to work with GCC countries on remote sensing and communications satellite, space utilization, aerospace infrastructure, and the selection and training of astronauts,” according to the text of the keynote speech made by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the summit, Dec. 9. The GCC intergovernmental group comprises Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. “China welcomes GCC astronauts to its space station for joint missions and space science experiments with their Chinese colleagues. China welcomes GCC countries’ participation in payloads cooperation in its aerospace missions, and will consider establishing a China-GCC joint center for lunar and deep space exploration,” the text continued. While broad in apparent scope and ambition, the words indicate only an initial expression of interest in establishing cooperation in these areas, with no indication of a commitment in terms of funding or practicalities at this point. The speech illustrates that China’s Tiangong space station—which became operational this month with its first crew handover—will be used in engaging countries around the world. China has spoken frequently of its openness to training astronauts from other countries and sought interest from aboard for international astronauts flying to Tiangong. The practical elements of how Chinese international astronaut cooperation, such as any requisite language training, will proceed have not been revealed. China launched its first crewed flight in 2003 and its 10th, the six-month-long Shenzhou-15 mission , launched late November. An official with the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) recently stated that China is considering expanding the three-module Tiangong station. This would provide greater capacity for hosting astronauts. CAST is also developing a new generation crew spacecraft which will be able to carry up to six astronauts to low Earth orbit. Lunar exploration is another area in which China is seeking partners, particularly for its vision for an International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ). Notably, of the six GCC countries, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are already signatories to the U.S.-led Artemis Accords. In a more concrete related development from the summit, Origin Space, a Shenzhen-based space resource utilization firm, announced it will establish a subsidiary, a research and development center and an exhibition center within the China-UAE Industrial Capacity Cooperation Demonstration Zone, a joint project under the Belt and Road Initiative. Origin Space has its sights set on asteroid mining and already has other international branches in Luxembourg and Singapore. Space activity in the Gulf region has increased greatly in recent years. The UAE has had its spacecraft launched to Mars and the moon and is reported to be considering contributing an airlock module to Nasa’s Lunar Gateway and an Emirati astronaut is set to embark on a long-duration mission to the International Space Station through an agreement with Axiom Space. Two Saudi Arabian astronauts meanwhile will head to ISS on the Ax-2 mission no earlier than Spring 2023. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have also already established initial space cooperation with China. A small camera from the King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST) flew on the Longjiang-2 (DSLWP-B) lunar microsatellite launched with a relay satellite for the Chang’e-4 lunar far side landing. Saudi Arabia will also send an experiment to Tiangong through a cooperation mechanism established by China’s human spaceflight agency and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). The experiment will study the effect of cosmic rays on the performance of the high efficiency solar cells. The Saudisat 5A and 5B satellites were launched by a Long March 2D in 2018. The UAE and China reached an agreement in September for the Rashid II rover to fly along with the Chang’e-7 lander targeting the lunar south pole. That mission is currently scheduled for 2026.
SpaceX capped off the busiest year in its two-decade history Dec. 30 with a Falcon 9 launch of a commercial Israeli imaging satellite. A Falcon 9 lifted off at 2:38 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The rocket’s first stage, flying its 11th mission, landed back at the launch site eight minutes after liftoff. The Falcon 9 upper stage deployed its payload, the EROS C3 imaging satellite, nearly 15 minutes after liftoff. The satellite was released at an altitude of nearly 500 kilometers in an unusual mid-inclination retrograde orbit, rather than the sun-synchronous orbit commonly used for optical imaging spacecraft. EROS C3 was built by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) for ImageSat International, a Tel Aviv-based commercial imaging company. The 400-kilogram satellite, based on IAI’s OPTSAT-3000 bus, is designed to take images at a resolution of 30 centimeters. ImageSat International, which went public in February on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, stated in a prospectus filed as part of that process that EROS C3 cost the company $186 million, a figure that included the spacecraft itself, the launch and insurance. The company planned to use part of the $100 million raised from going public to pay some of the remaining costs to build and launch the spacecraft. EROS C3 joins EROS B, launched in 2006, as satellites owned and operated by ImageSat International. The company also offers imagery from two other satellites, which it calls EROS C1 and EROS C2, that are owned by an unnamed third party but have capabilities similar to EROS C3. Those satellites may be part of the Ofeq series of Israeli reconnaissance satellites, also built by IAI, which operate in mid-inclination retrograde orbits similar to EROS C3 because of the limitations of launching from Israel. EROS C3 is part of ImageSat’s EROS NG constellation, which includes EROS C1 and C2 as well as a planned future imaging satellite, EROS C4, slated for launch in 2026. EROS NG will also incorporate two synthetic aperture radar satellites that will be owned by an unnamed third party and commercialized by ImageSat. The launch of EROS C3 completed the most active year to date for SpaceX. The company performed 61 launches, all successful, in 2022. All but one, a Falcon Heavy launch for the U.S. Space Force, were of the company’s Falcon 9 vehicle, which has become a workhorse for the global space industry. SpaceX nearly doubled its launch rate from 2021, when the company performed a then-record 31 Falcon 9 launches. That launch activity was driven by the company’s Starlink constellation, which accounted for 34 of the 61 launches in 2022. The 61 launches SpaceX performed in 2022 exceeded a goal of 60 set by Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, in a tweet in March . Musk has not publicly stated how many launches he expects SpaceX to conduct in 2023, but SpaceX’s first launch of the new year, the Transporter-6 dedicated rideshare mission, is scheduled for no earlier than Jan. 2 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40.
Fresh off of securing a significant budget increase, the European Space Agency plans to hire 200 new employees in 2023 to help it implement new projects. At a Dec. 15 briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council, agency officials announced ESA would increase its staff, currently at about 6,000 people, by 200 in the next year to support projects funded by its members at the November ministerial meeting. “We’ve got new projects to initiate thanks to the very good and strong subscriptions of the member states, so we need additional staff to do that,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said. Vacancy notices for the new positions will be released in early 2023, he said. ESA expects to hire about 400 people overall in 2023, including both the new positions as well as replacements for existing positions. The new employees will be placed “strategically” in various parts of the agency to support new or growing programs, but he did go into specifics. That hiring will be a key element of what Aschbacher called “transformation of ESA as an institution,” which he described as encompassing strategic issues within ESA as well as reforming its bureaucracy. The agency will, with this new set of employees, attempt to reduce the time to hire by 40%. ESA’s decision to hire more staff came after its member states agreed Nov. 23 to provide 16.9 billion euros ($18 billion) for the agency over the next three years , an increase of nearly 17% from the previous ministerial council meeting in 2019. The amount, while a significant increase, fell short of the agency’s proposal for 18.5 billion euros. Aschbacher and Anna Rathsman, chair of the ESA Council, celebrated the increased funding at the briefing. “Everyone is really happy about the results from the ministerial meeting,” Rathsman said, concluding that the increased funding “really shows the importance of space when we have this very difficult time.” Aschbacher emphasized a point not made clear immediately after the ministerial, that the funding increase will incorporate inflation adjustments over the next three years. “Inflation comes on top,” he said. That explains why some countries announced funding commitments larger than what ESA reported, accounting for inflation. ESA is still assessing how to accommodate undersubscriptions, or funding for programs that fell short of its proposal, as well as, in a few cases, oversubscriptions where countries pledged more funding than ESA requested. Each ESA director is working with member states on how to allocate the funding they received, Aschbacher said, developing work plans to be considered by program boards in February. Those plans will determine what projects go forward and at what level. “We all want to proceed very quickly with the contractual implementation” of the programs, he said, such as procurements. The ESA Council also approved at the meeting hiring two new directors. Carole Mundell, a British astrophysicist, will be ESA’s next director of science, succeeding the retiring Günther Hasinger. ESA also hired Dietmar Pilz, an Airbus Defence and Space executive, to be its next director of technology, engineering and quality, replacing acting director Torben Henriksen. Both are slated to start work in early 2023.
A cubesat launched on Artemis 1 missed its original chance to go into orbit around the moon but could still carry out its primary mission if engineers fix its thrusters in the coming weeks. The NASA-funded LunaH-Map spacecraft, a six-unit cubesat, was one of 10 cubesat secondary payloads flown on the Artemis 1 mission on the inaugural launch of the Space Launch System Nov. 16. Those payloads were deployed from the SLS upper stage several hours after liftoff. In the months leading up to the liftoff there were concerns that the batteries on LunaH-Map might have drained during its long wait for launch. The cubesat could not be charged after it was secured on the rocket in the fall of 2021. However, the batteries were in good condition when the spacecraft transmitted its first telemetry shortly after deployment. “Our batteries were at 70% state of charge,” said Craig Hardgrove, principal investigator for LunaH-Map at Arizona State University, during a presentation about the mission at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union Dec. 15. “That was in line with our very optimistic predictions.” While the spacecraft had sufficient power, it ran into problems with its propulsion system. “We had a very brief window to fire our propulsion system and hit a lunar gravity assist to get back to the moon,” he said. However, the thrusters failed to operate as expected to enable that maneuver to go into lunar orbit. LunaH-Map is equipped with a BIT-3 ion thruster from Busek that uses solid iodine fuel. Hardgrove said Doppler ranging data suggests that a valve is partially stuck, allowing some iodine through but not enough to generate the required thrust. Spacecraft engineers are trying to correct the problem with heaters in the propulsion system to free up the valve. “The sticking is something that we knew about,” he said, suggesting it came from the long wait for the launch. If the problem can be fixed by mid-January, he said the spacecraft could take an alternative trajectory to the moon, arriving in January 2024. After that, there are options for sending LunaH-Map to rendezvous with or fly by a near Earth asteroid. Other spacecraft systems are working well, he said. The spacecraft’s primary instrument, a neutron spectrometer designed to look for water ice deposits at the lunar south pole, collected data as it flew by the moon five days after launch. “It shows that this instrument is capable of performing the science investigation that we had planned to do,” Hardgrove said. LunaH-Map is not the only cubesat launched on Artemis 1 that suffered technical problems. A Japanese cubesat called OMOTENASHI that was designed to perform a “semi-hard” landing on the moon failed to generate enough power from its solar arrays to communicate with Earth and was declared a loss. Controllers have struggled to contact the CubeSat to Study Solar Particles (CuSP), which also appeared to encounter a battery problem, and Near Earth Asteroid Scout, a cubesat with a solar sail to fly by an asteroid. Lockheed Martin’s LunIR cubesat encountered an “unexpected issue with our radio signal,” the company said Dec. 8, but still considered the mission a useful technology demonstration. Hardgrove, in his conference talk, remained optimistic about LunaH-Map. “We’re not dead. We’re doing great,” he said. “I think we’re hopefully going to ignite our propulsion system soon.”
China has conducted its 64th and final launch of the year, sending the Shiyan-10 (02) into orbit from Xichang spaceport. A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 11:43 p.m. Eastern Dec. 28, carrying Shiyan-10 (02). The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), confirmed launch success shortly after. The purpose of the satellites was not revealed. Shiyan series satellites are often classified and understood to be used to test new technologies and payloads for Chinese space systems. State media Xinhua stated the new satellite will be “used for in-orbit verification of new space technologies, such as space environment monitoring.” The Shiyan-10 (02) is a classified spacecraft which could be sent to join the earlier Shiyan-10 satellite in a highly-elliptical Molniya orbit to provide greater operational coverage of the northern hemisphere. The first Shiyan-10 satellite launch from Xichang Satellite Launch Center Sept. 27, 2021. It was initially reported by CASC to be stranded in transfer orbit. It was later picked up in a highly elliptical 1,880 by 38,881 kilometer altitude orbit with an inclination of 63.6 degrees, having effected a large alteration to its earlier orbital inclination, putting it into a Molniya orbit. Such orbits—the highly elliptical nature of which means spacecraft spend most of their roughly 12-hour orbital period visible over the northern hemisphere—are used for communications, remote sensing or missile early warning systems, climate and weather monitoring, early warning systems and other purposes such as signals intelligence. The new satellite could be sent into a similar orbit to the first satellite, but with a different right ascension of the ascending node to provide greater coverage over the northern hemisphere. When the spacecraft is near its apogee over the northern hemisphere, it will appear to move slowly over the Earth below. This makes the orbit useful for providing communications between two sites in the northern hemisphere or monitoring for early warning. Constant services can be provided by placing three satellites in similar Molniya orbits, each providing links for several hours each day. China operates its China Remote Sensing Satellite North Polar Ground Station, which is located in Kiruna, northern Sweden, which would be visible to the Shiyan-10 satellites for long periods near its apogee. The mission followed the Dec. 27 launch of the Gaofen-11 (04) Earth observation satellite from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China using a Long March 4B rocket. Earlier reports indicate these satellites belong to a classified segment of China’s Gaofen series, with the capability to return optical imagery at a resolution of around 10 centimeters . The Shiyan-10 (02) launch was China’s 64th of 2022. This meant the country has far surpassed its previous national record for a calendar year of 55, set in 2021 . 53 of the 2022 launches were Long March rocket launches conducted by CASC, all of which were successful. These included six missions to the now-completed Tiangong space station, a 22-satellite mission using the Long March 8 and a first launch of the Long March 6A , a first liquid core-solid booster combo for CASC and China. Expace , China Rocket and CAS Space —spinoffs from CASIC, CASC and the Chinese Academy of Sciences respectively—and private outfits Galactic Energy , iSpace and Landspace accounted for the other launches. The launches of iSpace’s Hyperbola-1 solid rocket and Landspace’s milestone Zhuque-2 methalox launcher represented the two failures.
TAMPA, Fla. — Uncrewed rather than crewed spacecraft will be key to realizing an emerging in-orbit manufacturing industry, according to a European venture that has tasked Thales Alenia Space to develop a vehicle called REV1 for missions starting in late 2025. Thales Alenia Space signed a first phase contract for the REV1 reusable and pressurized “space factory” in early December with REV, an eight-year-old Luxembourg-based venture seeking funds to develop a microgravity research and manufacturing business. While Texas-based Axiom Space closes in on a sizable investment round to develop a crewed commercial space station, Space Cargo Unlimited says an uncrewed system like REV1 could be more flexible and cheaper by avoiding the numerous safety measures needed to support human activities. “Safety measures on space stations will rightfully always protect human lives to the detriments of the payload at stake,” Space Cargo Unlimited CEO and co-founder Nicolas Gaume told SpaceNews . “To scale in-space manufacturing, we do not believe in multipurpose vehicles with humans on board,” Gaume added. “In fact, we believe that the approach to in-space manufacturing should be driven from the payload, not the vehicle.” Thales Alenia Space is responsible for designing, engineering, and developing REV1, which is about the size of a compact car and would be owned and operated commercially by Space Cargo Unlimited. The first phase contract gets Space Cargo Unlimited up “to the ability to start manufacturing,” a spokesperson for the venture said. REV1 is being designed to carry up to 1,000 kilograms of payload for several months in low Earth orbit, where it would dock with a Reusable Orbiting Service Module that Thales Alenia Space is also developing. This service module would have solar panels and electric thrusters to remain in orbit for about 10 years, according to Gaume, or roughly 20 REV-1 missions. After completing its mission, a heat shield fitted to REV1 would enable it to reenter Earth’s atmosphere for a parachute-assisted landing. Target markets include biotechnology, pharmaceuticals , and manufacturers looking to develop new materials from space. REV1 has “a number of exciting in-space manufacturing payloads from defining customers we will be unveiling as we get closer to launch,” Gaume said. The spacecraft would also assist agricultural experiments the venture has already been facilitating on the International Space Station for growing vines and maturing wine in microgravity. Gaume said REV1 has lined up “a number of” other in-orbit development and validation projects, including test beds for propulsion systems. “The first case for the failure of satellites lies with their propulsion systems,” he said via email. “And if you think about it most of the satellite’s propulsion systems are not tested in Space, and when they are, they do not come back, increasing dramatically the cost and timing of developing a new system. “By opening the possibility to test rapidly and return, we accelerate and support the whole Space ecosystem.” Space Cargo Unlimited and Thales Alenia Space hope to build a “space garage” in Turin, Italy, for maintaining, repairing, and overhauling REV1 and other spacecraft. European private equity firm Eurazeo is Space Cargo Unlimited’s main financial backer and is a shareholder. Space Cargo Unlimited said it has also secured investments from Thales’ venture capital arm and European early-stage investor Geodesic for its plans. Other companies developing uncrewed spacecraft for in-orbit manufacturing and other applications include Space Forge, a British startup planning to launch its first satellite on Virgin Orbit’s inaugural mission from the United Kingdom early next year .
A task order Collins Aerospace received to develop a new spacesuit for the International Space Station was awarded on a sole-source basis, a move NASA says was intended to preserve competition for later phases of the program. NASA announced Dec. 8 it awarded a $97.2 million task order to Collins to develop a spacesuit that will replace the aging Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) suits used for ISS spacewalks. The task order included ground testing of the suits, with an option to perform a test of the suit on an ISS spacewalk by 2026. NASA awarded the task order as part of its Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contract. NASA awarded xEVAS contracts to Collins and Axiom Space in June to develop suits for both the ISS and Artemis lunar missions that would be provided as services. NASA issued a $228.5 million task order to Axiom in September to develop an Artemis spacesuit ; the agency received proposals from both companies but did not explain why it selected Axiom. However, in a Dec. 15 procurement filing called a Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity, NASA said it made a sole-source award of the ISS spacesuit task order to Collins to keep both companies active in suit development. “Dual providers ensure a safer and more reliable EVA missions to the ISS, the Moon, and beyond by providing more options and flexibility for NASA throughout contract performance,” the NASA filing stated. The filing also noted that the xEVAS contract with Collins has a guaranteed minimum, although the size of it was redacted in the filing. The minimum “aligns with NASA’s EVA requirements over the full duration of the contract,” it stated. Because of the extended time needed to carry out the work to develop the suit, known as contract line item number (CLIN) 1A in the contract, NASA argued it had an “immediate need” to award a task order to Collins. NASA notified both companies at the end of September of its plan to issue a sole-source award to Collins and asked them to notify NASA of any issues. The rest of the paragraph is redacted, so it is unclear what issues, if any, they raised and how NASA addressed them. The agency said that “whenever practical” it plans to compete future xEVAS task orders. “A sole source award to Collins for CLIN 1A not only increases NASA’s ability to compete EVA services tasks in the future, but also enables a strategy intended to mitigate the agency’s technical and schedule risks associated with the development and execution of EVA services to support NASA’s mission needs.” Collins, like Axiom, has not released many technical details about its suit. In an interview, Peggy Guirgis, general manager of space systems at Collins Aerospace, said the competitive nature of the xEVAS contract limited what she could say about the suit. While Axiom’s task order is for an Artemis lunar spacesuit, the NASA filing stated that its task order included an option to demonstrate its suit on the ISS as a “delta effort.” Guirgis said the Collins suit has a number of advantages over the existing EMU suits, including lower mass and fewer components while also supporting a larger range of sizes. It also has improvements in carbon dioxide scrubbing and design changes to prevent water intrusion into the spacesuit helmet. She said the biggest challenge to the work is a schedule that calls for a critical design review in early 2024. “We’ve got resources in place, and we’re ready to hit the ground running. There’s just a tremendous amount of work to get done,” she said. Developing the suit for the ISS will also support a version of the suit for Artemis that it could offer to NASA for future phases of the xEVAS contract. Guirgis said about 90% of its ISS suit could be adapted to Artemis, with changes needed for walking as well as the thermal and dust environment of the moon. “NASA absolutely has the opportunity to turn us on for a subsequent task order that would enable us to continue the remaining development,” she said. “We’re going to be making progress from an Artemis perspective,” she said, “and that way NASA is able to retain, from a competitive perspective, a couple of options where they can choose who they want to support for each mission and they’ll have that same flexibility for ISS.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Canadian startup Magnestar is establishing a platform to predict radio frequency interference among satellite operators. “By mapping and monitoring all communication pathways between Earth and space, we predict when points of interference will occur for multiple operators, giving them time to reroute their signals or take other measures to maintain consistent operations and increase uptime,” Jacqueline Good, Magnestar founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. In spite of the economic downturn, Toronto-based Magnestar, founded in late 2021, has attracted enough financing to create an enterprise-grade platform for satellite operators. “We’d like to bring as many satellite operators onto the platform as possible to get the added benefit of the network,” Good said. Before establishing Magnestar, Good spent a decade helping companies organize and draw insights from data. Her understanding of high-frequency stock trading, in particular, “gave Magnestar a specific advantage in terms of building a marketplace to do all the clearing of the signal communications between Earth and space at an expedited rate,” Good said. Like the stock market, data security is a top priority for satellite operators. Good’s first hire was Ian Service, a network security specialist who serves as infrastructure director on Magnestar’s nine-person staff. Good, a trained data scientist, began her pivot to the space sector in 2021 when the European Space Agency sponsored her participation in the International Space University Summer Studies Program. During the intensive nine-week course, Good delved into growing threats to satellites including debris and RF interference. Magnestar plans to address the interference problem through a variety of tools including secure infrastructure messaging. “I grew up building that for companies, whether that be oil and gas companies, contract manufacturers or stock exchanges around the world,” Good said. “It’s applying the same type of architecture.” Magnestar’s platform aggregates data on previous interference events to determine exactly what occurred and why. The goal is “to be able to let the operators know two days ahead of time when they are going to have a service outage so that they can have prescriptive action associated to ensure the outage does not occur,” Good said in October at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. “We give them options from a prescriptive standpoint around how to best mitigate that risk to ensure their throughput is strong enough to meet their service-level agreements.” Magnestar is working with Canada’s University of Regina to develop a small satellite component to assess the source of interference. In terms of financing, Magnestar won a $100,000 equity investment in July after claiming the Best of the Fest title at Startupfest, a Canadian startup conference. “We got so much traction from that,” Good said. “Then, we built on that with the momentum to actually be able to fund the company and have enough money to survive the next couple years.” Northern Canada relies heavily on satellite communications. Past outages and ongoing frustration with limited satellite service in Northern Canadian cities, towns and villages have prompted competing campaigns to establish undersea fiber-optic cables. “What I realized very early on when building the company was that as the satellite operators are becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of stuff in space, the services they provide on Earth are also at jeopardy,” Good said. “And when those services go down and people start to question if they can rely on space services, it puts the entire sector in jeopardy as well, because people end up relying more on ground systems than space systems.” As a result, Magnestar is “focused on ensuring the resiliency of space services so that people here on Earth can rely on them.”
Congress in a massive $1.7 trillion government funding bill on Dec. 23 approved $797.7 billion for the Defense Department, or $69.3 billion more than DoD got in 2022. The consolidated funding bill funds the U.S. government for the remainder of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. The bill provides $26.3 billion for the U.S. Space Force, which is nearly $1.7 billion more than the Pentagon requested, according to estimates from the defense and aerospace consulting firm Velos. The House passed the omnibus spending package in a 225 to 201 vote, and the Senate 68 to 29. The bulk of the $1.7 billion added to the Space Force budget is for new satellites. More than $500 million of the increase is for the Space Development Agency (SDA), an organization formed inside the Pentagon in 2019 to help accelerate the use of commercial space technology and transferred to the U.S. Space Force on Oct. 1. SDA is acquiring hundreds of satellites and associated ground systems for a low Earth orbit constellation that will be used to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and a mesh network of communications satellites to pass data to military users around the world. The 2023 defense appropriations bill adds $51 million for experiments, $216 million for launch services to accelerate the deployment of SDA’s missile warning and missile-tracking satellites, and $250 million to expand a demonstration of SDA’s missile-tracking constellation in the Indo-Pacific region. Congress in 2022 had already appropriated $550 million for the demonstration. Another notable add-on in the omnibus bill is $442 million for a wideband communications satellite, an action reminiscent of the 2018 defense appropriations bill when Congress inserted $600 million for a new Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite made by Boeing. The U.S. Air Force had planned on only buying 10 WGS satellites but Congress compelled the service to buy WGS-11 and this year is adding money presumably to buy WGS-12. The explanatory text released with the bill does not specify whether the funding is for a WGS satellite. The statement says the Space Force should “procure a protected wideband satellite to provide resilient, jam resistant tactical communications to support warfighter needs.” The bill directs the Secretary of the Air Force to provide a funding plan for launch and operation and maintenance. The 2023 spending bill also adds $50 million for tactically responsive space , a program that Congress directed to demonstrate the use of commercial small launch vehicles for fast turnaround operations. This funding “supports the maturation of a responsive launch program of record to rapidly place and reconstitute space assets in support of combatant command requirements and space enterprise resilience,” appropriators said in their statement. They noted that the Department of the Air Force has yet to respond to congressional requests over the past two years for a long-term procurement plan for tactically responsive launch. The Pentagon’s 2023 request “does not include any resources to establish the program despite a need to counter adversarial launches of disruptive technologies in a tactically relevant timeline,” said the statement. Biden signs NDAA Also on Dec. 23 President Biden signed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. The legislation passed the Senate on December 15 by a vote of 83-11, and cleared the House on December 8 by a vote of 350-80. The bill overturns Biden’s own mandate that troops receive the covid vaccine. On space policy matters, the NDAA requires the Space Force and U.S. Space Command to figure out how to make future satellites more resilient to enemy counterspace weapons and cyberattacks. The bill requires the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence to make publicly available in the next 90 days “an unclassified strategy containing the actions that will be taken to defend and protect on-orbit satellites of the DoD and the intelligence community from the capabilities of adversaries to target, degrade, or destroy satellites.” Despite significant lobbying from outside groups, the NDAA does not authorize a Space National Guard and would consider an alternative proposed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to establish the Space Force as a single component with full-time and part-time members. The NDAA directs the Secretary of the Air Force to to identify “rules, regulations, policies, guidance, and statutory provisions that may be implemented to govern the component, draft legislative text, feasibility assessments, and implication assessments.”
The Senate passed legislation that would direct NASA to establish a program to remove orbital debris, but supporters of the bill will likely have to try again in the next Congress to enact it. The Senate passed by unanimous consent late Dec. 21 the Orbital Sustainability, or ORBITS, Act. The bill was introduced by Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, in September. The bill was co-sponsored by the ranking member of the subcommittee, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) along with the chair and ranking member of the full committee, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) The bill would direct NASA, working with other government agencies and the private sector, to publish a list of debris objects “that pose the greatest immediate risk to the safety and sustainability of orbiting satellites and on-orbit activities.” The bill doesn’t define how to calculate that risk or how many objects to include in the list. The ORBITS Act would also require NASA to establish an active debris removal remediation program. It would make awards “for the development of technologies leading to the remediation of selected orbital debris” identified in the list, including demonstration missions to remove the debris. The bill would allow NASA and other agencies to acquire debris removal services. Besides the provisions on active debris removal, the bill would require the National Space Council to update the government’s existing Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices, with future updates every five years. It directs the Commerce Department to work with other agencies on standard practices for space traffic coordination. The bill does not authorize any specific funding for NASA or other agencies to carry out the active debris removal or other activities, beyond noting that such would work be subject to appropriations. It did have support from many companies and organizations such the satellite servicing industry group CONFERS, which said in a September statement that the bill recognized orbital debris cleanup needed to be a joint effort of government and industry. “This bill will jumpstart the technology development needed to remove the most dangerous junk before it knocks out a satellite, crashes into a NASA mission, or falls to the ground and hurts someone,” Cantwell said in a statement after the bill’s passage. “I’m over the moon that our ORBITS Act passed and we can start cleaning up this space junk,” Hickenlooper said in a separate stating, adding that he would work to send the bill to the president. That work, though, will have to start over next year. The House did not take up the ORBITS Act before passage of the fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill Dec. 23, the last bill the House is scheduled to vote on in this Congress. Proponents will have to reintroduce the bill in the next Congress that convenes in January. A bill on a related topic also died in the House. Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) introduced the Space Safety and Situational Awareness Transition Act of 2022 Dec. 14 that would have authorized the Commerce Department to establish a civil space situational awareness (SSA) capability, something it is in the process of doing under Space Policy Directive 3 but so far without formal congressional authorization. It would direct NASA to pursue research to improve SSA capabilities. The bill “is our best attempt to direct inter-agency traffic and establish clearly defined roles for key players on space situational awareness, including the Department of Commerce and NASA,” Beyer, chair of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, said in a statement, acknowledging that this version was primarily a starting point for work in the next Congress. “I hope that this legislation will serve as a strong starting place for future discussions about the way forward on space situational awareness.”
The quadrennial wait for updating global spectrum rules stands in stark contrast to the rapid pace of change now sweeping through space and terrestrial communications. Satellite and ground-based networks are fast converging to unprecedented levels, underlined by the emergence of direct-to-smartphone capabilities. This integration promises new business opportunities but also creates interference and other challenges threatening critical infrastructure. And yet regulators only gather once roughly every four years for the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) to set ground rules for existing and future telecoms services. “The world is moving fast, and we need to be more nimble, more agile with respect to both technology and business,” said Rajeev Gopal, vice president for advanced systems at satellite broadband provider Hughes Network Systems. “All of us have heard about agile software development,” Gopal added, “we need an agile approach in business and regulatory affairs — the way people change policies within a country, across countries. We can’t wait for four years.” However, regulatory machines tend to be built for something other than speed. While increasing the frequency of WRCs sounds good, “overcoming the real practical issues is the problem,” noted Jennifer Manner, senior vice president for regulatory affairs at Hughes’ parent company EchoStar. “In the early 90s, there was a movement to have WRC every two to three years, and it was an abysmal failure,” she warned. “And the reason for that is there have to be studies done on an international basis, and it takes time to vet and garner consensus.” At the end of each WRC, an agenda is adopted for the issues the next one will address, and an initial preparatory meeting starts just a week later to divvy them out to various study groups. Taking into account time to recoup from WRC and deadlines for preparing conclusions ahead of the next conference, Manner said the current setup allows a little over two years for conducting highly complex technical studies. Even some rule-making proceedings at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission are only wrapped up in two years, and they concern just one country, not all of them. WRC study groups must conclude their findings roughly one year before the next conference to be included in the Conference Preparatory Meeting Report, which is critical preparation for the international event. Amid the pandemic, some study meetings have been held remotely in the run-up to the next WRC in late 2023 in the United Arab Emirates, reducing costs and travel time. However, Manner said virtual discussions have proved far less effective. “It’s awful being remote because you don’t have that interpersonal ability to talk to people to come up with solutions,” she said. “I think people are ruder online … I think diplomacy has suffered incredibly much from the pandemic.” This has likely set the stage next year for a more contentious than usual WRC, which despite their convergence remains a key battleground between space and terrestrial players for access to more spectrum resources. “You could bring the gap between WRC meetings down to 3 ½ years, possibly,” a source at British satellite operator Inmarsat involved in WRC negotiations said via email. However, “given the nature of what WRC has to cover — in a lot of technical detail — and the national and international bodies that attend, plus the role of commercial enterprises and organisations representing them, it’s difficult to see how it could be any more frequent than that.” For now, the space industry should perhaps be thankful WRCs only run for four weeks — or six weeks, including adjacent meetings — when they used to last four months at a time. “People used to get divorced, have affairs,” remarked another source who did not want to be named, “I mean, they still have affairs. This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Russia’s flouting of international order set in motion a realignment with near, medium and long-term implications, casting dark clouds over the global space community but also revealing some silver linings. The ongoing war in Ukraine has accelerated the U.S. Defense Department and intelligence community’s embrace of commercial satellite communications and Earth observation. Nations around the world, taking note of the commercial contributions, have backed domestic space startups and forged relationships with existing satellite service providers. Satellites coupled with NATO weapons systems have helped Ukraine mount a formidable defense. On the diplomatic side, public dissemination of satellite imagery has stymied Russian disinformation operations and helped document war crimes and atrocities. The war’s impact has been equally profound on the launch side. While Russia’s self-inflicted exile has proved a nuisance for space companies depending on Russian hardware, Russia’s most important space exports before the invasion were launch vehicles. With Russia’s Soyuz sidelined, possibly permanently, Europe is reckoning with gaps in its ability to deploy and maintain vital space infrastructure without outside assistance. Near term, that’s meant the European Space Agency and the European Union are pivoting from Russian dependence to U.S. dependence a la SpaceX. Commercially, the loss of Soyuz, trade embargoes and Russian missile strikes on Dnipro’s Yuzhmash factory fed the supply chain dumpster fire that’s slowed constellation deployment. The termination of Soyuz launch contracts stranded more than a dozen non-Russian satellite missions.After an eight-month pause, OneWeb resumed launching satellites for its broadband constellation in October on India’s GSLV Mark 3 rocket. A second Indian launch and three SpaceX Falcon 9 flights are lined up to help OneWeb complete its first-generation global constellation. The European Space Agency also had to find new space transportation. ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover was scheduled to launch in September 2022 on a Russian Proton rocket and descend to the Martian surface in 2023 on a Roscosmos-built landing platform. With European and Russian cooperation severed, ESA has drafted plans for a European descent vehicle, making it unlikely the ExoMars mission will launch before 2028. Other missions slated for Soyuz have had an easier time regrouping. Two pairs of Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites have signed up for rides in 2023 on Arianespace Ariane 6 rockets. Falcon 9 rockets are scheduled to transport ESA’s Euclid cosmology mission to Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point next year and ESA’s Hera mission to Dimorphos, the asteroid struck by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test, in 2024. Meanwhile, Europe’s Vega-C rocket is now slated to launch ESA’s EarthCARE Earth science mission in early 2024. Before the Russian invasion, ESA and Roscosmos were planning a trio of lunar exploration missions, which have now been scrapped. The war and Western sanctions have forced nations to choose between partnering with the West or Russia. Lacking western partners, Russia has more closely aligned itself with China and forged a pact with Iran that led to the August launch of an Iranian remote-sensing satellite on a Soyuz rocket. ESA, the European Union and individual nations have spent the last 10 months dismantling programs with Russian involvement and fostering domestic capabilities. “We have to focus on ensuring full European autonomy in space as well as investing more in commercial growth areas,” Géraldine Naja, the European Space Agency’s director of commercialization, industry and procurement, said in November at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany. To bolster European autonomy, the ESA member states approved a 16.9 billion euro budget ($17.5 billion) over three years at the Ministerial Council Meeting in November, about 16.6 percent more than the spending plan approved in 2019. “We must take bold decisions today. As I’ve said before, we must invest in the future because we are in a crisis,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in the leadup to the budget vote. The European Parliament and European Union member states also agreed to contribute 2.4 billion euros toward a six billion euro campaign with ESA to establish a satellite communications constellation called IRIS2, for Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. “The efforts and energy made at [the] European level to move this initiative forward at record speed also reflect, in my view, the importance of IRIS² in an increasingly contested geostrategic environment,” Thierry Breton, European Union commissioner for the internal market, said in a Nov. 17 blog. Meanwhile, efforts to bolster funding for European startups, already underway before the invasion, have snowballed. The European Commission, European Investment Bank and European Investment Fund have pledged to invest one billion euros over five years in early-stage European space and Earth-observation companies through the Cassini fund. That did not go over well with the Russians. Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for non-proliferation and arms, told a United Nations committee meeting that Starlink, although a commercial system providing internet services, “might no longer be considered purely civilian” and would be considered a military target. The aggressive rhetoric can’t be brushed aside, given Russia’s demonstrated anti-satellite weapons capability. If Ukraine, for example, uses Starlink for military command and control, “these satellites would become legitimate military objectives for Russian forces,” noted U.S. Air Force Academy law professor Lt. Col. Timothy Goines. Commercial remote sensing satellites that tracked Russia’s pre-invasion moves and galvanized the West in support of Ukraine also have drawn Putin’s ire. “The Russians saying commercial space is fair game, I think that’s huge,” said Scott Herman, a former DigitalGlobe and BlackSky executive. “We are entering uncharted waters that no one actually understands or knows what are the actual legal implications.” Shooting a satellite down would be the extreme and less likely scenario. More plausible are cyber or jamming attacks, where attributing responsibility is much harder. In such scenarios, what constitutes an act of war and how the U.S. or NATO should respond are “unanswered legal questions right now,” Herman said. These developments led the Pentagon to consider adding indemnification provisions in future contracts to compensate commercial companies if their satellites were attacked while supporting the U.S. military in a conflict. “This has significant business implications because most satellite insurance policies do not cover acts of war,” Herman said. Commercial operators optimize their satellites for efficiency and to generate revenue, not necessarily for resiliency during war. So the government providing some type of indemnification is a “a pretty good answer,” Herman said. Speaking at a recent space investment conference, a top U.S. congressional appropriations staffer said he expects this issue to gain more attention. Ukraine showed the value of commercial satellites, said William Adkins, professional staff member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. “But the flip side of that is the degree to which commercial assets can become targets,” Adkins said. “That’s both a policy issue and a technical issue to think through in the future, as other conflicts are certainly going to come down the road.” The use of satellite images to shape the narrative of this war is the work of the Maxar News Bureau, an organization that has worked in relative obscurity for years. Earth-observation company Maxar, which operates four high-resolution imaging satellites, created the news bureau in 2017 to leverage its satellite imagery and analysis for social good and global transparency. It built relationships with trusted media organizations worldwide and provided visual content at no cost to support their reporting. “High-resolution satellite imagery and analytics are a powerful complement to good journalism, providing indisputable truth at a time when credibility is critical,” the company said in a 2018 news release. Over the past few years, Maxar’s imagery exposed the displacement and killing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; provided evidence of human trafficking and illegal fishing; monitored the growth of refugee camps in Uganda; chronicled the physical toll of wars in Iraq and Syria; and revealed the devastation of numerous natural disasters. The bureau started monitoring the buildup of Russian forces and hardware along the Ukrainian border months before the invasion started in February 2022. Maxar’s bureau staff and news organizations every day aggregate and analyze thousands of images to identify newsworthy activities happening in Ukraine, including revelations of war crimes and human rights violations. Maxar is, first and foremost, a commercial business. Its Earth imaging generates about $1.1 billion a year in revenue, about two-thirds of that from U.S. government contracts. But the Ukraine war cemented the role of the news bureau in promoting global transparency and combatting the spread of disinformation. Companies like BlackSky and Planet have followed in Maxar’s footsteps providing electro-optical imagery to the news media. Commercial synthetic aperture radar imagery from Capella Space and Iceye also has seen higher demand, as radar penetrated heavy cloud coverage over Ukraine. Radio-frequency data providers like HawkEye 360 and Spire Global used satellites to track Russian GPS jammers. Commercial electro-optical imagery has opened the door to these other geospatial services, said Amy Hopkins, Capella Space vice president and general manager of government services. The crisis in Ukraine has helped “make us that much more capable” in figuring out how information can be collected, analyzed and delivered, Hopkins said. Companies like Maxar helped the rest of the industry by making the U.S. government customer “comfortable with the concept of buying commercial capabilities,” said HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini. Herman, the former BlackSky executive, said Ukraine has helped put companies on the map, although that doesn’t necessarily guarantee sales or government contracts. “A conflict like this actually helps you develop meaningful use cases and scenarios that you can then use to illustrate the value of your product,” he said. Companies that have demonstrated their capabilities in Ukraine “can take it to the market and investors and say, ‘here’s all the stuff we were doing,” Herman said. Wars and natural disasters are painful, “but one of the silver linings is that it really helps us test our capabilities and build demonstrable use cases that help us sell in the future,” he added. This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
As astronauts completed a delayed spacewalk outside the International Space Station, NASA and Roscosmos officials said they are continuing to study whether a Soyuz spacecraft that suffered a coolant leak can safely return its crew home. NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio successfully completed a spacewalk Dec. 22 lasting seven hours and eight minutes. The two installed the fourth of six ISS Roll-Out Solar Array, or iROSA, panels on the station that will supplement the station’s existing arrays. The spacewalk was scheduled for Dec. 21 but postponed as Cassada and Rubio were in final preparations to start it. NASA delayed the spacewalk after concluding a piece of orbital debris, a fragment of a Fregat upper stage, would pass within a half-kilometer of the station, prompting a debris avoidance maneuver by a Progress cargo spacecraft docked to the station. NASA previously delayed the spacewalk from Dec. 19 to allow the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm to be used to survey the exterior of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the ISS. That spacecraft suffered a coolant leak Dec. 14 , delaying a separate spacewalk by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. At a Dec. 22 media teleconference that took place during the spacewalk, NASA and Roscosmos managers said the investigation into that leak is ongoing. The hole is a few millimeters across, said Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human spaceflight programs at Roscosmos, affecting a coolant pipe less than a millimeter across. “Now we are doing thermal analysis to see if we can use this vehicle to do a nominal reentry with a crew,” he said, “or if we need to send a rescue vehicle to the station in the future.” In the latter case, the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft would be launched to the station without a crew to replace Soyuz MS-22, which brought Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio to the station in September. It would serve as a lifeboat for those three ISS crew members, with Soyuz MS-22 returning to Earth without a crew. Soyuz MS-23 is currently scheduled to launch on a crew rotation mission in the middle of March. Krikalev said its launch could be moved up two to three weeks if necessary. However, if it needs to be launched without a crew, it’s unclear what it would mean for future crew rotation missions. Krikalev said only those plans would need to be “readjusted.” The cause of the leak remains under investigation but both Krikalev and Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, ruled out a micrometeoroid hit from the Geminid meteor shower. Russian officials in the days after the link suggested that meteor shower, which took place in mid-December, could have caused the leak , but offered no evidence to support that conclusion. Controllers in both Houston and Moscow concluded the hole was not in the direction of the shower, but still aren’t sure what caused it. “We’re trying to get better video and imagery of that hole,” Montalbano said. “Right now, we haven’t confirmed that’s an MMOD, micrometeoroid debris, or some other type of failure.” He said the direction of the leak meant that coolant did not contaminate exterior surfaces of the station, like solar panels or windows. That was something controllers reviewed before proceeding with the spacewalk by Cassada and Rubio. Montalbano said NASA and Roscosmos have closely coordinated on the Soyuz leak investigation, including regular discussions between the two of them as well as at operational levels. “The teams are going back and forth. We’re constantly exchanging data,” he said. “The teams have worked together as they always have.”
NASA is seeking concepts from industry on how they would reboost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope, a sign that the agency is looking beyond SpaceX for any mission to extend the orbiting observatory’s life. NASA published a request for information (RFI) Dec. 22 asking industry how they would demonstrate commercial satellite servicing capabilities by raising the orbit of Hubble. The agency said it is looking for technical information about how a company would carry out the mission, the risks involved and the likelihood of success. NASA emphasized in the RFI that it had no plans to procure a mission to reboost Hubble. “Partner(s) would be expected to participate and undertake this mission on a no-exchange-of-funds basis,” the document stated, with companies responsible for the cost for the mission. In the RFI, NASA said its interest in a Hubble reboost demonstration was part of broader efforts to support satellite servicing, including of aging government satellites. “With a growing commercial space industry developing and maturing space technologies and capabilities, NASA seeks to partner with commercial entities to demonstrate capabilities to operate and provide in-space services.” This RFI, though, comes nearly three months after the agency announced a Space Act Agreement with SpaceX to study a Crew Dragon mission to Hubble to reboost it and possibly perform servicing of the observatory. The proposed mission could be conducted as part of the Polaris Program of private astronaut missions funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. At the time, NASA officials said they would be open to similar agreements with other companies. “We at NASA will look at any or all options that are in the interest of the taxpayer,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said in a call with reporters in September about the SpaceX agreement when asked how NASA would consider other satellite servicing options. However, until the release of the RFI there was no formal mechanism to look at those options. NASA said only that its work with SpaceX was “non-exclusive” and that other companies could propose similar studies. NASA said in a Dec. 22 statement that the SpaceX study is “ongoing” but provided no other updates. According to the text of the agreement , an initial draft of an “out brief” about the study was due eight weeks into the effort, with a final version after 24 weeks. “The proposed study would provide valuable insight into existing commercial capabilities, allowing NASA to make important programmatic decisions for Hubble and other near-earth NASA satellites,” the Space Act Agreement stated. “The study would also permit SpaceX to better understand the unique technical challenges associated with extravehicular servicing missions, particularly for legacy assets with unique mission constraints.” NASA set a Jan. 24 deadline for responses to the RFI. It did not state when it might decide on how to proceed with any Hubble reboost effort, but noted in the RFI that Hubble’s orbit is projected to decay to an altitude of 500 kilometers by around 2025, “at which point there is a risk that rendezvous would be more difficult.” Hubble is projected to reenter in the mid-2030s if its orbit is not raised.
TAMPA, Fla. — French satellite operator Eutelsat said Dec. 22 it stands to lose up to 15 million euros ($16 million) in annual revenues from restricting broadcasts in Russia and Iran to comply with sanctions. The amount represents 2.2% of the broadcast revenues Eutelsat reported for its previous fiscal year to the end of June 2022, or 1.3% of total revenues for a company that has been growing its connectivity business as the broader satellite TV market gradually declines. The operator said it has now “ended all involvement in the broadcast” of three Russian propaganda channels and ceased all broadcasts related to Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), a state-controlled media company. “Eutelsat has also ensured that it is not involved in the broadcasting of RT News in Russia,” Eutelsat said in a news release, referring to the TV network funded by the Russian government. According to Eutelsat, these measures will reduce revenues for its fiscal year to the end of June by between 10 million and 15 million euros. Eutelsat now expects revenues for this fiscal year to come in between 1.14 billion and 1.2 billion euros. The company said complying with international sanctions against Iran and Russia will also shave between 15 million and 20 million euros off annual EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. France’s TV regulator gave Eutelsat a week to stop broadcasting Russia’s Rossiya 1, Perviy Kanal, and NTV Dec. 14, following European sanctions stemming from their coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Eutelsat had been distributing these channels via capacity leased from three satellites operated by Russia’s RSCC: Ekspress-AMU1 (known commercially as Eutelsat 36C), Ekspress AT1, and Ekspress AT2. “Eutelsat has amended the legal framework of its operations in Russia in order to make sure that no Eutelsat-leased capacity is used by the sanctioned channels anymore,” Eutelsat spokesperson Anita Baltagi told SpaceNews . Russia is still able to broadcast channels sanctioned by the European Union via the capacity it controls on these and other satellites. For Iran, Baltagi said Eutelsat had “a direct contract” with IRIB to use capacity on Hotbird, a satellite fully owned by the French operator. The European Union singled out IRIB in a round of sanctions Dec. 12 following a violent crackdown on a major women’s protest movement in Iran. “IRIB is responsible for producing and broadcasting the forced confessions of detainees, including journalists, political activists, and persons belonging to Kurdish and Arab minorities, thereby violating internationally recognised rights to a fair trial and due process,” the Council of the European Union stated. “IRIB is therefore responsible for serious human rights violations in Iran.” IRIB controls Press TV, the Iranian news channel that was the target of earlier European sanctions. Eutelsat previously told SpaceNews it did not have a direct commercial relationship with Press TV and so had been relying on distributors and partners to drop the channel.
SAN FRANCISCO – Northrop Grumman has completed ground-based tests to demonstrate critical technology required for a 2025 demonstration of space-based solar power. “As far as the technologies go, we’re very confident in our design and we’ve proven it out,” Tara Theret, Northrop Grumman’s Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research (SSPIDR) program director, told SpaceNews. “Now, it’s just building, testing and integrating the rest of the hardware on a challenging timeline.” Northrop Grumman announced Dec. 15 the successful demonstration of a key element of SSPIDR, the ability to beam radio frequency energy toward various antennas by steering the beam. The testing was conducted in one of Northrop Grumman’s anechoic test chambers in Baltimore. Next, Northrop Grumman will “take those findings and translate them into our prototype, which we anticipate launching in 2025 to actually show the capability of beaming RF energy down to the planet,” said Jay Patel, vice president of Northrop Grumman Remote Sensing Programs. Beyond the prototype for the future objective system, Northrop Grumman will need to shrink electronic components and significantly scale up the quantity of “sandwich tiles,” or panels of photovoltaic cells to collect solar energy and provide power to another layer of components that enable solar-to-RF conversion and beamforming. “We are currently busy manufacturing our flight hardware so that we can put together this system that we’re going to be launching on our Northrop Grumman ESPAStar platform,” Patel said. (ESPAStar, a satellite bus built around an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Secondary Payload Adapter, provides propulsion, power, attitude control and communications for payloads.) The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Northrop Grumman a $100 million contract in 2018 to develop a payload to demonstrate key components of a prototype space solar power system . AFRL conceived of the flight experiment, called Arachne, to spur the development of technology needed for a prototype space-based system that could provide solar power to remote military bases. In late 2021, Northrop Grumman showed its “sandwich tile” could convert solar energy to RF power. With the latest demonstration, the company is relying on phased array technology to control the RF beam and steer it toward multiple fixed rectifying antennas. “It was a very exciting demonstration that allowed us to show the culmination of those different technology milestones that we’ve been developing since the beginning of this project,” Patel said. Space-based solar power, long a feature of science fiction, is being investigated by government agencies around the world. The Naval Research Laboratory launched an experiment in 2020 aboard the Air Force’s X-37B space plane that captured sunlight and converted it into direct current electrical energy. The China Academy of Space Technology announced plans for a 2028 space-based demonstration. The European Space Agency approved plans for a three-year research program called Solaris. And the United Kingdom is offering grants for space solar power studies and technology development. If solar power can be gathered in space and beamed to the ground, there are many promising applications, Patel said. “If you have a flood or a hurricane that knocks out power to an area, it takes weeks sometimes for them to get back online,” Patel said. “This system can provide temporary power during those periods until that infrastructure is built back up.”
Updated Dec. 23 to revise list of previous investors. SEOUL, South Korea — Boryung, a South Korean pharmaceutical company, has decided to invest $50 million in U.S. commercial space station developer Axiom Space’s Series C funding round. The Seoul-based company announced the decision in a Dec. 21 regulatory filing to the Financial Supervisory Service, calling the deal a “forward-looking investment” aimed at establishing a business footing in space. Boryung will take a 2.28% stake in Axiom by Dec. 30 in exchange for the investment, according to the filing. This follows Boryung’s $10 million investment in Axiom, disclosed in a May 16 regulatory filing, which gave the Korean company a 0.4% stake in the space station developer. “This strategic investment in Axiom will lay the foundation for finding diverse business opportunities in the private space industry,” Boryung said in a Dec. 21 statement. Lee Young-hyeok, a Boryung spokesperson, told SpaceNews the company has a “strong commitment to exploring space-based healthcare solutions.” Amir Blachman’ Axiom’s chief investment officer, said Boryung’s investment is “part of a larger funding round” that the U.S. company “will close out toward the beginning of the new year.” Axiom Space’s Series A investors included Hemisphere Ventures, The Venture Collective, Starbridge Venture Capital, Silicon Valley venture investors and super angels. The company raised $130 million in Series B funds in early 2021 from Declaration Partners, C5 Capital, Prime Movers Labs and others. The company has since received investments from Mitsui & Co., Neventa Capital, Washington University of St. Louis and prominent venture and family office investors. Founded in 1957 as a mom-and-pop pharmacy in Seoul, Boryung is now a major healthcare company in South Korea offering a range of medical and healthcare products and services. It reported 627.3 billion won ($488 million) in sales in 2021, up 11.6% year-on-year, with operating profit up 3.7% to 41.4 billion won. The Boryung spokesperson said its space-related projects are all initiated and managed by a task force, called the Global Investment Center, which is under the direct control of CEO Jay Kim. The chief executive had a closed one-on-one meeting May 17 with Axiom founder and CEO Kam Ghaffarian in Seoul. Boryung, along with Axiom and Starburst Aerospace, hosted the “Care in Space Challenge” this year, a collaborative space startup incubation program that awards winning entrepreneurs and their companies an equity investment of $100,000, and admission into Starburst’s 13-week accelerator program to help bring their ideas to fruition. Space News senior staff writer Jeff Foust contributed to this article from Washington.
Space hardware tumbling out of orbit may lead to unforeseen environmental and climate impacts. Due to the growing scale and pace of launch activities, what is needed is better monitoring of the situation, as well as regulation to create an environmentally sustainable space industry. Making that case is Jamie Shutler, associate professor of Earth observation at the University of Exeter, Cornwall. Shutler and colleagues authored the research paper “Atmospheric impacts of the space industry require oversight” in the August issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. Decreased satellite costs have led to large spacecraft constellations, thereby creating a constant flow of de-orbiting debris as craft die and are replaced. “This debris could double the annual injection of aerosol particle mass into the mesosphere,” the paper explains, thereby increasing the number of aluminum particles that can reach the stratosphere, where they promote ozone loss. “We are now realizing the full benefits of access to space, but our understanding of the environmental impact of these activities is currently limited,” Shutler told SpaceNews. “Maximizing these benefits whilst minimizing the environmental impact is likely to become increasingly important for science and industry.” As for research priorities that need to be further explored, Shutler underscored there are key steps forward. One is for the space industry to collect rocket emissions data during launches and make it publicly available. Shutler said that industry could also make available the total satellite content, a simple total for each type of mineral or substance within their existing spacecraft and satellites yet to be lofted. “These data would significantly aid research in this area,” Shutler said. “The research itself is going to be highly cross-disciplinary and need input from rocket designers, atmospheric scientists, numerical modelers, satellite and orbital engineers, climate scientists, etc.” In another study, published in June in the journal Earth’s Future, researchers from University College London (UCL), the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology assessed the impact of rocket launches and space debris on stratospheric ozone and global climate. Eloise Marais, a study co-author and associate professor of physical geography at UCL, said there’s a need for more sustainable solutions for dealing with space debris. Even if a reentering rocket were to completely “burn up,” it would produce the air pollutant nitric oxide (NOx) from the high temperatures, she said, contributing to the depletion of ozone in the stratosphere where ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. A follow-on study project is underway, said Marais, one that estimates the potential emissions from SpaceX’s Starlink and Starship programs. While that research is in progress, “certainly our preliminary results suggest that the substantial increase in satellite launches and early return of satellites from the Starlink program are cause for concern,” Marais said. Adding their view to gauging environmental and other effects on Earth’s atmosphere from satellite reentry is the U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO’s September report to Congress, “Large Constellations of Satellites: Mitigating Environmental and Other Effects,” observes that spacecraft produce emissions when they make their fiery fall during reentry. As of spring 2022, there are almost 5,500 active satellites in orbit, the GAO explains, and one estimate predicts the launch of an additional 58,000 by 2030. Exotic material emissions can be produced during satellite reentry, the GAO study observes, citing experts. Those exotic materials can include paints, resins, epoxies, toxic materials, and radioactive materials used in spacecraft components such as electronics and batteries. “Rocket launches and satellite reentries produce particles and gases that can affect atmospheric temperatures and deplete the ozone layer. Limiting use of rocket engines that produce certain harmful emissions could mitigate the effects,” states the GAO study. Regarding satellite reentry emissions into the upper atmosphere, GAO found that “the size and significance of these effects are poorly understood due to a lack of observational data, and it is not yet clear if mitigation is warranted.” Drawing upon a specially convened meeting of experts in coordination with the National Academies in November 2021, the GAO appraisal said that industry cooperation on the makeup of spacecraft would help increase the understanding of how materials react during reentry. There are few observational data for satellite reentry, the GAO report states, “and accurate modeling data are limited because the industry has not released satellite composition data.” This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
China’s main space contractor is working towards making the country a leading space power with a focus on developing capabilities, space infrastructure and self-reliance. Wu Yansheng, chairman of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor outlined a series of goals in a lecture broadcast by China Central Television Dec. 20. Among the ambitions are known plans for a crewed lunar landing along with other exploration and transportation goals, while stressing the importance of space infrastructure and developing capabilities such as on-orbit servicing, building a space governance system. The plans are presented as following a strategic plan of Communist Party of China General Secretary Xi Jinping to build a strong space nation. The plan is developing within a broader, Xi-driven push for technological and economic self-reliance amid the U.S. taking steps to “decouple” from economic engagement with China. The overarching ambition is to make China one of the world’s main aerospace powers by 2030 and become a fully comprehensive space power by 2045. CASC, ranked 322 in this year’s Fortune 500 list, has previously stated plans to make China a global leader in space technology by 2045, a focus seen by some as a challenge to the U.S. Major themes focus on space transportation, space exploration, governance, and national civil space infrastructure; the latter likely combining Earth observation, telecommunications and navigation and positioning constellations and services and providing global coverage. Space transportation emphasizes developing smart and reusable launch vehicles to provide economical, fast and reliable access to space. CASC aims to comprehensively improve China’s ability to use space, by continuing to “upgrade and improve our space infrastructure, build an in-orbit service and maintenance system, actively promote the construction of a next-generation space infrastructure system,” according to machine translation, and achieve efficient, low-cost transportation by 2030. The giant space and defense contractor is already working on reusable rockets, including the Long March 8R, Long March 9 and suborbital and orbital spacecraft . The presentation also notes the need for construction of a system of space law and space environment governance, and the development of capabilities for space domain awareness and space debris removal. Wu stated that challenges exist, notably including conditions created by the U.S. “restarting great power competition,” the so-called “Wolf clause,” being kept out of the International Space Station project and Chinese aerospace firms being added to U.S. export blacklists. The U.S. is also seen by Wu as seeking to seize strategic resources including specific orbits, locations and radio frequencies. The presentation highlights both long-term goals with apparent strong political backing, but also that China is focused on reaching targets and developing capabilities independently, rather than relying on international cooperation to a great degree. In terms of nearer-term goals, Wu Yansheng stated plans for a crewed lunar landing by 2030 , establishing the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s, following three Chang’e robotic landing missions during this decade. China is however seeking partnerships for the IRLS, which will be developed alongside and separate to the U.S. Artemis program. China also plans a Mars sample return mission in the “next 10 to 15 years,” suggesting a possible delay to earlier stated plans to deliver material from the Red Planet to Earth in 2031. Missions targeting the head and tail of the heliopause and, separately, Jupiter and Uranus are also noted. A CASC-led program for studying exoplanets named “Miyin Project” is also mentioned. CASC this year completed China’s Tiangong space station, manufacturing and then launching the three modules into low Earth orbit. China also has plans to expand Tiangong , starting with a second core module and docking hub. CASC has previously released grand plans for space, including a space transportation roadmap to 2045, and plans to development a $10 trillion Earth-moon economic zone . — Edited at 2:49 a.m. Eastern Dec. 23 to correct an exploration target to Uranus, not Neptune.
Arianespace and the European Space Agency will establish an independent commission to investigate the Vega C launch failure Dec. 20 that resulted in the loss of two satellites and new questions about the future of European space access. Arianespace and ESA announced Dec. 21 they will jointly create an independent inquiry commission to identify the cause of the launch failure and determine the steps needed to return the Vega C to flight. The committee will be chaired by ESA’s inspector general and Arianespace’s chief technical officer and be staffed with “independent experts,” the company and agency said. In a short online presentation Dec. 21 — billed as a press conference but without taking any questions from media — officials provided a few additional details about the failure. Pierre-Yves Tissier, Arianespace’s chief technical officer, confirmed that the failure involved the Vega C’s second stage, a solid motor called the Zefiro-40 or Z-40. “The failure seems limited to the Z-40,” he said. After a nominal burn by the rocket’s P120C first stage, the Zefiro-40 ignited and performed normally for seven seconds. “After seven seconds, we saw a progressive decrease of the chamber pressure up to 208 seconds” after liftoff, he said. At that point, “the pressure dropped down suddenly.” Several electronics units on the stage then failed, he said. That matched tracking video shown during the launch webcast . At about three and a half minutes after liftoff, the plume from the engine changed appearance, brightening and expanding. Around that time the rocket began to diverge from its trajectory displayed on the webcast. Tissier said that range safety shortly thereafter terminated the launch. The vehicle and its payload fell into the Atlantic Ocean out of harm’s way. “We have recovered all the data from the flight, so we are in position to analyze all these data,” he said. Stefano Bianchi, head of flight programs at ESA’s space transportation directorate, confirmed the focus of the investigation will be on the Zefiro-40 stage. That motor is an upgraded version of the Zefiro-23 from the original Vega. The Zefiro-23 was blamed for a July 2019 Vega launch failure that destroyed a Falcon Eye imaging satellite for the UAE. “The engine was qualified on the ground through two successful firing tests,” he said of the Zefiro-40, as well as the first, successful Vega C launch in July. “In our capacity as the industrial prime contractor, first of all we take full charge of the responsibility for this Vega C failure,” said Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio. Shares in the company, trading on the Borsa Italiana exchange, fell 9.5% in trading Dec. 21. He said Avio and its suppliers would fully support the independent investigation into the failure and “follow rigorously the recommendations it will come up with to improve in a radical manner the flightworthiness of this new launcher.” Neither Ranzo nor others at the presentation estimated how long the investigation and return-to-flight activities would take. After the July 2019 Vega launch failure, the vehicle was grounded for more than a year, returning to flight with a successful launch in September 2020. The rocket’s next launch, in November 2020, failed because of incorrectly connected cables in the control system of the Avum upper stage. Vega returned to flight in April 2021. The Vega C failure is another setback for Europe’s space access capabilities, which have also suffered from extensive delays in the development of the Ariane 6, whose first launch has slipped to late 2023, and withdrawal of the Soyuz rocket from French Guiana after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, noted at the presentation that the Vega problem does not affect either the Ariane 5 or Ariane 6. The Ariane 6 in particular uses the same P120C motor that powers Vega C’s first stage for its strap-on boosters, but the P120C worked as expected on the Vega launch. The Ariane 5 has no such link to the Vega C, but there are only two launches of that vehicle left, which are expected to take place in the first half of 2023. “We are committed to organize and implement a long-lasting, successful return to flight of Vega C,” Israël said, but did not estimate how long that would take.
Terran Orbital announced Dec. 22 it has completed delivery of 10 satellite buses ordered by Lockheed Martin for the Space Development Agency’s mesh network in low Earth orbit. The first satellite bus was delivered in May. Lockheed Martin in August 2020 won a $187.5 million contract from the Space Development Agency (SDA) to produce 10 communications satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 0. The Tranche 0 constellation will provide secure high-bandwidth, low-latency data links for military users. Terran Orbital, based in Boca Raton, Florida, in October announced Lockheed Martin made a $100 million investment in the company that will be used to expand Terran Orbital’s satellite manufacturing facilities in Irvine, California. Lockheed Martin also selected Terran Orbital as its satellite bus supplier for the Transport Layer Tranche 1 , a much larger constellation of satellites made by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space. Lockheed Martin’s Tranche 0 satellites are projected to launch in June . The expansion of manufacturing capacity in Irvine is intended to help meet a 2024 deadline to deliver 42 buses for SDA’s Tranche 1 under a $700 million contract . Terran Orbital CEO Marc Bell said the delivery of Tranche 0 satellites coincides with the company’s “shift from lower quantity, mission-unique satellites to robust production.” This fall Terran Orbital announced it would abandon plans to build a constellation of 96 synthetic aperture radar satellites, called PredaSAR, in order to focus on the production of satellites for U.S. defense and national security customers. The company also formed a new business unit that will produce electro-optical imaging satellites.
TAMPA, Fla. — Saturn Satellite Networks is close to securing funds for another attempt at getting its small geostationary satellite manufacturing business off the ground, according to an executive for the U.S.-based firm. The company said in a Dec. 20 news release that equity investors have promised to fund nearly half of its $500 million Space BroadbandNetworks-1 (SBN-1) program, which comprises six identical satellites destined for geostationary orbit (GEO) in 2025. These backers include German investment firm EMP Structured Assets and an unnamed U.S. defense contractor that Saturn vice president Kevin Reyes said would be disclosed “very soon.” Reyes told SpaceNews that Saturn has a commitment letter from the Export–Import Bank of the United States, the country’s export credit agency, which it plans to initiate in the first quarter of 2023 to cover the rest of the project’s financing needs. Once Saturn finalizes contracts with equity investors, he said the Melbourne, Florida-headquartered manufacturer would start ordering parts and conduct preliminary and critical design reviews to commence manufacturing, assembly, and testing. “Actual manufacturing and integration will start later in 2023 or early 2024,” he said via email. Reyes said the company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with “a preeminent heavy lift launch system operator” to deploy all six satellites on a single mission in the second half of 2025. Deployment delays The project aims to put Saturn back on track following setbacks for a company established five years ago by former executives of satellite operator ABS. The SBN-1 satellites are based on Saturn’s Intelligent Space Node (ISN) platform, which is an evolution of the NationSat platform Saturn developed three years ago after investing in NovaWurks, a satellite developer based in California. SpaceNews reported in 2019 that Intersputnik, a Moscow-based intergovernmental organization that resells satellite capacity, had signed up as a customer for the first NationSat mission. This mission was at one point slated to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission in 2021. Reyes declined to identify Intersputnik as the customer for the first NationSat, saying the mission was canceled “as the project did not materialize as anticipated.” Saturn had also once planned to deploy one or two NationSats with Northrop Grumman’s OmegA rocket in 2021 — despite not having a customer for them — before plans for that launch system were scrapped . Unlike NationSat, Saturn says its Intelligent Space Node platform uses independently steerable and shapeable beams that would enable their operators to move and tailor capacity to adapt to changing mission needs. Intelligent Space Node is also designed to operate with about seven kilowatts of power, compared with five kilowatts for the NationSat platform. In the Dec. 20 news release, Saturn said phased array antennas from Austin, Texas-based CesiumAstro would enable SBN-1 to provide high-throughput services at more than 120 gigabits per second, despite being much smaller than typical GEO telecoms spacecraft to save costs. While GEO telecom spacecraft usually weigh thousands of kilograms, Reyes said SBN-1 satellites would have a mass of around 650 kilograms. SBN-1 has secured more than $1 billion in usage commitments from satellite operators and other end users, according to the news release, via commercial arrangements that include full and partial satellite leases. Saturn is still marketing the NationSat platform, which Reyes said has completed a preliminary design review and is suitable for operators and countries that prefer a dedicated mission with bespoke payloads. The company also offers a two-kilowatt satellite platform, called MiniGEOSat, and a version of ISN designed for non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). Reyes said Saturn has “executed a launch agreement” with a U.S.-based company to deploy its first satellite to NGSO in the second half of 2024. In addition to serving payload customers, he said the mission aims to demonstrate a broadband constellation called Curvanet that is being developed by Saturn sister company Curvalux.
Satellite ground segment providers tend to be skeptical of ground-based optical communications. They don’t doubt the utility of optical intersatellite links. They simply question how quickly optical terminals will be adopted by enterprise customers to link satellites in low-Earth orbit with the ground. “Personally, I don’t think optical to low Earth orbit is really going to go,” said Rolf Skatteboe, president and CEO of Kongsberg Satellite Systems, the Norwegian company that established the first commercial ground station in Greece in 2020. “There will be a lot of satellite-to-satellite links. But more interesting is optical to moon and beyond.” Skatteboe made the comment Sept. 15 during a World Satellite Business Week panel in Paris, where he noted KSAT was operating the first commercial optical ground terminal. Swedish Space Corp. is “skeptical as well” regarding the speed of optical communications adoption, said fellow panelist Nick Priborsky, SSC Satellite Management Services president. “Nevertheless, it’s also important to get that experience under your belt.” SSC announced plans later that day to establish its first optical ground station in Western Australia. Why are companies building optical ground stations if they are dubious about the technology’s near-term prospects? In part, because government agencies are picking up the tab. SSC’s optical ground terminal was funded by the European Space Agency. In the United States, the Space Force’s Space Development Agency is spending billions of dollars on satellites equipped with optical terminals to communicate with other spacecraft as well as airborne and ground terminals. For government agencies, part of the appeal is security. Optical signals travel in a narrow beam of light, making them harder to intercept or jam than radio frequency signals. “You may send the RF beam to the satellite you intend to, but behind it in the shadow there is another” satellite, said Shantanu Gupta, Aerospace Corp. chief engineer for optical communications. “Interference will happen because the [RF] beam is 1,000 to 10,000 times broader than the optical beam.” Optical links also can speed up transmission of the massive amounts of Earth observation data obtained by optical and synthetic aperture radar satellites from satellite to satellite and from space to the ground. “You’re at a point where the sensors can generate a lot more data,” Gupta said. “If you had fat pipes to bring it down with low latency, that would be very useful because still most of the processing and computing power is on the ground.” Overall, optical communications is “a great technology for enabling high-data-rate connections and providing resiliency between platforms,” said Julee Pandya, Lockheed Martin senior manager for communications and networking technologies. Like RF communications, optical technologies are tools that can be applied “to maximize their benefit for a particular customer need and application,” Pandya said in an interview. Lockheed Martin is producing satellites for the Space Development Agency equipped with optical terminals provided by Tesat-Spacecom, an Airbus U.S. subsidiary. Skeptics don’t doubt whether optical signals can transmit data to and from space. The Japanese space agency JAXA established an optical link in 2006 between a ground station in Tokyo and its Optical Inter-Orbit Engineering Test Satellite in low-Earth orbit. NASA’s Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer satellite sent high-definition video from the ground to lunar orbit in 2013. Nor do people question the value of optical intersatellite links. “Generally speaking for intersatellite links, almost everybody is thinking of optical,” Gupta said in an interview. “It’s almost getting to where it’s mature.” The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, for example, plans to launch hundreds of Transport Layer satellites with optical crosslinks to transmit imagery and data around the world, plus RF and optical terminals to send them to the ground. “Once you get data onto the Transport Layer, I can move it to whatever weapon system it needs to go to, I can fuse the data,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said in October at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. SDA’s vote of confidence in optical technology coupled with the agency’s purchasing power is helping drive down the cost of optical terminals. Early optical communications demonstrations were performed by government agencies flying bespoke terminals. In recent years, companies have slashed the cost of optical terminals and set up mass manufacturing to supply satellite constellations. “The challenge is making it so that the terminals are producible at an economic cost and schedule that systems can afford,” said David Czajkowski, CEO, director and co-founder of Space Micro, a firm acquired earlier this year by Voyager Space. Space Micro is under contract to supply optical terminals to the Space Force Space Systems Command. While companies are making steady progress on the economic front, ground segment providers point out other challenges. Clouds and fog block optical signals. And Earth’s atmosphere distorts light waves, causing fluctuations in their intensity. Getting optical links “set up and getting them to work reliably when nothing is moving is really challenging,” Andrew Ivers, president of Communications and Power Industries, an electronic component manufacturer, said during the World Satellite Business Week panel. “Getting them to work in a scintillating atmosphere, when everything is moving around a little bit and you have even mild weather, can be a huge issue.” If that issue can be solved, optical technology “has a great, great home in the satellite industry,” added fellow panelist Paul Gaske, Hughes Network Systems executive vice president and general manager. “If you look at the amount of capacity that you need to get to a satellite in the [high-throughput satellite] world, we’ll put in 20 gateways or 200 gateways of smaller size. We’re doing that because we can’t get enough bits in a single stream. But if you could get an optical link to work, that would be great.” To lessen the impact of weather, organizations seek sunny locations or mountaintops for optical ground stations. Unfortunately, those sites don’t always provide the necessary terrestrial infrastructure. “I need internet connections to my gateway,” Kartik Seshadri, vice president of Hughes Network Systems International Division, said in an interview. “I need good diverse, highly available fiber to the internet.” To clear that hurdle, companies are establishing geographically dispersed ground station networks. “It comes down to diversification,” Andrew Csizmar, Honeywell senior director of small satellites, said at World Satellite Business Week. “If you get enough ground stations, you will get the throughput that you need, but it’s going to be on a global basis. Connectivity then is about how you get that backhaul back to the users.” Honeywell is working with Skyloom to provide optical intersatellite links for Space Development Agency satellites being built by York Space Systems. Companies are addressing the distortion caused by Earth’s atmosphere with technology. Atmospheric air currents can carry smoke or water vapor that interferes with optical waves. To neutralize atmospheric turbulence, wavefront sensors determine the atmosphere’s impact on a light beam and employ fast-steering or deformable mirrors to compensate for the disruption. Ground-based observatories employ similar technologies to improve the quality of astronautical images. “It’s a control loop,” Gupta said. “You sense it and correct it with adaptive optics.” Looking to the future, Lockheed Martin is investigating nonmechanical techniques to address atmospheric turbulence. “We want to move away from things that can be hard to manufacture and integrate,” Pandya said. “A nonmechanical solution is envisioned for the future to improve the overall reliability of some of these systems as well as reduce size, weight and power.” This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine under the title “Walking a Narrow Beam: Laser links are great for satellite relay, but challenges abound for taking it to ground.”
NASA has officially ended the mission of the InSight Mars lander after power levels on the spacecraft dropped to the point where it could no longer communicate with Earth. NASA announced Dec. 21 that InSight had missed two consecutive communications sessions, the threshold the agency set in November for declaring the mission over. The lack of communications, engineers concluded, came after the spacecraft’s batteries were drained, a condition called “dead bus.” InSight missed its first planned communications session Dec. 18 after communicating with Earth as expected three days earlier, the agency said Dec. 19. NASA did not disclose when the second missed communications session was scheduled. The agency will continue to listen for any transmissions from the lander for some time, but said in a statement it is unlikely to hear from it again. Project leaders had been closely monitoring power levels on the spacecraft since last year as dust accumulated on the spacecraft’s solar arrays, diminishing the power they can generate. Those arrays produced 5,000 watt-hours of power at the beginning of the mission but had dropped to just 700 watt-hours in June 2021. As of Dec. 12, power levels had dropped to 285 watt-hours. Engineers made several attempts to try and remove the accumulated dust, including using the lander’s robotic arm to scoop up regolith and dump it near the arrays, allowing some wind-borne particles to bounce off the arrays and, in the process, remove dust. That process, called saltation, did boost power levels slightly on the arrays but was not a long-term solution . InSight, selected in 2012 as part of NASA’s Discovery line of planetary science missions, landed on Mars in November 2018 and far exceeded its prime mission of one Martian year, or 687 Earth days. The spacecraft carried two major instruments: a seismometer and a heat flow probe, designed to help scientists understand the interior structure of the planet. The seismometer worked well, recording more than 1,300 “marsquakes” during the mission. However, the heat flow probe, designed to burrow into the surface to a depth of up to five meters, got stuck just below the surface as it could not gain traction with soil despite extensive efforts to hammer or push it the probe deeper. “The heat flux experiment actually did return science. It did not get the heat flow measurements that we wanted to get, but it did get a lot of other really great science,” Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for InSight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a Dec. 12 talk about the mission during American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. That included measuring the mechanical properties and thermal conductivity of the soil. In addition to those two main instruments, InSight carried several other payloads, including engineering sensors, a camera and a suite of meteorological instruments that provided what Banerdt called “an unprecedently complete set of meteorological data,” such as pressure and wind speeds, for more than one Martian year. “InSight has more than lived up to its name,” Laurie Leshin, director of JPL, said in a statement. “As a scientist who’s spent a career studying Mars, it’s been a thrill to see what the lander has achieved, thanks to an entire team of people across the globe who helped make this mission a success.” InSight continued collecting seismic data up until the end of the mission, although limited power meant that the seismometer could only operate for eight hours at a time, after which it would rest for three days to recharge batteries. That hastened the mission’s demise, Banerdt said in his AGU talk. “We made the decision that collecting data on Mars is the reason why we’re here, so even though we could extend the life of the mission, it doesn’t make any sense if you’re not getting any data.” In that talk, he acknowledged the mission was in its final weeks as its power levels dropped. He said that his entry into a “dead pool” predicting the end of the mission was Jan. 30, “which was later than most people on the project, but we’ll see what happens.” NASA spent $813.8 million on InSight through the end of its prime mission in late 2020, including the spacecraft, launch and operations. France and Germany, which contributed the seismometer and heat flow probe, spent about $180 million. “InSight really isn’t a very pretentious mission. It’s kind of a laid-back mission. It’s kind of an underdog mission,” Banerdt said in his AGU talk. “I spent about 20 years trying to convince people that this was a mission worth doing, and I think InSight has proved it was definitely worth doing.”
British regulators have issued a launch license to Virgin Orbit for its first LauncherOne mission from the United Kingdom, now expected to take place in January. The U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced Dec. 21 it issued launch and range licenses to Virgin Orbit for its “Start Me Up” mission, which will take off from Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England. The CAA previously issued a spaceport license for Spaceport Cornwall . The licenses are the first issued by the CAA for commercial launches from the U.K. Virgin Orbit now has all the regulatory approvals needed for its first launch from the U.K. that is now expected for January, although the company has not announced a specific launch date. The launch will carry seven satellites for commercial and government customers, including the U.K. Ministry of Defence, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the government of Oman. “Receiving Virgin Orbit’s range and launch licenses takes us one step closer to the first satellite launch takeoff from U.K. soil,” said Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, in a statement. “This is a major milestone for the CAA and represents the successful completion of an enormous effort, which has included the construction of new regulations, new processes and new teams.” Hart, in a company earnings call in November, had complained that the licensing process was taking longer than expected and requiring more effort by the company . Virgin Orbit had projected conducting the launch before the end of the year, and before that earnings call was still expecting to return the LauncherOne air-launch system to the U.S. for another launch before the end of 2022. However, the company announced Dec. 8 it was postponing the launch, then scheduled for mid-December, “for the coming weeks.” The company blamed the delay in part on a lack of a launch license but also said additional technical work was needed to prepare the vehicle for launch. “This is another major milestone in enabling the very first orbital space launch from U.K. shores and these licenses will assist Virgin Orbit with their final preparations for launch,” Tim Johnson, director for space regulations at the CAA, said in a statement. “Effective licensing forms an integral part of U.K. space activity, and with public safety at the heart of our decision making, we’ve worked with Virgin Orbit to assess their applications and issue licenses within our expected timelines,” he stated. The CAA has previously estimated the launch licensing process to take 9 to 18 months, and in the statement noted it awarded the license to Virgin Orbit in 15 months. The delays in the first U.K. launch had added to concerns about Virgin Orbit’s financial condition. The company, which had anticipated performing up to six launches in 2022 when the year started, has performed only two. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Dec. 20, Virgin Orbit announced it had raised an additional $20 million from Virgin Investments Limited, an investment arm of the Virgin Group. The funding came through a convertible note, a loan that can be converted into equity. Virgin Orbit said in the filing that it will use the funding for working capital.
The fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill provides two agencies with much, but not all, of the budget increases they requested to take on new or expanding commercial space work. The omnibus spending bill released by Congressional appropriators included $70 million for the Office of Space Commerce, located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the Commerce Department. The administration requested $87 million for the office in its budget request in March. That amount, though, is still far above the $16 million the office received in fiscal year 2022. The office sought a large increase to ramp up development of a civil space traffic management system. That funding would go towards hiring staff and establishing an open architecture data repository, or OADR, that would aggregate space situational awareness data from multiple sources that would be used to provide warnings of potential conjunctions. The report accompanying the omnibus did not provide any specific direction on the office’s activities, beyond providing a detailed spending plan and a five-year strategic plan for the office. Another part of the omnibus, funding the Federal Aviation Administration, included $37.854 million for its Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The office, which received $32.47 million in fiscal year 2022, requested $42.5 million for 2023. The FAA sought the increase for the office in order to hire more staff to keep up with a growing pace of commercial launch and reentry activities that it licenses. That growth in commercial activity, including companies applying for new launch licenses, was straining the office. “The number of applicants is at an all-time high. We are processing applications for new activities, modifications, waiver requests, you name it, we’re in the business of working that, all simultaneously, with a limited number of staff,” Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said at a Dec. 15 meeting of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). “That’s become more challenging.” He said at the meeting he hoped the fiscal year 2023 budget would provide the increase the FAA sought to allow the office to hire more personnel. “We certainly do not want to be, and don’t intend to be, the bottleneck” for the commercial spaceflight industry, he said. The office was preparing to prioritize work given limited resources, putting some unspecified activities into a queue. “We certainly can’t work everything simultaneously, given the staff we have,” he told COMSTAC, because of concerns that doing too much at one would overstretch staff and lead to safety lapses. The report accompanying the bill directed the FAA to hire up to 40 more people for the office with the additional funding. It also requested a report within 90 days on efforts to integrate commercial space operations into the national airspace system, data on delays to commercial aviation caused by commercial spaceflight activities and an evaluation of the impact of commercial spaceflight on the environment and communities. In addition to the operational funding for the FAA commercial space transportation office, the omnibus bill includes $5 million to support commercial space integration airspace research and development and $4.7 million for commercial space transportation safety work. 
Weather satellite funding cut Elsewhere in the NOAA section of the omnibus bill, appropriators cut requested funding for the agency’s next-generation geostationary weather satellite effort, called Geostationary Extended Operations or GeoXO. NOAA requested $653.8 million for GeoXO to complete Phase A formulation studies for two instruments planned for those satellites, an imager and a sounder, and start Phase A work on the remaining instruments and the spacecraft. The omnibus, though, included less than half that amount, $285 million. Appropriators said the funding will be sufficient to complete the current formulation studies on schedule and award a development contract for the imager. It called on NOAA to provide a report on user needs and requirements for those next-generation satellites and lifecycle cost estimates for those satellites. Other weather satellite programs received their requested funding with the exception of Polar Weather Satellite, which covers future polar-orbiting weather satellites. NOAA requested $350.2 million for the program but the omnibus provided $180.5 million. The report accompanying the omnibus did not explain the funding cut.
The second flight of Arianespace’s Vega C failed to reach orbit Dec. 20 after its second stage malfunctioned, destroying two Pléiades Neo imaging satellites. The Vega C rocket lifted off at 8:47 p.m. Eastern from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying the Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 imaging satellites for Airbus. The liftoff took place on schedule and the initial phases of flight appeared to go as planned. However, on-screen telemetry showed that the rocket was deviating from its planned trajectory within four minutes of liftoff, during the burn of the rocket’s Zefiro-40 second stage. Arianespace said in a later statement that the stage malfunctioned 2 minutes and 27 second after liftoff, seconds after ignition of the stage. The flight continued for several minutes, including separation of the second stage and ignition of the third stage, as well as payload fairing separation, even as the stage reached an apogee of 110 kilometers and started to descend. “After the liftoff and the nominal ignition of the P120C, which is the first stage of the Vega, an underpressure has been observed on the Zefiro-40, which is the second stage of the Vega,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said on the launch webcast a few minutes later. “After this underpressure, we have observed the deviation of the trajectory and very strong anomalies, so unfortunately we can say that the mission is lost.” He did not provide additional details about the problem. “We will now have to work with all of our partners to better understand why the Zefiro-40 has not worked properly tonight, triggering the failure of the mission,” he said, apologizing to Airbus Defence and Space, the customer for the launch. Arianespace then terminated the launch webcast. The launch was the second for the Vega C after a successful inaugural launch of the rocket July 13 carrying a set of institutional payloads. This was the first commercial launch of the Vega C. The launch was postponed from late November because of a problem with the pyrotechnics in the payload fairing separation system. The Vega C is an upgraded version of the Vega rocket with increased payload performance. Among the changes is the introduction of the Zefiro-40 solid-fuel second stage, which replaced the less powerful Zefiro-23 used on the Vega. Avio is the prime contractor for the Vega C. The Vega suffered two failures in three launches in 2019 and 2020. A 2019 Vega launch of the UAE’s Falcon Eye 1 imaging satellite failed because of a problem with the thermal protection system on part of the rocket’s second stage. A Vega launch in November 2020 failed when its Avum upper stage tumbled immediately after ignition because of what Arianespace later determined to be improperly connected cables. The failure of the Vega C deals another blow to European efforts to maintain autonomy in launch. The Vega C was one of the cornerstones of that strategy, along with the still-in-development Ariane 6, with the European Union awarding Arianespace a contract Nov. 29 for five Vega C launches of Sentinel satellites . That contract brought the Vega C backlog to 13 launches, along with two remaining launches of the original Vega. The launch failure also hurts Airbus, which had counted on the launch to add to its constellation of high-resolution imaging satellites. Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 were similar to the previously launched Pléiades Neo 3 and 4 but included laser links for faster transmission of imagery. An unspecified “equipment issue” with Pléiades Neo 3 led Airbus to file a partial insurance claim after its April 2021 launch. Airbus said the launch of Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 would allow it to work around the issues with Pléiades Neo 3 and meet all its customer commitments.
SAN FRANCISCO – German startup NeuralAgent GmbH is joining forces with French startup Miratlas SAS to address a vexing problem for satellite optical communications: transmitting data through Earth’s atmosphere. Under a memorandum of understanding announced Dec. 16, NeuralAgent and Miratlas will “build a predictive and robust networking capability for optical communications under atmospheric constraints,” NeuralAgent CEO Onur Deniz told SpaceNews by email. Clouds, rain, fog and other weather conditions can interfere with the transfer of optical data between satellites and ground stations. To address the problem, NeuralAgent and Miratlas are developing an AI-based technique to predict atmospheric conditions and determine the optimal paths for optical data. “We can bring another solution to laser communication problems,” said Deniz, who previously served as digitalization vice president for APWorks GmbH, an Airbus subsidiary. “This predictive solution is also an essential element to dynamic aerial networks in the sky and multi-domain systems.” NeuralAgent was founded in 2021 to provide artificial intelligence-bases software for communications networks. Miratlas has designed and manufactured instruments that characterize Earth’s atmosphere for optical communications since 2018. “This partnership between a French and a German company is a model for pan-European space collaboration between two startups operating in adjacent segments of a burgeoning high-tech industry where Europe leads the rest of the world: optical-laser communications,” Dirk Hoke, former Airbus Defense and Space CEO, said in a statement. Hoke joined NeuralAgent as a board member and strategic advisor in early 2022. “With a common vision and complementary technologies, we’re excited to be working with NeuralAgent to speed up the adoption of direct-to-Earth optical coms and the extension of the terrestrial network infrastructure into space to support future constellations bandwidth requirement,” Frédéric Jabet, Miratlas chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Routing is one of the most important problematic of Free Space Optical constellations for it handles the uncertainties introduced by the ever changing medium. With this collaboration, we will be able to have the atmosphere taken into account by smart routing algorithms, the loop is closed.”
Pioneering space research is opening a new avenue for combating some of Earth’s most complex and devastating diseases. The National Stem Cell Foundation secured funding early this year to cover spaceflight costs for a launch around the end of 2023 to the ISS, where it will test drugs for Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis (MS) for the first time in orbit. It will be the fifth mission to the ISS for the foundation, which has been supporting first-of-a-kind neurodegeneration studies on the space station since 2019 to get to this point. Cells behave very differently in space. Proteins do not fold in the same way, cartilage grows faster — and, of particular interest to the foundation’s researchers, cells can be seen interacting with each other in 3D in a way that’s impossible back on Earth. Its research uses constructs derived from skin or blood cells from people with Parkinson’s disease and progressive MS called organoids that have been re-programmed to mimic brain cells. Because the microgravity environment on the ISS gives researchers access to how these cells interact, they have the chance to see where things go wrong and test new drugs or cell therapies to stop that from happening. “You can simulate microgravity in a laboratory by centrifuge, but those cells are confused,” says Paula Grisanti, the foundation’s CEO, “and if you’re looking under a microscope on Earth, they’re slightly flattened.” The hope is to help find treatments for Parkinson’s and MS, which Grisanti says for the United States alone costs the economy about $137 billion annually. And any headway into treating them could also have a knock-on impact on other neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and ALS. While there are millions of people who have Parkinson’s and MS, the foundation’s work also has implications further afield. “We’re going to be flying people to the Moon and Mars for long duration stays,” Grisanti says, “and the ability to understand how neurodegeneration begins or can be stopped is important for astronaut health too.” The National Stem Cell Foundation also funds research for orthopedic diseases that could benefit from space-based studies. “That’s an area I would like to explore further,” she said, adding: “If we already know that cartilage grows faster in space, how can we use that information? “What kind of an experiment could you fly with cartilage cells to rebuild knees, rather than have knee replacements?” As the cost to access space declines, companies have been investigating ways to manufacture other constructs in orbit. Crystals are more uniform in microgravity, which could support the development of fiber optic cables. Goodyear is investigating ways to make better rubber in space, and Budweiser has sent hops to the ISS as part of efforts to improve production. Pharmaceutical companies could also one day produce drugs from orbit. “I think that research in space will be big for the pharmaceutical industry,” Grisanti adds, not least because it offers the “opportunity to make drugs differently or improve their production.” However, costs to send resources to and from orbit need to be significantly lower to make this a reality. This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill will provide NASA with nearly $25.4 billion, an increase of more than 5% from 2022 but less than what the agency requested. Congressional appropriators released the final version of the omnibus spending bill early Dec. 20. That bill, slated to be taken up by the House and Senate in the coming days, includes $25.384 billion for NASA in the fiscal year that started Oct. 1. That amount is slightly less than a House bill in June that offered $25.446 billion for NASA . It is, though, significantly less than the $25.974 billion that the White House requested for NASA in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal in March. A draft Senate bill released in July matched that request. The amount provided for NASA in the omnibus is a 5.6% increase over the $24.041 billion the agency received in fiscal year 2022. That is slightly below the current rate of inflation, however. The report accompanying the bill followed many of the directions in the House bill on specific NASA programs. That includes providing no less than $90 million for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to search for potentially hazardous objects. NASA proposed only $40 million for NEO Surveyor, one-fourth of its previously projected funding for 2023, and sought to delay its launch to 2028. The report accompanying the omnibus notes appropriators’ “concern about NEO Surveyor’s proposed launch slippage into 2028 and reminds NASA of its mandate to detect 90 percent of objects greater than 140 meters in size that threaten Earth” from an earlier NASA authorization bill. The $90 million, though, is not sufficient to keep the mission on its earlier schedule to launch in 2026, according to agency sources. Science overall gets $7.795 billion in the bill, nearly $200 million below the request. Planetary science and heliophysics get slightly more than requested, while astrophysics, Earth science and biological and physics sciences suffer cuts. The report affirms NASA’s recent decision to cancel the GeoCarb mission to monitor greenhouse gases that suffered delays and cost increases after its original plans to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite fell through. The report provides $20 million for closeout costs and says that, should the instrument itself be completed with the remaining funding, NASA should find an alternative way to fly it as a mission of opportunity. The bill provides NASA’s space technology programs $1.2 billion, less than the request of nearly $1.45 billion but a $100 million increase from 2022. That includes $227 million for the OSAM-1 satellite servicing mission formerly known as Restore-L and $110 million for nuclear thermal propulsion. NASA’s exploration programs receive $7.469 billion, effectively the full request. Orion, the Space Launch System, Exploration Ground Systems and Artemis Campaign Development all received the full request or slightly more. That includes $1.486 billion for the Human Landing System program, the agency’s request, supporting development of a second lander alongside SpaceX’s Starship. The report included up to $281.4 million for Mobile Launcher 2, a long-delayed platform needed for the Block 1B version of SLS. The report stated that the funding includes half the increase NASA identified it needed after the release of the budget proposal. “NASA is expected to find the other half of the estimated need from within other resources provided without proposing reductions in Congressional priorities, both in fiscal year 2023 and beyond,” the report states. Space operations received $4.25 billion, also nearly its full request, including $224.3 million for NASA’s Commercial LEO Development effort to support work on commercial space stations to replace the International Space Station. It also sets aside $10 million for technical activities needed for a future competition to develop an ISS deorbiting vehicle. NASA’s construction and environmental compliance and restoration account, used to fund work to build and maintain facilities, received $414.3 million, nearly the full request, but $367 million comes from a separate disaster supplemental spending bill. That supplemental also includes $189.4 million for repairs to agency facilities damaged by Hurricanes Ian and Nicole this fall. The House and Senate are expected to vote on the full omnibus spending bill this week so that it can be signed into law before a current stopgap funding bill expires Dec. 23. 
NASA Fiscal Year 2023 Budget (all values in millions)
Rocket Lab will have to wait until January for its next attempt at its inaugural Electron launch from Virginia after suffering delays because of weather and range issues. Rocket Lab scrubbed an Electron launch attempt Dec. 18 from Launch Complex 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia. While the rocket and its payload were ready for launch, upper-level winds were too strong and the company called off the launch near the end of the two-hour window that closed at 8 p.m. Eastern. The company said it ruled out a Dec. 19 launch because of those winds but was looking into additional opportunities before holiday airspace restrictions, intended to keep launches from interfering with a higher volume of air traffic, went into effect. However, the company said late Dec. 19 that forecasts on Dec. 20 called for continued unacceptably strong upper-level winds. Dec. 20 was the last opportunity for Rocket Lab to launch before the holiday airspace restrictions go into effect. The company said it would reschedule the launch for some time in January. The mission, called “Virginia is for Launch Lovers” by Rocket Lab, would have been the company’s tenth Electron launch of the year, but also the first from Launch Complex 2. The mission will place into orbit three radio-frequency surveillance satellites for HawkEye 360, a company based in Northern Virginia. Rocket Lab was prepared to launch Electron Dec. 16, but the night before announced that the launch was postponed two days to allow NASA, which operates the Wallops Flight Facility co-located with MARS, and the Federal Aviation Administration to complete what the company called “range-driven documentation.” The issue, Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck said in a Dec. 16 interview, involved differences between NASA and FAA on range safety and flight safety documentation. At a Dec. 14 briefing, NASA said it expected that paperwork to be completed in a day, but at a launch readiness review the two agencies said they needed more time to complete it. Beck said he was “disappointed and frustrated” with the delay. “This is the first time and there’s always going to be some teething issues,” he said. “I guess we’re just frustrated that these teething issues didn’t happen six months ago. It happened literally days before we were ready to launch.” He noted the rocket and its payload had been ready to launch for nearly two weeks while waiting for final approvals. The paperwork issue was not related to the rocket’s autonomous flight termination system . Its certification for use on Electron from Wallops was delayed by more than two years because of problems with the NASA-developed software for it. Before this delay, Rocket Lab said it was planning four to six Electron launches in 2023 from Wallops. Beck said customer preference is a major factor in determining what launch site to use. HawkEye 360, the customer for this first launch, specifically chose to launch from Wallops since it is also based in Virginia. U.S. government agencies are also likely to use Wallops for their Electron launches Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, though, will remain the primary site for Electron. “We can turn stuff around quickly and be very commercial,” he said. The company owns the launch site and thus has much more control over operations. The challenges of getting started at Wallops, he said, “make you appreciate owning your own range where you’re in control of all of this and you’re dealing with one regulator directly.” He said he expects that future launches from Wallops will go more smoothly. “That is what has been promised, and that is our expectation, because it can’t be like this.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX could start launching second-generation Starlink satellites in the coming weeks to add more capacity to its increasingly congested broadband network. In Dec. 16 regulatory filings with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX said it “anticipates that it will begin launching Gen2 satellites before the end of December 2022.” The company is asking the FCC for a 60-day special temporary authority (STA) to connect existing user terminals to the upcoming satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). If granted, the STA would allow SpaceX to start providing Gen2 services while waiting for the FCC to process its application for longer-term approval. Granting the STA would enable users “to access the increased capacity for low-latency broadband services from SpaceX’s upgraded, next-generation NGSO system as soon as its satellites are deployed,” SpaceX told the FCC. Starlink has more than one million “ active subscribers ,” SpaceX tweeted Dec. 19, up from 250,000 the company said it had in March. The network has come under strain amid its growing popularity, according to analysis from Ookla showing how median Starlink download speeds have continued to fall in the United States and Canada. SpaceX has launched more than 3,600 Starlink satellites to date with Falcon 9 rockets. Of those, around 3,300 of the 4,408 Gen1 satellites authorized by the FCC are estimated to still be in orbit. On Dec. 1, the FCC granted Starlink partial approval to operate 7,500 of the nearly 30,000 satellites in its proposed Gen2 constellation. In addition to adding more capacity for existing Starlink customers, SpaceX is hoping to use Gen2 to add new capabilities, including direct-to-smartphone services. The FCC continues to review SpaceX’s overall proposal to expand the Gen2 constellation significantly. The regulator also deferred a decision on SpaceX’s plans to add small radio frequency beacons to Gen2 satellites that, according to the company, will improve their safety by providing specialized telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) functions. SpaceX provided more details about the beacons in a separate regulatory filing, which detailed how they could be used to track and maintain contact with Gen 2 satellites during orbit raising and poor space weather conditions. The beacons would be capable of broadcasting a telemetry tracking message once every 100 seconds on average, SpaceX said. “Once the satellites reach their intended orbit, the beacons will be shut off, only to transmit again if commanded in the unlikely event of an emergency,” SpaceX senior director of satellite policy David Goldman told the FCC in a Dec. 15 letter. “Such capability will enable SpaceX to continue to lead the industry in space stewardship by formally including a redundant backup TT&C system on its already-advanced Gen2 satellites.” SpaceX has plans to use Falcon 9 rockets and its upcoming Starship heavy-launch vehicle to deploy Gen2. The company has previously outlined intentions to launch Gen2 satellites at least once a week, with plans to increase this cadence.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s first robotic lunar orbiter, Danuri, entered the lunar orbit after conducting its first lunar orbit insertion maneuver Dec. 16. The orbiter is circling the moon in an elliptic orbit every 12.3 hours, with a perigee of 109 kilometers and an apogee of 8,920 kilometers, said the science ministry in a Dec. 19 statement . The first maneuver, done with the firing of thrusters for thirteen minutes from 12:45 p.m. Eastern, “reduced the speed of Danuri from about 8,000 kilometers per hour to 7,500 kilometers per hour,” the ministry said in the statement. “It was confirmed that Danuri had been trapped in lunar gravity in a stable manner, which means it has become a genuine lunar orbiter.” The ministry said the spacecraft would conduct four more propulsive maneuvers with its thrusters by Dec. 28 to steer it into a circular, low-altitude orbit about 100 kilometers from the lunar surface by Dec. 29. If successful, the 678-kilogram orbiter will go through a brief period of commissioning and tests to begin its yearlong mission from January, with six scientific instruments aboard, including NASA-funded hypersensitive optical camera ShadowCam . The camera is set to collect images of permanently shadowed regions near the moon’s poles to search for evidence of ice deposits, observe seasonal changes, and measure the terrain inside the craters. Collected data will be shared with NASA, which aims to send humans to the moon in the coming years under its Artemis program. The Korean orbiter, also known as Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), launched into space Aug. 4 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 40. It flew to the moon on a ballistic lunar transfer trajectory, which initially took the spacecraft toward the sun and looped it back to the moon. The route, while much longer than traveling directly toward the moon, allows more fuel efficiency as it leverages the sun’s gravity for travel. While going to the moon, the orbiter demonstrated “ space internet ” by sending video and photo files, including a popular Korean band’s music video, at a distance of more than 1.2 million kilometers to Earth. The demonstration was conducted twice — Aug. 25 and Oct. 28 — using a space internet demonstrator developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) here, validating an interplanetary internet connection using delay-disruption tolerant networking. The spacecraft also sent photos of the Earth and the moon’s orbit it took between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15 using a built-in high-resolution camera at a distance of between 1.46 million kilometers and 1.548 million kilometers to Earth. The Danuri mission marks the beginning of South Korea’s deep space exploration initiative. The country’s leader recently pledged to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon in 2032 and on Mars in 2045. To that end, the government is planning to invest 2.13 billion won ($1.63 billion) in developing a next-generation rocket, KSLV-3, a two-stage vehicle capable of putting up to seven tons of payload into sun-synchronous orbit, 3.7 tons into geostationary transfer orbit, and 1,8 tons into Earth-Moon transfer orbit. As part of this, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) is working to develop kerosene-fueled 100-ton thrust engines in five years. The leader also promised to double the government’s space development budget in the next five years and funnel at least 100 trillion won ($76.7 billion) into the space sector by 2045. South Korea’s space budget for 2022 is 734 billion won ($563 million). 

L3Harris Technologies on Dec. 18 announced an agreement to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.7 billion. The deal comes exactly two years after Lockheed Martin sought to buy Aerojet in a $4.4 billion bid that was blocked by antitrust regulators earlier this year. L3Harris is buying Aerojet at $58 per share in an all-cash transaction. Aerojet shares traded at $54.89 on Dec. 16. The deal is expected to close in 2023, pending regulatory approvals. Aerojet Rocketdyne, based in Sacramento, California, manufactures rocket engines and propulsion systems for space vehicles, ballistic missiles and military tactical weapons. The company generates approximately $2.3 billion in annual revenue. L3Harris, headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, is a global defense and aerospace firm with $17 billion in annual revenue. The acquisition of Aerojet would give L3Harris a greater footprint in civil space, strategic defense systems and precision munitions. “With this acquisition, we will use the combined talents of more than 50,000 employees to drive continuous process improvement, enhance business operations and elevate the performance of this crucial national asset,” L3Harris CEO Christopher Kubasik said in a statement. Aerojet’s CEO Eileen Drake said the sale of the company to L3Harris will “accelerate innovation for national security propulsion solutions while providing a premium cash value for our shareholders and tremendous benefits for our employees, customers, partners and the communities in which we operate.” According to media reports, multiple buyers were interested in acquiring Aerojet, including General Electric, Textron and private equity firms. As the last remaining independent U.S. supplier of propulsion systems for tactical missiles, Aerojet has been at the center of a contentious battle for the past two years over the consolidation of aerospace and defense industry firms. The Pentagon never publicly disclosed its views on Lockheed’s attempt to buy Aerojet but made it clear in a report that it would challenge the vertical integration of defense suppliers. Aerojet executives and some lawmakers have argued that the company needs more financial resources to invest in next-generation technologies and would be better off as part of a larger defense contractor rather than as an independent company. ‘Strengthened merchant supplier’ The Federal Trade Commission in February blocked Lockheed’s bid arguing that the deal would give Lockheed — a major supplier of tactical missiles — the ability to “cut off other defense contractors from the critical components they need to build competing missiles.” L3Harris said Dec. 18 the acquisition will “ensure the defense industrial base and our customers will have a strengthened merchant supplier to effectively address both current and emerging threats – and promote scientific discovery and innovation – through targeted investment in advanced missile technologies, hypersonics and more.” Aerojet and L3Harris would combine complementary programs and not likely create the vertical integration concerns that scuttled the deal with Lockheed Martin, industry analyst Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners wrote in a research note last month. L3Harris does not have a “significant market position in solid propellant rocket motors or satellite maneuvering systems.” The acquisition of Aerojet would continue L3Harris’ expansion in the defense and space sectors following the 2019 merger of L3 Technologies and Harris Corp. The company in October acquired Viasat’s tactical data link business for $1.96 billion. If the deal goes through, it will bring certainty to Aerojet after two years of turmoil. The CEO of one of Aerojet’s main customers, Raytheon, recently complained in a Defense One interview that the quality of Aerojet’s rocket motors and schedule performance have slipped due to the distractions of being for sale. On the NASA side, Aerojet reported delays in the production of RS-25 engines for the Artemis moon program. The company won a $1.79 billion contract from NASA in 2020 to produce a new expendable version of the engine for the Space Launch System to replace the current supply of refurbished Space Shuttle-era RS-25 engines.
Updated Dec. 20 regarding NASA concerns about satellite antenna size and AST SpaceMobile comment. WASHINGTON — NASA has signed an agreement with AST SpaceMobile to cooperate on spaceflight safety, even as astronomers grow increasingly concerned about the effects of that company’s satellites. NASA announced Dec. 15 it signed agreement with the company to create what it called “a deeper level of coordination, cooperation, and data sharing” between the two regarding satellite operations, including avoiding conjunctions between their satellites and launch collision avoidance. The focus of the agreement is with on BlueWalker 3, the AST SpaceMobile satellite the company launched in September and which deployed its large phased-array antenna in mid-November. It also includes the company’s future BlueBird constellation, for which BlueWalker 3 is a prototype. In its own statement, AST SpaceMobile said it will collaborate with NASA’s Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis program on spaceflight safety practices. It will also provide the U.S. Space Force with updated predictions of its spacecraft’s trajectories through the Space Track service, allowing the Space Force to predict potential conjunctions up to a week in advance. “This agreement formalizes a commitment between AST SpaceMobile and NASA to share information and help safeguard low Earth orbit,” said Raymond Sedwick, chief scientist of space systems at AST SpaceMobile, in a statement. While even the full BlueBird constellation of dozens of satellites is significantly smaller that megaconstellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, NASA had informed the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that the proposed size of the antennas on those satellites, designed to enable direct-to-smartphone communications, posed a hazard because it gave the satellites a cross-sectional area far larger than other spacecraft, including those of NASA’s “A-Train” of Earth observation satellites in neighboring orbits. NASA said in a subsequent FCC filing that it had engaged in technical discussions with AST SpaceMobile and would not oppose the issuance of an FCC license. AST SpaceMobile noted in a filing with the FCC that it had stated an incorrect antenna size in an earlier document that was cited in NASA’s original filing. NASA stated that another factor in the agreement is that AST SpaceMobile’s satellites use what the agency described as a “high impulse, low thrust maneuvering system that may require complex risk mitigation maneuver plans.” The improved interaction between NASA and AST SpaceMobile enabled by the agreement, NASA said, ensures “all parties involved are fully aware of the exact location of spacecraft and debris in orbit resulting in a safer space environment for all.” NASA signed a similar agreement with SpaceX in March 2021 regarding spaceflight safety involving Starlink satellites. As part of that agreement, SpaceX agreed that, in the case of any potential conjunctions between Starlink and NASA spacecraft, it would maneuver the Starlink satellites to avoid them. The NASA-AST SpaceMobile announcements did not disclose if there is a similar provision. While NASA says the agreement with AST SpaceMobile improves spaceflight safety, another group remains concerned about the effects of the company’s satellites. The large size of the BlueWalker 3 antenna means it reflects enough sunlight that, at times, it can be one of the brightest objects in the night sky, to the dismay of astronomers. In a Nov. 28 statement, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference, also known as CPS, said it was concerned about both the brightness of the satellite as well as its use of spectrum reserved for terrestrial applications that could interfere with radio astronomy. In the statement, CPS said that BlueWalker 3, after deploying its 64-square-meter antenna, can reach a brightness of magnitude 1, placing it among the 20 brightest stars visible. By contrast, Starlink satellites, which have concerned astronomers since SpaceX started launching the constellation in 2019, have a brightness between magnitude 6 and 7 once in their operational orbits, too dim to be seen by the naked eye but which can still interfere with astronomical observations. Radio astronomers are concerned that AST SpaceMobile satellites could interfere with observatories even in radio-quiet areas that limit terrestrial use of those frequencies. “Frequencies allocated to cell phones are already challenging to observe even in radio quiet zones we have created for our facilities. New satellites such as BlueWalker 3 have the potential to worsen this situation and compromise our ability to do science if not properly mitigated,” said Philip Diamond, director-general of the Square Kilometer Array Observatory, which is building two large radio observatories in Australia and South Africa, in the IAU statement. “BlueWalker 3 is a big shift in the constellation satellite issue and should give us all reason to pause,” said Piero Benvenuti, director of CPS, in the statement. In a statement, AST SpaceMobile said it was in talks with astronomers and others about ways to mitigate the effects of its satellites. That would include not broadcasting in or near the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone in parts of Virginia and West Virginia as well as other major radioastronomy observatories. The IAU said it has started discussions with AST SpaceMobile about the effects of its satellites on both optical and radio astronomy. “Recent discussions with some operators have led to mitigation measures,” the organization stated, “but much more work is needed.”
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will soon start depositing a cache of samples that it has collected since landing last year as part of efforts to eventually return those samples to Earth. At an online briefing Dec. 16 held during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), project officials said the rover is scheduled to place the first of 10 sample tubes on the surface as soon as Dec. 19. Confirmation the tube was successfully placed on the surface would come in images returned the next day. Perseverance is depositing the tubes to create a depot that could be retrieved by later missions in the overall Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. It will serve as a backup to Perseverance itself, which will keep other tubes and return them to a future Sample Retrieval Lander. That lander will carry two helicopters, based on the Ingenuity helicopter included on the Perseverance missions, that will fly from the lander to the cache, picking up a tube at a time and returning them to the lander. That approach, as outlined in a revised Mars Sample Return strategy released in July , does away with a rover that would pick up samples, reducing the overall cost of the mission. The cache is located in a region called Three Forks that will also serve as the landing site for the future Sample Retrieval Lander. “One would be hard-pressed to imagine a more benign place,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters. The terrain is flat with few rocks or other obstructions. “The surface is like a pool table, really boring.” The tubes will not be dropped in a single place but instead spread out over dozens of meters. “There are a lot of different requirements about how far apart the tubes can be to allow the retrieval,” said Justin Maki, Mars 2020 imaging scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Among the biggest is placing them far enough apart that helicopters can pick them up without disturbing the rest of the cache. The result is an intricate pattern with the 10 tubes placed between 5 and 15 meters apart from one another. Depositing them requires carrying out a “highly choreographed and strategically coordinated” plan, said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist at JPL. That process will take one to two months, she estimated. Once the depot is complete, Perseverance will continue its science mission, heading out of the floor of Jezero Crater and onto the top of the delta created by the ancient river that flowed into the crater. The rover will continue up to the crater rim and perhaps beyond, collecting additional samples along the way. The creation of the depot will also mark a change in sampling strategy for Perseverance. “During this prime mission, the sampling approach taken by Mars 2020 has been to collect paired samples,” said Meenakshi Wadhwa, MSR principal scientist at Arizona State University. One tube of each pair will be placed in the cache and the other retained on the rover. After completing the cache, Perseverance will switch to a “single sample strategy,” said Stack Morgan, collecting only one sample at a time. “We can think about more locations and more kinds of rocks we can sample.” Perseverance has filled 21 of its 43 tubes so far. Helicopter development As Perseverance deposits sample tubes as the depot, engineers are working on the design of the helicopters that would pick them up. That effort started in earnest about six months ago, when MSR managers asked the Ingenuity team if a helicopter based on that design could be used to pick up sample tubes, said Teddy Tzanetos, manager for Sample Recovery Helicopter at JPL, during another AGU Fall Meeting briefing Dec. 12. There had been some earlier studies, he said, looking at the feasibility of using an Ingenuity-based helicopter for transporting sample tubes. The new helicopter is similar to Ingenuity, with the biggest differences being the addition of a robotic arm to pick up sample tubes and wheels on each of its four landing legs. It weighs 2.3 kilograms, about half a kilogram more than Ingenuity, and can carry a 150-gram sample tube. Other characteristics, including its maximum speed, range and flight time, are the same as Ingenuity. “We want to, where we can, rely on heritage, and where appropriate, deviate from that heritage to generate this new capability,” he said. “But we are largely leveraging all of the amazing lessons learned that we have learned, and will continue to learn, from Ingenuity over the last year and a half.” Retrieving a sample will take four sols, or Martian days. On the first sol, the helicopter will fly from the Sample Retrieval Lander to a landing site a few meters from the tube. On the second sol, the helicopter will roll up to the tube and grapple it. On the third sol, the helicopter will fly back to the lander, and on the fourth sol roll into position so that the lander’s robotic arm can take the tube. “We’re really a fusion now of a small little rover that can fly, or you can think about it as a small helicopter that can drive,” Tzanetos said. He said the new helicopter can leverage the design in Ingenuity because of conservative margins in the design of Ingenuity, so that the new one can be heavier without any major changes. “We’re going to keep testing that to see how much further we can push our old heritage design. We’re going to be making some decisions in the months ahead of us about how much of our heritage that we want to keep versus how much do we want to change.” Ingenuity, meanwhile, continues to operate on Mars, far exceeding original plans for no more than five flights. At the Dec. 12 AGU briefing, Håvard Grip, chief pilot for Ingenuity, noted that before the first flight the project created a logbook for recording the flights. “A book with only five pages is going to look too silly, so we put a bunch of extra pages in here, just so it would look like a real book.” Ingenuity made its 36th flight Dec. 10, traveling 110 meters in one minute. “Guess what?” Grip said. “We are out of pages.”
NASA is delaying a spacewalk at the International Space Station by two days to support the Russian investigation into a coolant leak on a Soyuz spacecraft docked there. In a statement late Dec. 16, NASA announced that a spacewalk by astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio, previously scheduled for Dec. 19, would be pushed back to Dec. 21. The spacewalk is the second of two planned to install a new set of solar arrays on the station, following one Dec. 3. NASA said the postponement would allow flight controllers to use the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm to inspect the exterior of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked there. That spacecraft suffered a coolant leak late Dec. 14 , canceling a Russian spacewalk that was about to start. The “majority” of the coolant in that loop in the spacecraft leaked out by 1:30 p.m. Eastern Dec. 15, NASA said. Both the cause of the leak and its severity remain uncertain. The Canadarm2 observations are meant to augment those performed hours after the leak by the European Robotic Arm attached to the Nauka module on the station’s Russian segment. Those observations were reportedly inconclusive in identifying the source of the leak. Despite the lack of information about the source of the leak, Roscosmos officials have speculated it was caused by a micrometeoroid impact. In a Dec. 16 statement posted by Roscosmos on Telegram, a social media service, Viktor Voropaev, lead engineer at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, said he believed an impact by a micrometeoid linked to the Geminid meteor shower was the “main suspect” for the leak. He offered no other evidence to support that conclusion. Roscosmos also denied a report in Russian media Dec. 16 that temperatures in the Soyuz spacecraft rose as high as 50 degrees Celsius after the loss of coolant. Temperatures in the spacecraft are instead about 30 degrees Celsius, which Roscosmos described as only a “slight change” and do not pose an immediate threat to the spacecraft or people on the station. NASA, in its statement, noted that Roscosmos performed a test of a thruster on the Soyuz Dec. 16. “The systems that were tested were nominal, and Roscosmos assessments of additional Soyuz systems continue,” NASA stated. “Temperatures and humidity within the Soyuz spacecraft, which remains docked to the Rassvet module, are within acceptable limits.” While there may be no immediate danger, there remain concerns that the spacecraft may not be able to return to Earth as currently planned in March 2023. Soyuz MS-22 launched to the station Sept. 21 with NASA’s Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. The loss of coolant could affect not just conditions for the people on board during its return to Earth but also computer systems critical for operating the spacecraft. Options include operating as-is, with the spacecraft and its crew returning in March; an early return of the Soyuz and its crew, leaving just four people on the ISS until a new Soyuz can be launched; or launching the next Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, without a crew to replace Soyuz MS-22. The last option would likely extend the stay of Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio until another Soyuz is ready to launch their replacements. In a Dec. 17 post on Telegram , Roscosmos said that working groups are continuing to investigate the leak and make recommendations for next steps. Decisions on those next steps are planned for a meeting at the end of December. Roscosmos added that preparations for the launch of Soyuz MS-23 continue at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. “If necessary, it can be accelerated to send it to the ISS at an earlier date.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched the first O3b mPower satellites for SES’ next-generation broadband constellation Dec. 16, each promising 10 times more throughput than their predecessors in medium Earth orbit (MEO). A Falcon 9 carrying two of 11 planned O3b mPower satellites lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 5:48 p.m. Eastern and deployed them in separate sequences about two hours later. It was the eighth mission for the rocket’s reusable first-stage booster, which landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after lift-off. Using onboard all-electric propulsion, it will take about five months for the Boeing-built O3b mPower satellites to reach their orbital positions. Meanwhile, SpaceX plans to launch two more pairs of O3b mPower satellites early next year, which would enable SES to start initial O3b mPower services globally by the third quarter of 2023. SpaceX is slated to launch another pair of O3b mPower satellites later 2023, and then three on a single Falcon 9 mission in 2024 to add additional capacity to the constellation. Preparing to upgrade Each O3b mPower satellite is designed to provide up to 10 gigabits of throughput, SES CEO Steve Collar said during a press event here, roughly 10 times more than the first-generation O3b satellites built by Thales Alenia Space. Based on a modified version of Boeing’s 702 platform, each second-generation satellite is also designed to generate up to around 5,000 electronically steered spot beams. SES says these flexible beams would enable the operator to dynamically move capacity in response to shifting demand in real-time, unlike first-generation O3b satellites that have mechanically steered antennas and just 10 beams each. “With each satellite that we add, the economics improve,” Collar said, “because, essentially, the satellites become cheaper … all the links become more efficient [and] we get this virtuous cycle of more and more efficiency.” SES operates 20 first-generation O3b satellites in MEO, which offer lower latency services than the satellites the company operates farther away from the Earth in geostationary orbit. The operator has been using the MEO network to meet growing demand for connectivity in markets including mobile backhaul, aviation, maritime, and government. Collar pointed to how SES initially started deploying the services in the Amazon region via Brazil-based telecoms partner Claro in small incremental steps because it was “not entirely sure how it would take off.” “[W]e started with 10 megabits, then 50 megabits, then 100 megabits,” he said, “we’re now delivering almost six gigabits per second with Claro in Brazil. He said the region is one of the places “we’re hitting the limits of what’s possible with O3b, and that’s where O3b mPower comes in.” Globally, Collar expects about 50% of O3b mPower’s capacity will serve government customers, including the U.S. where SES is strengthening its focus on the national security market . At one point SpaceX had planned to launch a separate Falcon 9 from nearby Kennedy Space Center Dec. 16 — less than half an hour after its SES mission — for its Starlink broadband constellation. However, SpaceX said it decided to delay the Starlink mission to Dec. 17 to prioritize the O3b mPower satellites.
VentureScope, a consulting and venture investment firm, won a contract to establish an internal accelerator as part of AFWERX, a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory initiative to connect government, industry and academic innovators. Under a $750,000 Air Force Small Business Innovation Research contract, VentureScope is setting up The Refinery, an accelerator to help innovators within the Air Force address problems and devise solutions that could be adopted throughout the Air Force and Defense Department. In recent years, the Defense Department, Air Force and Space Force have established multiple initiatives to forge ties with commercial firms developing technology and services with promising military applications. In contrast, The Refinery is designed for Air Force personnel. “The Air Force has some really smart folks with some sharp ideas that, if properly cultivated, could solve key problems,” Jason Chen, VentureScope founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “This contract is focused on having an internal accelerator to help them flesh those ideas out, develop buy-in within the Air Force and build out the actual solution.” Traditionally, Falls Church, Virginia-based VentureScope has helped government agencies and large private enterprises connect with startups and venture capital groups. VentureScope also runs Mach37, an accelerator for cybersecurity startups. Mach37 focuses on building “the next generation of cyber companies through its diverse network, emerging tech scouting, and emphasis on applying customer discovery, leadership and well-being skill sets,” according to a Dec. 13 VentureScope news release. For the SBIR contract, VentureScope will draw on its Mach37 platform to support people addressing military problems. “We are pleased to partner with VentureScope and their team to bring their startup acceleration expertise into the Air Force,” Colin Dziadaszek, Air Force Refinery program manager, said in a statement. “Through their SBIR contract, we are adding world-class accelerator tools, workshops and programmatics to The Refinery’s operations. This will advance our goal to help Airmen and Guardians rapidly prototype and scale their solutions that meet critical mission needs.” After years of working with entrepreneurs, VentureScope executives see growing demand among organizations seeking support for intrapreneurs, people within organizations who have innovative ideas. “Large organizations are trying to create opportunities for people to stay inside and use their creative mindsets to build something that would be of value to the organization and its customer base,” Chen said. Like entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs can help organizations struggling to keep up with the frenetic pace of technological change, Chen added. While intrapreneurs may not profit financially from their innovations in the same way as entrepreneurs, “they’re looking to improve their own jobs, solve the problems that are right in front of them and have an impact on an organization,” said Jennifer Quarrie, VentureScope chief operations officer. In addition, intrapreneurial activity can lead to an individual’s promotion with an organization and give someone a sense of autonomy within a hierarchical organization, Quarrie added.
The White House announced the new membership of an advisory group of the National Space Council Dec. 16 with wholesale changes in the roster reflecting a new emphasis on climate change and workforce issues. Vice President Kamala Harris, chair of the National Space Council, announced a roster of 30 members of the Users’ Advisory Committee (UAG), the advisory group that supports the council on various space topics. Their membership on the committee is pending a formal appointment by the NASA administrator, a formality linked to NASA’s role in hosting the UAG. The new UAG members, the White House announcement said, “represent a cross-section of companies and organizations that support the United States’ large and highly skilled space workforce; users of space services, including climate scientists and agriculture providers; individuals focused on developing the next generation of space professionals; and leading experts in space.” The board will be chaired by Lester Lyles, a retired U.S. Air Force general who also serves as chair of the NASA Advisory Council. Harris announced the selection of Lyles at the most recent National Space Council meeting Sept. 8 in Houston. Lyles, who previously served on the UAG, succeeded James Ellis, a retired admiral who is no longer on the UAG. Of the 27 members who were previously appointed to the UAG during the Trump administration, only seven people, including Lyles, were retained. Five are executives of major aerospace companies: Tory Bruno; chief executive of United Launch Alliance; Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX; Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin; James Taiclet, president and chief executive of Lockheed Martin; and Kathy Warden, chairwoman and chief executive of Northrop Grumman. The sixth is Mandy Vaughn, who was previously on the UAG in her previous role as president of Virgin Orbit subsidiary VOX Space and returns as a “subject matter expert.” The new UAG includes several people with expertise in climate science and the environment, reflecting a priority that Harris set at the first meeting of the council she chaired in December 2021. They include Nancy Colleton, president of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies; Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Project Drawdown, a climate change organization; and Jeremy Williams, head of Climate Corporation, part of Bayer Crop Science. Education and workforce experts are also represented on the UAG, reflecting another priority that Harris set for the council. They include Lance Bush, president and chief executive of the Challenger Center; Daniel Hastings, head of the department of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Harold Lee Martin, chancellor of North Carolina A&T State University. A third priority that Harris announced for the council was promoting norms and rules of behavior in space. The UAG includes executives of two companies involved in space sustainability: Ron Lopez, president and managing director of Astroscale U.S., and Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and chief executive of Slingshot Aerospace. The UAG does include executives of several other space companies, including Amazon Project Kuiper, Ball Aerospace, Boeing, Maxar and Planet. “LEO constellations like Project Kuiper play an important role in the growing space economy, and this is a great opportunity to help shape the nation’s long-term space policy and strategy goals,” said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology of Amazon Project Kuiper and a new member of the UAG, said in a statement to SpaceNews. However, some companies previously represented on the UAG are not included on the new roster, such as Aerojet Rocketdyne, Relativity Space and Sierra Nevada Corporation. The New UAG also lacks current or former politicians. The previous roster included the governor of Alabama, lieutenant governor of Florida and former congressman John Culberson, who was chair of the appropriations subcommittee that funded NASA. The earlier UAG included four former astronauts, none of whom are returning: Buzz Aldrin, Eileen Collins, Harrison Schmitt and David Wolf. The new UAG includes Charlie Bolden, former astronaut and NASA administrator, as well as Sian Proctor, who was pilot of the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission launched by SpaceX in September 2021. The White House announcement did not state when the full UAG will first meet or if it will retain the same structure of subcommittees the earlier version had. 
National Space Council Users’ Advisory Group membership 
* denotes members retained from the previous version of the group
Maxar Technologies, a space company that gained global attention with its high-resolution satellite images of the Ukraine war, is being acquired by the private equity firm Advent International for $6.4 billion. Under the deal announced Dec. 16, Advent is acquiring all outstanding shares of Maxar common stock for $53.00 per share in cash, more than double Maxar’s stock price of $23.10 on December 15, the company’s last full trading day as a public company. The acquisition is expected to be completed in mid-2023. Advent International, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is a global firm with $89 billion in assets. Maxar is headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, The acquisition will help Maxar “to accelerate investment in and development of the company’s next-generation satellite technologies and data insights for its customers,” the company said in a statement. Maxar, with an estimated $2 billion in revenue for 2022, will remain a U.S.-controlled and operated company. The company is the U.S. government’s primary supplier of satellite imagery and in May secured a $3.2 billion agreement with the National Reconnaissance Office to provide imagery over the next 10 years. Separately from its satellite imaging business, Maxar also operates a satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, a business that delivered more than 100 large geostationary communications satellites over the past three decades but has faced headwinds from declining commercial orders and has been pursuing defense and intelligence contracts . As a private company, Maxar said, it will be better positioned to successfully deploy a $600 million next-generation WorldView Legion imaging constellation, a program that has been plagued by delays . “ With approximately $28 billion invested across the defense, security and cybersecurity sectors in the last three years, Advent’s portfolio companies have substantial expertise supporting many satellite and defense platforms which serve the U.S. government and its allies as well as companies across the globe,” the company said. Daniel Jablonsky, president and CEO of Maxar, called the $6.4 billion acquisition “an exceptional outcome for stockholders” and a validation of the company’s products and reputation. “As a private company, we will be able to move faster, including in next generation satellite technologies,” Jablonsky told SpaceNews Dec. 16. He said Advent wants to accelerate the deployment of WorldView Legion seven and eight after the initial six satellites are in orbit. Under the previous plan, “we wouldn’t have started spending on them until the tail end of 2024, maybe the beginning of 2025,” he said. “This allows us to go faster and get those birds up sooner for our customers.” Jablonsky said Advent also is committed to the satellite manufacturing business. “That’s been part of the turnaround story here at Maxar,” he said, noting the company recently received orders for two new Sirius XM satellites. “We are excited about continuing to do that.” David Mussafer, chairman and managing partner of Advent, said Maxar is a “uniquely positioned and attractive asset in satellite manufacturing and space-based high-resolution imagery, with an incredible workforce and many opportunities ahead.” Maxar became a U.S. corporation about two years ago when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA. The Canadian firm MDA purchased the Palo Alto-based satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral in 2012 and in 2017 acquired the Westminster-based Earth-imaging firm DigitalGlobe. The combined companies were rebranded Maxar Technologies in 2018, and MDA was sold off in 2020.
A Falcon 9 successfully launched an Earth science mission jointly developed by the United States and France to monitor water levels and the effects of climate change. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 6:46 a.m. Eastern Dec. 16. The rocket’s upper stage released the payload, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft, into an 890-kilometer orbit 52 minutes later. The rocket’s first stage, making its sixth flight, landed back at the launch site seven and a half minutes after liftoff. The launch was previously scheduled for Dec. 15 but SpaceX postponed it to perform inspections of two first-stage engines where moisture was noticed. That moisture could have been water left over from recent rains, leaking fuel or a fluid used in the engine refurbishment process between flights, said Julianna Scheiman, civil satellite missions director at SpaceX, during a Dec. 14 pre-launch briefing. If it was water, the launch could proceed, but if not the engines would need to be replaced, a process that would have delayed the launch by “many days,” she said. NASA said late Dec. 15 that inspections had cleared the launch without requiring an engine replacement. SWOT is a joint mission of NASA and the French space agency CNES to track water levels globally with much better resolution than past spacecraft. “What SWOT will do is give us a ten-fold improvement in the fidelity, the spatial resolution of our measurements of water height,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division, at the pre-launch briefing. That improved resolution will provide new data on ocean circulation and better track changes along coastlines, she said. It will also be able to measure inland water bodies like lakes and rivers that could not be tracked by earlier altimetry missions. “Globally, we’ll be able to go from seeing a couple thousand inland water bodies, like reservoirs, to millions.” Those measurements, she said, are critical for understanding climate change effects, such as rising sea levels. “The measurements from SWOT will help us really understand how this water cycle is changing and the critical role the oceans play in climate change.” The key instrument for SWOT is the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn), which enables the higher resolution water height measurements. KaRIn is installed on a boom 10 meters long that will be deployed starting about four days after launch. “It’s a first-of-its-kind design,” said Parag Vaze, SWOT project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of KaRIn at the pre-launch briefing. “We plan to do it step-by-step, carefully.” That deployment will take about four days, completing the initial phase of post-launch commissioning of the spacecraft. In addition to KaRIn, SWOT carries an altimeter similar to those used on the Jason series of ocean science satellites and a microwave radiometer based on the design flown on Jason-3. Three other instruments are used to precisely determine the orbit of SWOT to enable its science. NASA spent $822.4 million on SWOT, including KaRIn and some other instruments and the launch. CNES spent 340 million euros ($362 million) on the mission, providing the altimeter and other instruments and the spacecraft bus, built by Thales Alenia Space. CNES will also handle spacecraft operations. The Canadian Space Agency and United Kingdom Space Agency also contributed components of SWOT, valued at about $26 million combined. SWOT has a prime mission of three years, but those involved in the mission expect it to last longer. The satellite bus has a rated lifetime of at least 10 years, said Thierry Lafon, SWOT project manager at CNES. “If everything is OK on board, certainly there will be an extension of the mission. Five years is completely reachable,” he said. “I can guarantee we will be able to make this a long mission because we need this data for a long time.” The launch is the first of two Falcon 9 missions planned by SpaceX for the day. Another Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral at 4:21 p.m. Eastern carrying the first two O3b mPOWER communications satellites for operator SES. SpaceX had scheduled a third launch from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A carrying Starlink satellites at little as 20 minutes after the SES launch, but the company said late Dec. 15 it was “prioritizing” the O3b mPOWER launch and delayed the Starlink launch one day.
China launched a Long March 11 solid rocket from Xichang early Friday, completing a campaign of seven orbit launch attempts in just over a week which included the debut of two new launch vehicles. The Long March 11 rocket lifted off at 1:17 a.m. Eastern (0617 UTC) Dec. 16, sending the Shiyan-21 satellite into orbit. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced launch success less than 30 minutes after liftoff. Little was revealed about the Shiyan-21 satellite, with CASC stating only that it was developed by its subsidiary, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). Shiyan series satellites are believed to be used to pilot new technologies in space. State media Xinhua reported that the newly launched satellite will be used for “in-orbit verification of new space technologies,” adding that Shiyan means “experiment” in Chinese. The launcher was provided by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), another major entity under CASC. The mission marked the 15th launch of the 20.8-meter-long, 2-meter-diameter and 58-metric-ton four-stage solid Long March 11. Of these, 11 have taken place at national spaceports Jiuquan and Xichang, with four more conducted from converted barges out on the Yellow Sea. The Long March 11 uses a cold launch system, which sees it expelled from its canister before igniting. https://twitter.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1603646125977661440 The launch also completed a flurry of seven Chinese launches across a little more than nine days, and just 36 hours after the previous launch from Xichang, which saw a hypergolic Long March 2D rocket launch a fourth group of three Yaogan-36 reconnaissance satellites. The intense period of launch activity kicked off at 0115 UTC Dec. 7 at Jiuquan, seeing a successful second flight of the Kuaizhou-11 rocket for CASC sister group CASIC, more than two years after the failure of the first launch. The launch put the VHF Data Exchange System (VDES) test satellite into orbit as part of the Xingyun constellation. The route to operational status for Kuaizhou-11 may also have been hindered by an explosion at a CASIC site at Jiuquan. This was followed by the launch Dec. 8 of the Gaofen-5 (01A) hyperspectral imaging satellite on a Long March 2D from Taiyuan, north China, with the first launch of the Jielong-3 solid rocket from a converted barge in the Yellow Sea 12 hours later. Launches of the Shiyan-20 A and B satellites on a Long March 4C and Zhuque-2 , a failed attempt by private firm Landspace to become the first to fly a methane-fueled rocket to orbit, took place at Jiuquan on Dec. 12 and 14 respectively. The launches mean China has launched 62 times this year and already surpassed its national record of launches in a calendar year, 55, set in 2021 . China’s prior record had been 39 launches, reached in both 2018 and 2020. 51 of these launches have been Long March launches conducted by CASC, all successfully. The Jielong-3, Kuiazhou-11 and Zhuque-2 are among the 11 non-Long March rockets launching from China this year, along with four launches of the smaller Kuaizhou-1A , the debut of the ZK-1A from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a third consecutive failure of iSpace’s Hyperbola-1 and two launches of Galactic Energy’s Ceres-1 solid rocket. CASC stated early in the year that it intended to launch more than 50 times in 2022, including a series of missions to complete the Tiangong space station. At press time, the U.S. had conducted 82 launches so far in 2022, including Rocket Lab Electron launches. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 accounts for 55 of these, and another pair scheduled for later Dec. 16.
Updated 7:10 p.m. Eastern with launch slip. WASHINGTON — The first Electron launch from Wallops will mark what spaceport officials hope is the start of a new era of increased launch activity there. Rocket Lab said Dec. 15 that its first Electron launch from Launch Complex 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia, has slipped two days to Dec. 18 between 6 and 8 p.m. Eastern. The company said that NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration were still working to complete range documentation needed for the launch. A backup launch opportunity is available Dec. 19. The introduction of the Electron, delayed by two years because of problems developing and certifying a NASA autonomous flight termination system , comes as more new launch vehicles enter the market and look for sites to launch from. “We have a great deal of interest, both from international rocket providers as well as domestic, for seeing if they can secure an opportunity to launch from MARS,” said Ted Mercer, chief executive and executive director of Virginia Space, which operates the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) where Launch Complex 2 is based. He spoke during a Dec. 14 briefing about the upcoming Electron launch. He said “several” launch companies are talking with him about launching from MARS, but did not identify any. “Interest is high,” he said, including working on an agreement with a non-U.S. launch provider. “We are willing and able to talk to new providers about launching from MARS.” At a media event in June, Mercer said he was working with companies to understand their requirements. Some companies, he said then, were looking to use methane rather than kerosene for fuel. “We’re already planning for those,” he said, along with upgrades to launch control facilities to replace old blockhouses. In addition to the MARS facilities, there are two “flat pads” at Wallops with only the most basic infrastructure, such as a concrete pad and lightning towers, that could be used for small launch vehicles. Bob Jameson, deputy director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said in June those were built by DARPA for potential use in its DARPA Launch Challenge, and are still owned by that agency but operated by NASA. “That represents the future of a multi-user spaceport,” he said of those flat pads. “Emerging small launch vehicles would bring in all their stuff and operate there.” The main user of MARS today is Northrop Grumman, which launches its Antares rocket for Cygnus cargo missions to the International Space Station from Launch Pad 0A at MARS and Minotaur rockets from Launch Pad 0B. (Virginia Space designates Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 2 as Launch Pad 0C.) However, Minotaur launches are infrequent and Antares will go on hiatus after one more launch early next year as Northrop works with Firefly Aerospace on a new version of the rocket to replace its existing Ukrainian first stage and Russian engines. That new version, the Antares 330, will launch from Launch Pad 0A at MARS as well, but no earlier than late 2024. In the interim, Northrop will launch Cygnus missions on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from Florida. In that hiatus, Rocket Lab may become the anchor tenant at MARS. Company executives said in a Nov. 9 earnings call that they expect to conduct four to six Electron launches from Wallops, out of 14 Electron launches overall, in 2023 . The company is also building a factory just outside the Wallops gates where it will produce its Neutron reusable vehicle, which will launch from a new pad at Wallops as soon as 2024. That activity means jobs for the region. “We see a very large number of jobs” coming from Electron and Neutron activities at Wallops, said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, at the Dec. 14 briefing. “It’s on the order of hundreds. We’re looking to establish a pretty significant footprint here.” David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said he has been working with officials in the Eastern Shore region on issues ranging from launch-related tourism to education and workforce to support a higher launch rate. Wallops-related activities today have an economic impact on the region of $1.4 billion a year, he said, “and we see nothing but that increasing with Peter’s investment and confidence in Wallops.” Mercer said he expected the projected increase in launch activity to attract more suppliers in the area to support Rocket Lab and other launch companies. “That is another dimension that you will see in terms of growth and economic impact on the Eastern Shore.”
SAN FRANCISCO – EOI Space, the Earth-observation startup formerly known as Earth Observant, attracted its first major customer for ultra-high-resolution imagery drawn from a constellation of satellites destined for very low Earth orbit. NTT Data, part of the Tokyo-based technology company NTT Group, is acquiring 2.5 percent of EOI plus exclusive rights to sell EOI satellite imagery in Japan, one of the world’s largest Earth-observation markets. NTT Data is the first partner to sign up for priority access to EOI imagery and services. EOI plans to work with other organizations and governments across the globe, but the NTT Data contract is an important one. “That contract we have with NTT alone makes us profitable,” Christopher Thein, EOI CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. EOI is preparing to send its first Stingray satellite into very low Earth orbit in early 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rideshare flight. Five more EOI satellites are scheduled to follow on SpaceX flights within one year. In 2023, NTT Data will establish a secure access facility in Japan to downlink data from the Stringray constellation. NTT Data expects to begin acquiring satellite imagery from EOI in December 2024. Through added-value services like imagery analysis based on artificial intelligence, NTT Data forecasts sales related to its pact with EOI to exceed 10 billion yen ($72.4 million) by 2028, according to a Nov. 25 NTT Data news release. Most sales will come from defense, public safety, and disaster management applications, the release added. “By utilizing EOI Space’s Stingray constellation, we will be able to accumulate large amounts of very high-resolution imagery in our data center and analyze it locally,” Hideyuki Nakamura, NTT Data executive manager, said in a statement. “Using our latest AI algorithms, we will provide value-added products to our customers by extracting the differences from past and newly collected data to detect anomalies. In addition, we will be able to expand the use of EOI Space’s imagery into various disaster prevention systems and facility maintenance projects that will be developed in the future, creating new products that improve resiliency.” Extensive onboard processing will allow EOI Stingray satellites to deliver data rapidly. “People are going after onboard compute,” Thein said. “We are going after it in a much bigger way. We will have a cluster of multiple devices on the spacecraft.” EOI, based in Louisville, Colorado, was founded in 2017 to provide government and commercial customers with Earth imagery. “I look forward to serving the commercial market, but we are more focused on defense and national intelligence from the get-go because those are the customers that buy the most data and want, specifically, the highest resolution,” Thein said. Satellites traveling in very low Earth orbit require propulsion to offset atmospheric drag. EOI developed its own Hall-effect thruster for its 330-kilogram satellites.
TAMPA, Fla. — British cybersecurity software developer Arqit is looking to sell a partly built satellite after scrapping plans for a space-based quantum encryption network. Arqit said Dec. 14 it no longer needs satellites to deliver encryption keys that can resist attacks from quantum computers. Instead, the company said it has developed a terrestrial distribution method that enables symmetric key cryptography without the risk and costs of building out a quantum communications network in space. “The security of encryption keys created on the end points [such as customer devices and data centers] using our lightweight software agent is as strong with a terrestrial method as with the satellite method,” Arqit founder and CEO David Williams said during the company’s Dec. 14 earnings call. The decision does not affect the construction of a satellite that Qinetiq (now owned by Redwire) is currently building under a contract partly funded by the European Space Agency. SEC probe The strategy pivot came as Arqit disclosed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating its merger with Centricus Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that catapulted the startup to the NASDAQ stock exchange in September 2021. Arqit said in a regulatory filing that it is cooperating with the investigation, including by voluntarily producing documents. “The SEC has informed Arqit that this is a fact-finding inquiry,” the company said without providing additional details. Arqit recorded revenue for its fiscal year to the end of September that is lower than it projected in August 2021, during an investor presentation a month before the SPAC merger to attract investor interest. The company launched commercial operations this year and recorded $7.2 million in revenue for its fiscal year 2022, or $20 million when including other income, including funds from ESA. In the August 2021 presentation, Arqit said it expected to generate $14 million in revenue for the 2021 calendar year, and $32 million in 2022. The company’s ESA contract was recently reclassified as other income in Arqit’s accounts, instead of revenue, partly because the company does not consider this work to be its primary output. Arqit said in a regulatory filing that it is also aware of a putative class action lawsuit against the company, filed in early May, which alleges “materially false and misleading statements relating to Arqit’s business prospects and projections.” While Arqit said it has not been served the complaint, and has no knowledge about whether the lawsuit will proceed, it “intends to vigorously defend against these claims” if necessary. SPACs offer companies a fast-track to the public markets without the level of due diligence that accompanies traditional stock market listings, enabling them to make optimistic growth projections to garner investor support. The popularity of SPACs among space and other companies has been declining amid stricter regulations, weakening economic conditions, and the poor stock performance of post-SPAC companies. Arqit’s satellite pivot Arqit said there is still demand for quantum encryption satellites, including from government defense departments looking to avoid sending data traffic across international cables. Instead of building its own satellites, Arqit intends to license the technology it has developed for them to other organizations. There are discussions with “a number of potential customers” to buy the satellite that is currently under construction, according to Arqit, and for licenses to use its quantum satellite intellectual property. Arqit had previously lined up Virgin Orbit, which had invested in the company’s SPAC deal, to launch the satellite in 2023. “Through innovation we have simplified our technology and removed significant future capital expenditures,” Williams added. Arqit recently announced customer contracts with cybersecurity firm Fortinet, computer developer Dell Technologies, and cloud giant Amazon Web Services to use its security software. The company’s shares closed at $5.15 Dec. 14, down 17% from the day before, after falling from a high of $37.41 in December 2021.
Soon after his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, started to put together a list of problems he saw in DoD’s space procurements and possible ways to fix them. It turned out to be a really long list that eventually Calvelli boiled down to a three-page memo he released Oct. 31. “After I started actually working on this, I realized I was writing a novel and no one was ever going to read this,” he said Dec. 15 at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event near Capitol Hill. At the top of Calvelli’s list of nine “space acquisition tenets” is to build smaller satellites using commercial components and production methods. He expects the U.S. Space Force to start transitioning to smaller satellites and end procurements of billion-dollar satellites that on average take seven years to develop. “There’s a lot of pressure on the Department to go faster in space acquisition,” Calvelli said, amid concerns that China is building new constellations at a rapid pace to compete with the United States. Military space systems today are primarily large satellites in geostationary orbits , and there is no easy or fast way to replace these assets if they were struck by anti-satellite weapons. “We have a need for resiliency in our architecture through things like orbit diversification and proliferation of satellites,” said Calvelli. “As the threat to space systems continues to evolve, and as space becomes even more important to give advantages to our troops, timely delivery of capabilities becomes even more critical for the nation,” he said. “So given the threat, and the need to drive speed into our space acquisition, I fundamentally believe that traditional ways of doing space acquisition must be reformed.” Calvelli wants acquisition officers to avoid cost-plus contracts when at all possible and instead buy satellites at fixed prices, a model embraced by the Space Development Agency, a Space Force agency that is procuring a mesh network of small satellites in low Earth orbit. “Speed in space acquisition is a very simple formula,” Calvelli said. “You build small, you use existing technology and reduce non recurring engineering. You take advantage of commercial capabilities and you execute.” Cost-plus contracts — where the government pays for development costs and absorbs any cost overruns — incentivize vendors to add years to a program and make systems more complex than they need to be, he said. Fixed-price contracts, on the other hand, incentivize “speed and performance.” “Don’t. be afraid to use fixed price contracts,” he insisted. “NASA is now doing more fixed price contracting. The National Reconnaissance Office has talked about doing more fixed price contracts. Now the Space Force needs to be doing more fixed-price contracting.” Calvelli’s watch list for 2023 As Calvelli continues to push for changes in the Space Force procurement culture and contracting practices, there are some specific programs he will be watching closely next year. One is United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, a new launch vehicle the Space Force selected for national security missions and is years behind schedule due to engine development delays. “I want to see Vulcan fly in 2023. I look forward to that,” Calvelli said. Other programs that Calvelli will be monitoring are the next-generation OCX ground control system for the Global Positioning System constellation, and a space-tracking system called ATLAS, short for Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System . The long-delayed ATLAS was designed to replace an old legacy system, called SPADOC, used for tracking space objects. “I want to see the retirement of SPADOC,” said Calvelli. “We need to do that.” With regard to OCX, “I want to see OCX deliver,” he said. Also on his radar are the next-generation geosynchronous and polar infrared satellites that provide early warning of ballistic missile launches. Five satellites — projected to cost nearly $14 billion — are in various stages of development. “We need the next-gen GEO and polar on cost and on schedule.” Finally, Calvelli wants to see the Space Development Agency launch its first batch of satellites to low Earth orbit. The agency’s Tranche 0 satellites were scheduled to launch in 2022 but slipped to next year , with the first launch targeted for March and the second in June. “I look forward to that,” he said. “ I want to see SDA launch Tranche 0. That has to happen.”
A coolant leak in a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station Dec. 14 forced flight controllers to cancel a Russian spacewalk there and raised questions about the spacecraft’s ability to return to Earth safely. Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk when station controllers noticed a coolant leak in the service module of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked there at approximately 7:45 p.m. Eastern. That spacecraft delivered Prokopyev and Petelin, along with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, to the station nearly three months ago. The two cosmonauts continued their spacewalk preparations but remained in the airlock as engineers on the ground assessed the problem. Their seven-hour spacewalk was scheduled to begin at about 9:20 p.m. Eastern, but was delayed and ultimately canceled shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern. The leak, visible as a stream of particles from the Soyuz, was visible more than three hours after it started in NASA TV coverage. “The best plan of action tonight was focus all of our Moscow team’s attention on sorting out what’s going on exactly with the Soyuz spacecraft and then we’ll regroup tomorrow,” Emily Nelson, NASA chief flight director at the Johnson Space Center, said in comments on NASA TV around midnight Eastern. The Russian space agency Roscosmos, in a brief statement Dec. 15, said there was “damage to the outer lining” of the service module of the Soyuz, but didn’t offer more details on the problem. Roscosmos said a third Russian cosmonaut on the station, Anna Kikina, used a robotic arm to perform a photographic inspection of the spacecraft, returning those images to Earth for analysis. Both the cause and the severity of the leak are unclear. The leak did not pose any immediate risk to the station and its crew, but in a worst-case scenario, it would render the Soyuz spacecraft unable to return to Earth safely with its crew. Roscosmos could launch the next Soyuz to the station without any crew on board as a replacement, but it’s uncertain when the spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, could be prepared for launch, and doing so would affect future crew rotations. Soyuz MS-23 is currently scheduled to launch to the station in March 2023 with two Roscosmos cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut. The risk of a problem with either Soyuz or U.S. commercial crew vehicles is a major reason why NASA had, for years, sought to exchange seats between such spacecraft in a barter arrangement. That would mean there would be at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut on the station at any time should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be out of service for an extended period. After extensive negotiations, NASA and Roscosmos completed the seat barter agreement in July . Rubio flew to the station on Soyuz MS-22 in September and Kikina on the SpaceX Crew-5 Crew Dragon mission in October, becoming the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a commercial crew vehicle. The current agreement includes seat barters on Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions scheduled for the spring and fall of 2023. The leak marked the second consecutive postponement of a spacewalk by Prokopyev and Petelin, intended to move a radiator from the Rassvet module to the Nauka module on the station. Roscosmos called off the first attempt at the spacewalk Nov. 25 because of a problem with a pump in one of the spacesuits.
TAMPA, Fla. — Microsoft said Dec. 14 it is partnering with satellite operator Viasat to find solutions for bringing internet access to 10 million unserved or underserved people within three years. Viasat is the first satellite operator to join Microsoft’s Airband initiative, which aims to deliver connectivity to a quarter of a billion people by the end of 2025 through a mix of technologies. Microsoft set up Airband in 2017 and said the initiative had enabled high-speed internet access for more than 51 million people globally — about 20% of its goal. In addition to telcos, Airband seeks to facilitate connectivity-enabling partnerships among equipment makers, local and regional energy access providers, nonprofits, and governmental and non-governmental organizations. “Microsoft and Viasat will jointly review options to co-invest on a project-by-project basis,” Evan Dixon, Viasat’s president of global fixed broadband, told SpaceNews . The companies will first look at projects that could leverage Viasat’s fleet of existing satellites in geostationary orbit, including its upcoming ViaSat-3 constellation. However, Dixon said Viasat will also explore solutions from low Earth orbit in its search to deliver “broadband in the most productive and cost-effective manner.” Half of the 10 million people the companies are partnering to reach are in Africa, where they said Viasat’s support would help expand Airband’s work for the first time to Egypt, Senegal, and Angola. Only 40% of Africa’s roughly 1.4 billion population is currently online, according to data from the United Nations. “Working with Viasat, we will use satellite to reach remote areas that previously have had few, if any, options for conventional connectivity,” Teresa Hutson, Microsoft’s vice president of technology and corporate responsibility, said in a statement. “Together, we will be able to rapidly scale and expand Airband’s reach, exploring a wider pipeline of projects and new countries where we haven’t yet worked.” According to Microsoft, Airband has helped connect nine million people in Africa to date across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria. By the end of 2025, it aims to have helped connect 100 million people on the continent. Microsoft said the partnership with Viasat builds on the relationship its data center business already has with the company — in addition to other satellite operators — via Azure Space, which aims to integrate terrestrial and space networks to enable global cloud access with low latency.
After more than two years of delays, NASA and Rocket Lab are finally ready to conduct the first Electron launch from Wallops Island in Virginia on Dec. 16. The launch, called “Virginia is for Launch Lovers” by the company, is scheduled from the company’s Launch Complex (LC) 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops during a two-hour window that opens at 6 p.m. Eastern Dec. 16. There is an 85% chance of favorable weather for the launch that day as well as on a backup day Dec. 17. The mission will place into orbit three satellites for HawkEye 360, which operates a constellation of spacecraft that perform radio-frequency surveillance. HawkEye 360 signed a contract in April for three Electron launches , including the first Electron launch from Wallops. The scheduled launch comes three years after Rocket Lab declared Launch Complex 2 complete . At that time, it expected to perform the first launch there in the second quarter of 2020 for the Defense Department’s Space Test Program. However, delays in development by NASA of a new autonomous flight termination system (AFTS) required for Electron launches from Wallops delayed that first flight by more than two years. At a Dec. 14 online briefing, David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said the final safety certification of what’s called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU) was originally scheduled in time to support a mid-2020 first launch from LC-2. During final checks of the software, engineers discovered numerous errors in the code. In the fall of 2020, NASA established a “cross-agency” team that included the U.S. Space Force and Federal Aviation Administration to fix the software and go through a certification process, he said. It took more than a year to develop the test procedures and scripts needed to ensure the software met range safety requirements. By early 2022, NAFTU was ready for independent certification testing. “As part of that, as normally happens in I&T [integration and testing], you find errors or bugs that needed to be fixed, and that’s what we did,” he said. “We knocked down each one of those challenges, one by one, and we completed independent testing in the summer of 2022.” The system completed an independent certification led by the chief engineer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in October. “As soon as we completed that, we turned to supporting Peter [Beck] and the fabulous Rocket Lab team” as the company modified NAFTU for use on Electron. Rocket Lab’s implementation of NAFTU, which the company calls Pegasus, has received approval from the FAA for the upcoming launch. Pierce said NASA still needs to complete “cleaning up some of the paperwork” for full certification of NAFTU from the FAA, which he expects to be complete by the end of the month. He said there is some additional final paperwork to complete for the Electron launch, in the form of additional analyses by a joint NASA-Rocket Lab team. “What we’ve been doing over the past couple weeks is following up with answers to questions to show how NASA Wallops validated the combined response to our flight safety plan to the FAA,” he said. That work will be complete before a Dec. 15 launch readiness review. NAFTU will be available to other range users to reduce the number and cost of traditional range safety assets and support higher flight rates. Eighteen companies have requested access to the software, Pierce said, but Rocket Lab will be the first to use it on the upcoming Electron launch. Rocket Lab has been using its own AFTS for more than 20 Electron launches from its original launch site, LC-1 in New Zealand. “It is a significant reduction in range costs and range equipment,” Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said at the briefing. “AFTS is a huge game-changer.” A successful launch would finally bring into service LC-2, which Beck said will enable the company to increase its launch rate, of about one per month for most of 2022, in 2023. He offered few specifics about upcoming launches from Wallops at the briefing, but in an earnings call Nov. 9 executives said they anticipated performing 14 Electron launches in 2023 , four to six of which would be at LC-2. Most customers will be able to use either LC-1 or LC-2, he said, and can move between them. “There are some customers that have a U.S. launch requirement,” primarily U.S. government agencies, he said, requiring them to use LC-2. Beck said the company set up in Virginia, rather than at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station or Kennedy Space Center in Florida, because of the “quietness of the range” or lack of other launches from Wallops. The site currently hosts two Northrop Grumman Antares launches a year along with an occasional Minotaur launch by that company, as well as about a dozen sounding rocket launches a year. “KSC is an amazing range, but I think everybody has to agree it’s pretty busy,” he said. The company also plans to use Wallops for its Neutron reusable launch vehicle, which will be produced at a factory just outside the Wallops gates. “We can achieve almost the same trajectories out of Virginia and the range is not nearly as busy. There’s a lot of room to grow.”
In the global race to deploy broadband constellations in low Earth orbit, the United States holds a major advantage. However, the U.S. government should “enact policies and incentives to keep U.S. companies competitive internationally” especially against China, says a new report released Dec. 14 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The study, funded by satellite broadband firms Amazon Kuiper and SpaceX, argues that economic and regulatory issues are creating competitive pressures for U.S. industry. “As China continues to f urther its ambitions for its own LEO broadband network, which may fall somewhere in the gray zone between commercial and governmental, the United States could lose its competitive edge,” says the report. China is building LEO systems for its own use but also plans to provide services across countries in Asia, South America, and Africa that do not currently have widespread internet infrastructure and where U.S. companies also are competing for business, the study adds. China is leveraging its Belt and Road initiative to increase market share for its LEO constellations. “U.S. leaders should aim to increase soft power across the globe by working with commercial companies that can successfully operate broadband internet constellations,” the report says. “With China’s heavy economic presence in many Belt and Road partner countries, it’s positioned to negotiate regulatory concessions for its national LEO system while discouraging the adoption of U.S. commercial services.” Because of the huge startup costs of building and deploying a functioning LEO constellation — estimated to range from $5 billion to $10 billion — U.S. companies need more agile regulatory practices so they can compete internationally, the report contends. “Regulatory agencies with jurisdiction over space and space-related activities are struggling to keep pace with private sector growth in managing these constellations, a task that is correspondingly growing in difficulty,” says the report. There is a need for “updated regulation and an increase in capacity for the regulatory review process.” The regulatory process carries huge stakes for SpaceX’s Starlink and for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. As of November 2022, Starlink has launched over 3,500 satellites and offers coverage in more than 50 markets across North America, South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand Kuiper plans to launch 1,618 satellites by 2026, and deploy a total of about 3,200. SpaceX has requested authorization from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for another 30,000 satellites, and received authorization for 7,500 so far. China applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to operate a 12,992-satellite fleet in LEO. The state-funded SatNet plans to establish a space hub for the production of satellites and reusable launch vehicles, the CSIS report says. “SatNet is to be a critical part of China’s political goal of being a leader in advanced technology across the globe.” The constellations of OneWeb, Amazon, Telesat, and China SatNet together could potentially add over 90,000 satellites into Earth orbit. FCC commissioner supports study findings Speaking at CSIS to discuss the study, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said “this latest generation of low Earth orbit satellites is absolutely a game changer.” He said U.S. industry needs to remain competitive. “There’s no technology sector that we as Americans should cede leadership to the Communist Party of China. The CCP has set their goals on dominating a lot of technology sectors, but one of them is this low Earth orbit satellite system.” In the U.S. government, he added, “we have to give the tools to our private sector to compete and to win.” For the FCC, that means “making sure that we have the spectrum available, and that we don’t introduce new services that could cause harmful interference to these technologies. Most importantly, we have to go faster.” Carr said the FCC plans to stand up a space bureau “to help speed things up.” Congress also is stepping in. He expressed support for a House Energy and Commerce Committee bipartisan bill introduced Dec. 8 to reform the FCC’s satellite licensing rules. “Fundamentally at the FCC we have to go faster on our approvals,” he said. The agency also needs to address concerns about companies in the U.S. having to disclose competitive secrets earlier than if they were licensed in other countries. “We’re gonna make sure it’s not a competitive disadvantage,” said Carr.
A recently completed U.S. space strategy stresses the need to deploy resilient constellations that can operate under attack, and supports norms for responsible behavior in space, a senior Pentagon official said Dec. 14. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said the strategic space review is a classified document and will not be publicly released. In general, “it’s about our overall space posture and where we should be headed from a national security standpoint,” he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a fireside chat with CSIS senior fellow Kari Bingen. The review, directed by the White House National Security Adviser, was conducted jointly by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. Plumb said the substance of the review is “very consistent with previous administration’s and current administration guidance,” and reflects the space policy priorities the White House released in December 2021. The guidance to DoD is “to protect and defend our national security interests” against counterspace capabilities used by adversaries, he said. Other priorities are to “build a resilient national security space architecture” and “lead in the responsible and peaceful use of space,” including practices that minimize the creation of space debris. Plumb said DoD is working “to address all these problems.” With regard to resiliency, DoD is making investments in modern satellite constellations in low Earth orbit that are more survivable against attacks than traditional geostationary satellites. “Resilience is in every single conversation about future space architectures that I’m part of,” he said. ‘And that’s not just the space piece. It’s also the ground piece, and the user equipment piece.” DoD is making a “fundamental shift in how we think about things,” Plumb insisted. “We have to be resilient because the adversary is coming for us. And so what we need is a constellation that allows me to take a punch, fight through … absorb a blow and kind of degrade the ability of an adversary to take a shot.” Plumb said his office’s top three priorities are: space control, space cooperation and space classification. Space control is about ensuring the U.S. military has access to space and is able to use its satellites, while denying an adversary its use of space. Cooperation and joint efforts with allies are a key piece of the plan, he noted. The classification of military space programs and policy documents is an issue that is constantly being debated, he said, particularly because it gets in the way of sharing information with allies . “I’m really working in my office and with the intelligence community on reducing some of those classification issues,” said Plumb. Congress also has become concerned about what some see as excessive classification in the national security space business. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act draft bill approved by the House and expected to soon be approved by the Senate directs DoD to examine all Space Force programs to determine if the level of classification of any of these programs could be changed to a lower level or declassified entirely. 
TAMPA, Fla. — France’s TV regulator ordered Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat to stop broadcasting three Russian propaganda channels, reversing an earlier decision not to interfere. French media regulator Arcom said Dec. 14 it gave Eutelsat a week to stop broadcasting Rossiya 1, Perviy Kanal, and NTV via its satellites. Russia-based service providers NTV Plus and Trikolor currently use Eutelsat satellite capacity to broadcast these Russian-language channels to the west of the country. It is unclear how removing the channels from Eutelsat transponders will reduce their reach because NTV Plus and Trikolor also use satellite capacity that is provided from outside the European Union. In a news release, Arcom said the television stations’ coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine “include repeated incitement to hatred and violence and numerous shortcomings to the honesty of the information.” Eutelsat said in a brief statement that “it will no longer be involved in the broadcasting of the three sanctioned channels within the prescribed time-frame.” Arcom’s decision comes a week after France’s top administrative court, prompted by a request from the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders advocacy group, ordered Arcom to review an initial decision to permit Eutelsat to continue carrying the stations. Arcom said it has the power to block the channels after an investigation found they “were broadcast not only in Russia, but also in the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia.” The regulator said: “Since, unlike Russia, Ukraine has signed and ratified the European Convention on Transfrontier Television, as has France, Arcom therefore has a legal basis to demand that Eutelsat cease broadcast of these channels.” Eutelsat has been under mounting pressure to remove pro-Kremlin broadcasts from campaign groups seeking to curb Russian propaganda, which clashes with the company’s strict policy of editorial neutrality. For some channels, such as Iranian state-owned news network Press TV, Eutelsat’s efforts to drop sanctioned broadcasts are also complicated by its reliance on distributors and partners to remove them. Eutelsat declined to comment further on Arcom’s decision. In its latest annual financial report, Eutelsat said 6.7% of its roughly $1.3 billion in revenues for the year to the end of June were exposed to Russian companies. These Russian customers are mainly served by capacity Eutelsat leases on four satellites owned by Russian operator RSCC.
The United States and Europe, at least in the immediate future, will be largely dependent on SpaceX for satellite launches and human spaceflight missions, creating a supply and demand imbalance that might not be sustainable, warned Casey Dreier, chief policy adviser for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes exploration of space. “We’re in this strange new period of constriction of launch, not just because of Russia, but because of this transition period that we’ve been having,” Dreier said Dec. 13 on an online forum hosted by the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress. A confluence of events has led to this, he noted, including Russia’s exit from the global launch market a fter the invasion of Ukraine — and the cancellation of previously planned Soyuz launches , and commercial companies taking longer than expected to transition to new launch vehicles. United Launch Alliance for years has been planning to retire the Atlas 5 rocket which uses the Russian-made RD-180 engine, but its replacement, Vulcan Centaur, will not be ready for its first launch until some time in 2023. Blue Origin is developing New Glenn and it’s unclear when that vehicle will fly. Europe only has two Ariane 5 rockets remaining before it transitions to the long-delayed Ariane 6, also slated to debut in 2023. The U.S. government has to face the prospect that until these new vehicles are available, there might be a period when it will only have access to a single provider, Dreier said. “At the moment, it’s really just SpaceX. We’re down to a single provider for a vast portion of U.S. and even European launches,” he said. “So we’re at this weird chokepoint.” “Fortunately, SpaceX happens to be this three-sigma outlier of a company that’s capable of launching 50 or maybe 60 times a year. But that’s not something that’s really resilient in the long run,” Dreier added. A key takeaway from the Ukraine crisis has been the risks of supply chains. “Do you want to have just one provider of commercial satellite communications? Do you want to have just one provider of launch? Of course you don’t. And we’re seeing this chokepoint being revealed.” Dreier’s comments follow similar warnings by ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno , who is advising the U.S. Space Force to preemptively buy heavy launch services as rockets could be in short supply over the next several years due to rising commercial demand. “The scarcity environment is a big shift in our industry,” Bruno said. Dreier said the current environment poses risks for the U.S. government’s access to launch. On the one hand, SpaceX “is just outpacing everyone else” and is showing no signs of slowing down. However, the government has to worry about alternative sources of supply. “And so how much does the government then prop up alternate commercial providers? … Then, is this at the end of the day really a commercial market?” The Defense Department has been there before. Prior to the U.S. Air Force certifying SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for national security launches in 2015, ULA was the military’s only launch provider.
Chinese launch company Landspace suffered failure Wednesday in what was the world’s first attempt to achieve orbit with a methane-fueled rocket. The Zhuque-2 methane-liquid oxygen rocket lifted off from newly-constructed facilities at the national Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Dec. 14. Apparent spectator footage posted on Chinese social media showed the rocket ascending into clear skies, trailed by white exhaust. While the first stage is understood to have performed well, separate apparent leaked footage suggests that issues affecting the rocket’s second stage resulted in the failure of the mission. Data suggest an expected burn of the stage’s vernier thrusters, intended to carry the stage and payloads into orbit after a burn by the main engine, did not occur as planned. Chinese launch successes are typically announced immediately after successful orbital insertion. There was still no official announcement of mission success or failure at press time, eight hours after launch. The launch attempt represents a leap by Chinese commercial launch providers despite the failure, marking the country’s first launch attempt of a privately-developed liquid propellant launch vehicle. Zhuque-2 was carrying a number of satellites for commercial companies and targeted deploying these in a sun-synchronous orbit. Zhuque-2, which translates to “Vermillion Bird-2,” is powered by gas generator engines and is capable of delivering a 6,000-kilogram payload capacity to a 200-kilometer low Earth orbit (LEO), or 4,000 kilograms to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), according to Landspace. The rocket has a diameter of 3.35 meters—the same as a number of national Long March rockets—-a total length of 49.5 meters, a take-off mass of 219 tons and producing 268 tons of thrust. The mission was also the world’s first orbital launch of a methane-fueled rocket. A range of launch vehicles, including SpaceX’s Starship, the ULA Vulcan, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and Terran 1 from Relativity Space are working toward their own test flights. Developing methane rocket engines has involved numerous engineering challenges but promises advantages in terms of reusability, a capability seen to be transforming the launch market. Landspace is one of the earliest and best-funded of China’s emerging commercial launch firms. The company’s first launch took place four years ago with the much smaller and simpler solid-propellant Zhuque-1 and ended in failure . Chinese firms iSpace, OneSpace and Galactic Energy have all attempted or completed launches of light-lift solid rockets, along with spinoffs from giant state-owned enterprises CASC ( China Rocket ), CASIC ( Expace ) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS Space ). Landspace said in November that it was already working on a second flight model of the Zhuque-2. It is currently unclear how the failure will affect the timeline for the new launch attempt. Wednesday’s launch attempt used an expendable rocket, but Landspace is working on making Zhuque-2 reusable, having in recent months tested a restartable version of the 80-ton-thrust TQ-12 engine which powers the Zhuque-2 first stage. The firm is also working on an improved second-stage engine which will not require vernier engines. Zhuque-2 will soon face competition, with Beijing-based iSpace developing its own methalox rocket, the Hyperbola-2. The firm recently unveiled a first-stage test article at Jiuquan in preparation to conduct hop tests. Galactic Energy is meanwhile developing its two-stage, kerosene-liquid oxygen Pallas-1, designed to carry 5,000 kilograms to LEO or 3,000 kilograms to a 700-kilometer SSO. Both could launch in 2023. Another firm, Deep Blue Aerospace, has begun hop tests for its planned Nebula-1 reusable kerolox launcher. Officials from China’s main space contractor CASC have also presented concepts for reusable, methalox launchers and a methane-powered version of the Long March 9. Its main Shanghai rocket-making institute is looking at methalox launch solutions. China’s government opened portions of the space sector to private capital in late 2014, spurring the emergence of hundreds of space-related companies engaged in a range of activities, including launch, satellite operation and manufacture, ground stations, downstream applications, and more. China has sought to foster the development of commercial space with policy support and guidance, including regulations for launch and small satellites and national strategies supporting “ satellite internet .” Investment , from a mix of venture capital and government-linked investment vehicles, has also flowed in recent years. A number of commercial launch companies are stating the national satellite internet project as a potential source of contracts and revenue. The military-civilian fusion national strategy has also allowed the production of sensitive, dual-use technologies to take place in the private sector. Methane-LOX engines have been under study by CASC prior to the development of commercial Chinese methane rocket engines.
Two African countries became the first from the continent to join the Artemis Accords as the United States works to bring more emerging space nations into the agreement. During the Space Forum portion of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit here Dec. 13, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that Rwanda and Nigeria would sign the Accords, making them the latest nations to sign the document that outlines best practices for safe and sustainable space exploration based on the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements. “I’m so proud of Rwanda and Nigeria that they will be the 22nd and 23rd signatories of the Artemis Accords and first two African nations to sign,” he said. Isa Ali Ibrahim, minister of communications and digital economy, signed the Accords for Nigeria, while Francis Ngabo, chief executive officer of the Rwanda Space Agency, signed the document for Rwanda. Current officials, as well as those who were involved in the development of the Artemis Accords in 2020, welcomed the latest signatories. “The unique energy, vision and passion for space exploration that these two new signatories will provide is vital to achieving the Artemis vision,” Mike Gold, chief growth officer at Redwire who spearheaded the development of the Accords when he was at NASA, told SpaceNews. “Nigeria and Rwanda for the first time bring Africa to the Artemis Accords, substantively enriching the already diverse mosaic of nations that have adopted the Accords.” “As we enter this new era of space development, it’s important to remember the benefits that space partnerships can deliver to our citizens, and we are so glad that African nations will now be active participants in partners in our Artemis program,” said Monica Medina, assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, at the summit. At a Secure World Foundation event Dec. 12, Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, hinted that more countries would soon join the 21 nations that had signed the Artemis Accords to date. More countries, she said then, would join “in the very near future,” but didn’t elaborate. She said that when most of the Artemis Accords signatories met face-to-face for the first time in Paris at the International Astronautical Congress in September , one key issue that emerged was how to bring in more emerging space countries into the agreement. The Accords include many major space nations, like International Space Station partners, but also countries with little space experience to date, such as Bahrain and Colombia. That issue, she said, includes “how to help them understand the importance of the Artemis Accords and to ensure that the early activities that we do, and the agreements we make, by more established spacefaring nations, don’t preclude later entrants.” Neither Nigerian nor Rwandan officials described in detail any plans to participate in Artemis at the signing ceremony, but at the Secure World Foundation event, a State Department official said that is not a condition for signing the Accords. “We continue to encourage all responsible spacefaring nations to sign the Accords, and we also encourage countries that are just developing their space sector to also consider signing,” said Kristina Leszczak of the State Department’s Office of Space Affairs. “We stress that interested countries do not need to come to the table with existing space capabilities or even near-term plans to contribute to Artemis. We find this opens the conversation up to a much more diverse group.” While the United States led the development of the Accords, it is not the “gatekeeper” of it, she said, adding that any country can sign on without requiring approval of existing signatories provided they agree to uphold its provisions. “They are looking for different things,” Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation said of emerging space countries’ interest in the Accords. “It’s not just to go to the moon but also benefits on Earth. They’re still looking for how does this help our citizens, how does it help our economy.” Both NASA’s Nelson and the State Department’s Medina said at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit that they hope other African countries sign the Accords in the future. “We are so delighted to welcome Nigeria and Rwanda as the first two African nations to sign the Artemis Accords,” said Medina, “but I certainly hope they will not be the last.” 
TAMPA, Fla. — Arianespace launched Europe’s most advanced weather-tracking spacecraft Dec. 13 along with a pair of satellites Intelsat needs to clear C-band spectrum in the United States. The triple payload totaling nearly 11,000 kilograms lifted off at 3:30 p.m. Eastern from Kourou, French Guiana, on a heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket to geostationary transfer orbit. Intelsat’s Galaxy 35 and Galaxy 36 satellites separated from the rocket about 30 minutes later , followed shortly by MTG-I1 for Eumetsat, Europe’s intergovernmental meteorological organization. Intelsat and Eumetsat confirmed successful contact with their satellites post-launch and the deployment of solar panels. 
 The Maxar-built Galaxy 35 and Galaxy 36 are due to start services in March and February, respectively, after using onboard propulsion to reach their final positions in geostationary orbit. They are the fifth and sixth of seven satellites Intelsat has ordered to help clear C-band spectrum for terrestrial 5G services. The operator is in line for nearly $5 billion in total from the Federal Communications Commission if it clears the frequencies by Dec. 5, 2023, although rival operator SES continues to challenge its share of this windfall. SpaceX launched the first four satellites in Intelsat’s C-band clearing plan over two separate missions earlier this year. Intelsat 37, the final satellite in this spectrum-clearing strategy, is slated to launch in June on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Improving weather forecasts MTG-I1 is the first of six satellites Thales Alenia Space and OHB are building for Eumetsat’s MTG (Meteosat Third Generation) constellation, which is set to be deployed over the next few decades to improve weather forecasts. The satellite carries Europe’s first instrument dedicated to mapping lightning flashes, developed by Leonardo in Italy, for tracking severe storms and how they evolve. It also has a Flexible Combined Imager designed for imaging Europe and Africa every 10 minutes across 16 spectral channels. Prime contractor Thales said it would take MTG-I1 around 11 days to get into position for unfurling its antennas to begin transferring weather data back to Earth. The MTG constellation comprises four imaging (MTG-I) and two (MTG-S) sounding satellites that are identical in their series. The MTG-I satellites also carry two smaller payloads to collect data from remote science and search and rescue emergency beacons. Phil Evans, Eumetsat’s director general, detailed the organization’s long-term constellation deployment plans in an interview with SpaceNews last year. Arianespace said it has now launched 14 satellites for Eumetsat and 64 for Intelsat. The company has two more Ariane 5s remaining before the arrival of Europe’s delayed next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, which is currently slated to debut in 2023.
Quantum Space has raised $15 million to further development of the first in a constellation of satellites intended to provide services in cislunar space. Quantum Space said that Prime Movers Lab invested $15 million in a Series A round in the Rockville, Maryland-based company. The funding will support development of its QS-1 spacecraft the company announced in October it is building for launch in 2024 to cislunar space. Prime Movers Lab is a venture fund that has invested in several space companies, including commercial space station developer Axiom Space, megaconstellation startup E-Space and space tourism company Space Perspective. Both Axiom Space and Quantum Space were founded by Kam Ghaffarian. “Kam is a visionary entrepreneur who we’ve wanted to partner with again since investing in some of his previous endeavors,” Anton Breve, a partner at Prime Movers Lab, said in a statement. “We believe Quantum Space will play a critical role in establishing the infrastructure to support humankind’s expansion beyond Earth.” In an interview, Steve Jurczyk, president and chief executive of Quantum Space, said the funding from Prime Movers Lab will make up most of the Series A round the company expects to close by the end of the year. Two other investors will provide about $1 million each to complete the round. That funding will advance work on the QS-1 spacecraft, being provided by Blue Canyon Technologies, and its space situational awareness payload from GEOST, to the critical design review level. It will also fund purchases of long-lead items needed to keep the mission on track for an October 2024 launch. QS-1 is the first spacecraft in a constellation called QuantumNet that the company projects developing in cislunar space, also known as xGEO. The company foresees having more than 40 of what the company calls Scout spacecraft in service by 2032 throughout cislunar space. Those spacecraft will carry a variety of payloads, including communications, navigation and space situational awareness. QS-1 will launch as a rideshare payload, Jurczyk said, but future spacecraft will be delivered through an in-space transportation vehicle called Ranger that the company is also developing, capable of carrying four Scouts. “Starting in late ’25, and every year thereafter, we plan on delivering four Scouts via this Ranger vehicle to xGEO and to various locations like Lagrange points and other orbits to provide space domain awareness and other capabilities in that very large volume of space,” he said. Quantum Space is seeing strong interest in both the Scout satellites for providing various services, and the Ranger transportation vehicle, particularly from governments. That interest includes from those interested in a communications network around the moon to support lunar exploration activities. Jurczyk said Quantum Space brought in Prime Movers Lab as an investor in part because of that fund’s part work with Ghaffarian but also because of other support it can provide. “They’re also going to help us with recruiting the talent that we need. They’ll help us particularly with some hard-to-recruit skill areas,” he said. The company currently has 20 employees with plans to hire a dozen more by the first quarter of next year. Prime Movers Lab will also help Quantum Space identify new investors for a Series B round planned for next year, he said, which will support completion of QS-1 and future projects. The company is still determining how much it will seek to raise in that round.
The United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for a halt to one type of anti-satellite (ASAT) testing, a largely symbolic move intended to support broader space sustainability initiatives. The resolution, introduced by the United States and several other nations, was approved by the U.N. General Assembly Dec. 7 among dozens of other resolutions on arms control and related topics with little discussion or debate. A total of 155 nations voted in favor of the resolution, with 9 voting against it and 9 others abstaining. The resolution calls on countries to halt destructive testing of direct-ascent ASAT weapons, citing concern that such creates large amounts of debris that threaten the safety of other satellites. An example is the November 2021 ASAT test by Russia that destroyed the Cosmos 1408 satellite, creating nearly 1,800 tracked pieces of debris and likely many more objects too small to be tracked. About a third of the tracked debris from that test was still in orbit nearly a year later. The resolution is non-binding in the sense that it does not require countries to halt such tests, instead calling upon states to refrain from conducting tests. It states that it considers such a commitment to refrain from tests “an urgent, initial measure aimed at preventing damage to the outer space environment, while also contributing to the development of further measures for the prevention of an arms race in outer space.” It also supports continued efforts to develop “further practical steps” to reduce risks in outer space. The General Assembly vote was nearly identical to one by the U.N.’s First Committee, which deals with disarmament and international security topics. It voted 154-8 in favor of the resolution Nov. 1, with 10 countries abstaining. The eight countries that voted against the resolution in the First Committee — Belarus, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia and Syria — also voted against the resolution in the General Assembly. They were joined by the Central African Republic, which voted in favor of the resolution in the First Committee but against it in the General Assembly for unknown reasons. India was among the countries that abstained from the vote, both in the First Committee and at the General Assembly. Vice President Kamala Harris, who announced in April that the United States would refrain from destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests and called on others to do the same, welcomed the U.N. vote. “Back in April, I announced the United States will not conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests, and I called on other nations to join us. Today, 155 countries voted in favor of a UN resolution, helping establish this as an international norm for space,” she tweeted after the vote. Since the announcement by Harris in April, nine other countries have announced their own pledges not to conduct such tests, most recently France on Nov. 29 . None of the countries had active direct-ascent ASAT testing programs. The resolution is one of several efforts to promote safe and sustainable space activities. A parallel effort, kicked off by another U.N. resolution a year ago, established an Open-Ended Working Group to discuss ways of reducing space threats. That working group has met twice, with two more meetings scheduled for 2023 before offering its conclusions for future actions. A separate effort, the Artemis Accords, seeks to promote safe and sustainable activities in space exploration. While not dealing directly with issues like ASAT testing, the Accords call on countries to limit the generation of orbital debris, while calling on transparency in space activities and affirming the use of space for peaceful purposes. “We and the other original signatories of the Artemis Accords came together to think about that next era of space exploration and make sure that it was being implemented in accordance with the fundamental principles of responsible behavior,” Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in a talk Dec. 12 at a Secure World Foundation event about the Accords. The United States and seven other nations were original signatories of the Artemis Accords in October 2020. Twenty-one nations have now signed the Accords, and Melroy said in her remarks she expected more nations to join in the near future.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida — For a time, as a late Tuesday night in November became Wednesday morning, it appeared the hydrogen demon had returned to delay another Space Launch System launch attempt. Ever since the second Artemis 1 launch attempt was scrubbed in early September because of hydrogen leaks during fueling of the core stage, NASA worked to find solutions to the problem. That ranged from replacing damaged seals in the hydrogen fuel lines to creating what officials called a “kinder, gentler” approach to fueling. In mid-September, NASA went through a tanking test, filling the core stage with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, this time without any leaks. “All in all, it was a good day. We’re very happy with the results,” said Brad McCain, vice president and general manager of Jacobs Space Operations Group, of that tanking test during a briefing two days later. “We’re very optimistic about our next launch attempt.” NASA, at the time, was gearing up for a launch attempt in late September or early October, before that launch period closed in early October. However, Hurricane Ian intervened: a day after that briefing, NASA decided to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), rather than risk having the vehicle damaged on the pad, where it had been sitting since August. The rollback to the VAB effectively ruled out a launch in the next launch period in the latter half of October, given the work planned on the vehicle while in the building and the time needed to prepare the vehicle while on the pad. Instead, NASA rolled out the rocket back to the pad Nov. 4 for a launch no earlier than Nov. 14, with Nov. 16 and 19 as backup dates. (NASA also worked to secure another launch date on Nov. 25, Black Friday) NASA soon got a reminder that the Atlantic hurricane season runs through the end of November. Even before the rollout, meteorologists were tracking a potential tropical storm forming in the Atlantic that could head toward Florida. However, at the time of the rollout, forecasts suggested the system had only a 30% chance of becoming a named tropical storm and no chance of exceeding wind limits on the pad. “We’ll have impacts from that in terms of the wind, but we’re not looking at any likelihood at this point of seeing a strong system emerge out of this,” said Mark Burger, launch weather officer with the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, at a briefing the day before the rollout. A couple days later, though, what would become Hurricane Nicole became stronger than expected as it churned west toward the Florida coast. NASA decided to leave the rocket at the pad this time even as the risk of high winds, and damage, grew. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in a later interview that the storm developed too quickly for the agency to move the rocket back to the VAB before it arrived. “I think the weather folks gave us the best information they could give us. I don’t think anybody saw it coming together to be a hurricane.” Free said the agency’s concern was that something could happen, like a mechanical issue with the crawler-transporter, that could strand the rocket between the VAB and the pad. “It would have been an absolute worst-case nightmare for us,” he said of that scenario. “I don’t think we would have survived it.” Nicole came through as a category one hurricane, the weakest on a one-to-five scale, and NASA reported winds that came close to, but did not exceed, certified limits at the pad. Afterwards, NASA reported only minor damage, with the biggest the loss of about three meters of a caulk-like material called RTV, for room temperature vulcanizing, that covers an aerodynamic gap between the Orion crew capsule and its launch abort tower. The loss of that piece of RTV itself was not a major concern: its primary purpose is to smooth the airflow over that gap to avoid heating. “As you fly through the atmosphere, you want a very smooth outer mold line, so you don’t trip the boundary layer or cause acoustic noise issues or thermal heating,” said Jim Geffre, Orion vehicle integration manager, in an interview. He said the material, designed to stay in place as the vehicle accelerated to orbit, likely came off in hurricane-force winds because of the direction and duration of the winds, not their force. Engineers, though, were concerned that more material could come off during launch and hit other portions of the vehicle, with the potential of causing damage. That meant doing worse-case analyses to see what would happen if more RTV material came off. NASA had already ruled out a Nov. 14 launch because of the time lost to the hurricane, but decided to press ahead with a Nov. 16 launch after completing those analyses. “We agreed that the risk was bounded by current hazards,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager, at a pre-launch briefing, even if more material came off during flight. “We’re comfortable flying as-is.” He said that if RTV material came off, it would most likely hit the launch vehicle stage adapter below the Orion, a conical structure that he said would not be damaged by material impacting it. There was much less of a chance of it hitting further down the core stage or the boosters. That briefing also revisited the hydrogen leak issues from the past launch attempts. “I feel very confident in the procedures that we’ve worked, but that will be one of those things that will be a big milestone once we get into a steady state fill” of liquid hydrogen, said Jeremy Parsons, deputy program manager for NASA Exploration Ground Systems. “That’s something we’ll all be watching closely.” As fueling got underway, that confidence seemed well-placed. As hydrogen pumped into the core stage, there were no signs of the serious leaks seen in early September. The core stage filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, with the upper stage following. Then, a few hours before the scheduled 1:04 am EST liftoff time, came the dreaded news: there was a hydrogen leak after all, in ground equipment used to replenish the core stage. Engineers suspected there were nuts loose in a valve in that line, allowing hydrogen to leak above acceptable levels. Mission managers decided to send a three-person “red team” (or “red crew”) to the pad to fix the problem. While red teams performed pad repairs during shuttle missions, they were not watched as closely as this trio, monitored by cameras as they drove up to the pad and went inside the structure to tighten the nuts on the valve. Mike Bolger, Exploration Ground Systems program manager, later described the repairs as an iterative process: tightening the nuts and then cycling the valve to see if it remained loose. By the third time, “they were really solid and we felt good that the packing nuts were tight and we had a good valve.” The red team left the pad and controllers started flowing hydrogen through the valve. “We resolved that problem and no longer had a leak in the base,” he said. With the leak resolved, and no other major issues, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson gave the approval to go into the terminal countdown from a hold at T-10 minutes, with liftoff scheduled now for 1:47 am. As the final minutes ticked off, the crowd looked towards Launch Complex 39B, partially preparing for liftoff but also steeling themselves up for another hold. Past countdown rehearsals had never gotten all the way to the planned cutoff at about T-10 seconds, so there was every reason to believe that some other issue would come in those final seconds to halt the countdown. Those issues never arose. Instead, the SLS ignited its four RS-25 core stage engines, followed by its two five-segment solid rocket boosters, and the rocket rose off the pad, at long last. After all the problems with its development, years of delays, and months of scrubs, the rocket’s ascent to orbit went very nearly to plan. “All indications were that the system performed spot-on,” Sarafin said at a Nov. 18 briefing, noting that a full review of the SLS performance was still ongoing. That spot-on performance was illustrated by the core stage putting Orion and its Interim Cryogenic Propulsion System (ICPS) upper stage into an orbit with a few kilometers as planned. The translunar injection burn by the ICPS put Orion on its required trajectory to the Moon, where it performed a powered flyby maneuver Nov. 21 to send it toward distant retrograde orbit. All attention now is on Orion. The successful launch and lunar insertion ensures that NASA has a “priority-one” mission, Sarafin said after launch. The top priority of the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission is to demonstrate the reentry of the crew capsule at lunar return velocities. The second priority is to test other Orion systems, followed by recovery of the capsule after splashdown and miscellaneous other flight objectives. He said at the Nov. 18 briefing that, for the second and fourth priorities, NASA had completed 20% of the objectives with another 40% in progess. That work will be done in a mission lasting about 25.5 days, with splashdown around midday Dec. 11 off the California coast. That is considered a “short-class” mission by NASA, versus “long-class” missions lasting up to 42 days. Those longer missions would have spent more time in the distant retrograde orbit. The mission timeline still enables all flight objectives to be met, but with less margin for error. “We did proofs of concept early on to demonstrate that you can fit all the objectives the program has decided they want us to accomplish into the shortest class mission,” said Emily Nelson, NASA chief flight director, in a pre-launch interview. “But, it’s much more of a Tetris puzzle to make sure all of those things fit in.” Each potential launch opportunity required a different timeline, she said, but controllers resisted the urge to use the delay from late summer to further adjust mission timelines. They did, though, craft many contingency plans in case something went wrong at any phase of the mission. “We’re Mission Control. We always have backup plans on backup plans, right?” There will be, at any given time, a little more than a dozen people in Mission Control during Artemis 1, with about the same number in back rooms supporting those controllers. That includes a capcom, even though there are no astronauts in the capsule to communicate with. “Capcom will be there listening and following along,” she said, particularly during key operations, “basically as a training opportunity for next time.” Geffre, meanwhile, will be among those closely monitoring the health of the spacecraft over the course of the mission. He said there are more than 1,000 development flight instrumentation channels on the spacecraft collecting data on aspects of Orion’s performance during the mission, some of which will be transmitted back but others that will be offloaded after landing. “As soon as we get all that data back, we’re going to turn it over to the engineers and they’re going to find out all those areas where we can push the envelope a little bit more and other areas where we have to sharpen the pencil,” he said. “We’re really looking forward to that activity.” The launch, though, offered a wave of relief for NASA in general and the Space Launch System team in particular, getting the rocket off the ground after years of delays. The red team turned into heroes of the hour with their repairs to fix the hydrogen leak, earning them NASA’s equivalent of 15 minutes of fame: a photo op with NASA administrator Bill Nelson and an appearance on NASA TV shortly after liftoff. “The rocket’s alive. It’s creaking, it’s making venting noises, it’s pretty scary,” said Trent Annis, one of the red team members, on NASA TV. “My heart was pumping.” “It was a low moment when we first saw the leak,” Bolger said, bringing up at a post-launch briefing hydrogen leaks in past launch attempts, “but really a high moment when we recognized we’d solved the problem.” Or, as Annis put in, “Yeah, we showed up today.” This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
No one influences spaceflight today more than Elon Musk. SpaceX dominates the launch market with the Falcon 9, while Starlink is becoming a major, even essential, satellite broadband provider. Waiting in the wings is Starship, a vehicle that promises to further disrupt the launch market while also delivering astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century. And yet, Musk is more distracted from space than ever. His attention, long balanced between SpaceX and electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, now seems consumed by his latest acquisition, Twitter. Since taking over the social media company in a quixotic $44 billion acquisition in October, he has been fully engaged trying to remake — or break — the company. Musk has long been both a power user of Twitter and one of the most powerful people to use it. It is his primary marketing channel and a place where legions of fans rally behind his lofty ambitions to colonize Mars and cheer his earthy memes. Twitter is where Musk is at his juvenile worst, exhibiting a crassness in stark contrast to the seriousness of geopolitical issues he wades into, along with a truculence that stokes the flames of a troublesome strain of tribalism. With thousands of employees laid off and many advertisers alienated in the weeks since the deal closed, some wonder if Twitter can survive Elon Musk. Just as critical, though, is whether Musk, and his vision of a multiplanetary civilization, can survive Twitter. It was through Twitter that Musk facilitated critical Starlink connectivity for Ukraine during its war with Russia, responding to a tweet from a Ukrainian government minister shortly after the invasion began. Starlink terminals soon started operating on the front lines, providing essential communications. “They tweeted at Elon and so we turned it on,” recalled SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell in a talk a few weeks after the start of the war, noting the company had been in negotiations with the Ukrainian government for landing rights in the weeks before the war started. “That was our permission. That was the letter from the minister. It was a tweet.” Starlink in general has been reshaping the perception of satellite broadband from just a technology of last resort to one that can bring high speeds and new capabilities in places that previously had little to no connectivity options. Building on its early success among fixed consumer households, Starlink is now expanding services for those on the move, including at sea and in the air, where Musk promises internet on planes comparable with speeds back at home for the first time. A little further out, Musk’s plan to connect Starlink directly to standard smartphones would extend his space empire into consumer pockets — all facilitated by the largest satellite constellation ever deployed. While there is a ways to go to make a business relying on heavily subsidized antennas economically sustainable, Starlink’s aggressive expansion is rewriting the playbook for a low Earth orbit broadband market littered with bankruptcies and failures. Starlink has had another effect: creating a finely tuned launch system. The current Starlink generation requires SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites at a dizzying pace to build out the constellation and meet growing demand for its broadband services. Launches, as well as recovery of the Falcon 9 first stages and payload fairings, are now routine. As of Dec. 1, SpaceX had performed 54 launches in 2022; in 2002, the year Musk founded SpaceX, there were only 65 orbital launch attempts worldwide. SpaceX has demonstrated with this high flight cadence that, in addition to its major customers like NASA and the U.S. Space Force, it can squeeze in additional customers simply by delaying a Starlink launch: an “elastic launch manifest,” in the words of one industry source. That has become increasingly important given the growth of satellite constellations and delays in the introduction of new launch vehicles like the Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur. That elasticity allowed SpaceX to ride to the rescue when Russia’s widely condemned invasion of Ukraine took the Soyuz off the launch market, resulting in a series of unusual launch deals for SpaceX. Days after it terminated its Soyuz launch contract in March, OneWeb — a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink — announced it would launch some of its remaining satellites on three Falcon 9 rockets. While OneWeb also bought two launches of India’s GSLV, it had few other options if it wanted to minimize the delay in launching satellites that had been scheduled to launch this year on Soyuz. OneWeb is not the only unusual customer being rescued by SpaceX. In October, the European Space Agency announced it would launch two missions, the Euclid astrophysics mission and Hera asteroid mission, on Falcon 9. Euclid was originally slated to fly on Soyuz, while Hera was a victim of continued Ariane 6 delays that would have kept it from launching in 2024 as planned. Two months earlier, Northrop Grumman said it would buy at least three Falcon 9 launches of Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which has long competed with SpaceX’s Dragon to service the International Space Station. Those launches will serve as a stopgap between the retirement of the current version of its Antares rocket, with a Ukrainian first stage and Russian engine, and the introduction of a new version developed with Firefly Aerospace. But Ukraine also underlines how Musk is not always the benevolent savior his fans make him out to be. The billionaire threatened to cut off the country’s Starlink lifeline after Ukrainian officials condemned him for putting forward a peace plan, via Twitter, that included ceding territory to their invader. Musk has also made conflicting statements about his willingness to continue funding some Starlink services in Ukraine, even while in negotiations to have the Pentagon support it. Starlink has come under fire from astronomers, environmentalists and other satellite operators over the sprawling constellation’s impact on the night sky and its potential to create hazardous space junk. While SpaceX has taken steps to address those space sustainability concerns, some remain unconvinced, particularly as SpaceX proposes to grow the constellation from roughly 3,000 today to more than 30,000. More satellites exacerbate the constellation’s potential for harm, but they also come amid question marks over the speeds Starlink would be capable of without an upgrade as the network gets increasingly congested. In August, Starlink was denied nearly $900 million in rural broadband subsidies from the FCC after failing to show it could deliver the services it promised nearly 643,000 homes and businesses in the United States. While the FCC said Starlink has real promise, the regulator made a point of not subsidizing technology that needs more development to get up to speed. SpaceX is appealing the decision. Musk routinely butts heads with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. financial regulator, which fined him $20 million in 2018 for erroneously tweeting he had the funding to take his electric car maker Tesla private for $ 420 a share. Musk has also sparred with the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses SpaceX’s launches. The kerfuffles have ranged from complaints about the lengthy environmental review for the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, launch site to performing a suborbital test flight of Starship there in December 2020 in violation of the terms of its launch license. The FAA let SpaceX off after a brief investigation. SpaceX is now facing scrutiny from yet another agency. Eight former SpaceX employees filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board Nov. 16, alleging they had been illegally fired by the company in June for organizing activities protected under federal law. Those activities include circulating an open letter within the company calling on SpaceX to formally distance itself from public comments — including tweets — by Musk. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX—every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company,” they wrote. Musk is now not just a controversial Twitter user, but also a controversial Twitter owner and chief executive. As he fans the firestorm in his efforts to remake that company, every hour spent there is an hour less that could be spent at SpaceX, where he often had a hands-on presence, particularly with Starship development in Boca Chica. Musk’s private plane last visited the Brownsville, Texas, airport closest to Boca Chica in mid-October, before the Twitter deal closed, according to a service — a Twitter account, of course — that tracks the plane’s flights. In late November, one person tweeted at Musk a meme showing a person, labeled Musk, lavishing attention on one child in a pool — Twitter — while the other, Tesla, is ignored and struggles to stay afloat. Below them is a skeleton at the bottom of the ocean, labeled “Mars mission.” “Mars plans are still moving forward,” Musk responded. Many of his supporters no doubt believe him, but others have reason to wonder if his multiplanetary vision is now a little blurry. This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
ThinkOrbital, a space infrastructure startup, is designing an orbital platform aimed at commercial businesses, military and government agencies that want to manufacture products in orbit or recycle debris. The Lafayette, Colorado-based company last year lost out in NASA’s competition to develop commercial space station concepts and is now working on a new product that it believes is more viable, said Lee Rosen, ThinkOrbital’s co-founder, president and chief strategy officer. A former vice president at SpaceX, Rosen became an advisor to ThinkOrbital when the company was founded in early 2021. Last week he was named president as the company pursues plans to raise funds and demonstrate on-orbit assembly. The technologies required to build platforms in low Earth orbit already exist, Rosen told SpaceNews . But they need to be engineered so structures can be assembled autonomously and scalable for different customers, he said. The company’s spherical habitat, called ThinkPlatform, would be assembled in space using a robotic arm. Rosen said it could operate as a component of a larger commercial station or docked with a space vehicle like SpaceX’s Starship. “This platform can be for manufacturing, human habitation, military applications and whatnot,” Rosen said. “And the good news is we don’t have to bend any physics to make it happen. In-space electron beam welding was demonstrated by the Soviets in the 80s so we know it works. We want to do an inflight demo so we have the data ourselves. But we’re confident that it works.” Earlier this year ThinkOrbital — with partners Redwire, KMI and Arizona State University — won two research contracts worth $260,000 under the U.S. Space Force Orbital Prime program for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. Rosen said the plan is to refine the design concept for a space structure that could be used for debris removal and recycling. “We’re working on a hub and spoke concept where smaller satellites would go out and gather the debris, bring it back to a central location, process it and we could either turn them into fuel or deorbit them,” said Rosen. “We could process debris at that hub, for example, and turn aluminum into aluminum powder that could be used for spacecraft fuel.” ThinkOrbital is hoping to be selected for the next phase of Orbital Prime which could be worth up to $1.5 million. “We hope to be able to work with the Space Force as one of the organizations that are interested in in-space manufacturing,” said Rosen. He said the future of in-space manufacturing remains unclear but could gain momentum when commercial companies start deploying space stations in LEO. The expectation is that high-speed computer chips, fiber optics or pharmaceutical products will be manufactured in space, “but the reason why in-space manufacturing doesn’t exist on a large scale is because there’s nowhere to do it. They just don’t have the room on the International Space Station to do all of the things that could be done.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A technical issue likely knocked Iran’s Press TV temporarily off the air last week, Eutelsat said as the French satellite operator calls on partners to stop broadcasting the news channel to comply with European sanctions. The Iranian state-owned news network lashed out at Eutelsat Dec. 7 via Twitter and an article — which has since been updated — after losing service for what it described as an attack on free speech. Press TV initially said Eutelsat had “taken Press TV off air” before updating the article’s text to instead focus on a notification about plans to drop the channel without mentioning the service outage. Daphne Joseph-Gabriel, Eutelsat’s corporate communications officer, said the service interruption was likely caused by “a technical incident on the feeder signal” and therefore not in its control. “In the case at hand, Eutelsat does not have any direct commercial relationship with PressTV,” Joseph-Gabriel told SpaceNews via email. “It is therefore up to its distributors and partners to comply with the sanctions-related provisions of its contracts.” Eutelsat sent out an official request to immediately cease broadcasting Press TV after the Council of the European Union singled the channel out in a Nov. 14 round of sanctions against Iran. The Council said the EU holds Press TV “responsible for producing and broadcasting the forced confessions of detainees” amid widespread unrest in Iran following the death of a woman while in police custody. Depending on how a channel is uplinked, Joseph-Gabriel said in some cases only the broadcaster has the ability to discontinue the service of a specific channel. “In such cases, Eutelsat is not able to remove the channels without impacting other legitimate channels on the same transponder that are not targeted by sanctions,” she said. She said the French operator “is closely monitoring the situation” and will “consider further action accordingly.” Satellite broadcasters straddle a fine line between facilitating free speech and promoting propaganda. It is an issue that continues to play out in Russia , where Eutelsat is under pressure to curb broadcasts of pro-Kremlin content amid the country’s war in Ukraine.
Updated at 5:45 p.m. Eastern after post-splashdown briefing. WASHINGTON — Fifty years to the day after the last Apollo moon mission touched down on the lunar surface, NASA’s plans to return to the moon took a major step forward with the successful splashdown of the Orion spacecraft to end the Artemis 1 mission. The Orion spacecraft splashed down off the coast of Baja California at 12:40 p.m. Eastern Dec. 11, ending the 25.5-day Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight. The splashdown took place near recovery forces led by the USS Portland, which will haul the capsule onto the ship to transport back to the port of San Diego, California. “This has been an extraordinarily successful mission,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing about three hours after splashdown. “It is the beginning of the new beginning, and that is to explore the heavens.” After the European Service Module separated at 12:00 p.m. Eastern, the Orion crew capsule performed a “skip” reentry, descending first to an altitude of about 60 kilometers, then ascending to about 90 kilometers before completing the rest of descent. That maneuver is designed to reduce g-forces on the spacecraft and allows more flexibility in selecting a landing site. Successfully completing reentry at lunar return velocities of up to 40,000 kilometers per hour was the top objective of the Artemis 1 mission, since there was no other way to test the spacecraft’s thermal protection system. “There is no arcjet or aerothermal facility here on Earth of replicating hypersonic reentry with a heat shield of this size,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager, at a Dec. 8 briefing. At the post-splashdown briefing, Sarafin and Howard Hu, NASA Orion program manager, said they were only starting to review data collected during the reentry, but what they had reviewed so far showed that the Orion thermal protection system met expectations. “I would say we’re very happy with what we’ve seen so far on the heat shield,” Hu said. “Initial indications are very favorable, but there’s more ahead of us in terms of exactly understanding what the reentry flight test told us,” Sarafin said. Sarafin said there was no evidence of any issues from the time of service module separation through splashdown, although they still needed to review data collected during two communications blackouts caused by the plasma from reentry, as expected. The splashdown took place within 3.9 kilometers of the target, according to Hu. The mission had a requirement of splashing down within 10 kilometers. After splashdown, Sarafin said crews were not able to recover the parachutes or the door to the forward bay on the capsule where they were stored before they sank into the ocean, but said project officials knew that was a possibility. “The fact that the parachute deployment was all nominal really makes the retrieval of the parachutes kind of a moot point,” he added. After splashdown, NASA planned to leave the capsule in the water and powered on for two hours to conduct a “soakback” test to see how the capsule handled the heat from reentry. Teams will then use boats to tow the capsule into the well deck of the USS Portland, where it will be secured in a cradle and the deck drained before heading to San Diego. The splashdown concluded a long-delayed mission that started with a launch on the first flight of the Space Launch System Nov. 16 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the second time the Orion capsule flew in space, after the brief Exploration Flight Test 1 orbital mission in December 2014, but the first to feature the full Orion spacecraft that included the European Service Module. Orion flew by the moon Nov. 21 , passing about 130 kilometers above the surface as it performed a maneuver to send the spacecraft towards a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. Orion entered that orbit Nov. 25 , departing Dec. 1 and performing another lunar flyby and maneuver Dec. 5 that put the spacecraft on course back to Earth. The splashdown took place 50 years to the day after Apollo 17’s Lunar Module touched down in the Taurus-Littrow region of the moon on the sixth and final Apollo lunar landing mission. No humans have been beyond low Earth orbit since the conclusion of that mission. Sarafin, at the Dec. 8 briefing, noted Artemis 1 was the 65th mission supporting human spaceflight he had been involved with. “I love flight testing,” he said when asked to compare Artemis 1 with Apollo 17. “The first time you do anything is harder than a repeat.” “Firsts are harder, because you don’t know what you don’t know,” he said. “But as you get to more and more challenging missions, like Apollo 17, that becomes a harder question to answer.” The first crewed Orion mission, Artemis 2, is projected to take place no earlier than late 2024. It will take four astronauts, including one from the Canadian Space Agency, on a flight around the moon and back. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said at the post-splashdown briefing that NASA still planned to conduct Artemis 2 about two years after Artemis 1, in part because of avonics components from the Artemis 1 Orion that will be refurbished and reused on the Artemis 2 Orion.. “We obviously want to try and do it quicker,” he said, by applying lessons learned from Artemis 1. Regarding a crew for the mission, Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, said NASA wanted to wait until it was clear Artemis 1 was a success before naming a crew. “If all is still go and everything looks good, then our plan is to name the crew in early 2023.”
A billionaire-backed private astronaut mission on a SpaceX Crew Dragon has slipped from late this year to March 2023 and could be further delayed, in part for issues beyond its control. The Polaris Program, an initiative announced in February by Shift4 founder Jared Isaacman, originally planned its first Crew Dragon mission, Polaris Dawn, to fly in the fourth quarter of this year. The four-person crew, which includes Isaacman, will perform the first spacewalk from a Crew Dragon spacecraft and fly to a higher altitude than previous crewed orbital spaceflights. As recently as July, that mission was still scheduled to fly this year, with a projected launch in December . By September, though, the launch had quietly slipped to no earlier than March 2023, a date the Polaris Program confirmed Oct. 24 in an announcement of biomedical experiments it plans to perform on the five-day flight. In a Oct. 24 statement to SpaceNews, Polaris spokesperson Sarah Grover said that the program reevaluated the December launch date in September based on the readiness of hardware, software and training for the mission, as well as the overall manifest of SpaceX missions. That led the program to move the launch to no earlier than March 1. That date, too, is subject to change. “In addition to the development driven schedule risk, moving into the winter brings us into a busy period and our date could be directly impacted by ISS missions, which carry their own uncertainty,” she said. While Polaris Dawn is not going to the International Space Station, other SpaceX crew and cargo missions would launch from the same pad at Launch Complex 39A. That includes NASA’s Crew-6 mission to the ISS, tentatively scheduled for as soon as February 2023. Another factor is the use of LC-39A for Falcon Heavy launches. “There is also uncertainty from the Falcon side as there are potential Falcon Heavy launches with government priority ratings in the mix,” she said. Those are likely the USSF-67 and USSF-52 missions for the U.S. Space Force, currently scheduled for early 2023 after extended delays. She said the next evaluation point for Polaris Dawn is in November. “In the meantime we’ll continue to burn down development items and gain certainty in our manifest.” That includes training for Isaacman and the other members of the crew: Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. That training features preparations for a spacewalk, something not done on Crew Dragon or any other commercial mission to date, although the program has not disclosed details about it. “We do take this very seriously,” Isaacman said of training in an Oct. 3 Washington Post webinar, with eight to nine months planned versus six months for Inspiration4. “We’ve got to get it right, because if we do get it wrong, this timeline gets reset in a big way.” A second Polaris Program flight, also on a Crew Dragon, could go to the Hubble Space Telescope to reboost or service it, pending the outcome of a study NASA announced it was undertaking with SpaceX Sept. 29 . The third mission would be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. Neither Polaris nor SpaceX have announced dates for those projected missions.
A NASA spacecraft is on course to deliberately collide with a small asteroid Sept. 26 to test how that technique could be used to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, launched last November , is on a trajectory to collide with Dimorphos, a small asteroid orbiting the larger near Earth asteroid Didymos, at 7:14 p.m. Eastern Sept. 26. The collision will change slightly the orbit of Dimorphos, allowing scientists to measure how effective such a collision, or “kinetic impact,” could be to change the trajectory of any future asteroids that pose a hazard to the Earth. At a Sept. 22 briefing, project officials said the spacecraft was operating well as it approached the asteroids. “The team is ready, the ground systems are ready and the spacecraft is healthy and on track for an impact on Monday,” said Edward Reynolds, DART project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, which operates the mission. Targeting Dimorphos, an object about 160 meters across, will be a challenge. The object won’t be resolved by DART’s camera, DRACO, until about an hour before impact. The spacecraft will use software called SMART Nav to lock on to Dimorphos and adjust its trajectory to stay centered on it. That work will be done autonomously by the spacecraft, although controllers will have the ability to send commands until the final minutes if needed. “We have 21 contingencies that we planned for and are ready to execute,” said Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at APL. Those contingencies include adjusting camera settings if Dimorphos is too dim and telling the spacecraft to change objects it is targeting. Another factor is that scientists don’t know the shape of Dimorphos, which could range from something roughly spherical to highly elongated. “There are a lot of different possibilities of what it could be, and it won’t really be until those last seconds and minutes, as we’re honing in, that we’re going to get a real sense of what it’s made out of, what is its shape,” said Betsy Congdon, DART mechanical lead engineer at APL, in a talk at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris Sept. 22. The mission is also prepared if DART misses Dimorphos. “If there is a miss, the first thing we have to do is figure out what happened,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA planetary defense officer. “That will be the first thing: to safe the spacecraft, get all the information down from the spacecraft.” Adams said the 21 contingencies the mission has prepared for includes missing Dimorphos. “We’re going to start preserving all the data on board about why we missed,” she said. “Then we’ll start preserving propellant and we’ll start looking for an object to come back to.” However, NASA is confident that DART will hit Dimorphos. “Through all the testing that we’ve done,” Johnson said, “I’m highly confident that we’re going to hit on Monday and that it will be a complete success.” While the impact marks the end of DART the spacecraft, it is only the beginning of the next phase of the overall DART mission. A network of ground-based telescopes will observe the asteroids in the days and weeks after the impact to measure the change in period in the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos. The Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope and Lucy spacecraft, approaching Earth for a gravity-assist flyby, will also observe the asteroids. “Different parts of the investigation team have their own ideas about that and they’re competing with each other,” Tom Statler, DART program scientist at NASA, said of the time it would take to determine the new orbit of Dimorphos. “I would be surprised if we had a firm measurement of the period change in less than a few days, and I would be really surprised if it took more than three weeks.” There may also be images of the impact and aftermath taken by an Italian cubesat called LICIACube that hitched a ride with DART and was deployed earlier this month. LICIACube will pass about 55 kilometers from Dimorphos about three minutes after the impact, collecting images to return to Earth afterwards. Statler said the rate the cubesat can return images will depend on the spacecraft’s status after the close approach and availability of time on the Deep Space Network. The cubesat, operated by the Italian space agency ASI, will attempt to first return images taken at times most likely to confirm an impact. “I don’t think we should be expecting more than a couple of images per day, on average,” he said. A successful impact will give NASA more insight into the effectiveness of the kinetic impactor approach to changing the orbit of potentially hazardous asteroids, although agency officials emphasized that Didymos, nor any other known asteroid, poses a near-term impact threat to the Earth. “This demonstration is extremely important to our future here on the Earth, and life on Earth,” said Johnson. There will be some tension in the control room in the final minutes. “In the last couple of minutes, we’re all going to be standing up, waiting to see us hit an asteroid,” said Adams. The DRACO camera will be returning images at a rate of one per second, with the last taken about 2.5 seconds before impact because of onboard processing, she said. At that point contact with DART will be lost. “The mood right now is one of nervous excitement,” said Congdon, discussing dress rehearsals for the impact in mission control. “Everyone is confident and really excited about the next couple of days. During this mission dress rehearsal we even practiced cheering for the loss of signal.”
Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, was at Cape Canaveral, Florida, earlier this week, hoping to see NASA’s first Artemis launch. The launch was scrubbed but Shaw said he took advantage of the time there to chat with NASA leaders about future collaborations. “We had a lot of discussions,” he said Aug. 31 in remarks to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency “DARPA Forward” conference held in Fort Collins, Colorado. Shaw said space security problems confronting the United States and allies can’t be solved by the military alone, particularly as DoD looks to support operations beyond Earth orbit. “As NASA and Artemis go to the moon, one of the challenges that we will have as a nation is understanding that lunar environment,” he said. DoD today performs space traffic control to help satellites in orbit and the International Space Station avoid collisions with other satellites or with debris objects. “We think that we’re probably going to need to partner with NASA in the future as we send astronauts into the lunar environment for long durations to do the same thing there,” Shaw said. In cislunar space, “it’s not quite as crowded, but it’s not empty of debris and objects.” Tracking that vast region of space will be difficult due to the “tyranny of volume,” said Shaw. The area between the Earth and the moon is “a lot of volume, and that’s a lot of opportunity for us to miss things that are happening that we need to be aware of,” he said. That includes natural hazards, debris and electromagnetic interference but also “deliberate threats.” Shaw said new technologies will be needed to better understand the cislunar space environment, including space-based sensors and vehicles that can operate autonomously for long periods of time without resupply or commands from the ground. He noted that DARPA has led the way in technological innovations with autonomous vehicles, mostly for operations on land, at sea or in the air. “I would propose that in no domain will it be more important to have cutting-edge autonomy enabled by machine learning than in the space domain,” said Shaw. Because of the distances, he said, “we’re going to need platforms that don’t need human operators or even machines necessarily back on Earth to tell them what’s going on and how to behave,” he added. “They’re going to need to do that autonomously, whether that’s maintaining orbits, avoiding debris, avoiding threats, or finding the optimal ways to conduct their mission.” As technology evolves, he said, “we have to find the right balance between human oversight and what we allow machines to do on their own … as we’re operating more complex systems farther and farther away from the planet.” Addressing the DARPA crowd, Shaw said, “I urge you all, when you’re thinking autonomous platforms, think not only the terrestrial domains, but think about space, how do we take that cutting-edge innovation and capability and apply it to missions that we’re going to need to be able to do in the space domain?” Propulsion, in-space refueling Other technologies that will be critical for deep space are propulsion and logistics support, Shaw said. He gave kudos to DARPA for its nuclear powered spacecraft project known as DRACO , or Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations. Range and endurance are limited by current electric and chemical space propulsion systems, which Shaw called “the tyranny of the rocket equation.” Right now, “I don’t see anything on the technological horizon that’s going to be a big game changer on that,” said Shaw, adding that programs like DRACO will bring incremental improvements in propulsion for long-dwell missions or missions that require quick maneuvers on short timelines. Logistics support is another major hurdle, he said. “Since the dawn of the space age … all of our satellites and spacecraft we send to space have taken their propellant with them and they don’t refuel.” As the nation invests in new space platforms, said Shaw, “we need to develop with that a complementary logistics structure that allows us to refuel, to service and extend lifetime and extend capability.” Military organizations that are planning satellite missions “have to use the constraints on their propellant in their calculations. They have to consider the delta-v budget over the lifetime of a satellite when they think about their mission,” he said. “I would love to take that out of the equation.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX could provide “full and continuous” direct-to-smartphone services across much of the globe with less than a third of the 7,500 Gen 2 Starlink satellites approved last week, the company said in a request to add the capability to the broadband constellation. SpaceX filed an application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Dec. 6 to include a “direct-to-cellular” hosted payload on around 2,000 Gen 2 satellites. The payload would enable these satellites to use spectrum from cellular partners to deliver “voice, messaging, and basic web browsing” to standard phones beyond the reach of terrestrial networks, SpaceX senior regulatory engineer Kyle Wesson wrote in an accompanying letter to the FCC. “At full deployment, this hosted payload will enable SpaceX to provide full and continuous coverage of the Earth within +58° to -58° latitude by mid-2024,” Wesson said. SpaceX has so far only announced a partnership to use spectrum from T-Mobile to provide a direct-to-smartphone service in the United States. In its application with the FCC, SpaceX said its direct-to-smartphone service would be able to connect to phones that communicate in the same 1.9 GHz band that T-Mobile uses. “The total number of satellites serving the United States and its territories simultaneously will typically be between 80 and 100,” Wesson said. He outlined “theoretical peak speeds” of up to 18.3 megabits per second (Mbps) downlink and 7.2 Mbps upload per beam when using a higher bandwidth channel. “The direct-to-cellular services will be available for residential, commercial, institutional, and governmental users in the entire contiguous United States, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and some of the most remote corridors of Alaska,” he told the FCC. SpaceX’s application comes barely a week after the FCC granted it conditional approval to launch only a quarter of its proposed 30,000 Gen 2 satellites , while deferring action on the rest. The new service could also connect remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Wesson said, building on “SpaceX’s expansion into this mobile services arena with its acquisition of [small satellite operator] Swarm Technologies” last year. Swarm was co-founded by Sara Spangelo, who is now a SpaceX senior director of satellite engineering and is helping lead its direct-to-smartphone expansion. In November, Spangelo said SpaceX expected to secure three to five more direct-to-smartphone partnerships by early 2023 after being approached by more than 50 telcos worldwide. She said SpaceX could launch initial services, starting with text messaging, as early as 2024. Direct-to-smartphone services Apple launched via Globalstar satellites in November are currently limited to emergency SOS messaging for iPhone 14 handsets in the United States and Canada. Other established companies and startups also have their own plans to deploy a variety of satellite services directly to standard smartphones. And while SpaceX is searching for more terrestrial spectrum partners, the company has asked the FCC for more spectrum that could be used for a mobile Starlink satellite service — including in the 1.6GHz and 2.4GHz spectrum bands used by Globalstar and the 2GHz band assigned to satellite broadcaster Dish Network . SpaceX has launched more than 3,500 satellites for Starlink’s current generation to date as it continues to build out coverage to reach a critical mass of subscribers worldwide.
TAMPA, Fla. — The European Space Agency has awarded funds to develop a demonstrator for Skimsat, a small satellite platform designed to operate in very low Earth orbit (VLEO). Europe’s Thales Alenia Space said July 19 it had secured 2.3 million euros ($2.4 million) in ESA funding to advance its design of a satellite capable of operating in orbit below 300 kilometers. The funding includes an 800,000 euro study contract for a demonstrator that would use electrical propulsion to compensate for air drag at these low altitudes, which promise sharper resolutions for Earth observation applications. The company secured the funds in partnership with QinetiQ, a British aerospace company planning to provide altitude and orbit control systems (AOCS), among other capabilities for the platform. Their one-year study, led by Thales Alenia Space’s U.K. subsidiary and QinetiQ’s space division in Belgium, includes the selection of payloads for a future Skimsat mission. Nigel Towers, head of sales strategy and marketing for Thales Alenia Space in the U.K., did not give a potential launch date for Skimsat, but said the study contract enables the companies to define the mission and platform concept. The study funds were awarded under ESA’s Discovery Preparation and Technology Development (DPTD) activities, and Towers said via email that Skimsat also received approval for 1.5 million euros “for predevelopments.” Skimsat “stands to completely change the Earth observation market,” according to Andrew Stanniland, CEO of Thales Alenia Space in the U.K. Stanniland said in a statement that Skimsat challenges “the traditional use of high altitudes that avoid air drag” and will create a “new business model for high resolution imaging” through more cost-effective satellites. Thales Alenia Space has previously secured funds for Skimsat from the British government as part of the platform’s role in the Quantum Accelerometer Climate Explorer (Q-ACE) mission. Following the demonstrator, a Q-ACE consortium led by Thales Alenia Space’s British subsidiary plans to use Skimsat for a mission to measure the density of the Earth’s thermosphere to improve climate forecasts. Q-ACE is also in very early stages of development and does not have a firm target launch date, Towers said. VLEO, referring to orbits between 250 and 450 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, also promises speedier communications for operators able to compensate for air drag . Multiple companies have been developing VLEO solutions amid growing interest from commercial players and national security agencies. In May, SpaceX launched a satellite built by Blue Canyon Technologies for MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, that aims to test operations in VLEO for several months .
SAN FRANCISCO – Spire Global is adding propulsion to its multipurpose Lemur satellite constellation. French startup ThrustMe announced plans Sept. 1 to provide seven I2T5 iodine cold gas propulsion systems for Spire three-unit cubesats scheduled to launch later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission. “Incorporating propulsion into our satellites will increase the capability of our constellation and safety of operations,” Jeroen Cappaert, Spire co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “ThrustMe’s I2T5 unit has distinct advantages for Spire from a technical risk perspective. The small physical volume and low power requirements are critical for 3U satellites.” Spire operates a constellation of more than 100 Lemurs cubesats equipped with sensors to gather weather data, track ships and airplanes, and provide customers with other space-based services. As electronic components shrink, Spire keeps packing additional sensors and other components into its satellites, which are roughly the size of a bottle of wine. ThrustMe has delivered more than 20 I2T5 propulsion systems to clients around the world. In July, ThrustMe unveiled plans for a 900-square-meter site to manufacture 365 propulsion systems per year. “It is particularly important for us to meet the needs of clients such as Spire, who have specific parameters for propulsion solutions,” Ane Aanesland, ThrustMe co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We have designed and developed a system that provides sufficient in-orbit maneuverability for satellites with power and volume constraints, so that they can perform essential and soon-to-be mandatory operations.” Until recently, cubesat operators had few propulsion options . Now that several miniature thrusters have been flight proven, companies like Spire are ready to begin using the thrusters to move satellites around in orbit and to help them to reenter Earth’s atmosphere when their missions conclude. Due to concerns about orbital debris and space traffic, government agencies around the world are tightening regulations related to collision avoidance and deorbit timelines.
Updated 9:00 a.m. Eastern after post-launch briefing. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — After years of delays, NASA’s Space Launch System lifted off for the first time Nov. 16, sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a shakedown cruise around the moon. The SLS lifted off from Launch Complex 39B here at 1:47 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage, called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), separated from the core stage eight and a half minutes after liftoff. The Orion spacecraft separated from the ICPS nearly two hours after liftoff, after the stage completed a translunar injection burn. “We have a priority-one mission in play right now,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager, at a post-launch briefing. He was referring to the mission’s top priority to have the Orion capsule reenter at lunar velocities at the end of the mission, something enabled by the successful launch. “We had the rocket do its job and deliver the spacecraft to the point of translunar injection.” The Orion spacecraft was “performing exactly as we intended,” he said, with the exception of a few “funnies” or minor issues. That included a glitch with a spacecraft star tracker and microswitches in a solar array that did not immediately indicate it latched into place as expected when the array deployed, but later did so. The launch took place more than 40 minutes into a two-hour window after overcoming two issues during the countdown. A little more than three hours before the opening of the launch window, NASA reported a leak in a valve in ground equipment used to replenish the core stage’s liquid hydrogen tank. The launch director dispatched a small “red crew” to the pad to tighten bolts in the valve, fixing the leak. “Our most likely case here was that we just had some loose nuts on those valves,” said Mike Bolger, Exploration Ground Systems Program manager, at a post-launch briefing. “We sent the team out and they did a terrific job, and we got the issue resolved.” “It was a low moment when we first saw the leak,” he added, bringing up hydrogen leaks in past launch attempts, “but really a high moment when we recognized we’d solved the problem.” Around the time the red crew completed its work, the U.S. Space Force, which operates the Eastern Range that includes KSC, said a radar needed to track the launch had malfunctioned, a problem traced to a faulty Ethernet switch. Replacing the switch took more than an hour. The successful launch came after two scrubbed attempts in late August and early September. The first, Aug. 29, was called off when sensors indicated one of four RS-25 core stage engines had not properly cooled down , a problem later blamed on a faulty sensor. NASA scrubbed the second, Sept. 3, after detecting a hydrogen leak during fueling of the core stage . NASA replaced damaged seals in the liquid hydrogen line and changed tanking procedures, which it successfully tested Sept. 21. However, Hurricane Ian forced NASA to send the SLS back to the safety of the Vehicle Assembly Building before making another attempt in a launch period that closed in early October. NASA rolled the SLS back to the pad Nov. 4, then had to wait as Hurricane Nicole passed through Nov. 10. The storm caused “very minor” damage that mission managers concluded either could be repaired or was not a constraint to launch. That damage included a caulk material called RTV that had started to come off the interface between the Orion crew capsule and its launch abort system in the aftermath of the hurricane. Sarafin said imagery showed “a couple indications” that additional material came off during flight, but that engineers were still studying the data to determine what, if anything did come off Orion during ascent. Those earlier launch scrubs, though, were only minor setbacks for a launch vehicle whose development suffered extensive delays. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act, which instructed NASA to develop SLS, called for the vehicle to be ready by the end of 2016. Various technical issues, primarily with the rocket’s core stage, steadily pushed back the first flight of the vehicle until now. The Artemis 1 mission will see the Orion spacecraft, without astronauts on board, go to the moon and enter a distant retrograde orbit there. Orion will remain in that orbit for five days, reaching a maximum distance from Earth of 480,500 kilometers. It will then depart the orbit and return to Earth, splashing down off the coast of San Diego, California, at 12:40 p.m. Eastern Dec. 11. The 25-day mission is considered a “short-class” mission by NASA, versus missions of up to 42 days that Orion would have flown in two earlier launch attempts. The shorter mission will still achieve all the test objectives, but in a more compressed timeframe. “We did proofs of concept early on to demonstrate that you can fit all the objects the program has decided they want us to accomplish into the shortest class mission,” said Emily Nelson, NASA chief flight director, in a Nov. 14 interview. “But, it’s much more of a Tetris puzzle to make sure all of those things fit in.” Those plans are revised for each launch opportunity. “Each different launch opportunity is a new challenge in terms of when is the spacecraft in the right place to accomplish those different mission objectives,” she said. Artemis 1 is designed to test the Orion spacecraft in cislunar space, including testing the spacecraft’s heat shield when reentering at lunar return velocities. It will be followed by Artemis 2, the first crewed Orion mission, no earlier than 2024.
The Defense Innovation Unit awarded contracts to Anduril, Aalyria Technologies, Atlas Space Operations and Enveil for a project that seeks to demonstrate a hybrid architecture where commercial, civil and military satellites can share data. DIU, based in Silicon Valley, was created to tap technologies from the commercial market for military applications. Its hybrid space architecture project is being done in collaboration with the Space Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Atlas Space last month announced its DIU award. The agency said more contracts are expected from the same solicitation. “Hybrid space communications is the next great leap forward,” DIU said in a statement. Rogan Shimmin, DIU program manager, said the initial goals are to demonstrate on-demand collection and analysis of imagery and other tactical data collected by commercial and government satellites operating in different orbits. On-orbit demonstrations are planned within 24 months, said DIU. The project will focus on four main areas: A secure software defined network to integrate diverse telecom systems across low, medium and geostationary orbits, and cislunar space. There is currently limited communication between systems across orbits. Combining data from multiple sources will require common data standards and interfaces, and common command and control interfaces to manage data collection will be necessary. Cloud-based analytics using artificial intelligence and machine learning A variable trust protocol to protect information. According to DIU, “we must ensure that we do not introduce vulnerabilities through the increased access points. Due to the broad variety of participating networks, each link and each node will be dynamically assigned a trust score based on observed behavior within the architecture. The traffic can then be routed over preferred links based on sensitivity and timeliness. Speaking last month at a National Security Space Association event, Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of DIU’s space portfolio, said the hybrid space architecture will help support a Pentagon effort to connect diverse networks known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control. “Ultimately our goal is secure, assured multipath communications that serves the commercial, civil and national security space, not just in LEO but in all orbits, and it should be scalable,” said Butow. With regard to cybersecurity, he said, a hybrid network needs to provide security but also ensure access. “If you’re gonna have an internet of things, and they’re all gonna be connected through the hybrid architecture, you can’t use encryption methods that typically we use with small constellations. We have to move more to a zero trust architecture.” The project also will look at different ways to manage data transport, said Butow. “There’s lots of companies that are responsible for moving data between GEO and MEO and LEO, from space to ground and ground to space,” he said. “We want to take advantage of all that data transport architecture, and to make sure that we have both the least expensive but also the most responsive ways to move critical information to users who need it.” The hybrid space architecture will be designed to support commercial industry’s revenue models, Butow said. “We want to make it easy for them to exchange their data with end users in a revenue positive model. There’s no commercial business case if there’s no revenue.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The maiden flight for Ariane 6 that had been slated toward the end of 2022 is now targeting next year, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said June 13. Aschbacher said Ariane 6 is set to fly “some time” in 2023 during a BBC interview without giving a reason for the delay. Just a few weeks ago, a senior executive for Arianespace said it was preparing to conduct the inaugural launch toward the end of 2022 from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Arianespace referred questions to ESA, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Ariane 6 had previously been scheduled to debut in 2020 before suffering multiple delays following the COVID-19 pandemic. The next-generation launcher comes in two versions: Ariane 64 with four boosters and Ariane 62 with two. They are designed to replace Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 and the medium-lift Soyuz rocket sourced from Russia, respectively. Arianespace expects to deploy satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation constellation with Ariane 6 in the mission that follows its inaugural launch. Ariane 6 commercial customers include Viasat and Amazon’s Project Kuiper megaconstellation . Europe is also developing a successor to Vega, its small launch vehicle, called Vega C. According to an ESA media invitation June 7, Arianespace is due to conduct Vega C’s inaugural launch July 7 at 7:13 a.m. Eastern from Kourou. Giulio Ranzo, CEO of Italian rocket maker Avio that is Vega’s prime contractor and a subcontractor for Ariane 6, discussed development timelines for both launchers in a recent SpaceNews interview . Aschbacher also said during the BBC interview that Europe has still “not decided what will happen or [what] will be the future” of the ExoMars rover mission it had shared with Russia. He said ESA is “working with NASA to see whether they could be a partner on this mission,” after suspending cooperation with Russia in March in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, he stressed that a decision had not been made on how to proceed with the scientific mission. ExoMars was previously set to launch in September on a Russian Proton rocket, and use a landing platform from Russia to deliver the ESA-built Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface of Mars. Speaking at a May 3 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist at ESA, said he doubted a new lander could be ready by 2026 and that he believed the rover’s launch would be delayed to at least 2028 . googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Leaders of the House space subcommittee have asked the Federal Aviation Administration for more details on its investigation into a Blue Origin New Shepard launch accident. In a Sept. 15 letter to Billy Nolen , acting administrator of the FAA, Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Brian Babin (R-Texas) sought more details into the FAA’s ongoing investigation into the Sept. 12 failure of the New Shepard vehicle on an uncrewed suborbital flight designated NS-23. They wrote that their interest, not usually seen in other commercial launch failures, stems from the fact that New Shepard also carries people. “On a different day with a different mission, this vehicle’s anomaly could have put human lives in danger,” they wrote. The particular vehicle involved in the failure had only been used for uncrewed flights; a different New Shepard vehicle has flown Blue Origin’s crewed flights since July 2021. Beyer and Babin, the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, mentioned their responsibility of providing oversight of the FAA’s commercial space transportation office and commercial launch and reentry in general for their desire for more information into the investigation, including, ultimately the root cause and steps to correct the problem that caused it They also asked for a briefing of subcommittee staff within 10 days. The letter was not the first time Beyer commented on the accident. “Today’s booster failure of NS-23 is a compelling reminder of the risks of spaceflight,” Beyer said in a statement hours after the incident. “As commercial human spaceflight is now a reality, the subcommittee’s work on the safety of commercial human spaceflight is more important than ever.” Neither the FAA nor Blue Origin have provided more details about the incident, when an apparent problem with the vehicle’s booster triggered the launch escape motor of the capsule, taking it safely away from the booster. The capsule, carrying three dozen payloads that included a number of NASA-sponsored experiments, landed safely under parachutes several minutes later. Blue Origin said the booster was destroyed. The FAA confirmed Sept. 12 that it was leading the investigation into the accident. That work would have gone to the National Transportation Safety Board, under terms of an agreement the agencies signed Sept. 9, had anyone been killed or seriously injured, or if debris that could have caused death or serious injury fell outside the launch site. A Blue Origin executive, Jarrett Jones, said at World Satellite Business Week Sept. 13 that it was still “super early” into the investigation . He played down speculation that the failure was linked to an issue with the booster’s BE-3 engine. “It’s a little premature to assume that it was something related to the engine.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said July 26 it has been selected to study multi-orbit satellite networks for the European Space Agency. The study will be conducted by the U.S.-based satellite broadband operator’s British subsidiary, which will spend a year evaluating technical requirements and potential markets for hybrid networks that combine multiple frequency bands and network architectures. These include systems in geostationary orbit (GEO), medium Earth orbit (MEO), low Earth orbit (LEO) and High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) such as balloons and airships. John Reeves, managing director of Viasat UK, said the company will research how multi-layer networks “can increase capability, resilience, and performance for end-users across commercial and government.” Viasat UK provides communications solutions mainly for the British government, particularly for data security and information insurance applications. Carlsbad, California-headquartered Viasat is currently working through regulatory approvals to buy British satellite operator Inmarsat in a $7.3 billion deal, which would expand the U.S. company’s Ka-band GEO constellation globally into other spectrum bands. Inmarsat operates a fleet in GEO but has plans for satellites in LEO and highly elliptical orbits (HEO) that can maximize a satellite’s dwell time over higher latitudes. Meanwhile, the European Union is seeking to develop a multibillion-dollar LEO constellation to fill broadband access gaps in Europe and Africa. The proposed sovereign constellation — which is in very early stages — also aims to provide secure communications for European governments and military organizations through quantum encryption technologies. A consortium including European satellite makers, operators, service and launch providers has been helping Europe study the constellation’s feasibility. Two other groups of mostly early-stage space companies have also been studying the proposed network: New Symphonie, which French companies lead, and UN:IO which is led by businesses based in Germany. Viasat expects to complete its study for ESA in the second quarter of 2023 to give the U.K., Europe and allied nations “important guidance on a pathway toward developing and harnessing the potential of resilient multi-layered” satellite communications capabilities. Viasat declined to disclose the amount of funding it will receive from ESA for the study. “The study will focus on understanding how combining orbital regimes can create future systems that more efficiently use all available resources on orbit,” Viasat spokesperson Daniel Bleier said. While the study “is not intended to specifically inform Europe’s plans for a sovereign LEO constellation,” Bleier said “it could provide valuable insight to advance the analysis of LEO, MEO, and GEO systems as well as the capabilities of hybrid, multi-layered systems.” Viasat’s multi-orbit plan Viasat’s shareholders last month approved its plans to acquire Inmarsat, putting the deal on track to wrap up later this year following regulatory approvals. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the U.K.’s competition regulator, said July 25 it has started to review the transaction. The regulator invited the public to weigh in on its review during a comment period that closes Aug. 15. “This is an important and anticipated part of the process towards completion of the deal, and we are committed to continued engagement with the CMA on this review,” Viasat spokesperson Jessica Packard said in an emailed statement. “We maintain our belief that the complementary resources and assets of the combination with Inmarsat will result in the creation of a better UK business that will offer greater capabilities to both UK consumers and Government customers.” French GEO operator Eutelsat announced the industry’s latest multi-orbit consolidation deal July 26 with plans to merge with OneWeb, the U.K.-based LEO broadband operator. That deal could have implications for Europe’s sovereign broadband constellation, because Eutelsat is part of the industry consortium that has been helping to develop the network. Although Eutelsat would take over OneWeb through their proposed all-share transaction, the British government would retain a special share in OneWeb that comes with priority voting rights.
The unclassified version of the U.S. national defense strategy released by the Defense Department Oct. 27 forecasts a decades-long competition with China and lays out priorities for the military going forward. In the introduction to the strategy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says China “remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.” Meanwhile, the United States will continue to respond to Russia’s “reckless invasion of Ukraine” and support efforts by the NATO alliance. With regard to outer space, the strategy warns that China and other rivals are likely to target U.S. satellites in a conflict in order to cripple the military’s access to critical services, and calls for greater use of commercial space technologies to enhance U.S. defense. “Because the cyber and space domains empower the entire force, we will prioritize building resilience in these areas,” says the strategy. The document validates the Pentagon’s plan to build a multi-layer network of missile-defense and missile-tracking satellites, and to supplement military space networks with commercial systems. DoD will “reduce adversary incentives for early attack by fielding diverse, resilient and redundant satellites constellations .. and we will bolster our ability to fight through disruption by improving defensive capabilities and increasing options for reconstitution.” The strategy says DoD “will increase collaboration with the private sector in priority areas, especially with the commercial space industry, leveraging its technological advancements and entrepreneurial spirit to enable new capabilities.” The Pentagon also included in the document the unclassified nuclear posture review and missile defense review. “By weaving these documents together, the entire Department is matching resources to goals,” DoD said. The national defense strategy is a companion document to the broader national security strategy the White House released Oct. 12.
ARCADIA, Calif. — A SpaceX cargo Dragon mission to the International Space Station will now launch no earlier than July 11, a delay of more than a month after engineers identified the source of elevated hydrazine readings in the spacecraft. In a statement late June 13, NASA said that agency officials met with SpaceX to discuss the status of the investigation into elevated vapor readings of monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) detected earlier this month after the spacecraft was fueled ahead of a launch then planned for June 10. The readings, the sign of a potential leak in the vehicle’s Draco thrusters, prompted a launch delay announced June 6 . After removing propellant from the vehicle, “SpaceX was able to narrow down the source of the issue to a Draco thruster valve inlet joint,” the agency said. “Teams will now remove the specific hardware to replace it ahead of flight.” In the statement, NASA said it has rescheduled the launch of the CRS-25 cargo mission to no earlier than July 11. The agency said last week, before the cause of the readings had been identified, that it had rescheduled the launch for no earlier than June 28. The spacecraft will transport experiments and cargo to the station. The Draco thrusters are used for orbital maneuvering by Dragon, including approaching and departing the station, as well as for deorbiting at the end of the mission. The thrusters use MMH and nitrogen tetroxide propellants.
Rocket Lab announced Sept. 7 it has signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. military to explore the possibility of using the company’s space launch vehicles to transport cargo around the world. The cooperative research and development agreement known as a CRADA was signed with U.S. Transportation Command, the organization that oversees global military logistics operations. The command has signed similar agreements with SpaceX and Blue Origin . These CRADAs support the U.S. Air Force’s rocket cargo project that is exploring concepts to transport equipment across Earth via space. The agreement with Rocket Lab USA will examine the point-to-point transportation capabilities of the company’s small launcher Electron and its future reusable medium-lift rocket Neutron . It also will look at possible applications of the company’s Photon spacecraft as a platform for on-orbit cargo depots and as delivery re-entry vehicles. Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement that point-to-point space transportation offers a “new ability to move equipment quickly around the world in hours, enabling a faster response to global emergencies and natural disasters.” Beck said rocket cargo has the potential to offer the U.S. military new options for logistics operations that today depend entirely on ground, sea and air transportation. Jamie Malak, the CRADA’s government project lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said U.S. military combatant commands “have been constrained to logistics at the speed of conventional aircraft — or often far less — for their entire history. Now we can look to transport critical military cargo an order of magnitude faster than ever before.” Under these agreements with commercial launch companies, he said, “we will explore how to integrate rocket cargo systems in defense logistics processes and how to make space transportation a reliable and practical option for operations of the future.
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Germany’s Team NimbRo took home the $5 million grand prize in the ANA Avatar XPrize finals Nov. 5, after completing a test course that showed how remote-control robots could contribute to space exploration. French startup Pollen Robotics captured the $2 million second-place prize. Team Northeastern from Boston won $1 million for coming in third. Seventeen teams from 10 countries competed in the two-day finals of the ANA Avatar XPrize at the Long Beach Convention Center. The space exploration theme was designed to help validate the avatar technology for space-related tasks, while engaging the public. It was the first public XPrize testing event since the $10 million Ansari XPrize was claimed in 2004 by a team led by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “One of the applications of this type of technology is for harsh environments, where a human would have a difficult time,” Anousheh Ansari, XPrize Foundation CEO and one of the founders of the Ansari XPrize, told SpaceNews. “It could be a fire or a nuclear-meltdown situation, but also the environment of space is not very friendly to human body. It definitely can be a means of exploring extreme environments and surfaces through a means where you’re not only having a robot send pictures to you. You have more sensory information through using avatar systems.” ANA, Japan’s largest airline, announced its sponsorship of the Avatar competition in 2018. “When we think about the world that we live in right now, where only about 6% of the population can travel over long distances using airlines, there’s still quite a large gap that we have to fill to connect the world,” said Kevin Kajitani, co-founder and chief operating officer of avatarin Inc., a startup that spun out of ANA Holdings Inc. in 2020. Avatars could, for example, help business travelers connect with families at home or enable people to visit relatives in remote locations. The space scenario is also “very meaningful because robotic systems could allow humans to go into areas they could not otherwise access,” Kajitani said. Ansari, who spent eight days on the International Space Station in 2006, said “the ability to see the world through that lens was transformational. That lens gave me a different way of prioritizing everything in my life.” Since it would be impossible for everyone on Earth to travel to low-Earth orbit, “how do you bring that experience back to them? Being able to use an avatar system to get close to that experience would be still transformational because it goes beyond seeing pictures of Earth from space,” Ansari said. “If you spend enough time in an avatar suit, seeing through the robot’s eyes, your brain starts to think you are the robot.” In the ANA Avatar XPrize finals, the remote-controlled robots were judged on their interaction with a human commander who explained the challenge and their ability to perform a series of tasks including moving a lever, traversing a 25-meter course lined with boulders, weigh and manipulate canisters, use a battery-powered drill and select a rock based on its texture. “We made it very difficult,” Ansari said. “On the obstacle course, you’re not only roving but picking things up that are difficult to pick up and moving the hands and fingers to use the drill.” To succeed, ANA Avatar XPrize competitors must combine “advancements in mobility, robotics, artificial intelligence, advanced sensors and haptics,” said David Locke, ANA Avatar Xprize senior program director. The avatar built by XPrize winner, NimbRo from the University of Bonn’s Autonomous Intelligent Systems lab, has an upper body that looks like a human torso and two arms with five-finger apiece. Attached to the head is a wide-angle stereo camera, a stereo microphone and a display showing an animated version of the operator’s face.
Partner agencies on the International Space Station program say they are in discussions about how they will use, and pay for, commercial space stations that will replace it. Representatives of several countries currently involved in the ISS said during a panel at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ ASCEND conference here Oct. 25 that they are looking at options for how to continue work they currently do on the ISS on the commercial space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) NASA is helping develop to replace it at the end of the decade. “With the commercialization of LEO, it is really necessary to revisit our principles of doing cooperation,” said Peter Gräf, director of applications and science at the German space agency DLR. Germany is the biggest contributor to ESA’s share of the ISS and actively uses the station for fundamental and applied research. He said discussions among agencies and companies had started on how those arrangements would change with a commercial station. “We need to find ways to work together, certainly in other ways than we did before,” he said. “There are a lot of options available and the main players are in heavy discussions on that.” The ISS today relies extensively on barter arrangements among participating agencies, providing services to cover their share of operations of the station. Such arrangements are unlikely to work for commercial stations, however. “We need to find a new way of cooperating,” said Nicolas Maubert, space counselor at the French Embassy in the U.S. and representative of the French space agency CNES in the U.S., citing the challenges of extending current barter arrangements to commercial stations. “We need to put on the table every option.” The simplest approach — direct payments from space agencies to the companies operating commercial stations — could face political obstacles. “The taxpayers in Europe don’t want to pay directly to private American companies,” he said. He suggested Europe might consider developing its own space station as ESA members debate developing European human spaceflight capabilities. “Having autonomous capabilities is one of the solutions,” he said, one he acknowledged would depend on budgets. Another option is for companies in other countries to be part of the U.S.-led ventures developing commercial stations. Thales Alenia, for example, is manufacturing modules for Axiom Space and builds components for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft that will be adapted for use on its proposed station. Japanese companies are also involved in those commercial space station initiatives, said Masami Onoda, director of the Washington office of the Japanese space agency JAXA. “We are very much looking forward to a partnership with commercial outposts.” First, though, she said the ISS partners needed to finalize plans to extend operations of the station to 2030. “One of the arrangements I hope to see in the coming months is around the ISS. We need to first find out how we’re moving on with the ISS.” “The bottom line for all is that there is a strong demand for capabilities in low Earth orbit,” Gräf said. “It’s quite clear there will be a human outpost in LEO, no matter what the future will bring.”
Landspace is preparing for a test launch of its Zhuque-2 rocket in what could be a marker for the progress being made by Chinese commercial launch companies. The methane and liquid oxygen-powered Zhuque-2 is being readied for a launch attempt expected in the coming days and will take place at newly-built launch facilities at the national Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, northwest China. Airspace closure notices suggest the launch attempt is scheduled for around 4 a.m. Eastern (0900 UTC) Saturday, Dec. 10. Chinese firms Landspace, iSpace, OneSpace and Galactic Energy have all attempted or completed launches of light-lift solid rockets, along with spinoffs from giant state-owned enterprises CASC ( China Rocket ), CASIC ( Expace ) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS Space ). Landspace’s Zhuque-2 will however mark the first launch of a commercially-developed Chinese liquid rocket. The developments follow a Chinese government policy decision in late 2014 to open up portions of the space sector to private involvement. The new launcher will also be much larger than anything so far attempted by its domestic rivals. Zhuque-2, which translated to “Vermillion Bird-2,” is powered by gas generator engines and will be capable of delivering a 6,000-kilogram payload capacity to a 200-kilometer low Earth orbit (LEO), or 4,000 kilograms to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), according to Landspace. The rocket has a diameter of 3.35 meters—the same as a number of national Long March rockets—-a total length of 49.5 meters, a take-off mass of 219 tons and producing 268 tons of thrust . While Landspace is working on making Zhuque-2 reusable, having in recent months tested a restartable version of the 80-ton-thrust TQ-12 engine, this first flight will be expendable. Landspace announced late last month that it was already assembling the second Zhuque-2 at its base in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province. Landspace first unveiled the Zhuque-2 project at the 2018 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) ahead of its Zhuque-1 launch. It initially targeted a test launch for 2020. Last November the company’s CEO Zhang Changwu said in an interview that Zhuque-2 could lift off in the first quarter of 2022. In the global context, Zhuque-2 will also be the first orbital launch of a methane-fueled rocket from a field of in-development launch systems. These include SpaceX’s Starship, the ULA Vulcan, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and Terran 1 from Relativity Space. Landspace is one of the earliest and best-funded of China’s emerging commercial launch firms. The launch will be only the second to be attempted by Landspace. The first, with the much smaller and simpler solid-propellant Zhuque-1, ended in failure . It was however a milestone in that it marked the first flight of a launch by a privately-funded Chinese launch firm. ISpace and Galactic Energy have since reached orbit, with the latter having succeeded with all four launches of its Ceres-1 solid rocket to date. Three consecutive failures from iSpace have however added a perceived amount of pressure on private firms to succeed, as their performance is seen to be tied to the overall image of China’s space endeavors. Beijing-based iSpace is developing its own methalox rocket, the Hyperbola-2. The firm recently unveiled a first stage test article at Jiuquan in preparation to conduct hop tests. Galactic Energy is meanwhile developing its two-stage, kerosene-liquid oxygen Pallas-1, designed to carry 5,000 kilograms to LEO or 3,000 kilograms to a 700-kilometer SSO. Both could launch in 2023. Another firm, Deep Blue Aerospace, has begun hop tests for its planned Nebula-1 reusable kerolox launcher. Officials from China’s main space contractor CASC have also presented concepts for reusable, methalox launchers and a methane-powered version of the Long March 9. Its main Shanghai rocket-making institute is looking at methalox launch solutions. China’s government has sought to foster the development of commercial space with policy support and guidance, including regulations for launch and small satellites and national strategies supporting “ satellite internet .” Investment , from a mix of venture capital and government-linked investment vehicles, has also flowed in recent years. A number of commercial launch companies are stating the national satellite internet project as a potential source of contracts and revenue. The military-civilian fusion national strategy has also allowed production of sensitive, dual-use technologies to take place in the private sector. Methane-LOX engines have been under study by CASC prior to the development of commercial Chinese methane rocket engines.
Shay Har-Noy, former Spire Global general manager for aviation and a former DigitalGlobe and Maxar Technologies vice president, has taken the helm at Edgybees, a company that specializes in aligning satellite and aerial still and full-motion imagery. Har-Noy, who previously founded and led geospatial crowdsourcing platform Tomnod, became the CEO of Edgybees to tackle what he sees as the fundamental challenge in the Earth-observation sector now. “On the commercial space imaging side, the days of data snacking are over,” Har-Noy told SpaceNews . Customers, no longer satisfied with intermittent access to Earth imagery, seek accurate, reliable datasets delivered on a dependable schedule. And customers who acquire multiple datasets, need the imagery to “sing together, to form a coherent and authoritative picture,” Har-Noy said. What Har-Noy means is that various imagery sources should be georegistered, or linked with exact geographic locations. Plus, satellite imagery captured from various angles, in different spectral bands and light conditions needs to be aligned together, Har-Noy said. Large Earth-observation satellites such as those built by Airbus Defence and Space and Maxar “have expensive components and incur substantial costs to ensure the accurate precision-pointing of onboard cameras,” Har-Noy said. “While georegistration is still a problem for them, the opportunity for software-based georegistration is particularly ripe for small satellite constellations which offer potential for greater revisit and lower costs.” Edgybees software “takes imagery from satellite and airborne platforms and makes it consistent and reliable, such that they can be leveraged for AI and for mapping,” Har-Noy said. “We’re making great headway working with some of these commercial operators as well as with end customers.” “I see an opportunity for the commercial space players to improve their data to meet the specifications their customers demand,” Har-Noy said. “The most discerning customers, governments and large organizations that have contracts with more than one space imaging provider, need to be able to form a common picture by bringing the datasets together.” Edgybees, founded in 2016 to develop augmented reality video games, quickly pivoted to augmenting full motion video imagery with graphic overlays to provide situational awareness. As a result, “the software was built from the ground up with performance and accuracy as a key tenet,” Har-Noy said. More recently, Edgybees has rolled out the application of the company’s technology to satellite imagery. For Edgybees, “satellite is a relatively new venture,” Har-Noy said. “But the software works extremely well and quickly. Combine that with talented founders and an amazing technical team — that’s what piqued my interest.”
Satellite operators are dealing with the reality that the ground systems and network equipment used to operate space systems provide many entry points for cyber attackers. Cyber and malware attacks can be pulled off at a relatively low cost, making these types of weapons far more accessible than missiles or lasers. This is an issue of growing concern for the U.S. Space Force, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of Space Operations Command. A key challenge for the Space Force is how to assess cyber security risks, Whiting said July 7 on the Space Policy Show, hosted by the Aerospace Corp. “That’s been on my mind recently: cyber security and how we measure risk in the cyber domain,” said Whiting, who has described the cyber domain as the “ soft underbelly of our global space networks.” “It’s a real issue and it’s an issue that we’ve asked for and gotten some help from the policy community,” he said. The military is more comfortable dealing with physical security threats whereas cybersecurity is a different problem that requires a nontraditional approach, he noted. “At Peterson Space Force Base [Colorado] we have a fence around our installation, we have armed security forces members who are well trained on how to defend this installation,” Whiting said. “We have security cameras, we have security alarms, all of that coming together. We’re pretty comfortable understanding what our security posture is relative to the threat outside the gate, based on intelligence and law enforcement.” Now contrast that with cybersecurity, he said, “where we know there are countries that are trying to probe us in cyber, what we call advanced, persistent threat actors. We don’t have a similar feel for how to measure our risk in cyber.” The Space Force is now looking to add more squadrons of cyber specialists to support military units that operate communications, surveillance and navigation satellites. “W e’ve invested in cyber defenses,” said Whiting. “We have a cyber workforce who is thinking about defensive cyber.” The challenge is “how do you measure that cyber risk in a way that you can come to a decision on whether I’m comfortable with my risk posture?” Russia’s tactics in Ukraine, where h ackers were trying to penetrate Ukraine’s communications satellite infrastructure ahead of the February invasion, are seen as a playbook for how cyber weapons could be used in other conflicts. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported jamming of Starlink communications near Ukrainian conflict areas. And hackers infiltrated Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite internet network, disabling modems that provided thousands of customers in Ukraine and nearby countries with internet links.
The U.S. Air Force selected five companies for a $4.8 billion multi-award contract to provide research, development and software services over 10 years in support of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. Altamira Technologies, Epsilon Systems Solutions, Modern Technology Solutions, Radiance Technologies and Xandar were selected, the Air Force announced Aug. 19. The contract was a small-business set-aside for companies with fewer than 1,500 employees. The National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) based at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is the Department of Defense’s primary source for intelligence on threats that affect air and space operations. Military and civilian personnel from the intelligence community at NASIC analyze foreign air and space capabilities and their implications for U.S. national security. The Space Force in June established a separate intelligence center within NASIC. The Air Force said the five vendors were selected in a competitive process, and 10 bids were received. The five winners will compete for task orders under a so-called indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract. Known as NOVASTAR (short for National Air and Space Intelligence Center Scientific and Technical Intelligence Capability Support Services), the contract was an effort to consolidate 20 previous intelligence analysis service contracts under fewer vendors.
TAMPA, Fla. — France’s TV regulator ordered Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat to stop broadcasting three Russian propaganda channels, reversing an earlier decision not to interfere. French media regulator Arcom said Dec. 14 it gave Eutelsat a week to stop broadcasting Rossiya 1, Perviy Kanal, and NTV via its satellites. Russia-based service providers NTV Plus and Trikolor currently use Eutelsat satellite capacity to broadcast these Russian-language channels to the west of the country. It is unclear how removing the channels from Eutelsat transponders will reduce their reach because NTV Plus and Trikolor also use satellite capacity that is provided from outside the European Union. In a news release, Arcom said the television stations’ coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine “include repeated incitement to hatred and violence and numerous shortcomings to the honesty of the information.” Eutelsat said in a brief statement that “it will no longer be involved in the broadcasting of the three sanctioned channels within the prescribed time-frame.” Arcom’s decision comes a week after France’s top administrative court, prompted by a request from the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders advocacy group, ordered Arcom to review an initial decision to permit Eutelsat to continue carrying the stations. Arcom said it has the power to block the channels after an investigation found they “were broadcast not only in Russia, but also in the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia.” The regulator said: “Since, unlike Russia, Ukraine has signed and ratified the European Convention on Transfrontier Television, as has France, Arcom therefore has a legal basis to demand that Eutelsat cease broadcast of these channels.” Eutelsat has been under mounting pressure to remove pro-Kremlin broadcasts from campaign groups seeking to curb Russian propaganda, which clashes with the company’s strict policy of editorial neutrality. For some channels, such as Iranian state-owned news network Press TV, Eutelsat’s efforts to drop sanctioned broadcasts are also complicated by its reliance on distributors and partners to remove them. Eutelsat declined to comment further on Arcom’s decision. In its latest annual financial report, Eutelsat said 6.7% of its roughly $1.3 billion in revenues for the year to the end of June were exposed to Russian companies. These Russian customers are mainly served by capacity Eutelsat leases on four satellites owned by Russian operator RSCC.
ARCADIA, Calif. — An Astra launch of two NASA cubesats to monitor tropical storms failed June 12 when the rocket’s upper stage shut down prematurely. Astra’s Rocket 3.3 vehicle, designated LV0010, lifted off from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:43 p.m. Eastern. The liftoff took place near the end of a two-hour window that opened at 12 p.m. Eastern, after an initial launch attempt was stopped less than two minutes before liftoff because of an issue with the condition of the vehicle’s liquid oxygen propellant. The launch initially went according to plan, with the first stage firing for three minutes, followed by engine shutdown, deployment of the payload fairing, and stage separation. The upper stage engine ignited for a burn intended to last 5 minutes and 15 seconds, according to a mission timeline distributed by the company. However, about four minutes into that burn, video from the rocket briefly showed a plume from the engine, after which the vehicle appeared to tumble. The planned time of engine shutdown and deployment of the rocket’s payload of two cubesats passed in silence. The company soon acknowledged a mission failure. “We had a nominal first stage flight. The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit,” the company tweeted . “We have shared our regrets with NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data review.” The failure is the second in three launch attempts for Astra this year. Another launch for NASA, also taking place from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 10, failed when the payload fairing failed to separate , a problem the company traced to a flaw in the wiring diagram for the separation system. The company returned to flight March 15, placing its first customer payloads into orbit on a launch from Kodiak Island, Alaska . The company has successfully reached orbit on only two of its first seven launches. This launch was the first of three for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) constellation , a set of six three-unit cubesats that carry microwave radiometers to measure temperature and precipitation in tropical storm systems. The full six-satellite constellation would have provided revisit times of less than an hour, allowing scientists to better track the formation of such storms, although the mission can still achieve its science goals with four satellites. The six TROPICS satellites would launch two at a time on three Astra rockets, each into different orbital planes. The preferred orbits of the mission — an altitude of 550 kilometers and an inclination of 29.75 degrees — optimized the science they could produce but drove a dedicated launch solution rather than launching them as secondary payloads. “We need to go to a 30-degree inclined orbit and no one else really wants to go there. The rideshares are all going to sun-synchronous orbits or mid-inclinations, so it’s very well targeted to a smaller vehicle with a very targeted insertion where they can get us exactly where we want to go,” said William Blackwell, principal investigator for TROPICS at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in a video about the mission. NASA acknowledged, though, that it was taking greater risk with this approach. It awarded Astra a contract valued at $7.95 million for the three launches in February 2021, before the company’s first successful launch. “Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, tweeted after the launch failure. “I am confident that in the future we will succeed in using this valuable launch capability to explore the unknown and give others the same opportunity to inspire the world through discovery,” he added.
A test of the booster for SpaceX’s first orbital Starship vehicle July 11 ended with flames erupting unexpectedly from the base of the vehicle, triggering a fire at the pad. Video of testing activities at SpaceX’s Starbase complex at Boca Chica, Texas, showed a burst of flames at the base of the Super Heavy booster called Booster 7 around 5:20 p.m. Eastern. Later, at least one fire was seen in the vicinity of the pad, presumably triggered by the incident, sending a plume of black smoke into the air. It’s not clear yet what caused the anomaly. SpaceX had not issued warnings that it would attempt a static-fire test of Booster 7. Such a test, involving some or all of the 33 Raptor engines in the booster, is a major milestone before the vehicle’s first orbital launch attempt. In a series of tweets, Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive, said the company was planning a “spin start test” of the engines, one that did not involve ignition of the engines. “Raptor has a complex start sequence,” he wrote . “Going forward, we won’t do a spin start test with all 33 engines at once.” While Musk acknowledged the incident was “not good,” it was not clear what damage it did to the booster itself. “Base of the vehicle seems ok by flashlight,” he said in a late-night tweet . “Will know more in the morning.” SpaceX has been conducting tests of both Booster 7 and a Starship upper stage called Ship 24 at Starbase ahead of a first orbital launch of the vehicle. SpaceX has not set a formal launch date for that first flight, nor is it clear how this incident will affect those plans. On that orbital launch, the Super Heavy booster will either splash down in the Gulf of Mexico or attempt a landing back at Starbase, according to a recent Federal Communications Commission filing . Starship will briefly enter orbit at an altitude of about 250 kilometers before reentering and making a “powered, targeted landing” in the Pacific Ocean just north of Hawaii. That FCC application for an experimental license covers a six-month period starting Aug. 1. SpaceX will still need a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration in order to conduct the launch. While the FAA completed an environmental assessment June 13 allowing such launches to proceed , that review requires SpaceX to implement dozens of measures to mitigate environmental effects. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operator Iridium Communications said July 26 it has entered into a development agreement to enable its technology in smartphones. The operator said the deal with the unnamed company is “contingent upon the successful development of the technology,” as well as a service provider agreement that it expects to finalize before the end of 2022. “The development agreement also provides for development fees, royalties and network usage fees to be paid to Iridium,” the U.S.-based operator said in a regulatory filing. “To protect each company’s investment in this newly developed technology, the overall arrangement will include substantial recoupment payments from each company for commercializing a similar capability with another party.” Iridium declined to disclose details about the project. Raymond James analyst Ric Prentiss speculated that the service provider agreement could be similar to one Iridium has with Garmin for the GPS technology provider’s InReach handsets. That partnership sells the InReach product along with a satellite subscription to Iridium’s L-band network to end users. Like InReach, phones on the market for connecting to Iridium satellites are specialized devices that are optimized for low-bandwidth mobile telephony, monitoring and tracking applications in harsh and remote locations. Potential revenues from expanding an addressable market to the seven billion smartphones in the world “could be quite substantial,” Prentiss said. Meanwhile, Iridium’s U.S.-based rival Globalstar is rumored to be working with Apple to connect iPhones with satellites for emergency services. Startups AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are also developing constellations that aim to provide high-speed connectivity services directly to smartphones. Iridium revealed its development agreement the same day it reported record revenue growth in the second quarter of 2022. Revenue increased 17% to $175 million for the three months to the end of June, compared with the same period last year. Net income increased 19% to $4.6 million. “2022 is shaping up to be a blockbuster year for Iridium, as demand for equipment and new subscriber activations drove record revenue growth in the second quarter,” Iridium CEO Matt Desch said. “We’re seeing momentum across all commercial product areas.” Iridium now expects to report a 7-9% increase in total service revenue growth for 2022, up from its previous 5-7% forecast.
The NASA associate administrator responsible for the agency’s science programs will resign by the end of the year after more than six years on the job. NASA announced Sept. 13 that Thomas Zurbuchen would step down as associate administrator for science at the end of the year. He had served in that role since October 2016. “Thomas has made an indelible mark at NASA — indeed, he has held this job continuously longer than any other person — and I am thankful for his dedication to our agency,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. Ed Weiler served longer cumulatively as head of NASA’s science programs in two stints from 1998 to 2004 and 2008 to 2011. Zurbuchen, in a blog post announcing his resignation , said that while he continued to enjoy working at NASA, it was time for leave for his own benefit as well as for the agency. “I am leaving for two reasons. I believe it is best for NASA, and especially the NASA Science community, and I believe it is best for me,” he wrote. For NASA, he wrote that after six years “I feel I have had a chance to implement my best ideas” and that it was time to allow others to step up and try their ideas, while also addressing unspecified weaknesses in his leadership. “That is why leadership changes are imperative for organizations who seek excellence.” He added personally that he wanted to find a new challenge. “I have achieved the key goals I set for myself when I took this job,” he wrote, “and I will continue to struggle with the ones I am still struggling with, even if I stayed longer.” Zurbuchen won praise from scientists and others in the space community for his leadership of a portfolio of missions that ranges from cubesats to the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. He shepherded development of established programs while starting new initiatives, like the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for flying science investigations on commercial lunar landers. In June, he announced a project to study what NASA data could support studies of unidentified aerial phenomena as an example of “high risk, high reward” work the agency should do as part of a balanced set of research efforts. “Thomas Zurbuchen was the most entrepreneurial associate administrator in the history of the agency,” Mike Gold, executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire, and a former NASA official, told SpaceNews. “Thomas always saw the big picture, supporting not only public-private partnerships, but regulatory reform, and establishing a close relationship with human spaceflight which greatly benefited both exploration and science.” Zurbuchen said he had no immediate plans after leaving NASA at the end of the year, and will instead take time off while thinking about the next phase of his career. “So — what will I do next? The answer is ‘take a break!’” he wrote.
Vice President Kamala Harris said Aug. 12 that the National Space Council will work to revise commercial space regulations that have become “simply outdated” as the industry evolves. Harris, in a brief speech at a science center in Oakland, California, said a “new rules framework” for commercial space activities will be discussed at the next National Space Council meeting, scheduled for Sept. 9. “We’ve got to update the rules because they’re just simply outdated. They were written for a space industry of the last century,” she said. “We will do this work to make sure our nation remains a role model for the responsible use of space because we must keep pace with the tremendous rate of innovation.” “We must write new rules to provide the clarity that all of us require, to provide certainty,” she said. “We must write new rules to provide flexibility to incorporate the innovation that is occurring in real time.” She said those updates are needed to make sure the United States retains its role as a “flag of choice” for commercial space activities. “With that comes great opportunities but also great responsibility in terms of what course we will chart for the work that happens here on Earth that will then maximize the opportunities in space.” Harris did not elaborate on specific regulatory issues the National Space Council will take up at its next meeting. However, one longstanding issue has been determining what agency or agencies will have responsibility for authorization and continuing supervision of commercial space activities required by Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty. While those responsibilities are understood for existing industries like satellite communications and remote sensing, they are less clear for emerging commercial markets like space stations, satellite servicing and lunar missions. “I applaud the vice president’s leadership to address the rules of the road for commercial space. Specifically, industry needs a clear and efficient process for providing continuing supervision of private sector activities as required by the Outer Space Treaty,” Mike Gold, executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire, told SpaceNews. “This process must encourage innovation while providing the government with the information necessary to preserve and protect the space environment.” There have been previous efforts to address Article 6 oversight. The Obama administration pursued a “mission authorization” concept that would have been handled by the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space transportation office, but didn’t complete the effort before the end of the administration. The Trump administration moved to have that responsibility go to the Office of Space Commerce within the Department of Commerce, but made little progress. Harris didn’t offer a timeline for completing the revisions to commercial space regulations, other than a desire to do so at a “swift pace.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat has applied for a U.K. license to connect broadband terminals with Lightspeed satellites it plans to start deploying in 2025 to low Earth orbit. The Canadian operator’s application says the first of 198 Lightspeed satellites will be launched in the third quarter of 2025, British telecoms regulator Ofcom said June 24. This is a narrower launch window than Telesat has previously outlined since supply chain issues forced it to downsize plans for the constellation by a third earlier this year. Initial services in the United Kingdom are slated for 2026, about a year later than Telesat had planned before it was hit by the pandemic-related supply shortages. Ofcom said it is due to announce a decision on Telesat’s request to connect user terminals, via a non-geostationary satellite Earth station network license, Sept. 12 following a public comment period. LEO broadband megaconstellations Starlink and OneWeb already have licenses that give them permission to connect satellites to user terminals in the U.K. Starlink and OneWeb use Ku-band spectrum to connect to users and Ka-band frequencies for gateway Earth Stations, which link their constellations to the internet or a private network and require a separate U.K. license to operate. Telesat’s planned terminals and gateways operate in Ka-band, and Ofcom said the company has not yet applied for permission to operate Earth stations in the United Kingdom. SpaceX’s Starlink recently applied for permission to add six more gateways in England to improve services in the region, which is also subject to an Ofcom consultation. Starlink said it needs the extra ground stations to meet user demand as it rapidly expands the constellation toward global coverage. While OneWeb’s satellite launches were disrupted in March following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an executive for the British startup said June 23 that deployments are set to resume in the fourth quarter of 2022. “We’re going to be in service with global coverage, 24/7, by the end of next year,” said Maurizio Vanotti, OneWeb vice president of space infrastructure development and partnerships. Ofcom says Telesat has yet to reach a spectrum coordination agreement of the kind Starlink and OneWeb agreed on earlier this month . In a document Ofcom published June 24 to invite comments on Telesat’s license application, the regulator said Telesat has not reached coordination agreements with other licensed non-geostationary operators in U.K. However, Ofcom said Telesat told the regulator that its Lightspeed satellites can avoid interference by dynamically assigning capacity where and as required. This includes “through the selection of the satellite chosen to deliver the service, of the size and steering of satellite spot beams, and of the amount of spectrum and power allocated to them.” Ofcom said its preliminary view is “Telesat Lightspeed should be able to coexist with existing NGSO licence holders with the approach described. “However, we encourage all parties to continue coordinating in good faith between now and the launch of the Lightspeed constellation.” Ofcom added it “wants to enable as many NGSO systems as possible, to provide services and increase choice for people and businesses in the UK.” Telesat has so far secured about $3.3 billion of Lightspeed’s anticipated $5 billion cost. The company needs to secure the rest of the funds before Europe’s Thales Alenia Space can move forward with plans to build the satellites. Telesat announced May 8 that it has selected South Korean antenna maker Intellian to design and supply dual-parabolic reference user terminals for the LEO constellation. Intellian is also providing antennas for OneWeb and SES’ medium-Earth orbit O3b mPOWER broadband constellation. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Solstar Space will provide Wi-Fi access for crew and devices in the NASA lunar Gateway Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module, under a contract the New Mexico in-orbit communications startup signed with Northrop Grumman Corp. Within the HALO module, which is scheduled to launch in 2024 and serve as an initial habitat for crews visiting the lunar Gateway, Solstar will provide Wi-Fi access through a device smaller than a laptop. “Persistent connectivity is crucial for space-based operations,” Solstar co-founder Mark Matossian said in a statement. The Solstar wireless access point “will provide a Wi-Fi network for connectivity that will support astronaut communications with ground control, the lunar surface and spacecraft, while also supporting payload integration, experiments and more,” Matossian added. “It will securely connect Wi-Fi-enabled components including computers and IoT sensors, creating a collection of space-based networked devices.” Northrop Grumman is NASA’s prime contractor for the HALO module. The module is based on the company’s Cygnus cargo transportation vehicle. Santa Fe-based Solstar develops communications technology for space applications. In 2018, Solstar demonstrated its Schmitt communicator, connecting spaceflight experiments with researchers on the ground during test flights of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital capsule. More recently, Solstar has developed devices to create Wi-Fi hotspots for instruments and payloads mounted inside or outside various spacecraft. “Future space-hardened units could be developed for surface of the moon operations, and used on rovers and habitation units,” Matossian said. For communications in Earth orbit, Solstar transmits messages through commercial communications satellites. In lunar orbit, NASA is exploring a concept called LunaNet that would rely on cooperating networks to provide interoperable communications and navigation services for missions operating on and around the Moon.
China’s Xidian University has completed what it calls the world’s first full-link and full-system ground test system for space-based solar power. The 75-meter-high steel structure, located in the south campus of Xidian University in Xi’an, north China, hosts subsystems for testing a space-based solar power (SBSP) concept. It passed an acceptance inspection on June 5, according to a university statement , three years ahead of schedule. The facility is designed to collect solar energy and convert it into direct current electricity. This is to then be converted into microwaves for transmission via an antenna over a distance of 55 meters. It includes technologies for concentrating light and photoelectric conversion, conversion of energy into microwaves, microwave transmission and waveform optimization, microwave beam aiming measurement and control, and microwave reception and rectification. The work was led by Academician Duan Baoyan, a leading Chinese expert in SBSP. Duan is a co-author of the proposed SSPS-OMEGA (Orb-Shape Membrane Energy Gathering Array) concentrator system for generating electricity in geostationary orbit. The new facility is designed to test and verify technology for the OMEGA system. “The research on space solar power is currently a hot spot in the world,” Duan said in the press release. He noted however that the realization of SBSP would take generations. “To use an analogy, heaven and earth transmission is like common prosperity,” Duan said, in a modified machine translation of the statement. “That is the ultimate goal and must take many years and many people to achieve it, but we can start working on it now and start from where it is most likely to be achieved.” The OMEGA modular system is presented in comparison and contrast to NASA’s proposed SPS-ALPHA (Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large Phased Array) project. Duan is part of a special expert team on SPS strategic research created by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in 2014 which includes Long Lehao, a Long March rocket chief designer, who is involved in another Chinese SBSP concept. The Multi-Rotary joints SPS (MR-SPS) is proposed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the country’s main, state-owned spacecraft maker. In contrast to the “orb-shaped” SSPS-OMEGA, it would involve numerous linear solar arrays with multiple rotary joints to avoid single-point failure. It would require in-space assembly using free flying robotic spacecraft. Long last year presented a proposed reusable version of the under-development Long March 9 super heavy-lift launch vehicle which could be used for construction of large SBSP facilities in geostationary orbit. Meanwhile CAST plans to conduct a “Space high voltage transfer and wireless power transmission experiment” in low Earth orbit in 2028, followed by tests in GEO in 2030. CAST last year conducted microwave power transmission over a distance of 300 meters using a payload aboard a small airship and receivers aboard a maritime research vessel as part of its research.
The Space Force launch procurement command in Los Angeles later this year will send to the Pentagon a proposed strategy for selecting national security launch services providers for the next round of contracts expected to be awarded in 2024. “T he NSSL [National Security Space Launch] team is off working the strategy for Phase 3, but nothing has been agreed to yet,” Frank Calvelli, the Space Force’s senior acquisition executive, told reporters June 28. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX in 2020 won five-year NSSL Phase 2 contracts to launch as many as 35 military and intelligence space missions. These contracts are up for recompete in 2024, The launch office at the Space Systems Command will be drafting a proposed Phase 3 strategy over the summer and fall, “and then it’ll go through the approval cycle here. So it’s in the works,” he said. Calvelli said he would be open to a different model than the current two-vendor approach. One of the options being discussed is to select multiple vendors to compete for task orders, a method the Space Force uses to buy smallsat launch services under the Rocket Systems Launch Program (RSLP). The program also allows new providers to be added if the government decides it needs more competitors. “ We haven’t made decisions on that, and we’re still thinking that through,” said Calvelli. “But that’s one thought that’s come up.” Calvelli said he liked the RSLP model “because it allows new folks to be added in … and show that they can do things.” In the industry today “there’s all these different providers out there. And there’s some really great ones. So how do you take advantage of that and make sure you’re able to be innovative in terms of allowing new folks into the contract?” The Space Systems Command has been doing market research in preparation for Phase 3. In January it issued a request to industry providers asking for information about their capabilities. Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond told the House Armed Services Committee in April that “there’s room for increased competition” in the NSSL program. The committee in its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act said the Space Force should “explore new and innovative acquisition approaches to leverage launch competition within the commercial market.” Todd Harrison, senior vice president and head of research at Meta Aerospace, said the two-vendor strategy should be reconsidered. “You don’t have to lock yourself into a five-year duopoly, which is what their current acquisition strategy does,” Harrison said June 28 during a National Security Space Association online event. “They could open that up and you may have other launch companies like Blue Origin, and others becoming operational in the near future. So why limit yourself? Go with the best provider. That’s value.”
SAN FRANCISCO – MyRadar is looking beyond weather forecasts to wildfire detection and mitigation with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We are expanding beyond weather as a primary use case and radar as a primary sensing modality to become a platform for awareness and environmental intelligence across a variety of hazards,” Sarvesh Garimella, MyRadar’s chief scientist and chief operating officer, told SpaceNews. In late October, MyRadar announced a $150,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from NOAA to test the feasibility of wildfire detection and mitigation technology. With NOAA funding, MyRadar is training artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms with data from the urban-wildland interface, where buildings are adjacent to wilderness areas. “We’ve been doing flights with drones and making laboratory measurements with the sensors to get the ground-truth representation of what we are looking for,” Garimella said. “We will then compare it to existing satellite datasets. This stretch will culminate in the Pathfinder project, where we have our sensors in orbit collecting data that will help us understand operational constraints and allow us to collect additional training data.” MyRadar launched three prototype satellites in May on a Rocket Lab Electron for the Orlando, Florida-based company’s Hyperspectral Orbital Remote Imaging Spectrometer (HORIS) constellation . Once the company has 15 satellites in orbit, “we can start being effective,” said MyRadar CEO Andy Green. “The immediate goal is for a 150-satellite constellation. That’s where we want to go for real-time alerting.” MyRadar plans to begin launching HORIS Pathfinder satellites in mid-2023. The single cubesats will be packed with sensors and AI to sift through weather data and detect hazards like smoke, aerosols and fire hotspots, Green said. In addition to alerting people of ongoing wildfires, MyRadar intends to help municipalities identify areas at risk of ignition. “We’ll have a good view from orbit of the areas that are most likely prone to risk,” Green said. MyRadar’s fire fire detection app will “improve significantly on the available coverage from a temporal and spatial standpoint, “filling in the gaps” in NASA and NOAA imagery to “deliver billions of alerts per year to our users,” Garimella said. A good user experience, Garimella added, will be critical for the success of the wildfire-detection app. Users will need to quickly digest information and make decisions. MyRadar, a free weather and environmental app offered by Acme AtronOmatic, has more than 13 million monthly users.
TAMPA, Fla. — Sony has formed a company to develop laser communications equipment for small satellites, drawing on optical disc technology it pioneered for CD players and other devices. The Japanese conglomerate said June 2 it founded Sony Space Communications (SSC) in San Mateo, California, to help companies avoid running out of radio waves as the number of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) soars. SSC plans to develop, build and supply devices that would enable small satellites to use laser beams instead of radio frequencies to communicate with ground stations — and each other for real-time connectivity. The volume of data used in LEO is increasing every year but the amount of radio waves is limited, SSC president Kyohei Iwamoto said in a statement. “Additionally, the need for frequency licenses for radio waves and the requirement for lower power consumption of communication equipment needed by smaller satellites, like micro satellites, are also issues to be addressed,” he said. Conventional radio communications need larger satellite antennas and more power than optical networks, Sony said, making it “physically difficult” to achieve high speeds on small satellites. Sony said it has been researching and developing optical communications systems that are small enough to fit microsatellites, which NASA defines as spacecraft between 10 and 100 kilograms. The company did not say when its devices could be available or if it had customers lined up for the technology. SSC plans to apply its optical disc technology to create satellite communication devices that are ultra-compact, lightweight, mass-producible and able to withstand harsh conditions in space. In 2020, Sony said an optical communications device it developed in cooperation with Japan’s space agency was installed on Kibo, the Japanese experimental module on the International Space Station. According to Sony, SOLISS, or Small Optical Link for International Space Station, established a bidirectional laser communications link with a space optical communication ground station in Japan, and successfully transmitted high-definition image data. Sony also said it successfully conducted a data file transfer experiment this year that it says provides “the technological basis” for internet services through LEO optical communications. Mynaric , CACI , Tesat and other companies are also building out optical space businesses as laser communications technology matures. Japan-based startup Warpspace is developing an inter-satellite laser communications system , and is also establishing a U.S. presence as it seeks to partner with American companies and compete for government and military contracts. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Nations that have signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords met in person for the first time Sept. 19 as an initial step to elaborate on the principles for safe and sustainable space exploration. Representatives from the 21 countries that have signed the Accords met on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress here. The meeting was primarily an organizational one, with no major announcements or other findings emerging from it. “We spent most of the time raising and floating ideas,” said Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, at a press conference after the meeting. That included a desire to set up working groups to address technical and other issues. “We had some very interesting discussions about concrete steps to go forward.” That was the U.S. government’s expectation going into the meeting. “It was simply to convene and have the first discussion to get a better sense of what we could do,” said Jennifer Littlejohn, principal deputy assistant secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs at the State Department, in an interview. “It’s just the start of the conversation.” Other attendees echoed those sentiments. “We believe we have a chance to translate those principles into practical rules,” said Carlos Moura, president of the Brazilian space agency AEB. “We have a long way to go.” “We found the meeting extremely useful,” said Giorgio Saccoccia, president of the Italian space agency ASI. “There was consensus on the importance of having frequent gatherings of all the signatories.” As the current Artemis Accords signatories meet, the U.S. is continuing to look for additional countries to join. That group has grown from the initial set of eight countries announced in October 2020 to 21 currently, with Saudi Arabia the most recent signatory in July . “What we’ve been doing is trying to have conversations on the margins of this event, for example, with countries who are curious, who have asked questions,” said Littlejohn, such as what the benefits are for countries to join the Accords. “We’re just trying to start out with getting to know folks and getting a better sense of what their interests are and what their concerns are.” She billed the Accords as an opportunity for countries to help set “rules of the road” for space exploration. “The message is sign up, take your seat at the table and be a part of shaping that and thinking through that.” Those principles, and the Accords themselves, are nonbinding, but some participants expressed an interest to eventually move them into a binding agreement of some kind. “France believes that multilateral discussion and multilateral coordination is a cornerstone,” said Philippe Baptiste, president of the French space agency CNES. At some point, “the principles discussed or the ideas discussed within the Artemis Accords should be the basis for later discussions in the U.N. framework.” “This will most likely take time,” he added, “but we believe this is very important.”
Soon after his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, started to put together a list of problems he saw in DoD’s space procurements and possible ways to fix them. It turned out to be a really long list that eventually Calvelli boiled down to a three-page memo he released Oct. 31. “After I started actually working on this, I realized I was writing a novel and no one was ever going to read this,” he said Dec. 15 at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event near Capitol Hill. At the top of Calvelli’s list of nine “space acquisition tenets” is to build smaller satellites using commercial components and production methods. He expects the U.S. Space Force to start transitioning to smaller satellites and end procurements of billion-dollar satellites that on average take seven years to develop. “There’s a lot of pressure on the Department to go faster in space acquisition,” Calvelli said, amid concerns that China is building new constellations at a rapid pace to compete with the United States. Military space systems today are primarily large satellites in geostationary orbits , and there is no easy or fast way to replace these assets if they were struck by anti-satellite weapons. “We have a need for resiliency in our architecture through things like orbit diversification and proliferation of satellites,” said Calvelli. “As the threat to space systems continues to evolve, and as space becomes even more important to give advantages to our troops, timely delivery of capabilities becomes even more critical for the nation,” he said. “So given the threat, and the need to drive speed into our space acquisition, I fundamentally believe that traditional ways of doing space acquisition must be reformed.” Calvelli wants acquisition officers to avoid cost-plus contracts when at all possible and instead buy satellites at fixed prices, a model embraced by the Space Development Agency, a Space Force agency that is procuring a mesh network of small satellites in low Earth orbit. “Speed in space acquisition is a very simple formula,” Calvelli said. “You build small, you use existing technology and reduce non recurring engineering. You take advantage of commercial capabilities and you execute.” Cost-plus contracts — where the government pays for development costs and absorbs any cost overruns — incentivize vendors to add years to a program and make systems more complex than they need to be, he said. Fixed-price contracts, on the other hand, incentivize “speed and performance.” “Don’t. be afraid to use fixed price contracts,” he insisted. “NASA is now doing more fixed price contracting. The National Reconnaissance Office has talked about doing more fixed price contracts. Now the Space Force needs to be doing more fixed-price contracting.” Calvelli’s watch list for 2023 As Calvelli continues to push for changes in the Space Force procurement culture and contracting practices, there are some specific programs he will be watching closely next year. One is United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, a new launch vehicle the Space Force selected for national security missions and is years behind schedule due to engine development delays. “I want to see Vulcan fly in 2023. I look forward to that,” Calvelli said. Other programs that Calvelli will be monitoring are the next-generation OCX ground control system for the Global Positioning System constellation, and a space-tracking system called ATLAS, short for Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System . The long-delayed ATLAS was designed to replace an old legacy system, called SPADOC, used for tracking space objects. “I want to see the retirement of SPADOC,” said Calvelli. “We need to do that.” With regard to OCX, “I want to see OCX deliver,” he said. Also on his radar are the next-generation geosynchronous and polar infrared satellites that provide early warning of ballistic missile launches. Five satellites — projected to cost nearly $14 billion — are in various stages of development. “We need the next-gen GEO and polar on cost and on schedule.” Finally, Calvelli wants to see the Space Development Agency launch its first batch of satellites to low Earth orbit. The agency’s Tranche 0 satellites were scheduled to launch in 2022 but slipped to next year , with the first launch targeted for March and the second in June. “I look forward to that,” he said. “ I want to see SDA launch Tranche 0. That has to happen.”
A Chinese private company wants to build a constellation of 80 satellites to provide weather data, further illustrating the growth and scope of China’s commercial space sector. Tianjin-based Yunyao Yuhang recently secured nearly $14.8 million in “Pre-A+” funding, the company announced Aug. 4, following a previous round worth “tens of millions of yuan” in July 2021. The new round was led by Zhongwei Yihe Investment. Yunyao Yuhang was founded in 2019 in response to a call for deepened “military-civilian integration” in China. The company’s aim is to provide data for global weather forecasting and even short-term earthquake forecasting, including for countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative. Earlier statements from the company laid out a 2023 target for establishing the 80-strong constellation, a timeline omitted from the latest press release. However, instead of using dedicated satellites, the company has apparently chosen the route of arranging for its GNSS occultation (GNSS-RO) and GNSS reflectometry (GNSS-R) payloads to fly aboard the satellites of other firms. GNSS-RO remote sensing payloads in low Earth orbit are designed to pick up GPS, Beidou and other GNSS satellite signals, with changes to the signals as they pass through Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere providing data useful for weather forecasting and atmospheric processes, ionospheric research and other areas. GNSS-R payloads collect signals reflected from the Earth’s surface and can be used to monitor ocean, land and ice surfaces, wind state, soil moisture, sea levels and more. Yunyao Aerospace has already sent a number of payloads into orbit, including aboard the small Baoyun satellite launched on a Ceres-1 solid rocket in December, on sats developed by Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST), a remote sensing satellite company. Most recently Yunyao Yuhang saw its first dual-polarization L-band GNSS-R payload for ocean measurements sent into space aboard the Jilin-1 Kuanfu 01C satellite launched May 3. Yunyao Aerospace and CGST signed a deal in 2020 for carrying 23 GNSS occultation payloads. The firm’s core team of engineers and meteorological industry experts are former employees of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s giant state-owned space contractor. Commercial satellite weather data is also of interest elsewhere, with American startups including Boston-based Tomorrow.io , Colorado-based PlanetiQ and Florida-based Acme . The U.S. Space Force is considering buying commercial weather data services to supplement data collected by its own sensor satellites. China’s government opened up the space sector in late 2014, with a particular initial aim of attracting private capital to boost small satellite and remote sensing capacity. A number of launch and small satellite firms have notably emerged, but commercial and private space activity has spread to various upstream and downstream segments and applications, including satellite communications, subsystems, component manufacturing, ground stations, antennae, electric propulsion , laser communications, space resources and beyond. A number of cities and provinces are seeking to attract and foster clusters of these high-end technology firms, including Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Guangzhou , Beijing, Shenzhen , Chengdu, Xi’an, Changsha and Wenchang and the Yangtze Delta region .
Correction: Spaceflight also demonstrated an orbital transfer vehicle. Sherpa LTE performed an altitude change, working under a customer’s direction. SAN FRANCISCO – Space logistics company D-Orbit announced a $2 million contract June 9 with the European Space Agency to upgrade production of its ION Satellite Carrier. It was the latest win for the Italian firm with ambitious plans to offer a wide range of satellite services from active debris removal to space-based cloud computing. Under the contract, ESA will fund D-Orbit’s campaign to improve the performance and reduce the cost of ION, the vehicle that transports cubesats and microsatellites from the point where a large rocket drops them off to their desired orbital destinations. The growing popularity of rideshare flights like SpaceX Transporter missions is expected to spur demand for last-mile delivery. Euroconsult’s Space Logistics Markets report released in May forecasts 120 orbital transfer vehicles in operation by 2031. About a dozen companies around the world are designing, developing and testing orbital transfer vehicles. D-Orbit first demonstrated its last-mile delivery service in 2020. Over six flights, D-Orbit has transported more than 80 payloads in orbit, including 60 satellites deployed from ION and additional payloads hosted onboard. Spaceflight Inc.’s first Sherpa LTE, launched in June 2021, also used an electric propulsion system to execute maneuvers and change altitudes working under a customer’s direction. The Seattle company declined to name the customer or provide additional details. D-Orbit also maintains a line of products and services for other space companies. Beyond Gravity, for example, formerly called Ruag Space, awarded D-Orbit a contract in April to supply carbon fiber-reinforced polymer tools and metallic structural components for ESA’s Space Rider. Thales Alenia Space is the prime contractor for Space Rider, an uncrewed laboratory designed to house technology demonstrations and science experiments in low-Earth orbit, before returning payloads to Earth. The Space Rider vehicle will then be refurbished, refueled and loaded for another flight. The Space Rider mission “is perfectly in line with our vision to enable profitable business and human expansion in a sustainable space,” Renato Panesi, D-Orbit founder and chief commercial officer, told SpaceNews . Over the long term, D-Orbit seeks to dominate the space logistics market. “The idea is to take care of the customer’s journey from mission analysis to launch to decommissioning,” Panesi said. “It’s about having your assets correctly positioned when you want.” D-Orbit intends to offer satellite services including inspection, refueling and small repairs. “Maybe we can consider active debris removal as part of the service, today in low-Earth orbit, later on in geostationary orbit,” Panesi said. “In the far future, we do for see potential markets for recycling and in-orbit manufacturing.” In the meantime, D-Orbit is laying the groundwork for a space-based cloud computing business. “If we manage to have an ION equipped with its own cloud computing suite and intersatellite links, we can have a small constellation of nodes processing information,” Panesi said. D-Orbit worked with Sweden’s Unibap to demonstrate a radiation-tolerant computing module onboard ION in 2021. “One of the things we’re going to test later this year or the beginning of next year will be the intersatellite links, both optical and radio frequencies,” Panesi said. On the financial side, D-Orbit is preparing to merge with Breeze Holdings Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The merger is expected to conclude in the third quarter of this year. While SPACs are not as popular in the space sector as they were in 2021, Panesi remains confident the deal will benefit D-Orbit. “On one side, we are securing capital,” Panesi said. “On the other side, we have a valuable partner to help us enter, one step at a time, the big U.S. market.” D-Orbit employs about 200 people, with the majority based near the firm’s Como, Italy headquarters. In addition, D-Orbit has offices in Portugal, the United Kingdom and Falls Church, Virginia.
Preparations for the first flight of the Space Launch System remain on track for a liftoff as soon as Aug. 29, NASA officials said Aug. 3. SLS managers and agency leaders said the work to prepare the SLS and the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 1 mission inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center was “on plan” to support a rollout to the pad Aug. 18 and a launch 11 days later. “We are in the final stretch,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis 1 launch director at KSC, said at a briefing to preview the mission. “We are targeting that rollout date of Aug. 18. We are on plan for that at this time.” A rollout that day would allow a launch on Aug. 29. Since NASA announced the targeted launch date July 20 , crews have been working on both SLS and Orion, ranging from completing repairs to the rocket to installing payloads inside the Orion capsule. Technicians also powered on Orion for the final time before launch last weekend. One remaining item to complete is testing of the rocket’s flight termination system (FTS) in the “intertank” portion of the core stage. That testing will begin next week, she said. The FTS could complicate launch planning for Artemis 1. At a July 20 briefing, NASA officials said the Eastern Range requires testing 15 days prior to launch. Doing so, said Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager for the Exploration Ground Systems program, creates “some challenges” to complete close-out work on schedule. The testing also starts a 20-day clock to conduct the launch. “We do have issues with that timing,” he said then, to support backup launch opportunities on Sept. 2 and Sept. 5. NASA was working with the range to try and resolve those concerns. At the Aug. 3 briefing, Blackwell-Thompson said those discussions with the range are ongoing. “We have provided all the performance data to the range,” she said. “The range has that data. They’re reviewing it currently.” Current plans, she said, would allow two launches in that 20-day period. “We’ll be continuing to review that data with the range and, should additional days become available, we will factor that into our scrub planning.” The briefing offered few other new details about the mission, instead providing the overview of the flight. The SLS will send the uncrewed Orion spacecraft to the moon, where the Orion service module’s main thruster will fire for a “powered fly-by” of the moon, placing it in a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. Orion will later exit the orbit and return to Earth, splashing down off the coast of San Diego Oct. 10, assuming a launch Aug. 29. The mission will test both SLS and Orion before Artemis 2, the first mission to carry astronauts, scheduled for no earlier than 2024. “We have a ‘lean forward’ strategy on Artemis 1 because it is an uncrewed test flight,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager at NASA Headquarters. That means sending Orion to the moon even if there may be issues with the spacecraft in order to bring it back, testing the mission’s primary objective of demonstrating that Orion’s heat shield can work at lunar reentry velocities. “We will be ‘go’ for failures on Artemis 1 that we would normally be ‘no go’ for on Artemis 2, on a crewed mission, in the interest of crew safety,” he said. “We’re trying to buy down risk for crewed flights, so we’re willing to take more risk on Artemis 1, on an uncrewed test flight, than we would on later crewed flights.” “That’s why it’s a 42-day mission,” added NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, noting additional tests planned for the spacecraft. “Just remember, it’s a test flight.”
Less than six months after being sworn in as the Space Force’s procurement chief , Frank Calvelli has issued a list of do’s and don’ts for the acquisition workforce. In an Oct. 31 memo, Calvelli laid out nine “space acquisition tenets” intended to drive change in the procurement of satellites and space systems in general. The guidelines in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by SpaceNews , echo concerns previously voiced by Calvelli about the slow pace and high cost of Space Force satellite procurements. Calvelli’s boss, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, has called for the Space Force to innovate faster to counter China’s advancements in space technology and anti-satellite weapons. “The traditional ways of doing space acquisition must be reformed in order to add speed to our acquisitions to meet our priorities,” Calvelli wrote in the memo. “To gain speed we must shorten development timelines by building smaller satellites, acquiring ground and software intensive systems in smaller more manageable pieces that can be delivered faster, using existing technology and designs.” Calvelli is the first assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, a new post created by Congress due to concerns that there are too many agencies overseeing space procurements and the Space Force should have its own civilian leader to oversee acquisitions. The nine tenets, Calvelli said, are intended to help develop a new space acquisition philosophy: Build smaller satellites, smaller ground systems and minimize non-recurring engineering. Use existing technology and designs. Acquire ground and software intensive systems in smaller more manageable pieces that can be delivered faster. Get the acquisition strategy correct, including contract type and contract incentives for both speed and performance. Have clear, specific, unambiguous statements of work, minimize and avoid government furnished equipment and avoid putting the government in the middle of multiple contracts as the integrator. Do not be afraid to use fixed price contracts. Enable teamwork between contracting officers and program managers, and they preferably should be collocated. Award contracts with realistic cost and schedule targets to avoid low bids and buy-ins. Ensure companies have the correct skills to successfully execute the contract. Understand what companies are capable of doing or not doing. Maintain stability in programs. Push back on year-to-year budget changes that drive rebaselining and slow down acquisitions. Avoid accepting new requirements after going on contract. Avoid over-classifying. Putting programs in the “special access program” category hinders the integration of space capabilities across other domains and can hinder getting ideas from a broader pool of industry. Avoid classifying systems as “no foreign” to enable future sharing with allies. Deliver ground before launch. Ensure ground systems are completed and ready for operations before launch of a new capability. Hold industry accountable for results. Do not tolerate bad performance that we have seen in some traditional large satellite and ground systems cost-plus contracts. Take corrective action and consider all tools available for poor performers including loss of fee, use of the Contractor Responsibility Watch List, and if necessary, stopping programs. Industry works for you, so be a demanding customer. Execute and deliver capabilities that work, on schedule and on cost. Identify issues early in order to quickly resolve them. “This is our most important tenet. Success is measured by executing on plan.”
China launched a 5-meter-resolution synthetic aperture radar satellite late Wednesday, continuing a period of intense Chinese launch activity. A Long March 2C rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern China at 6:53 p.m. Eastern (2253 UTC) Oct. 12, with insulation tiles falling away from the upper stage as the rocket rose into the sky . The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) confirmed launch success within the hour. The launch is China’s 18th since early August. Aboard was the S-band S-SAR01 satellite, also named as Huanjing-2E, adding to a series of satellites for environmental monitoring. The satellite carries a deployable truss antenna, similar to that on the Huanjing-1C satellite launched in 2012. An object associated with the launch was tracked in a 498 by 763-kilometer orbit inclined by 97.65 degrees. The 5-meter resolution S-band radar image data from S-SAR01 will support “disaster prevention, reduction, relief, and environmental protection,” and also “serve natural resources, water conservancy, agriculture, forestry, earthquakes, and other fields,” according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Its main users will be the Ministry of Emergency Management and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, according to Chinese state media. The satellite was built by DFH Satellite Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the main spacecraft maker under CASC. The Long March 2C was provided by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), also under CASC. The launch of Huanjing-2E follows the Huanjing-2A and 2B medium resolution optical satellites launched in 2020, which replaced the 1A and 1B satellites launched in 2008. The satellite adds to the country’s growing SAR capabilities while a series of commercial SAR constellations also appear to be in the works, some involving public-private partnerships. Days earlier China launched the Advanced Space-borne Solar Observatory (ASO-S), the country’s first dedicated satellite for studying the sun . Launch took place at 7:43 p.m. Eastern (23:43 UTC) Oct. 8, with the four-year-mission seeking to provide insight into the relationship between the sun’s magnetic fields and solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The mission was preceded by the launch of a pair of navigation enhancement satellites, named CentiSpace-1 S5 and S6, just under 36 hours earlier. The duo were sent into orbit by a Long March 11 solid rocket lifting off from a converted barge for providing mobile offshore launch. The launch was China’s fourth sea launch as the country seeks to grow a satellite and launch ecosystem around the sea launch facilities at Haiyang in the eastern province of Shandong. The launches were China’s 43rd, 44th and 45th of 2022. The vast majority have been conducted by CASC, which is planning more than 50 launches across 2022. CASC is currently gearing up to launch the third and final Tiangong space station module late in October. The second module, Wentian, which launched in July, was recently transpositioned to a side docking port where it will remain for the lifetime of the Tiangong outpost, while also making way for the arrival of the 22-metric-ton Mengtian module.
SAN FRANCISCO – Euroconsult forecasts 120 orbital transport vehicles to be in operation by 2031, according to the consulting firm’s latest Space Logistics Markets report. “We anticipate constellations to be the most likely customers, accounting for three-quarters of the demand for satellites in the 200- to 350-kilogram mass range,” said Maxime Puteaux, Euroconsult principal advisor and author of the report released in May. Euroconsult expects constellation operators to rely on orbital transfer vehicles to move satellites into multiple orbital planes, decreasing the constellation operators’ reliance on dedicated launch vehicles. “Indeed, most of the small to medium constellations’ demand by orbital planes are either too large for micro or small launchers or too small for medium or heavy ones,” Puteaux said by email. It remains to be seen how the adoption of onboard propulsion by satellite developers influences the last-mile logistics market. Satellites with powerful onboard propulsion may not need to hitch rides on orbital transfer vehicles. A widespread perception of unmet demand for moving around small satellites in orbit is attracting companies to the last-mile logistics sector. Italian firms D-Orbit and Group of Astrodynamics for the Use of Space Systems (GAUSS) as well as U.S. companies Momentus, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and Spaceflight Inc. have developed, manufactured, tested or flown orbital transfer vehicles. Seven additional companies are preparing to enter the market with initial flights scheduled in the next three years. The companies are: Atomos, Exotrail, Firefly Aerospace, Launcher, Space Machines, Exolaunch and Impulse Space. It’s too soon to say how many of these companies will prosper in the last-mile delivery market, which in the future, is not likely to be limited to low-Earth orbit as it is now. “Operators are eyeing transportation of larger satellites and more distant orbits, such as geostationary or even beyond-Earth orbits for exploration,” Puteaux said. Vehicles designed to serve larger satellites and distant orbits will require powerful propulsion systems. In addition, reusability through on-orbit refueling will also be “a key enabler,” Puteaux said. If powerful, reusable orbital transfer vehicles come online, satellite operators may “adapt their satellites’ designs to leverage the service, for instance by installing docking ports for towing or removing part of the propulsion system and fuel to increase payload capacity,” Puteaux said. Demand for orbital transfer vehicles will also be determined by the emergence of super heavy launch vehicles. A reduction in launch costs produced by the giant rockets could lower the cost of last-mile service. At the same time, giant rockets could spur demand for orbital transfer vehicles by increasing the number of satellites released in similar orbits from super heavy rideshare missions, Puteaux said.
Commercial and government activities in outer space are increasingly endangered by rapidly growing congestion in the space environment . And it’s unclear how much longer industries and governments can continue to operate safely in space without globally coordinated space traffic management, says a new report from the Atlantic Council. The report by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security urges the U.S. government and allies to push for an international framework for space traffic management. Maxar Technologies provided funding for the report. There is an urgent need for an “international coordinating authority to lead on space traffic management,” argue the authors, Mir Sadat and Julia Siegel . This could be done through an existing organization, such as the United Nations’ I nternational Civil Aviation Organization , or the crea tion of a new organization with proper authorities. A central message in the report is that it is no longer sufficient to know the location of spacecraft and space debris. As space becomes more crowded, “it is imperative to have a common understanding of and management over maneuver in a congested environment.” U.S. Space Command currently is tracking 35,000 space objects. This is just a small fraction of objects orbiting Earth and only a subset of the debris that can harm spacecraft, the report says. Many governments, corporations and international organizations track space objects and notify satellite operators when the probability of collision is notable. But it is ultimately up to the operators to determine whether and when they will move their spacecraft. This decentralized system has worked so far but may not be adequate to prevent collisions in the future, Mir and Siegel write. “The United States should urgently lead on a globally coordinated policy framework for space traffic management, else the space domain will remain on an unsustainable path endangering national imperatives.” The report calls on the U.S. Congress to examine the capabilities of the Office of Space Commerce – the Department of Commerce organization assigned to take over space traffic management duties. Lawmakers should look into whether this office is equipped to do this job, and has the structure, mandate and funding to oversee national space traffic management. Another recommendation is for the U.S. government to provide standards for satellites that lack maneuvering capability. “Achieving security, economic, and societal objectives in the 21st century hinges on free and open access to outer space,” the report says. “The current regulatory vacuum on space traffic management leaves room for malign activity and unsustainable business practices … Now is the time to act and protect a future of security and prosperity in space.”
Companies working on commercial space stations intended to succeed the International Space Station say they need more clarity from the federal government on who will regulate them and how. During panel discussions at the Beyond Earth Symposium here Oct. 13, representatives of several of the companies working on commercial space stations said they have to deal with an “alphabet soup” of agencies, none of which today have the authority to provide oversight of their operations as required under the Outer Space Treaty. “We need to figure these things out now so that we don’t have problematic issues that slow down the engineering and the scientific and commercial progress in the future,” said Mike Gold, executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire Space, which is a partner on the Orbital Reef commercial space station concept. “We need to have predictability, we need to have clarity and we need to have certainty in terms of the regulatory structure.” No federal agency today has the authority to provide the authorization and continuing supervision of commercial space stations required under Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty. Similar gaps in authority exist for other emerging commercial space fields, like satellite servicing and lunar landers. “We have to be careful of the absolute alphabet soup of agencies that we have to go to conduct our operations,” he said. They include the Federal Communications Commission for communications licenses, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for remote sensing licenses and the Federal Aviation Administration for launch licenses and payload reviews. Those reviews can involve other agencies, like the Commerce and Defense Departments. “It’s extraordinarily challenging,” he said. “It’s vital that we consolidate and simplify not only because it makes it easier on the private sector, it will also result in better safety and better innovation.” Those issues are growing larger as the companies make progress towards first launches of space station elements, although with some schedule slips. Mary Lynne Dittmar, chief government and external relations officer at Axiom Space, said her company now plans to launch its first commercial module to be installed on the ISS in late 2025, about a year later than previously planned. She said the company just “rebaselined” that schedule as it goes through a critical design review of the module. A second module, a clone of the first, would follow in six to eight months. Asked what regulatory changes were required to enable Axiom’s commercial space station and others, she noted many issues are interconnected. A key issue, though, is mission authorization. “I want to understand how it is that’s going to be framed, where that’s going to sit, because there are a lot of other issues that tie directly to it.” Gold said that mission authorization includes figuring out how to do the “continuing supervision” required by Article 6. He called for a “self-certification” approach for that. “We’re in the driver’s seat and understand the technology more than anyone, so it’s very important that, from a regulatory perspective, the private sector should be on the front lines of delivering that information to the government,” he said. There is no shortage of concepts for how to carry out mission authorization. George Nield, former associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA, suggested placing it within the Department of Transportation. “My recommendation is that we take this opportunity to recognize spaceflight as a mode of transportation, just like highways, railways, maritime, aviation and pipelines, and create a Bureau of Commercial Space Transportation under the U.S. Department of Transportation,” he said. “That could be a one-stop shop for regulating space.” In the near term, simply having a checklist of agencies to deal with for mission authorization would be helpful, said Eric Stallmer, executive vice president of government affairs and public policy at Voyager Space, which is working on its Starlab commercial space station. “It’s something we all could follow,” he said. “The sky is not falling yet,” said Erika Wagner, senior director for emerging space markets at Blue Origin, a lead partner on Orbital Reef, noting the success of private astronaut missions like Inspiration4 and Ax-1. “The question is, how do we manage that uncertainty and the risk that comes with not having a clear path.” There are other regulatory issues beyond mission authorization for commercial space station developers to grapple with. Gold noted that the ISS enjoys exceptions and prioritizations for export control regulations that commercial space stations will need. Commercial space stations may also pose challenges for workplace safety and related regulations. Wagner noted that NASA uses career radiation limits for its astronauts, while terrestrial industries have annual radiation limits. “That doesn’t work very well if you’re going to build a cadre of folks that are working privately on a space station.” Those visiting commercial space stations, either as tourists or researchers, will expect some minimum standard of care to ensure their safety, said Jennifer Fogarty, chief scientific officer for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine. It may be too early, though, to have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the branch of the Department of Labor that regulates workplace safety, get involved. “I would not advocate for OSHA playing a role in this, but I think there are best practices that come out of it that could develop into something that benefits any of the providers,” she said, adding that companies will have an incentive to make sure customers of commercial stations have a good experience. “If you want good word of mouth, I suggest you work really hard at that.”
The United States wants space to be a peaceful domain for scientific and commercial pursuits, said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. But preventing a conflict over space assets is going to become increasingly difficult, he said, due to the strategic value of satellites and the proliferation of technologies that can be used to destroy satellites. “A characteristic of space, unfortunately, is that it’s a sort of a no man’s land where each side has the other side under observation, and there’s instability associated with that, because whoever moves first could have a significant advantage,” Kendall said Sept. 29 at the Center for American Progress. “Both Russia and China have been building space systems to support their military operationally and for strategic reasons, and they both have been working on offensive capability to counter our space systems,” Kendall added. “So we cannot ignore that.” Kendall, who is the civilian leader of the U.S. Air Force and the Space Force, earlier this year issued a list of focus areas for both services, the first o f which is a “resilient space order of battle.” This means the Space Force has to develop systems and tactics to ensure U.S. forces have access to satellite-based intelligence, navigation, communication and other essential services, and that these services are reliable and continue to operate while under attack. Space is tightly coupled with everything the U.S. military does, said Kendall. “ The unfortunate truth is that space has become to a certain degree militarized” so the U.S. has to prepare for the possibility of conflict, he noted. “This is the dynamic that we have to deal with.” He said it is “an unfortunate fact of our lives that space is going in this direction.” Since taking over as Air Force secretary, Kendall has insisted that the biggest challenge for U.S. forces will be to counter China’s technological advances. During his talk at the Center for American Progress, Kendall repeated what he has said frequently: “I have three priorities: China, China, China.”
Northrop Grumman, one of three companies selected to deliver 42 satellites for a U.S. military low Earth orbit constellation, announced June 14 it completed a ground demonstration of laser terminals that will be used to send and receive data in space. For the demonstration, Northrop Grumman teamed with laser terminal manufacturer Mynaric and space avionics provider Innoflight. The companies tested high-rate encryption and decryption across an optical link. Optical inter-satellite links are one of the key technologies required for the Transport Layer communications network to be built by the Space Development Agency. SDA in 2024 plans to start deploying the Transport Layer Tranche 1 — a mesh constellation of 126 satellites made by Lockheed Martin, York Space Systems and Northrop Grumman. “The demonstration validated compatibility between commercially developed laser communication and secure U.S. government encryption hardware,” said Blake Bullock, vice president of communication systems and strategic space systems at Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman selected Mynaric as a strategic supplier for laser communications , and Innoflight for encryption and other aspects of Northrop Grumman’s architecture. For the demonstration, Mynaric provided the CONDOR Mk2 terminal . The company p lans to introduce the more advanced Mk3 terminal for the Transport Layer Tranche 1 constellation. Innoflight used a so-called high-assurance internet protocol encryptor device for the demonstration. The company said the first space-qualified device of this kind is on track to receive U.S. government certification in 2022. 
NASA awarded a $228.5 million task order to Axiom Space to develop a spacesuit to be used on the first Artemis landing mission, although the design of the suit remains under wraps. NASA announced Sept. 7 it selected Axiom to develop the “moonwalking system” for the Artemis 3 mission, including the design, development and production of the spacesuits that astronauts will wear on NASA’s first crewed landing on the moon in more than 50 years. Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace won Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contracts from NASA in June for work on spacesuits for both Artemis missions and International Space Station spacewalks. The companies would then compete for task orders for various aspects of spacesuit development and services. NASA said it received proposals from the two companies for this task order, but did not disclose details about why it selected Axiom. Both companies will be eligible for future task orders that will include development of ISS spacesuits and “recurring spacesuit services” for later Artemis missions. “Our team at Axiom Space is honored to be awarded this first task order to build the next-generation spacesuit,” Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, said in a statement. “Our modernized, evolvable spacesuits will enable rapid upgrades to implement better, safer technologies over time, ensuring our astronauts are always equipped with high performing, robust equipment.” The company, though, has released few details about its suit beyond that statement. Axiom said its suit is based on a NASA-developed reference design called xEMU, and incorporates “increased flexibility and specialized tools” for lunar exploration. However, it has not even released an image of the full suit: an illustration accompanying its press release showed only the helmet and upper torso of the suit, much of it in shadow. NASA’s selection of Axiom surprised some in the industry, who thought the company was more interested in spacesuits to support its planned commercial space station. Collins Aerospace, by contrast, emphasized its work on lunar spacesuit designs at the June announcement of its xEVAS contract, showing off concepts of the suit. Collins formally opened Aug. 31 an 11,000-square-meter facility in Houston that will be used for spacesuit development. Axiom says it remains interested in ISS spacesuit development as well. “We are excited to provide our expertise to meet NASA’s exploration needs, while simultaneously serving our commercial customers in low Earth orbit and fulfill future space station goals that enable a commercial space economy,” Suffredini said in the statement. In a source selection statement NASA released after the announcement of the xEVAS contracts to Axiom and Collins , the agency noted a “very high commonality” between the Artemis and ISS versions of both companies’ suits. However, it said both companies rely “on rapid acceleration of technology maturation and resolution of key technical trade studies” in order to complete their spacesuits on schedule. That statement, while not providing specific pricing, said that Axiom offered a lower price than Collins. The Axiom proposal was 23% below NASA’s independent government cost estimate, while Collins was 2% below it. NASA did not disclose the value of that cost estimate. Axiom is working with several other companies on the xEVAS suit development effort, including KBR, Air-Lock, Arrow Science and Technology, David Clark Company, Paragon Space Development Corporation, Sophic Synergistics and A-P-T Research. While those companies have experience in spacesuit, life support and related work, the NASA source selection statement warned that none had demonstrated relevant past performance for one aspect of the suit, the pressure garment system, that KBR would be responsible for producing.
Updated 7 p.m. Eastern with additional contract details. WASHINGTON — NASA awarded contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to provide spacesuits for International Space Station spacewalks and Artemis moonwalks, although neither the agency nor the winning companies offered many technical or financial details. NASA announced June 1 it selected the two companies for Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contracts to support the development of new spacesuits as well as purchasing spacesuit services. The companies will own the suits they develop and will effectively rent them to NASA for space station and Artemis missions, while also being able to offer the suits to other customers. The goal, NASA officials said at a briefing about the awards, is to have lunar spacesuits ready for the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than 2025. NASA will also conduct an “orderly transition” from existing, decades-old suits on the ISS to the new suits around the same time. NASA earlier planned to develop suits internally though an effort known as the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, but shifted gears to a services model with competition, building on the accomplishments of commercial cargo and crew transportation. NASA is making xEMU data and other capabilities available to the companies to support their work. “I really believe that all of that data is helping to reduce the risk and speed that transition process up to the contractor community,” said Lara Kearney, manager of the extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “We were at a great place to transition just because of how mature the xEMU was at the time.” Axiom, which is working with a team of companies that includes David Clark Company, KBR and Paragon Space Development Corporation, intended to develop spacesuits to support its commercial space station plans. “We have a number of customers who already would like to do a spacewalk,” explained Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom, said at the briefing. “It’s fantastic to have a partnership where we can benefit from the years of experience that NASA has and all the work they’ve done to advance designs.” Collins Aerospace, working with ILC Dover and Oceaneering, plans to make use of experience that includes development of the Apollo moonwalking suits and the spacesuits used today on ISS spacewalks. “The goal is to take the foundations that NASA laid with the xEMU in partnership with industry and evolve that technology, and create a suit that is compatible with the entire spectrum of crew members,” said Dan Burbank, senior technical fellow at Collins. Both Burbank, a former astronaut, and Suffredini, a former NASA ISS program manager, emphasized their commitment to meeting NASA’s extensive requirements for the suits, including being compatible with astronauts ranging in height from the 5th percentile woman to the 95th percentile man. However, the companies provided few technical details about their suit designs, and NASA did not even have illustrations of the winning designs to show, electing instead to release an illustration of two moonwalking astronauts wearing suits not necessarily associated with either company. Collins did later release several illustrations of its proposed suit as well as images of that design being testing in a lab. The total value of the xEVAS contracts is $3.5 billion through 2034, a figure that assumes all task orders are exercised. NASA officials at the briefing declined to break out that total between the two companies, stating that information will instead be in the source selection statement for the procurement, expected to be released publicly in late June. In many other commercial procurements, NASA has released the value of individual awards to companies. NASA spokesperson Rebecca Wickes later told SpaceNews that the individual contract values will not be published in the source selection statement. Instead, that document will list the percentage difference in the prices compared to other bidders, “We guaranteed them an amount to make sure we could get them going and they had skin in the game, and we’re going to be careful to protect that,” said Mark Wiese of NASA, who chaired the source selection board for the xEVAS competition. He did not disclose those guaranteed amounts. “NASA will protect the exact amounts of contract guaranteed minimums and/or individual task order award amounts due to the proprietary nature of the commercial solutions while also protecting the ongoing competitive nature of this contract,” Wickes said. NASA said in the statement that each company “has invested a significant amount of its own money” into development, but did not disclose those amounts. Burbank said that since he focused on the technical side of spacesuit development, he did not know how much the company had spent. Recent work for the xEVAS contract, he said, “is just the latest version of continual investment in internal R&D.” Suffredini said that Axiom’s suit development was entirely internally funded. “Now you have to go figure out what that is,” he said. Both companies said they expected to have spacesuits ready for testing on the ISS and for the Artemis 3 mission by the mid-2020s, but another company plans to test its own spacesuit in orbit before then. As part of the Polaris Program announced in February and funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, SpaceX is developing a version of its Crew Dragon pressure suit that can be used for spacewalks. That suit will be tested on the Polaris Dawn mission scheduled for later this year.
Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said DoD had no comment on Elon Musk’s announcement on Monday that SpaceX will continue to pick up the tab for Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine. “What an individual company may or may not do in any particular corner of the world of course is incumbent on that company to decide and do,” Ryder told reporters at a news conference Oct. 18. Ryder’s comments follow a series of tweets and news reports over the weekend about the possibility that SpaceX could cut off Starlink communications services in Ukraine unless the U.S. government agrees to foot the bill. After arguing that providing Starlink internet service in Ukraine was becoming too expensive for SpaceX and the government should help, Musk made an abrupt about-face on Monday, tweeting that “SpaceX has already withdrawn its request for funding.” Musk said 25,300 terminals were sent to Ukraine but only 10,630 are paying for service. The number presumably includes 5,000 terminals that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) delivered to the government of Ukraine as part of a public-private partnership with SpaceX. Ryder declined to comment on Musk’s recent tweets. “In regards to any statements that have been made by the company in terms of their business strategy or focus, I’d obviously refer you to them.” The Department of Defense, meanwhile, “does continue to discuss various matters with SpaceX. to include Starlink,” Ryder added. He confirmed that so far DoD has not paid SpaceX any money for Starlink services in Ukraine. “But when it comes to the broader issue of providing satellite communication to Ukraine, we are in discussions with SpaceX as well as other companies to look at how best to provide that service,” said Ryder. He noted that for any type of service that receives DoD funding, “there’s a process by which we go through to look at contracting and acquisition requirements and how we would do that.” The Pentagon said it has committed more than $18.2 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, including approximately $17.6 billion since Russia’s invasion. 
NASA’s Orion spacecraft entered a high-altitude orbit around the moon Nov. 25 in the latest major step in the Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight. The Orion spacecraft fired the main engine in its European Service Module at 4:52 p.m. Eastern for 88 seconds. The maneuver changed the velocity of the spacecraft by about 110 meters per second, placing the spacecraft into a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the moon. The use of DRO is unique to Artemis 1. The Artemis 2 mission will fly a free return trajectory around the moon, while Artemis 3 and later missions will go into a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, which will also be used by the lunar Gateway. NASA chose DRO for this mission since it is a stable orbit that enables testing of the spacecraft without requiring much fuel to maintain the orbit. Orion, though, will not remain in DRO for long. The spacecraft will perform a maneuver Dec. 1 to depart DRO, heading back towards the moon. The spacecraft will conduct another burn during a lunar flyby Dec. 5 to put the spacecraft on track for a reentry Dec. 11, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. Since its Nov. 16 launch, the Artemis 1 mission has gone well, with only a few minor issues. “In terms of overall systems failures, we haven’t seen a single thing on the rocket or on the spacecraft that would have caused us to question our reliability or our redundancy,” Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager, said at the most recent briefing about the mission Nov. 21. At the time of that briefing, NASA said it was looking at two issues with the spacecraft, one involving the spacecraft’s star trackers and what Sarafin called “funny indications” on the power system on the service module, where one of eight units used to distribute power opened without being commanded to do so. Neither issue, he said, were “hard concerns or hard constraints” on the mission. “We don’t fully understand what the system and the flight hardware is telling us, but we’ve got ample redundancy and we are recovering from these ‘funnies’ that we see,” he said. On Nov. 23, NASA reported that it lost communications with Orion unexpectedly for 47 minutes starting at 1:09 a.m. Eastern. The loss of signal took place during one of a regular series of reconfigurations of the link between Orion and the Deep Space Network. It was unclear if the problem was with Orion or ground stations, and NASA has not provided an update on the issue since first reporting the glitch. Sarafin also said at that Nov. 21 briefing that the Space Launch System rocket that launched Orion met or exceeded requirements. “The results were eye-watering,” he said. “Everything was either on predict or off by less than 1%.” Engineers are also reviewing the status of the mobile launch platform, which sustained some damage from the launch, including having its elevator blast doors blown off and damage to the platform’s deck. “The mobile launcher has a little bit of damage to it, but it will be ready to fly the crewed launch on Artemis 2,” he said. That mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than late 2024.
LOGAN, Utah — The growth of the small launch vehicle industry is slowing, with fewer new vehicles entering the market and more vehicles going defunct, as demand for such vehicles lags expectations. In a presentation at the Small Satellite Conference Aug. 11, Carlos Niederstrasser of Northrop Grumman discussed the latest version of an annual survey of the small launch vehicle industry , focused on vehicles capable of placing up to 1,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit and available commercially. The survey now includes 166 launch vehicle projects, far higher than the 31 the same survey identified in 2015. However, growth in the number of those vehicles is now slowing. “There is no longer the crazy growth we were seeing back in ’16 or ’17,” he said. In addition, the number of systems that have gone defunct for technical, financial or other reasons has grown. “We are definitely seeing significant attrition. That should surprise no one.” There are 11 operational small launch vehicles, defined as those that have made at least one successful flight with more scheduled. However, that list includes Astra’s Rocket 3.3, which the company announced Aug. 4 that it was discontinuing to focus on development of its larger Rocket 4. The other operational vehicles include Northrop Grumman’s Minotaur 1 and Pegasus XL, Rocket Lab’s Electron, Virgin Orbit’s Launcher One and six Chinese vehicles: Ceres-1, Hyperbola-1, Jielong 1, Kuaizhou-1A, Kaituozhe-2 and Long March 11. “The impressive thing is that we’re seeing slow but steady growth in the number of operational systems,” he said. Several more vehicles are expected to make their debuts in the next two years, including vehicles by ABL Space Systems and Relativity Space that are slightly larger than the upper limit of launch vehicles included in this survey. Even as new vehicles emerge, questions remain about how much demand there will be for them. One of the most successful small launch vehicles, Electron, has flown more than 20 times but its launch rate has lagged company predictions. Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a recent interview that the company’s launch rate is “100% driven” by market demand. In a conference keynote Aug. 8, Beck mentioned that customer readiness was an ongoing challenge. “Launch cadence is really governed by our customers’ readiness,” he said. “When I think about our launch manifest, it feels like a game of Whac-A-Mole,” he said, moving customers around based on their shifting schedules. “If we didn’t do that, our launch cadence would be even less. The number one driver for us at this point is customer readiness.” “We’re still far away from seeing the demand that will drive the once-a-week launches that many of these companies are hoping to see in the future,” Niederstrasser said. “That, of course, is the question for the smallsat community: are small launches really a viable way of having a steady access to space or will things like rideshare continue to dominate?” While those issues may have slowed growth of the industry, it has not stopped it. Niederstrasser said later in the conference session that he had just found out about another vehicle not previously included in the survey, bringing the total to 167.
“A single strike could reshape our world, and the only thing that can stop it is science.” Those are the opening lines of “Asteroid Hunters,” an IMAX film narrated by Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame. If a June 17 screening near the NASA Ames Research Center is any guide, “Asteroid Hunters” achieves its goal of underscoring the threat asteroids pose and the opportunity to deflect a dangerous one headed toward Earth. At the film’s conclusion, an audience largely comprised of people from NASA Ames and related organizations discussed ongoing efforts to search for near-Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids or comets within about 45 million kilometers of Earth’s orbit. Mainly, they expressed concern for the fate of NASA’s NEO Surveyor space telescope. NASA’s 2023 budget proposal released in March called for slashing the NEO Surveyor space telescope budget from about $143 million in 2022 to less than $40 million in 2023. The budget plan, which would delay the space telescope’s launch two years to 2028, is opposed by the National Space Society and the Planetary Society. “We urge the committee to restore funding and augment NASA’s budget to provide at least $170 million to NEO Surveyor in FY 2023,” the space outreach organizations said in a June 16 letter to U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees. NEO Surveyor “is the fastest method to satisfy the congressional mandate to detect 90% of NEOs 140 meters and larger. Absent NEO Surveyor, NASA will not achieve the congressional detection mandate for another 30 years.” Congress directed NASA in 2005 to identify 90 percent of an estimated 25,000 NEOs measuring 140 meters in diameter or larger by the end of 2020 and to analyze ways of diverting threatening ones. Eighteen months past the deadline, fewer than half of those NEOs have been identified. Experts anticipate swift progress in the coming decade, though, based on the expected contributions of NEO Surveyor and the Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The Rubin Observatory, being built on a mountaintop in Chile, “will observe about 5,000 asteroids in a single image, and hundreds of thousands each night,” said Ed Lu, former NASA astronaut and executive director of the virtual Asteroid Institute at B612. “It will be the big dog, absolutely the most powerful machine ever built for tracking asteroids.” Telescopes built to track asteroids gather multiple images of the same area every night. The Asteroid Institute and the University of Washington’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology are developing computational tools to detect NEOs in other types of astronomical imagery, as long as they provide five to six views of an area within 15 to 30 days. An algorithm called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, running on Google Cloud, helped astronomers discover 104 main-belt asteroids in a search of the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory digital archives. An upcoming search of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer data will likely detect thousands. “We want to apply the technique to the LSST data stream, but we need to practice on these existing datasets,” Lu said. Even with powerful computational tools, NASA can’t reach the goal of detecting 90 percent of the 140-meter NEOs anytime soon without a space-based telescope. “Finding more than 90% of near-Earth asteroids over 140 meters in diameter is a difficult problem because the objects are far away and spread all over the sky, but Rubin and NEO Surveyor together will get the job done,” Amy Mainzer, NEO Surveyor principal investigator and a University of Arizona planetary sciences professor, said by email. “Rubin Observatory uses visible wavelengths and is therefore sensitive to objects with more reflective surfaces, and it searches the night sky. NEO Surveyor operates at thermal infrared wavelengths and is therefore very sensitive to dark objects; it searches the near-Sun regions of the sky, thus allowing it to find objects with the most Earth-like (and therefore potentially hazardous) orbits.” From its orbit near Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, NEO Surveyor also will provide data on NEO sizes, “which is important for figuring out which ones are capable of causing severe damage,” Mainzer said. “Given the stakes, and just like monitoring for other types of natural disasters, it’s critical that we have complete coverage.” A 140-meter asteroid hitting Earth would release hundreds of megatons of energy. “There’s never been an explosion of a nuclear weapon anywhere close to that,” Lu said. (For comparison, the 40- to 60-meter asteroid that flattened an area the size of the Los Angeles basin near Siberia’s Tunguska River in 1908 released an estimated 10 to 15 megatons.) The planetary sciences decadal survey, published in April by a National Academies committee, supported “the development, timely launch, and subsequent operation of the NEO Surveyor” and Double Asteroid Redirection Test. In September, NASA’s DART spacecraft is scheduled to collide with Dimorphos, a moon orbiting near-Earth asteroid Didymos, demonstrating a technique for deflecting an asteroid’s trajectory. The timing is not yet clear for NEO Surveyor, which “is extremely important and needs to happen,” said Philip Christensen, an Arizona State University geological sciences professor and co-chair of the planetary sciences decadal survey, Origins, Worlds, and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology 2023-2032. NASA recommended delaying NEO Surveyor to boost funding for Mars Sample Return and Europa Clipper. Compared with the $7 billion Mars Sample Return and $5 billion Europa Clipper, NEO Surveyor is a small mission. NASA planned to spend about $811 million on NEO Surveyor from 2022 to 2026 before the President’s budget called for a delay. “The more you delay a project like this, the more it’s going to cost,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA planetary defense officer. Plus, NASA will need at least three to five years, and preferably 10, to take action if astronomers discover a large asteroid likely to strike Earth, Johnson said. “Although a significant impact to the Earth is of course a very rare event, we don’t know when the next one might be, and NEO Surveyor is designed to find out,” Johnson said. “The earlier we find it, the more time we have to react and the more options that are viable to deal with it.” Congress will ultimately determine NEO Surveyor’s fate. In budget documents released last year, NASA anticipated spending $170 million on the space telescope in 2023. House Appropriators included $94.9 million for NEO Surveyor in the 2023 budget and directed NASA to provide a timeline for launching the telescope before 2028. Philip Groves, “Asteroid Hunters” writer and producer, hopes the film spurs congressional support of NEO Surveyor and other efforts to detect, assess and, if necessary, divert asteroids. Asteroid Hunters, initially released in 2020 before COVID-19 reduced attendance at IMAX theaters, is now playing in Florida at the NASA Kennedy Space Center visitor complex and in Los Angeles at the California Science Center. “My hope is to get this in front of as many members of Congress and world leaders as possible,” Groves said. “An asteroid impact is the one natural disaster we can prevent.” Looking ahead, the decadal survey called for “a rapid-response, flyby reconnaissance mission targeted to a challenging NEO of 50 to 100 meters in diameter — which is representative of the population of objects posing the highest probability of a destructive Earth impact.” Large asteroid strikes are relatively rare. “In the last century or so, the largest impact that we know about was the Tunguska event,” Johnson said. “An event that really grabs our attention might happen once a century or every other century on average. The situation we’re in right now, though, is we don’t know when the next one is going to be. But we do have the knowledge and the technology to find out.” NASA also has international partners. “Although the United States has currently the most significant program looking at this, we are working with a very large team around the world,” Johnson said. The European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have vigorous programs underway. In addition, dozens of countries are part of the International Asteroid Warning Network, a United Nations-endorsed forum focused on helping government agencies analyze potential impacts and mitigate their consequences. “There are very significant efforts to come to an understanding on the best way to respond to this worldwide hazard,” Johnson said. Aside from the threat, Lu sees creating a detailed map of the solar system as an opportunity. “What did all the great powers in the 1500s spend their treasures on? Mapping the world,” Lu said. “We’re on that cusp right now of opening up space, and we will need a map of where things are in the solar system. With 99% of the Tunguska-size asteroids in our solar system currently untracked, we have a very incomplete map right now.” This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
LOGAN, Utah — Blue Canyon Technologies won its largest constellation order to date, a contract with weather technology company Tomorrow.io. Under a contract announced Aug. 9, Blue Canyon, a Raytheon subsidiary, will provide products and services for 18 Tomorrow.io cubesats with microwave sounders. In addition to providing cubesat buses and payloads elements, Blue Canyon will support payload integration, conduct space vehicle testing and handle pre-launch mission operations services. “Our cubesat and components teams are looking forward to building at a larger scale, in a new facility, with improved payload interfaces and standardized designs,” John Carvo, Blue Canyon executive director of cubesats, said in a statement. “Raytheon Technologies’ continued investment has allowed us to increase inventory and acquire new testing equipment and facilities, so we can continue providing innovative products and the agility to move quickly to ensure rapid delivery to our customers.” Tomorrow.io plans to begin gathering radar and microwave observations to feed weather models by the end of 2024. Tomorrow.io has not yet disclosed the manufacturer for its 200-kilogram radar satellites. “We chose Blue Canyon Technologies due to their proven experience in delivering a complex small-sat sounder to orbit with the TROPICS mission, and their ability to scale and help us meet market demand,” Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews by email. “Together with our radar satellites and our weather intelligence platform, it will allow us to continue revolutionizing global weather forecasting.” Blue Canyon has been expanding rapidly in recent years. Earlier this week, the Colorado-based small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider held a grand opening for its new cubesat factory in Boulder, Colorado. The 2,880-square-meter facility allows Blue Canyon to increase annual production from 50 to 85 cubesats, the company said in an Aug. 4 news release. 
European officials are as excited as their American counterparts about the upcoming Artemis 1 launch that will bring them one step closer to flying European astronauts to the moon. The European Space Agency’s major contribution to the mission, scheduled to launch as soon as Aug. 29, is the service module for the Orion spacecraft, called the ESM. That module, based on the Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo spacecraft ESA developed for space station resupply, provides power, propulsion, life support and other services for Orion. “With this Artemis mission, Europe is going to the moon. That is quite historic,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said at an Aug. 23 media briefing. “The fact that NASA entrusts ESA to be on the critical path is huge,” he noted. “The partnership with NASA has been strong for decades, but with Artemis it will really reach a new level.” Development of the ESM, including production of the module flying on Artemis 1, cost ESA about 650 million euros ($650 million), said David Parker, ESA’s director for human and robotic exploration. The overall cost of the program, which currently includes six service modules, is about 2.1 billion euros, reflecting lower per-unit costs as the module moves into regular production. “We are entering into a serial production mode,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, executive vice president of space systems at Airbus, the prime contractor for the ESM, with the ability to work on three modules simultaneously. “We will deliver one ESM per year and we are extremely proud of being able to do that with all our partners in Europe.” In exchange for the service modules, ESA will receive three seats on future Artemis missions. “We have not made, together with NASA, the final decision which missions those ESA astronauts will fly on,” Parker said. Two of those seats, he said, would likely be on Artemis 4 and 5, missions that will deliver ESA-developed components for the lunar Gateway. Aschbacher said he hoped the third seat would allow a European astronaut to walk on the moon. “What I’m asking NASA very clearly is that Europe wishes to have a European astronaut footprint on the moon before the end of this decade.” Those discussions, he said, will depend on both the outcome of Artemis 1 as well as the next ESA ministerial council meeting in November, where member states will fund ESA programs for the next three years. Aschbacher said ESA will request about 1.1 billion euros to continue work on ESM production and Gateway elements, part of an overall exploration package worth about three billion euros. ESA is hoping a successful Artemis 1 mission can build support for broader exploration plans. One initiative the agency is seeking funding for is a large cargo lander that can support later Artemis missions. “We hope on our side that these so-called ‘Argonaut’ landers could be ESA’s next contribution to European exploration history, but the ministers will decide in November,” Parker said. The ESA astronauts that will fly on upcoming Artemis missions will likely be selected from the existing group of seven active astronauts, Aschbacher said. “The selection will need to be made sooner rather than later because, at some point, the training needs to start,” he said, but added there was no date set yet for any announcement. ESA is also in the final stages of selecting a new astronaut class. “I will select the next class of astronauts pretty soon,” he said. “This will be happening in the coming weeks.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Mangata Networks, a U.S. satellite startup founded by a former OneWeb executive, has applied for a U.K. license to connect broadband terminals to its planned multi-orbit constellation. The startup expects to begin services in the United Kingdom and across North America and Northern Europe by 2025, according to a license application British telecoms regulator Ofcom published Sept. 20. These initial services would follow two launches of a total eight satellites in 2024 to highly elliptical orbit (HEO). Phoenix, Arizona-based Mangata announced plans last year for a research and development center in Edinburgh, Scotland, to develop its technologies, although the startup has not said who will build or launch its satellites. Plans for the center followed an investment of about $4 million from Scotland’s national economic development agency. Mangata ultimately plans to deploy 224 satellites in HEO and 567 in medium Earth orbit to provide services in fixed and mobility markets, including cellular backhaul and aviation. The startup aims to connect these satellites to phased array antennas smaller than one meter in diameter, and parabolic reflectors larger than one meter, depending on the application. User terminals less than one meter in diameter would be capable of 50-500 megabits per second (Mbps) speeds, according to Mangata, while larger terminals would serve “capacities 500 Mbps and greater.” Mangata’s network would use Ka-band spectrum for both its terminals and gateways. Only SpaceX’s Starlink and OneWeb currently have permission to connect user terminals in the United Kingdom to satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). These operators deploy terminals in the Ku-band. Ofcom said it is continuing to review a request from Canada’s Telesat for an NGSO Earth station network license for its Lightspeed constellation, which also plans to operate both gateways and terminals in the Ka-band. The regulator recently decided to extend its deadline to make a decision on Telesat’s application to Oct. 14 after asking the Canadian company for more information about its application. Ofcom is inviting comments from the public on Mangata’s license request by Oct. 18. Magnata was founded by Brian Holz, a former vice president of space systems at OneWeb and CEO of OneWeb Satellites, the joint venture the operator shares with Airbus to build its satellites. In January, Mangata said it had raised $33 million in a Series A funding round led by Playground Global, the U.S. venture capital firm that has previously invested in rocket developer Relativity Space.
LOGAN, Utah — Italy’s D-Orbit said Aug. 9 that it would launch 20 nanosatellites over three years for Swiss startup Astrocast with its orbital transfer vehicle. The first mission under their agreement is slated for no sooner than November 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, which will launch D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier with four Astrocast satellites onboard. Each satellite in this batch is 3U, or the size of three cubesats, and will be dropped off at a 500-600-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) to improve coverage for Astrocast’s internet of things (IoT) constellation. D-Orbit plans to launch another batch of six 6U satellites for Astrocast in 2023 and 10 more in 2024 to complete the launch agreement. Astrocast currently has 12 3U satellites, including two test spacecraft, and aims to expand its network to 20 satellites before the end of 2022. In addition to D-Orbit, Astrocast chief financial officer Kjell Karlsen said the Swiss operator also has launch agreements with U.S. rideshare provider Spaceflight this year. Astrocast plans to grow the constellation to 40 satellites in 2023 and to operate 100 of them by 2025. To help fund this expansion, Astrocast — which already trades as a public company on Norway’s Euronext Growth Oslo stock market — is looking to raise 60-80 million euros ($64-86 million) by listing shares on the Euronext Growth Paris junior stock market. The company had been preparing to complete this offering of shares this summer, but “global market conditions prevented it,” Karlsen said. “We are now working with our advisers to determine the right window for the offering,” he added. In May, Astrocast said it plans to issue new shares to buy Dutch connectivity solutions provider Hiber, which agreed to invest around $11 million in Astrocast’s second stock market as part of the acquisition. Karlsen said that the acquisition is contingent on Astrocast’s secondary stock market listing in France, “but we have full confidence that we will meet it and close during 2022.” Fabien Jordan, Astrocast’s CEO, said in a statement: “It is important for European space companies to work together to find solutions that increase the competitiveness of European space, and we believe that working with D-Orbit enables this for Astrocast,” Astrocast CEO and co-founder Fabien Jordan said. Following the launch with D-Orbit via U.S.-based SpaceX, Jordan said Astrocast is looking forward to “potential future missions on European rockets.”
Satellites in space operated by private companies helped governments and news media tell the story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With momentum from these operations, players in this industry are hoping to grow their business selling not just imagery but also analytics products that draw trends and insights from raw data. The main customer for these services is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which last year announced a $29 million procurement of data analytics services over five years, and intends to increase buys as companies come up with new products, said David Gauthier, director of NGA’s Commercial and Business Operations Group, The agency traditionally has relied on its own analysts to draw insights from imagery. But NGA has a growing appetite for new types of analytics services offered by the private sector, Gauthier said Sept. 15 at the Intelligence & National Security Summit held at National Harbor, Maryland. Of interest are monitoring services performed by small satellites that make repeated image captures at set intervals. The frequent, automated collections — and the analysis done with artificial intelligence and machine learning software — help track change and identify trends. The industry can do this at a fast pace, Gauthier said. “It reduces the latency for us, it reduces the barriers to operational use and integration into our workflows.” Gauthier said NGA is using commercial services, for example, to monitor global economic trends. “We’re buying automated detections that tell us things about infrastructure, roads, rails, building damage,” he said. “We’re buying automated detection to tell us about objects, cars, ships and aircraft.” The data provides insights on activities that have national security and economic implications, such as illegal fishing, GPS interference or the flow of methane gas, he said. Earth monitoring and satellite imaging company BlackSky has won some of NGA’s recent contracts for economic monitoring. The company received a total of $13.8 million of orders over the past year, BlackSky said Sept. 19. “These awards underscore the growing demand for commercial real-time, AI-driven monitoring services that reveal economic activity at manufacturing hubs, major maritime ports and airports around the world,” BlackSky said in a statement. Competitive advantage Government and commercially owned spy satellites are proliferating and the United States increasingly will face tough competition in this area, said Frank Garcia, professional staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This should put pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to tap the commercial market in order to gain a competitive advantage, Garcia said Sept. 15 at the INSS symposium. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, he added, are concerned that the U.S. government is not doing enough to incentivize private investment in this sector of the industry. The House and Senate intelligence committees asked the Government Accountability Office to dig into these questions. The GAO in a report earlier this month concluded that “actions are needed to better use commercial satellite imagery and analytics.” One of the takeaways from GAO’s report, said Garcia, is that there’s a need for an acquisition organization to work with industry to “develop a next generation of capabilities that is going to benefit both commercial applications, government intelligence collection and combat support.” Garcia said one of the challenges is the procurement bureaucracy, as the intelligence community has divided responsibilities for acquisition. The National Reconnaissance Office operates the nation’s spy satellites and is in charge of buying commercial imagery, while NGA is responsible for analytics products and services. “That’s a tension that in my mind isn’t fully resolved,” he said. The NRO in May awarded 10-year contracts to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky and Planet Labs to supply imagery. This creates “some stability,” Garcia said. However, he said, “you don’t want to be locked in for so long and miss out on opportunities that may arise very quickly … and miss the ability to onboard new entrants as innovations keep coming.” On Capitol Hill, he said, members “think it is really vital for us to continue investing. And yet when the budgets come in, we still see some level of under investment, which is kind of disappointing.” He suggested the government should share with the industry a forward-looking spending plan for commercial imagery and analytics services, which would likely spur private investment, said Garcia. “We’re trying to encourage the administration to lay that out.” While the NRO is a major buyer of electro-optical imagery, agencies have not yet leveraged the new types of commercial satellite data – such as synthetic aperture radar, radio-frequency mapping and hyperspectral imagery — where the commercial market isn’t fully baked, said Garcia. HawkEye 360, a commercial provider of space-based radio frequency data and analytics, is one of the newer entrants that has seen growing demand for its services during the Ukraine war and is looking for longer term, steady contracts. James Doggett, vice president of mission assurance at HawkEye 360, said the U.S. government has made it clear it wants to work with commercial suppliers but does not want to be the anchor customer, which puts pressure on companies to seek business elsewhere. For newer companies that don’t have multi-year contracts, when government demand goes down, “it can be existential,” Doggett said. Lifelines are sought in the export market, he said, but companies need help from the U.S. government to navigate the interagency process to get export licenses. “And I think that’s a key area where the government can act as a partner.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has published an updated space policy that emphasizes its roles in cybersecurity and resilience. The policy , less than three pages long, was signed by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas April 14. It was not published on the department’s website, though, for more than two months. “While America continues to grow its commercial space opportunities, our adversaries will also seek to disrupt the advantages the space economy will bring,” the document states. “The Department must therefore support America’s expanding space ecosystem by recognizing its importance to the security of the homeland and through a DHS Space Policy that defines and updates DHS’s role in this important domain.” The policy identifies three specific roles for the department in space. One is to protect both commercial and government space-based systems and their supply chains from threats, particularly cyberattacks. “DHS will advocate for the incorporation of cybersecurity principles for all phases of space systems design, development, acquisition, deployment, and operation across the industry,” the document states. That includes continued implementation of Space Policy Directive 5, a 2020 policy for cybersecurity of space systems . The second element of the policy is devoted to resilience “to minimize the impact of any natural or human-made disruptions on the homeland and to DHS mission execution.” That effort includes exercises to test how the department and others would respond to the loss of critical space systems. The third element of the policy is creating contingency plans for operating in a “degraded” space environment. “In addition to impacts of space weather and other natural causes, DHS must prepare for the potential that heightened tensions or adversarial activities in space may lead to impacts upon domestic space assets,” the document states. The department will develop plans that include “potential vulnerabilities, likely targets, and mitigation measures that may be unique to adversarial military actions in the space domain.” The policy does not offer details on how DHS will implement those elements of the policy, such as timetables or assignments of responsibility. The preamble of the policy suggests other roles for DHS in space, particularly in coordinating impacts of space launches on maritime traffic. “The commercial space industry increasingly relies on the maritime domain for cost-effective launch and recovery of commercial rockets to support its business model in ways that impact traditional maritime stakeholders and requires DHS to develop new maritime safety and security priorities,” it states. The policy doesn’t elaborate on those priorities, but SpaceX uses droneships as landing platforms for its boosters. Launches by SpaceX and others can create conflicts with maritime traffic at places like Port Canaveral, Florida, including an incident in January where SpaceX scrubbed a launch when a cruise ship entered restricted waters. The U.S. Coast Guard, part of DHS, has been working to refine those restriction zones and improve communication of them to ships. While DHS did not publish the space policy until June, a department official mentioned it in April in an interview for a Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) podcast . The department did not respond to questions about the policy in the weeks after the publication of the podcast. “I think this is a really important moment for DHS because it is unifying the DHS approach to space,” said Nick Reese, deputy director for emerging technology policy at the department, in the podcast. The department has not traditionally been involved in space, he noted, “so what DHS has had to do is really take a deliberate approach and study what it could do in space, what its role is and how it be value-added and not cover territory that others are covering.” The policy was developed through an interagency process coordinated by the National Space Council, he said. That created a policy “that really reflects what DHS wants to do and how DHS wants to contribute.”
The Senate Armed Services Committee on June 16 voted 23-3 to advance its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. According to a summary released by the committee, the bill authorizes $817.3 billion for the Department of Defense, a nearly $45 billion increase above the Biden administration’s request of $773 billion. The SASC proposal now heads to the Senate floor for consideration. Unlike an appropriations bill , the NDAA does not provide budget authority but establishes policy and provides guidance on how appropriated funds should be spent on authorized activities. The SASC said the increase is needed to “address the effects of inflation and accelerate implementation of the national defense strategy.” The committee’s markup includes language in support of the U.S. Space Force. “As space becomes a contested domain among near-peer rivals, the Strategic Forces subcommittee mark continues its oversight of the Space Force consistent with the intent of the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act by consolidating DoD space programs under it,” said the summary. The bill includes several provisions on the Space Force and space programs:
Redwire and Sodern announced a partnership Sept. 12 where Redwire will produce in the U.S. a version of a Sodern star tracker. The companies signed a teaming agreement during World Satellite Business Week here to allow Redwire to manufacture in the United States a star tracker based on Sodern’s Hydra star tracker built in Europe. “In the last couple of years, we’ve had a number of customers come to us in the United States and asked us if we built high-end, sophisticated star trackers at the level of Hydra,” Peter Cannito, chief executive of Redwire, said at the signing ceremony. Redwire and its heritage companies did not, and that started 18 months of discussions with Sodern on a manufacturing partnership. Under the agreement, Redwire will make a star tracker called Eagle Eye based on Sodern’s Hydra. Manufacturing of Eagle Eye will start in the “near term,” he said once a production line is set up at a Redwire facility in Massachusetts. “We already have customers who are very interested in it,” he noted, although Redwire did not take any orders in advance of signing the agreement. Those customers, he said, are those who want a U.S. source for a star tracker for national security needs or just the convenience of working with a domestic supplier. “That’s one of the big drivers of the capability.” “Eagle Eye will benefit from the heritage of the Sodern Hydra star tracker,” said Vincent Dedieu, deputy chief executive of Sodern. Hydra has flown on more than 60 spacecraft launched in the last decade, including the GOES-R line of weather satellites and the Pléiades Neo series of Earth observation satellites. Both executives said the agreement opened the door for additional cooperation in the future. Sodern makes several other cameras, while Redwire produces a range of components. “From our perspective, this is a first step,” said Cannito. “Eagle Eye is the pathfinder here for what we hope to be a long-term, mutually beneficial agreement.” “We don’t want to embrace too many projects at the same time, so we will make this one work, and then I’m sure we will have others,” Dedieu said.
Evona has offered employees the flexibility to work remotely since the space recruitment startup was founded in Bristol, England, in 2018. The policy was a departure from strict management in the founders’ previous jobs. Plus, they thought it would give them a competitive advantage. “We were a startup, and we needed to attract the talent against the big guys,” said Evona co-founder Tom Kelly. “So, we said, ‘If you want to work from a beach in Spain, you have that flexibility.’” In 2018, remote work was not the norm for jobs outside the tech sector. Space companies employed remote software engineers and data analysts, but most people reported to offices, laboratories, factories or facilities designed to safeguard classified information. “It required a catalyst like a global pandemic to prove across many different job functions and industries that it was possible to work remote and do it in a productive way,” said Justus Kilian, Space Capital and Space Talent founder. “That experiment has proven that many jobs, not all, but many jobs can operate in a remote way.” Now, there are many remote jobs in the space sector. Only 14 percent of the companies Evona works with require candidates to be on-site for more than three days a week to perform sales and operations jobs. For software and tech roles, 26 percent of the companies expect employees to spend a majority of the week on-site. Hardware and infrastructure work still requires people to show up in person for 92 percent of the companies Evona supports. “Even the roles that require the employee to be on-site for the majority of the week are now increasingly offering some level of flexibility and autonomy to their staff,” said Adele Fox, Evona’s marketing director. “Very few seem to be demanding that their employees are onsite 100 percent of the working week, even when working with specialist tools.” MIXED REACTIONS Some space company leaders are embracing the trend toward remote work. Others caution against it. In any case, the pandemic has changed the calculus for current and prospective employees. After working from home for months or even years during the pandemic, some people realize how much they enjoy working alongside colleagues, while others now resist the idea of commuting or following rigid work schedules. Employers need to understand “this remote work shift” and figure out how to stay competitive, Killian said. Earth-imaging company Satellogic had a globally distributed workforce before the pandemic, which allowed the company to shift quickly to remote operations. Remote operations “helps increase the talent pool,” said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic CEO and co-founder. Satellogic employees still work side-by-side building satellites, and the company has retained offices because “not everyone has a quiet room in the house where they can work,” Kargieman said. Istvan Lorinc, Morpheus Space cofounder and president, is not a fan of remote work. “That was a solution for a state of emergency and not a permanent good thing,” Lorinc said. “Imagine how much experience and knowledge is not being transferred because of remote work. In time, if this continues, the quality of work will decline.” Most companies have a mix of remote and on-site work. Since Novawurks was founded in 2011, people who needed to work outside the office have done so. “Of course, when they need to touch hardware, they come in,” said Talbot Jaeger, Novawurks founder and chief technology officer. Bill Crandall, Novawurks business development vice president, added, “We’ve had people that wanted to move, and we said, ‘Don’t quit. We’ll send a spacecraft building block with you.’” AAC Clyde Space performs more work remotely than it did before the pandemic. “Of course, we have eight satellites in the cleanroom, and someone has to actually build them,” said Luis Gomes, AAC Clyde Space CEO. “Some tasks have to be done in the facility. You can’t hire a civil engineer from South America to work remotely. Design engineer? Yes. And we have done that.” Raytheon Intelligence & Space has adopted three different working styles: remote, hybrid and on-site. Remote work can be performed anywhere in the United States. Hybrid jobs require employees to spend 50 percent of their time at a company facility. Jobs where employees spend 100 percent of their time on-site are often related to classified government work. “Hardware being built, especially classified hardware being built, most of that is an on-site activity,” said Matt Magana, Raytheon Space Systems vice president. “Then, there is a lot of classified development work. We’ve done a lot to separate classified and unclassified to allow us to build a more flexible workforce because I can’t ask somebody to come into a classified area and sit in there for eight hours a day, seven days a week. The environment has changed now.” CHANGING ENVIRONMENT Space industry recruiters have front-row seats to observe changes in space sector employment. Early in the pandemic, many satellite and rocket manufacturers, as well as suppliers, were designated as critical infrastructure. “That forced companies to differentiate who is required to be on premise versus who is providing some sort of support and can work remote,” Kilian said. “I think we’re going to see a continuation of that. It’s hard to compete in a world where people have seen the benefits of working from home and not having to commute. To pull that back is very challenging.” Fox agrees.“What we’re hearing constantly from candidates is because they’ve been working remote, because they can see their life-work balance split is better, that’s what they are demanding,” Fox said. “Companies that say to them you are 100 percent on-site are going to struggle to compete in a marketplace where there aren’t enough qualified people to fill the roles that we have in the space sector as it is.” Evona encourages space companies to offer workers flexibility where possible. Jobs that require people to work on-site can “have drastically shortened core hours and let people start later,” Kelly said. “If you let people take their kids to school and pick their kids up from school, I can promise you will get 100 times more out from those people because you’re supporting them and you’re supporting their families.” For employers who worry people offsite will not be as productive, Kelly has seen the opposite. “As long as you hire the right people with the right motivations and allow them to work in their way, the results go through the roof,” Kelly said. “We are pushing this message as much as we can to our clients. There is certainly still a resistance, but it’s a lot better since the pandemic.” Flexible work policies have helped Evona retain workers, Kelly said. The company has an annual staff turnover rate of six percent, compared to the United Kingdom’s recruitment industry average of around 40 percent. TIME TOGETHER Despite the trend toward remote work, many employers would rather interact with employees face-to-face. “We don’t have an issue with remote work, but we do love to get together,” Jaeger said. “We have a lot of fun together.” In addition, there are times when remote work isn’t advantageous. Leaders of early-stage startups, for instance, often work closely together. “There is a lot of value to having close proximity to your co-founders,” Kilian said. “You can make decisions very quickly [and] be very action-oriented.” Even later-stage companies are planning retreats and other ways to bring employees together. After a couple of years of extensive remote operations, Satellogic is now “trying to push in the opposite direction and get employees together physically as much as we can,” Kargieman said. “There’s obviously a portion of being in the flesh, in the same room that just can’t be fully replaced by remote work.” This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
LOGAN, Utah — An inquiry into updating rules around space debris and emerging on-orbit services seeks to position the U.S. as a leader in an emerging space economy. The Federal Communications Commission voted Aug. 5 to explore the economic potential and policy questions relating to in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing capabilities (ISAM). “We believe the new space age needs new rules,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement, because “the regulatory frameworks we rely on to shape space policy were largely built for another era.” Rosenworcel said ISAM capabilities can lead to the development of new ways to clear up orbital debris that, if left unaddressed, will constrain the future space economy. The move will, for the first time, “create a record of what is needed to support and enable the new space economy before the FCC,” said Laura Cummings, regulatory affairs counsel for debris-removal startup Astroscale’s U.S. division. “This includes consideration of spectrum use by novel missions, application processing and licensing procedures to facilitate commercial activity, and orbital debris considerations for unprecedented operations,” Cummings said at the Small Satellite Conference here. The FCC said it is specifically seeking information on how the regulator might update, clarify, or modify its rules and licensing processes to reduce barriers for ISAM missions and advance their progress. It is part of a broader effort to update space-related rules to keep up with technological developments and a growing number of private companies in the industry. The regulator said last week that it is considering opening up more Ku-band spectrum to non-geostationary satellite (NGSO) operators to improve broadband speeds. Other initiatives include identifying more spectrum for commercial space launches, a review of application processes for satellite systems, and exploring new space-based connectivity opportunities with V-band spectrum. “It’s a lot,” Rosenworcel said, adding that the FCC has increased the size of its division responsible for satellite matters by 38% to tackle the workload. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Experts have labeled the Ukraine conflict the first commercial space war due to the extensive use of private-sector satellites for imagery and for communications, with companies like SpaceX and Viasat becoming targets of electronic and cyber attacks. Commercial satellites have crossed the Rubicon and companies need to figure out how they will cope with the prospect of intentional or accidental attacks during international conflicts, says a new report by Aerospace Corp. Typically only companies that provide direct services to the U.S. military would consider security issues to be relevant to day-to-day commercial operations, but that is changing, the report says. “In crises and conflicts, commercial space actors risk getting caught in the middle of a tense and escalatory environment,” writes Robin Dickey, space policy and strategy analyst at Aerospace’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy, An attack could occur “either because a commercial system is misidentified as a military system or because that commercial system is suspected of acting aggressively or threateningly,” the report says. Because of these risks, Dickey argues, commercial space companies should consider getting directly or indirectly involved in international efforts to develop norms of behavior in space, even though traditionally only governments and the United Nations take the lead in space security policy discussions. Some of these norms, the report suggests, could involve the application of existing laws of armed conflict that protect civilians and their property. Other norms could be the adoption of minimum cybersecurity standards for all satellites. “Commercial actors should not be left out of the discussion,” the report says, and should be proactive to mitigate potential threats that could disrupt the capabilities and services they provide to customers. Major powers are “talking more explicitly about an era of militarized competition,” Dickey points out. “And commercial actors will likely have to operate in times that are not so peaceful, and commercial companies will not be exempt if conflict breaks out. In those situations, norms could help to mitigate some of the risks and threats for commercial operators.” If a nation state were to blow up another nation’s satellite with a missile strike during a conflict, the impact from the debris could affect commercial satellites in unpredictable ways, the report noted. Throughout the history of war, significant harm was inflicted on civilians or their property, leading to the adoption of international norms to mitigate collateral damage. “This parallels the challenges of indiscriminate systems in space — like debris-producing anti-satellite weapons,” says the report. “The destruction of a satellite in a conflict could result in the destruction of a commercial satellite on the other side of the world months or years later, a similar dynamic to the persistent threat of landmines for decades after they were deployed.”
LOGAN, Utah — Space logistics startup TransAstronautica announced a partnership Aug. 9 with online astronomy platform Slooh to offer U.S. schools access to a global network of ground-based and space-based telescopes. “We will find moving objects in space with a partnership between education, industry and government,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “For the first time, thousands of amateurs and kids of all stripes will be able to log on to the global network of telescopes that are optimized for finding moving bodies in space.” Under the agreement, TransAstra and Slooh will work together to install TransAstra’s Sutter telescopes at Slooh and TransAstra observation sites around the world. Slooh currently operates telescopes at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics and the observatory at the Pontifical Catholic University in Chile. Slooh plans to add telescope sites in the United Arab Emirates and India. TransAstra’s first Sutter telescope, which is designed to detect high-speed objects moving through cislunar and deep space, was installed in April at the Winer Observatory in Arizona. TransAstra operates a second Sutter telescope at the Sierra Remote Observatory in California. Taken together, the observatory locations will provide students with 24-hour coverage of the night sky. “This removes an important barrier to everyone being able to get in on the new space age,” said Michael Paolucci, Slooh founder and CEO. “We’re all not going to be able to get up in a spaceship, and even Ph.D. astronomers battle to get time on telescopes. We’re offering 24-hour access to the night sky that is not weather dependent.” TransAstra, a Los Angeles startup focused on orbital logistics and space mining, developed the Sutter telescope to survey asteroid minerals. In addition to the ground-based observations, TransAstra and Slooh plan to launch a small commercial telescope within two years. “Once deployed, that telescope will be the first of its kind to allow school children and amateurs from all over the world to control a spaceborne astronomical instrument for finding moving bodies in space,” according to an Aug. 9 TransAstra news release. The spaceborne telescope will serve as a demonstration for Sutter Ultra, a mission that involves “hundreds of inexpensive commercial telescopes fitted out with Sutter technology to be mounted on just three modest size spacecraft and flown in heliocentric space,” Sercel said. “Our calculations show that in the first year of operation, Sutter Ultra can find up to 300 times more asteroids than have been found in the entire history of astronomy. That’s a game-changing breakthrough.” TransAstra also is working with Slooh to determine how students could share credit for asteroid discoveries or name their discoveries. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Isotropic Systems is changing its name to All.Space, as the British antenna manufacturer unveils its “fifth-generation smart terminal” to link cellular and satellite networks. All.Space announced plans Aug. 1 to begin production in late 2022 of the new terminal, which is designed to connect networks “via multiple, simultaneous links,” according to the company based in Reading, England. Last year, the British company announced successful field tests of its flat-panel antenna, after successfully connecting to fleet operator SES’s satellites in geostationary and medium Earth orbit at the same time. Recently, All.Space concluded field tests with U.S. and U.K. government agencies as well as satellite operators to demonstrate antennas that linked satellites in low-Earth, medium-Earth and geostationary orbits. Eutelsat and OneWeb recently agreed on a plan to merge their businesses to create a global multi-orbit satellite broadband operator. It was the latest sign that satellite communications firms are eager to establish constellations with satellites in multiple orbits. With the growing importance of nongeostationary orbit constellations and high-throughput satellites, there is a “pressing need to connect satellites in different orbits,” John Finney, All.Space founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We have created the next chapter for the all-important ground segment.” Finney added that the introduction of the new All.Space terminals “will be a catalyst for a whole new era of communications, defined by multiple full-performance connections, power and waveform integration, computing, resource control and intelligent routing that enables a range of value-added software-defined services.” At the end of the year, All.Spaceplans to begin shipping its smart terminals “to a significant backlog of commercial and NATO defense customers,” according to the Aug. 1 news release. Since the company then called Isotropic was founded in 2013, it has raised approximately $97 million, according to business information website Crunchbase. Investors include SES, Orbital Ventures, Boeing , Space Angels and Firmament Ventures.
Satellite ground stations that for decades have been operated by the U.S. Army will be officially handed over to the Space Force on Aug. 15. The Space Force will take over control of the Wideband Global Satcom and Defense Satellite Communications System constellations of military satellites. The satellites were built and launched by the U.S. Air Force but the Army controlled the payloads. The Pentagon approved the transfer last year in an effort to consolidate space programs under the new military branch , which is responsible for providing satellite-based services to DoD and allies. The Army shifted about $78 million to the Space Force’s 2022 budget to cover the cost of operating five satellite operations centers and four regional support centers. About 500 military and civilian personnel will transition from the Army to the Space Force’s Delta 8 unit based at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. In addition to the Wideband Global Satcom the Defense Satellite Communications System, Space Delta 8 operates the Global Positioning System constellation and several communications systems, including Advanced EHF, MILSTAR and the Enhanced Polar System. “This transfer will mark the first time all Department of Defense military satellite communication functions have been consolidated under a single military service,” the Space Force said in a news release. Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, head of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said the transfer of satcom operations to the Space Force does not mean the Army is exiting the space business. In fact the Army is looking for new ways to use space capabilities in nontraditional ways such as for cyber warfare and information operations. “Space is a joint team sport,” Karbler said last week at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. The vital role of space “ demands integration at the tactical level,” he said. “No longer will the space domain be untethered from air, sea and land components.” Karbler said “each service with their unique mission sets must leverage the space domain and apply it to service-specific execution, command and control.” Due to its large size, the Army is the military’s largest consumer of space services, he said, “and we must retain organic capabilities tailored to meet our demands, responsive to our priorities, and reflective of our culture.” That said, the Army is not looking to fight turf battles with other services, Karbler added. The Army’s need for its own space systems “doesn’t mean that we’re just all going to circle our wagons in some service parochial way.” The Army will retain its 1st Space Brigade , based at Fort Carson, Colorado. The brigade was established in 2005 in response to the military’s growing use of satellites and ground stations for combat operations. Many of its nearly 2,000 soldiers are deployed in 11 countries. During deployments, members of the brigade monitor the health of satellites in orbit, help commanders analyze data from missile missile satellites and other space-based intelligence like imagery. According to multiple sources, the Space Force has been in talks with the Army about possibly transfering the Army’s Joint Tactical Ground Stations based in Italy, South Korea, Japan and Qatar. Known as JTAGS, these units are currently part of the 1st Space Brigade. They analyze and disseminate infrared data downlinked from overhead sensors and provide early warning of ballistic missile launches. Army’s space command to develop payloads The Army Space and Missile Defense Command, based in Huntsville, in recent years has developed and launched satellites like the Kestrel Eye , Gunsmoke-J imaging spacecraft, and the Lonestar experiment for space-based situational awareness. Moving forward, SMDC does not plan to build complete satellites but will develop payloads that the Space Force or other organizations will integrate on military or commercial satellite buses, said Wheeler “Chip” Hardy, director of space applications at SMDC’s Technical Center. “To operate effectively in the space domain, we must retain organic capabilities tailored to meet Army requirements and demands,” Wheeler said at the symposium. Ground forces, for example, have particular needs for overhead surveillance, target identification and non-GPS alternative forms of navigation. “Space capabilities tailored to unique land force requirements and just as importantly, the knowledge of those needs, do not currently reside within the Space Force,” said Wheeler. “As DoD’s largest user of space, the Army is best positioned to define and execute Army operational space requirements.” The plan for the next few years is to focus on the development of payloads and sensors, Wheeler said. SMC could develop and demonstrate a payload on a high altitude platform such as Zephyr drone, or as part of a space experiment, he said. “This is our view of the future, where we can concentrate almost fully on the payload and then transition the payload technology to another agency such as the Space Force for operational effects.”
The X Prize Foundation is considering a prize competition focused on removal of space debris to spur technological innovation in the field. During a panel discussion at the Fourth Summit for Space Sustainability by the Secure World Foundation and the U.K. Space Agency June 23, Anousheh Ansari, chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, said her organization was studying several potential ways to run a prize to support development of active debris removal systems. That work is still in its early stages. “This one is challenging,” she said. “We haven’t finished the design right now.” The foundation is looking at three options for a debris removal prize. One would be to remove rocket bodies, which constitute the largest and potentially most dangerous pieces of debris in orbit. “From an awareness perspective, it will be a good driver of conversation to change policy,” she said. A second option would be a mission to remove several “cubesat or larger” objects. A third option would be to remove a cloud of smaller debris, which she said would be the most challenging. “We’re still trying to evaluate all the different aspects,” she said, perhaps by combining two of the options in some way. While the design of the prize remains open, Ansari said she was convinced of the importance of having such a competition. One reason is to build awareness of the space debris problem and potential solutions beyond the space community. “One of the things we do really well at X Prize is create public awareness through competitions.” A second reason is to spur technological advancements. “We never try to predict a solution or approach to solving a problem,” she said, instead providing “specific, measurable objectives” for teams to achieve in their preferred ways. “That leads to really novel and original approaches sometimes.” A prize competition could also spur development of policies needed to enable active debris removal. “That is a grand challenge that needs to be resolved if we’re going to have a robust economy around this.” Ansari didn’t offer a schedule for developing the prize, but said she hoped the prize would run over five years. That ruled out, she said, more ambitious efforts like not just removing debris but instead recycling it in space in some way. “Everyone told us that you’d have to make this a 10- to 15-year prize, not a 5-year prize,” she said. However, the prize could be structured in such a way that debris is not deorbited but instead moved to a “junkyard” orbit for later reuse. An active debris removal prize would be the third space-related competition by the X Prize Foundation, which has a mixed track record on past competitions. The foundation started more than 25 years ago with a $10 million prize for suborbital human spaceflight, won by Scaled Composites in 2004 with SpaceShipOne. That prize led to the formation of Virgin Galactic, which licensed that technology to develop SpaceShipTwo. However, that vehicle has yet to enter regular commercial service after lengthy delays. None of the roughly two dozen other teams that participated in that competition ever reached space. The Google Lunar X Prize offered $30 million in prizes to private lunar lander missions. However, the prize ended in 2018 , a decade after its start, without a winner. The competition did award several small milestone prizes to teams and a $1 million “Moonshot Award” to SpaceIL , which attempted to land on the moon in 2019 but crashed. Ansari noted that some teams continued their lander efforts after the prize and have won commercial and government contracts, like Astrobotic and ispace. “We consider this the best failure we had,” she said. The foundation also administered the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge for terrestrial testing of lunar lander technology, sponsored by Northrop Grumman and with a prize purse from NASA’s Centennial Challenges program. Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems won the prizes in 2009. Masten is now developing a lunar lander for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program while Armadillo Aerospace went defunct several years after the competition.
NASA’s Artemis 1 mission and a Japanese lander are set to launch to the moon from Florida within days of each other in November. NASA announced Oct. 12 that it has scheduled the launch of the Artemis 1 mission for Nov. 14 from the Kennedy Space Center. The launch would take place during a 69-minute window that opens at 12:07 a.m. Eastern. Backup launch windows are available Nov. 16 at 1:04 a.m. Eastern and Nov. 19 at 1:45 a.m. Eastern, each two hours long. The agency said that inspections of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft after it rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building Sept. 27 found “minimal work” needed to prepare them for another launch attempt. That work includes repairing minor damage to the rocket’s thermal protection system from earlier launch attempts and tests, as well as replacing or recharging batteries for the rocket’s flight termination system. NASA expects to have the vehicle ready to roll back to Launch Complex 39B as soon as Nov. 4. NASA rolled the rocket back to the VAB to protect it from Hurricane Ian as the storm cut across Florida. That ruled out launch opportunities in late September and early October, and the rollback meant NASA could not try again during a launch period open in the latter half of October. The new launch opportunities are near the start of the following launch period. NASA is pressing ahead with those opportunities despite them being at night. Agency officials earlier suggested they preferred to launch during the day for improved tracking of the SLS on its inaugural flight, but that would have required waiting until at least Nov. 22, in the latter half of the launch period. The new launch date for Artemis 1 means it is now scheduled for launch within days of a commercial lunar lander mission. Japanese company ispace announced Oct. 12 that it plans to launch its first HAKUTO-R lander on a Falcon 9 between Nov. 9 and 15 from Cape Canaveral. The M1 lander completed testing last month at a facility in Germany and it being prepared for shipment to the launch site. The lander is carrying a variety of payloads, including a small lunar rover called Rashid developed by the United Arab Emirates. “For me this is a milestone on the road to realizing our vision, but I am already proud of our results,” Takeshi Hakamada, chief executive of ispace, said in a statement. “I look forward to watching the launch alongside all of our employees and those who have supported us.” That schedule puts ispace ahead of two American companies also preparing lunar landers for launch. Both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines had planned to launch their first lander missions before the end of the year, carrying payloads that included those provided by NASA though its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. However, Intuitive Machines said over the summer that the Falcon 9 launch of its IM-1 mission would slip to early 2023. Astrobotic, flying on the inaugural mission of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, had been holding a 2022 launch until Oct. 10, when ULA announced it was delaying the launch to the first quarter of 2023 to give Astrobotic more time to complete its lander. It was not clear that Vulcan itself would be ready to launch this year because of delays in the delivery of the BE-4 engines that power its first stage. In an Oct. 10 statement, John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, said his company would release more details about its launch plans in the near future, but noted the lander has recently returned to the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters after completing pressure testing of its propulsion system. “We are now proceeding with final spacecraft assembly which includes installation of the solar panel along with avionics, sensors, communications equipment and payloads, which are already tested and integrated with their corresponding decks,” he said. “As Peregrine begins its journey to the Moon in early 2023, it will be an incredible accomplishment for Astrobotic, the city of Pittsburgh, and the space industry as a whole.” Tokyo-based ispace is not directly a part of the CLPS program. However, its U.S. office is part of a team led by Draper that won a CLPS award in July for a lander mission to the far side of the moon scheduled for launch in 2025.
WAILEA, Hawaii — The National Space Council plans to hold “learning sessions” with industry in coming weeks on how to develop a new regulatory framework for novel commercial space activities. Speaking at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference here Sept. 29, Diane Howard, director of commercial space policy for the National Space Council, said the council would soon publish formal notifications of those sessions to get input on both the types of space activities and how they should be supervised in order to comply with the Outer Space Treaty. “I’d like you to start thinking about supervision: what it would look like, what are some ways to provide meaningful supervision of the operational phase of missions that doesn’t burden business models and doesn’t hinder innovation,” she said. One learning session, scheduled for a little more than a month from now, will invite industry to discuss their planned missions “so we can better understand them and be more effective in crafting a flexible framework that can grow with them,” she said. A second session will focus on how to implement that supervision. The sessions are part of an effort kicked off by Vice President Kamala Harris at the Sept. 9 meeting of the National Space Council, where she called for ideas to develop a new regulatory framework for commercial space activities that don’t fit into current systems . Those activities include in-space servicing and debris removal and commercial space stations. Harris asked for recommendations on that framework in 180 days. “This is a big deal. We’re taking a good look at our regulatory framework, and we want to do this right,” she said, encouraging industry participation in the learning sessions or in private one-on-one meetings with the council. Speaking to an audience of industry and government experts in space situational awareness (SSA), Howard said those evolving capabilities should play a role in that new regulatory framework. “I posit that SSA and traffic coordination might be able to help us accomplish this feat,” she said. “We would like to hear your thoughts on how the capabilities of this community can help us with the supervision piece.”
An independent review of Ligado’s planned deployment of a terrestrial wireless network concluded that it will likely interfere with some GPS signals and with space-based communications services provided by Iridium . The review, conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), was mandated by Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. A committee of experts who worked on the review for over a year released its findings Sept. 9 in a 78-page report . Congress ordered the study after Ligado Networks in 2020 was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission to develop a 5G cellular service by repurposing a portion of L-band radio spectrum adjacent to that used by GPS and Iridium. The FCC’s order led to a major dustup, as the Defense Department, Iridium and several industry groups pushed to overturn the regulatory approval arguing that Ligado’s network will disrupt services that support national security, civil aviation and other sectors. The chairman of the NASEM committee Michael McQuade, of Carnegie Mellon University, said the group looked at the technical issues regarding the FCC’s spectrum allocation but was not asked to assess whether the FCC made a good or bad decision. “It is complex, there are significant economic, legal, and regulatory issues at play that have been debated and analyzed for a very long time,” McQuade said Sept. 9 on a webcast hosted by the National Academies. On the central issue of whether Ligado’s network will disrupt GPS services, the panel said most receivers will not be affected but the “high precision” systems used by DoD likely will be. “We do conclude that most commercially produced general navigation timing cellular or certified GPS receivers will not experience significant harmful interference from Ligado emissions as authorized by the FCC,” said McQuade. “The receivers that are potentially most vulnerable are the high precision receivers,” he said, In tests, the highest proportion of systems that experienced “significant harmful interference were the high precision receivers.” McQuade also noted that the interference issue would be easily solved in newly designed GPS receivers “that could coexist with the authorized Ligado signals and achieve good performance.” But he cautioned that replacing receivers would be unrealistic for DoD that has fielded millions of GPS-enabled pieces of equipment. With regard to Iridium terminals, “our conclusion is that the Iridium terminals will experience harmful interference on their downlink caused by Ligado user terminals operating in the Uplink 1 band,” said McQuade. The interference would happen when Iridium terminals are closer than 732 meters to the Ligado emitters. DoD, Ligado react to report In a statement, DoD said the NASEM study “confirms that Ligado’s system will interfere with DoD GPS receivers, which include high-precision GPS receivers. The study also confirms that Iridium satellite communications will experience harmful interference caused by Ligado user terminals.” These conclusions are “consistent with DoD’s long-standing view that Ligado’s system will interfere with critical GPS receivers and that it is impractical to mitigate the impact of that interference.” As to what happens next, DoD said it “looks forward to continuing to work with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, FCC and Ligado on this complex and important issue.” The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is the interagency organization that oversees the government’s spectrum policies. Ligado said in a statement it “appreciates the review of the FCC’s April 2020 order by the National Academies of Sciences.” The company’s take on the review is that it “confirms what the FCC found over two years ago. Ligado’s licensed and authorized operations can co-exist with GPS.” Ligado noted that only a “small percentage of very old and poorly designed GPS devices may require upgrading. Ligado, in tandem with the FCC, established a program two years ago to upgrade or replace federal equipment, and we remain ready to help any agency that comes forward with outdated devices. So far, none have.” Now that the review is completed, Ligado said, “it is our sincere hope the DoD and the NTIA will stop blocking Ligado’s license authority and focus instead on working with Ligado to resolve potential impacts relating to all DoD systems.” An industry group that has worked to overturn the FCC order, known as the Keep GPS Working Coalition, said the NASEM report validates the group’s belief that the “FCC essentially authorized terrestrial operations in a satellite band without adequately considering the impact Ligado’s proposed operations would have on countless consumers, farmers, ranchers, pilots, boat owners, surveyors, construction companies and others.” Iridium said in a statement that the study offers proof that the FCC order “failed to fully consider the risk of harmful interference posed to mission-critical satellite systems. Iridium urges the FCC to take swift action to reverse the order before Ligado starts its technical demonstrations this fall.” The FCC has not yet commented on the report. In response to congressional pushback, the agency in the past has defended its decision to authorize Ligado’s network as part of a national effort to advance 5G connectivity. The FCC set conditions, such as requiring that Ligado network design ensures that adjacent band operations, including GPS, are protected from harmful interference. The NASEM report said mitigation measures are helpful but can’t be applied unilaterally. “It has to be the result of extensive dialogue between a presumed affected party and Ligado,” and those conversations presumably did not take place, said McQuade. “We simply make the statement that without that dialogue, it is impractical to believe that the mitigation measures can work,” he said. These mitigation measures also would not be practical if they’re not applied “at operationally relevant timescales and at reasonable cost for DoD systems.” The NASEM panel, however, did not endorse the approaches used by DoD to test interference and should not be used going forward. McQuade said the committee believes that “some form of cohesive policy” is needed to address the rights of current spectrum users , what those rights are, how long those rights should prevail, and what the impact of equipment lifetimes are likely to be. These are debates that should be had “outside of the pressure of an individual spectrum decision,” he said. The committee’s work has been officially completed, McQuade said. As the government works to resolve the Ligado issue, “the committee believes that whatever process is followed, that process would be much more much more effective if the FCC and the NTIA both engaged in dialogue.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Mangata Networks, the U.S.-based startup founded by a former OneWeb executive, said Dec. 5 it signed a $100 million financing deal to build a manufacturing facility in Scotland for its multi-orbit broadband constellation. The facility at Prestwick International Aerospace Park, located in the Ayrshire region near Glasgow, will also serve as Mangata’s engineering and operations hub as it aims to start deploying nearly 800 broadband satellites from late 2025. Once up to speed, Phoenix, Arizona-based Mangata said the facility could produce and test 24 satellites up to 1,500 kilograms every three months. These satellites would be spread across medium Earth orbit (MEO) and highly elliptical orbits (HEO) to provide high-speed internet services to aviation, cellular backhaul, and other connectivity markets. Mangata CEO Brian Holz said customers have already reserved nearly all the capacity on the operator’s initial 32 satellites, representing more than 1.5 terabits per second of capacity. Holz is a former vice president of space systems at OneWeb and CEO of OneWeb Satellites, the joint venture the low Earth orbit broadband operator shares with Airbus to build its satellites. The Scottish facility’s construction is being funded under a 15-year lease-back contract that gives Mangata the right to buy out its property investors at any time. South Ayrshire Council is investing 29.2 million British pounds ($36 million) in the project through the government-backed Ayrshire Growth Deal fund. Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s national economic development agency, said it has invested 54 million British pounds to construct the hub, including a $3 million investment made in Mangata’s $33 million series A investment round in January. In March, Scottish Enterprise also announced it had awarded Mangata 3.6 million British pounds in research and development grant funding. According to Mangata, its hub will create up to 575 mainly highly paid, highly skilled technical engineering jobs in Scotland over the “coming few years.” Adrian Gillespie, Scottish Enterprise’s CEO, said: “Not only will it bring hundreds of new quality jobs for the people of Scotland, but it will be a catalyst for a new supply chain, opening up opportunities and partnerships both domestically and internationally.” Prestwick is also home to Prestwick Spaceport, which is gearing up to facilitate horizontal air-launches of satellites from 2024.
The Space Development Agency remains optimistic it will launch next month the first satellites of a planned mesh network of sensors and communications nodes in low Earth orbit, the agency’s director Derek Tournear said Nov. 10. “We have high confidence … but there’s obviously risk there because we are pushing industry to go as quickly as possible,” he said on an online forum hosted by the National Security Space Association. SDA’s goal is to deploy 28 satellites in two launches contracted with SpaceX, one in December and one in March. These include 20 satellites that make up the Transport Layer Tranche 0, and eight for the Tracking Layer Tranche 0. The December mission is expected to carry four tracking satellites made by SpaceX and an unspecified number of Transport satellites made by Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems . This launch was originally scheduled in late September but was delayed due to supply chain problems that have affected all vendors in the program. The March mission will include four L3Harris Tracking Layer Tranche 0 satellites and an unspecified number of Transport Layer satellites. Tournear said it’s important for the agency to get Tranche 0 satellites on orbit by March so they can be tested in military exercises next summer. “Tranche 0 is our minimum viable product to do a demonstration that shows that we can get data from a satellite to a targeting cell … and that we can detect and track a hypersonic glide vehicle,” Tournear said. “Those are our two demonstrations that we want the warfighter to experiment with.” The satellites trying to make the December launch are “in integration right now, doing last minute finishing touches, putting the payloads on the satellites,” he said. “There was some ground software that we actually had to change.” SDA reassigned the ground software development that was being done by the Naval Research Laboratory to the satellite contractors “to help with the schedule,” Tournear said. “There’s not a lot of margin.” Tournear said there’s also some risk in the schedule of L3Harris’ satellites. “It’s something that we’re tracking daily to make sure that we get the parts delivered and the satellites built on time.” The first Tranche 0 launch is SDA’s main focus right now, he said. “We are all tracking this every day, almost hourly.” People are used to seeing Starlink launches go up every month with a lot of satellites, Tournear noted. SpaceX makes it look easy “but it does take years to get this kind of model up and running and going.” Tournear said his biggest worries regarding SDA’s constellation are cyber attacks and supply chain issues. “Those are the ones that keep me up at night,” he said. There are two main concerns about the supply chain. One is the possibility that an adversary infiltrates the supply chain and inserts counterfeit components. The other is having enough resiliency in the supply chain so the government is not dependent on a single supplier, a problem that contributed to the delays in the Tranche 0 satellites. Tournear said the vendors producing Tranche 1 satellites for the next deployment are seeing improvements in their supply chains. 
SEOUL, South Korea — Indian space startup Bellatrix Aerospace said June 1 that it had raised $8 million in a Series A funding round to pursue the development of in-space propulsion systems. Including $3 million raised in pre-Series A in June 2019, Bellatrix has raised $11 million since its establishment in 2015. Investors include StartupXseed, Pavestone Capital, Mankind Pharma family office, Survam Partners and Karsemven Fund. Several angel investors and family offices joined the latest funding round, the company said in a June 1 statement . “In the past ten years, the number of satellites in space has increased almost tenfold and based on announced private-sector missions is likely to multiply rapidly in the next ten years,” the company said in the statement. “In-space propulsion systems that save costs and use more environmentally friendly technologies are increasingly relevant to the growing satellite market.” The company added orbital transfer vehicles are becoming a “new means of reaching orbit on rideshare missions for micro and small satellites.” Bellatrix is developing an orbital transfer vehicle based on its in-space propulsion technologies as part of its efforts to become a full-fledged space transportation technology company. In the statement, Rohan M Ganapathy, Bellatrix’s co-founder and CEO, said the pre-Series A funding helped the company develop “numerous critical technologies in-house.” The latest funding will help his company expand the product portfolio, hire new employees and validate its products in space. The chief executive said the company plans to complete the development and test of four home-developed thruster modules by the end of the year. The company is also planning to complete space qualification testing of its under-development orbital transfer vehicle “in the coming months.” While Bellatrix didn’t elaborate on how the space qualification test will be performed, it’s likely that the vehicle will be launched aboard a rocket developed by another Indian space startup Skyroot Aerospace . The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding in February 2021 , under which Bellatrix’s orbital transfer vehicle is supposed to launch on a rocket that Skyroot is developing. The latter, founded in 2018 by former scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is developing a small satellite launcher named Vikram 1. It’s a solid-fueled, three-stage satellite launcher designed to deliver up to 500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit, and 500 kilograms to sun-synchronous polar orbit, according to the company’s website . Skyroot successfully carried out a full-duration test of Vikram 1’s third stage in May, which lasted 108 seconds with a peak thrust of 100 kN. Test firings of the rocket’s first and second stages are expected in the coming months because the company targets Vikram I’s maiden flight by the end of the year and the first commercial orbital mission early next year.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper needs half of its internet constellation – or about 1,600 satellites — to be operating in low Earth orbit by July 2026. Getting there will be a race against time, as most of the rockets that are under contract to launch these satellites are new vehicles that have not yet flown. The availability of heavy-lift rockets to deploy Kuiper satellites on time is “a constrained resource right now,” Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services said Oct. 27 at a Washington Post Live event. The July 2026 deadline was set by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 2020 when it approved Amazon’s request to operate an estimated $10 billion constellation of roughly 3,200 internet satellites in low Earth orbit. Amazon in April announced it procured 83 launches on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Arianespace’s Ariane 6, none of which has yet flown. Previously Amazon had ordered nine launches on ULA’s Atlas 5, a proven vehicle that is in limited supply as ULA plans to retire it and transition to Vulcan. Limp said the company remains confident it will meet the FCC deadline even if that requires buying launches from satellite internet archrival SpaceX. On Vulcan, New Glenn and Ariane 6, the question is not “will they fly, it’s just when, it’s a timing question,” he said. By buying Atlas 5s, “we hedged our bets a bit.” The new vehicles “hopefully come into place,” he said. “But there are also other providers out there,” Limp added. “We have a lot of satellites to put up into space. So we’re open to contracting with anyone,” including SpaceX. Amazon Kuiper is positioning to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation but it would not rule out seeking launch services from its competitor given the tight deadline, Limp said. “We are open to talking to SpaceX. You’d be crazy not to, given their track record.” The Falcon 9, however, is not as large as Amazon would like it to be in order to get maximum bang for its launch buck, as Kuiper satellites are larger than Starlink’s. “I would say Falcon 9 is probably at the low end of the capacity that we need,” Limp said. Perhaps a better option would be Falcon Heavy or the much larger Starship, which is still in development. As Starship transitions to production readiness, “that becomes a very viable candidate for us as well.” There are many “cool and amazing” rockets flying today, he said, “but the fact of the matter is that heavy launch capacity is still pretty constrained, and I think it will be for the coming years.” Race to build satellites In an effort to meet the 2026 target, Amazon is ramping up satellite production. The company on Thursday announced plans to open a 172,000-square-foot satellite production facility in Kirkland, Washington, to build as many as four satellites per day. That’s in addition to the 219,000-square-foot research and development facility it already operates in Redmond, Washington. “We have to build manufacturing capabilities that look more like consumer electronics or automobiles and less like the traditional space industry,” Limp said. ‘We’re over 1,000 people now we’re continuing to hire,” he said. The first two Kuiper prototype satellites are being produced in Redmond. “Those should be done by the end of the fourth quarter, and we’re in test right now,” he said. The plan is to deliver them to ULA in early 2023 so they can fly on Vulcan’s first launch . “Given the schedule we have in front of us,” Limp said, “assuming success of our prototype satellites, we’re in parallel bringing up manufacturing of our production satellites so we can meet that milestone.” Limp pushed back on the idea that Amazon is too far behind SpaceX to become a viable competitor. “The headlines would have you think that this is a sports race and there’s going to be one winner,” he said. “But there are literally hundreds of millions of customers around the world that don’t have access to great broadband … And I think there’s plenty of room for two great constellations.” He said Amazon did not greenlight billions of dollars in launch contracts until “we had a satellite on a bench that seemed to be working and we had an antenna that seemed to be working.” Amazon intends to compete with Starlink by offering affordable terminals, Limp said. Kuiper terminals cost under $400 to produce, Limp said, but did specify what they will sell for. “The actual dish that will connect to the satellite network has a much lower cost than anybody has seen before, including Starlink. So I think we’ll have some advantages, because in the end, I think there’ll be plenty of room for two constellations.” The Kuiper constellation was designed to operate in the Ka band , which resulted in larger and more expensive satellites, said Limp, “but we have more power on our bus, and the advantage for us was to be able to build a much lower cost antenna.” Commercial satellites and national security Limp said Amazon is pursuing U.S. government contracts, including the military . “We’ve had discussions with a bunch of different parts of the U.S. government,” he said. The company earlier this year secured a NASA contract for mesh networking in space. In response to a question on the role of commercial satellites during war, Limp said, “At Amazon, in general, it’s one of our tenets that technology should be used to help national security and so to the extent that Kuiper can help, I think we’re open to those discussions.” It’s too early to speculate on specific roles Projet Kuiper would play in support of of national security, Limp added. “But I would say from a macro level that access to broadband is part and parcel to access to information, and when you get information that is not censored, that is the path of freedom.” Right now, “we’re too early to be thinking about that. We’ve got to get this system up and working first. But I do believe the moral high ground of having access to ground truth information is an important one for society.”
TAMPA, Fla. — British Earth observation startup Satellite Vu has ordered a second satellite from Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) for its planned thermal imaging constellation. Satellite Vu said July 21 the satellite is a clone of the one it ordered last year from U.K.-based SSTL, and would double the data it can collect to identify buildings that are wasting heat and other climate change applications. The two satellites are based on SSTL’s 130-kilogram DarkCarb design, which carries mid-wave infrared (MWIR) technology for capturing thermal imagery at a resolution of 3.5 meters. The first of seven planned satellites are slated to launch in the first quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter rideshare mission. The satellite was previously slated to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022. The British startup expects its second satellite will be launched in early 2024. It did not provide a timeframe for the remaining satellites. “The procurement of another satellite is driven by market demand for more capacity to address urgent customer problems and investor confidence in the team to accelerate the execution of the company business plan,” Satellite Vu founder and CEO Anthony Baker said in a statement. Satellite Vu said it has been working to de-risk the technology with funding support from the UK Space Agency’s National Space Innovation Programme (NSIP). The startup has raised £20 million ($24 million) in grants and venture capital to date, including an investment announced in March from U.S.-based Lockheed Martin and In-Q-Tel. The full constellation would be able to measure heat coming off a building multiple times a day, according to Satellite Vu. This would enable the company to provide insights for increasing the efficiency of the built environment, which is estimated to account for 40% of global carbon emissions. Other startups developing thermal imagery constellations include Germany’s OroraTech and Washington-based Hydrosat . Advances in satellite-based thermal imagery solutions are also helping prevent and combat wildfires that are becoming increasingly prevalent in the changing climate. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
TAMPA, Fla. — British defense firm Qinetiq is selling its Belgian commercial satellite systems division to Redwire, a U.S.-based consolidator of space infrastructure. Redwire said Oct.3 it plans to buy QinetiQ Space, which supplies small satellites and other instruments for European end-to-end space missions, for 32 million euros ($31.4 million). It is Redwire’s first acquisition in nearly a year since it bought biotechnology company Techshot in November — a few months after going public to raise a war chest for further deals. Created by private equity firm AE Industrial Partners in June 2020, Redwire has built up a diverse space technology business by snapping up other companies. These include space manufacturing company Made In Space and Deployable Space Systems, which develops spacecraft structures and solar arrays. Despite poor macroeconomic conditions, Redwire chair and CEO Pete Cannito said the company continues to have an appetite for acquisitions. “We are entering a multi-decade space competition with China and Russia,” Cannito told SpaceNews via email. “As a result, despite a negative trending macro-environment across the general economy, demand for space capabilities from both US and international government participants remains strong.” A challenging macroeconomic environment could also bring more distressed companies to the deal table. Redwire’s strategic focus areas include orbit servicing and manufacturing, digitally engineered spacecraft, and space domain awareness. In September 2021, Redwire became a public company by merging with Genesis Park Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, to fuel further acquisitions. However, apart from its deal for Techshot and the plan to buy QinetiQ Space, the group has been quiet on the acquisition front since listing on the New York Stock Exchange. “Inorganic growth has always been a part of the Redwire strategy,” Cannito said. “We did take time to stop to go public before moving on to our next major acquisition.” Following a surge of investments in the broader space industry over the last few years, investors have recently raised concerns about the amount of capital raised and the valuations of space companies, including those listed on stock markets through SPAC mergers. The acquisition of QinetiQ Space “will provide additional revenue diversity, a larger addressable market and deeper relationships with international customers,” Cannito added, and came at “a reasonable valuation to enhance Redwire’s resiliency regardless of future macro-economic uncertainty.” QinetiQ to focus on home markets Belgium’s QinetiQ Space recorded 49 million euros of revenue for the year to the end of March and three million euros in profit after taxes. The company has a contracted backlog of 113 million euros for core products that include advanced payloads, small satellite technology, berthing and docking equipment, and space instruments. Redwire said buying would increase its exposure to European customers, including the European Space Agency and the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO). Farnborough, England-headquartered QinetiQ said selling the Belgian company will strengthen its focus on its three home countries: The U.K., U.S., and Australia. QinetiQ also announced plans Oct. 3 to buy Air Affairs, an Australian defense services company, for 53 million Australian dollars ($35 million). In August, QinetiQ said it had agreed to buy Avantus — a U.S. cyber, data analytics, and software development solutions provider, in a deal valued at $590 million. Redwire expects to close its QinetiQ Space acquisition later this year, following customary approvals.
China’s launch vehicle makers appear to be designing a fully reusable version of the Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket needed for future megaprojects. The emergence of plans for new reusable methane-liquid oxygen launch vehicles to be ready for 2035 suggests that China is looking to make significant changes to its space transportation plans. China’s government last year signaled approval for the continued development of a super heavy-lift launcher, known as the Long March 9. The long-planned, expendable launcher is planned to be operational by 2030, in time to facilitate Chinese megaprojects including the International Lunar Research Station . The giant rocket will consist of three stages and four side boosters, with the first stage and boosters using a kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant mix. However, a new concept for a fully reusable two-stage launcher has now been presented in a recent public lecture (viewable here ) by Long Lehao, a veteran chief designer of the Long March rocket series. The first stage of the 10.6-meter-diameter launcher would be powered by 26 clustered 200-ton-thrust methalox engines. It would be capable of carrying 150 tons of payload to Low Earth orbit, 65 tons to geosynchronous transfer orbit, or 50 tons to trans-lunar injection. Long, a senior official who frequently presented updates on China’s space activities, revealed that the new launches are to be ready by 2035, and likely developed in parallel to the expendable version. The largest variant, apparently including a third stage, would have a length of 110 meters and a takeoff mass of 4,122 tons. The concepts would be a dramatic departure from both the expendable model of the Long March 9 and a version with a reusable first stage presented last year , with fully reusability now a goal. The frequent change in concepts however also suggests China’s plans are somewhat in flux. The presentation, made in July, comes shortly ahead of first orbital test flights for the expendable Space Launch System and SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship. Methane-liquid oxygen offers advantages in performance and reduces issues of soot formation and coking for purposes of reusability. The plans follow the trend of SpaceX, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance in switching to the fuel. It also follows a smaller two-stage methane-liquid oxygen launcher concept , apparently drawing on SpaceX’s Starship, presented by Wang Xiaojun, president of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). The apparent switch to methalox appears sudden. China’s propulsion institutes, under the state-owned conglomerate the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), have however long been working on methane engines, making a change of plans somewhat feasible. A smaller five-meter-diameter reusable rocket presented by Long could potentially be intended to replace a number of aging hypergolic rockets, as well as more recent kerosene-fueled Long March rockets which have become operational over the last decade. Chinese commercial launch companies Landspace and iSpace have been developing methane-liquid oxygen launchers in recent years, possibly with help of military-civil fusion national strategy which facilitates transfer of restricted technologies. Landspace is set to attempt its first launch on the methalox Zhuque-2 in the near future from Jiuquan spaceport. Competitor iSpace is also preparing to conduct hop tests with a methalox first stage test article for its reusable Hyperbola-2 rocket at Jiuquan. While various figures have been published, the original, expendable Long March 9 is expected to be around 103 meters long, feature a 10-meter-diameter core and have a mass at liftoff of 4,140 metric tons, and be capable of lifting 140 tons to Low Earth orbit or 50 tons to trans-lunar injection. Dual nozzle 500 ton-thrust kerosene-liquid oxygen (YF-130) engines will power the first stage and boosters, 220-ton-thrust liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen staged combustion cycle (YF-90) engines for the second stage, with significant progress already made on both. Vacuum-optimized hydrolox engines would power the third stage. The reusable first stage version presented in 2021 would switch to a first stage using 16 clustered 360-ton-thrust kerolox engines and no side boosters. 120-ton-thrust hydrolox engines would be used for the second and third stages. The largest variant of the Long March 9 in Long’s new lecture featuring the fully reusable concepts would have a 10.6-meter-diameter, a length of 110 meters and takeoff mass of 4,122 tons, matching the capabilities of the earlier plans. A more economical, reusable version of the Long March 9 could be ready to support a proposed space-based solar power program in geostationary orbit. China is also developing a three-stage heavy-lift rocket designed to be capable of sending Chinese astronauts to the moon. A two-stage version for low Earth orbit could have its first flight in 2026.
Virgin Orbit now expects to perform four launches this year, at the low end of earlier projections, but with a higher per-launch revenue. The company, in its second quarter earnings release Aug. 12, reported no revenue in the quarter and a net loss of $33.3 million. The company, though, said it recorded more than $12 million in revenue in its second launch of the year July 2 , just after the end of the quarter. The company recognizes revenue at the time of launch. The $12 million is significantly higher than previous launches, which averaged $2.5 million per launch. Upcoming launches, the company projected, will produce $6 million to $12 million of revenue per launch. “You’re seeing a reaction of the market as we have steadily proven the technology and then gone into operations and demonstrated the reliability of the system,” said Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit. “You’re also seeing that some customers have additional requirements and needs, oftentimes government payloads require some additional aspects of mission assurance or handling of their payloads.” As Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne system moved from development into operations, with four consecutive successful launches dating back to early 2021, the company is making improvements in launch operations. Hart said that on the most recent launch, the company reduced manufacturing labor hours for the rocket by 25% and time in launch operations by 9%. “Fewer days in launch operations significantly reduces our overall launch costs and drives overhead efficiency, while increasing our launch responsiveness,” Hart said, adding that the company was “ahead of the planned learning curve” with those reductions. However, its forecast for the number of launches in the year has shrunk. The company now projects conducting just four launches this year, down from the six the company planned at the beginning of the year and a range of four to six launches it forecast in June . The next launch remains the first Virgin Orbit launch from outside the United States, at Spaceport Cornwall in England. The company, which previously expected that launch to take place in September, did not give a date for it in its earnings call, instead calling it only its “next launch.” Hart said the LauncherOne rocket for that mission will leave the company’s Long Beach, California, factory in the next two weeks and go to the Mojave Air and Space Port for a launch rehearsal. He said Virgin Orbit is also working closely with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the U.K. agency responsible for licensing launches. The CAA announced a public consultation on the proposed launch license July 22 , scheduled to close Aug. 22. “This is the first launch that they’ve ever done, and so we’re working very closely with them. It’s a new process and it takes a bit of time to go through it,” Hart said of the company’s interactions with the CAA. Other factors for the timing of the launch include the readiness of the payloads for the mission as well as required infrastructure at the launch site, a commercial airport. After the Cornwall launch, Virgin Orbit expects to perform one more launch in the fourth quarter from Mojave, the site of its previous launches. The company did not disclose the customer for that launch. Virgin Orbit ended the quarter with $122 million of cash on hand. That included raising $50 million through exercising part of a standby equity purchase agreement it announced in March with a hedge fund, Yorkville Advisors, to sell up to $250 million in equity over three years. Brita O’Rear, Virgin Orbit’s chief financial officer, said the cash on hand should “provide sufficient near-term liquidity” for the company. “We will continue to be opportunistic in the capital markets.”
WAILEA, Hawaii — The Space Force expects to know by next spring what capabilities it will need to carry out space domain awareness activities in cislunar space. In a talk during the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference here Sept. 28, Col. Marc Brock, commander of Space Delta 2, the unit responsible for space domain awareness for the Space Force, said a study is underway by the 19th Space Defense Squadron (SDS) on what’s needed to monitor activities beyond geostationary orbit, called xGEO by the Space Force, and out to the moon. That study, he said, will look at requirements to create an “operational capability” for cislunar or xGEO space domain awareness. That includes training, technologies and centers needed to carry out the mission. He said that report should be ready by next April or May. “Following that, the timeframe to have a viable capability is dependent on the resourcing that we have as a service,” he said. Some existing ground-based resources already exist to carry out that mission, he said, but said there will likely need to be new space-based systems. “We need a space-based capability to really provide the surveillance of xGEO or cislunar and so I can’t give you a timeframe for when that is,” he said. There are some technology demonstration efforts underway, like the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Cislunar Highway Patrol System, or CHPS. That is a mission planned for launch in 2025 to operate in cislunar space, testing technologies to track and identify objects there. Brock referred to those efforts, but said an operational system based on something like CHPS may take considerably longer to implement. “To really have a long-term viable operational capability, it’s going to take will and it’s going to take resources,” he said. “I can’t answer a specific time other than we will be postured hopefully within the next several years to utilize the resources that are available to perform that mission.” The work on cislunar space domain awareness is one of the missions of the 19th SDS, which he described as an “innovation sandbox” for Space Delta 2. The squadron has also taken over conjunction assessment work that was previously done by the 18th Space Defense Squadron, a move he said was a “precursor” to shifting civil space traffic management responsibilities to the Commerce Department. He said the work with Commerce on that transition is going well but did not go into details about that work. “We are committed 110% to helping the DOC establish their function,” he said, claiming there no challenges in that effort. “They have a lot of work to do to secure funding and determine exactly when they want to roll out capability, but we’re side by side with the DOC to help them as much as we possibly can.”
Space Force Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt said discussions between DoD and the Department of Commerce are picking up momentum as both agencies work to figure out how to transition space traffic management to the Office of Space Commerce. Burt, who is special assistant to the vice chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, spoke Nov. 7 at the Air Traffic Control Association’s annual conference and exhibition. She said it is “absolutely vital” that Commerce succeeds at establishing a civilian space traffic management office, an effort that started in 2018 when the former Trump administration issued a policy directing Commerce to provide spaceflight safety services for civil and commercial satellite operators, a job currently performed by U.S. Space Command’s 18th Space Defense squadron. Burt said she met in July with Richard DalBello , director of the Office of Space Commerce. “He’s doing great work. And we’ve been teaming with him over the last few months,” she added. “It’s vital for the Department of Defense that the relationship is successful.” There is no time to waste getting this office stood up, given the rapid growth in commercial space activities, said Burt. “Every domain has a civil entity or government entity that works the traffic in a peacetime environment. We need to make that happen in the space domain.” DoD has performed these duties by default “primarily because we had the preponderance of assets on orbit. But that is no longer the case. The commercial market is outstripping us in numbers,” Burt said. Just like the U.S. Air Force scrambles jets when there’s unauthorized aircraft in the air, the same concept would apply in space, she said. The routine space traffic should be managed by a civilian agency and DoD would be called up when there’s something suspicious or nefarious going on. A key part of the transition is figuring out “how we communicate” between Commerce and Defense, Burt said. “There absolutely has to be interchangeable data and information so that we don’t have any unknowns.” Burt said there are working groups from DoD and OSC meeting weekly to map out “how we’re going to go after this.” The key questions that have to be answered, she said, are “how are we sharing data? What are we measuring the data against ? What is truth data? What’s the classification of the data? How will we protect the data? How will we maintain the catalog that’s produced and published to the world ? And what are basic services?” The 2018 Space Policy Directive-3 directs the Department of Commerce to provide a basic level of space situational awareness for public and private use, based on the space catalog compiled by the Department of Defense. Commerce would inform satellite operators if there is a potential for a collision with another passing satellite or piece of debris. The 18th Space Defense Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, currently provides SSA services and issues collision warnings to satellite operators around the world. 
A NASA space science spacecraft launched three years ago has been out of contact with controllers for nearly two weeks after suffering some kind of technical problem. NASA announced Dec. 7 that the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) spacecraft has not communicated with ground stations since Nov. 25. The spacecraft, launched in October 2019 , had not experienced any major issues reported by NASA before this incident. The loss of contract would have triggered an eight-day “command loss timer” on the spacecraft, causing it to reset its systems after eight days. NASA said that it has yet to restore contact with the spacecraft even after completing that power cycle. The agency said engineers believe the problem is with the spacecraft’s avionics or communications subsystems, but have little information to support troubleshooting. “The team is currently unable to determine the health of the spacecraft, and the lack of a downlink signal could be indicative of a system failure,” it stated. NASA said it has ruled out damage to the spacecraft from an explosion of debris impact, noting that observations of the low Earth orbit spacecraft by the Defense Department’s Space Surveillance Network concluded that ICON is intact. The $252 million ICON mission was designed to study the interaction of space weather with terrestrial weather in the Earth’s ionosphere to better understand what drives variations in the ionosphere. That included measurements that showed the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in January 2022 in the Pacific had effects extending into the ionosphere, where it disrupted electrical currents. ICON completed its two-year primary mission in late 2021 and was in an interim extended mission. ICON will be part of NASA’s next senior review of heliophysics missions in 2023 to determine if its mission should be extended. NASA projected spending $6.7 million on ICON operations in fiscal year 2023. 
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched a National Reconnaissance Office mission Aug. 4 at 1:00 a.m. Eastern. The NROL-199 mission lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex-1 at Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand. Rocket Lab said the payload separated from the rocket an hour after liftoff and the payload was deployed to its intended orbit. The NRO also confirmed the mission was successful. NROL-199 was the second of two missions the NRO developed in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence. The first one, NROL-162, launched from Mahia Peninsula July 13. Rocket Lab and the NRO sought to demonstrate that two national security missions could be launched within a short timeline . “The NROL-162 and NROL-199 missions demonstrate NRO’s capability to launch multiple rockets from overseas locations within weeks of one another,” the NRO said in a news release. “This speed and agility are critical as NRO innovates faster working with government partners. NRO worked closely with New Zealand Space Agency, which licensed the launch, and Rocket Lab as the launch provider.” Launch services for NROL-162 and NROL-199 were acquired through the NRO’s Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket (RASR) contract the agency uses to buy small satellite launch services from commercial providers. NROL-162 and NROL-199 were NRO’s third and fourth launches from a Rocket Lab Electron rocket and from New Zealand. The previous Electron launches occurred Jan. 31, 2020 with the NROL-151 mission, and June 13, 2020 with the RASR-2 launch.
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile said June 13 that SpaceX aims to launch the prototype for its cellphone-compatible broadband constellation in the week of Aug. 15. The actual launch date is subject to final integration of the BlueWalker 3 test satellite, AST SpaceMobile added, and other factors including the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s readiness and weather. The launch window announcement comes days after AST SpaceMobile CEO and chair Abel Avellan said BlueWalker 3 had successfully conducted end-to-end tests. “We also got the satellite fueled for our planned summer launch,” Avellan tweeted June 10 . BlueWalker 3 was developed at AST SpaceMobile’s facilities in Texas and is slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket with other passengers from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The 1,500-kilogram satellite has a 64-square-meter phased array antenna that is designed to unfold in space to connect standard smartphones and other devices at broadband speeds. The startup has an experimental license for in-orbit BlueWalker 3 tests to configure ground equipment and software for significantly larger operational satellites called BlueBird. Avellan said May 16 that BlueBird’s development is so advanced that it is ready to start deploying the operational satellites in 2023 even if Blue Walker 3 runs into issues. SpaceX is also slated to launch the first BlueBird. By the end of 2024, AST SpaceMobile expects to have deployed 110 of the satellites to provide “substantial global” mobile coverage.
NASA expects SpaceX to be ready to attempt a first orbital flight of its Starship vehicle, an essential element in the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration plans, as soon as early December, pending tests and regulatory approvals. Speaking to the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee Oc. 31, Mark Kirasich, deputy associate administrator for Artemis Campaign Development at NASA, said the agency’s understanding of progress on testing of the Starship vehicle, including its Super Heavy booster, supported an orbital launch attempt late this year. “Right now, the schedule would lead to an early December test flight,” he said. The profile for that test flight would be the same as the company previously detailed in regulatory filings, with the Super Heavy booster and Starship lifting off from the Boca Chica, Texas, test site. Starship would go into orbit but almost immediately reenter, splashing down near Hawaii after completing less than one orbit. That schedule is dependent on several upcoming milestones, including a static-fire test of all 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster designated Booster 7. SpaceX has yet to fire all 33 Raptor engines simultaneously, having done tests of up to seven engines at a time as well as a “spin prime” test where the engines’ turbopumps are turned on and propellant flowed through the engines without igniting them. It was during a spin prime test July 11 that SpaceX suffered what NASA euphemistically calls a “high-energy event” when propellants ignited underneath the booster, damaging it. SpaceX has repaired the booster and implemented corrective actions, according to the agency. Kirasich said that test put “a relatively large amount of fuel” into a cloud of oxygen, triggering the detonation. “That was an operational and planning oversight. SpaceX, in the early days, goes for speed above systems engineering rigor,” he said, calling it a “pause and learn” event for SpaceX. “They’ve since elevated the level of systems engineering put into each one of these tests, as well as brought in some new leadership into the team down there,” he said, resulting in “additional rigor” in subsequent tests. That incident also attracted the attention of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. A member of the panel, Paul Hill, mentioned it at the panel’s Oct. 27 public meeting. “SpaceX is still pursuing an aggressive Starship development test plan, but this failure resulted in corrective actions to increase systems engineering and risk management rigor,” he said. Kirasich said there are still several milestones before Starship will be ready for an orbital launch. That includes the static-fire test of all 33 Raptor engines in Super Heavy as well as a full wet dress rehearsal where the Starship and Super Heavy vehicles are loaded with propellants and go through a practice countdown. SpaceX also requires a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the mission. While the FAA cleared the way for Starship launches from Boca Chica with an environmental review in June, that review required SpaceX to implement more than 75 measures to mitigate the environmental effects of those launches. That licensing “is still ahead of us,” Kirasich said. NASA is closely following preparations for the first Starship orbital launch because the agency sees it as the first in a series of tests of a vehicle the agency plans to use to land astronauts on the moon on Artemis 3 through its Human Landing System contract with SpaceX. “We track four major Starship flights,” Kirasich said, starting with the first orbital launch. That’s followed by one to test propellant transfer in space, which is needed to refuel the Starship lunar lander, and a “longer duration” Starship mission, details of which he did not discuss. The fourth mission is the uncrewed lunar landing demonstration mission scheduled for late 2024. He said those four tests were evenly spaced in the schedule back when the orbital launch was scheduled for this summer. “SpaceX has lost a number of months” because of the delays in that first orbital launch, he said, but didn’t state how it would affect the schedule of the latest tests the agency is following.
Arianespace launched the 6.5-ton Konnect VHTS satellite for Eutelsat Sept. 7 to improve broadband coverage in Europe. The Ariane 5 lifted off from the European Space Port in Kourou, French Guiana, at 5:45 p.m. Eastern Wednesday. The satellite separated from the upper stage after 28 minutes and entered a sub-synchronous transfer orbit. The Konnect Very High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) satellite has a mass of 6.4 metric tons and will provide a Ka-band throughput of 500 Gbps from its final position in geostationary orbit. The 8.9-meter-tall satellite will deliver 230 beams for high-speed broadband and in-flight connectivity across Europe for operator Eutelsat, including isolated regions with low coverage. Konnect VHTS was built by Thales Alenia Space and is based on an all-electric Spacebus NEO platform. It is the largest spacecraft so far built by the French-Italian firm. The satellite features new antenna deployment and pointing mechanisms used within the antenna tracking system, as well as other innovative features including next-generation batteries and structural panels, all developed under the ESA Partnership Project, according to an ESA statement . The payload includes the most powerful digital processor in the world, according to an Arianespace press release. The satellite is designed to operate in orbit for at least 15 years and will undergo a period of testing before it enters commercial service. The satellite had earlier expected to enter service in 2021 before pandemic-related issues delayed its delivery. The delays affecting Konnect VHTS and Eutelsat 10B are expected to have “a mechanical effect on our expectations for subsequent years,” Eutelsat said in its Feb. 17 financial report. The launch was the second Ariane 5 mission of 2022, following the launch in June of a pair of satellites to improve broadband coverage in the Asia-Pacific. It is the 114th Ariane 5 launch overall since its first flight of the 50.5 meter-tall rocket in 1996. The rocket launched the James Webb Space Telescope in December last year. Just three more Ariane 5 flights now remain, according to Arianespace, including ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, JUICE, in 2023, with an initial launch window opening in April. The Ariane 6 will take the role as Europe’s heavy-lift launcher after the retirement of the Ariane 5. The maiden flight of the Ariane 6 is currently slated for 2023 following a series of delays.
Thales Alenia Space said Sept. 12 it has signed a contract to deliver a communications satellite for South Korea’s KT SAT in the fourth quarter of 2024. The Koreasat 6A spacecraft will have 20 transponders for fixed satellite services and six for TV broadcasting to replace Koreasat 6, which launched to geostationary orbit (GEO) at 116 degrees East in December 2010. Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy built Koreasat 6 and has a long history of providing satellites for South Korea. In addition to delivering three other communications satellites — Koreasat 5, 5A, and 7 — Thales Alenia Space has helped provide Earth observation, navigation, and meteorological spacecraft for the country. The company is also supporting South Korea’s lunar exploration program, which is on track to send a robotic spacecraft to lunar orbit in December. KT SAT CEO David Kyungmin Song said it picked Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for Koreasat 6A after running a competitive process with multiple bidders. Koreasat 6A will be based on the manufacturer’s Spacebus 4000B2 platform and is expected to weigh about 3.5 metric tons at launch. The manufacturer said it will be designed to operate for at least 15 years. Thales Alenia Space is also training and supporting KT Sat’s on-site engineering team as part of its contract, and will provide operational assistance throughout the satellite’s operational lifetime. While Koreasat 6A’s services will be focused on South Korea, KT SAT has coverage over other countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa with its fleet of four fully owned satellites built by Thales Alenia Space, and capacity the operator leases from a satellite manufactured by what is now Maxar Technologies. Thales Alenia Space said it had signed a launch contract for Koreasat 6A that it expects to announce shortly. GEO rebound Speaking to SpaceNews on the sidelines of World Satellite Business Week here, Thales Alenia Space CEO Hervé Derrey said the company has secured orders for eight GEO satcoms satellites in the last 10 months. Most of these are based on Thales Alenia Space’s Space Inspire platform, part of a new breed of software-defined satellites that can be reprogrammed in orbit to respond to changing data demands. However, Koreasat 6A, ASTRA 1P for SES , and HTS 113BT for Indonesia’s Telkomsat are classic GEO satellites without a software-defined payload, which Derrey said promises better economics for operators with more stable demand forecasts that are also looking to deploy their spacecraft faster. Despite Koreasat 6A’s speedy two-year delivery schedule, Derrey is confident Thales Alenia Space can avoid getting caught up in supply chain issues that have slowed down other satellite projects across the industry. “It’s a product that is fully developed — for which we also have some stock in terms of components,” he said. Still, Derrey expects software-defined satellites will cover “at least 60% of the GEO market” in the coming years. These flexible satellites are helping to drive a “rebound in the GEO [satcoms] market,” he added, which appears on track to average “between 12 and 15” orders a year. Although that is still short of the 20 GEO orders the industry was pulling in annually seven years ago, it is a significant improvement on the fewer than 10 orders a year the market has seen recently. Derrey attributed part of the GEO slump to uncertainty in the market from incoming constellations in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). “There was a kind of belief at that time that [NGSO] would totally replace GEO,” he said. However, operators increasingly see GEO and NGSO capabilities as complementary, Derrey added, pointing to the synergies Eutelsat and OneWeb aim to achieve by combining their networks . Sept. 13 update: KT SAT CEO David Kyungmin Song told World Satellite Business Week that SpaceX will launch Koreasat 6A
 Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told an audience of space entrepreneurs that he is trying to drive a sense of urgency in military procurements. “I want to go fast in space acquisition,” Calvelli said Dec. 6 at a TechCrunch Space event in Los Angeles, where he was interviewed by Tess Hatch, vice president of Bessemer Venture Partners. Agility in procurements is an imperative Calvelli discussed in an Oct. 31 memo where he laid out nine space acquisition tenets . “I think that the threats against our systems posed by both Russia and China right now are too great,” said Calvelli. These countries are developing anti-satellite weapons that are expected to target U.S. systems in a future conflict. In response, the United States is working to deploy proliferated networks of satellites that would be harder to disrupt and cheaper to build than traditional military satellites. The U.S. today has a “magnificent architecture that the Department has built over decades for missile warning, missile tracking, precision navigation and timing, satellite communications and space domain awareness,” Calvelli said. “These are fantastic systems” but most of these satellites are very large, he added, and “we put a lot of stuff in geosynchronous orbit. So there’s not much diversification of our systems.” “And when you look at the threat, you look at how important space is, not only to the warfighter, but also to the U.S. economy. It’s really important that we drive our architecture to have some resiliency, and that’s going to be through diversification, diversification of orbits and proliferation of satellites,” said Calvelli. He said he wrote the nine tenets because “I really, really want to go faster.” The “old way of doing business” was to spend a decade developing large satellites. “We need to change that paradigm and do things much faster.” Message to industry Calvelli also wanted these tenets to serve as “my messaging to the industry” that the traditional contracts where the government bears the risks and pays for cost overruns will no longer be acceptable. He said future satellites will follow the playbook of the Space Development Agency, which has ordered hundreds of satellites under fixed-price contracts. The agency is procuring a large constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites in low Earth orbit. Calvelli encouraged space startups to continue to innovate and take advantage of DoD seed-funding programs offered by organizations like SpaceWERX and the Defense Innovation Unit. “Keep driving technology and bring those ideas forward,” said Calvelli. At TechCrunch, some vendors’ displays that caught his attention were for virtual reality systems that simulate the space environment, electric propulsion for satellites, and in-space satellite refueling. “Keep pushing the envelope on space,” Calvelli said.
A NASA spacecraft that deliberately collided with a near Earth asteroid last month changed its orbital period by more than a half-hour, exceeding expectations for the planetary defense demonstration. At an Oct. 11 briefing, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which collided with the asteroid Dimorphos Sept. 26 , changed the asteroid’s orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos, by 32 minutes. Dimorphos, which previously took 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit Didymos, now completes an orbit in 11 hours and 23 minutes, based on ground-based optical and radar observations. “This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity,” said Nelson. “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us.” DART collided with Dimorphos as a test of the “kinetic impactor” technique that could be used to deflect an asteroid on a trajectory to impact the Earth. The mission had a requirement to change the orbit by at least 73 seconds, and models from before the impact predicted a change of between a few minutes and several tens of minutes, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. The revised orbit, with a precision of plus or minus two minutes, is consistent with those models, “but clearly at the upper end of that range.” The revised orbit came from observations from four telescopes in Chile and South Africa that monitored the lightcurve, or change in brightness over time, of the combined Didymos-Dimorphos system. Those data, analyzed by two groups in different ways, reached the same measurement of the new orbital period, said Nancy Chabot, DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Radar observations from observatories in California and West Virginia also measured the same orbital period. “This is a very exciting and promising result for planetary defense,” Chabot said. “It’s definitely indicating that you’re getting an enhanced deflection due to the amount of ejecta, that rocky material being thrown off when DART’s collision happened.” That ejecta may be linked to Dimorphos being a “rubble pile” asteroid, a collection of smaller rocks rather than a single intact body. “We expect a solid rock to be less responsive than a pile of gravel,” said Tom Statler, DART program scientist at NASA Headquarters. “When I saw Dimorphos come into view and when I saw there was not a single crater on it, and there were a lot of what appeared to be loose rocks,” he said, recalling some of the last images returned by DART before its impact, “I looked at it and I said, ‘This is not going to be 73 seconds.’” Scientists are still working to measure the overall effectiveness of the impact, a value known as beta; a higher value means a greater change in momentum of the asteroid. “It seems virtually certain that the ejecta were a significant contributor to the period change, so we know beta is not equal to one, because that would have been no ejecta,” Statler said. Observations of Didymos and Dimorphos will continue for months, including those from large ground- and space-based telescopes that show a tail of debris extending for 10,000 kilometers from Dimorphos. An Italian cubesat called LICIACube, deployed from DART in the weeks before the impact, flew by the asteroid minutes afterwards and took 720 images that show details of the ejecta plume not visible from Earth. The test provides optimism for NASA that a similar spacecraft could deflect a hazardous asteroid. “Dimorphos is a size of asteroid that is a priority for planetary defense,” said Chabot. The object is 160 meters across, large enough to cause damage on a regional scale if it hit the Earth. “It’s the first time we’ve been to an object that size and see how it reacts.” Statler cautioned not to generalize the success of this test for all asteroids. “This is one test done on one asteroid. What we’re learning every time we send a mission to another asteroid is that each asteroid has a different part of the story of our solar system’s past to tell,” he said. “We should not be too eager to say that one test on one asteroid tells us how every other asteroid would behave in a similar situation.” NASA has no plans to conduct additional impact tests like DART. Glaze said NASA’s priority now for planetary defense is the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to discover more such asteroids. However, NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget request slashed funding for the mission and pushed out a planned 2026 launch to 2028. NASA is also considering a recommendation by the planetary science decadal survey in April to follow up NEO Surveyor with a “rapid response” mission to study an asteroid on short notice as practice if a threatening asteroid was discovered. “We are capable of deflecting an asteroid” of the size of Dimorphos, Glaze said. “It’s been an incredibly successful demonstration of the kinetic impactor. Hopefully, we’ve got that tool in our toolkit now.”
Updated 7:45 a.m. Eastern to correct the source of the leak. WASHINGTON — NASA came within 20 seconds of completing a full countdown rehearsal of its Space Launch System rocket June 20, although it was not immediately clear if the agency got enough data from the test to be able to proceed with a launch. After five hours of delays caused by various technical issues, the countdown for the fourth wet dress rehearsal (WDR) of the SLS at Launch Complex 39B made it to T-29 seconds, several seconds beyond the point where control was transferred from ground to flight computers, before the computer saw a “flag” and stopped the countdown at about 7:37 p.m. Eastern. NASA originally hoped to get the countdown to a manual cutoff point of T-9.3 seconds, just before, on an actual launch, the vehicle would ignite the four RS-25 engines in its core stage. However, NASA TV commentary stated that they expected to see a flag at the 29-second point in the countdown. That terminal count took place about five hours later than planned because of technical issues, including a liquid hydrogen leak in a “quick disconnect” fitting for a bleed line that transfers that propellant from the core stage back to the pad. Efforts to stop the leak, including warming then cooling the fitting in the hopes of resealing the connection, failed. After lengthy deliberation, NASA managers elected to proceed with the terminal countdown from a preplanned T-10 minute hold after taking steps to mask, or hide, the warnings about the leak from computers. “We were always protected in the flight software so we knew that we had protections there,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said on NASA TV shortly after the end of the test, when asked about the decision to proceed with the countdown despite the leak. Launch personnel were monitoring the vehicle closely. “I felt like we were in a really good configuration to continue to get into terminal count and see how the hardware performed.” The hydrogen leak, which was not related to the leak seen in a previous WDR in April, was the most serious but not the only issue that came up during this test. NASA delayed the start of tanking of the core stage by about two hours because of a problem with a valve in a backup gaseous nitrogen line serving the pad. Later, loading of liquid oxygen into the SLS upper stage was halted for a time after hitting a pressure limit. There was also a small grass fire near a flare stack in the vicinity of the pad used to burn off excess hydrogen. Those problems and the delays they caused led to changes in the countdown rehearsal, scrapping a plan to stop the countdown at T-33 seconds, recycling, then going again to T-9.3 seconds. However, this WDR got far closer to completion than three previous attempts in April, and marked the first time the vehicle was completely filled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant at the pad. “That was a big milestone for us,” Blackwell-Thompson said of fueling the vehicle. “Definitely a good day for us and a very exciting day as well.” It’s unclear if the day was good enough to meet all of NASA’s requirements for the WDR and allow the vehicle to go back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to prepare for a launch that could take place as soon as late August. She declined to speculate on what this test meant for launch plans, saying the launch team was focused on reviewing the data. At a June 15 briefing, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, was asked what NASA would do in a scenario like this, where it could perform only one of the two planned terminal countdowns. “We need to understand everything we can before we commit to launch,” he said. “My first caution is to say we’re going to understand what every situation is and run it to ground before we would press to commit to launch.” “To me, it would depend on what the scenario was,” Blackwell-Thompson said at that earlier briefing, noting the agency would evaluate the data and any “residual risk” from not completing the full WDR. “It’s hard to speculate without the specifics.”
China has set its sights on near-Earth object 202 PN1 as the target for a combined asteroid deflection and observation test mission due to launch in 2026. The new details of the near-Earth asteroid defense system demonstration and verification test mission were presented by Long Lehao, chief designer of China’s Long March rocket series, in a recent “Science and Innovation China” series lecture ( video in Chinese). A slide presented by Long indicates that the impactor mission will launch in 2026 on a Long March 3B rocket. The mission will include a separate impactor and orbiter. The former will impact near-Earth object 2020 PN1 with the latter spacecraft making observations. If correct, the mission appears to combine elements of the separate NASA DART mission, due to collide with Dimorphos, a moon orbiting the near Earth asteroid Didymos, in September, and the European Space Agency’s Hera mission, which will observe Didymos and Dimorphos later this decade to determine the effects of the DART collision. Combined, the DART and Hera missions are known as the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment ( AIDA ) collaboration. The target for China’s test, 2020 PN1 , is an Earth-crossing asteroid and a temporary co-orbital companion to the Earth. It was discovered in 2020 and estimates of its size put it at around 40 meters in diameter. The Long March 3B launcher is a workhorse for missions to geostationary orbit but has also launched lunar robotic lander missions. China earlier announced plans in April to attempt to alter the orbit of a potentially threatening asteroid with a kinetic impactor test as part of plans for an entire planetary defense system. Long’s lecture however provides the first details regarding the mission target and profile, which differentiate it from earlier proposals. Chinese researchers had previously published papers on concepts for kinetic impactors, namely the “ Assembled Kinetic Impactor ” (AKI) using a Long March 5, and the more complex “ Enhanced Asteroid Deflector ,” which would first collect rocks from a near-Earth asteroid before impacting a potentially hazardous asteroid. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) also stated in April that it will establish an early warning system and develop software to simulate operations against the near Earth objects and test and verify basic procedures. Long’s lecture also touched on exploration missions, including Tianwen-2 , a near-Earth asteroid sample-return mission, the Tianwen-3 Mars sample-return, and a Jupiter system mission. It also reiterated plans for a two-launch mission to put a pair of Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030, a new methane-liquid oxygen heavy-lift rocket and reusable launchers, and future propulsion concepts including nuclear propulsion and a spaceplane .
The Space Force is changing its approach to buying satellites for the Space Test Program, which for decades has launched experiments for the U.S. government and allies. Instead of awarding separate contracts for STP missions, the Space Force will select a group of vendors that will compete for $50 million worth of task orders under a five-year indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract. The plan is to select a mix of vendors that can produce spacecraft ranging from 12U cubesats to 180-kilogram ESPA-class satellites. These contractors will be responsible to design, develop and manufacture the spacecraft, integrate experimental payloads, test the integrated space vehicle, support the launch and post-launch mission operations. A draft solicitation for the Space Test Experiment Platform 2.0, or STEP 2.0 program, was published Oct. 18. A final request for proposals is scheduled to be released in February and IDIQ contract awards are expected as early as July, said Col. Edward Byrne, deputy program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power. Byrne spoke at the Space Industry Days conference Oct. 20 in Los Angeles. His office will host an industry briefing Oct. 25-27 to discuss STEP 2.0. “The purpose of the STEP 2.0 program is to fill the existing spacecraft procurement gap within the Space Test Program, and to ensure space experiments can be hosted on free-flyer satellite buses,” said Byrne. The first task order to be awarded will be for STP Sat-8, a 12U cubesat projected to launch in 2025. The STP program since it was established in 1965 has deployed more than 300 missions. 
NASA has selected 13 regions around the south pole of the moon that it is considering for the first crewed landing of the Artemis program later this decade. The 13 locations released by NASA Aug. 19 reach include multiple sites that could host landings by SpaceX’s Starship vehicle serving as the lunar lander for the Artemis 3 mission that will carry the first NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon since Apollo 17 a half-century ago. NASA and SpaceX officials working on Artemis “have worked very closely with our agency’s scientists and technologists to identify these 13 regions,” said Mark Kirasich, deputy associate administrator for the Artemis Campaign Development Division at NASA, during a call with reporters about the landing sites. All the regions are of interest to scientists, he said, “as well as meet the Artemis mission planning constraints, which can be challenging.” The 13 locations, each about 15 by 15 kilometers, are located within six degrees of latitude of the south pole. They are named: Each location contains multiple landing sites, regions 100 meters across that would be landing zones for Starships. Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA Headquarters, said each region has at least 10 landing sites “and in many of them there are more than that.” Different regions may be selected based on when the mission takes place because of changing lighting conditions. “Specific landing sites are tightly coupled to the timing of the launch window, so multiple regions ensure flexibility to launch throughout the year,” the agency noted in a statement. The regions meet several requirements, including providing continuous access to sunlight for six and a half days, the duration of the Artemis 3 landing, while being close enough to permanently shadowed regions that they can be reached on moonwalks by the astronauts. Those permanently shadowed regions may harbor ice deposits that both are of scientific interest and could be resources for future crewed missions. Kirasich said he hopes to narrow down the list of landing sites about 18 months before Artemis 3, currently scheduled to launch in late 2025, to give mission planners time to prepare procedures specific to each site. Because of lighting variations that change over time, there will be several even for a single launch period. “Exactly how many we don’t know yet,” he said. “We have a lot to learn between now and then.” NASA said it will consult with the broader science and engineering community about the selected regions to get insights on the regions. That is expected to include the annual meeting of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group Aug. 23-25 in Maryland. The agency said it will continue working with SpaceX to ensure those sites are still compatible with the lunar lander version of Starship. Bleacher said the selection process won’t depend on data from future missions, including orbiters, landers and rovers. “The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did a great job,” he said, a spacecraft originally developed for the Constellation lunar exploration program in the late 2000s and remains in service providing high-resolution images, although its orbit no longer takes it over the polar regions. He added, though, that NASA will welcome data from future missions, like t he Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission launching in late 2024 to search for volatiles in the south polar regions of the moon. “Any data is helpful, and we’re happy to have it, but we don’t require additional data in order to complete an Artemis 3 landing at these 13 regions at this time.” “We can do exciting science at all of them,” Sarah Noble, Artemis lunar science lead in NASA’s planetary science division, said of the 13 landing regions on the call, which took place an hour after NASA released the list of locations under consideration. “Many of our scientists have gotten hold of this press release an hour ago and are poring over it,” she said. “Everybody already has favorite places.”
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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s science ministry plans to set aside 47.2 billion won ($32.9 million) in next year’s budget to launch two satellites that have been left grounded because of Western sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine. Once the requested budget is endorsed by congress, the ministry will nix the existing launch contracts with Russia and make a “package deal” with a launch company in the United States or Europe for the two satellites: CAS500-2 remote sensing satellite and KOMPSAT-6 multipurpose satellite. Rep. Park Wan-joo revealed this Sept. 28 based on information he had secured from the ministry that manages South Korea’s space programs. According to the lawmaker, the ministry seeks 37.4 billion won ($26.1 million) for KOMPSAT-6 and 9.82 billion won ($6.86 million) for CAS500-2. “Under consideration are launch companies in the U.S. and EU,” the ministry said in a document sent to the lawmaker, “Once the requested budget is endorsed by the congress, we will revoke the existing contracts with Russia, and then sign a new contract with a launch service provider in a manner that we have done so far.” While the ministry didn’t specify launch companies it wants to talk with, reports indicate that the ministry would choose one between SpaceX and Arianespace. The ministry’s spokesman refused to comment on the issue. In August, Kwon Hyun-joon, a senior science ministry officer, told SpaceNews that the two satellites’ launch would be conducted by a single company under a “package deal” with the Korean government. The CAS500-2 spacecraft, built mainly by Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) , was supposed to launch in the first half of this year on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan under a 2017 contract with GK Launch Services . The KOMPSAT-6 satellite, co-developed by KAI, LIG Nex1 and Airbus Defence and Space , was due to fly in the second half of the year on a Russian Angara rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Yet, the plan went awry with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. On top of this, the document shows the ministry has found it “almost impossible” to get back from Russia the 47.2 billion won ($32.9 million) it already paid for the launch of three satellites this year, including CAS500-2 and KOMPSAT-6. The remaining one is a set of nanosatellites called SNIPE . The ministry paid 28.7 billion won ($20 million) for KOMPSAT-6, 17.4 billion won ($12.15 million) for CAS500-2, and 1.1 billion won ($760,000) for SNIPE. The ministry said the existing contracts with Russia contain a clause allowing the contracts to be revoked without or limited reimbursement when a “force majeure” occurs, though it didn’t give further details. The ministry sees the ongoing war as something that would leave Russia fully immune from reimbursement. The ministry plans to nix the contracts for CAS500-2 and KOMPSAT-6 regardless of the possibility of requesting any reimbursement, while keeping the contract for SNIPE in place, hoping it would enable another Korean satellite to launch on a Russian rocket in the future.
BAE Systems has delivered an undisclosed number of jam-resistant Global Positioning System receivers to Germany’s military forces, the company announced July 12. The deal to sell Germany the GPS receivers was signed two years ago under the Foreign Military Sales program. The Pentagon routinely sells GPS user equipment to allies to improve interoperability with U.S. systems. DoD agreed for Germany to become the first non-U.S. buyer of the most advanced GPS receivers. The equipment, to be used by the German army, is the Miniature Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver Engine – M-Code (MPE-M), which is compatible with the more secure M-code GPS signal. M-Code, short for military code, is hardened against signal jamming and spoofing and provides cryptography for added security. Many of the current 31 GPS satellites currently in orbit broadcast the M-Code signal. BAE produced Germany’s receivers under a contract with the U.S. Space Systems Command. The company said the MPE-M receiver will be used in handheld devices, ground vehicles and unmanned aerial systems. “Germany is the first country to receive M-Code GPS capabilities via FMS, leading the way among our allies,” said Greg Wild, director of Navigation and Sensor Systems at BAE Systems. “Accelerating the delivery of M-Code capabilities to allied warfighters around the globe is critical to ensuring trusted PNT in the face of modern threats from our adversaries.” M-Code receivers have been in development for nearly a decade under a $1.4 billion U.S. Air Force program called Military Global Positioning System User Equipment. Raytheon, L3Harris and BAE Systems (which acquired Rockwell Collins’ military GPS business) have been under contract since 2012 to produce M-Code receivers.
Updated 11:45 p.m. with Northrop Grumman comments. LOGAN, Utah — Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace announced Aug. 8 that they will work together to develop a new first stage for Northrop’s Antares launch vehicle as well as a future medium-lift rocket. The new version of the Antares, called the Antares 330, will feature a first stage using seven Miranda engines under development by Firefly. The stage will also use Firefly composites for its structure and tanks. The Antares 330 upper stage will be similar to what Northrop is currently using on the Antares, with the company’s Castor 30XL solid-fuel motor and existing avionics and structures. The vehicle is designed to launch from the current pad at Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport that has hosted all previous Antares launches. “Through our collaboration, we will first develop a fully domestic version of our Antares rocket, the Antares 330, for Cygnus space station commercial resupply services,” Scott Lehr, vice president and general manager of launch missile defense systems at Northrop, said in a statement. The partnership would solve Northrop’s current reliance on Ukrainian and Russian suppliers for the Antares first stage that put the future of the vehicle, used for launching Cygnus cargo missions to the International Space Station, in doubt. Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Building plant produces the Antares first stage, which is powered by RD-181 engines from Russia’s NPO Energomash. The supply of both the engines and the first stage has been in doubt since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Northrop officials noted they have completed first stages for two more Antares launches, the first of which is scheduled for October, and that the company was working on options should either the stage or the engines become unavailable. Those executives, though, had declined to go into details about those backup plans before the Firefly partnership announcement. The two companies provided few other details about their partnership, including financial aspects. Kurt Eberly, director of space launch programs at Northrop Grumman, told SpaceNews that the company expects the Antares 330 to be ready as soon as 2024. To cover the gap between the last launch of the current Antares and the new version, Northrop is buying three SpaceX Falcon 9 launches for its Cygnus spacecraft. The companies said the Antares 330 will “significantly increase” the vehicle’s payload capacity compared to the existing Antares. Eberly said the Antares 330 will be able to place up to 10,500 kilograms into the insertion orbit sued for ISS missions, compared to 8,100 kilograms for the current Antares. He said that performance would translate into an additional 1,250 kilograms of cargo that Cygnus could deliver to the ISS, to 5,000 kilograms. The companies also said the partnership would lead to the development of a separate “entirely new” medium-lift launch vehicle, details of which the companies did not disclose. Firefly is working on its own medium-lift vehicle, called Beta, whose first stage will also incorporate the Miranda engine. That engine, which uses liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants, is designed to produce about 230,000 pounds-force of thrust. Eberly said that new vehicle is projected to make its first launch as soon as 2025. “Firefly prides itself on being a disrupter in the new space industry and collaborating with a proven space pioneer like Northrop Grumman will help us continue that disruption,” said Peter Schumacher, interim chief executive of Firefly, in the statement.
The U.S. Space Systems Command announced Nov. 18 it signed an agreement with Blue Origin that “paves the way” for the company’s New Glenn rocket to compete for national security launch contracts once it completes the required flight certification. The cooperative research and development (CRADA) agreement does not include any government funding and is largely symbolic, as New Glenn is still in development and Blue Origin has no target date for the first launch. The National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program requires new entrants to perform at least two successful orbital launches to get certification. The agreement was signed by Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for assured access to space; and Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin. Purdy said the CRADA “marks the restart of certification activities for Blue Origin’s New Glenn that began in 2018 when Blue Origin won a Launch Service Agreement.” Space Systems Command terminated the LSA in December 2020 after Blue Origin lost out to United Launch Alliance and SpaceX in the NSSL Phase 2 launch services competition. The 2018 LSA agreements awarded to Blue Origin and other companies were public-private partnerships where both parties agreed to invest in rocket development and infrastructure required to compete for national security space launch contracts. From October 2018 through December 2020, Blue Origin was paid $255.5 million. The original six-year agreement was worth $500 million. In return for the investment, Blue Origin was required to provide limited rights to data and hardware the companies developed under the agreements. With this new CRADA, the Space Force is signaling it wants to see Blue Origin challenge ULA and SpaceX when their five-year contracts are up for recompete in 2024. Requests for bids for NSSL Phase 3 could be released some time in 2023. “This agreement paves the way for Blue Origin to compete for the next NSSL launch service competition and is an example of how we foster competition and leverage industry innovation,” said Purdy. “I look forward to Blue Origin completing New Glenn development and competing for the opportunity to win NSSL launch services.” Having more competitors “will help us meet an important national defense imperative to field advanced capabilities in space and get capabilities into the hands of our warfighters faster,” he said. To qualify for NSSL awards, New Glenn “must successfully complete certification flights and provide design and qualification data to enable AATS [assured access to space program office] to conduct its independent verification and validation process,” Space Systems Command said. Jones said Blue Origin “is proud to partner with the Space Force on our journey to become a fully certified National Security Space Launch provider.” Blue Origin in recent months has not commented on when New Glenn is expected to complete development or when it might perform its first launch. The heavylift reusable rocket — first introduced in 2016 — is projected to lift off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The booster will be powered by seven BE-4 engines that Blue Origin developed jointly with ULA. The first two BE-4s were recently delivered to ULA for the company’s first Vulcan Centaur launch. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno said the engines so far have performed well and expects to launch Vulcan in the first quarter of 2023. Blue Origin in 2020 announced plans to manufacture BE-4s and other engines in Huntsville, Alabama.
The head of the National Reconnaissance Office said the agency will continue to build large, bespoke satellites but also will increasingly rely on lower cost commercial smallsats and payloads developed with international partners. “We’re proliferating our architecture,” Chris Scolese, director of the NRO, said Aug. 4 at a Mitchell Institute event. The NRO is an intelligence and defense agency that builds and operates classified surveillance satellites. Earlier this year two SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets launched national security NRO satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. But two recent space missions the agency launched July 13 and Aug. 4 were small satellites developed jointly with the Australian government, and launched on commercial Rocket Lab vehicles from New Zealand. A mix of small and large satellites launched to different orbits “will become the norm,” said Scolese. “We’re letting physics dictate what we need,” he said. There is still a demand for traditional satellites that launch on big rockets from the Eastern Range and Western Ranges, “but we’re also going with smaller systems that we can proliferate and improve that revisit time.” Having access to multiple launch sites around the world also is part of the plan, said Scolese. Besides the major coastal ranges and Rocket Lab’s New Zealand sites, the NRO launches missions from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, and in the future hopes to launch from the United Kingdom . “Having the capability to launch pretty much from almost anywhere in the world gives us great flexibility and adds to our resilience,” said Scolese. “It also gives us the ability to reconstitute should we lose a capability either due to a mission failure or in a conflict.” For lower cost smallsat missions, the NRO will buy satellite buses from the open market like the ones used by commercial operators, he said. “We need to work with spacecraft that are, for all intents and purposes in the space industry lexicon, commodities,” Scolese added. “We’re seeing very capable buses being developed. And we’re going to take advantage of those because that’s going to help us reduce the cost of our constellations.” The NRO will buy satellites from commercial production lines but also wants to learn “how we can adapt some commercial practices to government systems so that we can make all of our systems more efficient and more affordable.”
 General Dynamics Mission Systems won a $324.5 million contract to operate the ground systems and manage network operations of the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit constellation, the agency announced May 26. The seven-year contract is for $162.9 million as a baseline, with $161.5 million in options to establish the ground operations and integration (O&I) segment for SDA’s Tranche 1 constellation, a mesh network projected to have as many as 166 communications, data-relay and sensor satellites to support military users around the world. The base contract runs from May 2022 until January 2025, and options would extend the contract until September 2029. The O&I contract is “cost plus,” a type of contract used by the Pentagon for the development of new technologies where the contractor is paid based on the cost of the project plus an additional fee. SDA procures its satellites under fixed-price contracts but decided the O&I agreement with General Dynamics should be cost-plus, an SDA official told reporters. There is a risk that, because of its complexity, the cost of the project could exceed the original estimates and the government should absorb “a certain amount of risk” the official said. General Dynamics for this bid teamed with Iridium Communications . Other partners include KSAT, Emergent and Raytheon. The scope of the contract is broad, including network management and constellation monitoring across ground space, and user segments. The O&I contractor will stand up two operations centers located at government facilities in Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, and Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Additionally it will have to develop 14 new ground stations, or data entry points: eight Ka-band, two S-band and four with optical communications. Three satellite manufacturers selected so far for the Transport Layer Tranche 1 — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems — will operate their spacecraft using their own ground stations but the O&I contractor will coordinate data traffic and manage the command and control of the mission payloads such as the inter-satellite crosslinks and the on-orbit data processors. Transport Layer Tranche 1 satellites are projected to launch in 2024. Two more satellite suppliers are expected to be selected for Tranche 1 of the Tracking Layer of missile-detecting satellites, which would launch in 2025. The O&I contractor will have to figure out a common ground architecture to integrate satellites from all seven vendors. This is a complex task, the SDA official said, and “carries the highest risk.” The success of Tranche 1, said the official, depends on successful integration of the satellites, ground systems and user equipment. SDA received seven proposals for the O&I contract, the official said. Collin Lee, director of Frontiers – a space technology incubator for General Dynamics Mission Systems — said in a statement to SpaceNews that the company’s team brings a “long heritage of mission-critical space and ground communications and networking expertise to the Space Development Agency.” “Iridium, General Dynamics Mission Systems and the U.S. government have a long and successful history of working together and partnering on this project is a natural evolution of our relationship,” said Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium. “Iridium’s 25 years of experience operating in LEO makes us uniquely qualified for this opportunity.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Over the last year, Microsoft and Xplore worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to show how commercial services could support operations of polar-orbiting weather satellites. During a proof-of-concept demonstration, NOAA obtained data downlinked from NOAA-18 through an Azure Orbital ground station in Quincy, Washington, to the Azure cloud. Commands to the 17-year-old satellite were sent with Xplore’s Major Tom mission control software running in Azure Orbital. “By combining Azure Orbital with Xplore’s Major Tom mission control software platform, NOAA was able to securely transmit commands to its NOAA-18 spacecraft and verify receipt of those commands in near real-time,” Stephen Kitay, Microsoft Azure Space senior director, told SpaceNews. “What this allows our customers to do is rather than paying for fully manned, dedicated infrastructure, they’re paying for a service. There are no capital expenditures. They are only paying for what they need. NOAA is able to continue the operation of its legacy satellites without those costly capital investments to its ground infrastructure.” In terms of security, Microsoft’s “cloud-based solutions performed successfully across the measures that NOAA set out,” Kitay said. NOAA is investing in a new generation of Earth-observing satellites as well as ground and IT systems to transfer data into the cloud. Ground-station-as-a-service and cloud-services providers are expected to play an important role in helping NOAA process, disseminate and store data. In April, NOAA sought information from contractors interested in providing engineering and information-technology services, and handling flight operations for polar-orbiting satellites NOAA-15, NOAA-18 and NOAA-19. The NOAA-18 demonstration could inform that effort and also prompt other government agencies to turn to commercial clouds for primary or backup satellite services. “I would envision the future is a hybrid architecture where the government has unique government applications and missions, but they are also leveraging commercial technologies and integrating those technologies into the missions that they are performing,” Kitay said. When Microsoft and NOAA signed the cooperative research and development agreement last year, their partner was Kubos. In April, Xplore acquired Kubos and its Major Tom software. “By our continued support of the Major Tom team, we were able to continue that work,” said Lisa Rich, Xplore founder and chief operating officer.
As NASA prepares to select the crew of the second Artemis mission, the agency’s chief astronaut says the entire astronaut corps, and not a previously announced subset, is eligible for that flight and future missions to the moon. At an Aug. 5 briefing at the Johnson Space Center about the upcoming uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, Reid Weisman, the chief of the astronaut office, said he expected the four-person crew who will fly on Artemis 2 to be selected soon. “The question everyone will ask is when are we assigning a crew to Artemis 2? We hope that will be later this year,” he said. That mission is expected to launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis 2 will be the first crewed flight of Orion, going around the moon on a flight lasting about 10 days. The four-person crew will include one Canadian astronaut as part of a December 2020 agreement between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency regarding Canada’s contribution of the Canadarm3 robotic arm for the lunar Gateway. NASA has not stated if any other international partners, such as Europe or Japan, will fly astronauts on Artemis 2. As for the agency’s own astronauts, Wiseman said the entire 42-person astronaut corps will be considered for that mission and later Artemis flights. “The way I look at it, any one of our 42 active astronauts is eligible for an Artemis mission,” he said, a point he emphasized several times during the briefing. “We want to assemble the right team for this mission.” That is a change from late 2020, when NASA unveiled an “Artemis Team” of 18 astronauts that agency leadership at the time, along with then-Vice President Mike Pence, said would form a pool from which NASA would select crews for at least initial Artemis missions. “My fellow Americans, I give you the heroes of the future who will carry us back to the moon and beyond, the Artemis generation,” Pence said at a December 2020 National Space Council meeting where he announced the 18 astronauts who would comprise the team. Five of the 18 attended that meeting at the Kennedy Space Center. Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator at the time, said more astronauts would be added in the future, including those from international partners. “This is our first cadre of our Artemis astronauts,” Bridenstine said. “I want to be clear: there’s going to be more.” Wiseman, though, emphasized that he would consider all current astronauts, as well as 10 astronaut candidates currently in training. “We have 42 active astronauts here in Houston and 10 astronaut candidates who will be beating down the door for Artemis 2 and beyond,” he said. He added that NASA has also changed lifetime radiation exposure requirements, which previously varied by age and gender, to a single limit. A June 2021 report by the National Academies endorsed such a proposal , noting it “creates equality of opportunity for spaceflight” over the previous standards that set lower limits for women. Wiseman said those earlier “draconian” standards had been replaced by a single limit. “We have equalized all radiation limits. It does not matter whether you’re a man, whether you’re a woman, it is the exact same.” “Our end goal is, the United States of America is half men, half women. Well, space should be at least that,” he said. “If we cannot make these spacecraft equitable, and we can’t fly any type of person on them, then we need to look at our systems and reevaluate.” There are also no age restrictions on Artemis mission assignments, he said, noting the astronaut corps includes people with ages ranging from the late 20s to the mid-60s. “As long as you are healthy, we’re going to load you on a rocket and shoot you off the planet.”
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate over the next three years hopes to launch big-ticket military experiments, including a GPS-like navigation satellite, a solar power spacecraft and a deep-space mission to monitor regions around the moon. With these and other space projects in the pipeline, AFRL is looking to shore up its technical workforce and to partner with private companies , Col. Jeremy Raley, the new head of the space vehicles directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, told SpaceNews . Raley, who assumed command of the directorate last month , said there is a growing list of projects on tap “and I need people who want to come here to New Mexico or otherwise partner with AFRL and work on these things.” The directorate, with more than 800 employees and an annual budget for more than $500 million, performs some of the military’s most cutting-edge space experiments. “There’s a lot of opportunity for young engineers to really have an impact,” Raley said. AFRL’s experiments are trying to answer questions such as how the military could deploy satellites between the Earth and the moon, use space to deploy new types of communications architectures and extend the lives of satellites in orbit. “Those are going to be huge things and exciting things to work on,” Raley said. “I need junior to mid level engineers who want to come here and make that happen.” In addition to hiring people , the space vehicles directorate is looking for outside contractor help from the space industry, he said. Upcoming experiments Before taking over the AFRL space vehicles division, Raley worked at the Space Force’s Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. While organizations like the Space RCO need mature technologies that can be fielded relatively quickly, at AFRL “we have to place a bunch of smart technical bets,” Raley said. Many of AFRL’s projects are in support of the Space Force. An $84 million experiment scheduled to launch in mid to late 2023 is the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), which will fly to a geostationary Earth orbit to augment the positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services provided by GPS satellites. NTS-3 will add a layer of resiliency to the PNT architecture, Raley said, but the “real victory” his office hopes to achieve in this experiment is to figure out how to develop and field user equipment on a rapid timeline so it’s available as soon as the satellite is operational. One of the problems in the GPS program has been the lack of synchronization between the deployment of satellites and the production of receivers. “We want to make sure that the folks who need to integrate receivers into aircraft, munitions and other systems that require PNT are able to leverage what we’re doing with the space segment, and we can actually move both segments together at once,” said Raley. Looking ahead to 2025, AFRL plans to launch a $100 million experimental satellite to collect solar power in outer space for use back on Earth. The demonstration, named Arachne , is one of a series of solar power experiments AFRL is looking to pursue. If Arachne is successful, it could help develop technologies to deliver solar power to military forces in the field so they can deploy without having to bring along massive fuel trucks. Also in the works is an experiment to monitor deep space beyond Earth’s orbit. Previously known as the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS), the experiment has been renamed Oracle. Raley said the lab decided to rebrand the project and select a name from Greek mythology, in line with NASA’s preference to name moon missions after Greek gods. “Like NASA we’re going to be operating in those same spaces. And we’re going to be looking for smart ways to cooperate,” Raley said. Both NASA and DoD care about “domain awareness and understanding what’s going on out there.” AFRL is evaluating industry proposals for Oracle, Raley said. “There’s a lot that we need to learn about how to operate, navigate and communicate from that section of space.” A priority for the military is to “understand if other countries are operating out there, and what capabilities they have,” he said. However, he added, “it is not 100% clear yet that there’s a lot of military utility to operating in cislunar space. And so a lot of what we’re doing is starting to answer that question before the U.S. government makes a bigger investment in militarizing that space.” Raley said he has not seen any of the proposals submitted for Oracle. “I’m anticipating that we will see several teaming arrangements where people take mature technologies in sensors, propulsion, navigation and timing, and bring those together.” The space vehicles directorate in July launched Recurve , a cubesat experiment intended to demonstrate radio-frequency links and mesh networking in space. Recurve, which flew on a Virgin Orbit small-satellite launch vehicle, is an example of low-cost experiments that AFRL wants to start ramping up to take advantage of new launch services that offer more flexible options. Autonomous satellite operations Raley’s vision is not necessarily to come up with brand new experiments but to focus on key foundational technologies that could help the Space Force across all its satellite programs. An example is autonomous command and control of satellite constellations, a capability that many private satellite operators have perfected but the military is still experimenting with . This is important for the future of the Space Force, Raley said. “Getting our command and control right and getting some of this autonomy Incorporated is going to have an outsize impact on the economy of force.” That’s another way of saying that the Space Force has a small workforce and needs to automate its operations as much as possible. “We’re not getting a bunch more people to come fly all the satellites,” he said. “As we move to larger numbers of satellites, we’re going to have to be very efficient in how we control those, and we’re going to have to learn what is the right kind and level of autonomy.” With that goal in mind, AFRL is doing ground-based experiments using quadcopters in a cage and giving them an objective without telling them how to do it, said Raley. “We’re taking what we learn from that and starting to move toward what we can do on orbit with cooperative autonomous operation among satellites.” One of the objectives is to have self-healing networks that autonomously reroute traffic when a satellite is jammed, for example. “If we are in a contested environment where somebody is denying us the use of a satellite, we have to figure out how to get the remaining satellites to replan the mission.”
NASA has reserved three days in late August and early September for the first launch of its Space Launch System rocket to send the Orion spacecraft to orbit around the moon and back. At a July 20 briefing, NASA officials announced that they had target launch dates of Aug. 29, Sept. 2 and Sept. 5 for the Artemis 1 mission, an uncrewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft and the first launch of the SLS. Orion will spend up to six weeks in cislunar space before splashing down off the coast of San Diego. “We think we’re on a good path to get to attempts on those dates,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said on the call. Crews have been working on SLS and Orion since it returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) July 2 after the fourth wet dress rehearsal test, where the rocket was loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants and put through a practice countdown. That included work to fix a liquid hydrogen leak on the core stage found during that test. During that work, technicians discovered a loose fitting, called a collet, where the liquid hydrogen umbilical connects to the rocket. That required going into the rocket’s engine section to tighten the fitting. “That actually gave us a little pause of wondering if we were going to be able to make a launch date on those three dates,” Free said. With those repairs complete, he said he was more confident about being ready for those dates. Free and other NASA officials on the call cautioned they still had work to perform on both SLS and Orion to get the vehicles ready for launch. If those preparations remain on schedule, the vehicle would roll back out to Launch Complex 39B around Aug. 18, although a final decision on proceeding with a launch attempt would come only after a flight readiness review about a week before launch. The three launch dates have different launch windows and mission durations: All three are considered “long-class” missions by NASA, while launch opportunities on other days instead support shorter missions lasting about four weeks. “We don’t have a strong preference of whether it’s a short- or long-class mission,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager. Both support all the mission objectives of testing the launch vehicle and spacecraft, with a particular emphasis on demonstrating Orion’s heat shield on a reentry at lunar return velocities. One complication for launch planning is the batteries for the rocket’s flight termination system (FTS). That includes conducting a launch no more than 20 days after a final test of the system. “With our three attempts, we do have issues with that timing,” said Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager in NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program. NASA is working with the Eastern Range to see if there are ways to address that issue. Another issue is that the FTS batteries are located on portions of the SLS not accessible at the pad. That means that, if the vehicle rolls out to the pad in August but does not launch by Sept. 5, it would have to return the VAB for additional testing and reset of the clock. That would make it difficult to have the vehicle ready for the next launch period, which runs from Sept. 20 to Oct. 4. “That would be a real challenge for us, to be honest with you,” Lanham said of launching during that timeframe. “But we would certainly give it our best shot.” The following launch period runs from Oct. 17 to 31.
TAMPA, Fla. — Initial direct-to-smartphone services from Iridium’s constellation will support occasional communications for emergencies and other unforeseen needs in remote areas worldwide, CEO Matt Desch said Oct. 20. Similar to rival low Earth orbit (LEO) operator Globalstar’s plan to bring basic SOS connectivity to the iPhone 14 next month, Desch said its incoming service is designed for casual use. There will be little overlap with Iridium’s existing personal communications business, he said, which provides remote low-data rate voice and data services to specialized handsets for recreational, maritime, and other less casual users. Iridium remains highly guarded about plans to enter the direct-to-smartphone market. The operator entered into a development agreement in July with an unnamed company to enable its technology in smartphones. Their agreement is contingent on a service provider deal that Iridium still expects to finalize before the end of 2022. According to Apple, iPhone 14 users outside a cellular network in the United States and Canada will be able to give emergency responders information by selecting from a series of short text messages. “Obviously, if you make a connection to a smartphone, you can do a lot more than just push an emergency button,” Desch said during Iridium’s Oct. 20 financial results call for the three months to the end of September. “I won’t go into exactly how and what more you can do, but our network is very efficient at sending information back and forth. So lots could be done.” Apple is financing the majority of new Globalstar satellites to support its direct-to-smartphone plans. Unlike Globalstar and most other companies that have announced plans to enter this market, Desch said Iridium would not need to invest in a new constellation. “[W]e think we have plenty of capacity to support the services that we’re expecting using our existing network, and existing spectrum,” he said. Like Globalstar, Iridium also already has global permission to use spectrum to connect satellites with devices on the ground, including smartphones. Companies such as SpaceX, meanwhile, must secure regulatory approvals for the frequencies they need to connect to smartphones directly. SpaceX plans to upgrade its Starlink broadband constellation to provide direct-to-smartphone connectivity starting in the U.S. next year in partnership with T-Mobile. Iridium’s long-term goal is to connect other types of consumer devices directly to satellites, according to Desch, including potentially tablets and watches. The company also has long-term plans to potentially integrate its technology into cars, “not for everyday use, but as a complement to other technologies that are going into those vehicles.” However, he is skeptical about forecasts suggesting direct-to-smartphone could become a market measured in the tens of billions of dollars. “That’s really implying a high speed, seamless, works-in-your-pocket-anywhere-on-the-planet kind of activity,” he said, which is many years away — “if ever,” because of the investment, technical, and regulatory work that would be needed. Iridium’s commercial voice and data revenue increased 10% to around $50 million for the three months to the end of September, compared with the corresponding period last year. The increase helped total revenue to climb 14% to just over $184 million as the company continued to add more subscribers to its business. Iridium reported an 8% increase in operational earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to nearly $108 million, a record for the operator. The strong growth prompted the company to revise its full-year outlook. It now expects full-year EBITDA to be $420 million, at the high end of earlier projections, and to achieve an 8-9% growth in revenue. Rival funding progress Californian startup eSAT Global says it also does not need new spectrum licenses or satellites to break into the direct-to-smartphone market. The venture is developing a chip to enable phones to connect to satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). The technology aims to draw from unused capacity on satellites operated by its partners Yahsat and Inmarsat, based in the United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom, respectively. Yahsat announced an investment Oct. 11 in eSAT as the startup seeks to convince smartphone makers to modify chipsets for tapping into this satellite network. The startup also plans to use the technology to connect low-power internet of things (IoT) devices directly to GEO satellites. According to eSAT CEO Rick Somerton, the venture just needs to raise $4 million to launch commercial IoT services next year. Its capital costs for providing a direct-to-smartphone service are “probably two orders of magnitude lower than any of the LEOs,” Somerton said Oct. 19 during the APSCC 2022 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in Seoul, South Korea. He said services would begin with “two-second latency” from the outset, without the need for additional satellite launches, because they would leverage existing GEO infrastructure. For existing, unmodified phones, eSAT is developing a small hub device that Somerton says would cost around $50 to enable satellite connectivity on multiple nearby handsets. The network would have the capacity to serve a million devices simultaneously sending about 1.5 billion messages per day, according to Somerton. “The capability will be well beyond just emergency messaging in the U.S. and Canada,” he added. James Alderdice, vice president of Asia Pacific for Virginia-based Lynk Global, told the conference his startup has raised $27 million for a constellation of dedicated LEO satellites that would connect directly to unmodified phones. Lynk deployed the first satellite for its operational network in April and expects SpaceX to launch three more before the end of this year to provide initial services. Four satellites would enable users to send and receive text messages about four to eight times a day , depending on their latitude, and Alderdice said Lynk is closing in on a Series B round that would get it to an additional 100 satellites. Lynk expects to have deployed 50 pizza-boxed shaped satellites by the end of 2023, which he said would close the service gap to between 30 and 45 minutes. Alderdice said “continuous service” would require less than a thousand satellites in certain areas. Meanwhile, Texas-based venture AST SpaceMobile is preparing to deploy a 64-square-meter antenna on a much larger satellite called BlueWalker-3. This satellite will serve as a prototype for commercial spacecraft, which AST expects to start deploying late next year, for a higher bandwidth direct-to-smartphone service.
SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft is expanding its relationships with space companies through the Azure Space Partner Community, an initiative unveiled July 19 at the Microsoft Inspire 2022 conference. “By launching the Azure Space Partner Community, we can enable our partners to deliver the most comprehensive and innovative offerings to our joint customers, and help shape the future of space technologies and services,” Stephen Kitay, Microsoft Azure Space senior director, told SpaceNews . “This is an ecosystem of space partners with exclusive access to technical support and scaling solutions.” Microsoft’s inaugural cohort of space-related partners are Airbus, Amergint, Ball Aerospace, blackshark.ai, Esri, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, iDirect, Intelsat, Kratos, KSAT, Loft Orbital, Nokia, Omnispace, Orbital Insight, SES, SkyWatch, SpaceX, Thales Alenia Space, US Electrodynamics, Viasat and Xplore. “We look forward to welcoming new partners in the days to come,” Kitay said. Microsoft has played a growing role in the space sector since announcing plans in 2020 to help customers move data directly from satellites into the Azure cloud for processing and storage. “We’ve increasingly seen an opportunity for this community to benefit from Microsoft engineering and go-to-market resources,” Kitay said. Azure Space Community partners will have access to Microsoft sales and engineering specialists, go-to-market scale and support, and guidance related to marketing and community involvement. In addition, Azure Space Partners will be eligible for incentives like Azure credits, sponsored accounts and volume discounts. By establishing the Azure Space Community, Microsoft is “creating more of a structure” to clearly convey the benefits of membership and enable the tech giant to “efficiently onboard” new partners, Kitay said. Through the Azure Space Community, which falls under the broader Microsoft Partner Program, Microsoft also is acknowledging the growing importance of the space sector. “It is absolutely representative of the value and importance that Microsoft is placing on this industry and our excitement about growing alongside these partners,” Kitay said. “Space is a big data domain, where massive amounts of data are either moving through space with connectivity solutions or being collected from space and transmitted to the Earth. The need to process that, understand it and then connect it with customers is vitally important.”
NASA and the European Space Agency signed an agreement on cooperation on lunar exploration activities that could open the door to additional ESA roles in the NASA-led Artemis effort. Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, announced Sept. 20 that he and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson signed a joint statement on lunar cooperation activities during the International Astronautical Congress. Aschbacher called the agreement a “valuable contribution” to ESA’s preparations for its November ministerial council meeting where it will seek funding for its programs for the next three years. Neither ESA nor NASA published the agreement, which in a photograph appeared to be little more than one page. In a Sept. 23 statement, NASA described the agreement as a “non-binding joint statement” about current and prospective future cooperation in Artemis. “The joint statement noted NASA and ESA cooperation on human space flight activities such as the International Space Station, Gateway, and the ESA-provided European Service Module for the Orion capsule, and highlighted ongoing discussions on future collaboration on the Moon,” NASA stated. ESA provides the Orion service module and is also building components of the lunar Gateway, including the I-HAB habitation module and the ESPRIT refueling element. In return, ESA will get to fly three astronauts on later Artemis missions. Two of those are likely to fly on Artemis 4 and 5, missions that will deliver the European components to the Gateway. ESA is considering additional programs that could be incorporated into Artemis. One, Moonlight, proposes to establish a communications and navigation network around the moon to support other missions. Another, the European Large Logistics Lander, is a cargo lander that could deliver heavy payloads to the lunar surface for science or to support Artemis missions. ESA will seek funding for both at the upcoming ministerial. The agency’s hope is that those programs could be integrated into the overall Artemis lunar exploration campaign, providing services to NASA in exchange for additional seats on Artemis missions, including having a European astronaut walk on the moon. Aschbacher mentioned both the European Large Logistics Lander and Moonlight in comments at a heads-of-agencies panel at the conference Sept. 18, saying that, if funded, they could be developed “in exchange for astronaut flights,” something he added was yet to be negotiated with NASA. 
The Chinese Academy Sciences is preparing to select a new batch of space missions from proposals to study Earth, the Sun and solar system, and the deeper universe as part of a “New Horizons Program.” Concepts proposed in recent years have been down selected to a list of 13 candidate missions in four broad fields of space astronomy and astrophysics, exoplanets, heliophysics and planetary and Earth science. It is expected that a Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) committee will select 5-7 missions for CAS’s third Strategic Priority Program (SPP III) project, also known as the New Horizons Program, according to a new paper in the Chinese Journal of Space Science. Ranking and selection of missions is to be completed around the middle of the year, and will depend on the available budget, technological readiness and manufacturing schedule. Selected missions will likely launch during 2026-2030, a period covering China’s 15th Five-year plan. The SPP III missions are somewhat separate from China’s already-stated Chang’e (lunar) and Tianwen (planetary) exploration missions under the aegis of the China National Space Administration (CNSA). A number of the missions have already been highlighted in journal articles and press reports, while little is known about some of the proposals. The space astronomy and astrophysics field has three candidates.The Enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry ( eXTP ) mission is a powerful X-ray observatory to monitor the sky and enable multi-messenger studies for gravitational waves and neutrino sources. The DArk Matter Particle Explorer-2 (DAMPE-2) would be a follow up to the 2015 DAMPE satellite mission to look for possible evidence of dark matter annihilation or decay signals. Finally, the Discovering the Sky at the Longest Wavelength ( DSL ) mission proposes to send an array of 10 small satellites into lunar orbit, using the moon as a shield from Earth interference to study faint signals from the early universe. The exoplanet field has a pair of competing proposals. These are the Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey ( CHES ) and Earth 2.0 ( ET ) missions. CHES aims to study 100 sun-like stars within 33 light-year, using micro-arcsecond relative astrometry, while ET seeks Earth-size exoplanets with similar orbits around sun-like stars through a photometric survey. Both would operate at Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2). There are currently four missions proposed for flight for the heliophysics field. SOlar Ring (SOR) would use three 120°-separated spacecraft orbiting at one astronomical unit (AU) orbit to study the Sun and inner heliosphere. Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO) proposes to study poles of the Sun, orbiting at an inclination of greater than 80 degrees with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. The Earth-occulted Solar Eclipse Observatory (ESEO) would orbit at Sun-Earth L2 to study the inner corona. The Chinese Heliospheric Interstellar Medium Explorer (CHIME) candidate spacecraft aims to provide the first in situ measurements of pristine interstellar gas and dust in their high-density regions at 2-3 AU from the Sun. Finally, there are four candidate missions proposed to study deep questions related to planet Earth and other celestial bodies across the solar system. The E-type Asteroid Sample Return (ASR) is aimed at exploring the asteroid 1989 ML and delivering to Earth samples collected from up to three sites on the roughly 0.6-kilometer-diameter body. The Venus Volcano Imaging and Climate Explorer (VOICE) concept is a Venus orbiting mission to investigate the planet’s geological evolution, atmospheric thermal-chemical processes, surface-atmosphere interactions, and the potential for a habitable environment and life in the clouds. The low-Earth orbit Climate and Atmospheric Components Exploring Satellites (CACES) would focus on benchmark climate variables and atmospheric composition observations, while the Ocean Surface Current multiscale Observation Mission (OSCOM) is dedicated to the frontier of ocean multiscale dynamics and energetics based on satellite Doppler oceanography. SPP III follows on from a first Strategic Priority Program on Space Science which saw the DAMPE, HXMT, Shijian-10 and Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) missions launched across 2015-2017. The SPP II missions include the Einstein Probe , due to launch next year, the Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor ( GECAM ) launched in 2020, the Advanced space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) launching this year, and the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) in collaboration with the European Space Agency. Additionally, the New Horizon Program is supporting preliminary and advanced research projects on future science mission concepts. A first call for SPP III concept and technology development of the future science mission candidates has been completed, and more than 20 proposals have been submitted, including the Very Large Area Gamma-ray Space Telescope ( VLAST ), a space weather exploration program, a Ceres Exploration program, the Gravity Experimental Satellite and more. SPP III is an “effective approach to promote China’s space activities, and make great contributions to international space science and exploration,” according to the journal paper, authored by Wang Chi, director of the National Space Science Center (NSSC) under CAS and colleagues. The SPP selection process combines bottom-up and top-down space science mission selection methods from other space actors and institutions and could be considered somewhat analogous to NASA’s New Frontiers program.
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said Aug. 11 it has signed a global distribution deal with OneWeb to provide multi-orbit inflight connectivity solutions for airlines. The agreement enables Intelsat, which currently uses satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) to connect airline passengers, to also provide low Earth orbit (LEO) solutions once OneWeb deploys the last third of its constellation. The companies expect to be able to provide the multi-orbit services by 2024. LEO satellites can provide lower-latency broadband than satellites farther away from the Earth in GEO. OneWeb’s polar-orbiting network would also provide more global coverage than GEO satellites fixed along the equator. Meanwhile, larger and more powerful GEO spacecraft can bring more capacity to densely populated areas, such as bustling airports. “The hybrid service offering further allows the global airline community to plan their suite of next-generation onboard services with confidence,” Intelsat president of commercial aviation Jeff Sare said in a statement. The partnership announcement comes soon after OneWeb and French GEO fleet operator Eutelsat agreed a plan to merge their companies, following other multi-orbit tie-ups in the industry. Intelsat spokesperson Clay McConnell said its hybrid inflight connectivity solution would use an electronically steered antenna it announced last month . This terminal stands 90 millimeters high on an airplane’s fuselage, and is designed to automatically switch between satellites in GEO and other orbits. “The routing algorithm sitting behind the modems makes switching decisions based on what system will provide the best connectivity for the aircraft at its given location at that time,” McConnell said. “This algorithm will be based on years of Intelsat [inflight connectivity] experience and makes routing decisions based on a complex service fabric.” The terminal is based on antenna technology from Ball Aerospace and will use integration designs and hardware from Stellar Blu Solutions. Intelsat expects the antenna will first be installed on a CRJ-700 regional jet airliner in late 2022, ahead of production installations about a year later. OneWeb said it successfully tested high-speed services with its LEO network on a Boeing commercial airliner in May, when it achieved 260 megabits per second download and 80 megabits per second upload speeds.
TAMPA, Fla. — Remote communications provider Speedcast is preparing to buy another sizable chunk of satellite capacity as demand soars beyond pre-pandemic levels. Speedcast added 13 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity from satellite operators to its international network in late May, giving it a record 30 Gbps of bandwidth to primarily serve cruise and energy markets. “We’re looking at similar network growth over the coming months,” Speedcast CEO Joe Spytek told SpaceNews . “We expect to add another 12 Gbps of bandwidth when [cruise] ships return to the Caribbean beginning in September, in anticipation of the industry returning to full service at 100% occupancy this winter.” He expects cruiseliners returning to full service will demand more high-bandwidth connectivity than ever before. Speedcast also sees increased activity from the energy sector with new projects and a need for longer-term contracts. It took only about a month to complete Speedcast’s latest network expansion. “Adding 13 Gbps to the network in that short timeframe is a huge undertaking, but we’ve got the intelligent automation in place across our network to be able to layer in high volumes of capacity in a short timeframe,” Spytek said. However, demand for satcoms in Speedcast’s markets is outstripping supply amid a lack of new geostationary satellites, according Spytek. Low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband megaconstellations aim to deliver a significant amount of new capacity for these connectivity markets. They also promise to bring fiber-like data speeds with low latency to every part of the world. But OneWeb and others planning on selling their capacity on a wholesale business to satcom providers like Speedcast have suffered delays in deploying their networks. Speedcast has signed up as one of the distribution partners for OneWeb’s LEO network, which is currently only available for fixed services at 50 degrees and north while it waits to resume satellite deployments this year . “With a tighter capacity market, OneWeb expansion provides another option in our toolkit for customers, especially as some operations and expeditions move farther north and south toward the poles, where GEO solutions are less viable,” Spytek said. Speedcast installed the first OneWeb customer demonstration antenna system at the end of May in Aberdeen, Scotland. Spytek said Speedcast is also launching demonstration centers in other locations to show customers how its technology-agnostic network can weave in other emerging high-bandwidth solutions. “Like OneWeb, there are a growing number of communication paths, satellite orbits and unique constellations coming to market,” he said. Although SpaceX’s Starlink broadband megaconstellation has built a business around selling to customers directly, Speedcast and select customers “are actively trialing Starlink services,” and developing capabilities to accommodate them within Speedcast’s network. Spytek said “assessments to-date position Starlink as a companion service combined with our higher-end, guaranteed throughput services, targeted toward crew use” and other complementary services. “That said, there is potential where we have overlapping geographies — in which Starlink offers coverage and we have the right profile of customers.” Spytek said Speedcast has a mix of fixed site and mobility customers slated for OneWeb trials this year. He said OneWeb’s ability to serve mobility markets is currently slated for the end of 2022, with full global coverage expected in mid-2023.
As satellites become military targets, the U.S. Space Force is training its operators to think on their feet, said officials who participated in a two-week exercise focused on space operations. “The threats have grown in both scope and complexity over the years,” said Lt. Col. Albert Harris, commander of the Space Training and Readiness Command’s 392nd Combat Training Squadron. The squadron runs Space Flag, a military exercis e modeled after the Air Force’s Red Flag. More than 130 members of the Space Force, Air Force, Army and Marine Corps just completed the latest Space Flag that ran from Aug. 8 through Aug. 19. Harris and other officers who participated in the exercise spoke with SpaceNews from Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. The wargame is fought from computer screens, a “ synthetic virtual battlefield where teams figure out how they can solve hard problems in the space domain,” said Harris. In the exercise, a “blue cell” of Space Force guardians had to provide satellite-based services like GPS navigation and communications for a simulated joint-service military operation. Meanwhile, a “red cell” of aggressors sought to disrupt those satellite services using counterspace tactics like those expected to be employed by U.S. adversaries in a conflict. Harris described the exercise as “advanced training for our guardians” who need to be ready to fight a real war if called upon, and ensure the joint force has access to space capabilities. At Space Flag, guardians get to hone their skills flying satellites, Harris noted. But as a new branch of the military, the Space Force also has to learn how to integrate with the other armed services during an actual operation, and that’s a key part of the training, he said. “The integration is what really brings home this exercise.” Satellite operators spend most of their time “laser focused” on flying their specific systems, and during Space Flag they get to interact with other units and experience what a combat mission could look like, said Harris. “Guardians are used to maneuvering in their own sphere, and what we do is challenge them, bring them into an environment where their peers are flying other satellites or operating space radars,” and they have to react to threats in concert with their peers. “They start talking to each other and they start to realize that their mission partner at another base really depends on their data to do their warfighting mission,” Harris added. Space Force operators “see how they’re affecting the fight and are helping their other members fight. They get to exercise decision making skills with other variables that they have to consider.” Space Force operators are mostly a “very young crowd,” Harris said. “At Space Flag we throw all kinds of things at them … This is the first time they get exposed to the force packaging and the force integration.” At Space Flag, said Harris, “we’re asking lieutenants and specialists to make decisions that colonels and captains, and sometimes general officers, are actually making.” ‘We’re a young force’ The director of the recent Space Flag, 1st Lt. DeShawna Moore, is the youngest officer to ever run this exercise. “We’re a young force, we are a critically thinking force, and we’re overall excited about the problems that were presented during the exercise,” Moore said. “A lot of our players are company grade officers, captains and below,” she said. “So these players are very much at the tactical level within their units. Moore said players were empowered to come up with different courses of action, map out options for how they would execute those actions, and present their strategy to the “space boss” who ultimately gave the go or no go, Moore said. The “space boss” for the last three days of the exercise was Col. Donald Brooks, head of the U.S. Army’s 1st Space Brigade. Brooks said he found Space Force guardians to be “technically and tactically competent, years beyond what I am used to seeing.” What they do at Space Flag is “train in the art and science of planning, decision making, evaluating risk to better inform the space boss,” Brooks said. Army satellite operators who participated in the exercise focused on “how we integrate with guardians, with space electronic warfare capabilities and their planning and decision making process,” Brooks said. “For us in the Army this is a great environment to train … Space is an inherently joint warfighting domain and it’s vitally important to train and exercise as we operate in the space domain.” Capt. Perry VanZandt, of the 57th Space Aggressor Squadron, ran the “red cell.” A graduate of the Space Force’s Supra Coder program, VanZandt developed a software tool that is now used at Space Flag to help operators understand orbital uncertainty as they track their assets in space. “Our mission was to mimic potential adversaries and present blue forces with realistic circumstances and enemy actions that they will have to contend with in the future,” said VanZandt. The red cell at Space Flag is a small team of seven people, he said. “We try to keep ourselves as an independent cell, without having too much influence from the actual exercise planner.” VanZandt said he could not discuss specific tactics or anti-satellite weapons he used in Space Flag. “It’s any capability that any nation might have that could affect U.S. space assets in any way that would degrade their capability.” Space Flag players from the blue cell said one of the takeaways from the exercise was a better understanding of the value of satellites in combat operations. “The part that was essential to me was just to learn what everyone else is doing and how GPS can play a role in that, and how to critically think” as operations unfold, said 1st Lt. Chanler May, of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron, the unit responsible for operating the GPS constellation. “I don’t think I fully understood how much impact GPS has,” she said. An exercise like Space Flag brings that to light, May added. “You don’t really get to see that when you’re in your little windowless room by yourself.” Specialist 4 Darian Jones, of the 4th Space Operations Squadron that operates military communications satellites, had a similar take. “The integration piece, that we keep touching on, is key,” said Jones. “We get so dug down into our foxholes and we focus on our specific mission set, but we don’t ever get the chance to come together and really look at how we all interact and come together to enable the ground fight. I think that was the biggest eye opener for everybody … to see how much impact we all have on other services. Everybody got to see how space affects the total force.” The Space Flag that wrapped up Aug. 19 was the third of fiscal year 2022 and the 15th overall. Harris said the next two in December and April will include representatives from allied countries. 
Leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 28 unveiled 12 appropriations draft bills for the upcoming fiscal year, including a defense spending bill recommending a $792 billion budget for the Defense Department. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana), chairman of the appropriations defense subcommittee, said the defense top line is $63.6 billion above what Congress enacted in fiscal year 2022. The increase is needed to “address higher inflation for acquisition programs, goods and services, and higher compensation costs,” the committee said in a statement. The defense bill adds more than $2 billion for military space programs above what the Biden administration requested. Most of the increase is for satellites and launch services for the military’s missile-warning space network. They include the following: In a report accompanying the defense bill, Senate appropriators said they want to see a “responsive launch program of record to rapidly place and reconstitute space assets in support of combatant command requirements and space enterprise resilience.” They direct the Secretary of the Air Force to submit to Congress an acquisition strategy for this capability. The committee also wants DoD to invest in technologies to reach and operate in cislunar space beyond Earth orbit. Last year Congress appropriated $61 million for a cislunar flight experiment and $70 million for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort to develop propulsion technologies for cislunar flight. “Developing capabilities and operating within cislunar space is imperative for the nation to obtain national security, science and technology, and economic advantages,” said the report, urging the Secretary of the Air Force to increase investments in this area. Senate appropriators did not include funding for a Space National Guard but asked for additional information on how current space activities conducted by the Air National Guard will transition to the Space Force. “The committee notes that there are Air National Guard units conducting space missions and that there is disagreement within the Department of the Air Force on how best to allocate those forces following establishment of the Space Force,” the SAC report says. Appropriators direct the Department of the Air Force to submit a “full analysis of the costs, benefits, and unit impacts” and to explain future plans to transfer space missions, personnel or equipment of the Air National Guard to the Space Force. 
The U.S. Space Force has ordered a second environmental satellite known as the Weather System Follow-on Microwave, or WSF-M, made by Ball Aerospace. The first one was purchased in 2018 and is projected to launch in 2024 . The Space Force announced Nov. 9 it awarded the company a $78.2 million contract modification, exercising an option to acquire a second WSF-M satellite that would launch in 2028. Since the Air Force selected the company in 2017, Ball Aerospace has received awards worth about $417.3 million for WSF-M. According to the contract terms, the Space Force had to exercise the option for the second satellite by November 2022 or be subject to renegotiation. Each satellite is estimated to cost $511 million, according to the Department of the Air Force. They were designed to replace the most critical capabilities of the U.S. military’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), an aging constellation that is expected to run out of service life in the near future. WSF-M has a microwave imager instrument to collect weather data including the measurement of ocean surface wind speed and direction, ice thickness, snow depth, soil moisture and local space weather. Both spacecraft will operate in a polar orbit. “WSF-M will provide U.S. and allied warfighters with essential weather data,” the Space Force said. “The data gathered by WSF-M will be provided to meteorologists in support of the generation of a wide variety of weather products necessary to conduct mission planning and operations globally every day.”
When international regulators adopted deployment milestones in late 2019 to rein in a flood of proposed satellite constellations, they could not have foreseen the havoc a pandemic was about to wreak across the industry. COVID-19 jammed up satellite manufacturing supply chains, disrupted workforces and shook financial markets, piling on extra burdens and delays for satellite projects. Even as the pandemic loosens its grip on the industry two-and-a-half years later, space companies face fierce macroeconomic headwinds and a looming launch capacity crunch. The war in Ukraine has also exasperated the industry’s manufacturing and launch constraints. Russia’s invasion has disrupted the availability of noble gases used by electric satellite thrusters and semiconductor manufacturers, and prompted international sanctions that have taken Soyuz rockets off the table for those in the West. Will regulators show mercy for constellation hopefuls battling unprecedented manufacturing and launch constraints outside their control? The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an affiliate of the United Nations, regulates spectrum rights for satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) globally. The ITU’s task has become increasingly challenging as technology advancements sparked a recent surge of spectrum applications for NGSO constellations. To help separate applicants that are truly building and launching satellites from those more interested in hoarding spectrum, the ITU adopted rules in November 2019 that force NGSO operators to hit deployment milestones or lose their spectrum rights. Under ITU Resolution 35, these deployment milestones start seven years after an application for the spectrum is filed with the ITU, during which applicants must deploy and operate their first satellite. After those seven years, NGSO operators need to launch 10% of their constellation in two years, 50% in five years and 100% in seven years. If they fail to launch enough satellites before these deadlines, or finish the constellation within the total 14 years allotted, their spectrum rights are limited proportionally to the number deployed before time ran out. Previously, an NGSO project only needed to operate its first satellite within the initial seven-year deadline to preserve its frequencies. A cursory survey of the ITU’s filing database uncovers 384 filings that appear to be subject to Resolution 35, notes George John, a senior associate at law firm Hogan Lovells. While quirks in the database’s search features that prevent precise queries make this tally imperfect, and some NGSO operators enlist multiple filing for one constellation, these filings conservatively represent tens of thousands of proposed satellites. The ITU said in July that it rejected a petition for a one-year extension for all constellations subject to ITU Resolution 35. The petition was submitted by the government of Liechtenstein and its U.S.- based industrial partner, Rivada Space Networks, on behalf of all NGSO operators. Rivada acquired the spectrum filings in early 2022, after their former holder had already brought them into use in 2020, seeking to kickstart a project that continues to be mired by shareholder disputes. However, the company now has to launch 10% of its planned 600 satellites by September 2023 to keep its frequencies. With just over a year to put up its first 60 satellites, Rivada has yet to start building spacecraft. Rivada spokesperson Brian Carney said the company is reviewing potential manufacturers for the constellation after issuing a request for proposals in the spring. “We continue to make every effort to meet the applicable deadlines and we expect to be able to meet them,” Carney said. However, he said “owing to international conflict that has removed launch capacity from the industry, together with the economic effects of the pandemic and other unforeseeable factors, every constellation seeking launch and manufacturing capacity is facing constraints outside its control.” Carney said Rivada petitioned the ITU for the extension “in part to raise awareness of the industry conditions faced by all NGSO constellation[s] currently in the development stage.” Rivada is “not surprised at the rejection of our application,” he added, and expects a final disposition of this matter to come the next time the ITU meets to set rules in 2023. Resolution 35 has a provision instructing the ITU to report any difficulties it encounters in implementing the milestone approach at the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-23), a four-week meeting that starts Nov. 20, 2023. The ITU’s Radio Regulations Board (RRB) currently only has the authority to grant deadline extensions for individual NGSO operators that can prove circumstances beyond their control. “The RRB has no authority to change regulatory time limits in general but only with respect to specific individual cases,” an ITU spokesperson said. These companies need to prove a delay was caused by either an issue with a satellite sharing the same rocket launch or a force majeure event. There are a number of conditions for an event to qualify as force majeure, including being completely out of the NGSO operator’s control and not self-induced. It must also be unforeseen — or if it was foreseeable, then inevitable or irresistible — and make it impossible for the NGSO operator to perform its obligation. “Consequently, mere difficulty in performing an obligation is not deemed to constitute force majeure,” the ITU spokesperson said via email. There also has to be a direct connection between the force majeure event and the missed deadline. “It must of course be made clear in this regard that the causal connection should not be the result of behaviour willfully adopted by the obligor,” the ITU spokesperson added. Given how young the deployment-milestone framework is for NGSO, Hogan Lovells’ John expects more meaningful inquiries and challenges in coming years. “This next year will most certainly be an interesting one, with the large number of global NGSO constellations seeking access and priorities for scarce spectrum resources, layered atop priorities and operations of existing operators” both in NGSO and geostationary orbit, Hogan Lovells partner Randy Segal added. “We have certainly been watching with interest applications at the ITU to extend deadlines, and to see whether and how the ITU’s position will change and what those changes will mean for operators.” There is not enough satellite manufacturing or launch capacity available for every NGSO venture to meet their milestones — even if they can finance their plans, according to Armand Musey, founder of New York-based advisory firm Summit Ridge Group. “There will be many NGSO systems that really don’t have a chance to make their milestones,” Musey said. Amazon used its significant financial power earlier this year to snap up 83 future launches for its proposed Project Kuiper constellation, which Musey believes leaves little room for other NGSO projects. “The only truly proven launch provider that can scale launches is SpaceX and they have their own competing NGSO system,” he said. Excluding SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, Musey counts more than 55,000 approved satellites. Even launching weekly and assuming 100 satellites per mission, it would take SpaceX about 10 years to launch that number. Multiple small, medium and heavy launch vehicles are currently in development, but Musey expects none to fly more than 10 times a year by 2024. Forcing the industry to rush as many launches as possible to meet satellite deployment deadlines also has implications for space sustainability. With space environmental issues rising to the top of international agendas, regulators meeting at WRC-23 next year might be encouraged to consider whether their deadlines increase the risk of space debris from rocket and satellite failures. This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A contract the U.S. Space Force awarded last month to Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space was just the first step toward a goal of launching a space mission on 24 hours’ notice. A lot of moving parts have to come together to pull this off, said Lt. Col. MacKenzie Birchenough, materiel leader of Space Safari , an office the Space Systems Command established last year to figure out faster ways to field technologies. Birchenough will oversee the planning of the 24-hour callup mission known as Victus Nox. This will be Space Safari’s second attempt to demonstrate “ tactically responsive space ,” a capability that Congress has insisted the Space Force should have in case U.S. satellites are shot down in a war. “The timeline definitely is ambitious,” Birchenough told SpaceNews . “But we think the warfighter really needs this,” she said. “In a time of conflict, if you can’t respond to a threat or augment your capabilities within that 24-hour period, it might be too late. So that’s really what we’re trying to get after and demonstrate with Victus Nox.” The payload — a Millennium small-satellite bus carrying a space domain awareness sensor — will be delivered in late April, Birchenough said. “That’s our deadline to make sure that everything is ready to go.” “By the end of April, everything’s got to be done, and at that point, we then move into a standby phase,” she added. The standby phase could last six months or longer. The timeline is intended to simulate an actual operation when there would be “indications and warnings” that an attack could happen, Birchenough said. “At some point during that standby phase, we would get a phone call and Victus Nox would enter a short activation period of about 60 hours.” It’s during that 60-hour period that the satellite would be transported to the launch site and integrated with the launch vehicle. “And then we go into an alert phase, which could last a few days or up to a couple of months.” The 24-hour call-up would come during the alert phase, she said. “And after that we have a goal to be mission capable in a very short time period as well.” Feedback from the industry Maj. Jason Altenhofen, deputy chief for Space Safari, said the Victus Nox experiment will help the government and industry figure out more efficient processes for mating satellites and launch vehicles, and aligning schedules. “We’ve actually conducted quite a few studies and received a lot of feedback from industry on things we ought to consider for future missions,” he said. The plan is to work with a broad range of launch providers and satellite manufacturers, Altenhofen said. “Having multiple folks ready to go comes down to our acquisition strategy for tactically responsive space,” he added. “We need the right type of contracts in place so we can quickly acquire both space vehicles and launch vehicles on extremely short timelines.” Some industry executives have suggested that the Space Force could buy responsive launches as a full end-to-end service. Mark Baird, president of Virgin Orbit National Systems, said the thinking about tactically responsive launch continues to evolve as the industry matures. Buying this capability as a service would be an option the government should consider, he said. Virgin Orbit is one of several companies positioning to compete for future responsive space missions. “The tactically responsive space mission is the reason that I came to Virgin Orbit,” said Baird, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general. “This is a product that I’ve been pushing since I was in uniform.” “Obviously we always want the government to go faster, especially in light of the fact that we have a peer competitor threat,” he told SpaceNews . “So tactically responsive space is no doubt going to be a requirement.” He would advise the Space Force to “strengthen the concept of operations,” said Baird. “How would we employ this? How do we train people? What is the role of Space Force guardians, and the role of the commercial sector? These are questions that have to be worked through.”
A startup that envisions manufacturing large numbers of small satellites has raised a seed round of funding. Los Angeles-based Apex announced Oct. 24 it raised a $7.5 million seed round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Several other funds participated in the round, including XYZ, J2, Lux Capital and Village Global. Apex plans to enter the satellite manufacturing market with a bus called Aries, weighing 103 kilograms with the ability to host payloads of up to 94 kilograms. The bus is designed to support a range of missions, including Earth observation and communications. Ian Cinnamon, cofounder and chief executive of Apex, argues that satellite buses have lacked the innovation seen in other parts of the space industry. “The satellite buses themselves are very much an afterthought,” he said in an interview, as companies focus their attention on payloads. Yet, “the major issue, whether it be cost of timeline, is now entirely on the bus side.” He said the company sees Aries as a standardized bus that can be produced in large volumes, but also be customized in much the same way automobiles are. Payloads that require precise pointing can use a higher-end reaction wheel, or those with greater need to maneuver can incorporate a larger propulsion system. “Without having to redesign the bus we could simply swap in or out different subassemblies,” he said, something that will be accommodated by customized software to enable plug-and-play component changes. “That configurability will make it really fast and seamless, and minimize the amount of nonrecurring engineering that’s required any time a new configuration is shipped off the assembly line.” Apex plans to gradually ramp up to mass production of those satellite buses. The company plans to build its first bus in 2023 to launch as a demonstration, followed by five in 2024. Cinnamon said that production will increase to 100 in 2026, at which point “we will start to really hit the market demand that we’re seeing right now.” The company faces competition in two directions. One is from other companies that build smallsat buses, including Millennium Space Systems, Terran Orbital and York Space Systems. The other is from companies that build their satellite buses in-house, notably SpaceX for its Starlink constellation and Amazon for its upcoming Project Kuiper constellation. Cinnamon said Apex will differentiate itself from other smallsat manufacturers by focusing primarily on commercial customers, whereas its competitors do extensive business for the Space Development Agency and other government organizations. “We are very much focused on the ‘scaled’ commercial side,” he said. “The existing smallsat manufacturers who currently are on that side are not able to produce at the scale we’re designing to.” Apex said it can offer a better solution for companies producing small volumes of satellites in-house. “Fundamentally, they weren’t designed for manufacturing,” he said of those companies. Outsourcing bus production could be attractive for those companies, he said, as they look to focus on their product specialties. Cinnamon declined to identify any specific customers Apex has attracted. “We’re in far-along discussions with many customers,” he said, both those that build satellites in-house and those who work with other manufacturers. The funding round will allow Apex to set up a production facility near Los Angeles International Airport. The company, co-founded by Cinnamon and Max Benassi, former director of engineering at Astra, has five employees but is actively hiring. The seed round, Cinnamon said, will take the company through the development of that initial demonstration satellite. The ability to mass-produce satellites, he said, is essential to a long-term future for humanity in space. “Do we really think all of those satellites are going to be hand-assembled the way they are today? They need to be mass-manufactured, and we believe that we are the company that is going to be equipped to deliver on that.”
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — Astra Space announced Aug. 29 it won a contract from Airbus OneWeb Satellites to provide electric propulsion systems for the Arrow line of small satellites. Astra said that Airbus OneWeb Satellites will acquire an unspecified number of its Astra Spacecraft Engines, an electric propulsion system, for Arrow satellites. Astra did not disclose or answer questions about the number of thrusters ordered or the value or duration of the deal. The Astra Spacecraft Engine is an electric thruster that uses xenon or krypton as propellants. Astra offers two versions of the thruster, one that requires 400 watts of power and produces up to 300 kilonewton-seconds of total impulse, and another that uses 1,450 watts of power and produces up to 1.5 meganewton-seconds of total impulse. The thruster was originally developed by a startup, Apollo Fusion. Astra, which started as a launch vehicle developer, acquired Apollo Fusion in 2021 as part of an effort to obtain technologies it needed for its vision of a vertically integrated company that could produce spacecraft as well as rockets. Astra, in a quarterly earnings call Aug. 4, said it had received more than 100 “committed” orders for the Astra Spacecraft Engine through the end of the second quarter, and announced it was leasing a new 5,575-square-meter facility that will be devoted to production of the engine. Engine production will ramp up by the middle of 2023, although the company didn’t give an estimate of how many it expects to produce. Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said in the earnings call that customers of the Astra Spacecraft Engine are attracted by features such as a higher specific impulse, a measure of engine efficiency, as well as experience of having operated “hundreds of times” in space to date. “It’s very cost competitive, and as we work with our customers, we’re trying to strike that balance of offering a product that is high performance and lower cost,” he said. In that same earnings call, Astra announced it was discontinuing its existing launch vehicle , the Rocket 3.3, after its most recent launch failure in June. The company is now focusing on a larger vehicle, Rocket 4, but test flights of that vehicle won’t begin until some time in 2023, and executives cautioned the new vehicle might not be ready for commercial, revenue-generating launches before the end of 2023. In the near term, Astra expects its revenue to be dominated by sales of its Astra Spacecraft Engine. “If you look at 2023, what we’re looking at in terms of revenue forecasts will largely be spacecraft engines,” Kemp said. Airbus OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture of satellite constellation company OneWeb and Airbus Defence and Space, did not disclose how the company plans to use the thrusters. The company is best known for producing the first generation of OneWeb satellites at its facility near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida but is also signing up commercial and government customers for its Arrow smallsat bus. Airbus OneWeb Satellites had previously used electric propulsion systems from Fakel, a Russian company, for the OneWeb satellites it produced. However, those thrusters are no longer available after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Doreen Bogdan-Martin will become the first woman to head the U.N.’s telecoms agency in its 157-year history from January, and the first American in the role since the 1960s after beating a Russian leadership challenge. As the next Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), she will oversee a global communications remit spanning terrestrial infrastructure to space. The ITU facilitates the international coordination of satellites in their assigned orbits, assists the development of technical standards, and supports efforts to improve connectivity in underserved communities. Bogdan-Martin won an election for the role Sept. 29 with 139 out of 172 votes cast by the ITU’s 193 member states. Her challenger Rashid Ismailov, a former deputy telecoms minister in Russia who has previously called for more internet regulation , received 25 votes. Bogdan-Martin is currently director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), responsible for creating policies, regulation, and providing training programs and financial strategies in developing countries. When COVID-19 hit, she spearheaded a collaboration platform called REG4COVID for regulators and policymakers to share initiatives for keeping communities connected during the pandemic. A qualified amateur radio operator, Bogdan-Martin has held leadership positions in global telecoms policy for over two decades. She began her career in 1989 as a telecoms specialist at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which advises the U.S. President on telecoms policies. The Department of Commerce awarded her a medal for her work on satellite policy during her four years with NTIA. She later joined the ITU’s BDT in 1993 initially on a one-year secondment, but has remained with the agency since and climbed its ranks gradually to become BDT director in 2019. Her four-year term as ITU Secretary-General starts Jan. 1 to replace Houlin Zhao of China, who was elected to the role in 2014 and re-elected in 2018. The ITU will enter “a new era of global and regional partnerships” under her leadership, Bogdan-Martin has said, and the agency “must evolve and sometimes break from old ways” to stay relevant. U.S. President Joe Biden said Bogdan-Martin “possesses the integrity, experience, and vision necessary to transform the digital landscape” in a Sept. 20 statement endorsing her candidacy. Married with four children, Bogdan-Martin is fluent in English, Spanish, and French. She holds a Master’s degree in International Communications Policy from American University in Washington, D.C, and a post-graduate certification in Strategies for Leadership from the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. Tomas Lamanauskas of Lithuania, a managing partner at advisory firm Envision Associates, was elected Deputy Secretary-General during the ITU elections taking place in Bucharest, Romania.
While SpaceX’s Starlink continues to build momentum in the U.S. defense market, other industry players are positioning to compete for military customers that seek low-latency satellite broadband and more specialized services. “In the U.S. defense and government marketplace, the demand is for mobile, mobile, mobile,” Ian Canning, chief operating officer of OneWeb Technologies, said last week at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. OneWeb Technologies is the U.S. proxy subsidiary of British satellite operator OneWeb. Like Starlink, OneWeb originally planned to focus on consumer broadband but later pivoted to the enterprise and government markets. Canning said OneWeb Technologies is projecting that nearly 70% of its business will be from U.S. government contracts in the coming years. To reach that goal, the company has to ramp up space launches so it can deploy the remaining two-thirds of its planned low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of 648 satellites and start the deployment of second-generation spacecraft. OneWeb in March suspended launches with Russia’s Soyuz rockets after the Russian government put severe conditions, including requiring the British government to divest its stake in the company. OneWeb has since booked launches with India’s space agency and with SpaceX . “We will complete our network deployment by the end of next year,” Canning said. He said the military is signaling strong demand for LEO-based communications, and also for flexible networks that connect ground users to satellites in different orbits. “We’re looking to integrate with other networks, other capabilities to provide that resilience,” said Canning. OneWeb’s second-generation constellation , projected to start launching in 2026 or 2027, will have more advanced cybersecurity features and likely will attract government customers, he said. “We’re really looking to make sure that we bring in as many of the government’s requirements, particularly around cybersecurity, that we reasonably can within a commercial service.” Inmarsat to launch LEO network Inmarsat, an operator of communications satellites in geostationary and highly elliptical orbits, is already a dominant player in the defense market but is looking to gain more military customers with a new low Earth orbit network planned for 2026. “Our future lies in Orchestra ,” said Walter Moffitt, chief architect of Inmarsat Government, the U.S. subsidiary of Inmarsat. The company is expected to merge with U.S. satellite operator Viasat after the U.K. government completes an antitrust review . Orchestra is envisioned as a multi-orbit system with at least 150 LEO satellites that will be integrated with those in geostationary and highly elliptical orbits, and with terrestrial 5G, using a new network-management technology called software-defined wide area network, or SD-WAN. The SD-WAN technology, Moffitt said at the MilSat conference, would provide added cybersecurity to the government by rerouting data traffic if one of the network nodes is attacked. “I think we’re in a fairly good place as we look at government requirements for resiliency and flexibility.” Moffitt said there are unique satcom demands for military users that can’t be met by traditional commercial services. “There’s just some particular missions within the DoD as we all know, that not might not necessarily lend themselves to a well structured commercial satellite service,” he said. For example, the company is investing in electronically steered arrays suited for military autonomous drones. “We’re working a lot in ever smaller mobility terminals for unmanned platforms.” Demand for low-profile antennas Richard Hadsall, vice president of satellite antenna manufacturer Kymeta, said the company is seeing a marked increase in U.S. military demand for low-profile electronically steered antennas that track satellites on the move. In response to military requests, he said, Kymeta has been focusing on antennas that can track satellites in multiple orbits. Hadsall said the company projecting that 75% of the demand for flat panel electronically steered antennas by 2024 will come from the U.S. government, followed by the first responder and energy sectors. “They want flexibility,” he said. “So you have to have a product that is capable of switching automatically and seamlessly between GEO and LEO.” “I see the demand for land mobility ever increasing,” said Hadsall. Kymeta plans to roll out a new terminal in 2023 that will talk to satellites in GEO, LEO and medium orbits. The U.S. military also is a target customer for Kymeta’s broadband service, a custom satellite-cellular hybrid service for mobile users. “We’ve been very successful with our government users,” he said. “They bring their own crypto and put it on the system.” The flat panel antennas, entirely controlled by software, can be customized with anti jamming or other applications to mitigate interference.
China conducted its 36th and 37th orbital launches of 2022 within a couple of hours of each other starting late Monday, using the Jiuquan and Xichang spaceports. A Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket lifted off into clear skies from a transport erector launcher at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 10:24 p.m. Eastern Sept. 5. The launch succeeded in sending the CentiSpace 1-S3 and 1-S4 satellites in orbit for Beijing Future Navigation Technology Co. Ltd. The CentiSpace satellites will carry out technical verification tests including navigation enhancement while in orbit. The Kuaizhou-1A is operated by Expace, a spinoff from the giant state-owned missile and defense contractor China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). The rocket is capable of carrying 200 kilograms of payload into a 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The first launch took place in January 2017 and the rocket has now flown 17 times overall. The three times since June, when it made a return-to-flight after suffering its second launch failure in December 2021. Last month the rocket launched from Xichang spaceport for the first time . Kuaizhou solid rockets were planned to launch an 80-satellite narrowband constellation named Xingyun for CASIC and its subsidiaries. However, Kuaizhou-1A failures in 2021 and 2020 , and the loss of the only flight so far of the larger Kuaizhou-11 have apparently delayed the project. One hour and 55 minutes later, at Xichang in southwest China, a Long March 2D lifted off from Xichang, delivering a fifth batch of Yaogan-35 triplets into a predetermined orbit. A pair of the satellites were developed by the Beijing-based China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), with the final spacecraft provided by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). CAST and SAST subsidiaries of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor. It is the fourth group of three Yaogan-35 satellites launched since June, all from Xichang on Long March 2D rockets. The first group launched in November 2021 and the previous set launched Aug. 19. A mission patch in SAST’s press release indicates that Tuesday’s launch included a 25 square meter drag sail on the payload adapter, following a trend set by the June Yaogan-35 (02) launch. Chinese state media reports state that the satellites will be mainly used to conduct “scientific experiments, land resource surveys, agricultural product yield estimation, and disaster prevention and reduction.” Yaogan means “remote sensing” and Western analysts believe the overall Yaogan satellite series to be designed to provide a comprehensive military surveillance system, made of optical, radar and electronic reconnaissance capabilities. The new set are expected to join the earlier groups in orbits of roughly 500 by 495 kilometers with an inclination of 35 degrees, providing frequent revisits over areas of interest. The mission was the 64th Long March 2D launch which has suffered a solitary partial failure. CASC stated last month that it was developing a version of the 2D utilizing kerosene-liquid oxygen engines with an eye on reusability and reducing use of toxic hypergolic propellant. CASC is planning more than 50 launches across 2022 and recently began the launch campaign for the third and final Tiangong space station module. Chinese companies including Expace, Galactic Energy, Landspace , iSpace and CAS Space are also conducting their own launches during the year.
Rocket Lab successfully launched a Japanese radar imaging satellite Sept. 15 as the company prepares for another attempt to recover and reuse a booster. An Electron rocket lifted off from Pad B at Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 4:38 p.m. Eastern. The rocket’s kick stage deployed its payload, the StriX-1 satellite for Japanese company Synspective, into a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 563 kilometers about an hour later. The satellite is the third synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellite launched for Synspective, all on Electron rockets. StriX-1 is the first “pre-commercial” satellite after two demonstration satellites as the company prepares to build out a constellation of up to 30 SAR satellites by 2026. StriX-1 features improvements to its batteries and communications system to enable it to collect more imagery. The launch was the seventh Electron mission of the year and the 30th overall for the company. StriX-1 was the 150th satellite placed in orbit over those Electron missions. Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the Electron first stage. The last attempt to do so was on a launch in May , when a helicopter briefly grappled the stage as it descended under a parachute but had to let it go because of unanticipated loads on the helicopter. The booster was instead recovered from the ocean after splashing down. During the webcast of the StriX-1 launch, the company said it would make another midair recovery attempt later this year. Rocket Lab has continued work to prepare reusing boosters. The company announced Sept. 1 it test-fired a Rutherford engine from the booster recovered from the May launch, demonstrating that it worked with only “minimal” refurbishment after its first flight. “If we can achieve this high level of performance from engine components recovered from the ocean, then I’m optimistic and incredibly excited about what we can do when we bring back dry engines under a helicopter next time,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a statement. Others in the small launch vehicle industry remain more skeptical about the benefits of reusability for such rockets. “Reusability, in my mind, always pops up as something extremely fancy and attractive, and also there is obviously the appeal of something more environmentally friendly,” said Giulio Ranzo, chief executive of Avio, manufacturer of the Vega, during a panel at World Satellite Business Week Sept. 13. He argued that reusability made sense primarily for larger launch vehicles with a high flight rate. “The smaller the launcher and the lower the flight rate, the more it becomes useless,” he said. “I do not see, technically, how on a 200-kilogram-performance launcher, reusability would be very convenient, especially if the flight rate tends to be something like four or five launches a year.” “Reusability is something that is going to be looked at,” said Jason Mello, president of Firefly Space Transport Services, a subsidiary of Firefly Aerospace. That includes both for the company’s Alpha vehicle, about to make its second flight, as well as the future Medium Launch Vehicle it will develop with Northrop Grumman. “We have to look at the business case and see what makes sense, and what is that customer demand that we need,” he said. Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said the company has looked at reusability for its LauncherOne rocket. “There are puts and takes there,” he said. “There are constraints and logistics complexities associated with reusability. However, if you get the hardware back and make use of it, there’s certainly a benefit to that.” He said the company has been looking at manufacturing improvements to drive down launch costs rather than rely on reusing components. “The tradeoff is pretty unclear of whether reusability makes a whole lot of sense.” One part of the overall LauncherOne system is reusable, though: the Boeing 747 aircraft used as the air-launch platform for the rocket. “She’s flown over 8,500 times,” Hart said of the company’s plane. “So, from a reusability standpoint, I think she’s in the lead.”
The U.S. Space Force announced Nov. 28 it has ordered three GPS 3F satellites from Lockheed Martin for $744 million. The Space Force exercised the fourth contract option awarded to Lockheed Martin under a 2018 agreement worth $7.2 billion for up to 22 satellites The first was a $1.3 billion order in September 2018 for two GPS 3Fs (space vehicles 11 and 12); the second in October 2020 was a $511 million contract option for two satellites (space vehicles 13 and 14); and the third for space vehicles 15, 16 and 17, worth $737 million. The new contract option covers GPS 3F space vehicles 18, 19 and 20. GPS 3F is the newest version of the U.S. satellites that provide global positioning, navigation and timing services to civil and military users. GPS 3F satellites will have more advanced anti-jamming capabilities, an upgraded nuclear detection detonation system payload, an improved search and rescue payload, and a laser retroreflector array that provides greater geolocation accuracy. Lockheed Martin in 2008 won a contract to produce 10 GPS 3 satellites and the company has transitioned production to the GPS 3F version. The Space Force so far has launched only five of the 10 GPS 3 models it has purchased. The new GPS satellites will augment the constellation of 31 spacecraft in medium Earth orbit and replace some of the oldest that date back to the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Maxar Technologies, a space company that gained global attention with its high-resolution satellite images of the Ukraine war, is being acquired by the private equity firm Advent International for $6.4 billion. Under the deal announced Dec. 16, Advent is acquiring all outstanding shares of Maxar common stock for $53.00 per share in cash, more than double Maxar’s stock price of $23.10 on December 15, the company’s last full trading day as a public company. The acquisition is expected to be completed in mid-2023. Advent International, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is a global firm with $89 billion in assets. Maxar is headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, The acquisition will help Maxar “to accelerate investment in and development of the company’s next-generation satellite technologies and data insights for its customers,” the company said in a statement. Maxar, with an estimated $2 billion in revenue for 2022, will remain a U.S.-controlled and operated company. The company is the U.S. government’s primary supplier of satellite imagery and in May secured a $3.2 billion agreement with the National Reconnaissance Office to provide imagery over the next 10 years. Separately from its satellite imaging business, Maxar also operates a satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, a business that delivered more than 100 large geostationary communications satellites over the past three decades but has faced headwinds from declining commercial orders and has been pursuing defense and intelligence contracts . As a private company, Maxar said, it will be better positioned to successfully deploy a $600 million next-generation WorldView Legion imaging constellation, a program that has been plagued by delays . “ With approximately $28 billion invested across the defense, security and cybersecurity sectors in the last three years, Advent’s portfolio companies have substantial expertise supporting many satellite and defense platforms which serve the U.S. government and its allies as well as companies across the globe,” the company said. Daniel Jablonsky, president and CEO of Maxar, called the $6.4 billion acquisition “an exceptional outcome for stockholders” and a validation of the company’s products and reputation. “As a private company, we will be able to move faster, including in next generation satellite technologies,” Jablonsky told SpaceNews Dec. 16. He said Advent wants to accelerate the deployment of WorldView Legion seven and eight after the initial six satellites are in orbit. Under the previous plan, “we wouldn’t have started spending on them until the tail end of 2024, maybe the beginning of 2025,” he said. “This allows us to go faster and get those birds up sooner for our customers.” Jablonsky said Advent also is committed to the satellite manufacturing business. “That’s been part of the turnaround story here at Maxar,” he said, noting the company recently received orders for two new Sirius XM satellites. “We are excited about continuing to do that.” David Mussafer, chairman and managing partner of Advent, said Maxar is a “uniquely positioned and attractive asset in satellite manufacturing and space-based high-resolution imagery, with an incredible workforce and many opportunities ahead.” Maxar became a U.S. corporation about two years ago when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA. The Canadian firm MDA purchased the Palo Alto-based satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral in 2012 and in 2017 acquired the Westminster-based Earth-imaging firm DigitalGlobe. The combined companies were rebranded Maxar Technologies in 2018, and MDA was sold off in 2020.
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Arkisys is inviting U.S. companies with Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer funding to test payloads or subsystems in low Earth orbit on the Port, the orbital outpost the Southern California startup is developing. Through a program called Embark, Arkisys is offering to fly payloads to the Port, scheduled to launch in 2024, for $150,000. “As you can imagine we will not be making any money at that price point,” David Barnhart, Arkisys CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. Instead, Arkisys is following a model popular in the tech sector of offering infrastructure as a service. With a low introductory price, companies like Amazon Web Services bring customers onboard. When businesses expand and more services are needed, the tech companies benefit. Similarly, Embark customers will have access to additional services and opportunities to collaborate in orbit. “This infrastructure needs to be utilized in order to scale,” said Dan Lopez, Arkisys chief business officer. “Without scale, there’s no market. Without a market, there is no customer.” Arkisys executives intend to serve the innovators who typically struggle to send their technology to orbit. For years, people have lamented the valley of death for space technology. It’s relatively easy for companies to win small SBIR or STTR phase 1 awards from U.S. government agencies to show the technical merit or feasibility of an idea. It’s harder, but not extremely difficult, to win SBIR phase 2 funds to continue the research and development. Very few companies make it to SBIR phase 3, where the technology transitions into a government program or toward a commercial product or service. “What’s fascinating is that in [SBIR or STTR] phase two, many companies build hardware and never get a chance to see its maturity or continue the innovation because they never get a chance to fly,” Barnhart said. “We would love to accelerate that innovation.” While many commercial space platforms or space stations are being developed, none are operating yet. Arkisys is one of three companies that won funding in 2020 from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit to study small, uncrewed space stations in low Earth orbit. Sierra Space and NanoRacks also received awards “Our belief is that there’s a huge untapped set of innovative ideas that are sort of left on the floor with the current [SBIR and STTR] process,” Barnhart said. “It makes the most sense to go after that.” In the future, Arkisys plans to extend the Embark program to companies outside the United States. Arkisys initially announced the Embark program in 2021. Since then, the company has refined the concept based on feedback from potential customers. Companies can sign up for the Embark program on the Arkisys website. “Then, we contact you to start the onboarding process,” Barnhart said. “We want to make sure that we know what you’re going to fly and when you want to fly.”
Microsoft is continuing to expand its role in the space sector on multiple fronts with a strategy built around partnerships. Microsoft announced plans Sept. 14 to begin offering private previews of Azure Orbital Cloud Access, a product that integrates satellites and terrestrial communications, and promises global cloud access with low latency. “That essentially gives people the opportunity to get constant access in more of a turnkey kind of way,” Jason Zander, Microsoft Strategic Missions and Technologies executive vice president, said at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. In addition, the tech giant’s Azure Orbital Ground Station, which was previously available only for private previews, is now “generally available and ready to go,” Zander said. Partnerships are a key piece of Microsoft’s Azure Space strategy. “We believe in the power of the ecosystem,” Zander said. Azure Orbital partners include Airbus, Amergint, Ball Aerospace, blackshark.ai, Esri, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, iDirect, Intelsat, Kratos, KSAT, Loft Orbital, Nokia, Omnispace, Orbital Insight, SES, SkyWatch, SpaceX, Thales Alenia Space, US Electrodynamics, Viasat and Xplore. In Paris, Microsoft executives were meeting with additional companies, more potential partners in the firm’s campaign to connect the Azure cloud with “a backbone of programmable connectivity” available anytime, anywhere on Earth, Zander said. Satellite communications is an essential element of that backbone, Zander said. “Any cloud today that wants to be a hyperscaler going forward, must have a satellite solution,” he added. In a subtle reference to AWS Ground Stations, Blue Origin and Project Kuiper, Zander said, “other hyperscalers are going to go build and launch their own satellites. They’re going to do the vertical stack.” In contrast, Microsoft, after making big investments in fiber networks, software and data centers, does not intend to invest in its own satellites, Zander said.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Five commercial satellite operators — SpaceX, Telesat, SpaceLink, Viasat and Amazon’s Kuiper — are among 11 organizations selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help develop laser terminals and technical standards to connect satellites in space. Under a project called space-based adaptive communications node, or Space-BACN , DARPA is pursuing a new laser terminal design that would be compatible with any constellation and make it easier for government and commercial satellites to talk to each other . DARPA announced Aug. 10 it selected 11 teams for phase 1 of Space-BACN. The goal is to create an internet of low Earth orbit satellites, “enabling seamless communication between military, government and commercial and civil satellite constellations that currently are unable to talk with each other,” Greg Kuperman, program manager at DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, said in a statement. CACI, MBryonics and Mynaric were selected to develop a small optical terminal. II-VI Aerospace and Defense, Arizona State University and Intel Federal will work on a reconfigurable optical modem and will help define the interface between system components. The five satellite operators will help define command-and-control requirements to support optical intersatellite link communications across constellations. Phase 1 of Space- BACN will last about 14 months and will conclude with a preliminary design review and a connectivity demonstration in a simulated environment. DARPA said at the completion of phase 1, some of the providers will be selected to participate in an 18-month phase 2 to develop engineering design units of the optical terminal components. The satellite operators during phase 2 will continue to evolve concepts for cross-constellation communications.
The Office of Space Commerce and the Department of Defense announced Dec. 6 they have selected six commercial firms to prototype space traffic data platforms that track objects and medium and geostationary Earth orbits. COMSPOC Corp., ExoAnalytic Solutions, Kayhan Space, KBR, NorthStar Earth & Space Inc. and Slingshot Aerospace received contracts for a pilot project to demonstrate the use of commercial technologies for space traffic management. The Space Data Association also is participating in the project. This pilot project marks a key step toward implementing a 2018 presidential policy directing the Department of Commerce to provide spaceflight safety services for civil and commercial satellite operators, a job currently performed by the U.S. military. The Office of Space Commerce and the Defense Department signed an agreement in September formalizing their commitment to cooperate. The OSC is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The pilot project, focused on MEO and GEO orbits, “will explore how, and to what extent, commercial space situational awareness services can be used to augment or replace government services for commercial and civil space traffic coordination,” NOAA said in a statement. The commercial and civil space tracking and situational awareness services will migrate to the Commerce Department starting in fiscal year 2024. This will require Commerce to stand up a space data management infrastructure and figure out processes for issuing collision warnings to operators when their satellites come dangerously close to others, or debris objects approach active satellites. The seven vendors will perform “ real-time civil spaceflight safety functions, including satellite tracking, spaceflight safety analysis and notification and anomaly detection and alerting over a two month period,” NOAA said. The Space Data Association will collect feedback from commercial satellite operators on the usefulness of the service provided. The Office of Space Commerce decided to start with only MEO and GEO orbits, which are less congested. A separate pilot project is planned for the much more challenging low Earth orbit, where there are tens of thousands of active satellites and debris objects. At the conclusion of the MEO-GEO pilot in February, the Office of Space Commerce will assess the commercial capabilities against a benchmark of present services to determine their maturity, said NOAA. The office is “working closely with the Department of Defense on the MEO-GEO pilot project and the overall migration of commercial and civil SSA responsibilities to the Commerce Department.”
Slingshot Aerospace, a space data analytics company, announced Dec. 6 it has raised $40.8 million in a Series A2 funding round. The oversubscribed round was led by Sway Ventures and included participation from C16 Ventures, ATX Venture Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Draper Associates. Horizon Technology Finance separately provided a venture loan, Slingshot said. “The massive growth in space operations carries a significant risk as well as an opportunity,” said Najib Khouri-Haddad, general partner of Sway Ventures. Founded in 2017, Slingshot is based in El Segundo, California; and Austin, Texas. The new funding will help the company develop new products and also finance recent acquisitions. Slingshot in August acquired Numerica’s Space Division , a Colorado-based company that operates a global network of ground-based telescopes to track space objects; and Seradata, a space data analysis firm based in the United Kingdom. One of the company’s products is a space traffic control software tool used by satellite operators to coordinate satellite maneuvers and communicate with other operators to avert collisions. Under a contract with the U.S. Space Force, the company developed a space digital twin — a virtual space environment to train military operators. “Our successful funding round during a global economic downturn is validation that investors understand the urgent need for safe and sustainable spaceflight operations.” said Melanie Stricklan, Slingshot’s co-founder and CEO. The company to date has raised $82.5 million, she said. The geopolitical unrest in the world today is driving up defense budgets, including space programs, Stricklan told SpaceNews . “Investors’ interest in space hasn’t wavered with the economic downturn.” Slingshot sees opportunities to provide space domain awareness services to the U.S. Space Force which recently established a new office focused on acquiring commercial services. DoD and Congress, said Stricklan, are “starting to really understand the technologies that are commercially viable, that the government doesn’t have to build those technologies.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency selected Spire Global to design a small satellite for an experiment to study high-frequency radio signals in the upper layers of the atmosphere, the company announced Nov. 1. The value of the contract was not disclosed. Spire will design a cubesat to carry a sensor in a very low Earth orbit experiment intended to learn how radio signals behave in the ionosphere, which spans the upper edges of the Earth’s atmosphere to the lower regions of space. The design will be a modified version of Spire’s Low Earth Multi-Use Receiver ( LEMUR ) satellite. Spire operates a constellation of more than 100 LEMUR cubesats equipped with sensors to gather weather data, track ships and airplanes, and provide customers with other space-based services. The award is part of DARPA’s Ouija program , a project to deploy sensors on satellites to study high-frequency (HF) radio wave propagation in the ionosphere. The program seeks to quantify the space HF noise environment and improve characterization of the ionosphere. DARPA launched the Ouija program in May and plans to launch several satellites in very low orbits to monitor radio wave propagation. The agency said the study of radio waves in this lower layer of space will help enhance the performance of military weapon systems that rely on radio signals.
SAN FRANCISCO – Orbion Space Technology will supply a propulsion system for a U.S. Space Force prototype weather satellite, under a contract with General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS). In February, the Space Force announced the selection of General Atomics and Orion Space Solutions to each develop and launch demonstration satellites to gather global weather imagery and data on cloud characteristics. The General Atomics satellite will rely on Orbion’s Aurora Hall-effect plasma thruster system for orbit raising and orbit maintenance, Orbion executives told SpaceNews . The Aurora system also will propel the 400-kilogram satellite out of orbit at the conclusion of its mission. “In terms of total impulse, thrust and fuel-efficiency the technical specifications of our Aurora product were a near-perfect fit for the EWS propulsion requirements,” Brad King, Orbion co-founder and CEO, said by email . “Last year the EWS program was upgraded from a one-year sensor demonstration to a three-year to five-year operational mission. This placed increased reliability requirements on the propulsion system – which Aurora was already suited for by-design.” Gregg Burgess, GA-EMS Space Systems vice president, added in a statement that the Aurora thruster “met our technical requirements” and that the Orbion’s “focus on delivering capability for an operational mission underpinned our selection.” In response to customer demand, Orbion is upgrading its manufacturing infrastructure. “We have a team in Germany this week conducting final inspection of new custom test stands,” King said. “These test stands and extensive support equipment will be integrated into our new factory building in fall 2022.” Orbion will have production capacity for “a couple of hundred propulsion units per year by mid-2023,” King said. “We are delivering a few dozen propulsion systems to customers over the next year as the first products coming out of the new facility. In addition to our flagship Aurora Hall-effect propulsion systems, we will soon be offering spacecraft component products that include gas regulators, propellant flow control systems and valves.” Orbion did not disclose the value of the GA-EMS award.
Hausjärvi, FINLAND — China is gearing up to send a second module to its under-construction space station with a launch from the coastal Wenchang spaceport later this month. A Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket will launch the roughly 22-ton Wentian experiment module around 02:20 a.m. ET (0620 UTC) July 24, according to recently announced area clearance notices consistent with such a launch. The 53.7-meter-long, 837.5 metric ton rocket will be rolled out to the pad at Wenchang in the coming days. Wentian is expected to rendezvous and join Tianhe, the similarly-sized core module for the Tiangong space station which launched in April 2021. Tianhe made orbital adjustments earlier this month to prepare for the arrival of Wentian. The new module has a length of 17.9 meters and a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters. It features crew quarters and an airlock cabin which will become the main exit-entry point for extravehicular activities (EVAs) once active, replacing the role now played by the Tianhe docking hub. The new crew facilities will allow China to perform a first crew handover. This will take place when the current Shenzhou-14 crew greet three new astronauts due to fly aboard Shenzhou-15 in December. Tiangong will then host six astronauts for a period of days. Its main role is hosting experiment racks for science experiments, while also providing backups to the life support and control functions of Tianhe. Wentian carries a five-meter-long robotic arm, supplemental to the 10-meter-long Tianhe arm. The two arms can also join together. Wentian will also come with 30-meter-long solar arrays, boosting the power available to Tiangong. Wentian will host a new round of live science lectures, following on from those presented by the Shenzhou-13 crew aboard Tianhe. “Wentian is a critical stage in the building of China’s space station,” says Brian Harvey, author of China in Space: The Great Leap Forward. “The Tianhe crew has overseen numerous undockings and redockings, so such maneuvers are well practiced, but nothing can be taken for granted, especially for the first time.” The Shenzhou-14 astronauts aboard Tianhe have been undergoing a training program including rendezvous and docking operations and using Tianhe’s mechanical arm in preparation for the arrival of Wentian. Tianzhou-2, a cargo craft initially charged to deliver supplies to Tianhe for the first crew, Shenzhou-12, was used early this year for a transposition test to verify procedures for moving a module from the forward docking port and towards a lateral port. Tianhe has so far been visited by three separate three-person crews. The most recent, Shenzhou-14, arrived on June 5 and will oversee the arrival of Wentian and Mengtian, another 22-ton experiment module scheduled for launch in October. The arrival of the latter will complete the planned T-shaped Tiangong space station, though China has suggested it could later expand the complex to six modules. “The real work of the station, which we can expect to fly into the 2040s, will begin,” Harvey says, once Mengtian is docked in position. The Chinese space station was first envisioned in 1992 with the approval of Project 921 which called for the development of human spaceflight capabilities. The project suffered delays due to issues with development and performance of the Long March 5B, but could also be expanded to six modules and most commercial and tourist missions. The country also plans to launch a co-orbiting optical telescope module, named Xuntian, in late 2023. It will be capable of docking with Tianhe for repairs, maintenance, refueling and upgrades, and aims to survey 40 percent of the sky across a decade. Xuntian features a two-meter-diameter aperture and a field of view more than 300 times greater than the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. NASA plans a new survey mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, around 2027. The two previous Long March 5B launches, which carried a test new generation crew spacecraft prototype and the Tianhe module respectively, notably saw the large first stage of the rocket enter orbit and make uncontrolled reentries. Attention will be on whether or not the launch profile has been altered or deorbiting capabilities, such as restarting engines, have been added. If not, the mission could see another uncontrolled reentry occur. Exceptionally, the Long March 5B includes a core stage and boosters. Usually smaller second or further stages do the final work to carry a spacecraft into orbit, with the larger first stage cutting off before reaching orbital velocity and falling within a calculated, safe area. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin stated last year that it was “common practice across the world for upper stages of rockets to burn up while reentering the atmosphere.” In this case, the large first stage is also the upper stage. While such an event would involve particularly large and massive spacecraft, the standalone threat of the spent rocket stage causing damage or harm will be very low. Most of the stage will burn up in the atmosphere and is likely to land in the oceans or uninhabited areas. There is however a larger cumulative risk, according to academics, from uncontrolled reentries stemming from space launch activities. Area clearance notices provide drop zones for the boosters and payload fairings for the upcoming Wentian launch, but no indication of a zone for the first stage.
SAN FRANCISCO – Propulsion startup Plasmos is testing its first rocket engine thanks to a $250,000 in-kind investment from Velo3D, a metal additive manufacturing startup known for its work with SpaceX. Benny Buller, Velo3D founder and CEO, decided to make the investment after meeting Ali Baghchehsara, Plasmos founder and CEO. “I was for two years an investor before I started Velo3D,” Buller told SpaceNews. “Startups are, first and foremost, the people. Ali is one of those remarkable founders that you believe will prevail no matter what.” In addition, Buller sees Velo3D’s technology as a game-changer for Plasmos. Since the Velo3D was founded in 2014 to additively manufacture complex geometric structures, the Campbell, California company’s technology has been used by SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Astra and Launcher to print rocket engines and other mission-critical parts for space. Velo3D’s metal 3D printing technology is also used to produce jet engines, gas turbines, semiconductor manufacturing equipment and automotive tooling. “When we see people that are incredible founders with incredible technology that could leverage our capabilities in a meaningful way, we basically say, ‘We have to help this type of company,’” Buller said. Plasmos, a Colorado corporation based in Los Angeles, was interested in working with Velo3D because the company’s laser powder bed fusion machine could print 95 percent of Plasmos’ chemical-electric engine, including its complicated cooling mechanism. “That’s not possible with anything else I have seen on the market,” Baghchehsara said. In the future, Velo3D additive manufacturing also could benefit Plasmos’ plan to develop a vehicle to transport spacecraft within low Earth orbit. “We are considering using Velo3D technology for the manufacturing of a space tug and space tug components,” Baghchehsara said. Like Baghchehsara, Buller immigrated to the United States. Baghchehsara moved from Iran to Germany as a teenager. In Germany, he earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering and worked for the German Aerospace Center DLR and Airbus Defence and Space. Buller, born in Russia, spent his childhood in Ukraine and Israel. Before moving to the United States, he worked for an Israeli Defense Force intelligence unit focused on advanced technology.
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K. announced a public consultation July 22 to assess the environmental impact of the country’s first space launch, as part of the licensing process for clearing Virgin Orbit’s mission this year. The U.K.’s space regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), is seeking comments on an environmental assessment from Virgin Orbit and Spaceport Cornwall, a government and industry consortium providing the mission’s intended launch site. The assessment, which is required to secure operating licenses from the CAA, covers the steps Virgin Orbit and Spaceport Cornwall are taking to minimize the environmental impact of using Newquay Cornwall Airport in southwest England as a take-off and landing zone for Virgin Orbit’s air-launch system. Virgin Orbit has proposed to undertake two horizontal launches per year from Spaceport Cornwall until 2030, CAA said. Its LauncherOne air-launch system uses a modified Boeing 747 aircraft that carries a two-stage rocket under its wing, and has conducted five orbital missions in the U.S. to date. The fifth and fourth consecutive successful mission placed a set of payloads for the U.S. Space Force July 2. The CAA’s consultation closes Aug. 22. Virgin Orbit also needs a license from the U.K.’s Marine Management Organisation (MMO), which includes another public consultation that is slated to close Aug. 19. LauncherOne has been scheduled to fly as soon as September from Spaceport Cornwall, which is operated by a consortium comprising Virgin Orbit, the UK Space Agency, Goonhilly Earth Station and the Cornwall Council unitary authority. “This is the first time the Civil Aviation Authority has consulted on an organisation’s environmental assessment around a space launch,” CAA policy director Tim Johnson said in a statement. “As the UK’s space regulator, it’s important we review environmental effects before issuing licences, and we are working closely with the Marine Management Organisation to make sure Newquay residents and businesses’ voices are heard before making any final decisions.” Payloads due to fly on Virgin Orbit’s first U.K. mission include two Prometheus 2 cubesats, carrying pathfinder experiments to support the U.K.’s Minerva remote-sensing constellation. The mission will also carry a positioning, navigation and timing pathfinder satellite for RHEA Group, and a joint experiment developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the U.K. Defense Science and Technology Laboratory to study changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom., companies racing to conduct the first-ever vertical launch to orbit from British soil. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
A new mobile launch platform that Bechtel is building for NASA will cost up to four times as much as originally planned and could push back the first launch of an upgraded version of the Space Launch System to the late 2020s, a NASA audit concluded. The audit by NASA’s Office of Inspector General , published June 9, was sharply critical of both Bechtel and, to a lesser extent, NASA for cost overruns and delays in work on Mobile Launcher (ML) 2, which will be used for launches of the Block 1B version of the SLS starting with the Artemis 4 mission. The larger Block 1B cannot be accommodated on the existing mobile launch platform for SLS. NASA awarded Bechtel a $383 million cost-plus contract in June 2019 to both design and build ML-2 for delivery to NASA in March 2023. That contract grew to $460.3 million by March because of “government-driven changes” that also pushed back delivery of the platform to January 2024. The project has since suffered significant overruns and delays, though, revealed in the audit. As of February, Bechtel’s estimate of the cost at completion of ML-2 has increased to $960.1 million, or 2.5 times the original contract value. That estimate projects completing ML-2 in October 2025, after which more than a year of testing and other preparations is expected before it is ready for the Artemis 4 launch. However, the audit noted that a joint confidence level analysis, which NASA uses to estimate the probability of completing a project at a set cost and schedule, projected only a 3.9% chance of completing ML-2 at the revised budget and schedule. Using the 70% confidence level that is the NASA standard for project estimates, an independent review team commissioned by the Kennedy Space Center concluded ML-2 would cost nearly $1.5 billion and not be delivered until November 2027. That would push the launch of Artemis 4, tentatively projected for 2027, to no earlier than the end of 2028. The audit placed much of the blame for the overruns on Bechtel. More than 70% of the cost increase and 60% of the schedule delay “is related to poor contractor performance,” the audit stated. “According to both NASA and Bechtel management, Bechtel underestimated the overall scope and complexity of designing and building the ML-2 at the onset of the project,” the report stated, significantly underestimating costs for equipment and supplies as well as labor hours. Bechtel also struggled with the weight of ML-2, with the original target weight of about 5.4 million kilograms exceeded by more than 400,000 kilograms as of January. NASA also contributed to a lesser extent, the audit found. A lack of finalized requirements for the Exploration Upper Stage, used by the SLS Block 1B, contributed to some of the initial cost growth. NASA also “struggled to motivate and improve Bechtel’s performance using the award fee structure,” giving Bechtel nearly half of the $16.8 million in award fees it was eligible for through September 2021 despite problems with ML-2’s development. Bechtel took issue with the audit’s conclusions. “Unfortunately, the Inspector General’s report does not provide a complete picture of what led to the current situation, and we strongly disagree with the report’s overarching conclusions on the primary causes of the cost increases,” a Bechtel spokesperson said in a statement to SpaceNews. The company had previously declined to comment on the project. The company argued the audit “does not appreciate the significance of the impacts of necessary design changes” needed to support SLS Block 1B or the effects of the pandemic. It also claimed that the audit “wrongly attributes significant cost increases to poor project performance, including management of the mobile launcher weight,” which the company says it has resolved with NASA. The audit stated that NASA found additional margin in the crawler-transporter that carries the mobile launch platform, increasing its maximum capacity to just above the revised ML-2 weight. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson expressed his frustration with ML-2 at a Senate hearing May 3 . “Because Bechtel underbid on a cost-plus contract in order to, what appears, to get it,” he said, “they couldn’t perform. And NASA is stuck.” Nelson said at the hearing that while he met with the chief executive of Bechtel, there was little the agency could do about the costs because of the nature of the cost-plus contract. “There’s no way, under the contract, since it’s a cost-plus contract, that we can do anything but eat it,” he said. “And that’s not right.” Nelson used the agency’s experience with ML-2 to advocate for greater use of fixed-price contracts. The audit stated that NASA is investigating what parts of the ML-2 contract can be converted to a fixed-price structure. “At this stage, it is too early to tell what impact these efforts will have on the ML-2 project’s cost and schedule,” the audit stated of overall recovery efforts for the contract. “In particular, while converting portions of the ML-2 contract to a fixed-price would reduce NASA’s risk and increase transparency, it is unclear whether Bechtel would agree to this approach nor is it clear if NASA could afford the high costs associated with this contract structure.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Spire Global said Aug. 4 it will host a second Earth-imaging payload for Hancom InSpace, which became the first private South Korean company to operate a commercial satellite mission earlier this year. Hancom will host an optical payload on a 6U Spire satellite — the size of six cubesats — in a mission slated to launch in the second half of 2023. Spire will manage the payload integration, launch, and mission operations for the Hancom-2 satellite as part of its space-as-a-service business. In May, SpaceX launched a Spire satellite carrying the Hancom-1 payload on a Falcon 9 Transporter-5 rideshare mission, marking the first commercial satellite deployed for a private South Korean company. Hancom is a spin-off from South Korea’s space agency and specializes in image analysis for tracking vehicles and changes in infrastructure and the environment. Hancom-1 and Hancom-2 are focused on optical imagery for agricultural applications and are part of a proposed constellation of up to 50 satellites. The South Korean company “plans to provide solutions that observe crops and predict output through satellite observations,” Hancom CEO Choi Myungjin said, and “initial target countries are in Asia and the Middle East, where demand for satellite image data is high.” Spire co-founder Joel Spark, who is general manager for the operator’s space services business, said Hancom-2 is currently planned to be the only payload on its upcoming 6U satellite. Spire operates a constellation of more than a hundred multipurpose satellites in low Earth orbit that it builds in-house. Most of them are 3U in size, Spark told SpaceNews , but the company also designs and manufactures 6U, 12U, and 16U satellites. Spire declined to say how many customers its space services business has secured, although the group counts more than 625 customers across more than 60 countries. “There is so much potential to create applications and businesses in space that will improve our lives on Earth, but the barriers to space are traditionally quite high,” he said. “Building infrastructure in space is time intensive, takes a lot of capital, and requires a unique set of expertise. We’re seeing more and more organizations, both commercial and government, turn to us for our Space Services offering to help them deploy and scale their own constellation quickly and with minimum risk.” Customers can bring their own payload, develop a custom one with Spire, or upload their software to one of Spire’s existing satellites for a “flat monthly fee,” he said. Spire sees more growth opportunities ahead by improving the quantity and quality of data its satellites can produce. “For more than two decades, the capability per kilogram of a satellite has been increasing about tenfold every five years,” Spark said. “As this improvement curve continues, we’ll likely see more power and capability in smaller form factors, enabling more applications to be carried out on smallsats.” Spire announced plans July 20 to improve its weather forecast capabilities by fitting future smallsats in its fleet with microwave sounders. A demonstration mission using a 16U Spire satellite is slated around the end of 2023 or early 2024. The company also plans to install Ku-band antennas on its satellites beginning next year to provide higher capacity data services.
Virgin Galactic will work with two aerospace manufacturers to provide the major components of its next-generation suborbital spaceplane. Virgin Galactic announced Nov. 2 that it reached agreements with Bell Textron and Qarbon Aerospace to produce major subassemblies of its Delta class of suborbital spaceplanes, which Virgin will assemble. The companies did not disclose the value of the contracts. Virgin Galactic selected the suppliers after a “highly competitive and methodical selection process,” said Swami Iyer, president of aerospace systems at Virgin Galactic, in a statement. He did not disclose how many companies responded to the company’s request for proposals. Qarbon Aerospace, which produces composite and metallic aerospace structures, will provide the fuselage and wings of the Delta-class vehicles. Bell Textron will produce the control surfaces as well as the feathering system that raises the tail booms for reentry and lowers them again for landing. The companies will deliver those components to Virgin Galactic, which will handle final assembly at a new factory in Mesa, Arizona, that the company announced in July it would establish . Virgin will also remain responsible for the overall design of the system as well as testing. The selection of Bell Textron and Qarbon Aerospace is part of a broader effort by the company to diversify its supply chain. The company announced in July it selected Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing subsidiary, to build components for aircraft that will carry the Delta-class spaceplanes aloft, replacing the WhiteKnightTwo plane built for flights of SpaceShipTwo. Virgin will handle final assembly of those planes at an existing company factory in Mojave, California. “The Delta class spaceships are an evolution of our distinctive flight system, designed for improved manufacturability, maintenance and flight rate capability,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in a statement. With the new contracts and the earlier one with Aurora, “we now have the primary suppliers in place to propel the production of our spaceline fleet at scale.” Virgin Galactic envisions producing up to six Delta-class vehicles a year at the Arizona factory. The vehicles are set to begin revenue-generating payload flights as soon as late 2025 and private astronaut flights in 2026. The Delta-class spaceplane is critical to Virgin Galactic’s long-term growth plans because of both the number of vehicles produced and higher flight rates. While the current SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, can fly no more than once a month, the Delta-class vehicles are designed for weekly flights. Virgin Galactic has not conducted a spaceflight since July 2021, when VSS Unity reached space with company founder Richard Branson on board. The company said in August that delays in refurbishment of VMS Eve, its WhiteKnightTwo plane, had further pushed back the resumption of commercial flights to the second quarter of 2023. The company is expected to provide an update on the status of returning to commercial service when it releases its third quarter financial results after the markets close Nov. 3.
The House Appropriations Committee in a report accompanying the fiscal year 2023 defense appropriations bill warned about schedule and cost risks in Space Force acquisition programs. “The Space Force’s ambitious plans for new architectures, programs and mission areas do not appear to be backed up with credible budget pro jections in the outyears to actually deliver these capabilities,” said the committee in an explanatory statement released June 21. The committee on Wednesday will mark up a $761.6 billion defense funding bill , which was advanced by the defense appropriations subcommittee on June 15. The Space Force’s 2023 budget request of $24.5 billion is projected to increase slightly in fiscal year 2024 and then decline through fiscal year 2027, the committee noted. Given that funding outlook, appropriators caution the Space Force “against starting more programs than it can afford.” The lack of a credible five-year budget, the report said, “raises fundamental questions about whether any serious analysis or long-term planning has been done to assess the realism and affordability of the entire portfolio of programs.” Appropriators direct the Space Force to conduct a “rigorous technical analysis matched with executable plans resourced by realistic budgets.” The current plan “does not meet this expectation particularly with respect to aligning priorities within realistic budgets.” The committee criticized the Space Force’s fiscal year 2023 budget request for failing to clearly lay out long-term cost, risks, uncertainties, and potential alternatives to proposed new acquisitions. “The current plan does not meet this expectation particularly with respect to aligning priorities within realistic budgets,” said the report, which directs the secretary of the Air Force to submit a report to congressional committees on the projected cost, affordability and executability of the full portfolio of classified and unclassified Space Force programs. Appropriators raised red flags about the Space Force’s missile-warning satellite programs, for which the service requested $4.5 billion in the fiscal year 2023 budget. The largest program is the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) constellation of geostationary and polar orbit satellites. The Space Force requested nearly $3.5 billion for Next-Gen OPIR, an increase of $1.1 billion over 2022 funding. In addition, the Space Force is requesting $1 billion to start a new program called Resilient Missile Warning-Missile Tracking system, which combines the Space Development Agency’s missile-tracking satellites to be deployed in low Earth orbit, and a new Space Force procurement of missile-tracking satellites in medium Earth orbit . “The Committee recognizes that the Space Force is pivoting away from relying on a small number of exquisite, yet vulnerable, satellites to a more proliferated and diverse architecture of smaller satellites in various orbits,” said the HAC report. “While the committee supports the intent of the pivot, the Space Force has not provided sufficient information on the expected life-cycle cost of the new architecture, the cost to recapitalize a proliferated architecture every 3 to 5 years, potential risks and challenges in the supply chain, the ability of the Space Force to scale up capabilities to command and control a much larger number of satellites.”
In the global race to deploy broadband constellations in low Earth orbit, the United States holds a major advantage. However, the U.S. government should “enact policies and incentives to keep U.S. companies competitive internationally” especially against China, says a new report released Dec. 14 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The study, funded by satellite broadband firms Amazon Kuiper and SpaceX, argues that economic and regulatory issues are creating competitive pressures for U.S. industry. “As China continues to f urther its ambitions for its own LEO broadband network, which may fall somewhere in the gray zone between commercial and governmental, the United States could lose its competitive edge,” says the report. China is building LEO systems for its own use but also plans to provide services across countries in Asia, South America, and Africa that do not currently have widespread internet infrastructure and where U.S. companies also are competing for business, the study adds. China is leveraging its Belt and Road initiative to increase market share for its LEO constellations. “U.S. leaders should aim to increase soft power across the globe by working with commercial companies that can successfully operate broadband internet constellations,” the report says. “With China’s heavy economic presence in many Belt and Road partner countries, it’s positioned to negotiate regulatory concessions for its national LEO system while discouraging the adoption of U.S. commercial services.” Because of the huge startup costs of building and deploying a functioning LEO constellation — estimated to range from $5 billion to $10 billion — U.S. companies need more agile regulatory practices so they can compete internationally, the report contends. “Regulatory agencies with jurisdiction over space and space-related activities are struggling to keep pace with private sector growth in managing these constellations, a task that is correspondingly growing in difficulty,” says the report. There is a need for “updated regulation and an increase in capacity for the regulatory review process.” The regulatory process carries huge stakes for SpaceX’s Starlink and for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. As of November 2022, Starlink has launched over 3,500 satellites and offers coverage in more than 50 markets across North America, South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand Kuiper plans to launch 1,618 satellites by 2026, and deploy a total of about 3,200. SpaceX has requested authorization from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for another 30,000 satellites, and received authorization for 7,500 so far. China applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to operate a 12,992-satellite fleet in LEO. The state-funded SatNet plans to establish a space hub for the production of satellites and reusable launch vehicles, the CSIS report says. “SatNet is to be a critical part of China’s political goal of being a leader in advanced technology across the globe.” The constellations of OneWeb, Amazon, Telesat, and China SatNet together could potentially add over 90,000 satellites into Earth orbit. FCC commissioner supports study findings Speaking at CSIS to discuss the study, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said “this latest generation of low Earth orbit satellites is absolutely a game changer.” He said U.S. industry needs to remain competitive. “There’s no technology sector that we as Americans should cede leadership to the Communist Party of China. The CCP has set their goals on dominating a lot of technology sectors, but one of them is this low Earth orbit satellite system.” In the U.S. government, he added, “we have to give the tools to our private sector to compete and to win.” For the FCC, that means “making sure that we have the spectrum available, and that we don’t introduce new services that could cause harmful interference to these technologies. Most importantly, we have to go faster.” Carr said the FCC plans to stand up a space bureau “to help speed things up.” Congress also is stepping in. He expressed support for a House Energy and Commerce Committee bipartisan bill introduced Dec. 8 to reform the FCC’s satellite licensing rules. “Fundamentally at the FCC we have to go faster on our approvals,” he said. The agency also needs to address concerns about companies in the U.S. having to disclose competitive secrets earlier than if they were licensed in other countries. “We’re gonna make sure it’s not a competitive disadvantage,” said Carr. 
Iridium will launch five of its remaining six ground spare satellites on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission in 2023, the company announced Sept. 8. Iridium said it selected SpaceX for the launch of the five satellites, sharing a launch with other, unnamed payloads. The launch is scheduled for the middle of 2023 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. “We have always said that when the right opportunity presented itself, we would launch many, if not all, of our remaining ground spares, and just such an opportunity came about,” Matt Desch, chief executive of Iridium, said in a statement announcing the launch. “Our constellation is incredibly healthy; however, the spare satellites have no utility to us on the ground.” Iridium launched its second generation of 75 satellites on eight Falcon 9 missions from January 2017 to January 2019. Seven of the launches were dedicated to Iridium and carried 10 satellites each, while the eighth was a rideshare mission with five Iridium satellites and two NASA-German GRACE-FO Earth science spacecraft. Iridium indicated earlier this year it was seeking to launch up to five of the remaining six spare satellites, currently in storage in Arizona . Desch said in April that the company was looking for a cost-effective opportunity to launch the satellites rather than continue to pay to keep them in storage. In its second quarter earnings release July 26, Iridium announced it signed a contract for the launch of five satellites for $35 million but did not disclose the launch provider Iridium signed a contract with small launch vehicle startup Relativity Space in 2020 to launch up to six of the ground spares on Relativity’s Terran 1 rocket. The companies said at the time the spares would be launched individually on an on-demand basis to fill gaps in Iridium’s constellation. Desch said in the July 26 earnings call that the five satellites covered by the new contract would not be launched by Relativity. “We do have an arrangement still” with Relativity, he said. “It offered the opportunity to launch, but didn’t require a specific number of satellites to launch.” He hinted in the call that the contract could still be exercised for the final spare satellite, and reiterated that in a tweet after announcing the SpaceX launch contract. “It’s an option for us. We still support Relativity’s development (and the rest of the launch industry),” he wrote. “Focused on this one now though.”
China intends to use its newly-completed Tiangong space station to test key technologies required for space-based polar power, according to a senior space official. Robotic arms already operating on the outside of Tiangong will be used to test on-orbit assembly of modules for a space-based solar power test system, Yang Hong, chief designer of the Tiangong space station said in a presentation at the ongoing China Space Conference. The test system will then orbit independently and deploy its solar arrays and other systems. It is likely to test and verify capabilities such as power generation, conversion and transmission. The test will be designed to “promote breakthroughs in individual technologies, accumulate on-orbit experimental data, and make contributions to the realization of carbon peak and carbon neutrality,” Yang told CCTV. In 2020 China announced targets of peak carbon emissions by 2030, and carbon neutrality in 2060. Yang noted that SBSP is one pathway to new, green energy, but that such a project still faces many technical challenges. Work is underway however. The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the country’s main, state-owned spacecraft maker which made the modules for Tiangong, earlier stated that it plans to conduct a “Space high voltage transfer and wireless power transmission experiment” in low Earth orbit in 2028. This first phase test is to be followed by a second phase experiment conducted in geostationary orbit, requiring accurate energy transmission over a distance of 35,800 kilometers to Earth, according to earlier presentations. Phases 3 and 4, in 2035 and 2050 respectively will aim for energy generation of 10 MW and 2 gigawatts, requiring leaps in capabilities in power transmission, orbital assembly capabilities, beam steering accuracy and transmission architecture. Long Lehao, chief designer of China’s Long March rocket series and a SBSP advocate, said in June 2021 that the potential project would use the in-development Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket to send the requisite infrastructure into geostationary orbit. China recently apparently scrapped plans for an early, expendable Long March 9 concept, instead looking to transition to a reusable version. China’s Xidian University in June completed a 75-meter-high steel structure facility which it calls the world’s first full-link and full-system ground test system for SBSP. In another possibly related development, research into construction of kilometer-scale objects in orbit received funding last year. Such work could help to address the major challenge of assembling the giant arrays needed for solar power collection and transmission arrays. Space-based solar power faces major challenges including economic feasibility and manufacturing costs, cheap and reliable launch services, and efficient and safe energy transmission.
A draft environmental assessment released July 13 by the Department of the Air Force said the proposed relocation of U.S. Space Command to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, would have “no significant impacts on the human or natural environment.” The Air Force also conducted environmental assessments of five other locations considered “reasonable alternatives” — Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado; Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico; Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska; Port San Antonio, Texas; and Space Coast Spaceport, Florida. No environmental impacts were found at any of these other locations. U.S. Space Command is currently based at Peterson. These reviews are required by the National Environmental Policy Act. After the release of the draft document there is a 30-day public comment period. The final environmental assessment will take into account comments received before making a final basing decision for the command’s headquarters. Space Command is responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. military and for protecting those assets from foreign threats. The January 2021 selection of Redstone Arsenal as the preferred location for U.S. Space Command headquarters has been challenged by Colorado lawmakers. The decision process has been reviewed by the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office . Before the Secretary of the Air Force makes its final decision, the department said it will review concerns expressed by the DoD IG and GAO that the selection process did not adequately consider how long it would take for Space Command headquarters to reach “full operational capability” once it relocates. Other issues that will be looked at before the final decision is made are the analysis criteria for “childcare, housing affordability and access to military/veteran support, to verify that identification of the preferred alternative was supported,” the Air Force said July 13. Colorado lawmakers allege that former president Trump improperly influenced the decision and that the Air Force’s basing process did not properly take into account senior military officials’ concerns that the relocation would add years to Space Command efforts to reach full operational capacity as soon as possible. Approximately 1,450 personnel would be assigned to the proposed U.S. Space Command headquarters facility, Support contractors and other partners would be co-located, so the environment review assessed the impact of 1,800 personnel. The proposed headquarters would consist of approximately 464,000 square feet of office space and approximately 402,000 square feet of vehicle parking. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said the Air Force draft review is a “welcomed result.” “I look forward to the conclusion of the comment period and doing what I can to support Space Command as it makes Huntsville its new home,” he said in a statement. Sen. Michael Bennet in a statement said Colorado is the “rightful home for U.S Space Command, especially given Peterson’s unique ability to reach full operational capability faster than other candidate bases. I will continue to work with Coloradans to express ongoing concerns about the Trump Administration’s flawed decision.”
A Russian official speaking at a United Nations meeting on outer space security, criticized Western nations’ use of commercial satellites in military operations, adding fuel to previous declarations that Russia could target space networks operated by private companies. Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for non-proliferation and arms, called the West’s use of commercial satellites “an extremely dangerous trend that … has become apparent during the latest developments in Ukraine.” He said that commercial systems as “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.” Russia in recent months has aimed its wrath at SpaceX’s internet satellite network Starlink , which has served as a communications lifeline for the Ukrainian military. Meanwhile, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies have increasingly relied on commercial imaging satellites to monitor the conflict. The aggressive rhetoric from Russia comes as the Pentagon plans to increase its use of commercial space services and considers how it might compensate companies if their spacecraft are damaged during an armed conflict. U.S. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David “DT” Thompson, speaking at a conference Oct. 25, said these conversations are gaining momentum. For many years the U.S. military in strategic space wargames recognized that commercial vendors would play a role in a future conflict. “For a long time, we have worked on ideas and concepts of what it meant to be a commercial operator in a scenario like that, a military service depending on commercial capabilities, and we’ve also exercised it in real time,” Thompson said at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies conference. However, all this wargaming was “theoretical and academic as you don’t know exactly what the real world would look like,” he added. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “let’s just say that the conversation between us and our allies and partners in the commercial sector has picked up a sense of urgency, and a better understanding of what it might really look like based on what’s happened in Ukraine,” Thompson said. “Commercial companies generally are interested in where their limits are, where their capabilities are, how they can contribute, but at the same time, in how they can be protected,” he added. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, but I will tell you, Russia and Ukraine has changed the perspective based on the real world.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The Federal Communications Commission is considering opening up more Ku-band spectrum to Starlink and other non-geostationary satellite (NGSO) operators to improve broadband speeds. The U.S. regulator said Aug. 3 it will invite comments on a proposal to free up 17 GHz frequencies as it approved a similar move for satellites in higher geostationary orbits (GEO). The FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making will seek comments under a 90-day comment period that starts from when it is published in the Federal Register. If approved, NGSO operators would get access to frequencies in the 17.3-17.7 GHz band for satellite services provided to fixed points on Earth, such as to a stationary residential antenna. Frequencies in the 17.7-17.8 GHz band would be made available for NGSO operators to transmit signals from fixed sites on Earth back to their satellites. Starlink-owner SpaceX has told the FCC that “timely access to the 17 GHz band is critical to enable satellite operators to meet the growing demand of American consumers for next-generation broadband connectivity wherever they are.” The spectrum already allocated to NGSO operators for fixed-satellite services is limited, SpaceX said, because it must be shared among other NGSO operators through coordination agreements. According to SpaceX, this presents “a potential bottleneck” that could reduce the ability of NGSO operators to provide high-capacity and low-latency “broadband services to underserved and unserved Americans.” OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, SES, and companies behind other existing and proposed NGSO constellations are supporting the FCC’s proposal. However, U.S. telco AT&T, which owns satellite broadcaster DirecTV, warns that neither the FCC nor international authorities have studied the technical feasibility of NGSO operations in the 17.3-17.7 GHz band. The telco has urged the FCC to wait until technical studies show they would not cause harmful interference to incumbent services in the band. Hughes Network Systems, a GEO satellite broadband provider, asserts that NGSO operators should only get access to the spectrum on a “secondary basis,” if at all. In July, SpaceX requested spectrum in the 2 GHz band to improve mobile satellite services for Starlink users. SpaceX also continues to be locked in a bitter regulatory battle with Dish Network over spectrum in the 12 GHz band, which the satellite broadcaster wants to use to empower its terrestrial 5G network . SpaceX, OneWeb, and DirecTV have warned the FCC that Dish’s plans would severely disrupt their services across the United States.
PARIS – Skyloom and Space Compass, a joint venture between NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT, plan to establish a constellation to relay data from low Earth orbit to the ground through satellites in geostationary orbit. It was the latest entry in an increasingly crowded field of companies seeking to address growing demand from satellite operators for high-speed data transfer. At the World Satellite Business Week conference here, Hirokazu Mori, chief strategy officer for Japan-based Warpspace, described the company’s plan to begin offering a commercial optical data relay service in 2025. SpaceLink, based in Northern Virginia, is building a constellation of four satellites in medium-Earth orbit to receive data from spacecraft in low-Earth orbit via laser links and transmit it to the ground through RF signals. Kepler Communications plans to begin deploying its Aether data-relay constellation , which relies on optical and RF data links, early next year. Capella Space transmits tasking instructions from the ground to its synthetic aperture radar constellation in low-Earth orbit through Inmarsat’s Inter-satellite Data Relay System. Why all the activity? Government agencies and commercial firms are looking for ways to move data around more quickly and securely. Optical communications speed up data transfer and laser beams require precise pointing, making signals difficult to access for anyone other than the intended recipient. Still, RF links will remain valuable. “We don’t have to be dogmatic to say the one will replace the other,” said Tesat CEO Thomas Reinartz, during a panel discussion here. “It is an add-on.” Military organizations around the world are experimenting with data-relay services. In addition, NASA is seeking commercial alternatives to its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite constellation. A European Space Agency program called High-throughput Space Optical Network, known as HydRON, is aimed at linking space and ground terminals. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is investing in a data relay system that includes optical and RF communications. New data relay options are scheduled to come online quickly. Skyloom and Space Compass plan to send their first optical data-relay node to serve the Asian market into geostationary orbit in 2024. The companies plan to extend the constellation to offer global coverage by 2026. Warpspace is slated to launch its first data-relay satellite for beta testing in 2024, followed by two more satellites in 2025. SpaceLink plans to begin offering data-relay services in early 2024.
NASA will decide the future of a lunar smallsat orbiter mission at a review this fall after cost overruns by the spacecraft’s manufacturer. The Lunar Trailblazer mission, scheduled to launch in mid-2023 to characterize water ice deposits on the moon, will undergo a continuation/termination review by NASA Headquarters because of cost issues, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “Technically the mission is coming along very well,” said Glaze at an Aug. 23 meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG). “There are some cost challenges with Lunar Trailblazer. There’s been some increases in the cost with the spacecraft development, and so we are working now towards a cost review that’s going to take place later this fall.” Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer at Caltech, said in a presentation at LEAG Aug. 24 that Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft subcontractor, notified NASA of “recent and projected future overruns” on the project in June. Neither Ehlmann, NASA nor Lockheed Martin quantified those overruns. “As we brought this mission from paper to life, the engineering and design efforts exceeded our original estimate,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement to SpaceNews Aug. 25. “Our Lockheed Martin team continues to implement cutting edge digital production tools and seek out operational efficiencies to minimize any extra cost incurred over Lunar Trailblazer’s development.” Ehlmann said the project team was working with Lockheed to identify ways to deal with the cost overrun. That includes, she said, “developing the go-forward plan, putting it into place to make sure that we understand the cost to complete, and being in close communication with NASA to make decisions now that are appropriately balancing the cost, the risk and the science return.” In its statement, Lockheed said it was considering steps such as “streamlining programmatic functions and evaluating test efficiency opportunities” to reduce costs on the mission. Lunar Trailblazer was one of three missions NASA selected in 2019 as part of its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program of planetary science smallsat missions, along with the asteroid flyby mission Janus and EscaPADE, a mission to study the interaction of the Martian atmosphere with the solar wind. Each SIMPLEx mission has a cost cap of $55 million. “It’s a disappointing turn of events,” said Ehlmann of the cost overrun. “We had run a competition for the spacecraft bid and selected the vendor with the best historical technical and cost performance.” Lockheed Martin, though, was not the original spacecraft provider. When NASA selected Lunar Trailblazer in 2019, Ball Aerospace was listed as the spacecraft subcontractor. In July 2020, though, the mission elected to go with Lockheed Martin instead “after the original spacecraft partner ran into design and cost challenges.” Before this cost overrun, Lunar Trailblazer’s biggest problem had been out of its control. NASA originally planned to launch the spacecraft as a rideshare on its Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission. Delays in IMAP, though, pushed that launched into 2025, even though the spacecraft would be ready for launch by 2023. In June, NASA announced it would instead launch Lunar Trailblazer as a secondary payload on the second Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission , scheduled for mid-2023. The challenge of fitting a smallsat planetary mission into a $55 million budget was mentioned in the planetary science decadal survey published in April, which recommended that NASA increase the cost cap for SIMPLEx missions by 50%. NASA, in its initial response to the decadal earlier this month, said the recommendation “mirrors a debate that NASA has been having internally for quite some time” but that it was continuing to study the issue. “We’re doing something hard, which is the delivery of science data that are of the quality of a Discovery or New Frontiers mission,” Ehlmann said at the LEAG meeting, referring to two classes of larger planetary science missions, “at almost an order of magnitude lower cost.”
This article was edited June 15 with details about the megaconstellation operators’ V-band plans. TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX and OneWeb said June 13 they have reached a spectrum coordination plan that would enable their current and second-generation broadband megaconstellations to coexist. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, the companies asked the regulator to disregard any spectrum coordination issues they had previously filed against each other. “Given this positive development, the Parties encourage the Commission to quickly approve each second-round system so that they may begin deploying these cutting-edge systems and offering even more advanced services as soon as possible, they said. SpaceX has permission to deploy 4,408 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that use Ku-band spectrum to connect users to its Starlink network, and is seeking approval to add nearly 30,000 more to improve its broadband services. The company has a separate FCC authorization to launch 7,500 V-band satellites, which Starlink’s first generation needs to reach a total of around 12,000 satellites for global services. OneWeb has permission for 648 satellites that are currently designed to use Ku-band in LEO to connect users, and wants to grow its constellation to roughly 7,000 satellites. The British startup has also secured permission to add V-band payloads to its fleet. There are currently 2,404 Starlink and 427 OneWeb satellites in orbit, according to statistics maintained by spaceflight analyst and astronomer Jonathan McDowell. Starship, the heavy-lift launch vehicle SpaceX is developing in Texas, is critical to the company’s plan to upgrade its Starlink constellation. Gen 2 Starlink satellites will be nearly seven meters long and five times bigger than its first generation, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. On June 13, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded a long-awaited review that enables Starship orbital launches from Texas — if the company completes dozens of mitigations to reduce impacts on the environment and the public. SpaceX has been using Falcon 9 rockets to launch batches of typically 53 Starlink satellites at a time. The next Starlink launch has been slated for June 17 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Arianespace had been using Russian Soyuz rockets to launch 32-36 satellites per OneWeb mission, however, it had to pause deployments in March following sanctions resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OneWeb has signed contracts with SpaceX and the commercial arm of Indian space agency ISRO to resume launches this year. Amazon and Canadian satellite operator Telesat, which are planning to deploy their own LEO broadband constellations, declined to comment on Starlink and OneWeb’s coordination plan. Regulatory battles In a separate June 13 regulatory filing , SpaceX said it had raised nearly $1.68 billion through a private offering of shares as it continues to invest heavily in Starlink and Starship. Starlink is already the world’s largest megaconstellation, and its expansion plans have met fierce resistance from U.S.-based geostationary satellite broadband operator Viasat. Viasat has called on the FCC to perform an environmental review of Starlink before allowing the company to expand its network, and in May pointed to light pollution issues it says remain unresolved. Meanwhile, SpaceX is seeking to block Viasat’s $7.3 billion plan to buy British satellite operator Inmarsat to expand its business internationally and across multiple orbits. In a letter filed with the FCC June 10, SpaceX said Viasat is unfit to take control of Inmarsat’s spectrum licenses because Viasat is allegedly violating its current frequency rights. SpaceX accused Viasat of using Ka-band frequencies designated for operators in non-geostationary orbit on a primary basis without first meeting FCC conditions. SpaceX said it relies on this spectrum for communications between its satellites and gateway Earth stations. “The public interest is not served by giving a company with such blatant disregard for the Commission’s rules control over the Inmarsat satellite system,” SpaceX said in the June 10 letter. Viasat denies it has violated FCC rules. “Viasat has previously refuted SpaceX’s baseless claims at length,” Viasat spokesperson Jessica Packard said in a statement. “There is nothing new here. We continue to believe that the transaction will serve the public interest and remain confident that the FCC will reach that same conclusion after reviewing the complete record.” Packard said Viasat remains on course to complete the Inmarsat acquisition before the end of 2022, subject to regulatory clearances and the approval of Viasat shareholders who are due to vote on the deal June 21.
TAMPA, Fla. — Washington-based Hydrosat, a geospatial data and analytics startup, announced July 29 it has secured U.S. regulatory approval to provide global services from its upcoming thermal imaging system. Hydrosat was awarded a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration license at Tier 1, which has the fewest conditions under a streamlined regulatory regime that came into effect in 2020. Tier 1 systems have capabilities deemed similar to systems that are not licensed by the U.S. Commerce Department, such as the U.S. government’s Landsat-9 satellite or foreign commercial systems. Tier 2 remote sensing ventures offering data matched only by other U.S. systems, and Tier 3 systems seeking to provide a “completely novel capability,” are subject to stricter regulatory constraints which make it more difficult to sell commercially or internationally. Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel said Tier 1 certification for VanZyl-1, Hydrosat’s first satellite mission which is set to launch on a Loft Orbital condosat via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission early next year, gives the startup the highest degree of flexibility in how it can collect and sell data commercially. The license “gives us the most freedom to operate independently, and signifies that NOAA has determined that what we’re doing as a commercial organization, as an exporter, as a job creator is worthwhile,” Fossel said. VanZyl-1 will use multi-spectral infrared sensor technology to track water stress, assess wildfire risk and support agricultural monitoring applications. Hydrosat ultimately plans a constellation of about 16 satellites, which Fossel said would enable it to “image every spot on Earth twice per day.” Combined with in-house analysis, Hydrosat says its surface temperature data enables a variety of geospatial intelligence solutions, including services for helping farmers understand local crop conditions and supply. The startup raised $10 million in seed funding last year, bringing total funding for its goal to develop global thermal infrared maps to $15 million. Other startups developing thermal imagery satellite constellations include U.K.-based Satellite Vu and Germany’s OroraTech. OroraTech deployed its first satellite, FOREST-1, in January and is focused on monitoring wildfires. Satellite Vu, which expects its first satellite will be launched in the first quarter of 2023, specializes in tracking heat waste from buildings for climate change applications. The British startup said July 21 it has ordered a second satellite that is slated to launch in early 2024. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Updated 8:30 a.m. Eastern Nov. 21 with completion of the flyby maneuver. WASHINGTON — NASA’s Orion spacecraft performed a critical maneuver Nov. 21 that will send the spacecraft into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon, a key phase in the overall Artemis 1 mission. The two-and-a-half-minute burn took place at 7:44 a.m. Eastern while the spacecraft was in a 34-minute blackout period behind the moon, approaching withing 130 kilometers of the surface. Controllers reestablished contact with Orion as expected at approximately 7:59 a.m. Eastern. “This is absolutely a critical burn. It’s one that Orion has to perform,” said Jim Geffre, Orion vehicle integration manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, during a Nov. 18 briefing. The burn can be done by the main engine or several auxiliary thrusters if there is a problem with the main engine. “We designate it as critical, which it why we configured the software to ensure that burn happens.” A second maneuver, scheduled for Nov. 25, will insert Orion into the distant retrograde orbit, going as far as 432,000 kilometers from the Earth. It will remain in that orbit for six days before performing two more maneuvers to exit the orbit and fly by the moon again, returning to Earth. At the briefing, agency officials said Orion had been operating well since its Nov. 16 launch on the test flight. “Overall, the mission, in just three short days, is proceeding and exceeding expectations,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager, at the Nov. 18 briefing. The mission has not been problem-free, though. He said they reviewed 13 anomalies, most of which he said were “relatively benign” and learning about system performance. One issue, with the spacecraft’s star trackers, did require convening an anomaly resolution team that concluded its work by the Nov. 18 briefing. Sarafin said the issue with the star trackers was “dazzling” of the imagers by thruster plumes. “The thrusters were being picked up by the star tracker because it was thrusting over the field of view of the star tracker, by design,” he said. “The light was hitting the plume and it was picking it up,” confusing the software. “The star tracker itself is performing perfectly,” Geffre said, noting the issue came from a combination of factors that could not be fully simulated on the ground. He said he expects to see the issue “periodically” through the rest of the mission but the team now is ready to handle it. The problem never violated flight rules, said Jeff Radigan, a flight director. “It was really a case that we were seeing something that we didn’t understand,” he said. “At all times they were providing us measurements that were able to allow the mission to proceed.” Sarafin said the agency was also still assessing the performance of the Space Launch System rocket that launched Orion. “All indications were that the system performed spot-on,” he said, noting that the core stage and boosters placed Orion and its ICPS upper stage very close to its planned altitude, and that the ICPS burn that sent Orion to the moon “was exactly where we had intended.” The launch also caused some damage to ground systems, like the mobile launch platform, creating hazards at the pad that delayed photographers from picking up remote cameras for two days. That included nitrogen and helium gas leaks, as well as elevator blast doors that were blown off, taking the mobile launcher elevator out of service, according to Sarafin. “We did anticipate some amount of damage, and they are finding some amount of damage,” he said. “The mobile launcher itself performed well. We’re just having to work our way through some of the damage assessments.”
The Defense Innovation Unit on Nov. 2 announced new agreements with Amazon Web Services, Kuiper Government Solutions, Microsoft Azure Space and SpiderOak Mission Systems for a project to demonstrate space-based communications using interconnected commercial and government networks. DIU’s goal is to demonstrate a hybrid space architecture using commercial communication systems as transport pipes to move data collected by imaging satellites and deliver it quickly to military and government users. The hybrid-network concept assumes that commercial satellites will talk to each other via interoperable links, including radio-frequency spectrum, optical inter-satellite links, military tactical data links, and legacy ground wired networks. The new contracts follow awards DIU made earlier this year to Aalyria, Anduril, Atlas, and Enveil . DIU is a Defense Department agency created to work with commercial companies that are not traditional defense contractors. The U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory also are participating in the hybrid architecture project. Under the hybrid architecture program, companies will be expected to collaborate in areas like network interoperability and compatibility with existing DoD assets. The prototyping work and demonstrations done under this project will support Space Force plans to design and deploy a hybrid communications architecture with additional layers of satellites to increase network resilience. By adding cloud providers Amazon and Microsoft in this new phase of the program, DIU wants to link terrestrial cloud and internet services with proliferated commercial communications satellite constellations. SpiderOak will provide cybersecurity software for user authentication and data protection using blockchain ledgers to create a variable trust architecture. Operations in Eastern Europe a use case DIU said a use case for a hybrid network is seen today in Eastern Europe where armies rely on multiple cloud servers and various commercial communication terminals on the ground and in space to move data to and from the battlefield, and where cyber attacks are expected. “In a fully realized hybrid architecture, it will not matter if a commercial node is blocked, shut down, or destroyed, the future network will self heal and provide true resilience as long as there is an entry point for an individual user into the network,” said Rogan Shimmin, program manager of the hybrid space architecture at DIU. John Moberly, senior vice president for space at SpiderOak, said DIU in this project “is really doing what they were chartered for, bringing in non-traditional suppliers with new approaches.” A hybrid network creates cybersecurity challenges that cannot be solved with the traditional “checklist” approach, Moberly told SpaceNews . The company previously won Space Force Small Business Innovation Research contracts for its OrbitSecure software. Moberly said the DIU project is an opportunity to “demonstrate an enhanced space-domain cyber resilience even when network hardware or application software has been compromised.” The company is teaming with satellite manufacturer York Space Systems to demonstrate the OrbitSecure software in a future space experiment, said Moberly. “We’re building out OrbitSecure and so we have several demonstrations with major primes going on.” DIU is trying to prove out a “zero-trust architecture” where network users by default are not trusted and special keys are required to access encrypted data. SpideOak uses blockchain for data transactions so every modification made to the ledger is time stamped and signed, ensuring traceability. Jason Zander, executive vice president of Microsoft, in a blog post said the DIU hybrid space architecture project “will leverage key capabilities from our suite of Azure Space solutions, including Azure Orbital Cloud Access and Azure Orbital Ground Station.” The company’s global data transport network and cloud, said Zander, “bring together key functions of the hybrid space architecture, including remote sensing, multi-path communications and cloud computing.” Amazon said AWS will work with DIU to identify scenarios to integrate cloud services and technologies into hybrid space architecture. Project Kuiper will model components of a potential hybrid government-Kuiper data transport architecture to support services such as on-demand weather data. In the second phase of the project, the company will do hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop testing.
Sierra Space has created a group of former government officials, including a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a NASA deputy administrator, to advise the company as it seeks to win national security business. The company announced July 26 the creation of the eight-person National Security Advisory Group. The committee will advise Sierra Space on national security threats and technology trends and potential solutions the company could offer. The group is chaired by James F. Geurts, who retired from the government last August after serving for several months as the acting undersecretary of the U.S. Navy. He previously was the Navy’s acquisition chief and held positions in the U.S. Special Operations Command. “Forming this National Security Advisory Group is the logical next step for Sierra Space, as it brings together the most innovative and pioneering minds in the industry to help ensure the safety and security of space,” Geurts said in a statement. Other members of the group include: “As we develop a robust and vibrant commercial space economy where thousands of people are living and working in space, we must ensure its freedom, safety and security,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. “Utilizing the deep expertise of our advisory group, we will better understand the challenges – including debris – and invent and deploy solutions that affordably and effectively neutralize these challenges.” Sierra Space is best known for developing the Dream Chaser vehicle that will initially deliver cargo to the International Space Station and for partnering with Blue Origin on the Orbital Reef commercial space station project. Company executives have previously discussed, though, developing a version of Dream Chaser for national security applications. In an interview in April , Vice confirmed that the company has talked with the national security space community about a Dream Chaser variant, but declined to discuss specifics about what capabilities it would have or what missions it could perform. “I would just say it is an engaging two-way conversation,” he said.
The first launch of the Space Development Agency’s constellation planned for mid-December will slip to March 2023 due to an anomaly in York Space’s satellites that was identified during tests, the agency’s director Derek Tournear said Dec. 9. The Space Development Agency, a procurement organization under the U.S. Space Force, is working with multiple vendors to build a mesh network in low Earth orbit that includes data-transport communications satellites and infrared sensor satellites that detect and track missiles in flight. York Space Systems, based in Denver, Colorado, won a $94 million contract in August 2020 to build 10 satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 0. The first Tranche 0 launch was originally planned for September and pushed to December due to supply chain problems across all vendors in the program. Tournear said the latest delay resulted from a “noisy power supply” issue that requires a fix for all eight York satellites that were manifested to launch in December. “Technical issues came up during testing … we had a noisy power supply,” Tournear told SpaceNews . “We have to take the satellites apart and add in an electrical filter to all the York satellites.” A noisy power supply, meaning that it generates a lot of electrical noise, can interfere with the satellite’s performance. York and SDA engineers agreed the solution is to add a filter. Getting all the satellites retrofitted with filters, reassembled and tested will take approximately three months, Tournear said. York Space will absorb the cost as they were purchased under a fixed-price contract. Tournear said the government may have to bear “some small nominal costs” for rescheduling the launch but is not paying for the satellite fixes. The launch rescheduled for March includes York’s eight satellites and two of four SpaceX-Leidos missile-tracking satellites the companies are building for SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 0. Tranche 0 also includes 10 Transport Layer satellites made by Lockheed Martin and four Tracking Layer satellites made by L3Harris. Second Tranche 0 launch pushed to June SDA had planned its second Tranche 0 launch — with Lockheed Martin’s and L3Harris’ satellites — in March, but this mission is now being pushed to no earlier than June as SDA needs at least three months between launches to perform the necessary orbit raising maneuvers, testing and checkout, said Tournear. “Our plan now is to launch 10 satellites in March and the remaining 18 in June,” he said. Both launches will be on SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicles from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Charles Beames, executive chairman of York Space Systems, told SpaceNews that the noisy power issue came up during the most recent tests but had not come up in earlier design reviews. He said the addition of the filter is a relatively minor expense and does not require a major rebuild of the satellites. Tournear said these setbacks are to be expected and SDA remains confident it can deploy its constellation at a pace that is much faster than traditional military programs. After both Tranche 0 launches are completed next year, the next target is the launch of the Transport Layer Tranche 1. York Space, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are each building 42 satellites projected to launch in September 2024. “We are absolutely not going to back off our ambitious schedule targets,” Tournear said. The goal for Tranche 1 and beyond remains 30 months from contract award to launch.
Updated after post-impact press conference. LAUREL, Md. — A NASA spacecraft collided with a moon orbiting a near Earth asteroid Sept. 26 in a demonstration of a technology that could one day be used to protect the Earth from a hazardous object. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft hit Dimorphos, an asteroid about 160 meters across orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos, at 7:14 p.m. Eastern. Confirmation of the impact, at a speed of 6.5 kilometers per second, came from a loss of signal from DART at mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL) here. The final approach of DART to Dimorphos appeared to go as planned, with no issues reported by controllers in the last hour. The spacecraft was able to autonomously lock onto Dimorphos and target the asteroid, 160 meters across, with a final reported miss distance of only 17 meters from the center of the asteroid. “Forty minutes out, you were really getting a good feeling,” Ed Reynolds, DART program manager at APL, said at a post-impact briefing. In the final two minutes, when the spacecraft’s trajectory could no longer be changed and it showed it to be on course for impact, “it was just joy. You got to enjoy the moment.” “We saw that we were going to impact. This asteroid was coming into the field of view for the first time. We really had no idea what to expect,” said Elena Adams, mission systems engineer for DART at APL, said. “All of us were kind of holding our breaths.” DART launched last November as NASA’s first dedicated planetary defense mission. The purpose of DART is to test the “kinetic impactor” approach to changing the trajectory of asteroids if one was found to be on a collision course with the Earth. The impact kicks off a campaign of observations to determine the change in the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos. Nancy Chabot, coordination lead for DART at APL, said more than three dozen observatories around the world plan to observe the asteroids using optical and radar instruments to measure the change. “We want to maximize what we’re able to learn from this first planetary defense mission, so we’ve kept the international, worldwide observation campaign pretty open,” she said. Cristina Thomas, observation working group lead for the mission at Northern Arizona University, said those observations will continue for about six months, until Didymos is no longer visible from Earth, to get an extremely precise measurement of the orbit change. An initial measurement of that change should be available in a couple weeks. Telescopes on Earth and in space also observed the impact itself, with some initial reports of a plume of ejecta from the impact visible on ground-based telescopes. Images from LICIACube, an Italian cubesat deployed from DART and which flew by Dimorphos a few minutes after the impact, should be returned over the next several days that may show additional views of the impact. The size of the orbit change will tell how efficient the impact was in changing the orbit, which will be useful for planning for any future missions. Models of the impact show a wide range of potential outcomes based on the composition, structure and shape of Dimorphos. “It’s really dependent on what Dimorphos is made of,” said Angela Stickle of APL, who led modeling efforts ahead of the DART impact. “It’s the reason we’re doing the test, because we don’t know a lot about the asteroid.” While there are wide variations in the size and composition of asteroids, the data from the DART impact can help refine models. “It’s extremely helpful,” said Mallory DeCoster of APL, who also worked on modeling. “Your models need validation with experimental data, even if you have just one data point to extrapolate to.” Carolyn Ernst, instrument scientist for DART’s camera, said Dimorphos looked like a “rubble pile” asteroid that is an agglomeration of smaller rocks rather than a single rock. “It really looks amazing,” she said. “It looks, in a lot of ways, like a lot of other small asteroids that we’ve seen.” While it was popular to state that NASA was “smashing” an asteroid, Dimorphos is likely intact other than a crater a few tens of meters across. DART itself is destroyed, although Stickle said the impact speed was not high enough to vaporize the spacecraft. Some debris may be left behind on the surface, she said, although it’s not clear it would be recognizable. When it comes to the collision between DART and Dimorphos, said Chabot, “the spacecraft is going to lose.”
Nearly 300 space executives from 195 companies filled a University of Colorado auditorium in late July to hear the U.S. Space Force talk about its needs for space domain awareness. Known as SDA, space domain awareness is the military term for space situational awareness, which means knowledge of the space environment. The Air Force Space Command in a 2019 memo said the Defense Department would use the term SDA to convey the message that the military now views space as a domain of war, like sea, air and land. “In a warfighting domain, in addition to knowing what an object in orbit is, we want to know its intent,” F Schnell, senior materiel leader for space domain awareness at U.S. Space Systems Command, told SpaceNews. The Space Systems Command, the procurement arm of the Space Force that hosted the industry meeting, stood up an office dedicated to SDA when it reorganized earlier this year. A key user of SDA technologies is U.S. Space Command. One of its units, the 18th Space Defense Squadron, tracks objects in orbit and issues collision warnings in its role as global space traffic coordinator. DoD plans to hand over some of that responsibility to the U.S. Commerce Department over the next few years so military space operators can focus on SDA. SDA is more complex than traditional space traffic management, Schnell said. It requires tracking objects, analyzing their characteristics, and discriminating benign from aggressive activities in orbit. The Space Force wants to augment the government’s own capabilities with data and analytics tools developed by the private sector, said Schnell. “The technologies that our commercial partners are bringing are absolutely getting after what we need,” he added.“They have matured their capabilities to get after the characterization problem.” Following the July briefing in Colorado, the Space Systems Command invited companies for one-on-one meetings. “I was really amazed by their capabilities,” Schnell said. “A lot of them are building truly commercial use cases and funding structures, with the Space Force being a portion of it, but not the majority of their use cases. So that was wonderful to see.” More meetings are scheduled later this month in Hawaii at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) conference, Schnell said. Maui is home to the 15th Space Surveillance Squadron, a unit of the Space Force’s Space Delta 2 that operates military telescopes. U.S. Space Command, meanwhile, has created other avenues for SDA vendors to get noticed by military buyers. The DRAGON Army program, short for Defense Readiness Agile Gaming Online Network, provides a virtual sandbox where selected companies can bring their software to the command’s Joint Task Force-Space Defense commercial operations cell. These 14-day software sprint events are held in Colorado Springs three times a year. DRAGON Army participants also get access to officials from the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce who attend these sprint events as they evaluate commercial data sources for a future civilian space traffic management system. The Space Systems Command is buying commercial space data for the unified data library, a data repository and online marketplace that can be accessed by defense and intelligence agencies, and will support the Commerce Department’s civilian space traffic management effort. Schnell said the Space Force will continue its market research as it considers procurement strategies to buy commercial SDA services. “What business models are out there and how we can best leverage those business models is part of the ongoing conversation,” he said. “The priority for Space Systems Command is to exploit all the data that we have, buy what we can, and build only what we must.” Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, said a key obstacle preventing DoD from leveraging commercial space technology, including SDA, is fear of vendor lock-in. DoD doesn’t want to become dependent on one specific service or technology — or find that switching vendors is cost prohibitive. “It’s a problem with a lot of the existing DoD procurement programs,” Weeden told SpaceNews. If the government agrees to buy a system from a contractor, typically only that contractor can do software upgrades and maintenance, “and it makes it hard to shop around.” As the military looks to leverage the commercial space market, buyers worry that if they pick one or two companies and give them large contracts, they will disincentivize other players from continuing to invest and innovate. Weeden said the government, in order to capitalize on private investment, has to send a demand signal to the industry so investors stay in the game. Despite vendor lock-in concerns, if the Pentagon wants to keep vendors around, it will need to award contracts for products and services, Weeden added. For nearly a decade, the Pentagon has been talking about using commercial space data, he said, but the rhetoric has not been matched by action. In the SDA sector, “you can’t point to a large contract that the government has given to a commercial entity.” Given the security challenges in the space domain and the proliferation of anti-satellite technology, DoD should accelerate the use of commercial SDA services, said Weeden, who served in the U.S. Air Force as a space control officer. In the early 2000s, the only data that could be had on space objects was the general location, said Weeden. “If an object was tracked by one of the missile warning radars, we could get a radar cross section that would indicate its general size. That was all the information we had. And I suspect it hasn’t gotten much better for the teams currently assigned to this mission.” Since then, commercial SDA technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. “Now you’ve got more than a dozen companies that have their own telescopes, have their own radars, their own other kinds of phenomenology, that are building their own space catalog and doing a lot of really impressive things.” The government, meanwhile, “is still struggling to figure out how to leverage that commercial innovation,” Weeden noted. If DoD selects multiple vendors to support SDA, it will not be in a vendor lock-in situation. To build a profitable business, companies must offer more than just raw data, he said, as the value is in the analysis and insights sold as a subscription service. “Everyone wants to get that recurring subscription income, with more guaranteed revenue.” He noted that in the SDA market, a lot of data is available for free from the U.S. military, which maintains the space tracking catalog and provides conjunction warnings at no cost. This, in some ways, puts the government in competition with the private sector. Several developments in space over the past several months have raised alarms across the space and national security communities. Events such as Russia blowing up a satellite in low Earth orbit, China deploying a spacecraft with a robotic arm, and a Russian vehicle reportedly stalking a U.S. spy satellite have gotten the Pentagon’s attention. A panel of advisers to the secretary of defense, the Defense Policy Board, is scheduled to receive classified briefings this month on Chinese and Russian space weapons and space policy doctrine, according to a Federal Register notice. Space Force deputy chief of space operations, Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, said the military needs to “understand potential adversaries on orbit, their capabilities, their weapons, their operations, tactics and intentions.” Saltzman, nominated to be the next four-star chief of the Space Force, said in a speech at the GEOINT Symposium in Denver this spring that the ability to prove who did what in space is necessary in order to deter aggressive behavior. “I think it’s time we start considering attribution as a military mission,” he said. Eric Desautels, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification and compliance, said intelligence about space objects today is not precise enough to be able to differentiate between benign and potentially nefarious activities. A ground-launched missile aimed at a low-orbiting spacecraft is clearly an anti-satellite weapon, he said. But other systems now being deployed in space are dual use. A case in point is the Chinese satellite that a private company, ExoAnalytic Solutions, detected docking with a defunct spacecraft in December. China called it a debris removal system, but some U.S. officials said it was a demonstration of an anti-satellite weapon. “Defining what a weapon in space is is very challenging,” Desautels said Aug. 24 at a space policy conference in Washington. “We haven’t gotten there yet … we observe behaviors and try to determine intent.” Space policy experts worry that if a space vehicle is inaccurately characterized, tensions could escalate and lead to broader conflict. In a recent report on the U.S. space industrial base, experts from the Defense Innovation Unit, the Air Force, and Space Force said the government needs to bring in commercial solutions to fill increasingly complex needs for SDA. “There remains a significant lack of coverage, both in the number of sensors and the orbital diversity and geometry of those sensors,” said the report. “Comprehensive SDA means responsive detection, characterization, and custody in order to update the catalog and dependent models faster.” The report warned the U.S. is “not postured to adequately execute intelligence and space traffic management missions.” The private sector for years has been investing in SDA capabilities and is hoping the government will buy services at scale, said Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot Aerospace. Slingshot recently acquired Numerica, a company that operates a network of optical space sensors and has participated in the Space Command commercial cell’s demonstrations. “We help the government understand how they could use that data. But I think they’ve got to do that faster,” said Stricklan. “It’s not getting any safer on orbit.” Companies keep hearing the government is not ready to sign contracts due to concerns about vendor lock-in, said Stricklan, noting that she doesn’t believe these worries are justified. To understand the space environment, DoD will need to work with a diversity of suppliers, she said. “You need a layered approach to space domain awareness so that we can get those predictive models.” Space Force and Space Command are now far more knowledgeable about the capabilities of the industry due to activities like the commercial cell and DRAGON Army, said Stricklan. But they need to find a way to keep working with companies beyond experiments and small business research projects. “What the government perceives as vendor lock is a myth,” she said. “When you subscribe to something, just like on your iPhone, you’re not in a vendor lock situation.” Siamak Hesar, co-founder and CEO of Kayhan Space, said companies see signals from the Space Force that they are interested in commercial capabilities. “But I wish they would accelerate that process because we have been discussing this for quite a while now,” he said. “We keep hearing conversations, but we haven’t seen any notable action.” Kayhan developed a collision-avoidance software platform that automatically tells a client satellite how to maneuver to avoid a threat. Hesar said the company has over a dozen customers and has won small-business research grants from DoD, but so far, no government contracts to buy the service. At the industry meeting the Space Systems Command hosted in Colorado, “there was a lot of discussion about utilizing commercial capabilities,” but how that will be implemented remains unclear, Hesar said. A common fear in the industry is that the Space Force will try to “reinvent the wheel” and develop systems in-house that already exist in the commercial world, Hesar said. Space Command leaders, for example, have publicly voiced concerns that the 18th Space Defense Squadron crews are overworked due to the proliferation of satellites and debris. This is an area where commercial systems can provide immediate help, Hesar said. “We have a tool that can do conjunction assessments autonomously.” If DoD doesn’t move forward with contracts, “some companies might get frustrated and go and sell their services to Europe or Middle Eastern countries,” Hesar said. Activities like the DRAGON Army sprint exercises are helpful, he said, but it can be costly for small businesses to support government demonstrations on their own dime, in addition to their normal day-to-day operations. Hesar said the government can take advantage of proven and available commercial capabilities. “And if one fails or one goes down, there are others,” he added. The cost to acquire multiple commercial services will still be “faster and cheaper than building stuff from scratch.” Ghonhee Lee, founder and CEO of Katalyst Space Technologies, said commercial companies want to see the government “shift their contractual vehicles to take advantage of data-as-a-service models.” Katalyst is one of eight startups selected in July for a Space Force-funded accelerator focused on SDA technologies. The three-month accelerator is currently underway at the Catalyst Campus in Colorado Springs. Lee’s company developed a sensor payload aimed at the commercial market for in-space docking and satellite servicing. But until demand picks up for commercial services, the company is focused on the military market. Katalyst is offering an SDA sensor that could be installed on any satellite. Lee said the Space Force has agreed to test the payload on an experimental satellite in geostationary orbit projected to launch in 2024. The project is an example of how the Space Force could use commercial technology to keep an eye on threats in orbit, said Lee. These dual-use systems are attractive to commercial investors that demand multiple use cases, said Lee. “We can use our payload for debris monitoring and to help the Space Force track threats in orbit.” With funding from U.S. Air Force small business innovation research contracts, Katalyst developed software to help characterize objects in orbit, said Lee. “Using advanced algorithms, we can get considerable intelligence about a spacecraft and help with the attribution element, which is obviously very important.” This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Microsoft said Dec. 14 it is partnering with satellite operator Viasat to find solutions for bringing internet access to 10 million unserved or underserved people within three years. Viasat is the first satellite operator to join Microsoft’s Airband initiative, which aims to deliver connectivity to a quarter of a billion people by the end of 2025 through a mix of technologies. Microsoft set up Airband in 2017 and said the initiative had enabled high-speed internet access for more than 51 million people globally — about 20% of its goal. In addition to telcos, Airband seeks to facilitate connectivity-enabling partnerships among equipment makers, local and regional energy access providers, nonprofits, and governmental and non-governmental organizations. “Microsoft and Viasat will jointly review options to co-invest on a project-by-project basis,” Evan Dixon, Viasat’s president of global fixed broadband, told SpaceNews . The companies will first look at projects that could leverage Viasat’s fleet of existing satellites in geostationary orbit, including its upcoming ViaSat-3 constellation. However, Dixon said Viasat will also explore solutions from low Earth orbit in its search to deliver “broadband in the most productive and cost-effective manner.” Half of the 10 million people the companies are partnering to reach are in Africa, where they said Viasat’s support would help expand Airband’s work for the first time to Egypt, Senegal, and Angola. Only 40% of Africa’s roughly 1.4 billion population is currently online, according to data from the United Nations. “Working with Viasat, we will use satellite to reach remote areas that previously have had few, if any, options for conventional connectivity,” Teresa Hutson, Microsoft’s vice president of technology and corporate responsibility, said in a statement. “Together, we will be able to rapidly scale and expand Airband’s reach, exploring a wider pipeline of projects and new countries where we haven’t yet worked.” According to Microsoft, Airband has helped connect nine million people in Africa to date across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria. By the end of 2025, it aims to have helped connect 100 million people on the continent. Microsoft said the partnership with Viasat builds on the relationship its data center business already has with the company — in addition to other satellite operators — via Azure Space, which aims to integrate terrestrial and space networks to enable global cloud access with low latency.
OneWeb is considering plans for a second-generation constellation jointly with Eutelsat ahead of closing their proposed merger, executives for the satellite operators said Sept. 12. The companies “do not need to wait” for the six to nine months it could take for their merger to clear shareholder and regulatory approvals, OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson said during World Satellite Business Week here. If OneWeb can leverage Eutelsat’s fleet in geostationary orbit (GEO), Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said the low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband startup “might not need quite as many new satellites in order to address peak capacity.” The British LEO startup has deployed about two-thirds of the 648 LEO satellites in its current generation constellation. It has launch agreements with SpaceX and India’s space agency to complete the network by the end of spring. Before the operators announced plans July 26 to merge their businesses, OneWeb’s Gen 2 was expected to feature far more satellites than the current generation to improve its connectivity services. Berneke also said the operators might look to jointly develop a ground network for the upgraded constellation to carve out hybrid network synergies. The companies plan to provide more details about the cost of Gen 2 in mid-October. Berneke said she expects the companies will be able to issue a request for quote (RFQ) for Gen 2 in about six months, and then finalize the design of the constellation six months after that. The merged company plans to pursue business-to-business and business-to-consumer connectivity markets they expect to grow to by three and five times, respectively, over the next decade to a combined $16 billion. The “demand is not a problem here,” Masterson said, “fulfillment is the problem.” According to Masterson, combining OneWeb and Eutelsat’s technologies will unlock more use cases to capture this expanding connectivity market. While Eutelsat’s GEO satellites can deliver more capacity to congested areas, OneWeb’s LEO network offers reduced latency and pole-to-pole coverage. One of the growth avenues the companies are exploring is using OneWeb Gen 2 to support Europe’s plans for a sovereign satellite network constellation. Although the U.K. will continue to hold a “golden share” in the LEO operator following its merger with France-based Eutelsat, which grants the British government special voting rights, Masterson said the combined group could implement measures that would safeguard European sovereignty. He said OneWeb and Eutelsat already have similar firewalls in their organizations for serving government customers. “It’s absolutely normal,” he added, “it’s done day in, day out by all the major satellite operators. “And so there’s no reason why that model can’t be transferred to Europe or any other country.” OneWeb has also reserved options for 90% of the launch capacity it will require for Gen 2, Masterson said without elaborating. In June, OneWeb announced it will launch some of its Gen 2 satellites on a launch vehicle being developed by Relativity Space as soon as 2025. Speaking to SpaceNews on the conference’s sidelines, Berneke said the companies plan to pool their launch reservations together, including slots Eutelsat has booked on new launch vehicles from Arianespace and Blue Origin. She said Eutelsat has been “building an inventory of access to space,” and has four or five launches in reserve over the next five to six years. OneWeb also has about 60 replacement satellites for its current generation, she added, which means it could hold off from launching Gen 2 until 2026. “They can prolong the life a little bit, but we do want to have the Gen 2 up there because that will have new functionality, more capacity [and will be] cheaper, so we’re not going to prolong Gen 1 forever,” she said.
A Chinese reusable experimental spacecraft remains in orbit nearly two weeks after launch, despite passing directly over its expected landing site early Monday. The “reusable experiment spacecraft” launched from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert atop of a Long March 2F rocket Aug. 4 and has remained in 346 by 593 kilometer orbit inclined by 50 degrees since launch, according to tracking by the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (18 SDS). Though China has released no details of the mission, there are clear differences from the spacecraft’s apparent first outing in September 2020. The new mission orbit is more eccentric than that of the first, when the spaceplane spent two days in an orbit of 331 by 347 kilometers. The previous mission saw the spaceplane release a small test satellite emitting S-band radio signals. The sat was possibly similar to the small Banxing satellites released by previous Shenzhou crewed missions to make observations. This time 18 SDS tracked seven objects in orbit along with the spaceplane (NORAD: 53357). While some are debris from the Long March 2F second stage, one or both of a pair of unknown objects could be inspector satellites to track the main spacecraft. The spacecraft is also spending a much longer time in orbit, passing up a good opportunity for landing. At 0700 UTC Monday the spaceplane was due to pass over the Lop Nur base in Xinjiang, the reported site for the 2020 mission landing. The spacecraft remained in orbit however, tracking from 18 SDS confirms. China’s 2020 and ongoing 2022 spaceplane missions have been highly classified, with no images of the spacecraft nor its launch released. When the spacecraft will land is also not known. The terse news report from Chinese media following the Aug. 4 launch stated that the test spacecraft will “operate in orbit for a period of time” before returning to its intended landing site in China, mirroring the report from the first mission. Surprisingly, given the prior level of secrecy surrounding the project, apparent debris from the recent Long March 2F launch was put on display at a middle school in the city of Jiyuan in Henan province, notably including payload fairing. The fairing appears to be a modified version of the 4.2-meter-diameter, 12.7-meter-long shroud used previously with the Long March 2F to launch 8-metric-ton Tiangong test space labs. The fairing shows additions which could have been made to accommodate the extra wingspan of a reusable winged spacecraft, similar to the U.S. X-37B uncrewed spaceplane. When it does land, the spaceplane is expected to touch down horizontally at a landing strip near Lop Nur. Satellite imagery shows recent activity near the landing strip. While there is little information about the mission, the project appears to fit into space transportation development plans outlined by CASC, China’s main space contractor, and its major subsidiaries. CASC has previously iterated plans to develop low-cost, reliable access to space, including reusable launch vehicles and a spaceplane. The project, as described, would need to be scaled up dramatically from the test spacecraft currently in orbit. A once-every-five-year space “white paper” released by the State Council Information Office in January stated that China would, “continue to strengthen research into key technologies for reusable space transport systems, and conduct test flights accordingly.” Chen Hongbo, from CASC’s China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), told Science and Technology Daily ( Chinese ) in 2017 that an under-development reusable spacecraft would be capable of carrying both crew and payloads, would be tested in 2020. Long Lehao, a veteran chief designer of the Long March rocket series, last month presented a range of space transportation concepts during a public lecture, including a spaceplane render, viewable here . Meanwhile, the U.S. X-37B spaceplane is currently carrying out its sixth mission, which has already extended to more than 800 days in orbit.
Spire Global said Sept. 15 it will build three 16U cubesats launching in 2023 to expand Canadian greenhouse gas-monitoring operator GHGSat’s constellation. The three satellites, each the size of 16 cubesats, are slated to join the six similarly sized spacecraft that GHGSat currently operates in low Earth orbit. Joel Spark, co-founder and general manager of Spire’s space services business, told SpaceNews these cubesats would be dedicated to GHGSat and not host other payloads. He said the satellites will launch in late 2023, although Spire has not yet allocated them a berth under the multi-launch agreements it has in place with launch providers he did not specify. “By deferring the allocation to closer to the customer’s desired launch time, we’re able to give our customers a high degree of flexibility and protect them from schedule issues with any one vehicle or provider,” he said. GHGSat’s six operating satellites were built by the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory (SFL), which is building three more spacecraft targeted for launch in the first half of 2023. Switzerland-based ABB has an agreement to provide the gas-detection payloads for GHGSat’s six upcoming satellites. ABB also provided the payloads for GHGSat’s current constellation of six satellites, which the operator has been using to track methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and other industries. “Hosting GHGSat payloads on Spire satellites allows us to focus on monitoring rather than on satellite manufacturing and operations,” GHGSat CEO Stephane Germain said in a statement. “Having successfully completed and launched our initial satellite assets, GHGSat plans to add hosted payload solutions to complement our full satellite solutions to accelerate monitoring.” Additional satellites will enable GHGSat to broaden its coverage and provide more timely insights for applications including the detection of emission leaks. Jean-Francois Gauthier, GHGSat’s vice president of measurements and strategic initiatives, said the satellite operator also aims to expand its use of drones to improve its analysis. Early demand for GHGSat’s methane-tracking services came from the private sector, Gauthier said Sept. 15 during a World Satellite Business Week panel here. Companies are seeking to understand more about the greenhouse gases they emit for their “investors, shareholders — also to do the right thing on the environmental side,” he said. He said the startup is also gaining traction from government and regulatory agencies. “It’s a much slower developing aspect,” he added, “mainly in our case because of the acceptance of new technologies and the validation that’s required to gain confidence in the results and the quality of the data.” Gauthier said GHGSat recently achieved a key technology readiness milestone with the European Space Agency that paves the way toward “having more and more of these discussions” with governments. One of the three satellites Spire is developing will carry the GHGSat’s first payload for detecting carbon dioxide emissions, Gauthier told SpaceNews . He said GHGSat will likely need to order future satellites depending on demand, but has not decided whether to choose Spire or SFL for these. Spire is seeing growing demand for the space-as-a-service side of its business, where it manages payload integration, launch, and mission operations for the payloads it hosts. Spire mainly provides data-gathering and analysis solutions across maritime, aviation, weather, climate, and other markets under its primary business. The company, which went public in August 2021, outlined potential plans Sept. 14 to raise up to $180 million by selling shares. Spire declined to comment on how it would use these funds.
TAMPA, Fla. — Danish startup Quadsat said June 16 it has secured European Space Agency funding to productize the drones it uses to calibrate and test satellite antennas. At the end of the 10-month 500,000 euro ($525,000) ESA contract, Quadsat CEO Joakim Espeland said the company aims to launch its first drone that customers can operate themselves to test their networks. Quadsat currently has to send technicians to the customers that want to use its quadcopters as stand-ins for satellites. The quadcopters are integrated with custom radio frequency payloads that help operators, including megaconstellation startup OneWeb , verify ground segment antennas more efficiently outside laboratory conditions. In March, Quadsat announced it had also worked alongside ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) to test antennas as large as 15 meters in Sweden. “This funding will make it easier to launch a more productised version as currently it is service-led,” Joakim Espeland told SpaceNews via email. “This will make it easier to scale the solution, making drone-based testing more widely available.” The funding came from ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) Core Competitiveness program, which supports the development of innovative satellite communications products, services and systems. Including a previous 250,000 euro funding round with ESA, Espeland said QuadSat has so far raised about $5 million in total. He said the company plans to raise more funding to expand its operations. Quadsat says its drones use specialized software for flight automation and frequency measurements that can be used in any location. The company sees strong demand for its antenna-testing solutions from low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations. LEO operators traditionally use a visible geostationary (GEO) satellite to calibrate gateways outside the lab. However, the closer the gateway is to the poles the trickier it is to get an unobstructed view of a GEO satellite to lock onto, because of how low they appear on the horizon. Beacons on top of large structures can also be built to characterize gateways, which Quadsat says are often logistically challenging to use and limit the range of possible tests.
LOGAN, Utah — NASA is investigating alternative ways to launch four Earth science cubesats after Astra discontinued the rocket originally contracted to launch them. Four Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) cubesats were to launch on two Rocket 3.3 vehicles by Astra, after the first two TROPICS cubesats were lost in a June 12 launch failure on another Rocket 3.3 . However, Astra announced Aug. 4 it was canceling all remaining Rocket 3.3 launches to focus on the much larger Rocket 4. The Rocket 3 series of vehicles had reached orbit successfully on only two launches in seven attempts. With Rocket 3.3 no longer available, NASA is looking for alternative options to launch the remaining TROPICS cubesats. “We are still looking for a ride and, once the ride is found, we’ll launch it,” said Sachidananda Babu, a program manager in NASA’s Earth science division, during a NASA town hall meeting at the Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 8. Astra executives said in the earnings call where they announced the termination of the Rocket 3 program that NASA was considering launching TROPICS on the new Rocket 4. “We are in discussions with NASA to proceed with TROPICS on Launch System 2.0,” said Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra. Launch System 2.0 includes Rocket 4 and its ground systems. However, Rocket 4 would be a poor fit for TROPICS, as the vehicle is designed to place up to 600 kilograms into low Earth orbit, where each TROPICS cubesat weighs only a few kilograms. TROPICS has specific orbit requirements — an altitude of 550 kilometers and inclination of about 30 degrees — needed to meet its science goals. That orbit, though, is not commonly used by other spacecraft, ruling out rideshare opportunities. “We need to go to a 30-degree inclined orbit and no one else really wants to go there. The rideshares are all going to sun-synchronous orbits or mid-inclinations, so it’s very well targeted to a smaller vehicle with a very targeted insertion where they can get us exactly where we want to go,” said William Blackwell, principal investigator for TROPICS at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in a video about the mission produced before the June launch failure. Astra’s contract with NASA called for three dedicated Rocket 3.3 launches, each carrying two TROPICS cubesats. The satellites would be placed in three orbital planes to maximize revisits of tropical latitudes to study the formation of tropical storms. TROPICS, though, can meet its science goals with just four satellites. Agency sources said Astra’s announcement that the company was discontinuing the Rocket 3.3 took them by surprise. Switching vehicles poses cost and schedule challenges that NASA is still studying. However, even before the announcement, NASA was looking into alternative options while awaiting the outcome of the investigation into the June launch failure. Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division, said at an Aug. 2 meeting of its Earth Science Advisory Committee that she was in discussions with the Launch Services Program “to figure out what that path forward will be” for launching the remaining TROPICS cubesats.
U.S. troops at Thule Air Base, Greenland, a remote military outpost well outside the footprint of a typical geostationary satellite, are getting high-speed internet from OneWeb’s polar-orbiting constellation. Hughes Network Systems and OneWeb announced June 22 that they have successfully deployed a prototype low Earth orbit network at Thule, fast enough to enable video conferencing, streaming video and interactive games. The network supports about 600 service members living at the base. One recent evening, about 100 military personnel at Thule “were online simultaneously, consuming close to a terabyte of connectivity,” Hughes said in a news release. Thule Air Base is home to U.S. military units that conduct missile warning, space tracking, and satellite command-and-control operations. The Hughes-OneWeb demonstration is significant as high-speed internet connectivity in the Arctic region is hard to come by. For decades, Iridium Communications has been the only operator able to provide continuous coverage over the poles — and only for less bandwidth-hungry services such as mobile telephony and various monitoring and tracking applications. Hughes and OneWeb are working under a $3.4 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory. AFRL oversees the U.S. Air Force’s Defense Experimentation Using the Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program. Hughes, the prime contractor on the Thule project, is a OneWeb investor and is supplying portions of the ground segment. Built in the 1950s, Thule is the northernmost U.S. military installation, located less than 1,000 miles from the North Pole. “The testing has demonstrated the ability of emerging LEO networks to dramatically improve communications to areas that have traditionally been extremely difficult to serve,” said AFRL program manager Brian Beal. “The residents at Thule have been thrilled with both the performance and stability of the network as they’ve used it to connect with family, friends, and colleagues around the world.” Hughes said the Thule LEO network includes four antennas connecting with the OneWeb satellites that orbit overhead, delivering about 14 terabytes of data per month.
Maxar Technologies, a space company headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, has gained global attention with its high-resolution satellite images of the Ukraine war. The company also operates a satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, a business that delivered more than 100 large geostationary communications satellites over the past three decades but now faces headwinds from declining orders. To offset a downturn in commercial satellite sales, Maxar is positioning itself to compete in the national security arena, Chris Johnson, head of Maxar’s satellite manufacturing operations, told SpaceNews. The company this month scored a big win as a subcontractor to L3Harris Technologies, which won a $700 million contract from the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency to produce 14 satellites to launch in 2025. SDA is building a low Earth orbit constellation of data transport and missile-tracking satellites for DoD. Maxar on Aug. 9 announced it was selected by L3Harris to supply 14 satellite buses. The geostationary satellite market “is still important but not quite the size that it was before,” he said. “So we are working to transform this business and diversify into other areas.” Johnson, whose official title is senior vice president and general manager of space, was a long-time Boeing satellite executive before joining Maxar just over a year ago to help the company raise its profile in the U.S. government market. Just four years ago, Maxar was considering selling or even shutting down its commercial geostationary (GEO) satellite business but instead restructured it to emphasize smaller satellites and government sales. “We are not wavering at this point,” Johnson said. “We’re investing in our people and our processes and facilities and trying to keep a clear focus.” For decades, the company worked almost exclusively with commercial customers but has won some civil space contracts in recent years from NASA. Several years ago it set a goal to split its sales one-third each between commercial, civil and national security space. Johnson said key target customers are defense and intelligence agencies pivoting to multi-orbit systems. Future architectures will be a mix of LEO, MEO (medium Earth orbit), GEO and even beyond GEO satellites, he said. “That’s really where we’re headed.” Maxar’s interest in working with the Space Development Agency came to light in October 2021 when Maxar filed a bid protest over a solicitation SDA had issued in August for the Transport Layer Tranche 1, a procurement of 126 small satellites. Maxar challenged the solicitation on the grounds that the terms unfairly favored certain companies over others. “There was an appearance that we limited competition,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said at the time. The Government Accountability Office dismissed the protest after SDA agreed to cancel the solicitation and reopen a new one under a different contracting mechanism known as Other Transaction Authority, which requires large defense contractors to team up with commercial players. Maxar ultimately did not win a Transport Layer Tranche 1 award, and those contracts went to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems. Johnson said Maxar has moved on from the protest. “We had a lot of really candid discussions with our partners on the government side and our future partners,” he said. “That was kind of a unique moment in time, and I think we’ve moved forward and feel like we have the right capabilities and value.” At Maxar’s 80,000-square-meter factory in the San Francisco Bay Area, approximately 2,000 workers are building 15 spacecraft, including six WorldView Legion imaging satellites for Maxar’s Earth observation constellation. Johnson said a top priority is to complete the six Legion satellites and launch them to orbit as soon as possible to meet growing demands for 30-centimeter-resolution optical imagery. After years of delays, the first two Legions are projected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022. The other satellites currently in production are geostationary spacecraft for commercial customers, including four Intelsat communications satellites funded by C-band spectrum proceeds. Fleet operators Intelsat and SES ordered 13 satellites in 2020 from Boeing, Maxar, Northrop Grumman and Thales Alenia Space. These operators have to clear C-band spectrum for cellular 5G networks to qualify for $9.7 billion in incentive payments from the Federal Communications Commission. The C-band auction created an artificial bump in the commercial satcom market, and these orders will help Maxar keep production lines going until at least 2024, said industry analyst Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics. In addition to the six Legion and four Intelsat C-band satellites, Maxar is producing a next-generation Intelsat 40E, two Sirius XM radio satellites, the Jupiter 3 comsat for EchoStar’s Hughes Network Systems and a Legion-class geostationary satellite for Ovzon, a Swedish provider of broadband services. Maxar has a relatively short window to line up new customers before the current backlog is completed, Quilty said. In the face of a downturn in the GEO satellite market, Maxar has been trying to pivot toward the LEO sector but has suffered setbacks, including a failed bid to build Canadian operator Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation. The business also has been impacted by the trend among satellite operators toward vertical integration. Maxar, for example, used to build imaging satellites for Planet’s SkySat constellation before Planet transitioned to in-house satellite manufacturing. Quilty said winning SDA contracts could be “game-changing” for the company given that the agency intends to acquire several hundred satellites in increments every two years as it builds out tranches of its Transport Layer and Tracking Layer constellations. He noted that Maxar scored a handful of NASA contracts over the past few years, helping to increase the company’s government portfolio. In 2019 Maxar was selected by NASA to build and perform a spaceflight demonstration of the lunar Gateway’s power and propulsion element spacecraft, a key component to NASA’s plans to land astronauts on the moon. Under a 2016 contract, Maxar also developed NASA’s On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (OSAM-1) mission that will refuel a satellite in LEO. Most recently, Maxar delivered the solar electric propulsion chassis for NASA’s Psyche mission to explore an asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The mission was projected to launch this year but has been delayed due to software testing issues. Johnson said he could not discuss the specifics of the testing problems and cited NASA’s recent comments that the agency is trying to figure out a new plan for Psyche. Quilty noted that Maxar’s NASA programs are tailing off, and the company has not signed any new major deals to replace them. Hiring Johnson to run the space infrastructure business was a clear sign that Maxar is eager to up its game in the government market, Quilty said. Under Johnson’s tenure, Maxar has won some small development programs for government space demonstrations, “orders that they hope they can turn into bigger contracts.” Quilty said Maxar is better positioned for smaller orders of higher value satellites than for mass-production of lower-cost hardware. Going after high-volume, low-cost production would require a substantial retooling of their operations, “which might not be a smart decision for them,” he said. “Maxar, for better or worse, is considered an old space manufacturing company. Their expertise is in building rugged, survivable hardware.” The Legion bus is flexible enough to serve any number of government or commercial customers, Quilty said. “Anytime you have a proven heritage bus where you’ve got an existing supply chain, it becomes an attractive platform.” Austin Moeller, aerospace and defense analyst at the Canaccord Genuity investment bank, estimated that Maxar’s space infrastructure business is on track to generate about $735 million of the company’s projected $1.9 billion in overall revenues for 2022. Given the uncertainty in the commercial GEO satellite market, the message from Maxar leaders in recent earnings calls is that once the C-band auctions are over, the company will need government orders. The SDA contract is a significant one, Moeller said. For the Tracking Layer, Maxar will be using a new, modular satellite bus designed for proliferated low Earth orbit constellations. “This is a major step for Maxar,” he said Aug. 9 in a research note. Profit margins on the Tranche 1 production, Moeller said. “will be lower due to the development work required, but the company intends to leverage this clean sheet design to sell into an array of other government and commercial programs going forward.” Defense and intelligence “just tends to be a more stable market and a lot less bumpy than the commercial comsat market,” Moeller said. “And when you look at the defense budget, the Space Force has the fastest growing budget of any of the service branches.” “Certainly DoD has deep pockets right now with the Ukraine conflict and wanting to build out a distributed satellite capability in orbit, and the bigger Space Force budget,” he said, so it would be smart for Maxar to start gaining a foothold in that market. Maxar’s Earth intelligence business has been hugely successful on the government side, having recently won a $3.2 billion deal from the National Reconnaissance Office to supply satellite imagery over the next 10 years, Moeller noted. “So I’m sure they’re trying to mirror that on the satellite manufacturing side.” A turning point for Maxar’s satellite business came in December 2019 when executives announced a deal to sell and lease back the Palo Alto facility to boost the company’s bottom line. Johnson said the company made a deliberate decision to keep manufacturing satellites but decided it needed to compete more aggressively in the defense and commercial LEO segments. Johnson said that the plan is to invest in manufacturing capabilities to support commercial, civil and national security space and push commonality across all three segments. “That’s really how you get to speed, and that’s how you get the price points down.” Maxar is also investing in marketing talent, he said. Selling to defense agencies “takes some different sales chops” than what is required for commercial sales. “What is mission success for a commercial customer might be different than how the U.S. government customer or an international government customer might see it.” At Maxar’s factory today, “it is kind of standing room only,” said Johnson. At the same time, the company recognizes that it needs to move quickly to secure orders to keep going into the future, he said. Johnson pointed out that it was more difficult for Maxar to compete for defense and intelligence contracts until it officially became a U.S. corporation about two years ago when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA. “Those hurdles are now gone,” he said. The Canadian firm MDA purchased the Palo Alto-based satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral in 2012 and in 2017 acquired the Westminster-based Earth-imaging firm DigitalGlobe. The combined companies were rebranded Maxar Technologies in 2018, and MDA was sold off in 2020. The company’s origin goes back to 1957. Western Development Laboratories, a division of Philco, was the first building block of what would eventually become Maxar. Western Development Laboratories launched its first communications satellite in 1960, The following year, Philco was purchased by Ford Motor Co. The combined Philco-Ford became Space Systems Loral in 1990. “Our heritage goes back to the beginning of the space age,” said Johnson. “What we need to do as Maxar is to continue to tell that story.” This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman — President Biden’s pick to serve as chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force — told lawmakers Sept. 13 in a confirmation hearing that China’s aggressive pursuit of advanced technologies is “the most immediate threat” to U.S. satellite capabilities and ground infrastructure. The Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing for Saltzman, who is poised to get a fourth star and become the second chief of space operations, or CSO, succeeding Gen. John “Jay” Raymond. Saltzman has served as deputy chief of space operations since 2020 and is expected to be swiftly confirmed. SASC Chairman Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and other members of the committee told Saltzman that they looked forward to supporting his nomination. Many of the questions posed to Saltzman during the hearing were about the current and future capabilities of the Space Force to defend U.S. satellites from increasingly advanced anti-satellite weapons that China and Russia are developing. The Space Force is an independent military service under the Department of the Air Force. It has nearly 8,000 uniformed members known as guardians, and about an equal number of civilian employees charged with operating and protecting U.S. satellites — including GPS, communications and missile-warning constellations — and supporting systems that provide critical services to the armed forces. “We are still the greatest spacefaring nation on the planet,” Saltzman said. “The Space Force’s capabilities, what we can provide to the joint force, are extremely capable and I still put us at the head of the table.” “Unfortunately, our adversaries are investing heavily to close that gap and supersede us. I’m worried about the pace with which they are making those changes,” he added. “China first amongst them, but Russia is also committed to investing heavily in the kinds of capabilities that are going to disrupt, degrade and even destroy our on-orbit capabilities. And so it’s that pace of change and their commitment to disabling it, that’s most concerning to me,” Cyber attacks like those seen during the Ukraine war are worrisome, he said. “We see how important it is to defend our cyber networks, because those cyber networks create vulnerabilities, if attacked, to actual space capabilities. And so when I look across what we’re seeing in that Ukrainian theater, I see some important lessons that we should take to heart in terms of building our Space Force design.” Saltzman said one of his top priorities “is to make sure that we’re on track to build and field effective capabilities and then train the guardians to operate in a contested domain so that we can counter this activity by our strategic competitors.” The Biden administration adopted a self-imposed ban on anti-satellite (ASAT) tests that create debris in orbit, and plans to seek a UN resolution that could compel more nations to join the ban. In response to questions about the U.S. policy on ASAT tests, Saltzman said anti-satellite missile tests are “the most dangerous” because of the damage that the debris can cause. In adopting that ban, he said, “we don’t give up much because we have other ways to test our capabilities. But we lead by saying we’re not going to intentionally create debris in space … Building a coalition of like minded spacefaring nations around a set of responsible behaviors will create peer pressure, if you will, for the international community to deem certain activities professional and responsible and other activities to be irresponsible.” Use of commercial space technologies The Space Force will need to tap the commercial market for innovative technologies to supplement government systems, said Saltzman. The procurement culture favors bespoke purpose-built systems but now the Space Systems Command is trying to change that, he said. “They’ve adopted a mantra about exploiting what we have, buying what we can and only building what we must. And I think having that open thought process for how best to bring capabilities to bear will actually streamline the process and make us do a better job.” “It’s a top priority as CSO to get the most we can from the private sector,” he said. To make satellite networks more difficult for enemies to attack, for example, the Space Force will use lower cost commercial-type small satellites, Saltzman said.. “We’re doing distributed architectures because they’re more resilient,” he added. “We’re trying to think about ways to to disaggregate our payloads so they’re not easy targets.” Some technologies that the Space Force currently doesn’t have and will need are modern training tools. “We don’t have simulators that allow our operators to practice their tactics against a thinking adversary, even if it’s a simulated adversary,” said Saltzman. “We don’t have good simulators. We don’t have ranges where they can routinely practice their tradecraft. We don’t have the ability to link multiple units together so they can practice the coordination that’s necessary to do large force deployments.” The U.S. military “has been operating in a benign environment for so long, we didn’t need to necessarily have those kinds of capabilities. And so I think over the next few years, we’re going to have to look at that and be as specific as we can, and provide that kind of training and experience to our operators.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Starlink is deepening its foothold in Japan as SpaceX’s satellite broadband service looks to expand elsewhere in Asia, which will be critical for generating much-needed revenues. Japanese telco KDDI announced a deal Oct. 12 to resell Starlink to its enterprise and civil government customers this year — days after SpaceX said it had launched its first services in Asia through Japan. Starlink is currently available around Tokyo and a part of the country extending north of the megalopolis, according to its availability map . The company expects to make the service available elsewhere in Japan before the end of this year. KDDI said it would act as an “authorized Starlink integrator” under its deal with SpaceX. The Tokyo-based telco has been conducting technical demonstrations on Starlink’s low Earth orbit (LEO) network since 2021, which it says proved the service’s quality and performance for applications that include mobile backhaul. The tests were conducted under an experimental license from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which enabled the companies to operate a ground station in the country to access Starlink’s network. “With Japan having more than 16,000 mountains and 6,000 islands, Starlink’s industry-leading satellite constellation is uniquely suited to provide Japanese enterprises with reliable, sustainable internet connectivity, even in times of natural disaster,” KDDI President Makoto Takahashi said in a statement. Enterprise and government markets are also important growth areas for OneWeb. The British LEO broadband operator partnered with KDDI rival SoftBank in May 2021 to bring its satellite services to Japan. However, OneWeb’s expansion has been delayed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put the kibosh on a series of Soyuz launches OneWeb was counting on to complete deployment by the middle of 2022. OneWeb plans to resume satellite deployments later this month with a flurry of launches from India and SpaceX. Those five launches are slated to complete within six months to expand OneWeb’s coverage beyond the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, SpaceX has continued an aggressive launch campaign for Starlink satellites and has lofted more than 3,400 of them to date to build out global coverage. SpaceX has steadily brought Starlink online in more than 40 countries while it begins to build traction in Asia. The Philippines in July approved Starlink’s plan to create a local subsidiary in the country to “expedite the service’s immediate roll-out,” as it sought to become the first country in Southeast Asia to access Starlink. Starlink’s availability map shows services becoming available for the Philippines in the fourth quarter of 2022, despite local reports citing a government official that its launch has been delayed from December to the first half of 2023. Last year, India ordered Starlink to stop taking deposits from potential customers before getting a license to operate in the country, leading to the resignation of the executive that had overseen its expansion there. Citing people with knowledge of the matter, the Economic Times of India reported Oct. 12 that SpaceX was preparing to apply for a license in India to provide Starlink services. India is estimated to have the second-largest population in the world with more than 1.4 billion people. It is set to overtake China as the most populous country in 2023, according to a recent report from the United Nations . China, however, has tighter control over its citizens’ access to communications and information. The Chinese government has sought assurances that Starlink would not be sold in China , SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the Financial Times in an article published Oct. 7. Starlink’s availability map shows services for other countries in Asia are due to come online this year or next. Successfully expanding into more regions will be important for Starlink as it seeks to gain a critical mass of subscribers for financial stability. “Should be noted that Starlink is still far from cash flow positive,” Musk tweeted Oct. 4 . “All LEO communications constellations to date have gone bankrupt, so any support is super helpful.” Starlink has also been expanding its range of services to tap into different markets since launching with a focus on residential consumer broadband more than two years ago. In addition to a business-level subscription tier for heavy bandwidth users, the company has recently rolled out a maritime service and a subscription package designed for customers with recreational vehicles (RVs). Starlink for RVs had more than 100,000 customers as of Oct. 12 after launching the service just five months ago, according to a SpaceX tweet . Although marketed for camping or road trips, Starlink for RVs can be used at home by customers willing to pay more a month than the company’s standard service to avoid availability waitlists in congested areas. Starlink has also been signing connectivity deals directly with large businesses, including Hawaiian Airlines and cruise line operator Royal Caribbean.
TAMPA, Fla. — Lockheed Martin no longer expects its UK Pathfinder mission will fly this year, although it remains in the running to perform the first-ever vertical launch to orbit from British soil. With British microlaunch startup Orbex targeting this year or early next for its maiden flight, the delay appears to pull Lockheed Martin and its launch partner ABL Space Systems behind in the race to perform the United Kingdom’s first vertical orbital launch. “There are a number of programme dependencies that we continually manage which makes the first quarter of 2023 more favourable,” Nik Smith, Lockheed Martin’s regional director of space for the U.K. and Europe, told SpaceNews via email. These include “the launch vehicle and spaceport maturation and license application approvals,” he said. Lockheed Martin secured British government funding in 2018 to help develop a domestic launch capability. The company later picked ABL to perform a launch in 2022 from SaxaVord Spaceport at the northernmost part of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. However, the RS1 rocket that ABL plans to use for the UK Pathfinder mission has suffered delays following a test accident in January. ABL, which had previously planned to conduct RS1’s first launch from Kodiak Island in Alaska early in 2022, now aims to debut the rocket in early summer . Dan Piemont, president and co-founder of ABL, said: “We’ll want to see a few flights of the rocket in the U.S. before we fly it in Scotland, but there will be plenty of opportunity for that.” ABL is also slated to fly two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation in the fourth quarter of 2022. Piemont said ABL plans to build the rocket and launch system in California before shipping them by sea to Scotland for the UK Pathfinder mission. He said in “the future we’ll evaluate doing as much of the work as possible within the U.K.” While transporting the rocket by boat will take about a month, he added it is possible to use a plane if the company needs to move faster. Astra also has plans to carry out launches from SaxaVord starting 2023, which it said May 10 are pending final agreements and regulatory approvals. Spaceport readiness SaxaVord announced May 24 that its final planning applications have secured Scottish government approval, enabling it to finish construction to be ready for orbital launches before the end of 2022. The spaceport is being prepared to perform a site-wide rehearsal in early July, which aims to test facilities by launching a tiny rocket to an altitude of 3.6 kilometers — well below the cruising altitude of commercial airlines. A portable launchpad system will loft the roughly 3-meter-tall rocket from the Lamba Ness peninsula, where a permanent launchpad remains under construction. Despite the rocket’s small size, SaxaVord’s operational team hope to simulate, practice and evaluate all the processes required to launch a much larger rocket. These include vehicle tracking and clearance procedures for airspace and maritime safety. The test rocket will use a small parachute to slow its descent to the sea after launching from the northernmost part of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, where Scottish marine engineering firm Ocean Kinetics will help recover it. “This exercise will mark another exciting step in SaxaVord and Shetland’s journey towards becoming the home of the UK’s first vertical launch spaceport,” SaxaVord Spaceport CEO Frank Strang said in a statement. SaxaVord’s first commercial mission could come sooner. Mario Kobald, CEO of German startup HyImpulse Technologies, told SpaceNews it is planning to demonstrate its SR75 suborbital sounding rocket from SaxaVord this fall. The mission will carry a payload for German microgravity research startup Yuri. Kobald said it will also “demonstrate our propulsion technology and other key systems that will be also on our SL1 [orbital] launch vehicle.” SL1 was previously slated to debut in late 2022, but Kobald said this is now planned for 2024. “We have customers who booked slots on our maiden launch and launch options,” he said, and a “launch site will be announced in the future.” Orbital bragging rights Orbex is preparing to launch its Prime orbital rocket from Space Hub Sutherland on the north coast of mainland Scotland. The startup unveiled a full-scale prototype of Prime May 11 that it plans to use to perform integrated tests ahead of its maiden flight. The integrated testing paves the way for dress rehearsals of rocket launches and the development and optimization of launch procedures. As with RS1’s maiden flight in the U.K., Prime’s debut depends on launch vehicle tests, launch site construction and regulatory clearances. The first time a satellite is sent to orbit from the U.K. is set to take place from Spaceport Cornwall, in southwest England, this summer via Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne air launch system. Jim Simpson, chief strategy officer of Virgin Orbit, recently said it expects to perform the launch in late August — pending regulatory approval. Virgin Orbit’s rocket system relies on a modified carrier aircraft to perform what is known as a horizontal launch.
TAMPA, Fla. — Dutch remote monitoring specialist Hiber is demanding $1.5 million from cash-strapped Astrocast after plans to be sold to the company ran out of time, according to the Swiss small satellite operator. The acquisition was tied to Astrocast’s plan to list shares on the Euronext Growth Paris junior stock market in France, which Hiber agreed to invest in, and was subject to a Nov. 30 deadline. Astrocast announced plans to buy Hiber half a year ago and had hoped to complete its offering of shares by this summer before running into volatile financial markets. The Swiss company connects internet of things devices in remote areas with a constellation of 14 operational satellites, and planned to use spectrum Hiber leases from Inmarsat to expand to the Americas to provide services globally. Hiber provides satellite-connected devices and solutions that enable customers to monitor and track assets in remote locations, with a particular focus on the oil and gas industry — a key growth area for Astrocast. In May, Astrocast said it needed to raise 43 million Swiss Francs ($45 million) this year to fund expansion plans for growing its fleet to 20 satellites before the end of 2022 , and to 40 in 2023 to improve coverage. In a Nov. 24 announcement signaling Hiber’s intent to terminate their deal, Astrocast said it has been using short-term debt from existing investors to fund current operations. The Swiss operator added that it is assessing “strategic alternatives for strengthening its financial position on a long-term basis.” Kjell Karlsen, Astrocast’s chief financial officer, told SpaceNews : “We have a target and feel confident that we will reach this based on ongoing discussions with existing and new investors.” The operator still plans “an eventual listing” of shares in France without Hiber’s support, Karlsen added, although there is no current timeframe. He declined to detail Hiber’s financial claim, which is part of “certain areas of the purchase agreement that are being disputed.” Astrocast said Hiber is seeking mediation to resolve the dispute under an arbitration process and the Swiss company is assessing “all legal remedies to support its position.” Hiber declined to comment on the dispute. Fabienne Pinot, Hiber’s marketing director, said the Dutch company had been set to close the sale “immediately” following Astrocast’s stock listing in France, before it missed its deadline. Astrocast already trades shares in Norway, where it raised $42 million by listing them on the Euronext Growth Oslo stock exchange in August 2021. The operator launched initial commercial services in February. Its latest batch of four satellites, each the size of three cubesats, were deployed Nov. 26 as a secondary payload aboard India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket. Karlsen said this successful launch will aid the company’s discussions with investors. More satellites enable the company to improve coverage and satellite revisit rates. Astrocast ultimately aims to operate 100 of them in low Earth orbit. In August, Italy’s D-Orbit said it struck a deal to use its orbital transfer vehicle to launch 20 Astrocast satellites over a three-year period . Karlsen said D-Orbit is slated to deploy four satellites for Astrocast in late December on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission. “That is it for this year,” he said, adding: “We are evaluating our launch plans for 2023 as we are meeting our customer needs with these satellites in orbit.” According to Karlsen, the company has also “ partially funded ” four more satellites “ and the launch for them as well ” . Astrocast recently recorded 287,000 Swiss Francs in revenues for the six months to the end of June, down from 824,000 Swiss Francs for the same period in 2021 — a year it benefited from a European Space Agency development contract. The company reported a 9.1 million Swiss Franc loss for the first half of 2022 in EBITDA — or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — compared with a loss of 5.5 million Swiss Francs for H1 2021. At the end of June, Astrocast said it had a cash balance of 553,000 Swiss Francs.
Orbit Fab, a startup that is developing an infrastructure for in-space refueling of spacecraft, announced plans to purchase a small amount of lunar regolith and transfer it to a trust to promote sustainable management of lunar resources. The Colorado-based company said July 26 that it signed a letter of intent with Breaking Ground, a trust established last year seeking to develop approaches for managing lunar resources. Under the agreement, Orbit Fab will purchase lunar regolith from another company and donate it to Breaking Ground to hold in trust. The intent of the transfer is to create a model for transfer of lunar resources and to develop management approaches for such resources that are “cooperative, adaptive, plural, and balanced to fit the needs of as many stakeholders as possible,” the two organizations said in a statement. Breaking Ground sees the trust as a way to avoid future conflicts over, or monopolization of, lunar resources by companies or countries that could hinder future activities on the moon. The trust can create precedents for the transfer of lunar resources and help mature approaches for management of those resources. “We are looking forward to partnering with Orbit Fab and other companies to prototype new models of resource management while encouraging investment in this new domain,” Jessy Kate Schingler, one of Breaking Ground’s trustees, said in a statement. “We need to establish the norms of operations and normalize this as an activity so that people have a little more confidence that it’s something that can be done,” Daniel Faber, co-founder and chief executive of Orbit Fab, said in an interview of transferring lunar resources. “These are things that we take for granted on Earth that haven’t been done, or shown to be done, in space.” Orbit Fab executives said they were inspired by the “1% for the Planet” initiative where companies agree to donate 1% of their revenues to environmental nonprofit organizations. “We could start to build a structure for space where a humanitarian, responsible company framework is built in from the beginning, being effective stewards of the space environment,” said James Bultitude, chief technology officer of Orbit Fab. Faber said Orbit Fab is in talks with several companies planning lunar landing missions to purchase regolith from them that it will then donate to Breaking Ground. “It’s basically as much as we could get from the first of the landers on the moon,” he said. “It’s not going to be a large amount because the primary purpose of those missions is not to extract and store a lot of material.” Orbit Fab’s announcement follows NASA’s plans to purchase lunar resources from companies. In December 2020, the agency awarded contracts to four companies to transfer lunar regolith that those companies propose to acquire on future lander missions, a move intended to set a precedent for the extraction and transfer of lunar resources. “What NASA has done is fantastic,” Faber said. “We’re expanding the realm of what has been done and setting it up in a way that we see as a responsible activity.” Bultitude said the company envisions buying and transferring more lunar resources to Breaking Ground in the future. “Breaking Ground can go figure out the best way to shepherd that,” he said, including utilizing those resources itself or preserving them for the scientific community. “While the first donation is symbolic, it’s an intention and setting a precedent for the future that we shouldn’t necessarily be our own watchdogs.” Orbit Fab is currently best known for developing infrastructure for satellite refueling, including an interface called RAFTI designed to enable in-space refueling as well as tankers to provide propellant for that refueling. The company anticipates in the long term harnessing lunar resources to produce fuel or other material. “We’re looking to buy regolith or beneficiated material from anyone that will sell it to us in from the asteroids or the moon and turn that into things that people want to buy in orbit,” Faber said, hence its interest in models for managing lunar resources. “We want to help be in the middle of that and shape that, and make sure that it’s going to work for an actual economy.”
NASA will move the Space Launch System rocket from its launch pad back the Vehicle Assembly Building as a precaution for an approaching hurricane, a decision that may delay the Artemis 1 mission until November. NASA announced Sept. 26 that mission managers decided, after days of deliberation, to move the SLS from Launch Complex 39B back to the VAB as a precaution given the approach of what is now Hurricane Ian to Florida. The storm, which officially became a hurricane earlier in the morning, is forecast to approach the west coast of the Florida peninsula by the middle of the week as a major hurricane, with some tracks taking it closer to the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s east coast. NASA said in a brief statement that managers made the rollback decision “based on the latest weather predictions associated with Hurricane Ian, after additional data gathered overnight did not show improving expected conditions for the Kennedy Space Center area.” Doing so, it added, would both protect the rocket and allow employees to make their own preparations for the storm. The rollback is scheduled to begin at about 11 p.m. Eastern Sept. 26, which would have the vehicle back in the VAB by morning of Sept. 27, ahead of the storm. NASA announced Sept. 24 it would not proceed with the next launch opportunity Sept. 27 , citing the threat posed by then-Tropical Storm Ian. However, it delayed a decision on the rollback by a day to Sept. 25, then again to Sept. 26, as the storm headed north more slowly than previously forecast. NASA delayed its decision to further evaluate forecasts and determine if a rollback was necessary. Agency officials made clear at a Sept. 23 briefing that their “Plan A” was to keep the rocket at the pad, allowing for launch opportunities Sept. 27 and Oct. 2. At that briefing, when Ian was still an unnamed tropical depression, they argued that forecasts showed winds not exceeding the peak of 74 knots (137 kilometers per hour) the vehicle was rated for at the pad. However, they said they were also working on a “Plan B” rollback if needed, doing some preparations in parallel with those for a launch. That included, over the weekend, moving the crawler-transporter used to carry the mobile launch platform out to the pad to be in position if a rollback was needed. Rolling the SLS lack to the pad rules out an Artemis 1 launch during the current launch period, which closes Oct. 4. The next launch period opens Oct. 17 and runs through Oct. 31, although with no launch opportunities on Oct. 24-26 and Oct. 28 because of other mission constraints. NASA did not give a new launch date for the mission when it announced the rollback. However, launching in late October may be challenging depending on the amount of time spent in the VAB, where technicians are likely to perform work such as replacing batteries on the SLS flight termination system. Once it rolls back to the pad, the SLS would be ready for another launch attempt in about a week and a half. If Artemis 1 does not launch in October, the next launch period is from Nov. 12 to 27.
A deep field of distant galaxies, some dating back to the first billion years after the Big Bang, is the first full-color image to come from the James Webb Space Telescope. The image, released at a White House event July 11 and called “Webb’s First Deep Field,” is a sneak preview of a broader set of early release observations that NASA and its European and Canadian partners on JWST plan to publish July 12. The White House event, attended by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, was announced with less than 24 hours’ notice. The image shows a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723 about 4.5 billion light-years away. The cluster acts as a gravitational lens, bringing into view far more distant galaxies, some of which appear in the image as arcs. “We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the event. The NASA statement accompanying the image release didn’t give specifics on the more distant galaxies visible in the image, which involved 12.5 hours of images taken at several wavelengths. The Big Bang took place an estimated 13.8 billion years ago, meaning those distant galaxies date back to when the universe was less than a billion years old. The detail in the image comes from a very tiny part of the sky. “If you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm’s length, that is the part of the universe you’re seeing. Just one little speck of the universe,” Nelson said. Biden appeared pleased by what he saw and by the performance of JWST. “It symbolizes the relentless spirit of American ingenuity and it shows what we can achieve, what more we can discover,” he said of the space telescope, which finally launched last December after billions of dollars of cost overruns and years of schedule delays. JWST is now working better than expected at the Earth-sun L-2 point 1.5 million kilometers away. “These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things.” “This telescope is one of humanity’s great engineering achievements,” added Harris. Both she and Biden emphasized the role of international cooperation in JWST’s development, including how, according to Harris, “a scientific endeavor can build upon the international rules and norms that govern our cooperation in space.” The White House event started more than an hour later because, Biden said, he was busy preparing for an upcoming trip to the Middle East. Media were ushered out of the room and the webcast ended after only about 10 minutes. Scientists and others were immediately impressed, though, with the image. “This is just a first glimpse of what Webb can do,” said Macarena Garcia Marin, ESA instrument scientist for a mid-infrared instrument on JWST called MIRI, in an ESA statement. “While we are truly in awe today of Webb’s first deep field, I can’t help but think of what images and science results are just around the corner in the many years to come.” “The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope unveiled this evening is an incredible preview of its remarkable technology and scientific power,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), chair of the House Science Committee, in a statement that featured bipartisan praise of the spacecraft from the committee’s leadership. “As a steadfast supporter of Webb and its mission, I am elated to see this image today — an image that has been 20 years of hard work in the making.” The deep field image was originally scheduled to be released July 12 with the other early release observations. NASA and its partners will still release those other observations at that event. The other observations, announced by NASA July 8, include the Carina Nebula and Southern Ring Nebula within our own galaxy and the galaxy group Stephan’s Quintet about 290 million light-years away. NASA will also release spectra of the exoplanet WASP-96b, a “hot Jupiter” planet orbiting close to its star.
A key House member outlined his priorities for NASA and civil space activities that he says are necessary to compete in a new “space race” with China. Speaking at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference July 27, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) outlined how he believes NASA, working with other agencies and the private sector, should work together to ensure U.S. preeminence in space as China grows its capabilities. “The space race of today is not like the one we faced with the Soviets. One can actually argue that the space race today has far more on the line,” he said, citing Chinese lunar and Mars missions and development of a space station as evidence of China’s ambitions in space. “In this new era where the United States is being challenged across every sector, our American space enterprise cannot afford to lose focus or momentum,” he said. “Therefore, to ensure the United States remains the global space power, we must commit to a set of pillars that are based on principles.” Those pillars, which he outlined in his speech and in a separate document , call for U.S. space leadership, permanence, harmony, security and support. He also discussed 11 “critical markers” he expected the U.S. to achieve in space by the end of the decade. While one such marker is maintaining a human presence in low Earth orbit while establishing an “ongoing” one at the moon, most involve policy, infrastructure or other institutional issues. They included expanded cooperation with allies, establishing rules and norms of behavior in space and roles for the National Space Council and the Office of Space Commerce in policy coordination and regulation, respectively. Another element of his plan was a call for “greater cohesion” between NASA and the Defense Department. “We much ensure that we can easily leverage NASA assets for space security, as well as Department of Defense assets for NASA development,” he said, citing one example of the former potential national security applications of the Space Launch System. While Aderholt has long been a major supporter of the SLS, he also praised the efforts of companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX that had been seen as rivals or even threats to traditional space companies and programs. “We must recognize the changing landscape of the industry,” he said. “Gone are the days of ‘New Space’ and ‘Old Space’ jockeying for relevance in separate lanes. In this new era, we only have American space.” Aderholt’s proposal also included a call to “contain Chinese space ambitions,” which raised eyebrows among some observers. “The obvious threat posed by the Chinese regime must be taken very seriously,” he said, but he focused on alleged Chinese espionage and illegal technology transfers from American industry rather that Chinese space activities themselves. He focused primarily on perceived threats from China but also discussed concerns about Russia, calling for a “serious discussion about the future of U.S.-Russian relations in space.” Russian statements July 26 stating that they would leave the ISS some time after 2024, even as the U.S. and other partners work to extend the station to 2030, “only furthers the narrative that Russia is an erratic partner.” He noted he included language in the House version of a commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill for fiscal year 2023 that would restrict NASA’s ability to cooperate with Russia on programs other than the ISS. In practice, there is now little, if any, such cooperation taking place, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Aderholt, in his speech or accompanying document, did not provide any specific plans or funding levels to achieve these goals. However, he is in position to make progress on them as the ranking member of the House CJS appropriations subcommittee. With Republicans widely expected to take control of the House after the 2022 elections, he would be in line to chair the subcommittee. This comes as other influential members of Congress on space issues, notably Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, will retire after this year. “It will be a top priority for me to help marshal the power of the purse in support of these enterprises,” he said, calling on fellow members to “provide all the resources and guidance necessary” to the space agency. “The United States Congress must be an arsenal for support in space.”
Updated 7:50 a.m. Eastern with LOFTID splashdown, JPSS-2 array issue. WASHINGTON — An Atlas 5 successfully launched a polar-orbiting weather satellite and a reentry technology demonstrator on the final flight of the vehicle from California. The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 401 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 3 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 4:49 a.m. Eastern Nov. 10. A problem loading liquid oxygen in the rocket’s Centaur upper stage delayed the liftoff by 24 minutes, two-thirds of the way into the 36-minute launch window. The Centaur upper stage deployed the mission’s primary payload, the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 satellite, 28 minutes after liftoff, placing it into a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of approximately 800 kilometers. The spacecraft made contact with controllers shortly after deployment. However, NASA reported nerly three hours after liftoff that they had yet to receive telemetry that the solar array deployed as planned. JPSS-2 is the second of four planned polar-orbiting weather satellites in the JPSS program to provide weather data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. JPSS-1, built by Ball Aerospace, launched in 2017 and is in service as NOAA-20. An older satellite, Suomi NPP, also provides weather data from polar orbit but is nearing the end of its life as it runs out of stationkeeping propellant. Northrop Grumman built JPSS-2 and has contracts for JPSS-3 and -4, which will provide continuity for the JPSS program into the 2030s. Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial space at Northrop Grumman, said in an October interview that the company is “well along” in the production of the two future JPSS satellites. The satellites use the latest version of Northrop’s LEOStar-3 bus. “We’ve got a new avionics suite, we’ve got a new set of sensors, wheels, star trackers, et cetera, that we brought to bear both for the Landsat [9] mission and the JPSS mission,” he said. “It’s a continuous upgrade in components and operating paradigms.” The JPSS satellites provide critical weather data that complements observations by the GOES series of satellites in geostationary orbit. “JPSS data is a major input into U.S. and international global numerical weather prediction models,” said Jordan Gerth, meteorologist and satellite scientist at NOAA’s National Weather Service, during a pre-launch briefing Nov. 8. “With JPSS, the quality of local three- to seven-day weather forecasts is outstanding.” A secondary payload on the launch was the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), a technology demonstration of an inflatable heat shield. LOFTID separated from the Centaur 75 minutes after liftoff, after the upper stage performed two burns to place it on a reentry trajectory. The vehicle appeared to perform as expected through reentry, deploying a parachute and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean east of Hawaii 2 hours and 13 minutes after liftoff. A recovery vessel will pick up the spacecraft as well as a separate data recorder ejected from LOFTID before splashdown. LOFTID is designed to test the performance of an inflatable decelerator six meters across , collecting data during reentry before splashing down east of Hawaii. NASA is interested in using that technology, scaled up, for landing future Mars missions too large for existing entry, descent and landing systems. ULA, which cooperated with NASA on LOFTID through a Space Act Agreement, is studying using that technology for recovering engines from its Vulcan rocket. The launch was the 100th mission for NASA’s Launch Services Program, which coordinates launches for NASA science missions. It is also the final Atlas 5 launch for the program and the final Atlas 5 launch from Vandenberg. ULA will convert the launch pad for use by Vulcan.
The European Space Agency has again delayed the first flight of Europe’s Ariane 6 launch vehicle, this time to late 2023, as the new vehicle makes slow progress to the launch pad. At an Oct. 19 briefing, ESA officials as well as those with the rocket’s prime contractor, ArianeGroup, and launch services provider Arianespace said the first flight of the rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, was now scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2023, a slip from a notional launch date in early 2023. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said that date emerged from an external review of the program established in May. He warned that date was not final. “With a project of this magnitude, it needs to be clear that this is a planned date and that the program will still need to successfully and timely achieve a number of key milestones in order for this schedule to be valid,” he said. Aschbacher and others did not state what specific issues caused the latest slip for a vehicle once projected to make its inaugural launch in 2020. Instead, they emphasized several ongoing critical tests, in particular static-fire tests of the upper stage that started earlier this month and integrated testing of an Ariane 6 prototype with the launch facilities in Kourou built for it. Another milestone is a launch system qualification review. André-Hubert Roussel, chief executive of ArianeGroup, said the initial upper stage hot-fire test was “extremely successful,” with review of the data from that 45-second test ongoing. “There remains quite a number of tests to perform,” he said, including three hot-fire tests, before the upper stage is qualified for flight. An Ariane 6 prototype is on the pad at Kourou for tests of interfaces between the rocket and ground equipment. “We still have quite some intensive tests to do,” said Philippe Baptiste, head of the French space agency CNES. Those range from tests of software and control systems to tests of mechanical and fluid interfaces. The goal is to complete both the upper stage and launch complex tests in the first quarter of 2023. After that, Roussel said, there will be views of the data of those tests and qualify the vehicle for flight. The first flight model of the Ariane 6 is in the “final steps” of being assembled, he said, and then be shipped to Kourou for the launch campaign. The Ariane 6 is designed for a relatively short launch campaign of two to three weeks, but he suggested that it may be longer for the first flight. “For the qualification flight, obviously we have taken some margin” in the schedule, he said, which he said was on the order of a few months. ESA and ArianeGroup officials did not discuss details on the cost of this latest delay. Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA director of space transportation, said that the overall cost of Ariane 6 development to this point was “slightly below” four billion euros ($3.9 billion), but did not state how much more it would cost to complete work on the rocket. At the November ESA ministerial meeting, Neuenschwander said ESA would seek 600 million euros for a “transition program” for the Ariane 6 to support an increase in production of the rocket as it enters commercial service. ESA member states, he said, have already committed two-thirds of the funding for that program. ESA will also seek support for a “Block 2” upgrade for the Ariane 6 that will include a larger solid rocket motor, the P120+, for the vehicle’s strap-on boosters as well as improvements in the Vinci engine in the upper stage. That will increase the rocket’s capacity to low Earth orbit by three metric tons, he said. Despite the delays, Roussel said he was pleased with the recent testing milestones. “I am optimistic on the progress,” he said, adding that the company would not cut corners to save a few weeks of schedule. Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said demand for Ariane 6 remains high, citing Amazon’s large order of Ariane 6 launches it made in April for its Project Kuiper broadband constellation , along with orders of Blue Origin’s New Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. “It’s a very strong order book regarding Ariane 6 for a launcher that has not flown yet.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat and OneWeb’s planned merger requires the “strictest possible scrutiny,” a cross-party group of British government officials said in a report warning the U.K has become a “third-rank” power in space post-Brexit. Combining U.K.-based OneWeb with France’s Eutelsat poses “serious questions about the handing over of critical technology to foreign powers and the need for sovereignty,” said Tobias Ellwood, chair of the U.K’s Defence Select Committee. In a report published Oct. 19 for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence, the committee called for a thorough review of the deal under the country’s National Security and Investment Act. The committee also called for creating a high-level government post to provide clear centralized “direction and accountability” for the U.K.’s civil and defense ambitions in space. Their report took aim at an “unacceptable” amount of progress in developing an independent satellite navigation system almost four years after the country left Europe’s Galileo program. One option under consideration is to add position, navigation and timing (PNT) capabilities to OneWeb’s second-generation constellation, which the operator expects to enter service in 2028 . However, despite spending tens of millions of dollars on exploring options over the last several years, Ellwood said the U.K. is no closer to developing a replacement PNT network. The lack of progress means the country risks “falling further behind both our peers and our adversaries,” Ellwood said in a statement. He added: “Over this inquiry we heard that the UK is, at best, a third-rank space power, lagging behind Italy. “And while Government has recognised there is work to do, the Whitehall machine is not moving fast enough.” The committee’s report did not mention U.S.-based Viasat’s plan to acquire British satellite operator Inmarsat, which received national security clearance from the U.K. in September. Viasat’s deal still requires other regulatory approvals, including from the U.K.’s competition watchdog which launched a lengthy investigation process Oct. 14. The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence plans to spend £1.4 billion ($1.6 billion) on developing new space capabilities over the next decade. On Oct. 17, the UK Space Agency announced a new 15 million pound fund to support British businesses developing satellite communications technology. The fund is being distributed via a competitive process that runs until spring. The government anticipates it will catalyze further investments into the U.K.’s space sector, which employs about 47,000 people. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Astra Space is preparing to conduct the first of three launches of NASA cubesats to monitor tropical storms as soon as June 12, pending receipt of a launch license. The company announced June 8 that it was ready for the launch of two Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) cubesats on its Rocket 3.3 vehicle from Cape Canaveral on June 12. The launch is the first of three under a NASA contract awarded in February 2021 valued at $7.95 million. “We’re expecting a launch license on Friday [June 10] to enable us to begin a series of launches for the TROPICS mission that is coming up out of Cape Canaveral,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said in a Bloomberg Television June 8 . “Our launch window will open up on Sunday, should we receive the license on Friday.” The company said in a May 5 earnings call that the three TROPICS launches were the next on the manifest and would take place in “a pretty rapid cadence,” according to Kemp. However, he said it was unlikely the company would conduct all three launches in the second quarter. Speaking at a meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board June 9, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said the launches would take place about two weeks apart. TROPICS requires three launches to place the satellites into separate orbital planes to improve revisit times. “I love TROPICS just because it’s kind of a crazy mission,” he said. “Think of six cubesats doing science, looking at tropical storms with a repeat time of 50 minutes instead of 12 hours.” Each three-unit cubesat carries a microwave radiometer to collect information on temperature, humidity and precipitation. NASA tested that sensor on an experimental cubesat, TROPICS Pathfinder, launched in 2021. The full TROPICS constellation will allow for frequent revisits that are useful for tracking rapid growth of tropical storm systems. Both the TROPICS satellites and at least the first of the three Rocket 3.3 vehicles have been ready for some time, with the Federal Aviation Administration commercial launch license the only remaining step. Astra previously obtained an FAA launch license for a launch from Cape Canaveral in February using the agency’s streamlined Part 450 regulations, and did not explain why it needed a new license for the TROPICS launches. Kemp, in an interview in May, suggested one factor was the high rate of launch activity at the Eastern Range. “There’s never been a busier time out at the Cape,” he said. “There’s nothing standing in our way other than getting all the final details with the FAA and the range worked out.” The launch will be the first for Astra since a March 15 mission that placed its first customer payloads into orbit . It was only the second Astra launch to reach orbit on six attempts, after a November 2021 launch that carried only an instrumentation package that remained attached to the upper stage. NASA is embracing the risk associated with the vehicle. Zurbuchen noted at the Space Studies Board meeting that the mission requires only two of the three launches to be successful in order to meet its science goals. “This is a different risk level than what we do in so many other things where we focus on really flattening the risk — pound it down as much as we can — and that is deliberate,” he said. “It is deliberate because speed matters when you’re in the innovation game and we want new capabilities, new assets, new tools.”
 The Space Systems Command on May 26 rolled out a new process to assess the cybersecurity of commercial satellite operators that do business with the Defense Department. Under the Infrastructure Asset Pre-Approval program, or IA-Pre , commercial suppliers of satellite-based services are evaluated based on their cybersecurity practices and systems. Those suppliers that pass the government’s checklist are then placed on a pre-approved list and will not be required to complete lengthy cybersecurity questionnaires for each individual contract proposal. “Our office will begin accepting IA-Pre applications for a limited number of assets to perform assessments,” said Jared Reece, program analyst at the Space Systems Command’s commercial services systems office. He said IA-Pre replaces a self-assessment process where commercial companies wanting to do business with DoD had to submit required information via a questionnaire. The new process “will ensure effective safeguards are applied and validated; and weaknesses are mitigated to reduce the cybersecurity risks which could impact DoD missions,” said Reece. The Space Systems Command will do on-site assessments for verification of cybersecurity compliance using third- party auditors certified and licensed by the U.S. Space Force Security Controls Assessor. Clare Grason, division chief of the commercial systems services office, said the IA-Pre program was developed in partnership with commercial vendors. “We’re looking forward to the positive impact that IA-Pre will have in the future for all our stakeholders,” she said. AI-Pre was first announced in 2020. The Space Systems Command said IA- pre-trials are anticipated to start next month. Space Force adding cyber warfare units The Space Force, meanwhile, is looking to add more squadrons of cyber specialists to support military units that operate communications, surveillance and navigation satellites, Col. Roy Rockwell, commander of Space Delta 6, said May 26. Space Delta 6 is the Space Force unit that oversees the military’s satellite control network and cybersecurity operations. Speaking at a Space Force Association online event, Rockwell said the ground systems used to operate satellites are under threat of cyber attacks. “You don’t have to spend millions or billions of dollars to gain access to the cyber domain and build those capabilities,” he said. Cyber and malware attacks can be pulled off at a relatively low cost, he noted, making these types of weapons far more accessible than missiles or lasers. “As we look at how we’ll be attacked in future fights, and how adversaries will try to eliminate us in the space domain, they’ll start with cyber attacks first and foremost,’ said Rockwell.
Wallaroo Labs announced July 26 it won a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research study contract from the U.S. Space Force to model the performance of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms during space missions. The contract was awarded by SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force , in support of the Orbital Prime program to develop technologies for space debris cleanup and other on-orbit services. The five-year-old startup, based in New York City, developed a software platform that helps businesses assess the performance of AI applications and determine if the data analyzed with AI and ML algorithms provides any real value. Wallaroo Labs will model the deployment of AI and ML software that the Space Force would use in OSAM (On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing) missions when it will have to rely on edge computers in space to analyze data. The company will examine potential challenges of running AI and ML algorithms on edge computers for satellite life extension, on-orbit refueling, active debris removal, and the reuse and recycling of materials to build the foundation for assembly and manufacturing in space. Joel Mozer, director of science, technology and research at SpaceWERX said the service “must invest in AI and ML capabilities that can be deployed in the cloud and at the edge.” The Space Force plans to rely on edge computing for OSAM and other missions. Edge computing is the practice of moving compute power physically closer to where data is generated, such as a sensor in space. Machine learning is a critical technology for spacecraft avoidance and automated retasking of sensors. Vid Jain, CEO and founder of Wallaroo, said edge computing eliminates the need to downlink data and saves a lot of time, but a major challenge for space systems is the compute capacity available aboard a spacecraft, compared to the massive capacity of cloud computing on the ground. He said Wallaroo’s platform facilitates what is known as the “last mile of the machine learning journey, which is getting machine learning into a production environment.” “Even after you hire data scientists and machine learning experts to develop data algorithms and sophisticated techniques, getting those data algorithms into a production environment and delivering the outcome you want — whether it’s efficiency or more revenue of your business — that turns out to be really hard,” said Jain. Wallaroo Labs is privately held. In February it announced it raised $25 million in a series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture arm.
The United Arab Emirates will develop a radar satellite constellation as part of a new fund worth more than $800 million to support the country’s space sector. The UAE government announced July 17 plans for a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation called Sirb, Arabic for a flock of birds. The constellation will be developed over six years, with the first satellite scheduled to launch in three years. The UAE Space Agency offered few details about the Sirb satellites, other than that they will be small satellites will operate in X-band. The agency did not disclose the budget for the system or the number of satellites planned. An illustration released by the agency showed a cubesat-class satellite with a deployable antenna. “SAR technology leapfrogs traditional imaging satellites, providing more powerful imaging using X-band radar technologies,” Sarah Al Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency, said in a government statement. “These small-scale satellites are more agile, faster to develop and more powerful, an indicator of the types of new generation systems that technology is now making possible.” The UAE plans to seek bids for at least some aspects of the system. In the statement, the government said it would request proposals for development of satellite components as well as for launch, operations and a commercialization plan. The project will include opportunities for both Emirati and international companies. The Sirb constellation is the cornerstone of a new National Space Fund also announced July 17, with the government committing to spend 3 billion dirhams ($817 million) on space projects such as Sirb. “The National Space Fund will encourage global partnerships to establish themselves here in the Emirates, providing new and vital technology platforms and development to answer the needs of the UAE Space Program and other global customers for vital innovation and technologies that answer the needs and possibilities of today’s world,” Salem Al Qubaisi, director general of the UAE Space Agency, said in a statement. The government did not announce what other projects are under consideration for support by the new fund or how long the fund will operate. Al Amiri said that the fund “is precisely targeted at building opportunities for international cooperation in building Emirati enterprises.” The UAE government has emphasized space as one area of growth for the country as it works to diversify its economy. Its highest profile initiative in that area is the Emirates Mars Mission, or Hope, a Mars orbiter launched two years ago . The country is now pursuing a “Beyond Mars” mission that would fly by Venus and several asteroids, with launch planned in 2028. The country also has a small astronaut corps, with one person who flew on a short-duration Soyuz mission to the International Space Station in 2019. In April, the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre signed a contract with Axiom Space for a long-duration ISS mission launching as soon as the spring of 2023. The Emirati astronaut to fly that mission, yet to be announced, will take a seat that Axiom acquired from NASA as part of a three-way deal with Roscosmos last year to obtain a Soyuz seat for a NASA astronaut.
GeoOptics Inc. won a NASA contract worth a maximum of $7 million over five years to provide researchers with data acquired by the company’s small satellite constellation. The contract, announced Nov. 14, was GeoOptics’ first as part of NASA’s Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition program. Pasadena, Calif.-based GeoOptics has supplied radio occultation data to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for weather forecasts since 2020. GeoOptics CEO Alex Saltman welcomed the NASA award. “We’ve always had a very strong sense of responsibility to the science community,” Saltman told SpaceNews. “All of our technologies come out of that community. Many of our employees come out of that community. And we want to provide a really great science product for researchers.” The NASA contract directs GeoOptics to deliver a comprehensive catalog of its data products “indicating at a minimum: the data sets, associated metadata and ancillary information; data cadence; data latency; area coverage; and data usage policy,” according to the news release. NASA acquires commercial data under licenses that allow the agency to share datasets with U.S. government agencies and partners. GeoOptics will process radio occultation data for NASA to a higher degree of accuracy than data the company provides to NOAA for weather forecasting. “Often when you process radio occultation data in real time, you’re using, for example, real-time orbit for GPS satellites, which are not quite as accurate as the eventual orbits that folks can determine days or weeks later,” Saltman said. “That’s one of the ways that it’s more precise.” GeoOptics has launched 10 satellites. The company’s next launch is scheduled for late 2023. GeoOptics does not comment on how many satellites remain operational. NASA established the Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition pilot program in 2017 to determine whether commercial observations could augment or complement government datasets. NASA began buying datasets in 2018 after principal investigators showed the data and imagery bolstered Earth-observation research and applications. Through the program, NASA has acquired data from Airbus U.S. , BlackSky Technology, Maxar Technologies, Planet , Spire Global and Teledyne Brown Engineering. NASA also has purchased high-resolution Digital Elevation Models produced by the EarthDEM Project, a collaboration that includes the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center, Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center, and the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and based on Maxar satellite data.
Gen. B. Chance Saltzman assumed command of the U.S. Space Force, and departing chief Gen. John “Jay” Raymond retired Nov. 2 at a ceremony at Joint Base Andrews Maryland, presided by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In attendance were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and other top Pentagon officials, members of Congress as well as NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and space billionaire Elon Musk . In remarks, Austin recognized Raymond for his role leading the first new service branch established in more than 70 years. “He laid the foundations for the culture and the traditions that will define this service for decades to come,” Austin said. On Saltzman taking over command, said Austin, “he knows his way around the space domain, he’s operated satellites, he’s spent many nights at the Joint Space Operations Center during ICBM alerts … So we’re lucky to have General Saltzman take the colors today.” Austin said the Space Force has a key job protecting U.S. assets in space. “The United States leads the way in space. But in recent years, the competition has picked up. It has become a contested environment. And China and Russia are investing in their own space capabilities.” This will require a “relentless pursuit of innovation and technological advancements that will help us maintain and expand our edge … working together with our partners and allies to keep building our collective strength in space,” Austin said. Kendall called Raymond “the father of the Space Force.” “You grew from a service of zero to now almost 15,000 guardians,” he said. “Saltzman has big shoes to fill.” Congrats from the VP Vice President Kamala Harris in a letter read at the ceremony congratulated Saltzman. “As the chair of the National Space Council, I look forward to working with you to ensure the US Space Force is positioned to support our nation, particularly in light of the growing threats to our space enterprise and the need to promote responsible behaviors in space.” Saltzman in remarks addressing the entire Space Force, said “You will hear plenty from me in the coming weeks, months and years. So I’ll keep this short and to the point. The world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place and preserving U.S. national security interest in space is growing harder every day.” “Without the space capabilities you are designing, building, protecting and operating, the Joint Force will not be capable of accomplishing its missions. A resilient ready and combat capable Space Force is indispensable to deterrence. And in the worst case, if deterrence fails, the Space Force will be an indispensable component of our joint force at war,” said Saltzman. Milley in a speech praised Raymond’s military service, and recognized SpaceX founder Musk who was in the audience. “He needs no introduction,” said Milley. “But what he symbolizes is the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.” Raymond in closing remarks said the United States military “has never been stronger or more ready than it is today, and it needs to be as we face the most complex strategic times in our nation’s history.”
SAN FRANCISCO – With recent grants from government agencies, Dawn Aerospace is refining its nitrous-based satellite propulsion technology. Dawn, based in New Zealand and the Netherlands, announced in May the first in-orbit demonstration of its B20 thrusters on a D-Orbit ION Satellite Carrier. Since reaching that milestone, the company has been signing up new propulsion customers, primarily in Europe and the United States, every four to six weeks,” Dawn CEO Stefan Powell told SpaceNews. At the Small Satellite Conference earlier this month in Logan, Utah, Dawn executives said the company had 30 thrusters in orbit and another 36 delivered to customers for integration with satellites awaiting launch. In recent weeks, Dawn has won grants to further its research on small satellite thrusters fueled with nontoxic propellants. On Aug. 26 Dawn announced a $1.5 million grant from the New Zealand Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment to conduct research with the German Space Agency DLR Institute of Combustion Technology. Dawn also announced a 200,000 euro ($199,000) award in early August from the European Space Agency to bolster the performance of its green bi-propellant satellite thrusters. A 1.4 million euro grant to Dawn from the European Commission was announced in July. Dawn propulsion systems are designed to offer the same performance of thrusters fueled with hydrazine, a compound classified by the European Commission as a substance of very high concern because it is toxic and a probable human carcinogen. Dawn’s “technology is now at a point where people can believe in it,” Powell said. The number of thrusters in orbit is significant enough to make “the risk more palatable for more and more of the market,” he added. Still, Powell understands why some satellite developers continue to opt for hydrazine-fueled thrusters with decades of heritage. “The system we’re proposing is only going to be an option for them when it’s proven,” Powell said. “I don’t mean 30 thrusters. I mean hundreds of thrusters for many years. We are on the path to that.” In addition to small satellite propulsion, Dawn has conducted more than 30 flights of Mk-II Aurora, a sub-scale suborbital spaceplane demonstrator designed to takeoff and land horizontally at conventional airports. During a flight conducted in New Zealand earlier this month, “we did a powered flight and then cut the engines for a gliding landing to simulate coming back from reentry,” Powell said. “We were making sure that it was pilot-able and that we can do the energy management.”
NASA has selected Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four cubesats of a constellation to monitor tropical weather systems after the first two were lost in an Astra launch failure. NASA announced Nov. 23 that it awarded a task order to Rocket Lab through the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract for the launch of the satellites on two Electron vehicles scheduled for a 60-day period no earlier than May 1, 2023. That schedule would allow the satellites to be ready for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season. NASA originally awarded a $7.95 million contract to Astra for launching six of the Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) satellites on three of the company’s Rocket 3.3 vehicles. Although each TROPICS satellite is only a 3U cubesat, the three launches were needed to place the satellites into three orbital planes for improved revisit times. However, the first two TROPICS cubesats were lost in a Rocket 3.3 launch failure June 12 . In August, Astra announced it was retiring that vehicle so it could focus on the larger Rocket 4, which will not enter service before late 2023. NASA and Astra later revised the contract for the remaining two launches, which will now be used to launch “comparable scientific payloads” on Rocket 4. The agency said it would procure launches for the remaining satellites through its VADR contract vehicle. In a break from traditional launch contract announcements, neither NASA nor Rocket Lab would disclose the value of this VADR task order. “Pricing provided in response to launch service task orders under VADR are competed in a closed environment and as such are considered proprietary to the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract,” a NASA spokesperson said. The NASA release stated that, despite the small size of the satellites, the two launches would be dedicated missions, likely because of the specific orbits required by TROPICS. Rocket Lab executives said in a Nov. 9 earnings call that the current average price for an Electron launch is $7 million to $7.5 million. 
 Virginia launch plans, 2023 projections The NASA announcement did not disclose where the TROPICS launches would take place. Rocket Lab later said that it will use Launch Complex (LC) 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, for the two TROPICS launches. Rocket Lab is gearing up for its first launch from LC-2, carrying three satellites for HawkEye 360 , a radio-frequency intelligence company. Rocket Lab announced Nov. 21 it completed the final dress rehearsal for the launch, scheduled for no earlier than Dec. 7. That is dependent on NASA completing certification of the autonomous flight termination system required for the launch, something Rocket Lab said NASA “is continuing to make progress in.” That will be followed by a second Electron launch from LC-2 in January. Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said that second launch would be for an “undisclosed commercial constellation customer.” One possibility is Capella Space, a company that operates a growing constellation of synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites. A Federal Communications Commission application in September sought a license for telemetry for an Electron launch of the Capella-9 and -10 satellites on an Electron from LC-2 between December 2022 and June 2023. “We’re looking at what we think will be a pretty impressive growth year on Electron launch cadence” in 2023, said Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer, during the earnings call. He projected “around 14” Electron launches in 2023. The upcoming inaugural LC-2 launch will be Rocket Lab’s tenth and final Electron launch of 2022. Of those 14 launches, four to six will take place from LC-2. They will take place “pretty sporadically” through the year, Beck said, perhaps moving into a more regular cadence late in the year as the company and the launch range get used to Electron launches there. While Rocket Lab says a typical Electron launch generates $7–7.5 million in revenue, there are variations, according to Spice. The company said its most recent launch Nov. 4 , which carried a Swedish science satellite, was “heavily subsidized” since it was also a research and development flight to test rocket reusability. The company had intended to try and catch the booster in mid-air as it descended under a parachute, but a loss of telemetry from the falling booster forced the company to call off the attempt and instead recover the booster from the ocean. Those recovery attempts generate less revenue, he said, since the schedule of the launches is driven by when the company is ready to make another recovery. “We basically try to subsidize the cost of that recovery mission with whatever payloads will fit into that defined timescale,” Spice said. “It’s much more important for us to get the mission off, even if we sell the rocket half-full.” Spice said the company can generate positive gross margins on its launch business with four full-price launches per quarter. “A lot of good things happen when we’re launching more than once per month.” However, he said that Rocket Lab is still some time from achieving profitability as it invests in the development of Neutron, its medium-class reusable launch vehicle. “Achieving and sustaining profitability can really only happen once we’ve got the majority of the R&D spending on Neutron in the rear-view mirror.”
Spacecraft controllers have restored communications with a lunar cubesat that went silent shortly after its deployment earlier this week. NASA and Advanced Space, the company operating the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat, said the spacecraft started transmitting again early July 6. The spacecraft stopped communicating about 11 hours after its July 4 deployment from Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon transfer vehicle. Both the agency and the company said the root cause of the communications malfunction remains under investigation. After troubleshooting, controllers received a signal from the spacecraft at 9:26 a.m. Eastern and full telemetry from it nearly an hour later, confirming that the spacecraft was in good condition. “Through the work over the last day, the team has high confidence that the issue has been cleared and through changes to the configuration and operations it will not happen again,” Advanced Space said in a statement about the spacecraft’s status. NASA, in its own statement, said the loss of contact “was triggered during commissioning activities of the communications system” based on ground-based testing. The interruption in communications led controllers to postpone CAPSTONE’s first trajectory correction maneuver, which was scheduled for July 5. NASA and Advanced Space said that maneuver is now scheduled for approximately 11:30 a.m. Eastern July 7. The spacecraft is still on track to enter the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon on Nov. 13.
The growth of space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities worldwide, intended to better track satellites and debris in orbit, could instead create confusion for satellite operators, one official warned. Speaking at the annual conference of the Global Network on Sustainability in Space (GNOSIS) Nov. 30, Richard DalBello, director of the U.S. Office of Space Commerce, said one issue he is watching is how emerging SSA systems elsewhere should cooperate on exchanging data and predictions of potential collisions. “We have an issue of how are we managing proliferating SSA systems,” he said. A prime example of that is the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) system, which he said is planning to start offering collision avoidance services to third parties in January. “We will have some common data, but they will also be operating on unique sensors. Sensors are not always in alignment and the math doesn’t aways agree on SSA calculations,” he said. That creates a scenario where, for example, one operator gets a warning of a collision with another satellite based on data from one system, while the operator of the other satellite, using another SSA system, concludes there is no risk of a collision. “The question is, is there any effort to align those solutions, and do we care?” DalBello said. “If I feel like there’s a conjunction and I’m only using the U.S. system, and somebody else disagrees because they’re using another system, it’s not immediately clear to me how we resolve that today.” There is some degree of data exchange among SSA systems, including an agreement between the Office of Space Commerce and EU SST in October to conduct a data sharing study. DalBello said one person in his office, seconded from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was working on SSA data standards to ensure systems were interoperable. Standards alone, though, are not sufficient, he argued. “You can understand each other in the same language, but if your sensors are out of alignment, you may not be able to communicate effectively.” He added he was a “little disappointed” that his EU SST counterparts informed him at a recent meeting that they would not buy commercial SSA data from U.S. providers. He said the Office of Space Commerce had no formal policy regarding buying data from international providers. “Overall, we will benefit by some kind of open process.” At another event, some officials called for some kind of international space traffic management (STM) regime to coordinate activities, saying that voluntary cooperation was no longer sufficient. “We need urgently a space traffic management system,” said Miguel Belló Mora, commissioner for aerospace in Spain’s Ministry for Science and Innovation, during the CompTIA Global Space Summit here Dec. 2. “Just as we have air traffic management, we need space traffic management.” Without a coordinated STM system, he said he feared there would be a runaway growth of orbital debris, commonly called the Kessler Syndrome, that could render some orbits unusable. He said he expected Spain to take action on the issue next year as it holds the presidency of the European Union. “Spain is willing to put space traffic management as priority number one of Europe next year,” he said, including discussing it at a European space summit next fall that non-European nations would also be encouraged to attend. “We would like to call on not only European but also world leaders to take a step forward towards space traffic management, because we have to act and we have to act now.” Another panelist said just getting several major countries to cooperate on STM would be beneficial. “If just a few countries agree, that would help a lot,” said Ole Morton Olsen, director of business development and innovation at the Norwegian Space Agency. That includes widespread adoption of national regulations addressing space sustainability, such as a recent order by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that requires low Earth orbit satellites to deorbit no more than five years after the end of their mission, rather than the 25-year guideline previously used. “The U.S. is in some ways the leader, so a lot of countries follow the U.S.,” he said. “I think most other countries will follow, at least in the Western part of the world.”
Boeing announced Nov. 17 it is reorganizing its defense and space business, a sector of the company that last month reported nearly $3 billion in losses in the third quarter. The sector’s losses were blamed on poor-performing Pentagon programs and the long-delayed Starliner capsule , a reusable spacecraft designed to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), a $26.5 billion a year business, will continue to be led by Ted Colbert, who was named BDS president and CEO in March. BDS includes a broad portfolio of fixed-wing and rotary wing aircraft, commercial and government satellites, human spaceflight programs and weapons. Boeing announced it will consolidate BDS’s eight divisions into four: Vertical Lift; Mobility, Surveillance & Bombers; Air Dominance; Space, Intelligence & Weapon Systems. The Space, Intelligence & Weapon Systems sector will be led by space industry veteran Kay Sears , who joined Boeing in February as vice president and general manager of autonomous systems, and was previously vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s military space portfolio. Sears will oversee space exploration and launch programs, including NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket , as well as satellites, munitions, missiles, weapon system deterrents, maritime undersea, Phantom Works Space and subsidiaries. James Chilton, who was senior vice president of space and launch, will transition to a new role as senior advisor to Ted Colbert, focusing on future space ventures. Between now and Feb. 4, 2023, Chilton will continue to manage space exploration and launch programs, satellites and Phantom Works Space. “I am confident this reorganization will drive greater and more simplified integration and collaboration across Boeing Defense, Space & Security,” said Colbert. “These changes will help accelerate operational discipline and program quality and performance, while stabilizing our development and production programs,” he said. “These are necessary steps to put BDS on the path to stronger, profitable growth.”
L3Harris is making a strategic investment in laser communications company Mynaric with plans to make increased use of that technology for space and other applications. The companies announced July 5 that L3Harris will invest 11.2 million euros ($11.4 million) into Mynaric, taking a 7.2% stake in the Munich-based company. L3Harris, which uses Mynaric’s HAWK terminals for airborne laser communications, said it would expand its use of Mynaric systems for other applications, including space. “Laser communications is rapidly proliferating as a technological pillar for joint all-domain command and control capabilities across space, air, maritime, and terrestrial domains,” said Daniel Gittsovich, vice president of corporate strategy and development at L3Harris, in a statement. “Mynaric will be an excellent partner to rapidly address our customers’ needs for high-bandwidth and secure connectivity.” As part of the investment, Mynaric will become the “preferred provider” of laser communications systems for L3Harris. The two companies will also collaborate on such technologies, including access to labs and testbeds Mynaric created to emulate laser communications between space and the ground. That testing could extend to space itself. Mynaric announced in May an agreement with Airbus U.S. Space and Defense to install a CONDOR Mark 2 laser terminal on the Bartolomeo external payload rack that Airbus operates on the International Space Station. That terminal, to be delivered to the station this fall, will be used to test laser communications. “L3Harris is an excellent partner to further accelerate the scale deployments of our industrialized laser communication products across multiple market segments and we look forward to deepening our relationship going forward,” Bulent Altan, chief executive of Mynaric, said in the statement about the deal. Mynaric has been working with other companies to demonstrate space laser communications. Northrop Grumman selected Mynaric as a “strategic supplier” of such systems in November 2021 and announced June 14 a ground test of optical communications using a Mynaric terminal . Northrop plans to use the technology for intersatellite links on the spacecraft it is building for the Space Development Agency’s Transport Layer Tranche 1 communications network. Mynaric trades on both Germany’s Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq in the United States. It started trading on the Nasdaq last November , and closed July 5, before the L3Harris deal was announced, near its low at $6.63 per share. On the Frankfurt exchange, where the company’s shares had fallen by more than 60% over the last year, shares were up more than 11% in midday trading July 6.
The House on July 14 passed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act by a vote of 329-101. The bill authorizes $839 billion for military spending, or $37 billion more than the administration requested. The House version of the NDAA will have to be reconciled with the Senate’s version in a House-Senate conference later this year. The Senate has not yet scheduled a vote on its version of the NDAA. The bill approved by the House includes several space-related amendments adopted on June 23 by the House Armed Services Committee. These amendments include increases in funding for space launch and requirements for the Pentagon to stand up a “tactically responsive space” program focused on rapid launch of small satellites. Other provisions in the House NDAA urge DoD to use commercial space services for communications, space domain awareness, and debris removal. The bill also establishes a Space National Guard, which the Biden administration firmly opposes. In a July 12 statement of administration policy, the White House said “we continue to strongly oppose the creation of a Space National Guard.” The administration supports personnel reforms to “allow part-time service within the Space Force without requiring the additional overhead of a separate component.” The White House “urges the Congress not to create a new, potential costly bureaucracy with far-reaching and enduring implications.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat would nearly double annual sales in five years to around $2 billion if its OneWeb merger gets approved, the satellite operators said Oct. 12 as they disclosed financials underpinning their multi-orbit deal. U.K.-based OneWeb’s non-geostationary (NGSO) network is key to competing in a satellite connectivity market that is projected to more than triple to $16 billion by 2030, according to Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke. Berneke said about half this future market will be captured by the NGSO sector, where she believes OneWeb’s low-latency services will have an edge by tapping into Eutelsat’s higher-bandwidth satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). Eutelsat announced plans in July to take over OneWeb in an all-share transaction valuing the British startup at $3.4 billion. French investment bank Bpifrance and other top shareholders in publicly listed Eutelsat have voiced support for the deal, alongside OneWeb shareholders including Bharti, SoftBank, Hanwha, and the British government. However, the transaction requires permission from foreign investment authorities and other regulatory bodies, in addition to a Eutelsat shareholder vote to be held in the first half of next year. OneWeb financials OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson expects the startup to record $50 million in revenues for the 12 months to June 30, 2023 — the end of Eutelsat’s 2023 fiscal year — after recently launching commercial services. The startup is the world’s second-largest satellite operator behind SpaceX’s Starlink NGSO broadband constellation, and has 428 of a planned 648 satellites in orbit, enough to provide coverage in the upper part of the northern hemisphere. Masterson said OneWeb is set to deploy its remaining satellites in half a year after resuming its suspended launch campaign later this month. Global services are slated to start commercially in 15 months. According to OneWeb, it has made $21 million in sales to date from North America. Following the start of global services, OneWeb expects to record between $150 million and $250 million for Eutelsat’s 2024 fiscal year. Revenues are projected to come in between $300 million and $500 million the following year, and exceed more than $600 million the year after. The NGSO operator has signed nearly $700 million worth of customer contracts, Masterson said, which includes $275 million under commercial partnerships with Eutelsat. Materson also pointed to a $1.9 billion “risk-weighted pipeline” of potential deals across enterprise, government, aviation, and maritime markets with more than 150 customers trials are underway. OneWeb has been investing heavily to deploy a constellation estimated to cost $5 billion in total, although its current shareholders have only provided about $2.7 billion of this after taking ownership following its 2020 bankruptcy. Srikanth Balachandran, OneWeb’s chief financial officer, said the operator will spend a final $500 million over the next 12 months to cover the constellation’ s remaining costs. He estimated OneWeb has made a $198 million loss over the last 12 months in EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The operator expects to reach EBITDA break-even by the end of June 2025. Eutelsat connectivity growth Eutelsat expects the combined company to generate about $1.2 billion for its 2023 fiscal year ending June 30, and then grow in double digits annually to about $2 billion for fiscal year 2027. Combined EBITDA would outpace revenue growth, the company said, rising from around $700 million in fiscal year 2023 to about $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2027. The companies expect to capture about $150 million in average annual revenue synergies four years after closing the deal by integrating services and products, including future hybrid terminals that would connect to both constellations. They said Eutelsat’s expertise and resources would also accelerate OneWeb’s commercial launch and the ramp-up of its services globally. Five years after closing the deal, the operators expect to realize an average $80 million in annual run-rate pre-tax cost synergies by avoiding duplicated efforts. This includes personnel, although the companies said no layoffs are needed to achieve this target. Eutelsat and OneWeb also expect about $80 million in average annual capital expenditure synergies from the first year of their merger as they rationalize their future satellite fleets. They have already started work on planning the NGSO operator’s second-generation constellation, which they expect to cost $4 billion and to enter service by early 2028. Eutelsat already owns 23% of OneWeb after building up a stake in the business to bolster connectivity services amid a gradual decline in its legacy satellite TV business. The French operator said during financial results released Oct. 12 that it is extending its no-dividend policy another 12 months to three fiscal years to support investments. The company reported 287 million euros ($279 million) for the three months to the end of September, down 4.5% compared with the same period last year on a like-for-like basis when adjusted for foreign exchange rates. Broadcast revenues fell 7.4% to 170 million euros. Sales from fixed broadband and mobile connectivity jumped 21.1% and 31.4%, respectively, to about 19 million euros and 26 million euros. Eutelsat reported 1.15 billion euros in revenues for the year to the end of June, down 6.7% compared with the period the year before. Berneke said Eutelsat and OneWeb have filed most of the applications needed to get their merger approved by regulators, and expect to secure permission for the transaction in five to six months.
Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital has formed a new business unit that will produce electro-optical imaging satellites, the company announced Dec. 8. Named Optical Solutions Group, this segment of the company plans to sell both off-the-shelf and custom-made imaging satellites, Terran Orbital’s CEO Marc Bell told SpaceNews . Bell said the company in the first quarter of 2023 will unveil an electro-optical satellite product line that customers can order from a catalog. “Instead of waiting for two years to design and build a satellite, you will be able to order it and get it within weeks,” he said. The satellites will be made with Terran Orbital’s buses and sensors from partner companies. Bell said the company is expanding its manufacturing capacity so it can produce small and large buses of up to 800 kilograms. Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, Terran Orbital manufactures satellites in Irvine, California, The company’s foray into the electro-optical satellite imaging market follows its recent move to cancel a planned synthetic aperture radar constellation and instead build SAR satellites and sell them directly to commercial operators or government agencies. Electro-optical satellites take photographs from space by converting light from the target object into digital images. The U.S. government operates its own E/O imaging satellites and also buys imagery from commercial providers like Maxar, BlackSky, Planet and Satellogic. Bell said Terran Orbital’s satellites are aimed at national governments around the world that don’t have sovereign constellations and are looking for lower cost options. “A lot of people have been asking for this,” he said. “There are many countries that want to control their own satellites and get their own data.” Alex Pertica, recently hired as v ice president for space domain awareness solutions at Terran Orbital, will lead the Optical Solutions Group. Pertica joined Terran Orbital after a 36-year career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he managed space science and national security projects. Industry sources who asked to not be quoted by name said Terran Orbital’s plan would put the company in somewhat direct competition with companies like Maxar, Airbus, Thales Alenia and others that manufacture satellites for the Earth observation market. “It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and whether Terran Orbital can gain traction,” one executive said. “They’ve got an uphill climb in terms of flight heritage.”
Rocket Lab, a launch services company and space hardware manufacturer, announced Dec. 1 it is creating a separate entity to focus on U.S. defense and intelligence agency customers. The new business sector, called Rocket Lab National Security, also will work with U.S. allies, the company said. Rocket Lab, which went public in August 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, is looking to sign more defense and intelligence customers for its small launch vehicle Electron and its future medium-lift rocket Neutron — expected to debut in 2024. The company decided it needs a separate business dedicated to this market, a spokesperson said in a statement to SpaceNews . “National security missions and payloads on Electron and Neutron, which can have different bureaucratic requirements to commercial launches, will be contracted through the RLNS subsidiary,” the spokesperson said. Having a dedicated national security subsidiary will help understand these customers’ requirements, “which may be dedicated rapid call-up launch, satellite design, build and integration, spacecraft operations, or all of the above.” The establishment of a national security business follows Rocket Lab’s recent introduction of a “ responsive space” program aimed at government customers. Rocket Lab USA is based in Long Beach, California. The company operates a launch site in New Zealand and will soon start flying from Wallops, Virginia. Since Electron’s first launch in 2017, Rocket Lab has secured multiple deals with national security agencies, including the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. Space Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Rocket Lab’s solar power business supplies solar cells for U.S. Space Force missile-warning satellites. Another sector of the company recently won contracts to provide separation systems for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency satellites. 
 Rocket Lab also signed a research agreement with the United States Transportation Command to explore the use of rockets for point to point cargo delivery. “Top of the list for national security is reliability and responsiveness,” said Brian Rogers, senior director of Rocket Lab’s global government launch services. 
Aalyria Technologies, a startup that emerged from stealth mode Sept. 13, plans to provide high-speed internet using software and networking technology from Google’s ill-fated project to beam internet service from high-altitude balloons. Founded by former U.S. Marine and defense industry executive Chris Taylor, Aalyria is repurposing Google’s networking software but is not using balloons. Its goal is to provide high-speed communications that extend from land to sea, air and space. Aalyria advisor and former Google vice president Milo Medin said the company’s software and optical network technology “marries ground-based fiber with space, wireless, and optical links to create a survivable on-demand network infrastructure.” He said this vision supports both military and commercial needs. In a news release Sept. 13, Aalyria revealed it won an $8 million contract from the Defense Innovation Unit to prototype a network for DIU’s hybrid space architecture program that seeks to provide internet connectivity using both commercial and government satellites deployed in different orbits. DIU had initially showed interest in Google’s Loon program, launched in 2014 and shut down in 2021 . The idea of connecting networks from different domains appeals to the Defense Department as it looks to link systems in a joint command-and-control architecture. “Aalyria brings together two technologies originally developed at Alphabet as part of its wireless connectivity efforts: atmospheric laser communications technology and a software platform for orchestrating networks across land, sea, air, space and beyond,” the company said. It is backed by Silicon Valley investors including the founders of Accel, J2 Ventures and Housatonic. The company hired former executives and technical experts from Google, Amazon, Meta, NASA, Cisco, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lockheed Martin. Its advisory board includes former DoD and civil government officials. The combination of Aalyria’s network orchestration technology and laser communications, the company said, could support communications networks with up to 15 million possible links. A software platform called Spacetime was designed to manage networks of ground stations, aircraft, satellites, ships and urban meshes, and to be compatible with legacy network architectures. The laser communications technology, called Tightbeam, would move data in space and through the atmosphere, “offering connectivity where no supporting infrastructure exists,” said Aalyria. “These technologies set the new standard for intelligently orchestrating, managing, and extending mesh networks across all domains — land, sea, air, and space — to create connectivity everywhere, no matter the protocol,” said Taylor, the company’s CEO. Aalyria said it is working with commercial space companies and governments “to make their networks more resilient, and make their spectrum more profitable.”
KAHULUI, Hawaii — With the Space Launch System now safely back inside the Vehicle Assembly Building ahead of Hurricane Ian, NASA is now studying what work to do on the rocket to prepare for a next launch attempt unlikely to occur before mid-November. The SLS and Orion spacecraft arrived back in the VAB at 9:15 a.m. Eastern Sept. 27, about 10 hours after departing Launch Complex 39B. NASA decided Sept. 26 to roll the vehicle back to the VAB given forecasts of high winds at the Kennedy Space Center later this week from Hurricane Ian. The agency is now planning work to perform on the SLS while in the VAB, starting with replacing batteries for the rocket’s flight termination system (FTS). The core stage FTS batteries are located in the intertank section between the rocket’s liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen stages, and can only be accessed while in the VAB. “Getting into some of these volumes is difficult,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, in a Sept. 27 call with reporters. “The FTS changeout is not simple.” That alone, he suggested, would make it difficult to get the vehicle ready for the next launch period, which runs from Oct. 17 through 31. “I don’t think we’re going to take anything off the table,” he said when asked if an October launch was still feasible. “I also recognize it’s Sept. 27 and getting back out to the pad and trying to get there may be a challenge.” That work, Free added, is unlikely to start before next week because of hurricane preparations at KSC. “We don’t want to go out too fast,” he said, and overlook other work on the vehicle. That other work includes assessing any “limited life” items on the vehicle that may need to be replaced or serviced. Those items include other batteries on the vehicle, storage of hypergolic propellants on the Orion service module as well as its “soft goods” like seals. Free added NASA would also work with United Launch Alliance on examining any components on the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage that may need work. The work the FTS batteries will reset its certification by the Eastern Range, which was originally set for 25 days. NASA obtained a waiver last week from the U.S. Space Force, which operates the range, that effectively more than doubled that lifetime to allow for launch attempts as late as Oct. 2. However, Free said that despite the waiver, his assumption was that the FTS certification reverted to the original 25 days once the batteries are serviced. There are also long-term issues with the vehicle, which was fully stacked last fall and has remained in that configuration much longer than originally expected. “The team evolved their thinking” about limited-life items over the last several months, he said. “The analysis we’re doing to clear ourselves and get comfortable with the limited-life items are a function of the hardware itself but also the duration it’s been stacked.” If the Artemis 1 launch does slip to November, there are launch opportunities from Nov. 12 to Nov. 27. More than half take place in the middle of the night. Free said it’s NASA’s preference to conduct the inaugural SLS launch during the day for improved tracking. “I think we’ll look at the risk-versus-benefit trade,” he said. “Our preference is probably a daylight launch, but we won’t rule out a nighttime launch, either.” NASA also had to deal with a fire reported in the VAB about two and a half hours after the SLS arrived back in the building. The minor fire did not result in any injuries or major damage. Janet Petro, director of KSC, said on the call than a 40-volt electrical panel caught fire on a wall in a high bay in the building, a “good distance” from the SLS. Personnel were briefly evacuated from the building, but had returned by the time she spoke to reporters. “I don’t know if I can speculate any more on what caused the fire,” she said. “There was nothing close to the vehicle. The vehicle was never at risk.” In a statement late Sept. 27, NASA said a spark from an “arc flash event” on an electrical panel fell on a rope and caused it to smolder, triggering a fire alarm. The agency emphasized that neither the SLS or Orion were at risk from the fire. 
China has performed its first repeated use of a suborbital spaceplane as part of efforts to develop a fully reusable space transportation system. The suborbital vehicle launched vertically from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on Friday, Aug. 26 Beijing time (Aug. 25 Eastern), according to CASC, China’s main space contractor. The suborbital spaceplane later landed at Alxa Right Banner airport in Inner Mongolia. The short statement provided neither images of the craft nor information such as time, duration or apogee of the launch. The launch occurred while an orbital spaceplane —launched Aug. 4 and an apparent part of a planned two-vehicle reusable system—continues to orbit the Earth. The clandestine mission marks the second flight for the suborbital spaceplane, which was developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), a major CASC subsidiary. CASC’s statement declared the complete success of the flight test, and represents a leap in the development of China’s space transportation technology from single-use to reusable. The first flight took place in July 2021, also launching vertically from Jiuquan and landing horizontally at Alxa Right Banner. CASC stated last year that the vehicle uses integrated aviation and space technologies. The second flight followed 13 months later, after what CASC describes as inspection and maintenance. Meanwhile CALT’s orbital spaceplane launched from Jiuquan Aug. 4 remains in orbit on its second mission. The suborbital and orbital spaceplanes could be combined to create a fully-reusable space transportation system. The orbital vehicle could land Aug. 27, according to Orbital Focus , when the spacecraft’s ground track takes it over the Lop Nur airstrip in Xinjiang, the location of its landing after its first mission in 2020. The CASC spaceplane project was apparently unveiled in 2017 when senior CALT official Chen Hongbo told Science and Technology Daily ( Chinese ) that an under-development reusable spacecraft would be tested in 2020 and ultimately be capable of carrying both crew and payloads. A once-every-five-year space “white paper” released by the State Council Information Office in January stated that “successful demonstration flight tests on reusable launch vehicles have been carried out,” and that China would, “continue to strengthen research into key technologies for reusable space transport systems, and conduct test flights accordingly.” Such projects face large technological and other challenges, Bleddyn Bowen of the University of Leicester told SpaceNews ahead of the second orbital spaceplane launch earlier this month. “Spaceplanes and reusable orbital vehicles have come and gone, and come back again. There can be some marginal and varied uses for them but they are extremely expensive compared to conventional rockets because the stresses of atmospheric re-entry wreaks havoc on the materials and structures,” Bowen said. “The Chinese development of spaceplane technology will be remarkable if they manage to overcome the problems Dyna-Soar and the Space Shuttle faced, and the challenges SpaceX’s Starship is now facing as well.” Other reusable spacecraft or spaceplane projects are under consideration in China. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC) is working on its own spaceplane , named Tengyun, while commercial firm Space Transportation last year raised more than $46.3 million for its hypersonic spaceplane plans. A number of Chinese rocket companies have also created presentations including small spaceplanes launching atop concepts for liquid rockets.
BREMEN, Germany — European space officials are stressing a need for greater autonomy and sovereign capabilities going forward in the wake of geopolitical trends and developments. “Europe is already a very large space power, but it can even become better in the sense that Europe has strong capabilities in every sector but lacks autonomy independence in some parts,” said Gerldine Naja, the European Space Agency’s Director of Commercialization, Industry and Procurement, a keynote speaker at the opening of the industry conference at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany, Nov. 15. “We have to focus on ensuring full European autonomy in space as well as investing more in commercial growth areas,” Naja added. Naja touched on a number of areas in which Europe needs to boost its independence, including exploration, for which requires nuclear power sources for long duration missions in deep space. The matter of space transportation was stated to be critical. “There is no space policy without an autonomous launcher capability,” Naja said. “And Europe has to strengthen and maintain this autonomy. This is crucial.” “I believe that we are at the start of a new era for launches in Europe, with a higher focus on commercial launch services. And ESA must follow this trend.” The policy push for autonomy and independence is being addressed at all levels. “I mentioned the need for European independence. It is clear that this applies also to European components,” Naja said, adding that the EEE initiative—which seeks to secure the availability of suitable, reliable and cost-effective electrical, electronic and electro-mechanical components—will ensure European sovereignty and independence. The same theme was echoed in a later keynote panel. Jean-Marc Astorg, director of strategy at French space agency CNES, spoke about the importance and opportunities presented by constellations. “We need sovereignty for secure connectivity in Europe,” Astorg said, referring to a proposed broadband constellation . He added that ESA and the European Commission have done a good job of coming together to propose several configurations of secure connectivity. “It’s important to have this system, which must be available as soon as possible. But it’s important, from my point of view, to show that the European public sector is capable to solve its inherent difficulties to develop a system.” The EU secure connectivity program will be one of many packages on the table at next week’s ESA ministerial meeting , as will advanced technologies , including many related to competitiveness. These moves are linked to long term trends but are also being advanced by more recent and acute developments. “Autonomy and sovereignty are some of the underpinning elements of EU thinking that have been there for a few years already. But I would say that the global and geopolitical developments, especially in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, have strongly accelerated this,” Tomas Hrozensky, a researcher at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told SpaceNews . “Europe is trying to send a message to the world that it is one of the global space powers but indeed it has an issue with not actually having sovereign capabilities that you think are associated with that,” Hrozensky says, noting dependence on some subcomponents. “So it’s really something where the European Union comes into play and I think it’s associated with a broader trend of geopolitical awareness of the EU.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Earth observation startup Albedo raised $48 million in a Series A funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Shield Capital. Participating in the round were new and existing Albedo investors including Republic Capital, San Francisco-based Giant Step Capital Partners, C16 Ventures, Initialized Capital, Liquid 2 and SNR. With the cash infusion announced Sept. 7, Albedo plans to complete development and testing of its first satellite destined for very low Earth orbit, or VLEO, as well as the software for satellite operations and imagery distribution. “This basically allows us to start going heads-down on executing our technical roadmap with flying in VLEO and obtaining this level of resolution in both optical and thermal infrared,” Topher Haddad, Albedo co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “There’s a lot of new core technologies that we’re developing to enable us to do that.” Albedo, based in Austin, Texas, and Denver, is developing satellites to acquire optical imagery with a resolution of 10 centimeters per pixel and thermal infrared imagery with two-meter resolution on the same platform. Because the satellites will obtain optical and thermal infrared imagery nearly simultaneously, Albedo can use the higher-resolution optical imagery to sharpen features in the thermal infrared imagery and offer “insights that you couldn’t get if you had thermal on its own,” Haddad said. The resulting imagery, which can reveal moisture levels, temperature differences and energy efficiency, has applications for precision agriculture, mapping, insurance, vegetation management, construction, pipeline monitoring, urban planning and defense. “To reach net zero, we will need high fidelity visual and thermal data that is available at low cost and high frequency, enabling a host of Earth science focused climate solutions,” Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures said in a statement. “Albedo is the first company we’ve seen that can provide this data that will enable applications for precision agriculture, forestry management, and wildfire prevention and management.” Earth observation experts say that classified U.S. government satellites obtain optical imagery with a resolution of about 10 centimeters per pixel. As an example, they point to images of a damaged Iranian launchpad tweeted in 2019 by then-President Trump. At that resolution level, analysts can classify military vehicles and aircraft, and observe missile tests. In December, Albedo received a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration license to sell commercial optical imagery with a resolution of 10 centimeters per pixel. In April 2021, the company raised $10 million in a Seed funding round. “Beyond the capital, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with two lead investors who reflect the markets with some of the strongest needs for Albedo’s imagery,” said Haddad said in a statement. “We have an exciting and challenging road ahead. With the new funding and regulatory risks behind us, it’s time to ramp up our technical development and execute on bringing this capability to market.”
TAMPA, Fla. — NanoAvionics expects to be able to churn out several hundred satellites annually in two years following a multimillion-dollar investment plan from its new Norwegian owners. The Lithuanian company also said Oct. 25 it has changed its name to Kongsberg NanoAvionics after finishing the sale of a majority stake to Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace last month, although it will continue to trade as NanoAvionics. Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace produces spacecraft subsystems and other products mainly for military customers. It is part of Norwegian technology giant Kongsberg, which pulled in about $2.6 billion in revenues in 2021. NanoAvionics CEO Vytenis Buzas said Konsberg’s sizable resources will help expand the company into the defense market, and transform it into a global “prime supplier for small satellite constellations.” The companies declined to disclose specific information about this growth plan. Buzas told SpaceNews it includes the addition of about 2,000 square meters of floor space at its facility in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, where the company was founded as a university spin-off in 2014. Expanding production facilities and staff will help “grow our mass manufacturing capabilities to an annual output of several hundred identical satellites a year,” he said. NanoAvionics also plans to add manufacturing capacity at its U.S. facility in Columbia, Illinois. The manufacturer and mission integrator currently employs about 200 people. Defense expansion Buzas said NanoAvionics is ramping up research and development activities under its investment plan to make its modular satellite architecture more secure and reliable, which would help capture a larger share of the defense market. “I cannot reveal any numbers but interest in smallsat technology from the defense sector has been increasing, and I imagine our involvement in defense missions is heading for exponential growth,” he said. “To do that we need to build satellite busses with defense-grade reliability and with capabilities that match mission needs, which to some extend we already have.” Some of these new capabilities will also benefit its commercial customers, he added. NanoAvionics’ current defense customers include Kongsberg, which ordered three satellites earlier this year for a maritime surveillance mission covering the North Sea. The spacecraft will be based on the MP42 microsatellite bus, which at more than 50 kilograms is NanoAvionics’ largest yet as the company extends into bigger spacecraft with more capabilities. Buzas said NanoAvionics’ plan to grow in the defense market would see it develop even more components in-house. Roughly half the components used for its satellite buses were sourced from outside suppliers six years ago, compared to around 20% today. Crowded market Despite the company’s strengthened focus on defense under Kongsberg, Buzas continues to see strong demand in the commercial market. Startups continue to flock to the space market, providing a source for customers but also competitors as others seek to muscle in on the smallsat manufacturing sector. Most recently, Los Angeles-based startup Apex came out of stealth Oct. 24 after raising a $7.5 million seed round for plans to produce large numbers of smallsats. Large and established satellite makers also looking for ways to capture more of the smallsat market, including partnership-hungry Lockheed Martin . Although “the market is crowded, and especially for the newcomers,” Buzas believes NanoAvionics’ nimbleness and modular architecture give it an advantage over the competition. About 80% of the company’s satellite architecture remains the same from mission to mission, despite changes in the payload, enabling it to reduce costs and shorten production times by buying parts in advance. Newcomers to the market will also need to build up flight heritage to gain traction with customers. “It took for us quite a few years to find ourselves within this market,” Buzas said, “and to position ourselves within this market.” Operational heritage is particularly important for defense customers that are often happy to pay a premium for highly reliable and resilient space products.
A payload hitching a ride on the launch of a weather satellite will demonstrate a technology that both NASA is considering for future Mars landings and a company is studying for rocket reusability. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 4:25 a.m. Eastern Nov. 10. The primary payload of the rocket is the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 weather satellite, which will be placed in a polar orbit to collect weather data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The launch was previously scheduled for Nov. 1 but postponed to replace a battery in the rocket’s Centaur upper stage . A secondary payload on the launch of JPSS-2 is Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), a NASA technology demonstration. While JPSS-2 will be deployed nearly a half-hour after liftoff, LOFTID will remain attached to the Centaur until 75 minutes after liftoff, following a deorbit burn of the Centaur. Shortly before deployment, LOFTID will inflate a reentry shield six meters in diameter. That heat shield will slow down the vehicle from orbital velocity to Mach 0.7 as instruments on board collect data on the performance of the shield. LOFTID will then deploy parachutes to slow it down for the rest of its descent, splashing down in the Pacific east of Hawaii to be recovered by a ship. LOFTID is the latest in a series of technology demonstrations by NASA of inflatable reentry systems whose size is not constrained by the payload fairing of the rocket. “Currently, using rigid technologies, we’re limiting the size of the aeroshell itself to fit within the fairing of a launch vehicle,” or no more than about five meters across, said Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center, during a pre-launch briefing in October. That limits the size of payloads delivered to the surface of Mars to about 1.5 metric tons. A larger aeroshell, using inflatable technology, could enable much heavier payloads, up to the range of 20 to 40 metric tons. “It’s what you need to put humans on Mars,” he said. Larger aeroshells also enable access to higher terrains on Mars where the atmosphere is not dense enough to slow down vehicles with existing systems. NASA hopes to collect performance on inflatable heat shields with the LOFTID test. John DiNonno, LOFTID chief engineer at NASA Langley, said the heat shield will see peak temperatures in excess of 1,400 degrees Celsius during reentry and experience decelerations of up to 9g. The inflatable structure is protected by a flexible thermal protection system made of materials that can be tailored for the specific mission. A ship off the coast of Hawaii will recover LOFTID after splashdown, but as a precaution the vehicle will eject data recorders while descending under parachutes that can be recovered separately. It will also return some limited data in real time. “We should be able to get some preliminary feedback within at least a couple hours of reentry on whether it was successful or not,” Del Corso said. LOFTID cost NASA nearly $93 million over five years, said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA is also cooperating with ULA on the mission through an unfunded Space Act Agreement, with ULA supporting integration of LOFTID on the Centaur, as well as the parachute system and recovery ship. The LOFTID mission is formally dedicated to Bernard Kutter, a ULA engineer who worked on advanced technologies but died unexpectedly in 2020. John Reed, ULA’s chief technologist, said his company is interested in LOFTID as part of the company’s Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology (SMART) reusability concept for its Vulcan rocket. Under the SMART approach, the engine section of the Vulcan booster would detach after stage separation and deploy an inflatable aeroshell to slow it during reentry. A parachute would slow the engine section in the final phases of descent. He said the company is also interested in broader commercial applications of the technology. “The whole focus of this effort has been to develop a path that can support not just us but also LEO commercial applications, returning products from cislunar, as well as getting on to Mars and having the downmass to really enable humanity’s expansion.” Those future applications will require much larger aeroshells than the six-meter version being tested on LOFTID. At a briefing during the AIAA ASCEND conference Oct. 25, Michelle Munk, acting chief architect at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, estimated ULA will likely need aeroshells 12 to 14 meters across, while Mars landers may need versions up to 16 meters across. “We have in our development strategy scaled-up flight tests,” she said, which would also make the inflatable aeroshells more robust and include integrated guidance, navigation and control required for Mars missions. She added that she expected that any ULA testing of larger inflatable decelerators would support NASA Mars plans. “We’ll get several flights of the hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator that will be instrumented and give us increased data sets about its performance in the flight environment, which we can use to build confidence and make improvements,” she said. Those future tests by ULA, she said, will also help sustain vendors that produce key components of inflatable aeroshells that NASA will rely on for future missions. “We see this as a wonderful partnership and a way to maintain the supply chain and keep the learning going as we progress, in the long term, towards a Mars mission.” Kortes said it’s too early to determine when an inflatable decelerator might be used on a Mars mission. “This is risk reduction,” she said. After LOFTID, “there is a scale-up that we would begin to talk about, begin to work on.”
Firefly Aerospace says its Alpha launch early this month was a success despite the fact that its payloads, placed in a lower orbit than planned, reentered within several days. The Alpha rocket lifted off Oct. 1 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the second flight of the vehicle , after the inaugural Alpha launch 13 months earlier failed when a first-stage engine shut down shortly after liftoff. On this launch, Alpha’s upper stage reached orbit and deployed its payloads, and the company declared the launch a success. The launch carried three satellite payloads: a 3U educational cubesat called Teachers in Space (TIS)-Serenity, a 3U NASA technology demonstration cubesat named TechEdSat-15 and PicoBus, a deployer from the Libre Space Foundation carrying five PocketQube piosatellites. The U.S. Space Force ultimately cataloged five objects from the launch, including the Alpha upper stage, with two of the other four provisionally identified as TIS-Serenity and TechEdSat-15. The satellites, though, appeared to be in lower orbits than originally planned. The press kit distributed by Firefly ahead of the launch said that the satellites would be placed in a 300-kilometer orbit after the upper stage performed a circularization burn. However, Space Force tracking data initially placed the objects into orbits with a perigee of about 220 kilometers and apogee of 275 kilometers. Those orbits caused the payloads to decay rapidly. According to the Space Force’s Space-Track database, three of the objects reentered by Oct. 5 and the fourth, the Alpha upper stage, reentered on Oct. 7. Only the payload labeled as “Object A”, at one point identified as TIS-Serenity, is still listed in orbit according to Space-Track, although other sources list it as also having reentered. That’s led to speculation that there was a problem with the launch. Seradata, a firm owned by space traffic management company Slingshot Aerospace that runs a leading satellite database, announced Oct. 6 it considered the launch a failure “due to the likely life loss for the seven satellites aboard when compared to their design lives.” Firefly, though, reiterated the launch was a success. “First stage and second stage performance was in-line with our flight 2 requirements and therefore successful,” the company said in response to questions from SpaceNews about the mission. There had been discussion immediately after the launch about a potential stage separation issue, with onboard video showing the nozzle of the upper stage engine appearing to nearly hit the interstage. Firefly, though, said there were no issues with stage separation: “Stage separation relative motion remained within vehicle requirements and expected from component level qualification and therefore successful for this test flight.” “Our primary objective for the Alpha FLTA002 mission was to achieve a pre-defined elliptical orbit, following the second stage burn, which was 100% successful,” the company added, omitting the circularization burn mentioned in the press kit. “Our data review continues, but we are excited by our preliminary review showing that we will only need to make very minor tweaks for our next mission.” NASA spokesperson Rachel Hoover confirmed Oct. 7 that TechEdSat-15 had deorbited. She added, though, that the spacecraft’s mission had been expected to last less than 10 days. The primary purpose of TechEdSat-15 was to test an “exo-brake,” a drag device to aid in the deorbiting of satellites. The exo-brake is designed to operate at higher temperatures than other drag devices to enable more precise targeting of satellite reentries. The low orbit the spacecraft was placed in, though, led some to wonder if the exo-brake could be tested. “TechEdSat-15 was delivered to an orbit that allowed the project to achieve its objectives,” Hoover said. “The team is now analyzing the flight data to study performance of the latest iteration of its exo-brake technology.”
Chinese launch company Landspace suffered failure Wednesday in what was the world’s first attempt to achieve orbit with a methane-fueled rocket. The Zhuque-2 methane-liquid oxygen rocket lifted off from newly-constructed facilities at the national Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Dec. 14. Apparent spectator footage posted on Chinese social media showed the rocket ascending into clear skies, trailed by white exhaust. While the first stage is understood to have performed well, separate apparent leaked footage suggests that issues affecting the rocket’s second stage resulted in the failure of the mission. Data suggest an expected burn of the stage’s vernier thrusters, intended to carry the stage and payloads into orbit after a burn by the main engine, did not occur as planned. Chinese launch successes are typically announced immediately after successful orbital insertion. There was still no official announcement of mission success or failure at press time, eight hours after launch. The launch attempt represents a leap by Chinese commercial launch providers despite the failure, marking the country’s first launch attempt of a privately-developed liquid propellant launch vehicle. Zhuque-2 was carrying a number of satellites for commercial companies and targeted deploying these in a sun-synchronous orbit. Zhuque-2, which translates to “Vermillion Bird-2,” is powered by gas generator engines and is capable of delivering a 6,000-kilogram payload capacity to a 200-kilometer low Earth orbit (LEO), or 4,000 kilograms to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), according to Landspace. The rocket has a diameter of 3.35 meters—the same as a number of national Long March rockets—-a total length of 49.5 meters, a take-off mass of 219 tons and producing 268 tons of thrust. The mission was also the world’s first orbital launch of a methane-fueled rocket. A range of launch vehicles, including SpaceX’s Starship, the ULA Vulcan, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and Terran 1 from Relativity Space are working toward their own test flights. Developing methane rocket engines has involved numerous engineering challenges but promises advantages in terms of reusability, a capability seen to be transforming the launch market. Landspace is one of the earliest and best-funded of China’s emerging commercial launch firms. The company’s first launch took place four years ago with the much smaller and simpler solid-propellant Zhuque-1 and ended in failure . Chinese firms iSpace, OneSpace and Galactic Energy have all attempted or completed launches of light-lift solid rockets, along with spinoffs from giant state-owned enterprises CASC ( China Rocket ), CASIC ( Expace ) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS Space ). Landspace said in November that it was already working on a second flight model of the Zhuque-2. It is currently unclear how the failure will affect the timeline for the new launch attempt. Wednesday’s launch attempt used an expendable rocket, but Landspace is working on making Zhuque-2 reusable, having in recent months tested a restartable version of the 80-ton-thrust TQ-12 engine which powers the Zhuque-2 first stage. The firm is also working on an improved second-stage engine which will not require vernier engines. Zhuque-2 will soon face competition, with Beijing-based iSpace developing its own methalox rocket, the Hyperbola-2. The firm recently unveiled a first-stage test article at Jiuquan in preparation to conduct hop tests. Galactic Energy is meanwhile developing its two-stage, kerosene-liquid oxygen Pallas-1, designed to carry 5,000 kilograms to LEO or 3,000 kilograms to a 700-kilometer SSO. Both could launch in 2023. Another firm, Deep Blue Aerospace, has begun hop tests for its planned Nebula-1 reusable kerolox launcher. Officials from China’s main space contractor CASC have also presented concepts for reusable, methalox launchers and a methane-powered version of the Long March 9. Its main Shanghai rocket-making institute is looking at methalox launch solutions. China’s government opened portions of the space sector to private capital in late 2014, spurring the emergence of hundreds of space-related companies engaged in a range of activities, including launch, satellite operation and manufacture, ground stations, downstream applications, and more. China has sought to foster the development of commercial space with policy support and guidance, including regulations for launch and small satellites and national strategies supporting “ satellite internet .” Investment , from a mix of venture capital and government-linked investment vehicles, has also flowed in recent years. A number of commercial launch companies are stating the national satellite internet project as a potential source of contracts and revenue. The military-civilian fusion national strategy has also allowed the production of sensitive, dual-use technologies to take place in the private sector. Methane-LOX engines have been under study by CASC prior to the development of commercial Chinese methane rocket engines.
SAN FRANCISCO – Toronto-based Space Flight Laboratory won a contract to support development of HawkEye 360 satellites, which pinpoint the location of radio frequency signals. Under the contract announced Nov. 14, SFL will support development of five HawkEye 360 clusters, comprised of three satellites apiece. SFL will design, assemble and integrate HawkEye 360’s Cluster 9. In addition, SFL, part of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies, will provide technical support for HawkEye 360’s integration of Clusters 7, 8, 10 and 11 at its manufacturing facility in near its Herndon, Virginia, headquarters. The value of the contract was not disclosed. The award is significant for SFL because it reveals SFL’s ongoing relationship with HawkEye 360, an SFL customer that built its own satellite manufacturing facility earlier this year. The contract also demonstrates the popularity of SFL Flex Production, a new program that offers to help customers with any aspects of satellite design, assembly, integration and testing. “The idea is to adapt to customer needs,” Zee said. “Different customers have different needs.” Space startups tend to focus on reducing the cost of space-related products and services. To keep costs low, many companies have opted for in-house production. Still, some startups turn to organizations like SFL that have experience in delivering satellites “that perform well in orbit and last quite a long time,” Zee said. “The challenge in industry is to have the benefits of both worlds.” Customers in SFL’s Flex Production program, could have SFL “build all their satellites or they could build their satellites in-house or they could have SFL enlist the assistance of a third party” to quickly mass produce a large constellation, Zee said. Customers tend to rely more heavily on SFL to support design changes like adding payloads or performing other technology upgrades. HawkEye 360 satellites fly in formation to detect and geolocate RF signals for a variety of applications including maritime, emergency response and national security. The company’s goal is to launch 20 three-satellite clusters by the end of 2025. SFL developed HawkEye 360’s three-satellite Pathfinder cluster launched in 2018. SFL also built the satellites in HawkEye 360’s second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth clusters. HawkEye 360’s sixth cluster of three satellites is scheduled to launch in December on the first Rocket Lab Electron from Wallops Island, Virginia.
The U.S. Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $22 million contract to produce a satellite bus able to carry multiple small payloads that will be used to demonstrate on-orbit refueling in geostationary orbit. The contract, announced July 8, was a sole-source award for a satellite called ROOSTER, short for Rapid On-orbit Space Technology Evaluation Ring. It is based on the Northrop Grumman ESPA Star payload adapter, a ring-shaped bus designed to ride as a secondary payload on national security space missions launched by United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Northrop Grumman in 2017 won a contract to develop the so-called Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE) to host small payloads and experiments. The Space Force ordered three LDPE satellites, the first of which launched in December , with two more scheduled to launch on upcoming national security space missions. The LDPE program was recently renamed ROOSTER. The new contract is for a 2026 delivery of a ROOSTER “multi-manifest rideshare satellite supporting operational and prototype missions in a geostationary orbit and maturing technology needed to conduct on-orbit refueling for future missions,” said the announcement. The Space Force nicknamed the smallsat ring “ the freight train to space ” that can insert smallsats into geosynchronous orbit or host dedicated payloads on the ring itself until test completion. The ROOSTER satellites would primarily operate in GEO but the Space Force said cislunar, medium Earth orbit, and to a lesser extent low Earth orbit are also being considered.
TAMPA, Fla. — The payload for Viasat’s second ViaSat-3 broadband satellite has arrived in California to be integrated with a Boeing chassis, the operator said July 13. The high-throughput payload traveled by truck from Viasat’s facility in Tempe, Arizona, to Boeing in El Segundo, where it will also undergo environmental tests in preparation for launch. The first Ka-band ViaSat-3 satellite was integrated with Boeing’s 702 satellite bus platform last year. This satellite is slated to launch to geostationary orbit (GEO) later in 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to cover the Americas. The second ViaSat-3 is due to launch about six months after the first to cover Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The third and final ViaSat-3 is on track to launch about six months after that to expand the company’s coverage over Asia-Pacific. Viasat is developing all three payload modules in-house. According to the company, they will each be capable of receiving, transmitting and processing data at rates greater than one terabit a second — three times faster than the Americas-focused ViaSat-2 that launched in 2017. Viasat had initially planned to deploy the first ViaSat-3 satellite in 2019 before supply chain issues and pandemic-related delays pushed it into 2022. Jupiter-3, EchoStar’s Americas-focused high-throughput GEO satellite that Maxar Technologies is building, has also been caught up in delays and is now set to launch on a Falcon Heavy in 2023 instead of this year. Meanwhile, SpaceX has been busy launching non-geostationary satellites to expand the coverage and availability of its Starlink constellation. Starlink reached a key milestone for serving mobility markets June 30 when the Federal Communications Commission granted permission to connect land vehicles, boats and aircraft. Viasat sees strong growth potential in the inflight connectivity market, in particular, and has been building up its partnerships with airlines. Most recently, Virgin Atlantic said July 12 that Viasat terminals will be installed on 16 new Airbus A330-900 aircraft, scheduled to enter service in the second half of 2022 with intercontinental flights between the Americas and the United Kingdom. The equipment Viasat is installing is designed to be forward-compatible with its ViaSat-3 constellation. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
The Federal Communication Commission wants to require operators of low Earth orbit satellites to deorbit their spacecraft within five years after their mission ends, a much shorter timeframe than currently required. The FCC issued a draft order Sept. 8 setting a “five-year rule” for post-mission disposal of LEO satellites. The commission will take up the order at its Sept. 29 open meeting. The order, if adopted by commissioners, would require spacecraft that end their missions in or passing through LEO — defined as altitudes below 2,000 kilometers — dispose of their spacecraft through reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere as soon as practicable and no more than five years after the end of the mission. The rule would apply to satellites launched two years after the order is adopted, and include both U.S.-licensed satellites as well as those licensed by other jurisdictions but seeking U.S. market access. The FCC did not have a formal rule setting a deadline for deorbiting satellites, but in the licenses it issued for satellites the agency “consistently applied” a 25-year rule used by both international orbital debris mitigation guidelines and U.S. government standard practices. Many in the space industry, though, argued that timeline was too long, creating an increased risk of collisions. A counterargument came from NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, which noted in 2020 that reducing the post-mission lifetime from 25 years to 5 years would result in only a 10% decrease in the orbital debris population over 200 years, “which is not a statistically significant benefit.” The FCC, though, sided with those who argued that decreasing the post-mission lifetime had benefits beyond limiting long-term debris generation. Keeping defunct satellites in orbit longer, the FCC noted, also requires operators of active satellites to perform more collision avoidance maneuvers, adding to a growing burden. “We believe that a five-year post-mission orbital lifetime strikes an appropriate balance between meaningfully reducing risk while remaining flexible and responsive to a broader selection of mission profiles,” the order stated. In the order, the FCC left open the possibility of additional conditions on deorbiting satellites. That could include a shorter post-mission lifetime for satellites in large constellations as well as maneuverability requirements for satellites. The new five-year rule comes after the FCC delayed consideration of a similar rule in April 2020 . FCC commissioners elected then to get more feedback on a potential change to the 25-year guideline as well as more controversial measures, such as a performance bond to provide a financial incentive for operators to properly dispose of their satellites. The release of the FCC draft order came the same day the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) published a “Satellite Orbital Safety Best Practices” guide developed in cooperation with Iridium, OneWeb and SpaceX. The document outlines steps satellites operators should take during development, launch, on-orbit operations and disposal. The document recommends that satellites deorbit within five years of the end of life, with a goal of one year. For those satellites that can’t achieve that guideline through natural orbital decay, or whose orbits take them in the path of crewed spacecraft, the document calls for an “actively-managed deorbit” of the satellite, lowering it to just above the point of natural decay. Regulatory issues The FCC’s move to set new a new rule for post-mission disposal of LEO satellites is likely to trigger another round of discussions about what agency should be responsible for setting such rules. “The rest of us were talking about space debris and it was the FCC that stepped forward and made some significant rules,” said Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, during an Aug. 24 panel discussion organized by The Aerospace Corporation and George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “That being said, the question is, how do we want to do this going forward?” he added, noting that responsibilities for oversight of the commercial space industry are currently spread among several agencies, including his office and the Federal Aviation Administration. DalBello praised the FCC for the “intellectual work” it has done on orbital debris and other topics and its rigorous process for establishing rules. “My only question is, is that the way we want to piecemeal this going forward, or would we like to take a step back?” The release of the FCC draft order came a day before a meeting of the National Space Council at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Vice President Kamala Harris, chair of the council, said in an Aug. 12 speech that the meeting would take up the need to revise “simply outdated” commercial space regulations . In a Sept. 8 letter to Harris, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the vice president to use the council meeting “to provide regulatory clarity for the domestic space industry and to advance international norms for space activity.” Feinstein specifically mentioned her concerns about the growing population of orbital debris. “Space debris increasingly threatens satellites, and debris can only be managed through international cooperation, yet no international guidelines for right-of-way or satellite repositioning responsibility exist,” Feinstein wrote. “I urge you to work with experts in government and industry, as well as international partners to develop clearer rules for spaceflight and debris management.” The White House has not released an agenda for the council meeting or other details about the event in advance. Only with the release of the vice president’s schedule late Sept. 8 was the time of the meeting announced: 2:20 p.m. Eastern.
TAMPA, Fla. — Ovzon’s first satellite is set to launch between December and February following the delivery of parts caught up in supply chain delays, the Swedish broadband service provider said Aug. 18. The Ovzon 3 satellite is now able to enter the final stages of integration and assembly with manufacturer Maxar Technologies, which had been waiting on parts that include a reaction wheel from supplier Honeywell. Arianespace had planned to fly Ovzon 3 earlier in 2022 on an Ariane 5 rocket with Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS satellite. However, Eutelsat opted for a dedicated Ariane 5 mission after it emerged Ovzon-3 would not be ready in time. Konnect VHTS is slated to launch Sept. 6. Arianespace is looking to add Ovzon-3 to one of three remaining Ariane 5 flights before transitioning to the Ariane 6. Ovzon 3 is lighter and smaller than traditional communications satellites designed for geostationary orbit. Ovzon CEO Per Norén said Ovzon 3’s size makes it easier for Arianespace to work the spacecraft into an existing launch manifest. “It fits with many different other satellites and it’s not that difficult … to be a co-passenger with,” Norén said, adding “we’re not worried about” it. Once launched from Arianespace’s launchpad in French Guiana, he said it would take about four months for Ovzon-3 to enter service and expand the company’s available capacity with five steerable beams. Ovzon leases capacity from Intelsat and other satellite operators to provide broadband mainly for government customers across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Intelsat also has an agreement to use Ovzon 3’s services. In the third quarter, Intelsat’s $56.2 million pre-capacity commitment for Ovzon-3 was reduced 5% because of the satellite’s delay. Norén said the pre-capacity deal will likely be adjusted down another 10% in the fourth quarter to $47.8 million. He said Intelsat’s reduced pre-capacity commitment “will not have any impact on future revenues for Ovzon 3” because of rising demand for the company’s services, and its “solid relationship and collaboration” with Intelsat. Demand for Ovzon’s services has been growing following Russia’s Feb. 24. invasion of Ukraine. “We have been in active dialogues with European, American, and international civil and defense organizations since the war in Ukraine started,” Norén said. “There is clearly an increased need for high performing and resilient mobile satellite communications for all types of critical mission.” Ovzon said revenues jumped 135% to 78 million Swedish Krona ($7.4 million) for the three months to the end of June, compared with the same period last year. The company reported an operating loss of 8.8 million Swedish Krona, compared with a loss of 31 million Swedish Krona in 2021.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – While Astra Space is taking the delisting warning the company received from NASDAQ seriously, the company has “lots of different strategies” to address it, Astra CEO Chris Kemp said at the Satellite Innovation conference here. “Our plan is to work really hard to ship lots of great products for our customers and continue to run the business well and have a great earnings call,” Kemp said in a fireside chat with Tess Hatch, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Alameda, Calif.-based Astra received a NASDAQ warning Oct. 6 because its share price had been below $1 for 30 consecutive days. After that type of notice, a company has 180 days to bring its share price back up and trade above $1 for at least 10 consecutive days. “Based on what’s happening in the markets, there might be other space tech companies that get similar notices,” Kemp said. One Astra strategy for raising its share price is shipping space propulsion to customers. Astra acquired Apollo Fusion and its electric propulsion technology in 2021. At the time, Apollo Fusion thrusters did not have space heritage. Now the technology has proven itself in space. Astra has orders for more than 100 propulsion systems and the company will continue to increase propulsion shipments next year, “which will create another revenue stream for us in our space technology business,” Kemp said. While people might think of Astra as a launch company, it is much more, Kemp said. Still, launch remains a key component. Astra has launched four rockets, two successfully delivering 23 satellites to orbit. Based on changing market conditions and changes in the company, Astra is redesigning its rocket. We decided not “to burden” our employees with the rocket “we built as a much smaller company before we went public,’” Kemp said. “Let’s take everything we’ve learned from these flights and let’s do a fourth version of our product and focus on reliability. Let’s take this quarter million square foot facility we just built in Alameda and let’s use it with all the new equipment and all the new people and processes.” Astra recently hired Doug Kunzman, the former Blue Origin senior director for New Shepard operations and Maintenance, to be its vice president of test and launch engineering and operations and to lead its rocket program. Astra remains focused on producing inexpensive rockets designed to be launched at a high cadence. As a result, the rocket is not manufactured with carbon fiber or metal 3D printing. “We basically engineered the whole rocket to be as inexpensive as possible,” Kemp said. “If you look at our track record of launches, the ones that didn’t work had nothing to do with this cost optimization. They had to do with further investments we needed to make it process integrity.” In a report soon to be published, Astra determined that its upper stage engine consumed fuel at a rate faster than predicted and faster than engineers observed in testing on ground-based stands. “We basically ran out of fuel a little early. That caused the engine to shutdown, which caused the requisite velocity to not be reached to deliver the payloads at the target orbits. Everything else worked fine,” Kemp said. Why not simply fix the problem and launch the same rocket, Hatch asked. “No one really cared about a 50-kilogram rocket anymore,” Kemp said. “When you looked at the economics, we basically need a 500-kilogram-class launch vehicle. Customers really want this larger vehicle.” With additional modifications of batteries and turbo pumps, the new rocket “will deliver over 10 times the payload capacity,” while building on heritage software, structures, tanks, welding “and all the things that we’ve been doing for the past five years,” Kemp said.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA has restarted the countdown for the first launch of its Space Launch System vehicle and Orion spacecraft after concluding a faulty sensor caused the first attempt to scrub earlier in the week. Countdown clocks started ticking down after a mission management team meeting Sept. 1, setting up a launch attempt at 2:17 p.m. Eastern at the beginning of a two-hour window. This will be the second attempt to launch the SLS after controllers scrubbed the initial attempt Aug. 29 . At a briefing late Sept. 1, officials said they believe the primary issue that caused the first scrub, a higher-than-expected temperature in one of four RS-25 engines in the core stage after chilling them with liquid hydrogen, was an artifact of a faulty sensor in that engine and not a problem cooling the engine. “Yes, we know we had a bad sensor,” said John Honeycutt, NASA SLS program manager, arguing the sensor’s anomalously high temperature reading did not match the physics of the flow of liquid hydrogen through the engine. “We’ve had time to go back and look at the data and compare many sources of data, and do some independent analysis that confirmed it’s a bad sensor and we’re getting good quality propellant through the engine.” John Blevins, SLS chief engineer at NASA, said the sensor is there for engineering purposes only, as one means to measure the engine chilldown, and is not used by the vehicle’s flight computer. Because of that, the data from the faulty sensor does not need to be “masked” or hidden from the flight computer for the countdown to proceed. “We do not need the sensor for flight.” Asked if controllers will simply ignore the data from that sensor, Blevins responded, “Yes, we will.” Because that chilldown is being moved up somewhat earlier in the countdown, he said there will be sufficient time for controllers to verify by other means that liquid hydrogen is flowing through the engines enough to cool them to the proper temperatures. Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager, said controllers ran out of time during the first launch attempt to confirm the engine chilldown was properly working despite the bad sensor. “We ran into other issues” earlier in the countdown, he said, such as a hydrogen leak in a ground umbilical and a vent valve that was not working. “We were off the script in terms of the normal tanking operation,” he said. “One of the worst things you can do when you find yourself in a hazardous condition is just go even further off-script.” With “20/20 hindsight” it’s now clear those sensors are not the best means of measuring the status of the engine chilldown, he addded. “We have a great plan moving forward. We understand the risk posture associated with the getting the engines thermally conditioned,” he said. “The team was asked today, very specifically, ‘Are you ready to go load the vehicle with this earlier tanking and earlier bleed flow operation?’ and the answer was absolutely yes.” Workers also used the time since the first scrub to address other issues, including the hydrogen leak seen in the tail service mast umbilical earlier in the countdown. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, said technicians used the experience from a similar issue during an earlier wet dress rehearsal to fix the leak. The issue, she said, appeared to be a pressure sensor that gotten loose, and workers replaced its seal and retorqued it. “We believe that is, most likely, the leak source,” she said, as other potential sources appeared to be normal. “Until you hit it with cryo, you don’t know for sure.” Weather forecasts for the launch are more favorable, with a 60% chance of acceptable weather for the Sept. 3 launch window and 70% if the launch is rescheduled for Sept. 5. There may be times during the window when weather is no-go because of clouds or showers, said Melody Lovin, weather officer with the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, “but the bottom line is that I don’t expect weather to be a showstopper.” Launch managers separately ruled out a Sept. 4 launch attempt, which would have only been an option if NASA postponed the Sept. 3 launch before beginning tanking of the rocket. An analysis showed that, if the SLS upper stage underperformed during its translunar injection burn on a launch that day, Orion could be placed on a trajectory that increased eclipses that would have caused problems for the solar-powered spacecraft. A launch is possible on Sept. 6, the last day of the current launch period, but only in a short window at the end of the day. Sarafin said that, with a successful launch Sept. 3, the Artemis 3 mission would last approximately 37 days, with a splashdown off the California coast Oct. 11.
SAN FRANCISCO – Trans Astronautica Corp. announced an agreement Sept. 27 with telescope manufacturer Celestron to develop a space-qualified version of the company’s Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA) ground-based telescope. “We’ve been using Celestron’s RASA telescopes in our space domain awareness and asteroid prospecting systems, and we found them to be very affordable, high-quality optical systems,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “We looked at the designs and we realized it would not be that hard to adapt them for space use.” Over the next year, TransAstra plans to modify the RASA telescope design and substitute materials to produce a telescope that can withstand radiation exposure, temperature swings, and the vibration and shock loads of space launch. Through the partnership, TransAstra and Celestron intend to produce ground-based and space-qualified RASA telescopes that rely on TransAstra’s Optimized Match Filter Tracking (OMFT) system to track faint objects in deep space. With three or four inexpensive telescopes mounted on satellites, aerospace companies or government agencies could monitor space traffic and pinpoint space debris, Sercel said. “We have designs for space domain awareness sensors that would allow you to see targets the size of a toaster from medium-Earth orbit out well beyond the moon,” he added. Celestron engineers have long recognized that their RASA telescopes “are great for satellite tracking and space situational awareness,” said Celestron CEO Corey Lee. “But at the same time, we needed a partner who has the necessary experience and software expertise to expand into the arena.” In August, TransAstra announced a partnership with online astronomy platform Slooh to offer U.S. schools access to a global network of ground-based and space-based telescopes. TransAstra operates Sutter telescopes at the Winer Observatory in Arizona and at the Sierra Remote Observatory in California.
Engineers have restored normal attitude control of a cubesat bound for the moon nearly a month after suffering a problem during a maneuver. Advanced Space, the company that owns the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) spacecraft, said Oct. 7 that it was able to restore normal three-axis attitude control of the spacecraft earlier that day. The spacecraft had been in a spin-stabilized state since going into a safe mode during a trajectory correction maneuver Sept. 8 . According to the company, engineers isolated the problem to a valve with one of the spacecraft’s eight thrusters. “The partially open valve resulted in thrust from the associated thruster whenever the propulsion system was pressurized,” Advanced Space said in a statement. After what the company described as extensive testing and simulation, controllers uploaded commands to the spacecraft Oct. 6 to restore normal three-axis attitude control. “Initial telemetry and observation data after the recovery attempt points to a successful recovery of the system which has now regained 3-axis attitude control,” the company stated. Advanced Space said that, assuming the spacecraft remains in its normal attitude, it will work on changes to other spacecraft procedures for subsequent maneuvers that incorporate the effects of the partially open valve. The attitude control problem was the second major issue for CAPSTONE since it was launched in June. Shortly after its deployment from Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon kick stage July 4, the spacecraft lost contact with controllers. That contact was restored about a day later, and the company said a series of events that included an “improperly formatted command” caused the communications outage. CAPSTONE, funded by NASA to test the stability of the near-rectilinear halo orbit that will be used by future Artemis missions, remains on track to enter orbit around the moon on Nov. 13.
BREMEN, Germany — The European Space Agency is looking to create a more sustainable path for space, starting with growing commercial partnerships in lunar exploration. A panel discussion titled “Understanding the Evolution towards Commercial Partnerships in the Development of Europe’s Lunar Economy,” at the Space Tech Expo in Bremen, Germany, Nov. 16 got underway just as the recently-launched Artemis 1 mission started its trans-lunar injection burn. Bernhard Hufenbach, commercialization and innovation team leader at ESA, said his team has a very simple vision “to extend the economy into space to boost the benefits space exploration delivers.” “We’re trying to stimulate demand for the services by customers and then either supporting them to deliver the business cases and to try to attract and help industry to attract third party funding… So instead of procuring spacecraft hardware, we are procuring services.” One of these initiatives centers on setting up services to assist lunar exploration. ESA will buy communications services and fly payloads on Lunar Pathfinder, a small communications satellite that ESA and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) plans to launch in 2024. The Commercial Lunar Mission Support Services (CLMSS) is planned to deliver vital infrastructure for future moon exploration and, according to ESA, strategically position European capabilities. This and other initiates will need broader work to ensure consistency, adaptability and applicability. “We need to make sure that the service that we’re providing is compatible. There’s no point having a service from the US and a service from Japan and a service from China or somebody that doesn’t work together,” said Andrew Haslehurst, chief technology officer at SSTL. “So it’s how we work as a community to make sure we can build on that service together. To provide the long term, sustained growth in exploration.” ESA is working on its own Argonaut, or European Large Logistics Lander. But prior to this the agency is considering paying for commercial delivery services from small lander providers. Laura Todd, head of future programs space exploration at Airbus Defence and Space, says the company is looking at sustainability, modularity, scalability and bringing base costs down, and also looking at smaller companies to fill gaps. There are however difficulties ahead. “We’re in that transition point from the institutional funding, or the government funding, moving into the private funding. And I think another difficulty we have in space exploration is, as we all know, there’s a market there, but we just don’t know when, especially when you look at the lunar economy, when you look at resources,” Todd said. Bernard Foing, executive director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG), also noted that knowledge gaps needed to be filled to be able to build a lunar economy. Hufenbach stated that there are intense incubation programs which are spread all across Europe, as well as ESA’s so-called accelerators . What may be possible could come down to decisions at this week’s ESA Ministerial meeting . “If you look at all the programs which are present at the ministers meeting, every program has the element which is linked to commercialization supporting startups supporting industry initiative,” Hufenbach stated. “By commercialization we not only increase the economic footprint of our program, we think we offer more competition, we can accelerate the exploration process. And if it works out, ESA gets more valued for the same investment.” The ministerial meeting is seen as crucial, in which ESA will ask for a 25% increase over 2019 funding. The panel, in general, agreed on the value of European investment in space going forward. “I fundamentally believe that it’s only through space exploration, that we are going to advanced technologies that are going to address the current challenges on the earth today,” said Todd.
As European ministers gather to allocate funding for European Space Agency programs for the next three years, agency leadership is optimistic about winning support for its priorities. Ministers gathered here Nov. 22 for the start of a two-day meeting where ESA’s 22 full member states and several associate states will formally commit to funding programs from exploration to space transportation. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher has put forward a package of programs at a total cost of 18.7 billion euros ($19.2 billion), an increase of about 25% from the previous ministerial in 2019. In comments at the opening, public session of the meeting, Aschbacher made what was, in effect, a closing argument for that package, arguing that nations needed to invest more in space despite challenges such as inflation, an energy crisis and the ongoing war in Ukraine. “We must take bold decisions today. As I’ve said before, we must invest in the future because we are in a crisis,” he said after outlining the components of the program he is asking members to fund. In a briefing with reporters late Nov. 21, Aschbacher and Anna Rathsman, chair of the ESA Council, said they were going into the ministerial feeling confident and better prepared than past meetings, when agreements came together at the last minute. “It looks good,” Rathsman said after a final meeting to finalize resolutions for the ministerial. “There are a lot of different views among the 22 member states, of course, when you discuss things, but I think they’re very constructive. There’s a willingness to really find a way forward.” “I’ve been to many ministerial conferences myself, and I’ve never seen it go so fast, so early,” Aschabcher said. Smooth planning, though, doesn’t guarantee that funding will follow. The ministerial will feature, largely behind closed doors, debates and negotiations about what programs countries will subscribe to and with what amounts. Among the key issues is a request for 750 million euros as ESA’s contribution to the European Union’s secure connectivity constellation, recently named Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite or IRIS². ESA also needs 700 million euros to restructure the ExoMars mission after ESA cut ties with Russia earlier this year, although the agency is looking for only half of that at this ministerial meeting. That would enable ExoMars, previously planned to launch in September on a Russian rocket with a Russian landing platform, to launch no earlier than 2028 with European replacements for those Russian elements. While ESA is seeking significant funding increase overall, that is not apportioned equally among all programs. ESA’s science programs, for example, will get an increase only enough to cover inflation. That flat funding comes after a modest increase ESA won for science at the previous ministerial in 2019 in Seville, Spain. “We all fought very hard in Seville to get this modest increase, but inflation is taking it away,” said Günther Hasinger, ESA science director, at the Nov. 21 briefing. “The economic boundary conditions are such that we cannot afford a big uplift.” He said that the lack of a funding increase will not affect missions already in development, although one large one, an X-ray telescope called Athena, is undergoing restructuring and a likely delay because of development issues and cost growth. Hasinger said ESA will instead delay later missions. One reason for the disparity is that science programs are “mandatory” programs, with all ESA members contributing to them based on their gross domestic product. Optional programs, on the other hand, give member states more flexibility in what programs to support and by how much. “Everyone believes that the science program is extremely important. On the other hand, the number of optional programs that really have a good purpose is growing all the time,” said Rathsman. Nicolas Walter, chief executive of the European Science Foundation, raised concerns about science funding in remarks at the ministerial council’s opening session. “We’re concerned that declining purchasing power will decrease the scope and the scale of the program, including the enabling technologies for future missions, and thus we encourage increased investment as soon as possible,” he said, calling for that increase no later than 2025 ministerial. In opening remarks at the ministerial, several member states announced their intent to increase their contributions to ESA programs, although typically with few details about the amount of the increase or how it would be allocated among those programs. French economic minister Bruno Le Maire, who served as the host of the ministerial council meeting, told reporters before the opening session he was confident that ESA would secure its full request. “I’m confident because I think that this space cooperation and this space vision is absolutely key for the independence of Europe,” he said. “So I’m quite confident that the financing of space and European ambitions will be a priority for all the member states.”
Regional satellite operators are searching for faster ways to add more capacity to their networks to meet soaring demand for broadband, according to executives speaking at World Satellite Business Week here. Saudi Arabia’s Arabsat is in talks to buy Ka-band capacity in the Middle East and Africa from another operator while it waits to expand its own fleet of satellites, vice president and chief strategy officer Abdulhadi Alhassani said on a conference panel of regional operators Sept. 13. Arabsat operates 10 satellites and has three more in the pipeline, Alhassani said, including the Badr 8 slated to launch in 2023 and Arabsat 7A that it ordered in April . He said the company plans to order a Ka-band high throughput satellite before the end of the year for a launch in 2025 or 2026 to meet growing demand for data. “We needed that satellite yesterday,” he added. South Korea-based KT Sat is also open to opportunities for extra capacity. KT Sat announced Sept. 12 that it had ordered a satellite from Thales Alenia Space for a launch in late 2024; however, this will replace its aging Koreasat 6 spacecraft and will not provide the expansion capacity it needs in the region. David Kyungmin Song, KT SAT’s CEO, said its customers are demanding capacity from the operator that it currently does not have. Speaking to SpaceNews on the conference’s sidelines, he said KT SAT is planning to order a high throughput satellite to meet these needs in South East Asia, but this will take time to finalize. He declined to give a timeframe for when KT Sat plans to deploy this satellite. Incoming LEO capacity KT Sat is talking to SpaceX’s Starlink and others developing low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellations to add capacity in Asia. Starlink has been focused on selling directly to customers since it launched early services around two years ago for the consumer side of its business. Earlier this year, Starlink introduced services targeted toward larger enterprise customers and is open to partnerships to expand in this market. Starlink is exploring “the opportunity to work with partners around the globe,” said Jonathan Hofeller, vice president of Starlink commercial sales at SpaceX, said Sept. 13. “Between now and the end of the year, that’s something that I’m personally trying to drive,” he said, “and figuring out how we can impact more people.” Remote communications provider Speedcast announced the first deal Sept. 13 to resell Starlink services to enterprise and maritime customers, which would help SpaceX get a foothold in the global energy market. Half of KT SAT’s revenues currently come from broadband, and Song said the operator plans to integrate low-latency services from LEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO) to diversify its operations. In January, the South Korean company invested in U.S.-based startup Mangata Networks , which is planning a constellation in MEO and highly elliptical orbit. KT SAT also has regulatory filings submitted to the International Telecommunications Union last year to develop its own LEO constellation. Song expects demand from consumers in Asia for LEO services will be limited. Terrestrial networks pose strong competition in developed countries, including South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. In less developed regions without widespread fiber optical networks, he said pricing LEO services for consumers is a challenge. However, KT Sat sees strong LEO demand from governments, militaries and business-to-business markets in Asia, such as maritime and aviation. Hasan Ertok, CEO of Turkish satellite operator Turksat, said his company is also in discussions with LEO operators to add capacity in its markets. Arabsat is considering LEO partnerships, Alhassani said, but said there are business and technical issues that remain unresolved, including the availability of suitable antennas. This article was updated Sept. 15 to correct Abdulhadi Alhassani’s title at Arabsat
President Biden’s proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2023 is “record-breaking” when it comes to national security space, says a new report from the consulting firm Avascent . Funding for military space has increased every year since 2018 but that growth may not be sustainable, the report says. The administration’s own projections show that funding for the Space Force – $24.5 billion proposed for 2023 – will grow by a modest 4.2% in 2025 before leveling off by 2027. “With inflation eroding the value of any planned increases and a potential recession looming, space investment in real dollars may have reached its zenith,” says Avascent. A major concern for the Space Force will be paying for its ambitious multi-orbit architecture of missile warning, missile tracking and communications satellites which all saw substantial increases in 2023. This issue also was raised by the House Appropriations Committee in a report submitted with its markup of the 2023 defense budget. Defense and aerospace industry analyst Andrew Penn, one of the authors of the Avascent report, said DoD five-year funding projections are likely to change but it’s unclear what the future holds for space budgets. “One thing is certain: with an ever changing Congress and executive branch, actual outyear DoD spending will certainly diverge from the current projections,” he told SpaceNews . “The five-year defense plan summarizes the current administration and customer community’s best guess based on the present threat environment, industrial base, and competing federal priorities. But given the long procurement timelines for large programs, the FYDP can serve a good starting point.” Despite congressional support and strong arguments in favor of continued space investment, he said, “spending levels for the national security space budget will ultimately be shaped by exogenous factors as well as the attitudes of congressional appropriators.” Penn noted that the 2023 defense plan was put together long before the inflationary pressures started and well before Russia invaded Ukraine. Trade-offs likely will be needed If the top line does not go up after 2025 as is currently projected, DoD and the Space Force could face some tough trade-offs, said Penn. Within the space budget, the biggest line items are missile warning and missile tracking satellites, “and there’s a lot of skepticism on the Hill around just how much that’s going to cost,” he added, as the current numbers do not reflect the effects of inflation. The assumption when this budget was written was a 2.2% inflation rate, but inflation today is over 8%, with no immediate sign of abating. “For those programs to execute on schedule, they’d certainly need more money than the current plan calls for,” Penn said. Another program that could face trouble is the Evolved Strategic Satcom, or ESS, the most expensive of the Space Force’s communications satellites . The ESS will provide highly secure communications lines for the most sensitive national security operations, including nuclear command and control. Penn said DoD could push the ESS schedule to the right to save money in the short term as the nuclear command-and-control mission can be met with existing satellites, “though this would come at the cost of less resiliency and mission capability that ESS would provide.” Because of the national security implications of space programs and the accelerating space race with China, however, future administrations and lawmakers will be reluctant to cut these projects, said Penn. “If you are looking for bill payers for broader government funding issues, space is not the place to look.” National security space accounts for only 1.3% of federal discretionary investment and 2.7% of DoD spending. “It’s a blip on the radar,” said Penn. “And it delivers a strong ‘bang for buck’ which should help maintain budget growth moving forward.”
Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha launch vehicle reached orbit f or the first time Oct. 1, just hours after the U.S. Space Force announced it awarded the company a $17.6 million contract for a 2023 mission to demonstrate rapid-response space launch. Jason Mello, president of Firefly Space Transport Services, said the Space Force contract is a “game changer” that opens up opportunities in the highly competitive national security launch market. As a new entrant, Firefly faces an uphill climb, “but it was really important for us to get our first Space Force contract,” Mello told SpaceNews . The contract is for the Tactically Responsive Space TacRS-3 mission, where Firefly will be given just 24 hours’ notice to launch a Millennium Space small satellite to low Earth orbit. “We won against a very tough line of competitors,” he said. Mello joined Firefly less than a year ago after retiring from the U.S. Air Force. He said responsive launch was talked about back when he was in the service, but there was never enough funding or capabilities to do it. “Now there’s a real push to rapidly respond to threats and develop that operational capability,” he said. The company is marketing the Alpha launch vehicle, which can deploy 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, as an alternative to other small launcher competitors that can only lift a fraction of that, Mello said. He said a newer version of Alpha will lift up to 1,400 kilograms. For responsive launch, another selling point is having more than one launch location. Firefly now only launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, but plans to also launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida . The TacRS-3 demonstration is significant for Firefly to build experience supporting military customers, Mello said. “It will definitely help us as a company to mature and to be able to meet the operational requirement.” The next launch scheduled for Alpha is the NASA Venture Class Launch Service Demonstration 2 planned for later this year. Meanwhile, between now and when the Space Force mission is called up next year, “we’re going to be working very closely with Millennium on the interfaces to ensure that we have a smooth mission integration,” he said. “We’re already starting to have those discussions.” By requiring launch and payload providers to work together upfront, the Space Force is helping the industry, especially launch providers “so we are able to launch satellites from different providers,” said Mello. “That’s going to be really important to be able to get to that 24 hour period.” National security space launch A longer term goal for Firefly is to compete for national security space launch missions with a future medium-class vehicle it will develop in partnership with Northrop Grumman . “Our plan right now is to look at NSSL Phase 3,” said Mello. The Space Force plans to select launch providers in 2024 for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contracts. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won Phase 2 in 2020, and their current contracts will be recompeted. Northrop Grumman in August announced it selected Firefly to provide an American-built first-stage upgrade for the Antares rocket in order to end Northrop’s current reliance on Ukrainian and Russian suppliers for the Antares first stage. The upgraded Antares 330 — which will use seven Firefly Miranda engines — will support NASA’s space station commercial resupply services. The new medium launch vehicle is projected to lift more than 13,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. “We’ll be working with Northrop Grumman on how to meet the national security space requirements for Phase 3,” Mello said. “I think it is exciting right now for the commercial marketplace to be able to provide capabilities to the government,” he said. “The Space Force is really looking for what capabilities are out there,” he added. “We are contested when it comes to space and the ability to launch is so vitally important to our national security.”
NASA said it completed all the objectives of a Space Launch System tanking test Sept. 21 despite the reoccurrence of liquid hydrogen leaks. The day-long test at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B involved filling the SLS core stage and upper stage with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, carrying out the “kickstart bleed” of liquid hydrogen into the core stage engines and a “pre-press” test of the liquid hydrogen tank. The test was designed to confirm that changes such as replacement of seals and a new loading procedure would prevent hydrogen leaks seen in the previous launch attempt Sept. 3. Early in the test, though, controllers reported a liquid hydrogen leak in the tail service mast umbilical, where liquid hydrogen is transferred from ground systems to the core stage, that exceeded limits and temporarily stopped loading. Warming the connection of the umbilical to the core stage then cooling it appeared to work, with the leak falling well below the limit of 4% concentration of hydrogen but not completely going away. Another hydrogen leak took place during the pre-press test on a second, smaller liquid hydrogen line, with concentrations as high as 5%. Engineers continued the test and the leak diminished over time. NASA said at the conclusion of the test that they met all of their objectives but stopped short of declaring they were ready to proceed with a launch at the next opportunity, Sept. 27. “I think the test went really well,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis 1 launch director, during a NASA TV interview shortly after the end of the tanking test. “All of the objectives that we set out to do we were able to accomplish today.” She said, though, it was premature to declare the vehicle ready for another launch attempt. “I think we’ll take the data and we’ll go see what it tells us,” she said. “I don’t like to get ahead of the data, and so I’d like the team to have the opportunity to go look at it to see if there are changes we need to make to our loading procedure, our timelines, or if we’re good as is.” The tanking test is not the only factor influencing a launch decision. NASA is still working with the Eastern Range to secure a waiver for the SLS flight termination system, whose certification expired at the end of the previous launch period in early September. The U.S. Space Force, which operates the range, was not expected to decide on a waiver until after the tanking test. Tropical weather could also play a factor. A system currently called Invest 98L is forming the Caribbean that is forecast to become a tropical storm within the next few days and could head towards Florida, based on current long-range weather models. That would require NASA to at least consider rolling back the SLS to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, said at a Sept. 19 briefing that it would take about three days to get the vehicle back in the VAB.
A new office within the Space Force’s procurement command will buck traditional military programs by only buying technologies that the space industry provides as a service. “With so many new capabilities being provided by industry, commercial services are taking off in ways that we never probably imagined just a few years ago,” said Brig. Gen. Timothy Sejba, program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power at the Space Systems Command. The command’s Commercial Services Office, known as COMSO, was established earlier this year amid fears that the military is missing out on proven and promising technologies due to procurement bottlenecks and a culture that tilts toward developing government-owned systems. “We need to figure out how do we go and buy not just satellite communications but things like space domain awareness — and other capabilities that are being turned into services — that we might want to leverage both in peacetime and certainly in time of conflict,” Sejba said Oct. 19 at the Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles. Jeremy Leader, a former U.S. Air Force space officer and procurement executive, was named director of COMSO in April. He said there is a push from the top to buy commercially available services — including satellite imagery, weather forecasting, space data analytics, inspace data relay and others that might emerge in the future — to augment or replace traditional procurements of military hardware. The attitude is to “exploit what we have, buy what we can and only build what we must,” Leader told SpaceNews. COMSO is part of the Los Angeles-based Space Systems Command but will operate primarily in the Washington, D.C., area with at least two planned locations in Northern Virginia. The majority of commercial deals COMSO will award in the near term will be for satellite communications services, estimated at about $1 billion a year, he said. But over time, billions more are expected to shift from hardware procurements to a broader range of commercial services. “The ‘buy what we can’ piece includes going to commercial space services already available before building exotic, one-off military-centric systems,” he said. “We have historically done programs of record only in the ‘build’ category, and our requirements and budgeting processes are built for that as well.” COMSO will be keeping a close eye on where the market is going, Leader said, especially in dual-use areas where there is both government and commercial demand. “When there’s new and interesting opportunities, I want to make sure that our office stays agile enough to capitalize on those,” he said. One of COMSO’s locations in Northern Virginia will be in Chantilly, near the National Reconnaissance Office. The location is not coincidental, said Leader, as COMSO is trying to take a page from the NRO’s commercial contracting playbook. The Space Force is particularly interested in learning how it can work more closely with the NRO to take advantage of the agency’s long-term deals with commercial providers of electro-optical, radar and radio-frequency satellite imagery. The intelligence community is “a little bit ahead of us in this effort,” he said. “How the NRO structured their agreements is awesome. It allows the Space Force to actually use the contracts that are already there.” COMSO wants to set up additional contract vehicles to support specific needs of DoD organizations for imagery and data analytics services. If a combatant command, for example, is not getting what they want from the intelligence community, Leader said, “we’ll have the ability to set up an augmented contract to help fill the gaps.” The idea is to partner with the NRO, not to engage in bureaucratic turf battles, he added. “I’m less worried about who owns a mission area and more worried about delivering capability.” COMSO will launch pilot programs in the coming year with combatant commands that have a growing demand for tactical intelligence, and experiment with different contracting approaches, said Leader. “If we need contracts to buy the analytics products in times of crisis or contingencies, then we need to have that menu for combatant commanders, versus them going off and trying to figure it out on their own.” Chris Worley, vice president and general manager of Maxar’s defense business, said the industry is eager to see DoD take advantage of commercial data and analytics services. Maxar is the NRO’s largest commercial imagery supplier. But for commercial companies to be able to support the government, “it’s important to be an integrated part of the architecture of how information is provided to the warfighter,” Worley said Oct. 25 at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies conference. The market is constantly putting out new products, he said. Military users want these products, “but how are we going to bring them?” That is a significant question because providers need to know if they will be connected to the military’s mesh network, for example, or if they must bring their own systems. “I think there needs to be a broader dialogue on policy and concepts,” Worley said. An emerging commercial services opportunity is data analytics for space domain awareness, said Col. Joseph Roth, director of innovation and prototyping at Space Systems Command. The Space Force buys data collected by private companies but also needs help analyzing the military’s own data acquired by the Space Surveillance Network sensors. “We’re looking for analytical tools and capabilities to analyze information that the Space Force is collecting on a regular basis,” he said. “We have some of the most exquisite capabilities in the world when it comes to telescopes and radars around the globe,” he said. “The challenge that we face right now is in many cases, we cannot get all the data off of those sensors to take advantage of that exquisite information.” Leader said space domain awareness, or SDA, is the next category of services, after satellite communications, likely to see growth. An online SDA marketplace — a portal where companies can sell data to the government — was created by the Space Systems Command a few years ago and will transition to COMSO. The plan is to set up contract vehicles to make commercial data more accessible to any government organization, including the Department of Commerce’s emerging space traffic management office. “We are doing a pilot program with the Office of Space Commerce,” said Leader. “COMSO will ensure that the data we buy from one place has the ability to be transitioned into the Department of Commerce.” Barbara Golf, strategic adviser to the U.S. Space Force for space domain awareness, works with many startups and commercial companies that pitch products to the military. Her assessment of the industry, she told SpaceNews, is that it is “providing mature enough technology that it can be acquired as a service under contract.” “We are doing this today,” she said. “However, we do not currently use or encourage the use of long-term, greater than one-year contracts in order to maintain competitive pressure on providers to continue upgrading and improving capabilities,” Golf added. “This is based on lessons learned from previous failures in incorporating commercial capabilities into operations.” Transitioning to long-term service contracts will be easier said than done, she said. Some of the challenges will be “maintaining competition across the procurement and operations construct for commercial capabilities in order to avoid vendor-lock and limit price instabilities.” Other hurdles ahead, said Golf, include “expanding funding lines and supporting infrastructure to enable the on-boarding of the rapidly advancing commercial capabilities demonstrated in our operations.” Although the idea of “buying what we can” seems straightforward, it can quickly get complicated, Leader said. It’s a discussion around the question of what space capabilities should be “inherently governmental,” and which could be acquired commercially, he said. “And the answer often depends on who you talk to.” The Global Positioning System that provides positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) is a case in point, Leader noted. “We see markets emerging for alternative PNT solutions even though GPS is inherently governmental today.” Going forward, he said, “as we understand how commercial markets are evolving and where those services are at, I’m keenly looking at how we define what that inherently governmental piece is.” Leader cautioned that the government has to be careful not to inadvertently “kill” a sector of the industry by funding in-house programs that compete directly with commercial services. “When a market starts to evolve, we need to get out of the way and let it grow.” Market areas to watch will be weather data and SDA, where the Space Force is looking to buy commercial services but where the government also provides data at no cost to users. In these markets where there’s a lot of free data, companies compete by offering value-added services like analytics. Nevertheless, “we have to make sure that we’re not destroying the market before it has the chance to exist,” said Leader. With satellite imagery, the NRO has shown a smart approach for negotiating data rights and user licenses, he said. The agreements allow the intelligence community to share imagery with allies and other government agencies but also ensure providers are compensated, he said. “I think that’s a great model for not killing the market and it has some applicability in other areas such as space domain awareness,” Leader said. As COMSO works to get its house in order, an immediate task will be to set up a working capital fund where military customers will transfer money to pay for commercial services. Congress in 2015 authorized DoD to set up a working capital fund to facilitate the procurement of satellite communications services. Leader said the existing working capital fund needs to be broadened so customers can buy other space industry services. “For most people, this is kind of in the weeds, but it’s a very important piece,” he said. “What will make the commercial services office effective is having the right contractual and financial tools to do these things smartly and quickly. And a working capital fund is a huge win.” A more grueling effort will be to realign funding in the Pentagon’s five-year budget plans. That will require shifting funds from “programs of record” that the Space Force traditionally would spend on new development or bespoke systems, to a separate funding line for commercial services. “We need a way to move the money so when commercial capabilities exist to meet requirements, program offices have the ability to move between the ‘buy’ and ‘build’ button,” Leader said. In addition, the Space Force will have to articulate in so-called requirements documents why it makes sense to buy commercial service, he noted. “We have to develop the requirements process around commercial services,” he added. “The byproduct of that is how we budget directly for commercial, how we build a contractual infrastructure that will allow the combatant commands to go fast.” As it looks to buy commercial services, the Space Force wants to make sure there are agreements in place to ensure military customers are prioritized during a conflict or emergency. The NRO’s version of that is the Civil Reserve Space Fleet, an agreement that allows the agency and DoD to request that commercial imagery suppliers collect data over a designated area for exclusive U.S. government use. DoD also has agreements with commercial airlines under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet to get additional airlift capacity during a crisis. Roth said the Space Systems Command plans to meet with industry representatives in January to discuss concepts for a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve. This is an important topic, he said, because if the Space Force is going to rely on commercial industry, it needs to know they will be there in wartime and that “if it’s an unpopular conflict, that they don’t decide to turn their capabilities off.” An industry day event on this subject will be held in the Washington, D.C., area early next year to allow White House and congressional participation, said Roth. “We definitely need the best and brightest minds working on that.” Brig. Gen. Dennis Bythewood, deputy commander of the Joint Task Force Space Defense under U.S. Space Command, said commercial augmentation contracts are an area of growing interest, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the central role that commercial satellites have played in that conflict. “What we really need to think through is what are the liabilities that are put on the commercial industry,” he said at the Space Industry Days conference. “A warfighting environment won’t be benign, and we need to make sure they are there to augment us,” Bythewood added. “So I do think there’s a lot of work to be done here.” Leader said these discussions need to happen sooner rather than later given the unpredictability of world events. “The day you need a commercial service isn’t the day you start negotiating contracts or integrating the capability,” he said. “So all the more reason that we should have ways to onramp those capabilities.” This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The Space Force on June 24 established a new unit, Space Delta 18, responsible for providing “quality intelligence” to U.S. policy makers about the space domain, Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of Space Operations Command, said at a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio. Space Delta 18 will run the National Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Whiting said it’s important for the Space Force to have a unit focused on threat analysis to help inform national defense policy and space systems acquisitions. Space intelligence analysis was previously under the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. Space Force leaders pushed to have a separate organization co-located with NASIC. “The question is why do we need to stand up a National Space Intelligence Center and the truth is that we needed a sharper focus on the space threat that is here today,” Maj. Gen. Leah Lauderback, Space Force director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said at the ceremony. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines called the standup of the NSIC a “critical step to shape the future of the Space Force, improve acquisitions and drive innovation across the community.” “NSIC will be well positioned to support U.S. and allied space decision makers at an absolutely critical moment in the history of space development,” Haines said. “The opportunities for our nation in space are extraordinary. Already, it is critical to our communications infrastructure, for early warning systems, for protecting our planet, our environment, for our national security, our intelligence and our prosperity.” States such as China and Russia are developing, testing and fielding counterspace weapons to monitor and target U.S. and allied satellites, said Haines. “Our capacity to understand what is happening in the space domain is crucial to our ability to operate in space. In the years ahead, the environment will only become more contested.” She said the NSIC will be relied upon to “produce and analyze scientific and technical intelligence related to space for the entire nation.” Space Delta 18 will be made up of 345 military and civilian personnel. The unit was named in honor of the U.S. Space Force’s role as the 18th member of the intelligence community . Space Delta 18 is made up of two units originally activated in 2008 within the Air Force: The 1st Space Analysis Squadron Mission will produce foundational intelligence on foreign space capabilities. The 2nd Space Analysis Squadron Mission will produce foundational intelligence on foreign threats to space operations.
China is progressing with the development of two super heavy-lift rockets for crewed missions and infrastructure launches to the moon, according to officials. The new launchers are designed to allow China to conduct short-term lunar landings before 2030 and send large pieces of infrastructure to the moon in the 2030s respectively. Though China’s government has not formally approved a crewed lunar landing, work on the necessary elements of such a program is underway and the country’s space actors and state media are openly talking of its lunar ambitions. Progress on the rockets—a new generation crew launch vehicle and a super heavy-lift launcher known as the Long March 9 —has been moving ahead in an orderly manner, according to Chen Xiaofei, of the general design department at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), a major institute under China’s main space contractor, talking with state media China Central Television. The new crew launcher is also referred to unofficially as the CZ5DY, taking the CZ initials for the Chinese for Long March, and DY meaning “dengyue” or moon landing. The rocket is based on technology and tooling developed for the Long March 5 heavy rocket variants that have launched China’s space station modules, Mars mission and a lunar sample-return. A two-stage version of the rocket, for sending a new generation crew spacecraft into low Earth orbit, is envisioned for a test flight in 2026. The three-core, three-stage variant capable of sending 27 metric tons into trans-lunar injection is expected to launch later in the decade. The kerosene-fueled rocket will use clusters of uprated versions of the existing YF-100 engine and the launcher is also intended to be made reusable. Last year other CALT officials stated that two launches of the rocket would be able to facilitate a six-hour stay on the lunar surface. The Long March 9 will boast a payload capacity of around 140 tons to LEO and will launch elements for the planned International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) jointly planned by China and Russia. CCTV did not provide details of the progress made. However, CALT earlier this month announced completion of structural tests related to the CZ5DY, and in April tested titanium engine components for the launcher. The update on progress was provided after China marked 103 consecutive successful launches with its Long March rocket family, eclipsing its previous record of 102 set between 1996 and 2011. Chen also stated that CALT’s first reusable rocket—thought to be the Long March 8 —would complete relevant flight tests within the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025). Global Times, a Beijing tabloid, published Aug. 21 strident views on the respective progress, approaches and motives of U.S. and Chinese crewed lunar exploration plans. “Space observers also pointed out that as NASA is trying hard to relive its Apollo glories, China is working on innovative plans to carry out its own crewed moon landing missions,” the article read. The piece also criticized recent comments made by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in which he claimed China would occupy the moon and claimed China focuses “more on technology readiness in a rather broad time frame, going forward steadily and surely,” rather than the “U.S.’ practice of setting specific year deadlines.” Global Times quoted Wang Ya’nan, chief editor of the Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge magazine, as saying, “China’s crewed moon landing is more in line with scientific principles, but NASA might grow more hostile against China in the space domain given the huge pressure it is facing to maintain its global leadership in moon exploration,” in response to a question on the possibility of a new space race. Both the U.S. and China are planning robotic and crewed landings at the lunar south pole in the coming years under respective Artemis and ILRS programs.
China’s secretive reusable spaceplane has released an object into orbit, according to tracking data from the U.S. Space Force. China carried out the second launch of its “reusable experimental spacecraft” from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert atop a Long March 2F rocket Aug. 4. The spacecraft has now been in orbit for 90 days. Two weeks ago the spacecraft raised its perigee—or the point during its orbit at which a spacecraft is closest to Earth—to shift to a near-circular 597 by 608-kilometer orbit. In a latest development the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron has tracked an object close to the spaceplane. The Space-track.org database added a new entry for an object in a similar orbit to the spacecraft Oct. 31 (NORAD ID 54218 (2022-093J COSPAR ID)). The object—the nature of which is unknown—is likely in very close proximity to the spacecraft and thus only entered into the database once it could be discerned to be a separate, discrete object with a high level of confidence. Robert Christy of Orbital Focus notes that the release of the object could have taken place anytime between Oct. 24 and Oct. 31, performing station-keeping to remain close to the spaceplace. China has not released any updates on the mission since a terse statement announcing the launch of the spacecraft. No images of the craft have been published. This is not the first time the spacecraft has ejected an object. China’s spaceplane released an object around two orbits before deorbiting at the end of its first, two-day mission in September 2020. The object broadcast S-band transmissions for weeks afterwards. One possibility is that the object is a small satellite for monitoring the spaceplane. Chinese crew capsules have previously released ‘Banxing’ small companion satellites for monitoring purposes. It could also be a test for deploying small satellite payloads into orbit. Another possible explanation is that the object is a service module, astronomer and spacecraft tracker Jonathan McDowell noted in a tweet . Little is known about China’s spaceplane project. Chinese space authorities have closely guarded launch operations and only announced its two missions once the spacecraft was in orbit. Clues as to the dimensions and shape of the craft appeared in August however with apparent images of the payload fairing for the mission appearing online. The spacecraft appears to be related to the development of an orbital segment of a fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit space transportation system. A suborbital segment—featuring a vertical takeoff and horizontal landing—had a second flight in September this year. The project recently acquired national level funding from the Natural Science Foundation of China. The project is seen to support the construction of China’s scientific and technological power, aerospace power and transportation power, and has practical social, technological, economic and other application values, according to the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) which is developing the vehicles. How long the spacecraft will remain in orbit is unknown but it is, as with its first flight, likely to land at the Lop Nur base in Xinjiang. Satellite imagery suggests recent activity near the landing site. An analysis of the spaceplane’s orbit by Christy suggests that the spacecraft had an opportunity to deorbit and land at Lop Nur, the site for the landing of the first mission, late Nov. 1 UTC. The new orbit has repeating ground tracks roughly every 71 hours, meaning the spacecraft will make passes over Lop Nur and have opportunities to land once every three days. The opportunities during the coming weeks would however involve a landing during local nighttime. Other reusable spacecraft or spaceplane projects are under consideration in China. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC) is working on its own spaceplane , named Tengyun, while commercial firm Space Transportation last year raised more than $46.3 million for its hypersonic spaceplane plans. A number of Chinese rocket companies have also created presentations including small spaceplanes launching atop concepts for liquid rockets.
Updated 7:45 a.m. July 8 with comment from ESA’s Aschbacher. WASHINGTON — NASA strongly criticized Russia for using the International Space Station to promote its invasion of Ukraine, a break from the agency’s approach of emphasizing ongoing cooperation despite the war. In a statement late July 7, NASA said it “strongly rebukes” Russia for political activity on the station related to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The brief statement did not specify what incident prompted the statement. “NASA strongly rebukes Russia using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the station’s primary function among the 15 international participating countries to advance science and develop technology for peaceful purposes,” the agency said in a statement emailed to reporters. The statement appears to be in response to images released by the Russian space agency Roscosmos July 4 that showed the three Russian cosmonauts on the station — Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev — holding flags associated with the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic. These are regions of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces but whose independence is recognized by only Russia and Syria. The flags were displayed to mark the Russian occupation of Lysychansk, the last city in Luhansk to fall to Russian forces. In the Roscosmos statement posted on the Telegram social media network, the agency said it and the cosmonauts on the station congratulated the Luhansk People’s Republic government on the capture of the city. The NASA statement stands in contrast to its past efforts to publicly minimize the effect of the war on the ISS partnership. NASA leadership had in the past noted a long-running relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union in spaceflight that dated back to the Cold War. “On the station are Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, and they are all very professional. The relationship between the mission control in Houston and in Moscow is very professional,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 during a joint press conference with his European Space Agency counterpart, Josef Aschbacher, when asked about relations with Russia. “Despite the tragedies that are occurring in Ukraine by President Putin, the fact is that the international partnership is solid when it comes to the civilian space program,” he said. Aschbacher offered a comment similar to the NASA statement in a July 8 tweet . “It is unacceptable that the ISS becomes a platform to play out the political or humanitarian crises happening on the ground,” he wrote. “The purpose of the ISS is to conduct research & prepare us for deeper exploration. It must remain a symbol of peace and inspiration.” It’s unclear if this incident will have any lasting effect on ISS cooperation . NASA and Roscosmos have yet to finalize a seat barter agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew spacecraft and American astronauts to go on Soyuz spacecraft. In a separate Telegram post July 6 , Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said he expected a final version of the agreement in one to two weeks. A European Space Agency astronaut on the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, is scheduled to perform a spacewalk from the station’s Russian segment July 21 with Artemyev. The two will work on a European robotic arm on the station’s Nauka module.
Rocket designers with China’s main launch vehicle institute have scrapped plans for an expendable super heavy-lift launcher in favor of a design featuring a reusable first stage. A new model of a Long March 9 rocket featuring grid fins and no side boosters recently went on display at the ongoing Zhuhai Airshow in southern China, prompting speculation that the long-standing plan of an expendable rocket had been dropped. Liu Bing, director of the general design department at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), later confirmed the new direction in an interview with China Central Television Nov. 7. The new, current plan for the rocket will be a three-stage, 108-meter-high, 10-meter-diameter and 4,180 metric ton rocket capable of delivering 150 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), 50 tons to lunar transfer orbit (LTO), or 35 tons to Mars transfer orbit. The rocket is scheduled to be ready for test flight around 2030. Liu told CCTV however that the design has not been finalized and will likely see changes as the team selects the optimal pathway, while committing to the goal of constantly breaking through technological challenges and increasing its launching power. The Long March 9 rocket project has been under development at CALT for a number of years. The original plan was to build an expendable rocket capable of delivering 100 metric tons or more to LEO. The original design would have made the Long March 9 analogous to NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the first of which, for the Artemis 1 mission, currently sits on the pad at Launch Complex 39B at the the Kennedy Space Center with Tropical Storm Nicole approaching Florida. In recent years senior CALT official Long Lehao has presented new concepts for the Long March 9, apparently in reaction to developments in reusability demonstrated by SpaceX. The presentations suggested, unofficially, at a transition away from the expendable version with boosters, displayed at Zhuhai Airshow last year , to separate reusable kerosene (sometimes referred to as version 21 and version 22) and methane-fueled concepts. The methane version could be ready by 2035, according to Long. The new model keeps the old timeframe for a test flight, suggesting a switch from large, dual-nozzle 500-ton-thrust engines, to clusters of lower thrust, single-nozzle engines noted in Long’s presentations to facilitate recovery and reuse. At the same time, the Sixth Academy of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which also owns CALT, recently performed the first full system hot fire test of the 500-ton-thrust YF-130 kerosene-liquid oxygen engine, thought to be developed to power the expendable Long March 9. How the engine will be used going forward remains to be seen. Also on display in Zhuhai was China’s new generation crew launch vehicle, sometimes referred to as the Long March 5 Dengyue (“moon landing”) or Long March 5G. The showing indicates a shift from the slanted nose cones on the side cores of earlier models. The rocket will be capable of sending 27 metric tons into trans-lunar injection. A pair of the new rockets will be capable of sending a crewed spacecraft and, separately, a landing stack, to lunar orbit. This would allow two astronauts to make a landing on the moon. Liu said the rocket is almost ready for the prototyping stage and would have a test flight in 2027. It was not clear if this referred to the single-stick variant for launches of a new generation crew spacecraft to LEO—earlier slated for a 2026 first launch—or the full, three-core, three-stage version for lunar missions. CASC recently conducted 300-second mission duty cycle tests of the YF-100M vacuum-optimized engines for the rocket’s second stage. Senior Chinese space officials including Long Lehao and Ye Peijian stated last year the country will be capable of executing this idea for the two-launch, short-term lunar stay mission before 2030 .
President Biden has nominated Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman , currently serving as U.S. Space Force deputy chief of operations, for promotion to four-star general, and selected him to lead the Space Force as chief of space operations. The White House on July 27 submitted Saltzman’s nomination to the Senate and it will be referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee. If confirmed by the Senate, Saltzman will succeed Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, who is retiring after 38 years of service. Raymond was the first chief of the military space branch established in December 2019. The chief of space operations is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Space Force is an independent military service under the Department of the Air Force. It has nearly 8,000 uniformed members known as guardians, and about an equal number of civilian employees charged with operating and protecting the U.S. military’s satellites and supporting systems. Saltzman served most of his military career in the U.S. Air Force and commanded coalition air forces in the Middle East before transferring to the Space Force in 2020 where he has overall responsibility for operations , intelligence, sustainment, cyber and nuclear operations. According to multiple sources, Raymond strongly supported the selection of Saltzman as his successor. Other candidates on the short list included Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the Space Force’s Space Operations Command; and Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command. 
NASA will continue a lunar smallsat mission for launch in mid-2023 despite exceeding its cost cap by 30%. NASA said Nov. 9 that the agency decided after a review to continue work on the Lunar Trailblazer mission, a small spacecraft that will orbit the moon to map the abundance of water ice deposits. The spacecraft will launch in the middle of 2023 as a secondary payload on the Falcon 9 launch of the IM-2 lunar lander by Intuitive Machines. NASA announced in August that the mission would undergo a continuation/termination review because of overruns by the spacecraft subcontractor, Lockheed Martin. “There’s been some increases in the cost with the spacecraft development, and so we are working now towards a cost review that’s going to take place later this fall,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at a conference in August. In the statement, NASA said that while the mission has a higher degree of risk tolerance than larger missions, Lockheed “found that mission success required additional engineering and design efforts that exceeded the original estimate and resulted in an overrun.” The Lunar Trailblazer team replanned the work remaining on the mission, resulting in a cost increase of $8 million. “The mission will also implement changes to reduce programmatic risks and seek out more operational efficiencies going forward,” the agency stated. NASA says the mission has a revised overall cost estimate of $72 million, a figure it says “includes previously agreed-to changes to the mission’s implementation, including spacecraft vendor, launch provider and launch date, among others.” NASA had not previously disclosed the magnitude of cost increases with the program. Lunar Trailblazer had gone through several changes since its selection in 2019. That includes switching spacecraft contractors from Ball Aerospace to Lockheed Martin because of “design and cost challenges” as well as changing rideshare launch opportunities from the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission, which is not launching until 2025, to IM-2. The mission is one of three NASA selected in 2019 for its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, along with the Janus asteroid mission and Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE) Mars mission. Each mission was supposed to fit within a $55 million cost cap. Lunar Trailblazer, with its new $72 million cost, is now more than 30% over that cap. Both EscaPADE and Janus have encountered problems in their development, some beyond their control. The two missions were originally slated to fly as secondary payloads on the launch of the Psyche asteroid mission. Changes in the Psyche mission trajectory caused NASA to remove EscaPADE from the launch and delay its development. EscaPADE revised the design of its mission using spacecraft buses from Rocket Lab and is slated for launch in 2024, although NASA has not disclosed launch plans for the mission. Janus missed its launch window when NASA delayed the Psyche launch because of software development problems. While Psyche has since been rescheduled for launch in October 2023 , NASA said Oct. 28 it “continues to assess options” for Janus. The planetary science decadal survey, published in April, endorsed the SIMPLEx program but recommended increasing the cost cap for future missions from $55 million to $80 million. NASA, in its initial response to the decadal, said it was studying the issue, noting the recommendation “mirrors a debate that NASA has been having internally for quite some time.”
The expansion of Chinese ground stations in South America is generating concern regarding Beijing’s intentions in the region and in space, according to a new report. “China’s space network in South America is part of a broader push by Beijing to establish itself as a leading global space power and partner of choice in space for middle-income economies,” claims the report released Oct. 4 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The network, while having clear civilian uses, could be used to spy on, monitor and potentially even target U.S. and other nations’ spacecraft, it says. The report details China’s ground station presence in countries including Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela as well as through services provided by the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) in Chile. It also uses satellite imagery to highlight the facilities themselves. Ground stations are vital for any space actor. This key infrastructure is required to operate spacecraft, facilitating the exchange of commands and data. Their importance means they are likely to be another area of contest for opposing space powers. Some of China’s assets, such as Neuquen in Argentina, are part of the China Deep Space Network and support lunar and interplanetary missions such as Chang’e-5 and Tianwen-1 . China has a network of ground stations in China and a presence in places including Namibia, but infrastructure in South America is important to facilitate links with spacecraft when they are orbiting over that part of the world. Yet the opacity of the agreements with host countries and China’s space industry raises concerns of the potential for military applications of what is inherently dual-use technology, the CSIS report states. The risks “stem from the far-reaching influence of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) within China’s space ecosystem,” the CSIS report states, adding that the “PLA Strategic Support Force (PLASSF)—which is responsible for space, cyber, and electronic warfare—has a hand in virtually all Chinese space activities.” Officials within the U.S. military have expressed concerns in Congressional testimony that the stations “can be used to spy on U.S. assets and intercept sensitive information,” given their proximity to the United States. Beijing is not exceptional in carving out a role for the military in space, the report states, but adds that the caveat that China’s main civilian space agency, the China National Space Administration, is “overshadowed by the military.” A more nuanced assessment of PLA involvement in areas of China’s space decision-making can be found in another recent report published by the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI). The report provides a detailed look at organizations known as Leading Small Groups (LSGs) understood through which the Communist Party of China, rather than the PLA, seeks to control its space programs. While a PLA representative is present in both the lunar exploration and human spaceflight LSGs, these are one among a number of representatives from government and space-related state-owned enterprises and organizations. The CSIS report however notes that the opacity of China’s activities, intentions and organization raises concerns. Many of China’s ground station assets, including a fleet of “Yuanwang” tracking ships, are controlled by the China Satellite Launch and Tracking Control General (CLTC), a sub-entity of the PLASSF. Espacio Lejano, a ground station in Neuquen, Argentina, is owned by CLTC and has attracted attention in the past. A contract between the two governments also stipulates that Argentina “not interfere or interrupt” normal activities carried out at the station during the 50-year agreement. CSIS cite 2019 testimony from Admiral Craig Faller, then commander of the U.S. Southern Command, that the station at Neuquen, which includes 35-meter and 13.5-meter-diameter antennae, could have the ability “to monitor and potentially target U.S., allied, and partner space activities.” Issues related to China’s ground stations have cropped up elsewhere, with the SSC in 2020 opting to not renew contracts to provide services to China through a station in Australia. In July a diplomatic incident was sparked when India protested the expected arrival of China’s Yuanwang 5 space tracking ship at a port in Sri Lanka. China uses its Yuanwang ships to support launches, providing a key link to launch vehicles and spacecraft during their journey to orbit. The ships are necessary in part because of a lack of vital ground infrastructure in other countries. Ground stations, given their geographically distributed nature, are often subject to geopolitical tensions and concerns, and will be a point of contention going forward, particularly in the context of U.S.-China relations. China is understood to be developing inter-satellite laser link capabilities to help offset its lack of distributed ground segment infrastructure.
SAN FRANCISCO –Agile Space Industries is preparing to consolidate propulsion design, manufacturing and production this summer in a new 1,860-square-meter facility in Durango, Colorado. “The goal is to move all of our design, manufacturing and production processes under one roof,” Bryce Dabbs, Agile Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Finance, told SpaceNews . “In addition to active lunar lander and other commercial contracts in place today, we’re recognizing increased market demand from new customers and have recently begun receiving recurring engine orders from existing customers.” Agile is largely vertically integrated. Agile Space Industries was incorporated in August 2019, after combining Agile Space Propulsion and Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test, a company formed in 2009 to offer testing services for commercial and government customers. In 2021, Agile acquired Tronix3D, a Pittsburgh-based additive manufacturer, and created an Agile Additive division to reduce propulsion lead time and speed up the design-iteration process. Controlling the additive manufacturing process helps Agile deliver chemical thrusters and engines in “a timely, accurate fashion,” Dabbs said. Agile’s production and manufacturing teams are in the process of mapping out the layout of their new Durango factory as they prepare to move in machinery and equipment. “We are setting up a streamlined workflow from shipping and receiving all the way through to production,” Dabbs said. Then, engines “will be taken down the road to our Agile-owned testing facility. This capability is not so common within the propulsion industry.”
A European astrophysics spacecraft stranded when Russia cut off access to Soyuz launch vehicles may instead fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9, NASA officials said Oct. 17. At a meeting of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Council, Mark Clampin, director of the agency’s astrophysics division, said his understanding is that the European Space Agency was leaning towards launching its Euclid mission on a Falcon 9 in mid to late 2023. NASA is a partner on Euclid, a space telescope that will operate around the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth to study dark energy, dark matter and other aspects of cosmology. The 2,160-kilogram spacecraft was to launch on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana in 2023. Those plans changed, though, after Russia invaded in Ukraine in February, leading to a series of sanctions from Western countries and responses from Russia. That included Russia halting Soyuz launches from French Guiana, leaving several ESA and other European missions looking for new rides to space. “The current situation with Euclid really comes down to the current political situation,” Clampin said, citing the loss of access to Soyuz. “Right now, ESA is investigating SpaceX Falcon 9 options for late 2023.” That launch could take place in mid-2023, officials later said at the meeting. The comments are the strongest indication to date that ESA will look outside of Europe to launch missions originally intended to fly on Soyuz. Agency leaders had previously stated they would consider non-European launch options for at least some missions, but had offered few specifics. In an interview in late August, Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said the agency was still investigating alternative launches for missions like Euclid. “We are going through the technology assessments” of alternative launchers, he said then, with a goal at the time of finalizing launch options within weeks. At the committee meeting, another NASA official, Shahid Habib, said a feasibility study for launching Euclid on Falcon 9 was still ongoing. “This should be completed by the end of this month,” he said. Launching it on Ariane, he said, was not an option because of the lack of remaining Ariane 5 rockets. The new Ariane 6 has yet to make its first launch, and there are several missions competing for its initial launches. “At this time, the best option for them is really Falcon 9,” he said. Euclid may be the only ESA or European Union mission to shift to a non-European launch vehicle. EarthCARE, an Earth science mission also originally manifested on a Soyuz, will likely go on Vega C, Aschbacher said in August. Sentinel-1C, a radar mapping mission, will also launch on Vega C, while two pairs of Galileo satellites previously set to launch on Soyuz are expected to go on Ariane 6 instead. He emphasized them any use of non-European launch options like SpaceX would be a temporary measure. “If we go to backup solutions that are not European, this is an interim solution, and Ariane 6 and Vega C will remain our baseline launchers,” he said. ESA is scheduled to give an update Oct. 19 on the status of Ariane 6 testing that may include a new schedule for that vehicle’s first launch, which has slipped to some time in 2023.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The head of U.S. Space Command said he expects a final decision to be made relatively soon on where the command will be permanently headquartered. The Department of the Air Force in January 2021 recommended that Space Command, currently located at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, move to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. The basing decision has since been embroiled in a political fight as Colorado lawmakers have pushed back. Space Command is responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. military and for protecting those assets from foreign threats. As required by law, the Air Force last month completed a study on the environmental impact of locating Space Command at Redstone Arsenal, and a 30-day period for public comments is about to close. The next and presumably final step will be taken by the Department of the Air Force, expected to make the final decision on where U.S. Space Command goes. “So we’ll see what happens,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said Aug. 9 at the 25th Space and Missile Defense Symposium. At the request of Colorado lawmakers, the base selection process has been reviewed by the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office . “They are still doing a 30 day public comment period on the draft environmental assessments, and I think we’re wrapping those up in the next week or two,” Dickinson said. The environmental assessments were done on six possible locations . “And so pending those results coming in, then it will go to the Department of the Air Force for their final decision,” he said. In an interview with SpaceNews , Dickinson said Space Command is trying to get to “full operational capability” as soon as possible but needs a basing decision to be finalized so it can move forward. Dickinson a year ago said the command had reached “initial operational capability.” Reaching full capability r equires the headquarters to be fully staffed and to have a permanent headquarters. “As we look to the future, it’s just like every combatant command, you’ve got to have all the resources. And that’s what full operational capability is about, having the resources, the capacity to executive unified command missions that are given to me by the President,” said Dickinson. “Now, that’s not to say I’m not doing them now. I am doing those, but I will be able to do them more comprehensively once I get to FOC.” When that full capability will be reached depends on having a basing decision, he said. “So I’m waiting to find out when that is. We’re excited to get a decision. Once I get that decision, I’ll be able to give you a better marker on the calendar when I can get to FOC.”
Kall Morris Inc. announced Sept. 7 it received three study contracts for debris-cleanup technologies under the Space Force’s Orbital Prime program. KMI, based in Michigan, is a research and development startup focused on space debris remediation. Orbital Prime is run by SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force . In May it selected 125 industry teams for the initial phase of the program, intended to promote commercial development of technologies for orbital debris cleanup and other space services. KMI’s three awards, worth $750,000, are Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contracts which require small businesses to team with academic or nonprofit institutions. The winners of the first phase of Orbital Prime can compete for larger follow-on contracts. The company is pitching a debris removal concept that uses adhesive arms — a technique known as gecko adhesion — to capture debris objects like inert satellites and rocket bodies that are flying in orbit uncontrolled and are unprepared for capture. For each of the three Orbital Prime awards, KMI partnered with different universities. It’s working with the University of Southern California’s Space Engineering Research Center to refine the adhesive arms concept. It teamed with Stanford University’s Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab to explore other adhesion techniques, and with MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics to examine ways to conduct debris collection and analysis. Troy Morris, KMI co-founder and director of operations, said the teaming between the private sector and universities enhances the quality of the proposals. “Universities provide technical support, a great wealth of experience and testing resources,” he said . “It helps small businesses so we don’t have to go out and rebuild or buy something that’s already sitting in their lab.” Business case for debris removal Morris said companies participating in the Orbital Prime program hope it will lead to an actual debris-removal mission and a commitment from the U.S. government to buy cleanup services from the private sector. A major hurdle for the industry, he said, is that there are no credible estimates of what it will cost to remove tens of thousands of debris objects that are making space operations increasingly dangerous due to the risk of collisions. Removing space junk is a huge technical challenge and some companies already are demonstrating it’s possible. The hardest piece is the business case, said Morris. “It’s having the proper signaling from the Space Force, commercial operators and others to prove to investors that there’s a real market that can go forward and fix the problem.” Morris said the most concerning debris are large rocket bodies that would obliterate spacecraft in a collision. Most are upper stages of rockets launched decades ago that were never designed to be captured or dock with other vehicles. Companies in the space industry have adopted sustainability plans to minimize debris such as deorbiting non-functioning satellites, but the number of debris objects is still on the rise, Morris said. Many in the space industry believe there’s a future market not just in retrieving and removing junk but also repurposing , said Morris, as rocket bodies would provide raw materials to manufacture hardware in orbit. 
Inmarsat Government announced Nov. 7 it won a $410 million, five-year contract extension to provide internet-of-things satellite connectivity for U.S. Army battlefield tracking devices. The contract, awarded by the Defense Information Systems Agency, is for the Army’s Blue Force Tracker network services. Inmarsat Government, based in Reston, Virginia, is a subsidiary of British communications satellite operator Inmarsat. Inmarsat Government will connect the Blue Force Tracker using a new network called ELERA , designed to support IoT services using its existing L-band satellites. This network will provide connectivity between Blue Force Tracker transceivers and satellite ground stations. Blue Force tracker devices display friendly force tracking information on tens of thousands of Army platforms. Inmarsat Government won a previous contract in 2017 to support the Blue Force Tracker network, which has been in operation since 2002. The newest version of Blue Force Tracker has increased network capacity to transfer data, and was designed to be more resilient against electronic warfare attacks.
A Canadian startup is developing a rover it plans to launch to the moon in the next few years to provide power to other spacecraft on the lunar surface. Toronto-based STELLS unveiled its plans Nov. 21 to develop its Mobile Power Rover (MPR), a rover that will generate power from its solar arrays and can transfer it through wireless charging to other vehicles on the lunar surface. Its MPR-1 rover is slated to launch by 2025 as a payload on an Intuitive Machines lander to the south polar regions of the moon. In an interview, Alex Kapralov, chief executive of STELLS, said he started the company to develop a rover for scientific missions. “We found issues in terms of power and mobility for small and medium-sized rover and even human missions to be able to get enough power in permanently shadowed regions” of craters at the lunar poles, he said. He said the company briefly considered using a radioisotope thermoelectric generator on its rover, but technical and policy challenges ruled that out. Instead, the company decided to pursue a rover that could generate and transfer solar power to other vehicles on the lunar surface. The rover will transfer power using wireless technology, moving to a customer’s vehicje. Another approach would be to leave the wireless charging unit in the crater, then have the rover move out of the crater into sunlight, allowing it to generate power and transfer it through a cable to that charging unit that other vehicles would travel to. Kapralov said the company has completed a prototype of the rover and has started work on a “proto-flight” model closer to the actual rover. The MPR-1 rover, weighing about 30 kilograms, will primarily be a demonstration, but he expects some commercial use of its power transfer capabilities. “We are planning partnerships with those are coming with us on the lander,” he said, although there are no formal contracts in place yet. STELLS is not the first company to pursue a power distribution system on the moon. Astrobotic announced plans in September for LunaGrid , which would combine its work on lunar landers with separate development of vertical solar arrays optimized for use at the lunar poles. Tethered rovers would deliver the power to customers. Kapralov argues his company’s approach is simpler, with the rover itself generating the power. He added STELLS has been in talks with Astrobotic about flying a rover on a future Astrobotic lander mission; the company’s website lists Astrobotic as one of several collaborators, along with Intuitive Machines. Kapralov’s background is in the tech industry, including serving as chief executive of Pixfuture, an ad tech company. “I was always thinking about the space industry,” he said, but what spurred him to start STELLS was a conversation with an employee who previously worked in the space industry, who convinced him a mission like a lunar rover was “complicated but doable.” STELLS current has about 20 employees, he said, working at a Toronto facility. Kapralov is funding the company himself using his holding company, but he said he plans to look for outside investment and government contracts to support future work. He did not disclose the estimated cost to build and fly MPR-1, but said the largest expense will be the transportation to get the rover to the moon: about $1 million per kilogram or $30 million for the 30-kilogram rover. “Building the rover itself is not something that is super new,” he said. “The main thing is how you make it to be simple and survivable. That’s what we’re focusing on.” The announcement of MPR-1 comes a week after the Canadian Space Agency announced it awarded a $43 million Canadian ($32 million) contract to Canadensys Aerospace Corporation to build a rover carrying six scientific payloads. That rover will fly on a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission to the moon no earlier than 2026. Kapralov said that while STELLS had been working on a scientific lunar rover initially, it did not compete for the Canadian Space Agency mission. “Every time I speak with people from the space industry and explain to them our project, they support it,” he said. “They see that all of these missions need power. They need to have redundancy for their missions. They want to go further and we want to go further with them and provide them with power.”
Two African countries became the first from the continent to join the Artemis Accords as the United States works to bring more emerging space nations into the agreement. During the Space Forum portion of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit here Dec. 13, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that Rwanda and Nigeria would sign the Accords, making them the latest nations to sign the document that outlines best practices for safe and sustainable space exploration based on the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements. “I’m so proud of Rwanda and Nigeria that they will be the 22nd and 23rd signatories of the Artemis Accords and first two African nations to sign,” he said. Isa Ali Ibrahim, minister of communications and digital economy, signed the Accords for Nigeria, while Francis Ngabo, chief executive officer of the Rwanda Space Agency, signed the document for Rwanda. Current officials, as well as those who were involved in the development of the Artemis Accords in 2020, welcomed the latest signatories. “The unique energy, vision and passion for space exploration that these two new signatories will provide is vital to achieving the Artemis vision,” Mike Gold, chief growth officer at Redwire who spearheaded the development of the Accords when he was at NASA, told SpaceNews. “Nigeria and Rwanda for the first time bring Africa to the Artemis Accords, substantively enriching the already diverse mosaic of nations that have adopted the Accords.” “As we enter this new era of space development, it’s important to remember the benefits that space partnerships can deliver to our citizens, and we are so glad that African nations will now be active participants in partners in our Artemis program,” said Monica Medina, assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, at the summit. At a Secure World Foundation event Dec. 12, Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, hinted that more countries would soon join the 21 nations that had signed the Artemis Accords to date. More countries, she said then, would join “in the very near future,” but didn’t elaborate. She said that when most of the Artemis Accords signatories met face-to-face for the first time in Paris at the International Astronautical Congress in September , one key issue that emerged was how to bring in more emerging space countries into the agreement. The Accords include many major space nations, like International Space Station partners, but also countries with little space experience to date, such as Bahrain and Colombia. That issue, she said, includes “how to help them understand the importance of the Artemis Accords and to ensure that the early activities that we do, and the agreements we make, by more established spacefaring nations, don’t preclude later entrants.” Neither Nigerian nor Rwandan officials described in detail any plans to participate in Artemis at the signing ceremony, but at the Secure World Foundation event, a State Department official said that is not a condition for signing the Accords. “We continue to encourage all responsible spacefaring nations to sign the Accords, and we also encourage countries that are just developing their space sector to also consider signing,” said Kristina Leszczak of the State Department’s Office of Space Affairs. “We stress that interested countries do not need to come to the table with existing space capabilities or even near-term plans to contribute to Artemis. We find this opens the conversation up to a much more diverse group.” While the United States led the development of the Accords, it is not the “gatekeeper” of it, she said, adding that any country can sign on without requiring approval of existing signatories provided they agree to uphold its provisions. “They are looking for different things,” Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation said of emerging space countries’ interest in the Accords. “It’s not just to go to the moon but also benefits on Earth. They’re still looking for how does this help our citizens, how does it help our economy.” Both NASA’s Nelson and the State Department’s Medina said at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit that they hope other African countries sign the Accords in the future. “We are so delighted to welcome Nigeria and Rwanda as the first two African nations to sign the Artemis Accords,” said Medina, “but I certainly hope they will not be the last.” 
Launch vehicle developer Relativity Space will expand its engine test site at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, the second company in as many months to announce new or expanded facilities there. Relativity said Oct. 18 it will build test stands, office buildings and a vehicle hangar on more than 150 acres of land at the Mississippi center. Those facilities will be used for testing of its Aeon R engine for its Terran R reusable launch vehicle starting in late 2023. Relativity uses several existing test sites at Stennis, either through exclusive-use agreements or reimbursable Space Act Agreements, for testing the Aeon 1 engine for its Terran 1 small launch vehicle or the Aeon R. The Terran 1 is expected to make its first orbital launch attempt before the end of the year while the Terran R is scheduled to make its debut no earlier than 2024. “We’re honored to partner with NASA and are grateful for their support,” Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, said in a statement. “We look forward to growing our Stennis-based team, who will be pivotal in our success of meeting many more first-ever milestones as we scale our Terran R program.” “NASA is committed to working with commercial companies to help them achieve their space goals, and Stennis is a proven leader in enabling such partnerships. Since their arrival in the spring of 2018, Relativity Space has continued to grow as a respected member of the Stennis federal city,” Rick Gilbrech, director of Stennis, said in a statement. Relativity is one of several launch companies in recent years that signed agreements to use test stands at Stennis that, in some cases, had been dormant for years. Relativity’s expansion comes less than a month after Rocket Lab announced it would test the Archimedes engines it is developing for its Neutron rocket at the A-3 test stand at Stennis. Rocket Lab said Sept. 21 it signed a 10-year agreement to use that test stand, which had been mothballed for years after being used to test the J-2X engine developed for NASA’s Constellation program. The agreement includes an option to extend the agreement for 10 more years. “By being in the Stennis facility, we can leverage a lot of their site-wide infrastructure for power systems, transport network, commodity and supply chains; all the little things that make a test site run and tick,” Shaun D’Mello, vice president of launch systems at Rocket Lab, said at the company’s investor day event Sept. 21. He said the company would start work soon to modify the test site to support Archimedes, using a “generous capital incentive” offered by the Mississippi Development Authority, the state’s economic development agency. Modifying the A-3 test stand will allow the company to start using it in a matter of months, he said, rather than the years that might be required to build a new test facility. “Creating a test complex from scratch to the scale and complexity needed to test and develop Archimedes would have had an inconceivably long lead time, so the fact that we’ve secured Stennis and can leverage its existing infrastructure and test stand puts us on the fast-track to Neutron’s first launch,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab. 
NASA’s Space Launch System made its third trip to the launch pad Aug. 17, this time with the intent of lifting by early next month. The mobile launch platform carrying the SLS and its Orion spacecraft left the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center at approximately 10 p.m. Eastern Aug. 16, arriving at Launch Complex 39B at 8 a.m. Eastern Aug. 17. This was the third rollout of the SLS/Orion stack, after previous rollouts in March and June for countdown rehearsals, and took place with little fanfare. In those earlier tests, known as wet dress rehearsals (WDRs), the rocket’s core and upper stages were loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants and the vehicle went through a countdown intended to stop just before the core stage’s engines ignited. NASA carried out four WDRs in April and June, declaring success after the fourth test June 20 even though it stopped early. Now that the vehicle is back on the pad, prelaunch preparations will be “very similar to what we’ve done in the past,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis 1 launch director, said during an Aug. 3 briefing. NASA planned an 11-day campaign of work at the pad to prepare for the launch, but the vehicle rolled out a day early, giving some schedule margin in the event of any weather or technical issues. That work includes checking connections for data, power and other commodities at the pad, as well as servicing the solid rocket boosters, whose hydraulic power units will be fueled with hydrazine to operate their thrust vector control systems. There will also be “program-specific engineering tests” of the vehicle at the pad, she said. For the first launch opportunity, a two-hour window that opens at 8:33 a.m. Eastern Aug. 29, the countdown will start with a “call to stations” for personnel nearly 48 hours earlier with tanking of the vehicle starting about eight hours before liftoff. One change from the WDRs, Blackwell-Thompson said, is that a hold in the countdown before tanking starts is now an hour longer. “As part of our wet dress loading operations, we found that we needed a little additional time and we wanted to make sure we were all set up and configured for an on-time launch,” she said. “I suspect we’ll continue to learn some things as we continue to go through our launch countdown,” she said, “but I am very pleased with where we are in our preparations.” A launch on Aug. 29 would start a 42-day Artemis 1 mission, sending the Orion spacecraft into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon to test the spacecraft before returning to Earth to splash down off the coast of San Diego, California. Backup launch opportunities are on Sept. 2, with a two-hour window that opens at 12:48 p.m. Eastern; and Sept. 5, with a 90-minute window that opens at 5:12 p.m. Eastern.
SAN FRANCISCO – Dawn Aerospace has raised $20 million to expand its line of in-space propulsion products and to extend spaceplane development. New Zealand’s Icehouse Ventures led the investment round for Dawn, a space transportation company based in New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United States. GD1 and Movac, investors also based in New Zealand, supported the round. The funding will support Dawn’s effort to develop a new orbital spaceplane and to provide thrusters for satellites traveling in geostationary and lunar orbit, Stefan Powell, Dawn co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. Dawn has raised $21.2 million since the company was established in Christchurch in 2017. The latest investment raises Dawn’s valuation to 170 million New Zealand dollars ($108.5 million), according to the Dec. 6 news release. The company’s work also has been funded by revenue from its satellite propulsion business and grants from government agencies , including the New Zealand Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and the European Space Agency. “Thousands of space tech companies have raised billions of dollars, yet very few have actually been to space or generated revenue,” Icehouse Ventures CEO Robbie Paul said in a statement. “Dawn’s technical and commercial traction is a testament to the founders and their amazing team.” Dawn places “strategic importance on getting to customer revenue – with hardware on orbit,” James Powell, Dawn co-founder and chief financial officer, said in a statement. “In the space startup world, most don’t get anything flying without hundreds of millions in investment. Prior to this round, Dawn had more money come from sales than venture capital.” In 2022, Dawn closed deals valued at $22 million. Additional deals with a potential value of $150 million are being negotiated with customers, Powell said. As a result, “it won’t be long until propulsion sales resume bringing in more cash than VC,” he added. Dawn’s most high-profile project is the Dawn Mk-II Aurora, a rocket-powered spaceplane demonstrator. In testing to date, Dawn has flown Mk-II with jet engines. Rocket-powered flight tests are scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2023. On the satellite propulsion side, 33 Dawn thruster have flown on eight satellites. Another 12 satellites are scheduled to launch with Dawn thrusters by the end of the year. “Our understanding is that at least one, if not multiple, customers are flying Dawn thrusters on every scheduled” SpaceX Transporter rideshare mission, Catherine Moreau Hammond, Dawn sales and marketing manager, told SpaceNews.
U.S. military and allied forces in upcoming exercises will put to the test commercial technologies that could help detect GPS jamming or other activities that disrupt satellite-based navigation. The project is led by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a Pentagon organization focused on commercial technology. DIU is working with vendors to develop prototype systems that use data from satellites and other sources, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to locate intentional interference to GNSS signals. GNSS, short for global navigation satellite systems, includes GPS and other constellations that provide positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. “Mapping GPS disruptions and contextualizing patterns of behavior are key to mitigating the effects of degraded PNT as well as enabling safety of navigation under such conditions,” DIU program manager Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep said Aug. 17 in a news release. “Instead of developing, building and deploying hardware tailored for collection of navigation warfare operations, we are accessing currently available commercial data and analytics to address the need for PNT situational awareness,” Estep said. The ability to detect GPS jamming and spoofing is a growing priority for DoD and for many industries that depend on GPS, as disruptions affect every aspect of operations. DIU requested bids last fall for the project named Harmonious Rook. It selected several vendors and a non-governmental organization to develop prototype systems. Palo Alto, California-based Orbital Insight announced in February it was selected for the project. The company integrates different types of sensor data into its platform, including data from electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar and RF monitoring satellites. It also captures vessel traffic data, or Automatic Identification System; air traffic data from the Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast, or ADS-B, hosted on Iridium communication satellites. The Orbital Insight platform will help to identify “intentional GNSS interference and manipulation operations across the world,” the company said . “The platform will leverage commercially available data to detect GNSS spoofing, where falsified or manipulated GNSS signals are used to confuse adversaries or obscure illicit activities.” The international nonprofit Global Fishing Watch (GFW) is participating in the project. “Our work is focused on detecting false position data in the Automatic Identification System (AIS) used by ships. Some of these false positions result from GNSS interference,” a spokesman said. GFW was founded by Oceana, an international ocean conservation organization; SkyTruth, a technology firm that uses satellite imagery and data to protect the environment; and Google. HawkEye 360 — a geospatial analytics company that uses satellites to track emissions of radio frequency signals and data analytics to spot GNSS interference — also was selected to develop a prototype, a DIU spokesperson said. Military exercises DIU said it will bring GNSS detection prototypes to the Southeast Asia Cooperation and Training exercise in Singapore, focused on maritime crises and response to illegal activities; and the U.S. Army 1st Armored Division’s Command Post Exercise at the National Training Center in California. “We must leverage non-organic, commercially available software and equipment, like Harmonious Rook, as a stopgap to increase awareness,” said Lt. Col. Patrick Jones of 1st Armored Division’s Space Support Element. “During the exercise, capabilities will be tested to support intelligence, information operations, and command and control elements with commercial geospatial and navigation warfare awareness at the tactical level.” DIU said it is working to explore the use of publicly available PNT data to draw insight from domestic GPS interference events. “With widespread users and subscribers that rely on PNT services, any intentional or unintentional disruption can lead to severe transportation, communication, and financial implications,” said DIU. “This highlights the importance of bringing both government and private sector industries together to identify, attribute and mitigate GPS interference as quickly as possible.” The National Air and Space Intelligence Center and the National Space Intelligence Center (NSIC) are participating in the Harmonious Rook project. “It is a very promising new approach that complements traditional collection methodologies, as it will help our customers by sharing analysis due to the unclassified and commercial nature of the data,” said Scott Feairheller, a senior analyst at NSIC. The Government Accountability Office noted in a recent report that GNSS interference poses a significant threat to military systems. “Given its ubiquity, the denial or disruption of GPS capabilities could impact aircraft, ships, munitions, land vehicles, and ground troops in military operations and conflicts, said GAO. “For instance, in 2017 the installation of a new system at the San Angelo Airport interrupted civilian GPS systems for both ground and air operations within 15 miles.”
SpaceLink announced Aug. 22 it will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop protocols for how commercial communications constellations will connect with defense and military systems. DARPA earlier this month kicked off a new project called Space BACN (space-based adaptive communications node) to develop low-cost optical links to connect commercial and government constellations. The agency wants to create an internet of low Earth orbit satellites that enables seamless communication between military, civil and private-sector satellite networks that currently are not interoperable. SpaceLink, a company building a data-relay constellation of satellites in medium Earth orbit connected by laser links, is one of 11 organizations selected for the first phase of the Space BACN project. SpaceLink is partnering with Parsons Corp. It will use Parsons’ satellite scheduling and tasking software Optimyz, a tool that DARPA also selected to control its own Blackjack satellites . For DARPA’s laser communications project, SpaceLink will develop a technical approach and interfaces to “enable space-to-space optical communications terminals that can be dynamically modified on orbit and talk across various optical standards used by satellite systems,” said David Nemeth, the company’s senior vice president of systems engineering. One of the concepts that will be explored is the use of SpaceLink’s network in medium orbit — about 8,700 miles above Earth — to route data from commercial Earth observation satellites to military users on the ground, said Nemeth. The company in 2024 plans to start deploying a relay network of four satellites. SpaceLink’s vice president of intelligence James Schwenke said a key challenge in the DARPA project is to develop a user-friendly API, an application programming interface that would allow commercial networks such as Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, Telesat and Viasat to communicate and tie into the DoD infrastructure, including the Space Development Agency’s own Transport Layer. Schwenke said a DARPA-led study team is working with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Space Development Agency and other organizations “to see how all these communities are going to get together.”
SpinLaunch, a company developing a launch system that uses a centrifuge as a first stage, raised $71 million to continue work on that system and a line of satellites. SpinLaunch, based in Long Beach, California, announced Sept. 20 it raised the funding in a Series B round led by ATW Partners, with the participation of several other funds and individuals. The round is a mix of debt and equity, but the company did not disclose the split between the two. The company has raised $150 million to date to fund work on a unique launch system that uses a centrifuge to accelerate vehicles to hypersonic speeds. The vehicles will then use rocket engines, like on conventional upper stages, to place payloads into orbit. SpinLaunch argues that approach can enable a much higher flight rate than conventional rockets while also being more environmentally friendly. “We share in the company’s goal to realize the full-potential of the space economy by developing a revolutionary space launch system that is both very low cost and environmentally sustainable,” said Wen Hsieh, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that participated in the funding round, in a statement. SpinLaunch built a smaller version of its centrifuge at Spaceport America in New Mexico, 33 meters in diameter, for suborbital tests. The system launched its first vehicle in October 2021 and has conducted nine tests to date, although it has disclosed few details about the speed and peak altitude of those tests. “SpinLaunch’s mission is to bring the world low-cost, sustainable access to space. We’ve taken a big step in that direction with the completion of our 33-meter Suborbital Mass Accelerator,” said Jonathan Yaney, chief executive of SpinLaunch, “retiring the technical risk as we prepare the way for the construction of our full-size Orbital Launch system.” The company projects beginning orbital launches with a much larger accelerator, 100 meters across, as soon as 2026, but has not announced where that accelerator will be based. It will not be at Spaceport America because of overflight issues, said Randy Villahermosa, vice president of product and space systems at SpinLaunch, during an Sept. 14 presentation at the Small Payload Ride Share Association annual symposium. While the orbital centrifuge will not be ready until 2026, Villahermosa mentioned in his talk the company was planning “an intermediate service around 2024 that will use some of our satellite and launch tech.” He didn’t elaborate on the service but said that the company will release additional details in the coming months. SpinLaunch, in addition to the launch system, is working on satellites optimized for it. They include a 12U cubesat bus and a 200-kilogram satellite, the latter equal to the payload capacity of the orbital system. A 12U cubesat prototype will launch as soon as January, he said, but disclose the launch provider. The company is developing the satellites in part to meet anticipated demand for launch services that could exceed what current satellite manufacturers could meet. The orbital system is designed for up to 10 launches a day and 2,000 per year. “We anticipate there won’t be enough industrial base to support our launch system, yet there’s plenty of demand,” he said. The satellites are also designed specifically for the orbital system, where the centrifuge accelerates payloads at 10,000 g. SpinLaunch has also tested satellite components and found many could handle the launch environment despite those accelerations, in part because the acceleration takes place in a vacuum and thus there are no random vibrations from acoustics. “We get asked a lot about the g’s,” he said. “It’s a very gentle 10,000 g’s.”
 The House Armed Services Committee early Thursday approved its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023 by a vote of 57-1 after an all-night markup session. Hundreds of amendments were negotiated during the 17-hour markup session. The annual defense policy bill now heads to the House floor. The committee approved an amendment by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) to increase the defense budget by $37 billion, a proposal opposed by HASC Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) . Smith had recommended $772.5 billion for DoD. But Golden’s amendment passed the HASC by a vote of 42 to 17. The funding increase approved by HASC is less than the $45 billion proposed by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The bills will be reconciled in a conference committee later this year. Amendment increases launch funding The HASC passed an amendment offered by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) to authorize $100 million for tactically responsive space , a program that funds small-satellite launch experiments and demonstrations. That is $25 million more than the $75 million Smith had recommended. Another Horsford amendment adopted by the HASC requires the U.S. Space Force and Space Command to develop a “responsive space strategy, principles and a model architecture to be implemented across the United States Space Command.” The bill would require DoD to “establish a program to demonstrate responsive space capabilities through operational exercises, wargames, and table-top exercises,” Horsford’s amendment said. It also calls for the U.S. to work with allies on joint space missions that demonstrate “rapid launch, reconstitution and satellite augmentation from locations in the Indo-Pacific, European, and other theaters of operations.” Commercial space technologies The HASC approved an amendment from Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) that calls on the Space Force to “rapidly integrate new capabilities related to space situational and domain awareness, satellite imagery, satellite communications, and others.” The committee mandates a report on “how the Space Force plans to communicate current and emerging needs across all mission areas to commercial space service providers and how commercial services can contribute to fulfilling space domain awareness requirements.” Satellite communications Also approved was an amendment offered by Rep. Robert Wittman (R-Va.) directing a report on how DoD plans to integrate commercial satellite communications into its larger satcom enterprise. “The committee remains aware of the encouraging opportunities presented by integrated commercial and military satellite communications architectures for delivering robust, flexible, and manageable enterprise solutions for the Department of Defense,” said the bill. It added that DoD “must continue to focus on the efficient acquisition of commercial satellite communications by applying sustainable and efficient practices for contracting with commercial providers and making appropriate and timely adjustments to react to new demand signals from the military departments.” The committee wants a report detailing “how contracting with commercial providers for satellite communication capabilities will adjust to future demand signals” and a description of how contracts with commercial providers for satellite communication capabilities are designed to accommodate unforeseen demand increases. Commercial services for debris cleanup The HASC adopted an amendment from Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) directing DoD to submit a plan on how it will use commercially available technologies for on-orbit services and debris removal. The amendment mentions the Space Force’s recently launched Orbital Prime program to use commercial technologies for on-orbit demonstrations. But the committee is concerned that DoD plans “do not appropriately incorporate recent advancements in commercial on-orbit servicing technology offerings to extend operational spacecraft mission lifetimes or enable timely post-mission disposal,” the amendment said. The bill requests a report detailing “plans to prioritize the servicing of existing in-orbit spacecraft to extend life, alleviate debris, add resiliency and capability with commercially available services, wherever possible.”
ARCADIA, Calif. — The nonprofit that runs the national laboratory portion of the International Space Station is not making full use of the advisory group established after an independent review of the organization. A report published by the Government Accountability Office June 7 said that the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which manages the resources of the ISS designated as a national laboratory, was not providing its User Advisory Committee (UAC) with information on how the lab was being used or seeking input from the committee on resource allocations. CASIS established the UAC in 2020 in response to t he findings of an independent review commissioned by NASA in 2019 that sharply criticized management of the ISS national laboratory (ISSNL). One of the review’s recommendations was a creation of an advisory committee to serve as a liaison between CASIS and the community of lab users. The GAO review, requested by the leadership of the House Science Committee, found issues with how CASIS used the 35-person UAC. “For example, the charter states the UAC should prepare information that can be used to inform decisions on the ISSNL utilization portfolio,” the report states. “However, CASIS leadership has not obtained input from the UAC when deciding how to allocate resources across its lines of business.” CASIS said it has not sought input from the UAC in part because it felt it was unlikely that the UAC could provide a consensus view among all lab users, an explanation the GAO rejected. “A potential lack of consensus from the users does not preclude CASIS from obtaining information from its UAC,” it concluded. “As diverse perspectives can inform decision-making, diverse input could enhance CASIS leadership’s understanding of risks and opportunities across the ISSNL portfolio.” UAC members said that while CASIS does provide them with some information about how it allocates resources, it sought “greater transparency” such as the full queue of payloads flying to the station. That information, they said, “would help the users determine why planned resource allocations change, and help them better prepare for additional changes in the future.” CASIS said it had not provided that level of detail since the resource allocation process for payloads going to the station is “complex and fluid.” The GAO concluded, though, that NASA officials acknowledged there were opportunities for improvement. The GAO also raised concerns about the succession plan for the leadership of the UAC, whose two-year terms will expire in November. As of May, the report stated, “CASIS and UAC leadership had not established a timeframe for finalizing the succession plan, or how current and new members’ terms will overlap.” “While establishing the UAC was a step in the right direction, CASIS has opportunities to further improve the collaboration with ISSNL users by obtaining input on resource allocation decisions,” the GAO report concluded. It made recommendations that NASA ensure CASIS seek input from the UAC on resource allocations, provide more data about those allocations and develop a succession plan for the committee. NASA, in a response to the GAO included in the report, accepted the recommendations except for one about access to the flight queue of payloads going to the ISS. Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, wrote that the “visibility into the overall ISS flight queue is not possible until the ISS program has had time to evaluate the needs of the ISS as a whole, which are subject to change on a flight-by-flight basis somewhat close to launch.”
OneWeb will launch some of its next-generation satellites on Relativity Space’s next-generation launch vehicle starting as soon as 2025, the companies announced June 30. Relativity Space announced that OneWeb signed a launch services agreement for multiple launches of OneWeb Gen 2 satellites on Relativity’s Terran R reusable launch vehicle under development. The companies declined to disclose details about the agreement, including the value of the contract and the number of launches included. OneWeb has disclosed few details about the planned Gen 2 constellation, although it is expected to feature far more satellites than the current generation of 648 satellites the company is deploying. Those future satellites will likely offer additional communications services and could also carry navigation payloads. The lack of details extends to the size of the satellites themselves. The companies declined to disclose how many satellites would fit on a Terran R, a rocket with a projected payload capacity in the same class as SpaceX’s Falcon 9. OneWeb is the first customer that Relativity has announced for the Terran R but the fifth overall. Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, said in a written response to questions that the other four undisclosed customers are “are top satellite operators we are extremely excited about having on our manifest.” Ellis said that, among all customers, Relativity has orders for more than 20 Terran R launches, with a backlog the company valued at more than $1.2 billion. “The OneWeb agreement represents a large anchor customer with other significant customer agreements making up the total announced today,” he said. The other four customers each signed multi-launch agreements. Relativity announced the Terran R in June 2021 at the same time it disclosed a $650 million funding round . Terran R will be constructed using 3D-printing technologies the company has been working on since its inception. Both stages and its payload fairing will be reusable. The company is nearing the first launch of its smaller Terran 1 rocket. The vehicle is undergoing testing at Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station ahead of a launch projected for later this summer. That mission, called “Good Luck, Have Fun” by the company, will not carry a payload. OneWeb, meanwhile, is preparing to resume launches of its first-generation constellation that were paused when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February led the company to halt use of Soyuz vehicles. A OneWeb executive said June 23 that it expects launches to resume in the fourth quarter using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3. S Somanath, chairman of the Indian space agency ISRO, told reporters June 30 that two GSLV Mark 3 launches of OneWeb satellites are currently on the agency’s manifest, one for mid-September to October of this year and the other by January 2023.
The European Space Agency will seek a roughly 25% increase in funding from member states this fall despite economic and geopolitical challenges in Europe. In a Sept. 12 speech at the World Satellite Business Week conference here, Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said the agency will request more than 18 billion euros ($18 billion) from its members at November’s ministerial meeting, where members will agree to programs and funding levels for the next three years. In a tweet after the speech, he said ESA would request 18.7 billion euros. At the last ministerial meeting, Space19+ in November 2019, ESA won 14.5 billion euros . The new proposal would be an increase of more than 25% from 2019 before taking inflation into account. “I’m putting together a very ambitious package despite the current situation, despite the economic difficulties we have, because I firmly believe that, if we are not doing that, we will make a huge mistake in Europe,” he said. Those difficulties include high inflation rates and the threat of recession, exacerbated by skyrocketing energy prices from restrictions on Russian oil and gas affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions. Aschbacher acknowledged those conditions make it difficult to seek a major increase in funding for space programs. “The preparation for the ministerial as challenging as ever before,” he said. “This is not a good boundary condition for a ministerial conference. Still, I believe that, because of this situation in which we are, we have to invest in space.” He argued Europe needed to invest more in space to develop independent capabilities, citing the “painful” but necessary termination of links with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. That included an indefinite delay in the launch of the ExoMars mission that was scheduled to launch this month and the need to find new launches for other European missions that can no longer fly on Soyuz. “You realize, especially in Europe, how dependent we are in space on Russia,” he said. “We had to decouple our cooperation and our links with Russia very, very quickly. This is something that is not easy.” That dependence is a factor for planning for the ministerial. “This realization of the dependence that we had is certainly a trigger and a message that I get very clearly, to make a package of ministerial proposals that is resilient, increases our independence and strengthens our European space sector overall to make sure that we can do what we need to do,” he said. He did not go into details about what will be in that package of programs, although he highlighted space access and development of satellites in navigation, communications and Earth observation. He also emphasized the importance of being a “strong partner” for other nations and building up Europe’s commercial space sector. That international cooperation will likely include proposals for new contributions to NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration effort, such as a lunar cargo lander and communications network. “Our package is still in negotiation,” he said, with meetings “constantly” with member states. He later tweeted that more than two billion euros would go to “new growth markets” in space. “We are, despite the circumstances, optimistic,” he said. “We need a very strong space sector.”
NASA’s safety advisers warn that the agency’s efforts to transition from the International Space Station to commercial space stations without a gap are on a “precarious trajectory.” At a July 21 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, members said they were concerned that commercial stations whose development is being supported by NASA were unlikely to be ready in time before the ISS is retired at the end of the decade, and that those efforts suffered from insufficient budgets. Those plans, called Commercial Leo Earth Orbit (LEO) Destinations by NASA, “are on a precarious trajectory to realization on a schedule and within the projected resources needed to maintain a NASA LEO presence,” said Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel. “This is an area of concern for us.” NASA selected proposals from teams led by Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman in December for funded Space Act Agreements to mature their designs for commercial space stations. The agency has a separate agreement with Axiom Space giving that company access to a port on the ISS to which the company is preparing to attach a series of commercial modules that will later form the core of a stand-alone station. However, Amy Donahue, a member of the panel, said that NASA plans to issue formal requirements for its use of those stations only in late 2024. “There is very little margin for ensuring a continuous U.S. presence in LEO is maintained” given the planned ISS retirement in 2030, she said. The concern the panel had, she said, involved human-rating of a commercial station, noting that the current schedule calls for doing so faster than any other agency human spaceflight program since Mercury. “It raises some question about what NASA might do to mitigate the risk of failing to meet this schedule,” she said. “It’s certainly a concern for us from a risk perspective.” The panel is not the first to warn that NASA’s schedule for replacing the ISS may not be achievable. A report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General last November, just before NASA made its commercial space station awards, warned a commercial station “is not likely to be ready until well after 2030” and that NASA’s schedule for have one or more ready before 2030 “is unrealistic.” Another issue is resources not just for supporting development of the stations but also NASA’s use of them. “It doesn’t have a forecast or a way to guarantee to providers the extent of NASA’s business once a commercial laboratory is available,” Donahue said. “We also see it as likely that NASA will have to provide bridge funding during the transfer of operations from a fully funded government space station to a fully commercial space station for the duration of time required to develop a robust commercial market.” “In short,” she concluded, “NASA really needs to acknowledge and plan for the underlying reality that maintaining a continuous human presence on orbit now and into the future is going to require significant government investment.” Keeping the ISS operating through 2030 faces challenges of its own. Another member of the panel, Mark Sirangelo, noted several issues that both NASA and the safety panel have been tracking, from geopolitical tensions with Russia to pressure shell cracks in a Russian module. “The ISS is now in its third decade and it is feeling its age,” he said. “It faces new challenges all the time.” The panel, he said, found no serious issues that threatened the station’s operations, but called on NASA to expedite replacement of the aging spacesuits whose technical problems currently prevent astronauts from performing spacewalks. Some of those problems are beyond the control of NASA. Sirangelo cited the growing orbital debris population that has sharply increased the number of close approaches, or conjunctions, with the station. “The number of conjunctions with the ISS has increased substantially, and by multiples, over the last two years,” he said. Much of that is due to the November 2021 demonstration of a Russian antisatellite weapon that destroyed the Cosmos 1408 satellite and created thousands of pieces of debris in orbits that intersect the ISS. He said that, as of June 1, there had been 681 conjunction notifications for the station so far this year. Of the, 505 were linked to debris from that ASAT demonstration.
PARIS – While much of the Earth-observation industry works to improve imagery resolution, EarthDaily Analytics is focused on high-quality imagery that can be quickly analyzed to detect change. “When I say quality, it’s the quality of the color, the size of the pixel, the geolocation of the pixel across 22 spectral bands,” said Don Osborne, EarthDaily Analytics CEO told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. “It’s a continuous calibration and check to make sure that the data coming off the satellite is high quality.” EarthDaily Analytics plans to gather daily imagery of Earth’s landmass with a constellation of 10 satellites being provided by Loft Orbital , based on the OneWeb platform . Switzerland-based ABB and Xiphos Technologies of Montreal are developing payloads for the 200-kilogram satellites, scheduled to begin launching in late 2023 or early 2024. Under a $150 million contract announced early this year, Loft will integrate the satellites and payloads, arrange the launch and operate the constellation for 10 years. “The satellites are going to be delivered in just over a year,” said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, LoftOrbital CEO and co-founder. “Everything was purchased over a year ago. That’s the benefit of piggybacking on someone who has a production line with hundreds of satellites.” Temporal consistency is a priority for the EarthDaily constellation. Imagery with a native resolution of five meters per pixel and processed resolution of 3.5 meters per pixel will be captured at approximately 10:30 am local time, Osborne said. The EarthDaily constellation will cross-calibrate satellites instruments with European Space Agency Sentinel satellites. Since change detection is the goal, EarthDaily Analytics is happy to hand off responsibility for satellite and sensor manufacturing to experts, Osborne said. “We’re focused on the software side,” he added. “We have partners doing what they do best.” EarthDaily Analytics was formed by Antarctica Capital in 2021 after the private equity firm bought parts of UrtheCast. To handle the extensive dataset the EarthDaily constellation will capture, EarthDaily Analytics has spent nearly $30 million creating an automated data-processing and quality-control system. “That data comes in, it’s ingested, it’s processed to be ready for the application of analytics, whether somebody brings their own API or whether we deliver the data to them,” Osborne said Before deciding to establish a constellation, EarthDaily Analytics surveyed the market for available data. EarthDaily Agro, the EarthDaily Analytics division formerly known as Geosys, relies on Earth observation data from Sentinel, Airbus and other satellites. “We integrate all these pieces of data, which still doesn’t get the coverage and consistency that we’d really like for broad area,” Osborne said. In addition, fusing disparate data sources is difficult. “If you’re trying to look over a continent, it becomes very expensive and people who are utilizing that data, frankly, aren’t willing to pay the price,” Osborne said. Osborne sees important applications for the data gathered by the EarthDaily constellation in food security and water optimization. “These are really global problems which we can’t solve, but we can help contribute to the solutions,” he added.
Remote communications provider Speedcast has become the first company to sign a distribution deal to resell SpaceX’s Starlink broadband services to enterprise and maritime customers. Announcing the agreement Sept. 13 during World Satellite Business Week here, Speedcast said SpaceX’s low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation would enable higher speeds and lower latency for its customers on oil rigs, merchant vessels, and those in other remote areas. Speedcast currently connects these locations via capacity it buys from satellites operating farther from the Earth in geostationary orbit. “Starlink is an exciting new communications pathway for customers,” Speedcast CEO Joe Spytek said in a statement, “offering significant diversity and added capacity at a time when remote sites continue to push to the farthest ends of the Earth and when bandwidth demand is ever increasing.” Speedcast said their agreement marks the first deal of its kind with Starlink, which typically prefers to sell directly to customers. Starlink branched out of consumer broadband into the enterprise and maritime markets earlier this year as SpaceX continues to expand its constellation globally. There is a high barrier to entry to serve energy customers in particular, Euroconsult Canada managing director Nathan de Ruiter said, and this distribution deal is one way for SpaceX to break into that market. The energy industry is a premium user of satellite capacity and has high service requirements to ensure safety and resilient operations. The other large satellite communications provider in this market is Rignet, which was sold to Starlink’s GEO broadband rival Viasat in 2020. James Trevelyan, who leads Speedcast’s global enterprise business, said the company expects to start providing Starlink services in the near-term globally — depending on where the network is available, and the regions SpaceX has permission to operate. “We can’t get enough capacity,” Trevelyan said on the sidelines of World Satellite Business Week. “It’s fundamental to our whole ethos of bringing more bandwidth to the edge. The fact that it’s a different technology doesn’t really matter. Our mission is to bring bandwidth to these sites and make sure they work all the time.” Spytek told SpaceNews in April that demand for capacity was outstripping supply amid a lack of new GEO satellites. Speedcast also has a partnership to sell broadband services from LEO operator OneWeb, which currently only has coverage at 50 degrees and north while it waits to resume satellite deployments this year.
Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice has previously hinted about possible military applications for the company’s Dream Chaser space plane . On Sept. 8, Sierra Space announced it signed a c ooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Transportation Command to develop concepts for using Dream Chaser space planes and Shooting Star cargo modules for “timely global delivery of Department of Defense logistics and personnel.” The company joins a list of commercial space players — including SpaceX , Blue Origin and Rocket Lab — that are exploring options for using rockets and space vehicles to transport military crews and cargo around the world. The Dream Chaser winged space plane adds a new feature to the mix, as it launches to space on a rocket but flies back to Earth and lands on a runway. U.S. Transcom and the U.S. Air Force have shown interest in space vehicles to supplement traditional air, land and surface transportation modes. The vehicles also could support non-combat activities such as humanitarian relief operations and medical missions. Sierra Space said the CRADA with U.S. Transcom “outlines plans to identify current capabilities and maturity of Sierra Space’s space transportation methods, as well as both observed and projected risks, benefits and additional research and development needed as a result.” The first Dream Chaser, currently under construction in Louisville, Colorado, is projected to launch in 2023 and begin flying a series of NASA cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station. The Shooting Star cargo module operates attached to the Dream Chaser. Vice said the national security market is of key interest to Sierra Space. “We are focused on providing unique ultra-high-speed, heavy payload solutions to the Department of Defense for logistics and personnel movement,” he said. “We plan to leverage these technologies to reach anywhere on the globe within three hours.” 
SEOUL, South Korea – The United Kingdom and South Korea have pledged not to conduct direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing, throwing their weight behind the U.S.-driven initiative launched in April to promote peaceful and safe use of outer space. This came about three weeks after Japan and Germany joined the initiative, raising the number of like-minded countries to seven. Canada joined the initiative in May and New Zealand in July. And more countries are expected to join as the U.S. ramps up efforts to promote the ban. “The Republic of Korea commits not to conduct destructive direct ascent anti-satellite missile testing, following the U.S. announcement in April,” said Hwang Joon-kook, South Korea’s permanent representative to the United Nations, in an Oct. 4 speech at the U.N. First Committee’s third plenary meeting, which was livestreamed via UN Web TV. “We call on other states to join the relay of this commitment.” He said deliberate destruction of space objects creates long-lived space debris, hampering peaceful use of space. “In this vein,” he said, South Korea “welcomes the ongoing OEWG [open-ended working group] process as an important opportunity to find the common ground on identifying responsible behaviors to reduce space threats.” The U.K. government announced its decision in an Oct. 3 statement jointly issued by the foreign ministry and the UK Space Agency. “The UK has today, 3 October, announced that it commits not to destructively test direct ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) missiles, as part of the UK’s enduring efforts to promote responsible space behaviours,” the statement reads. “Given our increasing security and socio-economic reliance on space, we believe that destructive testing of direct ascent anti-satellite missiles can be conclusively regarded as irresponsible.” The UK has played an important role at the United Nations’ open-ended working group on reducing space threats. The working group itself was established by a U .K.-sponsored resolution in December last year. The working group had its second session in September and will conclude its work in August 2023. 
TOULOUSE, France — BAE Systems said Sept. 7 it is developing its first multi-sensor satellite cluster to gather intelligence for military and disaster response needs in 2024. The British aerospace and defense company partnered with Finnish satellite operator Iceye, which is building a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite for the four-strong constellation known as Azalea. The other three satellites will have optical cameras and sensors that can track radio frequencies (RF) on Earth. “We’re also going to have chip-scale atomic clocks on the platforms,” said Doug Liddle, CEO of smallsat maker In-Space Missions which BAE acquired last year . Liddle said these atomic clocks could use the cluster’s Ka-band inter-satellite links for aperture synthesis to improve its data collection and geolocation capabilities. These three satellites will weigh about 100 kilograms and are the size of about 10 cubesats, he said, while the fourth satellite modeled on Iceye’s existing SAR constellation will be slightly larger because of its longer antenna. The optical satellites aim to provide 1-meter resolution images, which would be supported by 5-10-meter resolution cameras for monitoring larger areas. At about 500 kilometers above the Earth, Azalea would pass over all points on the globe every 4-5 days, Liddle added, and BAE is already planning future clusters to increase revisit rates. He said the company is closing in on securing a launch contract with SpaceX for deploying the first cluster in 2024. Elizabeth Seward, BAE’s head of space strategy, said Azalea will leverage BAE’s security and assurance heritage so that “we’ll have a U.K. sovereign cluster that meets the security requirements that we can deliver information and intelligence for defense customers.” The cluster will also have software-defined radios that can be reprogrammed post-launch to respond to changing mission needs. “We can do almost anything that you would want to do with a combination of optical imagery, RF sensing and SAR,” Seward added. The cluster could pick up RF signals at a location previously thought to be vacant, she said, and then use optical and cloud-penetrating SAR sensors to analyze the activity. This data could then be sent back to headquarters or straight to a nearby base. The ability to group multiple sensors on different satellites that fly as one unit helps future-proof the system, according to Liddle. “If you put those capabilities in space, it’s going to be very hard to find a way not to use it,” Liddle said, because there are so many things you can do with that to address not only existing requirements but also the requirements you haven’t thought of yet.” A single payload would be more dependent on one type of customer, he added, where “all it takes is a small change in the market” to become obsolete. While Azalea has not yet secured a commercial contract, he said the company is receiving interest from a “number of customers” who are interested in accessing the data it plans to provide.
TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk Global said Sept. 28 it will test the ability to send a 5G signal from a satellite launching in December to standard mobile devices, after getting funding for the demonstration from an undisclosed partner. The experimental 5G payload will be onboard its second commercial satellite, which SpaceX is slated to fly on a Falcon 9 rocket as part of its Transporter 6 rideshare mission. Two other Lynk satellites are also due to fly on this mission to give the Virginia-based startup four commercial satellites in low Earth orbit. Lynk’s initial satellites are designed to provide connectivity for its mobile network operator (MNO) partners’ customers over 2G to 4G. The startup said “in the future” its software-defined radios “will be able to switch to 5G when our MNO partners and other customers prefer that over 4G.” Details of the 5G tests were not disclosed. Lynk has plans to operate more than 50 satellites before the end of 2023, which it says would enable users to send and receive text messages every 15-30 minutes. Charles Miller, Lynk’s CEO, expects MNOs will want to upgrade from 4G to 5G satellite connectivity in 2025, when the startup would be able to provide “continuous” voice and broadband data services from orbit. “Another issue is how prevalent the demand for 5G will be from our MNO partners,” Miller said via email. “If we are only putting 5G beams down in a country, that means that 4G phones will not get service. Our MNO partners will need to decide when a transition takes place from 4G to 5G. This decision is up to the MNOs.” He added: “I suspect Lynk will be ready to provide 5G services well before MNOs want to make the transition from 4G to 5G.” Lynk’s long-term plan is to beam down 4G connectivity in one spectrum band and 5G in another, enabling MNOs to use both 4G and 5G services. Texas-based startup AST SpaceMobile plans to start deploying its first commercial spacecraft in late 2023. These will be larger than Lynk’s pizza-boxed shaped satellites for providing voice, video streaming, and other higher bandwidth services. AST’s BlueWalker-3 prototype satellite, which SpaceX launched Sept. 10, is slated to unfurl its 64-square-meter antenna in the next couple of weeks to test its ability to bring 4G and 5G connectivity to standard mobile phones. SpaceX announced plans Aug. 25 to provide its own direct-to-cell service as early as late next year in partnership with U.S.-based MNO T-Mobile. “Lynk is years ahead of everyone else in enabling MNOs to extend their cellular networks to 100% of their geographic territories,” Dan Dooley, Lynk’s chief commercial officer of Lynk, said in a statement. “We will be years ahead in 5G as well.” He said Lynk is actively testing satellite-direct-to-phone-services in 12 countries on five continents. The startup secured regulatory approval Sept. 16 to operate its initial cellphone-compatible constellation globally; however, it has not yet obtained landing rights in any country to provide services.
Updated 9:30 a.m. Eastern with Nelson remarks. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA scrubbed the first attempt to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft Aug. 29 after a problem with a hydrogen bleed line with one of the rocket’s four core stage engines. NASA called off the launch shortly after the scheduled 8:33 a.m. Eastern liftoff after spending more than two and a half hours attempting to resolve a problem flowing liquid hydrogen into one of four main engines in the rocket’s core stage to prepare them for the planned launch. NASA encountered an issue with the “hydrogen kickstart” of the four RS-25 engines, where liquid hydrogen is flowed through the engines for thermal conditioning ahead of launch. That system was not tested in the final wet dress rehearsal in June because of a leak in a quick-disconnect fitting, and was something project officials said they would test earlier than planned in the launch countdown. The hydrogen kickstart worked on three of the four engines, but on the fourth, designated engine #3, controllers did not see the flow of liquid hydrogen they expected. They took several measures to try to increase that flow, including shutting off the flow in the other three engines to increase the pressure for engine #3, without success. NASA then called for an unplanned hold at T-40 minutes, originally scheduled to last 10 minutes, to work on a troubleshooting plan for the engine. After more than an hour, NASA scrubbed the launch but planned to collect additional data before unloading the liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants from the core and upper stages. NASA first ran into challenges with the launch shortly after managers gave their approval to load the rocket with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants nearly nine hours before the scheduled liftoff. Thunderstorms in the vicinity of the launch site kept tanking from starting for about an hour until weather conditions improved. “We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in remarks on NASA TV about half an hour after the scrub. “It’s just illustrative that this is a very complicated machine.” “They’re going to work it. They’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said of launch teams. “We’ll get it fixed and then we’ll fly.” Nelson added that he had briefed Vice President Kamala Harris, who arrived at the Kennedy Space Center earlier in the morning, about the status of the launch. Harris was scheduled to tour the center, including hardware for Orion spacecraft under construction, and give a speech later in the day. Launch officials reported no issues during earlier phases of the countdown, which formally started with a “call to stations” on the morning of Aug. 27 . Lightning strikes in the vicinity of Launch Complex 39B the afternoon if Aug. 27, including some on towers surrounding the pad, did not cause any damage to the vehicle or ground systems. “Everything to date looks good from a vehicle perspective,” Jeff Spaulding, NASA Artemis 1 senior test director, said at an Aug. 28 briefing. “My thoughts are that we look great for tomorrow,” he added when asked to give the odds for an Aug. 29 launch. The next launch opportunity is no earlier than Sept. 2, because of Orion performance constraints that rule out launches on Aug. 30, 31 and Sept. 1. A two-hour launch window opens at 12:48 p.m. Eastern and would set up a 39-day mission for the Orion spacecraft. A third window, 90 minutes long is available Sept. 5 starting at 5:12 p.m. Eastern. Spaulding said Aug. 28 there is some flexibility to attempt launches on Sept. 3, 4 or 6, the last day of the current launch period. “If we did not tank, for example, on the 2nd for some reason, we could potentially come back the next day and try again,” he said. However, if tanking of the rocket did take place on the Sept. 2 attempt, NASA would not be able to try again until Sept. 5. Melody Lovin, weather officer for the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, said at the Aug. 28 briefing the first weather forecast for a Sept. 2 launch attempt would come Aug. 29. She expected, though, that the probability of acceptable weather would be lower than for the initial launch attempt because the launch window is later in the day, with greater odds of storms. Another factor, she said, would be the potential development of tropical weather systems that could affect the region by the end of the week. “The forecast is largely going to depend on the evolution of the tropics.”
Solestial, a Tempe, Arizona company focused on solar energy for space applications, closed a $10 million funding round led by Airbus Ventures. AEI HorizonX, GPVC, Stellar Ventures, Industrious Ventures and other investors participated in the round. “With this seed round, we will fully validate the technology and then prepare ourselves to transition to mass production of solar cells and panels,” Stanislau Herasimenka, Solestial co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We will do a lot of ground testing to predict how our panels will perform. And we will have multiple flights over the next year.” Solestial panels have not flown yet. The company has delivered three sets of panels to customers. Herasimenka declined to name the customers, but said they included prime contractors and well-funded startups. “I’m very happy to see a strong demand from different segments of the satellite manufacturing market,” Herasimenko said. “It seems that solar is a pain for not only for the LEO [low-Earth orbit] megaconstellations that we are primarily targeting because they need a lot. Everyone would benefit from more affordable solar panels in space.” Solestial intends to offer solar panels that are much less expensive than current panels, “mass producible” and space stable, Herasimenka said. “In space, it can last for 10 years and preserve some reasonable performance.” In contrast to existing space solar panels, which Herasimenko compares to Lamborghinis, Solestial aims to bring the space industry something less costly and easier to manufacture like a Ford F-150 pickup truck. “It can serve as the workhorse for this industry that’s expanding and needs a lot of solar power,” Herasimenko said. Solestial, formerly known as Regher Solar, spun out of Arizona State University, where Herasimenka earned a PhD in electrical and electronics engineering, conducted post-doctoral research and served as an assistant research professor. The company was developing thin silicon solar cells for terrestrial markets. Noting the rapid expansion of the space sector in recent years, the company began testing the impact of radiation on its technology. Like other solar cells, Solestial solar cells can be damaged by radiation, but the company designed the cells to anneal, or cure the defects, at normal operating temperatures. In addition to private investment, Solestial has won Small Business Innovation Research awards from NASA, the National Science Foundation and other government agencies with a combined value of more than $2.5 million. “We are at a new inflection point for the aerospace and the energy industries,” Mat Costes, Airbus Ventures partner, said in a statement. “We’re excited to welcome the team at Solestial into our vibrant community of entrepreneurs working to advance breakthrough technologies to help solve critical, near-term planetary challenges.”
An uncrewed test of NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft moved a step closer to launch with the completion of a flight readiness review Aug. 22. NASA officials said late Aug. 22 that the review confirmed plans for a launch of the Artemis 1 mission from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B as soon as 8:33 a.m. Eastern Aug. 29, at the beginning of a two-hour window. A second two-hour window is available Sept. 2, and a 90-minute window Sept. 5. “We had no exceptions today. We actually had no actions coming out of the review and we had no dissenting opinions,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said at a briefing after the review. There is still some “open work” to do on the SLS and Orion spacecraft before launch, said Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA. Some of that is planned work to prepare the vehicles for launch, “largely things that we have a path to close before we go fly.” One issue that won’t be checked until the final stages of the countdown is a step called the “hydrogen kickstart” to thermally condition the engines. That could not be tested during the series of wet dress rehearsals of the vehicle in April and June because a leak in a hydrogen bleed line detected in the final rehearsal in June. Sarafin and Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, said there is a plan to test that step during a “quiescent” phase in the countdown a few hours before launch once the core stage’s liquid hydrogen tank is filled. “We believe that we have taken all the actions to correct that problem,” Blackwell-Thompson said, but won’t know for certain until the test at the pad. “If we do not successfully demonstrate that,” Sarafin said, “we are not going to launch that day.” A launch on Aug. 29 would start what is scheduled to be a 42-day mission for the Orion spacecraft. The SLS’s upper stage will place the spacecraft on a trajectory to the moon, called translunar injection (TLI), less than two hours after liftoff. Orion will fly by the moon five days later, maneuvering into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. After spending two weeks in that orbit, the spacecraft will maneuver back to the moon, performing another powered flyby to bring it back to Earth, splashing down off coast of San Diego, California Oct. 10. The six-week mission is a stress test of sorts of the spacecraft. Howard Hu, NASA Orion program manager, noted that Orion is designed to support a four-person crew for three weeks. “This mission allows us to push a lot of capability,” he said. “The long-class mission we’re talking about, 42 days, will allow us to stress a lot of systems.” “Going 42 days puts a lot more stress on those systems, plus the environment it’s in — longer exposure to radiation, longer exposure to micrometeoroid hits — means we’re going to learn a lot from this test flight,” said Bob Cabana, NASA associate administrator. “We’re stressing it beyond what it is designed for and we’ll see what we learn.” Cabana and others at the briefing emphasized that Artemis 1 was a test flight. “It’s not without risk,” he said. That includes scenarios, he said, where Orion is not able to complete the planned mission and returns early. NASA, though, will push to at least send Orion towards the moon to enable the mission’s top objective, testing the spacecraft’s heat shield at lunar reentry velocities of about 40,000 kilometers per hour. That includes pressing ahead with TLI even if there are issues with the spacecraft, like a solar panel that doesn’t properly deploy immediately after launch. “We have a lean-forward strategy to get our high-priority objective, which is to demonstrate the heat shield at lunar reentry conditions,” said Sarafin. “We’re going to press to the point of translunar injection unless we’re sure we’re going to lose the vehicle.” “We would be go on this flight for conditions that we would normally be no-go for on a crewed flight in the interest of crew safety, because we want to buy down risk,” he added.
SAN FRANCISCO – Belgian startup Aerospacelab announced plans June 14 to establish a “megafactory” large enough to produce 500 satellites annually. Aerospacelab plans to operate two manufacturing plants in Belgium. The new plant will be located in Charleroi, roughly 40 kilometers from the company’s existing factory in Ottignies-Louvain-La-Neuve, which is designed to produce as many as 24 satellite per year. In February, Aerospacelab announced a 40 million euro funding round. “One of the stated goals of our last fundraising was to scale up Aerospacelab’s production capacity to be able to serve the constellations market along with our needs,” Erika Verbelen, Aerospacelab marketing manager, told SpaceNews by email. “The factory in Charleroi, which will be able to produce up to 500 satellites yearly, is the industrial tool enabling manufacturing of large series of spacecraft at an unparalleled pace and a means to reduce unit costs. Belgium, located at the heart of Europe, was a logical choice to implement such capability.” Benoît Deper, Aerospacelab CEO and founder, said in a statement, “We’ve been inspired by the automotive industry where standardized products still have the possibility to be adjusted to specific needs. We are setting up satellite manufacturing plants, with production lines using ‘off-the-shelf’ components and specific instruments when needed.” At both Belgian factories, Aerospacelab will own and operate “testing facilities relevant for satellite manufacturing, which allows vertical integration and as a result agility,” Deper added. Aerospacelab held a ceremony June 14 to mark the start of construction of the Charleroi factory. Attending were: Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for internal market; Belgian deputy prime minister Petra De Sutter; Belgian Defence Minister Ludivine De Donder; Thomas Dermine, Belgian state secretary for economic recovery and strategic investment; Mathieu Michel, Belgian state secretary for digitalization; Walloon government vice president Willy Borsus; and Charleroi Mayor Paul Magnette. The Aerospacelab megafactory “project is the perfect illustration of the essential role a VC can play to revitalize our economy and ensure that Wallonia and Belgium stay at the forefront of technology in Europe and in the world,” Borsus said in a statement. The Charleroi factory, where Aerospacelab plans to start manufacturing 150- to 700-kilogram satellites in early 2025, includes a 6,000-square-meter cleanroom and 3,000-square-meter laboratory space. Aerospacelab plans to begin producing satellites weighing 150 to 400 kilograms later this year in the 2,000-square-meter Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve factory. Aerospacelab ‘s first satellite launched in 2021. The European Space Agency has awarded Aerospacelab contracts for two additional missions. The first is slated to launch later this year. “Aerospacelab has additional ongoing contracts with institutional and commercial customers that support the strategic decision to invest in a megafactory,” Verbelen said. Aerospacelab, established in 2018, employs more than 140 people full time. Correction: This article previously said the Charleroi factory was 6,000 square feet. That is only the clean room, however. 
Slingshot Aerospace, a data analytics company that develops simulations of the space environment, on Aug. 3 announced it has acquired Numerica’s space business and Seradata, a space data analysis company based in the United Kingdom. The value of the acquisitions was not disclosed. Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, said both transactions have cleared regulatory approvals and the companies officially merged their operations Aug. 1. Founded in 2017, Slingshot is based in El Segundo, California; and Austin, Texas. Numerica is located in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, Colorado. Only the space domain awareness division of Numerica was sold to Slingshot. The air and missile defense divisions of Numerica will continue to operate as usual. These acquisitions will help Slingshot expand its footprint in the commercial and government space markets, Stricklan said. One of its main products is a space digital twin — a virtual space environment built with data from multiple sources. The company also offers a space traffic coordination service called Slingshot Beacon. Slingshot now owns Numerica’s network of ground-based telescopes that track space objects in daytime and at nighttime. That network includes 150 sensors and 30 telescopes at 20 locations around the globe. According to Numerica, its sensors can track satellites and debris as small as 10 centimeters in size. The company sells data as a service to the U.S. government and commercial satellite operators. With the acquisition of Seradata, Slingshot is absorbing the company’s SpaceTrak satellite and launch database, and establishing a foothold in the U.K. and European markets. The SpaceTrak database and analytics platform covers all launches and satellites since Sputnik in 1957. The combined capabilities of Slingshot, Numerica and Seradata will provide customers higher quality data and insights, Stricklan said. “Today, satellite operators across the commercial, civil, and defense sectors rely on siloed tools and data that significantly limit the efficiency of day-to-day operations.” A key driver of these acquisitions is the need for better data and technology in support of space sustainability, said Stricklan. “The exponential growth of launch and satellite activities requires reliable data and insights to guide safe space operations and protect our modern way of life.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Near Space Labs announced plans Sept. 7 to provide free high-resolution Earth imagery to researchers, universities and nonprofit organizations. Brooklyn-based NSL will share 10-centimeter-resolution imagery of the most populous U.S. cities over a period of 12 months through its Community Resilience & Innovation Earth Imagery Grant program. The five-year old startup established the grant program to “provide the most recent and high-quality data on the market not only to our enterprise customers, but to those doing equally important work for the betterment of our overall society,” Rema Matevosyan, NSL co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “It is our hope that our ability to extend access of our imagery database to a broader set of researchers and those who have limited budget will allow them to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their analyses as they work to identify key issues and develop solutions to the challenges we face every day within our cities, suburbs and rural areas.” NSL gathers Earth imagery with sensors mounted on Swifty high-altitude balloons. The latest model, which the news release refers to as “ Swifty 3 stratospheric imaging robots,” operate at altitudes as high as 26,000 meters and gather imagery covering 400 to 1,000 square kilometers per flight. To qualify for the NSL grants, applicants must be based in the United States. Grant recipients will access images through NSL’s XYZ Tile Application Programming Interface. “Ideal projects will seek to develop a cohesive understanding of urban change and how it may impact society as a whole and the specific needs of local communities,” according to the news release. Customers rely on NSL imagery to assess insurance claims and risks, respond to natural disasters, monitor infrastructure including roads and bridges, and observe environmental conditions.
TAMPA, Fla. — SatixFy named David Ripstein as CEO June 23 to lead the satcoms equipment maker’s planned transformation into a public company. Ripstein is currently CEO of British automotive-focused telematics provider GreenRoad Technologies, and will assume his new role at Israel-based SatixFy June 27. He will take over responsibilities from SatixFy chair and chief financial officer Yoav Leibovitch, who held them on a temporary basis after co-founder and former CEO Yoel Gat died April 8 from cancer. Leibovitch, who also co-founded the company in 2012, remains chair and CFO. SatixFy said plans announced in March to trade shares on Nasdaq by merging with Endurance Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), remain on track to complete in the second half of 2022. The deal values the combined company at $813 million, and could potentially raise up to $230 million for SatixFy’s expansion plans. Before joining GreenRoad in 2017, Ripstein was president and CEO of publicly traded Radcom, which provides network intelligence solutions for telecoms operators transitioning to 5G. Ripstein said SatixFy plans to use the cash injection from going public to “launch an aggressive sales strategy, and expect to see this approach lead to strong revenue growth and profitability over time.” SatixFy sees growing demand from broadband satellites in low Earth orbit and other altitudes for its antennas, terminals and modems — which are based on semiconductors it develops in-house. The company has forecasted revenues to grow from $22 million in 2021 to $374 million in 2026. After essentially breaking even in 2022, SatixFy expects to generate $23 million in EBITDA — or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — in 2023, rising to $113 million in 2026. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
The United States and Europe, at least in the immediate future, will be largely dependent on SpaceX for satellite launches and human spaceflight missions, creating a supply and demand imbalance that might not be sustainable, warned Casey Dreier, chief policy adviser for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes exploration of space. “We’re in this strange new period of constriction of launch, not just because of Russia, but because of this transition period that we’ve been having,” Dreier said Dec. 13 on an online forum hosted by the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress. A confluence of events has led to this, he noted, including Russia’s exit from the global launch market a fter the invasion of Ukraine — and the cancellation of previously planned Soyuz launches , and commercial companies taking longer than expected to transition to new launch vehicles. United Launch Alliance for years has been planning to retire the Atlas 5 rocket which uses the Russian-made RD-180 engine, but its replacement, Vulcan Centaur, will not be ready for its first launch until some time in 2023. Blue Origin is developing New Glenn and it’s unclear when that vehicle will fly. Europe only has two Ariane 5 rockets remaining before it transitions to the long-delayed Ariane 6, also slated to debut in 2023. The U.S. government has to face the prospect that until these new vehicles are available, there might be a period when it will only have access to a single provider, Dreier said. “At the moment, it’s really just SpaceX. We’re down to a single provider for a vast portion of U.S. and even European launches,” he said. “So we’re at this weird chokepoint.” “Fortunately, SpaceX happens to be this three-sigma outlier of a company that’s capable of launching 50 or maybe 60 times a year. But that’s not something that’s really resilient in the long run,” Dreier added. A key takeaway from the Ukraine crisis has been the risks of supply chains. “Do you want to have just one provider of commercial satellite communications? Do you want to have just one provider of launch? Of course you don’t. And we’re seeing this chokepoint being revealed.” Dreier’s comments follow similar warnings by ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno , who is advising the U.S. Space Force to preemptively buy heavy launch services as rockets could be in short supply over the next several years due to rising commercial demand. “The scarcity environment is a big shift in our industry,” Bruno said. Dreier said the current environment poses risks for the U.S. government’s access to launch. On the one hand, SpaceX “is just outpacing everyone else” and is showing no signs of slowing down. However, the government has to worry about alternative sources of supply. “And so how much does the government then prop up alternate commercial providers? … Then, is this at the end of the day really a commercial market?” The Defense Department has been there before. Prior to the U.S. Air Force certifying SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for national security launches in 2015, ULA was the military’s only launch provider.
SEOUL, South Korea — President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea said Nov. 28 that the country will land a robotic spacecraft on the moon in 2032 and on Mars in 2045, when the nation will mark the 100th anniversary of liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule. This was part of a set of broader space exploration goals the president unveiled during a keynote speech at the Korea Space Forum 2022 here. To reach the ambitious goals, he promised to double the government’s space development budget in the next five years and funnel at least 100 trillion won ($74.7 billion) into the space sector by 2045. South Korea’s space budget for 2022 is 734 billion won ($553 million). “In the future, countries with a space vision will lead the world’s economy and will be able to solve the problems that humanity is currently facing,” the president said. “The dream of becoming a powerhouse in space is not distant. It will be an opportunity and hope for children and the youth.” Yoon pledged to develop a next-generation rocket engine for the moon mission in five years and launch a national space agency modeled after NASA by next year. The envisioned agency, tentatively named Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA), is expected to offer integrated management of state-funded space programs currently scattered in various departments and agencies, under the supervision of the science ministry. Yoon didn’t elaborate on the next-generation engine, which he said will be developed in five years. A science ministry official managing the engine development was not immediately available for comment. The kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled KRE-075 engine , used to launch South Korea’s first homegrown space rocket KSLV-2, is the most advanced rocket engine the country has developed. And the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) started developing liquid-fueled 100-ton thrust engines this year for future missions. The president didn’t explain why the target year for moon landing was pushed back to 2032 from 2030, set by his predecessor . Chang Dong-soo, a science ministry official involved in the moon landing project, told SpaceNews that the longer-than-expected time to develop a lander and a carrier rocket could be blamed for the delay. Landing on Mars is a new objective for South Korea. Details are expected to be included in the 4th revision of the Basic Plan for Promotion of Space Development, a five-year plan that covers through 2027. “By 2045, we will be able to plant our national flag on Mars,” Yoon said. “To make this happen, we will develop unimaginable technologies and explore uncharted areas.” In light of this, he said the government would step up public-to-private transfer of space technologies and launch a funding program for up-and-coming space companies. And the president himself will chair the National Space Council, the top decision-making body on space issues, currently controlled by the prime minister. On top of this, the president emphasized that South Korea will strengthen its ties with the United States in the space sector, especially regarding national security. “The Korea-U.S. alliance will be extended into the Korea-U.S. space alliance, and we will expand the cooperation with the international society in space security,” he said. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Team Miles founder Wesley Faler has spent more than a decade developing and refining the plasma thrusters set to fly for the first time on a cubesat launching alongside the NASA Artemis 1 mission. The Team Miles cubesat, one of ten secondary payloads mounted on a Space Launch System adapter, won its ride to orbit in 2017 through the NASA CubeQuest Challenge, a competition aimed at encouraging citizens to invent affordable technologies for miniature spacecraft. For the CubeQuest Challenge, Faler, whose expertise ranges from particle physics to software and manufacturing systems, leads an all-volunteer team of scientists and engineers who designed and built the Team Mile cubesat. Team Miles won prizes in every CubeQuest ground tournaments by proving, for example, the merit of its engineering designs, plans, analysis and models. Faler co-invented the team’s patent-pending water-fueled plasma thruster. Twelve of the thrusters, mounted on the Team Miles cubesat, are controlled by a custom-built radiation-tolerant computer. The computer continuously evaluates the performance of each thruster. “It’s running a small experiment on itself to figure out which thrust heads are behaving best,” Faler said. A subsystem to enable the six-unit cubesat to communicate with Earth from deep space also was invented by Faler. Communicating from at least 3 million kilometers from Earth is one of the technical objective of the CubeQuest Challenge. Competitors who prove that feat will share a $1.5 million prize. There was no technology that was capable of providing communications for a satellite as small as Team Miles’ from the moon and beyond, said Brad Berkson, Miles Space chief operating officer. The Team Miles cubesat is smaller than the Mars Cube One satellites. Miles Space, a Florida startup founded by Team Miles members, is the commercial outlet for the technology. Executives are not yet ready to name their customers, but Faler said, “we have other in-space demo opportunities lining up right now.” Faler has been working on his unique propulsion system since the early 2000s. Some elements of it have been patented. Others patents are pending. “It’s completely novel and what’s been interesting is the massive denial on the part of the experts, who say it is physically impossible and it can’t work,” Berkson said. The problem is that the thrust equation most engineers remember is an abbreviated one. “It leaves out a pressure term,” Faler said. “They use the shorthand version to relate thrust to power and fuel economy. When you plug in the full equation, we’re about 5 percent efficient.” Team Miles has conducted extensive testing of its cubesat on the ground. “We know it can fly if the batteries are dead,” Faler said. “We know it will keep flying if the software hiccups and the computer reboots. We know that if the radio signal is weak, we can still recover the signal here on the ground.” Still, the prospect of the cubesat finally reaching orbit is both exciting and terrifying, Faler said. “I’m looking forward to a nap after flies,” Faler said. “After years of waiting, my anxiety is really high. I won’t be able to relax until I know it’s coasting free after swinging by the moon.”
SEOUL, South Korea — The second launch of South Korea’s first domestically built rocket is set for June 21, a delay of a week due to strong winds and a technical glitch. “We convened a meeting of the launch management committee and decided to pursue the second launch on June 21,” Kwon Hyun-joon, a senior science ministry official, said June 17 in a live-streamed media briefing . Kwon said the kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled three-stage rocket KSLV-2 was lying horizontally in a hangar at the Naro Space Center, after a malfunctioning sensor in the first-stage booster was replaced with a new one. The rocket will be rolled back to the launch pad June 20, he said. KSLV-2’s second launch was initially set for June 15, with a backup launch window spanning June 16-23. However, it was delayed to the following day due to strong winds — and delayed again after engineers found a problem with a level sensor, installed inside the oxidizer tank of the rocket’s first-stage booster, during a final pre-launch checkup at the launch pad. According to the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), readings on the malfunctioning sensor remained static when the tank was being filled. The rocket was pulled off the launch pad and rolled back to the hangar June 15, and went through a checkup to identify the cause of the problem. KARI said engineers identified the problematic part within the sensor and replaced it, and Kwon said they also found no other problems after inspecting the rest of the rocket. Kwon noted that the rescheduled launch date could be subject to change depending on weather conditions. The Naro Space Center is expecting a 60-70% chance of rain on June 21, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration. KSLV-2 is South Korea’s first domestically developed space rocket, capable of putting up to 1,500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit. Its first-stage booster has a cluster of four KRE-075 engines, the second-stage has a single KRE-075 engine and the third-stage has a KRE-007 engine. The rocket reached its intended altitude during its maiden flight Oct. 21, but its third-stage engine shut down 46 seconds early, releasing its 1,500-kilogram dummy payload at less than orbital speed. The dummy payload fell back to Earth south of Australia, according to KARI. The premature engine shutdown was later blamed on improperly anchored helium tanks inside the upper stage. In the upcoming launch, the rocket will carry five satellites — a 180-kilogram performance test satellite and four smaller satellites developed by domestic universities. Besides the upcoming mission, South Korea plans to conduct four additional KSLV-2 launches by 2027 as part of efforts to further advance the country’s space rocket program.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act proposes adding $75 million to the Pentagon’s budget for “tactically responsive space,” a program that funds small-satellite launch experiments and demonstrations. Smith on June 20 released his version of the NDAA, or chairman’s mark. The bill authorizes $772.5 billion for the Defense Department, in line with the Biden administration’s $773 billion request, but less than the $817 billion proposed by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The House Armed Services Committee will mark up its version of the NDAA on June 22. Smith in the 2023 NDAA directs the Space Force to consider new ways to acquire national security space launch services. And he continues to press DoD to fund a program known as “tactically responsive space” — a catchphrase for rapid access to commercial launch vehicles that can be rapidly integrated with payloads and launched during a conflict or a crisis to replace a damaged satellite or augment existing constellations. The Space Force last year demonstrated a tactically responsive launch mission called TacRL-2 . A satellite launch that normally would have taken two to five years to plan and executive was accomplished in 11 months. The HASC wants the Space Force to step up these efforts and shorten the timelines for launching small satellites in preparation for conflicts when adversaries might target U.S. constellations. Smith’s bill directs the Space Force to figure out processes and contracting arrangements with providers so space missions can be quickly turned around. “The Chief of Space Operations should formalize tactically responsive requirements for all space capabilities” that the Defense Department performs, the bill says. Congress in recent years has added funding for tactically responsive launch — $15 million in 2020, $50 million in 2021 and another $50 million in 2022. A group of lawmakers is pushing to increase funding to $150 million in 2023. A HASC staff member suggested $150 million would be excessive as DoD is “still working through some of that money” that was added last year. “Jumping up to $150 million this year, we just didn’t see the full justification for that,” the committee staff member said. “But we did think it was important to continue the efforts and that’s why we kind of went with the middle, which is more than was appropriated last year.” As to why DoD has not formally requested funding for this program, the staff member said: “I think that the Space Force and particularly the Space Systems Command are still figuring out what the breadth of the tactically responsive space program looks like.” Tactically responsive space concepts have for the most part been focused on the launch piece, looking at small launch providers, the committee staffer said. “But I think that they’re trying to take a larger look at that” to include the timelines for the development of payloads and the integration of payloads and launch vehicles. “I can’t speak to why they are not funding it in the program line like we have been the past several years,” the staffer said. “Perhaps they think that we will just continue to do that.” The HASC chairman’s mark says the Space Force “should consider adding a corresponding budget line item for ‘tactically responsive space’ to fund areas beyond launch that would contribute to responsive space activities.” It also asks for a report, “including a detailed budget plan for launch activities and all other efforts needed to enable tactically responsive space capabilities.”
The U.S. Space Force announced June 8 it delivered the first of two military communications payloads that will launch in 2023 on Space Norway’s Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission known as ASBM. The $1.3 billion Enhanced Polar Systems-Recapitalization (EPS-R) payloads – developed by Northrop Grumman — will fly to highly elliptical orbits on two ASBM satellites scheduled to lift off next year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The mission also includes communications payloads for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense and for British satellite operator Inmarsat. The EPS-R are Extremely High Frequency Extended Data Rate payloads that will provide secure communications services for U.S. forces operating in the north polar region. The two EPS-R payloads will augment two existing Enhanced Polar Systems satellites also made by Northrop Grumman. The company also is updating the ground segment. The project has been hailed by U.S. defense officials as an example of international cooperation on space programs. The Space Force said the U.S.-Norway agreement to launch EPS-R marks the first national security space payload to be hosted on an allied spacecraft.
KIHEI, Hawaii — Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha launch vehicle reached orbit on its second launch Oct. 1, more than a year after the vehicle’s first launch failed. The Alpha rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 3:01 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage achieved orbit nearly eight minutes later. After a circularization burn, the upper stage deployed its payloads, and Firefly declared “100% Mission success” about one hour and 45 minutes after liftoff. Firefly initially attempted to launch Alpha nearly three weeks earlier, on Sept. 11. Controllers halted the countdown one minutes before the scheduled launch, which would have been at the start of a four-hour window. Firefly later said a drop in the supply of helium used to pressurize tanks in the rocket’s second stage prompted the abort, and ultimately scrubbed the launch. A second launch attempt the next day was postponed by weather, and Firefly then had to wait for improved weather and range availability before making a third attempt Sept. 30. That launch attempt saw the engines briefly ignite as the countdown reached zero, only to shut down. Firefly later said the rocket went into “auto abort” at engine ignition but did not disclose the issue that caused the scrub. The “To The Black” test flight carried several satellites to be deployed into a 300-kilometer orbit inclined at 137 degrees. The Teachers in Space – Serenity 3U cubesat is designed to collect basic flight data for use by educators. NASA’s TechEdSat-15 3U cubesat includes several technology demonstration payloads, such as an “exo-brake” intended to provide a targeted reentry of the cubesat. A PicoBus deployer carried six PocketQube satellites for AMSAT Spain, Fossa and Libra Space Foundation. Firefly launched the first Alpha 13 months ago. One of the four Reaver engines in the first stage of the rocket shut down 15 seconds into the flight , although the rocket continued to ascend until it hit maximum dynamic pressure about two minutes later, causing it to tumble. Range safety then detonated the rocket. The company later determined a faulty electrical connection caused the engine to shut down. The company corrected that problem and made other changes to the manufacturing process, said Peter Schumacher, a partner at majority owner AE Industrial Partners who served as interim chief executive of Firefly in summer. “It’s around ensuring that the second flight, the product that is sitting out there, is the absolute best product that we can produce.” Schumacher said in July that, if the launch was successful, they would perform one more Alpha launch this year, carrying a set of NASA-sponsored cubesats through a Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) contract the company won in December 2020. The company was left off the initial list of companies that received Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) awards in January for smallsat launches because the company was in the middle of a sale. On Sept. 9, though, NASA announced it added Firefly to the VADR contract, citing the need for a provider capable of launching payloads between 500 and 1,000 kilograms. “Firefly is the only launch vehicle provider in this grouping that has completed development and conducted its first test launch of their Alpha Launch Vehicle,” NASA stated in the procurement filing. Schumacher said in July that the company is projecting up to six launches in 2023, and is setting up production at its Texas factory to support that launch rate. The launch came hours after the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command announced it awarded a launch contract to Firefly Aerospace for a space domain awareness mission called Victus Nox , using a spacecraft that will be built by Millennium Space. The announcement did not disclose the value of the launch contract or the estimated launch date. Victus Nox will be a demonstration of responsive launch, building upon the TacRS-2 mission in June 2021, when Northrop Grumman was given 21 days to integrate and launch a payload on its Pegasus XL rocket. With Victus Nox, the Space Force is aiming for a 24-hour callup for launch. “What we have challenged that team to do, and what I am seeing them demonstrate the ability to do, is to rapidly respond to a real threat, with an operational capability, using operational crews on operationally relevant timelines,” said Lt. Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, commander of Space Systems Command, in a Sept. 28 speech at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference. “Within 24 hours, they can bring a satellite launch vehicle together, mate it, encapsulate it, launch it and put it into operations, all within 24 hours, and they’re going to demonstrate that next summer,” he said of the upcoming Victus Nox mission.
Russian officials have made veiled threats to obliterate SpaceX’s internet satellite network which has served as a communications lifeline for the Ukrainian military. To date, however, “how many Starlink satellites have the Russians shot down? … zero,” noted Derek Tournear, director of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency. Although Russia in November demonstrated it can strike a satellite in low Earth orbit with a ballistic missile, the fact that it hasn’t taken down any Starlink satellites speaks to the power of a proliferated constellation to deter attacks and provide resilience, Tournear said Oct. 25 at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event in Arlington, Virginia. The performance of SpaceX’s 3,500-plus satellite network during an armed conflict is encouraging to the Space Development Agency (SDA) which plans to spend billions of dollars over the next several years to deploy a low Earth orbit network of hundreds of data transport and missile-tracking satellites to support U.S. military operations. “There’s obviously operational resilience through proliferation,” Tournear said. Even if the SDA network came under attack, “we expect to be able to absorb a certain amount of attrition.” “How much attrition? If you look at the math really quickly, as a rule of thumb, our satellites will have five-year lifetimes. So that means you’re going to be roughly replacing 20% of your satellites a year,” he explained. ‘“We do it in chunks so you kind of expect that level of attrition to be able to operate through without any degradation of capabilities once you’re fully operational.” As DoD looks at future scenarios when satellites could be targeted, “what we base the resiliency off of is proliferation,” Tournear said. Earlier this year, Chinese and other media reported that China’s military views Starlink as a threat and plans to develop capabilities to destroy or disable the network. Electronic jamming is one of the tactics that Russia has used to disrupt Starlink service, according to Elon Musk who tweeted that the network faces “ relentless jamming ” but efforts have been unsuccessful so far. Tournear noted that China saw the benefits of proliferated space LEO systems long before the Ukraine conflict and even long before SDA started building DoD’s constellation. “If you look at China’s space architecture , they clearly have embraced those pillars of proliferation and spiral development before we have, and that’s kind of their model going forward,” Tournear said. “I’m not going to comment on whether they have better or worse capabilities than we do, but I will say it’s clear that they’re following more of the proliferation and more of the faster development timelines than the U.S. has historically done.”
A spaceplane launched by China in August has performed an orbit-raising maneuver and recently secured new funding to promote new modes of transportation. The “reusable experiment spacecraft” launched from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert atop of a Long March 2F rocket Aug. 4. It has spent most of its 82 days in an orbit similar to the 346 by 593-kilometer orbit inclined by 50 degrees initially tracked by the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (18 SDS). Robert Christy of Orbital Focus noted a change in the orbit occurred Oct. 23, with the spacecraft raising its perigee to shift to a near-circular 597 by 608-kilometer orbit. Little is known about the project with China closely guarding the launch operations and only announcing the mission once the spaceplane was in orbit. The country has yet to provide any updates on the mission and it is unknown how long the spacecraft will remain in orbit. The first flight , which took place in September 2020, was a similarly clandestine mission lasting two days. It was noted in terse state media reports following launch and landing. Clues as to its dimensions did however emerge after the second launch when images of the assembled debris from the spaceplane’s Long March 2F rocket and modified payload fairing at a middle school in Henan province. The project is being run by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the main space launch vehicle maker under China’s main space contractor, CASC. CALT is also developing a reusable suborbital spaceplane, which completed its second flight in late August. CALT’s spaceplane project secured funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in September. The “suborbital long-range air-to-space transportation system” project is being led by Song Zhengyu, chief designer of the Long March 8 carrier rocket, who noted that long-distance, high-speed transportation has become a new hot spot in space research, with SpaceX investing billions in the development of the Starship . The system will be capable of lifting off and landing from a runway and making intercontinental flights inside an hour. It will also be capable of repeated use and feature high reliability, and give birth to new industries such as global high-speed transportation and popular space tourism, according to a CALT press statement . Illustrations contained in the statement show a shuttle orbiter-like spacecraft on top of a larger winged vehicle, along with a diagram demonstrating the two crafts’ respective flights. The carrier spaceplane would reach around 100 kilometers before releasing the spacecraft which would continue to climb, and skip off the atmosphere and glide back to Earth. The project is seen to support the construction of China’s scientific and technological power, aerospace power and transportation power, and has practical social, technological, economic and other application values, according to CALT. The institute also noted that the project is the first major space project to be approved by the NSFC. CALT also aims to deeply integrate the spheres of space and transportation. The highly secret nature of the program so far is likely related to its military funding and applications. The new national funding source is unlikely to change this, given the sensitivity of hypersonic technology. Other reusable spacecraft or spaceplane projects are under consideration in China. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC) is working on its own spaceplane , named Tengyun, while commercial firm Space Transportation last year raised more than $46.3 million for its hypersonic spaceplane plans. A number of Chinese rocket companies have also created presentations including small spaceplanes launching atop concepts for liquid rockets. — Edited at 11:58 a.m. Eastern, Oct. 25, to correct reference to first flight of the reusable experimental spaceplane.
Updated June 14 with additional information from SDA WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency is looking to acquire as many as 10 satellites to host military payloads for experiments in low Earth orbit. This new procurement of satellites – known as the NExT experimental testbed – was previously part of an SDA program called T1DES but is now an independent program. The T1DES procurement was for 18 satellites hosting industry-developed experimental payloads. The plan was to integrate them with the agency’s 126-satellite broadband constellation known as the Transport Layer Tranche 1 projected to launch in 2024. Under the new plan, SDA will move forward with the deployment of the Transport Layer and will select a separate contractor to produce 10 satellites that will host government-developed payloads for technology experiments. SDA will hold an industry day briefing June 22 to discuss the NExT procurement with potential contractors. The selected contractor will develop, manufacture and operate the NExT satellites and the ground systems for the duration of the contract. The contractor also will be responsible for procuring commercial rideshare launches for the 10 NExT satellites. SDA wants the experimental payloads deployed between March 2024 and March 2025, in two planes of four and one plane of two. The NExT satellites will have optical crosslink communications terminals so they can connect with the Transport Layer satellites. An SDA official told SpaceNews that NExT was originally the T1DES-X project, but it was pulled out to become its own tranche-independent program. The official said SDA still plans to purchase up to 12 T1DES satellites.
Soon after a pair of Chinese satellites reached geostationary orbit early this year, space surveillance satellite USA 270 maneuvered to get a closer look at its new neighbors. As USA 270 closed in on Shiyan-12-01 and Shiyan-12-02, the Chinese inspection satellites took off in opposite directions with Shiyan 12 02 moving into position to get a sunlit view of the U.S. surveillance satellite. “It’s pretty clear that as USA 270 gets close, these guys are getting out of Dodge,” said Dan Oltrogge, COMSPOC Corp. research director. “It also demonstrates that countries are doing what we call counterspace. They’re taking action to avoid disclosure of their capabilities or their activities.” This sort of geostationary orbit cat and mouse is happening with greater frequency than ever before, according to space traffic experts. U.S. military satellites have kept tabs on the geostationary orbit belt since the 1990s. In the last few years, Russian and Chinese reconnaissance satellites have followed suit, cozying up to government and commercial satellites in ways that U.S. government officials find disturbing. “The U.S. is very concerned about what other countries might be able to find out about the capabilities of those satellites and about being able to protect them,” said Brian Weeden, Secure World Foundation director of program planning. The Secure World Foundation, for its part, is “concerned that the ambiguity over some of these actions and that heightened tensions could lead to some sort of conflict, to mistakes or misperceptions,” he said. Geostationary orbit is not what it used to be. While not nearly as crowded as low Earth orbit, traffic is increasing in this valuable orbital real estate where satellites can maintain a constant view of terrestrial regions. In mid-April, there were 589 operational satellites in geostationary orbit, up from 480 in 2017. “That’s not anything like the huge increase in the number of active low-Earth orbit satellites, but at the same time, GEO is a very special, almost fragile orbital shell because your orbital period is 24 hours,” Oltrogge said. “One collision or explosion could spread very quickly throughout the GEO belt. It requires careful allocation and assignment of spacecraft for both conjunction-assessment purposes and to make sure you don’t have RF interference.” Most geostationary satellites remain in their assigned orbital slots, providing Earth observation and communications services. Military satellites, though, are demonstrating increasingly complex capabilities. In the past 10 years, China, Russia and the United States have sent satellites “shuffling back and forth in the GEO band, doing various tasks that we didn’t use to see in GEO,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and spaceflight analyst. “The point of GEO is to be able to stop at one place relative to the Earth.” Instead, some satellites drift or maneuver to perform rendezvous and proximity operations. Two Mission Extension Vehicles from SpaceLogistics, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, for example, have docked with Intelsat communications satellites to take over station-keeping. While that mission is widely lauded, U.S. military leaders expressed concern when China’s Shijian-21 space debris mitigation satellite grabbed a defunct Beidou navigation satellite and hauled it 3,000 kilometers to the graveyard above the GEO belt. Removing obsolete satellites from the geostationary belt is a valuable service. The same technology, though, could have more nefarious applications. “Shijian-17 and Shijian-21, which are satellites with robotic arm technology, could be used in a future system for grappling and disabling other satellites,” U.S. Army Gen. James Dickinson, Commander of the U.S. Space Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. Even close approaches, which in geostationary orbit are measured in tens of kilometers, can expose satellites to unwanted scrutiny. “You can imagine taking the full variety of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance capabilities that we have on satellites to look at the Earth and putting those on a satellite and look at other satellites,” said Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force officer. “Think thermal, radar, lidar, hyperspectral as well as optical imaging.” Communications can also be intercepted. Ground stations communicate with geostationary satellites by pointing dish antennas toward orbital slots. “No matter how tight your focus, your radio frequency beam is going to spill over a little bit,” Weeden said. “That suggests if you put a satellite close enough to another satellite, it’s probably possible to eavesdrop on the signals being sent up.” Former French defense minister Florence Parly made that clear when she accused Russia of trying to intercept communications directed toward the French-Italian geostationary military communications satellite, Athena-Fidus, with a Luch satellite. “Trying to listen to your neighbors is not only unfriendly, it’s an act of espionage,” Parly said in 2018. Historically, the operations of spy satellites were concealed from public view. Information on U.S. government surveillance programs was classified, and amateur sleuths who track classified military satellites in low Earth orbit usually don’t have telescopes powerful enough to view objects nearly 36,000 kilometers away. The veil of secrecy began to lift in 2014 when the U.S. military revealed the existence of Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites. Gen. John Hyten, then commander of Air Force Space Command, said in 2015 that GSSAP’s declassification was meant to show the world that the U.S. military was watching everything happening in orbit. The fifth and sixth GSSAP spacecraft, built by Northrop Grumman, were launched in January. Even after 2014, spy satellite maneuvers were largely invisible until firms like COMSPOC and ExoAnalytic Solutions began publishing observations and analyzing information gleaned from global sensor networks. At the Space Symposium in April, an ExoAnalytic display showed the movements of USA 270 and Shiyan 12 satellites. “People are monitoring these orbital regions and making the evidence of who’s doing what to whom as public as possible,” said Moriba Jah, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chief scientific adviser for space sustainability startup Privateer. “That level of transparency is probably going to curb some behavior.” Still, there are no international laws or even norms that define when and how unrelated satellites should approach one another in geostationary orbit, making it hard to define suspicious activity. Is a satellite drifting to survey its orbital neighbors, or is the satellite being checked out before moving to its assigned orbital slot? “You have to be careful in jumping to conclusions,” McDowell said. “When you say, ‘That satellite moves next to mine to spy on me,’ that may be true. Or maybe that was the only free space they could find to park for a while.” As geostationary traffic picks up, so do calls for norms of behavior. “Satellites should maintain safe separation and safe trajectory” was one of the Tenets of Responsible Behavior outlined last year by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. But what is a safe separation in geostationary orbit? 10 kilometers? 20 kilometers? In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an agreement called Prevention of Incidents On and Over the High Seas to prevent maritime or aircraft collisions from sparking World War III. One provision of the agreement required surveillance ships to maintain a safe distance from the object they were investigating. “There’s discussion about developing something like that agreement for space,” Weeden said. “The problem is defining what is ‘too close’ in space is very difficult. Close is more a function of energy and delta-v than of distance. More communications between satellite operators could also head off conjunctions. Satellites moving to different orbital slots sometimes raise or lower their altitude to drift. “You could suddenly be approaching another satellite near you that doesn’t know you’ve done that maneuver,” Oltrogge said. “Increasingly, commercial satellite operators are willing to share their ephemeris and maneuver plans.” Even for military satellites, there should be more communications between countries involved regarding close approach, Weeden said. Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. Space Force deputy chief of space operations, has suggested establishing hotlines between the U.S. and foreign rivals. In the Middle East, the U.S. and Russia established a hotline to prevent miscommunication regarding aircraft operations near Syria. “I don’t see any reason why a similar approach couldn’t work for the space domain,” Saltzman said in November. This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Updated 11:30 a.m. Eastern with statement from CAA. WASHINGTON — Virgin Orbit acknowledged it has taken longer than planned to get approvals for its first launch from the United Kingdom but still expects to conduct the mission before the end of the year. In an earnings call after the release of its third quarter financial results Nov. 7, Virgin Orbit Chief Executive Dan Hart said there was not any “showstopper” preventing the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) from issuing a launch license for the “Start Me Up” mission from England’s Spaceport Cornwall but that the process was being delayed. “We don’t have major issues at play,” he said. “This is the first space launch ever from the U.K. There’s a new set of regulations, a new team. We’ve been working very closely with them, and it’s just taken time.” Virgin Orbit once projected performing the launch this summer but delayed it several times. Last month, the company’s Boeing 747 aircraft, nicknamed “Cosmic Girl,” arrived at the spaceport along with the LauncherOne rocket and other equipment needed for the mission, while the satellites flying on the mission were being prepared for launch. The mission is now scheduled for launch as soon as later this month, but Virgin Orbit is still awaiting a CAA launch license and Spaceport Cornwall also has pending a spaceport license from the agency. Hart, in the call, did not estimate when he expected the CAA to issue the licenses. “The good news is that we don’t see a showstopper or a big issue we’re working,” he said. “But, it is taking longer than we had anticipated and it is taking a bit more effort than we anticipated as well.” The CAA has not commented publicly on the status of the Virgin Orbit and Spaceport Cornwall license applications. The delays have attracted the attention of a House of Commons committee, which released a report Nov. 4 criticizing those delays and calling for more personnel to be assigned to reviewing license applications. “For this initial set of licence applications, the Department for Transport must provide additional resource to the CAA to ensure that the licensing process does not impede the feasibility of a launch this year,” the report stated. A source familiar with the CAA’s licensing activities, speaking on background, noted that the CAA now had about 50 people working on license applications, up from the 35 mentioned in the report. That included one person seconded to the CAA from the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. “We are assessing the evidence supporting a range of space industry license applications to determine if they meet the statutory requirements for granting space licenses for U.K. launch, which include safety, security and the environment,” a spokesperson for the CAA said in a statement to SpaceNews. “We’re committed to helping drive forward a U.K. space sector and continue to work proactively with all parties. As part of this, it is important we do so with a view to prioritizing public safety, and be satisfied that steps being taken by operators manage safety risks to as low as reasonably practicable.” Those delays have affected the schedule of Virgin Orbit launches. While Virgin Orbit entered the year projecting up to six launches, and in August still expected to conduct four, Hart said on the call that the company now projects only three launches this year, with the Cornwall launch being the third one after successful launches in January and July. That schedule, he said, is “driven by the timing of regulatory approvals, our efforts to obtain certifications for high-value payloads and satellite readiness.” Despite the challenges getting ready for a U.K. launch, Virgin Orbit remains committed to a strategy of offering its air-launch system to other countries. Hart mentioned in the call agreements to at least study providing air launch services in Australia, Luxembourg and South Korea, all signed in recent months. “There are a number of countries watching and learning,” Hart said. “I think this activity will help us form a blueprint that we can apply again and again.” Virgin Orbit, which recorded no revenue in the second quarter, generated $30.9 million in the third quarter. Brita O’Rear, chief financial officer, said that revenue came from a launch conducted in July as well as “other proprietary mission unique launch service activities as well as funded studies.” She did not break out the split between launch and other revenue. The company, despite the increased revenue, had negative adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $42.9 million and negative free cash flow of $52.5 million. The company ended the quarter with $71 million of cash on hand, but raised $25 million in new funding from Virgin Group Nov. 4. Hart was optimistic on the call about new markets, with the company expecting to at least double its launch rate next year. That includes increased demand for responsive space from the U.S. military despite losing a U.S. Space Force Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) contract to Firefly Aerospace in September . “Tactically responsive launch is a key market area for us, and we’re going to continue to work closely with that customer,” he said. The company’s proposal rated very high in technical capabilities, but Hart said the company, while disappointed in the loss, didn’t contemplate a protest. “We’re instead working very closely with that customer to put forward a solution that we think will be a game-changer for them.”
KIHEI, Hawaii — NASA and Astra Space have revised a launch contract originally awarded for the launch of a cubesat constellation after Astra retired the launch vehicle that would have launched those spacecraft. Astra had a contract for three launches of its Rocket 3.3 vehicle, each carrying two of NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) cubesats under a $7.95 million contract awarded in February 2021. However, the first launch in June failed to reach orbit , resulting in the loss of two TROPICS satellites. Astra announced Aug. 4 it was retiring the Rocket 3.3 vehicle so that the company could focus on the larger Rocket 4, with a payload capacity of up to 600 kilograms versus 50 kilograms for Rocket 3.3. While Astra said at the time it was in discussions with NASA about using Rocket 4 for launching the remaining TROPICS satellites, the larger vehicle would have been a poor fit for those 3U cubesats and would have required NASA to wait until perhaps 2024 given Astra’s projected development schedule for Rocket 4. NASA announced Sept. 28 it agreed with Astra to modify that contract. Instead of launching TROPICS cubesats, the contract will be used for “the launch of comparable scientific payloads” on Rocket 4. The agency will solicit proposals from companies that are part of its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract for smallsat launch services to launch the TROPICS cubesats in time for the 2023 hurricane season. NASA selected a dozen companies, including Astra, for the VADR contract in January and recently added Firefly Aerospace. Those companies are eligible to bid for task orders from NASA for launching smallsats either on dedicated missions or as rideshare payloads on larger vehicles. “We are delighted to maintain our strong partnership and to have NASA as a launch customer on the next version of Astra’s rocket,” Astra said in a statement. Neither the company nor NASA disclosed details about the contract modification, including how many launches it will cover and when those launches could take place. The cause of the June 12 Rocket 3.3 launch failure remains under investigation. In a separate statement Sept. 28, Astra said it narrowed down the cause of the failure to an issue with the upper stage engine, which shut down early after consuming fuel at a higher rate than planned. That issue, Astra stated, has been verified in ground tests “that yielded results consistent with the failure condition in flight.” The company said it would disclose more details once its failure investigation is completed in cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration.
SAN FRANCISCO – Canopy Aerospace, a startup participating in the TechStars Aerospace and Defense Accelerator, plans to set up a pilot factory in Denver to produce thermal protection systems (TPS) for rockets, spacecraft, reentry capsules and hypersonic vehicles. The company, founded in 2021 by Matt Shieh, a former U.S. Air Force officer with a master’s in business administration, and John Howard, an entrepreneur with a PhD in materials science, is developing a manufacturing process that relies on software, automation and 3D printing to supply heat shields for the commercial space and hypersonic industries. Through FedTech, a Washington-based technology transfer accelerator, the Catalyst co-founders learned about TPS technology developed at the NASA Ames Research Center and discovered problems with the commercial TPS supply chain. Companies often spend years designing and manufacturing heat shields for space and hypersonic vehicles. Canopy plans to compress the design and manufacturing process into months, Shieh told SpaceNews. Through a Space Act Agreement with NASA, signed in March, Canopy gained access to NASA TPS material processing, vehicle modeling and simulation, design, entry systems analysis and testing facilities. “We are transitioning legacy materials out of NASA that have been flight proven,” Shieh said. “We’re going to be to build out this capability over the next decade to support many different vehicles and systems.” Currently, Canopy is expanding its staff, selecting a manufacturing site and forging agreements with potential partners and customers. “Our solutions provide end-to-end turnkey solutions from design to maintenance, repair and overhaul,” Shieh said. A company developing a space capsule, for example, could hire Canopy to assist in thermal modeling: determining how much TPS material is needed, how thick it should be and the cost. Canopy then manufacturers the TPS. Canopy also intends to take over TPS installation for companies that have performed their own aerothermal design and want help manufacturing and installing thermal protection systems. “Think of it like Rolls Royce selling and maintaining engines for Boeing and other companies,” Shieh said. “It makes sense for the space industry to follow more of a path that the aerospace industry has followed it.” Over the long term, Canopy plans to apply the manufacturing processes the company is developing to “other dated manufacturing models in ceramics components,” Shieh said. “Industries such as automobiles, medical components and industrial manufacturing use manufacturing processes that are costly and have long lead times. We are evaluating using additive manufacturing and better design processes for applications in these areas.”
PLD Space, a Spanish company developing a small launch vehicle, says it is ready to proceed with the launch of a suborbital technology demonstrator after completing a static-fire test. The company conducted a 122-second test of its Miura 1 rocket Sept. 15 at a company facility in Teruel, Spain. That firing, called the full mission test, came after two earlier static-fire tests lasting 5 and 20 seconds. The test simulated how the vehicle would perform on an actual suborbital flight. “We make the rocket truly think it’s on its way to space,” said Raúl Torres, chief executive of PLD Space, in a statement about the test. The series of tests confirmed the vehicle is ready for an actual flight. “We have collected a list of small modifications that require programmatic management, such as changing a component or updating some design that we need to improve, but nothing critical,” Torres said. With the static-fire test campaign complete, PLD Space is ready to proceed with the first flight of the suborbital vehicle. That launch is scheduled for as soon as December from the El Arenosillo site in southwestern Spain. “Our plan is to do two test flights,” said Raúl Verdú, chief operating officer, in an interview during World Satellite Business Week. The company has enough hardware for three such vehicles. PLD Space has advertised the Miura 1 as a sounding rocket that can carry 100 kilograms to an altitude of 150 kilometers, generating up to four minutes of microgravity time. Verdú said the primary purpose of Miura 1 is to demonstrate technology for its Miura 5 orbital launch vehicle under development. “The main purpose of Miura 1 is to demonstrate all the subsystems, all the operations, all the infrastructure we need,” he said. The company is using the same vehicle technology and control center for Miura 1 as it plans to use for Miura 5. It also helps train the company’s growing staff — it has 120 employees now with plans to grow to 260 — in manufacturing and operations. “Our intention is to reduce the risk a lot for the first launch of Miura 5,” he said. The Miura 5, designed to place about 450 kilograms into low Earth orbit, is currently scheduled to make its first launch in 2024. Those launches will take place from Kourou, French Guiana, where PLD Space will share a new multiuser launch facility. Verdú just visited the site and said he’s pleased with the progress there since the company started discussions with the French space agency CNES about the site in 2019. “When we started the conversation with CNES there was nothing there,” he said. “Now there is a place and a team to allow newcomers to be an operator there.” He said the company expected to use existing infrastructure there for initial launches but develop more facilities over time as the company increases its launch rate. Development of that infrastructure is not urgent, he said, as the company expects to take two years to conduct two demonstration launches of Miura 5 followed by the first two commercial launches, “if everything goes perfectly.” Verdú added that PLD Space is not racing with other European companies also developing small launch expected to make their first flights within the next two years. “Our vision is not to be the first one to launch a rocket into space,” he said, arguing its approach to do suborbital test flights gives it an advantage over those attempting to go directly to orbital launches. “This is the reason why we’re doing Miura 1, to develop heritage.”
Updated 6:20 p.m. Eastern with comments from post-scrub briefing. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA called off a second attempt to conduct the inaugural launch of the Space Launch System Sept. 3 after failing to resolve a liquid hydrogen leak during fueling of the rocket, potentially delaying the mission until October. NASA scrubbed the launch, which had been scheduled for a two-hour window that opened at 2:17 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 39B here, three hours before the window opened. Mission managers concluded that they had run out of time to fix a liquid hydrogen leak detected hours earlier. Controllers noticed a leak in a quick-disconnect fitting for a liquid hydrogen line into the core stage of the SLS shortly after fueling of the core stage started. Engineers made several attempts to reseat the fitting, first by allowing it to warm up and then start flowing liquid hydrogen into it again, believing the temperature change would seal it into place again. It did not work. A second technique involved stopping hydrogen flow and closing a valve, then using pressure from helium in ground systems to force the fitting back into place. That also did not work, as did a second attempt to warm and then cool the fitting. The leak was a large one, said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager, exceeding a concentration limit of 4%, set by flammability risks, by a factor of two or three. The leak was much larger than one detected in the first launch attempt Monday , which was not a constraint for launch. “In terms of the leak that we saw on Monday, it was a manageable leak. This was not a manageable leak,” he said at a briefing several hours after the scrub. One possible cause of the leak, he said, was an “inadvertent overpressurization” of the liquid hydrogen line just before fuel loading started, possibly caused by human error. That could have damaged the seal of the quick-disconnect fitting, but Sarafin added it was too soon to know. Officials ruled out attempting a launch in the remaining days of the current launch period, called launch period 25 by NASA and which closes Sept. 6. “Launch period 25 is definitely off the table,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development. The next two opportunities, launch periods 26 and 27, run from Sept. 20 to Oct. 4 and from Oct. 17 to 31, respectively. “Launch periods 26 and 27 will really depend on the options that the team comes back with” early next week, he said. Those options largely revolve around whether the quick-disconnect fitting can be repaired on the pad or if the work needs to be done back in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). An on-pad repair offers the possibility of completing the work sooner and to test the repairs using the pad’s liquid hydrogen, which is not an option in the VAB. However, the rocket’s flight termination system (FTS) is certified only through the current launch window. NASA would need to seek an extension from the U.S. Space Force, which operates the Eastern Range, if it wants to keep the vehicle on the pad and allow for a launch as soon as late September. If the FTS certification is not extended, the vehicle would have to roll back to the VAB to check and replace its batteries. “We don’t have an FTS waiver right now beyond 25 days. Until we have that, we have to roll back,” Free said. “We’ll work with the range to try and get that.” Other issues about a stay on the pad include the effects of an extended stay on the pad on the Orion spacecraft. Tropical weather could also require the rocket to roll back regardless of any technical constraints. “We need to look at exactly what work we need to do,” Sarafin said. “It’s a little bit early to say as to what the right path forward is.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reiterated at the briefing that the agency would not attempt to launch Artemis 1 until they feel they are ready. He added he has not noticed any pressure, either from within the agency or from the White House or Congress, to launch the mission. “If I knew about it, I would try to stop it,” he said. “But we have felt no pressure whatsoever.”
Updated 8 a.m. Eastern Nov. 27 with docking. WASHINGTON — A brand new SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully launched a new cargo Dragon spacecraft Nov. 26, carrying supplies, experiments and new solar arrays for the International Space Station. The Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 2:20 p.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage deployed the Dragon spacecraft into low Earth orbit 12 minutes later. The rocket’s first stage, making its first flight, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The launch was previously scheduled for Nov. 22 but scrubbed because of poor weather. SpaceX waited until after the Thanksgiving holiday for the next launch attempt in part because of efforts to limit airspace restrictions during the busy travel period, as well as to refresh cargo on the spacecraft. The Dragon spacecraft, also making its first flight, docked with the ISS Nov. 27 at 7:39 a.m. Eastern. It delivered 3,528 kilograms of cargo to the station, including supplies for the station’s crew, research experiments and hardware. That hardware includes two ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or iROSA. The arrays will be installed during two upcoming spacewalks by space station astronauts, joining two others installed last year. NASA plans to ultimately install six iROSA arrays to augment the station’s power supply as the station’s original arrays age, ensuring sufficient power to operate the station through its anticipated retirement in 2030. Experiments delivered to the station on Dragon include the latest version of a plant growth payload called Veggie that will attempt to grow dwarf tomatoes in microgravity. The Dragon is also carrying a handheld microscope that will be tested in the station to see how it could be used to study blood samples on future missions to the moon and Mars. The Dragon is carrying four cubesats for NASA’s Cubesat Launch Initiative that will be deployed from the station. Two of the cubesats, petitSat and SPORT, were built by NASA’s Goddard and Marshall Space Flight Centers, respectively. A third, MARIO, comes from the University of Michigan, while TJREVERB was built by students at Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The Dragon will remain at the station for about 45 days, longer than a typical mission that remains docked to the station for a month. At a Nov. 18 pre-launch briefing, Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said the extended stay will give astronauts time to perform the spacewalks required for the iROSA installation and meet science requirements. Dragon will splash down off the Florida coast to return science payloads as well as some ISS hardware. SpaceX said before the launch that this mission will be t he first flight of the third and final cargo Dragon spacecraft it anticipates building . It will join four Crew Dragon spacecraft currently in service with a fifth under development. Those spacecraft, capable of flying up to 15 times each, will be sufficient to meet NASA’s requirements under commercial cargo and crew contracts through the end of the decade.
China launched its new Jielong-3 rocket from a mobile sea platform in the Yellow Sea Friday, successfully sending 14 satellites into orbit. The Jielong-3 (“Smart Dragon-3”) lifted off at 1:35 a.m. Eastern (0635 UTC) Dec. 9, from the Tai Rui modified barge off in the Yellow Sea. The mission carried eight satellites developed by commercial remote sensing firm Changguang Satellite Technology, designated Jilin-1 Gaofen 03D 44-50 remote sensing satellite and the Jilin-1 Pingtai 01A01 satellites. The latter is a new satellite platform adaptable to remote sensing, communications or navigation requirements. Also aboard the launch were the Fengtai Shaonian-2 (CAS-5A) satellite, Head-2H, the Golden Bauhinia-1 05 and 06 satellites, Tianqi-07, and Torch-1 , a first life science experiment satellite for private firm Rocket Pi . The four-stage rocket can carry 1,500 kilograms of payload into a 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) and was developed by China Rocket Co. Ltd. Jielong-3 has close similarities in terms of lift capacity, length and diameter (2.65 meters), payload fairing (3.35 meters) and mass at liftoff with the ZK-1A rocket developed and recently launched by a group under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. China Rocket is a commercial spinoff from CALT, a main launch vehicle manufacturing arm under the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), China’s main space contractor. Jiang Jie, a senior CALT rocket designer, said in March 2021 that the rocket would aim to bring the price of sending one kilogram to orbit down to $10,000, when producing 20 rockets per year. It is the second launch for China Rocket, following the sole launch of Jielong-1 back in 2019. The planned step of developing and launching the Jielong-2 rocket—very similar in capabilities to the extant Long March 11 solid rocket—has apparently been skipped. China Rocket stated Friday that it is working on a Jielong-4 rocket which would utilize a 500-ton-thrust solid engine. Though not explicitly stated, such an engine was test-fired by CASC in 2021. China has launched Long March 11 rockets from the Yellow Sea previously. Those launches were “cold” launches, with the rocket expelled from its container with a separate gas system. The Jielong-3 was China’s first sea hot launch, propelling itself from its launch cell with its own engines. The launch structure extends out from the vessel over the water, allowing the dissipation and suppression of the rocket’s exhaust. The mission highlights two separate developments. First, China is committed to developing a range of solid rockets to boost its overall space capabilities. “Overall, from a strategic point of view, mastering such a new capability gives China flexibility and redundancy, demonstrates technological prowess to the outside world and create important synergies for other, non-space objectives,” Tomas Hrozensky, a researcher at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told SpaceNews earlier this year. Second is the growing role of sea launch capabilities. Preparations for launch were made at facilities near Haiyang in the eastern coastal province of Shandong, which provide China with another option for accessing space. The Haiyang spaceport provides both greater flexibility and reduces pressure on China’s main spaceports. The project is also seeking to attract a range of space sector firms to foster a space industrial chain. Private firms including Orienspace with its Gravity series rockets and Galactic Energy with the Ceres-1 solid rocket are planning sea launches. This is in addition to activities related to China Rocket and the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), which is apparently working on an adapted Long March 8 launcher for sea launches. China Rocket says it is working on new phases on construction of assembly and testing facilities in Shandong and aims to reach an annual production capacity of 20 rockets by the end of 2023. The launch was China’s 58th of 2022, already surpassing the country’s record set in 2021 .
ArianeGroup has started static-fire tests of the upper stage of the Ariane 6 rocket, a key step in the development of the vehicle whose first launch remains uncertain. ArianeGroup and the European Space Agency announced Oct. 6 that they started a campaign of hot-fire tests of the Ariane 6 upper stage and its Vinci engine at a test site in Lampoldshausen, Germany, operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The test firing on Oct. 5 was the first of up to four planned to qualify the stage for flight. “The completion of this hot-firing test is an important step on the way to the qualification of Ariane 6 and its successful inaugural flight,” André-Hubert Roussel, chief executive of ArianeGroup, said in a company statement. The Vinci engine uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and is designed to be re-ignited up to four times to enable complex payload deployments. The stage includes an auxiliary power unit to pressurize the propellant tanks in place of helium. The test facility at Lampoldshausen is designed to simulate the conditions that the upper stage will experience during a launch, other than microgravity and vacuum. Once the hot-fire tests are complete, the stage will go to an ESA center in the Netherlands for acoustic and stage separation tests. At the same time, other Ariane 6 hardware is being tested at the launch site in French Guiana, so called “combined tests” to study interfaces between the launch vehicle and ground infrastructure. The stages for the first flight model of the Ariane 6 are being assembled at ArianeGroup factories in Bremen, Germany, and Les Mureaux, France. “We are working tirelessly to ensure the successful first flight and series production of Ariane 6, meeting the expectations of Arianespace’s prestigious European institutional customers as well as its commercial customers around the world,” Roussel said in the statement. However, neither ArianeGroup nor ESA disclosed a date for that inaugural launch. Development of Ariane 6 has suffered significant delays and that first launch, once planned for 2020, has now slipped to 2023. During a panel session at World Satellite Business Week in Paris Sept. 12, Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, declined to give an updated estimate of when that first launch would take place, saying that ESA and Ariane 6 development partners would meet later in the month to update its status. They have since not reported any updates on when the vehicle might be ready for launch. “Ariane 6 development is not a walk in the park,” Roussel said in comments at the opening ceremony of the International Astronautical Congress in Paris Sept. 18. “We’re all working like hell to put the rocket on the pad for the first launch.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said Oct. 18 it got the nod from Australia’s foreign investment regulator to take over Inmarsat, although the deal remains subject to regulatory approvals elsewhere. The Australian government’s Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) confirmed it has no objections to the combination, Viasat said. Although Viasat is based in the United States and Inmarsat in the United Kingdom, the operators hailed the decision as an important milestone for their $7.3 billion deal because they have significant business and customer relations in Australia. Last year, the Australian Defence Force extended a contract to use Inmarsat’s satellites to 2027, and expanded the agreement to include managed services. However, the transaction still requires permission from other regulators, including the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) which decided to launch an in-depth investigation Oct. 14. The CMA said it is concerned the combination could harm competition in the global inflight connectivity market. Its review has likely pushed the timeframe for closing the acquisition well into next year. Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri said FIRB’s approval endorses “the sound competitive logic” behind the deal. “Australia is an international market that is key to global advances and innovation in mobility,” he said. “Their approval brings us one step closer to being even better placed to invest in the technologies required to compete in a fast-changing global satellite communications market undergoing profound changes.” The companies have secured other approvals for the deal since it was announced in November, including permission from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and British national security clearance. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
A NASA astronaut flying to the International Space Station on a Soyuz spacecraft next month says his training hasn’t been affected by tensions with Russia or uncertainty about the status of his mission. Frank Rubio is scheduled to launch to the ISS Sept. 21 on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, joined by Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. He will spend six months on the station as part of the Expedition 68 crew. Rubio will be the first NASA astronaut to fly on a Soyuz since Mark Vande Hei returned from the station in March after spending nearly one year on the station. That return took place a month after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting a series of measures that severed most space cooperation between Russia and the West other than the ISS. In a call with reporters Aug. 22, Rubio said a “good and strong relationship” remained in place between NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos on the ISS despite the invasion. “This crew swap really represents the ongoing effort of tremendous teams on both sides and amazing people that make this happen,” he said. “I think it’s important that, when we’re at moments of possible tension elsewhere, human spaceflight and exploration, something that both agencies are incredibly passionate about, remains a form of diplomacy and partnership where we can find common ground and keep achieving great things together,” he added. Rubio said he gets along well with his two Russian crewmates. “We all have similar priorities,” he said. “Our main focus is to make this mission happen as safely and as productively as possible.” Rubio is the first to fly under an “integrated crews” or seat barter agreement between NASA and Roscosmos finalized July 15 . The agreement allows NASA astronauts to fly on Soyuz vehicles in exchange for Russian cosmonauts flying on commercial crew vehicles, with no funds exchanged between the agencies. Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina will fly on the SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the ISS at the end of September. Delays in finalizing the agreement between the American and Russian governments raised questions about whether it would be completed in time to allow Rubio to fly on Soyuz MS-22. However, he said he wasn’t nervous about that uncertainty while training for the mission. “I had confidence in the team that it would happen,” he said. “At the same time, there was the confidence of knowing that if it happened, we would be ready, and if it didn’t, there were going to be other opportunities.” Rubio is in Star City, the Russian cosmonaut training center outside Moscow, for final preparations for the launch. He will be there when NASA is scheduled to launch the Artemis 1 mission Aug. 29, but said he didn’t know if training would allow him to watch the launch live. “Next week is finals week, so we’ll be pretty deep into our preparation for that,” he said. “If I don’t get to watch it live, I will for sure watch a recording of it as soon as possible.”
NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on a Falcon Heavy, but at a price significantly higher than most previous agency contracts. NASA announced July 19 that it awarded a contract to SpaceX to launch Roman on the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is valued at $255 million for the launch and other mission-related costs. Roman is the next large, or flagship, astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft features a 2.4-meter primary mirror, donated to NASA a decade ago by the National Reconnaissance Office, with a wide field instrument and a coronagraph to conduct research in cosmology, exoplanets and general astrophysics. The spacecraft, with a mass of about 4,200 kilograms, will operate from the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point, a region of space about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth in the direction away from the sun. That is the same location that JWST and several other astrophysics missions operate. The value of the launch contract is much higher than most previous NASA awards for Falcon Heavy missions. NASA awarded SpaceX a contract a year ago for a Falcon Heavy launch of the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter in 2024 valued at $178 million. A September 2021 contract for the Falcon Heavy launch of the GOES-U weather satellite , also in 2024, is worth $152.5 million. SpaceX offers the Falcon Heavy at a commercial list price of $97 million. The company increased that price earlier this year from $90 million, citing “excessive levels of inflation.” SpaceX may have had no competition for the Roman launch. Tory Bruno, chief executive of United Launch Alliance, tweeted in February that his company was not bidding on the launch. His company’s Vulcan Centaur has yet to make its first launch. Blue Origin’s New Glenn also has yet to launch. Roman is a key mission for NASA not just for science but also program management. Previously called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the mission is the top priority flagship mission from the 2010 astrophysics decadal survey. The most recent decadal survey, published in November 2021, concluded Roman “remains both powerful and necessary for achieving the scientific goals” set forth in the earlier survey. Despite early challenges and several agency budget proposals that sought to terminate the mission, Roman has continued development. Last year, though, the mission suffered a seven-month launch delay and $382 million cost increase that the agency blamed on the effects of pandemic. The mission now has a total lifecycle cost of $4.32 billion. A Government Accountability Office assessment of major NASA programs published in June warned of the potential for further delays in Roman, citing issues with the spacecraft’s primary mirror assembly and restraint release actuators. Keeping Roman on schedule and within budget is critical, agency officials said, to build up confidence that it can manage large science missions after the significant cost and schedule overruns with JWST. Only then, they argue, can NASA pursue large space telescopes like those endorsed by the latest astrophysics decadal survey, such as a six-meter space telescope for observations in optical, ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. “Number one on the priority list is to make sure that the Roman Space Telescope is delivered within our cost and schedule commitments,” Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in June. “Unless NASA can show that we have learned lessons from the mistakes that were made in the management of the James Webb Space Telescope program and we can show that we can apply those lessons to another very expensive, very difficult great observatory, like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, nobody will take us seriously,” he argued.
A bipartisan compromise version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act released overnight on Dec. 6 directs DoD to figure out a strategy to protect military satellites from threats in orbit. And it continues to press the Space Force to work with commercial launch providers on new concepts of operations. The bill moved to the House floor Dec. 7. Senate leaders said they plan to take up the NDAA some time next week. On space policy, the compromise bill does not authorize a Space National Guard as a reserve component of the U.S. Space Force, which had been included in the House Armed Services Committee’s version. The administration and the Senate opposed it. The NDAA requires DoD to lay out a “strategy and requirements for the protection of DoD satellites.” The bill “recognizes the need to shift to a more resilient and defendable national security space architecture” and requires the Chief of Space Operations to work on a strategy in collaboration with the Director for National Intelligence. 
 The Space Force also is directed to “include defense and resiliency requirements prior to the start of any new major satellite acquisition program.” The NDAA calls for DoD to fund “tactically responsive space” demonstrations with commercial launch providers where satellites would be deployed on short notice, and requires a report on the resiliency of current launch sites and spaceports. More funding for DoD The NDAA authorizes $857.9 billion for DoD, or $45 billion more than what the Biden administration requested. Todd Harrison, defense budget analyst and managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights, said he expects the NDAA to pass by the end of the next week. The additional funding for DoD is only an authorization as the NDAA does not set appropriations. The government is only funded through Dec. 16 under a temporary measure. Speaking Dec. 7 at an event hosted by the investment advisory firm Canaccord Genuity, Harrison said he is skeptical Congress will come up with a spending agreement and likely will keep funding the government under a continuing resolution. Congressional leaders and the White House have discussed an omnibus appropriations bill combining 12 government spending bills into one big package. “If this gets resolved before Christmas, it’s in an omnibus bill,” said Harrison. But there are growing doubts that will happen as House Republicans want to punt the appropriations bill until they take over the majority in January, he said. “That’s going to give them a better position to negotiate their own priorities in appropriations,” said Harrison. “I don’t think that their priorities for defense appropriations are really that different than what we’re seeing from Democrats,” he added. However, Republicans want to negotiate reduced levels of non-defense appropriations. “If they don’t strike a deal now, then we’re looking at probably March at the earliest before we get appropriations passed.”
HawkEye 360, a provider of space-based radio frequency data, announced Nov. 9 its next three satellites will launch as early as December 7 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from a Virginia spaceport. The mission, named “Virginia is for Launch Lovers,” will be Rocket Lab USA’s first from U.S. soil . The company to date has only launched missions from New Zealand . It developed Launch Complex 2 at Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport — located within NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility — to support U.S. customers. There will be a 13-day launch window starting December 7 for the launch of Hawkeye 360’s three “Cluster 6” satellites Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, HawkEye 360 uses radio-frequency data analytics to geolocate electronic emissions and draw insights. Its small satellites fly in triangular formations in low Earth orbit. As a cluster passes over an area, each satellite observes signal waveforms and downlinks the data to a cloud system on the ground where it’s analyzed. The data is used to detect activities such as illegal fishing or GPS jamming . The Cluster 6 satellites will fly to an inclined orbit to boost revisits over the mid-latitude regions of the globe, HawkEye 360 said. The December launch will be the first of three flights the company booked with Rocket Lab, Rob Rainhart, chief operating officer of HawkEye 360, said in a statement. The company currently operates 15 satellites, including 12 modernized next-generation satellites. Cluster 6 will grow the constellation to 18. Cluster 7 is projected to launch in February and Clusters 8 and 9 by mid-year. Once Cluster 6 is operational, HawkEye 360 says it will be able to collect RF data as frequently as every hour anywhere in the world. HawkEye 360 is one of six companies that recently signed agreements with the National Reconnaissance Office to provide space-based RF data as part of an effort by the agency to increase use of commercially available geospatial intelligence. Since the company was founded in 2015, HawkEye 360 has raised more than $300 million in six funding rounds. 
China’s Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission. Sun Zezhou, chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission, presented a new mission profile for China’s Mars sample return during a June 20 presentation in which he outlined plans for a two-launch profile, lifting off in late 2028 and delivering samples to Earth in July 2031. The complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites. However, if successful, it would deliver to Earth the first collected Martian samples; an objective widely noted as one the major scientific goals of space exploration. In March, NASA announced plans to delay the next phase of its Mars Sample Return campaign and split a lander mission into two separate spacecraft to reduce the overall risk of the program. ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter would launch in 2027, and the samples would return to Earth in 2033 under the revised schedule. China’s mission, named Tianwen-3, will consist of two combinations: a lander and ascent vehicle, and an orbiter and return module. The combinations will launch separately on Long March 5 and Long March 3B rockets respectively. Earlier statements on the mission suggested using a single future Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket. The mission will build on the Mars entry, descent and landing technologies and techniques demonstrated by Tianwen-1 in May 2021 , as well as the regolith sampling, automated lunar orbit rendezvous and docking , and high velocity atmospheric reentry success achieved by the 2020 Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission. Sun presented the mission profile at a deep space exploration technology forum, also part of a seminar series marking the 120th anniversary of Nanjing University. Landing on Mars would take place around September 2029. Sampling techniques will include surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot. The ascent vehicle will consist of two stages, using either solid or liquid propulsion, and will be required to reach a speed of 4.5 kilometers per second, according to the presentation. After rendezvous and docking with the waiting orbiter, the spacecraft will depart Mars orbit in late October 2030 for a return to Earth in July 2031. Sun added that the Tianwen-1 orbiter will conduct an aerobraking test in Mars orbit later this year as part of the sample return mission preparation. The technological complexity and requirements for autonomy represent some of the major challenges for the mission. Another noted aspect will be that the landing would take place around the autumnal equinox in the northern hemisphere, in which the mission will likely land. Related difficulties include potential sand storms and low solar energy availability. China’s Mars sample return mission appears to have backing from the relevant top space and government authorities. The country’s ambition to carry out the unprecedented mission has been stated previously and was included in the China National Space Administration’s plans for development across 2021-2025 . Completing “key technological research on Mars sampling and return” was noted as an objective for the same period in a government space white paper released in January. The sample return will follow two missions. Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020, sending an orbiter and rover to Mars, was the country’s first independent interplanetary mission. Tianwen-2 will be a near-Earth asteroid sampling mission which will also visit a main belt comet. Current plans indicate a launch in 2025.
The U.S. Space Force has received initial images from a new missile-warning satellite launched in July , Millennium Space Systems announced Nov. 29. The Boeing-owned company is the manufacturer of the Wide Field of View (WFOV) , a mid-sized spacecraft equipped with an L3Harris infrared sensor payload. Deployed in geosynchronous Earth orbit, WFOV already transmitted “first light” data and will undergo calibration over the next several weeks, the company said. “After seeing the initial images, our team is pleased with how well this sensor is performing,” said Col. Heather Bogstie, senior materiel leader for resilient missile warning at U.S. Space Systems Command. WFOV will operate as an early warning satellite to detect ballistic missile launches. Infrared detectors identify missiles from the heat given off by its engines. “Achieving this major milestone is a huge accomplishment, and we are very excited to enter into the calibration phase of this program,” said Bogstie. “Soon we will be able to assess it for operations in the missile warning architecture against new and emerging threats.” First light is the focal plane’s first exposure in space and is a key step toward demonstrating the satellite’s large-format focal plane technology, she added. The sensor is expected to simultaneously stare at and scan more than 3,000 kilometers of the Earth at any one time. Following calibration, data from WFOV will be analyzed at the Space Force’s TAP Lab , short for Tools Applications and Processors lab, in Boulder, Colorado. Data analyzed at the TAP Lab is used for military operations, as well as to support firefighters and for meteorological services. Millennium Space was recently awarded a one-year operations and sustainment contract for WFOV. The contract also includes two additional one-year option periods. 
The Defense Department released an updated policy document that recognizes space “as a priority domain of national military power” and formally adopts rules for safe operations in space. DoD Directive 3100.10, “Space Policy” was signed Aug. 30 by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. It replaces a previous space policy document issued in 2012 and updated in 2016. The newly updated policy is the first one that lays out the roles of DoD’s space organizations that didn’t exist until 2019, including the U.S. Space Force, U.S. Space Command, and the assistant secretary of defense for space policy. The document also reflects DoD’s shift in posture since 2016 with regard to space amid concerns that rival nations are challenging U.S. access to Earth’s orbit. DoD says it will “ protect and defend the use of space for U.S. national security purposes, the U.S. economy, and allies and partners of the United States.” The updated policy formally adopts a list of “tenets of responsible behavior in space” issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a July 2021 memo . The five tenets call for the U.S. military to: Operate in, from, to and through space with due regard to others and in a professional manner; limit the generation of long-lived debris; avoid the creation of harmful interference; maintain safe separation and safe trajectory; and communicate and make notifications to enhance the safety and stability of the domain. Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, noted that the policy effectively “directs compliance with the memo.”
An agreement among three European countries could help secure near-term funding for launch vehicle development but have a bigger effect in the long term on how future projects are financed. The governments of France, Germany and Italy announced Nov. 22 they signed an agreement on “the future of launcher exploitation in Europe” intended, they said, to enhance competitiveness of European vehicles while also ensuring independent European access to space. The agreement includes a timetable that, by June 2024, calls for a new framework to be in place for public financing of vehicles such as the Ariane 6 and Vega C. That includes “a mechanism incentivizing cost reduction” with funding “commensurate to the commercial risks taken” and ability to achieve target prices. The agreement also endorses having new small launch vehicles under development by several European companies be able to compete for European Space Agency missions. That’s considered a priority for Germany in particular, which has supported development of commercial small launch vehicles. The agreement coincides with the ongoing ESA ministerial meeting where member states will allocate funding for projects, including launch vehicle development. ESA is seeking a little more than 3 billion euros ($3.1 billion) for space transportation overall, including 600 million euros for an Ariane 6 “transition program” as the long-delayed rocket, whose first flight has slipped to at least late 2023 , enters service. The program has secured two-thirds of its funding going into the ministerial, but faced a gap of 195 million euros as the meeting started. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, speaking to reporters at the end of the first day of the ministerial council meeting Nov. 22, said he was optimistic the agreement announced by France, Germany and Italy would help close that gap. “This was quite important because this political understanding and agreement unblocks other discussions that then have an influence on subscriptions,” he said. “That was quite important and significant, and opened the door for a discussion later on.” However, as of late Nov. 22 that funding gap was not yet closed, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. That was, the source added, to be expected given the nature of negotiations, including the iterative process where countries revise their funding commitments over several rounds. The agreement will help close that funding gap, the source said, because it united France, Germany and Italy around support for both Ariane 6 and Vega C as well as future launch systems, creating interdependence among the countries given differing priorities. Any long-term agreement requires success in securing funding for launch programs at the ministerial. However, the agreement appeared to open the door to revisit a long-standing ESA principle of “georeturn,” or apportioning contracts based on the share each country contributes to agency programs. Some larger countries have been critical of georeturn, arguing it makes programs less efficient. The document stated that, as part of the new launcher framework, “such exercise would involve starting a reflection with concerned states on the conditions for the industrial and geographical distribution of work in exploitation.” A statement from the French economic ministry was more blunt, stating that competitiveness would be achieved in part by a change in the rules for geographic return. Any change, an agency source said, would be a long-term effort, and require the approval of ESA’s 22 member states, which would not be easy. The rules for Ariane 6 and Vega C in particular were set at the beginning of those programs year ago, although the source said that the georeturn issue could be examined for future launch vehicle development projects. There is other pressure on ESA to reform its support of launch vehicle development. “There is no European space policy without autonomous access to space,” said Thierry Breton, European Union commissioner for the internal market, in comments at the opening session of the ministerial meeting Nov. 22. “The shortage of autonomous launch capacity in the E.U. has a direct impact on the deployment of E.U. space programs like Galileo,” he said, referring to the ongoing pause in launching Galileo satellites because the Soyuz rocket is no longer available and Ariane 6 is delayed. “The situation is not sustainable for long, and there is an urgent need to remedy the situation through a truly European approach to have a fully autonomous, reliable and cost-effective E.U. launch solution, including, of course, backups covering all ranges of launchers.” Breton said he expected ESA member states to back “sustained financing” of Ariane 6 and Vega C and work on future launch systems. The E.U., he said, “is definitely ready to support all these efforts, and it will.”
China and the United States have identified overlapping potential landing sites at the south pole of the moon as both countries ramp up their lunar exploration ambitions. The partially intersecting plans for lunar landings highlight the new interest in particular lunar resources and pose questions as to how competing countries implement and coordinate their respective moon exploration plans. NASA earlier this month announced the selection of 13 potential locations for the Artemis 3 crewed mission which is currently scheduled to launch in late 2025. NASA candidate landing sites, each about 15 by 15 kilometers, are located within six degrees of latitude of the south pole. Meanwhile, a Chinese journal article on potential lunar south pole landing sites, authored by Chang’e-4 lunar mission commander Zhang He and others, identifies 10 suitable spots near the lunar south pole. The sites are thought to be related to the country’s Chang’e-7 mission , currently scheduled for 2024. Chang’e-7 will be uncrewed and consist of an orbiter, relay satellite , lander, rover and “mini flying detector,” with the latter to look for the presence of water. Artemis 3 and Chang’e-7 both identify sites near Shackleton, Haworth and Nobile craters as potential landing zones. The overlap is in part due to both looking to find sites with high elevation and good lighting conditions for conducting mission activities while also being close enough to permanently shadowed craters which are thought to trap volatiles such as water-ice. It is not clear how the two countries will coordinate their respective lunar plans, with NASA preparing to launch Artemis 1 and China having its own plans for an International Lunar Research Station . NASA is severely limited in its capacity to engage with Chinese entities by the so-called Wolf Amendment inserted into an appropriation bill in 2011. In 2015 the Obama Administration began the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue, organized by the State Department, allowing discussion of space matters. While meetings were continued into the Trump Administration, that avenue currently does not appear conducive to discussion. A State Department spokesperson said on background that, “The last U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue was in 2017. There are no plans presently for another civil space dialogue. Should a civil space dialogue be scheduled, the United States will announce at the appropriate time. “We have and will continue to keep the lines of communication open with Beijing, including on issues of spaceflight safety.” The International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) could however allow for multilateral discussions and coordination of plans. Neither NASA nor paper author Zhang He had responded to a request for comment on the overlapping landing sites at press time. Christopher Newman, professor of space law and policy at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, told SpaceNews that “this is a genuine opportunity for collaboration and cooperation between the two giant powers, and would be an opportunity to show all the rhetoric about space exploration being more than geopolitical in nature.” “However, in reality it is not hard to see why they both want the same spots. It is prime lunar real estate for in-situ resource utilization. This could be the first potential point of conflict over resources beyond Earth,” Newman said. “Both parties are signatories to the Outer Space Treaty so nominally accept the use of celestial bodies for peaceful purposes, but it will be interesting to see what happens. A lot will depend on who gets there first. This could add an unwelcome element of competition which threatens security both in space and on Earth.” Both parties’ landing plans will likely be revised as the respective missions get closer. NASA officials state they aim to narrow the list about 18 months before Artemis 3 to time to prepare procedures specific to each site. It is not clear how China, which used data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) for its selection, will proceed with narrowing down its potential landing sites. The landing area for the 2020 Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission was known years in advance, partly because of a 2017 launch failure that delayed that mission. In the case of the early 2019 Chang’e-4 lunar far side landing, a number of research papers identifying potential sites in the South Pole-Aitken Basin—a vast impact crater of immense scientific interest—were published ahead of the mission by mid-2018, but the selection of Von Kármán crater as a primary landing site was not revealed until closer to launch that December. Both countries have recently exchanged criticism over respective space activities. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is reported to have told German publication Bild that China would occupy the moon, while later criticizing China over the uncontrolled reentry of a Long March 5B first stage. “Space observers also pointed out that as NASA is trying hard to relive its Apollo glories, China is working on innovative plans to carry out its own crewed moon landing missions,” an Aug.21 article from Beijing tabloid Global Times read, with quotes stating the belief that “NASA might grow more hostile against China in the space domain given the huge pressure it is facing to maintain its global leadership in moon exploration.” The same outlet again criticized Nelson for his comments in the wake of the Artemis 1 launch scrub on Monday. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat and OneWeb said July 26 they have agreed a plan to merge their businesses to create a global multi-orbit satellite broadband operator. The deal would combine France-based Eutelsat’s satellite fleet in geostationary orbit (GEO) with British startup OneWeb’s constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO). Eutelsat already owns 23% of OneWeb and has been building a position in the startup to strengthen connectivity services amid a gradual decline in its satellite TV business. The combined company would be “the first multi-orbit satellite operator offering integrated GEO and LEO solutions,” Eutelsat said, targeting a satellite connectivity market projected to be worth $16 billion by 2030. It comes amid plans for other multi-orbit combinations that seek synergies from integrating satellites operating in GEO and LEO. A satellite fixed in GEO can provide more capacity to a specific region than non-geostationary satellites in a megaconstellation that has to serve the entire globe. Constellations closer to the Earth, however, promise low-latency solutions that can integrate with terrestrial infrastructure more effectively. Eutelsat’s European rival SES operates a satellite network in GEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO). U.S.-based GEO broadband operator Viasat is in the middle of acquiring British satellite fleet operator Inmarsat, which has plans for satellites in LEO and highly elliptical orbit. Canadian GEO operator Telesat plans to start deploying LEO satellites for its delayed Lightspeed constellation in 2025. Intelsat had also tried to merge with OneWeb but scrapped the deal in 2017 after failing to win support from debt holders to buy the company. Indian telecom company Bharti Global is OneWeb’s largest shareholder. Other shareholders include Japanese internet giant SoftBank, South Korean conglomerate Hanwha, U.S.-based Hughes Network Systems and the British government. French state-owned investment bank Bpifrance is the largest shareholder in publicly listed Eutelsat. The Chinese government is Eutelsat’s fourth-largest shareholder via sovereign fund China Investment Corp, reported Reuters citing data from financial research firm Refinitiv. The deal Eutelsat and OneWeb signed a Memorandum of Understanding to combine through an all-share transaction that would result in Eutelsat taking over OneWeb, although the British government would continue to hold a share in the British startup with priority voting rights. OneWeb’s shareholders would contribute their stake in the startup to Eutelsat in exchange for newly issued shares in the French company, valuing OneWeb at $3.4 billion. Eutelsat and OneWeb shareholders would each get 50% of the combined company’s shares. The companies said the transaction has the backing of each of their long-term investors, including Bpifrance and French investment firm Fonds Stratégique de Participations on Eutelsat’s side, and Bharti, SoftBank, Hanwha and the British government for OneWeb. Eutelsat plans to hold a shareholder meeting in the first half of 2023 to vote on the deal. The transaction also requires regulatory approvals, including permission from foreign investment authorities. OneWeb would continue to operate the LEO business from its headquarters in the U.K. following the deal, and Eutelsat would remain headquartered in France and listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange. The combined group’s board of directors would comprise 15 members: seven proposed by OneWeb and seven by Eutelsat in addition to its CEO Eva Berneke, who would be CEO for the combined group. Eutelsat’s chair Dominique D’Hinnin is being lined up to take on the same role for the merged company, while Bharti founder Sunil Bharti Mittal would be co-chair. The companies expect to complete the merger by the end of the first half of 2023. Industry shake-up The proposed transformational deal comes after Eutelsat’s board rejected an unsolicited $3.2 billion takeover attempt in September from Patrick Drahi, the billionaire magnate who founded multinational telecommunications firm Altice. Former CEO Rodolphe Belmer announced plans a month later to leave Eutelsat after six years with the company. Berneke, a technology and telecoms veteran who previously led Danish IT and software company KMD, took Eutelsat’s reins as CEO at the start of 2022. “This ground-breaking combination will create a powerful global player with the financial strength and technical expertise to accelerate both OneWeb’s commercial deployment, and Eutelsat’s pivot to Connectivity,” Berneke said in a statement. Eutelsat reported 1.15 billion euros ($1.8 billion) in revenues for the year to the end of June, down 6.7% compared with the period the year before. Its broadcast segment, representing 61% of total revenues, fell 6.9% on a like-for-like basis when adjusted for foreign exchange rates. Revenues from fixed broadband and mobile connectivity services jumped up 36% and 13%, respectively. Eutelsat and OneWeb expect their combined company would generate 1.2 billion euros for the year to the end of June 2023. They forecast revenues to grow at a low double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next decade. Eutelsat operates 36 satellites in GEO. OneWeb currently has 428 satellites in LEO, about 66% of its planned feet, and has lined up missions with SpaceX and India’s space agency to resume launches later this year. OneWeb has not been able to add satellites to its constellation since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February forced the company to halt the use of Soyuz vehicles. The British company expects to have deployed the remaining satellites by the end of 2023 to provide global connectivity services. Meanwhile, U.S.-based SpaceX has amassed more than 2,700 satellites in LEO for its Starlink broadband constellation as it expands global coverage, according to astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell. The latest batch of 53 Starlink satellites launched July 24 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. This article was updated July 26 after Eutelsat and OneWeb announced details of a Memorandum of Understanding to pursue a combination of their businesses.
Satellite operator consolidation has been a perennial topic at industry conferences such as the annual World Satellite Business Week in Paris. The potential for small and regional fixed satellite service (FSS) operators to consolidate was highlighted as a key trend to watch out for at WSBW back in 2006, recalls Maxime Puteaux, a principal adviser at Euroconsult, the conference’s organizer. Observers had expected fierce competition would push some of the 33 operators in geostationary orbit (GEO) at that time to merge amid disappointing prospects in the broadcast market. However, mergers between even small operators have been few and far between in an industry where nationalistic protectionism and unique regulations often inhibit deal-making. The number of GEO operators has actually increased to 53 since Euroconsult’s 2006 tally, Puteaux said, fueled by the creation of national or small regional operators with strong government backing. That momentum faded away around 2015 and, in recent years, a surge of non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) companies has changed the playing field for GEO operators of all sizes. The rise of Starlink, OneWeb, and other NGSO broadband constellations has come amid a broader shift away from video broadcast revenues that have historically sustained the commercial satellite sector. Data is now widely seen as the growth engine for satellite operators. The recent spate of sizable satellite operator mergers “reflects that a shift from video to data use-cases is well underway,” says Brad Grady, a space industry analyst at Northern Sky Research. It shows that the industry previously “wasn’t well positioned to capture those opportunities efficiently,” he says. French GEO fleet operator Eutelsat and U.K.-based OneWeb pointed to a multi-orbit industry future when they announced plans in July to combine. OneWeb’s low Earth orbit satellites can provide lower-latency broadband than satellites farther away from the Earth in GEO. The startup’s polar-orbiting network also aims to provide more global coverage than GEO satellites fixed along the equator. Meanwhile, Eutelsat’s larger and more powerful GEO spacecraft can bring more capacity to densely populated areas. These hybrid networks have only recently become viable through small-scale user terminals that can seamlessly switch from satellites in one orbit to another. Before agreeing to merge with OneWeb, Eutelsat had already amassed a 23% stake in the startup to strengthen data services while its video business gradually declined. A similar multi-orbit growth story was painted in November when U.S.-based GEO broadband operator Viasat said it would buy British satellite fleet operator Inmarsat. However, unlike Eutelsat, Viasat has always been a pure-broadband operator. Its deal for Inmarsat would also provide access to multiple spectrum bands and an international foothold as ViaSat-3, a group of three GEO satellites Boeing is building for the company, is set to expand its services globally for the first time. As for SES and Intelsat, neither will say if they are discussing a merger that the Financial Times reported Aug. 4. was in active discussions. But both have acknowledged paying close attention to the consolidation taking place in the industry. The satellite industry “is transforming,” Intelsat spokesperson Clay McConnell said, “with new capabilities and technologies being brought to the market.” Partnerships “bringing together complementary capabilities can drive competition” in the connectivity market, he added. SES CEO Steve Collar made similar comments Aug. 4 when asked about the reported talks with Intelsat, saying “industry consolidation is a good thing” to help rationalize the market. Intelsat operates a GEO constellation and is looking to start a new connectivity-focused growth chapter since emerging from bankruptcy in February, when the operator cut its debt mountain by more than half to $7 billion. SES also has sights set on growing data markets with satellites in GEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO). SES acquired its MEO business in 2016 when it combined with O3b Networks — a deal with similarities to Eutelsat and OneWeb’s proposed tie-up, Grady notes. He likened Viasat buying Inmarsat to Luxembourg-based SES acquiring U.S. rival Americom in 2001 to expand internationally — one of the few sizable satellite operator mergers to be successful in recent decades. Another notable consolidation deal was completed in 2006 when Intelsat bought PanAmSat to become the largest satellite operator at the time. In 2014, Eutelsat also bought Mexican satellite operator Satmex to expand its presence in Latin America. Eutelsat once had a stake in Spanish operator Hispasat and at one point had hoped to merge with the company, however, it was ultimately unable to win the favor of Spain’s government. Although Eutelsat plans to take over OneWeb, the British government would keep its so-called golden share in the startup under their merger agreement. This means the U.K. would retain special voting rights for the OneWeb business, which was a critical component of successful merger negotiations with Eutelsat. While consolation and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity has been rare among satellite operators, it has been prevalent elsewhere in the industry, particularly across satellite distribution and equipment providers. A pandemic that started impacting global markets in early 2020 has also been helping to push space companies to the deal table. COVID-19 put “some companies under jeopardy and opened the door to acquisition” as funding sources dried up, Puteaux notes, pointing to how it contributed to OneWeb’s collapse into bankruptcy in March 2020. The British government and Indian conglomerate Bharti Global bought OneWeb out of bankruptcy later that year for about $1 billion. That’s a sizable discount for a startup that had raised more than $3 billion for its constellation before it collapsed. The pandemic also pushed Intelsat into bankruptcy in May 2020. The operator emerged nearly two years later in February under the control of former debt holders. Puteaux expects “opportunistic” buyers will snap up more companies if macroeconomic conditions worsen and reduce access to capital. COVID-19 has taken on “a phased character” for space, says BryceTech analyst Phil Smith, first impacting labor and then supply chains. Some pandemic-related supply chain shortages, such as semiconductors and other electronic components, impact multiple industries. Other supply shortages, including liquid oxygen used to combat the pandemic early on, are more specific to space. And while Russia’s war in Ukraine has boosted demand for satellite capacity in the Eastern European region, it has negatively impacted the broader industry. Ukraine is the world’s dominant supplier of noble gases commonly used as propellants for electric satellite thrusters. The war has also reduced the availability of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft that satellite makers use for transporting large spacecraft to launchpads. “The full nature of these and other activities continues to unfold,” Smith said. As with the war in Ukraine, analysts also see COVID-19 as a double-edged sword for satellite companies. As markets begin to recover from the pandemic, NSR research suggests operators are seeing increased demand for backhaul, social inclusion programs, and consumer broadband. “Consolidation leads to enhanced market power and a more competitive posture” for capturing these opportunities, NSR research director Jose Del Rosario said. Before Starlink’s rapidly expanding broadband network, these players believed they could win against the competition by themselves. Going it alone no longer seems as attractive for some. This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
One part of an instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope is out of service temporarily, although project officials are confident it will not be a long-term problem. NASA announced Sept. 20 that it had stopped using one of four observing modes on the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on JWST after a mechanism that supports that observing mode “exhibited what appears to be increased friction” during preparations for an observation. Controllers first noticed the issue Aug. 24, and the project convened an anomaly team to study it Sept. 6. The problem affects medium-resolution spectroscopy observations with the telescope. The other three observing modes — imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy and coronagraphy — are not affected, and observations using those modes of MIRI are continuing. NASA officials played down the issue in presentations at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here Sept. 21. “We’re taking a break and just making sure it works well,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, during a plenary presentation. Engineers “do not anticipate that this will preclude this will preclude using this instrument in the future, but they wanted to understand why they’re seeing this particular increase in friction,” said Eric Smith, JWST program scientist at NASA Headquarters, during a press conference later in the day. He described the decision to halt use of the medium-resolution spectroscopy mode as one made out of “an abundance of caution.” The issue with MIRI is one of three challenges for operations of JWST that Zurbuchen mentioned in his IAC presentation. The others are micrometeoroid hits on the telescope’s mirrors and access to the Deep Space Network (DSN) for communications during the upcoming Artemis 1 mission. Smith said the project is seeing the expected number of micrometeoroid hits on the mirror, but that one of the impacts, during the spacecraft commissioning process, was larger than expected. “We expect maybe one hit of that magnitude per year,” he said. “So far, the indications are we’ve seen that hit early, but we’ll have to verify that over the course of the year.” He said after the briefing that the demands on the Artemis 1 mission may limit the amount of time the DSN can communicate with JWST. “In nominal operations we have eight hours of contact a day,” he said. “We start to be concerned when it gets below four hours a day.” There may be a “handful” of days during the mission when DSN time drops below that four-hour threshold, he said. In that case, controllers will plan observations that require less data storage on the spacecraft so it can go longer between DSN contacts. “Stuff gets shuffled around, but it doesn’t prevent science.” JWST continues to perform at or above expectations otherwise. At the IAC press conference, the mission released an infrared image of the planet Neptune, its rings and moons, the most detailed look at the distant planet since the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by it in 1989. The telescope has also observed galaxies in the distant universe, showing some that date back to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. “James Webb has been delivering data to us for a little over two months, and already in that time it’s revolutionized the field of very early and distant galaxies,” said Guido Roberts-Borsani, a postdoc at UCLA involved in those observations, at the press conference. “Let’s see what we can do in a year.”
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — NASA has restored plans to include a lunar landing on its Artemis 4 mission to the moon later this decade, months after saying that the mission would instead be devoted to assembly of the lunar Gateway. In a presentation Oct. 28 at the American Astronautical Society’s Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium here, Mark Kirasich, deputy associate administrator for Artemis Campaign Development at NASA, outlined the series of Artemis missions on the books for NASA through the late 2020s. That included Artemis 4, which he described as the “second time people land on the moon” under Artemis after the Artemis 3 mission. However, earlier this year Kirasich and other NASA officials said that NASA was not planning to include a lunar landing on Artemis 4 . Instead, they said the complexity of the mission, which will involve the delivery of the I-Hab habitation module to the Gateway on the first flight of the upgraded Block 1B version of the Space Launch System, precluded a lunar landing. Kirasich confirmed after the panel that NASA had decided to include a landing on Artemis 4 again. The mission would likely use the “Option B” version of SpaceX’s Starship lander, he said. NASA announced in March it would exercise that Option B in its Human Landing System (HLS) contract with SpaceX , which originally covered an Option A lander that SpaceX will demonstrate on the Artemis 3 mission. Option B would fund changes to the Starship lander to support more ambitious missions in the later “sustainable” phase of Artemis, and include a second demonstration mission. NASA announced it would fund Option B at the same time it unveiled the Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) effort to select a second lunar lander provider for those later missions. Kirasich said it would be unlikely that the lander selected in that program would be ready in time for Artemis 4, and instead would be demonstrated on Artemis 5. In a schedule released as part of the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal in March, days after announcing the SLD program, NASA projected Artemis 4 launching in 2027, but without a lunar landing. That same schedule expects Artemis 3 to launch no earlier than 2025, with Artemis 5 to follow in 2028 as part of an annual cadence of missions That date, though, will depend on several factors. One is the readiness of the Option B version of the Starship lander. During another panel at the symposium, NASA and SpaceX officials said they were making good progress on the lander but provided few technical details or a schedule. Rene Ortega, HLS chief engineer at NASA, praised SpaceX for giving the agency access to hardware and test data from the overall Starship launch vehicle development effort. “It’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s one of the practices that I’ve been impressed with.” The Artemis 4 schedule will also depend on the readiness of the I-Hab module, being developed by Europe and Japan, and the SLS Block 1B itself. That version of SLS, which uses the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage, in turn requires a new mobile launch platform, the Mobile Launcher (ML) 2. NASA officials, including Administrator Bill Nelson, have been unusually publicly critical of the ML-2 prime contractor, Bechtel, for major cost overruns and schedule delays. “Right now, Mobile Launcher 2 is the critical path to Artemis 4,” said Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, during another conference panel Oct. 27. “It’s something we’re working the schedule very intensively on.” Variety of second landers NASA is currently soliciting proposals for the SLD program, formally known as Appendix P of its Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships, or NextSTEP, effort. NASA issued the call for proposals Sept. 16 with an original deadline of Nov. 15. NASA pushed back the deadline Oct. 21 to Dec. 6 to provide more time for the agency to review requests by companies for use of government facilities. During a conference panel session Oct. 28, NASA and several companies declined to discuss details about the SLD procurement because it was ongoing, including whether they would submit a proposal and, if so, with whom they were teaming. However, they did discuss work on a separate NextSTEP effort, Appendix N, to support work on sustainable lunar lander technologies. NASA selected five companies in September 2021 for $146 million in studies on key technologies for such landers. Some of the companies have used the Appendix N awards to continue work on concepts they proposed in the original HLS competition. “Dynetics felt like we had a very sustainable lander approach even in the base period, so we really appreciated the opportunity to further mature that design during Appendix N,” said Andy Crocker, HLS program manager at Dynetics. He said the company has been working on about 20 different tasks related to risk reduction on its lander design, including the lander’s engine, which uses liquid oxygen and methane propellants. The company performed a static-fire test of that engine a week earlier, he noted. “I think it helped continue the momentum that we build up under the base period,” said Ben Cichy, senior director of lunar program engineering at Blue Origin, of its Appendix N activities. That included work on cryogenic fluid management for the hydrogen fuel used on its BE-7 engine, as well as precision landing technologies and dust mitigation. Blue Origin competed for the Option A award ultimately won by SpaceX as part of the so-called “National Team” that included Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two companies that won separate Appendix N awards. Those companies are examining different approaches to lunar landers. “Under Appendix N we’ve been given a great opportunity to step back and take a look at everything that has been developed since the Apollo missions,” said John Marzano, Northrop’s HLS program director, “and essentially pick what we think is a series of the best potential characteristics of each of those different concepts.” He said the company is looking at two parallel efforts for lunar lander engines. One is an internal project leveraging experience dating back to TRW, which developed an engine for the Apollo lunar lander. The other is an engine from Sierra Space. The lander, he said, would use storable propellants rather than cryogenic ones. Kirk Shireman, vice president, lunar exploration campaign at Lockheed Martin, said his company is examining incorporating nuclear thermal propulsion in its lander architecture, seeing as key to future human exploration of Mars. “Having a high-thrust, high-Isp engine is really key to our future,” he said. Isp, or specific impulse, is a measure of an engine’s efficiency. He said the company is working on technologies such as cryogenic fluid management, fuel testing and a turbopump design. He said later that the nuclear propulsion system would be used for transit between the Earth and moon. “We’ve been able to continue our collaboration that we established under the base period of the HLS contract,” he said of the company’s work with NASA. “It’s continuing the great work, the great relationship, that we had through Appendix N so that we can continue it, hopefully, under Appendix P. whenever that comes about.”
China is planning to greatly increase the number of launches of its Long March 5B rocket which has created a number of high-profile uncontrolled reentries of its large first stage. Liu Bing, director of the general design department at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), told Chinese media that the the Long March 5B, designed for launches to low Earth orbit, would be used together with the Yuanzheng upper stage series to launch multiple satellites for constellations. Though not clearly stated, the launcher and YZ-2 combination could be used to help deliver high numbers of satellites into orbit for the planned national “guowang” satellite internet megaconstellation . SatNet, the company overseeing Guowang, is understood to be looking to contract companies from China’s nascent private sector to launch the small communication satellites, but the large Long March 5B could provide a route to launches more comparable to how SpaceX uses the Falcon 9 to launch its Starlink satellites. “In the next few years, the Long March 5 series of rockets will be transferred to the high-density launch stage to meet the country’s needs for large-scale and rapid access to space,” Liu said. The Long March 5B rocket has so far been used to launch modules for China’s now-completed Tiangong space station, as well as a test of a new generation crew spacecraft . Notably however the four Long March 5B launches so far have seen the 30-meter-long, roughly 23-ton first stage of the rocket enter orbit and make uncontrolled reentries around a week later, sparking rebuke from NASA administrators and strong rebuttals from China’s foreign ministry. The most recent reentered over the south-central Pacific Ocean Nov. 4, days after sending the Mengtian experiment module into orbit, but not before bringing about airspace closures in Europe. However, future Long March 5B launches utilizing the YZ-2 upper stage might be able to avoid the issue of uncontrolled first stage reentries. The upper stage could provide the kick to carry the payloads into orbit without the need for the first stage itself to reach orbital velocity. “It is plausible that it [the YZ-2 upper stage] will let the Long March 5B be mildly suborbital, as with Proton-M/Briz-M where the Proton stage, orbital on the earlier Blok DM version, is suborbital for Briz-M launches,” astronomer and spacecraft tracker Jonathan McDowell told SpaceNews . McDowell notes however that it is unclear whether or not this will be the case, with much depending on how large the initial YZ-2 burn will be. Chinese space officials have not commented on the issue. Other considerations, such as calculating safe drop zones for the rocket stage downrange from the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan island, or the possibility of making the rocket’s YF-77 hydrolox engines capable of restarting and thus controlling when and where the first stage reenters, could decide how these launches are planned. The value of the payload compared with multi-billion-dollar space station modules, could also be part of determining whether or not the future Long March 5B first stages go orbital and make uncontrolled reentries. The danger of injury or property damage from an uncontrolled reentry of a Long March 5B first stage is very small, but much greater than a standard but still troublesome reentry of a rocket’s smaller second or upper stage. Ted Muelhaupt of the Aerospace Corporation said in July that the odds of debris from the reentry following the launch of the Wentian module ranged from one in 230 to one in 1,000. This was more than an order of magnitude greater than internationally accepted casualty risk threshold for the uncontrolled reentry of rockets of one in 10,000, stated in a 2019 report issued by the U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices. China meanwhile has been dismissive of the risks, noting that it is “customary international practice for rockets’ upper stages to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said during a July 27 press conference. Exceptionally, the first and largest stage of the Long March 5B has also acted as the upper stage, inserting the payload into orbit. Long March 5B reentries is a large and prominent symptom of a wider problem. A recent Nature Astronomy paper published earlier assesses that current international space practices mean there is a 10 percent chance of uncontrolled reentries causing one or more casualties over a decade. The Long March 5B is next slated to launch Xuntian, a Hubble-class space telescope with a large field of view. It will co-orbit with the Tiangong space station and be able to dock with it for repairs, maintenance and possibly upgrades. That mission is expected no earlier than late 2023. 
TAMPA, Fla. — SiriusXM said Nov. 29 it has ordered two more satellites from Maxar Technologies to expand its radio broadcasting constellation. The twin SXM-11 and SXM-12 satellites are slated to launch around 2026-2027 on a rocket that has not yet been booked, said Bridget Neville, SiriusXM’s vice president of satellite and terrestrial engineering and operations. Like the SXM-9 and SXM-10 spacecraft ordered from Maxar last year, they will be based on Maxar’s 1300-class platform and are part of SiriusXM’s third-generation constellation. SiriusXM currently has five operational satellites with an estimated minimum lifetime ranging from 2024 to 2036 — plus two in-orbit spares — for broadcasting radio across North America and Canada. Although the four satellites Maxar is building will primarily replace existing capacity, Neville said they will have more powerful antennas for expanding coverage in Canada and southern Alaska. Demand for satellite radio is “very consistent across all of the continental U.S. and Canada,” she told SpaceNews in an interview, and areas underserved by terrestrial alternatives are particularly compelling. “When you start getting outside of big cities, especially in areas like Alaska, then that’s a good market for us,” she said. SXM-8, the Maxar-built satellite that SpaceX launched in 2021, is currently SiriusXM’s only third-generation satellite providing radio services in orbit. “Having higher power satellites gives us more [capacity] to play with,” Neville said, and enables the company “to spread it differently.” SiriusXM recently reported revenue for its radio business up 5% year-on-year to $1.7 billion for the three months to the end of September, boosted by an increase in self-pay subscribers. In addition to radio, SiriusXM’s satellites offer connected vehicle services, including automatic crash notifications and stolen vehicle recovery assistance. Growth in the company’s other businesses, including its ad-supported Pandora audio streaming service, helped total revenues rise 4% to $2.28 billion for the group. However, the company also warned that downward trends in the advertising market add risk to the group’s full-year growth expectations. Neville said signing its latest satellite contract underlines “a very long-term investment in infrastructure” for SiriusXM. “The expected operational life of these satellites takes us well into 2040,” she said. “And so we certainly think that the satellite radio business is going to be very, very strong through that time period — and [we’re] looking forward to getting the next generation satellites into service.” SXM-7, launched by SpaceX in December 2020, was due to be the first satellite in SiriusXM’s third-generation constellation. However, SiriusXM has been unable to use the spacecraft for satellite radio service after it suffered a payload failure shortly after launch . Neville said SXM-7 has a secondary payload that is functioning for a separate service she declined to detail. When asked what kind of service SXM-7 is providing, she said, “it’s not something we’ve previously disclosed.” The delivery of SXM-11 and SXM-12 will bring the number of Maxar-built satellites for SiriusXM to 13. Most of these were ordered from Space Systems Loral, which in 2012 became a part of a company that later became Maxar. Chris Johnson, Maxar’s senior vice president of space, said the manufacturer is “proactively working” with suppliers to ensure it keeps the four satellites it is currently building for SiriusXM on track. Pandemic-related supply chain issues have delayed multiple large spacecraft projects destined for geostationary orbit. Maxar recently agreed to compensate Echostar for production issues that have delayed the launch of its Jupiter 3 satellite to at least the first half of 2023, two years later than initially planned.
The Defense Innovation Unit is seeking proposals for commercial services to deploy and operate payloads in outer space beyond Earth orbit, an area known as cislunar space. DIU, a Defense Department agency created to bring commercially developed technology into military programs, is looking for “responsive access” to the vast region of space that begins at geosynchronous Earth orbit and extends out to the Earth-moon Lagrange point on the far side of the moon. Outer space beyond GEO will “experience a rapid influx of activity from national, international and commercial sources in this decade,” said DIU in a Dec. 7 solicitation . “As the U.S. prepares to return to the moon, the need for responsive access to this region is absolutely necessary.” The Department of Defense is interested in “commercial solutions for implementing responsive access to xGEO and demonstrating timely and precise delivery of a space vehicle to a predetermined orbit in xGEO.” DIU’s new project on cislunar space comes on the heels of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s $72 million contract award for an experimental spacecraft to monitor the xGEO region. U.S. military leaders have warned that growing activity in cislunar space could turn this region into a contested domain as countries seek access to lunar resources and stake out areas of jurisdiction. Current sensors used by the military for space domain awareness were designed to track satellites in Earth orbits, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer, and not for cislunar space which extends out 385,000 kilometers and has different orbital trajectories. DIU said companies bidding for this project can expect many technical challenges. “The communications infrastructure is sparse, the radiation environment is harsh, and gravity from the moon and sun have greater effects on station keeping and maneuvering,” said the solicitation. Proposals are due Dec. 21. Vendors are asked to propose satellite concepts that can operate a suite of payloads or instruments in one or more of the five Earth-moon Lagrange points and lunar orbits. DIU wants commercial technologies that can be prototyped within 12 to 18 months from contract award. “Delivery methods may include a combination of terrestrial-based launch and multi-orbit logistics,” said DIU. Satellites can be anywhere from cubesats to ESPA-class small satellites, and must have at least one or more payloads for visible and infrared imaging, onboard image processing, high impulse propulsion, autonomy, space-radiation monitoring and communications. DoD also wants to explore the integration of commercial and government-owned payloads on the same spacecraft. After proposals are received, DIU might recommend that companies offering complementary technologies work together, although vendors can propose their own teaming arrangements. In about three months, DIU plans to select companies that will receive Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) contracts to prototype systems. The agency has the option to award follow-on production contracts “without the use of competitive procedures.” OTA contracts are used by the federal government mostly for research and development projects. These contracts are different from traditional procurement deals in that they are not subject to many of the regulations and requirements that apply to traditional contracts. OTAs frequently are used for projects that require collaboration between the government and non-traditional defense contractors.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences is considering potential missions including a Ceres orbiter and a huge telescope to hunt for clues about the nature of dark matter. More than 20 candidates are vying for funding for further study under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Strategic Priority Program on Space Science (SPP), also known as the New Horizon Program, and are currently undergoing evaluation. The National Space Science Center (NSSC) in Beijing is expected to organize a panel of experts to review these pre-phase A candidates and make project priority recommendations in the second half of 2022. The selected missions could then move ahead with further study and potentially be developed into missions over the next decade. A handful of the mission proposals are named in a paper on the progress of the third round of SPP mission selection published in the Chinese Journal of Space Science. These are the Very Large Area Gamma-ray Space Telescope (VLAST), a Space Weather program, a Ceres exploration program and a Gravity Experimental Satellite. The proposals cover the fields of space astronomy and astrophysics, exoplanets, heliophysics, planetary science, Earth science, space biology and fundamental physics. Few details are known at this point regarding most of the missions but the Ceres and VLAST missions appear to be more defined. It is understood the Ceres proposal would be an orbiter carrying a ground-penetrating radar as a main payload, focusing on the “origin of Ceres and its underground ocean and volcanic geological activities.” The only spacecraft to visit Ceres so far is NASA’s Dawn mission , approved under the Discovery Program and launched in 2007. Ceres is recognized as an ocean world with potential ongoing geological activity and could be further assessed for potential habitability. The mission could provide new insights in these areas, furthering understanding of Ceres and, by extension, ocean worlds and volatiles elsewhere in the solar system. VLAST would seek to detect signals of dark matter in gamma ray emissions, following on from the DAMPE mission launched in 2015. It would also conduct gamma ray astronomy in the mega- and giga-electron volt range and make measurements of cosmic rays. VLAST is expected to increase the sensitivity of the Fermi Large Area Telescope by a factor of 10, according to a paper in Acta Astronomica Sinica in May this year. The roughly 16-metric-ton observatory would need to be launched by a Long March 5 rocket. More immediately the CAS is evaluating 13 missions for possible implementation across 2025-2030 as part of the SPP III round of missions. From the candidates 5-7 missions will be selected from the fields of space astronomy and astrophysics, exoplanets, heliophysics and planetary and Earth science. Candidates include a Venus orbiter, an astronomy constellation in lunar orbit, exoplanet hunting missions, ocean and climate missions and solar observatories. SPP III is an “effective approach to promote China’s space activities, and make great contributions to international space science and exploration,” according to the journal paper. The emergence of the New Horizons Program shows China is also looking to develop medium-class missions alongside the flagship Chang’e lunar and Tianwen deep space missions and could add to its deep space exploration depending on mission selection. The proposed CAS missions are also somewhat separate from, and additional to, the Chang’e and Tianwen missions, which are nominally under the aegis of the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Tianwen-1 launched in 2020, sending an orbiter and rover to Mars. Tianwen-2 will be a combined near-Earth asteroid sampling and comet rendezvous mission launching around 2025, while Tianwen-3 is to attempt to collect samples from Mars and deliver them to Earth, launching in 2028. Tianwen-4 will launch a pair of spacecraft towards Jupiter around 2030. One will study the Jovian system and enter orbit around Callisto, with the other using a gravity assist to head for a flyby of Uranus. SPP III follows on from a first Strategic Priority Program on Space Science which saw the DAMPE, HXMT, Shijian-10 and Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) missions launched across 2015-2017. The SPP II missions include the Einstein Probe , due to launch next year, the Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor ( GECAM ) launched in 2020, the Advanced space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) launching this year, and the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) in collaboration with the European Space Agency.
Astrobotic unveiled plans Sept. 19 to develop a commercial power service for the moon that the company argues is essential for creating long-term infrastructure on the lunar surface. At the International Astronautical Congress here, Astrobotic announced its LunaGrid project, which will combine solar arrays the company is developing with tethered rovers that will deliver uninterrupted power to customers on the lunar surface. Such a power system, said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, is essential for systems that can survive for extended periods on the moon. “What we need is long-term infrastructure that can be there and last multiple years,” he said in an interview. “We see this as the grid for the surface of the moon, principally at the poles.” The power would be generated by Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT) arrays, solar arrays that are deployed vertically and are optimized for operations at the lunar poles, where the sun is always low on the horizon. Astrobotic won a $6.2 million award from NASA Aug. 23 to develop and test prototypes of that solar array, one of three the agency made for similar technologies. The power would be distributed from the VSAT arrays to users through tethered rovers, based on the company’s CubeRover design. Wireless charging technology would then transfer the power from the rover to the customer’s surface asset. The system would start off generating 10 kilowatts of power but can be scaled up over time. The VSAT arrays will themselves be mounted on rovers and can move as needed. LunaGrid, Thornton said, is the culmination of technologies that have been in development for years by the company, which is best known for the commercial lunar landers it is building for NASA and other customers. “It uses every part of the company,” he said, “and showcases why we’ve been looking at developing all of these capabilities because, ultimately, we think that power on the moon is going to be a bigger long-term business than any of our other businesses.” The first operational LunaGrid system is planned for 2028, but initial elements could be ready sooner. “It could be deployed mid-decade, in time for an Artemis astronaut to actually be able to plug into it,” he said. “This is not a long-term technology that needs continued development.” Astrobotic expects the initial customers for LunaGrid will primarily be NASA and its Artemis partners to support their lunar exploration plans. “That will probably continue to be the case until something like this exists,” Thornton said. “That’s when it can open up more commercial opportunities.” When something like LunaGrid is available, missions will become more affordable because they won’t have to develop their own surface power systems, and will also be able to operate through the lunar night. Without the need to have their own power systems “the vehicles could be simpler and more robust,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a case where this pays for itself if you integrated this into the architecture of Artemis, by eliminating the power systems on all the vehicles.” Thornton said it was too soon to discuss prices Astrobotic would charge for power delivered through LunaGrid. He estimated the development cost of the system at “hundreds of millions” of dollars, “not billions.” The announcement of LunaGrid comes after Astrobotic finalized its acquisition earlier in the month of the assets of Masten Space Systems for $4.5 million in a bankruptcy auction . Astrobotic confirmed the deal Sept. 13, stating that it will keep Masten’s facilities open at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California and continue flights of its suborbital technology demonstration vehicles. “Masten’s suborbital launch vehicles and propulsion test centers are national assets for the space industry. We are excited to operate and expand these services for companies, governments and space agencies internationally,” Thornton said in a statement about the acquisition. Astrobotic will also hire back Masten’s workforce, expanding its staff to more than 200 employees between Mojave and Astrobotic’s Pittsburgh headquarters. The company, though, was silent on plans for use of lunar lander technology that Masten was developing or its NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) award. “On behalf of the Masten team, I am excited to join Astrobotic in our shared mission to make space accessible to the world,” Dave Masten, founder of Masten Space Systems, said in the statement. “This combined organization will let us continue to provide important services to our customers and help us make a bigger impact on humanity’s future in space.”
The Pentagon’s top research official has directed the Defense Science Board to examine the military’s growing demand for commercial space technology and its implications, and to recommend steps DoD should take to ensure access to these services. Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, in a memo last month established a Defense Science Board task force on “commercial space system access and integrity.” The DSB is a committee of civilian experts who advise the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The task force will spend several months conducting research and report back to Shyu. A central question Shyu wants the panel to address is how DoD should acquire commercial space services — such as satellite-based communications and Earth imaging — so they can be part of the larger defense architecture. “Because of the rapidly improving commercial space capabilities, a comprehensive plan for using commercial space systems in the context of classified U.S. space capabilities is needed,” said the memo. Another issue is how to ensure that space services are available to military users and agencies that typically have not had access to space-based technologies but now want to take advantage of emerging commercial products. “Mounting demand is leading to heightened competition between traditional consumers of space products like at the strategic level and users at the operational and tactical levels,” the memo said. “DoD faces an impending challenge in de-conflicting those needs” and making sure there are acquisition programs in place to meet those needs. The panel also will look at security threats to space systems as Russia and China are expected to target U.S. satellites, regardless of whether they’re owned by the government or the private sector. “Space has become a contested environment with emerging and evolving threats to space systems,” said the memo, pointing out that adversaries presumably would have access to the same commercial space technologies that the U.S. military relies upon. “In addition to direct threats to space architecture, adversaries could disrupt DoD access to space products and services by competing as users of the same systems or by controlling access to economic means,” the memo noted. “As use of commercial space rises, such threats must be evaluated and mitigated to ensure DOD does not become overly dependent on capabilities that may or may not be available in times of armed conflict.”
A Kuaizhou-1A rocket sent the Tianxing-1 satellite into orbit late Tuesday, marking a return to flight six months after the solid light-light launcher suffered failure. The Kuaizhou-1A lifted off from a transport erector launcher at 10:08 p.m. Eastern June 21 (0208 UTC June 22) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Little is known about the Tianxing-1 payload. The satellite is set to be used for experiments including “space environment detection,” according to Chinese space authorities and media. Tianxing-1 was developed by the Institute of Mechanics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The Kuaizhou-1A consists of three solid stages and a liquid propellant upper stage. It is capable of carrying 200 kilograms of payload into a 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The rocket has now flown 15 times. The previous Kuaizhou-1A flight ended with the rocket’s second failure in December 2021. The first launch took place in January 2017. The launcher is operated by Expace and has attracted a number of Chinese commercial customers including remote sensing constellation operator Changguang Satellite Technology. Giant state-owned missile and defense contractor China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) is the parent company of Expace. CASIC is a separate entity to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). CASC is the country’s main space contractor and operator of the Long March rockets. CASIC and its subsidiaries plan an 80-satellite narrowband constellation named Xingyun. Plans to launch at least 12 Xingyun-2 satellites in 2022 to form the second stage of the three-stage constellation had been announced before the December 2021 failure. Similar plans for launches of 12 Xingyun satellites across 2021 were stated in 2020. The KZ-1A then suffered its first failure in September 2020. Tuesday’s mission was China’s 20th launch of 2022, with CASC alone aiming for more than 50 missions , including completion of the country’s low Earth orbit space station. A number of commercial Chinese rockets expected to add to Chinese launch activity this year, including the Kuaizhou series. Landspace and CAS Space are expected to debut new rockets from Jiuquan in the near future, while Galactic Energy will begin a new set of launches of its Ceres-1 solid rocket in the second half of the year.
Adranos, a startup that manufactures solid rocket motors, announced Sept. 8 it opened a fuel-production facility in Indiana. The facility will produce an aluminum-lithium alloy solid rocket fuel called ALITEC to power solid rocket motors used in tactical missiles and space launch vehicles. The company said the ALITEC fuel was tested on U.S. military tactical solid rocket motors, but has not disclosed specific customers. “At the moment, we are on contract with both commercial space and defense customers,” said Adranos vice president Michael Grasso. “We are designing, manufacturing, and testing ALITEC-fueled motors to demonstrate their performance enhancement over traditional systems.” With the new facility in Indiana, said Grasso, “we can produce ALITEC in large enough quantities to support additional customers, especially those that require large volumes of solid rocket fuel.” The company is manufacturing solid rocket motors in coastal Mississippi, with the goal to become a Defense Department supplier and compete for orders against dominant providers Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Purdue Research Foundation and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation provided significant funding for the new facility, located in the Purdue Research Park. ALITEC was invented at Purdue University by Adranos co-founder and chief technology officer Brandon Terry. “In the last three years, Adranos has worked with its Department of Defense and commercial customers to demonstrate the substantial performance increase that ALITEC fuel delivers,” said Adranos co-founder and CEO Chris Stoker. “With this facility completed, we can produce ALITEC at scales necessary to meet the needs of national security and commercial space customers.” The company in April announced a $20 million Series A funding round. 
The Government Accountability Office in a report released June 2 raised concerns about how the U.S. Air Force selected Huntsville, Alabama, as its preferred location for U.S. Space Command, which currently is based in Colorado. After a year-long review, GAO found that the Air Force’s basing decision process largely followed guidelines directed by the secretary of defense. But GAO also identified “significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility,” said the report. As a result, the decision created the “appearance of bias.” GAO said the January 2021 selection of Redstone Arsenal as the preferred location for U.S. Space Command headquarters was made using methods that are inconsistent with existing “best practices” used by federal government agencies in basing decisions. said the report. This review was conducted at the request of Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) who asked GAO to look into the methodology that led to the January 2021 recommendation by the Trump administration to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. According to GAO, from December 2018 through early March 2020, the Air Force largely followed its established strategic basing process to determine the preferred location for U.S. Space Command headquarters. From early March 2020 through January 2021, the Air Force implemented a revised process at the direction of then Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, culminating in the selection of Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. “The revised process followed some elements of the established basing process, but included different steps. For example, in its revised process, the Air Force solicited nominations from all 50 states instead of beginning with a set of candidates based on their respective ability to meet defined functional requirements,” said GAO. The 89-page document released June 2 is an edited version of a more detailed report that GAO shared with lawmakers last month. DoD asked that several sections of the original report not be disclosed due to the sensitivity of the content. GAO was directed to omit information on the number and names of candidates the Air Force would have considered under an amended enterprise definition; candidate scores and ranks during the evaluation phase; and certain scoring criteria such as available qualified workforce. GAO also removed from the public report information on the Air Force’s selection phase methodology; input to the deliberations before a January 11, 2021, meeting at the White House involving high-ranking officials; and the Air Force’s rationale for selecting Redstone Arsenal as the preferred location for U.S. Space Command headquarters. Although the Air Force documented the general rationale for selecting Redstone Arsenal in an action memorandum and accompanying documents, GAO noted, “there was no consensus among the officials we interviewed regarding who ultimately made the decision to name Redstone Arsenal as the preferred location for U.S. Space Command headquarters, including the role of the then President in making the decision.” GAO in the report recommends that the Air Force develop guidance for future strategic basing decisions that is consistent with GAO’s best practices. The Air Force neither agreed nor disagreed. Air Force officials told GAO that the established Air Force basing process “does not require the level of detailed documentation included in our analysis of alternatives best practices.” Lamborn and other Colorado lawmakers allege that the former administration improperly influenced the decision and that the Air Force’s basing process did not properly take into account senior military officials’ concerns that the relocation would add years to Space Command efforts to reach “full operational capacity” as soon as possible. Space Command is responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. military and for protecting those assets from foreign threats. GAO’s report comes on the heels of another inquiry into Space Command’s basing decision conducted by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. The IG in a report released May 10 said it found nothing improper in the selection of Redstone Arsenal. What happens next is still unclear. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee May 14 that his office will review the findings of GAO and the OIG before finalizing the basing decision. Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper met with Kendall May 17 and made the case that the Air Force should keep Space Command at Peterson for national security and cost reasons, the senators said in a statement. “Both the reports from the Department of Defense Inspector General and Government Accountability Office affirm our doubts about the accuracy and credibility of the decision-making process. We underscored those concerns with Secretary Kendall.”
A problem with Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle caused an in-flight abort a minute after liftoff Sept. 12, causing a capsule filled with payloads but not people to fire its launch abort motor and parachute to a safe landing. New Shepard lifted off on the NS-23 mission at 10:27 a.m. Eastern from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. The mission, postponed from the end of August because of bad weather at the launch site, had its liftoff delayed by nearly an hour, although the company did not disclose the reason for the holds during the countdown. The launch appeared to be going normally until about T+1 minutes. The plume from the BE-3 engine that powers the vehicle’s booster changed appearance, and the vehicle then appeared to veer slightly from the vertical. At T+1:05, the capsule’s launch escape motor activated, sending the capsule clear of the booster. The capsule reached a peak altitude of about 11.4 kilometers, then descended, deploying drogue and main parachutes as it would on a normal mission. The capsule touched down near the launch site about five and a half minutes after liftoff. “It appears that we have experienced an anomaly on today’s flight. This wasn’t planned and we have no details yet,” Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner said on the launch webcast shortly after the abort motor fired. The company did not disclose other information about the problem, or the fate of the booster, which was presumed to have been destroyed. NS-23 was the first uncrewed New Shepard mission in more than a year and uses a different capsule and booster from the flights that carry people. This vehicle was making its ninth flight, having been used for other payload flights and tests of the overall New Shepard system. The NS-23 mission had three dozen payloads on board, half of which were experiments sponsored by NASA through its Flight Opportunities program for suborbital research on commercial vehicles. Other payloads included thousands of postcards from students from Club for the Future, a nonprofit associated with Blue Origin.
TAMPA, Fla. — Dish Network and others pushing for permission to use 12 GHz spectrum for 5G said July 7 that SpaceX’s study on how it would severely disrupt its broadband customers is “scientifically and logically flawed.” The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition, which includes the satellite TV broadcaster and a mix of telcos, public interest groups and trade associations, said the study draws nationwide conclusions from a “single cherry-picked” area that is “among the most unfavorable geographies to analyze” interference. The coalition also said SpaceX’s broadband company Starlink was spreading misinformation by telling customers their service cannot coexist with plans to use 12 GHz frequencies for a high-power 5G network. The Federal Communications Commission has received nearly 100,000 comments amid Starlink’s call to customers to urge the agency to reject Dish Network’s 12 GHz proposal. “This tactic, which is commonly used by Elon Musk, is not only disingenuous, but it promulgates an anti-5G narrative that is harmful to American consumers who deserve greater competition, connectivity options and innovation,” the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition said a statement. “It also stands to threaten America’s global leadership in the 5G and technology sector as other countries outpace the nation in delivering next-generation services.” The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition pointed to earlier interference studies commissioned by RS Access, a spectrum holding company that is one of the group’s members, which estimated a nationwide 5G network would cause interference to less than 1% of terminals used by non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite operators. SpaceX declined to comment but has previously refuted these studies, which were conducted by engineering firm RKF Engineering Solutions. Conflicting analysis Both RS Access and Dish Network have licenses in the 12 GHz band that they are seeking to upgrade for high-speed terrestrial mobile services. The 12 GHz band is part of the Ku-band spectrum that Starlink, OneWeb and other satellite operators use to connect with user terminals. RS Access told the FCC in May that 5G wireless broadband in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band “can readily coexist” with NGSO “fixed satellite service deployments, which use 10.7-12.7 GHz for downlink.” However, SpaceX said June 21 that tests it conducted in Las Vegas showed how Starlink would become unusable for most Americans if the FCC allowed high-power mobile services in the 12 GHz band. Starlink users would experience harmful interference 77% of the time, according to SpaceX’s study, and total outage of services 74% of the time. SpaceX said its analysis underlined various inaccuracies and incorrect assumptions made in RFK’s studies. The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition took issue with how SpaceX’s results were generated from the Las Vegas partial economic area (PEA), in “contrast to the nationwide simulation submitted by RKF.” SpaceX said it chose this area because it is a market that Dish Network has targeted for its first mobile operations. But the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition said this PEA’s “unique topology and morphology” makes it ten times as unfavorable to assess 5G and satellite coexistence as the national average. The group said SpaceX’s study also “grossly distorts the 5G network configuration to create interference with NGSO terminals.” It said: “If the assumptions SpaceX uses in Las Vegas are extrapolated nationwide, they would necessitate the deployment of over 600,000 macro 12 GHz sites across the country.” This compares with the 67,000 sites AT&T currently uses for its nationwide network. The coalition added that SpaceX’s Las Vegas analysis also assumes a higher level of service in urban and suburban areas than previously indicated. The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition’s statement comes a week after the FCC gave Starlink permission June 30 to use part of the 12 GHz band to connect vehicles, boats and aircraft on the move — in addition to fixed locations — subject to various conditions. Dish Network and RS Access had argued against the approval, which the FCC said does not prejudge a decision on their 5G deployment plans. Starlink announced a maritime-focused service plan for U.S. customers July 7, which offers up to 350 megabits per second download speeds while at sea for $5,000 a month and a one-time $10,000 hardware cost for two terminals. Starlink Maritime currently advertises a latency rate of under 99 milliseconds, compared with 20-40 milliseconds for its other service plans. The maritime service also currently only covers coastal waters , with broadband coverage slated for elsewhere in the fourth quarter of 2022, and across seas globally in the first quarter of 2023. This article was updated July 8 with details on Starlink’s maritime service plan.
The European Commission awarded a contract to Arianespace Nov. 29 for launches of five Copernicus Earth observation spacecraft on Vega C rockets between 2024 and 2026. The contract, Arianespace Chief Executive Stéphane Israël said in a press conference, secures the position of the European Commission, which operates both Copernicus and the Galileo navigation constellation, as the launch provider’s top institutional customer. “The Copernicus contract that we have signed today is a mark of the deep relationship that we have with the European Commission,” he said, calling the commission the company’s best customer. The contract includes the launch of Sentinel-1D, a synthetic aperture radar mission in the second half of 2024; Sentinel-2C, a high-resolution land imaging satellite in mid-2024; Sentinel-3C, an optical, radar and altimetry satellite slated for launch in 2024 or 2025; and Sentinel CO2M-A and CO2M-B, two satellites for studying carbon dioxide emissions that will launch separately in 2025-2026. They join Sentinel-1C, which Arianespace won a contract in April to launch on a Vega C in 2023. Israël declined to give the value of the contract but claimed the value was “very competitive” with American launch vehicles. “What we sold for Sentinel is highly competitive as opposed to what I have seen when one has been launched from the U.S.” It’s unlikely the European Commission, whose leadership has emphasized the importance for autonomous European access to space, would have gone with another launch provider. However, the enhanced payload capacity of the Vega C, which made its debut in July , enabled the selection of that vehicle. Israël said four of the satellites, including Sentinel-1C, could not have launched on the original Vega. “Vega C allows us to deploy the Copernicus constellation.” Two of the satellites, Sentinel-2C and -3C, are small enough to allow the launches to accommodate secondary payloads, said Marino Fragnito, senior vice president and head of the Vega business unit at Arianespace. The company has a provision in its launch contract to incorporate additional satellites on those launches, with “a few institutional co-passengers” planned to go on the Sentinel-2C launch. The Copernicus contract brings the Vega C backlog to 13 launches, with two additional launches of the original Vega. One of the two Vega launches, Fragnito said, is for the European Space Agency’s Biomass satellite, while the other is tentatively set to launch the PLATiNO imaging satellite for the Italian Space Agency. Vega C was scheduled to perform its first commercial launch Nov. 24, carrying two Pléiades Neo imaging satellites for Airbus, but Arianespace postponed the launch because of an unspecified technical issue with the rocket. That launch has been postponed to Dec. 20, with an Ariane 5 launch moved up a day to Dec. 13. Fragnito said the problem was with pyrotechnics in the payload fairing separation system, which could not be repaired on the pad. “We had to bring the upper composite back to the integration facility, open the fairing, change the equipment, close it and bring it back to the launch pad,” he said. “This takes some weeks.” Israël thanked the French space agency CNES, which operates the Kourou launch site, for reducing the time between launches to seven days to allow the launches to take place back-to-back. In addition to the Copernicus launches, Arianespace has five Galileo launches on its manifest. That includes two originally scheduled to launch on Soyuz, which is no longer available after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Negotiations on how to handle those launches are ongoing, he said, with no resolution yet. Israël said he expected that, once the Soyuz launch contract issue is resolved, he expected to finalize a framework contract with the European Commission for launching the next-generation Galileo satellites. “We first have to solve the force majeure issue, which is not an easy one.” He also expects Arianespace to play a role in the commission’s secure connectivity constellation, recently named Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite or IRIS². “Ariane 6 is perfectly adapted to deploy the IRIS² constellation. It could be complemented by Vega C,” he said. “Nothing is decided yet, and it would be the choice of the European Commission.”
NASA and Boeing are changing how they assemble the core stage of the Space Launch System, moving some of the final integration work to the Kennedy Space Center. Currently, the five major sections of the core stage — forward skirt, liquid oxygen tank, interstage, liquid hydrogen tank and engine section — are manufactured and joined together into a single unit at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The core stage for the Artemis 2 mission is being assembled in that manner and is scheduled to be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center in 2023. Starting with the SLS manufactured for Artemis 3, the upper four-fifths of the SLS — excluding the engine section — will be joined together at Michoud and shipped to KSC. The engine section will still be manufactured at Michoud but shipped separately to KSC, where it will undergo final outfitting at the Space Station Processing Facility there, including installation of its four RS-25 engines. It will later be attached to the rest of the core stage inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC. The change, NASA said in a Dec. 6 statement, is intended to free up space at Michoud for additional SLS work. That includes production of the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), which will be used on the Block 1B version of the SLS starting with the Artemis 4 mission. The current Block 1 SLS uses the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage manufactured by United Launch Alliance at its Decatur, Alabama, factory. That change in SLS manufacturing processes is already in effect. Workers moved the engine section for the Artemis 3 SLS from the Michoud factory to a barge Dec. 4, which will transport the stage to KSC later in the month. A spokesperson for Boeing, the prime contractor for both the SLS core stage and EUS, said Dec. 7 that the revised plan will create approximately 125 jobs at Michoud and 145 jobs at KSC. Personnel at both facilities will be reassigned to support the shifting projects at each site, the spokesperson said.
As a second session of a United Nations working group on reducing space threats approaches, U.S. government officials say they’re looking for ways to encourage more countries to back a ban on anti-satellite weapon tests. Vice President Kamala Harris announced April 18 that the United States would refrain from conducting direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) tests , calling such debris-generating activities “reckless and irresponsible.” She called on other nations to also halt such tests. Her speech, officials later said, was timed to influence discussions at the first meeting of a U.N. Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on norms of behavior for reducing space threats held in May in Geneva. During that meeting Canada announced that it would join the United States in the ASAT testing ban . In July, the New Zealand government announced that it, too, would commit not to test direct-ascent ASATs . Neither country had developed or were planning to develop such weapons. Eric Desautels, acting deputy assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance at the State Department, said at an Aug. 24 panel discussion organized by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and The Aerospace Corporation that the timing of the ASAT test ban announcement had the desired effect. “I think the timing and our use of the norm did exactly as we planned,” he said. “What was clear was that there was a shared concern in the room regarding the indiscriminate nature of the debris created by ASAT missile testing, even of some of those countries weren’t comfortable criticizing countries that has done debris-generating ASAT tests.” With the second OEWG session scheduled for the week of Sept. 12 in Geneva, Desautels said the U.S. government was looking at ways to “multilateralize” the test ban, including both non-binding and legally binding mechanisms. “Depending on the feedback that we get from allies and partners over the next couple of months, there are two approaches that we may take to multilateralize this commitment,” he said. One would be a non-binding U.N. General Assembly resolution as soon as its next session from September to December. “Such a resolution would allow countries to go on record regarding their support, creating that shared agreement among the majority of U.N. member states, while increasing political pressure on countries that have plans for future ASAT tests,” he said. A second approach, according to Desautels, would be a legally binding agreement of some kind. “I view that as a much longer term effort,” he said. One issue, he said, is that U.S. policy requires space arms control agreements be equitable, verifiable and in U.S. national security interests. A ban on ASAT testing may meet those criteria. “It’s verifiable. It’s attributable. There’s very little ambiguity about who did it,” said Chirag Parikh, executive secretary of the National Space Council, said of the ASAT test ban in a keynote at the event. “We think that was a very good initial movement from the United States,” he said of the ban. “Also, I believe it demonstrates U.S. leadership by taking the first step.” The near-term focus, though, is on establishing a ban on ASAT testing as a norm of behavior. “This is a first step,” Desautels said. “There are potentially other steps that could eventually get you to a legally binding arms control agreement, but these are slow, painful processes. Diplomacy doesn’t move very quickly, so let’s address things that we can, potentially through the U.N.” There is precedent for this, he noted. In 1963, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution that called on countries not to place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in outer space, which eventually became part of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. “It shows you, do something quick and soon, and eventually you might get to that arms control solution.”
WAILEA, Hawaii — With space essential to military operations, better understanding of what objects are in orbit and the threats they may pose is “foundational” for space security, a Space Force general said. Speaking at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference here Sept. 28, Lt. Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, commander of Space Systems Command, said that as warfighters acknowledged they need space assets to carry out their missions, it’s incumbent on the service to better track potential threats to those assets. “I’ll tell you for the first time in my career,” he said, “the joint warfighter has come to grips with the fact that they cannot win without space.” Space provides the “overmatch” needed for military forces to be successful, he said. “Our overmatch in space is at the heart of space security, which starts with space domain awareness. Space domain awareness is foundational to our operations and provides the U.S. and its partners with continued advantage.” Guetlein argued that requires improving those capabilities. “The days of us focusing only on maintaining the space catalog of knowns is over,” he said. “Not only are we focusing on what we know is out there, we’re searching for new objects. We are identifying where those objects came from, why they are there and what their intents are.” He added that also means “being able to defend against those objects if necessary.” He emphasized the need for improved cooperation with industry, academia and international partners, which involves overcoming traditional barriers to sharing space domain awareness information. “We’ve got to lower the classification level” of such data that has traditionally been highly classified. “All we’re doing is hiding from ourselves. We got to start having the critical conversations and opening up the dialogue.” Those efforts have new urgency given the growing capabilities of China and Russia to attack satellites. “I wish I could come up here and say the threat is getting better. But the threat is only getting worse,” he said. He was particularly concerned about China, claiming that demographic and economic challenges China would face in the coming years could create a “nexus of ambition and desperation” that could lead to conflict that extends to space. “In order to deter the threat we have to have overmatch. Today, I can stand up here and tell you without a shadow of a doubt that we have overmatch,” he said. “But the threat is proving themselves intent on changing that status quo.” Guetlein, though, balanced that concern with optimism about the “unprecedented level of unity of effort” within Defense Department and intelligence community to tackle challenges from acquisition to improved relationships with industry. “We’ve seen space become even more congested and contested. And initially, I will tell you, we as a nation were slow to respond. We were distracted by what was happening in the Middle East,” he said. “But I’m proud to tell you that we are seeing a strategic shift across the entire landscape of both DoD, IC and our international partners and we are laser-focused on countering that rising threat.”
LOGAN, Utah — Two experimental payloads built by university students have been integrated with a RocketStar suborbital test flight set for next month. Students at Brigham Young University and the University of Central Florida provided the experimental payloads, which TriSept Corp. integrated with New York-based RocketStar’s 10-meter-tall, aerospike-powered Cowbell rocket. The UCF payload is designed to simulate asteroid particle activity during the suborbital flight. Students, who have flown a similar payload on the International Space Station, are investigating particle collisions inside a device they developed. BYU College of Engineering students provided a sensor suite to measure motion, acceleration and vibration aboard the launch vehicle. “We are excited to work with TriSept and RocketStar to put our flight motion payload to the test and to work with flight-grade security software on its maiden voyage in space,” David Long, BYU Center for Remote Sensing engineering professor, said in a statement. Data from the student payloads will help RocketStar characterize the flight environment for future payload customers, RocketStar CEO Chris Craddock told SpaceNews . In its quest to develop a single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle, RocketStar has conducted nine suborbital launches, flying Cowbell as high as 15 kilometers. In March 2023, RocketStar plans to return to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a flight test of a larger rocket with a payload capacity that “may be upwards of 150 kilograms,” Craddock said. The September suborbital launch is the first suborbital test for TriSept’s new satellite security operating system. The operating system, called TriSept Security Enhanced Layer, will plug vulnerabilities and protect the overall satellite operation, said Jason Armstrong, TriSept launch and integration services director.
Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major announced Aug. 31 it won a U.S. Air Force contract to support the development of the company’s Hadley liquid engine for small launch vehicles. The $3.6 million deal is a small business innovation research contract known as a TACFI, or Tactical Funding Increase that includes both government and private funds. “This partnership is one example of how the federal government is furthering its research and development progress by engaging with our country’s promising entrepreneurs and innovators,” Shawn Phillips, chief of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s rocket propulsion division, said in a statement. Ursa Major founder and CEO Joe Laurienti said the company has been manufacturing and testing the 5,000-pound thrust Hadley at its facility in Berthoud, Colorado. The agreement with the Air Force would give the 3D-printed engine a “stamp of approval” and increase customers’ trust in the technology, he said. “It’s a big deal for us,” Laurienti told SpaceNews . AFRL has been a customer of the Hadley engine — which uses liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants — to power the X-60A airdropped rocket designed for hypersonic flight research. The program supports Air Force plans to develop hypersonic missiles. Under the AFRL contract, Ursa Major will test the engine’s performance in more strenuous flight conditions than what is normally expected by commercial customers, said Laurienti. “ It’s really a broad qualification campaign.” This agreement “validates the dual use nature of this engine that we’ve been so so aggressive about,” he said. “The same engine should work for a commercial launcher or a government launcher without being more expensive.” The qualification test campaign will seek to demonstrate that Hadley “operates safely and reliably within the power level and mixture ratio required for missions of DoD interest,” Laurienti said. The qualification will involve multiple Hadley engines and the Air Force will get data on measurements of specific impulse, or ISP, combustion stability, vibration and shock profiles, and range of inlet pressures and temperatures, he said. Ursa Major is producing about 30 Hadley engines a year for the Air Force and several commercial customers, including small launcher startup Phantom Space and Stratolaunch, which uses a massive carrier to launch rocket-powered hypersonic vehicles. Laurienti said the company so far this year has delivered 12 engines. Following an $85 million funding round last year, Ursa Major’s workforce has grown to 250 employees. The company is developing a larger engine called Ripley, which can generate 50,000 pounds of thrust. “W e’re going larger and larger,” said Laurienti. “I don’t think that’s necessarily because we see a diminishing demand in the small launch space. It’s more because we see more versatile opportunities in larger vehicles.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A bill that would give $52 billion in subsidies to U.S. chip makers promises to galvanize domestic production, although it will take time to alleviate a semiconductor shortage that has been delaying satellite projects. U.S. President Biden is set to sign the bill, dubbed the Chips and Science Act , after it passed House and Senate votes last week. It comprises $280 billion in total support for America’s manufacturing and technological capabilities. The legislation aims to boost U.S. competitiveness in the global semiconductor market with grants, tax credits and other incentives in response to China’s growing dominance in the sector. It also comes as a lack of chips and other spacecraft components during the pandemic have been slowing down satellite projects and increasing costs. But while there will be a lag between the bill’s approval and when new fabrication facilities can be brought online to improve supply, reducing U.S. dependence on foreign suppliers also has security implications. Nearly four-fifths of global fabrication capacity was in Asia as of 2019, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service . Although the figures show China had 12% of the world’s capacity, the U.S.-based Semiconductor Industry Association said last year that China’s investments in the sector put the country on track to command the largest share of global production by 2030. Meanwhile, the Congressional Research Service said U.S. share of semiconductor fabrication capacity has declined from around 40% in 1990 to 12% in 2020. Most advanced types of chips are also largely made in Taiwan, which is the subject of mounting political tensions with China. “Space applications are an area where a secure and reliable source of chips is critical to mission success,” said Zachary Collier, an assistant professor at Radford University in Virginia. Reducing reliance on foreign suppliers would help ensure chips are not tampered with in ways that could impact their integrity and reliability, which Collier said “could result in loss of life or mission failure in a manned space flight, or unauthorized access to sensitive satellite data.” He said: “Increasing domestic manufacturing capacity is an important step toward building a secure and trusted end-to-end semiconductor ecosystem, which is needed to support space, defense, critical infrastructure, and many other sectors.” Onshoring manufacturing capabilities will increase supply chain traceability, Collier added, and knowing where chips have been and who has handled them throughout their lifecycle is necessary “to make an assurance case that the components used in space applications are secure.” Jim Taiclet, the CEO of satellite maker Lockheed Martin, told President Biden during a July 26 White House event that a secure supply of chips is essential both to national security and to the aerospace industry’s industrial base. “We got to have confidence in the security of the hardware itself – that it hasn’t been tampered with or degraded when we receive it and put it into our aircraft, missiles, satellites etc,” Taiclet said according to a White House transcript . Along with almost all Democrats, 24 Republicans in the House and 17 in the Senate voted to pass the legislation, called Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act. Critics of the bill say it will contribute to record inflation and have questioned whether cash-rich semiconductor companies should be subsidized. “The five biggest semi-conductor companies that will likely receive the lion’s share of this taxpayer handout, Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, Global Foundries and Samsung, made $70 billion in profits last year,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in a July 15 statement . “Does it sound like these companies really need corporate welfare?” The legislation also authorizes about $100 billion in spending over five years on scientific research.
WAILEA, Hawaii — The Federal Communications Commission’s adoption of a new rule for disposal of low Earth orbit satellites is well-intentioned but pushing the limits of its authority, says the director of the Office of Space Commerce. In a talk at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference here Sept. 30, Richard DalBello said the FCC’s approval of new regulations the day before , intended to limit the creation of orbital debris by requiring satellites in LEO to be deorbited no more than five years after the end of their life, illustrates the gaps in domestic space regulation. “I think the FCC, for their part, has pushed the boundaries of their authorities pretty aggressively,” he said when asked about what agency should have oversight for issues like that, as his office works to create a civil space traffic management capability. “Although I certainly congratulate them on the depth of their intellectual work,” he said of the FCC and its new order, “a lot of the things that they articulated are probably, arguably, outside their job jar.” The FCC’s work on orbital debris regulations reflects the “specific grants of authority” given to various agencies, he noted, that can create gaps. An example he cited is that while his office can regulate various types of remote sensing satellite systems, including optical and radar, it cannot regulate radio-frequency monitoring satellites, such as those operated by HawkEye360, because they are not included in the legislation giving that licensing authority to his office. Efforts are underway by the National Space Council to look at those regulatory gaps as well as identify regulatory frameworks for novel commercial space systems. “We will do what we can in the administration, and ultimately there will be a dialogue with the U.S. Congress, and we’ll see where this ultimately ends up,” he said. DalBello spent most his presentation talking about the ongoing work by his office to establish a civil space traffic management (STM) capability as required by Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018. He said the office is making progress in developing those capabilities, aided by a memorandum of agreement with the Defense Department announced Sept. 9 . That transition of civil STM from the DOD to Commerce will be a gradual process. “I think that there was this idea that there was going to be this magical date when this transition happened,” he said, which is not the case. “What is likely to happen is that we’ll stand up pieces of this capability and, when we’re stable and DOD feels like we’ve got it, they can step back a bit.” The discussions with the Defense Department, he said, include access to data from the Space Surveillance Network, which his office will augment with commercial data buys. He added the Commerce Department had no plans to build its own space situational awareness sensors, focusing instead on analysis and distribution of data from other sources. One issue the office is dealing with, DalBello said, is what kind of basic service it will offer free of charge. “The central message that we’re getting from the commercial sector is, ‘Richard, if all you’re going to do is give us what we’re already getting from the Defense Department, we think that’s not enough.’” He added that, as the office considers what it can provide as a basic service, it is being careful not to step on the toes of companies that would offer more advanced services for a fee. “That line is a little murky,” he said. “We don’t want to compete with young companies. On the other hand, we do want to provide a forward-leaning, technologically superior product to what they’re receiving today.” It’s unlikely, DalBello later said, that the Office of Space Commerce will formally define what falls under the definition of a basic service in the near future, calling it a “fluid” situation as the needs and capabilities of industry evolve. He said he brings up in discussions with companies offering STM services how they define the difference between basic and advanced. “The natural tendency on our team is going to want to get better. So, we’re going to want to do better. And the question is, when does doing better start interfering with somebody else’s valid business plan?”
Astrobotic Technology, a lunar lander developer, has made a formal bid for “substantially all” of the assets of Masten Space Systems, another lander company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last month. In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Delaware Aug. 14, Masten said it received a “stalking horse” bid of $4.2 million for Masten’s assets, including a SpaceX launch credit worth $14 million, from Astrobotic. The agreement, in effect, sets a minimum price for the sale of those assets but does not prevent Masten from seeking higher bids through an auction process that runs through early September. The agreement appears to supersede an earlier agreement between Masten and a third lunar lander company, Intuitive Machines, included in Masten’s Chapter 11 filing July 28 . That agreement covered the SpaceX launch credits alone and Masten did not disclose the value of it in its original filing. Masten said in the filing that it was not until Aug. 3, after the original filing, that it was “seriously engaged in conversations with Astrobotic” that led to the agreement. By Aug. 10, Astrobotic agreed to make the stalking horse bid for “substantially all” of Masten’s assets. The agreement also includes up to $1.4 million in debtor-in-possession financing that can serve as a credit towards the asset purchase. The filing didn’t indicate what assets, if any, might be excluded from the agreement. In addition to its work on the XL-1 lunar lander, Masten also operated vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicles for technology demonstration. Astrobotic, through a spokesperson, declined to comment Aug. 15 on the filing. Potentially the most valuable asset is the SpaceX launch credit. SpaceX terminated an existing launch contract with Masten June 30 because of missed payments but agreed to provide an assignable credit for the amount paid to date. However, the filing states that SpaceX requires the credit go to “certain parties within the CLPS vendor pool,” a reference to NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. That is, the filing notes, “a very small pool of potential assignees.” There are 14 companies eligible to compete for CLPS task orders, with five of them — Astrobotic, Draper, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines and Masten — having active task orders. All but Draper plan to launch at least some of their CLPS missions on SpaceX vehicles. Draper, which won its CLPS award for a lunar farside landing mission July 21 , has not announced its plans for launching the mission. Masten financial woes The filing also outlines in greater detail the series of events that led Masten to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July. The company had, over the years, demonstrated its technical capabilities with its VTVL vehicles, but “from a business perspective, the company was less successful financially,” the filing notes. The company, with less than 25 employees for much of its history, had to scale up when it won its CLPS award in April 2020. That created “financial pressures from which the company could not recover,” the filing states, further complicated by the pandemic. In late 2021, the company tried to raise $60 million but failed to find much interest, which it blamed on being late to the market. “When the Debtor entered the market late in the year, many investors interested in making substantial investments in space companies had already done so.” In March 2022, a space company identified in the filing only as Company A approached Masten about a potential acquisition. That led to a letter of intent at the end of that month on an acquisition, but by late April Company A backed out, citing “substantial liabilities recognized to date and additional future projected losses” from the CLPS mission. A second space company, Company B, approached Masten in May about a potential acquisition or purchase of Masten’s assets through a bankruptcy proceeding known as a Section 363 sale. That company, though, concluded it could not close the deal on the short timeline Masten required. There were also discussions with a Company C, described as another CLPS company, about selling Masten’s CLPS award, but that did not go forward because of uncertainty of NASA approving the transfer. By late July, when Masten filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company was down to $22,000 in cash and had furloughed all but six of its employees. Uncertain future Masten’s bankruptcy filing and potential sale of its assets raise doubts about the future of both its lunar lander program for CLPS and the VTVL flights, which NASA uses through its Flight Opportunities program. NASA CLPS officials said shortly after the Chapter 11 filing that, if Masten was unable to carry out its CLPS task order, they would consider either reassigning the payloads intended to fly on that lander on other missions, or compete a new task order. They added, though, they had not made any decisions yet because they had not been formally notified by Masten that it will be unable to fulfill its task order. The same is true for Masten’s work with the Flight Opportunities program. “We still have task orders with them,” said John Kelly, NASA Flight Opportunities program manager, during a NASA town hall meeting Aug. 8 at the Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. “We will wait and see what happens.” Jim Reuter, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said at an Aug. 3 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s technology committee that there is an “unsustainable” number of companies in the CLPS program. “There’s going to be some sorting out.” He said at the time that he believed that Masten would try to retain its VTVL vehicles in any bankruptcy reorganization. “We do a fair amount with them on that, so that’s where it would really affect us without them,” he said. “But that’s in work.”
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on July 1 launched the USSF-12 mission for the U.S. Space Force. The rocket lifted off at 7:15 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The $1.1 billion USSF-12 mission to geosynchronous Earth orbit carried two satellites: the Wide Field of View (WFOV) missile-warning spacecraft for the U.S. Space Force, and a ring-shaped payload adapter with six classified smallsat experiments for DoD’s Space Test Program. This was the 94th mission of the Atlas 5 rocket. The vehicle’s first stage was powered by an RD-180 engine and four solid rocket boosters, and the Centaur upper stage by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C-1 engine. To encapsulate the satellites, ULA used a 5.4-meter diameter payload fairing made by Beyond Gravity (formerly RUAG Space). USSF-12 was originally scheduled to fly in April but was delayed for undisclosed reasons. A June 30 launch attempt was scrubbed due to bad weather conditions . WFOV is a mid-sized spacecraft made by Millennium Space Systems with an infrared sensor payload developed by L3Harris Technologies under a 2016 contract from the U.S. Air Force. WFOV is a testbed satellite, meaning that it is not part of an operational missile-warning constellation but a stand-alone experiment. At 1,000 kilograms, WFOV is about one-fourth the size of the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) spacecraft that currently perform strategic and tactical missile warning for the Defense Department. ULA will launch the SBIRS-6 satellite in late July. The WFOV satellite, equipped with a staring sensor, will be used to test different ways to collect and report missile launch data. The Space Force said the research will inform the design of future missile-warning satellites. WFOV will be able to continuously monitor up to one-third of the Earth’s surface. The ring-shaped smallsat carrier payload, known as a propulsive ESPA ring, was built by Northrop Grumman. The Space Systems Command in a news release confirmed both satellites on USSF-12 reached orbit six hours after liftoff, a trajectory requiring three Centaur engine burns. ULA used an in-flight power system to keep the WFOV satellite’s batteries topped off throughout the six-hour flight to geosynchronous orbit.
TAMPA, Fla. — Former SES CEO Karim Michel Sabbagh has returned to the space industry to oversee strategy in Europe and the Middle East for E-Space, the connectivity startup plotting a network of hundreds of thousands of satellites. Sabbagh left SES in April 2018 after four years with the Luxembourg-based satellite operator to head Abu Dhabi-based cybersecurity company DarkMatter. He more recently served as a senior advisor on policy matters and investment strategies in the Middle East, E-Space said, and was also engaged in a think tank and academic activities before joining the startup. E-Space CEO Greg Wyler, who founded medium Earth orbit broadband operator O3b Networks now owned by SES, said Sabbagh will help “disrupt traditional NewSpace markets” as the startup plots serial satellite production next year. Sabbagh will support regional corporate development, technical, and manufacturing team activities, the venture said in an Oct. 10 news release. Florida-headquartered E-Space has Rwanda-backed spectrum filings for 300,000 low Earth orbit satellites, which it says would have significantly smaller cross-sections than other constellations to reduce their environmental impact. The startup remains cryptic about the size and exact function of these “multi-application communication satellites” in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). Sabbagh said E-Space’s “focus is directed on enabling an entirely new class of ubiquitous, real-time communications and Internet of Things services to support everything from basic messaging up to advanced voice, video and data communications.” SES took an initial stake in O3b in 2009 and took full ownership of the operator in 2016 during Sabbagh’s tenure as CEO. “I have known Karim since working with SES,” Wyler said in the Oct. 10 news release, “when he had the foresight to see how NGSO systems were going to change the industry.” In addition to overseeing strategy in Europe and the Middle East, E-Space said Sabbagh will support Wyler in defining key programs, operational actions, and general management functions. Wyler has been busy expanding E-Space’s leadership team after announcing $50 million in seed financing in February to fund operations into next year. The venture said in August that it had hired 60 employees , including a chief financial officer and chief satellite systems engineer, with a goal to nearly double its team to 100 before the end of 2022. After deploying its first three prototype satellites in May, E-Space plans to launch another batch of spacecraft on an undisclosed rocket in the first half of 2023, before moving into an initial phase of serial production. Wyler also founded NGSO broadband operator Oneweb, which builds its satellites at a high-volume facility in Florida via a joint venture with Airbus.
Saudi Arabia is the latest nation to sign the Artemis Accords as part of what the White House called “expanding cooperation” with the United States in space. The signing of the Accords, which outline best practices for safe and sustainable space exploration, took place in a virtual ceremony July 14 featuring officials from NASA, the U.S. State Department, Saudi Space Commission and the countries’ embassies. “Today Saudi Arabia adds its voice to a diverse and growing set of nations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an agency statement. “Together we can ensure that humanity’s rapid expansion into space, toward the moon and destinations beyond, will be done peaceably, safely and in full accordance with international law.” “President Biden welcomed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia signing the Artemis Accords and reaffirming its commitment to the responsible, peaceful and sustainable exploration and use of outer space,” the White House said in a statement July 15. That statement outlined outcomes from meetings President Biden held that day in Saudi Arabia with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Those meetings were controversial because of the role the U.S. government believes Mohammed bin Salman played in the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The White House statement indicated additional cooperation is planned between the United States and Saudi Arabia in space: “The U.S. and Saudi Arabia are expanding cooperation in all fields of space exploration, including human spaceflight, Earth observation, commercial and regulatory development, and responsible behavior in outer space.” The statement didn’t elaborate on what that cooperation would entail. Saudi Arabia has a modest space program, with only a few domestically built smallsats. Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, a member of the royal family, flew to space in 1985 as a payload specialist on the STS-51-G shuttle mission, and is the only person from the country to go to space to date. He later served as chairman of the Saudi Space Commission. The country is also home to the headquarters of Arabsat, a regional operator of geostationary communications satellites. Saudi Arabia is the 21st country to join the Artemis Accords, announced by NASA in October 2020 with eight countries as original signatories. The Accords specify best practices for spaceflight that largely build upon the Outer Space Treaty and related agreements.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s $7.3 billion Inmarsat takeover could lead to more expensive and poorer quality Wi-Fi for plane passengers, the U.K.’s competition watchdog said Oct. 6 as it prepared to launch a full-scale probe of the deal. The satellite operators have until Oct. 13 to offer a solution to allay the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) concerns, or face an in-depth investigation that could push the timeframe for closing the deal well into next year. The CMA’s initial assessment found the two satellite operators are “currently the strongest” providers of inflight connectivity (IFC) available to airlines. While SpaceX, OneWeb, and other new players plan to provide IFC services from non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), the CMA is uncertain any of them could effectively compete against the merged company. SpaceX won a contract with Hawaiian Airlines in April to provide Wi-Fi services next year. Still, the regulator believes NGSO operators “face many financial, operational, technical, regulatory, and commercial barriers before they can supply IFC services on board aircraft.” Incentives to overcome these barriers are not unlimited, the CMA added, and NGSO operators still need to see if they can achieve a return on investment in aviation. Because it is difficult for airlines to switch providers once they have installed IFC antennas on their aircraft, the watchdog is also concerned Viasat and Inmarsat could lock out a large part of the customer base before services from NGSO become credible. Viasat and Inmarsat’s IFC businesses are vertically integrated, giving them tighter control of the prices they charge for their services. IFC first-mover Panasonic’s high share of supply is declining because it relies on third-party satellite operators for capacity, according to CMA, “and airlines’ perception that it is expensive and offers old technology.” Anuvu seeks to deploy its own constellation to support IFC services it provides through leasing capacity from third-party satellites; however, the watchdog said it “competes only for short-haul flights and is considered a weak option by airlines.” Intelsat “occupies a modest position in the market,” the regulator continued “and it is uncertain how it will develop in the future” following the operator’s emergence from bankruptcy in February. Intelsat recently signed a global distribution deal with OneWeb to provide multi-orbit inflight connectivity solutions for airlines by 2024. Viasat had said it was possible it could close its acquisition of Inmarsat by the end of 2022, however, an in-depth investigation from the CMA can take several months to complete. California-based Viasat and London-headquartered Inmarsat did not indicate any plan to offer remedies in a joint statement following the regulator’s announcement. “There is no lack of competition in satellite connectivity for the aviation sector,” Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri said. “Strong players are already offering” IFC, he added, and NGSO “players —which already operate over half the satellite broadband capacity available globally—are aggressively and successfully targeting aviation.” He said the merged group “will be well-placed to invest in the technologies needed to meet the growing needs of aviation customers and compete” with NGSO operators and others. Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said the CMA’s decision to open a more in-depth investigation “is not unexpected, even though IFC represents less than 10% of the revenues of the combined company.” He said: “This is still a nascent, dynamic, and rapidly evolving business, with existing providers and extremely well-financed new entrants bringing new technologies and new business models to increase adoption among airlines, passengers, and aircraft types.” The operators announced their proposed deal in November, and it has already secured several key approvals from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, including British national security clearance and permission from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). However, the takeover remains subject to clearances from authorities in addition to the CMA, including the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department. In July, the European Commission said the deal also needs antitrust approval from the European Union.
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat is preparing to deploy the first of two new jamming-resistant broadcast satellites over the Middle East following signal interference in Iran. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13F satellite Oct. 15 at 1:22 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, to geostationary transfer orbit. After separating from the rocket about 35 minutes later, the Airbus-built satellite will use onboard electric propulsion to reach the French operator’s 13 degrees East orbital slot in the coming months. Hotbird 13F, and its twin Hotbird 13G that SpaceX is slated to launch later this year, are due to replace three aging satellites at this orbital position to provide video services over the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa: Hotbird 13B, 13C, and 13E. Together, these three satellites deliver 1,000 television channels to more than 160 million homes to support a broadcast business that — although gradually declining — represented 59% of the 287 million euros Eutelsat made in the three months to end of September. On Oct. 7, Eutelsat said signals originating from within Iran have been jamming foreign broadcasts in the country from Hotbird 13C as authorities there seek to clamp down on mass protests. The company’s Eutelsat 7B satellite positioned at 7 degrees East has also been affected by jamming. Eutelsat’s incoming Hotbird 13F and 13G are based on Airbus’ new Eurostar Neo design, which promises improvements in payload capacity, power efficiency, and thermal control systems. Notably, they also have improved “uplink signal protection and resilience” to resist attempts to interfere with their services, according to Eutelsat. Eutelsat declined to comment on how Hotbird 13F and 13G would guard against signal jamming for security reasons, and Airbus referred questions to Eutelsat. The French operator has previously helped pioneer anti-jamming technology on its fleet to protect its revenues. The Eutelsat 8 West B satellite, launched in 2015 with coverage over the Middle East, carried experimental frequency converters to protect against interference. Eutelsat ordered that satellite from Thales Alenia Space in 2013 after experiencing signal disruption in the region during the Arab Spring anti-government unrest earlier that decade. Hotbird 13F is the first satellite based on Airbus’ Eurostar Neo platform, which was developed with funding from space agencies in Europe and the United Kingdom. Airbus has sold eight satellites based on the platform in total, including a military communications spacecraft for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence. Hotbird 13G arrives by Beluga A few hours following Hotbird 13F’s launch, its twin landed at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center after traveling from France via an Airbus BelugaST. It is the first Beluga to visit the United States since the 2009 delivery of Europe’s Tranquility module for a Space Shuttle launch to the International Space Station. Large geostationary satellites usually travel internationally on large Ukrainian Antonov aircraft, or slower-moving boats amid the disruption caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Airbus started offering outsized freight transportation in January for customers with its fleet of five BelugaST aircraft, which until recently were dedicated to serving the manufacturer’s inter-site transportation of large aircraft sections. These internal needs are being progressively transferred to new, larger, BelugaXL aircraft to make BelugaST available for commercial transport needs.
A large ship that Blue Origin planned to convert into a landing platform for New Glenn boosters is instead being sent to the scrapyard as the company changes its recovery plans. Blue Origin acquired the Stena Freighter , a roll-on, roll-off cargo ship, in 2018. The company brought the ship to the Port of Pensacola in Florida to convert it into a landing platform for New Glenn first stages, and renamed the ship Jacklyn , after the mother of company founder Jeff Bezos, in late 2020. Company executives touted the benefits of using a large ship like Jacklyn , more than 180 meters long and 25 meters across, to serve as a landing platform for New Glenn boosters, The ship could be underway during landings and provide greater stability in high seas than the autonomous droneships that SpaceX uses for landing Falcon boosters. However, Blue Origin appeared to reconsider that approach earlier this year. Local media reported in April that the company appeared to be reevaluating the conversion of Jacklyn into a landing platform , although the company said at the time it had made no decisions about whether to continue that work. On Aug. 14, Jacklyn was towed from the Port of Pensacola, bound for Brownsville, Texas. In a video released by the port , Clark Merritt, port director, said the ship would be scrapped in Brownsville because the process of converting the ship into a landing platform had gone too far to convert it back to a cargo vessel, but did not state why the conversion had stopped. “Blue Origin is committed to safe and cost-effective access to space, and after careful consideration have made the decision to transition away from the Jacklyn as a landing solution,” a company spokesperson said Aug. 15. Blue Origin did not disclose what alternatives it is considering, but is rumored to be considering versions of the barges used by SpaceX. The first New Glenn is expected some time in 2023, although the company has not provided a recent update on progress towards that first launch. Blue Origin did not disclose how much it spent acquiring and converting Jacklyn before deciding to scrap it. Merritt said in the video that “tens of millions of dollars of work” was carried out at the port by Offshore Inland, the company responsible for the conversion, employing up to 150 people at its peak. Jacklyn is scheduled to arrive at the Port of Brownsville Aug. 19, according to a vessel arrival chart by the port , which notes the ship will be scrapped. The port, ironically, is a short distance from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, where the company is working on its Starship launch system.
TAMPA, Fla. — A technical issue likely knocked Iran’s Press TV temporarily off the air last week, Eutelsat said as the French satellite operator calls on partners to stop broadcasting the news channel to comply with European sanctions. The Iranian state-owned news network lashed out at Eutelsat Dec. 7 via Twitter and an article — which has since been updated — after losing service for what it described as an attack on free speech. Press TV initially said Eutelsat had “taken Press TV off air” before updating the article’s text to instead focus on a notification about plans to drop the channel without mentioning the service outage. Daphne Joseph-Gabriel, Eutelsat’s corporate communications officer, said the service interruption was likely caused by “a technical incident on the feeder signal” and therefore not in its control. “In the case at hand, Eutelsat does not have any direct commercial relationship with PressTV,” Joseph-Gabriel told SpaceNews via email. “It is therefore up to its distributors and partners to comply with the sanctions-related provisions of its contracts.” Eutelsat sent out an official request to immediately cease broadcasting Press TV after the Council of the European Union singled the channel out in a Nov. 14 round of sanctions against Iran. The Council said the EU holds Press TV “responsible for producing and broadcasting the forced confessions of detainees” amid widespread unrest in Iran following the death of a woman while in police custody. Depending on how a channel is uplinked, Joseph-Gabriel said in some cases only the broadcaster has the ability to discontinue the service of a specific channel. “In such cases, Eutelsat is not able to remove the channels without impacting other legitimate channels on the same transponder that are not targeted by sanctions,” she said. She said the French operator “is closely monitoring the situation” and will “consider further action accordingly.” Satellite broadcasters straddle a fine line between facilitating free speech and promoting propaganda. It is an issue that continues to play out in Russia , where Eutelsat is under pressure to curb broadcasts of pro-Kremlin content amid the country’s war in Ukraine. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Kelly Hammett, former head of the Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate, is now director of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. Hammett will lead the Space Force organization known as the Space RCO, located at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. The office procures space technologies and manages classified programs for the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command. During more than two decades at AFRL, Hammett worked on programs like high-power lasers and high power microwave developments, and oversaw the the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing site known as AMOS. AFRL’s directed energy division has 1,200 employees and an annual budget of $355 million. In a statement June 13, Hammett said: “I’m really excited about the new opportunity and the trust being placed in me to lead the Space RCO team as they deliver new capabilities to the U.S. Space Force that are desperately needed to fill important warfighter gaps.”
SAN FRANCISCO – The SmallSat Alliance is inviting U.S. university students to propose space-related solutions for formidable technical and policy challenges as part of the Collegiate Space Competition . The first of what is expected to become an annual competition focuses on two topics: Earth science and environmental monitoring as well as space congestion and orbital debris. Entries must be submitted by May 8, 2023. First, second and third place winners in technical and nontechnical categories will receive cash prizes. The Collegiate Space Competition is designed to bolster space-sector recruiting and to publicize the wide range of skills and talents space companies need. “Many college students are not aware of this whole sector of the economy,” said SmallSat Alliance Chairman Chuck Beames. While industry initiatives often focus on connecting space companies with students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math, “there’s also a huge need in the space business for nontechnical people,” Beames said. “We need liberal arts majors. We need business majors.” On the policy front, for example, the Collegiate Space Competition notes that small satellites measure and monitor a variety of environmental conditions from soil moisture to air pollution. It then asks competitors to suggest ways state and local governments could take advantage of the small satellite sector to prepare for changing environmental conditions. For technical entries, the competition poses questions about the role of small satellites in assessing soil moisture and nitrogen levels. It also asks how space data can help mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. Regarding orbital congestion, the Collegiate Space Competition asks whether the U.S. government should play a role in regulating private-sector access to orbital slots. And if so, what kind of regulatory and government model would ensure that orbital slots are allocated equitably worldwide? Technical competitors, meanwhile, are asked to provide “a realistic and environmentally safe solution to dispose of old rocket and satellite debris.” Through the Collegiate Space Competition, the SmallSat Alliance intends to raise the profile of the entrepreneurial space sector for students attending minority-serving institutions including historically black colleges and universities. “There’s a great amount of talent there,” Beames said. “I want them to become aware of this sector of the economy.”
TAMPA, Fla. — 3D printing specialist Swissto12 said Nov. 7 it has sold its first small satellite to Intelsat for a launch to geostationary orbit (GEO) in 2025. Intelsat 45 (IS-45) will be based on Swissto12’s HummingSat satellite platform, which at about the size of a dishwasher is one-tenth the size of conventional GEO satellites. At just one cubic meter in volume, Swissto12 CEO Emile de Rijk said HummingSats are “at least 3 times cheaper” than larger telecoms commercial satellites in GEO. HummingSats will also have the same coverage area as traditional spacecraft in GEO, de Rijk said via email, although with less capacity because of their reduced space for transponders and power. Intelsat 45 will have 12 Ku-band transponders, about a fourth as many as a classic mid-sized Intelsat satellite. Jean-Luc Foreliger, Intelsat’s senior vice president of space systems, said Intelsat 45 will complement the larger satellites in its fleet by providing services for regional direct-to-home broadcasts and government needs. “We’ve identified a couple of locations, and as we get closer to launch we’ll decide which location to go to,” he said in a Nov. 7 media call announcing the order. The European Space Agency helped Swissto12 develop HummingSat and in July said the platform had passed its systems requirements review. The Swiss company has never built a commercial satellite, and to date has only produced parts of them with additive manufacturing, including radio frequency payload modules and thermal subsystem products. Satellite makers are increasingly adopting 3D printing technology because it can help accelerate production, cut costs, and improve performance. But while Swissto12 plans to leverage its expertise in this area for HummingSat, de Rijk said it will reuse “significant products and subsystems that bear GEO heritage and so some units, products and subsystems” will not be 3D-printed. News of the company’s first commercial satellite customer comes after it announced plans last year to collaborate with U.S.-based GEO smallsat manufacturing startup Saturn Satellite Network. However, de Rijk said Saturn is not working on Intelsat 45. Other startups see opportunities for small satellites in GEO that can help operators plug regional gaps in their constellations — or provide targeted services in specific areas. San Francisco-based Astranis is counting down to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch late this year of its first GEO smallsat, which telco Pacific Dataport Inc (PDI) plans to use for broadband coverage over Alaska. The satellite for PDI, called Arcturus, will tag along as a secondary payload with Viasat’s first ViaSat-3 satellite as the rocket’s primary passenger.
TAMPA, Fla. — Software startup Epsilon3 said June 20 it has raised $15 million to expand its suite of space project management solutions. Existing investor Lux Capital led the Series A funding round to support Epsilon3’s web-based platform, which provides collaboration tools that are tailor-made for spacecraft manufacturing and operations. Engineering and operational teams behind a fifth of orbital launches from the United States in the year to date used Epsilon3 software, according to chief operating officer Max Mednik, who co-founded the startup 18 months ago. Mednik said Epsilon3 has built up a “mix of space startups and established large companies” as customers, including Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, Sierra Space and the U.S. Space Force. He said the Los Angeles-based venture is also “supporting a multi-thousand person launch company” in the U.S., which he did not name, and is “in discussions with some of the large defense primes who are interested in using our software and evaluating it now.” Epsilon3’s platform aims to replace applications including word processing software and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for managing complex spacecraft-specific testing and operational workflows. First Resonance, a startup founded by former SpaceX engineers that is also based in Los Angeles, has developed a collaborative software platform with a similar purpose. In December 2021, First Resonance announced it had raised $14 million in a Series A round led by venture capital firm Craft Ventures to scale up its business. Mednik said Epsilon3 is mainly focused on integration, testing and operational workflows, whereas First Resonance is more focused on manufacturing tasks earlier in the process lifecycle. “Some of our customers actually use both First Resonance and Epsilon3, and we are looking forward to building an integration with them in the future so customers can build their hardware on First Resonance and then integrate and operate it using Epsilon3,” he said. Epsilon3 is led by CEO Laura Crabtree, who worked as a mission operations engineer at SpaceX for more than a decade before co-founding the venture. The startup plans to use proceeds from its latest funding round to hire more engineers to build new software products, including analytical tools for making workflows more efficient. “The next major milestone is an interconnected set of products that helps our customers run their testing and operations even more efficiently and in a way that’s synchronized to the other tools they’re using,” Mednik said. Epsilon3 was one of 10 startups that cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services chose to join its month-long space accelerator program in June. The accelerator course includes up to $100,000 in cloud networking technical services and resources. Early-stage investors Moore Strategic Ventures, Y Combinator and MaC Venture Capital also participated in Epsilon3’s Series A round, which Mednik said brings its total funding to more than $18 million.
Northrop Grumman announced July 5 it selected Airbus as its satellite bus supplier for the U.S. Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit constellation. Northrop Grumman in February won a $692 million contract from SDA, one of three companies selected by the Pentagon’s space agency to each produce 42 satellites projected to launch in 2024. Airbus U.S. Space and Defense, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, will produce satellite buses for the Transport Layer Tranche 1, a mesh network of small satellites to support military communications, surveillance and tracking of enemy targets. SDA plans to launch Tranche 1 satellites in late 2024. Northrop Grumman will use the Airbus Arrow 450, a new commercial platform that will be produced at the Airbus OneWeb Satellites factory in Merritt Island, Florida. The factory is an Airbus-OneWeb joint venture. The Arrow 450 bus — designed to be scaled from 300 kilograms to 500 kilograms — is significantly larger than the Arrow 150 used in the OneWeb constellation. Northrop Grumman is the company’s first customer for the larger bus, Debra Facktor, head of U.S. space systems at Airbus U.S. Space and Defense, told SpaceNews. The first Arrow 450 is scheduled to roll off the assembly line by fall 2023, Facktor said. “ We’ve been working on the design for a while,” she added. “And we are also adapting the factory to accommodate a higher level of security and processing required for U.S. military satellites.” Airbus has produced over 400 buses for OneWeb, and more are being manufactured to complete the planned 648-satellite constellation. Facktor said the company plans to leverage the OneWeb supply chain and vendors as much as possible for the larger Arrow 450. 
 Under the contract with Northrop Grumman, Airbus will provide buses as well as integration, testing, launch support and space vehicle commissioning services. “We are pleased to have Airbus U.S. as one of our key commercial suppliers for this significant national security mission,” said Blake Bullock, Northrop Grumman’s vice president of communication and strategic space systems. For the Tranche 1 contract, Northrop Grumman will build satellites integrating the Airbus platform with government and industry payloads, including optical communications terminals made by Mynaric . The other two prime contractors for Tranche 1 are Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems. Lockheed Martin will be using Terran Orbital satellite buses. York Space manufactures its own buses in-house. Facktor said Airbus was aligned with other prime contractors besides Northrop Grumman as a supplier of satellite buses for the SDA constellation, but could not say which ones due to nondisclosure agreements. Airbus in 2020 bid as a prime contractor to supply SDA missile-tracking satellites but lost out to L3Harris and SpaceX . Following that loss, Airbus decided to shift gears and position itself as a merchant supplier of commodity buses that could be used by any SDA prime contractor. “This time, we bid only as a sub and as a partner because we realized that what we’re really good at is leveraging the factory and the manufacturing, and then combining that with DoD requirements,” Facktor said. “What we’re doing is really sticking to a commercial way of doing business.” The Arrow 450 bus, she said, has been offered to multiple potential buyers, she added. “We have various proposals in various stages of consideration.”
Keeping close tabs on satellites and their increasingly crowded orbits requires exquisite spatial data that multiple startups say can only be gained from space. At least eight early-stage companies in North America, Europe, and Australia have secured funds for space-based systems they say will be needed to provide more accurate, complete and reliable information about objects in space. Some of these startups are chasing anticipated demand for guiding on-orbit servicers. Others see more potential in providing intricately detailed maps and trajectories of satellites, rocket stages and other objects across the near-space landscape. Some envisage deploying hundreds of dedicated space situational awareness (SSA) satellites, whereas others opt to deploy their sensors on third-party spacecraft. But while these early-stage ventures offer different solutions for improved SSA, they all believe the ground-based telescopes and radar currently used to keep tabs on-orbit will need an in-space assist to meet future demand. Orbital SSA advocates say the tens of thousands of satellites bound for low Earth orbit (LEO) over the next decade will strain existing ground capabilities. Debris-causing events in LEO, such as November’s Russian anti-satellite weapon test, also compound the issue. The U.S. Department of Defense’s ground-based Space Surveillance Network undergirds one of the most comprehensive catalogs of orbital observations. DoD’s publicly accessible Space-Track.org database provides information about objects that are 10 centimeters or larger, and employs statistical models to infer the population of smaller objects. This means only 4% of current objects in LEO are detected, said Julien Cantegreil, CEO of French satellite-based SSA startup SpaceAble. Rapidly expanding LEO constellations like Starlink and OneWeb will “make it more difficult and costly” for terrestrial networks to pinpoint space objects and predict conjunctions, he says. The U.S. space catalog’s use of statistical models that only provide information on the localization and trajectories of objects also misses a “wide range of other data,” which Cantegreil says is “crucial in the conduct of space activities.” This includes dynamic radiation, energetic atomic particles and tiny particulates such as micrometeoroids and orbital debris. Operating in the vacuum of space nearer to the action and free from atmospheric distortion, sensors on satellites, orbital SSA advocates say, would be able to monitor and track much smaller objects than what can currently be seen from the ground. Even objects smaller than 10 centimeters can have the energy in orbit to cause unrepairable damage if they collide with satellites or other spacecraft. And while Cantegreil says the U.S. government provides the highest quality SSA information, he said the data is filtered by the Department of Defense before transmission. “Many spatial data users have raised concerns regarding the inability to verify the information provided and criticized the lack of transparency and standards related to the exact process by which the U.S. government provides information on an object’s location and processes collision assessment or warning,” Cantegreil said. SSA provider LeoLabs, a seven-year-old company based in Menlo Park, California, has been busy expanding its worldwide network of radars to improve LEO monitoring capabilities from the ground. Dan Ceperley, LeoLabs founder and CEO, said the company has surpassed the U.S. government over the past year in the overall volume of daily measurements collected. This summer, Ceperley said LeoLabs will also be able to start cataloging objects smaller than 10 centimeters for the first time. LeoLabs serves its customers — including operators accounting for around two-thirds of the satellites currently in LEO — by providing alerts when potential conjunctions are detected and assessing planned maneuvers to ensure they do not lead to a collision. Its growing network of ground-based radars also track rocket launches and the atmospheric reentry of rocket stages and satellites. LeoLabs currently has radars in Texas, Alaska, Costa Rica, and New Zealand with new sites under development in Western Australia and the Azores. “For our mission at LeoLabs, which is to track and catalog hundreds of thousands of objects in LEO multiple times per day every day, we utilize ground-based, phased-array radar systems because they are by far the best choice for this effort,” Ceperley said via email. He added: “You simply can’t match the power, reliability, and performance of these systems which operate around the clock 24/7/365 through any weather and lighting conditions, and have multi-decade operational lifetimes that will vastly exceed that of satellites performing the same missions. “With ground-based systems, we can also service, repair, and upgrade our equipment over time, and at a vastly lower cost than space-based systems. “Plus, you eliminate the cost and complexity of having to launch to space, and there’s always a non-zero chance that any satellite — even one designed to do SSA — can itself get hit by a piece of space debris and cause more damage to the surrounding environment.” Relative to the U.S. government’s Space Surveillance Network, Ceperley says LeoLabs offers more transparency and shows “all of our work” to foster trust and cooperation. While a ground site is fixed and far from objects in orbit compared with space-based systems, he said this is ultimately a positive for sites that can sit still while objects in LEO precess them. Ground systems have access to more power than those in space, he says, and also benefit from comparatively “massive computational and communications capabilities” that make them significantly more efficient than orbital assets. Paris-based Euroconsult forecasts the commercial SSA market — combining space and terrestrial systems — will grow from $82 million in 2022 to about $1.4 billion over the next 10 years. Maxime Puteaux, a Euroconsult principal advisor, said the research and consulting firm does not yet break down this forecast into ground and space-based revenues, but sees demand growing for both. Although the SSA market is still in its infancy with low solution uptake and early-stage levels of technology, Puteaux sees “dramatic” sensor hardware and software improvements in the coming years that will increase performance and lower costs. More satellites in orbit and several debris-causing events in LEO are driving the need for SSA services, he said, and geopolitical tensions are also increasing demand for tracking objects in GEO. Canada’s NorthStar Earth & Space is by far the best-funded of the bunch after raising more than $90 million to date. NorthStar announced March 16 it had hired LEO satellite operator Spire to develop three SSA-sensor-equipped 12-unit cubesats for a launch in 2023. The Canadian company had previously ordered three larger SSA satellites from Thales Alenia Space, which is working in cooperation with LeoStella. Those satellites were originally slated to launch in 2022, but NorthStar spokesperson Jean-Philippe Arseneau said they are now targeting the second quarter of 2023. NorthStar aims to deploy a full constellation of 24 satellites, which Arseneau says will work with third-party ground systems to enable “simultaneous monitoring of all near-Earth orbits,” including highly elliptical orbit (HEO). He says the constellation will be able to track objects down to five centimeters in LEO, to 10 centimeters in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and 40 centimeters in geostationary orbit (GEO). The minimum object size for HEO depends on its altitude when it is observed, and will in general vary between 10-40 centimeters. Satellite operator SES is working with NorthStar to develop data products to support its fleet of satellites in MEO and GEO. SES said this spring it plans to use NorthStar’s SSA data as part of its commitments to space sustainability. NorthStar plans to set up European headquarters in Luxembourg, where SES is based, after the country’s government-backed venture capital fund joined a $45 million investment round. The Canadian company also has plans for 40 follow-on spacecraft with infrared and hyperspectral sensors that will focus on monitoring Earth, giving NorthStar another revenue stream besides SSA. NorthStar secured Canadian government funding last year to develop an airborne hyperspectral sensor system to monitor sensitive marine and coastal environments. Alexandria, Virginia-based Scout deployed its first and so far only SSA payload to orbit in July 2021 when it launched onboard Tanker-001 Tenzing, Orbit Fab’s satellite refueling demo spacecraft. The Scout-Vision payload enables Tenzing to passively detect, identify, and model objects it encounters in LEO from as far as two kilometers away. Eric Ingram, Scout’s CEO and co-founder, said its sensors are designed to “integrate seamlessly” to give other blind spacecraft the ability to observe their surroundings. He said the company secured its first commercial customer late last year in Momentus, an in-space transportation company that selected Scout to deliver spacecraft vision capabilities for its upcoming missions. Momentus’ first Vigoride space tug, which launched May 25 on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission, did not carry a Scout-Vision payload. A Scout-Vision is slated to fly on the next Momentus Vigoride mission, which has not yet confirmed a launch date. “Companies like [debris removal startup] Astroscale and Momentus are developing and will be providing crucial on-orbit services for the industry and Scout can provide these service providers with much better data and imagery resolutions than the traditional ground-based networks can — because we are space-based,” Ingram said. Scout also plans to operate its own six-unit cubesats named OVER-Sat (Oversight Visuals and External Reference-Sat) from next year, which will help it build a space object catalog using on-board cameras and AI-based computing. Scout-Vision will be a key subsystem for its first OVER-Sat mission slated in the second quarter of 2023. “We estimate we’ll have 100+ OVER-Sat systems in operation by 2026, which will provide continuous observation and coverage of low Earth orbit,” Ingram said. Scout has raised $1.5 million to date, and Ingram said it is in the middle of a seed round that he expects to complete by the third quarter of 2022. In November, Scout won a $50,000 U.S. Air Force contract to demonstrate that data collected in space can improve debris tracking and collision predictions. Australia’s High Earth Orbit Robotics is already providing a gallery of objects in orbit that it compiles by commandeering a partner’s Earth-observation satellite when it is not being used, tilting it, and controlling an onboard camera to picture objects it flies past. HEO Robotics has access to 28 satellites today, according to CEO and co-founder William Crowe. “From late 2022, we will be launching our own Holmes imaging systems as hosted payloads on spacecraft that wouldn’t otherwise have a camera that meets our requirements,” he said. Examples include communications satellites and orbital transfer vehicles. “This will allow us to provide coverage where there are no existing Earth observation satellites today, such as high LEO, MEO and GEO,” he said. He said HEO Robotics has signed “with two suppliers and are in final discussions with several more” to host its sensors. One of these is Australian startup Space Machines Company, which announced May 18 it had secured an April 2023 launch for its Optimus-1 Orbital Transport Vehicle. HEO Robotics does not plan to develop its own satellites while there are other options. Crowe said the startup secured seed funding in 2021 that enabled it to build out its HEO Inspect software suite and services, and the majority of its revenues are currently coming from government customers. He said its growing database of flyby inspections includes observations such as an object’s external shape, size, orientation, signs of damage, color and what is turned on or off on a satellite. “We have access to 28 cameras on-orbit today, but believe the number of cameras for ubiquitous coverage of all Earth orbits in 10 years is in the range of 2,500,” he said. “As humanity extends space-based activities to other physical regimes of space, we’ll extend coverage too.” Crowe says its inspection service could also spare satellite operators the expense of including barely used sensors on their satellites. “For example, if an operator has a camera to check deployment of a boom just one time, they should remove that subsystem and the associated engineering complexity and have a flyby inspection instead,” he said. India-based Digantara is planning to deploy at least 40 satellites over the next three years in LEO to track objects as small as a centimeter. The startup says its use of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors sets it apart from the pack, and will enable it to track objects with greater precision in sunlight and eclipse phases. Digantara’s LIDAR sensors also aim to provide near-real-time space weather data that, according to business and strategy head Shreyas Mirji, will be important for fine-tuning object trajectory predictions and monitoring a spacecraft’s health. “We initially sought to address the lack of data for 96 percent of the LEO objects that currently remain untracked,” Mirji said via email. “As we dug deeper into the problem, we realised that there was a lack in Space Weather Data that had direct implications on Space Situational Awareness.” Digantara also seeks to place sensors on partner satellites for enhanced data collection. Mirji said the startup has received $2.5 million in seed funding and $150,000 in grants to date. These funds are supporting a technology demonstrator that he said Digantara plans to deploy in the first quarter of 2023, although it has not yet secured a launch contract. “We are currently working with a handful of agencies and governments on SSA and have on-boarded a beta cohort of commercial space stakeholders including Telespazio, and a megaconstellation operator on building effective SSA data products,” Mirji said. These stakeholders will get a year of free access to data from Digantara’s demo satellite. In the future, Digantara plans to extend its presence to MEO and GEO. “With increased space applications, most spacefaring nations now consider space to be the fourth operational domain, and in order to be self-sufficient, every nation wants to have a strong sovereign capability when it comes to SSA,” he added. Darmstadt, Germany-based Vyoma is already providing tracking services and data quality assessments to European defense customers through third-party ground-based networks. However, Vyoma CEO Stefan Frey says even the best-performing telescopes in its network can only observe objects down 5-10 centimeters in size in LEO, and down to around 50-centimeters in GEO. This can also only be achieved “via dedicated target tracking” of objects in certain positions and under clear atmospheric conditions. Vyoma is raising a Series A round to fund two pilot microsatellites for a launch toward the end of 2023. Its plans call for another 10 satellites over the following 18 months for a constellation Frey says will work semi-autonomously to catalog objects as small as one centimeter. He said via email the finished system will give Vyoma “the most comprehensive catalogue of man-made space objects, providing the most complete space safety and automation services for” LEO, MEO, and GEO orbits.” Frey said Vyoma plans to use its satellites to detect near-Earth asteroids and eventually extend its services to include cislunar space, the vast area between the Earth and the moon. British startup Odin Space is focused on tracking, mapping and characterizing sub-centimeter debris across LEO and GEO. “This size range is too small for current solutions, yet still carries the energy of a bullet,” CEO James New said. But instead of putting up its own satellites, Odin Space aims to deploy on-orbit detectors called ODIN, or Orbital Debris Impact Network, as hosted payloads. “This avoids the need to launch dedicated satellites that ultimately generate more debris and add to the problem,” New said. “We see a certain irony in that approach.” He said Odin Space is close to signing a deal to add an ODIN detector capable of tracking objects as small as 0.1 millimeters on another company’s payload, which he did not name but said it plans to launch in the first quarter of 2023. “We see a future where every new satellite hosts an ODIN detector,” New said. “They are lightweight, cost less than a solar array, and require very little power.” Odin Space plans to raise a seed round later this year after raising $500,000 in pre-seed funding and securing two grants from the UK Space Agency. French startup SpaceAble’s in-space SSA strategy is built around an inspection satellite called The Orbiter that would be assigned to each orbital plane in a customer’s constellation to rendezvous and assess their satellites on-demand. “The data collected during the inspections will complete the health check of the client’s satellites, currently established from telemetry,” SpaceAble CEO and founder Julien Cantegreil said, “and will make it possible to clearly increase the reliability of space missions.” Cantegreil says observing satellites close-up would enable their operators to optimize future generations of constellations, while helping them prevent debris-causing failures. SpaceAble, which has raised roughly $5 million from investors and grants, also aims to use The Orbiter to assist de-orbit missions. The startup is “still looking for the right satellite to inspect” for a 2024 demo mission that would preceed a 2025 launch of its first operational satellite. The startup is also developing a LEO data collection software platform called ISSAN that uses artificial intelligence and blockchain-enabled decentralized storage for security. Space underwriter XL AXA announced a partnership with Spaceable in April 2021 that includes access to ISSAN’s space traffic management interface, which XL AXA said will enhance its insurance products for satellite operators. U.S.-based Privateer is the latest startup to announce plans to improve SSA with satellites, although they remain shrouded in secrecy despite coming out of stealth mode in March. The venture is backed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Moriba Jah, Privateer’s chief scientific adviser, said in a Space.com interview published in November that Privateer was looking at gradually deploying several hundred satellites to map objects in orbit. Jah had developed a visualization tool before he joined Privateer called AstriaGraph that pools SSA data from multiple sources, and has said this platform provides the foundation for Privateer’s efforts. Privateer unveiled its first product March 1 with a web application based on AstriaGraph called Wayfinder, a visualization tool offered partly for free that combines data from U.S. Space Command and other sources, including data provided directly by satellite operators. Privateer partnered with Swiss watchmaker Omega to launch and promote the tool. Privateer’s first satellite, a sensor-laden, three-unit cubesat called Pono-1 that will mostly serve as a technology demonstrator, is slated to launch later this year. Alex Fielding, Privateer’s CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews in March that the venture is interested in flying future systems as hosted payloads on other satellites rather than building its own constellation. “We really don’t want to create more stuff in space,” he said. Fielding said Privateer “will be announcing our full constellation plan soon,” in response to a request to comment for this article. “Currently, our initial focus is on much-needed enhancements to the tracking and knowledge of all space objects to provide an information-oriented mapping of the space environment to ensure safety and sustainability for space providers,” he said. While the venture does not disclose its customers, he said: “We work with commercial customers and friendly governments alike.” This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX started accepting preorders Tuesday from high-flying private jet owners willing to pay a hefty price to receive high-speed Starlink services in the air. Starlink Aviation will cost between $12,500 and $25,000 per month to deliver up to 350 megabits per second (Mbps) low-latency broadband per plane, on top of a one-time $150,000 hardware fee for an “Aero Terminal” to access the satellite broadband network. That compares to $5,000 per month and a one-time $10,000 hardware cost for similar speeds from Starlink’s maritime service that launched in July. In the U.S., Starlink’s standard residential service charges customers $110 per month and $599 for hardware for up to 200 Mbps download speeds. SpaceX says Starlink will enable jetsetters to engage in video calls, online gaming, and other activities “previously not functional” in flight. “Internet in airplanes will feel same as if you were accessing Internet at home!” Musk tweeted. According to Musk, the company was able to conduct a “video call on one airplane aloft to Starlink on another, far away, airplane aloft” successfully. Starlink’s rapidly expanding satellite constellation is in low Earth orbit (LEO), enabling latency as low as 20 milliseconds compared to the 600-millisecond signal lag typical of geostationary (GEO) satellites orbiting 70 times higher. A LEO network can also extend coverage to polar regions that typically can’t be reached by the GEO satellites used by today’s inflight connectivity (IFC) providers. Jet service provider JSX has said it plans to offer Starlink on its planes this year, and Hawaiian Airlines expects to provide the service on larger aircraft for transpacific flights to and from Hawaii in 2023. For Starlink Aviation, SpaceX said work is underway to obtain Federal Aviation Administration licenses to enable the services on 12 types of small jets, including the ERJ-135 and ERJ-145 aircraft that JSX uses. SpaceX has started accepting $5,000 deposits for Starlink Aviation and expects to begin deliveries in the middle of 2023. The Aero Terminal’s $150,000 fee does not include installation, which SpaceX says could be installed by the aircraft’s current maintenance organization. “Starlink’s simplified design enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks,” the company said. Starlink Aviation hardware is under warranty for as long as a subscription is active, according to SpaceX, and all plans are free from data usage limits and are not tied to long-term contracts. Meanwhile, Starlink’s LEO broadband rival OneWeb has been securing aviation partnerships for a network that achieved 260 Mbps download speeds during tests in July, including with inflight connectivity (IFC) provider Gogo to connect business jets in 2024. OneWeb also has a global distribution deal with GEO fleet operator Intelsat that aims to provide airlines with multi-orbit connectivity solutions. The British startup announced a similar arrangement Oct. 18 with Panasonic Avionics, an IFC pioneer that leases all of its satellite capacity from multiple GEO operators, including Intelsat. More than three-quarters of the commercial long-haul market that offers Wi-Fi on planes use services from Panasonic or Intelsat , according to their IFC rival Viasat. However, the market is transforming as Viasat and Inmarsat seek to consolidate their IFC businesses , Starlink gains traction, and other entrants plot their own LEO networks.
TAMPA, Fla. — Canada’s Kepler Communications said June 30 it plans to use D-Orbit’s orbital transfer vehicle for the next two satellites in its low-data-rate constellation. The Kepler-20 and Kepler-21 satellites will be boarded on the Italian space logistics company’s ION Satellite Carrier, which has booked a flight in the first quarter of 2023 on a rocket the companies declined to disclose. After separating from the launch vehicle, D-Orbit intends to use ION to drop Kepler’s satellites off at a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) between 500 and 600 kilometers. Each satellite is the size of six cubesats, a standard smallsat form factor measuring 10 centimeters on each side. ION and orbital transfer vehicles developed by other companies offer operational efficiencies for satellite operators, enabling them to save fuel by ferrying their spacecraft to custom orbits post-launch. While D-Orbit spokesperson Elena Ceraso declined to identify the launch vehicle that will take ION to orbit, she said it is not the mission the company announced June 22 with German startup Isar Aerospace . Kepler currently operates 19 satellites to provide connectivity to devices out of range of terrestrial networks. The first two were three-unit cubesats, Kepler chief technology officer Wen Chong said, and the remaining 17 are six-unit spacecraft. As with two of the four Kepler satellites that launched Jan. 13 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, he said Kepler-20 and Kepler-21 will have an S-band terminal to test inter-satellite links. Kepler plans to use inter-satellite links to tap into a data-relay constellation of larger satellites it aims to start deploying early next year. The Canadian company started testing inter-satellite links earlier this year for its Aether data relay network. In October 2020, Kepler announced an agreement to use Momentus Space’s Vigoride orbital transfer vehicle to deploy two satellites in 2021. However, Momentus Space ran into technical and regulatory delays that ultimately saw the company launch its first Vigoride mission May 25 on a Falcon 9, without Kepler onboard. Momentus started trading shares on Nasdaq in August after merging with Stable Road Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). D-Orbit announced its own SPAC merger plan in January to become a public company in the third quarter of 2022.
TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk Global said it is still waiting for Spaceflight to rebook a flight for the second commercial satellite in its cellphone-compatible broadband network, four months after the launch services provider’s space tug was kicked off a SpaceX mission. Lynk-07 was supposed to launch onboard Spaceflight’s Sherpa orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) in April on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission, Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller told SpaceNews. However, SpaceX decided in March to remove Sherpa from its Transporter 4 mission following concerns about environmental factors affecting the satellites installed on the OTV. SpaceX also said it would no longer work with Spaceflight on future rideshare missions after launching those remaining on its manifest. Spaceflight, which used another variant of Sherpa to deploy satellites on SpaceX’s Transporter 5 mission in May, said March 21 that it had found alternative rides for all its customers who could not fly on Transporter 4. Jodi Sorensen, Spaceflight’s marketing vice president, said July 8 that Spaceflight is currently working with SpaceX on “several more missions” following Transporter 5. “Those haven’t all been disclosed yet, but several will feature our Sherpa OTVs, including the GeoPathfinder mission slated for next year,” Sorensen said. Sorensen said contracts and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) with Lynk Global prevent Spaceflight from discussing efforts to rebook the company on another flight, saying she is “not at liberty to share launch plan details about our customers,” and that “they’ll have to provide that themselves.” Miller said via email: “It has been 4 months since Spaceflight was booted off the flight in March, and they have not found us a reflight.” He said one option to secure an alternative launch for Lynk-07 this year “is to buy direct from SpaceX, but that is a lot more expensive.” Virginia-based Lynk Global has directly booked a SpaceX launch in November for its third and fourth commercial satellites. The November mission will use “a new deployer system that is designed to carry up to a half dozen of Lynk’s satellites,” he said. “Lynk will be the integrator on that launch.” Funding boost Lynk Global announced July 5 that it had secured funding from Virginia Venture Partners, the equity investment arm of Virginia’s non-profit Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), to accelerate its initial commercial services launch in late 2022. Miller said Lynk Global secured $1 million in funding — the first time VIPC has decided to invest up to its maximum funding cap in a single transaction — which will be used to build and integrate its third and fourth commercial satellites. VIPC had also invested $50,000 in the startup’s seed-stage several years ago. Separately, Lynk Global announced July 6 that it had won this year’s car2satellite innovation challenge run by automaker Mercedes Benz and Germany’s space agency. Competition winners receive technological and economic support in addition to access to a worldwide network of contacts. Commercial services this year Lynk Tower 1, Lynk Global’s first commercial satellite, was launched in SpaceX’s Transporter 4 mission in April without Spaceflight’s Sherpa tug. It is currently the startup’s only operational satellite. The five test satellites Lynk Global deployed earlier to develop its constellation have been shut down or de-orbited. According to Miller, Lynk Global will be able to launch initial text messaging, emergency alerts and internet of things services before the end of this year with four operational satellites in low Earth orbit. The startup has signed contracts with 12 mobile network operators (MNOs) that want “one or more of these services” for their subscribers. Of these, Lynk Global has only announced deals in the Bahamas, Papua New Guinea, Central African Republic, Solomon Islands and Mongolia. Miller said the startup is in “advanced contract negotiations” with more than two dozen other MNOs. He said customers using initial services would be able to send and receive text messages with existing smartphones about four to eight times a day, depending on their latitude. Lynk Global’s initial satellites will pass over customers at higher latitudes more frequently than those closer to the equator. For IoT services designed for small, low-power devices, he said “there are many use cases where remote monitoring of equipment several times a day is more than good enough.” Lynk Global builds its “pizza-box shaped” spacecraft in-house, and plans to deploy more than 50 of them before the end of 2023 to “provide an order of magnitude more [satellite] overpasses.” Depending on their latitude, Miller said its average user will be in the range of a satellite overpass every 15-30 minutes by the end of 2023. Lynk Global is not the only startup seeking to deploy a broadband constellation with phased array antennas that connect directly to standard smartphones. Texas-based AST SpaceMobile expects SpaceX will launch the BlueWalker 3 test satellite for its cellphone-compatible constellation in the week of Aug. 15 . SpaceX is also slated to launch AST SpaceMobile’s first commercial BlueBird satellite in 2023. AST SpaceMobile aims to have deployed 110 BlueBird satellites by the end of 2024 to provide substantial mobile coverage. This article was edited July 8 with additional comments from Spaceflight.
U.S. Space Force acquisition executive Frank Calvelli this week will visit United Launch Alliance’s factory in Decatur, Alabama, and get an update on the company’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket, a vehicle that the U.S. military has invested in and expects to use to launch national security satellites. Calvelli, who has been on the job for less than two months, told reporters at the Pentagon June 28 that he is aware of the delays in the development of Vulcan’s main engine, Blue Origin’s BE-4, and that is why he decided to put ULA and Blue Origin on this travel schedule sooner rather than later. “One of the first industry visits I want to make is down there to make sure they understand the importance of hitting their milestones with that engine delivery as well as with the launch,” Calvelli said. Vulcan is years behind schedule due to delays in the development and testing of the BE-4 engine that powers the vehicle’s first stage. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno has said the two flight engines needed for Vulcan’s first flight will be delivered this summer and Vulcan should be ready to fly before the end of the year . Calvelli said he expects Vulcan’s first launch in December. “That’s what I’ve been told.” ULA needs to start flying Vulcan and complete two commercial orbital missions successfully in order to get certified to launch U.S. military and intelligence satellites under the National Security Space Launch program. ULA is under contract, along with SpaceX , to launch as many as 35 missions over the next five years. Having Vulcan certified as soon as possible is critical for the Defense Department. ULA currently launches NSSL missions with its workhorse Atlas 5 rocket but DoD cannot buy any Atlas 5 launches beyond 2022 due to a congressional ban on the use of Russian rocket engines. The Atlas 5 uses the Russian-built RD-180s engines. ULA said it has sold all its remaining Atlas 5’s and just won a big contract from Amazon to launch the Kuiper broadband constellation so it’s imperative for the company to start transitioning to Vulcan and fly a domestically produced engine. Calvelli said he will be briefed on the status of Vulcan during his planned visit June 30. “I’ve never gotten a good deep dive on just what Vulcan is all about and what the BE-4 is all about,” he said. “I’m going down there as one of my first industry visits to make sure they know it’s really critical that they launch this year in December like they committed to, that they get those engines delivered,” he added. “So I’m going there as education to learn, and to make sure that both Blue Origin and ULA know how critical this is.” At this point Calvelli said he has no specific concerns about the program but believes it’s important enough to merit a visit. “I just want them to recognize that there’s somebody new in town, and that this is really important to me.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Looking for immortality? Space Crystals LLC might have the answer. The startup, founded in 2021 by Waypoint 2 Space CEO Kevin Heath, plans to send crystals grown in microgravity and infused with customer DNA to the moon next year. “We’ve got the technology,” Heath told SpaceNews . “We are in the midst of submitting a patent for the process. We proved we can get crystal growth in space.” Space Crystals unveiled its website Oct. 24 where customers can sign up for the $150,000 service by paying a $5,000 deposit. The $150,000 fee covers one DNA kit, DNA processing into a crystalline solution, flight to ISS to grow two crystals, return of one crystal to the customer for safekeeping and transportation of the matching crystal to the moon. (Space Crystals extracts DNA from a strand of a customer’s hair.) But wait, there’s more. Each customer who sends a crystal to the moon receives a commemorative plaque showing the geographic coordinates of the Space Crystal’s Lunar Time Capsule, which remains attached to the lunar lander. Customers also send one gigabyte of personal data with the lunar mission. “Whether that’s TickTock videos, books they’ve written, whatever,” Heath said. “They get to tell their own story to whoever ends up finding this.” Space Crystals combines ideas popular in science and entertainment. The “Jurassic Park” film series began with the premise that scientists could clone dinosaurs by extracting DNA preserved in amber. In real life, University of Arizona scientists propose storing samples of Earth’s 6.7 million species in lunar lava tubes, part of a Noah’s Ark-inspired way of capturing the planet’s biodiversity. Space Crystals sent 36 samples to the International Space Station earlier this year to figure out the how to grow DNA-infused crystals in orbit. Part of the challenge was insuring the crystals didn’t form on the ground prior to launch. Heath can’t yet name Space Crystals’ contractors, launch providers or implementation partners due to nondisclosure agreements. For now, Space Crystals is focused on attracting customers. “Our target is to fly 260 customers,” Heath said. “The maximum we can possibly fly in the Lunar Time Capsule is 522.” It’s unclear whether DNA stored in synthetic crystals could be extracted someday. “We’ll see in 5,000 to 10,000 years when these things finally get opened by us or aliens,” Heath said. “Did it work?” In the meantime, customers can display their Space Crystals on the ground. In contrast to the control group of DNA-infused crystals grown in terrestrial laboratories, each crystal grown on ISS is unique. Without gravity, crystals grow in all directions and air bubbles remain trapped rather than rising to the surface as they would on Earth. Houston-based Space Crystals worked with a local jeweler to mount some of the crystals it has returned to Earth on necklaces.
TAMPA, Fla. — Mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu is looking for more avenues for growth with the acquisition of Signal Mountain Networks, a satellite communications provider to the U.S. government. Anuvu said Aug. 11 that the 20-year-old mission-critical solutions provider could help unlock new revenue streams ahead of plans to start deploying its own constellation next year. Los Angeles-headquartered Anuvu currently leases capacity from other operators to provide Wi-Fi on aircraft, boats, and remote locations to commercial and government customers. Signal Mountain is based in Atlanta and designs, implements, and supports satcoms and other connectivity systems for customers that include NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Army, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While Anuvu already has a long-term commercial partnership with Signal Mountain, it said using the company’s position on key contracting vehicles for government agencies enables it to expand into new areas. The companies did not disclose financial details of the transaction. Signal Mountain founder and CEO Jonathan Huffman is set to assume a leadership role within Anuvu following the deal. San Francisco-based Astranis is building the first two satellites for Anuvu’s upcoming constellation, and they are due to launch next year to geostationary orbit (GEO) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. At around 400 kilograms, Astranis satellites are much smaller than traditional GEO satellites and are scaled to provide smaller geographies with dedicated bandwidth at lower costs. SpaceX is slated to fly Astranis’ first commercial satellite, Arcturus for U.S.-based telco Pacific Dataport Inc., as a secondary payload on a Falcon Heavy later this year. The mission’s primary payload is ViaSat-3, the first satellite in U.S.-based broadband provider Viasat’s next-generation constellation. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
SAN FRANCISCO – French startup Preligens is expanding its U.S. subsidiary in a bid to become a long-term supplier of geospatial data analysis software to the U.S. Department of Defense. Since establishing a U.S. subsidiary about three years ago, Preligens has participated in the Defense Department’s Foreign Comparative Testing program, an effort to satisfy military requirements through products and services employed by U.S. allies. “The objective for us, starting next year, is to scale the service,” Arnaud Guérin, Preligens co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews during a visit to Washington . “We are growing our local engineering capabilities. The U.S. subsidiary, staffed with U.S. nationals, can provide service directly to the U.S. government.” Preligens does not operate geospatial sensors or analyze geospatial data. The company supplies software that runs at each customer’s premises to fuse geospatial datasets and identify objects. “We can offer software that that has been combat-proven,” Guérin said. “It has demonstrated its performance and security.” Earlier this month, France’s General Directorate of Armaments awarded Preligens a seven-year contract with a potential value of 240 million euros ($237 million) for data-processing software. Preligens also supplies software to NATO and Japan’s Ministry of Defense. Preligens was founded in 2016 by Guérin, an engineer who previously worked in the nuclear industry, and Renaud Allioux, a former Airbus Defence and Space remote sensing engineer. Because the company did not have access to imagery gathered by French military and intelligence satellites in its early days, Preligens built sensor-agnostic AI tools. Preligens currently provides AI for optical sensor analysis in the United States. “We are in the process of getting an export license for additional sources,” Guérin said. “The scope of the contract in France is slightly broader than what we are offering in the U.S. My goal in 2023 is to bring those capabilities to the U.S. government as well.” Fusing geospatial datasets and identifying objects with AI is challenging. Satellites observe objects on the ground at different angles, with different resolutions, in different light and weather conditions. “If you want to take advantage of all the strengths of those specific sources of data, you need to have a very detailed identification capability of the objects,” Guérin said.
China is already considering adding modules to its recently-completed Tiangong space station complex, according to a senior space official. China recently completed construction of its three-module, T-shaped Tiangong space station and conducted its first crew handover , seeing the Shenzhou-14 mission astronauts welcome aboard three new astronauts from Shenzhou-15. The potential next phase would be adding a new core module, Wang Xiang, commander of the space station system at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). “Following our current design, we can continue to launch an extension module to dock with the forward section of the space station, and the extension module can carry a new hub for docking with the subsequent space vehicles,” Wang told CCTV following the return to Earth of the Shenzhou-14 crew Dec. 4. Tianhe, the space station core module, was the first piece of the station to be launched back in April 2021. It provides the main propulsion and life support systems and crew quarters for the astronauts on Tiangong and carries a docking hub to facilitate the arrival of spacecraft and further modules. Wang said that the additional module would provide a larger and more comfortable environment for the astronauts, while providing an environment for better applications of scientific payloads, both inside and outside the module. A backup or engineering model of the Tianhe core module including docking hubs has been seen in CAST presentations alongside the flight model prior to launch. Models of both the Tianhe and Wentian and Mengtian science modules have also been shown connected for ground testing. Wang did not state that the plan to expand Tiangong had been approved, but underlined that adding a new core module would open up avenues for more international cooperation in the future, and provide a basis for the next development of the space station. Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut to reach space and now deputy chief designer of China’s human spaceflight project, revealed in March this year at the country’s annual political sessions in Beijing that a number of countries have submitted applications to China for astronaut training and joint spaceflight missions. Yang also noted the possibility of tourist flights to Tiangong, while another senior official stated that China is exploring commercial possibilities . In terms of further ambitions, Wang stated that an extended space station could prove useful for the country’s crewed lunar endeavors, noting that the outpost could be used for testing new generation spacecraft . China’s original, basic plan for Tiangong is to keep the space station occupied and operational for at least 10 years. A co-orbiting survey space telescope named Xuntian is expected to join Tiangong in orbit no earlier than late 2023.
China sent a highly-classified reusable experimental spacecraft into orbit Thursday, two years after a similarly clandestine mission. A Long March 2F rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert Aug. 4, sending a “reusable test space” into low Earth orbit, Chinese language state media Xinhua reported . Xinhua confirmed the successful launch around three hours after the 12:00 p.m. Eastern opening of a launch window, indicated by airspace closure notices issued days earlier. The terse report stated that the test spacecraft will “operate in orbit for a period of time” before returning to its intended landing site in China. Technical verification of reusable and in-orbit services will be carried out as planned to provide technical support for the peaceful use of space, according to a machine translation of the report. U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (18 SDS) later tracked the spacecraft in 346 by 593 kilometer orbit inclined by 50 degrees. China’s space authorities have not released any images of the launch or related operations from this or a similar profile mission launched in 2020. The report did not state the mission to be a second flight of the spacecraft. While little is known about the spacecraft, it is speculated, based on previous statements and activities, that the vehicle is a spaceplane. It is possibly an orbital segment which will operate with a reusable suborbital stage, apparently tested in 2021 . The latter involved a vertical takeoff and horizontal landing. The Long March 2F usually launches China’s Shenzhou crewed missions and has a payload capacity of just over eight metric tons to low Earth orbit, suggesting that the spacecraft could be similar in size and function to U.S. Air Force’s X-37B spaceplane . The Long March 2F and its payload fairing would have been modified to accommodate the launch the reusable test spacecraft. China’s previous orbital test of a reusable experimental spacecraft took place in September 2020, with the spacecraft spending just under two days in orbit. It released a small payload before landing in China. While there is little information about the mission, the project appears to fit into space transportation development plans outlined by CASC, China’s main space contractor, and its major subsidiaries. CASC has previously iterated plans to develop low-cost, reliable access to space, including reusable launch vehicles and a spaceplane. A once-every-five-year space “white paper” released by the State Council Information Office in January stated that China would, “continue to strengthen research into key technologies for reusable space transport systems, and conduct test flights accordingly.” Chen Hongbo, from CASC’s China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), told Science and Technology Daily ( Chinese ) in 2017 that an under-development reusable spacecraft would be capable of carrying both crew and payloads, would be tested i n 2020. Long Lehao, a veteran chief designer of the Long March rocket series, last month presented a range of space transportation concepts during a public lecture, including a spaceplane render, viewable here . Any such project will however face large technological and other challenges, Bleddyn Bowen of the University of Leicester told SpaceNews . “Spaceplanes and reusable orbital vehicles have come and gone, and come back again. There can be some marginal and varied uses for them but they are extremely expensive compared to conventional rockets because the stresses of atmospheric re-entry wreaks havoc on the materials and structures,” Bowen said. “The Chinese development of spaceplane technology will be remarkable if they manage to overcome the problems Dyna-Soar and the Space Shuttle faced, and the challenges SpaceX’s Starship is now facing as well. We should see spaceplane development as part of China’s wider investments in all manner of space technologies, civilian and military, and not as something uniquely threatening or certain to succeed where others have failed.” Other reusable spacecraft or spaceplane projects are under consideration in China. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC), another giant state-owned enterprise, is working on its own spaceplane , named Tengyun. “Unlike rocket recycling adopted by SpaceX, the spaceplane can take off from an ordinary airport to transport spacecraft into orbit. It will bring about a revolution for future space transportation,” CASIC’s Zhang Hongwen told CCTV in 2018. In addition, Chinese commercial firm Space Transportation last year raised more than $46.3 million for its hypersonic spaceplane plans. Meanwhile, the U.S. X-37B spaceplane is currently carrying out its sixth mission, which has already extended to more than 800 days in orbit. CALT has also recently revealed plans to develop a fully-reusable super-heavy lift launch vehicle over the next decade, apparently inspired by the SpaceX Starship project. — Edited at 6:35 p.m. Eastern, Aug. 4, to add spacecraft orbit information.
Updated 5 p.m. Eastern with Nelson statement. WASHINGTON — NASA officials said July 26 they have received no official notification from Roscosmos of plans to end cooperation on the International Space Station despite comments from that agency’s new leader. Russian media reported that Yuri Borisov, who took over as director general of Roscosmos July 15 , told Russian president Vladimir Putin that the agency had decided to end cooperation on the ISS after 2024. “We will definitely fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to withdraw from this station after 2024 has been made,” Borisov told Putin, according to a TASS report . Roscosmos will instead focus on developing its own national space station called the Russian Orbital Service Station, or ROSS. NASA officials, speaking at the ISS Research and Development Conference here, said they have not been formally notified of any plans by Roscosmos to terminate its participation in the station. “We haven’t received any official word from the partner as to the news today,” said Robyn Gatens, ISS director at NASA Headquarters. She speculated that the comments referenced Russia’s long-term plans for low Earth orbit operations after the ISS, much as NASA is working to stimulate development of commercial space stations to succeed the ISS. “I think the Russians, just like us, are thinking ahead to what’s next for them. As we’re planning for a transition after 2030 to commercially owned and operated space stations in low Earth orbit, they have similar plans.” Gatens spoke after a live video link with NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Jessica Watkins on the ISS. “We haven’t heard anything officially” about Russia’s plans, Lindgren said, adding that “everybody is working together” on the station now to carry out research and keep the station functioning. In a statement late July 26, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also said the agency has not been notified by Roscosmos of any plans to end ISS cooperation. “NASA is committed to the safe operation of the International Space Station through 2030, and is coordinating with our partners. NASA has not been made aware of decisions from any of the partners, though we are continuing to build future capabilities to assure our major presence in low Earth orbit.” The White House announced at the end of last year its intent to formally extend ISS operations from 2024 to 2030 , a move that ISS partners Canada, Europe and Japan, but not Russia, have endorsed. NASA authorization legislation being considered by Congress as part of a bill called the CHIPS Act would formally authorize that extension. “We’re going to go to 2030 full up,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, during comments at the conference. “Anybody who thinks that there is a different plan, you’re wrong. We’re going to 2030.” He acknowledged that the ISS partnership has “struggles” but that NASA was committed to work through them. He noted that he was in Moscow last week to meet with Russian officials just after finalizing a seat barter agreement that will allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew vehicles and American astronauts to fly on Soyuz spacecraft. Montalbano declined to answer questions immediately after the conference panel. A NASA spokesperson did not respond to questions about Borisov’s comments. It’s unclear if Borisov’s comments reflect any change in Russia’s position. Roscosmos has previously discussed establishing a national space station and have been reluctant to commit to an ISS extension beyond 2024, but has also not taken any formal steps to end its participation in the ISS partnership. Industry sources noted the “after 2024” language is vague and does not mean that Roscosmos will exit the station in 2024. It’s unlikely, they note, that ROSS will be ready to support crews before the end of the decade because Roscosmos has just started the effort and also has limited resources available for it. Others, though, cautioned that NASA should not ignore those comments and be prepared for a Russian departure from the station before 2030. Any Russian departure from the ISS could also be an opportunity. “We need to grow beyond the Cold War paradigm,” Mike Gold, executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire Space and a former NASA official, said on a policy panel at the conference. “We should view this as an opportunity to broaden the ISS partnership and look at more innovative ways to integrate commercial partners onto the ISS.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Contec said June 10 that it had raised 61 billion won ($47.3 million) in a Series C funding round to pursue its goal of building a global ground station network and operating its own Earth observation satellites. Including 13.6 billion won raised in the two previous funding rounds , the South Korean company has raised 74.6 billion won ( or nearly $58 million) since it was founded in 2015 as a spin-off from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Contec is planning to go public next year, recently hiring Daeshin Securities to manage the IPO. The Series C round was led by domestic venture capital Spring Ventures, with six other institutions joining as new investors. It attracted additional funding from three existing investors, Korea Investment Partners, Korean Development Bank and Atinum Investment. “We are planning to go public next year, without a pre-IPO funding round,” Contec founder and CEO Lee Sung-hee told SpaceNews . “To that end, there are many things we should do with the fund raised this time.” Lee said the company currently operates six ground stations, including two in South Korea (Seoul and Jeju Island) and four overseas in Ireland, Alaska, Sweden and South Africa. Six more will be operational in Malaysia, Australia, South Korea’s port city of Busan, and Chile by the end of November. “We aim at operating twelve RF ground stations in 10 locations around the world by the end of the year,” the chief executive said. “We will build three more in 2023, each in Portugal, Mexico and Southeast Asia. That means we will operate 15 [radio-frequency]ground stations by the end of 2023.” Lee said the company will also operate three optical ground stations by 2024. “The first optical ground station will be operational in Australia by November 2023. A contract for this has already been signed,” he said. “We will build two more in 2024, one in the Middle East and the other in the United States. While it’s not decided where to put it in the U.S., there are candidates: Texas, Colorado or New Mexico.” Contec projects rapidly increasing demand for optical ground stations as more satellites adopt laser links as the primary means for communicating with ground stations. Space situational awareness is another market the company is planning to tap. Lee said Contec will go into SSA services next year. To that end, Contec will install a cluster of four telescopes in an undisclosed location next year and two more the following year. On top of this, Contec is planning to develop and operate its own fleet of Earth observation satellites. Lee said the company would soon sign a contract with a European satellite maker to jointly develop a synthetic-aperture radar satellite capable of producing 50-centimeter-resolution imagery. “We will proceed with development as efficiently as possible in order to launch the [synthetic aperture radar] satellite in the third or fourth quarter of 2023,” Lee said. “Then we will develop and launch one more.” Meanwhile, Contec’s first electro-optical satellite is set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, according to the chief executive. Contec contracted in 2021 with U.S. smallsat mission integrator NanoAvionics for a 16-unit cubsesat bus will carry a Contec laser communications terminal and a 1.5-meter-resolution imager supplied by South Africa’s Simera Sense.
LOGAN, Utah – Geospatial intelligence company Orbital Insight announced plans Aug. 9 to work with Israeli startup Asterra to jointly provide remote sensing analytics to water utilities, infrastructure organizations and other industries. Establishing a relationship with Orbital Insight will make Asterra data accessible for a wider audience, Lauren Guy, Asterra founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement. Palo Alto, California-based Orbital Insight fuses different types of sensor data into its Go platform, including electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and radio frequency monitoring, to shed light on economic, societal and environmental activity. The company works with corporations like Unilever and Chevron in addition to government customers like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Asterra, founded in 2017, offers Earth-observation products and services based on SAR satellite data. Asterra EarthWorks, for example, draws in L-band polarimetric SAR data to detect soil moisture underground. Working with Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Foundation for Applied Water Management Research, Asterra is testing EarthWorks as a tool for inspecting soil moisture near canal levees and flood defenses. Asterra gathers data from Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2, and Saocom 1A and 1B radar satellite built by the Argentina’s space agency and operated jointly with the Italian Cosmos-SkyMed constellation. Under the agreement with Asterra, Orbital Insight will determine customer requirements and pursue opportunities that take advantage of Asterra’s analytics. Initially, the collaboration will focus on facility monitoring by identifying underground water, sewage, chemical leaks and erosion. “Asterra’s Earth observation technology for monitoring infrastructure is the best in the business, and we’re thrilled to add this rich data source to our suite of products,” Orbital Insight CEO Kevin O’Brien said in a statement. “We also have a shared goal to use geospatial technology, analytics and data science to make our world safer and more sustainable, so this partnership helps progress the whole industry forward.”
Axiom Space will fly two astronauts from Saudi Arabia, one of them a woman, to space as soon as next year, the company and the Saudi government announced Sept. 22. The Saudi Space Commission said it had created the country’s first astronaut program that would fly a man and a woman to space next year. The announcement disclosed few details about the recruitment and selection, and also did not state how the astronauts would fly to space. The commission did not immediately respond to emailed questions about the announcement. Shortly after the Saudi statement, Axiom Space announced it was working with the Saudi Space Commission on “a future flight opportunity” for those astronauts no earlier than 2023. The company did not disclose terms of the agreement, That flight could be as soon as the Ax-2 mission in the second quarter of 2023 to the International Space Station. The occupants of two of the four seats on that flight have yet to be announced by Axiom Space. Reuters first reported an agreement between the Saudi Space Commission and Axiom Space. “This partnership highlights Axiom Space’s profound commitment to expand human spaceflight opportunities to a larger share of the international community, as well as to multiply scientific and technological development on Earth and in orbit,” Michael Suffredini, chief executive of Axiom Space, said in a statement. The agreement with Saudi Arabia was one of several with countries that Axiom announced during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here. On Sept. 19, Axiom announced an agreement with the Turkish Space Agency to fly a Turkish astronaut on a future Axiom mission. Neither Axiom nor the Turkish government announced a date for the flight. “This mission is a part of Turkey’s ambitious 10-year space road map, which includes missions to the low-Earth orbit and the moon as well as developing internationally viable satellite systems.” said Serdar Hüseyin Yıldırım, president of the Turkish Space Agency, in a statement. Axiom also announced Sept. 21 a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian Space Agency to study future space cooperation opportunities that could include flying Canadian astronauts on Axiom missions. While Canada is a partner in the ISS, as the smallest partner it gets opportunities to fly astronauts to the station only once every several years, less than Europe and Japan. Axiom previously announced an agreement with the United Arab Emirates to send an astronaut on a long-duration ISS flight , the Crew-6 mission launching in 2023. That flight uses a seat that Axiom acquired from NASA in exchange for a Soyuz seat that the company had purchased directly from Roscosmos. Axiom is also in talks with Hungary about flying an astronaut to the ISS. The company has agreements with Italy and New Zealand about research opportunities that do not necessarily involve flying astronauts from those countries. The agreements, industry sources say, are part of an effort to demonstrate the demand from so-called “sovereign clients” or other nations, rather than from private astronauts. The Ax-1 mission flew three private astronauts, although they emphasized doing research during their two-week mission to the station in April. Working with national space agencies, though, also carries risks. At the IAC, the Saudi government made an aggressive bid to host the conference in Riyadh in 2025. That bid appeared to be the front-runner, but encountered a backlash from delegates concerned about the country’s human rights record. The International Astronautical Federation announced Sept. 22 that the 2025 event will be held in Sydney, Australia.
TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon and Telesat said Sept. 21 they have finalized spectrum arrangements to keep their planned satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) from interfering with each other. The coordination deals “ensure the coexistence” of their broadband constellations, the companies told the Federal Communications Commission in a letter. Both constellations plan to use Ka-band spectrum to provide broadband services to user terminals. Amazon secured a spectrum license for its Project Kuiper network as part of the FCC’s 2020 NGSO processing round, while Telesat’s Lightspeed was processed as part of an earlier 2016 round. Neither company has started deploying their NGSO constellation, although Canada-based Telesat launched a prototype to low Earth orbit in 2018 on an Indian PSLV rocket. Thales Alenia Space, which is slated to build Lightspeed, has suffered supply chain delays that have hampered the operator’s ability to fund the final third of the project’s cost. As rising inflation and other economic pressures also take their toll, Telesat expects these supply issues have added another $250 million to $500 million on top of LightSpeed’s original $5 billion budget. Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said Sept. 13 he remains optimistic that the company will be able to secure these funds amid ongoing talks with export credit agencies. The operator envisages a network of 198 satellites in total. Telesat said it expected to start providing Lightspeed services in 2026 in its last update on the constellation’s deployment timeline in May. The delays have likely brought Lightspeed’s debut closer to the launch of Amazon’s planned Project Kuiper constellation. Amazon has not said when it could launch Project Kuiper commercially, although the company must deploy half its constellation by 2026 under its FCC license. Amazon has to deploy the rest of Project Kuiper’s proposed 3,236 satellites three years later. The internet giant has signed contracts worth several billion dollars to reserve launches for most of the constellation. Rocket developer ABL Space Systems has been planning to launch two prototypes for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation between October and December. NGSO coordination Parties in the same NGSO processing round have an equal right to the spectrum the FCC awards in that round. Factors including which NGSO system was first to provide services determine how they must share their spectrum if they cannot coordinate something more definitive amongst themselves. However, there is currently no specific FCC rule obligating NGSO operators to protect services of constellations that secured spectrum in earlier processing rounds. The FCC seeks to change this through a notice of proposed rulemaking released last year — not least because the rules do not cover the potential for NGSO operators to start services faster than those in earlier processing rounds. Amazon and Telesat said their coordination agreements also cover the Canadian operator’s existing fleet of satellites in geostationary orbit. OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink, which connect broadband customers using Ku-band spectrum secured in the FCC’s 2016 NGSO processing round, announced a spectrum coordination plan in June for their current and proposed second-generation networks.
A technology demonstration satellite for which SES will lead the development could be a prototype of a constellation by the satellite operator providing quantum-encrypted communications. The European Space Agency and SES formally signed the contact for Eagle-1 during a ceremony at the International Astronautical Congress here. SES will lead a consortium of 20 companies to build and operate the smallsat, scheduled for launch in 2024 for a three-year mission. The main purpose of Eagle-1 is to test long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD), a core technology for quantum encryption. Space offers a means of carrying out QKD using laser communications over longer distances than what is possible with terrestrial systems. “Eagle-1 is a major building block of a major new European quantum key system. It’s the first satellite quantum cryptography system for European cybersecurity,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher at the signing event. “It’s also a major step towards a secure and scalable European quantum communications infrastructure.” The spacecraft, weighing about 300 kilograms, will be built by Italian company Sitael, with Tesat providing the optical communications terminals. The spacecraft will operate in a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, making a few passes a day over European ground stations that will be sufficient for testing, said Alberto Rubio, ESA project manager. The launch will be on a European vehicle, he said, as part of a contract that will be announced in the near future. The cost of the program, including the satellite and ground systems, is about 130 million euros ($130 million), said Elodie Viau, ESA director of telecommunications. Eight ESA member states — Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — are contributing to the project, along with support from the European Commission. The technologies demonstrated on Eagle-1 could be incorporated into the European Commission’s planned secure connectivity satellite system as part of the European Quantum Communication Initiative, or EuroQCI, program. “EuroQCI is a European Union initiative to build, develop and deploy this pan-European quantum secure communications network,” said Gilles Lequeux of the European Commission. “This is why we see this Eagle-1 as a key step and for which we contribute financially.” Steve Collar, chief executive of SES, said his company is involved in Eagle-1 because of the potential for future commercial systems separate from the E.U. effort. “We think that there is commercialization potential of this system, and we will start that commercialization with Eagle-1,” he said. “If that looks good, and we think that there’s business there, that should lead to a small constellation of satellites that will deliver these services on a global basis.” “It’s a very important project in and of itself, but I think it has broader implications and fits well other programs and initiatives that are ongoing, either within SES, within ESA or within the Commission,” he added. Eagle-1 is not the only QKD satellite project in Europe or involving ESA. The agency is working with Arqit, based in the United Kingdom, on quantum encryption technologies for that company’s planned satellite system. The biggest programmatic difference between the Eagle-1 project and Arqit’s QKDSat is Eagle-1’s ties to EuroQCI. “In the Arqit project the are some non-E.U. member states also involved, and therefore the European Commission is not involved in the Arqit program,” said Viau. The U.K. is no longer a part of the European Union. Eagle-1 was not the only quantum communications project announced during the conference. On Sept. 19, Thales Alenia Space announced a memorandum of understanding with Singapore-based SpeQtral to conduct tests involving the SpeQtral-1 satellite and ground equipment developed by Thales Alenia. The satellite is slated for launch in 2024 with the tests taking place by 2025.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the second of two satellites for Eutelsat Nov. 3 to replenish one of the largest broadcast systems in Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. A Falcon 9 carrying the Hotbird 13G satellite for the French operator lifted off at 1:22 a.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The all-electric satellite separated from the rocket in geostationary transfer orbit about 35 minutes later. According to Eutelsat, Hotbird 13G was successfully initialized over a three-hour period to begin making its way to its orbital slot at 13 degrees east with onboard propulsion. The Falcon 9’s first stage successfully landed on a SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for reuse shortly after the launch. The booster has been used in six other SpaceX missions, including cargo and crew deliveries to the International Space Station, launching a Turkish satellite, and a batch of spacecraft for the Starlink broadband constellation. Fortifying coverage Hotbird 13F, Hotbird 13G’s twin that SpaceX l aunched to geostationary transfer orbit Oct. 15 , is also on its way to 13 degrees east. Both satellites were ordered from Airbus to replace three aging spacecraft at this position — Hotbird 13B, 13C, and 13E — which together deliver 1,000 television channels to more than 160 million homes in the region. Hotbird 13F and Hotbird 13G, based on the manufacturer’s new Eurostar Neo platform, have the capacity of three older satellites and are more resistant to jamming. Eutelsat said Oct. 7 that signals from within Iran have been disrupting foreign broadcasts in the country as authorities there seek to quell widespread protests . Airbus expects Hotbird 13F and Hotbird 13G will reach their final orbital destinations in the first half of 2023 to start services. Hotbird 13G also carries a payload for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), which Europe uses to augment and improve global positioning systems in the region. The French operator signed a contract worth 100 million euros ($98 million) in February 2021 to host the EGNOS GEO-4 payload in orbit for 15 years. EGNOS GEO-4 is needed for plans to upgrade the overlay service by 2025 to improve support for aircraft as they land and take off, and for other applications, including precision farming and geomatics. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); }) This article was edited Nov. 3 to correct the name of the Hotbird 13G satellite.
After a successful launch of a Crew Dragon spacecraft whose crew included a Russian cosmonaut, a Roscosmos official struck a more conciliatory tone about relations with NASA. At a briefing after the Oct. 5 launch of the Crew-5 mission from the Kennedy Space Center, Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human space flight programs at Roscosmos, emphasized long-running cooperation between the United States and Russia in civil space, cooperation that has been strained since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. “We just continue what we started many years ago in 1975 when the Apollo-Soyuz crew worked together, and now we continue our cooperation,” he said after mentioning a “new phase of cooperation” with the exchange of seats between NASA and Roscosmos. That seat barter agreement, completed in July , allowed NASA astronaut Frank Rubio to fly to the International Space Station last month on a Soyuz spacecraft. Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, in turn, was on the Crew-5 mission. The agreement includes exchanges between Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions in 2023 and 2024. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said the agency plans to extend that agreement to cover Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which, once certified for crewed flights, will alternate ISS missions with Crew Dragon. “Once a Boeing gets up and running our plan is to continue this cooperation on the Boeing missions,” he said. “As we extend space station — get partner across-the-board agreement to extend past ’24 — we will also extend the agreement.” One seat remains open on the first operational Starliner mission, Starliner-1, after NASA announced Sept. 30 it has assigned astronauts Scott Tingle and Mike Fincke as commander and pilot, respectively, to that mission. With another NASA astronaut, Jeannette Epps, already assigned to the mission, only one seat remains available for either a Russian cosmonaut or astronaut from another ISS partner, although NASA noted that Epps is also training on Crew Dragon “to protect for other flight opportunities.” NASA and Roscosmos, along with the U.S. State Department and Russia’s Foreign Ministry, completed that agreement despite incendiary rhetoric at times from the head of Roscosmos at the time, Dmitry Rogozin, who appeared to threaten to abandon the ISS and allow it to reenter. NASA leadership responded by emphasizing the “professional” relationship between the agencies in continuing to operate the ISS. That rhetoric has cooled after Rogozin was removed as head of Roscosmos in mid-July, replaced by Yuri Borisov. In late July, Borisov appeared to announce that Russia would end its cooperation on the ISS after 2024, the date the partners had previously agreed to operate the station, and not extend it to 2030 as NASA and the other Western partners support. However, Borisov and others, including Krikalev, later stated that comment only meant that Russia would end its work on the ISS at some time after 2024, not necessarily immediately after 2024. “We already talked with our international partners and we are talking with our specialists in Russia, looking through technical capability of station to fly, and we understand that it makes sense to keep flying,” Krikalev said at the briefing. “We are going to keep it in future and we will see how long the station will be able to fly and I think main limitation is technical.” He added that Russia is continuing to study plans for its own space station, but emphasized that work is still in its earliest phases. “There is no final decision yet but we are going to keep flying International Space Station” until that station is built, he said. “We don’t know yet how it’s going to be built, what kind of modules we will have, but I’m sure that we will stay in the international partnership.” At last month’s International Astronautical Congress in Paris, where Russian officials were notably absent, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reemphasized a “professional relationship” between NASA and Roscosmos on the ISS. He said at a press conference that he had spoken by phone with Borisov but did not go into details about the conversation. “I told him that I look forward to seeing him at the first opportunity,” he said, although it’s unclear when the two might meet in person. Asked at the Crew-5 briefing if recent comments by Borisov and himself were part of a deliberate effort to improve relations with NASA that had been strained by Rogozin, Krikalev smiled and said, “The answer is yes.” He did not comment further.
SAN FRANCISCO – Barring last-minute offers from potential buyers or investors, SpaceLink, a startup developing a space-relay constellation, will wind down its operations. Australia’s Electro Optic Systems Holdings Ltd., SpaceLink’s parent company, revealed plans in September to focus on its core defense and space business, and seek outside investment to support SpaceLink. In the current economic environment with rising interest rates and declines in many space stocks, SpaceLink has been unable to attract new investors. “We had a great team and great technology, but unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of a lot of runway from the parent company, who is having their own financial difficulties,” SpaceLink CEO Dave Bettinger told SpaceNews. EOS, which acquired Silicon Valley startup Audacy, established SpaceLink in 2020 to develop a constellation of communications satellites in medium-Earth orbit to relay data between the ground and low-Earth orbit. Future demand is likely to strong for this type of constellation, but setting it up requires significant upfront investment. SpaceLink would need approximately $70 million in the near term to complete its contracts with satellite vendors, make down payments on launches and purchase long-lead items. In all, about $250 million would be required to complete the SpaceLink constellation. If that investment were made, SpaceLink expects to generate revenues of $150 million a year. “There’s no question that the market is there and that the need is there,” said Tony Colucci, SpaceLink chief strategy and commercial officer. “Five years from now, there will be a commercial service moving data for remote sensing, moving data for human spaceflight, etc.” There still may be time for a buyer could scoop up SpaceLink’s assets. “We would certainly like to be able to talk to any serious investor that shares our vision of carrying this program on,” Bettinger said. SpaceLink possesses satellite communications spectrum, “a fully baked architecture and design that’s ready to go,” Bettinger said. “We have contracts that have been negotiated with all the major system-level component providers. And we have some customer contracts. The real value is in the team that we had brought together.” In addition to growing commercial demand, government agencies are likely to become major customers for commercial data-relay services. NASA, for example, plans to rely on commercial services instead up replacing its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite constellation. SpaceLink won a $190,000 NASA contract for a data-relay study. The company also has worked with Parsons and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army to begin preparing to relay military data.
TAMPA, Fla. — ClearSpace, the Swiss orbital debris removal startup, said Nov. 14 it is planning a mission to extend the life of an Intelsat satellite before it runs out of fuel around 2026-2028. The four-year-old company’s announcement gave no further details about its “collaboration” with Intelsat, which marks an expansion for ClearSpace out of plans to clean up debris in low Earth orbit (LEO) to servicing geostationary spacecraft. Intelsat declined to comment on the specifics of its collaboration with ClearSpace. “With this in-orbit servicing collaboration, besides the economic benefits of the services, Intelsat is supporting ClearSpace´s work towards an accessible, resilient and sustainable space economy,” Intelsat chief technology officer Bruno Fromont said. ClearSpace aims to build on core capabilities it is already developing for the European Space Agency’s ClearSpace-1 program in 2025, the venture’s first mission, when it aims to use a spacecraft with four articulated arms to de-orbit part of a Vega rocket. Separately in September, the UK Space Agency shortlisted groups led by ClearSpace and Japan-based in-orbit servicing venture Astroscale for a mission to remove two spacecraft from LEO in 2026 . Intelsat is currently the only satellite operator that has employed commercial life extension services. Mission Extension Vehicles (MEVs) from Northrop Grumman are currently extending the lives of two Intelsat satellites that were previously running out of fuel: IS 901 and IS 10-02. Their five-year agreements started in 2020 and 2021, respectively. SpaceLogistics, Northrop Grumman’s satellite-servicing subsidiary, plans to send a new type of servicer called a Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) to a satellite owned by Australia’s Optus in 2024. The MRV will have a robotic arm designed to install propulsion jet packs on satellites that need more fuel. Other startups are also developing businesses for the nascent satellite life-extension market. Starfish Space said Nov. 9 it has booked a SpaceX launch to perform its first satellite docking test next fall. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
The successful launch of a NASA lunar cubesat mission was the culmination of two and a half years of work at Rocket Lab that, the company’s chief executive says, could enable “ridiculously low cost” planetary missions. Rocket Lab’s Electron launched NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat and the company’s Lunar Photon kick stage June 28. The Photon will gradually raise its orbit over the next several days before a final burn that places CAPSTONE on a ballistic lunar trajectory. The payload, with an overall mass of more than 300 kilograms, pushed the Electron to the limit. “Electron gave everything that it could give. We’ve never run the engines as hard as we ran them tonight,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview a few hours after the launch, which took place in the evening in New Zealand. “We put the Lunar Photon exactly where it needed to be and we had some performance left over in the vehicle.” The high energy Lunar Photon kick stage was a major effort for Rocket Lab. Beck said a challenge was the high performance needed from the stage’s HyperCurie engine, with a specific impulse of 310 seconds. “That’s really hard to do in a small engine, and the mass margins were so tight,” he said. “This was just next-level hard,” Beck said of the overall mission. “It’s been two and a half years of a huge amount of effort by the team.” The payoff, he said, is a system that can be used for other smallsat missions with high performance requirements. Rocket Lab is already planning to use the same kick stage for a privately funded mission to Venus, replacing the CAPSTONE cubesat with an atmospheric entry probe. “We can go to Mars and to asteroids equally well,” he said. “This really is an entirely new system for deep space exploration at just a ridiculously low cost.” In the near term, Rocket Lab will return to more typical Electron launches. The CAPSTONE launch was the fourth Electron mission of the year and while neither Beck nor Rocket Lab disclosed when the next launch would take place, Beck said the company was preparing for a series of launches in the near future. “We’ve got a stack of vehicles backed up that we need to launch and we’ve had a good run of customer readiness with their payloads, so once this mission is over, we’ll get the next one on the pad,” Beck said. He said the company’s launch rate is paced by when customers, and not launch vehicles, are ready to fly. “The customer is really determining our launch cadence, not our readiness,” he said. “What it does mean is that it makes a pretty lumpy manifest where, as one customer slips, we try and leapfrog another customer in front of it. We’re always playing manifest whack-a-mole to make sure we keep the flow.” Beck also said that Rocket Lab will try again relatively soon to perform a midair recovery of an Electron booster. A helicopter briefly captured the booster on a May 2 launch but had to release it because of unexpected load characteristics on the helicopter. “We haven’t made any changes to the vehicle or any of the recovery systems,” he said. “It’s purely down to getting the technique right and just all the mission operations that go into that.” “That team’s been working around the clock,” Beck said of recovery efforts, “and you won’t have to wait long for the next recovery mission.”
SAN FRANCISCO – NASA approved a demonstration flight for DiskSat, the thin round satellite designed by the Aerospace Corp. Aerospace Corp. engineers are building four DiskSats and a DiskSat dispenser, which they plan to send to low-Earth orbit in 2024 to validate the technology. “People ask me, ‘Can you really fly that? Can you keep it under attitude control?’” Richard Welle, DiskSat inventor and senior scientist in Aerospace’s Mission Systems Engineering Division, told SpaceNews . “It’s a very ungainly vehicle compared to other things that are traditionally flown. Can you do the thermal management so that you don’t melt yourself down by collecting all that solar power?” One-meter-diameter DiskSats are 2.5-centimeters thick. With the extensive surface area for solar panels, DiskSats could provide about 60 to 80 watts for onboard electronics. A DiskSat with a rigid deployable solar panel provides average onboard power of 100 to 160 watts. Much of the power is likely to be harnessed for propulsion. During the demonstration mission, Aerospace plans to fly DiskSats in very low Earth orbit. One pair of DiskSats, deployed from a rocket at an altitude of roughly 500 kilometers, will maneuver down to a 250-kilometer orbit. With propulsion to fight drag, mission planners intend to keep the DiskSats at that altitude for more than a week before moving it to a higher orbit. The second pair of DiskSats will fly in an eccentric orbit with a perigee below 200 kilometers. “The propulsion system has enough thrust to offset the drag down to about 230 kilometers in a circular orbit,” Welle said. “But in elliptical orbit, you can go lower provided you have time at higher altitude to do the drag makeup.” In late April, Aerospace began the 18-month development campaign for the DiskSat demonstration mission. No launch vehicle has been identified yet. At the Small Satellite Conference at Utah State University in August, Aerospace plans to display a DiskSat model. “We’ll be happy to talk to anybody that’s interested in flying a DiskSat,” Welle said. “We’re planning to develop a DiskSat standard, analogous to the cubesat standard. We’ll define the interface between the satellite and launch vehicle with the idea that it can be used in rideshare operations.” Aerospace engineers are developing a dispenser to release the circular spacecraft. “In the long run, you may have flights with 20 DiskSats in a single dispenser,” Welle said. “We’re developing a dispensing mechanism that will release them one at a time with some reasonable time in between to ensure separation between adjacent disks in the stack.” Welle sees key advantages to circular DiskSats compared with cubesats. In terms of power, an eight-kilogram DiskSat with a deployable panel can easily provide 100 watts of onboard average power. To provide the same power, a cubesat with deployable panels would weigh approximately 30 kilograms, Welle said. With higher power and lower mass than cubesats, DiskSats could employ electric propulsion to change their orbits dramatically. A 10-kilogram DiskSat could move, for example, from low-Earth to geosynchronous or even lunar orbit. In addition, a DiskSat’s 2.5-centimeter edge would encounter little atmospheric drag, which is why the miniature satellites could operate at low altitudes. There’s growing interest in very low orbits where sensors can gather high-resolution Earth imagery. “Operating DiskSats below 300 kilometers is straightforward,” Welle said. “That gives you a whole new orbital regime that is not overpopulated by other satellites.” DiskSats are lightweight composite structures with hollow interiors. Components can be distributed throughout the internal volume or clustered in a central avionics bay. “There’s a lot of volume that is spread out and easily accessible,” Welle said. “It greatly simplifies the manufacturing process.” In addition, DiskSats in low Earth orbit are likely to reenter Earth’s atmosphere quickly once their missions end. Without attitude control, a DiskSat in a 600-kilometer orbit will reenter the atmosphere about two and a half years. “If the attitude control system fails, the satellite tumbles,” Welle said. “That will increase the drag by an order of magnitude.”
The U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command awarded SpaceX a $1.9 million one-year contract to evaluate Starlink internet services in Europe and Africa starting this month. The contract is for hardware and services in support of military airlift units based at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. It includes satellite terminals and internet services for an operational evaluation of the service at fixed sites and by mobile users who need to connect devices to the internet. The Air Force Special Operations Command’s contracting office said this was a sole-source contract as SpaceX was the only bidder that could provide the required service and that had shown it could operate in a hostile electronic environment . The general requirement was for a commercial satellite internet solution using low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites with available services in Europe and Africa to support the Air Force’s 86th Airlift Wing. “After extensive research it was found that SpaceX Starlink is the only vendor able to provide this specialized communication service in the current areas of operation in the required time,” said the contract justification document released Aug. 5. “Starlink is the only LEO constellation communications company that currently provides this commercial satellite solution with services to Europe and Africa.” The pricing information used to determine the value of the contract was redacted from the document. Several other companies are competing to establish LEO, medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit(GEO) satellite internet networks, but Starlink “currently has the most well-established LEO satellite network … whereas the LEO networks of its competitors are still in their infancy,” the document said. Following the most recent launch of Starlink satellites Aug. 12, SpaceX has the largest constellation of satellites in orbit, with 2,287 spacecraft currently in service. None of the current LEO internet providers — Amazon Kuiper, OneWeb, Telesat — can provide any service in both Europe and Africa, the document said. “Starlink is also the only LEO satellite network provider that is currently being used in a contested environment: Ukraine.” With Ukraine’s operations in high gear, the communication requirements within and around eastern European areas in support of Ukraine operations expands daily, the Air Force said. The Air Force Research Laboratory and the Space Force’s Space Systems Command are running a program called Global Lightning to test the capabilities of commercial space internet providers. “AFRL has discovered that in a contested environment, LEO constellations are much more resilient to signal jamming and also provide the low latency required to support tactical missions,” the document noted. “Companies like OneWeb, Telesat and Amazon are all expected to provide LEO service to the European Command (EUCOM) and Africa Command (AFRICOM) areas of responsibility in the next few years.” Next to Starlink, the document said, OneWeb was the next best option. At the time the market research was conducted in late 2021, AFRL and the Space Force determined that OneWeb could not provide service south of 50 degree north latitude. “OneWeb can only provide service north of 50 degrees north latitude starting in November 2021. This does not cover the majority of the EUCOM area of responsibility and does not cover any of the AFRICOM area of responsibility.” The expected throughput to be delivered by the Starlink high-performance terminal is up to 500 megabits per second download speed and low latency connectivity. 
PASADENA, Calif. — Firefly Aerospace announced June 15 that Tom Markusic, co-founder of the launch vehicle and spacecraft developer, will step down as its chief executive but remain with the company as it prepares for its second launch. The company said that Markusic would shift from chief executive to a new role of chief technical advisor, effective June 16. He will remain a member of the company’s board and a “significant minority investor” in the company. The move comes four months after AE Industrial Partners (AEI), a private equity firm, agreed to acquire a “significant stake” in Firefly from Noosphere Venture Partners , which sold its interest in Firefly at the request of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Noopshere is a fund run by Ukrainian-born investor Max Polyakov. In March, AEI said it was leading Firefly’s $75 million Series B round . The statement suggested that Firefly’s new owners wanted new leadership for the company as it prepares a second launch of its Alpha rocket. That launch is expected no earlier than mid-July from Vandenberg Space Force Base, nearly a year after the first Alpha launch failed. Firefly is also working on an orbital transfer vehicle and its Blue Ghost lunar lander, which will fly a mission for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program in 2024. Firefly has started design work on a larger launch vehicle, Beta, whose first launch would be around the middle of the decade. “With new ownership and funding, Firefly has been reinvigorated. The company is entering a new phase of growth,” Kirk Konert, partner at AEI, said in the statement. “We are confident that we will soon find the right person to build upon this momentum and collaborate with the talented Firefly team to help the company continue its success.” “The future for Firefly is bright, and the time is right for a new leader with the necessary skills to lead the company into its next stage of growth and development,” Markusic said in the same statement. Another AEI partner, Peter Schumacher, will serve as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent successor. The company didn’t offer a timeline for that search process. In an interview in April during Space Symposium, Markusic said he was happy that AEI had invested in Firefly. “They’re going to be a great partner for us,” he said. “They are a very different type of investor that really understands the industry, but also has very strong connections to the biggest financial institutions in the world.” He added that AEI was pleased overall with the direction Firefly was going. “They like our business plan,” he said. “They want us to focus in a few areas, but overall, we’re doing the same things we’d set out to do on our five-year plan, but now for a really strong financial partner.”
Updated 6:15 p.m. Eastern with Northrop Grumman statement. WASHINGTON — A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station Nov. 9 despite having only one of its two solar arrays deployed. The Cygnus spacecraft, flying the NG-18 cargo resupply mission for NASA, arrived at the station and was grappled by the station’s robotic arm at 5:20 a.m. Eastern. The arm berthed the spacecraft to the station’s Unity module two and a half hours later. An Antares rocket successfully launched Cygnus Nov. 7, but several hours later NASA reported that one of two solar arrays had failed to deploy after reaching orbit . Northrop said that the spacecraft had enough power from the one deployed solar array to operate the vehicle, but NASA said engineers were studying any issues the undeployed array might have on grappling and berthing the spacecraft. NASA said in a Nov. 8 statement that it would proceed with having Cygnus approach the station. “Northrop Grumman and NASA made the determination not to deploy the second solar array after initial attempts to deploy it were unsuccessful,” the agency stated. Video from the ISS showed that while one of the circular arrays, designed to unfold like a fan, deployed as expected, the other appeared to have unfolded only slightly. “The Cygnus team is gathering information on why the second array did not deploy as planned,” NASA stated. In a statement late Nov. 9, Northrop Grumman blamed the failed deployment of the array on debris from the launch. “During a rocket stage separation event, debris from an Antares acoustic blanket became lodged in one of the Cygnus solar array mechanisms, preventing it from opening,” said Cyrus Dhalla, vice president and general manager of tactical space systems at Northrop Grumman. The company did not explain how the debris got into the mechanism, something the company has not reported happening on previous Cygnus launches. Cygnus delivered to the station nearly 3,750 kilograms of cargo, including crew supplies, scientific payloads and hardware. That hardware includes a solar array bracket that astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio will install outside the station on a Nov. 15 spacewalk as part of efforts to upgrade the station’s solar power systems. Cygnus is scheduled to remain attached to the station until late January, when it will depart the station, loaded with trash, for a destructive reentry.
RESTON, Va. — The National Reconnaissance Office continues to borrow pages from the space industry’s playbook as it seeks to accelerate deployments of spy satellites, the agency’s director Chris Scolese said Nov. 15. “We are taking seriously the need to move faster in all the things that we do,” Scolese told a large audience of executives at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance dinner event. The NRO designs, builds and operates the nation’s spy satellites. Scolese said the NRO today can take satellites from the drawing board to the launch pad in less than three years. It is launching satellites on multiple commercial rockets in the U.S. and overseas . The next innovation the agency has set its sights on is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to orchestrate the operation of imaging satellites and to analyze data in orbit. The ability to process information aboard satellites instead of having to send it back to Earth is an emerging capability in the geospatial imaging industry that Scolese said could be a game changer and wants the NRO to incorporate in its satellite architecture. Scolese said the NRO also is looking at the use of machine learning to command satellites and respond rapidly to mission requests, a technology that is being pursued by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . In a fireside chat with former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Letitia Long, Scolese said AI and machine learning are key areas where he could use more help from the private sector. U.S. intelligence agencies are very adept at downloading imagery from satellites and analyzing it on cloud computing systems. “The challenge now is moving those capabilities into space where you can do automatic feature recognition and automatic target recognition,” Scolese said. In-space analytics would allow the NRO to deliver critical intelligence to users on the ground faster “by reducing the amount of data that comes down to just what’s needed,” he said. “And of course, figuring out just what’s needed is a challenge that requires us to work with our partners to figure that out as you move that into space.” For example, if military units in the field need imagery over a particular area of the world, AI and machine learning could be used to instantly determine which satellite is located over the target area and whether that satellite has the right type of sensor. “If you want an image of Kherson [Ukraine], if it’s cloudy, it’s gotta be radar … So we’ll be using AI and ML to address those kinds of things,” said Scolese. “We need help with that,” he added. “Those are hard problems, and it requires a change in our mindset.”
Updated 12:30 p.m. Eastern with confirmation of launch failure. SEOUL, South Korea — The inaugural launch of India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) failed to reach orbit Aug. 6 when the rocket’s kick stage malfunctioned. The three-stage vehicle, capable of placing up to 500 kilograms of payload to a 500-kilometer low Earth orbit, lifted off at 11:48 p.m. Eastern from Satish Dhawan Space Centre’s launch pad No.1, carrying the 135-kilogram Earth observation satellite EOS-02 built by the Indian space agency ISRO and an eight-kilogram cubesat AzaadiSAT, made by Indian students. Live footage showed the 34-meter rocket, decorated with India’s national flag, soaring into the air. The rocket’s three lower stages used a solid fuel, hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, while its final stage, called the Velocity Trimming Module (VTM), used thrusters powered by hydrazine and mixed oxides of nitrogen for the precise deployment of its payloads. Flight events seen on the live-streamed screen indicated that the rocket’s flight began smoothly. The first stage was separated about two minutes after liftoff as planned, and the second stage did so 3.5 minutes later. The third stage’s separation took place 10.7 minutes after liftoff. The last available data on the screen was that the injection module’s ignition began 10.8 minutes after liftoff but cut off after just one tenth of a second. At one point, the footage showed the EOS-02 satellite being deployed from the module. S. Somanath, chairman of ISRO, said in remarks a short time later that the first three stages had performed as expected, but “some data loss” had occurred in the final phase of the flight. He did not disclose additional details about the problem but said more details would be announced later. ISRO then ended the launch webcast. Several hours later, ISRO announced that the VTM had malfunctioned, deploying the satellites into an elliptical orbit of 76 by 356 kilometers, instead of the intended circular orbit of 356 kilometers. “Satellites are no longer usable,” ISRO stated, and likely reentered over the Pacific Ocean. ISRO said that “failure of a logic to identify a sensor failure” and take corrective action caused the satellites to be deployed into the wrong orbit. ISRO didn’t state if that was linked to the apparent shutdown of the VTM’s thrusters after a tenth of a second. “This issue related to the SSLV has been reasonably identified, but we will go deeper into it,” Somanath said in a video posted on ISRO’s website . “The system has a deficiency which we need to look at very carefully.” He emphasized that the first three stages all worked as expected. “The entire vehicle’s performance was very good in the mission,” he said. Other than the VTM malfunction, “we couldn’t see any other anomaly. Every other new element that has been incorporated into this rocket worked very well.” He was optimistic that the problem can be corrected quickly. “We hope that, with the small corrections and other re-validation of those corrections through an adequate number of tests, we’ll come back for launch for the next development flight of the SSLV, SSLV-D2, very soon.” ISRO developed SSLV with the aim of providing cheaper and more flexible access to space, compared to its two operational vehicles, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). To that end, SSLV was designed to be configured with a simple modular interface, and the vehicle’s assembly can be done horizontally and vertically. Development of SSLV started in 2017 with an original goal of a first launch as soon as 2019. Its development was delayed by both technical problems, including the failure of a first-stage motor in a static-fire test in 2021, as well as an overall slowdown in Indian space activities linked to the pandemic. Senior Staff Writer Jeff Foust contributed to this article from Logan, Utah.
NASA has delayed the first flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle with astronauts on board, a slip that will push back the spacecraft’s first operational mission into 2024. NASA said Nov. 3 that the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, with agency astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, was now scheduled for April 2023. The mission was previously planned for February. NASA said the new date avoids a conflict with the SpaceX Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station, which is currently scheduled for launch in mid-February. “The date adjustment deconflicts visiting spacecraft traffic at the space station as NASA and Boeing work together to achieve flight readiness,” the agency stated, adding that both Starliner and its Atlas 5 rocket “remain on track for readiness in early 2023.” However, at an Oct. 27 meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, members raised doubts about the readiness of the vehicle for both CFT and later operational missions. “While it is fortunate that the U.S. has one operating ISS crew launch provider, we need to continue to express our serious concern with the impact of the ongoing delays of the CST-100 program on the commercial crew program,” said Mark Sirangelo, a member of the panel. That impact, he said, includes the lack of redundancy the program intended by selecting two companies. He noted that the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 uncrewed test flight of Starliner in May “produced a number of in-flight anomalies” that need to be resolved before CFT, as well as additional testing of the latest version of its flight software. Sirangelo added that NASA’s commercial crew program was following additional longer-term issues with Starliner, including the transition to the first operational or post-certification missions, transition from the Atlas 5 vehicle that United Launch Alliance is retiring and availability of spare hardware, “which may further delay the second source provider coming online.” At an Oct. 31 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee, Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, hinted at a possible delay in the CFT mission, saying a new launch date would soon be released soon. However, he played down any problems with the spacecraft. “There were several in-flight anomalies that we had to assess” from the OFT-2 mission, he said. “Some of that is still ongoing. That work has to be completed and closed out before the CFT flight.” Asked later about specific issues with Starliner being studied, McAlister said work continued on parachutes and software. There were also thruster problems on the uncrewed mission, but those are “pretty well understood and in hand,” he said. “I wouldn’t characterize anything as major.” The delay in CFT will affect the schedule of later operational missions. When CFT was scheduled for launch in February, NASA had tentatively planned to follow that with the first operational Starliner mission, called Starliner-1, in the fall of 2023. Once Starliner is certified, NASA plans to alternate between Starliner and Crew Dragon missions. However, NASA said it has moved up SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission, previously planned for the spring of 2024, to the fall of 2023, indicating that the agency no longer believes Starliner can be certified in time for an operational mission in the fall of 2023. “A launch date for NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission will be determined following a successful flight test with astronauts and close out of the agency’s certification work,” NASA said in its announcement of the delay. Boeing announced Oct. 26 as part of its quarterly financial results that it would take an additional $195 million charge against earnings for Starliner delays , bringing the total losses recorded by the company to $883 million. It warned in a regulatory filing that “we may record additional losses in future periods.”
WASHINGTON – Ukrainian startup Promin Aerospace remains on track to conduct the first test of its small satellite launch technology early next year, in spite of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. “We have done a lot of research, development and manufacturing in the last 10 months and we hired two engineers in August,” Misha Rudominski, Promin CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews . Remaining on track in the midst of a war has not been easy. Promin’s research and development laboratory is based in Dnipro, a central Ukrainian city that has been struck by Russian missiles. To keep employees there safe, Promin does not publicize the location of its lab. The company also strives to prevent power outages there by maintaining two separate electric circuits. “We can’t really move out of the city because that’s where we hire. That’s where a lot of specialists are,” Rudominski said. Dnipro is known for aerospace expertise because it is home to Ukraine’s state-run aerospace company Yuzhmash and space technology design office Yuzhnoe. Although work continues, the war forced Promin to scale back expansion plans. On Feb. 22, two days before the Russian invasion, Rudominski sent the first batch of emails seeking seed investment. When the war started, Promin executives realized their investment plans would need to be put on hold while their focus shifted to the safety of employees, families and friends, plus support for Ukrainian defense and humanitarian relief efforts . By early April, most employees were back working full time. “The worst thing psychologically for a person during wartime is to just sit and do nothing because you worry about the war,” Rudominski said. Instead of expanding its staff as previously planned for 2022, Promin has “doubled down on engineering” with funding raised during earlier rounds and $100,000 in non-dilutive funding provided by Google in August. Early next year, Promin plans to conduct the first test launch of a small rocket. If possible, the company will attempt to send the rocket to an altitude of roughly 100 meters in Ukraine. “Obviously, there are questions whether the [Ukrainian] administer government is going to allow us to do it,” Rudominski said. If Promin does not receive approval to conduct the launch in Ukraine, it is likely to occur in Scotland. Promin has a memorandum of understanding to launch from a Scottish spaceport. “By the end of summer 2023, we are planning to do our launches from the spaceport in Scotland,” Rudominski said. Correction: Google awarded non-dilutive funding to Promin Aerospace in August, not in May as stated in an earlier version of this article. 
SAN FRANCISCO – For years, consumers of Earth-observation data lamented the time required to task satellites to collect imagery of a specific site. The lag between image order and delivery was typically measured in days and only achieved through lengthy phone conversations. That’s no longer the case. “You don’t have to call anybody on the phone anymore,” said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic founder and CEO. “If you have the credentials to our system, you can just log in and book orders directly into an API.” BlackSky Technology announced plans July 12 to offer tasking through a new cloud-based application that allows BlackSky customers to order imagery through Esri’s ArcGIS Online cloud-based mapping platform. “By clicking a button that pops up in an ArcGIS app, users can task an area of interest,” said Beau Legeer, Esri imagery and remote sensing director. “When the tasking is done, that data comes down into a user’s ArcGIS Online” account. “It gives the ArcGIS users options that they never had before to derive important GIS information,” Legeer added. “What’s changing? What’s growing? What’s the impact of some human event or some natural disaster?” Tasking Tools BlackSky is not alone in reimagining satellite tasking. Earth observation startups and established firms have worked for years to streamline the process. Capella Space offers customers access to an automated scheduler through an API or through the Capella Console web portal. Customers can select a location for tasking. An automatic scheduler determines which of Capella’s seven synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in low Earth orbit is in the best position to fulfill the order. The order is then transmitted to the satellite through Inmarsat’s communications constellation in geostationary orbit. Imagery collected is downlinked during the satellite’s next pass over a ground station. “Once it hits the ground, with no human in the loop, it gets processed and it shows up either through the API or through the Console, depending on how it was ordered,” said Payam Banazadeh, Capella founder and CEO. Iceye also is rolling out an API and a web portal to allow customers to input tasking requirements for the Finnish company’s SAR constellation. Still, some customers benefit from conversations about tasking because of the many variables involved. “The traditional way of purchasing imagery by phone allows you to package fuzzy logic into the conversation,” said Iceye co-founder Pekka Laurila. “Whereas the API doesn’t.” Say a customer wants to monitor certain sites every five hours and other sites every 30 hours. What type of leeway will the customer accept, plus or minus five hours? Does the customer need data acquired from the same geometric angle every time to perform a specific type of change monitoring? “How I want to establish my monitoring comes down to a relatively large number of variables,” Laurila said. “Generally speaking, it is a control that we want to give to the user. Of course, it also needs a degree of education in the market.” Expanding Market Early adopters of commercial SAR data tend to be governments or large enterprises with extensive remote sensing expertise and employees adept at tasking satellite. As the commercial imagery market expands, companies that operate SAR and electro-optical satellites are striving to make tasking easy for new customers as well. “Some customers have one task and that’s all they need to do,” said Jim Thomason, Planet vice president of imagery products and analytics. “Some customers have hundreds of tasks a day that they need to enter into our system. Obviously, we need to provide tools for both of those customers.” A customer submitting a single task to Planet’s constellation of 21 SkySats can access a web-based graphical interface. By dropping a pin on a map, the customer can identify the tasking location and select parameters for the order like viewing angles or time constraints. Someone who begins the process in ArcGIS or QGIS can follow a hyperlink to complete the process through Planet’s Dashboard. “It can really be that easy and intuitive for users that aren’t necessarily experts in orbital dynamics and ways to task satellite,” Thomason said. At the same time, Planet offers a suite of tasking tools for Earth-imagery veterans. “They can enter different angles that they want to capture,” Thomason said. “If they want stereo or points or areas or strips, all of this is available graphically or programmatically, if they like to write code.” Satellogic also employs two mechanisms for tasking the Argentine company’s 26-satellite constellation. Satellogic unveiled its tasking platform Aleph earlier this year. “We’re trying to make this as seamless and as easy as possible,” Kargieman said. “We need to empower a large number of new people to use Earth observation that never used it in the past. Part of that is making pricing transparent and making capacity transparent so people know when to expect data.” Making tasking simple allows customers to focus on “using the data to deliver solutions internally to companies and governments, and also to develop value-added services,” Kargieman said. More sophisticated Satellogic customers can place tasking orders through an API. “You can simulate different orders, see what it would cost to satisfy them and pick what’s best for you,” Kargieman said. Industry Giants Airbus Defence and Space and Maxar Technologies, two companies that have operated Earth-observation satellites for decades, also have updated satellite tasking. In early June, Airbus unveiled an API that allows customers to task the aerospace giant’s radar satellites and gain access to the 15-year archive through Airbus’ OneAtlas platform. In late June, Airbus added access to WorldDEM, a suite of digital elevation models derived from radar data. “We are the only satellite imagery provider to allow, through a unique platform, online tasking of both optical and radar constellations, easy access to archive imagery as well as elevation data,” François Lombard, Airbus Defence and Space Intelligence director, said in a statement. “OneAtlas already provides access to optical satellite data from the Airbus Constellation, including Pléiades Neo, and we continue to push the boundaries in terms of what data access looks like.” Since 2018, Maxar has offered tasking through the Rapid Access Program , a multi-year subscription service that relies on Maxar’s ground station network. Maxar’s Direct Access Program is a subscription program that provides direct satellite tasking for customers with their own ground stations.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has tested positive for COVID-19, he announced June 29, but is continuing to lead the agency as he isolates at home. Nelson revealed the diagnosis when he participated by phone, rather than in person as originally planned, at a media event at the Space Telescope Science Institute here to discuss the status of commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope. “I wish I could be there, but I tested positive for COVID last night,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on his condition. NASA press secretary Jackie McGuiness told SpaceNews that Nelson is fully vaccinated, including boosters, for COVID-19. “In the meantime, he will continue to work from home as he isolates and follows CDC guidelines,” she said. Those guidelines recommend people who test positive to isolate for at least five days after symptoms improve. Nelson recently returned from an extended trip to Europe that featured meetings with European Space Agency officials , representatives of national space agencies and government organizations, and companies. That included an appearance at the ILA Berlin air show June 23. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, who accompanied Nelson on the trip to Europe earlier this month, did participate in person at the JWST event.
SAN FRANCISCO – The launch of the next U.S. weather satellite is coming just in time to ensure the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has two healthy spacecraft making observations from polar orbit. NOAA is preparing to launch the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 on Nov. 1 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The satellite, built and integrated by Northrop Grumman, will travel to low-Earth orbit on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 401 rocket. Although the new satellite is called JPSS-2, it is the third satellite in the JPSS constellation. The first was Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite launched in October 2011. Suomi NPP was designed as a precursor for the joint NASA, NOAA, Defense Department National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Since NPOESS was cancelled , NPP was pressed into operational service. After nearly 11 years, Suomi NPP is running low on fuel. It was launched with enough propellant to maintain its orbit for at least 10.5 years plus enough extra fuel to deorbit over the Pacific Ocean. “We’re getting towards the end of that lifetime,” Tim Walsh, NOAA JPSS program director, said during an Oct. 4 press briefing. “We have to think of innovative ways to keep it in its desired orbit.” Because the Suomi NPP instruments continue to function well, NOAA is considering options to extend its life, like allowing the satellite to drift in orbit. First though, the agency wants to ensure that JPSS-2 and its instruments built by Ball Aerospace, L3Harris Technologies, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Technologies are functioning well. The JPSS-2 satellite, which will be renamed NOAA-21 in orbit, will gather observations in tandem with NOAA-20, which was known prior to reaching orbit as JPSS-1. The benefit of having two satellites making observations in low-Earth orbit was demonstrated during Hurricane Ian. NOAA 20 imagery showed two sides of the Category 4 Atlantic hurricane. In contrast, Suomi NPP captured an image “right down the center of the storm,” said Jordan Gerth, NOAA National Weather Service meteorologist. “It’s critical for our meteorologists to have the best view of the various storm systems.” NASA has completed environmental testing of the JPSS-2 satellite and is integrating it with LOFTID , the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator. LOFTID is flying as a secondary payload on the JPSS-2 launch to demonstrate the reentry technology. “I’m happy to report that we have an observatory that’s well checked out and ready to be integrated on top of the launch vehicle,” said André Dress, JPSS flight project manager at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. After launch, NASA will oversee the 90-day commissioning phase before handing over the satellite operations to NOAA. Once commissioning is completed, NOAA-21 will circle the globe every 90 minutes, providing data for numerical weather models, observing storms, detecting fires and other environmental hazards, monitoring sea surface temperatures, spotting harmful algal blooms and measuring atmospheric ozone. The observations come from Ball Aerospace’s Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite, the L3Harris Cross-track Infrared Sounder, Northrop Grumman’s Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder and Raytheon’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. JPSS-2 is equipped with many of the same instruments as NOAA-20. However, JPSS-2 does not include NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System to provide information on Earth’s energy cycle. JPSS also carries a different ozone-mapping instrument than NOAA-20. The ozone-mapping instrument on JPSS-2 is similar to the one on Suomi NPP. The JPSS-2 launch will be United Launch Alliance’s final Atlas 5 flight from the West Coast. After takeoff, ULA will begin converting the Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex-3, for the Vulcan Centaur rocket.
Startup Scout Space won a Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Space Force to augment military systems with commercial data from space-based sensors, the company announced July 22. The $750,000 award allows the company to continue software-development work started last year under an SBIR Phase 1 contract. Scout wants to demonstrate that commercial data collected by sensors in space combined with data from traditional ground sensors can improve the accuracy of space debris tracking and can help predict collisions. The ability to augment the military’s space catalog with commercial data that can be shared with international allies is of growing interest to the U.S. Space Force, said Scout’s co-founder and CEO Eric Ingram. The company’s software will be tested by the operators from Space Delta 2, a Space Force unit that focuses on space domain awareness, and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s intelligence systems division. The Alexandria, Virginia-based company, founded in 2019, developed a sensing payload called SCOUT Vision that would give spacecraft “eyes to enable better navigation and avoid threats,” said co-founder and chief technology officer Sergio Gallucci. The payload uses computer vision and guidance software. The first one launched in June 2021 on an Orbit Fab’s on-orbit refueling spacecraft and is currently in operation. “Our first payload has been collecting data and we have been leveraging that data in our internal development, that data is just not part of this Phase 2 contract,” Ingram said. For the Phase 2 contract, the company will be using a simulated digital space environment, known as digital twin data. Ingram said Scout plans to launch more vision sensors in upcoming missions, including two planned with the space transportation startup Momentus and others. Gallucci said the key goal under the SBIR project is to make sure the data can be used on military systems. “Some within the Space Force are curious about, but uncertain, about what kind of data can be delivered on an unclassified basis,” he said. “U.S. and coalition allies have been challenged for years by the ability to share space situational awareness data. And that is one of the thrusts that we’re pursuing with the AFRL intelligence systems group.” Col. Marc Brock, commander of Space Force Delta 2, said the Space Force has gaps in its space domain awareness enterprise “and we are always in pursuit of new capabilities to fill those gaps.” Having access to unclassified data and capabilities to automatically generate analytic products and services, he said, “have potential to become critical enablers for Delta 2’s mission.”
Teams led by Blue Origin and Dynetics, runners-up in NASA’s first competition to develop a lander to transport astronauts to the lunar surface, have submitted proposals for a NASA competition to select a second lander. Blue Origin announced Dec. 6 that it submitted a proposal for NASA’s Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) competition to fund development of a lander capable of transporting astronauts to and from the lunar surface. The announcement coincided with NASA’s deadline for SLD proposals. As with its original Human Landing System (HLS) proposal, Blue Origin called the companies it partnered with on the SLD proposal the “National Team.” Draper and Lockheed Martin, who were part of that original proposal, rejoined the new team. Blue Origin also added Astrobotic, a company developing robotic lunar landers, and Honeybee Robotics, a space technology company acquired by Blue Origin in January. Notably absent from the team is Northrop Grumman, which was part of Blue Origin’s original proposal, contributing a module that would transport the lander from the lunar Gateway to a low lunar orbit. In its place is Boeing, a company that submitted its own HLS proposal but was not selected for an initial “base period” award in 2020 . Blue Origin did not disclose details about its proposed lander or the roles its partners would play. The company instead emphasized the national aspect of its team, with suppliers in 48 of 50 states, excluding only Nebraska and North Dakota. Northrop Grumman is instead joining a team led by Dynetics that submitted its own SLD proposal, the companies announced Dec. 7. The companies also did not disclose details about their concept but did release an illustration, showing a design similar to what Dynetics proposed in the original HLS competition. “As the only company to successfully build a crewed lunar lander, Northrop Grumman will be an excellent partner as we support NASA’s inspiring efforts to return humans to the lunar surface,” said Steve Cook, president of Dynetics, in a statement, referring to the development of the Apollo-era Lunar Module by Grumman Aerospace. “We believe our partnership with Northrop Grumman makes us more than ready for the challenge.” No other companies have yet announced submitting SLD bids. Blue Origin and Dynetics will be front-runners even if there are other proposals given their experience in the earlier HLS competition as well as receiving awards in September 2021 from NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Appendix N effort to support work on future lunar landers. Lockheed and Northrop also received Appendix N awards. In a panel during the American Astronautical Society’s Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in October , Andy Crocker, HLS program manager at Dynetics, said his company had used the Appendix N award to mature key technologies for its lander, including its engine. In the same panel, Ben Cichy, senior director of lunar program engineering at Blue Origin, said his company has also used Appendix N to advance key technologies in several areas, such as cryogenic fluid management for the hydrogen fuel used on its BE-7 engine. NASA announced the SLD effort in March to select a second provider of lunar landing services for Artemis missions, with enhanced capabilities to support the later “sustainable” phase of lunar exploration, such as larger crews and longer stays. The company NASA selects for SLD will fly one demonstration mission, likely no earlier than Artemis 5 in the late 2020s, and be eligible to compete for future missions. NASA prohibited SpaceX from competing for SLD as that company had won a $2.9 billion HLS contract in April 2021 to develop a lander based on the company’s Starship vehicle. Both Blue Origin and Dynetics protested that award to the Government Accountability Office, which rejected their protests. Blue Origin later filed suit, and lost, in the Court of Federal Claims. Instead, NASA exercised what it calls “Option B” in that award for SpaceX to modify that design for later sustainable missions and conduct a second demonstration mission. NASA finalized that Option B award Nov. 15 , valued at $1.15 billion. NASA expects to select the winner of the SLD competition in June 2023.
The SpaceNews editorial team is producing a daily for the 2022 Small Satellite show, a nightly email newsletter and all-day web coverage during the 2022 Small Satellite show in Logan, Utah the week of August 8.
Orbit Fab, a startup developing infrastructure for in-space refueling of satellites, announced Oct. 25 it lined up a new investor to support those plans. Orbit Fab said that 8090 Industries was a “new major investor” in the company, but did not disclose the size of the investment. The company had previously raised a total of $17 million, including more than $10 million in a September 2021 round that included Lockheed Martin Ventures and Northrop Grumman. 8090 Industries bills itself as an investment firm that backs “category-leading industrial giants of tomorrow.” The firm has previously funded startups working on alternative energy technologies, such as those seeking to “decarbonize” heavy industry and transportation, as well as batteries and aviation. It has not previously invested in a space company. The firm says it partners with more than 20 “industrial leaders” to support its efforts, including the Ozmen family that founded Sierra Nevada Corporation and its space spinoff, Sierra Space. “We see Orbit Fab as the critical layer of infrastructure for the new in-space economy,” Rayyan Islam, partner at 8090 Industries, said in a statement. “The industry’s future will be built around refueling services, and OrbitFab has a clear path to be the category-defining company to unlock the industrialization of space.” “We are extremely impressed by the relationship that 8090 Industries has with the world’s leading industrial companies and the aerospace industry in particular. We are already leveraging these connections to help Orbit Fab in our next stage of growth,” Daniel Faber, chief executive and co-founder of Orbit Fab, said in the statement. Orbit Fab has been developing technologies needed for in-space refueling of spacecraft. That includes the Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface, a refueling port for satellites. It also launched last year its first small tanker, Tenzing, to test operations of future tankers for refueling satellites. The company announced in August it would offer in-space hydrazine refueling at a price of $20 million , starting in 2025. It recently won a $13.3 million contract from the Defense Innovation Unit to supply hydrazine to a Defense Department spacecraft in geostationary orbit in 2025. Refueling is emerging as a key initial market for the broader satellite servicing industry, given the benefits its offers in extending the life and increasing the maneuverability of satellites. “Refueling is really a force multiplier,” Faber said in a talk Oct. 20 at the Global Satellite Servicing Forum by the satellite servicing industry group CONFERS. “Simply put, you can reduce costs and increase revenues.” The cost reductions, he says, come from not having to launch a satellite with all the fuel it needs for its lifetime, instead launching a smaller, less expensive satellite that can be refueled. Revenue increases from a satellite being able to move more quickly to its operational orbit. “You can move faster because fuel is no longer your constraint. You don’t have to worry about taking the most efficient thruster system. You can take the thruster system that can take you to earning money the quickest.” Refueling is also necessary for more ambitious satellite servicing efforts, such as repairing or upgrading satellites. “To be able to use servicing to its full potential for upgrades, in-space assembly, and those type of things, you need the fuel,” he said. “All the technologies are converging and they’re going to create opportunities that any single one of these things on its own wouldn’t enable.”
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched a satellite Oct. 7 carrying a payload for U.S. and French government agencies that will track wildlife and collect other sensor data. The Electron lifted off from Pad B at Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 1:09 p.m. Eastern. The two-stage rocket deployed a kick stage into orbit nine minutes later. After an extended coast, the kick stage fired its Curie engine then deployed its payload, the GAzelle satellite, into a 750-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit about 55 minutes after liftoff. GAzelle was built by General Atomics as part of a complex set of relationships among several government agencies. The U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command selected General Atomics to host the Argos Advanced Data Collection System payload through its Hosted Payload Services contract vehicle, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at a cost of $64 million. The GAzelle spacecraft, weighing about 110 kilograms, hosts the Argos-4 instrument, provided by the French space agency CNES, as part of the Argos program that includes NOAA, NASA and other national space agencies. Argos payloads on satellites collect and relay data from sensors worldwide, primarily those that track wildlife. The Argos program dates back to the 1970s, with Argos-4 representing the most advanced receivers yet flown. Sophie Coutin-Faye, head of the Argos program office at CNES, said at a Sept. 27 media briefing that Argos-4 covers a wider frequency band and has greater data transmission capacity. “These improvements and the expanded coverage that the upcoming launches will provide will make it easier for current and new users to collect more data, from many more beacons, across the globe and with much better data timeliness,” she said. Argos is most commonly used for wildlife tracking because of its low power requirements. “No other satellite system has the same global coverage, supports very small, low powered transmitters, and has transmissions that require less than one second,” said Melinda Holland, chief executive of Wildlife Computers, which provides Argos telemetry instruments for marine animal studies, at the briefing. “This makes Argos the only currently available satellite system suitable for briefly surfacing marine animals such as whales, seals and sea turtles, and even non-air breathing animals such as billfish, sharks and rays,” she added. Electron and Neutron plans The launch was the eighth this year for Rocket Lab and the 31st launch overall for the Electron rocket. The company did not immediately disclose the schedule for its next launch. At a Sept. 21 investor day event, Rocket Lab said it was proceeding with plans for its first Electron launch from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, in December. That launch will carry satellites for HawkEye 360, which operates a constellation of satellites to perform radio-frequency tracking. Rocket Lab had hopes to start launching from Virginia in 2020, but was delayed by a lengthy NASA certification process for the rocket’s autonomous flight termination system, or AFTS, needed for launches from Wallops. “We have absolute assurances from NASA that the AFTS will be complete on time,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, at the investor day event. “After nearly a two-year delay on that, we’re super excited to get this first vehicle launched off LC-2 by the end of the year.” Beck disclosed at the event that the company signed a second, confidential customer for an Electron launch from LC-2 in January. “Basically, we’ll have one out of December, one in January, and that LC-2 launch site will be well and truly kicked off and up and running,” he said. Much of the event was devoted to an update on Neutron, the medium-class reusable launch vehicle that the company announced in 2021. “We are building this thing,” Beck said, pointing to work on tooling to produce the tanks for the vehicle. “There’s real hardware coming, and this is an exciting time.” While initially billed as a vehicle capable of placing up to eight tons into orbit, Beck said that is for the version that returns to land at the launch site. That performance increases to 13 tons for missions that land on a barge downrange from the launch site, and 15 tons if the vehicle is expended. Rocket Lab also changed the design of Neutron’s fairing, which opens to release the upper stage then closes and remains attached to the vehicle. The fairing now opens in two panels rather than four. “We made that change to just reduce part counting and complexity,” Beck said. The vehicle now has nine Archimedes engines in its first stage, up from seven in the original design. Those engines, Rocket Lab announced, will be tested at a facility it is leasing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Construction is underway on the factory adjacent to the Wallops Flight Facility where Rocket Lab will assemble Neutron rockets, which will be launched from a new pad, Launch Complex 3, at Wallops. Beck also used the presentation to tease a possible human spaceflight project, showing renderings of a capsule atop a Neutron rocket and docking with the International Space Station. He said the company was not announcing plans to develop such a capsule, but didn’t rule out doing so in the future. “The vehicle is designed to be human-ratable. You don’t design a vehicle like this without that mind,” Beck said of Neutron. “We don’t have any particular programs focusing on capsules, but we’re looking at it.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Arianespace plans to conduct the maiden flight of Vega C and Ariane 6 rockets in “the first week of July” and “towards the end of the year,” respectively, a senior executive said June 1. Vivian Quenet, Arianespace’s managing director and head of sales for the Asia-Pacific region, announced the timetable during a fireside chat at Asia Satellite Business Week in Singapore. He said Vega C’s debut would be the company’s second launch of the year, after the Ariane 5 that is set to lift off June 22 from French Guiana with a pair of geostationary satellites from Malaysia and India. “After that one [Ariane 5 launch] we will have the maiden flight of the Vega C” in first week of July, Quenet said, and then “towards the end of the year, we have the maiden flight of Ariane 6, which is our heavy launcher which will replace Ariane 5.” He did not say which payload Vega C will be carrying on its first flight. Vega C had previously been slated to perform its maiden flight toward the end of June, while the Ariane 6 debut was scheduled for the second half of the year . The executive said Arianespace had received “a lot of requests” from many Asian countries seeking to develop sovereign launch vehicles and Earth observation satellites. The France-based company is “discussing with those countries to see how we can help them,” he added, without giving further details. He called Russia’s war in Ukraine a “black swan” that has taken a toll on the company’s launch capacity and planning. “We had an impact because we had 11 launches planned on [Russian rocket] Soyuz,” he said. “And because of the collaboration was suspended due to the sanction, we had to find solutions for those eleven launchers. “Sometimes we’ve been helping our customers to reach out to our competitors to find a solution.” However, he expects the situation will improve as Vega C and Ariane 6 become operational in coming months.
Among the 59 small-satellite missions SpaceX launched on May 25 on the Transporter 5 rideshare was a shoebox-size cubesat designed to operate in very low orbit for an extended period of time. The “agile microsat” known as AMS was developed by Blue Canyon Technologies for the MIT Lincoln Laboratory with U.S. Air Force funding. The goal is to test the ability of small spacecraft to maneuver and perform tasks in very low orbits — generally between 200 to 300 kilometers above Earth — where satellites have to fight atmospheric drag. Now in orbit after two years in development, the AMS will begin flight operations in mid-June, said Brad Tousley, vice president of business strategy and advanced technology for space, command and control at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. Raytheon acquired Blue Canyon in December 2020. “What we are interested in doing is to validate that you can operate in very low Earth orbit with autonomous flight control software,” Tousley told SpaceNews. He said AMS would be the first Blue Canyon hardware to fly in VLEO for an extended duration mission that could last several months. The AMS spacecraft will be operated from Blue Canyon’s mission operations center in Lafayette, Colorado. The AMS carries a laser beacon and remote sensing payloads developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Blue Canyon used a 6U-XL bus in a configuration with symmetric double-deployed solar panels and a Enpulsion NANO AR 3 electric propulsion thruster that will attempt to maneuver to the lowest altitude possible. “When you operate in very low earth orbit, your drag is increased. So unless you appropriately control the propulsion and your flight software, you can quickly deorbit,” Tousley said. “So that’s the point, to show that we can operate at duration, and go up and down in altitude.” Military interest in low orbit demos Tousley said there is growing interest from national security agencies in exploring VLEO space applications. Blue Canyon in 2019 was selected by the Naval Research Laboratory to support a combined U.S. Navy and U.K. Ministry of Defense demonstration mission in very low orbit. The mission, called CIRCE — short for Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment — has been in development for more than two years and is projected to launch from the U.K. on a Virgin Orbit rocket in late 2022. Two 6U cubesats will fly in tandem formation to measure the ionosphere and radiation environment from multiple vantage points. The ionosphere spans the upper edges of the Earth’s atmosphere to the lower regions of space. Tousley said Blue Canyon is hoping to be selected for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project that will launch several satellites to study high-frequency radio signals in the upper layers of the atmosphere. DARPA is now seeking industry bids for the project called Ouija. It will use sensors on low-orbiting satellites to monitor radio wave propagation. The agency said the study of radio waves in this lower layer of space will help enhance the performance of military weapon systems that rely on radio signals. These VLEO missions are important in many areas of scientific research, said Tousley. “If you want to characterize the ionosphere, you need to drop down to lower than normal LEO orbits, and most folks wouldn’t operate there at extended duration,” he said. “The drag will increase and you just eventually deorbit in a matter of months.”
Kayhan Space, and partners Astroscale US and the University of Texas at Austin, won a U.S. Space Force contract to develop software for in-orbit servicing vehicles, the companies announced Sept. 28. The team won a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase 1 award worth $250,000 under the Space Force’s Orbital Prime program. Under the contract, they will develop software to enable spacecraft to conduct proximity maneuvers autonomously. Orbital Prime is run by SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force . In May it selected 125 industry teams for the initial phase of the program, intended to promote commercial development of technologies for orbital debris cleanup and other space services. Orbital Prime STTR contracts require small businesses to team with academic or nonprofit institutions. Winners of Phase 1 contracts in 2023 will have an opportunity to compete for second-phase awards of up to $1.5 million to continue development and prototyping. Kayhan Proxima, a software application designed for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), will be deployed as an enhancement to Astroscale’s current flight software used in servicing vehicles. “This complements and enhances our RPO solution to work more autonomously by leveraging Kayhan’s collision avoidance expertise,” said Astroscale. The technology will be offered to the Space Force for possible use in a demonstration planned for 2024. Potential applications for autonomous RPO include in-space assembly and manufacturing, refueling, maintenance, debris removal and other activities. Kayhan Space , a startup based in Boulder, Colorado, has won Small Business Innovation Research contracts for its space situational awareness and collision avoidance technology. Astroscale provides on-orbit logistics and debris removal services to governments and commercial satellite operators. Denver, Colorado-based Astroscale US is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Astroscale Holdings. The Kayhan Proxima enhancement will allow “close proximity among spacecraft in extremely popular and busy orbits by enabling repeatable, safe and autonomous RPO missions and maneuvers with minimal manual support,” said the company’s co-founder and CEO Siamak Hesar. “The goal is to make RPO missions autonomous, which is necessary for the growing new space economy. We want to minimize the need to have ground crews supporting every RPO process,” he said. Ron Lopez, president and managing director of Astroscale U.S., said the team will seek to “provide the Space Force and SpaceWERX a solution that achieves their vision to enable sustainable space operations.” Renato Zanetti, assistant aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics professor at UT Austin, said the STTR contract is an opportunity for the university to support Space Force goals to conduct “efficient and safe RPO operations in space.”
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Preparations for the next attempt to launch the Space Launch System rocket on the Artemis 1 mission remain on schedule for the middle of November, but agency officials said launch opportunities may be limited if it slips to later in the month because of the Thanksgiving holiday. NASA and industry officials participating in a panel at the American Astronautical Society’s Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium here Oct. 27 said preparations for the next Artemis 1 launch attempt remain on track, with a rollout of the rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B on Nov. 4. That would set up a launch attempt on Nov. 14 at 12:07 a.m. Eastern at the start of a 69-minute launch window. NASA has secured backup launch dates of Nov. 16 and Nov. 19. Those launch dates are within a launch period that opens Nov. 12 and runs through Nov. 27. However, if the vehicle does not launch by Nov. 19 there may be, at best, only one chance to try again before the end of that launch period. Nov. 20 and 21 are not available because of what NASA calls Orion performance constraints, such as a trajectory that would put the solar-powered spacecraft into an extended eclipse. Other opportunities are available Nov. 22–25 and Nov. 27, but those are close to the Thanksgiving holiday Nov. 24, traditionally a very busy travel period. Airspace closures for a launch would affect East Coast flight corridors off the coast. “There is an opportunity to get a fourth attempt within that launch period,” said Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, most likely on Nov. 25. A launch that day, he added, would require “a series of discussions that need to occur with the FAA.” Agency and industry officials remain optimistic they will not need to worry about that additional launch attempt, expressing confidence they resolved issues such as the hydrogen leak that scrubbed the previous launch attempt Sept. 3. That confidence is linked to a tanking test Sept. 21 that did not have similar hydrogen leaks after replacing seals and updating loading procedures. “I think we have good procedures to go load the tank. I think we’ve got the hardware in excellent shape. And, I think we have a team that’s been put through their paces a number of times and, every single time, gets better,” Parsons said. Workers are in what Parsons described as the “final phases of closeouts” on the vehicle to prepare for the rollout of Nov. 4. That includes setting up the flight termination system (FTS) on the SLS core stage. Delays in earlier SLS launch attempts required NASA to request, and ultimately obtain, waivers from the U.S. Space Force, which operates the Eastern Range SLS launches from, to what was originally a 20-day life for the FTS. Despite those earlier waivers, the FTS has the same certified life for this launch attempt. “It was a one-time deal,” said John Honeycutt, NASA SLS program manager, of those waivers. “We have not entertained going to back to them just yet.” The current FTS certification period would cover the first three launch opportunities in November. The waivers were necessary because the FTS system, notably its batteries, cannot be accessed at the pad. Parsons said he’s started a study to look at options to be able to access the FTS batteries while at the pad. “We are brainstorming different options,” he said. “We don’t have an answer yet, but we recognize we want to look at it and make some intensive and intentional decisions.”
LOGAN, Utah — A NASA cubesat was removed from a recent rideshare launch opportunity on a U.S. Space Force mission because the spacecraft could not meet guidelines for deorbiting at the end of its life. The GTOSat mission, developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was manifested to fly as a secondary payload on the Atlas 5 launch of the SBIRS GEO-6 missile-warning satellite. The SBIRS satellite was successfully launched Aug. 4 . However, GTOSat and a second, unidentified rideshare payload were not included on the launch. Space Force officials said in a prelaunch briefing that the satellites were not compliant with orbital debris mitigation guidelines but did not elaborate. In an Aug. 8 presentation about GTOSat at the Small Satellite Conference, John Lucas of NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility said the issue was with the requirement that satellites deorbit no more than 25 years after the end of their mission. “We had worked on a number of deorbit analysis issues, trying to meet the 25-year rule,” he said. That was particularly challenging for GTOSat, a 6U cubesat that would be placed in a geostationary transfer orbit to study the dynamics of the Earth’s outer radiation belt. Meeting the 25-year timeline, he said, was highly sensitive to when the spacecraft launched because of the complex orbital dynamics. A final slip in the launch of SBIRS GEO-6 “pushed us above the limit.” Lucas said GTOSat and the other payload sought waivers to the 25-year deorbit rule, and went so far as to make the last-minute addition of a retroreflector to the spacecraft to aid in the tracking of the satellite. Ultimately, though, the spacecraft could not get waivers and were removed from the launch. The mission is now working with NASA’s Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis program, becoming what Lucas called a “pathfinder” for dealing with debris analysis issues. The spacecraft itself is being returned to Goddard, where it will be put into long-term storage “while we look for a new ride” with the support of NASA’s Cubesat Launch Initiative. The 25-year rule has become controversial in part because some believe leaving defunct satellites in orbit for that long is unwise. Some space sustainability advocates have pushed for shortening that timeframe, perhaps to as little as five years. A recent White House report could prompt action on that issue. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued in July a National Orbital Debris Implementation Plan , which outlined activities to address issues in orbital debris mitigation and remediation. One element of that plan calls for a short-term study to be led by NASA “to better understand the impact of changing deorbit requirements” for the U.S. government, including “the potential benefits and cost in reducing the deorbit timelines.” The report, though, did not specify by how much deorbit timelines should be shortened.
An Electron rocket successfully launched a NASA-funded cubesat mission June 28 that will test the stability of the orbit around the moon the agency plans to use for future Artemis lunar missions. The Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1B in New Zealand at 5:55 a.m. Eastern. The Electron deployed the Photon kick stage nine minutes after launch, which then fired its HyperCurie engine twice over an hour to raise its orbit. Photon will perform a series of burns over five days, gradually raising the apogee of its orbit. A final burn six days after launch will place the vehicle on a ballistic lunar trajectory. Photon will then deploy its payload, NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat. CAPSTONE will follow a low-energy trajectory to the moon, entering into a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon Nov. 13. That trajectory is designed to minimize the propulsion needed by CAPSTONE, a 12U cubesat weighing 25 kilograms, to go into orbit. CAPSTONE is owned and operated by Advanced Space, a Colorado company that won a NASA contract in 2019 to develop the spacecraft to test the stability of the NRHO, which NASA plans to use for Artemis missions, including the lunar Gateway. That contract is valued at $19.98 million, said Christopher Baker, program executive for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, at a prelaunch briefing in May. The spacecraft itself was built by Terran Orbital, with Stellar Exploration providing the propulsion system. NASA awarded a $9.95 million contract to Rocket Lab in 2020 for the launch. Part of the CAPSTONE mission will be to better understand the NRHO ahead of Artemis missions, data agency officials say will be useful but not essential. “The data will be really helpful to refine models, maybe find efficiencies, but it’s not necessary or required to proceed,” said Nujoud Merancy, head of the exploration mission planning office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC), at the prelaunch briefing. “CAPSTONE is already yielding benefits for the planning and development efforts for Gateway and Artemis,” said Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Advanced Space. “Our team is working day-to-day with the team at JSC.” The other part of CAPSTONE will be a test of an autonomous navigation system, where CAPSTONE will send signals to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to measure its position. “The CAPSTONE spacecraft will imitate a ground station and will send a ranging tone to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that LRO will turn around and send back to us,” Cheetham explained. “From that, the CAPSTONE spacecraft, using the CAPS software, will be able to estimate both spacecraft.” For Rocket Lab, the CAPSTONE mission represented its heaviest payload to date, with the combination of CAPSTONE and Photon weighing 300 kilograms. It was also the first mission to use the HyperCurie engine, which uses hypergolic propellants and provides more than 3.2 kilometers per second of delta-V, or change in velocity. “That was a tremendous amount of work,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said of HyperCurie at the prelaunch briefing. He said that the company is considering the same combination of Photon and cubesat for a planned private mission to Venus “and a bunch of other potential programs” that have high delta-V requirements.
Not long ago, small satellite manufacturers were confident their suppliers would deliver needed parts and components on schedule. Sure, there were hiccups. But overall, supply was sufficient to meet demand. Then the COVID-19 pandemic followed by the war in Ukraine dealt a one-two punch to the global supply chain at a time when demand was surging due to ever-growing small satellite constellations. “Everything is balancing on us to be able to provide what is needed because if we don’t, it will have a domino effect and the whole NewSpace industry will come close to collapse,” said Istvan Lorinz, Morpheus Space president and co-founder. Microchips are in short supply. So are electronic components, certain thrusters, steel bearings for reaction wheels and various gases. “We get surprised sometimes because there are certain things that we think should be available and they aren’t,” said Luis Gomes, AAC Clyde Space chief executive. “On other occasions, it is the opposite. For certain parts, we have heard that there is a shortage and there isn’t.” Supply chain issues are cropping up at an inflection point for the small satellite industry. Launch capacity is increasing alongside demand for Earth-observation data and satellite communications. Meanwhile, the ongoing miniaturization of electronic components enables manufacturers to build increasingly capable small satellites. Euroconsult expects companies and government agencies worldwide to launch 1,846 small satellites annually, an average of five per day, compared with slightly more than one a day from 2012 to 2021. (Euroconsult defines small satellites as those weighing up to 500 kilograms.) That will only happen, though, if manufacturers can find the necessary parts. Even before COVID and the war, analysts warned suppliers would be hard-pressed to satisfy the soaring demands of the small satellite manufacturing sector. “A market that has historically been relatively slow to develop will now experience an accelerated expansion,” analyst Shagun Sachdeva wrote in “SmallSat Growth on Shaky Foundation,” a 2019 report for consulting firm Northern Sky Research. “This is bound to put immense pressure on the existing infrastructure and the different stakeholders in the supply and value chain.” Specifically, the report warned that the limited pool of satellite suppliers would struggle to keep up with demand. At the same time, new entrants would have trouble gaining a foothold in a market that puts a premium on proven components and long-term relationships. Further complicating the equation are export-control rules like the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations that limit global trade of certain spacecraft subsystems. Demand for space-related parts and materials “was exploding before COVID and before the war,” which “have exacerbated the supply issues,” said Alexandre Najjar, Euroconsult senior consultant. “Overall, the supply issues are driving cost increases and lead time. We see delays, delays, delays everywhere.” Successive pandemic waves temporarily halted the mining of gold, copper and platinum group metals needed for batteries and electronic devices. As schools and offices closed, heightened demand for computers, game consoles and mobile devices raised demand for microchips. Meanwhile, the pandemic wreaked havoc on the aviation sector. A slump in passenger traffic and a rise in cargo transportation forced firms that supplied components for aircraft and spacecraft to look for new markets or halt production altogether. Just as some of those issues were abating, Russia invaded Ukraine, the world’s dominant supplier of noble gases, including neon, xenon and krypton. Xenon and krypton are common propellants for electric satellite thrusters, and all three gases are used in semiconductor manufacturing. Western sanctions to penalize Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are preventing OneWeb and other satellite manufacturers from buying thrusters from Russia-based electric propulsion company EDB Fakel. Meanwhile, steel production is suffering because Ukraine and Russia provide raw materials and finished products. In recent years, Blue Canyon Technologies, a Raytheon subsidiary, has doubled its sales forecast for reaction wheels, which the company’s component business produces for its own buses and sells to other satellite manufacturers. For the moment, though, it’s hard to find enough steel bearings. “That is one of the specific challenges that we’ve had with our local vendors,” said Jeff Schrader, Blue Canyon Technologies president. It often takes twice or three times as long as before the pandemic to acquire materials, components and subsystems. “You have to design around the supply chain bottlenecks,” said Joel Sercel, Trans Astronautica Corp. president and CEO. Blue Canyon is combining orders stemming from different contracts to stock up on everything from solar arrays to screws. “That helps the supply chain, and it helps us make sure that we can hit the schedule,” Schrader said. Blue Canyon also is leaning on Raytheon’s supply chain expertise. “They help us focus on things like long-term agreements and negotiations with our subcontractors, so they benefit, we benefit, and our customer benefits,” Schrader said. NanoAvionics began bulk buying components in 2020. “Back then, we noticed the first signs of unusual market behavior and took steps to invest in our stock,” Regimantas Gervelis, NanoAvionics head of production, said by email. “The difference we see now when ordering a part or component is that it takes much more effort to achieve the same results. For example, it requires more calls and more persistence to buy some components.” Xplore employees constantly check in with suppliers to get schedule updates. “I think that’s how any business has to be run right now, especially in the space industry,” said Lisa Rich, Xplore founder and chief operating officer. Worse than delays and price hikes is uncertainty. AAC Clyde suppliers sometime can’t quote prices or commit to delivery schedules for future orders. “It can be quite challenging,” Gomes said. “We have changed some designs. In other cases, we are placing orders in advance of needing anything that is long lead or on the critical path of design.” Supply chain constraints are helping fuel a trend toward vertical integration in satellite manufacturing. “This was already a significant trend before COVID and before the war,” Najjar said. “This is just going to become the new norm.” Satellogic has a dedicated team managing its global supply chain, but it is largely focused on buying parts because Satellogic produces its own subsystems. “Companies that are less vertically integrated are suffering a little bit more,” said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic founder and CEO. Blue Canyon executives also see the benefits of vertical integration. “We’re more agile because of our components,” Schrader said. “That’s one of the reasons Raytheon procured Blue Canyon.” This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The first stage of the Long March 5B rocket which launched China’s Wentian space station module could reenter the atmosphere around July 31, according to a prediction from the Aerospace Corporation. China launched the second module for its Tiangong space station early July 24. The Wentian module successfully docked with the already-orbiting Tianhe core module around 13 hours later. The massive first stage of the rocket—which, exceptionally, also acts as the upper stage for the mission, inserting the payload into its intended orbit—also entered orbit. Initial tracking from U.S. Space Command showed the Wentian module, the Long March 5B booster and another related object from the launch were all in orbit. Aerospace Corporation experts at the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) have been closely tracking the 53.6-meter-tall stage, which is thought to have a mass of around 23 metric tons. They predict a reentry centered on 11:07 UTC (7:07 a.m. Eastern) 31 July, plus or minus 24 hours. The large window for the reentry is due to the challenges of modeling, including variables such as atmospheric fluctuations which affect how quickly the orbit of an object decays. Prediction windows will narrow closer to the reentry event. The most likely scenario is that the stage reenters over the oceans. There is however a “non-zero probability of the surviving debris landing in a populated area—over 88 percent of the world’s population lives under the reentry’s potential debris footprint,” according to an Aerospace Corporation post stated July 26. “A reentry of this size will not burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the general rule of thumb is that 20–40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground, though it depends on the design of the object,” the post states. Two previous launches of the Long March 5B resulted in uncontrolled reentries of the rocket’s first stage, in 2020 and 2021. First stages for orbital launches typically do not reach orbital velocity and fall within a calculated area downrange. Some upper stages, including China’s Long March 2D, restart their engines after delivering a payload into orbit and deorbit themselves to reduce space debris and the risk of collisions in orbit. However, many upper stages make uncontrolled reentries. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said last year ahead of the reentry for the booster that launched Tianhe that it was “common practice across the world for upper stages of rockets to burn up while reentering the atmosphere.” A recent Nature Astronomy paper assesses that current practices mean there is a 10 percent chance of uncontrolled reentries causing one or more casualties over a decade. Without the ability to restart its engines, the Long March 5B reentry will be uncontrolled. The spent booster will gradually lose altitude due to increasing collisions with molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, and eventually reenter the atmosphere somewhere between 41 degrees north and 41 degrees south. The stage’s orbit sees to reach a latitude a little farther north than New York, Madrid, and Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand. Ground tracks for individual orbits are shown in an Aerospace Corporation illustration. China is planning two further Long March 5B launches. The first, scheduled for October, will send a third space station module named Mengtian into orbit. A Hubble-class space telescope, Xuntian, will be launched around 2024 and co-orbit with the completed Tiangong space station. Earlier on Tuesday China’s human spaceflight agency announced that the Tianzhou-3 cargo spacecraft would make a controlled reentry sometime during July 27 (Beijing time). Tianzhou-3 launched in September last year to deliver supplies to the Tianhe space station module ahead of the six-month-long Shenzhou-13 crewed mission. The spacecraft is expected to be commanded to fire its engines to effect a reentry over the South Pacific, as with the earlier Tianzhou missions, and inline with international practice.
The United Arab Emirates will fly its Rashid 2 rover on China’s 2026 Chang’e-7 lunar landing mission following an agreement between the two countries. A memorandum of understanding was signed Sept. 16 by H.E. Salem Humaid AlMarri, Director General of MBRSC, and Wu Yanhua, Vice Administrator of CNSA, marking a first instance of cooperation between the two for a space mission. Chang’e-7 is a multi-spacecraft mission involving an orbiter, lander, rover and a small, repetitive movable lander for investigating shadowed craters. The surface spacecraft will be supported by a relay satellite operating in an inclined, highly elliptical lunar orbit. The mission will now also carry the small UAE rover which will be developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) in Dubai. No specifications for the vehicle have so far been released. Launch of Chang’e-7 is currently expected in late 2026, according to Chinese reports. Earlier Chinese mission plans suggested that the mission could launch around 2024 and before the Chang’e-6 sample return. The spacecraft will have a combined mass of around 8 tons and launch on a Long March 5 rocket. Some of the mission’s apparent candidate landing sites overlap with those recently selected as possible landing areas for NASA’s Artemis 3 crewed mission. China, the U.S. and others are interested in areas of the south polar region which provide good lighting conditions, safe landing areas and proximity to permanently shadowed craters that are thought to contain cold-trapped volatiles including water ice. The UAE is due to see its Rashid 1 rover, named for Dubai’s late ruler Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, launched later this year by a Falcon 9 rocket. The 10-kilogram rover will be carried by the Hakuto-R lander developed by Japanese firm ispace. The UAE is a signatory to the U.S.-led Artemis Accords which seeks to establish a shared set of principles for responsible behavior on the moon, but cooperation with other parties is not prohibited. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which restrict and control the export of technologies, could however pose different questions for the manufacture of the Rashid 2 rover. China opened its Chang’e-7 mission to prospective partners for a small rover when it announced a roadmap in June 2021 for an International Lunar Research Station in partnership with Russia. China has already landed two lander-rover missions on the near and far sides of the moon with Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-4 respectively. It also carried out a complex lunar sample return mission in 2020 with Chang’e-5 . The country’s next scheduled lunar mission is Chang’e-6 which will attempt to collect samples from the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon. The landing site is however expected to be at a similar latitude to that of Chang’e-5 rather than in the vicinity of the lunar south pole. Chang’e-3, 4 and 5 all set down at a latitude in the mid-40s, suggesting the spacecraft are designed for lighting conditions in these areas. Chang’e-7 spacecraft will require different solar array designs to operate in challenging lighting conditions at the lunar south pole. Chang’e-6, 7 and 8 planned for launch this decade are part of a fourth phase of Chinese lunar exploration and are termed to be precursors to the ILRS.
The U.S. Space Force on June 24 plans to formally establish the National Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The NSIC will be run by a new Space Force unit, Space Delta 18, responsible for analyzing foreign threats to the United States in the space domain. The space intelligence center will be co-located with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. The center will be formed by transferring NASIC’s Space Analysis Squadron and Counter-Space Analysis Squadron to the Space Force. Col. Marqus Randall will serve as commander of the NSIC. Standing up a separate organization focused on space has been a priority of the Space Force since it was established as an independent military branch in December 2019. Space Force intelligence analysts are responsible for discovering and analyzing raw data, recognizing and assessing usable intelligence from a variety of sources. The Space Force has an intelligence unit, Space Delta 7, at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, responsible for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance that support military operations. The Space Delta 18 will support the space intelligence community that includes the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.
LOGAN, Utah — A new solar activity cycle that may be stronger than forecast poses challenges for smallsat operators keeping their spacecraft in orbit and functioning. During a panel discussion organized by the Secure World Foundation at the 36th Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 8, a space weather expert warned that the relatively benign conditions of the last several years are ending. “Whatever you’ve experienced in the past two years doesn’t matter,” said Tzu-Wei Fang, a space scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). “Whatever you learned the past two years is not going to apply in the next five years.” One effect of increased space weather activity is more drag on satellites as storms heat and expand the upper atmosphere, increasing its density. That was illustrated in February when a solar storm caused 38 of 49 newly launched SpaceX Starlink satellites to reenter when those satellites’ thrusters could not overcome the enhanced atmospheric drag created by the storm. “That storm was actually a minor storm in our catalog. It’s not a huge storm,” she said. SWPC has been working with SpaceX to study that incident, including how models of space weather can be better used to predict atmospheric conditions than can affect satellites. A paper summarizing those findings will be published in a journal soon. In addition to evaluating models, she said SpaceX is providing orbit data from its Starlink satellites. “We’re trying to see how we can utilize this data to improve the density estimations.” Increased atmospheric drag has implications for space traffic management as well. “After one storm, in two days everything goes everywhere,” she said, as drag effects vary among satellites and debris. “That’s the time to start worrying about collisions.” This rise in solar activity not only coincides with a sharp increase in the number of satellites launched but also comes after the previous 11-year cycle, called Cycle 24 by space scientists, that was relatively mild. That means many satellite operators aren’t experienced with the impacts of an active sun. The new Cycle 25, peaking around the middle of the decade, appears likely to be more active. “If you look at the beginning of this year, things are very crazy. We’ve had a solar flare almost every week,” she said. The current cycle is trending higher than predictions, increasing the chances for more, and more powerful, solar storms over the next several years. “We’re already way beyond where we predicted at this point.” Solar storms can also disrupt satellite operations or even damage components. This could affect smallsats in particular, which have often used commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics that are more susceptible to solar activity than radiation-hardened components that are more expensive and can take longer to order. Industry officials at the conference said they have not yet noticed any major shifts by companies and organizations from COTS to rad-hardened electronics for smallsats prompted by concerns about increased solar activity. One option for satellite operators, they said, is to use rad-hardened components on critical subsystems and retain COTS components on other systems that can handle occasional disruptions. Fang said satellite operators cannot ignore the effects of solar storms. “It’s very important that we all be aware of the impact of the space environment, how your satellite is going to mitigate this radiation environment and how you’re going to mitigate the drag effects.”
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Executives from Lockheed Martin and its venture capital arm will meet next week to discuss investment opportunities, and many of them are likely to come from the space sector, said Lockheed Martin vice president Eric Brown. Lockheed Martin Ventures on Aug. 3 announced it plans to double investments in tech startups from $200 million to $400 million. Brown, who runs the company’s military space advanced program development, told SpaceNews that “a very sizable portion” of that additional money in the portfolio will be invested in technologies focused on the space domain. A number of commercial space companies in recent years have benefited from Lockheed’s venture funding, including small satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital , small satellite launcher ABL , satellite refueling startup Orbit Fab , space data relay startup Hedron , and navigation startup Xona Space Systems . Brown said Lockheed Martin Ventures “needs to behave like a venture capital organization so far as delivering returns, but at the same time it’s looking at technologies that are going to be beneficial to the various missions that Lockheed Martin undertakes.” In internal discussions on various areas that are candidates for investments, “a lot of the energy has gone into future phenomenologies and future computing,” said Brown. Of particular interest is quantum computing for space-based applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. For sensors, the company is interested in nontraditional phenomenologies to capture data from space. An area of focus is “how we bring together the space piece with weapons systems,” Brown said. “We are looking at advanced processing, computing capabilities that allow you to start taking all of the data that’s formed on orbit and enable other systems in other domains such as the cockpit of an F-35 fighter aircraft or missile systems that Lockheed Martin develops.” On-orbit logistics is another area where Lockheed Martin is looking for opportunities. The company already is investing in Orbit Fab but also would be interested in satellite-servicing technologies to supplement what Lockheed Martin is already doing with docking technology to make satellites interoperable and easier to update on orbit. There is a lot of research money going into robotic arms for spacecraft, Brown noted. “That’s great. But if you can’t interface with the satellite, then you’re really just kind of pulling things off and sticking them on the outside.” In conversations with U.S. military leaders, Brown said he often tries to make the case that DoD should be trying to take advantage of the innovation from startups. This doesn’t require a major restructuring of programs, Brown said. “It’s really about having enough flexibility in the acquisition processes and adapting, even mid program, to on-ramp new technologies,” he said. In military space programs, “there are plenty of opportunities to on-ramp technologies, versus waiting for the next generation.” When working with startups, “you’re inherently going to have things that are not as proven and that you want to take some chances on,” he said. “And the government acquisition environment needs to enable that sort of thing.”
Small launch vehicle developer Orbex announced Nov. 1 it had secured agreements to begin construction of a launch site in northern Scotland for its rocket that will allow a first launch by the end of 2023. Orbex said it signed a lease with Scottish development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) for a 10-acre site in the northwestern part of Sutherland county in northern Scotland. The lease is for 50 years with an option for an additional 25 years. The agreement is technically a sublease, as HIE leases the land from its owners, the Melness Crofters’ Estate. The company will build a facility at the site for launching its Prime small launch vehicle it is developing, hosting up to 12 launches per year. Construction of the site will begin “imminently,” Chris Larmour, chief executive of Orbex, told SpaceNews, and will be completed some time in 2023. Orbex did not disclose details of the facilities that will be built there, although one illustration shows a basic launch pad but little other infrastructure. Larmour said the cost of building and operating the site over three years will be “in excess” of 20 million pounds ($23 million), funded by Orbex. The spaceport announcement comes two weeks after Orbex closed a Series C funding round , raising 40.4 million pounds from several investors. One of the new investors is Jacobs, the U.S.-based engineering company whose work includes being the prime contractor for the ground systems used by NASA’s Space Launch System. Jacobs will serve as the prime contractor for spaceport construction. Plans for what’s called the Sutherland Spaceport date back to 2018, when the U.K. Space Agency selected the site as its preferred location for a vertical launch facility. At the same time, it announced awards to Lockheed Martin and Orbex to launch from the facility . Development of the site, though, was slowed by years of environmental reviews, regulatory approvals and legal battles. In 2020, Lockheed announced it would instead perform the launch funded by the U.K. Space Agency at the Shetland Space Centre , now called SaxaVord Spaceport, a commercial launch site being developed in the Shetland Islands. Lockheed will use ABL Space Systems’ RS1 rocket for that mission, tentatively scheduled for 2023. The spaceport will be dedicated to Orbex Prime launches. “Orbex is the first European launcher company to also manage a dedicated spaceport,” Larmour said in a statement. “It is an important competitive advantage to the company, which will make it really easy for us to work with customers as we scale up our operations.” “Construction of Sutherland Spaceport will mark a major step forward for Scotland’s vertical launch capability and lead to the creation of a range of new jobs in the local community and beyond,” Ian Annett, deputy chief executive of the U.K. Space Agency, said in the same statement. “I’m confident that this new agreement will allow Orbex to strengthen the U.K.’s position as the leading destination in Europe for commercial spaceflight services and international investment.” Neither Sutherland nor SaxaVord, though, are in line to host the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne air-launch system is currently at Spaceport Cornwall, an airport in southwestern England, preparing for its “Start Me Up” mission. That launch is scheduled for some time in November, pending receipt of a launch license from the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority.
BREMEN, Germany — Rocket Factory Augsburg has signed a deal allowing it to build and operate its own engine test stand at German Aerospace Center (DLR) premises. RFA announced the deal at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany, Nov. 16, which will allow RFA to use the P2.4 test site in Lampoldshausen. DLR provides the basic infrastructure while RFA brings its own test stand and supporting infrastructure. Test stands in Lampoldshausen have so far only been used by DLR, the European Space Agency and ArianeGroup. The new test stand will add to RFA engine testing capacity already established in Esrange in northern Sweden, where the company has been conducting testing on the Helix engine for the RFA One launcher. Testing will continue in Sweden but the new development simplifies logistics and bureaucracy related to import and export rules. The three-stage RFA One launcher uses a cluster of 9 kerosene-liquid oxygen staged combustion Helix engines on the first stage and is designed to carry up to 1,300 kilograms into a 300-kilometer polar orbit. “Less than a week before the ESA Ministerial Council, this collaboration is a clear RFA location commitment to Germany and sends a strong signal to policy makers and the industry,” Jörn Spurmann, chief commercial officer at Rocket Factory Augsburg, said in a statement . RFA fired its Helix engine for the first time for a total duration of 74 seconds during the middle of the year, with the same Helix engine ignited and shut down three times without the need to replace any components, according to the firm, with an integrated system test of a complete upper stage tank with a Helix engine due to follow. Spurmann told SpaceNews that the company was working towards a first orbital test flight at the end of 2023. “So we have right now a second stage on the tests and in Sweden and we want to start in this campaign before the end of year. Then in the first half of next year, we’re going to work on the core stage. And given that these are positive, the first flight by the end of next year is what we’re planning. The first launch of the RFA One rocket will take place from the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands in the United Kingdom. If successful, the firm will then begin working through launches already secured. “I think it’s looking really well,” Spurmann said regarding booking launches. “The manifest for 2024 is filling up with a dozen customers.” Munich-based Isar Aerospace and UK-based Skyrora and Orbex are also competing with RFA to become the European launch startup to reach orbit and secure clients.
House appropriators partially restored funding for a planetary defense mission as part of a spending bill while also raising concerns about NASA’s closure of an airborne observatory and plans to return samples from Mars. The House Appropriations Committee released June 27 the report accompanying its commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill for fiscal year 2023, due to be marked up by the full committee June 28. The CJS appropriations subcommittee approved the bill without debate June 22. The report spells out in greater detail how appropriators seek to allocate the $25.446 billion they provide to NASA, $1.4 billion more than what the agency received in 2022 but $527 million less than what NASA requested for fiscal year 2023 in March. Appropriators partially rejected a proposal by NASA to cut funding for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to search for potentially hazardous asteroids. NASA requested only $40 million for NEO Surveyor, pushing its 2026 launch back by at least two years. The project previously expected needing $170 million in 2023. The report provides $94.9 million for NEO Surveyor and urges NASA to find a way to minimize the delay in the mission’s launch. “While NASA has rightly expressed concern about a lack of funding in prior years for near-Earth object surveillance, the Committee is concerned by the agency’s proposal to delay a high priority of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey until 2028,” the report stated, a reference to NEO Surveyor’s endorsement in the latest decadal survey, published in April. The report directs NASA, in its next budget proposal, “to provide a timeline for a NEO Surveyor launch prior to 2028.” The committee criticized, but did not reject, NASA’s plans to terminate the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with an infrared telescope, at the end of the current fiscal year in September. While appropriators said they were concerned about NASA’s decision to terminate SOFIA without a formal senior review, they only directed NASA to provide a report “on NASA’s strategy to mitigate the science and data collection that will no longer be produced by SOFIA.” It also provides $30 million to close out the SOFIA project, $20 million more than what NASA requested. Appropriators were also concerned about NASA’s Mars Sample Return campaign, in particular increasing costs of the effort to return samples being cached by the Perseverance rover. Specifically, it requests NASA to provide a report on using helicopters like the Ingenuity helicopter flown with Perseverance to support Mars Sample Return. Using multiple helicopters “could increase redundancy and ensure NASA has a capability to return samples by augmenting the Ingenuity helicopter design to add a sample retrieval capability,” the report states. NASA officials have been quietly considering the use of helicopters, which have not been part of previous concepts for Mars Sample Return. At a meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee June 21, Jeff Gramling, Mars Sample Return program director at NASA, said the success of Ingenuity prompted a review of whether it could be used for Mars Sample Return. “We’ve looked at whether we could take the Ingenuity helicopter design and potentially modify it for us to fly, with the capability to carry samples,” he said. That is part of ongoing Phase A design studies expected to conclude before the end of the fiscal year. In human spaceflight, appropriators largely followed the agency’s request. That includes $1.486 billion for the Human Landing System program for Artemis lunar landers and $224.3 million for Commercial Low Earth Orbit destinations, the project to support work on commercial space stations. The bill itself provided full funding, or even slightly more than requested, for the Space Launch System, Orion and Exploration Ground Systems programs. Appropriators, though, did mention the cost and schedule overruns on Mobile Launcher 2, the mobile launch platform for the Block 1B version of SLS that was the subject of a sharply critical audit by NASA’s Office of Inspector General recently . The report restricts spending on Mobile Launcher 2 until 30 days after NASA submits a revised cost and schedule baseline for the project. Appropriators also urge NASA “to consider new methods of ensuring that cost and schedule estimates are met on this project, including the possible use of outside management advisory services.” In space technology, the report urged NASA to take a larger role in orbital debris research. It directs NASA to spend up to $5 million for early-stage technology development “addressing tall pole technology gaps” for large orbital debris, such as grappling tumbling objects. It also calls on the agency to establish a competition through its Centennial Challenges prize program to find ways to detect, track and remove small space debris less than 10 centimeters across.
NASA has delayed the launch of an ice-prospecting lunar rover by a year to perform more testing of its commercial lander, the agency announced July 18. NASA said it is delaying the launch of its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission from November 2023 to November 2024. The rover is designed to land near Nobile Crater in the south polar regions of the moon to look for water ice, of interest to both lunar scientists and as a resource for future human missions. The one-year delay is to conduct additional ground testing of the Griffin lunar lander that Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic is building to deliver VIPER to the lunar surface. NASA awarded Astrobotic a task order in June 2020 , originally valued at $199.5 million, to transport VIPER as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. NASA said that the additional tests are intended to reduce the risk of landing VIPER. To conduct the work, NASA is adding $67.8 million to the Astrobotic order that, with previous increases, brings the value of the award to $320.4 million. VIPER is by far the largest and most expensive payload assigned to a CLPS mission to date, with an official cost estimate of $433.5 million. That has clashed with NASA’s “shots on goal” approach to CLPS where the agency has emphasized a higher tolerance of risk, and of mission failures, to keep costs down. “VIPER is NASA’s largest and most sophisticated science payload to be delivered to the Moon through CLPS, and we’ve implemented enhanced lander testing for this particular CLPS surface delivery,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate, said in the agency statement. An audit of the VIPER mission by NASA’s Office of Inspector General , published in April, noted that NASA instituted “augmented oversight” of the CLPS task order to Astrobotic given the higher cost and importance of VIPER compared to other CLPS missions. That oversight includes meetings three times a week among NASA and Astrobotic personnel to discuss issues with both VIPER and the Griffin lander. That audit also noted that NASA’s decision to select a lander before finalizing the design of VIPER led to cost increases. VIPER did not complete its critical design review until October 2021, more than a year after the CLPS award, and the audit found several issues, such as an increase in mass of the rover and concerns about excess vibration, that led to changes in the Astrobotic CLPS task order that increased its value. “Additional modifications remain a possibility, as the rover and Griffin Lander have yet to complete their designs and finalize their requirements,” the audit stated. “Also, because CLPS is a new acquisition model for NASA, additional revisions may become necessary as the project matures and lessons are learned.” Another risk is that Astrobotic has yet to launch its first lunar lander mission, Peregrine. The company unveiled the lander, still in final assembly, in April , and plans to launch it as soon as late this year on the inaugural flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. While Griffin is a different, larger lander, the audit noted that the landers share subsystems and any problems with them found on Peregrine’s mission could affect development of Griffin. This is not the first delay for VIPER. When the agency announced the rover mission in 2019 , it was projecting a launch in late 2022 with a cost of $250 million. By the time the agency awarded the CLPS task order for VIPER to Astrobotic, the agency had delayed its launch to late 2023 to enhance the rover and allow it to operate for 100 days, versus the 14 originally planned. That also contributed to the cost increase for the rover.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft started its trip back to Earth Dec. 1 with the first of two maneuvers that will put the spacecraft on course for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean in a week and a half. The main engine in Orion’s service module fired at 4:53 p.m. Eastern for 1 minute at 45 seconds. That burn nudged the spacecraft out of the distant retrograde orbit around the moon it had been in since Nov. 25 . Orion is now descending back towards the moon, where it will perform a second maneuver, called the return powered flyby, on Dec. 5. That will set up Orion for a reentry and splashdown off the California coast Dec. 11. At a Nov. 30 briefing, NASA managers said the spacecraft continued to perform well with only minor issues. “We are very proud that our system is functioning perfectly. It’s better than we ever expected,” said Philippe Deloo, ESA program manager for the European Service Module. The spacecraft was producing more electrical power than expected but consuming less than expected because of better thermal stability. The propulsion system, which includes the main engine that is a repurposed shuttle-era Orbital Maneuvering System engine as well as several auxiliary thrusters and reaction control system thrusters, also is working well, he said, despite problems in its development. “The regulation of the propulsion system has been our trouble child throughout development, and it has just worked beautifully,” he said. “No problem whatsoever with this propulsion system.” That lack of problems has freed up controllers to perform additional tests of the spacecraft. “With how well the mission is going, we have found ourselves, rather than having to work anomalies, able to push the boundaries,” said Zebulon Scoville, deputy chief flight director. That, he said, helps further reduce the risks for astronauts on Artemis 2, the first crewed mission. Mission managers earlier added seven flight objectives during the spacecraft’s stay in distant retrograde orbit to test out the thermal characteristics of the spacecraft and its propulsion system. That included a thruster firing to maintain that orbit Nov. 30 that used auxiliary thrusters for longer than previous burns to see how they performed. Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager, said they have added four more objectives for the return leg of the mission. Two involve tests of a valve in a helium pressurization system to characterize its leak rate. A third will test attitude control maneuvers at a faster rate, and the fourth will test a different attitude control mode that could save propellant. “We all came into the mission expecting to have challenges,” Scoville said, with controllers going through extensive training for such problems. “Instead, it’s kind of purring along and staying very smooth. The kinds of discussions we’re having are how to rev the engine a little bit harder and how to push it a little bit harder and faster.”
The satellite communications industry is on a mission to virtualize every possible piece of ground infrastructure to catch up with the age of cloud-based networks. Converting hardware into software installed and managed remotely via third-party data centers would give satellite operators more flexibility over their networks and speed up how quickly they can respond to customer demands. The industry could be just years away from being able to tap into virtual ground stations that would have no need for physical modems and their cabling. However, many technical challenges still need to be solved. In September, satcoms equipment maker ST Engineering iDirect and cloud giant Microsoft Azure said they had successfully demonstrated an important milestone: the ability of a virtual modem to extract information from a high-speed satellite signal. Modems are a critical part of the ground segment. They are used in teleports and at customer sites to translate the satellite signals an antenna receives and convert them for transmission through other networks. From within the cloud, their virtual modem could also receive satellite signals digitally via an ethernet cable. Signals from satellites today are traditionally connected to physical modems via analog cables that are not directly compatible with cloudbased networks. These are significant breakthroughs, according to ST Engineering iDirect chief technology officer Frederik Simoens, because they pave the way for virtual modems running on third-party cloud infrastructure to replace their physical counterparts. There would be “no specific satellite hardware needed anymore,” he said, because data traffic could “go from a cloud environment through the digital interface directly to the antennas” that connect to spacecraft. Currently, if a satcoms customer like a cruise line wants a new service, their provider has to go to them and the satellite gateway to physically install equipment. In the future, this could be done remotely without buying and installing satellite modem hardware — although physical antennas, amplifiers, and frequency converters would still be needed to communicate with satellites. “Virtualization doesn’t mean that teleport operators can tear down their antennas and throw out their high-powered amplifiers,” says Robert Bell, executive director of the World Teleport Association. “But it does offer big gains in cost as well as reducing the complexity of operations and expanding markets.” Bell said digitizing signals as close to the downlink antenna as possible and converting them to analog as close to the uplink as possible, rather than moving analog signals around on interfacility links, gives operators “more opportunities” to improve the flexibility of their services. However, it might not always be possible to fully implement virtualized network solutions at a customer’s location even when they become available, at least in the near term. For most remote customer terminals, “there will not be a handy data center standing back to host a virtual modem,” Bell said. For companies like iDirect, moving to software would enable it to offer its communications technology via a service model. Instead of buying network equipment from iDirect under a “one-off” type of deal, a satcoms provider could get the capability with a subscription and pay only for what it needs and when. A maritime satcoms provider only needing coverage over the Caribbean in the summer and the Mediterranean during other seasons, for instance, could respond to changes in demand remotely with a few clicks in the cloud. Today, it would need to have installed physical modems and a greater level of infrastructure in both regions with the capacity to deal with maximum traffic loads. “I think it will revolutionize the industry,” SES CEO Steve Collar said, “it’s something that’s been a goal for a while, but we now think it’s in reach.” SES and Microsoft recently formed an initiative they call the satellite communications virtualization program to help convert satcoms hardware from iDirect, Gilat, and others to software. Large public cloud networks from companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are seen as key enablers for integrating space-based networks with terrestrial communications, which would help satellite operators capture more of the telecoms market. The satellite industry made about $279 billion in revenues in 2021, according to a recent report from BryceTech, while the global telecoms market is measured in the trillions of dollars. Their increasingly nimble, cloud-compatible networks also come amid a broader industry shift toward more flexible — albeit sometimes shorter-term — customer contracts to compete in this industry. SES and Microsoft plan to issue a request for proposals before the end of this year for those looking to join its virtualization program, which they say will be a blueprint for aligning cloud and satellite network architectures. The program also seeks to accelerate the adoption of standards to replace customer antennas with standardized and non-proprietary hardware. SES is one of many satellite operators seeking more integration with cloud networks, although some, like Viasat and Hughes Network Systems, have built businesses around proprietary antenna technology. Still, Collar believes it will probably be years before the satcoms industry realizes its virtual teleport ambitions. “We can start delivering some services within 12 to 18 months that are fully cloud-based and not hardware-based,” he said, “but it somewhat depends on getting the industry on board.” Some parts of the ground segment are easier to transfer to the public cloud than others. The first step for iDirect will be offloading processes that have already been virtualized under a private cloud network, including network management systems, to the public cloud. Migrating other processes that currently run on dedicated hardware is “more tricky,” Simoens said. Virtualizing this hardware needs to go hand-in-hand with fully digitizing how they interface with antennas, amplifiers, and frequency converters. There is plenty of work to do to reach the level of standardization that these interfaces will need to be widely adopted. “If we cloudify everything on the modem side, but there’s no antennas or amplifiers that can talk the digital language, let’s say, then, of course, we cannot fully create a digital teleport,” Simoens said. Overall, he expects it will take about three to five years to combine all these pieces of the puzzle. However, while public cloud providers are bringing new software tools to aid the ground segment’s virtual transformation, they will also need to develop sustainable pricing models to make this a reality. The cloud would work very well for occasional use cases and those applications requiring a lot of regional flexibility, Simoens said. Still, it remains expensive for services that need to run 24/7. Nailing down cloud business models for different space applications is one of the areas SES and Microsoft are keen to address. This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
European Space Agency member states have provided the agency with 16.9 billion euros ($17.5 billion) for the next three years, a significant increase over 2019 but more than 1.5 billion euros below what the agency sought. At a Nov. 23 briefing concluding the two-day ministerial conference here, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher announced that ESA members had agreed to contribute 16.923 billion euros over the next three years, a 16.6% increase — before accounting for inflation — from the previous ministerial in 2019. However, it fell short of the roughly 18.5 billion euros that ESA leadership sought going into the meeting . “This is a very significant increase, but you have to see this figure in context,” Aschbacher said, citing Europe’s energy crisis, high inflation, and economies still recovering from the pandemic. “Despite these circumstances, with inflation being so high, I have to say I’m very impressed by this figure.” Despite falling short of its target, none of ESA’s major priorities were deleted from the budget, he said. They ranged from starting work on a lunar cargo lander that could participate the NASA-led Artemis program and funding a share of the European Union’s IRIS² secure connectivity constellation to revampin the ExoMars rover mission that had been sidelined after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extending ESA’s participation on the International Space Station to 2030. “Nothing has been curtailed. Some of it was reduced slightly in scope,” he said. “Nothing had to be deleted or taken out of the portfolio.” One example of an “under subscription” was ESA’s FutureEO program, a suite of future Earth science missions. Simonetta Cheli, ESA director of Earth observation, said at the briefing that the program received about 80% of the request, but did not provide a specific figure. She said ESA would go back to the member states between December and February and develop a plan “of what can be implemented” given the available funding and strategic priorities. The same will be true for other programs that fell short of their requests, Aschbacher said, with discussions with the member states contributing to those programs to see what can be done with the available funding. “We define this in work plans that are decided by the member states,” he said. “This is a standard process, a standard procedure, as we do every time after a ministerial conference.” ESA provided few details about funding levels beyond the top-level numbers for each of its major programs, and directors for most of those programs were not available for comment after the briefing. Some programs did get all the funding they requested and more. That included a request for 600 million euros for a transition program for the Ariane 6 as that rocket, which has suffered several years of delays, enters service over the next three years. ESA went into the ministerial needing to close a nearly 200 million euro gap. Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA director of space transportation, said at the briefing the agency was “a little bit above what we expected” for the program but did not give a specific figure. Aschbacher praised member states for their contributions. “Almost every country had a significant increase of its budget this year compared to last time,” he said. However, there was also some confusion about the contributions each member state made. That included ESA’s largest contributor, Germany, which is providing 3.51 billion euros, compared to 3.29 billion euros in 2019, according to ESA. However, a release by Germany’s economic ministry claimed the country was providing 4 billion euros. Anna Christmann, the German government’s federal aerospace coordinator and chair the ESA ministerial council meeting, praised the outcome. “I’m delighted that we have a very good result from this conference,” she said. “I think we have shown what European ambition really is and what it means to collaborate together for making these efforts possible.”
Following a surge in demand for the company’s services during the war in Ukraine, HawkEye 360 is looking at a new round of funding, and possibly going public in a couple of years, CEO John Serafini said Sept. 8. 
 Earth observation company HawkEye 360 uses satellites to monitor radio frequency (RF) signals emitted by electronic devices and analyzes the data to draw conclusions. “We’ve performed over 1,000 individual missions over Ukraine, and it’s given us bona fides that we can then go take to other places where we’re required, in particular Asia Pacific with the rise of China,” Serafini said at an aerospace and defense symposium in New York City hosted by the investment advisory firm Gabelli Funds. Of particular interest to military and intelligence agencies is the use of RF detection to locate sources of GPS jamming or other activities that disrupt satellite-based navigation. HawkEye 360 in March reported its satellites over Ukraine detected extensive GPS interference activity. Serafini said HawkEye 360 is planning a new funding round and perhaps an IPO, depending on market conditions. An almost exclusive focus on U.S. and international military and intelligence customers makes the company less vulnerable to the swings of the commercial markets, he said. “We service recession resistant customers that are going to spend billions upon billions of dollars to get what they need regardless of recessionary conditions elsewhere in the world,” said Serafini. “We are very focused on government centric defense, intelligence and security missions, not just for the U.S. government, but for our international allies as well.” Since the company was founded in 2015, HawkEye 360 has raised more than $300 million in six funding rounds. “As we contemplate our next round, I think we will continue to look for private sources of capital, particularly for perhaps a pre IPO round, in anticipation of an IPO likely in 2024 or 2025 depending upon the macro conditions,” he said. The economic trends of late — rising interest rates, soaring inflation and uncertainty driven by the ongoing war in Ukraine — have been unfavorable for commercial space and data analytics companies seeking to go public. Space logistics company D-Orbit last month canceled plans to go public by merging with Breeze Holdings Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Earlier this year, weather and climate security platform Tomorrow.io and special purpose acquisition company Pine Technology Acquisition Corp also terminated a SPAC merger agreement due to market conditions.
TAMPA, Fla. — Plans to use a part of Ku-band for 5G networks in the United States could disrupt Starlink broadband services even more than SpaceX previously estimated, the company said Oct. 4 as it released interference analysis from a third party. SpaceX said the analysis validates its in-house study in June, when it warned Starlink would be unusable for most Americans if a 5G high-power mobile service is allowed to operate with 12 GHz band frequencies across the United States. The analysis from engineering consulting firm Savid also shows “SpaceX may have underestimated the likelihood of interference and potential harm to Starlink services,” SpaceX senior director of satellite policy David Goldman wrote to the Federal Communications Commission. Starlink uses 12 GHz spectrum to connect its satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) to user terminals. Satellite broadcaster Dish Network uses frequencies in the band to provide linear TV programming, and is seeking permission from the FCC to upgrade its license to provide terrestrial 5G services. According to Dish and RS Access, a spectrum holding company that also seeks to adjust a license it has in the band to run a terrestrial network, their plans can coexist with other users of the band. RS Access, backed by billionaire Michael Dell, has commissioned studies from engineering firm RKF Engineering Solutions to show how such a network would impact fewer than 1% of terminals connecting to satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). Dish and RS Access point to mitigation techniques they say are readily available for affected terminals, although it is unclear how quickly they could deploy their proposed networks following FCC approval. “SpaceX’s latest submission follows the company’s familiar pattern: making exaggerated claims in service of trapping 500 MHz of 5G-ready spectrum,” Dish executive vice president for external and legislative affairs Jeff Blum said via email. “It is no surprise that yesterday’s filing from SpaceX includes a flawed technical analysis that purports – unsuccessfully – to rebut the multiple studies submitted to the FCC from the best experts in the field that have concluded that co-existence is eminently possible.” SpaceX says the interference studies Dish and RS Access draw from are inaccurate and based on incorrect assumptions about its network. In the letter to the FCC, Goldman said its latest analysis also addresses a claim from RS Access that “only a third party could truly analyze” how the proposed network would interfere with NGSO satellites. NGSO broadband operator OneWeb also uses the band to connect user terminals. OneWeb submitted its own study to the FCC in July to show how using the spectrum for terrestrial 5G would severely disrupt NGSO broadband across the United States. DirecTV, a Dish satellite broadcaster rival majority owned by U.S. telecoms giant AT&T, has said its TV customers also face major disruption if the FCC approves the plan. A study DirecTV filed with the FCC in July that underpinned its warning was also conducted by Savid. “The record is definitive that unavoidable interference caused by high-power transmitters in the 12 GHz band would be devastating for millions of American consumers who depend on the satellite services in the band,” Goldman wrote to the FCC. “SAVID’s technical conclusions validate SpaceX’s study and expose how RKF severely underestimates interference to Starlink customers.” Third-party findings While Savid found SpaceX’s power assumption in its June study was conservative in favor of Dish by a factor of four, SpaceX’s outside analyst said the report commissioned by RS Access underestimated by a factor of 40 Dish had also criticized how SpaceX’s earlier study extrapolated data from the Las Vegas region to simulate a nationwide interference impact. According to Savid, the Las Vegas market is representative of other major regions in the U.S. where Starlink services are deployed. SpaceX’s Goldman said Dish had also argued that SpaceX should not have assumed Dish “would actually deploy sufficient base stations to meet its build out requirements.” However, he said Savid found that even Dish’s own base station assumptions would result in “degraded service which indicates a minor difference in results,” and at “many multiples of the levels that would still render the band useless for existing satellite services.” He said RKF’s assumptions that Dish’s network would only operate under low power levels were also found to be inconsistent with a status report Dish issued in July , showing its progress deploying 5G in other spectrum bands. In the inteference analysis SpaceX released Oct. 4, Savid said Dish’s 5G deployment practice to date “clearly indicates” that Dish’s terrestrial mobile systems “will tend to maximize” base station transmission power. Savid also observed that the use of statistical methods in any of the analyses submitted to the FCC “washes out the real interference that a Starlink user will see from high-power terrestrial mobile base stations operating nearby,” Goldman added. He called on the FCC to swiftly reject the terrestrial 5G plans.
The National Reconnaissance Office has released a request for proposals from commercial providers of space-based radio frequency (RF) imagery. Companies in this emerging sector of the remote sensing industry use low-orbiting satellites to track ships, vehicles or any devices that emit radio frequency signals. The new solicitation is part of a broad NRO program rolled out in October called Strategic Commercial Enhancements . The agency said it wants to assess how commercial RF could play in the larger signals intelligence overhead architecture. The commercial RF data program would follow the model used by the NRO to work with commercial providers of space-based synthetic aperture radar data. The agency in January announced it signed agreements with five SAR companies, giving the NRO access to data collected by commercial satellites so government analysts can better understand the quality of commercially available imagery. “Much like the first focus area which was for commercial radar, this procurement represents a flexible approach for the NRO to continuously evaluate new and emerging capabilities and providers in a more streamlined acquisition fashion,” an NRO spokesman told SpaceNews July 14. The goal is to award contracts later this summer or early fall, the spokesman said. “The number of awards depends on the number and quality of proposals we receive, but much like the first focus area for commercial radar, we anticipate to have multiple providers for assessment.” Commercial companies that provide space-based RF data include HawkEye 360 , Kleos and Spire . The NRO does not publicly release its solicitations. Interested contractors who have registered to do business with the NRO can access the request for proposals from the Acquisition Center of Excellence Acquisition Research Center.
BlueHalo won an $11 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a pair of optical laser communications terminals and a ground station that will be used for on-orbit experiments, the company announced June 14. The terminals and ground stations, to be delivered in 2025, will support demonstrations of optical uplinks and downlinks between satellites in geostationary and low Earth orbits. They also will be used to establish space-to-ground links, to demonstrate positioning and timing over optical communication links, and interoperability with multiple optical communications standards. BlueHalo, a privately owned defense and intelligence contractor based in Arlington, Virginia, developed optical communications technology used by NASA in its recent Laser Communications Relay Demonstration that flew to orbit in December as part of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Test Program 3 mission. Vikram Manikonda, BlueHalo’s chief technology officer, said in a statement that laser communications technology allows “high data rate communications, ranging, and timing services with low probability of intercept or detection due to extremely narrow beam widths.” The AFRL demonstration, he said, will push technological breakthroughs in optical jitter control and precision pointing.
Boeing announced Oct. 26 it will take yet another charge against earnings because of delays in the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew program, bringing the total losses recorded by the company to date on the program to nearly $900 million. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission , Boeing announced a charge of $195 million recorded in its fiscal third quarter it blamed on Starliner. It comes after a $93 million charge reported in its second quarter financial results July 27 . The latest charge brings the total losses announced by Boeing on the Starliner program to $883 million dating back to early 2020, when the company took a $410 million charge after a first uncrewed test flight, called Orbital Flight Test (OFT) was cut short by technical problems. The company took an additional $185 million charge in October 2021 when valve problems delayed the OFT-2 mission. The company blamed the charges in the last two quarters in part on increased costs to get Starliner ready for its first flight with astronauts on board, the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, now scheduled for no earlier than February 2023 . That will allow operational, or post-certification, missions for NASA to begin as soon as the fall of 2023. Boeing said the major factor in the latest charge was a change in schedule for those post-certification missions. “The increase recorded in the third quarter of 2022 was primarily driven by timing of the three future post certification missions which are now assumed to be completed by 2026 based on NASA’s revised launch plans,” the company stated in its SEC filing. “We had previously assumed that the post certification missions would be completed by 2024.” NASA officials have stated that, once Starliner is certified after the CFT mission, it will alternate with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which has been performing all of NASA’s commercial crew missions since being certified after the Demo-2 test flight in mid-2020. Each company would thus conduct one commercial flight for NASA per year. Boeing’s commercial crew contract that NASA awarded in 2014 includes six post-certification missions. NASA awarded the same amount to SpaceX but has twice added missions to the contract, bringing the total to 14 as of the end of August . Boeing did not discuss in detail commercial crew charge in the press release it issued about its quarterly financial results, stating only that it recorded losses on commercial crew as well as four aircraft programs in its Defense, Space and Security business unit. The company also did not mention the commercial crew charge in an earnings call. The company did caution in the SEC filing that this latest charge may not be the last for the Starliner program. “Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods,” it stated.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s first robotic lunar orbiter is looping back to the moon from the L1 Lagrange point after successfully conducting a critical trajectory correction maneuver Sept. 2, a milestone in its voyage toward the moon. The science ministry announced Sept. 4 that the maneuver was so successful that the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), which controls the spacecraft called Danuri, has decided to skip an additional correction maneuver planned for Sept. 16. “The maneuver was a critical step for Danuri to make fuel-efficient travel to the moon and reach the moon’s orbit on time,” the ministry said in the statement. The orbiter, launched Aug. 5 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, is on a ballistic lunar transfer trajectory — which takes the spacecraft toward the sun before looping back to arrive at the moon’s orbit in December. The route, while much longer than traveling directly toward the moon, allows more fuel efficiency as it leverages the sun’s gravity for travel. The orbiter — if everything goes as planned — will be captured in lunar orbit on Dec. 16. A series of propulsive maneuvers with the spacecraft’s thrusters will steer it into a circular, low-altitude orbit about 100 kilometers from the lunar surface by Dec. 31. After a brief period of commissioning and tests, the spacecraft’s yearlong mission is expected to begin in January. Roh Hyung-il, a KARI spokesman, told SpaceNews there would be another major trajectory correction maneuver in November. Once captured in lunar orbit on Dec. 16, he added, the spacecraft will conduct five more maneuvers between Dec. 17 and Dec. 31 to get to its final orbit 100 kilometers from the lunar surface. Starting in January, Danuri — also known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter — will measure terrains, magnetic strengths, gamma rays and other traits of the lunar surface using six onboard instruments, including a NASA-funded hypersensitive optical camera called ShadowCam, during its yearlong mission. The orbiter will also identify potential landing sites for future lunar missions.
NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission will not launch this year as previously planned after the agency concluded there was not enough time to complete testing of the spacecraft’s software before its launch window closes. In a briefing held June 24 on just a few hours’ notice, agency officials said the mission did not have enough time to test guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software on the spacecraft before its launch window closes Oct. 11. NASA had already delayed the launch from Aug. 1 because of the software testing issue . “Following exhaustive analysis, augmentation of resources and efforts to rescope or rephase functionality, the project and JPL have concluded that Psyche does not have a path to launch with acceptable risk in the 2022 opportunity,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. Project officials said the problem was not with the GNC software itself but rather a testbed used to test that software by simulating the spacecraft. “The testbed is basically a splayed-out simulation of the actual spacecraft. It’s a combination of hardware and software,” said Henry Stone, Psyche project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s intended to make a replica of the flight system onto which you can then run the software to test out all of the system behaviors.” The testbed is the responsibility of JPL, he said, but also includes components provided by Maxar, the prime contractor for the Psyche spacecraft. “We had to merge that portion of simulators and test equipment with the portion at JPL to create the overall system. We ran into some issues there.” Maxar did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding its role on the Psyche testbed. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at Arizona State University, said development of the GNC software was running behind schedule last year. By early this year, the project knew the testbed was also behind schedule. That testbed is now working, but too late to test the software in time for a launch this fall. “Only recently did it become clear that time would just be too tight to reach the 2022 launch period,” she said. “We haven’t had this exact problem before, especially the unique challenge of the testbed environment,” Laurie Leshin, director of JPL, said. She estimated it would have taken “weeks to months” to complete the testing. Glaze said NASA just made the decision not to launch Psyche this year, and thus has not made firm plans for the mission’s future. She said the agency will commission an independent review of the mission to examine options and associated costs for continuing it. That will support a formal review to either continue or terminate the mission. “I’d like to get that done as soon as we can,” she said of that continuation review, but didn’t give a firm schedule for doing so, citing the need to assess “complex trajectories” for future launch opportunities. Elkins-Tanton said there are launch windows for the mission in July and September next year, but didn’t state how long it would take for Psyche to reach its destination, a metallic main-belt asteroid also called Psyche, if it launches then. A launch in 2022 would have allowed the spacecraft to reach the asteroid in 2026. Leshin noted that Psyche’s use of electric propulsion gives mission designers some flexibility in planning trajectories for the spacecraft. “There are good-looking opportunities in ’23 that get us there before the end of the decade.” That review will also address the additional cost caused by the delay. An assessment of NASA projects released by the Government Accountability Office June 22 noted that Psyche’s cost was $965.6 million, 3.1% below its baseline cost commitment of $996.4 million. However, that report stated that the mission’s cost reserves were lower than projected and that even before this software testing issue “the project anticipated that additional funding would be necessary to meet its planned launch readiness date.” Glaze said the review will look at how the additional costs of Psyche could affect other planetary science missions at the agency, in particular the Discovery line of cost-capped missions that includes Psyche. She did not elaborate on potential implications for Discovery those missions, but they could affect two Venus missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, selected for development by NASA in the Discovery program a year ago . Psyche’s delay will also affect Janus, a rideshare mission launching with Psyche designed to fly by binary asteroids. The earlier delay of Psyche’s launch from Aug. 1 to no earlier than Sept. 20 already disrupted that mission, preventing it from performing the Earth flybys it needed to reach its original destinations . Glaze said that NASA’s focus for now is on figuring out a new plan for Psyche. “Once we know that, we will be able to think a little more completely about what the path forward for Janus will look like,” she said. The same is true, she added, for the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration installed on Psyche itself, an experiment to test high-bandwidth laser communications. “We will do what’s needed, and we will work with NASA on all options moving forward,” Elkins-Tanton said.
 Scout Space , a startup developing technologies for in-space services, won two U.S. Space Force contracts in support of the debris-cleanup project known as Orbital Prime. Each contract is worth $250,000. The company announced Aug. 24 its partners for the project are Stanford University’s Space Rendezvous Laboratory ( SLAB ) and the Florida Institute of Technology’s Orion Lab . Orbital Prime is run by SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force . In May it selected 125 industry teams for the initial phase of the program, intended to promote commercial development of technologies for orbital debris cleanup and other space services. The awards are known as Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contracts which require small businesses to team with academic or nonprofit institutions. The two research contracts won by Scout are for on-orbit navigation, safe approaching and tracking technologies. “Orbital Prime is providing us, a private company, with a very unique opportunity to partner with highly respected academic institutions to kickstart advances in technologies for on-orbit approach and on-orbit acquisition,” said Eric Ingram, Scout’s founder and CEO. Simone D’Amico, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University and founding director of SLAB, called the project “a great opportunity for an academic laboratory to deploy new machine learning algorithms for autonomous spacecraft navigation in actual space missions led by industry.” The SLAB and Orion labs provide “unique and exciting capabilities for technology transfer,” said Scout’s co-founder and chief technology officer Sergio Gallucci. The teams that won phase-one contracts will have an opportunity later this year to compete for second-phase awards of up to $1.5 million for each of the contracts to continue development and prototyping.
Updated 8:30 p.m. Eastern with Advanced Space statement. WASHINGTON — A NASA lunar cubesat mission has lost contact with Earth a day after its deployment, putting into jeopardy its plans to demonstrate the orbit that will be used for later Artemis missions. In a July 5 statement, NASA said the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat “experienced communications issues” during its second pass with the Deep Space Network (DSN) after its July 4 deployment from Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon kick stage . Amateur satellite observers had noticed a lack of transmissions from the spacecraft, prompting speculation something had gone wrong with it. “The spacecraft team currently is working to understand the cause and re-establish contact,” NASA said in its statement, noting controllers had good data on the spacecraft’s trajectory from the first DSN pass and second, but partial, DSN pass. “If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post-separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days.” While CAPSTONE is a NASA-funded mission, it is operated by Advanced Space, a Colorado-based startup. “During commissioning activities an anomaly was experienced related to the communication subsystem; the operations team is actively working this issue with the Deep Space Network and determining the best next steps,” the company said in a statement late July 5. Advanced Space said that, before the communications problem, the spacecraft had deployed its solar panels and was charging its batteries. It has also commissioned its propulsion system in preparation for a trajectory correction maneuver. CAPSTONE is flying a low-energy trajectory that will take it more than 1.2 million kilometers from Earth, eventually going into a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon in November. That trajectory was designed to minimize the propellant needed by the small spacecraft, weighing only 25 kilograms, to go into orbit. The original mission plan called for its first trajectory correction maneuver on July 5, but that is on hold. “The mission transfer approach and system margins provide time to resolve and understand this anomaly before proceeding with the first trajectory correction maneuver,” the company stated. NASA funded CAPSTONE to collect data on the stability of that halo orbit, which will be used by later Artemis missions and the lunar Gateway. However, agency officials have previously said that while the CAPSTONE data will be helpful to refine plans for those Artemis missions, is it not essential. Lunar Photon’s extended mission While CAPSTONE engineers work to restore contact with that cubesat, Rocket Lab says its Lunar Photon vehicle is still operational after boosting CAPSTONE onto its lunar trajectory and releasing it. Lunar Photon is “well and healthy,” Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s chief executive, said in a call with reporters July 5. “We’re now in the process of working through a secondary mission for that spacecraft. It seemed too great an asset to have in deep space to not take advantage of and do some cool things.” He said it was too early to discuss what that extended mission might include, but noted the spacecraft has additional propellant available, as well as generating sufficient power. “It’s really down to comms,” he said, as Rocket Lab is using commercial ground stations rather the DSN to communicate with Lunar Photon. Beck noted that Lunar Photon could, for example, enter the same halo orbit that CAPSTONE plans to use. “A piece of cake,” he said when asked about that scenario. “We have plenty of propellant for that, so if required, we could do that, no problem.” Rocket Lab plans to use the same Photon spacecraft for a privately funded Venus mission, replacing the CAPSTONE cubesat with an atmospheric entry probe. “There’s no difference in the spacecraft with the one that will take us to Venus,” he said. “We’re learning a lot and this is a wonderful dry run for the Venus mission.”
A Cygnus cargo spacecraft departed the International Space Station June 28, three days after it demonstrated its ability to raise the station’s orbit. The station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm unberthed the NG-17 Cygnus spacecraft and released it at 7:07 a.m. Eastern, after which it maneuvered away from the station. The spacecraft, loaded with garbage for disposal, is scheduled to reenter after a June 29 deorbit burn by the spacecraft. The Cygnus left the station three days after the spacecraft used its main thruster to raise the station’s orbit. The spacecraft fired its engine for 301 seconds, raising the station’s perigee by about 0.8 kilometers and its apogee by nearly 0.2 kilometers. The test demonstrated the ability of Cygnus to raise the station’s orbit, although “This reboost of the ISS using Cygnus adds a critical capability to help maintain and support the space station,” Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial space at Northrop Grumman, said in a company statement. Maintenance of the station’s orbit is usually handled by thrusters on the Russian segment of the station or Progress spacecraft docked to it. The June 25 maneuver was the second attempt by Cygnus to raise the station’s orbit. A maneuver June 20 was aborted after just five seconds. NASA later said that “system parameters that differed from Cygnus flight operations” triggered the abort, but that engineers concluded that the parameters were acceptable. A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket launched the Cygnus Feb. 19 , which arrived at the station two days later. It delivered nearly 3,800 kilograms of cargo, including supplies, equipment and scientific payloads to the station. The next Cygnus mission is scheduled for launch no earlier than August. The long-term future of Cygnus missions is uncertain, though, because the Antares rocket uses a Russian engine, the RD-181, in a first stage manufactured by Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye/Yuzhmash. The availability of both is uncertain after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine days after the Antares launch of the NG-17 Cygnus mission. In a prelaunch briefing in February, Northrop executives said they had all the components needed for two more Antares launches, but did not discuss what would happen after those two launches. “We have a plan in place that we could use other sources if needed, beyond those two launches,” Kathy Warden, president and chief executive of Northrop Grumman, said in an earnings call in April. She did not disclose details of that plan.
SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft announced the private preview Nov. 17 of a new product, the Azure Orbital Space Software Development Kit (SDK). With the spacecraft-agnostic SDK, Azure Orbital intends to make it easy for developers to create space-related applications in the cloud and deploy them on spacecraft operated by Azure Orbital partners, Stephen Kitay, Azure Space senior director, told SpaceNews. “Microsoft has a vision to lower the barrier of entry for space developers and to reduce the need for custom solutions,” Kitay said. Space applications development is a highly specialized field. A lack of standards makes it time-consuming and difficult to write applications and reuse code across satellites and missions, Kitay said. On-orbit computers are become increasingly capable. Still, demands for rapid data processing are surging as Earth observation, communications and space domain awareness missions turn to artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed up operations and increase spacecraft autonomy. Instead of launching its own satellites, Azure Orbital created an intelligent hosting platform, software, that runs on spacecraft operated by its partners Ball Aerospace, Loft Orbital, Thales Alenia Space and Xplore. The hosting platform is designed to help applications communicate with spacecraft hardware in a secure way, meaning developers can test code in space. Xplore is the latest addition to the Azure Orbital Ecosystem. The a Redmond, Washington-based startup is preparing to launch an Earth-observation satellite to gather hyperspectral data and high-resolution video imagery. Applying that imagery and data to a task like detecting fires in remote areas requires significant onboard processing. It would be too time-consuming to transmit terabytes of data and imagery to the ground for processing, Kitay said. “We’re bringing the processing to the edge to then notify, tip and cue,” Kitay said. “We’re providing a whole new toolset for developers that are building applications for these different mission verticals across different enterprises.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Japanese startup GITAI plans to demonstrate robotic arm capabilities externally on the International Space Station for the first time next year. GITAI said July 11 its autonomous, 1.5-meter-long dual robotic arm system (S2) would be mounted on the Bishop Airlock, a module funded by U.S.-based Nanoracks. The startup aims to achieve NASA’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 from the demonstration, confirming its feasibility as a technology that could be used in space. S2 achieved TRL 6 in February after completing tasks inside a thermal vacuum chamber at Tsukuba Space Center, Japanese space agency JAXA’s headquarters in Japan. GITAI first demonstrated its robotic technology onboard the ISS in 2021, when its S1 space system demonstrated the ability to assemble structures and operate switches from inside the Bishop Airlock. Sho Nakanose, GITAI’s founder and CEO, said its latest tests bring the company closer to flight-qualified technology for applications beyond the ISS, including on-orbit servicing and lunar exploration. “Our vision is to provide a safe and affordable means of labor in space, and this opportunity on the Bishop Airlock brings us one step closer to making that happen,” he said. The ISS already features three, significantly longer robotic arms: Canada’s Canadarm2, the Japanese Experiment Module Remote Manipulator System (JEMRMS) and the European Robotic Arm (ERA) that launched last year. U.S. expansion GITAI announced June 22 it had opened its U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles and kicked off an engineering-focused recruitment drive to expand its operations. The facility will be used for engineering, manufacturing, and business development efforts in the country. The startup is also working with JAXA and Japanese automaker Toyota in Japan to develop a crewed pressurized rover for the moon’s surface. GITAI is helping to develop a robotic arm for the Lunar Cruiser rover, slated to launch in the late 2020s. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Communications satellite operator SES announced Aug. 1 it completed the acquisition of DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, a business acquired from Leonardo DRS for $450 million. DRS GES will be part of SES Government Solutions, based in Reston, Virginia. The acquisition was announced in March. Before it was sold to SES, DRS GES was a business unit of defense contractor Leonardo DRS and one of a handful of network integrators that provide managed satcom services to the Defense Department and other government agencies. The Pentagon relies on integrators to stitch together networks from multiple vendors. SES, headquartered in Luxembourg, operates a fleet of more than 70 geosynchronous and medium Earth orbit satellites. The company expects to leverage the DRS customer base to grow its U.S. defense and government business. SES said it plans to serve “multi-orbit satellite communications needs of the U.S. government and supporting missions anywhere on land, at sea or in the air.” Following this acquisition, the U.S. government is expected to become “SES’s largest data business segment in terms of revenue,” said the company. DRS as an integrator was vendor agnostic and provided satcom services from multiple operators of satellites in geostationary, medium and low Earth orbits. SES said the new business will offer “multi-operator network solutions” but particularly focus on SES’s soon-to-be launched O3b mPower constellation which the company designed with military and government customers in mind. As is required for U.S. government and defense contractors owned by a foreign parent company, the combined SES and DRS business will operate under the direction of the SES GS proxy board of directors. The combined business is led by former DRS senior vice president David Fields, who assumed responsibilities Aug. 1. He succeeds Pete Hoene as president and CEO of SES Government Solutions. Hoene is retiring after 11 years at the company. Billy Bingham, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, was named chairman of the SES GS proxy board. 
Mynaric selected a cybersecurity tool from Redwire and BigBear.ai for an inter-satellite laser communications terminal it is developing for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the companies announced Dec. 6. Laser communications supplier Mynaric is designing an optical communications terminal for DARPA’s Space Based Adaptive Communications Node program known as Space-BACN . The agency is working with multiple vendors to develop a low-cost laser communications terminal that is compatible with government and private-sector optical intersatellite link standards. DARPA’s goal is to enable seamless communications between government and commercial networks in low Earth orbit. The Redwire-BigBear.ai cybersecurity technology, called Space Cyber Resiliency through Evaluation and Security Testing , or SpaceCREST, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze data and predict threats “SpaceCREST will be a critical tool for the proactive maintenance and protection for government and commercial customers building the next generation of resilient space architectures,” said Dean Bellamy, Redwire’s executive vice president of national security space. “SpaceCREST will be used to identify vulnerabilities that could affect the terminal or disrupt its operation and then find ways to protect against those vulnerabilities,” he said. BigBear.ai and space infrastructure provider Redwire signed an agreement in October 2021 to collaborate on SpaceCREST. The companies said they decided to partner due to the growing critical infrastructure in the U.S. that relies on space systems, and the need for advanced predictive analytics capabilities to identify and protect against potential cyber vulnerabilities.
The European Space Agency is continuing to study options to ensure a continued supply of upper stage engines for the Vega C rocket as that vehicle gears up for its inaugural launch. The first flight of the Vega C, an upgraded version of the Vega small launch vehicle, is scheduled for 7:13 a.m. Eastern on July 13 from Kourou, French Guiana. The four-stage rocket’s primary payload is an Italian physics satellite, Laser Relativity Satellite-2 or LARES-2, a 295-kilogram spacecraft whose orbit will be closely tracked to test general relativity. The rocket is also carrying six cubesat secondary payloads. The Vega C features several upgrades, including two new solid-propellant motors, the P120 first stage — which will also be used as strap-on boosters for the Ariane 6 — and Zefiro-40 second stage. Those upgrades will increase the payload capacity from about 1,500 to 2,300 kilograms to a circular polar orbit. “We have a completely new launcher which comes from the heritage of Vega,” said Stefano Bianchi, head of ESA’s Flight Programmes Department, during a July 7 media briefing about the upcoming Vega C launch. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though, created uncertainty about the future of Vega C. The rocket’s AVUM upper stage uses an engine manufactured by Ukrainian company Yuzhmash, and European officials acknowledged in the spring they were looking at options should it lose access to those engines. Bianchi said ESA was studying several options, including business as usual. “We wish to continue our cooperation with Ukraine for reasons that you can certainly understand. They have been, so far, a very reliable partner,” he said. Avio, the prime contractor for Vega, has a stockpile of AVUM engines in Italy, he said, but did not disclose how many engines are in that stockpile. In an April interview , Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said six engines had been delivered, enough for launches through 2023. ESA is also looking at several options to replace the AVUM engine. One is to accelerate development of Avio’s M10 engine, a liquid oxygen/methane engine the company is developing for the future Vega E vehicle. Bianchi said testing of the M10 engine is in progress. ESA is also considering two other engines that could replace AVUM in the near term if the supply of that engine is cut off, but he did not disclose which ones are under study. “We are doing everything to avoid any discontinuation in the launches of Vega because it is crucial.” There was no risk of a pause in launches through the “medium-term,” he said, because of the stockpile of AVUM engines. “We are working on risk mitigation for whatever will happen.” There are 14 Vega C launches on the vehicle’s manifest through 2025, including five in 2023 and four each in 2024 and 2025. Bianchi said the launches are for a mix of institutional customers, such as ESA, the European Union and the Italian Space Agency ASI, as well as commercial customers that he did not identify. The Vega C is more than two years behind schedule, with its first flight originally planned to take place by the end of 2019. Bianchi blamed the delays on two Vega launch failures in 2019 and 2020 that took engineers away from the Vega C program. The pandemic also slowed progress, he added. “We did not have major issues in development” of Vega C, he said, noting that work on the P120 and Zefiro-40 stages “went quite smoothly.” Ettore Scardecchia, head of engineering at Avio, said the company felt better prepared for the inaugural Vega C launch than it did for the first Vega launch a decade ago. “Now, we are more aware of what it means to launch. We are more aware of all the risks,” he said. “The team is really motivated, as it was in the first flight,” he added. “We rely on this motivation of all the team, of all the companies, to have a good flight.”
China’s space ambitions and rapid adoption of commercial technology figure prominently in the Pentagon’s 2022 annual report on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.” The 174-page congressionally mandated report , released Nov. 29, dives into China’s military and defense capabilities, which the Pentagon considers “the most consequential and systemic challenge to U.S. national security.” As it has done in previous reports, the Pentagon again calls out China for plowing ahead with investments in advanced military space capabilities despite the regime’s public rhetoric against the militarization of space. And the 2022 report repeatedly mentions China’s dogged pursuit of “space superiority.” While the PRC “officially advocates for the peaceful use of space and is pursuing agreements in the United Nations on the non-weaponization of space, it continues to improve its counter space weapons capabilities,” the report says. Other takeaways highlighted by the Pentagon on China’s space strategy: A concern for the United States is how quickly China is adopting commercial technologies and taking advantage of low-cost launch, said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute. For decades only the United States could afford to deploy advanced satellites and China’s systems were nowhere nearly as sophisticated, Mulvaney told SpaceNews . In recent years China has leveraged lower cost satellites and launch vehicles that have made space more accessible, he said. “This has provided China the ability to quickly catch up,” said Mulvaney. Instead of building exquisite satellites that last for 20 years or longer, China is deploying cheaper ones meant to only last five years, and in the same 20-year cycle it refreshes the technology multiple times. 
NASA officials said they met most, but not all, of the objectives in a countdown rehearsal of the Space Launch System, and were still determining if they were ready to move ahead with the vehicle’s first launch. In a call with reporters June 21, a day after the fourth wet dress rehearsal (WDR) of the SLS at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B , agency officials said they were pleased with what they were able to accomplish despite having to cut the test short because of a leak in a bleed line that takes hydrogen away from the vehicle. “It was a very successful rehearsal,” said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at NASA. “We have to methodically go through the things that are still on the plate, just a handful of things.” NASA wasn’t able to meet all of the objectives because the countdown was stopped at T-29 seconds, versus the original plan to go down to about T-9.3 seconds, just before the core stage’s four RS-25 engines would ignite on a launch. The countdown stopped just after control shifted from ground computers to flight systems, which noticed the hydrogen bleed line issue. “We did expect, once we made that handoff, we would have a cutoff shortly thereafter because one of the things the flight software looks for is the indication that the bleed system is in configuration for launch,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director. “We accomplished a majority of the objectives that we had not completed in the prior wet dress rehearsals.” Officials were vague, though, about specific objectives they did not meet in this latest test and whether they would need to do yet another WDR to accomplish them. “There was no whole objective that we didn’t meet,” she said. “You can dissect that objective into pieces and there are elements within terminal count that we did not get to verify, and that was primarily the bleed flow.” Whitmeyer added that the bleed flow, which takes hydrogen away from the engines after conditioning them, is not a concern based on hotfire tests at the Stennis Space Center last year. “I’m confident the bleed flow works,” he said, and that the focus is on repairing the “quick disconnect” fitting that was the source of the leak. “We’re at the 90th percentile in terms of where we need to be overall” for completing objectives, said Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, citing both the WDR and past tests. “That said, there are still some open items that we need to go off and look at from a system verification and validation standpoint, and cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s to say that we’re ready from a flight rationale standpoint.” Whitmeyer said officials would review the data over a “couple days” before deciding whether NASA needs to conduct another dress rehearsal or can move ahead into final preparations for launch, which would be no earlier than late August. He sounded optimistic, though, that the agency is ready to press ahead to launch. “We think we had a really successful rehearsal,” he said. “I’m very encouraged by the amount of objectives” met in the test.
China is planning solar power generation and transmission tests at different orbital altitudes over the next decade as part of a phased development of a space-based solar power station. The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the country’s main, state-owned spacecraft maker, plans to conduct a “Space high voltage transfer and wireless power transmission experiment” in low Earth orbit in 2028. The satellite will be capable of generating 10 kilowatts and carry a solar cell array, microwave transmitting antenna, a low power laser transmission payload, a transmitting array and test power transmission across distances of 400 kilometers from orbit. The plan also involves building infrastructure on the ground for receiving energy transmissions. The update to CAST’s plans appears in the paper “Retro-directive microwave power beam steering technology of space solar power station,” published in the journal China Space Science and Technology last week. The paper was first reported by the South China Morning Post June 7 . The move means a first satellite in orbit two years earlier than planned, with CAST previously stating a goal of launching a megawatt-level satellite by 2030. The 2028 phase 1 test is to be quickly followed by phase 2 in 2030, launched into geostationary orbit, requiring accurate energy transmission over a distance of 35,800 kilometers to Earth. This second mission would generate up to one megawatt, feature much larger transmission arrays and medium power laser power transmission and require on-orbit assembly. Phases 3 and 4, in 2035 and 2050, each demand very challenging increases in energy generation (10 MW and 2 gigawatts) and transmission, orbital assembly capabilities, beam steering accuracy and transmission architecture. The spacecraft would require transmission arrays of larger than 100 meters and around 1 kilometer respectively. The paper, authored by Dong Shiwei, of the State Key Laboratory of Space Microwave Technology under CAST, and two others with the Qian Xuesen Space Technology Laboratory and Chongqing University, claim the four-phase project could assist with China’s energy security and carbon neutrality goals. The updated plan is in part a response to domestic and international development trends and progress in technological research. CAST stated in 2021 that it is working towards small-scale electricity generation tests in 2022, potentially leading to a megawatt-level power generation facility around 2030. It is constructing test facilities in Chongqing to support its space-based solar power research. Last year it tested power transmission over a distance of 300 meters using a payload aboard a small airship. Research into construction of kilometer-scale objects in orbit received support last year funding, which would be a major challenge in assembling the giant arrays needed for solar power collection and transmission arrays. In a related development, a senior official with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), like CAST a subsidiary of China’s main space contractor, CASC, last year presented a plan for using a reusable Long March 9 super-heavy launch vehicle for construction of a space-based power station in GEO. The project is far from certain to proceed or gain official approval. Space-based solar power faces major challenges including economic feasibility and manufacturing costs, cheap and reliable launch services, and efficient and safe energy transmission.
Updated Aug. 2: The launch of NROL-199 was scrubbed Aug. 2 due to high ground winds at the launch site. New launch date to be announced. WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab and the National Reconnaissance Office had hoped to launch two missions within 10 days. The first one, NROL-162, lifted off July 13 but the second one, NROL-199, required payload software upgrades and was not ready to launch as planned on July 22. The mission is now projected to launch Aug. 2 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from the company’s launch site in New Zealand. The ability to launch two NRO missions on a short timeline is an opportunity for Rocket Lab to demonstrate that space launch can be made more nimble, but the NROL-199 delay illustrates the challenges of responsive launch, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO Peter Beck told SpaceNews July 28 . As soon as the NROL-199 payload upgrades were completed, the mission was rescheduled relatively quickly as Rocket Lab operates its own launch complex. But Beck’s point is that all the talk about responsive launch often ignores the reality that if satellites aren’t ready on time, they can’t take advantage of rapid launch capabilities Rocket Lab earlier this month announced a responsive space program aimed at commercial and government satellite operators that want to be able to launch payloads on short notice. Beck said the concept of responsive space is not new but how to actually implement it continues to be a topic of discussion. The U.S. military is becoming more interested in responsive launch as something it might need in a future conflict if enemies attack U.S. systems with anti-satellite weapons. Amid these concerns, Congress has added more than $100 million to the defense budget in recent years for responsive space launch and plans to add even more. Beck called it “a little bit of a folly that when someone talks about responsive space, everybody turns to the rocket.” The rapid turnaround of launch vehicles is a problem that has been solved, he said. “If there was a launch needed in a very short timeframe, we can do that tomorrow. What’s not solved is the spacecraft. If you need to put a particular sensor or a particular capability on orbit, how do you do that in a way that isn’t measured in months?” Rocket Lab believes the answer to responsive space services is to offer a complete end-to-end package, including the satellite and the launch. The company in 2019 started manufacturing Photon small satellites in Huntington Beach, California. “That’s one of the reasons why we started vertically integrating,” said Beck. “We needed some reaction wheels for a satellite and it was a nine-month lead time.” Reaction wheels are components used for spacecraft attitude control. Rocket Lab in 2020 acquired manufacturer Sinclair Interplanetary “so we can ensure that reaction wheels are on the shelf for us at all times.” Another key acquisition was SolAero, a major manufacturer of solar power systems for spacecraft . When producing a satellite, said Beck, the solar power unit is “generally the thing you want first, and it’s generally a very long lead item.” “What we’re really doing here is positioning ourselves for a customer to come to us and say, ‘Hey, I need this capability,’” Beck said. “And it can be a defense customer, or it can be a commercial customer.” There was a time when launching a mission 18 months after getting a customer order was considered highly responsive but the world is changing fast, he said. “I mean, look how quickly Ukraine and Russia escalated. You don’t have 18 months, we’re talking weeks to maybe a small number of months before you need to actually respond with a capability.” The other piece is the licensing of a space mission, which can set back any schedule, Beck noted. “The way you get around that is you have a predetermined spacecraft that you know you’re launching and you can have it pre-licensed,” he added. “It’s a solvable problem. It just requires maintaining some level of readiness.” Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit, which launches rockets from a carrier aircraft , argues that its LauncherOne service is more responsive than vertical launchers because an aircraft can take off from any runway and does not require fixed launch infrastructure. Beck said there are both pluses and minuses to any type of launch setup. “I don’t necessarily want to throw shade at our competitors,” he said. But launching a space mission from an airport can be just as challenging as from a conventional pad. “Having trailers and trailers of stuff sitting in an airport is no different to having trailers and trailers of stuff sitting at a launch site.” Not many companies have demonstrated they can provide responsive access to space, Beck said. “It’s something that’s easy to talk about, but difficult to do.”
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off Nov. 1 at 9:41 a.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, carrying the U.S. Space Force USSF-44 mission to geostationary Earth orbit. This was the vehicle’s first national security space launch mission, its fourth flight since 2018 and the first in more than three years . The Falcon Heavy is made up of three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, with 27 engines powering the first stage and one engine in the second stage. USSF-44 — originally scheduled to launch in 2020 and delayed multiple times — was a direct-to-geostationary orbit launch carrying two Space Force satellites and small rideshare payloads. About two and a half minutes after liftoff, both side boosters separated. The second stage separated from the core stage just over four minutes after liftoff. After second-stage separation, SpaceX ended the live webcast and did not show views of the second stage or the payloads at U.S. government request. Both side boosters landed back at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. SpaceX said these boosters — the company’s 150th and 151th successful recoveries — will be refurbished for future national security space missions. The expendable center core was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean and was not recovered as the mission’s performance requirements did not allow enough fuel to return the stage back to Earth. The Space Systems Command in a news release Tuesday evening confirmed the mission was successful. USSF-44 marked a milestone for SpaceX as its first direct-to-GEO operational mission, requiring the Falcon Heavy upper stage to perform a long-duration coast and engine re-start. Typically SpaceX has deployed satellites to a geostationary transfer orbit and the spacecraft use their own propulsion to reach their final orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. USSF-44 carried the Tetra-1 satellite and the LDPE-2 ESPA-class ring with six small satellites attached. Tetra-1 was built by Millennium Space Systems under a 2018 contract. The Space Force plans to use Tetra-1 as a test platform for rendezvous and proximity operations. The LDPE-2 is the Long Duration Propulsive EELV Secondary Payload Adapter , a satellite bus made by Northrop Grumman. It hosted six payloads to demonstrate communications, space weather sensing and other technologies. This was the second of three missions for the LDPE program, which the Space Force views as an important capability to get payloads to GEO relatively quickly. LDPE-1 launched aboard the Space Test Program mission on Dec. 7, 2021. LDPE-3A is scheduled to launch with the USSF-67 mission in 2023, also on a Falcon Heavy. USSF-44 was SpaceX’s 50th launch of 2022.
Benchmark Space Systems has nearly tripled its staff and established manufacturing facilities to produce as many as 1,000 engines in the United States and United Kingdom over five years. Benchmark has booked more than 250 engine orders. Most of the engines are being built and tested at the company’s Burlington, Vermont, headquarters. However, the company also has manufacturing and test facilities in California and the United Kingdom. Benchmark staff grew from 30 to 83 people in the last 12 months. Key new hires include Wesley Grove, senior operations manager, Matt Bradley, vice president of finance, and Kent Frankovich, vice president of electric propulsion. While boosting manufacturing capacity, Benchmark has expanded its guidance, navigation and control software-engineering organization. That organization is focused on thrusters, positioning subsystems and SmartAIM Guidance, Navigation and Control software for satellites equipped with the Benchmark’s Halcyon high-test peroxide thrusters and Xantus metal plasma thrusters. Benchmark is ready to begin manufacturing propulsion system in the U.K. Benchmark announced plans in May to establish a manufacturing and test facility at the Westcott Innovation Centre. By working with the U.K.-based Satellite Applications Catapult, Benchmark was able to set up its U.K. assembly and clean room in less than six months. In the U.K., Benchmark will begin producing Halcyon Avant bipropellant systems for Space Forge , a company based in Wales focused on producing high-value materials in orbit to bring to Earth. Benchmark first demonstrated its chemical propulsion on an undisclosed government satellite in 2021. Since then company has demonstrated its “breakthrough chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems,” Benchmark CEO Ryan McDevitt said in a statement. As a result, Benchmark will be filling “major engine orders” in the coming months, McDevitt said. “Benchmark is inking major contracts to enable mission-critical government and commercial space programs, and we have the people and infrastructure in place to deliver on the exciting demand,” he added. Mark Arthur, Benchmark’s European operations director, called Benchmark’s U.K. facility “an important piece” of the company’s global strategy. “We are now very well positioned to meet the specific needs of the European space market with tailored chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion solutions,” Arthur said in a statement. “We expect to conduct our first hot fire testing early next year.”
Saber Astronautics announced Sept. 5 the U.S. Space Force has extended the company’s contract to develop a space domain awareness tool designed for satellite operators. The company won a $540,000 small business contract known as a TACFI, or Tactical Funding Increase, to add new features to its Space Cockpit software tool. The award follows a $1.8 million U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research award that Saber Astronautics won in 2019 to develop Space Cockpit. Saber Astronautics USA director Nathan Parrott said the space visualization software was developed on the Air Force’s Platform One enterprise system using DevSecOps standards, short for development, security, and operations. It has been used by Space Force units in both classified and unclassified systems. “Normally the government buys software and that’s the end of it. But modern warfare, especially in space, is very dynamic. We needed the ability to update the program on the fly to respond to the rapidly evolving threat landscape,” said Parrott. He said Space Cockpit uses 3D graphics and gaming-like controls to give a more intuitive feel to the space domain. The TACFI contract funds upgrades to the orbit propagation algorithms to support cislunar spaceflight beyond Earth orbit, and adds a space collision warning system developed by Saber called Sentinel . Jason Held, Saber Astronautics CEO, said hundreds of operators across the Space Force are using the software. He noted that the Space Cockpit provides visual aids that military operators previously did not have. “We’re not sure if it’s replacing any system,” he said. “The customer saw it as a new capability that adds value to the systems they currently use. These things aren’t always a ‘zero-sum’ game where one product wins and another one loses.” The TACFI contract allows Space Force units to “continue to work with us to add several new features and also lets us continue to reach across multiple units so the program improves iteratively with their developing mission,” said Held. Headquartered in Australia with U.S. operations in Boulder, Colorado, Saber Astronautics developed Space Cockpit based on a commercial version of the system used by Australia’s space agency and private-sector satellite operators to monitor, fly and diagnose problems in spacecraft.
The European Space Agency has selected its first new astronauts in more than a decade, although long-term flight opportunities for the agency’s astronaut corps remain uncertain. At an event here immediately after a briefing on the agency’s new three-year budget Nov. 23 , ESA announced a class of 17 people it selected as a combination of professional and reserve astronauts, the completion of a selection process that started with more than 22,500 applicants last year. It’s the agency’s first new astronaut class since 2009. Five of the 17 are “career” astronauts, who will join ESA full-time and start training at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, in April. After completing one year of basic training, they will join ESA’s seven current career astronauts and be eligible for flight assignments. The five career astronauts are: Eleven others were selected as “reserve” astronauts. “They’re not yet engaged by ESA directly though a permanent contract, but they will be available for future astronaut activities” while staying in their current jobs, said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher. The final astronaut is John McFall, picked by ESA as part of a “parastronaut” feasibility study to see if people with some physical disabilities could fly in space. McFall, a British doctor, lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident at age 19, but went on to become a Paralympian in track and field. “Being an astronaut is a very exclusive thing to be, but having a disability shouldn’t rule you out,” said David Parker, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, at the event. “We are pioneering something here. It’s something we are really excited to be doing.” “I felt compelled to help ESA answer this question: can we get someone with a physical disability to do meaningful work in space?” McFall said. The focus of the feasibility study will be on safety for both the parastronaut as well as his crewmates, said Frank De Winne, head of the European Astronaut Center and himself a former astronaut, in an interview before the astronaut announcement. “When you have an emergency on the launch pad, you need to be able to evacuate the vehicle in a very short amount of time,” he said. “How can we make sure that the parastronaut can fulfill those requirements together with his crew without endangering himself or his crew?” The feasibility study, which will include participation by NASA and others, will examine what changes might be needed to the International Space Station and crew transportation vehicles to accommodate the parastronaut. “We need to find agreement with the international partners, and we need to find if there needs to be vehicle adaptations,” he said. For the new career astronauts, they will be eligible for missions to the ISS once they complete training. ESA also has seats on three Artemis missions as part of an agreement with NASA, and ESA officials previously said they expect two of those seats would be on the Artemis 4 and 5 missions, as they will deliver European components to the lunar Gateway. The Artemis flights will likely go to ESA’s existing astronauts, all of whom have flight experience. “The new class of astronauts will do their initial flights to the space station,” De Winne said. For the Artemis missions, he said, “we think it’s prudent we select astronauts that have proven their capabilities and that have already some spaceflight experience under their belts.” ESA has not yet selected astronauts for any of the Artemis missions De Winne said that selection will likely be about two years before each mission. For ISS missions, De Winne said ESA is flying, on average, one astronaut every one and a half years. The agency is starting to think about how it will fly astronauts after the scheduled retirement of the ISS in 2030, a date that ESA member states formally endorsed at the ministerial meeting. NASA plans to shift research and technology development activities currently done on the ISS to one or more commercial space stations it is helping stimulate development of. “We need to see in Europe how we enter that world,” De Winne said, with planning for that a focus the next three years, leading up to the next ministerial in 2025. Those options, he said, include buying services directly from commercial space station operators as well as reaching a new barter agreement with NASA where it buys commercial space station flights and then exchanges them with ESA. Another option, he said, is for ESA to develop its own transportation capability for cargo or crew and offer that to commercial space station operators to offset the costs of using those stations. ESA member states, he said, want to maintain the same level of activity in that post-ISS environment as they do on the ISS today, including about one flight a year and a similar amount of research. “Then we need to see how we implement that and that is the big question we all have.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Startup Xona Space Systems is preparing to demonstrate services from a test satellite to the first major customer for its planned navigation constellation. Canadian GPS equipment and solutions provider NovAtel, which said May 31 it has signed up to be an early adopter of Xona’s proposed network of around 300 cubesats, plans to use the in-orbit test bed to configure its technology. NovAtel is part of publicly listed technology provider Hexagon — which generated about $4.7 billion in net sales in 2021 — and is one of the largest makers of GPS signal receivers. The company has signed a memorandum of understanding to use Xona’s services while also helping to develop them. California-based Xona built the test satellite, called Huginn, in-house and it was one of several dozen payloads that SpaceX launched in a May 25 Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Huginn is still undergoing health checks that it needs to complete before starting demonstrations, Xona CEO and co-founder Brian Manning told SpaceNews June 7. The commissioning phase for a satellite can take several weeks from launch, and this can vary massively depending on the type of satellite and complexity of the mission. Once complete, Manning said Huginn aims to show the performance advantages its planned Pulsar constellation would have over GPS, and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). By operating in a much lower orbit, Xona says its positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services would deliver 10 times better accuracy than standard GNSS. Pulsar satellites are also designed to operate in poor weather that can disrupt ground-based light detection and ranging (LIDAR) solutions for PNT. Manning said this means a customer would be able to know what lane they are driving in, even when lane lines are not visible, compared to existing GNSS systems that are only accurate enough to show which road their vehicle is on. The startup sees growing demand for its PNT capabilities in the emerging autonomous vehicle industry, which is one of the markets Hexagon serves. Manning said Xona has other “various commercial customers who are developing equipment to be compatible” with Pulsar satellites, which he expects to start deploying in low Earth orbit by early 2025. Lengthy tests required He said a second prototype satellite Xona is building in-house called Muninn has secured a launch contract for deployment in early 2023. Huginn and Muninn are essentially twins, although “Muninn will have some internal upgrades based on what we learned from Huginn,” he said. “With Muninn we plan to expand the geographical regions that we are testing in, and also test more advanced user scenarios on the ground with multiple satellites in view instead of just one,” Manning said. Xona has raised about $10 million to date and seeks to secure more funds to support its proposed constellation. Manning declined to comment on whether Xona will seek to outsource production for Pulsar. For now, he said the startup is focusing on using Huginn and Muninn to ensure its technology can operatively safely in any environment. “One of the biggest keys to operating a successful satellite navigation system is reliability, especially when you are building a system to support safety critical applications such as autonomous driving,” he said. “This can be designed in as best as possible, but at the end of the day just requires a lot of test cycles to make sure that when we launch the system can be trusted in applications where failure could have fatal consequences.” He said Xona’s ground operations systems, satellite systems and end user equipment are all “brand new designs, so each will be tested individually as well.” Enhancing security Xona says its GNSS signals will be encrypted, and also aim to be 100 times more resistant to interference or blockage — whether from tree cover and other obstacles or intentional jamming. Manning said Russia’s war in Ukraine has helped underline the role commercial companies can play in services that governments traditionally provided. Some of the most compelling images of the war have come from satellites operated by private companies. “Ukraine really highlighted how much value commercial space can provide in terms of agility and responsiveness to threats,” he added. “Arguably GNSS is the one that needs this the most and has it the least, and that’s where I think our system can really fill a huge gap there in being able to provide that level of service, essentially, to not only governments but also civilians.” Xona is not the only company with PNT technology aiming to supplement or replace existing GNSS solutions. Washington-based Satelles has been providing assured PNT services to back up GNSS since 2016 over Iridium’s satellites in low Earth orbit. Satelles, Xona and 19 other companies that make hardware or provide services for PNT are part of a group called the Open PNT Industry Alliance, which lobbies to accelerate government efforts to back up existing GNSS capabilities for critical infrastructure.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Space Force is working to finalize a procurement strategy for the next national security launch services contracts expected to be awarded in 2024. A draft request for industry proposals could be issued as early as February 2023, Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, told SpaceNews on the sidelines of the Air, Space & Cyber conference. Before the Space Systems Command can release a draft request for proposals, the strategy has to be approved by the Department of Defense, said Purdy. “We are trying to get everyone at DoD to agree … there are a lot of stakeholders.” The strategy now being reviewed is for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contracts. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won Phase 2 in 2020, and their current contracts will be re-competed in 2024. Officials have said they would consider changing the NSSL program to take advantage of new launch providers entering the market. Another potential twist in Phase 3 is that the Space Force might consider buying not only traditional launch services from Earth to orbit but also in-space transportation services. One option being discussed is to select multiple vendors to compete for task orders, a method the Space Force uses to buy smallsat launch services under the Rocket Systems Launch Program (RSLP). The program also allows new providers to be added if the government decides it needs more competitors. Purdy’s office at the Space Systems Command has been doing market research in preparation for Phase 3. In January it issued a request to industry providers asking for information about their capabilities. Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond in a keynote speech Tuesday at Air, Space & Cyber conference, said the Space Force’s launch ranges at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, are on track this year to conduct more than 60 launches from the East Coast and as many as 18 from the West Coast. “In the next few years, projections show that those numbers will soar to approximately 300 launches a year,” he said. “Just think about that, just shy of one launch per day.” The vast majority of missions at both East and West coast ranges are commercial or civil. Purdy said the rise of the private space industry calls for investments in infrastructure and managing ranges more like commercial airports.
A joint U.S.-French Earth science mission is ready to be delivered to California for a launch now scheduled for early December, a slight delay caused in part because of transportation issues. Thales Alenia Space, the prime contractor for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft, said Sept. 6 it is making final preparations to ship the two-ton spacecraft from its factory in Cannes, France, to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. There, it will be integrated with a SpaceX Falcon 9 for a launch no earlier than Dec. 5 . SWOT, a joint mission of NASA and the French space agency CNES, with participation from the Canadian Space Agency and U.K. Space Agency, will carry out observations for oceanography and hydrology using a synthetic aperture radar, altimeter and other instruments. Scientists plan to use SWOT to conduct a global survey of the Earth’s water, including measuring changes in lakes and rivers as well as ocean currents. Getting the spacecraft from France, where the NASA-supplied science payload was installed on the Thales-built spacecraft and then tested, to the United States, turned into more than a challenge than once expected. “We had a slight issue with the transport of it,” said Kathleen Boggs, acting associate director for flight programs in NASA’s Earth science division, at an Aug. 2 advisory committee meeting. “It was supposed to come back on a Ukrainian Antonov aircraft that was provided by CNES.” Those aircraft, though, have largely been grounded because of sanctions and other issues linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those aircraft had been frequently used before the invasion to transport large satellites that do not fit on other cargo aircraft, and with the planes unavailable, satellite manufacturers have limited options for transporting their spacecraft to launch sites by air . Boggs said at the meeting that NASA was “pretty close” to an agreement with the U.S. Air Force to transport the spacecraft. In its Sept. 6 release, Thales Alenia said SWOT will be transported to California in early October on a U.S. Air Force C-5 cargo plane “deployed specially” for SWOT. Using the Air Force to transport the plane, she added, was preferable from a schedule standpoint to using a ship. “If we have to use transport by sea, it could cost us some time and some money, so we’re pushing really hard for the Air Force solution.” Arranging that alternative transport did contribute to a schedule slip for the launch of SWOT. NASA announced Aug. 25 that the launch, which had previously been scheduled for November, was now planned for Dec. 5. The agency said the delay “was needed in order to complete all the necessary tasks in the lead-up to launch, including transporting the satellite from Cannes, France, to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.”
NorthStar Earth and Space, a company planning a constellation of satellites to collect space situational awareness data, will launch its first satellites in mid-2023 with Virgin Orbit. NorthStar announced Oct. 27 that its first three satellites, 12-unit cubesats built by Spire, will be launched by Virgin Orbit in mid-2023. The companies did not disclose terms of the launch deal or where the launch, using Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne air-launch system, will take place. NorthStar announced in March a contract with Spire for those three satellites , part of Spire’s “space as a service” business model where it builds and operates satellites for other customers in addition to those for its own constellation. Spire announced Oct. 12 a launch agreement with Virgin Orbit covering multiple LauncherOne missions over several years, starting 2023. “We’re proud that NorthStar is leveraging our space services model and established space, ground, and web infrastructure to rapidly deploy its constellation,” Joel Sparks, co-founder and general manager for space services at Spire, said in a statement. The satellites are the first in a constellation of 24 spacecraft planned by NorthStar to collect commercial SSA data. NorthStar plans to place the satellites into eight orbital planes of three satellites each, scanning out from low Earth orbit to track satellites and debris. NorthStar’s agreement with Spire includes options for “dozens” of additional satellites. NorthStar has not disclosed many technical details about the satellite system, including how many objects it can track or the accuracy of the SSA data they will produce. Stewart Bain, chief executive of NorthStar, said in an Oct. 28 talk at the NewSpace Europe conference in Luxembourg that the satellites will be able to track objects all the way out to geostationary orbit and cislunar space, but did not discuss specifics about those satellites’ capabilities. The satellite constellation, he said, would complement existing SSA systems, citing as one example the Space Fence radar operated by the U.S. Space Force on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. “It doesn’t replace it. It contributes,” he said.
The Senate is moving forward with a revised version of a NASA authorization bill that formally authorizes the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration effort and extends operations of the International Space Station. The Senate Commerce Committee released July 20 the text of the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act , a bill primarily intended to support domestic manufacturing of semiconductors. The release came a day after the Senate voted 64–34 in favor of a procedural motion to advance the legislation. The CHIPS Act emerged from conference negotiations between a Senate bill, the United States Innovation and Competition Act, and a House counterpart, the America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength (COMPETES) Act. The Senate bill included a NASA authorization act , while the House version did not. The CHIPS Act does include a NASA authorization, although one that does not authorize specific funding levels for the agency. Instead, the version in the new bill focuses on policy issues in exploration, science and other parts of the agency. The bill directs NASA to establish a “Moon to Mars Program Office” within the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. It would oversee what it calls the Moon to Mars Program, which includes the agency’s Artemis campaign of lunar exploration missions and eventual human missions to Mars. The office would be led by a director responsible for the overall Artemis effort, reporting to the associate administrator for exploration systems development. That program would include the familiar elements of Artemis, including the Space Launch System, Orion, Exploration Ground Systems, the lunar Gateway, the Human Landing System, spacesuits and other elements needed to achieve its goals. The bill directs NASA to launch the SLS annually after the first successful crewed launch of Orion, which would be the Artemis 2 mission no earlier than 2024, going to two missions a year “to the extent practicable” after the first crewed lunar landing. NASA’s plans currently call for no more than one SLS/Orion mission a year through the end of the decade, with none in some years. NASA would be required to have the Block 1B version of SLS, with the larger Exploration Upper Stage, ready by the Artemis 4 mission in 2027. It also directs NASA to provide a report on the status of the Mobile Launcher 2, whose development has suffered massive cost and schedule overruns . The bill offers little direction on the Human Landing System, beyond requiring at least one uncrewed test flight, an approach NASA was already following. By comparison, the earlier Senate bill directed NASA to select a second lander — a course NASA is now taking — and authorized $10 billion for the overall HLS program. The bill extends NASA’s authorization to operate the ISS from September 2024 to September 2030, something Congress has attempted to do several times in recent years in other bills that were not enacted. It calls for a report on the technical feasibility of the extension and another report on commercial spaceflight participants to the ISS “to ensure government astronaut safety, to avoid interference in ISS operations and research priorities, and to prevent undue demands on crew time and resources.” In science, the bill endorses the concept of a new generation of “Great Observatories” in astrophysics backed in the Astro2020 decadal survey, calling on NASA to “pursue an ambitious astrophysics program that meets the scientific vision of the astronomical community and the transformative capacity of technological innovation.” However, the bill cautions that NASA should incorporate lessons in cost and schedule management from past missions. The bill formally creates the Planetary Defense Coordination Office that NASA already has within its planetary science division. It directs NASA to proceed with a space telescope mission to search for near Earth objects, called NEO Surveyor, and “should not delay the development and launch of the mission due to cost growth on other planetary science missions.” NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal sought to delay development of NEO Surveyor by two years to cover the increasing cost of other programs. The technology section of the bill backs continued development of space nuclear power and propulsion systems, “including in cargo missions to Mars in the late 2020’s and crewed missions to Mars in the 2030’s.” NASA has not announced any plans for cargo missions to Mars in the latter part of this decade. The bill directs NASA to establish an Independent Program Analysis and Evaluation Office to perform cost and technical assessments of agency programs and carry out strategic planning activities. NASA created last year an Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy to perform similar work. The bill calls on the office to maintain an “ongoing, focused effort” reviewing NASA’s exploration programs as well as a stand-alone report on the cost of operating the ISS through 2030. Other parts of the bill include language for other science and technology agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF). One section directs the NSF to support research on mitigating the effect of satellite constellations on astronomy. Another section calls on the NSF to facilitate access for researchers it funds to platforms for microgravity research, including those run by the private sector as well as NASA. While the Senate Commerce Committee published the CHIPS Act, it has the support of the chair of the House Science Committee. “In this bill we are putting forth strong initiatives” at several agencies, including NASA, said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) in a statement. “Of course, after months of negotiating between the House and the Senate on an innovation package, compromises had to be made. And not everyone is going to get all that they originally wanted — including me. But that is the nature of compromise.”
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — SAIC is partnering with startup Rogue Space Systems to develop small satellites for in-space services, the companies announced Sept. 20. Based in Reston, Virginia, SAIC is a $7.4 billion government services technology contractor. Rogue Space is a two-year-old startup based in Laconia, New Hampshire. The company designed a cubesat known as Orbital Robot for in-orbit services such as inspection and repairs. According to the agreement announced Tuesday at the Air, Space & Cyber conference, SAIC will integrate two Rogue cubesats for a planned 2023 mission. Going forward, SAIC will help develop Rogue’s fleet of Orbital Robots for space situational awareness, in-space services, assembly and manufacturing. “SAIC and Rogue bring unique skills and expertise that will support the growing demand for services in Earth orbit, the cislunar domain and beyond,” said David Ray, senior vice president of SAIC’s space business unit. Part of SAIC’s space business strategy is to partner with smallsat developers that need access to integration and testing facilities. Jeromy Grimmett, CEO of Rogue Space, said SAIC’s government expertise will help reach new customers. “We are excited to partner with SAIC as we serve the growing demand for in-space services and space situational awareness,” he said. “SAIC will also help Rogue identify business development opportunities.” Rogue is one of dozens of small businesses selected by the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX organization for a program known as Orbital Prime . The company submitted 13 proposals and 11 of them won Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I awards, adding up to about $2.75 million in funding.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Space Force is buying billion-dollar satellites that on average take seven years to develop while China is moving to build new constellations at a rapid pace. This is a problem that calls for new ways of doing business, said Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. Speaking on a panel Sept. 20 at the Air, Space & Cyber conference, Calvelli said satellites need to be smaller, cheaper and made more rapidly. “The old approach, the seven-year development contracts that we’re doing for GEO satellites … that has to change,” he said, referring to the next-generation geostationary missile warning satellites that the Space Force is buying. “That should not be that hard,” he added. “It’s a seven-year development for a class of spacecraft that we have been building as a nation for 30 to 40 years.” To produce satellites faster and at lower cost, the Space Force needs to move away from cost-plus contracts that incentivize contractors to redesign and over-engineer systems, he said. A model for the Space Force to follow is the one used by the Space Development Agency , which buys larger numbers of satellites on fixed-price contracts. “We really want to go fast, we have got to stop the traditional way of building satellites, and the sort of large seven-year cost-plus contracts and go to smaller systems that are more proliferated,” he said. “And stop redesigning everything.” Addressing industry executives in the audience, Calvelli said, “please bid on programs with realistic cost and realistic schedules, and please bid on programs you can be successful at. And then when you win that contract, execute and deliver those programs on cost and on schedule … I think this is going to be key to all of our success as a nation and to counter the threat against China.” Since taking over in May as the Department of the Air Force’s space acquisition executive, Calvelli has noticed a “track record of being late on programs, and we have to turn that track record around and actually execute.” He said he worries that managers add cost and schedule to programs to get a relatively small technology improvement. “We end up down this development path for that 10% extra performance. And we end up adding two years to the schedule. And I just don’t think that is an effective approach,” he said. “Now that there is a threat, there is a sense of urgency, I think we have to back off on that. And we have to start to use existing technology, existing designs in different ways to get speed,” said Calvelli. “It’s really going to be key for us to enter this new paradigm of how we want to go develop things faster. We just can’t afford to do things like we did in the past.” Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, said contractors can contribute to the problem by promising solutions that they know they can’t deliver. “I need an honest frank conversation with the industry but what I don’t need is the BD sales pitch,” he said, using the abbreviation for business development. An example is digital engineering tools, a technology that is in high demand in the Space Force. “We get a lot of industry pitches” that are not credible and intended to persuade buyers that didn’t grow up with that technology, said Purdy. “And so what I really, really need is for industry to understand where our systems are and what our needs are and how you can plug into those needs in a non proprietary way,” he said. “Don’t try to sell me on something that I am going to have to go buy a license for a year to eternity.” “You may have a great solution that works great in your lab, but I have 12 other contractors that are saying exactly the same thing,” he said. “And it’s very difficult to get past those BD sales pitches into some real discussions.”
United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno is advising the U.S. Space Force to preemptively buy heavy launch services as rockets could be in short supply over the next several years. “There is a worldwide shortage of launch,” Bruno told SpaceNews in a recent interview. “For the past 20 to 30 years, there has always been more launch provider capacity than there have been missions,” he said. Now the tables have turned as commercial megaconstellations like Amazon’s Project Kuiper are buying most of the available large rockets, including ULA’s. “The scarcity environment is a big shift in our industry.” Amazon in April announced it procured 83 launches on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Arianespace’s Ariane 6, none of which have yet flown. If all goes as planned, ULA and Arianespace expect to start flying their new vehicles in 2023, and it’s still unclear when New Glenn will be ready. Amazon also ordered nine launches on ULA’s Atlas 5, a vehicle that is in limited supply as ULA plans to retire it and transition to Vulcan. The rise in commercial demand and the Russian Soyuz rocket’s sudden exit from the global stage after the invasion of Ukraine have created a “perfect storm,” said Bruno. These dynamics could put the U.S. national security launch program in a bind, he warned. ULA and SpaceX are under contract to launch as many as 35 U.S. military and intelligence space missions under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 deal the companies won in 2020. These contracts are up for recompete in 2024. The Space Force’s Space Systems Command is drafting a proposed Phase 3 strategy to be released sometime next year. Looking beyond the Phase 2 contract, Bruno said, both ULA and SpaceX will be hard pressed to meet government and growing commercial demand. “There’ll be more missions than both of us are really able to fly and that’ll be for a number of years,” he said. “By the way, this is one of the reasons why we advise the national security procurers to plan ahead, just as they did in Phase 2,” said Bruno. “They should do ‘block buys,’ for example, in order to avoid being caught in a position where they can’t get on a manifest when they want to, or have the flexibility that they’ve had in the past,” he said. ULA has been the military’s primary launch services provider for nearly two decades and has not had a significant commercial workload. “So when a national security space payload is delayed for some reason, in the past we were able to just simply accommodate that,” said Bruno. “That’s going to be harder going forward when the commercial marketplace is trying to buy up all the capacity.” SpaceX, too, will face pressures to launch its customers’ satellites and its own Starlink broadband constellation, Bruno said. “As with the Kuiper constellation, there are milestones you have to hit, and you need a certain amount of satellites covering the world … so all of those Starlink launches are captive for Falcon or for Starship in the future, and they’ll be pretty busy flying all of those,” he added. “We’re in a state of shortage of lift.” National security space launch Phase 3 The Space Force and the Defense Department are still discussing a strategy for the next NSSL launch services procurement. Officials said they would be open to a different model than the two-vendor approach. One of the options being discussed is to select multiple vendors to compete for task orders, a method the Space Force uses to buy smallsat launch services . In preparation for the Phase 3 procurement, the Space Force has reached out to the industry and asked for feedback, Bruno said. “What we tell them is that when they were doing Phase 2 it was important to stabilize the industrial base for heavy lift, and they did a fine job of doing that.” “And as we roll into Phase 3 … they have to decide not just the structure of the procurement, but what they are trying to procure,” said Bruno, and understand the “new reality that we have in our marketplace.” The Space Force “did block buys in Phase 2 and attracted investment for new capabilities. Now they need to block buy so that they can be assured of the flexibility and schedule that they need,” Bruno insisted, “because the private, commercial, megaconstellation marketplace is buying up literally all the capacity.” 
 “That’s the nature of the conversation I’m having with them,” he said. “It’s about making sure they understand the marketplace and encouraging them to focus on the nation’s needs.” On the status of Vulcan Centaur, Bruno said the vehicle is being assembled at ULA’s factory in Decatur, Alabama. After years of delays , Blue Origin finally completed testing of the BE-4 main booster engines and delivered the first two for Vulcan’s maiden flight, which is now projected for the first quarter of 2023. The first mission will fly Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander and Kuiper’s first two demonstration satellites. The second planned flight is a Sierra Space Dream Chaser cargo vehicle to low Earth orbit. If Astrobotic’s lunar lander is delayed beyond the first quarter, ULA is prepared to launch a mass simulator surrogate payload. Vulcan needs to launch successfully twice to be certified for NSSL Phase 2 missions. 
Northrop Grumman on June 8 confirmed that it received a contract worth more than $2 billion over several years to produce solid rocket boosters for United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 and Vulcan Centaur launch vehicles. Northrop Grumman’s CEO during a first-quarter earnings call in April said the company expected the contract to be signed in the second quarter of 2022. The contract is for the production of 63-inch-diameter Graphite Epoxy Motor GEM 63 solid rocket boosters and the extended length GEM 63XL. ULA is ramping up orders of strap-on solid boosters to support upcoming launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper low Earth orbit constellation and other customers. A Northrop Grumman spokesman told SpaceNews that ULA’s contract “provides multiple years of high-rate production potentially extending work to the end of this decade and beyond.” The company expects to produce more than 75 motors per year, the majority of which will be GEM 63XL, said the spokesman. The company started to develop the GEM strap-on boosters in 2015 under contract to ULA. The GEM 63 solid rocket booster first flew on ULA’s NROL-101 mission in November 2020. To date, 13 GEM 63 boosters have supported four Atlas 5 launches, with nine more scheduled to fly on three more Atlas 5 launches in 2022. Each booster provides 371,500 pounds of additional maximum thrust to the launch vehicle, and up to five boosters can be strapped on an Atlas 5. The GEM 63XL was designed for the Vulcan Centaur rocket, which has not yet flown. ULA said it expects Vulcan’s first flight to take place in late 2022. Each XL booster will provide 463,249 pounds of additional thrust to the rocket, and as many as six boosters can be used on a single launch for a heavy-lift mission. Northrop Grumman manufactures the GEM solid rocket boosters at several facilities in Utah. The spokesman said upgrades are being planned to fill the growing demand. “We are in the process of finalizing facility plans, but the expansion will primarily take place at our Bacchus, Utah, site, with other improvements also taking place at our Clearfield and Promontory, Utah sites.”
LOGAN, Utah — Four smallsats designed to study the solar wind will share a ride to space on a Falcon 9 with a NASA astrophysics mission in 2025. NASA announced Aug. 3 that the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, a set of four smallsats, will fly as a rideshare on the Falcon 9 launch of the agency’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission. NASA awarded a contract to SpaceX in February 2021 for the Falcon 9 launch for SPHEREx alone , valued at $98.8 million. The agency said it updated the SpaceX contract July 14 to include PUNCH on the same launch but did not disclose any change in contract value. “It’s great to have a definite launch date and vehicle, and we’re looking forward to working with the SPHEREx team as we ‘carpool’ to orbit,” Craig DeForest, principal investigator for PUNCH at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement about the rideshare announcement. The launch remains scheduled for no earlier than April 2025, the date NASA announced when it awarded SpaceX the launch contract for SPHEREx. PUNCH had previously been planning to launch in October 2023, but the 18-month slip provides “new schedule flexibility to mitigate some schedule constraints due to supply chain challenges,” NASA said. PUNCH features four satellites, each weighing about 40 kilograms. The satellites will go into a sun-synchronous orbit along the terminator, providing continuous observations of the sun. The spacecraft carry instruments to study how the solar corona transitions into the solar wind. SPHEREx itself is a small spacecraft, weighing about 200 kilograms. It carries a wide-field telescope designed to carry out an all-sky survey every six months, collecting spectra of hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. The small size of SPHEREx suggested at the time of the award that NASA might add more spacecraft to the launch. The agency has, in recent years, sought to take advantage of excess capacity on launches it procures for science missions to fly additional spacecraft. While the rideshare approach offers cost savings, it can also create scheduling problems. NASA originally planned to fly a small lunar orbiter mission, Lunar Trailblazer, as a rideshare on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission. However, while Lunar Trailblazer was expected to be ready for launch as soon as late 2022, IMAP will not be ready for launch until early 2025. NASA announced in June that it would take Lunar Trailblazer off the IMAP launch and instead launch it as a secondary payload on a commercial lunar mission , the IM-2 lunar lander by Intuitive Machines. IM-2 is expected to launch in 2023.
OroraTech, a German company developing a constellation of thermal mapping satellites for tracking wildfires and other applications, has raised an additional 15 million euros ($15.4 million) to support work on future satellites. Munich-based OroraTech said Nov. 30 it raised the money as an extension of a Series A round that raised 5.8 million euros in June 2021 . Edaphon, a Belgium-based climate impact fund, led the new funding along with several existing investors. The money will fund work on the company’s second satellite. Thomas Grübler, chief executive of OroraTech, said in an interview that second satellite is slated for launch in May 2023 on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare mission and, like the first, is being developed in cooperation with Spire. OroraTech’s first satellite launched in January on another SpaceX Transporter mission to demonstrate the company’s thermal infrared camera. “We got more than we expected,” he said, such as detecting features at much sharper resolutions than designed. “It basically overachieved. We got better quality than we ever expected on this first prototype.” The second satellite features an improved thermal imager. The swath width will increase from 100 to 400 kilometers while adding a third band in medium- and long-wave infrared. The camera’s resolution will also improve from 200 to 80 meters. The new satellite is a precursor for an initial constellation of eight satellites that will be in a late-afternoon sun-synchronous orbit. Those satellites are planned for launch in May 2024, but Grübler said the company will need to raise additional funding to build them. The company developed the satellites to offer wildfire tracking services, and is getting interest from firefighting agencies. “They want to replace some of their observation flights,” he said. “They want to fly less often because it’s very risky.” The company currently offers a product, called Wildfire Intelligence Solution, using third-party data. However, he said the company is also seeing interest, particularly in Europe, for using the satellites for mapping urban heat islands to help cities deal with heat waves. OroraTech now has about 80 employees, and Grübler said he did not expect the company to grow much larger with the new funding. However, the company is expanding geographically, hiring people in Canada and South America, and is preparing to open a U.S. office in the San Francisco area. Those offices will initially be focused on sales and marketing, but may later expand into product development to support specific customer needs in those regions. Grübler said it was more difficult raising this new round, part of a general tightening of capital markets. “It’s harder for everyone. When I go to conferences, everyone says it’s harder now,” he said. “I think we are in a very good position because we are tackling climate change with our solution. Therefore, our solution will always be needed.”
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Maxar Technologies announced Aug. 9 it was selected by L3Harris to manufacture 14 missile-detection satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency. DoD’s space agency last month announced it awarded L3Harris Technologies and Northrop Grumman contracts to each build 14 missile-tracking satellites for a low Earth orbit constellation known as the Tracking Layer Tranche 1. L3Harris won a $700 million contract. The 28 infrared-sensing satellites will be part of a global network of eyes in the sky the Pentagon will use to detect and track the latest generation of ballistic and hypersonic missiles being developed by countries like Russia and China. “This is a big win,” Maxar CEO Daniel Jablonsky said Aug. 9 during a second-quarter earnings call. He called the agreement with L3Harris a validation of Maxar’s strategy to pursue national security satellite contracts to diversify its mostly commercial-only business. Maxar will supply satellite buses and provide support services as a subcontractor to L3Harris. The company did not disclose the value of the contract. Jablonsky said it’s a fixed-price deal for Maxar’s new “workhorse PLEO” bus, designed for proliferated low Earth orbit constellations and based on an earlier design the company bid for the Telesat constellation. The contract with L3Harris also covers the integration of mission payloads, including optical terminals for mesh networking, Ka-band communications and infrared sensors. Maxar will manufacture the buses at its factories in Palo Alto and San Jose, California, for delivery in 2024. Launches are scheduled to begin in April 2025. “This program demonstrates that Maxar is primed to handle a diverse set of missions,” said Chris Johnson, Maxar senior vice president and general manager of space. Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of spectral solutions at L3Harris, said the company considered the Maxar platform a good fit for SDA’s Tracking Layer. “Developing and manufacturing commoditized, commercially available spacecraft for the national defense space architecture is key for the Space Development Agency.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX overcame a bleak weather forecast to launch a satellite Nov. 22 that expands Eutelsat further into fast-growing markets for providing broadband to planes and ships. A Falcon 9 carrying the Eutelsat 10B satellite lifted off 9:47 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, during a window that had been given a probability of just 10% to be go for launch. The mission was delayed from Nov. 21 to give SpaceX more time to conduct “additional pre-flight checkouts.” SpaceX used an expendable version of the Falcon 9 to send Eutelsat 10B to a high-energy supersynchronous transfer orbit, which should shorten the time it takes the all-electric satellite to reach its final geostationary position with its own thrusters. The trajectory shaves 10 days off the satellite’s five-to-six-month journey compared to a more typical launch to an apogee below geostationary orbit (GEO), according to Sandrine Bielecki, spokesperson for Eutelsat 10B builder Thales Alenia Space. The faster route follows production issues that have delayed plans to bring Eutelsat 10B into service in the first half of 2023. Eutelsat did not say whether it paid SpaceX more for a Falcon 9 that did not reserve fuel its booster needed to land on a drone ship post-launch for reuse. Intelsat paid a premium to use an expendable Falcon 9 to give a pair of satellites an extra boost Nov. 12 on their way to their final GEO destinations. SpaceX’s booster splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean after launching Eutelsat 10B in its eleventh mission. It was SpaceX’s oldest active booster and had previously supported missions for Telesat, Iridium, and SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. Based on Thales Alenia Space’s Spacebus NEO platform, Eutelsat 10B has about 35 gigabits per second of capacity across its high-throughput payloads. Eutelsat 10B is slated to deliver Ku-band services for aviation and maritime customers in high-traffic areas across Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. The satellite also carries two C- and Ku-band payloads to replace TV broadcast services provided by Eutelsat 10A at 10 degrees East, which is due to reach the end of its operational life at the end of 2023. Eutelsat’s broadcast business brings in about 59% of the company’s revenues but has gradually declined amid shifting consumer trends. The GEO operator has set its sights on serving connectivity markets as a source for future growth, and is in the middle of merging with low Earth orbit broadband operator OneWeb to bolster this strategy. The aviation and maritime connectivity markets promise significant growth opportunities for satellite operators able to meet growing demand from passengers for improved connectivity services. Eutelsat said Nov. 23 it has already secured multi-year capacity commitments from “several leading in-flight connectivity service providers” for more than a third of Eutelsat 10B’s high throughput capacity. In September, Arianespace launched the Konnect VHTS satellite for Eutelsat to provide 500 gigabits per second of Ka-band throughput to European broadband markets. Konnect VHTS (Very High Throughput Satellite) was also caught up in Thales Alenia Space’s production delays. Eutelsat said in February that Konnect VHTS is slated to enter service in the second half of 2023 instead of the first. Bringing Konnect VHTS and Eutelsat 10B online slower than planned would have “a mechanical impact” on its revenue projections for “subsequent years,” the operator said.
 The House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee on June 15 approved by voice vote a defense funding bill for fiscal year 2023. The bill provides $761.6 billion for the Defense Department, an increase of $32 billion above 2022 funding but less than the $773 billion requested by the Biden administration. The full Appropriations Committee markup of the bill is scheduled for June 22. The defense appropriations subcommittee, or HAC-D, approved funding for the Space Force and national security space programs largely in line with the president’s request . That includes $3.7 billion for procurement of satellites and launch services, and $15.4 billion for research, development and testing of space technologies. The panel added nearly $200 million for national security space launch above the administration’s request. The president’s proposed budget includes $1.3 billion for three national security space launch missions (NSSL) and three launches of Space Development Agency (SDA) satellites to low Earth orbit. The HAC-D added approximately $160 million to the NSSL procurement budget to fund two additional Space Development Agency launches and added $30 million to DoD’s $124 million request for NSSL research and development projects to be done in partnerships with domestic launch providers. Funding for two additional SDA launches was requested by the agency in April to accelerate the deployment of a $2.5 billion missile-tracking constellation that the agency initially planned to start launching in 2026 but is now looking to accelerate to 2025. SDA’s Tracking Layer, a constellation of infrared sensing satellites in low Earth orbit, has emerged as a top priority for the Pentagon amid concerns that current defense systems might not be able to detect high-speed maneuvering missiles. The Tracking Layer is envisioned as a global network of eyes in the sky that would provide a defensive shield against Russian and Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles. As many as 100 satellites are planned to be added to the Tracking Layer over the next five years. Congress inserted $550 million in the Pentagon’s 2022 budget to speed up the project. DoD’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 includes $500 million for the Tracking Layer. 
PARIS – British small satellite startup Open Cosmos announced plans Sept. 21 for OpenConstellation, shared space infrastructure that offers partners access to satellite data. At the International Astronautical Congress here, Open Cosmos invited countries, institutions or companies around the world to contribute their satellites to OpenConstellation. Eventually, Open Cosmos hopes OpenConstellation expands to include 25 satellites with sensors offering varying spatial and spectral resolutions. In return for contributing satellites, OpenConstellation partners gain access to data over their areas of interest. The goal is to give businesses, nonprofits, national and regional governments that may not have the resources individually to establish multifaceted Earth-observation constellations access to “insightful, actionable data from space for the first time while keeping high levels of governance and security,” according to the news release. Space organizations from the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal are among the partners who have made commitments for the first six OpenConstellation satellites. The first launch is scheduled for November. “The main challenges the world faces today are global and satellites naturally provide that global perspective we need to make the right decisions,” said Rafel Jorda Siquier, Open Cosmos founder and CEO. “The key objective of OpenConstellation is to make necessary data and information from space more accessible.” The shared infrastructure is designed to strike a balance between what organizations or governments can afford and the performance they need, Siquier added. The first six OpenConstellation satellites are all being built by Open Cosmos. They include Open Cosmos’ multispectral 12-unit cubesat and the company’s 6U cubesats, which provides data in 32 spectral bands with a resolution of 4.95 meters per pixel. The OpenConstellation infrastructure will be managed by Open Cosmos’ ground operations staff. “Additional satellites with higher resolution and covering other bands of the spectrum are planned to be added in a second phase,” the news release added.
As the Artemis 1 mission reaches the halfway mark, NASA managers are adding additional test objectives for the Orion spacecraft to prepare for the vehicle’s first crewed flight. At a Nov. 28 briefing, agency officials said they continued to be pleased by the performance of the uncrewed Orion spacecraft as it orbits the moon in the middle of the 25.5-day Artemis 1 mission. Controllers have dealt with only minor issues during the mission, none of which “are of consequence,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager. Because of that performance, NASA is adding seven new objectives to test the thermal environment of the spacecraft and its propulsion system during the mission. “We’re going to try and expand the thermal environment,” said flight director Rick LaBrode. Orion normally flies in a “tail to sun” orientation with the aft section of the spacecraft pointed towards the sun for both thermal stability and power generation, but can deviate by up to 20 degrees in pitch and yaw. “What we’re doing is characterizing the corners of the box,” with the new test objectives, said Sarafin, as well as a requirement that, if the spacecraft is out of that orientation for more than three hours, it needs to return to its regular orientation for 10 hours for “thermal recovery” before using any thrusters. “That is consistent with a test flight. We want to do envelope expansion and validate our models,” he said. “The halfway point in this mission affords us an opportunity to step back and look at what our margins are and where we could be a little smarter to buy down risk and understand the spacecraft’s performance for crewed flight on the very next mission.” Those seven new objectives are on top of the 124 that Artemis 1 had for testing the performance of the Orion spacecraft. Sarafin said 25% of those objectives are now complete, with half of the rest in progress. Many of the remaining objectives, he said, are tied to events at the end of the mission, including reentry and splashdown. Engineers have concluded an investigation into one issue Orion had suffered with random access memory in its star trackers. “We essentially concluded that the hardware is performing as expected and that this is a byproduct of the flight environment,” he said. LaBrode said a 47-minute unexpected loss of communications with Orion early Nov. 23 was a configuration issue involving the Deep Space Network. Controllers had worked to increase bandwidth from Orion, which has enabled the spacecraft to stream live video. “It was simply a misconfiguration at the Deep Space Network, where they were set up for a data rate that the vehicle was not set up for,” he said. While the performance of Orion is buying down overall risk ahead of the Artemis 2 crewed mission, Sarafin said that some won’t be addressed until Orion returns for a Dec. 11 reentry and splashdown off the California coast. The mission’s highest priority is to test the performance of the spacecraft when reentering at lunar return speeds, while another top priority is to recover the spacecraft after splashdown, including components like avionics units that will be reflown on Artemis 2. “If you’re looking at our top ten risk drivers,” he said, “some of them have been retired, some are still in play, and some won’t be realized, for good or bad, until we get to entry, descent and splashdown day.”
Viasat took a step closer to buying London-based Inmarsat Sept. 16 after the British government ruled it poses no risk to the U.K.’s national security. The government found sufficient measures in place to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access, and to continue the provision of strategic capabilities to the U.K. following the merger. The review was conducted as part of new national security procedures under the UK National Security and Investment Act 2021 (NSI Act), which came into force Jan. 4. The legislation gave the government more power to scrutinize and intervene in acquisitions of companies in space and other sensitive areas. Inmarsat and California-headquartered Viasat have made economic commitments to the government to help clear their $7.3 billion transaction. These include a pledge to expand the number of highly skilled jobs in certain areas of the United Kingdom, and to increase research and development spending by 30% in the country. The transaction remains subject to other regulatory reviews, including approval from the U.K.’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority. The satellite operators recently received approval for the deal from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). However, they still need the green light from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department. The European Commission said July 27 that the deal would also need antitrust approval from the European Union before it can be completed. “Timing of the process is down to the EU, but we are cooperating fully and engaging with the regulator regarding the transaction,” Inmarsat spokesperson Jonathan Sinnatt said. Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said Sept. 13 that it will “probably be another month or so” before the company has a sense of whether it can close the acquisition this year or in 2023.
The Hungarian government plans to spend $100 million to send an astronaut to the International Space Station in two years through a deal with Axiom Space. In a presentation at the European Space Agency’s ministerial council meeting Nov. 22, Péter Szijjártó, Hungarian foreign minister, said the country was in the middle of a process to select an astronaut to fly on a month-long mission to the ISS in late 2024 or early 2025. Axiom Space announced in July it signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Hungary regarding that country’s Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) program, which would fly a Hungarian astronaut to space on a future Axiom Space mission. That announcement, though, provided few details about when that person would fly. Szijjártó offered more details about the effort during remarks that he gave in the opening session of the ESA ministerial, when representatives of ESA member states, associated states and other observers were granted three minutes each to discuss their views on ESA issues. “This is a program which is being carried out with the cooperation of the American company Axiom Space and its extent is $100 million,” he said of the initiative. “This will end up in a 30-day-long research mission of a Hungarian astronaut with three other astronauts at the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025, depending on what time NASA confirms access to the International Space Station.” NASA has yet to award missions to Axiom Space beyond its Ax-2 mission scheduled for the spring of 2023, but is evaluating proposals for two private astronaut missions that could include an Axiom Space flight in that timeframe. Szijjártó said the government is in the middle of an astronaut selection process, having received 244 applications, 39 of which were women. That has been narrowed down to eight candidates, with four picked by the end of the year to go into training. “The final decision about the final astronaut will be made just a couple of months before the mission itself.” The selected astronaut will “test 12 Hungarian devices” and perform eight experiments from Hungarian universities, he said. “We are ready to offer research and experiment slots for ESA as well during this 30-day-long space mission.” Hungary is one of several countries pursuing astronaut flights with Axiom Space. In September, Axiom Space announced an agreement with the Saudi Space Commission to fly two Saudi astronauts. A NASA official later said those astronauts would likely fly on the Ax-2 mission. Axiom also has an agreement with Turkey to fly a Turkish astronaut on a later Axiom mission. Hungary, though, is a member of ESA, which has its own astronaut corps. The statement by Szijjártó about the private spaceflight during the ministerial raised eyebrows among other ESA members, particularly as it comes just before ESA is set to announce a new astronaut class that will include career and reserve astronauts. Another concern is that the $100 million Hungary plans to spend on the astronaut flight is similar to its funding of ESA programs overall. Hungary committed 97 million euros to ESA programs at the 2019 ministerial, and Szijjártó said Hungary planned to make a similar commitment to ESA programs at the ongoing meeting. “This is a choice of Hungary so I’m not commenting on the arrangements that are made between one country and a private company,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told reporters late Nov. 22 when asked about the Hungarian statement. “Personally, I would prefer having this astronaut flying within an ESA context, but this is a choice, obviously, of every single country.”
Virgin Galactic has once again pushed back the start of commercial flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, saying upgrades of its carrier aircraft are taking longer than expected. In its release of its second quarter earnings Aug. 4, the company said it is now expecting to start commercial flights of its single SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, in the second quarter of 2023. In its previous earnings release in May, the company had delayed the start of such flights from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023 . In an earnings call, company executives said that the latest delay was not directly related to supply chain and staffing problems it blamed for the previous delay. Instead, refurbishment work on its WhiteKnightTwo plane, VMS Eve, was taking longer than planned. “The driver is around the amount of time it is taking us to accomplish the work scope on Eve,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic. “We did not plan the full amount of time that’s been needed to get this work accomplished.” The “most acute” issue was work on the central wing section of the plane, where workers were replacing the pylon to which SpaceShipTwo is attached. There are differences between the designs for the plane and what was actually built, he said. There are also limited working environments on the plane that restricts how much work can be done in parallel. He said there are still staffing issues contributing to delays. That work is taking place at the company’s factory in Mojave, California. “It is a challenged labor market in that area,” he said. The company has, in the last couple months, shifted people who had been working on VSS Imagine, its second spaceplane, onto Eve. “We need to get Unity back in the air and we to get Eve flying,” Colglazier said. That shift in workforce will slow down work on Imagine, he said. While the company previously planned to have that in service carrying customers in mid-2023, Colglazier said the company now expects those flights to begin no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2023. “Imagine is a new vehicle and will require a sequence of planned test flights before it carries private astronauts,” he said. The inherent uncertainty in any campaign of test flights, he noted, “could potentially extend Imagine’s window for private astronaut service into early 2024.” The company is also changing direction on ticket sales. The company has sold more than 800 seats to date of an initial tranche of 1,000. Colglazier said that the company plans to reserve 100 of the remaining seats to sell for private and government researchers. Most of the rest will be sold through a partnership with Virtuoso, a company that specializes in luxury and adventure travel. He said the research market “commands a significant price premium” compared to private astronaut tickets that currently sell for $450,000. “We want to seed this. I think this has potential to grow,” he said. The Virtuoso partnership, he said, is intended to attract customers who don’t identify as space enthusiasts. “A heavy percentage of the people that we have right now are space enthusiasts,” he said. “There is a much, much larger group out there that does very-high-end luxury and adventure travel.” The company reported a net loss of $111 million and negative adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $93 million in the second quarter. Those losses were much higher than the same quarter last year, which the company said was from higher research and development costs as it starts development of the new Delta-class of suborbital spaceplanes. Virgin Galactic has cash and cash equivalents of $1.1 billion as of the end of the second quarter and announced plans to sell up to $300 million in stock. Doug Ahrens, chief financial officer, said in the call the filing to sell the stock was part of “steps to give us financial flexibility going forward.” The release of Virgin Galactic’s financial results came the same day as i ts suborbital spaceflight rival, Blue Origin, flew its sixth crewed New Shepard flight . That company has flown 31 people to date, including one person who went on two flights. All those New Shepard launches have taken place since the last SpaceShipTwo suborbital flight in July 2021.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Under a $700 million contract from the U.S. Space Development Agency, L3Harris will build 14 satellites using a new Maxar bus. The satellites will be part of a missile-detecting and tracking network being developed by the agency. Maxar Technologies CEO Daniel Jablonsky said the bus selected by L3Harris is a new product the company designed for low Earth orbit constellations. The new bus is slightly smaller than the Legion model the company designed for its next-generation imaging satellites. “It’s a new proprietary design that we worked on with L3Harris to make sure that the spacecraft is fit for the purpose of the mission,” Jablonsky said in an interview at the Air, Space & Cyber conference. L3Harris and Northrop Grumman were selected by the Defense Department’s space agency to each produce 14 missile-tracking satellites for a low Earth orbit constellation known as the Tracking Layer Tranche 1. The 28 satellites will be part of a global network to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The agreement with L3Harris is Maxar’s first major defense satellite contract. Jablonsky said he views it as a validation of the company’s strategy to diversify its mostly commercial satellite manufacturing business . “We’re very excited about the relationship and really glad L3Harris picked us as a partner and trusts us to do this for them,” he said. Jablonsky said the supplier agreement with L3Harris is not exclusive and the company could potentially team up with other defense contractors. He noted that L3Harris for years has been a supplier of reflectors for Maxar’s communication satellites, and of wideband antennas for the Legion imaging satellites. Kelle Wendling, president of L3Harris Space Systems, told SpaceNews that the company works with multiple satellite bus suppliers and selected Maxar for the Space Development Agency bid following a competitive evaluation. “We try to be very agnostic about what capabilities we bring to DoD,” she said. For the Tranche 1 contract, “we did a very candid trade, we looked at what our bus options were, and Maxar came out on top.” L3Harris plans to compete for other military space programs and will evaluate buses for low, medium and geostationary orbit satellites, said Wendling. Further down the road, “we’ll talk about cislunar and other things as well. But we definitely need to make sure we have buses for different orbits.” The company has been building f our missile-tracking infrared satellites for SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 0 under a contract awarded in 2020. These satellites, made with Moog buses, are projected to launch in March 2023. L3Harris also is building a navigation satellite for the U.S. Air Force, also projected to launch in 2023, using a Northrop Grumman bus. Wendling said she is confident L3Harris will win more contracts for missile-tracking satellites. The company’s infrared sensors, originally developed for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites, already have demonstrated they can detect hypersonic missile launches, she said. “Because of the sensitivity of our infrared sensors, we were able to see the Chinese hypersonic missile test launch last August,” she said. “We took this really seasoned technology from the infrared domain focused on weather into missile warnings and defense.” Supply chain concerns loom The 28 Tranche 1 tracking satellites are projected to launch in 2024, an ambitious schedule that might be difficult to meet if current supply chain problems continue. SDA Director Derek Tournear said last week that the launch of the agency’s first Tranche 0 satellites that had been scheduled for late September is slipping to no earlier than mid-December. Jablonsky said Maxar is putting in place business processes to ensure it can build 14 buses for L3Harris over the next two years. The industry is trying to get back on track after an unprecedented 24 months when the global pandemic disrupted supply chains in many sectors. In Maxar’s case, he said, its supply chain had already been impacted before the pandemic due to a downturn in geostationary commercial satellite orders that started in 2016. “With all of the new activity that’s being generated with space, with commercial, intelligence, defense and civil missions, I think that we will be building a much more robust supply base, but it will look different than the one that we had going into the pandemic,” said Jablonsky. “Things are much better already,” he added. “We’re getting much more predictable bids. We can go out to suppliers and sit with them and understand their capacity, their timelines … We’re very pleased with a lot of the investments the supply chain has been making to add better speed and predictability.”
Consolidation among some of the world’s largest satellite operators is rippling through the broader commercial space industry. Viasat received shareholder approval in June to buy London-based satellite operator Inmarsat in a $7.3 billion deal expected to close this year. Eutelsat and OneWeb, meanwhile, announced in July their intent to combine operations in an all-stock transaction that values OneWeb at $3.4 billion. Other operators could jump on the bandwagon. And while there are no guarantees any of these transactions will close, a period of consolidation at the operator level promises more change in what are already transformational times for the market. For starters, it could result in fewer orders of broadband satellites for geostationary orbit (GEO) as operators rationalize their merged fleets, according to BryceTech analyst Phil Smith. At the same time, more orders could be on the way for satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), if emerging business models there prove successful. That would mean fewer commercial launches to GEO, Smith says, pushing the launch market further toward catering to the needs of constellations of smaller satellites. The Royal Caribbean Group said Aug. 30 it will connect cruise ships to Starlink’s rapidly expanding NGSO broadband network across all three of its main brands by the end of March. However, it is still early days for assessing how viable NGSO broadband constellations will be for serving global connectivity needs. “The demand is there, to be sure, but the manner in which this demand is addressed using satellite constellations [is] only now generating data that will inform more detailed business analyses,” Smith says. As well as competing with terrestrial networks, these satellite constellations must also find ways to compete with each other effectively. There is also the potential that operators rationalizing merged fleets could significantly downsize their needs. “If consolidation leads to reduction in size or elimination of a space-based system,” such as a constellation, “then the impact would be significant,” Smith warns. “This almost always leads to changes in labor, like layoffs.” Fewer independent satellite operators would make it harder for new operators to enter the market, according to analysts at Northern Sky Research. Future entrants would also likely struggle to offer the same capabilities as those that have joined forces. However, even though fewer operators means less competition to drive down prices, NSR analysts do not see end-user capacity costs changing much as a result. The supply of capacity for high-through-put and fixed satellite services (FSS) is still higher than demand they see across all orbits. Overall, NSR analysts foresee better cost economics and improved bandwidth utilization —namely, higher satellite fill rates — from operators entering a consolidation period that could ultimately create a “healthier ecosystem.” Smith expects the wave of operator consolidation will extend to service providers and spacecraft manufacturers. This is “not terribly unusual” in the aerospace industry, he says, and “would be taking place periodically despite the pandemic” and Russia’s war with Ukraine, which have both disrupted satellite supply chains. Satellite capacity resellers such as Speedcast have been consolidating to build scale and take advantage of the glut in supply. Facing uncertainty in their markets because of incoming NGSO broadband constellations, GEO operators have also been buying service providers to get closer to end customers. Case in point, Intelsat acquired Gogo’s commercial aviation business in 2020 to boost its position in the inflight connectivity market. In the manufacturing market, Boeing’s Millennium Space acquisition in 2018 and Lockheed Martin’s investments in Terran Orbital gave them small satellite expertise for NGSO networks — and a strengthened supply chain. NSR believes smallsat builders that have made overly ambitious bets on an expanding constellation market could see more of them sold to bigger primes. Despite market challenges, manufacturers are still in a “build, build, build” phase, NSR says, to meet anticipated demand from new constellations that continue to be announced. “The market is not big enough to support all of these players, as new fleets are not disruptive enough on pricing or service to open or create opportunities,” according to NSR. SpaceX has launched more than a thousand satellites for Starlink since the beginning of 2022, OneWeb is preparing to resume the deployment of its NGSO constellation this year, and Amazon signed billions of dollars in launch agreements for Project Kuiper in April with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. A slowdown in momentum from emerging players could create a “more enticing environment for acquisition,” NSR says. Prospects for consolidation in the crowded small satellite launch market are less rosy. Analysts expect many of the launch startups created in recent years — and there are more than a hundred — will fail because of a lack of demand and the substantial capital investments they need to become commercial. Most of these will likely fall to the wayside rather than merge with another launch startup, not least because few synergies can be gained from integrating rocket hardware this way. “Of the many proposed vehicles and those under development, a lot have not really provided updates on progress in recent years, which is notable,” Smith says. “Of course, it is a competitive environment, but other companies have been much more obvious about their plans, even if largely focused on announcing investment rounds and management hires, as opposed to technical specifications.” That said, Northrop Grumman’s recent decision to develop a new first stage for its Antares launch vehicle — and a future medium-lift rocket — with startup Firefly Aerospace highlights the possibility for other kinds of tie-ups. Northrop was forced to look beyond its previous reliance on Ukrainian and Russian suppliers for the first stage once those two nations were at war, and chose to reach out to a startup rather than a direct competitor. It remains to be seen whether this partnership could evolve into an acquisition. This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
LOGAN, Utah – At the Small Satellite Conference, Benchmark Space Systems unveiled a collision-avoidance kit designed to help small satellites dodge debris and steer clear of other spacecraft. Benchmark is taking orders for its “Cola Kit,” which the company plans to begin shipping to customers in early 2023. The Cola Kit is the size of a two-unit (2U) cubesat. “If you give me 2U in an ESPA class [satellite], I can give you two to 10 collision-avoidance maneuvers for $100,000 to $150,000,” Chris Carella, Benchmark executive vice president of business development and strategy, told SpaceNews. Benchmark developed the Cola Kit in response to demand from prime contractors that are equipping their spacecraft with electric propulsion systems but still lacking the ability to maneuver quickly in response to conjunction alerts. “They are flying these high-cost, high-value assets, but they have this vulnerability that’s just not acceptable,” Carella said. Orbital conjunctions are becoming more frequent thanks to the growing number of satellites launched and detailed information on objects in orbit being provided by companies. The Cola Kit is our “response to all the great data that the space domain awareness and space traffic management companies are coming out with,” Carella said. “The Cola Kit is a cheap, small, lightweight insurance policy for your high-cost asset.” Benchmark’s Cola Kit combines the company’s chemical propulsion tanks and thruster, which have flight heritage, with control electronics, inlet and outlet manifolds, and an adjustable mount. In addition to avoiding collisions, the Cola Kit is designed to give satellites and orbital transfer vehicles the ability to perform controlled deorbits. “We think the demand is strong enough for Cola Kits that when we have capacity on the production floor, we’ll use it to build metal plasma thrusters and Cola Kits,” Carella said. Benchmark is forging partnerships to market Cola Kits with several electric propulsion and space traffic management companies. The first company to sign-on was space safety startup Scout Space . “Scout will deploy our fleet of in-space and on-orbit systems to provide continuous situational awareness services to support sustainable space operations,” Scout CEO Eric Ingram said in a statement. “Scout and Benchmark have shared missions in the past and we have strong synergies in our respective roadmaps that highlight several opportuawnities to work cooperatively to bring pre-integrated, bundled solutions to benefit the market.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Private equity firm Antarctica Capital has acquired geospatial analytics provider Descartes Labs to support its growing space-based data portfolio. Antarctica said Aug.4 it bought a controlling stake in Descartes Labs for an undisclosed sum in a news release that offered few details about the deal. As part of the transaction, Antarctica operating partners Richard Davis and Graeme Shaw will serve, respectively, as CEO and chief operating officer of Descartes Labs. Descartes Labs provides analysis from a mix of third-party satellites with a cloud-based platform that helps companies make forecasts related to agriculture, energy, sustainability, mining, shipping, financial and other services. The Santa Fe, New Mexico-based company also supports government customers in processing multi-source geospatial data. In 2020, Descartes Labs said it had secured a $1.5 million contract to help the U.S. Air Force draw intelligence from imagery and other data collected by satellites and autonomous aerial vehicles. Descartes Labs was spun off from the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2014. Antarctica managing partner Chandra Patel said the New York-based private equity firm has a “strong institutional commitment to the geospatial and data analytics sectors,” and Descartes Labs “will be very complementary to our other portfolio companies in these sectors.” Antarctica formed a Canadian optical satellite imagery provider called EarthDaily Analytics (EDA) last year after buying parts of UrtheCast that sought creditor protection to avoid bankruptcy. The private equity firm bought satellite designs, software, customer contracts, intellectual property from the company, but did not buy its satellites or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) assets. EDA said Jan. 18 it had picked condosat operator Loft Orbital to build, launch and operate a fleet of 10 Earth-observation satellites in 2023. According to EDA, the constellation’s sensors will cover a broad spectral range from visible to thermal wavelengths for markets that include agriculture and commodity trading. Davis, who replaces Terry Cunningham as Descartes Labs CEO, said there was no relationship between Descartes Labs and EDA prior to the acquisition. “ Both companies have their own core competencies and market strengths, ” he told SpaceNews . “ We do not see them as competitors, but rather as complimentary service providers to their customers. ” He anticipates “ being able to leverage the proprietary data from EarthDaily’s constellation when it launches late next year, which will have value across multiple verticals. We are actively working with both management teams to explore these opportunities for collaboration. ” Antarctica, which manages more than $2 billion of assets, told SpaceNews last year that it was in talks about buying other businesses in complementary areas. The private equity firm is also behind a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Endurance Acquisition Corp, which plans to merge with Israeli satcoms equipment maker SatixFy this year. Endurance raised about $200 million for the deal in September by listing shares on the Nasdaq Capital Market.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea seeks a $459 million budget to build a 1.8-ton robotic lunar lander, which it wants to send to the moon in 2031 for a one-year mission on the nation’s next-generation carrier rocket under development. The project would be South Korea’s second lunar exploration mission after its first robotic lunar orbiter , called Danuri, which is on the way to the moon after launching Aug. 4 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Details of the plan were presented in an Aug. 24 public hearing organized by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), the mission’s lead manager. The hearing was an essential step for KARI to request a budget for the mission. The plan can be modified in a feasibility study by the finance ministry. According to the presentation, KARI seeks 618.4 billion won ($459 million) to build the lander and payload in collaboration with domestic institutes, universities and companies as part of an effort to nurture the nascent domestic space industry. Aboard the lander would be a 13-kilogram detector of volatile substances in the regolith, a 27-kilogram autonomous navigation system for the lander’s soft-landing on the moon, a 0.75-kilogram nuclear power generator, and a 15-kilogram rover. The rover could carry a 5-kilogram payload: an electron gun designed to image and analyze lunar dust, and a high-resolution camera. The octangle lander with four fixed landing gears would carry 1,210 kilograms of fuel and maneuver with three 420-newton thrusters, six 220-newton thrusters, and sixteen 20-newton engines for attitude control. While solar panels will be installed on the lander’s top and side, the rover’s deployment platform will be installed on one side of the lander. The presentation didn’t identify organizations that would participate in the project. “If everything goes as planned, the development will begin in 2024 and continue through 2031,” said Cheon Yee-jin, a principal researcher at KARI, in the presentation live streamed online. “It will launch in 2031 and operate on the lunar surface for one year.” He said the lander would fly to the moon on the direct transfer trajectory, which takes five days to reach the moon, or the phasing loop transfer trajectory, which takes about 30 days to get there. The researcher said the KARI is pushing forward with the lunar lander project for two major reasons: to demonstrate the homemade soft-landing technology and to develop the capability to carry out independent lunar exploration. “To develop our independent capability for lunar landing and exploration is very important because international lunar exploration projects are expected to be done in a mutually reciprocal manner, which means we will get a chance to join an international project only when we have something unique to contribute,” Cheon said. 
 Rocket Lab on July 13 launched the NROL-162 mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office from the company’s launch complex in New Zealand. NROL-162 is the first of two NRO missions the agency developed in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence. The second one, NROL-199, is planned for July 22. Both missions are classified spy satellites that the U.S. intelligence agency developed jointly with the Australian government. “The NRO works with allies and partners to identify and advance common goals,” said NRO Director Chris Scolese. The payloads on NROL-162 and NROL-199 were “designed, built, and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence as part of a broad range of cooperative satellite activities with Australia,” an NRO spokesperson said. Australia’s defense minister Peter Dutton in a speech in March announced the establishment of the Australian Space Command with a goal of expanding the country’s space activities and joint investments with the United States. “ Importantly, Australia and the United States are strengthening our alliance to support our mutual objectives in the space domain,” Dutton said . “The Australian Department of Defence and the National Reconnaissance Office have committed to a broad range of cooperative satellite activities which will expand Australia’s space knowledge and capabilities.” The partnership with Australia is part of a broader effort by the National Reconnaissance Office to have a more integrated space architecture to support U.S. and allies’ surveillance needs. The NRO recently announced a similar partnership with the United Kingdom . The NRO said this collaboration will deliver “meaningful contributions to the NRO’s enduring pursuit of a more capable, integrated, and resilient space architecture designed to provide global coverage in support of a wide range of intelligence mission requirements.” The NROL-162 and 199 missions are the “latest examples of NRO’s commitment to enhancing relationships with U.S. allies and partners.” The NRO worked with New Zealand Space Agency, which licensed the launch. For Rocket Lab, the NRO’s twin missions will be an opportunity to demonstrate its “ responsive space launch ” service, advertised as a “24/7 rapid call-up launch capability and streamlined satellite build and operation options.” NROL-162 and 199 are the third and fourth missions awarded to Rocket Lab by the NRO under the Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket (RASR) contract. The company launched RASR-1 and RASR-2 in 2020. 
The U.S. Space Systems Command announced Nov. 28 that two satellite designs — one by Millennium Space Systems and the other by Raytheon Intelligence & Space — passed critical reviews and will move into the next phase of development. Both companies designed medium Earth orbit (MEO) sensor satellites to detect and track hypersonic missiles, and are on schedule for a 2026 on-orbit demonstration, the command said. The Space Systems Command’s announcement follows a Nov. 23 news release by Millennium Space about the company’s MEO satellite passing a critical design review. MEO satellites would add a new layer to the Pentagon’s missile-defense architecture to improve the detection and tracking of hypersonic missiles. “The critical design reviews proved the sensor designs are mature and we can move from demo to development,” said Lt. Col. Gary Goff, program manager at SSC’s Space Sensing Directorate. Roger Cole, executive director of strategic systems at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, said Nov. 29 that the company used digital engineering-based models and demonstrations to show that the designs of elements — such as focal plane, electronics, firmware and the telescope — are ready for fabrication. “This approach reduced technical and schedule risk,” he said. Raytheon’s sensor payload is being developed at the company’s facility in El Segundo, California. Space Systems Command plans to conduct another review in summer 2023 of both companies’ spacecraft designs, Goff said. “If successful designs are matured and proven, the program can then proceed into building multiple satellites,” Goff said, adding that the goal is to conduct two launches in late 2026. In the demonstration, the payloads in MEO will track missile launches and hypersonic glide vehicles and will work in concert with current Space Based Infrared Systems (SBIRS) constellations operating in geosynchronous Earth and highly elliptical orbits. They will also be connected with the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer satellites in low Earth orbit. Both Millennium Space and Raytheon Intelligence & Space have options in their contracts to produce up to three spacecraft each. The value of the development contracts was not disclosed. The Pentagon requested $139 million for MEO missile-warning satellites in the 2023 budget. 
SEOUL, South Korea —Australia has pledged not to conduct direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing, throwing its weight behind the U.S.-driven initiative launched in April to promote the peaceful and safe use of outer space. Australia’s pledge comes about three weeks after the United Kingdom and South Korea joined the initiative, raising the number of like-minded countries to eight. Japan and Germany joined the campaign in mid-September, New Zealand in July and Canada in May. And more countries are expected to join as the U.S. ramps up efforts to promote the ban. “The Australian Government commits to never conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti – satellite missile testing, consistent with our role as a responsible actor in space,” said the country’s foreign minister Penny Wong, defense minister Richard Marles and industry and science minister Ed Husic in an Oct. 27 joint statement . “The use of these missiles to destroy space objects is reckless, irresponsible and poses threats to space assets of all nations.” They called on “all nations” to join the initiative as a “transparency and confidence-building measure.” This announcement came one day after a ranking Russian diplomat reiterated previous declarations at a United Nations meeting that Russia could target private space networks that assist military operations against Russia. Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for non-proliferation and arms, called the West’s use of commercial satellites “an extremely dangerous trend that … has become apparent during the latest developments in Ukraine.” He noted that such assistance constitutes “indirect participation” in military conflicts, adding “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.” Although the diplomat did not mention Starlink by name in the speech , the SpaceX internet satellite network has served as a communications lifeline for Ukraine. Meanwhile, the three Australian ministers expressed support for the United Nations open-ended working group on reducing space threats working on setting norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors in space. “The global community must work together to build a common understanding on rules and norms that can guide how states behave in outer space,” the foreign minister said in the statement. “This commitment to responsible behaviour, helps build a meaningful framework that contributes to the security, safety and sustainability of outer space.” The working group, established by a U.K.-sponsored resolution in December last year, had its second session in September and will conclude its work in August 2023. 
Updated 4:20 p.m. Eastern with new launch date. WASHINGTON — NASA is, for now, moving ahead with plans for a launch of the next crew to the International Space Station early next week as it watches an approaching hurricane. NASA held a flight readiness review Sept. 26 for the Crew-5 mission, at the time scheduled for launch Oct. 3. The Crew Dragon spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina to the station. Officials acknowledged at a briefing after the review that the schedule is dependent on weather as Hurricane Ian heads towards the west coast of the Florida peninsula, with effects to be felt throughout the state, including the Kennedy Space Center. That forecast prompted the agency to announce Sept. 26 that it would roll back the Space Launch System from Launch Complex 39B to the Vehicle Assembly Building , a process completed by early Sept. 27. “Our biggest discussion today was probably regarding weather and timing,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations. “The team is still working towards the Oct. 3 launch timeframe, but we also know we’ve got to work through weather conditions here at KSC.” NASA announced Sept. 27 it had delayed the launch one day, to Oct. 4, citing the hurricane. “Mission teams will continue to monitor the impacts of Ian on the Space Coast and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and could adjust the launch date again, as necessary,” the agency said in a statement. The anticipated storm prompted NASA to delay the arrival of the crew, which was scheduled for Sept. 26. That alone would not push back the launch: Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said they crew would typically arrive about four days before launch for preparations. If weather or other issues case a delay, Stich said there are additional launch opportunities Oct. 4 and 5, as well as Oct. 7 through 9. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said there were no issues with the station if the launch was further delayed. As of the time of the briefing KSC was in a condition called HURCON IV, meaning that the center was expecting severe weather in the next 72 hours. That involves initial preparations for the storm, said Kelvin Manning, deputy director of the center, such as checking on equipment that would be used by a “rideout team” that would stay at KSC during the storm to monitor damage. “We’re securing facilities, property and equipment,” he said, such as at construction sites at KSC. The center is also coordinating its plans with Space Launch Delta 45, which operates neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. KSC entered HURCON III, meaning high winds were expected in the next 48 hours, on the morning of Sept. 27. At the briefing, NASA and SpaceX officials said they were finishing up reviews of two technical issues with the spacecraft and Falcon 9 launch vehicle. One involved reviews of a “nonstandard” weld repair on a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) on another vehicle. Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said the company wanted to make sure none of the COPVs on the Crew-5 are affected and, if so, they are acceptable to fly. “This is just an abundance of caution on the SpaceX team, and kudos to them for identifying it,” Stich said. Stich said a second issue is to check a flap on the perimeter of the spacecraft where it bonds to composite material. “We want to go make sure and check the margins,” he said. The Crew-5 launch was previously scheduled for early September but delayed when the new Falcon 9 booster for the mission was damaged during transport from SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, factory to its McGregor, Texas, test site. The booster hit a highway bridge that required replacing the interstage section at the top of the booster, as well as avionics and a grid fin. Stich said the booster underwent additional tests at McGregor, including a pressure test of the liquid oxygen tank, as well as standard booster tests and a static fire. “We convinced ourselves we’ve got a good vehicle to go fly,” he said. “This rocket went through its normal full-up testing, post all the repairs, to make sure that it is ready to go,” said Gerstenmaier. “This booster is perfectly ready to go fly.”
Despite near-term headwinds in the economy and the markets, executives and investors remain bullish about the space industry’s long-term prospects. A panel at the World Satellite Business Week conference here Sept. 12 acknowledged a decline in enthusiasm for space investment in the last year but argued the fundamentals of the industry remained strong. “The demand side of space has not changed at all, even though there are a number of concerns about the direction of the economy,” said Peter Cannito, chairman and chief executive of Redwire. “The space industry is a port in the storm, and one of the reasons for this is the critical roles that governments play in providing a stable environment for space demand.” The space industry attracted a wave of investment in recent years. More recently, though, there are warning signs in terms of the amount of capital raised and valuations of companies, including those that went public through mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. The outsized attention space gets “makes it seem like it’s falling in terms of venture perhaps more than it is,” said Mike Palmer, managing director of Cerberus Capital Management. “I still think there’s a lot of interest.” He acknowledged, though, that the SPAC market has dried up, and companies that have gone public using them have seen their stock prices plummet. “It all happened very fast, and probably a little too fast,” he acknowledged of the wave of space SPACs. He suggested some of those companies may have gone public too early. “It’s hard, unless you have near-term catalysts in the public markets, to really maintain your footing,” he said, arguing they still had longer-term potential. Redwire is among the companies that went public through a SPAC last year, which he said was part of a long-term play. “Space has become a very investible industry, if you’re looking at it over decades,” he said. “Over a year, over two years, what’s going to happen? I don’t know.” A near-term decline in valuations, he argued, creates opportunities for a company like his, which has acquired several companies to create a “middle market” space infrastructure firm. “The fact that valuations have started to come down creates a real opportunity for a company like ours,” he said. “Redwire has positioned itself as an aggregator.” Consolidation has also emerged among satellite operators , with Viasat planning to acquire Inmarsat and Eutelsat merging with OneWeb. There are rumors of still more potential deals, such as SES merging with Intelsat. “Consolidation is good for the sector,” said Vaibhav Lohiya, managing director and global head of space technology at Deutsche Bank Securities. That can allow companies to reduce their capital expenditures, or capex, and shift investment into new capabilities like mobility. “Consolidation helps with reducing and rationalizing that capex, putting those dollars that you’re saving towards mobility, either organically or inorganically.” A rumored SES-Intelsat merger would be a prime example of that, he said, allowing them to combine their large fleets of GEO communications satellites and reduce capital expenditures over the long term. A challenge for such a deal, though, is that Intelsat only recently emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring. “It’s not a very investment-grade capital structure.” Consolidation, though, has ripple effects for other parts of the space industry, such as satellite manufacturers. “If two of these merge,” Lohiya said of satellite operators, “then it reduces the demand for new satellites.” That concern applies throughout the industry. “If you have a supply chain that is geared towards a large number of vendors, you’re going to find fewer guys to talk to,” said Robert Wallin, managing director of the telecom and tech industry group at Natixis CIB. Cannito emphasized a long-term view. “In terms of publicly investible space companies, we’re in the first inning of spring training.”
The new head of Russia’s space agency backed away from comments suggesting Russia would withdraw from the International Space Station as soon as 2024 but expressed doubts Russia would be involved through 2030. Yuri Borisov raised alarms among the other ISS partners July 26 when he told Russian president Vladimir Putin that Russia would end its participation on the station after 2024 . The comments came as NASA and other partners continued plans to extend ISS operations to 2030. In a July 29 interview with the Russia 24 television network, also published on the Roscosmos website , Borisov emphasized that Russia would leave some time after 2024, and not 2024 itself. “We stated that we intend to do so not from 2024, but after 2024,” he said, according to a translation of the document. He said Russia would abide by the intergovernmental agreement for the ISS partners that requires countries to provide at least one year’s notice before withdrawing. The withdrawal process, he added, could take up to two years. “We haven’t warned about it yet, there’s no need for it,” he said of withdrawal. “We just said that after 2024 we are starting the exit process. Whether it will be in mid-2024 or 2025 — it all depends, in fact, including on the state of performance of the ISS itself.” Industry sources said that Roscosmos officials have privately advised NASA that Russia is unlikely to withdraw from the ISS before it starts launching modules for the Russian Orbital Service Station, a new national space station. That is expected no earlier than 2028. Borisov expressed skepticism in the interview that Russia will remain involved with the station until 2030. One was his belief that Russia would soon exhaust the research it wanted to conduct on the station. “From a scientific point of view, we do not see any additional dividends, stretching this process until 2030,” he said of that research. Another issue involves maintenance of the station. He said Russian engineers were concerned there could be “avalanche-like” failures of systems on aging modules. Because of that, “about two years ago we began to seriously think about the continuation of the manned program and the development of a domestic orbital station.” He added that ISS crews, including those on the U.S. segment, are now spending time on station maintenance that begins “to exceed all reasonable limits” and thus takes away from research activities. NASA officials, by contrast, have emphasized there is abundant time available for doing research on the U.S. segment. “We’re flush with crew time,” said Kirt Costello, chief scientist for the ISS program at NASA, during a briefing in June. “We’re not seeing crew time as a limiting factor.” Other NASA officials insisted after Borisov’s earlier comments that there is no near-term change in ISS operations planned, including no formal notification from Roscosmos of its intent to withdraw from the partnership. “We are staying the course,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said July 27 at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference. “We are working to extend the International Space Station to 2030. It’s got good years left.” Borisov took over as head of Roscosmos July 15, replacing Dmitry Rogozin, who was dismissed by Putin. Borisov, previously deputy prime minister with responsibilities that included the defense and space industries, acknowledged that Russia had fallen behind other nations in satellite manufacturing. “If we compare today the state of the space groups of the main players in this market — Americans, Europeans and Chinese — they have long overtaken us in this regard,” he said in the interview, which came after a visit to a Russian spacecraft manufacturer, Lavochkin. He said a “radical restructuring” of Russia’s space industry may be required to improve production, a process he said will be hindered by Western sanctions that restrict the export of satellite-related technologies to Russia. He argued that Russia’s electronics industry is able to produce components that are “quite acceptable” and that Russia can work with unnamed countries that have not imposed relevant sanctions.
TAMPA, Fla. — 4iG, a Hungarian provider of terrestrial communications, plans to buy a majority stake in Israeli satellite operator Spacecom in stages following resistance from Israel’s government. 4iG said Sept. 29 that Israel’s Ministry of Communications has approved its plan to buy an initial 20% of the operator, which the Hungarian telco sees as a springboard for its global space ambitions. Under 4iG’s agreement with Spacecom, it can increase its ownership by another 31% over the next three years if it can get approvals from the operator’s shareholders and the Israeli government. 4iG had originally announced plans in June 2021 to acquire 51% of Spacecom for $65 million. However, the Israeli government had concerns about Spacecom’s satellites coming under foreign control, the Jerusalem Post reported in January, and 4iG’s ties to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “By this agreement, 4iG can be the very first Hungarian enterprise that bears capabilities from landline to space communication assets,” 4iG chair Gellért Jászai said in a Sept. 29 statement. 4iG is part of a joint venture called CarpathiaSat that has announced plans to launch Hungary’s first communications satellite. CarpathiaSat, which also includes TV and radio broadcast company Antenna Hungária and international relations specialist New Space Industries, plans to use an orbital slot Hungary is currently leasing to Spacecom for the project. That lease is due to expire in 2024, when CarpathiaSat says it will take over the right to operate Hungary’s orbital position for 20 years. Spacecom uses the Hungarian orbital slot for Amos-3, one of four broadcast and broadband satellites that the Israeli company operates to serve Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Jászai said Spacecom’s expertise could help Hungary launch its inaugural commercial satellite within four to five years. Last year, 4iG acquired a majority stake in a Hungarian satellite communications services provider to fortify its space strategy. In January, the telco completed its acquisition of DIGI, a satellite TV broadcaster and one of Hungary’s largest telecoms providers.
TAMPA, Fla. — United Launch Alliance launched a pair of satellites for SES Oct. 4 that are vital to the operator’s bid to claim nearly $4 billion in C-band clearing proceeds. SES-20 and SES-21 lifted off 5:36 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and separated from their Atlas 5 rocket around six hours later. The lengthy mission dropped the Boeing-built satellites off at 35,888 kilometers above the equator at 1.9 degrees of inclination, much closer than a typical launch of spacecraft to geostationary transfer orbit. The companies said this will cut several months off the time it will take these satellites to reach their final orbit destinations using onboard electric propulsion. “We didn’t want to wait longer than we absolutely had to to get our hands on the satellites,” SES CEO Steve Collar said in a call with journalists, and SES-20 and SES-21 will “be operational in November, which given that we’re sitting here in October is pretty impressive.” Having already launched SES-22 in June as part of its shift out of C-band, the Oct. 4 mission leaves SES with just two more satellites it plans to deploy by early next year to stay on pace to claim the maximum payout from the Federal Communications Commission. SES is paying for these satellites with proceeds from the FCC’s C-band auction last year, which fetched more than $80 billion from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and other U.S. wireless carriers who need more spectrum for 5G. In addition to covering costs to vacate C-band for terrestrial 5G, the FCC is offering satellite operators nearly $10 billion in total incentive payments if they can meet the regulator’s spectrum-clearing deadlines. SES and Intelsat hold the majority of C-band in the United States and are in line for a maximum of $3.97 billion and $4.9 billion, respectively, if they can fully vacate the lower 300 MHz slice of C-band by Dec. 5, 2023, by moving broadcast customers to the upper 200 MHz of the band. They unlocked more than $2 billion in combined proceeds from the FCC last year after meeting the regulator’s first major C-band clearing deadline, however, hitting the regulator’s final deadline will require new satellites in orbit. SES loses C-band battle against Intelsat SES lost its bid Sept. 30 to convince a court overseeing Intelsat’s recent bankruptcy that it was owed $1.8 billion over a broken agreement to equally share C-band clearing proceeds. SES brought the claim to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia two months after Intelsat filed for Chapter 11 in May 2020, and was one of its largest creditors. The operator made the claim to cover damages resulting from Intelsat’s departure from a pact to equally share the compensation they would get from the FCC. Intelsat argued the agreement was nullified once the FCC decided to reallocate satellite C-band spectrum to 5G cellular network carriers via a public auction, rather than a private process run by the satellite operators. After more than two years of legal action, the court decided Sept. 30 to sustain Intelsat’s objection and disallow the claims from SES. In a Memorandum Opinion, Judge Keith Phillips wrote that SES could have objected to the FCC’s draft order if it thought its split was unfair. The satellite operator could have also “refused to participate in the accelerated clearing; it did neither,” he added. “In short, the Court does not see anything ‘unjust’ about allowing the split of accelerated relocation payments set by the FCC based on objective criteria to determine the amounts available to SES and Intelsat.” SES spokesperson Suzanne One said it is “disappointed with the ruling,” and “is reviewing with outside counsel its options to appeal.” Intelsat, which emerged from bankruptcy in February and is looking to use C-band proceeds to pay off more debt and fuel its return to growth, “is pleased to have resolved this matter with a ruling in our favor based on the clear and convincing evidence presented,” Intelsat spokesperson Clay McConnell said. Merger implications The court’s decision likely lessens the need to rush any merger talks between the two satellite operators. The Financial Times reported Aug. 4. that SES and Intelsat were in active talks about combining their companies amid consolidation deals elsewhere in the industry. While SES and Intelsat have not explicitly commented on the rumor, they have each touted the benefits of satellite operator consolidation to help rationalize the industry. “If the opportunity of consolidation is there, and it makes sense for our shareholders, we’ll grab it and execute hard,” Collar in a Sept. 14 SpaceNews interview during World Satellite Business Week in Paris. “If not, we’ve got a fantastic plan … using the cash flows that we’re generating from video to invest meaningfully in” SES’ data-focused networks business. More replacement satellites needed SES and Intelsat have ordered 13 C-band replacement satellites between them to clear the spectrum for mobile operators. SpaceX is slated to launch two more for SES on Falcon 9 rocket toward the end of the year. Collar said in the media call that “we may end up pushing into early next year depending on the manifest,” but the satellites are essentially “more or less ready to go.” The operator’s remaining work to vacate C-band following this launch will be on the ground as the operator moves customers and filters antennas across the United States. SES ordered six C-band replacement satellites in total, and the sixth will be used as a ground spare. Intelsat has ordered seven satellites for its C-band clearing plan, with none of them intended as ground spares, and has lined up Arianespace and SpaceX for launches starting Oct. 6. SpaceX is slated to launch Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 7:07 p.m. Eastern.
Work to assemble a Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket is underway at Wenchang spaceport as China prepares to complete the construction of its Tiangong space station. Components of the 849-metric-ton Long March 5B rocket were recently delivered to Wenchang, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced Sept. 3. The rocket is now being prepared for an early October launch of the 17.9-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter and 22-ton Mengtian (“dreaming of the heavens”) experiment module. Mengtian will join two earlier modules—the Tianhe core module and Wentian experiment module—in orbit to complete the T-shaped Tiangong space station. China intends to keep the space station permanently inhabited for at least a decade, gaining human spaceflight experience, conducting a range of experiments and potentially exploring commercial possibilities. Mengtian will be China’s third module launch in 18 months, following the launch of Tianhe in April 2021 and Wentian in July this year. China had earlier intended to launch Tianhe in 2018, but a Long March 5 launch failure in July 2017 and subsequent engine issues delayed the project. Components of the fourth Long March 5B rocket were delivered to Qinglan port near Wenchang on Hainan island in early September by the purpose-built Yuanwang 21 and 22 cargo ships. The five-meter-diameter rocket was manufactured and tested in the northern port city of Tianjin before being shipped south. The launch is also expected to see the first stage of the Long March 5B enter orbit. The previous three Long March 5B launches have resulted in high-profile and controversial uncontrolled reentries of the roughly 22 metric ton core stages. Mengtian was also shipped from Tianjin and arrived at Wenchang Aug. 9. The new module will see Tiangong expand to a living and working space of around 110 cubic meters. It will also provide greater power generation with another pair of 30-meter-long solar arrays like those on Wentian. The module will host science racks for conducting experiments in microgravity, with areas of research including fluid physics, combustion and materials science and space technologies. It also has a payload airlock which will allow the small, 5.2-meter-long robotic arm launched with the Wentian module to grasp science experiments and install them on payload adapters Mengtian will be greeted in orbit by the three members of the Shenzhou-14 mission crew. Commander Chen Dong and crew mate Liu Yang on Thursday completed their first extravehicular activity, using the new Wentian airlock. The Wentian module is currently docked at the forward port of the Tianhe docking hub. It will be transpositioned to a lateral port ahead of the arrival of Mengtian. The new module will also later be moved, completing the T-shaped space station. The Shenzhou-14 crew are also scheduled to welcome the Shenzhou-15 crew aboard Tiangong late in the year, marking China’s first crew handover. The Xuntian optical module, a co-orbiting, Hubble-class space survey telescope, is planned for launch in 2024. Xuntian will be capable of docking with the CSS for maintenance and repairs. The space station itself could also be expanded from three to six modules, according to Chinese space officials. Such an expansion may depend upon other countries joining the project.
Updated Oct. 10 with first post-launch maneuver. WASHINGTON — A Sherpa tug launched a month ago is still undergoing commissioning only recently started maneuvers to raise its orbit. Spaceflight Inc.’s Sherpa-LTC2 tug launched Sept. 4 as a rideshare payload on a Falcon 9 launch of 51 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket placed the payloads into an initial orbit of about 310 kilometers. Spaceflight planned to use a chemical propulsion system on the Sherpa, provided by Benchmark Space Systems, to raise the orbit of the vehicle to an altitude of 1,000 kilometers. The Sherpa payload, initially not disclosed by Spaceflight, is a V-band communications demonstration by Boeing called Varuna . However, tracking information from the U.S. Space Force showed a month after launch that Sherpa had yet to raise its orbit. Atmospheric drag has caused that orbit to gradually decay, and the spacecraft was most recently tracked in an orbit of 283 by 296 kilometers. That raised concerns that the spacecraft could reenter in a matter of weeks if it does not start firing its thrusters. Spaceflight spokesperson Jodi Sorenson told SpaceNews Oct. 4 that the company is still going through the post-launch commissioning process for the Sherpa tug. “As always with experimental, first-flight systems, the commissioning process is fluid,” she said, with orbit-raising maneuvers set to begin once commissioning is complete. She did not give an estimate of when the spacecraft commissioning will be completed. Tracking data later showed, though, that the spacecraft performed a maneuver on Oct. 7 to raise its orbit, with a new apogee of 328 kilometers. Spaceflight confirmed the burn in a tweet but has not disclosed additional details about the maneuver or future plans to move the spacecraft to its planned operational orbit. Sherpa-LTC2 is the first of Spaceflight’s line of Sherpa tugs to launch with this high-performance chemical propulsion system. The original Sherpa-LTC tug was to launch on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare mission in January but was removed because of leaks in that propulsion system. That was one in a series of events that led SpaceX to announce in March it would not fly Spaceflight payloads on rideshare missions after those already manifested. Curt Blake, chief executive of Spaceflight, said in August that the company had “gone through all kinds of checks to get things right” ahead of the Sherpa-LTC2 launch. Sherpa-LTC is part of a line of Sherpa vehicles that include versions without propulsion systems, with attitude control thrusters and with electric propulsion. Another Sherpa vehicle, Sherpa-ES, will carry a chemical propulsion system with high delta-V, or change in velocity, performance, for a mission that will take payloads on a “lunar slingshot” mission around the moon to geostationary orbit in 2023.
The chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission announced plans Nov. 3 to reorganize the agency and create a bureau devoted to its increasing work with space systems. In a speech at a Satellite Industry Association event, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced her intent to reorganize the commission’s International Bureau into a new Space Bureau and a standalone Office of International Affairs. That reorganization, she said, would give satellite licensing and regulatory work greater prominence and access to more resources. “The organizational structures of the agency have not kept pace as the applications and proceedings before us have multiplied,” she said, saying that the FCC has applications under consideration for systems totaling 64,000 satellites. “You can’t just keep doing things the old way and expect to lead in the new.” Having a bureau devoted to space, she said, would go hand-in-hand with efforts to increase staffing and develop new regulations for space systems. “This organization will help ensure that the new Space Bureau and the Office of International Affairs stay relevant, efficient and effective over time.” Rosenworcel’s announcement is only the start of the process to create the Space Bureau. In a panel discussion that followed her speech, Umair Javed, FCC chief counsel for Rosenworcel, said the proposal still needs to be discussed with congressional appropriations and authorizing committees and with the other commissioners, among others. “There’s still a lot more work to be done, but I think this is a priority for the chairwoman,” he said. “Our steps forward will reflect that in how fast we try to move.” Two industry executives at the event welcomed the Space Bureau proposal. “It sends the message that the commission recognizes the pace of innovation in the satellite industry and seeks to match that,” said Julie Zoller, head of global regulatory affairs for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. “It also gives encouragement to new space actors that there will be staff accessible to answer the many questions they must have as they try to enter this exciting industry.” Both Zoller and Jennifer Warren, vice president of civil and regulatory affairs at Lockheed Martin, said the new bureau will be helpful as the industry prepares for the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC), which takes place in late 2023. Several issues about access to spectrum for space issues will be up for discussion at the meeting. With a Space Bureau, Warren said, the FCC can bring new attention “to future agenda items for the WRC that we have for international regulatory frameworks that are enabling.” The announcement comes as some in the industry watch with caution steps by the FCC to move beyond issues purely associated with spectrum, such as the commission’s adoption in September of a new order requiring low Earth orbit satellites it licenses to deorbit no more than five years after the end of their missions . It also sought industry input on a “notice of inquiry” regarding in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) issues. Rosenworcel said she sought to create the Space Bureau to deal with the commission’s existing space activities, not any new ones. “The changes I am announcing today are not about taking on new responsibilities at the FCC. They are about performing our existing statutory responsibilities better and freeing up resources to help focus on our mission.” Javed reiterated that point in a later panel discussion. “This isn’t about growing the scope of the FCC’s activities. This is about doing the job we’re supposed to do better,” he said, emphasizing the FCC was working closely with the National Space Council and others on topics like ISAM and mission authorization of new space activities. “We are very much coordinated across the government.”
Despite growing enthusiasm for new space internet services, some military buyers remain distrustful of commercial solutions as a replacement for government-developed systems, a senior procurement official said June 2. “We see the LEO mania, and the new capability available … but customers have a bit of a trust issue,” Clare Grason, chief of the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office, said during an online event hosted by the Aerospace Corp. Services provided by commercial satellites from low Earth orbit are one item on a growing menu of options offered by LEO, medium orbit and geostationary Earth orbit satellite operators to fill military communications needs. Grason said her office — which is responsible for matching military satcom demand with commercial suppliers — is “trying to get DoD comfortable that commercial solutions are reliable and dependable. We are trying to build confidence.” Grason noted that most military buyers of commercial satellite capacity still prefer the traditional approach of using commercial bandwidth under short-term leases rather than buy fully managed services now offered by the industry. An exception is a seven-year agreement DoD signed in 2019 with Iridium Communications for unlimited use of the company’s mobile communications constellation. Otherwise, the “majority of what we’re procuring today is transponder capacity,” Grason said. “They [military customers] want to own and control the terminals, the ground segment and the management of the network traffic.” Some users are warming up to commercial services, however, Grason said. The U.S. Army, for example, recently started a pilot program to evaluate commercial services, which is likely to be followed up with a managed service contract. The Marine Corps is looking to follow suit. “The barrier in many cases is largely cultural,” she said. Commercial satellite communications acquisitions peaked in 2012, fueled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “After 2012 there was a slight decline,” said Grason. “Now we’re seeing our numbers rising.” Aerospace held the June 2 event to highlight a recent white paper that provides broad guidelines for government agencies to determine when it makes sense to buy commercial services. The “commercial readiness assessment framework” lists recommendations for how government organizations can assess commercial providers and commercial markets to meet national needs. Ronald Birk, associate principal director at Aerospace and one of the authors of the assessment, said U.S. administrations for at least two decades have issued guidance to agencies to “use commercial as much as possible” but have not given guidance on “how to assess the appropriateness and readiness of providers.” “When making the decision to acquire a commercial capability, government agencies should determine the level and scope of assessments needed to match their risk tolerance,” said the Aerospace paper. A new business model Grason said the Space Force “is laying the foundation to grow and prioritize commercial relationships.” The space industry is leading in many areas “and we’re seeing that in satcom.” Contracts like Iridium’s that aggregate demand is a more efficient way of buying satcom, compared to having multiple contracts for different military customers, Grason said. Her office currently manages 175 different contracts for satellite communications. “We believe that approach is a bit suboptimal,” he said. But transitioning to full-service contracts will be difficult for DoD users because it’s an unfamiliar business model. Grason said her office is working with the consulting firm Deloitte to build an automated system to manage satcom procurements using the Salesforce customer relations management platform. “This should provide us with better information and promote better decision making and responsiveness,” she said. An effort also is under way to educate military program managers, said Grason. “Space Force organizations are focused on building systems,” she said. Some organizations are not familiar with the types of contracting methods that are now available that they could take advantage of, and worry that if they use commercial services, their needs will not be prioritized, Grason said. “Our customers need to understand that making a transition makes sense economically and they can scale without having to add significantly more cost,” she said. It also would be helpful for commercial companies to make sure their business plans “match the budgets our customers have,” she said. “And what are the terms and conditions? If DoD wants to lease terminals, what are the terms of replacing them? There are concerns that seemingly attractive models could become cost prohibitive.” Grason’s message to commercial industry: “Never assume that the audience you’re dealing with has a high level of understanding.”
The head of a Venus mission delayed at least three years by NASA in response to problems with another mission says she will attempt to shorten that delay. As part of the Nov. 4 release of an independent review board’s report on the delays with the Psyche mission , which uncovered broader institutional issues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where it was being developed, NASA announced it would delay the launch of the Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy, or VERITAS, Venus orbiter mission by at least three years, to no earlier than 2031. VERITAS, like Psyche, is run by JPL. “This postponement can offset both the workforce imbalance for at least those three years and provide some of the increased funding that will be required to continue Psyche towards that 2023 launch,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at an online town hall meeting to discuss the report. NASA selected VERITAS and another Venus mission, DAVINCI+, in the latest round of its Discovery program of planetary science missions in June 2021 . While VERITAS will study the planet from orbit, DAVINCI+, or Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging, will send a probe into the planet’s atmosphere. It remains scheduled for launch in June 2029. The announcement of the delay in VERITAS came days before the annual meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group, or VEXAG, to discuss Venus science and planned missions like VERITAS. Scientists used part of the meeting to discuss the ramifications of the delay of the mission and efforts to minimize the delay. Suzanne Smrekar of JPL, principal investigator for VERITAS, said there were no problems with the mission itself when NASA decided to delay it. “To this point, we have been on schedule and on budget, and we have an excellent and highly experienced team,” she said in a Nov. 7 presentation about the mission. VERITAS had already taken steps to address recommendations from the Psyche independent review, such as moving work out of JPL and reducing spending in 2022 and 2023. “We had already done our best faith effort to contribute to the issues being faced.” She said she wanted to work with NASA and the science community on ways to shorten the delay, noting there were “many opportunities” between the mission’s original launch date of the end of 2027 and the current no-earlier-than date of 2031 to launch VERITAS. “There are many chances to pull back from the brink if things improve.” Delaying VERITAS creates problems for the mission and its team, Smrekar. Several of the orbiter’s instruments are provided by partners in France, Germany and Italy, who are also working on a European Space Agency Venus mission, EnVision. “This puts the workforce pileup onto our foreign partners, and we’ll be working to assess these consequences.” The delay in VERITAS means it will launch at about the same time as EnVision. Scientists had planned to use data from VERITAS to inform planning for EnVision, such as looking for active volcanism and other changes on the planet. Smrekar said it was unclear if there were technical issues about operating the missions at the same time, including conducting aerobraking in the atmosphere of Venus. She added she was concerned that the delay would force it to disband the team currently assembled, creating a loss of expertise that the independent review had warned about. It will also affect the science team, including students and early-career researchers. “We want to continue to find a way to engage them despite the fact that the data is so far out.” “There are many, many downsides to doing this with respect to the knowledge base, the expertise, the risk, the cost,” she said of the delay. “There are many reasons to try to pull us back if at all possible.” Smrekar said the mission would work both with NASA Headquarters and the broader science community to try to reduce the delay. During the VEXAG meeting, participants discussed recommending to NASA that it either reduce the delay in VERITAS to 1 to 1.5 years or select a single Discovery mission, rather than two, in the next round of the program. “We understand there are very big hurdles to doing this,” she said of shortening the mission’s delay, “but we will try to find a way.”
PARIS – The quest for enhanced space-based computing and data storage is extending to lunar missions. Skycorp announced plans Sept. 12 to send a commercial solid-state drive from Taiwan-based Phison Electronics Corp. to the moon next year. Ramon.Space unveiled plans Sept. 7 to provide computing technology for a lander being developed for Israel’s Beresheet 2 lunar mission scheduled for 2025. Like missions in low-Earth and geostationary orbit, deep space missions will require extensive computing capability . Still, companies are reluctant to adopt technology without space heritage. “We are breaking through that wall,” Dennis Wingo, CEO of California-based Skycorp, told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here . “We hope to bring advanced computing and data storage technology into the space arena.” Skycorp is currently testing Phison technology on its intelligent Space Systems Interface experiment on the International Space Station. The solid-state drive Skycorp plans to test on the moon, an upgraded version of the ISS drive, is designed to offer eight terabytes of data storage. Skycorp plans to send the hard drive to the lunar south pole on LoneStar LLC’s data server demonstration slated to fly on an Intuitive Machines lander as part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Israeli companies Ramon.Space and Lulav Space are working together on the navigation system for the Beresheet 2 mission being developed by SpaceIL, another Israeli firm. Beresheet 2, the follow-on to the original Beresheet mission that crash landed on the moon in 2019, includes two small landers. Lulav Space is relying on Ramon.Space’s radiation-hardened computer and digital signal processor for the landing sensor’s computer-vision system. “An accurate, robust navigation sensor is critical to support lunar landings,” Noam Leiter, Lulav Space CEO, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have been chosen by SpaceIL for the Beresheet 2 mission. By using Ramon.Space’s computing platform, we can develop our advanced algorithms easily, rapidly, and reliably to ensure the most accurate and detailed information and support this historic mission.” Wingo, who also founded Skycorp, has been interested in improving space-based computing and storage for decades. He began testing spinning hard disk drives on NASA Space Shuttle flights in the 1990s, including a one gigabyte hard drive in 1992. Lonestar announced plans in April to deploy a miniature proof-of-concept data center on the moon . “Advanced compute is moving into space,” Wingo said. The test of the Phison hard drive “helps get that ball rolling,” he added.
China launched a Long March 11 solid rocket from Xichang early Friday, completing a campaign of seven orbit launch attempts in just over a week which included the debut of two new launch vehicles. The Long March 11 rocket lifted off at 1:17 a.m. Eastern (0617 UTC) Dec. 16, sending the Shiyan-21 satellite into orbit. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced launch success less than 30 minutes after liftoff. Little was revealed about the Shiyan-21 satellite, with CASC stating only that it was developed by its subsidiary, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). Shiyan series satellites are believed to be used to pilot new technologies in space. State media Xinhua reported that the newly launched satellite will be used for “in-orbit verification of new space technologies,” adding that Shiyan means “experiment” in Chinese. The launcher was provided by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), another major entity under CASC. The mission marked the 15th launch of the 20.8-meter-long, 2-meter-diameter and 58-metric-ton four-stage solid Long March 11. Of these, 11 have taken place at national spaceports Jiuquan and Xichang, with four more conducted from converted barges out on the Yellow Sea. The Long March 11 uses a cold launch system, which sees it expelled from its canister before igniting. The launch also completed a flurry of seven Chinese launches across a little more than nine days, and just 36 hours after the previous launch from Xichang, which saw a hypergolic Long March 2D rocket launch a fourth group of three Yaogan-36 reconnaissance satellites. The intense period of launch activity kicked off at 0115 UTC Dec. 7 at Jiuquan, seeing a successful second flight of the Kuaizhou-11 rocket for CASC sister group CASIC, more than two years after the failure of the first launch. The launch put the VHF Data Exchange System (VDES) test satellite into orbit as part of the Xingyun constellation. The route to operational status for Kuaizhou-11 may also have been hindered by an explosion at a CASIC site at Jiuquan. This was followed by the launch Dec. 8 of the Gaofen-5 (01A) hyperspectral imaging satellite on a Long March 2D from Taiyuan, north China, with the first launch of the Jielong-3 solid rocket from a converted barge in the Yellow Sea 12 hours later. Launches of the Shiyan-20 A and B satellites on a Long March 4C and Zhuque-2 , a failed attempt by private firm Landspace to become the first to fly a methane-fueled rocket to orbit, took place at Jiuquan on Dec. 12 and 14 respectively. The launches mean China has launched 62 times this year and already surpassed its national record of launches in a calendar year, 55, set in 2021 . China’s prior record had been 39 launches, reached in both 2018 and 2020. 51 of these launches have been Long March launches conducted by CASC, all successfully. The Jielong-3, Kuiazhou-11 and Zhuque-2 are among the 11 non-Long March rockets launching from China this year, along with four launches of the smaller Kuaizhou-1A , the debut of the ZK-1A from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a third consecutive failure of iSpace’s Hyperbola-1 and two launches of Galactic Energy’s Ceres-1 solid rocket. CASC stated early in the year that it intended to launch more than 50 times in 2022, including a series of missions to complete the Tiangong space station. At press time, the U.S. had conducted 82 launches so far in 2022, including Rocket Lab Electron launches. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 accounts for 55 of these, and another pair scheduled for later Dec. 16.
TAMPA, Fla. — British handset maker Bullitt said Nov. 29 it will release a smartphone early next year capable of sending and receiving texts via satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). The company has been working with chipmaker MediaTek for 18 months to develop the hybrid smartphone, which they say can connect directly to a satellite when terrestrial networks are unavailable without needing an external antenna. The smartphone’s exact dimensions will be announced during the CES annual trade show in January, Bullitt co-founder Richard Wharton told SpaceNews . Wharton said its solution is “constellation agnostic” and will use satellites from multiple operators that he declined to name. Bullitt, which designs and builds ruggedized mobile phones under brand licenses from Motorola and heavy-duty vehicle specialist Caterpillar, expects to launch initial satellite coverage across North America and Europe in the first quarter of 2023, “with the rest of world following very shortly after.” The smartphone will run on Google’s Android operating system and will also include a satellite-enabled emergency SOS service for free, similar to the capability Apple launched Nov. 15 via Globalstar’s satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). Unlike Apple’s service for its latest iPhones, which only facilitates two-way texting with emergency services, Wharton said Bullitt users will be able to text back and forth with any other mobile phone over a satellite network. He said Bullitt successfully tested this capability with MediaTek’s chip in October. More system and service tests are currently underway in North America and Europe ahead of commercial launch. According to Bullitt, the time to initially connect to a GEO satellite and send a message will be around 10 seconds. Under ideal conditions, Apple has said current Globalstar bandwidth constraints mean a message sent via its satellite could take 15 seconds to send, and as long as three minutes in other cases. Californian startup eSAT Global is also developing a chip enabling smartphones to connect directly GEO satellites. The company has partnered to use unused capacity on Yahsat and Inmarsat satellites as it tries to convince smartphone makers to modify their chipsets to tap into the network. Other companies are developing similar businesses in LEO using either proprietary chip technology or bespoke constellations that can connect to unmodified smartphones. With enough satellites, LEO constellations promise lower latency than satellites farther away from the Earth in GEO, which is seen as an important advantage for higher bandwidth capabilities, including voice and video calls.
BREMEN, Germany — Scotland-based launch startup Skyrora is focused on making a first orbital launch attempt late next year, building on experience from a suborbital attempt in Iceland. Skyrora’s team took their 11-meter-long Skylark L single-stage suborbital launch vehicle to Iceland’s Langanes peninsula in October to attempt to reach above the Karman line. The rocket however reached an altitude of only around 300 meters, due an anomaly now discovered to be a software issue, and crashed into the Norwegian Sea. Skyrora plans to have divers locate and retrieve the rocket for further research, including how the engines scale up for reusability. The launch however did provide the team with around 60% of what they hoped to accomplish for the launch, Derek Harris, business operations manager at Skyrora, told SpaceNews at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany, particularly in terms of proving mobility and agility. Skyrora is planning on another Skylark L launch from Iceland around April next year while preparing for a first orbital launch attempt with the Skyrora XL from the SaxaVord Spaceport being developed on Shetland off the coast of Scotland. Skyrora XL is a three-stage rocket using 3D-printed engines designed to place payloads weighing up to 315 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit. “We have the majority of the engines now completed for the first stage, which carries nine engines,” Harris said. “Five are printed and qualified so the rest are just being worked on at the moment. They should be ready by around early spring, which should then allow it to be integrated with the tanks and then have the static passed in the first stage.” Following this will be whole vehicle integration and a static fire test. The Skyrora team is around 150, mostly in the UK but with sites and research and development in Germany, Slovakia and Ukraine, the latter of which has been impacted by the Russian invasion. The focus is firmly on the engineering work for launch, with Harris stating that support from the European Space Agency with grant funding, and, for example, Space Scotland, a government body, is making various aspects of preparing for launch a much easier process. Requisite licensing processes for launch are underway, with the support of the UK Space Agency. The Civil Aviation Authority, the UK equivalent of the U.S. FAA, has just issued the first license for a British spaceport under the Space Industry Act 2018. This brings Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England a step closer to hosting a launch by Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne air-launch system and the first ever orbital launch from the UK. Skyrora is in competition with Orbex, another UK launch startup, to make the first vertical orbital launch from British soil. The firm is developing a launch vehicle named Prime, capable of placing up to 180 kilograms into orbit, which it plans to launch from the Sutherland spaceport in Scotland. Beyond this, German startups Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are providing competition on the continent with their respective Spectrum and RFA One launchers, aiming to make their first attempts to reach orbit in late 2023. The competition for a limited pool of contracts may be fierce among these and other emerging European launch startups, but the indication is that, as demonstrated to an extent by initiatives such as ESA’s Boost! Program, and the force of wider European political trends, that there is a place for commercial launch providers to boost European autonomy and independence in space.
Slingshot Aerospace, a space data analytics company, announced Sept. 13 it is offering a free version of its space traffic control software to satellite operators worldwide. Satellite operators that sign up for Slingshot Beacon, the company said, can receive urgent collision alerts so they’re able to coordinate satellite maneuvers and communicate with other operators in high-risk situations. Slingshot, based in El Segundo, California; and Austin, Texas, launched Beacon a year ago as a collaboration platform to help satellite operators share space traffic information. The system pulls in public data and customers’ private data to create a space catalog. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Stricklan said the company decided to offer a free basic service to help bring in as many satellite operators as possible into the platform. “In order for this to work, it’s got to be a global capability. It’s got to be easily accessible,” she said, “so that all space operators around the world can coordinate, communicate and deconflict spaceflight risk.” Stricklan said she expects many operators will sign up for the free basic service, and the company hopes to attract customers for Beacon’s more advanced options such as automated coordination for operators that have larger fleets, and more refined warnings. “We believe that a free service can absolutely help our business,” she said. “Every company has their own risk tolerance and decision logic when it comes to maneuver.” The company’s database shows there are 9,800 satellites in orbit today, and 30% of alerts for potential collisions are with other active satellites. “This means space operators need to avoid more than just debris when maneuvering in space, and underscores the need for active coordination amongst the global space community,” Stricklan said. Satellite operators today can get collision warning messages at no cost from the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron based at Vandenberg, California. Stricklan said the Beacon service uses different algorithms so the risk assessment is more precise than that provided by the government. The 18th SDS tracks the positions of satellites and extrapolates their future positions to determine when conjunctions are likely. One problem with the current government system is that it generates thousands of collision warnings daily that include reports of nearly zero-probability of on-orbit conjunctions, Stricklan said the Beacon system uses “more accurate models to cut through the noise of irrelevant data.” “It’s anywhere from 13,000 to 100,000 warning messages going out a day, and it’s just noise at this point,” she said. A more precise warning system is needed given the growing number of satellites in orbit, Stricklan added. “We’ve got to refine those messages into something that’s usable for the operators.”
A Chinese nuclear reactor for providing power and propulsion in outer space has passed a comprehensive performance evaluation, according to reports. The reactor was designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and can generate one megawatt of electricity for spacecraft power supply and propulsion. The project passed a comprehensive performance evaluation by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology Aug. 25, according to Science and Technology Daily and other Chinese media. The online reports across multiple outlets have since been deleted but cached and archived versions are accessible. No technical details nor plans for use of the nuclear power system were stated in the reports. Nuclear fission systems offer high levels of power and electricity propulsion for robotic missions to the outer planets, which receive very low levels of energy from the sun, rendering solar power generation useless. They can also provide power on planetary surfaces for crewed missions. The project was initiated in 2019 as a national key research and development program and demonstrates a strong Chinese interest in developing nuclear power for use in space. The South China Morning Post reported last year that a prototype design had been completed and some components had been built. Senior Chinese space exploration official Wu Weiren, director of the newly-established Tiandu deep space exploration laboratory, in 2019 called for breakthroughs in nuclear power for space, to meet future mission requirements. Chinese civilian mission proposals using a nuclear space reactor to provide power for propulsion include Voyager-like missions which would see a pair of spacecraft towards the nose and tail of the heliosphere and potentially a third perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. A Neptune orbiter mission concept using electric propulsion powered by a nuclear reactor has also been published. China has been expanding its space transportation and deep space capabilities in recent years, successfully developing cryogenic rockets to facilitate lunar, Mars and space station projects. It is now working on reusable launchers, super heavy-lift rockets and a two-stage-to-orbit reusable spaceplane system . The U.S. is also moving ahead with nuclear powered spacecraft plans, with DARPA , NASA and the Department of Defense all working on concepts.
NASA will attempt to fix on the pad a liquid hydrogen seal that caused a Space Launch System scrub, keeping open the option to proceed with a new launch attempt later this month. In a statement late Sept. 6, NASA said that technicians will proceed with plans to replace the seal for the interface called the quick disconnect between a liquid hydrogen feed line and the core stage of the SLS. That work will be done on the pad rather than rolling the vehicle back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center. A problem with that seal resulted in what officials called a large leak of liquid hydrogen during fueling of the core stage during the Sept. 3 launch attempt. Several efforts to reseat the quick disconnect, by warming and then cooling it and by applying helium gas pressure on the fitting, failed to stop the leak, and NASA called off the Artemis 1 launch attempt three hours before the two-hour launch window opened . At a briefing after the Sept. 3 scrub, NASA officials said that they were considering options to repair the quick disconnect seal while remaining at Launch Complex 39B versus rolling back to the VAB. Staying at the pad has “a couple of pros and cons associated with it,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager. “The cons happen pretty much every afternoon around here when you get a shower or thunderstorm coming through.” NASA said in its latest statement that, before starting work replacing the seal, technicians would place an enclosure around the interface “to protect the hardware from the weather and other environmental conditions.” The agency did not state how long either that preparatory work, or the replacement of the seal itself, would take. One advantage of doing the work at the pad is that workers can then test the fitting using liquid hydrogen there, which is not an option if the work is done back at the VAB. “That is the only place we can get a full cryo test and be sure we do not have a further issue with respect to leaks at the temperatures we need to fill the vehicle on the day of launch,” Sarafin said. Doing the work on the pad would also preserve the option of proceeding with another launch attempt without rolling back to the VAB. That is only possible, though, if the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, which operates the Eastern Range, extends the certification of the flight termination system (FTS) on the rocket. That certification expired Sept. 6, and NASA would have to roll back to the VAB to reset the FTS, which is in a part of the rocket that can’t be accessed on the pad. “We don’t have an FTS waiver right now beyond 25 days. Until we have that, we have to roll back,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said at the Sept. 3 briefing. He said the agency would consider seeking an extension, but would need to determine how long of an extension it needed versus how much the Eastern Range would grant. “That negotiation hasn’t happened, so as far as I’m concerned we have to roll back.” If, however, the Eastern Range does extend the FTS certification, it could be possible to attempt another SLS launch during the next launch period, which opens Sept. 20 and runs through Oct. 4. “I think it’s too early to tell” if a late September launch is feasible, Sarafin said. “It really comes down to what the fault tree analysis tells us and what are the necessary changes and mitigations required in order have the confidence that we’ve resolved this.” Free said other factors could weigh into a decision to remain on the pad, including any constraints for the Orion spacecraft remaining at the pad. “Ultimately we’re driven by the FTS.” If NASA decides to roll back to the VAB, which could be to perform other work on the vehicle or because of weather as Florida enters the peak of the hurricane season, it would delay the launch by several weeks, Sarafin said. That would push the launch back to at least the next launch period, which runs from Oct. 17 through 31. The Sept. 6 update from NASA did not provide additional details on what caused the quick disconnect seal to leak. Agency officials speculated after the scrub that an “inadvertent overpressurization” of the liquid hydrogen line during preparations for fueling could have damaged the seal, but said they needed more time to investigate the issue. 
PARIS – Planet released additional information about the hyperspectral constellation the Earth-observation company is developing through the Carbon Mapper public-private partnership. San Francisco-based Planet remains on schedule to launch the first two hyperspectral satellites in 2023 to gather data in 400 spectral bands with a resolution of 30 meters per pixel. While data to pinpoint methane and carbon dioxide sources will be shared publicly through the Carbon Mapper Coalition, Planet also will combine hyperspectral data with electro-optical imagery obtained by its Dove, Pelican and SkySat satellite fleets to provide data and insights for government and commercial customers. “By helping to identify the spectral ‘signatures’ of chemicals, materials and processes across the globe, hyperspectral data can reveal otherwise hidden trends and could fill intelligence gaps and mitigate risks,” according to a Sept. 19 news release. Planet’s hyperspectral satellites destined for sun-synchronous orbit are called Tanager, named for a family of colorful Central and South American birds. In 2021, a consortium led by the State of California, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Planet announced plans for the Carbon Mapper constellation of satellites equipped with hyperspectral sensors to detect, quantify and track sources of methane and carbon dioxide. Additional Carbon Mapper Coalition partners include the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, the High Tide Foundation and the non-profit RMI. “Beyond offering methane and CO2 signatures, Planet’s commercial hyperspectral offering looks to provide customers with data for dozens of other environmental applications and indicators that are needed to closely monitor the health of the planet,” according to the news release. “The satellites’ hyperspectral sensor technology, pioneered by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory will provide 30-meter resolution and a full spectral range of shortwave infrared and high-precision 5-nanometer wide bands; this hyperspectral offering is designed to help organizations understand changes on land and at sea, from coastal zones to forests to urban areas and more.” Planet obtains daily imagery of Earth’s landmass with a constellation of more than 200 satellites. Tanager satellites are being manufactured in San Francisco, alongside Doves and Pelicans. Planet is upgrading its constellation of Dove cubesats with SuperDoves , which gather imagery in eight spectral bands at a resolution of about 3 meters per pixel, compared with four spectral bands for their predecessors. The company continues to obtain high-resolution imagery from SkySats, manufactured by Maxar Technologies.
BREMEN, Germany — Precious Payload has announced partnerships with a pair of companies to market payload slots and launches on its online satellite launch marketplace. Precious Payload and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) announced Nov. 17 at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany that launches of the RFA One rocket are to be added to the launch schedule hosted on Precious Payload’s Launch.ctrl marketplace. Precious Payload is based in the United Arab Emirates, with offices in the U.S. and Germany and emerged as a growing number of satellites sought access to space as secondary payloads. Its platform allows payload developers around the globe to browse potential commercial launches for their spacecraft. German launch startup RFA is working towards integrated systems testing of its upper stage and Helix engine as the next step towards a first orbital test flight of its RFA One rocket scheduled to follow at the end of 2023. “Precious Payload has pioneered and truly defined the online rideshare marketplace and we’re thrilled to distribute our future launches via their Launch.ctrl platform,” commented Jörn Spurmann, Chief Commercial Officer of RFA in a press statement . “The software is a lead magnet for every payload developer looking for a launch or other related services, from insurance to SSA tools.” The agreement with RFA follows a partnership with Arkisys Inc, formalized Nov. 15, to market upcoming hosted payload slots on Arkisys’ Port , the orbital outpost the Los Alamitos, California-based startup is developing. Arkisys, which offers infrastructure as a service, is developing Applique, a universal interface adapter designed to connect any spacecraft payload using a variety of common interface standards and protocols, and targeting 2024 for the launch of its first ‘Port’ element for space research and tech demos, according to a press statement. “We’re seeing great international interest for affordable solutions to increase the TRL level of space projects or alternatives to ISS space research services,” said Andrew Maximov, CEO and co-founder of Precious Payload. “Having a cost-effective hosted payload option to conduct an experiment in LEO is very important to savvy payload developers using our software to find the best launch for their mission… We’re pleased to welcome the Port platform by Arkisys to our Launch.ctrl online marketplace.” Precious Payload developed space.ctrl, providing software tools for building and managing custom space missions. Launch.ctrl helps users book a launch and hosted platforms across a network of 27 launch partners, while Insurance.ctrl provides options for launch, pre-launch and third-party liability insurance.
TAMPA, Fla. — Canada’s Telesat is relocating an in-orbit C-band satellite it bought from another operator as thruster issues force its Anik F2 spacecraft into early retirement. The satellite is expected to reach Anik F2’s geostationary orbital slot at 111 degrees west “in the coming months,” Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said Nov. 8 during the company’s financial results update. Anik F2 will be moved into inclined orbit after using up fuel faster than expected under a workaround mode that enabled it to continue providing services over the past year despite losing half its four thrusters. The Boeing-built satellite was launched in 2004 and, despite operating beyond its 15-year design life, Telesat had expected to get another three years of services out of it before the anomaly. To mitigate the impact on broadcast and broadband customers mainly based in Canada, the operator has been leveraging other satellites in its fleet, leasing capacity from other operators, and adjusting customer antennas on the ground. “Assuming all of these things occur as planned, we now anticipate that we’ll retain over 90% of the revenue we originally expected to recognize from Anik F2 next year,” Goldberg said. The company had warned in August that it could lose around 33% of the revenues that Anik F2 was due to generate next year. The satellite represents 8% of Telesat’s overall revenue, or around 50 million Canadian dollars ($37 million). However, these workarounds and mitigation techniques will increase the company’s operational costs. Goldberg said Telesat aims to provide an update on the cost increase when it next reports quarterly financial results. The company declined to disclose the identity of the C-band satellite it is relocating, which comes as operators order new C-band satellites in the United States to clear part of the spectrum for 5G wireless operators. Anik F2 also has Ku-band and Ka-band transponders. Telesat reported 180 million Canadian dollars for the three months to the end of September, down 8% compared with the same period last year when adjusted for changes in foreign exchange rates. The decrease was primarily due to satellite broadcaster Dish Network downsizing a capacity contract that was up for renewal, Telesat said, and revenue from short-term services provided to another satellite operator last year that did not recur in 2022. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, fell 14% to 137 million Canadian dollars. Goldberg said the results were in line with expectations and the company continues to anticipate full-year 2022 revenues of between 740 million and 750 million Canadian dollars. Telesat also continues to expect full-year 2022 adjusted EBITDA between 545 million and 560 million Canadian dollars. Lightspeed limbo The company had no updates to share on debt negotiations to fully finance Telesat Lightspeed, its proposed low Earth orbit constellation of nearly 200 broadband satellites. Goldberg said he continues to expect to “have a much better sense” of where the company stands with export credit agency (ECA) lenders to help complete the project’s financing by the end of this year. Telesat has lined up more than 4 billion Canadian dollars so far, drawing from existing financial resources and commitments from the Canadian government. This funding had represented about two-thirds of Lightspeed’s total budget before rising inflation and supply chain issues pushed costs up by 5-10%. Goldberg said Telesat also remains locked in talks with other types of lenders as it seeks to raise more debt than previously anticipated to cover cost overruns. Telesat needs to complete the project’s funding so Thales Alenia Space, the constellation’s prime manufacturer, can start full-scale production. Delays have already pushed out Lightspeed’s service debut to at least 2026, according to the company’s last schedule update in May, closer to the deployment of rival constellations that include Amazon’s Project Kuiper. However, Goldberg said he has not seen anything from Amazon or other constellations “that changes the way we think about our ability to be successful with Lightspeed.”
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency plans to double spending on contracts to monitor global economic activity from space, the agency said in a Nov. 15 notification . NGA said it will increase the contract ceiling for its Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) program from $29.9 million to $60 million over five years. The program seeks to use commercial geospatial data and analytics services to improve the U.S. government’s insights on economic activity and trends around the world, such as the flow of raw materials, agricultural products, fuels and vehicles. “Understanding economic activity and trends around the world is critically important to our policymakers,” Dave Gauthier, director of commercial business operations at NGA, said last year when the EIM program was rolled out. NGA in 2021 selected five vendors to compete for awards: BAE Systems, Ball Aerospace, BlackSky, Continental Mapping Consultants and Royce Geospatial Consultants. BlackSky has won the majority of the awards, with $13.8 million in orders to date, the company said. No new vendors will be selected for the larger EIM program, said NGA. “The present EIM vendor pool has proven to be a vibrant and diverse pool of vendors that are capable and competitive at producing CV [object] detections from imagery and analytic services at a cost and accuracy that meets government requirements,” the notification said. The additional funds for EIM are expected to be appropriated in the 2023 defense budget. “Given the timing of likely congressional increases to the FY23 budget again for commercial GEOINT and the EIM program support to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, it is prudent to leverage NGA’s current EIM vendor pool to continue to provide world-class geospatial-intelligence and lead the global GEOINT enterprise,” said NGA.
TAMPA, Fla. — U.K.-based Avanti Communications is seeking more partnerships to grow its footprint after securing its first major deal to use another regional satellite operator’s capacity. Avanti announced a five-year partnership with Turkey’s Turksat Sept. 13 that pools more than 100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) of Ka-band capacity between them across Africa and the Middle East. The deal combines Avanti’s Hylas 4 and Hylas 2 satellites with Turksat’s recently launched Turksat-5B to sell broadband in areas with limited terrestrial infrastructure. Turksat had signed a contract in 2019 to use capacity on Hylas 2 — which covers Europe, the Middle East, and eastern and southern Africa — for three years with an option for a one-year extension. Their expanded partnership “is a milestone for Avanti’s business and the first time we are partnering with another strong regional satellite operator to access their capacity,” Avanti CEO Kyle Whitehill told SpaceNews . Whitehill said the company is “continuing to seek out partnerships that harness satellite technology, and help individuals, businesses and communities to thrive.” He said Avanti has “committed 75% of our total investment” to bring more connectivity to Africa. The company recently launched a managed satellite service called Avanti Extend, which is focused on helping mobile operator customers bring connectivity to remote and hard-to-reach areas across sub-Saharan Africa. “This enables customers to provide reliable cellular service to the 100 million people living in these challenging locations that would otherwise be impossible to reach using traditional terrestrial infrastructure,” he said. Avanti is also currently building a satellite gateway in Senegal to extend the coverage of Hylas 4, the operator’s latest satellite, to West Africa. While Avanti’s fleet of five satellites are in geostationary orbit, Whitehill said the company is developing hybrid network products and services that integrate capacity from lower orbits and terrestrial network capabilities. Regional satellite operators are keen to partner with Starlink and other low Earth orbit broadband constellations to meet growing demand for bandwidth, executives from some of these companies said Sept. 13 during the World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris.
China added a new experiment module to its space station Sunday, following a high-profile launch from the country’s coastal spaceport. The Wentian experiment module launched atop of a Long March 5B rocket at 2:22 a.m. Eastern from the Wenchang spaceport on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, with crowds watching on from nearby public beach areas. Wentian used its own propulsion system to match orbit with Tianhe, the core module of China’s under-construction space station, and completed rendezvous and docking with a forward docking port at 3:13 p.m. Eastern, July 24, China’s human spaceflight agency confirmed . The Wentian module had a mass at takeoff of 23,000 kilograms and is designed to host a range of science cabinets for on-orbit experiments. It also provides backup life support and propulsion for Tianhe, which launched in April 2021, and provides new working and living quarters and an EVA hatch for astronauts. “This should be a historic moment. China’s largest carrying rocket today successfully launched the heaviest, longest and arguably the most important craft in the country’s space history. The mission was well fulfilled, which is very exciting and exhilarating,” Li Dong, chief designer of the third March 5B rocket told China Central Television. The country has now successfully launched eight space station-related missions for the project, including two modules, three cargo spacecraft and three crewed missions. A third module, named Mengtian, is expected to launch around October. Both Wentian and Mengtian will be transpositioned to lateral docking ports, completing the planned T-shaped Tiangong space station. China intends to operate the station for at least a decade, with crews of three astronauts six-month-missions. “There are mainly the experimental cabinets of life ecology and biotechnology,” Zhao Liping, chief designer of the module, told Chinese state media CGTN. “There are also glove boxes for astronauts to handle samples in orbit, as well as refrigerators with temperatures of minus 80 degrees Celsius, minus 20 degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius, which will store samples after completing the in-orbit experiments.” While the launch and docking were successful, attention will also now be on the fate of the large first stage of the Long March 5B rocket, which entered orbit along with Wentian. U.S. Space Command cataloged two objects in orbit following launch of Wentian, indicating that the large first stage was not actively deorbited following launch. The two previous Long March 5B launches, which carried a test new generation crew spacecraft prototype and the Tianhe module respectively, notably saw the large first stage of the rocket enter orbit and make uncontrolled reentries. The rocket stage from the Tianhe launch reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean 10 days after launch. If not actively deorbited, the latest Long March 5B stage will reenter the atmosphere between 41 degrees north and 41 degrees south due to atmospheric drag Where and when the roughly 21-metric-ton empty will reenter cannot be accurately estimated. The stage will orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes, with the decay of its orbit dependent on atmospheric fluctuations. Variables including solar activity, which can puff up the atmosphere, leading to greater drag at higher altitudes. “Although the amount of debris that survives reentry isn’t simply a function of stage mass, it’s nevertheless true that a 21 tonne stage poses a much bigger risk than a typical 1 to 5 tonne upper stage, as the 2020 Ivory Coast incident makes clear,” astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell told SpaceNews . “So, I congratulate China on the successful launch of Wentian but deplore their failure to redesign the Long March 5B that sets us up for another major uncontrolled reentry.” The first stage of a rocket for an orbital launch cuts its engines off before reaching orbital velocity, falling within a calculated, safe area. Smaller second or further stages do the final work to carry a spacecraft into orbit. In the case of the Long March 5B, the large first stage is also the upper stage. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin stated last year that it was “common practice across the world for upper stages of rockets to burn up while reentering the atmosphere.” Last year’s Long March 5B uncontrolled reentry led to indirect exchanges of commentary from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and China’s Foreign Ministry spokespersons . The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the maker of the Long March 5B, did not comment on the previous incidents. It has however stated that it carries out passivation of spent stages, including venting remaining propellant depleting batteries, to prevent debris-causing explosions in orbit in line with international practices. The wider issue of uncontrolled rocket body reentries is assessed in a Nature Astronomy paper published July 11. It estimates that, with current practices, there is a 10 percent chance of uncontrolled reentries causing one or more casualties over a decade.
Gen. David “DT” Thompson, U.S. vice chief of space operations, said the Space Force is likely to see continued funding increases to counter China’s rapid advances in its space program. “You’re going to see a significant increase in the resources for the United States Space Force and other space missions,” Thompson said Oct. 25 at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event in Arlington, Virginia. Thompson said the Biden administration understands that more resources will be needed to build more resilient space systems and to meet the U.S. military’s demand for satellite-based communications, data and other services. For the Space Force, there is “tremendous opportunity, tremendous need for growth,” he said. ‘Our national leadership understands … that we need to get after all these missions, the pivot that we have to do to more resilient architectures, and the missions that we didn’t do a decade ago, that we now need to do to defend and protect our interests.” In a conflict in the Pacific, for example, the Space Force expects China’s military to leverage its vast and growing network of satellites, and at the same time attempt to disrupt U.S. satellite networks using jammers, lasers or other weapons. “They are building and fielding space capabilities at an incredible pace,” said Thompson. In just five years, China has deployed more than 260 imaging satellites and about 50 navigation satellites, he added. “Their space capabilities are still not quite as good as ours, but they are really, really good. And so we have to assume that they are a peer competitor in that regard.” “Are they better than us? Will they win? Are we in parity? I can’t say that,” Thompson added. “All I can say is that they are a serious challenge. They are a serious threat. Their capabilities are close to ours. We simply need to do what we need to do, continue to resource and field new capabilities, train our forces and be prepared.” The Biden administration’s 2023 budget proposal for the Defense Department included $24.5 billion for the Space Force, or about $5 billion more than what Congress enacted in 2022. Although funding for military space has increased every year since 2018, analysts have warned that pace of growth may not be sustainable due to rising inflation and economic conditions. Think tanks advocate for space funding The Space Force’s case for more funding is being bolstered by two recent think tanks reports. In its annual assessment of U.S. military capabilities, the Heritage Foundation rated the Space Force as “weak.” The report said “there is little evidence that the U.S. Space Force is … ready in any way to execute defensive and offensive counterspace operations to the degree envisioned by Congress when it authorized the creation of the Space Force.” The majority of Space Force platforms, said the report, have “exceeded their life span, and modernization efforts to replace them are slow and incremental.” The service’s “current visible capacity is not sufficient to support, fight or weather a war with a peer competitor.” Meanwhile, the Mitchell Institute in a report calls for DoD to consolidate under the Space Force authorities and funding to field an information and data-sharing network for the U.S. military, an effort known as Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2. “Congress must approve robust resourcing to enable the Space Force to deliver enhanced space domain awareness and to develop space-based weapons systems that are specifically designed to defend the JADC2 space transport layer against kinetic and non- kinetic acts of aggression,” the report said. “The comparative military advantage the United States held against China has deteriorated significantly both quantitatively and qualitatively over the last 30 years,” the report adds. “They intend to use space the way they have watched us use it for decades, in addition to building a whole suite of counterspace weapons to deny us.” 
A NASA mission to an asteroid that missed its launch window this fall because of technical issues has been rescheduled for launch next October. NASA announced Oct. 28 that Psyche, a Discovery-class mission to the metallic main belt asteroid of the same name, will launch on a Falcon Heavy during a launch window that opens Oct. 10, 2023. The spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid in August 2029. Psyche was originally scheduled to launch in August, but was delayed first to a backup launch window in late September to early October, before NASA postponed the launch indefinitely in June after concluding that there would not be enough time to complete testing of the spacecraft’s flight software. The specific issue was not with the software itself but a testbed, a combination of hardware and software, that simulates the spacecraft. Engineers encountered problems combining elements of the testbed from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, with components from spacecraft prime contractor Maxar. With the launch on hold, NASA conducted a formal “continuation/termination” review to determine whether NASA should continue the mission with a new launch attempt or cancel it. Termination was not widely considered a likely outcome, but the review was required to confirm that the testing problems could be resolved. “I’m extremely proud of the Psyche team,” Laurie Leshin, director of JPL, said in a statement. “During this review, they have demonstrated significant progress already made toward the future launch date. I am confident in the plan moving forward and excited by the unique and important science this mission will return.” NASA did not disclose details about the review’s assessment in the announcement, but said it will publicly release the review’s final report and NASA’s response when finalized. The agency also did not disclose the cost of the delay. “The lessons learned from Psyche will be implemented across our entire mission portfolio,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, in the statement. Psyche’s launch delay also affected another NASA asteroid mission, Janus , that was to fly as a rideshare on the launch if Psyche. Janus features a pair of smallsats that would fly by binary asteroids. The delay meant that the original mission of Janus, to fly by 1991 VH and 1996 FG3, was no longer possible. NASA said that it “continues to assess options” for Janus. An optical communications technology demonstration hosted payload on Psyche, called Deep Space Optical Communications, remains installed on the spacecraft.
SAN FRANCISCO – Ball Aerospace and Seagate Technology Holdings are working together to develop and test high-capacity commercial data processing and storage devices for spaceflight applications. The companies are conducting laboratory demonstrations to determine how Seagate storage devices can be integrated with Ball spaceflight avionics and software. “The hardware is equivalent to what we might want to fly in terms of processing capability, operating system and data rates for a lot of the use cases that we’ve developed,” David Ellis, Ball Aerospace strategic capabilities and partnerships director, told SpaceNews . The two companies plan to conduct further testing of a Seagate storage device providing memory for a Ball payload on a small satellite in low Earth orbit in 2023. The growth of the space sector along with surging demand for data processing and storage is attracting the attention of firms focused primarily on terrestrial markets. “Lots of data is coming off focal planes and RF sensors,” Ellis said. “There are a lot of things that we can do onboard [satellites] if can keep up with what the sensors are putting out. We can do a little bit of processing, downlink important things first, stack frames to get better signal-to-noise.” The Ball-Seagate partnership began when Ball was looking for data storage devices that offered “higher capacity, higher density, lower power and more commercial-like interfaces,” Ellis said. Seagate evaluated the market and found its niche between the “high-end, small-capacity, radiation-hardened storage devices” and “commercial-off-the-shelf storage devices,” said Jon Trantham, Seagate principal technologist. “We didn’t see something in the middle that is a little more robust for space application, but yet still brings the commodity interfaces, high bandwidth, high performance of a commercial product.” Through its work with Ball, Seagate is “trying to learn whether we can cost-effectively harden portions of the design to make a much more reliable data storage product that could then be used in a variety of applications in space,” Trantham said. “Seagate generally makes commodity products that conform to standard interfaces. Our goal here is to make a standard storage product, a tool that can be used in whatever application.” Seagate engineers are used to size and power constraints. Developing lightweight devices for spacecraft presents a new challenge, though. “In general weight has never been one of our critical-to-quality parameters,” Trantham said. Radiation presents additional challenges. Even if a Seagate device were integrated with a small satellite instrument in low Earth orbit, it would be unlikely to be exposed to high levels of radiation. As a result, radiation testing is being performed on the ground to determine how Seagate devices react. “If I’m an instrument provider, I don’t necessarily have to be free of upsets,” Ellis said. “I have to know what the upset does to me. Does a reboot clear it? If it’s not destructive, the majority of our mission space can tolerate nondestructive upsets. We take care of it in software or we take care of it by writing the data more than once and doing some error checking.”
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — U.S. defense and intelligence agencies that increasingly rely on commercial satellites for imagery and other services are discussing how they might compensate companies if their spacecraft is damaged during an armed conflict, officials said Sept. 15. If private sector satellites become part of a hybrid public-private space architecture, “then we have some obligation to think about commercial protection,” David Gauthier, director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s Commercial and Business Operations Group, said at the Intelligence and National Security Summit hosted by AFCEA International, and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Gauthier also is c hair of the Intelligence Community Commercial Space Council, a newly formed organization that develops policy recommendations for senior leaders. The council met Sept. 13 and the topic of indemnification came up, said Gauthier. “We’re engaging with our industry partners to have that discussion more fully. And everything is still on the table.” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks echoed that sentiment during a fireside chat at the symposium. She said the prospect of a conflict where satellites would be targeted “does require us to think about how we contract effectively, including issues like indemnification,” she said. It’s one of the options that is “absolutely on the table.” Gauthier said he was pleased to hear that DoD is considering indemnification, and he expects the issue to continue to be discussed. The topic is also being discussed on Capitol Hill, said Frank Garcia, professional staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He said he is “very optimistic” that the DoD and the intelligence community will work together and “come up with a comprehensive approach.” Gauthier said commercial imaging satellites are critical to the U.S. government because they provide unclassified data that can be shared with the public, and they add resilience, especially during a conflict when an adversary could target a U.S. asset regardless of whether it’s private or government owned. A recent report by the Aerospace Corp. warned that during crises and conflicts, commercial space actors risk getting caught in the crossfire, and an attack could occur either because a commercial system is misidentified as a military system or because that commercial system is operating in support of the United States. Gauthier said the intelligence community in the runup to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine doubled its procurement of commercial satellite imagery from established suppliers but also from new providers of synthetic aperture radar data. “I can’t say enough about the world class technology industry in this country. They are able to innovate on the fly,” said Gauthier. John Huth, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s office of space and counterspace, said at the symposium that China and Russia are fielding a broad range of anti-satellite weapons, including lasers and electronic jammers, that could be aimed at commercial satellites. Another major risk is the ever increasing presence of space debris objects that fly uncontrolled and can damage satellites if they collide. Huth said DIA is looking to work more closely with commercial space data providers to improve the government’s ability to track threats in orbit. Maxar Technologies, the government’s primary supplier of electro-optical satellite imagery, deploys sensors on its satellites for in-space surveillance, which helps increase safety, said Tony Frazier, Maxar’s executive vice president and general manager of public sector Earth intelligence. “We’re really excited about the potential” of what can be done with data collected by satellites in orbit and analyzed using artificial intelligence and machine learning, said Frazier.
TAMPA, Fla. — The Federal Communications Commission denied Starlink nearly $900 million in rural broadband subsidies “without legal justification,” one of the regulator’s four commissioners said Aug. 24. While the FCC was obligated to review subsidies provisionally awarded for SpaceX’s broadband service in December 2020, Commissioner Brendan Carr said the agency exceeded “the scope of that authority” when it rejected them nearly two years later. SpaceX was in line for $885 million after successfully bidding in an auction for the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). However, the FCC said Aug. 10 SpaceX had failed to show it could meet requirements for releasing the subsidies, which covered broadband services spanning nearly 643,000 homes and businesses in 35 states. These requirements included providing 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds and 20 Mbps upload speeds. “We cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promised speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in an Aug. 10 press release. Carr said he was surprised to learn about the decision from a press release while he was on a work trip to Alaska, adding that it was made without a vote or authorization from the FCC’s Commissioners. “As an initial matter, this a very curious outcome because the reasons the agency offers for backtracking on this infrastructure decision do not withstand even casual scrutiny,” he said. The FCC’s skepticism is in “direct conflict” with the confidence expressed elsewhere in the federal government, he said, pointing to how the Air Force recently signed a $1.9 million deal to provide Starlink services to military bases. While the FCC said it denied SpaceX subsidies partly to avoid rural broadband expansion delays, Carr warned of more delays because there is nothing to replace the commitments SpaceX had made to win a share of RDOF. It would take “in the neighborhood of $3 billion” to extend high-speed fiber networks to the areas SpaceX had committed to connecting via its subsidies. Carr also pointed to data showing a year-on-year increase in Starlink speeds as SpaceX expands its constellation in low Earth orbit. Ookla speed tests showed median download speeds for Starlink improved 38% to 90.55 Mbps in the first quarter of 2022, compared with the corresponding quarter last year. However, Ookla also said upload speeds fell from 16.29 Mbps to 9.33 Mbps. In any case, Carr said broadband speed benchmarks under RDOF do not kick in for another three years. “Particularly given the speeds Starlink is already offering and the pace with which it is continuing to launch satellites, the FCC’s decision offers no reasoned basis for determining that Starlink was incapable of meeting its regulatory obligations,” he said. “In fact, Starlink is already exceeding those benchmark speeds in other countries where their services are online.” Carr also took aim at how Starlink’s price point contributed to the FCC’s decision, which highlighted how its users must purchase a $600 dish on top of a monthly subscription. The FCC is currently subsidizing slower internet services that cost consumers more, according to Carr. He also said the FCC is not authorized to deny winning RDOF bids based on the price of equipment, “let alone based on an arbitrary one selectively applied to one winner.” Notably, some Starlink subscribers worldwide are reporting getting their monthly fees reduced, in some cases by up to 50% , although it is unclear what is prompting the price cuts. Carr’s statement did not mention terrestrial telco LTD Broadband, which was denied $1.3 billion in provisionally awarded subsidies at the same time as SpaceX. Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC, added that the decision to deny SpaceX rural broadband subsidies “reflects many of the same missteps that the Administration has been making as it implements federal broadband infrastructure programs.” He has been a vocal critic of an apparent lack of oversight over funds that Congress has been appropriating to tackle the digital divide, and has called for a national strategy to coordinate a technology-neutral approach. Rosenworcel, who was confirmed as the head of the FCC in December, has also been critical about how the RDOF program was set up in 2020 during the previous administration. Meanwhile, SpaceX is due to announce a partnership with U.S. mobile operator T-Mobile at 8 p.m. Eastern from its Starbase test site in Texas. The announcement will be about increasing connectivity, SpaceX said, triggering speculation that the companies will work together in some way to combine their communications networks across the United States.
The government of New Zealand has formally joined a U.S.-led ban on testing of destructive direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) weapons in an effort to build momentum for a global prohibition on such tests. In a July 1 speech at the University of Otago, New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced that the government would join the declaration by the United States in April that it would not conduct such “irresponsible” ASAT tests because of the debris they produce, increasing the risk of collisions with satellites. “Today I’m pleased to announce that Aotearoa New Zealand will join this declaration and make the same commitment,” she said, according to an official transcript of her speech . “We will not conduct destructive direct-ascent antisatellite missile testing.” The decision has no practical effect on New Zealand’s space activities, as the country had neither developed nor proposed to develop direct-ascent ASATs. “We do not have that capability, and neither are we looking to develop it,” she said. “But our commitment is a further expression of our multilateral commitment towards establishment of rules and norms.” That included, Mahuta noted in her speech, participation in the first meeting of a United Nations-chartered Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on responsible space behaviors in Geneva in May. That meeting was the first of four over two years in an effort to develop norms and rules of behavior that might eventually lead to binding agreements. “We are only at the beginning of that process, but we are optimistic that this approach can lead to a pragmatic and constructive outcome,” she said of the OEWG meeting. “It will take time and will require ongoing attention to ensure the rules remain fit for purpose. Eventually, this may mean the negotiation of a comprehensive legally binding treaty. “ It was at that OEWG meeting that the Canadian government announced it was joining the U.S. ASAT testing ban . No other countries have formally joined the ban, but at the meeting representatives of several countries expressed support for it while stopping short of formally acceding to it. “We definitely welcome the U.S. commitment,” said Clive Hughes, head of space security and advanced threats in the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, during a panel discussion at the Fourth Summit for Space Sustainability June 23. The U.K. led the passage of the U.N. resolution that established the OEWG. “It’s got to be at the forefront of the kind of responsible behaviors we’re trying to persuade through the U.N. Open-Ended Working Group process,” he said of an ASAT testing ban. Jessica Tok, space policy analyst in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, said on the panel the U.S. government’s decision to ban such tests was an attempt to focus on behaviors rather than specific technologies. “Instead of banning the technology, what is the behavior we want to stop?” she said. A destructive direct-ascent ASAT test ban was “one of the easiest behaviors we could come out with” ahead of the first OEWG meeting. She called an ASAT testing ban an “initial step” toward broader norms and rules of behavior, rather than going directly to a binding treaty as some nations have argued. “We’ve got to take that first step, and so for us, the ASAT missile testing ban is essentially that first step.” Another advantage of the testing ban, she added, was verification. “We want something that the international community is able to verify itself,” rather than simply trust the United States or another country, she said, citing the growing space situational awareness capabilities of countries and companies. “It’s a lot easier to verify that a violation has occurred.” During the panel, Dan Oltrogge, chief scientist of commercial space situational awareness company COMSPOC, discussed the effects the November 2021 Russian ASAT test had on operations in low Earth orbit, including “conjunction squalls” or spikes in the number of closes approaches with satellites in sun-synchronous orbits. “ASAT tests are a pressing threat to our safety and security and sustainability,” he said, noting the U.S. ban on such tests. “I’m sure the global community would love to see more and more countries take this step.”
The European Space Agency now plans to launch a space telescope and an asteroid mission on Falcon 9 rockets because of its loss of access to Soyuz vehicles and delays in the introduction of the Ariane 6. At an Oct. 20 press briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the agency had decided to launch the Euclid astrophysics mission on a Falcon 9 in 2023 and Hera, an asteroid mission, in 2024. Euclid, a cosmology mission featuring a space telescope operating at the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point, was originally scheduled to launch on Soyuz, but needed a new launch vehicle after Russia halted Soyuz launch operations from French Guiana in response to Western sanctions. Falcon 9 had emerged as the likely option to launch Euclid, something confirmed by NASA officials Oct. 17 who said that ESA was conducting a feasibility study on using Falcon 9 to launch Euclid . Euclid was one of two ESA missions that had been scheduled to launch on Soyuz. The other, an Earth science mission called EarthCARE, will launch on Europe’s Vega C, Ashcbacher said. Hera is a mission that will fly to the near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos, the target of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that collided with Dimorphos last month. Hera will study the asteroids, including the effects on Dimorphos from the DART collision. Hera was scheduled to launch by the end of 2024 on an Ariane 6, a schedule Aschbacher said was no longer feasible given the latest delay in the first Ariane 6 launch that ESA announced Oct. 19. “Given the rampup that is expected on Ariane 6, it will not be possible to launch on Ariane 6,” he said. “Therefore, this will be launched on the Falcon 9.” ESA did not disclose the cost of shifting the missions to Falcon 9, including any Soyuz launch contract deposits it may have forfeited with the change. Günther Hasinger, ESA director of science, said the change would have a “positive effect” on the science budget because it would save time versus waiting for a European launch. “I think this is a positive move for the science budget.” Other missions could also be affected by Ariane 6 delays. Francisco-Javier Benedicto Ruiz, director of navigation for ESA, said that ESA and the European Union need to resume launches of Galileo satellites, put on hold by the loss of Soyuz and Ariane 6 delays, in late 2023 or early 2024 to keep the navigation constellation at full strength. “Ariane 6 is our preferred option,” he said. “We are going to be monitoring the planning of Ariane 6 in the coming months. In the meantime, we have initiated actions to look for non-European launch service options.” He said he expected a decision sometime in the first half of 2023 on how to launch the next Galileo satellites, which are currently manifested on the second Ariane 6 flight. Another mission affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is ExoMars, which was to launch in September on a Proton to send the Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars. Aschbacher said ESA member states will make a decision on the future of the mission at the November ministerial meeting. The preferred option is to launch ExoMars in 2028, which will require building a new descent module to replace the one Russia provided. David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, said the agency will request funding to start work on the new module at the ministerial, but did not disclose the budget for it. Aschbacher said the mission had studied if the rover was still useful scientifically even if it launches in 2028, arriving at Mars in 2030. The mission is designed to drill into the surface to look for evidence of past Martian life. That review, presented at the ESA Council meeting, confirmed those scientific objectives remained valid even if the mission is delayed to the end of the decade. “The project scientist presented the science case and actually got a round of applause at the end of it, because in a few minutes he captivated the audience with the scientific goals of the mission.”
Satellite-to-smartphone startup AST SpaceMobile is preparing to unfurl the largest commercial antenna ever deployed in low Earth orbit after establishing contact with its BlueWalker 3 prototype satellite. AST SpaceMobile said Sept. 13 that BlueWalker 3 is stable and responding to commands from ground crews following its launch three days earlier on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews the startup expects solar and other conditions to be optimal in a “couple of weeks” to unfold the satellite’s 64-square-meter phased array antenna. It will only take about a minute to extend the antenna, Wisniewski added, using spring-loaded hinges in a process Wisniewski said is designed to be “as simple and dumb as possible.” He said the startup aims to begin testing BlueWalker 3’s ability to bring 4G and 5G connectivity to standard mobile phones a couple of weeks later. AST SpaceMobile plans to test applications including voice and video with the prototype, using an experimental license from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. “We’ve got three different frequencies we’re working with that we’re authorized to use with AT&T” in the United States, Wisniewski said. He said the startup is also setting up sites to test BlueWalker 3 with more than 10 mobile operators globally “on all six inhabited continents,” which will help these telcos configure their terrestrial infrastructure. BlueWalker 3 aims to be able to connect with unmodified phones for tests in certain areas for several minutes a day. The startup plans to deploy the first batch of operational BlueBird satellites in late 2023 to start ramping up toward global services. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
The U.S. Space Systems Command has actively promoted a new initiative to help commercial companies do business with the government called “Front Door.” The effort, however, is off to a slow start as the command irons out some wrinkles in the program, SSC executive director Joy White said July 7. The Front Door initiative is intended to provide a one-stop-shop for learning about contracting opportunities and engaging with SSC. It has been touted by SSC leaders as a response to frequent complaints from commercial firms and startups that doing business with the government can be daunting due to red tape and confusion about who’s in charge of what program. SSC officials said companies should email queries to SSCFrontDoor@spaceforce.mil . The head of the command Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein said the idea is to assign officials known as “sherpas” to help guide startups and small businesses that are unfamiliar with defense procurement. Speaking at a National Security Space Association online forum, White responded to questions about reported delays that companies have experienced in getting a response from Front Door. “Right now, I will say that I don’t believe it’s as fast as it will be,” she said. She said the goal is to make Front Door work like an online store where customers can log into a live chat and get their questions answered. “That’s my vision for SSC Front Door,” Whites said. “That’s when you’re hooked in, you’re getting somebody immediately responding to you. So that’s the long term goal.” For now, companies should expect to have to wait several days to get a response, White said. “W e’re still manning up that office, and we’re still building up that capability. So my guess is right now you’re probably seeing a few days before you get engagement.” White said SSC also is working to figure out an easier process to allow companies to participate in face-to-face “industry day” meetings the command plans to host on a monthly basis. The next one scheduled for July 28 will focus on cislunar space domain awareness , and another one later in the year on commercial data analysis tools. “Your best venue for getting your name in and getting included is Front Door,” she said. “And I will acknowledge, as I said, it’s in its infancy.” Some industry days are not open to all as they require security clearances. “Those may be more challenging for some folks to be able to attend,” White added. “But generally we’re trying to get everyone in the door to the maximum extent practicable.”
LOGAN, Utah — SpaceX, whose rideshare services have reshaped the smallsat launch market, says it continues to see strong demand with missions booked into 2025. In a presentation at the Small Satellite Conference Aug. 9, Jarrod McLachlan, director of rideshare sales at SpaceX, said the company has launched more than 400 customer payloads through its series of Transporter missions and other rideshare opportunities with “several hundred more” payloads manifested for launch. “One of the questions that we’re getting a lot is, ‘How full are you guys?’” he said. “All the Transporters are fully manifested in 2023 and we’re getting pretty full in 2024. We’ve really seen a strong market demand.” SpaceX has performed five Transporter missions to date, with another scheduled before the end of the year. The company expects to average about three Transporter missions a year, all to sun-synchronous orbits, as well as occasional rideshare opportunities on Starlink and other launches. While the near-term manifest is full, McLachlan said there should be opportunities for customers looking for last-minute rides to find a slot. “We get a lot of movement in the manifest, a lot of customers coming off and on,” he said. “We’re often able to backfill customers.” In addition, launch brokers who procure ports on Transporter launches often have room to accommodate latecomers. SpaceX has rideshare customers booked on missions to sun-synchronous orbit as late as 2025, he said. The company is also booking rides on Starlink missions as well as “traditional” rideshare opportunities where a launch of a primary payload has excess capacity. There are also rideshare opportunities for missions to geostationary transfer orbit and to the moon. SpaceX recently updated its rideshare payload users guide. “Based on what we’ve seen in regards to mission assurance, we’ve simplified our testing approach,” he said. Some tests are now advised rather than required, or in other cases testing requirements have changed. Cubesat testing has also been simplified. “For fully containerized cubesats, we’ve actually reduced the test requirements drastically,” he said, focused on random vibration, electromagnetic interference and pressure system testing. However, he said the company still strongly advised customers to perform integrated testing of their satelites for mission assurance. Those rideshare missions have been using the Falcon 9, but McLachlan said SpaceX is starting to think about rideshare missions involving the much larger Starship vehicle in development. “We are working on the rideshare configuration and smallsat offerings for Starship,” he said, although the company is not ready to announce any specific rideshare opportunities. “The team is fully focused on first flight.”
When U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced in an April 18 speech at Vandenberg Space Force Base that the United States would ban the testing of destructive, direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) weapons, it was not entirely surprising. Like many other Western governments, the Biden administration was sharply critical of last November’s Russian ASAT test that destroyed the Cosmos 1408 satellite and created more than 1,500 pieces of debris large enough to be tracked, and likely many more smaller pieces. Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, said at a meeting of the National Space Council just a couple weeks later that the Pentagon “would like to see all nations agree to refrain from antisatellite weapons testing that creates debris.” Why wait months before announcing a ban? The timing was linked to a United Nations meeting in May to discuss reducing space threats. The meeting is part of a long-term effort to agree on rules of the road to maintain safety in Earth orbit and prevent runaway growth of debris. But the growing commercial users of space are not waiting on the U.N. to take action. The U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution in December establishing a committee to discuss ways of reducing space threats. That committee, known in U.N. parlance as an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), would meet four times over two years to exchange views and see if they could establish consensus, building on past efforts like the long-term space sustainability guidelines crafted by the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The speech by Harris came just three weeks before the first OEWG meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. “The timing of our announcement by the vice president on Monday is meant to spur a meaningful discussion in the Open-Ended Working Group,” said Eric Desautels, acting assistant deputy of state for arms control, verification and compliance, during a webinar by the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) three days later. He said the U.S. viewed the working group as a vehicle to “multilateralize,” or build international support for, an ASAT testing ban. “Having our own proposal at the OEWG of a norm of responsible behavior will allow the United States to demonstrate our leadership in this area and to drive a conversation in a way that supports our position and doesn’t undermine U.S. and allied security in the face of what surely will be competing proposals,” he said. Space security experts see the ban as a counterproposal to a longstanding effort by China and Russia to advance a binding treaty, the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects, or PPWT, that would ban placing weapons in outer space but not necessarily the direct-ascent ASATs that both countries have demonstrated. The U.S. has long rejected the PPWT but never offered an alternative. “It seems like the United States has realized that it can’t not engage with the PPWT in the Conference on Disarmament, but not do anything or not be seen to be doing anything regarding norms or soft law,” said Bleddyn Bowen of the University of Leicester at the BASIC event. The ASAT ban was a move to engage in discussions, he said, although “quite a modest move.” The Conference on Disarmament is the traditional forum for arms control discussions that might include something like an ASAT ban, but that organization has become dysfunctional. “It has not been able to reach consensus on an agenda, much less the topics being discussed, for decades now,” said Victoria Samson, Washington office director of the Secure World Foundation. The OEWG, then, might offer a fresh start. But like the Conference on Disarmament, the OEWG also operates on consensus. “I think we still need to aim for consensus at the working group,” said Jessica West, senior researcher on space security at Ploughshares Canada. “I think we have to hold ourselves to a high standard, because if we’re not aiming for it, we certainly won’t get there.” The working group held its first meeting the week of May 9 in Geneva. As expected, the U.S. ASAT testing ban was a major topic of discussion. “The United States’ pledge certainly shook up discussions of the Open-Ended Working Group in Geneva, and contributed to moving the space security dialogue forward after several years without much substantive progress,” wrote Almudena Azcárate Ortega and Laetitia Cesari Zarkan of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research in a May 23 white paper. But while many countries expressed general support for the ban, only one country formally joined the United States. “For 40 years Canada has advocated for a halt to anti-satellite (ASAT) tests,” the Canadian government’s mission in Geneva stated May 9. “Today we joined the U.S. pledge not to conduct destructive ASAT missile testing. We encourage all states to join so that together we can make this a global norm.” China and Russia, as expected, promoted their PPWT treaty. “The development of an international legally binding instrument to prevent an arms race in outer space and to preserve it for peaceful purposes, prohibiting the placement of any kind of weapons in outer space and the use or threat of force in, from or against outer space, should be launched without delay,” the Russian government said in a paper it submitted to the OEWG, arguing the PPWT could be the basis for it. The debates about ASAT bans and other topics in Geneva are largely beyond the scope of companies. “We can bring the facts and figures about how this is threatening our operations, but at the end of the day we are not sovereigns in the international sphere,” Laura Cummings, regulatory affairs counsel at Astroscale U.S., a satellite servicing and life extension company, said of ASAT testing. “Commercial can inform and should be vocal,” she said during a panel discussion at Space Tech Expo in May. “But we don’t control that decision at the end of the day.” Tobias Nassif, director of the Space Data Association (SDA), agreed. “I don’t know if anyone is willing to listen to the commercial sector,” he said. “When you have adversaries operating in space, I think they are going to look at national interests over the interests of the commercial sector.” Companies that are launching more satellites, and dealing with more debris, don’t want to wait for governments to take action to reduce space threats, be it with international agreements like ASAT bans or national efforts at space traffic management. They and other panelists endorsed more decentralized approaches to space sustainability, working together to coordinate activities and avoid collisions. The SDA, for example, includes nearly 30 companies — and a few government agencies, like NASA — that share information about their satellites through its Space Data Center, providing more accurate warnings of close approaches than what operators would get from government tracking data alone. “All of the founders of the SDA are fierce competitors in the marketplace,” Nassif said, primarily in communications. “We came together because we knew we had a common problem that, if we were to have a collision, have a problem in space, it not only affects one but it affects all.” “SDA is a perfect example of actors who share a common environment start who get together because they realize and recognize that safety is in the interest of all us,” said Josef Koller, co-founder of the Space Safety Institute at The Aerospace Corporation. He noted that it’s common in other industries, such as aviation, to share safety information. He suggested that the future of space traffic management doesn’t require a central body, be it the Defense Department of the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce, which is building up its own civil space traffic management (STM) system. “We need to rethink this notion of the need for a centralized body of space traffic management,” he said, advocating for a peer-to-peer alternative where actors coordinate with each other. “Modern technology has given us a lot of ways and means to think about different approaches to managing all the different participants with all their varying degrees of capabilities and technologies they have available.” Another SDA official said the organization has tried to work more closely with the Office of Space Commerce but has found little traction. The office hasn’t held industry days with satellite operators or explained how it will use data from those operators, said Andrew D’Uva, senior policy adviser for the SDA, at a May 12 congressional hearing on space situational awareness, contrary to an earlier vision for a civil STM system the office developed. “Instead, they’re turned inward, taking a government systems development approach with federal research and development centers,” he told members of the House Science space subcommittee. “Developing new government systems is too risky and slow, and it’s unnecessary.” Kevin O’Connell, former head of the Office of Space Commerce, called for greater coordination between government and industry on STM at the hearing. He endorsed an April report by MITRE and the National Academy of Public Administration that called for the office to be a “convener” that brings in various stakeholders to develop policies, norms and standards. “It’s an important ability to be the convener,” he said. “It does have that ability.” The office is now run by Richard DalBello, who started work as director days before that House hearing. “I wish him the best in that regard,” O’Connell said. The hearing, though, was largely silent on the ASAT testing ban or the U.N. discussions taking place at the same time in Geneva. “While space safety is a global issue that requires spacefaring nations to work together, we must continue to lead the way,” the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), said in his opening remarks. “I’m pleased that the Biden-Harris administration is doing just that by taking initial steps no norms of responsible behavior” like the ASAT ban, he added. The U.N. Open-Ended Working Group is scheduled to meet again later this year, and twice in 2023, to try to develop recommendations on norms and rules of responsible behavior in space, topics that go beyond an ASAT testing ban. ASAT testing is “the very least that states could ban,” Azcárate and Zarkan wrote in their assessment of the working group’s first meeting, noting that the group could do more in terms of norms and rules of behavior. “Nevertheless, one such commitment is better than none at all, as any initiative seeking to make outer space more secure and sustainable benefits humankind as a whole.” This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Congress has passed the first NASA authorization bill in more than five years, formally extending operations of the International Space Station and backing NASA’s Artemis exploration effort. The House passed on a 243–187 vote July 28 the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act,” a day after the Senate passed the bill on a 64–33 vote. President Biden has stated he supports the bill and will sign it into law. The bill was primarily a vehicle for supporting domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, but one portion of the bill included NASA authorization legislation. That portion, released last week , extends NASA’s authorization to operate the ISS from 2024 to 2030. It also formally authorizes a “Moon to Mars Program” that includes the Artemis campaign of lunar missions and eventual human missions to Mars. The bill will be the first NASA authorization act to become law since the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 in March 2017 . That, in turn, was the first NASA authorization act enacted since 2010. In the last five years, there have been several attempts at new NASA authorization bills, including versions that passed one branch of Congress but not both. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who as a senator worked on several NASA authorization bills, welcomed the new bill. “This act shows continued bipartisan support of NASA’s many missions, including our Moon to Mars approach, as well extension of U.S. participation in the International Space Station to 2030,” he said in a statement. Industry groups also backed the bill. “It is encouraging to see Congress prioritize the enhancement of NASA technology, infrastructure, and workforce in this legislation, while also authorizing key programs including Artemis, ISS extension, sustainable aviation x-plane demonstrators, space nuclear systems, and a wide range of science missions,” said Eric Fanning, president and chief executive of the Aerospace Industries Association, in a July 27 statement after the Senate’s passage of the act. “I am thrilled to have helped craft and secure the first NASA authorization in five years,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), chair of the House space subcommittee, said in a statement after the House passed the bill. “This bill is a big win for space policy, the U.S. space program and NASA.” Nelson, in his statement, thanked several members of Congress of both parties for their work on the NASA portion of the CHIPS and Science Act. However, some of the Republicans he thanked voted against the final bill. Among them was Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member of the House Science Committee. In comments on the House floor, he said he was voting against the bill because of efforts by Senate Democrats, announced only after the Senate passed the act, to move ahead with a separate bill through the budget reconciliation process. “For better or for worse — and it’s very clearly for the worse — the CHIPS and Science Act has been irrevocably tied to a massive tax hike and spending spree in reconciliation,” he said in his speech, announcing his intent to vote against the bill, but added that his decision “is in no way a reflection of my feelings about the transformational research policies in this bill.” In the House, 24 Republicans voted for the CHIPS and Science Act, joining all the House Democrats but one who voted “present.”
LOGAN, Utah — Rocket Lab’s launch of a NASA lunar cubesat mission lived up to its name, serving as a capstone for the company’s efforts to develop end-to-end space systems and interplanetary missions, according to its chief executive. Giving a keynote at the Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 8, Peter Beck said the company’s work on both small launch vehicles and spacecraft came together with the June 28 launch of NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission to the moon. Rocket Lab provided the launch on its Electron rocket as well as the Lunar Photon kick stage that performed a series of maneuver to place CAPSTONE on a ballistic lunar trajectory. The mission came as Rocket Lab expanded from being strictly a small launch vehicle developer to one that also developed spacecraft and components for them, in part through a series of acquisitions. “Where all this really came together is when we did the CAPSTONE mission,” he said. “We not only just needed a rocket, we needed to build a spacecraft as well.” The CAPSTONE mission pushed the limits of Electron’s performance. The vehicle was originally designed to place 150 kilograms into low Earth orbit, but CAPSTONE and Lunar Photon weighed 320 kilograms at launch. “Every gram was accounted for,” he said, including the decision not to include onboard cameras usually flown on Electron to conserve mass. “We really pushed that vehicle as hard as we could.” Rocket Lab is continuing to operate Lunar Photon more than a month after it deployed CAPSTONE. The spacecraft is currently about 1.3 million kilometers from Earth, he said, and will swing back to Earth later in the month. The spacecraft still has 10-15% of its propellant remaining. “As it scoots past Earth,” Beck said, “we’ll have a crack at doing something cool with it and see how far into the solar system we can get with it.” That test will support Rocket Lab’s future plans for deep space smallsat missions, including a privately-funded mission to Venus and building the two spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars orbiter mission. “We’re using this opportunity to learn what it’s going to take to get to Venus and other destinations,” he said. He reiterated past comments that the CAPSTONE mission demonstrated the feasibility of low-cost interplanetary smallsat missions . “What we intended to do with the Lunar Photon spacecraft is to really lower the barrier for interplanetary missions,” he said. “The biggest thing that came out of that was there’s a spacecraft now that, for some tens of millions of dollars, that you can buy and go and visit an asteroid, go and visit the moon, go and visit another planet. That’s never existed before.” Beck, speaking remotely from New Zealand after illness prevented him from coming to the conference in person, touched on another key Rocket Lab initiative, creating a reusable version of the Electron booster. The company attempted to catch the booster with a helicopter on a May 2 launch , but unexpected loads forced the helicopter to release the booster seconds after grappling it. The company has been “somewhat opportunistic” with making recovery attempts, he said, depending on the requirements for each mission. “You shouldn’t need to wait long” for the next recovery attempt, he said, but was not more specific. He was confident that Rocket Lab will be able to soon recover and reuse the booster, given the progress made so far. “The biggest learning from the last one is that it is going to work,” he said. 
A NASA-funded cubesat mission to the moon has gone into safe mode after suffering a problem during a trajectory correction maneuver, the agency said Sept. 10. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) spacecraft was performing its third trajectory correction maneuver on Sept. 8 when it encountered an unspecified problem late in the burn, NASA said in a brief statement. That issue put the spacecraft into a protective safe mode. “The CAPSTONE mission team has good knowledge of the state and status of the spacecraft,” NASA said in the statement. “The mission operations team is in contact with the spacecraft and working towards a solution with support from the Deep Space Network.” NASA issued the statement several hours after satellite observers noticed unusual activity on the Deep Space Network associated with CAPSTONE, with several antennas at the network’s Goldstone, California, facility attempting to communicate with the spacecraft. That behavior appeared similar to what happened when the spacecraft encountered a communications problem shortly after its deployment in July . CAPSTONE is a NASA-funded mission to test operations in the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon that the agency plans to use for the Artemis lunar exploration campaign, including the lunar Gateway. The spacecraft will also test its ability to determine its position autonomously while in that orbit. CAPSTONE won the Small Satellite Mission of the Year award at the annual Small Satellite Conference in August. CAPSTONE is owned and operated by Colorado-based Advanced Space. “The anomaly resolution has been enabled by the exceptional support of the team at the Deep Space Network,” the company said in its own statement. “The mission operations team is in contact with the vehicle and working to resolve the anomaly.” Advanced Space handles operations of CAPSTONE along with Terran Orbital, which built the spacecraft. Rocket Lab launched CAPSTONE in June on its Electron rocket, injecting it into a ballistic lunar transfer trajectory on its Lunar Photon kick stage. It is scheduled to enter orbit around the moon Nov. 13.
WAILEA, Hawaii — Nearly two-thirds of the debris tracked from last year’s Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) test has since deorbited, but it could take more than a decade for the rest to reenter. In a talk at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference here Sept. 28, Deshaun Hutchinson, an orbital analyst with the Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, said that as of August, there were 1,783 tracked objects associated with the November 2021 destruction of the Cosmos 1408 satellite by a Russian direct-ascent ASAT. The squadron identified those objects more quickly than in past debris events, like the Chinese ASAT test in 2007. He credited a “megaconstellation team” in the squadron, tasked with monitoring the deployment of satellite systems like OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink, for the rapid identification of debris. “We decided to leverage those personnel, leverage that knowledge, and apply it to Cosmos 1408, and the result worked out quite well for us.” Of those tracked objects, 1,122 had decayed and were no longer in orbit, leaving 661 still in orbit. The remaining debris, though, may not reenter soon, based on modeling predictions. “It’s going to take until about 2033 for it to reenter,” he said, although solar activity could affect that. “We could be looking at dealing with Cosmos 1408 for another decade.” The total debris tracked from Cosmos 1408 matched expectations. Hutchinson said that NASA informed the squadron shortly after the ASAT test that its models estimated about 2,000 pieces of trackable debris would be created. He added that the squadron has tracked the size distribution of the debris but has not publicly released it. While the amount of debris has dropped, it still poses a hazard to other objects in orbit. He noted that another Space Force unit, the 19th Space Defense Squadron, generates 300,000 conjunction data messages a day identifying potential close approaches. “Of that, 53,000 of those are Cosmos 1408-related.” Of particular concern is the International Space Station. Hutchinson said, as of July, there had been 560 conjunction notifications between Cosmos 1408 debris and the station, of which 15 were deemed seriously enough that NASA started planning for a potential maneuver, although only one ISS maneuver to date has been linked to debris.
Millennium Space executives on July 20 revealed the results of a two-year experiment involving three small satellites launched in 2019 and 2020 from the International Space Station. The so-called Red-Eye experiment, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, included three 70-kilogram satellites made by Millennium Space, a Boeing subsidiary that manufacturers small and medium satellites. The company worked under a DARPA contract awarded in 2016. The experiment ended in December 2021. The project demonstrated capabilities – such as on-board data processing, inter-satellite communications and software-defined radios — that can now be achieved with low-cost smallsats, Millennium CEO Jason Kim said during a meeting with reporters. An unexpected discovery from the experiment was the ability to control the orbital spacing of the three-satellite constellation using atmospheric drag management techniques since none of the satellites had internal propulsion. “In planning our crosslink operations, we needed to have a specific spacing of our satellites to demonstrate crosslinks at various ranges. So our team developed a method to control the spacing of our constellation using just aerodynamic drag on our solar arrays,” said Doug Hulse, Red-Eye program manager at Millennium Space. In low Earth orbit there is some very small amount of atmosphere, he explained. The normal atmospheric drag would cause a satellite to slowly deorbit but was instead used to to influence the spacing between the satellites. Engineers took that further, using ground-based automation techniques to enable the constellation to essentially self-control its orbital spacing. This was a valuable takeaway from the experiment because satellite propulsion is not always an option, Hulse said. Because the satellites launched off the International Space Station, for safety reasons they were not allowed to have onboard propulsion. “Drag modulation is a really cool innovation,” said Hulse. “That wasn’t originally planned when we started the program.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX successfully launched a second pair of C-band replacement satellites for Intelsat over the weekend on the final flight of a frequently used Falcon 9 booster. A Falcon 9 carrying Galaxy 31 and Galaxy 32 lifted off Nov. 12 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:06 a.m. Eastern after a four-day delay caused by Hurricane Nicole. In what has become a rare occurrence, SpaceX did not attempt to recover the Falcon 9’s booster for reuse following its 14th mission — which tied a reuse record for the company. Using an expendable version of Falcon 9 enabled SpaceX to pack more propellant into the rocket for sending the Maxar Technologies-built satellites to a supersynchronous transfer orbit, rather than an orbit with an apogee below geostationary orbit (GEO). Jean-Luc Foreliger, Intelsat’s senior vice president of space systems, said the operator paid a premium for this mission because the satellites needed an extra boost toward their final GEO destinations. It was the first time a stack of two satellites based on Maxar’s 1300-class platform had launched together. Foreliger said a supersynchronous orbit was needed to “achieve a good orbital lifetime, meaning greater than 15 years.” While the Falcon 9’s booster will not be reused, SpaceX said it would recover the two halves of the rocket’s payload fairing for reuse following their fifth mission. Galaxy replacements Galaxy 31 and Galaxy 32 are performing as expected after separating from the rocket and deploying solar arrays, Maxar said. Foreliger expects Galaxy 31 to start services in January, followed by Galaxy 32 by the end of February. Galaxy 31 and Galaxy 32 are due to replace C-band broadcast coverage from Galaxy 23 and Galaxy 17, respectively, at 121 degrees west and 91 degrees west. Galaxy 17 also provides Ku-band services, which the Maxar-built Intelsat 40e satellite is slated to replace following its SpaceX launch next year. Of the 11 satellites in Intelsat’s Galaxy fleet, seven are being replaced with new satellites to help the operator clear C-band spectrum for terrestrial 5G services in the United States. Intelsat stands to get nearly $5 billion in total from the Federal Communications Commission for clearing spectrum by Dec. 5, 2023, although the company continues to face a legal challenge over its share of this windfall from rival operator SES. SpaceX launched the first two satellites under Intelsat’s spectrum clearing plan Oct. 8: Northrop Grumman-built Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34. Galaxy 33 recently entered services, Foreliger said, and Galaxy 34 is finishing up in-orbit tests. Maxar is building the remaining five C-band replacement satellites for Intelsat. Arianespace is due to deploy a pair before the end of this year, and SpaceX is slated to launch Intelsat’s final C-band replacement satellite in June. Foreliger said this fifth satellite, Intelsat 37, will ride on a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket with a reusable booster.
PASADENA, Calif. — A Federal Aviation Administration environmental review has concluded that SpaceX can conduct orbital launches of its Starship vehicle from its Texas test site, but only after completing dozens of mitigations to reduce impacts on the environment and the public. The FAA issued June 13, after nearly half a year of delays, what is formally known as a mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for SpaceX’s proposal to perform orbital launches of its Starship vehicle, atop its Super Heavy booster, from Boca Chica, Texas. The mitigated FONSI means that SpaceX is cleared, from an environmental standpoint, to carry out those launches once it implements more than 75 measures to mitigate environmental effects. Among those mitigations is changes in closures in the road that leads to both the SpaceX site, called Starbase, as well as a public beach. SpaceX will provide more advanced notice of closures for testing and launches. It will be prohibited from closing access during 18 holidays and will be limited to five weekend closures per year. Closures will be limited to 500 hours a year for normal operations and up to 300 more hours “to address anomalies,” according to FAA documents. The review is for up to five orbital launches per year, as well as five suborbital launches and ground tests. Other mitigations included in the modified FONSI include changes in lighting at the facility, monitoring of wildlife in the area by a “qualified biologist” and use of shuttles to transport employees to and from Starbase to limit traffic. In addition, SpaceX modified its proposal to eliminate infrastructure such as a desalination plant and a power plant that the company says it no longer needs to support launch operations. Completion of the environmental review, though, does not yet provide final clearance for SpaceX to begin orbital launches from Boca Chica. The company must implement the mitigations and also obtain an FAA launch license, the schedules for which neither the FAA nor SpaceX disclosed. SpaceX is also continuing to test the Starship/Super Heavy vehicle. SpaceX appeared to welcome the FAA decision. “One step closer to the orbital flight test of Starship,” the company tweeted , linking to the FAA website with the decision and related documents. The company offered no further comment. Environmental groups remain concerned about the impacts of Starship launches from Boca Chica. “We are disappointed in this decision, but surely Elon Musk and his team don’t actually want to harm endangered species,” said Mike Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy, in a statement. That organization is concerned about how Starship launches affect endangered and threatened species like the piping plover in the area. “We’re hoping that the SpaceX team will see that life here on Earth is worthy of more consideration and agree to minimizing the impacts at the Boca Chica facility,” he said.
The large first stage of the Long March 5B rocket which sent the Mengtian space station module into orbit earlier this week is set for an uncontrolled reentry Friday. China launched the third and final module for its Tiangong space station Oct. 31. The Mengtian module successfully docked with the station 13 hours later. As with China’s previous space station module launches, the roughly 21-metric-ton dry mass Long March 5B first stage also acts as the upper stage for the mission and entered orbit, which is exceptional in international spaceflight. The Long March 5B first stage is also unable to restart its engines to effect a controlled reentry into the atmosphere. Analysis by the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) gives a latest predicted reentry time of 1:56 p.m. Eastern (17:56 UTC) Nov. 4, with a window of uncertainty of six hours either side. The center of the window would see a reentry over the Gulf of Mexico, but the rocket stage is traveling at nearly eight kilometers per second, meaning a deviation of even a few minutes means a reentry more than a thousand kilometers away. The latest prediction from the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron predicts a reentry at 8:16 a.m. (12:16 UTC) plus or minus five hours. The large window for the reentry is due to the challenges of modeling, including variables such as atmospheric fluctuations which affect how quickly the orbit of an object decays. Prediction windows will narrow closer to the reentry event. The three earlier launches of this rocket ended with uncontrolled reentries. The previous launch sent the Wentian module into orbit and saw the first stage reenter the atmosphere over Southeast Asia less than a week later. Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant with The Aerospace Corporation’s Corporate Chief Engineer’s Office, opened a briefing on the situation Nov. 2 with the words “Here we go again.” Muelhaupt noted that the risk to any individual is vanishingly small, and no-one needs to alter their lives due to the event. There is a “99.5% chance that there’s zero casualties, but it’s high enough that the world has to watch and prepare and take precautionary steps and that has a cost which is unnecessary,” Muelhaupt said. Most of the rocket stage will burn up during the high-speed reentry into the atmosphere, but 10 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground, depending on the design of the object. The most likely scenario is that the stage reenters over the oceans. There is however a non-zero probability of the surviving debris landing in a populated area, with over 88 percent of the world’s population living under the reentry’s potential debris footprint, according to a presentation by Muelhaupt. The stage’s orbit sees it reach a latitude a little farther north than New York, Madrid, and Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand. Ground tracks for individual orbits are shown in an Aerospace Corporation illustration. “Two out of three of these [rocket reentries] have dumped big chunks of metal where people are. So far, no casualties. Property damage, maybe, which I can’t confirm. But in one case, they took precautionary evacuations. So there’s a real cost to this uncertainty and it’s avoidable.” First stages for orbital launches typically do not reach orbital velocity and fall within a calculated area downrange. Some upper stages, including China’s Long March 2D, restart their engines after delivering a payload into orbit and deorbit themselves to reduce space debris and the risk of collisions in orbit. However, many upper stages make uncontrolled reentries. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said last year ahead of the reentry for the booster that launched Tianhe that it was “common practice across the world for upper stages of rockets to burn up while reentering the atmosphere.” The Long March 5B reentry is a large and prominent symptom of a wider problem. A recent Nature Astronomy paper published earlier assesses that current practices mean there is a 10 percent chance of uncontrolled reentries causing one or more casualties over a decade. Around 50 objects with a mass of more than one ton reenter the atmosphere randomly each year, according to the Aerospace Corporation. The previous Long March 5B reentries have accounted for three of the five largest objects making uncontrolled reentries. The reentries of the U.S.’s Skylab in 1979 and the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 in 1991, at roughly 77 tons and 40 tons respectively, are the only higher mass events. — Article updates at 9.54 a.m. Eastern, Nov. 3 to update Aerospace Corporation prediction.
SEOUL, South Korea — Citing a “lack of technical capabilities,” South Korea has dropped the plan of developing a robotic spacecraft to escort asteroid Apophis during its 2029 close encounter with Earth. The science ministry, which manages state-funded space programs, recently ruled the mission “unfeasible” and decided not to request the $307.7 million budget it initially sought for the mission. The mission involved launching a robotic spacecraft between July 2026 and January 2027 to accompany Apophis as it whips by Earth in April 2029. The probe would observe and map Apophis the whole way, looking for changes in its structure due to its close encounter with Earth and the planet’s gravitational forces. In March 2021, then-President Moon Jae-in of South Korea said the mission, if executed, would help “cement the foundation of the nation’s space industry and advance related capabilities.” “We’ve decided not to pursue Apophis probe mission because there were various issues making it difficult for the mission to be successful,” Shin Won-sik, a science ministry official, told SpaceNews. “To probe Apophis, we have to launch a spacecraft by 2027 at the latest. But with the rocket and spacecraft-making capabilities we have, it’s unrealistic to launch in time.” The official said although the Apophis mission was canceled, it doesn’t mean South Korea has completely crossed off asteroid missions from its future mission catalog. Rather, he said, the government feels the need to develop a “concrete plan” to carry out a probe of another asteroid approaching Earth after Apophis. “We will start working on the 4th revision of the Basic Plan for Promotion of Space Development in the second half of the year. And it’s likely that a bit more concrete and realistic plan for [the] asteroid mission [than the 3rd revision] would be included in the new plan,” Shin said. The 3rd revision, announced in February 2018, contained only a rough plan with few details. It said “a spacecraft for asteroid sample-return mission would launch by 2035 with the country’s own capacity.” The plan assumed South Korea would be able to secure necessary technologies and capabilities by launching the nation’s first lunar orbiter in 2022 and a robotic lunar lander by 2030 . The lunar orbiter plan is proceeding on schedule, with the spacecraft set to launch Aug. 3 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. There’s been comparatively little progress on the planned development of a lunar lander or a rocket capable of putting a domestically built probe on an intercept course with an approaching asteroid. Meanwhile, NASA decided in April to extend its OSIRIS-Rex mission to have it visit Apophis after swinging past Earth in September 2023 to eject a canister of samples collected from the asteroid Bennu . During its extended mission, OSIRIS-Rex will encounter Apophis in 2029 shortly after that asteroid passes 32,000 kilometers from the Earth. The spacecraft will spend 18 months in the vicinity of Apophis, studying the 350-meter asteroid and coming close enough to use its thrusters to brush away surface rocks and expose subsurface materials. 
ThinkOrbital, a space infrastructure startup, is designing an orbital platform aimed at commercial businesses, military and government agencies that want to manufacture products in orbit or recycle debris. The Lafayette, Colorado-based company last year lost out in NASA’s competition to develop commercial space station concepts and is now working on a new product that it believes is more viable, said Lee Rosen, ThinkOrbital’s co-founder, president and chief strategy officer. A former vice president at SpaceX, Rosen became an advisor to ThinkOrbital when the company was founded in early 2021. Last week he was named president as the company pursues plans to raise funds and demonstrate on-orbit assembly. The technologies required to build platforms in low Earth orbit already exist, Rosen told SpaceNews . But they need to be engineered so structures can be assembled autonomously and scalable for different customers, he said. The company’s spherical habitat, called ThinkPlatform, would be assembled in space using a robotic arm. Rosen said it could operate as a component of a larger commercial station or docked with a space vehicle like SpaceX’s Starship. “This platform can be for manufacturing, human habitation, military applications and whatnot,” Rosen said. “And the good news is we don’t have to bend any physics to make it happen. In-space electron beam welding was demonstrated by the Soviets in the 80s so we know it works. We want to do an inflight demo so we have the data ourselves. But we’re confident that it works.” Earlier this year ThinkOrbital — with partners Redwire, KMI and Arizona State University — won two research contracts worth $260,000 under the U.S. Space Force Orbital Prime program for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. Rosen said the plan is to refine the design concept for a space structure that could be used for debris removal and recycling. “We’re working on a hub and spoke concept where smaller satellites would go out and gather the debris, bring it back to a central location, process it and we could either turn them into fuel or deorbit them,” said Rosen. “We could process debris at that hub, for example, and turn aluminum into aluminum powder that could be used for spacecraft fuel.” ThinkOrbital is hoping to be selected for the next phase of Orbital Prime which could be worth up to $1.5 million. “We hope to be able to work with the Space Force as one of the organizations that are interested in in-space manufacturing,” said Rosen. He said the future of in-space manufacturing remains unclear but could gain momentum when commercial companies start deploying space stations in LEO. The expectation is that high-speed computer chips, fiber optics or pharmaceutical products will be manufactured in space, “but the reason why in-space manufacturing doesn’t exist on a large scale is because there’s nowhere to do it. They just don’t have the room on the International Space Station to do all of the things that could be done.”
A NASA science division is seeking funding for a program that could fly scientists to the International Space Station on private missions to conduct research that could then be handed off to NASA astronauts. In a presentation at a July 13 meeting of a National Academies committee working on the decadal survey for biological and physical sciences research in space, Craig Kundrot, director of the NASA’s biological and physical sciences division, said the agency is seeking funding starting in fiscal year 2023 for an initiative that could allow “hyper-specialized” scientists go to the ISS and future commercial space stations. “We seek to bring scientists back into space,” he said, drawing parallels to payload specialists who flew on shuttle missions. Those non-career astronauts included scientists and engineers who flew on missions to conduct research. One, Charlie Walker, flew on three shuttle missions running microgravity experiments for his employer, McDonnell Douglas. “We are envisioning a different version of that now that we have, in this evolving, emerging commercial world, the private astronaut mission capability,” he said. “We seek to use that to fly hyper-specialized scientists to do research in LEO that is really very hard for even the most closely trained astronaut in that field to do.” The initiative, called Commercially Enabled Rapid Space Science, or CERISS, will start with requests for information (RFIs), he said. One RFI will ask companies for what research capabilities they have or are developing for use in low Earth orbit. A second RFI will ask researchers to determine what areas would benefit from having scientists conducting the research themselves in orbit. NASA will then fund proposals to develop and test research hardware and analysis capabilities, based on the feedback from the RFIs. That would be followed by grants to conduct research using those capabilities, including flying scientists to the ISS. NASA’s current ISS commercialization policy allows two private astronaut missions, or PAMs, a year to the ISS for up to 30 days at a time. Kundrot said one possibility was to have scientists flying on commercial missions to the ISS work with NASA astronauts in a sort of “buddy system,” training the professional astronaut to continue the research after the scientist departs. “Our astronaut corps at NASA is really talented, and there are increasingly trained scientists in the corps,” he said. “But when you get down to specific areas of research, many of them on the cutting edge, very few people are familiar with those systems, those techniques, et cetera. In those cases, it would make sense to fly a hyper-specialized scientist for up to 30 days on a PAM mission.” “One of the concepts we’re kicking around is developing a NASA buddy system,” he said. In that scenario, the scientist goes to the ISS on a private mission do conduct research. “During that time, the investigator is working hand-in-glove with a NASA astronaut who is learning at their side, and when the normal terrestrial researcher returns back to the ground, the NASA buddy can continue the work.” Kundrot said NASA is seeking funding for CERISS as part of its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, although the agency did not mention the initiative in its full budget justification document . An “exceedingly notional” budget he presented at the meeting would start with less than $10 million in fiscal year 2023, growing to about $25 million by 2028. That would allow scientist astronaut missions to begin as soon as 2026. CERISS would take advantage of a requested budget increase for biological and physical sciences at NASA. That division received $82.5 million in fiscal year 2022 but is seeking $100.4 million for 2023, growing to $108.4 million by 2027. The 2022 funding would serve as a base to support existing research, with the projected growth supporting CERISS. Kundrot said that flying scientists on commercial missions could accelerate the pace of research because the scientist will be present on the station, rather than waiting for results of experiments performed on the station to be returned to Earth for analysis. “In some disciplines,” he said, “this could easily produce a factor of 10-fold increase in speed of research, and even 100-fold.” 
A NASA-funded lunar cubesat is on its way to the moon July 4 after a series of burns by a Rocket Lab transfer stage. Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon stage released the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat at 3:18 a.m. Eastern, shortly after the seventh and final burn by the Photon’s HyperCurie engine that placed the vehicles onto a ballistic lunar trajectory. Rocket Lab’s Electron launched Lunar Photon and CAPSTONE June 28 , placing them into a low Earth orbit. Lunar Photon then performed maneuvers to increase the apogee of its orbit, reaching 70,000 kilometers before the final translunar injection burn. Advance Space will take over operations of CAPSTONE, a 12U cubesat built by Terran Orbital. The NASA-funded mission will enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon to test the stability of that orbit ahead of future Artemis missions, including the lunar Gateway, that will operate there. It will also test autonomous positioning technologies through a link to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA is spending about $30 million on CAPSTONE between its contracts with Advanced Space and Rocket Lab. “Getting to this point, we have learned a tremendous amount already, and the time has come to execute our unique expertise for this monumental moon mission for NASA,” Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Advanced Space, said in a statement. CAPSTONE will take more than four months to go to the moon, flying a low-energy trajectory that will take it 1.2 million kilometers from the Earth. That trajectory will minimize the propellant needed to enter lunar orbit in a maneuver scheduled for Nov. 13. CAPSTONE was Rocket Lab’s first mission beyond Earth orbit. The company is developing a privately funded Venus probe mission that will be similar in design to CAPSTONE and Lunar Photon for launch on an Electron as soon as next year. The same architecture could be used for other solar system missions as well , the company says. “We’ve built really impressive, low-cost access to not only the moon but to asteroids and other planets in our solar system,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in remarks on the company’s webcast of the CAPSTONE deployment. “This marks the beginning of a new scientific era where, for some tens of millions of dollars, you can go to the moon or you can go to an asteroid or you can go to Mars or Venus.” The CAPSTONE launch was Rocket Lab’s fourth Electron mission of the year. The company said the next Electron could roll out as soon as next week but has not disclosed a launch date or customer for that mission.
A new era of commercial lunar missions started Dec. 11 with the Falcon 9 launch of a Japanese lander mission that also carried a NASA cubesat. The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 2:38 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s first stage, making its fifth flight, landed at the company’s Landing Zone 2 at Cape Canaveral about eight minutes after liftoff. The launch, previously scheduled for late November, slipped by nearly two weeks because of unspecified issues with the Falcon 9. The previous Falcon 9 launch, of 40 OneWeb satellites Dec. 8 , also suffered delays, although it’s unclear if they are related. The rocket’s second stage, after a second burn, deployed the HAKUTO-R M1 spacecraft for Japanese company ispace 47 minutes after liftoff. The spacecraft will fly a low-energy trajectory to the moon that will set the spacecraft up for a landing in about five months. HAKUTO-R M1 will attempt a soft landing in Atlas Crater, located on the edge of Mare Frigoris in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon. Tokyo-based ispace considers HAKUTO-R M1 primarily a test flight of the spacecraft with several technology demonstration and promotional payloads on board, including the Rashid lunar rover from the United Arab Emirates. A second lander mission, M2, is scheduled for launch no earlier than 2024. HAKUTO-R started 12 years ago as a team in the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition by the X Prize Foundation to stimulate development of commercial lunar landers. “At the time of the X Prize, I thought that we could launch three to five years after we started,” recalled Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, in a pre-launch interview. “However, it was probably necessary to spend this amount of time.” Only the United States, China and the former Soviet Union have successfully soft-landed on the moon. In 2019, Beresheet, a privately funded Israeli spacecraft, crashed attempting to land on the moon, followed several months later by the failed landing of the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft by India’s space agency ISRO. “From the design point of view, we did everything that we could do” to ensure a successful landing, Hakamada said, including external reviews of the spacecraft. “We have high confidence on the landing.” That confidence comes in part, he said, from working with Draper, which provided guidance, navigation and control software. “When other spacecraft have failed in the past, it’s always been in the landing phase. Working with Draper, that gives us high confidence on landing.” “It’s not easy, but it’s feasible,” he said. “We’ve done everything we can do.” Hakamada said work is already underway on ispace’s M2 lander, which will be similar to M1. “We have several improvements” for that lander based on the development of M1. “We can make sure we have a better mission for mission 2.” The launch of HAKUTO-R M1 marks the start of a new wave of commercial lunar missions. Two U.S. companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, are planning launches of their first lunar landers in early 2023. Both companies are carrying payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and for other government and commercial customers. Draper and Firefly also have CLPS awards for commercial lunar lander missions. The Draper mission will use a lander developed by ispace’s U.S. office significantly larger than the HAKUTO-R landers. “We’re opening a new era of the commercial space industry,” Hakamada said. Also on the launch was Lunar Flashlight , a cubesat developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage about six minutes after HAKUTO-R M1. The 6U cubesat will go into a highly elliptical orbit that will take it within 15 kilometers of the surface over the south pole, allowing it shine lasers into the craters there to look for evidence of water ice. Lunar Flashlight was originally slated to go on the inaugural launch of the Space Launch System. However, problems with the spacecraft’s propulsion system caused it to miss a delivery deadline in the fall of 2021 to be integrated on the rocket. NASA originally procured a flight for it as a secondary payload on the Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission, then moved it to the ispace launch when the IM-1 mission slipped from late 2022 to March 2023.
The National Reconnaissance Office expects to select next month multiple providers of radio-frequency data collected by commercial satellites. RF data is used to track ships, vehicles or any devices that emit radio frequency signals. Pete Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office, said several proposals were received after the agency issued a solicitation in July . The plan is to sign agreements that give the NRO access to data collected by companies’ commercial satellites so government analysts can better understand the quality of the data. Another key goal of these contracts is to figure out how to integrate commercial data into government ground systems, Muend said Aug. 25 during an online event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. The agreements with RF data providers would be the second round of study contracts awarded by the NRO this year. In January the agency selected five suppliers of commercial synthetic aperture radar imagery. The NRO is the U.S. intelligence agency responsible f o r developing, launching and operating the nation’s spy satellites. It is also the primary acquirer of commercial imagery for the federal government. “We want to be able to understand where the commercial remote sensing capabilities are, and help inform operational capabilities and eventually requirements in the long term,” said Muend. Even though these are study contracts, the companies are providing a significant amount of data used in day-to-day operations, he said. “The radar contracts are going very well, providing a lot of data to the user community.” The NRO is trying to build a hybrid, or mixed architecture of government and commercial remote sensing satellites, Muend said. The agency has signed 10-year deals with three providers of electro-optical imagery but so far has not awarded similar contracts to providers of other types of imagery like radar, RF and hyperspectral. Muend said study contracts with a broad range of providers will inform “formal statements of capabilities” that could lead to long-term contracts. The agency last year launched a new program called Strategic Commercial Enhancements in an effort to attract non-traditional vendors. Muend said the commercial enhancements program allows the NRO to take advantage of emerging space industry systems and move closer to achieving its goal of a hybrid architecture with data from commercial and government satellites analyzed side by side. Building a mixed architecture is a complex task, said Muend. “There are a lot of parts that go into making that operationally effective … Integrating data in ground systems is a big part of the work we have ongoing.” Commercial providers, on average, deliver over 75,000 images every single week into the NRO’s ground enterprise, Muend said. “That’s a very significant amount of imagery,” he said, although he could not specify what share of the overall imagery used by the NRO comes from commercial sources. “As I said, the ground is a really big part of actually making that useful,” he insisted. “It’s one thing to have contracts in place to get the data, but actually making it work as part of a larger hybrid enterprise is a key part.” The idea is to take the “best total value” from national and commercial systems to deliver insight and intelligence. “We spend a lot of time and a lot of energy working through to make sure that the ground architecture can seamlessly plug in multiple commercial providers at scale, moving beyond, I’ll say, historic stovepipes.”
A Blue Origin executive said it’s too soon to conclude what caused the failure of a New Shepard suborbital vehicle on a Sept. 12 flight, playing down any implications for the company’s New Glenn orbital rocket. Speaking on a panel at World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 13, Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, offered few new details about the failure a little more than 24 hours earlier of the company’s New Shepard vehicle on a payload-only flight . On that flight, the vehicle’s capsule fired its launch abort motor at about T+65 seconds, sending the capsule clear of its booster. The capsule landed safely, and Blue Origin later confirmed the booster was destroyed. Speculation has focused on a potential problem with the vehicle’s BE-3 engine. The plume from that engine changed appearance at about T+60 seconds, and frame-by-frame analysis showed what appeared to be debris falling off the booster just before the capsule fired its escape motor. “We are not prepared to talk about what actually happened,” Jones said when asked about the accident during the panel. “It’s a little premature to assume that it was something related to the engine.” Blue Origin plans to use a version of the BE-3, called the BE-3U, on the upper stage of the New Glenn orbital rocket. Jones noted there was “technology transfer” from the engine used on New Shepard, called the BE-3PM, to the BE-3U on New Glenn, but added the BE-3U is “an upgraded version” of the engine. Jones, who is not involved with the New Shepard program, said he knew little more than what the company had publicly disclosed about the accident. “We still have some work to do. It’s super early,” he said. He did emphasize, like the company, the success of the launch escape system, which allowed the capsule, carrying three dozen research and other payloads, to land safely. “All the systems functioned the way we planned them,” he said of the escape system. “There was no damage that we could see from a payload perspective.” The Federal Aviation Administration said Sept. 12 that it will lead the investigation of the accident, and would not allow New Shepard to fly again until that investigation was completed. Both are standard measures for any commercial launch accident. The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board signed a memorandum of agreement Sept. 9 where the FAA would lead all such investigations except in cases where people were killed or seriously injured, or if there was debris that fell outside the launch site that could “reasonably” be expected to lead to deaths or serious injuries. During the panel, Jones said Blue Origin was making good progress on the long-delayed New Glenn. “The last 12 months have been absolutely critical for us,” he said, citing progress on both qualifying components of the vehicle and producing flight hardware. “We’re over the hump.” He declined, though, to give a target launch date for the first New Glenn launch, now expected some time in 2023. “We’re going to launch when we align with the customer that we’re looking at and working with,” he said. “We’re going to launch when we’re ready.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operators in Asia are banking on soaring demand for connecting plane passengers and other customers on the move to absorb an exponentially increasing supply of capacity in the region. More integration between satellite and mobile network operators will also create new opportunities for putting this anticipated glut of supply to work, executives said Oct. 18 during the APSCC 2022 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in Seoul, South Korea. Northern Sky Research expects global capacity supply to soar from about 39 terabits per second (Tbps) today to 172 Tbps by 2030. More than 61 Tbps of this satellite capacity is on track to cover Asia by 2030, according to Jose Rosario, research director at Northern Sky Research. This jump, largely driven by SpaceX’s rapidly expanding Starlink broadband network, follows a steady rise in global capacity over the previous eight years from around 1 Tbps in 201 3 to 3.7 Tbps in 202 1. After deploying another 54 Starlink satellites Oct. 20 in SpaceX’s 48th launch of the year, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company now “has more active satellites in orbit than rest of Earth combined, tracking to double rest of Earth soon.” The company has more than 3,100 working satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), according to data maintained by astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell. However, operators in geostationary orbit (GEO) are also contributing to this capacity flood. Viasat expects each of the three ViaSat-3 satellites it plans to start launching from this year will add about 1 Tbps of capacity to the market. The third ViaSat-3 satellite, slated to launch by the end of 2023, will specifically cover Asia. Mobility demand Peter Girvan, vice president and general manager of space and commercial networks at Viasat Australia, said there is an “enormous” opportunity in Asia to bring Wi-Fi to planes with this capacity. While the COVID-19 pandemic delayed plans to connect aircraft in the region and reduced travel worldwide, Girvan said it has also helped increase passenger demand for inflight connectivity (IFC). He pointed to how a hygiene policy from Australian airline Qantas Airways that prohibited the use of entertainment touchscreens built into the back of seats encouraged passengers to bring their own devices. That increased IFC adoption and the amount of bandwidth passengers use, according to Girvan, who said “Qantas is back to its pre-COVID traffic levels even though it has about two-thirds of the passengers that it was carrying pre-COVID.” Only about 9,000 of the roughly 28,000 commercial aircraft in service globally today currently provide IFC, said Terry Bleakley, regional vice president of Asia Pacific for GEO fleet operator Intelsat. Conservative estimates from Euroconsult analysts anticipate this growing to 16,000 connected aircraft by 2030, or 20,000 under an optimistic model. “Whichever way you look at it, pessimistically or optimistically, there’s a lot of connectivity to bring about in the next eight years to that market globally,” Bleakley said. Of the roughly 8,600 aircraft in service today in Asia, less than a third are connected — much lower than the rest of the world in an IFC market that the U.S. still dominates. Coupled with how 61% of all new aircraft being built over the next decade are for Asia, Bleakley highlighted an “incredible opportunity for growth in just that sector.” For India alone, Boeing recently forecasted airline operators would need more than 2,200 new jetliners over the next 20 years. The maritime market also continues to grow in Asia, Bleakley added, and a recent request from agricultural farming giant Deere & Company for satellite solutions to connect its machines could significantly boost demand for land mobility worldwide. “Just in mobility there’s three markets that are going to absorb a whole lot” of capacity coming to Asia, according to Bleakley. Intelsat will need all the bandwidth it can get, he said, adding that “we probably won’t have enough, and we’re going to have to take from others” to meet demand. There is also a growing need for backhaul services in Asia that will require more capacity in the region, said Christophe Cazes, CEO of Asia for GEO operator Eutelsat. Cazes highlighted particularly strong demand for backhaul in “ultra” rural areas across the continent amid the transition to 5G mobile services The need for scale Eutelsat plans to buy NGSO operator OneWeb to serve future connectivity needs better, and Viasat is seeking to buy Inmarsat to expand globally across different orbits and frequency bands. Viasat’s Girvan predicted more operators would turn to acquisitions to build scale as Starlink, Amazon, and other “entrants with deep pockets” come into the marketplace. “I don’t know that it’s over yet,” he said, “it’s in reaction to what’s coming.” While Intelsat bought part of IFC provider Gogo in 2020 to expand in the aviation market, Bleakley believes the industry needs to look beyond just mergers and acquisitions to build significant scale. “We’ve got to remember how small we are as an industry,” he said. Whereas the industry generates about $14 billion in wholesale revenues, this is dwarfed by satellite customers such as U.S. telco AT&T, which made nearly $169 billion in 2021. Another way to build scale is through standards, Bleakley said. If operators can find a way to adopt 5G waveforms used in cheaper chipsets for the wireless industry, “as opposed to [being] held hostage by the people making silicon and the modems, we can get those price points down to where we need to go,” he said. Intelsat and other satellite operators have been looking to virtualize modems and other ground-based hardware to increase interoperability. “We need to be homogenous with the [mobile operator] network,” he said, “and up to now we’ve been heterogeneous — we’ve sat on the outside of it.” Surviving industry transformation Satellite capacity prices fell at double-digit levels as supply gradually increased from 2017 to the first quarter of 2022, according to Northern Sky Research. But this is “nowhere near the supply shock that’s coming,” Rosario said. He believes GEO operators will need to innovate and reinvent themselves to be competitive to thrive in this changing market. “The option of staying still will lead to their companies going bankrupt,” Rosario warned. This could even lead to them no longer being labeled as satellite companies over the next decade, he added, as their space-based networks are seamlessly integrated with terrestrial networks.
TAMPA, Fla. — Absolut Group, a French cryogenic technology provider, said Dec. 7 it has ordered a demo nanosatellite for a constellation that would use sensors at very low temperatures to detect greenhouse gas leaks. The company’s newly created Absolut Sensing subsidiary ordered the chassis for a 16U satellite it calls Gen1 from Lithuania’s NanoAvionics for a launch in early 2024. The size of 16 cubesats, Gen1 would test a cryogenic sensor Absolut is developing for detecting smaller methane leaks, typically from oil and gas companies, to help in the fight against climate change. Operating at very low temperatures, Absolut Sensing CEO Tristan Laurent said its sensor could use higher infrared spectrum bands to detect local releases of methane at a threshold of about 50 kilograms per hour. GHGSat, Satlantis, and others building out similar methane-monitoring businesses are limited to around 100 kilograms per hour without cryogenically cooled sensors, according to Laurent. “There has been one cryogenics sensor developed up until now by NASA ,” he said, which “succeeded from a quality of the measurement perspective [but is] extremely hard to manufacture.” Absolut Sensing aims to miniaturize cryogenic hardware its parent group has provided organizations, including Europe’s meteorological satellite agency Eumetsat, to deploy at least 24 satellites for monitoring greenhouse gases. This number is needed to achieve “daily revisits on what we call the priority sites,” Laurent said, a “constantly evolving map of the regions worldwide that have industrial sites that emit constantly, or are likely to emit, a lot of methane.” While most of the greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas industry are controlled, he said leaks still pose significant financial and environmental costs. “And there’s a huge difference between getting the problem fixed in one day versus a week,” he added. Absolut Sensing aims to deploy the first 12 satellites dedicated to measuring methane by 2025. The rest of the constellation would focus on keeping tabs on other greenhouse gases, with six for carbon dioxide and six for nitrous oxide slated for 2026 and 2027, respectively. Laurent said each satellite would have artificial intelligence software to analyze sensors from low Earth orbit to enable near-real-time detection. In September, Absolut announced a contract enabling the European Space Agency to assess the company’s quality and validation protocols, with the aim of potentially procuring data and analytics under the European Union’s Copernicus program. Environmental business NanoAvionics is providing payload integration, testing, and other services as part of its contract for Gen1, including satellite operations once it is in orbit. A launch provider has not yet been selected for the satellite, and Absolut is still deciding who will build and deploy the rest of its proposed constellation. “Remote sensing applications make up a large part of our customer base,” NanoAvionics CEO Vytenis Buzas said, and the manufacturer sees “a growing trend in infrared imaging” as more companies take advantage of lower costs to access space. “These Earth observation missions typically have great thermal management, pointing accuracy, and stability demands,” Buzas noted. In response to the anticipated demand, he said NanoAvionics has optimized its modular satellite designs, attitude determination, and control systems to “accommodate many commercial imaging payloads for quick integration.” He added: “We even see demand coming from companies that own large ground-based infrastructure. They are beginning to see how small satellites in low Earth orbit can help them to monitor cost-efficiently their ground-based assets from space.” French investment firm VOL-V, Absolut’s main financial backer, recently injected 12 million euros ($13 million) into the company to support its expansion plans.
NASA is planning to purchase five more Crew Dragon missions to the International Space Station from SpaceX, a move the agency says is needed to ensure long-term access to the station. In a procurement notice published June 1, NASA announced its intent to issue a sole-source modification of its existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities, or CCtCap, contract with SpaceX to add five missions to the station later this decade. NASA said in the filing that it needed to add the missions to the contract for several reasons, including delays in the development and certification of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew vehicle, projections of when the additional missions would be needed and “the technical challenges associated with establishing and maintaining” crew transportation systems capable of flying every six months. The notice added that the additional missions “will ensure redundant and backup capabilities through 2030” for the ISS. The White House announced at the end of last year its intent to extend ISS operations through 2030 , an extension supported other station partners except for Russia. In a blog post published without fanfare by NASA late June 1, agency officials said the additional missions will ensure that they can bring Starliner into service without rushing it. “It’s critical we complete Starliner’s development without undue schedule pressure while working to position both Boeing and SpaceX for sustainable operations in the years ahead,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager. “Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 went very well and we hope to be able to certify the Starliner system in the near future,” said Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA. “However, we will need additional missions from SpaceX to implement our strategy of having each commercial provider flying alternating missions once per year.” The original CCtCap awards to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 provided each company with six operational, or post-certification, missions. Boeing has yet to perform any post-certification missions, as Starliner is still in testing. SpaceX is currently on its fourth post-certification mission, Crew-4, which launched to the station in April. NASA, anticipating that SpaceX would soon complete all six missions while Starliner was still in development, awarded SpaceX three additional mission in February for $776 million . The new modification, if it goes forward, would bring the total number of post-certification missions awarded to SpaceX to 14. By the time SpaceX starts flying those additional missions, Boeing’s Starliner should be in service. NASA and Boeing officials said after the completing of the OFT-2 uncrewed test flight May 25 that they believed they would be able to proceed with a crewed test flight as soon as late this year . If that is successful, Starliner could begin post-certification missions as soon as the fall of 2023, after SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission slated to launch in the spring of 2023. If that schedule holds, and NASA is able to alternate missions between the two companies, Boeing’s current contract would support missions launching through 2028. SpaceX’s extended contract would allow missions to 2030, with SpaceX returning to two missions a year after the conclusion of Boeing’s contract. NASA said in the statement that the extension planned for SpaceX “does not preclude NASA from seeking additional contract modifications in the future for additional transportation services as needed.” In the case of Boeing, an extension would likely also require certification of a new launch vehicle, as its current Starliner missions are slated to fly on the Atlas 5, a vehicle that United Launch Alliance is no longer offering for sale and plans to retire, likely with the last Starliner mission.
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K launched an in-depth probe Oct. 14 that will likely delay Viasat’s plan to buy Inmarsat, following concerns it could harm competition in the fledgling inflight connectivity (IFC) market. The U.K.’s competition watchdog kicked off the investigation after giving the satellite operators a chance to alter the $7.3 billion deal, which it says could lead to more expensive and poorer quality Wi-Fi for airline passengers. However, the companies argue their combination would lower costs and increase efficiencies to make IFC more affordable, faster, and more reliable. U.S.-based Viasat announced plans to buy the British satellite operator nearly a year ago . It had hoped to complete the takeover before the end of this year to expand its broadband network globally. That now seems unlikely following the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) decision to refer the plan to what is known as a Phase 2 investigation in the United Kingdom. The CMA expects to conclude this review and issue their report by March 30, but could extend that deadline if circumstances warrant. Viasat and Inmarsat are confident they can show the CMA how combining forces would not negatively impact competition in the IFC market, they said in a joint statement Oct. 14. According to the CMA’s initial assessment released last week , the two satellite operators are “currently the strongest” providers of IFC that are available to airlines. But Viasat and Inmarsat pointed to how Panasonic and Intelsat combined still represent more than three-quarters of the long-haul IFC market. The CMA is also concerned that SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, and others planning to enter the IFC market with services from low Earth orbit (LEO) could struggle to compete with the combined group. According to Viasat and Inmarsat, the more than $20 billion in capital these new market entrants have raised over the last three years underlines the intensity of the competition coming to the market. “Industry analysts anticipate that an already highly competitive IFC market will become even more competitive with the entrance of new, heavily financed LEO competitors,” Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said in a statement. “We believe that a comprehensive Phase 2 analysis will support that our transaction will benefit the nascent, but rapidly growing IFC services available to airline passengers.” Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri added: “Inmarsat faces intense competition every day in providing in-flight connectivity. There is good reason to expect that intensity to increase given the power of well-funded new companies entering the sector.” The takeover requires regulatory approvals in addition to the green light from the CMA, including permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department.
An explosion severely damaged rocket facilities at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in October 2021, commercial satellite imagery shows. Jiuquan spaceport is situated in the Gobi Desert and hosts major orbital launches including all of the country’s Shenzhou human spaceflight missions. Established in 1958 it is the first of China’s four national spaceports to be constructed. Evidence of the explosion was discovered by space enthusiast Harry Stranger using imagery from Airbus and CNES and posted on Twitter June 10. The incident occurred at facilities constructed around 16 kilometers to the southwest of Jiuquan’s two main launch complexes. The pair of launch pads are used by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) for hypergolic Long March rocket launches for human spaceflight, civil, military and scientific missions and were unaffected by the blast. The high resolution images show the facilities, which were possibly used for testing solid rocket motors, intact in October 2021. The apparent aftermath of an explosion is visible in an image from November 2021. Further satellite imagery from Planet’s Super Dove satellites seen by SpaceNews indicates that the explosion occurred between 0316 UTC on Oct. 15 and 0407 UTC Oct. 16 (11:16 p.m, Oct. 14 and 12:07 a.m. October 16 Eastern). China’s Shenzhou-13 crewed mission lifted off from Jiuquan at 16:23 UTC Oct. 15 (12:23 p.m. Eastern), suggesting the blast had little or no impact on CASC, the country’s main space contractor, and its major activities. There is no indication that the explosion was reported by Chinese media. It is thus somewhat unclear what the facilities were used for and what caused the explosion. Given the profile of launches at Jiuquan it is likely that the structures were related to testing and assembly of solid rockets operated by non-CASC entities. Construction of the test facilitIES began in September 2018. CASIC, a state-owned giant defense contractor separate from CASC but with its own space ambitions , is developing a series of solid rockets for orbital launches and has established infrastructure at Jiuquan for launches of Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11 rockets using transport erector launchers rather than a launch pad and service structure. Both of these have suffered launch failures. The former suffered a failure in December 2021 following a return to flight earlier in the autumn. The Kuaizhou-11 failed with its first and so far only launch in 2020 and has since remained grounded. The Kuaizhou-11 had been slated for a return to flight before the end of 2021 according to earlier reports. A news release from CASIC subsidiary Expace indicated that preparations for a final assembly for a launch were underway in August. No such launch attempt has been reported. The launch of Kuaizhou rockets from Jiuquan is part of a wider push to develop solid rocket launch capabilities , including privately-funded launch service providers. However a number of solid launch vehicles have experienced failures, with private firm iSpace suffering a third consecutive loss of a mission last month, casting doubt on the prospects of the Hyperbola-1 rocket. Landspace and OneSpace launches in 2018 and 2019 also failed. Alternatives are also on the way, however. Galactic Energy, established after the early commercial movers noted above, has succeeded with both launches of its Ceres-1 rocket and plans a third around July. CAS Space, spun off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is preparing for its first mission, using the ZK-1A designed to carry up to 2 metric tons of payload to LEO, which would be China’s largest solid rocket when it lifts off in June or July. CASC spinoff China Rocket has launched one Jielong-1 (“Smart Dragon”) rocket and plans to launch the larger Jielong-3 in the second half of the year. CASC also operates its solid Long March 11 from Jiuquan and other sites. Jiuquan has also hosted the construction of infrastructure for launches of new methane-liquid oxygen launchers, with Landspace expected to test launch its Zhuque-2 rocket in the near future.
PASADENA, Calif. — In-space transportation company Impulse Space, which raised $20 million in a seed round earlier this year, announced June 17 it raised another $10 million to help accelerate work on orbital transfer vehicles. Impulse Space said it raised $10 million from venture fund Lux Capital, which invests in “frontier technologies” like space. The company announced a $20 million seed round March 30 led by Founders Fund. Tom Mueller, one of the founding employees of SpaceX, established Impulse Space last September to develop in-space transportation systems. The company’s leadership includes several other former SpaceX employees. “With funding from Lux Capital, Impulse continues to build on a solid financial foundation and an equally strong foundation of the amazing people supporting us,” Mueller said in a statement about the new funding. In an interview, Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said the additional funding was “opportunistic” based on what the company needed and the interest from Lux Capital. “Tom and I talked and we agreed to go ahead and get a bit more money and make sure that we have a good war chest.” He added that uncertainty about the economy, including fears of a recession, “definitely influenced the decision” to raise more money now. “Anybody with a half-murky crystal ball could tell there’s going to be challenges in the capital markets” in a year, he said. The $30 million raised overall allows Impulse Space to advance work on three different designs for orbital transfer vehicles, Matsumori said, starting with a small vehicle for moving cubesats and nanosatellites in low Earth orbit. Two larger vehicles would be capable of moving spacecraft into higher orbits, like geostationary orbit, or cislunar space. The company has provided few other details about its capabilities, although its vehicles will use chemical propulsion. “Electric propulsion has its place, and it’s a great technology, but it’s slow,” he said. “What are our customers interested in? They’re interested in the ability to get injected into their orbit so they can start generating revenue as soon as they can.” Impulse Space has signed up customers but has not announced any of them yet. Matsumori said the company will be releasing details about its first mission “pretty soon.” Impulse Space is one of several companies that have announced efforts to develop orbital transfer vehicles. Only a few, though, have flown such vehicles yet, such as D-Orbit and Spaceflight. Momentus launched its first Vigoride tug last month but that vehicle has suffered serious technical problems . A recent study by Euroconsult projected 120 orbital transfer vehicles to be in operation by 2031 . It projects the greatest source of demand to be constellations of microsatellites that are too large to be deployed by small launch vehicles but too small for larger vehicles. Matsumori said he expected Impulse Space to stand out in a potentially crowded market based on the track record of Mueller and other company leaders. “A lot of what this team is built around is a reputation for actual execution,” he said. “We’re all about execution.”
The U.S. Space Systems Command has started market research for its next procurement of payload integration services, according to a request for information published Nov. 18. The Space Force is trying to identify industry interest in competing for a multi-year contract to integrate and operate rideshare payloads in national security and other U.S. government missions. This procurement would be the follow-on to the $94 million Launch Manifest Systems Integration (LMSI) contract that Parsons Corp. won in 2019 . A new competition would start in 2024. The engineering and infrastructure firm integrates small satellites as secondary payloads on national security or civil space missions. The company operates a smallsat integration facility in Torrance, California. The Space Systems Command “seeks to identify sources capable of providing multi-mission manifesting, integration, and operations services beginning in fiscal year 2025 and is requesting more detailed information on each provider’s capabilities, business case analysis and alternate approaches,” said the RFI. Responses are due Dec. 16. Under its contract with the Space Force’s Mission Manifest Office, Parsons has integrated payloads for several missions , including NASA-U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat 9 , which carried four cubesats from other U.S. government agencies. The U.S. Air Force created the mission manifest office in 2018 to maximize rideshare opportunities on national security space missions. Traditionally large satellites were launched by themselves in part due to security concerns . The first multi-manifest mission was the EZ-1 Flight System on the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF)-5 that launched in 2019. 
Lockheed Martin is upping its stake in small satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital with a $100 million investment that increases its total equity from 9.4% to 33.5%. Terran Orbital announced the new investment Oct. 31. Lockheed Martin has invested in the company since 2017 and selected it to produce 42 satellites for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency under a $700 million contract . Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, Terran Orbital plans to spend the new funding to expand satellite manufacturing facilities in Irvine, California, and is canceling plans to build a large factory on Florida’s Space Coast in partnership with Space Florida. “This makes sense for us right now because there is an immediate demand for satellites,” Terran Orbital’s co-founder and CEO Marc Bell told SpaceNews . Building an assembly line in Florida was projected to take three years while the expansion in Irvine will only take 12 months, he said. “For me to add on to that is far easier than trying to expand on another coast.” Terran Orbital also is pivoting away from plans to build a constellation of 96 synthetic aperture radar satellites, called PredaSAR. The company will continue to produce SAR satellites but will sell them to customers, avoiding the risk and expense of building its own constellation. “We want to focus on manufacturing and not on being a satellite operator,” Bell said. He said the shift was precipitated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sudden growth in demand for SAR satellites. “So we thought the best move for us in the long term was to sell the satellites” either to government or commercial operators, Bell said. Since the start of the conflict, a number of companies and government organizations have inquired about buying satellites, said Bell. So it became clear that selling hardware — including buses, payloads and components — was the way to go, he added. “A SAR constellation is very capital intensive, as any constellation is. So this de-risks the company going forward from a capital perspective.” Executives concluded that PredaSAR was dragging down the market value of Terran Orbital after learning about the recent acquisition of its competitor York Space by a private equity firm and that York’s market value was $1.12 billion, or more than three times the valuation of Terran Orbital. “We are much larger than York, and we’re trading at a fraction of what York’s valuation was,” said Bell. “So there’s a big disconnect between us and them, and we think the constellation was a drag on our valuation.” The Irvine plant has capacity to produce 250 satellites per year, which is higher than York’s , he said. Bell said the revised strategy should boost Terran Orbital’s share price, which was over $11 when the company started trading on the New York Stock Exchange after going public in a SPAC merger — and is currently trading at less than $3, in part due to the broader market downturn in SPAC stocks. “The market wants us to do something different,” said Bell. “So we’re gonna focus on our core business, which is manufacturing, which is not capital intensive, and very low risk.” Austin Moeller, aerospace and defense analyst at the Canaccord Genuity investment bank, wrote in a research note Oct. 31 that Terran Orbital’s value will rise as a result of Lockheed’s investment. “It is apparent that Lockheed is looking to do more than just dip its toe into the water in the smallsat manufacturing realm, given the significant TAM [total addressable market] opportunity for smallsats relative to exquisite, GEO satellites.” According to Moeller, “considering that York has constructed just 13 satellites in the past decade (as opposed to 70+ for Terran), we continue to see a disconnect between the current valuation of LLAP [Terran Orbital] (~$350M market cap) and peers like York that sold for 3.2x this valuation to private equity.”
Former mobile dead zones could be teeming with life in coming years as more satellite operators consider jumping in to provide connectivity directly to standard phones. The momentum behind this direct-to-cell capability has shifted into a higher gear following early product launches, big-name announcements, and the progress startups are making for their dedicated cell-compatible constellations. After years of rumors, smartphone makers Apple and Huawei recently launched models capable of connecting to a partner’s satellites for emergency messaging services. Apple’s iPhone 14 and Huawei’s new flagship Mate 50 series can facilitate limited SOS services beyond the reach of terrestrial cell towers — without a bulky handset antenna that usually accompanies satellite-compatible phones. In August, SpaceX unveiled plans to provide direct-to-cell services for emergency assistance and beyond in partnership with U.S. mobile operator T-Mobile. These include text and picture messaging services available in the United States “as soon as late next year,” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said during an Aug. 25 event at SpaceX Starbase in Texas. Voice, video streaming and other high-bandwidth capabilities would come at an unspecified time after that. While Apple is using Globalstar’s satellite spectrum and Huawei is leveraging China’s space-based Beidou navigation constellation, SpaceX would use T-Mobile’s terrestrial wireless frequencies to connect phones outside cellular networks. Instead of broadcasting from cell towers, these frequencies would beam from upgraded Starlink satellites that SpaceX mostly uses to provide broadband services to fixed addresses. U.S.-based startups Lynk Global and AST SpaceMobile have a similar direct-to-cell strategy. They are busy forging alliances internationally to give their planned satellites access to mobile operator spectrum, which would have more reach from space to serve a telco’s customers where its terrestrial infrastructure cannot. There are five billion smartphones in circulation today, and mobile dead zones are prevalent even in countries with widespread 5G networks. More than half a million square miles of the United States are untouched by terrestrial cell signals from any provider, according to T-Mobile. It is a compelling opportunity for satellite operators that can monetize these mobile dead zones, and those looking to take advantage of the direct-to-cell hype. Spanish startup Sateliot recently said satellite technology it is developing for small internet of things (IoT) devices could also be used to send and receive SMS messages from a regular handset. While Sateliot CEO Jaume Sanpera says direct-to-cell was always part of its strategy, he said the venture decided to go public with the plan following a spike in interest for the capability. The startup has enough funding to deploy its first five operational satellites next year to connect other devices in remote areas, Sanpera said, but needs around $100 million for a full network of 250 satellites to provide direct-to-cell services. “We really believe this will be a huge push for our Series B,” he said, “because there is real big business on the direct to phone connectivity.” Sateliot’s approach also relies on convincing smartphone makers to add a compatible chip into their designs so their handsets can connect to its proposed satellites. Globalstar rival Iridium has been working on direct-to-cell technology for years but remains tight-lipped about its plans. Iridium CEO Matt Desch told World Satellite Business Week in Paris Sept. 12 that it will “be involved in a big way” but declined to disclose details about a partner it is working with under a development contract. Iridium said in July its deal with this unnamed company is contingent upon successful technology development and a service provider agreement it expected to finalize before the end of this year. Other established satellite operators are closely following the growing momentum in the direct-to-cell market. “It’s something we’ve had our eye on for a while,” SES CEO Steve Collar said, because it is one of the areas that could enable the satellite industry to play a role in a much broader ecosystem. “Clearly, there are big technical challenges,” Collar cautioned, “mainly just having a link that is powerful enough effectively to access a phone with a very poor performing antenna — relative to the antennas that we normally communicate with from space.” It is also unclear whether the best strategy is to provide connectivity via mobile satellite spectrum (MSS) or terrestrial frequencies that have been assigned to mobile operators. “As far as SES is concerned, right now and today, this is an opportunity rather than something that we’re concretely doing,” he said. “We’re still doing our homework and figuring out where we can play and where we can add value.” In May, SES obtained spectrum rights for 62 proposed satellites that were about to expire following a call for proposals from Luxembourg, where SES is based. These spectrum rights cover satellites operating between 8,062 and 519 kilometers, much closer to Earth than the 20 broadband satellites SES has in medium Earth-orbit (MEO) at 8,063 kilometers. SES also operates a fleet of satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) for broadband and broadcast services. Collar noted that the major direct-to-cell projects announced to date are in low Earth orbit (LEO), below 2,000 kilometers. “One of the things that we’re looking at as we’re looking at possible architectures is, does that have to be the case? Could you do this from some combination of GEO and LEO, or LEO and MEO?” Offering a direct-to-cell capability could also help SES play a part in Europe’s planned sovereign broadband constellation. “We certainly haven’t made a decision that we would invest [in direct-to-cell services],” Collar said. “It would be kind of a meaningful diversification for us, moving into a different part of the value chain in the industry, but we think there’s potential there, and we’re working hard.” Intelsat, which operates a fleet of GEO satellites and has a distribution alliance with LEO broadband operator OneWeb, also has satellite spectrum filings in MEO that could be used for a direct-to-cell service. “We’re partnering right off the bat with OneWeb to get that [non-geostationary orbit] capability into our network, but we’ve also been evaluating other opportunities internally,” Intelsat chief commercial officer Michael DeMarco said. Intelsat has not specified its plans for MEO, and DeMarco said “anything that we come to market with would be complementary to the network that we have in place today.” He said the operator is watching the direct-to-cell activity closely, and “we’ll see how our multi-orbit architecture … can evolve to potentially capture share” as the market shakes out. Inmarsat is also “very much in the investigative stage,” said Barry French, the operator’s chief marketing and communications officer. “Some of the things you’ve seen announced so far are pretty far in the future,” French said. “There’s a lot of work to do between now and then — and the same is true for us,” he added, “but we do have this compelling L-band capability.” While there are a lot of smartphones, handset makers and connectivity providers, he said there are few companies “who have the kind of global L-band spectrum coverage that we have. So we think we have a very clear asset that maybe others don’t.” While smartphone satellite connectivity first-movers Apple and Huawei are only planning basic services initially, albeit seemingly for free, they will likely add to the capability if the demand is there from consumers. Apple has dedicated $450 million from its advanced manufacturing fund toward satellite infrastructure to support its SOS feature and is financing the majority of new Globalstar satellites that underpin the service. Starting in November, an app pre-installed on iPhone 14s will help users find and keep locked onto a Globalstar satellite to access Apple’s emergency service. The feature would enable users outside a cellular network, initially only in the United States and Canada, to give emergency responders information by selecting from a series of short text messages. Under ideal conditions, Apple said these messages could take 15 seconds to send because of current bandwidth constraints and as long as three minutes in other cases. Virginia-based Lynk, which looks to be next in line to start providing initial direct-to-cell services, aims to start by providing emergency alerts, text messaging, and connectivity for internet of things devices. The startup secured regulatory approval Sept. 16 to operate its constellation globally after launching its first operational satellite in April. Three more satellites are slated for deployment in December, which would be enough to enable users to send and receive text messages about four to eight times a day, depending on their latitude. However, Lynk has not yet secured landing rights in any country where it plans to provide services. Charles Miller, Lynk’s CEO, said its next step is to secure a commercial contract with a mobile operator in the United States. The two companies would then jointly seek permission from the Federal Communications Commission to serve U.S. customers. Lynk plans to deploy more than 50 satellites before the end of 2023 to increase satellite revisit times to every 15-30 minutes. Texas-based AST expects to deploy its first operational satellites in late 2023. These will be much larger than Lynk’s pizza-boxed shaped satellites for providing higher-bandwidth 5G services. At press time, AST was weeks away from unfurling the antenna on its BlueWalker 3 prototype following its launch Sept. 10. At 64-square-meters, it is the largest commercial antenna ever deployed to LEO. AST, Lynk, and Starlink expect to connect phone users as seamlessly as they connect to cell towers through native device support. Although T-Mobile’s Sievert said it is not ready to announce a product, he expects to include satellite-enabled coverage in the United States under the telco’s most popular mobile plans for free. T-Mobile will likely charge a monthly service fee for customers that want to add the coverage to some of its cheaper mobile plans. SpaceX and T-Mobile are searching for mobile operators internationally with suitable frequencies to forge reciprocal roaming alliances. T-Mobile is providing 1.9 GHz spectrum in the United States under their partnership. Curiously, SpaceX recently requested permission from the FCC to use the nearby 2 GHz spectrum band for MSS. This band is not used by terrestrial mobile operators, suggesting SpaceX might be planning to avoid other providers altogether to sell services directly to consumers. Lynk and AST envisage various types of partnerships with mobile operators. “When you’re out of coverage you can receive a text from your mobile network operator, and if you want to roam onto our network then you can click ‘yes’ and you can buy a day pass,” AST chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski said. “Or you can sign up to a recurring ‘add-on’ for your monthly plan.” Wisniewski said AST intends to provide an invisible layer of connectivity for consumers, leaving the consumer-facing business to the mobile operator. “We bring the network and the mobile network operator brings the customers, the spectrum, and their marketing power,” he said, enabling AST “to leverage those things that they’ve already built.” Miller said Lynk will also be a wholesale partner for mobile operators and will never go “direct to consumer.” However, he said Lynk is still deciding whether to be a consumer-facing brand or just a provider of white label-enabling technologies to mobile carriers. “We have some ideas on this that we are not ready to share,” he said. While customers would use the SMS texting platform already built into their phone for sending messages through Lynk’s network, he said the startup has developed an app called LynkCast to collect data broadcast from space. “LynkCast will be a service that allows everybody to get critical local information (weather, news) delivered directly to your phone, no matter where you are,” he said via email. “For example, you are in a remote area? What is the weather prediction for the next several hours? The next several days? Is there a hurricane coming? A blizzard? Tornado conditions? Your life might depend on getting weather predictions.” Both startups welcome the interest and activity their emerging market is receiving. They say it is a market that will be big enough to support multiple players, giving mobile operators alternatives and differentiated services for their satellite-enabled needs. Apple iPhone 14 users could still tap into AST’s planned network, Wisniewski said. “Technology-wise, there’s not really a fundamental incompatibility,” he added. “The phone looks [for our satellite] if they’re in certain locations instead of looking for a tower, and if someone else has some other feature on a different frequency or a different app, you can do that without conflicting.” It is ultimately up to the mobile operator. Just like how telcos “use multiple ground-based tower networks,” Miller said, “nothing stops them from using multiple satellite networks.” This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Sierra Space has hired a former SpaceX executive as its chief information officer as the company builds up its infrastructure to support work on commercial spacecraft and a space station. The company announced Oct. 6 it hired Ken Venner as senior vice president and chief information officer. Venner served as CIO of SpaceX from 2012 to 2018 and most recently was president and chief product officer of e-Share, a company developing collaboration software. Jeff Babione, chief operating officer of Sierra Space, billed the hiring of Venner as part of efforts to build up the company, spun out of Sierra Nevada Corporation last year. “We are confident that he will play a significant role in helping the company continue to expand and build platforms in space to help benefit life on Earth,” he said in a statement. “Sierra Space stands at the forefront of the emerging space economy and is in the unique position to build a vibrant, growing and accessible commercial space economy through Dream Chaser, Orbital Reef and more,” Venner said in the statement. “I look forward to helping grow Sierra Space and cement its position as an industry leader in the commercial space economy.” While Sierra Space just announced the hiring of Venner as CIO, he had been at the company for three months. “Excited to be part of the team that is going to make space affordable and obtainable for all,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. “Been here since 7/5/2022 – just found enough time to update my LinkedIn status just now.” The hiring is part of what Sierra Space calls an “extensive recruitment drive” that seeks to nearly double the size of its workforce with 1,000 new positions this year. The company said Sept. 27 that effort was “well underway” with the hiring of another executive, Heidi Hendrix, as its chief people officer. Those employees will largely work on the company’s Dream Chaser vehicle and Orbital Reef, a commercial space station Sierra Space is partnering with Blue Origin and others to develop. During a session of the International Astronautical Congress in Paris Sept. 19, Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, said the company now expected the long-delayed first flight of Dream Chaser to take place in the summer of 2023 on the second launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. That mission is the first of seven that the company has under contract with NASA to transport cargo to and from the International Space Station. She added the company was actively developing a crewed version of Dream Chaser. “We expect to fly people on a crewed version by 2026,” she said, “which should be in plenty of time for our debut of Orbital Reef in the 2027 or ’28 time frame.”
Rising interest rates are making it more difficult for space startups to raise money, some warn, forcing them to seek alternative sources of funding. A series of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, intended to halt the post-pandemic spike in inflation, could have the side effect of driving funding out of risky venture investments, such as space, because of the higher rates offered elsewhere. “We’ve just come off 15 years of a near-zero interest rate environment that encouraged risk taking,” said Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments company Shift4, during a Washington Post webinar Oct. 3. Isaacman is best known in the space industry for leading the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission on a Crew Dragon last year and backing the Polaris Program of private missions with SpaceX. “A lot of industries and a lot of companies were formed that, in more challenging times, would never have been able to survive. That’s not exclusive to space,” he said. “The space industry received a lot of capital, and I am definitely concerned they don’t continue to receive it.” He predicted that many space startups, as well as those in other technology sectors, will struggle to raise money. “A lot will go away, just like I think across tech and other industries. You’re going to see a lot of business failures as interest rates are now essentially going through the roof,” he said. “In that environment, you have to pick your battles as to where you deploy your capital from an investor’s perspective.” In its latest quarterly report in July , Space Capital warned that the “macro environment” of higher interest rates and potential recession were having an impact on space investment. The number of deals and overall investment in the industry dropped by more than a third over the previous quarter, according to its assessment. “While we believe the macro environment will continue to cause headwinds for some space companies, we do not believe that the space economy is at existential risk,” the report noted. However, “we expect the macro environment will disproportionately affect funding for capital-intensive Launch and Emerging Industries companies for the foreseeable future (1-3 years).” Companies had, starting about two years ago, turned to mergers with special purpose acquisition corporations, or SPACs, as a means of raising money and going public. However, many of those deals failed to raise the expected funding as SPAC investors sought redemptions of their shares, and the companies themselves fared poorly on the market after going public. Astra, a space launch company that went public through a SPAC merger in mid-2021, announced Oct. 7 it received a delisting warning from the Nasdaq exchange because its shares had traded at a price of below $1 for more than 30 days. Astra has 180 days to get the share price above $1 for at least 10 consecutive days. Astra shares closed at $0.52 Oct. 10, after trading as high as $13.58 in the last year. Not every company is deterred from SPACs, though. Intuitive Machines, a company developing lunar landers and related technologies, announced Sept. 16 it would go public through a merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp., a SPAC on the Nasdaq. “A SPAC is simply a mechanism to get into the public markets and we have a fantastic opportunity for retail investors, for the first time in history, to invest in space exploration,” argued Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, during an Oct. 6 webinar by IPO-Edge. “Now, with going public, we have access to the capital we need to essentially fund our business plan moving forward and continue our growth.” He acknowledged “some variability” in SPAC transactions, which depend on how much of the capital raised by the SPAC is redeemed by shareholders rather than retained in the merged company. Inflection Point has $330 million in cash in trust, plus $105 million in separate lines of capital from other investors. Altemus didn’t explain how the company’s plans would change depending on how much they raise. “SPACs are still very much an option, but we have to recognize that the complexion of SPAC deals and the SPAC market has changed,” said Nick S. Dhesi, a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP, during the IPO-Edge webinar. “There’s a focus on real revenues and contracts, fully funded business models and paths to profitability.” He predicted it would be difficult for companies to go public through a more traditional initial public offering through the rest of the year. For private funding, “you’re seeing structured products — preferred equity, convertible debt — and well as strategic investors starting to step in to look for more vertical integration in their business.” There has been increasing use of debt alongside, or in place of, equity investment in businesses. SpinLaunch’s $71 million Series B round , announced Sept. 20, included a mix of debt and equity, but the company did not disclose the ratio of the two. Astroscale, a Tokyo-based in-space servicing and debris removal company, announced Sept. 30 it raised 5 billion yen ($34.3 million) through a three-year term loan agreement with MUFG Bank, Ltd., leveraging a credit guarantee program by the Japanese government. Isaacman, despite his concerns about overall funding, said he felt some companies were in good shape. “That’s not to say that the world will just be SpaceX,” he said. “I think there’s a couple really good space companies that have been smart on their capital allocation, they bought other businesses, they diversified their revenue streams, they’re more vertically integrated. I think they’ll succeed.” He didn’t give any examples of such companies. But, he warned, “A lot of the space industry won’t be able to cut it.”
PASADENA, Calif. — The organization that operates an airborne astronomical observatory that NASA is shutting down this year wants to end the project on a high note. In a June 15 statement, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) acknowledged the impending end of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with a 2.7-meter infrared telescope mounted in its fuselage. NASA announced April 28 an agreement with its partner on SOFIA, the German space agency DLR, to cease flight operations of SOFIA at the end of September . That announcement came a month after NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget request proposed ending the project. USRA had in the past opposed efforts to terminate SOFIA, including proposals in the fiscal years 2021 and 2022 budgets. In both cases, Congress restored funding. However, in the statement, USRA said it would work with NASA to wind down SOFIA. “USRA has been proud to work with NASA on SOFIA whose legacy has been remarkable,” it said. “USRA looks forward to partner with NASA to ensure the safe fly out of SOFIA and ensure that its science legacy is captured appropriately for the astronomical community.” Project officials offered a similar message at a town hall meeting June 15 during the 240th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society here. They said SOFIA flights would continue to the end of September, including a deployment to New Zealand later this month for southern hemisphere observations. “The focus on the project right now remains on current operations. Safe operations is our highest priority,” said Naseem Rangwala, NASA project scientist for SOFIA. “Our focus is also on maximizing science observations before the end of this mission. Our goal is to give the SOFIA mission and team a very strong finish.” That includes, she said, additional flights after SOFIA returns from New Zealand later this summer. That would allow SOFIA to complete up to 80% of its high-priority observations by the end of September. Rangwala said the project is still working on detailed planning for closeout of SOFIA. Those plans cover placing data into archives, transitioning the project workforce and transferring the instruments and even the aircraft and telescope. “Our desire is for it to be in a museum with the telescope on it,” she said of the aircraft, “but we are working on that.” There was, though, some frustration among astronomers in the standing-room-only session about the end of SOFIA. A few called on their colleagues to write to Congress in a last-ditch effort to stave off termination. Paul Hertz, NASA director of astrophysics, said at the town hall meeting that NASA was following the recommendation of the decadal survey published last November, which concluded SOFIA’s modest scientific productivity did not justify its high operations cost: at $85 million a year, only Hubble is currently more expensive to operate among current astrophysics missions. “NASA and DLR have together accepted that recommendation, thus, this is the last year of operations,” he said. Astronomers at the meeting worried that ending SOFIA creates a gap in observations in the far infrared, at wavelengths longer than even JWST can observe. “Although we all wish that we could have capabilities in every wavelength all the time, that has just never been true historically,” Hertz said. It’s not the end of mid- and far-infrared astronomy, he said, because of smaller missions. NASA will also consider proposals for larger far-infrared space observatories next year for its first probe-class astrophysics mission. Advocates for SOFIA have argued the decadal survey did not incorporate increased scientific productivity by SOFIA in recent years when it made its recommendation to terminate operations. Rangwala said the decadal used the number of papers in peer-reviewed publications as its metric of scientific productivity. “We are ending on a scientific and performance peak,” said Margaret Meixner, SOFIA science mission operations director at USRA, at the town hall meeting. “It’s personally sad to see it closing right at that moment.”
Faced within increasing costs, the European Space Agency is looking for ways to revise the design of a large X-ray space telescope, an effort that could have implications for NASA’s own astrophysics programs. ESA selected the Athena mission in 2014 as one of two flagship astrophysics missions, along with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Athena — a name derived from Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics — would launch by the mid-2030s to study supermassive black holes, supernova explosions and other sources of X-rays using a large X-ray mirror. At the time of selection, each mission has an estimated cost to ESA of 1.05 billion euros ($1.07 billion), or about 1.17 billion euros today, said Paul McNamara, ESA astronomy and astrophysics coordinator, during a July 21 presentation to NASA’s astronomy and astrophysics committee. By 2019, though, the combined price of Athena and LISA had grown to 2.5 billion euros. As of May 2022, LISA has an estimated cost of 1.5 billion euros, but Athena had grown to 1.9 billion euros. This came even as Athena was making good technical progress, he said, such as in development of new lightweight mirror technology. Much of the recent increase, he said, came after member states that had planned to make their own contributions to the mission backed out. “Several of the member states concluded that they were unable to fulfill their commitments,” he said, “and they asked ESA to take over their responsibility.” That increased the cost to ESA for Athena. “These costs are not sustainable,” he said. “If we want to maintain the diverse content that is at the heart of our program, we have to cut the cost of our large missions.” McNamara said there are no plans by ESA to cancel Athena, but the agency is instead considering a “rescoped” mission of some kind with a cost of no more than 1.3 billion euros. “We have to rescope the Athena mission to significantly reduce its cost.” That rescoped mission, currently dubbed NewAthena, would likely involve scaling back its science. “At the moment, it does not appear feasible that we can reach the 1.3 [billion euro] target, the cost to completion for ESA, while maintaining the full science objectives of the mission,” he said. That effort will involve potential changes to its instrument configuration as well as creation of a science “redefinition” team to reconsider science objectives. The goal will be to develop a revised concept, called a minimum disrupted mission, that will cost ESA no more than 1.3 billion euros but still perform science expected of a flagship-class mission. What that means for the schedule of Athena is unclear. McNamara said ESA is preparing to “adopt,” or move into the next phase of development, either Athena or LISA in November 2023. The other will be adopted in 2024 or 2025. Another uncertainty is the funding that will be available in the next few years for Athena and LISA, something that ESA member states will decide at the next ministerial council meeting in November. “At the moment we’re assuming a potential level of resources for the future,” he said. “If we don’t get that, we don’t know what’s going to happen.” A redesign of Athena could also affect NASA. The agency is contributing hardware for one instrument on Athena as well as other resources, such as testing and calibration facilities for its X-ray mirror. McNamara said ESA officials have been in contact with their NASA counterparts about plans for Athena. He added ESA would not rule out increased cooperation with NASA as a means of reducing ESA’s cost for the revised Athena mission. “No door is closed,” he said. “We’re looking for any way we can try to get the best mission possible within the programmatic constraints.”
The United States will introduce a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly this month calling for a halt on direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) testing. Speaking at a meeting of the National Space Council Sept. 9 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Vice President Kamala Harris said the measure was an effort to get more countries to join a moratorium on such tests that the United States announced in April . “Later this month, the United States will introduce a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly to call on other nations to make the same commitment” that the United States made, Harris said. Her announcement comes after a State Department official said in August that such a resolution was under consideration as one way to build greater international support for the moratorium. While several nations have expressed support for the idea of halting such debris-producing tests, only Canada and New Zealand have formally announced their intent to join the moratorium. “Such a resolution would allow countries to go on record regarding their support, creating that shared agreement among the majority of U.N. member states, while increasing political pressure on countries that have plans for future ASAT tests,” said Eric Desautels, acting deputy assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance at the State Department, during an Aug. 24 panel discussion organized by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and The Aerospace Corporation . A second option, he said then, would be to develop a legally binding agreement to ban such tests. However, he said that would be “a much longer term effort” that would likely come only after establishing a ban on destructive ASAT tests as a norm of behavior. Monica Medina, assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs at the State Department, said later in the council meeting that Mallory Stewart, assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, would be lobbying other nations to support the U.N. resolution once it is introduced. “In the coming weeks, Assistant Secretary Stewart and her team will have extensive consultations at the U.N.,” Medina said. “Our goal is that this resolution is adopted with the broadest possible support.” The announcement also comes just before the second meeting of a U.N. Open-Ended Working Group on norms of behavior for reducing space threats, scheduled for the week of Sept. 12 in Geneva. The announcement of the U.S. ban on direct-ascent ASAT testing was times to influence the first meeting of the working group in May. Medina said Stewart will be in Geneva for the working group’s second meeting. “The United States, working in close partnership with our allies and like-minded countries, sees this working group as an important opportunity for all nations to advance rules, norms and principles of responsible behavior in outer space,” she said. Artemis Accords meeting Another avenue the United States has established for international cooperation in space is the Artemis Accords. The agreement outlines best practices for sustainable space exploration, largely building on the Outer Space Treaty. Twenty-one countries have signed the Accords, most recently Saudi Arabia in July . “With the Accords, we are inviting other spacefaring nations to join in a common vision, a practical set of principles grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 for safe, transparent and responsible behavior in space that will facilitate exploration, science and commercial activities for the benefit of all humanity,” Medina said at the Space Council meeting. She announced that representatives of the Artemis Accord countries would meet for the first time during the International Astronautical Congress in Paris later this month. That meeting will be jointly hosted by the United States, France and Brazil. “The participants will discuss how to operationalize the Accords in a civil and commercial context and how to continue to add to the Artemis family of signatory nations,” she said. “We want more Artemis partners.”
TAMPA, Fla. — French satellite fleet operator Eutelsat said Nov. 15 its board has approved multi-orbit plans to combine with British broadband venture OneWeb, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals. Eutelsat’s board gave its full backing for the deal after getting the opinions of employee representatives on combining its fleet in geostationary orbit with OneWeb, which is about two-thirds into deploying its low Earth orbit constellation. OneWeb’s main shareholders — Indian conglomerate Bharti, Japan’s Softbank, South Korea’s Hanwha, and the British government — signed a final combination agreement Nov. 14 with Eutelsat following the approval. Publicly listed Eutelsat’s shareholders still need to approve the merger during a meeting the operator expects to hold in the second or third quarter of 2023. Bpifrance and Fonds Stratégique de Participations, two French investment banks, and other top shareholders in Eutelsat have already voiced their support. The all-share deal valuing OneWeb at $3.4 billion, announced in July , also hinges on international regulatory approvals that likely push the transaction’s closure well into next year. Eutelsat chair Dominique D’Hinnin and CEO Eva Berneke are set to take on the same roles for the combined company. Bharti founder Sunil Bharti Mittal, currently representing OneWeb’s largest shareholder on the LEO operator’s board of directors, will be co-chair. Bpifrance, Fonds Stratégique de Participations, Hanwha, and the British government are set to appoint one director each to the combined group’s board. OneWeb and Eutelsat also get to propose three and four independent directors, respectively, following the merger. Eutelsat said last month that combining with OneWeb would nearly double its annual sales in five years to around $2 billion. Eutelsat sees hybrid orbit networks as key to serving future satellite connectivity needs , and OneWeb hopes to use the French operator’s resources to accelerate the commercial rollout of its constellation. OneWeb has 462 of a planned 648 satellites in orbit after resuming its launch campaign Oct. 22 with the launch of 36 satellites onboard India’s GSLV Mark 3 rocket. The mission marked the end of an eight-month launch hiatus for OneWeb after it terminated a contract for Soyuz launches in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OneWeb has contracts for one more launch with India in total and three SpaceX Falcon 9 missions that it expects will be carried out within the next six months so it can provide global services.
NASA confirmed Nov. 1 that two astronauts from Saudi Arabia will go to the International Space Station on a private mission in the spring of 2023 operated by Axiom Space. Speaking at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee, Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s commercial LEO development program, said that two Saudi mission specialists, yet to be publicly named, would accompany Peggy Whitson and John Shoffner on the Ax-2 mission, a Crew Dragon flight set to launch no earlier than May 1, 2023, to the station. The names of the two Saudis on the flight have not been released, she said, but that “we are working very hard with them on training already.” A slide for her presentation noted the two would be named after formal approval by the ISS program’s Multilateral Crew Operations Panel. That slide also stated that crew training for the mission started Oct. 17. The Saudi Space Commission and Axiom Space separately announced Sept. 22 plans to fly two Saudi citizens on a future Axiom Space mission . However, while it was widely rumored the two would fly on Ax-2, neither announcement stated a specific mission. The Saudi statement said that one of the two people would be a woman but did not disclose how the astronauts would be selected. The commission did not respond to questions at the time about the selection process. The upcoming Ax-2 mission, Hart said, will be similar to the Ax-1 private astronaut mission that spent two weeks at the station in April. The 10-day mission will conduct commercial and non-profit research and other activities at the station. “We learned a lot on the first mission,” she said. “We have completed updating a lot of our planning milestones and deliverables and timelines based on the Ax-1 lessons learned.” Among the lessons incorporated for future missions is a new requirement that private astronaut missions be commanded by a former NASA astronaut with flight experience. NASA said in August it was adding that requirement based on experience from Ax-1 , which was commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, and “other recent civilian-crew spaceflight.” The change does not apply to Ax-2, but Axiom had already named Whitson, a former astronaut, as commander. The requirement does apply to two future private astronaut missions that NASA solicited proposals for in September that would go to the ISS between late 2023 and the end of 2024. Those proposals were due to NASA Oct. 27, Hart said, with selections expected late this year or early next year. In addition to the requirement about the mission’s commander, NASA instituted “stricter workday requirements,” she said, to address packed schedules, as well as built in time for crews to adapt to the station and to set up and tear down equipment.
The U.S. Space Force announced Nov. 28 it delivered the second and final military communications payloads that will launch in 2023 on Space Norway’s Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission known as ASBM. The first Enhanced Polar System Recapitalization (EPS-R) payload was delivered in June . Both payloads are scheduled to launch to highly elliptical orbits on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The EPS-R payloads were built by Northrop Grumman at its Space Park campus in Redondo Beach, California. “The EPS-R satellite program will provide vital protected satellite communications to the warfighter in the increasingly important arctic region,” said 2nd Lt. Clayton Lieberman, payload integration and test lead at the Space Systems Command. The ASBM mission also includes communications payloads for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense and for British satellite operator Inmarsat. The EPS-R are Extremely High Frequency Extended Data Rate payloads that will provide secure communications services. The EPS-R satellites and ground system will be operated by the U.S. Space Force but the primary users of the service will be the U.S. Navy’s surface and subsurface fleets, and Coast Guard units operating in the north polar region. The two EPS-R payloads will augment two existing Enhanced Polar Systems satellites also made by Northrop Grumman. The company also is updating the ground segment. The project has been hailed by U.S. defense officials as an example of international cooperation on space programs.
The Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft rolled back out to the launch pad Nov. 4 as the agency prepares for the third attempt to launch the vehicle on Artemis 1 mission later this month. SLS and Orion, on its mobile launch platform, arrived at Launch Complex 39B at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Nov. 4, a little more than nine hours after emerging from the Vehicle Assembly Building. The rollout was the fourth for the vehicle since March. The rollout supports NASA’s plans to conduct the next Artemis 1 launch attempt Nov. 14, with liftoff scheduled at 12:07 a.m. Eastern at the beginning of a 69-minute launch window. Two backup windows are reserved for Nov. 16 and Nov. 19. In a Nov, 3 call with reporters, Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said managers gave the go-ahead for the rollout after reviewing weather forecasts that show the risk of a tropical storm system forming and heading towards Florida early next week. “Our engineering team thought it was an OK risk to go out tonight,” he said. Mark Burger, launch weather officer with the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, said there is only a 30% chance of the system becoming a named storm, with peak wind gusts not expected to exceed 74 kilometers per hour. “Those are well within our constraints for riding out” the storm at the pad, he said. “We’ll have impacts from that in terms of the wind, but we’re not looking at any likelihood at this point of see a strong system emerge out of this.” SLS and Orion had been in the VAB since late September, when NASA rolled back to protect the vehicle from Hurricane Ian. Before the storm forced the rollback, agency officials felt they had resolved hydrogen leak problems that scrubbed the previous launch attempt Sept. 3. The investigation into that leak has not turned up a single clear cause. “There’s not really a smoking gun, per se,” said Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager in NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program. “We feel pretty confident that, through the loading procedures and controlling the pressures, we understand it much better now.” “Our teams have continued to grow and learn about the vehicle, and we’re confident,” said Free, who added he felt they had three good opportunities to launch. “But, it’s a flight test.” “What we’ve learned in every wet dress [rehearsal], our two launch attempts and our tanking test help build our confidence,” he said. “I don’t think we would roll out if we didn’t feel confident.” If the vehicle does not launch by Nov. 19, there is a fourth possible launch window on Nov. 25. Beyond that, Free said NASA would likely leave the vehicle on the pad and wait until the next launch period opens in December, which would require getting waivers from the Eastern Range for the SLS flight termination system, much like what happened in September. December also marks the deadline for the lifetime of the two solid rocket boosters. Lanham said that the boosters, which originally had a 12-month life when they were stacked in early 2021, have been certified through Dec. 9 for one booster and Dec. 14 for the other. If the vehicle doesn’t launch by then, Free said, they would do another “analysis cycle” on the boosters to see if their lives can be further extended.
TAMPA, Fla. — Gomspace delayed the release of financial results Oct. 27 as the European smallsat maker tries to get a major commercial customer to pay its bills. The company halted work on a contract accounting for just under half its annual revenues earlier this month, following about $3.6 million in unpaid invoices and $1.6 million of work-in-progress it had yet to invoice. Gomspace expects 2022 revenue to total roughly $17 million to $23 million as a result, down from its earlier $24 million to $27 million full-year forecast. Gomspace intends to publish financial results for its most recent quarter Nov. 28 as it reviews how to treat the suspended contract in its accounts. According to Gomspace CEO Niels Buus, the issue with the company he declined to name stems from “a scope increase that the customer has requested that they do not pay their invoices for.” Buus referred SpaceNews to a recent interview he did with Danish newspaper Nordjyske Stiftstidende , which said this customer had also requested an accelerated timeframe for a project worth around $15 million in total. In 2018, Gomspace was forced to lay off about a third of its workforce after scrapping a contract with Sky and Space Global, a communications startup, for a 200-cubesat order following missed payments. Buus told the Danish newspaper that Gomspace is moving employees that had worked on its recently suspended contract to other tasks, meaning there will be no layoffs this time around for its 250-strong workforce. During Gomspace’s last set of results July 25, Buus said the company had shown strong financial performance in delivering platforms, payloads and subsystems. “However, this is not enough to offset the increased cost of completing one large commercial project and a few other scientific satellite solutions with a high degree of non-recurring engineering,” he said. Combined with the effect of fewer scientific satellite orders that usually give significant prepayments when contracts are signed, the publicly listed company reported negative cashflow for the three months to the end of June. Gomspace also said it was exploring financing opportunities to meet the shortfall. The manufacturer said net revenues for the second quarter increased 8% to around $4.7 million, compared with the same period last year. However, it recorded a deeper loss for the period at about $2.6 million. Keeping pace with the market Executives have warned that worsening economic conditions could slow growth in the space industry in the next few years and dry up capital for satellite operators and their manufacturers. Many less established satellite manufacturers also risk overextending themselves as raw materials and other costs rise for projects they secured after aggressively undercutting the competition, according to Luis Gomes, CEO of smallsat maker AAC Clyde Space. “There are a lot of companies on the market [and] a lot of competition,” Gomes said in an interview with SpaceNews . “And that means that sometimes companies take contracts that they can’t deliver.” Marc Bell, CEO of smallsat maker Terran Orbital, pointed to the dangers of working on credit in this challenging environment. Most of the projects Terran Orbital takes on are related to the U.S. government, “and they always pay their bills,” Bell said. For commercial customers, he said work is paid for in advance, with only rare exceptions for companies with exceptionally good credit scores.
SEOUL, South Korea — Skyroot Aerospace, an Indian rocket startup that aims to launch its solid-fueled Vikram S suborbital rocket by year’s end and orbital class Vikram 1 in 2023, has raised $51 million in a Series B round led by Singapore sovereign investor GIC. Skyroot said in a Sept. 3 news release the round will fund “infrastructure and initial developmental launches, enabling us to achieve commercial operations next year.” Including $17 million raised through a seed round , Series A and a bridge round , the company has raised $68 million since its establishment in 2018. Investors include Google’s founding board member Ram Shriram’s Sherpalo Ventures, former Google senior vice president Amit Singhal, former WhatsApp chief business officer Neeraj Arora, and India’s renewable energy company Greenko Group. The latest funding enabled GIC’s India managing director, Mayank Rawat, to join Skyroot’s board, the rocket maker said in a Sept. 6 statement . “This round puts us in a trajectory of hyper-growth by funding all of our initial launches, and enables building infrastructure to meet high launch cadence required by our satellite customers,” said Pawan Kumar Chandana, Skyroot co-founder and CEO, in the statement. Another co-founder, Naga Bharath Daka, said the latest round will “help us get to full-fledged commercial satellite launch scale within a year.” He said Skyroot has started booking payload slots for upcoming launches. The Vikram S, which Skyroot is developing for its inaugural flight by the end of the year, is a single-stage, solid fueled sub-orbital rocket. Its flight will give the company a chance to test various subsystems and technologies that would be applied to its orbital-class vehicles — Vikram 1, Vikram 2 and Vikram 3. The Vikram 1, whose inaugural flight is expected in 2023, is a solid-fueled, three-stage satellite launcher designed to deliver up to 500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit or sun-synchronous polar orbit, according to the company’s website . The rocket’s third stage successfully underwent a full-duration test in May, which lasted 108 seconds with a peak thrust of 22,000 pounds. Test firings of the rocket’s first and second stages are expected soon. The company is also developing Vikram 1 and Vikram 3 , which are designed to carry heavier payloads with multiple orbital insertions. On top of this, Skyroot continues to expand its partnership with other space startups. In February 2021, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with India’s in-space propulsion system maker Bellatrix Aerospace, under which the latter’s orbital transfer vehicle will launch on a Skyroot’s rocket. The company recently formed a partnership with two Australian space companies — HEX20 and QL Space — as part of six industry-to-industry collaboration deals between India and Australia. Under the deals, HEX20, which provides satellite platforms and mission services, will work with Skyroot Aerospace to provide launch services, spacecraft avionics and components to Australian space initiatives. QL Space, a mining technology developer, will partner with Skyroot to further develop launch facilities in Australia and support joint mineral exploration missions in space. Correction: An earlier version of this article said Skyroot aimed to conduct the first orbital launch of its Vikram 1 rocket by the end of 2022. It should have said Skyroot aims to conduct a suborbital launch by the end of 2022 of the Vikram S technology demonstrator rocket. Vikram 1’s first launch is planned for 2023. 
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s robotic lunar orbiter Danuri successfully demonstrated “space internet” on its way to the moon by sending video and photo files, including a popular Korean band’s music video , at a distance of more than 1.2 million kilometers to Earth, said Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), the spacecraft’s operator, Nov. 7 . The demonstration was conducted twice — Aug. 25 and Oct. 28 — using a space internet demonstrator developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) here, validating an interplanetary internet connection using delay-disruption tolerant networking. The device was designed to test the data transmission capability in a space environment where disconnection of telecommunications frequently occurs. The tests were supervised by KARI, ETRI, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, according to KARI. While the first demonstration was conducted with the orbiter located about 1.21 million kilometers away from Earth, Danuri was 1.28 million kilometers from Earth for the second demo, according to KARI. “The performance verification test is significant in that they were conducted at distances of about three times the communication distance of about 380,000 kilometers, which was the mission given to Danuri before launch,” the institute said in a Nov. 7 statement . KARI also unveiled photos of the Earth and the moon’s orbit taken by the orbiter. Using a built-in high-resolution camera developed by KARI, the orbiter took photos at a distance of between 1.46 million kilometers and 1.548 million kilometers for a month from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. The spacecraft took fifteen photos Sept. 24 from a distance of 1.544 million kilometers as the moon orbited Earth. “These photos are meaningful in that the Danuri captured the process of the moon orbiting and passing the Earth,” KARI said in the statement. Launched Aug. 4 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the orbiter is traveling toward the moon at a speed of 0.54 kilometers per second to reach the moon’s orbit by Dec. 17, according to KARI. A series of propulsive maneuvers with the spacecraft’s thrusters will steer it into a circular, low-altitude orbit about 100 kilometers from the lunar surface by Dec. 31. After a brief period of commissioning and tests, the spacecraft’s yearlong mission is expected to begin in January.
Sierra Space will work with Spaceport America in New Mexico to use that commercial spaceport as a potential future landing site for the company’s Dream Chaser vehicle. Sierra Space announced June 21 it signed a memorandum of understanding with Spaceport America to study landings of Dream Chaser vehicles at the spaceport’s 3,650-meter runway. That includes jointly working on an application to the Federal Aviation Administration for a reentry site license to allow landings there. In a statement, Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, described the agreement as part of the company’s efforts to develop a “vibrant, growing and accessible commercial space economy” through its Dream Chaser vehicle and role in the proposed Orbital Reef commercial space station. “With that vision in mind, we are creating space-tech hubs within the commercial space ecosystem and adding Spaceport America as a prospective landing site for Dream Chaser to continue to open up affordable access to space for all.” The former Shuttle Landing Facility runway at the Kennedy Space Center, now known as the Launch and Landing Facility and operated by Space Florida, will be the initial landing site for Dream Chaser missions transporting cargo to and from the International Space Station for NASA. However, Sierra Space has been working to expand the network of potential landing sites for Dream Chaser both within and outside of the United States. The FAA awarded Huntsville International Airport in Alabama a reentry site license May 13 for Dream Chaser landings at that airport, which will allow up to eight landings there from 2023 through 2027. Sierra Space signed an agreement last June with Spaceport Cornwall in England to study potential Dream Chaser landings there, and a similar agreement in February for landings at Japan’s Oita Airport . The agreement is the latest step in Spaceport America’s efforts to diversify its customer base. The state of New Mexico built the facility for Virgin Galactic, but that company’s suborbital spaceflight business has been slow to develop. The last SpaceShipTwo flight by the company there was in July 2021, with flights not expected to resume after an extended maintenance period until late this year. Spaceport officials have been working to attract other customers to the spaceport, ranging from small launch vehicle developers to SpinLaunch, which built a scale version of its centrifugal launch system at the spaceport for suborbital tests. “We are excited to expand the partnership and working relationship with Sierra Space,” Scott McLaughlin, executive director of Spaceport America, said in a statement. “This MOU also helps highlight the vision for Spaceport America and to help connect other users of both the spaceport and the Dream Chaser to New Mexico.” The announcement was tied to another Spaceport America event: the Spaceport America Cup, a collegiate rocketry competition taking place this week. Sierra Space is one of the major sponsors of the event.
China’s Shenzhou-14 crewed spacecraft docked with the Tianhe space station module early Sunday, marking the start of a crucial six-month-long mission. Shenzhou-14 completed a fast automated rendezvous and docking with the Tianhe module at 5:42 a.m. Eastern, June 5, marking the safe arrival of astronauts Chen Dong (commander), Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe. The Long March 2F rocket carrying Shenzhou-14 and the three astronauts lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 10:44 p.m. Eastern Saturday. The spacecraft completed docking with the nadir, or Earth-facing, port of the Tianhe docking hub just under seven hours after launch from the Gobi Desert. Also docked with the 16.6-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter Tianhe is the Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft, launched in May , containing supplies for the crew, along with propellant, science experiments and a number of CubeSats. The Shenzhou-14 mission will, crucially, manage the arrival of two new 20-metric-ton-plus modules to the space station, namely Wentian and Mengtian, in July and October respectively. “During the six months, we will be very busy,” Liu, who in 2012 became China’s first woman in space, said at a pre-launch press conference on Saturday. The astronauts were separated from the media by a screen, due to quarantine procedures. “We will modify our space station from a single module into a three-module, three-spacecraft complex, during which three will be nine combination formations, five dockings, three departures and evacuations and two position changes.” The missions will see the completion of the T-shaped, three-module Tiangong space station, a project initiated back in 1992. Tianhe was launched in April 2021 and has so far hosted two crewed missions, Shenzhou-12 and Shenzhou-13, supported by the Tianzhou-2 and Tianzhou-3 logistics missions respectively. “We will enter Wentian and Mentian lab modules for the first time,” Liu said. “We will conduct extravehicular activities with the aid of an airlock and robotic forearm, and carry out the combined operation of the [Tianhe] large arm and [Wentian] small arm.” The crew will also complete a high number of scientific experiments and hold science outreach events, Liu added. Chen, 43, first went to space on the month-long Shenzhou-11 mission to the Tiangong-2 test lab in 2016. Liu, 43, flew on Shenzhou-9 to visit Tiangong-1, while Cai, 46, is embarking on his first mission. The new airlock cabin in Wentian will become the main exit-entry point for extravehicular activities (EVAs) once active. The Shenzhou-12 and Shenzhou-13 crews have so far used Tianhe’s docking hub for EVA entry and exit. China’s first human spaceflight mission, Shenzhou-5, reached orbit in October 2003. Shenzhou-14 is only the ninth crewed mission launched by China in almost two decades, but the country is now committing to rolling six-month-long missions to the Tiangong space station for at least a decade. Shenzhou-14 will handover to the Shenzhou-15 mission, expected to launch in December, when Tiangong will briefly host six astronauts for the first time. Tiangong is designed to operate in orbit for at least ten years. It could be extended to six modules and host international astronauts. China is also considering making the station available for tourist visits and will open Tiangong to commercial missions . The country also plans to launch a co-orbiting optical telescope module, named Xuntian, in late 2023. It will be capable of docking with Tianhe for repairs, maintenance, refueling and upgrades, and aims to survey 40 percent of the sky across a decade. Xuntian features a two-meter-diameter aperture and a field of view more than 300 times greater than the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. Russian officials have stated an interest in deeper human spaceflight cooperation with China while threatening to end its involvement in the International Space Station. However, the 41.5 degree inclination of the Tiangong space station makes it very difficult for a Soyuz to launch to Tiangong from Russian territory, while ESA’s Kourou, which was being considered for hosting crewed Soyuz missions, is no longer available to Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Four of the six O3b mPower broadband satellites that SES had planned to launch this year with SpaceX won’t be ready until early 2023, the operator said Nov. 3 as it recorded strong growth in its networks business. While a launch for the first pair of O3b mPower satellites has been “locked in” for Dec. 15, SES CEO Steve Collar said delays have pushed the next-generation constellation’s service debut from the second to the third quarter of 2023. Collar said the Boeing-built satellites needed more time than expected to be tested and prepared for their Falcon 9 launch to medium Earth orbit (MEO). He expects the next two satellites will be launched in the first half of January, with the third launch of two satellites coming “probably in February,” although this mission is still being finalized. SpaceX had initially been slated to start launching an O3b mPower constellation that comprises 11 satellites in total in 2021. O3b mPower is designed to provide significantly more capacity than SES’ current low-latency O3b network in MEO, which the fleet operator says is needed to meet growing demand from government and mobility customers, including aviation and maritime. According to Collar, SES will be able to start generating revenues from O3b mPower soon after it launches services by leveraging the groundwork its “classic” O3b constellation has already put in place. SES has been investing heavily in the networks side of its business, which is also supported by the SES-17 satellite that entered service from geostationary orbit in June. Collar has said that SES-17 — with its focus on the commercial aviation market over the Americas, the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean — will anchor the company’s growth over the next several years. Aviation and cruise markets recovering from a pandemic slump helped drive growth in the company’s networks business for the nine months to the end of September. Revenues for its networks unit climbed 2.7% to 636 million euros ($620 million) for the first three quarters of 2022, compared with the same period last year when adjusted for changes in foreign exchange rates and excluding its recent acquisition of Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions (GES) , a satcoms provider to the U.S. government. This is despite a 7% fall in government revenue pinned on the rapid U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. Meanwhile, revenue from its video business unit fell 5.6% to 763 million euros amid a gradual decline across the broader satellite TV market. Overall group revenue declined 2.1% to 1.4 billion euros when adjusted for foreign exchange rates and excluding DRS GES. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, increased 0.7% to 829 million euros. SES also said it was ahead of schedule to meet next year’s regulatory deadline for clearing C-band spectrum in the United States for terrestrial mobile operators. Recent satellite launches have given the company a “clear line of sight” to receiving $3 billion in proceeds from Federal Communications Commission, Collar said, by meeting the regulator’s Dec. 5, 2023, deadline. SES has already passed an initial milestone that entitles the operator to around $1 billion in additional spectrum-clearing proceeds from the FCC. Separately, the company has agreed to a private C-band clearing deal with U.S. mobile operator Verizon, which Collar said should deliver an extra $170 million of proceeds before the end of 2022.
As Artemis 1 nears its conclusion, U.S. Space Command is using the mission to highlight its role in supporting NASA, even as the space agency considers alternatives to some of those services. The Orion crew capsule is scheduled to splash down at 12:39 p.m. Eastern Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California. It will be recovered by a joint NASA/U.S. Navy team using the ship USS Portland, along with several helicopters and small boats. The military forces involved in the recovery are coordinated by U.S. Space Command. “It’s one of the most visible mission sets within U.S. Space Command that we do, and it’s a pretty neat one,” said U.S. Army Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, in an interview at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida before the first Artemis 1 launch attempt in August. For Artemis 1 and other missions, Space Command coordinates closely with NASA on schedules and requirements, he said. “They invite us and include us into their planning sessions, really from the very beginning,” he said of NASA, noting that discussions have already started for the Artemis 2 crewed mission, scheduled for no earlier than late 2024. “We go figure out what is feasible and come back with two or three different courses of action.” Space Command then works with other combatant commands to identify the resources needed to support the mission, like the naval vessel that will be used for the Artemis 1 recovery. “You’ve got to be able to have a global reach and the fact that I’m a combatant command and I can work and orchestrate and integrate with other regional geographic combatant commands,” he said, “gives us the ability to use the joint force in order to provide those services that are required by NASA.” Space Command supports other NASA missions as well, notably commercial crew missions. A task force called Detachment 3 at Patrick is trained for rescuing astronauts in the event of a launch abort for Crew Dragon and future Starliner crewed missions, and will be used on crewed Artemis missions. It also provides medical support for astronauts who return to Earth on Soyuz spacecraft landing in Kazakhstan. NASA reimburses Space Command for the support it provides for crewed launches and Artemis. “Quite frankly, it’s great training for the joint force,” Dickinson said. “We do joint operations every day all around the world and this is just an extension of this. So, the training we get out of it is very applicable to what we’re doing elsewhere in the world.” NASA, though, is at least considering alternatives to Detachment 3 for crew rescue services. The agency released in July a request for information for potential astronaut crew rescue services for commercial crew and Artemis missions. “Currently, the Department of Defense (DoD) provides NASA with rescue support,” the RFI stated. “However, NASA is exploring the possibility of a commercial solution for crew rescue services.” Responses to the RFI were due to NASA Aug. 29, and the agency has not provided an update on any plans to issue a formal solicitation for astronaut rescue services. Dickinson said Space Command was prepared for a steady cadence of future Artemis missions. “We’re developing techniques and procedures for identifying assets. We’re developing a training regiment that would make sure our rescue divers have the right skills,” he said. “One you do that first time, then the idea is how to make it repeatable so we can support Artemis going forward.” NASA ultimately plans to fly Artemis missions once a year, a cadence Dickinson said he was not familiar with but that the command could handle. “Whatever that becomes, we’ll continue to do it like other operations within the command, and that’s pretty exciting.”
Cognitive Space, a startup based in Houston, Texas, announced Nov. 8 it won a $1.2 million contract extension to continue development of the company’s satellite tasking software for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The contract is a Small Business Innovation Research agreement known as a TACFI, or Tactical Funding Increase. The Air Force uses the company’s Cognitive Inference Tasking (CNTIENT) software tool to prototype a hybrid architecture of government and commercial remote-sensing satellites. Cognitive Space in 2020 won a $1.5 million SBIR Phase 2 contract for the artificial intelligence-driven software. The $1.2 million TACFI deal includes both government and private funding, and extends the work for two more years. The new contract funds the development of a tailored version of CNTIENT for dynamic satellite scheduling on a cloud platform. Cognitive Space said the CNTIENT platform is used both by commercial and government space operators to “optimize and tailor remote sensing mission planning, automate payload scheduling and prioritize tasking.” The machine learning-based software will help the Air Force to automate the command and control of its satellites, said the company, and conduct experiments in both virtual and operational settings. Cognitive Space also announced a new SBIR Phase 1 contract from the Space Development Agency to develop intelligent space mesh network routing algorithms and study hardware solutions for low Earth orbit communications. SDA plans to field a low-latency data transport integrated with tactical data links, to track advanced missile threats, as well as land and maritime targets. For this contract Cognitive Space is partnering with the Southwest Research Institute.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX successfully launched 40 satellites for OneWeb’s rival broadband constellation Dec. 8 on a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at 5:27 p.m. Eastern and released the satellites over three separation sequences about an hour and a half later. Following its part of a mission that completes almost 80% of OneWeb’s low Earth orbit (LEO) network, the Falcon 9’s first stage successfully landed at Landing Zone 1 at Florida’s Canaveral Space Force Station for reuse. It will take about 100 days for OneWeb’s latest batch of satellites to reach their final LEO destinations to begin services, according to OneWeb chief commercial officer Stephen Beynon. Once online he said the satellites would expand the operator’s constellation into the southern hemisphere while improving the density of coverage to the north. The satellites would enable coverage across “a substantial part” of North America, he said in an interview, where the operator has a distribution agreement with telecoms giant AT&T. SpaceX’s first launch for OneWeb was delayed from Dec. 6 to allow for additional pre-launch checks. A similar reason was recently given for pushing out the Falcon 9 launch of a Japan-based ispace’s lunar lander by four days to Dec. 11. Back on track The mission is the first of three dedicated Falcon 9 launches that OneWeb booked in March, shortly after an agreement with Arianespace to complete its constellation with Russian Soyuz rockets was suspended amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. OneWeb also booked two flights with New Space India Limited, the commercial arm of India’s space agency. The first of these two missions enabled the operator to resume its launch campaign Oct. 22 when 36 OneWeb satellites were deployed on a GSLV Mark 3 rocket from India. Beynon said it had not been decided whether its next launch would be with SpaceX or India. SpaceX has launched 55 missions this year, and more than half of them were for its LEO broadband constellation Starlink. While the British operator’s launches were on hold, SpaceX branched Starlink out of consumer broadband households into the enterprise and government markets that OneWeb is also targeting. Starlink has also expanded its strategy from only selling directly to customers to also using distributors , similar to OneWeb’s growth strategy. However, Beynon said OneWeb sees growth opportunities by being more integrated with its distribution partners and not directly competing with terrestrial telcos. “Our goal is to enable the growth of our distribution partners,” he said, by being “a core part of that inside their offering,” which he said is different from Starlink’s use of resellers. The latest launch gives OneWeb 504 of the 648 satellites in its proposed LEO constellation. Only 588 satellites are needed to provide global coverage, Beynon said, and the remaining satellites will form a mix of in-orbit and ground spares that the operator has yet to determine. He said OneWeb expects to complete its remaining launch missions “early next year” to provide global services by the end of 2023. While SpaceX will be instrumental in this, and OneWeb “couldn’t be happier” with its launch service, he said their collaboration is “not a precursor to any bigger cooperation between us.” SpaceX has launched more than 3,500 Starlink satellites to date and recently received partial approval to start deploying a second-generation constellation. This article was updated Dec. 8 after OneWeb announced it had confirmed signal acquisition on all 40 satellites and to correct the landing site for the Falcon 9 first stage.
Aerospace Corp. on Sept. 7 unveiled a new facility in Colorado Springs equipped with digital engineering and simulation labs to support military space programs. The $100 million 90,000-square-foot Space Warfighting Center will provide work areas and digital tools for military space agencies that design satellites and train satellite operators, Aerospace executives said. During a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Colorado officials said the facility will boost the local economy and create about 250 jobs. Aerospace CEO Steve Isakowitz said the center “leverages cutting-edge digital tools to aid our government partners as they design and support the development, training, and testing of the nation’s future space enterprise.” A nonprofit corporation operating as a federally funded research and development center, or FFRDC, Aerospace advises government agencies on national security, civil, commercial, and international space issues. Jean Michael, general manager of Aerospace’s space enterprise and warfighting division, said the company decided to build the facility to meet local demand for technical design and specialized training. Colorado Springs is home to the U.S. Space Command, the U.S. Space Force Space Operations Command, and the Space Training and Readiness Command. The Space Warfighting Center is located next to Aerospace’s existing facility near the Colorado Springs airport. “We designed it to assist the government in evaluating new concepts and how they best fit into the larger space enterprise,” said Michael. ‘It’s really just a continuation of our mission and charter as an FFRDC in support of the Space Force and others.”
Newly-developed orbital and suborbital launch vehicles are being readied for test flights at the Jiuquan spaceport as China’s efforts to foster a commercial space sector advance. Landspace, a Beijing-based launch startup, is working towards the launch of its Zhuque-2, methane and liquid oxygen rocket. The mission, expected in the near future, will represent the first launch of a liquid propellant launch vehicle by China’s nascent commercial space sector. The government opened sections of the space sector in late 2014. The move has so far brought a proliferation of solid launchers , with mixed success. Liquid launch capabilities would represent a leap for the sector. As previously reported by SpaceNews , Landspace has constructed infrastructure at Jiuquan to facilitate methane and liquid oxygen launchers. The firm’s Zhuque-2 is powered by gas generator engines and will be capable of delivering a 6,000-kilogram payload capacity to a 200-kilometer LEO, or. 4,000 kilograms to 500-kilometer SSO, according to Landspace. Zhuque-2 could become the world’s first methane-fueled rocket to make a launch attempt, with SpaceX also working towards a full test flight of the much larger Starship . Landspace has set up an intelligent manufacturing base in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province and established a $1.5 billion medium and large-scale liquid rocket assembly and test plant at Jiaxing, also in Zhejiang. Meanwhile another Chinese launch firm, iSpace, is developing its own methalox rocket, the Hyperbola-2. The firm recently unveiled a first stage test article at Jiuquan in preparation to conduct hop tests. The hop tests will be carried out ahead of a potential orbital launch in 2023, with reusability a key target for the Hyperbola-2. The Zhuque-2 will initially be expendable, but Landspace aims to convert it to make the first stage recoverable. CAS Space, a spinoff from the state-owned Chinese Academy of Sciences, is also preparing for its first launch from Jiuquan, with its ZK-1A (Lijian-1) solid rocket. The ZK-1A is to be capable of lifting 1,500 kilograms to a 500-kilometer SSO, making it the most powerful solid launch vehicle in China, ellipsing the Long March 11. CAS Space is also working on larger solid rockets and reusable liquid launchers. China Rocket, a spinoff from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) under the country’s main space contractor, CASC, has conducted a series of tests as it targets a first launch of the comparable Jielong-3 solid rocket no earlier than September. Jiuquan has undergone an expansion in recent years to facilitate the surge in space launch actors and meet a growth in demand for launch. CASIC has also established infrastructure at Jiuquan for launches of Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11 rockets using transport erector launchers. An explosion occurred at Jiuquan in October 2021 at facilities in Jiuquan, but apparently did not disrupt major operations at the spaceport. Jiuquans is not the only spaceport expanding. A ground breaking ceremony for a commercial launch site at the Wenchang coastal space center was held July 6. The Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site project invited representatives from commercial companies Landspace, iSpace, Deep Blue Aerospace, Space Pioneer, CAS Space and Orienspace. The project also aims to attract CASC, CASIC and China SatNet, a state-owned enterprise established in 2021 to coordinate a national telecommunications megaconstellation project.
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — Firefly Aerospace has hired an executive with extensive experience in aerospace and defense as its next CEO as the company gears up for its second orbital launch attempt. Firefly announced Sept. 1 that it hired Bill Weber as its new chief executive, effective immediately. Weber takes over from Peter Schumacher, a partner at majority owner AE Industrial Partners (AEI) who had served as interim chief executive since mid-June, when co-founder Tom Markusic stepped down as chief executive . Weber was previously president and chief executive of KeyW Corporation, a cyberspace operations and geospatial intelligence company serving the national security community. Jacobs acquired KeyW in 2019 for $815 million. Before KeyW, he was an executive at several other companies supporting the federal government in national security and diplomacy, including XLA, Kaseman and GTSI Corporation. He also was a founding partner of First Light Acquisition Corporation, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) seeking to merge with a company in the aerospace and defense markets. “Bill is a proven leader with an impressive record of helping companies successfully navigate change, making him the clear choice to lead Firefly during this transitional growth period,” Schumacher said in a statement. “His deep experience and strong relationships across many areas of the aerospace and defense landscape will be invaluable as Firefly transitions to full-rate production across its portfolio of products.” “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead a company on the forefront of critical, leading-edge space transportation solutions,” Weber said in the statement. “I look forward to collaborating with the Firefly and AEI teams at this critical juncture in the company’s development.” The hiring of Weber comes as Firefly gears up for its second attempt to launch its Alpha rocket. The company announced Aug. 17 that, after completing a static-fire test of the rocket’s first stage, it was planning a launch for Sept. 11 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The “To the Black” mission, scheduled for liftoff at 6 p.m. Eastern, will carry several cubesats to deploy into low Earth orbit. The launch will come a little more than a year after the failed inaugural Alpha launch, also from Vandenberg. In that launch, one of four engines in the rocket’s first stage shut down 15 seconds into flight because of a faulty electrical connection. Range safety terminated the flight about two and a half minutes after liftoff. In addition to its Alpha launch vehicle, Firefly announced Aug. 8 an agreement with Northrop Grumman to partner on a new version of the Antares rocket . The Antares 330 will use a new first stage provided by Firefly, replacing the existing Antares first stage built in Ukraine and using Russian engines. The first Antares 330 launch is scheduled for as soon as 2024. Firefly is also continuing development of its Blue Ghost lunar lander, part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander at Firefly, said at an Aug. 24 meeting the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group that the company has 50 people working fulltime on Blue Ghost for a 2024 mission to Mare Crisium.
Astrobotic, a company developing landers and other lunar technologies, has secured NASA funding to fly a small rover on a future mission to test its ability to survive the lunar night. The Pittsburgh-based company announced Aug. 24 that it won NASA funding through the agency’s Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program to fly its CubeRover spacecraft on a future Astrobotic lander. That mission will test the ability of the small rover to survive the two-week lunar night. “We have been working to survive the lunar night for several years. This mission ushers in a new era of commercial space where scientific instruments can survive months to even years on the Moon’s surface, generating a significantly higher return on investment,” said Mike Provenzano, director of lunar surface systems at Astrobotic, in a statement. Most initial commercial lander missions count on operating only for a single lunar day because of the lack of power and ability to keep key systems warm during the extended night, when temperatures can drop to as low as –200 degrees Celsius. However, scientists are counting on later missions to be able to survive the lunar night and operate for months. CubeRover will also be able to communicate with lunar relay satellites rather than through a lander. That can increase the range of the rover, the company says, since it doesn’t have to remain within the line of sight of the lander to maintain communications. Astrobotic said that the SBIR contract, known as a Sequential Phase 2 award, covers the development of the CubeRover and a future commercial flight opportunity. Astrobotic did not disclose the value of the award, but it is one of six Sequential Phase 2 awards NASA announced Aug. 18 for work on lunar technologies as well as uncrewed aerial vehicles and smallsats. The six awards, intended to “spur rapid advancement for technology demonstration and use by NASA,” have a combined value of nearly $27 million, according to an agency statement. An Astrobotic spokesperson said the award will allow the CubeRover to fly on a future Astrobotic lander mission as soon as 2025. The company currently has two lander missions under contract, both through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The Peregrine lander is scheduled to launch as soon as late this year on the inaugural United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur mission. The Griffin lander, carrying a large NASA rover called VIPER, is set to launch in late 2024. Astrobotic has one kilogram of payload capacity on the CubeRover that it is offering commercially. “We’re finding this capability has opened several new doors for us and there is just generally a lot of excitement buzzing to fly on this mission,” said Dan Hendrickson, Astrobotic’s vice president of business development, in a statement.
Stellar Ventures unveiled a fund July 7 with $23 million to invest in early-stage space-related startups. “The cost of launch has come down so much that any person with an innovative idea can bring it to market,” Stellar Ventures co-founder Celeste Ford told SpaceNews. “It’s like the internet in the 90s. People didn’t know what they were going to do with it. Now, they can’t work if their internet is down.” Stellar Ventures plans to work closely with Stellar Solutions, a Silicon Valley systems engineering firm Ford founded in 1995. Stellar Solutions currently has more than 300 employees working with U.S. and international aerospace companies and government agencies. “At the end of the day, that’s really our competitive advantage,” Ford said. “We get three things from Stellar Solutions that no other fund has: deal flow, due diligence and facilitating introductions with the government.” After investing in Skyloom, for example, Stellar Ventures introduced the optical communications startup to aerospace giant Honeywell. Now, the companies are working together to produce laser crosslink terminals for commercial and military satellites. Once Stellar Ventures decides to back a company, Stellar Ventures executives often share their plans with fellow space investors. “There aren’t too many funds that invest in space,” Ford said. “When we have a good investment, we tell each other and we try to raise the bar together.” Ford welcomes the recent dip in valuations for space startups. “I was collecting money for the fund when space was frothy,” Ford said. “Now that it’s not, it’s going to be easier to invest. One of the problems we were having when pre-seed and seed valuations were so high was that writing a $500,000 or $1 million check was not moving the needle.” Ford founded Stellar Ventures earlier this year with investor and entrepreneur Matt Patterson, the firm’s managing partner, and David Anderman, the former SpaceX general counsel who serves as operating partner. “Stellar Ventures is committed to identifying successful investments for its limited partners and fueling the development of space-enabled technologies to achieve ambitious business, government and environmental goals” Anderman, a former Lucasfilm Ltd. chief operating officer and general counsel, said in a statement. “Engineers creating the next generation of space startups can prove out their technology on orbit for a fraction of what it cost just a few years ago. What was once the realm of science fiction is now reality as humanity expands into the cosmos.”
As it prepares to start deploying a mesh network in low Earth orbit, the Space Development Agency is seeking proposals for a demonstration of laser communications between orbiting satellites and aircraft in flight. The agency on Aug. 4 issued a “ special notice ” asking vendors to submit by Sept. 2 proposals on how they would conduct a live demonstration of laser crosslinks between SDA’s Transport Layer satellites and a moving aircraft. An SDA-funded experiment to test out this technology was launched in June 2021 but was unsuccessful . General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems launched two cubesats carrying optical communications terminals to test inter-satellite links but the cubesats never reached their intended orbit and the company was unable to establish contact. One of the goals of the experiment was to establish optical communications between the satellites and an optical terminal on a General Atomics unmanned aircraft. In the new solicitation, SDA asks vendors to figure out a way to connect one or more of the 20 Tranche 0 Transport Layer satellites — projected to launch in September — with an aircraft that would be chosen by the vendor. SDA is interested in a live flight demonstration but also would consider a phased experiment, starting with space to ground, space to a moving ground vehicle, and space to an airborne platform. “This demonstration is concentrated on space to airborne test only to research, design, develop and test,” said the solicitation. “Testing must include successful demonstration of pointing, acquisition and tracking, and the capability to acquire and maintain the link with stability to pass up to 1 gigabit per second test data.” Experts say optical communications between air and space is a tough technical challenge due to the difficulties of pointing and navigating while maintaining a link to a moving aircraft. It also requires correcting the turbulence in the atmosphere that interferes with lasers.
A SpaceX Dragon launching soon to the International Space Station is the last cargo version of the spacecraft the company expects to build, with one more crewed spacecraft under construction. At an Nov. 18 briefing about the upcoming SpaceX CRS-26 cargo mission to the station, NASA and SpaceX announced the launch, previously scheduled for Nov. 21 from the Kennedy Space Center, had slipped a day to Nov. 22 at 3:54 p.m. Eastern. A launch that day would allow the Dragon to dock with the station Nov. 23 at 5:57 a.m. Eastern. Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said the delay stemmed from repairs to the spacecraft required after detecting a leak in the spacecraft’s thermal control system during pre-launch processing. The leak was tracked down to a single flange whose rubber seal was damaged, which has since been repaired. Those repairs “put us about a shift behind” the schedule for a Nov. 21 launch, she said, leading to the decision at the mission’s launch readiness review to instead attempt a launch Nov. 22. Weather forecasts project only a 30% chance of acceptable conditions that day, however. The launch will be the first flight of this spacecraft, designated C211, the third cargo version of the Dragon 2 spacecraft built by SpaceX. Since starting its Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract with the CRS-21 mission in late 2020, SpaceX has been alternating between two other cargo Dragon spacecraft, designated C208 and C209. In addition to the three cargo Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX has four Crew Dragon spacecraft, and Walker revealed at the briefing SpaceX plans to build a fifth and likely final Crew Dragon. “This is the last new cargo Dragon spacecraft we plan to build,” she said. “We recently decided to build one more crewed spacecraft as well.” Previously, SpaceX executives said four Crew Dragon spacecraft would be enough to meet its future needs. At an October 2021 NASA briefing, Walker said the four Crew Dragon vehicles the company planned then “seem sufficient to meet our manifest, which is thriving right now.” At the Nov. 18 briefing, she attributed the decision for a fifth Crew Dragon to further growth of that manifest. That included NASA’s decision to add eight ISS missions to SpaceX’s existing commercial crew contract as well as an “exciting commercial human spaceflight manifest.” The new Crew Dragon, she said later in the call, should be ready for a first flight “in the 2024 timeframe.” While each Crew Dragon or cargo Dragon mission requires a new trunk section, which is jettisoned prior to reentry, the capsule itself is designed for multiple flights. “About 15 flights is what we’re targeting right now,” she said. Some components are not likely to fly as many times, but overall each spacecraft should be capable of that many missions, she added. “The vast majority of the capsule should be at 15 flights.” If the CRS-26 mission does not launch Nov. 22, Walker said the next launch opportunities are Nov. 26 and 27. The gap, she said, was in part due to airspace restrictions during the Thanksgiving holiday period, as well as orbital mechanics and the need to refresh some of the cargo on board. 
Most of the enthusiasm about small launch vehicles has focused on the very smallest ones, those capable of placing a few hundred, and in some cases just a few dozen, kilograms into low Earth orbit. Some of them have been quite successful, like Rocket Lab’s Electron, which has launched five times in the first seven months of the year. Others, less so: Astra’s Rocket 3 has failed in five of its seven orbital launch attempts, including its most recent launch in June with two NASA Earth science cubesats on board. In the next few months, though, the industry’s attention will shift to a larger class of rockets, sometimes called ”mini-launchers,” capable of placing about a metric ton into orbit. Firefly Aerospace is gearing up for its second Alpha launch a year after its inaugural flight failed, but with more changes at the company than on the rocket. Two other companies, ABL Space Systems and Relativity Space, are preparing for their first launches. Last September, Firefly’s first Alpha lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base — and was almost immediately doomed. Fifteen seconds after liftoff, one of four first-stage engines shut down because of what the company later determined to be a faulty electrical connection that closed propellant valves. The rocket continued to ascend for two minutes until it reached maximum dynamic pressure, causing it to tumble. Range termination systems then blew up the rocket. The fix for that specific problem was straightforward, but the company has used the time since the failure to improve how it produces rockets. “What we’ve done in the year since we launched is a step change in the processes that we have internally,” Peter Schumacher, interim chief executive of Firefly, said in an interview in July. “It’s around ensuring that the product sitting out there is the absolute best product that we can produce.” The second Alpha is in a hangar at Vandenberg and is ready for launch, other than conducting a wet dress rehearsal and static-fire test that Schumacher estimated will take place about two weeks before launch. Firefly, for now, is waiting on a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration and then working around other launches at Vandenberg. That license is pending work on a new debris model for Alpha launches. When the range detonated the first Alpha rocket, debris drifted outside the expected corridor, in some cases landing in towns near Vandenberg. The debris, made of carbon composite materials, caused no damage but raised safety concerns. “We have the unfortunate precedent of being the first large composite rocket ever to be terminated,” Schumacher said. The debris model they had used assumed rockets with metallic structures, which break up differently than composite ones. Firefly worked with another company and the FAA on an improved model that was nearing final approval. Depending on when the company received its FAA launch license and the schedule of other launches from Vandenberg, he predicted Firefly would be ready to attempt an Alpha launch in late August or early September. Firefly itself has arguably changed more in the last year than its Alpha rocket. Max Polyakov, the Ukrainian entrepreneur who rescued the former Firefly Space Systems from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017, put his majority stake in the company up for sale in December 2021 at the request of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Firefly didn’t explain what prompted the CFIUS request but speculated it was linked to rising tensions ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Polyakov’s Noosphere Venture Partners sold that stake in Firefly in February to AE Industrial Partners (AEI), a private equity firm that created Redwire Space in 2020 through the acquisition of several space technology companies and invested in Sierra Space, Terran Orbital and Virgin Orbit. AEI led a $75 million Series B round raised by Firefly in March. In June, Tom Markusic, co-founder of Firefly, announced he was stepping down as chief executive but would remain on the company’s board and serve as a chief technical adviser. Schumacher, a partner at AEI, stepped in as interim chief executive. He made it clear in the interview that he does not plan to lead Firefly for long. The company has hired a recruiter, Korn Ferry, to identify candidates for the job, with a goal of having a new chief executive in place by mid-August. In the meantime, Schumacher said he’s been working to find ways Firefly can benefit from other AEI portfolio companies. That included bringing in executives from Atlas Aerospace, which makes aircraft components such as doors used on the Boeing 737. “They went through the entire machining, production and assembly areas at Firefly and brought their expertise to bear,” he said. “They’re working to bring efficiencies in and machining times down to a quarter of what they were before.” That efficiency is needed as Firefly looks to increase its launch rate in 2023. If the upcoming Alpha launch is successful, Firefly expects to conduct another Alpha launch late in the year, carrying cubesats on a contract through NASA’s Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) program. The company is planning up to six launches in 2023. Schumacher said Firefly will build rockets on a schedule and then find customers for them rather than produce rockets once contracts are signed. “I’m getting the company on the mindset that we need a rocket manufactured every two to three months,” he said. “Then I put it on the business development team to go sell that rocket. So, regardless of whether or not we have a paying customer, we’re going to have a rocket ready.” That approach could give Firefly the flexibility to pursue customers who need launches on short notice, such as national security responsive launch programs. The company is also in the process of being added to NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract for smallsat launches. The company missed out on VADR when NASA announced an initial set of 12 providers in January, Schumacher said, because the CFIUS request forced the company to break off negotiations with NASA. While Firefly prepares for its second Alpha flight, two other companies are gearing up for the first flights of similarly sized rockets. ABL Space Systems has its first RS1 rocket at Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island, going through the final preparations for its inaugural launch. That included a static-fire test of the rocket’s first stage at Kodiak on July 9, confirming it was ready to fly. “The operation verified our startup sequence and stage level engine performance,” said Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, noting the company completed the test on the first try. RS1 is a vehicle capable of placing up to 1,350 kilograms into low Earth orbit for $12 million a launch. The vehicle has Lockheed Martin as an anchor customer: the aerospace giant signed a contract in 2021 for up to 58 RS1 launches over the next decade, and also selected the rocket to perform a “U.K. Pathfinder” launch for the U.K. Space Agency from the Shetland Islands in 2023. ABL was on a path to conduct the first RS1 launch earlier this year, but the upper stage it built for that launch was destroyed in a testing mishap in January at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. O’Hanley said that the upper stage engine suffered a “hard start”: an explosive rise in energy in a rocket engine when propellants are ignited. The hard start triggered a fire at the aft end of the stage that led to the complete failure of the stage 20 seconds later. Before the failure, ABL expected to be ready for a first launch as soon as February from Kodiak. The company completed a new upper stage and ran a series of acceptance tests in May, correcting the flaw that caused the hard start. Dan Piemont, president of ABL, said in mid-July the company was still conducting post-test analysis. “It’s premature to set a launch window,” but projected a minimum of four to six weeks, or sometime in the latter half of August, before the company would be ready for a launch. As of late July, the company did not yet have an FAA launch license, nor had aviation or maritime notices of a launch been issued. At Cape Canaveral, Relativity Space has been performing tests of its first Terran 1 rocket at Launch Complex 16. That included briefly igniting the nine engines in the first stage. The company has not set a launch date for the mission, whimsically named “Good Luck, Have Fun,” but has suggested it could take place in the next couple of months. Relativity is best known for making extensive use of additive manufacturing to produce the rocket. Even as it tests the first Terran 1 on the pad at Cape Canaveral, it is printing the second Terran 1 for a NASA VCLS mission at its Long Beach, California, factory. The Terran 1, capable of placing up to 1,250 kilograms into low Earth orbit, is in danger of being overshadowed by the much larger Terran R, a fully reusable launch vehicle Relativity announced last year with a payload performance similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Relativity estimates having the Terran R ready as soon as 2024. It has a backlog of more than 20 launches under contract, including a deal with OneWeb announced in June for its second-generation satellites. Relativity says it has five Terran R customers but has only identified OneWeb. Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, called those other customers “top satellite operators we are extremely excited about having on our manifest.” Relativity has announced several customers for Terran 1, including Iridium and Telesat, the latter for its future LEO constellation. The Iridium contract, announced in June 2020, included up to six launches, each carrying a single spare satellite currently in ground storage. However, Iridium announced July 26 that it signed a contract with an unnamed company to launch five of its spare satellites next year for $35 million. In an earnings call, Matt Desch, chief executive of Iridium, said the launch contract was not with Relativity but declined to name the provider. Iridium previously launched its satellites on Falcon 9 missions, including five on one launch it shared with an Earth science mission. Desch said Iridium’s contract with Relativity remains in effect. “It offered the opportunity to launch but didn’t require a specific number of satellites to launch,” he said. With the contract with the unnamed provider for five satellites, Iridium has just one spare left to launch on a Terran 1. Firefly’s Schumacher is keeping an eye on the competition but feels his company has an advantage given its experience with its first launch attempt and overall capabilities. “The more I learned, the more I am excited about where Firefly is,” he said. “Our competitors may make the news more and they’re a little more splashy, but when you think about where they are relative to where we are, we are in such a better position from a technology perspective and a maturity perspective.” “Once we demonstrate our technology on this flight,” he said of the upcoming Alpha launch, “the market is going to see what I see where we are relative to our competitors and be quite impressed.” This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have signed a new agreement outlining their roles investigating commercial space accidents. The agencies announced Sept. 9 that they signed a new memorandum of agreement , updating one signed 22 years ago. The agreement outlines the roles and responsibilities of the agencies in the event of a commercial spaceflight mishap Under the agreement, the NTSB will be the lead agency for investigating mishaps that involve a fatality or serious injury as well as those that involve damage to property outside the launch site “from debris that could reasonably be expected to cause death or serious injury.” The FAA will lead all other commercial spaceflight investigations. “So far in commercial space we’ve established a great safety record: 550 operations licensed, with none resulting in public death or injury, but we know we need to keep focusing on that safety record,” said Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of transportation, at a meeting of the National Space Council Sept. 9 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. She then announced the new agreement between the FAA and NTSB. “We are strengthening the interagency partnerships,” she said. The new agreement “clarifies each organization’s responsibilities investigating commercial launch and reentry safety events.” The new agreement comes after NTSB proposed new rules in November 2021 that would give it a larger role in investigating commercial spaceflight accidents. The commercial launch industry, as well as the FAA, opposed the proposal , saying the rules would duplicate the FAA’s existing work to investigate accidents. After members of the House Science Committee asked the White House to instruct the NTSB to withdraw the proposal, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said it was working with both the FAA and industry to address their concerns. She added that the board would use the comments it received to publish a supplemental proposal for public comment, rather than go directly to a final rule. “This agreement is proof that the federal government can keep pace with the exciting advances taking place in the private sector while also prioritizing safety as we enter a new space age,” Homendy said in a statement. “This agreement reflects our shared goal to ensure a safe, robust and vibrant U.S. commercial space industry,” said Billy Nolen, acting FAA administrator. “This will help us ensure that safety lessons learned move into the operation as quickly and seamlessly as possible.” The FAA also announced Sept. 9 that Kelvin Coleman, who has been serving as acting associate administrator for commercial space transportation since the retirement of Wayne Monteith in March, will take over the position on a permanent basis. Coleman has been with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST, in leadership roles for more than 25 years, most recently as deputy associate administrator. Coleman is highly regarded in the commercial space industry and his promotion won praise. “Kelvin is singularly qualified to lead the AST,” said Mike Gold, executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire Space and a former chair of AST’s advisory group, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). “He has been a long-time advocate for commercial growth and innovation while maintaining a strong focus on safety,” Gold added. “Kelvin will ensure that government and the private sector work together to benefit the U.S. and the world.”
TALLINN, Estonia — Chinese launch service provider Expace has secured $237 million in B round funding, following last week’s return to flight of its Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket. Expace, a subsidiary of giant state-owned missile and defense contractor China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), announced the funding round following a ceremony in Wuhan with local officials. The funding follows an A round of $180 million in 2017 and surpasses the $200 million raised by Galactic Energy earlier this year, the previous apparent largest funding round for a Chinese commercial launch vehicle maker. The development is part of a trend of Chinese state-owned entities developing a growing range of solid rockets. The pattern has been interpreted as a means to meet growing launch demands and contribute to the country’s wider strategy to boost its overall space capabilities . China opened portions of its space sector to private capital with a late 2014 government decision and has since been providing policy and other means of support to commercial companies. Chinese launch firms have attracted a number of significant funding rounds this year, including Space Pioneer, Orienspace , Space Trek and Deep Blue Aerospace . Expace says the funds will be used for research and development and improvement of its Kuaizhou solid launch vehicle series as well as developing key technologies for liquid propellant launchers, having previously announced it was developing a methane-liquid oxygen engine. The capital expansion project was approved in January and seven unnamed investors joined the round. The announcement comes days after the Kuaizhou-1A light-lift solid rocket returned to flight . The rocket suffered a failure in December 2021. The firm has sent 23 satellites into orbit on 13 successful Kuaizhou-1A flights since 2017. Two Kuaizhou-1A missions have ended in failure. The larger Kuaizhou-11 rocket remains grounded after the loss of its test flight in 2020. It is unknown whether an explosion at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in October 2021 was related to the rocket. Expace is part of CASIC’s plans to develop a number of commercial projects , including launch, constellations and reusable spaceplane (separate from another initiative led by main space contractor CASC). Expace activities are centered at the CASIC-led 68.8-square-kilometer Wuhan National Aerospace Industrial Base, which became fully operational in February 2021. It is said to be capable of assembling and testing 20 solid rockets and producing 240 small satellites each year. Expace Kuaizhou rockets are expected to launch an 80-satellite narrowband constellation named Xingyun. LEOBIT Technology, also based in the Wuhan cluster and owned by CASIC, will operate the constellation. CASIC previously stated plans to construct a broadband constellation named Hongyun. The expectation is that Hongyun and other, similar constellation plans have been subsumed by a national plan for a 13,000-satellite megaconstellation . Meanwhile ZeroG Lab, a Beijing-based developer of micro- and nanosatellites and components, recently raised $14.9 million to develop its Magpie (or Lingque) remote sensing constellation of up to 160 optical and radar satellites and continue to develop overseas business. Chinese commercial remote sensing developments could be closely watched in the near future, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the role of commercial remote sensing. The official newspaper of China’s military forces published a commentary in April noting that companies such as Maxar and Black Sky provided satellite imagery of Russian troop movements to Ukraine. The People’s Liberation Army Daily piece claims the U.S. has in recent years been “promoting the construction of so-called ‘space resilience’, attempting to blur the boundary between military and civilian spheres,” bringing commercial entities and the general public into the space arms race in order to strengthen its dominant position in space. As well as China building its Gaofen and Yaogan constellations, commercial remote sensing constellations are also being deployed. Jilin-1, being constructed by the Changchun-based Changguang Satellite Technology, a spinoff from an institute of the state-owned Chinese Academy of Sciences, now has 54 satellites on orbit following a May 4 launch. Commercial companies and public-private partnerships are also developing synthetic aperture radar constellations .
TAMPA, Fla. — Panasonic Avionics, one of the largest providers of satellite-enabled broadband to aircraft, said Oct. 18 it has reached a deal to sell low Earth orbit (LEO) connectivity services from OneWeb in the second half of 2023. The agreement enables Panasonic to resell standalone services from the British startup or pair it with the capacity it leases from satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). Panasonic helped pioneer the nascent inflight connectivity (IFC) market. It delivers services to more than 70 airlines via a GEO service covering 99.6% of the world’s flight routes. Adding LEO capabilities from OneWeb would enable pole-to-pole coverage with forward link speeds approaching 200 megabits per second (Mbps), according to Panasonic, and return link speeds up to 32 Mbps. Ben Griffin, OneWeb’s vice president for mobility services, said the deal enables the LEO operator to leverage Panasonic’s “reputation, expertise, and reach” to bring its network to airlines. The agreement also paves the way for OneWeb’s services to be integrated into existing in-flight entertainment systems that Panasonic provides for aircraft. OneWeb expects to resume its satellite launch campaign Oct. 22 following an eight-month delay after Russian Soyuz launches were embargoed over the war in Ukraine. The startup expects to deploy its remaining satellites over the next six months to reach global coverage before the end of 2023. Fast-evolving market Panasonic’s OneWeb tie-up has implications for Viasat’s planned takeover of U.K.-based Inmarsat. The U.K.’s competition watchdog launched an in-depth investigation into the deal Oct. 14 after highlighting its potential to harm IFC competition. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Viasat and Inmarsat are currently the strongest IFC players, and their combination could make it difficult for OneWeb, SpaceX’s Starlink, and other new entrants to build up market share. Although Panasonic currently has a high share of the IFC market, the CMA said the company’s share is shrinking because of its dependence on third-party satellite capacity “and airlines’ perception that it is expensive and offers old technology.” According to Viasat and Inmarsat, competition in the IFC market is already sky-high, and will be put into an even higher gear as these well-funded entrants gain traction. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA is proceeding with its next Artemis 1 launch attempt on Nov. 16 after concluding that loose caulk on the Orion spacecraft did not pose a significant risk. At a briefing late Nov. 14, NASA managers said they were continuing preparations for the launch, scheduled for 1:04 a.m. Eastern Nov. 16 at the start of a two-hour window. Weather forecasts project a 90% chance of acceptable conditions for the planned launch. The briefing took place after a mission management team meeting to discuss two remaining issues not resolved a day earlier. One involved an electrical connector for the hydrogen tail service mast umbilical on the launch platform, which showed transients when powered up. Technicians had changed out a cable in the system overnight. The second, and more serious, issue involved loose material called room temperature vulcanizing silicone, or RTV, on the Orion spacecraft. That material, a type of caulk, seals a gap between the Orion crew module and its launch abort system. About three meters of RTV came loose during Hurricane Nicole, raising concerns more could come off during flight. “We needed a little bit more time to review our flight rationale,” Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager, said at the briefing. “We agreed that the risk was bounded by current hazards.” He said that, with no ability to repair or remove the RTV material while the vehicle was at the pad, the agency said it accepted the risk that more material might come off during launch and hit other components of the vehicle. “We’re comfortable flying as-is,” he said. The concern is that more RTV could come off during a brief phase of flight, as the Space Launch System accelerates from Mach 2 to Mach 3.5. The atmospheric density is still high enough in that phase that any material that comes off would be slowed down, creating a stronger impact. The most likely part of the vehicle any material would hit in that scenario is the launch vehicle stage adapter, a conical section between the core and upper stages. That adapter is “a very robust piece of hardware,” Sarafin said, making it unlikely an impact would cause serious damage. Engineers also evaluated potential impacts on the core and upper stages and the interior portions of the boosters. “All of those were enveloped by other debris sources and other hazards and risks that we had,” he said. The RTV is installed to cover an aerodynamic gap between the Orion crew module and launch abort system. “You want a very smooth outer mold line so you don’t trip the boundary layer or cause acoustic noise issues and thermal heating,” said Jim Geffre, NASA Orion vehicle integration manager, in a Nov. 14 interview. “To seal that interface, we apply a thin skim coat of RTV all the way around.” Any loss of RTV doesn’t pose an aerodynamic issue for the vehicle, though, Sarafin said, based on aerodynamic modeling. “This was just a way to reduce the aerodynamic turbulence and flow in that particular area,” he said. NASA is still studying how the RTV came off during the storm, when it was subjected to only a fraction of the force it will experience during launch. “I think it’s a combination of the direction and the intensity for how long it lasted,” Geffre said. The portion of the RTV that came off was on the side that faced the brunt of the hurricane’s winds. Meanwhile, replacing the electrical cable did not resolve the issue with the connector for the hydrogen tail service mast umbilical, Sarafin said. “We’re still seeing some funnies on that particular umbilical,” he said, but the system has sufficient redundancies to not pose an issue. “We know we have redundancy in these other measurements and we are still OK to launch,” said Jeremy Parsons, NASA Exploration Ground Systems deputy program manager. “The unanimous recommendation from the team is that we were in a good position to go ahead and proceed with the launch countdown.” Sarafin and Parsons reported no other issues with the vehicle at the briefing. Parsons said the issue he’ll be watching the most closely in the countdown is the start of loading of liquid hydrogen into the core stage of the SLS, given the problems with leaks in the past. “I’ll probably breathe a sigh of relief” after that begins, he said. “I feel very confident in the procedures that we’ve worked, but that will be one of those things that will be a big milestone once we get into a steady state fill” of liquid hydrogen. “That’s something we’ll all be watching closely.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The European Space Agency has tasked an SES-led consortium to develop a satellite and begin operating it in 2024 to validate quantum key distribution (QKD) technology. The group of more than 20 European companies secured a contract for the Eagle-1 satellite that includes three years of missions in low Earth orbit, where they aim to transmit keys using the quantum properties of photons to encrypt communications on the ground. QKD is touted as the next big leap for delivering secure networks because any attempt to eavesdrop on the communication changes the state of the photons, destroying the keys. While quantum keys can be distributed terrestrially, the distance they can reliably travel via fiber optic cables at sufficient speeds is limited. Entering the quantum race Luxembourg-based SES said Sept. 22 that Eagle-1 will be the first sovereign European end-to-end space-based QKD system. In 2016, China launched a satellite called Micius that Chinese state media hailed as the world’s first quantum-enabled satellite. The Chinese government said in July that a smaller satellite designed in the country, by developers including the University of Science and Technology of China, had started operations in LEO for real-time QKD experiments. Singaporean startup SpeQtral is planning to deploy its first LEO QKD satellite in 2024, and Sept. 19 said it had signed a deal to use ground services from Europe’s Thales Alenia Space. Meanwhile, Virgin Orbit is slated to launch the first LEO satellites for British quantum technology encryption startup Arqit in 2023. ESA has a public-private partnership with Arqit and invested in its first satellite, which is being developed by a pan-European team including Austria, Belgium, Canada and the Czech Republic. The Eagle-1 project is co-funded by ESA under its Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) program, including contributions from Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. The European Commission is supporting Eagle-1 through Horizon Europe, a funding program for research and innovation. SES said Eagle-1 will also support efforts to develop Europe’s proposed sovereign broadband satellite network.
The Space Development Agency, a defense organization building a mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit, plans to start launching payloads this fall, and by 2024 as many as 176 spacecraft will be ready to go to orbit. SDA’s constellation will be launched by National Security Space Launch providers SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, and Space Force officials said they would be ready to support SDA launches. However, these will not be traditional NSSL missions that fly a large primary satellite and occasionally a smallsat rideshare payload. SDA’s smaller satellites are expected to launch in batches of between 14 to 21 spacecraft in a single rocket. The agency’s strategy to deploy a large constellation of small satellites for communications and missile-tracking is widely supported on Capitol Hill but lawmakers in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act draft bill raised concerns about the ability of the NSSL program to perform SDA’s rideshare launches on budget and on schedule. Specifically, the House Armed Services Committee suggested that DoD should hire a “common launch integrator” to help manage the integration of SDA’s satellites on NSSL rockets. With a growing number of launches and a demanding schedule set by SDA, the HASC said it’s unclear how the Space Force intends to “drive down cost, reduce risk, and ensure launch reliability and performance.” A common launch integrator would work with SDA, satellite manufacturers and launch providers to facilitate the integration of payloads with multiple launch vehicles, said the HASC. The committee asks the Space Force to report back on the “benefits, including cost and schedule, of using one consistent launch integration solution across all types of space and launch vehicles, and all plans to utilize a common launch integrator for current and future programs.” A spokesperson for SDA said the agency could not comment on pending legislation. “We are prepared to support U.S. Space Force efforts to provide the required briefing regarding the impacts of a common launch integrator, if and when the bill is enacted,” the spokesperson told SpaceNews. The HASC suggested DoD could use the existing U.S. Space Force Launch Manifest Systems Integrator (LMSI) contract to handle the SDA payload integration workload. The current LMSI contractor, Parsons Corp ., advocated for the HASC language. The engineering and infrastructure firm in 2019 won a $94 million five-year contract to integrate small satellites as secondary payloads on NSSL or civil space missions. The company operates a smallsat integration facility in Torrance, California. The LMSI contract would be up for recompete in 2024, around the time when SDA expects to be ramping up launches and the Space Force would be in the process of selecting launch providers for the next NSSL contract. Space Force officials said they might consider working with more than two launch companies. Richard Waterman, Parsons’ vice president of payload integration and operations, said the HASC proposal is trying to address the problem of how to make launch operations more efficient as more satellite manufacturers and possibly more launch providers enter the national security market. For missions with multiple payloads like SDA’s, “getting everything lined up and ready to launch on time is like herding cats, because you have to bring satellite programs that are each on very different schedules,” Waterman told SpaceNews . SDA and the Space Force would benefit from having an integrator to “sync everything up and get all of those systems onto a single launch which is a bit of a challenge,” he said. For example, if SDA were trying to launch a batch of 21 satellites and some were late, the integrator could work with vendors to move up other satellites that are ready to go and book the stragglers on later launches. “With an integrator, you can bring all of that together and ensure vendors’ proprietary information is not shared with competitors,” said Waterman. Based on SDA’s projections, when it starts deploying its Transport Layer Tranche 1 and Tracking Layer Tranche 1 in 2024 and 2025, over the course of a year there would be at least one launch per month, said Waterman. For the NSSL program, “that’s not an easy feat.” An SDA official, meanwhile, said the agency prefers to have flexible options for launch and would not necessarily favor universal use of a common launch integrator. An integrator would make sense in some scenarios when multiple satellites with different hosted payloads have to be launched simultaneously, the official said, but it would not be as helpful for launches of Transport Layer satellites that are pretty standardized. In fact, the official said, SDA’s own internal analysis determined that using an integrator for Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 launches would increase costs and impact launch readiness timelines. The official said that if a launch integrator were needed, it would be sought in a “full and open competition” as in all other SDA activities. 
TAMPA, Fla. — British cybersecurity software developer Arqit is looking to sell a partly built satellite after scrapping plans for a space-based quantum encryption network. Arqit said Dec. 14 it no longer needs satellites to deliver encryption keys that can resist attacks from quantum computers. Instead, the company said it has developed a terrestrial distribution method that enables symmetric key cryptography without the risk and costs of building out a quantum communications network in space. “The security of encryption keys created on the end points [such as customer devices and data centers] using our lightweight software agent is as strong with a terrestrial method as with the satellite method,” Arqit founder and CEO David Williams said during the company’s Dec. 14 earnings call. The decision does not affect the construction of a satellite that Qinetiq is currently building under a contract partly funded by the European Space Agency. SEC probe The strategy pivot came as Arqit disclosed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating its merger with Centricus Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that catapulted the startup to the NASDAQ stock exchange in September 2021. Arqit said in a regulatory filing that it is cooperating with the investigation, including by voluntarily producing documents. “The SEC has informed Arqit that this is a fact-finding inquiry,” the company said without providing additional details. Arqit recorded revenue for its fiscal year to the end of September that is lower than it projected in August 2021, during an investor presentation a month before the SPAC merger to attract investor interest. The company launched commercial operations this year and recorded $7.2 million in revenue for its fiscal year 2022, or $20 million when including other income, including funds from ESA. In the August 2021 presentation, Arqit said it expected to generate $14 million in revenue for the 2021 calendar year, and $32 million in 2022. The company’s ESA contract was recently reclassified as other income in Arqit’s accounts, instead of revenue, partly because the company does not consider this work to be its primary output. Arqit said in a regulatory filing that it is also aware of a putative class action lawsuit against the company, filed in early May, which alleges “materially false and misleading statements relating to Arqit’s business prospects and projections.” While Arqit said it has not been served the complaint, and has no knowledge about whether the lawsuit will proceed, it “intends to vigorously defend against these claims” if necessary. SPACs offer companies a fast-track to the public markets without the level of due diligence that accompanies traditional stock market listings, enabling them to make optimistic growth projections to garner investor support. The popularity of SPACs among space and other companies has been declining amid stricter regulations, weakening economic conditions, and the poor stock performance of post-SPAC companies. Arqit’s satellite pivot Arqit said there is still demand for quantum encryption satellites, including from government defense departments looking to avoid sending data traffic across international cables. Instead of building its own satellites, Arqit intends to license the technology it has developed for them to other organizations. There are discussions with “a number of potential customers” to buy the satellite that is currently under construction, according to Arqit, and for licenses to use its quantum satellite intellectual property. Arqit had previously lined up Virgin Orbit, which had invested in the company’s SPAC deal, to launch the satellite in 2023. “Through innovation we have simplified our technology and removed significant future capital expenditures,” Williams added. Arqit recently announced customer contracts with cybersecurity firm Fortinet, computer developer Dell Technologies, and cloud giant Amazon Web Services to use its security software. The company’s shares closed at $5.15 Dec. 14, down 17% from the day before, after falling from a high of $37.41 in December 2021.
The White House on Oct. 12 released a long-delayed national security strategy that lays out challenges the United States faces in a tripolar world, with China and Russia as the nation’s key competitors. President Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan said the United States is entering a “decisive decade” of strategic competition with major powers. At the same time, the U.S. will need to work closely with allies to address transnational challenges like climate change, food insecurity, pandemics, terrorism, energy shortages and inflation. “We will leverage all elements of our national power to outcompete our strategic competitors; tackle shared challenges; and shape the rules of the road,” the strategy says. With regard to outer space and its role in national security, Biden’s strategy takes a less combative tone than the former Trump administration’s strategy released in 2017 . “Space exploration and use benefits humanity, from creating economic opportunities to developing new technologies and enabling climate surveillance,” Biden’s strategy says. “America will maintain our position as the world’s leader in space and work alongside the international community to ensure the domain’s sustainability, safety, stability, and security. We must lead in updating outer space governance, establishing a space traffic coordination system and charting a path for future space norms and arms control. “Working with allies and partners, we will develop policies and regulations that enable the burgeoning U.S. commercial space sector to compete internationally. We will enhance the resilience of U.S. space systems that we rely on for critical national and homeland security functions. These efforts aim to protect U.S. interests in space, avoid destabilizing arms races, and responsibly steward the space environment,” the document states. By contrast, the Trump strategy emphasized the role of space as a domain of warfare. It stated that “any harmful interference with or an attack upon critical components of our space architecture that directly affects this vital U.S. interest will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner, and domain of our choosing.” U.S. national security strategies are mandated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. They are written by each presidential administration to communicate its priorities to Congress. The National Security Strategy in turn informs the Defense Department’s National Defense Strategy and more detailed DoD-led reviews on the nation’s nuclear posture and on missile defense. The Biden administration had planned to release its National Security Strategy in the spring but the document had to be revised in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sullivan told reporters Oct. 12.
TAMPA, Fla. — Spire Global said July 20 it plans to improve its weather forecast services by fitting future smallsats in its fleet with microwave sounders from RAL Space, the British government’s national laboratory. RAL Space’s Hyperspectral Microwave Sounder (HYMS) instrument would enable Spire to measure atmospheric moisture for the first time, Spire spokesperson Kristina Spychalski said. Spire’s constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites currently uses radio occultation and reflectometry to collect atmospheric, surface and space weather data. Radio occultation instruments can measure atmospheric temperature, humidity and pressure. Spire uses reflectometry sensors for data on soil moisture, ocean winds and sea ice. Adding HYMS to future satellites would provide meteorological agencies that use Spire’s space-based data “ with the inputs needed to deliver even more accurate forecasts, ” said Kevin Petty, vice president of weather and Earth intelligence at Spire. Spychalski said a demonstration mission using a Spire satellite the size of 16 cubesats will take place “by late 2023 to early 2024,” and will fly HYMS in space for the first time. According to RAL Space, the shoebox-size HYMS offers up to four times more frequency resolution than much larger sounders flying on government-operated weather satellites. “The HYMS technology we’ve created is more advanced than anything that is currently on the market, and it is extremely exciting to be able to offer its use to industry for space applications,” said Peter Huggard, Millimetre Wave Technology Group Leader at RAL Space. “The improved spectral resolution of our HYMS instrument will provide better atmospheric information for weather forecasting and, when deployed in a constellation of small satellites, a much-reduced interval between measurements.” Boston-based startup Tomorrow.io announced plans in March to add satellites with microwave sounders to the weather constellation it expects to have deployed in orbit by the end of 2024. Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews July 20 that the company is working with U.S. government-funded MIT Lincoln Laboratory on a microwave sounder. The instrument will be an improved version of a payload used by NASA’s tropical storm-monitoring TROPICS cubesat constellation , or Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats. A pathfinder satellite for TROPICS was successfully launched last year. However, the first two cubesats for the TROPICS constellation failed to reach orbit June 12 after the upper stage of Astra’s Rocket 3.3 vehicle shut down prematurely. The launch was one of three NASA had booked from Astra to complete the constellation, which can still meet its science goals with four satellites. Astra is reviewing the failure. Goffer said Tomorrow.io selected MIT Lincoln Laboratory after a comprehensive study of sounder technologies primarily because of TROPICS’ higher technology maturation level. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
China launched eight classified remote sensing satellites across three launches in recent days, adding to the country’s development of reconnaissance capabilities. A Long March 6 kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, north China, at 7:50 p.m. Eastern on Sept. 26, carrying the Shiyan-16A and B, and Shiyan-17 satellites into orbit. Launch success was confirmed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) within the hour. No images of the satellites were made available and were stated to be mainly used for purposes including “land survey, urban planning and disaster prevention and mitigation.” A China Aerospace Studies Institute analysis published earlier this year suggests that Shiyan satellites play a role in the early stages in the development process of new space systems, including remote sensing. Just over 48 hours before the Long March 6 launch, a Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket operated by Expace, a commercial spinoff from the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), lifted off from Taiyuan at 6:55 p.m. Eastern Sept. 24, carrying the Shiyan-14 and Shiyan-15 satellites. The Shiyan satellites were again stated to be “mainly used for land survey, urban planning and disaster prevention and mitigation,” according to Chinese press reports. The Kuaizhou-1A is capable of carrying 200 kilograms of payload into a 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) and now launches from all three of China’s inland national spaceports. The first launch took place in January 2017 and the rocket has now flown four successful flights since June, when it made a return-to-flight after suffering its second launch failure in December 2021. The Kuaizhou-1A has yet to resume launches of spacecraft for a 80-satellite narrowband constellation named Xingyun for LEOBIT Technology, another entity owned by CASIC. Expace is developing a series of larger solid rockets and raised $237 million in June. In between the above launches, at Xichang spaceport in southwest China, a Long March 2D hypergolic rocket launched a trio of classified Yaogan-36 satellites, lifting off at 7:38 a.m. Eastern Sept. 26 (1338 UTC). Neither CASC nor state media provided a description of the satellites in their releases. Yaogan means “remote sensing” and generally receive generic descriptions in Chinese reports. Western analysts believe the overall Yaogan satellite series to be designed to provide a comprehensive military surveillance system, made of optical, radar and electronic reconnaissance capabilities. Yaogan-36 A and B were made by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) in Beijing while the third satellite, C, was provided by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). China has already launched a number of groups of Yaogan-35 series satellites, with each set of triplets in orbits of roughly 500 by 495 kilometers with an inclination of 35 degrees, providing frequent revisits over areas of interest. Prior to the above launches, China launched a Long March 2D rocket at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. The rocket lifted off at 7:15 p.m. Eastern September 20 (2315 UTC) sending the Yunhai 1-03 satellite into a 775 x 780-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. Chinese state media reported that the satellite is “tasked with surveying atmospheric, marine and space environments, providing data to support disaster prevention and mitigation efforts, and carrying out scientific experiments.” Yunhai series satellites are considered to be military meteorological satellites by some Western analysts. The latest mission on Sept. 26 marked China’s 42nd launch of 2022. CASC is planning more than 50 launches across 2022 and is expected to launch the third and final Tiangong space station module next month. Chinese companies including Expace, Galactic Energy, Landspace , iSpace and CAS Space are also conducting their own launches during the year.
The successful launch of the Artemis 1 mission comes just in time for the European Space Agency as it seeks support from its member states for new exploration initiatives. ESA supplied the service module on the Orion spacecraft that provides power, propulsion and other services. That service module has been performing well since launch ahead of a critical maneuver, the Outbound Powered Flyby, by the service module’s main engine scheduled for early Nov. 21. “The propulsion system will be one of the subsystems that we will have a close eye on,” said Philippe Deloo, European Service Module program manager at ESA, during a pre-launch interview at the Kennedy Space Center. Of concern, he said, were valves that were not working exactly as desired, but he said engineers had developed a workaround that should allow the propulsion system to perform as required. The European Service Module (ESM) on Artemis 1 is the first of six ESA has currently agreed to provide, with Airbus Defence and Space serving as the prime contractor. ESM-2 was delivered to KSC last year, with ESM-3 and -4 under construction at an Airbus facility in Bremen, Germany. “The efficiencies are much better” on the later service modules, Deloo said, with a series of improvements in each one produced. “The team has gotten into a routine where they process things much faster, but there are still a number of things to resolve and to improve.” There will be more changes to the ESM with ESM-4, which will be used on the Artemis 4 mission. That is the first to launch on the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, whose additional performance will enable Orion to deliver co-manifested payloads, like lunar Gateway modules. Deloo said those modifications include changing the angle of reaction control system thrusters to accommodate the additional mass when Orion is docked to those co-manifested payloads while avoiding thruster plumes hitting the service module’s solar arrays. He said ESA’s goal is to get into routine production of the service modules starting with ESM-4, with a goal of producing one service module a year to match the cadence of later Artemis missions. “We’re not there yet, but that is eventually the goal we will reach starting with ESM-4 onwards.” At the ESA ministerial council meeting in Paris Nov. 22-23, the agency will seek approval from its member states for three more service modules, ESM-7 through -9. “My target is to place a contract with industry next year” for those three service modules, he said. The successful Artemis 1 launch is good timing for the ministerial, where ESA will request funding for other exploration initiatives, such as a lunar cargo lander and a lunar communications and navigation network. “It would be a tremendous signal that, yes, we are going and we have a viable program,” Deloo said. “That’s want the ministers want to see.” ESA released Nov. 15 the results of a poll of residents of ESA member states conducted by Harris Interactive. The poll found that climate change, exploration and space science, and space debris were top priorities Europeans had for the space agency. “I’ve been quite encouraged with what I saw,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said in an online briefing about the poll results, noting they were in line with the agency’s priorities going into the ministerial meeting. “I’m very reassured that what we hear from the population is fully in line with our overarching strategy of ESA but also the ministerial conference.” That includes exploration and space science, which was second only to climate change in the poll results. “I’m quite happy to see that,” he said, “because there is a strong package for the ministerial.”
China has laid out its pathway for robotic and crewed lunar and deep space exploration, with a number of missions building towards a permanent moon base. Three upcoming robotic missions will set in place landers, orbiters, relay satellites and test key technologies needed to begin construction of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s. While China is now planning a short-term crewed lunar landing mission before the end of the decade, ILRS will initially be a robotic base that will be permanently habitable after 2035. China is currently working towards launch of the Chang’e-6, 7 and 8 mission in the coming years to set the stage of the larger moon base initiative, senior space official Wu Weiren told China Central Television (CCTV) after the conclusion of the four-day United Nations/China Global Partnership Workshop on Space Exploration and Innovation in Haikou on the island province of Hainan on Nov. 24. Chang’e-6, a backup to the successful 2020 Chang’e-5 lunar sample return, will attempt to collect up to two kilograms of material from the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the lunar far side in 2026. The landing is expected to take place at a similar latitude to the 2019 Chang’e-4 landing in Von Karman crater due to engineering constraints. A new lunar relay satellite will also be launched to facilitate communications with missions targeting the vicinity of the south pole of the moon. Chang’e-7 will launch around 2026 and consist of an orbiter, lander, rover and “mini flying detector,” to study the lunar topography, material composition and environment, with the latter spacecraft to look for the presence of water-ice. The mission will aim to investigate permanently shadowed areas at the lunar south pole and both the U.S. and China have overlapping target landing areas in the region. “We hope that Chang’e-7 will use its hopping detector to investigate one or two of those craters and find out whether there is any water inside,” Wu said. Chang’e-8, currently scheduled for launch around 2028, will be an in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission. The infrastructure launched as part of these missions will serve as a basis to support the larger ILRS initiative. China is also now working towards a crewed lunar landing before 2030. The mission would use two launches of an under-development new generation crew launch vehicle to send three astronauts to the moon, seeing two of them set down on the surface for around six hours. The requisite spacecraft and lunar lander are in development. ILRS will see five launches across the early 2030s to put in place n-orbit and surface infrastructure for energy, communications, in-situ resource utilization and other technologies. These missions will require the lifting capability of the planned Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket, which officials recently announced has undergone changes in its design to make it reusable. Earlier plans would see the Long March 9 rocket be expendable. The South China Morning Post also reported that Wu stated China was working on a “new system that uses nuclear energy to address the moon station’s long-term, high-power energy demands.” Wu has been a strong advocate of such technologies to fuel space exploration, including missions to the edges of the solar system . In August a megawatt-level reactor designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences passed a key review . Unveiled in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2021, the plan envisions five missions named ILRS-1 through 5 focusing respectively on energy and communications, research and exploration facilities, in-situ resource utilization, general technologies and astronomy capabilities. “We prepare to work with other countries to build the International Lunar Research Station and appeal to them to join hands with us in conducting the designing and surveying and the subsequent scientific data sharing…. We hope to finish building the ILRS by 2035 and we also hope it will grow to be a national mega science project,” Wu said. China’s current partner for the endeavor is Russia, which pledges to integrate its planned Luna missions into the initiative as well as contribute with super heavy-lift launcher missions. China declared its openness to international partnerships for ILRS and deep space missions at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris in September, but Russia was not mentioned in the plans . The omission of China’s main partner was likely due to sensitivity to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the situation poses a dilemma for China in its attempt to broaden its cooperation. Wu also reiterated China’s plans for a near Earth asteroid sample return mission, Mars sample return , sending twin probes to opposite ends of the heliosphere, a mission targeting Jupiter and Uranus, and a planetary defense test. The latter asteroid deflection mission will include both a survey spacecraft and an impactor, Wu said, targeting an object with a diameter of about 30 meters, earlier revealed as 2020 PN1 . Wu also hinted at even grander plans. “In the next 15 years, I think we should start preparations for sending human beings to Mars and we should leave Chinese people’s footprints on the moon,” Wu said.
LOGAN, Utah — Benchmark Space Systems announced plans Aug. 8 to acquire Alameda Applied Science Corp.’s electric propulsion technologies, and to begin offering customers hybrid chemical-electric propulsion systems. Hybrid propulsion eliminates “the need for satellite operators and end users to compromise between speed and endurance,” Chris Carella, Benchmark executive vice president of business development and strategy, told SpaceNews . The Burlington, Vermont, company intends to offer hybrid systems that are “not only cost competitive, but also increase return on investment and capability,” he added. After determining that many customers would benefit from a hybrid propulsion system, Benchmark, a company that is rapidly expanding its chemical propulsion manufacturing line, conducted an extensive review of millinewton-class electric propulsion technologies. “The metal plasma thruster technology by AASC was compelling and differentiated enough in its class where we decided to acquire the technology,” Carella said. AASC Xantus thrusters, which are scheduled to be demonstrated in space later this year, are “deceptively simple,” said AASC President Mahadevan Krishnan. “You take a 45 volt capacitor, put it in a box with a chunk of metal and the metal spits out plasma at 10 miles a second and propels the spacecraft.” Benchmark intends to pair its own Halcyon high-test peroxide thrusters with Xantus thrusters in a turnkey propulsion system. In the near term, satellites weighing 50 to 200 kilograms will benefit from Benchmark’s new hybrid propulsion systems, Carella said. Millinewton thrusters already serve the needs of cubesats. For microsatellites and ESPA-class satellites, electric propulsion can take over “all of the things that chemical propulsion doesn’t do well,” Carella said. For example, chemical thrusters could rapidly move satellites into their optimal orbits before electric thrusters take over station-keeping. Adding electric propulsion also promises to reduce volume and mass compared with chemical propulsion alone, Carella said. “We’re downsizing what would be a chemical propellant-only system by putting in this lightweight, miniature cruise control functionality,” he added. AASC’s metal plasma thrusters have undergone extensive ground testing and have been integrated in a weather satellite Orion Space is scheduled to launch later this year under a U.S. Space Force contract. If the weather satellite demonstration is successful, AACS anticipates strong demand for the thrusters, which it would not be able to meet without Benchmark’s help. If a customer wants 50 or 100 of these thrusters, Krishnan said he will give the customer Benchmark’s number. “As a small business, I wouldn’t even be credible to many customers if they were serious about putting a constellation of 300 satellites and they needed 600 engines to begin with and a refresh rate of 100 engines every six months,” Krishnan said. As part of the acquisition agreement, Benchmark is gaining AASC intellectual property associated with the metal plasma thruster, emerging technologies in metal plasma physics, one AASC employee who will head Benchmark’s electric propulsion line and a portion of Krishnan’s time. Someday, metal plasma thrusters could run on metal discarded in space. “Any metal can be used as a propellant,” said Krishnan. “You can eventually think of covering an entire spacecraft with these. As it goes further into deep space, it consumes itself, leaving behind just your payload when you get to wherever you’re going.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — As soon as he finished his keynote at the Satellite Innovation conference here, Robert Lightfoot was surrounded by entrepreneurs responding to his invitation to explore partnerships. “Our customers are asking us to move with urgency,” said Lightfoot, who spent 29 years at NASA, rising to the rank of acting administrator, before joining Lockheed Martin Jan. 1 to lead the Space Division. “That means I can’t do everything myself anymore. I’ve got the capability. I just don’t have the time.” Lightfoot told the audience of entrepreneurs and investors about Lockheed Martin Ventures, a fund the company recently doubled from $200 million to $400 million. About a third of the fund’s venture capital goes to space companies. “We see an opportunity there and we’re not just looking at the technical piece,” Lightfoot said. “We’re looking at your business models and how we can invest.” Lockheed Martin Ventures already backs launch vehicle developer ABL Space Systems, communications startup Hedron, Orbit Fab space-based fuel depots, Earth observation company SatelliteVu, satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital, and Xona, a startup focused on secure position, navigation and timing. After the Oct. 12 keynote, Lightfoot spoke with SpaceNews . Why did you decide to attend this conference? It looked like a great opportunity to get connected with some new players in our industry, and to show that we’re here and we want to partner with them going forward. I think a lot of the folks that are here are going to help us solve some of our biggest challenges that we have as a nation, not just as Lockheed Martin, but as a nation. We’d like them to solve those with us. Is the urgency you mentioned coming from your customers? Yes. But it’s coming from me, too. Part of my real objective as executive vice president is to remind people that every day matters. That’s what I mean by urgency. When you look at some of the missions we do, it may take three years to build a spacecraft. In month one, that three years looks a long way away. But everybody has to be engaged. Not just the engineering team and the business team, but the contracts team. You spoke a lot about partnerships and mentioned Terran Orbital . It’s a good example of us bringing our strengths to help them and them bringing their capabilities to help us. Sometimes, it’s hard to strike that balance. Recently, I was talking to a CEO of a much larger company with a lot of small suppliers and partners, new entrants in their world. The comment that the CEO made was, “It’s my job to make sure my team doesn’t bruise them, that they bruise us.” I thought that was a perfect example of that balance we have to strike. Years ago, companies worried about being crushed by partnership with aerospace giants. The strategy that I’m forming is: let’s let them be successful. Don’t take away their advantage. Embrace it, leverage it and feed it so that they can then help us in their own independent way. It’s the way of the future and it’s the way of now. You are going to see it accelerate. In your keynote, you talked about Lockheed Martin offering services. Today, our model is we get a big procurement, we go in and we build that. The question becomes, can we build it ourselves and then offer the data, the intelligence? An example is lunar infrastructure. We build communication satellites. Let’s put it up there and anybody that’s going to the moon can use our satellite and pay by the drink. Instead of making someone pay up front, we build it ourselves and then sell it as a service over time. It is a totally different model for Lockheed. Martin, but I think it leverages our capabilities in the best way possible. It would require significant upfront investment, not the company’s traditional model. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not going to do that everywhere, obviously, but we think it’s right for us to at least see what we can do in that area. You also discussed plans to fly the LM 400 satellite as part of a technology demonstration strategy. Is the strategy aimed at providing heritage for spacecraft systems? Well, it’s two things. The first thing is to inject that speed in my own team. We’re going to do these every year. The second is to be able to tell the customer that this core model has flown. One of their big concerns is technical maturity. If I walk in with something that hadn’t flown yet, the customer says, “I’m taking some technical risks.” If I walk in and say it’s flying, the core is flying, I believe they will look at that as a reduction of risks. Not all our tech demos are going to fly. But it’s all about advancing that the technology readiness level of the capability. Is your approach to international partnerships changing? A lot of the international partners are looking at what they can do in space. They’re saying to us, “You build these systems for the U.S. Can you build them for us?” In some cases, they’re looking for sovereign or indigenous capability in their countries. If we help an allied country develop that capability, they can be a supplier back to us. When we talk about supply chain challenges, the more suppliers we can have for things, the better off we are. It’s a longer term strategy. I’m going to help them with their near-term problem. But in return, hopefully, they will help me by being a supplier. A perfect example of that is U.K. space launch. We’re helping them with their first launch from the ground. We work with ABL. ABL is going to be launching from the Shetlands. It’s an exciting time. You start with launch and you work your way back to working on payloads. Then you get back all the way to the universities, where you now have a pipeline for kids who come out of the universities in these countries. They can go into space and they don’t have to leave their countries.
NASA is continuing to work with Roscosmos on a seat barter agreement despite missing a self-imposed deadline last month to complete a deal in time to allow exchanges on missions launching this fall. In April, NASA International Space Station officials said they needed to have an agreement between NASA and Roscosmos finalized by late June in order to have a Russian cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, fly on the Crew-5 Crew Dragon mission in early September and an American astronaut, likely Frank Rubio, fly on the Soyuz MS-22 mission launching later in September. While the Russian government gave its approval June 10 to allow Roscosmos to complete an agreement with NASA on exchanging seats, neither agency has confirmed that agreement is in place or finalized crew assignments for the two missions launching in September. “NASA continues working toward an agreement with Roscosmos whereby we would routinely fly integrated crews to the International Space Station aboard Soyuz and the commercial crew spacecraft,” NASA spokesperson Josh Finch told SpaceNews July 1. The agencies appear to be preserving the possibility of exchanging seats on the two September missions. Roscosmos announced June 25 that Kikina was going to the United States for additional training, including fitting for a Crew Dragon pressure suit. The statement said that Kikina was still being considered for the Crew-5 mission, which Roscosmos said is scheduled for launch Sept. 1. NASA has not announced a launch date for the mission. NASA has long worked to secure a seat barter agreement with Roscosmos to enable “mixed crews” so that there is at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut on the station should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be grounded for an extended period. That advocacy has continued even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine strained relations between Russia and the other ISS partners. “We are proceeding on the seat swap,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 in a joint press conference with Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, citing the interdependence between the U.S. and Russian segments of the station. “Therefore, we will proceed on that basis.” He did not give a schedule for completing an agreement for a seat swap. NASA astronauts, meanwhile, have been training for potential Soyuz flights to the ISS. The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center released June 29 images from recent training for emergency water landings of Soyuz spacecraft . Among those participating in the training was NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, who was identified as being part of the Expedition 70 crew.
NASA is ready to resume spacewalks outside the International Space Station after completing an investigation of water found in a spacesuit during a spacewalk earlier this year. The agency said Oct. 18 it expected to resume spacewalks at the station in mid-November after tracking down the source of a thin layer of water that pooled on the visor of European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer at the end of a March 23 spacewalk. NASA station managers said in May that they were “no-go” for routine spacewalks while they investigated the incident. That investigation, which included returning the spacesuit Maurer wore to Earth for analysis on a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft in August, concluded there was no specific hardware flaw with the suit itself. Instead, NASA blamed “integrated system performance where several variables such as crew exertion and crew cooling settings led to the generation of comparatively larger than normal amounts of condensation within the system.” NASA says that, in response, it has updated procedures and developed “new mitigation hardware” to minimize water accumulation and to absorb any water that does accumulate in the helmet. With those measures, NASA says spacewalks can resume on the station. “I’m proud of the space station and ground teams’ work to keep our crew members safe, for taking the time necessary to close out the investigation, and for continually findings ways to mitigate risks in human spaceflight,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said in a statement. The pause in spacewalks had little effect on ISS operations. NASA did not have any spacewalks planned until late this year, when three are scheduled to install a new set of solar arrays on the station. The prohibition on routine spacewalks did not apply to any “contingency” spacewalks that might have been needed for repairs, with NASA station officials saying in May that they would weigh the risk of not doing the repair versus the risk of having another spacesuit issue. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said at a briefing in August that the first of the three spacewalks would install support hardware for a later set of solar arrays. That would be followed by two spacewalks to install roll-out solar arrays like those installed during a series of spacewalks in June 2021. The solar arrays to be installed on those spacewalks will be delivered to the station on the SpaceX CRS-26 cargo mission scheduled for launch no earlier than mid-November. The suit incident highlighted concerns about the condition of the aging suits used for ISS spacewalks. NASA awarded contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in June to provide spacesuits to NASA for both ISS and Artemis lunar missions. NASA plans to effectively rent the suits from the companies, rather than own them, allowing the companies to offer the suits to other customers. NASA announced Sept. 7 it awarded a task order to Axiom Space for development of spacesuits for Artemis missions . It has not yet awarded a task order for suits needed for ISS spacewalks.
PARIS – Satlantis, a Spanish Earth-observation technology company, signed a contract Sept. 14 to buy two multispectral satellites from OHB Sweden. Satlantis will supply the instrument, a sensor to gather optical and infrared imagery with a resolution of 80 centimeters per pixel, for OHB’s InnoSat platform. The satellites are expected to weigh less than 150 kilograms and launch in 2024. Methane detection will be an important application for the imagery, according to a Sept. 15 news release. Satlantis, founded in 2013, designs and manufactures Earth-observation payloads for small satellites. The company is based at the University of the Basque Country Science Park. A sister company, Satlantis LLC, is located at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Innovation Hub. The OHB satellites will fly Satlantis’ seventh flight mission. “OHB Sweden has provided the right agility and capabilities that complement our camera capabilities,” Satlantis CEO Juan T. Hernani, said in a statement. OHB Sweden, part of the OHB AG Group, is known for satellites and spacecraft subsystems. The InnoSat bus is designed to accommodate Earth-observation, communications and scientific missions in the 40- to 200-kilogram range. “This is the fifth application of our InnoSat platform, and the demonstration of the versatility and competitiveness of our product,” Benoit Mathieu, OHB Sweden managing director, said in statement. “Our InnoSat satellite platform combines the reliability and robustness of design, based on our 30 years of heritage. The combination with the Satlantis camera technology is the right sweet spot for the most competitive sub-metric and [shortwave infrared] solution for EO based on microsatellites.”
Exotrail, a French company developing orbital transfer vehicles, has signed a contract with German launch vehicle developer Isar Aerospace for multiple launches over the next several years. The companies announced Nov. 3 they signed a launch services agreement to launch Exotrail’s spacevan vehicle on Isar’s Spectrum rocket on multiple missions between 2024 and 2029. The launches will take place from Andøya, Norway, and Kourou, French Guiana. The companies did not disclose a specific number of launches or the value of the agreement. Exotrail will use the launches for a service it calls spacedrop for delivering smallsats to their desired orbits. That uses the spacevan orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) the company is developing, which in turn uses electric propulsion systems and software the company currently offers to other customers. “The contract with Isar Aerospace enables us to consolidate our spacedrop service by offering more launch opportunities to customers looking for bespoke and competitive access to LEO and GEO orbits,” Jean-Luc Maria, chief executive of Exotrail, said in a statement. Exotrail has primarily been known for its work on electric propulsion systems. That included an agreement announced in September with Airbus to provide Exotrail thrusters for future Airbus Earth observation satellites. A service like spacedrop, though, has long been part of the company’s plans. “When we started in 2017, we did so as a logistics company,” said David Henri, chief product officer of Exotrail, in an interview in September during World Satellite Business Week. “People know us mostly for propulsion, but we’ve been doing more than that from the beginning.” He said Exotrail sets itself apart from others developing orbital transfer vehicles because of its in-house development of electric propulsion. That translates into increased payload capacity and performance, including the ability to perform larger orbital plane changes that would be desirable for customers deploying a satellite constellation. “The market wants plane changes and access to GEO. Today, that’s where we see the big interest in OTVs,” he said. “I do not see how to close a business case for an OTV using chemical propulsion.” Henri argued transfer vehicles like spacevan are needed even with the proliferation of small launch vehicles that offer the promise of dedicated launches. That’s particularly true, he said, of companies working on relatively small constellations that might require launching 100 kilograms of satellites at a time. “Buying 100 kilograms on a one-ton-class microlauncher is not enough to secure your destination,” he said. “You will be considered a rideshare customer.” Isar’s Spectrum, which is in that one-ton class of small launch vehicles, is under development and scheduled to make its first launch in 2023. “Exotrail is one of the leading European NewSpace companies. We are delighted to welcome them on board Spectrum’s flights,” Daniel Metzler, chief executive of Isar Aerospace, said in a statement. “We are proud to further expand our launch manifest.” Exotrail is not the first OTV developer to sign a launch agreement with Isar. In June, D-Orbit, an Italian space logistics company, announced it booked a Spectrum launch for its ION Satellite Carrier vehicle scheduled to take place as soon as 2023.
PARIS – Euroconsult expects satellite communications services revenues to reach $1.2 trillion over the next decade, as growth in data services offsets declines in the video market. “The total share of data in satcom services revenue is expected to grow from 15 percent to 42 percent by 2031,” Nathan de Ruiter, Euroconsult Canada managing director, said during the first day of the World Satellite Business Week conference here. In the United States, customers are continuing to turn away from traditional direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television subscriptions. While that service is still growing in some African and Asia-Pacific markets, the subscriptions are not as lucrative on a per-customer basis. “To replace one single DTH customer in the U.S. you need to sign up 20 new DTH customers in India,” de Ruiter said. “The good news is all the other market segments are expected to see strong growth in end-user adoption, from consumer broadband to the mobility markets.” Euroconsult sees the potential for emerging services, including satellite-to-cellphone and autonomous vehicles, to generate additional revenues. Those services will be made possible, in part, from dramatic changes in satellite communications infrastructure both in space and on the ground. “We see clear investments into the multi-orbit software-defined networks that have to be fully integrated into the 5G world,” de Ruiter said. After years investment and technical innovation, software-defined satellites are becoming the norm, accounting for more than 70 percent of recent geostationary satellite orders. Euroconsult expects the next generation of broadband satellites to include some software-defined features. Satellite communications companies are preparing for the integration of satellites with terrestrial 5G networks by forming alliances with cloud-service providers and creating industry standards. At a time of dramatic change in the satellite communications market, Euroconsult expects companies to expand revenues by introducing new services, attracting additional customers for existing services and cutting costs. “There is so much room for growth,” de Ruiter said. “Only 10 percent of the universal broadband access market is currently penetrated by satellite and below 20 percent of the addressable mobility market is currently captured by satellite.” Reducing the cost of satellite communications services is one way to attract new customers. The quest for savings is likely to spur further consolidation. On the satellite manufacturing side, Euroconsult expects “large incumbents to acquire new entrants and component suppliers to better control the supply chain,” de Ruiter said. Consolidation already is underway among satellite fleet operators and service providers. Viasat is buying Inmarsat . Eutelsat is merging with OneWeb . In contrast, the satellite services sector is full of small companies. “We would expect that markets like mobility and aero will be the first one where we’ll see consolidation happen, but it could also expand into the fixed broadband market,” de Ruiter said.
The first private astronaut to fly to the International Space Station plans to return to space on a trip around the moon on SpaceX’s Starship with his wife and up to 10 other people. SpaceX announced Oct. 12 that it sold tickets to Dennis and Akiko Tito for what will be the second crewed Starship mission around the moon. The two are the first of as many as 12 people who will go on that mission, whose schedule is unclear. The mission, as currently designed, involves a Starship launched into low Earth orbit that would rendezvous with a depot, another Starship whose tanks would have been filled with propellant from additional Starship launches. Once the lunar-bound Starship’s tanks are filled, it will fire its engines on a circumlunar trajectory, a figure-eight that will take it around the moon and within 200 kilometers of its surface before returning to Earth. The entire mission would take about a week, including three days each way to the moon and back. The flight will be a return to space for 82-year-old Dennis Tito, who flew on a Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS in April 2001 as the first private astronaut to visit the station and the first to pay his own way to space. He spent eight days in space before returning to Earth on another Soyuz. In the years after the flight, Tito said he did not have an interest in returning to space, but in a call with reporters explained that changed as he followed the progress of SpaceX. “Over time, watching the developments of SpaceX and just what they were doing fascinated me,” he said. The first discussions with SpaceX about a flight took place a little more than a year ago, he said. At that time, he recalled company officials asking him if he was interested in going back to space, and he said he was not interested in a return trip to the ISS or other orbital flight. “But I would be interested in going to the moon,” he said. “And then I looked over to Akiko, and we had a little eye contact, and she goes, ‘Yeah, me too.’ And that’s how it all began.” Akiko Tito, an engineer, pilot and real estate investor, said the flight fulfills an interest in space dating back to her childhood. “This mission is the first of many that will help humanity become multiplanetary and I’m so honored to be part of it,” she said on the call. The mission, which does not have a formal name, will be the second Starship circumlunar mission. In 2018, SpaceX announced it sold a flight of Starship — then known as Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR — to Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa , who planned to fly himself and a group of artists around the moon on a mission called “dearMoon.” Maezawa kicked off a competition to select the crew for that flight in March 2021 , with the goal of selecting the crew by that summer and begin training for a mission then planned for 2023. However, Maezawa has yet to announce the crew for the flight and the latest update, more than year old, simply stated that finalists had completed medical checkups. The project did not respond to a request for comment Oct. 12 about the status of the dearMoon mission. There were similarly few details about the flight the Titos will take around the moon. There is no schedule for the mission other than it will take place after both dearMoon and a flight by the Polaris Program, an initiative led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, that will be the first crewed Starship flight. Aarti Matthews, director of Starship crew and cargo programs at SpaceX, said the company had yet to decide if the mission will launch from its Starbase test site at Boca Chica, Texas, or from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Dennis Tito declined to state how much he and his wife paid for the flight. They will be two of up to 12 people on the flight, with SpaceX actively working to sell the other seats. “We have a lot of interest for the other seats on the mission. We’re talking to many different customers,” Matthews said. Starship has yet to make its first orbital launch attempt, although crews at Starbase are currently setting up a Starship vehicle and its Super Heavy booster for tests ahead of a potential orbital launch attempt in the coming months. By contrast, when Dennis Tito flew on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2001, the vehicle had been in service for more than three decades and had flown several dozen crewed missions. Tito said he was not concerned about Starship’s current lack of flight heritage, predicting that Starship will launch “hundreds” of times before his flight. “This is not going to happen in the near term,” he said of his mission. “There’s going to be a lot of flights, a lot of testing. I think actually the vehicle will be better tested when we fly than even the Soyuz was when I flew 21 years ago.” “We are confident that we will have this vehicle fully tested out and ready to go by the time we fly this mission,” Matthews said. Preparations for both the Titos’ flight and the earlier dearMoon mission are independent of SpaceX’s work on a lunar lander version of Starship the company is development for NASA’s Human Landing System program. “The mission profile is pretty different, so we expect that those two flights to be pretty independent of each other,” Matthews said. Dennis Tito added he was not interested in landing on the moon, and would likely retire from spaceflight after the circumlunar trip. “I can say unequivocally that we will not be landing on the moon. That’s a completely different mission,” he said. He added that he would be open to going into orbit around the moon rather than swinging around it as currently planned. “That would be wishful thinking, but if it happened, I’m not going to complain.”
NASA’s Orion spacecraft flew by the moon for a second and final time Dec. 5, performing a maneuver that sets up the spacecraft for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean in six days. The Orion’s European Service Module fired its main engine for 3 minutes and 27 seconds starting at 11:43 a.m. Eastern. The maneuver, called the Return Powered Flyby, took place during a close approach to the moon that brought Orion within 130 kilometers of the lunar surface. NASA officials said at a later briefing that the maneuver, the largest and last major engine burn of the Artemis 1 mission, went as expected, putting the spacecraft on a trajectory that returns it to Earth for a Dec. 11 splashdown. That maneuver “is essentially our deorbit burn,” said Judd Frieling, flight director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, at the briefing. “This sets us up for the landing trajectory that going to occur on Dec. 11.” With the flyby complete, NASA is moving ahead with preparations for splashdown. Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis 1 mission manager, said the mission management team gave its approval to deploy recovery forces on Dec. 7. That includes a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Portland, that will host the recovery forces and bring the Orion spacecraft onboard to return to the port of San Diego, California. Melissa Jones, landing and recovery director for the mission at NASA, said the recovery team completed a three-day rehearsal for the recovery last week. “We are ready and honored, as an integrated team, to bring Orion home on the last leg of her journey,” she said. Orion, which launched nearly three weeks ago, continues to perform well with only minor problems. That includes continuing issues with latching current limiters in the spacecraft’s power distribution system. Four of those devices had switched off during a test, affecting power to six reaction control thrusters. Controllers were able to restore power to those thrusters. “What it appears is that they were commanded open, but there were no commands sent,” Debbie Korth, NASA Orion deputy program manager, said of the current limiters at the briefing. “We’re not exactly sure of the root cause yet.” She said engineers are doing some testing of the power system in a ground-based lab, and will likely propose some tests to do later this week on the spacecraft ahead of the end of the mission. “We discard the service module, so we have a pretty limited window if there’s anything we want to do before that happens.” She and other agency officials at the briefing downplayed the significance of it, noting there are redundant systems onboard. Had it taken place on a crewed mission, Frieling said, the astronauts would have been informed on their displays, but would not have noticed any other effects. There was also a communications outage lasting four and a half hours on Dec. 3 that was caused by a hardware problem with a Deep Space Network (DSN) center in Goldstone, California. The outage would have been longer, Sarafin said, but the mission was able to negotiate with other missions using the DSN to get time on the network. Praise from former agency leaders The success of the mission to date won praise from two previous top NASA officials who see it as evidence that the overall Artemis effort is now on track after years of development delays. “I feel really good about it,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a SpaceNews event Dec. 5. “I think one of the biggest achievements is that there’s a lot of hardware here that has been under development for a long time. The Artemis program just gave all that hardware a mission, which is what we needed in order to get to where we are today.” “I think it truly is a great thing to see this mission being so successful, as Jim said. A long time to get here, for sure,” said former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver at the same event. Bridenstine, who gave the Artemis program its name while in office during the Trump administration, credited the Biden administration for retaining it. “NASA has a long history of programs getting cancelled, and billions of dollars being wasted,” he said. “And in this case, they kept continuity of purpose and moved forward and I’m just very grateful for that.” Garver, deputy administrator during the Obama administration, noted the program brought together hardware started in various administrations. “I think the timing was right and it was good to do,” she said. However, she expressed skepticism that the technical approach, including use of the Space Launch System, was the right one for the long term. “I do not believe that the country can or should probably spend the amount of money we are on launch infrastructure over the longer term. I think that when we have private launch capabilities that rival this we should transition, and that will make me feel a lot better about the future and the future success of Artemis,” she said. She said she had argued against SLS and Orion while at NASA, but lost that argument. “I was clear when I was at NASA that, once that decision had been made, our job was to make it the very best vehicle we could have.” “You did not lose the argument,” Bridenstine said. “You got the argument started. It is still going forward and it’s transitioning how we do space.”
The United Kingdom on Sept. 1 released “ UK Space Power, ” the military’s keystone doctrine publication focused on the space domain . The 91-page public document lays out in broad terms the role of the UK military in protecting space from foreign threats and provides “a basis for understanding the utility of the space domain in the military context,” the paper says. A central message is that space is a global domain; and military, civil and commercial space activities are intertwined. “Space power capabilities, or enabling capabilities in other operational domains, can contribute to deterrence but must form part of a wider, whole-of-government strategy,” the document says. “Space offers political choice through its ubiquity and pervasiveness but is not solely a military, or even state, endeavor,” says the doctrine. “Non-state actors increasingly own a stake in the development and operation of capabilities. Partnerships with civil, industry, commercial and academic entities are therefore essential to increase resilience, understand the progress of technology and develop further opportunities for deterrence.” The document highlights the UK-US military space alliance. “As our pre-eminent national security partner, cooperation with the US is exceptionally close and the relationship is critical to assure access to a host of space services,” the paper says. Additionally, UK military space experts are currently supporting US space capabilities. Other takeaways from the UK space doctrine:
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s first lunar orbiter has begun its voyage toward the moon on a mission critical to the country’s future space projects. The 678-kilogram spacecraft, named Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) or Danuri in Korean, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 40 at 7:08 p.m. Eastern, Aug. 4. The Danuri orbiter is carrying six scientific instruments, including a hypersensitive optical camera, ShadowCam, provided by NASA and a “space internet” demonstrator developed by South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, which will validate an interplanetary internet connection using delay-disruption tolerant networking. The orbiter was working normally and traveling on a planned trajectory toward the moon, said the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), which controls the spacecraft. It is expected to enter the moon’s orbit in December before starting a year-long observation mission. If it succeeds, South Korea will become the world’s seventh lunar explorer, after the former Soviet Union, the U.S., China, India, the European Union and Japan. The Falcon 9’s upper stage deployed its dedicated payload 40 minutes after liftoff. The rocket’s first stage made a pinpoint landing on the SpaceX droneship “Just Read the Instructions” nine minutes after liftoff. It was the sixth touchdown to date for the booster, SpaceX said. The launch was scheduled for Aug. 2 but was delayed two days to allow time for SpaceX to complete additional work on the Falcon 9 rocket. The orbiter, developed by KARI, unfurled its two solar panels shortly after the deployment and exchanged first signals with a NASA ground station in Canberra, Australia, about 45 minutes later, according to KARI. It will stay connected to the Earth around the clock through a network of four ground stations — Korea Deep Space Antenna in South Korea; NASA’s Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia; Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex in Spain; and Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the United States. South Korea President Yoon Suk-yeol hailed the successful launch, calling the spacecraft “pathfinder” that will give a boost to South Korea’s economy and scientific prowess. “Danuri has just begun its 130-day journey toward the moon,” Yoon wrote on Facebook. “I look forward to seeing images of the moon and BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ the Danuri will send (to Earth) at the end of the year. Go for it, Danuri!” Dynamite is Korean pop star BTS’s mega-hit song, and the Korean orbiter will conduct a test of sending a file of its music video to the Earth from the lunar orbit in a “space internet” technology demonstration. KPLO’s lunar trajectory The KPLO is set to fly to the moon on a low-energy, fuel-efficient ballistic lunar transfer trajectory, a path being pioneered by NASA’s CAPSTONE cubesat, launched in late June on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from New Zealand. The KPLO is currently on a trajectory that will take it close to the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable location nearly 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth and four times farther than the moon. Gravitational forces will naturally pull the orbiter back toward the Earth and the moon. The Korean spacecraft — if everything goes as planned — will be captured in lunar orbit on Dec. 16, according to KARI. A series of propulsive maneuvers with the spacecraft’s thrusters will steer it into a circular, low-altitude orbit about 100 kilometers from the lunar surface by Dec. 31. After a brief period of commissioning and tests, the spacecraft’s yearlong mission is expected to begin in January. Science objectives With the six instruments aboard, the orbiter will collect a variety of data orbiting the moon twelve times a day. NASA’s ShadowCam will peer into permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles in search of large quantities of ice that radar observations suggest is present. To see into the dark shadows and spot hidden ice, ShadowCam has been designed to be several hundred times more light-sensitive than any previous camera to have gone to the moon, according to NASA. Collected data will be shared with NASA, which aims to send humans to the moon in the coming years under its Artemis program. A South Korea-developed gamma-ray spectrometer called KGRS will look for any spontaneous gamma ray bursts produced by massive dying stars; a magnetometer called KMAG will track the magnetic field between Earth and the Moon; and a high-resolution camera LUTI will take high-resolution images of the lunar surface, which would be used for South Korea’s lunar landing mission targeted for the early 2030s. The orbiter is also armed with PolCam, a wide-angle polarimetric camera that will study the bulk properties of the lunar surface material. The space internet test will be conducted by the Disruption Tolerant Network Experiment Payload (DTNPL). South Korea began developing the KPLO mission in 2016 for a planned launch in 2020, but officials delayed the mission after the spacecraft grew above its original launch weight, and engineers needed more time to revise its design and other details. This project cost 236.7 billion won ($182 million). 
WAILEA, Hawaii — Ahead of a Federal Communications Commission vote on a proposal to set a five-year deadline for deorbiting low Earth orbit satellites, leaders of the House Science Committee are questioning the FCC’s authority to do so. FCC commissioners will take up at their Sept. 29 open meeting a proposal released earlier in the month that would require operators of LEO satellites to deorbit their satellites as soon as possible after the end of their mission and in no more than five years. The rule, which would take effect in two years, would apply to satellites licensed by the FCC as well as those seeking U.S. market access. However, the bipartisan leadership of the House Science Committee, in a Sept. 27 letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel , asked the FCC to delay consideration of the proposal, citing concerns about “unilateral” action they believe the FCC is taking with the rule. The letter was signed by the chair and ranking member of the full committee, Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), as well as the chair and ranking member of the space subcommittee, Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Brian Babin (R-Texas). “[W]e understand the importance of supporting a safe, sustainable space environment,” stated the letter. “However, we are concerned that the Commission’s proposal to promulgate rules on this matter could create uncertainty and potentially conflicting guidance.” One issue is the question of whether the FCC has the authority to establish such rules, something the committee also raised questions about in 2020 when the commission first considered such a rule. “As we stated in 2020, regulatory action by the FCC at this time, without clear authority from Congress, will at the very least create confusion and undermine the Commission’s work, and at worst undermine U.S. economic competitiveness and leadership in space,” the congressional letter argued. The committee leaders also criticized the FCC for acting on its own as the National Space Council seeks to coordinate actions among agencies. The FCC proposal “poses the potential for creating confusion in an area that has historically been closely coordinated,” the letter stated, mentioning actions like direction given to NASA in a July orbital debris implementation plan to study if the existing 25-year deobrbit guideline should be revised. The letter suggested the committee could seek to overturn the FCC rule if commissioners approve it. The letter called on the FCC to work with the committee on the issue, which “would ensure that procedural measures such as the Congressional Review Act are not necessary.” That act allows Congress to pass a “joint resolution of disapproval” to overturn rules enacted by federal agencies. Industry feedback In filings with the FCC, satellite operators expressed support in general for the proposed five-year rule, but requested some adjustments for how some satellites or constellations are treated, In a joint filing, EchoStar, Iridium, OneWeb and SES asked the FCC to allow for waivers to the five-year rule for satellites for “good cause,” such as those that have suffered an anomaly or other event beyond the operator’s control. The FCC, they added, should also provide objective criteria for evaluating those waiver requests. “Such a minor change,” they write, “provides greater certainty to all NGSO operators as they continue to develop and deploy new and innovative satellite networks.” In another filing, HawkEye 360, Planet and Spire Global made a similar request, stating that the reliability of post-mission disposal should be calculated “based on nominal mission operations.” They also asked the FCC to remove language about potential future, more stringent, rules for “large constellations,” noting that the FCC hasn’t defined what constitutes a large constellation. Kepler Communications, in its own letter to the FCC, also sought the ability to get a waiver to the five-year rule “for satellite failures that are attributable to events or issues that are beyond the operator’s control,” as well as request a definition of “large constellation” before attempting to place any specific rules for such systems. None of the companies, though, formally objected to the five-year rule in general or questioned the FCC’s authority to seek it. Two orbital debris experts, Dan Oltrogge of COMSPOC and Darren McKnight of LeoLabs, praised the FCC for proposing the rule in their own filing. The current 25-year rule, they write, “is effectively a policy‐sanctioned graveyard orbit that is near and above many operational spacecraft” at altitudes of 490 to 625 kilometers. One company, Astroscale U.S., argued that the revised rule alone was not enough since it does not cap overall environmental risk. “The United States will not see the momentous decrease in risk to operational satellites desired, even with the shortened post-mission disposal period, unless current regulations cease to underrepresent the environmental risk of failed spacecraft within a system,” the company wrote, calling for the FCC to produce “a regular cadence of orbital debris regulation updates.”
France will increase spending on national and European space programs as the European Space Agency works to secure commitments for its own significant budget increase. In a speech at the opening ceremony of the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here Sept. 18, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced the government planned to allocate more than 9 billion euros ($9 billion) to space activities over the next three years, an increase of about 25% over the past three years. That funding included a “massive” increase in the budget of the French space agency CNES, although she did not give a specific figure, with 1.5 billion euros coming from the “France 2030” investment program to support space and other major industries. The projected increases would also go towards France’s contribution to ESA ahead of its November ministerial meeting where the agency’s 22 member states will set funding for the next three years. “It’s very good news,” Philippe Baptiste, president of CNES, said of the budget increase at a press conference of heads of space agencies during the IAC later in the day. “We have to decide which fraction of this nine billion is dedicated to ESA and which part of it is dedicated to other kinds of programs.” In her remarks, Borne emphasized investment in launch vehicles, a major priority for France. “We cannot be dependent on other partners to launch our satellites,” she said in a translation of her remarks in French. “We cannot tolerate that.” That included, she said, supporting both the Ariane 6 as well as emerging commercially developed small launch vehicles. “We have always invested a lot in launchers,” Baptiste said at an IAC roundtable about the upcoming ESA ministerial. “There is no European strategy in space if we don’t have European access to space.” The overall increase is in lockstep with ESA’s plans to seek a 25% budget increase at November’s ministerial meeting. ESA will request more than 18 billion euros from its member states to fund existing programs and new initiatives for the next three years. Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, defended the increase as a necessity for Europe to keep up with other major space players. During the IAC roundtable, he noted budgets in both the United States and China are rising at similar or even faster rates. “Our proposal of a 25% increase is more or less keeping pace,” he said. “What we are aiming at doing is making sure we are not thrown out of the race.” He acknowledged during a conference plenary that ESA was seeking that increase in circumstances that are “as difficult as ever before,” including the effects of the pandemic, inflation and other economic concerns, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine that disrupted many ESA programs. “Our ministerial package in November will be focused to make Europe more independent, more resilient, stronger in terms of its space infrastructure,” he said, making it “a good partner internationally.” Officials with several major member states expressed optimism about the ministerial. “It was expected that we would not stick together” during the crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion, said Walther Pelzer, director general of the German Space Agency, at the IAC roundtable. “Our top priority in Germany is a strong ESA.” “The big challenge at the end is to get all the member states going in the same direction,” said Anna Rathsman, director general of the Swedish National Space Agency and chair of the ESA Council, said of the upcoming ministerial. “The measure of success” for the ministerial, said Aschbacher, “is that the member states, when they come to the table at the ministerial level, are satisfied at the end of the day, and think they’ve done the right thing and the right decisions, and go home smiling.”
The two companies NASA selected earlier this month to develop spacesuits for the International Space Station and Artemis lunar missions were the only companies to bid on the project, according to agency procurement documents. NASA announced June 1 it awarded contracts to teams led by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to develop new spacesuits for both ISS spacewalks and Artemis lunar landing missions through its Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, program. Agency officials, though, provided few details at the time about the contracts or why it selected those two companies. In a source selection statement released by NASA later in the month, the agency outlined how it selected the two companies. In particular, despite dozens of companies included in an “interested parties” list by NASA, only Axiom and Collins submitted complete proposals by the December 2021 deadline. A third company, called New Horizons Space, did submit one volume of the overall xEVAS proposal, detailing past performance, which was due before the other volumes. However, the company did not submit the rest of the proposal and thus was not considered by NASA. There is little information about New Horizons Space, which was not included in NASA’s interested parties list, although a New Horizons Space LLC was incorporated in Delaware in June 2021, after a release of a request for information NASA used to prepare for the xEVAS procurement. NASA evaluated the two complete proposals it received and ultimately concluded both were acceptable. Both received similar “mission suitability” scores, with Axiom getting 834 of a possible 1,000 points and Collins 829. In the evaluation of past performance, NASA had a moderate level of confidence Axiom can successfully carry out the work, and a high level of confidence in Collins. The statement praised both companies’ technical approaches. Axiom’s design supports “an appreciable greater number of ISS and Artemis EVAs per mission” as well as longer EVAs and increased emergency life support capabilities. There is also “very high commonality” between the versions of the suit that would be used on the ISS and Artemis missions. The Collins design was cited for its reduced mass and volume and “extended quiescent stowage.” Like Axiom, NASA said that there is very high commonality between the ISS and Artemis versions of the Collins suit. NASA established the xEVAS program as a services effort, with NASA buying spacesuit services from the two companies rather than the suits themselves. NASA’s expectation is that the companies will find other customers for the suits. Axiom, for example, is developing commercial modules for the ISS that will later form a standalone commercial space station that will require spacewalks. Axiom’s commercialization approach “demonstrates a close alignment between the xEVAS requirements and Axiom’s commercial goals and objectives,” the NASA source selection statement concluded. Collins, meanwhile, “proposes a reasonable commercialization approach that demonstrates an understanding of NASA’s goal to become one of many customers.” Collins has not disclosed its plans for offering its spacesuits commercially, but one of the members of its team, not previously disclosed, is Blue Origin, which is the lead company on the proposed Orbital Reef commercial space station. NASA also praised Collins for “a reasonable approach to ISS and Artemis development milestones by shifting the phasing of payments and altering milestones in a way that enhances Government insight while reducing early Government financial commitment.” The statement, though, did raise issues with both companies’ plans. Both companies rely “on rapid acceleration of technology maturation and resolution of key technical trade studies” to achieve their proposed schedules. NASA also warned that Axiom’s commercialization plan “includes assumptions with respect to revenue capture that could impact their ability to finance the xEVAS effort.” The source selection statement did not include specific price figures, which were also excluded from the original NASA announcement beyond a total value of $3.5 billion through 2034. Both companies, though, offered prices below NASA’s own independent government cost estimate, with Axiom 23% below that estimate and Collins 2% below that estimate. The statement did not disclose the value of the cost estimate. NASA has not disclosed other financial details about the xEVAS contracts, including the guaranteed minimum amounts each company will receive. An agency spokesperson said when the contracts were announced that NASA would not disclose those guaranteed minimums or even the value of individual task orders “due to the proprietary nature of the commercial solutions while also protecting the ongoing competitive nature of this contract.” NASA later said it will release “non-sensitive task order pricing information” once a task order is awarded. According to NASA procurement databases, the agency has yet to obligate any funding under the xEVAS contracts to either Axiom or Collins. NASA announced the contract awards June 1, nearly a month after Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center and the source selection authority, made the May 3 decision to select the two companies for xEVAS awards, according to the source selection statement.
NASA is requesting information from industry on its capabilities and interest in developing a spacecraft that would deorbit the International Space Station at the end of its life. NASA issued the request for information (RFI) late Aug. 19, asking companies to supply information about how they could develop a spacecraft that would be used to perform the final reentry maneuvers at the end of the station’s life, pushing it into the atmosphere to break up over the South Pacific Ocean. Under a nominal deorbiting scenario provided by NASA in the RFI, the spacecraft would attach to the forward port on the Node 2 module a year before reentry. During this time, the station’s altitude would gradually decay from atmospheric drag and maneuvers from thrusters on the station’s Russian segment, descending below 220 kilometers, the altitude below which only thrusters can provide attitude control for the station. The deorbit vehicle would first place the ISS into an elliptical orbit of 145 by 200 kilometers to minimize the period in which the station has to rely on thrusters for attitude control. It would then make a final burn to lower the perigee to 50 kilometers, ensuring “atmospheric capture” or breakup of the station upon reentry. NASA, in an ISS transition plan published in January , projected using Russian Progress cargo spacecraft for reentry. “NASA and its partners have evaluated varying quantities of Russian Progress spacecraft and determined that three can accomplish the de-orbit,” the report stated. It added that Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, which is capable of reboosting the station’s orbit, has also been considered for deorbiting the station. “In a years-long effort, NASA and its partners have studied deorbit requirements and developed a strategy and action plan that evaluated the use of multiple Roscosmos Progress spacecraft to support deorbit operations,” NASA said in a statement announcing the RFI. “These studies indicated additional spacecraft may provide more robust capabilities for deorbit, and NASA has decided to assess U.S. industry’s ability to aid with safe deorbit of the complex.” “NASA and our international partners are taking the prudent approach to the space station’s end of life planning to safely execute deorbit,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said in the statement. “As part of our 2030 transition planning, we are pursuing sufficient redundancy for the safety of the crew and people and structures on Earth. This also could be an important U.S. capability for future commercial destinations.” NASA and the other ISS partners, except for Russia, have endorsed an extension of ISS operations from 2024 to 2030. Russian officials have said they plan to exit the ISS some time after 2024, but have not set a firm date . In the RFI, NASA said the nominal scenario calls for deorbiting the ISS in early 2031, but that it could be delayed or moved up depending on the status of ISS operations. “Although nominal ISS [end of life] is late 2030, the Government requires that this deorbit capability be available as soon as possible to protect for contingencies that could drive early re-entry and beyond 2030 in the event of further ISS mission extensions,” the RFI stated. That includes the ability of launching the deorbit spacecraft as soon as six months before the final deorbit maneuvers. In the RFI, NASA asks industry for their technical capabilities to develop a deorbit module that meets its requirements, as well as preferred contracting arrangements, operational issues and extensibility of such a module to serve commercial space stations. Responses are due to NASA Sept. 9.
TAMPA, Fla. — T-Mobile announced plans Aug. 25 to use SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites next year to bring connectivity to phones beyond the reach of its cell towers in the United States. Upgraded Starlink satellites would connect directly to standard cellphones under a technology partnership that aims to bring services to “mobile dead zones” across the country. Beta services that would be initially limited to messages and pictures could begin “as soon as late next year,” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said, with voice and data capabilities later coming at an unspecified time. T-Mobile is contributing a slice of cellphone-ready nationwide spectrum as part of its partnership with SpaceX, which would beam the frequencies to phones from second-generation Starlink satellites using antennas roughly 25 square meters in size. Starlink V2 satellites are too big to fit on a Falcon 9 that SpaceX has been using to launch its current generation of Starlinks, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, and need the super-heavy-lift Starship vehicle it is developing to get to low Earth orbit. If the Starship program is “delayed longer than expected,” he said the company is considering initially downsizing second-generation satellites — “a sort of Starlink V2 mini” — so they would fit on a Falcon 9. Musk did not specify whether a downsized Starlink V2 would have an antenna large enough to connect to mobile phones directly. SpaceX first unveiled the plan to use a mix of Falcon 9 and Starship rockets for its Starlink V2 in an Aug. 19 letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Regulatory obstacles In June, the Federal Aviation Administration said SpaceX must implement dozens of measures to mitigate environmental effects before launching Starship to orbit from its Texas test site. SpaceX also still needs permission from the FCC to operate the 30,000 Starlink V2 satellites in its proposed second-generation constellation. Musk said “we are constrained by regulatory approval,” but “from a technical standpoint” its direct-to-cellphone service would work even with just a handful of Starlinks in orbit with large enough antennas — although there would be a lag in the service until it ramps up. “We have it working in the lab and we’re confident this will work in the field,” he said. According to Musk, the service will be capable of providing “maybe two to four megabits” of capacity, enabling 1,000-2,000 simultaneous voice calls or hundreds of thousands of text messages. However, this capacity would be spread over a very large area. “It’s not a substitute for ground cell stations,” Musk said, because those “especially in urban and suburban areas will definitely be superior to what we’re talking about here. “This is really meant to provide basic coverage to areas that are currently completely dead.” Starlink’s expansion into areas without wireless connectivity notably comes just weeks after the FCC denied it nearly $900 million in subsidies to expand its rural broadband services. Satellite expansion Sievert said their direct-to-cellphone service would also create a layer of redundancy for cellular networks in case cell towers get knocked out by natural disasters or other means. While T-Mobile is not ready to announce a product yet, he said the company expects to include satellite-enabled nationwide coverage in its most popular mobile plans for free. For the low-cost plans that don’t include it, he said “our aspiration is to charge a monthly service fee that will be far less than the monthly service fees charged by today’s satellite connectivity services.” He said the companies plan to reach out to messaging app providers, such as Apple with its iMessage service, to include them in the service “right out the gate.” The companies are also seeking partnerships with mobile providers internationally to forge reciprocal roaming alliances. If a foreign carrier can find suitable spectrum in their country to participate in a roaming alliance, he said their customers could stay connected wherever they travel in the U.S, in return for giving U.S. customers the same capability in their country. SpaceX and T-Mobile’s alliance threatens to disrupt startups AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global, which are developing constellations that also aim to connect directly to unmodified phones . Lynk Global has been looking to launch initial commercial services for its network before the end of this year, while AST SpaceMobile expects to deploy its first set of operational satellites in late 2023. AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 prototype is slated to launch in early to mid-September on a Falcon 9 with other passengers.
PASADENA, Calif. — As SpaceX gears up for another launch of Starlink satellites, astronomers are concerned the company maybe backsliding in its efforts to reduce the brightness of those satellites. A Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off at 12:08 p.m. Eastern June 17 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, placing 53 Starlink satellites into orbit. This mission will bring the total number of Starlink satellites launched to more than 2,700, with more than 2,450 in orbit. These satellites, like several hundred before it, are version 1.5 of the Starlink design. Those satellites lack visors that SpaceX installed on satellites in 2020 to keep sunlight from reaching reflective surfaces on the satellites and thus reduce their brightness as seen from the ground. The visors were not compatible with the laser intersatellite links installed on the V1.5 satellites. Astronomers say they’ve noticed the V1.5 satellites are brighter than the earlier “VisorSat” Starlink satellites. During a panel discussion at the 240th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) here June 13, Pat Seitzer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan who studies satellite brightness, said the VisorSats were at magnitude 6.5. That brightness was near the recommendation set by astronomers of being no brighter than magnitude 7 to minimize interference with astronomical observations. However, the V1.5 Starlink satellites are about half a magnitude brighter than the VisorSats. “In a real sense, we’re going backwards here,” he said. “We have to talk to SpaceX and see what their eventual plans on this are.” A bigger concern is the second generation of Starlink satellites. Those satellites, designed to be launched on SpaceX’s Starship, will be significantly larger and, thus, potentially brighter. “It’s anybody’s guess what the brightness will be,” Seitzer said. “Hopefully they can incorporate all of the lessons they’ve learned so they don’t end up a factor of four brighter than they are now.” In a presentation last month to the Federation of Astronomical Societies , David Goldstein, principal engineer at SpaceX, said the company was working on new technologies to mitigate the brightness of the second-generation Starlink satellites. That includes development of a “dielectric mirror sticker” to place on the satellites to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. He said that approach would make the satellites 10 times dimmer than if they were coated with vantablack, one of the darkest commercially available paint. That paint also erodes in the space environment and has poor thermal performance. Other panelists at the AAS event acknowledged that SpaceX and other companies were making efforts to reduce the brightness of their satellites. “SpaceX has put in a lot of money and person-power into solving this problem,” said Connie Walker, co-director of the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference. “They’re trying again to create a mitigation strategy to lower the brightness of their satellites.” Besides technical solutions, astronomers are also considering policy approaches. Julie Davis, an AAS public policy fellow, said that includes potential language in a wide-ranging competitiveness bill currently being negotiated by a House-Senate conference committee that would fund studies to measure the impact of satellite constellations on astronomy. She said there was not a lot of awareness of the issue among policymakers, and that astronomers had to balance their concerns with the demand for broadband access that satellites can offer. “We need to be explicit in explaining what our problem is here. We are not against the internet, we just want it to not be super-reflective.” Seitzer suggested potential solutions could come from the national security space community. “Previously, outside of the classified defense industry, satellite brightness has not been a design criterion,” he said. “I suspect that knowledge exists on the dark side, pun intended.” 
With commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope nearly complete, project officials and NASA leadership promise the telescope’s first images will stun scientists and the public alike. During a media event at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) here June 29, project managers and scientists said the telescope is already collecting “early release observations” that NASA, along with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency, will unveil July 12. Those observations are taking place as engineers finish preparing the telescope for routine science observations, with 15 of its 17 observing modes now commissioned. JWST’s technical performance continues to exceed expectations. Lee Feinberg, JWST optical telescope element manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, that the telescope had a requirement that its resolution be diffraction limited — that is, its sharpness limited only by the laws of physics — at wavelengths as short as 2 microns. He said the telescope was in fact diffraction limited down to 1.1 microns. Feinberg credited that technical performance to several factors, such as attention to detail during its development and extensive testing. “We knew how significant this observatory is. It’s the biggest, most complex science mission, potentially, that NASA has ever built,” he said. “As the systems engineer, I made sure that we had margin, performance margin, that we can count on,” said Mike Menzel, JWST lead mission systems engineer at NASA Goddard. That margin, he and others said, allows for improved performance now and ensures it can meet its specifications even as systems degrade over time. An example is a micrometeoroid impact on a mirror segment in May that was larger than what engineers had modeled during development of the telescope. “Time will tell whether or not that last impact was just an anomaly,” Menzel said. However, he played down the significance of the impact, noting the significant margin in the telescope and strategies the mission is developing to mitigate such impacts. “Even after that last impact, the telescope is working magnificently.” While JWST was designed for 10-year operational life, Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said that engineers confirmed that the precise launch provided by the Ariane 5 rocket last December helped conserve fuel originally budgeted for trajectory corrections, allowing it to operate at the Earth-sun L-2 point for 20 years. Scientists are gearing up for the upcoming release of the initial science observations, which will include color images and spectra. Those observations will “demonstrate to the world that Webb is, in fact, ready for science, and that it produces excellent and spectacular results,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at STScI. “It’s also to highlight the sheer breadth of science that can be done with Webb and to highlight all of the four science instruments.” Project scientists have kept the list of objects for those initial observations confidential. “It’s been a years’ long process in coming up with what the first images would be,” he said, depending in part on what regions of the sky the telescope could observe when it was ready for those initial observations. “We knew we needed a very long list of targets: more than 70 in the end.” That process created a prioritized list of observations when the telescope’s instruments were ready. While the list remains secret, NASA officials dropped hints about what will be released on July 12. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, participating in the event by phone after testing positive for COVID-19 the night before , said one will be “the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken,” better than various “deep field” observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. “This is farther than humanity has ever looked before,” Nelson said. “We’re only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do.” Pontoppidan confirmed that scientists will release the deepest infrared image yet of the universe, but did not quantify how it compared to past deep field images. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said the early release observations will also include spectra of an exoplanet, which can help scientists determine the composition of its atmosphere. “We’re looking forward to seeing the atmosphere of that specific planet and many more,” he said. Both Melroy and Zurbuchen said they have already seen some of those images that will be released at the July 12 event. “What I have seen just moved me,” said Melroy, “as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being.”
The war in Ukraine has put on display military forces’ growing reliance on satellites and has created incentives to disrupt opponents’ access to space systems, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, said Dec. 3. “I think this modern war that we’re seeing play out in Ukraine is just indicative of what we can expect in the future,” Saltzman said during a panel session at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. Saltzman’s two main takeaways from the conflict in Ukraine: the value of space “has been proven out,” and space is “clearly a contested domain.” Whether it’s satellite-based communications, imagery, early warning of missile launches, or positioning navigation and timing, “the capability that space offers has demonstrated its value so much so that both sides are engaged in trying to counter those capabilities and deny those advantages to the opponent,” he said. Saltzman, who assumed command of the Space Force Nov. 2, said a top priority for the Department of Defense is “to protect our capabilities in space.” The Space Force is working on that, he said, but it will take years. The satellites the United States military has on orbit today are high-performing machines and would be difficult to replace if an enemy took one down. Before China in 2007 demonstrated an anti-satellite weapon, the thinking in the Pentagon was to make satellites as capable as possible to minimize the number that needed to be launched, Saltzman explained. After China’s ASAT test , it became clear that relying on a small number of big-ticket satellites “was not inherently resilient,” he said. “If you can just take out a few satellites and radically degrade the capabilities, you don’t have a resilient architecture,” Saltzman added. This has to be the “starting point of a discussion that we need to build a new type of space capabilities with resiliency baked in from the beginning.” With these challenges in mind, the Space Force is looking to deploy newer types of satellites but also train operators for the contested space environment, he said. “If we think we can just buy the best arsenal, we are only going to have half of the equation met,” said Saltzman. The other pieces are “the tactics, the training, the experience, the ability to work hand in glove with allies and partners. That takes a lot of time and energy and a different set of tools … All of that is critical to turning an arsenal into a military force.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX has decided to use a mix of Falcon 9 and Starship rockets to launch the 30,000 satellites in its proposed second-generation Starlink broadband constellation. Launching some of the satellites with SpaceX’s “tested and dependable Falcon 9” will accelerate the constellation’s deployment to improve Starlink services. SpaceX director of satellite policy David Goldman wrote in an Aug. 19 letter to the Federal Communications Commission. Goldman did not say when SpaceX could start launching the second-generation constellation, which remains subject to FCC approval. In January, SpaceX said it had picked a configuration for the low Earth orbit (LEO) network that leverages Starship, the delayed super-heavy-lift vehicle the company is developing in Boca Chica, Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration completed a lengthy environmental assessment in June that would allow Starship launches from Boca Chica. However, SpaceX must first implement dozens of measures to mitigate environmental effects. Starship is designed to send more than 100 tons of payload to LEO, versus under 23 tons for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 workhorse. SpaceX has also previously said second-generation Starlinks deployed via Starship could enter service within weeks after launch, rather than months following a Falcon 9 mission. “While SpaceX will use technically identical satellites on both rockets, the physical structures will be tailored to meet the physical dimensions of the rockets on which they will be launched,” Goldman told the FCC. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, has said full-sized second-generation Starlinks are seven meters long and weigh about five times more than its first generation at around 1,250 kilograms. Goldman said SpaceX remains committed to deploying all of its 29,988 proposed second-generation satellites — at altitudes of between 340 and 614 kilometers across nine inclined orbits — whether they are launched with Falcon 9 or Starship. “Specifically, SpaceX plans to launch satellites for its Gen2 constellation beginning with its three 500-kilometer shells, followed by satellites in its lower-altitude shells,” he said. “The result will be that more Americans will receive high-quality broadband faster.” SpaceX’s constellation plans face opposition from companies, including satellite broadband operator Viasat, which wants the FCC to perform an environmental review before approving the second-generation network. SpaceX has launched more than 3,100 satellites for Starlink’s current generation with Falcon 9, usually in batches of around 50 per mission. According to astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell, more than 2,800 are currently working in LEO. The company has said its second generation would provide denser rural coverage and improved performance while being compatible with existing Starlink user terminals. SpaceX currently has permission to deploy 4,408 satellites in LEO for a network that uses Ku-band spectrum to connect users from around 550 kilometers above the Earth. A separate FCC authorization also gives SpaceX permission to launch 7,500 V-band satellites, which Starlink’s first generation needs to reach a total of around 12,000 satellites for global services.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper is in discussions with DoD about the possibility of installing laser communications terminals on some of the company’s internet satellites so they can transfer data from remote-sensing satellites directly into the military’s mesh network in low Earth orbit. Derek Tournear, director of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency, said the plan is for some Kuiper or other commercial satellites to serve as “translators” so they can support high-speed data transfer, for example, from commercial imaging satellites to military users on the ground. Speaking Oct. 13 at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Tournear said such an agreement with Amazon or other commercial companies would be significant because it will help move data more quickly and securely. The Space Development Agency (SDA) is building a mesh network — called Transport Layer — of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit to relay time-sensitive data to military forces around the world. To make its satellites interoperable, the agency requires vendors to use optical terminals that comply with SDA’s specifications. SDA also plans to establish agreements with commercial remote-sensing companies so they can send imagery from their satellites directly to the Transport Layer. But not every imagery provider will have compatible optical links, Tournear noted, so having a commercial data-relay partner like Amazon to serve as a translator would be important. “Amazon Kuiper will have their own optical terminals that they’re planning on using for their mesh network,” Tournear said. “But they’re going to put some SDA-compatible optical terminals on some of their satellites so that those satellites act as translators. That way we can move data on and off the Kuiper network onto the Transport Layer.” Project Kuiper is planning a network of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed internet globally. The Federal Communications Commission authorized the system in 2020. The first two prototype satellites are projected to launch in 2023 . SDA trying to prove naysayers wrong Tournear in a presentation at MilSat noted that the Space Development Agency’s business model of buying smaller, lower cost satellites was initially criticized inside the Pentagon but has now become the preferred approach for modernizing space systems. Tournear noted a top critic of SDA was former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson who argued that SDA’s approach would not work and the agency was not needed. SDA now has to show it can deliver on the proliferated low Earth orbit vision and prove naysayers wrong, he said. “We’ve got to deliver to make sure that all those people [who wanted SDA to go away] don’t come back and say ‘I told you so’ because that’s a fear I have.” The next immediate challenge for the agency is to launch its first batch of satellites. The first launch had been scheduled for late September but slipped to mid-December due to supply chain problems. Tournear said if he had to choose one “problem area that will require industry investment to solve” it would be the supply chain. “I get nervous anytime the tier-two and tier-three providers on our satellite systems are down to single vendors,” he said. “That’s good for those vendors but it just makes me nervous because we may be able to work with different primes but if they’re all relying on single vendors, somewhere along that chain, that becomes an issue.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the first television broadcast satellite under SES’s C-band clearing plan June 29 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 5:04 p.m. Eastern carrying the SES-22 satellite, which will help SES reap billions of dollars from vacating C-band frequencies for U.S. 5G networks. SES-22 separated from the rocket in geostationary transfer orbit about 33 minutes later. The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage successfully landed on a SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean following the launch. The booster previously supported a mission in May for Starlink, SpaceX’s broadband megaconstellation. SES-22 is the first to launch of six geostationary satellites that SES ordered to migrate broadcast customers into a narrower swath of C-band. SES and other C-band holders are in line for $9.7 billion in total from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) if they meet its deadlines for clearing 300 MHz of the spectrum. The 3,500 kilogram SES-22 satellite was built by Thales Alenia Space, which is also constructing the company’s SES-23 C-band replacement satellite. Northrop Grumman and Boeing are also building two C-band satellites apiece for SES. United Launch Alliance is slated to launch two SES C-band replacement satellites in the third quarter of 2022, and SpaceX is due to deploy another two later in the year. The sixth satellite is being used as a ground spare. SES said June. 24 it remains on track to meet the FCC’s December 2023 spectrum clearing deadline. SES and Intelsat, which together hold the largest share of C-band in the United States, successfully unlocked more than $2 billion in combined proceeds from meeting an initial FCC milestone last year. Intelsat and SES will get a total $4.9 billion and $3.97 billion, respectively, under the FCC’s plan. However, the satellite operators remain locked in a long-running legal dispute over their share of the proceeds. The dispute stems from Intelsat’s withdrawal from their C-Band Alliance, where SES says the competitors agreed to split proceeds from clearing the spectrum evenly. Intelsat argues their agreement was no longer applicable when the FCC decided to hold a public auction of C-band spectrum, rather than a private process run by the C-Band Alliance. Intelsat ordered seven satellites for its C-band clearing plan and has lined up Arianespace and SpaceX for launches starting in 2022. Maxar Technologies is building four C-band replacement satellites for Intelsat and Northrop Grumman is constructing the other two. None of the seven are intended to be ground spares. Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34, Intelsat’s first two C-band replacement satellites, are due to launch on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in October.
The person tapped to be the next head of NASA’s astrophysics division says his top priority is to keep the agency’s next large space telescope on schedule and within its budget. NASA announced July 14 that Mark Clampin would take over as director of NASA’s astrophysics division, effective Aug. 15. He succeeds Paul Hertz, who announced last year his intent to step down from the position after a decade. Hertz will remain at the agency as a senior adviser to Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. Clampin is currently director of the science and exploration directorate at the Goddard Space Flight Center. He previously led the center’s astrophysics division and also worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite missions. During a meeting of the agency’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee July 21, Clampin said a key priority for him is to keep the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on track for a launch as soon as October 2026 . The 2.4-meter telescope is the next large, or flagship, astrophysics mission after JWST. “For me, the number one challenge is making sure that we keep the Roman Space Telescope on track,” he said, including “staying ahead of the fires” or problems that crop up during its development. Hertz previously said that keeping Roman on cost and schedule was critical to winning support for future space telescopes, such as the line of missions proposed by the Astro2020 decadal survey last year. Clampin offered a similar view. “People are watching how we do on Roman as an example of whether we can do a good job in the future,” he said. “The Roman science is important and it’s also important that we demonstrate that we can stay on track on this telescope as we put it together. That would be my highest priority.” NASA is starting efforts to plan for the next flagship mission after Roman, currently envisioned as a large infrared, optical and ultraviolet space telescope designated IROUV. A new effort, the Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program or GOMAP, is getting underway to define science goals and advance key technologies need for the mission. Clampin said he was getting a briefing soon on GOMAP. “One of the important lessons I want to bring to this endeavor is to make sure that we really focus on the science goals and don’t let the science scope of this mission expand too much,” he said. “One of my lessons learned from Webb is that ends up coming at the expense of a lot of additional costs.” A near-term challenge he faces is budget pressures on NASA’s portfolio of astrophysics missions. A spending bill approved by House appropriators last month would provide $1.525 billion for astrophysics in fiscal year 2023, slightly less than the request. With full funding allocated to several major programs, including Roman, Hubble and JWST, and an increase in closeout funding for the SOFIA airborne observatory, other parts of astrophysics are facing a $51 million cut should those funding levels stand in the final version of the bill, Hertz told the committee July 20. Clampin acknowledged concerns about the budget but said that public interest in the field, stimulated by the first science images from JWST released earlier in the month, can help win support for other astrophysics programs. “One of the great strengths we have is that what we do in astrophysics really engages with the general public, with our stakeholders on the Hill. Everybody gets excited,” he said. He recalled a recent meeting at Capitol Hill with congressional officials about JWST. “They are all really excited about James Webb. You talk to them about the science, they’re jazzed by that. And then the next question is, ‘What are you doing next? What’s the next big technical challenge for the nation in the astrophysics?’”
KIHEI, Hawaii — NASA will wait until at least the middle of November before attempting another launch of the Space Launch System on the Artemis 1 mission, citing the impacts from Hurricane Ian. NASA announced late Sept. 30 that inspections of Kennedy Space Center facilities after the passage of the storm a day earlier turned up no evidence of damage to the SLS or Orion spacecraft, which had moved back into the Vehicle Assembly Building Sept. 27 as a precautionary measure . NASA reported no significant damage at all to KSC facilities from the storm, as did the U.S. Space Force to neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Launch operations are resuming this week with an Atlas 5 launch of two SES communications satellites scheduled for Oct. 4 and a Falcon 9 launch of the Crew-5 commercial crew mission Oct. 5. However, NASA said it has ruled out attempting a launch of the Artemis 1 mission during the next launch period, which opens Oct. 17 and runs through Oct. 31. Instead, it will focus on the following launch window, which runs from Nov. 12 to 27. “Focusing efforts on the November launch period allows time for employees at Kennedy to address the needs of their families and homes after the storm and for teams to identify additional checkouts needed before returning to the pad for launch,” NASA said in the statement. An October launch, even in the best circumstances, would have been difficult. Workers would need time to perform maintenance on the vehicles, including refurbishing the SLS flight termination system. Agency officials previously estimated that they needed about a week and a half after rolling back out to the pad to be ready for a launch attempt, giving technicians only a few weeks to complete the work to be ready for a late October launch attempt. “I don’t think we’re going to take anything off the table,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in a Sept. 27 call with reporters when asked if an October launch was feasible. However, he admitted, given that available time “getting back out to the pad and trying to get there may be a challenge.” NASA, in the Sept. 30 statement, did not state when in the November launch period it might be ready to attempt a launch. “Over the coming days, managers will assess the scope of work to perform while in the VAB and identify a specific date for the next launch attempt,” the agency stated. One issue for the November launch is that, unlike the launch opportunities in August and September, many of the windows on individual days are at night. Launch windows from Nov. 12 through 19 range from nearly midnight to 1:45 a.m. Eastern. Launch windows from Nov. 22 to 27 are in the morning to midday. “Our preference is to launch in the daylight,” Free said at the Sept. 27 briefing, because of the improved tracking of the rocket during a daytime launch. He would not, though, rule out a nighttime launch for the first SLS mission. “I think we look at the risk-versus-benefit trades” for launching at night, he said. “Our preference is probably a daylight launch, but we won’t rule out a nighttime launch, either,” Free added.
SEOUL, South Korea – India’s space agency ISRO launched a one-ton Earth observation satellite and eight nanosatellites to sun-synchronous polar orbit Nov. 26 aboard the nation’s workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket. The rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 1:26 a.m. Eastern. The launch was live-streamed on YouTube , which showed the 44-meter rocket blasting off with bright flame jetting from its first-stage booster and soaring into the sky. The primary payload, EOS-06, separated from the rocket’s upper stage about 17 minutes after liftoff at an altitude of 742 kilometers. The other satellites were deployed between 114 and 125 minutes after liftoff. ISRO Chairman S. Somnath declared the mission a success in a speech made about two hours after launch. “I am really happy to announce the successful accomplishment of the PSLV-C54/EOS-06 mission,” the chairman said. “We also observed that the performance of the rocket in this mission in all its stages and functions were exceedingly good.” The EOS-06 is the third-generation Earth observation satellite in India’s Oceansat series, designed to provide “continuity services of Oceansat-2 spacecraft with enhanced payload specifications as well as application areas,” according to ISRO’s pre-launch document of the mission. The spacecraft has four payloads: an ocean color monitor (OCM-3); sea surface temperature monitor (SSTM); Ku-band Scatterometer (SCAT-3); and ARGOS, a French payload meant to reinforce the existing fleet of Indo-French weather satellites. The secondary payloads include ISRO nano-satellite-2 for Bhutan (INS-2B), which will have two payloads, namely NanoMx and APRS-Digipeater. NanoMx is a multispectral optical imaging payload. The Nov. 26 launch was ISRO’s fifth and final mission for 2022. The first mission in February put three satellites into low Earth orbit aboard a PSLV rocket, followed by the launch of three satellites in June aboard a PSLV, the failed maiden flight of Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) in August, and the successful launch of 36 OneWeb satellites in October aboard a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3 rocket. It was the 56th flight of PSLV since it went operational in 1993, according to ISRO. Meanwhile, Indian startup Skyroot Aerospace launched the country’s first privately developed rocket, Vikram-S, Nov. 18 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. It was a suborbital launch aimed at testing and validating technologies that will be applied to the company’s first orbital-class launcher, Vikram 1, which the company plans to launch in 2023. 
The European Space Agency has officially ended cooperation with Russia on the ExoMars mission, prompting a Russian threat to halt use of a European robotic arm on the International Space Station. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher announced July 12 that the ESA Council formally decided to terminate cooperation on ExoMars, where Russia would have launched a European rover called Rosalind Franklin to the surface of Mars. That cooperation has been on hold since March . While ESA has previously only suspended cooperation, it appeared highly unlikely that work with Russia would ever resume. Aschbacher said that the decision came because “the circumstances which led to the suspension of the cooperation with Roscosmos – the war in Ukraine and the resulting sanctions – continue to prevail.” Since ESA’s decision to suspend work with Russia on ExoMars, it has been examining how to replace Russia’s contributions. That included not just the Proton launch of the spacecraft but also the Kazachok landing platform and some instruments and radioisotope heating units on the rover. Options include cooperation with NASA as well as entirely European alternatives. Aschbacher said that ESA would provide “new insights on the way forward with other partners” at a July 20 media briefing, with details to follow. An ESA media advisory July 13, outlining its presence at the upcoming Farnborough International Airshow, said there would be a July 20 briefing in London “on the future of Mars exploration” with ESA, NASA and the U.K. Space Agency participating. While ESA’s decision to formally end cooperation with Russia on ExoMars was not surprising, it prompted a sharp reaction from Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos. In a post on the social media network Telegram shortly after the ESA announcement, Rogozin accused Aschbacher of “sabotaging” the joint ExoMars mission. He said Roscosmos would seek the return of the Kazachok platform, which was in Europe for launch preparations at the time ESA suspended cooperation on the mission. Rogozin also said he commanded the Russian cosmonauts on the station to no longer use a European robotic arm there. That arm is part of the Nauka module launched a year ago and still being commissioned. It was not immediately clear if that command would be carried out and, if so, what effect it would have on ISS operations. It was also unclear if that would postpone a scheduled July 21 spacewalk from the Russian segment of the station by Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. A major purpose of that spacewalk is to work on that robotic arm. ISS relations between Russia and the Western partners have seen increasing strain, particularly after Roscosmos published photos July 4 of Russian cosmonauts holding flags of two regions of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces. NASA, in a July 7 statement, strongly criticized Russia for that photo op , a sentiment shared by ESA’s Aschbacher. “There is no place on the International Space Station for politics,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters after an event July 12 at the Goddard Space Flight Center to mark the release of observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. However, he reiterated that a “very professional relationship” continues among the ISS crew as well as between mission control centers in Houston and Moscow, and believed all the partners, including Russia, would remain involved through the end of the decade. “This is an international science, technology and research endeavor that will continue.” Nelson added that negotiations continue between NASA and Roscosmos on a seat barter agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew vehicles in exchange for American astronaut flying on Soyuz spacecraft. NASA ISS managers said in the spring that a deal needed to be concluded by June to enable crew swaps for missions launching in September. “The drop-dead date has not passed,” he said, but didn’t indicate when a deal needed to be concluded.
PASADENA, Calif. — The first orbital transfer vehicle launched by Momentus continues to experience problems and the company says its confidence that the spacecraft can complete its mission has “substantially declined.” In a June 13 statement, the company said it was still trying to fix problems with its Vigoride-3 tug after its launch May 25 on the SpaceX Transporter-5 rideshare mission. The company previously said the tug had deployed two of nine small satellites it carried but had suffered “some anomalous behaviors” about which the company offered few details. Those problems prevented other planned tests of the spacecraft, including its propulsion system. The company said one issue with the spacecraft was a problem with solar arrays that failed to deploy as expected after launch. This caused both power and communications issues, the company said, although other body-mounted solar arrays did work correctly. Momentus said it was working with the company which provided the arrays, which it did not identify, and together “have identified what we believe is the root cause of the arrays not operating as intended.” It added that it also identified potential root causes for other, unspecified anomalies with the spacecraft. The failure of the solar arrays to deploy has reduced power and limited communication. The company did have initial contact with Vigoride-3 and was able to confirm the two satellite deployments, but even with Federal Communications Commission approval of the use of unplanned frequencies it has not been able to maintain two-way communications. “We are continuing efforts to address the anomalies,” the company stated, “but our level of confidence that we will be able to deploy additional customer satellites from Vigoride and perform some planned operations of the vehicle on this test and demonstration mission has substantially declined.” Momentus had emphasized that Vigoride-3 was an experimental vehicle and, while carrying some customer payloads intended to generate a small amount of revenue, was primarily a technology demonstration mission. “During this first launch of the Vigoride vehicle to space, we have learned a great deal and plan to incorporate improvements in other Vigoride vehicles currently being assembled and ground tested. This was the primary purpose of this initial Vigoride mission,” John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said in the statement. “As we stated prior to the launch, we fully expected to experience challenges during this test and demonstration mission and to learn from them, which is what we are doing.” The company said it would proceed with plans to fly payloads on future SpaceX rideshare missions, starting with Transporter-6 in November. The company is working on other Vigoride vehicles, but has not ruled out flying payloads on future missions that can be deployed from an adapter without propulsion, like other rideshare providers. Momentus had a payload on a second port deployed from such an adapter provided by an unnamed “trusted partner.” “Like other companies that have worked through initial challenges to create successful capabilities, our engineering team at Momentus is focused on learning as much as possible from the remainder of the current Vigoride mission and utilizing industry best practices to implement corrective actions and lessons learned for our upcoming missions,” Rood said. Shares in Momentus closed down 2.2% in trading June 14. The company’s shares have fallen by nearly 40% since June 6.
NASA and the European Space Agency have revised their plans to return samples from Mars, removing a rover and its lander from the effort and replacing them with helicopters modeled on Ingenuity. At a July 27 briefing, officials with the two space agencies discussed the latest version of the planned Mars Sample Return campaign, with the goal of returning to Earth in 2033 samples currently being collected by the Perseverance rover. In March, NASA said it would split a sample retrieval lander into two separate landers . One would carry an ESA-provided “fetch rover” that would pick up samples cached by Perseverance and return them to the second lander, which contained the rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) that would launch the samples into orbit. ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter would collect the sample package and return it to Earth in 2033. The two landers, NASA said then, were needed since a single lander that could carry both the MAV and the fetch rover had become too large to land using technologies demonstrated on previous landers. The new concept, though, does away with the fetch rover and its lander. Instead, NASA and ESA will rely primarily on Perseverance to bring the samples to the lander with the MAV. An ESA-provided robotic arm will transfer the samples from Perseverance to the MAV. “Key to our new architecture is a recent assessment of Perseverance’s reliability and life expectancy based on its performance to date,” said Jeff Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return program at NASA. That assessment, along with the performance of the similar Curiosity rover, which will mark 10 years on Mars next month, led the agencies to conclude that Perseverance will be able to deliver samples to the lander. “We have confidence that the rover will be available to deliver samples to the sample retrieval lander in 2030, when we need it to be,” he said. As a backup, the lander will bring with it two helicopters similar to Ingenuity, the small helicopter delivered as part of the Perseverance mission and which far exceeded expectations . The helicopter was originally planned to conduct no more than five flights over a month, but has flown 29 times over more than a year. Richard Cook, manager of the Mars Sample Return program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the new helicopters would be slightly heavier than Ingenuity. Each would be equipped with robotic arms to grapple sample tubes and have wheels on their landing legs. The wheels, he said, would allow the helicopters to land near a sample tube and then roll up to it to grab it. The helicopters would then fly back to the lander and roll up to it. “They would be used as a backup to bring the tubes back to the lander,” he said. “There’s also the possibility we could do other things with it, such as observing the area around the lander and potentially taking pictures of the MAV launch.” Gramling said eliminating the fetch rover and its lander would reduce the risk of the overall Mars Sample Return campaign. “This mission is simpler. It’s less organizationally complex,” he said. “We believe now that we have an architecture that is simpler and will position us for success.” It will also presumably be less expensive, but Gramling did not provide any estimates of the cost savings. “Obviously, one lander is much less expensive than two,” he said, but deferred any cost estimates until the mission reaches a milestone called Key Decision Point C, where the agency sets cost and schedule commitments, in about a year. Two years ago, NASA and ESA estimated the overall cost to the agencies for all the missions in the full Mars Sample Return campaign to be at least $7 billion . An independent review several months later estimated that cost to rise by on the order of $1 billion . NASA did not disclose how much the two-lander approach considered earlier this year would cost. ESA will save significant money by not building the fetch rover, which comes as it works to try to find a new way to launch its ExoMars mission and the Rosalind Franklin rover after terminating cooperation with Roscosmos . David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, said the project has been working “at great speed” on alternative concepts for the mission. “There’s been some excellent discussions between NASA and ESA to explore the different options getting Rosalind Franklin to Mars,” he said. However, ESA ruled out using Rosalind Franklin as the Mars Sample Return fetch rover because of significant differences in design. Parker said a decision on the future of ExoMars would come at ESA’s ministerial meeting in November. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said on the call that he’s been giving talks recently about the James Webb Space Telescope, which released its first science observations earlier this month after a successful launch and commissioning that came only after years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns. He said he sees comparisons between JWST and Mars Sample Return. “Both are historic missions. Both are international. They’re big missions that are both difficult but are very much worth doing.”
Blue Origin announced June 15 that former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten will join Jeff Bezos’ space company as executive director of the firm’s Club for the Future foundation and as a strategic advisor. Hyten, who retired in November after 40 years of service in the U.S. Air Force, was the nation’s second highest-ranking military officer. As vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he ran the Joint Requirements Oversight Council that oversees all military acquisitions. He previously served as commander of the Air Force Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command. An advocate for space programs, Hyten was a long-time critic of the plodding ways of the Pentagon, particularly in the development of next-generation weapon systems. “We are deeply honored to have General Hyten apply his tremendous leadership skills and space expertise to Blue Origin and Club for the Future,” Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin, said in a statement. As head of Club for the Future, Hyten will focus on community outreach and engagement activities to encourage students to become scientists, engineers and explorers, said Blue Origin. Hyten also will advise the company’s senior leadership. “I’m excited to join Club for the Future and empower students from all backgrounds to pursue a career in STEM and make their dreams of working in space a reality,” Hyten said. Hyten is joining Blue Origin as the company moves forward with the development of a heavy-lift rocket New Glenn, and looks to compete again to become a national security space launch services provider. Blue Origin in 2020 lost out to United Launch Alliance and SpaceX and is expected to offer New Glenn when the national security launch contracts are recompeted in 2024. Blue Origin also signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. military to explore the possibility of using its rockets to transport cargo and people around the world. A cooperative research and development agreement was signed in December with the U.S. Transportation Command.
The new head of the Office of Space Commerce says he’s talking with industry on how his office can best take over civil space traffic management while also potentially taking on more regulatory responsibilities. Speaking June 22 at the Fourth Summit for Space Sustainability by the Secure World Foundation and the U.K. Space Agency, Richard DalBello said he’s been on a “listening tour” with satellite operators and commercial space situational awareness data providers since taking over as director of the Office of Space Commerce last month . That office is charged with implementing Space Policy Directive 3, a four-year-old policy that directs the Commerce Department to take over civil space traffic management responsibilities (STM) currently handled by the Defense Department. That includes providing warnings to satellite operators of potential close approaches between their satellites and other space objects. “The question is, what exactly is it that we’re going to do?” he said in his remarks. In conversations with satellite operators, he said he’s asked them what basic services they expect to see once his office takes cover civil STM responsibilities. While operators initially say they want to see his office continue what the Defense Department currently provides, they also acknowledge that they’re not satisfied with those services. “Once you prompt them — the people fly satellites for a living and who live this every day — it’s easy to get a list out of them” of improved services, he said. That list features rapid cataloging of satellites after launch, faster screening of potential conjunctions and ability by the government to easily accept position data from satellite operators to improve the accuracy of satellite catalogs. The growing amount of satellites and debris, and increased commercial activities in low Earth orbit in particular, also drive the need for improved STM services, he said. “We need to go to the next level.” He said that later this summer and this fall, the Office of Space Commerce will move ahead on efforts such as buying data and contracting for “essential commercial services” to support that effort, with the goal of creation of an open architecture data repository of SSA data. “All of this is targeted to an initial operational capability in 2024,” he said. DalBello said that his vision for the office is that it will “first and foremost execute on the task of implementing an open architecture data repository that provides basic services to commercial, civil and international entities for free.” He also sees the office being an advocate and “troubleshooter” for the space industry generally and the SSA industry specifically. That work extends to international cooperation on STM issues. He said he will be meeting with European Union officials next week where STM will be on the agenda. “It’s the beginning of an important multiyear dialogue,” he said. “It’s not something that just the U.S. can do. This is something that requires the engagement of all nations.” The Office of Space Commerce also has a regulatory responsibility for commercial remote sensing after the office was combined with a separate Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs office. The role could expand, he said, to regulate other commercial space activities. Of particular interest is the responsibility for authorization and continuing supervision for commercial space activities required by Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty. That is handled in the U.S. by a patchwork of agencies for launch, communications and remote sensing, an approach that leaves gaps for new industries and services. DalBello said his office has been in discussions with the White House and Congress about whether it should take on those oversight responsibilities to fill those gaps. “We are in open dialogue with the administration and with the Hill about whether we should fill that gap, what’s the most appropriate way to fill that gap that we all see in the authorities in the U.S.,” he said. “I see us playing a larger role in that space.” That could eventually include oversight of commercial space stations and, with it, human safety in space. “That’s not something that is on our agenda today or, quite frankly, even next year, but it could eventually be,” he said. If that happens, he said he expects other organizations, like NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, to assist with such oversight. “If we were tasked with that authority, I think we would have a lot of support and assistance in the interagency community.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Hyperspectral imaging startup Wyvern said Nov. 1 it secured $7 million in additional seed funds ahead of deploying its first satellites early next year. Venture capital firm Uncork Capital led the funding round with participation from earlier investors MaC Venture Capital and Y Combinator. Wyvern has now raised about $15 million toward plans to ultimately develop a foldable telescope, which the Canadian startup says would let it pack more performance into smaller, cheaper-to-launch hyperspectral imaging satellites. According to Wyvern, this telescope would enable commercial customers to access the kind of hyperspectral imaging services traditionally sold to the defense market from larger, more expensive satellites. Hyperspectral sensors provide data across a multitude of spectral bands to enable analysts to detect phenomena in colors that typically can’t be seen by the human eye. Commercial applications for improving these sensors include helping farms save costs and improve operational efficiencies by reducing the amount of fertilizer, pesticide, and water used. Wyvern’s initial satellites will not be equipped with deployable optics and will be limited to providing imagery at a 5-meter resolution. Instead, these satellites are designed to give Wyvern a foothold in a commercial marketplace that is also being targeted by other imaging startups, including Virginia-based HySpeqIQ and Indian venture Pixxel. Earth observation constellation operator Planet said Sept. 21 it also plans to add hyperspectral imagery satellites to its fleet starting next year. AAC Clyde Space is building Wyvern’s first three satellites, each the size of six cubesats, for a launch early next year on an undisclosed rocket. “This funding provided the certainty that our first constellation will make it to space,” Wyvern co-founder and chief operating officer Callie Lissinna said via email. “Beyond mitigating any barriers to reaching space for the first time, this funding is also accelerating our development timeline.” Wyvern expects to launch a constellation of 36 satellites in the coming years with its deployable optics technology — some bigger and others smaller than its initial 6U satellites. Lissinna declined to say when it could deploy the first satellite with its foldable telescope, or what company would build this constellation. “We have been hitting key milestones around the development of our first demonstration satellite for this deployable optics technology, and are well on-track to deliver global-scale coverage with our proprietary technology in the coming years,” Lissinna said. She said Wyvern “flew extensive aerial surveys” with a hyperspectral drone this summer to gather data for solutions it is developing for the agriculture market. “This data is creating the foundation to a customer ‘Sandbox’, a platform we’re still developing, that will help customers in all industries play with hyperspectral data,” she added. Some of these companies have already signed up as customers, according to Lissinna.
Firefly Aerospace is preparing for the second launch of its Alpha rocket in late August or early September, hoping that a successful mission can enable a “step change” in activity for the company. The second Alpha rocket is currently at the company’s launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as the company makes final preparations for the launch. The first Alpha rocket launched from there in September 2021 but failed to reach orbit when one of its first first-stage engines shut down shortly after liftoff . “Our target is in the next 45 to 60 days of being able to launch,” Peter Schumacher, interim chief executive of Firefly, said in a recent interview. “It’s really pending, at this point, range availability.” The rocket itself is ready for flight, he said, other than performing a wet dress rehearsal and a static fire test, which he said would be done within two weeks of launch. The company is waiting on a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration, which in turn depends on approval of a new debris model for the rocket. The revised debris model came after the first Alpha rocket exploded in flight when the range activated its flight termination system. Debris from the rocket, made primarily of carbon composite materials, fell outside of the range, including in nearby communities, although no damage was reported. “We have the unfortunate precedent of being the first large composite rocket ever to be terminated,” he said. Previous debris models, including the one used for that flight, were based on metallic rockets. “So when we did terminate, some of the pieces fell outside where this model predicted.” Schumacher said Firefly has been working with the FAA and an unnamed third party to develop a revised debris model that better handles composite materials. The revised model, which now fits the behavior seen on the first launch, is pending final approval by the FAA and the Western Range. Once the model is approved and a license awarded, Firefly will wait for a launch opportunity at Vandenberg. Schumacher said the company will have to work around a few government launches scheduled, such as a Delta 4 Heavy launch of a National Reconnaissance Office payload. “If they don’t move, we’ll probably be looking at a launch in the first or second week of September,” he said. “If those government launches are delayed for any reason, we might be able to sneak into the last week of August.” Besides correcting the engine problem that caused the first launch to fail, he said the company has adopted a more rigorous approach to manufacturing overall. “It’s around ensuring that the second flight, the product that is sitting out there, is the absolute best product that we can produce,” he said. “This rigor is really what is the difference and what is giving us the confidence that we think flight two is going to be successful.” Future launches and NASA If the upcoming launch is successful, Firefly plans one more launch this year. A mission for NASA under a Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) demonstration contract awarded in December 2020, valued at $9.8 million, will carry a set of NASA cubesats to orbit as soon as November. Schumacher said the company is projecting up to six launches in 2023. To achieve that higher flight rate, the company is performing “lean manufacturing exercises” as well as working with its supply chain to ensure a steady supply of external components. “Just making sure we’re getting ahead of long-lead ordering,” he said, “and ensuring that our internal manufacturing is as lean as possible and can meet the rates that we need.” One change is that the company will be building rockets to meet a schedule rather than a specific mission. “I’m getting the company on the mindset of we need a rocket manufactured every two to three months,” he said. “I put it on the business development team to go and sell that rocket. So regardless of whether or not we have a paying customer, we’re going to have a rocket ready.” The company believes that approach could help it win business such as the Tactically Responsive Space 3 mission being competing by the U.S. Space Force to launch a payload on short notice. “That’s going to require us to have a rocket sitting around,” he said. Firefly is also in the process of getting added to a NASA contract for small launches. Despite its VCLS award, the company was not among the dozen launch providers NASA selected in January for its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract , which makes them eligible to compete for future NASA smallsat launches. The NASA source selection statement for VADR stated only that the agency’s contracting officer for the procurement concluded Firefly was ineligible for an award. Schumacher said that stemmed from a request by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in December that company’s largest shareholder, Ukrainian-born entrepreneur Max Polyakov, divest his stake in the company. Polyakov sold his shares in the company to AE Industrial Partners in February. “When CFIUS happened, we were forced to cease all negotiations with NASA,” he said. “As soon as we overcame our CFIUS issues, the company reengaged with NASA on VADR. Over the last few months, we’ve been negotiating with them and finally were able to get back on that contract.” NASA, in a July 1 procurement filing , announced its intent to add Firefly to the VADR contract vehicle, saying that only one other company with the ability to launch payloads weighing between 500 and 1,000 kilograms was on the contract. Company leadership Schumacher, a partner at AE Industrial Partners, became interim chief executive June 16 after Tom Markusic, who has been chief executive, stepped down to become chief technical adviser while staying on the board. Schumacher said the company is working quickly to find a permanent replacement, hiring an executive search firm, Korn Ferry, to identify potential candidates. Interviews of some of those candidates have started. “We’re targeting to have the CEO ideally chosen by the end of July and then in place sometime mid-August.” In his short time running Firefly, he said he had a better understanding of both the company and the broader launch industry. “The more I learn, the more excited I am about where Firefly is,” he said, citing the company’s technology and maturity. “Once we demonstrate our technology on this flight, I think the market is going to see what I see where we are relative to our competitors, and be quite impressed with what we’ve done quietly over the last year.”
Despite a growing demand for satellite imagery, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are not taking advantage of available commercial technology due to slow and cumbersome procurement methods, the Government Accountability Office said in a Sept. 7 report. The war in Ukraine has drawn attention to how governments are using commercial satellites to track troop movement and the impact of attacks. Meanwhile, the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense continue to do business as usual and are not incorporating emerging commercial capabilities, said the report directed by the House and Senate intelligence committees. “Until they address this, the U.S. risks losing a technological advantage over emerging competitors, like China,” said GAO. The National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates the nation’s classified spy satellites and also is responsible for buying commercial imagery, has for years been working on a strategy to acquire emerging commercial capabilities. But during that time the commercial sector has flourished and the government’s procurement strategy is behind the curve, said Brian Mazanec, GAO’s director of defense capabilities and management and author of the report. “We found that the current approach faces challenges incorporating the rapidly improving commercial capabilities, both in terms of timeliness and scaling,” Mazanec said. “The commercial satellite imagery industry continues to rapidly change so finding ways the government can take advantage of that continuous innovation is difficult.” The IC and DoD for the most part continue to use their standard process for buying products and services, “which isn’t fast,” he said. From 2019 through 2021, the report said, the NRO spent some of its commercial imagery budget on emerging capabilities, but those efforts have not generally led to sustained funding. Study contracts with small dollar amounts “limit the ability of vendors to expand and enhance service offerings.” Imagery analysts at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) also face challenges integrating data from commercial satellites, according to the report. “For example, NGA officials reported that, although NRO has a number of study contracts exploring commercial radar capabilities, NGA does not have formal requirements to ingest and process this commercial radar data in their ground systems from these emerging capabilities.” Mazanec noted that NRO spending on commercial imagery for foundational mapping is “quite significant” and has allowed the NRO to focus on other capabilities. However, DoD and the IC “have a really hard time incorporating emerging commercial capabilities at scale and in a timely manner.” He said GAO investigators spoke with about a dozen commercial vendors. Those that only have research and development contracts “expressed genuine frustration with the long lead time in the process. They also found that the small study contracts rarely translated into larger government commitments.” Lack of coordination between DoD and IC GAO also highlighted a lack of coordination between DoD and the IC on imagery requirements. This fragmented approach, said the report, results in overlapping wish lists and procurements. “We found that the IC and the DoD need to establish clear roles and responsibilities for the acquisition of commercial satellite imagery, and then communicate this to all the relevant stakeholders,” said Mazanec. The NRO and NGA, for example, have written agreements documenting specific responsibilities among their two agencies. “However, once you get outside of NRO and NGA, there’s no guidance that addresses organizational roles and responsibilities across the IC and DoD related to commercial satellite imagery. And this is particularly problematic with the U.S. Space Force coming online and developing its service specific mission areas and focus.” The report has four main recommendations: The IC and DoD should lay down clear roles and responsibilities for acquiring commercial satellite imagery. They should figure out how to scale emerging commercial satellite capabilities into operational support contracts in a timely manner. The third one is to set performance goals and measures towards maximizing the use of commercial satellite imagery. Finally, the IC and DoD should provide better guidance for the use of commercial analytics services that use remote sensing data. “Our bottom line is that commercial satellite capabilities are increasingly going to be indispensable to the national security enterprise,” said Mazanec. “We really believe that if DoD and the IC can develop an effective approach to incorporate and sustain emerging commercial satellite capabilities in a timely manner, the national security enterprise will be better positioned to maintain and grow its technological advantage in space.”
LOGAN, Utah – Atlas Space Operations upgraded its user interface to make it easier for customers to schedule communications with their satellites and to quickly confirm whether data was transmitted. Through the new user interface, Atlas shares the data and metrics the company gathers at each ground site for every satellite pass. “Through our user interface, our customers can see all of the checks that our operations team goes through and flags for every single pass,” Brad Bode, Atlas founder, chief technology officer and chief information officer, told SpaceNews . “That gives the operators insight into how our team determines the success or failure of a pass. Passes don’t fail that often, but people want to know what’s going on.” By sharing information on each pass, Atlas also is “empowering customers to solve problems as quickly as possible,” Bode said. If a satellite fails to transmit data during a pass, for instance, the user interface shares that information with the satellite operator. “That tool is important to put in the hands of those customers who don’t have a large software team that can code the solution,” Bode said. “We as an operations team know what to look at and we want to offer that to our customers for free.” The new user interface also is designed to make it easier for customers to schedule satellite passes. The satellite operator can visualize the passes that have the highest probability of being awarded or scheduled. “It affords the satellite operator, especially the one who only has one or two satellites, the ability to visualize which passes are the highest probability of success or guaranteed to succeed as opposed to guessing,” Bode said. “A lot of times, customers ask for a pass, get rejected and ask for another one without knowing what’s available or not available.” To remedy that, Atlas is exposing its scheduling through the user interface. For every time a customer’s satellite will be visible overhead and communications are possible, Atlas shows the likelihood of contact. If the likelihood is 100 percent for a specific pass, that means there is no conflict in the entire Atlas network and communications is virtually guaranteed. “If you have an urgent task, you want to choose the visibility that is 100% free,” Bode said. “Now if you see 80% free, you can request a little less of the visibility. What we’re saying is you can get request a little less time and we’ll get it for you, rather than an all or nothing approach.” Atlas revised its user interface to help companies or government agencies without extensive satellite communications experience. “We want to foster a new community of what everyone is calling NewSpace,” Bode said. “But it’s complicated and takes a long time. We have to use software abstract away some of these problems and make them easier to solve until people can get fully machine-to-machine integrated.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network reclaimed permission to operate in France June 2 following a month-long public consultation in the country. French telecoms regulator ARCEP said it decided to award Starlink a spectrum license again after its consultation highlighted demand for the services in areas poorly served by terrestrial networks. ARCEP had authorized Starlink in February 2021, however, France’s highest administrative court revoked the license April 5 after ruling that the regulator should have first launched a public consultation. That ruling came after two French environmental activist organizations submitted an appeal to challenge Starlink’s frequency rights, citing concerns including the impact of megaconstellations on views of the night sky and space debris. Starlink broadband is available in 32 countries and currently serving nearly 500,000 users, according to a video presentation SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted June 5. SpaceX also said it had sent 15,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine that will help keep the country connected amid Russia’s invasion. Starlink has more than 2,400 satellites in orbit after SpaceX launched its first batch of the spacecraft in May 2019, according to statistics maintained by spaceflight analyst and astronomer Jonathan McDowell. The decision to grant Starlink permission to operate in France came a week after the Philippines became the first country in Southeast Asia to approve Starlink. SpaceX also recently said Nigeria had joined Mozambique as the first countries in Africa to give its broadband network the nod. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
TAMPA, Fla. — Italian rocket maker Avio is rushing to expand facilities to help Arianespace meet its share of a multibillion-dollar launch deal that Amazon announced in April, comprising up to 83 rockets for deploying its Project Kuiper broadband satellites. The largest-ever commercial launch agreement includes 18 heavy-lift Ariane 6 rockets, which each use two or four of Avio’s P120 engines as strap-on boosters, depending on their configuration. The P120 also serves as the first stage of Europe’s next-generation small launch vehicle Vega C, which like the upcoming Ariane 6 is set to ramp up production after a maiden launch this year. Avio is Vega’s prime contractor and is a subcontractor for the Ariane 6. Giulio Ranzo, Avio’s CEO, says Amazon’s colossal order helps expand the company’s capabilities to serve future demand as European startups seek to muscle in for market share. Avio’s long-term growth prospects will help the company compete with these entrants for customers and employees, according to Ranzo. The publicly listed company reported a 25% jump in revenue for the first three months of 2022 to 66 million euros ($71 million), compared with the same period last year. However, adjusted EBITDA — or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — fell 73% to 1.2 million euros as rising energy costs stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine started taking their toll. The war also raises questions about Avio’s ability to produce Vega C’s upper stage, which is powered by Attitude and Vernier Upper Module — or AVUM — engines that use a propulsion system sourced from Yuzhnoe and Yuzhmash in Ukraine. SpaceNews interviewed Ranzo to learn more about Avio’s growth strategy weeks before Vega-C’s critical launch debut. What are the key takeaways from Avio’s recent financial results? The main message is we are paving the road for very robust future growth, which is pretty evident from the path we’re following in terms of acquiring new orders — both for Ariane and Vega — and for the development of new products and technologies. This prospective growth was also clear maybe a year ago, but it was not as concrete because we didn’t have the orders. Now, the order book is completely full. So we see a bright future ahead of us, considering market demand is growing so fast. At the same time, we’ve suffered very high energy prices that are affecting near-term profitability. But by nature this is a very long-term business so you don’t care much about what is happening in one quarter or the other; you’d rather look at the next decade or so. How has Amazon’s order of 18 Ariane 6 launches for Project Kuiper affected demand for Avio’s P120 boosters? It will enable us by 2025 to reach the maximum utilization of our production capacity, which in any industry is key to maximizing profits. These boosters are also used on Vega — it’s the first time a family of rockets has been built by using the same booster for the first stage [but taking advantage of this requires] the ability to fully leverage the economy of scale, where the more you make the less they cost. When you reach the maximum utilization of capacity, the profitability is at the maximum, and that will also be extremely important for maximizing quality. How many P120s does Avio expect to produce this year, and what is your projection for 2025? This year we’ll manufacture an equivalent of about 16 of them, and by 2025 we’ll be at 35 boosters per year. Do you expect demand to stay that high after 2025? Well, this we will see — what the commercial timeline suggests is that we might go beyond this level, in which case we’ll upgrade production capacity. Now, we also need to go through the maiden flights of Vega C and Ariane 6. We need to demonstrate that the product works as we expect. If we achieve this, we might see enough demand to go to an even higher production rate. As you ramp up production, how exposed is Avio to industry supply chain issues? The European supply chain is very well tied into pan-European partnerships under the umbrella of European Space Agency projects. The available capacity and capability is very well monitored by ESA. Key supply chain partners are selected jointly with ESA, which assesses and controls the suppliers’ level of capacity, capability and quality. So I think we are reasonably well equipped to embrace the challenge. The Vega supply chain team has been in place for over 10 years and delivering as expected. Does the revenue boost and facility expansion enable Avio to consider opportunities that were perhaps out of reach before? If we deliver — first and foremost by launching successfully Vega C in a matter of a few weeks from now [Arianespace says the first flight is slated for the first week of July ] , and subsequently by launching Ariane 6 before the end of the year — we will for sure access new opportunities that would not have been possible before we had this opportunity with Amazon. It’s no doubt a crucial contract for which we need to thank Arianespace. They’ve done a great job from a commercial point of view, and now it’s time to execute. What’s the latest on Vega C’s upcoming maiden flight? We are on track to be ready by the end of June. I personally inspected the rocket’s fourth stage which will be integrated in the next 10 days or so. The first three stages of the rocket are already integrated. The launchpad and control bench are up and running. The payload is on its way to the launchpad. It’s going to be very exciting in the next few weeks. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); }) Are you still on track for a total of three Vega C launches by the end of the year? Yes, we have contracts for that. We will perform the second launch in the fall. In the winter we should be doing the third one. I don’t know yet whether it will be before the end of the year or immediately at the beginning of next year. It depends on the success of the maiden flight. But that’s the plan. How is Vega C competing against a proliferation of European rocket startups? First of all there is no other proven orbital vehicle [of this class] in Europe today other than Vega. We will see how much time other vehicles will take to become fully functional to launch satellites to low Earth orbit, and to reach a payload capacity that enables the same level of capability as Vega C. Vega C is launched from Kourou, and this means it can do any orbital inclination and any type of mission, whereas many of these newly announced rockets are slated to launch from the Nordics. From there you can only launch north. Other anticipated rockets will be relatively smaller in size. So I think there will be quite some time within which Vega C will face very limited competition in Europe. Are Vega C and Ariane 6 picking up the slack following the embargo on Russian Soyuz rockets that Arianespace had been using? Yes, this is the expectation. This is also by design, because some of the satellites that we used to launch with Soyuz from Kourou are meant to be launched by Ariane 6, namely the European Galileo satellites. Some of the smaller payloads that Soyuz used to launch on a commercial basis can now be launched with Vega C. So I think there will be a positive effect on both European launchers in the years to come from the disappearance of Soyuz as a viable solution for non-Russia payloads. Are there specific contracts you can talk about? I can tell you we have plenty of demand, even from the U.S., because the number of payloads that are wishing to be launched is very substantial, and there’s not enough capacity yet available in the market for them. We are now looking at launch opportunities by 2026, 2027 and 2028. So we have plenty of opportunity to grow also in flight rates — from three launches to four per year and then towards six launches annually in the next three to four years. How challenging is it to expand your workforce to expand production? We are looking for 200 smart engineers who want to come and join us. It’s a massive effort to recruit people, train them, and put them up work. There is also a lot of job rotation from one company to the other. I think young people should look at which companies really have a robust plan for the future. A plan which is financially backed up by orders and funding. There are plenty of startups that are portraying a future that they might not be able to execute on because they do not have the financial resources. Luckily, we are financially very strong. We’re listed on a stock market, we are cash positive, we have a lot of order backlog — we’ll soon have a backlog exceeding a billion euros. So it’s extremely important for young people to understand that to grow you have to have it in the backlog, or it will not happen. I think people will eventually go to companies that are stronger from the backlog perspective, and are not at risk of disappearing a few months later. Vega C’s upper stage is powered by AVUM engines sourced from Ukraine. How many of those have already been delivered? For security and commercial sensitivity reasons, we do not release the number we have. However, I shared with the public that we have enough strategic stock to not worry about it in the medium term. After the war in 2014 for Crimea we understood the situation may have gone into some instability. We started in 2017 to pick up strategic stock to provide for deliveries until 2026, so we are today reasonably covered. And by the way, as we speak the Ukrainian suppliers continue to work successfully. I can only praise them for the work they’re doing today, in the middle of a war, to continue this product as expected. Are you doing anything else to mitigate the risk of the conflict in Ukraine affecting future supply? Are you looking at AVUM alternatives? Yes, absolutely. On one side, we are preparing for the design of an innovative orbital propulsion system using green propellant that may be implemented in the next few years. It’s a new generation, storable orbital propulsion that will be used for new applications such as in-orbit servicing. That may represent an alternative to AVUM, should production be interrupted. But I really hope AVUM production will not be interrupted, and I do count on the fact that the Ukrainian supplier is very, very resilient. Secondly, we have recently fired, on ground, our liquid oxygen and methane engine. It’s an extremely powerful solution that will power the upper stage of Vega E by 2026. So, in the in the 2026 timeframe, we may have more than one new upper stage solution available to us. Could you accelerate the introduction of the next-generation Vega E rocket? I think we can move the schedule forward by some time — not too much. We cannot cut it in half and make this happen by 2024. But probably we can accelerate it up to maybe eight months or a year, considering that the first step on our engine development testing went extremely well. If we see the need to make this happen, we will. For the time being, we want to take all the time we need to make this happen successfully. Keep in mind that, between now and 2026, we have lots of other things to do. We have of course Vega C, but we also have Space Rider, our remotely piloted spaceplane. We need to be careful not to want to do too many things at the same time. After Avio successfully performed its first M10 liquid oxygen and methane engine test for Vega E, what’s the next milestone for Vega C’s successor? We will be performing more refining tests on the engine in the course of 2022, and then we will use that to perfect the stage. So the combination of the engine, plus the propellant tanks, the liquid propulsion system and all that goes with the engine. Then we’ll have to use 2024 and 2025 to prepare the launchpad, which will need to be equipped for the ability to use any propellant, among other milestones we’ll have to go through to get to a first flight by 2026. Now, we can put some of these things like the launchpad preparation in parallel. But for the sequence of securing engine performance, then securing propulsion stage performance with tanks and all of that — and then doing the job at the level of the launch system — it’s an inadvisable roadmap that some of my announced competitors seem to have forgotten. Unfortunately, it’s a path you have to go through and you cannot skip any of these steps. Vega E aims to have higher performance and reduced costs compared with Vega C. Can you quantify that? Yes, today Vega C has a capacity of 2.3 metric tons to low Earth orbit, and in particular in sun-synchronous orbit. Vega E will have three tons of capacity. It’s another important increase in capacity that will let the cost per kilogram drop by quite a bit. Also, between Vega C and Vega E, we reduce the number of stages by one. Three propulsion stages rather than four, so that simplifies the product as well. And by 2026, we will also be manufacturing 35 or more P120s annually. This will make the first stage significantly cheaper — which by nature is the most expensive part for us. You mentioned how the Russia-Ukraine conflict has helped raise energy prices that are affecting Avio’s profits. What are you doing to mitigate that issue? That’s a tricky one. On one side we have a number of energy consumption reduction programs that we’re running that will help, but the problem is the price of natural gas is six times what it was a year ago. Our efforts in the short term will do little to the problem. What we have done is engage with a new energy partner. We’ve entered into a joint venture with Italy’s largest power-generation company to try to work with renewable energy to optimize at least the cost of electricity. But for a portion of the energy we use, which is thermal energy to generate steam, there’s unfortunately little we can do in the short term, because the steam we need can only be produced with gas. As long as gas stays at this price, it’s going to be hard. At the same time, I think this is a problem that any citizen in Europe is facing. How will Avio benefit from Europe’s planned sovereign broadband constellation? I am not sure on how it will shape up, but definitely the European Commission is pushing this project ahead strongly, and I think it will primarily be an opportunity for Ariane 6 and marginally, maybe, for Vega. What is also important is that the Italian government launched a billion-dollar project at the beginning of the year for a small Earth-observation constellation, which will entirely be launched by Vega. Can you elaborate? Europe has launched a campaign called the Recovery Plan for recovering post-pandemic. As part of this, Italy has decided to invest 2.3 billion euros in space — one billion of which is to create an Italian observation constellation to monitor the country. Italy by nature is a peculiar country with a very long coastline. We have all sorts of issues with natural disasters including earthquakes, with immigration from Africa — we’ve got it all. So we elected to create a network of optical radar satellites to monitor our country. Such a constellation will be made of some 34 satellites — we’ll see, but that’s another good stream of work that will come. When is the first launch for Italy’s Iride Earth observation constellation? Some of the first launches may be towards the end of 2024, beginning of 2025. How else is Europe’s Recovery Plan helping Italy’s space industry? Another good chunk of money from it is going toward developing rocket technology. We will use this funding to create a demonstrator of a new rocket using our liquid oxygen and methane engine. And also to develop a new liquid oxygen and methane engine that will be six times more powerful. So that paves the road for the next generation launchers that we will likely have in the 2030s. This interview has been edited for length and clarity
A weather satellite is in good condition after suffering a problem deploying its solar array immediately after launch Nov. 10. NASA launched the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 spacecraft on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket early Nov. 10 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, deploying the satellite into its planned polar orbit. While the agency initially stated that the spacecraft extended its single solar array shortly after reaching orbit, the agency said about three hours after liftoff later that telemetry was unable to confirm the deployment. In two subsequent updates later in the day, NASA said that controllers were still working to deploy the array, but provided few details on the specific problem. The spacecraft was “power positive,” meaning that it was generating power from the part of the undeployed array exposed to the sun, but the agency didn’t provide additional details on why the array had not extended. In an update issued about 14 hours after reaching orbit, NASA said the JPSS-2 solar array had finally deployed. “The operations team will continue to evaluate an earlier solar array deployment issue, but at this time, the satellite is healthy and operating as expected,” NASA stated. Shortly after the update, both NASA and Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for JPSS-2, issued press releases celebrating the successful launch, with no additional information about the solar array issue. The spacecraft, which will be renamed NOAA-21 when it enters service for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will join the first JPSS satellite, NOAA-20, as well as Suomi NPP in providing weather data from polar orbit. JPSS-2 is the first of three such satellites that Northrop Grumman is under contract to produce for launch over the next decade. JPSS-2 is the second Northrop-built spacecraft to suffer solar array deployment problems this week. The company’s NG-18 Cygnus spacecraft, launched Nov. 7, failed to deploy one of its two solar arrays after reaching orbit. The company later said debris from an insulation blanket on the Antares rocket lodged in the solar array deployment mechanism, but the spacecraft still had enough power from the one deployed array to function, reaching the International Space Station Nov. 9 . The two spacecraft, though, have very different solar array systems. The Cygnus uses UltraFlex arrays that unfold into a circular shape, like a fan. JPSS-2 uses more traditional rectangular arrays. A NASA statement said that the array has four panels, while a Northrop Grumman fact sheet said the array has five panels that collectively produce at least four kilowatts of power. The post-launch NASA statement also confirmed the success of a technology demonstration payload that launched with JPSS-2 on the Atlas rocket. The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) payload deployed from the Centaur upper stage 75 minutes after liftoff. Its inflatable heat shield, six meters across, protected the spacecraft as it reentered over the Pacific Ocean, splashing down 800 kilometers east of Hawaii. A boat recovered both LOFTID and a data recorder ejected from the vehicle during its descent. “We were pleased to work with our ULA, NASA science and NOAA colleagues to perform this technology demonstration in conjunction with JPSS-2’s launch,” Jim Reuter, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said in the statement. NASA said it would share more details about the outcome of the LOFTID flight experiment after the project team reviews data from it.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — When U.S. Space Command was established in 2019, the unit responsible for monitoring space traffic was tracking about 25,000 pieces of debris in orbit. Three years later, that number has risen to over 47,000.. “And it keeps increasing,” the head of U.S. Space Command Gen. James Dickinson said Aug. 9 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “If you think about the resources it takes to keep track of all that stuff in orbit, it is very difficult,” he said. Adding to the workload of the 18th Space Defense Squadron is the rapidly increasing pace of satellite deployments by nations and commercial companies. “Much of this growth and development is beneficial,” said Dickinson, but the duties associated with managing that space traffic are straining the resources of the squadron at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. “They do some remarkable work. They do all the predictive analysis to determine whether or not one of those pieces of debris may hold the International Space Station or other spacecraft at risk,” he said. “The amount of debris is very concerning. We want to make sure we don’t have a low Earth orbit that we can’t operate safely in,” said Dickinson. “And if you read the national defense strategy, it talks about having a safe and stable and secure operating environment in the space domain.” These operators at Vandenberg also have to keep an eye on hostile activities and “increasing challenges posed by our competitors,” Dickinson said. A Russian missile destroyed a satellite in a November 2021 test, creating a large cloud of debris that is endangering satellites in low Earth orbit. Russia also recently launched a s atellite reportedly in an orbit near a U.S. government satellite. In an interview with SpaceNews , Dickinson said there are only about 100 Space Force guardians that support space tracking and they’re under strain. He wants to see Space Command spend less time on traffic management and more time tracking potentially nefarious activities by U.S. adversaries. Space Command is ready to start handing over space traffic management duties to the Department of Commerce as soon as possible, said Dickinson. The Office of Space Commerce is charged with implementing Space Policy Directive 3, a four-year-old policy that directs the Commerce Department to take over civil space traffic management responsibilities currently handled by Space Command. That includes providing warnings to satellite operators of potential close approaches between their satellites and other space objects. “They’re working with us right now,” Dickinson said of the Office of Space Commerce. Now that Congress has appropriated funding for this office, the hope is that the transition can move forward, he added. “When they stand up that capability, that will be very significant for us,” Dickinson said. “Tracking should be a civil responsibility.” The goal is a division of labor, “where they do the routine type of tasking that we’re doing right now. And that will allow the limited resources I have to do the things that we need them to do, which is better characterization of things that are going on in orbit, specifically by some of our competitors.” Commerce officials said the transition will start in 2024 . Dickinson said he would like to see Commerce meet that goal. “If they have the resources they need, I think they can probably make that.”
SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded contracts to GeoOptics, PlanetIQ and Spire Global to provide space weather data as part of a pilot program to test the value of the commercial observations. “The awards represent NOAA’s next step toward working with the commercial sector to obtain and analyze space weather data to meet its critical space weather forecasting mission,” according to NOAA’s July 14 news release. Under the contracts, the three companies will provide NOAA with radio occultation datasets that reveal weather conditions in Earth’s ionosphere. NOAA’s goal is to determine the impact the commercial datasets would have on existing and anticipated future operational space weather models and applications. Over approximately 12 months, NOAA will evaluate data supplied by GeoOptics, PlanetIQ and Spire. Then, NOAA may opt to purchase commercial space weather data to support operational forecasting. NOAA began soliciting vendors in the first round of the Commercial Weather Data Pilot in 2016. The initial program focused on the value of radio occultation soundings, which reveal atmospheric temperature, pressure and moisture, in improving terrestrial weather forecasts. Since 2020, NOAA has been purchasing radio occultation data to improve terrestrial weather forecasts from GeoOptics and Spire . NOAA signaled its intention to begin evaluating space weather data with a request for proposals issued in May. Congress prompted NOAA to establish a commercial space weather data pilot program in the PROSWIFT Act , space weather legislation enacted in 2020. (PROSWIFT stands for Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow.) “GeoOptics is excited to be working with NOAA to show that we can continue to deliver the reliable and timely satellite space weather data the nation needs to protect our national infrastructure and support the most accurate space weather forecasts,” Conrad Lautenbacher, GeoOptics executive chairman, told SpaceNews by email. Chuck Cash, Spire vice president of federal sales, said Spire, with a constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites, is the largest producer of radio occultation data, which he called “a powerful component of highly accurate, modern weather forecasting.” “We’ve provided radio occultation data to NOAA for over three years and are thrilled to expand our relationship to provide data for space weather forecasting research, which will lead to safer and more efficient operations of planes and spacecraft,” Cash said by email. This article was updated Thursday evening with comments from Spire and PlanetIQ. 
China launched a Long March 7A rocket Tuesday, successfully inserting the Zhongxing-1E satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit. A Long March 7A lifted off from Wenchang spaceport on Hainan island at 9:18 a.m. Eastern Sept. 13. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, announced launch success just under 40 minutes later, also confirming the previously unannounced payload. Zhongxing-1E (ChinaSat-1E) is described as being for providing “high-quality voice, data, radio and television transmission services,” according to Chinese state media. The vague description of the satellite matches statements for earlier Zhongxing-1 series satellites. The lack of information and images of the satellite suggests that the satellite series serves military customers. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a major spacecraft maker belonging to CASC. The previous satellite in the series, Zhongxing-1D , launched in November 2021. Notably, that mission used a Long March 3B, launching from the southwestern, inland spaceport at Xichang. The switch of launcher and spaceport for the Zhongxing-1E launch, along with wording in a CAST press release , suggests a larger, heavier satellite bus than earlier satellites. The satellite was also transported by ship from Tianjin to Wenchang, whereas satellites are flown to Xichang. It is also possible CASC is looking to use the Long March 7A more often for launches to GTO rather than relying mainly on the aging, hypergolic Long March 3B. The Long March 7A is a 60.1-meter-long, 3.35-meter-diameter kerosene and liquid oxygen launch vehicle with four side boosters, capable of delivering up to 7 metric tons of payload to GTO. The Long March 7A is more capable than the older Long March 3B, which can launch 5.5 tons to GTO. By launching from the coast, the Long March 7A avoids the cost and hazards of the inland 3B launches, which have seen spent boosters fall on inhabited areas , and also has the advantage of launching from a lower latitude. The first Long March 7A launch took place in March 2020 and ended in failure . The second flight a year later successfully inserted Shiyan-9 into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The previous Long March 7A rocket launched a pair of Shiyan-12 satellites encapsulated in an elongated payload fairing in December 2021. The two spacecraft are believed to be Chinese inspector satellites for geosynchronous orbit and have been involved in a game of cat and mouse with USA 270. CASC stated in its Zhongxing-1E press release that it is developing a new, wider 5.2-meter diameter fairing to further improve the rocket’s adaptability. Tuesday’s mission was China’s 38th orbital launch of 2022. CASC has planned more than 50 launches across the year and is currently gearing up to launch the third and final module for the Tiangong space station. Chinese companies including Expace , Galactic Energy , Landspace , iSpace and CAS Space are also conducting their own launches during the year.
Five missile-detection satellites built by L3Harris under Pentagon contracts are projected to launch in 2023. Despite strains in the space industry supply chains, the company expects to complete these satellites on schedule and ramp up production of 14 more to be delivered by 2025, a senior executive said July 27. Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of spectral solutions at L3Harris, said these upcoming launches cap years of studies and demonstrations as the company fought its way into the U.S. missile defense satellite market dominated by much larger players like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. “We’ve been on a journey to penetrate the missile defense market for a few years now,” Mitrevski told SpaceNews . Four of the infrared sensor satellites are for the U.S. Space Development Agency and are projected to launch to low Earth orbit in March. The fifth one, developed for the Missile Defense Agency, is expected to launch to low Earth orbit also in 2023 but the specific timeframe is classified. SDA, a defense agency tasked to field a large constellation of satellites for communications and missile tracking, in October 2020 awarded SpaceX a $149 million contract and L3Harris a $193.5 million contract to each build four satellites to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, including the most advanced missiles now being developed by China and Russia. The eight satellites make up the Tracking Layer Tranche 0. The first Tracking Layer launch, projected for September 2022, is likely to include at least two SpaceX satellites. The second launch, planned for March, will include all four L3Harris satellites and others from the Transport Layer Tranche 0 , which are being produced by Lockheed Martin and York Space . SDA said the manifest has not yet been finalized. Separately, L3Harris is developing a missile-detection satellite under a $121 million contract with the Missile Defense Agency for the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, or HBTSS. MDA plans to launch two prototypes, one from L3Harris and another from Northrop Grumman, to test the capabilities of the sensors to track hypersonic and dim upper-stage ballistic missiles. These so-called medium-field-of-view sensors are capable of producing “fire control” data needed to be able to target an interceptor weapon to shoot down the enemy missile. Following the completion of the HBTSS and Tracking Layer Tranche 0 satellites, L3Harris will have less than three years to produce 14 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1. L3Harris this month won a $700 million deal and Northrop Grumman a $617 million contract. The 28 infrared-sensing Tranche 1 satellites will be launched in batches of seven to low polar orbits starting in April 2025. Each plane of seven satellites will be deployed at different locations around the globe. Mitrevski said L3Harris will produce and test the infrared payloads at its new classified facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The satellites will be assembled at the company’s production plant in Central Florida. The global supply chain issues and shortages of microelectronics are real concerns, he said. “We’ve been able to mitigate this with internal investments and some creative work across different customers.”
At least three senior engineers and program executives left satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital late last week amid disagreements over the company’s direction, sources told SpaceNews . CEO Marc Bell in an interview Nov. 14 confirmed the departures of Adam Thurn, vice president of engineering; Austin Williams, chief technology officer; and John Abel, senior technology fellow. Bell said the executives resigned over disagreements with Terran Orbital’s top management over the company’s decision to focus primarily on the national security satellite market. “They wanted to build cubesats. They don’t want to build military satellites and protect national interests,” Bell said. “I wish them the best, they weren’t fired, they quit.” Thurn, Williams and Abel did not respond to requests for comment for this article. All three had worked at Terran Orbital’s subsidiary Tyvak Nano Satellite Systems, founded in 2011 in Irvine, California, and acquired by Terran Orbital in 2014. Williams was a co-founder of Tyvak. Before it became a publicly traded company in March, Terran Orbital, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, reorganized and announced it would phase out the name Tyvak as it transitioned from nanosats and cubesats to larger satellites. The company wants to produce larger buses, ranging from 150 to 500 kilograms, in order to compete for Defense Department, U.S. intelligence agencies and NASA contracts. Bell said the pivot started last year when he and co-founders Anthony Previte — who passed away this summer — and Daniel Staton agreed to shift their focus to military satellites and support its largest strategic investor and customer Lockheed Martin. Bell said Lockheed Martin to date has invested $160 million in Terran Orbital. With Lockheed Martin’s latest $100 million investment, Terran Orbital is expanding satellite manufacturing facilities in Irvine. It also is canceling plans to build a large factory in Florida and to develop a radar-imaging constellation. Lockheed Martin selected Terran Orbital as its satellite bus supplier for the Space Development Agency, a U.S. Space Force agency building a mesh network in low Earth orbit. Lockheed won a $187.5 million contract in 2020 to produce 10 satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 0 and a $700 million contract earlier this year to produce 42 satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 1. Bell said the 10 Tranche 0 buses will be delivered to Lockheed Martin by the end of the year, in time to meet SDA’s target schedule to launch all 10 satellites in March. Production of Tranche 1 satellites is already underway, he said. During the company’s recent earnings call, Bell said Terran Orbital has $162 million in backlog orders and thanks to Lockheed’s investment, will expand capacity over the next decade and produce much larger buses of up to 1,000 kilograms. “I want to do things to protect the national interest. I have no interest in building cubesats,” Bell said in the interview. “They were great at the time. But there are other companies out there that can do cubesats. Our future is working for the DoD and the IC.” With regard to the departures of the company’s top engineers, Bell said he plans to fill those jobs as early as this week. Challenges meeting surge in demand According to sources close to Terran Orbital who asked to not be quoted by name, the resignations last week capped a period of aggressive growth and change, along with pressures to boost the company’s stock price and build value for shareholders after going public in March in a SPAC merger. These sources said supply chain problems that affected the entire industry impacted Terran Orbital’s production of SDA’s Tranche 0 satellites. As the company increased hiring and demanded longer work hours to meet production goals, these sources said, disagreements increased between the engineering and manufacturing departments on how to best meet these demands. Months of rising tension came to a head last week when Thurn, Williams and Abel resigned in protest. According to one source, there was significant discontent amongst engineers and employees who had been with the company for a long time. Williams was overseeing the Lunar Infrared imaging spacecraft , a payload riding on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis I mission. These sources said losing top engineers could hurt the company, at least in the near term, because of their experience and familiarity with the spacecraft. Lockheed Martin remains ‘confident’ Despite Terran Orbital’s growing pains, Lockheed Martin has “tremendous confidence in their ability to deliver us the 10 buses that we need for Tranche 0,” Tom McCormick, vice president and deputy general manager of Lockheed Martin’s military space portfolio, told SpaceNews . “Organizational changes are not uncommon in any company, big, medium or small,” he said. Lockheed Martin expects to have at least three buses by Thanksgiving “and the rest of them in the first couple of weeks of December,” said McCormick. “Although there may have been some personnel changes at Terran, every company has some growth pains,” he said. “Organizational changes are a fact of life. They happen. I don’t have any concerns with their ability to deliver those buses and for us to be ready to launch 10 satellites in March.” Lockheed Martin will integrate the buses with the payloads at the company’s manufacturing campus in Littleton, Colorado. Each Tranche 0 satellite will have two optical communications terminals and a Ka-band radio-frequency link,; and three of the 10 will have Link 16 data-communications radios. For Tranche 1, all 42 satellites will have Link 16 and RF communications, plus four optical terminals per satellite.
NASA has revised and expanded a set of objectives it will use to guide its architecture for lunar and Mars exploration after receiving volumes of feedback from commercial and international partners. The agency released the revised list of 63 objectives to coincide with a presentation by the agency’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, at the International Astronautical Congress here Sept. 20. The document is an updated version of 50 objectives for transportation and habitation, lunar and Martian infrastructure, operations and science that the agency released in May for public comment . “Our overarching goal is to create a blueprint for sustained human presence and exploration throughout the solar system,” Melroy said in her speech. The original draft of 50 objectives generated more than 5,000 comments from industry, international partners and the general public. The agency then invited some of those who submitted comments to two workshops, in Houston and in London, for additional discussion. One change is that the science objectives were “completely restructured,” she said. The original objectives focused only on lunar science with no Mars-specific goals other than carrying out the Mars Sample Return campaign. “That’s kind of important. We do have to know what we need to learn at Mars before we send humans.” NASA also rewrote the objectives to make them more consistent in the level of detail, and added categories such as “science-enabling” objectives that develop techniques to support science as well as applied science. The result was 26 science objectives, compared to 20 in the original one, most of which apply to both the moon and Mars. The revised document now includes a set of nine “recurring tenets,” or common themes across all objectives. An example of that is explicitly mentioning responsible use of space and defining what that means. “We just considered it was consistent with our responsibility obligations and it was something that was just assumed, but it wasn’t explicitly stated,” she said. Other recurring tenets included in the document range from international and industry collaboration to interoperability and reuse. The objectives are part of a broader approach by NASA to develop an architecture for human and robotic exploration and use that to guide programs. “We have a founding principle to architect from the right and execute from the left,” she said, meaning developing an architecture to meet a desired goal and use that to guide work on existing programs. Melroy said NASA planned a “regular cadence” of workshops to provide new input into that architecture and set of objectives. “We’re going to be revisiting the architecture on an annual basis,” she said. “Our watch words are refinement, analysis review and engagement, and that’s a cycle we intend to repeat.” The revised objectives won an endorsement from one organization, the American Astronautical Society (AAS). “It is especially important that NASA has put science up front and prioritized international cooperation, goals AAS has championed goals since its founding,” Alan DeLuna, president of AAS, said in a statement.
SAN FRANCISCO – Lockheed Martin and Maxar Space won contracts worth $5 million apiece to help define the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s future geostationary weather satellite program. NOAA announced the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) Spacecraft Phase A Study contracts July 26, which NASA awarded on behalf of NOAA. Under the contracts, each company will spend ten months developing the GeoXO spacecraft concept, maturing necessary technologies and helping define the spacecraft’s potential performance, risks, costs and development schedule. The results of the study will help NASA and NOAA establish requirements for GeoXO spacecraft development contracts scheduled to be awarded in 2024. “We are super excited about NASA and NOAA’s GeoXO program,” Adrián Cuadra, Lockheed Martin’s weather and Earth science director, told SpaceNews by email. “It’s going to build on the technology we have today and be an absolute game-changer for the future of severe weather forecasting, ocean and climate monitoring.” Lockheed Martin builds two instruments on the current geostationary weather constellation, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) R Series: the Geostationary Lightning Mapper and Solar Ultraviolet Imager. “We know what it takes to be successful and are very much looking forward to continuing our trusted partnership, focused on the mission of saving lives,” Cuadra added. Maxar also has a history of work on NOAA weather satellites. Maxar manufactured eight of NOAA’s first- and second-generation GOES satellites in the 1970s and 1990s, Chris Johnson, Maxar senior vice president and general manager of Space, said by email. “Maxar is committed to helping customers use spacecraft and space-based data to further efforts to study weather patterns and mitigate climate change, so this GeoXO study contract is the next evolution of that work,” Johnson added. In the early 2030s, NOAA plans to begin operating three GeoXO satellites. One over the Eastern and one over the Western United States, like the current GOES-R series, plus a third satellite over the central United States. With the GeoXO constellation, NOAA seeks improved imagery compared with the GOES-R Series. The agency also intends to continue mapping lightning and observing space weather from GeoXO satellites. In addition, the constellation will fly ocean color instruments and the centrally-located GeoXO spacecraft will carry a hyperspectral infrared sounder and an atmospheric composition instrument. NOAA funds, operates and manages the GeoXO mission. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the study contract awards.
Millennium Space Systems announced Nov. 23 its proposed satellite design for a U.S. Space Force missile-warning constellation passed a critical review. The company, a subsidiary of the Boeing Co., is developing a sensor satellite for a constellation that the Space Force plans to field in medium Earth orbit (MEO) to detect and track hypersonic missiles. Millennium Space and Raytheon in May 2021 were selected to design separate MEO satellite concepts. Passing a critical design review allows Millennium Space to move forward to the next phase of the program. The Space Force next year plans to seek industry bids for as many as four MEO satellites for a projected multi-orbit architecture of overhead persistent infrared (OPIR) sensors. “This initial CDR process marks 18 months of hard design work that is necessary to build the next generation of affordable OPIR sensors that can detect and maintain custody of emerging missile threats,” Lt. Col. Gary Goff, a program official at the U.S. Space Systems Command’s space sensing directorate, said in a statement. Jason Kim, CEO of Millennium Space, said the company developed a “digital model that gives our customer the ability to accurately track hypersonic glide vehicles and modern threats.” “Millennium will transition into space and ground segment development for a projected launch in 2026,” he said. Following the design review, the Space Systems Command exercised the next contract option for the first space vehicle to be delivered in August 2026, a Millennium Space spokesperson said. There are contract options for a second and third vehicle. MEO satellites would add a new layer to the Pentagon’s missile-defense architecture to provide extra eyes on enemy hypersonic missiles. The Pentagon is requesting funding for as many as four MEO satellites to be launched from 2026 to 2028. Compared to current sensors in geostationary satellites, sensors in medium orbits closer to Earth would see and track a wider area than satellites in low Earth orbit. The Space Force plans to deploy a constellation of 135 missile-warning and missile-tracking satellites in LEO and 16 in MEO. The Space Development Agency will develop the LEO layer. The Space Systems Command is responsible for the MEO layer and serves as the total system integrator. The Aerospace Corp. in a recent report said a MEO constellation could provide additional resiliency to the U.S. missile-warning network due in part to being in a different orbit than other missile warning assets. “If the eventual constellation is to consist of purely LEO and MEO capabilities, the MEO systems would offer wider field of view and longer pass times over target areas than the LEO systems and add angular diversity to the broader architecture for tracking missile threats,” said the report. The Pentagon requested $139 million for MEO missile-warning satellites in the 2023 budget. Congressional committees in markups proposed increases of anywhere from $100 million to $300 million above the Pentagon’s request to speed up the deployment of the MEO constellation. The Aerospace report noted that Senate appropriators, particularly, “seem to want to accelerate this transition, cutting some of the funding for next-generation GEO and polar-orbiting systems and nearly doubling the funding for LEO and MEO.”
The Space Development Agency announced Oct. 4 it awarded Ball Aerospace a $176 million contract to build, operate and secure launch services for 10 experimental satellites. The satellites, projected to launch in 2024 and 2025, are part of the agency’s NExT program, designed to demonstrate low-latency data transport and beyond line-of-sight command and control. NExT is short for National Defense Space Architecture Experimental Testbed. Under the agreement, Ball Aerospace will manufacture the satellites, integrate government-furnished payloads, procure rideshare launches, provide the ground control system and operate the satellites from its facilities in Colorado. The NExT experiments are in support of the Space Development Agency’s constellations of data transport and missile-tracking satellites in low Earth orbit that the agency will deploy over the next few years. Once the NExT payloads are in orbit, SDA will assess their utility before they are incorporated into operational systems. SDA has selected the payloads but did not disclose specifics on what missions they will perform. “NExT is an exciting program that has a lot of tie-in with our mission partners and will help to advance future tranches of the national defense space architecture,” said Derek Tournear, SDA director. “Ball Aerospace is excited to work with SDA on the upcoming NExT program,” said Dave Kaufman, president of Ball Aerospace. The company for decades has built satellites for the Defense Department, NASA and theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A member of the European Parliament is touring the United States to help enhance space policy relationships while also promoting an effort to develop a European space law. Niklas Nienass, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, met with officials in Washington this week, including at NASA, NOAA and the White House, before going on to Denver and Houston, stops that included meeting with Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), who chairs the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, and touring the Johnson Space Center. “The very first task is to build up good relations and have somebody to talk to” as the European Union enhances its profile in space policy, he said in an interview. While there is close cooperation on space topics between American and European agencies, such as between NASA and the European Space Agency, he argued it’s lacking at a higher level between the U.S. and the E.U. “If you look at the political level, there’s just not so much in terms of coordination and working together.” Part of that, he said, is because of the multitude of European players, such as ESA and national space agencies as well as the European Commission. “We definitely have to work on that so we have one coherent strategy in which all these things can go.” Closer cooperation between the European Union and the United States, he said, is needed for topics like space traffic management and utilization of space resources. He said American efforts like the Artemis Accords, which several E.U. nations have signed, aren’t sufficient to address those issues. He has previously criticized the provision of the Artemis Accords supporting resource utilization, arguing instead for the Moon Agreement that he says could offer a more equitable distribution of resources. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be the Moon Treaty,” he said. “But I think there has to be a more comprehensive text that brings together multiple stakeholders, whereas the Artemis Accords are not even a treaty.” Such an international agreement, he said, could cover issues like space traffic management and space resources. “There are a lot of points where I think we could go further in international relations and where we need an update anyway, because the Outer Space treaty is not sufficient enough,” he said. “The Artemis Accords are just not fitting to solve the problem.” Nienass is also working to strengthen space policy within Europe. He is a leading advocate for an overarching European space law to cover various issues that have traditionally been handled by a patchwork of national space laws among E.U. members. That will make it easier, he argued, for European companies to work across national borders. “I want to have this harmonized so that they can easily work together.” Among the provisions of the proposed legislation include liabilities and registrations that are handled at a national level today. The legislation would address support for European space industry, including both startups and larger companies. Space sustainability will be another topic, such as requiring satellites to deorbit at the end of their lives. “I think it would set a really strong precedent for international legislation to show what is possible,” he said, adding that by giving firm guidance to Europe’s space industry “they will really accelerate.” Work on the space law, he said, is still in its earliest stages. One challenge for the bill, he said, is that the treaty outlining the European Union’s responsibilities states that there is no harmonization required for space and other research activities among members, but for commerce harmonization is required. “Now that space is going from research toward more private, commercial activity, the European Commission is wondering which direction should it go.” Nienass said the European Parliament will take up a resolution next week that will call for a European space law. However, commissioners will then have to propose a law for the parliament to consider. “I want to go forward and make them do that for the next two years,” he said, because his mandate in parliament ends in 2024. There is strong support for a European space law, he said, particularly among companies who support harmonization of national space laws. “Everybody agrees that it’s a good direction to go, but everybody’s skeptical whether we are allowed to do it.”
The Space Force’s new acquisition executive Frank Calvelli says there is no quick fix for problems that for years have plagued defense procurements, such as cost overruns and schedule delays. His plan is straightforward. “We need to make sure we have really good acquisition and contracting strategies upfront. We have to execute and deliver on time,” Calvelli said in an interview with SpaceNews. Calvelli on May 5 was sworn in as assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, a new position Congress created in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act due to concerns that there were too many agencies overseeing space procurements and the Space Force needed its own civilian leader to keep projects on track. One of his first moves will be to impose discipline into acquisitions, a skill he learned over a 30-year career at the National Reconnaissance Office, where he oversaw satellite and ground system acquisitions. “A big push for me is going to be how do we set a program baseline right upfront so that we can actually achieve it,” he said. A number of Space Force programs are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, issues that Calvelli believes could be avoided by developing realistic cost estimates and timelines, staying with the plan and holding contractors accountable. Examples of troubled programs that Calvelli said he is monitoring closely include the next-generation OCX ground control system for the Global Positioning System constellation, and a space-tracking system called ATLAS , short for Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System. ATLAS was designed to replace an old legacy system used for tracking space objects and is expected to enter service sometime next spring, years later than envisioned. “I know it’s important to the Hill as well as to [the chief of the Space Force] General Raymond,” said Calvelli. “So I’m keeping a close eye on that.” “The infamous OCX program is supposed to transition to operations next year as well. So we will keep an eye on that one as well,” he said. Calvelli said these setbacks can be blamed both on government mismanagement and on contractors not delivering what was expected. “From what I can tell in my initial assessment is that both the government and industry are at fault,” he said. “It seems like the government’s never happy with what the requirements are, and they may change them from time to time,” which drives up costs. Again, he pointed to the problem of “not having a set baseline and schedule.” In the ATLAS program, it’s not clear there was a baseline or schedule, he said. “And that, to me, has been one of the reasons why we’re having some challenges. So we need to stay focused. It’s part of that discipline process where we agree on a set of requirements, we put it on contract, we have a clear plan and we execute to that plan.” It appears that there’s been a lack of discipline, “sometimes both on the government side and on the industry side when it comes to programs like ATLAS,” he added. Congressional concerns The Space Force will have to give Congress a progress report sometime next year on what it’s doing to prevent acquisition failures. The House Appropriations Committee in a report accompanying the fiscal year 2023 defense appropriations bill directs the Space Force to conduct a “rigorous technical analysis matched with executable plans resourced by realistic budgets.” The current plan, the committee said, “does not meet this expectation particularly with respect to aligning priorities within realistic budgets.” Calvelli did not comment specifically on the HAC report. But he said he wants to make sure project managers “properly resource and fund programs across the five-year defense program.” He also will advocate for the use of independent cost estimates. “I need my government program managers to proactively oversee and manage their programs.” On the contractor side, he said, “I need industry to deliver executable proposals. And what I mean by that is proposals that have realistic costs and realistic schedules that they can actually meet.” “I will tell you from my experience, given the competitive environment, industry tends to be optimistic on schedule and optimistic on cost,” said. If the government accepts those projections at faith value, “we end up setting not the best baseline to execute against.” This puts programs at risk of poor performance or even cancellation. “This is really a partnership with industry,” he said. “We need their help to be successful and we need to do our job by putting out good RFPs [requests for proposals] upfront and good contracts, strategies and incentives.” “And industry needs to do their part by giving us executable proposals and delivering the program that they committed to,” he said. “That’s going to be my initial focus area.” One way to ensure contractors don’t get away with unrealistic proposals is to make that part of the proposal evaluation, Calvelli said. The Pentagon’s independent cost estimators provide reliable data that can be used to assess contractors’ bids, he said. “And so what you do is you make schedule realism and cost realism a major element in any competition.” “And if the numbers are dramatically lower than what the independent folks say in terms of costs and schedule, you throw those proposals out,” he said. “The other thing we have to do is communicate with industry, to make sure that they know that we’re expecting these realistic proposals,” he said. Integration of GPS enterprise Calvelli said he has spent a lot of time reading Government Accountability Office reports critical of DoD’s management of the GPS enterprise, and he sees these assessments as cautionary tales. The GPS enterprise includes three segments: satellites in space, the ground control system and receivers installed on weapons systems and handheld devices. But each segment is managed separately. To provide additional security for military users, newer GPS satellites broadcast a stronger signal called M-code. But despite greater availability of M-code, most U.S. military forces still can’t take advantage of the more secure signal because they don’t have compatible user equipment. GAO for years has called out the Pentagon for not producing enough M-code-capable receiver equipment and for taking too long to install these receivers across all weapon systems. Calvelli said he plans to take on this problem. “We seem to have a disconnect between space and ground systems,” he said. “If we’re late on the space segment, and we finally launch it, if the ground is not ready to actually use it, it’s even worse. And so this whole program discipline is really what I really want to focus on.” The GPS program is an example of where the “integration” part of Calvelli’s job comes into play. Another is the missile-warning satellite architecture , where multiple agencies are involved. Calvelli has to coordinate programs run by the Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Missile Defense Agency and some shared with the intelligence community. To ease this task, Congress gave Calvelli’s job authority to chair a Space Acquisition Council to oversee, direct and manage acquisition and integration of space programs across the national security space enterprise. “Congress gave me this interesting tool called the Space Acquisition Council,” Calvelli said. “It’s supposed to be the integrating forum across the different organizations that I control, across the services to make sure that programs are heading in the right direction. And so I have that tool that I need to take advantage of.” Calvelli said smoother integration of programs will help achieve one of his top priorities, which is to “drive speed into our acquisitions.” As the U.S. faces threats from foreign adversaries, it’s important to accelerate technology developments and procurements, he said. “Space capabilities give our warfighters a strategic edge,” he said. “One of the big things about space is that it’s a key enabler for air, for sea and for land. We have to properly integrate space with all the warfighting domains to take full advantage of that.” Use of commercial systems Another pressing issue in Space Force programs is to make systems more resilient against anti-satellite weapons. Raymond and other leaders have called for a shift in DoD’s space architecture , moving from fewer, exquisite satellites to a more diverse, proliferated architecture and increased use of commercial space assets to complement national security space assets. “I like the diversification of the architecture a lot,” said Calvelli. He is especially enthused about the work being done by the Space Development Agency to deploy a l arge constellation of missile-tracking and communications satellites in low Earth orbit. “I think it’s really great,” he said of the SDA program. A proliferated network combined with some of the more traditional satellites “adds a lot of diversity and resiliency to the architecture.” Using commercial space systems also adds resiliency but the Space Force has yet to figure out how to integrate government and private networks. “I think we need to really have a plan. I’m not sure we’ve developed a vision,” he said. “Having our adversaries not know where commercial ends and government systems begin creates confusion that actually could be really good for our country from a resiliency perspective.”
LOGAN, Utah — Busek is rapidly expanding its staff and facilities in response to strong demand for the Natick, Massachusetts, company’s spacecraft propulsion. “We definitely have the headroom now to double in size,” Busek Vice President Peter Hruby told SpaceNews . This summer, Busek acquired a 1,022-square-meter facility, bringing the company’s total offices, laboratory and manufacturing space to nearly 4,645 square meters. As the business footprint expands, Busek is hiring. The company intends to add 15 people to its 60-person staff by the end of the year. Busek is producing 6-kilowatt Hall-effect thrusters for the NASA lunar Gateway Power and Propulsion Element being built by Maxar Technologies. “It will be the first human-rated mission to use electric propulsion,” Hruby said. “For us to have our engines on it is a great accomplishment.” Busek, founded in 1985, also manufactures mid-power thrusters for commercial satellite constellations and low-power thrusters for small satellites. “That’s one of the things that makes us unique,” Hruby said. “We serve a variety of customers.” Busek is supplying BHT-350 Hall thrusters to Florida-based Airbus OneWeb Satellites. The company’s product line has expanded to include gridded ion engines with iodine propellant, and miniature electrospray thrusters based on technology Busek developed with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the European Space Agency Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Pathfinder gravity wave mission launched in 2015. Finding thrusters, which are essential for many satellite missions, has become more difficult since Russia invaded Ukraine, the world’s dominant supplier of common satellite thruster propellants, including xenon and krypton. The war also severed OneWeb’s relationship with Russia-based electric propulsion supplier EDB Fakel. Hruby declined to offer details about the war’s impact on OneWeb but said Busek has been working with the broadband constellation developer for about six years. “We started with a clean-sheet design to accommodate the prime contractor’s rigorous requirements,” Hruby said. Because of growing demand for thrusters, much of Busek’s work with prime contractors “has been focused on bringing critical processes in-house, ensuring robust supply chains and scaling manufacturing operations,” Hruby said. Busek’s newest thruster systems, including electrospray and iodine-fueled ion engines, are scheduled for first flight next year. Iodine propellant is not appropriate for every mission or every customer, Hruby said, but it offers key advantages. “One, there’s a domestic source for iodine. Two, it stores as a solid, so you don’t need a pressure vessel,” Hruby said. “And three, iodine is a fraction of the cost of xenon and krypton.”
France joined the U.S.-led Artemis Accords June 7, a long-anticipated but significant milestone for the effort to establish best practices for sustainable space exploration. In a ceremony at the French ambassador’s resident here, Philippe Baptiste, president of the French space agency CNES, signed the Artemis Accords alongside NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The signing ceremony was part of an event to mark the 60th anniversary of CNES. “We have drawn inspiration from the success of the International Space Station, and we are now entering a new chapter in human exploration,” Baptiste said in remarks at the event. France becomes the 20th nation to sign the Accords, which started with a core group of the United States and seven other countries in October 2020. The United States established the Accords in an effort to establish norms of behavior on topics ranging from the exchange of scientific data to utilization of space resources, building upon the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements. “These set forth a framework for the peaceful exploration of space, and sets norms and values and objectives,” said Nelson at the event, giving the example of one provision of the Accords, rendering assistance in the event of an emergency. France signaled its interest in signing the Artemis Accords last fall, when French President Emmanuel Macron met with Vice President Kamala Harris. At a December meeting of the National Space Council , Harris mentioned France’s intention to sign the Accords but did not estimate when it would take place. “I applaud France for affirming its commitment to the peaceful, responsible and sustainable exploration of outer space,” Harris said in a tweet June 7 after France signed the Accords. A steady stream of countries has signed the Accords since their introduction in 2020, including many nontraditional spacefaring nations such as Bahrain and Colombia. France, by contrast, is among the leading nations in both government and commercial space activities, and is a major player in both the European Space Agency and the European Union. Signing the accords, industry insiders say, helps dispel the notion of European reticence to sign, or even opposition to, the Accords. Five of the 20 signatories — France, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland and Romania — are E.U. members. “Today’s signature is not just a victory for America and France, our nation’s first international ally, but represents a dramatic step forward for norms of behavior generally,” said Mike Gold, executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire and a former NASA official who led the development of the Accords. “France joining the already robust Artemis Accords family of nations shows that there is a strong desire globally to honor and implement the principles of the Outer Space Treaty and other international agreements.” The Artemis Accords was not the only agreement the two nations signed June 7. At a separate event, the United States, represented by NOAA, formally joined the Space Climate Observatory, a French-led effort to share satellite data to monitor climate change.
The launch of a polar-orbiting weather satellite and reentry technology demonstration will be delayed more than a week because of a battery problem with the upper stage of their rocket, NASA announced Oct. 29. The agency said the Atlas 5 launch of the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 satellite, which was scheduled for the early morning hours of Nov. 1 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, would be postponed “due to the need to replace a battery on board the Centaur upper stage of the launch vehicle.” That work will delay the launch to at least Nov. 9. At a pre-launch briefing Oct. 28, NASA and United Launch Alliance officials reported no problems with the launch vehicle or any other issues that would delay the launch, beyond unsettled weather that was forecasted for the launch. “The team’s not working any issues and we’re on track for a 2:25 a.m. Pacific launch here,” said Gary Wentz, vice president of government and commercial programs at ULA, during the briefing, which took place after a launch readiness review earlier in the day. The primary payload for the launch in JPSS-2, the second satellite in a series of polar-orbiting satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for weather forecasting. It will join JPSS-1, which entered service in May 2018 six months after its launch . A third polar-orbiting satellite, Suomi NPP, also provides weather data. The spacecraft was originally built as a prototype for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), but was turned into an operational satellite when NPOESS was cancelled. Suomi NPP is nearing the end of its life as it runs out of propellant to maintain its orbit. While JPSS-2 is the second satellite of the program, it is the first of three built by Northrop Grumman under a contract awarded in 2015. Ball Aerospace won the contract for the first JPSS satellite. In an Oct. 24 interview, Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial space at Northrop Grumman, said there had been no issues with processing of the satellite for launch. The company is “well along” in the production of JPSS-3 and -4, he said. The satellites use the latest version of Northrop’s LEOStar-3 bus. “We’ve got a new avionics suite, we’ve got a new set of sensors, wheels, star trackers, et cetera, that we brought to bear both for the Landsat [9] mission and the JPSS mission,” he said. “It’s a continuous upgrade in components and operating paradigms.” Also on the Atlas 5 is NASA’s Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), a technology demonstration payload that will deploy an inflatable heat shield six meters across. LOFTID will separate from the Centaur upper stage after the stage performs a deorbit burn. The inflatable shield will slow LOFTID from Mach 25 to Mach 0.7, then deploy a parachute and splash down east of Hawaii for recovery. LOFTID is the latest in a series of tests of inflatable decelerators that NASA envisions could be used to support future Mars missions too large to land using existing systems. ULA is also interested in the technology as a means of recovering the BE-4 engines on the Vulcan first stage for potential reuse. The launch, the 100th in NASA’s Launch Services Program, will be the final Atlas 5 mission for the program and the final Atlas 5 to launch from Vandenberg. Wentz said that, after the launch, ULA will start work to convert the Atlas pad at Vandenberg, Space Launch Complex 3, for use by the Vulcan rocket.
The X-37B spaceplane landed Nov. 12 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at 5:22 a.m. Eastern, setting a new endurance record after spending 908 days on orbit. Its previous record was 780 days. This was the sixth mission of the crewless reusable spaceplane, built by Boeing and jointly operated by the U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. Known as Orbital Test Vehicle 6, it launched to orbit May 17, 2020, on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. On this mission, the X-37B carried several U.S. military and NASA science experiments, including a Naval Research Laboratory project to capture sunlight and convert it into direct current electrical energy, and the U.S. Air Force Academy’s FalconSat-8, which remains in orbit. One of NASA’s experiments was the Materials Exposure and Technology Innovation in Space ( METIS-2 ). Scientists will use the data to understand the effects of the space environment on different types of materials. Another experiment was to investigate the effects of long-duration space exposure on seeds. The spaceplane is a derivative of the X-37A designed by NASA in the late 1990s to deploy from the Space Shuttle. The program later was transferred to the Defense Department. There are two X-37B spacecraft, which were originally designed for missions of 270 days, but have greatly exceeded that goal since the spaceplane’s first mission in 2010. The Air Force for a decade kept the X-37B in a cloak of secrecy, but the Space Force is now openly showing it off. “This mission highlights the Space Force’s focus on collaboration in space exploration and expanding low-cost access to space for our partners, within and outside of the Department of the Air Force,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said in a statement. “The X-37B continues to push the boundaries of experimentation, enabled by an elite government and industry team behind the scenes,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Fritschen, X-37B program director at the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. The OTV-6 mission for the first time carried a service module to host additional experiments. The service module separated from the OTV before landing. The Space Force said the module will be disposed of in accordance with best practices intended to reduce the amount of space debris in orbit. “With the service module added, this was the most we’ve ever carried to orbit on the X-37B,” said Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing Space and Launch. 
Two startups recently raised a combined $25 million in seed rounds to advance plans for lunar and asteroid missions, showing continued interest in space startups despite broader market uncertainty. Lunar Outpost announced May 24 it raised a $12 million seed round from several investors. Explorer 1 Fund led the round with participation from Promus Ventures, Space Capital, Type 1 Ventures and Cathexis Ventures. Golden, Colorado-based Lunar Outpost will use the funding to further development of a line of robotic lunar rovers. The company is working on its first rover, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), that will go on Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 lunar lander launching in 2023. A second rover will launch on another Intuitive Machines lander in 2024, both part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The funding “allows us to build the next class of robotic systems on the moon,” said Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost, in an interview. While the MAPP rovers weigh 10 to 20 kilograms each, the company is envisioning a larger rover weighing 100 to 200 kilograms capable of operating for years on the lunar surface. “We already have Earth-specific prototypes of that class,” he said. “What this allows us to do is space-rate those technologies and line up a mission or two.” Cyrus said the company looks to have the first of the larger robotic rovers ready for flight by late 2023 or early 2024. Lunar Outpost plans to announce a third rover mission to the moon some time this summer, he said, but declined to say if that would be for the larger rover or another MAPP rover. Besides developing lunar rovers, Lunar Outpost also developed a line of environmental monitors called Canary for terrestrial applications. That line is profitable, and Cyrus said that the company would consider using some of the funding to expand those monitors into new markets. “We were not in a position where we had to raise money. We didn’t need the money to survive,” he said, choosing to work with these investors to both grow the business and tap into their technical and business expertise. “We chose to raise the money with these investors because they provide substantial amount of value to help us get to the moon sustainably.” Lunar Outpost also won a NASA award in 2020 to collect samples and transfer them to NASA . Lunar Outpost offered just $1 for its samples, and last August received a milestone payment in the form of a check worth 10 cents, handed to Cyrus by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “That 10-cent check helped enable the $12 million check,” Cyrus said, “by showing people that the most respected space agency in the world is looking at resources.” Another startup raised money for ambitions beyond the moon. AstroForge, based in Huntington Beach, California, announced May 26 it raised a $13 million “seed-plus” round led by Initialized Capital, with investments from Seven Seven Six, EarthRise, Aera VC, Liquid 2 and Soma. The startup, part of the Y Combinator business accelerator, plans to take a fresh look at asteroid mining, using proprietary technology it claims can enable the mining of platinum-group metals from near Earth asteroids. Past ventures, such as Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, attempted asteroid mining several years ago but failed to get beyond Earth orbit and initial funding rounds. Matt Gialich, co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview that decreased launch costs and wider availability of satellite components make it easier and cheaper to develop spacecraft, allowing the company to focus on the specific technologies it needs for asteroid mining. The company’s first mission, planned for launch in early 2023, will place a six-unit cubesat developed by British company OrbAstro into orbit on a SpaceX rideshare mission. That spacecraft will carry what Gialich calls an “asteroid-like material” that the company will attempt to extract platinum-group metals from using its technology. He declined to go into the details about the specific technology. A second mission, launching as soon as the summer of 2023, would fly past an asteroid to test the spacecraft and instruments and identify potential targets for later mining missions. On a “green-light” schedule with no failures or other setbacks, he said, “we’re five years away from launching that [mining] mission and five and a half years from actually doing our extraction.” He insists the company had learned from the failures of past mining ventures by focusing on smaller, less expensive spacecraft. “All these guys want to build a multibillion-dollar 600-meter-long spacecraft and they’ll get a trillion dollars’ worth of metal,” he said, recalling conversations with investors. “We think we can do it by thinking about it very differently.” One former employee of an asteroid mining venture is skeptical. “It looks to me like the history of asteroid mining is repeating itself,” Elizabeth Frank, a planetary scientist who previously worked at Planetary Resources, tweeted May 31. She raised several issues, including challenges extracting platinum-group metals from asteroids, difficulty identifying such metals using existing remote sensing instruments and a lack of experience working with metallic asteroids. “I truly wish them the best — they’ve got their work cut out for them,” she concluded.
NASA is laying the groundwork for another attempt to launch the Space Launch System on the Artemis 1 mission late this month, pending both repairs to leaking liquid hydrogen lines and negotiations with the Eastern Range. During a Sept. 8 briefing, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said the agency had requested launch dates of Sept. 23 and 27 for the Artemis 1 mission after technical problems scrubbed two earlier launch attempts Aug. 29 and Sept. 3 . The revised dates, he said, reflect upcoming work to remove and replace seals on two liquid hydrogen lines that connect to the SLS core stage and then perform a tanking test at Launch Complex 39B to confirm that the repairs eliminated leaks seen during the two earlier launch attempts. They also avoid planned use of the Deep Space Network, needed for communications with the Orion spacecraft, for the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft with a moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos on Sept. 26. That schedule depends first on completing work on the liquid hydrogen lines. Mike Bolger, NASA Exploration Ground Systems program manager, said crews were at the pad replacing the seal on the quick-disconnect fitting for one liquid hydrogen line, 20 centimeters in diameter, as well as a separate line 10 centimeters in diameter, that run from ground systems to the core stage of the SLS. He said both seals could be replaced by the end of the day if weather does not interfere with work on the pad. Once the seals are replaced and the lines reconnected, NASA will begin preparations for a tanking test, tentatively scheduled for Sept. 17. In that test, the agency will fill both the core stage and the upper stage of the SLS with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to verify the performance of the seals. While the rocket will be fully loaded with fuel, NASA does not plan to conduct a formal wet dress rehearsal, as it did four times in April and June. “The purpose of this event is to prove to ourselves that the seals that we’ve replaced are good,” Bolger said. “We feel like the prior wet dresses that we’ve run have accomplished all of the requirements that we intended to capture.” None of the previous wet dress rehearsals made it all the way to the planned cutoff time at approximately T-10 seconds, with the last one in June stopping 20 seconds earlier. “You might say it’s been piece-parted, if you will,” John Blevins, NASA SLS chief engineer, said of the previous rehearsals. A full tanking “is a really smart test to do risk mitigation going into the next launch attempt.” Engineers are still investigating what caused the leak in the larger liquid hydrogen line that led to the Sept. 3 scrub. Bolger said there was evidence of a small “notch” on that seal that will be studied more closely. He added that was also not yet clear if an “inadvertent overpressurization” of that liquid hydrogen line during preparations to begin fueling caused the leak. One change for future propellant loading of the core stage, he said, will be a “kinder and gentler” loading process that reduces the pressure and flow changes, based on how the tanking was done during Green Run tests of the core stage at the Stennis Space Center. “We noticed that when we temper the changes, we’re better able to manage those leaks.” Even if the tanking test demonstrates the liquid hydrogen seals are now working, NASA cannot proceed with a launch without the approval of the Eastern Range. The flight termination system (FTS) on the core stage was certified only through the end of the most recent launch period, which ended Sept. 6. The U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, which runs the Eastern Range, would have to approve an extension of that certification without rolling the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to test the FTS batteries. “We did submit our waiver package to them,” Free said. “We’ll look to hear from them on any clarifications that they need for us.” He didn’t specify a deadline for securing a waiver, other that it can’t come the day before the scheduled launch. “When we get closer to the tanking test, obviously we’ll have to make a decision after that if we don’t have a decision from the range.” Free went to great lengths to praise the Eastern Range and its commander, Space Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, suggesting that comments he made after the Sept. 3 scrub about seeking a waiver were somehow misinterpreted by the range. “Gen. Purdy and his team have just been fantastic at listening to where we want to go and giving us their thoughts,” he said. Blevins said that test data NASA had about the FTS batteries showed “considerable time” remaining on them. “The last three days have been constant contact” with the Eastern Range regarding the data they need to evaluate a waiver. Should NASA get approval to proceed with a launch later this month, the Sept. 23 launch window opens at 6:47 a.m. Eastern and lasts for two hours, and would result in a “short-class” mission that would end with an Orion splashdown Oct. 18. The Sept. 27 launch window opens at 11:37 a.m. Eastern and runs for 70 minutes, and would allow for a “long-class” mission ending Nov. 5.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The Earth observation company BlackSky will launch new imaging satellites in 2023 and one of them will be used exclusively by the U.S. Army for tests and experiments. The Gen-3 satellite will produce images with 50-centimeter resolution, compared to current Gen-2 satellites that deliver one-meter imagery. “We will operate the satellite but the Army will use it. They’ll assess the capabilities and figure out how to integrate it with their operations,” said BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole. O’Toole spoke with SpaceNews Aug. 10 following the release of the company’s second-quarter earnings report. He said the program with the Army, known as “tactical geoint,” is an important piece of the company’s strategy to win more government contracts. BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs won 10-year contracts from the National Reconnaissance Office to provide satellite imagery for U.S. intelligence, defense and federal civil agencies. O’Toole said the Army has indicated it plans to use commercial imagery services in addition to what it gets from the NRO. The tactical geoint program was initiated by the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon organization that works with commercial companies. Once the Gen-3 satellites are operational, Army users will be able to task one and downlink imagery to existing remote ground terminals and to a new ground station known as TITAN, short for tactical intelligence targeting access node designed to analyze data from space, aerial and terrestrial sensors. O’Toole said BlackSky hopes the experiments will lead to larger Army contracts for data as a service. The first launch of Gen-3 satellites is projected in mid-2023, he said. The first batch is being produced by BlackSky’s sister company LeoStella, based in Seattle, Washington. These satellites will provide short wave infrared imaging, which can see in low light conditions, through smoke and haze. Army officials said they want to take advantage of commercial space services that provide imagery from low orbiting satellites that revisit the same spot multiple times a day. 
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Propulsion startup Phase Four is expanding its Maxwell plasma propulsion line by offering Max-V, an iodine-fueled engine. Prices have surged in the last year for the noble gases that fuel conventional electric propulsion engines, which is one of the reasons Phase Four is betting on iodine. Another is domestic production. In contrast to the noble gases often sourced from Ukraine, Russia and China, Iodine is available in Oklahoma. “The U.S. is the third largest producer of iodine in the world and all of the U.S. iodine comes from Oklahoma,” Phase Four CEO Beau Jarvis told SpaceNews. “There are no supply chain constraints or volatile cost components.” Under a contract awarded last year from the U.S. Air Force AFWERX program, Phase Four began working with iodine propellant. That contract “allowed us to start working with iodine and understanding how to flow it, how to store it, how our thruster interacts with it,” said Phase Four CEO Beau Jarvis. “It accelerated our early-stage research with iodine.” Now, Phase Four is focused on development and testing of the iodine propulsion “to prove to our customers that a it works and that it’s safe to use,” Jarvis said Phase Four plans to begin selling the Max-V engine commercially in the second half of 2023. “We want industry to understand you have a non-noble gas option for satellites that are starting to launch at the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024,” Jarvis said. “We want people to understand their options.” Max-V engines are designed for a broad range of spacecraft, with power requirements from 200 watts to more than one kilowatt. Six of Phase Four’s original Maxwell engines are currently in orbit. Another six have been delivered to customers. Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA Administrator and Republican congressman, joined the Phase Four board of directors in September because he’s convinced that spacecraft will require multimode, both chemical and electric, propulsion in a single system, which is Phase Four’s ultimate goal. “What we need is we need to be able to maneuver without regret,” Bridenstine said in an Oct. 13 keynote at the Satellite Innovation conference here. “We need to be able to have a high delta-V maneuver and we also have to have high Isp [specific impulse] in the same system, not hybrid with two stovepipe systems.” For national security missions, high delta-V offers the ability to perform quick maneuvers to avoid collisions or kinetic threats, Bridenstine said. For commercial satellites, the combination promises to reduce the cost of propulsion and improve efficiency, he added. Eventually, the multimode propulsion systems could be refueled in space, Bridenstine said.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The U.S. Army’s land forces for decades have relied on satellites for communications, navigation and early warning of missile attack. But the Army now wants to figure out other ways to use space technologies for nontraditional military operations such as cyber and information warfare. Army leaders in panel discussions at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium said wars in the future will be fought in the space and cyber domains. And they argued that there should be more synergy among space, cyber and information warfare capabilities so they can be layered to greater effect. The head of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler described the concept as a “triad of space, cyber and special operations.” This would require developing concepts of operations where surveillance satellites and cyber tools, for example, would be used in support of U.S. special forces that specialize in counterterrorism, information warfare and influence operations. The idea was endorsed by the Army’s top cyberwarfare officer Lt. Gen, Maria Barrett, and the head of Army Special Operations Command Lt. Gen. Jon Braga, who made a joint appearance at the conference. Using space and cyber technologies deliberately to locate targets, disrupt adversaries’ operations and gain information advantage is a departure from the Army’s traditional role of just being a passive consumer of GPS and satcom services. Officials said the concept aligns with the Pentagon’s national defense strategy that calls for the military to develop non-lethal capabilities, including those that can disable enemies’ networks and satellites. In a conflict against a peer competitor, “we need flexible options to counter disinformation, cyber attacks and asymmetric threats,” said Karbler. Space and cyber tools would complement traditional hard power to “address threats that transcend geographical boundaries and provide options when higher power escalatory options are less comfortable.” Barrett said cyberwarfare capabilities, when combined with the global reach provided by space systems, could “disrupt adversary actions and shape adversary perceptions.” Karbler said these unconventional approaches “underscore the vital importance of space and the essential role it plays when used in combination with new and existing capabilities.” Going forward, he added, “no longer can the space domain be untethered from land components.” Braga argued that greater use of space technologies in warfare is necessary as “adversaries have made great investments in space capabilities and have shown that they will use them.” China’s military doctrine, for example, integrates cyberspace, space, information operations, psychological warfare, and electronic warfare capabilities into joint military operations. Special operations forces increasingly are aware of the importance of space as a high ground, Braga said, as “there is no sanctuary” anywhere on Earth. Braga suggested the Army and other military services should collectively develop experiments that use space and cyber tools and eventually “test solutions in service exercises and joint force exercises.” He said Army Special Operations Command in March hosted an exercise focused on the intersection of space, cyber and special operations, but more is needed. Growing role of space in land combat The idea of combining space, cyber and special warfare marks a departure from the way the Army views space-based capabilities, said Eric Brown, vice president of military space advanced program development at Lockheed Martin. Brown said in an interview that the “triad” concept floated by Karbler appears to be an effort to use space and cyber technologies in more sophisticated ways. “The Army is, and has been, one of the largest consumers of space technologies of any of the services, just based on its sheer size,” said Brown. That is not likely to change but now “they are starting to think about the effects that you would want to have in an unconventional way,” he said. This stands in contrast to the conventional ways of measuring combat power based on the numbers of battalions, tanks and aircraft Brown said tactics enabled by space and cyber systems give the military options to fight in scenarios the Pentagon calls “ anti-access area denial ” where enemies deploy air defenses, missiles at sea and other systems to counter U.S. conventional military power. Bringing in special operations forces into the mix makes sense, he said. “We use our special operators to get into places that are difficult for other people to get into.” These are the units that identify and locate targets on the battlefield to enable the conventional forces to have an impact, Brown added. Space-based target location and reconnaissance is one way to support missions in denied areas. The Air Force and Space Force have made the case that surveillance traditionally performed by aircraft should move to the space domain, said Brown, “because we don’t expect that we’ll be able to get air assets in place.” Electronic warfare is another area that could leverage space systems, he added. When one looks at what could be done with electronic signals from space, “it really starts getting creative in how you use assets in a different way.”
A NASA demonstration of an inflatable heat shield showed the technology worked and can be scaled up for missions on Earth and Mars, project leaders said Nov. 17. NASA flew the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) as a secondary payload on the Atlas 5 launch of a weather satellite Nov. 10 . The payload inflated a heat shield six meters in diameter that separated from the rocket’s Centaur upper stage and reentered over the Pacific, splashing down east of Hawaii. While engineers are just beginning the process of analyzing data collected by LOFTID during its reentry, project officials concluded in a media teleconference that initial reviews proved that LOFTID worked as expected, shielding the payload from the heat of reentry without suffering damage. “The demonstration was a huge success,” Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center, said, basing that assessment on those initial reviews. The data they do have includes cameras from inside the vehicle that monitored heating as it reentered as well as the later deployment of its parachute. Crews later recovered LOFTID as well as a data recorder ejected during its descent as a backup in case the vehicle could not be recovered. “I couldn’t be happier with the way this mission went and with what we’re seeing so far,” said John DiNonno, LOFTID chief engineer at NASA Langley. He said engineers are still working to get all of the data collected by LOFTID downloaded and converted into usable formats, something he said would take a “considerable amount of time.” The initial analysis, he said, showed uniform heating of the aeroshell during reentry. The aeroshell looked “pristine” with any damage primarily coming from the splashdown and recovery, rather than the reentry itself. “It looks as through the inflatable structure could fly again.” There are no plans to fly LOFTID again, but project officials said they are working to scale up the technology, called Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD). Larger versions of the inflatable heat shield could be used for landing large spacecraft on Mars . United Launch Alliance, which partnered with NASA on the LOFTID flight, is also interested in using the technology to recover the engine section of its Vulcan rocket for reuse. “Scaling up would be a next step for us,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. That work, she said, would be guided by existing technology roadmaps the agency uses to prioritize work in various areas, including entry, descent and landing systems. “We’re taking a look at that now and in the short-term future.” Mars missions would need aeroshells 20 meters or more in diameter, far larger than LOFTID, six meters across. That will create issues with facilities at NASA for producing them and performing ground tests, she noted. Flight testing such a large aeroshell will also be a challenge. Del Corso said that NASA has looked at ways of demonstrating it by returning a Cygnus cargo spacecraft or even an International Space Station module. “Even then, it doesn’t quite get to the mass that really need to demonstrate 18- to 20-meter scale” aeroshells, Del Corso said, as those items would only require an aeroshell 10 to 12 meters across. “We really need a heavy mass to bring back in order to get to relevant conditions for 18 to 20 meters.” He said that NASA is finalizing a Space Act Agreement with ULA on applying LOFTID technology for the company’s Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology (SMART) reusability concept, where an inflatable heat shield would be used to help recover the Vulcan booster’s engine section. “They have clearly been very excited” about the technology, he said. Del Corso also compared the success of LOFTID with the inaugural launch of the heavy-lift Space Launch System Nov. 16 on the Artemis 1 mission. “We have now the ability to both put heavy payloads into space and to bring them back down,” he said. “These two successes are huge steps in enabling human access and exploration.”
LOGAN, Utah – Spaceflight safety startup Kayhan Space is broadening its product line to address collision threats for launch vehicles and satellites with or without propulsion. As traffic increases in popular orbits, Kayhan is updating its Pathfinder platform, which provides conjunction assessment and autonomous collision avoidance services. More than a dozen customers have signed up for the subscription-based Pathfinder platform including Capella Space, Lynk Global and Globalstar, Kayhan announced at the Small Satellite Conference here. “The reception for Pathfinder has been strong and we are hoping to sign up a lot more operators given the new capabilities,” Araz Feyzi, Kayhan Space co-founder and chief technology officer, told SpaceNews. The latest version of Pathfinder is designed for satellites with various types of thrusters as well as for spacecraft without onboard propulsion. “If a satellite doesn’t have propulsion but can change its attitude and drag profile, we recommend maneuvers that can significantly reduce the risk of a collision,” Feyzi said. “It’s a difficult problem to solve but it’s a real problem. There are thousands of satellites flying with no ability to make an avoidance maneuver.” Kayhan also is selling the orbit propagation software that the company developed for internal use. “Kayhan Eagle propagates orbits both around Earth and in the cislunar environment for thousands of objects 14 days out, within seconds,” Feyzi said. Gamut, Kayhan’s latest product, helps launch service providers identify safe launch windows. “If you want to make sure that your spacecraft first stage, second stage and all the payload components are safe from collisions, you can pre-screen your mission for conjunctions,” Feyzi said. Gamut software could show, for example, when a launching at a specific time could threaten the International Space Station or risk colliding with space debris.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) in a draft version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act pushes for changes in military launch services procurement, calling on the Space Force to replace the current two-vendor strategy with an open competition model. Smith’s version of the NDAA, or chairman’s mark, is scheduled to be released June 20 and the full committee will mark up the bill June 22. The chairman’s mark brings up concerns Smith has expressed previously about creating opportunities for new players to compete in the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. The HASC leader has been critical of the two-vendor model preferred by the Space Force, which in 2020 awarded United Launch Alliance and SpaceX five-year NSSL Phase 2 contracts to launch collectively as many as 35 NSSL missions. The language in the 2023 NDAA urges the Space Force to consider other procurement approaches in Phase 3 of the NSSL program in 2024 so more than two companies can win launch contracts. “It is the sense of Congress that the acquisition approach for Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch program should account for changes in the launch industry and planned architectures of the Space Force,” according to a draft version of the chairman’s mark, a copy of which was obtained by SpaceNews. The Space Force should “explore new and innovative acquisition approaches to leverage launch competition within the commercial market,” says the draft bill. With more companies competing in the commercial launch market, the bill says, the Defense Department should “examine all possible options for awarding contracts for launches during the period covered by the phase, including block buys, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or a hybrid approach.” Rather than limit launches to the two selected providers, as in Phase 2, Smith suggests including options to add launch providers and launch systems during the period of performance of Phase 3 so the military can take advantage of emerging technologies in areas like in-space transportation, logistics and on-orbit servicing. The bill also recommends the Space Force buy launch services from commercial vehicles that can perform missions beyond the nine reference orbits around the Earth required for Phase 2 of the NSSL program. The Space Force in Phase 3, says the chairman’s mark, should include vehicles with high-performance upper stages, payload fairings that exceed current launch requirements and vehicles with increased heavy lift capability. The HASC bill requires the Space Force to provide quarterly updates to congressional committees on the Phase 3 acquisition strategy. If the HASC provisions become law, they would likely help Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company based in Smith’s home state. The company, which competed unsuccessfully for an NSSL Phase 2 launch services procurement contract, is developing New Glenn, a huge rocket with a much larger payload fairing than current launch vehicles, projected to have an advanced upper stage to reach high-energy orbits. During a hearing in April, Smith pressed Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond to shed light on the Space Force’s future plans to buy space launch services. Raymond said the Space Force might consider working with more than two companies, Smith at the hearing said: “There are so many companies, certainly the big ones that we’ve heard about, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others, but then probably a dozen others that are smaller. And if we can encourage that competition, I think we can get a better product for a better price. So I want to make sure we do that.”
Chinese satellite internet startup GalaxySpace has raised new funding which the company says puts its value at $1.58 billion. The financing follows a November 2020 round which put the firm’s valuation at $1.2 billion and underlines the company’s strong position to make significant contributions to China’s planned 13,000-satellite strong national satellite internet megaconstellation . The round was led by CCB International—an investment vehicle belonging to China Construction Bank Corporation, one of China’s big four banks—along with Anhui Sanzhongyichuang Industry Development Fund, Hefei Industry Investment and Sincere Fund. Previous backers Legend Capital and Chaos Investment furthered their investment. GalaxySpace founder and CEO Xu Ming said the financing will be mainly used for the research and development of satellite Internet-related technologies and their commercial applications. GalaxySpace will also accelerate the research on core technologies including stackable satellites with flat panel antennas, multi-beam phased array technology, flexible solar arrays, digital processing payloads, and low-cost mass manufacturing capabilities for satellites, according to a company statement . The company unveiled a stackable satellite bus with a phased array flat panel antenna and flexible solar array in late August during the National Science and Technology Week. GalaxySpace says dozens of satellites can be stacked and launched at the same time on a single rocket, with the flat panel antennas and flexible arrays saving mass and space with the payload fairing. The first of GalaxySpace’s stackable satellites are due to be launched early next year, according to the firm, and are the first of their kind to be developed in China. In March GalaxySpace launched six communications satellites for an experimental network called the “Mini-spider constellation” using an earlier satellite bus. The satellites and their successful 5G network tests were also perceived to be relevant to China’s national broadband constellation plan. “These six satellites will form an experimental network integrating communication and remote sensing,” Chang Ming of Galaxy Space told CCTV following the launch. “When the whole experimental network forms, it will be verified in various application scenarios. It will also be the first technical verification for China’s low-orbit broadband satellite constellation.” Beijing-based GalaxySpace was founded in 2016 with initial plans to construct its own, private satellite communications constellation. The firm later recruited Deng Zongquan, head of the National Defense Program 793 and the director of the mysterious “Aerospace Institutions and Control Technology at a National Defense Key Discipline Laboratory,” as chairperson of Galaxy Space’s technical committee, providing valuable links to the state space sector, according to The China Project . State-owned CASC and CASIC also formulated their own, respective Hongyan and Hongyun low Earth orbit broadband constellation plans, but all of these appear to have been either subsumed or replaced by China’s plans for a national constellation. The new, national plan is being overseen by China Satellite Network Group Co. Ltd.,or SatNet, a state-owned enterprise established in April 2021. SatNet has since made agreements with a number of cities and is apparently looking to China’s nascent commercial space sector to aid its construction. A number of commercial launch companies are stating the national satellite internet project as a potential source of contracts and revenue.
A large rocket stage used to launch the final module for China’s space station made an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere Friday after precautionary airspace closures took effect in southern Europe. The roughly 21-metric-ton dry mass Long March 5B rocket stage reentered over the south-central Pacific Ocean at 6:01 a.m. Eastern (10:01 UTC) Nov. 4, according to the U.S. Space Command, just over four days after its launch. The reentry event had been tracked by U.S. and European authorities which provided predictions for the reentry. China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, regularly released orbital data updates for the rocket stage but provided no predictions. China launched the third and final module for its Tiangong space station with the fourth Long March 5B rocket Oct. 31. The Mengtian module successfully docked with the station 13 hours later. As with China’s previous space station module launches, the Long March 5B first stage also acts as the upper stage for the mission and entered orbit, which is exceptional in international spaceflight. The stage reentered over the Pacific Ocean but not before causing issues for air traffic in Europe, due in part to the uncertainty in predicting reentry events. A section of airspace over northern Spain was closed early Friday based on a bulletin issued by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) Nov. 3 based on predictions from the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EUSST). France also closed airspace south of Corsica from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. local time. The bulletin noted a number of cities potentially to be affected based on ground tracks including Lisbon in Portugal, Barcelona and Madrid in Spain, Marseille in France, and Rome in Italy. The advisory recommended National Aviation Authorities regularly monitor and take into consideration predictions of the Long March 5B reentry and further recommended that, “the respective authorities of the affected Member States to consider implementing and notifying airspace restrictions on a path of minimum 70 km and up to 120 km on each side of the estimated re‐entry trajectory, a few minutes before and after the time window.” The large prediction windows for the reentry are due to the challenges of modeling, including variables such as atmospheric fluctuations which affect how quickly the orbit of an object decays. Prediction windows are on the order of hours even within a day on the reentry. Objects in low Earth orbit travel at nearly eight kilometers per second, meaning a deviation of even a few minutes means a reentry more than a thousand kilometers away. The Long March 5B reentry is a large and prominent symptom of a wider problem. A recent Nature Astronomy paper published earlier assesses that current practices mean there is a 10 percent chance of uncontrolled reentries causing one or more casualties over a decade. Around 50 objects with a mass of more than one ton reenter the atmosphere randomly each year, according to the Aerospace Corporation. Long March 5B reentries account for four of the six largest objects making uncontrolled reentries. The reentries of the U.S.’s Skylab in 1979 and the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 in 1991, at roughly 77 tons and 40 tons respectively, are the only higher mass events. China’s next apparent scheduled use of the Long March 5B is to launch the Xuntian observatory around late 2023 or 2024. Xuntian is a Hubble-class space telescope which will co-orbit with the Tiangong space station.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX started taking pre-orders Oct. 25 for a flat panel antenna that enables land vehicles to use its Starlink broadband service while in motion. The company aims to make deliveries starting in December for an upgraded Starlink for RVs service, which currently only comes with a standard $599 Starlink dish designed for stationary use. The flat panel antenna will cost subscribers $2,500 and is better suited for moving vehicles because its wide area of view can connect to more satellites, according to SpaceX. The company has warned customers that using any other Starlink dish on the go will void their limited warranty. Despite being primarily marketed to owners of RVs (recreational vehicles), SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the in-motion service works “on any moving land object” that can fit a dish with a little over half a square meter of surface area. The flat panel antenna also comes with enhanced GPS capabilities to keep connectivity consistent on the go, SpaceX said, is “resilient in harsh environments,” and is designed for permanent installation on a vehicle. Starlink for RVs will cost the same $135 per month in the U.S., regardless of the antenna, for connection speeds that are throttled during peak hours to prioritize customers on residential and other Starlink service plans. The new service will be ready before the end of the year for “select markets” where Starlink has regulatory clearances for providing in-motion connectivity, the company said. These markets include the United States, although SpaceX says current capacity constraints mean high-speed, low-latency services are not guaranteed around the country’s southeast during peak hours. The standard Starlink for RVs antenna remains available and can be shipped within two weeks — even to customers in low-capacity areas subject to waitlists extending into 2023 on other Starlink service plans. Starlink for RVs had more than 100,000 customers as of the middle of October despite being launched just five months earlier. Customers that want to use the service on the move must install Starlink’s flat panel antenna with a wedge mount that is included in their kit, according to SpaceX’s website. Those not confident in their DIY skills can use third-party installers from companies that include Winegard, a connectivity equipment provider that announced a reseller agreement with Starlink Oct. 25. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission gave Starlink permission June 30 to connect vehicles, boats and aircraft on the move. Starlink launched a maritime-focused service plan a week later, and in Oct. 18 started accepting pre-orders for customers looking to use the broadband network in the air .
At the last Farnborough International Airshow in 2018, the United Kingdom started the countdown to the first orbital launch from the country. The U.K. Space Agency announced it selected a site near the town of Sutherland in northern Scotland to host a vertical launch facility, and awarded $38 million to two companies to perform launches there. Other launch companies and prospective spaceports also announced plans to develop and launch rockets in the county. Four years later, as the aerospace industry prepares to squeeze onto trains and line up for shuttle buses to return to Farnborough, that countdown still hasn’t reached zero. The Sutherland launch site hasn’t been built yet, while British companies that might use it or other launch sites are still working on their vehicles. The first orbital launch from the U.K. now appears likely to be performed by a U.S. company, Virgin Orbit, whose LauncherOne air-launch system is scheduled to fly from Spaceport Cornwall as soon as September. Launch companies in the U.K., though, are not deterred by that slow progress. While lagging American launch vehicle developers, they see themselves at the forefront of the European small launch industry, with ambitions to begin launches in the next year or two. One of the companies that received awards from the U.K. government in 2018 was Orbex, which is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime it plans to launch from Sutherland, capable of placing up to 180 kilograms into orbit. (The other, Lockheed Martin, later decided to acquire a rocket from a U.S. company, ABL Space Systems, and move that launch from Sutherland to SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands.) That award was part of nearly $40 million in both government and private funding the company announced to continue development of Prime, then planned for a first launch in the second half of 2021. The company, like so many other launch vehicle developers, has seen its schedule slip, but it is making progress towards a first launch. In May, it rolled out a full-sized prototype of Prime to a test stand a few kilometers from the Scottish factory where it builds the rocket. Orbex, which had kept a low profile before winning the U.K. launch award in 2018, turned the rollout into a media event complete with a light show and comments from U.K. science minister George Freeman and ESA director general Josef Aschbacher. Chris Larmour, chief executive of Orbex, said since that rollout, the company has been busy testing Prime, including operations of the engines under “vertical firing conditions.” Crews have also been working on launch operations, including rolling out, erecting and fueling the rocket, refining procedures the company will use for future launches. Orbex indicated in May that the first orbital launch of Prime, carrying an experimental payload for smallsat manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., could take place late this year or early next year. But that depends on factors beyond work on the rocket itself, which means the company is reticent to set a specific launch date. “There are three elements which all have to come together,” Larmour said. One is work on Prime itself, which he said is going well. The second is construction of launch facilities at Sutherland, while the third is receiving a launch license from the U.K. government. “All the elements are progressing in parallel, but Orbex is only fully in control of the launch vehicle itself.” Despite delays in development of the Sutherland site, Orbex continues to consider it the company’s “home” spaceport. “Nonetheless, we’re open to working with other spaceports and we’re in discussions with other European and American sites,” he said, but did not disclose any specific launch sites the company is considering. In close competition with Orbex is Skyrora. It is working on Skyrora XL, a three-stage rocket designed to place payloads weighing up to 315 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit. It is also working on Skylark L, a suborbital sounding rocket intended to test some of the technologies needed for the larger Skyrora XL. In May, the company completed a series of static-fire tests of the 3D-printed engine that will power the first two stages of Skyrora XL. The engine, which produces 15,700 pounds-force of thrust, uses high-test peroxide — a concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide — and kerosene, although the company says it’s working on an alternative to kerosene it calls Ecosene that can be produced from plastic waste. The engine test was backed by an ESA program called Boost! — the exclamation point is part of the name — intended to aid development of small launch vehicles, or microlaunchers, in ESA member states. Skyrora won the $3.1 million award in 2021 for engine testing. (Orbex also received a Boost! award valued at $7.8 million for work on avionics and software.) “This test concludes a key milestone,” said Jack James Marlow, head of engineering at Skyrora, in a statement about the test, “and now unlocks the next series of tests for engine qualification.” Skyrora announced June 7 it hired a former SpaceX executive as its new chief operations officer. Lee Rosen spent a decade at SpaceX as vice president of mission and launch operations, and before that served 23 years in the U.S. Air Force in various launch-related roles. “It’s an exciting time to join the company,” Rosen said in a statement. “Skyrora’s mobile, agile and responsive launch and on-orbit capability can provide the U.K. with something it has been missing and bolster its special relationship with the U.S.” Earlier this year, Skyrora suggested it would be ready to launch Skyrora XL from SaxaVord before the end of the year, but has since backed away from that schedule. Company spokesperson Nickie Finnegan said that given the pandemic, Ukraine war and other issues, “we’ve stopped trying to guess ourselves exactly when an orbital launch will occur.” She added, though, that the company could be ready by the second quarter of 2023 “given our current pace of technical development.” Beyond Orbex and Skyrora, there are a handful of other launch ventures based in the U.K. Most are still in the very early stages or have made little progress. An example of the latter is Starchaser Industries, a company that attempted to develop a suborbital crewed vehicle to compete for the Ansari X Prize, won 18 years ago by Scaled Composites. The company says it’s continuing to work on such vehicles, but its last update was in 2017, when it launched a small rocket to an altitude of less than two kilometers. One company trying to separate itself from that pack is Astraius. The company, founded in 2019, is working on an air-launch system. Rather than drop a rocket from a wing or fuselage, like Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus or Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne, the rocket would be carried inside a C-17 cargo aircraft. The plane’s rear doors would open in flight and parachutes would pull the rocket out the back, stabilizing it vertically so it could ignite its engines and ascend to orbit. The idea is not new. In 2006, a U.S. company, AirLaunch LLC, tested the deployment of a prototype of its QuickReach rocket from a C-17 in flight. The test, backed by DAPRA, was successful, but the company ran out of funding before it could attempt an orbital launch. Astraius envisions flying out of Prestwick Spaceport, the current Prestwick Airport near Glasgow. Development of facilities there to support Astraius launches, funded by an £80 million ($98 million) regional economic development package, is proceeding “at pace,” the company says. Astraius is keeping under wraps, though, many elements of its launch system. It describes the rocket itself as a “system successfully used by the U.S. Government for over 30 complex missions” and capable of placing up to 800 kilograms into orbit, far more than other air-launch systems, but has not revealed details about this rocket. It’s also unclear how it will gain access to C-17 aircraft, which are used solely by militaries. The company says it “will work with numerous C-17 operators worldwide” to get the planes needed for its launches, but did not provide further details on those efforts or development of the overall launch system in response to questions about them. Astraius adds that the company is “fully funded for its initial development efforts” but has not disclosed how much funding it has raised. “We continue to have significant market engagement and are in discussions with customers and potential customers in the UK, US and elsewhere ahead of our first launch in spring 2024,” Kevin Seymour, chief executive of Astraius. While Astraius, Orbex and Skyrora all take different technical approaches to developing launch vehicles in the U.K., they all face a similar challenge: getting a launch license from the government. After the passage of the Space Industry Act of 2018, which established the legal framework for commercial launch activity in the country, government officials spent two years finalizing regulations for commercial launches, modeled at least in part by those used by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for launches. The Civil Aviation Authority, the U.K. equivalent of the FAA, oversees those regulations but has yet to issue a launch license or a spaceport license. At a hearing of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in January, CAA officials didn’t give a schedule for issuing any launch licenses. “We’re open for business. We’re processing applications. The key driver for the timetable will be the quality of the applications, the evidence presented,” Tim Johnson, director of strategy and policy for the CAA, said when asked several times by committee members whether the agency would issue licenses for commercial launches this year. The first company needing a CAA launch license is Virgin Orbit for its LauncherOne mission from Cornwall. “The CAA, their regulatory agency, has been quite engaged with our experts, making sure they understand the system,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in a June 28 call with reporters. “That kind of dialogue has really helped quite a bit in clarifying their questions and making sure the regulatory process moves along.” He added there’s “tremendous interest all the way up through the minister and above level” in supporting his company’s U.K. launch plans but didn’t give an estimate on when the CAA would issue a license beyond projecting a launch in September. Orbex’s Larmour said his company submitted a launch license application to the CAA in February. “We have a positive ongoing dialogue with the CAA,” he said, “and we anticipate being licensed for the first launch of Prime in due course.” Skyrora, meanwhile, has faced a regulatory challenge in another country. The company says it has been working since last year to secure approvals from the government of Iceland to conduct a launch of its Skylark L suborbital rocket there. The company took the unusual step of publicly complaining about the delay in April, issuing a statement calling on the Icelandic government to issue a license and end nearly a year of delays. “We are continuing to work alongside the Icelandic government to refine the regulatory environment for launch,” Finnegan, the Skyrora spokesperson, said in June. The countdown clock for U.K. launch will still be ticking at this year’s Farnborough air show, but when the industry returns for the next one in 2024, one or more companies may have finally achieved liftoff. This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
China’s main space contractor plans to revamp a highly successful, 30-year-old Long March rocket model to adapt to the trend towards reusability in the launch sector. The 63rd and latest Long March 2D lifted off from the fog-shrouded Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, north China, late on Aug. 23 Eastern time, with insulation tiles falling from the payload fairing as the rocket rose into the sky. The two-stage, hypergolic rocket—with its record blemished only by a single partial failure in December 2016— successfully inserted the Beijing-3B satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit. The rocket has in recent years launched from all three of China’s inland spaceports, providing China with a level of reliability and flexibility for launches of up to 3,500 and 1,300 kilograms to low Earth orbit and SSO respectively. Despite this success the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and its subsidiary, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) are looking to greatly change and improve the rocket, according to a report from official industry newspaper China Space News Aug. 24. Both stages of the Long March 2D use dinitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, a highly toxic and corrosive bipropellant mix that poses risks and costs both for launch preparation and recovery of spent stages downrange. CASC states that the rocket will in the future be upgraded to use engines powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, replacing the hypergolic YF-21C and YF-24C engines currently in use. The news report did not state which specific engines would power the kerolox version of the Long March 2D, nor their configuration. China developed YF-100 kerolox engines for its new generation Long March 5-8 series rockets, which have debuted within the last 10 years. CASC is also working on uprated YF-100K engines which will notably power its new-generation crewed rocket . Tan Xuejun, the commander-in-chief of the Long March 2D, was quoted as saying the engines would also provide greater thrust. In an earlier step towards reusability the Long March 2D was fitted with grid fins for the first time in October last year for the launch of the Chinese H-alpha Solar Explorer . The grid fins have also been tested on the Long March 2C rocket. Their use helps constrain the area within which spent first stages fall. Spent stages from rockets launched from China’s inland spaceports have frequently caused issues downrange, and require evacuations of inhabited areas, depending on expected drop zones. A reusable Long March 2D and ditching hypergolic fuels could cut launch costs, Tan said. The move appears to be part of a long term plan to develop reusable space transportation systems. SAST has previously stated it was working on a reusable version of the Long March 6 rocket. CASC’s other main rocket maker, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, is developing the Long March 8 for reusability, while also stating its super heavy-lift crew and Long March 9 launchers will eventually be made reusable. Landspace, a privately-backed Beijing launch startup, last week stated it successfully tested an upgraded version of its Tianque-12 methane-liquid oxygen engine which will make the first stage of its Zhuque-2 rocket reusable. CALT’s orbital spaceplane is currently nearly four weeks into its second mission, while the suborbital spaceplane segment of the two-stage reusable space transportation system had its short and similarly clandestine second flight last week.
The Departments of Commerce and Defense have signed an agreement to cooperate on transferring responsibility for civil and commercial space traffic management. Don Graves, deputy secretary of commerce, announced the memorandum of agreement, or MOA, between his department and the Pentagon during a Sept. 9 meeting of the National Space Council at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The agreement “will drive our mutual work,” he said. “That’s really going to allow us to have not just a basic level of space traffic awareness, but it will also allow us to drive the research, the innovation, we all know we need to maximize the space environment for future generations.” The agreement, the Commerce Department said in a statement, defines how the two departments will work together to implement provisions of Space Policy Directive (SPD) 3 in 2018 that directed commerce to provide space situational awareness (SSA) and space traffic management (STM) services, such as conjunction warnings, currently provided by the U.S. military. The statement didn’t elaborate on the specific provisions of the agreement. “Establishing and maintaining coordinated SSA and STM technology, data, and services for civil and commercial entities is the foundation of the Department of Commerce’s efforts to ensure the continued safe and sustainable growth of the commercial space industry,” Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in the statement. NOAA hosts the Office of Space Commerce, which is tasked with building up a civil STM capability. “We are pleased to partner with DoC on this effort and look to broaden our relationship with industry, allies, and partners to help achieve the objectives of SPD-3,” said John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, in the statement. Plumb signed the agreement for the Defense Department along with officials from the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command. “This MOA is a necessary first step in a civil authority conducting tracking and notification of space objects,” said Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, in a statement. A key part of the Commerce Department’s effort to create a civil STM capability is the development of an open architecture data repository that will combine SSA data provided by the U.S. military with data from commercial and international sources. As a part of that effort, the Office of Space Commerce issued a request for proposals in July for commercial SSA data that would be used in pilot programs. Graves announced at the Space Council meeting that the department has made its first data buys under that effort. Neither he nor the office immediately disclosed the companies selected or the value of the awards, but said the data would cover both low Earth orbit and geostationary orbit. One company that did receive a contract was LeoLabs, which operates a worldwide network of radars to track objects in low Earth orbit. The company said it will provide real-time and archived data on a subset of objects it tracks in orbit for use by the Office of Space Commerce in evaluating prototype STM systems. “The traffic in LEO is growing exponentially, driven by commercial innovation and economic opportunity,” said Dan Ceperley, chief executive of LeoLabs, in a statement. “LeoLabs was founded to drive innovation in space traffic management, therefore we look forward to working with the U.S. government on this effort to ensure the continued success of the space industry.” Graves said at the council meeting that, later this fall, the Office of Space Commerce will conduct an “all-commercial” pilot of an STM system. “It will seek to replicate a portion of the DoD’s basic safety services using only commercial data and analytical services.”
China appears to have considered boosting its space situational awareness capabilities by placing a satellite in a retrograde orbit out at the geostationary belt. A paper published in Nature Scientific Reports by authors from the Xi’an Satellite Control Center looks at using a lunar swingby to insert a satellite into a retrograde orbit out at the geostationary belt (GEO) for monitoring activities and debris warning. Satellites in GEO orbit at around 35,786 kilometers above the Earth, at zero degrees inclination and an altitude at which the orbit of satellites matches the Earth’s rotational period. This belt is thus very useful for applications such as telecommunications and weather, with the satellites appearing to be in a fixed spot in the sky for transmissions and making observations. Monitoring satellites out at GEO such as the U.S. Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) are typically in prograde orbits tens of kilometers above or below the belt. This allows them to drift either west or east respectively and sweep past satellites and objects in the belt over time at a low relative velocity, moving a degree or so a day, and allowing close approaches for inspection. An orbital informant satellite in retro-GEO however would be able to pass by all assets in GEO every 12 hours. This would allow a rapid cataloging of debris as well as movements of other satellites, providing important information on a highly-valued orbit. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) are of great value for government and commercial purposes and monitoring of this critical orbit is vital. China has greatly increased in its launch rate and presence in GEO over the last decade, and thus has an increasing need of situational awareness capabilities to understand activities and changes. Getting a satellite into retrograde geostationary orbit (retro-GEO) would be a challenge, however, as the spacecraft needs to be inclined by 180 degrees, traveling in the opposite direction to everything else in GEO. Spacecraft heading to GEO are launched to the east, using the rotational speed of the Earth to help them achieve orbit. Launching to the west incurs high energy penalties for launch, leading the authors, citing earlier Western papers on the topic, to consider a path to retro-GEO via the moon. So far, the highest inclination of a satellite in geosynchronous orbit is 60.3 degrees, an orbit used by Japan’s Quasi Zenith Satellite System for regional GPS enhancement. China similarly has Beidou-IGSO satellites inclined by 55.2 degrees. Heading to the moon and using it for a gravity assist could put a spacecraft into a transfer orbit for entering retro-GEO incurs a lesser fuel cost. The concept has been around since the 1980s at least, but has not been utilized. One reason is that a spacecraft in such an orbit could add to the debris dangers it would aim to assess. “I think it could be dangerous because you’re moving through the GEO region at a much higher relative velocity to everything else,” Brian Weeden, Director of Program Planning for the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews . “If you’re doing this at exactly the same altitude as GEO, it would be like a car driving the wrong way down the freeway. Hopefully, you’d still have it above or below GEO to avoid collisions with the geostationary belt, but you’d still have to do some collision avoidance and you’d have less time to make decisions,” Weeden says. This is due to the higher relative velocities of the objects involved. Another downside would be that monitoring satellites in retro-GEO would also not be able to conduct Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPOs) to inspect a country’s own assets or spy on those of others because of the high relative velocities. “I don’t really see much value in doing it,” Weeden says. “If the goal is monitoring objects in the GEO region, I think you’re better off with a constellation of satellites in normal drift orbits. And I think the international reaction would be one of significant concern.” “It might be slightly better for doing up-close characterization because you can cover the belt faster, but at the expense of shorter times observing any one particular object or region.” China appears to have chosen a path similar to GSSAP, sending pairs of satellites to sweep above and below the GEO belt. It launched the Shiyan-12-01 and Shiyan-12-02 satellites in December 2021 which could be the first of a series of GEO inspector satellites. A game of orbital cat and mouse between Shiyan-12-01 and 02 and U.S. surveillance USA 270 earlier this year highlighted that China had exquisite SSA, tactics and counterspace capabilities.
NASA has found a new ride for a small lunar orbiter mission that will allow the spacecraft to avoid a two-year wait for its launch. In a June 21 presentation to the Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Lori Glaze, NASA planetary science division director, said the Lunar Trailblazer mission will now launch as a secondary payload on the second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, called IM-2 and part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. That mission will launch in about a year, she said. Lunar Trailblazer was previously manifested to launch as one of several rideshare payloads on NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than early 2025. That schedule was driven by development of IMAP itself, with Lunar Trailblazer expected to be completed by early 2023. “We have removed Lunar Trailblazer from the IMAP manifest so that it can fly sooner,” Glaze said. She didn’t elaborate on the process by which NASA decided to move Lunar Trailblazer from the IMAP launch to IM-2, but later said that the agency’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program “decided to accommodate that additional cost” of launching on IM-2 rather than staying on IMAP. “Our Lunar Trailblazer project is pleased that NASA has planned a launch for Lunar Trailblazer in 2023 to get Lunar Trailblazer’s high-resolution water ice maps to the science and exploration communities to understand the lunar water cycle and inform future landed missions,” Bethany Ehlmann, the Caltech professor who is the principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer, told SpaceNews. The lunar science community had been pushing NASA to find an earlier ride for Lunar Trailblazer once it became clear that the mission would be ready for launch long before IMAP. Glaze said in early 2021 that the agency was looking for alternative opportunities to launch the mission but would keep the mission on IMAP until it could find one. Lunar Trailblazer is equipped with a spectrometer and thermal mapper to study the distribution of water on the moon, information that could support future robotic and human missions. Ehlmann said the spacecraft passed its systems integration review in May and is scheduled to be completed in early 2023. The mission was one of three NASA selected in 2019 as part of its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program of small planetary science missions, with cost caps of $55 million and use of rideshare launch opportunities. All three have run into issues with their launches. Another SIMPLEx mission, Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE), was originally expected to launch with NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission to study the interaction of the Martian atmosphere with the solar wind. However, NASA removed EscaPADE from that mission after NASA selected a Falcon Heavy to launch Psyche, changing its trajectory in such a way it could no longer be dropped off at Mars during a flyby. A redesigned EscaPADE is now moving forward but has not yet been assigned a launch. Janus, a mission featuring twin small spacecraft that would study binary asteroids, is also scheduled to launch with Psyche as a rideshare. However, a delay in the launch of Psyche from early August to no earlier than Sept. 20 means that Janus will no longer be able to use its original trajectory for flybys of two binary asteroid s. At the Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Joan Salute, program executive in NASA’s planetary science division, said the Janus mission team was still studying potential alternative targets for the spacecraft if it launches in the new window. “They’re dedicated to getting as much science as they can, whenever they launch,” she said. Those problems prompted discussion at the committee meeting on ways to improve launch opportunities for small missions like those in the SIMPLEx program. Glaze noted such missions are categorized by the agency as “Class D,” which accept a greater degree of risk and must fit into a cost cap that, in turn, drives the use of rideshares. NASA is looking for ways to improve the rideshare process, though, for such missions, including creation of a rideshare office within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate to coordinate such opportunities. NASA is also looking at low-cost dedicated launch options for small science missions through its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program, which awarded contracts to 12 companies in January that makes them eligible to compete for future task orders . “We have not made specific plans to make use of that,” Salute said of VADR, “but that is another avenue opening up.” Lunar Trailblazer will not be the first NASA mission to hitch a ride on a CLPS launch. Lunar Flashlight is a cubesat originally scheduled to launch on the first Space Launch System mission, Artemis 1. However, problems with its propulsion system kept it from being delivered in time last summer to be integrated onto the rocket. At a lunar science workshop in May, Barbara Cohen, a Lunar Flashlight scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said the spacecraft was now scheduled to launch as a secondary payload on the IM-1 lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, slated for no earlier than late this year.
NASA is moving ahead with the next Artemis 1 launch attempt on Nov. 16 after finding no major repairs required to the Space Launch System and Orion from Hurricane Nicole. In a call with reporters Nov. 11, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said technicians were working on minor issues caused by the storm’s passage a day earlier but nothing that could not be repaired in time for the current projected launch date of Nov. 16 during a two-hour window that opens at 1:04 a.m. Eastern. “Right now, there’s nothing preventing us from getting to the 16th,” he said. “We do have some work to do.” That work, he said, includes cutting away some loose caulk, known as RTV, on the Orion launch abort system that isn’t needed for flight. A rain cover in one SLS engine was torn and is being fixed, while water that pooled in the crew access arm was removed. An umbilical leading from the launch tower to Orion came off a tray and was replaced. He added that a tail service mast unit that feeds liquid hydrogen into the SLS had an electrical umbilical that had “some erratic signals,” that was being inspected. That wiring harness could be replaced if required. Free spent much of the call explaining, and defending, the agency’s decision to leave the SLS on the pad. He said there was a lengthy discussion about the forecast before deciding to roll out to the pad Nov. 4. “There were folks really thinking it hard” about rolling out, he recalled. “In the end, everyone agreed that we should roll out.” By the time forecasts showed the storm had strengthened, it was too late to roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). In discussions Nov. 6, he said, the earliest the vehicle could roll back was late Nov. 8. “The wind speeds then were predicted to be 35 knots [65 km/h] sustained gusting up to 40 [74 km/h],” he said, raising concerns about loads on the vehicle as it moved back to the VAB. “With the risk of moving with the high winds we decided to stay at the pad.” The winds ultimately stayed just below the certification limits for the SLS. At the 18-meter level, NASA reported a peak just of 132 kilometers per hour, just below the rated limit of 137 kilometers per hour. Free said NASA also measured the winds at other levels of the pad, including the top of the lightning towers, 140 meters high. “During the hurricane, all the measurements taken showed no breaking of those limits,” he said. Free declined to give the wind limits at other levels of the vehicle, citing concerns associated with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), one category of export controls. “It’s how we do the calculations and on the design of the vehicle,” he argued. “You can bring some of that together and draw some conclusions that would violate that.” However, NASA has previously published wind limits for the SLS, notably in an October 2021 document available on a NASA website with a notice that it is “approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.” That shows wind limits increasing with height at the pad, topping out at the 150-meter level at 172 kilometers per hour. The top wind gust reported during the storm was approximately 160 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 142 meters The wind limits, he added, were conservative. “It’s 75% of what we can take, which means we have another 25% of margin on top of that before we even get into our 1.4 factor of safety,” he said. “From our perspective, we stayed within our certification at the wind that we saw during the hurricane.” He acknowledged that NASA likely would have kept the SLS in the VAB had it known before the Nov. 4 rollout how Hurricane Nicole would develop. “If we knew on the night before we were rolling out that it was going to be a hurricane, we probably would have stayed in the VAB.” Keeping the vehicle on the pad, though, preserves the Nov. 16 launch attempt as well as a backup date on Nov. 19. Free said NASA had also secured an additional launch date of Nov. 25, the last one available in the current launch period, from the Federal Aviation Administration. He said that he was not nervous about having SLS on the pad during the storm, at least not more than he does in general about the vehicle ahead of its first launch. “I worry about this rocket if it were bright and sunny all the time because this is our first one, and our flight test has absolutely critical objectives that are going to be difficult to achieve,” he said. “So, I’m going to worry about this rocket until we see that [Orion] capsule safely back in the well deck of the Navy ship.”
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA started the countdown Aug. 27 for its first attempt to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for an uncrewed flight around the moon. The countdown for the Artemis 1 launch formally started at 10:23 a.m. Eastern after a meeting of the mission management team. Liftoff is scheduled for 8:33 a.m. Eastern Aug. 29 at the beginning of a two-hour launch window. At a briefing here shortly after the countdown started, agency officials said they were not working on any problems with the vehicle that could threaten the launch. In addition to a lack of technical issues, weather remains favorable, with a 70% chance of acceptable weather. “We do feel good about our attempt on Monday in terms of our overall setup,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager. He cautioned, though, that the launch could scrub for any number of reasons, including technical issues, weather, or range violations. But he and other agency officials expressed confidence in the prospects of a launch on the first attempt of the new launch vehicle. “The vehicle is in great shape,” Sharon Cobb, NASA SLS associate program manager, said in an interview. “We have really tested everything we can test up until launch and we believe our systems are in really good shape, except for that one activity of chilling down the engines.” That is a reference to a “hydrogen kickstart” that could not be conducted on the last wet dress rehearsal in June because of a leak in a hydrogen bleed line. That will be tested about five hours before liftoff, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis 1 launch director, at the briefing. “We feel really good that, once we get through that, we’ll know everything we need to know about the vehicle,” Cobb said. The launch is not without risk, though. At the briefing, Sarafin said NASA estimated a 1-in-125 chance of a loss of the Orion vehicle on Artemis 1. That figure comes from a probabilistic risk assessment that looks at the potential failure modes and the probability of them taking place. “Some of our top risk drivers are common to any other program out there,” he said, such as damage from micrometeoroids and orbital debris as well as parachutes and the heat shield. The micrometeoroid risk is a function of the length of the mission, with a higher risk of damage for a longer mission. Should NASA scrub the Aug. 29 launch, there are backup launch opportunities Sept. 2 and 5. However, Blackwell-Thompson said they have flexibility to target launches on Sept. 3, 4 and 6 instead depending on factors such weather and when a launch attempt is scrubbed. Key factors will be availability of liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen, with pad supplies scheduled to be topped off if the Aug. 29 launch is scrubbed. “Because we go ahead and top off the LOX and hydrogen, we’re in a really great spot,” she said. “There are other opportunities. It doesn’t have to be the second or the fifth.” A launch in early September, though, raises the odds of tropical weather systems based on long-term forecasts. Melody Lovin, weather officer at the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, said it was too early to forecast weather for the next opportunity Sept. 2.
TAMPA, Fla. — SES and Intelsat are in active merger talks as a wave of consolidation sweeps over the satellite industry, the Financial Times reported Aug. 4. The satellite fleet operators are discussing the structure of a potential combination to improve competition against SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation, the report said , citing sources that stressed there is no guarantee a deal will be reached. A merged group would generate $4 billion in revenues, and follow plans Eutelsat and OneWeb announced last week to combine their businesses. Viasat is also close to completing its $7.3 billion plan to acquire Inmarsat this year following regulatory approvals. Intelsat and SES won’t say whether they are discussing a merger, but both companies acknowledged paying close attention to industry consolidation. “We do not comment on rumors and speculation,” Intelsat spokesperson Clay McConnell said. “Nonetheless, it’s clear that our industry is transforming, with new capabilities and technologies being brought to the market. Intelsat is focused on being a leader in that transformation.” He said “partnerships among satellite communications companies and bringing together complementary capabilities can drive competition” in the connectivity market. SES CEO Steve Collar made similar comments when asked about the reported negotiations during the company’s Aug. 4 financial results for the second half of 2022. Collar said, generally, satellite “industry consolidation is a good thing” that will help rationalize the market. “Of course, from an SES standpoint, we will do things only in the best interests of our shareholders, and we’ll just leave it there,” he added. The Luxembourg-based company’s shares fell as much as 10% following the Financial Times report, despite announcing financial results that beat analyst expectations. SES generated 899 million euros ($916 million) in revenues for the first six months of 2022, down 2.1% compared with the same period last year when adjusted for foreign exchange rates. The decline was driven by a 7% year-on-year drop in underlying video revenues to 501 million euros. Video continues to provide the bulk of the operator’s revenues, although its connectivity-focused networks business has been catching up in recent years. Underlining revenues for the SES’ networks business increased 2.1% to 387 million euros. Government revenues fell 7.5% to 146 million euros for the six months to the end of June. SES announced Aug. 1 that it had completed its acquisition of DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, a provider of satcoms services to the U.S. government, in a deal that would double its government business. Group adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, dropped 3.8% to 545 million euros. SES also announced another delay for its O3b mPower constellation, the operator’s next-generation constellation in medium Earth orbit. The operator had been planning to deploy six of 11 Boeing-built O3b mPower satellites across three SpaceX launches between July and September. However, these satellites are now slated to launch between October and December. Collar said SES is going to have “to be a little more patient than we would like, but the good news is that we’re fully locked on for three launches this year, and have a solid in-service date for [the second quarter of 2023],” adding that the delay does not change its growth trajectory. As for Intelsat, the U.S.-based company emerged from bankruptcy in February after a restructuring deal that cut its debt from $16 billion to $7 billion. The operator appointed David Wajsgras as CEO in April, who has been building out a new leadership team to guide a connectivity-focused growth strategy with this lighter debt load. Intelsat and SES are also in line for nearly $9 billion in combined proceeds for clearing C-band spectrum for terrestrial cellular operators. Notably, they have also been locked in a long-running legal battle over how those proceeds should be split between them.
The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded a $72 million contract to Advanced Space to develop an experimental spacecraft to monitor deep space, far beyond Earth’s orbit. The experiment, led by AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate, was previously known as the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS) and was recently renamed Oracle. “The name was chosen to acknowledge the accomplishments of the Apollo program and the U.S. Space Force’s commitment to support NASA as they return to the moon,” said AFRL. The Oracle spacecraft is projected to launch in late 2025 and will conduct two years of on-orbit experiments. “Our primary goals for the program are to advance techniques to detect previously unknown objects through search and discovery, to detect small or distant objects, and to study spacecraft positioning and navigation in the XGEO realm,” said James Frith, the principal investigator. XGEO refers to the space beyond geosynchronous orbit out to the moon. Oracle will operate in the vicinity of Earth-moon Lagrange Point 1, about 200,000 miles from Earth. The GEO belt, by comparison, is about 22,000 miles above Earth. An additional goal of Oracle is to help mature AFRL’s green propellant technology. “While there are no specific plans yet to refuel Oracle, AFRL wants to encourage civil and commercial development of on-orbit refueling services,” said Frith. Col. Jeremy Raley, the director of AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate, said Oracle is an important experiment to understand the cislunar environment. “Like NASA we’re going to be operating in those same spaces. And we’re going to be looking for smart ways to cooperate,” Raley said . Both NASA and DoD care about “domain awareness and understanding what’s going on out there.” Advanced Space, based in Westminster, Colorado, operates the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) experiment launched in June as part of NASA’s Artemis program .
SAN FRANCISCO – Five space-related companies from the United States and one from the United Kingdom are joining the fall 2022 Techstars Aerospace and Defense Accelerator. For the first time since 2019, founders will travel to Los Angeles for the 12-week accelerator, backed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Space Force. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the program was conducted virtually. The new Techstars Aerospace and Defense Accelerator cohort includes: In selecting startups for the accelerator, Techstars looks for “spectacular teams with the ambition, the grit and the pitch-ability to build a great business,” Matt Kozlov, Techstars Los Angeles managing director, told SpaceNews . “We look for technical capabilities. We have a lot of PhDs and a lot of company founders have aerospace experience on their executive team.” In addition, Techstars looks to its Space Force, JPL and NASA advisors for guidance on startup selection. “Every company on that list is a company that at least one of our partners said is highly interesting to us,” Kozlov said. Since Techstars LA was established in 2017, the startup accelerator has provided funding and guidance for space companies including HydroSat, Morpheus Space, Orbit Fab, Pixxel Space and Scout Space. In spite of the economic slowdown, Techstars continues to see strong investor interest in space companies. “Now if you are a seed or Series A-stage space company, everything isn’t peaches and cream but it’s not bad,” Kozlov said. “Valuations have come down a bit and people are a little bit more sensitive to outlandish claims, but there is still a market.”
Rocket Lab USA won two contracts worth $14 million to provide separation systems for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency satellites, the company announced Nov. 9. Separation systems are interfaces that attach satellites to rockets and release them in space once the rocket reaches its intended orbit. Rocket Lab will provide separation systems for 84 satellites made by Lockheed Martin and another undisclosed manufacturer for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer, projected to launch in 2024. SDA selected Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space to each produce 42 satellites for the Transport Layer, a planned mesh network in low Earth orbit intended to move data to military users around the world. Rocket Lab will supply “Lightband” separation systems made by its subsidiary Planetary Systems Corporation (PSC), a Maryland-based supplier of separation systems and satellite dispensers. Rocket Lab acquired PSC in 2021. Rocket Lab is a launch services company but also has a vertically integrated satellite manufacturing and components business that has grown through acquisitions . “Compared to typical clamp band separation systems, Rocket Lab’s Lightbands are lighter weight, have a lower profile, shock and tip-off rate, and have attained the highest technology readiness level by the U.S. government,” Rocket Lab said. The Lightbands have been used by NASA on the International Space Station and Space Shuttle missions.
BREMEN, Germany — Arianespace and German launch startups Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are moving towards first launches next year but have mixed views on how the European launch sector has and should develop. Speakers from an established, institutional player in Arianespace and a pair of new companies from Europe’s emerging commercial launch arena appeared together on a panel on “Aligning European Launch Development for Mission Success,” at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany, Nov. 16. Arianespace will launch its final three Ariane 5 missions next year, including ESA’s Juice mission to Jupiter, and then transition to the first launch of the Ariane 6 , Manuel Oesterschlink, head of CEO office and institutional relations at Arianespace said. That launch will come late in the year. “We often have our successes on Christmas, like we did with James Webb last time, so maybe this will be another Christmas present,” Oesterschlink said. Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg meanwhile are working towards their own, first flights, with their respective new, light lift orbital launchers. “We are super excited about this upcoming year. We are building, testing and we will be soon launching Spectrum, which is a vehicle that it’s designed to lift about a ton to LEO,” Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer at Isar Aerospace, said. Jörn Spurmann, chief commercial officer at Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), said the team is working hard everyday and has a second stage on the stand in Esrange, Sweden, for testing, building towards a launch in late 2023. That the new launch vehicles are not ready is problematic, Guillen notes. “We don’t have the capacity that we need, especially in Europe. More than 50 launches are happening from the US when in Europe we launch what, four or five so far. So I think we need the capacity and we need to lower the cost to access space. “We honestly we’re late and the market demand is happening right now and we already understand there’s urgency to catch up. Customers have basically one choice right now to launch and it’s not from Europe. We need to launch faster and reliably and economically and we need to change that,” Guillen said. The question of meeting demand highlighted different views. ArianeGroup COO Karl-Heinz Servos, ArianeGroup, speaking on a Nov. 14 panel, said it is seeking investment and support to be able to increase the cadence of Ariane 6 from the up to 12 per year currently built in. Spurmann however strongly stated his view that commercial space is the way forward. “Can we continue to spend €6 billion on an Ariane 6 or 7 and people are telling us it’s half the price of what it was before?” “You spent 50 million a year on the Boost! program on seven small launch companies. I think overall they hired a thousand people throughout the last three years, and four or five are seeing the first launch next year. Why would you ever spend billions again on a launch system development from the institutional side?” Discussion moderator Thilo Kranz, ESA’s Commercial Space Transportation Programme Manager, provided a counterpoint, stating that at the previous event in Bremen last year Arianespace, Isar Aerospace and RFA each stated late 2022 as the target for their respective first launches of the new rockets. Kranz also noted a need for European autonomy in strategic fields and cautioned that how the commercial field proceeds and develops remains to be seen. Spurmann, on a question on why Europe did not develop reusable launchers first, said the answer is because “ESA didn’t have the vision, and because there were no commercial launches. Before it was all institutionally driven. And in that sense, why not change it? Why not see how many things can be commercialized in the European space industry and try to push that forward?” The issue of Starship was seen as a big, looming question in the room, particularly whether or not its capacities, once online, would mean no other launchers are needed anymore. “When I talk to people launching on the Transporter missions on the Falcon 9, it’s in terms of delays in interfacing, in documentation, things they have to create,” Spurmann said. “They’re making the rocket even bigger. It’s not helping the problem that they’re having. Oesterschlink drew attention however to what he sees as a big development happening at the moment. “It’s the constellations… Constellations that from our point of view, are where they really need big launches to deploy the constellation quickly,” Oesterschlink added that there is space for smaller launches but that recent developments with Amazon’s Kuiper constellation demonstrate that, “they are happy to have a big launcher to make this possible.” Asked about 10 years in the future, all three representatives agreed that European human spaceflight capabilities, whatever institutional, commercial or mixed, was the dream. For now, though, there are more immediate, pressing challenges. “We are 15 years behind the US right now in terms of cadence of launch so in 10 years we should be able to catch up a little bit,” Guillen said.
SEOUL, South Korea — Japan and Germany pledged this week not to conduct direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing, throwing their weight behind the U.S.-driven initiative launched in April to promote peaceful and safe use of outer space. The two countries announced their commitment during the second session of the U.N. Open-Ended Working Group on reducing space threats, which is underway from Sept. 12 in Geneva. “Japan commits not to conduct destructive, direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) missile testing and joins the US commitment announced in April,” Ambassador Ogasawara Ichiro, permanent representative of Japan to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, said in a Sept. 12 statement. “Japan strongly believes that states should refrain from the deliberate destruction of space objects that creates negative impact on the space environment, especially through debris which could hamper access to and use of outer space for a long time.” In a separate Sept. 13 statement, Japan’s foreign ministry said the country will “continue to play an active role to achieve secure, stable and sustainable outer space, including the development of norms of responsible behavior in outer space.” Japan’s announcement was followed by the German one. “Germany commits not to conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing,” the country said in a Sept. 13 statement. “Germany commends the United States of America for their commitment not to conduct such tests and all Nations who are joining this commitment.” It called on other countries to follow suit and advocated for the creation of a universal norm banning such testing. Including Japan and Germany, a total of five countries have formally declared a self-imposed ASAT testing ban since April, when the United States pledged to ban direct-ascent ASAT tests that create orbital debris. Canada joined the initiative in May and New Zealand in July . And more countries are expected to join as the U.S. ramps up efforts to promote the ban. Last week, during a Sept. 9 meeting of the National Space Council in Houston, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said the United States would introduce a resolution at the U.N. General Assembly this month calling for a halt on direct-ascent ASAT testing. “Later this month, the United States will introduce a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly to call on other nations to make the same commitment” that the United States made, Harris said. Speaking at a space policy event in Washington last month , the U.S. State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance, Eric Desautels, said a resolution “would allow countries to go on record regarding their support, creating that shared agreement among the majority of U.N. member states, while increasing political pressure on countries that have plans for future ASAT tests.” In the mid-1980s, the United States developed and tested an air-launched missile capable of intercepting and destroying a satellite. A 1985 test destroyed a U.S. science satellite in low Earth orbit. In February 2008, the United States used a ship-launched missile to destroy a crippled U.S. spy satellite. While U.S. officials said the action was taken in the name of safety to prevent the satellite’s uncontrolled reentry, the move was widely seen as a response to China’s January 2007 use of a ground-launched missile to destroy a defunct Chinese weather satellite in a 537-kilometer polar orbit. The United States, in stark contrast to China’s unannounced test, briefed news media before and after the shoot-down of USA-193. Russia has conducted several ASAT missile tests since 2015, including a November 2021 test of a ground-launched missile that destroyed a Russian Kosmos satellite, creating a debris field that has put the International Space Station, SpaceX’s Starlink constellation and other low-Earth-orbiting satellites in harm’s way. India also possesses direct-ascent ASAT weapons. In March 2019, India used a modified ballistic missile interceptor to destroy an Indian satellite in low Earth orbit.
An English airport has secured the first-of-its-kind spaceport license from a British regulator that brings it one step closer to hosting the country’s first orbital launch. The United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced Nov. 16 that it had issued its first spaceport license to Spaceport Cornwall, located at Cornwall Airport Newquay in southwestern England. The license will allow the spaceport to host launches by Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne air-launch system. The license, analogous to the launch site operator’s license issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, confirms that the spaceport can host launches without endangering public safety or the environment. Each company seeking to launch from the spaceport would need its own launch license, also issued by the CAA. “This is an historic moment as we license the first ever spaceport in the U.K.,” said Richard Moriarty, chief executive of the CAA, in a statement announcing the license. “We’re proud to be playing our part in facilitating the UK’s space ambitions through assessing the safety, security and other requirements of these activities.” “The regulatory environment created by the Civil Aviation Authority ensures that U.K. launch will set the global bar in terms of responsibility and transparency,” Melissa Thorpe, head of Spaceport Cornwall, said in the statement. While Virgin Orbit has set up operations at the spaceport, including sending its Boeing 747 aircraft, LauncherOne rocket and other support equipment there, the company is still waiting for a launch license from the CAA. In the statement, the agency said it was in “very advanced stages” of evaluating that company’s launch license application, but did not state when it anticipated completing that evaluation. Both the company and U.K. government officials remain hopeful the license can be issued in time for a launch, the first orbital mission from the U.K., before the end of the year. “The first ever spaceport license granted by the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority is another major milestone as we look forward to the first satellite launch from U.K. soil this year,” Ian Annett, deputy chief executive of the U.K. Space Agency, said in a statement. Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in the announcement that he was looking forward to a launch “in the coming weeks.” During a Nov. 7 earnings call , though, he acknowledged that the licensing process was taking longer than the company originally expected. “The good news is that we don’t see a showstopper or a big issue we’re working,” he said then. “But, it is taking longer than we had anticipated and it is taking a bit more effort than we anticipated as well.” The delays had prompted criticism from a U.K. Parliament committee, which in a Nov. 4 report called on the CAA to assign more personnel to its space licensing efforts. However, the CAA had already brought in more people to work on licensing by the time the report was released, from 35 to 50 people, including one person seconded from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. A source familiar with the CAA’s licensing activities, speaking on background, said staffing was not the limiting factor in reviewing license applications, but instead the amount of work required to complete applications and the ability of applicants to provide required information. Those reviews were closely matching original expectations of 9 to 18 months for a launch license and up to nine months for a spaceport license. The CAA is working with several other launch vehicle and spaceport operations on their license applications, the agency stated in its announcement of the Spaceport Cornwall license, including recently starting an environmental review of the proposed SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands for vertical launches.
Canadian launch startup SpaceRyde revealed plans Nov. 15 to launch four private commercial flights for ISILaunch, a subsidiary of Innovative Solutions In Space B.V. of the Netherlands. Customers will pay $250,000 to launch 25-kilogram payloads on SpaceRyde’s Ryder rocket and Flying Spider balloon. The flights are scheduled to begin in 2024. For the SpaceRyde flights, ISILaunch will offer customization including scheduling weeks prior to launch, access to custom orbits and various fairing configurations. “SpaceRyde is excited to join ISILaunch’s portfolio of heritage launch partners,” Negar Feher, SpaceRyde chief revenue officer, said in a statement. “A gap exists for fast and reliable access to custom orbits in space at a competitive price. These four launches are only the beginning.” SpaceRyde, founded in 2018, is developing the Rocket Network, space transportation infrastructure to ferry cargo continuously between Earth, the moon and destinations in-between. Stratospheric balloons will serve as the first stage, lifting Ryder rockets through Earth’s atmosphere before rocket engines fire. Ryder’s upper stage, called Black Bay, is designed to remain in orbit, maneuvering and refueling as needed to provide in-orbit servicing and in-space transportation. Test flights of SpaceRyde’s Ryder rocket and Flying Spider balloon are slated for 2023. Commercial fights are set to begin in 2024 as is SpaceRyde’s first moon mission . SpaceRyde will not be operating at a loss when it sells $250,000 rides to low-Earth orbit, Feher said. “SpaceRyde’s upper stages are reusable as in-space vehicles, therefore there is a recurring revenue tail on every launch as we build our Rocket Network,” Feher told SpaceNews by email. In addition to cubesats, SpaceRyde flights can accommodate 100-kilogram to 150-kilogram satellites. “Our maximum launch cost is $1 million,” Feher said. “Our company philosophy is transparent pricing. We truly believe transparency to be an enabler for the space economy.” Vertical integration is helping SpaceRyde reduce launch costs. Spacecraft and launch systems are being built in-house and the company will manage everything from payload integration to launch, according to the Nov. 15 news release. “We’re excited to add SpaceRyde to our roster of launch providers,” Abe Bonnema, ISISpace and ISILaunch co-founder, said in a statement. “Our mission is to provide the best launch experience to each of our customers. With SpaceRyde’s reusable technology, we will be able to cater to even more customer missions in various inclinations and altitudes.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX Oct. 8 successfully deployed the first two of seven satellites Intelsat needs to clear C-band spectrum in the United States, keeping the operator on course to launch all but one of them before the end of this year. A Falcon 9 carrying Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34 lifted off at 7:05 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and deployed the satellites into geostationary transfer orbit about 40 minutes after liftoff. The rocket’s reusable first stage also successfully landed on a SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean following a record-tying 14th flight. A helium leak had forced SpaceX to scrub a previously planned Oct. 6 launch, and a follow-up flight Oct. 7 was also postponed. It will take about two weeks for the satellites to use onboard propulsion to reach their final geostationary orbit, according to Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat’s vice president of space systems engineering and operations. Northrop Grumman built the satellites, which will help Intelsat move broadcast customers into a narrower swath of its C-band spectrum to give more frequencies to terrestrial 5G operators in the United States. Intelsat stands to get nearly $5 billion from the Federal Communications Commission if it can fully vacate the lower 300 MHz slice of C-band by the regulator’s Dec. 5, 2023, deadline. Rival satellite operator SES is in line for nearly $4 billion if it can clear its C-band spectrum in time — after recently losing a legal challenge for an equal split . SpaceX launched the first of five C-band replacement satellites in June that SES needs in orbit for its spectrum-clearing efforts, and United Launch Alliance deployed another two Oct. 4. SES CEO Steve Collar recently said he expects SpaceX will launch its final two C-band satellites late this year or early next. “Intelsat might not have launched the first C band satellites but is planning to launch 6 of the 7 c band satellites before the end of the year,” Froeliger told SpaceNews via email. “By the end of 2022 Intelsat will have launched more C band replacement satellites than SES. In any case what is important is to have all these new C band spectrum clearing satellites in service before the FCC deadline of December 5th, 2023, which Intelsat is on track to do.” Maxar is providing Intelsat’s remaining five C-band replacement satellites. SpaceX is slated to launch two of them in November, according to Intelsat, and Arianespace is due to deploy another pair in the fourth quarter of this year. Intelsat said SpaceX will launch its final C-band replacement spacecraft in the second quarter of 2023. 
LOGAN, Utah. — Astro Digital started out in 2015 with plans for an Earth observation constellation but pivoted three years later to instead provide its small satellite technology as a service for other operators. While this service model was unusual at the time, California-based Astro Digital has grown as more companies seek space projects without manufacturing, launch integration, and other burdens that typically come with them. SpaceNews caught up with Chris Biddy, Astro Digital’s co-founder and CEO, at the Small Satellite Conference here. What happened to your constellation plan — are you still considering it? For the moment, we’re not. We took an honest look at the competitive landscape and the ability to raise funds for a large constellation of satellites and decided it was just better for our business to focus on core capabilities. To go out and generate revenue and build a positive cash flow business earlier, compared with having to raise a bunch of money, deploy a lot of satellites, and then generate revenue on the data. What’s the size range of the satellites you’re making? We’ve been trending larger. We still offer our 6U cubesats on the smaller side, but we’ve lately been building satellites that are in the 100-kilogram class and, very shortly, stuff that will be exceeding 200 kilograms. What’s driving that? Available launch capacity has increased quite a bit over the last several years, and I think that takes a little bit of pressure off satellite size constraints. It seems to make it a little easier to build the satellite bus around the mission and the payload requirements without having to aggressively miniaturize. Where are you seeing the most demand, and for what applications? The biggest demand we’re seeing right now is still for the small satellite industry’s bread and butter applications: remote sensing and communications. The newer demand and interesting applications we’re supporting could probably be categorized as in-orbit infrastructure and transportation. We’re supporting our friends at Spaceflight on their Sherpa orbital transfer vehicle, where we’re providing some technologies and flight operations. We’ve also got some other missions we’re working on that we haven’t been public about yet around in-orbit infrastructure and transportation. How have supply chain shortages stemming from the pandemic affected Astro Digital? It’s pushed lead times out a little bit. We’ve had to design around shortages of parts. It’s created a bit more effort in managing the supply chain, where we’re seeking out those hard-to-find components and constantly looking for alternatives. In some cases, we’ve had to design out parts that we just couldn’t get. How long do you think the industry will face these challenges? I’m not sure. We’re seeing positive signs that it’s improving, and my hope is that we’re past this by the end of the year — that may be a little bit optimistic, but we’re at least seeing positive signs. What’s next for Astro Digital? Smallsats are now mainstream. They’re no longer pure academic or pure technology demonstrations. Our hypothesis has turned out correct and we’ve been able to make a real business out of this. We just more than doubled our footprint with another almost 18,000 square feet [1,700 square meters] of facility space, and we’ve doubled our team in the last 12 to 18 months. Even though we’re pretty quiet, we’re getting a lot of interest in our products and services. It’s a really great time to be in the industry. This interview has been edited for length and clarity
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — NASA announced Aug. 31 that it has extended its commercial crew contract with SpaceX, adding five missions for more than $1.4 billion. The award of the five missions, designated Crew-10 through Crew-14, came after NASA announced its plans in a procurement notice June 1 to add the missions to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities (CCtCap) contract. The extension has a value of $1.44 billion, or $288 million per mission to the International Space Station. It comes after an extension in February that added three flights to the contract , Crew-7 through Crew-9, for $776 million or $258.7 million per flight. The total value of SpaceX’s CCtCap contract, awarded in 2014 to complete development and testing of Crew Dragon followed by six operational missions, is now $4.93 billion. NASA said in a statement that the contract extension “allows NASA to maintain an uninterrupted U.S. capability for human access to the space station until 2030.” That comes from the combination of SpaceX’s extended CCtCap contract along with Boeing’s own CCtCap contract for six flights of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle. NASA officials have previously stated that, once Starliner is certified to carry NASA astronauts, they will alternate between Starliner and Crew Dragon missions to the ISS. That would start with the first operational Starliner mission in the fall of 2023, assuming a successful crewed test flight of Starliner now scheduled for no earlier than February . The next SpaceX commercial crew mission, Crew-5, had been scheduled for early September but was delayed in July when the Falcon 9 booster that will launch the mission was damaged during transport from California to Texas for testing. That mission, carrying NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, is now scheduled for launch Oct. 3.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Pentagon plans to end procurements of very large geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) infrared satellites that provide initial warning of ballistic missile launches anywhere on the globe. Over the coming years DoD will start transitioning to a proliferated architecture of smaller satellites in lower orbits, officials said Sept. 21. “The path the Space Force is marching towards is that we won’t rely on those [GEO satellites] in the future,” Space Development Agency Director Derek Tournear told reporters at the Air, Space & Cyber conference. The agency, known as SDA, is developing a constellation of missile-tracking satellites using large numbers of small satellites in lower orbits. SDA next month will become part of the Space Force. Tournear’s comments came a day after the Space Force’s top acquisition executive Frank Calvelli said DoD can no longer afford billion-dollar satellites that on average take seven years to develop while China is moving to build new constellations at a rapid pace. He specifically criticized the current Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) satellites that the Space Force is buying from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $7.8 billion for three GEO satellites and ground systems. By comparison, SDA recently ordered 28 missile-tracking satellites for about $1.4 billion. Next-Gen OPIR will be the last GEO missile-warning satellites to be acquired by the Defense Department, Tournear said. The plan is to launch all three between 2025 and 2028. Northrop Grumman separately is developing two Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites that have not yet transitioned to production. After the three GEO satellites are launched, “the future will all be proliferated LEO with a semi-proliferated MEO to give you that resilience.” said Tournear. The Space Force plans to field a layer of medium Earth orbit missile-defense satellites. “We’ll do away with the GEOs and the big, exquisite, expensive satellites,” said Tournear. “We’ll have this proliferated layer in LEO and MEO to provide missile warning and missile tracking.” Current missile warning satellites, to be sure, will stay in operation for decades to come. There are today six Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellites in GEO and highly elliptical orbits that are projected to last two more decades. And the Next-Gen GEOs will be in orbit well past 2050. The architecture will shift but missile-warning satellites can’t be turned off “because this is a no-fail mission that the U.S. is relying on the Space Force to provide,” said Tournear. “so we want to have that overlap … We want to make sure we have a firm handle and make sure that the LEO layer is working before we let go.” GEO constellations will be part of the architecture for the lifetime of those satellites, he said. The chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond told reporters on Wednesday that the missile-warning satellite architecture is being redesigned but insisted that current systems will stay in operation for as long as necessary. “The challenge that we have in the space domain is that we operate all these capabilities for the world,” he said. “And you can’t tell the world I’m going to turn off GPS, or turn off missile warning and we’ll be back to you in about 10 years with new stuff.” “We’re looking to diversify our architecture,” he said. “That will help us be more resilient .. But you’ve got to have a bridge,” Raymond said. “And so those are the discussions we’re having on how you balance risk as we transition from old to new.” Notably, when the U.S. Air Force announced in 2018 it would stop buying SBIRS satellites and acquire the Next-Gen OPIR, officials argued that the new satellites would be less costly and more survivable than SBIRS. SBIRS satellites were criticized in 2017 by Gen. John Hyten for being “juicy targets” for enemy anti-satellite weapons. That led the Air Force to accelerate the procurement of Next-gen OPIR.
Arkisys, a Southern California startup developing robotic infrastructure for on-orbit commerce, announced plans Sept. 21 for a spaceflight demonstration of a key technology. In 2023, Arkisys plans to launch Applique, a universal interface adapter designed to connect any spacecraft payload, using a variety of common interface standards and protocols. Funding for the mission comes from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, which awarded Arkisys $17.5 million in other transaction authority in 2020 for a series of projects. “It’s a system-on-a-chip design, which allows us to connect any external payload to the inner workings of our port,” Dan Lopez, Arkisys chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews. “ You can connect a robotic arm, multispectral camera, synthetic aperture radar instrument, power, solar panels to anything: propulsion, launchers for smallsats or cubesats, metal recycling.” Arkisys designed Applique after discussions with companies focused on various element of on-orbit servicing, including refueling, robotic arm manipulation, and rendezvous and proximity operations. In addition to securely connecting payloads on Arkisys Port Module platforms, Applique is an integral element of the company’s Digital Twin, which Arkisys also is developing with DIU backing. Arkisys was founded in 2014 by former UrtheCast vice president Dan Lopez and David Barnhart, director of the University of Southern California Space Engineering Research Center. The company is developing standard Port platforms to serve as nexus points for commerce in low-Earth orbit. To ensure customer payloads can connect with the Port, Arkisys created a Digital Twin. Before customers send payloads to orbit, they are sent an Applique device, which they use to remotely connect with the cloud-based Digital Twin through a secure connection. The virtual link ensures that Arkisys is prepared to integrate the customer payload with the Port once it reaches orbit, Lopez said. “That’s the way to speed things up,” he added. In developing the interface connector, Arkisys worked with Germany’s iBoss Space and Novawurks of Los Alamitos, California, companies that have developed hardware and software interfaces for space applications. “Everything we are working on is meant to scale, yet be simple and easy for customers to integrate into, encouraging and accelerating innovation at multiple levels,” Rahul Rughani, Arkisys chief of systems engineering, said in a statement.
NASA will commission a small independent study of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), a move the agency says is part of its desire to support risky research that has the potential for high payoffs. The agency announced June 9 it will set up an independent team of researchers who, starting in early fall, will spend about nine months examining what data is available about UAPs and make recommendations on what additional data to collect to better understand the phenomena. A final report will be publicly released at the end of the study. Sightings of UAPs have attracted considerable attention in recent years, including studies by two groups established by the Defense Department. However, there is no consensus to explain such sightings, primarily by military aviators, with rationales ranging from advanced weapons and extraterrestrial objects to natural phenomena or miscellaneous objects, like balloons. The goal of the study, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, in a call with reporters, is to “take a field that is relatively data poor and make it into a field that is much more data rich and therefore worthy of scientific investigation and analysis.” The study will be chaired by David Spergel, an astrophysicist who is president of the Simons Foundation. “Our plan is to conduct an open inquiry that we hope will advance our understanding so that, when this is done, we at least have a road map of how to move forward,” he said on the call. He later said the only preconceived notion he had about UAPs going into the study is that the data may be explained by several different phenomena. NASA, in its statement about the study, emphasized that there is “no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.” “Don’t ever underestimate what nature can do,” Zurbuchen said. “Sometimes we have this assertion that we understand the natural world and everything that’s not explained with the laws of nature that we have right now is somehow not natural. I really believe there’s a lot to learn still.” Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the study team will include scientists, aeronautics experts and “data practitioners.” The study, he said, will be set up like committees NASA regularly establishes for reviewing grant proposals, and will have a similar budget that he said is unlikely to exceed $100,000. With that limited budget and schedule, Evans said the focus will be on identifying existing data and data gaps, rather than finding an explanation or explanations for UAPs. “The first step in any scientific investigation is to figure out what data is at hand,” he said. “We’re not actually going to be, within that budget, analyzing those data directly. This is just step one: what data are out there that could be brought to bear upon the problem.” Earlier in the day, Zurbuchen announced the UAP study at a meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board (SSB). He pitched it as an example of “high-risk, high-impact” research that he believed the agency should be doing more of. “Taking risk is necessary for breeding innovation and leadership,” he said at the meeting. “We assert that failure, in fact, can be an option. We think about failure all the time, and we’re comfortable with that.” He said at the meeting that, in discussions with scientists, 8 of 10 told him the agency was not doing enough high-risk/high-impact research. Reviewers of grant proposals found that 3% of such proposals fell into the high-risk/high-impact category. “My gut feeling is that it should be bigger.” At both the SSB meeting and the call with reporters, Zurbuchen acknowledged the “reputational risk” associated with studying UAPs. “In a traditional type of science environment, talking about some of these issues may be considered selling out or not actual science,” he said in the call. “I really vehemently oppose that. I really believe that the quality of science is not measured by the outputs that come behind it but also the questions we’re willing to tackle with science.” Members of the SSB showed little overt interest in the UAP study he announced, using a question-and-answer session to instead bring up issues such as research funding and demographics as well as the status of specific missions and programs.
SAN FRANCISCO – Atlas Space Operations announced a Defense Innovation Unit contract June 8 to demonstrate a hybrid network linking Defense Department, civil government and commercial satellites. For Atlas, “some of the tangible benefits will be the knowledge that we gain in the integration with the Department of Defense and our civil agent,” Ed McCarty, Atlas vice president of global sales, told SpaceNews. “They all do things a little bit differently.” In addition, winning the DIU Hybrid Space Architecture award puts Atlas in a strong position to compete for the U.S. Space Force Enterprise Resource Management (ERM). The Space Force Space Enterprise Consortium announced ERM in November, a Space Systems Command program to support its Enterprise Corps Cross-Mission Ground Data Transport Branch. “We hope that we’re able to convince Space System Command that we already have demonstrated the capabilities that they want to capture in ERM,” McCarty said. The Defense Department is looking for ways to take advantage of the proliferation of commercial satellites and ground stations to create resilient hybrid networks capable of transmitting data at multiple classification levels. Rather than communicating with each network independently, the Defense Department is asking companies for help integrating the networks. “With the award of the Hybrid Space Architecture network, we’ll be able to demonstrate a federated capability with a Department of Defense antenna, a civil antenna and commercial antennas,” McCarty said. “The government, through one of their mission operations centers, will be able to access an entire network through a single API using the Atlas Freedom software platform. This is the first time it’s ever been done.” One of the reasons the Defense Department has proceeded cautiously in creating hybrid networks is security. The DIU Hybrid Space Architecture solicitation released in October notes the network data transport must not compromise “information assurance or cybersecurity.” “There will be technical hurdles that we need to overcome to make sure that we are compliant with Defense Department networks,” said Brad Bode, Atlas chief technology officer. “We’ll spend quite a bit of time checking out all the security requirements to ensure that we’re still accredited and validated in our system and not violating any of the government restrictions.” The Atlas Freedom Network, which is integrated with Amazon Web Services, includes 13 global teleports and 14 antennas. Traverse City, Michigan-based Atlas won its first Defense Department contract in 2018 to provide satellite communications for a U.S. Air Force Academy satellite. Since then, the company has worked under Air Force Small Business Innovation Research contracts to develop a ground segment to support hybrid space networks.
Intuitive Machines, a company developing lunar landers and related capabilities for NASA and other customers, will go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), it announced Sept. 16. Houston-based Intuitive Machines said it will merge with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp., a SPAC trading on the Nasdaq exchange. The merged company would have a pro forma enterprise value of $815 million. Inflection Point has $330 million of cash in trust, although that money is subject to redemptions from shareholders if they elect not to hold stock in the merged company and request their money back. The deal includes $55 million in secured capital separate from the SPAC holdings from the SPAC’s sponsor as well as a founder of Intuitive Machines, and a $50 million equity facility from CF Principal Investments LLC, an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald & Company. The companies said will support the Intuitive Machines business plan to profitability, which it expects to be in two to three years. Intuitive Machines is developing a series of lunar landers, including three missions that are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The first of those missions, IM-1, is scheduled to launch in early 2023. The company is also developing a satellite network to provide communication around the moon. “We are in a leading position in the development of lunar space, to be for the moon what steamships, toll roads and rail companies were to Earth economies,” Steve Altemus, president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in a statement. “This transaction will provide the capital to execute on the rapidly growing demand for the company’s proprietary technologies and services with key government and commercial customers,” said Michael Blitzer, co-chief executive of Inflection Point, in the statement. Intuitive Machines recorded $73 million in revenue in 2021, according to an investor presentation, and estimates $102 million in revenue in 2022. The company’s projections call for that increasing to $759 million in 2024, with lunar lander revenue supplemented by lunar data services and other new products and services, including a potential entry into the in-space servicing market. That presentation projected the company breaking even, in terms of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), in 2024. The deal is the first involving a space company merging with a SPAC since early in the year. The surge of interest in space SPACs from late 2020 through 2021 has faded, along with SPACs in general, given the poor performance on the stock market of many of the companies that went public through that approach. D-Orbit, which announced a SPAC merger in January, canceled that deal Aug. 12 , citing changing market conditions caused in part by the war in Ukraine. That left satellite communications equipment maker Satixfy as the only space industry company still pursuing a SPAC merger, which it expects to close by the end of the year. Mike Palmer, managing director of Cerberus Capital Management, said during a panel at World Satellite Business Week Sept. 12 that some investors saw SPACs as a shortcut to get into an interesting but “intimidating” market like space. “It all happened very fast, probably a little too fast.”
China is looking to build partnerships for its upcoming missions to the moon and deep ventures into the solar system, while omitting mention of main partner Russia. Chinese space officials presented a range of opportunities for international cooperation in the country’s plans during a session at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris, Sept. 21. Wang Qiong of the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center under the China National Space Administration (CNSA) stated that China was open to proposals for its Chang’e-7 lunar south pole landing and orbiting mission—with a coinciding call announced by CNSA—and later Chang’e-8 in-situ resource utilization test mission. Chang’e-6 already features participation from Sweden and ESA in the form of a negative ion detector, an Italian retroreflector, a French radon instrument and a Pakistani CubeSat, named ICUBE-Q, Wang stated. The UAE will also have a small rover with a mass of around 10 kilograms on board the mission. In deep space, China is working on Tianwen-2, a near-Earth asteroid sampling mission which will also visit a main belt comet, launching around 2025. The Tianwen-3 Mars sample return and Tianwen-4 mission to Jupiter and Uranus are still at preliminary stages and open to collaboration. The Tianwen-4 mission will include a solar-powered Jupiter orbiter and a smaller, radioisotope-powered spacecraft to make a flyby of Uranus. Currently China is inviting proposals for payloads to join its own, already planned and approved Chang’e lunar missions due to launch before the end of the decade. This has characterized much of China’s cooperation, with the main exception of collaborative projects with Europe. The International Lunar Research Station , a megaproject envisioning the establishment of a permanent robotic and later human-occupied moon base in the 2030s, will however be open to a much wider scope and depth of involvement. This will allow countries, agencies, companies and other entities to join in at the planning and other stages to form a coordinated set of infrastructure on the moon. The elephant in the room was however not mentioned. The ILRS roadmap was presented as a joint project by nominally equal partners China and Russia in June 2021 in St. Petersburg during another International Astronautical Federation (IAF) event. There was no Russian presence at IAC due to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The project had generally been referred to as a joint China-Russia program until after the invasion. Wang’s presentation stated instead that the ILRS was conceived in 2014 and selected as an “ongoing program of international major scientific project in China” in 2020. The only visible representation of potential Russian came in a slide listing future Chinese Chang’e and Russia Luna missions, alongside graphics of the Chinese Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket and a large Russian launch vehicle. The slide was taken straight from ILRS handbook released to coincide with the St. Petersburg event in 2021, and Russia nor its missions were not explicitly named. It is hard to say if the lack of representation of Russian involvement reflects a change in Beijing’s thinking or a sensitivity to the current geopolitical context. But China appears to face a dilemma for its grandest space ambitions so far. “Be it in space or elsewhere, China has a very realistic view of Russia and partnering with Moscow has never been Beijing’s most preferred outcome, for the two countries are not natural partners,” Marco Aliberti, a senior research fellow at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) in Vienna, told SpaceNews . “This uneasiness is well reflected in the very nature of their cooperation initiatives, including most notably their joint ILRS, which still remains little more than a coordination mechanism rather than a bold undertaking sharing a common goal.” “In moving forward, however, Beijing now seems to be increasingly confronted with a difficult dilemma: turn the relationship into a real partnership or drop it altogether.” Aliberti says China has been eager to build a credible alternative to the US-led Artemis, not only from a programmatic but also a normative perspective. But potential gains from partnering with Russia, previously including tapping into technological knowhow, are evaporating. “Beyond a few launcher programmes, with questionable success, military satellites and heritage human spaceflight experience, Russia has not been able to offer novel and innovative efforts to the international community in the recent past and I believe this will be exacerbated even more by the continuing sanctions and overall isolation of the country,” says Tomas Hrozensky, also of ESPI. Given Russia’s current standing in the world, a partnership “may prevent new, and possibly more auspicious, partners” such as European countries, working with China, Aliberti notes. He adds that what may result is a continuation of an ambiguous stance that will “officially celebrate the importance of cooperation with Russia while in parallel pursuing opportunities that better serve its national interests.”
OneWeb, the broadband megaconstellation company whose launch plans were disrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, expects to resume launches late this year, an executive said June 23. Speaking at the Fourth Summit for Space Sustainability by the Secure World Foundation and the U.K. Space Agency, Maurizio Vanotti, vice president of space infrastructure development and partnerships at OneWeb, said new launch agreements with SpaceX and NewSpace India Ltd. (NSIL) would allow the company to launch the remaining satellites of its first-generation system by the second quarter of 2023. “Our plan is to be back on the launch pad in quarter four, after the summer, and to complete deployment of the constellation by quarter two next year,” he said. It will take several months after that final launch for the satellites to move to their operational orbits, he added. “We’re going to be in service with global coverage, 24/7, by the end of next year,” he said. OneWeb once expected to have its constellation complete by the end of this year using Soyuz rockets. Its plans were upended, though, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent Western sanctions. OneWeb formally suspended launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome after rejecting conditions imposed by Roscosmos that included no military use of the satellites and divestment of the British government’s stake in the company. OneWeb announced less than three weeks later a launch agreement with SpaceX , but neither company disclosed details about the agreement. Notably, Vanotti said that the agreement, negotiated over less than three days, is for a “few Falcon 9 launches.” The companies had previously declined to say even how many launches were included in the agreement. OneWeb announced April 20 that it signed an agreement with NSIL , the commercial arm of the Indian space agency ISRO, for launches of OneWeb satellites. Vanotti confirmed that NSIL will launch those satellites on the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3, the most powerful version of the GSLV but one that has not launched since 2019. He did not disclose how many launches that contract includes. “Considering the geopolitical situation, I would say that we’ve had an incredible turnaround with great support from both SpaceX and the Indian space agency,” he said. Commitment to space sustainability Vanotti appeared on a panel with Julie Zoller, head of global regulatory affairs for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation, where both emphasized their commitment to space sustainability. “Space sustainability is critical for Project Kuiper. It’s been a priority from day one,” Zoller said, citing as examples the company’s plans to use narrow tolerances for the orbits of the satellites and to actively deorbit them at the end of their lives. “We take our responsibility for the space commons extremely seriously,” Vanotti said, emphasizing the company’s commitment to reliability for its satellites to ensure they can deorbit at the end of their lives. The high orbit of the OneWeb satellites means they will not reenter within 25 years, as recommended by current orbital debris mitigation guidelines, with atmospheric drag alone. OneWeb has also worked to ensure its satellites can be removed from orbit by other spacecraft should their onboard propulsion fail. However, Zoller said there were no similar plans for Project Kuiper satellites, in part because those satellites are in lower orbits of between 590 and 630 kilometers. “We’re not using a third party to do active debris removal. We are the active debris remover,” she said, claiming the satellites can deorbit within 10 years even without propulsion. Both also said they were working on another element of space sustainability, reducing the brightness of their satellites to limit their interference to astronomy. For Amazon, that includes a test with two prototype satellites that the company plans to launch as soon as late this year on an ABL Space Systems RS1 rocket. Zoller said one of the two satellites will be equipped with a sunshade to block sunlight from reflecting off parts of the satellite, similar to the “VisorSat” concept SpaceX used for some of its Starlink satellites. “We can compare and contrast the difference between a shielded and an unshielded satellite in our very first launch,” she said. “We’re excited to get data on that and to find out what we can do next.” Vanotti said OneWeb keeps in contact with astronomical groups in the United States and United Kingdom, and in the last year started an “active observation campaign” to monitor the brightness of its satellites. Those observations help refine a model of the satellites. “We’re going to be using this tool in order to optimize the design of the future generation of our satellites,” he said, “to have a lower impact on dark skies.”
A coolant leak in a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station Dec. 14 forced flight controllers to cancel a Russian spacewalk there and raised questions about the spacecraft’s ability to return to Earth safely. Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk when station controllers noticed a coolant leak in the service module of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked there at approximately 7:45 p.m. Eastern. That spacecraft delivered Prokopyev and Petelin, along with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, to the station nearly three months ago. The two cosmonauts continued their spacewalk preparations but remained in the airlock as engineers on the ground assessed the problem. Their seven-hour spacewalk was scheduled to begin at about 9:20 p.m. Eastern, but was delayed and ultimately canceled shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern. The leak, visible as a stream of particles from the Soyuz, was visible more than three hours after it started in NASA TV coverage. “The best plan of action tonight was focus all of our Moscow team’s attention on sorting out what’s going on exactly with the Soyuz spacecraft and then we’ll regroup tomorrow,” Emily Nelson, NASA chief flight director at the Johnson Space Center, said in comments on NASA TV around midnight Eastern. The Russian space agency Roscosmos, in a brief statement Dec. 15, said there was “damage to the outer lining” of the service module of the Soyuz, but didn’t offer more details on the problem. Roscosmos said a third Russian cosmonaut on the station, Anna Kikina, used a robotic arm to perform a photographic inspection of the spacecraft, returning those images to Earth for analysis. Both the cause and the severity of the leak are unclear. The leak did not pose any immediate risk to the station and its crew, but in a worst-case scenario, it would render the Soyuz spacecraft unable to return to Earth safely with its crew. Roscosmos could launch the next Soyuz to the station without any crew on board as a replacement, but it’s uncertain when the spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, could be prepared for launch, and doing so would affect future crew rotations. Soyuz MS-23 is currently scheduled to launch to the station in March 2023 with two Roscosmos cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut. The risk of a problem with either Soyuz or U.S. commercial crew vehicles is a major reason why NASA had, for years, sought to exchange seats between such spacecraft in a barter arrangement. That would mean there would be at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut on the station at any time should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be out of service for an extended period. After extensive negotiations, NASA and Roscosmos completed the seat barter agreement in July . Rubio flew to the station on Soyuz MS-22 in September and Kikina on the SpaceX Crew-5 Crew Dragon mission in October, becoming the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a commercial crew vehicle. The current agreement includes seat barters on Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions scheduled for the spring and fall of 2023. The leak marked the second consecutive postponement of a spacewalk by Prokopyev and Petelin, intended to move a radiator from the Rassvet module to the Nauka module on the station. Roscosmos called off the first attempt at the spacewalk Nov. 25 because of a problem with a pump in one of the spacesuits.
Rocket Lab announced its solar power business will supply solar cells for three missile-warning satellites that Lockheed Martin is building for the U.S. Space Force. The agreement with Lockheed Martin, announced July 27, is to supply solar cells and radiation-hardened assemblies for the geostationary Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared ( Next-Gen OPIR ) satellites, the first of which is scheduled to launch in 2025. The satellites will be operated by the U.S. Space Force and provide initial warning of a ballistic or tactical missile launch anywhere on the globe. Rocket Lab is a launch services company but also has a satellite manufacturing and components business that has grown through acquisitions. The company in January completed the $80 million acquisition of solar power system manufacturer SolAero Technologies, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. SolAero, founded in 1998, supplied solar power units used in NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Mars Insight Lander, Cygnus cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station and the OneWeb communications satellite constellation. Lockheed Martin used SolAero systems in the previous generation of missile-warning satellites, the Space Based Infrared System ( SBIRS ). The company produced six SBIRS satellites before the Space Force decided to transition to the Next-Gen OPIR. The deal to supply solar power units for Next-Gen OPIR satellites had been in the works with SolAero before the company was acquired by Rocket Lab and was recently finalized. Rocket Lab will supply solar cells and Coverglass Interconnected Cell (CIC) assemblies, designed for severe space radiation environments and thermal stress conditions. The CICs will be integrated into the solar panels and arrays on the Next-Gen OPIR spacecraft. “We are excited to continue our long-term partnership with Lockheed Martin by powering the Next Gen OPIR GEO satellites,” said Brad Clevenger, Rocket Lab’s vice president and general manager of space systems power solutions. 
NASA has released a request for proposals for a second human lunar lander for the Artemis program to join the Starship lander under development by SpaceX. NASA released the call for proposals Sept. 16, nearly six months after announcing plans for the Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) project and releasing a draft call for proposals for industry feedback. The agency set a deadline of Nov. 15 for receiving proposals with an award expected in May 2023. The selected company would develop a lander that would support missions after Artemis 3, the first crewed landing of the Artemis campaign that will be done by SpaceX no earlier than 2025. The winning company would carry out an uncrewed landing followed by a crewed landing no earlier than the Artemis 5 mission in the late 2020s, then be eligible, along with SpaceX, to complete for lunar landing service contracts for later missions. “Work done under this solicitation, in addition to current lander development and studies taking place, will help build the foundation for long-term deep space exploration,” Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager of the Human Landing System (HLS) program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a statement about the release of the call for proposals. In March, NASA billed Sustaining Lunar Development as fulfilling a commitment to Congress that it will have competition in the overall HLS program. “I promised competition, so here it is,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the March announcement of the project. The winning company will have to demonstrate its lander can meet the requirements for a notional lunar lander mission called a Polar Sortie Mission. That mission would carry two astronauts to the lunar surface for a stay of up to 6.25 days and support four planned and one contingency moonwalk. A later Polar Excursion Mission would require the lander to transport four astronauts to the lunar surface and stay there for 33 days. That mission would assume there are other assets at the landing site, like a habitat where astronauts would stay during the mission, and thus require only one roundtrip moonwalk from the lander to the habitat and back. Companies can also show how their landers could support short-stay missions to regions other than the south pole of the moon as well as be used to transport cargo. The original HLS competition, won by SpaceX in April 2021, also included bids from teams led by Blue Origin and Dynetics. Those companies protested the award to the Government Accountability Office, which rejected the protests three months later. Blue Origin then filed suit in federal court, which ruled against the company, allowing NASA to proceed with SpaceX. Neither Blue Origin nor Dynetics have formally announced their intent to bid on the Sustaining Lunar Development program, although Blue Origin does have an “Artemis Lander” placeholder page on its website. It’s also unclear if Blue Origin’s partners on its “National Team” that bid on HLS, including Draper, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will join Blue Origin again on the new competition. Officials with Lockheed and Northrop were noncommittal shortly after the announcement of the project in March, saying at the time they were studying options. “We’re looking at SLD. Obviously, it’s an opportunity for us,” Robert Lightfoot, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, said in an Aug. 28 interview before the first Artemis 1 launch attempt. He said the company had decided what companies it would work with on the proposal but wasn’t ready to disclose them.
A deep-space telescope developed in the United States and relocated to Australia has been declared operational this month. “With testing complete, the Space Surveillance Telescope will allow greater space domain awareness,” Australia’s Department of Defence said in a statement Sept. 30. The Space Surveillance Telescope , or SST, will join the network of sensors used by the United States, Australia and other allies to track objects in orbit. The Royal Australian Air Force will operate the telescope in coordination with the U.S. Space Force’s Space Delta 2 unit responsible for space domain awareness. The United States owns the 261,850-pound telescope. Australia built the site and infrastructure, and is responsible for operations and training. SST can track faint objects in deep space to help predict and avoid potential collisions, as well as detect asteroids and comets, and can imaging objects in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. The SST was originally developed more than 20 years ago by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The program later was handed over to the Air Force. Australia and the United States in 2013 agreed to relocate the SST from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to Naval Communication Station Harold E Holt in Western Australia, in order to add a new vantage point in the Southern Hemisphere. The Australian government built a new dome for the telescope and a 2.1-megawatt central power station. The SST achieved “first light” in 2020 , meaning the telescope’s optics were successfully aligned with its wide-field-of-view camera to allow the telescope to capture its first images of objects in orbit. Air-Vice Marshal Cath Roberts, head of Australia’s Defence Space Command, said the telescope “will provide enhanced awareness of the space domain and contribute to greater alliance cooperation.” She said the bespoke facilities and supporting infrastructure are “as much of a milestone as the telescope itself and represent a significant achievement by Defence and Australian industry”. 
NASA says a historical review of actions by former administrator James Webb confirmed its decision to keep the agency’s flagship space telescope named after him. NASA released Nov. 18 an 89-page report by the agency’s chief historian, Brian Odom, reviewing allegations that Webb, first at the State Department and later at NASA, was directly involved in the firings of employees based on their sexual orientations. Those allegations had led many astronomers to call on NASA to rename the James Webb Space Telescope. The study, Odom concluded, found no evidence to support those claims. “In conclusion, to date, no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation,” he stated in the report. NASA said in October 2021 that its initial review of the historical record found no evidence to support claims Webb fired LGBTQ+ employees. However, at the time NASA did not provide a detailed report backing that conclusion. Astronomers, including the agency’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee, pressed NASA to release a report, a process delayed because of historical archives that have only recently reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic. The report reviewed two specific allegations. One was that Webb, as deputy under secretary of state in 1950, approved firing s of LGBTQ+ employees at the State Department during the “Lavender Scare.” The historical record, Odom concluded, showed that Webb was primarily concerned with limiting access to State Department personnel records from congressional investigations. The other was in 1963, when Webb was NASA administrator. An agency budget analyst, Clifford Norton, was arrested and later fired due to his sexual orientation. Norton later sued the Civil Service Commission, a case that helped lead to overturning civil service policies that permitted such firings. Odom concluded that Webb likely was not aware of the Norton case. “Because it was accepted policy across the government, the firing was, highly likely – though, sadly – considered unexceptional,” he states in the report. The report’s conclusions, NASA said in the statement, confirmed its earlier decision not to rename JWST. “Based on the available evidence, the agency does not plan to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope.” However, both the report and the statement condemned past discrimination. “For decades, discrimination against LGBTQI+ federal employees was not merely tolerated, it was shamefully promoted by federal policies. The Lavender Scare that took place following World War II is a painful part of America’s story and the struggle for LGBTQI+ rights,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement. The report’s conclusions seemed unlikely to be accepted by at least some astronomers critical of naming JWST after James Webb. In a Nov. 18 statement , four astronomers who led the effort to rename JWST — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Lucianne Walkowicz, Sarah Tuttle and Brian Nord — said they had not yet read the report but believed it was focused too narrowly on those specific cases. The report, they wrote, “seems to be answering the question ‘Is there definitive physical proof that James Webb knew about Clifford Norton and his case?’ That’s a separate question from, ‘Was James Webb, as administrator, responsible for the activities of the agency he led?’” They said they find it hard to believe that, as NASA administrator, Webb did not know of Clifford’s firing. “Ultimately, Webb has at best a complicated legacy,” they concluded. “His activities did not earn him a $10 billion monument.” It’s not clear what next steps there are for those who oppose naming JWST after Webb. In October, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in the United Kingdom announced that it would require authors submitting papers to its journals to refer to the telescope solely as JWST and not spell it out, as required for other acronyms. That policy would be in place, the RAS said, until the results of the historical investigation are published. Robert Massey, deputy executive director of the RAS, told SpaceNews Nov. 19 that he planned to bring the report to the attention of the organization’s governing council at its next meeting Dec. 9. There had been few signs, though, that criticism of JWST’s name had extended beyond the astronomical community. The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee held a hearing Nov. 16 on early results from JWST, with Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, among those testifying. While committee members asked questions about lessons learned from JWST’s development and technical issues, no one during the 90-minute hearing brought up the controversy about its name.
Apple formally announced its long-anticipated partnership with Globalstar Sept. 7 to provide satellite messaging services for new iPhones and becoming Globalstar’s biggest customer. At an event to unveil new iPhone and other products, Apple said the new iPhone 14 series will include an “Emergency SOS” feature that will allow users to send emergency messages via satellite when out of terrestrial network coverage. Those services will start in November and will be available initially in the United States and Canada. Those services will be free for at least the first two years. In the presentation, Apple emphasized the difficulty of providing connectivity via satellite for its phones. “The bandwidth is so limited that even sending a text message is a technical challenge,” said Ashley Williams, manager of satellite modeling and simulation at Apple. The phone features customized hardware and software to allow it to connect via satellite. “That connection is only possible when the phone is pointing directly at a satellite,” she said, with the phone offering special interface to instruct the user where to point the phone to create and maintain a connection. That eliminates the need for a special external antenna like those on conventional satellite phones. In the presentation, Apple did not disclose what satellite system the phone would communicate with, focusing instead on how the system is designed to efficiently collect information and transmit it via text messages either directly to emergency services providers or to “relay centers” where operators would then call a provider. “It took years to make this vision a reality, through game-changing hardware, software and infrastructure innovation,” Williams said. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission immediately after the announcement, Globalstar revealed that it will provide the satellite connectivity for Apple’s Emergency SOS service, confirming long-held industry speculation that Apple was the unnamed partner Globalstar mentioned it had been working with since 2020. The so-called “Terms Agreement” with Apple that Globalstar had mentioned in past filings included several milestones, including construction of 10 new gateways worldwide and the launch of a spare satellite in June. Apple will also fund 95% of costs of a new generation of satellites Globalstar ordered in February from MDA Ltd. and Rocket Lab . As part of the agreement, Globalstar said it will allocate 85% of its network capacity to Apple. Globalstar said it will continue to offer its own services, such as internet-of-things connectivity, through the remaining 15% of capacity on the system, while also exploring terrestrial applications of its spectrum. “Globalstar expects that its business strategy will allow it to generate reliable cash flow with substantial growth potential and greater profitability,” the company said in its SEC filing. The company, which reported $124.3 million in revenue in 2021, says it expects to increase that to between $185 million and $230 million in 2023, with a further 35% increase by 2026. With its partnership with Globalstar, Apple formally joins an increasingly crowded market for direct-to-handset satellite connectivity services. AST SpaceMobile and Lynk are developing their own satellite constellations to provide messaging, and eventually voice and data, services to unmodified phones. SpaceX and T-Mobile announced a partnership Aug. 25 where second-generation Starlink satellites, expected to start launching next year, will provide connectivity to cellphones using T-Mobile spectrum. 
SpaceX on Dec. 2 revealed a new business segment called Starshield aimed at U.S. national security government agencies. This sector of SpaceX intends to leverage the Starlink internet constellation in low Earth orbit to develop products and services — including secure communications, remote sensing and space surveillance payloads — that are in growing demand by U.S. defense and intelligence organizations. “While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on three areas: Earth observation, communications and hosted payloads,” the company said on its website. The Starshield site is heavy on marketing and light on details but conveys SpaceX’s vision to disrupt the national security satellite sector much like it has in launch, commercial broadband and civil space . “SpaceX’s ongoing work with the Department of Defense and other partners demonstrates our ability to provide in-space and on-ground capability at scale,” said the company. These statements suggest that as SpaceX has expanded its reach in the national security launch and satellite broadband markets, it decided it needs to offer more specialized products in order to win big-ticket contracts. Starshield will offer “end-to-end systems,” meaning complete services from launch vehicles to satellites and user terminals. “It appears they have finally understood that going all commercial and asking national security space customers to use it doesn’t always work, so they are going to offer alternative products that are focused on national security but based on Starlink technology and production lines,” an industry analyst told SpaceNews . Starshield products and services will include satellites with sensing payloads that can deliver processed data directly to the user, secure global communications and user equipment, and customized satellite buses. Satellite communications services offerings would draw from the company’s experience in Ukraine , where Starlink demonstrated its can operate in a combat zone and proved to be more resilient than the U.S. military would have expected from a commercial system. The Air Force has bought Starlink services to support units in Europe and Africa due to the system’s ability to operate in a hostile electronic environment . Starshield also is capitalizing on SpaceX’s participation in the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency’s missile-tracking and missile-detection constellation, where it partnered with Leidos to develop four classified infrared sensor satellites scheduled to launch before the end of the year. SpaceX will offer to host “classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements,” the company said. Starshield satellites would be equipped with laser terminals to make them interoperable with military satellites. Interoperability is a key requirement as DoD wants to use commercial low Earth orbit satellite capacity to transport data collected by remote sensing systems. Defense officials warned the current Starlink network, because of its highly proprietary technology, cannot be integrated into a hybrid architecture that DoD hopes to build. SpaceX also promises “rapid deployment and development” of capabilities, a pitch that resonates with DoD space buying agencies that for years have been frustrated by the slow pace and high cost of satellite procurements. Some of the more advanced capabilities advertised by Starshield will probably not be available until SpaceX deploys its second-generation Starlink satellites. These will be larger than the first-generation version and designed with performance features needed to host national security payloads and deliver higher levels of encryption than the commercial Starlink service. To date SpaceX has launched approximately 3,500 first-generation Starlink satellites and recently won licensing approval to deploy Gen2 spacecraft.
SAN FRANCISCO – Launch startup Evolution Space signed a memorandum of understanding to launch a small satellite constellation for optical communications startup Xenesis. Under the $120 million deal signed in May, Evolution will conduct five suborbital and 25 orbital launches for Xenesis beginning in 2025. Mojave, Calif.-based Evolution is taking an iterative approach to developing small solid rockets to deliver 250 to 450 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. “We focus on simplicity and have no ambitions to build bigger rockets,” Steve Heller, Evolution founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “We are starting with a suborbital platform and using that as a leap pad for an orbital platform.” A subscale version of Evolution’s suborbital rocket, which will serve as the booster for company’s orbital vehicle, cost the company about $70,000 to build. That rocket reached an altitude of 56,219 meters during tests conducted in Mojave in November. In May, Evolution conducted further tests of a new suborbital vehicle. That rocket, built in three weeks for less than $50,000, demonstrated improvement in the company’s guidance, navigation and control system, Heller said. Six more launches are scheduled to be completed within the next year. Evolution, originally called Sugarhouse Aerospace, was founded in Salt Lake City in 2018. Since rebranding one year ago, the company has assembled a staff of 10 people, which it plans to double within a year. “We’re solid propulsion geeks. We build every piece of our rockets” from the propulsion to starter pellets, Heller said. The company’s streamlined approach makes it a good fit for the times, since investors are not as eager to back space companies as they were a year ago. “I think the spend mirrors the market,” Heller said. Working with Xenesis is helping Evolution refine its rocket development program. “We’ve been looking for is a customer to tell us exactly what to build,” Heller said. “Is 250 kilograms to low-Earth orbit or is it 400? What’s more important: customizable inclinations or time to launch, because solids are broadly applicable to customers trying to put things up where they want, when they want?” Founded in 2017, Xenesis plans to establish an optical communications constellation to provide connectivity for mobile network operators, internet service providers and enterprises. Mark LaPenna, Xenesis founder and CEO, said he’s pleased to be working with Evolution because “these guys represent a paradigm shift in the way we do business in this industry.” “It’s the rapid iteration,” LaPenna said. “It’s the fail fast, succeed fast mentality that these guys are hammering home. It’s also a high degree of professionalism. They have a build schedule. They’re executing.”
TAMPA, Fla. — E-Space has expanded its leadership team as the startup prepares to start serial production next year for a network of potentially hundreds of thousands of satellites. The startup said Aug. 24 that Gunjan Murarka, chief financial officer of small satellite maker LeoStella, has taken the same role at E-Space. Dalibor Djuran, a former director of satellite manufacturing at Earth observation operator Planet Labs, also joined E-Space as chief satellite systems engineer. E-Space said they will help accelerate plans to develop a low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of what the startup describes as “multi-application communication satellites.” The constellation has spectrum filings backed by Rwanda for 300,000 satellites, which E-Space founder and CEO Greg Wyler says would have significantly smaller cross-sections than other LEO networks to reduce their environmental impact. These dimensions, which have not been undisclosed, aim to reduce the chances of in-orbit collisions and debris resulting from them. E-Space also hopes one day to use the constellation to capture and de-orbit debris that is currently too small to track. According to Wyler, this means it would ultimately have a net positive impact on the space environment. The startup deployed its first three prototype satellites in May on a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle. While Wyler declined to discuss features being tested on these prototypes, which are “very different” from its planned operational satellites, he said the launch validated a capability to deploy its satellites without a dispenser. “We’ve tested our dispenser-less design and we can save about 10% of the mass [on a launch mission] by getting rid of the dispenser,” he said in an interview with SpaceNews . This potentially enables E-Space to pack more satellites into a single rocket while giving the startup more launch flexibility. “This is a major step forward because it allows for faster launches, it allows for faster production of the launcher, and reduce supply chain challenges,” he said. E-Space plans to deploy an unspecified number of preproduction satellites on an undisclosed rocket for its next mission in the first half of 2023. “We’re looking to get this next batch to be as close to [the production model] as possible, and validate certain major performance features,” he said. The startup had planned to demonstrate features from its second batch of preproduction satellites in December. “It will be ready when it’s ready,” Wyler added, “after that, we move into our first level of production.” E-Space plans to build all its satellites in-house. Wyler, who declined to say how frequently the startup could churn out production satellites, has previous experience in setting up a high-volume satellite facility in Florida for OneWeb, the LEO broadband operator he founded. None of E-Space’s early satellites will have a debris de-orbit capability that the venture plans to add to its constellation eventually. Expanding the team E-Space has hired about 60 employees and Wyler said it is on track to almost double that to 100 by the end of this year. Murarka and Djuran will be based out of an office E-Space recently opened in Los Gatos, California. The office is mostly focusing on developing software, Wyler said, while hardware manufacturing will “most likely” take place in facilities the startup is looking to expand in Toulouse, France. Headquartered in Florida, E-Space also has smaller offices in Boston and Washington D.C. E-Space announced $50 million in seed financing in February to fund operations up to serial satellite production next year. Wyler said the startup’s decision to hire a chief financial officer to manage its finances does not mean another fundraising is imminent. “There are a lot of activities that are ongoing in different groups and in different parts of the world,” he said, “and somebody needs to track and manage all that, as well as of course the continuous internal management of our finances and our future. “And so the CFO will be helpful for that as well as fundraising or managing investors as and when the time comes.” He said E-Space has “quite a lot of interest on the investment side,” but “it’s not something we need right now.” In addition to founding OneWeb, Wyler also founded the O3b Networks, the medium Earth orbit broadband constellation now owned by SES.
NASA has approved for development a space telescope to search for near Earth objects as some members of Congress lobby the agency to move up the mission. NASA announced Dec. 6 that it had confirmed the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, after passing a programmatic milestone called Key Decision Point C. That allows the mission to proceed into the next phase of its development. NEO Surveyor will fly a telescope half a meter in diameter equipped with an infrared camera. Operating from the Earth-sun L-1 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth in the direction of the sun, the spacecraft will be able to scan large regions of space to look for NEOs, including those that could be pose future impact risks to the Earth. The Key Decision Point (KDP) C review, which took place last week, is when the agency sets formal cost and schedule commitments for the mission. NASA said it estimates NEO Surveyor will cost $1.2 billion to development and be ready for launch no later than June 2028. The cost is double what NASA once projected for NEO Surveyor. When the agency said in September 2019 it would pursue NEO Surveyor as a directed mission , based on a mission concept called NEOCam that was proposed for the Discovery program of competed planetary science missions, agency officials estimated its cost at $500–600 million, launching no earlier than 2025. NASA’s fiscal year 2022 budget proposal projected spending $811.2 million on the mission from 2022 through 2026 , supporting a launch in 2026. “The cost and schedule commitments outlined at KDP-C align the NEO Surveyor mission with program management best practices that account for potential technical risks and budgetary uncertainty beyond the development project’s control,” NASA said in a brief statement announcing the review. NASA, in its fiscal year 2023 budget request, said it would delay the mission’s launch from 2026 to 2028, seeking just $39.9 million for it in 2023. The 2022 budget proposal had projected spending $174.2 million on it in 2023 to support a 2026 launch. NASA said the delay was part of efforts to shore up “higher priority missions” in its planetary science program, including Europa Clipper and Mars Sample Return. In a Nov. 28 letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson , five Republican members of the House Science Committee called the proposed delay in NEO Surveyor “troubling” and sought information on the funding needed to put the mission on schedule to launch in 2026. They noted language in a NASA authorization act included in the CHIPS and Science Act signed into law in August directed NASA to have NEO Surveyor ready for launch no later than the end of March 2026. “This statutory direction is clear – NASA must prioritize funding the NEO Surveyor project to achieve a 2026 launch within levels appropriated to planetary science,” stated the letter, signed by Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member of the full committee, and Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), ranking member of the space subcommittee, among others. House and Senate versions of fiscal year 2023 spending bills would partially restore funding for NEO Surveyor. The House bill would provide the mission with $94.9 million and direct NASA to find ways to move up the launch from 2028, while a draft bill from Democratic appropriators in the Senate would provide $80 million and “welcomes NASA’s commitment to a 2026 launch.” Sources familiar with the project say that neither version would provide enough funding to allow NEO Surveyor to launch in 2026.
China has six astronauts aboard its recently-completed space station for the first time following the arrival of three crew members aboard Shenzhou-15. Shenzhou-15 launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 10:08 a.m. Eastern Nov. 29. Rendezvous and docking with the Tiangong space station was completed at 4:42 p.m., China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, confirmed . Astronauts Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu are to be greeted aboard Tiangong by Shenzhou 14 crew members Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe, who have spent the last six months aboard the station and overseen the arrival of two new modules . The Shenzhou 15 crew will be sustained by supplies delivered to Tiangong aboard the Tianzhou-5 cargo mission launched Nov. 11 Eastern time. The Tiangong space station now consists of three roughly 22-ton modules in a 393 by 386-kilometer orbit. The 13.5-ton Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft and two roughly 8.2-ton Shenzhou spacecraft are docked with it. The Shenzhou-14 crew are expected to return to Earth in early December. The first crew rotation marks the start of science operations on Tiangong, which carries 24 experiment cabinets and a payload airlock. China aims to keep the orbital outpost constantly occupied and operational in orbit for at least ten years. China will begin to send international experiments to the station through an initiative with UNOOSA in the near future. It is expected that Tiangong will outlast the aging International Space Station and could become the only permanent crewed outpost in orbit. The arrival of Shenzhou-15 at Tiangong signifies the completion of plans approved in 1992 to develop human spaceflight capabilities and build a space station. The country’s first crewed mission, Shenzhou-5 in 2003, made it only the third to develop independent human spaceflight capabilities. Two Tiangong test labs followed in the 2010s to test rendezvous and docking, life support and on-orbit operations. At the same time China was effectively barred from joining the ISS by U.S. legislation which effectively prevented NASA engagement with Chinese state entities. China aimed to launch its first proper space station module in 2018 and complete the station with further module launches in 2020 and 2022. A failure of the Long March 5 rocket in July 2017 and subsequent issues with the rocket’s engines and turbopumps delayed this schedule. With the Long March 5B finally operational, China condensed the construction phase of Tiangong to fit inside 18 months. The Tianhe core module launched in April 2021, and culminated 10 launches later with Shenzhou-15 arriving at the completed T-shaped complex. Tiangong itself could also be expanded from three to six modules, according to Chinese space officials. Such an expansion may depend upon other countries joining the project. The Xuntian optical module—a co-orbiting, Hubble-class space survey telescope with a two meter aperture and 2.5 gigapixel camera—is planned to join Tiangong in orbit in late 2023 or 2024. The decision to embark on a space station program was taken back when the country’s economy represented around 2% of the global economy and seeking a foothold in the international launch market. China has since become the world’s second largest economy behind the United States, and achieved a number of feats in space, including a Mars rover landing , lunar far side landing, building its Beidou GNSS constellation and more. The country is also moving forward with a robotic lunar exploration program with the goal of building a lunar base in the vicinity of the south pole of the moon in the 2030s. This pathway is designed to converge with human spaceflight experience gained from Tiangong and the development of new, large rockets to allow China to send astronauts to the International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ).
Updated 7:10 p.m. Eastern with launch slip. WASHINGTON — The first Electron launch from Wallops will mark what spaceport officials hope is the start of a new era of increased launch activity there. Rocket Lab said Dec. 15 that its first Electron launch from Launch Complex 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia, has slipped two days to Dec. 18 between 6 and 8 p.m. Eastern. The company said that NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration were still working to complete range documentation needed for the launch. A backup launch opportunity is available Dec. 19. The introduction of the Electron, delayed by two years because of problems developing and certifying a NASA autonomous flight termination system , comes as more new launch vehicles enter the market and look for sites to launch from. “We have a great deal of interest, both from international rocket providers as well as domestic, for seeing if they can secure an opportunity to launch from MARS,” said Ted Mercer, chief executive and executive director of Virginia Space, which operates the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) where Launch Complex 2 is based. He spoke during a Dec. 14 briefing about the upcoming Electron launch. He said “several” launch companies are talking with him about launching from MARS, but did not identify any. “Interest is high,” he said, including working on an agreement with a non-U.S. launch provider. “We are willing and able to talk to new providers about launching from MARS.” At a media event in June, Mercer said he was working with companies to understand their requirements. Some companies, he said then, were looking to use methane rather than kerosene for fuel. “We’re already planning for those,” he said, along with upgrades to launch control facilities to replace old blockhouses. In addition to the MARS facilities, there are two “flat pads” at Wallops with only the most basic infrastructure, such as a concrete pad and lightning towers, that could be used for small launch vehicles. Bob Jameson, deputy director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said in June those were built by DARPA for potential use in its DARPA Launch Challenge, and are still owned by that agency but operated by NASA. “That represents the future of a multi-user spaceport,” he said of those flat pads. “Emerging small launch vehicles would bring in all their stuff and operate there.” The main user of MARS today is Northrop Grumman, which launches its Antares rocket for Cygnus cargo missions to the International Space Station from Launch Pad 0A at MARS and Minotaur rockets from Launch Pad 0B. (Virginia Space designates Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 2 as Launch Pad 0C.) However, Minotaur launches are infrequent and Antares will go on hiatus after one more launch early next year as Northrop works with Firefly Aerospace on a new version of the rocket to replace its existing Ukrainian first stage and Russian engines. That new version, the Antares 330, will launch from Launch Pad 0A at MARS as well, but no earlier than late 2024. In the interim, Northrop will launch Cygnus missions on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from Florida. In that hiatus, Rocket Lab may become the anchor tenant at MARS. Company executives said in a Nov. 9 earnings call that they expect to conduct four to six Electron launches from Wallops, out of 14 Electron launches overall, in 2023 . The company is also building a factory just outside the Wallops gates where it will produce its Neutron reusable vehicle, which will launch from a new pad at Wallops as soon as 2024. That activity means jobs for the region. “We see a very large number of jobs” coming from Electron and Neutron activities at Wallops, said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, at the Dec. 14 briefing. “It’s on the order of hundreds. We’re looking to establish a pretty significant footprint here.” David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said he has been working with officials in the Eastern Shore region on issues ranging from launch-related tourism to education and workforce to support a higher launch rate. Wallops-related activities today have an economic impact on the region of $1.4 billion a year, he said, “and we see nothing but that increasing with Peter’s investment and confidence in Wallops.” Mercer said he expected the projected increase in launch activity to attract more suppliers in the area to support Rocket Lab and other launch companies. “That is another dimension that you will see in terms of growth and economic impact on the Eastern Shore.”
Momentus says it has “higher confidence” in its second space tug set to launch in December after fixing problems encountered with its first vehicle launched earlier this year. In an earnings call after the release of its third quarter financial results Nov. 8, John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said the company’s Vigoride 5 tug is on track to launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 rideshare mission, scheduled to launch in December on a Falcon 9 from Florida. The company completed a flight readiness review for the spacecraft about a week earlier and will ship it to Cape Canaveral “in the coming days.” Vigoride 5 follows the company’s first tug, Vigoride 3, launched on the Transporter-5 mission in May. That vehicle suffered several problems, including communications issues and a solar array that failed to properly deploy, although the company was eventually able to deploy seven of the nine satellites on board . “Based on lessons learned from our first mission, enhancements made to our integration and testing processes, and improvements made to the vehicle itself, we have higher confidence going into our second mission than we had ahead of our first mission,” Rood said. He said the company found fewer issues during the testing of Vigoride 5 than it did with Vigoride 3, and that problems it did encounter were resolved faster. The work on Vigoride 5 included enhanced testing of its deployable solar array to confirm it worked as expected. “In addition to the solar array issue, we’ve also identified the root causes of the other issues experienced during our inaugural mission and we have made changes to address these issues ahead of our next mission,” he added, without going into details on those other problems. The Vigoride 5 mission will be launched into a sun-synchronous orbit with an initial altitude of about 500 kilometers. It will deploy a single satellite from a Singapore-based company, Qosmosys. That company has released few details about the satellite , which it calls Zeus-1, other than it will carry an unspecified “scientific payload” as well as “artworks.” Vigoride will then remain in orbit for several months, operating a hosted payload provided by Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project. The payload features three experiments to test solar cell performance, deployment mechanisms and beam focusing and steering technologies needed for future space-based systems that could convert sunlight into electricity and transmit it to Earth as microwaves. The vehicle will also maneuver in orbit during that time, testing its microwave electrothermal thruster that uses water as propellant. At the end of the mission, Vigoride 5 will lower its orbit to speed up its reentry. Rood did not disclose the planned length of the mission, although a paper by the Caltech group flying the space solar power payload said the vehicle would spend seven months in orbit, with six months dedicated to the hosted payload mission. Vigoride 5 represents an upgrade that Rood called “Block 2.2”, versus the Block 2.0 design of Vigoride 3. The improvements, beyond the technical fixes, include a modular payload bay and enhanced payload hosting capabilities. The vehicle also includes a new version of its microwave electrothermal thruster with improved performance. “The primary objective of this upcoming mission is to test the vehicle, learn from any issues we encounter and address those issues on subsequent Vigoride vehicles as we work towards freezing the design for production,” Rood said. Momentus has two more Vigoride vehicles in development that it plans to fly on Transporter missions in February and May 2023, although Rood said the schedule was “tight” for the February mission. Those will also use the Block 2.2 design. Momentus has also started procurement of components for three more Vigoride vehicles. The upcoming missions come as the company seeks to extend its available cash to support operations through the end of 2023. The company reported $129,000 in revenue in the third quarter and adjusted negative earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $16 million. The company has $82 million in cash and cash equivalents, which executives aid in the call was sufficient runway to get through the end of 2023.
Correction: The NRO contract award to Planet is worth $146 over five years, not two years as stated in an earlier version of this article. SAN FRANCISCO – Planet revealed the value of its largest contract to date, a $146 million award from the National Reconnaissance Office to provide imagery over five years, during the company’s June 14 earnings call. Rather than disclosing the maximum potential value of the contract with options over 10 years like BlackSky and Maxar Technologies , the other two companies that won contracts in NRO’s Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL), Planet reported NRO’s initial commitment of $146 million for the first five years of SkySat constellation tasking, PlanetScope daily imagery and access to Planet’s imagery archive. “There’s quite a lot of flexibility in that contract to expand,” said Will Marshall, Planet co-founder and CEO. “They can execute change orders, exercise new options and extend the deal for a total period of up to 10 years.” Marshall declined, however, to reveal the maximum potential value of the contract over 10 years. Even the initial two-year award nearly doubles Planet’s backlog, which stood at $152 million on April 30. NRO announced its selection of EOCL vendors on May 25. At the time, Planet did not disclose the value of the contract, citing a quiet period ahead of its quarterly earnings announcement. During the June 14 earnings call, Marshall said Planet executives “are very proud” of the EOCL contract. “The NRO has embraced leveraging Planet’s capabilities pretty much as they are,” Marshall said. “The fact that they’re buying it at such a scale and with such a commitment is really pleasing to us. I’m confident that as we develop new capabilities the government will buy them.” Overall, Planet reported $40.1 million in first quarter 2023 revenues, a 26 percent increase compared with the first quarter of Planet’s fiscal 2022 first quarter. As of April 30, the end of the quarter, Planet had 826 customers, a 23 percent hike from a year earlier. “We’re seeing growing demand across all vertical markets,” Marshall said, citing agriculture, defense, intelligence, civil government. Looking ahead, Marshall expect Planet revenues to remain split between government and commercial markets. Even the EOCL contract will not significantly alter that split, he said. Roughly half of Planet’s revenues come from commercial markets and half from government markets. Within the government business, about half of it stems from civil agencies and half from military and intelligence organizations. While the various market shares “may change a little bit from time to time, we don’t expect, over the long arc, for that to change materially,” Marshall said. Ashley Fieglein Johnson, Planet chief financial officer, added, that the company has seen strong demand from civil and military government customers. In addition, she added that Planet is attracting customers in the agriculture, financial and insurance sectors. “The expectation is that diversification of the business over the long term will only increase,” Johnson said. Planet announced expansion June 14 of its contract with Bayer, the multinational life sciences and pharmaceutical company. “They’re using Planet Fusion data as well as high resolution SkySat data to understand historical and in-season performance and empower data scientists to generate valuable insights that have the potential to support production globally,” Marshall said. Planet also announced an agreement in April to work with Moody’s to help the financial services firm identify ways to assess and monitor Environmental, Social, and Governance risks. “We think our data can help to improve the quality and consistency of ESG measurement and reporting, ultimately leading to better accountability and management of natural resources,” Marshall said.
The U.S. Army has signed an agreement to evaluate the use of space data from HawkEye 360, an Earth observation company that operates satellites to monitor radio-frequency signals emitted by electronic devices. HawkEye 360 announced Aug. 25 it signed a two-year cooperative research and development agreement, known as a CRADA, with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. The agreement is for the company to demonstrate applications of RF data and analytics for surveillance operations in support of troops in the field. “We are excited to be able to evaluate the utility of this type of capability for the tactical warfighter,” Chip Hardy, division chief of the SMDC space applications division, said in a statement. Alex Fox, HawkEye 360 chief growth officer, said the Army will identify military exercises where the RF data will be tested, for example, to detect GPS jamming or to locate enemy weapons systems. Fox said HawkEye 360 and Army operators will downlink data from satellites and analyze it both on the company’s mobile ground stations and on Army systems. The data also will be used to tip and cue Army surveillance platforms. Agreements with commercial remote-sensing companies allow the Army to work with unclassified data that can be shared with allies. Insights drawn from the location of electronic emitters can help “understand the battlefield,” said Fox. Hawkeye 360 satellites can locate and characterize signals from devices like VHF radios, UHF push-to-talk radios, maritime and land-based radar systems, GPS-enable devices and emergency beacons. “The Army can use that information to neutralize the threat,” said Fox. Although a CRADA does not commit the Army to buying services, a successful demonstration is the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” he said. The Army could later decide to buy RF data and analytics services directly from HawkEye 360 or from intelligence community agencies that already use the data. The company launches satellites in clusters of three spacecraft each. It recently announced clusters 4 and 5 satellites have started operations . Its goal is to deploy a total of 20 clusters. The Army’s agreement with HawkEye 360 follows other CRADAs the service signed with SpaceLink and with commercial remote sensing satellite operators such as Iceye and Capella Space . 
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — SpaceLink signed an agreement with the U.S. Army to explore ways to use the company’s data-relay constellation to deliver commercial satellite imagery directly to troops on the ground. The company on Aug. 8 announced a five-year agreement with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Under the CRADA, short for cooperative research and development agreement, SpaceLink will share proprietary information about its system and in exchange will get insights on the Army’s concepts of operations and specific needs. Founded in 2020, SpaceLink is a U.S.-based subsidiary of Electro Optic Systems Holdings, an Australian company. Th e company in 2024 plans to start deploying a satellite relay network of four satellites about 8,700 miles above Earth. Due to its location in medium Earth orbit, the network will have continuous line of sight to satellites in lower and higher orbits, as well as high-altitude airborne platforms, the company said. The relay satellites will have both optical and radio-frequency communications links. Anthony Colucci, SpaceLink’s chief strategy and commercial officer, said the plan is to use models and simulations to show the Army how government systems would connect with the relay network. A MEO network would expedite the flow of data to users, he said. “Today communicating with LEO satellites can only occur when they’re over a ground station. We’re able to see all LEO’s all the time so we can communicate instantaneously.” The company is headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area. Its satellite ground stations will be located in the Mojave desert area in the Southwest and in Hawaii. SpaceLink said it’s also considering adding gateways in Australia and Europe. SpaceLink vice president of intelligence James Schwenke told SpaceNews the Army is looking to address a long-standing problem: how to quickly deliver commercial satellite imagery to troops in the field. Army leaders have argued that U.S. intelligence agencies that collect satellite imagery are not able to meet urgent demand for data in the field . Another problem with images from national satellites is that they are classified and cannot be shared with allies. Ground forces today rely on overhead drones for surveillance and to locate targets but the U.S. military now has to prepare for possible armed conflicts against technologically advanced enemies like China that would have air defenses and shoot down U.S. drones. “For that reason all the services are looking at space as vital to their needs,” Schwenke said. “How can we get into these denied areas? So that’s the reason for a CRADA. To figure out how we can support their needs and how they’re going to execute it.” The Army’s agreement with SpaceLink follows other CRADAs the service signed with commercial remote sensing satellite operators such as Iceye and Capella Space . The Army also inked a deal with BlackSky to directly operate and task one of the company’s imaging satellites. “They’re trying to see how these commercial assets can really support them,” said Schwenke. “And we’re the comms transport layer. The Army is going to see how all this stuff works together.” SpaceLink estimates that about two thirds of the data it will carry on its network will end up in U.S. government hands, said Colucci. “We anticipate that once we’re in service, we will have contracts with the National Reconnaissance Office, the Space Force, the Army and others to bring them data.”
Space Force Maj. Gen. Douglas Schiess on Aug. 22 assumed command of U.S. Space Command’s Combined Force Space Component Command at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The CFSCC, with more than 700 personnel, oversees U.S. and allied space operations, and coordinates space traffic management. It also ensures space capabilities such as GPS navigation and satellite-based communications are available to U.S. commanders and allied nations. At the Combined Space Operations Center (CspOC), U.S. and allied personnel from Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom track objects and activities in space. Schiess, a former commander of Florida’s Eastern Range space launch facilities , was most recently deputy commander at Space Operations Command at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. He replaces Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt, who will be taking a senior post at Space Force headquarters at the Pentagon. At a change of command ceremony at Vandenberg, the head of U.S. Space Command Gen. James Dickinson credited Burt for overseeing the U.S. response to Russia’s anti-satellite missile test and coordinating space support services for U.S. European Command, which runs security assistance efforts for Ukraine. In remarks at the ceremony, Burt said the CspOC is still tracking 655 pieces of debris from Russia’s ASAT test. She also gave kudos to SpaceX, Viasat and Maxar for their role providing satellite services to Ukraine and allies. Burt said the CFSCC played a role in helping shape the debate on norms of behavior in space. The U.S. government has called for the adoption of global rules in response to the development of anti-satellite weapons by Russia and China. “We want free and fair use of space for all,” Burt said.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – French startup ExoTrail won a contract worth “several million euros” to perform an orbital logistics mission for French institutions. Under the contract announced Oct. 11 and awarded through a competitive tender process, ExoTrail will demonstrate in 2024 that its orbital transfer vehicle, spacevan, can change a satellite’s altitude. Then in 2025, ExoTrail will perform an in-orbit delivery, moving a microsatellite from the point where a launch vehicle drops it off to its final orbital destination. Exotrail calls its orbital transfer service spacedrop. Funding for the effort stems from the France 2030 investment plan unveiled in 2021 that included 1 billion euros ($969 million) for emerging French space companies. “We are honored to have been selected as part of the ambitious France 2030 plan, aimed at building next space leaders,” ExoTrail CEO Jean-Luc Maria said in a statement. This contract rewards ExoTrail’s hardworking teams and the space logistics vision the company has pursued since its very foundation.” ExoTrail plans to launch its first spacevan on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight in October 2023. At the time, the company revealed plans for three additional spacevan flights in 2024 on various launch vehicles. Exotrail intends to become “an end-to-end space mobility operator,” according to the news release. In January, ExoTrail announced that its miniature Hall-effect thruster ignited in orbit to propel a NanoAvionics cubesat to change its semi-major axis by 700 meters. ExoTrail also offers mission, system design and constellation software. At least initially, spacevan will rely on the same Hall-effect propulsion. Since the company was founded in 2017, ExoTrail has garnered more than 20 million euros through investment and grants. Exotrail announced a contract in May with the Defence Innovation Agency, part of the French Ministry of Defence.
TAMPA, Fla. — Europe’s new Vega C medium-lift rocket lifted off on its maiden flight July 13, carrying an Italian physics satellite and six cubesats. The four-stage rocket launched from Kourou, French Guiana, at 9:13 a.m. Eastern at the end of a two-hour launch window. Technical issues had twice halted the countdown sequence. Italy’s 295-kilogram Laser Relativity Satellite-2, or LARES-2, is the primary payload and was placed in an unusual inclined orbit at 5,893 kilometers to test Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. LARES-2 was deployed nearly 85 minutes after lift-off, followed by six cubesats about 45 minutes later. Three of the cubesats are also from Italy: AstroBio which will test a solution for detecting biomolecules in space, Greencube with an experiment for growing plants in microgravity and ALPHA, which aims to demonstrate technology for understanding the Earth’s magnetosphere. Joining them were MTCube-2 and Celesta from France and Trisat-R from Slovenia which will study the effects of radiation on electronic systems. Arianespace conducted the launch and declared the mission a success in a press release following a flight that lasted about two hours and 15 minutes. “With this inaugural launch officially declared a success, Arianespace will now commence Vega C operations, a key milestone for European sovereign access to space,” said Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël. The first commercial launch of Vega C is scheduled for November, when the rocket is slated to place the Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 Earth-imaging satellites for their builder and operator Airbus. Vega C has more powerful rocket motors and a larger payload volume than Vega, which is retiring after first launching a decade ago. The upgraded rocket can carry about 2.3 metric tons to a reference 700-kilometer altitude polar orbit, according to the European Space Agency, compared with 1.5 metric tons for its predecessor. Vega C’s first stage is powered by a P120 engine that will also be used by Europe’s upcoming Ariane 6 launcher, which has two variants for replacing Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 and the medium-lift Soyuz rocket that was sourced from Russia. ESA said July 12 that the Ariane 6 central core, comprising its core stage and upper stage, had been transferred to a launchpad in Kourou for combined tests ahead of a maiden launch next year . The central core is joined by three pylons shaped like the rocket’s solid boosters, and an inert mockup of the fourth booster, for tests that include filling tanks and an automated countdown sequence. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); }) This article was updated July 13 after the final payload on Vega C’s maiden flight separated from the rocket.
TAMPA, Fla. — Startups developing constellations for providing connectivity directly to standard cellphones say they stand to benefit from SpaceX entering their market. The business opportunity SpaceX’s Elon Musk sees validates an emerging market that would be big enough for multiple players, according to U.S.-based startups AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global. While these ventures have yet to provide commercial services, they also point to a head-start in securing the mobile operator partnerships that would be needed for a global network. SpaceX unveiled its direct-to-cell plans Aug. 25 in a partnership with T-Mobile that, subject to regulatory approvals, would connect phones beyond the reach of cell towers in the United States as soon as next year. Beta services would initially be limited to basic messaging, with voice and data capabilities coming at an unspecified future date. It is the latest space-related market that Musk is seeking to disrupt. SpaceX has already transformed the launch industry with reusable Falcon 9 rockets, and its rapidly expanding Starlink broadband network is currently the world’s largest constellation with more than 2,800 satellites in orbit. Last year, SpaceX also bought Swarm Technologies to expand into the market for connecting low-power Internet of Things devices, although plans to disrupt this sector remain under wraps. “We knew this day would come,” Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller said in an interview. “I didn’t know when it would come or how, like in partnership with T-Mobile, but I knew Elon couldn’t resist jumping in. He has to be part of any really big business.” It is a global market forecast to reach “tens of billions of dollars,” AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski said. Both startups see Musk’s arrival as helping to validate this projection, while helping to build traction among customers and investors. Musk’s game plan SpaceX and T-Mobile seek international partnerships with mobile providers to forge reciprocal roaming alliances. T-Mobile is providing a slice of its 1.9 GHz spectrum in the United States under its partnership with SpaceX. Notably, SpaceX requested permission last month to use the nearby 2 GHz spectrum band for mobile satellite services. These frequencies would likely transmit from the same antenna that SpaceX’s upgraded Starlink satellites would use to connect directly to cell phones in the 1.9 GHz band. However, many companies do not operate terrestrial mobile wireless services in the 1.9 GHz band, Miller said, and none currently have rights to the 2 GHz band. While it is unknown whether Musk could consider partnerships in other frequencies, mobile operators unable to join SpaceX’s planned international roaming alliance could find themselves clambering for alternatives. Musk’s request for 2 GHz spectrum suggests he could be planning to avoid mobile operator partnerships altogether to sell directly to consumers, Miller added. SpaceX sells its Starlink broadband service directly to customers. Musk’s Tesla automaker has also grown without partnering with dealerships. Miller said Lynk has 14 commercial contracts covering 35 countries for its planned services, and “over 30 testing agreements” with other mobile operators. Lynk Tower 1, the Virginia-based startup’s first commercial satellite, launched to orbit in April on a SpaceX Transporter 4 rideshare mission. Lynk had planned to deploy its second satellite on Transporter 4 via Spaceflight’s Sherpa tug, but had to find an alternative after the orbital transfer vehicle could not fly on the mission. This second satellite is now slated to fly with two other Lynk spacecraft on a SpaceX Transporter 6 mission slated for December, Miller said. Four satellites in orbit would be enough to launch initial text messaging, emergency alerts and IoT services. By the end of 2023, Lynk expects to have deployed more than 50 satellites to increase satellite revisit times to every 15-30 minutes. Texas-based AST SpaceMobile has partnerships with more than 25 mobile operators, including an exclusive agreement with Vodafone in 24 different markets. The company expects to deploy the first five operational satellites for its direct-to-cell constellation late next year. While these will be half the size of satellites AST SpaceMobile plans to deploy later, they are larger than Lynk’s pizza box-shaped spacecraft at about 1,500 kilograms each. AST SpaceMobile’s satellites will also have antennas of around 64 square meters in size, more than double the size of antennas that Musk outlined for its service. “We are designing a cellular broadband solution,” Wisniewski said, “and in terms of capability and throughput per cell, we expect to be an order of magnitude larger.” While Lynk says it is reducing technical and financial risks with smaller satellites, it and AST SpaceMobile highlight cost and operational advantages of constellations dedicated to direct-to-cell services. SpaceX seeks to add this capability to second-generation Starlink satellites that would also beam high-speed broadband to dishes at mainly fixed locations. Meanwhile, another entrant for the direct-to-cell satellite market could emerge this week. Speculation that Apple is preparing to announce a partnership with Globalstar to offer some form of iPhone satellite connectivity resurfaced after SpaceX’s T-Mobile tie-up. An announcement could be made during an event Sep. 7 to unveil the iPhone 14, although similar rumors around previous iPhone events have failed to materialize. This article was updated Aug. 30 with the correct Sep. 7 date for Apple’s next iPhone unveiling event.
The Space Development Agency awarded York Space Systems a contract worth up to $200 million to build and operate 12 satellites with experimental military communications payloads. The contract was awarded on Sept. 30 and announced Oct. 6. SDA, an agency within the U.S. Space Force, is building the Defense Department’s first internet-in-space constellation in low Earth orbit. The 12 satellites to be produced by York will be part of the Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System, known as T1DES. These 12 satellites will have military Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) and S-band communications payloads that currently provide mobile wireless services from geostationary satellites. SDA wants to see whether these payloads can perform the same service from low Earth orbit. SDA Director Derek Tournear during a call with reporters Oct. 6 said moving these communications payloads to much lower orbits poses significant technical challenges and that is why the agency is running this experiment with 12 satellites. “We need to show that the technology that now operates in geosynchronous orbit can be applied to LEO where you have Doppler shift differences and things like that,” he said. York will be responsible for the procurement and integration of the communications payloads, and will need to provide significant on-board processing capacity, “which is where the real technical challenge lies,” Tournear said. The T1DES experiment is possible, he said, “because of what commercial industry has pushed in the ability to do supercomputing in low Earth orbit.” SDA in February ordered 126 satellites for its Tranche 1 Transport Layer mesh network projected to start launching in 2024. These satellites will have optical laser terminals, Link 16 tactical links, and Ka-band radio payloads to move data in space and down to the ground. York Space Systems is producing 42 of the Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites under a $382 million contract. The others will be supplied by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. York Space and Lockheed Martin also won contracts in August 2020 to each supply 10 satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 0. Tournear said T1DES was a “full and open competition and we determined that York provided the best value to the government to deliver on-schedule, at an affordable cost, and meet our demonstration requirements.” He said York’s bid for the 12 satellites was “affordable” but he could not discuss the pricing offered by five other bidders that competed for the contract. In the Transport Layer Tranche 1 bid, York’s prices were dramatically lower than those of its competitors, which is attributed to York’s ability to manufacture satellites in-house whereas Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are buying satellite buses from partner companies and integrating them. Although companies like York Space, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris have been repeat winners of SDA contracts, Tournear has insisted that the agency does not plan to keep buying satellites from the same vendors indefinitely, and intends to create a competitive environment where companies every two years will have opportunities to win contracts. “We remain committed to provide regular opportunities through our spiral development model to promote a marketplace of industry partners,” Tournear said. York’s streak of SDA contract wins has helped the company attract investors. The private equity firm AE Industrial Partners on Tuesday announced plans to acquire a majority stake in York Space Systems. The 12 T1DES satellites are projected to launch starting fiscal year 2025 in four separate missions. Each launch will deploy 10 satellites: three T1DES and seven Tracking Layer Tranche 1 satellites. The 28-satellite Tracking Layer is a planned network of space sensors designed to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Apple said Nov. 10 its $450 million investment in an SOS via satellite service has helped Globalstar upgrade ground stations across the United States and elsewhere with high-power antennas. These upgrades were needed to increase the reliability and coverage of Globalstar’s satellite constellation, Apple said ahead of the service’s debut later this month, to ensure iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro users can reach emergency crews while outside terrestrial networks. Cobham Satcom provided the antennas to bolster all of Globalstar’s ground stations worldwide, including new sites in Nevada and Hawaii, and existing facilities in Texas, Alaska, Florida, and Puerto Rico. The SOS via satellite service will initially only be available in the United States and Canada. Apple’s latest iPhones have an app that helps users lock onto one of Globalstar’s 24 satellites in low Earth orbit, enabling them to send an SOS text message when they are outside terrestrial coverage. After being received by one of Globalstar’s satellites, the message is sent to a ground station and then routed directly to emergency services — or to a relay center if the closest dispatcher cannot receive text messages. According to Apple, iPhone users could also share their location via satellite when outside of cellular or Wi-Fi networks. “With Apple’s infrastructure investment, we’ve grown our teams in California and elsewhere to construct, expand, and upgrade our ground stations,” Globalstar executive chair Jay Monroe said in a statement. More than 300 Globalstar employees are supporting the new service, Apple said in the blog post. The satellite operator had 329 employees in 14 countries as of the end of December. Apple’s $450 million investment, derived from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund, is also supporting broader investments to improve Globalstar’s network. Globalstar has ordered a new generation of satellites from MDA Ltd. and Rocket Lab that will primarily support its partnership with Apple. The operator has said 85% of the capacity on this new constellation will be reserved for Apple, with the remaining 15% supporting legacy services that include providing connectivity for internet of things (IoT) devices. Apple has agreed to reimburse Globalstar for most of the costs to develop the new constellation, provided it hits certain milestones. Apple’s emergency SOS feature will initially be a free service for compatible iPhones, although fees could be added later as more bandwidth is added to the network for additional capabilities. Direct-to-smartphone traction While Apple and Globalstar are leading the charge to establish a direct-to-smartphone market, others chasing this opportunity are also gaining traction. Spanish connectivity startup Sateliot recently said it has secured a launch deal with SpaceX to deploy its first operational satellite early next year. It is the first of 250 satellites that Sateliot has proposed to connect IoT devices, and eventually smartphones, in remote areas. SpaceX also wants to enter this market. The company plans to use its Starlink broadband satellites to connect with unmodified smartphones to enable services starting with text as early as 2024. SpaceX is looking to expand partnerships with mobile operators beyond T-Mobile in the U.S. to provide global services in 2025, SpaceX senior director of satellite engineering Sara Spangelo said Nov. 9. Spangelo told the Connecting the World from the Skies conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that more than 50 telcos have reached out about partnering with SpaceX to provide direct-to-smartphone services. She said several potential partnerships are in the final stages of negotiations, and expects SpaceX to secure three to five of them by around the beginning of 2023. Viasat, Starlink’s satellite broadband rival, also gave more details about its plan to compete with direct-to-smartphone players during Nov. 8 financial results .
An independent review of problems that delayed the launch of NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission uncovered institutional issues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that led the agency to delay the launch of another mission being developed there. NASA released Nov. 4 the report by an independent review board commissioned by NASA after the Psyche mission missed its launch window earlier this year. The mission, to the metallic main belt asteroid of the same name, suffered delays in development and testing of its flight software, and is now scheduled for launch in October 2023 . The independent review, chaired by retired aerospace executive Tom Young, found that while delays in development and testing were the cause of the mission to mission its August 2022 launch window, they were not the only problems Psyche had encountered. The board said that other unresolved software issues, incomplete verification and validation of vehicle systems, and “insufficient plans and preparation for mission operations” could have also caused a delay. The board linked those problems to more fundamental issues with the management not just of the Psyche mission itself but also others at JPL. “The Psyche issues are not unique to Psyche. They are indicative of broader institutional issues,” Young said at an online town hall meeting held by NASA to present the report’s findings. JPL, he said, has an “unprecedented workload” of projects and the board found the lab’s resources were stretched thin, particularly in key technical expertise. “There is a large imbalance today between the workload and the available resources at JPL,” he said. “This imbalance was clearly a root cause of the Psyche issues and, in our judgement, adversely affects all flight project activity at JPL.” The report highlighted challenges in hiring and retaining skilled engineers, as JPL competes with aerospace companies that offer higher salaries, particularly in engineering and software development. “Thus, there is a perfect storm, with outside competitive pressures and inside demand pressures affecting the availability of these critical resources,” the report stated. Young said the board found that there was a lack of communications, as engineers struggled to bring problems to the attention of managers while senior leadership failed to “sufficiently penetrate” the project and detect problems earlier. The pandemic, and the shift to remote and hybrid work, also contributed to the problems with Psyche in particular and JPL in general. Limited in-person interactions, the board concluded, reduce informal communications opportunities like “drop in” meetings. The report noted that Psyche team members “exchanged valuable project information” at a Christmas party in late 2021, their first in-person gathering in more than 18 months. The board made several recommendations to JPL to improve hiring and retention of key technical personnel, increase oversight of projects and revisit its current hybrid work policies. It also called on Caltech, which runs JPL for NASA, to improve its knowledge of JPL activities. NASA said it’s implementing recommendations specific to Psyche, including increasing staffing on the mission and improving oversight. Young said the board believes that the agency has developed a plan for the mission that will support a launch next October. Laurie Leshin, who took over as director of JPL in May, said she accepted the board’s finding about the lab. “Psyche revealed shortcomings that we need to address, and we’re committed to strengthening our organization and our processes in a purpose-driven way and a forward-looking way,” she said. That included revisiting hybrid work approaches, although she said JPL would not go back to pre-pandemic policies. Implementing those recommendations will affect another NASA mission being developed at JPL. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, noted that Psyche was the second Discovery-class mission run by JPL that suffered launch delays, after the InSight Mars lander. The next Discovery-class mission run by JPL is Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy, or VERITAS, a Venus orbiter mission the agency selected for development in 2021. “After long deliberations, I have to say that we intend to postpone the VERITAS launch readiness date to no earlier than 2031,” she said, a three-year slip. “This postponement can offset both the workforce imbalance for at least those three years and provide some of the increased funding that will be required to continue Psyche towards that 2023 launch.” In a later call with reporters, Glaze said the agency was still working to determine the cost of the Psyche delay because the mission was studying changes of operating the mission with the new launch and arrival dates. She said Psyche will need more money than what the agency will save by postponing VERITAS. Leshin said JPL will use the recommendations of the panel to review the status of other JPL-led missions, like Europa Clipper and Mars Sample Return. “We are going to be working through each and every one of our projects, especially the big ones like Clipper and Mars Sample Return, to make sure the lessons learned are appropriately applied.” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said he was in “active discussions” with the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, two other centers that lead NASA science missions, to see if any kind of NASA Headquarters-led review is required of the management of their missions.
Update: OneWeb confirmed Oct. 22 that the launch successfully deployed 36 satellites. WASHINGTON — The launch of a set of OneWeb satellites on an Indian rocket could be the harbinger of a greater role India will play in a commercial launch industry straining to satisfy demand. A Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3 rocket, also designated LVM3, is scheduled to launch from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre Oct. 22 at 2:37 p.m. Eastern carrying 36 OneWeb satellites. The launch is the first of two that the broadband satellite constellation company acquired from NewSpace India Ltd. (NSIL), the commercial arm of the Indian space agency ISRO, in the spring. OneWeb turned to NSIL after terminating its contract for Soyuz launches in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OneWeb also signed a contract with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches to deploy the remainder of its first-generation satellite constellation. OneWeb had few other options to consider given the current state of the launch market. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had cut off access to the Soyuz as well as Proton, a vehicle that was once a major player in the commercial launch market but which had fallen out of favor in recent years. The remaining Ariane 5 and Atlas 5 vehicles have all been sold, while new vehicles like Ariane 6, H3, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur have suffered delays that have pushed back first launches, once projected for as soon as 2020, to 2023 or beyond. Exacerbating the problem is surging demand from megaconstellations, including an order by Amazon in April for more than 80 Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur launches for its Project Kuiper system . That order alone absorbed much of the available capacity in the commercial launch market in the near future outside of Falcon 9. “We’ve got a real challenge in terms of access to space in the next five years, especially to GEO,” said Mark Dickinson, deputy chief technology officer and vice president of the space segment at Inmarsat, during a keynote at the Global Satellite Servicing Forum Oct. 20. “At the moment, there’s not a huge amount of choice.” NSIL sees that capacity crunch as an opportunity to win commercial business for the GSLV Mark 3, a rocket that has flown only four times since its introduction in 2014, all carrying Indian institutional payloads. The GSLV Mark 3 is India’s largest vehicle, capable of placing more than four tons into geostationary transfer orbit. Radhakrishnan Durairaj, chairman and managing director of NSIL, told reporters on the sidelines of World Satellite Business Week in Paris last month that ISRO was looking into increasing the production rate of the rocket. ISRO placed an order in 2018 for 10 GSLV Mark 3 vehicles over five years, with a current production rate of three vehicles every two years. “We are trying to see if the production capability of the launcher can be increased,” he said, by shifting that work to industry. “We have a good indication that, in two to three years’ timeframe, industry will be able to produce at least four to five vehicles per year.” That production rate, he said, could attract interest from commercial customers seeking alternatives to existing vehicles. “What I find is that because of these LEO broadband constellations coming up and satellites on offer for 4.2 to 4.5 tons, I feel that four to five vehicles per year would be a good bargain,” he said. That production rate, he added, would be separate from GSLV Mark 3 vehicles used for Indian government missions, including its Gaganyaan human spaceflight program. The order the Indian government placed for 10 GSLV Mark 3 vehicles in 2018 was valued at $540 million. Radhakrishnan declined to give a current list price for commercial GSLV launches other than it in the range of $60-65 million. While a launch rate of four to five per year pales in comparison to the Falcon 9, which performed its 48th launch of 2022 with a Starlink mission Oct. 20, he said he believed there would be commercial interest in the GSLV, particularly among satellite constellations that want to spread their launches over several vehicles rather than rely on a single provider. He said ISRO may consider improvements to the GSLV Mark 3 that would “marginally” increase its payload capacity, but that the vehicle today should be able to serve commercial customers well. “I think that, in the current context, what we have today should be able to meet the LEO broadband market.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Space logistics company D-Orbit said Aug. 12 it has canceled plans to go public by merging with Breeze Holdings Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The Italian company had hoped to raise $185 million from the deal to expand staff and accelerate investments in ION Satellite Carrier, its orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) that completed its first commercial mission in late 2020. However, “financial markets have changed substantially” since the deal was announced Jan. 27, Breeze CEO Douglas Ramsey said, amid rising interest rates, soaring inflation, and an ongoing war in Ukraine. “As we look ahead, we remain focused on identifying another value creating opportunity for Breeze shareholders,” Ramsey added. D-Orbit’s growth trajectory remains on track despite market conditions “beyond our control,” its CEO Luca Rossettini said in a statement. The company said it has delivered more than 80 customer payloads to their orbits so far this year with three ION missions, and is set to fly another three ION missions before the end of the year. Last week, D-Orbit announced a deal to launch 20 nanosatellites over three years for Swiss startup Astrocast with ION. D-Orbit spokesperson Caterina Cazzola said “our plan to go public is simply on hold for now and when the time is right, we will review the opportunity for a public listing and the best strategy of doing so.” SPACs falling out of favor A rough macroeconomic backdrop also led to U.S.-based Tomorrow.io canceling plans in March to accelerate its constellation of commercial weather radar satellites with a SPAC merger. SPACs are shell companies that use money raised from listing on a stock market to merge with another company, offering them a cash infusion and a fast track to the public market for future growth. However, there are questions over whether early-stage space companies are a good fit for public investors because their businesses are typically capital-intensive and subject to delays. Of the nine space companies that went public through SPAC mergers in 2021, only Rocket Lab’s shares finished the year trading above their price when the merger closed. Demand for new SPAC deals has also been waning amid declining investor appetite for risk and increasing regulatory scrutiny over how these blank check firms operate. More than 40 SPAC mergers have been canceled so far this year, reported Bloomberg. In the space sector, satellite communications equipment maker Satixfy is continuing to work toward closing its SPAC merger this year . Satisfy announced its deal to combine with Endurance Acquisition Corp March 8, the day after Tomorrow.io scrapped its SPAC merger plan over market conditions.
SciTec, a small business based in Princeton, New Jersey, won a $272 million contract to develop software to analyze data collected by the U.S. military’s early-warning infrared satellites. The Space Systems Command announced the contract Sept. 8. SciTec edged out competitors Maxar and Altamira in a project to develop data processing applications that take in raw sensor data and turn it into information for military users, civilian first responders and researchers. The contract is in support of a new ground system to collect and process data from the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) and the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) missile warning satellites. The new ground system, called Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE), is still in development. The Space Force in 2020 selected Raytheon Technologies to design the FORGE operating system. “After performing competitive prototyping among three nontraditional companies for one year, the down-select and award went to SciTec,” Col. Dan Walter, strategic missile warning senior materiel leader at Space Systems Command, said in a statement. “This is a no-fail mission, and we’re excited for the game-changing applications being delivered.” For the competition, SciTec developed applications, for example, for dim target tracking and for data fusion. The company teamed up with Centil, Cosmic Advanced Engineering Solutions, L3Harris Technologies, Monterey Technologies, Outside Analytics and Raytheon Technologies. The companies held demonstrations at the Space Force’s TAP Lab, short for Tools Applications and Processors lab, in Boulder, Colorado. The U.S. Air Force started FORGE in 2019 to serve as the ground system for the current SBIRS constellation and Next-Gen OPIR satellites projected to be launched over the next decade. FORGE is being designed as an open-architecture system to host third-party apps at different classification levels. The Space Systems Command said the goal is to transition from the current SBIRS ground system that uses proprietary technology. The new ground system is a “modular and scalable mission data processing architecture that allows for new OPIR sensors to be rapidly incorporated as new threats evolve,” said SSC. “Further, the government owns the technical baseline, which allows for competition of third-party application developers.” David Simenc, SciTec’s executive director, said the company under the new contract will “further develop, tune, and integrate advanced algorithms, signal processing, graphical user interfaces and data communications components.” The FORGE system is about “taking raw sensor data, and normalizing it for downstream exploitation, while simultaneously delivering an open, secure and government-owned solution,” said Simenc.
LOGAN, Utah — Debris from a Russian antisatellite weapon demonstration that caused “squalls” of close approaches to satellites earlier this year is now affecting a new series of Starlink satellites. During a presentation at a Secure World Foundation event during the Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 8, Dan Oltrogge, chief scientist at COMSPOC, said his company found a “conjunction squall” affecting Starlink satellites Aug. 6, with a spike in the number of close approaches of debris from the former Cosmos 1408 satellite. That debris, created when a Russian direct-ascent ASAT destroyed Cosmos 1408 in a November 2021 test, is in an orbit that lines up with satellites in sun-synchronous orbit. COMSPOC found earlier this year that this created surges of close approaches, or conjunctions, as the satellites run head-on into the debris . In the Aug. 6 event, Oltrogge said there were more than 6,000 close approaches, defined as being within 10 kilometers, involving 841 Starlink satellites, about 30% of the constellation. It’s unclear how many, if any, of the satellites had to maneuver to avoid collisions. This conjunction squall was exacerbated by a new group of Starlink satellites. SpaceX launched the first set of “Group 3” Starlink satellites July 10 from Vandenberg Space Force Base into polar orbit, followed by a second set July 22. A third batch of Group 3 satellites is scheduled to launch Aug. 12. Those satellites are in similar orbits to the remote sensing satellites in sun-synchronous orbit whose orbits lined up earlier this year with the ASAT debris, causing conjunction squalls. “It’s the very orbit that’s put at risk by the ASAT,” Oltrogge said. SpaceX has long emphasized the ability of its Starlink satellites to autonomously maneuver to avoid conjunctions. The company said that, between December 2021 and May 2022, Starlink satellites performed nearly 7,000 collision avoidance maneuvers, of which 1,700 were linked to Russian ASAT debris. While SpaceX may be able to manage those conjunctions with its technology, it may be more difficult for other operators of satellite constellations. “If you didn’t have that automated system taking care of a spike like this, it could be really challenging to work it though,” he said. Those conjunction squalls will subside over time as the debris decays. However, Oltrogge said that may only shift the risk to other orbits, notably the International Space Station. “It’s going to put ISS and others at risk.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Signals originating within Iran have been jamming two Eutelsat satellites that provide foreign broadcasts in the country since Sept. 26, the French operator said Oct. 7. “The interferences harmfully affect the transmission of several digital TV and radio channels broadcasting in Persian from outside of Iran, as well as other channels,” the company said in a news release. The jamming is disrupting services from the operator’s Hot Bird 13C and Eutelsat 7B satellites in geostationary orbit, Eutelsat external communications director Anita Baltagi told SpaceNews . Baltagi declined to specify the channels involved, but said “Eutelsat is a target because it broadcasts Farsi channels that are based abroad and therefore not under the control of IRIB,” or Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the country’s state-owned media organization. The jamming comes amid weeks of protests in Iran following the death of a woman while in police custody. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the protests were part of a foreign plot to destabilize the country during his first public comments on the unrest Oct. 3, reported the Associated Press . The Iranian government has not commented on Eutelsat’s jamming issues. According to Eutelsat, it used a “specially designed interference detection system” to conclude that all uplink transmissions interfering with the two satellites originate within Iran. The operator said its technical experts “have been working around the clock with affected customers to mitigate the impact of the interference” on its services as much as possible. “Eutelsat has immediately notified the relevant authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran, demanding that the harmful jamming operations be immediately and permanently stopped,” the company said. It has also reminded Iranian authorities that intentional jamming is “explicitly prohibited” by radio regulations under the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); }) This article was edited Oct. 7 to correct the name of one of the two satellites that Eutelsat said are having their signals jammed from within Iran.
TAMPA, Fla. — French aerospace giant Safran said Nov. 4 it is extending its ground communications expertise to space by acquiring Syrlinks, which manufactures satellite radio-frequency equipment. Syrlinks, also based in France, specializes in radiocommunications and radio navigational technologies for the space sector. The company employs about 140 people and was sold to Safran’s electronics and defense division for an undisclosed sum. Safran already provides antennas and modems for ground stations. With Syrlinks, Safran Electronics & Defense press officer Pascal Debergé said the group can offer integrated technologies that are “fully adapted” for uplink and downlink communications. The products Safran previously sold for satellites were for applications outside of radiocommunications, including plasma thrusters, optical components, oscillators, inertial measurement units, and atomic clocks for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) capabilities. Syrlinks also develops miniature atomic clocks as part of its PNT solutions for global navigation satellite systems. According to Debergé, Syrlinks will bring additional receiver solutions to expand Safran’s PNT capabilities for commercial and defense markets. Combining their technologies will help create more PNT solutions that can continue to “operate in denied or sensitive” environments, he said, where “safety, integrity of data are required.” Safran’s announcement said Syrlinks’ headquarters in Cesson-Sévigné, northwestern France, also gives it a base in an academic and industrial community that is renowned for its expertise in telecoms and electronics. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
An updated U.S. strategy for the Arctic the Biden administration released Oct. 7 predicts greater power competition in that part of the world, fueled by climate change and growing military activities. The strategy updates the 2013 version, and lays out a 10-year plan “to position the United States to both effectively compete and manage tensions.” The plan recommends investments in infrastructure to monitor the region and to improve connectivity, echoing topics raised by the Defense Department and the U.S. armed services in their own Arctic strategies. The strategy suggests infrastructure improvements will require investments in space-based communications and Earth monitoring. U.S. defense officials have pointed out the value of space systems to support a region where there is sparse ground infrastructure. “A deeper understanding of the Arctic operating environment is needed to inform real-time decision-making and respond to changing conditions,” says the U.S. strategy. The strategy recommends investments in: The U.S. Arctic strategy is being released at a time when satellite operators are venturing into the Arctic to improve connectivity as the changing atmospheric and geopolitical climate drives demand for more bandwidth. There is also a growing commercial remote-sensing industry deploying constellations tailor-made to monitor climate change , including melting ice melting trends in the Arctic. “The Arctic’s growing strategic importance has intensified competition to shape its future as countries pursue new economic interests and prepare for increased activity,” the strategy says. It notes that Russia has invested significantly in its military presence in the Arctic over the last decade. It is modernizing its military bases and airfields; deploying new coastal and air defense missile systems and upgraded submarines; and increasing military exercises and training operations. Russia is also building an economic infrastructure in its Arctic territories to develop hydrocarbons, minerals, and fisheries and is attempting to constrain freedom of navigation through its excessive maritime claims along the Northern Sea Route. “Russia’s war in Ukraine has raised geopolitical tensions in the Arctic, as it has globally, creating new risks of unintended conflict and hindering cooperation,” the document says. China, meanwhile, is seeking to increase its influence in the Arctic through economic, diplomatic, scientific, and military activities, says the strategy. China over the past decade “has doubled its investments, with a focus on critical mineral extraction; expanded its scientific activities; and used these scientific engagements to conduct dual-use research with intelligence or military applications in the Arctic.”
Chinese commercial launch service provider Galactic Energy maintained a 100 percent launch record early Tuesday with its third Ceres-1 solid rocket launch. The four-stage Ceres-1 rocket lifted off at 12:11 a.m. Eastern Aug. 9 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert.Aboard were three small satellites. Taijing-1 01 and 02, developed by private small satellite manufacturer Minospace using its MN50 platform, will mainly provide commercial remote sensing services. Donghai-1, developed by Shanghai-based ASES Space, is designed to verify multi-mode remote sensing and key technologies. The trio were sent into 500-kilometer-altitude Sun synchronous orbit (SSO), according to a Galactic Energy press release. The Ceres-1 rocket has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. The Ceres-1 this time featured a more voluminous, 1.6-meter-diameter payload fairing. The rocket featured a white color scheme, and bore the mission name “White is the new black”. The previous two Ceres-1 rockets were painted black. Galactic Energy said earlier in the year that it is planning between five and six launches in 2022. The firm could also potentially conduct a sea launch of the Ceres-1, facilitated by a new Eastern spaceport for sea launches established at Haiyang, Shandong province. Galactic Energy was founded in 2018. In November 2020 it became only the second Chinese private launch firm to reach orbit . It became the only such company to reach orbit twice, in December 2021, when the second Ceres–1 launched five satellites . The company is however looking beyond solid rockets to reusable liquid launch vehicles. Pallas-1, a reusable kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher, will be capable of lofting 5,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO. It could launch as soon as during the first half of 2023. Galactic Energy announced in January that it had secured $200 million in funding for Pallas-1 in what was then the largest funding round of any launch company in China. This has since been surpassed by Expace, a spinoff from state-owned defense giant CASIC, which raised $237 million in B round funding in June backed by seven undisclosed investors. Other Chinese launch firms have attracted a number of significant funding rounds this year, including Space Pioneer, Orienspace , Space Trek and Deep Blue Aerospace . Some of these are also developing reusable launch vehicles, with Landspace expected to conduct the test flight of its Zhuque-2 methane- liquid oxygen rocket in the near future. The Ceres-1 mission was China’s 30th orbital launch of 2022, and the fourth not involving the Long March rockets developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). ISpace, another private launch service provider, failed with a third consecutive Hyperbola-1 solid rocket launch in May, while Expace had a successful return to flight with another light-lift solid rocket, the Kuaizou-1A , in the same month. CAS Space, another spinoff, this time from the Chinese Academy of Science in July debuted what is now China’s largest orbital solid rocket, Lijian-1 , putting six satellites in orbit. Chinese state-owned and commercial actors are developing a range of solid rockets, a trend perceived as intending to boost overall space capabilities and increase flexibility and access to space. 
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA and the European Space Agency announced agreements to cooperate on Earth science and a lunar mission June 15, but agency leaders said they’re still discussing more substantial cooperation on the Artemis program and Mars exploration. After a meeting of the ESA Council in Noordwijk, Netherlands, NASA and ESA announced two new cooperative agreements. One, called the Framework Agreement for a Strategic Partnership in Earth System Science, outlines cooperation between the agencies on topics that include continuity of measurements and exchange of data. It builds upon a joint statement of intent the agencies signed in July 2021. The other agreement is a memorandum of understanding regarding Lunar Pathfinder, a commercial lunar communications spacecraft being developed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. with ESA as an anchor customer. It is slated to be ready for launch in late 2024 or early 2025. NASA will arrange for the launch of Lunar Pathfinder through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and gain access to communications services from the spacecraft. ESA and NASA will also collaborate on a navigation experiment using the spacecraft. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson signed the agreements with his ESA counterpart, Director General Josef Aschbacher, at the ESA Council meeting. The agencies said it was the first time that a NASA administrator attended a meeting of the council, the governing body of ESA. At a media briefing after the council meeting, Aschbacher and Nelson talked more about further cooperation between the agencies, such as roles NASA could play to assist ESA respond to impacts from sanctions stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That includes the ExoMars rover mission, which was set to launch in September but is now postponed indefinitely after ESA severed cooperation with Roscosmos. “Since the 24th of February, we have to say that this partnership intensified,” Aschbacher said of ESA’s relationship with NASA. “In space, the hand that was reached out by NASA to us was very welcome and very much appreciated.” He said, though, that ESA is still evaluating options for continuing ExoMars, including those that involve NASA assistance. Aschbacher and other ESA officials have said they may seek from NASA new descent engines for the ExoMars lander, radioisotope heating units to keep the rover warm at night and perhaps a launch of the mission . Aschbacher said NASA “offered help to conduct studies” for ExoMars, including a “very strong” letter of support from Nelson, but that ESA had yet to decide how to proceed with the mission. He said there are no plans to combine ExoMars with the Mars Sample Return campaign by NASA and ESA to return to Earth samples of the planet cached by the Perseverance rover. “There are still a lot of intense discussions ongoing,” he said. “It’s going the right way and I’m very confident that we’ll find a good partnership on ExoMars. Of course, the final decision on our side is with our member states.” “That is being discussed and is under consideration,” Nelson said about a NASA role on ExoMars. “That’s what we’re prepared to say today. We really want to help ESA given the circumstances.” Another issue is cooperation between ESA and NASA on the Artemis initiative of human lunar exploration. ESA is contributing elements such as the service module for the Orion spacecraft and, with the Japanese space agency JAXA, modules for the lunar Gateway. Such contributions come with the expectation that European astronauts will be assigned to Artemis missions, including landing on the moon. No ESA astronauts have been announced yet for Artemis missions. Nelson said there is no firm timetable for selecting ESA astronauts to Artemis missions but that an ESA astronaut would be included on an Artemis landing some time after Artemis 3, currently scheduled for 2025. “What the composition of the crews are after that is all to be worked out and negotiated,” he said. “We will look forward to having an ESA astronaut with us on the moon at a future time.” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, who also attended the meeting, suggested an ESA astronaut could be assigned to Artemis 4, a mission currently planned not to land on the moon but to install European and Japanese components for the lunar Gateway. “We are absolutely intending that an ESA astronaut will support those missions to Gateway,” she said. “This is all in the hands of NASA,” Aschbacher said of getting an ESA astronaut to the lunar surface. “Certainly, I would hope that it would be before the end of this decade, but this is my wish, which is well known to Bill.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Canada-based EnerStar Solutions, a rental company for the energy sector, said Oct. 3 it has reached a deal to add SpaceX’s Starlink broadband to the services it provides industrial workers. Remote communications are a large part of the solutions EnerStar provides job sites in Canada and North America. Until now, the Canadian company has been limited to connectivity partnerships with terrestrial networks and satellites in geostationary orbit. Starlink’s low Earth orbit satellites address client “needs for high-throughput speeds and low-latency,” EnerStar vice president of U.S. operations and business development said. These include “real-time” drilling requirements and communications for all on-site personnel for business, personal and safety purposes. EnerStar expects to have Starlink units available for its operations in the United States from Oct. 7, and approvals needed to deploy Starlink’s enterprise products in Canada “are expected soon.” The Canadian company is also building a Starlink-compatible backend network for connecting internet of things devices for remote monitoring. Although its head office is in Canada, EnerStar marketing coordinator Amber Beierbach said its operations are primarily focused on the United States. “With the addition of Starlink to our product offerings, we look forward to expanding our operations more into Canada as well outside of the Energy sector,” Beierbach said via email. EnerStar has 119 full-time employees and relies on a network of partnerships throughout multiple industries to provide diversified services, which also include accommodations, power, and lighting. Beierbach said the company will continue using alternative communications networks based on location and job type. “The ability to offer Starlink however will now provide us the ability to ensure even the most remote job sites reach data speeds far more reliable and high speed than they have ever experienced before,” she said. EnerStar is the third company to announce a reseller agreement with Starlink as the broadband operator seeks enterprise-focused partners to branch further out of consumer-focused markets. Maritime connectivity specialist Marlink said Sept. 22 it has signed an agreement to offer Starlink to its maritime and enterprise customers. A week before, remote communications provider Speedcast said it had become the first company to sign such a distribution deal with Starlink.
Virgin Galactic announced July 14 plans to assemble a fleet of suborbital spaceplanes in a new factory in a suburb of Phoenix. The company said it has started work on the factory in Mesa, Arizona, where it will perform final assembly of new Delta-class spaceplanes. The facility is scheduled to be fully operational by late 2023. The first of those spaceplanes will start flying private astronauts in 2026, the company projects. Virgin Galactic disclosed few details about the new factory, such as its size, but said it construction of it was in progress. It is located adjacent to Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, enabling completed spaceplanes to be transported by air to Spaceport America in New Mexico. The company said the factory will support “hundreds” of jobs and produce up to six spaceplanes a year. “Our spaceship final assembly factory is key to accelerating the production of our Delta fleet, enabling a rapid increase in flight capacity that will drive our revenue growth,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in a company statement. “We’re thrilled to expand into the greater Phoenix area, which is home to outstanding aerospace talent, and we look forward to growing our team and fleet at our new facility.” The Delta-class spaceplanes are the next generation of suborbital spacecraft that the company says will be able to fly more frequently than existing SpaceShipTwo vehicles. Virgin Galactic projects Delta class vehicles to be able to fly once a week, while the existing SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, will only be able to fly monthly. VSS Imagine, a spaceplane being built by Virgin Galactic at its Mojave, California, factory, is designed to perform two flights a month. Virgin Galactic did not go into details about why it selected Mesa, Arizona, for the factory, but the company previously said it was considering several locations. “We’ve been in contact with multiple municipalities about locations and have received interest from at least three states,” Colglazier said in a November 2021 earnings call about plans for the Delta-class factory. “We expect interest to grow as we estimate we’ll be creating more than 1,000 new jobs. We are looking forward to the new opportunities and community relationships that our expanded footprint will bring.” “Arizona is a growing innovation hub, geographically situated between our existing operations in Southern California and New Mexico,” Swami Iyer, president of aerospace systems at Virgin Galactic, said in a statement. “This will allow us to accelerate progress from conceptual design to production to final assembly at scale as we capitalize on the many advantages Mesa and the Greater Phoenix area offer.” Virgin Galactic will contract with suppliers to produce major components of the Delta-class vehicles, which will then be assembled in Mesa. The company has not announced which suppliers it is working with. The company is taking a similar approach for building new planes to replace the existing WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, VMS Eve, used for carrying SpaceShipTwo aloft. Virgin announced July 6 i t selected Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing subsidiary, to produce major components of two aircraft , which will then be assembled at Virgin’s Mojave factory.
Chinese launch services provider CAS Space successfully placed six small satellites in orbit early Wednesday with the first launch of the Lijian-1 solid rocket. The four-stage Lijian-1 (ZK-1A) rocket lifted off from an erector-launcher at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 12:12 a.m. Eastern. Launch success was confirmed by China’s official space publication within an hour of liftoff. The rocket had a take-off weight of 135 tons, a total length of 30 meters, a core stage diameter of 2.65 meters, a fairing diameter of 2.65 meters and can carry 1,500 kilogram of payload into a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The six satellites, some developed by the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, were described vaguely for conducting research in space technology, atmospheric density measurements, quantum key distribution experiments and electromagnetic tests, according to Chinese state media. The Nanyue Science Satellite, developed by SASTSpace, under the state-owned Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), will be used for science popularization. It also carries a GNSS-R payload, detecting reflected signals from Beidou and GPS satellites to make soil moisture measurements. It also carries an ion propulsion system developed by SAST’s 803rd research institute. The launch facilities include a horizontally retractable cover and an erector-launcher, orbital images reveal. The Lijian-1 is similar in capabilities to the Jielong-3 (Smart Dragon-3) rocket expected to launch in the coming months and developed by China Rocket, a spinoff from state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). China’s state-owned and commercial space entities have been developing a range of solid rockets with varying capabilities in recent years, with the trend seen as an effort to boost the country’s overall space capabilities . Lijian-1 is now the largest operational Chinese solid launcher and CAS Space is also developing larger rockets. Expace, a spinoff from state-owned missile-maker CASIC, is also working on a range of large solid rockets. CAS Space is a commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The company raised $31 million in 2021 but leading investors were CITIC Juxin, ultimately owned by state-owned investment company CITIC Group Corporation, Zhongke Chuangxing, an accelerator fund set up by CAS, and Yuexiu Industrial Investment, another state-owned investment vehicle, operating in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The industrial base for CAS Space has been established in Nansha district in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. Nansha states it aims to foster a complete industrial chain including rockets (upstream), satellites (midstream) and downstream applications. Space subsidiaries of carmaker Geely, including Geespace, Shanghe Aerospace and Xingkong Zhilian have also settled in Nansha. Parent CAS develops a range of spacecraft, including Beidou satellites, and has previously launched sounding rockets, but Wednesday’s orbital launch marks a big step forward. Solid rockets appear to be only the start of CAS Space’s ambitions, however. CAS Space is also working on reusable liquid engines with the goal of developing recoverable launchers. A new website unveiled by the company in recent days shows launch vehicle renders similar to Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and New Shepard launchers. The suborbital reusable launcher is being developed for space tourism in a similar fashion to Blue Origin’s New Shepard, sending up to seven passengers on 10-minutes rides, briefly passing above the 100-kilometer-altitude Kármán line. The company recently signed a deal with China Tourism Group to boost these efforts and a first test launch is planned for around 2024.
The Space Development Agency announced July 18 it selected L3Harris Technologies and Northrop Grumman to each build 14 missile-tracking satellites for a low Earth orbit constellation known as the Tracking Layer. L3Harris won a $700 million contract and Northrop Grumman a $617 million deal for the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1. The 28 infrared-sensing satellites will be part of a global network of eyes in the sky intended to detect and track the latest generation of ballistic and hypersonic missiles being developed by countries like Russia and China. Speaking at a Pentagon news conference, Space Development Agency Director Derek Tournear said the 28 spacecraft will be launched in batches of seven to polar orbits about 600 miles above Earth. Each plane of seven satellites will be deployed over different locations around the globe. The first launch is projected in April 2025. Having a constellation of infrared sensing satellites in low Earth orbit has emerged as a top priority for the Pentagon amid concerns that current defense systems might not be able to detect low-flying hypersonic missiles. SDA’s Tracking Layer satellites should be able to see targets with greater fidelity than current DoD missile-defense satellites in geostationary orbit 22,000 miles above the equator. Existing satellites provide global missile warning and detect launches of short-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles, but they were not designed to track advanced maneuvering missiles like hypersonic glide vehicles. SDA in 2020 ordered the first eight satellites of the Tracking Layer — known as Tranche 0 — from L3Harris and SpaceX . The first two Tranche 0 satellites are projected to launch in 2023. SDA estimated the entire cost of the Tracking Layer Tranche 1 will be about $2.5 billion, a price tag that includes the 28 satellites as well as four launches, ground integration and support costs. Tournear said seven proposals were received for Tracking Layer Tranche 1. The two winning bids were selected based on their schedules, technical merit and price. Both L3Harris and Northrop Grumman won so-called “other transaction agreements” used by the Pentagon as alternatives to traditional contracts. These agreements require contractors to team with nontraditional commercial vendors. Neither L3Harris nor Northrop has yet disclosed its commercial partners for this contract. These are the second major contracts that L3Harris and Northrop Grumman have won to date from DoD’s space agency. L3Harris got a contract for four Tracking Layer Tranche 0 satellites and Northrop Grumman won a 42-satellite deal for SDA’s broadband constellation called Transport Layer Tranche 1. The data collected by Tracking Layer satellites would be sent via optical links to the Transport Layer so if a missile threat is detected, its location and trajectory data can be transmitted securely through space and downlinked to military command centers. Both the Tracking and Transport Layers will be built in increments over several years, with new satellites acquired every two years. The next Tranche 2 of the Tracking Layer is expected to have 54 satellites. “The T1 Tracking Layer effort is a critical step toward building the national defense space architecture,” Tournear said. “SDA is confident that selection of the L3 Harris and Northrop Grumman teams provides the best overall solution to accelerate delivery of a low-Earth orbit constellation with wide-field-of-view infrared sensors for a global missile warning and missile tracking capability.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Arianespace is exploring the compatibility of its rockets with orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) being developed by Space Machines Company, an Australian startup. The companies signed a deal Oct. 30 that lays the groundwork for their cooperation, which could later see them jointly offering services to customers seeking post-launch in-space logistics. Optimus-1, SMC’s first 270-kilogram space tug, is slated to make its debut in the second quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission to low Earth orbit (LEO). After separating from the rocket, Optimus-1 is due to carry Australian customer payloads to their final orbital destinations as it gains flight qualification. SMC has not released technical details for Optimus-1, which was originally due to launch in 2022 on a small launch vehicle being developed by Gilmour Space, another Australian startup. Gilmour said Oct. 10 the first commercial launch of its Eris rocket is slated for the first half of 2023. SMC is also developing OTVs for payload transportation missions beyond LEO and into deep space and for in-orbit services, including refueling. The startup aims to make its Optimus family of space tugs compatible “with as many launchers as possible worldwide.” These include Arianespace’s medium-lift rocket Vega C which performed its maiden flight in July and its larger Ariane 6 launch vehicle, which recently saw its debut delayed to at least late 2023 . Stéphane Israël, Arianespace’s CEO, said the company is looking for other space tug providers to support “the last-mile-to-orbit delivery” of payloads. In 2020, Arianespace deployed the first ION Satellite Carrier space tug for Italy’s D-Orbit with an earlier iteration of Vega C. In August, the French launch services provider announced plans to deploy Spaceflight’s Sherpa OTVs from Vega rockets. Spaceflight said it could launch its first OTV on a Vega around the end of 2023 or early 2024. The U.S.-based company has deployed five Sherpa OTVs to date across four SpaceX missions. The OTV partnership with Arianespace came about five months after SpaceX signaled plans to phase out its working relationship with Spaceflight. OTV applications, including last-mile deliveries and hosted payloads, will “generate $100s of millions in revenue during the next decade,” according to a recent report from analysts at BryceTech. Emerging OTV applications also include in-orbit inspections and debris removal services. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Maxar Technologies, an operator of high-resolution Earth imaging satellites, has received regulatory approval to use its satellites to monitor the space environment and sell that data commercially. Having a license to offer non-Earth imagery allows commercial remote sensing satellites to observe objects such as other satellites and orbital debris. Maxar is looking to use this capability to fill growing commercial and government demand for debris monitoring and space domain awareness data, the company’s CEO Daniel Jablonsky told SpaceNews Sept. 20 at the Air, Space & Cyber conference. Jablonsky said the company’s in-space monitoring services could support national security priorities that range from tracking objects, analyzing their characteristics and discriminating benign from aggressive activities in orbit. Maxar’s four imaging satellites currently in orbit have always had the capability to watch the space environment but the new remote-sensing license modificati on approved recently by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “ allows us to do that commercially,” said Jablonsky. He said securing this licensing approval has been a long-time goal of Maxar given the congestion in orbit and the hazards posed by debris objects. Jablonsky credited the Biden administration’s National Space Council for “having done a nice job of making sure that commercial capabilities that can be brought to bear can be commercialized. And I think this is a good example of that.” Vice President Kamala Harris said the council will work to revamp regulations for the entire space industry to boost U.S. competitiveness. For Maxar and other industry operators, having accurate data on potential threats in orbit has huge financial implications. Jablonsky noted that the WorldView-2 imaging satellite — then operated by DigitalGlobe — in 2016 was hit by a non-tracked piece of debris. Since acquiring DigitalGlobe in 2017, Maxar has increased advocacy for better space situational awareness and traffic management. After the debris incident, the company used one of its other satellites to image WorldView-2 and determine that the damage was minimal. But in order to do that, under the licensing agreement at the time, it had to get permission from NOAA to take an image of its own satellite. The licensing for non-Earth imagery also applies to Maxar’s six WorldView Legion satellites that the company plans to start launching later this year.
The Air Force Research Laboratory plans to use experimental cubesats to create a training environment for cybersecurity exercises focused on the space domain. The AFRL Information Directorate is looking to build a cyber range for the Space Force and other organizations to conduct realistic exercises simulating cyberattacks against satellites and ground systems. “There’s recently been a bigger push to have cyber defense experts working in the space arena,” said Thomas Parisi, program manager at the AFRL Information Directorate based in Rome, New York. Parisi said there is a growing need for cyber defense training as the U.S. military worries its satellite networks could be targeted . In response to that demand, AFRL is prototyping a training range that would replicate a real-world satellite operations center. While the Defense Department has numerous training facilities for cyberwarfare exercises, Parisi said, none exist where military researchers and operators can practice defending satellites using actual spacecraft in orbit. AFRL is working with Stephenson Stellar Corp., a nonprofit research and development company that specializes in cybersecurity. The company, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last year received a $22.7 million contract to develop the so-called Stellar Space Cyber Range. “This provides for an actual, not simulated, space-based range environment for this research,” Parisi said. “We will work together with the space folks and determine what concepts, what technologies, what next generation cyber defense capabilities we can bring into the space domain.” The cyber range concept includes four cubesats that AFRL plans to launch to low Earth orbit in fiscal year 2024, said Parisi. Jeff Moulton, president of Stephenson Stellar, said the cubesats have been built but there are still parts of the project that have not been funded. “We’re looking for funding for launch,” he said. Moulton estimates that an additional $18 million would be needed to get the satellites launched and to develop cloud-based ground stations. He said potential users of the system, such as the Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency and other Space Force organizations are likely to provide funding. Parisi said having access to real hardware is a priority for researchers and for operators who need to protect systems. “We’re excited because we want to be able to get real assets up in space that researchers can actually use as a test range versus just working in the laboratory,” he said. “Being able to demonstrate concepts with an actual satellite constellation instead of just in a lab will have a much stronger impact.”
The European Space Agency will seek funding this fall for a feasibility study of space-based solar power, the latest sign of support for a concept that still faces significant technical and financial challenges. Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, tweeted Aug. 16 that he will ask member states at this November’s ministerial meeting to fund a preparatory program for space-based solar power (SBSP) called Solaris. He did not disclose how much funding he was requesting for Solaris. “We have the main building blocks already, but let me be clear: for the project to succeed, much technology development and funding is still needed,” he wrote. Solaris, according to ESA, would be a three-year study to address technical issues associated with SBSP, a concept where solar energy is converted into electricity and then beamed to Earth for terrestrial use. The study would examine potential commercial opportunities for developing SBSP and address policy issues. “It would ensure that Europe becomes a key player — and potentially leader — in the international race towards scalable clean energy solutions for mitigating climate change,” ESA states on a web page about Solaris . The three-year study would support a decision at the next ministerial meeting in 2025 on proceeding with a full-fledged SBSP development effort. ESA is requesting funding for Solaris after two independent cost-benefit studies by consulting firms Frazer-Nash in the United Kingdom and Roland Berger in Germany. Both concluded SBSP has the potential to meet European energy needs while supporting the goal of “net zero” emissions by 2050 set by the European Commission The Frazer-Nash study estimated that the net present value of a European SBSP system from 2022 to 2070 would range between 149 billion and 262 billion euros ($150–264 billion). A central case of 54 “gigawatt-class” SBSP satellites would produce 601 billion euros in benefits in that period, primarily from avoided costs of producing energy terrestrially along with its carbon dioxide emissions, with 418 billion euros in costs to develop and operate the SBSP system. The Roland Berger study concluded that a single SBSP satellite, based on an existing design, could cost as little as 8.1 billion euros to build and 7.5 billion euros to operate for 30 years, assuming “substantial advances” in key technologies. In a worst-case scenario without those advances, the same design would cost 33.4 billion euros to build and 31.1 billion euros to operate. Despite the uncertainty, it concluded SBSP “has strong potential to become a competitive renewable technology.” The ESA initiative comes amid a resurgence of interest globally in SBSP, which first had its heyday a half-century and has periodically resurfaced since then. The U.K. government has shown an interest in SBSP, including it among other alternative energy technologies it was considering last year. The China Academy of Space Technology announced in June it would test wireless power transmission, an essential technology for SBSP, in low Earth orbit in 2028 followed by a megawatt-class experimental satellite in geostationary orbit as soon as 2030. Those tests are part of a long-term effort that could lead to satellites producing two gigawatts of power in GEO in 2050. NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy announced at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in May that it was undertaking a short-term study of SBSP , updating existing concepts to reflect advances in technology and reductions in launch costs. The agency expects to have the study completed in time to present at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris in September. Advocates of SBSP said the potential for major reductions in launch costs enabled by systems like SpaceX’s Starship, along with growing demand for clean energy sources to meet net-zero goals, is driving the renewed interest in SBSP by governments. However, even those advocates acknowledge SBSP faces major hurdles, from the economics of such systems to development of key technologies needed to assemble and operate massive satellites, as well as policy implications associated with beaming power from space.
SEOUL, South Korea — While Starlink is ramping up efforts to expand its foothold in Asia , satellite operators there remain undeterred as they expect the U.S. broadband service would end up seeking their help for business. Senior executives of Asian satellite operators at the APSCC 2022 Satellite Conference and Exhibition said Oct. 18 that Starlink, and other low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband operators, would find various reasons to seek partnerships with regional players. These reasons range from regulatory issues to business cultures that differ from country to country, and the cost of building and maintaining ground infrastructure to operate terminals — particularly in remote areas with limited power supply. “Bringing the satellite is just one part of it,” said Yau Chyong Lim, chief operating officer of Malaysia’s Measat. “How to connect people, how to bring the equipment in and knowing the local culture … that plays a key role in [a] very successful broadband program.” He said LEO operators would find it more challenging to provide connectivity to rural areas of Asia’s developing countries because many still have limited power supply, meaning even if ground terminals are installed there, their operation would be unstable. “So, when you go to this region, you have to think of how to provide power to all these terminals,” Lim said, adding regional operators already have cost-effective solutions such as solar power systems. Patompob Suwansiri, CEO of Thaicom, cited the regulatory landscape as a reason for LEO satellite operators to seek collaboration with Asian operators. He said Thailand handles regulatory issues in a way that is different from Indonesia, Malaysia and other Asian countries Starlink looks to enter. “So, therefore, we think that regional operators have a role to play something on the table that will add value to LEO satellite operators.” Knowing this, he said, U.S. satellite operator Globalstar formed a partnership with Thaicom early this year. Adi Adiwoso, president of Indonesia’s satellite operator Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN), agreed that building partnerships would be a cost-effective way for LEO operators to enter Asian countries. However, there is still an issue that needs to be addressed to make the deal sustainable: How much margin would they give to the Asian partner? “That’s the real complication,” he said. “[It is] because the cost of installing terminals in remote areas can be quite high. We have to take a flight. We have to take a car. We have to take a boat. We have to take a motorcycle.” He assumed while installing a terminal for a geostationary satellite in developed areas would cost less than $500, doing so in a remote area would cost more than $1000. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Updated 3:30 p.m. Eastern after Globalstar statement. WASHINGTON — SpaceX completed a surge of three successful launches in a little more than 36 hours early June 19, days after an open letter within the company critical of founder Elon Musk led to the firing of several employees. The stretch of launches started June 17 with a Falcon 9 launch from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A. The rocket, lifting off at 12:09 p.m. Eastern, placed 53 Starlink satellites into orbit. The booster used for the launch completed its 13th flight with a droneship landing, setting a company record for booster reuse. The second launch took place at 10:19 a.m. Eastern June 18 from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Falcon 9 placed into orbit the SARah-1 radar imaging satellite, built by Airbus for the German military as a replacement for the existing SAR-Lupe system. SpaceX provided limited information about the launch, similar to restrictions for classified U.S. launches, but the German military later confirmed payload deployment and successful contact with the four-ton satellite. The booster, which flew two National Reconnaissance Office missions earlier this year, landed back at the launch site. The final, and perhaps most mysterious, launch took place at 12:27 a.m. Eastern June 19 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The only identified payload on the launch was Globalstar FM15, a spare satellite for low Earth orbit satellite operator Globalstar. That satellite deployed from the upper stage nearly two hours after liftoff. Several aspects of the mission suggested to observers that Globalstar FM15 was not the only payload on the launch. That included an unusual set of three burns by the upper stage and the droneship landing of the first stage, even through the Globalstar satellite alone, weighing about 700 kilograms, was small enough to enable a landing back at the launch site. SpaceX initially did not initially provide video of the payload after fairing separation, but did after the second burn. Those views showed not just the Globalstar satellite but also what appeared to be a payload adapter. That could mean the rocket also carried one or more payloads deployed after the upper stage’s first burn. It could also mean, though, that the launch was originally intended to carry additional payloads but launched without them. Globalstar provided few details about its own satellite on the mission. The company did not publicize the launch in advance. In a statement after its quarterly earnings release May 5, Dave Kagan, chief executive of Globalstar, said the company was planning to launch that ground spare “in the coming months” that would, along with plans for a new set of satellites ordered earlier in the year, “ensure continuity of service to all of our existing and future subscribers as well as other users of the network.” In a statement June 19, Globalstar said the satellite was working well after launch. The spacecraft will remain in a lower transfer orbit as an on-orbit spare until needed to replace an existing satellite. In its filing of its quarterly results with the Securities and Exchange Commission May 5, the company said the “vast majority” of the costs for both preparing Globalstar FM15 for launch and the launch itself were paid for by an unnamed customer. That same customer is also financing nearly all the costs of 17 new satellites Globalstar ordered from Canadian company MDA in February . Internal criticism The launches took place days after internal criticism of Elon Musk, founder of chief executive of SpaceX, erupted into public view. An open letter circulated within company networks June 15 said Musk’s public statements had become an “embarrassment” for some employees, distracting them from their work. “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks,” the letter stated. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX — every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company. It is critical to make clear to our teams and to our potential talent pool that his messaging does not reflect our work, our mission, or our values.” The letter, first reported by The Verge , did not include any specific examples of behavior by Musk, although there is arguably no shortage of such cases. That includes not just controversial tweets but also a claim published in May that he sexually harassed a flight attendant on a SpaceX private jet in 2016 , an account that Musk has strongly denied. The letter called on SpaceX to “publicly address and condemn Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior” and “separate itself from Elon’s personal brand.” It also demanded that the company’s leadership be held “equally accountable” for addressing workplace issues, and better define its “zero tolerance” policies for unacceptable behavior. Company sources, speaking on background because they are not authorized to speak publicly, said they believed several hundred employees had endorsed the letter before it was taken off company networks. Neither Musk nor SpaceX did not respond publicly to the open letter. However, in a memo to company employees June 16, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said it had fired “a number of employees” involved with the open letter. The New York Times first reported the firings . Shotwell, in the memo, claimed that “the letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views.” Disseminating the letter, she said, went against company policies “and does not show the strong judgment needed to work in this very challenging space transportation sector.” Shotwell said the letter was a distraction for the company as it worked on activities that included the three launches that were coming up. “We have 3 launches within 37 hours for critical satellites this weekend,” she wrote, as well as work on cargo and crew Dragon spacecraft and being “on the cusp” of an orbital Starship launch. “We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A U.S. appeals court Aug. 26 upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s year-old decision to let SpaceX deploy more satellites at lower altitudes to improve the Starlink broadband constellation’s performance. The FCC’s decision allowed SpaceX to operate all its approved Ku-band and Ka-band satellites at around 550 kilometers above the Earth. Previously, SpaceX was required to deploy nearly two-thirds of its constellation between 1,100 and 1,300 kilometers, adding more latency for the network. Nearly two-thirds of the 4,408 satellites SpaceX has permission to deploy in Ku-band and Ka-band are currently in orbit , according to astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell. Satellite TV broadcaster Dish Network and broadband competitor Viasat had challenged the modification to SpaceX’s regulatory license to operate at lower altitudes. Viasat argued that the FCC should have conducted a thorough environmental review of SpaceX’s constellation before letting it operate more satellites at lower altitudes in low Earth orbit (LEO). Satellite systems have a categorical exemption from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the FCC and other federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of their actions. The FCC implemented the exemption in the mid-1980s based on analysis at the time that individual satellite launches would not have measurable effects on the environment. However, Viasat says the recent emergence of Starlink and plans for other sizable constellations has created new environmental considerations that need to be addressed. The appeals court said Viasat and The Balance Group, an environmental organization that had joined the operator in the legal action, did not meet requirements to have standing for an appeal on their claim that the FCC violated NEPA by allowing Starlink to lower its altitude without an environmental assessment. While Viasat worries that Starlink ’ s satellites could collide with others and cause debris, the court said this “ theory of injury is much too speculative. ” “ To ground standing on the risk of future harm, a party must show both that the risk is substantial and that the challenged action substantially increases it, ” the court said, and “Viasat posits too many unlikely contingencies to clear those hurdles.” Viasat had also argued that SpaceX’s constellation makes it more technically complex and expensive for Viasat to launch its own satellites. The court said these and other harms cited by Viasat are economic and fall outside the zone of interests protected by NEPA. “We believe that the Court’s decision is a setback for both space safety and environmental protection,” Viasat said in a statement after losing the appeal. “Had the Court forced the FCC to properly grapple with the complicated issues surrounding deployment of mega-constellations in LEO, we believe harmful impacts that otherwise may persist for decades or even centuries to come could have been avoided.” Dish had argued that the FCC refused to consider reports from experts that claimed SpaceX’s altitude change would interfere with the broadcaster’s satellites. The court said these reports “ use a different method for assessing interference than what binding regulations require. ” The FCC considered the possibility of interference, the court added, and found that changing the altitude of Starlink satellites “ will not increase interference ” to satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Viasat also opposes SpaceX’s request for FCC approval to operate a second-generation constellation of nearly 30,000 satellites, which would operate between 340 and 614 kilometers in LEO, on environmental grounds. SpaceX has separate approval from the FCC permission to deploy 7,500 LEO satellites operating in V-band. This article was updated Aug. 30 to add more details from the appeals court’s decision.
Northrop Grumman does not expect an ongoing antitrust review of its acquisition of Orbital ATK to have any “adverse impact” on the company, CEO Kathy Warden said July 28. During a second-quarter earnings call, Warden was asked to comment on news reported by Politico July 22 that the Federal Trade Commission is weighing legal action against Northrop Grumman for alleged violations of the 2018 agreement with the U.S. government that allowed it to acquire the space and defense firm Orbital ATK. The FTC presumably is looking into anti-competitive actions in the solid rocket motors market. Orbital ATK before it was acquired by Northrop was one of just two suppliers of solid rocket motors , along with Aerojet Rocketdyne. But Orbital ATK was the dominant supplier of large solid rocket motors that power U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. Northrop Grumman in September 2017 announced a deal to acquire Orbital ATK for $7.8 billion. The acquisition was approved in June 2018 . During that same time period, Northrop Grumman and Boeing were competing for a huge Air Force contract to develop and build the next-generation ICBM known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent to replace the Minuteman 3. Boeing in July 2019 informed the Air Force it was dropping out of the GBSD competition arguing that it faced an insurmountable disadvantage because of Northrop’s dominance of the solid rocket motors market following its acquisition of Orbital ATK. Under the terms of the Orbital ATK acquisition, Northrop Grumman was obligated to supply solid rocket motors to competitors “on a non-discriminatory basis” and in programs where Northrop is also bidding as a prime. Northrop also had to set up firewalls to prevent any use of proprietary information in a manner that harmed competition. But Boeing alleged that the arrangement still gave Northrop an overwhelming advantage. The FTC over the past several years has been looking into the matter. The Air Force in September 2020 awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 billion contract for GBSD. Warden said “there’s been some recent speculation based on the status of that investigation and a broad range of possible next steps that the government might attempt to take.” According to the Politico report, the FTC could seek to toughen the terms of the deal or even sue to reverse the merger. Warden suggested that is highly unlikely. “I’ll say that we don’t see merit or precedent for most of those scenarios. We continue to maintain that we don’t believe this matter will have a material adverse impact to our company. So I won’t speculate what the size [of the impact] will be because we believe it could be zero, and certainly isn’t material.” From the time the acquisition was announced in September 2017 until it was approved in June 2018, the Department of Defense and the FTC “spent many months looking at the pro-competitive aspects of the deal, which there were many, and any anti-competitive risk before they approved the deal,” said Warden. “During this period, the government identified only one concern, and it was around solid rocket motors. And so we agreed to a consent order to address that concern. Over the past four years, we’ve executed an extensive compliance program and worked with the government very closely in line with the terms of the order,” Warden added. “We believe we’ve been and we continue to be in compliance with the order.” The U.S. government’s approval of the Northrop-Orbital merger was brought up by Lockheed Martin when it sought to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne in a $4.4 billion deal announced in December 2020. The FTC in January 2022 sued to block the acquisition on grounds that it would create a monopoly for rocket and missile propulsion systems. Lockheed Martin had argued that its planned acquisition of Aerojet should follow the same template as the Northrop-Orbital deal . But the FTC disagreed and Lockheed Martin in February 2022 terminated the agreement to buy Aerojet. Since the start of the Biden administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan has indicated the agency would challenge what it considered anti-competitive industry consolidation. In the wake of the failed Lockheed-Aerojet deal, the Defense Department in a February 2022 report said it would “strengthen oversight” of industry mergers amid concerns that corporate consolidation is undermining U.S. competitiveness.
NASA and Roscosmos reiterated that they expect to continue operations of the International Space Station after 2024 as NASA continues to push for an extension to 2030. At an Aug. 4 briefing about the upcoming SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the ISS, officials with the two agencies played down comments July 26 by Yuri Borisov, new head of Roscosmos, initially interpreted to mean that Russia would withdraw from the partnership as soon as 2024. NASA officials said at the time they had received no notification of any planned withdrawal, and Borisov later said Russia would withdraw only at some unspecified time after 2024 . “Perhaps something was lost in the translation,” said Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human space flight programs at Roscosmos, himself speaking through an interpreter. “The statement actually said that Russia will not pull out of the program until after 2024. This means that, up until the end of 2024, there will be no changes.” “‘After 2024’ could mean 2025, 2028 or 2030,” he added. “The decision about the termination of the program will be based on the technical condition of the station and assessment of outcomes.” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said the Multilateral Control Board of ISS partners that oversees the station met last week. That meeting, she said, featured discussion of the provision in a new NASA authorization bill Congress passed last week that formally approves an extension of ISS operations to 2030. “All the other governments are working through their plans” for an extension, she said. “It was very helpful to hear where everyone was with their progress. All of us are looking at the planning, laying in the next steps for getting approval.” Part of that ongoing work includes implementing the agreement for integrated crews between NASA and Roscosmos announced July 15. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio will fly on the Soyuz MS-22 mission launching Sept. 21, while Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina will be on Crew-5. While the Crew-5 mission is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than Sept. 29, NASA officials said it was likely that the launch would be pushed back a few days to provide more spacing with the Soyuz mission. The current NASA-Roscosmos agreement on integrated crews covers one mission a year in 2022 through 2024, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, and only involves exchanges between Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions. He said NASA will work to add Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner to the agreement after its Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, the first time the spacecraft will launch with astronauts on board. “Our long-term goal is to have integrated crews on all the missions,” he said. “We are just doing this in steps.” The CFT mission was tentatively planned for late this year, but Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said it will likely take place early next year instead. Review of data from an uncrewed test flight called OFT-2 in May will wrap up in a few weeks, after which NASA and Boeing will work to set a launch date for CFT. Dragon issues Crew-5 was scheduled to launch in early September, but NASA announced July 21 it was delaying the launch to no earlier than Sept. 29 after the Falcon 9 booster that will launch the mission was damaged during shipment from SpaceX’s Hawthorne , California, factory to its McGregor, Texas, test site. The booster hit a bridge during transport, said Benji Reed, SpaceX senior director for human spaceflight. “It was a fairly minor incursion, but it still caused some damage,” he said. SpaceX decided to replace the composite interstage at the top of the booster and other components. “We went through a very robust process of analysis and test to assure that stage would be ready to go and be absolutely safe to fly the crew,” he said. The booster, which will be making its first flight on Crew-5, is going through a full round of qualification tests in McGregor. Reed also revealed that one of four main parachute canopies suffered minor damage on the Crew Dragon spacecraft that returned on the Crew-3 mission in May. “There was no impact that we could see in terms of overall performance of the vehicle,” he said. “Certainly, the crew on Crew-3 during their return were never at risk.” He said the company is doing testing to better understand what happened and make sure there are no other, more serious issues with the parachute system, but that there was no risk for either the astronauts who will return on the Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station for Crew-4 or for the upcoming Crew-5 mission. Dragon debris Reed confirmed that debris found in Australia last month was from another Crew Dragon spacecraft. The debris, which reentered July 9, was found in a sheep paddock in rural New South Wales and was linked to the trunk section of the Crew-1 mission. That trunk section is jettisoned before reentry and left in an orbit that decays gradually from atmospheric drag. “We have a team going there to check that out,” he said, with the company working closely with the U.S. State Department, Federal Aviation Administration and Australian Space Agency. The debris, which included several large pieces, alarmed some, but Reed argued it did not appear to be out of the ordinary. “This was all within the expected analyzed space of what can happen.” “We always look for ways we can improve things,” he added, “but this was within analyzed space, within expectations.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Apple is extending its SOS via satellite service for iPhone 14 smartphones to parts of Europe in December, the company said Nov. 15 after bringing the capability online across the United States and Canada. The expansion will enable users outside cellular and Wi-Fi coverage in France, Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom to send basic messages to emergency services. Customized components and software on Apple’s latest iPhone models — iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max — enable them to directly connect with one of 24 satellites Globalstar operates in low Earth orbit. The feature also enables users to share their location off the terrestrial grid. While limited satellite bandwidth currently restricts users to basic SOS text messages, initially facilitated by a short questionnaire, Apple has $450 million plans to upgrade Globalstar’s network. Apple has also said the service will be free for two years, leaving the door open for potentially adding a fee for a more capable service. SpaceX, Globalstar’s rival Iridium, and other satellite operators both established and early-stage, are also developing plans for direct-to-smartphone services ranging from basis SOS to 5G broadband. The direct-to-smartphone market could be a game-changer for the satellite communications industry, according to industry analyst Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics. “One of the curses of the space industry is that it has always been a low-volume industry,” Quilty said Nov. 9 on the Constellations podcast sponsored by U.S. space contractor Kratos. It is “by its very nature a scale business,” he said, “so if the industry can figure a way to tap into the billions of handset users out there that have smartphones in their hands, and make even a little bit of money off those customers, it’s big news for the space industry.” Many technical, commercial, and regulatory challenges stand in the way of higher bandwidth direct-to-smartphone services. These include spectrum interference issues for companies, including SpaceX, that are seeking to repurpose spectrum from mobile operators to connect unmodified phones. Apple and others looking to use spectrum already assigned to satellite operators face hardware challenges to ensure the compatibility of their devices. Quilty said “there’s advantages [and] disadvantages of both models, and I think there’s probably room for success for both models.” googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
A NASA-funded cubesat successfully completed a maneuver to enter orbit around the moon Nov. 13. NASA announced that the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) spacecraft, a 12U cubesat, completed a 16-minute maneuver at 7:39 p.m. Eastern, placing the spacecraft into a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon. Data from the spacecraft showed that the maneuver took place as expected. “That is a huge step for the agency,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said at a Nov. 13 briefing about preparations for the Artemis 1 launch. CAPSTONE is designed to test the stability of the NRHO, the orbit that NASA plans to use for the lunar Gateway. The spacecraft, operated by Colorado-based Advanced Space, will also test autonomous positioning technologies through a link to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. “This is a very important orbit for us here on the Artemis program, specifically, because that is where we will fly Gateway,” Free said. “As CAPSTONE flies in that orbit for about six months, we’ll get more data to understand and characterize that orbit.” CAPSTONE is the first spacecraft to fly in the NRHO, an elliptical orbit over the moon’s poles at altitudes ranging from 3,500 to 71,000 kilometers. It is also the first cubesat to go into any orbit around the moon. CAPSTONE launched on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket June 28 and, after a series of maneuvers by Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon kick stage, was deployed onto a low-energy ballistic lunar trajectory July 4 . That trajectory took the spacecraft far beyond the moon before swinging back to allow it to enter orbit with a small maneuver. CAPSTONE’s cruise was not without incident. The spacecraft lost communication with Earth shortly after deployment because of a glitch during commissioning, but contact was restored about a day later . The spacecraft went into safe mode during a trajectory correction maneuver in September , which engineers later traced to a valve problem with one of its thrusters. Controllers restored CAPSTONE to normal operations a month later . While the orbital insertion maneuver was successful, NASA said that two “clean up” maneuvers are scheduled for this week. After that, NASA and Advanced Space will be able to confirm that CAPSTONE is in the desired orbit. CAPSTONE, with a total cost to NASA of about $30 million, has a six-month primary mission but the potential to operate for an additional 12 or more months in an extended mission. While CAPSTONE is the first cubesat to orbit the moon, it may soon be joined by several others. The Artemis 1 mission, scheduled to launch as soon as Nov. 16, carries 10 cubesats, some of which will fly by, orbit, or land on the moon. Another NASA cubesat, Lunar Flashlight, is slated to launch to the moon later this month as a secondary payload on the launch of a commercial lunar lander by Japanese company ispace . Advanced Space is now working on a second cislunar smallsat mission. The Air Force Research Lab awarded the company a $72 million contract Nov. 10 to build Oracle , a mission to test space situational awareness technologies beyond Earth orbit out to the moon. Oracle is scheduled to launch in late 2025 for a two-year mission.
The privately funded Polaris Program is planning its first crewed launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in December, a mission that will include the first spacewalk on a private mission. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who organized the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission that spent three days in orbit in September 2021, announced the Polaris Program in February , billing it as a series of missions to develop experience in human spaceflight. The first mission, Polaris Dawn, will fly Isaacman and three others on a five-day Crew Dragon mission. In an appearance at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, July 29, Isaacman said he expected the mission to fly late this year. “We’re looking at the end of the year right now so, so likely December.” The mission has three major goals. One is to fly Crew Dragon in an orbit with an apogee of 1,400 kilometers, the highest for a crewed mission in Earth orbit. Another is to test communications with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The third, and perhaps most ambitious, is a spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), that will be both the first from a Crew Dragon spacecraft and the first for a private mission. “There’s a ton of new development that’s happening to support that,” said Anna Menon of SpaceX, another member of the Polaris Dawn crew. That involves both upgrades to the life support systems on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, because the entire cabin will be depressurized for the spacewalk and repressurized afterwards, as well as development of a spacesuit. “The suit development that is occurring for this mission is really going to help us learn, and we’ll be able to build on this as we go to the moon and ultimately go to Mars,” she said. A big focus on training for the months leading up to the launch will be on that spacewalk. “The back half of the year is pretty loaded to the EVA ops,” Isaacman said. “This is a development program, and as part of that, this is an entirely new training program that we’re developing,” said Sarah Gillis, another SpaceX employee who is flying on the mission. “I think we’re going to learn a lot along the way.” Menon said there are more than 35 experiments planned for the five-day mission, many focused on the elevated radiation environment of the higher orbit. “That’s something that we’re going to really need to understand for missions to the moon and to Mars.” Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions that will culminate with the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship. “To get there, we’re going to try to learn an awful lot along the way,” Isaacman said.
TAMPA, Fla. — The last two high-resolution imaging satellites for Airbus Defence and Space’s Pléiades Neo constellation have arrived in French Guiana ahead of their launch next month. Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 flew from Toulouse, France, Oct. 21 via a Ukrainian Antonov 124 cargo plane for what would be the first commercial mission for Europe’s Vega C rocket. Arianespace completed the medium-lift launch vehicle’s maiden flight in July with a non-commercial mission that deployed an Italian physics satellite and six cubesats. Arianespace is slated to launch the pair of Pléiades Neo satellites in late November from its launchpad in Kourou, French Guiana. The company launched two other Pléiades Neo satellites in separate missions last year with an earlier iteration of the Vega launch vehicle. All four satellites are identical to each other apart from laser links on the final two, which enable the network to increase data speeds for ordering and downloading imagery at 30-centimeter-resolution. Airbus built and operates the constellation, which aims to cover the entire Earth landmass five times per year once fully deployed. The company also operates satellites with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) and lower-resolution optical sensors. Pléiades Neo 3, the first satellite in the constellation, entered commercial service last November with an onboard “ equipment issue ” that prompted Airbus to file a partial insurance claim for the satellite. The second Pléiades Neo satellite entered service in December without this issue. Airbus expects to leverage the full constellation to work around the Pléiades Neo 3 setback, which the company says has not affected its ability to meet customer commitments. The constellation currently covers one million square kilometers a day, according to Airbus Defence and Space head of intelligence François Lombard. The final two satellites would enable Airbus to “double our capacity and be able to respond to our customers’ needs even faster,” he said in an Oct. 24 statement. Antonov satellite lift Antonov cargo aircraft are back in service for transporting spacecraft over long distances, albeit with limited availability for the space industry amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. Airbus has started offering the BelugaST planes it uses to move aircraft parts between company sites to others needing outsized commercial freight transportation. The company recently used a BelugaST to deliver the Hotbird 13F satellite it built for Eutelsat from France to its launch site in Florida. However, the supply of BelugaST also remains low as Airbus gradually transitions to larger BelugaXL aircraft for its inter-site transportation needs. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
RESTON, Va. — The National Reconnaissance Office plans to continue to sign agreements with commercial satellite imaging operators. The next round of contracts will be for hyperspectral satellite data, Jeremy Banik, deputy director of the NRO Commercial Systems Program Office, said Nov. 3 “I’m excited to say we’re finishing the RFP [request for proposals] for commercial hyperspectral remote sensing,” Banik said at the CyberSatGov conference. “We’re looking forward to exploring this emerging phenomenology that’s coming out.” He said the release of the RFP is expected before the end of this year. Hyperspectral sensors provide data across a multitude of spectral bands to enable analysts to detect phenomena in colors that typically can’t be seen by the human eye. The technology has numerous commercial applications and the NRO has for years expressed interest in using the data. Banik said the NRO is building on the momentum from recent contract awards for commercial space imagery, including three multibillion-dollar deals for electro-optical imagery, five study contracts for radar imagery and six study contracts for radio-frequency data. “We’re growing our commercial partnerships,” he said. “These partnerships, especially in recent years, really have changed the way that we operate.” The NRO established the Commercial Systems Program Office in 2018 to tap into the thriving remote-sensing industry. “We plan to continue releasing multiple focus areas,” Banik said. “We will be continuously assessing or adopting new providers, adopting new technologies and emerging capabilities coming out of the industry.” Partnerships with companies that don’t yet have operational constellations allow the NRO access to the companies’ modeling and simulation. “And then once they’re able to start delivering real data, then we work through those demonstrations with the providers.” Banik’s office has pushed for “low barriers to entry” for the industry. “We’ve structured agreements so that we minimize many of the typical government contract requirements. We want to be able to cast the widest net possible to capture the best from industry.” Foreign companies with U.S. subsidiaries, for example, are allowed to bid, said Banik. “But they must have a U.S. presence.”
The Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency have formed a new program office to coordinate disparate procurements of satellites to detect ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The Space Systems Command (SSC), the procurement arm of the U.S. Space Force, announced the realignment Sept. 15. The combined program office “establishes a formal partnership among missile warning, missile tracking and and missile defense acquisition organizations for greater delivery of integrated and resilient sensor-to-shooter capabilities,” said Col. Brian Denaro, SSC space sensing program executive officer, who will lead the new office. “Our adversaries continue to develop missile technologies that are faster burning, dimmer, and more maneuverable,” Denaro said in a statement. Representatives from the three agencies will coordinate what is envisioned as a multilayer architecture of missile-defense satellites in geostationary, highly elliptical, medium and low Earth orbits. Each of these layers is developed and procured by different Space Force, SDA and MDA offices. Deconflicting missile-defense projects has been a congressional priority amid concerns that agencies are developing systems in isolation and not coordinating efforts. The Missile Defense Agency for decades has been in charge of deploying sensors and interceptors to protect the U.S. and allies from ballistic missiles. The Space Force when it was established in December 2019 took over from the Air Force the development and procurement of geostationary missile-warning satellites. The Pentagon in its 2019 Missile Defense Review added a new layer of satellites to the mix and decided to invest in a low Earth orbit network of space sensors to track hypersonic missiles fielded by Russia and China, which fly at high speeds and are capable of maneuvering in flight. DoD also created the Space Development Agency in 2019 to field a missile-tracking network using large numbers of smaller, cheaper satellites in lower orbits. SDA next month will be become part of the Space Force. Meanwhile, the Missile Defense Review gave MDA the leading role in developing defenses against hypersonic weapons. The agency started a low Earth orbit satellite system called Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS). Given the fragmented responsibilities for missile defense, Congress has criticized DoD’s effort for lack of coordination and cooperation. The Government Accountability Office in a June 2022 report said MDA “has not adequately coordinated the HBTSS effort with DoD’s Space Development Agency and Space Force.” Separately, the Space Force is developing another layer of sensor satellites to track hypersonic missiles from medium Earth orbit . The new combined program office will bring more unity into these efforts, Walter Chai, director for space sensors at MDA, said in a statement, “With the emerging advanced threats, space-based sensors are essential to missile defense. The close collaboration between SDA, SSC, and MDA will ensure that we are able to defeat these threats.” A spokesman for SDA said the combined office “will enable the coordinated development and fielding of capabilities.”
NASA is preparing to award a contract to a Boeing-Northrop Grumman joint venture for Space Launch System missions that could run through the middle of the next decade. The agency published July 26 a pre-solicitation notice for its Exploration Production and Operations Contract (EPOC) , which would shift procurement of SLS launches to a services contract. Under the contract, NASA would procure launch services, rather than the vehicles themselves, for missions starting with Artemis 5 in the late 2020s. NASA envisions EPOC as a means of saving money as well as opening the door to other uses of the heavy-lift rocket. The baseline contract would cover missions Artemis 5 through 9, with an option for missions Artemis 10 through 14 and another option for up to 10 non-Artemis launches. If the options are exercised, the contract would run through the Artemis 14 mission that NASA projects flying in 2036. “Through this contract approach, we are working to enable the use of this one-of-a-kind heavy lift capability to other customers,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, in a statement. “This approach will also allow NASA to streamline SLS production and operations under one contract, creating a more affordable and sustainable exploration framework for decades to come.” NASA expects to award the contract to a new joint venture called Deep Space Transport LLC. That joint venture consists of Boeing, the prime contractor for the SLS core stage and the Exploration Upper Stage that will be used on SLS missions starting with Artemis 4, and Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the SLS solid rocket boosters. The contract would effectively be sole-sourced to Deep Space Transport. In the pre-solicitation notice, NASA says that it believes it would be infeasible to hand over production of SLS components to other companies because of both proprietary processes the companies use as well as the time required to establish an alternative production line. “To have another company manufacture the Core Stage and Exploration Upper Stage may take as long as 10 years,” NASA states in the documents, with “a duplicative cost to the Government not expected to be recovered through competition.” Producing the five-segment boosters would take another company up to nine years, NASA estimates, and seven years for an alternative manufacturer of the RS-25 engines for the core stage produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Neither the NASA statement nor the pre-solicitation notice discussed the value of the EPOC award. In a request for information last October, NASA said it was seeking “a substantial savings of 50% or more off of the current industry baseline per flight cost” for SLS through the new contract, but did not disclose that baseline cost. “I think we’d be really happy at some stage if we could get our launch and processing costs to between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, but we’ve got a little ways to go,” Lueders said in a call with reporters last November about its plans for EPOC . A report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General last November estimated one SLS costs $2.2 billion, accounting for a little more than half the total cost of $4.1 billion for a single Artemis mission that includes the Orion spacecraft and ground systems. The report was skeptical that NASA could achieve significant near-term cost savings, and recommended NASA “monitor the commercial development of heavy-lift space flight systems and begin discussions of whether it makes financial and strategic sense to consider these options” as alternatives to SLS. NASA stated in the pre-solicitation notice that it expects to make the EPOC award to Deep Space Transport by the end of 2023.
The Space Force set a goal to replace custom-built ground stations with a common system that can be used with multiple types of satellites. But the effort is running into roadblocks due to the technical and management challenges of integrating satellites with a new ground architecture, Space Systems Command official Claire Leon said July 14. “The enterprise ground progress has not been as great as we have wanted it to be. So we are trying to figure out what the vision is, what every program is doing and how to bring all that together,” said Leon, who is the director of the Space Systems Integration Office at the Space Systems Command. Speaking at a National Security Space Association online forum, Leon mentioned satellite ground systems as one of the top challenges for her office, which was recently established by SSC Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein to help bring cohesion to space programs that have been managed in silos. A move away from customized ground systems has been strongly advocated by senior Air Force officials who argue that constellations of missile-warning, communication, weather and GPS satellites should be operated on the ground using common standards to save money and simplify operators’ training. Leon said the Space Operations Command, which oversees satellite operations, continues to push for a shift to a common ground system but there is still a lot of work to be done. Space Systems Command recently held a two-day workshop on enterprise ground, Leon said. “There’s been a mandate to transition to an enterprise ground system and get away from ‘every program kind of doing their own thing’ with respect to ground.” Need for ‘governance process’ A key barrier to the adoption of EGS is that the Space Force lacks a “governance process” for integrating software onto a hardware platform and for deciding what mission unique software should be developed by contractors, and how it should be integrated, she said. “The demand signal coming out of the workshop is that we need to work harder on governance and interfaces to enable programs to be more successful.” “The mandate is really to address the concerns of SPOC [Space Operations Command] and do a better job at not having 50 different ground systems that look different to operators,” said Leon. Another challenge is figuring out a realistic schedule and timeline, she said. “We can’t transition everything all at once. So what programs are more important to address near term and what ones are more important to address long term?” Leon noted that there are multiple pieces to enterprise ground services — like antenna as a service, or flight dynamics — and trying to address them all across many programs is impractical. “So then again, which ones do you want to do first, because you can’t do everything all at once.” Another goal of EGS is putting systems in place that are easier to maintain and do not tie the Space Force to a specific contractor so there’s more flexibility, said Leon. The push for a common ground system began in 2018 with a memo signed by then Air Force Space Command Commander Gen. John Raymond, declaring EGS the “common platform to execute satellite operations for tactical command and control of space assets.” To ensure information can be shared, EGS will require “machine to machine exchanges” in all ground systems. They also must use universal messaging standards.” The first EGS prototype was developed by Parsons as a suite of satellite command-and-control services that uses open standards and a common platform to operate different constellations.
The successful conclusion of the Artemis 1 mission Dec. 11 won widespread support from politicians and industry, a sign of broad support for a program that has suffered extensive delays. The Artemis 1 mission wrapped up 25 and a half days after its liftoff on the inaugural flight of the Space Launch System with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California. After post-splashdown tests and examinations, crews secured the capsule inside of the recovery ship USS Portland about six hours after splashdown. The ship should arrive at the port of San Diego, California, Dec. 13. The success of the overall mission won praise from the White House and members of Congress, often using similar language. “I applaud the @NASA team for their work on completing a successful Artemis 1 mission. We’re one step closer to returning astronauts to the moon,” tweeted Vice President Kamala Harris, who chairs the National Space Council. “From launch to splashdown and its ongoing recovery, the successful Artemis 1 mission marks a new era in space exploration,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the chair of the House Science Committee who is retiring at the end of the year, in a statement. “We are now one step closer to returning American astronauts to the moon.” “Success! We are one giant leap closer to returning Americans to the moon and a new era of deep space exploration,” tweeted Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), ranking member of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee. His district includes the Johnson Space Center. The praise came despite years of delays in the development of the key Artemis programs, Orion and SLS. The 2010 NASA authorization act directed NASA to have the SLS ready for its first launch by the end of 2016, but suffered lengthy delays. Orion was also not immune to problems, particularly with its European-built service module. “NASA is basically nonpartisan,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the post-splashdown briefing of the broad support he sees for the agency, reiterating a point he often made when he was a senator. “R’s and D’s [Republicans and Democrats] alike come together to join us.” While the next SLS/Orion mission, Artemis 2, is still about two years away, Nelson said he was not concerned about losing support currently evident for Artemis and NASA in general on Capitol Hill. “That support is enduring,” he said, predicting it will be sustained by an expected announcement of the crew for Artemis 2 in early 2023. International and industry support Nelson also pointed to strong international support for Artemis, offering an anecdote about how, when he was in Paris in September for the International Astronautical Congress, he received word that French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to meet with him. “He’s a space aficionado,” he said of Macron, noting that on a recent state visit to the U.S., Macron visited NASA Headquarters with Vice President Harris . “The success of the first Artemis mission further strengthens the international partnership going forward to the moon,” said David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency, in a statement after splashdown. “As a child of Apollo, it is humbling to be part of the human return to the moon thanks to the huge efforts over many years by the joint team of ESA and industry that have designed, built and flown the first European Service Module.” “We just witnessed the first of a multi-mission campaign aimed at bringing sustainable human presence to the moon’s orbit and its surface,” said Lisa Campbell, president of the Canadian Space Agency, in a statement. Her agency did not have a major role in Artemis 1 but will have an astronaut on Artemis 2 and another on a later Artemis mission in exchange for providing the Canadarm3 robotic arm system for the lunar Gateway. “Our space legacy is more alive than ever: Canadians of all ages and backgrounds are eagerly waiting to see how this new chapter unfolds.” Space industry groups also weighed in. “The success of the Artemis 1 mission validates the readiness of systems supporting human missions to deep space,” said Frank Slazer, president and chief executive of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. “If there was any question about whether NASA and its industry partners were ready to go back to the moon, Artemis 1 has definitively answered ‘Yes!’ For the first time in nearly 50 years, we’ll be ready to send people back to the moon – and soon.” That return to the human surface will rely on another company, SpaceX, which has more than $4 billion in NASA awards to develop lunar lander versions of its Starship vehicle and demonstrate them on the Artemis 3 and 4 missions. SpaceX was not directly involved in the Artemis 1 mission and neither the company nor its leadership publicly commented on the conclusion of the mission. Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, has been consumed in recent weeks with his acquisition of social media company Twitter, devoting nearly all of his time on reshaping the company while also courting controversy. That included a tweet early Dec. 11 that called for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retiring director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for unstated offenses while also appearing to mock the use of preferred pronouns. When a reporter asked Nelson about those comments at the post-splashdown briefing, Nelson and other NASA officials said they could not understand the reporter’s question because of interference on the telephone line, although the question was largely intelligible to other reporters listening in. Another reporter in the room approached Nelson after the briefing to ask about any concerns the agency had about Musk. Nelson said he had spoken recently with Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, who reassured him that Musk’s work at Twitter would not be a distraction to SpaceX. In response to another question at the briefing, Nelson said he checks in frequently with Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, to see if Starship development was meeting its benchmarks. “And the answer that comes back to me is yes, and in some cases exceeding,” he said. That includes an uncrewed lunar landing in late 2023, he claimed, although SpaceX has yet to attempt a Starship orbital launch.
NASA and the European Space Agency have selected a location on Mars to cache samples collected by the Perseverance rover, one step in the overall process of returning those samples to Earth. NASA announced Oct. 28 that the agencies agreed to deposit some of the 14 samples collected by Perseverance to date at a location dubbed “Three Forks” in Jezero Crater, near the remnants of an ancient river delta that once flowed into the crater. Those samples, encased in metallic tubes, will be picked up for return to Earth by later missions. “NASA and ESA have reviewed the proposed site and the Mars samples that will be deployed for this cache as soon as next month. When that first tube is positioned on the surface, it will be a historic moment in space exploration,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said in a statement. The sample cache is part of a revised strategy for the overall Mars Sample Return campaign announced in July . That strategy does away with a European “fetch” rover that was to pick up samples cached by Perseverance. Instead, it will rely on Perseverance as the primary means of returning samples to a future lander, which will then launch them into orbit to be picked up by an ESA orbiter for return to Earth. This cache serves as a backup should Perseverance be unable to return to the lander. That lander will have two small helicopters, based on the Ingenuity helicopter accompanying Perseverance, that will fly to the cache, collect sample tubes, and return them to the lander. “The depot is risk mitigation if the rover does not make the long journey” to the lander, said Francois Spoto, the Mars exploration group leader at ESA, during a presentation about Mars Sample Return at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris Sept. 20. Perseverance had been taking duplicate samples from each site so that one set can be kept on Perseverance and the other deposited in the cache. “Once we’ve done that, we’ll stop double sampling and continue to build the cache to be retained on Perseverance,” said Jeff Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return program at NASA, at the IAC presentation. In the announcement of the sample cache plans, NASA also said that on Oct. 1 the Mars Sample Return program entered Phase B, which covers preliminary design work and completion of key technologies needed for the future lander mission. Both NASA and ESA officials have remained reticent to discuss the costs of the revised Mars Sample Return architecture, including any cost savings from deleting the fetch rover and a second lander that would have delivered it. NASA generally does not provide formal cost and schedule estimates for a mission until it is ready to enter Phase C, where the design is finalized and fabrication of components begins. Asked about the costs of Mars Sample Return during their IAC presentation, neither Gramling nor Spoto would give a specific cost or range of costs. However, they did estimate that ESA’s share would be 15-20% of the overall cost.
KIHEI, Hawaii — NASA and SpaceX announced Sept. 29 they will study a concept to send a Crew Dragon spacecraft to reboost, and possibly service, the Hubble Space Telescope to extend its life. In a briefing called on several hours’ notice, NASA and SpaceX officials, along with billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, announced an unfunded Space Act Agreement to explore the possibility of at least reboosting Hubble’s orbit using a Crew Dragon spacecraft. The agreement came after SpaceX approached NASA about the concept. “We want to know what the possibilities are,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, at the briefing. “Commercial partnerships, we have learned, have opened the door to new and exciting opportunities for NASA science and tech exploration by offering new ideas and innovative ways to support them.” The baseline concept would involve a Crew Dragon spacecraft docking with Hubble, possibly using a capture mechanism installed on the last shuttle servicing mission in 2009, and raising its orbit. That orbit has gradually decayed from atmospheric drag and is currently at about 535 kilometers, said Patrick Crouse, Hubble Space Telescope project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Continued decay creates a 50% probability that Hubble will reenter by 2037. He said one goal of such a mission would be to raise Hubble’s orbit back to 600 kilometers, where it was when it was deployed from the shuttle more than three decades ago. “If we were to get back to 600 kilometers,” he said, “you’d add easily 15 to perhaps 20 years of orbit life to the mission.” Hubble remains in good operating condition, and NASA expects the spacecraft to continue to operate through the end of the decade and perhaps into early next decade. However, both NASA and SpaceX said they would at least consider the ability to do some kind of servicing to the telescope during such a mission. “We wouldn’t anticipate being at the level of complexity of some of the servicing missions that were accomplished with the shuttle and NASA astronaut crews from the past,” said Crouse, “but we’re excited to look at what opportunities are available with our commercial partners.” The study will take about six months, said Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX. “Part of it is going to be figuring out the cost and figuring out a little bit of the schedule, what it’s going to take to make this happen and make it happen safely,” she said. The primary focus of the study will be the technical aspects of a reboost or servicing mission, she said. “Everything is on the table,” she added, including whether the mission would require astronauts. If NASA and SpaceX do go forward with a mission, it could be part of the Polaris Program, an initiative that SpaceX and Isaacman announced early this year for a series of crewed flights on Crew Dragon and, later, Starship, to test human spaceflight capabilities. Isaacman, who led the private Inspiration4 Crew Dragon mission a year ago, will command the first Polaris mission, Polaris Dawn, now scheduled for the first quarter of 2023. That flight would include the first spacewalk from a Crew Dragon spacecraft. Isaacman suggested at the briefing that a Hubble reboost or servicing mission could be the second Polaris mission. “We’d be taking advantage of everything that’s being developed within the commercial space industry to potentially execute on a mission, should the study warrant it, with little or no potential cost to the government,” he said. While SpaceX has extensive experience with flying Dragon missions to the International Space Station, it has yet to attempt any kind of satellite reboost or servicing. At the same time, several companies are developing, or have already demonstrated, robotic in-space servicing technologies. One example is Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle, two of which are docked to Intelsat communications satellites in geostationary orbit to extend their lives. “We at NASA will look at any or all options that are in the interest of the taxpayer,” Zurbuchen said when asked how NASA would consider those other satellite servicing options. In a statement, NASA said that “other companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model.” One industry source, speaking on background, said NASA should take a more formal approach for studying any servicing options than the current agreement with SpaceX. That would start with a request for information seeking input from companies on how they could reboost or service Hubble. NASA officials defended the current study. “When people come in with ideas for things that would help us,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, “it’s not an unusual thing to go do feasibility studies.” “We’re working on crazy ideas all the time,” added Zurbuchen. “That’s what we’re supposed to do. I hope you agree. We’re always supposed to push the envelope.”
NASA has canceled a greenhouse gas monitoring mission once intended to fly as a commercial hosted payload after the mission lost its ride to orbit and suffered severe cost overruns. NASA announced Nov. 29 it was canceling GeoCarb, a mission the agency selected in 2016 to monitor carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere over most of North and South America. GeoCarb was part of the Earth Ventures line of small Earth science missions with an original cost cap of about $170 million. GeoCarb was originally designed to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial geostationary communications satellite. When GeoCarb passed its confirmation review at the end of 2019 , NASA planned to work with SES Government Solutions, the subsidiary of satellite operator SES that works with U.S. government customers, to find a suitable host for GeoCarb that would provide coverage over the Americas. At the time, NASA expected GeoCarb to be ready for launch in 2022. In February, though, NASA announced it was no longer pursuing a hosted payload opportunity for GeoCarb . The agency said that market research showed no suitable hosted payload opportunities for the instrument through the end of 2024. Instead, NASA had started a new effort, called the GeoCarb Access to Space (GCATS) project, to procure a spacecraft and launch for the payload. However, on Sept. 20 NASA disclosed in a procurement filing that it was canceling the request for proposal for GCATS, but did not a give a reason. NASA spokesperson Tylar Greene later said that NASA elected not to award a contract for GCATS “due to adjustments in the mission timeline and the instrument delivery date.” In NASA’s announcement, the agency cited technical concerns with the mission as well as cost performance and the availability of other sources of greenhouse gas monitoring data as reasons for canceling GeoCarb. The agency said that the estimated lifecycle cost of the mission had grown to more than $600 million, and it had spent $173 million on GeoCarb to date. “Decisions like this are difficult, but NASA is dedicated to making careful choices with the resources provided by the people of the United States,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said in the statement announcing the cancellation. “We look forward to accomplishing our commitment to state-of-the-art climate observation in a more efficient and cost-effective way.” That includes extending operations of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 instrument on the International Space Station, performing more airborne observations and obtaining data from international and commercial partners. In September, NASA awarded a contract to Canadian company GHGSat, which operates several satellites that collect greenhouse gas data, as part of the agency’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition program. NASA said it will also prioritize a greenhouse gas mission as the first in its new Earth System Explorers line of competed Earth science missions, a recommendation of the Earth science decadal survey. NASA plans to issue a formal announcement of opportunity for that first mission in March 2023, with several proposals selected for concept studies in early 2024 and a final selection in mid-2025. “We are committed to making key methane and carbon dioxide observations, integrating them with measurements collected by other national, international, and private sector missions, and making actionable information available to communities and organizations who need it to inform their decisions,” Karen St. Germain, NASA Earth science division director, said in the GeoCarb cancellation statement.
LAUREL, Md. — A SpaceX Starship that will land on the moon an on uncrewed test flight may only be a “skeleton” of the version of that will carry people on the Artemis 3 mission, NASA says. In a presentation at the annual meeting of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) here Aug. 23, Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager of the Human Landing System (HLS) program, said the Starship that performs that uncrewed landing demo mission won’t necessarily be identical to the vehicle that is used to transport astronauts to and from the surface of the moon on Artemis 3 as soon as 2025. “For the uncrewed demo, the goal is to have a safe landing,” she said. “The uncrewed demo is not necessarily planned to be the same Starship that you see for the crewed demo. It’s going to be a skeleton because it just has to land. It does not have to take back off.” “Clearly we want it to,” she added, referring to a takeoff, “but the requirements are for it to land.” That uncrewed landing, scheduled for no earlier than 2024, is a key test ahead of the crewed Artemis 3 mission. Watson-Morgan said that the uncrewed landing will take place in the south polar regions of the moon, but no decisions have been made on a landing site, including whether it will be one of the 13 regions NASA announced Aug. 19 would be considered for the Artemis 3 mission . One factor in choosing a landing site, she said, was to “preserve science in the future” by not disrupting any Artemis 3 landing sites. There will be an opportunity to do science on the uncrewed demo landing. That includes flying a suite of sensors and imagers “and potentially one payload,” she said, but didn’t specify what kinds of sensors or payloads might fly. The types of payloads NASA were interested in flying include those “that don’t require a tremendous amount of upkeep.” However, she and others said they want to maximize the performance that Starship offers on lunar landings, with the potential to carry large payloads. While the original HLS competition had a requirement to carry only 100 kilograms of cargo to the surface and back in addition to two astronauts, said Logan Kennedy, HLS surface lead at NASA, the later “sustained” missions will increase that to 182 kilograms to the surface and 160 kilograms back, with a goal of 1,000 kilograms down and back. “We’re going to leverage all that we can on this mission to try and take up and down as much as we can, using the size of their system,” Watson-Morgan said. She said SpaceX has been a “fantastic partner” on HLS so far, with close cooperation between the company and the agency. SpaceX has been involved in the Artemis 3 landing site selection process to ensure potential landing regions are compatible with Starship. NASA, in turn, has its personnel, including astronauts, visiting SpaceX facilities for reviews and hardware tests. That includes one of the unique attributes of Starship, the elevator required to go from the crew cabin to the surface. “It’s a very tall lander. It doesn’t look like the traditional landers that we’ve all seen in the past, so it can be hard to reconcile that mentally,” Watson-Morgan said. She assured scientists at the meeting that the elevator design was robust, saying it was “multi-fault-tolerant” and designed for operating in lunar conditions. In his presentation, Kennedy showed images of a full-scale mockup of the elevator that SpaceX built for “crew-in-the-loop” tests, including ones where astronauts wore simulated spacesuits to test the ability to get in and out of the elevator. Some aspects of the overall Starship lunar landing architecture, though, remain unclear. The concept of operations for the lander involves SpaceX launching a Starship into low Earth orbit that will serve as a fuel depot, which is filled by subsequent Starship launches that serve as tankers. The lunar lander Starship will then launch, fill its tanks at the depot, and head to lunar orbit. Neither NASA nor SpaceX, though, have said exactly how many launches will be required for a single Starship lunar landing mission, an issue of contention during protests of the SpaceX HLS award last year by Blue Origin. “How many? However many is needed. That is how many we’ll launch,” Watson-Morgan said. NASA’s requirements for HLS missions end once the astronauts are returned to Orion. “We don’t tell them to do anything with it,” Kennedy said of the fate of the Starship lander after returning astronauts from the lunar surface. “That’s going to be up to SpaceX.”
The first two satellites of Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation — Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2 — will launch on the maiden flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, the company announced Oct. 12. ULA said the first flight of Vulcan will be in the first quarter of 2023 from the company’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Vulcan is years behind schedule due to delays in the development and testing of the Blue Origin BE-4 engine that powers the vehicle’s first stage. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno said in a news release Oct. 12 that the first Vulcan launch vehicle is nearing completion at ULA’s factory in Decatur, Alabama and is awaiting installation of its BE-4 engines. “We expect to ship the completed vehicle to the launch site in November,” said ULA. The first Vulcan mission is now expected to carry payload customer Astrobotic, which is flying the Peregrine lunar lander to the moon for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The rocket also will launch Celestis payloads and Amazon’s two demonstration satellites. Vulcan Centaur needs to complete two commercial orbital missions successfully in order to get certified to launch U.S. military and intelligence satellites under the National Security Space Launch program. Having Vulcan certified as soon as possible is critical for the Defense Department. ULA currently launches NSSL missions with its workhorse Atlas 5 rocket but DoD cannot buy any Atlas 5 launches beyond 2022 due to a congressional ban on the use of Russian rocket engines. The Atlas 5 uses the Russian-built RD-180s engines so it’s imperative for the company to start transitioning to Vulcan and fly a domestically produced engine. Mark Peller, ULA’s vice president of major development, said in a statement: “We are committed to ensuring we fly the first certification mission and stay on schedule to achieve U.S. Space Force certification of Vulcan in advance of our first national security space mission in 4th quarter 2023.” The success of Vulcan’s first launch also is significant for the vehicle’s future as a commercial launcher. ULA is under contract to provide 47 launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation, including 38 on Vulcan. Launching two prototype satellites on the first Vulcan mission “will give us practical experience working together ahead of those launches,” Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper, said in a news release. “Our prototype satellites will be ready this year, and we look forward to flying with ULA.” “We’ll use findings from the mission to help finalize design, deployment, and operational plans for our commercial satellite system,” he said. Amazon has secured up to 92 launches with ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin to deploy its constellation of 3,236 satellites. The company plans to retain its agreement with ABL Space Systems to launch two satellites. ABL was originally booked to deploy Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2 on its new RS1 rocket which is still in development and nearing its first launch.
BlackSky Technology unveiled satellite tasking July 12 through Esri’s ArcGIS Online geographic mapping platform at the Esri User Conference in San Diego. After working closely together, BlackSky and Esri released BlackSky Tasking, a cloud-based application that allows Esri and BlackSky customers to task a satellite and receive the imagery in ArcGIS Online. “It is first time that users have the ability to do dynamic monitoring and satellite tasking through ArcGIS Online leveraging BlackSky’s constellation and platform,” BlackSky Chief Commercial Officer Amy Minnick told SpaceNews. “Through that interface and through BlackSky’s capabilities, you can task a satellite to monitor locations from the time the sun comes up to the time the sun goes down, virtually hourly, in many locations around the world, and then get that data back down to the user within hours.” Earth observation companies are reinventing satellite tasking to appeal to new and established customers. “The world needs the ability to do dynamic tasking right now,” Minnick said, citing the importance of monitoring climate change, global supply chains and crises occurring within countries and across borders. BlackSky joined forces with Esri due in part to ArcGIS Online’s millions of users in 300,000 organizations. BlackSky was eager “to integrate that dynamic tasking capability with a company of the caliber of Esri and then deliver it to end customers around the world that need insights that matter to them,” Minnick said. Richard Cooke, Esri global business development director, said in a statement that imagery captured arrives “within hours” and “can immediately be leveraged using ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online to perform analytic workflows that provide analysis for informed decision making.” BlackSky operates a constellation of 14 Earth observation satellites. The company offers customers access to data from its own constellations and other sources through its cloud-based Spectra AI platform. “By opening access to BlackSky’s Spectra AI tasking through our API integration, Esri users can incorporate BlackSky’s imagery directly into their current workflows by ordering imagery and having ready-to-use imagery delivered with very little training required,” Minnick said in a statement.
After more than two years of delays, NASA and Rocket Lab are finally ready to conduct the first Electron launch from Wallops Island in Virginia on Dec. 16. The launch, called “Virginia is for Launch Lovers” by the company, is scheduled from the company’s Launch Complex (LC) 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops during a two-hour window that opens at 6 p.m. Eastern Dec. 16. There is an 85% chance of favorable weather for the launch that day as well as on a backup day Dec. 17. The mission will place into orbit three satellites for HawkEye 360, which operates a constellation of spacecraft that perform radio-frequency surveillance. HawkEye 360 signed a contract in April for three Electron launches , including the first Electron launch from Wallops. The scheduled launch comes three years after Rocket Lab declared Launch Complex 2 complete . At that time, it expected to perform the first launch there in the second quarter of 2020 for the Defense Department’s Space Test Program. However, delays in development by NASA of a new autonomous flight termination system (AFTS) required for Electron launches from Wallops delayed that first flight by more than two years. At a Dec. 14 online briefing, David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said the final safety certification of what’s called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU) was originally scheduled in time to support a mid-2020 first launch from LC-2. During final checks of the software, engineers discovered numerous errors in the code. In the fall of 2020, NASA established a “cross-agency” team that included the U.S. Space Force and Federal Aviation Administration to fix the software and go through a certification process, he said. It took more than a year to develop the test procedures and scripts needed to ensure the software met range safety requirements. By early 2022, NAFTU was ready for independent certification testing. “As part of that, as normally happens in I&T [integration and testing], you find errors or bugs that needed to be fixed, and that’s what we did,” he said. “We knocked down each one of those challenges, one by one, and we completed independent testing in the summer of 2022.” The system completed an independent certification led by the chief engineer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in October. “As soon as we completed that, we turned to supporting Peter [Beck] and the fabulous Rocket Lab team” as the company modified NAFTU for use on Electron. Rocket Lab’s implementation of NAFTU, which the company calls Pegasus, has received approval from the FAA for the upcoming launch. Pierce said NASA still needs to complete “cleaning up some of the paperwork” for full certification of NAFTU from the FAA, which he expects to be complete by the end of the month. He said there is some additional final paperwork to complete for the Electron launch, in the form of additional analyses by a joint NASA-Rocket Lab team. “What we’ve been doing over the past couple weeks is following up with answers to questions to show how NASA Wallops validated the combined response to our flight safety plan to the FAA,” he said. That work will be complete before a Dec. 15 launch readiness review. NAFTU will be available to other range users to reduce the number and cost of traditional range safety assets and support higher flight rates. Eighteen companies have requested access to the software, Pierce said, but Rocket Lab will be the first to use it on the upcoming Electron launch. Rocket Lab has been using its own AFTS for more than 20 Electron launches from its original launch site, LC-1 in New Zealand. “It is a significant reduction in range costs and range equipment,” Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said at the briefing. “AFTS is a huge game-changer.” A successful launch would finally bring into service LC-2, which Beck said will enable the company to increase its launch rate, of about one per month for most of 2022, in 2023. He offered few specifics about upcoming launches from Wallops at the briefing, but in an earnings call Nov. 9 executives said they anticipated performing 14 Electron launches in 2023 , four to six of which would be at LC-2. Most customers will be able to use either LC-1 or LC-2, he said, and can move between them. “There are some customers that have a U.S. launch requirement,” primarily U.S. government agencies, he said, requiring them to use LC-2. Beck said the company set up in Virginia, rather than at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station or Kennedy Space Center in Florida, because of the “quietness of the range” or lack of other launches from Wallops. The site currently hosts two Northrop Grumman Antares launches a year along with an occasional Minotaur launch by that company, as well as about a dozen sounding rocket launches a year. “KSC is an amazing range, but I think everybody has to agree it’s pretty busy,” he said. The company also plans to use Wallops for its Neutron reusable launch vehicle, which will be produced at a factory just outside the Wallops gates. “We can achieve almost the same trajectories out of Virginia and the range is not nearly as busy. There’s a lot of room to grow.”
NASA is delaying the next commercial crew mission to the International Space Station by nearly a month after the Falcon 9 booster that will launch it was damaged during transport across the country for testing. NASA announced July 21 that the Crew-5 mission is now scheduled for launch no earlier than Sept. 29, after previously being scheduled for early September. The spacecraft will transport NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina to the station. The revised launch date, NASA said in the statement, “will allow SpaceX to complete hardware processing.” Crew-5 will now arrive at the ISS after a Soyuz crew handover in mid-September, when Soyuz MS-22 arrives with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio. Soyuz MS-21 will return with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Sergey Korsakov and Denis Matveev. The Crew-5 launch will use a new Falcon 9 booster, a relatively rare event given SpaceX’s extensive reuse of boosters. NASA said in a statement that SpaceX had to remove the rocket’s interstage — the section between the booster and upper stage — and some instrumentation after they were damaged during transport from SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California, to its booster testing site in McGregor, Texas. SpaceX performed inspections and testing of the booster to confirm the damage was limited to the interstage, work that NASA said it reviewed. The booster will now undergo regular stage testing at McGregor ahead of certification for flight. Neither SpaceX nor NASA disclosed when the booster was damaged. At a July 13 prelaunch briefing for the CRS-25 cargo Dragon mission to the station, Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said they were still planning a launch of Crew-5 at the beginning of September. However, at a July 20 briefing about the Artemis 1 mission, NASA officials said the launch had slipped. That mission has three potential launch dates of Aug. 29, Sept. 2 and Sept. 5, which raised questions of potential conflicts with Crew-5 launching in early September. “Before Crew-5 slipped, we were working closely with them,” Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said of discussions with the commercial crew program about coordinating launches. “We’re going to put the same thing into practice if we end up going towards the end of September.” Ironically, NASA has become increasingly comfortable flying astronauts on reused Falcon 9 boosters and Crew Dragon spacecraft. The Crew-4 mission that launched to the station in April used a Falcon 9 booster making its fourth flight. “As both NASA and SpaceX have gained experience with working together and SpaceX has accumulated a flight history on both the Falcon 9 booster and Dragon capsule, NASA has been thinking carefully about reuse and their certification process for reuse,” said Sandra Magnus, a member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, during a July 21 meeting of the panel. “As a result, NASA has determined they are comfortable with up to a five-time reuse for both the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon capsule,” she said.
SEOUL, South Korea — Hyundai Motor is moving to develop a vehicle for lunar surface exploration. The Korean carmaker and its sister company Kia Motors formed a consortium July 27 with six state-funded research institutes here to explore the concept of lunar exploration mobility and core technologies required. They will also layout strategies for sending the vehicle to the moon and operating it once there. The six partner institutes are: “We will expand the scope of human movement experience beyond traditional means of transport and beyond the bounds of Earth to further contribute to the progress of humankind and help create a better future,” said Kim Yong-wha, executive vice president of Hyundai, in a July 27 statement . Hyundai and Kia will contribute to the mission with their robotic technologies and software and hardware design expertise. Hyundai has bolstered its competitiveness in robotics. The company acquired a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics , an American engineering and robotics design company, in June 2021. Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot dog, named NeBula-SPOT , was recognized by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for its ability to autonomously explore hundreds of meters of Martian-like caves with no prior information about the map or features of the environment. In December 2020 , NASA scientists suggested the idea of sending a modified version of the robot dog to Mars to navigate treacherous terrain and subsurface caves, which wheeled rovers never could. On top of this, Hyundai has developed wearable robots, artificial intelligence-powered service robots and mobile robots through its robotics-specialized internal laboratory, Robotics LAB . Hyundai said the consortium would start working in August but didn’t share further details. 
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — A launch vehicle in development for more than a decade is now less than a day from attempting to lift off for the first time on the Artemis 1 mission. At an Aug. 28 briefing, agency officials said launch preparations remained on track for liftoff of the Space Launch System, carrying the Orion spacecraft, at 8:33 a.m. Eastern at the beginning of a two-hour launch window. Forecasts project an 80% chance of acceptable weather at the start of the window, decreasing to 60% at the end. Jeff Spaulding, senior NASA test director for the mission, said there were no effects from several lightning strikes at the vicinity of Launch Complex 39B the previous afternoon, including some that hit lightning protection towers surrounding the pad. “Everything to date looks good from a vehicle perspective,” he said, noting the strikes were not strong enough to warrant significant retests of systems. The only issue teams were looking at was helium pressure in a ground system that was lower than expected, but still within requirements. Crews were scheduled to check the system and look for a possible leak later in the day. “We’re within tolerance on being able to support us for launch,” he said. Spaulding declined to give specific odds for a launch Aug. 29. “My thoughts are that we look great for tomorrow,” he said. “I love the fact that the weather looks like it’s going to cooperate at the beginning of the window and our job is to get to the beginning of the window.” That will mark the first time NASA has attempted to launch the SLS since the program started more than a decade ago. Congress, in a 2010 NASA authorization act, directed NASA to develop a vehicle it called the Space Launch System capable of placing at least 70 metric tons into low Earth orbit and of being enhanced later to 130 metric tons. The act set a goal of “operational capability” for the initial version of the vehicle no later than the end of 2016. SLS, though suffered years of development delays that pushed back the first launch, originally called Exploration Mission 1 and later renamed Artemis 1. Few are better placed to reflect on those delays than the current NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, who as a senator in 2010 helped craft the authorization bill that established the SLS. “I would simply say to you that space is hard,” Nelson said when asked about what lessons NASA learned from the SLS delays that the agency would seek to apply to future elements of the overall Artemis effort. “We are developing new systems and new technologies, and it takes money and it takes time.” SLS, though, was billed on reusing existing shuttle-era technologies. The core stage is a version of the shuttle’s external tank with four RS-25 engines, previously flown on the shuttle orbiter, in its base. The rocket uses five-segment versions of the four-segment solid rocket boosters flown on shuttle. The current SLS upper stage, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, is based on the upper stage used on United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4. He acknowledged that the agency recognized the need to address cost and schedule overruns seen on SLS. That includes, he said, consolidating contracts as well as implementing a program office for its “Moon to Mars” effort “so we can have better coordination there.” Congress, in a NASA authorization act passed in July as part of the CHIPS Act , directed the creation of that program office to oversee the Artemis campaign, addressing concerns in Congress and from agency advisers that there was no Artemis program, in NASA’s program management structure, and no single person running it. Nelson has previously been critical of the cost-plus contracting used for many elements of Artemis, including SLS. At a Senate hearing in May, he cited the cost and schedule overruns on Mobile Launcher 2 , a launch platform for the future Block 1B version of SLS, as an example of the problems with that contracting mechanism. “There is no excuse for cost overruns, but the old way of doing business was cost-plus,” he said then. “Because of the competition we’ve been talking about, we have been moving to fixed-price where we can under procurement law.” NASA published a pre-solicitation notice July 26 for a new contract called Exploration Production and Operations Contract (EPOC) where NASA would buy SLS launch services, rather than the rockets themselves, starting as soon as Artemis 5 in the late 2020s. The contract, which would go to a joint venture of Boeing and Northrop Grumman, is intendd to provide “a more affordable and sustainable exploration framework,” Kathy Lueuders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said at the time. It’s unclear how much cost savings the contract would provide. NASA’s Office of Inspector General estimated last year a single SLS launch costs NASA $2.2 billion, excluding Orion and ground systems. Lueders said last year the agency would be “really happy” to get launch and processing costs down to between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. A successful SLS launch, though, could mitigate critiques of the cost and schedule overruns with the program. Nelson hinted at that when he mentioned at the briefing the success of the James Webb Space Telescope, which also suffered major cost and schedule problems that have been largely forgotten now that the telescope is in operation and producing stunning images and scientifically valuable data. “We’re trying to do these things and, at the same time, do space,” he said. “The proof will be in the pudding, but right now, we’re on the cusp of something that is pretty great. You have been seeing it out there in the hopes and dreams on that pad, 39B, right now.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Supply chain issues have delayed the launch of the first operational satellite in AST SpaceMobile’s cellphone-compatible broadband constellation by about six months to late 2023. The Texas-based company said Aug. 15 its first five satellites, now slated to launch aboard the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will also be 50% smaller than initially planned to avoid further delaying commercial services. They will leverage existing components used for the constellation’s BlueWalker 3 prototype to accelerate production, AST SpaceMobile chief financial officer Sean Wallace said during the company’s financial results. This includes “certain integrated circuit components, navigation controls, and antennas.” In a regulatory filing, AST SpaceMobile said it expects these initial satellites will be “of similar size and weight” to its 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker 3 prototype. BlueWalker 3, which is slated to launch next month, has a 64-square-meter phased array antenna for testing communications with smartphones and other devices at broadband speeds. Although initial BlueBirds would “have design improvements” over BlueWalker 3 “for enhanced power efficiency and throughput designed to increase capacity,” it is unclear how their reduced size will affect planned performance and coverage. The company expects future generations of BlueBirds “to derive greater throughput” by taking advantage of technology improvements and larger antennas. AST SpaceMobile had earlier planned to deploy 20 full-sized BlueBirds in the first two or three quarters of 2023. Rising costs AST SpaceMobile said the first five BlueBirds would also use flexible chips that can be reprogrammed after they are made, while later satellites will migrate to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to increase production efficiencies. “We benefit from this change in mix of satellites as it will enable AST to construct and launch the satellites sooner,” Wallace said. “But this will also result in an increase in cost per satellite due to the current higher cost of these first generation components.” He said the expected cost for AST SpaceMobile’s first 20 BlueBirds increased “a little over 14%” to $16 million per satellite as inflation and rising supply chain prices also take their toll. AST SpaceMobile, which listed shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange in April 2021 after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), said it has enough financial resources to cover operations over the next 12 months despite the mounting costs. The company reported $35 million in operating expenses during the second quarter of 2022, and had $202 million in cash reserves at the end of June. According to the company, the first five BlueBird satellites in low Earth orbit would enable it to start generating revenues from a “limited, noncontinuous” service in certain countries. However, Wallace said AST SpaceMobile will need to raise additional capital to deploy the 20 satellites it needs for the first phase of planned commercial services around the equatorial region. The company did not give an update on the deployment plan for the rest of the constellation. Previously, AST SpaceMobile has outlined plans to deploy 110 satellites before the end of 2024 to achieve “substantial global” mobile coverage. It also has an agreement with SpaceX that provides a framework for ordering additional launches up until the end of 2024. AST SpaceMobile said Aug. 9 that BlueWalker 3 had arrived at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a launch on a Falcon 9 with other passengers in early to mid-September. In November, SpaceX is due to launch two more satellites for startup Lynk Global’s cellphone-compatible broadband network. The Virginia-based startup expects to launch initial commercial services before the end of this year — if it can secure a ride for a fourth operational satellite. This article was edited Aug. 17 with details about AST SpaceMobile’s earlier constellation deployment expectations.
LOGAN, Utah — In-space transportation company Momentus plans to reduce spending to conserve cash while moving ahead with its next series of tug missions. Momentus announced Aug. 11 that its next mission, called Vigoride-5, remains on schedule for a launch on the SpaceX Transporter-6 rideshare mission in November as the company implements fixes in the vehicle’s design after the Vigoride-3 tug suffered problems after its launch. “Right now, we’re on track to launch in November,” said John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, on an earnings call to discuss the company’s second quarter financial results. “We do have a tight schedule to prepare the Vigoride vehicle.” An investigation into the problems with Vigoride-3, which failed to properly deploy its solar panels after launch in May, traced that problem to a mechanical issue with a holddown bracket and connector pin that did not release as intended, Rood said. Body-mounted solar panels are working, but alone don’t produce enough power for normal spacecraft operations. He said that the solar panel deployment mechanism was tested on the ground “dozens of times” before launch. However, a component of that mechanism had “an unknown design flaw and it differed from the test equipment that performed the ground tests on the deployable solar arrays” on that vehicle. Vigoride-3, in addition to producing far less power than planned, has also suffered communications issues. Momentus has not been able to establish two-way communication with the spacecraft since late May when the spacecraft was able to deploy two smallsats. Controllers since then have been broadcasting commands into the blind. The tug deployed four more satellites in July , with three more yet to be deployed. Rood said that the company is implementing “enhanced ground testing” on Vigoride-5 “to make sure that the corrective actions we’ve implemented to address the anomalies we experienced on Vigoride-3 are accomplished.” In addition to Vigoride-5 flying on Transporter-6, Momentus has reserved ports on three Transporter launches in 2023 for additional Vigoride missions, although Rood only mentioned working on Vigoride-5, 6 and 7. “Getting these three missions right over the next 10 months is the highest priority for our company in the framework of our available cash,” he said. Momentus reported negligible revenue in the second quarter and a net loss of $22.9 million. The company ended the quarter with $109 million of cash and cash equivalents. The company used the earnings release to announce plans to cut costs to stretch out its remaining cash. “With these reductions, we now estimate that the cash on our balance sheet should carry us through the end of 2023,” Rood said. While he did not rule out trying to raise more capital, “we believe it’s prudent to plan to extend our existing cash runway given the state of the capital markets.” Those cuts include operational efficiencies and reducing overhead, although the company did not disclose if that meant reducing staff. Momentus also plans to reduce research and development spending on a reusable version of Vigoride that would remain in orbit and perform multiple missions. A reusable Vigoride is still in the company’s plans, Rood said, but “we think it makes sense to reduce company-funded spending on R&D projects like this with longer time frames to produce results in order to conserve cash and extend our runway.” That vehicle would not have been ready before the middle of the decade under its previous spending plans, he added. Those cost reductions, he said, will not affect work on the next three Vigoride spacecraft. “You’ll begin seeing additional cost reductions following those launches.”
A week after the launch of its first space tug, Momentus is still dealing with “anomalies” with the vehicle, but the company’s chief executive remains optimistic those issues will be resolved. Among the payloads on the SpaceX Transporter-5 rideshare mission that launched on a Falcon 9 May 25 was Vigoride-3, the first tug developed by Momentus. The vehicle, primarily a technology demonstration mission, carried nine small satellites from three customers for later deployment. In a statement released late May 27, the company said that while it had established contact with Vigoride, it had “some initial anomalies” engineers were working to resolve. The company said it obtained a special temporary authority from the Federal Communications Commission to use “an unplanned frequency” to assist in resolving those problems. Appearing at a June 1 webinar by IPO-Edge, John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said the company was continuing to deal with “some anomalous behaviors” with Vigoride, but declined to discuss specific problems. “It would be premature for me to comment on the details because the mission is underway and we’re working towards a resolution,” he said. One issue is apparently with the communications system on the vehicle that required the special temporary authority from the FCC. In a filing, the company said that it determined the communications equipment on Vigoride-3 “is erroneously operating on different center frequencies” that prevented it from using frequencies originally licensed for the mission. The spacecraft was licensed to operate at an uplink frequency of 2,075 megahertz and downlink frequency of 8,200 megahertz, but the spacecraft was operating at 2,067.5 and 8,250 megahertz, respectively. The company didn’t explain in the filing why the spacecraft was tuned to the wrong frequencies, but asked permission to operate at the other frequencies for 30 days. It said it would work to set the spacecraft to the originally authorized frequencies. Rood said the problems don’t extend to the spacecraft’s main propulsion system, the microwave electrothermal thruster. “It’s too early in the mission,” he said. “We’ve not yet attempted a test with it.” He said the problems that Vigoride has suffered are not unexpected, comparing this first flight of the vehicle to the sea trials of a new naval vessel. “Obviously, we would have preferred not to have issues,” he said. “However, it’s not uncommon that there are these kinds of issues on the first flight of an article in space.” “We continue to work hard to address those anomalies,” he said, but didn’t give an estimate for when he expected them to be resolved. “This is going to be something that we’re going to evaluate on an ongoing basis.” Despite the problems, he said Momentus was able to deploy two satellites on Vigoride, both from FOSSA Systems, a Spanish company developing an internet-of-things constellation using “PocketQube” satellites five centimeters on a side. FOSSA Systems said it had seven such satellites on the Vigoride tug. An eighth PocketQube is for an undisclosed customer, while the tug also carries SelfieSat, a two-unit cubesat developed by Orbit NTNU, a Norwegian student space organization.
NASA officials say they’re ready to try a new approach to fueling the Space Launch System to prevent the return of leaks that scrubbed an earlier launch attempt even though they are not certain what caused that leak. Preparations are underway for the Sept. 21 tanking test of the SLS at Launch Complex 39B, with loading of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants into the core stage beginning at around 7 a.m. Eastern. After filling the tanks of the core stage and upper stage, controllers will conduct tests of a “kickstart bleed” of hydrogen into the core stage engines and a pre-pressurization test before wrapping up at about 3 p.m. Eastern. The main objective of the test is to confirm that repairs to seals in liquid hydrogen lines into the core stage, as well as other changes in procedures, eliminate a significant leak seen in the second attempt to launch the rocket on the Artemis 1 mission Sept. 3. Controllers saw concentrations of hydrogen in the enclosure around the connection at least two times a limit of 4%. Workers replaced the seals for two liquid hydrogen quick-disconnect fittings. The larger one, 20 centimeters in diameter, has a “witness mark” or indentation associated with foreign object debris, said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager. The size of the indentation was about 0.25 millimeters. “An indentation of that size does provide an opportunity for a pressurized gas to leak through that,” especially hydrogen, he said. However, later in the call agency officials backed away from the hypothesis that the foreign object debris caused the indentation, noting that no debris was recovered. They even hesitated to conclude the indentation was the source of the leak. “There are just so many things that could have created the indentation. We believe that indentation is consistent with the leak, but we don’t fully know that, either,” said John Blevins, NASA SLS chief engineer. Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters, noted the leak did not appear during the first SLS launch attempt Aug. 29. He suggested that multiple factors may have played a role in the leak. “There’s certainly more than one aspect for this condition that we don’t really fully understand,” he said. “We’ve looked at every path possible that could be related to it and making sure that we’ve done everything we can.” That includes a new “kinder, gentler” loading approach for liquid hydrogen, using less pressure to push liquid hydrogen through the lines into the core stage. “We’re trying to minimize both pressure spikes and thermal spikes,” said Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of the Exploration Ground Systems program. “The team feels this helps mitigate some of the risks.” Agency officials said they should know pretty quickly after the test if the new seals and fueling process were successful in preventing a reoccurrence of the leak. However, that alone will not be enough to clear the way for a Sept. 27 launch attempt, the next available opportunity. NASA is still working with the U.S. Space Force, which operates the Eastern Range, to obtain a waiver for the SLS flight termination system (FTS). That system’s certification expired after the last SLS launch attempt. “Right now, we’re still in the process of having technical discussions with the range. It’s been very productive and collaborative. We just need to see where those discussion take us,” Whitmeyer said. A decision on an FTS waiver is not expected until after the tanking test, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in a Sept. 18 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress here. Approval of the FTS waiver, and of a Sept. 27 launch, could come down to the wire. A mission management team meeting is scheduled for Sept. 25, said Sarafin, a “formal decision gate where we will decide on whether we want to proceed that particular attempt.” A decision could come sooner, he added. “It depends on what the outcome of Wednesday is and what, if anything, we need to change or learn between now and then.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Arianespace launched a pair of satellites aiming to improve broadband coverage in the Asia-Pacific region June 22 on the Ariane 5 rocket’s first flight of the year. The rocket lifted off 5:50 p.m. Eastern from the Guiana Space Center spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, carrying Measat-3d for Malaysian operator Measat and GSAT-24 for India. After successfully separating from Ariane 5, both satellites are due to use onboard propulsion to reach final positions in geostationary orbit. This was the 113th overall mission for Ariane 5, and the first since it launched the James Webb Space Telescope Dec. 25. Arianespace said four heavy-lift Ariane 5 vehicles are now remaining before Europe’s next-generation Ariane 6 launcher takes up the baton. The maiden flight for Ariane 6 is currently slated for 2023 following delays. Stéphane Israël, Arianespace’s CEO, said the next Ariane 5 mission is scheduled for Sept. 6 to launch Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS satellite. The next Arianespace launch is slated for July 7 to perform the maiden flight for Vega C, the successor to Europe’s small launch vehicle Vega. Measat-3d is due to replace two aging satellites for Measat, including one that started drifting out of its geostationary orbit slot in the middle of last year. Europe’s Airbus Defence and Space built Measat-3d, which aims to provide broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits per second in areas with limited or no terrestrial network throughout Malaysia. In addition to broadband, the satellite aims to provide redundancy and additional capacity for video distribution in the Asia-Pacific region. Measat-3d also carries a navigation payload that Korean satellite operator KTSAT plans to use to improve air traffic control in South Korea. Indian space agency ISRO built GSAT-24 for its state-funded commercial arm NewSpace India Limited, which plans to use the satellite for telecoms and broadcast services in India.
Japanese lunar lander developer ispace is in the final phases of preparations for the launch of its first lunar lander mission, a flight that will include a NASA lunar cubesat mission as a secondary payload. Tokyo-based ispace announced Oct. 31 that its HAKUTO-R M1 lander had arrived at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for final preparations for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9. The spacecraft arrived by plane from Germany, where it had completed final assembly and testing. The company previously targeted a launch between Nov. 9 and 15, but said in the announcement that it had postponed the launch to no earlier than Nov. 22. The new launch date “allows for best preparation for the mission when considering the fuel-loading schedule for the lander and launch date availability,” the company stated. The M1 lander is carrying government and commercial payloads, including Rashid, a small lunar rover developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in the United Arab Emirates, and a “transformable lunar robot” the size of a baseball from Japan’s space agency JAXA. Other payloads include cameras and technology demonstrations. As the name suggests, the M1 lander is the first in a series planned by ispace. The next mission, M2, is tentatively scheduled for launch in 2024. The Falcon 9 launch of the ispace lander will carry a NASA cubesat as a secondary payload. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Oct. 28 that its Lunar Flashlight cubesat was being prepared to launch on that flight. The 6U cubesat will go into a highly elliptical orbit that will take it within 15 kilometers of the surface over the south pole, allowing it shine lasers into the craters there to look for evidence of water ice. Lunar Flashlight was originally slated to fly with a dozen other cubesats as secondary payloads on Artemis 1, the first launch of the Space Launch System. However, problems with the propulsion system on the cubesat prevented it from being completed in time to meet a delivery deadline last fall for being integrated on the rocket. Last spring, NASA said it planned to fly Lunar Flashlight instead as a secondary payload on another Falcon 9 launching IM-1, the first lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, carrying a set of payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program as well as commercial customers. That mission, once set to launch by the end of this year, has now slipped to March 2023. In a statement to SpaceNews Oct. 31, NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program said that it worked with a launch broker “who placed the spacecraft on the earliest possible suitable launch opportunity based on the launch trajectory.” When launch schedules changed in the fall, the ispace mission became that earliest launch opportunity. Despite missing its original ride, Lunar Flashlight won’t be far behind the cubesats it was to fly with on Artemis 1. NASA is planning a launch of the SLS on that mission no earlier than Nov. 14.
Colorado’s senators in a Sept. 27 to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall argue that a final basing decision on U.S. Space Command needs to be made as soon as possible in light of the Ukraine conflict and China’s expansion in the Pacific The letter marks yet another push by Colorado lawmakers to reverse the Department of the Air Force’s January 2021 recommendation that Space Command, currently located at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, move to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. “A final decision must be based on the imperative to face rapidly evolving threats in space,” says the letter signed by Sens. Michael Bennet (D) and John Hickenlooper (D). U.S. Space Command is responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. military and for protecting those assets from foreign threats. The basing decision has been reviewed by the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office . Neither review found anything improper with the basing process but the IG did ask the Secretary of Defense to look into concerns expressed by senior military officials that relocating Space Command would not allow it to reach “full operational capability,” or FOC, as quickly as if it stayed at Peterson. “The SecDef agreed and stated that he would direct the Secretary of the Air Force to conduct a review of the concerns regarding the USSPACECOM FOC, and to take such steps as the SECAF deems appropriate,” the IG said in its report. Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said last month that he expected the Department of the Air Force to issue a decision in the near future. Dickinson said Space Command, established in August 2019, is trying to get to FOC but needs a basing decision to be finalized so it can move forward. FOC requires the headquarters to be fully staffed and to have a permanent location. Bennet and Hickenlooper point out that the DoD IG and GAO reports said senior military leaders proposed the renovation of Building 1 at Peterson Space Force Base in order to achieve FOC faster and at less cost than a brand-new building. “We request a briefing on your review prior to any final decision to understand how the Air Force has accounted for critical national security and cost implications,” the senators wrote.
SpaceX completed its fourth operational commercial crew mission to the International Space Station Oct. 14 with the safe return of a Crew Dragon spacecraft with four American and European astronauts on board. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville, Florida, at 4:55 p.m. Eastern, less than five hours after undocking from the ISS, a record for fastest return of a Crew Dragon from the ISS. On board the spacecraft were NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren and Jessica Watkins and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The Crew Dragon’s return to Earth was “very nominal,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, in a call with reporters after splashdown, with all four astronauts on good shape. “The entire team did a great job.” NASA had planned for the Crew Dragon to depart the station on Oct. 12 for an Oct. 13 splashdown, but postponed that departure as well as one on the morning of Oct. 13 because of weather at splashdown locations off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of Florida. Weather conditions improved, allowing for Crew Dragon to undock at 12:05 p.m. Eastern Oct. 14 for a brief trip back to Earth. “Weather was a big challenge this week. It’s probably the first time we’ve experienced the dealing with cold fronts” for a Crew Dragon splashdown, said Stich. On Oct. 13, he said NASA had hoped the cold front would clear the region in time to allow a splashdown off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, but it didn’t work out. “We just really couldn’t get comfortable with the winds at landing, so we took it down pretty close and we decided to wave off before we got through depressing the vestibule and using some of the ISS consumables.” The splashdown marks the end of the Crew-4 mission, which started with a Falcon 9 launch from the Kennedy Space Center in the pre-dawn hours April 27, docking with the station less than 16 hours later. The four astronauts spent 170 days in space. The Crew-4 astronauts departed the station nearly eight days after the arrival of another Crew Dragon spacecraft, Endurance, on the Crew-5 mission, delivering American, Japanese and Russian crewmembers to the station. That included Anna Kikina, the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a commercial crew vehicle and the first to go on any U.S. spacecraft in two decades. Crew-4 was the fourth operational, or post-certification, SpaceX commercial crew mission for NASA. In addition to those missions, SpaceX flew the Demo-2 test flight for NASA in 2020 and two private astronaut missions, Inspiration4 and Axiom Space’s Ax-1. Two more private astronaut missions, Polaris Dawn and Ax-2, are scheduled for the first half of 2023. SpaceX will fly another crew rotation mission for NASA, Crew-6, in the spring of 2023. After that, NASA expects to alternate missions with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner assuming that vehicle successfully completes a crewed test flight in early 2023. That would start with Starliner-1 launching in the fall of 2023. Boeing has six crewed missions under its original Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities (CCtCap) contract awarded in 2014. SpaceX also had six flights under its CCtCap contract, but NASA has twice extended that, adding three missions in February and five in August , bringing the total to 14. That extension, and Boeing’s contract, should be sufficient to support ISS operations through its currently planned end of life in 2030.
NASA and the U.S. Space Force have resolved an issue with the flight termination system on the Space Launch System that could have cut short the vehicle’s inaugural launch campaign. In an update late Aug. 12, NASA said it worked with Space Launch Delta 45, the Space Force unit that operates the Eastern Range, to extend the certification of the flight termination system (FTS) on the rocket from 20 to 25 days. That extension will be valid for all attempts for the upcoming Artemis 1 mission. NASA officials previously said the 20-day limit on the FTS, after which the unit would need to be retested, restricted the launch opportunities for the mission . The Eastern Range requires the FTS to be tested 15 days before launch, starting a 20-day clock to conduct the launch. That would have allowed launches to take place on Aug. 29 and Sept. 2, but not a third opportunity Sept. 5. “The clock starts during processing in the VAB,” or Vehicle Assembly Building, said Judd Frieling, NASA Artemis 1 ascent/entry flight director, during a briefing Aug. 5 at the Johnson Space Center. Specifically, that period starts when the batteries for the FTS are installed and charged. Those batteries, he said, were previously certified for only 20 days. “They are in talks with the Eastern Range to extend that certification to a little bit longer than 20 days, hopefully to bring in a third attempt, but those negotiations are still in work.” With the extension of the FTS certification to 25 days, NASA could proceed with a Sept. 5 launch opportunity if needed. That is the last launch opportunity before the current launch period, driven by operational requirements such as a daytime splashdown of the Orion spacecraft at the end of the mission, ends Sept. 6. The FTS, designed to destroy the vehicle if it veers off course after launch, is located in an area of the core stage accessible only in the VAB and not at the pad. If Artemis 1 does not launch by Sept. 5, it would have to roll back to the VAB to recertify the FTS. Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, said in a July briefing that it would be a “real challenge” to complete that work and roll the vehicle back out in time for a launch during the next launch period, which opens Sept. 20 and runs through Oct. 4. With the extension of the FTS certification, NASA is moving into the final steps of vehicle preparations inside the VAB before rolling the vehicle back to Launch Complex 39B. That rollout is scheduled to begin shortly after midnight Eastern Aug. 18.
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — NASA has rescheduled the next attempt to launch the Artemis 1 mission for Sept. 3 after concluding that a faulty temperature sensor may be at the root of the problem that scrubbed the first launch attempt. Agency officials said at an Aug. 30 media teleconference that they’re moving ahead with a second attempt to launch the Space Launch System rocket, carrying the Orion spacecraft, during a two-hour window that opens at 2:17 p.m. Eastern Sept. 3. That is one day later than the agency’s original plan for the next launch attempt. One reason for the additional delay is to give engineers time to work on a hydrogen leak detected in the tail service mast umbilical that loads liquid hydrogen into the core stage. “We want to do some inspections and want to do some retorques,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director. However, that leak was resolved during the Aug. 29 launch attempt and was not the reason the launch was scrubbed. Instead, launch controllers ran into problems with the “kickstart bleed” where liquid hydrogen flows through the four RS-25 engines in the core stage to cool them before launch. One of the four engines, designated engine #3, did not get down to the same temperature as the other three, and efforts to correct the problem failed, prompting the scrub . John Honeycutt, NASA SLS program manager, said the hydrogen bleed is intended to cool the engines to about –250 degrees Celsius. Three of the engines, #1, 2 and 4, got down to about –245 degrees Celsius, but engine #3 was only at about –230 degrees Celsius, according to temperature sensors in the engines. He said one possibility for the difference is a problem with the sensor in the engine, rather than the flow of liquid hydrogen into the engine. “We’re a little bit concerned about one of those sensors,” he said, because they’re seeing “good, cold liquid hydrogen” being vented out of the engine. “We understand the physics about hydrogen performs,” he said later in the briefing. “The way the sensor is behaving doesn’t line up with the physics of the situation.” For now, the only change planned for the Sept. 3 launch attempt is to start flowing hydrogen into the engines about 30 to 45 minutes earlier, said Blackwell-Thompson, while the core stage hydrogen tank is in the “fast fill” phase of loading. That is what happened during Green Run tests of the core stage at the Stennis Space Center in early 2021, where there were no temperature issues reported. “The only thing I know to change to replicate the success we had at Stennis is moving the test earlier in the timeline,” Honeycutt said. If the same temperature problem reappears, it may be possible to proceed with the countdown if engineers believe the sensor is faulty and that engine #3 is properly cooled. “We will have a plan for a go/no-go rather than us sitting around scratching our heads,” he said. “We’ve got to continue poring over the data. We’ve got to put the flight rationale together anticipating we’re not going to get any better results on that engine #3 bleed temp sensor.” A sensor that is off by tens of degrees, rather than be completely offline, is not unexpected. “Over the course of my career I have seen many sensors on launch vehicles be erratic,” he said, “and go out of calibration.” Replacing the sensor while the SLS is at the launch pad is “likely not ideal,” Blackwell-Thompson said, and couldn’t be done before the current launch period ends Sept. 6. Even if technical problems are resolved, weather could be an issue for a Sept. 3 launch. Mark Burger, launch weather officer with the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, said that the probability of violating weather constraints is “somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%” for that day. However, because the launch window is two hours long, he said it should be possible to find times within it when conditions will be acceptable as afternoon showers, typical for this time of year in Florida, pass through. “I still think we have a pretty good opportunity, weatherwise, to launch on Saturday.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The United Kingdom launched a public consultation June 21 under a recently strengthened licensing regime to consider Starlink’s expansion plans. SpaceX is seeking to deploy six more gateways in England to meet user demand and improve network resiliency for its non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) broadband constellation. Starlink already has three gateways across the British Isles, which were approved before Ofcom updated NGSO regulations in December to add new checks on interference and competition risks. A consultation process was not part of the approval process for the earlier gateways. The regulator also does not typically run consultations for the majority of other spectrum licenses it issues, with NGSO now being the exception. Ofcom set a July 19 closing date for responses to the consultation on Starlink’s request for six NGSO Earth station licenses. In addition to Ka-band uplink frequencies that fall within part of the spectrum available under an NGSO gateway license, Ofcom said Starlink wants to use 28 GHz spectrum that was auctioned off in 2006 to terrestrial connectivity operators. “SpaceX have confirmed that they have the necessary commercial arrangements with 28GHz Licence Holders in the locations they are seeking to operate,” Ofcom said in the consultation document. SpaceX is the only company currently operating NGSO gateways in the U.K., according to Ofcom. An Ofcom spokesperson said SpaceX’s request to operate more gateways is also the first application it has received under its new licensing procedures. Besides Starlink, Ofcom said U.K.-based OneWeb and Canada’s Kepler Communications have NGSO Earth station licenses in the country, but none of them are currently deploying terminals in Ka-band. Ofcom said it does not think SpaceX’s application will block potential gateways from other NGSO operators, and also presents few competition risks. “Our preliminary assessment is that granting these licences would increase the availability of high-quality broadband services, which would be beneficial for UK consumers,’ the regulator said. Ofcom anticipates making a decision on whether to approve SpaceX’s application by September 15.
NASA is postponing the next Artemis 1 launch attempt by at least two days as a tropical storm, forecast to become a hurricane, approaches the Florida coast. NASA announced late Nov. 8 that it would no longer pursue a launch of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 14. Before the announcement, NASA had been working towards a launch of the Artemis 1 mission at 12:07 a.m. Eastern that day, at the opening of a 69-minute window. The agency said the slip will give personnel time to prepare for the approaching Tropical Storm Nicole, currently in the Atlantic Ocean heading west towards the east coast of Florida. Forecasts from the National Hurricane Center predict the storm will strengthen into a hurricane before reaching the coast south of KSC early Nov. 10. Despite the approaching storm, NASA will keep SLS on the pad at Launch Complex 39B, where it rolled out early Nov. 4 . Agency officials said in a briefing the day before the rollout that they were tracking the potential for the formation of a tropical storm but concluded that even if the storm developed, it would not be strong enough to damage the vehicle. NASA said that assessment is still valid even though the storm is forecast to be stronger that previously predicted. “Based on expected weather conditions and options to roll back ahead of the storm, the agency determined Sunday evening the safest option for the launch hardware was to keep the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft secured at the pad,” NASA said in a statement announcing the delay. The SLS is rated to withstand winds of up to 137 kilometers per hour — above the minimum speed for a hurricane — at the 18-meter level at the pad. “Current forecasts predict the greatest risks at the pad are high winds that are not expected to exceed the SLS design,” the agency stated. NASA said that, in preparation for the storm, it powered down the SLS and Orion and secured equipment, as well as looked for debris around the pad that could become airborne in the storm. KSC itself is in HURCON, or Hurricane Condition, 3, securing facilities and setting up a “rideout” team that would remain at the center as the storm passes. With the Nov. 14 launch opportunity ruled out, the next possible launch date is Nov. 16, with a two-hour window opening at 1:04 a.m. Eastern. Another launch window, also two hour long, opens at 1:45 a.m. Eastern Nov. 19. Those dates, NASA said, will depend on the status of SLS and Orion, and KSC overall, after the storm passes. The current launch period runs through Nov. 27, although there are no launch opportunities Nov. 20 or 21, as well as Nov. 26, because of Orion performance constraints. Agency officials earlier said that launches on the remaining days would be difficult because of the high air traffic during the Thanksgiving holiday, but had tentatively identified Nov. 25 as a potential launch date if Artemis 1 does not launch by Nov. 19 . If Artemis 1 does not launch in November, the next launch period opens Dec. 9 and runs through Dec. 22.
NASA and SpaceX have postponed the launch of a cargo Dragon mission to the International Space Station after discovering a potential propellant leak in the spacecraft’s thrusters. In a statement late June 6, NASA said the launch of the CRS-25 mission, which had been scheduled for June 10, would be postponed after detecting “elevated vapor readings” of monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) in a portion of the spacecraft’s Draco thruster system. The cause of the elevated reading is under investigation. The Dragon spacecraft uses Draco thrusters for orbital maneuvers, including approaching and departing the space station and to deorbit at the end of the mission. The thrusters use MMH and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, a storable, hypergolic combination. The cargo version of Dragon lacks the more powerful SuperDraco thrusters SpaceX developed for the abort system on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. NASA said the elevated readings were detected when propellant was loaded into the spacecraft, but did not state when that took place other that the problem was “identified over the weekend.” NASA and SpaceX officials said they met June 6 to discuss the issue “and the best path forward.” The agency said that the MMH and nitrogen tetroxide propellants had been offloaded from Dragon to allow engineers to investigate the problem. “Once the exact source of the elevated readings is identified and cause is determined, the joint NASA and SpaceX teams will determine and announce a new target launch date,” it stated. The Dragon will deliver more than two tons of supplies and equipment to the ISS. Among the science payloads on the mission, highlighted in a NASA briefing June 2, include an Earth science instrument that will study mineral dust in the atmosphere, experiments to study how sutured wounds heal in microgravity and aging of the immune system, and a student-developed experiment that will use biopolymers to create bricks from materials like those found in lunar and Martian regolith. The thruster problem is the second issue to involve a Dragon spacecraft in recent weeks. NASA said May 24 that SpaceX was replacing the heat shield structure for the next Crew Dragon spacecraft , which will launch in September on the Crew-5 mission. That heat shield failed an acceptance test earlier in May. NASA revealed the heat shield issue in a statement that denied a published report that there had been a leak of hypergolic propellants during the reentry of the Crew Dragon spacecraft that flew the Ax-1 private astronaut mission in April, damaging the heat shield. “The data associated with Dragon’s recent crew reentries was normal — the system performed as designed without dispute,” the agency stated last month. “There has not been a hypergol leak during the return of a crewed Dragon mission nor any contamination with the heat shield causing excessive wear.”
A robotic arm developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has completed key tests and is on track to be integrated with a Northrop Grumman spacecraft next year and launch to geosynchronous Earth orbit in 2024, the agency said Nov. 8. “The program anticipates on-orbit satellite servicing activities will begin in 2025,” DARPA said in a news release. Meeting that goal would mark a major victory for DARPA’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS), a program the agency started in 2017 building on a decade of research and lessons from a 2007 experiment . DARPA wanted to take advantage of emerging commercial space technology to be able to inspect and repair aging satellites in GEO. “Currently, no options exist for visual diagnosis, upgrades, or repairs of a malfunctioning satellite’s components,” the agency said. The plan was to team up with a commercial satellite provider that would build the spacecraft to carry the payload. DARPA 2017 selected SSL as its commercial partner. But in 2019 SSL’s parent company Maxar Technologies bowed out of the partnership for financial reasons. DARPA solicited new bids and in 2020 selected Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary SpaceLogistics as its partner. The platform for the RSGS payload is SpaceLogistics’ Mission Robotic Vehicle, a 3,000-kilogram spacecraft. DARPA completed testing of robotic payload elements, not the entire spacecraft. Still to be completed is testing of the flight robotic hardware and software. Integration of the robotic payload with the spacecraft bus will begin in 2023, followed by testing and verification of the combined system. After launch in 2024, the vehicle will use its electric propulsion to climb to GEO. “We are seeking to create a persistent operational dexterous robotic capability in geosynchronous Earth orbit,” said Ana Saplan, DARPA’s RSGS program manager. The robotic arm was designed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory with DARPA funding. “Instead of relegating satellites to space junk because of a broken part or lack of propellant, our robot mechanic will be making repair ‘service calls’ in space,” Saplan said. The hardware that DARPA will provide to SpaceLogistics includes two robotic arms, multiple robotic tools, on-orbit checkout and calibration equipment, equipment stowage ports, cameras and lighting, and avionics boxes. DARPA said the first assembled arm has successfully completed functional, vibration and electromagnetic testing, and is preparing to begin thermal vacuum testing. The second arm is completing integration and will begin environmental testing this fall at NRL. SpaceLogistics announced earlier this year that its first customer for the Mission Robotic Vehicle is Optus, Australia’s largest satellite operator. The plan is to install propulsion jet packs that would extend the service life of a 2,000 kilogram satellite by six years. The MRV and three propulsion jet packs — known as Mission Extension Pods — are being assembled at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Dulles, Virginia. Three pods will launch in 2024 with the MRV — one will be installed on an Optus satellite and the other two are for other customers that have not yet been announced. 
NASA’s Orion spacecraft is in the home stretch of the Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight as the agency prepares for the vehicle’s ultimate test: reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Project officials said at a Dec. 8 briefing that all was going well with the final phases of the Artemis 1 mission, with the 25.5-day mission set to conclude with a splashdown in the Pacific at about 12:40 p.m. Eastern Dec. 11. One change in the mission’s final phases is the splashdown location. Judd Frieling, a flight director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said mission managers decided to move the splashdown from its original location off the coast of San Diego, California, by about 550 kilometers uprange, to the south. The spacecraft will instead splash down near Isla Guadalupe, west of Baja California. He said both the primary landing site as well as alternate to the north were “no-go” because of weather conditions as a cold front is forecast to pass through the area around the time of splashdown. Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager, later said concerns about flying the spacecraft through light rain, as well as winds and waves that could hamper recovery efforts, led them to move the landing zone. “There was an uncertainty zone in there for the weather forecast,” Sarafin said, with conditions just on the edge of what would be acceptable, “and we moved south of the uncertainty zone.” The change in landing location won’t affect recovery operations. The recovery team, on the U.S. Navy ship USS Portland, will arrive at the splashdown location at least 24 hours in advance to collect weather data to support reentry, said Melissa Jones, NASA landing and recovery director for the mission. Once the capsule splashes down it will remain in the water for two hours to conduct a “soakback” test to see how the spacecraft manages the heat impulse from reentry. The recovery team, supported by small boats and helicopters, will then tow the capsule into the well deck of the USS Portland, placing it in a cradle and then draining the deck. Testing Orion through reentry at lunar return velocities of about 40,000 kilometers per hour is the mission’s top priority. “There is no arcjet or aerothermal facility here on Earth of replicating hypersonic reentry with a heat shield of this size,” Sarafin said. “It is a safety-critical piece of equipment. It is designed to protect the spacecraft and the passengers, the astronauts on board. So the heat shield needs to work.” Orion will also use a “skip” reentry, where the capsule reenters and descends to an altitude of about 60 kilometers, then ascends to 90 kilometers before descending again to splashdown. The maneuver is designed to reduce g-loads on the spacecraft and its occupants and also provide more flexibility in selecting a landing site. Recovering Orion after splashdown is another major priority. That is both to study the spacecraft after its flight as well as recover several avionics units on the spacecraft that will be refurbished and reflown on Artemis 2. Among 124 other objectives for testing Orion during the mission, Sarafin said more than 30% were complete and another 37.5% were in progress, in some cases collecting data up until reentry. The rest, he said, primarily involve objectives involved with reentry, splashdown and recovery, as well as a couple post-flight objectives, such as monitoring the spacecraft for corrosion from exposure to salt water. The lack of major problems during the mission allowed NASA to add 14 objectives, of which 10 are complete, he said. The other four are in progress or yet to start work. While the spacecraft has been largely healthy, officials said they are still trying to understand an issue with the spacecraft’s power system where devices called latching current limiters opened without being commanded to do so. That has happened 17 times over the Artemis 1 mission, Sarafin said. “That is the one thing the team is working hard to understand. We have yet to achieve a root cause on that,” he said. Engineers are also monitoring degraded performance in recent days from a phased array antenna on the spacecraft that has caused some communications dropouts.
The U.S. Space Systems Command announced Sept. 30 it selected Firefly Space Transport Services and Millennium Space Systems to conduct a demonstration of a rapid-response space mission to low Earth orbit in 2023. The companies will perform a Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) mission as part of a broader effort by the U.S. Space Force to accelerate the timeline for deploying payloads to orbit. Firefly Space Transport Services, a subsidiary of Firefly Aerospace, operates the expendable Alpha small-satellite launcher. The Space Force’s announcement on the TacRS contract came just a few hours before Firefly’s Alpha performed its first successful orbital launch, sending three small satellites to low Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California , in the overnight hours Oct. 1. Millennium Space Systems , a subsidiary of the Boeing Co., manufactures small satellites in El Segundo, California. Firefly and Millennium won contracts for the TacRS-3 mission, a space domain awareness small satellite projected to launch in 2023. The companies received task-orders under the Space Force Orbital Services Program (OSP)-4, an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract for rapid acquisition of launch services. Firefly will be responsible for launch services, and Millennium for the delivery of the space and ground systems. The order includes the spacecraft bus, sensor payload, space vehicle integration, ground segment, and on-orbit operations. “Both contract actions are integral to the end-to-end operational demonstration,” the Space Systems Command said. The command did not disclose the value of the task orders. TacRS-3 will “demonstrate the United States’ ability to rapidly place an asset on-orbit when and where we need it, ensuring we can augment our space capabilities with very little notice,” said Lt. Col. MacKenzie Birchenough, materiel leader at the Space Safari office, which oversees the responsive launch program.
Blue Origin launched its New Shepard suborbital vehicle on its sixth crewed flight in a little more than a year Aug. 4, carrying six people that included the first individuals from Egypt and Portugal to go to space. New Shepard lifted off on the NS-22 mission at 9:56 a.m. Eastern from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. The booster made a propulsive landing seven and a half minutes after launch while the capsule, which reached a peak altitude of approximately 107 kilometers, landed under parachutes 10 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff. As with three previous crewed flights, the NS-22 carried a crew of six people, who nicknamed themselves “Titanium Feather”: With NS-22, Blue Origin has now flown 31 people on six crewed flights, including one person who flew twice. Those flights have taken place over a little more than a year, dating back to the NS-16 mission in July 2021 that carried company founder Jeff Bezos and three others to space. In February, Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said the company this year would “easily double” the 14 people who went to space on three New Shepard crewed flights in 2021. So far this year, the company has flown 18 people on three flights. Smith at the time declined to give a specific target in terms of number of flights, but said it would require bringing into service a new New Shepard vehicle as well as shortening the turnaround time between flights. The company has been using the same capsule, named RSS First Step, and booster for all six crewed flights to date, with a turnaround time of about two months between recent flights.
Swarms of autonomously maneuvering satellites promise to make space operations far more efficient. But they also pose collision risks. Through the Starling mission, NASA and SpaceX will begin testing strategies for preventing autonomous satellites from crashing into each other. NASA originally planned to send the Starling mission into an orbital altitude of 555 kilometers. Because SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites operate in that orbit, the space agency’s Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) group advised Starling mission managers to send the four Starling cubesats 10 kilometers higher. “Realizing that these two constellations are close to each other gave us an opportunity to look at how we will deal with space traffic management in the future, when there are even more spacecraft in low Earth orbit,” said Howard Cannon, NASA Starling project manager at the NASA Ames Research Center. “How can we avoid collisions given the number of spacecraft that will be up there?” After Starling completes a six-month series of experiments to demonstrate swarm communications, navigation and autonomy, CARA, Starling and Starlink will test collision-avoidance strategies. The spacecraft will report their positions to the ground systems. “Then, conjunction-analysis software on the ground will automatically say, ‘Hey, you’re going to run into each other if you don’t do something,’” Cannon said. The warning will be sent to the satellites, which will plan maneuvers. Before carrying out the maneuvers, though, the satellites will seek approval from the ground systems. As traffic surges in low Earth orbit, this type of coordination will be essential. “You can’t have humans in the loop,” Cannon said. “This is all going to have to be automatic in the future.” Moriba Jah, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, agreed. “Most people don’t recognize that there is a data-pipeline problem in space,” Jah said. “There’s no way to downlink information from satellites to the ground fast enough to do the computations and send commands back to the satellites. There’s not enough time for that given the current infrastructure.” By working together, Starling and Starlink will show how two constellations “can talk to each other and start playing out different criteria like right of way,” Jah said. This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine as “Starling meets Starlink.”
PASADENA, Calif. — Sierra Space is creating an astronaut training program led by a company executive and former NASA astronaut as another step in developing a crewed version of its Dream Chaser vehicle and a commercial space station. The company announced June 14 it was opening a commercial human spaceflight training center and astronaut training academy at its offices at the Kennedy Space Center. Janet Kavandi, a former NASA astronaut and president of Sierra Space, will lead the center. “The commercialization of space, starting with low Earth orbit, will require an innovative new approach to the selection, training and preparation of the large numbers of women and men that we will need to live and work in space,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. “Janet has an unequaled level of expertise and experience that uniquely qualifies her for this one-of-a-kind role.” Kavandi, a former NASA astronaut, flew on three shuttle missions and served as deputy chief of the astronaut office and flight crew operations director. She later was director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center before joining Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) in 2019. SNC spun off Sierra Space as a standalone company in 2021. The center will train three types of astronauts. One will be professional astronauts analogous to NASA astronauts who will operate the Orbital Reef commercial space station that Sierra Space is partnering with Blue Origin and others to develop. A second type of astronauts will be “specialists” who receive training to do research and other work on the station. A third is “experiential” astronauts, akin to space tourists. The professional astronauts would undergo training for 12 to 18 months, Kavandi said in a Q&A distributed by the company. Specialists would need three to six months while experiential astronauts would require “more modest training,” she said. Sierra Space expects to start selecting astronauts for training in 2023, and is currently establishing a medical advisory board to support that selection process. The first class of astronauts will start training in early 2024. “This keeps us on track to start flying astronauts by 2026, supporting the start of Orbital Reef construction,” Kavandi said. In addition to its work on Orbital Reef, Sierra Space is working on a crewed version of its Dream Chaser vehicle. The company said in the announcement of its astronaut training center that the crewed Dream Chaser passed a systems requirements review earlier in the month, with a first flight scheduled for 2026. Kavandi said Sierra Space is still working on its astronaut selection strategy, but said the company planned to pick some of its employees for training. “Every Monday, we have orientation for new hires, and I make it clear whenever I speak to new team members that we will be taking at least some people from within the company to help us staff on-orbit destinations.”
In its proposed 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate Armed Services Committee directs the Pentagon’s outside business advisors to review the acquisition process for space programs, and specifically whether the current approach is “ agile enough for the rapid development of space acquisition systems to keep pace with today’s space industry.” The SASC approved the bill June 16 and released the full text July 18 before sending it to the Senate floor. In a report accompanying the NDAA, the committee notes that despite congressional efforts to consolidate space acquisition authorities from multiple agencies under a new civilian leader, it remains unclear whether these reforms are producing the intended results. The bill directs a joint review by the Defense Business Board and the Defense Innovation Board. These are panels of business and technology experts that provide insights and recommendations to the secretary of defense. Congress in the 2020 NDAA signed into law a “fundamental reorganization of the way the Department of Defense conducts space operations and the acquisition to support those operations,” says the SASC report. The legislation that established the U.S. Space also created a separate service acquisition executive for space . “The primary intent was to centralize space acquisition for the armed forces under the space SAE,” states the committee. In the 2021 NDAA, Congress passed other provisions on space acquisitions, notably transferring the Space Development Agency from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the Space Force, and gave the space SAE oversight of the SDA, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) and the Space Systems Command (SSC). The 2022 NDAA further consolidated space acquisition, elevating the role of the space SAE to have oversight of space acquisition across the U.S. armed services. It renamed the Space Force Acquisition Council to the Space Acquisition Council and gave it authority to review all military space acquisition projects. These three consecutive NDAAs have resulted in a “fundamental reform of space acquisition for the armed forces,” the SASC says. However, the committee suggests that it’s not clear that these congressional efforts have made space acquisitions any more agile or more efficient. Of concern to the committee is that senior acquisition leaders continue to refer to the space acquisition process as a “unity of effort between the SSC, Space RCO, SDA, and Missile Defense Agency.” Before mandating any more reforms in the NDAA, the SASC wants to get fresh perspectives from the Defense Business Board and the Defense Innovation Board. The boards will be asked to “review the unity of effort decision making process … and whether the unity of effort process is agile enough for the rapid development of space acquisition systems to keep pace with today’s space industry,” says the SASC. “The two boards shall consider all options, from retaining the existing unity of effort structure to developing a clean sheet approach to space acquisition.” The SASC wants the advisory boards to report back by March 31, 2023.
Inmarsat Government announced Oct. 11 it won a 10-year contract worth $980 million to provide broadband satellite and terrestrial communications services to the U.S. Navy. The contract, awarded by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), is the second iteration of the U.S. Navy Commercial Broadband Satellite Program Satellite Services Contract, known as CSSC II. Inmarsat Government, based in Reston, Virginia, is a subsidiary of British communications satellite operator Inmarsat. The company was the incumbent on the previous CSSC I contract and won the re-compete. The contract is for managed telecommunications services, integrating Inmarsat Global Xpress Ka-band, as well as C-, Ku- and X-band frequencies. Navy users include units located at fixed sites, as well as mobile maritime, airborne and ground platforms. The agreement also covers commercial teleport services; backhaul connectivity; monitoring and control; operations; information assurance and cybersecurity. The Navy requires Inmarsat to build a network that is interoperable with military Ka-band satellite systems, and to provide coverage in the Arctic region . That coverage will be available as early as next year when Inmarsat launches two satellites on Space Norway’s Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission ( ASBM ). The GX Arctic payloads will be placed into highly elliptical orbits in order to get continuous coverage in areas North of the 65th parallel. Inmarsat Government’s CEO Susan Miller said the company will integrate geostationary and non-geostationary capacity as well as highly elliptical orbit satellites. For the CSSC II contract, she said, Inmarsat has teamed up with other satellite operators, service providers and technology companies but at this time is not disclosing the names of its partners. Award delayed by protest The award of CSSC II was expected last year but was delayed due to a protest Inmarsat filed in February 2021 with the Government Accountability Office. The company protested DISA’s draft solicitation for CSSC II released in September 2020. At the time, Inmarsat held the CSSC I $450 million contract it had won in 2015. According to the protest, DISA inadvertently released Inmarsat’s CSSC I pricing information, giving competitors access to proprietary data. GAO in May 2021 concluded that the disclosure of Inmarsat’s detailed pricing resulted in competitive harm. DISA reissued the solicitation in July 2021. The CSSC II award follows another 10-year deal worth $578 million won by Inmarsat Government in August to provide communications services for the U.S. Navy Military Sealift Command. With 14 satellites currently in orbit, Inmarsat later this year expects to complete a $7.3 billion merger with global satellite operator Viasat. After Viasat’s acquisition is approved, the combined firms will operate a fleet of 19 satellites, with an additional 10 spacecraft under construction and projected to launch within the next three years. Viasat said the acquisition of Inmarsat will be one of the growth drivers in the combined companies’ government satcom business.
The Defense Innovation Unit is funding space projects that the agency hopes will spur commercial investments in satellite refueling technologies and support services for geostationary satellites. “Imagine a world where every 18 to 24 months, you could simply upgrade the processor on a satellite in GEO the way that you upgrade your smartphone to take advantage of new processing power and new functionality,” said Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit. DIU, based in Silicon Valley, is a Defense Department agency established in 2015 to help bring privately funded innovation into military programs. Since its inception, much of DIU’s space portfolio focused on low Earth orbit capabilities but the agency is now turning more attention toward the GEO belt, 22,000 miles above the Equator where many of the military’s key satellites operate. In recent years “DoD has kind of awakened to the power of low Earth orbit … and now we want to make GEO cool again,” Butow said last month at a National Security Space Association online event. DIU is especially interested in logistics, manufacturing and in-space satellite servicing. Butow said the plan is to team up with private companies and fund prototypes of systems that could later be commercialized. Another benefit for DoD is that having a more robust infrastructure in GEO would help support operations beyond Earth orbit into cislunar space. “If we can deliver new transformative capabilities to the GEO belt, the cislunar domain is literally open for business as well,” said Butow. These technologies, he said, also would support NASA’s space exploration efforts. A DIU spokesperson said the agency could not disclose how much funding is going to GEO space infrastructure projects. The agency has a small budget but gets programs funded by teaming up with larger DoD agencies such as the Space Systems Command and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Private companies that work with DIU also have to agree to partially fund projects. In-space satellite refueling and robotic servicing vehicles are two areas where DoD is expected to increase investments, Space Force Maj. David Ryan, DIU program manager, told SpaceNews . DIU is reviewing bids for a project to demonstrate in-orbit refueling across several orbits. The program is known as RAPID, which stands for readily accessible propellant in diverse orbits. Another program is called Modularity for Space Systems , or M4SS. DIU in March selected three companies — Motiv Space Systems, Maxar Technologies and Tethers Unlimited — to prototype robotic arms and other modular systems that could be attached to servicing vehicles operating in GEO. The companies have to deliver prototypes in 2024. The value of their contracts has not been disclosed. These robotic arms, Ryan said, are going to “capture, attach themselves to other vehicles, provide upgrades or servicing.” DIU told the three companies to design systems that could be commercialized rather than follow military specs. The idea is to keep costs as low as possible and help the companies sell their services to a broad range of customers, Ryan said. If these prototypes are successful, the expectation is that DoD organizations will provide long-term funding. DoD’s financial support for satellite refueling and servicing is important because it sends a signal to the commercial market that if companies invest in these technologies, the military will be a customer, Ryan said. “Industry wants to know that they’re not going to put an expensive satellite into an austere orbit and be abandoned because there’s no infrastructure to support that down the line.” “DIU in a way is representing the government when we invest in these projects like robotic arms and interfaces to provide power, data, and of course refueling,” Ryan said. “We’re kind of at a tipping point,” he said. Commercial industry is ready to move forward but needs the government “to provide those demand indicators, lay out that framework, provide a certain amount of infrastructure to demonstrate that there’s going to be a market.” The government does not plan to be the anchor customer “but it’ll probably be one of the biggest users of these technologies, especially in GEO,” Ryan said.
A delay in the launch of NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission is forcing another asteroid mission hitching a ride to revise its plans. Janus, a NASA smallsat mission selected in 2019, will launch two identical spacecraft as secondary payloads on the Falcon Heavy rocket whose primary payload is Psyche. After a series of Earth flybys, each Janus spacecraft was to fly by different binary asteroids, designated 1996 FG3 and 1991 VH. However, the mission’s principal investigator said June 8 that mission plan is no longer possible. Speaking at a meeting of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), Dan Scheeres of the University of Colorado noted that mission plan assumed Psyche launched in August of this year as previously planned. NASA announced May 23 that the mission’s launch had been delayed to no earlier than Sept. 20 to provide more time for testing the spacecraft’s software. With the revised launch date, he said it’s no longer possible for the spacecraft to perform those Earth flybys with the existing spacecraft design. “Those flybys were essential for setting up our flybys of our target binaries, 1991 VH and 1996 FG3,” he said. He said it is possible for Janus to reach one of the original binary asteroid targets, 1996 FG3, if the mission launches between Oct. 7 and 10. That would be near the end of the new launch window for Psyche, which closes Oct. 11. In that scenario, the mission would send both spacecraft to 1996 FG3, allowing it to achieve its threshold science goals. “We have no ability to influence the launch dates or the targeting of the launch vehicle, and that arises from our status as a rideshare,” he said. The mission team is now looking for alternative asteroids that the spacecraft could visit if it can’t fly by either of its original destinations. Scheeres said they have found “multiple asteroids” the spacecraft could visit, depending on the day the mission launches. He did not disclose which ones are under consideration, but said some violate current mission constraints such as flyby speed or communications data rate. “Many of these constraints can be accommodated, it just takes a little bit more work,” he said. Those plans depend on the ability of Psyche to launch during the revised launch window. During an earlier presentation at the SBAG meeting, Carol Polanskey, a co-investigator on the Psyche mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said work continues to upgrade the simulation environment needed for software testing. “We have a new JPL flight software architecture that needs to be blended with the heritage Maxar simulation capabilities,” she said. Maxar built the Psyche spacecraft bus. “That has proven to be a little more challenging than we anticipated, so we have put a lot of resources in tackling this.” She said the problem should be resolved in the “near future” but wasn’t more specific. “The project is very motivated to launch in that window,” she said. “We are doing everything possible to get into that second launch opportunity.” Should Psyche and Janus miss that second window, Polanskey suggested the mission could return to its original plan to launch in 2023 before it moved up a year. “We’ve haven’t really looked at what that would imply,” she said. Rideshare woes NASA selected Janus as one of three missions in its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration, or SIMPLEx, program of low-cost planetary science smallsat missions, with a cost cap of $55 million each. All three have now suffered issues with their plans to launch as rideshare payloads. The Psyche launch originally was going to carry both Janus and Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE), a smallsat mission to study the interaction between the solar wind and the Martian atmosphere. However, a change in launch vehicles for Psyche from the Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy changed the mission trajectory enough to no longer make it viable to accommodate EscaPADE, and NASA paused work on the mission in 2020. EscaPADE found new life in 2021 when NASA approved a revised plan for the mission using Photon spacecraft buses from Rocket Lab , with greater propulsion capabilities than the original design. The twin EscaPADE spacecraft are now scheduled for launch in 2024, although NASA has not announced how they will get to Mars. The third SIMPLEx mission, Lunar Trailblazer, is scheduled to be completed late this year, but will not launch until early 2025 because of delays in the primary payload of its rideshare mission, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). Some lunar scientists have lobbied NASA to find an earlier ride for the mission , which will study the water distribution on the moon, because it could support other robotic and human lander missions. Scheeres said in a discussion at the SBAG meeting that the issues Janus and other rideshare missions face illustrate one of the drawbacks of that approach for launching missions. “Having developed the spacecraft for a specific mission and then having at least part of that, and maybe all of it, taken away, highlights the fragility of having a very specific mission developed with no control over launch circumstances,” he said. He suggested that rideshare payloads should have more say in the launch date than they do today. “Maybe there should be some accommodation for small adjustments to launch dates,” he proposed. There are no plans, though, to take Janus off the Psyche launch and find an alternative means to space. A preliminary assessment, he said, found no other suitable missions that could accommodate Janus as a rideshare mission and could better meet the mission’s science goals. “That’s not going to get us any closer to out original target binary asteroids,” he said when asked about the possibility of not launching on Psyche, “unless someone’s willing to spring for an independent launch for us, and I haven’t found any takers for that.”
NASA is changing rules for future private astronaut missions to the International Space Station, including requiring such missions to be led by a former NASA astronaut. In an Aug. 1 procurement notice , NASA announced changes in requirements for future solicitations for private astronaut missions, or PAMs, to the station. The changes, the agency said, came from the experience from the first such mission, Axiom Space’s Ax-1 flight in April, “and other recent civilian-crew spaceflight.” One of the biggest changes, and one still being finalized according to the procurement notice, is a requirement that such missions have “a former flown NASA (U.S.) government astronaut” as a commander. “A former NASA astronaut provides experienced guidance for the private astronauts during pre-flight preparation through mission execution,” the document states, and “provides a link between the resident ISS expedition crew and the private astronauts and reduces risk to ISS operations and PAM/ISS safety.” The Ax-1 mission was led by a former NASA astronaut, Michael López-Alegría. The company’s second mission, the only other PAM approved to date by NASA, will also be led by a former NASA astronaut, Peggy Whitson. “It became pretty clear, first of all, that customers really didn’t want to fly with nobody who has done it before,” López-Alegría recalled of planning for the Ax-1 mission during a talk at the ISS Research and Development Conference July 28. “Secondly, NASA was a lot more comfortable having someone who had been there before.” However, Axiom executives said shortly before the Ax-1 mission that they were looking ahead to missions without a professional astronaut on board. Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom, said at an April 1 briefing that the company expected to fly four customers, rather than three customers and one professional astronaut, by its fourth mission. That change has implications for the revenue and profitability of such flights. Axiom has declined to say if the current missions, with three paying customers, are profitable. Other changes to the PAM requirements outlined in the NASA notice also clearly reflect the experience from Ax-1. NASA will require private missions to submit research plans to the ISS National Laboratory at least 12 months in advance in order to review them and certify payloads. “Significant research activities were not originally envisioned as a primary objective for private astronaut missions,” the document states. Similarly, the new requirements include a “mission specific communications plan” outlining media and commercial activities for a mission, including those taking place in space, and the roles of NASA and the company providing the crew vehicle will play. “Our time on ISS was extraordinarily busy,” López-Alegría said at the conference. “We had a timeline that looked just like a NASA timeline.” That included 25 experiments and 30 outreach events that took “well over 100 hours” of crew time, he said. That tight schedule is linked to another requirements change. “Arrival to the spaceflight environment requires adaptation time for each individual; therefore, NASA is requiring additional time for microgravity adaptation and handover activities prior to the execution of the main mission activities,” the document states. “We got up there and, boy, we were overwhelmed,” López-Alegría said. “Getting used to zero gravity is not an overnight thing.” The original timelines, he said, didn’t allow enough time to get adapted to life on the station and then work through an ambitious schedule of experiments and outreach events. He said at the conference that Axiom was wrapping up its own lessons-learned processes, along with separate ones by NASA and SpaceX. One change for Ax-2 is that Whitson will have more time to assist the private astronauts accompanying her. “That will help offload the burden that we put on the ISS crew,” he said. Axiom is in the final stages of planning with NASA for that mission, expected to fly next spring. He said the company has “kind of put together” an Ax-3 mission, depending on when NASA seeks proposals for another PAM. “We still have a lot of learning to do,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, of private astronaut missions during another panel at the conference July 27. She said NASA was working to roll out lessons learned from Ax-1 in future solicitations for PAMs. “You’ll see some of that learning as we come out with our new agreements going forward.”
Virgin Orbit says it’s ready for a nighttime launch for the U.S. Space Force as it attempts to get into a more frequent rhythm of building and launching vehicles. Virgin Orbit executives said at a June 28 briefing that their LauncherOne system was set for its fifth orbital launch attempt, a mission called “Straight Up” by the company. Its Boeing 747 aircraft that serves as a launch platform is scheduled to take off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 1 a.m. Eastern June 30. The only issue, said Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit chief executive, was with airport infrastructure he said was damaged in a lightning storm last week, which he only described as “one of the standard aid systems for a commercial runway.” He added there are “workarounds” if the system can’t be repaired in time. The customer for the mission is the U.S. Space Force, which designated it STP-S28A. It is carrying seven payloads for the Space Test Program, primarily science and technology demonstration cubesats. The goal of the launch is to deploy the payloads into a 500-kilometer orbit at an inclination of 45 degrees, the same orbit as on the previous LauncherOne mission in January . That previous launch, and all earlier LauncherOne missions, took place during daylight. The nighttime launch, Hart said, is not driven by any payload requirements. “It’s expanding the envelope and going through the ops for nighttime missions, because we have some of those on our books,” he said. “We want to make sure we do them first in our backyard here in Mojave.” Hart confirmed that, after the Straight Up launch, the next LauncherOne mission will be the first from the United Kingdom, flying out of Spaceport Cornwall. That launch, a joint mission for the U.K. Ministry of Defence and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office , is now expected in the “September time frame,” Hart said. The company previously projected that launch to take place in August . That schedule is dependent on Virgin Orbit receiving a launch license from the U.K. government as well as a separate license for Spaceport Cornwall. “It’s the first time that space launch has been licensed in the U.K.,” he said, with that licensing being done by the Civil Aviation Authority. “They have been quite engaged with our experts, making sure they understand the system.” He added there is “tremendous interest all the way up through the minister and above levels in the U.K.” in the launch. “All things are moving in a good direction for Cornwall.” Straight Up will be the second LauncherOne mission of the year. Hart said that the company was maintaining earlier projections of four to six launches this year but will update that in its next earnings call, scheduled for August. While nearly a year and a half has passed since the first successful LauncherOne mission in January 2021, Virgin Orbit has been slow to ramp up its launch activity, conducting only two more launches, both successful, since then. Hart attributed that to the growing pains of transitioning from development to operations. “You’ve got two competing objectives. One is to just build more of the same and increase rate, which is really important, and the other is to make whatever modifications are needed or are desired to extend margin or expand performance or capabilities,” he said. “Pretty much all programs go through that.” Hart said that, through that process, the company is seeing improvements in efficiency and cost. “We’re seeing the right trends and the right things happening in the system, and it’s a matter now of turning that crank and accelerating.”
China is looking to land spacecraft near permanently shadowed regions near the south pole of the moon to investigate the potential presence of resources trapped in craters. Researchers from the Key Laboratory of Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves at Fudan University published a paper in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration on landing site selection in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) on the moon, indicating that China’s Chang’e-7 mission will attempt a highly accurate, fixed point landing at a solar illuminated area, such as a crater rim near the lunar south pole. The landing site will also be in the proximity of a PSR which could then be searched and sampled for detecting water and other volatiles. PSRs do not receive any sunlight due to their latitude and elevation. With temperatures around –230 degrees Celsius, PSRs are colder than the surface of Pluto, making them potential traps for volatiles including water ice but also methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and more. Such resources could help support human explorers on the moon, with water ice converted into drinking water, or electrolyzed to produce rocket propellant. The Chang’e-7 mission, expected to launch in 2024 or 2025, will consist of multiple spacecraft including an orbiter, relay satellite , lander, rover and “mini flying detector.” Searching for water ice in a permanently shadowed region (PSR) is noted as a major mission objective. The PSR search will be carried out by the Chang’e-7 mini flying detector. A main candidate design appears to be a six-legged movable repetitive lander named HexaMRL and developed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The craft would be capable of numerous takeoffs and landings, moving using its six legs and sampling the lunar regolith. The authors of the landing site paper use synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquired by the Mini-RF onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter with optical images and utilize high-resolution digital elevation modeling to try to find flat areas within the craters Shackleton and Shoemaker for landing and regolith sampling by the mini flying detector. Insights from this process are then used to learn how the Polarization Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pol-SAR) to be carried by the Chang’e-7 orbiter can be used to evaluate the topography and roughness of the lunar surface to select landing and sampling sites. The microwave imaging radar would enable high-resolution imaging of a shadowed region, where optical observations cannot be made. The mission could have big implications for lunar exploration, if it confirms the presence of stored, accessible resources. “PSRs are critically important because right now they contain the largest potential reservoirs of water and volatiles on the moon but we don’t know much about the reserve potential,” Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame, told SpaceNews . “There have been a few studies using orbital data to try and estimate abundances within PSRs but we need 3D ground truth. So we need to get in and operate assets there to understand these PSRs and the ice that’s within them.” “A “flying probe” or hopper is a way to get point data within a PSR and the data will be enlightening. But we need to get rovers in these PSRs to understand the real extent of the ice both at the surface and in the subsurface.” Neal notes that investigating PSRs will be challenging because of the temperature and navigation, but adds that data ShadowCam on South Korea’s upcoming KPLO mission will yield much needed navigational data for PSR exploration. Neal also notes that any volatiles in Shackleton may be kilometers distant from a landing site and down a 30 degree angle slope. China is far from the only actor interested in lunar south pole volatiles. NASA plans to launch its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission in late 2023, near the western edge of Nobile Crater. Both China and the U.S. would place high value on areas containing volatiles, given both parties have long-term lunar plans, making their confirmation all the more important. NASA is developing its Artemis Program which calls for a “sustained human presence” on the moon. China has meanwhile announced plans to construct the International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) with Russia. While initially robotic, the station would be capable of hosting long-term human stays on the moon in the 2030s.
L3Harris Technologies has agreed to acquire Viasat’s tactical data link business for $1.96 billion, the companies announced Oct. 3. Satellite operator Viasat is selling the portion of its military communications business known as Link 16, an encrypted tactical data network used by the U.S. military and NATO allies to exchange data between ships, aircraft and troops on land. Viasat CEO and Chairman of the Board Mark Dankberg said the sale of Link 16 allows the company to invest in its satellite business and increase its focus on space-based networks. The proceeds from the sale also are expected to reduce the company’s debt following the closing of its acquisition of Inmarsat. The Link 16 business generates about $400 million in annual sales, or about 35% of Viasat’s Government Systems revenue, according to Viasat. There are more than 20,000 Link 16 terminals currently installed in U.S. and allied weapons systems and platforms. Viasat’s major competitor in this sector is Rockwell Collins. Viasat’s Link 16 product line employs 450 employees. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2023, subject to regulatory approvals. L3Harris, a defense contractor with $17 billion in annual sales, said the acquisition gives the company access to a key technology the military uses to share data. Link 16 also is a key piece of the DoD network known as Joint All Domain Command and Control . “Viasat’s Tactical Data Link product line naturally aligns with our proven communication capabilities,” said L3Harris’ CEO and Chairman Christopher Kubasik. Dankberg said, pos t-sale, Viasat Government Systems’ annual revenue will be approximately $700 million. After the $5.5 billion Inmarsat merger is finalized, the company expects the government business to generate about $1 billion in annual sales. The market research firm William Blair in a note to investors Oct. 3 said Viasat “shedding assets to raise capital is necessary to fund its capital-intensive satellite business and fend off intense competition from SpaceX’s Starlink.” Analysts from Vertical Research Partners said they expect “more regulatory scrutiny of this deal than may have been the case in the past, but we think that the DoD is likely to judge that the Link 16 TDL business has a better home at LHX [L3Harris] than it does within a commercial space company.” L3Harris for years has been a subcontractor to Viasat as an integrator of Link 16 networks. The acquisition coincides with the Pentagon’s planned expansion of the Link 16 network to the space domain. Viasat since 2019 has been developing an experimental Link 16 satellite under a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory contract. The satellite is years behind schedule and could launch perhaps this year or next year to test the use of a Link 16 terminal from low Earth orbit as a network relay. Link 16 today works as a line-of-sight network, and extending it into space would provide beyond line-of-sight connectivity. A military low Earth orbit communications network to be fielded by the Space Development Agency is expected to have Link 16 radios in every satellite. Redwire is currently under contract to produce 42 Link 16 antennas for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer. SDA’s Transport Layer is a low Earth orbit mesh network of optically-interconnected satellites that will send and receive wideband data to and from ground stations and mobile users. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Canada’s Telesat is bracing for a revenue hit in 2023 after being forced to retire its Anik F2 satellite from full service three years earlier than planned. The aging Boeing-built satellite has been operating under a workaround mode for the past year after two of its four station-keeping thrusters suffered an anomaly. One of the thrusters failed while the second continued to support operations with some constraints, Telesat said Aug. 5, enabling the company to avoid impacting Anik F2 customers that are mainly based in Canada. However, this workaround required Anik F2 to use fuel faster than planned, which reduced the time it could maintain its position in geostationary orbit. “We expected this approach would allow us to provide station-kept service until 2025,” Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said during the company’s financial results call. “But it now appears that we can only maintain station-kept service until the end of this year, at which point the satellite will be put in inclined orbit.” Some services will be adversely impacted as early as February, Goldberg said, while “other services will degrade over time, depending on the size of the antennas receiving signals from the satellite.” “As a result, beginning next year, we expect Anik F2 revenues will decline if we can’t find alternative ways to support the services.” Mitigation techniques include adding tracking antennas at certain sites to extend customer service life, and repointing existing antennas to other Telesat satellites or third-party spacecraft. Anik F2 currently represents about 8% of Telesat’s revenue, or around 50 million Canadian dollars ($39 million). Telesat is set to lose around a third of Anik F2’s revenue next year if mitigation techniques are unsuccessful, Goldberg added. This “likely would be somewhat offset” by reselling freed-up capacity for mobility services that Anik F2 would be able to support in an inclined orbit, he said. Anik F2 launched in 2004 and was already operating beyond its 15-year design life when some of its thrusters malfunctioned. There is still no known cause behind the failure and the satellite was not insured at the time, Telesat spokesperson Lynette Simmons said. Mounting Telesat Lightspeed costs Goldberg also disclosed higher costs and additional delays for Telesat Lightspeed, its proposed low Earth orbit broadband constellation. During Telesat’s last financial update May 6, Goldberg said he expected to know where it stood with export credit agencies (ECAs) about completing the project’s financing by the end of June. The company now expects to have that clarity in the fourth quarter and to have signed a term sheet by the end of the year, which Goldberg says is needed to “feel comfortable about making meaningful expenditures and moving forward with the program.” Goldberg said Europe’s Thales Alenia Space, the constellation’s prospective manufacturer, was only able to send a final proposal for the project “a few weeks ago,” which was sent to ECA lenders earlier this week. Pandemic-related supply chain issues have delayed and complicated plans for the constellation and other satellite projects across the industry. Despite downsizing the proposed constellation by a third to 198 satellites earlier this year to keep within its $5 billion budget, Goldberg said delays and soaring inflation have increased costs by 5-10%. To date, Telesat has lined up about 4.2 billion Canadian dollars to fund the project from existing financial resources and Canadian government funding, and had expected to substantially complete the final third of its cost with ECA debt. However, Goldberg said the company will need to raise additional funds outside what it can secure from ECA lenders to cover increasing costs. The company will also need extra funds to meet the so-far-unknown “contingent capital” needs of ECA lenders. These funds would be set aside to deal with schedule delays, cost overruns, and other issues that could affect the multi-year project. “Although we’ve been disappointed with the supply chain challenges and inflationary pressures that we’ve encountered, we remain extremely bullish about the opportunity Telesat Lightspeed gives us to grow our business,” Goldberg said. Goldberg also sees no impact on its negotiations with French state-owned ECA lender Bpifrance following Eutelsat’s plan to merge with OneWeb, a LEO broadband constellation that would compete against Telesat Lightspeed. Bpifrance is Eutelsat’s largest shareholder. He said, fundamentally, “these export credit agencies are there to support their domestic exporters” to help create jobs and develop technologies. Schedule adjustments Goldberg also suggested during Telesat’s financial results call that the company could look beyond Thales Alenia Space as the constellation’s prime manufacturer. He said “they’re a good prime contractor, I think they’ve got a great track record, but we’re not locked into Thales.” Telesat intends to provide an update on the constellation’s timing and deployment plan once it has secured its financing. The company’s last update in May pushed out Telesat Lightspeed service debut a year to 2026. These delays also mean the company will likely need to request extensions for the deployment milestones tied to its spectrum licenses from the U.S. and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). One of the Canadian company’s ITU filings for the project, relating to 72 satellites, requires Telesat to have 10% and 50% of the satellites in their assigned orbits by Jan. 1, 2023 and Jan. 1, 2026, respectively. Telesat reported 187 million Canadian dollars in revenue for the three months to the end of June, a 3% decrease compared with the same period last year when adjusted for changes in foreign exchange rates. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, fell 4% to 146 million Canadian dollars.
Updated 11:30 a.m. Eastern with comments from post-flight briefing. WASHINGTON — Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle performed its fifth crewed suborbital flight June 4, carrying six people including the first Mexican-born woman to go to space and the company’s first repeat customer. New Shepard lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:25 a.m. Eastern. The crew capsule, with six people on board, landed 10 minutes after liftoff after reaching a peak altitude of about 107 kilometers. The vehicle’s booster made a propulsive landing nearly three minutes earlier. The six people on board included Blue Origin’s first repeat customer, Evan Dick, who flew on the NS-19 mission in December 2021. Another, Katya Echazarreta, is a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer and the first Mexican-born woman to go so space. She was selected for the flight by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that offers flights to space for those who cannot afford them on their own. Other on the flight include pilot Hamish Harding; Brazilian engineer Victor Correa Hespanha, who is only the second Brazilian to go to space; businessman and adventurer Jaison Robinson; and Victor Vescovo, an explorer who has summited some of the world’s highest mountains and dived to the deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep. In a post-flight media briefing, Dick said his second trip on New Shepard was “maybe a little bit less exciting than the first time, but because of that, I was able to focus a little bit more on the beauty” of seeing the Earth from above. “I’ve been dreaming about going to space my entire life,” said Echazarreta. “Nobody can truly imagine it until they experience it.” The NS-21 mission was originally scheduled for launch May 20. However, two days before the launch the company postponed it because an unspecified backup system on the vehicle “was not meeting our expectations for performance.” Blue Origin did not provide further details about the problem or how it resolved it. The flight was the fifth time New Shepard carried people, and the second flight of 2022. In February, Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said he expected his company this year to “easily double” the 14 people it took to space in 2021 on three New Shepard flights . He declined to say how many New Shepard flights, including both crewed and payload-only ones, the company projected launching this year. Crypto and spaceflight One of the crew members, Hespanha, flew thanks to an organization called the Crypto Space Agency (CSA). It sold digital collectibles called non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and picked one of the purchasers at random for a seat on the flight. One of the founders of the CSA, Joshua Skurla, said in an interview that he and co-founder Sam Hutchison established the organization to tap into interest in both space and “Web3” technologies like cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. “This is a disruptive moment and there were going to be some really interesting ways to find a convergence, or help drive a convergence, between space and Web3,” he said. That convergence includes participation in human spaceflight. “We were excited about the idea of offering a flight to someone who had not necessarily the means to be able to pay for this flight on their own accord but was absolutely fascinated by space and wanted to participate,” he said. Skurla said the CSA purchased the seat in advance, then sold the NFTs on a “compressed” schedule for the flight. “Availability for seats is not incredibly high, so you have to work around the rocket schedule,” he said. While the organization is offering up to 5,555 NFTs, he said it sold “less than 300” when it picked Hespanha to go on NS-21, and about 400 as of the flight. He acknowledged that the sale of the NFTs did not cover the cost of the ticket. The CSA sells the NFTs using the Ethereum, or ETH, currency, with an NFT costing 0.25 ETH, or about $450 at the current value of Ethereum. Ethereum was significantly more valuable in late April when the CSA started selling NFTs, part of an overall sharp decline in the value of cryptocurrencies. That would appear to impair the CSA’s ability to fund later flights or other projects, but Skurla said he was not concerned. “We’re facing a slightly different market now than when we set the NFTs out for sale,” he said. “It’s a great time for us to be focused on building our core mission.” While it looks like a high-tech raffle, he said the sales of the NFT and the selection of one person to fly on New Shepard is part of an effort to build a broader community. “We’re providing a platform for everyone to come together around the three tenets of the CSA,” he said, which include human spaceflight as well as support for planetary defense and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Skurla said CSA had identified opportunities to support both planetary defense and SETI, but did not disclose them. NASA currently spends $150 million per year on planetary defense activities, while billionaire Yuri Milner pledged $100 million over 10 years for a SETI effort called Breakthrough Listen. He argued that even if CSA captures only a tiny fraction of the overall crypto market, it could still raise millions of dollars to spend on spaceflight, planetary defense and SETI. “It is realistic to generate those types of numbers, and if we aspire to be a meaningful player in this space, then yes, we do aspire to have that type of resources at our disposal.” CSA is not the only crypto organization planning to fly on New Shepard. Blue Origin stated in an April 25 tweet that MoonDAO, another organization that is selling NFTs, “has purchased seats on an upcoming New Shepard flight.” Neither Blue Origin nor MoonDAO stated when those flights would take place. In December, Blue Origin announced that Justin Lin, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur, had placed the winning bid for a seat on the first crewed New Shepard flight but, being unable to go, instead is buying a dedicated New Shepard flight in the fourth quarter of 2022 . Lin said he would select five “space warriors” to accompany him on the flight, but since the announcement he has provided no major updates on the selection process or other plans for the mission.
A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station after a successful launch Nov. 7 on the next-to-last flight of the current version of the company’s Antares rocket. The Antares 230+ rocket lifted off from Pad-0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 5:32 a.m. Eastern. The rocket placed a Cygnus spacecraft into orbit that is set to arrive at the ISS early Nov. 9. The launch was originally scheduled for Nov. 6 but scrubbed about 15 minutes before liftoff because of a fire alarm at Northrop’s Cygnus mission control center in Dulles, Virginia. The center was evacuated and could not support the launch. The Cygnus spacecraft, named S.S. Sally Ride after the first American woman to go to space, is flying the NG-18 mission for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program. The spacecraft is delivering 3,749 kilograms of cargo, including crew supplies, science investigations and hardware for the station. Among the hardware on board are brackets for another set of ISS Rollout Solar Arrays, or iROSAs, that will be installed on the station. NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio will install the brackets on a Nov. 15 spacewalk, which will be followed by spacewalks Nov. 28 and Dec. 1 to install iROSA arrays on another set of brackets. The Cygnus is delivering a set of payloads that include Redwire’s BioFabrication Facility, a 3D printer for producing human tissue, and experiments ranging from plant growth to mudflows. Cygnus is also delivering the first satellites built by Uganda and Zimbabwe, cubesats that will be deployed along with a Japanese satellite. The research is a mix of new and existing users. “There are a lot of firsts in terms of research on this flight,” said Heidi Parris, NASA ISS associate program scientist, at a Nov. 5 pre-launch briefing, citing some of the new research payloads and the cubesats. “We also have a lot of investigations that are building upon past successes and past results in a field in order to expand that area of research,” such as the BioFabrication Facility, which is making its second flight. The Cygnus is optimized to maximize the amount of cargo it is carrying as well as propellant that will be used for ISS reboost maneuvers while attached to the station. The Cygnus is filled to within less than a kilogram of its capacity, said Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial space at Northrop Grumman, at the briefing. He added there are no plans for any extended mission for the spacecraft after it completes a three-month stay at the station. Northrop Grumman increased the payload performance of the Antares launching the Cygnus by about 70 kilograms, said Kurt Eberly, director of space launch programs at Northrop Grumman, increasing the cargo capacity of Cygnus by 20 kilograms. “ “We didn’t change any hardware,” he said, with engineers instead reviewing data from six previous launches of the Antares 230+ to refine the models of the vehicle’s performance. “We took some of the conservatism out now that we have that flight data to look at. By taking that conservatism out, we aimed a little higher and we’re able to offer a little bit more performance.” The launch is also the first for Antares since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, days after the NG-17 launch. Antares uses a first stage built in Ukraine and powered by RD-181 engines manufactured in Russia. Eberly said that that had no effect on preparations for the NG-18 launch. “We do all the work on the hardware,” he said, with all the Antares hardware for the NG-18 mission and next spring’s NG-19 delivered before the NG-17 launch. “We’ve been in communication with our suppliers and it’s been situation normal for the processing.” “We’ve gotten support from our Ukrainian partners,” Krein said in an earlier interview, with some personnel remaining in the U.S. “We’ve got subject matter expertise both in house and with some industrial partners to fill any gaps that we might have in the in the Russian coverage.” NG-18, though, is the penultimate launch of the Antares 230+ vehicle. Northrop announced in August it is working with Firefly Aerospace on a new version of the vehicle, the Antares 330 , that will replace the existing first stage with one developed by Firefly using new engines it is developing. The Antares 330 will be ready for a first launch no earlier than 2024. After NG-19, Northrop Grumman plans to launch three Cygnus missions on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets until the Antares 330 is ready.
LOGAN, Utah — Sidus Space could launch LizzieSat-1 without thrusters if it can’t get safety clearances in time to deploy its first satellite from the International Space Station early next year. It is unclear if Sidus can get all NASA approvals to add operational-life-extending thrusters to LizzieSat-1 for a cargo trip to the ISS in February, Sidus chief mission operations officer John Curry said Aug. 8 during the Small Satellite Conference here. “It’s possible we may end up deciding not to fly the thruster,” Curry said Aug. 8 during the Small Satellite Conference here, so that it can “just get through the safety process and go ahead and fly. “It’s not that we can’t get past that, but it takes a long time.” LizzieSat-1 was previously slated to launch on a mission to the ISS in October before NASA re-manifested it to February. While Sidus still plans to launch LizzieSat-1 from the ISS, the company’s flexible deployment capabilities also enable it to leverage rideshare opportunities. LizzieSat-1 is the first of 100 satellites Sidus is planning for a constellation that would initially provide in-orbit testing services. The 100-kilogram spacecraft had been set to use a deployer on the ISS that Sidus manages as part of its existing government contractor business. If deployed from the ISS without thrusters, Curry said LizzieSat-1 would only provide services for around 130-200 days before losing operational altitude. While that would still be enough time to demonstrate core technology, he said its satellites with thrusters could last 18 months to three years, depending on mission requirements. LizzieSat-1’s customers include NASA and Mission Helios, a financial services startup that aims to test technology for NFTs. Curry said that these and other future customers don’t care about the length of time they spend on orbit, and a LizzieSat without thrusters has more room for payloads. However, a LizzieSat with thrusters is the standard design for the company’s constellation and would enable more control over the satellite’s de-orbit trajectory. While a rideshare launch would likely come after the Feb. 19 ISS Cargo mission Sidus is currently targeting, getting to LEO on a rocket would likely deliver the satellite to orbit faster than via the ISS, where Curry said it would take astronauts 30-60 days to deploy the spacecraft once it arrived on the station. For an ISS launch, he said NASA also requires delivery of a “fully outfitted” satellite 10 and a half weeks before launch, compared to four weeks for a rideshare mission. That means using rideshare providers for future satellites would give customers more time to provide the payloads they want to test on LizzieSat satellites. It would also guard against the possibility of supply chain delays. Sidus is negotiating with “a number of different providers” for launching other LizzieSats later in 2023 
ABL Space Systems successfully test-fired the rocket it plans to launch on the company’s first flight in the next several weeks. Company executives said that they performed the static-fire test of the first stage of its RS1 rocket July 9 at the Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island, the site where the company plans to conduct its first launch. “The operation verified our startup sequence and stage level engine performance,” Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, said in a statement to SpaceNews. “A testament to our team’s intense preparation, we completed the test on the first attempt.” The static-fire test also verified the performance of the ground systems, including a portable launch stool that can be packed into a shipping container. That system, O’Hanley said, enables launching from a flat pad like at Kodiak. The company has, in parallel, been working on the upper stage, which completed acceptance testing in May . That included tests of the stage’s avionics, flight termination system and telemetry, he said. “At this point, each stage has individually completed all major pre-flight tests,” O’Hanley said. “Next, we’ll prepare for stage mate to perform final checkouts on the fully stacked vehicle and perform a wet dress rehearsal. Following that, launch.” The company has not set a date for that first launch. “We’re still performing post-test analysis and it’s premature to set a launch window,” Dan Piemont, president of ABL, said. He estimated a minimum of four to six weeks to issue aviation and maritime notices of an upcoming launch. The RS1 rocket is capable if placing up to 1,350 kilograms into low Earth orbit for $12 million a launch. The company, which has raised several hundred million dollars, has Lockheed Martin as an anchor customer. That company signed a contract last year for up to 58 RS1 launches over the next decade , in addition to selecting the rocket for the “U.K. Pathfinder” launch from the Shetland Islands, now projected for 2023 .
The first chief of the U.S. Space Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond on Nov. 2 will relinquish command to Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, and will retire after 38 years of military service. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is scheduled to attend the change-of-command ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, and recognize Raymond for his role in laying the foundation for the nation’s first military service focused on the space domain. Long before he was sworn in as chief of the U.S. Space Force in January 2020 , Raymond had been the leading figure in the U.S. Air Force’s space organization. When the Pentagon re-established U.S. Space Command in August 2019, Raymond was named commander. So when Congress signed legislation in December 2019 authorizing the Space Force as the nation’s sixth military branch within the Department of the Air Force, Raymond was seen as the obvious choice to lead it. As the first official member of the new service, Raymond had to start building it from the ground up, transferring people and funding from the Air Force’s space units. Amidst all this, he had to navigate a charged political landscape as the Space Force in its early days was viewed as a vanity project of former President Trump and was parodied on a Netflix show. At a White House event on the Space Force’s first anniversary, then Vice President Mike Pence announced the members of the service would be called guardians . While many predicted President Joe Biden would reverse course on the Space Force, the administration gave full support and over the past two years boosted the service’s budget amid concerns that U.S. satellites have become military targets and need to be better defended. Raymond played a central role calling attention to U.S. military and intelligence assessments that Russia is deploying anti-satellite weapons that could threaten U.S. systems, and has urged the Space Force to innovate faster to stay ahead of China . He also has advocated for the U.S. and all other nations to adopt “ norms of behavior ” to keep outer space safe from weapons and debris. Accomplishments, challenges ahead Saltzman, who was Raymond’s top choice to succeed him, inherits a Space Force of about 16,000 personnel, half uniformed and half civilian. In a recent interview with SpaceNews , Raymond said he is proud of what’s been accomplished in less than three years, and is confident that the Space Force is on solid footing. “When we established this service we wanted to build it to be very agile, very lean. We flattened bureaucracy, we reduced headquarters layers, we stood this up largely out of existing resources,” he said. Being small, however, can make it difficult to keep up with the administrative and bureaucratic demands associated with a military service, Raymond warned. The new chief also will be under pressure to modernize aging systems and resolve a way forward for the Space Force’s reserve component. Raymond said Saltzman “is going to have to figure out what is the right size of the service.” “When you operate inside of the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense, you have to have enough mass to be able to just attend meetings, get things through and approved,” he added. “Do we have enough, or do we have to grow a little bit?” The good news for the incoming chief is that “over the last handful of years, the Department has prioritized space,” said Raymond. “And there has been an increase in our budgets.” Going forward, “we just need to be able to articulate what it is that we need, and have the analytical rigor that says: here’s why.” An organization within the Space Force that Raymond pushed to create is the Space Warfighting Analysis Center . The SWAC is a group of “our smartest PhDs and our best and brightest operators” in charge of what Raymond calls the “force design” that will inform future procurements of satellites and other systems. “I’m very comfortable today that we’ve got capabilities and I’m comfortable that we can protect and defend that,” he said, “but we have to complete this work.” “As the threat continues to evolve, and as threats to our space assets continue to emerge, we must transform our space architectures to be more capable and resilient,” he said. “If we do this right, it will allow us to capitalize on commercial industry capabilities. I think the way that we’re moving on force design is going to open up the opportunity to leverage more commercial and more allies and partners.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – OneWeb is inviting individuals, companies and academic organizations to propose applications for the London-based company’s low-Earth orbit satellite constellation. Through the Connectivity and Beyond Innovation Challenge, backed by the European Space Agency, OneWeb is looking “ for innovative thinkers to collaborate with the company to drive the future of not only communications, but any application that could be unlocked through the OneWeb constellation,” OneWeb said in an Oct. 12 news release. Challenge winners, in both the industrial and academic/researcher categories, will have opportunities to collaborate with OneWeb. Companies entering the 2022 Innovation Challenge will be eligible to participate in OneWeb’s co-engineering program and will receive a OneWeb satellite model. Industry competitors in ESA member states also will be eligible to receive funding from ESA’s Sunrise Partnership project, which supports demonstrations of advanced space technologies, systems, services and applications. Academic and research entrants in the 2022 Innovation Challenge could win visits to either the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands or the OneWeb Satellites factory in Florida. Proposals for the 2022 Innovation Challenge are due Nov. 11. Challenge entries are being accepted at the OneWeb Innovation Challenge website. OneWeb plans to announce finalists in December. Finalists will be invited to present their proposals to the OneWeb Innovation Challenge jury. Awards are scheduled to be announced in January 2023 OneWeb’s annual Innovation Challenge “aims to harness ideas that will continue to improve and transform satellite-based solutions, bringing forward new proposals for future LEO satellite and ground applications and technologies. OneWeb is looking for industrial partners from any sector, as well as students and research partners, to present proposals for how existing or new technology could be applied to build the LEO constellation-based applications of the future,” according to the news release. OneWeb “welcomes ideas on how its global LEO constellation could support applications including, but not limited to, telemedicine, crisis response, natural disaster monitoring and data fusion,” the news release added. OneWeb’s 2021 Innovation Challenge selected five industrial winners : IRT Saint Exupéry, Mbryonics, Morpheus Space, Oledcomm and R3-IoT. OneWeb continues to collaborate with some of last year’s challenge winners on technology development for our next generation of satellites. A OneWeb spokesperson declined to share information on specific companies or projects, citing confidentiality concerns.
Both NASA and the companies selected by the agency to begin development of commercial space stations say they don’t share concerns raised by watchdogs that such stations may not be ready by the time the International Space Station is retired. NASA’s effort, called Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, seeks to support the development of one of more commercial space stations that will be ready when NASA anticipates retiring the ISS in 2030. Those stations would ideally be ready by the late 2020s, enabling a gradual transition from the ISS to those facilities. However, some worry those stations will not be ready before the retirement of ISS. Last November, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) warned NASA’s schedules were “unrealistic” and that a commercial station “is not likely to be ready until well after 2030.” NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), at its most recent meeting July 21, raised the same issue, concluding NASA’s efforts were “on a precarious trajectory” to maintain cost and schedule . Both NASA and companies working on commercial stations shrugged off those warnings during a panel at the ISS Research and Development Conference July 27. “Our number-one goal is a continuous human presence,” said Angela Hart, CLD program manager at NASA. The companies with CLD awards are moving quickly, she said. “The frameworks of these agreements are set up to allow them to run quickly, to run a lot faster than our normal typical development, and we are absolutely seeing that.” She suggested that OIG and ASAP erred by comparing the commercial space station development with more traditional government programs. The companies involved are motivated to be first, she argued. “Because of those motivations and the differences of this framework, you’re going to see a different kind of development that you just can’t compare to a typical government program development, which is what OIG and ASAP are doing.” The four companies on the panel all said they are on schedules that would have their stations in orbit before 2030. Christian Maender, executive vice president of in-space solutions at Axiom Space, a company with a NASA agreement to attach commercial modules to the ISS as a precursor to a standalone station, said work on the first two modules in on schedule, with the first set to be launched in late 2024. ‘The only concerns that come up is if the space station is going to be ready for us,” he said. “I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment” from OIG and ASAP. “We are well on our way,” said Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, which is partnering with Blue Origin and other companies on the Orbital Reef station. She cited testing of inflatable modules that Sierra Space is developing for the station and other testing. The first Orbital Reef modules are slated to launch in 2027, a schedule she said provides plenty of time to transition from the ISS. “We are committed to be there two years prior to the decommissioning of the ISS,” said Amela Wilson, chief executive of Nanoracks, which is leading work on the Starlab station concept. “No worries there.” Only Rick Mastracchio, director of strategy and business development at Northrop Grumman, hedged on the ability to be ready before the retirement of the ISS. “It’s obviously very dependent on the market,” he said, including the size of the market and when it will emerge. “That’s really the big question. We can get there before ISS comes down, but it’s all dependent on the market.” Exactly who will be the customers of commercial space stations beyond NASA and how much demand they will generate remain unclear. Commercial station developers have talked about a mix of private astronauts, national space agencies, commercial researchers and in-space manufacturing as applications of their stations, but acknowledge they’re not sure how those individual markets will emerge. “The thing that keeps me up at night is mostly focused on how mature can I make those markets when we’re ready to fully independent,” Maender said. “I have high hopes, based on the discussions that we’ve had with clients and customers, that there seems to be a lot of interest.” “We don’t know, honestly, what will come of all these new space stations,” Kavandi said, noting it’s not uncommon for new, unforeseen applications to emerge. “I am absolutely positive that it’s going to be fantastic.”
Space Perspective, a company offering tourist flights into the stratosphere, is buying a ship it plans to use as an oceangoing launch platform for its balloons. The Florida-based company announced Nov. 15 it acquired a ship called MS Voyager that it is converting to serve as a launch platform for its Spaceship Neptune balloon system, taking people into the stratosphere to offer views like those experienced from space. Jane Poynter, co-chief executive of Space Perspective, said in an interview that the ship, the first of several the company plans to acquire, will augment its original plans to launch its balloon from land on Florida’s Space Coast. “This marine spaceport gives us incredible flexibility,” she said. “We are able to launch from most parts of the world where there is a maritime environment, and at different times of day.” Weather conditions over land typically restrict balloon launches to early morning. However, at sea, winds would allow launches at different times of day, allowing he company to offer flights not just at dawn but also at dusk and even at night, she said. The ship gives the company flexibility to offer flights from different locations, including the potential for flights during the Northern Lights aurora. Space Perspective already planned to have its Spaceship Neptune capsule splash down in the ocean at the end of its flights. Plan to expand internationally, Poynter said, led them to consider taking off from the ocean as well. “We’ve now got something that is really readily scalable,” she said. “It was a no-brainer to go in this direction.” Space Perspective acquired MS Voyager from shipbuilder Edison Chouest Offshore, but did not disclose the cost of the ship. The vessel, 89 meters long, is being converted into a launch platform now at a Louisiana shipyard and should be ready by the end of the year, with Port Canaveral in Florida serving as its home port. The ship will support the next series of Spaceship Neptune test flights, Poynter said. The company is completing its first pressurized capsule that it plans to start flying in the “first part” of 2023 on uncrewed tests as it gears up manufacturing of the balloons that will take the capsule aloft. Space Perspective expects to start commercial flights as soon as late 2024. The company started selling tickets in June 2021 and has now sold more than 1,000, with a current price of $125,000. Poynter noted that 40% of its customers are buying an entire flight, which can accommodate eight passengers. “That means this is a shared experience,” she said. The company raised $17 million in May and more than $65 million to date. Poynter said the company is fully funded through the start of commercial operations but that she expected to raise additional funding to support its growth.
The Federal Communications Commission has partially approved SpaceX’s application for the second generation of its Starlink constellation, allowing the company to launch up to a quarter of the proposed 30,000 satellites while deferring action on the rest. In a Dec. 1 order , the FCC granted permission to SpaceX to launch 7,500 satellites of its proposed Gen2 Starlink constellation, allowing the company to begin deployment of the system while it reviews the overall proposal by the company for placing 29,988 satellites into low Earth orbit. Those 7,500 satellites would go into orbital shells at an altitude of 525 kilometers and an inclination of 53 degrees, 530 kilometers and 43 degrees, and 535 kilometers and 33 degrees. Those shells, the FCC said, were the first the company planned to populate in the deployment of the overall Gen2 Starlink system. “Our action will allow SpaceX to begin deployment of Gen2 Starlink, which will bring next generation satellite broadband to Americans nationwide,” the FCC said in the order. “At the same time, this limited grant and associated conditions will protect other satellite and terrestrial operators from harmful interference and maintain a safe space environment, promoting competition and protecting spectrum and orbital resources for future use.” SpaceX had sought permission to launch satellites into both higher and lower orbits than the shells approved by the FCC. That included 19,440 satellites in orbits between 340 and 360 kilometers and 468 satellites at altitudes of 604 and 614 kilometers. Its application included 10,080 satellites in those three shells between 525 and 535 kilometers. The FCC said its initial approval matches SpaceX’s plans for deployment of the constellation, which would start with those three shells and use both Falcon 9 and Starship launches. SpaceX then planned to fill the lower shells before completing the system with the 604- and 614-kilometer shells. The FCC said its decision addresses orbital safety concerns raised by competing satellite operators and others. Because SpaceX no longer plans to deploy a separate 7,518-satellite V-band system previously authorized by the agency, the order stated, “the total number of satellites SpaceX is authorized to deploy is not increased by our action today, and in fact is slightly reduced, as compared to the total number of satellites SpaceX would potentially have deployed absent today’s action.” Allowing partial approval, the FCC said, was consistent with past actions, such as when it granted SpaceX permission to launch 10 Starlink first-generation satellites into a polar orbit while it reviewed a modification to SpaceX’s license in 2021 . “Here, the public interest would be served by taking this approach in order to permit monitoring of developments involving this large-scale deployment and permit additional consideration of issues unique to the other orbits SpaceX requests.” While the order allows some variation in the altitudes of the satellites in those three shells, to address variations in atmospheric drag, the order restricts SpaceX from having any Starlink satellite go above 580 kilometers at this time to avoid conflicts with Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites, which are licensed for those higher altitudes. The FCC said that the Gen2 Starlink satellites should be able to comply with its new order, approved in September, requiring satellites in low Earth orbit to deorbit no more than five years after the end of their lives , even of the satellite fail and are unable to deorbit on their own. The order, though, adds a new condition proposed by LeoLabs that limits the number of “object years” of failed Gen2 Starlink satellites: the number of years each failed satellite remains in orbit, added up over all the failed satellites. If the system passed a threshold of 100 object years, the FCC said, it will require SpaceX to pause deployment of additional satellites “while the sources of satellite failure are reviewed to determine whether there are any adequate and reliable mitigation measures going forward.” In addition to standard requirements that SpaceX coordinate frequency use with other satellite systems, particularly those that have priority from previous processing rounds, the FCC required SpaceX to continue to coordinate with NASA to avoid conflicts with NASA satellites. It also requires the company to work with the National Science Foundation and specific observatories to mitigate interference with radio and optical astronomical observations. The size of the Gen2 satellites, significantly larger than existing Starlink satellites, has raised concerns among astronomers that they could be significantly brighter . SpaceX has argued it will incorporate new technologies, such as dielectric mirrors, to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and make the Gen2 satellites dimmer than current models. The FCC will require SpaceX to coordinate with the NSF on mitigating the brightness of the satellites, filing an annual report on those efforts. The FCC, though, declined to require an environmental assessment for the Gen2 Starlink constellation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The FCC, in response to a Nov. 2 report by the Government Accountability Office about the applicability of NEPA to satellite systems, said it would review the existing categorical exemption for large constellations like Starlink, but was waiting until after the Council on Environmental Quality completed revisions to its regulations for implementing NEPA.
Astra Space announced Aug. 4 it is canceling its existing small launch vehicle after its most recent failure and will focus instead on a much larger vehicle that may not be ready to fly customers until 2024. In its release of its second quarter earnings, Astra said it would stop flying its Rocket 3.3 vehicle. That vehicle had failed to reach orbit three times in five launches, including its most recent launch June 12 , which carried two NASA TROPICS cubesats to monitor tropical weather systems. Counting earlier versions, Rocket 3 failed five times in seven launches. Astra said in an earnings call that it is still investigating the cause of that failure, working with NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed the launch. Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said the rocket’s first stage worked as expected, but that the upper stage suffered an anomaly that caused its engine to run out of fuel early. The company says that it will no longer fly the Rocket 3.3 and move on to its larger Rocket 4 vehicle that it announced in May . One change is that the payload performance of the new rocket has doubled to 600 kilograms. Kemp didn’t disclose details of the design change other than an upgrade to its upper stage engine. Rocket 3.3, by contrast, had a payload capacity of no more than 50 kilograms. “The feedback that we were getting from some of the larger constellation operators was that satellites were getting larger,” he said. Discontinuing the existing Rocket 3.3, he said, allowed the company to focus its resources on the new launch system, including increasing its payload capacity. “Then we started talking to our customers, and it was pretty clear that, after two of the last four flights we had flown were not successful, the opportunity to fly on a vehicle that has received all of this attention and energy from our team was also favorable to them,” Kemp said. Customers who had signed contracts for Rocket 3 launches will be re-manifested on future Rocket 4 launches, he said, including NASA. “We are in discussions with NASA to proceed with TROPICS on Launch System 2.0,” he said, which includes Rocket 4 and its ground systems. NASA officials speaking at an Aug. 2 meeting of the agency’s Earth Science Advisory Committee suggested they had yet to decide how to launch the four remaining TROPICS cubesats. “We had contracted with a new and innovative launch company, and we knew we were taking some risk. In this case, the risk didn’t pay off,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division. She said NASA was talking with partners on launch plans for the other four cubesats, including a meeting that was scheduled for Aug. 3 with NASA’s Launch Services Program “to figure out what that path forward will be.” NASA and other customers may have to wait some time for new rides from Astra. The company said it does not plan to conduct any more launches this year and will only begin test launches of the new vehicle some time in 2023. “I want to give [chief engineer] Benjamin [Lyon] time, and the team the time, to really get this right,” Kemp said. That includes several test flights of the vehicle in addition to extensive ground testing. “There is a lot of uncertainty because we want to give the time to the team to do all that testing before we do another commercial launch,” he said when asked for a schedule for the new vehicle. “Whether we’ll be able to commence commercial launches in 2023 will depend on the success of our test flights.” The company, which reported a net loss of $82.3 million and negative adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $48.4 million in the second quarter, has $200.7 million in cash and cash equivalents on hand. The company announced Aug. 2 an agreement with B. Riley Principal Capital II to sell up to $100 million in stock over the next two years. “The company expects that its sources of liquidity will be sufficient to fund operating and capital expenditure requirements through at least 12 months,” said Kelyn Brannon, chief financial officer of Astra, on the earnings call. Besides the work on the new launch vehicle, the company is scaling up production of its Astra Spacecraft Engine electric propulsion system. That thruster was developed by Apollo Fusion, which Astra acquired last year. Kemp said the company had received 103 “committed orders” for the thruster as of the end of the second quarter. Astra is leasing a new 5,575-square-meter facility that will be devoted to production of the engine. “If you look at 2023, what we’re looking at in terms of revenue forecasts will largely be spacecraft engines,” he said.
NASA is requesting proposals for two private astronaut missions to the International Space Station in 2023 and 2024, enforcing a requirement such missions be commanded by former NASA astronauts. NASA said Sept. 14 it was seeking proposals for the third and fourth private astronaut missions, or PAMs, to the space station, with the proposals due Oct. 27. One mission would fly between late 2023 and mid 2024, and the other in the second half of 2024, depending on overall ISS schedules. The first PAM, the Ax-1 mission by Axiom Space, flew to the station in April . NASA selected Axiom last December for the second PAM, Ax-2, and finalized the agreement for that mission Aug. 31 . Ax-2 is scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. As part of the agency’s broader low Earth commercialization strategy, NASA will allow up to two private missions to the ISS each year, each lasting up to two weeks, to help industry build up experience for future commercial space stations that will succeed the ISS. “These provide a unique opportunity for industry to gain critical experience needed to select, train and manage crews on future commercial low-Earth orbit destinations, as well as work with new science partners, future commercial partners and grow this non-traditional market,” said Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s Commercial LEO Development program at the Johnson Space Center, in an agency statement. NASA requested proposals for that third PAM opportunity last year at the same time as the second PAM. While NASA selected Axiom Space — the only company to submit a proposal — for the second PAM, it rejected proposals from Axiom and another company, Shuttle IO Technologies, for the third PAM after giving them poor ratings. NASA said at the time it would seek proposals for the third PAM at a later date after incorporating experience from initial missions. The request for proposals also confirms NASA’s plans, disclosed in an Aug. 1 regulatory filing , that private astronaut missions be led by a former NASA astronaut. “A former NASA astronaut provides experienced guidance for the private astronauts during pre-flight preparation through mission execution,” NASA said in the filing, noting that, at the time, that requirement was still being finalized. Companies responding to the PAM solicitation are required to provide up to 10 pages of information about the commander of the mission and that person’s experience. That includes being a “former NASA (U.S.) flown government astronaut” with experience in key technologies, operations and “maintaining a harmonious and cohesive relationship among crewmembers.” NASA also requires three references from previous supervisors or managers in the Flight Operations Directorate who know the proposed commander from their time at NASA. NASA also noted in the procurement that proposed missions seeking to conduct a spacewalk by private astronauts “will not be considered allowable.” It’s unclear if any companies were actively considering spacewalks on private missions. Axiom Space, which won one of two spacesuit development awards from NASA announced in June , said at the time that it had customers interested in doing spacewalks, but didn’t say if those would be on PAM flights or the company’s later commercial space station.
The inaugural flight of the Space Launch System won positive reactions from the White House and Congress, celebrating the successful liftoff while overlooking the vehicle’s extensive delays. While there was no formal White House statement after the Nov. 16 launch of the SLS on the Artemis 1 uncrewed mission , both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted congratulatory remarks about the launch. “This ship will enable the first woman and first person of color to set foot on the lunar surface and will lead countless students to become explorers and show America’s limitless possibilities to the world,” Biden tweeted , referencing the overall Artemis program. “Congratulations to NASA and our private sector and international partners on the launch of Artemis I,” tweeted Harris, whose responsibilities include chairing the National Space Council. “Today, America is charting a path back to the Moon. This is a landmark moment for our nation and our world.” At a press conference a few hours after liftoff, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he not spoken with Biden, noting that the president was in Indonesia wrapping up the G20 summit there. “I would not be surprised that, since it was daytime over there,” he said, “if, in whatever meeting he was in, his assistants took a TV to him and showed him the launch.” Nelson later tweeted that the president called him later in the morning “to express his thanks for missions that unite Americans behind our nation’s can-do spirit. Like millions around the globe, he tuned in to launch and I’m thankful for his leadership.” The launch also got a warm reception by leaders of congressional committees with oversight of NASA. “Thanks to the hard work of everyone at NASA and their partners, we are one step closer to achieving our goal of returning American astronauts to the Moon,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) in a statement. “As Chairwoman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, I have been a steadfast supporter of our human space exploration program, and I look forward to our nation’s return to the Moon in preparation for future human missions to Mars.” “The Artemis program has been a high priority for the Science Committee, and I’m so proud to see it come to fruition,” said Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member of the committee and in line to chair it in the next Congress after Republicans won control of the House in November’s midterm elections. His comments came in the same statement as Johnson’s. “Artemis I is the start of the next era of human space exploration.” Similar comments came from the leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee. “This flight test of the Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful in the world, and the Orion spacecraft will demonstrate its groundbreaking abilities during its mission around the Moon,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member of the committee, who noted the Stennis Space Center in his state hosted SLS engine tests. “The hard-working Mississippians at Stennis Space Center will forever hold a significant role in this incredible moment in history.” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the committee, also played up the local angle in the launch. “It also shows that Washington state remains an aerospace industry leader, with workers at 42 companies from seven different counties contributing components for the Artemis missions,” she said in a statement. However, the praise of the launch rarely, if ever, mentioned the challenges the Artemis program has faced, including extensive delays in the development of the SLS. The vehicle was originally intended to make its first flight by the end of 2016, according to direction given to NASA in a 2010 authorization act. One of the key figures who drafted that bill was Nelson, at the time a Florida senator. Asked about that at the post-launch conference, he said that one of the first things he did after the launch was to text another former senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, who in 2010 had worked with Nelson to draft the authorization act, to commemorate the success. He added he also planned to congratulate two former Obama administration officials, Rob Nabors and Jack Lew, who negotiated the contents of that authorization bill as a compromise between the administration’s original plans to cancel the Constellation program and congressional efforts to preserve it, “as soon as I can get their addresses.” “This is really a gratifying time,” he said, “but it’s only going to get better.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Arianespace said Nov. 25 it is delaying the first commercial flight for Europe’s upgraded Vega C rocket by nearly a month to replace defective equipment. The company discovered the defect on the medium-lift rocket as it was being armed in Kourou, French Guiana, to launch the final two satellites for Airbus’ Pléiades Neo Earth-imaging constellation Nov. 24. Vega C and the high-resolution Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 satellites are in a safe condition, Arianespace said in a short statement. “In order to replace the equipment, the upper composite of the launcher will be taken back to the payload preparation facilities and the payload fairing will be opened for the intervention,” the company added. The upper composite comprises the satellites and the AVUM (Attitude and Vernier Upper Module) stage that uses a liquid-propellant engine built by Ukrainian company Yuzhmash. Arianespace said the mission is now targeting a launch Dec. 20. The company launched two other Pléiades Neo satellites in separate missions last year with an earlier iteration of the Vega launch vehicle. Vega C debuted in July , launching an Italian physics satellite and six cubesats in a non-commercial mission managed by the European Space Agency. Arianespace updated its manifest following the Vega C delay to bring forward the last mission for Ariane 5 this year by one day to Dec. 13. The Ariane 5 is slated to launch two C-band replacement satellites for Intelsat and a spacecraft for Eumetsat, Europe’s meteorological satellite agency. Following this mission, two more heavy-lift Ariane 5 rockets would remain before Europe’s next-generation Ariane 6 launcher is slated to take up the baton in late 2023.
A Long March 2C launched nine positioning and connectivity test satellites early Thursday, in a first step for a constellation to support autonomous driving for automaker Geely. A Long March 2C lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 12:00 a.m. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed launch success, revealing the payload to be GeeSAT-5 (01-09) for Geespace. Geespace is a wholly owned subsidiary of automaker Geely Technology Group, which has first developed, produced and will operate the low-orbit commercial satellites. All nine satellites were functioning correctly after making contact with a ground station in Korla, Geespace confirmed in a press release . The nine satellites are part of the planned “Geely Future Mobility Constellation” constellation that will consist of 240 satellites. The first phase of 72 satellites are planned to be sent into orbit by 2025, with a second phase of 168 satellites to follow. Geespace says the satellites will provide centimeter-level accuracy positioning and connectivity support for Geely brand cars to support autonomous driving. Described as modular, high-resilience, high-performance, mass-produced low-orbit satellites, each will have an operating lifespan of five years. Geely aims to offer the first combined commercial Precise Point Positioning and Real-Time Kinematic (PPP-RTK) services. The route to orbit for Geespace has not been smooth. A report in April 2020 stated that two Geely satellites had been transported to Jiuquan for launch in the second half of 2020. A Kuaizhou-1A failure followed, grounding the rocket. After a successful return to flight, a pair or Geespace satellites were lost on a December 2021 Kuaizhou-1A launch. Geely established a $326 million satellite mass manufacturing factory in Taizhou in March 2020, which will have an estimated production capacity of over 500 satellites per year, according to a press release. The first mass manufactured satellites rolled out of Taizhou in late September 2021. It is unclear if the satellites lost in the December launch were the earlier pair or a new set from Taizhou. Thursday’s launch followed the signing of an agreement for Long March launch services between Geespace and CGWIC of CASC in September 2021. Geely’s space-related subsidiaries are l ocated in Nansha district of Guangzhou, with the city looking to foster a space cluster which includes CAS Space, a commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Tony Wang, CEO and Chief Scientist of Geespace said: “Many favorable factors such as policy support and market demand is accelerating the growth of the commercial aerospace sector. By establishing the Geely Future Mobility Constellation, Geespace is positioning itself to meet future user demands for high-precision positioning, space-based communication, and remote sensing services.” China’s government opened portions of the space sector to private capital in late 2014, seeking to foster commercial space ecosystems beyond the state sector dominated by CASC through incentives, policy support and a military-civil fusion technology transfer national strategy. The moves are seen as a response to the earlier rise of commercial space activities in the U.S. in the shape of SpaceX and others. Chinese policy frameworks, including support for new infrastructures such as “satellite internet,” and localities seeking to attract high-end technology space firms, have supported the emergence of hundreds of companies in areas around launch, satellite and downstream applications, leading to the formation of several space industry clusters and pilot zones in China. The GeeSat-5 satellites are likely to have onboard propulsion. A “notice on promoting the orderly development of small satellites” ( Chinese ) issued in May 2021 states that small satellites in orbits below 2,000 kilometers should be capable of collision avoidance maneuvers, as well as lowering orbits following the end of missions, to ensure satellites are deorbited no more than 25 years after the end of operations. State departments may take relevant “appropriate measures” if a company does not track, report on, and deorbit its satellites.
SAN FRANCISCO – French startup Grasp SAS has acquired Baltimore, Maryland-based AirPhoton to create Grasp Global, a European and U.S. Earth-observation company with plans for a cubesat constellation. Grasp, which stands for Generalized Retrieval of Atmosphere and Surface Properties, was founded in 2015 to provide software and remote-sensing services primarily to agencies including the European Space Agency and Eumetsat, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. AirPhoton, founded in 2012 by scientists who met at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, specializes in in-situ instruments to measure particulates and satellite payloads. Earlier this year, Grasp raised 2 million euros ($1.96 million) in a funding round, backed by Austria-based Findus Ventures and Cloudflight, a German IT services firm. With the money, Grasp acquired AirPhoton in August and began offering Earth observation hardware and software. “We have a lot of complementarity because we succeeded with software and AirPhoton succeeded in hardware,” said Oleg Dubovik, Grasp Global co-founder and research director of the French National Center for Scientific Research Atmospheric Optics Laboratory at the French University of Lille. Grasp Global now has access to the U.S. market and is eligible to compete for NASA or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contracts. Similarly, the company can sell hardware developed by AirPhoton in Europe. To demonstrate its capabilities, Grasp Global plans to establish an Earth-observation constellation to provide frequent observations of atmospheric aerosols and surface properties. “We plan to develop our first constellation of multi-angle polarimeters, called Gapmap, to retrieve advanced atmosphere composition products (atmospheric aerosols) for air quality applications of interest to polluting industries and atmospheric correction products of interest to many other satellite constellations,” David Fuertes, Grasp Global co-founder and CEO, said by email. Lorraine Remer, Airphoton co-founder and chief science officer, added by email, “Government agencies have a number of projects to launch similar instruments. We believe our data will be of sufficient quality while much cheaper, and therefore will provide a valuable complement to state-funded missions.” With the recent investment, Grasp Global has funding to launch its first instrument. The French space agency CNES is contributing approximately 1 million euros toward the launch of Grasp Global’s second mission on a U-Space cubesat. U-Space is a French startup offering turnkey spaceflight services.
As NASA takes the first steps to implement recommendations of the planetary science decadal survey, the agency is warning that projected funding for at least the near term will fall short of that’s report’s projections. NASA’s planetary science division held a town hall online Aug. 18 to discuss its initial 90-day response to the planetary science decadal survey, released in April . That report recommended NASA continue its development of Mars Sample Return as a flagship mission and pursue new flagship missions to Uranus and Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. The decadal included two funding profiles. A “recommended program” projected spending $41.1 billion on planetary science from fiscal years 2023 through 2032, enough to start work early in that decade on the Uranus flagship and, in the later years, the Enceladus mission. A “level program” projected spending $35 billion in the same period, enough to start work later in the decade on the Uranus flagship but not the Enceladus one. In the town hall, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said the agency’s budget projections fall short of even the level program. While the decadal’s level program has the planetary science spending at NASA increasing to more than $3.5 billion a year by the middle of the decadal, the projection included in the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget request keeps spending a little below $3.2 billion a year through 2026, rising to $3.3 billion in 2027. “We have to keep in mind that the current planning budget we have now is short of even the level budget,” she said. “We’re just trying to set expectations for where we are now and the challenges we have going forward.” She noted that the fiscal year 2023 request was still in the hands of Congress, although both a bill passed by the House Appropriations Committee in June and a draft Senate version would provide NASA’s planetary science programs with about $3.2 billion in 2023, very close to the agency’s request. “The decadal is inspirational and we will continue to advocate for budgets to support the aspirational goals of the survey,” she said, “but to just have a little bit of reality, we need to recognize that some of the recommended activities may need to be pushed to the right a little bit.” One example is the Uranus Orbiter and Probe flagship mission recommended by the decadal, which in its recommended budget would start almost immediately to enable it to launch in the early 2030s, allowing it to take advantage of a Jupiter gravity assist to shorten the travel time to Uranus. “We are really excited about this,” Glaze said of the mission concept, but stated NASA would be taking a somewhat slower approach to its development. Mission concept studies will begin no later than fiscal year 2024 examining a range of options for the mission. “The timeline for that is probably going to put a launch no earlier than the early 2030s.” Glaze added that NASA supports the other new flagship recommended by the decadal, the Enceladus Orbilander. “The guidance from the decadal survey is pretty clear that we need to get Uranus underway first,” she said, with no mission studies expected for the Enceladus flagship before fiscal year 2026. NASA is still evaluating other aspects of the decadal survey, including its recommendations for missions such as a lunar rover called Endurance-A that would collect samples for later return to Earth by crewed Artemis missions as well as a Mars astrobiology lander mission called Mars Life Explorer. It did support the decadal’s endorsement of the NEO Surveyor mission to search for near Earth asteroids despite cutting funding for the mission in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, delaying its 2026 launch by at least two years. The decadal, agency officials noted, was published a few weeks after the 2023 budget proposal. “The ’23 funding is a challenge,” Glaze said. “We are going to be working hard to make sure we can confirm the mission and move out on NEO Surveyor.” NASA is also acting on another decadal recommendation to continue the Mars Exploration Program beyond the Mars Sample Return mission. The agency said in its response that it plans to complete a “comprehensive architecture” for the program by the end of the year that can be carried out in parallel with Mars Sample Return, implementing insights from previous studies that recommended a series of missions to conduct Mars science. However, NASA rejected a recommendation in the decadal to develop similar scientific exploration strategies for other solar system destinations, such as Venus and “ocean worlds” in the outer solar system. Such strategies should be developed by the scientific community through existing advisory committees, Glaze said. “We’re really excited that this decadal is focused on questions and not destinations, and we want to focus those important questions that are identified in the decadal.”
Just days after setting a launch date for its first launch from the United Kingdom, Virgin Orbit announced Dec. 8 it was delaying that mission for weeks because of technical and regulatory issues. In a statement provided to SpaceNews, Virgin Orbit Chief Executive Dan Hart said the company’s “Start Me Up” mission from Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England, which had been set for as soon as Dec. 14, would be delayed “for the coming weeks.” “With licenses still outstanding for the launch itself and for the satellites within the payload, additional technical work needed to establish system health and readiness, and a very limited available launch window of only two days,” he said, “we have determined that it is prudent to retarget launch for the coming weeks to allow ourselves and our stakeholders time to pave the way for full mission success.” The company did not elaborate on the technical work needed for the flight. The LauncherOne system, including the rocket and its Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, have been at the spaceport since October, and the plane conducted a flight Dec. 2 as a dress rehearsal of the mission profile for the launch. Spaceport Cornwall, located at Cornwall Airport Newquay, received a spaceport license from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the U.K. launch regulator, Nov. 16 . However, Virgin Orbit has yet to receive a launch license from the CAA, and the U.S.-based company may also require a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. In a Nov. 7 earnings call, Hart said the CAA licensing was taking longer than Virgin Orbit expected , which he said was caused, at least in part, by being the first company to go through the new U.K. launch licensing process. “The good news is that we don’t see a showstopper or a big issue we’re working,” he said then. “But, it is taking longer than we had anticipated and it is taking a bit more effort than we anticipated as well.” In a separate statement, the CAA argued it was not to blame for the launch delay. “The U.K. space regulation process is not a barrier to a U.K. space launch,” said Tim Johnson, director for space regulation at the CAA. “Virgin Orbit has said in its statement this morning that there are some technical issues that will need to be resolved before launch. These in no way relate to the timing of when a license will be issued by the Civil Aviation Authority.” The announcement of the delay came less than 48 hours after the company advised reporters it was preparing for a launch as soon as Dec. 14. That launch, though, could slip to Dec. 15 or 16 “or later,” a spokesperson for the company said in a Dec. 6 email. Virgin Orbit did not give an estimate of a new launch date for the mission beyond “the coming weeks,” although one industry source said it was unlikely the launch would take place before the end of the year. That would mean Virgin Orbit will end the year with just two launches, after estimating at the start of 2022 it would conduct as many as six. The lack of launch activity and revenue from it has raised new questions about the company’s finances. Virgin Orbit said in its Nov. 7 earnings call that it ended the third quarter with $71 million of cash on hand, but had raised $25 million from Virgin Group earlier in the month. The company reported an EBITDA loss of $42.9 million in the quarter. Virgin Orbit said Nov. 23 that while it had evaluated the possibility of conducting a secondary offering to raise funds, it decided not to do so because of current market conditions. It added that any later plans to raise capital “will depend upon future market conditions.”
PARIS – Morpheus Space raised $28 million in a Series A funding round announced Sept. 14. Alpine Space Ventures led the round. Morpheus Ventures, a Los Angeles company unrelated to Morpheus Space, participated in the round along with existing Morpheus Space investors. “We raised more than we anticipated and could select the best partners for our round,” Daniel Bock, Morpheus Space CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. “All of our existing investors participated, which is also a great sign.” With the influx of capital, Los Angeles-based Morpheus Space is, in a nutshell, “investing in scalability,” Bock said. The company plans to establish a factory in Dresden, Germany, to produce thousands of propulsion systems annually. At the same time, Morpheus plans to expand its sales, business development, contracting and satellite operations organizations. Morpheus, a company originally focused on producing miniature electric thrusters, has broadened the scope of its business to offer propulsion systems and software to help satellites maneuver in orbit and deorbit at the conclusion of their missions. Last year, Morpheus unveiled a suite of products designed to reduce the cost and complexity of operating satellite constellations. The Sphere Ecosystem includes thrusters with nontoxic propellant, plug-and-play autopilot, space mission software and a web application. Morpheus has raised $33 million since the company spun out of a German university in 2018. When announcing Morpheus’ first investment round in 2020, executives declined to say how much money they raised, preferring instead to draw attention to their high-profile investors: Germany’s Vsquared Ventures, Lavrock Ventures, Airbus Ventures, Pallas Ventures, Techstars Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community. Morpheus completed its Series A funding round before the Federal Communication Commission issued a draft order Sept. 8 setting a five-year rule for disposal of satellites in low Earth orbit. The rule, if adopted, is likely to increase demand for small satellite propulsion. “It’s wonderful news for us as a propulsion company and wonderful news for the sustainability of the space industry,” Bock said. “I think it’s overdue. Five years is the right direction. Maybe in future that will be even less.”
PARIS – Iceye announced preliminary plans Sept. 14 to work with Satlantis, a Spanish Earth-observation technology company, to launch a constellation of four satellites to acquire high-resolution radar and optical imagery. Satellites in the proposed Tandem4EO constellation would fly in formation in sun synchronous low-Earth orbit with two Iceye synthetic aperture radar satellites flying in a bistatic formation ahead of two Satlantis satellites designed to gather imagery with a resolution of less than one meter per pixel. “Earth observation is ultimately about truly understanding what is happening in a selected location — with confidence,” Rafal Modrzewski, Iceye CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “To achieve robust and fast analysis, combining the strengths of optical and SAR satellites in a single constellation yields incredibly useful insights for stakeholders in Spain and Europe.” The Tandem4EO program is designed to bolster Spain’s New Space sector. Work would be performed at Finland-based Iceye’s manufacturing and research facilities in Jumilla, Spain, and Satlantis’ headquarters in Bilbao. “Both companies will continue to increase their investments in their local operations, supporting Earth observation downstream applications in the European Union, and the growth of the local New Space ecosystem,” according to a Sept. 14 news release. “Spain is in a remarkable position in Europe, with two leading New Space companies established in its territory opening new and unique opportunities in Earth observation,” Satlantis CEO Juan Tomás Hernani said in a statement. “This proposed initiative is the type of aerospace collaboration that would not have been feasible before. We’re in the golden age of New Space, and now is the right time to act on it.” Flying radar satellites in a bistatic formation would allow Iceye to offer customers satellite interferometry, a product that can reveal millimeter-scale vertical differences in the Earth’s surface or structures. In addition, the combination of high-resolution optical imagery with SAR has applications related to natural catastrophes, security, environmental monitoring and infrastructure development, according to the news release.
As SpaceX’s Starlink continues to gain military customers, the Pentagon worries that the company’s use of proprietary technology will make it difficult to integrate into a hybrid architecture that DoD hopes to build. This is becoming an issue for the Defense Innovation Unit, which is leading a project to develop a hybrid space architecture , integrating satellite communications systems across low, medium and geostationary orbits. Speaking Oct. 13 at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Rogan Shimmin, program manager of DIU’s space portfolio, said it will be difficult to build a hybrid architecture if the largest commercial satellite internet constellation is not interoperable with other providers. Without mentioning Starlink by name, Shimmin said “there is a particular commercial satellite provider in low Earth orbit, for example, that is several years ahead of the rest of the field. They do tend to try to establish interfaces, proprietary interfaces, that don’t necessarily want to play well with others.” DIU’s hybrid space architecture would use commercial communication systems as transport pipes to move data collected by imaging satellites and deliver it quickly to government users. The concept assumes that commercial satellites will talk to each other via interoperable links. Shimmin said his office awards contracts to commercial companies with incentives that “gently encourage different vendors to cooperate together.” By doing that, “we’ve created a much more collaborative relationship with our vendors.” DIU is working with the Space Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory on the hybrid architecture. The project is intended to support Pentagon efforts to connect ground, air, maritime and space systems, a concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2 . The backbone of the hybrid network will be DoD’s Transport Layer , a constellation to be deployed by the Space Development Agency, he said. “We want to augment it with the commercial communications architectures that are coming online to proliferate the internet in space, get every satellite talking to every other satellite, relaying through ground stations regardless of who owns the ground stations, they should all function as routers.” The thinking in JADC2 is “to embrace multiple providers so we don’t have a single point of failure,” said Shimmin. In some ways, this is a “futuristic techno-utopia with satellites talking to each other,” he said. The problem for DoD is that the industry is moving forward “establishing their own partnerships, without government funding, and the government is trying to catch up.” Military using Starlink Meanwhile, the demand for Starlink’s internet services continues to rise across the U.S. military. The ever-growing constellation has now more than 3,400 satellites in orbit and has approval to launch up to 12,000. The Air Force in recent contract documents said Starlink is the only provider that can meet the needs of deployed units in Europe and Africa . The U.S. Air Force 48th Fighter Wing based in the United Kingdom last month issued a sole-source solicitation for Starlink internet service at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, a host base for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. Starlink also is being used in multinational military exercises that require connectivity between ships, aircraft and operators on the ground. Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in the Middle East, said Starlink internet is an example of commercial technology that is filling critical military needs. During a roundtable with reporters at the Pentagon Oct. 12, Cooper said Starlink was used to connect drones operated by U.S. and allies forces in a recent NATO exercise off the coast of Portugal. During the exercise, approximately 120 unmanned aircraft, vessels and underwater vehicles were integrated into a common network. Cooper said U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, based in Bahrain, conducts dozens of maritime security exercises with allies. A goal for next year is to deploy as many as 100 U.S. and allied unmanned surface vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea for maritime surveillance. As more data is collected by drones, there is a greater demand for connectivity so information can be uploaded and analyzed in a timely manner, Cooper said, adding that U.S. and allied forces in the region plan to use Starlink next year when it’s expected to be available in the Middle East . During the NATO exercise in Europe, “what we found is that it works perfectly great,” Cooper said. The data moves at speeds much faster than with previous systems, and at less cost, he added. “So that’s the future.”
The head of U.S. Space Systems Command Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein has directed the command’s procurement offices to “buy what we can and only build what we must.” One area of interest is space domain awareness, or SDA . The Space Force wants to supplement its own intelligence with data from commercial companies to help satellite operators identify potential threats in orbit. F Schnell, senior materiel leader for space domain awareness at Space Systems Command, said in an interview Oct. 1 that many companies in the SDA market are eager to work with the Space Force but need a clearer picture of future demand. “They have to tell their investors what they’re investing against,” Schnell told SpaceNews . “We need to tell them what we see coming down the pipeline.” Companies in this sector of the industry operate ground and space-based sensors that track objects in all orbits, and use artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze the data. During a keynote speech last week at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) conference in Hawaii, Guetlein said SSC spent about $134 million on commercial space domain awareness products over the past two years. But the command has yet to map out a forecast for future years so it can “advertise that number to the investors,” Schnell said. During the AMOS event, Schnell and other SSC officials held one-on-one meetings with dozens of private companies. “Everybody we met had questions about what does that market look like?” he said. “We need to scope that out.” Col. Marc Brock, commander of Space Delta 2, the Space Force unit responsible for SDA, said there are today technical and cultural hurdles that prevent widespread use of commercial data. “We need to integrate and exploit nontraditional commercial data,” Brock said at the AMOS conference. “But there has been a push against this to a certain extent within our own enterprise, and I’ve been pushing back on that.” “We need our commercial partners,” he said. “We need the data that you have and we need to figure out how to use that data.” The commercial data that the Space Force uses today is uploaded to a repository known as the Unified Data Library . But the communications systems that Space Delta 2 uses to move that data are very slow, he said. The unit also needs tools to validate the accuracy and consistency of the data. Schnell said SSC is helping Space Delta 2 address some of these issues. “The use of commercial data is still relatively new,” he said. “How do we give operators confidence that commercial data is as good as that from our exquisite sensors?” Analytics tools needed Guetlein in his speech at AMOS cited recent comments by Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, who said most of the domain awareness data available today is “left on the cutting room floor” and not even analyzed. That’s because data collected by military sensors for the most part is classified, managed in stovepipes and not shared, VanHerck said during a panel discussion Sept. 21 at the Air, Space & Cyber conference. To solve this problem, Guetlein said “we have to free the data.” Over the years, he said, “we have put so many constraints on the data, so many rules on what you can look at, what you can’t look at.” With regard to Brock’s issues with data transmissions, Guetlein agreed that “we need better comm pipes. We are still traveling over the old copper lines that were built back in the 60s. We’ve got to get past that.” “And I’ve got to lower the classification level,” he said. “All we’re doing is hiding from ourselves. We’ve got to start having the critical conversations and open up the dialogue.” The acquisition model Guetlein is pushing, to “exploit what we have, buy what we can, and build only what we must requires a culture change,” he said. “Our operators have to know they can count on the commercial data,” he added. “In places like Ukraine, the data will flow. So we’re working on a culture change.”
NASA and Roscosmos are in the final stages of completing a long-awaited agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew vehicles and American astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft. At a July 13 briefing about the upcoming launch of a SpaceX cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said the agencies were “pretty close” to finalizing an agreement that would allow seat swaps starting with Crew Dragon and Soyuz missions launching in September. “We’re hopeful that we’re pretty close to finalizing the agreement. It is in the final stages of review with both NASA and Roscosmos,” she said. That agreement has been in negotiations and reviews for months by the two agencies as well as the U.S. State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry. NASA has long advocated for the agreement to enable what it calls “mixed crews” or “integrated crews” on spacecraft. That would ensure at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut would be on the station should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be unavailable for an extended period. In April, NASA ISS managers said they needed to have a seat barter agreement in place by late June to enable a crew swap on the SpaceX Crew-5 and Roscosmos Soyuz MS-22 missions, both launching in September. That deadline passed without an agreement, but NASA said July 1 that discussions were ongoing . In a conversation with reporters July 12 after an event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to mark the release of the first James Webb Space Telescope science images, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reiterated that it was the agency’s plan to have a crew swap on the upcoming Crew Dragon and Soyuz flights despite the lack of a completed agreement and heightened tensions created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The drop-dead date has not passed,” he said, but didn’t state what the new deadline was. Weigel said that Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina was continuing to train to be on the Crew-5 mission, while NASA astronaut Frank Rubio has been training for Soyuz MS-22. “Things are going well there,” she said. Any deadline, she suggested, is based on the remaining training for those flights and what would happen if Kikina and Rubio needed to be replaced. “It looks like we can wait until, basically, the end of next week, and then we would have some hard trades to make for training,” she said. “That’s really our end target.” Crew-5 is scheduled to launch for the beginning of September, Weigel said. “We’ll go through the final resolution, looking at the vehicle processing or any issues, and we’ll adjust it if we need to.” Roscosmos previously cited a Sept. 1 launch date for Crew-5. Soyuz MS-22 is planned to launch in mid-September. NASA has not stated who would go on Crew-5 in place of Kikina if a seat barter agreement is not completed in time. However, the agency previous said that Jeanette Epps, currently assigned to the first operational mission of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew, has been “cross-training” on Crew Dragon as well. At the briefing, NASA and SpaceX officials said they were ready for the cargo Dragon launch, scheduled for 8:44 p.m. Eastern July 14 from the Kennedy Space Center with a 70% chance of favorable weather. The CRS-25 mission will carry more than 2,600 kilograms of science investigations, equipment and supplies to the ISS. An on-time launch would have Dragon docking with the ISS July 16, remaining there for a little more than a month.
Correction: SES plans to launch two O3b mPower satellites in December, six in 2023 and three in 2024. Service with a six-satellite constellation is scheduled to begin within the next year, but the 11-satellite constellation will not be completed until 2024. An earlier version of the article listed incorrect launch dates. EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – At a time of unprecedented change in the satellite communications sector, fleet operator SES is eagerly awaiting the December launch of its first Boeing-built O3b mPower broadband satellites. “We think we have something special,” said Ruy Pinto, SES chief technology officer, referring to the constellation of 11 O3b mPower satellites destined for medium-Earth orbit. “This second generation of MEO satellites, it’s that holy grail of complete configurability.” Each of the 11 satellites in the O3b mPower constellation can generate up to 5,000 spot beams. While SES is not likely to need that many, the company appreciates the flexibility provided by the satellite’s software-defined payload. “You can just upload the coefficients and you can change the size of the beams,” Pinto said Nov. 10 during a press briefing at the Boeing satellite factory here. “And you can create that dynamically. Every minute you can change the configuration.” Flexibility is increasingly important to satellite operators, given the complex regulatory environment and spectral interference issues they face, said Ryan Reid, president of Boeing Commercial Satellite Systems International. Fleet operators need to be “able to control and fine tune with a high degree of precision and at a very rapid pace where power is being distributed or where power is not being distributed,” he added. The first two O3b mPower satellites are scheduled for launch in mid-December. Six more are on the manifest for 2023, with four launching in the first quarter. The last three O3b mPower satellites are set to launch in 2024. SES plans to begin providing O3b mPower service in the third quarter of 2023 with a six-satellite constellation. The first eight will launch in pairs on four SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. The final three will share another Falcon 9. After launch, it will take approximately five months for each O3b mPower satellite to propel itself to its designated orbit and an additional month for commissioning. Origin Story The discussions that prompted Boeing and SES to work together on the O3b mPower constellation began in 2016. SES, one of the world’s largest satellite fleet operators, sought a fundamentally different approach to satellite communications. The Luxembourg-based company wanted to integrate satellites with a network that could dynamically reconfigure power and bandwidth to provide fiber-like connections anywhere in the world. At the time, Boeing was conducting internal research and development on marrying terrestrial 5G technologies with high-precision semiconductor manufacturing to create integrated phased arrays. “That really becomes an extension of the ground software to provide complete flexibility in whatever dimension flexibility needs to be provided,” Reid said. During development and manufacturing of the O3b mPower constellation, more than 10 SES engineers have been co-located at the Boeing satellite factory. “They were not here just looking over someone’s shoulder to say, “Did you tick that box,’” Pinto said. “They have been driving the design and the configuration and how we are going to deploy that.” Meanwhile, SES was working with industry partners to update ground networks and create Adaptive Resource Control, software that links SES satellites in geostationary (GEO) and medium-Earth orbit with terminals and gateways on the ground. “We are trying to make it API-driven,” Pinto said. “So, if we buy another GEO or if we partner with a [low-Earth orbit] constellation, we can just plug that in. You plug platforms, constellations or satellites in.” Changing Markets Recent shifts in the government and commercial markets have underscored the need for flexibility. “What we have been through the last few years with the pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine has just highlighted some changes in the way we look at space,” Pinto said. “These trends were there before but they have accelerated over the last few years.” Governments around the world have always considered space capabilities important. Now, they look at space as being strategic, Pinto said. On the commercial side, the satellite communications market is being disrupted by SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation, Amazon Project Kuiper and other companies responding to heightened demand for global, low-latency connectivity. “Those companies and the owners of those companies don’t go into that market just because they fancy it,” Pinto said. “They see that there is grounds for growth and grounds for disruptive transformation.” Radiation O3b mPower satellites can launch in pairs and a trio because of their size. The software-defined satellites, built on Boeing’s 702X platform, are much smaller than traditional geostationary communications satellites, but larger than the first generation of O3b satellites built by Thales Alenia Space. Boeing modified the 702 platform and solar panels to withstand the harsh radiation of medium-Earth orbit for 10 years, O3b mPower’s design life. “Unlike a geostationary satellite where fuel tends to be the limiting factor, power is the limiting factor for these satellites in the radiation environment,” Reid said. “Fortunately as the satellites age, the ground system can continuously reconfigure them so they gracefully degrade over time.” Beyond O3b mPower While preparing to launch the first two O3b mPower satellites in mid-December, SES executive are looking ahead. “We are already thinking about the third generation,” Pinto said. “What is the next stage in technological development? How do we keep ourselves relevant in terms of technology?” Enhanced power, configurability and coverage will all be important. “We want to increase the power from single-digit gigabits for a single site to double-digit gigabits,” Pinto said. “And we want to have more coverage than O3b mPower is providing.” SES executives are talking with satellite manufacturers about the third-generation mPower constellation ahead of a formal tender process. “But it’s not about the call for tender, it’s about how we partner and stretch the envelope,” Pinto said. “What is it that we can deploy in three years’ time or four years’ time that will change the game again for us?”
SpaceX will replace the heat shield on the next Crew Dragon spacecraft flying to the International Space Station after it failed inspections, but NASA says there is no risk of a similar problem for the spacecraft currently at the station. In a May 24 statement to reporters, NASA said that a heat shield structure that SpaceX built for the Crew-5 mission to the station, slated to launch in early September, failed an acceptance test earlier this month and will not be used on that spacecraft. “SpaceX has a rigorous testing process to put every component and system through its paces to ensure safety and reliability,” the agency said in the statement. “The test did its job and found a manufacturing defect.” Those tests include X-rays of the structure as well as applying physical loads to it to simulate the forces it would experience on reentry and at splashdown, said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, during a May 25 briefing after the return of Boeing’s CST-100 on an uncrewed test flight. “What happened for Crew-5 is that, when we put the heat shield through the landing loads, it did not pass,” he said. “We could tell there was some damage inside the heat shield from that test, so we knew we couldn’t go forward and fly that heat shield.” NASA said SpaceX will use a different heat shield on that spacecraft, Endurance, that will go through the same tests. The agency said in its statement that it was still planning a September launch of that mission. The defect does not affect the heat shield on the Crew-4 Crew Dragon spacecraft, Freedom, currently at the ISS. “It does not have the same issues in manufacturing that we saw for Crew-5,” Stich said. “It has been through this testing sequence where we go apply all the loads to it and it has passed all those load cases, so we don’t have any concerns about the heat shield on Crew-4.” The NASA statement was in response to a published report May 23 that claimed that there had been a leak of hypergolic propellants from thrusters on Crew Dragon that caused significant damage to the heat shield at the end of the Axiom Space’s Ax-1 private astronaut mission to the station, which splashed down April 25. That raised a potential issue with the Crew-4 spacecraft that launched less than two days later. NASA denied there was any leak or heat shield problem on that mission. “The data associated with Dragon’s recent crew reentries was normal — the system performed as designed without dispute,” the agency stated. “There has not been a hypergol leak during the return of a crewed Dragon mission nor any contamination with the heat shield causing excessive wear.” NASA added there was a “full engineering review” of the Crew Dragon’s thermal protection system after the Ax-1 splashdown and before the launch of Crew-4. While the heat shield’s composite structure was reused for Crew-4, the thermal protection system material itself is new, the case for all crewed missions.
TAMPA, Fla. — Luxembourg startup OQ Technology said Sept. 1 it has raised about $13 million for its planned satellite constellation to connect internet of things (IoT) devices. The Series A funding round was co-led by Saudi oil and gas company Aramco’s venture capital arm and a fund managed by Greek early-stage investor 5G Ventures. OQ and CEO Omar Qaise said proceeds would fund future satellites and help the company expand internationally, particularly across Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, and Greece. The startup has two demonstration satellites in orbit, which Qaise said have been showing potential customers how its technology is compatible with devices operating under 5G protocols. “We have some MoUs with these customers,” Qaise said, and “are in a stage right now to … clear the formalities for commercial contracts and procurement.” He said Arianespace is set to launch OQ’s first fully commercial satellite as part of its next Vega C mission, which was slated for November but is now targeting December through January. All three of OQ’s initial satellites were built by Lithuania-based NanoAvionics. They are part of slightly more than seven “Batch one” satellites, each the size of six cubesats, that OQ expects to have deployed by the end of 2023 to improve revisit rates. The startup’s fundraising fully covers Batch one deployment, Qaise said, which would enable its constellation to visit the same area more than twice a day to relay data — depending on the region. OQ has already reserved slots for launches next year, he added, and has plans for more than 60 spacecraft in total. OQ also announced plans Sept. 1 for a subsidiary in Athens, Greece, and another in Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia as part of its expansion plans. The startup said its Saudi unit would host one of the Middle East’s largest 5G data and network operations centers. It will focus on engaging with large oil and gas companies in the region, which could use OQ’s network to monitor facilities without terrestrial connectivity. The Greek subsidiary would be located within incubator facilities under the Athena Research Centre, which also hosts the Hellenic Space Technologies and Applications Cluster. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
NASA is in talks with the Italian Space Agency to fly an Earth science instrument originally planned to go on a commercial smallsat. At a meeting of the Earth Science Advisory Committee Aug. 2, Greg Stover, program manager for NASA’s Earth System Pathfinder Program, said NASA was in talks with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to fly the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) instrument on a future Italian satellite. “We’re working with the Italians to find an access to space for the Multi-Angle Imager to be able to launch that in the next couple of years,” he said. “We’re working the international agreements right now to do that.” Karen St. Germain, NASA Earth science division director, added that NASA and ASI had not yet finalized that agreement. “This is an active discussion. We have signed agreements to be taking the next steps. It is not a completed agreement, though, but it is promising.” MAIA is designed to study particulate matter air pollution in urban areas and help scientists understand their effects on human health. The mission is intended to operate in a polar orbit at an altitude of 740 kilometers. MAIA was originally scheduled to fly on General Atomics’ Orbital Test Bed (OTB) 2 spacecraft. The agency awarded a $38.5 million contract to General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) in 2018 to host MAIA on the OTB-2 spacecraft. General Atomics was responsible for launching the satellite, and in February 2021 it awarded a contract to Firefly Aerospace for a launch on Firefly’s Alpha rocket . Stover said that “we had to stop pursuing” a flight of MAIA but didn’t disclose why. NASA had not publicly announced it had terminated its contract with General Atomics. “The MAIA instrument will ride on a host satellite, to be selected by NASA at a future date,” the mission’s website currently states. “NASA and General Atomics mutually agreed to end the MAIA Hosting contractual relationship in late 2021 due to overall technical alignment and programmatic challenges,” NASA spokesperson Jacob Richmond said Aug. 5. “We have been actively pursuing multiple paths including exploring a collaboration with the Italian Space Agency.” He added that Charles Webb, at the time associate director for flight programs in the Earth sciences division, briefed the science community on a potential delay in the launch of MAIA at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in January. At that time, though, the delay appeared linked to issues at Firefly Aerospace , whose largest shareholder, Noosphere Venture Partners, was divesting its stake at the request of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. “General Atomics is no longer hosting the MAIA instrument, as a result of a mutual decision between General Atomics and NASA,” Gregg Burgess, vice president of GA-EMS Space Systems, said in an Aug. 5 statement. “Residual hardware and software from that OTB spacecraft is being repurposed for use on other General Atomics spacecraft.” General Atomics entered the smallsat industry through acquisitions of manufacturers Miltec in 2016 and the U.S. subsidiary of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. in 2017. The company has won several orders from NASA as well as the U.S. Space Force, Space Development Agency (SDA) and DARPA for smallsat missions. OTB-2, though, is not the only General Atomics smallsat program to run into problems. The SDA’s Laser Interconnect and Networking Communications System (LINCS) mission featured two cubesats developed by General Atomics to test laser intersatellite links. However, the satellites tumbled after deployment on the SpaceX Transporter-2 rideshare mission last June and were unable to carry out the mission. Burgess, speaking in February, blamed the failure on “an issue with the launch vehicle” but did not elaborate. General Atomics has also encountered problems with the development of the Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor-2 (TSIS-2) spacecraft for NASA under a $32.9 million contract awarded in 2020 . The company won the contract by offering its OTB bus at a cost 40% below that of Southwest Research Institute, the other bidder. In a separate presentation at the Earth Science Advisory Committee meeting Aug. 2, Kathleen Boggs, acting associate director for flight programs in the Earth science division, said there had been “challenges” in the development of TSIS-2, noting unspecified issues identified by the mission’s standing review board. “It is a new vendor, new to the space arena, so we felt this was a good opportunity to help a nascent space company,” she said. “We spent some more time with them. Goddard [Space Flight Center] helped work through their scheduling challenges. They now have what we think is a good schedule and are getting ready for mission CDR,” or critical design review, now scheduled for September.
LOGAN, Utah – After a series of spaceflight demonstrations followed by years of secrecy, NovaWurks is ready to discuss contracts, customers and expansion plans. NovaWurks made a splash nearly a decade ago when the Southern California startup proposed constructing spacecraft with identical box-shaped modules weighing about six kilograms. The modules, now trademarked as Slego, provide the functions of conventional components like pointing, information processing and data storage. Designed to operate in geostationary orbit for 15 years, Slegos offer “tons of capability,” Talbot Jaeger, NovaWurks founder and chief technologist, told SpaceNews at the Small Satellite Conference . Rather than custom-designing spacecraft to accommodate payloads, NovaWurks arranges Slego building blocks in different configurations. “We’re not designing, we’re configuring,” Jaeger said. “Configuration doesn’t spend money on all that nonrecurring engineering.” NovaWurks performed its first in-orbit demonstration in 2017 on the International Space Station. An astronaut assembled a small satellite by combining six modules, then called HISats, with deployable solar arrays and an electro-optical imager in the NASA-sponsored Satlet Initial Proofs and Lessons mission. In 2018, NovaWurks’ Payload Orbital Delivery Satellite, PODSat-1, a mission funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, reached geostationary transfer orbit. PODSat-1’s four Slegos with a radio and antenna traveled to geostationary transfer orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as a hosted payload that was later deployed from a Hispasat communications satellite. Novawurks again demonstrated its modular approach through the 2018 eXperiment for Cellular Integration Technology, or eXCITe, mission. Another Falcon 9 sent eXCITe, one of 64 payloads on the rideshare flight, to low Earth orbit. Taken together, the demonstrations provided NovaWurks with the information engineers needed to refine their approach. For more than two years, company executives revealed little about the company’s spaceflight demonstrations or future plans. At the time, NovaWurks engineers were busy upgrading Slegos. “With all that testing, fixing, correcting, adjusting, we have a product now that is ready and we’ve got people interested,” Jaeger said. “It was hard to turn science fiction into fact. It took a lot of money and time, but it was worth it because we can change space.” Early in-orbit demonstrations have led to contracts. To keep up, NovaWurks plans to more than double its staff by the end of the year from 20 to 50 people. For example, NovaWurks is working with Saturn Satellite Networks to jointly develop Saturn’s NationSat, a small geostationary communications satellite. NovaWurks also is working with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency and the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command on a mission to measure solar energy reflected and absorbed by Earth. Data will be gathered with a small telescope attached to NovaWurks Slegos. The project, called Athena, is a test of NovaWurks’ quick-turnaround capability. During the pandemic, NovaWurks provided the Space Force with another demonstration of its quick-turnaround strategy. The Space Force gave NovaWurks three different spacecraft payloads with different thermal and field-of-view requirements. The idea was that once the Space Force selected one of the three payloads to fly, NovaWurks would have only 60 days to configure the spacecraft. “When we said that was easy, they made 30 days a stretch goal,” said Bill Crandall, NovaWurks business development vice president. The Space Force then selected one of the three payloads. It took NovaWurks five days to configure and turn on the spacecraft to accommodate it. The response from the Space Force was, “Okay, take that one apart and build another one,” Crandall said. Again, it took less than five days. NovaWurks captured the process on video to share with the Space Force “because they didn’t believe it,” Jaeger said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Starfish Space said Nov. 9 it plans to perform the first satellite docking test using electric propulsion next fall, when its Otter Pup demonstrator will attempt to rendezvous with another spacecraft in low Earth orbit. An orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) from Launcher, a small rocket developer, aims to drop the demonstrator off at an initial altitude after riding together on a Falcon 9 in the summer. The OTV will also serve as its docking target. Kent, Washington-based Starfish said the OTV and Otter Pup have secured a launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 8 rideshare mission. Exotrail, which is also developing OTVs, is providing the electric propulsion thruster that Otter Pup will use for a mission aiming to demonstrate key technologies for Starfish’s in-orbit servicing business. Starfish says using electric propulsion, instead of chemical-based alternatives, will enable it to produce servicers that are cheaper and smaller than the servicing spacecraft that Northrop Grumman and Astroscale currently have in orbit. “We are trying to dock a satellite at 5% the cost of any similar mission in history,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett said. Astro Digital is manufacturing the chassis for Otter Pup, which is about the size of a microwave, and Redwire is providing the Argus camera hardware it will use for relative navigation. The mission also aims to demonstrate Starfish’s rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (RPOD) technologies, including software for determining the relative position of a docking target and for planning trajectories. Starfish flight tested its RPOD software during Orbit Fab’s spacecraft refueling demo mission last year in low earth orbit. Starfish co-founder Austin Link said this software is capable of taking Otter Pup from several kilometers away in for docking without any human input. However, “with an abundance of caution for this mission we do have multiple time windows where humans can decide we’re not comfortable and we can halt the trajectory sequence,” he added via email. After separating from the OTV, Otter Pup is due to lock back on with an electrostatic-based capture mechanism Starfish calls Nautilus, before detaching and retreating to a safe distance to conduct other tests. Honeybee Robotics supported Nautilus’s mechanical design. Link said the venture is still deciding where to dock with the OTV. “ We won’t dock back exactly where we’re released from because there’s a separation ring in that spot, but there are a couple locations near there,” he said. If the demo is successful, Starfish aims to develop a slightly larger Otter satellite servicing vehicle — somewhere between the size of a mini-fridge and an oven — that could extend the life of geostationary satellites in addition to disposing of debris. The venture raised $7 million last year from early-stage investors to accelerate its plans.
A draft House spending bill would provide NASA with a smaller spending increase than requested for fiscal year 2023, with cuts spread among exploration, science and technology programs. The House Appropriations Committee released its commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill late June 21, a day before its CJS subcommittee will mark up the bill. The full appropriations committee will take up the bill June 28. The draft bill includes $25.446 billion for NASA for fiscal year 2023. That is $1.4 billion, or 5.8%, more than what NASA received in fiscal year 2022, but $527 million less than what the agency requested in its budget proposal in March . The bill reduces funding increases across most major NASA budget accounts, including aeronautics, exploration, science, space operations and space technology. NASA, for example, sought nearly $8 billion for science, but the House bill offers $7.9 billion. The bill includes few details about funding for specific programs, details that are usually included in a separate report that will be released later in the appropriations process. In space technology, the bill provides $1.25 billion for space technology, compared to the request of nearly $1.44 billion. The bill, though, specifies $227 million be spent on a satellite servicing mission called OSAM-1 (formerly Restore-L) and $110 million for nuclear thermal propulsion. NASA sought $227 million for OSAM-1 but only $15 million for nuclear propulsion. The House bill provides $7.32 billion for deep space exploration systems, about $155 million below the administration’s request. However, the bill specified funding for the Space Launch System, Orion and Exploration Ground Systems at or slightly above the request. That means the cut would be absorbed by other exploration programs, such as the lunar Gateway and Human Landing System. The lack of details in the bill means it is silent on some of the budget proposal’s more controversial provisions. That includes NASA’s proposal to cut funding for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to search for potentially hazardous asteroids. NASA sought only $40 million for the mission in 2023, compared to $170 million previously projected for the mission in 2023. The agency said the cut, which would delay the mission’s planned 2026 launch by at least two years, was needed to accommodate cost growth in other programs. In a June 16 letter , the leaders of two advocacy groups, the National Space Society and The Planetary Society, asked House and Senate appropriators to reject the cut and fully fund NEO Surveyor. It cited an endorsement of the mission in the recent planetary science decadal survey, published after release of the budget proposal, and the value of in-space detection of asteroids. At a June 21 meeting of the Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, acknowledged the budget proposal is “not great” for NEO Surveyor. “We recognize that it is a really hard cut for NEO Surveyor,” she said. “We have not lessened our interest in completing NEO Surveyor. We definitely want to continue the mission.”
Mynaric has hired an experienced executive from the optical communications and semiconductor industries as its new president, charged with overseeing production of its laser communications systems. Mynaric announced Aug. 18 that it named Mustafa Veziroglu as its new president. Veziroglu was previously chief operating officer for communications and sensing at SA Photonics and earlier held key positions at Xilinx and Lattice Semiconductor. In the new role, he will oversee production, development and product management for laser communications systems that Mynaric is offering to commercial and government customers. He will be based in Germany, where Mynaric is headquartered; the company also has facilities in the United States. A key priority will be scaling up production of laser communications terminals in anticipation of larger orders for satellite constellations. “The main challenge in the industry is how do we mature the design to a state where we can freeze it, and it’s good enough to meet the current need, and transfer it to manufacturing so that we can build those things in volume,” he said in an interview. “It’s that stage is where I think my initial focus is going to be.” He said he was impressed by the steps Mynaric had taken to prepare for high-rate production. “It was really the nimbleness of the company and how they are leaning forward in terms of investment that company has made in preparation for really high-volume manufacturing,” he said. Bulent Altan, chief executive of Mynaric, said he knew Veziroglu from his previous job and saw him as a good fit for the new role. “When we identified this president position, which is a very operational position for us, we decided to reach out to him,” he said in an interview. The demand for laser communications systems, for both air and space applications, is for now dominated by government applications, Altan said. Mynaric was one of 11 companies and organizations selected by DARPA Aug. 10 for its space-based adaptive communications node, or Space-BACN, project to develop interoperable inter-satellite links. It is also Northrop Grumman’s supplier of laser communications terminals for its Space Development Agency (SDA) Transport Layer Tranche 1 satellite contract . Altan, though, said he expected commercial satellite constellation developers to soon make decisions on laser communications links for their systems. “The year end will bring with it those commercial decisions,” he said, such as by Telesat and OneWeb’s next-generation constellation. “They are trying to figure out what their future in optical communications will be.” Mynaric says its products can serve both commercial and government customers. “We are seeing a certain amount of divergence between the two markets when it comes to the required bandwidth,” Altan said. “The government is taking a more cautious route on demanding lower bandwidth versus the commercial players.” Mynaric’s system, he said, can adapt to both markets. “There’s a learning curve,” said Veziroglu. “I believe that the learning from government will set us up for the much higher volumes for commercial.” One challenge to scaling up production will be supply chain issues that are widespread throughout the space industry. “It helps that we are vertically integrated,” said Altan. He said electronics shortages involving higher-end components are an issue, but that the company has invested in stockpiling such items. Veziroglu said he expected space-based optical communications to spur interest in other markets. “The space-based constellations will drive demand for other domains, like airborne and terrestrial,” he said. “Think of space as the lead that will drive substantial demand for other domains.”
European civil and military space organizations are revising budgets, programs and policies in light of the war in Ukraine. “For ESA, one of the lessons learned from the conflict is that we need to have an autonomous transportation capability,” Stefaan De Mey, European Space Agency senior strategy officer for Human and Robotic Exploration, said during a World Satellite Business Week panel discussion. “That is actually the problem number one.” Defense agencies, meanwhile, have recognized the value of commercial space services. “The NewSpace strategy from the U.S. is actually working right now,” Col. Guillaume Bourdeloux, Commander of the French Space Command’s Space Operations Brigade, said during a panel on military space at World Satellite Business Week. “Using contracted services for satellite observation, not to mention communications, is key to Ukraine right now.” Europe’s space sector continues to grapple with the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Roscosmos’ decision announced in February to halt Soyuz launches from French Guiana in response to European sanctions has left ESA scrambling to find alternative transportation for Galileo navigation satellites, the EarthCARE Earth science mission and the Euclid infrared space telescope. Without Soyuz, France also is searching for a way to launch its CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite. “We cannot be dependent on other partners to launch our satellites,” French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne said at the International Astronautical Congress. “We cannot tolerate that.” Demand for Europe’s own launch capabilities is translating to proposals to hike funding for space agencies in general and for launch vehicles specifically. At the ministerial council in November, ESA will seek $18.7 billion euros, a roughly 25% increase in funding from member states. In addition to backing for Ariane 6, which is scheduled to fly for the first time next year, and Vega C, slated to deliver a pair of Airbus Defense and Space Pléiades Neo Earth-observation satellites to low Earth orbit on its second flight in November, commercial launch vehicle developers expect the war in Ukraine to increase funding for their efforts in Europe. “The war in Ukraine certainly has underscored the fact that people want to have their own capabilities from a political flexibility perspective,” Lee Rosen, chief operations officer of Skyrora Ltd., a launch vehicle developer based in Scotland, said in an interview. “If Ukraine had its ability to replenish its own reconnaissance satellite capability or communication satellite capability, I’m sure that they would be very happy to do that.” Military space agencies, meanwhile, are expected to increase funding for Earth observation, space situational awareness and communications. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the value of various Earth-observation satellites, including optical constellations offering frequent revisit rates, radar satellites and radio-frequency-monitoring constellations, Bourdeloux said. The value of satellite communications was underscored at the outset of the war by the Russian cyberattack that knocked tens of thousands of Viasat modems offline. “Communications coming from space are key in this war in terms of tactical efficiency, but also command and control,” Bourdeloux said. “NewSpace is here, and it’s working.” The conflict in Ukraine also has highlighted the importance of space situational awareness. Three months before Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s border, Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a direct-ascent antisatellite missile. From that moment on, French Space Command began paying even closer attention to space domain awareness. “What we see from a French Space Command perspective is actually the start of orbital warfare,” Bourdeloux said. “We see tactics going on in space, where the competitor is trying to deceive us so that we don’t see them and don’t understand what they are doing. Of course, it’s just the start, and we want to make sure we can detect and attribute those issues.” Since the war began, Luxembourg has revised its space priorities. Before the conflict, Luxembourg was investing in the development of future capabilities for its armed forces. Now, the focus is more short-term. “We are very focused on delivering equipment and system that can be used by the armed forces,” said Geoffroy Beaudot, space and cyber head for Luxembourg’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs Defense Directorate. For example, Luxembourg has made it a priority to deliver commercial Earth observation and satellite communications services that can be used directly by Ukrainian armed forces because “national assets that we have in Luxembourg cannot be directly given to the Ukraine force because it could be considered as a weapon system used by the forces outside of NATO countries,” he added. For the European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen) based in Madrid, which provides geospatial intelligence and training, the war prompted a shift in tempo rather than priorities. “It definitely pushed us off a kind of normal rhythm,” said SatCen Director Ambassador Sorin Ducaru. “SatCen has a regime of being 24/7 on call, but the call was now always there. This unprecedented situation has increased the rhythm and the speed of reactivity.” The conflict also underscored the need to automate Earth observation tasks, “to have automatic recognition of infrastructure or military equipment,” Ducaru said. “It enhanced the recognition of the value of such geospatial analysis capabilities.” This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The satellite industry’s largest and most established operators are bracing for major disruption as consolidation and new entrants shake up the state of play. “The way the industry looks today with the core players may or may not look the same in the next couple of years,” Intelsat CEO David Wajsgras said during a Sept. 13 World Satellite Business Week panel here. The entry of Starlink’s low Earth orbit constellation is increasing competition in the broadband market, which has become an important source of growth for the industry amid declining revenues from broadcast services. Eutelsat is seeking to merge its business in geostationary orbit with OneWeb to compete more effectively in connectivity markets. Viasat is also in the middle of acquiring Inmarsat as part of a multi-orbit plan to build scale internationally. Wajsgras did not specifically address industry speculation that Intelsat is in talks about merging with SES but said Intelsat is “considering various types of opportunities that will help support our growth path” in response to this changing landscape. “I can tell you with absolute certitude in the next three to four years there’ll be other new players that will also be disruptive companies [that] most of us have never heard of yet,” he said. “And companies that we’re looking at today that we think are on the right glide path may just drop off, drop out of existence for one reason or another.” He said the ability to manage the supply chain issues in the industry, which could last “another couple of years before things really settled down,” will be crucial. “The companies that execute managing the supply chain best will be the companies that end up on top,” according to Wajsgras. SES CEO Steve Collar said worsening macroeconomic conditions will create winners and losers in the industry. Inflation and recessionary pressures will also make investors more discerning about the projects they support, Collar said. While he declined to comment specifically on whether SES is negotiating a merger with Intelsat, he has previously discussed consolidation in general terms as a positive move to help make the industry more sustainable. Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said consolidation is “good for the sector” during the conference session. He said the scale of investments needed to be competitive in bringing customers the connectivity they are demanding is partly driving the activity. “And some of it’s coming from … two new big entrants that we’re having in the sector: SpaceX/Starlink being one and Amazon the other — and here again, they are bringing very large, very capital-intensive broadband connectivity infrastructures to market.” He said Telesat remains hopeful of securing the remaining funds the GEO operator needs for its planned Lightspeed LEO constellation, despite the project’s manufacturing delays and rising costs .
A satellite communications payload Boeing developed for the U.S. Space Force successfully demonstrated it can prevent jamming attacks, the company said Nov. 15. The anti-jam test, conducted at Boeing’s facility in El Segundo, California, is a key step toward the planned 2024 launch of the Protected Tactical Satcom Prototype, or PTS-P, a payload that the Space Force will test in orbit to assess whether it can provide secure communications in potential war scenarios when U.S. networks would be targets of electronic and cyber attacks. Boeing and Northrop Grumman in 2020 won separate contracts worth $191 million and $253 million, respectively, to design PTS payloads. These are part of a larger Space Force program to deploy jam-resistant geostationary satellites or perhaps hosted payloads for military classified and unclassified communications. Boeing’s and Northrop Grumman’s prototype PTS payloads will operate in geosynchronous Earth orbit so they are compatible with military terminals with stationary antennas that point only to GEO satellites. “Our adversaries are always attempting to deny our ability to communicate,” said Justin Bruner, PTS-P program manager at the U.S. Space Force. In a statement Nov. 15, he said Boeing “has made significant strides” in the development of anti-jam capabilities. The PTS-P uses military-developed software known as the Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW). Boeing said the payload can “geolocate and actively suppress jamming in real-time, with thousands of data points gathered every second.” 
 
 In the recent demonstration, the company simulated adversaries’ attempts to block a user’s communication. “In every simulation, the prototype autonomously mitigated highly-dynamic jamming attempts and preserved connectivity, including situations where the user was in close proximity to the interference source,” Boeing said. 
 
 Troy Dawson, vice president of government satellite solutions at Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said the company’s PTS-P payload is scalable and hostable on both commercial or government satellites. “The team has completed several hardware and software demonstrations, working towards a 2024 launch and ensuing on-orbit demonstrations,” he said. Neither Boeing nor the Space Force has said what platform will host the PTS-P payload for the 2024 demonstration. A spokesman for Space Systems Command said plans for future PTS acquisitions have yet to be finalized. “Since the host of the Boeing PTS prototype payload is contractor proprietary, we are not able to provide any further details at this time,” the spokesman said. Under a separate program, Boeing is developing the U.S. military’s 11th broadband communications satellite known as Wideband Global Satcom, or WGS -11+, projected to be completed by 2024. 
A $600 million DoD initiative to demonstrate 5G wireless networks at military bases nationwide is primarily focused on terrestrial communications but is being closely watched by the satellite industry as non-terrestrial networks increasingly become part of the 5G ecosystem . These DoD experiments with 5G also will serve as an indicator of how the military intends to employ commercial technologies for fixed and mobile communications, which could shape future demand for space-based services. “The question is where do they go with it?” said Rick Lober, vice president and general manager of the defense business division of Hughes Network Systems. Satellite operators Hughes and Viasat are among several telecommunications technology firms that have won Pentagon contracts under the 5G pilot project. “After this experimentation phase, we understand that in the 2024 budget cycle we may see it being programmed in for operational use,” Lober told SpaceNews. The next step would be for DoD to take advantage of low Earth orbit satellites with lower latencies to deliver 5G for mobile users, Lober said. “What we’re doing now is terrestrial. But what’s coming next is that a 5G standard is going to be adopted for space. So we’re going to be talking about satellite-direct-to-phone connections, probably using LEO networks,” he said. Hughes, an investor in OneWeb, plans to partner with the company on DoD 5G efforts. Most recently, satellite communication provider SatixFy Technology announced it successfully demonstrated 5G backhaul communications connected to a OneWeb satellite in low Earth orbit. Amazon’s LEO network known as Project Kuiper has teamed with Verizon Communications to pair Verizon’s 5G terrestrial mobile network with Kuiper satellites. The Pentagon views the 5G race as part of the U.S. strategic competition with China, and DoD could leverage mobile 5G to fill communications needs not currently met by military satellites, said Lober. A major development for space-based 5G was the recent release of standards by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the international body responsible for defining technical specifications for mobile wireless networks.. The latest standards release — 3GPP Release 17 — deals with non-terrestrial networks and supports expansion of coverage using satellites. “Commercial industry is driving that, and I think the DoD can really take advantage of it,” said Lober. “5G gives you much higher throughput, and much lower latency. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that lower latency allows you to do edge computing on the battlefield.” The satcom industry expects more funding for 5G in the Pentagon’s 2024 budget, he said. “We hope to see funding to take what we’ve done experimenting with terrestrial and make it operational.” Commercial mobile 5G from space would be a worthwhile option for DoD to fill future narrowband communications needs, he added. The U.S. Space Force is considering buying two more Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellites that provide voice and low-rate data transfer for mobile users. Current MUOS satellites are oversubscribed, and the Space Force is conducting an analysis of alternatives to determine whether it should buy two more MUOS, opt for a new design or use commercial services. One of the issues with MUOS is that there are not enough user handsets and terminals in the U.S. military to take advantage of the features of the more advanced payload. Most users have older terminals that only communicate with MUOS legacy payload that has outdated technology. “This has been a big problem,” said Lober. “Commercially, we look at space, ground terminal and network management, all in parallel.” Now the industry is moving to space-based 5G and “we feel that the DoD should strongly consider that for their narrowband analysis of alternatives,” said Lober. “The beauty of that is that if you can get the same device to operate terrestrial and space, you’re really advancing things.”
The United Kingdom has its sights set on meeting emerging demands in its quest to become a major global space power. Few on the horizon are more pressing than the need to improve orbital sustainability. Alongside investments in startups building businesses to clean up orbital debris, the British government is seeking to shape regulations to ingrain these companies in the future space ecosystem. The government is also on a mission to incentivize sustainable space practices more broadly. U.K. Science Minister George Freeman launched a raft of sustainability measures in June that include plans to make licenses, insurance and other costs cheaper for environmentally conscious space players. Less sustainable space businesses could face a comparatively harsher business climate. Called the Plan for Space Sustainability, it joins the U.K.’s wider strategy for a bigger slice of the global space industry to bolster its post-Brexit economy. On the surface, adding more bureaucracy appears to be a drag on other growth pillars set out in the National Space Strategy the country published in September. Namely, plans to develop a domestic launch capability and foster a business-friendly environment to attract more early-stage companies. However, it comes as the low Earth orbit (LEO) population is estimated to grow from about 4,000 satellites to 100,000 by 2030, according to a June report British satellite operator Inmarsat published in partnership with Astro Analytica. The estimate did not include startup E-Space’s proposed 300,000-satellite constellation due to a lack of publicly available information about those plans. Either way, such dramatic growth could exponentially increase the risk of debris-causing collisions that threaten the operational viability of Earth orbit. Much depends on the shape U.K. space sustainability regulations take and if and how they are adopted outside the United Kingdom. “The problem with space debris is that it needs to be a global solution,” said Armand Musey, founder of New York-based advisory firm Summit Ridge Group. Without universal agreements, Musey contends space companies are incentivized to launch or operate from countries with less regulatory costs and burdens. The satellite industry’s rapid growth is also largely a product of how increasingly easy and cheap it is to access space. Musey describes this as “a recipe for small companies that don’t have the resources to clean up a mess if they make one.” While the drumbeat to address space sustainability issues is getting louder as megaconstellations like Starlink and OneWeb get bigger, he still sees little political will internationally to turn the tide. That is something the United Kingdom hopes to change. Freeman said the country’s sustainability measures aim to rein in the “Wild West space race,” which he says “without effective regulation risks a growing crisis of debris in space, adding to the existing threat from 400 redundant satellites and a million pieces of debris.” The Plan for Space Sustainability has four main elements: The government said additional funds for the debris removal demonstration, which involves de-orbiting unprepared defunct satellites, enables it to “move at pace” for picking two teams this summer to advance in the program. Last year, the U.K. awarded three feasibility study contracts with a combined value of £1 million to consortia led by Astroscale, ClearSpace and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. The plan is to remove two spacecraft from LEO by 2025. The government called for “swift action” to start cleaning up debris and introduce measures to minimize the footprint of future projects. “As it was with shipping in the 17th century and cars in the 20th, the key will be regulation which enforces good industry standards and reduces the cost of insurance and finance for a satellite launch which can show it is compliant,” Freeman said. The U.K. hopes to leverage London’s legacy as a global insurance and financial services hub to influence international space sustainability regulations. Freeman’s remarks came a day after Prince Charles called for an “Astro Carta” for space sustainability, referring to England’s Magna Carta that was signed more than 800 years ago to limit royal authority and establish the rule of law. He said an Astro Carta could build upon the U.S.-led Artemis Accords to establish sustainable space exploration. “Regulation can sometimes be viewed in a negative way, but many of the innovative activities we are taking forward to support sustainability could not be achieved without world-leading regulation,” a UK Space Agency spokesperson told SpaceNews via email. Astroscale has been a major benefactor of U.K. investments in the in-orbit servicing market. The Japanese startup’s British subsidiary recently secured funding to move ahead with a 2024 demo mission to de-orbit what will likely be a OneWeb satellite. Astroscale plans to launch commercial services after this demo mission, dubbed the End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-multiple, or ELSA-m. Supported by ground operators in the U.K., Astroscale is currently in the middle of demonstrating de-orbit technologies in LEO under ELSA-d, or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration. ELSA-d is using a 175-kilogram servicer and a much smaller satellite acting as debris to validate technologies. The servicer successfully released and re-captured its 17-kilogram client in August, but lost half of its eight thrusters as it was preparing another capture attempt early this year. Astroscale is still deciding whether to proceed with its original plan to ultimately de-orbit the client. ELSA-d and ELSA-m’s capture mechanisms require their targets to have magnetic docking plates, which will not be a part of the 2025 mission that Astroscale is competing to join. The UK Space Agency spokesperson said data from active debris removal, in-orbit servicing and other demo missions “provide ground truths” for how the U.K. should regulate the space industry. “The UK Space Agency increasingly hears from the space sector and our international partners that regulation and legal certainty are key to managing risks in space, engendering a responsible approach to space operations, and ensuring space remains a sustainable environment for all,” the spokesperson said. The country’s strategic focus on sustainability also aims to tap into an investment trend that favors businesses with strong Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) credentials. A number of companies have been voluntary including ESG statistics in their financial statements — such as how much pollution they cause and what they are doing to reduce it — to improve their corporate image and attract socially-minded investors. However, the ESG movement is struggling against a lack of universally recognized standards for verifying these credentials, leading to a confusing mix of competing guidelines and accusations of “greenwashing.” Even still, the UK Space Agency says companies that commit to an ethos where ESG “standards are at the heart of what they do attract an increasing pool of ethical investors and insurers.” Freeman said its new Space Sustainability Standard could serve as a “kitemark,” or standard of safety and quality, for attracting companies and ESG investors. The British government is developing and testing the standard with industry, academia and the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates its emerging launch capability. International expertise will also be harnessed. “This will be an on-going piece of work, but over the coming months industry will undertake the work to develop and scope the standard,” the UK Space Agency spokesperson added. The standard would include ESG-focused metrics that cover spacecraft and the use of space for environmental sustainability on Earth. It will apply existing space sustainability guidelines and principles, while also filling in any gaps to develop best practices across the lifecycle of space activities. Mark Boggett, managing director of British early-stage space investor Seraphim Capital, said such sustainability-focused regulation could work “hand in glove” with the rapid expansion of satellites in orbit. “I don’t meet any constellation companies that don’t want themselves to be a responsible operator,” he said. A day before the Plan for Space Sustainability was launched, British satellite fleet operator Inmarsat released a report with its own recommendations for improving sustainability. They included introducing a points-based penalty system tied to the licensing process for new launches and the management of constellations. This would directly link a company’s operating record to the outcome and speed of future license applications. “Robust and bold steps are needed to arrest the deteriorating state of the space environment,” Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri said. Other recommendations in Inmarsat’s far-reaching report include expanding the remit of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an affiliate of the United Nations. The ITU currently regulates global wireless radio spectrum and access to positions in geostationary orbit. To update the organization for the megaconstellation era, Inmarsat suggested expanding ITU’s remit from spectrum to orbital regulation in LEO. “It is important, in the long run, to have an international body recognised by all, that plays a role in overseeing orbital regime allocations and that can take a clear and complete perspective on LEO deployments from a global sustainability point of view,” Inmarsat said in the report. September’s National Space Strategy showed the U.K. had a 6% share of the global space economy in 2019. The government had for years promoted a goal of capturing 10% of the global space economy by 2030, but has walked away from this target and did not restate the ambition in the strategy report document. According to the UK Space Agency, the Space Directorate of the U.K.’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is currently designing a framework to “measure the collective progress against the goals set out in the National Space Strategy.” Through the European Space Agency, the UK Space Agency spokesperson said the U.K. has become “the largest investor in space safety,” which the country sees as underpinning satcoms, Earth observation, scientific, exploration and other aspects of the space sector. The U.K. also sees in-orbit servicing as a stepping stone toward dominance in a future in-orbit manufacturing industry. However, it is not the only one looking to get a foothold in these emerging markets. Europe and Japan have also recently announced programs to fund the development of debris-removing capabilities and conduct demo missions. A version of this article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine as “The UK’s ‘Astra Carta’ moment: Building a Space Sustainability Growth Platform.”
TAMPA, Fla. — The top Democrat and Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced bipartisan legislation Dec. 8 to reform the Federal Communication Commission’s satellite licensing rules. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and the ranking member, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), said their legislation is needed to modernize the FCC for the rapidly changing space industry. Their two bills — the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act and Secure Space Act — seek to update regulations covering foreign ownership, space sustainability, license processing timelines, and satellite spectrum sharing. The streamlining bill was introduced by Rodgers and co-sponsored by Pallone, while the security bill was introduced by Pallone and co-sponsored by Rodgers. Amid unprecedented demand from companies seeking to deploy constellations in non-geostationary orbit, the proposed rules include giving the FCC defined deadlines for processing satellite license applications for the first time. “To make sure the U.S. — not China — continues to lead this global industry, we must streamline our regulatory processes to unleash innovation while also ensuring our laws fully protect the American public,” Pallone and Rodgers said in a joint statement. Several technical changes were made to the bills since discussion drafts were circulated in February, including stricter requirements for a minor license change to qualify for automatic approval. FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, a Republican, said he supported the legislation in a Dec. 8 statement. “There is an insatiable hunger for low-latency, high-bandwidth broadband connections in every corner of the U.S. that satellite broadband providers are racing to feed,” Simington said. Satellite companies also “offer an unprecedented variety” of other services, he added, with more businesses and technologies emerging daily. “We must therefore ensure that we do not delay U.S. leadership by allowing providers of these invaluable services to get bogged down in the regulatory process,” he said. The FCC launched its own process in December 2021 to update its spectrum licensing procedures, and recently said it planned to set up a dedicated bureau to handle its increasing work with space systems. The legislation has to clear many hurdles before reaching the President for consideration on its way to potentially becoming law, including passing votes at both houses of Congress.
NASA is weighing whether it is safe for a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft to approach the International Space Station because one of two solar array failed to deploy hours after launch Nov. 7. The Cygnus spacecraft, flying the NG-18 mission for NASA, was scheduled to deploy its two circular UltraFlex solar arrays about three hours after launch on an Antares rocket from Virginia . The arrays produce 3.5 kilowatts of power for the spacecraft. However, in a statement issued more than six hours after launch, NASA said that only one of the two solar arrays had deployed. “Northrop Grumman is gathering data on the second array deployment and is working closely with NASA,” the agency said. According to the NASA statement, Northrop said the Cygnus had sufficient power to rendezvous with the station as planned early Nov. 9, allowing the station’s robotic arm to capture and berth it. NASA said it was “assessing” that information. “It had an array that didn’t deploy, so Northrop Grumman is working on it right now to get that deployed, and of course we’re assessing the capture and berthing in case it does not deploy,” said Dina Contella, operations integration manager for the ISS at NASA, at a previously scheduled briefing Nov. 7 about a series of upcoming spacewalks at the station. She stated the array goes through stages of deployment. “The team is trying to assess the data that they have and figure out their next steps,” she said, with Northrop leading those efforts. If the array does not deploy before Cygnus arrives at the ISS, Contella said the station program would want to better understand the state of the array before proceeding with a capture. “If it ends up partially deployed, it could jiggle upon capture or berthing, or it could come open,” she said. “Those are the types of things and risk assessments we’ll be doing, if necessary, as it approaches.” She added it’s possible that Cygnus could loiter near the station if needed to allow more time to study the solar array issue, although the specifics of how long it could do so depends on where in the approach NASA and Northrop decided to hold. “I am pretty hopeful that we’ll get the other array deployed.” While the solar arrays on past Cygnus missions have deployed normally, a larger version of the arrays suffered a problem on NASA’s Lucy asteroid mission launched in October 2021. One of two of the circular arrays failed to fully deploy and latch into place shortly after launch. Engineers spent months studying the problem and made several efforts to fully deploy the array , which made some progress but did not get the array to latch. NASA said in June that, while not fully deployed, the array was stable and would generate enough power for the spacecraft.
Gen. James Dickinson, head of U.S. Space Command, endorsed the idea of partnering with commercial launch companies that can demonstrate fast turnaround operations, a concept known as tactically responsive space . “We need commercial mission partners to build the capabilities to replenish our military space assets,” Dickinson said Nov. 29 at a Mitchell Institute online event. Pressed by Congress, the U.S. Space Force last year started a program to demonstrate responsive launch and recently awarded contracts for a 2023 mission . National security space launches typically are planned years in advance and rely on fixed infrastructure. Dickinson said the U.S. military should take advantage of more flexible, commercially available launch options and vehicles that can operate from multiple locations. Given recent advances in Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons, he said, responsive launch would likely be needed during a conflict to augment constellations or replace damaged satellites. U.S. Space Command has to prepare for “dynamic space operations,” he said. “This may include rapid software updates, some type of a responsive launch, and maneuver capabilities.” “We must greatly expand our ability to keep pace with the threat,” said Dickinson. “The joint forces’ ability, I think, to project and employ military power is predicated on the continuous availability of space based capabilities.” “I really like the tactically responsive space concept,” he said. “including rapid preparation of rockets and payloads and conducting immediate launch turnarounds, and we are seeing that in the commercial industry right now.” During a conflict, he said, having the ability to replenish assets would deter adversaries as it would make it costly for adversaries to deny the U.S. access to satellites. Dickinson cautioned that U.S. military doctrine for space warfare is “quite frankly, kind of in its infancy.” More work is needed by the U.S. and allies, to “design dynamic tactics techniques and procedures for space operations.”
The National Reconnaissance Office awarded study contracts to six commercial providers of space-based radio frequency (RF) data, the agency announced Sept. 28. Aurora Insight, HawkEye 360, Kleos Space, PredaSAR, Spire Global and Umbra Lab signed agreements giving the NRO access to their systems and business plans so the agency can decide what commercial data it might purchase for operational use. Companies in this emerging sector of the remote sensing industry use low-orbiting satellites to track ships, vehicles or any devices that emit radio frequency signals. “We’ve seen increasing demand for this data source from across the user community,” said Chris Scolese, director of the NRO. “ These studies will help NRO better understand the capabilities of commercial RF providers and how they can solve new intelligence challenges.” The NRO said commercial remote sensing data, by virtue of being unclassified, is a valuable source of intelligence that can be shared with U.S. allies. “Since the early days of the Ukraine crisis, NRO’s commercial data providers have been collecting electro-optical and radar imagery as well as commercial RF data over the region,” said Pete Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. The RF data vendors were selected under a broad NRO program rolled out in October called Strategic Commercial Enhancements . F ive commercial radar imagery providers were selected in January . The SCE program is open to both U.S. and foreign-owned U.S. commercial providers. PredaSAR and Umbra Lab, which also won contracts for space radar data, develop synthetic aperture radar satellites that can also passively scan for RF activity. Aurora Insight deploys sensors on buildings, in vehicles, on aircraft and on satellites to identify wireless network deployments. HawkEye 360 is the first commercial company to use satellites to create radio frequency (RF) data analytics. This is the company’s second agreement with the NRO, following a 2019 commercial RF survey study contract. Alex Fox, chief growth officer at HawkEye 360, said the company under the new agreement will “model and simulate current and future RF-sensing capabilities, engage in live end-to-end demonstrations, conduct accuracy and quality assessments, and demonstrate overhead delivery of RF data to government fixed, transportable, and mobile ground stations around the world.” Spire Global operates a constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites that monitor radio-frequency signals, including 40 satellites with geolocation capabilities that can track GPS jamming events. Chuck Cash, Spire’s vice president of federal sales, said the NRO agreements “recognize the value of RF data as part of its commercial acquisition strategy.” Kleos Space said it will provide “insights into how to optimize evolving commercial RF geolocation capability to enhance and augment existing capabilities .” “This study project represents a significant opportunity for Kleos to help the NRO assess the operational and decision-making usefulness of commercial RF GEOINT,” said Kleos’ chief revenue officer Eric von Eckartsberg 
The Space Force on Nov. 22 formally established a unit within U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the Defense Department’s largest combatant command. Based in Hawaii, U.S. Indo-Pacom is responsible for operations in the Asia-Pacific region. U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific initially will be staffed by 21 service members led by Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, a former commander of the space launch wing at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Despite its small size, Space Forces Indo-Pacific will play an important role supporting U.S. Indo-Pacom’s growing needs for space-based capabilities such as satellite navigation, communications and missile warning, Gen. David Thompson, vice chief of space operations, told reporters on Tuesday. This is the Space Force’s first formal establishment of a service component in an overseas combatant command, a decision driven by the rise of China as a space power, said Thompson. “We were very deliberate in picking Indo-Pacom,” he said. “Every day, Secretary of Defense [Lloyd] Austin reminds us of our pacing challenge, and that’s China,” said Thompson. “Air Force Secretary [Frank] Kendall has a different way of saying it. He just comes in and says, ‘China, China, China.’” In the coming months, the Space Force plans to establish service components at U.S. Forces Korea (a sub-command within Indo-Pacom), U.S. Central Command and U.S. European Command. Mastalir will report directly to Adm. John Aquilino, head of U.S. Indo-Pacom. He will also report back to the Pentagon to Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman. Thompson said Mastalir will be the point person coordinating space support services from government and commercial satellites so Aquilino doesn’t have to deal with multiple agencies and companies. And he will be responsible to inform Saltzman of U.S. Indo-Pacom’s needs so the Space Force can request the needed funding. Speaking Nov. 22 at U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacom command activation ceremony, Mastalir said space systems are critical in the region to “overcome the tyranny of distance.” “Space enables access to otherwise denied areas, to increase the range and lethality of our weapons systems, and space is key to our ability to project power at the time and place of our choosing,” he said. “We have to ensure that every warfighter in Indo-Pacom maximizes the combat effects available from United States Space Command, the intelligence community, and of course, commercial partners,” said Mastalir.
NASA managers say they have completed testing of the Space Launch System after a recent countdown rehearsal and are ready to move into preparations for a launch as soon as late August. In a briefing June 24, agency officials declared the test campaign for the SLS complete after a fourth wet dress rehearsal (WDR) of the vehicle at Launch Complex 39B four days earlier. That test stopped at T-29 seconds , about 20 seconds early, because of a leak in a hydrogen bleed line. Phil Weber, senior technical integration manager for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, said at the briefing that despite the early cutoff, only 13 of 128 planned “commanded functions” were not successfully completed during the terminal phase of the countdown. Most of those 13, he said, had previously been tested, such as retracting umbilicals. Of the remainder, NASA plans to perform one additional test at the pad of hydraulic power units used to gimble the nozzles of the vehicle’s solid rocket boosters. “The component is extremely robust, but the function is extremely important, so we just want to spin that up,” said John Blevins, SLS chief engineer. The other functions not tested involved de-energizing ground power supplies before disconnecting umbilicals, a step intended to avoid igniting any leaks of hydrogen. Weber said he was not worried about not testing that since the risk of ignition requires multiple failures. “That was really the only set we didn’t get validated,” he said. The decision to conclude the WDR campaign has the concurrence of agency leadership, including Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development. Free said in a June 15 briefing that he believed NASA needed “to understand what every situation is and run it to ground before we would press to commit to launch.” “We did go through that with Jim and he did give is the go-ahead to proceed,” said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development. NASA plans to roll the mobile launch platform carrying SLS back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) early July 1, weather permitting. Once back in the VAB, crews will spend several weeks preparing the vehicle to return to the pad for the Artemis 1 launch. That work includes inspecting and repairing a quick-disconnect fitting on the core stage that was the source of the hydrogen leak in the most recent WDR. Weber said they will likely replace a Teflon seal in that connector that has been there since the Green Run tests of the vehicle at the Stennis Space Center in 2020 and 2021. “It’s got some run time on it, as well as a couple trips to the pad, so we’re expecting we’re going to go in and change out those softgoods,” he said. He acknowledged that might not correct the problem. If the hydrogen leak persists once the vehicle returns to the pad, the connection is in area that can be accessed while at the pad, enabling repairs without having to return the VAB. Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, said he expected the vehicle to spend six to eight weeks in the VAB for the quick-disconnect repairs and other final work on SLS and Orion. That assumes the work doesn’t find any additional issues that require more work while in the building. Once SLS returns to the pad, Lanham estimated it would take about 10 to 14 days to get ready for a launch, although it may be possible to condense that schedule somewhat based on the experience with the wet dress rehearsals. That schedule, officials said, could still allow a launch in a window that runs from Aug. 23 through Sept. 6, although with no launch opportunities on Aug. 30, 31 or Sept. 1. The next window opens Sept. 19 and runs through Oct. 4. “We think we’re really in good shape and we’re not working any major technical issues at this time. It’s strictly vehicle processing and getting ready to do a launch attempt,” said Whitmeyer. He said it was too soon to set a window, citing upcoming reviews and assessment of work on the vehicle in the VAB. A launch in late August “is still on the table,” though, he added.
Maxar Technologies last week announced a new acquisition that furthers the company’s goal of turning its satellite imagery archive into 3D products for gaming, media and other industries. The company is acquiring Wovenware, an artificial intelligence and software firm based in Puerto Rico. Daniel Jablonsky, Maxar’s president and CEO, said Nov. 3 that Wovenware was acquired for its expertise in 3D geospatial technology and machine learning. “We’re bringing their 150 software engineers and developers to the Maxar team,” Jablonsky said during a third-quarter earnings call. Wovenware is the latest addition to Maxar’s 3D tech business following the 2020 acquisition of Vricon and a strategic investment earlier this year in Blackshark.ai. Maxar executives told analysts they plan to generate new business in the video gaming, media, entertainment and metaverse sectors. They said the company is well positioned to serve these markets with its high-resolution satellite imagery archive, daily image collections and 3D production capabilities. Jablonsky said acquisitions of tech companies like Wovenware are needed investments in order to generate new sources of revenue from the company’s current and future imaging satellites. The new Worldview Legion imaging constellation is critical to Maxar’s lucrative U.S. government business but the company also is looking for commercial markets. After multiple delays caused by production and testing issues, Jablonsky said the first two satellites will be ready to launch in January, with four more to follow later in the year. Dan Nord, a former Amazon and Electronic Arts executive, joined Maxar last year as senior vice president of enterprise business. He noted that Maxar’s 3D digital twin of the Earth has been used to develop highly accurate immersive training environments for the U.S. Army and maps for autonomous vehicle navigation, and the next target markets are gaming and entertainment. Maxar teamed with Blackshark.ai to pitch a digital twin product last month at the Unreal Fest conference hosted by Epic Games, makers of a popular game engine. “We presented our capability to thousands of developers and released a demo of a digital twin of New Orleans where the conference was being held,” said Nord. Maxar wants to make its 3D digital twin accessible to developers so that they can use them for their games and applications. Film producers, he said, could use Maxar’s 3D globe in a game engine and theoretically film anywhere, said Nord. “We said Blackshark would help us enter the gaming market and now it has.”
Northrop Grumman selected Leidos to supply infrared sensor payloads for the U.S. Space Development Agency’s missile-tracking satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. “It’s a key win for our space business,” Leidos chairman and CEO Roger Krone said Nov. 1 during a third-quarter earnings call. Northrop Grumman won a $617 million contract in July to produce 14 infrared-sensing satellites that will be part of a network of 28 missile-detecting satellites — known as Tracking Layer Tranche 1 — to be deployed by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency. A contract for the other 14 was awarded to L3Harris. Leidos has worked as a subcontractor to SpaceX under a $149 million contract SpaceX won in 2020 to build four satellites for the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer Tranche 0 . SpaceX’s Tranche 0 satellites are projected to launch in December. The company reportedly does not plan to bid on future tranches of the Tracking Layer so the new agreement with Northrop Grumman gives Leidos a long-term foothold in the program. Leidos was one of four companies that competed in 2020 for a Missile Defense Agency contract to design a hypersonic and ballistic missile-defense satellite, but lost out to L3Harris and Northrop Grumman. Under the new contract with Northrop Grumman, “we’ll develop and build the sensor payload for a proliferated constellation of low Earth orbit satellites for the Tranche 1 Tracking Layer,” Krone said. “On a predecessor contract, our Tranche 0 payload is on schedule to launch by the end of the year.” Krone said the Tranche 1 design will “increase coverage area while reducing payload size, weight and power.” Leidos, formed in 2013 as a spinoff of the defense contractor SAIC , gained significant expertise in sensor satellites and payloads when it acquired Dynetics in 2019.
SAN FRANCISCO – EOI Space, the Earth-observation startup formerly known as Earth Observant, attracted its first major customer for ultra-high-resolution imagery drawn from a constellation of satellites destined for very low Earth orbit. NTT Data, part of the Tokyo-based technology company NTT Group, is acquiring 2.5 percent of EOI plus exclusive rights to sell EOI satellite imagery in Japan, one of the world’s largest Earth-observation markets. NTT Data is the first partner to sign up for priority access to EOI imagery and services. EOI plans to work with other organizations and governments across the globe, but the NTT Data contract is an important one. “That contract we have with NTT alone makes us profitable,” Christopher Thein, EOI CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. EOI is preparing to send its first Stingray satellite into very low Earth orbit in early 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rideshare flight. Five more EOI satellites are scheduled to follow on SpaceX flights within one year. In 2023, NTT Data will establish a secure access facility in Japan to downlink data from the Stringray constellation. NTT Data expects to begin acquiring satellite imagery from EOI in December 2024. Through added-value services like imagery analysis based on artificial intelligence, NTT Data forecasts sales related to its pact with EOI to exceed 10 billion yen ($72.4 million) by 2028, according to a Nov. 25 NTT Data news release. Most sales will come from defense, public safety, and disaster management applications, the release added. “By utilizing EOI Space’s Stingray constellation, we will be able to accumulate large amounts of very high-resolution imagery in our data center and analyze it locally,” Hideyuki Nakamura, NTT Data executive manager, said in a statement. “Using our latest AI algorithms, we will provide value-added products to our customers by extracting the differences from past and newly collected data to detect anomalies. In addition, we will be able to expand the use of EOI Space’s imagery into various disaster prevention systems and facility maintenance projects that will be developed in the future, creating new products that improve resiliency.” Extensive onboard processing will allow EOI Stingray satellites to deliver data rapidly. “People are going after onboard compute,” Thein said. “We are going after it in a much bigger way. We will have a cluster of multiple devices on the spacecraft.” EOI, based in Louisville, Colorado, was founded in 2017 to provide government and commercial customers with Earth imagery. “I look forward to serving the commercial market, but we are more focused on defense and national intelligence from the get-go because those are the customers that buy the most data and want, specifically, the highest resolution,” Thein said. Satellites traveling in very low Earth orbit require propulsion to offset atmospheric drag. EOI developed its own Hall-effect thruster for its 330-kilogram satellites.
Work on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle to correct minor problems during an uncrewed test flight in May will delay its first flight with astronauts to early 2023, NASA and Boeing said Aug. 25. The Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on board , is now scheduled to launch no earlier than February 2023. Boeing had been preparing to fly CFT as soon as this December immediately after completing the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 test flight in May. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Starliner at Boeing, said during a media teleconference that a review of the data from the OFT-2 mission, which is now wrapping up, shows the need for a “minimal amount of changes” to the Starliner that will fly the CFT mission, a process he called “fine-tuning” and which he said the company expected from the earlier test flight. That work, though, ruled out any chance of a CFT mission this year. “We had schedules that supported late ’22, the December timeframe, for CFT,” he said. “There were areas that we needed to go do a little bit more work on the systems. We plugged that into the plan and that’s what moved us out by a month, five weeks or so.” That work addresses problems that came up during the OFT-2 flight, including Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters that shut down during the orbital insertion burn. Nappi said some “debris-related conditions” likely caused those thrusters to shut down, but later noted that is their best estimate since the OMAC thrusters are in a service module that burns up on reentry and is not recovered. “We do not know where the debris may have come from,” he said. “The bottom line is that it looks to be the leading root cause, and we’ve eliminated that by looking at the CFT vehicle and making sure that there’s absolutely no debris in the system.” Several reaction control thrusters also shut down during the mission, which Nappi said was likely due to low inlet pressures and can be addressed with a “tweak in timing and tolerances” in software. High pressures in a thermal control loop noticed in the mission were linked to filters that engineers determined are not needed and can be removed. A guidance system on the spacecraft called VESTA worked well but generated more data than the flight software could handle, requiring changes to the software. Work on the Starliner vehicle that will fly CFT, which includes the same crew module that flew the original OFT mission in December 2019, is on track, Nappi said. That crew module will be mated to its service module in November, “and we have good plans to get us to support that date in February.” Boeing is not planning to make major changes to the valves in the service module for CFT. Those valves suffered corrosion before an OFT-2 launch attempt in August 2021 when ambient moisture reacted with nitrogen tetroxide propellant that seeped through the valve, creating nitric acid that corroded aluminum elements of the valve. For the May OFT-2 launch, Boeing took steps to purge moisture from the valves and regularly open them to confirm they worked. “We feel that we have a good short-term solution that we are enhancing slightly for CFT because it’s being implemented during the build and not after the vehicle was built,” he said. “We’re flying that same configuration on CFT.” Boeing is continuing to study long-term changes that would involve sealing off the valves from moisture and replacing aluminum in them. “Our goal is to get it done as soon as possible,” he said, but added the schedule was tight to have it ready in time for the first operational Starliner mission, tentatively scheduled for the fall of 2023. A CFT mission to the International Space Station, docked there for eight days, would have to work around an “incredibly busy” schedule there in the first half of the year, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager. By early March there will be a Soyuz crew exchange, followed by the Crew-5/Crew-6 exchange of Crew Dragon missions. Also on the manifest are cargo Dragon, Cygnus and Progress missions and Axiom Space’s Ax-2 private astronaut mission. He said, though, that flying CFT will be a priority so that the vehicle can be certified in time for its first operational mission in the fall. “CFT is a big deal for us,” he said. “When these guys are ready in February, we’ll be making sure there’s room for them, and they will be a high priority unless we’re working a major issue on board space station.” Montalbano added that he expects to start discussions with the Russian space agency Roscosmos in the fall to update the existing “integrated crew” agreement signed in July to exchange seats between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles. The current agreement covers one exchange a year between Soyuz and Crew Dragon in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The modification, he said, would include Starliner and extend the agreement beyond 2024. “The goal is a long-term agreement where, every time we fly, we have a cosmonaut on either SpaceX or Boeing and then an astronaut on the Soyuz spacecraft.” Boeing, in its second quarter financial results release July 27, said it recorded a $93 million charge in the quarter from its commercial crew program , “driven by launch manifest updates and additional costs associated with OFT-2.” Boeing has now recorded $688 million in charges related to development of Starliner dating back to early 2020.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The conflict in Ukraine has shed light on the value of commercial satellites for national security. However, there are still open questions on how the military will work with private space companies in wartime, said Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt, special assistant to the U.S. Space Force’s space operations chief. “Now we need to codify our relationships with commercial [industry] to best bring those capabilities to bear in a fight,” Burt said Sept. 21 at the Air, Space & Cyber conference. Burt, who was recently commander of U.S. Space Command’s Combined Force Space Component, led the command’s Commercial Integration Cell, a group of 10 companies that share classified information about potential threats in orbit. The cell started as a pilot program in 2015 to facilitate data sharing between the U.S. military and commercial satellite operators. The member companies sign cooperative agreements with the government but are not paid. Burt noted that three of Space Command’s Commercial Integration Cell members — SpaceX , Viasat and Maxar — have supported Ukraine and allies, providing services like communications and satellite imagery. “All three of those companies were very much engaged in their own business, working with Ukraine, but we tried very hard to make sure, where we could, that we could talk with them and integrate with them,” she said. “As U.S. companies, was there anything we could do to help them?” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war that followed have shown that the military is becoming more dependent on commercial space services, more so than in previous conflicts, said Burt. How the military, for example, would integrate commercial space services into a hybrid architecture needs to be defined. Burt said U.S. Space Command and the Space Force are working with the intelligence community to lay out requirements for commercial space systems and “and how we would leverage those capabilities.” In previous wars DoD typically leased satellite capacity from commercial operators, “or we would have a whole satellite dedicated to us,” said Burt. The industry now offers fully managed services, and “now we need to think about buying things as a service, versus having to put guardians on consoles doing that.” Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, chief of space operations, told reporters Sept. 21 that one of the takeaways from the war in Ukraine is the value of commercial space systems. “You’ve seen where they’ve used Starlink; they’ve used commercial ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capabilities,” said Raymond. “I think that’s going to continue to happen as the commercial space industry continues to blossom. There’s going to be more and more missions that are commercially viable.” The idea that the military will become more dependent on commercial satellites for imagery and other services has set off discussions on how DoD might compensate companies if their spacecraft is damaged during an armed conflict. Industry executives speaking on a panel at Air, Space & Space said these are important policy issues that need to be resolved so the industry can plan accordingly. “I’m very excited that the conversation is starting,” said Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt, senior director of satellite systems at Boeing. “The commercial industry is very different in how it gets incentivized to do business,” he said. “And if the government is waffling on the fence about whether or not they’re investing in a service that they want provided,” the government might end up not getting that service, he added. If the government commits to providing financial support, companies will ensure government needs are considered when developing their next-generation systems, said Eberhardt. “So I think having this conversation at this point in time is really crucial.” James Reynolds, vice president of business development for defense space at SAIC, said it’s all about assessing risk. In the space industry, investors take a lot of risks, and they would welcome “some assurance that the government will support you for taking that risk.” Having a contractual agreement where the government compensates industry if commercial satellites are attacked “I think is a great way to make sure that we’re all working together, bringing in all the capabilities that we can, all the data sources that we can, to take on this threat.” “If commercial satellites get caught up in some irresponsible behavior, then we have to do what it takes as a nation to win,” said Shon Manasco, senior counselor at Palantir Technologies. “That means addressing this policy and being clear about what the federal government will do,” he said. “I think that is something that is absolutely imperative.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Germany’s Isar Aerospace announced plans June 22 to launch an orbital transfer vehicle no earlier than 2023 for Italian space logistics company D-Orbit. Isar Aerospace said D-Orbit is the primary customer for the mission to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), which will use the German company’s Spectrum launch vehicle that it expects to debut this year or next. The announcement said the launch term for their mission starts in 2023 and will use Isar Aerospace’s launchpad in Andøya, Norway, but did not reveal further details. Spectrum is designed to launch 700 kilograms to SSO, and D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier orbital transfer vehicle can host several cubesats and microsatellites per mission. Similar to other orbital transfer vehicles developed by companies including Spaceflight and Momentus, ION promises satellite operators operational efficiencies by dropping their payloads off at custom orbits post-launch. Isar Aerospace referred questions about the satellites planning to use the ION to fine-tune their orbits to D-Orbit, which was unable to comment before this article was published. Isar Aerospace chief commercial officer Stella Guillen said their agreement only covers one launch, ”but we are looking forward to strengthen our cooperation.” Guillen said Spectrum’s first and second flight will carry European payloads that are being selected as part of a competition run by German space agency DLR. The competition is part of an 11 million euro ($11.6 million) award Isar Aerospace received from DLR and the European Space Agency in April 2021 . In return, Isar Aerospace is giving the German government up to 150 kilograms of payload space on each of its first two Spectrum flights. DLR started inviting applications June 20 for free flights on Isar Aerospace’s second mission, which is slated to fly in 2023. While the first mission targeted European institutions, Isar Aerospace said startups and small and medium-sized businesses can apply for the second flight. The application deadline is October 15. “D-Orbit will be on-board of one of the following flights,” Guillen said. D-Orbit announced plans Jan. 27 to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in a deal valuing it at $1.28 billion. The company expects to raise $185 million after closing the deal in the third quarter of this year. It plans to use proceeds to accelerate the development of products and services, which also include plans for active debris removal and space-based cloud computing.
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile said Nov. 30 it could raise more than $86 million from selling a chunk of shares as the company looks to accelerate its direct-to-smartphone constellation plans. The satellite operator agreed to sell shares in a public offering for $5.50 each, less than half what they were worth the day it became a public company in April 2021. Investment bank B. Riley Securities is underwriting the sale of shares that would equate to about $75 million in gross proceeds for AST SpaceMobile. The underwriter has a 30-day option to buy additional shares that would bring this amount to $86.25 million. AST SpaceMobile initially aimed to raise up to $74.8 million when it first announced plans for a share sale Nov. 29, but upsized the target following investor demand. The companies expect to close the transaction Dec. 2. AST SpaceMobile became a public company April 7 by merging with New Providence Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that was already trading on the Nasdaq. The company raised around $417 million from the merger to boost a constellation aiming to bring 5G connectivity directly to unmodified smartphones, however, the stock has fluctuated since opening at $11.63 April 7. The shares were sent on a downward trend following news in August that supply chain issues have delayed the launch of AST SpaceMobile’s first operational satellite by about six months to late 2023. AST SpaceMobile said Nov. 14 it was exploring funding options to speed up deployments for future satellites in its constellation. A delay in launching its BlueWalker-3 prototype, which successfully deployed its phased array antenna earlier this month, has also put the company at risk of losing frequencies that have been provisionally assigned to the constellation. BlueWalker-3 missed a Nov. 22 deadline to reach 700 kilometers above the Earth to lock in rights to this spectrum following its launch in September. AST SpaceMobile is asking international regulators for an 18-month extension to give the prototype time to climb to position and a decision on this is due in March. The company has said more funds could help accelerate the development of technology and its manufacturing capabilities. More financial firepower could also help any plan to regain priority access to spectrum if this extension request fails. AST SpaceMobile had nearly $200 million in cash reserves as of September and has said it already has enough financial resources to cover operations over the next 12 months. Dec. 2 update: AST SpaceMobile said Dec. 2 it had successfully closed the $75 million portion of this share sale. 
NASA is preparing to launch Starling, its first satellite swarm. Instead of communicating directly with the four Starling cubesats, mission operators will send instructions to the swarm as a single entity. If successful, “swarms have a potential to revolutionize the way we do science,” said Howard Cannon, NASA Starling project manager at the NASA Ames Research Center. “Instead of having one monolithic spacecraft that you are dependent on operating properly, you can have multiple smaller spacecraft that are less expensive.” Swarms also offer NASA the opportunity to gather scientific data from multiple locations with far less handholding than traditional constellations. HelioSwarm, for example, is a $250 million mission NASA plans to launch in 2028 to study solar wind turbulence with nine satellites. HelioSwarm mission managers will communicate with the hub satellite built by Northrop Grumman, which will coordinate operations of eight smaller spacecraft built by Blue Canyon Technologies. “HelioSwarm’s nine spacecraft form an observatory to provide the first ever simultaneous, multiscale observations in the solar wind needed to understand space plasma turbulence,” Harlan Spence, HelioSwarm principal investigator and director of the University of New Hampshire Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, said by email. “Turbulence is inherently a multiscale process and those multiple scale sizes must be sampled simultaneously to understand how energy is conveyed.” Despite the promise, swarms in general and the Starling mission specifically present challenges. It remains to be seen whether communications, navigation and autonomy technologies are advanced enough for swarm operations. NASA intends to find out during the six-month Starling mission with a series of experiments. First up is the Mobile Ad-hoc Network experiment. Starling mission managers will test whether the six-unit cubesats can establish and maintain a dynamic communications network. “If one of the satellites goes out of range or fails, how do you make sure that network still meets a certain level of reliability and throughput,” asked Shey Sabripour, founder and CEO of CesiumAstro, which is providing Starling’s software-defined radios with S-band intersatellite links. “That is what we are trying to solve here with NASA.” Next up is the Starlink Formation-Flying Optical Experiment, known as StarFOX. Starling satellites will rely on star trackers to move into various formations and prevent collisions. “For the first time, we will give a swarm the capability to autonomously navigate in space without GPS, using only cameras embedded in these four cubesats pointing at one another,” said Simone D’Amico, who leads Stanford University’s Space Rendezvous Laboratory. “By exchanging and processing these cameras measurements, we are able to determine the orbits of all the spacecraft.” The third demo, Reconfiguration and Orbit Maintenance Experiments Onboard (ROMEO), will test whether Starling satellites can maneuver autonomously to achieve their objectives. “Coordinated autonomous maneuvering will be required for future constellations and swarms where communications delays and bandwidth limitations make ground-based control impractical,” said Austin Probe, chief technology officer for Emergent Space Technologies. “ROMEO is integrating our Autopilot and Navigator flight software products to demonstrate autonomous station keeping and reconfiguration of the Starling swarm.” While the Starling satellites conduct autonomous operations in orbit, L3Harris Technologies will be running a variation of its flight dynamics planning software on the ground. “The ground planning software is a reference to see how well the autonomous satellites are performing in this kind of test scenario,” said Praveen Kurian, L3Harris general manager for space superiority. The final Starling experiment, Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy, relies on artificial intelligence to make plans based on ionospheric observations. With GPS receivers, Starling satellites will monitor ionospheric density and move around to further explore regions of particularly high or low density. Starling satellites “will automatically adjust their measurement techniques in order to take advantage of their relative positions,” Cannon said. The Starling mission is scheduled to launch later this year from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on a Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket. The launch, alongside seven other cubesat missions, is a NASA Venture Class Launch Services demonstration. First, though, Firefly plans to complete Flight 2, the company’s second orbital test launch. Firefly attempted in September to send its first Alpha to orbit, but fell short due to the failure of one of Alpha’s four engines. Another orbital test flight is set for no earlier than mid-July, pending receipt of an FAA license. After that, the company “will go as quickly as possible” toward the NASA launch, said Kim Jennett, Firefly marketing director. For Firefly, Starling is “very significant in developing a long-term partnership with NASA,” said Tom Markusic, Firefly co-founder and chief technical advisor. “We feel very honored to be part of that program.” When the satellites are in orbit, Blue Canyon Technologies, the Raytheon Technologies subsidiary that also manufactured the Starling satellites, will provide mission operations support. “The mission gives BCT the opportunity to demonstrate the flexibility of our mission operation system, from ground scheduling to retrieval and uploading mission plans to timely mission data delivery, while operating a constellation of spacecraft,” said Stephanee Borck, BCT Starling program manager. This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Quantum Space, a company founded earlier this year to develop spacecraft platforms in cislunar space, announced plans Oct. 26 for its first smallsat pathfinder mission that will collect space situational awareness data. The QS-1 spacecraft, scheduled to launch in October 2024, will operate in cislunar space and carry a space situational awareness payload provided by GEOST as well as hosted payloads from other customers. Blue Canyon will provide the bus for the spacecraft, which will have a mass of up to 400 kilograms. “We intend on demonstrating the ability to operate and navigate in cislunar space,” Ben Reed, chief technology officer at Quantum Space, said in an interview during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ ASCEND conference. “We are going to be collecting space domain awareness and space situational awareness data.” That data will come from the GEOST payload, a visible imager that will scan cislunar space. GEOST develops similar sensors for other space situational awareness missions, including winning a Space Force contract last year to provide optical sensor payloads to monitor geosynchronous orbit . “There’s benefit to be able to look for known objects where we believe they are and retrack them to make sure they are where we believe they are,” said Sue Hall, vice president of programs at Quantum Space, in the interview. “It will also make sure that, in certain volumes of space, there aren’t things that should not be there.” Reed cited the example of a rocket body earlier this year that hit the moon that was originally identified as being from a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch but later linked to a Chinese mission . The difficulty in identifying it stemmed from a lack of tracking. “There are there more objects like that. We’d love to be able to identify them for the global community and make them aware of where they are.” That tracking will become increasing important, he added, given plans for a growing number of lunar missions by governments and companies around the world. “As more satellites start transiting through that volume, we think it’s important that there be the ability to collect information on those objects.” QS-1 will also be able to accommodate hosted payloads, although Quantum Space has not announced any specific customers or their payloads. Reed said the company was contacted by one unnamed organization looking for a ride for a payload but has not otherwise been actively marketing the hosted payload opportunities yet. He emphasized the hosted payloads were optional. “We don’t need the hosted payloads to close the mission,” he said, and that QS-1 would fly on its current schedule regardless of which payloads, if any, were available to fly on it. Quantum Space selected Blue Canyon for the bus based on its with smallsat bus. “They’re uniquely positioned in this space, they have experience with this type and size of bus,” Hall said. “Our Saturn product, with key enhancements for deep space, will provide Quantum Space with an architecture that has been designed specifically for these types of missions,” said Jeff Schrader, president of Blue Canyon, in a statement. The spacecraft will also have a “fairly large” propulsion system, Hall said. While Quantum Space has not disclosed launch plans for QS-1, she said the spacecraft will operate around the Earth-moon L-1 Lagrange point, between the Earth and moon, or the L-2 point beyond the far side of the moon, potentially moving between them. It will communicate with commercial ground stations over its three-year mission. Quantum Space did not disclose the cost of QS-1, although Reed said that the mission is fully funded through launch. The company unveiled its plans in February when it had only five employees, said Reed, who is one of the co-founders with Kam Ghaffarian and Steve Jurczyk, a former NASA associate administrator who is president and chief executive of Quantum Space. Reed said the company is now up to 25 people, mostly at its Rockville, Maryland, headquarters, and expects to grow to more than 50 by next summer. When Quantum Space announced its plans for cislunar missions in February , the company said it would start with a smallsat mission, and Reed said QS-1 is that mission. At the time the company said its vision was to create spacecraft platforms in cislunar space called outposts that could be serviced. Reed said the company is still studying what that long-term architecture will be. “We’re continuing to explore options and figuring out what sort of services we’ll be providing further down the road.” He added that the smallsat mission is called QS-1 “because there will be more behind it.”
WASHINGTON – Chris Pearson, former Roccor CEO and Redwire executive vice president, is the new CEO of Durango, Colorado-based propulsion startup Agile Space Industries. After initially planning to take a break in early 2023, Pearson decided to join Agile because of its “array of talent” and the opportunity to take “novel spacecraft chemical propulsion products to a part of the space industry that has not seen that much innovation during the new space era,” he said by email. Agile was established in 2019 when Agile Space Propulsion merged with Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test, a company formed in 2009 to offer testing services for commercial and government customers. Agile Additive was created in 2021 after Agile acquired Pittsburgh-based Tronix3D. Agile is supplying thrusters for robotic lunar landers being built by Astrobotic Technology and ispace. “A number of high-profile customers have already awarded contracts for different classes of thrusters,” Pearson said. “The first priority is ensuring that we repay that faith with successful deliveries” in the first and second quarters of 2023. Pearson’s long tenure in the space industry includes work at Airbus and Moog. Pearson also oversaw significant growth of ABSL Space Products’, a lithium-ion battery business prior to its 2011 acquisition by EnerSys, and of Roccor, a small satellite component supplier acquired in 2020 by Redwire. After the Roccor acquisition, Pearson became Redwire’s executive vice president for critical components, overseeing the space infrastructure company’s divisions in Massachusetts and Luxembourg. “Chris taking the helm at Agile is a game-changing boost for our team and our customers supporting the rapidly expanding space industry,” Daudi Barnes, Agile founder, president and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “The entire Agile team is excited for Chris to join us, and we are confident that under his leadership, we can scale Agile to be the leading provider of aerospace propulsion systems.” Pearson succeeds Andrew Thompson, Agile’s CEO since March. Thompson will continue to serve as Agile chief operating officer. During Thompson’s tenure, Agile raised $9 million in a previously unreported seed funding round led by Caruso Ventures that was completed in October.
The United States has no closer ally than the United Kingdom. The two nations have collaborated on space-related security efforts for decades. U.S. and U.K. space officials are now discussing the next steps to strengthen the partnership, a conversation that has gained momentum in recent months due to concerns that satellites are becoming military targets and a stronger defense posture is needed to deter and counter threats. Brig. Gen. Devin Pepper, U.S. Space Command’s deputy director of strategy, plans and policy, said U.S.-U.K. collaboration in space entered a new phase in April when the commanders of U.S. Space Command and U.K. Space Command signed an Enhanced Space Cooperation memorandum of understanding known as the ESC MOU. The ESC MOU is a non-legally binding framework for deeper military cooperation in the space domain. It calls for exchanging more information, harmonizing military space requirements, and identifying potential joint activities. The teamwork between the two nations is already strong, but the MOU “seeks to deepen collaboration,” Pepper told SpaceNews. “The fact that we have a U.K. one-star general on the U.S. Space Command headquarters staff speaks volumes.” Brigadier Paul Tedman, a British Army officer, works full-time at U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado Springs, as deputy director for policy and strategic partnerships. In that role, he serves as an exchange officer for a three-year term under the U.S. chain of command. U.S. Space Command is a combatant command the Pentagon re-established in 2019 to oversee military operations in the space domain. The United Kingdom stood up U.K. Space Command in April 2021. Pepper said the enhanced MOU with the United Kingdom could serve as a model to enhance U.S. and U.K. partnerships with other nations. “We established a program called ‘pathway to partnership,’ which establishes a method for allies and partners to integrate with U.S. Space Command,” he said. “The pathway allows any space capable country to join at the appropriate level and then progressively deepen their integration with the U.S. over time.” In a statement to SpaceNews, Tedman said the ESC MOU with the U.K. is the “most mature level of this pathway.” The United Kingdom is “in the vanguard of this work and we will quickly follow with other nations later this year,” he added. The MOU “allows us the freedom to identify areas of mutual interest as well as cohere and converge our efforts.” The United States and Britain are signatories of the Combined Space Operations Vision 2031, along with Australia, Canada, France, Germany and New Zealand. The document encourages responsible use of space and recognizes increased threats from “aggressive counter-space programs of other nation states.” This overarching agreement, announced in February, serves as a foundation, said Pepper. The U.S. and the U.K., meanwhile, are also interested in pursuing projects and initiatives on a bilateral basis, which led to the enhanced MOU. During a meeting in England in June, a team led by Tedman mapped out priorities for the next three years to increase cooperation with the United States, said Royal Air Force Air Commodore Mark Flewin, head of operations, plans and training at U.K. Space Command. The meeting took place at U.K. Space Command headquarters in High Wycombe, northwest of London. Flewin, who hosted the meeting, told SpaceNews that areas likely to be pursued under the enhanced MOU include joint development of new capabilities, wargames and training exercises, and greater information sharing. “Everything we do in space depends on effective information sharing,” he said. “So it’s really important we get this right.” The U.K. Ministry of Defense is developing new space systems with U.S. cooperation in mind, said Flewin. These include a transport layer of small satellites in low Earth orbit called Minerva, and an intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) constellation to support military operations. “The partnership with the U.S. in space has been an evolutionary journey,” said Flewin. “The enhanced MOU is just a natural next stepping stone. It’s very much looking at interoperability opportunities, as we go after that collective endeavor to sustain our freedom of action in space.” Flewin said he could not discuss specifics of how the U.S. and U.K. space commands might conduct joint operations. “But suffice it to say that it’s absolutely core to the enhanced MOU being able to operate seamlessly.” Wargaming and training are high on the list, too. British forces have participated in events like the annual U.S. Schriever Wargames, a multinational event that began in 2001. The U.K. also sends personnel to Space Flag — an annual exercise started by the U.S. Air Force in 2017 and now managed by the Space Force — and Global Sentinel, a multinational space situational awareness exercise launched by U.S. Strategic Command in 2016 and now overseen by U.S. Space Command. Flewin said U.K. space forces greatly benefit from these training events, and his command is now looking to organize a U.K.-based space exercise to supplement U.S. efforts. “We do have an ambition in due course, certainly within the timeframe up to 2025, to run a U.K.-led space exercise for the benefit of the broader international community,” he said. Another aspiration is to develop a U.K. Space Academy that would offer U.S.-accredited courses “so U.S. personnel can partake in our education and training just like we partake in U.S. education and training.” Efforts to step up U.S.-U.K. collaboration in space coincide with Britain’s plans to increase investments in new capabilities, Air Vice-Marshal Paul Godfrey, commander of U.K. Space Command, said last month in an interview with Government Matters, a U.S. public affairs talk show. Godfrey, who was in Washington in June for meetings with senior defense leaders, noted that the United Kingdom released a new military space strategy in February and announced plans to invest $1.7 billion in space technologies over the next decade. Close cooperation with the United States goes back many years, particularly in areas like space surveillance and missile warning. U.K. Space Command operates the Royal Air Force Fylingdales ballistic missile early warning radar that supports the U.K. and U.S. militaries. Since the Cold War, the radar has been part of the U.S. missile defense system and the U.S. space surveillance network that monitors objects re-entering the atmosphere. The Enhanced Space Cooperation MOU signed with U.S. Space Command in April “allows us now to look at where we’re going in the future and how we collaborate,” said Godfrey. U.K. military budgets are far smaller than the U.S., “so I’ve got to make sure that where we go in capability terms, we really do add value,” he said. “Many of the discussions we’re now having are about understanding where the U.S. is going, where we can add value, and with the wider partners as well, the allies and partners from Five Eyes, the Combined Space Operations Vision and NATO as well,” said Godfrey. “So there’s an awful lot that we need to do.” The Five Eyes is a decades-old intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. “The U.S. is the global allied leader in space,” Godfrey said. “And so I could go off and spend that billion and a half on all sorts of different things. But if I talk about it being a little cog, and if we can put our little cog in the U.S. machine in exactly the right place, that will make it more efficient.” There are growing threats that are building in the space domain, Godfrey added. “The U.S. can’t do this alone.” He called Russia’s Nov. 15 live-fire test of an anti-satellite missile “one of the more difficult things we’ve had to deal with.” The test destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite, creating thousands of pieces of orbital debris. The No. 1 priority now for U.K. Space Command is space domain awareness and “understanding what is going on out in that environment,” said Godfrey. “And that’s very much where the U.K.- U.S. collaboration and the other allies’ collaboration come in,” he added. “We’re all looking at the same thing in space and all using our different sensors to build that picture of what’s going on.” Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, U.S. chief of space operations, noted in a speech last year at the London Air & Space Power Conference that the alliance with the United Kingdom was built over the course of more than 50 years and reached a new level in 2019 with Operation Olympic Defender. The U.K. was the first country to be invited to join the U.S. Space Command-led Olympic Defender, a coalition created to shore up space defenses against aggressors and deter hostile actions in space. The other members are Australia and Canada. Under the agreement, the U.K. became the first country to gain access to the Standardized Astrodynamics Algorithm Library, or SAAL. The data in the SAAL library is used to help predict the locations and trajectories of satellites and objects in orbit. Access to the SAAL allows analysts at U.K. space operations centers to interpret, predict and integrate data shared by the U.S. 18th Space Control Squadron, at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, the U.S. Space Command unit responsible for space traffic management. Flewin said space launch is another area where he sees growing cooperation with the United States. U.K. Space Command, he added, is hugely supportive of efforts by the country’s civil space organization, the U.K. Space Agency, to launch satellites from the United Kingdom. Although the U.K. Space Agency is not part of the MOU with U.S. Space Command, Britain does not separate civil and military efforts like the United States. “I think one of the really key points for us is that defense and civil space are not separable. They very much work hand in glove,” he said. The U.K. Space Agency has been leading a push to establish commercial smallsat launch capabilities from U.K. spaceports. In June 2020, it signed the Technology Safeguards Agreement with the U.S. government, paving the way for U.S. companies to operate from U.K. spaceports. U.K. launch is important for the nation’s defense strategy as well, said Flewin. “Our civil partners are leading the enterprise, and we are very much in a supporting role,” he said. Flewin is especially enthusiastic about the U.K.’s burgeoning partnership with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The NRO announced in May it is teaming up with the U.K. Ministry of Defence to launch experimental smallsats to low Earth orbit in late 2022 on a Virgin Orbit air-launched rocket. Virgin Orbit’s carrier aircraft will take off from Newquay Airport in Cornwall, England, to perform what’s expected to be the first space launch to originate from British soil. The Virgin Orbit LauncherOne mission will fly two Prometheus 2 cubesats carrying pathfinder experiments in support of the Minerva remote-sensing constellation the U.K. is developing to monitor radio signals from space. Prometheus 2 is a collaboration between the U.K. Ministry of Defence and international partners, including the NRO. Another payload on that mission is a joint experiment developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the U.K. Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, called CIRCE, short for Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment. The mission will help researchers better understand changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which is important to the military because it affects the performance of over-the-horizon communications and radar. Prometheus 2 and CIRCE are “two great examples of collaboration … and something we’re very excited about,” said Flewin. The U.K. Space Command, he said, sees these space missions as a “real opportunity to capture the imagination of the nation and inject that passion into younger people in terms of the opportunities that the space profession may offer them in the future.” This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
European space mission integrator Telespazio said Sept. 14 it has signed a deal to distribute Canadian startup NorthStar Earth & Space’s planned space domain awareness services. Telespazio, a joint venture between aerospace giants Thales Group of France and Italy’s Leonardo, said the deal makes it NorthStar’s exclusive distributor for European governments, agencies, and institutions. NorthStar plans to deploy its first space situational awareness (SSA) payloads in low Earth orbit in early 2023 onboard three spacecraft that satellite operator Spire Global is developing. Each of these satellites will be the size of 12 cubesats. T he Canadian company had previously ordered three larger SSA satellites from Thales Alenia Space, another joint venture between Thales and Leonardo, but has canceled this agreement in favor of Spire to accelerate its constellation plans. Stewart Bain, NorthStar’s CEO, said the company has options for up to 30 satellites with Spire f or monitoring near-Earth orbits, which the startup says will be able to track objects down to five centimeters in LEO. The network will be able to track objects down to 10 centimeters in medium Earth orbit, according to NorthStar, 40 centimeters in geostationary orbit, and between 10-40 centimeters in highly elliptical orbit — depending on the target’s altitude. Telespazio plans to integrate NorthStar’s space-based SSA data into its existing space domain awareness solutions, which use ground-based sensors to track debris and satellites in near-Earth orbit in addition to asteroids. Luigi Pasquali, Telespazio’s CEO, said NorthStar’s space-based SSA data would help the Italian company refine its ability to detect, track, predict, identify, and characterize objects in space. This is “critical to address sophisticated market requirements,” Pasquali said, including defense. In addition to its headquarters in Italy, Telespazio has subsidiaries in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, and Romania that it plans to leverage to distribute NorthStar’s SSA capabilities to European customers. The company is also an investor in NorthStar, which has raised more than $90 million for its planned constellation. NorthStar is developing its SSA data products in partnership with SES, a satellite operator based in Luxembourg, where the Canadian company is setting up its European headquarters.
Delays in starting production of RS-25 engines for NASA affected Aerojet Rocketdyne’s earnings in the second quarter, but the company expects to catch up on the program later this year. The company reported Aug. 1 net sales of $528.5 million in the quarter ending June 30, with net income of $16.4 million. Both were lower than the same quarter of 2021, when the company reported net sales of $556.9 million and net income of $45 million. A key factor in the reduced sales, company executives said during an earnings call, was ongoing delays in the production of new RS-25 engines. The company won a $1.79 billion contract from NASA in 2020 to produce a new expendable version of the engine for the Space Launch System. Those engines will be used after the current supply of refurbished shuttle-era RS-25 engines is used up on the first four SLS launches. Eileen Drake, president and chief executive of Aerojet Rocketdyne, said on the call that production of the new RS-25 engines has been delayed by supply chain issues related to testing of the engines. “Those delays are not related to lack of raw materials or components, but rather they’re related to delays in first article qualification testing as we continue to ramp up our supply chain again after several decades without any RS-25 production,” she said. She didn’t elaborate on the issue beyond issues with “first article inspections and starting up those programs again.” Both Drake and Dan Boehle, Aerojet’s chief financial officer, said they were confident the issues with the RS-25 would be resolved soon. “For the second half of the year, large driver of those sales will be some of the catch-up on RS-25,” Boehle said. “We’re working closely with our suppliers and we’re confident we’ll manage through these issues and see accelerated sales growth for the second half of the year,” Drake said. Other space-related projects at Aerojet are going well, Drake said, emphasizing a record order for 116 RL10 engines that United Launch Alliance made in April for its Vulcan Centaur rocket , days after ULA announced an order of 38 Vulcan launches from Amazon for its Project Kuiper broadband constellation. Aerojet did not disclose the value of the order, but the company’s backlog grew from $6.4 billion at the end of the first quarter to $6.9 billion at the end of the second quarter. Drake said in the increase in backlog was “in large part” due to the ULA order for RL10 engines. The company has had a tumultuous year to date. In January, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would sue to block Aerojet’s acquisition by Lockheed Martin, announced in December 2020, on antitrust grounds. Lockheed terminated the $4.4 billion deal in February , with Aerojet remaining an independent company. Since then, Aerojet had been tied up in a proxy fight between Drake and the company’s executive chairman, Warren Lichtenstein, who had differing views on the future of the company after the termination of the Lockheed deal. That culminated in shareholders voting for a new board of directors, approving July 6 a slate backed by Drake over a rival one backed by Lichtenstein. The new board features Drake and seven others, including retired Air Force Gens. Kevin Chilton and Lance Lord, former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James. Drake said on the earnings call she was meeting with the new board for the first time later that day. Lichtenstein’s Steel Partners still owns about 5% of Aerojet. “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t see any impact” of Steel’s continued stake in the company, Drake said when asked about it on the call. “I think most of our shareholders realize the value of Aerojet Rocketdyne and the strength of this business.” “I don’t know of any changes with that one shareholder,” she added, “but we’ll certainly let you know if something pops up.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat said Dec. 1 it has ordered a geostationary broadband satellite to support multi-orbit services in the Americas from 2026. Thales Alenia Space is designing the Flexsat (flexible satellite) to accommodate the low Earth orbit network that the French operator stands to gain by merging with OneWeb, the U.K.-based constellation operator. “This new satellite will further underpin Eutelsat’s growth strategy aimed at addressing the booming Connectivity segment and it is also able to support joint GEO-LEO services,” Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said in a statement. In their joint news release, Eutelsat and Thales said Flexsat will “accommodate joint GEO-LEO services, specifically in zones where demand is highly concentrated.” Thales referred questions about how the satellite would help integrate GEO and LEO networks to Eutelsat. “We see particular emphasis on [combining GEO and LEO services] by customers in the Americas and want to have a satellite that, thanks to its flexibility, will be the perfect and modular complement to the connectivity layer provided from LEO,” Eutelsat corporate communications officer Daphne Joseph-Gabriel said via email. “Of course, it does not mean that a spacecraft positioned in GEO could provide “LEO-like” services.” Flexsat will be based on Thales’ Space Inspire software-enabled platform, which enables the satellite to be reconfigured once in orbit in response to changing mission needs. While outlining the benefits of multi-orbit architecture, Eutelsat has previously said its GEO satellites could provide more capacity to congested areas than OneWeb’s LEO network. In contrast, OneWeb satellites offer reduced latency and pole-to-pole coverage. Eutelsat said Flexsat would be capable of providing more than 100 gigabits per second of incremental capacity over the Americas, targeting enterprise, government, aviation, and maritime customers. It is the fifth GEO satellite that Thales has sold this year based on its software-defined Space Inspire product line, following two orders from Intelsat and one each from SES and Arabsat . In September, Thales said it had sold a more classic GEO satellite to South Korea’s KT Sat without a software-defined payload, which can provide better economics for operators with stable demand forecasts that are also looking to deploy their spacecraft faster. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
LOGAN, Utah — SpaceX has lost its bid for nearly $900 million in rural broadband subsidies for its Starlink service. The Federal Communications Commission said Aug. 10 that SpaceX had failed to show it could meet requirements for unlocking the funds, which aim to incentivize expanding broadband services to unserved areas across the United States. “We must put scarce universal service dollars to their best possible use as we move into a digital future that demands ever more powerful and faster networks,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “We cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promised speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements.” SpaceX was provisionally awarded the subsidies in December 2020 after competing in an auction under phase one of the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). SpaceX’s winning share was one of the largest among the auction’s 180 successful bidders, and covered nearly 643,000 homes and businesses in 35 states. Auction winners were required to submit paperwork to the FCC to show how they planned to deploy services that meet RDOF conditions to receive the funds over 10 years. For Starlink, this included providing 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds and 20 Mbps upload speeds. Terrestrial telco LTD Broadband, which was provisionally awarded $1.3 billion in subsidies under the program, also failed to demonstrate it could “deliver the promised service,” Rosenworcel said. “Starlink’s technology has real promise,” Rosenworcel added. “But the question before us was whether to publicly subsidize its still developing technology for consumer broadband—which requires that users purchase a $600 dish—with nearly $900 million in universal service funds until 2032.” Ookla speed tests showed median download speeds for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband network improved 38% to 90.55 Mbps in the first quarter of 2022, compared with the corresponding quarter last year. However, Ookla said upload speeds fell from 16.29 Mbps to 9.33 Mbps. SpaceX has launched more than 2,700 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) to improve its service and coverage. According to satellite broadband competitor Viasat, limitations in Starlink’s network architecture prevent it from meeting RDOF obligations even with more satellites. “As the number of Starlink subscribers increases, the system will become even more capacity-constrained, which is likely to impair network performance and constrain speeds for end users,” Viasat told the FCC in a July 13 letter. In a July 29 letter to the FCC, SpaceX said Viasat “is transparently attempting to have the Commission impede competition at all costs to protect its legacy technology.” SpaceX and Viasat have a long history of battling it out over regulatory matters through FCC filings. Viasat, which operates broadband satellites in geostationary orbit, was denied an attempt to bid for subsidies in the RDOF auction with a proposed LEO constellation. Rosenworcel’s decision comes after she said last year that the FCC was taking steps to “clean up issues with the program’s design originating from its adoption in 2020,” following complaints about how some of the subsidies would fund broadband in parking lots and well-served urban areas. These steps included letters to SpaceX and other winning RDOF bidders to withdraw funding requests for areas that already have service, or where “significant questions of waste have been raised.” SpaceX has been raising billions of dollars to support plans to expand Starlink and its next-generation rocket Starship. The company raised $250 million in an equity round from undisclosed investors in July, bringing total funding raised so far this year to a reported $2 billion . This article was edited Aug. 10 to correct a typo in Ookla’s upload speed figures for Starlink. 
Sierra Space announced an agreement with the Turkish Space Agency and an affiliated company June 29 that could lead to cooperation on human spaceflight and lunar missions. Sierra Space said it signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Turkish Space Agency and ESEN Sistem Entegrasyon, a Turkish company affiliated with Sierra Nevada Corporation, spanning a broad range of potential partnerships among the organizations that could include use of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft and inflatable modules it is developing for the Orbital Reef space station. “This agreement with the Turkish Space Agency and ESEN is another significant step for Sierra Space as we build a technology and business platform in LEO and, in doing so, deliver affordable access to space, opening the commercial space economy to the world,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. The agreement covers a wide range of potential projects over the next five years, with few specific details. Sierra Space cited in the statement potential work in space technologies and applications, use of the Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) inflatable module, and sending payloads to low Earth orbit and the moon. The agreement also includes engagement with Turkish businesses and universities on space-related projects. “There are tremendous benefits for our industries and future space projects by leveraging Sierra Space capabilities and technologies, and we look forward to further collaboration with Sierra Space to identify additional opportunities where we can be active participants in the future of commercial space’s infrastructure and economy,” said Serdar Hüseyin Yıldırım, president of the Turkish Space Agency, in the statement. The agency, established in 2018, is working on several satellite projects as well as a proposed small launch vehicle. It is also responsible for planning of broader national space activities.
The Pentagon plans to spend nearly $13 billion over the next five years to develop and acquire military communications satellites. According to U.S. Department of Defense budget documents, this large investment supports growing demands for connectivity and secure data networks across the U.S. armed forces and national security agencies. The 2023-2027 spending plan includes funding for the Pentagon’s first-ever low Earth orbit broadband constellation and smaller numbers of bespoke communications satellites to augment or replace existing systems. These procurements of bespoke satellites, analysts and industry executives told SpaceNews, appear to run counter to government claims that DoD is poised to transition away from traditional satellite procurements toward greater reliance on commercial space services. “I think it’s fair to say that this budget doesn’t reflect a pivot to a greater adoption of commercial capabilities in lieu of government-owned and operated capabilities,” said Mike Tierney, industry analyst at the defense and aerospace consulting firm Velos. Unlike satellite acquisitions, commercial satcom services are funded through revolving accounts on a year-to-year basis and are not forecast in budget line items, Tierney noted, so it’s difficult to predict future buys. Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of Space Systems Command, which oversees Space Force satellite procurements, said he is pushing for change in a culture that favors building systems in-house. The goal is to “buy what we can and only build what we must,” he said. “You will start to see that shift, year to year, as we go forward.” The satellite acquisitions funded in the Space Force budget, he said, reflect priorities vetted and approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The one thing that is always needed is more comm,” he said. “We never have enough comm to get after what we need to do. We need more comm to support the fight.” Guetlein said the satellite industry could expect more commercial satcom opportunities in the coming years. The U.S. Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO) said it plans to award nearly $2.3 billion in commercial satcom contracts over the next two years. CSCO buys commercial satcom capacity and services for the U.S. armed forces and allies. The largest of the commercial opportunities is an $875 million multiple-award deal for low Earth orbit satellite broadband services over 10 years. The Space Force, in a 2020 vision document, said satcom should be an “integrated enterprise” of military and commercial systems. According to the document, “for those frequency bands, coverage areas or specialized capabilities not offered by the commercial satcom industry, purpose-built constellations and payloads will be acquired.” Making these buy-vs-build decisions “requires a little bit of calculus,” said Guetlein. “We’ve got to really understand how that capability is going to be used in the future, in a time of crisis or time of conflict. And can I depend on that capability?” “If I cannot guarantee that it will be there when I need it, then I probably need to own it, not lease it,” Guetlein said. “If industry can guarantee that that capability will be there in times of crisis or conflict, then I can probably buy those services. And I would rather buy those services than have to go build something myself.” One reason to buy commercial satcom services is that it adds layers of resilience, he said. “In a conflict, it gives us proliferation. It gives us redundancy across our networks.” At a time when U.S. adversaries are stepping up cyber attacks that threaten terrestrial and satellite-based networks, said Guetlein, the Space Force and its satcom suppliers will be taking a “holistic approach to cybersecurity and not just look at it in stovepipes.” NEW The projected $13 billion worth of satellite procurements in the 2023-2027 defense budget pay for a mix of strategic and tactical communications systems. The lion’s share is for the Evolved Strategic Satcom, or ESS, program. The Space Force plans to spend $5.5 billion over five years to continue the development of three proposed payloads and ground system concepts from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The companies are expected to complete prototype designs by 2025 and conduct in-space demonstrations. The Space Force said it plans to field ESS in the early 2030s. The ESS will provide highly secure communications lines for the most sensitive national security operations, including nuclear command and control. Another big-ticket item in the budget is $2.2 billion for narrowband satellites. The Space Force is looking to buy two more Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellites that provide Ultra High Frequency (UHF) communications. The U.S. Navy acquired four MUOS satellites — made by Lockheed Martin — plus an on-orbit spare launched in 2016. The program has since been transferred to the Space Force. MUOS supports mobile users with voice and low-rate data transfer. Because the satellites are oversubscribed, DoD wants to buy two more. The Space Force is conducting an analysis of alternatives before it decides whether to buy two more MUOS or opt for a new design. A Lockheed Martin spokesperson said the company has kept its production line warm and is “ready for the next acquisition.” For secure tactical communications, DoD is budgeting $2.5 billion for Protected Tactical Service (PTS) satellites and a ground system called Protected Tactical Enterprise Service (PTES). Boeing and Northrop Grumman are developing PTS payloads and Boeing is also the PTES prime contractor. Both companies are expected to launch prototype payloads in 2024 for on-orbit demonstrations. The ESS and PTS constellations are intended to augment and eventually replace the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellites made by Lockheed Martin. The sixth and final AEHF satellite was launched in March 2020. The AEHF satellites carry strategic payloads, which must be able to operate in a nuclear war environment, and tactical payloads for battlefield use. The plan is to disaggregate the capabilities of AEHF into the ESS for strategic communications, and the PTS for tactical users. The Space Force said the ESS satellites will provide polar coverage, which AEHF does not. The military today relies on two Northrop Grumman-developed Enhanced Polar System satellites to extend the AEHF network over the North Pole. While military satellites have mostly operated from geostationary orbits, the Pentagon is now for the first time building its own broadband constellation in low Earth orbit that will connect users across the world. The Space Development Agency, which is overseeing the project, is budgeting $2.7 billion over five years for the Transport Layer, a mesh network expected to have hundreds of small satellites. Even though there are commercially available broadband services, DoD’s requirements are unique, said SDA Director Derek Tournear. The Transport Layer satellites, for example, have to be interoperable with the Link 16 tactical data link protocol that is only used by the U.S. military and allies. “There’s no commercial market for Link 16 as far as I know. So that’s one of the areas where it is mission specific to the DoD,” said Tournear. The five-year budget plan includes $257 million for “commercial satcom integration,” a funding line Congress created in 2019 in response to backlash from the commercial satcom industry after appropriators funded a new Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite that DoD did not request. Congress added $600 million in 2018 for WGS, arguing that the Air Force at the time was not providing sufficient satcom capacity to meet user demand. The integration line “is not huge dollars, and it’s not to buy commercial capacity, it’s just to develop standards and interfaces for the department to plan the architecture,” said Tierney, the industry consultant. So far, it is not clear that the desired hybrid networks are any closer to becoming a reality, he said. The priorities in the budget suggest that DoD remains heavily invested in military satcom and will rely on commercial services as a “relief valve” when it needs additional capacity. “The giant pivot people were hoping for is just not happening, at least not as quickly as commercial operators would have liked,” Tierney added. During a panel discussion at an Air & Space Forces Association conference in March, Guetlein said there’d been a running dialogue on how DoD should operate with commercial space systems during a conflict. “When we were in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was clear to us what was military, what was intelligence, what was commercial, what was allied,” he said. But the lines between government and commercial could become more blurred if DoD starts buying more commercial services, Guetlein said. “As we start going into the space fight and seek space superiority, there are those in a camp that says the government has to own all the capability on orbit,” he said. Some factions in DoD perceive commercial systems as being less cyber-secure than government-owned systems, but that thinking will change as the commercial sector continues to develop novel solutions to protect networks, said Keith Alexander, founder and chairman of IronNet, a cybersecurity consulting firm. Alexander, a retired Army general and former director of the National Security Agency, said satcom providers have to gradually build trust with government customers much like commercial cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure did more than a decade ago when they started to pursue military and intelligence contracts. Questions about the security of commercial systems “was a big issue that we had with the cloud,” said Alexander. The government eventually warmed to the idea that it could have a “top secret cloud with a commercial vendor. I think showing that we can do the same thing with commercial satellite communications will get us to the same place.” Peter Hoene, president and CEO of SES Government Solutions, said the industry is investing billions of dollars in new capabilities and DoD should be taking advantage of them. SES, an operator of geostationary and medium-Earth-orbit communications satellites, will be adding 11 high-capacity broadband satellites to its MEO constellation between 2022 and 2025. “Commercial satcom will likely never be a significant player in nuclear command and control and some other high-end missions,” Hoene said, but for the bulk of its satcom needs, DoD should be using commercial systems. The Space Force procurement office, CSCO, needs to “explore effective ways to adopt longer term contracts, purchasing commercial satcom more like fiber,” he added. CSCO so far “has not met industry expectations to explore deeper partnerships to ensure critical capacity is available to the warfighter when and where they need it,” Hoene said. “The acquisition process and the way the department procures commercial satcom is not where we believe the DoD needs to be.” SES in March made a major move to expand its military business with the $450 million acquisition of satcom integrator Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, one of the largest providers of commercial services to the U.S. government. Hoene said this acquisition allows SES to partner with other companies in order to meet DoD demands for multiorbit satcom. “The satellite communications market is becoming increasingly competitive, particularly with the entrance of low Earth orbit providers like Starlink, OneWeb, Telesat and Amazon Project Kuiper,” he said. “We see the importance of integrated GEO-MEO-LEO and managed service solutions for DoD customers.” Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems, said the industry would have liked to see in the 2023 budget an “increased focus on commercial satellite communications, although we are seeing some motion in that direction.” “For many years, we’ve been talking to the Air Force when they were in charge of this, and now with the formation of the Space Force, we’re working very hard to get them to understand the value of commercial,” said Miller. Viasat is a global provider of satellite broadband and is looking to sign up military customers for its new Viasat-3 geostationary constellation of three highcapacity satellites. The first ViaSat-3, projected to launch in late 2022, will cover the Americas, to be followed later in the year by a second satellite to service Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A third satellite will cover Asia. DoD could save money by using high-capacity commercial satellites for tactical communications instead of buying systems like PTS, said Miller. “ViaSat-3 absolutely can meet the requirements of that system and the anti-jam requirements that are associated with that.” There are other commercial LEO, MEO and GEO systems coming online that could meet the PTS mission, Miller added. For narrowband L-band communications, there is Iridium and Inmarsat, although they couldn’t replace MUOS because the military uses the UHF frequency band, and that spectrum is owned and operated by governments. A spokesman for Iridium said the company’s mobile communications network could supplement MUOS coverage in the polar regions. The company in 2019 won a seven-year $738.5 million DoD contract for unlimited usage of Iridium narrowband devices for an unlimited number of subscribers. “Since users are already on the contract, it’s an affordable option for the Iridium network to complement MUOS with Iridium narrowband services,” said the spokesman. “We have already tested the capabilities of voice-to-voice calls from Iridium devices to MUOS.” One problem facing commercial vendors is that DoD buyers often are not aware of what the market offers, Miller said. “We’re really optimistic that they’ll open their eyes to the value of commercial satcom and they use it because they’ll see how effective it is. I think part of it is that they don’t quite know what it’s capable of yet.” “Culture change is really hard,” Miller said. DoD doing “more of the same rather than doing something new is normal. But all in all, I think that we will see more adoption of commercial.” DoD’s strategy to build a global network known as “joint all-domain command and control” requires massive communications pipelines for data sharing that can’t be achieved only with government systems, Miller noted. “When you think about a future peer conflict with China,” Miller said, “we have to be in a position where we can leverage our commercial technological advantage and then spend our defense dollars on the things that absolutely need defense dollars, and not duplicate things that are being developed in the commercial market.” Brad Grady, space industry analyst at Analysys Mason, said satellite operators are encouraged by the military’s interest in commercial satcom but there are still underlying frustrations that the rhetoric doesn’t match the budget actions. “They keep talking about how Starlink was really awesome in Ukraine, that they could do this anti-jam stuff,” Grady said. Commercial operators wonder if this might serve as a justification for buying more commercial LEO services but it appears to be more of a validation for the procurement of the SDA Transport Layer, he said. “It kind of reinforces the mindset that LEO is great, therefore, we need to own it.” A message to be gleaned from what is happening in the world — and the increasing awareness of the value of space systems — is that DoD will remain an important customer for the satcom industry, said Grady. “Even though commercial business such as cruise ships and airlines are becoming more important, governments and militaries will still be key players in this market.” This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
In May, a new director took the reins of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The storied lab is home to many milestone-making spacecraft that have plumbed our solar system, but not without some missteps along the way. Laurie Leshin is the first woman to serve as JPL director, a role that includes serving as vice president at the California Institute of Technology, which manages JPL for NASA. Leshin is a well-known geochemist and space scientist, an active co-investigator for two instruments on NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover. She brings to JPL skills honed in academia and government, including senior NASA positions. Barely after setting foot in the door, Leshin faced a major spacecraft launch delay due to a software setback with a high-profile asteroid mission. She is also impacted by perplexing supply chain issues that can impair JPL’s capacity to better gauge project costs. Cost overruns in JPL programs have dogged the lab in the past, and she intends to take seriously better stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Toss into the management dilemma mix for Leshin is JPL’s need to appraise a return-to-lab posture contrasted with remote work by employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hard to build, equip and test spacecraft from home. As the head of a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), Leshin manages a special relationship with NASA. The space agency requires JPL to operate in the public interest, with objectivity and independence, be free from organizational conflicts of interest, and fully disclose its affairs to NASA. Now the helmswoman at JPL, Leshin sees opportunities to leverage JPL’s leadership in robotic space exploration and other areas. She advocates having the lab branch out beyond traditional collaborators, partners, and colleagues to embrace today’s non-traditional ecosystem of space players and providers. Leshin spoke with SpaceNews about what she envisions in coming years as she scopes out and fine-tunes the revered laboratory’s capabilities. It is important to me, and I take seriously the opportunity that it presents. That being said, I’m not just the director for women; I am the director for everyone. Once you reach these positions, you’ve got to use them to kick down doors for people, light the way and rewire the system to help make it possible for more to follow. JPL has an incredibly storied history with extraordinary achievements. You don’t want to break that. You want to continue to grow it. We start from a very strong foundation, but we start in a moment where there are many new opportunities. My biggest observation is that the space ecosystem has changed so much in the last decade. How do we continue to position JPL, given that new ecosystem? How do we partner more often and differently? How do we fly more often, not only when there are massive flagship missions, which is our sweet spot? How do we take advantage of new capabilities, especially around launch, new materials, and 3-D printing, to launch technologies more frequently into the space environment and explore more often? The traditional space ecosystem is the traditional players in aerospace. Then there’s the science community itself which is diversifying a lot. More universities are playing in the space game than ever. On the industry side, we’ve got a lot more folks thinking about space as a place to do business. So it’s really about branching out beyond our traditional collaborators, partners and colleagues. You have to take our stewardship of taxpayer resources seriously. We need to do better on the front end, ensuring we’re estimating costs effectively. We need to do better at scaling our appetite to the resources available. Leadership is often about balance. You’ve got to figure out how to respect the need to be cost-knowledgeable and cost-constrained while trying to push the frontiers of technology and knowledge. Part of our job is to be on the frontier. We do things that are first-of-a-kind. Sometimes it can be hard to predict costs. I am committed to embracing that balancing act more overtly. If there were an easy answer, it would have been changed. I don’t think it’s easy, and I wouldn’t want to portray it as such. Right now, we are staring at a lot of supply chain challenges. Even when we build a spacecraft in-house at JPL, most of the parts are built elsewhere. We contract for most of the pieces. We’re seeing more no-bids from contractor partners than we’ve ever seen before. We’re seeing bids come in higher and delivery times being much longer. That has a real impact, especially when your cost models are based on historical data. Supply chain challenges make you want to buy things earlier. This means you are in an earlier part of the design-life cycle, and maybe not quite as smart about what you need to buy, so you probably want to hedge your bets a little. There’s a lot of complexity in how that drives the system and connects to our ability to predict cost based on historical models. NASA makes a cost commitment at Key Decision Point C, which is about a year from now. The program is still in Phase A, and about ready to go into Phase B. This is the year when we’re going to get serious about estimating the cost. Not yet. It would be premature, but it will surely have a “b” [for billion] in front of that cost number. We’re trying to make sure when we do make a commitment, that it’s a strong one. We’ve all been through missions where that hasn’t been the case. We’re pushing hard for the 2028 launch; to do that, we need to understand the cost. I think the only thing to do is to be as transparent as possible so that people can understand our commitment to keeping folks safe. But also so they understand the science is telling us that it’s highly, highly unlikely that anything there would be extant life – something currently alive – in the samples as the environment at the martian surface is extremely harsh. We understand that when we overrun a cost commitment, it impacts downstream missions. Outer planet missions are complicated to plan. We’re excited to be diving into the Uranus orbiter and probe. It’s an unprecedented situation now to be building two large missions, the Europa Clipper and the Mars Sample Return, at the same time. Once Clipper launches some two years away, I think there will absolutely be a capability to ramp up on Uranus. Also, sticking to the 2028 launch date for Mars Sample Return helps that wedge open up for the Uranus orbiter and probe. It’s a miss on our part. Within a few weeks of taking on my JPL position, it was apparent that we were not going to make the launch date. We immediately told NASA headquarters and they quickly released it to the public. I think that was exactly the right thing to do. We were extremely transparent as we dug into the issue. We’re about to hear within the next couple of months from the independent review board. Not to pre-suppose their findings, I think they will say it was a little bit of COVID in terms of the team being communicative up and down the line as they needed to be. We were not aware of the depth of the challenge until it was too late to fix it and make the launch date. So that is a problem…a problem we’re committed to fixing. I think the board will also say there’s no fundamental technical reason that the spacecraft can’t fly in 2023, as there are launch opportunities. I think there’s an enormous opportunity for smaller spacecraft, in the inner solar system especially. But in general, I don’t think JPL should be in the business of building a ton of cubesats. There are providers out there who can work with us on those things. But I do think we should be enabling the science community to pursue science goals. I think it’s very interesting, maybe not cubesats in this case, but potentially it could be with larger cubesats coming along, to start thinking differently about the outer solar system. The next big frontier is a more sustained exploration of the outer solar system. What’s very enabling for science is figuring out certain technologies and capabilities to start flying there more frequently with smaller things. It’s not well formulated yet on my part, I will admit, but this is the kind of thing JPL should do. How do we figure out changing the paradigm — more sustained exploration — in the outer solar system? There are exciting decadal surveys in Earth science, astrophysics and in planetary, huge opportunities within NASA and for JPL. There’s work on the Carbon Mapper, which is an entirely philanthropically-funded mission to look at methane plumes and understand who intentionally is over-polluting with methane. We will provide a state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer. Then there’s the Surface Water and Ocean Topography spacecraft, the SWOT mission. It will help us understand and fully inventory Earth’s surface water for the first time; not just the oceans but all of the freshwater. Amazingly enough, our data about that is not complete. The JPL campus is buzzing. People are back, and we’ve been back since May. We quickly figured out how to bring back people building spacecraft since you can’t do that from home. But overall, we were pretty hybrid for a long time. Now that we’re open, we have established temporary hybrid work agreements with our employees. We’re learning as we go. It feels like a big science experiment that we’re trying to understand. In November, we’re going to do a big check-in across the lab and see if we need to make adjustments. Yes, the lab is buzzing here but with much less of a parking problem. This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Arianespace is looking to move Ovzon’s first satellite to another Ariane 5 after Eutelsat switched to a dedicated mission to launch sooner. Arianespace had been preparing to launch the Swedish broadband service provider’s Ovzon-3 satellite with Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS satellite. Both satellites destined for geostationary orbit (GEO) have suffered pandemic-related production delays. However, Ovzon CEO Per Norén said Ovzon-3 is only expected to be ready for launch toward the end of this year. Eutelsat decided it could not wait that long and reached a deal with Arianespace to launch Konnect VHTS Sept. 6 on a dedicated Ariane 5 mission. Ovzon-3 manufacturer Maxar Technologies is still waiting on a reaction wheel from its supplier Honeywell, Norén told SpaceNews June 28. Although this is due to be delivered soon, he said Ovzon was unable to guarantee the satellite would be ready to launch with Eutelsat in September. Not least because Ovzon-3 also needs to travel from Maxar’s California facilities to Arianespace’s launchpad in French Guiana by boat, amid a shortage of Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft . French fleet operator Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS satellite was previously slated to enter service in the first half of 2023, before being pushed into the second half of next year following delays at manufacturer Thales Alenia Space. Even though Konnect VHTS is now launching Sept. 6 on a dedicated Ariane 5 mission, Eutelsat spokesperson Marie-Sophie Ecuer said via email it requires “several months to be operational, notably in terms of Ground segment rollout.” Its predecessor Eutelsat Konnect took almost a year to enter service. Konnect VHTS has a mass of 6,300 kilograms and is designed to deliver 500 gigabits per second broadband speeds to Europe. Its service delay will help stretch Eutelsat’s revenue slump into 2023, the operator said Feb. 17 . Hunting for rides Ovzon-3 is smaller than traditional GEO communications satellites, weighing about 1,500 kilograms. This makes it possible for Ovzon-3 to join one of the last remaining Ariane 5 missions with one or even two existing passengers, according to Norén. After Arianespace’s September mission for Eutelsat, the launch provider will have three Ariane 5 rockets left before it transitions to the Ariane 6, which is slated to debut in 2023. While Arianespace declined to discuss its upcoming launch manifest, it confirmed all remaining Ariane 5s had booked customers. Lingering supply chain issues are continuing to cloud satellite launch schedules. “After COVID and supply chain issues and so on, it’s really hard to tell, I think, who is ready when, and that makes it pretty difficult for the launch providers to actually know exactly how to put the launch plan together,” Norén said. Ovzon-3 could launch on a dedicated mission, but that would require dropping another Ariane 5 customer, and would leave a large amount of unused capacity on the rocket. Arianespace is slated to launch the Galaxy 35 and Galaxy 36 C-band broadcast satellites for Intelsat on a single Ariane 5 this year. The MTG I1 satellite for Europe’s meteorological satellite agency Eumetsat is also due to launch on an Ariane 5 in 2022. Norén said Ovzon is also talking to other launch providers to ensure Ovzon-3 gets to launch in 2022. “We’re working very closely with Arianespace and that’s our main path forward — they’re really good to deal with, and they’re working with us to get our launch scheduled when we can guarantee the finalization of the satellite,” he said. “However, we have to have our options open.” Ovzon-3 was originally set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy before the Swedish company said it got a better offer from Arianespace in 2019. Norén said the delay in launching its dedicated satellite had not disrupted the company’s growth plans too much. Ovzon already provides broadband services by leasing capacity from other satellite operators. Only two-thirds of the capacity Ovzon bought from Intelsat two and a half years ago is currently being utilized, according to Norén, with the remaining third still available for customers. “It’s better for us to have our own capacity with Ovzon-3, but we’re not dependent on it,” he added. Ovzon-3 has five steerable beams and is focused primarily on serving government needs. The U.S. Defense Department has traditionally been Ovzon’s largest customer. Norén said demand for Ovzon-3, which also has a reprogrammable onboard processor that acts as a mesh network to enable remote satellite terminals to operate independently of a teleport, has increased following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
TAMPA, Fla. — An insurance claim for a Malaysian satellite that ran out of fuel prematurely remains unsettled more than a year after the incident. Some underwriters are disputing Malaysian satellite operator Measat’s $45 million claim to recover losses from Measat-3, an insurance source said, while others have agreed to pay out. Although many space insurance claims are settled within months — after a straightforward rocket explosion, for instance — it can take years following an incident in orbit when the cause of failure is initially unclear. “We were sitting there saying, hey, is this legit … how do you just run out of gas?”, an underwriter said. But while that underwriter said Measat and Boeing, Measat-3’s manufacturer, were ultimately able to provide analysis showing a valid insurance claim, other underwriters remain unconvinced. “Fuel left in the tank was miscalculated” in the latest health report given to insurers to decide whether to renew Measat-3’s in-orbit coverage, according to another underwriter. “At this stage, we do not think there should be a claim,” the person said, because information underwriters received before they agreed to extend insurance coverage at the end of 2020 for another year was “erroneous.” Since each insurer acts for their own share of a satellite’s insurance coverage, those that agree to a claim pay their share while those contesting it end up in arbitration. Measat-3 suffered a complete outage of services in mid-2022 after losing fuel earlier than its operator expected. Although Measat-3 did not have sufficient fuel to continue providing broadcast and telecoms services, enough remained to push it out of geostationary orbit (GEO) several weeks later when Measat gave up on trying to revive the satellite . It is unclear what was behind the disparity in Measat-3’s expected fuel reserves. Launched in December 2006, Measat-3 was nearing the end of its 15-year design life at the time. However, GEO satellites routinely have enough fuel to outlive this initial projection. Last year, an underwriter told SpaceNews that Measat had expected to get another two years of operations out of the satellite. A $45 million claim for the incident is “very much not settled,” another insurance source said Aug. 1, adding that it is unlikely to be resolved in the near term. Measat spokesperson Shawna Felicia said the company is “not able to comment on the insurance policy” for Measat-3. Joshua Barrett, a spokesperson for Boeing Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said Measat-3 was retired “following a premature depletion of propellant that was unique to this more than decade-old satellite.” Barrett said the satellite, which was based on Boeing’s 601HP design, was positioned “to a safe, end-of-life disposal orbit.” Boeing declined to comment further. Measat-3 made it less than halfway to a graveyard orbit 300 kilometers above the geostationary belt during de-orbit maneuvers last September, according to space-tracking firm ExoAnalytic Solutions. However, ExoAnalytic Solutions CEO Doug Hendrix said the satellite’s perigee of 138 kilometers above the geostationary belt “puts it reasonably out of harm’s way.” Measat did not mention Measat-3 in a July 22 news release announcing that Measat-3d, its successor, had entered service after passing in-orbit tests. Measat-3d was built for Measat by Airbus Defense and Space under a 2019 contract as a replacement for Measat-3 and Measat-3a, an Orbital Sciences-built satellite launched in 2009. Measat-3a “is operating nominally,” Felicia told SpaceNews in an Aug. 1 email. Arianespace launched Measat-3d June 22 on an Ariane 5 rocket to replace and expand Measat’s coverage over Asia Pacific at 91.5 degrees East, where Measat-3a and Measat-3b are also located. Measat-3d carries C-band and Ku-band transponders for satellite TV services in Asia Pacific, and a high-throughput Ka-band payload for high-speed broadband in Malaysia. The satellite also has a Q-band and V-band payload for studying radio frequency propagation in high rainfall regions such as Malaysia, which Measat says will provide insights for developing its future satellites.
Virgin Orbit says it is technically ready for its next LauncherOne mission, and the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom, but is still waiting on a launch license from the British government. Virgin Orbit announced Oct. 5 that it completed a launch rehearsal for the mission, including fueling of the rocket, three days earlier at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The vehicle is now “ready for flight,” the company said. Unlike the previous LauncherOne missions, the upcoming launch will not take place from Mojave but instead Spaceport Cornwall in England. That requires obtaining a launch license from the U.K. government, through its Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). That launch license is still pending, and the company said in its Oct. 5 statement that a schedule for the launch “will be determined by the launch permitting regulatory process.” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said at an IPO-Edge webinar Oct. 6 that the company is working closely with the CAA on the license application, including meetings he had “very recently” with U.K. government officials. “It’s very clear that there’s a real commitment to drive forward,” he said of the planned launch. “That said, there’s some questions and it’s important in this business to make sure that the roles are clear, and that safety is job one.” Hart said that the company does have an internal planning date for the launch but did not disclose it. “We will, over the next few days, put that out,” he said. “We’re gearing up right now for logistics to ship rockets and equipment.” Industry sources said the company had been working to a launch no earlier than Oct. 29, but that date appears unlikely given the time needed to set up for the launch in Cornwall as well as obtain the launch license. The mission, reportedly to be called “Start Me Up” after the Rolling Stones song, will carry nine cubesats from the United Kingdom, United States, Poland and Oman. The launch will place the satellites into a sun-synchronous orbit at about 550 kilometers altitude. The upcoming launch will be the third this year for Virgin Orbit, after successful launches in January and July from Mojave. The company, which originally projected conducting as many as six launches this year, later lowered that target to four, with a launch from Mojave late this year after the U.K. launch. Hart acknowledged getting that fourth launch in this year may be difficult depending on when the Cornwall launch takes place. “We will be focused first on this launch,” he said of the upcoming U.K. launch. “Then we’ll be taking a look and seeing if we can get that fourth one in.”
LOGAN, Utah — NanoAvionics said Aug. 10 it has extended its range of modular satellite buses in another step toward the heavier end of the small satellite market. The addition of the MP42D bus enables the Lithuanian smallsat maker to host more powerful customer payloads of up to 145 kilograms. This opens up new applications for customers, NanoAvionics CEO and co-founder Vytenis Buzas said, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery that requires larger antennas. With payload envelope dimensions starting at 74 x 73 x 50 centimeters, he said MP42D could also be used as an orbital transfer vehicle. The bus is based on NanoAvionics’ flagship MP42 platform that gained flight heritage in April, marking the company’s expansion out of the 10-kilogram-and-under nanosatellite class. NanoAvionics also announced another bus based on this platform, the MP42H, for payloads of up to 22 kilograms. The initial MP42 sits in the middle of the two new buses and can accommodate payloads of up to 75 kilograms. Lower launch costs in the industry are encouraging operators to order heavier and more powerful satellites to improve capabilities and forge new markets, Buzas told SpaceNews on the sidelines of the Small Satellite Conference here. MP42D and MP42H buses are already in production after securing customers that he declined to disclose. According to Buzas, demand from customers is currently split 50/50 between nanosatellites and its larger set of satellites, despite only announcing the MP42 product line in March 2021. The market for nanosatellites is still growing, he added, but not as fast as it is for larger spacecraft. The product announcement comes a month after Norwegian company Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace bought a majority stake in NanoAvionics for about $67 million. Despite its new owners and a portfolio branching out into heavier satellite classes, the company is sticking to its NanoAvionics branding for the time being. “We do not have any plans to rename ourselves to MicroAvionics,” Buzas quipped, “NanomicroAvionis or SmallAvionics.”
The U.S.-based subsidiary of satellite operator SES has been renamed to reflect the company’s focus on the national security market. SES Government Solutions, based in Reston, Virginia, will begin operating under the new name SES Space & Defense effective Dec. 8, the company announced. The renaming follows SES’ recent $450 million acquisition of DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, a business unit of defense contractor Leonardo DRS, which provided satellite communications services to the Defense Department, and other military and intelligence agencies. “The SES Space & Defense brand reflects the organization’s new positioning and expanded offering serving the needs of the U.S. government customers,” the company said in a statement. SES Space & Defense has two business units: Space Initiatives and Defense Networks. Space Initiatives offers services from SES’s own satellite fleet and infrastructure. The Defense Networks unit, like DRS GES, is an integrator that provides managed services from multiple satellite operators. The former head of DRS GES David Fields is now president and CEO of SES Space & Defense. SES, headquartered in Luxembourg, operates a commercial fleet of more than 70 geosynchronous and medium Earth orbit satellites. The company is preparing for the 2023 launch of its first Boeing-built O3b mPower broadband satellites. The U.S. military is expected to be a key customer of the planned constellation of 11 O3b mPower satellites in medium-Earth orbit.
TAMPA, Fla. — The European Union reached a provisional agreement Nov. 17 to cover nearly half the 6 billion euro ($6.2 billion) cost of deploying a secure connectivity constellation by 2027. The European Parliament and member states agreed on a deal to contribute 2.4 billion euros from 2023-2027 for a sovereign network of satellites called IRIS², or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. The financing would come from funding previously earmarked for other European programs over the period, with the private sector expected to provide the remaining 3.6 billion euros via public-private partnerships. Europe said contracts for these partnerships would be awarded through a competitive process to build the infrastructure needed for the constellation, which Reuters reported could involve up to 170 satellites in low Earth orbit. Initial services are slated to begin in 2024 ahead of full operational capability by 2027. The 27 members of the European Union are due to endorse the provisional funding agreement Nov. 23, followed soon after by approval from the European Parliament. The provisional agreement will become public after representatives of member states endorse it, said Arianne Sikken, a press officer for the Council of the European Union. “After they agree, we can comment more in detail on the technical specifications,” Sikken said. There will be other formalities left to clear following these steps, Sikken added, including approvals needed during a European Parliament plenary and from ministers convening at a European Council meeting. The European Commission said Nov. 17 that IRIS² would have a multi-orbit approach that will help it scale to future needs. It also aims to leverage efforts Europe is already making to improve communications security through quantum cryptography. As well as adding a non-geostationary element to Europe’s existing government communications assets in geostationary orbit, the constellation aims to provide commercial services for filling gaps in broadband access in parts of Europe and Africa. The plans come amid various public-supported or subsidized non-EU constellations elsewhere, including the U.S., China, and Russia. European space officials recently stressed the need for greater autonomy and sovereign capabilities , in general, to keep up with geopolitical trends. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said the Galaxy 15 broadcast satellite that stopped responding to commands earlier this month shut down its payload Aug. 31, reducing the risk of interfering with signals from other spacecraft. However, Galaxy 15 continues to drift out of its geostationary orbit slot at 133 degrees West, and “will soon begin transiting through orbital locations licensed for other satellites,” an Intelsat spokesperson said. “Intelsat is working closely with impacted operators to minimize the impact of these transients,” the spokesperson said via email. “With the payload muted, the focus of this coordination ensures ‘fly-by’ procedures are coordinated so that the spacecraft avoid a physical collision. This is a normal part of spacecraft operations that is regularly executed and poses minimal risk.” Intelsat said it has successfully moved all customers from Galaxy 15 to its Galaxy 23 satellite as part of the company’s in-orbit protection program. SpaceX is slated to launch Galaxy 33, Galaxy 15’s replacement, “on or about Oct. 8, 2022,” the spokesperson added. The operator expects to move customers from Galaxy 23 to Galaxy 33 once that satellite enters service in November. Galaxy 33 is one of two satellites Intelsat ordered in 2020 from Northrop Grumman as part of efforts to vacate C-band spectrum in the United States. Intelsat said the anomaly on Galaxy 15, which carries 24 C-band transponders serving media customers in North America, will have no impact on the overall timeline for meeting regulatory deadlines for clearing C-band. The company is in line for nearly $5 billion in total from the Federal Communications Commission if it meets the regulator’s final December 2023 spectrum clearing deadline. Galaxy 15 also has an L-band payload that is no longer in use. Launched in 2005, the satellite was built by Orbital Sciences Corp., now part of Northrop Grumman. Intelsat said Aug. 19 that it had lost the ability to command Galaxy 15 after the satellite was likely hit by a geomagnetic storm that knocked out onboard electronics. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
The European Space Agency is requesting several hundred million euros at its upcoming ministerial council meeting for new satellite navigation technologies from low Earth orbit to the moon. In a Nov. 9 briefing, ESA officials said they are proposing about 500 million euros ($518 million) over the next three years for projects to develop advanced technologies beyond its work supporting the European Union-led Galileo system that would both enhance existing services for terrestrial users and expand them to support lunar exploration. “This fast-growing market has raised the expectations of users in all domains,” said Javier Benedicto, ESA’s director of navigation, requiring improvements in resilience and accuracy. “At the next council at the ministerial level in November, ESA will work towards reinforcing the future capabilities of satellite navigation.” One initiative, called FutureNAV, will support development of two missions to advance satellite navigation technologies. One, GENESIS, will combine four different measurement techniques on a single satellite to improve the international terrestrial reference frame used for both navigation and Earth science applications. The other, LEO-PNT, would test a potential future satellite navigation constellation in low Earth orbit through a demonstration involving 6 to 12 smallsats. Operating from LEO, Benedicto said, would allow for stronger signals and greater resistance to jamming, potentially using other frequency bands. “By bringing satellite navigation closer to the Earth, LEO-PNT has the potential to make satellites cheaper and more efficient, and launches more economical.” The goal of LEO-PNT, ESA officials said at the briefing, is a “fast track” program that would launch the smallsats in 2026 to demonstrate the potential capabilities of such a constellation. That would support future planning for the development of a LEO navigation constellation, including whether it would use standalone satellites or hosted payloads, potentially as part of a broadband constellation. “We see in the future a growth, an evolution, in the architecture of satellite navigation systems,” he said, with current constellations like Galileo in medium Earth orbit serving as a “backbone” complemented by LEO systems. “The purpose of the in-orbit demonstration, the program we have in mind, is to test this in orbit and demonstrate to ourselves the added value of those new technologies before we take a programmatic decision about the future evolution of this overall architecture.” A third mission is Moonlight, a joint effort of ESA’s exploration, telecommunications and navigation directorates. Moonlight will develop communications and navigation services on and around the moon to support ESA and partner missions there, starting with a demonstration mission called Lunar Pathfinder being developed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) for launch in 2025. ESA is wrapping up the first phase of Moonlight , where it awarded study contracts in 2021 to two consortia, one led by SSTL and the other by Telespazio. If funded at the ministerial, ESA is prepared immediately afterwards to issue a request for proposals for a second phase to begin development of Moonlight, with a goal of making a selection in April 2023. Benedicto said ESA will seek 100 to 150 million euros for Moonlight at the ministerial council meeting, which takes place Nov. 22-23 in Paris. “It is a mission that is very scalable, and we will accommodate the scope of the mission as a function of the budget that is provided by our member states.” He said ESA is requesting 80 million euros for GENESIS and 100 million for LEO-PNT, as well as 120 million for its Navigation Innovation and Support Programme, or NAVISP, to support work on technologies and services enabled by satellite navigation, such as autonomous driving. Those efforts are complementary, Benedicto said, to the work funded by the European Commission for the Galileo satellite navigation system. “We have an agreement whereby we have a clear distribution of roles and responsibilities,” he said, with ESA responsible for developing Galileo satellites and the EGNOS augmentation service, which are then operated by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA). That includes work by ESA building first- and second-generation Galileo satellites, although launches of those satellites are on hold with the loss of the Soyuz vehicle after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and delays in the introduction of the Ariane 6. He said there is no urgent need to launch additional satellites given the health of the current constellation, although it would be helpful to add to the constellation’s in-orbit spares. “We are, at the moment, discussing with the European Union the possibility to identify additional launch services, if necessary, for the time frame of the end of 2023, beginning of 2024, in case there would be the need to launch urgently additional satellites to guarantee the continuity of the constellation,” Benedicto said. He later said that included “intense discussions” with launch companies other than Arianespace, although he did not disclose specific providers. Ove the longer term, he said, ESA would use the Ariane 6, whose first launch is currently scheduled for no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2023. “Ariane 6 remains our workhorse. It is our baseline for deployment of the Galileo constellation in the future.”
RS21, a data science startup developing artificial intelligence tools for autonomous space operations, won a U.S. Space Force contract to research the use of AI to predict satellite failures in orbit. The company, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, announced Oct. 26 it won a two-year Small Business Innovation Research Phase 3 contract worth $375,000 with options for over $1 million in additional work. The technology will be tested in an upcoming Space Test Program (STP) experiment, STPSat-7, projected to launch in 2023 to low Earth orbit. RS21 is developing software that will be integrated in the STP ground station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, prior to launch. The data will be used to train the AI model in preparation for the STPSat-7 experiment. Trisha Miller, director of research and development at RS21, said the SBIR funding will help accelerate the maturation of the company’s Space Prognostic AI Custodian Ecosystem, or SPAICE. The AI-powered monitoring system performs fault detection to predict satellite malfunctions. It uses real-time satellite telemetry data and anomaly messages to predict a lead time before satellites fail, said Miller. “We are optimistic that this groundbreaking AI technology will support government missions and have commercial applications to meet the demand for autonomous solutions.” she said. RS1 is seeking additional funding from the Space Force’s technology arm SpaceWERX for a cloud-based deployment of the SPAICE tool, and integration and analysis of data from the International Space Station. 
A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch a National Reconnaissance Office mission Sept. 24 from Space Launch Complex-6 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. This will be Delta 4’s final launch from the West Coast. ULA is under contract to launch two more missions on the Delta 4 Heavy in 2023 and 2024, but will fly those from Cape Canaveral, Florida, after which the vehicle will be retired. The launch of NROL-91 marks the end of an era, Col. Chad Davis, the NRO’s director of the Office of Space Launch, told reporters Sept. 22. “I think bittersweet is absolutely the right word to use with that.” After completing the NROL-91 mission, ULA plans to start vacating the pad, known as Space Launch Complex-6. The company’s future vehicle, Vulcan Centaur, will launch from Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex-3, from which ULA currently flies its Atlas 5 rocket. During a call with reporters, Col. Bryan Titus, vice commander for Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg, said range officials are in active discussions with launch companies to try to get a new tenant for SLC-6. Space Launch Delta 30 is the Space Force unit that operates the Vandenberg range. “I’m fairly confident that it will be utilized,” Titus said of SLC-6. He declined to name any potential tenants. Most launches at Vandenberg today are conducted by SpaceX, which leases Space Launch Complex-4 for launches and booster landings. Titus noted SLC-6’s storied past. It was originally built in the 1960s to launch the Air Force’s never-flown Manned Orbital Laboratory, and repurposed in the 1980s as a dedicated launch and landing site for military space shuttle missions. After the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Air Force mothballed the site without ever conducting a West Coast shuttle launch. It reactivated the site in the 1990s for a handful of Lockheed Martin Athena launches and eventually turned it over to the Delta 4 program. SLC-6’s runway has been used to land the Air Force’s X-37B reusable spaceplane. Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman reportedly considered working out an arrangement with ULA to use SLC-6 to launch national security missions had they been selected for the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract. But both were edged out by ULA and SpaceX in August 2020. The pad “has had many lives,” said Titus. “I think everyone at Vandenberg has a warm spot in their hearts for that place, and we’re going to make sure it’s continued to be utilized, but we don’t know exactly how,” he added. “There are many other launch service providers out there that could find utility in that location. There’s a lot of infrastructure there.” Gary Wentz, ULA’s vice president of government and commercial programs, said the company is preparing for Atlas 5’s final West Coast launch from SLC-3 scheduled for November 1. That will be the Joint Polar Satellite System 2 polar-orbiting weather satellite, developed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After that mission is completed, SLC-3 will be outfitted with new equipment in preparation for Vulcan, which is projected to start flying in 2023. He said ULA did not see a need to keep two launch pads on the West Coast. “From a business perspective, it was appropriate for us to use SLC-3 because there was a lot of commonality between Atlas and Vulcan systems.”
KAHULUI, Hawaii — As SpaceX prepares to launch a new crew to the International Space Station from one pad at the Kennedy Space Center, it is starting work to upgrade another pad at Cape Canaveral as a backup. NASA and SpaceX completed the launch readiness review Oct. 3 for the Crew-5 mission, currently scheduled for launch at 12 p.m. Eastern Oct. 5 from Launch Complex 39A. The mission will send NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina to the ISS for up to six months. At an Oct. 3 briefing, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the agency and SpaceX were working through three “open items” ahead of the launch, including replacing a thrust vector controller in one of the Falcon 9’s Merlin engines, fixing a leak in a fire extinguisher in the Dragon spacecraft and working on a communications issue that was affecting the ability of a SpaceX droneship to maintain position support the landing of the Falcon 9 booster. None of the issues were “showstoppers” for a launch, said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, during the briefing. Weather is forecast to be favorable for the launch, with a 90% chance of acceptable conditions at the launch site but a “moderate” risk of unfavorable weather along the ascent corridor because of the remnants of Hurricane Ian. The launch, like all previous Crew Dragon missions, will take place from LC-39A. But as SpaceX continues work to host Starship launches from the same complex, company officials said they’re also starting work to host cargo and crew launches from Space Launch Complex 40 at neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. At a Sept. 26 briefing, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president for build and flight reliability, said the company had already started preparations for the upgrades needed at SLC-40 for cargo and crew launches. “We’ve already started the work to begin the preparations for pad 40. We’ve ordered some hardware, put some contracts into place,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on the work needed to prepare SLC-40 for cargo and crew missions. “We’ll do cargo first. We can do that fairly easily,” he said. “It gives us some flexibility to move some things off 39A, which helps us balance launches off both pads. We’ll add crew at the right time.” SpaceX originally launched cargo Dragon missions from SLC-40. However, when the company moved to the second-generation cargo Dragon, based on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, those launches all moved to LC-39A, which has a gantry and crew access arm to provide access to the spacecraft until just before launch. The effort to build up a crew and cargo capability at SLC-40 is driven by SpaceX’s work to host Starship launched at LC-39A. With that vehicle yet to make its first orbital launch attempt, NASA raised concerns that a Starship launch failure at LC-39A could damage the existing launch infrastructure there and affect NASA’s ability to send cargo and crews to the ISS. “We are beginning to follow the activities at Pad 39A relative to Starship,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, noting it came up during the flight readiness review that took place before the Sept. 26 briefing. “We are looking at options of having a crew capability at 40.” He said later that NASA was following SpaceX’s plans “each step of the way.” Gerstenmaier said that while construction is underway at LC-39A to host Starship launches, no launches of that vehicle are imminent from the pad. “Our intent is to bring Starship to 39A after we have a reliable vehicle. We’ll do a series of tests in Boca [Chica] to makes sure the vehicle is ready to go. When we think we have a good and reliable vehicle, we’ll bring it to 39A.” It’s unclear when a “good and reliable” Starship will be ready to fly from LC-39A. SpaceX has continued testing of Starship prototypes at its Boca Chica, Texas, test site, including static-fire tests of the Starship vehicle and its Super Heavy booster, but has not set a launch date for an initial orbital flight attempt. Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, tweeted Sept. 21 that an orbital launch attempt could take place as soon as late October, “but November seems highly likely.” Musk has made many predictions, though, of an orbital launch of Starship, including at a September 2019 event when he predicted Starship would make an orbital launch by mid-2020. Musk tweeted Aug. 2 that he expected a first successful orbital flight of Starship any time from 1 to 12 months . The company has yet to secure a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for a Starship orbital launch, although it did pass an environmental review with conditions in June .
Rocket Lab successfully launched a Swedish atmospheric science satellite on an Electron rocket Nov. 4, but a telemetry problem kept the company from attempting a mid-air recovery of the rocket’s booster. The Electron rocket lifted off on the “Catch Me If You Can” mission at 1:27 p.m. Eastern from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The rocket’s primary payload, the MATS satellite for the Swedish National Space Agency, was deployed from the rocket’s kick stage about an hour after liftoff. The company attempted to catch the booster, descending under parachute, with a helicopter equipped with a hook. That hook is designed to grapple the parachute, allowing recovery of the stage before it hits the water. However, live video from the helicopter showed no sign of the booster, and Rocket Lab later said the mid-air catch had been called off. The company said it would instead recover the stage from the ocean, as on several previous launches. Rocket Lab said in a series of tweets that launch controllers lost telemetry from the first stage as it reentered. “As standard procedure, we pull the helicopter from the recovery zone if this happens,” the company said. The stage safely splashed down and a ship was en route to pick it up. “Rocket telemetry dropped out (it happens a bit during reentry) but we did not regain a solid link in time,” added Peter Beck , chief executive of Rocket Lab. “Without that link it’s just not safe to put the helicopter into the recovery zone, so we stood it off.” This mission was the second attempt by Rocket Lab to perform a mid-air recovery of the booster, the last step before the company would attempt to reuse the booster. Mid-air recovery avoids having the stage be subjected to salt water, which can damage some components. Rocket Lab made its first attempt at a mid-air recovery in May , and the hook was able to grapple the stage’s parachute. However, the helicopter released the stage moments later after noticing what the company called “different load characteristics than what we’ve experienced in testing.” The stage splashed down instead. The recovery attempt overshadowed the successful launch of MATS, or Mesospheric Airglow/Aerosol Tomography and Spectroscopy. The satellite was built by OHB Sweden for the Swedish National Space Agency to study waves in the upper atmosphere and their influence on weather and climate. The 54-kilogram satellite was originally slated to fly as a rideshare payload on a Soyuz launch, but the Swedish government abandoned those plans after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The spacecraft was designed to operate in a 585-kilometer dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, one for which rideshare opportunities were limited and thus driving the need for a dedicated launch.
Orbex has raised $45.8 million in a new funding round as the U.K. company gears up for the first flight of its small launch vehicle in 2023. Orbex announced Oct. 18 that it raised 40.4 million pounds ($45.8 million) in a Series C round led by the Scottish National Investment Bank, a new investor in the company. Several other new and existing investors joined the round. Orbex is developing Prime, a small launch vehicle designed to place up to 180 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The vehicle, built by the company at a factory in Forres, Scotland, will launch initially from Space Hub Sutherland, a new launch site under development in northern Scotland. “With Orbex, we will have a rocket assembled in Scotland, launching from Scotland and likely transporting satellites built in Scotland into orbit,” said Nicola Douglas, executive director of the Scottish National Investment Bank, in a statement. “We’re building a full end-to-end commercial space ecosystem in Scotland and we’re proud to play our part in this funding round.” Orbex previous raised $24 million in December 2020 and $39 million in July 2018 . The company also won 7.45 million euros from the European Space Agency in March 2021 as part of the agency’s Boost! program to support new launch vehicle development. Orbex said the new funding round would allow it to scale up as it approaches its first orbital launch and support future, unspecified projects. Chris Larmour, chief executive of Orbex, credited the company’s workforce for the progress the company has made that helped secure the new funding. “This significant new funding round is testament to the work of that team and will allow us to continue to build Orbex towards our long-term goal of establishing a reliable, economically successful and environmentally sustainable European space launch business,” he said in a statement. In addition to the Scottish National Investment Bank, several other new investors joined the round, including Jacobs, a company best known in the space industry as a major NASA contractor, leading work on ground systems for the Space Launch System. “We are looking forward to collaborating with Orbex over the long term in areas such as operational support and the provision of a range of technical, engineering and consultancy services,” said Karen Wiemelt, senior vice president of Jacobs Energy, Security and Technology, in a statement. The Danish Green Future Fund, Swiss venture capital firm Verve Ventures and British entrepreneurs Phillip and James Chambers also participated as new investors, while existing investors BGF, Heartcore Capital, High-Tech Gründerfonds and Octopus Ventures contributed to the round. Orbex rolled out a prototype of Prime in May for testing , but has provided few updates on the status of that testing. In its funding announcement, it said it is “currently performing a wide variety of integration tests” of the vehicle, but did not give a target date for the first launch beyond it taking place some time in 2023. “I congratulate this innovative business on its latest success in raising funds, which will propel progress towards a first launch from 2023,” Ivan McKee, the Scottish government’s business minister, said in the statement. Larmour told SpaceNews in June that the schedule for the first launch depended not only on the progress testing Prime but also construction of the Space Hub Sutherland launch site and receipt of a launch license from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority. “All the elements are progressing in parallel, but Orbex is only fully in control of the launch vehicle itself,” he said then. Orbex is competing with Skyrora to conduct the first vertical orbital launch from the United Kingdom. Skyrora attempted a launch Oct. 8 of Skylark L, a suborbital prototype of its Skyrora XL small orbital launcher, from a mobile pad near Langanes, Iceland. While the company’s goal was for Skylark L to fly to an altitude of up to 125 kilometers, the rocket veered sideways immediately after liftoff and crashed into the ocean 500 meters from the pad. “While this launch attempt did not go entirely as we expected, it has nevertheless been a valuable learning opportunity,” Volodymyr Levykin, chief executive of Skyrora, said in a statement about the Skylark L launch failure. He said that, despite the setback, the company was still working towards a first orbital launch of Skyrora XL in 2023.
Germany startup Okapi:Orbits raised 5.5 million euros ($5.7 million) in a seed funding round led by Munich Re Ventures with participation from Dolby Family Ventures, Herius Capital and APEX Ventures. Okapi offers space traffic management software designed to help satellite operators reduce maneuvers, save fuel and limit downtime. More than 50 satellites in orbit already rely on Okapi software, Kristina Nikolaus, Okapi co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews by email. Okapi is raising money to expand the user base for its platform, enhance its product portfolio and grow its international footprint at a time when increasing traffic in low-Earth orbit has heightened interest in space situational awareness and space traffic management. An increase in operational satellites and orbital debris is causing interference, close approaches and potential collisions. Okapi’s goal is to allow customers “interruption-free use of technology in space” through the use of the Okapi platform, according to the June 13 news release. Okapi’s space traffic management software fuses radar, telescope, space-based sensor and laser ranging data to predict risk, interference and environmental impacts. Okapi also offers risk analysis, simulation capabilities and tools to ensure compliance with regulations and standards. “Our overarching mission is to help operators to increase the lifetime of their assets with a minimal ecological footprint, keeping their investments safe and taking advantage of the great opportunities the booming space market has to offer for solving Earth’s problems,” Nikolaus said in a statement. In addition to venture capital firms, Okapi’s seed round attracted investments from individuals: Andreas Kupke, founder of German financial services firm Finanzcheck, SAP vice president Christian Dahlen, angel investor Ingo Luge and Michael Oxfort, fromer RapidEye chief technology officer. “Okapi:Orbits addresses a critical and under-serviced market,” Luge said in a statement. Timur Davis, Munich Re Ventures principal, said in a statement, “Munich Re Ventures is excited to support Okapi:Orbits with their vision of reducing the risk of collisions and other adverse events in space. We share their commitment to innovative solutions that facilitate a safe and sustainable space ecosystem.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said Nov. 8 its first ViaSat-3 broadband satellite will not be ready to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this year. The operator now expects the satellite will be shipped from Boeing’s manufacturing facilities in California to SpaceX’s launchpad in Florida in time for a launch in the first quarter of 2023. ViaSat-3’s deployable subsystems are currently being inspected and reintegrated into launch configuration following successful environmental and ground tests, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said during the company’s financial results call. He said Viasat is working with SpaceX to target a launch in the “earlier part of the quarter,” but this depends on the timing of “some U.S. national priority launches” using the same Falcon Heavy launchpad. Arcturus, the first commercial small satellite built by San Francisco-based startup Astranis, is slated to join the launch as a secondary payload. It marks the latest delay for Viasat’s next-generation constellation of three ViaSat-3 satellites, which were initially due to begin launching in 2019 before being caught up in supply chain issues. Recent production and testing setbacks have prompted other companies to announce additional delays for their next-generation constellations. SES said Nov. 3 delays to launch initial O3b mPower satellites had pushed the broadband network’s service debut from the second to the third quarter of 2023. Maxar Technologies said that same day that plans to launch the first two imaging satellites for its delayed WorldView Legion constellation have slipped out of 2022 into January 2023. Each Viasat-3 aims to provide more than one terabit a second of broadband capacity from geostationary orbit (GEO) — three times faster than the operator’s ViaSat-2 satellite that launched in 2017. The first ViaSat-3 will focus on covering the Americas. The second, targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, remains on schedule for a launch in the summer of 2023. The company plans to deploy the third ViaSat-3 covering the Asia Pacific region six months later. Dankberg said during its Nov. 8 financial results call that initial work has started on developing ViaSat-4, which aims to bring another seven terabits per second of broadband capacity to the Americas. The company declined to disclose a timeframe for launching ViaSat-4. ViaSat-3 transformation Viasat said it needs ViaSat-3 to relieve broadband capacity constraints that are holding back the operator’s growth. A decline in U.S. fixed broadband revenue largely offset significant year-on-year growth in the company’s commercial inflight connectivity (IFC) business for the three months to the end of September. The operator expects continued challenges to grow its U.S. fixed broadband services until its Americas-focused ViaSat-3 enters service, although customers reining in spending amid soaring inflation and competition from SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation also weighed on subscriber numbers. To boost revenues in the run-up to ViaSat-3, Dankberg said Viasat is planning to work with a partner to provide service plans offering “a lot more bandwidth” for specific streaming services. Overall revenue for the three months to the end of September increased 6% year-over-year to $745 million. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, jumped 21% to $188 million. Viasat attributed the growth to its strong IFC performance during the quarter, and damages received from litigation against optical networking solutions provider Acacia Communications, which had failed to pay royalties on a technology it used from the satellite operator. However, Viasat dampened its outlook for the year to the end of March, its fiscal year 2023, following the ViaSat-3 setback and issues caused by macroeconomic challenges, including delayed deliveries by aircraft manufacturers of planes needing IFC services. Viasat now anticipates “mid-single digit” revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth for FY2023 compared with FY2022, which “is slightly lower than our previous guidance.” Direct-to-smartphone opportunity Longer term, Viasat expects the $2 billion sale of its tactical data communications business and the $7 billion acquisition of British satellite operator Inmarsat — both subject to regulatory approvals — will position the company for significant growth. Inmarsat would transform Viasat into one of the largest holders of global mobile satellite spectrum (MSS). According to Dankberg, MSS is better suited for direct-to-smartphone services than plans by companies, including Starlink, to deploy this capability with repurposed terrestrial wireless frequencies . The need to avoid interfering with signals of various mobile network operators on a country-by-country basis means repurposing terrestrial spectrum is going to be “very complicated in most markets,” he said. Viasat is looking into the advantages of providing direct-to-smartphone services from GEO or low Earth orbit, and Dankberg said the operator could partner “with other holders of spectrum on that opportunity.” Providing these capabilities “at higher speeds and greater scale” will require new space systems, he said, adding this is at least two to three years away for any direct-to-smartphone provider.
TAMPA, Fla. — The United Kingdom gave SpaceX permission Nov. 10 to expand its Starlink satellite broadband network in the country, while also granting a license to Telesat for a competing constellation bound for non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). SpaceX got approval from British regulator Ofcom to increase the number of NGSO gateways in the U.K. from three to nine, enabling Starlink to add more capacity and improve network redundancy in the country. Ofcom granted Canada’s Telesat a license to connect broadband terminals in the U.K. to its planned Lightspeed NGSO constellation, slated to launch commercially in 2026 at the earliest . Starlink and British startup OneWeb already have licenses allowing them to connect U.K.-based user terminals from NGSO, although SpaceX is currently the only gateway license holder operating there. Mangata Networks, a U.S. satellite broadband startup founded by a former OneWeb executive, recently applied for a U.K. license to connect user terminals to an NGSO constellation it plans to launch commercially by 2025. Mangata and Telesat expect to use Ka-band spectrum for their user terminals and gateways. Starlink and OneWeb use Ka-band for gateways and Ku-band for the links to customer antennas. Ofcom is reviewing a public consultation on Mangata’s license request as part of a new licensing process for the regulator. Regulation revamp SpaceX is the first company to receive a license under this strengthened NGSO licensing regime . A consultation process was not part of the approval process for Starlink’s initial three gateways. Ofcom said Nov. 10 it is also continuing to review how it manages spectrum used by the space sector. In a space spectrum strategy document, the regulator outlined plans to “consider providing access to more spectrum to enable the delivery of higher speed satellite broadband services to more businesses and people.” The plans include a consultation on proposals to license gateways in higher frequency Q and V-band spectrum in 2023-2024. Ofcom will also consider options for authorizing gateways in even higher frequency spectrum in E-band, although it said “there are fewer operators seeking access” to these frequencies compared to Q and V-band. E-band technology is also less mature, “and the international regulatory framework needs further development at these frequencies,” Ofcom added, making it too early to say whether it could consult on proposals to use the spectrum band in 2023-2024. Starlink and OneWeb have secured permission to add V-band payloads to their fleets from the United States, which also recently announced plans to shake up its satellite licensing procedures . Higher frequency bands promise more bandwidth and throughput for satellite operators — and more technical challenges amid compounding weather attenuation and other issues.
TAMPA, Fla. — Georgia became the latest country July 14 to approve SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. Starlink applied for permission to provide services in Georgia July 8 after meeting regulatory officials at the end of June, the Georgian National Communications Commission (ComCom) said. “Starlink is especially important and interesting in mountainous regions as well as in settlements without broadband internet coverage,” ComCom said in a translated statement. “After the introduction of Starlink, access to high-speed Internet in all such geographical areas will be available to anyone.” According to the company’s availability map , SpaceX expects Starlink will be available across much of Georgia next year, apart from areas near the northern border the country shares with Russia. Russia is among a group of countries listed on the map without a plan for Starlink services in the near term, along with Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Starlink is available in more than 30 other countries and served nearly 500,000 users as of the last week of May, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Georgia’s approval comes hot on the heels of Nigeria and Mozambique in Africa, and the Philippines which May 26 became the first country in Southeast Asia to approve Starlink. Starlink was originally due to launch services in the Philippines before former President Rodrigo Duterte’s six-year term ended June 30, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez told reporters . However, Lopez said the construction of a gateway in the country had been delayed. Starlink’s availability map shows services in the Philippines becoming available in the fourth quarter of 2022. SpaceX has launched more than 2,800 Starlink satellites to date to expand the low Earth constellation globally, according to astronomer and spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell. The latest batch of 46 satellites launched July 10 on a Falcon 9. They are the first in a new polar-orbiting layer of 348 satellites for the Starlink fleet to improve coverage at high latitudes. SpaceX is slated to launch its next dedicated Starlink mission July 17 from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
WASHINGTON – TriSept, a launch integration and mission management specialist, announced a strategic partnership Dec. 7 with cybersecurity firm SpiderOak to offer an “end-to-end security system” for satellites and ground systems. To address growing cyberthreats, TriSept is pairing its satellite security software, TriSept Security Enhanced Layer (TSEL), with SpiderOak’s OrbitSecure zero-trust software. TSEL “protects the satellites themselves,” while OrbitSecure “protects the data that goes from that satellite compute module to other compute modules or to the ground,” SpiderOak CEO Dave Pearah told SpaceNews. “Together we provide a complete end-to-end solution for space cybersecurity. Threats to satellites and their terrestrial networks are growing. Increased reliance on satellites for communications, Earth observation and security makes them higher-profile targets for hackers. At the same time, network access points are multiplying. “It’s no longer that vertical stovepipe of one operator, one manufacturer, protecting their own system,” Pearah said. “We have data and computation crossing multiple satellite constellations and multiple operators of ground stations. The ability to restrict access for both compute and storage of data to just the actors that need to have it, that’s what zero trust is all about.” TriSept developed TSEL to augment cybersecurity for small satellites that often don’t “have the computing power and resources that you see on larger satellites or in ground infrastructure to provide a robust protection against intrusion,” said Augustine Ponturiero, TriSept chief strategy and growth officer. In 2021, the U.S. Air Force awarded SpiderOak a Small Business Innovation Research contract to test OrbitSecure on military satellites and ground stations. OrbitSecure establishes cryptographic keys to give various parties in a network access to the datasets they need to perform their work. “TriSept and SpiderOak are providing solutions for not just new satellites, but the entire existing infrastructure and all things that touch the ecosystem,” SpiderOak CEO Dave Pearah told SpaceNews. TriSept CEO Rob Spicer added in a statement, “As the new space economy leads to increasing dependence on spacecraft operations, commercial and government operators need a reliable and robust security solution that effectively protects against growing threats across the ground and space infrastructure supporting a broad range of missions.”
Several new launch vehicles, some years behind their original schedules, are now expected to make their inaugural launches within the next year. During a panel at World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 12, executives of several launch providers said they were entering the home stretch of development of their next-generation launch vehicles, in some cases as their existing vehicles near retirement. Mark Peller, vice president of major development at United Launch Alliance, said the company was still preparing for a first launch of its Vulcan Centaur before the end of the year despite widespread industry skepticism that either the rocket or its payload will be ready in time. “We’re coming down to the wire” on development of Vulcan, he said. “We have a handful of system tests to run through and we have a plan to be ready to fly before the end of the year.” A key factor in that plan is the status of the BE-4 engines for the rocket’s first stage. Those engines are being tested at Blue Origin’s West Texas facility and will be delivered to the ULA factory in Decatur, Alabama, “in the coming weeks” to be installed on the rocket, Peller said. “Once we get those engines, we’ll get that rocket out the door and down to the launch site, where we’ll do some final system-level testing before we’re ready to fly.” That readiness to fly will also depend on the status of the payload, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. “We are planning for a mission at the end of this year,” said Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic, at an Aug. 24 meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group. However, he declined then to say when the completed lander would need to be delivered to Cape Canaveral to support that, assuming the rocket is ready. “We are actively executing towards that schedule right now.” “We need to make sure that launch vehicle plan is aligned with our spacecraft customer’s plans, so we’re working that right now,” Peller said. “We’ll be narrowing down on a launch date very soon.” The Japanese space agency JAXA, meanwhile, is preparing to perform the first launch of the H3 rocket before the current Japanese fiscal year ends next March. Work on that vehicle has been delayed by problems with the turbopump of the LE-9 engine for its first stage. Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said that engineers have solved the turbine vibration problem that plagued the engine, confirming the solution in a series of tests in August. Up next is a static-fire test of the H3 at the launch site, scheduled for November. “After the success of that test, we will announce the date of the maiden flight,” he said. Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said the company is preparing to retire the Ariane 5 as soon as next April. With the launch of Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS Sept. 7 , only three more Ariane 5 launches remain, two carrying communications satellites and the third the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission for the European Space Agency. “We would like to end Ariane 5 operations with JUICE in April of next year,” he said. “Then Ariane 6 is coming.” Israël declined to provide details on the status of Ariane 6 testing and plans for a first launch, which like Vulcan and H3, has slipped from 2020. ESA and other Ariane 6 partners will provide an update later in the month on the status of its development later this month, he said. Jarrett Jones, senior vice president of New Glenn at Blue Origin, also held off on committing to a launch date for the first orbital flight of this company’s rocket , emphasizing the progress the company was making on vehicle development and testing as well as production of flight hardware. “We’re going to launch when we align with the customer that we’re looking at and working with,” he said, not disclosing the customer for that inaugural launch. “We’re going to launch when we’re ready.” Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX, said the first orbital flight of the company’s Starship reusable launch vehicle will take place within the next year. “Some time in the next year or so we should be orbital with Starship,” he said. That aligns with a tweet from Elon Musk , SpaceX chief executive, Aug. 2 where he predicted the first “successful” orbital Starship mission in the next 1 to 12 months. The introduction of Starship comes as SpaceX increases the flight rate of its Falcon 9. “We’re trying to get to a little over 60 launches this year,” he said. “Next year we’re trying to beat that record and try to do 100 launches.” That schedule includes six launches in the next 12 months of its Falcon Heavy, which last flew in mid-2019. Ochinero said that SpaceX plans to fly Falcon and Starship in parallel for some time, with the potential for each vehicle to back up the other, at least for some missions. “We’ll continue to fly both and let the market decide which vehicle they want to fly on,” he said.
The Space Development Agency, formed inside the Pentagon in 2019 to help accelerate the use of commercial space technology, was officially transferred to the U.S. Space Force on Oct. 1. Congress mandated the transfer in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act due to concerns that there are too many organizations running space programs. L awmakers noted that a key reason they supported establishing the Space Force was to consolidate and streamline the management of acquisition programs. When the Space Development Agency, or SDA, was established in March 2019, it was placed under the office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, a post then held by Mike Griffin, a staunch critic of the Defense Department’s procurement culture. At the time, Griffin was pushing the Pentagon to shift from the traditional large geosynchronous satellites to low Earth orbit constellations that, he argued, would be cheaper and faster to build due to commercial innovations. SDA faced early opposition from Air Force leaders and skepticism on Capitol Hill. After Griffin departed in July 2020 , there was speculation that it would not survive but the agency pressed on and has gained strong congressional support . Despite its relatively small size of under 200 people, it has had outsize impact in the world of military procurement because of its nontraditional approach of buying satellites under fixed-price contracts and setting ambitious schedule targets. The head of Space Force procurement Frank Calvelli will be the SDA’s new boss for acquisition matters, and the agency will report to the Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations for all other matters. “SDA will be key to rapidly delivering space capability to our warfighters,” Calvelli said in a statement Oct. 1. He said SDA’s proliferated low Earth orbit constellation model will be adopted across other Space Force programs. “I fully support their strategy, and we will maintain their structure and culture to let them continue to move fast and do what they do best. I’m excited for this dynamic organization to join the Space Force team.” SDA Director Derek Tournear, who has run the agency since June 2019, said the plan is to continue to focus on “speed, delivery and agility that our agency has demonstrated in the past.” The next major challenge for the agency is to launch its first batch of satellites, which were expected to lift off in September but are running behind schedule due to supply chain problems. Tournear said last month that components and microchip shortages that have stymied satellite manufacturers industry-wide have caught up with SDA. 
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), a key congressional proponent of establishing a Space National Guard, said he would consider an alternative proposal endorsed by Space Force leaders and by the Biden administration. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Space Force chief of space operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond support creating a hybrid active-reserve component that provides full-time and part-time service options. “I think there’s merit to what General Raymond and others are advocating in the administration with a different approach,” Lamborn said Sept. 28 at a Defense One online event. Lamborn last year partnered with Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) to introduce legislation to establish a Space National Guard as a reserve component of the Space Force. Lamborn and Crow are members of the House Armed Services Committee and their bill was adopted in the House version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. Lamborn’s comments on Wednesday suggest there is room for compromise, given that the Biden administration strongly opposes standing up a Space Guard and the Senate version of the NDAA does not include any language on it although some senators have expressed support for a Space Guard. The question of whether the Space Force should have its own National Guard component became a politically charged topic ever since the Space Force was established in December 2019. “This is a big debate that is still playing out,” Lamborn said. “But I think there’s merit on both sides of that question, frankly.” Raymond has argued that the Space Force is too small and too specialized to have a dedicated reserve force, and instead should have a single component with full-time and part-time guardians. He said allowing some service members to work part-time helps recruit and retain people with advanced technical skills who are also in high demand in the private sector. Under the one-component concept, guardians could transition more easily between traditional active-duty and reserve component positions. A key concern raised by members of Congress is the future of about 1,500 personnel currently in the Air National Guard who support space operations, many of whom are based in Colorado. Some could choose to join the Space Force but those who don’t might be reassigned to support Air Force units. Lamborn said he and Crow have worked on this issue for years and it’s time to “get it resolved.” He acknowledged that a Space National Guard “along the lines of what we’ve proposed is more going with the status quo, more of what we’re used to.” Meanwhile, what Kendall and Raymond have put forth is a new way of doing business. “Different approaches are sometimes very justified,” said Lamborn. The Space Force needs “highly qualified experts who have expertise in niche areas” and this alternative approach might be worth considering. Lamborn insisted that he wants to settle the issue sooner rather than later so everyone can move forward. “I think we can agree there’s merit on both sides. But let’s go ahead and get moving here.”
PARIS – Vast Space, a Southern California startup founded by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb, plans to establish an artificial-gravity space station in low Earth orbit. McCaleb envisions a future where millions of people are living throughout the solar system. Since other companies are helping to reduce launch costs, McCaleb thinks the next important step will be creating large structures where people can live and work in space. “Earth has finite resources, but out in the solar system, there is an enormous untapped wealth, both in terms of energy and matter, that could support many ‘Earths,'” McCaleb told SpaceNews by email. “Likewise, mankind needs a frontier. Every prosperous civilization has had one to push off into – nevertheless, we haven’t had one for some time. Without a frontier, the world becomes a zero-sum game, which is detrimental to the psyche of a civilization. And in terms of the long-term future of humanity, we will need to live off of the Earth eventually.” McCaleb, whose wealth Forbes pegs at $2.5 billion, initially plans to self-finance Vast’s work. “I’ve done many software startups and had great success in the crypto world, which gave me enough resources to attempt something ambitious in space,” McCaleb said. “Eventually, we hope to have some form of revenue generation. I’d like Vast to have a usable station in space by that time.” Over the long term, Vast is likely to seek outside investment. In the near term, though, the company will “focus on the mission and not become beholden to investors,” McCaleb said. “And at some point, we would like to get customers, like NASA or other national programs.” Vast’s greatest near-term challenge is “building a world-class engineering team that can attack any problem,” McCaleb said. “Vast will live or die on the quality of its engineering team.” Currently, the company has about 20 employees, including Kyle Dedmon, former SpaceX vice president for construction and facilities; Tom Hayford, a systems engineer who has worked for Relativity Space and SpaceX; Molly McCormick, a former SpaceX human factors engineer and Honeybee Robotics program manager; and Colin Smith, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer. In addition, former SpaceX vice president Hans Koenigsmann is advising the company. Like other billionaires investing in ambitious space ventures, McCaleb has a longstanding passion for space. Years ago, McCaleb jokingly told friends,” ‘If I ever have a ton of money, I’m going to mine asteroids.” After founding three successful cryptocurrency firms, McCaleb is focused on solving problems standing in the way of moving people further into the solar system. Because the longterm health impacts of microgravity can be serious, Vast is focused on creating a large spinning structure that creates a gravity-like pull. “Vast’s innovations will serve the role of a research platform, which is what the ISS did historically,” McCaleb said. “But we also want to be a machine shop where national and private sector astronauts can iterate and prototype things in orbit. Ultimately, our contributions will enable something akin to a way station for human habitation that orbits the moon – maybe even Mars.” McCaleb acknowledged the inherent challenges in creating spinning structures, like managing and controlling momentum. In addition, “docking to a spinning module” and communications will be complicated, he said. Vast faces additional challenges related to transportation and testing. “The things we are building aren’t road-shippable, so we need access to a seaport or airport for shipping,” McCaleb said. “Likewise, it’s challenging to test our modules without doing it in space – when testing on Earth, we have to contend with Earth’s gravity.” Still, McCaleb remains committed to creating an artificial-gravity station. “We still crave new frontiers, with many of us spending our lives anticipating the time when space will be unlocked for us,” McCaleb said in a statement. “By pushing our frontiers and expanding our habitat into the vastness of space, we may actually preserve Earth for thousands of years and generations to come.”
A proposed commercial space station has passed a key early NASA review, allowing it to move into the next phase of its design. Blue Origin and Sierra Space, the lead partners on the Orbital Reef station, said Aug. 22 that the station passed a system definition review (SDR) with NASA. The review is part of a Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, award they received from the agency last December to mature the design of Orbital Reef. The review, conducted between mid-June and mid-July, was intended to confirm that the Orbital Reef concept met various functional and performance requirements. Passing the review allows the companies to further develop the overall design of the space station. “This SDR moves Orbital Reef forward,” said Brent Sherwood, senior vice president for advanced development programs at Blue Origin, in a statement. “We are meeting the needs of both the commercial marketplace and NASA’s requirements.” The companies unveiled Orbital Reef last October as part of a team of companies and organizations that includes Boeing, Redwire and Arizona State University. The modular station, designed to expand to accommodate additional users, can support research and industrial applications as well as tourism. “The microgravity factories and services provided by Orbital Reef have the potential to revolutionize every industry and become a major growth contributor to the U.S. and world economies,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. Orbital Reef is one of three proposed commercial space stations that received funded Space Act Agreements from NASA in December as part of the CLD program . Besides the $130 million for Orbital Reef, a team led by Nanoracks won $160 million for its Starlab station while Northrop Grumman received $125 million for its own commercial space station concept. A fourth company, Axiom Space, has a separate agreement with NASA to attach commercial modules to the International Space Station that will later form the core of a commercial space station. NASA is supporting initial development of these designs as part of its long-term plans to transition from the ISS to commercial stations by the end of the decade. However, the agency has faced criticism from its own safety advisers as well as its inspector general, who cautioned that commercial stations may not be ready by the end of the decade. At the ISS Research and Development Conference last month, both NASA officials and representatives of the four companies working with the agency rejected those concerns . The companies argued that they believe their commercial stations will be ready by late this decade, enabling a gradual transition from the ISS by the end of the decade. Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, said on that panel that current plans for Orbital Reef called for having the first modules launched in 2027, a schedule she said provides plenty of time to transition from the ISS. “We are well on our way.”
SAN FRANCISCO – LEOcloud, a startup focused on space-based edge computing, announced a strategic collaboration agreement Nov. 15 with commercial space station provider Axiom Space. Under the agreement, the companies will work together to develop and deliver space-based cloud services linked to terrestrial cloud computers. “The value and benefit of edge computing on Earth is well known and understood,” Dennis Gatens, LEOcloud CEO and founder, told SpaceNews . “Extending that edge into space is the underlying value proposition here. Compute and data storage needs will be met in a local environment versus the application workloads run back on Earth.” For data customers, the primary benefit will be “reducing the timeframe from raw data to actionable insight, whether it’s a government, military or commercial customer,” Gatens added. LEOcloud’s space-based infrastructure will be designed to host Microsoft, Red Hat and other cloud services. Microsoft share’s LEOcloud’s strategic vision to extend cloud services into space. Azure Space hosted on LEOcloud’s infrastructure will enable customers to run artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in orbit while collaborating with colleagues on Earth. “Our collaboration combines the possibilities of space with the power of Microsoft Azure extending its capabilities anywhere in the universe through new space infrastructure making cloud connectivity and compute increasingly attainable for all at the ultimate edge—on-orbit in space,” Steve Kitay, Microsoft Azure Space senior director, said in a statement. “Together, Microsoft and LEOcloud can unlock brand new edge and cloud computing scenarios equipping organizations around the globe with fresh insights from space data to drive innovative solutions to their most complex and time-consuming questions.” Similarly, Red Hat sees its collaboration with LEOcloud as helping to “provide a common foundation from core to edge to cloud to deliver a reliable and secure infrastructure for mission critical, high-stakes environments like space,” Francis Chow, Red Hat Edge vice president and general manager, said in a statement. LEOcloud has been establishing relationships with industrial partners since the company was founded in 2021 to offer edge computing for space operations and to establish a constellation of space-based data centers. Partners include Exodus Orbitals, a startup developing an application hosting platform in space, ground segment-as-a-service startup Leaf Space and Ramon.Space, a startup that offers computers designed for the space environment. “Ramon.Space has significant heritage in delivering compute and data-storage solutions into a number of projects, including deep-space projects,” Gatens said. “That enables companies like LEOcloud to deliver it as part of a service.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite antenna developer NXT Communications Corp.’s equipment, property, and other collateral are being auctioned off amid production delays that have left L3Harris Technologies in the lurch. Three-year-old NXT Comm secured a deal last year with the defense contractor to deliver electronically steered antennas (ESAs) in the first quarter of 2022 to support U.S. Department of Defense warfighters. L3Harris has received only an engineering model antenna from NXT Comm, according to L3Harris director of global public relations Paul Swiergosz. “To date we have not received the production prototype, but this prototype is not tied to any active commitments or contracts L3Harris has with its customers,” he said. “While we continue to work with NXT Comm, we are prudently exploring other sources for ESAs moving forward.” In an April 7 blog post update, Georgia-based NXT Comm said it expected to bring its antenna “ into production later this year. ” However, component shortages, supply chain delays, and rocky financial markets have made life difficult for antenna developers racing to meet demand from incoming constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO). NXT Comm owes $2 million in secured debt to family-owned investment firm Western Pioneer, which will lead an auction of the startup’s assets Nov. 18. Western Pioneer president and NXT Comm board member Larry Soriano said the auction is part of a “private recapitalization” that aims to bring more investment into the company. The investment firm intends to keep the business running if it wins the auction and takes over NXT Comm’s assets, which also include intellectual property. In the meantime, NXT Comm’s “focus continues to be on developing flat panel antenna solutions,” Soriano said via email. He declined to comment further. NXT Comm announced plans to test its multi-orbit, flat panel with a Eutelsat satellite in 2020 after opening a production facility in Cherokee County, Georgia. It is competing in a crowded market where other startups have secured significant investments to develop their own flat-panel antennas. All.Space (formerly Isotropic Systems) has plans to release its first commercial satellite terminal later this year, and Kymeta is also working on expanding its antennas to the market for multi-orbit connectivity solutions. Each has raised more than $100 million for their plans. Satixfy, which provides antennas and other satellite communications equipment, became a public company Oct. 28 to accelerate its expansion. Its shares soared more than 40% to $29.39 after completing their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange Oct. 28, although they have since fallen just over 66% to close at $9.97 Nov. 9.
HERNDON, Va. — HawkEye 360 has opened a new manufacturing facility near its northern Virginia headquarters that will help the company accelerate the deployment of its constellation of radio-frequency (RF) monitoring satellites. In a July 21 ceremony, the company formally dedicated its Advanced Technology and Development Center, a 1,765-square-meter building here that will consolidate production of its satellites. The facility will host up to 70 employees handling development and operations of its constellation, which has 15 satellites in orbit. A major aspect of the facility is that it will allow the company to build the satellites in-house. While HawkEye 360 has always built the RF monitoring payloads, it has used satellite buses from the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. That approach is intended to improve the efficiency of producing the satellites, said John Serafini, chief executive of HawkEye 360, in an interview. “Being able to do it together allows us to scale faster and not have to ship the payload back and forth. That saves a meaningful amount of time and energy.” HawkEye 360 plans to maintain its relationship with SFL. “What we’re moving towards is two manufacturing lines, running in parallel,” he said. “By doing so, we’ll be able to build these satellites faster. We can better control the timeline and better control the costs.” The company’s goal is to have 20 clusters of three satellites each in orbit by the end of 2025. Serafini said the goal is to produce and launch at least four satellite clusters per year to both complete the constellation and to replace aging satellites. He said the first satellites built in Herndon will likely launch late this year on the first Rocket Lab Electron mission from Wallops Island, Virginia, part of a five-launch block buy HawkEye 360 announced in April . The Rocket Lab missions will augment the SpaceX rideshare missions that HawkEye 360 has been using for recent satellite launches. “They are so cost-effective and so routine,” he said of the SpaceX missions. Dedicated Electron launches, he said, will be used to target specific orbits needed to fill out the constellation and provide desired revisit times. The new facility and the expansion of its satellite constellation are backed by $200 million HawkEye 360 raised in two funding rounds last year. Serafini said the company does not expect to have to raise more money for the foreseeable future. “We’ve got a very robust balance sheet,” he said. “We’ve got cash for multiple years and I think we can achieve profitability with the cash that we have. If we wanted to go out and raise more capital, I think we could, but we don’t need to.” The ceremony to open the facility attracted a number of local officials as well as two members of Congress, Reps. Jennifer Wexton and Don Beyer (D-Va.), who thanked the company for expanding in the area. The company now has about 150 employees, with plans to grow to 200 by the end of the year. Serafini said the company is looking at options to expand or consolidate the new facility with its existing headquarters a short distance away, also in Herndon. “The bottom line is that we’re going to be in Herndon for a long time,” he said. “It’s a great place to be for us: proximity to the customer, proximity to D.C. and an amazing talent base here.”
Blue Canyon Technologies delivered the first of 10 satellite buses the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ordered in 2020 for its Blackjack experiment in low Earth orbit. SEAKR Engineering also announced Sept. 7 it has delivered the first two so-called Pit Boss mission data processing payloads that will fly on Blackjack satellites. The Pit Boss artificial-intelligence technology would allow the Blackjack constellation to operate autonomously. Both Blue Canyon and SEAKR are subsidiaries of Raytheon Technologies. DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office started the Blackjack program in 2018 to demonstrate a mesh network of satellites in space connected by optical links. The first Blackjack launch had been planned for 2021 but the schedule has moved to the right due to supply chain problems. Blue Canyon under the DARPA contract is producing Saturn-class small satellite buses which can carry payloads up to 200 kilograms. Blackjack is projected to have 12 satellites: 10 from Blue Canyon and two from Telesat . Jeff Schrader, president of Blue Canyon Technologies and SEAKR Engineering, said the Saturn bus shipped to DARPA was the first one to achieve environmental testing. The company said it plans to ship the remaining nine buses later this year. Blue Canyon manufactures satellites in Lafayette and Boulder, Colorado; and SEAKR makes payloads in Centennial, Colorado. The payload integration is done by Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California.
Astrobotic’s first lunar lander has passed a key set of acceptance tests, keeping the spacecraft on schedule for a launch in early 2023. The company announced Dec. 8 that its Peregrine lander completed vibration and acoustics testing at a commercial facility on New York’s Long Island. The tests confirmed the spacecraft can handle conditions during its launch on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur. “The completion of environmental testing marks a critical step forward in our program,” Pete Frye, mechanical and fluid systems manager at Astrobotic, said in a statement about the tests. “This testing ensured the spacecraft is fully capable of meeting the rough environments it will feel during launch, transit and landing on the moon.” The lander is now undergoing electromagnetic interference testing, which will be followed by thermal vacuum tests. Once those tests are complete, the company said, it will ship the lander to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to be integrated with the Vulcan Centaur for a launch currently scheduled in the first quarter of 2023. That launch will be the inaugural flight of the Vulcan Centaur. Astrobotic said the recent tests keep the mission on schedule. “The Astrobotic team is working tirelessly to an aggressive schedule for delivery to the launch site and, in fact, these recent tests were completed ahead of schedule,” said Sharad Bhaskaran, Peregrine mission manager at Astrobotic. “The momentum to launch is apparent in the team’s excitement.” Peregrine is Astrobotic’s first lunar lander, carrying a set of payloads for NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program as well as from other space agencies and companies. Peregrine is designed to carry up to 120 kilograms to the lunar surface and operate for one lunar day. Astrobotic previously announced that the first Peregrine mission would land in the Lacus Mortus region of the moon. However, in a presentation at a Dec. 6 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, showed a chart that had the mission landing instead at a region called Gruithuisen Domes, which is the target of a future CLPS missions. Neither NASA nor Astrobotic have formally announced any change in the landing site for Peregrine.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA officials say they are keeping open the possibility of attempting another launch of the Artemis 1 mission as soon as Sept. 2 as they continue to study a pair of issues that scrubbed the initial launch attempt Aug. 29. At a briefing several hours after the scrub, agency leaders said they were still examining the root cause of the postponed launch and were not prepared to either set a new launch date for the inaugural Space Launch System flight or conclude that the rocket should be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for repairs. “Friday is definitely in play” for a launch attempt, said Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager. Sept. 2 is the next possible launch date because of constraints on Orion’s trajectory to the moon to avoid extended eclipses that deprive the spacecraft of power. “We’re preserving the option for Friday.” Controllers scrubbed the launch when they were unable to resolve a hydrogen bleed line issue with one of four RS-25 engines in the core stage. The bleed is designed to flow hydrogen into the engines to condition them thermally for flight. For three of the engines, the bleed was working as planned, cooling the engines to the required temperature, but for the fourth, designated engine #3, it did not cool down sufficiently. Efforts to get hydrogen flowing into the engine by increasing pressure in the system were complicated by a separate problem with a vent valve in the intertank portion of the core stage between the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks. Sarafin said engineers are still studying the valve problem but it appeared to involve a leak. “The challenge that created was we wanted to increase the pressure in the tank in order to establish the hydrogen bleed, and the vent valve wasn’t cooperating,” he said. “That was the point where the team decided that it was appropriate to declare the scrub because we just weren’t going to make the two-hour window. It was one of those situations where we just knew we needed more time.” While the cause of the bleed problem in engine #3 remains under investigation, Sarafin said he believed the issue was not with the engine itself, something that might require replacing it back in the VAB. “It’s in the bleed system that thermally conditions the engines,” he said, located in the core stage. That bleed system was not tested in the most recent wet dress rehearsal of the SLS in June because of a leak in a quick-disconnect fitting in a hydrogen line. NASA decided to go ahead with a launch attempt despite not getting through the full countdown rehearsal, moving up the bleed test earlier in the countdown. “If we do not successfully demonstrate that, we are not going to launch that day,” Sarafin said at an Aug. 22 briefing. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, defended NASA’s decision to proceed with a launch attempt rather than first do another rehearsal to confirm the hydrogen bleed was working. “We would have taken another cycle of rolling out and back,” he said at the briefing, which introduces risk, while not accomplishing tasks like closing out the Orion spacecraft for launch and setting up the rocket’s flight termination system. “We won’t know until we know, but we also won’t know until we try,” he said. “We felt like we were in the best position to try.” Even without the technical issues, it may have been difficult to launch Artemis 1 in the two-hour window that was available on the morning of Aug. 29. Weather conditions were no-go at the start of the window because of precipitation and no-go again later in the window because of lightning, Sarafin said. Weather could also be an issue if NASA goes ahead with a Sept. 2 launch. A forecast issued after the scrub Aug. 29 by Space Launch Delta 45 predicted only a 40% chance for acceptable weather during a two-hour window that opens at 12:48 p.m. Eastern because of the potential for storms. There are additional launch opportunities through Sept. 6, after which the next window opens Sept. 20. Sarafin said NASA would be able to provide more details, including the prospects for a launch Sept. 2 or later, after a mission management meeting scheduled for the afternoon of Aug. 30. He added after the briefing that could include deciding to proceed with a Sept. 2 launch “at risk” by starting a countdown nearly 48 hours earlier while still attempting to resolve the issues with the bleed line and vent valve. “We really need more time to look at all the information, all the data,” he said. “We’re going to play all nine innings here. We’re not ready to give up yet.”
LOGAN, Utah — Spaceflight services company Telespazio is beginning to offer a family of products to help commercial space companies set up a digitized ground segment in the cloud. Under the brand name Ease, Telespazio offers products to help satellite operators control spacecraft and receive telemetry and data — services the Rome-based company has performed for decades in support of government and large commercial space missions. Telespazio is continuing to support large complex spacecraft through Ease-Mission. Ease-Rise is the company’s product designed to simplify the management of large constellations, cubesats and small satellites. Ease-Access offers access to ground stations operated by Telespazio and partners, including Leaf Space and AWS Ground Station. “Any customer can come to us, and by using our products, they don’t need to procure different ground segment elements from different companies,” Andres Martinez, Telespazio Germany sales director, told SpaceNews . Rounding out the family of products is Ease-Ground, which obtains data from space-based payloads, processes data and imagery, and delivers them to customers. Increasingly, Telespazio is seeing a new breed of spaceflight customers who do not want to establish their own ground stations or manage the transfer of data to and from satellites. “If a customer wants to deploy a constellation, they will knock on our door, and they can select our products,” Martinez said. “They will forget about anything that has to do with ground segments.” Telespazio’s family of standard products is designed to reduce the cost of the ground segment. “In space, traditionally, every system was tailor-made for every mission,” Martinez said. “We’re running away from that approach because it’s costly, and it takes time.” In 2019, Telespazio subsidiary Telespazio Germany began selling a cloud-based platform for space operations. The platform, now part of Ease Rise, has evolved and matured in terms of the features and capabilities based on customer feedback, said Zeina Mounzer, Telespazio Germany’s chief commercial officer. “The Ease products are complementary rather than overlapping,” Mounzer added. 
Update: OneWeb said Dec. 6 it is now targeting a launch date no earlier than Dec. 8 at 5:27 p.m. Eastern to “allow for additional pre-launch checks.” TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb said SpaceX is slated to launch 40 of its satellites as early as Dec. 6 to complete almost 80% of its low Earth orbit broadband (LEO) constellation. All 40 satellites have been encapsulated for a Falcon 9 launch no earlier than 5:37 p.m. Eastern from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, OneWeb said Dec. 2. It would be the first time a single launch mission has deployed more than 36 satellites for the British operator. Arianespace had previously used Russian Soyuz rockets to deploy 32-36 satellites at a time — before its launch agreement with OneWeb was suspended in March amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. OneWeb signed agreements for three and two launches with SpaceX and India, respectively, shortly after the suspension. New Space India Limited, the commercial arm of India’s space agency, resumed the operator’s launch campaign Oct. 22 with the launch of 36 satellites on the country’s GSLV Mark 3 rocket. OneWeb said SpaceX’s launch next week would enable the company to extend coverage “across the USA, Europe, and much of the Middle East and Asia” to the north. A successful mission would also expand OneWeb’s constellation across the South Pole, Southern Australia, South Africa, and parts of South America. OneWeb expects its remaining launch missions to be conducted within the next six months to enable global services. SpaceX has more than 3,000 Starlink satellites in LEO for its broadband network, which received partial approval Dec. 1 for its second-generation constellation. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
SEOUL, South Korea — A Japanese Epsilon small launch vehicle failed to reach orbit during an Oct. 11 launch, resulting in the loss of all eight smallsats on board. The rocket lifted off on schedule a t 8:50 p.m. Eastern from Japan’s Uchinoura Space Center carrying the RAISE-3 technology demonstration smallsat and seven secondary payloads. However, the rocket appeared to malfunction after its second stage shut down, and the Japanese space agency JAXA later said it sent a self-destruct command to the rocket seven minutes after liftoff as it deviated from its intended trajectory. The failure was the Epsilon rocket’s first in six launches since its 2013 debut. JAXA, which is investigating the cause of the failure, said the solid rocket’s first two stages performed nominally before something went wrong around the time the third stage was due to fire. The self-destruct command issued at 9:57 a.m. local time sent the destroyed rocket and payload into the sea. T here were no immediate reports of injury or property damage caused by the launch failure, according to JAXA. 
U.S. Space Systems Command officials earlier this month gave an unclassified briefing to Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on the power competition taking place in the space domain. Executives from the space company Blue Origin heard the briefing in September at a Space Systems Command industry meeting in Los Angeles. “The Blue Origin team was so impressed that they requested that SSC brief Jeff Bezos,” Col. Joseph Roth, the command’s director of innovation and prototyping, said Oct. 19 at the Space Industry Days conference hosted by AFCEA Los Angeles. The briefing was conducted by SMSgt. Ron Lerch, senior enlisted leader of Space Systems Command’s intelligence directorate. Speaking at the Space Industry Days event, Lerch said it is remarkable how much information can be obtained from open sources . A lot of people “roll their eyes” when you tell them the briefing is unclassified because they assume there’s little value in it, he said, but after hearing it they are surprised by the substance of the information. Some highlights from Lerch’s talk: Counter-space weapons are here today. Russia has openly talked about fixed-site and mobile laser systems that it could use to target foreign optical imaging satellites flying over Russian territory. “If they wanted to blind overhead satellites that rely on electro optical cameras, they’d be able to use these mobile systems to sort of blind our assets,” said Lerch. “When we look at today’s threat, we have to respect the fact that yes, the Chinese and the Russians can potentially blind our satellites. But as we move towards the turn of the decade, we should absolutely expect that the technology is going to get to a point where they could probably start looking at creating actual structural damage to some of our satellites, depending on what orbit it’s operating in.” A recent example of Chinese orbital capabilities is the Shijian-21 satellite that docked with a defunct Beidou spacecraft and tugged it to a graveyard orbit 300 kilometers above geostationary Earth orbit (GEO). China said this was a demonstration of debris removal, not of a space weapon. “The problem is when you start to look holistically at a lot of what the Chinese are doing in space, that’s where you start really getting worried about these robotic mechanisms that they’re utilizing,” said Lerch. China becoming more active in GEO. “There is an absolute cat and mouse game that’s happening up in GEO right now,” he said. A recent example is China’s Shiyan 12 01 and Shiyan 12 02 spacecraft that Lerch characterized as “inspector satellites.” For a period of time, anytime that GSSAP (the U.S. Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program) satellites seemingly was getting close to the satellites, you would see them just disperse.” The takeaway is that “when you start taking a look at the actions that they’re conducting, it’s tactics development, it’s rendezvous proximity operations, they’re starting to show that they’re also working on a lot of these … to be able to do maneuvering to potentially defeat an adversary.” “We have to expect that by the turn of the decade, the technology will likely get to a point where they’re going to hold satellites in higher orbits, not just in LEO, at risk.” The U.S. most exquisite satellites will be in danger. As China becomes more involved in space, putting up more satellites, they’re building an inventory only second to the U.S. For that reason they are unlikely to use kinetic weapons to damage satellites and create debris. Lerch said the concern is that the jammers that are now used on the ground will move to space, putting at risk critical U.S. satellites like the Advanced Extremely High Frequency used for classified communications that the Pentagon built precisely to resist jamming. “The safety blanket that the U.S. has right now is AEHF,” said Lerch. “That’s sort of the untouchable frequency band and capability that we have … Now we have to accept the fact that by the 2030s, that safety net probably won’t be there.” If the Chinese can jam satellites from the ground, “they’re certainly going to explore some of the things that they’re doing on orbit to bring some of those capabilities closer to our regimes.” Cyberattacks will be the first salvo fired. Lerch noted that cyber warfare is the most difficult topic to discuss in an unclassified forum “because so much of the attribution is what makes it classified.” He recalled that in 1999 the U.S. for the first time publicly acknowledged that the Chinese conducted a cyberattack against U.S. government websites in retaliation to NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. “That was more than two decades ago,” said Lerch. “So you have to believe that the capability has evolved significantly since then.” Russia’s cyberattacks in February that took out 10,000 or 20,000 satellite terminals across Europe as the invasion of Ukraine got under way is an example of a “day zero enabling effect” that a country would execute to get ready for protracted conflict.” China is advancing technologies for space-to-ground weapons. China last year reportedly tested a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) – a Cold War nuclear-weapons delivery technology — combined with a hypersonic glide vehicle, setting off alarms that this could give China a strategic advantage. Although China denied it was testing a FOBS, what stood out from the event was the distance the glider traveled, 40,000 kilometers, and that it completed 100 minutes of flight time, Lerch said. “Those are both records for the Chinese … This was considered to be a successful test for the Chinese.” “The concern here is the evolution of what comes next,” he said. “Imagine a world where you have something that is able to stay in orbit and it has a payload that’s able to be released whenever they desire or at least at a minimum be used as a deterrent. So that’s why some of the most recent launch activity that we’ve seen with regards to their suborbital and orbital reusable vehicles is definitely concerning.” China’s use of relay satellites to target U.S. forces. Lerch noted China’s deployment of the Tianlian data relay network in geostationary orbit which is now up to eight satellites. “It does offer capability to essentially do over the horizon targeting. They have the ISR [imaging] satellites as the infrastructure and now they have the data relay satellites up there as well, to be able to basically get coordinates of maybe a U.S. aircraft carrier that’s out there.” The relay system would be used potentially to pass the coordinates off to a weapon system to strike the carrier. Advanced features in China’s Beidou navigation satellites. Beidou is not quite as capable as GPS but it’s catching up, said Lerch. “Some of the more recent assessments say that they likely have at least on average, a two-meter accuracy and an error of 20 nanoseconds, which is pretty good. GPS is slightly better with about a one-meter accuracy and 10 nanoseconds error.” One of the unique features of Beidou is that they’re the only global navigation satellite system with a secure messaging service built in. Lerch said the global messaging service can support up to 40 Chinese characters, and the regional one can support up to 1,000 characters. “It is a very good capability that the Chinese advertise to attract customers.” The space war for China is economic. Chinese academics are forecasting that operations in cislunar space beyond Earth orbit is going to be a $10 trillion a year industry. “It’s clear that the Chinese have their eyes set on not just what’s happening close to Earth but they’re absolutely looking towards the future and seeing what technology needs to be developed to be able to get to that goal.” Of concern to the U.S. is that if China views the cislunar region as a space economic zone, “you’re going to have the celestial equivalent of the South China Seas happening in cislunar space.”
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Space Operations Command is assigning cybersecurity and intelligence specialists to work side-by-side with satellite operators so they’re better prepared to protect U.S. systems from electronic and physical threats, said Maj. Gen. Douglas Schiess. “We are preparing and posturing for the fight,” Schiess said Sept. 19 at the Air, Space & Cyber conference. Schiess is vice commander of the Space Force’s Space Operations Command and also oversees U.S. Space Command’s combined forces component at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Space Operations Command, based at Peterson Space Force Bae, Colorado, has several squadrons of cyber specialists that support military units that operate communications, surveillance and navigation satellites. More will be added over the coming year to ensure all satellite units have adequate cyber defenses, said Schiess. The Space Force is following a directive from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to harden space systems against cyber attacks that rivals like China would attempt during a conflict. “I’ve said from my first days on the job that my priorities were China, China, and China … and I’d like to think that the message is starting to resonate,” Kendall said on Monday in a keynote address at the conference. Schiess said one of the most recent actions was to assign a cyber squadron exclusively to work with the operators of the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellites that provide critical early warning of missile launches. “They are right there in the same building with our space and missile warning operators,” said Schiess. “We’re going to continue to do that.” In response to Pentagon concerns about Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons, the Space Force also is adding intelligence detachments to satellite operations units to ensure operators get accurate information about possible threats, “That shortens the amount of time it takes operators to get intelligence from days to minutes,” said Schiess. “Obviously, as you heard from the Secretary and others today, our near peer competitors are continuing to modernize their forces,” he added. “We have to continue to have intel-led operations so that we can make decisions faster to be able to get ahead of those near peer competitors.” Schiess said a priority going forward is to modernize the Space Force’s training and testing infrastructure so guardians can rehearse missions in a combat-like environment, and the survivability of satellites can be more accurately tested. The Space Force established a separate Space Training and Readiness Command at Peterson to focus on training and testing. “They plan to stand up a national space training and testing center,” said Schiess. “And we at Space Operations Command are probably the biggest proponents to help them be able to do that.”
In late March, Robert Braun became the new head of the Laurel, Maryland-based Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s (APL) Space Exploration Sector, a division involving civilian space exploration and national security-related space programs. Before taking on his new APL duties, Braun was director for planetary science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Braun brings a wealth of space technology expertise and organizational skills to APL, having served as NASA’s first Chief Technologist. Before that, he was Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There’s no shortfall of APL missions that Braun is now championing. Currently in operation are the Parker Solar Probe, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) that will showcase planetary defense technology, and New Horizons, which flew past Pluto in 2015 and continues to cruise onward. Future missions within APL’s portfolio include Europa Clipper to Jupiter, Dragonfly to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). SpaceNews correspondent Leonard David interviewed Braun to find out what’s on his agenda as he scopes out his vision for APL. I’ve had a number of different experiences over the course of my career and have learned from each and every one of them. What I’m hoping to bring to this existing role at APL is to apply all those lessons learned and experiences to lead the space sector forward. The space enterprise at APL is a little under 2,000 people. My message is that we’re open for business. We’re a trusted government partner, and we’re making critical contributions in both civil and national security space domains. We had nine different flight deliveries in this last year, a record for the sector. What we’ve decided to do is something like a decadal survey. We’re in the midst of a strategic visioning process in each sector. We are thinking about where we want to be in 10 years and how we get there? Now is a good time to take stock of where we are and determine who we want to be and what’s the right path forward for the sector and the lab in service of the nation. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. Not in any priority order, there are at least four areas of strength at APL that I think we can build off of when we think about the future. Space weather, astrobiology and the search for life in the solar system and elsewhere, cis-lunar for both civil and national security reasons, and the fourth is planetary defense. Yes, smallsats are a big part of our nation’s future in space. APL has been contributing in that area. We have a large number of successful smallsat missions, largely on the technology side for national security sponsors. We’re also taking those same concepts and applying them now in the civil space domain. One example would be our NASA Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE), which involves three smallsats to characterize the electric currents that link Earth’s aurora to the planet’s magnetosphere. There’s nothing ‘EZIE’ about this mission. We just had Preliminary Design Review and passed Key Decision Point-C, with flying colors. I think the capability of smallsats for Earth observation, navigation, communications, and even proximity operations will only grow. This is something that APL is keenly focused on. Most of the missions that we’ve done have been in support of national security objectives. From an APL perspective, I think you will see more and more of our missions, both in the national security space and civil space arena, being small spacecraft. That’s mainly because electronics just continue to miniaturize. Pretty soon, a 12U smallsat is going to be thought of as a big spacecraft! That’s the sweet spot for APL. We work with every facet of government that does space. Not just NASA or the Department of Defense, but the intelligence community, Homeland Security, and more. We work closely with the Space Force and the intelligence community as we do with NASA. In my view, this insight and experience benefit all government sponsors. Technologies can move back and forth between civil and national security space, or we can leverage investments across each area. The heat shield technology used for the Parker Solar Probe came out of some national security missions. The DART is another example. Basically, it is a bullet hitting another bullet. Some air and missile defense personnel and technologies here at APL joined forces with our space folks to create that mission which is the first test of planetary defense. Absolutely. Of course, the biggest EDL activity at APL right now is the Dragonfly mission to Titan. I wouldn’t call it EDL. I’d call it entry, descent and flight. EDF is perhaps a better acronym for us. Dragonfly is a rotorcraft, roughly the size of the Perseverance rover now on Mars. It flies right out of the backshell, goes to its first landing spot, and explores there, followed by many more liftoffs, flights and landings across the surface of Titan. I’m a big advocate for looking at low-cost Mars exploration, both orbital and landed concepts. I think there’s a lot that the community could put forward from a science perspective. I think there are scientifically viable and compelling Mars missions that could be done for much, much lower cost than the missions currently in development or in consideration. Mars is difficult to reach due to planetary alignment once every 26 months. I think low-cost at Mars is maybe a little bit different than low-cost at the moon or low-cost in low Earth orbit. If you want to bring missions in on cost, you must curb your appetite. You can’t turn missions into Christmas trees, adding every instrument conceivable. You have to have a more streamlined approach and willing to take de-scopes and realize that this ship is not the last ship out of town. It’s just the last ship today out of town, and there will be a follow-on mission where other science objectives can be accomplished. If we streamline our activities, whether we’re talking about lunar exploration or exploration of any of the planets…if we streamline our thinking and prioritize the most significant science objectives, I think a lot of NASA’s missions could be accomplished within cost or for lower cost. I’ve heard things like that in the community as well. I don’t really subscribe to that thinking. JPL is a great place and JPL is JPL. APL is a great place and has no intention of being JPL. APL is not a NASA center. We have no reason to want to be someone else. We don’t need to be NASA Goddard and we don’t need to be JPL. We need to be the best version of APL that we can be. The idea of partnering with NASA or its centers or various universities or industry are all things that we’re looking at, across a range of opportunities. Also, in almost all of our missions, we have international partners. APL’s Lunar Surface Innovations Consortium operates in collaboration with the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate under the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative. Hundreds of organizations are part of that consortium that NASA now has access to through APL. It’s a good model in which APL is also actively engaging with small businesses and universities that, perhaps, don’t have the expertise to fly technologies in space. We’re marrying some of the best ideas from innovators from all around the country to solve some of NASA’s challenges. It’s a fascinating model and I think it’s one that will pay dividends. I think we could do a similar thing in other areas, in space weather, planetary defense and frankly, for Mars exploration. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
PARIS – In a little over a week, the crowdfunding platform Spaced Ventures has obtained pledges of $11.4 million from 758 individuals eager to invest in SpaceX. The target is $25 million. That’s the figure Spaced Ventures executives think might attract the attention of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Aaron Burnett, Spaced Ventures CEO, told SpaceNews. (Neither Musk nor his company has backed this campaign to allow retail investors to own a piece of SpaceX.) It all started with a petition. Spaced Ventures, which helps connect early-stage space startups with retail investors, asked investors which private space company’s stock they would most like to own. More than 80 percent of respondents, picked SpaceX. After that, Spaced Ventures created a page and began accepting nonbinding commitments on Sept. 14. As of Sept. 21, the median commitment was $1,000. The average was significantly higher thanks to three $1 million pledges that are easy to spot on the timeline . If the pledges continue pouring in and Spaced Ventures succeeds in convincing SpaceX to accept the money, funds would be delivered in two ways. Investments from accredited investors, who meet certain criteria such as earning $200,000 a year or working in finance, would be pooled. As would the smaller sums from nonaccredited investors. Spaced Ventures has pledged to handle the investment without charging any management fees or carried interest. Still, if SpaceX accepts the investment, Spaced Ventures would receive a certain percentage of the crowdfunded portion of the investment, not to mention publicity. “If we do this right, our platform becomes the de facto space leader,” Burnett said.
Former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten said he worries the DoD bureaucracy and congressional overseers are making it difficult for the U.S. Space Force to acquire new technologies at the pace that is needed to keep up with adversaries. Hyten , who retired in November as the nation’s second highest-ranking military officer, is an advocate for space programs and a long-time critic of the Pentagon procurement system. He is now a strategic advisor at the space company Blue Origin. Speaking July 11 at the Space Innovation Summit , an online event, Hyten said he worries that the Space Force still has not “cracked the code on how to move fast in acquisition.” A more agile procurement process was an early goal of the Space Force when it was established in December 2019. Hyten noted that the defense authorization act passed by Congress that created a separate military service for space required the standup of an acquisition executive office and “gave the Space Force a blank sheet of paper to define their acquisition process.” The Space Force in 2020 drafted a proposal to change its acquisition process but it never got anywhere, Hyten noted. “The chief of space operations General [John] Raymond and his team put together an approach and they couldn’t get it through the bureaucracy for two years.” “The entire time I was there as the vice chairman, it never made it through the bureaucracy all the way back to Congress,” Hyten added. “I think that the leadership of the Space Force has done a great job. But the bureaucracy is just really tough sometimes,” he said. Meanwhile, congressional appropriators are criticizing the Space Force for submitting a budget plan that they view as unrealistic. Hyten said the Space Force is in a tough spot, caught between a DoD bureaucracy that wants to minimize risk and an appropriations committee that says the service is “trying to do too much too fast.” In a report June 15, appropriators cautioned the Space Force “against starting more programs than it can afford.” The takeaway is that Congress is being just as risk-averse as DoD, Hyten said. “I don’t know if anybody’s looked, but the threat is real. It exists today,” he said. “You’d better be doing a lot really fast and you’d better be taking some chances and that means you’re going to fail every once in a while.” “I would hope that the appropriations committee understands that they’re going to have to start taking risk in appropriations as well,” Hyten said. “I know they don’t like to do that because that puts Americans tax dollars at risk. But our nation is at risk if we don’t figure out how to do this. So we still haven’t put into place a fully formed acquisition process that can move fast enough and we’ve got to do that.” High marks for personnel Acquisition problems aside, Hyten said he gives the Space Force high marks for building a force of “ intelligent, motivated, excited people that are focused on this critical domain and ready to move forward as fast as the country will let them.” Space Force leaders also are pushing a “focus on warfighting and focus on the adversary, understanding what the adversary is, what the adversary is doing and understanding the need to move effectively against that,” said Hyten. “So those are two big positives.” A challenge for the Space Force is to develop “joint space officers” that can work across the land, sea, air and space domains. “That’s where the joint staff comes from. That’s where combatant commands come from. Warfighting really comes to fruition in a joint environment, not in a service environment,” Hyten said. “The Space Force, the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, they’re just force providers to a joint force that actually has to do things,” he added. “So we’re gonna have to create joint expertise in the Space Force.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Californian startup Epsilon3 said Aug. 23 it is building a software platform to help Axiom Space manage plans to deploy commercial modules on the International Space Station in 2024. The software startup is developing a set of operations and procedure management workflow tools as part of a multi-year deal with Axiom, which has a long-term ambition to establish the first private space station. The platform will help coordinate Axiom’s ground and on-orbit operations to support early prototyping, Epsilon3 chief operating officer Max Mednik said. “They’ve been testing out Epsilon3 for a few months and are now reaching the point of using it more significantly across their company for upcoming launches, work towards their station, engineering, testing, and flight ops,” Mednik said in an email. Epsilon3 says its platform is better suited for coordinating space development workflows than word processing software, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and other applications that are not tailored for the industry. Founded in 2021, the software startup recently raised $15 million to expand its project management suite. Axiom is “now reaching a stage in their development where they are building out their procedures for testing and operating their hardware systems and flights,” Mednik said, “so a tool like Epsilon3 is particularly useful to help them accelerate development, stay on schedule (reduce risk), and properly document everything.” Axiom has an agreement with NASA to attach commercial modules to the ISS. These modules will be designed to eventually detach from the ISS to form a standalone commercial space station. NASA is also funding three other groups of companies under the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program, which aims to advance the development of commercial space station alternatives to the ISS. The U.S. space agency plans to transition to commercial stations by the end of the decade, although watchdogs have raised concerns that these stations might not be ready by the time the ISS retires. Axiom raised $130 million from investors last year for its plans. In April, the company signaled a key milestone for its private space station goals when it sent four commercial astronauts to the ISS onboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Axiom has signed a contract for three additional Crew Dragon missions and expects its second private astronaut mission to the ISS to occur in spring.
The European Space Agency is putting the finishing touches on a package of programs it will ask its member states to support at a council meeting in November. At a press briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council in Paris Oct. 20, agency leaders said they were finalizing proposals and related documents for the Nov. 22-23 ministerial meeting, where the agency will seek funding commitments from its member states for a wide array of programs. “I think everyone is quite relieved on the progress we really made,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general. That work included finalizing most of the 36 programmatic documents, or budget lines, for programs in the ministerial package in areas that include science, exploration, navigation, and Earth observation, among others. “We are moving in the right direction, but there are still some things we have to sort out,” said Anna Rathsman, chair of the ESA Council. Neither Aschbacher or Rathsman elaborated on areas that still need to be worked out, or specific funding levels the agency is requesting. Aschbacher said in September ESA would request 18.7 billion euros ($18.2 billion) over three years at the ministerial , an increase of more than 25% from the last ministerial in 2019. That request comes as Europe grapples with multiple interrelated problems such as the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis and inflation. “We have a lot of challenges to handle along the way,” Rathsman acknowledged. “At the same time, we know and can really see the interest in space, and what we can achieve with space infrastructure, is fantastic and increasing all the time.” ESA members won’t make a formal commitment for funding ESA programs until the two-day ministerial meeting in Paris. “What we are doing today is making sure that all the paperwork is prepared, the legal documents, and the content is extremely well understood, so that member states can make up their minds and subscribe at the ministerial,” Aschbacher said. While ESA leadership did not provide a comprehensive review of the package and requested funding levels, they did discuss a few specific areas. David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, confirmed that the agency will seek funding for the European Large Logistics Lander, or EL3, a cargo lander that could be used to support the NASA-led Artemis campaign of human lunar missions. “We are asking at the ministerial for subscriptions to support the first step of development” of EL3, also known as Argonaut, he said. The agency is seeking 380 million euros for lunar robotic activities in general, of which the majority would go to EL3, which he said would put the program on track for a first mission in 2030. ESA’s Oct. 19 announcement of a delay in the first launch of the Ariane 6 , now expected no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2023, did not affect the ministerial package, said Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA director of space transportation. ESA will seek funding for an upgrade to the “Block 2” version the Ariane 6 with increased payload performance and a separate program for transitioning the rocket into high-rate production. “These are not affected by the announcement” of the delay of the first launch, he said, including the transition program. “This is impacted by the ramp-up that is now delayed, but we have already anticipated this in our request to the member states.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Royal Caribbean Group said Aug. 30 it has become the first cruise liner to adopt SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband services. The company plans to install Starlink by the end of March on some 50 ships operated under its Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, and Silversea Cruises brands. Future vessels operated under these brands will also be connected to Starlink. TUI Cruises and Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, which Royal Caribbean Group operates via joint ventures, are not part of the agreement. Jason Liberty, Royal Caribbean Group’s president and CEO, said its deal with SpaceX marks “the biggest public deployment of Starlink’s high-speed internet in the travel industry” to date. It follows trials of Starlink’s network onboard Royal Caribbean Group’s Freedom of the Seas, which at more than 156,000 tons was the world’s largest cruise ship when it was unveiled 2006. SpaceX received permission from the Federal Communications Commission on June 30 to provide Starlink services to boats, aircraft, and vehicles on the move. The Royal Caribbean Group had urged the FCC to move quickly to give SpaceX this approval. In a June 10 letter to the regulator, Royal Caribbean Group vice president of operational excellence John Maya wrote that “the satellite provider landscape has been largely static both in terms of capacity and innovation” during the previous two years, as pandemic-related travel restrictions negatively impacted the cruise industry. “As we return our fleet to full strength and look to grow our business through new and more innovative ships with larger and more reliable bandwidth demands, we are eager for more innovative competition in what is largely a stagnant internet service provider market.” While Royal Caribbean Group’s Aug. 30 Starlink announcement did not disclose anticipated broadband performance, Liberty said the service would “enable more high-bandwidth activities” for its customers and crew, including video streaming and video calls. SES said an agreement it has to provide connectivity to an unspecified number of Royal Caribbean International ships is unaffected by Starlink’s agreement. “While it has been an incredibly fruitful partnership, it has never been an exclusive one,” SES spokesperson Suzanne Ong said. SES has been connecting Royal Caribbean International ships since 2013 with its O3b Networks constellation in medium Earth orbit (MEO). Royal Caribbean International also has an agreement to use O3b mPower, SES’ upgraded MEO constellation that the operator expects to bring into service in the second quarter of 2023. Ong said the company has “signed extended framework agreements” for O3b mPower, and expects to “grow and evolve” its partnership in the coming years. SES is currently serving five out of the six major cruise operators, she added, including ships that also provide connectivity from other operators operating in geostationary orbit. In the aviation market, private jet charter company JSX plans to be the first air carrier to offer Starlink this year for flights in the United States. Hawaiian Airlines also has a deal to offer Starlink services on transpacific flights to and from Hawaii in 2023. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); }) This article was updated Aug. 31 to include details about SES’ Royal Caribbean International partnership.
U.S. Space Command announced Nov. 15 it is adding a new component to its organization to help coordinate operations and speed up the delivery of satellite-based services to military forces in the field. The new organization, called Combined Joint Task Force-Space Operations (CJTF-SO), marks another step in the evolution of the U.S. military’s space enterprise, officials said. “To outpace our strategic competitor, the People’s Republic of China, I am rapidly building the command to compete and win in the space domain, deter aggression from extending to space, and, when necessary, prevail in conflict,” said Gen. James Dickinson, head of U.S. Space Command. U.S. Space Command, located at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, is a military combatant command responsible for operations in outer space The CJTF-SO will serve as a bridge between the command’s headquarters and its two large field organizations; the Combined Force Space Component Command (CFSCC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; and the Joint Task Force Space Defense (JTF-SD) at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. The CFSCC ensures space capabilities such as GPS navigation and satellite-based communications are available to U.S. commanders and allied nations. It also runs an operations center where U.S. and allied personnel track objects and activities in space. The JTF-SD, a joint military and intelligence community unit, runs the classified National Space Defense Center, and tracks potential threats to satellites in orbit. The former commander of the JTF-SD Maj. Gen. Thomas James will temporarily run the new task force until a permanent three-star commander is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. “Moving forward, the establishment of CJTF-SO will ensure unity of effort among the functional components’ operations while USSPACECOM’s headquarters staff focuses on achieving national security objectives,” James said in a statement. The CFSCC and JTF-SD field units will report to the CJTF-SO. This is intended to create “unity of effort between operations and intelligence, allied, and commercial partners,” he said. The CJTF-SO will form a headquarters staff of about 125 personnel from across the military services, Maj. Gen. Brook Leonard, CJTF-SO director of operations, told SpaceNews . “With a growing and developing threat, the standup of Space Command, the standup of a Space Force, we’re continuing to mature the space enterprise organizations across the DoD,” said Leonard. What has been missing is the “operational integration and warfighting focus that space needed, the layer between strategic and tactical,” he said. “We needed a dedicated organization to look at competition and conflict and lead those endeavors,” Leonard said. The new task force will help create a culture where “it’s everybody’s job to protect and defend, and deliver those space capabilities.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said Sept. 29 its inaugural ViaSat-3 satellite has started environmental tests after being put into flight configuration for the first time. These tests will simulate the vibration and acoustic environments the broadband satellite is set to endure as it is launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket later this year. The satellite is one of three in a constellation that Viasat is building with Boeing to provide global high-throughput Ka-band services. Boeing is providing its 702 satellite bus platform to house the payloads that Viasat developed internally. The first ViaSat-3 will focus on covering the Americas from geostationary orbit. The second, launching about six months later, will cover Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Its payload is still undergoing integration with its 702 chassis after arriving at Boeing’s facility in El Segundo, California, in July. Viasat said the third satellite in the constellation, targeting the Asia Pacific region and slated to launch six months after the second, is currently in final payload tests at its Tempe, Arizona, facility. According to the operator, each Viasat-3 will have more than one terabit a second of broadband capacity, or 1,000 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is three times faster than the Americas-focused ViaSat-2 that launched in 2017. Viasat says the combined capacity of satellites in its current fleet is in the vicinity of 500 Gbps. ViaSat-3 will have some of the largest reflectors ever sent to space to increase signal strength. Each satellite will have a total eight solar panels per wing, giving ViaSat-3 an overall 44-meter wingspan, nearly the same as a Boeing 767 airplane.
A new report by The Aerospace Corporation calls for a more holistic approach to space safety, from avoiding collisions in orbit to cybersecurity. The 2022 Space Safety Compendium , released Oct. 19, offers a wide range of recommendations on topics that include space situational awareness, launch and reentry, spectrum and cybersecurity, and human spaceflight safety. It also identifies several cross-cutting issues, including workforce, diversity and development of norms of behavior. Aerospace’s Space Safety Institute, which developed the report, combined several topics into a single report to take a broader view of how efforts to improve safety in one field might affect safety in other fields. “At Aerospace, we feel like they’re all connected and we need a whole-of-space approach to space safety, which is why we established the Space Safety Institute,” said Uma Bruegman, lead of the institute, in a call with reporters. “We felt like there’s a more holistic approach necessary,” said Josef Koller, co-founder of the institute. “Safety is more like a Rubik’s Cube to use. If you try to fix the colors on one side, let’s say for robotic missions, it might affect how you do human spaceflight safety or it might affect launch.” Some of the report’s recommendations reflect activities that are ongoing. One endorses funding the Office of Space Commerce in the Commerce Department so it can take on civil space traffic management responsibilities. It also recommends updating human spaceflight mishap investigation requirements, a topic that was the subject of an agreement between the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board signed in September. Other recommendations call for improved space situational awareness data and analysis, support for on-orbit servicing and active debris removal, designing spacecraft to minimize the risk on the ground from reentry debris, and developing in-space rescue capabilities for human spaceflight. Koller declined to say which of the 35 recommendations in the report are the most important. “What you find in the compendium are the most important ones,” he said. “Every different field will have a different selection of those, but what you find in the compendium are really the top ones.” The focus of many of the recommendations are on the U.S., including specific policies, but could be extended globally. “We’ve got to start in the United States itself. We need to figure out how we’re going to do that between all the different, diverse organizations that work the problem, and then move out to the international community,” said Marlon Sorge, executive director of Aerospace’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, discussion recommendations on space situational awareness and space traffic management. “This is an international issue.” Bruegman said that Aerospace had already discussed the report’s recommendations with several government agencies, including FAA, NASA and the Commerce Department, as well as several companies. “The whole goal is bring everybody together, talk to them about our recommendations, listen to them and have some discussion,” she said.
As the Artemis 1 mission nears its conclusion, European Space Agency and industry officials praised the performance of the Orion spacecraft’s service module, which some see as a step towards a European crewed spacecraft. The Artemis 1 mission is set to conclude Dec. 11 with the reentry and splashdown of the Orion crew capsule , shortly after it separates from the European Service Module. That module provided power, propulsion and other services for the spacecraft since its Nov. 16 launch. “We are coming towards the end of what you might think of as a 100-meter race that’s followed a marathon,” said David Parker, ESA’s director for human and robotic exploration, during a Dec. 9 briefing. “The marathon was the 10 years of effort and preparation needed to build and prepare the first European Service Module for its journey to the moon and back again, and 100-meter race has been that actual mission itself.” During that 100-meter sprint, the service module has not broken stride. “The mission has gone really perfect from our point of view,” said Ralf Zimmermann, head of moon programs and the Orion European Service Module at Airbus, the prime contractor for the module. “We have absolutely flown a perfect mission so far.” There have been minor issues with the module, he noted, “but nothing mission critical.” One persistent issue has been with devices called latching current limiters in one part of the spacecraft’s power system. Those devices, similar to circuit breakers, have opened at least 17 times during the course of the mission without being commanded to do so, NASA officials said at a Dec. 8 briefing, but have not significantly affected spacecraft operations. “It’s not a big deal because they can be recommanded on,” said Philippe Deloo, ESA program manager for the service module. “We don’t have an idea of what is the root cause. We are investigating, looking at all possible options.” One possibility, he said, is that electromagnetic interference or noise in the power system is causing the latching current limiters to open. Another possibility is they are being affected by transmissions from spacecraft antennas. Engineers are doing as much testing as they can before the end of the mission to identify the cause. “This is going to be a difficult one to troubleshoot.” Zimmermann emphasized the issue was not serious. “When they open uncommanded, the effect on the mission is not that big,” he said, noting it affects only one of eight power lines on the spacecraft. “It is a glitch, not a mission-critical failure.” Other parts of the European Service Module have exceeded expectations. The spacecraft is producing more power than expected, yet using less power than planned. Deloo said the reduced power consumption is, in turn, linked to the spacecraft dissipating less heat than expected, meaning it has to use heaters less frequently to maintain its proper temperature. “This is one of the major lessons learned.” The service module has also produced many of the stunning images and video the mission has returned, thanks to GoPro cameras mounted on the tips of each of the four solar arrays. “We are calling them now four selfie sticks,” quipped Matthias Gronowski, chief engineer for the European Service Module at Airbus. The Artemis 1 mission, and excellent performance of its service modules, comes as some in Europe advocate for ESA to develop its own human spaceflight capability. Human spaceflight was one of the long-term “inspirator” concepts endorsed by ESA member states a year ago , and remains a topic of debate in Europe. “We have to see how far politicians are willing to look into this,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in a Dec. 1 speech at a Space Transportation Association luncheon here, noting the topic would come up at a second European “space summit” scheduled for late 2023. “Does Europe want to be more independent, more autonomous in human space transportation?” “In terms of technical capability, can Europe build a human-rated space vehicle? I don’t doubt it,” Parker said, citing the success not just of the Artemis 1 mission but work on International Space Station modules and elements of the future lunar Gateway. What would be needed, he said, was experience in end-to-end operations of a crew spacecraft and development of safety systems, like a launch abort system, as well as a human-rated launch vehicle. During the International Astronautical Congress in September, ArianeGroup released a concept for a vehicle called Smart Upper Stage for Innovative Exploration (SUSIE). The vehicle is designed to be a new, reusable upper stage for the Ariane 6 rocket, but could be used as a cargo and crew transportation vehicle. Morena Bernardini, head of strategy and innovation at ArianeGroup, said in an interview at the conference that a cargo version of SUSIE could be ready as soon as 2030 followed by a crewed version “immediately after.” At the briefing, Zimmerman suggested Airbus was more interested in working with others, along the lines of the existing partnership on Orion, than developing a European crewed vehicle. “We need to unite forces and share the costs,” he said, noting he was offering his personal opinion. “This is, to me, much more important than saying its Germany, France, England or Europe in total against the Americans.” Parker said the success of the service module shows ESA is ready for the next phases of Artemis. “We learned that we can send a crew-rated capsule to the moon and back again on its first flight, and that means it gives us a lot of confidence to go forward in the next steps in Artemis.” ESA has a contract with Airbus to produce service modules through Artemis 6, at a total value of a little more than two billion euros. ESA’s member states approved plans to produce three more service modules at November’s ministerial meeting, and Parker said the agency will get those under contract some time in 2023. The Artemis 1 service module will end its mission about 40 minutes before splashdown when it separates from the crew capsule shortly before reentry. The service module will burn up in the atmosphere, with any surviving pieces falling into the Pacific Ocean west of Peru. “It’s a little sad, but we’ve accomplished the mission,” Zimmerman said of the impending demise of the service module. “We are proud of all that has happened.” “You cannot be sad when you accomplish your mission,” Deloo said. “Everything has a life. The end of the life is part of the life. As long as the life has been successful, this is a great success. So, I’m happy about it.”
Norwegian company Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace will acquire a majority stake in NanoAvionics in a deal that values the smallsat manufacturer at 65 million euros ($67 million). Under the terms of the agreement announced July 5, Kongsberg will acquire 77% of NanoAvionics, with the management of NanoAvionics holding the other 23%. AST SpaceMobile, which acquired a 51% stake in NanoAvionics in 2018, will sell its shares. “The agreement to acquire NanoAvionics represents a game changer for Kongsberg’s space ambitions. By acquiring NanoAvionics, Kongsberg expands its portfolio to also have products and technology for designing and manufacturing small satellites,” said Geir Håøy, chief executive of Kongsberg, in a statement. “We have clear ambitions to grow further and with this acquisition we are taking the next step both for us and for Norwegian space industry.” The deal comes a month and a half after Kongsberg ordered three smallsats from NanoAvionics . The satellites, scheduled for launch in 2024, will be used to track ships using both Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders and radar emissions from vessels not broadcasting AIS signals. The three satellites could form the core of a larger constellation for global coverage, a Kongsberg manager said when the deal was announced. Those three satellites will use NanoAvionics’ MP42 satellite bus designed for satellites weighing 50 kilograms or more, a departure from the company’s earlier work primarily on cubesat-class spacecraft. The first MP42 satellite, a technology demonstrator with some hosted payloads, launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-4 rideshare mission in April. NanoAvionics, based in Lithuania with a U.S. subsidiary, has built up a diverse set of customers for its smallsats. In addition to the Kongsberg contract, it announced in recent months contracts to provide satellite buses or complete satellites for startups such as Gama, which is developing solar sail technology , and Turion Space, which has plans for satellite servicing and debris removal. It also announced deals to provide satellites for universities and research institutes in Australia and New Zealand. Kongsberg produces spacecraft subsystems and is best known in the space industry for Kongsberg Satellite Services, or KSAT, a leading ground station network operator. “Joining forces with Kongsberg, one of the most respected names in the defense, maritime and space domain, further strengthens and broadens our position in the NewSpace sector and provides us access to new markets,” said Vytenis J. Buzas, founder and chief executive of NanoAvionics, in a statement. “It is the right timing and a perfect match for our companies to consolidate our expertise and create a world class space company which will be a leading prime contractor for small satellite missions.” AST SpaceMobile said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it expects to receive 27 million euros for the shares in NanoAvionics it is selling. InMotion Holdings, LLC, a company owned by AST SpaceMobile’s chief executive, Abel Avellan, will receive an additional 7.7 million euros for options it has to acquire NanoAvionics shares. AST SpaceMobile acquired a controlling stake in NanoAvionics in 2018 with the intent of building up its satellite manufacturing capabilities. AST has since created its own satellite factory in Midland, Texas, for building the spacecraft it’s planning for a constellation to provide satellite telephony services. “The planned sale of our investment in NanoAvionics will provide additional liquidity and allow AST SpaceMobile to focus on its core, direct-to-cell phone technology and the launch of the first commercial satellites,” Scott Wisniewski, chief strategy officer at AST SpaceMobile, said in a statement. “Together with existing balance sheet cash, proceeds from the sale and the recently announced $75 million committed equity facility, we have access to significant liquidity to execute our business plan.” AST SpaceMobile reported having $255.1 million in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash on hand at the end of the first quarter of 2022. It announced May 6 an agreement with B. Riley Principal Capital to sell up to $75 million in AST stock over two years to provide additional funding. Kongsberg and NanoAvionics said the deal will close after completion of customary conditions, including regulatory reviews, but did not estimate when that would take place. AST SpaceMobile said in its SEC filing it expects the share sale to close in the third quarter.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with four people on board is on its way to the International Space Station after a successful launch Oct. 5. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 12 p.m. Eastern after a routine countdown. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance separated from the upper stage 12 minutes after liftoff. The Falcon 9 booster, making a rare first flight, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The Crew-5 mission is delivering to the ISS NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. Endurance, which previously flew the Crew-3 mission, is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 4:57 p.m. Eastern Oct. 6. Mann is serving as commander of Crew-5 and Cassada as pilot, with Wakata and Kikina as mission specialists. All are making their first flight to space except for Wakata, who has previously flown on two shuttle missions and two ISS expeditions, having spent 347 days in space. The four will serve on the ISS for up to six months before being relieved by the Crew-6 mission next spring. “That was a smooth ride uphill,” Mann said moments after Crew Dragon separated from the upper stage in orbit. “You’ve got three rookies that are pretty happy to be floating in space right now and one veteran astronaut who’s pretty happy to be back as well.” NASA and SpaceX proceeded with the launch after addressing three minor problems that came up during a launch readiness review Oct. 3. That included fixing a leak in a portable fire extinguisher in the Dragon spacecraft, replacing a thrust vector control actuator in one of nine Merlin engines in the rocket’s first stage and correcting an issue with the droneship. The launch is the first of three Falcon 9 missions SpaceX has planned in two days. Another Falcon 9 is set to launch a set of Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 7:10 p.m. Eastern Oct. 5. A third Falcon 9 will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida Oct. 6 at 7:07 p.m. Eastern carrying the Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34 communications satellites for Intelsat. SpaceX adjusted that schedule to accommodate the Crew-5 mission. When SpaceX postponed the Starlink launch at Vandenberg from Oct. 3 to provide additional time for pre-launch checks, it initially rescheduled the launch for Oct. 4, but said it would further delay the launch if the Crew-5 mission remained on schedule for Oct. 5. “As always, flying the crews are our top priority and crew safety is our top priority,” said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, at an Oct. 3 briefing. He said the company didn’t have a set time to review data from a previous launch before attempting a crewed launch, but instead it depended on the data needed for review. “We like to have about two days of stand off from, in this case, what was going to be the Starlink launch out of Vandenberg and then our launch here at the Cape,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, at the briefing, to allow for data reviews before the crewed launch. Crew-5 is the eighth crewed launch by SpaceX, all flown in less than two and a half years. In addition to the five ISS crew rotation flights, SpaceX launched the Demo-2 commercial crew test flight in May 2020 and two private astronaut missions, Inspiration4 last September and Axiom Space’s Ax-1 in April. The next SpaceX crewed launch will be another private astronaut mission, Polaris Dawn. That was originally scheduled for late this year but is now planned for no earlier than March 2023, according to Jared Isaacman, the billionaire leader of the Polaris effort, said in a Washington Post webcast Oct. 3. He did not disclose the reason for the delay.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat said June 21 that its shareholders voted to approve its $7.3 billion plan to acquire British satellite operator Inmarsat. Richard Baldridge, CEO of U.S.-based Viasat, said the deal received “overwhelming support” from shareholders, putting the transaction on track to compete later this year following regulatory approvals. Results from the shareholder meeting are due to be submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the coming days. Buying private equity-backed Inmarsat would significantly expand Viasat’s broadband network globally in multiple orbits and spectrum bands. The deal comprises $850 million in cash, about $3.1 billion in Viasat equity and the assumption of $3.4 billion of net debt. The acquisition is subject to a long list of regulatory approvals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, including new national security procedures in the United Kingdom. In a letter filed to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission June 10, SpaceX claimed Viasat is unfit to take control of Inmarsat’s spectrum licenses because Viasat is allegedly violating its current frequency rights . Viasat denies the accusation from SpaceX, which operates a competing satellite broadband network. Viasat recently said revenues for the three months to the end of March increased 18% to $702 million, compared with the same period the year before. The company posted a net loss of $29 million for the quarter, compared to a $7 million net income the prior year. Viasat blamed part of the loss on acquisition expenses. Inmarsat said its revenues climbed 8% to $348 million for the first quarter of 2022. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
TAMPA, Fla. — Sky Perfect JSAT said Aug. 18 it has picked SpaceX’s Starship rocket to launch its Superbird-9 satellite in 2024. The Japanese satellite operator said it signed a contract for a mission on the super-heavy-lift vehicle SpaceX is developing in Boca Chica, Texas, but offered no further details about the agreement. “SKY Perfect JSAT and SpaceX will continue to work together ahead of the launch of Superbird-9 Satellite,” the operator said in the brief announcement. It is one of the first contracts to be announced by a commercial satellite operator for a Starship launch. AST SpaceMobile, the Texas-based cellphone-compatible broadband constellation startup, has an agreement with SpaceX that provides options for booking Falcon 9 or Starship launches until the end of 2024. SpaceX has contracts with NASA to develop Starship to serve as a lander for crewed missions to the moon. Starship, designed to carry 21 tons of payload to geostationary transfer orbit and more than 100 tons to low Earth orbit, is also set to play a critical role in launching a proposed second-generation of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites. Standing at 120 meters tall, SpaceX hopes to one day use the rocket to help colonize Mars. The company has plans for missions deeper into the solar system with Starships that can be refueled in a “parking orbit” around the Earth. SpaceX has been conducting static fire tests of Starship’s Super Heavy first-stage booster as it prepares to conduct its first orbital flight test. In June, the Federal Aviation Administration removed a roadblock in the way of Starship’s development when it finished reviewing the environmental impact of allowing SpaceX to launch from Boca Chica. However, SpaceX must first implement dozens of measures to mitigate environmental effects . Airbus is building Superbird-9 for JSAT based on its reconfigurable payload platform OneSat, which has a dry mass of under 3 metric tons. That makes it likely Superbird-9 would launch with other passengers on its way to geostationary orbit. Jarrod McLachlan, SpaceX’s director of rideshare sales, said Aug. 9 it is “ working on the rideshare configuration and smallsat offerings for Starship,” although it was not ready to announce specific rideshare opportunities. JSAT said it expects to start operations with Superbird-9 in 2025, when it will use the satellite’s steerable beams to deliver broadcast and broadband services primarily over Japan and Eastern Asia. The operator has said it expects to invest 30 billion yen ($222 million) in the satellite project. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
U.S. Transportation Command is keeping an eye on space launch companies as they develop technology and mature concepts for point-to-point cargo delivery, said Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, head of the command. U.S. TRANSCOM, which manages the movement of military personnel and cargo around the world, over the past two years has signed cooperative research and development agreements, or CRADAs, with five space companies — SpaceX, Blue Origin , Sierra Space , Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab — to investigate potential concepts for using space vehicles in military logistics and humanitarian relief operations instead of aircraft. During a call with reporters Oct. 14, Van Ovost said the command is enthusiastic about the “rocket cargo” program led by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The CRADAs allow the exchange of data between the companies and TRANSCOM but so far it’s unclear when the industry will be ready to demonstrate cargo delivery capabilities, she said. “We obviously would like some sort of a demonstration launch,” said Van Ovost. “I think that would be very helpful to gather the data on what worked or not,” she added. “I am quite excited to move forward.” Any future rocket cargo demonstrations will be organized by AFRL. The lab earlier this year awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract to demonstrate technologies and capabilities to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world on a heavy rocket. But AFRL has yet to announce any planned demonstration. The first CRADA was signed with SpaceX in March 2020, and the Air Force in June 2021 designated rocket cargo as one of its “vanguard” programs . Enthusiasm for the program grew after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Starship megarocket designed to carry humans to the moon and Mars but also possibly for point-to-point transportation on Earth. The vehicle is still undergoing testing and has not yet flown an orbital mission. “Based on advertised commercial capability and business objectives, the Air Force Research Laboratory is currently assessing emerging rocket capability across the commercial vendor base, and its potential use for quickly transporting DOD materiel to ports across the globe,” AFRL said. Van Ovost said space transportation would be a fundamental shift in the way DoD could respond to contingencies and disasters, adding a new tool to existing air, land and sea delivery. “This is a very exciting area,” she said. “We signed five CRADAs because each of these companies are taking essentially a different approach at how they might do point to point, so we have something to learn from each of these different companies.” The agreement with Rocket Lab, for example, will explore using the company’s Photon spacecraft to establish on-orbit cargo depots and provide re-entry capability. Van Ovost said it’s important for TRANSCOM to be included and to shape concepts for cargo and passenger transportation, “whether it’s something that’s going to stay in space for a while and deorbit or something that’s really going to go point to point.” A key goal is to understand “the art of the possible” and what each company would need to do to carry out a mission. “In the end, we have to make a decision not just based on how fast something can launch, but it’s the entire chain. What kind of packaging? How do I get it to a location? And how is it loaded and unloaded at the end?”
A major arm of China’s state-owned space contractor is looking at developing a series of partially and fully-reusable launch vehicles apparently in response to SpaceX’s Starship. A paper published in the journal Aerospace Technology outlines plans under consideration by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) for a number of launch vehicles with varying diameters and clusters of methalox engines. A first generation of three launch vehicles with reusable first stages would have diameters of 3.35, 4.0 and 7.0 meters, powered by clusters of five, seven-to-nine and 9-22 “Longyun” 70-ton-thrust engines. Second stages would use vacuum-optimized versions of the engine. The 3.35m version is to be capable of lifting 2,500 kilograms to a 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), while the 4.0m variant—a size chosen to meet the maximum which can be transported to China’s inland launch sites—could launch up to 6,500 kg of payload to a similar orbit. The 7.0 meter version is planned to be able to launch more than 20,000 kg to 700 km SSO, while requiring new launch facilities and an offshore platform for recovering the first stage. The paper states that the technologies needed for a first generation of reusable launch vehicles, including grid fins, navigation guidance and control, and reusable, restartable engines, has advanced to the point of being ready for flight demonstrations. Tests would include low velocity and low altitude flights, building up to 100-kilometer-level launches. Though not explicitly stated, the 70-ton-thrust open cycle Longyun engines correspond to a product of the same name and capability developed by private firm Jiuzhou Yunjian. This would be a notable instance of a state-owned entity contracting a private company for engines. China opened up portions of its space activities to private capital in late 2014, resulting in hundreds of firms entering the sector. A number of companies have developed methane-liquid oxygen rocket engines for their own launch vehicles, including Landspace and iSpace, but Jiuzhou Yunjian has focused solely on engines. The firm signed a deal in October 2021 to supply its Longyun and smaller Lingyun engines to launch vehicle maker Rocket Pi for its Darwin-1 launcher. The proposed launch vehicles would also provide a different path to developing new launch capabilities in China, separate from those being developed by the Beijing-based China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). SAST and CALT are two major institutes under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned main space contractor. Both produce Long March launch vehicles, providing different launch capabilities but also a level of competition. CALT manufactures the large, kerosene-liquid oxygen Long March 5 and 7 rockets and is also developing the kerolox super heavy-lift Long March 9 . CALT officials have also presented concepts for reusable, methalox launchers and a methane-powered version of the Long March 9. SAST is also eyeing a second generation methane rocket for which both stages would be reusable and be capable of delivering 100,000 kg to low Earth orbit. The rocket would have a diameter of 9-10 meters, similar to the Long March 9, and use 25-28 200-ton-thrust, closed-cycle engines on its first stage. The second stage would feature 6-9 engines. China has been looking at numerous ways to boost its access to space in recent years, including a range of solid propellant rockets and reusable liquid launch vehicles from the state sector, as well as privately-developed capabilities. China’s first methalox rocket, Zhuque-2 developed by private firm Landspace, is expected to launch from Jiuquan in the near future.
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — Orbit Fab, a startup developing infrastructure for in-space refueling of spacecraft, will start offering hydrazine for satellites in geostationary orbit as soon as 2025 at a price of $20 million. The company announced Aug. 30 its plans to start offering refueling services for GEO spacecraft using a depot and “fuel shuttle” spacecraft. That depot will also be able to support spacecraft such as servicing vehicles that can travel to the depot for “self-service” refueling. At the $20 million price announced by Orbit Fab, the company would provide up to 100 kilograms of hydrazine. It’s the first time that the company has set a price for providing fuel, a move it says it made to help potential customers better understand the economics of refueling. “There hasn’t been certainty in the market about what it would cost to do a refueling and so that’s what we’re hoping to provide with this announcement,” said Adam Harris, vice president of business development at Orbit Fab, in an interview. Orbit Fab will initially offer the service in GEO, with a depot operating in what Jeremy Schiel, co-founder of Orbit Fab, called a “service lane” orbit about 300 kilometers above GEO. That’s designed to keep the depot out of the active belt of GEO satellites but just below the graveyard orbit of defunct satellites. In addition to the depot, Orbit Fab is developing a shuttle that would transport fuel to satellites. That would work for spacecraft that are equipped with a refueling port called the Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface (RAFTI) that Orbit Fab has developed for “cooperative docking,” said Harris. “That enables these commercial price points for fuel delivery. We’re not doing sophisticated surgery on a spacecraft.” Most spacecraft in GEO today, though, don’t have RAFTI ports. Orbit Fab would instead work with servicing vehicles from companies like Astroscale and Northrop Grumman, refueling those spacecraft. “They can go service the legacy satellites and we can service the servicing vehicles that are coming online,” Schiel said. “Eventually, when everyone’s flying a RAFTI fueling port, we can start going directly to them.” Harris said Orbit Fab is starting with hydrazine since it is commonly used in both commercial and government spacecraft. “We’re seeing major pull from the Department of Defense, NASA and the commercial sector in hydrazine,” he said, but added the company expects to support other fuels for both chemical and electric propulsion systems over time. Schiel said Orbit Fab has both government and commercial operators “who have expressed explicit interest to get refueled in the next three to five years,” but the company has not disclosed any beyond Astroscale, which announced a deal with Orbit Fab for xenon refueling services in January . “We’re working to get a few more by the end of the year.” The design of the depot, he said, is “basically done,” while the company is actively working on the design of the fuel shuttle. The company has been using a series of government contracts to work on key technologies for that spacecraft. Orbit Fab is starting in GEO because of the customer demand they are seeing as well as the simplicity of operating there versus the wide range of low Earth orbits used by different spacecraft. “It’s much easier to come up with a price for GEO because it’s one orbit,” Schiel said. “You’re going to have to have a different price point on each different orbit in LEO because of how you’re going to get there. We’re tackling the easy commercial price of GEO first and then we’ll start working our way down.”
The first flight of the Space Launch System will carry along with the Orion spacecraft 10 cubesats intended to carry out missions from prospecting for lunar ice to flying by an asteroid — if they’re not dead on arrival. Preparations continue for an Aug. 29 launch of the Artemis 1 mission, with NASA reporting no issues with the SLS or Orion spacecraft. A weather forecast from Space Launch Delta 45 Aug. 25 projected a 70% chance of acceptable weather for the launch during a two-hour window that opens at 8:33 a.m. Eastern. The primary purpose of the launch is to fly the Orion spacecraft around the moon, testing its capabilities before reentering and splashing down off the California coast about six weeks after liftoff. A successful flight would allow NASA to proceed with the first crewed Orion mission, Artemis 2, as soon as late 2024. In addition to Orion, though, SLS is carrying 10 6U cubesats in an adapter ring that connects Orion to the SLS upper stage. Those cubesats will be deployed from the upper stage at three “bus stops” on the way to the moon after Orion separates. The cubesats are from a variety of organizations in the United States as well as the Italian space agency ASI and Japanese space agency JAXA. Four of them are devoted to studies of the moon, including JAXA’s OMOTENASHI, which will attempt a “semi-hard” landing on the moon that would make it the world’s smallest lunar lander. Three others will study space weather and the radiation environment in cislunar space, such as the effects of that radiation on living organisms. Two cubesats will conduct technology demonstrations of deep-space communications, plasma thrusters and advanced optics. NASA’s NEA Scout will attempt to deploy a solar sail that will allow it to fly by a small near Earth asteroid. “Cubesats are a lower-cost approach to capturing scientific measurements that are high risk but also high reward,” said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA, during an Aug. 15 briefing about several of the cubesats. For some of the cubesats, the risks could be realized as soon as they are deployed. NASA required the spacecraft to be delivered a year ago so they could be installed on the adapter before Orion was integrated. Once Orion was in place, there was no way to access the cubesats. While some of the cubesats have access to power to keep their batteries charged, five of them — CuSP, LunaH-Map, Lunar IceCube, LunIR and Team Miles — did not. Their batteries have been slowly discharging since they were installed in the payload adapter, raising concerns they may be too depleted to activate the satellites after deployment. Craig Hardgrove, principal investigator for LunaH-Map at Arizona State University, said at the Aug. 15 briefing that the SLS program “didn’t feel comfortable with us charging” and thus could not keep its batteries charged during the extended wait for the launch. “It is a concern,” he said, but was optimistic that, given measured rates of discharge, the battery level should be sufficient for a launch during the current opportunity that runs through early September. If not, there are two solar panels that will be exposed immediately after deployment that should generate enough power to recharge the batteries. “For LunaH-Map, I think we should be OK with the launch coming up.” While NASA said Team Miles was another cubesat not able to charge its batteries, Wesley Faler, head of the project that produced the technology demonstration cubesat , said the team decided not to charge. “We had the opportunity to charge but we opted out of it,” he said at an Aug. 16 briefing. “There’s such a low self-discharge rate on our batteries that we figured, why rock the boat and introduce the variable of recharging?” The inability to charge, though, was a concern for some of the cubesats and was an issue they had been aware of for months as the Artemis 1 launch slipped to late summer. Some had quietly lobbied NASA for an opportunity to service the cubesats, which would have required removing Orion to gain access to the payload adapter. “We’re trying to work through preparations and get the SLS ready to fly. That’s the best thing we can do at this point,” Bleacher said of the cubesats. “If we can get the SLS off at the end of this month or early September, we hope that they’ll all have the opportunity to be able to fly.” Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, offered a similar message Aug. 22 at a briefing after the Artemis 1 flight readiness review. “The cubesats are relatively low cost and have relatively low levels of redundancy,” he said. “We do anticipate one or more of these cubesats to not be successful in its mission just due to the nature of the cubesats themselves.” Some cubesats failed to make it for the launch itself. NASA originally planned to fly 13 cubesats on Artemis 1, but three — Cislunar Explorers, CU-3E and Lunar Flashlight — were not ready before the deadline last fall for integration onto the SLS. The NASA-funded Lunar Flashlight, which suffered issues with its propulsion system, will instead fly as a secondary payload on the launch the IM-1 lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines in early 2023. In a presentation at the Small Satellite Conference at Utah State University Aug. 6, Brody Wallace of the University of Colorado said the CU-3E mission ran into several challenges, including dealing with safety requirements for flying on SLS. “The safety requirements for a human-rated launch vehicle are much larger than academic organizations are prepared for and anticipated,” he said. Delays in the SLS launch also made it difficult to manage the project, which largely involved students, and there were funding issues as well. “The academic environment can handle technology challenges,” he said, “but are less prepared on the programmatic side.”
A third module has arrived at China’s space station, completing the construction of the country’s crewed orbital outpost. A Long March 5B rocket lifted off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 3:37 a.m. Eastern Oct. 31. Launch success was announced inside 25 minutes of launch with the Mengtian module in low Earth orbit. Mengtian used its own propulsion to match orbit and rendezvous with the Tiangong space station—currently in a roughly 380 by 387-kilometer orbit—and connected with a forward port on Tiangong’s docking hub just under 13 hours after launch at 4:27 p.m. Eastern, China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, confirmed . The new experiment module joins two earlier modules: the Tianhe core module and Wentian experiment module. Mengtian will soon be transpositioned to the port docking ring to complete the T-shaped arrangement of the space station. Wentian was transpositioned to the starboard docking ring in late September. Mengtian (“dreaming of the heavens”) is a 17.9-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter and roughly 22-ton module designed to host a range of science experiments with areas of research including fluid physics, combustion and materials science and space technologies. It has a total volume of nearly 110 cubic meters, including around 32 cubic meters available for use by astronauts, according to CMSA Mengtian also has a payload airlock which will allow the small, 5.2-meter-long robotic arm launched with the Wentian module to grasp science experiments and install them on payload adapters on the outside of the module. The on-orbit release mechanism can deploy small spacecraft or CubeSats of up to 100 kilograms into orbit. The crew of three astronauts comprising the Shenzhou-14 mission watched events from aboard Tiangong, waiting for the arrival of Mengtian. Monday’s launch was the ninth of 11 missions mapped out for the construction and testing of Tiangong. The launch of a cargo spacecraft and separate crew launch will complete this phase before the end of the year. A Long March 7 rocket arrived at Wenchang Oct. 11 and will be assembled to launch the Tianzhou-5 cargo mission. Launch of Tianzhou-5 could take place in the first half of November and will provide supplies for the upcoming Shenzhou-15 crewed mission. The Tianzhou-4 spacecraft will undock from Tiangong and be deorbited ahead of these missions. Shenzhou-15 will launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on a Long March 2F rocket as early as late November, following the arrival of Tianzhou-5 at Tiangong. The arrival of Shenzhou-15 at Tiangong will see China’s first crew handover, and mark the start of the operational phase of the space station. China plans to keep Tiangong occupied for at least 10 years, conducting science experiments including international experiments through an initiative with UNOOSA. It could also host foreign astronauts in the future. China will add further capabilities to the Tiangong in the future. The Xuntian optical module—a co-orbiting, Hubble-class space survey telescope—is planned for launch in late 2023 or 2024. Xuntian has a two meter aperture and 2.5 gigapixel camera. With its wide field of view it aims to survey around 40 percent of the sky over the course of ten years. It will be capable of docking with Tiangong for maintenance and repairs. The space station itself could also be expanded from three to six modules, according to Chinese space officials. Such an expansion may depend upon other countries joining the project. As with previous Long March 5B missions the large first stage of the rocket entered orbit and is likely to make an uncontrolled reentry within the next week or so. U.S. Space Force 18th Space Defense Squadron tracked Mengtian in a 179 x 323 kilometer orbit inclined by 41.46 degrees hours after the launch, with the Long March 5B first stage in a 173 x 314 kilometer orbit. The three earlier Long March 5B launches notably saw the large first stage of the rocket enter orbit and make uncontrolled reentries. The previous launch sent the Wentian module into orbit and saw the first stage reenter the atmosphere over Southeast Asia less than a week later. Where and when the latest roughly 21-metric-ton empty stage will reenter cannot be accurately estimated. The stage will orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes, with the decay of its orbit dependent on atmospheric fluctuations. Variables including solar activity, which can puff up the atmosphere, leading to greater drag at higher altitudes. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the maker of the Long March 5B, did not comment on the previous incidents. It has however stated that it carries out passivation of spent stages, including venting remaining propellant depleting batteries, to prevent debris-causing explosions in orbit in line with international practices. The wider issue of uncontrolled rocket body reentries is assessed in a Nature Astronomy paper published July 11. It estimates that, with current practices, there is a 10 percent chance of uncontrolled reentries causing one or more casualties over a decade.
Arianespace said Sept. 13 it has reached a settlement deal that could revive a launch services agreement with OneWeb that was suspended following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The terms of Arianespace’s settlement with the British satellite operator were not disclosed. Arianespace’s launch campaign for OneWeb abruptly halted in March following sanctions on Russia’s Soyuz rocket, which the French company had used to deploy 428 of the operator’s planned 648 broadband satellites. Arianespace had aimed to perform six more Soyuz missions to complete the constellation under their 19-launch contract, including a launch of spare satellites for in-orbit backup capacity. OneWeb recently disclosed it took a $229 million charge this year linked to the canceled Soyuz launches — and the 36 satellites left stranded in Kazakhstan after their ride was called off. According to Arianespace, its settlement with OneWeb means its launch services agreement with the company “may be resumed in the future.” This likely covers options for OneWeb’s proposed second-generation constellation. Meanwhile, OneWeb has secured contracts with SpaceX and Indian space agency ISRO to launch the remaining satellites its current generation constellation needs to provide global services. The operator’s network is currently limited to the upper parts of the northern hemisphere. OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson said Sept. 12 during World Satellite Business Week that the company has five launches contracted to take place before the end of spring. Launches are set to begin in the fourth quarter of this year. Arianespace also said it is supporting OneWeb’s upcoming launches, including satellite dispenser services for two missions to be performed by NewSpace India Limited, part of ISRO. “Based on their unique heritage, OneWeb and Arianespace are determined to examine future opportunities together, especially on the Ariane 6 Launch Vehicle for the second generation of the constellation,” Arianespace added in its brief statement Sept. 13. OneWeb has reserved options for 90% of the launch capacity its second generation will require, according to Masterson . The British startup announced in June that it has a deal to use a launch vehicle being developed by Relativity Space for missions that could start as soon as 2025. French satellite operator Eutelsat also intends to contribute its launch reservations if its plan to merge with OneWeb passes shareholder and regulatory approvals.
TAMPA, Fla. — Greg Wyler’s megaconstellation startup E-Space said Dec. 5 it plans to buy radio frequency module developer CommAgility in a $14.5 million deal. The acquisition gives E-Space 5G software and experience that “would have taken years to recreate,” Wyler said in a statement. CommAgility, which employs 50 people and is currently part of publicly listed technology company Wireless Telecom Group, specializes in systems that manage signals for cellular, air-to-ground, and satellite networks. E-Space said it plans to integrate CommAgility’s source code into a network of potentially hundreds of thousands of connectivity satellites. The startup has given few details about the services it aims to provide from its constellation, which it describes as an intelligent network for connecting internet of things (IoT) devices — using satellites with smaller cross-sections than other constellations to reduce their environmental impact. CommAgility is being sold for $13.75 million in cash and a $750,000 financial instrument that is subject to agreed-upon reductions. The companies expect to finalize the acquisition by the end of January. It is the first deal E-Space has announced publicly since coming out of stealth in February with $50 million in seed financing. After launching a second batch of prototype satellites in the first half of next year, E-Space expects to move into an initial phase of serial production for a constellation with spectrum filings for 300,000 low Earth orbit satellites. Wyler also founded LEO broadband operator OneWeb and O3b Networks, the medium Earth orbit broadband operator now owned by SES. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Chinese commercial firm Changguang Satellite Technology says it will expand its under-construction Jilin-1 constellation from 138 to 300 satellites. Changguang Satellite, a satellite manufacturer and operator based in Changchun, Jilin Province in northeast China, initially planned for its Jilin-1 constellation to consist of 138 satellites in orbit by 2025 to provide 10-minute revisit times. The 138 satellites will now constitute a first phase, to be completed by 2023, according to Changguang Satellite official Jia Hongguang, China News Service reported Oct. 27. The second phase will then see the constellation to be expanded to 300 satellites by 2025. The news was reported alongside an announcement that five new satellites—Jilin-1 Gaofen 03D08 and Gaofen 03D51-54—had left the factory and begun a journey to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Changguang Satellite was founded in December 2014 as an remote sensing offshoot from the state-owned Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The firm secured $375 million in funding for its Jilin-1 project in November 2020 and already has by far the largest Chinese commercial constellation in orbit. It is one of the most prominent and well-funded of the commercial space companies to have emerged in China since a 2014 policy decision to open up the sector to private capital. Jilin-1 satellites generally deliver panchromatic imagery with a resolution of between 0.50 and 0.75-meters. Other satellites in the constellation have video, multispectral, multipurpose, infrared and other capabilities. Data products are being commercialized by HEAD Aerospace, headquartered in Beijing. A new batch of 16 Jilin-1 satellites were launched Aug. 10, meaning the firm now has 70 satellites in orbit. 10 of the new satellites were Jilin-1 Gaofen 03D optical satellites designed to deliver 75-centimeter resolution from an altitude around 535 kilometers. The six others were Jilin-1 Hongwai 1 (“infrared 1”) satellites with infrared imaging payloads, while also equipped with GNSS occultation instruments developed by Yunyao Aerospace , a Chinese commercial satellite weather data firm. Changguang Satellite stated in May that the Jilin-1 constellation can revisit any spot on Earth 17 to 20 times a day, following a launch of eight satellites May 4. The firm says it provides remote sensing data and product services for use in sectors including agriculture, forestry, oceans, environmental protection, urban construction, and scientific experiments. The expansion of the Jilin-1 constellation follows concerns raised by China over the use of U.S. commercial satellite constellations in the Ukraine conflict, including communications via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites but also imagery from companies such as Maxar. The People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China’s military forces and mouthpiece of the China Military Commission, ran a commentary ( Chinese ), published April 11, noting that companies such as Maxar and Black Sky provided satellite imagery of Russian troop movements to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in February. The commentary claims the U.S. has in recent years been “promoting the construction of so-called ‘space resilience’, attempting to blur the boundary between military and civilian spheres,” bringing commercial entities and the general public into the space arms race in order to strengthen its dominant position in space. It also framed the U.S. signing of more than 100 space situational awareness agreements as an attempt to create a “space NATO” alliance. At the same time, concerns over China’s progress have been noted by the United States. Gen. David Thompson, U.S. vice chief of space operations, said the U.S. Space Force is likely to see continued funding increases to counter China’s rapid advances in its space program, SpaceNews reported Oct. 25. “They are building and fielding space capabilities at an incredible pace,” said Thompson. In just five years, China has deployed more than 260 imaging satellites and about 50 navigation satellites, he added. “Their space capabilities are still not quite as good as ours, but they are really, really good. And so we have to assume that they are a peer competitor in that regard.” Meanwhile, a Russian official speaking at a United Nations meeting on outer space security Oct. 26 warned that commercial systems as “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation,” over developments in Ukraine.
GREENBELT, Md. — NASA released the long-anticipated first science observations from the James Webb Space Telescope July 12, the culmination of decades of work and the start of a new era in astrophysics. The observations, released during an event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center here a day after the unveiling of one image at a White House event , illustrated the capabilities of the $10 billion space telescope from analyzing the atmospheres of exoplanets to detecting hundreds of galaxies in the early universe. “The world’s vehicle for deepest space exploration is open for business,” Eric Smith, JWST program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said at a media briefing. The observations released at this event include images of the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region previously observed in lower resolution by the Hubble Space Telescope; the Southern Ring Nebula, a set of gas and dust rings produced by a dying star; Stephan’s Quintet, a set of five galaxies whose JWST image reveals new details about interactions among them; and a spectra of the exoplanet WASP-96 b that revealed the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of this “hot Jupiter” world. They join the “deep field” image that discovered distant galaxies released at the White House event July 11. The release of the observations became a celebration as a standing-room-only audience in a Goddard auditorium cheered each new image or spectra as well as the scientists, engineers and other involved in the mission. Scientists, some of whom have been involved with JWST for years or even decades, said they were still stunned by the quality of the initial observations, demonstrating that the telescope was performing better than specified. Jane Rigby, JWST operations project scientist at Goddard, said the telescope’s performance became clear with some of the first focused images it returned during the commissioning process. “We have an amazing engineering team and, across the board, we beat spec,” she said. “It was a combination of being giddy in the room, looking at the data, and then going have a little sob because it works.” “I’m a scientist and have been working on this project for 20 years, so we should expect what we saw. But no,” recalled René Doyon, principal investigator for JWST’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph at the University of Montreal. “Several times over the last six months I nearly broke my jaw over what I saw, these incredible images.” The quality of the observations confirmed to them that JWST stands ready to reshape much of astronomy through infrared images and spectra. “How could you not discover stuff if you’re 100 times more powerful than previous telescopes?” said Rigby. “This is going to be revolutionary.” It may take astronomers some time to push the limits of JWST’s capabilities. The telescope has started the first round of science observations, called Cycle 1, based on proposals submitted before the telescope launched. “They couldn’t know just how good Webb was going to be when they wrote those proposals,” Smith said, resulting in some conservative estimates of the number of objects they could see or exposure times. He expects astronomers to be more aggressive when the call for proposals for Cycle 2 comes out late this year. “People will be much more adventurous because they know just how good the facility is.” They and others will get more of a feel for the telescope’s performance July 14, when NASA releases 40 terabytes of data collected during the commissioning process, such as raw images and spectra. That will include the telescope’s first observations of solar system objects, said Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He said they were not included in the original early release observations to ensure the telescope could track moving objects properly. While astronomers were elated with the performance of JWST, they and others were also relieved that the telescope, which cost billions more than expected and launched years behind schedule, is working. “I am so thrilled and so relieved,” said John Mather, senior project scientist for JWST at NASA Goddard and a Nobel laureate in physics for studies of the cosmic microwave background. Asked after the event what was most striking about the early release observations, he said it was the telescope’s performance. “To me it was that all works. Everything works,” he said. “It’s got better image quality than we promised, it’s more sensitive than we promised, and it probably will last longer than we promised.” “We are so thrilled that it works because there was so much at risk,” he continued. “The world has trusted us to put our billions into this and make it go, and it works. So it’s an immense relief.” Mather has been involved with JWST since 1995 and is ready to see the telescope reshape astrophysics. “I’m looking forward to surprises every day,” he said. “I’m wishing for a big surprise, something that’s out there that we never guessed would be there at all.”
A Falcon 9 successfully launched an Earth science mission jointly developed by the United States and France to monitor water levels and the effects of climate change. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 6:46 a.m. Eastern Dec. 16. The rocket’s upper stage released the payload, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft, into an 890-kilometer orbit 52 minutes later. The rocket’s first stage, making its sixth flight, landed back at the launch site seven and a half minutes after liftoff. The launch was previously scheduled for Dec. 15 but SpaceX postponed it to perform inspections of two first-stage engines where moisture was noticed. That moisture could have been water left over from recent rains, leaking fuel or a fluid used in the engine refurbishment process between flights, said Julianna Scheiman, civil satellite missions director at SpaceX, during a Dec. 14 pre-launch briefing. If it was water, the launch could proceed, but if not the engines would need to be replaced, a process that would have delayed the launch by “many days,” she said. NASA said late Dec. 15 that inspections had cleared the launch without requiring an engine replacement. SWOT is a joint mission of NASA and the French space agency CNES to track water levels globally with much better resolution than past spacecraft. “What SWOT will do is give us a ten-fold improvement in the fidelity, the spatial resolution of our measurements of water height,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division, at the pre-launch briefing. That improved resolution will provide new data on ocean circulation and better track changes along coastlines, she said. It will also be able to measure inland water bodies like lakes and rivers that could not be tracked by earlier altimetry missions. “Globally, we’ll be able to go from seeing a couple thousand inland water bodies, like reservoirs, to millions.” Those measurements, she said, are critical for understanding climate change effects, such as rising sea levels. “The measurements from SWOT will help us really understand how this water cycle is changing and the critical role the oceans play in climate change.” The key instrument for SWOT is the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn), which enables the higher resolution water height measurements. KaRIn is installed on a boom 10 meters long that will be deployed starting about four days after launch. “It’s a first-of-its-kind design,” said Parag Vaze, SWOT project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of KaRIn at the pre-launch briefing. “We plan to do it step-by-step, carefully.” That deployment will take about four days, completing the initial phase of post-launch commissioning of the spacecraft. In addition to KaRIn, SWOT carries an altimeter similar to those used on the Jason series of ocean science satellites and a microwave radiometer based on the design flown on Jason-3. Three other instruments are used to precisely determine the orbit of SWOT to enable its science. NASA spent $822.4 million on SWOT, including KaRIn and some other instruments and the launch. CNES spent 340 million euros ($362 million) on the mission, providing the altimeter and other instruments and the spacecraft bus, built by Thales Alenia Space. CNES will also handle spacecraft operations. The Canadian Space Agency and United Kingdom Space Agency also contributed components of SWOT, valued at about $26 million combined. SWOT has a prime mission of three years, but those involved in the mission expect it to last longer. The satellite bus has a rated lifetime of at least 10 years, said Thierry Lafon, SWOT project manager at CNES. “If everything is OK on board, certainly there will be an extension of the mission. Five years is completely reachable,” he said. “I can guarantee we will be able to make this a long mission because we need this data for a long time.” The launch is the first of two Falcon 9 missions planned by SpaceX for the day. Another Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral at 4:21 p.m. Eastern carrying the first two O3b mPOWER communications satellites for operator SES. SpaceX had scheduled a third launch from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A carrying Starlink satellites at little as 20 minutes after the SES launch, but the company said late Dec. 15 it was “prioritizing” the O3b mPOWER launch and delayed the Starlink launch one day.
GREENBELT, Md. — The James Webb Space Telescope, once an albatross around the neck of NASA, has become a symbol of the agency’s capabilities and potentially a tool to win support and funding for other programs. That transformation has become evident with the successful launch and commissioning of the $10 billion space telescope, culminating with the release of initial observations by JWST July 12. The first image, a “deep field” view that captured galaxies from the early universe, was unveiled at a White House event a day earlier. While the public portion of that White House event ended after only about 10 minutes, a private briefing continued with both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in attendance. “You should have seen the president and the vice president last night,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in remarks at the Goddard Space Flight Center here July 12. “They asked just a million questions about a lot of things.” Nelson reiterated than enthusiasm talking with reporters after the Goddard event. “The president says to me last night, ‘Hey, Bill, do you need any money?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I could use a little help with the Office of Management and Budget in your White House,’” he said. That prompted laughter, he recalled, as an OMB official was in the audience at the White House event. The White House did offer NASA an 8% increase in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, seeking nearly $26 billion for the agency. A bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee June 28 trimmed that increase, instead providing $25.4 billion . “I’m not worried about the Congress,” Nelson said, citing public support for the agency and programs that include JWST. “So I think the Congress will respond with what we need.” Several members of Congress attended the JWST event at Goddard, all members of Maryland’s delegation. Among them was Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who serves on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA. In an interview, Van Hollen said senators were still working on topline spending figures for each of the subcommittees. “In the meantime, we’re moving forward in the subcommittees in terms of putting together our proposals,” he said. Regarding NASA’s budget proposal, “we’re going to be pushing very hard to make sure that we fully fund their budget request.” There was little discussion at the event about the past problems with JWST, including billions of dollars in cost overruns and years of schedule delays that, at times, threatened the program with cancellation. “While there were bumps along the way,” Van Hollen said in public comments at the Goddard event, “once the launch happened, everything had to go perfectly. And it did because of all of you.” Scientists involved with JWST saw the space telescope as a symbol of not just what the agency is capable of doing but also humanity. “A lot of people sometimes see pictures of space and it makes them feel small. When I see these pictures, they make me feel powerful that a team of people can make this unbelievable instrument to find out things about the universe revealed here,” said Eric Smith, JWST program scientist at NASA Headquarters. “When we want to, we can do that.” Jane Rigby, JWST operations project scientist at Goddard, said she had a similar perspective, one of “people in a broken world managing to do something right, and see some of the majesty that’s out there.” 
NASA has selected four mission concepts for additional study in the latest round of an astrophysics program, but selected missions could face delays because of budget constraints. NASA announced Aug. 18 it selected two mission proposals for its next astrophysics Medium Explorer, or MIDEX, mission, and two others as missions of opportunity. The MIDEX mission proposals will each get $3 million for nine-month concept studies, while the missions of opportunity will get $750,000 each for nine-month studies. One MIDEX proposal, called the Survey and Time-domain Astrophysical Research Explorer or STAR-X, would fly a wide-field X-ray telescope and an ultraviolet telescope to study transient phenomena like supernova explosions. STAR-X would also perform a deep X-ray survey to map hot gas in galaxy clusters to help astronomers understansd how those clusters developed over time. The other MIDEX proposal, called Ultraviolet Explorer or UVEX, would survey the whole sky in two ultraviolet bands to study the evolution of stars and galaxies. UVEX would also be able to detect ultraviolet emissions linked to gravitational wave events. Of the two missions of opportunity, one, the Large Area Burst Polarimeter or LEAP, would be installed on the International Space Station. LEAP would study gamma-ray bursts linked to supernova explosions or mergers of compact objects. The other, the Moon Burst Energetics All-sky Monitor or MoonBEAM, would fly in cislunar space and detect gamma-ray bursts, working in cooperation with telescopes on Earth and in low Earth orbit to triangulate the source of the bursts. NASA expects to select one MIDEX mission and one mission of opportunity in 2024. The MIDEX mission would have a cost cap of $300 million and launch by 2028, while the mission of opportunity would have an $80 million cost cap and launch by 2027. That schedule could face delays, though, based on reduced projections in the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal for astrophysics. “There’s hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of things we were planning to do in the ’22 budget request that don’t fit in the ’23 budget request any more,” said Paul Hertz at a meeting of the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee July 20. Hertz, at the time director of NASA’s astrophysics division, stepped down from that role earlier this month to become a senior adviser for the overall Science Mission Directorate. One of the effects of those reduced budgets, he said, was on the upcoming MIDEX selection. “The impact of the lowered out-year budget will start in Phase B,” he said, after a mission is selected for development, “where we’ll have to flatten out the ramp-up.” The selected mission will spend more time in Phase B than planned, delaying its launch by an unspecified period. Hertz said that the proposals selected for the mission concept studies will receive instructions from NASA on how to incorporate that revised funding profile and delay into their studies. The selected mission of opportunity will also see a similar delay, he added.
The contracts recently awarded by the National Reconnaissance Office to BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet for commercial satellite imagery will likely reshape the market, says a new report from Quilty Analytics , a research and consulting firm. The Electro-Optical Commercial Layer, or EOCL, contracts announced May 25 “reaffirmed Maxar’s position as the government’s anchor supplier of very high-resolution imagery, while also showing the heightened importance of smallsat constellations from Planet and BlackSky,” says the June 1 report. Maxar’s contract is much larger than those of its competitors, but the spy agency’s decision to award 10-year deals is significant for all three firms, the report says. This extended period “raises the credit quality and capital attractiveness of all EOCL awardees.” Maxar’s contract has a five-year baseline worth $1.5 billion with options for an additional $1.74 billion over the second half of the contract. BlackSky’s contract has a tw0-year $72 million baseline with options worth up to $1 billion. Planet Labs has not yet disclosed the value of its contract. The EOCL awards also send a strong signal from the NRO that it plans to spend more money on commercial satellite imagery than it has in the past, says Quilty Analytics. “A ssuming that Planet’s contract is no worse than BlackSky’s two-year, $72-million baseline, NRO will have raised its annual budget for commercial imagery by 24% above [Maxar’s previous contract] EnhancedView’s $300 million per year,” the report says. “Notably, BlackSky and Maxar strongly inferred that significant upside exists beyond the baseline contract.” Other takeaways from Quilty’s analysis: The EOCL contract continues to leverage Maxar’s legacy fleet of four imaging satellites so it was unchanged at $300 million per year through the first four years, with the potential to step up to $340 million in year five. Maxar’s future constellation WorldView Legion is not, at least initially, covered under the EOCL contract. “This will enable Maxar to monetize 100% of this new capacity with the NRO, other agencies, foreign governments, and commercial customers.” BlackSky’s baseline contract was generally in-line with expectations, but the company’s contract ceiling of about $1 billion over the 10-year period was substantially higher than analysts expected and “implies the potential for significant upside over the baseline contract award.” Maxar remains the top supplier of imagery to the U.S. government, but the company must now plan for long-term competition with BlackSky and Planet, both of which are planning fleets of 30 to 50-cm resolution satellites that will put them in more direct competition with Maxar in a few years. Foreign operators, including those with U.S. subsidiarie s like Airbus, ImageSat, Satellogic and SI Imaging were left out, which reaffirms the NRO’s policy to buy electro-optical imagery only from U.S.-owned, operated, and domiciled companies. The agency, however, said it plans to rely on non-U.S. owned companies for radar imagery and potentially other phenomenologies.
A SpaceX cargo Dragon spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station after a July 14 launch delayed more than a month by a hydrazine leak on the spacecraft. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 8:44 p.m. Eastern, deploying the Dragon into low Earth orbit 12 minutes later. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the station at about 11:20 a.m. Eastern July 16. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean seven and a half minutes after liftoff. The stage completed its fifth flight, having previously launched the Crew-3, Crew-4 and CRS-22 missions for NASA and the Turksat 5B communications satellite. The launch was the 30th so far this year for SpaceX, versus 31 for all of 2021. The Dragon spacecraft, flying a mission designated CRS-25, is carrying 2,668 kilograms of cargo, including science investigations as well as crew supplies, spacewalk equipment and hardware. That total includes 544 kilograms of equipment located in the unpressurized trunk section of the spacecraft. Among the science payloads is an Earth science instrument called the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, or EMIT, that will be installed on the station’s exterior. It will be used to study dust mineral dust in the atmosphere and how it interacts with ecosystems globally. “We really need to be able to model how dust interacts with the full Earth system,” said Robert Green, principal investigator for EMIT at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a NASA briefing in June. EMIT will provide far more data on mineral dust than other sensors. “We will use these new measurements to update those Earth system models and bring better fidelity to the Earth system models.” The instrument will also support planning for the Earth System Observatory line of future missions. The CRS-25 mission had been scheduled to launch in early June. However, NASA and SpaceX postponed the launch after detecting what NASA called “elevated vapor readings” of hydrazine in the spacecraft’s propulsion system. Dragon uses monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide as propellants for its Draco thrusters that handle its approach to and departure from the ISS, and deorbiting at the end of the mission. At a prelaunch briefing July 13, Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said the company traced the leak to imperfections in a “sealing surface” where a valve connects into the propulsion system. “We replaced that valve and then we thoroughly tested the system to confirm that there is no further leakage,” he said. He added the problem was not with the valve itself but with the sealing of joints and unions in the plumbing. The sealing surface around the valve had been “reworked” but appeared fine, he said. Initial tests of the propulsion system during assembly did not detect a leak, but may not have been sufficient to detect that leak if it existed at that time. SpaceX found the leak only in “full up” system testing ahead of launch. “Since then we have made updates to our processes,” Reed said. One involves how to do rework on sealing surfaces for “stricter acceptability.” The company is also incorporating more rigorous testing processes. The issue is isolated to the Dragon spacecraft flying this mission. “We did look very closely at that,” he said, but didn’t find similar problems on other Dragon spacecraft in the fleet. There’s also no sign of any leak on the Crew Dragon spacecraft currently docked to the station on the Crew-4 mission. During the investigation of this leak, SpaceX decided to replace the parachutes on the spacecraft. Reed said that was done as a precaution because hydrazine vapors could have degraded the parachutes. “The initial results from those inspections are coming in and those original parachutes look great,” he said. “We’ll likely use those on a future mission if the teams determine they’re safe to use for flight.” Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said at the prelaunch briefing that NASA plans to keep Dragon at the station for 33 days before undocking and splashing down off the Florida coast. The spacecraft will bring back about 50 science investigations as well as space station hardware that is being repaired or replaced. That includes a spacesuit that suffered a small water leak during a March spacewalk, or EVA, by European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, causing water to pool on his helmet visor. NASA has since suspended spacewalks at the station except for contingencies. Weigel said NASA is eager to get the suit back so engineers can determine the cause of the leak. “That’s really key for us,” she said. “That will be part of what we need for our assessment” to allow spacewalks to resume. After CRS-25, the next commercial cargo mission is NG-18, a Northrop Grumman Cygnus mission tentatively scheduled for mid-October. The SpaceX CRS-26 Dragon mission will follow late in the year, delivering among other cargo a set of solar arrays to be installed on the station by spacewalking astronauts. “That’s our next target for when we’re hoping to be able to do a planned EVA,” Weigel said.
The Russian government dismissed Dmitry Rogozin as the head of the space agency Roscosmos July 15, the same day the agency and NASA signed a long-anticipated agreement to exchange seats on flights to the International Space Station. In a brief statement, the Kremlin announced the Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, had dismissed Rogozin as head of Roscosmos, effective immediately. In a separate statement, the Kremlin announced the appointment of Yuri Borisov, deputy prime minister of Russia, as Rogozin’s successor at Roscosmos. The announcement gave no reason for Rogozin’s dismissal, but it may not be due to displeasure with his management of the space agency. Meduza, an independent Russian news publication, reported July 13 that the Kremlin was considering moving Rogozin into a position in the presidential administration or as a supervisor for two regions of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces. That publication cited sources who said Rogozin was “in favor” with Putin, who was “remarkably friendly” toward him in two public meetings since the start of Russia’s invasion in February. A reason for that, according to those sources, was Rogozin’s bombastic statements and other actions in favor of the war. That included the publication by Roscosmos July 4 of photos showing Russian cosmonauts on the ISS displaying flags of those occupied regions. That prompted complaints from both NASA and the European Space Agency, with NASA rebuking Russia for using the ISS “for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine.” Rogozin said July 12 he would instruct cosmonauts on the ISS to no longer use a European robotic arm on the Nauka module, part of the Russian segment of the station, in retaliation for ESA’s announcement that day it was formally terminating cooperation with Roscosmos on the ExoMars mission. That decision, though, would have more of an effect on Russian operations on the station than European ones. Rogozin didn’t comment on his dismissal beyond a post on his Telegram account that included a video and a message of thanks to Roscosmos. Borisov had been deputy prime minister of Russia since 2018, a post previously held by Rogozin. Before that, he served as deputy minister of defense. Seat barter agreement signed At almost the same time that the Kremlin announced the removal of Rogozin at Roscosmos, NASA announced it had completed an agreement with Roscosmos to exchange seats on spacecraft traveling to the ISS, starting with missions launching in September. Such “integrated crews,” with Russian cosmonauts on Crew Dragon spacecraft and American astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft, are essential to safe ISS operations, NASA explained in a statement. “Flying integrated crews ensures there are appropriately trained crew members on board the station for essential maintenance and spacewalks,” NASA said. “It also protects against contingencies such as a problem with any crew spacecraft, serious crew medical issues, or an emergency aboard the station that requires a crew and the vehicle they are assigned to return to Earth sooner than planned.” NASA confirmed that Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina will go to the ISS in September on the Crew-5 Crew Dragon spacecraft, with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio launching later in the month on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. In addition, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev has been assigned to the Crew-6 mission, launching in spring 2023, while NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara will fly on Soyuz MS-23 around the same time. NASA officials said earlier this week they were hoping to get the barter agreement finalized in about a week. “In order to make sure the training schedules hold for an early September launch, we would like to have that agreement potted by the end of next week. That will ensure that the crew members are all in the right places and their travel is all lined up,” said Dina Contella, operations integration manager for the ISS program at NASA, at a July 14 briefing after the launch of a SpaceX Dragon cargo mission to the station.
After breaking free from most of its debt restraints, British satellite operator Avanti Communications is ready to expand across Africa. Investors agreed in April to swap debt for equity in a deal that slashed Avanti’s $810 million debt burden by two-thirds. Avanti incurred the debt to build out its fleet of five geostationary satellites, giving it Ka-band broadband coverage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. However, the debt came back to haunt the company after it failed to sell its satellite capacity as quickly as planned. Hylas 3, its latest satellite, launched in August 2019 — just before COVID-19 started to disrupt connectivity and financial markets worldwide. As markets start to recover from the pandemic, and with much smaller interest payments to make, Avanti is now redoubling efforts to expand the company’s footprint in Africa. Africa has long been a challenging market for connectivity providers — not least because the average revenue per user is a fraction of what it is in the U.S. and elsewhere. In 2019, Avanti adjusted its business strategy away from consumer broadband to focus more on cellular backhaul, governments and selling capacity to other satellite operators. This strategy was showing signs of progress until it was stalled by COVID-19, according to Avanti CEO Kyle Whitehill. Whitehill expects Avanti will return to growth this year, and points to a partnership the company announced in May with a mobile operator in Senegal as a sign of things to come. Under the five-year deal, local mobile operator Free will build and host a new satellite gateway for an Avanti satellite in the country, extending the operator’s coverage to Senegal and neighboring countries in West Africa: Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Gambia and Liberia. The gateway, subject to the approval of Senegalese authorities, is slated to go live in December, when it will also complete Avanti’s Ivory Coast coverage. SpaceNews interviewed Whitehill to learn more about Avanti’s future strategy. The debt was all about building our space and ground network. Avanti ended up with five satellites and their ground stations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And that’s terrific, but the monetization of the assets hadn’t gone as quickly as planned — I don’t think it was clear what Avanti’s purpose was. It was all about spending money to build a network. Having less debt has two very specific benefits for me. The first one is I think customers and partners were perennially nervous about this. Secondly, we spent so much time on the capital structure. We had so many external parties to manage that it was hard to just focus on the business. Regarding growth ambitions, [the debt reduction] cleans up a ton of the noise and people’s confidence in who we are and our sustainability over time. It’s really simple. I just need to push hard to utilize that capacity and make sure we can grow. We grew pretty quickly between 2018 and 2020, and then kind of got stuck through the COVID-19 period. We see this year as being the re-ignition of growth again. If you’re a big operator like Viasat, Inmarsat, SES and so on, the business model was to build a GEO satellite, take it to market and sell transponders to the broadcast or broadband markets. You would have stability for the 15 years of the satellite, so it didn’t really matter where you got your money from because you had a long-term, profitable commitment in cash flow from that. When you’re a startup subscale operator, it really matters. If you do it through bonds, you’re immediately paying interest on that versus equity, which is someone who’s backing your ambition. That’s what we learned. As a startup, to suddenly end up with a $20 million interest bill every year was such a drag on us. You’re on a hamster wheel constantly trying to keep up with interest payments, rather than focus on the market. Am I immediately looking to do another classic GEO satellite like Hylas 4 with four or five years lead time, costing $300 million, etc.? No, that’s not really what we’re thinking of doing. But what does feel like it’s on the table are partnerships like we announced recently in Senegal. We’re building a new Earth station in Senegal, and that’s going to allow us to service six to eight countries in West Africa that we weren’t previously able to serve. So we’re looking to build our footprint in Africa. Secondly, there’s a lot of capacity coming in the next five to 10 years across LEO, MEO and GEO. We, therefore, feel the first step should be to build our distribution capability and work with people who want distribution in Africa, which we’re good at. That’s where the priority is. The only way you’re going to see widespread distribution of connectivity in Africa is through the mobile operators. These guys are really under pressure from regulators to drive rural distribution. But it’s logistically challenging because you’re physically delivering equipment to very, very remote communities. So now we’re just very focused on supporting tower companies and mobile operators on how to physically deploy these sites. We’re getting toward 60% now. The priorities for getting that up to 70% or so is, firstly, monetizing Hylas-3, which was launched as COVID-19 kicked in. And then there are the 10 to 12 African countries where it’s kind of tougher to do business: Zimbabwe, DRC and so on. If I want to get to that industry standard, I need to be able to monetize those two things. We’re a little bit short of that at the moment, but that’s what the revenue expectation will be for 2023 year-end. There are about four or five commercial initiatives we just need to deliver in the next 12 months and we’ll be there. The challenges of the industry are very clear. I think one of the things the GEO industry did very poorly was see LEO as a threat. For 12 months, we all agonized about customers, [with] analysts and journalists telling us we were all finished. And so [the industry] went into a kind of introspective mode and all got a bit slowed up. Now we are much more open-minded about it. We see customers are going to want a blend of different technologies, and it’s all about delivering what the customers want. For Avanti specifically, the founders of the company basically made a massive bet on Africa. And Africa is not like India. It’s a continent, but with 50 countries, governments, regulators and different ways of doing business. The greatest challenge I have on a day-to-day basis is prioritizing the six to eight countries where the biggest economic value opportunity is, being tenacious about getting that done, and not getting too hung up about being in 50. No, one of our key strategic priorities is being the partner of choice for LEO, MEO and GEO. In Nigeria, for example, I believe capacity will be exhausted quite quickly. So, yeah, we want to be taking LEO to Nigeria. We want to be working with Kenya on what that looks like. We’re super confident of being able to integrate those. A bit like Inmarsat announced with their multi-orbit Orchestra constellation where they’re looking to bundle different networks together, which I think is spot on. First of all, they’re two of my biggest customers. Combining them makes sense. Viasat are bringing three gigantic satellites to the marketplace [for global services], and they are quite U.S.-centric, so they needed some international capability distribution. It has not had an impact on us so far. They’re still operating relatively independently [because the deal has not been completed]. Neither of them are in Africa, and that’s the relationship we have with both — and the U.S. military. I think it shows how passionate Viasat believes in the future of GEO, and I would like to be a positive part of that. For me, it’s been a really interesting positive. I sit on the U.K. Space Leadership Council, which has exploded into activity because the British government is taking [space] really seriously now. There’s critical infrastructure: in Scotland you’ve got one of the biggest smallsat manufacturers in the world, and there’s going to be the first commercial orbital launch out of Cornwall. The U.K. seems pretty good at being at the leading edge of technology. I don’t think you’ll see the U.K. competing with Airbus, Boeing, Thales or Northrop Grumman, but I do think you’ll see small to medium-sized British companies being part of the new ecosystem. Brexit probably provoked a lot of investment and thinking going into the industry. Well, Avanti came out because we had borrowed so much money from so many people and had such a burden of governance that it was obvious to us that we were never going to ask the public markets for money again. And we’ve just delisted all the bonds as well. I think Inmarsat was more driven by the view that the stock market was undervaluing them, which is what the private equity guys all bought into [when they acquired the company in 2020]. The dilemma for the satellite industry is that going public is the best way of borrowing money, but the stock market also really challenges the high capital expenditure, long-term return business model. If you follow the special purpose acquisition company trend in the U.S., there are not so many successful SPACs, and not so many successful satellite startups from SPACs because it’s a tricky business model for the public markets. No is the straight answer to that one. We are supporting people delivering global in-flight connectivity contracts, or global energy contracts, so I don’t have any ambition. My proposition is that if I’m going to work with you, I’m not going to sell against you. I’m not going to compete with you in a direct model. Our ambition is to keep focused on the industry segments we’re in right now. The mobile industry thinks about spectrum as being agnostic. The mobile industry talks relentlessly about 3G, 4G and 5G, but in essence, a block of spectrum allows services to be delivered more or less efficiently depending on the frequencies used. 5G hits the sweet spot for ubiquity and low latency for the mobile industry. The big upside is it’s the first time that the mobile and satellite industries have sat down and decided to integrate with each other up front, rather than retrospectively. Whenever we went to a mobile operator and wanted to integrate our network into theirs, it would take two years of development work — basically, getting the mobile industry to trust the satellite industry. So for the first time both industries are working together, rather than satellite being seen by mobile as someone who has got far too much spectrum that shouldn’t really be with them. One day, every machine will be connected. I’ve always been a big believer in that. It was just unclear what network was actually being delivered because this is not a world of high throughput data. It’s a world of billions of devices being connected by delivering very small and less intense data packets. I think 5G finally gives the industry the opportunity to use an efficient network to deliver this capability. It’s probably not going to be first into Africa, but yes I think it’s pretty exciting. We talk about this nearly every day. We spent four years wondering what on Earth we were going to do with Hylas capacity in Ukraine and the eastern flank. So we’ve been very lucky that we are in a position to be able to help there, and there’s a huge amount of uptake. It fits into three categories. First, let’s call it the reconstruction of Ukraine — there are well-developed interests in knowing what critical infrastructure can satellite deliver in the reconstruction of Ukraine, because they’ve lost pretty much their entire network. Secondly, everyone is worried about what will happen next and if this is going to be a long-term conflict. That eastern flank is a few thousand kilometers long from Turkey right up to Finland. There’s a lot of interest in how to make sure that satellite technology is helping countries understand what’s happening across their borders — not about fighting, much more about what’s going on. Thirdly, almost every major blue-chip international company operates an office from Ukraine. They’ve suddenly lost all the fixed and mobile networks, and they want to keep operating. There’s lots of interest in building satellite networks to help those blue-chip companies continue to trade. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Some companies in the space industry may not survive the coming headwinds in the U.S. and global economies, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said July 11. “I think we’re really looking at a sea state change,” Bruno said at the Space Innovation Summit , an online event Economists and financial analysts are predicting an economic slowdown. Quilty Analytics, a market research firm focused on the space industry, noted that t here were no public equity financings completed during the month of June. “We expect the slowdown in public capital markets activity to continue, at least in the near-term, until market volatility remains subdued for a sufficient period of time,” the company said in a report. The current environment is driving investors to pull back from riskier ventures, including those in the space sector, said Bruno. “What we’ll see now with interest rates up in a recession is a lot more focus on what we invest in,” he said. “So we won’t see companies with dubious business models necessarily being invested in.” Now investors are “being very, very careful about the companies that can really make a difference and understand their market and have technologies that change our country’s capabilities in the marketplace,” Bruno added. “In the past, we have been in an environment with low interest rates, meaning that cash was cheap, it was plentiful, and therefore there was a lot of investment in a lot of different things. That will change.” A realignment in investments is “not all bad,” said Bruno. “In the environment we had before, there wasn’t a lot of discipline around that investment.” “Anything that sounded great was something to be invested in, it led to a strategy of investing in ‘interesting sounding companies’ … if one makes it you’ll be fine. You’ll trade on the valuations of the others as long as you don’t wait too long to get out,” Bruno said. What likely lies ahead is a shakeout and consolidation, and some companies may not survive, he said. “There may be some companies that would have been great to have saved. But the ones that do get invested in are going to get a lot more attention and have a better chance of surviving.” Innovation in space launch Despite economic headwinds, the United States has a healthy space industry that will continue to thrive and innovate, Bruno said. “The good thing for our country’s position right now is that we do have a broader industrial base for launch, as well as for spacecraft and technologies.” ULA is expected later this year to fly a new rocket, Vulcan Centaur, which was designed for the national security market and also won a big commercial contract to launch Amazon’s broadband constellation. Once Vulcan starts flying, Bruno said, the company plans to invest in upgrades, primarily on the upper stage so it can be used for in-space transportation. In these uncertain times, the challenge for space companies is to strike a balance between short-term and long-term goals, Bruno noted. “Where you get into trouble with not innovating for the future or not thinking about the future is where we’re going to have a situation with activist investors or boards,” he said. There has to be a balance between near term results and the long term health of a company,” Bruno said. “And really what you have to do as a CEO and as a management team is to stay focused on understanding the long term trends in the market and what it will take to continue to be a leader in your specific field.” “It can be tough,” he said. “It depends a lot on the makeup of who your investors are, who is sitting on your board, but you just got to stick to it.” Role of government Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, said “there is enormous opportunity right now” for the U.S. government to leverage commercial space and ensure innovative technologies don’t fall by the wayside. Virgin Orbit launches small satellites from rockets that are deployed from a Boeing 747 aircraft. “I think that the government needs to evaluate, select, nurture on a cyclical basis,” Hart said July 11 at the Space Innovation Summit. “There’s capital coming in, there are ideas that are being developed. But there is that chasm of death that we’ve all learned about,” he said, referring to the difficulty of transitioning technologies from research projects and prototypes to government procurement programs with long-term funding. “Government can be a major source of strength in pushing across that,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of innovation going on in the industry and we’re training an entire generation of space professionals,” Hart said. “And that will be one of the biggest things that comes out of this era.”
For four consecutive years, the “State of the Space Industrial Base” report has called out what it sees as outdated thinking in the U.S. government on the use of commercial technologies in space programs. The 2022 edition of the report, subtitled “ Winning the New Space Race for Sustainability, Prosperity and the Planet,” was written by military and civilian officials from the U.S. Space Force, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Department of the Air Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The content of the 110-page report was developed over two workshops held earlier this year with more than 250 participants. It echoes the themes of previous editions , arguing that the United States should lay out a strategy to remain a space superpower that embraces the private sector as a key partner to the government. “China could surpass the U.S. in space superiority if we don’t increase our investment,” Michael Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, said Aug. 24 at an Atlantic Council event to discuss the report. Brown said the United States needs a “national vision” for space investment and innovation to stay ahead of China. The report, for example, says the government has to increase spending in space infrastructure like in-space mining, manufacturing and solar energy, which would stimulate private investment. The space economy is being “profoundly impacted” by private investment, said Brown, which means the government doesn’t have to bear all the cost. “Therefore, what’s required to win the space race is the strengthening of private-public partnerships that emphasize commercial technology over bespoke systems,” he added. “We need to provide government contract revenue to these companies building the future of space.” Steven “Bucky” Butow, space portfolio director at the Defense Innovation Unit, cited the National Reconnaissance Office’s 10-year deals with three commercial imaging satellite operators as an example of how the government should work with the space industry. “These are m eaningful contracts by the NRO,” said Butow. “Now these companies can plan for the future as they are part of the government enterprise.” Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture at the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said the report lays out ambitious goals and bringing them to fruition will require significant cooperation and coordination among government agencies. Felt, one of the authors of the report, said it was important to keep repeating recommendations made in previous years because “we still have a long way to go in these areas.” S trategic plans and long-term visions are “hard things to do and we have not made enough progress.” According to the report, “China is making steady progress toward their goal of surpassing the U.S. as the dominant space power by 2045.” Meanwhile, in the United States, “the agile engineering ecosystem that has become the hallmark of the new space era is at risk due to U.S. policy and procurement practices intended for a different era that embrace static requirements.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – In spite of progress, different Earth observation systems cannot exchange information easily. “The way we are interoperable today is messy and time-consuming and annoying to the end user,” David Gauthier, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Source Commercial & Business Operations Group director, said Oct. 14 at the MilSat Symposium here. A decade ago, U.S. government agencies largely viewed commercial Earth observation as an augmentation of government capabilities. “We now see heavy reliance on commercial observation systems,” Gauthier said. “Because of that reliance, we need something more like a hybrid space architecture with interoperability by design as the basis of that capability.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February and ongoing war is spurring government adoption of commercial Earth observation, including optical, synthetic aperture radar, radio frequency monitoring, multispectral and hyperspectral data. The past eight months has offered “operational proof” of the value of commercial Earth observation, said Nicole Robinson, Ursa Space Systems president. “This capability has been tested in the most challenging of environments and has proven to be critical to revealing what’s happening in an environment where things are changing quite rapidly.” There’s growing recognition of “almost the necessity of the private sector to partner with the public sector in tackling global challenges,” said Peter Platzer, Spire Global CEO. Still, making government and commercial Earth observation systems interoperable remains challenging. “We need to bring some simplicity to the design so that it works more like a plug-and-play architecture,” Gauthier said. “When you seek information it’s instantly available to you and the end user has the experience of not having to fight for integrated information or insights. They’re just available.” Another challenge is trust. “Once you start opening up your information supply chain to many more suppliers than we’ve ever had before, from many different parts of the ecosystem, more many countries, you open up a little bit of a concern when it comes to trusting all that information,” Gauthier said. “The complexity of the problem has increased.” To build trust, government agencies can treat data like elements of any critical supply chain, validating each input. Gauthier pointed out another way to look at trust. “More data from more places has an inherent creation of greater trust, because you are constantly corroborating information with other sources,” Gauthier said. “If I have 100 sources of information from 100 different places and one of them is corrupted, the 99 other ones are telling me that’s the case. I can trust the 99 and still be okay.” Another issue is clearance. In most cases, Earth observation company employees lack the security clearances they would need to understand the problems their imagery and data would help government intelligence agencies solve. “Trying to build an infrastructure that can deliver intelligence to the intelligence community as a commercial operator sometimes feels like we’re throwing darts in the blind,” said Dan Katz, Orbital Sidekick CEO and founder.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket carrying a U.S. Space Force missile-warning satellite lifted off Aug. 4 at 6:29 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The SBIRS GEO-6 mission was the sixth and last of the Space Based Infrared System constellation of geosynchronous satellites equipped with scanning and staring infrared sensors to detect ballistic missile launches anywhere on the globe. The satellite was deployed to a customized geosynchronous transfer orbit approximately 22,000 miles above the equator. After separation from the main stage about five minutes after liftoff, the Centaur began the first of three planned engine firings to deliver SBIRS GEO 6 to the intended orbit. ULA said the payload separated and was released into a geosynchronous transfer orbit nearly three hours after liftoff. The vehicle’s first stage was powered by an RD-180 engine and two solid rocket boosters. The Centaur upper stage was powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C-1-1 engine. The SBIRS satellites are made by Lockheed Martin. The $1 billion GEO-6 is built on the LM 2100 bus and carries a sensor payload developed by Northrop Grumman. The first SBIRS GEO-1 launched in May 2011. ULA has launched all six satellites of the SBIRS constellation. The Air Force in 2018 decided to cancel the procurement of the seventh and eighth SBIRS satellites due to concerns that these systems were not resilient to possible attacks by adversaries. The Air Force moved to a new program, the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared. Three Next-Gen OPIR satellites are being built by Lockheed Martin and the first is scheduled to launch in 2025. SBIRS GEO-6 was the 95th mission of the Atlas 5, a workhorse rocket that ULA plans to retire in the near future as it seeks to end its reliance on the Russian RD-180 engine. While it transitions to a new vehicle, Vulcan Centaur, ULA still has 19 remaining missions under contract for the Atlas 5, said Gary Wentz, ULA’s vice president of government and commercial programs. These include two national security launches, seven civil space crew missions and 10 commercial launches.
TAMPA, Fla. — Egyptian operator NileSat’s latest communications satellite is ready to move to its final orbit after clearing health checks following its June 8 SpaceX launch, according to the spacecraft’s prime contractor. The roughly 4,000-kilogram Nilesat 301 satellite will use onboard chemical propulsion to start its journey within the next couple of days, Sandrine Bielecki, spokesperson for Franco-Italian manufacturer Thales Alenia Space, said June 9. It will likely take about a month for Nilesat 301 to reach its geostationary orbit slot at 7 degrees west, complete further tests and then enter commercial service to expand Nilesat’s African coverage. SpaceX launched Nilesat 301 to geosynchronous transfer orbit with a Falcon 9 rocket at 5:04 p.m. Eastern June 9 from Space Launch Complex 40, located at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Shortly after launch, the rocket’s first stage landed on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for reuse, marking the 116th time the company has successfully landed a first stage. The booster has previously supported six earlier SpaceX launches, including two missions to the International Space Station and satellites for GPS navigation and Starlink broadband. Based on Thales Alenia Space’s Spacebus 4000-B2 platform, Nilesat 301 carries Ku-band transponders for TV broadcasting and Ka-band capacity for internet services. The satellite has a projected 15-year operational lifetime and will eventually replace the Thales Alenia Space-built Nilesat 201, which the Egyptian company expects will run out of fuel in 2028 after its launch in 2010. In addition to covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions that Nilesat already serves with Nilesat 201 and other satellites it leases, the company said Nilesat 301 expands its reach into new markets in southern Africa and the Nile River basin. Nilesat said Nilesat 301 also supplements connectivity services across Egypt and other countries along the Nile provided by Tiba 1, the Egyptian government’s first satellite that launched in 2019 . googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Boeing said July 27 it will take another charge against its earnings because of the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew program as the company and NASA get closer to a first flight of the vehicle with astronauts on board. Boeing, in its second quarter financial results release, said it recorded a $93 million charge in the quarter from its commercial crew program, “driven by launch manifest updates and additional costs associated with OFT-2,” the second uncrewed test flight of the vehicle that took place in May. The company did not elaborate on the specific issues that caused the charge, and only briefly mentioned the program during an earnings call with financial analysts dominated by the company’s commercial airliner programs. “It was important. It was an emotional ‘up’ for all of us at Boeing to get back on track,” David Calhoun, president and chief executive of Boeing, said in the call, referring to the OFT-2 test. He later called the mission “a pivotal and emotional test for The Boeing Company and we feel good about it and we’re ready for the crewed flight.” Boeing has now recorded $688 million in charges related to development of Starliner. The company took a $410 million charge in January 2020 , a month after the original and unsuccessful Orbital Flight Test mission, to cover the costs of investigating the problems and flying a second mission. The company took an additional $185 million charge against earnings in October 2021 after a valve problem delayed the OFT-2 launch last August. The six-day OFT-2 mission in May, though, was largely successful , with no major issues reported during the spacecraft’s launch, docking with the International Space Station and return to Earth. That leaves open the possibility of proceeding with Starliner’s first flight with astronauts on board, called the Crew Test Flight (CFT), before the end of the year. “You saw the Starliner dock with the ISS, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test later this year and achieving the domestic redundancy that is so important to the ISS mission,” John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for the ISS at Boeing, said in remarks July 26 at the ISS Research and Development Conference here. NASA announced June 16 that CFT will fly two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore , rather than the three originally planned to fly the mission. Williams was moved up to CFT from Starliner-1, the first operational Starliner mission. Nicole Mann, who has originally been assigned to CFT, was reassigned last year to SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission launching in September. Mike Fincke, also previously assigned to CFT, will train as a backup for CFT and be available for future flight assignments. The CFT mission, NASA announced then, will last two weeks after earlier proposing to keep it at the station for up to six months. A two-week mission, the agency said, “is sufficient to meet all NASA and Boeing test objectives for CFT,” and a longer stay is not needed since Crew Dragon is now handling crew rotation missions. If CFT is successful, Starliner could start operational missions as soon as the fall of 2023, after the SpaceX Crew-6 mission launching in the spring of 2023. That will be the first of six missions under its Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities, or CCtCap, contract awarded in 2014. NASA has already added three flights to the six awarded to SpaceX under its own CCtCap contact, and announced June 1 its intent to add five more . 
China’s Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft released a small satellite after its departure from the Tiangong space station and ahead of its controlled deorbiting. The release of the Zhixing-3A satellite was not announced by the Tianzhou spacecraft operators, but was revealed by the satellite developers and its service providers and later tracked in orbit by the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, which focuses on space domain awareness. Tianzhou-4 launched May 9 on a Long March 7 rocket from China’s coastal Wenchang spaceport and docked with the orbiting Tianhe core module seven hours later. The mission delivered around 6 tons of supplies to support the scheduled Shenzhou-14 crewed mission which followed in early June. After completing its primary mission the freighter undocked from the completed, three-module Tiangong at 1:55 a.m Eastern Nov. 9, making way for the subsequent Tianzhou-5 cargo mission to dock at the station. Tianzhou-4 was then deorbited over the South Pacific at 6:21 p.m. Eastern, Nov. 15, according to China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA. Zhixing-3A, which CMSA had stated in April was to fly aboard Tianzhou-5, was deployed into orbit from Tianzhou-4 at 5:02 a.m. Eastern Nov. 13, after 188 days in storage and a day ahead of Tianzhou-4’s deorbiting. The satellite was released from a cubesat deployer developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the main spacecraft maker under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and manufacturer of Tianzhou spacecraft. The deployment was initially revealed by a commercial space firm Emposat (Hangtian Yuxing), which provides commercial satellite telemetry, tracking, and control services, with a network including facilities in China, Argentina, France, Kenya, South Africa, Samoa and more. Emposat reported a first uplink from its station in Azerbaijan shortly after deployment, with a first downlink in Xinjiang, west China, minutes later. Days later, 18th SDS cataloged Zhixing-3A as NORAD 54245, tracking the satellite in a 375 x 396-kilometer orbit with an inclination of 41.5 degrees. The satellite was developed by commercial firm Beijing Smart Satellite Space Technology Co., Ltd. The firm announced the remote sensing and radio software satellite was operational on Nov. 25 after completing on-orbit testing. Smart Satellite is planning a constellation of X-band synthetic aperture radar satellites. In July last year it signed a related agreement with 12th Institute of the China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a domestic leader in microwave electron vacuum devices. Emposat also provides on-orbit collision warning and space situational awareness services. The requirement for such commercial services was effectively codified in a “notice on promoting the orderly development of small satellites” ( Chinese ) issued in May 2021, stating that small satellites developed in China should be capable of collision avoidance maneuvers and end-of-lifetime deorbiting. Chinese satellite propulsion startups have also emerged as plans for commercial constellations grow. Tianzhou-5, launched earlier this month to supply the newly-arrived Shenzhou-15 crewed mission, also carried a number of cubesats to orbit. The Tiangong space station’s new Mengtian experiment module has a payload airlock which will allow the small, 5.2-meter-long robotic arm launched with the Wentian module to grasp science experiments and install them on payload adapters on the outside of the module. The on-orbit release mechanism can deploy small spacecraft or CubeSats of up to 100 kilograms into orbit.
When NASA unveiled in 2018 the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, its effort to fly science and technology demonstration payloads on commercial lunar landers, the phrase agency officials often used to describe it was “shots on goal.” The phrase was meant to describe the agency’s acceptance of risk and expectations of success for the program: just as not every soccer ball or hockey puck makes it into the back of the net, not every CLPS mission was expected to touch down successfully on the lunar surface. The payoff would come in more frequent and less expensive ways of reaching the moon to support science and exploration. Today, NASA is still waiting for that first shot on goal. The agency has issued task orders for eight missions to five companies: Astrobotic Technology, Draper, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines and Masten Space Systems. Some of those companies are finally getting close to flying their missions, with launches scheduled for late this year or early next year. Another company, though, has stumbled long before taking its shot on goal. Masten won a CLPS task order in April 2020 for a lander mission to the lunar south polar region. Masten’s XL-1 lander would carry a set of NASA instruments on what the company called Masten Mission One, or MM1. Masten, a small company based at Mojave Air and Space Port in California, had been best known for developing vertical takeoff and landing rockets, including those that won more than $1 million in 2009 in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, part of NASA’s Centennial Challenge prize program. The XL-1 lander would be by far the company’s biggest project. However, the company struggled to develop the lander and delayed its late 2022 launch by a year, citing the effects of the pandemic and supply chain problems. It also failed to raise the money needed to develop the mission, including hiring staff and expanding facilities. Those problems came to a head July 28, when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in federal court in Delaware. The documents Masten filed with the bankruptcy court revealed a company that had bitten off more than it could chew with the CLPS award. “It was proud of its well-earned gritty, non-corporate reputation in the industry,” Masten’s lawyers said of the company, “but this presented problems when the company needed to scale up rapidly.” Masten tried to raise $60 million last year, the filings state, but could not find a lead investor. Timing was an issue: by the time Masten went looking for funding, “many investors interested in making substantial investments in space companies had already done so.” A space company identified in the documents only as Company A approached Masten in March about acquiring it and signed a letter of intent to do so at the end of the month. A month later, though Company A backed out, citing “substantial liabilities recognized to date and additional future projected losses associated with MM1.” Several other potential deals failed to materialize, forcing Masten into Chapter 11 in July. Masten said at the time of the filing the company planned to use Chapter 11 to reorganize. “Masten intends to use the Chapter 11 process to streamline Masten’s expenses, optimize its operations and conduct sale processes that maximize value for its unsecured creditors,” Sean Bedford, general counsel of Masten, said in a statement. However, in an Aug. 14 filing, Masten announced it had a “stalking horse” agreement with Astrobotic to sell “substantially all” its assets for $4.2 million, including a $14 million credit on a SpaceX launch contract. Such an agreement guarantees a minimum Masten would get but allows it to seek better offers. Astrobotic declined to comment on the agreement, and the bankruptcy proceedings are set to wrap up in early September. NASA, which paid Masten $66.1 million of that $81.3 million CLPS award at the time of the Chapter 11 filing, has largely refrained from commenting on the company’s status beyond assuring those with NASA-sponsored payloads on the lander that they will fly, one way or another. “We’ll find out at the end of their Chapter 11 reorganization if they are ready to fulfill the terms of the task order,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during a presentation at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) Aug. 24 at the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. “If they’re not, we’ll go manifest those instruments, those investigations, on other delivery opportunities.” Two other companies are preparing to make their first shots on goal. In April, Astrobotic unveiled its Peregrine lander at its Pittsburgh headquarters. The lander was still being assembled — it was missing solar panels, fuel tanks and payloads — but company executives were confident that Peregrine would be ready for launch before the end of the year. Astrobotic has provided limited updates on the progress of Peregrine since then but is sticking to a launch in the fourth quarter. “We’re continuing integration” of the lander, said Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic, at the LEAG meeting. One complication is that the launch date is not entirely in Astrobotic’s control: the lander is flying on the first launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, which has suffered development delays. “We are planning for a mission at the end of this year,” he said but declined to say when the completed lander would need to be delivered to Cape Canaveral to support that, assuming the rocket is ready. “We are actively executing towards that schedule right now.” Intuitive Machines has also hoped to launch the first of its Nova-C landers, called IM-1, before the end of the year. Problems with a composite propellant tank on the lander, though, delayed work on it. In an interview in April at the company’s headquarters in Houston, Steve Altemus, president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said he was still hoping to launch IM-1 in December but needed to cut 30 days from the schedule to meet that goal. Changes in assembly procedures promised to save 18 days, “so I’ve got to find 12 more days to be able to get off in December.” Those savings, though, didn’t materialize, and by July the company said it now expected IM-1 to launch in early 2023 on a Falcon 9. The payload space on that lander is sold out with a mix of NASA and commercial payloads, said Trent Martin, vice president of Intuitive Machines, at the LEAG meeting. For both companies, their landers are just the first of many missions in development. Astrobotic has a second CLPS award for its Griffin lander, a much larger spacecraft that will carry NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the south pole of the moon. Intuitive Machines has CLPS orders for two more Nova-C landers, IM-2 and IM-3, and is also starting work on an IM-4 mission. Their lunar ambitions go beyond landers. Astrobotic has secured NASA funding for CubeRover, a small rover that would fly on a future lander with technology to survive the two-week lunar night. It also won in August a NASA contract to develop solar panels optimized to work at the south pole. Intuitive Machines is developing a network of satellites around the moon that would relay data from its landers and other missions; those spacecraft will launch as secondary payloads on Nova-C lander missions. “We always assumed we weren’t just building landers,” Martin said. “We’re building landers, providing data back from the moon, and that has expanded into all things cislunar.” Two other companies are in earlier stages of work on their landers. Firefly, best known for its Alpha launch vehicle, won a NASA CLPS award in February 2021 for its Blue Ghost lander, now scheduled to fly to the moon on a Falcon 9 in 2024. Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander at Firefly, said at the LEAG meeting that the company has 50 people working full-time on Blue Ghost. That mission passed an integration readiness review in April, confirming the company was ready to move into integration of the lander. The interconnected nature of the space industry creates for some strange bedfellows. Among the suppliers for Blue Ghost are solar cell manufacturer SolAero and software developer ASI, which are both owned by Rocket Lab, which competes with Firefly in the launch market. Two payloads on the lander are from Honeybee Robotics, which is owned by Blue Origin, another launch company. “We have four different rocket companies working together to help make this mission possible,” Coogan said. “Sometimes it takes a village. The moon is hard.” NASA’s latest CLPS award went to Draper, which is providing the SERIES-2 lander for a mission to the lunar farside under a $73 million task order announced July 21. The lander itself is designed by the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese company ispace and will be manufactured by Systima Technologies, while General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems will be responsible for payload integration and testing. Alan Campbell, program manager for the lander at Draper, said at the LEAG meeting that the lander is quite large. “You can probably fit four or five of us in each of the payload bays,” he said. The lander will ultimately have a payload capacity of 500 kilograms, although it’s unlikely to carry that much on the first mission. Because the landing site is on the far side of the moon, out of view from the Earth, the mission will bring with it two smallsats from Blue Canyon Technologies that will serve as communications relays. Campbell said Draper has booked a launch but declined to disclose details “until we get a few more things in the paperwork figured out.” All the companies say they know the risks of attempting to land on the moon. The recent track record of such missions globally is mixed: while China has successfully landed three times, India’s first lander and one built by Israel Aerospace Industries for privately funded SpaceIL both crashed while trying to land in 2019. “I think we know not 100% of these missions are going to succeed. I don’t think any one of us wants to be that does not,” said Firefly’s Coogan. “I would extend that further to say that I do not want one of the first attempts to be one of the ones that fails.” Astrobotic’s Hendrickson, who has one of those first missions, wants the community to react in much the same way as it did in the commercial cargo program when providers rebounded from launch failures. “We need to steel ourselves and learn from the failures and bounce back,” he said. “We are planning to be more successful than 50/50.” “It will be a higher risk, and I know NASA understands that,” said Intuitive Machines’ Martin. “It’s the shots-on-goal approach: the more we fly, the better this is going to be, the better the technology is going to get.” Among those at NASA who promoted the “shots on goal” approach to CLPS is Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. “We need to have the patience and make sure that the teams can prove themselves so that if the first one fails, we don’t get scared and walk away,” he said in an Aug. 28 interview. The program, he argued, has already helped lunar science. “I think from the science community’s perspective, CLPS has been a huge success already since it’s gotten many more people involved.” That approach, though, has its limits. NASA announced July 18 it was delaying the VIPER launch by a year to do more ground tests of the Griffin lander. That work will add $67.5 million to Astrobotic’s CLPS task order, increasing its value to $320.4 million, far more than other CLPS awards. Zurbuchen said that decision came from a “risk review” that examined whether the risk of flying VIPER, which costs NASA nearly half a billion dollars, on Griffin was appropriate. “The answer was no, you need to add more testing,” he said. “The delivery model is fine, you just need to add more testing. He added NASA examined how much it would cost the agency to develop its own lander for VIPER, following a more conventional approach than CLPS. “The answer is a factor of two or three more,” he said. If CLPS is successful, he sees it expanding beyond delivering science instruments. Such landers could preposition equipment and supplies for Artemis missions, reducing what the crewed landers have to bring with them. But first, those shots have to find their way into the goal. “There’s a non-zero chance that one or multiple of these missions will not work,” Zurbuchen said, at which point the industry will see how committed NASA is to the CLPS approach. “I sure hope we are.” This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
LOGAN, Utah — Spaceflight shipped its Sherpa-LTC2 orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) Aug. 10 to Cape Canaveral in Florida, where it will make a second attempt to debut the chemically powered space tug on a SpaceX launch. The Seattle-based company’s first Sherpa-LTC, which has more powerful thrusters for dropping satellites off in specific orbits post-launch faster than the other tugs it has deployed, leaked propellant in December after integrating with SpaceX equipment at Cape Canaveral. That led to SpaceX dropping the OTV from a Falcon 9 rideshare mission in January, forcing Spaceflight to find alternative launches for 10 cubesats set to hitch a ride on it. Benchmark Space Systems provided the non-toxic propulsion subsystems for both OTVs. The upcoming SpaceX launch will be the first time Benchmark’s Halcyon Avant bi-propellant thrusters have flown in space. Spaceflight CEO Curt Blake said Sherpa-LTC2 has “gone through all kinds of checks to get things right” ahead of its launch in September. Ahead of its four-to-five-day journey via truck from Seattle to Cape Canaveral, the OTV was integrated with a payload for Boeing’s Varuna Technology Demonstration Mission (Varuna-TDM). The demonstrator aims to test V-band communications for a proposed constellation of 147 non-geostationary broadband satellites. “Potential customers and industry partners will have the opportunity to participate in preliminary evaluations of this service, which is intended to provide unprecedented levels of connectivity across the globe to government and commercial customers,” a Boeing spokesperson said. California-based Astro Digital designed and built the payload, and booked the launch from Spaceflight on behalf of Boeing for what will be a dedicated mission. Astro Digital also provided the command and control system for Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC2. SpaceX is slated to launch the OTV as part of a mission to deploy a batch of Starlink broadband satellites that Spaceflight expects will launch to low Earth orbit this fall. If the mission goes according to plan, the Sherpa-LTC2 will deploy from Falcon 9 around 310 kilometers above the Earth, from where the OTV will ignite and transport its customer payload to a 1,000-kilometer low Earth orbit. Frayed SpaceX relationship Spaceflight has relied on SpaceX launches to deploy its expanding line of next-generation space tugs. The first of these was a Sherpa-FX, which has no propulsion, that made its debut as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-1’s rideshare mission in January 2021 SpaceX’s Transporter-2 mission then deployed a Sherpa-FX2 and a Sherpa-LTE — Spaceflight’s first OTV with electric propulsion — later that year in June. After the Sherpa-LTC was removed from SpaceX’s Transporter 3 flight in January 2022, Spaceflight had planned to launch a Sherpa-FX on its next rideshare flight in April. However, SpaceX decided to remove the tug from its Transporter 4 mission following concerns about environmental factors affecting the satellites installed on the OTV. About a week later, SpaceX said it would no longer work with Spaceflight after currently manifested missions. Blake declined to discuss Spaceflight’s relationship with SpaceX, or what would be its last OTV to fly with the company. To broaden its options, Spaceflight announced Aug. 8 an agreement to launch future space tugs on Arianespace’s Vega launch vehicles, including its next-generation Vega C rocket. Spaceflight said it signed a deal to access Vega with Italy’s SAB Launch Services — which also provides launch services on other European launchers — to cover launches starting as soon as next year. Blake said Spaceflight is “very close to identifying specifics” for the customers and Vega missions that would use Sherpa, with the first launch likely around the end of 2023 or early 2024. Spaceflight and SAB are also partnering to offer customers access to shared integration and storage facilities across Europe and the United States. Blake said Spaceflight is talking to “a number of” other launch providers, and “getting close to finalizing deals to launch OTVs on various launch vehicles.” Growing space tug family Meanwhile, Spaceflight has been working through its remaining manifest with SpaceX to develop its space tug product line. In May 2022, the company debuted Sherpa-AC (attitude control), a version for hosting payloads, on SpaceX’s Transporter 5 mission. SpaceX is slated to launch a Spaceflight space tug in mid-2023 when it is set to deploy a Sherpa EScape (Sherpa-ES), which is designed to swing around the moon to deliver payloads in geostationary orbit. According to Blake, its next OTV to fly could be the initial Sherpa-LTC that is under refurbishment. “It’s a possibility,” he said, “we’ve got some customers that want to go, and we’re trying to find the capacity right now.” A large portion of those are new vehicles, he added.
Virgin Orbit successfully placed a set of payloads for the U.S. Space Force into orbit early July 2 in the company’s first nighttime launch. Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 aircraft, Cosmic Girl, took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 1:49 a.m. Eastern. The aircraft flew to its drop zone over the Pacific Ocean west of San Diego, releasing the LauncherOne rocket at 2:53 a.m. Eastern. The rocket entered an initial transfer orbit and, after a 45-minute coast, fired its upper stage engine again before deploying its payloads into a 500-kilometer orbit inclined at 45 degrees. The launch, called “Straight Up” by Virgin Orbit, was performed under a contract with the U.S. Space Force, which designated the mission STP-S28A. The launch was previously scheduled for June 30 but scrubbed about a half-hour before the scheduled takeoff when propellant temperatures were out of acceptable bounds. The mission carried seven payloads, primarily science and technology demonstrations, arranged by the Space Test Program: The launch was the fifth orbital launch for Virgin Orbit overall, and the fourth consecutive successful one. All the previous LauncherOne missions took place in daylight, but this one took place at night, Virgin Orbit executives said in a prelaunch briefing , as practice for future missions whose orbits require such launches. Straight Up was Virgin Orbit’s second mission of the year after a launch in a January. The next launch, expected no sooner than September, will be the company’s first launch from the United Kingdom, flying out of Spaceport Cornwall. That launch is slated to be the first orbital launch by any vehicle from Great Britain. “The success of the Straight Up mission is another exciting milestone on our way to seeing the first satellite launch from U.K. soil,” said Matthew Archer, director of commercial spaceflight at the U.K. Space Agency, in a statement after observing the launch from Mojave. “We are working closely with Virgin Orbit and it was a privilege to be alongside our partners to witness another successful launch for the team.”
Two startups, each yet to fly their first missions, said July 19 they are collaborating on a Mars lander mission they claim could launch as soon as 2024. Launch vehicle startup Relativity Space and in-space transportation company Impulse Space jointly announced July 19 they are working on a robotic Mars lander they anticipate launching as soon as the late 2024 window for missions from Earth to Mars. Impulse would be responsible for building the lander itself as well as the cruise stage and entry capsule. Relativity would launch the spacecraft on the Terran R reusable rocket it is developing. “This is a monumental challenge, but one that successfully achieved will expand the possibilities for human experience in our lifetime across two planets,” Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, said in a statement. “With the delivery capabilities of Terran R coupled with Impulse’s in-space transportation, we are bringing humanity one step closer to making Mars a reality.” The companies offered few technical details about the design of the lander, such as its size and mass. The design of the lander, illustrated on Impulse’s website, is similar to past NASA missions, with a lander encapsuled in an entry capsule with a cruise stage attached to handle operations while traveling for more than six months from Earth to Mars. Upon arrival at Mars, the cruise stage would detach and a heat shield would slow down the capsule as it enters the Martian atmosphere. The heat shield would then detach and parachutes deploy to further slow the lander, which then uses thrusters for a soft landing. The lander, the companies said, will carry payloads “supporting the research and development needed to build toward humanity’s multiplanetary future.” The companies did not disclose the payloads or the payload capacity of the lander. In a written response to questions, the companies said they envision the lander carrying payloads for government and commercial customers, providing services similar to those by companies developing lunar landers that have won business through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The companies, in that response, declined to provide an estimated cost of the mission. “We can say that the overall estimated cost of the mission is significantly less than previous Mars missions. By building on the work NASA JPL has done, we’re able to take those learnings and commercialize missions at a lower cost.” The most recent static Mars lander mission run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Insight mission, cost the agency $814 million, including launch but not including major instruments contributed by international partners. That lander used a design that was based on previous missions, like the Phoenix lander, to reduce development costs. Only NASA and China’s space program have successfully landed and operated spacecraft on Mars. NASA has flown a series of landers from the two Viking landers in 1976 to the Perseverance rover that landed last year. China was successful in its first Mars landing attempt on the Tianwen-1 mission last year. The former Soviet Union’s Mars 3 spacecraft appeared to land successfully on Mars in 1971, but contact was lost less than two minutes after landing and never restored. Beagle 2, a small British lander that flew to Mars in 2003 as a rideshare payload on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, never made contact after landing. Images later showed the lander made it to the surface intact but failed to deploy two of its four solar panels and communications antenna. In 2016, SpaceX announced a proposed “Red Dragon” Mars landing mission launching as soon as 2018 using a version of its Dragon 2 spacecraft it was developing for NASA’s commercial crew program. That mission has NASA support through an unfunded Space Act Agreement that would give the agency access to data from the spacecraft’s entry, descent and landing. However, SpaceX dropped plans for Red Dragon a little more than a year later after electing not to pursue propulsive landings for the Dragon spacecraft . By that time the mission’s launch had already slipped to at least 2020. SpaceX is now pursuing Mars missions through its Starship vehicle. In a 2017 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, he projected launching the first cargo missions to Mars in 2022, a schedule he acknowledged then was “aspirational.” SpaceX has yet to conduct an orbital launch of its Starship vehicle, let alone one to Mars. Relativity and Impulse also have yet to conduct any launches. Relativity is testing its smaller Terran 1 rocket at its Cape Canaveral, Florida, launch site for a first launch later this summer, and expects to have the Terran R rocket ready no earlier than 2024. Impulse, which has raised $30 million in seed funding to date , is working on in-space transportation vehicles but has not disclosed details, or a schedule, for its first mission. In their announcement, Impulse and Relativity appeared to acknowledge the likelihood of delays. The companies said while they were planning a launch in 2024, their exclusive agreement to cooperate on the mission extends to 2029. “With launch windows occurring every two years, extending the agreement to 2029 allows for multiple launch options should we need them,” the companies said in their response to questions.
Space-tracking startup Scout Space announced Sept. 1 it is partnering with Privateer Space , a new venture also focused on space situational awareness services for satellite operators. Scout is based in Alexandria, Virginia; Privateer is located in Maui, Hawaii. “The collaboration is focused on integrating Scout’s systems architecture and data collection capabilities with Privateer’s data solutions,” the companies said in a statement. Privateer developed Wayfinder, a visualization tool to track satellites and debris in space that ingests data from commercial and government sources. “ The two companies plan to explore building out joint offerings that further enhance their respective datasets on space objects and events,” said the statement. Eric Ingram, co-founder and CEO of Scout, said the collaboration is “in the initial stages and we’re looking into how we can best combine our capabilities. There could very well be joint products in the future, but we are at the early stages of that process.” Scout developed a sensing payload that uses machine vision technology for in-space navigation and surveillance. The first one launched in June 2021 on an Orbit Fab’s on-orbit refueling spacecraft and is currently in operation. “We are working towards our own satellites for space situational awareness,” said Ingram. The company designed a space-sensing cubesat known as OVER-Sat expected to launch before the end of 2023. “We are excited to collaborate with Scout to advance our product capabilities to better track debris and enable sustainable growth for the new space economy,” said Travis Blake, chief commercial officer of Privateer, a venture founded by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Ripcord CEO Alex Fielding, and University of Texas-Austin professor Moriba Jah.
United States Central Command, responsible for military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, on Dec. 2 activated a Space Force component known as U.S. Space Forces-Central The Space Force unit will be based at U.S. Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. Up until now, the Air Force component of U.S. CENTCOM was responsible for coordinating space-based services and support such as positioning, navigation and timing, satellite communications and missile warning. The new space component will be led by Space Force Col. Christopher Putman. “U.S. Space Force-Central provides CENTCOM a subordinate command focused solely and continuously on space integration across the command,” he said in a news release. “Activating this component under CENTCOM provides expert guardians to work with coalition and regional partners to integrate space activities into shared operations and adds another level of commitment to partners,” said Putnam. CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla said space “underpins every element of warfighting in the CENTCOM region.” Since the Cold War, he said, “space has ceased to be a sanctuary. It is no longer solely the realm of progress and peace.” The standup of Space Forces-Central follows the Nov. 22 establishment of U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific within U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Within weeks, Iceye will transfer the full capability of one synthetic aperture radar satellite collecting imagery and data over Ukraine plus access to other satellites in its constellation to the Ukrainian government under a contract with a charitable organization. Iceye announced an agreement Aug. 18 with the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation, an organization established by a Ukrainian actor to provide drones, armored vehicles and humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian Armed Forces in response to the Russian invasion. In a statement, Prytula called the agreement with Iceye “a significant step in responding to the Government of Ukraine’s urgent request for critical Earth observation data and it will greatly benefit our Armed Forces.” Iceye is working closely with the Ukrainian government to delivery the SAR service “in the coming weeks,” Iceye CEO Rafal Modrzewski told SpaceNews by email. Iceye will continue to operate the SAR satellites and will provide the Ukrainian Armed Forces with frequently updated satellite imagery on critical locations, according to the news release. “With this agreement, Iceye further builds on its efforts to provide objective data and technological support to Ukraine,” Modrzewski said in a statement. “We firmly believe SAR technology and its capabilities will continue to add significant value to the Government of Ukraine, now enabled by the work of the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation.” SAR satellites, which gather imagery during the day, at night and in all weather conditions, have been a particularly valuable tool in a war that began in Eastern Europe in February. Iceye has launched 21 satellites since the company was founded in 2014. Not all of the spacecraft remain in operation, but the company doesn’t disclose exactly which satellites are still gathering data. Still, Iceye claims to operate the world’s largest constellation of SAR satellites. Iceye customers include organizations like the Ukrainian government seeking access to the full capability of a SAR satellite and customers who prefer to send tasking orders to be filled by any satellite in Iceye’s constellation. “It is very dependent on the requirements of the particular country,” Pekka Laurila, Iceye chief strategy officer, said by email. “Sovereign control of satellites and their operations can be very meaningful for some governments, but there are differences. Others prefer to ensure effectiveness through managed spacecraft operations together with Iceye. Ultimately, what practically all share is a need for having reliable access to information exactly when they need it.” In early March, Iceye announced on Twitter that the company was “saddened by the war in Ukraine” and “cooperating with the relevant government authorities” to provide assistance.
A Japanese billionaire has selected an eclectic group of people who will accompany him on a SpaceX Starship flight around the moon, although it remains uncertain when that mission will take place. In a Dec. 8 video, Yusaku Maezawa revealed the eight people he selected, along with two alternates, for his “dearMoon” circumlunar flight. The announcement was the culmination of a competition he started more than a year and a half ago. Maezawa, who originally expressed interest in flying artists with him on the mission, selected a range of creative individuals for the mission, from photographers and filmmakers to an actor and singer: The two alternates for the mission are Kaitlyn Farrington, an American snowboarder, and Miyu, a Japanese dancer. The ages of the crew range from 22 to 47, and seven of the eight prime crew members are men. “They are all fantastic people. They all have beautiful smiles,” Maezawa said. “There isn’t a set task for each of them, but I hope each and every crewmember will recognize the responsibility that comes with leaving the Earth, traveling around the moon and back within a week.” The selection process had been shrouded in mystery since a March 2021 deadline for submissions. In a release, the project said it received more than one million applications from 249 “countries and regions” around the world. (There are 193 nations who are members of the United Nations.) The project had not provided updates since last year on the selection process, to the consternation of some applicants who publicly complained about a lack of communications. The project did not respond to a request for comment about the status of the mission in October, when SpaceX announced a second circumlunar Starship flight that will include Dennis Tito, the first private astronaut to go to the International Space Station, and his wife. Dodd, whose “Everyday Astronaut” YouTube channel has more than one million subscribers, said in a video he underwent a “handful of interviews” and a “thorough medical checkout,” followed by an in-person meeting with other finalists for the mission. “Then there was one final interview, but it was actually just a call to tell me that I was chosen to be part of the crew.” Dodd said he was informed “quite a while” ago. He attended Maezawa’s launch to the ISS on a Soyuz space tourism mission one year ago , along with at least some of the other people also selected for the dearMoon flight, according to footage in his video. Maezawa didn’t explain why he announced the crew now other than it coincided with the one-year anniversary of his Soyuz launch. He tweeted Dec. 4 that he would make the announcement on the anniversary after an online meeting with Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, but it was not clear if Maezawa needed approval from Musk to make the announcement. He also did not state when he expected the mission to launch. When Maezawa and Musk originally announced the flight in September 2018 , they expected it to take place in 2023. While a schedule included in documents announcing the crew showed a launch in 2023, that is highly unlikely as Starship has yet to attempt its first orbital launch. Tito, in an October press conference to announce his own circumlunar Starship flight, said he predicted there would be “hundreds” of Starship flights before his own. “This is not going to happen in the near term,” he said, but also did not estimate when he thought his mission would fly. The two circumlunar flights will be preceded by at least one crewed Starship flight as part of the Polaris program of missions backed by billionaire Jared Isaacman. “We are confident that we will have this vehicle fully tested out and ready to go by the time we fly this mission,” Aarti Matthews, director of Starship crew and cargo programs at SpaceX, said at that October briefing, adding that commercial flights like dearMoon and Tito’s mission would be “pretty independent” of SpaceX’s work on a lunar lander version of Starship for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign. SpaceX has won more than $4 billion in NASA contracts to develop lunar lander versions of Starship for missions as soon as 2025. Dodd, in the video, apologized for having to be “vague” about topics like the schedule for dearMoon and other mission milestones. “There’s some stuff that I just won’t be able to talk about.”
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb said June 14 it successfully tested high-speed services on a commercial airliner last month using its low Earth orbit network. Video streaming, online virtual reality gaming and other low-latency capabilities were demonstrated on a Boeing B777-200LR that took off from a public airport in Texas May 27, according to OneWeb. The British startup said an electronically steered antenna on the aircraft achieved 260 megabits per second download and 80 megabits per second upload speeds. However, OneWeb added this performance was achieved under test conditions and does not represent the commercial services it plans to offer. The tests validated the terminal’s aircraft installation and integration, the company said, and demonstrated reliable connectivity during taxi, take-off, landing and other typical flight maneuvers. The plane flew for just over an hour after taking off from Fort Worth Alliance Airport. Aircraft equipment integration specialist Stellar Blu Solutions provided the terminal platform, called Sidewinder, which incorporates electronically steered array technology from Ball Aerospace. More Sidewinder flight tests are slated throughout 2022. The companies aim to certify and make the platform available for the commercial aviation market — from wide-body airliners to regional jets — in mid-2023. With 66% of its planned 648 satellites in LEO, OneWeb is currently only serving the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere as it waits to resume satellite deployments this year. The operator had to pause its launch campaign in March after getting caught up in sanctions resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last month, U.S.-based inflight connectivity provider Gogo announced plans to use a smaller electronically steered antenna from Hughes to connect lighter business jets to OneWeb satellites. “Both [antennas] use best-in-class technologies from leading industry partners, reinforcing our approach to developing and deploying a viable, credible and certifiable solution for the aviation industry by the aviation industry,” OneWeb spokesperson Nick Maynard said. OneWeb has said its constellation will be ready to connect business aircraft in 2024. SpaceX has also been testing its Starlink LEO broadband constellation on aircraft of different sizes. Jet service provider JSX has an agreement to become the first air carrier to provide Starlink this year. Larger commercial carrier Hawaiian Airlines aims to provide Starlink to its passengers in 2023 .
Orion Space Solutions announced Aug. 16 it was selected by the U.S. Space Force to develop three small satellites for a demonstration of on-orbit services in geostationary Earth orbit. The $44.5 million contract is for the Tetra-5 mission , a project intended to help the Space Force figure out how to take advantage of commercial technologies to inspect objects in space, and to service geostationary satellites 22,000 miles above Earth that perform critical missions and are expensive to replace. Orion Space , based in Louisville, Colorado, will work with several subcontractors, including Hera Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton and Scout Space. Chad Fish, chief operating officer of Orion Space, said the satellites for this mission will be about the size of two carry-on bags and will be delivered in about five years. The contract, awarded by the Space Force’s Space Enterprise Consortium, includes spacecraft and payload design, assembly, integration, testing and ground support. The Tetra-5 satellites will have sensors for rendezvous and proximity operations, and docking interfaces for refueling. Bidders have to install refueling ports in the satellites and have a choice of using interfaces developed by Orbit Fab or by Northrop Grumman. Sergio Gallucci, co-founder and chief technology officer of Scout Space , said the Tetra-5 program “represents a very important focus on critical advancements to spaceflight operations in the more congested and contested space domain of today.” The company develops sensor technology for in-space surveillance. In 2021, Orbit Fab deployed an on-orbit refueling vehicle equipped with Scout’s spaceflight vision system. Michael Johnston, vice president of space at Booz Allen Hamilton, said the company is “excited to support this new, increasingly critical mission area for the Space Force: in-space proximity operations, servicing, and life-extension of our nation’s critical space assets.” 
China is preparing to launch the final missions to complete its three-module Tiangong space station which it plans to keep constantly occupied for at least a decade. A Long March 5B is being assembled and tested at Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan. The 849-metric-ton rocket is expected to launch the third and final module for the Tiangong space station at the end of October. Mengtian (“dreaming of the heavens”) is a 17.9-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter and 22-ton module designed to host a range of science experiments with areas of research including fluid physics, combustion and materials science and space technologies. The module was fueled for launch Oct. 9, according to China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA. After insertion into orbit by the Long March 5B first stage, Mengtian will rendezvous and dock with Tiangong, joining two earlier modules—the Tianhe core module and Wentian experiment module—in orbit to complete the Tiangong space station. Wentian, launched in July, was transpositioned from the forward docking port on Tianhe to the starboard port Sept. 30, making way for the arrival of Mengtian. The new module will likewise dock with the forward port and be moved to the port docking ring, completing the T-shaped Tiangong space station. The crew of the ongoing Shenzhou-14 crewed mission are then likely to perform an EVA to assess Mengtian and set up equipment. Meanwhile a Long March 7 rocket arrived at Wenchang Oct. 11 and will be assembled to launch the Tianzhou-5 cargo mission. Launch could take place in the first half of November. Tianzhou-5 will be the fourth cargo mission to Tiangong and will provide supplies for the upcoming Shenzhou-15 crewed mission. Before this, Tianzhou-4, which supplied Shenzhou-14, will undock from Tiangong and be deorbited to make way for Tianzhou-5. Meanwhile, at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, a Long March 2F and the Shenzhou-15 crew spacecraft are being readied for a launch that could take place as early as late November. The pair have been in a state of standby for launch to Tiangong in the case of an emergency in orbit. It would take 8.5 days to be made ready for launch in an emergency scenario. When Shenzhou-15 does reach Tiangong, the new crew will be greeted by the Shenzhou-14 astronauts. This will mark China’s first direct crew handover. Shenzhou-14’s return to Earth days later will complete the construction phase of the space station, just over 30 years after the project was formally approved. Mariel Borowitz, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, notes that China’s completion of the Tiangong space station will be a significant accomplishment, both as an impressive scientific feat and for demonstrating their space capabilities compared to the United States. “With the completion of their modular space station, China has a capability that is broadly in line with that offered by the International Space Station,” told SpaceNews via email. “In addition, China’s space station is newer and likely to outlast the International Space Station, currently expected to be retired in 2030, which may offer China more stability in their low Earth orbit activities. “China has stated on numerous occasions that they welcome international engagement related to their station, so it will be interesting to see whether any such engagement occurs now that the station is complete.” China intends to keep the space station permanently inhabited for at least a decade, gaining human spaceflight experience, conducting a range of experiments and potentially exploring commercial possibilities. The Xuntian optical module—a co-orbiting, Hubble-class space survey telescope—is planned for launch in late 2023 or 2024. Xuntian will be capable of docking with Tiangong for maintenance and repairs. The space station itself could also be expanded from three to six modules, according to Chinese space officials. Such an expansion may depend upon other countries joining the project.
LOGAN, Utah — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says the agency has “gotten what we need” from an authorization bill that became law Aug. 9. President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act during a White House ceremony. The bill, primarily intended to stimulate domestic production of semiconductors, i ncluded the first NASA authorization act in more than five years . Its provisions featured support for NASA’s exploration programs and a formal extension of International Space Station operations to 2030. Biden briefly mentioned the NASA portion of the bill in remarks at the ceremony. “Right now, as Bill can tell you,” he said, referring to Nelson, who was in attendance, “NASA has a mission: going back to the moon, and then to Mars, the sun and beyond, capturing images of distant galaxies we could only once dream existed and we could never think we could see.” Shortly after the signing ceremony, Nelson told members of the NASA Advisory Council he was satisfied with the bill. “In our NASA authorization, we have basically gotten what we need,” he said. “The authorization gives us things that we have sought for years,” he said at the council’s Aug. 9 meeting, such as the ISS extension. He also mentioned “little nits and nats” in the bill, such as a long-term extension of the agency’s authority to enter into enhanced use lease agreements of agency facilities with companies and organizations. Nelson said he is turning his attention to the ongoing fiscal year 2023 appropriations process. NASA requested nearly $26 billion for 2023, a level matched by a draft bill released by Democratic leadership of the Senate Appropriations Committee July 28 . A House bill approved by appropriators in June provides NASA with about half a billion dollars less than the request. “Appropriations is always a struggle,” he said. Nelson did not discuss details of the appropriations process but expressed hope that a final 2023 spending bill could be enacted before the end of the year. “There is a convergence of interests in the Senate,” he said, citing the retirements at the end of the current Congress of Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I think there is some synergy there to want to get this thing wrapped up.” Even with the outcome of the fiscal year 2023 appropriations process uncertain, Nelson said the agency is working with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget on its fiscal year 2024 budget request that will be released next February. “I had a few conversations down at the White House today,” he said of the ongoing work on the 2024 budget. “That’s what’s going on in the meantime.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat said June 8 it has started beaming a test navigation signal from an aging satellite to help the United Kingdom replace space-based capabilities it lost following Brexit. The British satellite operator is leading a group of local companies that are developing an alternative to the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), which Europe uses to augment and improve GPS services in the region. The U.K. lost access to EGNOS satellites and ground stations last summer as a result of the country’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union. This includes access to the EGNOS Safety-of-Life (SoL) service that enables aircraft to make high-precision landing approaches with fewer costly ground-based navigation aids. The U.K.’s departure from the EU also means the country is no longer involved in Galileo, Europe’s global satellite navigation system (GNSS) that is set to reach full operational capability this year. The British government has said it is looking to develop a variety of independent space-based capabilities in the wake of Brexit, which also aligns with its strategy to expand the country’s domestic space industry. According to Inmarsat, it has repurposed a transponder on its I-3 F5 satellite to broadcast a positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signal that provides a test bed for replacing EGNOS SoL services. The operator said the signal will help British companies and regulators validate plans for a sovereign UK Space-Based Augmentation System (UKSBAS) to supplement GPS. The plan is for UKSBAS to use an overlay signal to improve services for satellite navigation users in U.K. airspace and waters, increasing positioning accuracy to a few centimeters compared with the few meters provided by standard GPS alone. Although I-3 F5 was launched in 1998 to provide connectivity over the U.K. and the Atlantic Ocean, Inmarsat spokesperson Matthew Knowles said it is expected to have enough fuel to continue operating even after the first phase of the UKSBAS tests are due to wrap up in July. Goonhilly Earth Station is providing the signal uplink for the tests from Cornwall in the southwest of England. GMV NSL, the U.K.-based satellite navigation specialist owned by Spanish technology provider GMV, is generating navigational data from the signal. Knowles said the companies were awarded about $1.5 million last year from the UK Space Agency, via the European Space Agency’s Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP), to conduct the first phase of the tests. He said further testing phases are set to take place through mid-2024 before UKSBAS can become operational. In 2017, Inmarsat started conducting tests for a similar augmentation network from another satellite in its fleet for Australia and New Zealand, which are in the middle of procuring an operational system through an open government tender. Knowles said their program is “expected to begin perhaps later this year or early next year.” Navigational independence The British government had initially embarked on plans to develop its own GNSS following Brexit. However, the government effectively decided not to pursue a full-fledged satellite navigation constellation in September 2020, when it replaced the GNSS project with its Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Programme (SBPP). Inmarsat was one of six companies in May that won UK Space Agency awards under SBPP — worth more than two million British pounds in total — to study technical and cost issues associated with satellite navigation systems. UK Space Agency spokesperson Gareth Bethell said these companies have since reported their findings to the government, which is considering them and “is working on next steps.” Knowles said the UKSBAS project “will help build up skills and capability in the industry” should the government decide to pursue independent satellite navigational capabilities. British megaconstellation startup OneWeb, which is partly owned by the British government, is also considering adding PNT to services to its current and next-generation satellites. Startups including California-based Xona Space Systems, which recently deployed a test satellite , are also developing plans for constellations that could supplement or replace existing GNSS capabilities.
TITUSVILLE, Fla — NASA has completed an agreement for a second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station with Axiom Space, the only company that bid on the opportunity. NASA announced Aug. 31 that it signed a “mission order” with Axiom Space for the mission, scheduled for the second quarter of 2023. The Ax-2 mission will fly four private astronauts to the station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft for a 10-day stay. NASA announced in December it selected Axiom for the second private astronaut mission (PAM) opportunity , at the time scheduled for some time between the fall of 2022 and the spring of 2023, and would start negotiations with the company on the formal mission order. Axiom flew the first such PAM, Ax-1, in April of this year. “Our new Ax-2 crew, together with a full mission manifest of science, outreach, and commercial activities, will continue to increase utilization of the International Space Station National Laboratory and demonstrate to the world the benefits of commercial space missions for all humanity,” Derek Hassmann, chief of mission integration and operation at Axiom, said in a statement. Axiom has yet to disclose the full crew for Ax-2. The company said last year the mission would be commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson , an Axiom employee, with a customer, John Shoffner, serving as pilot. Axiom has not announced who the other two customers flying on the mission will be. NASA said in its statement that Axiom will present proposed prime and backup crews to the ISS partners. That includes a new requirement that the mission be commanded by a former astronaut . “Following review and approval from NASA and its international partners, the prime crew members for the mission will be named,” the agency said, with training scheduled to start for the full crew in the fall. NASA announced its support for two private astronaut missions to the ISS a year in 2019 as part of a broader low Earth orbit commercialization strategy that includes support for commercial space stations intended to ultimately succeed the ISS. It solicited proposals in mid-2021 for the second and third PAM missions after originally selecting Axiom for the first PAM, Ax-1. “With each new step forward, we are working together with commercial space companies and growing the economy in low Earth orbit,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA Headquarters, said in the statement. “In addition to expanding access to orbit for more people, we are also hoping these private astronaut missions will help the industry learn and develop the skillset to conduct such missions.” NASA published Aug. 15 the source selection statements for the two PAM missions it requested proposals for last year. For PAM 2, the opportunity NASA awarded to Axiom Space, the document reveals that Axiom was the only company to submit a proposal. NASA graded the proposal favorably, with an overall score of “Good”, in the middle of a five-step adjectival rating system. “Overall, the Axiom Space proposal was a competent proposal representing a credible response to the solicitation, with strengths and weaknesses essentially balancing each other,” the agency concluded. NASA credited the proposal with several strengths, including its selection of a former NASA astronaut as mission commander a year before NASA made that a requirement, as well as its choice of partners for the mission. However, the agency raised concerns about a lack of information “to support its proposed claims to financially support and execute the proposed mission” as well as its ability to carry out a wide range of activities during the mission. Axiom’s proposal for Ax-2 also included an unspecified activity “for which NASA policy decisions are currently in work and which could impact that activity.” Axiom submitted a revised proposal that removed that activity. When NASA announced last December the selection of Axiom Space for the second PAM, it said it decided not to award a third PAM at the same time. “NASA will gather lessons learned from the first private astronaut flight as well as other applicable station activities and announce a new flight opportunity in the future,” the agency said then. According to the source selection statement, NASA received two proposals for the third PAM, from Axiom Space and Shuttle IO Technologies. Both, though, received the lowest rating of “poor” and NASA decided to select neither. Axiom’s proposal has some of the same strengths of its other one, but was given a weakness because “their proposal significantly lacked conceptual information regarding their proposed primary objective which prevented NASA’s ability to evaluate the merit of the proposed mission concept,” according to the statement. Axiom offered a secondary mission proposal in case “interest is not sufficient to proceed with the primary mission,” but the agency ruled that was an additional proposal that could not be considered under procurement regulations. The public version of the source selection statement doesn’t describe what that primary objective was, and portions of the document are redacted. The agency also gave the company a weakness because of a lack of financial information, including “identification of the source of funds to cover the deficit of the AX-2 proposed mission.” The Shuttle IO proposal was even worse, lacking details on how it would carry out the mission, raise funding for it, or identify key suppliers and partners. The company proposed “a wide variety of mission objectives” that would “result in high technical complexity and would require significant NASA resources, facilities and/or services” to be carried out in a short time, the document stated. Those mission objectives were redacted in the document. The company has disclosed few details about its plans. On its website it says it is “a luxury marketplace that connects people to space travel experiences enabling more commercial astronauts” but doesn’t elaborate on those efforts, inviting people instead to sign up for a waitlist. The Ax-2 mission will be the first to use an updated pricing policy for private astronaut missions, where NASA will charge $4.8 million per flight for integration and basic services and $5.2 million per flight for ISS crew time. There are additional per-person, per-day charges for food and other crew provisions, transporting those items to the station and disposing trash from the station that vary based on mission requirements. There are also charges for cargo and crew time for “private astronaut mission specific commercial activities.”
LOGAN, Utah — Canada’s MDA sees a growing opportunity to expand its international space business from the United Kingdom, where it plans to double its team to 80 employees in the next 12 months. Anita Bernie, who was appointed managing director for MDA’s U.K. unit in March, said the company has just moved into a larger, dedicated facility to accommodate this growth in Harwell, England. “The facility includes substantial cleanrooms and a state-of-the-art development laboratory,” Bernie said. The U.K. seeks a bigger portion of the global space industry to expand its post-Brexit economy. The British government’s national strategy to become a major space power includes investments in emerging technologies and streamlined licensing regimes to foster a more business-friendly environment. Canada, which joined the space race behind the Soviet Union and the United States with the launch of its first satellite in 1962, also sees an opportunity to bolster its space industry. The U.K, and Canada are “working more closely together than ever before,” Bernie said. The countries’ respective space agencies signed a memorandum of understanding in October to strengthen ties between their governments, space companies, and academic institutions. “MDA is a great example” of the U.K.-Canada relationship, Bernie said, and “provides multiple opportunities for our nations to work more closely together in support of our mutual space interests.” While MDA is best known for developing the robotic Canadarm used on the International Space Station, the company’s services span space operations, geo-intelligence, and satellite systems. MDA’s U.K unit recently partnered with debris removal startup Astroscale to study the feasibility of a UK Space Agency-funded mission to remove two satellites from low Earth orbit by 2025. Bernie said work on the Columbus Ka-band antenna, which was installed on the ISS Columbus science module last year, leveraged capabilities from across MDA’s sites in Canada and the United Kingdom. She said the antenna, dubbed ColKa for short, is operational and provides increased bandwidth for the Columbus module by communicating through European Data Relay System satellites. “We are participating in a range of flagship missions to return to the lunar surface, deliver in-orbit servicing missions and provide communications capabilities for astronauts onboard the International Space station,” she added. Earlier this year, U.S.-based Lockheed Martin said it was looking to set up a satellite manufacturing base in the United Kingdom to expand its global space business. The aerospace and defense giant has been looking into the feasibility of a facility that could focus on building satellites, their parts or ground networks and could include a research and development center.
The U.S. Special Operations Command awarded Viasat a $325 million contract to provide communications equipment and networking services over the next five years, the Pentagon announced Nov. 22. Viasat, a satellite operator and global communications services provider based in Carlsbad, California, will support USSOCOM’s program executive office for tactical communications systems, USSOCOM, based in Tampa, Florida, is a unified military command with components from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force. Under the indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) agreement, Viasat will provide communications hardware, technical support and network integration services. The sole-source contract extends the deal Viasat won in 2017 when USSOCOM awarded the company a $350 million five-year IDIQ contract for critical mission networking and communications equipment, sustainment and support services.
SAN FRANCISCO – Telespazio intends to play a key role in the future in-orbit servicing market, providing customers seeking satellite relocation, refueling, repair or removal with the necessary space and ground-based capabilities. “There is an industrial role that Telespazio can definitely play on the basis of 61 years of experience in providing operational service,” Marco Brancati, Telespazio head of innovation and technical governance, told SpaceNews . “On the other side, Telespazio can be a kind of broker, combining the needs of the owners of in-orbit assets with the availability of tugs able to provide specific services.” For now, Telespazio can assist satellite operators with orbit-raising, repositioning, station-keeping and deorbit. Over the longer term, the joint venture between Leonardo and Thales, intends to provide services for spacecraft designed for in-orbit repair, refueling, assembly or deorbit. “One possibility for the future is to perform refueling in orbit or to replace some unit of the satellite that has been broken,” Brancati said. “In that case, you need the availability of a tug with an automatic arm that is able to replace units on the satellite that needs such service and satellites assembled in a way that someone can replace units.” Telespazio will draw on the company’s experience as it establishes its satellite-servicing business. In terms of orbit-raising, Telespazio assisted the European Space Agency in moving the Advanced Relay and Technology Mission satellite to its intended orbit in 2003. After the satellite, called Artemis, was injected into the wrong orbit due to a launch failure, Telespazio helped salvage the mission by firing the onboard electric thrusters to raise its orbit. Telespazio has experience deorbiting satellites as well. Telespazio worked with Motorola, the parent company for the first Iridium constellation, to determine the actions that would need to be performed to deorbit Iridium satellites at the end of their useful lives. When satellites require the help of servicing vehicles or tugs, “we can utilize the best available solution in order to solve the problem of any customer having its own assets in orbit,” Brancati said. “Although technologically neutral, clearly the in-orbit servicing role we wish to play is facilitated by the expertise in this sector of our shareholders.” Rome-based Leonardo is developing robotic arms for NASA and ESA Mars missions. And Thales, based in the French city Cannes, has expertise in space tugs. “Telespazio does not own in-orbit assets,” Brancati said. “We do own a ground infrastructure.” Initially, companies that manufacture space tugs are likely to work directly with customers. “But we are convinced that in the medium term, it will be easier for them to rely upon a third party like Telespazio from the operational standpoint and they can concentrate on the manufacturing phase.” In-orbit servicing is likely to become increasingly important for commercial space operations and space exploration. Future commercial space stations could serve as a base for tugs, Brancati said. Space logistics is one of seven “innovation domains” identified by Telespazio. For the next decade, the company also will focus on space domain awareness, digital twins applied to space services, quantum communications, moon exploration and launch services. “A company like Telespazio that was born 61 years ago needs to plan for the medium and long term, not only the short term,” Brancati said.
TAMPA, Fla. — California startup Turion Space said Aug. 24 it has secured U.S. regulatory approval to sell space situational awareness (SSA) services from its first satellite next year. SpaceX is slated to fly the venture’s Droid.001 satellite May 15 on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission, Turion Space CEO Ryan Westerdahl said in an interview. Lithuania-based NanoAvionics built the bus for the satellite, which will provide imagery for Australian in-orbit inspection startup HEO Robotics, Turion Space’s first customer. Droid.001’s primary mission, however, is to test imagery capabilities that Westerdahl declined to specify for an SSA business he sees as a stepping stone toward more direct in-orbit services. After deploying three to four more SSA-focused Droids by around mid-2024, he said the startup plans to test a vision system for autonomous rendezvous operations with one of its spacecraft already in low Earth orbit. “By 2025, we want to do our first docking and de-orbit demonstration,” he said. Westerdahl ultimately envisions a constellation of Droids that can be tasked to provide services as needed. When that mission is over, they would return to their “home orbit” to track objects in space until they are called upon again. “We’re an early-stage startup and we don’t necessarily know how big our constellation is going to be yet,” he said. “All I can tell you with certainty for now is we’re going to build as many as we can, as fast as we can, without spending all our money and without going bankrupt.” Turion Space has raised $7.5 million in venture capital, which he said covers its first two satellites. The startup plans to deploy its second satellite in the fourth quarter of 2023, although it has not yet selected a launch provider. Earlier this year, Turion Space secured four contracts worth a combined $1 million from the U.S. Space Force’s Orbital Prime program, which will support the development of its in-orbit logistics capabilities. Orbital Prime launched last year to focus on emerging in-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing capabilities. Westerdahl said the startup is using funds raised from government contracts for research and development on the logistics side of its business, as well as finding ways to expand its SSA capabilities. Money raised from venture capital investors is supporting an SSA-focused commercial business, which would use early satellites that are not going to be focused on space logistics. “Although we think in-space logistics is a market primed for takeoff, we are prioritizing moving fast and deploying revenue generating assets early to maximize learning and market traction,” he said Turion Space, which employs 17 full time engineers, is one of a rising number of early-stage companies that are developing space-based solutions to improve SSA.
A U.S. Space Force infrared sensing demonstration satellite launched in July will soon start receiving data, the Space Systems Command announced Oct. 24. “The Wide Field of View (WFOV) geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) demonstration satellite is set to receive ‘first light’ data from its sensor after calibration is completed,” the command said. The WFOV is a mid-sized spacecraft made by Millennium Space with an infrared sensor payload developed by L3Harris under a 2016 contract from the U.S. Air Force. It launched in July on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The satellite will be able to continuously monitor large sectors of the Earth’s surface, said Col. Heather Bogstie, senior materiel leader for resilient missile warning and tracking at Space Systems Command. “This satellite has a new type of focal plane, a 4K by 4K focal plane that we have not used before,” she said. “This way we can see over 3,000 plus kilometers of the earth’s coverage at any one time, which is unprecedented.” The infrared imagery, once analyzed, will help develop new missile-warning sensors that the Space Force will deploy in low and medium Earth orbits , said Bogstie. “We’ll be able to collect a lot of information about current and emerging targets, threats, their signatures and profiles, and that information will be ready for future programs to leverage,” she said. “They’ll know exactly where to look and what they’re looking for.” The data from WFOV will be analyzed at the Space Force’s TAP Lab , short for Tools Applications and Processors lab, in Boulder, Colorado. Col. Brian Denaro, space sensing program executive officer at Space Systems Command, said his office plans to request industry bids for AI tools to analyze WFOV data. “We’ll be seeking industry solutions for exploiting data from the recently launched WFOV demo for operational use,” he said last week at the Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles. “That satellite is getting checked out now, we’ll be turning on the sensor very soon.” He said the Tab Lab will serve as a “sandbox for you to bring your algorithms and your systems to practice with real data.” The Space Force needs AI tools to handle massive amounts of data collected not just by WFOV but also by all its other infrared and environmental weather sensor satellites currently in orbit. Data analyzed at the Tap Lab is used for military operations, as well as to support firefighters and for meteorological services.
Updated 4:50 p.m. Eastern with details from SEC filing. WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic announced July 6 it signed an agreement with a Boeing subsidiary to build two new aircraft that will be used as launch platforms for its next-generation suborbital spaceplanes. Virgin Galactic said Aurora Flight Sciences will build two carrier aircraft, or motherships, that will succeed the original WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, called VMS Eve, that it has used for carrying SpaceShipTwo vehicles aloft on suborbital spaceflights. The companies did not disclose the value of the contract, but according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the contract includes a mix of fixed-price and time-and-materials task orders, with incentives to Aurora if it completes the planes on time, under budget or with improved performance. Aurora will manufacture components of the aircraft at its factories in Columbus, Mississippi, and Bridgeport, West Virginia. Final assembly of the planes will take place at Virgin’s production facility in Mojave, California. The first plane is scheduled to enter service in 2025, but the companies did not disclose when the second plane will be completed. The contract also includes delivery of a static test article that Virgin Galactic can use for structural integrity analyses without taking the planes out of service, according to the SEC filing. Virgin Galactic released few technical details about the new planes. The company described them as being easier to maintain than WhiteKnightTwo, which was built by Scaled Composites and started flying in 2008. That plane is currently in an extended maintenance period in Mojave for repairs and other upgrades that company officials previously said will improve its reliability and increase its flight rate. “Our next-generation motherships are integral to scaling our operations. They will be faster to produce, easier to maintain and will allow us to fly substantially more missions each year,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in a statement. The company said each plane will be designed to support up to 200 launches a year. Aurora Flight Sciences, based in Manassas, Virginia, was founded in 1989 and was acquired by Boeing in 2017. While the company is best known for its work on remotely piloted aircraft and urban air mobility, it also produces components for drones, helicopters and business jets. “Aurora’s decades of experience in aircraft design, composite manufacturing and vehicle integration, coupled with our world-class engineers and manufacturing technicians, enables us to provide the unique expertise and capabilities necessary to complete these next-generation aircraft,” Per Beith, president and chief executive of Aurora Flight Sciences, said in the statement about the deal. The first of the two planes will be ready around the time Virgin Galactic plans to introduce its new Delta-class suborbital vehicles. As with the new aircraft, the company plans to work with what it called “tier one” aerospace manufacturers to produce the Delta-class spaceplanes, with final assembly at a Virgin Galactic facility. The company has not yet disclosed who will build those vehicles or the location of that final assembly facility. Both VMS Eve, the WhiteKnightTwo plane, and VSS Unity, the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, remain in Mojave for extended maintenance. Virgin Galactic said those vehicles will return to commercial service in the first quarter of 2023, the same timeline it provided in its quarterly earnings release May 5 . Before that release the company had planned to resume commercial suborbital flights before the end of 2022.
TAMPA, Fla. — Satcoms equipment maker SatixFy started trading publicly Oct. 28 after its stock listing overcame waning investor interest in blank check mergers and the death of its co-founder and former CEO. Israel-based SatixFy listed on the New York Stock Exchange following its merger with Endurance Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) with no prior revenue. SatixFy’s shares are trading under the SATX symbol on NYSE American, the NYSE’s exchange for small, high-growth companies. The shares closed Oct. 28 at $29.39, up more than 40% from starting the day at $20.92. David Ripstein, who became SatixFy’s CEO after Yoel Gat died from cancer a month after announcing the SPAC merger in March , said being a public company creates “significant value and transparency” for customers as it prepares for significant growth. SPACs helped launch nine space companies to the public markets last year; however, their popularity among investors has faded following the lackluster performance of these stocks. The capital space firms have been getting once these mergers wrap up has also dwindled as more SPAC shareholders ask for money back instead of shares in the combined company. SatixFy has said it expects to raise up to $230 million in gross proceeds by merging with Endurance, which is backed by New York-based private equity firm Antarctica Capital. Following adjustments to the merger that cut SatixFy’s valuation by more than half to $365 million to help push the deal through, the companies set up an agreement to sell shares up for redemption to an investment fund for later resale. SatixFy plans to use proceeds from its SPAC deal to fund an aggressive sales strategy for the antennas, terminals, and modems it produces based on semiconductors developed in-house. The emergence of broadband constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO) is “creating a massive opportunity for SatixFy’s next-generation technologies,” Ripstein said. The company also recently announced plans to join a wave of space companies hoping to create a direct-to-smartphone satellite market. SatixFy’s chips will “enable low power-usage and cost-effective” antennas for “space applications such as direct-to-cell to deliver broadband directly to handheld cellular devices,” according to Ripstein. “We expect to play a key role in enabling the 5G satellite technologies of the future and expect this will become another strong market segment for SatixFy over time.” In March, the company forecast revenues to soar from $22 million in 2021 to $374 million in 2026 on the back of expanding LEO constellations. Its customers include British LEO broadband operator OneWeb, which plans to use terminals from SatixFy to provide Wi-Fi on planes. Canada-based Telesat also plans to use SatixFy modems for the landing station antennas it will need to connect to its proposed LEO network. The closure of SatixFy’s SPAC transaction l eaves lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines as the only other space company with a SPAC merger in the works. Meteorological intelligence startup Tomorrow.io and space logistics company D-Orbit scrapped their SPAC merger plans this year, citing challenging market conditions.
Article updated with comments from York Chairman Chuck Beames. Clarification: Redwire acquired the Belgian space business from British defense firm Qinetiq, rather than the entire British defense firm. SAN FRANCISCO — AE Industrial Partners announced plans Oct. 4 to acquire a majority stake in York Space Systems, a small satellite manufacturer and turnkey mission operator based in Denver. Terms of the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of the year, were not disclosed. “From our perspective, York is the last remaining independent satellite manufacturer of scale,” Kirk Konert, AEI partner, told SpaceNews. “They built a business that is changing the smallsat market with their bus design and manufacturing process to bring technology to both the defense and commercial markets in a more rapid and more cost-efficient manner.” York has grown rapidly since it was established in 2012 to produce standard small satellites for a variety of missions. York’s most high-profile success to date was its selection to provide spacecraft for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency Transport Layer Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 . In recent years, York has continued to expand its manufacturing plant , recently opening a facility in the Denver Tech Center that is large enough to produce 70 satellites at a time. York CEO Dirk Wallinger said in a statement that AEI “is the ideal partner for York as we look to rapidly scale the business. The firm’s deep sector knowledge as well as AEI’s experience in aerospace production will be critical as we continue to grow York and deliver for our customers.” After the agreement with AEI is completed, Wallinger will continue to serve as York CEO and York Chairman Chuck Beames will remain on York’s board of directors. Beames called the AEI investment s “another step in the right direction,” propelling York’s campaign to expand production, increase satellite autonomy and produce high-quality spacecraft for commercial and government customers. Some competing satellite manufacturers have suggested that York must be losing money on every satellite the company sells because the firms prices are lower than those of competitors. Beames laughed at that assertion and said York is one of the few space startups that is already profitable. Beames anticipates growing government and commercial demand for York’s S-Class platform for 180 kilogram satellites and LX-Class bus designed for satellites with a total mass of about 350 kilograms. Some small satellites operators are adopting larger platforms. Meanwhile, some government agencies that operate large spacecraft are looking to small satellites to take over certain missions. The people who invested in York and other small satellite manufacturers “all believed that would happen,” Beames said. “That’s why we put our own capital into these companies.” AEI remains bullish on the space sector. “We think space is the best place to invest invest capital right now,” Konert said. “We’re excited about the sector both from a government budget perspective and from a commercial perspective. Obviously we’ve got an interesting financial macro backdrop, but that’s not stopping us from investing long term in the sector.” AEI created Redwire Space in 2020 after acquiring Adcole Maryland Aerospace, Deep space Systems and Made In Space. Redwire, which became a publicly traded company in 2021, has since acquired several other companies including the Belgian space business from British defense firm Qinetiq in a deal announced Oct. 3. AEI, meanwhile, has invested in Virgin Orbit , Terran Orbital and Sierra Space . Other U.S. small satellite manufacturers have attracted investors and buyers. Boeing purchased Millennium Space Systems in 2018. Raytheon Technologies acquired Blue Canyon Technologies in 2020. Lockheed Martin Ventures began investing in Terran Orbital in 2017 and owns a minority share. Still, Terran Orbital remains an independent satellite manufacturer, said Marc Bell, Terran Orbital chairman, CEO and co-founder. Bell called the AEI investment in York “a huge validator” for satellite bus manufacturers.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA has awarded SpaceX a $1.15 billion contract to develop an upgraded version of its Starship lunar lander and fly a second crewed mission. NASA announced Nov. 15 it completed a contract modification for what is formally known as Option B of its Human Landing System (HLS) contract with SpaceX. Option B covers upgrades to the Starship lander originally selected for HLS by NASA in April 2021 for $2.9 billion. The option also includes a second crewed demonstration landing mission. “Continuing our collaborative efforts with SpaceX through Option B furthers our resilient plans for regular crewed transportation to the lunar surface and establishing a long-term human presence under Artemis,” Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA HLS program manager, said in a statement. “This critical work will help us focus on the development of sustainable, service-based lunar landers anchored to NASA’s requirements for regularly recurring missions to the lunar surface.” NASA announced its intent to exercise Option B in March when it unveiled its Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) effort to fund development of a second Artemis crewed lunar lander . SpaceX could not compete for the SLD award, but NASA said it would instead exercise the option in SpaceX’s original HLS award to upgrade Starship for later Artemis missions that will carry more astronauts and remain on the moon for longer periods. When NASA announced its intent to exercise Option B, it was not clear when that second mission would fly. However, agency officials said last month that the Option B mission would be Artemis 4, a mission that NASA previously planned to devote to work on the lunar Gateway and not include a landing. The lander selected for development under SLD would fly its demonstration mission no earlier than Artemis 5. SpaceX is continuing preparations for a first orbital launch attempt of Starship at its Boca Chica, Texas, test site. In a Nov. 14 static-fire test, SpaceX fired 14 of 33 Raptor engines in the vehicle’s Super Heavy booster, the most ignited in a single test. Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, tweeted afterwards that the company would follow the test with a 20-second engine test, “possibly one more static fire, then orbital launch attempt.” At an Oct. 31 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee, Mark Kirasich, deputy associate administrator for Artemis Campaign Development at NASA, said the first Starship orbital launch attempt could take place as soon as early December . That schedule depended on both testing of the vehicle as well as receipt of a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. He said NASA was closely following that upcoming test flight as one of the milestones in the development of the lunar lander version of Starship. NASA is currently soliciting proposals for the second Artemis lander, with a Dec. 6 deadline. The agency expects to make an award for that lander in June 2023.
The British government announced a series of measures June 23, from regulations to funding active debris removal projects, intended to make the country a leader in space sustainability. George Freeman, minister for science, research and innovation, announced a package called the Plan for Space Sustainability intended to create a standard that will encourage companies, along with investors and insurers, to adopt best practices for sustainable space operations. The goal of the effort is to “set a global commercial framework for the insurability, the licensing, the regulation of commercial satellites so that we drive down the cost for those who comply with the best standards of sustainability,” he said in a speech at the Fourth Summit for Space Sustainability by the Secure World Foundation and the U.K. Space Agency. “We have to mainstream sustainability in our commercial sector.” The plan has four main elements, although Freeman provided few details about them in his remarks. One is a review of the U.K. regulatory framework for all orbital activities. “Our ambition is to lead in the global regulatory standards for orbital activities. We want it to be industry led and government backed,” he said. A second element is to work internationally on space sustainability in organizations such as the United Nations and the G-7 nations. The third part of the plan is to develop “simple, accurate metrics” for measuring sustainability of space activities. Freeman was vague on what would be included on those metrics, which he said would be developed over the next several months, but said they could serve as a “kitemark,” or standard of safety and quality, that could attract companies as well as environmental, social and governance (ESG) investors. “To me, success will be when people start to say that you have to get your orbital license in the U.K. because if you’re compliant, the costs of insurance go down, the costs of licenses go down,” he said. “We need to give a lead and show what ESG-compliant space technology, space launch, space orbit programs look like. If we can do that, in a simple way to begin with, I think we’ll start to unlock some of that ESG funding.” The fourth element is a modest amount of additional funding for an active debris removal program. The government said in a statement that it would provide £5 million ($6.1 million) for the next phase of that program, allowing it to “move at pace” to select two teams later this summer. The government awarded three contracts with a combined value of about £1 million last year to consortia led by Astroscale, ClearSpace and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. for initial feasibility studies. The government also confirmed £5 million for the National Space Surveillance and Tracking Programme. That program is starting a collision assessment service for U.K.-licensed satellite operators. Freeman’s speech came a day after recorded remarks at the conference by Charles, Prince of Wales, on space sustainability. “We must develop a sustainable way, a durable way, of benefiting from space, just as we must here on the Earth,” he said. He called for an “Astro Carta” for space sustainability, one he said could build upon the U.S.-led Artemis Accords “to establish both peaceful but, crucially, sustainable space exploration.” He didn’t elaborate on what that agreement would contain or how it would be developed. Freeman endorsed the Astro Carta concept, drawing parallels with England’s Magna Carta. “What Prince Charles is setting out, very powerfully, is that we need a similarly noble set of principles to guide us,” he said. “I think the Astro Carta piece is about setting some principles, that we must go into space in this next phase with sustainability absolutely at the heart of everything we do.”
Momentus has deployed additional satellites from its first space tug that encountered technical problems shortly after its launch in May and is moving forward with a second launch later this year. The company said Aug. 2 that it deployed four satellites from the Vigoride-3 tug in July, in addition to two that were deployed three days after its launch May 25 on the SpaceX Transporter-5 rideshare mission. A seventh satellite, Bronco-Sat 1, was deployed from a second port on the Transporter-5 launch. All six of the satellites deployed from Vigoride-3 were “PocketQube” satellites, five centimeters on a side, from FOSSA Systems, a Spanish company developing an internet-of-things constellation. The company had seven such satellites on the tug. The tug also carried an eighth PocketQube from an undisclosed customer as well as SelfieSat, a two-unit cubesat developed by Orbit NTNU, a Norwegian student space organization. Vigoride-3 was primarily a demonstration mission of the company’s orbital transfer vehicle technology. However, the spacecraft suffered problems after launch that included communications issues and solar arrays that did not deploy properly after launch. The company said in mid-June that its confidence Vigoride-3 could complete its mission “has substantially declined” but had not provided any additional updates until the Aug. 2 statement. Momentus said its engineers had identified the root cause of the anomalies with Vigoride-3 but did not disclose details about the problem. An independent review team agreed with the conclusions of the company’s engineers. “We have completed our own internal reviews and welcomed an independent review team that conducted a comprehensive assessment of our first mission,” John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said in the statement. “We learned a lot from our first Vigoride demonstration mission already and intend to learn everything we can before the mission is over.” He said the company is moving ahead with its next vehicle, Vigoride-5, scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 mission in November. Rood said the company is “intently focused” on incorporating corrective actions on that vehicle in time for the launch. Shares in Momentus closed up 11.3% in trading Aug. 2 after the company announcement but are still near a 52-week low.
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA has assigned two veteran astronauts to the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft in the latest reshuffling of personnel assigned to the long-delayed mission. NASA announced June 16 that Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore will fly the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission no earlier than late this year. The mission will travel to the International Space Station on a flight currently expected to last two weeks. Both Williams and Wilmore have extensive spaceflight experience. Williams was on two long-duration ISS missions in 2006–2007 and 2012, with a total of 322 days in space. Wilmore was pilot of the STS-129 shuttle mission in 2009 and spent six months on the ISS in 2014–2015. NASA had previously assigned Williams to Starliner-1, the first operational Starliner mission to the ISS. Wilmore had been part of CFT since 2020 when he replaced Boeing commercial astronaut Chris Ferguson, who dropped out of the mission for personal reasons. At the time NASA assigned Wilmore to CFT, he was to fly with fellow NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann. However, NASA reassigned Mann in October 2021 to the SpaceX Crew-5 mission, scheduled to launch this September. In the announcement of the new CFT assignments, NASA said that Fincke will now train as a backup for CFT “and remains eligible for assignment to a future mission.” At a briefing last month before the launch of the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 uncrewed test flight of Starliner, Fincke, Williams and Wilmore all said they were training together as a “cadre” and not necessarily assigned to a particular mission. Wilmore said that had been the case since the initial OFT-2 launch attempt in August 2021 was postponed because of a problem with the valves on the spacecraft. “Since that time in August, the three of us have been working as a cadre supporting Starliner, and we know we are not necessarily assigned to CFT,” Wilmore said. A two-week mission, NASA said, “is sufficient to meet all NASA and Boeing test objectives for CFT.” Several years ago, NASA proposed extending CFT to as long as six months to ensure NASA access to the ISS given uncertainty about future purchases of Soyuz seats that the agency had been relying on for its astronauts. With SpaceX’s Crew Dragon now handling routine crew rotation missions, that extension is no longer needed. NASA has not yet set a date for the CFT mission. In the statement, the agency expected to make a “launch schedule assessment” at the end of July after reviewing data from OFT-2 and any changes needed to Starliner after that mission. Additional factors include the schedule of other missions to the ISS and the launch schedule for United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5, which launches Starliner. “Starliner and the Atlas 5 performed well during all phases of OFT-2, and now we are taking a methodical look at each system to determine what needs to be upgraded or improved ahead of CFT, just as we do with every other crewed flight,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said in the NASA statement. With the reassignment of Williams to CFT and the earlier shift of Josh Cassada to Crew-5, the only astronaut still part of Starliner-1 is Jeanette Epps. NASA said it still plans to fly Epps on that mission but that she has also been training on Crew Dragon “for additional scheduling and resource flexibility.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the award Aug. 3 of a $15 million contract for cloud services to SAIC and Carahsoft. The award, made by NOAA’s National Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) under an existing purchase agreement, calls for the companies to provide “up to 200 petabytes of egress capabilities and discounted storage services” over three years “through Amazon Web Services to meet operational requirements,” according to a NOAA news release. Moving data processing and storage to the cloud is a priority for NESDIS. “NESDIS leadership has determined that cloud computing is our future, and the organization is moving intelligently to the cloud,” Kenneth Casey, deputy chief of the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Center Data Stewardship Division, said in 2020. The agency sees cloud services as a tool for providing robust dissemination of imagery and data to partners, while making data freely available online. NESDIS also plans to expand its use of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for working with cloud-based data. “The fixed-price nature of this egress award will accelerate cloud migration, creating opportunities for increased value delivery to the users with a faster research-to-operations transition and future cost avoidance for refreshing on-premises systems,” according to the news release. NOAA has conducted a series of pilot programs to demonstrate cloud infrastructure. For example, NESDIS is working with Microsoft and Xplore to send data from polar-orbiting weather satellite NOAA-18 to the Azure cloud.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX is unlikely to offer shares in its broadband company Starlink to the public until 2025 or later, according to a report citing comments its CEO Elon Musk made to employees last week. Musk said he did not know exactly when Starlink could list shares on a public stock exchange, reported CNBC citing an audio recording of a June 2 SpaceX company meeting, but guessed it would be in three or four years. He reportedly reaffirmed a need for more financial stability in Starlink’s business before launching an initial public offering (IPO) of shares. SpaceX, which did not respond to a request for comment, has for years faced questions from potential investors about the possibility of carving Starlink out of SpaceX for an IPO. CNBC said it had also obtained an email Musk sent to employees in May 2019 about how it could make sense to turn Starlink into a public company in three years or so. However, when asked in March 2020 about reports that SpaceX was considering spinning out Starlink, Musk said he was “ thinking about that zero ,” and was instead focusing on avoiding the bankruptcies other satellite constellation companies have suffered. In February 2021, Musk said in a tweet that Starlink will launch an IPO once “we can predict cash flow reasonably well.” In a tweet Feb. 9, 2021 , he said: “SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable.” SpaceX has been raising billions of dollars from private investors to help expand Starlink’s coverage worldwide to gain a critical mass of subscribers to sustain the business. The company has launched more than 2,600 satellites to date for the constellation and — a ccording to a video presentation Musk tweeted June 5 — Starlink’s services are now available in 32 countries and have nearly 500,000 users. Earlier this year, SpaceX said soaring inflation had forced the company to raise prices for Starlink. For Starlink’s standard service plan in the United States, the price of its terminal increased from $499 to $549, while the cost of service increased from $99 to $110 a month. Musk also warned SpaceX employees June 2 how shares in public companies can lose value if they fail to meet expectations, CNBC reported, and said stock prices are a distraction.
SAN FRANCISCO – Silicon Valley startup Array Labs raised $5 million in a seed funding round backed by Seraphim Space and Agya Ventures, a real estate technology fund. With the infusion of capital, Array Labs is developing a constellation of radar satellites to fly in formation and gather global 3D imagery. “We’re imaging the same location at the same time from multiple different perspectives,” said Andrew Peterson, Array Labs co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “That allows us to generate a high-resolution three-dimensional data product for the first time.” Since founding the company in 2021, Array Labs has participated in two high-profile accelerators: Seraphim Space Camp and Y Combinator. The accelerators have opened doors to potential investors, customers and industry partners, Peterson said. After investing in 11 Earth-observation and satellite-communications, Seraphim Space investors thought they had “seen companies across all modalities,” said Lewis Jones, a San Francisco-based associate with Generation Space, Seraphim Space’s U.S. division. “But no one had contemplated 3D datasets in a cost-effective manner.” Two decades ago, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate planned to operate three radar satellites in formation as part of a reconnaissance mission called TechSat 21. The program was canceled in 2003. “The technology wasn’t there yet,” said Peterson, an aerospace engineer who previously worked for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Moog Space and Defense. “With cubesats and the new RF componentry we have thanks to 5G, we’re able to do new things.” Currently, demand for 3D imagery is often satisfied with airborne lidar. Array Labs will offer better coverage and less expensive data, Jones said. Jones and Peterson also see important applications for Array Labs’ 3D datasets in evolving markets for virtual and augmented reality. “All the blue-chip tech companies are trying to build digital twins of the world,” Peterson said. “If I want to drop a character into a virtual scene, being able to understand where the buildings and physical features are would be super helpful.” In preparation for its constellation, Array Labs is designing a three-unit cubesat equipped with a flat panel antenna that has a solar array on its backside. The technology demonstrator is scheduled to launch within 18 months. An operational cluster would follow 12 to 18 months later. “Within the next two or three years, we will have an initial constellation of these satellites operating and collecting data,” Peterson said.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX warned June 21 that its Starlink broadband network would become unusable for most Americans if a proposal to use the 12 GHz band for terrestrial 5G is approved. U.S.-based satellite broadcaster Dish Network is seeking permission to operate a high-power mobile service in the 12 GHz band, which is part of the Ku-band spectrum that Starlink, OneWeb and other satellite operators use to connect with user terminals. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX said tests it conducted in Las Vegas shows how the proposed network would cause Starlink users to “experience harmful interference” more than 77% of the time. Starlink would be “subjected to total outage of service 74% of the time,” wrote David Goldman, SpaceX senior director of satellite policy. “This analysis verifies what should be intuitive—that a high-power terrestrial network would blow out anyone using the high-sensitivity equipment satellite consumers must use to receive signals that comply with Commission and international power restrictions on satellite downlink transmissions,” he said. “As a result, vastly fewer Americans could be connected using next-generation satellite services, and those that remain would experience degraded service and regular network outages.” He said SpaceX’s analysis highlights inaccuracies and “egregious assumptions” in earlier interference studies commissioned by RS Access, a holding company that, like Dish Network, has licenses in the 12 GHz band that it wants to upgrade for a 5G network in the United States. One study for RS Access estimated a nationwide 5G network would cause interference to less than 1% of terminals used by non-geostationary satellite operators, and also detailed solutions that would mitigate the impact. However, Goldman said this analysis is “untethered from reality,” and fails to address factors including how satellite operators share their spectrum through coordination arrangements. “In fact, SpaceX recently announced that it reached a coordination agreement with OneWeb, but historic accomplishments like this require the flexibility that comes only with full access to this shared band,” he wrote in the letter to the FCC. He said RS Access’ analysis also assumes its terrestrial network would only cover dense urban areas, and that it would be geographically separated from satellite operators that would remain in almost entirely rural areas. That would require Starlink to essentially forgo “often unserved or underserved users” in these urban areas. According to SpaceX’s study, harmful interference from a high-power mobile service in the 12 GHz band would extend more than 13 miles from the macro base station in unobstructed conditions. SpaceX urged the FCC to reject Dish Network’s 12 GHz proposal, and to investigate whether earlier technical studies submitted to the regulator were intentionally misleading. Dish Network spokesperson Meredith Diers said the company’s “expert engineers are evaluating SpaceX’s claims in the filing.” RS Access did not respond to a request for comment. The letter is the latest exchange in a bitter regulatory feud between SpaceX and Dish Network that has been taking place in FCC filings for years. In a June 13 letter to the FCC, Dish Network counsel Pantelis Michalopoulos called on the regulator to force SpaceX to deactivate Starlink customers that have installed antennas on moving boats and cars, because the company does not yet have permission to operate mobility services. Goldman told the FCC in SpaceX’s June 21 letter that regulatory “attacks” from Dish Network have “delayed new services, such as mobile connection, badly needed by otherwise unserved Americans.” Dish Network has amassed frequencies in other spectrum bands for its 5G plans. The company said June 15 it has commercially launched 5G services in more than 100 cities across the United States, covering around 20% of the U.S. population. Most of the areas in the United States where Starlink is currently available for new orders are concentrated west of the Mississippi River and are not confined to cities, according to its availability map . Other areas have reached capacity and are set to become available for additional users in 2023 once SpaceX adds more satellites to the Starlink constellation. The final paragraph of this article was edited June 22 to clarify a description of Starlink’s availability map, which shows where the service is available and not where it has coverage.
A federal bankruptcy court approved the sale of nearly all the assets of Masten Space Systems, a company developing a lunar lander for a NASA mission, to another lander developer, Astrobotic. The federal bankruptcy court in Delaware approved Sept. 8 the results of an auction conducted two days earlier where Astrobotic submitted a high bid of $4.5 million for “substantially all” the assets of Masten. The sale was scheduled to close by the end of the day Sept. 9, although the companies had not filed updates to confirm that. Masten had entered into a “stalking horse” agreement with Astrobotic , the companies said in an Aug. 14 court filing. That set a minimum price for the assets but allowed Masten to seek higher bids. At the auction, Masten received two bids. One, from Intuitive Machines, another lunar lander developer, offered $2.725 million for the SpaceX launch credit, valued at $14 million but limited to companies that have NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts. Impulse Space, an in-space transportation company, offered $750,000 for equipment Masten has at its Mojave, California, headquarters. The combined value of the bids, though, was less than Astrobotic’s $4.5 million bid. Neither Intuitive Machines nor Impulse Space raised their bids, so Astrobotic won the auction. Astrobotic has not disclosed its plans for Masten’s assets. The company declined to comment on the stalking horse agreement last month. At the hearings, lawyers for both Masten and Astrobotic said that Astrobotic planned to hire at least some of Masten’s employees, most of whom had been laid off or furloughed by the time Masten filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy July 28. “We’re excited to be acquiring the assets of the debtor,” David Gaffey, a lawyer representing Astrobotic, said at the hearing. “We think they’re natural partners. We’re looking forward to continuing the business that Masten has started, incorporating the employees into our company.” Also uncertain is what will happen to Masten’s CLPS award. The bankruptcy documents suggested it would be among the assets transferred to Astrobotic in the agreement. NASA officials previously stated that, if Masten was unable to carry out the mission, it would move the payloads it planned to fly on that lander to other CLPS missions. “We’ll find out at the end of their Chapter 11 reorganization if they are ready to fulfill the terms of the task order,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during a presentation at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group Aug. 24 at the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. “If they’re not, we’ll go manifest those instruments, those investigations, on other delivery opportunities.”
The Japanese government has formally agreed to extend its participation on the International Space Station through 2030 and provide components for the lunar Gateway. In a virtual ceremony Nov. 17, NASA and Japanese government officials signed an agreement outlining the roles that Japan will provide in the Gateway, including components for several modules and a cargo resupply mission. NASA, in turn, will fly a Japanese astronaut to the Gateway on a future Artemis mission. In addition to the Gateway agreement, Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Keiko Nagaoka announced that the Japanese government had confirmed its intent to participate on the ISS through 2030, joining the United States in extending ISS operations beyond 2024. “The United States welcomes Japan’s intention to extend its support of International Space Station (ISS) operations through 2030, following the United States’ announcement of our ISS extension one year ago,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. “In addition, our two countries are taking a step forward by reaching an agreement on collaboration on the Lunar Gateway orbiting platform, which will pave the way for the return of humanity to the Moon.” The new Gateway agreement updates one announced in January 2021 . As with the earlier agreement, the Japanese space agency JAXA will provide the life support system, thermal controls, camera and batteries for the International Habitation, or I-Hab, module, being developed in cooperation with the European Space Agency. JAXA will also provide batteries for ESA’s European System Providing Refueling Infrastructure and Telecommunication (ESPRIT) refueling module and NASA’s Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module. Japan will develop a version of its HTV-X cargo spacecraft, called HTV-XG, to deliver supplies to the Gateway. NASA said the agreement includes a single mission to the Gateway no later than 2030. In return, NASA said a JAXA astronaut will be included as part of the crew of a mission to the Gateway, but did not specify when that person would fly. In the January 2021 agreement, NASA only agreed to an “intent” to find flight opportunities for Japanese astronauts that would be finalized and documented in a later agreement. “Today’s Gateway agreement represents the fulfillment commitments made by the Biden-Harris Administration and solidifies our nations’ collaboration, which will help ensure continued discoveries on Gateway, the International Space Station, and beyond,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement. He signed the agreement on the behalf of the agency from the Kennedy Space Center, while Nagaoka signed the agreement from Tokyo. NASA previously coordinated agreements with Canada and ESA for their Gateway contributions. Canada, which is providing a robotic arm for the Gateway, will fly an astronaut on the first crewed Orion flight, Artemis 2, along with a later Gateway mission. ESA will have three seats on Artemis missions, likely including the Artemis 4 and 5 missions that will deliver the I-Hab and ESPRIT modules to the Gateway. While the Gateway agreement covers only a single astronaut flight, Nagaoka said in a MEXT statement that the country will still seeking to land a Japanese astronaut on the moon as the first non-American astronaut “by the latter half of the 2020s.” NASA said that Japan’s announcement of its extension of ISS operations makes it only the second country, after the United States, to agree to participating on the ISS beyond 2024. Both Canada and ESA have indicated their willing to do so as well. Russia, despite comments this summer that it might leave the ISS partnership after 2024, is likely to remain a part at least until the late 2020s.
Days after NASA proposed to make its next attempt to launch the Artemis 1 mission on Sept. 23, the agency changed course and pushed back the launch. At a Sept. 8 briefing, NASA said it was tentatively planning to fly the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft as soon as Sept. 23 , with Sept. 27 as a backup launch date. That scheduled depended on completing and testing repairs to seals in liquid hydrogen lines that attach to the rocket’s core stage, as well as getting approval from the Eastern Range to extend the certification of the flight termination system (FTS) on SLS. In an update late Sept. 12, however, NASA said it dropped plans for a Sept. 23 launch. The agency said that date was no longer feasible after delaying a tanking test to confirm the new seals are working properly from Sept. 17 to Sept. 21. “The updated dates represent careful consideration of multiple logistical topics, including the additional value of having more time to prepare for the cryogenic demonstration test, and subsequently more time to prepare for the launch,” NASA said in a statement. It also allows more time to replenish supplies of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen at the pad and give launch teams enough rest. The earliest launch opportunity is Sept. 27, NASA said, with a potential backup launch date of Oct. 2. That backup date remains under review as the agency continues to plan to launch a new crew to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Crew-5 commercial crew mission on Oct. 3 from Launch Complex 39A, next to the SLS at Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. The Sept. 27 launch window opens at 11:37 a.m. Eastern and lasts for 70 minutes; a launch that day would set up a splashdown of the Orion spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean Nov. 5. The Oct. 2 launch would take place during a 109-minute window that opens at 2:52 p.m. Eastern, setting up a splashdown Nov. 11. In its statement, NASA said technicians completed replacement of seals on the two liquid hydrogen lines and reconnected them to the core stage. The seals will be tested at ambient temperatures this week before the rescheduled cryogenic tanking test next week. Even if the tanking test is successful, NASA will not be able to proceed with a launch without rolling back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to recertify the FTS unless the Eastern Range grants a waiver to its certified lifetime, which expired Sept. 6. NASA said that the Eastern Range is still evaluating NASA’s request for a waiver. “NASA is continuing to respect the Eastern Range’s process for review of the agency’s request for an extension of the current testing requirement for the flight termination system and is providing additional information and data as needed.”
SEOUL, South Korea — OneWeb and two subsidiaries of South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group have partnered to explore the joint provision of connectivity services to the Australian defense market. U.K.-based satellite broadband operator OneWeb signed a memorandum of understanding with Hanwha Group’s Hanwha Systems and Hanwha Defense Australia units July 19 at the Farnborough International Airshow, England. Under the deal, the three companies will discuss how they would combine capabilities to better compete for contracts under the Australian Military Satellite Tactical Internet Program. Hanwha said its two units had already responded to the Australian military’s request for information for the Land 4140 Tranche 1 program, a multi-layered communications program that will link satellite communication with ground communication networks. Hanwha expects that forming a partnership with OneWeb would put the consortium in a better position to make a deal. According to OneWeb’s July 20 statement , the company will contribute with its satellite broadband services; Hanwha Systems with vehicle type satellite communication terminal solutions and system integration; and Hanwha Defense Australia with a local marketing network. Hanwha Defense Australia is a local branch of South Korea-based Hanwha Defense that has provided self-propelled howitzers and armored vehicles to the Australian military. Hanwha Systems holds an 8.8% stake in OneWeb , which it bought in August 2021 for $300 million. The company has ramped up its antenna-making capabilities by acquiring British antenna maker Phasor Solutions in June 2020 and making a strategic investment in American antenna-maker Kymeta. 
The House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on strategic forces on June 8 passed its proposals for the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. The strategic forces panel – which covers military space, missile defense and nuclear weapons policy and programs – included language in its markup advocating for increased use of commercial space technology and data from commercial satellites. During a brief 10-minute markup session, subcommittee chairman Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said the military would benefit from greater use of commercial space technologies. “We must continue to buy the best off-the-shelf technology and partner with the best firms to invent new technology,” said Cooper. “We must also demand that the U.S. have capabilities that vastly exceed anything in the private sector.” This is Cooper’s final stint as chair of the subcommittee as he is retiring from Congress . The strategic forces markup – to be considered by the full House Armed Services Committee on June 22 — specifically suggests the military should increase use of commercial remote sensing satellite data such as radio-frequency and synthetic aperture radar. The bill also calls on the Space Force to run the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program more efficiently by standardizing satellite and launch vehicle interfaces so payloads can be deployed faster. Provisions on commercial remote sensing: • The bill says commercial satellite radio frequency (RF) remote sensing capabilities “have the potential to support a variety of Department of Defense missions, from warfighting to understanding the impacts of climate change.” • The committee asks for a DoD briefing on how U.S. commercial RF satellite capabilities are being leveraged in combatant command exercises, experimentation, and wargaming, and how these commercial capabilities should be integrated into information systems and workflows. • The committee encourages the National Reconnaissance Office to expand the current synthetic aperture radar (SAR) commercial acquisition program beyond its pilot program status. • The committee recommends the NRO accelerate adoption and integration of U.S. commercial SAR systems. It also asks for a report on NRO plans to acquire commercial SAR capabilities. Provisions on national security launch: • The committee says it is concerned about current efforts to “drive down cost, reduce risk and ensure launch reliability and performance.” • The cost of launch is an issue for the Space Development Agency, which plans to increase the total number of projected launches in the coming years as it deploys a large constellation in low Earth orbit. • The committee supports the use of a contractor to serve as a common launch integrator to simplify the integration of satellites with launch vehicles. “This approach could be an effective method to lower costs, reduce launch readiness timelines, and increase competition for launch providers.” • DoD is directed to brief the committee “on the benefits, including cost and schedule, of using one consistent launch integration solution across all types space and launch vehicles, and all plans to utilize a common launch integrator for current and future programs.”
The Space Force is planning its next major procurement of satellites — a constellation in medium Earth orbit that will track missile launches — as the service’s acquisitions come under increasing scrutiny. The Space Systems Command next year will seek industry bids for as many as four infrared sensing satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO) for missile warning and tracking. The satellites will add a new layer to the Pentagon’s planned multi-orbit architecture of space sensors. “We will provide increased capacity and capability, and ultimately resilience for the entire architecture,” Col. Brian Denaro, space sensing program executive officer at Space Systems Command, said Oct. 19 at an industry conference in Los Angeles hosted by AFCEA, the National Defense Industrial Association, the Southern California Aerospace Professional Representative, and the Air and Space Forces Association. Denaro said this procurement will take a “clean slate approach” and not follow the traditional processes used in legacy satellite acquisitions. The Pentagon decided to add MEO satellites to the missile-defense architecture to provide extra eyes on enemy hypersonic missiles. Compared to current sensors in geostationary satellites, sensors in medium orbits would see closer to Earth and track a wider area than satellites in low Earth orbit. DoD is seeking $4.7 billion for missile-tracking satellites in the 2023 budget request, including $140 million for the MEO layer. The Space Force agency in charge of architecture designs has recommended a constellation of 135 missile-warning and missile-tracking satellites in LEO and 16 in MEO. Denaro said the MEO constellation will follow the playbook of the Space Development Agency, which buys satellites in increments, or tranches, every two years. Traditional missile-warning geostationary satellites are custom designs that take years to develop, a process that was criticized by Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Frank Calvelli, who oversees space acquisitions. “The old approach, the seven-year development contracts that we’re doing for GEO satellites … that has to change,” Calvelli said at AFA’s annual conference last month. The message from Calvelli has been heard loud and clear, Brig. Gen. Timothy Sejba, program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power, said Oct. 19 in Los Angeles. “He has made the point that at the core of everything is sound program management focused on cost, schedule and performance,” said Sejba. The strategy for the MEO satellites is an example “of how we will execute to what the SAE [Calvelli] has asked us to go do,” he said. Sejba noted that Calvelli’s advice also applies to satellite contractors. “He made it very clear that he needs industry to only bid on the programs that you think you can execute and, if you bid, that you understand what the risks are, that you also bring mature technology so that we don’t find ourselves in a four-year program with an eight-year technology development.” Adopting SDA model The MEO satellite network will get upgrades every two years, an approach similar to that used by the Space Development Agency (SDA). SDA is building a mesh network of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit that includes a Transport Layer to relay time-sensitive data to military forces and a Tracking Layer of satellites to detect hypersonic missiles. The MEO satellites will be acquired in “two-year sprints, if you will, like SDA tranches,” said Denaro. “The idea is that we’re inserting incremental capability into those layers on a very regular cadence.” To coordinate missile-tracking programs handled by separate organizations, Denaro was put in charge of a combined program office that includes the Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency. In advance of the procurement of MEO satellites, the Space Systems Command last year started a “MEO Track Custody Demonstration” with Millennium Space and Raytheon developing digital models. Denaro said the deployment of missile-detection satellites is critical to keep up with the proliferation of ballistic and hypersonic missiles and the possibility that they could be targeted at U.S. forces and allies. “The trend line is worrisome,” he said. The Space Force tracked 1,968 missile launches globally in 2021. So far in 2022, “we’ve already seen an increase of over three and a half times more launches. So let that sink in for a moment.” There is a staggering number of “hot things launching off the face of the Earth that we need to not only detect, but track and predict where they’re going, warn our national command authority and the weapon systems that can do something about it.”
LOGAN, Utah — Canadian launch startup SpaceRyde said Aug. 8 it has added a second member to its advisory board with the appointment of Mina Mitry, the CEO of small satellite operator Kepler Communications. Mitry joins Jeff Thornburg, SpaceRyde’s inaugural advisory board member and a former vice president of propulsion engineering at SpaceX. Kepler, also based in Canada, operates 19 cubesats that provide low-data-rate connectivity to devices out of range of terrestrial networks. The operator also plans a data-relay constellation of larger satellites that it expects to start deploying in 2023. SpaceRyde said Mitry’s expertise will help the startup scale up operations as it plans to perform its first commercial mission in 2024. Founded in 2018, SpaceRyde is developing a small, three-stage rocket that would fire engines after a balloon takes it above most of the Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceRyde CEO Sohrab Haghighat said it plans to launch test payloads to sub-orbit and low Earth orbit (LEO) next year ahead of its first commercial mission, which is for an undisclosed biotechnology customer. “The customer requires ultimate flexibility in planning the mission and can only deliver the payload to be integrated into the rocket few hours before the launch,” Haghighat said on the sidelines of the Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. “As you can imagine, they cannot use rideshare missions and need a private rocket.” SpaceRyde ultimately plans to develop 20-meter-tall rockets that, after launching a customer payload, would leave its third stage in orbit for future missions. Called Black Bay, this third stage would use a liquid-fuelled engine for applications including in-orbit servicing and missions to the moon. Haghighat said SpaceRyde plans to send two rockets to LEO in the fourth quarter of 2024. One of them would refuel the other, which would then fly on a demonstration mission around the moon and back. “This mission is an important milestone not just for SpaceRyde, but for the industry as it will show the first ever multi-purpose rocket,” he said. SpaceRyde has secured $10 million to date, he added, and is planning to raise another funding round early next year to finance its plans. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
NASA awarded a contract to Draper to send three science instruments to the far side of the moon through a commercial payload delivery program. NASA announced July 21 it selected a team led by Draper for the 2025 mission to land in Schrödinger Basin, an impact basin about 320 kilometers across on the lunar farside near the south pole. The task order, awarded through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, is worth $73 million. The lander, called SERIES-2 by Draper, will deliver to Schrödinger Basin three experiments to collect seismic data, measure the heat flow and electrical conductivity of the lunar subsurface and measure electromagnetic phenomena created by the interaction of the solar wind and plasma with the lunar surface. The mission is the eighth NASA has awarded to date as part of CLPS, but the first to go to the lunar farside. The only mission by any country to land on the far side of the moon is China’s Chang’e-4 mission, which successfully landed in Von Kármán Crater in January 2019 and deployed the Yutu 2 rover that remains operational today. “The payload delivery location is a first for us. Operations from the far side of the moon will help improve how we track activities from this location to address scientific goals, all while we gather data from the payloads,” Chris Culbert, NASA CLPS program manager at the Johnson Space Center, said in a statement. Because the lunar farside is out of view of the Earth, the lander will need relay spacecraft to maintain communications. Draper said in its announcement of the contract that Blue Canyon Technologies will build two satellites that the mission will deploy before landing. Advanced Space, which operates the CAPSTONE lunar cubesat mission for NASA , will support planning and operation of those satellites. Several companies are involved in the mission. Draper serves as the prime contractor and will handle systems engineering, testing and quality assurance work, as well as providing the descent guidance, navigation and control system for the lander. The lander itself is based on a design by the U.S. subsidiary of ispace, a Japanese lunar lander company, and will be manufactured by Systima Technologies, a division of Karman Space & Defense. General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems will be responsible for payload integration and testing. Four other companies currently have CLPS awards, including three missions for Intuitive Machines, two for Astrobotic and one each for Firefly Aerospace and Masten Space Systems. None of the companies have launched their missions. The fate of one company is in question. Accord to a July 14 report , Masten had furloughed all its employees for the month of July and laid off many who had been working on its lunar lander mission. Other industry sources, speaking on background, confirmed that the company had halted work on its lunar lander mission as it tries to raise money. Masten has not publicly commented on the company’s status. Other companies have suffered delays. NASA announced July 18 it was pushing back the launch of its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission by a year to perform more testing on the Griffin lander that Astrobotic will use to deliver it to the lunar south pole through the CLPS program. During a panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Memorial Symposium July 20, Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic, said the company’s Peregrine lander, flying its other CLPS mission, remains on schedule for a launch in the fourth quarter of this year on the inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. However, Tim Crain, chief technology office of Intuitive Machines, said on the same panel that his company’s IM-1 lander mission, the first of its three CLPS missions under contract, will “most likely” launch in January 2023, versus late 2022 as previously planned. Besides the five companies with current CLPS awards, a sixth, OrbitBeyond, won a CLPS task order in May 2019 worth $97 million. The company, though, terminated the award two months later , citing “internal corporate challenges” and has kept a low profile since then. At the Glenn Symposium panel, though, Rob Kelso, program director at OrbitBeyond, said the company has refined the design of its lander. “Over the last two years we have completed a series of design reviews such that now we have a spacecraft design that closes around reliability, closes around performance, and closes around mass,” he said. He did not go into details about that lander but said the design was mature enough to proceed directly into a critical design review should it win a CLPS award. “We and all of our partners are ready to move into that development cycle at award.”
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX has applied for more spectrum to upgrade Starlink satellite broadband services for mobile users. The company asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission July 25 for permission to use the 2 GHz spectrum band to “augment” its mobile satellite services (MSS). Specific details about the next-generation services Starlink plans to provide were not disclosed. David Goldman, SpaceX’s senior director of satellite policy, told the FCC its planned “next-generation services for mobile users” would operate with latency below 50 milliseconds, “which is nearly unnoticeable to consumers.” A modular payload would be added to future Starlink satellites to transmit frequencies in the 2 GHz band under the plan. The constellation currently uses higher frequencies in the Ku and Ka spectrum bands to provide broadband to mainly fixed users. The 2 GHz MSS system will leverage “existing ground equipment and user terminals,” Goldman said, and “will also add new earth-station equipment to optimize performance for consumers.” However, the company also pointed to plans to expand its mobile services after last year acquiring Swarm Technologies, a narrowband MSS operator that connects small and portable Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In June, the FCC granted SpaceX permission to operate earth stations in motion (ESIMs), enabling broadband services on moving aircraft, ships, and motor vehicles that can support SpaceX’s directional antennas. “While these assets will enable SpaceX to provide unprecedented broadband capacity from its space-based platform, Americans are increasingly demanding connectivity wherever they are whenever they want, and whatever they are doing,” Goldman said. “In particular, they have grown accustomed to being able to connect using small, hand-held devices that they can carry with them or affix to mobile platforms.” News about SpaceX ’ s 2 GHz MSS application was first reported by PC Mag . Another spectrum battlefront Satellite broadcaster Dish Network has permission from the FCC to use 2 GHz and other spectrum bands for its U.S.-based terrestrial wireless network. “While DISH Network is currently licensed to operate in the band, there is scant evidence that DISH is actually providing MSS service to anyone, anywhere,” Goldman told the FCC. “Moreover, its two aging satellites, launched over a decade ago, will reach the end of their license terms in the next two years and there is no indication of plans for replacements to continue, much less enhance, its meager-at-best MSS services.” Starlink would also use the 2 GHz band to provide services in rural regions that Dish’s network would not cover, according to Goldman. He added that the MSS system would not interfere with other users of the band, including replacement satellites that Dish could order. SpaceX and Dish, respectively controlled by billionaires Elon Musk and Charlie Ergen, have also been battling over spectrum in the 12 GHz band, which is part of the Ku-band that Starlink and other non-geostationary satellite operators use to connect user terminals. Dish is asking the FCC for permission to upgrade a license it has in the 12 GHz band to support its 5G network plans. SpaceX told the FCC the plan would create interference that would make Starlink unusable for most Americans . British satellite operator OneWeb and U.S. satellite broadcaster DirecTV have also raised interference concerns about Dish’s proposal. According to Dish, its plan to use 12 GHz for 5G can coexist with other users of the spectrum band. Dish spokesperson Meredith Diers said SpaceX is “trying to bully the FCC for even more free spectrum by going after DISH’s 2 GHz frequencies in an anticompetitive attempt to harm DISH and deprive consumers” of its 5G network. “SpaceX, a company led by the richest person in the world, has already received authorization to use 15,000 MHz of spectrum – free of charge – from the FCC,” Diers said. “DISH, on the other hand, has purchased spectrum for over $30 billion, the vast majority of which was paid directly to the U.S. Treasury.” She said Dish was offering 5G to more than 20% of the U.S. population in more than 120 cities with its terrestrial network as of June 14. The network continues to “improve and grow weekly” toward its next regulatory milestone, to reach 70% of the U.S. population by June 14, 2023. “SpaceX appears to have a desire to utilize all the spectrum in the world, as long as they can manipulate it for free,” Diers added.
TAMPA, Fla. — Scottish startup R3-IoT rebranded as Krucial Aug. 18 amid plans to expand its connectivity solutions for remote sensors out of the aquaculture market. The venture launched a software platform called Krucial Connect to enable a wider variety of customers to tap into its gateways, which use satellites and cellular networks to transmit data from nearby equipment-monitoring sensors. Krucial CEO and co-founder Allan Cannon said the new application programming interface (API) “allows us to essentially scale our business much quicker and without becoming subject matter experts in every single market that we go into.” The four-year-old startup launched commercial services in May with an end-to-end managed service tailored for the aquaculture market. Cannon said the service has been “received really well in that industry” as many salmon farms are in remote and rural areas, although he declined to disclose customers. Krucial uses satellites operated by other companies to connect areas where cellular networks are unavailable. Where space and terrestrial networks can both reach, Cannon said its hybrid connectivity architecture increases resiliency for terminals that also have a 10-day battery backup. Outside of aquaculture, he sees strong demand for Krucial’s solutions in the utilities, energy, infrastructure, and transport markets. Cannon added that there is often no cellular coverage for rail infrastructure in rural regions of North America, meaning tracks without a satellite-based solution have to be physically inspected in person. These rail companies “have a lack of quality data that means that they can’t do things like preventative maintenance programs,” he said. While most of Krucial’s customers are in the United Kingdom, Cannon said there are “lots of partnership discussions in North America.” Krucial’s technology is designed to connect with satellites across multiple orbits. The company, which does not disclose its satellite partners, was one of the winners of a OneWeb innovation challenge last year. According to Cannon, Krucial’s connectivity-agnostic approach helps set the startup apart from others in a growing market for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Some sensor technology and satellite capacity providers are also seeking to provide services directly to customers. “In some cases, some of those companies would be competitors,” he said. “But we tend to see, actually, that because of the way that we’ve built our business … a lot of them actually become partners — or have the opportunity to become collaborators.” Last year, Krucial raised $4.3 million in seed funding led by venture capital firm Space Capital, which helped the company almost double its headcount to 30 people over the last 12 months. Cannon said the startup is seeking more funds to deploy its new Krucial Connect platform internationally.
TAMPA, Fla. — Echostar said Nov. 22 that Maxar Technologies is providing compensation for production issues that have delayed the launch of its Jupiter 3 satellite to at least the first half of 2023. The satellite operator said Maxar is “providing relief on future payments” under an amended contract, which also “expands EchoStar’s recourse” if there are more delays for a satellite originally slated to launch in 2021. In a regulatory filing, Maxar said it had informed the operator Nov. 9 that the delivery of Jupiter 3 had been delayed another month to April 27. Maxar is waiving all remaining milestone payments that Echostar owed the manufacturer related to Jupiter-3. The relief includes about $14 million in payments connected to raising Jupiter 3 to its orbital position following launch, and $44.5 million — plus 6% interest — in deferred incentive payments that were conditioned on the satellite’s in-orbit performance. Maxar would also need to start paying Echostar damages for every month Jupiter 3 is not delivered after the first half of 2023, totaling $21 million if the satellite is ultimately delivered in September, and then $10 million for every additional month of delay. The updated contract also gives Echostar the right to terminate their agreement from January 2024 and receive more compensation if the satellite has still not been delivered by then. Separately, Echostar said it has entered into an agreement to provide Maxar with “certain products and/or services during 2023” in exchange for payments that would deliver a margin of at least $30 million. Echostar recently said capacity constraints contributed to a 1.4% year-on-year fall in revenues for the three months to the end of September to just shy of $500 million. Jupiter 3 is due to provide around 500 gigabit-per-second of capacity over North and South America — more than double the capacity of Jupiter 2 that launched in 2017. EchoStar ordered Jupiter 3 from Maxar in 2017 as part of a $445 million contract, and the satellite has lined up a launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. However, production has been bogged down by pandemic-related supply chain issues that have also slowed other manufacturers of satellites bound for geostationary orbit. Jupiter 3 is currently undergoing final integration in preparation for performance tests that need to be completed before it is shipped to the launchpad.
LOGAN, Utah — Small satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital reported increased revenues Aug. 9 as it ramps up work on satellites for the Space Development Agency, but is planning to sell stock as its cash reserves decline. Terran Orbital reported $21.4 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2022, an increase of 127% over the same quarter a year ago. The company said its backlog increased to $224.1 million, a record high and 200% above the level at the end of 2021. “We are delighted in our team’s performance in the quarter and we are happy to report that our business is rapidly expanding,” Marc Bell, chief executive of Terran Orbital, said in an earnings call. The company had more than 400 employees as of the end of the quarter, 20% more than a quarter ago. Terran Orbital expects to complete an expanded satellite manufacturing facility in Irvine, California, this fall, that will provide the company with capacity to handle its SDA work and more. Bell said the company is still in discussions with Florida to finalize an agreement to build an even larger manufacturing facility at the Kennedy Space Center but that there is no schedule for starting construction there. However, the cost of that expanding business is growing even faster. The company reported a net loss of $32.2 million in the quarter, compared to an $8.9 million loss in same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) was a negative $14.8 million in the quarter, compared to a negative $2.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. Terran Orbital ended the quarter with $62.3 million of cash on hand, down from $76.7 million at the end of the first quarter. The company said it has entered into an agreement with an affiliate of B. Riley Securities to sell up to $100 million in stock over the next two years to raise additional capital. The agreement is similar to one that launch vehicle developer Astra announced, also with B. Riley, Aug. 2. The agreement “provides us with a flexible option for access to incremental liquidity as needed,” said Gary Hobart, chief financial officer of Terran Orbital, on the call. Terran Orbital’s near-term focus is to complete 10 satellite buses for Lockheed Martin for the SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 0. Bell said the company expected to have all 10 delivered by the end of the year and has started work on a separate set of 42 Tranche 1 satellites for Lockheed. That work has taken precedence over Terran Orbital’s own PredaSAR constellation of synthetic aperture radar satellites. “We’ve made it a priority to get the Tranche 0 buses done first before finishing the PredaSAR,” he said. The first two PredaSAR satellites will launch in the first or second quarter of 2023. The overall plan for the PredaSAR constellation, originally projected to include 96 satellites, is changing, although Bell didn’t disclose changes in the number of satellites or schedule for its deployment. “The plan is evolving. We are looking at getting the first two up,” he said. “The satellites continue to evolve.” Those satellites will be significantly larger than other smallsats being developed for SAR constellations and will use the Tranche 1 bus. “We’re seeing the benefits of going to a bigger bus with more batteries,” he said, allowing for more sustained radar imaging. The larger buses can also accommodate secondary payloads, such as one satellite that will have an optical inter-satellite link to communicate with DARPA’s Blackjack satellites. Bell said that, once deployed, he expected PredaSAR to be competitive with existing commercial SAR systems. “MySpace was the first, but it wasn’t the winner. We keep reminding ourselves that it’s all about the endgame.”
A recently completed U.S. space strategy stresses the need to deploy resilient constellations that can operate under attack, and supports norms for responsible behavior in space, a senior Pentagon official said Dec. 14. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said the strategic space review is a classified document and will not be publicly released. In general, “it’s about our overall space posture and where we should be headed from a national security standpoint,” he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a fireside chat with CSIS senior fellow Kari Bingen. The review, directed by the White House National Security Adviser, was conducted jointly by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. Plumb said the substance of the review is “very consistent with previous administration’s and current administration guidance,” and reflects the space policy priorities the White House released in December 2021. The guidance to DoD is “to protect and defend our national security interests” against counterspace capabilities used by adversaries, he said. Other priorities are to “build a resilient national security space architecture” and “lead in the responsible and peaceful use of space,” including practices that minimize the creation of space debris. Plumb said DoD is working “to address all these problems.” With regard to resiliency, DoD is making investments in modern satellite constellations in low Earth orbit that are more survivable against attacks than traditional geostationary satellites. “Resilience is in every single conversation about future space architectures that I’m part of,” he said. ‘And that’s not just the space piece. It’s also the ground piece, and the user equipment piece.” DoD is making a “fundamental shift in how we think about things,” Plumb insisted. “We have to be resilient because the adversary is coming for us. And so what we need is a constellation that allows me to take a punch, fight through … absorb a blow and kind of degrade the ability of an adversary to take a shot.” Plumb said his office’s top three priorities are: space control, space cooperation and space classification. Space control is about ensuring the U.S. military has access to space and is able to use its satellites, while denying an adversary its use of space. Cooperation and joint efforts with allies are a key piece of the plan, he noted. The classification of military space programs and policy documents is an issue that is constantly being debated, he said, particularly because it gets in the way of sharing information with allies . “I’m really working in my office and with the intelligence community on reducing some of those classification issues,” said Plumb. Congress also has become concerned about what some see as excessive classification in the national security space business. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act draft bill approved by the House and expected to soon be approved by the Senate directs DoD to examine all Space Force programs to determine if the level of classification of any of these programs could be changed to a lower level or declassified entirely. 
LOGAN, Utah – The Aerospace Corp. is developing a network of remotely operated optical communications terminals to support existing and future small satellite missions. To date, much of the optical communications research and development has been focused on reducing the size and cost of the space-based terminals. In order to make optical communications operational, it’s also important to develop a cost-efficient ground infrastructure, Darren Rowen, Aerospace Small Satellite Department director, told SpaceNews. Aerospace, a federally funded research and development center focused on space, demonstrated laser communications in 2018 with two Optical Communications Satellite Demonstration cubesats. For OCSD space-to-ground communications, Aerospace built an optical ground station prototype that two people operated in El Segundo, California. With similar technology, Aerospace established remotely operated optical communications ground stations in Maui, Hawaii, and at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Currently, Aerospace is evaluating whether to install a third station at Edwards Air Force Base in California. “We are going to have a network of three off-the-grid stations that are remotely controllable,” Rowen said. “We’re working toward making them fully autonomous.” Aerospace operational missions underway, including the Rogue Alpha and Beta cubesats, are delivering imagery to the remotely operated optical ground stations. The Rogue cubesats, which Aerospace built and operates for the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, gather visible and shortwave infrared imagery of rocket launches, volcanoes, wildfires and weather phenomena. For decades satellites have primarily sent data to the ground through RF signals to satellite dishes around the world. Those dishes require no human operators. “We’re trying to get to the same operational point because paying people to operate the ground stations would be too expensive,” Rowen said. Government agencies and companies are experimenting with optical communications as a way to speed up data transfer. Aerospace’s OCSD mission has transmitted data at a rate of 200 megabits per second. Engineers are working on an upgrade aimed at increasing the speed to 800 megabits per second.
TAMPA, Fla. — Italian rocket maker Avio secured 340 million euros ($358 million) in government funding June 29 to develop launch vehicles for the next decade. About two-thirds of the pandemic recovery stimulus funds from the Italian government will support a small, two-stage demonstration rocket that is slated to fly by 2026 with a new liquid oxygen and methane engine. Avio is using the remaining 120 million euros to develop another liquid oxygen methane engine that CEO Giulio Ranzo says will be six-times more powerful. The company aims to qualify this engine via ground tests by 2026. Both programs are leveraging Avio’s M10 liquid oxygen and methane engine prototype that it is currently testing for the upper stage of Vega E, a small launch rocket that is due to succeed Europe’s Vega C in the second half of this decade. Vega C, which is counting down to its maiden flight around July 7, is slated to replace the retiring Vega rocket. Vega E is currently on track to fly in 2026, and Ranzo said its development will run in parallel with work on its so-far unnamed demonstration rocket. “With these two contracts we are preparing the ground for the launchers that will fly in the 2030s,” he told SpaceNews . According to Ranzo, the demonstration rocket will have one-tenth of Vega E’s three-metric-ton payload capacity. “What will follow beyond this prototype, I don’t know, we will see,” he said. “On one side we will have this very small prototype and on the other side we will have a high thrust engine.” He added: “By the middle of this decade we will have all the main technologies we need to come up with even better products beyond Vega E.” Unlike Vega E, Avio’s upcoming demonstration launch vehicle will fully draw on liquid oxygen and methane propulsion. According to Ranzo, this propulsion’s comparatively cleaner combustion characteristics, compared to solid and other liquid-based alternatives previously used for Vega engines, potentially make them reusable. SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets are also being designed to use liquid oxygen and methane engines. The European Space Agency is the contracting authority for Avio’s new funding, which comes from the Italian government’s share of Europe’s Recovery Plan to support economies recovering from the pandemic. “The main intent is to expand the breadth of technological capabilities of Italy,” Ranzo said. Avio has unlocked an initial 11 million euros of the funding to cover early development work over the next few months. The company plans to engage with startups and small to medium-sized businesses to accelerate its development. Ranzo said Avio continues to “hire like crazy” after adding 150 employees since the beginning of the year, and now has more than 1,000 employees. Avio is Vega’s prime contractor and is a subcontractor for the Ariane 6 launch vehicle that is in line to replace Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket. Ranzo told SpaceNews in a recent interview how it has been expanding facilities to help Arianespace meet its share of a colossal launch deal for Amazon’s Project Kuiper megaconstellation. Earlier this year, the Italian government also launched a billion-dollar project for an Earth-observation constellation that Avio expects will be launched by Vega C. Ranzo expects a prime contractor to build around 34 satellites for the network to be selected “soon” to meet an objective to get them in orbit by 2026. 
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s homegrown rocket KSLV-2 successfully put satellites into low Earth orbit for the first time in its second flight June 21 . A performance test satellite, deployed from the rocket about 14 minutes after liftoff, exchanged its first signals with a ground station associated with South Korea’s research center in Antarctica about 42 minutes after liftoff, according to the science and technology ministry. The satellite will deploy four smaller satellites developed by domestic universities in the coming days. “We have arrived at a monumental moment not just in South Korea’s science and technology history but for South Korea’s history as well,” science minister Lee Jong-ho said in a televised press conference at the Naro Space Center. “This is a milestone we achieved nearly 30 years after the country launched its first sounding rocket in June 1993.” The minister said the government will conduct four additional KSLV-2 launches by 2027 as part of efforts to further advance the country’s space rocket program. President Yoon Suk-yeol hailed the success at his office in Seoul, saying, “the road to space from the Republic of Korea has opened.” The kerosene and liquid oxygen-fueled three-stage rocket KSLV-2 lifted off at the planned time of 3 a.m. EST from the Naro Space Center. Live footage showed the 47.2-meter rocket, emblazoned with South Korea’s flag, soaring into the air with bright yellow flames shooting out of its engines. The first-stage booster, powered by a cluster of four KRE-075 engines, was separated at 3:02 a.m. Eastern as planned, according to the ministry. The separation of its payload fairing took place about one minute and forty seconds later, and the second stage booster with a single KRE-075 engine at 3:04 a.m. The third stage with a KRE-007 engine pushed the payload to the intended orbit of 700 kilometers above the Earth and deployed the performance test satellite at 3:14 a.m. at the orbital velocity of 7.5 kilometers per second, according to the ministry. In the maiden flight last year, KSLV-2 reached its intended altitude, but its third-stage engine shut down 46 seconds early, releasing its 1,500-kilogram dummy payload at less than orbital speed. The dummy payload fell back to Earth south of Australia. The premature engine shutdown was later blamed on improperly anchored helium tanks inside the upper stage. The Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), responsible for the rocket’s development, fixed the flaw by reinforcing the structure anchoring the helium tanks. KSLV-2’s second launch was initially set for June 15, with a backup launch window spanning June 16-23. However, it was delayed to the following day due to strong winds. It was delayed again after engineers found a problem with a sensor inside the oxidizer tank of the rocket’s first-stage booster during a final pre-launch checkup at the launch pad. KARI said readings on the malfunctioning sensor remained static when the tank was being loaded. To fix the problem, the rocket was pulled off the launch pad and rolled back to the hangar June 15. KARI confirmed that the problem was confined to the sensor and replaced it with a new one. Then it set June 21 as the rocket’s launch date. KSLV-2 — which cost South Korea an estimated 2 trillion won ($1.6 billion) to develop — is the first step for South Korea’s ambitious space program, including the launch of the nation’s first robotic lunar lander on a domestically developed rocket by 2030 . The country had previously launched a space launch vehicle from Naro Space Center in 2013, a two-stage rocket built mainly with Russian hardware. That launch came after years of delays and consecutive failures. The rocket, KSLV-1, reached the desired altitude during its first test in 2009 but failed to eject a satellite into orbit, and then exploded shortly after takeoff during its second test in 2010.
WASHINGTON – Space cybersecurity firm SpiderOak on July 12 announced the appointment of former DoD and military officials to its advisory board. Joining the company are retired U.S. Air Force general Ellen Pawlikowski and former intelligence official and aerospace executive Frederick Doyle. Pawlikowski, who was a former commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, and Doyle join retired Navy admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld, retired Army lieutenant general Ken Tovo and former intelligence official Phil Eichensehr, who already serve on SpiderOak’s advisory board. “The board will help guide the company in fielding zero-trust products and services to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the most sensitive data in space networks,” the company said in a news release. ​​ SpiderOak uses software that encrypts data throughout private blockchain networks and creates cryptographic keys that give various parties access only to the datasets they need to perform their work. “Rethinking our nation’s space resilience is now a top priority of the Pentagon, and SpiderOak’s blockchain-based products for securing satellites and their networks are a crucial part of building that resiliency,” said Pawlikowski. SpiderOak’s executive chairman Charles Beames said the addition of these new members to the company’s space advisory board will “provide us the insight and guidance necessary to match our product development with federal needs.” Former Pentagon officials like Pawlikowski can help explain to the government what commercial technologies can bring, Beames told SpaceNews. “You kind of have to lead the bureaucracy. You have to get in there, meet with them routinely and explain the advantages.” China and Russia are stepping up their capabilities to attack U.S. networks, said Beames. The Pentagon has to rethink how it articulates its cybersecurity requirements “in such a way that it allows for commercial technologies to more readily be adapted and used,” he said. “That’s what’s going to be necessary to be able to react more quickly to what’s going on on the other side of the security fence.” The traditional Pentagon processes take five to 10 years to actually deploy a capability and that doesn’t work in the cyber domain, Beames said. “We will be dead in the water if we don’t adopt a commercial approach to addressing the cybersecurity threat.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Startup Xona Space Systems has raised around $15 million for its proposed navigation constellation, including funds from GPS satellite maker Lockheed Martin’s venture capital arm. Lockheed Martin Ventures was among new investors that joined a funding round Xona announced Aug. 3, which early-stage investor First Spark Ventures led. Xona CEO Brian Manning declined to disclose the amount of funds secured in the round, but said the startup has raised more than $25 million in total to date. In June, Xona put its total raise at $10 million . Manning said the new round will help Xona double its team to 60 employees ahead of deploying Muninn, its second prototype satellite, early next year. Huginn, the first prototype for California-based Xona’s proposed network of around 300 navigation cubesats, launched May 25 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Manning said “so far Huginn has been progressing through the early phases of its mission and is performing as expected.” He declined to disclose details about the tests, which aim to show certain performance advantages its constellation would have over GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). According to Xona, its positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services can deliver 10 times better accuracy than standard GNSS by operating in a much lower orbit. Manning said Xona has also secured a lease on a new 7,600-square-meter facility for manufacturing and research purposes in Burlingame, California, near its base in San Mateo. Muninn and Huginn were made in-house and Xona has not said whether it will outsource production for its operational Pulsar satellites, which the startup expects to start deploying in early 2025. Lockheed is building a new generation of GPS satellites for the U.S. Space Force that include more advanced anti-jamming and geolocation capabilities. In November, the U.S. Space Force ordered three GPS 3F satellites from Lockheed for $737 million, under a 2018 agreement worth $7.2 billion for up to 22 spacecraft. Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, said the fund “invested in Xona so they can continue to develop and build their commercial system to complement the greater” GNSS architecture. “As customer needs evolve, Lockheed Martin Ventures continues to work with companies we believe are on the forefront of emerging technology and that support increasingly resilient, hybrid systems,” Moran said in a statement Xona’s other new investors include SRI Ventures, Velvet Sea Ventures, Gaingels, Airstream Venture Partners, and Space.VC. Xona said existing investors also participated, including Seraphim Space, Toyota Ventures, 1517 Fund, MaC Venture Capital, and Stellar Ventures. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Maritime connectivity specialist Marlink will offer Starlink to its customers as SpaceX’s broadband service turns to partners to expand beyond the consumer market. Marlink and OmniAccess, its division focusing on high-end superyachts and boutique cruise lines, said Sept. 22 they have become “authorized Starlink integrators” for maritime and enterprise customers. The agreement combines connectivity from Starlink’s low Earth orbit constellation with terrestrial networks and capacity the service providers lease from commercial satellites in geostationary orbit. “Adding Starlink to its offerings will bring a new dimension of connectivity to Marlink’s global customer base,” SpaceX vice president of Starlink sales Jonathan Hofeller said in a statement. “This low-latency, high-bandwidth broadband experience will allow enterprise and maritime customers to manage their remote businesses more efficiently than ever before.” SpaceX had initially focused on selling Starlink directly to customers since it launched early services about two years ago that targeted the consumer market. Speaking during World Satellite Business Week Sept. 13, Hofeller said SpaceX is exploring international partnership opportunities after introducing services for enterprise and maritime customers earlier this year. That same day, remote communications provider Speedcast announced it had become the first company to sign a distribution deal to offer Starlink to its enterprise and maritime customers.
TAMPA, Fla. — The UK Space Agency (UKSA) said Sept. 26 it has shortlisted groups led by startups Astroscale and ClearSpace for a mission to remove two spacecraft from low Earth orbit in 2026. The U.K. divisions of Japan-based Astroscale and ClearSpace of Switzerland won £4 million ($4.28 million) in combined follow-on contracts, following funds awarded in October to study the mission’s feasibility. A consortium led by British small satellite maker SSTL had also taken a share of last year’s £1 million Active Debris Removal Phase 0-A Feasibility Study, but was not part of the announcement. Phase B lasts until October 2023 and will conclude with a preliminary design review. This will include details about the spacecraft they intend to remove, which must have been sent to orbit under a U.K. license. Astroscale said it has found “a small number of potential UK satellites currently in congested orbit” for what it calls its Cleaning Outer Space Mission through Innovative Capture (COSMIC). The company, awarded £1.7 million in funding under phase B, plans to work with Canadian startup NorthStar to gather space situational awareness data to help it pick suitable candidates. COSMIC partners include MDA UK, Thales Alenia Space UK, Nammo, GMV-NSL, NORSS, Goonhilly, Satellite Applications Catapult, and Willis Towers Watson. The mission would use a variant of the servicer the startup is developing for its End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-multiple (ELSA-m) mission , slated to launch in 2024 in partnership with UKSA, broadband operator OneWeb, and the European Space Agency. ELSA-m is designed to de-orbit more than one satellite in a single mission. Its capture mechanism relies on magnetic docking plates similar to those on OneWeb satellites, however, COSMIC would need to use robotic technology from its partner MDA to grapple with spacecraft that were not designed to be captured. The in-orbit capture and release tests Astroscale started performing last year for ELSA-d, or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration, also used a docking plate. Astroscale is also in the running to remove a discarded upper stage of a rocket for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Rocket Lab is due to launch an Astroscale spacecraft next year to inspect the debris, which does not have a docking plate, ahead of a potential removal attempt a few years later. Under a contract with the European Space Agency, ClearSpace plans to use a spacecraft with four articulated arms to de-orbit part of a Vega rocket in 2025 in its first mission. The Swiss startup secured £2.5 million from UKSA for the U.K. de-orbit attempt, which ClearSpace calls the Clearing of the LEO Environment with Active Removal (CLEAR) mission. SSTL is part of ClearSpace’s consortium, along with Alden Legal, AstroAgency, Critical Software, Deimos, MDA, Orbit Fab, and Satellite Applications Catapult. UKSA intends to pick just one team for further funding once they have completed their designs next year. Separately, the space agency Sept. 26 made the first of six calls for funding under its new Enabling Technology Programme (ETP). The program aims to provide up to £15 million to support the research and development of emerging technology in the country, including for in-orbit servicing and manufacturing.
Updated Nov. 3 to include OHB Sweden’s role on the satellite. WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab says it will make a second mid-air recovery attempt of an Electron booster during the launch later this week of a Swedish scientific satellite. Rocket Lab announced Nov. 1 plans for its next Electron launch, a mission it calls “Catch Me If You Can.” The launch is scheduled for Nov. 4 at 1:15 p.m. Eastern from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The launch will be the second attempt to recover the Electron’s first stage, descending under a parachute, using a helicopter. In the first attempt May 2 , a hook hanging from the helicopter grabbed the parachute, but the pilot released it moments later after noticing what the company called “different load characteristics than what we’ve experienced in testing.” The stage instead splashed down and was recovered by a boat. “Our first helicopter catch only a few months ago proved we can do what we set out to do with Electron, and we’re eager to get the helicopter back out there and advance our rocket reusability even further by bringing back a dry stage for the first time,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a statement about the upcoming launch. Beck said in the months after the launch that the company had been doing additional training on the helicopter recovery itself, rather than changes to the rocket and its recovery systems. “We haven’t made any changes to the vehicle or any of the recovery systems,” he said in an interview in late June. “It’s purely down to getting the technique right and just all the mission operations that go into that.” He had hinted for months that another recovery attempt would take place in the near future, including at the company’s Sept. 21 investor day event, when he said the next recovery attempt was “coming up soon.” The Nov. 1 announcement was the first notice of this launch, including both the payload and the recovery plans. Mid-air recovery is a key part of Rocket Lab’s plans to be able to reuse boosters after the company concluded a propulsive landing, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, was not feasible for a small rocket. Catching the booster before splashdown avoids issues with salt water intrusion. Beck said at the investor day presentation that the work attempting to recover Electron is helping the company as it develops Neutron, its medium-class reusable launcher that will perform propulsive landings. “There is no way we could have taken on the Neutron project with as much speed and confidence as we are without doing this,” he said, referring to Electron recovery. “We learned so much on reentering Electrons and going through the process of reusability that, if we had just gone straight to Neutron as a reusable vehicle without learning all of those super tough lessons, it would’ve been ugly.” The upcoming launch will carry a single satellite, called MATS, or Mesospheric Airglow/Aerosol Tomography and Spectroscopy. The satellite, funded by the Swedish National Space Agency and built by OHB Sweden with some components provided by AAC Clyde Space, will study waves in the upper atmosphere and how they affect weather and climate. MATS was originally scheduled to fly as a rideshare on a Soyuz rocket but the Swedish government canceled those plans in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The spacecraft, weighing about 50 kilograms, will go into a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 585 kilometers.
SAN FRANCISCO – Mynaric, SA Photonics, Skyloom and Tesat are providing optical communications terminals for Space Development Agency Tranche 0 Transport and Tracking layer satellites scheduled for launch late this year. Derek Tournear, director of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency, displayed the names of the Tranche 0 optical communications terminal providers Oct. 13 at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. Not all of the firms had previously announced their roles in the SDA program. “Across the four Tranche 0 teams (2 Transport, 2 Tracking), a total of four different [optical communications terminal] vendor solutions were carried through” preliminary design review, according to the slide that named the four vendors. In his keynote, Tournear underscored the importance optical communications for SDA’s proliferated low-Earth orbit constellation architecture. Transport Layer satellites will share data among themselves and with other satellites through optical crosslinks, and connect with ground and airborne terminals via optical and radio frequency communications. To ensure SDA satellites from multiple vendors work together, the agency has adopted Nebula networking and optical communications standards. “I’m going to do competitions for every Tranche, every layer, every time and it’s going to be full and open,” Tournear said. “The only way we can do that is if I make sure all the satellites work together as a network. People can launch new satellites and they also plug into this network.” With testbeds at the Naval Research Laboratory, SDA is confirming optical terminals from different vendors meet the standards. “If you can plug-and-play and network with those test beds, you can feel comfortable going out and building a bunch of these” terminals, Tournear said. Companies also are building and sharing their own optical terminal test beds. “God bless them. We welcome that too,” Tournear said. “That’s another way to do it.” Information on alliances between satellite and optical terminal manufacturers have been released piecemeal. Mynaric revealed plans Oct. 18 to provide optical terminals for the satellites Northrop Grumman is building for SDA’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer. Northrop Grumman and L3Harris Technologies are building 14 prototype missile warning and missile tracking satellites apiece for the Tranche 1 Tracking Layer. Germany-based Mynaric is establishing production and testing of optical communication terminals in Los Angeles. Reston, Virginia-based CACI acquired SA Photonics in December to pursue military and commercial markets for small, lower cost optical terminals. Skyloom, an Oakland, California company working with Honeywell to supply optical terminals for York Space Systems satellites, does not see itself as an optical communications terminal manufacturer. “We are an optical space data transport provider who uses our fundamental building block of optical communications terminals and our capabilities to create this optical space data relay network,” Campbell Marshall, Skyloom chief operating officer, told SpaceNews. In September, Skyloom and Space Compass , a joint venture between NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT, announced plans to begin relaying data from low Earth orbit to the ground through geostationary orbit in 2024.
While the European Space Agency has secured funding to continue the ExoMars mission for a 2028 launch, that plan requires cooperation with NASA that has yet to be finalized. At a Nov. 23 press conference at the end of a two-day ministerial council meeting , ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the agency had secured funding from its member states to continue the ExoMars mission, which had been stranded after ESA terminated cooperation with Russia in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just months before its planned September 2022 launch. ESA went into the meeting looking for about half of the 700 million euros ($725 million) needed to replace components of the mission Russia was originally to provide, including the landing platform that would deliver ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface of Mars. “There were different options that have been discussed, all the way to putting the Rosalind Franklin rover in a museum,” Aschbacher said. “I am very glad to say that we have found a very positive way forward.” He did not disclose how much funding ESA member states contributed to ExoMars. The mission, now slated for launch in 2028, will primarily replace the Russian components with European ones, with several exceptions. “We have expectations that the U.S. will also contribute to this, with a launcher, a braking engine and the RHUs, the radioisotope heating units,” he said. “But the majority of the future ExoMars mission is European.” Those NASA contributions are in line with past comments by project officials . In May, Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist at ESA, said the agency would likely need thrusters for the new landing system like those Aerojet Rocketdyne produced for NASA Mars landers because there are no similar thrusters available from European sources. Europe also lacks the plutonium-238 used for RHUs, devices about the size of a C-cell battery that provide heating through radioactive decay. NASA’s solar-powered Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, for example, each used eight RHUs to keep the spacecraft warm without using electrical power. Supplying the RHUs would, in turn, require launch on a U.S. vehicle because the RHUs cannot be exported. An industry source, speaking on background, said the launch will be the most expensive contribution, with the overall NASA contribution likely on the order of a couple hundred million dollars. NASA is expected, in turn, to seek opportunities for U.S. scientists to participate on ExoMars in exchange for that contribution. Both ESA and NASA officials have hinted for months about a role for the NASA along those lines to support the ExoMars mission but have been reticent to go into details. A schbacher and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson met in June , and Aschbacher said at a briefing that he received a “very strong” letter of support regarding ExoMars from Nelson, but no firm commitment. Aschbacher said at the briefing that those planned NASA contributions were pending an agreement yet to be finalized between the agencies. “Their contribution still needs to be confirmed because they waited for our decision today,” he said. NASA has not publicly commented on its plans for ExoMars since the ministerial meeting, and an agency spokesperson did not respond to questions Nov. 23 about NASA’s plans for the mission.
Updated Oct. 19 to change number of SLS launches included in the contract. WASHINGTON — A procurement document sheds new light on the formation of a joint venture to which NASA plans to award a long-term contract for producing the Space Launch System rocket. NASA published Oct. 12 a document formally known as the Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition for its planned Exploration Production and Operations Contract (EPOC) for as many as 10 SLS launches. The document explains NASA’s rationale, announced July 26 in a pre-solicitation statement , to sole-source the EPOC contract rather than hold a competition. That contract would be sole-sourced to Deep Space Transport (DST), a joint venture of Boeing and Northrop Grumman whose existence had not been publicized by the companies or NASA prior to the release of the pre-solicitation statement. Boeing is currently the prime contractor for the SLS core stage and the Exploration Upper Stage that will be used on the Block 1B version of SLS, while Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the SLS’s five-segment solid rocket boosters. According to the justification document, predating Deep Space Transport was Project Eta, a team that included Boeing, Northrop, Aerojet Rocketdyne and other companies. Project Eta was one of four entities to respond to a request for information (RFI) NASA issued in October 2021 regarding the proposed EPOC contract. Project Eta “provided a thorough response proposing the formulation of a JV [joint venture] to meet the launch service needs of EPOC,” NASA stated. The Project Eta response emphasized the importance of a “single accountable customer interface” for the contract as well as 17 unspecified “Affordability Efficiency Initiatives” that would provide cost savings. While NASA has not set a formal cost for EPOC, agency officials previously discussed a per-flight cost reduction of 50% or more. Three other organizations also responded to the RFI: All Points, Barrios Technology and SAIC. None of them, though, proposed taking on the EPOC contract, instead commenting on various aspects of the RFI. NASA said it examined other launch contracts it had, along with those by the U.S. Space Force, noting that none of them “include the requirement to lift 42t [metric tons] in a single-launch to the Moon and beyond,” which is the projected SLS Block 1B payload capacity. The agency concluded the RFI responses and research “yielded no knowledge of feasible alternatives for launch services using existing SLS hardware and validated NASA’s planned sole source approach.” At some point before the release of the pre-solicitation statement, “Project Eta was informed a formal corporate structure would be necessary to move forward with the procurement process,” the NASA document noted, not disclosing who specifically informed the team of that requirement. “Deep Space Transport, a joint venture between Boeing and Northrop Grumman, was formed to replace Project Eta.” The NASA document notes elsewhere that DST was established on June 6. A company with the same name was incorporated in the state of Delaware the same day, according to state databases. While DST is a joint venture of Boeing and Northrop, NASA states it is “strategically aligned” with Aerojet Rocketdyne, which provides the RS-25 engines used in the core stage of the SLS and the RL10 engines in the Exploration Upper Stage. NASA added it received one response, whose identity is redacted in the justification document, to its pre-solicitation statement. “Analysis of this submission yielded no additional information or capabilities which would change NASA’s intent to award a sole source contract for the EPOC requirements to DST,” it stated. Much of the document explained NASA’s rationale with working with Boeing, Northrop and Aerojet on EPOC, citing their extensive work on the SLS and access to infrastructure that could, the agency argued, take up to a decade to replicate by another company. Because of that, NASA concluded, “DST is the only responsible source to provide launch services under EPOC using the SLS Vehicle, and no other services will satisfy NASA’s requirements.” NASA added in the justification statement that it will look for “alternative solutions or new sources” before exercising any options on the EPOC contract, which as currently proposed would cover the Artemis 5 through 9 missions with options for Artemis 10 through 14. NASA, in the pre-solicitation statement in July, said that the contract would also include an option for up to 10 non-Artemis SLS missions, but NASA spokesperson Rachel Kraft said Oct. 19 that the agency had “refined our planning” and would limit EPOC to the 10 Artemis missions listed in the justification statement.
OneWeb took a $229 million charge this year linked to the termination of its Soyuz launch contract and dozens of satellites stranded in Kazakhstan after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In an annual financial report released by the company last month, the company included an impairment charge of $229.2 million in its 2022 fiscal year that said was linked to its suspension of launches of satellites on Soyuz rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, including one launch called off just before its launch in March. The charge, the report states, is intended “to reflect the loss suffered by the Group as a result of the postponement of a planned launch on 4 March 2022, the associated postponement of subsequent scheduled launches, the loss of satellites not returned to the Group and the impairment of a portion of the Group’s prepaid launch insurance.” OneWeb was about to launch 36 of its satellites on a Soyuz from Baikonur in March when the Russian government put severe conditions on the launch, including requiring the British government to divest its stake in the company. The board of OneWeb declined to agree to those conditions and announced it would suspend all launches from Baikonur . The satellites were placed in storage at Baikonur after the launch was called off and remain there. According to the report, the charge reflects a reduction in the value of property and equipment, such as satellites, of $272.3 million and loss of prepayments of $1 million. That is offset by the reversal of $44.1 million of charges, including payments for future launches that are no longer scheduled on Soyuz. “Negotiations are ongoing with the related vendors with regards to the recoverability of assets and the undelivered services,” the report states. “As the outcome of these negotiations is uncertain, no asset has been recognised.” OneWeb has since announced contracts with the Indian space agency ISRO and SpaceX to launch its remaining first-generation satellites. A OneWeb executive said in June that those launches will begin in the fourth quarter of this year , and will be completed by the second quarter of 2023. OneWeb reported $9.6 million in revenue from the year, which came from its acquisition of TrustComm , a managed satellite communications provider now called OneWeb Technologies. The company reported a net loss of $389.8 million and an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $186.9 million. OneWeb and Eutelsat announced July 26 their plans to merge , combining OneWeb’s low Earth orbit satellite constellation with Eutelsat’s fleet of geostationary orbit satellites. “The combination of a LEO/GEO offering for connectivity is forecast to generate substantial value,” OneWeb stated in the report, citing various opportunities to optimize spending, such as through improved purchasing power. The merger is expected to close in the middle of 2023.
Leaders of NASA’s Lucy asteroid mission are increasingly confident that the mission can continue as planned even if ongoing efforts to fully deploy and latch a solar array don’t succeed. Engineers have been studying for months one of two circular solar arrays that did not fully deploy and latch into place after the spacecraft’s launch in October 2021. They concluded that a lanyard used to pull open the solar array lost tension during the deployment process , causing the lanyard to wrap around the motor shaft. On May 9, controllers issued commands to run both the primary and backup motors for the solar array deployment process simultaneously, hoping that a harder pull would be sufficient to restore tension in the lanyard and continue deployment of the array. The spacecraft similarly ran both motors three times since then. “That’s allowing us to make significant process towards latch, but we’re not latched yet,” Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a presentation at a meeting of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group June 8. “We are seeing significant tensioning of the array.” That tensioning, he said, is a positive sign even though the array has not latched into place. “It makes it likely that, even if we don’t get the thing latched, we’ll be able to fly the mission as-is,” he said, noting the array, in its current configuration, is generating more than 90% of its planned power. The mission is preparing for an Earth gravity-assist flyby in October, when the spacecraft will pass about 350 kilometers above the Earth. After a second Earth flyby in 2024, Lucy will go past an asteroid in the main belt in 2025, then several Trojan asteroids in a cluster leading Jupiter in orbit around the sun in 2027 and 2028. A third Earth flyby in 2030 will set up encounters with two Trojan asteroids in a separate cluster trailing Jupiter in 2033. To set up the October flyby, Lucy performed a trajectory correction maneuver June 7, NASA said in a June 8 blog post. The maneuver is the first of several planned before the October flyby.
European small launch vehicle developer Isar Aerospace has signed an agreement with the French space agency CNES to launch its Spectrum rocket from French Guiana. Isar said July 21 it signed a binding term sheet with CNES to launch from the Diamant launch complex at the Guiana Space Center, or CSG, near Kourou, French Guiana. The new pad, which will be in addition to one at Andøya, Norway, will host launches starting in the first half of 2024. In an interview, Alexandre Dalloneau, vice president of mission and launch operations at Isar, said the second pad will allow for additional launches and serve orbits not accessible from Andøya, which can support launches to polar and retrograde orbits. The CSG pad will enable launches to orbits ranging from near-equatorial to polar. “It’s a huge asset for us to have two different launch sites. In Europe, we are the only one,” he said. He added that it also allows Isar to be competitive with American companies like ABL Space Systems, Firefly Aerospace and Relativity Space that are developing vehicles similar in performance to Spectrum and have access to multiple launch sites. The Diamant pad was built more than a half-century ago for the French rocket of the same name, but has been dormant for decades. CNES is now working to convert the facility into a multi-user site for small launch vehicles, and Isar is the first company the agency selected in an open competition to use the site. CNES will provide common infrastructure, Dalloneau said, such as power, communications and plumbing. Isar will then construct a launch pad and assembly hangar there for its launches, with the potential for other companies to build their own launch facilities there. The French Guiana site will be able to support up to 10 launches a year, the same as the company’s Andøya pad. That will depend in part on how many other launch providers set up at the Diamant complex, as well as other launch activity from Ariane and Vega pads at CSG. “I know that CNES wants to improve the capacity to launch from their launch complex,” he said. A flight rate of 10 per year, he said, appears feasible, “but it depends on the launch cadence of other launch providers.” The CSG pad will be identical to the one at Andøya. “We don’t want to change the launch system,” Dalloneau said. “The operator inside the hangar to assemble the launcher will not know where he is. He will have to open the door to see if there is snow or tropical weather.”
The European Space Agency is ending efforts to restore operations of the Sentinel-1B radar imaging satellite that malfunctioned more than half a year ago and will instead move up the launch of a replacement. ESA said in an Aug. 3 statement that the agency and the European Commission, partners on the Copernicus series of Earth observation satellites, had given up trying to restore the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload on Sentinel-1B and was ending the spacecraft’s mission more than six years after its launch. That payload malfunctioned in December 2021 and ESA has been working since then to try to recover it . A summary of the investigation into the SAR payload failure concluded that two 28-volt power regulators for the SAR payload malfunctioned. One is needed to operate the payload. Efforts to restore them failed other than one case in April when the main regulator turned on for 4.4 seconds before turning off again. That provided “valuable observations to identify possible failure modes,” the summary stated. The report concluded the most likely reason the power regulators failed was “a potential leakage of a ceramic capacitor” found in both regulators that had to be replaced during manufacturing and testing of the payload. The replacement was soldered in a way that may have damaged it. “The conclusion drawn by the Anomaly Review Board is that it is impossible to recover the 28V regulated bus of the satellite’s C-band synthetic aperture radar antenna power supply unit, which is needed to provide power to the radar electronics,” Simonetta Cheli, director of Earth observation program at ESA, said in the statement announcing the end of the Sentinel-1B mission. There had been rumors in recent days that ESA and the European Commission had given up on efforts to recover Sentinel-1B. the last public update on recovery efforts was in April. An ESA spokesperson said Aug. 2 that the agency was still “gathering some additional information” and coordinating with the commission about the mission. Sentinel-1B operated in tandem with Sentinel-1A, launched in 2014, to provide SAR imagery for a variety of Earth science applications. Sentinel-1A remains operational but has the same potential flaw in its payload power system. The ESA investigation noted that the payload power system on Sentinel-1A has not experienced any problems since launch and, since the Sentinel-1B anomaly, its performance is being closely monitored. “The permanent unavailability of Sentinel-1B satellite represents an important loss for the European Union’s space program and the European Commission is engaged to mitigate its impact,” Paraskevi Papantoniou, acting director for space in the European Commission’s Directorate General for Defence, Industry and Space, said in the statement. In the near term, ESA and the European Commission are buying SAR data from other satellites. That includes Canada’s Radarsat-2 and Radarsat Constellation Mission, Germany’s TerraSAR-X, Italy’s COSMO-SkyMed and Spain’s PAZ. A new satellite, Sentinel-1C, is nearly ready for launch. ESA announced in April a contract with Arianespace for the Vega-C launch of Sentinel-1C . At the time the launch was scheduled for some time in the first half of 2023. “Our focus is on fast-tracking the launch of Sentinel-1C,” Cheli said in the statement. “Now, thanks to the successful inaugural flight of the Vega-C rocket on 13 July, we, with Arianespace, are targeting the launch in the second quarter of 2023.” There was discussion early in the year, though, of moving up the Sentinel-1C launch to as soon as late this year. Despite the failure of its SAR payload, the Sentinel-1B spacecraft itself remains operational. “We have Sentinel-1B under control,” Alistair O’Connell, Sentinel-1 spacecraft operations manager, said in a statement. “We perform regular monitoring of the spacecraft health and routine orbit control maneuvers.” ESA will deorbit Sentinel-1B after the launch of Sentinel-1C. O’Connell said the spacecraft will comply with orbital debris mitigation guidelines that call for spacecraft to be deorbited within 25 years of the end of its mission. “In practice, the reentry duration is expected to be much shorter,” he said.
TAMPA, Fla. — French satellite antenna maker Anywaves said Dec. 8 it has raised around $3 million to help capture more business from U.S. customers. Anywaves CEO Nicolas Capet said the funds from French investor Ylliade Groupe enable the company to accelerate sales and marketing efforts in the United States, where only 10% of its customers are currently based. The majority of customers, about 80%, are based in Europe and the remaining 10% are from other countries including Australia and India. “Our objective is to balance this mix,” Capet told SpaceNews via email. Expanding in the U.S. “is important from a commercial point of view as well as from [a] historic cooperation one,” he added, pointing to France’s strategic space partnership with the country underlined during French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent trip to Washington. After spinning out of French space agency CNES five years ago, the company raised 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million) in 2019 for an antenna business focused on serving constellations of satellites. Anywaves has so far focused on producing generic antennas in S- and X-band that are compatible with a wide range of missions. Last year, the French manufacturer sold antennas to San Francisco-based condosat operator Loft Orbital in a deal they said marked the beginning of a “long-term partnership.” Anywaves also has a deal to provide 100 antennas for Florida-based satellite maker Airbus OneWeb Satellites, which is expanding its customer base beyond British constellation operator OneWeb to serve other organizations, including the U.S. government . According to Anywaves, it sold 400 products in 2022, double the amount sold in the past five years. The company plans to increase its manufacturing facilities in 2023 and develop a broader range of payload antennas.
Updated 2:45 p.m. Eastern with OSTP comments. KIHEI, Hawaii — The Federal Communications Commission adopted a new rule Sept. 29 that will shorten the time for satellite operators to deorbit low Earth orbit satellites from 25 to 5 years. Commissioners voted 4-0 to adopt the draft rule, published earlier this month , intended to address growing debris in LEO. Under the new rule, spacecraft that end their lives in orbits at altitudes of 2,000 kilometers or below will have to deorbit as soon as practicable and no more than five years after the end of their mission. The rule would apply to satellites launched two years after the order is adopted, and include both U.S.-licensed satellites as well as those licensed by other jurisdictions but seeking U.S. market access. The rule replaces a longstanding guideline that called for deorbiting satellites up to 25 years after the end of their mission. “Twenty-five years is a long time. There is no reason to wait that long anymore, especially in low Earth orbit,” Jessica Rosenworcel, FCC chairwoman, said at the meeting. She and other commissioners cited the growth of both satellites and debris in LEO, and projections of potentially tens of thousands of satellites to be launched in the next decade, as driving the need for the reduced post-mission disposal timeframe. “It will mean more accountability and less risk of collision that increase orbital debris and the likelihood of space communications failures,” Rosenworcel said. Other commissioners offered similar arguments in support of the rule. “Most new systems in LEO don’t need 25 years for that post-mission disposal,” said Geoffrey Starks. “With this order, we do take that practical step of reducing the demise times in LEO to no more than five years, a timeframe that is readily achievable. Compliance will be the new rule here to bend the curve of debris proliferation.” Commissioners did not mention a letter from the bipartisan leadership of the House Science Committee Sept. 27 calling on the FCC to delay consideration of the rule, citing questions about the FCC’s authority to regulate orbital debris and concerns about a lack of coordination with other agencies. “I’ve long expressed a little bit of skepticism about the FCC going alone here,” said Brendan Carr. “We need to make sure we’re leaning on the expertise of other agencies that do, in fact, have a cadre of rocket scientists to help inform this. I hope that we do that here.” Despite that skepticism, he said he supported the rule. “I continue to believe that the FCC must work collaboratively throughout the government, but we must leverage our collective expertise here as well,” Starks said. “We are right to move ahead.” Another commissioner, Nathan Simington, saw the rule as an opportunity to set a de facto global standard. “We have, through the option of extending our orbital debris rules to any who seek U.S. market access, a regulatory hook for creating a default rulebook for commercial operators globally,” he said. “That’s a powerful, even irresistible, incentive.” He added that he hoped that technologies like active debris removal or close cooperation among operators to avoid collisions could turn the five-year rule into “a largely unused backstop” but that the FCC could not count on it. “We can’t bet exclusively on that. Hope is not a plan.” The FCC’s move to shorten the post-mission disposal timeframe comes as NASA is leading a review of the federal government’s Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices, directed by a National Orbital Debris Implementation Plan released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in July. That review included a “short-term study” examining whether the 25 years for deorbiting currently in that document should be shortened. Speaking at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference Sept. 29, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, assistant director for space policy at OSTP, said the FCC’s order did not necessarily conflict with that ongoing review. “The FCC is part of, and continues to be part of, the orbital debris interagency working group,” she said. “It’s all working in tandem. It’s not a separate effort.” “We do need an updated review because 25 years is too long,” she added.
Astra Space is laying off one-sixth of its workforce, a move the company’s leadership says is needed to focus its resources on production of spacecraft electric thrusters and development of a new launch vehicle. The Alameda, California-based company, in quarterly financial results released Nov. 8, disclosed it is laying off 16% of its employees. It is also reducing investment on its “space services” business line to develop a satellite constellation that would provide services such as communications to customers, focusing instead on its spacecraft propulsion and launch vehicle business lines. “With the backdrop of continued macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, increasing inflation and interest rates, and equity market volatility, the team has prioritized resources on our core businesses,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said on the company’s earnings call. The company did not disclose how many people would be laid off, although Kemp said in the call that the company had “over 400” employees, implying that the company would be laying off more than 60 people. The company had not filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice with California’s Economic Development Department, required for companies in the state laying off more than 50 employees, as of Nov. 7, according to the department’s website. Kemp, in a later interview, said the layoffs were focused on people working on space services and launch vehicle production. It’s the first layoffs since the company went public in mid-2021, although he noted the company reduced staff in early 2020 when it lost a Rocket 3 vehicle on the pad in Alaska preparing for the DARPA Launch Challenge. The layoffs allow the company to focus on ramping up deliveries of its Astra Spacecraft Engine electric thrusters and develop its new Launch System 2, stretching funding “well into 2024,” Kemp said in the interview. “That’s enough funding to go deliver a bunch of spacecraft engines — hundreds of them — and also get back out to the pad with Launch System 2 and have a successful flight.” Astra says it has now received 237 orders for the Astra Spacecraft Engines, technology it obtained when it acquired Apollo Fusion last year, an increase of 130% from the end of the second quarter. The company has announced orders in recent months from several new customers, including Airbus OneWeb Satellites, Astroscale and Maxar, for those electric thrusters, and is opening a new production facility in Sunnyvale, California, devoted to manufacturing them. The $2.8 million in revenue Astra reported in the third quarter came exclusively from engine sales. Kemp said in the earnings call that the company completed the first “design loop” on Launch System 2, which features the Rocket 4 vehicle designed to ultimately place up to 600 kilograms into orbit. It has also upgraded test infrastructure needed for the vehicle and designed tooling needed for building vehicle structures, and is planning test launches of the vehicle in late 2023. Astra announced in August that it was retiring the much smaller Rocket 3.3 vehicle after several launch failures . Kemp said the company accelerated work on Rocket 4 after seeing demand for larger satellites grow significantly. “The market was not at 50 or 100 kilograms. The market was at 600 kilograms,” he said in the interview. “So, maturing a product that addresses such a small portion of the market just did not make sense.” While Astra took an iterative approach with Rocket 3, suffering several launch failures before reaching orbit, the company is focusing more on reliability from the start with Rocket 4. “Customers have told us, ‘You need to demonstrate reliability,’” he said, arguing that was consistent with Astra’s plans for a high flight rate. “If you want to do weekly launch, you have to have higher reliability.” “If we get anywhere in the ballpark of 600 kilograms, anywhere in the ballpark of $5 million [per launch], we’re going to be way better than anything else out there. Don’t optimize for performance, don’t optimize for cost,” he said. “But if the rocket doesn’t work, if we don’t have a reliable system, that’s the thing that could Astra in a difficult position.” Astra reported a net loss of $199.1 million, a figure that includes $133.4 million in impairment charges on assets that the company took for several factors, said Axel Martinez, new chief financial officer, in the earnings call. The company had an adjusted net loss of $45.2 million and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $41.4 million. The company had $150.5 million in cash and cash equivalents on hand at the end of the quarter. “We continue to evaluate various sources of capital as we carefully manage our financial runway,” he said. That runway is important, Kemp said in the interview, because of market uncertainty. “We could be going into a period where the stock market and the capital just isn’t available,” he said. “Winning might just be surviving through the next couple of years.”
Satellite radar startups disagree over how much of their resources should be moved to meet anticipated demand from commercial customers and away from governments, which today provide the bulk of revenues. Executives of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) companies Capella Space, Umbra, and Synspective discussed diverging growth strategies Sept. 16 during World Satellite Business Week. Payam Banazadeh, CEO and founder of Capella, said SAR providers must concentrate capacity on serving “the top 10 customers today,” which are primarily in the defense and intelligence market. “And you have to make sure that you’re the only one delivering to the top 10 customers and you’re the preferred provider,” he said. “You don’t do that you have no chance of making it. Zero.” Banazadeh said it is particularly vital for early-stage companies to focus on serving higher-paying customers to gain scale in the market. Joe Morrison, vice president of commercial product at Umbra, said he completely disagrees with this approach. He said Umbra is looking to use the infrastructure needed to serve large customers to also support smaller innovative companies seeking to grow market share. If SAR providers “don’t treat those customers with respect and focus on their use cases, you’re building for the past,” Morrison said. “And those same 10 customers that you want to focus on today, they’re looking at those companies for what’s coming in the future — and those companies are hamstrung because historically providers like us treat them like a distraction, but they’re not.” Satellite operators have a finite amount of capacity, Banazadeh retorted, and “you’re going to run out of capacity pretty quickly [at] places that people want to look at.” He added: “If you had an infinite amount of capacity, which none of us do and none of us will, then you don’t have to pick, because then you’ve saturated your capacity on the government customers and there’s excess capacity that you can use. “Well, that’s not the reality of how SAR constellations work.” Banazadeh told SpaceNews in an email that its strategy is not mutually exclusive with providing imagery to commercial customers, pointing to the agreements it already has in the commercial market. However, “ to win in the SAR market you need to dominate the existing market first before you experiment with other business models which might take away resources from your core customers. ” He added: “ Customers care far more about the stability of their data provider than experimental business models. The worst thing that could happen is if their data provider goes bankrupt or decides that their old business model is not keeping them afloat anymore and changes. ” Neither company disclosed specific information about how they are pricing their services. Banazadeh said on the panel that Umbra’s approach is a bet that lower SAR prices will significantly increase demand in the commercial market. Government customers are less sensitive to price, according to Banazadeh. The defense and intelligence markets have other variables they care more about, such as reliability and quality. Banazadeh said he hopes Umbra finds success in its strategy, “because if it works we’ll follow.” Capella had seven satellites in orbit as of April, and recently announced plans to launch an unspecified number of next-generation of spacecraft called Acadia starting early next year. Umbra currently has three satellites in orbit and expects to deploy two more before the end of this year. Morrison said there are “several more going up next year” to expand its fleet. Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japan’s Synspective that launched its first commercial satellite on a Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle Sept. 15, said its strategy lies somewhere between Capella and Umbra. Synspective is first focusing on government customers to build scale, and then plans to branch into the commercial market with a business based on providing solutions rather than pure data. While the Japanese government is currently its largest customer, he expects to expand internationally now that COVID-19 restrictions have relaxed. Synspective, which has been testing services on two demonstration satellites that Rocket Lab also launched, announced Sept. 16 that it had established contact with its first commercial spacecraft, called StriX-1. The startup plans to deploy four more satellites by the end of 2023. By the end of 2030, it expects to be operating a constellation of 30 satellites, although it has not yet announced a launch contract for any of its upcoming spacecraft. This article was updated Sept. 17 with additional comments from Capella CEO Payam Banazadeh.
SAN FRANCISCO – Kayhan Space and Morpheus Space announced a strategic partnership Nov. 15 to offer satellite operators a “one-click” collision-avoidance service. The service, which combines Kayhan’s space traffic management software with Morpheus’ pay-as-you-go propulsion service, “will bring a new capability for the industry and help make space safe again,” Morpheus CEO Daniel Bock told SpaceNews. Kayhan’s cloud-based collision-avoidance software service, Kayhan Pathfinder Pro, provides conjunction assessments and recommends collision-avoidance maneuvers. Morpheus, a Germany company, offers propulsion as a service through Gateway, a web application designed to streamline satellite operations. Satellite operators who rely on Morpheus propulsion, for example, can raise or maintain their satellite orbits through the platform, which is linked with their onboard electric propulsion. Instead of paying upfront for their anticipated propulsion needs, including maneuvers recommended by Kayhan, customers can purchase propulsion when it’s needed in orbit. “The core focus of our partnership with Kayhan Space is lowering the risk and cost barriers to safe space operations by making smart maneuverability and collision-avoidance capabilities simple and seamless to use as part of our on-demand and subscription-based mobility solutions,” Bock said in a statement. With the product Morpheus and Kayhan have developed together, “customers will see potential collision events in the interactive platform,” Araz Feyzi, co-founder and chief technology officer of Lafayette, Colo.-based Kayhan, told SpaceNews. “You will see Kayhan notifications and get direct access to Kayhan course-of-action avoidance maneuvers. The product has all the information that it requires to perform the right maneuvers.” Customers will have the option to put spacecraft on autopilot, enabling them to perform collision-avoidance maneuvers autonomously. Customers also can select manual operations, meaning the mission controller would review recommended maneuvers and select the ones to be performed. “Some of the largest satellite operators” in low-Earth orbit are working with Morpheus and Kayhan on “development of the intelligent propulsion offering,” according to the Nov. 15 news release. The unnamed constellation operators plan to begin deploying the service “aboard satellite missions beginning in early 2023,” the release added. Feyzi said in a statement, “The integration of Kayhan’s Pathfinder Pro spaceflight safety platform with the Morpheus mobility-as-a-service allows us to accelerate our ability to make these powerful and intelligent in-space mobility capabilities available to everyone in space. This collaborative solution is in direct response to requests from leading satellite operators, who will be among the first to contract for safe in-space mobility.”
TALLINN, Estonia — Chinese state-owned and commercial companies are developing capabilities to launch liquid propellant rockets from sea platforms to boost the country’s launch options. China has already demonstrated the ability to launch the Long March 11 solid rocket from sea platforms. These have been facilitated by a new spaceport near Haiyang in the eastern coastal province of Shandong. Now, private firms including Orienspace and the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) are developing larger, liquid propellant Gravity series rockets and adapted Long March 8 launchers for sea launches. The Haiyang seaport is attracting a range of space sector firms and is fostering an industry chain. Having so far used repurposed vessels, a 162.5-meter-long, 40-meters-wide “New-type rocket launching vessel” is under construction and expected to facilitate its first launch in 2022. RSpace, a liquid rocket component startup, is now constructing a 230-acre manufacturing and testing facility for storage tanks and liquid rocket body structures at Haiyang, with a planned total investment of $119 million. The project has received backing from the city and province and is listed as a key project for Shandong. The development indicates a concerted attempt to support liquid sea launches and its proximity would ease rocket transportation issues for customers. The company recently conducted thermal and insulation tests on 3.35-meter-diameter propellant tanks. Prospective clients include Orienspace, which was founded in late 2020 and raised $47 million and $59.9 million in pre-A and A-series funding rounds this year. The firm is currently aiming to launch its Gravity-1 solid rocket in mid-2023. The Gravity-2 kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher is to follow. Galactic Energy, a private launcher service provider, is planning to launch its third Ceres-1 solid rocket within the next couple of months, and could test a sea launch of the vehicle before the end of year. It is unknown if the firm’s in-development Pallas-1 kerolox rocket will be adapted for sea launch. Pallas-1 is currently slated for a test flight in early 2023. CALT has, similarly, recently established a nearby final assembly and test base which was used for the first time in May to support a Long March 11 sea launch of commercial remote sensing satellites. CALT, one of China’s two main state-owned launch vehicle manufacturers and designers operating under the ownership of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., is now also looking at adapting its new Long March 8 kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher for sea launch. “This breakthrough in sea launch technology will enable China to launch medium and large satellites and constellations ‘both on land and sea’, especially into low-inclination low-Earth orbits, and it allows China to remain competitive in the fast-paced space industry,” a 2021 paper in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics states. The article looks at the prospects of sea launches for the yet-to-fly reusable version of the Long March 8, describing the prospective launcher as a “low-cost, highly reliable and easy-to-use vehicle, revised for commercial market, which is preferable for sea launches.” Further studies into safety control of the launch site and drop zones for spent rocket stages are required, according to the authors, but also note the fewer constraints on launch and reusable launcher recovery at sea. The Wenchang spaceport on Hainan island could potentially host sea launches, and has recently begun construction of a new launch complex for commercial launch . China’s launch rate has expanded rapidly in recent years. China launched 19 times in 2015, all with Long March rockets. Last year the country conducted 55 launches , including missions from commercial actors. The country has expanded the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert to host solid and liquid commercial rockets to help accommodate the rising demand for launch, while also establishing Haiyang for sea launches. Wenchang and the city of Ningbo are also developing centers for commercial launch.
The Canadian government announced Oct. 18 it will fund development of a satellite and instruments for a NASA-led Earth science program. In a speech in Ottawa, François-Philippe Champagne, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, said the government had agreed to spend more than $200 million Canadian ($145 million) on High-altitude Aerosols, Water vapor and Clouds (HAWC), one element of NASA’s proposed Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) mission. HAWC would consist of two instruments on a Canadian satellite and a third instrument on a NASA satellite. Both spacecraft would be launched in 2031. The overall AOS system will feature at least four satellites in polar and inclined orbits, with launches starting in 2028. In addition to the Canadian contribution, the Japanese space agency JAXA is providing a satellite and French space agency CNES two instruments. “Canada has always played a key role in international space programs, helping to find solutions to global challenges,” Champagne said. “Today’s more than $200 million announcement builds on those successes with our participation in NASA’s AOS program.” AOS is part of the Earth System Observatory, an overarching series of missions designed to respond to the recommendations of the most recent Earth science decadal survey released in early 2018 . The AOS series of spacecraft would support two of the five “targeted observables” from that report, atmosphere and clouds, convection and precipitation. “This is more than a collection of five missions,” Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division, said of the Earth System Observatory at an Oct. 18 meeting of the Space Studies Board’s Committee on Earth Sciences and Applications from Space. “It really speaks to getting a more holistic of the Earth.” Three of the Earth System Observatory missions, including AOS, completed mission concept reviews this summer and are expected to pass a milestone called Key Decision Point (KDP) A later this fall, she said. That would allow the missions to move into Phase A of initial development. While AOS and other missions completed their concept reviews, NASA also performed an independent review of the overall Earth System Observatory. The purpose of that independent review, she said, was to “really look across the whole thing and see if we missed anything” in its formulation. She said the agency received the initial findings of that review and will incorporate them into the missions ahead of KDP-A.
The White House will ask federal agencies for their proposals for how to authorize and supervise emerging commercial space capabilities that don’t fit into current regulatory regimes. Near the end of the meeting of the National Space Council at NASA’s Johnson Space Center Sept. 9, Vice President Kamala Harris called on agencies who are members of the council to submit their proposals for the authorization and supervision of “commercial novel space activities” in the next six months. Harris had hinted at such a move in an Aug. 12 speech where she criticized “simply outdated” commercial space regulations. The proposals are meant to address a longstanding concern that the current U.S. commercial space regulatory system is ill-suited for new space markets that don’t fit into frameworks established for mature markets like communications, remote sensing and launch. Industry officials have warned that it can be difficult to know what agency or agencies are responsible for emerging applications like commercial space stations, satellite servicing or in-space manufacturing. Some degree of oversight is required for the United States to comply with its obligations under Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty to provide authorization and continuing supervision of space activities by companies. There has been no consensus, though, about who should oversee those activities. “What are the rules for those types of applications?” said Chirag Parikh, executive secretary of the National Space Council, in a speech Sept. 12 at World Satellite Business Week here, recapping the council’s latest meeting. “That’s one of the things that we’re taking very seriously.” There has been no shortage of proposals over the years to assign that responsibility to one agency or another, such as the Office of Space Commerce within the Commerce Department or the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, part of the Transportation Department. Representative of both departments discussed their interest in the issue at the council meeting. “We certainly recognize novel space activities require regulatory clarity and flexibility and predictability,” said Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of transportation. She cited efforts by the FAA to streamline launch and reentry regulations, which she called a “gamechanger” for improving the licensing process. “We believe that it’s absolutely critical for the U.S. to ensure that all commercial space missions are properly authorized and supervised,” said Don Graves, deputy secretary of commerce. He argued his department’s work on commercial remote sensing regulations and, more recently, civil space traffic management, gave it “unique insights” into how regulations fit emerging space activities. “We need a regulatory structure that can change in response to the rapid introduction of new technologies,” he said. He endorsed the concept of a “space portal” that would direct space companies to the right agencies, something similar to the “one-stop shop” proposed for the Office of Space Commerce in recent years. What is unclear, though, is how any proposals submitted in the next six months would differ from earlier concepts that have been studied for years, and what the National Space Council will do once it receives the proposals. Harris stated one issue that must be included in the proposals is space safety. “What I’d ask is that your proposals include how we will ensure space operations abide by space safety norms and protocols,” she said. “It’s one of the things we’re taking very seriously,” Parikh said of the process, calling it a “whole of government” effort that will also involve industry input. “You can’t have all these different stovepipes of rules and regulations. You have to have something that is innovative, that’s flexible, that keeps up with technology.” Companies are pushing the White House to move quickly on the issue. “We need to proceed with alacrity to address the issue of how we provide ‘continuing supervision’ by the government of commercial space activities as required by the Outer Space Treaty,” said Mike Gold, executive vice president for commercial space and external affairs at Redwire Space. “It is vital that a lead federal agency be identified as soon as possible and I applaud the vice president for her continued focus on this nuanced topic.”
The Pentagon on Friday said it is looking at options to provide satellite communications services for Ukraine’s military forces following Elon Musk’s warning that SpaceX will suspend Starlink internet services in Ukraine unless the U.S. government agrees to foot the bill. Deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh during a briefing at the Pentagon Oct. 14 said the Defense Department “has been in communication with SpaceX regarding Starlink” but declined to comment on the substance of the discussions. Singh said DoD “recognizes the advantages that any satcom capability has and allows the Ukrainians to use not just on the battlefield, but within the country itself. And we understand the fragility in those communications.” The Pentagon is “working with our partners and allies and trying to figure out what’s best,” she said. Singh declined to confirm whether the Pentagon will pay for Starlink specifically, and insisted it will examine other options. “There are certainly other satcom capabilities that exist out there. I’m not going to show our hand right now on exactly what those are, or who we’re talking to. But we do know that there are others,” Singh said. “There’s not just SpaceX, there are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine what they need on the battlefield.” “We are continuing to talk to SpaceX and other companies about satcom capabilities,” said Singh. “But I don’t want to go into further details.” Singh declined to confirm a CNN report that Musk sent a letter to DoD saying SpaceX can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service, claiming it will cost $120 million for the rest of the year and as much as $400 million for the next 12 months. “In addition to terminals, we have to create, launch, maintain & replenish satellites & ground stations & pay telcos for access to Internet via gateways,” Musk tweeted Oct. 14 . “We’ve also had to defend against cyberattacks & jamming, which are getting harder. Burn is approaching ~$20M/month.” SpaceX’s plea for government funding puts the Pentagon in a quandary because even though the Pentagon is sending billions of dollars worth of weapons, equipment and assistance to Ukraine, it appears that DoD never requested SpaceX to supply Starlink terminals and internet service to Ukrainian forces. As a senior U.S. defense official told The Washington Post , SpaceX “sticks the DoD with the bill for a system no one asked for but now so many depend on.” In reaction to critics, Musk on Oct. 15 tweeted : “The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” How it all started In the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Twitter posts, Musk single handedly moved to send over satellite terminals in response to a request by Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation . Musk said Feb. 26 — two days after Russia launched the invasion — that Starlink service had been turned on in the country and, two days later, an initial shipment of at least several dozen Starlink terminals arrived in Ukraine. Musk commented in March that SpaceX made software changes to reduce the terminal’s power consumption, allowing it to be powered by a cigarette lighter in a car, and to enable roaming on moving vehicles. Fedorov said Starlink has become a key piece of the country’s critical infrastructure. Singh said DoD is “trying to do what we can … to ensure that these communications remain for the Ukrainian forces … We are working with the Ukraine Ministry of Defense. We know that there is this demand and satcom capability is needed.” A senior executive from Viasat, a communications satellite operator that provides satcom service in Ukraine, said the company is ready to step in to help fill demand. “We have been providing broadband for humanitarian and rescue operations throughout the crisis, and stand ready to provide expanded services for the Ukraine, U.S. and our allies,” Craig Miller, Viasat’s president of government systems wrote Oct. 14 in a LinkedIn post. The power of a private company Amid the wrangling over who should pay for Starlink in Ukraine, questions also are being raised about the power of a private company in driving national policy. The topic came up during a panel discussion Oct. 13 at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. Preston Dunlap, CEO of Arkenstone Venture and a former U.S. Air Force official, pointed out the new reality that a CEO now has the power to turn off the internet in a critical part of the world. Preston was referring to reports that Musk personally declined a Ukrainian request to provide Starlink internet service in Crimea — territory Russia occupied in 2014 but continues to be claimed by Ukraine — because he thought that would result in a nuclear conflict. Political analyst Ian Bremmer from the Eurasia Group said Musk “refused given the potential for escalation.” Dean Bellamy, executive vice president of national security space at Redwire and a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, said SpaceX’s role in Ukraine will be a case study about a commercial business “not operating under a government contract but affecting policy and making decisions that could affect the outcome of a conflict.”
TAMPA, Fla. — DirecTV said July 18 its satellite TV customers face major disruption if broadcast rival Dish Network gets to deploy 5G wireless services in the 12 GHz spectrum band. Mobile operations in the band “would cause extensive harmful interference” to millions of DirecTV receivers across the United States, the company told the Federal Communications Commission in a letter. According to a study DirecTV commissioned from satellite consulting firm Savid, interference levels would exceed limits currently in place in the U.S. to protect Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) systems by a factor of 100 to 100,000. This would impact areas “extending well beyond the intended coverage area of the mobile base stations,” wrote Stacy Fuller, DirecTV’s senior vice president of external affairs. Fuller said the study is based on conservative assumptions that significantly understate interference levels, because neither the FCC nor the band’s mobile proponents have set out rules for the proposed two-way network. Dish and RS Access, a spectrum holding company, have licenses in the band that they want to upgrade for terrestrial 5G services. Both Dish and DirecTV are already using frequencies in the band to provide linear TV programming. OneWeb and SpaceX also use 12 GHz frequencies to connect their competing broadband satellite constellations in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) to user terminals. OneWeb and SpaceX recently commissioned studies showing the proposed 5G services would significantly disrupt their networks. Fuller said DirecTV’s broadcast services are even more vulnerable to disruption from interference because DBS is a one-way service. “Unlike broadband systems, which can replace lost [data] packets through two-way communications, DBS packets lost to interference result in frozen video screens—and canceled subscriptions,” she added. “Accordingly, the Commission should terminate this proceeding and give incumbent satellite operators in the band the certainty they need to continue to invest in developing and delivering advanced services for American consumers.” Both DirecTV and Dish have been losing customers in a declining satellite pay-TV market that has been losing out to online streaming alternatives. DirecTV is majority owned by U.S. telecoms giant AT&T, and has been expanding its streaming services in response to changing viewer habits. Alongside expanding its own streaming capabilities, Dish has been developing a terrestrial mobile network that has been using other spectrum bands for 5G. Back and forth studies Dish, RS Access and other members of the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition say mobile services can coexist with other users of the band. Studies for RS Access by RKF Engineering Solutions, an engineering firm, have focused on the potential for interfering with NGSO operators. SpaceX said analysis it submitted to the FCC June 21 addresses inaccuracies and incorrect assumptions that were made in earlier RFK interference studies. The proposed network would cause Starlink users to experience harmful interference more than 77% of the time, SpaceX warned. OneWeb followed with its own study July 12, which said it would leave significant areas of the United States unusable by the otherwise ubiquitous NGSO terminals. However, according to analysis from RFK that uses Starlink as a model, 5G deployments will have no effect on at least 99.85% of NGSO operations in the 12 GHz band. RS Access filed another RFK analysis to the FCC July 15 to identify factors driving the disparity between it and SpaceX’s study. The disparities stem from issues that include the “[e]xceptionally narrow geographic scope” of SpaceX’s study, RS Access CEO Noah Campbell said, unsupportable assumptions about how Starlink terminals would be distributed and how 5G base stations would be deployed.
SES and Hughes in a demonstration last month installed satellite internet service on a General Atomics surveillance drone that the company sells to the U.S. military and allies. The companies announced Nov. 10 that the MQ-9B SkyGuardian remotely piloted aircraft successfully communicated with SES satellites in medium and geostationary Earth orbits. The drone stayed on the ground and did not fly, but the companies said the demonstration showed how the military could use high-throughput satellite connectivity to transmit live-video streams faster and more reliably than traditional single-orbit networks. The demonstration took place Oct. 20 at General Atomics’ flight operations facility in El Mirage, Calif. “As we expand into new and more intricate payloads for our RPA, we’ll require higher data rates that provide the bandwidth, security and robustness to operate our sensors,” said Fred Darlington, senior vice president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. “This is the first time this multi-orbit capability was integrated onto the MQ-9 platform,” said Will Tong, SES vice president of strategic government initiatives. SES operates a network of satellites in both medium and GEO orbits. Hughes Network Systems provided a software-defined modem and network management software to enable roaming across satellites. Tong said one of the challenges of connecting aircraft to satellites is the size and weight of the terminals. In this demonstration SES used a small terminal that delivered throughput of 45 megabits per second. “Right now remotely piloted aircraft have low data rate L band as their secondary satcom link and that cannot carry the amount of data that is needed to bring critical data from the RPA to the ground,” he said. The Hughes modem, he said, switches the satcom link nearly instantaneously, which does not happen now. “If an RPA operator wants to switch links for any type of interference or jamming, it needs to be done manually and that takes time.” Some armed versions of the MQ-9s drop missiles on targets , but most conduct 24/7 reconnaissance over areas of interest. Its cameras transmit live video to intelligence units or command centers hundreds or thousands of miles away. Technologies available today allow the military to get more data from RPAs without having to weigh the aircraft down with heavy equipment, Tong said. “Integrating a small form factor antenna — about a third of the size of the current antenna — while showing over four-times more throughout than current capabilities opens the realm of the possible,” he said. RPAs currently have limited connectivity of anywhere from 2 to 10 megabits per second, depending on their antennas, said Tong. And they suffer from a lack of resilience from losing a satellite link. This limits how much data can be transmitted and how fast, he said, particularly high-resolution images and video.
Wreckage from a Chinese Long March 5B rocket first stage made a fiery reentry into Earth’s atmosphere over Southeast Asia Saturday, six days after launching a space station module into orbit. Debris from the roughly 30-meter-long, five-meter-wide empty and roughly 22 metric ton core stage of the Long March 5B at 12:45 p.m. Eastern (1645 UTC) July 30, U.S. Space Command announced at 1:45 p.m. “We refer you to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] for further details on the reentry’s technical aspects such as potential debris dispersal+ impact location,” a U.S. Space Command tweet read. China’s human spaceflight agency announced minutes later that debris from the Long March 5B reentered the atmosphere at around 12:55 p.m. Eastern, with a debris landing area of 119.0 degrees East and 9.1 degrees North, in the Sulu Sea, close to Palawan Island in the western Philippines. Possible footage of the reentry was posted on Twitter by an apparent onlooker in Kuching, Malaysia, matching the ground track during a 20-minute window from an U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (18 SDS) Tracking and Impact Prediction message. While much of the empty rocket stage is expected to have burned up on reentry, roughly 20 to 40 percent of a stage typically survives reentry according to experts, such as engine components designed to withstand high temperatures. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson commented on the situation via Twitter shortly after confirmation of reentry. The Long March 5B rocket launched July 24, sending the Wentian space station module into orbit. Wentian is the second module for China’s space station and successfully docked with the already-orbiting Tianhe core module 13 hours after launch. The Long March 5B is a variant of China’s largest rocket. It consists of a core stage and four side boosters. Exceptionally, the first and largest stage of this rocket also acts as the upper stage, inserting the payload into orbit. As the rocket’s YF-77 liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen engines apparently cannot restart once in orbit, the large first stage deorbits due to atmospheric drag, or an uncontrolled reentry. The vast majority of rocket first stages do not reach orbital velocity and fall within a calculated, safe area downrange from launch. The Aerospace Corporation, EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) and 18 SDS provided regular reentry prediction updates on the Long March 5B as the orbit of the rocket stage decayed. China’s human spaceflight agency tracked the stage, issuing daily updates on the basic orbital parameters of the Long March 5B, but did not provide estimates for time of reentry. Where and when the stage would reenter is impossible to predict with certainty, due to atmospheric fluctuations, the challenges of modeling and unknown aspects of the rocket’s design. Predictions however narrowed down the possible ground tracks as the orbit decayed and the window of uncertainty closed. The initial predictions and window of uncertainty issued two days after launch was plus or minus 24 hours. “It’s customary international practice for rockets’ upper stages to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said during a July 27 press conference. The Aerospace Corporation noted in a July 27 press briefing that around 50 objects weighing more than one ton reenter randomly per year. However the exceptionally large tonnage of the Long March 5B means that the debris from the rocket posed a relatively high threat. Ted Muelhaupt stated that odds of debris from this reentry event harming someone range from one in 230 to one in 1,000. This did not include the likelihood of damage to property. Muelhaupt added that this was more than an order of magnitude greater than internationally accepted casualty risk threshold for the uncontrolled reentry of rockets of one in 10,000, stated in a 2019 report issued by the U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices. Meanwhile in orbit, the Shenzhou-14 astronauts aboard China’s space station entered Wentian for the first time at 10:03 p.m. Sunday Eastern. The new module carries a range of cabinets for conducting science experiments. Wentian also provides backup life support and propulsion for Tianhe , which launched in April 2021, as well as new working and living quarters and an EVA hatch for astronauts. “This is the second working and living module that we have in space. The construction of China’s space station has taken another big step. We couldn’t be prouder and happier,” Shenzhou-14 mission commander Chen Dong said, according to Chinese state media. China plans to launch a third module in October to complete the three-module, T-shaped Tiangong space station. The mission will once again rely on a Long March 5B rocket. Both Wentian and Mengtian will be transpositioned from Tianhe’s forward docking port to respective lateral docking ports using a 10-meter-long robotic arm which launched with Tianhe. China intends to operate the station for at least a decade, with crews of three astronauts six-month-missions. It will also launch a co-orbiting optical telescope module, named Xuntian, in late 2023 or 2024. It will be capable of docking with Tianhe for repairs, maintenance, refueling and upgrades, and aims to survey 40 percent of the sky across a decade. Officials with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, have previously suggested that Tiangong could be expanded to six modules. China has stated it welcomes international participation in Tiangong, including payloads through an initiative with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as well as international astronauts and potentially additional modules.
The French government said Nov. 29 it will join the United States and several other countries in a pledge not to conduct anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons tests that can leave hazardous debris in orbit. In a statement, France’s foreign and defense ministries jointly announced that the country would not carry out destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests as a step towards a “safe, stable space environment.” “France has never carried out such tests, which it deems destabilizing and irresponsible,” the government stated. “They have caused a large amount of debris, which may lead to serious consequences for space security and safety, in particular by compromising the integrity of satellites in orbit.” France is the tenth nation to make such a commitment, which started with an April 2022 announcement by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as a means towards creating a norm of responsible behavior in space. Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom made similar pledges. France was also a co-sponsor of a United Nations resolution introduced by the United States in October calling for a similar commitment not to conduct destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests. Members of the U.N. First Committee, which deals with disarmament and international security topics, approved the draft resolution Nov. 1 on a 154-8 vote, with 10 abstentions. China and Russia were among the eight countries voting against it. The French announcement came a day before the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, met with Harris at NASA Headquarters. “I thank you, Mr. President, for your commitment, which was announced yesterday, to adopt this norm,” she told Macron, according to a White House transcript the meeting’s opening, public statements . “Thank you for having launched these very important items,” Macron said of the creation of norms of behavior like the ASAT test ban. “We have crazy players in the space as well, and we have rogue states there, and we have new hybrid attacks.” During those opening remarks, Harris and Macron largely praised cooperation between the United States and France in space, which has grown in the last year. That included the U.S. joining the French-led Space for Climate Observatory project to use space data for climate change, and France signing the U.S.-led Artemis Accords . The two countries also held a first comprehensive dialogue on space Nov. 10 in Paris on civil and national security space topics. A readout of the NASA Headquarters meeting released by the White House stated that Harris and Macron “agreed to strengthen U.S.-France space cooperation across civil, commercial, and national security sectors” but did not mention any specific steps along those lines. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Phillipe Baptiste, president of the French space agency CNES, did sign an agreement to fly a French instrument, the Farside Seismic Suite, on a commercial lunar lander through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. NASA had previously announced the instrument would be on a mission awarded to Draper that will land on the moon’s Schrödinger Basin in 2025. The next milestone in cooperation between France and the United States in space is the launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, a joint mission of NASA and CNES with participation from Canada and the United Kingdom to make the first global survey of the Earth’s surface water. The spacecraft is set to launch on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Dec. 15, NASA announced Nov. 30, a three-day delay to provide additional time for prelaunch processing.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – NASA has awarded contracts to KSAT Inc. and SpaceLink as part the space agency’s campaign to begin investigating commercial sources for future space communications services. NASA awarded KSAT a $162,000 contract and SpaceLink a $190,000 contract to conduct studies related to direct-to-Earth and lunar-space-relay communications. The contracts stem from the effort underway at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Commercialization, Innovation, and Synergies office, working with NASA’s Near Space Network project office, to work with commercial firms to demonstrate their ability to fulfill NASA communications requirements. SpaceLink is investing in a constellation of satellites in medium-Earth orbit to relay communications between the ground and low-Earth orbit. Initially, the constellation will transmit data through RF links to the ground and rely on optical intersatellite links. Kongsberg Satellite Services, the parent company for KSAT Inc., is establishing a dedicated antenna network for lunar communications. SpaceLink said its study for NASA would “identify the barriers, challenges, and solutions associated with integration of optical communications ground terminals into the Near Space Network architecture,” in an Oct. 11 news release. Fortunately for SpaceLink, the NASA contract “is leveraging all of the work that we’ve been working on for the past two years in building out our ground network,” SpaceLink CEO Dave Bettinger told SpaceNews . SpaceLink plans to establish the company’s primary gateway for optical and radio frequency communications at California’s Mojave Air & Space Port. On a roughly 20,000-square-meter parcel in Mojave, California, SpaceLink is setting up redundant high-capacity fiber backhaul to connect with data centers in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. SpaceLink also is establishing its Gateway Development Lab at the Mojave Air & Space Port. “Before we have our satellites up there, we’ll have all of the networking and simulation gear to simulate exactly what our network will be doing,”. “We’ll invite customers like NASA to come in and test our system end-to-end as if it was already launched in the sky.” The technical demonstration consists of an end-to-end test of multi-source data moving from SpaceLink’s Mojave Gateway facility to NASA’s terrestrial network using Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. In August, SpaceLink announced work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop protocols for connecting commercial communications constellations with defense and military systems. Earlier in August, SpaceLink announced an agreement with the U.S. Army to explore ways to use the company’s data-relay constellation to deliver commercial satellite imagery directly to troops on the ground. “We’re showing success on our business model, which includes commercial Earth observation and remote sensing satellites as well as civil space,” Bettinger said. “NASA. is another one of the three legs of our market that we’re going after. Now, we’ve established some NASA credibility. The last leg, of course, is the U.S. Defense Department and we have DARPA and the U.S. Army interacting with us.”
Raytheon Intelligence & Space announced July 18 it intends to acquire Northern Space and Security, or NORSS, a UK-based startup that specializes in space domain awareness, orbital analysis, space surveillance and tracking. NORSS was founded in 2017 by Royal Air Force veteran Ralph Dinsley. It provides orbital analyst technical services to the UK Space Agency and recently won a contract with the UK Ministry of Defence to develop a new simulator system for developing and testing future British military satellites and constellations. The value and terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Space domain awareness is an area of particular interest for Raytheon UK’s Strategic Research Group, part of the company’s UK-based space business. For NORSS, the acquisition is an opportunity to break into the U.S. market. “The acquisition, upon completion, will facilitate expansion by NORSS through access into new markets,” said Dinsley, the executive director of NORSS. “As part of Raytheon Intelligence & Space, we will have expanded access to international markets, continued investments in research and development, and opportunities to collaborate on the next generation of space technologies.” The combination “will enhance the quality of the UK’s orbital analysis and space situational awareness technologies,” said Jeff Lewis, chief executive of Raytheon UK. 
A NASA official says that initial inspections of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft turned up only “very minor damage” to the vehicle but declined to speculate on any additional delays for the Artemis 1 mission. In a tweet Nov. 10, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said remote inspections of the vehicle, using launch pad cameras, showed no major damage caused by the passage of Hurricane Nicole in the early morning hours. “Camera inspections show very minor damage such as loose caulk and tears in weather coverings,” he wrote. “The team will conduct additional onsite walk down inspections of the vehicle soon.” He did not state if any repairs, or lost time for pre-launch preparations because of the storm, would further delay the launch. NASA said Nov. 8 it would not attempt a launch Nov. 14 as previously planned , instead targeting Nov. 16 with Nov. 19 as a backup date. Free defended the agency’s decision to leave the rocket and spacecraft at Launch Complex 39B as Hurricane Nicole made landfall south of the Kennedy Space Center, rather than rolling back to the Vehicle Assembly as it did in September when Hurricane Ian approached the center. “We took the decision to keep Orion and SLS at the launch pad very seriously, reviewing the data in front of us and making the best decision possible with high uncertainty in predicting the weather four days out,” he wrote. “With the unexpected change to the forecast, returning to the Vehicle Assembly Building was deemed to be too risky in high winds, and the team decided the launch pad was the safest place for the rocket to weather the storm.” NASA was aware of the potential of a tropical system when it rolled the vehicle back to the pad Nov. 4 . At the time, though, forecasts predicted only a 30% chance of it becoming a named storm — a tropical storm or hurricane — with peak wind gusts no higher than 74 kilometers per hour. Free said that, while at the pad, the vehicle experienced peak wind gusts of 132 kilometers per hour at the 18-meter level at the pad, just under the vehicle’s rated limit of 137 kilometers per hour. However, other sensors at the pad reported gusts as high as 160 kilometers per hour at higher levels. NASA has not disclosed any certifications for wind speeds at higher levels, or the significance of the 18-meter level.
SAN FRANCISCO – The United Kingdom’s Oxford Space Systems and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. completed construction of a deployable, Wrapped Rib antenna for small synthetic aperture radar satellites. OSS designed the 3-meter parabolic reflector to stow compactly during transportation. SSTL supplied the high bandwidth radar instrument and radio frequency electronics. With funding for the project from the U.K. Space Agency’s National Space Technology Programme, the companies have tested the antenna, which could be demonstrated in orbit as early as 2023. The Wrapped Rib antenna is sized for SSTL’s CarbSAR platform. CarbSAR is a 140-kilogram X-band SAR technology demonstration satellite to showcase radar applications for defense and security, maritime, disaster response, environmental and infrastructure customers. OSS already is “seeing strong international customer interest for this product,” OSS Chief Executive Sean Sutcliffe said in a statement. Andrew Haslehurst, SSTL chief technology officer, said in a statement that SSTL embedded the SAR electronics into its core avionics to simplify the antenna architecture. That feature “combined with the impressive stowage volume of the Wrapped Rib has enabled SSTL to develop a very capable CarbSAR product providing high resolution X-band SAR imaging capabilities day, night and whatever the weather,” Haslehurst added. The U.K. Space Agency provides funding for companies like OSS and SSTL “to deliver new space capabilities that will help us tackle challenges, including disaster monitoring, urban planning and transport management,” Paul Bate, U.K. Space Agency chief executive, said in a statement. To test the deployable reflector, OSS worked with QuadSAT. QuadSAT’s drone-based measurement system removes “the complexity normally associated with testing large space deployable antennas which are subject to gravitational effects,” Carlo Rizzo, QuadSAT chief commercial officer, said in a statement.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Space Force in its 2023 budget adds billions of dollars for new constellations of missile-warning and missile-tracking satellites. But there is yet no consensus around a plan for how the Pentagon will transition from current legacy satellites to a much more distributed architecture of satellites in multiple orbits, argues a new report by the Aerospace Corp . The report, “Fiscal Year 2023 U.S. Space Force Budget Request: Missile Warning & Tracking Looms Large,” was released Sept. 20 by the Aerospace Center for Space Policy and Strategy. About $4.7 billion of the Space Force’s $24.7 billion budget request for 2023 is for new missile-defense satellites that the Pentagon argues is needed to detect and track advanced hypersonic missile and glide vehicles developed by Russia and China. “Over the next few years, the missile warning and tracking programs will weigh heavily in debates about the future of U.S. space systems,” said Sam Wilson, senior policy analyst at Aerospace and author of the report. The Space Force budget projections lay out a future architecture of about 135 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and 16 medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites that would work in concert through an integrated ground system. The 2023 budget “funds efforts across all orbits, with the bulk of the funding being in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) and polar,” Wilson wrote. These include the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) program with five satellites — three in GEO and two polar satellites. This budget “ushers in a new approach for missile warning and missile tracking,” said Wilson. Given their size and the number of stakeholders reliant on these programs, he noted, Congress could raise questions about how these complex programs are being orchestrated. “Although Congress seems supportive of moving to LEO and MEO, there seems to be a lack of consensus on how quickly, and in what manner, DoD should transition to this new architecture,” Wilson noted. Senate appropriators seem to want to accelerate this transition, he pointed out, cutting some of the funding for next-generation GEO and polar-orbiting systems and nearly doubling the funding for LEO and MEO. The multi-orbit approach, the report said, “may also be a harbinger for broader emphasis within the Pentagon to develop resilient and defendable architectures for other critical space missions. Such emphasis, if it materializes into more expensive and ambitious programs, could present significant budgetary pressures that DoD will need to balance, which could trigger additional scrutiny and concern from Congress.” Deconflicting missile-defense projects has been a congressional priority amid concerns that agencies are developing systems in isolation and not coordinating efforts. Last week the Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency announced they formed a new program office to synchronize satellite procurements.
TAMPA, Fla. — Japan’s ispace expects SpaceX to launch its lunar lander Nov. 28 at the earliest for a mission to the moon’s surface roughly five months later. The company said Nov. 17 its HAKUTO-R M1 lander is slated to fly on a Falcon 9 at 3:46 a.m Eastern from the Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, subject to weather and other conditions. This would put M1 on track to land on the moon by around the end of April, when it would deliver lunar payloads for the UAE-based Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, the Japanese space agency JAXA and commercial firms in Japan and Canada. The company also announced Nov. 17 it has chosen the Atlas Crater at Mare Frigoris to the far north of the moon as its primary landing site. Landing on the southeastern outer edge of Mare Frigoris — one of the moon’s dark basaltic plains — would provide M1 with continuous sunlight for power and visibility to Earth for communications, ispace said. Alternative landing targets include Lacus Somniorum, Sinus Iridium and Oceanus Procellarum. M1’s planned low-energy trajectory to the moon required the lander to have the Falcon 9 practically to itself. After separating from the rocket about an hour after lift-off, it will take the lander about four months to reach lunar orbit via a series of propulsive maneuvers. Once in lunar orbit it will then take about two weeks for ispace to perform the maneuvers and checks it needs to initiate a soft landing sequence it expects to take about an hour to complete. With its legs extended, M1 stands at 2.3 meters tall and 2.6 meters wide, with a dry mass of about 340 kilograms. Joining M1 on the Falcon 9 as a secondary payload is NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, which is the size of six cubesats, designed to hunt for evidence of water ice in craters around the moon’s south pole from a highly elliptical orbit. M1 is the first in a series of landers ispace plans to send to the lunar surface. Its next mission has been penciled in for 2024. The 12-year-old firm, which had 214 employees as of October, said it has insured its inaugural mission with coverage from Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, a Tokyo-based firm that started working with ispace in 2019. According to ispace’s Nov. 17 news release, the policy “covers from the launch of the rocket carrying the lunar lander, through the establishment of communication and data transmissions between the lander and mission control following landing on the lunar surface.” Global insurance broker Marsh supported the policy, which only covers the lander, not its payloads.
The first launch of the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit satellites that had been scheduled for late September is slipping to no earlier than mid-December. Speaking at the Washington Space Business Roundtable Sept. 14, SDA Director Derek Tournear said the launch of the agency’s Tranche 0 satellites had to be delayed due to supply chain problems that have affected all vendors in the program. The 28 satellites in Tranche 0 include 20 communications payloads made by Lockheed Martin and York Space ; and eight missile-tracking infrared sensor satellites made by SpaceX and L3Harris . Tournear over the past two years had expressed confidence that at least six to eight Tranche 0 satellites would launch in September. But components and microchip shortages that have stymied satellite manufacturers industry-wide have caught up with SDA. “We were going hard and fast” on Tranche 0 but software delays and a shortage of radios affected the deliveries from all four suppliers, he said. All 28 Tranche 0 satellites will be launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets under a $150 million commercial services contract. “The end of September was a stretch goal” that would have allowed SDA to launch just two years from contract award, said Tournear. The second batch of Tranche 0 is still on track to launch in March. The agency is working to deploy a network of satellites in low Earth orbit to serve as the eyes and ears of military forces in the field. The communications satellites make up the Transport Layer and the missile-detection satellites are the Tracking Layer. While it typically takes the Pentagon a decade to field new satellites, SDA set a goal to acquire batches of new spacecraft every two years and launch them in frequent intervals. The agency selected as its motto “semper citius” — Latin for “always faster” — to emphasize the idea that putting good-enough capabilities in the hands of troops soon is preferable to delivering the perfect solution too late. He said the manifest for the first Tranche 0 launch is still in flux, but the plan is to have a mixture of both tracking and transport satellites. “We’re shooting for between nine and 10 total satellites on that launch,” he said. “And the remainder will be going up on the March launch.” Tournear noted that the Tracking Layer got a late start due to a bid protest challenging the L3Harris and SpaceX awards. But had it not been for the supply chain setbacks that emerged in 2020 during the covid pandemic and continue to this day, the protest alone likely would not have affected the delivery schedule, said Tournear. “The longest pole in the tent that caused those satellites to slip was actually component delays, primarily stemming from microelectronics,” he said. “It was very difficult for us to get microelectronics, especially space qualified microelectronics for components such as radios.” All four vendors went back to the drawing board and redesigned satellites based on the available components and what they could get fastest, said Tournear. Even though they are working under fixed-price contracts, “this was all on their nickel,” he added. The lead time to get some parts used to be two months and suddenly that stretched to 18 months, said Tournear. “Industry did a great job with that,” he said. “And on the government side, we went to all of our government partners that had parts on the shelf” and asked them to share them with SDA. “All four companies had issues with components” and in one case all four relied on the same vendor, making it almost impossible to stay on schedule, he said. “I had high confidence that we would have at least six satellites” ready to launch in September but things didn’t work out. Tournear said none of SDA’s suppliers so far has asked for an adjustment to their fixed-price contracts due to the effects of inflation. The Defense Department on Sept. 12 issued new guidance to contracting officers allowing them to consider giving contractors some relief in fixed-price contracts based on specific circumstances. “We have received no requests from contractors for inflation adjustments,” said Tournear.
LOGAN, Utah — The Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) has completed the first of a constellation of cubesats for NASA that will act as a giant radio telescope in space to study space weather. At an Aug. 8 briefing, project officials from SDL and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed off the first completed cubesat for the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, or SunRISE, mission that NASA selected for development in 2020 as a mission of opportunity for its heliophysics Explorer program at a cost of $62.6 million. The 6U cubesat is the first of six that SDL will build over the next several months, equipped with X-shaped radio antennas to pinpoint the location of radio bursts on the sun and to map the pattern of magnetic field lines, helping scientists link those bursts to activity such as coronal mass ejections that can cause solar storms. The six satellites will fly together, acting as a single radio antenna with a baseline of 10 kilometers. Each satellite will operate independently, collecting and returning data to the ground weekly, where scientists will combine the data into a single observation of the sun. “This is the first time that we’ll fly six spacecraft to serve as a single instrument,” said Jim Lux, SunRISE project manager at JPL. This approach, called interferometry, requires knowledge of where each satellite is when it makes observations. GPS receivers on the satellites will collect that information at a high enough precision to allow the individual satellites’ data to be merged effectively without requiring pinpoint control of the satellites’ locations relative to one another. “We don’t need to control them really precisely,” said Lux. “We just need to nudge them every once in a while to keep them in the right general place.” An additional factor aiding that is that the satellites will detect radio waves with wavelengths of tens of meters. The first satellite served as a pathfinder for producing the rest of the constellation, said Tim Neilsen, program manager for SunRISE at SDL. “It’s been through a full suite of environmental and functional tests” that resulted in only minor adjustments to the design of the satellite. SDL is now ready to proceed with assembly, integration and testing of the other five satellites, he said. All six satellites should be complete and ready for launch in April 2023. Lux said the project is still working on launch arrangements for the satellites, with a current plan to launch them in mid-2024. “That could always change because we didn’t buy our own ride,” he said, instead relying on a rideshare launch opportunity. The spacecraft will operate about 300 kilometers above geostationary orbit in a region known as the “graveyard,” where GEO satellites are retired. “That way, we don’t have to do anything special to deorbit at the end of our mission,” Lux said. “We just stop talking.” SunRISE is designed to operate for about a year. There is no schedule pressure to launch by a particular date, he added. “This mission is observing the sun, and the sun will be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.”
TAMPA, Fla. — A year and a half after netting around $417 million through its IPO, AST SpaceMobile is seeking more funds to accelerate a direct-to-smartphone constellation that has fallen behind a key regulatory deadline. Despite successfully deploying its gigantic phased array antenna this week, AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker-3 prototype satellite will miss a Nov. 22 deadline for securing frequencies that have been provisionally assigned to the constellation. AST SpaceMobile has asked international regulators for 18 more months to give BlueWalker-3 time to climb to around 700 kilometers above the Earth to lock in rights to this spectrum, which its future satellites need to bring 5G to smartphones outside cellular coverage. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an affiliate of the United Nations that manages spectrum rights for satellites, said Nov. 4 it expects to decide whether to extend the deadline in March after asking for more information. The ITU will “continue to take into account the frequency assignments” in the meantime. The information the ITU needs from Papua New Guinea, which is managing AST SpaceMobile’s spectrum filings, includes the time it would have taken for BlueWalker-3 to reach its destination under previous plans to launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2021. Following delays with launch broker GK Launch Services’ primary passenger for this Soyuz launch, AST SpaceMobile decided in August 2021 to move its reservation to Falcon 9. Without an ITU extension, AST SpaceMobile risks losing the priority it has in Q and V band spectrum to another operator, complicating efforts to guard against interference. The Q and V band frequencies are needed to direct the traffic its satellites pick up from smartphones beyond the reach of cell towers to gateways on the ground, where this data is then routed to the cellular operator. Bolstering finances The Texas-based company said during a quarterly earnings call Nov. 14 that it is exploring funding options to speed up satellite deployments. This could help any plan to regain priority access to spectrum if its extension request fails. AST SpaceMobile, one of several space firms to go public last year by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), did not say how much extra capital it is looking for. The company said it already has enough financial resources to cover operations over the next 12 months, with nearly $200 million in cash reserves at the end of September. Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews “there are multiple ways to bring into use the frequency, but we are focused on the current process and bringing into use the frequencies with BlueWalker 3” under the ITU’s regulatory process. He declined to comment specifically on the venture’s financing plans, but said more funds could help accelerate the development of technology and its manufacturing capabilities. Any additional capital the venture secures would not bring forward the current timeline for deploying its first five revenue-generating BlueBird satellites in late 2023, he said. AST SpaceMobile had previously planned to deploy 20 BlueBirds by the third quarter of 2023 before pandemic-related production issues took hold. As part of efforts to reduce the impact of these delays, the company said in August that its first five BlueBirds, known as Block 1, will be 50% smaller than initially planned — now roughly the same size and weight as the 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker-3. The company did not give an updated timeline for launching satellites beyond 2023 during its Nov. 14 quarterly earnings call, although it said it plans to start ramping up manufacturing next year toward producing six BlueBirds per month. Previously, the company had plans to deploy 110 BlueBirds before the end of 2024 to reach “substantial global” mobile coverage. Testing unaffected Wisniewski said the next step for BlueWalker-3 after unfolding its phased array antenna — the largest deployed commercially in low Earth orbit — is to deploy smaller antennas that will test broadcasts in Q and V band spectrum. This will happen “soon,” Wisniewski said, paving the way for the prototype to connect with a smartphone for the first time during the first quarter of 2023 — regardless of BlueWalker-3’s regulatory issue with the ITU. “We currently have test licenses in a number of individual countries, including the U.S., which authorize us for transmissions, under certain limitations, in various [cellular] and satellite frequencies,” he said. “We expect a few more approvals in other countries in the coming months, ahead of testing in Q1.” Wisniewski said these tests will include transmission on several frequencies in the 800 MHz band used by mobile operators as well as Q and V band frequencies. “Testing at our current altitude is unaffected by the ongoing ITU Radio Regulations Board review process,” he added.
A small satellite mission the U.S. Space Force plans to launch in 2023 will test the ability of the commercial space industry to deploy a payload on an extraordinarily compressed timeline. A contract for the mission, code-named Victus Nox, was awarded Sept. 30 to launch services provider Firefly Aerospace and satellite manufacturer Millennium Space. Once the Space Force decides when the mission must launch, it will give Millennium a few months to produce the spacecraft and Firefly will only get 24 hours’ notice to get ready for liftoff. The point of Victus Nox — Latin for ‘conquer the night’ — is to demonstrate fast turnaround launch operations, known as tactically responsive space, and to help planners figure out the front-end processes leading up to the launch. This capability, strategists warn, will be needed during an armed conflict to augment constellations or replace satellites that adversaries would damage or blow up. “We need to be able to get to the point where we can go launch a rocket, a mission in 24 hours and get that data flowing,” Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, said Sept. 20 at the Air & Space Forces Association annual conference. A 24-hour call-up is “almost unobtainium right now,” he said. “But we need to get to that point.” The idea of responsive space launch has been talked about for years but is now gaining attention due to congressional and industry advocacy, as well as world events that have shown the strategic value of satellites, making them more attractive targets. Congress has criticized the Pentagon for not moving more quickly in this area and, over the past two years, inserted $65 million into the defense budget for tactically responsive spaceflight demonstrations. For 2023, the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee are proposing $100 million, although the final amount has yet to be negotiated. “As vividly demonstrated by Russia’s 2021 destructive anti-satellite test, threats to our critical national security space assets continue to increase, both from adversary on-orbit and terrestrial counter-space capabilities and from space debris,” a bipartisan group of 25 lawmakers wrote in a letter sent in January to appropriators. Meanwhile, the United States is “not currently positioned with an operational capability to rapidly replace assets in orbit that are degraded, disabled, or destroyed or to rapidly launch satellites for urgent new missions,” the letter said. Small-satellite launch companies like Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab have lobbied for this funding, arguing that the Defense Department should create a program of record with long-term budgets for tactically responsive launch. The letter to appropriators said, “robust investment in tactically responsive small launch in 2022 will help accelerate this emerging industry’s efforts to lower launch costs.” Amid congressional pressure to accelerate responsive launch demonstrations, the Space Force, in June 2021, conducted the Tactically Responsive Launch-2 (TacRL-2) mission on a Northrop Grumman air-launched Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Northrop Grumman was given 21 days’ notice to get ready to launch a small surveillance satellite to low Earth orbit. The Space Force has since renamed the program Tactically Responsive Space, so Victus Nox will be TacRS-3. The name change emphasizes that launch is just one piece of what it takes to accelerate space missions. Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, has been a long-time proponent of using commercial systems to speed up the military’s much slower development cycles. In an interview with SpaceNews, Raymond noted that responsive space is far from a new concept, but it is now more achievable because of the technology and business practices introduced by the commercial industry. In 2005 when Raymond was a strategist at the Defense Department’s Office of Force Transformation, he co-authored a paper with the office director, Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, titled “Operationally Responsive Space: A New Defense Business Model.” The paper said DoD should have the ability “to reconstitute larger space capabilities if adversaries succeed in finally developing capabilities to negate them.” Raymond said that paper was ahead of its time because the technology was not available to do responsive space missions. “Now, if we do this right, it will allow us to capitalize more on commercial capabilities.” Even to this day, national security space launch is a process that begins years in advance and relies on expensive, fixed infrastructure, he noted. There are now more flexible launch options like airplanes that deploy small rockets and small vertical launch vehicles that can operate from multiple locations. But what still has to be worked out is the “end to end” process for responsive space, Raymond said. No matter how quickly rockets can get to the pad, it doesn’t matter if the satellites are not ready, and there are regulatory requirements that have to be coordinated. The next major step for responsive space is to “develop the operational concept for how you replenish these constellations and how you might use responsive capabilities,” said Raymond. Also needed is a clearly articulated requirement that has to be approved by the Pentagon in order to get funded, he said. “We’ve got to figure out the operational concepts and then have the requirements as we continue to experiment.” A requirement is being drafted by U.S. Space Command, the organization responsible for determining a response plan if satellites come under attack. Raymond said demonstrations like TacRS-3 would help the command understand the art of the possible. There will likely be more demo flights, “but I want to progress from just doing experiments to no-kidding, real capability.” Raymond’s successor as chief of space operations, Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, said he intends to continue to support tactically responsive launch efforts. “If confirmed, the most critical issue I would address is expanding the scope of tactically responsive space to ensure we generate complete operational capabilities,” he said in written testimony submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee for his Sept. 13 confirmation hearing. “We must have end-to-end capabilities that include launch vehicles, satellites, ground systems and operational concepts,” he said. “And most importantly, the specific requirements of the combatant commanders, that enable a tangible response to potential adversary destabilizing actions in space.” The Space Systems Command in September held a three-day tabletop exercise at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, to examine the processes and the bureaucratic ins and outs of launching payloads on short notice. Col. James Horne, Space Systems Command’s deputy director of operations, said the lessons from this exercise would help plan the TacRS-3 mission and inform future budgets. A takeaway from the tabletop exercise, said Horne, is the need to involve all stakeholders, including the Space Force, U.S. Space Command, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other agencies that have regulatory responsibilities. “We looked at how we would execute a responsive launch, all the way from receiving orders from the combat commanders to delivering usable data to the warfighter with boots on the ground,” said Capt. Benjamin Vowell, chief of wargames and exercises at Space Systems Command. “We learned that there are organizational things that we need to work through,” said Vowell. “This exercise was a way for us to pull the various threads and understand how we can enable responsive space.” A central question, for example, is what it will take to integrate a satellite on the rocket so the launch provider can meet the 24-hour call-up. Processes like frequency allocation and approval and notifications to ships and aircraft would have to be dramatically accelerated. The infrastructure needed to conduct rapid launches is another major issue, said Master Sergeant Travis Ferguson, launch operations manager at Space Systems Command. “Our first option may be to just turn to a commercial contract and buy a capability depending on what mission area you’re talking about,” he said. “Or we could turn to an ally and ask them if we can use their assets.” Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, head of Space Systems Command, said the demonstration in 2023 will give decision makers a better grasp of “where tactically responsive space can fill a wartime or crisis requirement.” Back in 2018, similar questions were raised by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency when it announced a Launch Challenge prize competition. DARPA offered $10 million to any space company that could launch a payload to low Earth orbit with just a few days to prepare and do it again a couple weeks later. The effort was unsuccessful and ended when Astra, the lone challenge participant, scrubbed its launch in Kodiak, Alaska, less than a minute before liftoff. Chris Bassler, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said DARPA’s launch challenge shined a spotlight on responsive space but didn’t drive any policy or funding decisions at DoD. The proliferation of anti-satellite weapons means it’s just a matter of time before the United States faces a real-world situation when it will need to restock, Bassler said. DoD and the Space Force have stood by over the past couple of years while Congress has kept adding money to the program, Bassler said. The Space Force’s explanation that it doesn’t have specific requirements for rapid-response launch, he said, is a weak excuse. “They do have a requirement to provide space capability even if attacked or degraded, so it’s implicit that they need replenishment options, and that is something that should be funded,” he added. Investments in spaceports and agreements to launch from foreign countries would be needed in order to move away from DoD’s dependence on East and West Coast ranges, he said. The Space Force also needs to start working with multiple launch providers to try out different concepts and should accelerate the use of in-orbit servicing so satellites can be repaired. The responsive space demonstration missions are a step in the right direction, Bassler said. However, things are still “moving very slowly considering the threat pace that keeps being talked about, China clearly being the most concerning.” A military program focused on launching payloads in short order creates a major opportunity for small vehicles that can deploy from nontraditional spaceports, said Mandy Vaughn, industry consultant and former president of Virgin Orbit’s national security launch business. DoD efforts in this area would be welcomed by small satellite launchers that are facing lagging demand in the commercial sector, she said. The Space Force “definitely realizes that the small and medium portions of the launch market are part of the architecture that they need moving forward,” she said. “They need a diversity of solutions and modalities.” Despite the popularity of big-rocket rideshares, for responsive launch, they will need dedicated vehicles to reach specific orbits, Vaughn noted. Rocket Lab, for example, in April changed the target orbit of two BlackSky imaging satellites at the last minute after the customer decided it needed to increase coverage over Ukraine. “This shows that having a diversity of launch solutions is important,” said Vaughn. Small launch vehicles currently in operation include Northrop Grumman’s Minotaur 1 and Pegasus XL, Rocket Lab’s Electron, Virgin Orbit’s Launcher One, and the winner of TacRS-3, Firefly, which performed its first successful orbital launch Oct. 1 just hours after the Space Force announced the $17.6 million contract award. “We are honored to be chosen by Space Force for this important national security mission,” Bill Weber, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement. “Now more than ever our country needs the ability for quick response capabilities to combat threats in space.” Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit recently rolled out marketing campaigns focused on responsive launch services. In July, Rocket Lab, which also builds small satellites, announced a “24/7 rapid call-up launch capability and streamlined satellite build and operation options.” The company touts its ability to launch from New Zealand and Virginia’s Wallops Island. On July 13 and August 4, Rocket Lab launched two separate national security missions for the National Reconnaissance Office. The company said the rapid turnaround between those launches demonstrated responsive space. Virgin Orbit, which deploys small rockets from a Boeing 747 aircraft, in August released a marketing video on responsive launch featuring the company’s strategic advisers, former U.S. defense secretary Ash Carter, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, and retired Air Force lieutenant general Susan Helms. “Our current space posture is too vulnerable to attacks that could occur too quickly,” Carter said in the video. “And that is where the ability to launch rapidly, to launch from anywhere, and to launch into any orbit is so important.” Helms recalled participating in wargames of conflict scenarios in the South China Sea. “What we didn’t really have was responsiveness of launch, something everybody knew would help us in the exercise,” she said. Dan Piemont, president and co-founder of ABL Space, said the company did not compete for the TacRS-3 contract because its RS1 launch vehicle is not yet operational. “But we’re definitely interested in the program long term,” he said. “We’ve been engaged with leadership of the Space Force and other agencies that are interested in this type of capability as well.” Responsive space has been a talking point for years, said Piemont, but with these upcoming experiments, “the focus is understanding what needs to be done to conduct a useful launch within 24 hours of a call-up.” The Space Force and the industry need to figure out what level of readiness they would need in wartime, said Piemont. “You would likely need the rocket basically pre-positioned and maintained at a high state of alert.” In a July report, Senate appropriators chided DoD for not moving more quickly to create a responsive space program. The defense appropriations subcommittee, which recommended adding $100 million in fiscal year 2023, said a responsive launch program of record is needed to ensure U.S. combatant commanders can “rapidly place and reconstitute space assets.” Defense appropriators also noted that the Secretary of the Air Force failed to provide an acquisition strategy for responsive space as the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act directed. Meanwhile, the fiscal year 2023 president’s budget request “does not include any resources to establish the program despite a need to counter adversarial launches of disruptive technologies in a tactically relevant timeline.” The House version of the 2023 NDAA calls for a long-term budget line for tactically responsive space and for the Space Force to lay out a program with wargames, tabletop and operational exercises. “Given the successful Tactically Responsive Launch-2 mission,” said the House bill, “the Space Force should continue to broaden tactically responsive space efforts with a focus on rapid reconstitution and responsiveness.” This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
BREMEN, Germany — Spire Global has unveiled a new-generation satellite bus to meet demand for larger and more capable satellites. The 16U platform was announced at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany, Nov. 15. It is focused on meeting demands of Earth observation and space domain awareness customers with missions that require larger payloads and more power, volume, and data capabilities than a conventional 16U, according to Spire. “Increasingly we’re seeing that our customers’ missions require buses that offer the performance of a larger satellite with the agility of a nanosatellite,” Joel Spark, Co-Founder and General Manager, Space Services at Spire, said in a statement . “We’ve leveraged our extensive space heritage and experience in satellite design and manufacturing to build a one-of-a-kind satellite bus that checks all those boxes. Our next-gen satellite has been a natural next step for us, driven by the needs of the market.” A custom launch deployer for the new satellite bus, the EXOpod Nova deployer, has been developed in partnership between Exolaunch and Spire. Spire says the deployer has enabled the company to optimize the capacity and volume of the satellite while still fitting into standard deployment settings, adding that the 16U satellite can accommodate payloads of up to 30 kilograms. The new satellite bus has a 12U payload volume and has a satellite design life of 3-5 years. It features electric propulsion as with smaller Spire buses. Spire has earlier worked with ThrustMe and Morpheus space for on-board propulsion. Spire will launch its first 16U satellites to orbit, carrying payloads for Canadian companies NorthStar Earth & Space , focusing on space situational awareness, and GHGSat , for its greenhouse gas emissions monitoring constellation, in 2023. The satellite carrying NorthStar’s payload will be launched by Virgin Orbit in mid-2023. Beyond this, Spire is considering new future developments. “We will continue to explore building new and novel satellite form factors as the industry evolves and we see the market demand for it,” Kristina Spychalski, senior communications manager, told SpaceNews . Spire designs and builds its satellites at its manufacturing facility in Glasgow in the United Kingdom. “This is an exciting time for the space sector in Scotland. Businesses such as Spire Global are delivering innovative new satellites, helping to position Scotland as a global leader for commercial space developments gaining a £1 billion share of the global space market,” Scottish Government Minister for Business, Trade, Tourism and Enterprise, Ivan McKee, said in a statement. 
WASHINGTON – The Space Force, the military branch responsible for providing satellite-based services to the U.S. armed forces, was also recently assigned the role of “i ntegrator for joint space requirements ,” which means the Space Force will have to coordinate the wish lists of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, and recommend how to meet future needs. The bulk of those needs will come from the U.S. Army’s land forces, which are large consumers of satellite services for global navigation and communications. Army forces also have a growing appetite for new space services that provide alternatives to GPS navigation and imagery from low orbiting satellites that revisit the same spot multiple times a day. The Army and the Navy last year agreed to hand over their communications satellites and ground systems to the Space Force. At the same time, Army leaders revealed plans to deploy a “ tactical space layer ” program to address emerging needs for satellite-based capabilities. Doug Bush, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said the Army will rely on the Space Force to help figure out a plan for how these space services should be procured. “The Army still has needs that have to be addressed from space-based platforms,” Bush told reporters July 27 at the Pentagon. These requirements are being looked at and the Space Force will recommend a plan forward, he said. “I think that’s already underway.” “Our approach will be in line with the department’s policy, making sure, for example, that payloads that launch on platforms include Army payloads to make sure our needs are met,” Bush said. Bush said Army forces have “ unique requirements ” specially for secure navigation and timing, and intelligence over the battlefield. “We’re seeking to develop sensors and payloads to meet our needs.” But how those payloads will be deployed is still under discussion, he added. “I can’t speak to platforms.” One of those unique requirements is ensuring that data from space can be accessed and analyzed by a new Army ground system known as the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node. These TITAN ground stations are being designed to ingest data from satellites, and high-altitude aerial and terrestrial sensors. The Space Force, meanwhile, still has work to do figuring out a process for coordinating and de-conflicting space requirements from multiple services and getting them validated through the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, a group of four-star generals who vet military wish lists. In congressional testimony in May, the vice chief of the Space Force Gen. David Thompson said the service is in discussions with agencies across DoD and military commands “to understand, document and inform requirements satisfaction.” The Space Force will work on a plan to “facilitate consolidation of space requirements from across the Joint Force, identify capability gaps, advocate for DoD space requirements at joint forums and inform budget decisions,” Thompson said in a prepared statement. Significant space-based support for the Army and the other services will come from the Space Development Agency, a Pentagon organization building a large mesh network of small satellites in low Earth orbit for communications and missile defense . When SDA’s constellation is fully deployed over the next couple of years, DoD for the first time will have a global communications backbone so the military services can talk to one another, share data and intelligence. SDA later this year will be realigned from under the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the Space Force. 
TAMPA, Fla. — SES filed plans Oct. 14 to appeal a court’s decision last month that disallowed its bid to equally split nearly $9 billion of anticipated C-band clearing proceeds with Intelsat. SES will ask the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to review the decision, which the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia made Sept. 30 after more than two years of legal action. The satellite operator brought a $1.8 billion claim to the bankruptcy court in July 2020, two months after Intelsat filed for Chapter 11, over a broken agreement to split proceeds they would get for clearing C-band spectrum for terrestrial telcos. The bankruptcy court ultimately sustained an objection from Intelsat, which argued their agreement was nullified once the Federal Communications Commission chose to sell C-band frequencies to telcos in a public auction, rather than a private process run by the satellite operators. Intelsat emerged from bankruptcy in February and plans to use C-band proceeds to fuel its return to growth. The satellite operators have already unlocked more than $2 billion in combined proceeds from meeting an initial C-band clearing milestone last year. Intelsat and SES would get a maximum of $4.9 billion and $3.97 billion, respectively, if they can fully vacate the lower 300 MHz slice of C-band by Dec. 5, 2023. New C-band satellites are required to clear the spectrum and the operators have ordered 13 of these between them, with launches already underway . googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
Virgin Galactic’s second suborbital spaceplane won’t enter service in 2023 as previously planned because of demands on company personnel to both return the first spaceplane to flight and begin work on a next generation of vehicles. In a Nov. 3 earnings call, Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said the company was “prioritizing our resources” towards getting its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, back into service in the second quarter of 2023 while ramping up design work on the Delta-class of vehicles slated to begin flights no earlier than late 2025. Those efforts “will likely impact the pace of work on our second spaceship, VSS Imagine, and we are reassessing its schedule for entering commercial service,” he said. Later in the call, he ruled out having that vehicle ready before the end of next year. “We will not be in ’23 for commercial flights of Imagine.” The company announced plans in March 2021 to develop VSS Imagine as the first of two “Spaceship III” vehicles , along with VSS Inspire. The vehicles look similar to VSS Unity but featured design improvements to reduce their weight, allowing them to fly six customers versus four on Unity, and enable a higher flight rate. At the time of the announcement, the company said flight tests of Imagine would begin later that summer. However, work on Imagine has been delayed by efforts to complete flight testing of Unity and, then, after it carried company founder Richard Branson to space in July 2021, undergo an extensive refurbishment along with its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, VMS Eve. At the same time, the company has been devoting more resources to the design of the Delta-class spaceplanes and next-generation carrier aircraft. In its previous earnings call in August , Virgin Galactic said it expected to have Imagine in commercial service by the fourth quarter of 2023, a delay from an earlier date of mid-2023. The company had already deferred work on the second vehicle, Inspire. The delays, Colglazier said, are linked to demands on the company’s most experienced engineers, who are working on Unity and Eve or on Delta-class design work. “They require not just engineers, they require the engineers with the most history with our existing ships, and that is a limited resource,” he said. “We need to make sure we focus those deeply experienced engineers on those two things.” The schedule for getting Imagine into service, he said, will depend on the progress the company makes on those other efforts and “how quickly we’re able to pull people back” to Imagine. While the long-term effort at Virgin Galactic is on building a fleet of Delta-class vehicles, Imagine is important in the medium term for generating revenue. Imagine, capable of carrying six people and flying twice a month, will carry three times as many people per month as Unity, which can fly four people once a month. Colglazier said the company remained on schedule to resume commercial flights of Unity in the second quarter of 2023. Work on the spaceplane itself is complete, he said, while upgrades to Eve are due to be completed later this quarter at a company facility in Mojave, California. Eve will be ready to return to flight by early January and return to Spaceport America in New Mexico shortly thereafter. Once Eve returns to the spaceport, it will support a glide flight by Unity, followed by a powered test flight with company personnel on board. It will then conduct a flight for the Italian Air Force before starting flights of private astronauts in the second quarter of 2023. Virgin Galactic has “closed our efforts on sales” on its initial set of 1,000 seats, after transferring some to a travel agency, Virtuoso, to sell and reserving some for research. The company announced Nov. 3 an agreement with commercial space station developer Axiom Space to fly a microgravity research and training mission tentatively scheduled for 2023, training an Axiom astronaut for a later orbital mission. Colglazer said that he expected the company would reopen ticket sales after Unity begins commercial flights next year. He added, though, that the company has a backlog of customers “pushing towards four years.” Virgin Galactic reported a net loss in the third quarter of $146 million, with revenue of $767,000. The company has $1.1 billion in cash and equivalents on hand as of the end of the third quarter.
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb said Sept. 20 its latest batch of 36 broadband satellites has arrived in India ahead of plans to launch them next month on the country’s largest rocket. The British startup anticipates the commercial arm of Indian space agency ISRO will launch the satellites on a GSLV Mark 3 rocket in October, a OneWeb spokesperson said, “and exact details will be released in the coming weeks.” The mission would be the first dedicated commercial launch for ISRO’s NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) using GSLV Mark 3. OneWeb’s satellites traveled from their production facility in Florida to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India via a Ukrainian Antonov cargo airplane, which until recently had generally been unavailable for transporting satellites amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. Companies were forced to use slower-moving ships to transport satellites overseas as Antonovs that had not been destroyed in the war — or owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions — were used by Ukraine to support the war effort. Ukraine-based Antonov Airlines operated the AN-124 Antonov that delivered OneWeb’s spacecraft to India, the OneWeb spokesperson added. OneWeb has been unable to expand its constellation since sanctions on Russia forced Arianespace to suspend Soyuz launches in March. Arianespace had deployed 428 of OneWeb’s planned 648 satellites before hitting the brakes on their 19-launch contract. Arianespace had planned to carry out six more Soyuz missions to complete the constellation, including a launch of spare satellites for network redundancy. OneWeb pivoted to India and SpaceX to launch the remaining satellites it needs to provide global services, which the operator said will take place across five missions before the end of spring 2023. One additional launch will take place this year, according to OneWeb, and three more are targeted for early next year to complete the constellation. Arianespace said Sept. 13 it will support OneWeb’s upcoming launches, including satellite dispenser services for the two missions that NewSpace India Limited is conducting. The French company said it has reached a settlement deal that could revive its launch services agreement with OneWeb, which is plotting a second-generation constellation. The GSLV Mark 3, which last launched in 2019 , can lift about 9,000 kilograms to LEO, comparable with the Soyuz rockets that deployed 34-36 OneWeb satellites at a time. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket can send about 22,800 kilograms to LEO. OneWeb has not disclosed what SpaceX rocket it plans to use, how many satellites could launch per mission, or a specific timeframe for these missions. OneWeb’s satellites are built by a joint venture between the operator and Airbus called OneWeb Satellites. In an interview Sept. 14 during World Satellite Business Week in Paris, Airbus Defence and Space head of space Jean-Marc Nasr said all satellites OneWeb needs to complete its constellation have been produced and are awaiting deployment. Following sanctions, he said, OneWeb Satellites has pivoted from electric propulsion systems imported from Russia’s Fakel to thrusters from U.S.-based Busek Co. A batch of 36 OneWeb satellites that Arianespace had been preparing to launch from Kazakhstan in March was stranded in the country after the mission was scrapped. OneWeb recently said it took a $229 million charge this year linked to these satellites and the terminated Soyuz launch contract.
NASA has selected Collins Aerospace to develop a next-generation spacesuit for the International Space Station, replacing aging suits that have become a safety concern. NASA awarded a task order valued at $97.2 million to Collins to design, build and demonstrate the suit, which will replace the existing, decades-old Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) suits used for spacewalks outside the ISS. The task order covers development of the suit and testing on Earth in a simulated space environment by January 2024. An option in the task order, whose value was not disclosed, would involve demonstrating the suit on an ISS spacewalk with NASA astronauts, no later than April 2026. “Our next-generation spacesuit was built by astronauts for astronauts, continuing Collins’ long-standing legacy as a trusted partner of NASA’s human space exploration,” said Dave McClure, vice president and general manager at Collins, in a company statement. The Collins team includes ILC Dover and Oceaneering. The company released few details about the design of the suit, other than to say it is lighter and less bulky than the current EMU, improving efficiency, range of motion and comfort. The suit is also designed to fit “nearly” any body type to meet NASA requirements. NASA had been looking for years at options to replace the EMUs, which are decades old and showing signs of aging. NASA halted spacewalks outside the station for several months earlier this year after noticing water in the helmet of an astronaut, Matthias Maurer, during a March spacewalk. An investigation found no hardware flaw with the suit, and NASA concluded in October that “integrated system performance” involving several variables caused the water to collect in the suit helmet . NASA said it updated procedures and developed “new mitigation hardware” to minimize water accumulation and to absorb any water that does accumulate in the helmet. With those measures, NASA resumed spacewalks on the ISS in November. NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel has been closely monitoring the issue. The panel, which provides advice to NASA on safety issues, had long been concerned with the aging spacesuits and the risks they posed to astronauts. “While we, the panel, continued to be concerned about the long-term sustainability of the ISS spacesuits, given their age, the resolution of the most recent water intrusion issue is reasonable,” said Sandy Magnus, a panel member and former astronaut, during an Oct. 27 public meeting of the panel. “We are very much looking forward to hearing more about the timing and the deployment of the new suits.” NASA selected Collins and Axiom Space in June for contracts called Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services . The two companies would then compete for task orders to develop spacesuits and provide them to NASA as a service, rather than have the agency own them. That would allow the companies to offer the suits to other customers, such as companies developing commercial space stations. NASA selected Axiom Space in September for the first task order to develop suits for Artemis missions, an award valued at $228.5 million. Neither NASA nor Axiom have released details about the suit design. NASA said it received proposals from both companies but did not disclose why it selected Axiom. One member of the Collins team suggests that they are still in the running to provide spacesuits for later lunar missions by adapting the design they will develop for the ISS. “Leveraging our decades of experience engineering the pressure garments for the Apollo missions and the ISS, our latest spacesuits will have the ability to be outfitted for missions from the ISS to the lunar surface and beyond,” said Corey Walker, chief executive of ILC Dover.
TAMPA, Fla. — Plans to use the 12 GHz band for terrestrial 5G would severely disrupt non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) broadband across the United States, OneWeb said July 11 in analysis supporting an earlier study from SpaceX. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, OneWeb urged the regulator to reject a request from satellite broadcaster Dish Network and spectrum holder RS Access to run two-way mobile services in the band. If approved, “it would leave significant areas of the United States unusable by the otherwise ubiquitous NGSO [fixed satellite service] user terminals,” wrote Kimberly Baum, OneWeb’s vice president of spectrum engineering and strategy. To connect user terminals, the SpaceX-owned Starlink and OneWeb megaconstellations use a satellite downlink band that extends from 10.7 GHz to 12.7 GHz. The analysis from OneWeb is the latest in a string of studies assessing how a high-power mobile network in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band would impact NGSO services. According to studies conducted by engineering firm RKF Engineering Solutions for RS Access, the 5G network would impact fewer than 1% of NGSO terminals, and mitigation techniques are readily available for those that are affected. However, SpaceX told the FCC June 21 that its analysis shows Starlink users would suffer harmful interference 77% of the time . SpaceX said the RFK analysis was full of inaccuracies, and also failed to address how NGSO operators share the band among themselves through coordination agreements. The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition, which includes Dish and RS Access, hit back July 7 by slamming SpaceX’s study as “ scientifically and logically flawed. ” The coalition took particular issue with how SpaceX’s analysis extrapolated nationwide assumptions from tests conducted in Las Vegas. Baum said OneWeb’s analysis largely used the same assumptions as the RFK study, with “corrections only to the most egregiously flawed assumptions adopted by RS Access when applied to the OneWeb system, some of which overlap with corrections made by SpaceX in its study.” OneWeb spokesperson Katie Dowd said the study drew from a suburban area where both systems could be deployed, which she declined to disclose. “Additionally, we made a number of changes to take into account the OneWeb system and our business model, such as looking at NGSO user terminals deployed on the tops of several story commercial buildings that one might find in a suburban business park,” Dowd said. Like SpaceX, OneWeb’s main issue with the RFK analysis is its assumption that NGSO FSS terminals will be deployed with a heavy bias toward rural areas, while mobile base stations and devices will be heavily skewed towards urban areas. “There is no real world justification for this bias,” Baum wrote to the FCC. OneWeb’s study warns the operation of NGSO FSS user terminals in an area of expected mobile deployment “will almost always” result in harmful interference. This is “completely masked in the RS Access studies, since it looks at deployment spread over the entire United States as opposed to local conditions,” Baum said. The RS Access studies also only used Starlink to model interference, ignoring other NGSO operators she said “are architecturally, systematically, and entrepreneurially distinct from Starlink.” According to Baum, including OneWeb and others would substantially increase the number of customers that an expanded terrestrial service would adversely harm. While Starlink is currently providing broadband services across the United States, OneWeb expects to cover the country in 2023 after resuming satellite deployments later this year. “The RS Access studies were only able to show that a two-way mobile terrestrial service could coexist with incumbent NGSO FSS operations in the 12 GHz band by creating artificial separation between the geographic operating areas of satellite user terminals and mobile devices,” Baum added. “In reality, no such separation can or will exist. As the record illustrates, the viability of both NGSO FSS and mobile deployments hinge on the ability to be ubiquitously deployed.” Chip Pickering co-chair of the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition, described OneWeb’s study as “another in-house, non-independent effort to discredit the scientifically proven feasibility of coexistence” in the 12 GHz band. “It is important to note that the FCC has already made it clear that any NGSO FSS company utilizing the 12 GHz band is doing so at its own risk and there should be no expectation of exclusivity within the band,” Pickering said. He said the coalition remains committed to working with the FCC to prove how NGSO and terrestrial 5G operators can co-exist in the band.
A draft Senate appropriations bill released July 28 would fund NASA at the same overall level the agency requested, but with adjustments to some science, technology and exploration programs. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, released a “chairman’s mark” version of 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2023, including the commerce, justice and science (CJS) bill that funds NASA. The bills are not the product of full committee negotiations but instead reflect the priorities of the Democratic leadership of the committee. “It is my hope that by releasing these bills and making clear what the priorities of Senate Democrats are, we can take a step closer toward reaching a bipartisan compromise after months of stalled negotiations,” Leahy said in a statement. The CJS bill includes $25.974 billion for NASA, the same overall level the agency requested in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal. A separate bill approved by House appropriators last month would provide NASA with $25.446 billion. While the overall amount is identical, there are differences among the various programs. Science, exploration and space operations would each get small increases, while space technology would get nearly $175 million less than requested. The space technology funding of $1.264 billion would still be higher than the $1.1 billion it received in 2022. The report accompanying the bill includes support for NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to look for potentially hazardous asteroids. NASA sought just $40 million for the mission in 2023, far less than previously projected, and would delay its 2026 launch by at least two years in order to cover increased costs for other planetary science missions. The Senate bill would double the requested funding for NEO Surveyor “and welcomes NASA’s commitment to a 2026 launch.” However, those familiar with the project say that the partial restoration in funding for NEO Survey proposed in the bill would not be sufficient to keep the mission on track for a 2026 launch. The report, while providing $822.3 million for NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) effort, does express concern about delay in the launch of the sample retrieval lander from 2026 to 2028. The report would require NASA to provide “a year-by-year funding profile for a planned 2028 MSR launch along with any guardrails it has put in place to ensure that MSR does not continue to grow in cost while incurring launch delays.” Another NASA project appropriators criticize is Mobile Launcher 2, the mobile launch platform for the Block 1B version of the Space Launch System that has suffered serious cost and schedule overruns . The report cites an audit by NASA’s Office of Inspector General that gave the project just a 3.9% chance of achieving its $1 billion budget and October 2023 delivery date. “This is a stunningly low confidence level,” the report states. While the bill would provide nearly $50 million in additional funding for the project, it suggests that NASA will have to look elsewhere in the agency to cover some of the projects’ overruns. However, the report “cautions NASA against proposing reductions in Congressional priorities” to do so. In space operations, the report calls on NASA to certify another commercial crew provider in addition to Boeing and SpaceX, offering $50 million for that work. “Previous experience with Commercial Cargo where NASA was required to use an alternative launch vehicle when both providers were unable to provide services suggests that maintaining crew launch redundancy may require more than two service providers,” appropriators state. It’s unclear how NASA would approach that work, although Sierra Space has discussed making a crewed version of its Dream Chaser vehicle. The bill would fully fund NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program to stimulate development of commercial space stations to succeed the International Space Station. Appropriators, though, said the funding should focus “on solving supply rather than demand problems” and prevents NASA from spending any money “to subsidize the cost of any project that is primarily intended for marketing, advertising, or entertainment.” The draft bills, crafted without Republican input, were criticized by the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) He did not raise specific issues with the NASA funding in the draft bill, but warned that the process could result in a full-year continuing resolution (CR) that would hold funding at 2022 levels. “Today’s effort shows we have a long way to go,” he said. “Democrats need to get serious or, regrettably, I believe we will end up with a long-term CR.”
RESTON, Va. — The Office of Space Commerce is working to build out an infrastructure able to handle the demands of tracking tens of thousands of active satellites and debris objects in orbit. Speaking Nov. 3 at the CyberSatGov conference, OSC Director Richard DalBello said the standup of a civilian space traffic management office is moving along, but cautioned the process will move slower and more incrementally than many expect. The OSC’s primary job is to advocate for the U.S. space industry and oversee commercial remote-sensing regulations, but most of the office’s efforts are now focused on implementing a 2018 policy directive to provide spaceflight safety services for civil and commercial satellite operators, a job currently performed by the U.S. military. This will require Commerce to set up a cloud infrastructure, establish data-sharing agreements with DoD, line up contracts for the procurement of commercial data and figure out processes for issuing collision warnings to operators when debris objects approach active satellites. The departments of Commerce and Defense signed an agreement in September formalizing their commitment to cooperate. DalBello said the memo was just the beginning of a discussion to take place over the next several months to hash out the details. Not an FAA for space DalBello said many people believe the Office of Space Commerce will be a de-facto traffic controller, like the Federal Aviation Administration for space. But that is not what’s happening. “We use all these terms a lot: space situational awareness, space traffic management, space traffic control but in reality all we’re really stuck with is space situational awareness,” he said. OSC will not manage space traffic but rather provide information that operators can use to help prevent collisions, DalBello said. Once that warning is issued, “all the responsibility transfers to the operator.” That said, “we clearly are in the beginning of what will be a long, long process” to define what responsibilities should fall on the government and on the private sector with regard to space traffic management, he added. “If you look back at air traffic control, it kind of started in the same way. The first air traffic control centers were organized by the airlines.” Following the agreement with DoD, two working groups were formed: one focused on clarifying DoD’s and OSC’s roles and responsibilities, and another dealing with the more complicated issue of data sharing. DalBello insisted that DoD is not getting out of the business. “They’re just shifting the focus . We’re trying to take over civil and commercial, and some international activities. So we need to clarify roles and responsibilities.” The working groups will meet over the next several months. OSC will not overnight learn how to do everything that DoD has been doing for decades, he said. And there will not be a “big magic date” when a fully operational civilian system will be turned on and the military system turned off. A prototype cloud-based data repository unveiled last year was a first step, DalBello said. OSC plans to acquire an operational cloud system but the contracting process is now on hold until Congress appropriates 2023 funding. Separately, the office is working with U.S. Space Command’s commercial operations cell on pilot programs using data from the military’s unified data library . Eventually, he said, “we’ll need a constant source of commercial data.” Meanwhile, he said, “we’re going to be kicking off processes to buy other commercially available SSA services.” The transition of services from DoD to OSC perhaps will start with geostationary orbit SSA , then launch collision avoidance, and so on. “Once we have those up and running and stabilized, we can say to the Defense Department, okay, you can stand down on that.” OSC also is monitoring the progress of Europe’s counterpart, the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) services. “The world is not standing still waiting for us to get our act together. Europe is moving out,” said DalBello. “But that raises the question of how do we coordinate all those data sources?” “I heard that the EU SST is going to be offering their services to third parties as early as next year,” he said. “So we’ll be looking hard at that.”
WASHINGTON – Redwire and MDA announced June 7 they have won contracts to each produce 42 tactical communications antennas for U.S. military satellites in low Earth orbit. The antennas will be installed on satellites that will be part of the Link 16 tactical data network. The Link 16 standard is used by the U.S. military and NATO allies to exchange data between ships, aircraft and troops on land. Jacksonville, Florida-based Redwire, a space infrastructure company, said it’s under contract to deliver 42 high-gain Link 16 antennas over the next 18 months for an undisclosed customer. Ontario, Canada-based MDA, a space technology provider, said it received a contract from Lockheed Martin for 42 antennas for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer. Lockheed Martin is one of three companies building satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer constellation. MDA will supply steerable Ka-Band and Link-16 antennas, as well as the satellites’ GPS antennas. SDA’s Transport Layer is a low Earth orbit mesh network of optically-interconnected satellites that will send and receive wideband data to and from ground stations and mobile users. A Redwire spokesman said the company could not disclose the value of the contract or the specific customer. MDA also did not disclose the value of its contract. Based on a previous announcement , Redwire’s customer is likely York Space Systems, one of the other prime contractors building satellites for DoD’s Space Development Agency. Redwire in a January 2022 news release said it was under contract to deliver three L-band Link-16 helical antennas for the Space Development Agency’s Transport Layer Tranche 0. That earlier contract was with one of two satellite manufacturers — York Space and Lockheed Martin — that received contracts in August 2020 to build 10 Transport Layer satellites. Redwire did not specify which of the two satellite suppliers was the customer for the three antennas. York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in February won contracts from SDA to each produce 42 satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 1. The Link 16 antennas are important pieces of the Transport Layer satellites that have to be able to transmit and exchange data with all users of the Link 16 tactical data network. Redwire will produce high-gain antennas , a type of antenna with a narrow radio beam that is used to amplify weak satellite signals. The company said the antennas will be manufactured at its Longmont, Colorado, facility. Under a 2017 Small Business Innovation Research contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate, Roccor developed a deployable L-band antenna that can receive and transmit Link 16 signals via satellite. The carbon-fiber antenna boom has been successfully deployed on commercial satellites.
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA is gearing up for a fourth attempt to perform a fueling test and practice countdown of its Space Launch System ahead of a launch now no earlier than the latter half of August. During a June 15 call with reporters, agency officials said they were ready to proceed with a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) of the SLS at Launch Complex 39B. The test will begin with a “call to stations” for personnel at 5 p.m. Eastern June 18. Loading of liquid oxygen and liquid oxygen into the rocket’s core stage and upper stage will begin at 7 a.m. Eastern June 20, with the countdown ticking down to a T-0 at 2:40 p.m. Eastern that day. The overall approach of the WDR will be similar to three attempts to complete the test in April. That includes counting down to T-33 seconds, recycling and then counting down to about T-10 seconds, stopping just before the core stage’s engines would ignite. The three earlier attempts never reached the terminal stage of the countdown, running into a series of technical problems. NASA rolled the SLS back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to perform repairs that included replacing a helium check valve in the rocket’s upper stage and fixing a hydrogen leak in ground equipment. NASA also refined procedures for loading propellants into the core stage after running into issues with both liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen. “We saw some things with LOX when we loaded, and hydrogen,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development. “Our team was able to go back in, in that time we had back in the VAB, to automate those procedures, which we know will help us,” The changes are intended to prevent pressure fluctuations seen during loading in previous attempts, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director. “Some of it was demonstrated last time as well but we were able to automate some of it, and then we’re also able to look at some other ways in which we might be able to do that,” she said. NASA also promised to provide more real-time information for the upcoming WDR. During the three attempts in April, the agency provided only occasional blog posts and tweets, saying it could not provide more detailed technical information because of export control concerns, even though the agency provided such information during the shuttle program. For the upcoming test there will be commentary during the fueling and countdown, Free said, along with “fantastic” graphics, although the agency will still not release the same level of detail as during the shuttle program. “We are trying to be more transparent,” he said. Even if the upcoming WDR goes as planned, which was not the case the first three attempts, Free said a launch in the next available window, which opens July 26 and closes Aug. 10, is unlikely. “That late July/early August launch period is very difficult for us to hit,” he said, given the work needed after the WDR to return the vehicle to the VAB, make final preparations, and return to the pad. “I think we’re probably looking at the latter part of August.” That window opens Aug. 23 and closes Sept. 6, although there are no launch opportunities on Aug. 30, 31 and Sept. 1. That schedule also assumes there are no major issues during the upcoming test. “This is the first time that we’re flying this vehicle, and I think we need to understand everything we can before we commit to launch,” he said when asked if NASA would proceed with a launch even if it did not complete every part of the WDR. “We’re going to understand what every situation is and run it to ground before we would press to commit to launch.”
United Launch Alliance launched a classified National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite on a Delta 4 Heavy rocket September 24 at 3:25 p.m. Pacific from Space Launch Complex-6 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. NROL-91 is the Delta 4’s final mission from the West Coast . The vehicle last flew in April 2021 when it launched NROL-82 . About four minutes into flight, the outer boosters of the three-core Delta 4 Heavy separated. The second stage separated about two minutes later. At the request of the NRO, ULA ended the webcast nearly seven minutes into the flight after the nose fairing was jettisoned. NROL-91 was the 10th mission Delta 4 Heavy launched for the NRO. The vehicle has flown 43 missions overall and 14 in the Heavy configuration. Each of the Delta 4 Heavy’s common booster cores is powered by Aerojet Rocketdyone’s RS-68A main engines. The Delta cryogenic second stage is powered by an RL10C-2-1 engine. The rocket uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in all stages. The U.S. Space Systems Command and the NRO confirmed in a news release that the mission was successful. “The Delta 4 Heavy has proven to be an integral part of the NRO’s history, helping us build the architecture for the world’s best space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,” said NRO Director Chris Scolese. “As our agency and the aerospace industry continue to innovate and evolve, we will explore new vehicles for launching payloads even more efficiently and effectively.” ULA is under contract to launch two more NRO satellites on the Delta 4 Heavy in 2023 and 2024 but these will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. ULA then plans to retire the Delta 4 Heavy and replace it with the new Vulcan Centaur rocket.
TAMPA, Fla. — India expects to conduct the first launch of OneWeb satellites in eight months during the second half of October, Indian space agency ISRO said Oct. 5. ISRO said 36 satellites for the British broadband startup will be integrated with the upper stage of India’s GSLV Mark 3 medium-lift rocket in “the coming days.” The satellites, delivered to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India last month from a factory in Florida, have already been assembled into a dispenser unit after passing health checks. The dispenser functions as an interface between the satellites and the rocket and was built by Switzerland-based Beyond Gravity (formerly RUAG Space). Beyond Gravity also provided dispensers that Arianespace used to deploy 428 of OneWeb’s planned 648 satellites with Soyuz launch vehicles. Arianespace was forced to halt the deployment of OneWeb’s constellation after sanctions stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively banned Western companies from using Russian rockets. OneWeb’s previous batch of 36 satellites had been set to lift off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome March 4, before Russia imposed poison-pill conditions on the launch. 
 The British operator subsequently suspended all further Soyuz missions as international relations soured. Paul Horstink, executive vice president of Beyond Gravity’s launcher division, said “only a minor adaptation” was needed to make the dispenser used for OneWeb’s Soyuz launches compatible with GSLV Mark 3. “This will be the first flight of a dispenser from us” on an Indian rocket, he added. New Space India Limited (NSIL), ISRO’s commercial arm, will conduct the launch from one of two launchpads at Satish Dhawan Space Centre capable of facilitating orbital missions. Arianespace said Sept. 13 it had reached a settlement deal with OneWeb and will support upcoming launches, including satellite dispenser services from India. NSIL and SpaceX have signed agreements for two and three OneWeb launches, respectively, which are slated to complete before the end of spring 2023 to give the operator global coverage. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); }) This article was updated Oct. 7 with more details on Beyond Gravity’s updated OneWeb dispensers and Arianespace’s canceled Soyuz launches.
The U.S. Space Force has started building a gateway site at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska, where it will operate two new polar communications payloads scheduled to launch in 2023 on a Space Norway mission. The Space Systems Command’s satellite communications office broke ground earlier this week to prepare the site to serve as a gateway for the Enhanced Polar Systems-Recapitalization (EPS-R) payloads, the command said in a news release. Satcom terminals at Clear will be the main connection to the new EPS-R payloads that will launch next year on Space Norway’s Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission known as ASBM. The EPS-R payloads , developed by Northrop Grumman, will fly to highly elliptical orbits on two ASBM satellites projected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The EPS-R gateway segment is estimated to cost about $4 million. It also includes facilities at Naval Base Point Loma, and the Army’s Camp Roberts, in California. It’s a joint project led by the Space Force, the Naval Information Warfare Center and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The EPS-R are Extremely High Frequency Extended Data Rate payloads that will provide secure communications services for U.S. forces operating in the north polar region. The ASBM mission includes communications payloads for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense and for British satellite operator Inmarsat. The two EPS-R payloads will augment two existing Enhanced Polar Systems satellites also made by Northrop Grumman. The project has been praised by U.S. defense officials as an example of international cooperation on space programs. “The EPS-R system is crucial to multiple military services for warfighters in the polar region,” said 1st Lt. Timothy Phelps, EPS-R gateway and terminals team lead. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said Aug. 19 it has lost control of its Galaxy 15 broadcast satellite after it was likely hit by a geomagnetic storm. High space weather activity likely knocked out onboard electronics needed to communicate with the satellite, Intelsat said, and keep it locked in its geostationary orbit slot at 133 degrees West. “The satellite is otherwise operating nominally, keeping earth pointing with all payload operations nominal,” Intelsat spokesperson Melissa Longo said. While Intelsat is working to restore its ability to command the satellite, Longo said the company expects all customers to “have service continuity” until its Galaxy 33 replacement arrives in November. Intelsat ordered Galaxy 33 from Northrop Grumman in 2020, and SpaceX is slated to launch the satellite with Galaxy 34 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in October. Galaxy 15 was launched in 2005 and was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which is now part of Northrop Grumman. Intelsat temporarily lost the ability to command Galaxy 15 five years after launch following an anomaly that was also pinned on unusually violent solar activity . Longo said Intelsat is offloading customers to another satellite “to ensure service continuity,” and “will continue to try to regain command once they are off so we can eventually deorbit it.” Galaxy 15 carries 24 C-band transponders serving media customers in North America. It also has an L-band payload that was previously used by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to relay GPS information to aircraft to improve navigational accuracy. Intelsat said this L-band payload is no longer in use after the FAA service migrated to Galaxy 30 soon after that satellite was launched in 2020. Tzu-Wei Fang, a space scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), warned Aug. 8 that the relatively benign space weather conditions of the last several years are ending. A new solar activity cycle set to peak around the middle of the decade may be stronger than forecast , she told the 36th Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. This article was updated Aug. 20 with details about Galaxy 15’s L-band payload that is no longer in use.
China has conducted a series of successful hot fire tests for engines designed to power a launch vehicle capable of sending astronauts to the moon. A 300-second mission duty cycle test of a kerosene-liquid oxygen engine was conducted Oct. 23, the Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology (AALPT) announced . The engine has completed three successful tests totaling 650 seconds since late September. A pair of the engines—sometimes referred to as the YF-100M—will power the second stage of a new generation crew launch vehicle . The vacuum-optimized engine will use a titanium alloy nozzle. A liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen engine for the rocket’s third stage also recently passed the milestone of 10,000 seconds of testing, the Beijing Aerospace Testing Technology Research Institute said in a statement Oct. 29. The institute is, like AALPT, ultimately owned by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). CASC is a giant state-owned space and defense enterprise and the country’s main space contractor. The new rocket will combine a trio of five-meter-diameter cores, each equivalent to the size of the first stage of China’s current largest rocket, the Long March 5. Each core will use a cluster of seven YF-100K kerolox engines, which are uprated versions of the YF-100 engines which power the side boosters of the Long March 5. Work on the YF-100K is in advanced stages. The new rocket is sometimes referred to as the Long March 5 Dengyue (“moon landing”) or Long March 5G. It will be capable of sending 27 metric tons into trans-lunar injection. A pair of the new rockets will be capable of sending a crewed spacecraft and, separately, a landing stack, to lunar orbit. This would allow two astronauts to make a landing on the moon. Senior Chinese space officials say the country will be capable of executing this idea for a short-term lunar stay mission before 2030 . China is also aiming to hold a test launch of a two-stage version of the rocket in 2026, before testing the larger, three stage variant. The partially reusable, single-stick, two-stage variant will be used to send a new generation crew spacecraft into low Earth orbit, allowing it to access the Tiangong space station. Though China’s government has not formally approved a crewed lunar landing, work on the necessary elements of such a program is underway and the country’s space actors and state media are openly talking of its lunar ambitions. The lunar lander segment remains one of the more secretive aspects of China’s prospective moon landing architecture. The country is also planning to construct an International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) on the moon in the 2030s. The project will be implemented with Russia, according to a roadmap unveiled in St Petersburg in 2021. Meanwhile progress continues on another Chinese super heavy-lift launch vehicle with a test of the 25-ton thrust YF-79 expander cycle liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen engine, official publication China Space News reported early September. The engine is understood to power the third stage of one concept for the under-development Long March 9 rocket, which could launch before the end of the decade. The Long March 9 will be used for lunar and space infrastructure launches, including a potential space-based solar power program .
TAMPA, Fla. — Emirati fleet operator Yahsat said Oct. 11 it has invested in Californian startup eSAT Global, which is developing a chip that would enable phones to connect to its satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). The companies did not disclose financial details about Yahsat’s acquisition of a minority stake in eSAT. The deal includes a long-term commercial agreement for Thuraya, Yahsat’s L-band mobile satellite services business, to use eSAT’s technology to connect directly to phones and low-power internet of things (IoT) devices. San Diego-based eSAT was founded in 2017 to create communications modules enabling tracking, monitoring, and other low-cost IoT devices to connect directly to GEO satellites where terrestrial networks are unavailable. Last year, the startup said it was also developing a satellite-enabled text capability for emergency and “simple messaging” services. Alongside other startups, established satellite operators have recently announced plans for an emerging direct-to-cell market , including SpaceX’s Starlink . Most of these plans envisage leveraging small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), which are capable of lower latency services than spacecraft farther away in GEO. However, drawing from existing satellites in GEO can be more cost-effective than LEO for global low-power connectivity services, eSAT says, with latency below two seconds still possible for time-sensitive applications. “We have designed our systems to benefit from the intrinsic advantages that L-band GEO’s have over both LEO’s and other GEO’s,” eSAT CEO Rick Somerton said in a statement. “It is very exciting for us to have Yahsat, through their investment, endorsing our belief that their GEO’s will deliver low-cost, low-power, and low-latency IoT connectivity.” Silicon Valley startup Skylo is also developing a business to bring connectivity to IoT devices beyond the reach of terrestrial networks via third-party GEO satellites. Skylo, which has partnered with U.K.-based fleet operator Inmarsat to use its L-band satellites, announced its own plans Sept. 7 for the direct-to-cell sector. Direct-to-cell expansion Smartphone makers would need to add eSAT’s custom radio-frequency chip into their phone designs, or modify their existing chipsets with software, to give their handsets the ability to connect to partner satellites in GEO. The startup said it is developing a hotspot communications device that would link to existing handsets, enabling them to use eSAT’s Remote Text Service (eRTS) without these modifications. Somerton told SpaceNews it had planned to conduct field trials of eRTS in the second quarter of 2022, supported by Thuraya and Inmarsat, but he now expects these to take place in the first quarter of next year following delays related to COVID-19 and closing the startup’s funding. “The plan is for it to be a global service,” he said, and the startup is “looking at a soft launch in the second half of 2023” amid discussions with “several” smartphone makers. “ The fact that there will be minimal changes to hardware, if any, will make implementation easier, ” he added. The startup expects IoT devices capable of connecting to partner GEO satellites will be available by the fourth quarter of 2023. Thuraya’s L-band constellation comprises two aging satellites covering two-thirds of the globe, providing connectivity to specialized devices across commercial and government markets from Europe to the Asia Pacific. The operator relies on roaming agreements to cover the remaining third of the world that these satellites do not reach over the Americas. Yahsat operates three broadband satellites in GEO and bought Thuraya in 2018 to push into an expanding satellite-enabled IoT market. Yahsat ordered a next-generation L-band satellite called Thuraya-4 NGS from Airbus two years later to refresh part of Thuraya’s constellation, which SpaceX is slated to launch in 2024. The contract with Airbus included an option for a second satellite to continue coverage over Asia that Yahsat has not initiated. “Yahsat’s investment in eSAT, combined with Thuraya’s commercial agreement, is aligned with our belief in the outsized impact of the IoT sector for the satellite and space industry today and in the years to come,” Yahsat CEO Ali Al Hashemi said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we will be able to serve our customers even more effectively by offering smart, reliable, and customizable solutions that will unlock new and exciting opportunities across a range of sectors.” The IoT market is projected to grow to $525 billion over the next five years at a 22% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), Yahsat said, while satellite IoT is forecast to generate a total of $6 billion over the same period. This article was updated Oct. 12 with additional comments from eSAT CEO Rick Somerton.
Updated 2:25 p.m. Eastern with NASA statement. WASHINGTON — Masten Space Systems, a company developing a lunar lander for a NASA mission, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy July 28 with plans to sell one of its major assets to a competitor. Masten filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The company, based in Mojave, California, reported having estimated assets of between $10 million and $50 million, and estimated liabilities in the same range. The company is one of five that had won Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) awards from NASA to deliver payloads to the lunar surface. NASA issued an award originally valued at $75.9 million Masten in April 2020 to deliver a suite of experiments to the lunar surface using its XL-1 lander. The mission, originally scheduled for 2022, was pushed back to November 2023 because what the company said in June 2021 were pandemic-related supply chain issues. “NASA received notification its payloads slated for delivery aboard Masten Mission One may be impacted by Masten business operations. The agency is working closely with the company to ensure that any potential changes comply with Federal Acquisition Regulations,” NASA said in a July 29 statement. “In the event Masten Space Systems is unable to complete its task order, NASA will manifest its payloads on other CLPS flights.” NASA added that of the revised value of the award of $81.3 million, the agency paid Masten $66.1 million to date. Industry sources reported Masten Space Systems encountered financial problems recently, forcing it to furlough its staff for the month of July and lay off many of the people working on the XL-1 project. “Masten intends to use the Chapter 11 process to streamline Masten’s expenses, optimize its operations and conduct sale processes that maximize value for its unsecured creditors,” Sean Bedford, general counsel of Masten Space Systems, said in a statement to SpaceNews. “We are hopeful that this process will enable Masten to continue operations and deliver value for its customers and the space industry.” The filing lists as its largest creditor SpaceX, who has a contract to launch the XL-1 lander. Masten owes SpaceX $4.6 million, according to the filing. Other major creditors include Psionic, a developer of navigation systems; another lunar lander company, Astrobotic; NuSpace, an aerospace components supplier; and propulsion company Frontier Aerospace. Masten states in the filing that it has a “stalking horse asset purchase agreement” for its SpaceX launch credit with Intuitive Machines, another lunar lander company. Such an agreement ensures a sale of the asset but does not prevent Masten from seeking a better deal. The company said it will sell its other assets through “one or more purchases” to be approved by its board. While Masten says it intends to continue operations, one outside expert sees the situation differently. “This is not going to be a reorganization,” said Adam Stein-Sapir, a bankruptcy expert at Pioneer Funding Group, which is not involved in the case. His review of the filing led him to conclude that Masten’s investors decided “to cut their losses and sell the pieces to willing buyers.” While Chapter 11 filings are usually associated with reorganizations, he said they can also be used to liquidate a company. “It gives the debtor a little more control,” he said. A Chapter 7 filing to liquidate a company involves a court-assigned trustee that has discretion on how to dispose of assets. “This allows the management team to exercise a little more control over the wind-down.” The stalking horse agreement to sell the launch credits to Intuitive Machines suggested to him that the company has been planning for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy for some time. “This has been thought out. This is not an emergency filing,” he said. “I do expect a quick process.” In addition to its lunar lander work, Masten has developed several vertical-takeoff-and-landing rockets for use as technology demonstrators. The company had a contract with NASA’s Flight Opportunities program to offer those vehicles for researchers, including NASA itself, which used them to test technologies for the Mars 2020 lander.
Chirag Parikh, executive secretary of the National Space Council, said he expects the Office of Space Commerce to start developing an architecture for space traffic management, an initiative that has been bogged down by studies and lack of funding. “We were very happy that we were able to get Richard DalBello in that position of leadership to run the Office of Space Commerce,” Parikh said July 13 at a conference on Capitol Hill hosted by the Future Space Leaders Foundation. DalBello, a space industry veteran and former government official, was named to the top job at the Office of Space Commerce in late April. The post had been vacant since January 2021. “He’s working very closely with the Department of Defense right now, with the Space Force as well as U.S. Space Command, to be able to develop that linkage, to be able to transition that mission from the Department of Defense over to Commerce,” Parikh said. The Office of Space Commerce is charged with implementing Space Policy Directive 3, a four-year-old policy that directs the Commerce Department to take over civil space traffic management responsibilities currently handled by DoD. That includes providing warnings to satellite operators of potential close approaches between their satellites and other space objects. Parikh said the space traffic management effort has moved at a slow pace due to lack of funding as well as “all the studies and then the change of leadership along the way.” The future is brighter now with more funding on the way. “What we’ve done is we’re putting our money where our mouth is,” he said. “In the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget, we have almost 8x the budget so we can now start building the investments and the architecture and infrastructure.” The Biden administration requested $87.8 million for the Office of Space Commerce for 2023 — an 800% increase over the previous budget. “So they are now starting to go through the architectural reviews and how to be able to build out a prototyping capability, and partner with the commercial sector to be able to leverage that as much as we can,” said Parikh. The Commerce Department in February unveiled an early prototype for a space catalog and traffic software platform that would provide basic situational awareness and traffic management services. Transitioning these prototypes to operational systems is a top priority for the commercial space industry. “The anticipated proliferation of both spacecraft and orbital debris will likely drive further hazards and illustrates the need for a comprehensive approach to manage space traffic and ensure the sustainable growth of commercial space,” Boston Consulting Group analysts wrote in a recent op-ed . “Protecting the growth of the space economy and preserving access to space for all entrants — commercial and government — can only occur if technologies for collision risk mitigation and maneuverability are further developed.” Parikh said the Biden administration and allied countries continue to have conversations about this issue as orbits become more congested, creating growing risks to space activities. “We start thinking about large constellations of satellites and how they all coexist together. Who tracks what? Who notifies people to move left? Who moves right?” Parikh said. “These are hard problems and we are working across departments and agencies to be able to figure these elements out.”
NASA has called off plans to attempt to launch the Artemis 1 mission on Sept. 27 as a tropical storm, with the potential to become a major hurricane, heads for Florida. NASA announced Sept. 24 it would not proceed with the next launch opportunity for the mission, which was Sept. 27 at 11:37 a.m. Eastern. It cited the threat posed by Tropical Storm Ian, currently in the Caribbean Sea. Forecasts by the National Hurricane Center show the storm moving north, then curving northeast to reach southern and central Florida by the middle of the week as a major hurricane. While NASA won’t proceed with a launch on Sept. 27, it deferred a decision on rolling the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center to protect it from the storm, while continuing preparations for a rollback. NASA said in the statement it would wait until Sept. 25 to make that decision “to allow for additional data gathering and analysis.” At a Sept. 23 briefing, NASA officials said their preference was to leave the SLS at Launch Complex 39B. Doing so could preserve a final launch opportunity in this window Oct. 2, while rolling the vehicle back to the VAB could make it difficult to attempt a launch in the next window in the latter half of October. At the briefing, Mike Bolger, manager of the Exploration Ground Systems program at NASA, noted the vehicle is rated to handle wind gusts of up to 74 knots (137 kilometers per hour) at the pad. “Right now, we don’t have a forecast that shows winds gusting higher than 74 knots coming across the Kennedy Space Center,” he said. “We do have a certified design with factors of safety to those peak gusts,” said John Blevins, SLS chief engineer. “Ultimately we have a pretty robust vehicle, and we’ll just have to keep looking at that forecast to see if we fall within our certified parameters.” Agency officials seems curiously dismissive of the threat posed by the storm, which at the time of the briefing was still an unnamed tropical depression but forecast to strengthen significantly in the coming days. “It’s not even a named storm. It’s Tropical Depression Number Nine,” said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters. “It’s very early in, and some of the traces we see go in different directions and go at different speeds.” “I wish we were better at predicting weather absolutely five days in advance,” he added, noting that if he could, “I would pretty much quit this job to go work for the weather bureau.” In a statement after the briefing, NASA appeared to do some damage control. “NASA is grateful to its agency partners at NOAA, United State Space Force and the National Hurricane Center for giving us the highest quality products to protect our nation’s flight test to return us to the Moon,” the agency stated. Tanking test update and FTS waiver Weather turned out to be the biggest constraint for the launch after overcoming issues with hydrogen leaks and securing a waiver for the rocket’s flight termination system. At the Sept. 23 briefing, officials said they were satisfied with the tanking test two days earlier where the rocket’s core and upper stages were filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. NASA said the test accomplished all the objectives despite hydrogen leaks encountered during it. “All in all, it was a good day. We’re very happy with the results,” said Brad McCain, vice president and general manager of Jacobs Space Operations Group. “We’re very optimistic about our next launch attempt.” He and others said they were still in the process of learning how to best load propellants into the vehicle, something that requires practice. “The pressure and temperature of that seal — any seal in cryogenics — is always going to be tricky,” said Blevins. “Sometimes it takes a while to find out the stability points.” With the shuttle, said McCain, “it took a lot of tankings to get it right, get it consistent.” Blevins said that NASA also overcame another obstacle to the launch by securing a waiver from the U.S. Space Force, which operates the Eastern Range, for the SLS flight termination system (FTS). That system was certified only through the end of the previous launch window that ended in early September, but NASA had been in discussions with the range to show that the system would still operate should the vehicle launch in late September or early October. “We have received approval for the launch attempts that we have on the books,” which at the time was Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, Blevins said. “They did a lot of work to help us get to where we are.” He did not state if that waiver would be good if the launch slips later in the year. However, should NASA decide to roll the SLS back to the VAB, Whitmeyer said that workers would service the FTS and effectively restart the clock on its certification for a later launch attempt. “I don’t want to go into any details because it’s just not pertinent here,” Blevins said of the work to secure the FTS waiver, adding that disclosing any details would be “silly” given the number of parameters involved in the Space Force analysis of the waiver request. “They have an incredible mission and they do a good job at it. I’m really glad we had enough information to provide the public safety assurance they get to grade.” 
TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk Global secured regulatory approval Sept. 16 to operate its initial cellphone-compatible constellation globally, although the startup needs to deploy more satellites and get landing rights before it can start services. The Federal Communications Commission approved Lynk’s plan for an initial 10 pizza-boxed shaped satellites, designed to deliver basic connectivity services directly to standard mobile phones from low Earth orbit (LEO). The approval for Lynk Tower satellites 1 through 10 came with conditions that limit the startup’s use of radio frequencies to avoid interfering with other operators. Lynk also cannot gain “the exclusive right” to handle telecoms using satellite connectivity in bands allocated to terrestrial mobile services, the FCC said, to prevent the creation of a monopoly or duopoly in this emerging market. SpaceX launched Lynk Tower 1 in April and is slated to deploy three more satellites for the startup in December. Four in-orbit Lynk Towers would be enough to enable mobile users to send and receive text messages about four to eight times a day, depending on their latitude. Initial services would also include emergency alerts and connectivity for internet of things devices. However, Lynk has not yet secured landing rights in any country where it plans to provide services. The Virginia-based startup currently has licenses that enable it to test its planned services in 18 countries, including the United States, Lynk CEO Charles Miller told SpaceNews . “There is deep desire in these countries for commercial service,” Miller said. “We foresee approval in the near term in all of these countries, and many more.” He said the next step for Lynk is to sign a commercial contract with a mobile network operator (MNO) in the United States, which would then jointly seek permission from the FCC to operate in the country. “We have signed an MOU with a major US MNO, have been testing with two major MNOs in the U.S., and are in discussions with three major US MNOs,” he said via email. According to Miller, it “is possible” Lynk could secure a U.S. MNO partnership and gain a market access license in the country before it deploys the remaining six satellites in its initial constellation next year. He added: “The more important question right now is “who will Lynk partner with in the U.S.” There are four MNOs with nationwide spectrum, but Lynk is the only company who has both the proven sat-to-standard-phone technology and a commercial operator’s license.” Lynk builds its satellites in-house and plans to deploy more than 50 of them before the end of 2023 to increase satellite revisit times to every 15-30 minutes. Of the contracts Lynk has signed with MNOs, the startup has announced deals in the Bahamas, Papua New Guinea, Central African Republic, Solomon Islands, and Mongolia. The company’s early direct-to-cell rivals are also plotting initial services in the United States. Apple’s Globalstar-enabled satellite services will be limited to emergency SOS on certain iPhone 14 models when it launches via a software update this November. T-Mobile’s Starlink-enabled service hopes to provide services initially limited to messages and pictures “as soon as late next year,” subject to regulatory approvals and SpaceX’s progress with Starlink’s Gen 2 upgrade. Meanwhile, Texas-based startup AST SpaceMobile plans to hit the ground running with 4G and 5G capabilities after its first commercial satellites launch in late 2023. SpaceX launched AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 prototype Sept. 10, which is currently preparing to unfurl the largest commercial antenna ever deployed in LEO to test its planned services.
House appropriators eliminated most of a proposed budget increase for the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space transportation office while also directing the agency on spaceports and cooperation with another agency on spaceflight investigations. The House Appropriations Committee approved June 30 its version of a transportation and housing and urban development spending bill for fiscal year 2023. The bill funds several agencies, including the FAA. The report accompanying the bill, released June 29, included $33.675 million for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST. The agency requested $42.5 million for AST in its 2023 budget proposal, and the office received $32.47 million in fiscal year 2022. The report didn’t elaborate on the reduction from the request. Other parts of FAA operations received all or nearly all their requested funding. The report does fully fund other research and facility work related to commercial spaceflight. That includes $10 million for work integrating commercial launches and reentries into the national airspace system and $5.7 million for commercial spaceflight safety research. The report specifically directed the FAA “to continue prioritizing its research on the explosive yield and environmental effects of LOX/methane on public health and safety,” working with other agencies and the industry. Several new launch vehicles, including Starship, Vulcan Centaur and New Glenn, use liquid oxygen (LOX) and methane propellants, a combination about which there is limited safety information. Appropriators chided the FAA for not completing work on a spaceport report. An FAA reauthorization act in 2018 directed the agency to submit a report on national spaceport policies, including proposing “policies and programs designed to ensure a robust and resilient orbital and suborbital spaceport infrastructure” and recommendations for increased investment in such infrastructure. That spaceport report was due no later than a year after the bill’s enactment in October 2018. The appropriations report directed the FAA to specifically look at two existing programs, called Space Transportation Infrastructure Matching Grants and the Airport Improvement Program, and assess their effectiveness for supporting spaceport infrastructure projects. Commercial spaceport operators have complained about a lack of funding sources for improvement projects. In a separate portion of the report funding the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the committee took up a dispute between NTSB and FAA regarding investigations of commercial spaceflight accidents. The NTSB issued a proposed regulation last year that would give it authority to investigate such accidents, currently handled by FAA/AST, a move that both industry and the FAA sharply criticized. In May, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB, said in a letter to the House Science Committee leadership that her agency was engaging with both industry and the FAA on roles in such investigations . The NTSB would seek another round of public comment on the proposed regulations and continue meetings with the FAA to update an existing memorandum of agreement (MOA) between them. Appropriators said in the report they were “encouraged” by those recent developments and pushed the agencies to accelerate work on a new MOA. “The Committee believes that finalizing the MOA is of the utmost importance,” the report states, directing FAA and NTSB to complete the updated agreement within 180 days of the bill’s enactment. The committee also directed the agencies to brief industry on the contents of the MOA and hold a public hearing as part of the continuing NTSB rulemaking process.
The Senate on Sept. 29 confirmed the nomination of Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman for promotion to general and assignment as the chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force. The Senate by unanimous consent confirmed Saltzman and other military nominees on Thursday before adjourning for recess until Oct. 11. President Biden nominated Saltzman on July 27 and the Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing Sept. 13 . The committee sent the nomination to the Senate Sept. 22. Saltzman succeeds Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, who is retiring after 38 years of service. Raymond was the first chief of the military space branch established in December 2019. The chief of space operations is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Space Force is an independent military service under the Department of the Air Force. It has nearly 8,000 uniformed members known as guardians, and about an equal number of civilian employees charged with operating and protecting the U.S. military’s satellites and supporting systems. In testimony to the SASC, Saltzman said the Space Force “will continue to mature as an independent service. We must continue to develop the Space Force into a world class organization capable of integrating effectively into the Department of Defense … We must innovate new ways to accomplish our complex missions. We will not succeed if we assume our old habits will be effective in the emerging security environment.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Indian startup Digantara said July 6 its space weather monitoring payload ROBI is operational onboard a spent upper stage of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The company said the experimental payload has successfully sent data from PSLV’s Orbital Experimental Platform (POEM), which launched June 30 as part of the rocket’s primary mission to deploy three satellites for Singapore in low Earth orbit. It is the first time the PSLV’s fourth stage has been stabilized in LEO with a dedicated Navigation Guidance and Control system following its primary mission, according to India’s ISRO space agency. POEM has solar panels, control thrusters and other equipment to act as a hosted payload bus post-launch. The platform is carrying six payloads in total, including a satellite deployment system developed by Indian startup Dhruva Space. Dhruva Space said its Satellite Orbital Deployer has already achieved space-qualification from the mission. Digantara’s ROBI, or robust integrating proton fluence meter, aims to test space weather measurement and analysis capabilities for the startup’s future space situational awareness platform. Digantara plans to deploy a satellite early next year to demonstrate how light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors — combined with space weather data — would enable it to track space objects with greater precision than other systems in sunlight and eclipse phases. Shreyas Mirji, Digantara’s head of business and strategy, said the startup has established communications with ROBI, “and have started receiving the first batch of datasets and assessments are currently underway.” Digantara and Dhruva Space recently became the first private companies in India to secure approval from the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center (IN-SPACe), an autonomous government agency, for their space activities. India announced the creation of IN-SPACe in June 2020 to promote, permit and oversee non-government space-based activities in the country. Operating under India’s Department of Space, IN-SPACe regulates private space companies in the country and their use of facilities owned by the Indian government. Mirji described IN-SPACe’s first authorizations as “truly the pivotal point for private space activities in India.” He said India’s space ecosystem “is undergoing massive change” as the country’s government recognizes the role it must play in building a resilient economy. “This has gone well beyond promises with stakeholder consultation towards drafting India’s first comprehensive Space Activity Bill that will be tabled shortly before the parliament,” he said. The dedicated space legislation aims to provide clarity for private companies, which the government hopes will encourage more investors and activity in the country’s space industry. The largest satellite on PSLV’s June 30 mission was the 365-kilogram DS-EO, a high-resolution Earth observation spacecraft for Singapore. The mission also carried NeuSAR, Singapore’s first synthetic aperture radar observation satellite, and the SCOOB 1 solar-monitoring cubesat developed by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The Defense Innovation Unit and the U.S. Air Force announced Oct. 26 they selected five companies to help build weather models using data from satellites, aerial and terrestrial sensors. Muon Space, Tomorrow.io, Windborne Systems, Greensight and NextGen Federal Systems won contracts to demonstrate the integration of commercial data into the U.S. Air Force Weather Virtual Private Cloud. The Air Force 557th Weather Wing , the military’s primary meteorology center, uses data from a wide range of sources to build weather models, which the U.S. military relies upon to plan operations and for long-term research to understand the impact of climate change. DIU, a Defense Department agency created to work with commercial tech industries, said the companies will have to show that “data sources and interfaces are compatible with the Air Force’s Weather Virtual Private Cloud.” DoD will use the commercial data for weather forecasting and climate change assessments, DIU said. In this prototype, vendors were selected based on their ability to provide data from outside the continental United States. Data collected during this pilot project will be made available for experiments and research across the U.S. government, DIU said. “With the help of DIU, we’re accelerating the delivery of commercial weather sensing technology to meet the operational need,” said John Dreher, materiel leader for weather systems at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. Two space industry startups — Muon Space and Tomorrow.io — will participate in the project. Muon Space designs small satellites and sensing instruments that it plans to launch to orbit to monitor the atmosphere and oceans, and predict climate-related change. Tomorrow.io is developing a constellation with a mix of small radar-sensing weather satellites and microwave sounders. The company last year won a $19.3 million U.S. Air Force contract to support the development of the company’s weather satellites and provide data as a service to the military and other governmental agencies. Greensight developed a product called WeatherHive, an atmospheric monitoring technology system that uses nano-sized drones to measure atmospheric conditions. NextGen Federal Systems, a data analytics firm, will develop an artificial-intelligence prototype platform to curate commercial weather data. WindBorne Systems designs, builds, and operates a constellation of long-duration weather balloons for global in-situ weather observations.
LOGAN, Utah – Capella Space intends to offer improved image resolution and quality with a new generation of synthetic aperture radar satellites, called Acadia, scheduled to launch in early 2023. With Acadia, Capella plans to increase radar bandwidth from 500 to 700 megahertz and power by more than 40 percent. “If you increase your bandwidth to provide higher resolution products but don’t increase your signal strength, you will end up providing a lower quality product at higher resolution,” Payam Banazadeh, Capella CEO and founder, told SpaceNews by email. With Acadia, Capella seeks to ensure that its image quality does not suffer at higher resolutions, he added. Capella also is heavily focused on satellite tasking to shorten the time between customer orders and delivery. Tasking orders already travel from the ground to Capella satellites through Inmarsat communications satellites in geostationary orbit. For Acadia, Capella is upgrading the payload downlink antenna to reduce the time between ground contact and imaging. Acadia satellites also will be equipped with optical communications terminals, a move designed to reduce the time from imagery collection to downlinking, according to the news release. “Capella designs, builds and operates its own satellites,” Banazadeh said. “This vertical integration between satellite design and data delivery allows us to rapidly iterate our designs based on what our product and sales teams see as opportunities in the market.” Capella is not yet ready to reveal how many Acadia satellites the company plans to launch. “The number of satellites will scale with customer demand, but we have a substantial number of them in production as we speak,” Banazadeh said. In April, Capella Space announced a $97 million Series C investment round led by NightDragon. At the time, the company said the funds would help it expand its seven-satellite constellation, enhance its Capella Console data platform and expand its staff to meet the growing demand for synthetic aperture radar imagery and data.
Cognitive Space, a startup based in Houston, Texas, announced Dec. 1 that retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Aaron Prupas has joined the company as a strategic advisor. Prupas was most recently director for defense intelligence at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Guy de Carufel, founder and CEO of Cognitive Space, said Prupas will help guide the company as it seeks to expand its defense and intelligence business. Cognitive Space has won several Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts for its artificial intelligence-driven software used to manage and schedule satellite operations on a cloud platform. The company has been working with the Air Force Research Laboratory to demonstrate how this software can help automate the command and control of remote-sensing satellites. It won a $1.2 million SBIR agreement to develop software to manage a hybrid architecture of government and commercial remote-sensing satellites. Prupas will “provide guidance and advice to the Cognitive Space team with respect to continuing to grow its partnership with the intelligence community and Department of Defense,” de Carufel said. Cognitive Space has a mix of commercial and government customers and now sees a major opportunity to grow in defense and intelligence, de Carufel told SpaceNews . “The war in Ukraine has made it clear that space is a major component that’s vital for national security, particularly the use of commercial space. And we see commercial space playing a major role,” he said. “The defense and intelligence community recognizes that they need to make better use of space in all of its capacity, including leveraging existing dedicated assets, leveraging commercial providers and partners so that they can get the information they need quickly.”
The last time the planetary science community came together to conduct a decadal survey, Mars was ascendant. NASA had flown a series of Mars missions and was working on its most ambitious rover yet, Curiosity. The decadal survey endorsed continuing that Mars exploration strategy by backing a mission to collect samples as the first step to returning those samples to Earth. The situation is somewhat different in the latest planetary science decadal survey, published April 19 by a National Academies committee. While Mars is still at the center of much of present-day planetary science at NASA, the planetary decadal makes the case that the future is further out in the solar system, among distant planets as well as icy moons that could harbor life. While the decadal survey offers a broad survey of planetary science, from an overview of current knowledge of the field to the state of the profession itself, the section that gets the most scrutiny is its recommendations for the next flagship missions NASA should pursue. Those recommendations drive decisions on missions costing billions of dollars. The two flagship missions from the previous decadal survey in 2011, a Mars rover to cache samples and a Europa orbiter, took shape as the Perseverance rover currently on Mars and Europa Clipper, set to launch to that icy moon of Jupiter in 2024. The leaders of the decadal survey said that, in their deliberations, it became clear that the focus of the next major flagship mission should be two of the solar system’s least-studied planets, Uranus and Neptune. Both have been visited by just a single spacecraft: Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Both are called “ice giants” by scientists, as they’re smaller than the gas giant worlds of Jupiter and Saturn, and may have some mix of rock and ice in their interiors. “This is the only class of planet in the solar system that hasn’t had a dedicated orbital tour,” said Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the co-chairs of the steering committee for the survey. “Understanding the composition and the properties of either one would revolutionize our understanding of ice giant systems and solar system origins.” Another factor is that studying Uranus or Neptune could provide insights into exoplanets, given the large number of ice giants discovered around other stars. “This may, we think, be the most common class of planet in the universe,” she said. The key question then became whether to send a mission to Uranus or Neptune. Here, technical readiness tipped the scales in favor of a Uranus mission. “For the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, we have a viable end-to-end mission concept right now on currently available launch vehicles,” Canup said. “There are no new technologies required for this mission.” The $4.2 billion mission, launching as soon as 2031 on a Falcon Heavy or similar large launch vehicle, would place a large spacecraft in orbit around Uranus to study the planet and its moons and rings, and also deploy a probe into the planet’s atmosphere, as Galileo did at Jupiter in the 1990s. A launch in 2031 or 2032 could take advantage of a gravity assist by Jupiter to reach Uranus in about 13 years, while a launch later in the 2030s would require gravity assists in the inner solar system, reaching Uranus about 15 years after launch. The decadal also looked at a Neptune orbiter, but a key issue was uncertainty about the launch vehicle: it would require the upgraded Block 2 version of the Space Launch System with an additional Centaur upper stage. It would also cost about $1 billion more than the Uranus mission. The second-ranked flagship mission is one to Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn that has a subsurface ocean, with plumes of material from that ocean erupting into space. “This addresses the fundamental question: is Enceladus inhabited?” Canup said. It would do so first from orbit, sampling plume materials as they’re ejected into space, and then from the surface. The Enceladus Orbilander mission, costing between $4.2 billion and $4.9 billion, would launch in the late 2030s on either an SLS or Falcon Heavy. That would allow the spacecraft to land in the south polar regions of Enceladus, the site of many of those plumes, in the early 2050s, when lighting conditions are favorable. NASA has already been studying a mission to land on an icy moon, but not Enceladus. The agency did initial studies of a Europa Lander mission several years ago at the behest of John Culberson, at the time the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA and a staunch advocate of exploring Europa. A new Europa lander mission was among the flagships considered by the decadal survey, but it didn’t make the cut. Philip Christensen of Arizona State University, the other co-chair, said both the prominent plumes on Enceladus as well as a more benign environment there helped that mission win out over a Europa lander. The plumes at Europa are more sporadic, and the harsh radiation environment means a lander could operate for only weeks versus years at Enceladus. “We just felt that, if we have one opportunity to explore an ocean world with a flagship mission, Enceladus provided the best opportunity,” he said. “Enceladus is just the right opportunity for this time,” Canup added. “Hopefully, we’ll land on Europa some time, too.” None of the other flagship mission concepts studied in detail by the decadal survey included Mars. The report, though, endorsed NASA’s ongoing Mars Sample Return campaign, which includes Perseverance and now two landers to retrieve the samples that rover collected and a European-led orbiter to bring the samples back to Earth. “Our recommendation is that sample return is the highest scientific priority of NASA’s robotic mission, and Mars sample return should be completed as soon as practically possible with no changes in its current design,” Christensen said. However, he said NASA should closely watch the mission’s cost. The report stated that Mars Sample Return would cost $5.3 billion over the next decade, a figure NASA had not previously disclosed and is even more expensive than other flagship mission concepts studied by the decadal. That raises worries that cost increases would affect other planetary missions. “Looking back over the last 20 to 30 years, Mars exploration has clearly figured very prominently in NASA’s planetary exploration program,” he said, accounting for 25–35% of the overall planetary budget. Mars Sample Return accounts for 20% of the projected planetary budget for the next decade, he said, so there is some room for cost growth. However, the report recommended that NASA seek a “budget augmentation” if Mars Sample Return overruns its projected cost by 20% or more. That leaves very little room in the budget for other Mars missions, even as existing missions are projected to end over the next decade. The only new Mars mission the decadal endorsed was a lander called Mars Life Explorer, which would search for evidence of present-day life near the surface. That $2.1 billion mission would not launch until the mid-2030s, in part because work could not start until after Mars Sample Return got past its peak spending levels later this decade. By then, NASA will be shifting its attention to human missions to Mars, with agency officials today projecting the first crewed Mars missions could launch by the late 2030s. In the coming decade, there will be an overlap of human and robotic exploration of the moon, as NASA sends both robotic landers and Artemis crewed missions to the lunar surface. The decadal survey pushed NASA to incorporate planetary science into its human exploration plans. “NASA’s moon-to-Mars plans hold real promise for tremendous benefit to the nation and to the world,” Christensen said. “However, we feel strongly that a robust science program is the key that provides the motivating rationale for a truly sustained human program.” This fed into another mission the decadal recommended, a lunar rover called Endurance-A. The rover would be delivered on a robotic lander to the south polar regions of the moon, traveling more than 1,000 kilometers and collecting 100 kilograms of samples along the way. The rover would deliver the samples to astronauts on an Artemis mission to return to Earth on their lander. “It would truly revolutionize our understanding of not only the moon but of the early solar system,” he said. “It would begin to really get humans and robots all working to accomplish a truly remarkable goal.” An ambitious program of missions does not come cheap. The “recommended program” of missions included in the report assumes NASA’s planetary science budgets grow by 17.5% over the decade. An alternative “level program” that keeps pace with inflation (or, at least, expectations of 2% inflation when the report was developed) would delay the start of the Uranus mission to the late 2020s and defer the Enceladus Orbilander and Mars Life Explorer missions entirely. Another reason for the higher budgets is to reflect the true cost of smaller missions, including the Discovery and New Frontiers programs. Christensen said that while the Discovery program has an official $500 million cost cap, excluding launch and operations, the most recent missions have total costs twice that. “That total cost is totally commensurate with their expected scientific return,” he said. “However, the large difference between the cost cap and the true lifecycle costs undermines budget planning and creates a potential mismatch between the expectations and the budget reality.” The report instead recommends a revised cost cap of $800 million, including operations but not launch. The same is true for the larger New Frontiers program. The most recent competition had a cost cap of $850 million, excluding launch and operations. The winner, the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, will have a projected lifecycle cost more than twice as high. “This is the kind of mission we want to see done at New Frontiers,” Canup said of Dragonfly, but said it demonstrated the need for a better cost cap. The report recommended a revised cost cap of $1.65 billion for New Frontiers, a figure that includes operations but not launch. There would also be $30 million a year for “quiet cruise” phases of the mission, en route to its destination, to avoid penalizing missions that require long travel times. “You’re competing on a level playing field in terms of the scientific instruments and your spacecraft, and the science you do once you reach your target.” The report is now in the hands of NASA. “We’re all really excited,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, calling the report “incredibly compelling and exciting and inspiration.” During that inspiration and excitement into implementation plans will take time. “Our plan is to take 90 days to absorb this really comprehensive document,” she said at a NASA science town hall meeting the same day as the report’s release. By mid-July, she said, NASA plans to offer a preliminary response through town halls other meetings, with a more detailed plan later this year. So far, the report has received a positive reaction, with more concerns about funding than the choice of missions. “This particular survey is an ambitious, inspirational, and pragmatic plan for NASA that The Planetary Society looks forward to working to help realize,” said Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at Caltech and president of The Planetary Society, said of the decadal. The report’s authors believe the plan sets forth a strategy to answer some of the central questions in planetary science and beyond. “There’s a true desire this decade,” said Canup, “to make progress not just in studying habitability but also in trying to detect whether life exists elsewhere in our solar system.” This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Over a two-day conference last week, U.S. military and intelligence officials were briefed on the capabilities of commercial spy satellites and how data from these satellites could be used in military operations. Defense and intelligence agencies are longtime customers of commercial imagery companies and their consumption of commercial imagery has increased during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine . But there is also an emerging demand for new types of data now being collected by commercial satellites, such as radar imagery , radio-frequency signals, maritime and aerial traffic data . The ability to capture and analyze data from multiple sources, and turn it into useful intelligence, is known in military speak as tactical space-based ISR , short for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. More than 35 companies participated in the U.S. Space Force’s first industry day event May 19-20 focused on space-based ISR, a spokesperson said. The conference, held at an undisclosed location in the Washington, D.C. metro area, was organized by the Space Systems Command and the Aerospace Industries Association. John Galer, assistant vice president for national security space at the Aerospace Industries Association, said the command selected a mix of new space and traditional defense firms to brief a group of about 50 government officials on the state of technology for space-based ISR. “It was really an opportunity to have a conversation about what is available and what’s out there,” said Galer. “It was also an opportunity for Space Systems Command to talk about how they’re trying to do business in a different way.” Speaking May 18 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the head of Space Systems Command Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein said the tactical ISR industry day was part of a broader effort to better understand commercial industry capabilities which are advancing at a rapid pace. The National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency acquire satellite imagery and data analytics services for the U.S. government. But the military is looking for ways to use satellites in direct support of battlefield operations, to track targets on the ground or ships at sea, for example. The Space Force’s deputy director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance Joseph Rouge said in February his office was tasked by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to examine how DoD could better use commercial capabilities for tactical ISR. In support of this effort, the Space Systems Command is trying to figure out how tactical ISR would be procured from a diverse supplier base that includes satellite operators, sensor developers, data analytics firms and systems integrators. The industry day was a first step in trying to define what tactical space ISR means and how it should be procured, said Galer. “Tactical ISR has not been precisely defined, and that’s probably one of the reasons they’re really having this conversation,” he said. “You have satellite providers, but also data analytics, cloud and artificial intelligence companies.” Commercial companies that provide geospatial intelligence see the military’s interest in tactical ISR as a significant business opportunity. “The U.S. government is seeing the benefits of commercial capabilities for high-resolution and frequent revisit imagery,” BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole said in April. M ilitary organizations, he said, also are interested in nontraditional services that combine traditional imagery collection with on-demand satellite tasking. John Serafini, CEO of radio-frequency data analytics company HawkEye 360, said the Space Force’s interest in commercial ISR is good news for the industry as “there is now a bullpen of commercial companies that can service that.”
SEOUL, South Korea — In what appears to be a tit-for-tat move against Quad nations ’ launch of a satellite-based maritime domain awareness initiative for the Indo-Pacific region, China has rolled out a similar campaign with its four BRICS partners. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) “ officially launched ” the BRICS Joint Committee on Space Cooperation on May 25, with the goal of cooperation in the remote sensing satellite observation and data sharing among China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, the five nations that form an economic partnership called BRICS. The joint committee will “guide cooperation on the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation to better serve economic and social development in member countries,” Zhang Kejian, head of CNSA, said at the committee’s first video meeting. Zhang said the committee will “enable BRICS space agencies to work closer together when it comes to environmental protection, disaster prevention and mitigation, and tackling climate change with efficient data sharing and utilization.” While the five BRICS nations signed an agreement on the initiative in August 2021 , its official launch took place a day after leaders of Quad member countries — the United States, Japan, India and Australia — agreed to launch a satellite-based maritime observation initiative, as part of efforts to help countries in the Indo-Pacific region track illegal fishing and other suspicious maritime activities. Because the Quad is a U.S.-led security forum aimed at countering China , the monitoring effort is likely to focus on China’s maritime activities in the region. “We strongly oppose any coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo and increase tensions in the area, such as the militarization of disputed features, the dangerous use of coast guard vessels and maritime militia, and efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities,” the leaders said in a May 24 joint statement . The statement did not explicitly name China. They said the satellite-based maritime domain awareness initiative will “promote stability and prosperity in our seas and oceans.” China’s foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin denounced the initiative in a May 24 press conference , saying, “We hope certain countries would not see China through tinted glasses and make unwarranted accusations. Building small cliques and stoking bloc confrontation is the real threat to a peaceful, stable and cooperative maritime order.” At the May 25 meeting, representatives of BRICS nations’ space agencies “reviewed and adopted documents on the joint committee’s terms of reference, the technical specifications for data exchange, and the implementation procedures for joint observation,” according to CNSA. They will carry out the joint observation with six operating satellites: Gaofen-6 and Ziyuan III 02, both developed by China, CBERS-4, jointly developed by Brazil and China, Kanopus-V type, developed by Russia, and Resourcesat-2 and 2A, both developed by India. 
The National Reconnaissance Office announced May 25 it awarded BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs 10-year contracts to provide satellite imagery for U.S. intelligence, defense and federal civil agencies. The NRO called these awards the agency’s “largest-ever commercial imagery contracting effort.” Maxar’s deal is worth more than $3.2 billion over the decade. BlackSky’s contract has options worth up to $1 billion. Planet Labs has not yet disclosed the value of its contract. “These contracts mark a historic expansion of the NRO’s acquisition of commercial imagery to meet increasing customer demands with greater capacity,” said the agency. The contracts have a five-year base period of performance with options to extend up to 10 years. “NRO policy prohibits public statements of contract values. However, we can say the requirements have grown since EnhancedView and the contract scope and value have also grown,” a spokesperson said. EnhancedView was a single-vendor agreement signed with Maxar in 2010 worth about $300 million a year for access to the company’s high-resolution imagery satellites and image archive. The EnhancedView arrangement is now being replaced with the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) contract shared by three vendors. Maxar said its EOCL contract is worth up to $3.24 billion over the decade, with a firm five-year base commitment worth $1.5 billion and options estimated at $1.74 billion. Under EOCL, “Maxar will continue to provide high-resolution commercial satellite imagery services to the NRO for use across the U.S. defense and intelligence community,” the company said. The new contract gives the NRO access to the company’s current WorldView and GeoEye four-satellite constellation and to six new Legion satellites that have not yet been launched. Maxar said the EOCL contract is “flexible and allows for growth to consider additional capacity from the Legion satellites when they are operational.” There is a $40 million option in year five of Maxar’s EOCL contract, bringing the potential value for year five to $340 million. BlackSky said the starting value of its EOCL agreement is $85.5 million and the total contract options are worth $1 billion over the 10-year period. NRO market research The three companies selected for the EOCL procurement were expected to win. The NRO for several years had signaled its intent to expand the pool of imagery providers and in November issued the final EOCL request for bids after extensive market research, including study contracts awarded in 2019 to BlackSky, Maxar and Planet. The study contracts gave the NRO access to the companies’ business plans, finances and projected capacity of their satellite constellations. “Commercial imagery is a valuable tool for information sharing and decision making,” said Pete Muend, director of NRO’s commercial systems program office. “EOCL allows us to meet a larger number of customer requirements more quickly than ever before and dedicate national systems to the most challenging and sensitive missions.” Under the EOCL, the NRO will purchase a variety of imagery products, including foundation data and traditional imagery, as well as shortwave infrared, nighttime, and non-Earth imaging, and direct downlink to U.S. military remote ground terminals. Under this contract the NRO also can purchase “point collection” services where the government can task a commercial satellite to collect images over a particular spot. Non-Earth imaging of objects in space is a new capability that the NRO is buying that takes advantage of commercial satellites’ space situational awareness sensors. “Maxar has been a trusted U.S. government partner for more than two decades, and we’re proud to continue to serve that mission under EOCL,” said Maxar’s president and CEO Dan Jablonsky. Planet Labs said its contract will give the NRO access to Planet’s high and medium resolution satellite imagery. Once in orbit and operational, users will also have access to Planet’s next generation, rapid revisit Pelican fleet . The contract also makes available Planet’s archive of over 2,000 images of every point on Earth dating back to 2009. “We have long held the conviction that unclassified commercial satellite imagery not only equips the government with differentiated and innovative intelligence capabilities, but also increases transparency and accountability that advances global security, as well as trust between government and citizens,” said Planet’s co-founder and chief strategy officer Robbie Schingler. Planet, which became a publicly traded company in December after closing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, operates more than 200 imaging satellites. BlackSky also went public in September via a SPAC merger. Brian O’Toole, CEO of BlackSky, told SpaceNews that the NRO’s contract is a strong endorsement of the company’s “dynamic monitoring, high frequency imagery services. It goes beyond what was done in the past with just foundational imagery.” The company operates 14 imaging satellites. O’Toole said $72 million of the initial $85.5 million award is for services to be provided in the first two years of the contract. “So it’s a substantial expansion from where we were and a great start for a long term program that has a pretty big upside of up to a billion dollars.”
NASA has tentatively scheduled the next attempt to fuel the Space Launch System and go through a practice countdown for June 19, two weeks after the vehicle returns to the launch pad. At a May 27 briefing, NASA officials said they were wrapping up work on the rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. The rocket returned to the VAB a month ago after three attempts to complete a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) at Launch Complex 39B in the first half of April. Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, said a “call to stations” for the rollout is scheduled for the evening of June 5. The rollout will start at around midnight Eastern June 6. That is about six hours later than the first rollout in March, which he said is intended to make it less likely thunderstorms will interfere with the rollout. That would set NASA up to make its fourth WDR attempt no earlier than June 19, depending on weather and any potential range constraints, he said. NASA hopes this fourth attempt will be successful, filling both the core stage and the upper stage with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and going through a countdown that stops just before the core stage’s engines would ignite. However, Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development, said the agency will “add a little schedule this time around to make sure if we have to do more than one wet dress rehearsal attempt, we’re ready to support that.” Whitmeyer and Lanham said they felt confident workers had fixed the problems experienced during the April WDR attempts, including replacing a helium check valve in the upper stage and tightening flange bolts on an umbilical believed to be the source of a hydrogen leak. “All the things we’ve seen so far have been very positive in terms of the actual performance of the hardware,” Whitmeyer said. While the SLS was back in the VAB, Air Liquide, the contractor that runs the nitrogen gas distribution system at the center, completed an upgrade to increase the amount of gas available for SLS operations, an issue that cropped up during the earlier WDR attempts. That upgraded system completed a 34-hour test that exceeded the requirements for SLS, said John Blevins, NASA SLS chief engineer. NASA also used the vehicle’s time to perform some work that was scheduled for after the WDR. That included opening up the Orion spacecraft and installing some of the payloads it will carry on the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission and removing instrumentation on the SLS used to measure the loads on it during the first rollout. Thar work, Lanham said, “will really help us from the standpoint of the volume of work” that will need to be done after WDR to get the vehicle ready for launch. He didn’t give an estimate of how much time NASA saved by doing that work early, but noted doing it now avoided delays from “nonconformances” technicians encountered. “It allows us to lessen the demand on our resources when we do get back in the VAB and, I feel, lessen the risk on our overall schedule for rolling back out for launch,” he said. Agency officials have previously stated they will wait until after the WDR is complete to set a formal launch date for Artemis 1, but Whitmeyer reiterated recent statements by officials, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, that NASA hopes to launch the mission in August. NASA has published launch windows for the mission of July 26 through Aug. 10, excluding Aug. 1, 2 and 6, as well as Aug. 23 through Sept. 6, excluding Aug. 30, 31 and Sept. 1.
WASHINGTON – The Defense Innovation Unit announced May 17 it selected Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. and Avalanche Energy to develop small nuclear-powered spacecraft for in-space demonstrations planned for 2027. DIU, a Silicon Valley-based Pentagon organization that works with commercial industries and startups, awarded both companies “other transaction” contracts to demonstrate nuclear propulsion and power technology for future DoD space missions. OT contracts, increasingly used in military space projects , are negotiated faster than traditional defense procurements. The selection of Ultra Safe Nuclear and Avalanche comes just seven months after DIU issued a solicitation for small nuclear-powered engines for space missions beyond Earth orbit. Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear will demonstrate a chargeable, encapsulated nuclear radioisotope battery called EmberCore. Avalanche Energy, a venture-backed fusion energy startup also based in Seattle, developed a handheld micro-fusion reactor called Orbitron. “Compared to other fusion concepts, Orbitron devices are promising for space applications as they may be scaled down in size and enable their use as both a propulsion and power source,” said DIU. Ultra Safe Nuclear last year won a contract from the Idaho National Laboratory to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion reactor concept for a NASA space exploration mission. The company also is a subcontractor to General Atomics and Blue Origin in the first phase of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA plans to launch the DRACO nuclear thermal propulsion demonstration in 2025. Air Force Maj. Ryan Weed, DIU’s program manager for nuclear advanced propulsion and power, said the two small spacecraft prototypes funded by DIU complement the work being done by DARPA and NASA on nuclear propulsion for larger spacecraft. “DIU’s program is targeted at highly maneuverable, small spacecraft using fusion and radioisotopes,” Weed said. “Bottom line, chemical and solar-based systems won’t provide the power needed for future DoD missions.” Nuclear technology has traditionally been government-developed and operated, Weed said, “but we have discovered a thriving ecosystem of commercial companies, including startups, innovating in space.”
U.S. military buyers of space systems for decades have relied on a stable of aerospace and defense companies to develop technologies and launch them to orbit at the government’s request. In the years since SpaceX disrupted the military launch market, the growth of the space economy fueled by private money has upended what was historically a government-driven approach to technology developments. Staying up to date on commercial space activities has been challenging for military procurement organizations, Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, said May 18. “ We’re seeing more innovation coming out of industry than we have seen since the push to the moon, an enormous amount,” Guetlein said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “We’re at the point today where commercial innovation is actually outpacing the demand signal from the government, which traditionally hasn’t happened,” said Guetlein. Since taking the helm at the Los Angeles-based Space Systems Command last summer, Guetlein has started a number of efforts to bridge the gap between military buyers and new space companies. One initiative is to help startups and small businesses navigate the complex government procurement terrain. Guetlein. There are many business opportunities for companies but they are not presented to them in a user friendly way, he said. “With the acronyms, the office names, the different buckets out there, we completely confuse industry, they have no idea how to come do business with the government.” The Space Systems Command has assigned officials known as “sherpas” to help guide startups and small businesses that are unfamiliar with defense procurement, he said. “They will be the ones that kind of show the pathway to a customer.” The command also has stood up a commercial services office “to embrace as much of the commercial industry as we can,” Guetlein said. “When we stood up Space Systems Command, we did it with a mantra that we’re going to ‘buy what we can and build only what we must’ type model.” The commercial services office has the responsibility of “trying to look across all of industry to understand what’s in the realm of the possible,” said. Their key task is to identify technologies developed for commercial use that can also fill a military need. Space Systems Command also will increase the frequency of face-to-face “industry day” meetings with the private sector. Last fall the command hosted a meeting focused on crosslink communications technologies to connect satellites in space. On May 19 and May 20, companies were invited to pitch technologies at a “tactical ISR industry day,” focused on space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities in the commercial sector. “It’s going to be a reverse industry day,” said Guetlein. Instead of companies showing up to hear about the government’s wish list, Space Force program managers will hear about what companies have to offer. “That allows us to learn more about what’s out there,” he said. Next month there will be a similar event focused on cislunar space domain awareness , and another one later in the year on commercial data analysis tools.
SEOUL, South Korea — India and France have agreed to cooperate to tackle “contemporary challenges that have arisen in space,” including secure access to outer space. The pledge was part of a broader set of economic and security agreements reached between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron during their May 4 summit in Paris. “In order to address the contemporary challenges that have arisen in space, in particular maintaining secure access to space for all, India and France have agreed on setting up a bilateral strategic dialogue on space issues,” the two leaders said in a joint statement . “It will bring together experts from space and defense agencies, administration and specialized ecosystem to discuss security and economic challenges in outer space, the norms and principles applicable to space as well as unveil new areas of cooperation.” The two countries will hold the first round of the dialogue this year at the earliest, according to the statement. Besides boosting space-related cooperation, the two sides have agreed to step up efforts to connect their startup ecosystems and bolster public-private engagement to work together. For its part, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has opened its labs, testing and quality facilities to private space companies since June 2020 to help grow India’s space industry. The agreement came nearly one year after the two countries signed another space-related agreement in which France would cooperate for India’s first human spaceflight mission, named Gaganyaan. The deal was made at the request of ISRO, seeking France’s help to prepare for Gaganyaan’s uncrewed and crewed missions. The United States and Russia are also supporting the mission. Under the 2021 agreement , France’s space agency CNES is set to train India’s flight physicians and mission control teams, support a scientific experiment plan on validation missions, and exchange information on food packaging and spaceflight nutrition. CNES is also pledged to make French-made consumables and medical instruments available to Indian astronauts. The Gaganyaan orbital spacecraft project kicked off in August 2018 . It originally intended to send three astronauts to low Earth orbit from Indian soil by 2022 to celebrate the country’s 75th anniversary of independence. However, the mission has been delayed due to pandemic-induced lockdowns and supply chain disruption. ISRO is planning to conduct a first uncrewed test flight next year, the Times of India reported late last month . The mission will involve a human-rated version of India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III rocket with a modified upper stage compatible with a crew module and crew escape system.
Astra disclosed details about its new launch vehicle that will be capable of carrying heavier payloads and flying more frequently. At its “Spacetech Day” event at its Alameda, California, headquarters May 12, company executives offered some details about what it calls Launch System 2.0, a system that includes a new rocket called Rocket 4.0. The vehicle will be able to place up to 300 kilograms into low Earth orbit and 200 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit at a “base price” of $3.95 million. By contrast, Astra’s current Rocket 3.3 vehicle can accommodate a small fraction of that payload, having to date launched only a few cubesats at a time. Chris Kemp, Astra’s chief executive, said at the event that the company estimated that the average mass of satellites expected to launch over the next 10 years is 180 kilograms. “Our objective is to address the majority of the market for megaconstellation customers,” he said. The biggest change in the rocket is its first stage propulsion. While Rocket 3.3 uses five of Astra’s Delphin engines, generating a combined 35,000 pounds-force of thrust, Rocket 4.0 will use two larger engines that produce a combined 70,000 pounds-force of thrust. Astra didn’t disclose technical details about the engines other than they use a turbopump, rather than battery-powered pumps as on Delphin, and run on liquid oxygen and kerosene. The company did show videos of an undated qualification acceptance test firing of the engine. The company didn’t respond to a question about whether the engine was developed internally or uses technology from another company, after a report last year that Astra planned to license Firefly Aerospace’s Reaver engine , which is similar in performance to the engine described in the presentation. The overall launch system is still designed to be easily transportable. “It will still be, critically, a mobile launch system. The rocket will still be transportable in shipping containers,” Kemp said. “It really differentiates us from the large rockets when you can pack the entire thing up, put it on a plane, a truck, a train, a container ship, move it anywhere around the world discreetly.” The new launch system will also require fewer people in mission control. Kemp said the company has already reduced the staff required from 21 to 8, but would reduce it further with the new vehicle. “In this new model, the idea is a pilot and a co-pilot,” he said. “If hundreds of passengers can get on a jet and fly across the ocean with a pilot and a co-pilot, why can’t a couple of people fly a rocket?” Astra is targeting a higher flight rate for Rocket 4.0. “This new launch system is designed for weekly launch,” Kemp said. “The factory is designed and scaled for weekly production.” The launch system itself, he said, could conduct a launch and be recycled for another launch in a day. Astra did not disclose the cost of developing Launch System 2.0 in the presentation or a detailed schedule, but one slide stated a test launch of Rocket 4.0 was planned for the fourth quarter of this year. While Astra is scaling up its launch system, it is not planning to incorporate reusability, unlike Rocket Lab, which tested a midair recovery of its Electron booster during a May 2 launch . “We get a lot of questions about reusability,” said Adam London, Astra’s chief technology officer. While reusing rockets is “incredibly cool,” he argued the economics did not make sense for Astra. “Reusing rockets is hard,” he said, with both capital costs that need to be amortized as well as costs of refurbishing the vehicle between flights. “Our modeling and our analysis suggests that payoff is somewhere in the range of 20 and 50 reuses.” “I’m very, very happy to focus on making rockets simple. That’s hard enough,” he said, preferring to scale up production of expendable rockets instead. “It’s certainly possible we’re wrong about this.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense will launch a joint mission this summer on Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket, U.K. defense procurement minister Jeremy Quin announced May 10. The launch from Spaceport Cornwall — located at Newquay Airport in Cornwall, England — will be the first commercial rocket to lift off from the U.K. and from Western Europe. Virgin Orbit will fly nine payloads to orbit using the LauncherOne small launch platform deployed from a modified Boeing 747 aircraft. “It’s an honor to join the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in announcing this historic enterprise,” NRO Director Chris Scolese said in a statement. This mission will fly government and commercial payloads, including two U.K. MOD Prometheus 2 cubesats carrying pathfinder experiments in support of the U.K. Minerva constellation for future space-based intelligence and surveillance. Prometheus 2 is a collaboration between the U.K. Ministry of Defense and international partners, including the NRO. U.K. MOD Director of Space Air Vice-Marshal Harv Smyth said the Prometheus 2 cubesats “will deliver immense value to the U.K. MOD’s future space program and, thanks to our partners in the National Reconnaissance Office, these highly-capable satellites will launch from U.K. soil this summer.” The NRO said “launching from the U.K. “marks a continued expansion of NRO’s overseas launch locations in addition to New Zealand providing NRO with the ability to launch from three continents.” This is also the NRO’s first contract for a horizontal launch. The launch was acquired from Virgin Orbit National Systems, the company’s U.S. subsidiary formerly known as VOX Space. Virgin Orbit National Systems is one of the participants in the NRO’s Streamlined Launch Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity Contract (SLIC) base contract to compete for future NRO launch requirements. “This launch was procured as the first task order on SLIC to leverage commercial best practices. SLIC is the latest innovative and agile acquisition approach for more risk-tolerant missions,” an NRO spokesman told SpaceNews. Virgin Orbit on Monday announced its next space launch will be the U.S. military STP-28A Space Test Program mission, projected to fly no earlier than June 29 from the Mojave Air and Space Port, in California. STP-28A will carry seven experimental satellites from multiple government agencies and Aerospace Corp.’s Slingshot 1 intended to demonstrate a novel modular satellite bus. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket has flown three successful missions since a failed May 2020 test flight. In December, the company went public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company and now trades on the Nasdaq. The company on May 10 announced it has signed an agreement with L3Harris Technologies to acquire two Boeing 747-400 airframes to support U.S. national security and allies’ satellite launch demand.
As Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner prepares to return from its brief trip to the International Space Station, NASA officials say they’ll wait until this summer to determine the schedule for the vehicle’s first crewed flight and the astronauts who will fly it. NASA said May 23 it would proceed with plans to have Starliner return to earth May 25, six days after its launch on the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 uncrewed mission. The astronauts on the ISS will close Starliner’s hatch May 24, with undocking about 24 hours later at 2:36 p.m. Eastern May 25. That would allow Starliner to land at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 6:49 p.m. Eastern that day. In prelaunch briefings, NASA officials declined to set a date for the next test flight, the Crew Flight Test (CFT), which will carry people for the first time. The schedule, they said, will depend on any modifications to the spacecraft that emerged from OFT-2. The current mission has experienced several minor issues with malfunctioning thrusters and cooling systems, none serious enough to alter the mission. “One of the things we have to do is do this mission,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said of OFT-2 at a May 18 briefing. “We know we’ll have learning out of this mission, and then lay that into our plans and our schedule with the Boeing folks.” She anticipated knowing more details about CFT in the summer. That includes determining who will fly on CFT. NASA announced in October 2021 that Nicole Mann, who had been previously assigned to CFT, would instead fly on the Crew-5 Crew Dragon mission to the ISS, scheduled for launch this September. NASA also reassigned Josh Cassada, who previously was set to fly on the first operational Starliner mission, called Starliner-1, to Crew-5. At the time, NASA said it was keeping the other two veteran astronauts on CFT, Mike Fincke and Butch Wilmore, with Suni Williams also remaining on Starliner-1 with Jeanette Epps. But at the May 18 briefing, Fincke, Wilmore and Williams said they were training together as a “cadre” that could go on either mission. “We had a launch attempt with a valve issue back in late July, early August, of last year that changed things,” Wilmore said, referring to the initial OFT-2 launch attempt that was postponed because of stuck propellant valves in the spacecraft’s service module. “Since that time in August, the three of us have been working as a cadre supporting Starliner, and we know we are not necessarily assigned to CFT.” Lueders said NASA would consider crew assignments for other crewed missions coming up in the next year before assigning astronauts to CFT. “You realize the challenge the crew office has about the assignments and why it’s important to get the right timing and understand when exactly the Crew Flight Test is going to show up.” There are no plans, she added, to fly a Boeing astronaut on CFT. The mission originally included Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Boeing, as a commercial astronaut with two NASA astronauts. However, Ferguson dropped out of the mission in October 2020 citing family obligations when CFT was anticipated for 2021. Wilmore replaced Ferguson on the mission. If CFT solely serves as a test flight, Lueders said it will probably last only five to seven days. SpaceX’s crewed test flight, Demo-2, spent two months at the station in 2020 to provide additional crew given only three people were at the station at the time. The mission will have a minimum of two people, she said. Another factor for planning future crews is a still-pending agreement with Roscosmos that will allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew vehicles in exchange for NASA astronauts going on Soyuz spacecraft. Agency officials say they remain hopeful an agreement can be reached in time for a Russian cosmonaut to be on the Crew-5 mission launching in early September. It’s not clear, though, when Roscosmos would be willing to allow cosmonauts to fly on Starliner, given that agency’s initial reticence to flying cosmonauts on Crew Dragon until it performed several crewed flights. “They’re going to want to see the results from our test flights and they’re going to want us finish CFT and then we’ll have similar conversations,” Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said May 17. That could make crew swaps challenging if Roscosmos is willing to fly cosmonauts on Crew Dragon but not Starliner, given NASA’s plans to alternate commercial crew missions between the two spacecraft once Starliner is certified. “It’s another complexity going forward,” Lueders acknowledged, with the agency hoping to know “fairly quickly” when Roscosmos would allow cosmonauts to go on Starliner. “It’s another piece of the puzzle.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat said May 19 it has successfully tested a mesh network that enables ships to switch from satellite to terrestrial connectivity by using other vessels as stepping stones to land-based signal towers. The company plans to use the technology to offload its satellite capacity to terrestrial networks at ports and other congested areas, even if a ship is not close enough to connect directly to the shore. Following trials in Singapore, the satellite operator expects each encrypted ship-to-ship or ship-to-tower link in this planned network to be able to travel at least 10 kilometers. Inmarsat said the mesh network, which is designed to extend at least 30 kilometers from land towers before satellites take over transmission, would enable passengers to download a typical HD movie in under a minute. The maritime mesh network is part of the multi-orbit Orchestra constellation strategy that Inmarsat announced last year , which includes using low Earth orbit satellites starting in 2026 for addressing areas of high bandwidth demand that can’t be offloaded terrestrially. The trials in Singapore did not use the mesh terminal being developed for Orchestra, Inmarsat spokesperson Matthew Knowles told SpaceNews , so only distances of 5 kilometers have been achieved to date. A ship sailed to multiple common points daily in different weather conditions to communicate with a land-based signal tower in the most recent test. Inmarsat said the stepping stone aspect of the network was validated by connecting a ship to shore via another ship. “We didn’t focus on speeds for this test so no data there yet,” Knowles added. “We expect this to begin rolling out midway through next year but that will depend on relevant regulator approval in the countries chosen.” Inmarsat used “various combinations of frequency bands and terminal equipment onboard vessels” for the tests. The company is conducting independent spectrum sharing studies for the terrestrial network, which it says could also be deployed at airports and other congested areas. “We’ll unveil more about the spectrum plan and equipment itself later as more testing results come in,” Knowles said. According to Inmarsat, five shore stations near Singapore would enable its mesh network to deliver more than 10 gigabits per second of capacity across one of the world’s busiest container ports.
NASA is continuing to investigate water that leaked into a spacesuit helmet during a spacewalk earlier this year and is holding off on future spacewalks until engineers can resolve the problem. The leak took place during the most recent spacewalk from the U.S. segment of the station March 23, involving NASA astronaut Raja Chari and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer. At the end of the nearly seven-hour spacewalk, Maurer reported that water had pooled on his visor, although the thin layer of water, about 20 to 25 centimeters across, did not pose an immediate threat to him. NASA had provided few updates about the water leak since the incident. However, at a May 12 meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), Susan Helms, a former NASA astronaut who serves on the panel, said that the agency is “no-go” for spacewalks, or EVAs, currently because the ongoing investigation. “Because NASA is thinking through the risk posture for these suits, which are aging, the EMU is currently no-go for planned EVAs pending an investigation into what they discover,” she said. An EMU, or Extravehicular Mobility Unit, is the spacesuit used by NASA for ISS spacewalks. At a May 17 briefing about the upcoming Boeing CST-100 uncrewed flight test, Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, confirmed NASA is holding off on routine spacewalks for the time being. The investigation had found no signs of contamination in water in the suit that could be linked to the helmet leak. The suit itself, she said, can’t be inspected in detail until it’s returned to Earth. NASA is planning to bring the suit back on the next SpaceX cargo Dragon mission, launching to the station in early June. “From an EVA standpoint, until we understand better what the causal factors might have been during the last EVA with our EMU, we are no-go for nominal EVAs,” she said. “We won’t do a planned EVA until we’ve had a chance to really address and rule out major system failure modes.” That will be done through a review process she compared to a flight readiness review. Weigel said NASA will consider “contingency” spacewalks by balancing the risk of conducting the spacewalk against the risk posed by the station component that requires a spacewalk to repair or replace. “We’ll have to look at risk versus risk,” she said, which will include the status of the investigation and any measures to resolve the problem. The Crew-4 mission did deliver several pads designed to be placed inside the helmet to absorb water, she said. Sixteen more pads will be delivered on the Starliner mission. The “no-go” assessment for routine spacewalks has little practical effect on ISS operations, as no spacewalks were planned until later this year to install a second set of new solar arrays. Weigel didn’t estimate how long the investigation will take. The incident in March was nowhere near as serious as one in 2013, when water leaked into the helmet of another ESA astronaut, Luca Parmitano, shortly after his spacewalk started. He was able to return to the airlock safely, but only after about one and a half liters of water leaked into the helmet, making it difficult for him to breathe. Water leaks have been an intermittent issue for the suits for years. “There are still continuing issues with evidence of water in the spacesuit helmets after the conclusion of an EVA or even, in some cases, during an EVA,” Helms said at the ASAP meeting, with no clear root cause for the problem. Besides the addition of the pads, she said engineers are studying “the general level of helmet moisture” normal for the suit. The water leak, she suggested, is evidence that the decades-old suits are nearing the end of their useful lives. Replacing the suits has been a long-running area of concern for ASAP and others, including the agency’s inspector general. NASA has focused on a new spacesuit, called the xEMU, for Artemis lunar missions, and has proposed measures to extend the life of the current space station suits to 2028. “The current plan is to extend today’s EMU use to 2028; however, it is increasingly apparent that the usable life of the current EVA suits is limited,” the panel noted in its annual report published in January. “New suits are needed not only for future space exploration, but also for its current space activities. NASA cannot maintain the necessary, ongoing low-Earth orbit operations without fully functional EVA suits.”
Space technology company Redwire said that while it still sees the commercial sector as its biggest prospect for long-term growth, volatility among its customers may cause delays. Redwire, which went public through a SPAC merger last year, reported revenue of $32.9 million in its first-quarter earnings release May 12. The company had a net loss of $17.3 million and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $4.7 million in the quarter. The first quarter fell “slightly below expectations,” said Peter Cannito, chairman and chief executive of Redwire, in an earnings call. That shortfall was due in part to contract awards being pushed back because of delays in completing the federal government’s fiscal year 2022 appropriations, as well as supply chain issues with subcontractors. Another factor, he said, was “some volatility associated with orders from emerging commercial space contracts.” He did not give specific cases of problems, but later said companies running into funding or regulatory issues can affect the timing of orders. “With the rapidly changing economic conditions, the uncertainty has gone up,” he said. “If we were to say that anything has changed, it’s a little bit of uncertainty about the timing as a lot of commercial space companies in our sector that we’re a supplier to change their forecasts over time.” “If the commercial space segment does not deliver on their forecasts in line with the projections that were pervasive this time last year, that adds uncertainty to our forecast over the next five years as well,” he added. Despite that current uncertainty, Cannito remained optimistic about the commercial sector’s long-term growth potential. Redwire does business both with NASA and in national security space, where he said the company saw strong “demand signals” for various technologies the company develops. The company used the call to highlight work such as building roll-out solar arrays for the International Space Station and a U.S. Air Force indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum value of $950 million for the service’s Advanced Battle Management System, leveraging the company’s expertise in digital engineering. The commercial market, though, offered greater long-term prospects, he argued. “The emerging commercial space segment has tremendous growth potential over the next 5 to 10 years that could far outpace the other segments in annual growth rate.” Redwire affirmed previous financial forecasts for 2022, projecting $165 million to $195 million in revenue and $8 million to $15 million in adjusted EBITDA for the full year. “We expect sales to be more heavily weighted to the back half of the year,” said Bill Read, chief financial officer of Redwire, citing its backlog of $273.9 million.
Boeing says it is considering redesigning the propellant valves on future CST-100 Starliner commercial crew spacecraft as a long-term solution to the corrosion problem those valves suffered last year. At a May 11 briefing about the upcoming Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission, Boeing’s manager for the program said that while a solution to prevent corrosion of the valves is working for the upcoming mission, a valve redesign is “definitely on the table” as a long-term fix, something the company had not previously acknowledged. The launch of OFT-2 last August was scrubbed and eventually canceled when more than a dozen oxidizer valves in the spacecraft’s service module failed to open when commanded during pre-launch tests. An investigation by Boeing and NASA concluded that nitrogen tetroxide (NTO) propellant seeped through Teflon seals in the valve and reacted with ambient moisture, creating nitric acid that corroded aluminum in the valve. Boeing developed a solution to avoid that corrosion that does not make any changes to the valve itself other than sealing an electrical connector that provided a path for moisture to get into the valve. That solution includes loading NTO into the spacecraft later in the processing of the spacecraft to reduce the time it can seep through the valve and doing a dry purge of the valves with nitrogen gas to remove moisture. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, said at the briefing that the solution, which also includes cycling the valves once every several days, is working. “We have cycled the [oxidizer] valves four times so far,” he said. “They’re working really well.” However, Boeing said in a statement to Reuters that the company was working on “short- and long-term design changes to the valves.” The statement was in a May 11 story about a dispute between Boeing and the valve supplier, Aerojet Rocketdyne, on the cause of the corrosion, with Aerojet claiming it was caused by a cleaning solution that Boeing used in ground tests of the valve. Boeing had not previously disclosed plans to redesign the valves. At a May 3 briefing, Michelle Parker, vice president and deputy general manager of space and launch at Boeing, said there were no design changes to the valve for the OFT-2 mission. When asked later about long-term changes, she was noncommittal. “We have a usable solution for OFT-2. We don’t expect to have any issues,” she said at that earlier briefing. “As always, we’ll look long-term and see if there are improvements to be made — as somebody mentioned, the aluminum housing may be one piece of that — but right now we’re confident in the solution that we have, and we’ll continue to look at future missions.” Nappi said at the May 11 briefing that Boeing had been considering a redesign of the valve for some time. “The short-term solution has been not to have a redesigned valve,” he said. “For the long-term solution, we’ve been looking at options for at least a month, if not more, and it has included a valve redesign as an option.” Those plans, he said, depend on ongoing testing. “We’re already looking at different options for CFT,” the Crew Flight Test mission that would follow OFT-2 and be the first mission to carry people. “It’s not been decided what we’re going to do yet, but I can tell you that a valve redesign is definitely on the table.” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the agency supported Boeing’s approach of a short-term fix for the OFT-2 mission while continuing to study longer-term changes to the valve. Those changes, he said, could include the use of different materials or different ways to seal the valve. “We chose to put the mitigations in place that Mark talked about and stay with the qualified valve design,” Stich said. “We can go fly the flight with this. We know this flight is safe to go fly. We know the valves are working.” The briefing came after a flight test readiness review that confirmed plans for the launch of OFT-2 at 6:54 p.m. Eastern May 19, with a backup launch date of 6:32 p.m. Eastern May 20. Both launch opportunities would allow the uncrewed spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station about 24 hours later. Starliner will remain at the station for several days to carry out tests as well as to transfer more than 200 kilograms of cargo before undocking. The primary landing site for the spacecraft is White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, the landing site for the original OFT mission in December 2019.
Colombia signed the Artemis Accords for responsible space exploration May 10, continuing a steady stream of countries that have acceded to the agreement. Marta Lucía Ramírez, vice president and foreign minister of Colombia, signed the agreement at NASA Headquarters May 10 alongside NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. Colombia is the 19th nation to join the Accords, unveiled in 2020, and the third in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico. “It is a substantial steppingstone for my country as we continue to develop our knowledge, national capacity and understanding of the importance of space for future generations of Colombians to come,” Ramírez said of the Artemis Accords in a statement. “Our efforts to create a sustainable presence at the Moon and later Mars requires the partnership and expertise of a diverse and robust cadre of nations that embrace peaceful exploration of space,” Melroy said in the statement. “We look forward to our future collaborations with Colombia as the world explores together.” The Artemis Accords outline principles for responsible space exploration cooperation among nations, building upon the Outer Space Treaty and related agreements. Its provisions range from sharing of scientific data to the use of “safety zones” to deconflict space activities and support for the extraction and utilization of space resources. “As we look to work with the international community to uphold and strengthen a rules-based international order, the Artemis Accords present an opportunity for this generation to positively define the rules and principles that we will use to guide our civil exploration of the moon and onward to Mars,” said Valda Vikmanis-Keller, director of the Office of Space Affairs at the State Department, during a May 3 presentation at a meeting of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). She added that the United States wanted to expand the countries who are part of the Accords. Colombia is the fifth nation to sign the Accords this year, following Israel, Romania, Bahrain and Singapore. At a meeting of the National Space Council in December, Vice President Kamala Harris identified France and Mexico as two countries that expressed an interest in signing the Artemis Accords. Mexico signed the Accords later than month , but France has yet to formally join. Another country reportedly considering the Artemis Accords is India. “That is an ongoing conversation that we continue to have with our Indian colleagues,” Vikmanis-Keller said when asked about it at the COMSTAC meeting, citing unspecified “sensitivities and concerns” about the agreement there. “That is certainly something that we continue to raise when the opportunity presents itself. I don’t know if they will sign the Artemis Accords, but the dialogue is still very much active.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat said May 18 it demonstrated high-speed connectivity in India last month using a four-year-old prototype satellite. The so-called Phase 1 satellite connected through a teleport operated by local satellite communications provider Nelco, which is part of Indian conglomerate Tata. South Korea’s Intellian supplied the 85-centimeter parabolic antenna used in the April 25-29 demo. According to Telesat, the prototype demonstrated fiber-like 35 millisecond roundtrip latency at speeds fast enough to support applications including video conferencing and streaming. The Canadian operator’s Phase 1 satellite was launched to LEO in January 2018, and has been helping the company configure its delayed Lightspeed constellation. Plans for Lightspeed were recently downsized by a third to 198 satellites following supply chain issues that have pushed out the service’s debut a year to 2026. Telesat has so far secured about $3.3 billion of Lightspeed’s anticipated $5 billion cost. Dan Goldberg, Telesat’s CEO, said May 6 the company is close to securing the remaining funds that it needs before it can sign an order contract with Thales Alenia Space to build the satellites. India expansion Telesat announced plans to partner with Nelco in September 2020 , and other satellite operators have since made similar alliances with other local companies as the country looks to ease protectionist measures to encourage foreign investments. SES said Feb. 14 it has formed a joint venture with Jio Platforms Limited, the holding company for the country’s largest telecoms operator, to provide multi-orbit connectivity there. A month earlier , LEO startup OneWeb said it signed a distribution deal with India-based Hughes Communications India Pvt Ltd, a joint venture between U.S.-based Hughes Network Systems and Jio’s Indian telecoms rival Bharti Airtel. Bharti Airtel is part of the Bharti Global Indian conglomerate that is U.K.-based OneWeb’s largest shareholder, and Hughes is a minority investor in the LEO startup. SpaceX’s LEO network Starlink ran into trouble with India’s telecoms regulator late last year when it took deposits from potential customers before getting a license to operate in the country.
TAMPA, Fla. — Israeli satellite operator Spacecom is adjusting its business to serve maritime customers as the market shows signs of recovering from the pandemic. Spacecom said May 12 it has redirected a Ku-band beam on its AMOS-17 satellite to the Indian Ocean for future growth opportunities after securing its first maritime customer. This customer is using AMOS-17’s Ka-band to connect superyachts in the Indian Ocean, according to a Spacecom executive, who said the redirected Ku-band enables the operator to provide up to 2 gigabits per second of capacity over the region. The Ku-band transponder is one of 18 aboard AMOS-17 and previously offered services over east and southern Africa across land and sea, said Ofer Asif, Spacecom’s senior vice president of business development, strategy and marketing. “With the increasing demand for maritime services over east Africa and the Indian Ocean, we moved the land customers to the AMOS-7 satellite and re-pointed the AMOS-17 beam to cover the Indian Ocean Region,” Asif told SpaceNews. AMOS-17 is Spacecom’s newest satellite and was launched in 2019 to provide broadcast and broadband services across sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia. AMOS-7 is a satellite Spacecom is leasing from Hong Kong-based AsiaSat under a deal forged in 2016 to fill a coverage gap left by AMOS-6, which was destroyed after a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket preparing to launch it exploded during a fueling test. “Spacecom is working on all aspects of the maritime market from superyachts and commercial vessels, to container ships, to oil & gas platforms to regular shipping and also for security applications.” Asif added. Large cruise vessels and more than 60% of passenger cruises resumed service in 2021 after being forced aground by pandemic-related travel restrictions, according to an annual report on the maritime market released Apri 20 by Euroconsult analysts. More maritime traffic helped the number of active very-small-aperture (VSAT) terminals to increase by 32% to 31,100 terminals in 2021 compared with 2020. However, the market still has “a long way to go to reach pre-pandemic levels,” Euroconsult added, as the industry continues to feel the pressure of lengthy restrictions on international travel. Spacecom’s diversification strategy comes after 4iG, a Hungarian IT and communications company, announced plans in June to buy 51% of Spacecom and build out its portfolio of services. Israeli government concerns about Spacecom’s satellites coming under foreign control and 4iG’s ties to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have been delaying the deal’s closure, the Jerusalem Post reported in January.
With Arctic aviation and maritime activity on the rise, Europe and Canada are taking the lead in developing weather satellites to gather global data and improve observation of the Earth’s northernmost latitudes. A consortium led by OHB Sweden AB is developing a prototype for the European Space Agency’s Arctic Weather Satellite, a proposed constellation of 16 small satellites in polar orbit to gather weather data, under a 32.5 million euro ($34.8 million) European Space Agency contract awarded last year. The prototype, scheduled to launch in 2024, will be equipped with a microwave radiometer being developed by AAC Omnisys. Thales Alenia Space is the prime contractor for the Arctic Weather Satellite ground segment. The Arctic Weather Satellite mission “will greatly benefit the Arctic region and the globe with better weather predictions as the current systems do not provide the coverage and latency (to be implemented through a follow on constellation),” Bastiaan Lagaune, OHB Sweden space business engineer, told SpaceNews by email. Geostationary weather satellites orbiting the equator provide ongoing observation of weather conditions at Earth’s mid-latitudes. To forecast weather conditions at higher latitudes, meteorologists wait for polar-orbiting satellites to circle the globe and relay observations. In contrast, the Arctic Weather Satellite constellation “will ultimately provide an almost constant stream of temperature and humidity from every location on Earth, which will allow very short-range weather forecasting,” Lagaune added. Frequent Arctic weather observations, for example, could benefit “the maritime sector which is planning to use the Northern Sea routes more and more with the changing Arctic sea conditions due to climate change,” Lagaune said. “Having accurate weather predictions in this harsh and remote environment are vital in ensuring safe and efficient transportation.” The Canadian Space Agency, meanwhile, is working with Environment and Climate Change Canada and Natural Resources Canada on a two-year campaign to evaluate the cost and potential benefits of a proposed Arctic Observing Mission. If approved, the Arctic Observing Mission (AOM) would send two satellites into highly elliptical orbits to maximize their view of northern regions while gathering data on meteorological conditions, greenhouse gases, air quality and space weather. Preliminary plans call for the satellites to be equipped with spectrometers to track greenhouse gas emissions, a space weather sensor and a meteorological imager. International partners could play important roles in the AOM program, said Ray Nassar, AOM principal investigator at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “Some possibilities include NASA or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contributing the space weather instrument suite,” Nassar said by email. “NOAA could potentially also contribute a spare flight model of the Advanced Baseline Imager.” The Advanced Baseline Imager is the primary instrument on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R Series. Canada expects AOM to play an important role in an international constellation for weather, air quality and greenhouse gases. “It would enhance these constellations with Northern observations in all of these three disciplines with free and open data for the international community,” Nassar said in a presentation at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in January. If the project wins Canadian government funding in 2025, AOM satellites could launch in the early 2030s. A few years ago, NOAA also considered sending a weather satellite into a high-inclination Tundra orbit to enhance observation of northern latitudes. After evaluating the value of those observations against the program’s cost, though, NOAA opted to augment the data collected by its constellation of polar-orbiting satellites with observations made by international partners. This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
NASA is starting a study to reexamine the viability of space-based solar power, a long-touted solution to providing power from space that may be getting new interest thanks to technological advances and pushes for clean energy. In a presentation at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference May 27, Nikolai Joseph of NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy said the agency was beginning a short-term study evaluating the prospects of space-based solar power, or SBSP, the first by the agency in about two decades. “As the technology has evolved, the feasibility of the system has changed over time,” he said. “This study is going to assess the degree to which NASA should support space-based solar power.” The study will not attempt to come up with a new architecture for SBSP, but instead reexamine past concepts for collecting solar energy in space and transmitting it to the ground for conversion to electricity. Those updated systems will be compared to terrestrial power systems and assess policy and implementation challenges they face. It will also look at the costs of such systems, which traditionally has been a major stumbling block in previous studies dating back to the 1970s. “It’s going to be a lot of money, but money is not the only driver here,” he said. “If the number is huge and staggering, that might be OK.” Advanced in several technical areas, Joseph said, give the agency reason to at least reexamine the feasibility of SBSP. “The elephant in the room is launch costs, and launch has become significantly more accessible. That completely changes the way we look at this,” he said. Other areas that have seen advances include thermal systems, electronics, materials and solar panels. NASA has had discussions with the U.S. Space Force and other “technical agencies” on the study, he said. There are no plans currently to seek public input through a formal request for information or other process, but he did not rule out doing so later on. The goal is to finish the study and present it at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris in September. There has been a revival of interest in SBSP in recent years, including a workshop last December by the European Space Agency that Joseph said NASA attended and which led the agency to consider its own study. The British government included SBSP as a technology it was exploring alongside nuclear, wind and other energy systems last year . Much of that interest is driven by the desire for energy sources that can achieve goals of “net zero” carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. “I think it’s one of the more promising things that we can do from a space perspective to help save the planet. We’ve got to get to 2050 net-zero,” said Karen Jones of The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy during a later panel on SBSP at the conference. “It just doesn’t make any sense for the United States to not be looking at this,” said Peter Garretson, a former U.S. Air Force officer who led a study on SBSP by the now-defunct National Security Space Office in 2007. He cited both climate change as well as international competition, including reported Chinese interest in SBSP. “Even if you were to assume that space solar power would not end up being economical, the fact that we are losing the narrative by not trying for something on a global agenda just makes us look silly,” he argued. John Mankins, a longtime advocate for SBSP who led earlier NASA studies on the topic, said “super cheap” space access promised by vehicles like SpaceX’s Starship changed the economics of such system. “Transportation is no longer part of the cost equation,” he said. “That makes space solar power potentially affordable, depending on how you do it.” In his speech, Joseph said the study, besides looking at costs and policy issues, will also examine public perception of space-based solar power. “Public perception is something we don’t talk much about,” he said, noting that when he explains how such systems would beam power back to Earth, people ask what that would mean for birds flying through those beams. “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem, but I don’t fully know and I need to understand that.” He said the study could provide benefits even if it concludes SBSP isn’t feasible. “It’s a wonderful strawman for understanding how we attack big problems like this,” he said. “It’s also a great way to look at how you build policy around big projects.” “I feel there’s something of an obligation within NASA to look at this,” he added, “because it’s been around for so long and this idea hasn’t been destroyed yet. It’s persisted.”
SEOUL, South Korea —U.S. President Joe Biden promised to expand space cooperation with Japan and South Korea during back-to-back summits with the leaders of two East Asian allies. During a May 23 summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo, Biden agreed to work to put the first Japanese astronaut on the moon as part of the NASA-led Artemis program. In a May 21 summit with South Korea’s president Yoon Suk-yeol in Seoul, Biden agreed to strengthen the alliance “across all sectors of space cooperation.” In a joint statement issued following the May 23 summit, Biden and Kishida announced “progress in collaboration on the Artemis program,” including their “shared intention to include a Japanese astronaut on [the lunar] Gateway and on human and robotic lunar surface missions,” with a goal of signing an implementation agreement this year. The U.S.-Japan space cooperation is “taking off, looking towards the moon and to Mars,” Biden said at a post-summit press conference with Kishida, which was livestreamed on YouTube. “I’m excited about the work we will do together on the Gateway station around the moon and look forward to the first Japanese astronaut joining us in the mission to the lunar surface, under the Artemis program.” Kishida has made a priority of putting ‘Japanese boots on the moon’ since his inauguration in October. He revised Japan’s space policy roadmap to include the goal of landing a Japanese astronaut on the moon by the late 2020s. “We will promote the Artemis project to perform manned activities on the moon, and in the late 2020s, we will try to realize the lunar landing of Japanese astronauts,” the Japanese prime minister said during a Dec. 28 meeting of the Strategic Headquarters for Space Development. The revised roadmap also calls for cooperating with Japan’s private sector to develop crewed lunar rovers and other “systems that are essential for human activities on the moon.” Prior to the Tokyo summit, Biden met with South Korean President Yoon in Seoul, where they agreed to strengthen cooperation in all space-related sectors. The two countries will flesh out the commitment in working-level dialogues by the end of the year. The pledge was part of a broader set of trade, security and technology agreements reached between the two leaders during the summit. “President Yoon and President Biden commit to strengthening the ROK-U.S. alliance across all sectors of space cooperation,” they said in a joint statement issued after the summit, referring to South Korea’s official name, Republic of Korea. “Building on the ROK’s previous commitment to participate in the Artemis program , the two Presidents agreed to foster joint research in space exploration and to support the ROK’s development of the Korean Positioning System (KPS) .” The two leaders also agreed to hold the 3rd U.S.-ROK Civil Space Dialogue by the end of the year to discuss concrete plans for cooperation in space exploration, navigation and policy. The two countries launched the dialogue in 2014, based on a decision made by the ROK-U.S. Joint Committee on Science and Technology Cooperation. The first round of the dialogue was held in Washington in July 2014, and the second round in Seoul in April 2016, both with officials from space agencies and related government bodies of both sides attending. The two sides discussed a range of issues, including space exploration, satellites, space environment, and space policy, through the channel, but for unknown reasons, it has remained dormant following the second meeting. “To hold the third [U.S.-ROK] civil space dialogue means that the two sides are committed to dealing with various space issues in an integrated manner,” An Hyoung-joon, a research fellow at Science and Technology Policy Institute, a state-funded think tank based in Sejong, told SpaceNews . On top of this, the two leaders said they were committed to “continue cooperation to ensure a safe, secure, and sustainable space environment including through the bilateral space policy dialogue and strengthen defense space partnerships including through joint exercises.” To discuss related issues, the U.S. State Department and South Korea’s foreign ministry will hold a fifth round of space policy dialogue in Seoul this year. The previous round was held last August in Washington, during which the two sides discussed issues to “enhance bilateral and multilateral cooperation in the field of space security.” The U.S. and South Korea continue to get closer in space security and defense. In April, the two countries agreed to cooperate on space situational awareness (SSA) for military purposes. Under the agreement , Seoul and Washington will “share intelligence about outer space, nurture space experts through training and exercises, and enhance interoperability for combined space operations.” In August, South Korea’s air force chief of staff, Gen. Park In-ho, and U.S. Space Force Gen. John W. Raymond, chief of space operations, signed a memorandum of understanding on forming a joint space policy consultative body at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Under the agreement, the two sides have run a joint consultative body on space policy, shared information on space surveillance and worked together to enhance joint space operations capabilities such as missile defense. In line with this, the South Korean air force decided to join U.S. Space Force-led joint military drills.
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile will start deploying operational satellites in 2023 “even in the event of any complication” with the BlueWalker 3 prototype slated to launch this summer, an executive for the cellphone-compatible broadband constellation said. The startup’s operational BlueBird satellite program has been “advancing alongside” more than 700 ground tests performed on BlueWalker 3, AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan said during a May 16 earnings call. Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s chief strategy officer, said the BlueBird satellites it will start building in-house this year are benefiting from the more than $80 million spent on BlueWalker 3 over several years. “The BlueWalker 3 program, like any prototype, gave us the opportunity to put our technical solutions into practice, address design-for-manufacturing issues, develop our supplier base, refine internal teams and processes, and conduct on-the-ground testing,” Wisniewski said via email. While a “significant amount of testing can be done on the ground,” Wisniewski said BlueWalker 3’s upcoming SpaceX Falcon 9 launch remains important for demonstrating technology in low Earth orbit and configuring ground infrastructure. The 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker 3 prototype, which AST SpaceMobile has said is significantly smaller than BlueBird, has a 64-square-meter phased array antenna designed to unfold in space to communicate with smartphones and other devices at broadband speeds. AST SpaceMobile secured an experimental license May 2 from the Federal Communications Commission to test BlueWalker 3 services in Hawaii and its home state of Texas. AST SpaceMobile also expects to test BlueWalker 3 with cellular partners in Japan, Europe, Africa, South America and Asia. Wisniewski said the company will use BlueWalker 3 to configure ground equipment and software at the gateway level to optimize its planned services. “We plan to use BlueWalker 3 for this kind of testing and it is an important step to keep the ground network development on schedule with the space network development,” he said. “Our gateway development efforts have been underway for years, together with customers and vendors, alongside the space network development.” BlueWalker 3 is slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket with other passengers. AST SpaceMobile also has a contract with SpaceX for launching the first BlueBird in 2023. Their agreement provides a framework for ordering additional launches until the end of 2024, when AST SpaceMobile expects to have deployed 110 satellites to achieve “substantial global” mobile coverage. AST SpaceMobile remains open to using other launch providers for deploying its constellation, and has said more than one BlueBlird could fly on a heavy-lift vehicle. Supply chain resilience Avellan said during the company’s earnings call that AST SpaceMobile is on track to complete a second manufacturing facility in Texas by the end of 2022, which would enable the company to ramp up to producing six satellites a month the following year. He said AST SpaceMobile is confident its expansion plans will not be caught up in supply chain issues that have delayed other satellite projects. To lower the company’s exposure to semiconductor shortages, he said AST SpaceMobile has been stocking up on flexible chips that can be reprogrammed after they are manufactured. Early BlueBirds will leverage these Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Avellan said, while later satellites will migrate to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). “We feel that we can continue to execute on our plan despite any potential supply chain issues,” he added. AST SpaceMobile has been providing quarterly business updates since becoming a public company April 7, 2021, after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in a deal that raised about $462 million. AST SpaceMobile said it had about $254 million in cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, after incurring $32.7 million in operating expenses over the previous three months. About $8.3 million was spent on research and development (R&D) for the three months to March 31, up $8 million from the same period in 2021. Although AST SpaceMobile expects R&D will increase until BlueBird’s design and development are completed, the company said it has enough cash for at least 12 months. The company also announced a deal May 6 to raise up to $75 million by issuing and selling shares to B. Riley, a financial services firm, at AST SpaceMobile’s own discretion over the following 24 months. AST SpaceMobile had projected $181 million in revenue for 2023 in a December 2020 presentation outlining its SPAC merger plans. However, satellite manufacturing and launch delays have pushed plans to start generating revenues from the constellation into 2024. AST SpaceMobile’s shares closed at $7.01 May 16, after fluctuating as high as $15.48 and as low as $4.84 over a 52-week period. AST SpaceMobile has said it has early agreements with mobile operators worldwide that want to use its satellites to expand their coverage areas. According to the company, these mobile operators collectively serve more than 1.8 billion cellular customers. Virginia-based Lynk Global, which as a private company is not required to disclose the same level of detail about its business plans as AST SpaceMobile, is also developing a constellation to connect smartphones that are out the reach of cellular towers. SpaceX launched Lynk Global’s first operational satellite April 1, and the startup expects to deploy nine more in the next 12 months for text messaging, emergency alerts and other initial services. Like AST Space Mobile, Lynk Global is awaiting regulatory permission to provide commercial services in the U.S. and various other countries. Established satellite operator SES recently revealed that it is also considering plans to provide 5G services directly to handheld devices.
When Iceye co-founders Rafal Modrzewski and Pekka Laurila began looking for promising markets for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, they focused exclusively on the Arctic. It was a natural fit for the Finland-based SAR constellation operator founded in 2014. Eight years later, the Arctic remains a key market for Iceye due in part to its lack of terrestrial infrastructure. “The only way to monitor it is through satellites,” Modrzewski said. As Arctic sea ice dips to new lows, economic activity in the region is picking up. Meanwhile, soil under the Arctic tundra is thawing while some vegetation above is flourishing. To track the changes, companies and academic researchers often turn to satellite-based data products. Spire Global, for example, is developing datasets to help people make decisions about what to do as the Arctic region evolves over time, said Kevin Petty, Spire vice president of weather and Earth intelligence. With a fleet of more than 110 satellites, Spire tracks the movement of ships and airplanes through the region in addition to gathering atmospheric temperature, pressure and moisture data by noting how signals from GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems change as they pass through the atmosphere. By observing how the same signals reflect off Earth’s surface, Spire also can provide customers with data on soil moisture levels and sea ice. Planet is shedding light on the Arctic with more than 200 satellites in polar orbit acquiring electro-optical imagery. German researchers developed a deep learning model for PlanetScope, Planet’s daily global Earth imagery, to identify areas where the Arctic permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The research, led by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and the University of Potsdam Institute of Geosciences, maps small landslides that occur when permafrost thaws rapidly. “This is a type of application that we’re starting to see pick up quite a bit because we have so much coverage both spatially and temporally across the Arctic,” said Tanya Harrison, Planet scientific strategy director. For instance, Sarah Cooley, a University of Oregon assistant professor, applies machine learning to Planet imagery to track changes in hundreds of thousands of Arctic lakes in areas where the permafrost stores carbon. “Her results are suggesting that the combined action of all of these small lakes is actually going to be quite a substantial greenhouse gas source moving forward,” Harrison said. “That research is only possible with a dataset like this, because she’s looking at subseasonal scale over a massive area of the Arctic.” Maxar, meanwhile, is working with the World Wildlife Fund UK and the British Antarctic Survey to track the movement of walrus around the northern Atlantic Ocean and the Laptev Sea near Siberia. Using satellite images, private citizens are encouraged to help locate walrus on land. Researchers will use the information to study how the marine mammals are responding to the loss of sea ice. Still, aside from public and private research initiatives, satellite constellation operators see greater demand for Earth observation data for Ukraine, the Middle East and other areas of conflict than for the Arctic. “We haven’t seen much demand,” said Payam Banazadeh, founder and CEO of Capella Space, a SAR satellite operator. “That could change with shipping lanes opening up, but we haven’t seen that just yet.” As a result, some satellite constellation operators have been reluctant to perform radiometric calibrations of optical sensors to enhance their ability to capture imagery of snow and ice at high latitudes. “There are seasons when they can collect data, but there are large spans of time when anyone with an interest in the Arctic has to look to other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Mark Knapp, former vice president for defense and intelligence programs at geospatial intelligence company Preligens. For example, Preligens, a firm specializing in applying artificial intelligence to geospatial data, considers SAR and RF reflectometry useful resources for assessing conditions at high latitudes. With shortwave infrared data, Preligens also can determine when activity commences at sites such as Russian Arctic facilities. This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The Space Rapid Capabilities Office awarded BlueHalo a $1.4 billion eight-year contract to add communications capacity to the ground network used by the U.S. military to command and control its satellites. The Space RCO, a U.S. Space Force organization that procures and manages classified space systems, announced May 24 that BlueHalo was awarded a so-called other transaction authority contract — a type of cooperative agreement used by the government to speed up projects. The contract is for the project known as satellite communications augmentation resource program. BlueHalo is a privately owned defense and intelligence contractor based in Arlington, Virginia. The satellite communications augmentation resource program will “address the critical U.S. Space Command requirement to rapidly, responsively and affordably augment satellite control capacity for the satellite control network,” said the Space RCO. The satellite control network, or SCN, includes the ground stations and tracking antennas the U.S. military relies on to communicate with its satellites. The systems are decades-old and short of the capacity needed to keep up with the projected growth in space activities, officials said. BlueHalo will use electronically steerable phased array antennas to increase the communications capacity for satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The $1.2 billion contract is to upgrade up to 12 SCN units. SCN sites are located in the United States and around the world. About 15 large dish antennas at these sites are used to command and control more than 190 military and government satellites in multiple orbits. The SCN’s remote tracking stations monitor the position of satellites and control spacecraft propulsion, thermal and other systems. Because the legacy antennas can only talk to one satellite at a time, they have limited capacity to transmit and receive telemetry, tracking and command data. The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and the Space Systems Command over the past two years have looked at options to replace the existing parabolic antennas with modern electronic phased arrays that can maintain contact with multiple satellites across different orbits and frequency bands. The satellite communications augmentation resource program is an independent acquisition, a spokesperson said. The Space Systems Command completed an evaluation of phased arrays in February 2021 and “partnered with the SpRCO to share relevant information, knowledge and lessons learned from their original efforts.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. — As governments make slow progress on space traffic management systems, companies may be able work together more quickly to develop processes to support space sustainability. In a panel at Space Tech Expo here May 24, industry officials said it is in the best interest of companies to collaborate on space traffic issues independent of efforts at national and international levels to develop space traffic coordination systems or rules of the road for space activities. “If one person has a problem, it will affect everybody,” said David Barnhart, chief executive and co-founder of Ariksys, a company developing space servicing systems. “There has to be some realization that there is a co-alignment of incentives and desires, even by commercial companies that want to compete with each other.” That cooperation is already in place among some satellite operators through the Space Data Association (SDA), where members exchange data on their spacecraft to coordinate safe space operations. “Collaboration amongst competitors is really key to sharing sustainable space,” said Tobias Nassif, director of the SDA. “All of the founders of the SDA are fierce competitors in the marketplace,” he said, primarily in communications. “We came together because we knew we had a common problem that, if we were to have a collision, have a problem in space, it not only affects one but it affects all.” The SDA is a “perfect example” of how such company-to-company coordination can work, said Josef Koller, co-founder of the Space Safety Institute at The Aerospace Corporation. “More and more companies and nations are starting to realize the importance of spaceflight safety, that it’s in the interest of all of us and we ought to get together and have that discussion and information exchange.” That approach, he said, does not require some kind of central authority. “We need to rethink this notion of the need for a centralized body of space traffic management,” he said, instead calling for a “peer-to-peer” decentralized approach. “Modern technology has given us a lot of ways and means to think about different approaches to managing all the different participants.” Those views come as industry complains about the slow pace of government efforts, such as developing space traffic coordination systems and regulations. “One of the biggest disrupters is the lack of action on the part of government,” said Laura Cummings, regulatory affairs counsel at Astroscale U.S., which is developing satellite servicing and debris removal technologies. Governments talk about space sustainability, “but at the end of the day we still mostly just see talk.” Part of that, she said, is a lack of resources for organizations like the Office of Space Commerce, which is charged with implementing a civil space traffic management system in the United States under Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018. “Give people money to do things they were directed to do.” “That’s where we really need to rely on industry and companies to really set the tone, set the rules for being sustainable. You can’t wait for governments to react,” Nassif said. “If we pollute it and make it inoperable, we’re out of business, so it’s in the best interests of companies, of industry, to keep space sustainable so we have a place to do business.”
China is preparing to launch three astronauts to its Tiangong space station to oversee a crucial phase of construction of the orbital outpost. The Long March 2F rocket was rolled out to the pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert early on May 29. The 62-meter-long rocket was transferred vertically across the roughly 1,500 meters from the assembly building to the pad at no faster than 30 meters per minute. The launcher and the Shenzhou-14 crew spacecraft had been assembled and stored vertically at the site for more than 280 days as it stood on standby in case of need of an emergency on the space station. The Long March 2F and Shenzhou combination has a tell-tale solid motor launch escape system atop of its payload fairing. A time and date for launch has not been publicly announced, but liftoff is expected around June 5 Beijing time. Earlier this month the Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft docked with the Tianhe space station core module, carrying supplies in preparation for arrival of the Shenzhou-14 crew. Shenzhou-14 will dock with Tianhe module’s nadir port, a maneuver performed by Shenzhou-13 , a six-month-long mission completed April 16 . The three astronauts, the identities of which have yet to be revealed, are expected to stay aboard the 16.6-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter Tianhe core module for around six months. The crew will receive two new 20-metric-ton-plus modules, Wentian and Mengtian, in July and October respectively, Hao Chun, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) revealed in an April press conference. The modules will launch on Long March 5B rockets from Wenchang, south China. Jiuquan is the only launch site capable of crewed missions in China, with the 41.5 degree orbital inclination of the space station chosen to allow crewed launch access from Jiuquan. The new modules will dock with Tianhe’s forward port. The crew will cooperate with ground control to transposition the new modules to radial docking ports using a large robotic arm. Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”), will feature a new airlock for extravehicular activities, a small robotic arm, and additional living quarters that will allow crew handovers. The first of these will be undertaken when the Shenzhou-14 crew greet Shenzhou-15, which is expected to launch in December. Tiangong will then host six astronauts for a period of days. The new airlock cabin in Wentian will become the main exit-entry point for extravehicular activities (EVAs) once active. The Shenzhou-12 and 13 crews have so far used Tianhe’s docking hub for EVA entry and exit. The Shenzhou-14 crew will conduct EVAs, a range of experiments and engage in science popularization and outreach activities. Tianzhou-4’s cargo mostly consists of supplies for the Shenzhou-14 astronauts but also carries space station maintenance equipment, space science experiment apparatus, and a refrigerator for space science and medical experiments. It also includes a range of seeds to be exposed to radiation in low Earth orbit and later analyzed and used back on Earth. The first module for Tiangong, the Tianhe core module, was launched in April 2021. It has since received three cargo and two crewed missions. Tiangong will enter its operational period with the completion of the Shenzhou-15 mission, and host three-member crews for periods of six months at a time. Newly selected payload specialists and other civilian astronauts will then be eligible to fly to the station. Tiangong is designed to operate in orbit for at least ten years. It could be extended to six modules and host international astronauts. China is also considering making the station available for tourist visits and will open Tiangong to commercial missions .
During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing May 11, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Space Force officials if any lessons could be drawn from the war in Ukraine about the role of commercial satellites in armed conflicts. One lesson is the resiliency provided by large proliferated constellations, said Gen. David Thompson, vice chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force. Russia in a cyberattack in February managed to disrupt satcom services provided by a Viasat satellite. But SpaceX’s broadband constellation Starlink has continued to provide internet services in Ukraine despite attempts to disrupt it. A ccording to Elon Musk , the Starlink network “has resisted Russian cyberwar jamming and hacking attempts so far, but they’re ramping up their efforts.” At a hearing of the SASC strategic forces subcommittee, Cotton noted that most people expected Ukraine’s communications or internet access would be cut off in the first days or first hours of the war, “but that did not happen, and it still has not happened,” he said, and one reason for that is the availability of satellite based internet. “What lessons have we learned about what we can do should we ever face a similar conflict with Russia and China, and they try to deny us that?” he asked Thompson, who testified at the hearing alongside Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration; and John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, cyber and missile defense. In the case of Ukraine, Russia would have wanted to prevent Ukrainians from using space capabilities but their inability to do that is “a reflection of these new proliferated architectures that are very difficult to deny overall,” Thompson said. “You may be able to deny a piece of it, but you can’t eliminate the capability writ large,” he said. The capability shown by low Earth orbit commercial satcom in Ukraine validates the Space Force’s strategy to use a distributed architecture for space based communications and data relay, Thompson said, “not only bringing in commercial capability but absolutely that proliferated architecture that makes a network that’s very difficult to defeat,” he added. “That is another element of what I think we’re learning.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Virgin Orbit expects to perform its first launch from England in late August, pending award of a British launch license, a company executive said May 25. In a speech at Space Tech Expo here, Jim Simpson, chief strategy officer of Virgin Orbit, said the company was gearing up for that late August launch. It will come after a launch from Mojave Air and Space Port in California called “Straight Up” scheduled for no earlier than June 29 that will carry seven U.S. government payloads. “The U.K. launch is in the late August time frame. That’s the plan now,” he said. The company has a U.S. government export control license and has completed the “majority” of the work needed for a British government launch license through the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the U.K. equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration. “That’s all done, effectively,” he said, although he did not estimate when to expect the formal award of a launch license. Spaceport Cornwall, the English airport that will host Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne system, will also have to obtain a license from the CAA. “We’re extremely excited. This will be the first launch ever off of U.K. soil,” he noted, referring to orbital launches. “It will demonstrate a lot of different things, including the mobility of our system.” Simpson said the payloads for that mission have been selected, although it’s not clear all have been announced yet. Two of the payloads are Prometheus 2 cubesats developed by the U.K. Ministry of Defence in partnership with the National Reconnaissance Office . Others that have been announced are Amber-1, a cubesat developed by Satellite Applications Catapult and Horizon Technologies for maritime tracking; Forgestar-0, a satellite built by British space manufacturing startup Space Forge; Kernow Sat 1, a cubesat backed by the local Cornish government for environmental monitoring; and a cubesat built by SatRevolution for the government of Oman. Growth plans LauncherOne is an air-launch system consisting of a rocket deployed from a Boeing 747 aircraft. That rocket can take up to 300 kilograms to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, but Simpson said upgrades are in the works to increase that capacity to about 350 kilograms by the end of 2023. He also briefing touched upon other, longer-term upgrades that the company has hinted at in past presentations. One of them is recovering the first stage of the rocket. “We’re doing the trades now,” he said, showing an illustration of a stage descending under a parachute. The company has been looking at two options for a third stage, one of them being a solar-electric transfer vehicle being studied with ExoTerra under a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award. The companies said last year that stage could carry up to 180 kilograms to geostationary orbit and 150 kilograms to cislunar trajectories. The company is also looking ahead to a potential “LauncherTwo” rocket that, instead of being carried under the wing of the Boeing 747 would instead be mounted on top of the fuselage. That vehicle, Simpson’s slide stated, could offer three times the performance of LauncherOne. “We’re evolving the future constantly while we’re producing the launch vehicles,” he said.
Despite a widening loss in the first quarter, Virgin Orbit executives said they believe they have enough financial runway for their air launch business to gain altitude this year. In its first quarter financial results released May 11, the company announced a net loss of $62.6 million and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $49.6 million. The company reported revenue of only $2.1 million in the quarter. The results were significantly worse than the same quarter of 2021, when Virgin Orbit had revenue of $5.5 million, a net loss of $32.3 million and adjusted EBITDA loss of $29 million. As in the first quarter of this year, Virgin Orbit conducted a single LauncherOne mission in the first quarter of 2021. The company blamed the loss on “expected revenue recognition of contract losses given our initial low-rate production phase” as well as higher expenses associated with being a public company. Virgin Orbit went public when it closed its merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in late December. In an earnings call, Brita O’Rear, chief financial officer at Virgin Orbit, said the low revenue was linked to “introductory pricing” the company offered on initial LauncherOne missions. In its first three operational launches, the company averaged just $2.5 million in revenue per launch. Upcoming “near-term” launches, she said, will generate revenue of $6 million to $12 million each. “We see a progression of higher revenue per launch as our contracts now reflect increased customer confidence given our proven technology and the transition into recurring operations,” she said. Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit’s chief executive, said the high end of that per-launch revenue range would likely be linked to national security and other government launches, as well as those taking place outside the United States. “International flights will garner a higher revenue. It’s a unique and differentiated capability,” he said. By contrast, a commercial launch to a standard orbit like sun-synchronous orbit would be at the low end of that revenue range because of the competition with other vehicles. Virgin Orbit had negative free cash flow of $66.6 million in the quarter, and with $127 million in cash as of the end of the quarter, analysts on the call asked if the company would soon need to raise additional capital. O’Rear said the first quarter should have the highest cash outflow of the year for the company. “Right now, we see our cash burn improving through the year,” she said, stating that the company has “sufficient liquidity” to get through the year without raising more capital. The company announced in March a standby equity purchase agreement with a hedge fund, Yorkville Advisors, to sell up to $250 million in equity over three years. Virgin Orbit has yet to exercise that agreement, she said. Virgin Orbit did not provide projections of revenue or losses for the second quarter or the rest of the year in the earnings release. The company, which at the beginning of the year projected six launches in 2022 , will conduct only its second launch of the year, and the first since January, no earlier than June 29. That mission, called “Straight Up” by the company, will carry seven U.S. government payloads on a launch procured by the U.S. Space Force. Hart said the following LauncherOne mission will be the long-awaited first launch from the United Kingdom, flying out of Spaceport Cornwall. That launch is scheduled for the third quarter, pending licenses from the British government for both the launch and the spaceport. Hart said that after the Cornwall launch the company will perform “additional launches” back at Mojave Air and Space Port, but did not provide a formal estimate of the number of launches it now anticipates conducting in 2022. In anticipation of a higher launch rate, Virgin Orbit announced May 10 an agreement with L3Harris to acquire and modify two additional Boeing 747 aircraft. One of those planes would be ready “as early as 2023,” Hart said on the call. Having a second plane would allow the company to maintain a launch cadence if its current plane, dubbed “Cosmic Girl,” needs maintenance, and permits the company to conduct launches in two different locations. He declined, though, to say how much it will cost to acquire and modify the two planes. “We’re in the middle of discussions on those, and we have a couple of attractive options.” The company also declined to say what launch rate the company needs to break even. “We haven’t been sharing the number of launches to break even,” Hart said. “We’ll consider that as we go forward.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. – The U.S. Space Systems Command is continuing to refine its concept for establishing a single point of contact for commercial innovators called the front door . “We want to make ourselves more available for industry,” U.S. Air Force Maj. Adam Burnetta, Space Enterprise Consortium program manager, said May 24 at the Space Tech Expo here. “We want to be that front door for industry to ask any questions, to not get lost in the email riffraff of shifting offices or people, which the military often does.” By emailing SSCFrontDoor@spaceforce.mil , companies can find contacts within program offices as well as information on filing paperwork with the State Department and Defense Logistics Agency related to government contracts. “The Space Force needs to do a better job at leveraging commercial capability,” Burnetta said. In order to that, the Space Force needs to make it easier for companies to navigate a “dauntingly complex ecosystem,” he added. In most cases, the front door will direct companies to the Commercial Services Office, SpaceWERX or the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC). The Commercial Services Office works with mature technology that may need slight modification for use by a government agency. In contrast, the Space Force’s innovation arm, SpaceWERX, provides Small Business Innovation Research contracts for research, development, testing and evaluation of new technologies. SpEC works with a consortium of companies to fund space-related prototypes under other transaction authority agreements, which do not fall under extensive federal acquisition regulations. SpEC holds events around the country to introduce prime contractors to suppliers as well as events where Space Force leaders discuss their priorities with industry. Through the front-door initiative, the Space Systems Command is “facilitating engagement with industry partners in order to leverage innovation that’s taking place in the commercial industry and to ensure that we’re competitive not only with what’s going on commercially domestically, but also what’s happening for governments and commercially internationally as well,” Burnetta said.
Warming seas and thinning polar ice caps promise to turn the Arctic into a hub of greater economic activity — and a new hotspot for military competition. That prospect is shaping U.S. military strategy for Arctic operations and is drawing attention to the importance of space systems to keep watch over the region, monitor the climate and maintain constant communications. “This is a region of immense geostrategic significance and a key location for global power projection,” said the Department of the Air Force’s Arctic strategy published in 2020. The Arctic region surrounding the North Pole is more than twice the size of the continental United States. The area is particularly reliant on air and space assets due to its size, inhospitable weather and lack of infrastructure. The U.S. Air Force and Space Force provide about 80% of all Defense Department resources in the Arctic region, including military bases, training complexes, satellites, command and control stations, and early warning and missile defense radars. “The Arctic is really key terrain for us,” the Space Force chief of space operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, told SpaceNews in a recent interview. At Clear Space Force Station near Fairbanks, Alaska, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency last year completed construction of a long-range discrimination radar, designed to track ballistic missiles. Space Force units will start operating the radar in 2023. Raymond noted that the Pentagon’s 2023 budget request includes $68 million to build dormitories for troops expected to be permanently based at Clear. Thule Air Base in Greenland also is home to missile warning, space tracking, and satellite command-and-control units. “We have invested, and we continue to invest in the Arctic,” said Raymond. “It’s of strategic importance to us, and it’s only going to continue to grow in importance to our nation.” Clear Space Force Station is one of five major installations the U.S. military operates in Alaska. The others are Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Wainwright and Fort Greely. In its Arctic strategy, last updated in 2019, the Defense Department described the region as a potential vector for an attack on the U.S. homeland and a part of the world where Russia and China are operating more freely. The strategy said DoD “must be able to quickly identify threats in the Arctic, respond promptly and effectively to those threats, and shape the security environment to mitigate the prospect of those threats in the future.” In 2021, the U.S. Army and Navy published visions for how to posture for the Arctic. These documents highlight the potential for conflict over maritime boundary claims and economic rights. Russia, for example, requires foreign vessels to obtain permission and be escorted during transit of the Northern Sea Route that runs along the Russian Arctic coast to the Bering Strait, noted the Army’s strategy. “The decreasing amount of sea ice will lead to new routes opening in the future and may become an area of contention as Arctic nations attempt to exert control over key sea lanes.” For the Navy, the issue is what all this could mean for maritime security. Despite containing the world’s smallest ocean, the Arctic region has the potential to connect nearly 75% of the world’s population — linking Asia, Europe and North America, said the Navy’s vision document. Overseeing U.S. military operations in the Arctic is Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command. VanHerck told lawmakers during a hearing this spring on Capitol Hill that military efforts in the Arctic are meant to ensure the area remains “peaceful, stable and cooperative.” He noted that the United States is one of eight nations that in 1996 formed the Arctic Council. The other seven members are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. There are now concerns that as Russia becomes more isolated following its invasion of Ukraine, it could take a more aggressive posture in the Arctic. Russia’s eastern border is only 90 kilometers across the Bering Strait from the coast of Alaska. VanHerck noted that 25 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product comes from oil, minerals and other natural resources extracted in the Arctic. “So they absolutely have a vested interest in the Arctic, and they also want to ensure that it is secure for their efforts.” Over the past several years, Russia has revitalized a dozen or so military installations in the Arctic that had sat dormant after the Cold War, said VanHerck. “Not only are they placing defensive capabilities that they state are obviously for defensive purposes, they are putting offensive capabilities into the Arctic,” he said, including missiles that could strike North America. Russia formed the Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command in December 2014 to coordinate efforts in the Arctic. Since then, DoD said in its strategy document, Russia has gradually strengthened its presence by creating new Arctic units, refurbishing old airfields and infrastructure, and establishing military bases along its Arctic coastline. Russia also has been working to establish a network of air defense and coastal missile systems, early warning radars and rescue centers, the DoD strategy said. In February 2021, Russia launched the Arktika-M satellite to monitor the climate and environment in the region. The United States is also watching China’s moves in the Arctic. “China calls itself a near-Arctic nation and wants to be influential in the Arctic as well,” said VanHerck. Concerning U.S. capabilities, “I would assess that we’re in the game plan development,” he told the House Armed Services Committee. “We’re not able to have the persistence that I need to compete day-to-day in the Arctic.” Another looming concern for DoD is how climate change could impact U.S. military infrastructure in the Arctic. The issue was investigated recently by the department’s inspector general, who concluded in a report last month that DoD will need to invest billions of dollars to make military installations in the Arctic and sub-Arctic more resilient to climate change. The IG evaluated Thule Air Base in Greenland and DoD’s five military bases in Alaska. “Officials from all six installations identified current climate and energy challenges, such as cracked runways, sunken foundations, and multiple power outages,” said the IG report. At most of these installations, the “day-to-day focus was on reacting to immediate problems or reducing risk to existing hazards, rather than planning for future hazards.” The report said some construction projects at Army, Air Force and Space Force installations are already being funded to support increased Arctic operations. There is a huge need in the Arctic for reliable surveillance and communications systems because miscommunications could trigger unintended conflict, Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures, said at a Wilson Center panel discussion. “Awareness about what is going on in the Arctic is a key part of preserving peace,” he said. For example, in military wargames, the “avenues of approaches over the Arctic” for enemy missiles or bombers are a major concern. “The Arctic is the shortest route between our competitors and us.” The U.S. Air Force has operated in the Arctic for decades, Hinote said. “But our use of the Arctic as a strategic buffer is eroding for all the reasons that have been talked about, especially climate change, and especially with some of the activities that we see Russia and China engaging in.” As the Arctic melts, “competition for resources and influence in the region will increase,” he said. Hinote said the U.S. Air Force in recent years has intercepted and warned away a growing number of Russian military planes flying near the edge of Alaska’s restricted airspace. These security concerns “drove our focus on the Arctic and the release of a strategy.” Wargames organized by the U.S. military and allies typically have focused on “countering great powers specifically in Europe and in the Asia Pacific,” Hinote said. “And one of the things that we felt like we did not understand as well was how that competition would spill over into the Arctic.” Live military exercises like NATO’s Cold Response, NORAD’s Operation Noble Defender, and Northern Command’s Arctic Edge are helping the U.S. and allies “understand the nature of the competition,” he said. The submarine-focused Ice Exercise (ICEX) has been held since the 1960s, making it the longest-running Arctic exercise. To bolster the U.S. posture in the Arctic, the Air Force is stationing 54 F-35 advanced fighter aircraft at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. “Alaska is an incredibly well-positioned base of operations for defending the northern approaches to the United States, and this is why so many of the intercepts that happen when an adversary’s aircraft is coming from the north are done with assets that are stationed in Alaska,” Hinote said. The Department of the Air Force’s Arctic strategy also recommends greater use of space assets to support military and homeland defense efforts. “Space capabilities are tailor-made to support a region where there is sparse ground infrastructure,” Lt. Gen. William Liquori, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans and programs for the U.S. Space Force, said at the Wilson Center panel. “The satellite command-and-control capabilities that we have at Thule, those are there because military operations are going to happen in the Arctic,” said Liquori. “And that means we’re going to need to have satellite coverage in the Arctic.” To fill gaps in satellite communications coverage over the Arctic, the Air Force worked out a deal with the Norwegian Space Agency subsidiary Space Norway to launch two U.S. military communications payloads on Norwegian satellites. The payloads, developed by Northrop Grumman, will be integrated into the Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission satellites, projected to launch on a SpaceX rocket in 2023. Any Arctic strategy has to consider the importance of the space domain, said Mir Sadat, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. The United States is not doing enough to “prepare for the new frontier.” In contrast, Russia and China, by increasing their activities in the region, are positioning to one day take advantage of shorter sea lanes, Sadat said. A key goal for China and Russia is to “reach global markets or military targets faster and much more cheaply,” he said. Satellites to watch what Russia and others are doing on the ground is another critical capability that the United States might need to expand, said Scott Herman, CEO of Cognitive Space. The company participated in the recent Arctic Edge 2022 exercise as a military contractor, orchestrating collection opportunities across commercial satellite operators. Today, many commercial remote-sensing constellations can’t support Arctic activities because they can’t reach those high latitudes, said Herman. But if the Arctic becomes a geopolitical flashpoint, “you may see some adjustments to some of the satellite constellation plans to make sure they’ve got sufficient northern exposure.” In its strategy, the Department of the Air Force said there is a need for “domain awareness through new technologies ranging from over the horizon radar to space assets.” Michael Sfraga, chair and distinguished fellow of the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, said an imminent war in the Arctic is unlikely. “I think that’s a low probability,” said Sfraga, who is based in Alaska. But he believes the risk will increase as countries step up activities. “The higher probability, unfortunately, is a miscommunication: An exercise gone wrong, a missile fired by mistake, Russian bombers are escorted out of our airspace and there’s a miscommunication between pilots,” he said. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now casts things in a different light, he added. “No one thought something like Ukraine would actually happen. If anybody would have told you 20 years ago that China would have built islands in the South China Sea and claimed that territory, I would have said that seems pretty far-fetched.” The lesson for the United States is to remain “vigilant and diligent.” It’s well known that Russia derives a significant portion of its GDP from natural resource development in the Arctic, Sfraga said. It’s also continuing to expand its military presence and capabilities in the region. “China, which sometimes forgets that it’s not actually an Arctic state, is doing everything it can to establish its own influence in Arctic governance and economic development.” “While there’s no imminent threat of conflict in the Arctic, the increasing activity and proximity of these aggressive powers requires the U.S. to maintain situational awareness and operational capacity,” he said. The United States has to be better prepared to operate in the Arctic, Sfraga said, and noted that satellite-based services are sorely needed in the area. “Satellite communications, imagery, all of those things are very important to our national and civil security, search and rescue,” he said. “There’s just limited capacity.” “Presence equals influence,” he said. “Showing potential adversaries that you can actually conduct operations and protect your own interests in a landscape like the Arctic serves as a deterrent and is incredibly important.” This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Launch vehicle and in-space transportation services company Launcher has filled the manifest for the first flight of its space tug later this year with a mix of commercial and academic payloads. Launcher announced May 16 that the first flight of its Orbiter vehicle, which will be on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 rideshare mission in October, will deploy satellites for six customers and carry hosted payloads for four others. Three of the satellite customers are startups developing cubesats: Skyline Celestial, Innova Space and NPC Spacemind. Two others are student cubesat projects at Cal Poly Pomona and Stanford University. Launcher did not disclose the identity of the sixth satellite customer. The hosted payload customers include Cesium Astro, which will fly its Nightingale phased-array Ka-band communications system on the Orbiter vehicle. Other hosted payload customers include TRL11, a space technology startup; Beyond Burials, which offers space memorial services; and an undisclosed customer. “We are honored to have a broad range of customers joining us on Orbiter’s first flight, including academia, early-stage companies and more established ones,” David Caponio, head of product and business development at Launcher, said in a statement. “We are especially pleased to host two of these payloads on a long-duration mission, proving Orbiter’s viability and utility as a hosted satellite platform.” Launcher announced the Orbiter transfer vehicle in June 2021 to provide last-mile delivery services for satellites launched on both rideshare missions and its own launch vehicle, as well as hosted payload capabilities. It joins an increasingly crowded market of companies offering similar vehicles that can take small satellites to their desired orbits, particularly on SpaceX’s Transporter series of dedicated Falcon 9 rideshare launches. Launcher did not disclose terms of the customer agreements for this mission, but the company says it provides launch and orbital transfer services for satellites at a price of $8,000 to $25,000 per kilogram, depending on mission requirements. The company also offers a dedicated Orbiter mission at $400,000, plus launch costs. While the first Orbiter mission is now full, the company is selling future missions on three other SpaceX Transporter rideshare missions it booked in February . Those missions are scheduled to launch in January, April and October 2023. Orbiter is a bridge to the company’s own launch vehicle, Launcher Light, which will place up to 150 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The company announced April 25 the first full-thrust test firing of the E-2 engine it is developing for that launch vehicle. Launcher Light is scheduled for its inaugural flight in 2024.
The private astronauts who spent two weeks on the International Space Station in April said they tried to pack too much into their schedules while on the station, putting a strain on both themselves and the professional astronauts there. At a May 13 news conference, the four people who flew on Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission to the station said that while they had a good trip to the station, they overestimated how much work they could get done after their arrival at the ISS April 9 for what was originally scheduled to be an eight-day stay. “Our timeline was very aggressive, especially early in the mission,” said Michael López-Alegría, the former NASA astronaut and current Axiom employee who commanded Ax-1. “The pace was frenetic in the beginning.” “With the value of hindsight, we were way too aggressive on our schedule, in particular the first couple days,” said Larry Connor, one of the three customers who accompanied López-Alegría on Ax-1. He gave an example of one experiment that was scheduled to take two and a half hours to complete based on preflight training but ended up taking five hours. López-Alegría thanked the four Crew-3 astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency who were on the station during their visit for assistance, calling them “extraordinarily helpful, gracious, kind, sharing” during their stay. “I can’t say enough good things about them, and we really needed them.” That had an impact on the Crew-3 astronauts’ own work schedule. During a May 12 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Susan Helms, a former NASA astronaut who serves on the panel, said the Ax-1 visit posed “no apparent overt safety issues” but that it did affect the performance of the astronauts. “There were some real-time dynamics related to the flight crew timelines with the addition of these four Axiom personnel, who did have their own flight objectives,” she said. “In essence, the arrival of the Axiom personnel seemed to have a larger-than-expected impact on the daily workload on the professional International Space Station crew.” While the Ax-1 mission did allow for some new science, and the ability to transport some NASA cargo back to Earth, “there was also some opportunity cost in the form of overly stressing the workload of the onboard ISS members and the mission controllers who support them on the ground,” Helms said. She recommended that future private astronaut missions be managed in “normalized processes” that fully integrate them into overall ISS activities. “It’s incumbent on us to reduce our burden on the crew,” said Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, at the news conference, saying that was part of “lessons learned” discussions with NASA and SpaceX that will inform future missions to the station. “Over time, we’ll reduce what the crew has to do.” One way to reduce that burden is to stretch out the work over a longer stay. The Ax-1 mission ended up spending more than 15 days at the ISS, rather the original 8 days, because of unfavorable weather conditions at landing sites off the Florida coast. “It was a blessing to have the extra time,” López-Alegría said. “I think we were so focused on research and outreach in the first 8 or 10 days on orbit that we needed the extra time to complete the experience by having time to look out the window, to make contact with friends and family, to just enjoy the sensation.” Suffredini said longer missions would have to fit into a busy schedule on the ISS and address issues such as effects on the life support system of having 11 people there for an extended period. He did note, though, that Axiom has planned 30-day missions to the station and would like to go as long as 60 days. “This flight was really wildly successful,” he said. “From our perspective, we will go be a little more efficient, train a little differently, do a few things to help out the timeline.” He added the company had sold three seats on future missions since Ax-1, which included an agreement announced April 29 with the United Arab Emirates to fly an Emirati astronaut on a long-duration mission using a seat provided by NASA in exchange for a Soyuz seat Axiom had previously purchased from Roscosmos. He declined to disclose the other customers who signed up.
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Supply chain disruptions continue to pose a challenge for the space industry, but some see those disruptions as an opportunity for new approaches and innovation. During a panel discussion on supply chain issues at Space Tech Expo here May 24, government and industry officials said the industry continued to feel the effects of broader supply chain issues that was slowing its growth. “We want to buy products and services at scale,” said Brig. Gen. Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, citing efforts like satellite constellations for the Space Development Agency (SDA) for missile tracking and communications. “You can’t do that without healthy supply chains.” Chris Winslett, Lockheed Martin program director for its work on the SDA Transport Layer, said that many smallsat manufacturers had, in recent years, shifted away from space-grade components because of their long lead times in favor of more widely available commercial and automotive-grade alternatives. “But with the issues of the pandemic, we actually saw a lot of commercial and automotive parts have longer lead times than space parts,” he said. “It’s been an interesting few years.” Ron Faith, president and chief operating officer of RBC Signals, which operates a network of ground stations, said his company has seen a “significant impact” in lead times for components such as antennas, radios and other electronics. “They’ve stretched out from what used to be weeks to now many, many months,” he said. Supply chain issues have also affected logistics. Faith said the company traditionally transported six-meter antennas, manufactured in the United States, to ground stations around the world through traditional shipping, but now transports them by air freight. “It does increase costs, but quite frankly the time compression is way more important right now given the other challenges that are in the supply chain.” Those problems can slow the growth of companies. “We see companies that, during a healthy supply chain and healthy markets, would be thriving,” said Jordan Noone, co-founder and general partner at Embedded Ventures who previously cofounded Relativity Space. Today, “many of those companies have major struggles.” Those struggles, he said, also present an opportunity to shore up the supply chain. He cited technologies like additive manufacturing and digital engineering to speed up the design and production of components. “You can modify the factory at the speed of software,” he said. “That brings that flywheel of software to the aerospace manufacturing world.” The current supply chain disruptions, some panelists said, are a sign that some technologies, like electronics, whose production shifted to outside the United States in recent decades to reduce costs should be “onshored,” or brought back to the United States. Doing so could reduce supply chain reductions but increase costs. “Does onshoring have to be more expensive?” countered Jeffrey Smith, element architect for deep space logistics for NASA’s Gateway program, arguing innovative technologies can reduce costs. “We have to find a way to do it, especially for space exploration.” “It’s really imperative that we evolve and pull our acquisition heads out of the 1960s,” said Butow. “Look at how the industry is postured today, how to be more innovative, how to rapidly adopt and incentivize new technologies and new methodologies, and build and grow a healthy supply chain.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Benchmark Space Systems announced plans May 24 to produce engines in the United Kingdom and to work with U.K. startup Space Forge to develop reusable chemical propulsion systems. Space Forge of Cardiff, Wales, intends to produce high-value materials in orbit to bring to Earth. Under the contract announced May 24, Benchmark will provide propulsion for ForgeStar-1, Space Forge’s first in-space manufacturing and return demonstration. With the help of Benchmark thrusters, Space Forge will bring back SpaceForge-1 to a precise location on Earth, eliminating the expense and greenhouse gas production associated with transporting materials from distant recovery sites, said Andrew Bacon, chief technology officer and co-founder of Space Forge based in Cardiff, Wales. “The most important way to make sure your landing is safe is to do a precision deorbit and that requires a pretty significant engine burn continuously,” Bacon said. Space Forge will serve as the anchor customer for Benchmark’s first U.K. manufacturing and testing facility at the Satellite Applications Catapult at Westcott Venture Park in Aylesbury, England. “We’re working towards securing the development of the first test units in the next two or three months,” Arthur said. “Then, we’re pushing to deliver the first flight propulsion unit for integration at the end of this year.” Burlington, Vermont-based Benchmark has reported strong demand for its thrusters since proving its Halcyon high-test peroxide (HTP) monopropellant propulsion system last year on an undisclosed government satellite mission. The Satellite Applications Catapult “gives us access both to an ecosystem of test infrastructure for testing propulsion systems and also an ecosystem that has other suppliers and partners that we can work with on HTP propulsion systems as well,” said Mark Arthur, director of Benchmark’s European operations. Sam Adlen, Satellite Applications Catapult chief strategy officer, said in a statement, “We’re delighted that Benchmark will develop their innovative propulsion systems at the Westcott Innovation Centre, and that we will be able to support their growth through our range of facilities and expertise.” Satellites with HTP propulsion will be easier to collect from the ocean or just before they hit the water than spacecraft with hydrazine fuel, Arthur said. “You can pick it up and take it back to a cleanroom and disassemble it in a relatively straightforward manner.” Space Forge intends to manufacture a variety of high-value products in space including metal alloys and semiconductors in addition to performing biological research. In-space manufacturing will “enable you to generate thousands and potentially tens of thousands of new products that aren’t available now,” Bacon said. “We’re focused on using these new super materials to solve the challenges that really matter like climate change by switching to materials that don’t generate as much carbon dioxide in their use. For us it’s about making things in space to bring back to Earth for the good of Earth.” Returning cargo from space remains a challenge, though. “In the last 20 years, the cost of launch has come down hugely, but the cost of return has not,” Bacon said. “The Space Shuttle is still the cheapest per kilogram reentry system ever built. So, there’s a lot of room for improvement.” Benchmark’s alliance with Space Forge is aimed at engine reusability. “I know that Benchmark is keen on the ability to get those engines back after they’ve been in orbit and fired several times to be able to see them,” Bacon said. “What was the true performance being in orbit? Can we refurbish these engines and send them up again?”
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — Space Perspective has raised an additional $17 million to further development of its stratospheric passenger balloon system that simulates one aspect of spaceflight. The company announced May 19 it raised the funding from several new investors, including Silicon Valley Bank, Trinity Capital and Henry Kravis, co-founder of investment company KKR and Co. Space Perspective has raised more than $65 million to date. Florida-based Space Perspective is developing Spaceship Neptune, a stratospheric balloon system that will loft a capsule carrying eight passengers and one crew member to an altitude of about 30 kilometers. The capsule would remain aloft for several hours, providing those passengers with views of the Earth similar to what can be seen from space, before descending to an ocean splashdown. The flights will be performed under a license the company will obtain from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Space Perspective raised $40 million in a Series A round in October 2021 , which at the time executives said would fully fund the company through the start of commercial operations. In a statement, Space Perspective said the additional funding would “accelerate the company’s continued growth,” although it is still targeting the start of commercial operations in late 2024. Space Perspective is setting up operations at Space Coast Spaceport, also known as Space Coast Regional Airport near the Kennedy Space Center. The company expects to grow to 240 employees by 2026, and has hired a number of experts in fields ranging from high-altitude balloons to spacecraft marine recovery. The company is selling seats for $125,000 each and has said its first year of flights is sold out, but has not disclosed a specific number of tickets sold. Space Perspective is in competition with World View, a company that revived last year its original plans for passenger stratospheric balloon flights after spending several years working on balloons carrying payloads. World View is offering its flights, starting as soon as early 2024, for $50,000 per ticket. It announced May 4 it had collected 1,000 reservations, each requiring a $500 deposit. Both companies have released concepts of their passenger cabins, including a full-scale model World View displayed at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March. Both designs include reclining seats and large windows to maximize the view. “Even the restroom will have a view!” Space Perspective said in an April 12 announcement of its capsule.
Updated 9:30 a.m. to correct landing site of booster. LONG BEACH, Calif. — SpaceX launched several dozen payloads on its fifth dedicated rideshare mission May 25, illustrating the continued demand for such missions even as dedicated small launch vehicles emerge. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:35 p.m. Eastern. The rocket’s booster, flying its eighth mission, landed back at Cape Canaveral’s Landing Zone One eight and a half minutes after liftoff. The Transporter-5 mission carried 59 payloads, which SpaceX described as including satellites, orbital transfer vehicles and non-deploying hosted payloads. The latter included Nanoracks’ Outpost Mars Demo 1 experiment to test technologies for cutting into upper stages. Among the satellites that Transporter-5 deployed into sun-synchronous orbit, rideshare aggregator Exolaunch accounted for 21 satellites, including satellites for Iceye, Satellogic and Spire. Smallsat manufacturer Terran Orbital flew satellites for several customers, such as Fleet, GeoOptics and NASA. Other companies that had satellites on Transporter-5 are HawkEye 360, which flew another cluster of three radio-frequency intelligence satellites; GHGSat, which launched three satellites to monitor greenhouse gas emissions; and Umbra, which launched a synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite. The mission carried several orbital transfer vehicles, including the first from Momentus. Its Vigoride-3 tug carried payloads for two customers, FOSSA Systems and Orbit NTNU, but is principally a technology demonstration of the tug itself and its propulsion system, which uses a technology called microwave electrothermal thruster (MET). “Testing the MET on this first Vigoride flight is one of the important tasks that we plan to conduct as we continue to refine and improve its performance,” John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said in a statement after the launch. The launch marked a culmination of not just technical development of the tug but also securing regulatory approvals after the government blocked two attempts to fly a Vigoride tug last year on other Transporter rideshare missions. D-Orbit flew its own tug, an Ion Satellite Carrier mission called Infinite Blue, on Transporter-5. The tug will deploy two cubesat payloads and support two hosted payloads. Spaceflight flew its Sherpa-AC vehicle on Transporter-5 as well. That version of Sherpa includes augmented attitude control capabilities that the company says makes it well-suited for flying hosted payloads. This vehicle carried two hosted payloads as well as three smallsats. SpaceX announced in March that it would sever ties with Spaceflight , but only after missions already manifested. Transporter-5 was SpaceX’s fifth dedicated smallsat rideshare mission and the third this year, after Transporter-3 in January and Transporter-4 in April. The next rideshare mission, Transporter-6, is scheduled for October. Demand for those missions remains strong. “SpaceX rideshare is getting fully booked,” said Max Haot, chief executive of Launcher, during a panel at Space Tech Expo here May 25. His company is developing its own orbital transfer vehicle, Orbiter, that will make its first flight on Transporter-6. Launcher has booked Orbiter flights on several more Transporter missions in 2023, and he said those future Transporter missions are already filling up. Orbital transfer vehicles can help bridge the gap, he said, between pure rideshare missions where payloads have little or no control on the orbit they’re placed in and dedicated smallsat launches like Rocket Lab’s Electron, which offers greater control but at a higher price. “We’ll be able to make SpaceX rideshare more useful.” Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, acknowledged that Electron costs more than a SpaceX rideshare, but took issue with Haot’s claim the difference was a factor of 10. Rocket Lab has charged up to $10 million for an Electron launch, in the case of the upcoming NASA CAPSTONE lunar cubesat mission, although some commercial launches are less expensive. SpaceX currently charges $1.1 million for 200 kilograms of rideshare payload. “They are more expensive because we are offering a service that delivers the payloads exactly where they want to go when they want to be there, and that’s where the customers will pay a premium,” he said on the panel. “There’s not a 10 times differential in price, though.”
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) on May 12 announced he and a group of senators have introduced legislation to create a National Guard for the U.S. Space Force. The bill would allow Army and Air National Guard members currently supporting Space Force operations to join the Space National Guard. The bill titled Space National Guard Establishment Act was co-sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas). Similar legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives last year but did not pass the Senate. When the Space Force was established in 2019 as an independent military service, active-duty space units were moved out of the Air Force and placed in the new Space Force, but no corresponding move was made to create a Space National Guard. There are by some estimates about 1,500 members of the Air and Army National Guard currently supporting space operations in seven U.S. states and in Guam. The Biden administration opposes the establishment of a Space National Guard on grounds that it would add unnecessary costs. The administration has argued that the small size of the Space Force gives the service flexibility to pursue other options. A legislative proposal submitted April 1 by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recommended that instead of having a dedicated reserve force, the U.S. Space Force would have a regular active-duty force with full-time and part-time members. The proposal did not recommend establishing a Space National Guard. Kendall told lawmakers that the current Air and Army Guard members who support Space Force operations would be given the option of joining the Space Force active component. During a Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee hearing May 11, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) asked Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson how the Space Force would handle the possible departure of guardsmen who are now working on space operations but might leave if there is no Space National Guard for them to transfer into. “And to your knowledge is the Department of the Air Force assuming that those nearly 1,500 guardsmen would transfer into a combined active duty and reserve component if we did take that approach?” Kelly asked. Thompson said the Space Force “cannot do without the capability and missions that they [the Guard units] provide.” “I f in fact we do not create a Space National Guard … we do have to do that assessment and planning in preparation to move those forces. We are doing an assessment right now,” Thompson said. “We do not make the assumption that any number of Guard members will make that transition and that option would certainly be presented to them. If it came to that point, we are making no assumptions about whether those members would accept or desire that transfer or not.” The Space Force will need to determine “what would be required to replace those members by Space Force members,” he said. “We anticipate that the assessment will be done in time to support the next budget request.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Leaders of the United States, Japan, India and Australia have agreed to launch a satellite-based initiative to help countries in the Indo-Pacific region track illegal fishing and other suspicious maritime activities. The maritime monitoring pledge is part of a broader set of peace, security, science and technology agreements reached during the four-nation Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’s May 24 summit in Japan’s capital, Tokyo. Because the Quad is a U.S.-led security forum aimed at countering China , the monitoring effort is likely to focus on China’s maritime activities in the region. “We strongly oppose any coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo and increase tensions in the area, such as the militarization of disputed features, the dangerous use of coast guard vessels and maritime militia, and efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities,” the leaders said in a joint statement released after their meeting. The statement did not explicitly name China. They said the satellite-based maritime domain awareness initiative will “promote stability and prosperity in our seas and oceans.” In comments to reporters May 24, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the summit was to discuss and advance “practical cooperation” in the Indo-Pacific region, not to target any particular country, the South China Morning Post reported. But the prime minister noted that the four countries expressed “grave concern” over “China unilaterally changing the status quo in the East and South China Seas.” Along with Biden, who is on his first tour of Asia as U.S. president, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the new Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew to Japan for the day-long meeting. The leaders of the four nations last met in person in September, in Washington. On top of this, the four leaders agreed to improve public access to Earth-observation satellite data and applications by opening a “ Quad Satellite Data Portal ” that aggregates links to respective national satellite data resources. This overture is part of efforts they seek to address global challenges such as climate change with space-related applications and technologies. “Space-related applications and technologies can also contribute to addressing common challenges such as climate change, disaster preparedness and response, and sustainable uses of oceans and marine resources,” they said in the statement. “We will work together to develop space applications, including in the area of Earth observations, and provide capacity building support to countries in the region, including with regards to partnering on using space capabilities to respond to extreme precipitation events.” The leaders also agreed to hold joint workshops to promote rules, norms, guidelines and principles for the sustainable use of space.p
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is ready to attempt another uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station, with both the company and the agency expressing confidence in the spacecraft despite past problems. The Starliner spacecraft, atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, rolled out to the pad at Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, May 18. Launch of the spacecraft on the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission remains scheduled for 6:54 p.m. Eastern May 19. At prelaunch briefings here, NASA and Boeing officials said they were not dealing with any technical issues ahead of the launch, and weather forecasts project a 70% chance of acceptable conditions for launch. A backup launch opportunity is available May 20 at 6:32 p.m. Eastern, although weather forecasts project only a 30% chance of acceptable weather. According to the mission plan, Starliner will dock with the station about 24 hours after liftoff. It will remain there for several days for tests before undocking and landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. The mission will last 5 to 10 days, depending in part on weather conditions at the landing site. This will be the second attempt to launch OFT-2. The initial launch in August 2021 was scrubbed hours before liftoff when propellant valves in the spacecraft’s service module failed to open when commanded. Engineers found that the valves had corroded shut, causing a long-term delay of the mission. NASA and Boeing later concluded that nitrogen tetroxide propellant, seeping through the valve’s Teflon seal, reacted with ambient moisture to create nitric acid that corroded aluminum elements of the valve. This mission comes nearly two and a half years after the original OFT mission in December 2019. The spacecraft suffered problems immediately after separation from the rocket because a mission events timer in the spacecraft was improperly set. Engineers also discovered a software problem that could have caused the spacecraft’s service module to bump back into the crew module after separation just before reentry, fixing it with only hours to spare. The OFT-2 mission will confirm those issues have been fixed. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of the commercial crew program at Boeing, said at a May 17 briefing that spacecraft controllers have been regularly cycling the valves to ensure they are not corroding. “They all operated nominally, so we’re in good shape,” he said. The spacecraft will also carry out tests that the truncated OFT mission could not, in particular approaching and docking with the ISS. “We’re going to be paying attention to the artificial vision system, called VESTA, which we didn’t get a chance to see in action on the first Orbital Flight Test,” said Mike Fincke, a NASA astronaut who is among those training for future Starliner missions, at a May 18 briefing. VESTA, or Vision-based Electro-optical Sensor Tracking Assembly, helps the spacecraft identify the space station and approach it. There will be tests once Starliner is docked with the station, including work by space station astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines. Fincke said they will test various Starliner systems, such as communications handsets and microphones. “There are a lot of things with the interface to the International Space Station that the space station crew will help us with.” A successful OFT-2 mission would allow NASA to proceed with a test flight with astronauts on board, called the Crew Flight Test (CFT). That could launch as soon as the end of the year, although agency officials were reluctant in prelaunch briefings to set a schedule for CFT. “We are getting our Crew Flight Test vehicle ready to go by the end of the year,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said May 18. That schedule will depend on both resolving any issues that arise on OFT-2 as well as the schedule of other ISS missions. “We need to make sure there isn’t anything we need to fix or update on the spacecraft that we’re planning to have ready by the end of the year, and then lay out the full schedule for everybody,” she said, adding that the agency should know this summer both the schedule for CFT as well as who will fly it and how long the mission will last. There may still be work to do even after a successful OFT-2 mission. At a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel May 12, David West, a member of the panel, warned that Boeing’s work certifying Starliner’s parachutes was lagging behind schedule, but didn’t elaborate. He also said the panel was concerned that Boeing staffing levels on the program were “especially low,” particularly given the amount of work needed to get ready for the CFT mission after OFT-2. Nappi said May 17 that he believed the panel’s concerns were with certification for operational, or post-certification, missions after CFT. “We do have some testing planned this summer with NASA” on the parachutes, he said. “The results of that will obviously lead to certification.” Butch Wilmore, another NASA astronaut who is training for early Starliner missions, exuded confidence in the spacecraft despite past problems and the possibility of new problems, or “unknown unknowns,” on this mission. “We wouldn’t be here right now if we weren’t confident that this would be a successful mission,” he said at a May 18 briefing alongside Fincke and Suni Williams, another NASA astronaut. “We’re ready,” he said. “This spacecraft is ready. These teams are ready. Boeing is ready. ULA is ready. The mission ops folks who will control the spacecraft in space are ready, and we’re excited.”
Updated 10 p.m. Eastern with comments from postlaunch briefing. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station on a critical, long-delayed uncrewed test flight of the commercial crew vehicle. An Atlas 5 N22 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:54 p.m. Eastern May 19. The Starliner spacecraft, formally designated Spacecraft 2 by Boeing, separated from the dual-engine Centaur upper stage 15 minutes after liftoff, performing a 40-second orbital insertion burn 16 minutes later to place the spacecraft into a stable orbit. At a postlaunch briefing, NASA and Boeing officials said they were investigating the failure of 2 of 12 aft-facing Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters during the orbital insertion burn. A thruster in one of four “doghouses” or pods on the service module failed after one second, at which point the software switched to a second thruster in that doghouse. That thruster shut down after 25 seconds. A third thruster then took over for the rest of the burn. “The system is designed to be redundant and it performed like it was supposed to,” Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and commercial crew program manager, said at the briefing. “Now the team is working the why, as to why we had those anomalies occur.” Nappi and Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, played down the issue, noting that the OMAC thrusters are used only for a few more phasing burns to bring the spacecraft close to the ISS, but not during docking itself. They would not be used again until the deorbit burn at the end of the mission. “We’ll go look at the data and try to understand what happen, and then from a redundancy perspective, can we recover those thrusters,” Stich said. Because those thrusters already performed one phasing maneuver after the orbital insertion burn without problems, he said it wasn’t critical to resolve the problem before upcoming maneuvers. Other than the the thruster issue, “everything else looked really good,” said Nappi. “The spacecraft is in excellent condition.” Starliner will approach the ISS over the next day, with docking scheduled for approximately 7:10 p.m. Eastern May 20. The spacecraft will remain at the station for at least four to five days for various tests, as well as transferring approximately 225 kilograms of cargo from the spacecraft and loading about 270 kilograms of cargo for return to Earth. The spacecraft will then undock for a landing, with White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico the primary landing site. A successful OFT-2 mission would allow Boeing to press ahead with the Crew Flight Test, the first flight of the spacecraft to carry astronauts. That could happen as soon as the end of the year, although NASA officials have said in prelaunch briefing that the schedule will depend both on resolving any issues found during OFT-2 and the schedule of station activities. “We’ll learn. We’re going to take this one step at a time,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said at a May 18 briefing here. “We’re going to use this learning for us to then be able to fly our crews.” The launch of this mission, called Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2, comes almost exactly 29 months after the launch of another Starliner spacecraft on the original OFT mission. A problem with the spacecraft’s mission events timer caused problems almost immediately after spacecraft separation, f orcing NASA and Boeing to cancel the planned docking with the station and land just two days later. NASA later revealed that engineers found a problem with the spacecraft software while it was in orbit that could have caused the service module, designed to be jettisoned just before reentry, to bump back into the crew capsule. They developed a software patch that was installed just hours before reentry, but the incident prompted a broader review of the spacecraft’s software. Boeing took a $410 million charge against its earnings in early 2020 to cover the cost of addressing the problems found during OFT and to perform a second test flight. That mission was set to launch in August 2021, but scrubbed just hours before launch when propellant valves in the service module failed to open. Engineers found the valves had corroded shut, prompting a months-long delay. Boeing later concluded that the valves corroded when nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer seeped through the Teflon seals in the valves and reacted with ambient moisture, creating nitric acid. The company took several near-term steps to prevent the problem from reoccurring, including cycling the valves regularly and purging the valves with nitrogen gas to keep out moisture. The company is considering a long-term redesign of the valve . The delays have been costly to Boeing. In addition to the $410 million charge it took in 2020, the company took an additional $185 million charge in October 2021 because of the additional work needed to get OFT-2 launched. While Boeing is also offering Starliner commercially, it has not announced any firm deals beyond its NASA contract. “We’re focused first and foremost on getting safely back to flight and meeting our commitments to NASA, to our customer, and being able to bring this capability to NASA,” Michelle Parker, vice president and deputy general manager of space and launch at Boeing, said in a May 3 briefing when asked about the business case for Starliner. She added the company had other prospects, notably Orbital Reef, the commercial space station concept being developed with Blue Origin and Sierra Space as the lead partners. Boeing is participating in the project, in part by offering Starliner for transporting crews to and from the station. “We expect there will be additional opportunities in the future.” “We’re committed to the program,” she said. “Today, we’re really focused on getting back to flight safely.”
The U.S. Space Force plans to select a small satellite launcher to fly a payload to low Earth orbit on short notice, a capability known as tactically responsive space. The Space Force’s Space Systems Command on May 12 announced it plans to award a contract in August for the Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS-3) mission. Responsive space is a catchphrase for rapid access to commercial launch vehicles that can be rapidly integrated with payloads and launched during a conflict or a crisis to replace a damaged satellite or augment existing constellations. Congress inserted $50 million in the 2022 defense budget for this effort. TacRS-3 will be managed by the Space Force’s Rocket Systems Launch Program. Vendors that were pre-selected for the Orbital Services Program OSP-4 will compete for the task order. Space Systems Command had previously named the mission TacRL-3, for Tactically Responsive Launch but changed it to TacRS-3 to “emphasize that these efforts are broader than only launch and are focused on enabling comprehensive space capabilities provided as options for commanders responding to threats in space.” TacRS-3 will demonstrate an “end-to-end tactically responsive space capability including the launch segment, space segment, ground segment, and on-orbit operations,” said Space Systems Command. The selected launcher will deploy a space domain awareness payload called Victus Nox. A similar payload was launched in June 2021 for the TacRL-2 mission that flew on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The whole process from the start of the mission planning to launch took less than 10 months. The launch company was given 21 days to integrate the payload and get it to orbit. “This next mission is designed to push the limits of speed and responsiveness ,” said Lt. Col. Justin Beltz, RSLP program manager. “Our plan is to bring a launch service provider to readiness to execute this mission within months, hold them at that ready state for weeks to months, and then launch within 24 hours when directed to go.”
Facing a tight schedule to launch 28 satellites between September 2022 and March 2023, the Space Development Agency and its contractors have had to scramble to deal with parts shortages and other supply chain problems that have affected the entire space industry. Some satellite programs have been impacted by delays in the deliveries of microprocessors and focal planes arrays but SDA mostly has had to contend with a shortage of lower-end items, the agency’s director Derek Tournear said May 17. “What caught us off guard were some of the lower level components that you didn’t expect to have problems with — resistors, cables, connectors, things that you would expect are always a little difficult but usually you can control,” Tournear said at a Potomac Officers Club online event. Tournear credited SDA’s satellite manufacturers for having “a pretty good handle from the beginning. They knew from day one that the supply chain would be a risk factor for those space qualified parts.” Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems are each producing 10 communications satellites for SDA’s Transport Layer Tranche 0. L3Harris Technologies and SpaceX are each making four infrared sensor satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 0. SDA plans to launch its first 14 satellites in September. “Basically we have zero days of margin for that launch,” Tournear said. An item of concern right now are Ka-band radios needed for the satellites, Tournear said. “Our risk items are our Ka radios. We’re having a difficult time getting our radios built and delivered in time. And that’s because of the internal components that are going into those.” Optical crosslink terminals used to pass data from satellite to satellite also are experiencing production delays, he said. “We’ve had to shift around different vendors.” Lockheed Martin and York Space even agreed to share parts, Tournear said. “Our Transport Layer performers have been extremely helpful in sharing parts between one another.” “One vendor had radios ahead of schedule that they didn’t need until the second launch. The other vendor had optical crosslinks come in ahead of schedule, but they didn’t need them until the second launch,” he said. “And they were willing to actually share those with each other so that we hit our launch on time.” Tournear said that “sort of competitive camaraderie is kind of rare, but they’ve been able to do that. And that’s helped.” Additionally, SDA has reached out to other government agencies to borrow components, he said. “And that’s how we’re able to continue towards this Tranche 0 timeline.” Looking ahead to the much larger Transport Layer Tranche 1 – with Lockheed Martin, York Space and Northrop Grumman each under contract to produce 42 satellites, “we anticipate the same difficulties,” said Tournear. On the plus side, “suppliers know what’s coming” so they are likely to be better prepared, he said. “Now the supply chain is geared up and moving forward. So we anticipate that our primes have supply chain plans in place to be able to get the parts on hand and be able to deliver,” he added. “It’s one of those things we have to play whack-a-mole as we build these satellites out.”
As Maxar continues to see high demand for satellite imagery, the company is looking to attract customers for its mobile terminals that give users direct access to commercial imaging satellites. Maxar, a provider of Earth imaging and space infrastructure services, is offering a “mobile access terminal” that military units could deploy in the field to downlink electro-optical imagery from the company’s satellites and radar imagery from MDA’s Radarsat-2, as well as imagery from other commercial satellites. “ We’re seeing really strong demand signals, for example, for uplinking and downlinking and tasking in theater, which we hadn’t seen from the U.S. government before,” Maxar’s president and CEO Daniel Jablonsky said May 9 during the company’s first-quarter 2022 earnings call . “So we think that’s another growth vector for us,” he said. Maxar displayed the tactical access hardware last month at the GEOINT 2022 symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The setup on display included a satellite antenna from Safran and a small receiver terminal used for downlinking and analyzing data. A spokesperson said the equipment is aimed at users, particularly military and intelligence units, who need to operate in remote locations and would need access to satellites on-demand to track and identify targets or troop movements. It’s also marketed to organizations that provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Maxar currently has four imaging satellites in orbit supporting the U.S. government and other customers, and demand has soared due to the war in Ukraine. The company is in the process of building six new WorldView Legion satellites but their launch continues to suffer delays due to supply chain and logistical problems. Jablonsky said during the earnings call that the first two Legions are now projected to launch in September. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Elon Musk says Russian hackers are increasing efforts to take down SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service amid the war in Ukraine. “Starlink has resisted Russian cyberwar jamming and hacking attempts so far, but they’re ramping up their efforts,” Musk tweeted May 10. Earlier that day, the United States formally blamed Russia for a late February cyberattack on Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite internet network. “Today, in support of the European Union and other partners, the United States is sharing publicly its assessment that Russia launched cyber attacks in late February against commercial satellite communications networks to disrupt Ukrainian command and control during the invasion, and those actions had spillover impacts into other European countries,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in a May 10 press statement . Blinken said the Russian cyberattack “disabled very small aperture terminals in Ukraine and across Europe” including ”tens of thousands of terminals outside of Ukraine that, among other things, support wind turbines and provide Internet services to private citizens.” Some KA-SAT customers have had to replace modems to continue using the network, which Viasat says is now stabilized. U.S.-based Viasat provides KA-SAT services in Europe through a network of distributors following its acquisition from France’s Eutelsat. Typically, Viasat sells satellite services directly to end customers, including the U.S. government, which Viasat said was not affected by the disruption. Blinken said the U.S. government has developed new mechanisms to help Ukraine identify cyber threats and recover from cyber incidents. “We have also enhanced our support for Ukraine’s digital connectivity, including by providing satellite phones and data terminals to Ukrainian government officials, essential service providers, and critical infrastructure operators,” he said. SpaceX has been sending Starlink terminals to Ukraine since shortly after the Feb. 24 invasion following a public plea from Ukraine’s vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Fedorov, who also serves as the nation’s digital transformation minister, said May 2 that there were around 150,000 active Starlink users in Ukraine. In early March, Musk said shifting resources to address Starlink jamming would cause “slight delays” for its proposed second-generation constellation, and the Starship heavy launch vehicle SpaceX is developing in Texas.
TAMPA, Fla. — Astroscale has secured European Space Agency funding for a 2024 demo mission to remove what will likely be a OneWeb satellite. The debris-removal startup said May 27 that the 15 million euro ($16 million) funding enables it to complete the design of its ELSA-m servicer spacecraft, progressing through manufacturing up to the satellite pre-integration phase. Astroscale plans to launch a commercial de-orbit service for satellite operators after that. The Japanese startup’s British subsidiary Astroscale Ltd. and U.K-based partners secured the funds from the U.K. Space Agency via OneWeb, which has a public-private partnership with UKSA and ESA under ESA’s Sunrise program. However, it is too early to say which satellite will be part of the ELSA-m demonstration mission, according to Astroscale, or whether it will come from OneWeb’s low Earth orbit constellation. The servicer for ELSA-m, or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-multiple, is designed to de-orbit more than one satellite in a single mission. Astroscale Ltd. managing director John Auburn told SpaceNews the servicer could attempt to remove another spacecraft after its primary mission in 2024. That would mark the Astroscale’s first commercial mission, although Auburn stressed the venture has not yet covered all ELSA-m’s funding needs. An Astroscale spokesperson said the $15 million funding covers around a third of the cost to design and manufacture ELSA-m. The remaining costs will be funded from Astroscale’s own resources. Astroscale announced Nov. 25 that it had received $109 million in its latest funding round, bringing the total amount raised from venture capital to $300 million. ESA’s Council of Ministers is due to convene in November, where they are set to discuss proposals that include providing more funding to move the ELSA-m demo toward assembly, integration, verification and ultimately launch and operations. Last year, the Sunrise program awarded a OneWeb-led group about $45 million to launch a beam-hopping satellite in 2022 called Joey-Sat, which aimed to demonstrate how a satellite could switch its coverage area in real-time to respond to surges in demand. Astroscale got about $3.2 million as part of that funding to start developing technologies that could safely de-orbit satellites like Joey-Sat. Joey-Sat has not yet launched, and U.K.-based OneWeb was forced to pause the deployment of its broadband satellites in March amid sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OneWeb has deployed 428 satellites, or 66% of its planned total fleet to date, and has signed launch agreements with SpaceX and India’s space agency to resume satellite deployments this year. In November, OneWeb said it was considering options to de-orbit a satellite that failed due to a software issue soon after reaching its 1,200-kilometer orbit in 2020. Auburn said the majority of OneWeb satellites have magnetic docking plates that are compatible with ELSA-m’s capture mechanism. He said Astroscale is continuing to talk to other constellation operators about fitting compatible docking plates on their future satellites. Astroscale’s ELSA-d, or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration, released and re-captured a tiny LEO satellite with a docking plate in an August test. The 175-kilogram ELSA-d servicer and 17-kilogram client have been helping Astroscale validate its technologies in orbit. However, the servicer lost half of its eight thrusters as it was preparing another capture attempt early this year with less direct support from ground operators. Despite the thruster problem, the servicer was able to make a close-approach rendezvous with the client in April, before backing away about 300 kilometers while Astroscale decides whether to proceed with original plans to de-orbit the client. Auburn said ELSA-d has probably already done enough to pave the way for ELSA-m. “We’ve learned an enormous amount,” he said, including how solar weather can influence the trajectory of two spacecraft differently. The satellite ELSA-m seeks to capture will likely be much larger than ELSA-d’s client. ELSA-m will have a mass of “a few hundred kilos,” an Astroscale spokesperson said, and is designed to capture multiple clients of up to 800 kilograms. A OneWeb broadband satellite is about the size of a mini-fridge and weighs roughly 150 kilograms.
SEOUL, South Korea — Uzbekistan is trying to woo Starlink and OneWeb to bring their satellite broadband services to Central Asia’s most populous country. The overture is part of the Uzbek government’s efforts to strengthen the nation’s information technology competitiveness and provide better communications services to underserved remote areas. Ranking officials recently met with the Starlink and OneWeb representatives in the country’s capital, Tashkent, asking for their satellite broadband services to be made available in Uzbekistan. They also called on the two companies to open an office there to explore further cooperation. The meeting between Uzbekistan’s development of information technologies and communications minister and Starlink market access manager, Ben MacWilliams, took place May 10, on the sidelines of the Space Technology Conference STC-2022, according to a May 11 statement from Uzbekistan’s state investment promotion agency. During the meeting, the minister, Sherzod Shermatov, called on Starlink to expand the scope of its services to include the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia, according to the statement. The minister also suggested that Starlink open a representative office in Uzbekistan “to expand mutually beneficial cooperation.” In response, MacWilliams announced his company’s “readiness to implement large projects in Uzbekistan, as well as in other countries,” according to the statement. SpaceNews reached out to Starlink to ask what the “large projects” are, but the company didn’t respond. MacWilliams had a separate meeting May 9 with the director-general of Uzbekistan’s space agency. They discussed the issue of bringing Starlink services to the country, according to the agency . On top of this, the agency signed a memorandum of understanding with British satellite broadband provider OneWeb, according to the agency’s May 16 statement . OneWeb’s marketing director, Ivan Zaitsev, represented the company in the signing ceremony. “The main purpose of the memorandum [of understanding] is to attract the British satellite communications company OneWeb to the Uzbek market,” the statement reads. The deal set the stage for the two sides to hold a discussion of “regulatory issues and determining the main needs of the state to prioritize the use of the available OneWeb satellite capacity,” it added. As part of the deal, the two sides agreed to establish a center of expertise on the use of OneWeb’s satellite broadband in Uzbekistan. “The signing of a memorandum with OneWeb is a significant event in the development of space communications,” the space agency’s director-general, Shukhrat Kadirov, said in the statement. “The availability of OneWeb telecommunications services in the Republic of Uzbekistan will effectively implement the tasks envisaged by state programs for the development of information technologies and ensure the availability of innovative communication services even in remote regions of the republic.” Uzbekistan’s internet penetration rate stood at 70.5 percent of the total population of 34 million as of January 2022, according to data from DataReportal, an independent data collector.
Satellite operators are venturing into the Arctic to improve connectivity as the changing atmospheric and geopolitical climate drives demand for more bandwidth in one of Earth’s last remaining frontiers. Fledgling and established operators alike see a growing market for capacity in areas best served by satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink, the world’s largest broadband megaconstellations in low Earth orbit (LEO), already have polar-orbiting satellites in their expanding fleets. SES is looking at using inclined planes to cover the Arctic with O3b mPower, its next-generation medium Earth orbit network that aims to start deploying satellites this year. The Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM) — a joint venture between British satellite operator Inmarsat, the Norwegian Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Air Force — plans to deploy two satellites in highly elliptical orbits on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2023 for polar coverage. Russian Satellite Communications Co. (RSCC) has outlined plans to add four satellites in highly elliptical orbits to its fleet in the following years to extend coverage deep into the Arctic Circle. And Telesat has committed to connecting indigenous communities in Canada’s northernmost areas with its planned LEO constellation in return for government funding. These high-speed networks are looking to transform connectivity in the Arctic. For decades, Iridium Communications has been the only operator able to provide continuous coverage over the poles — and only for less bandwidth-hungry services such as mobile telephony and various monitoring and tracking applications. For higher bandwidth needs, operators have been using satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) to cover parts of the Arctic with a line of sight to their fixed positions along the equator, noted Armand Musey, founder of advisory firm Summit Ridge Group. The curvature of the Earth means geostationary satellites positioned above the equator can’t reach high polar altitudes. However, Musey said militaries and other government users have previously tasked older GEOs that have drifted north or south of their original equatorial orbits to provide capacity in these areas. “The polar coverage for a non-station kept satellite is usually only for several hours a day at each pole,” he said. GEO satellites also call for using larger and more expensive dishes the closer they are to the poles because of the low elevation angles, and “even then small variations in the terrain can block the look angle.” “For NGSO constellations with polar orbits, the opposite is true,” he said. “The satellites are crossing at the poles, and that is where capacity and look angles are the best.” Despite government subsidies for connecting remote Arctic areas often poorly served by terrestrial solutions, the region’s population is relatively small and has not historically proven to be a major market for the satellite industry. But while the Arctic continues to be seen as a niche market, satellite companies are increasingly investing in the area as a number of factors drive demand for more capacity. More planes with passengers demanding better inflight Wi-Fi are flying over the poles to reach international destinations, and the warming climate is carving out more efficient shipping routes that are increasing the flow of maritime traffic. The Arctic is also rich in natural resources, and its strategic importance to governments will have likely increased after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine significantly deteriorated relations with the West. Musey pointed out that some of the markets coming into focus in the region, particularly maritime and aviation, are among the fastest-growing users of satellite connectivity worldwide. Data from Northern Sky Research published in November — three months before Ukraine was invaded — forecasted commercial satcoms demand from government and military customers to climb from about 1,000 gigabits per second (Gbps) to 12 Gbps by 2030. “While that’s a small opportunity in the grand scheme of things,” noted NSR’s Brad Grady, the projected growth rate between 2020 and 2030 is nearly four times that of Europe, which is expected to achieve the next best growth rate over the period. Geopolitical rebalancing due to the Ukraine conflict could accelerate the demand, and Grady said there are also “highly likely” to be proprietary military satcoms networks that provide an additional layer of connectivity to government and military customers given the strategic importance of the region. For the Arctic’s commercial maritime market, NSR expects demand to grow to around 80 Gbps by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 60%. Merchant traffic using northern sea routes, passenger exploration-class cruise vessels transiting through higher northern latitudes, fishing, and the potential for more oil and gas exploration are driving demand here. “Again, it’s a relatively small opportunity, but it presents some of the highest 10-year CAGR for capacity demand in the maritime market,” Grady said. “Overall, we expect more vessels to be present in the Arctic as we see more ice-class newbuilds on the horizon, melting polar ice caps enabling safer operations, and longer-term development of arctic resources.” NSR does not currently provide similar forecasts in the region for aviation, but Grady said the recent shutdown of Russian airspace to Western flights, which is forcing more planes to fly over the Arctic to avoid traveling through the country, increases inflight connectivity demand over the region at least in the near term. Because high-speed NGSO broadband systems are much better suited for Arctic communications than GEO, Musey expects these operators to pursue the market “far more aggressively” to carve out new business opportunities. Unlike Starlink, all of OneWeb’s satellites orbit from pole to pole, so it has no choice but to cover the region. The Western ban on using Russian rockets has also paused OneWeb’s satellite deployments, leaving the upper part of the northern hemisphere the only area it has activated services to date. All broadband megaconstellations “have always had the challenge that ~70% of the earth is water,” Musey said via email, and with “access to the Russian and Chinese markets now largely closed, every other region, including the arctic, becomes that much more important to making their business models close.” “OneWeb has a number of user terminals installed across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Norway today with sites in Denmark, Finland and Iceland coming online in the near term,” said Dylan Browne, OneWeb’s vice president of government sales. “These early adopted sites have applications ranging from Community Broadband to Defense and Security services.” He said OneWeb is also testing services with offshore energy platforms and prototyping with naval fleets for Arctic patrols. “We are also working with telecommunications companies to provide network extensions to businesses and communities inside the Arctic Circle,” Browne added. “OneWeb is in active discussion with a number of airlines that anticipate to fly polar routes where existing broadband satellite connectivity doesn’t reach.” Inmarsat says ASBM has an advantage over LEO competitors because it will offer the only capability specifically designed for the region. LEO operators “make a big deal out of the fact they serve the Arctic, but they were never designed to serve the Arctic; it’s just that kind of comes for free,” said Peter Hadinger, Inmarsat’s chief technology officer. Norway’s government is the prime system owner for ASBM’s two satellites, which are designed to hand off to each other so that one is always positioned above the North Pole at any given time. The spacecraft will provide connectivity for Norway in X-band, for the U.S. government in EHF — both in military frequencies — and for Inmarsat in Ka-band in military and commercial frequencies. “We have a combined commercial military payload so that we can serve the airlines that are flying the shortcut route across the pole, serve the shipping industry that’s sailing along the various northern sea routes, and also serve the governments who have UAVs, which prefer the use of Ka-band for their links,” Hadinger said. ASBM’s systems in Ka-band will be compatible with the U.S. military’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) system, according to Hadinger, which is supported by Australia and other U.S. allies. WGS currently does not have a polar component. For most of Inmarsat’s more than 40 years of existence, the company focused on bringing connectivity to the world that can be seen from geostationary orbits — essentially everything but the poles. “There really wasn’t a whole lot of business to be made there, quite honestly,” Hadinger said. “A lot of this changed as we started getting into Global Xpress and a few things sort of coincided,” he said, referring to Inmarsat’s collection of mostly Ka-band satellites that it started deploying in GEO in 2013. Periods of open sea lane across the north of Canada and Russia were getting longer due to global warming, he said, increasing shipping traffic as more vessels took the “shortcut northern route” between oceans. “At the same time, those governments who were used to having ice-blocked northern borders all of a sudden had to start worrying about the fact that there were ships sailing across their northern borders,” he said. “And they had no defenses up there. They had no way of observing what was going on, so they wanted to fly patrol UAVs back and forth across these vast Arctic expanses” to monitor their borders. The geopolitical landscape also shifted around the same time, as countries with conflicting claims to Arctic resources started ramping up rhetoric around territorial rights. “The big problem for many, if not all people trying to serve the Arctic, is the demand there is so small that it’s hard to make a business case for a satellite system just to serve the Arctic,” Hadinger added. That’s a problem he thinks Inmarsat has solved by teaming up with governments. Hadinger said the operator is also open to a similar arrangement for the South Pole. “I don’t think we’ve quite found as much commercial and government demand in the South Pole, but we have told … southern governments that we’d be happy to entertain a similar kind of construct, as we did with Norway and the United States, if there was sufficient demand out there,” he said. Although more NGSO satellites are coming to the Arctic region, Iridium continues to see a market for its low-power services for applications that include scientific research, emergency SOS and environmental and natural resource monitoring. “There are going to be multiple suppliers of Arctic services for broadband purposes, which is great,” Iridium CEO Matt Desch said. But these services will mostly require large, power-hungry terminals, he said, and most of them will be fixed and not designed for mobility applications. “There still needs to be small devices you can carry with you that you can put on your dog sled that don’t require a pizza-size-antenna while you’re on there,” Desch said. Iridium also owns a part of Aireon, which uses the operator’s satellites to track planes. Isavia ANS, Iceland’s air navigation service provider, said April 14 it has agreed to expand its use of Aireon’s services to the upper reaches of its controlled airspace, which extends from the North Pole to Scotland and from the prime meridian in Greenwich to west of Greenland. “I think the Arctic region continues to be more and more important,” Desch said. “No, it’s not as dramatic in terms of bandwidth requirements as [elsewhere], but increasingly people are realizing that the demand is only going to increase and it will be a good market — it will be a good market for them and it’ll continue to be a good market for us.” He said industry attitudes about the Arctic have changed since Iridium started deploying its constellation around the turn of the century. Attending one of his first satellite industry conferences, Desch recalled a GEO competitor telling an audience how no one cares about polar coverage because “only polar bears and penguins” would use it. “Now of course, they’re launching a polar-orbiting service,” he quipped. This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Norway’s Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace has ordered three microsatellites to keep tabs on vessels operating clandestinely in the North Sea. Kongsberg ordered the satellites from Lithuania’s NanoAvionics for a 2024 launch. The satellites will have instruments Kongsberg has developed to detect Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, which all passenger ships and most ocean-going vessels above a certain tonnage must carry by law. If these ships deactivate their AIS, Kongsberg said a separate sensor it has developed can track signals from the radars they use to avoid crashing into boats and other obstacles that are especially hard to see at night. In a May 18 news release announcing the order, Kongsberg said the satellites’ ability to track so-called dark vessels will support Norway’s defense operations and efforts to crack down on activities including illegal fishing, smuggling and environmental crime. The company also aims to sell maritime traffic information to commercial customers for data analysis applications. The satellites will be operated by ground station supplier Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), a joint venture with Norway’s space agency, and will use encryption software developed by Norwegian firm Eidsvoll Electronics. NanoAvionics said the spacecraft will be based on the MP42 microsatellite bus, which at “50-kilogram-plus” is the Lithuanian firm’s largest yet as it expands out of the 10-kilogram-and-under nanosatellite class to develop larger smallsats with more capabilities. “The agreement with Kongsberg is a perfect example of our technological capabilities and proof that adding microsatellites to our portfolio was the right move,” NanoAvionics CEO and co-founder Vytenis Buzas said. “While nanosatellites are still in a high demand, it’s the microsatellites that offer new opportunities and room for more advanced missions and applications. The mission also demonstrates the continued strength of European space companies and agencies working together.” NanoAvionics said its MP42 bus gained flight heritage April 2022, when it carried a payload for Luxembourg connectivity startup OQ Technology that launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Kongsberg said its agreement with NanoAvionics forms the basis for a larger satellite constellation to increase coverage areas, revisit times and include different types of sensors. “We intend to expand the network with more satellites, but have not made formal decisions on this yet,” Evelyn Honoré-Livermore, system engineer and project manager at Kongsberg, told SpaceNews via email. “We plan to cover other parts of the world, ultimately achieving global coverage. For now, we are looking at the North Atlantic and some options in the southern hemisphere.” Honoré-Livermore said the company is considering ways to combine AIS, radio-frequency and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors for future satellites. Earth observation sensors “are also natural to explore at the next stage,” Honoré-Livermore added. Kongsberg has not selected a launch provider for deploying its satellites. “Our ambition is to launch the first satellite with Isar Aerospace from Andøya [in Norway] or with SpaceX, but we are not confirmed on this point yet,” Honoré-Livermore said. Germany-based Isar is developing a small launch vehicle called Spectrum, which is slated to make its maiden launch from Andøya late this year or early next year. Kongsberg owns 10% of the Andøya Space Center in northern Norway. Cheaper and more capable small satellites have opened up new markets for surveillance capabilities, and attracted multiple startups looking to carve out commercial businesses in this area. U.S.-based HawkEye 360, which has a substantial foothold in this market, has also been using its satellites to detect GPS interference in and around Ukraine amid Russia’s war there. British startup Horizon Technologies , Luxembourg-based Kleos Space and France’s Unseenlabs plan to deploy satellites in the near term to build out their maritime surveillance capabilities.
Sierra Space announced May 31 a strategic partnership with aerospace manufacturer Spirit AeroSystems for production of cargo modules for its Dream Chaser vehicles. The companies said they signed a letter of intent under which Spirit will assist in the development and production of Shooting Star, the cargo module attached to the aft end of the Dream Chaser lifting body vehicle. That module will support future cargo missions to the International Space Station under Sierra Space’s contract with NASA, and for other applications. Shooting Star can carry about 4,500 kilograms of pressurized and unpressurized cargo, and also has solar panels and thrusters. While the Dream Chaser itself returns to Earth to fly additional missions, the Shooting Star module is jettisoned before reentry and burns up in the atmosphere, meaning a new module is needed for each mission. Sierra Space built the first Shooting Star module on its own, but suggested in the statement that partnering with Spirit, a company best known for producing aircraft structures, can lower costs for future modules. “Shooting Star is another innovative technological solution from Sierra Space for the new space economy, and with Spirit as a key partner, we are broadening accessibility to our offering and increasing efficiencies to accelerate more widespread adoption,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. “Spirit AeroSystems brings unparalleled value in terms of design for manufacturability and industrialization to help scale production rates on the Dream Chaser and its derivatives,” said Tom Gentile, president and chief executive of Spirit AeroSystems, in the statement. Gentile thanked Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who serves on both the Senate Commerce Committee and the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, for bringing the two companies together. Spirit is headquartered in Wichita, Kansas. Besides producing Shooting Star cargo modules for future ISS cargo missions, the companies said in the statement that, through the partnership, they will “expand the versatility of variant designs in support of future Sierra Space cargo and service missions.” The first Dream Chaser mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than the first quarter of 2023 on the second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. It is the first of at least seven missions under a Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract awarded in 2016.
Congress added $50 million to the Pentagon’s 2022 budget for responsive launch – or services from commercial small satellite launchers that can fly payloads on short notice. Lawmakers are now proposing to increase that funding to $150 million in the 2023 budget. A bipartisan group of 25 House lawmakers in a letter last month asked the leaders of the defense appropriations subcommittee to consider tripling the funding for “tactically responsive launch” in the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2023 budget. “As vividly demonstrated by Russia’s 2021 destructive anti-satellite test, threats to our critical national security space assets continue to increase, both from adversary on-orbit and terrestrial counter-space capabilities and from space debris,” said the letter signed by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), and co-signed by 23 other members. The United States is “not currently positioned with an operational capability to rapidly replace assets in orbit that are degraded, disabled, or destroyed or to rapidly launch satellites for urgent new missions,” the letter said. “As an element of the United States’ move toward a more resilient space architecture, it is critical that its space assets can be launched, reconstituted, and augmented on tactical timelines in support of the warfighter and others responsible for our nation’s security.” Horsford and Waltz wrote a similar letter in January asking appropriators to add $50 million for tactically responsive launch. That letter was co-signed by 10 lawmakers, so the coalition has grown in the months since. The lawmakers suggest that the $150 million should be spent on several efforts: Continue to fly Tactically Responsive Launch (TacRL) missions managed by the Space Systems Command, demonstrate rapid space reconstitution and satellite augmentation, accelerate development of processes needed to implement tactically responsive space and launch operations, and establish specialized units. The latest letter points out that the head of U.S. Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, said having a responsive launch capability would likely deter enemies from attempting to destroy U.S. satellites, as they could be rapidly replaced. If Congress adds funding for tactically responsive launch in 2023, it would mark the third year in a row that the program gets funded by congressional add-ons as the Pentagon has not requested money for this program. Small satellite launch companies like Virgin Orbit have actively lobbied for funding for responsive launch, which would go to small launch services providers that don’t require conventional launch facilities. Virgin Orbit air-launches rockets from a modified Boeing 747- 400 carrier aircraft. The Space Force funds small satellite launches via the Rocket Systems Launch Program, and created the Orbital Services Program (OSP)-4 contracting vehicle. Vendors pre-selected for OSP-4 can compete for task orders to launch payloads greater than 400 pounds to any orbit within 12-24 months from contract award. The Space Force’s Space Systems Command on May 12 announced it plans to award a contract in August for the Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS-3) mission. OSP-4 vendors are eligible to compete for the task order. 
Updated 10:45 p.m. Eastern with post-launch briefing comments. TITUSVILLE, Fla. — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station May 20, a little more than 24 hours after its launch. The spacecraft docked with the forward docking port on the Harmony module of the station at 8:28 p.m. Eastern. Controllers reported a hard docking securing the spacecraft to the station about 20 minutes later, although hatches separating the spacecraft from the station won’t open until around 11:45 a.m. Eastern May 21. The docking took place more than an hour later than the original schedule as controllers worked through several minor issues. That included the spacecraft’s docking ring, which needed to be retracted and extended again before the spacecraft could make its final approach. “To the joint Boeing and NASA team, the crew of Expedition 67 would like to offer our congratulations on this momentous occasion,” NASA astronaut Bob Hines, currently on the station, said after the docking was confirmed. “Today marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA’s goal of returning humans to the moon and eventually to Mars.” “This was a really critical demonstration mission,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said in a briefing an hour after docking. “Seeing that vehicle docked now to the ISS is just phenomenal.” Neither NASA nor Boeing provided updates about the status of the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission for more than 17 hours after a postlaunch briefing May 19, an unusual silence that raised concerns that there was a problem with the spacecraft. A Boeing spokesperson told SpaceNews that the company would provide an update about the mission “in a bit” but the company did not release that update until more than three hours later. In that update, Boeing confirmed that the spacecraft was generally in good condition, having conducted several tests as planned. One issue was “off-nominal behavior” of a thermal cooling loop on the spacecraft, but the company said the system was still maintaining stable temperatures. “The ground team did a great job of managing those loops,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, at the post-docking briefing. He said some moisture may have gotten into the coolant loops that froze out and clogged a filter, causing a pressure rise in the loop. Controllers were able to manage the temperature of those coolant loops, and there was plenty of margin in the system. The other issue was the failure of 2 of 12 aft-facing Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters during the spacecraft’s orbit insertion burn shortly after launch. In the statement, Boeing said a drop in chamber pressure likely caused the thrusters to shut down. Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and commercial crew program manager, said engineers developed a fault three and identified “three or so” plausible causes, which he did not identify, later suggesting the two thrusters may have failed for different reasons. “We may never know what the real cause of what this is because we don’t get this vehicle back,” he said. The thrusters are located in the service module, which is jettisoned before reentry and burns up in the atmosphere. Other OMAC thrusters continued to work well, performing several maneuvers as the spacecraft approached the station before smaller reaction control system (RSC) thrusters took over for the final approach. The OMAC thrusters will not be used again until the spacecraft’s deorbit burn at the end of the mission. In addition to the two OMAC thruster failures, two RCS thrusters also shut down during the approach to the station after suffering a drop in chamber pressure. “I don’t think we know quite yet what happened to those thrusters, but the vehicle has plenty of redundancy,” Stich said, including for undocking and landing. Starliner is expected to remain at the station until at least May 25. Stich said the earliest undocking opportunity would set up a landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 6:46 p.m. Eastern that day, weather permitting. “We’re not in any hurry to come back. We want to learn as much from this vehicle as we can while it’s on orbit.”
A Long March 5B rocket has arrived at Wenchang spaceport as China gears up to send its second space station module into orbit. The components of the third Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket arrived at Wenchang May 29, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced ( Chinese ). The launcher components were manufactured and tested in Tianjin, north China, and shipped to Wenchang, on the coast of the south island province of Hainan via specially constructed cargo vessels. Assembly and testing of the launch vehicle is underway. The completed 849-metric-ton, 53.7-meter-long Long March 5B, which consists of a cryogenic core stage, four liquid boosters and an elongated payload fairing, is unofficially expected to launch around July 23. The mission aims to send the roughly 22-ton Wentian experiment module into orbit to join Tianhe, the similarly-sized core module for the Tiangong space station which launched in April 2021. The 17.9-meter-long Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”) module will dock with the forward port of Tianhe, which is currently in a 387 by 386-kilometer orbit inclined by 41.5 degrees. Three Shenzhou-14 astronauts—due to launch from Jiuquan around 10.40 p.m. Saturday, June 4 Eastern—will be aboard Tianhe for the arrival of Wentian and will cooperate with ground control to transpose the new module to a radial docking port using a large robotic arm. If successful, Wentian would be the second of three modules for the T-shaped Tiangong space station, with the final piece, Mengtian, scheduled for launch in October. The Chinese space station was first envisioned in 1992 when China approved its Project 921 to develop human spaceflight capabilities. The project suffered delays due to issues with development and performance of the Long March 5B, but could also be expanded to six modules and most commercial and tourist missions. Wentian features a new airlock for extravehicular activities, a small robotic arm which can work with the larger arm on Tianhe, and additional living quarters that will allow crew handovers. The first crew handover will take place when the Shenzhou-14 crew greet Shenzhou-15, which is expected to launch in December. Tiangong will then host six astronauts for a period of days. The new airlock cabin in Wentian will become the main exit-entry point for extravehicular activities (EVAs) once active. Wentian will also come with 30-meter-long solar arrays, boosting the power available to Tiangong. Another notable aspect to the mission will be the fate of the roughly 30-meter-long, 21-metric-ton Long March 5B first stage. The core stage also acts as the upper stage, meaning it reaches orbital velocity, rather than falling into a predetermined area on a ballistic trajectory as is most often the case with first stages. The first two Long March 5B first stages made uncontrolled reentries, gaining widespread public attention . Two further Long March 5B launches are expected in 2022 and 2023, to launch the Mengtian module and the Xuntian co-orbiting space telescope respectively. — Edited at 1:51 p.m. Eastern to correct Shenzhou-14 launch time.
An international race back to the moon is already underway, with t he United States, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates all at various stages of planning future lunar missions. Growing activity in outer space beyond Earth orbit — known as xGEO or cislunar space — could turn this region into a contested domain as countries seek access to lunar resources and stake out areas of jurisdiction. As a result, the U.S. military will likely have to pay more attention to what’s happening in xGEO, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Operations Command. “We are now seeing other actors go to the moon, go to lunar orbit and we do need to be concerned and interested in what they are doing there,” Whiting said May 16 at a Mitchell Institute event. Current sensors used by the military for space domain awareness were designed to track satellites in Earth orbits, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer, and not for cislunar space which extends out 385,000 kilometers and has different orbital trajectories. Scientists have pointed out that most activities in cislunar space are largely unmonitored and only self-reported . Whiting noted that keeping watch of Earth orbit alone is “a huge challenge” but nevertheless the military has to prepare to extend its surveillance capabilities. The Space Operations Command’s Space Delta 2, based in Colorado Springs, focuses on space domain awareness but not on cislunar space. The Space Force recently designated the 19th Space Defense Squadron , a new unit based in Dahlgren, Virginia, to take over xGEO surveillance. “Their job now is to go partner with other organizations,” he said, including NASA, academic institutions and the Air Force Research Laboratory. AFRL plans to launch an experimental surveillance satellite known as CHPS to lunar orbit in a few years. That mission “will help us figure out how to do space domain awareness from lunar orbit … and figure out how to conduct operations,” said Whiting. “There are pockets of cislunar and xGEO excellence out there and we’re working with all of them to create a community of interest and then start to develop a picture of what is happening in lunar space,” he said. The Space Force today is almost entirely focused on terrestrial operations, Whiting said, “but as commerce, as NASA as other countries start to go to the moon and beyond, we will have to pivot up and out for those orbital regimes.” Whiting said NASA will be the military’s primary partner for xGEO surveillance. “As they execute their civil scientific mission, and we execute our national defense mission, there are areas of overlap where we can help each other.” A 2020 agreement signed by the Space Force and NASA alludes to NASA’s plans to extend human presence beyond the International Space Station to the lunar surface and interplanetary destinations. It says the Space Force will seek to provide resources to protect U.S. interests so astronauts can operate “safely and securely on these distant frontiers.” Air Force ‘Project Rocket’ focused on xGEO During a presentation last week at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, senior Air Force and Space Force officials were briefed on Project Rocket, an Air Force-funded experiment that looked at the challenges of tracking objects in space beyond Earth’s orbit. The project was led by a group of officers selected for the Blue Horizons fellowship, created to help military leaders develop entrepreneurial skills and examine the impact of technology on national security. “We pitched the idea of focusing on how do we provide a combatant commander the capability to track adversary activity in xGEO,” said Lt. Col. Phoenix Torrijos, an intelligence and foreign area officer who led Project Rocket. The task for the 12 officers who worked on the project was to figure out how objects in xGEO could be located and tracked using existing sensors. They started last summer, and over 10 months, with a budget of about $1 million, the team was able to identify and track China’s Chang’e 5 orbiter and QueQiao relay satellite – a communications relay and radio satellite used by China for the Chang’e 4 lunar far-side mission. They also tracked India’s Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2 lunar exploration missions, several NASA missions and the James Webb Space Telescope. All these objects were tracked over the course of four weeks. They used optical, passive radio frequency (RF) and radar assets from the U.S. military Space Surveillance Network — a collection of ground-based radar, telescopes and space-based sensors that track objects in Earth’s orbit — and telescopes operated by universities and private companies. Maj. Jason Utulo, one of the members of the group, said the point was to try to be innovative with existing technology to look into xGEO rather than “wait for the next exquisite technological advances.” Another goal was to understand what skills and training the Space Force will need in the future in order to acquire xGEO space domain awareness. Utulo is a Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft navigator and is headed to U.S. Space Command for his next assignment. The next phase of Project Rocket will be to transition the work to military space organizations responsible for actual operations, such as Space Delta 2, the 19th Space Defense Squadron and U.S. Space Command’s Joint Task Force Space Defense. The plan is for military operators to continue to practice xGEO object tracking taking advantage of cislunar missions that NASA plans to launch, such as CAPSTONE and several others under the Artemis program, said Torrijos. “With their flight plans and mission profiles we’ll be able to stress our sensors to follow and track these mission sets throughout xGeo.” Looking further ahead, the goal is to produce a “concept of employment for the combatant commander on how we can track objects in xGEO using capabilities that already exist,” she added. “We understand that more holistic solutions are in early stages of development, but until our acquisitions cycle catches up to our operational reality, Project Rocket intends to develop a ‘today’ solution for xGEO space domain awareness.”
An orbital launch attempt by Chinese startup iSpace suffered failure early Friday, following two failures last year. The fourth Hyperbola-1, a four-stage solid rocket, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 3:09 a.m. Eastern May 13. Apparent launch footage appeared on a Chinese social media site shortly after launch but a period of silence followed, extending well past when a similar launch could have been declared successful. The failure was confirmed by Chinese state media Xinhua four hours after the launch. Teams are investigating the specific reasons for the failure. The mission was the 16th orbital launch attempt from China in 2022. It was the first launch not relying on a Long March rocket and the first failure. The loss of what was expected to be a new remote sensing satellite for a commercial satellite developer and operator will be a blow to iSpace’s plans. Beijing-based iSpace became the first Chinese company outside the state-owned, traditional space sector to successfully launch a satellite into orbit in July 2019 . However, the firm suffered two subsequent failures in February and August of last year. The company is also developing the more complex Hyperbola-2 , a larger methane-liquid oxygen launcher with a reusable first stage. It secured $173 million in funding in August 2020 to boost its development. Vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) tests had been planned for 2021 following progress with testing of the methalox engines and software, grid fins and landing leg deployment, but updates have been sparse in recent months. The Hyperbola-2 will likely use the same new launch infrastructure recently constructed at Jiuquan to facilitate the Zhuque-2 , another methalox launcher developed by rival Landspace. That rocket could make its first launch attempt in the near future. Landspace and iSpace will face competition in liquid and reusable launch services from rivals including Galactic Energy , Deep Blue Aerospace , Space Pioneer and the reemergent Linkspace . Hyperbola-1 is one of a wave of new Chinese light-lift solid launchers to boost the country’s overall space capabilities, but the record is patchy so far. While the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, successfully operates the Long March 11 from inland sites and a sea platform , Kuaizhou-1A and Kuaizhou-11 rockets developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) and its affiliates remain grounded after failures in 2021 and 2020 respectively. Landspace dropped its plans to operate the Zhuque-1 solid rocket after its single launch and failure in 2018, while OneSpace has not attempted another orbital launch since its sole attempt in 2019. Galactic Energy, established after the early commercial movers noted above, has succeeded with both launches of its Ceres-1 rocket and plans a third around July. CAS Space, spun off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is preparing for its first mission, using the ZK-1A designed to carry up to 2 metric tons of payload to LEO, which would be China’s largest solid rocket when it lifts off in June or July. CASC spinoff China Rocket has launched one Jielong-1 (“Smart Dragon”) rocket and plans to launch the larger Jielong-3 in the second half of the year. China’s government has sought to foster commercial space ecosystems beyond the state sector dominated by CASC through incentives, policy support and a military-civil fusion technology transfer national strategy. The moves are seen as a response to the earlier rise of commercial space activities in the U.S. in the shape of SpaceX and others. The latest failure adds pressure on upcoming launches to deliver success. A policy shift in 2014 opened up portions of the space sector to private capital, with large funding rounds now becoming increasingly common. Chinese policy frameworks, including support for new infrastructures such as “satellite internet,” and localities seeking to attract high-end technology space firms, have supported the emergence of hundreds of companies in areas around launch, satellite and downstream applications, leading to the formation of several space industry clusters and pilot zones in China. Earlier reporting indicates that China sees a role for such companies in establishing a low Earth orbit communications megaconstellation and performing commercial missions to and from the Tiangong Chinese space station. CASC and affiliates of its sister defense giant CASIC have recently unveiled small satellite mass manufacturing capabilities to produce hundreds of satellites per year. For now, though, China will be looking to see which of the range of new launch service provider hopefuls can deliver reliability.
NASA’s InSight Mars lander mission will likely conclude by the end of the year as power levels for the spacecraft continue to decline, project officials confirmed May 17. At a briefing about the mission, which has been on the surface of Mars since November 2018, project leaders said science operations will likely end in July as the output of the spacecraft’s two solar panels, coated with dust, drops below critical levels. Increasing dust levels in the atmosphere from seasonal changes are exacerbating the power decline. In the next few weeks, controllers will start shutting down some science instruments while putting the lander’s robotic arm into a “retirement pose,” with the camera on it oriented to see the lander’s primary instrument, a seismometer. That seismometer, which has been running continuously for most of the mission, will shift into intermittent operations this summer to conserve power before shutting down completely later this summer. The shutdown of the seismometer, which would end science operations of the lander, could be as soon as early to mid-July, said Kathya Zamora Garcia, InSight deputy project manager. The project expects to maintain intermittent contact, including an occasional image from the camera, until late this year when power levels drop below what’s needed to operate altogether. There is some uncertainty in that schedule, including hope that the lander could operate longer. “We’re in an operating regime we’ve never been in before,” said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for InSight at JPL. “As the power goes down, we’re not actually sure exactly how well the spacecraft will perform. It’s exceeded our expectations at just about every turn on Mars. It may last longer than that.” The project has been warning for some time that, as dust continued to accumulate on the lander’s solar panels, power levels would drop and put the mission in jeopardy. Banerdt said at an advisory committee meeting in February that power levels would drop below what’s needed to operate science instruments in May or June , and below “survivability” for the lander itself by the end of the year. Banerdt and others had hoped for a “cleaning event” to remove dust from the panels, such as a dust devil or wind gust. The panels generated 5,000 watt-hours of energy per Martian day at landing, but now produce just a tenth of that. Even a modest cleaning event could increase power levels enough to keep the mission operating. Engineers tried other means to clean the solar arrays, using the robotic arm to scoop up regolith and drop it near the arrays, allowing the wind to pick up grains and bounce them off the arrays, jarring loose accumulated dust in the process. That created temporary boosts in power, which Garcia said provided another four to six weeks of operations of the lander’s instruments. Banerdt said, in retrospect, he wishes the lander had some sort of mechanism for cleaning dust from the arrays, but that was one of the trade-offs for the mission to fit within the cost cap of the Discovery program. “If we put more money into the solar arrays, we would have less to put into the science instruments, so we tried to find the right balance,” he said. Despite its impending demise, NASA called InSight a success, operating well beyond its primary mission of one Martian year. That assessment comes even though one of its major instruments, a heat flow probe, was unable to burrow into the surface as planned because of soil conditions not anticipated by instrument designers based on what had been seen at other landing sites on the planet. That success includes the strongest “Marsquake” measured to date by the lander May 4, estimated to be a magnitude 5. Banerdt said scientists are still analyzing the data to try and pinpoint the source of the quake, which appears to be outside a known fault zone. “There really hasn’t been too much doom and gloom on the team. We’re still focused on operating the spacecraft,” he added. “We’re still figuring out how to get the most science out of it.” The project hasn’t ruled out trying to restore contact with InSight next year should a cleaning event remove dust from the arrays. NASA’s recent senior review of planetary missions found that t here may be a slim possibility of doing so in mid-2023 after the winter season at the landing site . “The Martian environment is very uncertain. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Garcia said, with planned communications sessions just in case. “We’ll be listening.”
NASA is seeking informal public input on a set of 50 objectives for its exploration efforts that agency leadership says will go into a broader effort to guide its activities for the next two decades. NASA released May 17 a set of high-level objectives for its lunar and Mars exploration campaign. The agency also announced it was soliciting input on those objectives through its website until May 31. The 50 objectives, each just a sentence long, fall in four categories: transportation and habitation, lunar and Martian infrastructure, operations and science. Examples range from “develop cislunar systems that crew can routinely operate to lunar orbit and lunar surface for extended durations” to “develop and demonstrate entry, descent, and landing (EDL) systems capable of delivering crew and large cargo to the Martian surface.” NASA is eschewing a traditional request for information (RFI) approach for this effort, but said in its announcement that it follow up on the feedback with “stakeholder worships.” One, in June, will include domestic industry and academia, while a second, in July, will involve international organizations. “They’re going to act for us as the guideposts over the next two decades and the individual programs and projects and technologies advance, come on line and work together,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said of those objectives in a May 17 speech at the Humans to Mars Summit. “They’ll help ensure that the things that we’re doing are integrated and that we are focused on Mars as a target.” The feedback on the objectives, she added, is not linked to a procurement activity, hence the lack of a formal RFI. “It’s really building a consensus about what the things we need to demonstrate, develop and achieve,” she said. The release of the list of objectives appeared for many in the space community to come out of the blue, but is part of a broader effort within NASA to develop a long-term strategy for human space exploration as an alternative to the “roller-coaster ride” of changing goals and approaches that started with the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989, said Kurt (Spuds) Vogel, director of space architectures at NASA, in a 35-minute video released by the agency May 17. NASA, he said, wants to move from a “capabilities-based approach” it’s used for more than a decade, where advances are based on what resources are available. “That can be an OK approach, except that it’s not going to be moving out with purpose and it doesn’t fully support a long-term strategy,” he said. The agency instead is looking to shift to an objectives-based approach. The ultimate objective, he said, is to create a blueprint for sustained human presence and exploration throughout the solar system. The set of 50 objectives support that goal to support human missions to the moon and initial human missions to Mars. The feedback on the objectives will refine them and support a gap analysis, comparing them with existing programs. “The reality is that there is going to be some disconnects,” he said, including objectives not supported by any existing efforts. “In that case, we need to start something.” There’s also the opposite case, he said, of efforts that don’t appear to support any objectives. “Is that an effort we shouldn’t be doing, or is that effort really for something that we should be doing, but not for this program?” he said. “Or, are we missing an objective?” That gap analysis, he said, would take place later this year after ongoing refinements of the exploration architecture.
SEOUL, South Korea — The Philippines has approved plans that will see it become the first country in Southeast Asia to access SpaceX’s Starlink broadband services. The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) approved May 26 the registration of Starlink Internet Services Philippines Inc., a subsidiary of SpaceX that will provide the satellite broadband to the archipelago. The approval set the stage for the subsidiary to start providing Starlink services in the country, according to the government-funded Philippine News Agency . In a statement, the commission said it had approved Starlink’s registration as a “value-added service (VAS) provider,” enabling the company to “directly access satellite systems, and build and operate broadband facilities to offer internet services,” according to the news agency. “The NTC is steadfast in helping ensure that roll-out of Starlink’s internet access services will be done expeditiously and professionally,” NTC commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba said in the statement . “The NTC’s swift processing of Starlink’s VAS provider registration was meant to expedite the service”s immediate roll-out.” The commissioner said Starlink is expected to cover villages in urban and suburban areas and rural regions that remain unserved or underserved with internet access services. The Philippines’ internet penetration rate stood at 67% of the country’s 110 million population as of January 2021, according to data from DataReportal , an independent data collector. Starlink’s expansion into the country comes after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte signed legislation March 21 that allows up to 100% foreign ownership of public services in the Philippines. The amended Public Service Act encourages investments in telecoms, transport and other sectors deemed essential to public welfare. In a March 31 statement , Philippine Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said Starlink will “augment as well as complement existing broadband capacities” and “further capacitate micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), facilitate online learning, e-commerce and fintech.”
Lockheed Martin is working with the Filecoin Foundation to demonstrate a blockchain network in space, the organizations announced May 23 at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Joe Landon, vice president of advanced programs development at Lockheed Martin Space, said the goal of the project is to develop a mission to demonstrate the Interplanetary File System, or IPFS, in space. IPFS is an open-source network that stores information that can be shared by users . The Filecoin Foundation is an independent organization that facilitates governance of the Filecoin network — a blockchain-based cryptocurrency and digital payment system that builds on top of the IPFS. Landon said critical infrastructure is needed in space for accessing and sharing data. “Filecoin is a decentralized storage network built on top of IPFS,” he said. “The Filecoin network is powered by a blockchain-based protocol, which is used to incentivize independent storage providers to contribute storage and offer competitive deals to store customer data.” “We need to develop the technology to support a long-term presence in space without having to rely entirely on Earth-based communications and data storage,” he said. Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation, said t oday’s centralized internet model “just doesn’t work in space.” “Every time you click, that data has to be retrieved from a particular server in a particular place,” she said. “That means that if you’re on the moon, there’s going to be a multi second delay while that data travels from Earth, but with IPFS data isn’t retrieved by where it is, but rather by what it is, so it can be retrieved from whatever’s closest to you, eliminating that delay.” Over the next several months, Lockheed Martin and Filecoin will work to identify a spacecraft platform to host an IPFS payload that will relay data to and from Earth,and other spacecraft. “We are starting out with an exploration phase that will include scoping the technical work required and identifying the right demonstration mission,” said Belcher. “Once we have identified the appropriate mission or missions, we’ll have a longer-term timeline.” The initial payload demonstration is being planned for low Earth orbit. IPFS allows users to back up files and websites by hosting them across numerous nodes. Landon said this project aims to bring the benefits of decentralized storage systems to space. “Ultimately, by minimizing the number of times that data has to be transmitted to Earth and return to space, IPFS’s decentralized storage model will enable more efficient data transfer and communication in space,” he said. 
LONG BEACH, Calif. — When space companies began adopting additive manufacturing, the process was deemed high risk and reserved for relatively straightforward parts like satellite brackets. Now, spacecraft developers are more likely to print sophisticated engine nozzles and other complex spacecraft components. “Additive manufacturing opens the window to make very complex parts very rapidly,” Stan Bouslog, NASA Johnson Space Center Entry Descent & Landing and Thermal Protection System discipline lead, said May 25 at the Space Tech Expo here. Instead of designing complex parts in pieces for later assembly, additive manufacturing allows engineers to produce parts and test them in overall systems. “If it doesn’t work, I can change that very complex part very quickly and replace it with another part,” Bouslog said. “It makes iteration in your system design process much more rapid.” Still, additive manufacturing will be employed alongside traditional subtractive-manufacturing processes for the foreseeable future. “Subtractive is not going anywhere,” said Paul Davies, Sandvik Additive Manufacturing technical solutions manager. “But there is an excellent synergy with additive manufacturing, because there’s still requirements for engineering interfaces, for threads. How to machine additively manufacturing parts is actually new knowledge that needs to be gathered.” Relativity Space was founded on the idea of flying the world’s first entirely 3D-printed rocket. Employees recognized early on, though, that the first iteration of the rocket “was probably not going to be fully 3D printed because not all the materials were available for 3D printing and not all the additive manufacturing processes were ready for what we wanted to do,” said Eliana Fu, former Relativity Space senior engineer for additive technologies and current aerospace industry manager for German machine manufacturer Trumpf. “So there was going to be a mixture of traditional and additive manufacturing. As a team, you have to look at what makes sense on a case-by-case basis.” Additive manufacturing technology is progressing rapidly for various materials. Metal additive manufacturing is mature and ceramics “are an up and coming technology,” said Mark Shaw, GE Additive government programs and technology director. “With our composite manufacturing capability we actually incorporate carbon fibers, for example, into the ceramic matrix.” GE Aviation won FAA certification for an additively manufactured heat exchanger for the GE9X engine that is smaller, lighter and offers higher thermal density than previous heat exchangers. That’s the type of complex part that makes sense for additive manufacturing, Shaw said. Still, there are times when it makes sense to additively manufacture simple parts like brackets. Some military aircraft built decades ago can no longer fly because of a lack of parts. “It actually does make sense to print that bracket if there’s no other way to do it,” Shaw said.
Rocket Lab, the company best known for its Electron small launch vehicle, generated most of its first quarter revenue from other space systems and not launch itself. In quarterly earnings released May 16, Rocket Lab reported $40.7 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2022, a net loss of $26.7 million and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $8 million. The earnings revealed a striking difference between the company’s two main lines of business, launch and space systems. That latter category, which includes its Photon spacecraft and components business, generated $34.1 million in revenue in the quarter. Launch provided only $6.6 million from a single Electron launch. That split reflects an aggressive diversification strategy that accelerated after the company went public in August 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) merger. Since the merger closed, Rocket Lab acquired flight software company Advanced Solutions Inc. , satellite separation system manufacturer Planetary Systems Corporation and solar panel manufacturer SolAero Holdings . The SolAero deal closed in the first quarter. The closing of the SolAero acquisition was a major factor in the sharp increase in the company’s backlog, from $241 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021 to $546 million at the end of the first quarter. The other major contributor was a $143 million contract the company won from Canadian company MDA in February to produce 17 spacecraft for Globalstar. The company projects that revenue difference to continue in the second quarter, although not nearly as pronounced. The company forecasts $51 million to $54 million in revenue in the second quarter, with space systems generating $32 million to $35 million and launch $19 million. The launch revenue comes from three Electron launches scheduled for the second quarter, two of which have already taken place. The third is the Electron launch of NASA’s CAPSTONE lunar smallsat mission, scheduled for the end of May. Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer, said on the company’s earnings call there is a possibility of a fourth launch in the quarter, a mission for an unidentified government customer in late June. The company is not including that launch in its revenue forecast for the quarter. Rocket Lab recognizes launch revenue in the quarter the launch takes place, which can result in significant variations from quarter to quarter depending on when launches take place. The first launch of the second quarter, carrying two BlackSky imaging satellites, took place in early April but was postponed from late March because of weather, causing the quarter in which the revenue was recognized to shift from the first to the second quarter. Launch cadence is “dominated by customer readiness,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab chief executive, on the call. “Launch is always a little bit lumpy.” There is also a variation in revenue per launch, company executives acknowledged. The CAPSTONE launch is valued at about $10 million under the contract NASA awarded in 2020. However, Spice said that the company’s previous launch May 2, carrying 34 smallsats, produced only a “de minimis” amount of revenue. “That was primarily an R&D platform. It had relatively small revenue contribution,” he said. “It wasn’t a regular launch at all.” Catch catchup Rocket Lab treated that launch differently because it was the company’s first attempt to catch the rocket’s first stage in midair during its descent using a helicopter, part of its strategy to reuse the boosters. The helicopter did catch the booster, but released it seconds later when the pilot was concerned that the load of the booster on the helicopter was different from that experienced in tests. “Quite frankly, I would have been pretty happy if we had only just sighted the stage coming back from the helicopter, but to actually catch it on the first go was a tremendous feat,” Beck said on the call. With the catch and release, he said the company is about 90% to its ultimate goal of catching a booster in midair, returning it to land and reusing it. The booster on this launch was recovered from the water shortly after splashdown and engineers are inspecting it to see what components could potentially be reused. The booster was in “extraordinarily good” condition, he said. “If we held that in the hook and brought it home, we’d be seriously thinking about putting that thing back on the pad.” Beck didn’t give a schedule for attempting another midair booster recovery, saying the company wanted to first do more practices with the helicopter. The company won’t attempt recovery of the booster on the upcoming CAPSTONE launch. “We’ll make a few tweaks and get back out there in the not-too-distant future for another attempt.” In the long term, Beck estimated that the company will attempt recovery on about half of all Electron launches. The recovery systems reduce the vehicle’s payload by 10% to 15%, he said, and some customers need all of Electron’s performance for their missions. Spice said the company would likely use a booster first on missions with lower performance requirements that enable reusability, then at the end of its life launch on a mission whose higher performance needs would rule out recovery.
As House and Senate conferees begin work to reconcile competitiveness bills, industry groups are pushing Congress to either include a NASA authorization bill in that legislation or pass a standalone bill. A conference committee that includes more than 100 members of the House and Senate met for the first time May 12 to discuss reconciling the Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) with the House’s America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength (COMPETES) Act. Both are broad-ranging competitiveness bills, but with differences that conferees will seek to hammer out in the coming weeks. Among the differences is that USICA includes a NASA authorization act, whose provisions include language authorizing NASA to select a second company for its Human Landing System program. Senators soundly defeated an effort by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) May 4 to instruct conferees to strip that provision from the final bill . The House’s America COMPETES Act does not include a NASA authorization. In opening remarks at the May 12 conference committee meeting, senators emphasized the importance of including a NASA authorization in the final bill. “Over the past several years, I have worked to ensure NASA missions have continued to progress forward without a NASA authorization,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA. “However, when you can present a bipartisan authorization followed up with the funding of programs, it sends a strong signal to the agency, industry and our global partners that we remain committed in accomplishing our stated missions.” House members, though, suggested they were not willing to simply accept the Senate’s NASA authorization language. “This highlights the need for us to get a NASA authorization done,” said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), ranking member of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, after discussing concerns about China “setting the rules” in space. “However, House priorities must be reflected in that final bill.” There is interest in passing some kind of NASA authorization in the House. “Is it good to have an authorization? Absolutely. It provides the agency, stakeholders and the public a common understanding of NASA’s goals and a reaffirmation of them,” said Tom Hammond, a member of the House space subcommittee staff, during a May 17 panel discussion at the Humans to Mars Summit. NASA does not require annual reauthorizations, unlike the Defense Department, he noted, but added it’s been five years since the last NASA authorization act. “I think NASA would benefit from a reauthorization right now,” he said. “Everyone I’ve talked with on Capitol Hill is interested doing an authorization to provide that continuity and reaffirmation.” Industry groups are also pushing for a NASA reauthorization of some kind. In a May 18 letter , a dozen groups, including the Aerospace Industries Association, Coalition for Deep Space Exploration and Satellite Industry Association, called on Congress to pass a NASA authorization bill. The groups mentioned various developments since the last NASA authorization in 2017, from the Artemis program to Mars exploration, that warrant a new bill. “A new authorization will provide clear bipartisan direction to build from these developments and set the stage for the next decade of accomplishments,” the letter states. The letter doesn’t advocate for any specific provisions in a bill because individual groups have different priorities, it states, nor does it take a stance on whether to include a NASA authorization in the final version of the bill that emerges from the conference committee or as a standalone bill. However, the letter states, “all agree a new NASA Authorization is long overdue.” In the meantime, NASA policy is shaped by annual appropriations bills. “Budget is policy and appropriations is policy,” said Jean Toal Eisen, staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice and science subcommittee, which funds NASA, at the Humans to Mars Summit. “To the extent that we have a roadmap from the authorizers, we also need the appropriations resources to meet that roadmap to get and maintain momentum.” She said the agency was at an “interesting point” given recent achievements and upcoming milestones like the Artemis 1 launch later this year, creating bipartisan support for NASA’s robotic and human exploration plans. “I do think there is a policy momentum that is shared with the authorizers and is shared across the House and Senate.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Ball Aerospace and Raytheon Intelligence & Space will begin developing ocean color sensors for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s next generation of geostationary weather satellites under contracts announced May 26. Under the firm-fixed-price contracts awarded by NASA, NOAA’s partner for the acquisition, each company will receive approximately $5.2 million to perform a definition-phase study of a passive imaging radiometer to provide frequent observations of ocean biology, chemistry and ecology. The ocean color instrument, known as OCX is a new addition to NOAA’s geostationary fleet. The future constellation, called Geostationary and Extended Observations or GeoXO, will gather data related to ocean productivity, ecosystem change, coastal and inland water quality, seafood safety and hazards like harmful algal blooms. Beginning in the early 2030s, NOAA plans to operate three GeoXO satellites. Two will be flown over the Eastern and Western United States, like the current GOES-R series, plus a third satellite over the central United States. The OCX instrument will gather imagery in the ultraviolet through near infrared spectral bands. Ball and Raytheon will have 20 months to define the instrument’s potential performance, risks, cost and development schedule. Based on the industry studies, NOAA will establish requirements for the OCX instrument implementation contract, which the agency plans to award in 2024. Ball and Raytheon won contracts earlier this month to begin developing GeoXO Atmospheric Composition instruments. Ball also is working on a definition Phase A study of a geostationary sounder for the GeoXO constellation. NASA awarded contracts valued at approximately $8 million apiece to Ball and to L3Harris in October. Raytheon is building a weather satellite prototype for the U.S. Space Force.
A Chinese satellite electric propulsion company has secured multi-million yuan angel round financing amid a proliferation of Chinese constellation plans. Kongtian Dongli (“Aerospace propulsion”) was established in March 2022. The round was led by Jinshajiang Hongyu and MiraclePlus, according to Chinese media reports . The company’s main products are Hall thrusters and microwave electric propulsion systems, with an on-orbit test of the latter planned before December this year. Few entities are engaged in propulsion for small satellites in China, but the demand for such systems is apparent. China has established a state-owned enterprise to manage a national satellite internet constellation of up to 13,000 satellites. China SatNet has been engaging with commercial companies as it develops a blueprint for constructing the “Guowang” constellation. Notably, these and other small satellites will be required to have onboard propulsion to reduce the chances of collision and mitigate the issue of debris in low Earth orbit. A “notice on promoting the orderly development of small satellites” ( Chinese ) issued in May 2021 states that small satellites should be capable of collision avoidance maneuvers, as well as lowering orbits following the end of missions. State departments may take relevant “appropriate measures” if a company does not track, report on, and deorbit its satellites. A number of commercial actors, sometimes in partnership with state-owned groups, are also developing low Earth orbit constellations for communications, remote sensing , navigation enhancement and more. The core of Kongtian Dongli’s personnel come from China’s state-owned space sector, many of which have previously been engaged in domestic satellite electric propulsion research and development. The company is also engaged in the development of ramjet engines for both military and civilian uses. China’s traditional space sector has demonstrated capabilities in ion propulsion, with the Shanghai Spaceflight Power Machinery Institute, the Center for Space Science and Applied Research (CSSAR) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Lanzhou Institute of Physics have all developed electric propulsion systems, some of which are now operational on the Chinese space station. Northwestern Polytechnical University, Beihang University and Tsinghua University are also engaged in research. Spacety, a Changsha-based small satellite startup, has successfully tested in orbit iodine thrusters developed by French startup ThrustMe, and has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Italian propulsion firm T4i. Spacety recently tested a xenon hall thruster provided by the giant state-owned enterprise China Electronics Technology Group (CETC) on its Chaohu-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite. Spacety is working with CETC’s 38th institute to build a 96-satellite “ Tianxian ” SAR constellation. China has been seeking to foster a commercial sector with sustainable supply chains and ecosystems, including launch, small satellites and downstream applications. Electric propulsion is another area in which new capabilities and mass manufacturing are required to support nascent commercial space activities, with others such as space situational awareness (SSA) likely to see new entrants as the sector grows.
HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Launcher won a $1.7 million contract from the U.S. Space Force that will assist the company’s development of a high-performance rocket engine for its small launch vehicle. Launcher announced May 25 it received the SBIR Phase 2B tactical funding increase, or TACFI, award from the Space Force earlier this month to accelerate work on the company’s E-2 engine. That includes full-duration testing of the engine’s turbopump and long-duration testing of the combustion chamber. The company has been testing the engine at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, including a test in April where the engine generated its full thrust of about 22,000 pounds-force. The engine features a combustion chamber 3D-printed using a copper alloy and runs on liquid oxygen and RP-1 propellants. Launcher won another SBIR award from the Air Force in 2019 , valued at $1.5 million, for E-2 engine development. “That was a really big boost for us in validation and funding,” Max Haot, founder and chief executive of Launcher, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters here. “We’re excited that they were pleased with our performance and that they wanted to sponsor us for another one.” “What we’re doing now is taking it to the next level, which is a long-duration test and the turbopump,” he said of the new award. “We’re also excited that they see the value of the staged combustion engine and its high performance.” Launcher has emphasized the high performance of the E-2 compared to other engines that use kerosene and liquid oxygen. The company says the E-2 has a specific impulse at sea level of 288 seconds, and 326 seconds in vacuum. That outperforms other American engines, including SpaceX’s Merlin, and is behind only the Russian RD-180. The E-2 will power Launcher Light, the small launch vehicle the company is developing for a first flight in 2024. A single engine will power the first stage of the vehicle, an approach Haot said offers simplicity compared to alternative designs that use clusters of smaller engines, while also enabling the company to later scale up to a larger launch vehicle with the same engine. Launcher is working on Launcher Light and the E-2 engine in parallel with Orbiter, an orbital transfer vehicle that will first fly later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission . Orbiter will later be used on Launcher Light missions as well. Both Launcher Light and Orbiter, Haot said, are designed to serve a demand for space access that is not being met despite the dozens of other companies working on similar vehicles. “The conflict in Ukraine has made it clear that launch vehicles and access to space is strategic,” he said. Even with dozens of launch vehicle startups, few have made it into service. “To me, the world is asking where are the rockets, not that there are too many.” That will continue, he said, even amid concerns about a recession. “In terms of the government outlook, as a customer, I certainly don’t see any slowdown,” he said. “For commercial, maybe there will be fewer startups for a few years. But the launch capacity is not there for what is being built today and for the next 5 to 10 years.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Spire Global said May 10 it is installing Ku-band antennas from fellow smallsat operator Kepler Communications on at least three satellites to offer higher capacity data services beginning next year. Their deal enables Spire to add high-speed Ku-band capabilities to its fleet in low Earth orbit under Kepler’s existing regulatory licenses, and includes an option to scale up to 50 satellites. U.S.-based Spire currently provides weather and tracking services with more than 100 satellites in LEO that transmit data in UHF, S and X-bands. The company also provides a service that offers its technology, ground station network and automated operations systems to others for deploying their own applications and sensors to orbit relatively quickly. With a Ku-band software-defined radio from Canada-based Kepler, a Spire satellite would be able to send larger amounts of data back to Earth for more data-intensive operations. Spire head of communications Hillary Yaffe said the Ku-band payload will benefit customers that include Canadian startup NorthStar Earth & Space, which March 16 said Spire will deliver and operate satellites focused on space situational awareness and debris monitoring. Spire’s deal with NorthStar is for an initial three 12-unit cubesats for launch in 2023, with an option to expand to a full constellation of dozens of satellites. Service expansion Kepler said its 19 satellites each have a variant of the Ku-band payload for a constellation that generates most of its revenues from providing connectivity to devices beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. The Canadian company has been seeking to expand into new markets after raising $60 million in June, including plans for data-relay services with an S-band terminal that successfully tested inter-satellite links earlier this year. In a separate deal announced Dec. 16, Kepler said it plans to test its data relay terminal on a Spire nanosatellite slated to launch late in 2022. Flown as a hosted payload, Kepler’s new Ku-band service includes the ground infrastructure needed to provide an end-to-end data transmission service. Mina Mitry, Kepler’s CEO, said undisclosed customers are already using the Ku-band terminals on its satellites to “transmit large quantities of data point-to-point across the globe quickly.” These customers are using a new service Kepler calls Global Data Services (GDS), he said, which is designed to be compatible with third-party fixed, maritime and next-generation flat panel antennas. According to Kepler, GDS has achieved more than 300 megabits per second (Mbps) of data speeds from LEO to a 3.4-meter dish on the ground with its Ku-band technology — and 240 Mbps on a Kymeta flat panel antenna. “GDS has helped our customers move data and given us valuable flight heritage for our next generation Ku-Band service – testing and validating the technology on the 19 satellites on-orbit,” Mitry said via email. He declined to disclose a dollar value for its Ku-band antenna contract with Spire, which went public in August by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The first Spire satellites with Ku-band service are slated to launch in early 2023. While the standard version of Kepler’s Ku-band software-defined radio is designed for satellites in LEO, Mitry said its in-house manufacturing capabilities enable the company to adapt the technology for other orbits and customer needs.
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Broader economic issues as well as the performance of some space companies could slow the growth of the industry in the next few years, executives warn. During a panel discussion at the Space Tech Expo here May 25, Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, warned that the industry is not immune from broader economic issues like supply chain disruptions, inflation and growing concerns about a recession. “We’re seeing right now a bit of a chilling going on within the industry,” he said. “This heating up of the market that we saw in the last couple of years when times were a little bit better, COVID excepted, is starting to level off a little bit.” “There’s going to be a little bit of a lull, if you will, over the next year or two, and then things should start picking back up again,” he said. “It’s still growing. It’s just not growing as fast as we were expecting or hoping two years ago or one year ago.” A factor in any slowdown, he said, could be a decrease in capital available to invest in startups. “If that starts to slow down,” he said, “that cools down the progress that a lot of us are making.” Some are worried that investor interest in space companies in general, regardless of economic conditions, could be diminishing. Jordan Noone, co-founder and general partner of Embedded Ventures and a co-founder of Relativity Space, said at another conference panel May 24 that the performance of space companies that have gone public in the last year through mergers with special purpose acquisition corporations (SPACs) could deter more investment. Those companies have, in general, seen sharp declines in stock prices over the last several months. “The fact that the space SPAC community had some of the worst returns and worst exposure once those companies became public is going to haunt the growth investor community for 5 or 10 years,” he said. Those investors, he said, may go back to “safe investments” in information technology fields rather than invest further in space if it’s seen as riskier, causing the industry to lose some of the momentum it’s gained in recent years. “The growth investors have all been spooked.” Rocket Lab is one of those companies that went public through a SPAC merger. While it has done better than many of its peers, its stock price has been sliding for several months, and is now at less than half the $10-per-share value of the original SPAC. “It’s a hard path,” Hoffman said of going public. “You better have your business in order before you do that if you want to survive, let alone thrive.” He noted the company has taken steps to diversify its business and serve a wider range of markets. “You’re building in diversity because those markets tend to rise and fall on different cycles,” he said. “You don’t get yourself caught up in just one single cycle.” Not everyone is pessimistic about the market. In a May 24 interview, Max Haot, chief executive of Launcher, said his company is seeing strong demand that likely will remain the case because of the strategic importance of space, citing the role commercial satellites have played in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We’re very bullish on the market,” he said. “We’ll see what happens with the economy, but it’s certainly the right sector to be in at this time.”
Members of the House Science Committee used a hearing about the planetary science decadal survey to criticize a proposal in NASA’s budget request to delay work on a space telescope to track near Earth objects (NEOs). The fiscal year 2023 budget request, released March 28, proposed just $39.9 million for NEO Surveyor, compared to the request of $143.2 million for the mission in 2022. NASA had projected spending $174.2 million on the mission in 2023 in the runout included in its fiscal year 2022 budget request. The funding decrease, NASA said in the request, reflected plans to delay the mission by two years, with a launch now no earlier than 2028. NEO Surveyor would place a small telescope with infrared detectors in space to more effectively search for NEOs and meet a goal established in a 2005 NASA authorization act to detect 90% of potentially hazardous objects at least 140 meters across. That delay, as well as plans to terminate a Mars orbiter called the International Mars Ice Mapper, was needed “to support higher priority missions” in NASA’s planetary science portfolio, including Mars Sample Return and Europa Clipper, the agency explained in the budget submission. Weeks later, though, the planetary science decadal survey endorsed continued development of NEO Surveyor . “NASA should fully support the development, timely launch, and subsequent operation of NEO Surveyor to achieve the highest priority planetary defense NEO survey goals,” the final report of the decadal survey stated. Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), ranking member of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, mentioned the conflict between the decadal survey’s recommendations and the budget proposal at a May 26 hearing about the report. “The recommendation to fully support the development, timely launch and subsequent operation of the NEO Surveyor mission is particularly important as NASA proposes to slash the NEO Surveyor mission budget and even reprogram existing appropriated funds from the current fiscal year,” he said in his opening statement. Such a reprogramming would have to be approved by Congress in an operating plan for fiscal year 2022 yet to be released by the agency. Later in the hearing, one of the co-chairs of the decadal survey steering committee reaffirmed its support for NEO Surveyor. “Our report strongly endorsed that mission,” said Philip Christensen of Arizona State University. “The consensus was very much that this is an important mission. It’s crucial to the people here on Earth. We need to understand and identify these objects.” “We continue to urge NASA and Congress to ensure that that mission gets funded and launched in a timely fashion,” he said in response to a question from Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member of the full committee. Lucas then asked if that meant that Congress should maintain funding for the mission to keep it on its earlier schedule. “We think it needs to happen and it should happen quickly,” Christensen responded. Neither House nor Senate appropriators brought up NEO Surveyor during their hearings earlier in the month on the NASA budget request, or have released details yet about their appropriations bills for fiscal year 2023. There was broad support in general for the recommendations of the decadal survey at the hearing, with only a few questions. Babin did ask about the report’s conclusion that cost caps for the Discovery and New Frontiers lines of competed planetary science missions be raised, to $800 million for Discovery and $1.6 billion for New Frontiers. Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute, the other co-chair of the decadal, said the proposed increase reflected a desire to include all costs, including operations, within the cap. “The intent is to get the cost cap back in line with what the true life cycle costs for these missions is turning out to be,” she said, noting that recent missions in both programs have had total costs that “are consistent with the cost cap structure we propose in the report this time.”
TAMPA, Fla. — British microlauncher startup Orbex unveiled a full-scale prototype May 11 of what it hopes will be the first-ever vertical rocket launched to orbit from British soil. The 19-meter two-stage Prime orbital rocket was successfully integrated and delivered to its dedicated pad on the north coast of Scotland, paving the way for tests ahead of the company’s maiden flight slated this year or early 2023. In addition to integrated rocket tests, Prime’s debut also depends on regulatory approvals and facilities still under construction at its Space Hub Sutherland launch site. Parts of the prototype could be used for Prime’s maiden mission, according to Orbex Chris Larmour, depending on the state of various hardware elements after integration tests. Larmour said Prime’s first flight will be a dedicated launch for Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. The British smallsat pioneer has not said much about the mission, other than it will use the Orbex Prime rocket to deploy an “experimental payload” to low Earth orbit (LEO). Prime’s six first-stage engines are intended to propel the vehicle to around 80 kilometers, where its single-engine second stage will complete the journey to LEO for releasing its payload. The rocket’s first- and second-stage engines are powered by renewable biopropane fuel that Orbex says significantly reduces carbon emissions for Prime compared with other similar-sized rockets under development. According to Orbex, its pad at Space Hub Sutherland is also the first and only spaceport worldwide that has committed to being carbon-neutral in its construction and operation. Larmour said the company has customers in place for six launches so far and “some more pending” for mostly communications and Earth-observation use cases. Prime is designed to launch payloads with masses of 10-180 kilograms for formats ranging from a single so-called PocketQube measuring 5 centimeters on each side, to 16U smallsats offering the same volume as 16 standard cubesats measuring 10 centimeters a side. Space Hub Sutherland was the first vertical spaceport to receive planning permission from the British government, and is one of seven potential spaceport sites under development across the United Kingdom. California-based Astra said May 10 it plans to perform launches in 2023 at SaxaVord Spaceport, located in the northernmost part of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. SaxaVord Spaceport has also been chosen by U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin and ABL Space Systems for the RS1 rocket’s first UK launch, scheduled for later this year. However, ABL’s first RS1 launch — from Kodiak Island, Alaska — has been delayed following a test accident in January . Meanwhile, Virgin Orbit expects to launch the first commercial rocket from the U.K. this summer with its LauncherOne air-launch system, which is due to deploy payloads from Spaceport Cornwall in southwest England using a modified Boeing 747 aircraft. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
WASHINGTON – During a hearing May 13 of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) asked Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to lay out the next steps in the possible relocation of U.S. Space Command. “Assuming that the GAO does not recommend overturning the original basing decision” to move Space Command from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, Aderholt asked, how long will it take to get this done? “We’re all hoping to move forward with a final decision as quickly as we can,” Kendall told Aderholt. The Government Accountability Office has completed one of two independent investigations of how the Air Force determined its preferred location for U.S. Space Command. Alleging that the former Trump administration improperly influenced the decision, Colorado lawmakers asked GAO and the Defense Department’s inspector general to review the process that led the Air Force in January 2021 to recommend Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The IG said in a report last week that investigators found no evidence of undue influence. Many of the details of how six candidate bases were scored and comments made by senior U.S. military officials were redacted from the IG report. The GAO report also is being heavily redacted. T he Defense Department designated it CUI, short for c ontrolled but unclassified information. “We are working as quickly as we can to develop a public version of our report; I anticipate that will be coming in the next few weeks,” a GAO spokesperson told SpaceNews . GAO has shared its report with members of Congress and staff who requested it and “who demonstrated a need to know,” the GAO spokesperson said. One of the lawmakers who briefed on the GAO report, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), said GAO “confirmed that during the U.S. Air Force’s comprehensive process, Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama was the highest scoring location in the evaluation phase, the highest ranked location in the selection phase, and the location with the most advantages in the final decision matrix.” He also said the GAO was “critical of eleventh hour attempts to elevate a much lower ranked installation into the number two position. That artificial action gave the appearance of bias.” Kendall said at the HAC-D hearing that his office had not yet reviewed all the final reports. Under the standard basing process, the next step would be to conduct an environmental review “as well as looking at some other considerations before we finalize the decision,” he said. The 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions. Normally, that process would take about four months total, Kendall said. Three months would be needed to complete the assessment and a month to allow public comments. “I’m very hopeful that one way or the other, we get a final decision within the next several months,” he said. If Redstone Arsenal passes the environmental review and no major issues emerge, the new headquarters would still take several years to stand up. Kendall noted a new building would have to be constructed that meets the requirements of a military command headquarters.
LONG BEACH, Calif. – A panel of space logistics experts underscored the importance of open standards to encourage the growth of the market. Over the long term, open standards are necessary “if we really want to build infrastructure in space,” Karol Janik, technology manager for the Manufacturing Technology Centre, an independent U.K. research and technology organization, said May 25 at the Space Tech Expo here. While not all space systems will be standardized, interfacing parts and communications are likely to follow standards, he added. Al Tadros, Redwire chief technology officer, emphasized the benefit of competition. “Over the last decade, I think we’ve all benefited from having both Android and iOS platforms because of the competitiveness,” Tadros said. “They can coexist. You can call each other on the phones and share information across platforms.” NASA generally has endorsed open systems like the International Docking System Standard for the International Space Station. In addition, the space agency is supporting efforts to standardize spacecraft fill and drain valves, said Brian Roberts, deputy director for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Exploration and In-space Services Projects Division. “You can still have innovative and maybe even proprietary systems behind that interface,” Roberts said. “For docking, for example, as long as you have the interface to dock, you can put all the proprietary stuff that makes you unique on the other side of the interface.” NanoRacks grappled with the question of open systems years ago when the company developed microgravity research modules for ISS called Nanolabs. “We made the decision not to patent that,” said Mike Lewis, Nanoracks chief innovation officer. “Through that, we succeeded in building our own competitors. It’s the rising tide that raises all boats. The more companies that are doing things in space to advance science and research, the better.” Robert Hauge, president of SpaceLogistics, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, is eager to see standards adopted for satellite refueling as well as a power and data port. “There is no space logistics market right now,” Hauge said. “We’re all postulating that it is going to be there.” To help make that happen, spacecraft need to have standardized ports. “If we have those on spacecraft, companies will have the opportunity to take advantage of that,” Hauge said. “They won’t have to be spacecraft manufacturers to get into this business.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Becoming a space sector entrepreneur requires creativity, courage and stamina. At the Space Tech Expo May 24, space industry executives and startup founders shared advice for fledgling startups. Entrepreneurs need to understand their prospective customers, said Andre Doumitt, Aerospace Corp. Director of Innovation Development. “What are they actually trying to get done and how do they do it?” Doumitt asked. “If your product or service can eliminate or reduce friction points in that workflow, quantify it in terms of dollars, time or people. That’s traction.” In some cases, an entrepreneur may have a great idea, but the timing may wrong. “Sometimes you can bring the audience along and sometimes you can’t,” said Melissa Rowe, RAND Corp. vice president for global research talent. “Then you may have to pivot. You may have to start working on a different problem that you’re not as interested in before you get to the problem that you are.” Advisors and mentors can help. “An entrepreneur coming fresh into the space industry is going to take a long time to figure out the ecosystem,” Doumitt said. “We at Aerospace Corporation as well as the Space Force, SpaceWERX and other government customers can help.” Jason Achilles Mezilis, owner of startup Zandef Deksit Inc., who moderated the panel, said he relies on the advice of Doumitt, Rowe and Rex Ridenoure, CEO of consulting firm IZUP LLC. Mezilis, a professional musician, got involved in the space sector in 2016. Through extensive research and cold calls to people at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mezilis found a role helping design the microphone for the Perseverance Mars rover. People who don’t have mentors may want to begin contacting people on LinkedIn. First, though, it’s extremely important to do your homework, Rowe said. Ridenoure received valuable advice decades ago from rocket propulsion engineer Gil Moore of Utah State University who told a group of young engineers, “It’s not all about who you know. It’s about who you know that knows what you know.” “His point was that you have to know something to bring to the table,” Ridenoure said. “Then, you have to network with other people that know that. If they appreciate what you know, they will plug you in to other people and it just starts snowballing.” Ali Baghchehsara, founder and president of propulsion startup Plasmos, relies on the expertise of advisors. Dirk Hoke, the former Airbus Defence and Space CEO, who will chair Plasmos’ board , will help the company navigate space and defense. Baghchehsara’s background is in aviation. For plasma science expertise, Baghchehsara will rely on Plasmos’ new chief scientist Richard Wirz, who leads the University of California, Los Angeles, Plasma and Space Propulsion Laboratory. “Richard will guide us through the testing and development cycles of the company to get that right faster,” Baghchehsara wrote on LinkedIn. “Plasmos also agrees to purchase certain technologies he has had developed over the years to help the company go faster in its journeys and help plasma propulsion become a solution satellite manufacturing companies will want to use.” Entrepreneurs also must remain flexible because in many cases startups have to pivot. To make that easier, Rowe suggests that entrepreneurs write personal mission statements. “It can be that guiding star that also allows you to do those pivots and not feel like you just threw everything away.” Rowe said. “It’s bigger than any single idea.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. — The launch of a NASA mission to the asteroid Psyche has been delayed at least a month and a half because of a problem with the spacecraft’s software, the agency confirmed May 23. In a brief statement to SpaceNews, NASA said it has delayed the launch of the Psyche spacecraft, previously scheduled for Aug. 1, until no earlier than Sept. 20 to address the problem. The delay was first reported by Spaceflight Now . “An issue is preventing confirmation that the software controlling the spacecraft is functioning as planned. The team is working to identify and correct the issue,” the agency said in a statement, but did not elaborate on the specific issue or how it is being corrected. NASA did not immediately respond to follow-up questions, including the duration of the launch window. NASA has not yet formally announced the slip in the launch. The website for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory still lists an Aug. 1 launch for the mission as of early May 24. The last agency update on the mission, published May 2 , discussed the spacecraft’s shipment from JPL to the Kennedy Space Center to begin preparations for its launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. “Not yet public, we’re working on it,” tweeted Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for the mission at Arizona State University, in response to a question May 23 about the delay and the mission’s launch window. NASA selected Psyche in January 2017 as one of two Discovery-class planetary science missions , along with the Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. At the time of selection, Psyche was scheduled to launch in 2023 and arrive at the main belt asteroid Psyche in 2030. However, NASA and the project agreed to move up the launch one year, revising its trajectory to allow it to arrive at Psyche in 2026 after a Mars flyby in 2023. Psyche the spacecraft will orbit Psyche the asteroid for at least 21 months, studying the large, metallic asteroid that may be the remnant of a protoplanetary core. The spacecraft will also test a payload called Deep Space Optical Communication that uses lasers to provide high-bandwidth communications with Earth. At the mission’s Key Decision Point C review in 2019, NASA estimated a total lifecycle cost of $996.4 million for Psyche. A Government Accountability Office report a year ago on cost and schedule performance of NASA programs stated that the mission’s estimated cost had since declined slightly, to $957.6 million, reflecting the cost of the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle NASA selected for the mission in 2020. JPL is responsible for overall management of Psyche, including engineering, integration and testing. Maxar built the spacecraft bus.
Boeing and United Launch Alliance say they remain committed to launching future CST-100 Starliner commercial crew missions on Atlas 5 rockets even after that vehicle is effectively retired for other missions. As with the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) mission in late 2019, an Atlas 5 launched Starliner on the OFT-2 mission May 19 . Boeing has a contract with ULA to launch both the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, the first Starliner mission to carry astronauts, and six operational or post-certification missions on Atlas 5 vehicles as well. With NASA planning to alternate between Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for International Space Station crew rotation missions once Starliner is certified, each flying once a year, it implies that Atlas 5 launches of Starliner could continue well into the latter half of the decade. ULA, which has stopped selling Atlas 5 launches, has previously discussed phasing out Atlas 5 in favor of Vulcan Centaur around the middle of the decade. NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel raised concerns about how delays in Starliner’s development might affect the availability of the Atlas 5 at its May 12 meeting. “Any further delays with Starliner launches would exacerbate this concern,” said David West, a member of the panel, adding that certifying Vulcan for crewed launches “could take years.” At a May 17 prelaunch briefing, NASA and ULA officials said that all the remaining Starliner missions under contract, including CFT and the six post-certification missions, would remain on Atlas 5 regardless of schedule. “From a resource perspective, we have measures in place to protect the talent and to ensure we retain the critical skills to be able to fly an Atlas as late as we need to,” said Gary Wentz, vice president of government and commercial programs at ULA. “We’re in conversations with Boeing and other customers for that capability.” Even at a pace of one mission a year, though, and with no other customers for Starliner, the supply of Atlas vehicles would be exhausted before the projected retirement of the ISS in 2030. “We would look, toward the end of the decade, to award other flights, or have other flights potentially for Boeing,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager. “We would look for a new system.” He added NASA would support human-rating a new system “when Boeing and ULA are ready.” ULA has not announced plans to human-rate Vulcan. However, Wentz said that “over 90%” of Vulcan Centaur hardware is already flying on Atlas 5, simplifying any human-rating process. One key change, he said, would be transferring the emergency detection system currently on Atlas, which alerts the spacecraft of any problems with the rocket to trigger its abort system, to Vulcan. The other major change, he said, would be human-rating the BE-4 engines used on Vulcan’s first stage. Boeing may not be the only customer, or even the first, to seek human-rating of Vulcan. Sierra Space is planning a crewed version of its Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft. The cargo version will launch on Vulcan rockets starting in 2023, and a crewed version could be ready as soon as 2026 .
The electric vehicle company that recently won a NASA contract to provide a modern version of the “Astrovan” to transport Artemis astronauts to the launch pad warned May 10 it may soon run out of money. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission May 10 , Canoo Technologies issued what is known as a “going concern” warning because of continued losses. The company reported a net loss of $125.4 million in the first quarter and had $104.9 million of cash available at the end of the quarter. “We believe substantial doubt exists about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern for twelve months from the date of issuance of our financial statements,” Canoo stated in the filing. NASA selected Canoo in March for the agency’s Artemis Crew Transportation Vehicles contract to provide electric vehicles that will be used to transport astronauts from the building at the Kennedy Space Center where they suit up for their missions to Launch Complex 39B. The vehicles are intended to replace the Airstream motor home called the “Astrovan” that had been used to transport NASA astronauts for most of the shuttle program. NASA required the use of zero-emissions vehicles for the contract, citing an August 2021 executive order promoting the use of such vehicles. Described by NASA in an April 13 statement as “futuristic transports with pod-shaped exteriors,” the vehicles are effectively electric vans capable of holding eight people, including four astronauts in spacesuits. Under the contract, Canoo will deliver three of those vehicles to NASA by June 2023. The NASA announcement did not disclose the contract value, but a procurement notice dated March 31 said the contract was worth $147,855. Canoo had delivered very few vehicles to date. The company said in its earnings announcement that it has built just 39 of its Gamma vehicles, upon which the NASA vehicles are based. The company says it will start full-scale production of its vehicles late this year, contingent on raising funding needed to remain in operation. In a May 10 earnings call, Canoo executives acknowledged the going concern warning but said they were working to raise up to $600 million in new funding. Of that, $50 million would come from an investment by an existing shareholder, Aquila Family Ventures, while $250 million would come from a share purchase agreement with Yorkville Advisors, a hedge fund. Canoo also filed a registration statement to sell up to $300 million in stock. Tony Aquila, chief executive of Canoo, said on the call that he expected the $50 million investment to close this week. The agreement with Yorkville would be done ready in a “couple weeks,” he added. He acknowledged, though, difficulties raising money in general. “It is a different market today, one with challenging conditions,” he said. “We will raise appropriate amounts to satisfy what we need, bridge to milestones, and be in a position to take advantage of our track record, our value creation and potentially improving market conditions.” Aquila mentioned the NASA award in the earnings call, playing up the publicity that the deal could provide for the company. “We anticipate billions of impressions associated with the Artemis program,” he said. However, he declined to go into specifics about the NASA contract. “The contents of that would be confidential, and really a NASA discussion,” he said. “But it’s a very exciting program.” The two companies providing commercial crew services for NASA have taken different approaches for transporting astronauts to the launch pad. SpaceX uses Tesla Model X electric cars for taking astronauts on the pad for Crew Dragon missions. Boeing worked with Airstream to develop what it called “Astrovan II” that will be used by astronauts flying on future CST-100 Starliner vehicles.
WASHINGTON – Two small satellites launched last summer by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency successfully established an optical link on April 14 during a nearly 40-minute test, according to CACI International, the supplier of the optical terminals . More than 200 gigabits of data were transmitted and received over a distance of about 100 kilometers, the company said May 17. Optical terminals use lasers to connect satellites in orbit so they can transfer data in space. DARPA’s experiment called Mandrake 2 was funded by the Space Development Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The success of the demonstration is significant as space-to-space optical communications is a critical technology for DARPA’s Blackjack constellation and for SDA’s planned mesh network of small satellites in low Earth orbit that will support military operations. SDA Director Derek Tournear said the agency set a goal to build a mesh network known as Transport Layer using commercially available satellite buses and laser terminals. The success of the Mandrake 2 experiment validates that strategy, he said. “We demonstrated with commoditized laser communication that we could do satellite to satellite communication, and really demonstrated that this is no longer at the very high end, that we can actually do this with commoditized laser communication platforms and technologies,” Tournear said May 17 at a Potomac Officers Club online event. SDA this fall plans to launch 20 satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 0. In 2024, it will start launching Tranche 1, a much larger deployment of 126 satellites. “We don’t have optical cross links on every one of our Tranche 0 satellites. But we do on Tranche 1,” Tournear said. The Tranche 1 satellites will have optical laser communication not only for satellite-to-satellite crosslinks but also for satellite-to-ground communications, as well as satellite to airborne platforms, he said. SDA satellite suppliers — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space — have not disclosed their laser terminals suppliers. Companies like CACI, Mynaric , Tesat and others said they are looking to ramp up production to support SDA’s planned procurements. As optical terminals get mass produced, said Tournear, “we can definitely buy those almost off the shelf and integrate them in the kinds of timescales and cost points that we need.” SDA’s efforts to demonstrate optical crosslinks suffered a setback last year when an experiment using General Atomics satellites and laser terminals failed in orbit. Two cubesats equipped with optical communications terminals flew to space but tumbled out of the intended orbit and the company was unable to establish contact with the satellites. 
ABL Space Systems has completed testing of the second stage of its small launch vehicle, four months after a previous version of the stage was destroyed in a test accident. In a video posted May 16, the company said it completed acceptance testing of the second stage of its RS1 vehicle at its Mojave, California, test site, including a static-fire test of the stage. The company has since shipped the stage to its launch site in Kodiak, Alaska. The company was conducting similar tests of its second stage in Mojave Jan. 19 when the stage was destroyed in what the company called a “test anomaly.” The company later said the stage’s E2 engine suffered a hard start , when the flow of propellants and ignition fluid in an engine doesn’t allow for a gradual increase in energy, but instead an explosive rise. That created a fire at the base of the stage, leading to a complete failure about 20 seconds later. Dan Piemont, president of ABL Space Systems, told SpaceNews the company used the incident as a “great opportunity” to demonstrate how quickly it can build and test a stage. The company built the stage itself in three weeks, followed by structural tests. The E2 engine went through its own tests before the integrated stage performed a four-week campaign of acceptance tests. Before the January accident, the company had planned a first launch of the RS1 rocket, capable of placing up to 1,350 kilograms into low Earth orbit for a list price of $12 million, early in the year. Shortly after the accident, the company estimated a three-month delay in its plans. Piemont said after the recent acceptance tests that the company was now targeting “early summer” for its first launch, pending completion of acceptance tests of the first stage.
TAMPA, Fla. — SES is considering plans to provide 5G services directly to handheld devices after rescuing spectrum rights for 62 proposed satellites that were about to expire. Luxembourg’s government filed an application in 2015 to international regulators at the ITU for the constellation, dubbed Cleosat, but faced losing it until SES used at least one of its satellites to secure the frequencies May 10 — two days before the deadline. Luxembourg had issued a call for proposals from companies interested in taking on the project Dec. 16 as its seven-year deadline neared, and picked SES early this year to operate Cleosat. “SES applied for this filing through the Lux govt because we recognise the potential of direct-to-handheld 5G satellite connectivity in the years to come,” SES vice president of external communications Suzanne Ong said via email. “We haven’t made any decision to significantly invest in this technology at this stage, and will in the coming months do our due diligence of assessing the market and business plans.” The company has not disclosed further information about the plans, and Luxembourg’s government has not spoken in detail about what it had in store. When Luxembourg issued a call for companies seeking control of Cleosat’s regulatory filing in December, it said the services it foresees for the network are global and include mobile satellite services, fixed satellite services and tracking and telecommand services. The proposed Cleosat constellation uses multiple frequency bands from around 1.5 GHz to 29 GHz, covering 62 satellites across eight planes in non-geostationary orbits between 519 and 8,062 kilometers. SES’s O3b Networks constellation of 20 medium-Earth-orbiting satellites operates at 8,063 kilometers over the equator, using 17-19 GHz frequencies for high-speed broadband services to mainly enterprise and government customers. The company also operates satellites in geostationary orbit for broadband and broadcast. It is unclear whether SES is looking at ways to provide connectivity to smartphones and consumer devices, similar to the businesses that satellite startups AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are developing . Satellite networks in general are set to become more compatible with terrestrial wireless infrastructure as 3GPP, the mobile industry association, works to incorporate satellite frequencies within global 5G standards for the first time. Satellite operators hope these standardization efforts will mean backhaul and other space-based capabilities can be integrated more easily into terrestrial networks, enabling them to capture a larger share of the telecoms market. Globalstar continues to face speculation that its satellites could be used to connect Apple iPhones for emergency services.
Chinese launch vehicle developer Orienspace has raised $59.9 million in a Series A funding round, which the company says it will use for a first rocket launch and new engine development. The new round was led by HikeCapital, followed by CMBC Int’l Holdings and others, including previous investors, according to a company press release ( Chinese ) May 20. The financing will be used for the development and first flight of the “Gravity-1” medium-lift launch vehicle, with a test flight planned for mid 2023. Gravity-1 will be 31.4 meters long with a 4.2-meter-diameter fairing and a takeoff mass of 400 metric tons. It will use a liquid propellant core stage and four solid propellant boosters. With the capability to lift around 6,500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit, or 3,700 kilograms to 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, it would be the largest-capacity launcher in China’s nascent commercial space sector. The funding will also go towards accelerating the development of a 100-ton-thrust, reusable kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket engine for the Gravity-2 launcher. The firm says it will follow the general idea of ​​iterative and systematic innovation. Orienspace was founded in late 2020, backed by initial funding of $65 million. It announced in January it had secured a further $47 million. The new round makes the company one of the best backed Chinese launch startups, despite its newcomer status. CMBC Int’l Holdings last month led A+ round financing for another launch startup, Deep Blue Aerospace , which conducted a kilometer-level rocket vertical takeoff and vertical landing test May 6 . The financing also follows a number of major funding rounds for Chinese launch startups early in 2022, notably including $200 million announced by Galactic Energy in January, a Chinese record for launch companies. Orienspace intends to begin to use a commercial launch vehicle final assembly and integration test center around the end of year, located at China’s eastern spaceport at Haiyang, Shandong province. The Haiyang spaceport facility was established to facilitate sea launches and recently hosted a third Long March 11 solid rocket sea launch , using a new, nearby final assembly and test base for the first time. Orienspace will compete with fellow Chinese launch firms Landspace , iSpace , Galactic Energy and others including Space Pioneer and Deep Blue Aerospace for commercial contracts and opportunities expected from a 13,000-satellite national satellite internet megaconstellation and future commercial services to the under-construction Chinese space station. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) operates the country’s Long March rocket series and conducts the vast majority of China’s civil and military launches. CASC is planning more than 50 launches in 2022, including six space station-related missions. China has been fostering a commercial space sector since late 2014, opening the industry to private capital and providing incentives, policy support and facilitating technology transfer through a military-civil fusion national strategy. The progress of launch startups has been checkered, however. Beijing-based iSpace became the first private Chinese launch company to reach orbit in 2019, but last week suffered its third consecutive failure with its Hyperbola-1 solid rocket. Galactic Energy is the other firm to achieve orbit, also with a light-lift solid rocket, and plans a next launch in the coming months. A number of the firms are planning the first launches of more complex and partially reusable liquid launchers over the next year or two, with Landspace expected to make the first attempt with its methane-liquid oxygen Zhuque-2 in the near future.
After a year-long investigation, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General concluded that the January 2021 recommendation to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama, was reasonable and not improperly influenced by politics. The IG released its findings May 10 in a report titled “ Evaluation of the Air Force Selection Process for the Permanent Location of the U.S. Space Command Headquarters.” The review was requested in February 2021 by Colorado lawmakers who argued that the decision to move Space Command headquarters from Peterson Space Force Base to Redstone Arsenal — made in the waning days of the Trump administration — was politically motivated and counterproductive as most of Space Command’s workforce and industrial base reside in Colorado. The IG, however, did not find any evidence to back those assertions. “Overall, we determined that the 2020 Basing Action process directed by the Secretary of Defense complied with Federal Law and DoD policy and that the process was reasonable,” wrote Randolph Stone, assistant inspector general for space, intelligence, engineering and oversight. The IG report said the Air Force developed the 2020 basing action “based on the best practices” used by the Army in 2018 when it selected Austin, Texas, as the location of the Army Futures Command. DoD approved four evaluation factors the Air Force recommended to assess six candidate locations: To score bases, Air Force “used publicly available data, incorporated site visits conducted by the basing office personnel, and provided periodic status updates to Congress,” said the IG. Many portions of the IG report were redacted. It said the evaluation factors that led to the selection of Huntsville “were a reasonable and objective means of assessing, scoring, and ranking the candidate locations for hosting the USSPACECOM HQ.” The IG did criticize the Air Force basing office personnel for poor record keeping. “During our analysis of the selection phase, basing office personnel could not provide us with all of the documentation used to support their analysis and ranking of candidate locations because they had generally not created or retained it.” As a result the IG had to do extra work to come up with the data it needed. There is one remaining step that must be completed before U.S. Space Command headquarters is relocated: an environmental study expected in spring 2023. Following the release of the IG report, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala), said: “The bottom line of the report is that the Air Force’s process which led to the selection of Redstone as the best home for SPACECOM was rock solid. For more than a year the IG conducted an audit of the Air Force’s work. I’m pleased that, after this extensive evaluation, the IG confirmed that the basing process complied with the law and that the decision was based on objective factors.” Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said in a statement that he will continue to fight to reverse the decision. “With only a cursory review of the process itself, the DoD OIG’s conclusion that the previous basing decision was reasonable simply means that it was logical based on flawed evaluations,” he said. A separate report on the basing selection process is expected to soon be released by the Government Accountability Office. “The DoD OIG report focused on the chronology of the events and whether any nefarious or illegal actions occurred, while the forthcoming GAO report did a much deeper review of the criteria and scoring in this basing decision,” said Lamborn. “Two of the four recommendations in the DoD OIG report are to more fully account for the imperative to quickly achieve full operational capability based on concerns raised by our military leaders that this was not adequately factored in during this basing process. I will continue to advocate for a fair and transparent basing decision that prioritizes national security imperatives and rapidly addresses the increasing threats we face in space.” Colorado senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper in a joint statement said they are “reviewing the findings of the report, and will have more to share in the coming days. Our position remains that the previous administration used a basing process for U.S. Space Command that was untested, lacked transparency, and neglected critical national security and cost considerations. Chief among those concerns is Peterson Space Force Base’s singular ability to reach full operational capability as quickly as possible. Space Command should remain permanently based at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado.”
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Microsoft is working with partners to identify commercial space applications for the latest software tools the tech giant has developed. In one of the many applications being explored for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Spaceborne Computer 2 , NASA is testing a Microsoft tool called Custom Vision to see whether it helps simplify the task of inspecting astronaut gloves to identify signs of damage after spacewalks. Custom Vision, which is part of the Azure Cognitive Services suite, helps developers “create AI models without necessarily needing a PhD,” said Steve Kitay, senior director of Microsoft’s Azure Space, told SpaceNews . “It’s done with low or no code by clicking on certain applications or certain areas of a picture to identify and train the model.” Kitay sees Earth observation as a promising application for Custom Vision. Whether the object being studied is one meter from the camera, like an astronaut’s glove, or thousands of kilometers away, like satellite imagery, Custom Vision can simplify the task of creating unique computer vision models, he added. Video, for instance, can be parsed into different frames. With Custom Vision, developers can identify specific areas of interest in imagery by drawing bounding boxes. Microsoft offers an open-source tool, called Distributed Application Runtime, or Dapr, that bring Custom Vision and other software components together to help developers create applications. Microsoft is exploring space applications for Dapr with Ball Aerospace, Loft Orbital and Thales Alenia Space. Thales is working with Microsoft to speed up processing of climate data captured by an International Space Station sensor. With Loft Orbital, Microsoft is exploring “rapid development and deployment of space applications,” Kitay said. Microsoft is supporting Ball’s work to build satellites that can be reconfigured quickly in orbit. In recent years, Microsoft has begun working with dozens of space companies . Azure Orbital , the company’s ground station-as-a-service business, is one element of the tech giant’s space program. Remote sensing is another. “When we think about remote sensing, customers care about connectivity and insights,” Kitay said. “Microsoft is not trying to replicate that infrastructure that’s now being built out in space. It’s looking at harnessing it with partners and then connecting it to end customers to empower them for whatever particular mission that they’re doing. We’re working on being that cloud fabric for the space community.”
Dust storms and changing seasons will limit the ability of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter to fly for the next several months, a project engineer said May 27. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released May 27 a video compiled from images taken by Ingenuity on a record-setting flight April 8. On that flight, the helicopter traveled 704 meters at a speed of 5.5 meters per second, the longest and fastest flight yet for the tiny helicopter. That flight was the 25th for Ingenuity, which was originally intended to perform no more than five flights over the course of a few weeks in April 2021. The helicopter’s most recent flight, and the 28th overall, was April 29. Ingenuity, though, lost communications with the Perseverance rover, which serves as a relay between the helicopter and controllers back on Earth, on May 3. Contact was reestablished two days later, with engineers concluding that the rover had gone into a “low-power state” when its battery levels dropped below a lower limit. In a May 6 statement, JPL said that increased dust in the atmosphere was blocking sunlight, reducing the power Ingenuity’s solar panels could generate. The lab said it was taking steps to reduce the helicopter’s battery usage, such as reducing the temperature at which the helicopter turns on heaters. “We are hopeful that we can accumulate battery charge in order to return to nominal operations and continue our mission into the weeks ahead,” Teddy Tzanetos, team lead for Ingenuity at JPL, said in the May 6 statement. In the May 27 release of the flight video, JPL said only that “the team is looking forward to its next flight on Mars.” “Currently we’re going through the worst of the Martian dust storm season. The skies are full of dust and our solar array generation is way down,” said Jaakko Karras, chief engineer for Ingenuity, after a May 27 presentation at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference. However, he said Ingenuity is now heading into winter, with less solar power and colder temperatures. “The hope is that, if we can make it through both of those,” he said, referring to the dust storms and winter, “in a handful of months we’ll start getting back into Martian spring where we get very energy positive again and back to business.” That will limit the ability of Ingenuity to continue flying. Karras said there may be tweaks the mission can do, like parking the helicopter on an incline to increase the amount of sunlight reaching the arrays, an approach previously used for solar-powered rovers like Spirit and Opportunity. However, he noted it may be difficult to land the helicopter on the right incline. For now, the helicopter is “mostly hunkering down,” he said. He didn’t saw how long it would be before Ingenuity will fly again and how frequently. “It will certainly be at least a couple of months before we’re back to the more luxurious energy levels that we’re used to,” he said.
NASA is gearing up to perform another practice countdown of the Space Launch System in mid-June as it completes repairs to the vehicle from previous tests. NASA said May 20 it expects to roll out the SLS from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center to Launch Complex 39B in early June for the next attempt at a wet dress rehearsal (WDR), where the vehicle is filled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants and goes through a countdown that stops just before ignition of the core stage’s four RS-25 engines. NASA made three attempts at completing a WDR at the pad in April, but stopped all three early after a series of problems. The agency rolled the SLS back to the VAB April 26 to fix both issues with the vehicle and its ground systems as well as with the supply of nitrogen gas at the pad. In the statement, NASA said workers have completed work on the vehicle, including replacing a helium check valve in the upper stage and fixing a hydrogen leak in an umbilical. Crews also modified “purge boots” on umbilical lines leading into the upper stage to protect them from the elements. NASA confirmed that Air Liquide, the contractor who provides nitrogen gas for the launch pad and other facilities at KSC, had completed upgrades that will ensure there will be enough gas available to support SLS operations. Janet Petro, director of KSC, said at a May 18 briefing that a test of the nitrogen gas system took place the previous night and went well. “We’re feeling really good about rolling out in early June and completing the wet dress.” NASA did give a date for the next WDR attempt, other than about 14 days after rollout. At the May 18 briefing, though, NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said he estimated the next attempt would be June 18 to 20. NASA officials had previously said they would not set a launch date for the Artemis 1 uncrewed mission until after completion of the WDR and assessment of the work needed to get the vehicle ready for flight. However, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told House appropriators May 17 he now expected it to launch in August. An updated schedule released by NASA May 16 said the next launch window for the Artemis 1 mission is July 26 to Aug. 10, although with no launches possible on Aug. 1, 2 and 6. The following window opens Aug. 23 and runs through Sept. 6, but with no launches on Aug. 30 through Sept. 1. Launch windows are constrained by several factors, including availability of trajectories for the SLS to send the Orion spacecraft to the moon and return for a splashdown in daylight hours off the California coast.
TAMPA, Fla. — Gogo is planning to use OneWeb satellites in a partnership that could see it take on Starlink in an emerging business aviation market for low Earth orbit services. Gogo announced plans May 22 to use OneWeb’s LEO network to connect business jets that are currently too small to use commercial high-speed satellite broadband solutions. The inflight connectivity provider plans to use an electronically steered antenna that is small and light enough to fit “virtually any size business aircraft,” Gogo spokesperson Dave Mellin said. This includes “super light jets” such the seven-seater HondaJet, or “large turboprops” that would include the King Air 350 that seats 9-11 passengers. Gogo said it plans to provide the services globally soon after OneWeb’s constellation is available. The British LEO startup is currently only serving the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere and says it will be ready to connect business aircraft in 2024. SpaceX’s Starlink LEO broadband services are more widely available and currently serve fixed customers in 32 countries . SpaceX has not specifically detailed Starlink’s plans for the business aviation market. However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted May 23 that he is testing Starlink on his business jet, adding that “[s]ome polishing needed, but it’s working quite well.” Musk reportedly uses a large, long-range Gulfstream G650ER business jet, which can be configured for 11 to 18 passengers. Musk tweeted May 24 that “Starlink does work on vehicles in motion, including planes, but not yet reliably.” Gogo expansion Gogo currently provides low-data rate communications internationally primarily through Iridium’s LEO satellite network, which uses an antenna the size of a hockey puck for voice and text services. Gogo also uses Inmarsat’s geostationary satellites for other low-data rate narrowband services including email. For aircraft flying over the continental United States, the Chicago-based company uses a system of towers for an air-to-ground, or ATG, network that it says is currently capable of 4G performance while it upgrades to 5G. Although Gogo’s high-speed service with OneWeb will also work on ultra-long-range large-cabin aircraft, Melin said May 25 that “the midsize and lower” class flying beyond the reach of ATG towers “have never had a broadband option before, and our service will fit on those aircraft.” Until Starlink, OneWeb and other LEO systems come online and are able to reliably provide services on-the-move, airlines flying beyond the reach of ATG ground networks have been using satellites in geostationary orbit for faster speeds. “The antennas that are available for [high-speed broadband] satellites today are … large enough that they have to sit in the tail of the aircraft,” Mellin said. “And there’s only so many aircraft that have a tail and can take the weight of that system to be able to install it.” Gogo’s electronically steered antenna was developed with Hughes Network Systems and is capable of terrestrial broadband performance, Gogo said in the May 22 news release. “This will be a fast and affordable broadband system that will provide best-in-class global performance on the broadest range of aircraft in business aviation,” Gogo president and chief operating officer Sergio Aguirre said in a statement. There were 6,526 aircraft flying with Gogo’s ATG systems onboard and 4,522 aircraft with narrowband satellite connectivity installed as of March 31, according to Gogo. Ric Prentiss, an analyst at Raymond James, said the partnership with OneWeb gives Gogo the ability to serve international business aviation markets that include 14,000 additional planes, on top of the domestic market at around 25,000 planes. Prentiss said the deal illustrates how inflight connectivity providers can benefit from LEO constellations even as some continue to view Starlink, OneWeb and others “as a potential competitive threat” to their businesses. “This partnership supports our belief that LEO connectivity represents a much greater opportunity than a threat for GOGO, as it makes sense for a wholesale LEO provider like OneWeb to partner with GOGO given the very fragmented dealer network and importance of relationships in going-to-market,” he said in a note to investors. Waiting on OneWeb OneWeb has signed launch agreements with SpaceX and India to resume satellite deployment this year, after plans to complete the constellation with Russian Soyuz rockets were scrapped over Russia’s war in Ukraine. The LEO startup has deployed 428 satellites, or 66% of the planned total fleet, enabling services in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere. SpaceX has more than 2,400 Starlink satellites in orbit, according to statistics maintained by spaceflight analyst and astronomer Jonathan McDowell. Last month, jet service provider JSX said it is set to become the first air carrier to provide Starlink’s LEO services later this year. Jonathan Hofeller, vice president of Starlink commercial sales, said the service will provide “internet experience similar to or better than what passengers experience at home.” Most of the routes the Dallas-based charter servicer operates are around the U.S. Southwest. JSX said the deal enables it to provide Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi on up to 100 planes. There are currently 77 30-seat Embraer jets in JSX’s fleet, and JSX declined to comment on whether the service will use an electronically steered antenna. Starlink unveiled a service plan designed for campervans, motorhomes and other recreational vehicles (RVs) May 23, but said the service is not yet ready for mobility. “While our teams are actively working to make it possible to use Starlink on moving vehicles (e.g., automobiles, RVs, boats), Starlink is not yet configured to be safely used in this way,” the company says on its website. Starlink is also targeting the commercial aviation market and has plans to connect Hawaiian Airlines flights next year.
TAMPA, Fla. — Cash-strapped smallsat operator Astrocast announced plans May 30 to buy Dutch connectivity solutions provider Hiber, which scrapped plans for its own constellation last year following failures on its initial satellites. Switzerland-based Astrocast said the deal would give it spectrum in the Americas to enable its growing constellation for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices to operate globally. Astrocast plans to issue new shares to fund the acquisition. Hiber has also agreed to invest around $11 million in Astrocast’s second stock market listing later this year to help the Swiss startup meet near-term funding needs. Astrocast hopes to raise 60-80 million euros ($64-86 million) by listing shares on the Euronext Growth Paris junior stock market in France. The startup said it needs more funds to expand its constellation of 12 satellites — including two test spacecraft — to 20 before the end of 2022, and to 40 in 2023 to improve coverage. By 2025, Astrocast aims to be operating 100 satellites in low Earth orbit. While the first 20 will be three-unit cubesats, Astrocast has said later models could be larger six-unit cubesats. Astrocast became a public company in August when it raised about $42 million by listing shares on Euronext Growth Oslo in Norway. The operator launched commercially in February for regions outside the Americas which, according to Astrocast spokesperson Fatima Vigil-Perez, currently receive services with a typical two-hour latency. However, Astrocast estimated in its May 13 annual financial report that it needs to raise 43 million Swiss Francs ($45 million) in 2022 for expansion plans that would enable it to improve coverage and satellite revisit rates. The company reported a 21.4 million Swiss Franc loss for 2021. Established operators — and other startups that include SpaceX-owned Swarm — are also seeking a share of a space-based IoT market that typically uses satellites to connect small devices out the reach of terrestrial networks. Astrocast says its services are focused on connecting customers in industrial markets that include agriculture, maritime and utilities. Hiber also targets industrial customers — particularly those in the oil & gas, mining, logistics and agriculture markets — and provides satellite-connected devices and solutions that enable customers to monitor and track assets in remote locations. The Dutch company’s business is based on multi-year subscriptions that cover sensors, network hardware, satellite connectivity and a user interface. In October, Hiber announced a partnership to use Inmarsat’s satellites for its IoT solutions after giving up on its own constellation. The Dutch company had surrendered a license to operate a network of 24 IoT smallsats just weeks before, blaming technical issues on four initial satellites it had deployed and financial issues. Astrocast said acquiring Hiber would give the Swiss company access to L-band spectrum for covering the Americas that is part of an agreement with Inmarsat. Astrocast’s satellites already use L-band to provide services. “Our satellites are designed to provide connectivity globally so there’s no need to wait for the launch of future satellites to provide connectivity in the Americas,” Vigil-Perez said. Astrocast plans to buy Hiber with newly issued shares that currently represent a 16.5% stake in Astrocast. The acquisition is dependent on Astrocast completing its Euronext Growth Paris stock market listing.
Story updated June 1 with new information from Space Systems Command on the value of the eight task orders WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Systems Command has identified which eight national security space launches were funded in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Of the eight missions, five were assigned to United Launch Alliance and three to SpaceX, the two companies that in 2020 won the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 launch services procurement contract, with ULA winning 60% and SpaceX 40% of the missions over five years. Missions assigned to United Launch Alliance: Missions assigned to SpaceX: The Space Systems Command in a May 26 news release said the eight missions are projected to launch over the next two years but did not specify timelines. ULA’s Vulcan Centaur has not yet flown but the command expects the vehicle to be ready for these upcoming missions. “ULA and SpaceX have highly capable launch systems and we have full confidence that they will meet our needs for the eight missions we ordered today,” said Col. Chad Melone, chief of launch procurement. Col. Douglas Pentecost, SSC’s deputy director of launch enterprise, said in a statement to SpaceNews that ULA’s task orders for the five missions are worth $566 million, and SpaceX’s orders for three missions are worth $280 million. Funding for these eight launch services comes from the U.S. Space Force, Missile Defense Agency, Space Development Agency, and international partner. Individual launch service prices are launch provider proprietary. The spokesman said that under the terms of the Phase 2 contract, the government is not obligated to publicly announce individual task order values. The Space Systems Command awarded seven Phase 2 missions between August 2020 and March 2021: Four were assigned to United Launch Alliance for $561.1 million and three to SpaceX for $475.7 million.
SEOUL, South Korea — Indian authorities are examining several pieces of suspected space debris that fell into rural western India on May 12, with the timing of the incident suggesting they could be parts of a Chinese rocket that reentered the atmosphere that day. Local media reported that the objects crashed with “loud thuds that shook the ground” in Gujarat. There were no casualties or property damage, according to The Indian Express . The crashed objects were all discovered within a 15-kilometer radius, and among them was a black metal ball weighing around five kilograms, the newspaper said. Neither local authorities nor the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had positively identified the objects. However, space watcher Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says the debris is probably part of the third stage of a Chinese Long March 3B rocket that reentered the atmosphere May 12. The rocket launched in September carrying China’s ZX-9B communications satellite. “We know that CZ-3B Y86 reentered that morning,” McDowell told SpaceNews via email May 16, referring to the Chinese rocket’s Spacetrack catalog name. “We don’t know for sure where, but its projected track does cross Gujarat at about the right time, so it’s a good candidate, and there were no other large objects that reentered that morning. Therefore, I conclude that the identification of this debris with CZ-3B Y86 is very strong (high confidence, although not 100% conclusive).” If the suspected debris is confirmed to be parts of a Chinese rocket, it would be the second time in less than two months that Chinese launch debris crashed on Indian territory. On April 2, India saw several objects, including a large metal ring, fell into another rural western village . ISRO scientists who conducted an onsite investigation April 15 tentatively labeled the objects as parts of a Chinese Long March rocket. Based on photos and videos of the objects, McDowell said the crashed objects could be parts of the third stage of Long March 3B serial number Y77, which was launched in February 2021. China has remained silent on the reentry incident. On top of this, there were several other cases in recent years in which a Chinese rocket made a troubling re-entry. In May 2021 , remnants from the roughly 30-meter-long, five-meter-wide core stage of China’s Long March 5B rocket fell into the Indian Ocean after days of speculation — and China’s silence — about where the debris would land. NASA criticized China for “failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.” One year earlier , debris from another Long March 5B fell onto at least two villages in the Ivory Coast, following an uncontrolled re-entry of the rocket’s core stage. In November 2019 , a spent stage of Long March 3B fell near the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China, destroying a house.
Almost three months into the war in Ukraine, it’s still too early to draw conclusions about Russia’s capabilities to disrupt satellite-based communications but one clear takeaway is the importance of protecting the ground systems and network user equipment that provide many entry points for cyber attackers, a senior U.S. Space Force official said May 19. Space Force Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, deputy chief of space operations for nuclear and cyber, said he has been briefed on the details of Russian cyber attacks aimed at Ukrainian users of satellite internet services. “One of the observations that I would offer on that is that, if you think the only way to dismantle space capabilities is by shooting down satellites, you’re missing the bigger picture … as these cyber attacks are on ground networks,” Saltzman told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast meeting. The U.S. State Department last week formally blamed Russia for a late February cyberattack on Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite internet network. The attack disabled user terminals in Ukraine and across Europe that provide internet services to private citizens. Viasat said the satellite itself was not targeted and the attack affected 40,000 user terminals, a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of customers of the network. Viasat said services have since been restored. Separately, Elon Musk tweeted this month that Russian hackers have been trying to take down SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service the company is providing in Ukraine. If the ground infrastructure that supports satellites becomes the main target, it will be important to have “assured networks that are defended by cyber professionals, or we’re not going to be effective in accomplishing our missions,” Saltzman said. “I think that’s a critical point that we’ve learned from this environment.” Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Operations Command, told SpaceNews last month that the most likely form of attack facing satellite networks today does not happen in space but on the ground. “Cyberspace is the soft underbelly of our global space networks,” said Whiting. In response, the Space Operations Command is retraining cybersecurity specialists who protect desktop systems at Space Force bases to more demanding roles defending military satellite networks. Saltzman said more time will be needed to evaluate the events in Ukraine as the conflict grinds on. “As a history major from Boston University, I will say some of these things take time and perspective to really draw the lessons. However, there’s clear observations that you can’t ignore.” He said one of those observations is that satellite services today are nearly impossible to disrupt completely because of the large numbers of satellites that are now operating in orbit, Saltzman said, echoing comments made last week by the Space Force’s vice chief of space operations Gen. David Thompson. “The commercial capabilities that have been given to the Ukrainians, those are in proliferated constellations like Starlink, and we’re seeing the value,” said Saltzman. Proliferated constellations are “very hard to deny, because it’s such a widespread set of targets. You can’t just jam one satellite and achieve that effect.”
The Canadian government is bolstering its defense and surveillance capabilities in the Arctic with a focus on using space assets and new technology. Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand said the 2022 federal government budget, released April 7, contains 252 million Canadian dollars ($199 million) to start research on modernizing the joint Canada-U.S. North Warning system in the Arctic. In addition, that money will be used for research into long-range communications and over-the-horizon radar systems for the northern region. Anand had previously indicated that more announcements on new Arctic-related projects are still to come. In an April 4 appearance before the Canadian Senate’s defense committee, Anand noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and concern about Russian activities in the Arctic are behind the new funding. “The current defense and security climate also has underscored that we need to do more to bolster our defenses in Canada and North America at large,” she said. “To that end, in the coming months, we will be bringing forward a robust package of investments to bolster our continental defense in close co-operation with the United States.” In a March 29 meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Anand pointed out that modernization of the capabilities of the North American Aerospace Defense Command is a key priority for the Canadian government. Much of that modernization will center on upgrading the North Warning System or NWS. The NWS was constructed between 1986 and 1992, and consists of a series of long and short-range air defense radar sites. Forty-seven of the 50 sites are located across the Canadian Arctic. Canadian and U.S. defense officials still have to work out the specifics of the modernization, but the estimated cost of such a project is expected to be around $10 billion. “You’re looking at a multi-year endeavor here, obviously working hand in hand with our allies to prioritize and land on specific plans,” Canadian Department of National Defence deputy minister Bill Matthews told the senators. However, in an Aug. 21, 2021 agreement, Canada and the U.S. set out priority areas for investment. These include situational awareness, particularly for the Arctic and maritime approaches to the continent. That would see the replacement of the North Warning System with more advanced technological solutions as soon as possible, including next-generation over-the-horizon radar systems, the two nations pointed out in a statement issued at the time. Also included were sensors both for the seafloor and in space. “The existing North Warning System is to be maintained until appropriate replacement capabilities are in place, “ the two countries noted. Also to be examined is a modernized command and control system that would include robust and resilient communications for remote locations in support of NORAD missions. In addition, members of Canada’s defense and aerospace industry were briefed by Canadian defense department officials on April 7 about some of the space initiatives that will move forward in the future. One of the key programs is the Enhanced Satellite Communications Project – Polar (ESCP-P). That will involve a satellite to provide reliable and secure communications access for the Arctic. Initial work on the project, which will provide narrowband and wideband communications capabilities, is expected start next year, according to the briefing provided to industry by Cam Stoltz, director of space requirements at the Department of National Defence. The budget still has to be set, but the defense department has estimated it could be up to 4.9 billion Canadian dollars. At one point, the Canadian government was looking at putting into orbit a constellation of satellites to provide communications for the Arctic and gather weather data from the region. That project proved too daunting and was canceled in 2016. Instead, Canada decided to focus just on communications capabilities, the result being ESCP-P. Other nations have also expressed interest in working with Canada on ESCP-P, including New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, the U.S. and France. The system is expected to be operating starting in 2034 and will be interoperable with the U.S. Department of Defense and NATO. Work will also begin next year on the Defence Enhanced Surveillance from Space Project (DESSP). That space system will provide surveillance of Canada’s Arctic and its maritime approaches as it is designed to be an upgrade of the defense capabilities now provided by the RADARSAT Constellation Mission. The RADARSAT Constellation Mission, launched in 2019, uses three radar-imaging satellites to conduct maritime and Arctic surveillance. The RCM is also equipped with an Automatic Identification System (AIS), allowing for detection and tracking of ships. The Department of National Defence has consulted with industry on DESSP and, in November 2021, received feedback from companies on what technology could be available for the project in the future. It will now be up to defense officials to determine how to proceed. However, the initial operating capability of the DESSP is envisioned in 2033, Stoltz explained to industry officials. This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Voyager Space announced that one of its portfolio companies, Nanoracks, will launch a NASA-funded experiment to demonstrate on-orbit metal cutting using a robotic arm. The mission named Outpost Mars Demo-1 is scheduled to launch May 25 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter 5 rideshare. The experiment originally was scheduled to launch in 2020 . The mission is part of Voyager’s outpost program that seeks to transform used launch vehicle upper stages into space habitat platforms. For the demonstration, a robotic arm developed by Maxar will use a milling cutting tool operating at high rotations per minute to melt the metal in such a way that no debris is generated, the company said. The robotic arm and the pieces of metal are all contained and launched in a single payload. Maxar’s robotic cutter also has thermal sensors and cameras. Once in space, Nanoracks and Maxar will have up to one hour to complete the cutting of three metal pieces made of corrosion resistant steel — the same material that is used on the outer shell of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. If all goes as planned, the demonstration will occur about nine minutes into flight and will be finished approximately 10 minutes later. Nanoracks, Maxar and United Launch Alliance are one of six teams selected by NASA in 2017 to prototype technologies in support of deep space habitats. “With outposts, spent upper stages live on as controllable infrastructure, rather than orbital debris,” Voyager said in a news release. The company plans to launch future outpost missions focused on satellite servicing, fuel depots and other in-space activities. One upcoming mission is being planned with Cislunar Industries to harvest, cut, refine, and reuse metal from existing space junk.
TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat is seeking permission from Greece to move a ground station there from the Netherlands, which wants to sell the C-band spectrum the site uses for maritime safety services to 5G wireless operators. The British satellite operator previously argued that moving out of the northern Netherlands village of Burum was unnecessary because it was possible its services could share the spectrum band with 5G operators. However, the company said May 13 it is working with authorities in Greece to secure a license following recommendations from an external committee, which was appointed by the Dutch government to find ways to sell the operator’s 3.5 GHz frequencies without interfering with safety services. Inmarsat had taken the Dutch government to court last year over an initial plan to sell the 3.5 GHz band it partly uses for these emergency services for 5G operators to use from September 2022. A Dutch administrative court in June suspended this spectrum auction plan , and ordered Inmarsat and the government to find a solution for releasing the frequencies for 5G that does not impact safety services. According to the external advisory committee, Inmarsat should move from Burum but part of the operator’s 3.5 GHz spectrum should not go to wireless operators until the operator sets up a ground station elsewhere. Their report was presented to the government May 12 to recommend moving the ground station to Greece, and auctioning the 3.5 GHz frequencies so they are available to mobile operators by December 2023. If Inmarsat has not moved its ground station by then, the report said it should be allowed to continue operating the site but with a smaller 80 MHz swath of the spectrum. Inmarsat’s maritime-safety ground station in Burum currently uses 126 MHz of the band. The frequencies are used for a mix of commercial and safety services that Inmarsat spokesperson Matthew Knowles said cannot be decoupled. “Throughout this process Inmarsat has sought to protect these essential safety services, on which millions of people rely every day, while offering a practical way forward to enable 5G mobile telecommunications in the Netherlands to begin quickly,” Inmarsat chief operating officer Jason Smith said in an emailed statement. Smith added: “Inmarsat will continue to operate in the current spectrum from Burum before moving operations — but not people — to a new location outside the Netherlands once a licence elsewhere is confirmed. Inmarsat is working with the authorities in Greece to secure a licence to operate there.” The London-based company has another ground station in this part of the world at Fucino in central Italy, however, the company says it requires two stations in this European region for redundancy because its safety services demand high reliability and performance levels. Inmarsat, which is in the process of being sold to U.S.-based satellite operator Viasat for $7.3 billion, provides maritime safety capabilities free of charge to users through services stemming from its history as an intergovernmental organization founded in the 1970s. The operator has ground stations in nine countries that provide safety services worldwide: Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Japan, India, Russia, China and Vietnam. Harald Hanemaaijer, spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, said the Dutch government will comment on the advisory report in a letter to its Parliament “before the summer.” “On the basis of the advice, the Ministry of Economic Affairs will draw up a new decision to amend the so-called National Frequency Plan (NFP) and in the meantime will continue to consult with the satellite company about facilitating its intended move to Greece,” the Dutch government said in a May 12 news release . The committee says its recommendations have the backing of mobile network operators in addition to Inmarsat. Behind other European countries, the Netherlands sold its first batch of 5G-suitable spectrum in 2020 in the 700 MHz, 1.4 GHz and 2.1 GHz bands. The Netherlands joins many other countries worldwide that have recently made moves to sell satellite C-band frequencies to boost 5G services. The U.S. raised more than $81 billion from auctioning off a chunk of C-band spectrum last year — Intelsat, SES and other satellite operators in the country are still working to clear all the frequencies that were sold for terrestrial use.
Updated 10:30 p.m. Eastern with comments from postlanding briefing. LONG BEACH, Calif. — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner safely landed in New Mexico May 25, concluding a six-day uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station and setting the stage for the spacecraft’s first flight with people. Starliner undocked from the International Space Station at 2:36 p.m. Eastern and maneuvered away from the station. After a one-minute deorbit burn using four Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters at 6:05 p.m. Eastern, the crew capsule jettisoned the service module and reentered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. The capsule deployed two drogue chutes followed by three main parachutes, jettisoning its heat shield to reveal air bags used to cushion the landing. The spacecraft touched down at 6:49 p.m. Eastern at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. The landing, immediately deemed successful by NASA and Boeing, wrapped up the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission almost exactly six days after its liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft docked with the station a little more than 24 hours after liftoff. “It was a picture-perfect landing,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at a postlanding briefing. “The systems performed great on the vehicle, and once we work through all the data, we’ll be ready to fly the crew on this vehicle.” OFT-2 was a redo of the original OFT mission in December 2019, which suffered problems immediately after launch that kept the spacecraft from reaching the ISS. Boeing attempted to launch OFT-2 in August 2021 but problems with propellant valves in the spacecraft’s service module postponed the launch. The company took nearly $600 million in charges to fix the problems from the original OFT and subsequent first OFT-2 launch attempt before it was able to launch the spacecraft last week. This mission was not without problems. Two OMAC thrusters failed during an orbital insertion burn shortly after separation from the Atlas 5 upper stage, an issue Boeing and NASA continue to investigate. Two reaction control system thrusters also malfunctioned but were later recovered. In both cases, Boeing said the vehicle had sufficient redundancy to continue the mission. The spacecraft also encountered problems with a thermal control loop early in the mission. Stich said controllers tried firing those two thrusters after undocking. “We saw an interesting signature that looks a little bit like the signatures we saw at shutdown,” he said. That could help narrow down the cause of the problem, he added. Neither Stich nor Mark Nappi, Boeing’s commercial crew program manager, were worried about the thruster problems. “None of them look to be serious, that they would turn into some kind of design change,” Nappi said. “I’m more optimistic that we’ll be able to explain these and move on.” The next step in development of Starliner is the vehicle’s first crewed flight, the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission carrying at least two NASA astronauts. The Starliner spacecraft could be ready for CFT as soon as late this year, although a launch date will depend on what work needs to be done in response to issues found during OFT-2, as well as the schedule of ISS activities. Nappi said it would likely be “several months” before they can set a date for the CFT mission. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t proceed to the Crew Flight Test next,” Stich said. “We have a few things to work on between now and then but I don’t see any showstoppers this time.” He added the performance of Starliner on OFT-2 was “very similar in lots of ways” to the Demo-1 uncrewed flight test of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in 2019 in terms of the issues encountered. “OFT-2 was a test flight, and we expected to learn from this thing, and we did,” Nappi said. Despite the thruster and thermal cooling system anomalies, “the team and the vehicle handled those extremely well, and it was a really good learning experience.” The valve problem that delayed OFT-2 from last August was not an issue on this flight, but Stich and Nappi said they would examine whether to perform the same mitigations, such as purging the valves with nitrogen gas to remove moisture, for CFT or take other measures that could include redesigning the valves. “We have options for CFT. We still need to look at the longer-term solution,” Nappi said. “I feel confident that we can get an option in place for use on CFT and look at longer-term solutions” for operational missions. “On a scale of 1 to 10,” he said when asked to rate the OFT-2 mission, “I think I’d give it a 15. This was incredible.”
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and Raytheon Intelligence & Space will begin developing technologies for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s next generation of geostationary weather satellites under contracts announced May 17. Under the firm-fixed-price contracts awarded by NASA, NOAA’s partner for the acquisition, each company will receive approximately $5 million to perform a definition-phase study of the Atmospheric Composition instrument for the Geostationary Extended Observations program, called GeoXO. In addition to monitoring terrestrial weather, NOAA’s GeoXO constellation , scheduled to begin launching in the early 2030s, will carry instruments to observe lightning, coastal ocean conditions and air quality. NOAA plans to operate GeoXO satellites over the Eastern and Western United States, like the current GOES-R series, plus a satellite over the center of the United States. The Atmospheric Composition instrument, called ACX, will gather imagery from ultraviolet through visible spectral bands. Ball and Raytheon will have 20 months to define the instrument’s potential performance, risks, cost and development schedule. Based on the industry studies, NOAA will establish requirements for the ACX instrument implementation contract, which the agency plans to award in 2024. From its perch over the central United States, ACX will gather extensive data on atmospheric chemicals and aerosols. “One of those key measurements is going to be around air quality, which will inform us on the risk to our health and safety here on Earth,” Matt Magaña, Raytheon Space Systems deputy vice president, told SpaceNews . “It’s obviously critical to how we live our lives and the pollution that we have now created, and how we’re going to observe those in the future.” Raytheon completed a design study last year of a high-resolution imager for the GeoXO constellation. After that, the company formed a team “to identify and characterize the new pollution threats, how we’re going to monitor them, how we’re advancing those observations to deliver a long tail of next generation Earth-observation instruments,” Magaña said. Ball also is working on a definition Phase A study of a geostationary sounder for the GeoXO constellation. NASA awarded contracts valued at approximately $8 million apiece to Ball and to L3Harris in October. Ball built the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, launched in 2011, and the first Joint Polar Satellite System spacecraft launched in 2017. Meanwhile, Ball is manufacturing the Weather System Follow-On satellite for the U.S. Space Force and the company won a contract in 2020 to build, integrate and operate NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On satellite destined for Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1. Raytheon announced a $67 million contract in December from the Space Force to build a weather satellite to provide imagery of cloud cover and other data needed for military operations. Raytheon also manufactures the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite flying on Suomi NPP and the first Joint Polar Satellite System as well as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA Terra and Aqua satellites.
TAMPA, Fla. — A new Starlink plan lets customers pay more to skip waitlists to connect to its broadband satellites without a fixed address, although connection speeds for other users will be prioritized. Users willing to pay $25 more a month than Starlink’s standard service for its RV plan will get equipment to access the network “shortly after” the order is placed. The new plan is mainly marketed to customers with a motorhome, campervan or another type of recreational vehicle (RV), but Starlink says other uses include “camping trips or for people who have seasonal homes.” Starlink for RVs appears to come with the same equipment given to residential customers for Starlink’s standard service, which averaged more than 100 megabits per second download speeds during research firm Ookla’s tests in the United States late last year. The RV plan does not come with a generator or another mobile power source, for instance, and Starlink currently does not have any specific mount options for attaching the antenna on RVs or campers. Starlink also says it does “not support Starlink use in motion at this time,” and warns customers that using the service on the move will void the limited warranty on their kit. “While our teams are actively working to make it possible to use Starlink on moving vehicles (e.g., automobiles, RVs, boats), Starlink is not yet configured to be safely used in this way,” the company says on its website. Starlink’s standard service for residential customers in the United States is $110 a month. However, the service will not be available for some fixed U.S. addresses in the country until 2023, according to Starlink’s website. Both the RV and standard residential service charge $599 for hardware that includes an antenna to connect to Starlink’s rapidly expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellation. Fixed locations get the priority “Network resources are always de-prioritized for Starlink for RVs users compared to other Starlink services, resulting in degraded service and slower speeds in congested areas and during peak hours,” Starlink’s website says. The company said service degradation for Starlink for RV customers will be most extreme in the residential waitlist areas on Starlink’s availability map during peak hours, which it did not define. Most of the waitlist areas in the United States are concentrated in the southeast. However, those subscribed to Starlink for RVs can also pause and resume services at any time. Starlink said it will bill these customers in monthly increments to enable “users to customize their service to their individual travel needs.” Customers using Starlink in a foreign country for more than two months will be required to move their account to the new location, or buy an additional Starlink plan to maintain service. Starlink also offers a premium service designed for small offices, storefronts and other high-demand users that promises 150-500 megabits per second speeds with a more advanced antenna. The premium plan has a $2,500 price tag for the hardware and charges $500 a month for the service in the United States. Hardware deliveries for premium plan subscribers are due to start at the end of June in the United States and Canada, according to Starlink’s website. For years since SpaceX started providing Starlink broadband in 2020, the service only worked within a specific area close to a user’s service address. Starlink launched a portability service earlier this month for existing fixed residential customers — enabling them to temporarily move their service to locations with active coverage within the same continent — for an extra $25 a month. Starlink said it will only prioritize network resources while customers with portability enabled are at their registered service address. SpaceX has more than 2,400 Starlink satellites in orbit, according to statistics maintained by spaceflight analyst and astronomer Jonathan McDowell, and is currently offering services in 32 countries . 
TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon Web Services announced May 24 it has picked 10 startups to join its second annual space accelerator program, which helps early-stage companies learn how to grow their businesses with cloud and analytic technologies. The startups come from across the Earth observation, space situational awareness (SSA), launch, propulsion and space exploration markets. They are: They will start a four-week course beginning June with mentors and experts from AWS and program partner AlchemistX, which is part of the San Fransisco-based Alchemist Accelerator. The early stage companies will also receive up to $100,000 in AWS technical services offered under the AWS Activate program. AWS partnered with British early-stage space investor Seraphim for the accelerator program last year , which selected: Cognitive Space, D-Orbit, Descartes Labs, Edgybees, HawkEye 360, LeoLabs, Lunar Outpost, Orbital Sidekick, Satellite VU and Ursa Space. These startups have collectively raised more than $359 million since they were picked for the course, according to an AWS spokesperson. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Space mapping startup LeoLabs announced a multimillion-dollar contract May 24 to provide space domain awareness data, services and training to the Japan Air Self Dense Force. “We are honored to be working with the Japan Ministry of Defense,” Dan Ceperley, LeoLabs CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews . “This is actually the first allied ministry of defense that is using our commercial services in a big way. It sets a good precedent.” The contract gives the Japan Air Self Defense Force access to data gathered by LeoLab’s global network of phased array radars as well as training on LeoLabs’ tracking, monitoring and collision-avoidance services. “One of the important things about working with us is they can train on real live data,” Ceperley said. LeoLabs operates radars in Alaska, New Zealand , Texas and Costa Rica and has radars under construction in Australia and the Azores archipelago . Operators of 60 percent of the satellites in low-Earth orbit, including U.S. military organizations and constellation operators OneWeb, Planet and SpaceX Starlink, rely on LeoLabs services. LeoLabs provides customers with messages when potential collisions are detected, and screens planned maneuvers to ensure they do not lead to conjunctions. LeoLabs is continuing to expand its network and services in light of recent activity in low-Earth orbit, including the expansion of broadband and Earth-observation constellations and the Russian antisatellite weapon test . “The space industry is scaling up with hundreds of new satellites,” Ceperley said. “It’s primarily driven by commercial activity. However, the threat environment is growing as well. We see proximity operations being tested by Russia and by China. We see a lot of new launches from around the world, not all of which are commercial. That’s a strong reason for nations to keep scaling up space domain awareness services.” In addition to tracking activity in low-Earth orbit, LeoLabs tracks rocket launches and atmospheric reentry of satellites and rocket stages. “As our sensor network continues to proliferate around the world, we are rapidly investing in analytics and tools that will scale to deliver timely updates on critical events in LEO,” Ceperley said in a statement. LeoLabs did not disclose the value of the Japan Air Self Defense subscription, simply referring to it as a multimillion-dollar contract.
While operations of the International Space Station continue without “serious interruptions,” sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are starting to have an effect on some activities, NASA’s safety advisers said. At a May 12 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), members reiterated past comments by agency officials that the day-to-day operations of the ISS have continued despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February and subsequent sanctions imposed on Russia by the other countries in the ISS partnership. “The work, training and preparations in Moscow that is happening and has always happened for our international partnership with Russia on the International Space Station is continuing without any serious interruptions,” said Susan Helms, a former NASA astronaut and member of the panel. “Everything seems as it’s always been. The teams are working together for the partnership.” There have been no problems getting visas to Russia or access to the Star City complex outside Moscow. NASA astronauts have been training in Russia while Russian cosmonauts trained in the United States. However, that partnership is feeling the effects of economic sanctions on Russia. “The geopolitical sanctions that have been levied on Russia that we’ve seen happen in the last few months have created an environment where there are some administrative difficulties that are becoming apparent,” she said, particularly for NASA personnel in Russia. Examples of those problems she provided included limited travel options as airlines cut or suspend service to Moscow. Credit cards are difficult or impossible to use as banks halt operations in Russia. There has also been a “voluntary departure” of some NASA personnel and their families from Russia, forcing NASA “to manage the workforce more tightly and more aggressively than they have in the past.” The sanctions are also having a “peripheral impact” on Russia’s contributions to the ISS partnership, Helms added. An example she provided is Microsoft’s suspension of support for products in Russia. The panel, she said, remains “resolute” in its support for seat exchanges between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles, allowing NASA astronauts to fly on Soyuz vehicles and Roscosmos cosmonauts fly on Crew Dragon. Such “mixed crews” would ensure there are both Americans and Russians on the ISS should either vehicle be out of service for an extended period. NASA officials recently said they needed to finalize an agreement by June to allow swaps to take place on missions launching to the station in September. The sanctions have not affected other ISS issues, including a long-running investigation into a small but persistent air leak in the Russian segment’s service module. “NASA and Russia are continuing to work cooperatively to determine root cause, risk margins and mitigations,” Helms said. Cosmonauts have installed strain gauges around suspected leak locations to measure the effects of stresses on the module, such as thruster firings, dockings and undockings of spacecraft and the thermal stresses of the day-night cycle as the station orbits the Earth.
TAMPA, Fla. — British small satellite startup Open Cosmos said May 27 it has secured European Space Agency funding to develop plans for a space weather monitoring constellation. ESA awarded a 5.2 million euro ($5.6 million) contract to Open Cosmos, which is the technical lead for a European consortium comprising engineering, research and academic organizations for the proposed three-satellite NanoMagSat network. The NanoMagSat concept aims to improve measurements of the magnetic field that protects Earth from incoming energetic charged particles, and of the ionospheric environment where space weather hazards threaten satellites and critical terrestrial infrastructure. Florian Deconinck, vice president of institutional partnerships and future missions at Open Cosmos, said the consortium will use its funding to de-risk technologies on the ground over the next 18 months. They will then propose a mission concept that could be developed for less than 30 million euros within three years. Deconinck said NanoMagSat would have additional sensors and provide better spatial and temporal coverage than ESA’s Swarm satellites, which have been monitoring Earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere since 2013. The roughly $300 million Swarm mission comprises three identical 468-kilogram satellites in near-polar orbit. The Swarm satellites were designed to operate for just four years. Each NanoMagSat will weigh 24–30 kilograms, typical for a 16-unit cubesat. Only one is set to be deployed to polar orbit, while the other two will be inclined at 60 degrees. This would enable NanoMagSat “to recover phenomena with shorter timescales” than Swarm, Deconinck said, reducing four-month temporal revisits at latitudes between 60 degrees south and 60 degrees north to a little more than one month. NanoMagSat will carry absolute and high-frequency magnetic-field-detecting magnetometers, and a mix of other instruments that include global navigation satellite system (GNSS) occultation sensors and high-sampling rate Langmuir probes, which determine the electron temperature and density of a plasma. While the Swarm satellites do not have GNSS occultation sensors and only fly lower-frequency magnetometers 
and Langmuir probes, they have some sensors that will not be part of NanoMagSat, including an accelerometer for measuring non-gravitational accelerations caused by solar radiation and other factors. NanoMagSat, in addition to monitoring conditions that influence space weather, will be able to support capabilities needed for accurate navigation, and provide information for geophysical surveying of minerals, Open Cosmos said. NanoMagSat was picked in 2020 as a candidate for an ESA Scout mission, a new Earth observation program for proving how smallsats can add scientific value to data from existing spacecraft. Scout missions have a 30-million-euro cost cap — including launch and in-orbit commissioning — and go from kick-off to launch in three years. If Swarm is still operating when NanoMagSat launches, Deconinck said NanoMagSat’s polar-orbiting satellite “would be launched in an orbit optimized with the Swarm-B, benefitting from a better coverage than each constellation taken individually.” Swarm’s three identical satellites are named Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie (or Swarm A, B and C). Open Cosmos is responsible for the satellite and mission concept. The British startup is partnering with IPGP, a French governmental non-profit research and higher education establishment that is part of France’s Université Paris Cité, which is the scientific lead for the mission. Other consortium members include the University of Oslo in Norway, French technology research institute CEA-Leti, and Spanish engineering companies COMET-Ingenieria and Prosix Engineering. CEA-Leti is overseeing the payload and developing its magnetometers, while the University of Oslo is providing the Langmuir probes. Comet Ingenieria and Prosix Engineering are providing the deployable boom and hardware to hold its sensors. A supplier for NanoMagSat’s GNSS sensors has not yet been selected.
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX said May 27 that Nigeria has joined Mozambique as the first countries in Africa to approve its Starlink broadband services. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the regulatory clearance in Africa via Twitter a few hours after tweeting that Starlink had been approved in the Philippines, the first country in Southeast Asia to grant it permission to provide services. Starlink’s regulatory approvals mean the low Earth orbit network “is now licensed on all seven continents,” SpaceX’s Twitter account added. Nigeria-based publication Nairametrics reported that the Nigerian Communications Commission confirmed it had licensed Starlink following Musk’s tweet. According to the Nairametrics report, Starlink was licensed as an internet service provider (ISP), which is a category terrestrial telcos also fall into, and the license will be up for renewal in 10 years. Starlink has been working to secure regulatory approval in Nigeria for at least a year. NCC said in a news release last year that SpaceX executives had met with the regulator May 6, 2021, to discuss providing Starlink services. The Nigerian telecoms regulator said SpaceX sent a delegation to the country after holding discussions virtually over the previous several months. Mozambique’s telecoms regulator INCM said in a Feb. 22 news release that it intended to deliver a license for Starlink services Feb. 23. “One of Starlink’s big bets is to provide ultra-fast broadband to the African Continent by the end of 2022, which will allow expansion to a greater number of people and places, with emphasis on rural areas and others not served until today,” INCM said in the news release. Starlink’s coverage map currently shows plans to start providing services to Africa — and the majority of regions where the network is currently unavailable — in 2023.
The U.S. Space Force in a vision document calls for the service to invest in infrastructure and a skilled workforce to support the testing of new satellite designs and other systems. In the “Space Test Enterprise Vision” released May 10, the Space Force says the traditional methods for testing hardware and software are no longer adequate to evaluate future systems. Satellites typically have been tested for their technical performance but not for their survivability against anti-satellite weapons, Gen. David Thompson, vice chief of space operations, told reporters May 10. “We have done testing and training of space capabilities for years,” he said. “But in years past we didn’t have to worry about specific threats in the domain and we didn’t have to test our systems against those threats or train our guardians to operate in the face of those threats,” Thompson said. Due to these changes, the Space Force has to create a “test enterprise and a culture among testers,” he said. “That’s really what this vision is about, and the infrastructure and the investment we’re creating around it.” Thompson said the Space Force requested $89 million in fiscal year 2023 to begin the design and development of a National Space Test and Training Complex, or NSTTC. This will include a digital environment for virtual testing and training, and some actual hardware that might be needed for real-world tests. Funding for this effort is likely to increase in future years, said Thompson. He noted that there is additional money in the Space Force budget for testing and training spread across multiple accounts. A key change the Space Force is recommending in the Space Test Enterprise Vision is to combine the traditional phases in military weapon systems – developmental testing and operational testing – into a single test activity, said Maj. Gen. Shawn Bratton, commander of the Space Training and Readiness Command, or STARCOM. STARCOM is the command designated to map out a plan for the future testing enterprise. “We think that if we can integrate the test activities, it’ll let us be more efficient, faster, and speed up the testing part of the acquisition process,” he said. The idea of consolidating testing into a single integrated activity has been discussed with the Pentagon’s director of operational testing and evaluation and DoD supports the plan, said Bratton, That said, the Space Force will have to “prove that in execution and gather data to show that it is effective.” Bratton said STARCOM will take the lead in charting a strategy for future testing and training and will work closely with space acquisition organizations and operational units to make sure all needs are taken into account. 
HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Launcher won a $1.7 million contract from the U.S. Space Force that will assist the company’s development of a high-performance rocket engine for its small launch vehicle. Launcher announced May 25 it received the SBIR Phase 2B tactical funding increase, or TACFI, award from the Space Force earlier this month to accelerate work on the company’s E-2 engine. That includes full-duration testing of the engine’s turbopump and long-duration testing of the combustion chamber. The company has been testing the engine at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, including a test in April where the engine generated its full thrust of about 22,000 pounds-force. The engine features a combustion chamber 3D-printed using a copper alloy and runs on liquid oxygen and RP-1 propellants. Launcher won another SBIR award from the Air Force in 2019 , valued at $1.5 million, for E-2 engine development. “That was a really big boost for us in validation and funding,” Max Haot, founder and chief executive of Launcher, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters here. “We’re excited that they were pleased with our performance and that they wanted to sponsor us for another one.” “What we’re doing now is taking it to the next level, which is a long-duration test and the turbopump,” he said of the new award. “We’re also excited that they see the value of the staged combustion engine and its high performance.” Launcher has emphasized the high performance of the E-2 compared to other engines that use kerosene and liquid oxygen. The company says the E-2 has a specific impulse at sea level of 288 seconds, and 326 seconds in vacuum. That outperforms other American engines, including SpaceX’s Merlin, and is behind only the Russian RD-180. The E-2 will power Launcher Light, the small launch vehicle the company is developing for a first flight in 2024. A single engine will power the first stage of the vehicle, an approach Haot said offers simplicity compared to alternative designs that use clusters of smaller engines, while also enabling the company to later scale up to a larger launch vehicle with the same engine. Launcher is working on Launcher Light and the E-2 engine in parallel with Orbiter, an orbital transfer vehicle that will first fly later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission . Orbiter will later be used on Launcher Light missions as well. Both Launcher Light and Orbiter, Haot said, are designed to serve a demand for space access that is not being met despite the dozens of other companies working on similar vehicles. “The conflict in Ukraine has made it clear that launch vehicles and access to space is strategic,” he said. Even with dozens of launch vehicle startups, few have made it into service. “To me, the world is asking where are the rockets, not that there are too many.” That will continue, he said, even amid concerns about a recession. “In terms of the government outlook, as a customer, I certainly don’t see any slowdown,” he said. “For commercial, maybe there will be fewer startups for a few years. But the launch capacity is not there for what is being built today and for the next 5 to 10 years.”
Astra announced May 10 that it plans to carry out launches from a spaceport in the Shetland Islands starting in 2023 as part of international expansion plans. Astra said it is partnering with SaxaVord Spaceport to provide launch services from that facility, located on the island of Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Islands. Those launches would begin in 2023 pending final agreements and regulatory approvals. Astra, which has carried out launches so far from Kodiak, Alaska, and Cape Canaveral, Florida, has emphasized both the mobility of its launch system and its desire to expand to locations outside the United States. SaxaVord would be the first spaceport outside the United States that Astra launches from. “Our entire launch system is mobile and can be easily and discretely transported anywhere in the world in a standard ISO shipping container by truck, ship, rail or cargo aircraft,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said in a May 5 earnings call, adding that the company requires six people to set up the launch system. “Our mobile launch system also enables our allies, governments that do not have access to space, to rapidly establish their own sovereign space launch capabilities by partnering with Astra.” “The additional inclinations, flexibility and launch capacity that this partnership enables will allow us to meet the needs of Astra’s customers and align directly with SaxaVord U.K. Spaceport’s economic investment and environmental goals,” said Matt Gansler, vice president of business operations at Astra, in a statement about the agreement. Astra is not the first U.S. company to announce plans to launch from SaxaVord. Lockheed Martin, which won an award from the British government in 2018 to perform a launch from the U.K., announced in 2021 that it would carry out that launch using an RS1 rocket from ABL Space Systems , a small launch vehicle developer Lockheed has both invested in and purchased launches from. That “U.K. Pathfinder” launch is scheduled for later this year, although ABL has yet to conduct a first launch of its RS1 vehicle. “This agreement between SaxaVord Spaceport and Astra is great news for Shetland and represents another step towards our shared ambition of bringing vertical launch satellite capability to Scotland,” said Ivan McKee, Scottish minister for business, trade, tourism and enterprise, in a statement. Scotland is also home to a launch site under development near the town of Sutherland that will host launches by Orbex. In addition to SaxaVord and Sutherland, England’s Spaceport Cornwall, also known as Cornwall Airport Newquay, plans to host launches by Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne air launch system. The first LauncherOne system from that spaceport is scheduled for later this summer, pending regulatory approvals. “This new partnership between Astra and SaxaVord U.K. Spaceport is another great example of the strong interest from the international space community in operating from U.K. spaceports,” said Matt Archer, director of commercial space at the U.K. Space Agency, in a statement.
The Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft completed an automated docking in orbit with the Tianhe space station module late Monday following launch from Wenchang. The Chinese cargo vessel completed docking with the aft port of the Tianhe module at 8:54 p.m. Eastern May 9, seven hours after launch on a Long March 7 rocket from the coastal Wenchang launch center in southern Hainan Province. Launch took place earlier on Monday at 1:56 p.m. Eastern, marking the fifth flight of the Long March 7, designed specifically for space station cargo missions. The 13,500-kilogram Tianzhou-4 spacecraft is the sixth of 11 missions for the construction of the T-shaped, three-module Chinese Space Station and delivers around 6.9 tons of supplies for June’s Shenzhou-14 mission. Shenzhou-14 will see three astronauts enter the Tianhe core module for the start of a six-month-long mission which will oversee the arrival of the second and third space station modules. Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”), featuring a new airlock for extravehicular activities, living quarters that will allow crew handovers, and a small robotic arm, is scheduled to launch on a Long March 5B in July. Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) will launch in October. After docking, the modules will be transpositioned to radial docking ports on a docking hub launched with Tianhe. Tianzhou-4’s cargo mostly consists of supplies for the astronauts but also includes space station maintenance equipment, space science experiment apparatus, and a refrigerator for space science and medical experiments. It also includes a range of seeds to be exposed to radiation in low Earth orbit and later analyzed and used back on Earth. The daily supplies now include more vegetables than the earlier Shenzhou-12 and 13 missions to Tianhe, following feedback from the astronauts. “So now, we have 32 types of vegetables aboard,” Wang Chunhui, manager of the test team affiliated to China Astronaut Research and Training Center’s Tianzhou-4 mission, told CCTV. “The changes were made because the astronauts said when they were in orbit they hoped that there would be more vegetables. So this is an optimization we’ve made in terms of food supply,” Wang said. The first space station cargo mission, Tianzhou-2, was deorbited March 31, having supplied the Shenzhou-12 mission and been used in transposition tests. Tianzhou-3 was subsequently undocked from Tianhe’s aft port and docked with the forward port to make way for the arrival of Tianzhou-4. Next, Shenzhou-14 will launch on a Long March 2F rocket from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert. The China Manned Space Agency has not revealed a precise time and date for the launch, but the mission is expected in early June.
The Canadian government announced May 9 that it is joining the United States in banning tests of destructive direct-ascent antisatellite weapons as a step toward norms of responsible behavior in space. In a tweet , the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations in Geneva announced that Canada would abide by the non-binding ban on such ASAT tests announced by Vice President Kamala Harris April 18 . Such tests, Harris said at the time, create dangerous amounts of debris in orbit, and she called on other nations to join the United States in the ban. “For 40 years [Canada] has advocated for a halt to anti-satellite (ASAT) tests. Today we joined the US pledge not to conduct destructive ASAT missile testing. We encourage all states to join so that together we can make this a global norm,” the Canadian government stated. The move is largely symbolic. Canada has never developed or tested ASAT weapons and had announced no plans to do so. However, the announcement, coming at the start of a week of deliberations by a U.N.-chartered Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) in Geneva on norms of behavior for reducing space threats, could help build momentum for broader support for the ban. A State Department official said last month that the United States announced the ASAT testing ban now to “spur a meaningful discussion” at the meeting , the first of four scheduled over the next two years. “Having our own proposal at the OEWG of a norm of responsible behavior will allow the United States to demonstrate our leadership in this area and to drive a conversation in a way that supports our position and doesn’t undermine U.S. and allied security in the face of what surely will be competing proposals,” said Eric Desautels, acting assistant deputy of state for arms control, verification and compliance, at an April 21 webinar. The Canadian government didn’t elaborate on its acceptance of the ASAT testing ban, but a paper it filed as part of the working group discussions outlined its opposition to ASAT testing. “Canada views responsible behaviour as committing to not undertake development, testing and use of ASAT capabilities which can cause widespread debris,” the paper stated. “Indeed, Canada supports discussions, in the context of the Conference on Disarmament, on a possible ban on testing and use of ASATs which cause space debris.” A lack of progress in the Conference on Disarmament for many years, including failing to approve an agenda of topics for discussion, led to efforts like this working group to develop non-binding “rules of the road” for safe space operations, which Canada said in its white paper it supported. “From Canada’s perspective, pragmatic, non-binding standards of responsible behaviours should be applied as soon as possible which, if accepted by a majority of space-faring nations, could become legally binding international law in the future.” The Secure World Foundation, an organization devoted to space sustainability, welcomed Canada’s announcement. “As the world has seen, these tests can produce hundreds or even thousands of pieces of debris, which pose a threat to all operators in nearby orbits,” it said in a statement, asking “other countries to adopt a similar commitment, helping to cement this initiative into a global norm.” Canada is the first to formally back the ASAT testing ban. Jessica West, a senior researcher on space security at Project Ploughshares who is attending the working group meeting, said May 9 that while no other nations have formally joined the ban, several countries expressed support for it at the meeting , including France, Germany, Ireland, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
The James Webb Space Telescope is operating better than expected as the spacecraft enter the final stages of commissioning, project officials said May 9. In a call with reporters, scientists and mission managers said they have completed the alignment of the telescope’s optics with all its instruments and now are moving into setting up the instruments for science operations, the final step in a commissioning process that started shortly after the telescope’s launch on Christmas Day last year. “The performance is even better than we anticipated,” said Michael McElwain, JWST observatory project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We’ve basically reached a perfect telescope alignment. There are no adjustments of the telescope optics that would make material improvements to our science performance.” Asked later to quantify that “better than expected” performance, he said a parameter known as the static wavefront error is “significantly better” than planned for. “What that means is that we put the telescope mirrors into position with better accuracy and precision than what we had budgeted for, so we’re doing much better than requirements.” That reduced error, he said, improved both the sensitivity and resolution of the instruments. Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of one of JWST’s instruments, the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), said that images taken by the instrument show that the telescope resolution is diffraction limited at key wavelengths, meaning its images are as sharp as possible under the laws of physics. “It’s just amazing that the image quality is that excellent, and that’s going to help our science quite a bit,” she said. With the telescope alignment completed, the project is moving the final phases of commissioning, which include preparing the instruments for science operations. “It’s the time we’re doing all the requisite checkouts and calibrations before we start science,” McElwain said. “I would also call this the home stretch,” he added. “We’ve had about 1,000 activities planned for all of commissioning, and there are only about 200 activities left to complete.” That process will take about two months. The mission will wrap up that commissioning with the public release of what it calls “early release observations,” an initial set of images designed to showcase the telescope’s capabilities. “Their objective is to demonstrate, at the end of commissioning, to the world and to the public, that Webb is fully operational and that it produces excellent results,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Formal science operations through a program of observations called Cycle 1 will begin after the early release observations are made public, which he said is tentatively planned for mid-July. Those early release observations will involve all four science instruments and cover a range of objects. Pontoppidan said a committee developed a ranked list of objects to include among the early release observations, but declined to say what objects are included in that list. One reason, he said, is that the objects selected could change depending on when observations can be scheduled. Also, he added, “we’d really like to be a surprise.” 
TAMPA, Fla. — Globalstar has signed a term sheet with a “large, global customer” to start deploying some of its spectrum for terrestrial use “in the U.S. and beyond,” the satellite operator said May 5. The mystery customer is looking to use frequencies Globalstar holds in a part of S-band dubbed Band 53, the operator said in an earnings release. While further details were not disclosed, Globalstar has been working with Nokia for years to develop terrestrial solutions for Band 53, including private wireless networks and systems for connecting internet of things (IoT) devices. In January 2021, Globalstar said the government agency overseeing Seattle’s seaport plans to use Band 53 for a private wireless network to support logistical operations for cranes, trucks and lifts. Globalstar said its latest agreement for the frequencies “is a significant opportunity that will take time but signs point towards success; we will share more information when we are allowed.” The company is also “active in several international opportunities in the mining, transportation and logistics sectors,” it said, “any of which would be meaningful if concluded.” Globalstar did not respond to requests for comment. Globalstar mystery deepens This is the second large-scale project Globalstar has recently said is in the works with a customer shrouded in secrecy. The operator said Feb. 24 it picked MDA and Rocket Lab to supply a set of 17 satellites to replenish its constellation after a “potential customer” agreed to fund most of the $327 million project. The agreement includes an option for up to nine additional satellites at $11.4 million each. Globalstar did not shed any light on the identity of this financial backer in its May 5 earnings announcement. Even still, B. Riley analyst Mike Crawford continues to believe Apple is “the most probable” wholesale buyer of this capacity, saying the release of the iPhone 14 later this year could be a potential catalyst. There were reports last fall that the iPhone 13 line could come with Globalstar-enabled connectivity, but Apple ultimately made no mention of satellite services when that smartphone was unveiled in September. Megaconstellation plans It also recently emerged that Globalstar is behind ITU filings that registered plans for 3,080 satellites operating in low Earth orbit between 485-700 kilometers. The spectrum filings were submitted to international regulators through Germany’s licensing authority in December 2020. However, it is not uncommon for companies to file for various potential constellation architectures without a firm plan for them. Globalstar’s limited capital means its expansion plans appear tethered to its undisclosed financial backer, noted Quilty Analytics senior analyst Caleb Henry. Because the constellation this customer is backing is smaller than Globalstar’s existing LEO network, Henry said “there does not appear to be significant momentum towards a large, multi-thousand-satellite constellation.” Instead, the megaconstellation filing could be breathing room for a larger constellation at a future date, he added, and could also become “a valuable spectrum asset one day if others saw merit in owning it.” Globalstar’s current business, which primarily provides low-data-rate IoT connectivity, data and voice services to specialized handsets, faces increasing competition on multiple fronts. In the IoT market, competition is rising from established and startup space companies looking to take advantage of falling small satellite costs to expand their share. In voice and data, startups Lynk and AST SpaceMobile are signaling progress for satellite constellations that aim to provide connectivity directly to unmodified phones. Globalstar said revenues soared 22% to $33 million for the first three months of 2022, compared with the same period last year, boosted by engineering and other service revenue derived from its undisclosed wholesale capacity customer. The revenue jump helped the company post a $21 million net loss for the first quarter of 2022, an improvement on the $36 million net loss recorded for the period in 2021.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s newly elected president Yoon Suk-yeol will take office May 10 with a set of ambitious space projects aimed at making the country a major space power by 2035. They include establishing an independent aerospace agency offering integrated management of civil and military space programs in Sacheon , South Gyeongsang Province, home to nearly 100 aerospace companies, and developing a high-power rocket for independent satellite launches in the near term and lunar and Mars exploration in the long-run. Early completion of the country’s own GNSS system , which is on track to launch a full-fledged service by 2035, is another mission the new leader wants to accomplish to bolster the nation’s economic and military prowess. Yoon has also promised to facilitate the public-to-private transfer of space technologies, reform regulations and launch a space industry cluster to grow the country’s nascent domestic space industry. In line with this, the science ministry recently selected five universities that will be subsidized $4 million each over the next five years in return for running education programs designed to nurture skilled space engineers. “Countries jockey for position in the space industry to secure a competitive edge in national security and future competitiveness,” Yoon wrote in his election manifesto , pledging to make South Korea “one of seven most advanced space powers in the world by 2035.” To bolster international collaboration, the new president will seek to expand South Korea’s role in NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program and seek collaboration with other space powers. In line with this, Yoon’s right-hand man, Rep. Park Jin, recently visited the United States and discussed the issue of expanding South Korea’s role in the Artemis program with U.S. officials, according to a local broadcaster, JTBC . Park, a four-term lawmaker, is the new president’s handpicked candidate for his administration’s first foreign minister. “Both sides reached a consensus that South Korea and the United States need to explore deeper technological cooperation in the aerospace sector through the Artemis program,” Park told JTBC. Another reason for Yoon to deepen space cooperation with the U.S. is to deter the increasing military provocation of nuclear-armed North Korea, which drew international condemnation recently with a series of missile tests . The North is also likely to conduct an underground nuclear test this month. Yoon believes the bilateral space cooperation would ensure more thorough surveillance of North Korea’s military activities. He seeks “faster and wider” deployment of reconnaissance satellites for closer monitoring of North Korea’s military activities. The defense ministry recently signed a contract with SpaceX to launch five spy satellites by 2025, with the first launch on a Falcon 9 rocket by the end of 2023. Once in orbit, the satellites will enable South Korea’s military to observe the nuclear-armed neighbor’s key military facilities every two hours with 30-50 centimeters resolution imagery. But, according to election pledges, Yoon wants them to be placed in orbit earlier and to launch more reconnaissance satellites to ensure strong deterrence against North Korea’s continuing provocations. On top of this, Yoon has openly supported South Korea’s participation in the working groups of the Quad —a U.S.-led regional forum that includes Australia, India and Japan —and additional deployment of the U.S. THAAD anti-missile system here. With these issues on the table, Yoon will host a May 21 summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul. U.S.-based think tank National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) said in a March 24 commentary that Yoon’s top foreign policy priority appears to be “strengthening relations with the United States and continuing the transformation of bilateral cooperation into a comprehensive strategic alliance.” Key to this transformation is “moving beyond military cooperation and expanding economic and technical cooperation,” the institute said. 
WASHINGTON – U.S. defense contractor CACI International is funding an experiment to demonstrate space technologies for military use, including an alternative to GPS navigation. As part of the company’s plan to grow its space business, CACI is launching two demonstration payloads on a York Space satellite scheduled to fly to low Earth orbit in January aboard the SpaceX Transporter 7 rideshare. “We’re looking at an alternative PNT [positioning, navigation and timing] solution that will work in a contested space domain,” CACI’s president and CEO John Mengucci said during a third-quarter fiscal year 2022 earnings call. “It won’t completely replace GPS, but it will support systems out there when GPS signals are jammed or when they’re attacked,” he said. Non-GPS navigation from space is expected to become a significant business opportunity, Mengucci added. The military is looking for alternatives that are “resilient and less vulnerable to jamming.” The navigation technology that will be tested is called two-way time transfer – a technique that has been used for many years in timing applications on the ground. Two-way time transfer in space means the satellite sends a timing signal and a receiver on the ground or aboard an aircraft sends a signal simultaneously back to the satellite. If the experiment is successful, CACI plans to offer the two-way time transfer PNT service to the military and other government agencies. The company does not plan to build its own satellites but would work with satellite operators that are deploying large constellations to have them host the payload. A potential customer is the U.S. Space Development Agency which is looking for alternative PNT systems to ensure its sensor satellites in low Earth orbit can accurately track enemy missiles without relying on GPS. The second payload on this mission is for electronic signals surveillance. CACI is repurposing an electronic warfare sensor system currently used by U.S. special operations forces on the ground to collect signals intelligence. That technology was developed by Mastodon Design, a company CACI acquired in 2019. The sensor collects signals emitted by adversary radios or jammers and geolocates those signals. Mengucci said the company wants to demonstrate that technology from space which would provide a more persistent capability and global coverage if hosted on a large number of satellites. “These are great examples of taking exquisite terrestrial capabilities and investing internally to deploy them in space,” he said. Both the navigation and the electronic warfare payloads were built with software-defined radios from CesiumAstro, a supplier of space-qualified electronics. 
In-space transportation company Momentus has secured all the regulatory approvals for its first mission, set to launch later this month. The company announced May 5 it passed a payload review by the Federal Aviation Administration required for the commercial launch of its orbital transfer vehicle on SpaceX’s Transporter-5 mission, scheduled for launch in late May from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company earlier obtained a Federal Communications Commission communications license and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration remote sensing license for cameras on the tug. The payload review is a major milestone for Momentus because the company failed to secure FAA payload reviews on two occasions last year for Vigoride tugs on earlier Transporter launches. Federal agencies raised national security concerns in that payload review process about the company’s Russian co-founders. That led Momentus, which at the time was going public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger, to buy out those co-founders and sign a national security agreement with the federal government outlining steps it would take to address those concerns, such as modernizing its information technology systems. “We welcome these decisions by the relevant U.S. government agencies that clear the way for Momentus to conduct its inaugural launch of the Vigoride spacecraft,” John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said in a statement. In an earnings call March 8, Rood said the company had a “tight” schedule to get the Vigoride 3 tug ready for a launch then scheduled for June , citing both payload approvals as well as completing work on the spacecraft. However, Momentus announced May 6 that it delivered the hardware for the mission to Cape Canaveral for integration onto the Falcon 9 for the Transporter-5 launch. Momentus said two customers, FOSSA Systems and Orbit NTNU, will have payloads on the tug. The company also acquired a payload dispenser from another company that will fly on Transporter-5, carrying a cubesat from a student group at Cal Poly Pomona and four other unnamed payloads. The company says the primary purpose of the mission is to test the Vigoride tug, which is designed to move to different orbits and deploy payloads. The mission will also generate “a small amount of revenue,” the company said. Momentus is scheduled to release its first quarter financial results after the markets close May 10.
NASA officials say they believe the latest effort to shut down an airborne observatory is more likely to be successful because of the endorsement of doing so by last year’s decadal survey. NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal called for shutting down the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with a 2.7-meter infrared telescope mounted in its fuselage. “SOFIA’s annual operations budget is the second-most expensive operating mission in Astrophysics, yet the science productivity of the mission is not commensurate with other large science missions,” the agency stated in its budget proposal. This was not the first time NASA proposed terminating SOFIA. The agency’s budget proposals in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 also recommended shutting down SOFIA for a similar rationale, as did the agency’s fiscal year 2015 budget request. All three times Congress restored funding for SOFIA. “What’s different this year is that the decadal survey has recommended ending the SOFIA science mission at the current mission extension” at the end of September, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics advisory committee, during a NASA astrophysics town hall meeting May 3 that featured several questions about the planned SOFIA cancellation. Congress, he added, also endorsed all of the recommendations of the decadal survey, which included ending SOFIA , in the report accompanying the fiscal year 2022 omnibus spending bill. Another difference, he said, was that NASA was not zeroing out SOFIA in 2023 but instead is seeking $10 million as a “closeout budget” for the observatory. He didn’t elaborate on how that funding would be spent. Hertz emphasized the agency’s decision was based not only SOFIA’s science alone but instead on the value of that science relative to the costs. NASA has spent about $85 million a year on SOFIA, more than any operating astrophysics mission other than the Hubble Space Telescope. “That funding comes out of a limited NASA astrophysics budget, and this year is an example where it is displacing other astrophysics in our budget,” he said. NASA and Congress have not yet approved an operations plan for fiscal year 2022, so he did not go into details about how Congress’s decision to restore SOFIA, without increasing the overall astrophysics budget, affected other programs. However, both the fiscal year 2022 spending bill and projections for future years included in the 2023 budget proposal that are lower than what NASA planned for a year ago will affect several astrophysics programs. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), selected for development by NASA in October 2021 as a small Explorer mission for launch in 2025, will “ramp up more slowly,” Hertz said. A medium-class Explorer mission that NASA will select later this year will also be stretched out. NASA will also delay an announcement of opportunity (AO) for a larger probe-class mission. The release of the AO, previously scheduled for January 2023, will be pushed back by 6 to 12 months, with a formal announcement of the revised schedule “very soon,” he said. Another factor that adds weight to NASA’s plans to shut down SOFIA is the agreement with its German partner on the program, the DLR space agency, to end SOFIA operations by Sept. 30 . In previous years, NASA and DLR had not announced similar arrangements. That agreement was criticized in a May 3 statement by Deutsche SOFIA Institut (DSI) , the German organization that handles operations of Germany’s share of SOFIA. DSI “distances itself from the justification for this decision,” complaining, as SOFIA’s American backers have previously said, that the decadal survey based its decision on old information and did not consider improvements intended to increase SOFIA’s efficiency. Alfred Krabbe, head of DSI, said in the statement that he hopes Congress restores funding for SOFIA for at least one more year, adding that the James Webb Space Telescope cannot replace SOFIA since SOFIA operates at longer infrared wavelengths than what JWST can observe. Congress, he noted, has supported SOFIA in the past. Congress has yet to weigh in publicly on the proposed termination of SOFIA. The program did not come up during a May 3 hearing on NASA’s budget proposal by a Senate appropriations subcommittee. “The NASA budget request is just that, a request,” Hertz said. “Congress will make the ultimate decision on what NASA projects receive funding.”
Two federal agencies in a turf battle over commercial spaceflight investigations say they are now talking with each other to better define their roles and responsibilities. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) triggered the debate when it published a notice of proposed rulemaking in November 2021 to codify the role it would take in investigating accidents involving commercial launches and reentries. Companies in the industry widely criticized the proposal, saying it duplicated existing regulations at the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial launches and reentries. The FAA also criticized the proposal, calling on the NTSB to instead work with the FAA to update an existing memorandum of agreement (MOA) between the agencies. In an April 6 letter to President Joe Biden, the chair and ranking member of the House Science Committee, Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), called the proposed NTSB rule “plainly unlawful” and urged the administration to withdraw it . The letter came after committee staff previously complained that the NTSB declined to respond to earlier inquiries about the proposal. The NTSB did respond this letter. In a May 5 letter to Johnson , Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB, said the board was meeting with both the FAA and with industry “to seek clarity on the concerns that stakeholders have identified in their comments” as part of its reviews of the public comments submitted in response to the proposed rule. She added that the NTSB would not immediately move to a final rule, something it could have done after reviewing comments to the proposed rule. “We are seriously considering all the comments we received, and we anticipate proceeding to a supplemental [notice of proposed rulemaking] as our next step, which will be available for public comment,” she wrote. Homendy added that FAA and NTSB officials met in April to discuss potential updates to the MOA, which NTSB argues are needed to reflect changes in the industry like commercial human spaceflight. A second meeting is scheduled for May 11, she said, and that both an updated MOA and the “eventual” NTSB regulations “will clarify the roles and responsibilities of each agency, providing a framework for operators when an investigation is necessary.” At the May 3 meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), Kelvin Coleman, FAA acting associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said the FAA has had “good conversations” with the NTSB on updating the MOA. “So far, so good,” he said. “Chair Homendy has been very gracious and very accommodating working with the FAA on that, so I think that’s moving well.” At the COMSTAC meeting May 4, Joel Graham, a member of the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee, said he also welcomed the discussions between the agencies on updating the MOA on commercial spaceflight investigations. “That is what we wanted to see happen,” he said. “We don’t want one agency charging off in one direction and ignoring the other. This has to be a collaborative effort. It has to be a multiagency effort.”
Small launch vehicle developer Astra says it is ready to perform a series of launches for NASA once it receives a license for those missions. In a May 5 earnings call, Astra executives said they were ready to perform the first of three launches of its Rocket 3.3 vehicle from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying cubesats for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats (TROPICS) mission. The six satellites will be launched on three Rocket 3.3 vehicles over a relatively short period. “The rockets are ready,” Kelyn Brannon, chief financial officer of Astra, said during the call. “What we’re waiting on is the license for all the three launches, under one license.” In a separate blog post May 6 , Donald Allen, senior director of program management-operations at Astra, said the company expected to receive the Federal Aviation Administration launch license “in the next few weeks.” He did not state how soon after receiving the license he expected the first of the three launches to take place. Astra was also unusually critical of outside estimates of its launch plans. “There is a lot of speculation online about our launch dates and even websites that publish our supposed launch dates; these websites are not a reliable source of information as they do not have access to all of the data necessary to determine a launch date,” Allen wrote (emphasis in original.) While the company expects to perform the launches in quick succession from Space Launch Complex 46, which hosted an unsuccessful Rocket 3.3 launch in February, the company does not expect to complete all three launches by the end of the quarter. “It’s going to be a pretty rapid cadence,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said on the call, but added the company would have to work around weather and range constraints. “The objective is to start this campaign this quarter and get as many launches done this quarter as we can, but it is likely that we’re not going to be able to get them all done by the end of the quarter.” “This is a mission that we would like to complete before the storm season,” he added. He didn’t elaborate on “storm season,” but the Atlantic hurricane season, as defined by the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center , starts June 1, before the end of the quarter. Financial results Astra, in its first quarter, reported revenues of $3.9 million, a net loss of $85.7 million and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $47.5 million. The company projected an even larger loss for the second quarter, with an adjusted EBITDA loss of $58 million to $64 million. The company ended the first quarter with $255.2 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. Brannon said the company projected a “meaningful increase” in expenses in the quarter because of investment in its next launch system, Rocket 4. Some of those upcoming expenses, such as materials and consulting services, will not continue at the same rate in later quarters. However, Kemp said the company completed its expansion of its factory, so that capital expenditures associated with that will decline “rather substantially” in the second quarter and beyond. “We’re getting to the end of deploying capital into the infrastructure and the factory,” he said. The company plans to show off those investments in its factory at a “Spacetech Day” May 12. Astra plans to use the event to also discuss its plans on Rocket 4 vehicle. “We’re going to make some exciting product announcements,” Kemp said.
A Chinese launch startup sent a small rocket test stage up to an altitude of one kilometer Friday before a performing a powered descent and vertical landing. Deep Blue Aerospace, founded in 2017, conducted the test May 6 with the Nebula M1 test article at a facility at Tongchuan, Shaanxi Province, landing within less than half a meter of the landing pad “bullseye”. The test is a milestone in the development of the full Nebula-1 rocket with a recoverable first stage, and indicative of progress and efforts by Chinese launch startups to develop reusable launchers. The Nebula M1 is powered by a variable thrust Leiting-5 (“Thunder-5”) electric-pump-fed kerosene-liquid oxygen engine. The landing in the video is obscured by dust thrown up by the thrust, but the company claims the test was successful. The Nebula-M was used in two earlier, successful tests to altitudes of around 10 and 100 meters . New tests—to altitudes of 10 and 100 kilometers—will be conducted using a new test stage on the same scale as the full scale Nebula-1 rocket. It will use more powerful 20-ton-thrust Leiting-20 engines, which are to undergo testing as a next step. The first orbital launch and recovery of the Nebula-1 is planned for before the end of 2024. Huo Liang, founder of Deep Blue Aerospace, told SpaceNews in an earlier interview that the firm is targeting both private launch contracts and government programs including the national satellite Internet project and the space station as possible revenue streams. The company received a boost last month, announcing undisclosed A+ round financing April 19, three months after it raised $31.5 million in A round funding. Last autumn Deep Blue Aerospace employed nearly 100 people, with some coming from China’s traditional space industry institutes and companies, and some from areas such as the automobile and aviation industries. Around 70 percent of the team are engineers. Deep Blue Aerospace claims the vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) reached the highest altitude for such a test conducted in China, while also reaching the greatest speed and longest flight time. The apparent previous altitude record was of 300.2 meters set by Linkspace in 2019 using its RLV-T5 vehicle. After an apparent hiatus, Linkspace is now targeting a 100-kilometer level test in Q4 this year after a recent successful static fire test of the larger, methane-liquid oxygen RLV-T6. Deep Blue Aerospace and Linkspace are not the only commercial Chinese launch firms working towards reusability . Beijing-based iSpace is developing the methalox Hyperbola-2 launcher while Galactic Energy ( Pallas-1 ), Space Pioneer and others are also developing liquid propellant launchers and vertical takeoff, vertical landing capabilities. Landspace, one of the early movers in China, recently released images of its Zhuque-2 , suggesting its first test launch is near. While the launch will be expendable, the firm plans to convert the methalox rocket into a reusable launcher. The country’s main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), is also exploring reusability with its Long March 8 derived from existing Long March rockets, while a reusable variant based on the Long March 6 is being developed by CASC’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. CASC is also developing a new, reusable launcher with three cores for human spaceflight, while its Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket could also be made reusable .
TAMPA, Fla. — Increasing costs and delays have forced Telesat to downsize plans for 298 low Earth orbit satellites by a third to keep within its $5 billion budget. The Canadian satellite operator plans to order just 188 satellites plus 10 in-orbit spares from Thales Alenia Space, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said during the company’s May 6 earnings call. That is still enough for the Telesat Lightspeed network to provide “something like 10 terabits of capacity” globally, according to Goldberg, which is more capacity than all current satellites in geostationary orbit combined. Telesat had previously planned to provide 15 terabits of capacity with 298 operational LEO satellites for the government and enterprise markets it aims to serve. However, Telesat had to rethink the constellation after Thales Alenia Space alerted the company in October that it had run into supply chain shortages, which have pushed out the service’s planned debut a year to 2026. Despite downsizing Telesat Lightspeed, Goldberg expects the project will continue to cost $5 billion amid rising inflation. He said Telesat has lined up 4.2 billion Canadian dollars ($3.3 billion) so far to fund the project from existing financial resources and Canadian government funding. The company is waiting to get commitments for covering the rest of Telesat Lightspeed’s cost before signing an order contract with Thales Alenia Space. Goldberg said he expects to have “a pretty good sense of where we’re sitting” with export credit agencies to complete the project’s financing by the end of June. He said Telesat was close to securing these funds before having to pause discussions last year to update its constellation plans. Changing NGSO landscape The delay in ordering Telesat Lightspeed satellites gives Amazon’s proposed LEO constellation Project Kuiper more time to catch up with the company. Amazon announced multi-billion dollar contracts April 5 for launching most of Project Kuiper’s 3,236 satellites over five years. Although Amazon did not say when launches will start, it must deploy half the constellation by July 2026 under its Federal Communications Commission license. Project Kuiper is mostly focused on consumer broadband, similar to SpaceX’s rapidly expanding Starlink network that currently has more than 2,100 satellites in LEO, but could seek a share of Telesat Lightspeed’s enterprise and government markets. OneWeb’s planned LEO constellation is focused on enterprise and government markets. The British startup had deployed 428 satellites, or 66% of its planned total fleet, before pausing launches in March after being caught up in sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OneWeb has signed launch agreements with SpaceX and India’s space agency to resume satellite deployments this year. Telesat has previously said its LEO constellation could capture 1% of a total addressable market worth 430 billion Canadian dollars, implying revenue of 4.3 billion Canadian dollars. The company reported 186 million Canadian dollars in revenue for the three months to the end of March, a 2% decrease compared with the same period in 2021 when adjusted for foreign exchange rates. The revenue drop was primarily due to less direct-to-home broadcast business in North America and a fall in equipment sales to Canadian government customers, according to Telesat. Goldberg said U.S.-based satellite broadcaster Dish Network renewed a contract to use its Anik F3 Ku-band satellite for at least another two years but at a lower rate. Dish Network is using “a little more than half” the capacity it had previously been taking on Anik F3, he said, and most of the remaining capacity it did not renew was sold to a mobility services provider for the maritime market.
Virgin Galactic is again postponing the start of commercial service of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane from late 2022 to early 2023, blaming the latest delay on supply chain and labor issues. In the company’s first quarter earnings release May 5, Virgin Galactic said it expected to start commercial flights of its VSS Unity spaceplane in the first quarter of 2023 after completing upgrades of the vehicle and VMS Eve, its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft. The company had previously scheduled those flights to begin in the fourth quarter of 2022, a schedule it affirmed in February with the release of its 2021 financial results . Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, noted in an earnings call that it was experiencing “elevated levels of supply chain disruption” and hiring that was not keeping pace with projections. “Our projections on hiring and our forecast of certain long-lead material deliveries suggests we may need additional schedule contingency,” he said. “For this reason, we are shifting the expected commencement of commercial service from Q4 of ’22 to Q1 of ’23.” Asked later about specific supply chain issues, Colglazier mentioned availability of “high-performance metallics” used on the vehicles, which primarily are made of carbon composites. “It’s metallics where we’re really seeing delivery times that are quite extended,” he said, such an aluminum alloy that once had a lead time of a “couple, three weeks” now far longer. While the company has worked to mitigate those delay by finding alternative sources, “cumulatively these things start to add up.” The other issue is hiring. Virgin Galactic is expanding its engineering staff, but he said most of the new employees are working on the design of the company’s new “Delta-class” spaceplane that the company expects to enter service in mid-decade. Existing staff, he said, are spread out working on Unity, Eve and Imagine, the new suborbital spaceplane now slated to enter commercial service in mid-2023. “We had an engineering team that had mostly been building one ship, Imagine, because Unity and Eve were more in flight test,” he said. “We now have that same engineering team that has experience spread over all three ships.” Unity and Eve are currently scheduled to resume flight tests in the fourth quarter, Colglazier said, with one glide flight and one powered test flight planned before starting commercial service in early 2023. Imagine, the new spaceplane, will make its first flight to space in the first quarter of 2023 with several “revenue generating” test flights to follow before it starts carrying customers in mid-2023. He didn’t elaborate on the overall test flight schedule for Imagine, which would likely include a number of captive carry and glide flights before starting powered flights, based on the experience of past Virgin Galactic vehicles. Despite its current supply chain problems, Virgin Galactic is moving ahead with a strategy for building its Delta-class spaceplanes that will shift more of the work onto suppliers, with the company handling final assembly of the vehicles. Colglazier said Virgin Galactic hosted a suppliers conference recently and issued requests for information from prospective suppliers, but has not announced any firm contracts for building elements of the vehicles. “We’re putting together contracts and buys that will be material for folks,” he said, adding that while supply chains are “snarled” today, he couldn’t predict what the situation will be in two to three years when those vehicles are being built. Virgin Galactic is still seeing strong interest in suborbital flights despite the delays. The company now has 800 customers signed up, and Colglazier said the company should easily reach its goal of having 1,000 customers once commercial service begins in early 2023. He added that the company, which raised prices last year to $450,000 , doesn’t plan to raise them again in the near term despite higher inflation rates. “Once those last 200 are gone, we’ll assess pricing appropriately against the market,” he said. Those sales accounted for the $310,000 in revenue the company reported in the first quarter of 2022. The company reported a net loss of $93 million and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $77 million for the quarter. The company does have $1.22 billion of cash and equivalents on hand, a figure bolstered by a debt offering in the first quarter that raised $425 million.
WASHINGTON – The National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-85 mission launched April 17 by SpaceX was originally scheduled to fly from Cape Canaveral, Florida. But just 12 months before the launch, the NRO informed SpaceX it needed to send its payload to a different orbit so the launch had to be moved to the western range at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. “This was a challenge,” NROL-85 mission manager Maj. Jonathan Schirner said this week on the NRO’s “The Dish” podcast. National security space launch missions are rarely, if ever, moved from coast to coast on such short notice, Schirner said. “It’s the first time we’ve done a range change at the 12 month mark in the NSSL timeframe.” Typically it would be hugely expensive for the government to switch ranges like that because NSSL missions are planned two years in advance and SpaceX in this case had already started integration work at the Cape, Schirner said. The NRO and SpaceX worked out a deal to move NROL-85 to the West Coast at no extra cost to the government and in exchange the NRO agreed to fly the mission on a reused first stage that had previously flown another NRO mission. Under the agreement, SpaceX would launch NROL-87 in February at Vandenberg and reuse the boost for NROL-85 in April. Schirner said the deal also was possible because the Space Force’s Space Systems Command was able to examine the recovered booster and approve it for reuse in just two months, a much shorter than usual turnaround., NROL-87 was the first NRO launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket intended to be reused for a future mission . Schirner said a lot of effort and coordination went into the relocation of NROL-85. “About 12 months ago, the director of the NRO decided that in order to preserve the opportunity to optimize the orbit, that we would change ranges to Vandenberg because you can hit both of the orbits that he was looking at,” he said. NRO spacecraft are classified and the agency does not disclose what payloads it launches in national security missions. Satellite tracker Ted Molczan told Spaceflight Now he believed NROL-85 carried a pair of maritime surveillance satellites. The use of a previously flown booster was “part of the renegotiation for the contract to get us to the West Coast,” Schirner said. “The reused booster was in that contract mod. And that really was an offset to a lot of the integration work that has already been done at the Cape.” “By using a reused booster, we were able to move coasts, and we didn’t have to spend a dollar to do it,” he said. Under most circumstances, the government would have had to pay the contractor for the integration work that had already been done, he added. “So I think that when we talk about benefits of a reused booster, we’re talking about taxpayer savings on one end but specifically on this mission, we were able to get a priority of the director of the NRO done while spending zero taxpayer dollars to do it.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat announced financial, commercial and aviation leadership changes May 5 to guide the satellite operator’s post-bankruptcy future. The executive appointments come a month after former Raytheon executive David Wajsgras took over as CEO, replacing Stephen Spengler who had been at the helm for nearly seven years. Anthony (Toby) O’Brien, a former chief financial officer at Raytheon, was appointed to the same role at Intelsat. O’Brien had joined Raytheon as CFO in 2015 to replace Wajsgras, who was promoted to head of the company’s intelligence unit at the time. While Wajsgras left Raytheon in 2020 after it merged with United Technologies to join a private equity firm, O’Brien stayed on as CFO of the combined group. At Intelsat, O’Brien will oversee the $7 billion debt the company still has on its books after emerging from bankruptcy Feb. 23 , reduced from $16 billion following a long-running restructuring process that started May 2020. O’Brien replaces David Tolley as Intelsat CFO. Intelsat also named Jeff Sare May 5 as president of its commercial aviation division to replace responsibilities previously held by John Wade. Wade joined Intelsat at the end of 2020 — while the operator was still in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — when the company bought the commercial aviation part of Gogo’s inflight connectivity business. According to his LinkedIn profile , he remained as Gogo’s president of commercial aviation until he left Intelsat in January. Sare was previously vice president and connectivity solutions business segment leader at Panasonic Avionics, which serves an inflight connectivity market that Intelsat has said will be important for its future growth. Fierce competition in the inflight connectivity market is ramping up as SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network announces incoming services on airlines. Intelsat named Clay McConnell as senior vice president of corporate communications and marketing as part of the leadership changes. McConnell is a former director of corporate communications at Delta Airlines, and has also been head of communications for Airbus Americas. Intelsat also said May 5 it has promoted chief services officer Michael DeMarco to chief commercial officer to replace Samer Halawi, who announced plans to resign in December after joining Intelsat in January 2018. Intelsat ordered two software-defined satellites from Thales Alenia Space Jan. 12 as part of a post-restructuring growth strategy that, according to Halawi in October , could include the operator’s own low Earth orbit constellation. The IS-41 and IS-44 satellites are slated to launch in 2025 to provide commercial and government mobility services and cellular backhaul across Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Helping to fund these growth plans are nearly $5 billion in proceeds that Intelsat expects to receive from clearing C-band spectrum for terrestrial cellular operators. However, satellite operator SES is disputing Intelsat’s share of the proceeds amid ongoing legal action before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
NASA expects to be ready to perform another countdown rehearsal of the Space Launch System in early June as it pushes back the first launch of the vehicle to at least August. At a May 5 briefing, NASA officials said they had made progress on two problems with the SLS and its mobile launch platform discovered during three attempted wet dress rehearsal (WDR) operations last month at Launch Complex 39B. Those problems, along with the need to upgrade supplies of nitrogen gas at the pad, prompted NASA to roll the vehicle back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) April 26. That work included replacing a helium check valve in the rocket’s upper stage. Technicians found a small piece of rubber in the valve that prevented it from closing. “Right now they’re still investigating what could be the source of that piece of rubber,” said Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program. A hydrogen leak detected at the pad, he said, was likely caused by bolts on a gasket that has loosened up. Those bolts have been retorqued and don’t show signs of leaks, but he added they won’t know for certain that was the source of the leak until the vehicle is back at the pad and liquid hydrogen flows through that umbilical line. “We feel we’ve done what we can do at this point,” he said. While that work was in progress at the VAB, Air Liquide, the company that provides nitrogen gas supplies to various sites at KSC, has been working to upgrade its system to meet the higher demands of the SLS. “The repairs at Air Liquide are progressing on track,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development. He said NASA would soon check that the upgraded system can provide the nitrogen needed for SLS operations at the pad. The completion of the repairs in the VAB and the nitrogen upgrades at the pad will determine when the SLS rolls back out for another countdown rehearsal. Free estimated that the vehicle would roll out “in the late May time frame” is work goes as planned. That would allow another WDR in early to mid-June. He acknowledged that NASA might need to perform more than one WDR before feeling confident enough to move ahead with final launch preparations. “We are optimistic we only need one more based on everything we’ve been able to do so far,” he said. “But, we also want to be realistic and upfront with you that it may take more than one attempt.” The current schedule for Artemis 1, he said, would allow at least two countdown rehearsals at the pad in June before rolling back to the VAB for final launch preparations, then back to the pad for a launch “in the August time frame.” One launch period from July 26 to Aug. 9, but Free said NASA was looking only at the early August part of that window. The launch would have to work around the Falcon Heavy launch of the Psyche asteroid mission, which has a short launch window that opens at the beginning of August. Additional launch windows are available Aug. 23 to 29 and Sept. 2 to 6. “We have launch periods planned for the entire rest of the year,” Free said, although dates beyond early September are preliminary.
Updated 6 a.m. Eastern with post-launch briefing comments. WASHINGTON — A Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico May 6, returning four astronauts to Earth after nearly six months on the International Space Station. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance splashed down off the coast from Tampa, Florida, at 12:43 a.m. Eastern, after a normal reentry. Recovery teams placed the spacecraft onto a boat a half-hour later. The spacecraft undocked from the ISS nearly 24 hours earlier with the four Crew-3 astronauts on board: Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron of NASA and Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency. The four launched to the station on that spacecraft last November. “We’re glad to be back. Thanks for letting us take Endurance on a shakedown cruise,” Chari, the Crew-3 commander, said moments after splashdown. “It was a great ride.” During a post-splashdown briefing, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said the Crew-3 astronauts noticed a small piece of debris float away from the spacecraft after its May 5 docking. Photos suggest the piece is part of a frangible nut that was used to hold a tension rod that connected the spacecraft’s trunk to the Falcon 9 rocket during launch. The debris did not pose a risk to either the spacecraft or the ISS. The nut is designed to be captured in a hole in the trunk but managed to wiggle out, he said. “It’s something we don’t want to have happen. We’ll figure out the right way” to keep it from happening, he said. “We’ll look for a design change.” The splashdown wraps up an active month in human spaceflight for SpaceX. The company launched the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour April 8 on the commercial Ax-1 mission for Axiom Space. The spacecraft docked with the ISS a day later and its crew of four private astronauts remained there 15 days, undocking April 24 for a splashdown off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, April 25. Less than 39 hours after that splashdown, another Crew Dragon spacecraft, Freedom, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on the Crew-4 mission to the ISS. It docked to the station after a 16-hour journey, delivering NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines and and Jessica Watkins and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. They will remain on the station until relieved by the Crew-5 mission, projected to launch in September on the same Endurance spacecraft that returned Crew-3. “It is, for us, unprecedented,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said of the recent pace of operations at the post-splashdown briefing. She said the NASA and SpaceX teams were being “thoughtful” about the size of teams and amount of work they’re doing. “You’ve just got to do it one step at a time.” “I think this is a great time to be in spaceflight,” Gerstenmaier said, noting that SpaceX was also preparing for a Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites from the Kennedy Space Center that took place at 5:42 a.m. Eastern. “I think we’re poised well as a company to support these multiple activities.” “Maybe we can all take a few days of rest,” Lueders added.
TAMPA, Fla. — EchoStar says satellite builder Maxar Technologies won’t deliver its long-awaited Jupiter-3 satellite in time for its end-of-year launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The head of EchoStar’s Hughes Network Systems said in a May 5 earnings call that the satellite, which it badly needs to relieve broadband capacity constraints in the Americas, won’t launch before the first quarter of 2023. “This delay is due in part to relocation of critical resources at Maxar to a higher priority government-related spacecraft project,” said Pradman Kaul, president of Hughes Networks Systems, the EchoStar subsidiary that operates the Jupiter network. Maxar declined to directly confirm Kaul’s explanation for the additional delay for the 500 gigabit-per-second Ka-band satellite. “Maxar complies with all legal directives and regulations requiring prioritization of government missions while ensuring we maintain our commitment to customer-focused solutions and service,” Maxar said via email May 5. Maxar CEO Dan Jablonsky told SpaceNews in early April that it was looking to deploy WorldView Legion, a constellation of six imagery satellites, “as quickly as possible” to meet soaring government demand following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. According to Jablonsky, Maxar’s existing fleet of four imagery spacecraft will be stretched for capacity until higher-resolution WorldView Legion satellites are deployed. SpaceX is slated to launch the first two WorldView Legion satellites in early summer, and then the remaining four in pairs over two three-month intervals. Jablonsky said Maxar had “made accommodations with some of our other [imagery] customers to be able to surge capacity for the U.S. and allies.” Maxar is also working on the OSAM-1 robotic satellite servicing mission and the Power and Propulsion Element for the lunar Gateway that will support human lunar landings, which are both programs for NASA but neither is due to launch before 2024. “Maxar’s manufacturing facilities are very active building a multitude of government, civil and commercial customer satellites,” Maxar said via email May 5. “EchoStar is a valued customer of Maxar. We’re working hard and looking forward to successful completion of the Jupiter-3 satellite for them. Satellite delays EchoStar ordered Jupiter-3 from Maxar in 2017, and had initially planned to deploy it in 2021 to cover North and South America, Canada and Mexico. The satellite has more than double the capacity of Jupiter-2, which was launched in 2017 to cover North America, Mexico and Canada. The Jupiter-3 project suffered multiple delays stemming from a pandemic that began tightening its grip on international supply chains in early 2020. After delaying a decision to pick a launch provider for Jupiter-3 to allow more time for uncertainty in the market to shake out, EchoStar tapped SpaceX in late 2020 for a 2021 launch to geostationary (GEO) orbit. The pandemic continued to disrupt the availability of skilled workers and components across the satellite industry in 2021, forcing EchoStar to push the launch into early 2022. More pandemic-related setbacks pushed Jupiter-3’s launch date to various points in the year before the latest delay knocked it into 2023. Other GEO satellites have also suffered pandemic-related delays, even as closures, mask mandates and other restrictions were easing worldwide amid deployment of COVID-19 vaccines. During its Feb. 3 financial update, Viasat said a pandemic-related shortage of skilled workers had pushed the Falcon Heavy launch of its Boeing-built ViaSat-3 satellite from the first half of 2022 to “late summer.” Like Jupiter-3, ViaSat-3 is intended to provide high-speed services across the Americas. In Europe, Eutelsat expects two delayed GEO satellites from Thales Alenia Space will stretch its revenue slump into 2023, the French fleet operator said during Feb. 17 financial results. And supply chain issues have not just affected large GEO satellites. Canada’s Telesat said March 18 that ongoing manufacturing delays at Thales Alenia Space have pushed out the completion of its low Earth orbit Lightspeed network by a year to 2026. SES CEO Steve Collar said May 5 it has adjusted its launch agreement with SpaceX this year to accommodate “a slightly later delivery” of satellites Boeing is building for O3b mPower, the operator’s next-generation constellation in medium Earth orbit. The operator had previously planned to split the first six O3b mPower satellites between two SpaceX launches in the second quarter of 2022. Instead, the companies are planning to deploy six O3b mPower satellites across three SpaceX launches between July and September, keeping SES on track to launch the upgraded network commercially “from the beginning of 2023.” Boeing is building 11 satellites for O3b mPower in total. EchoStar capacity crunch EchoStar said revenues jumped nearly 4% to $502 million for the three months to the end of March 2022, compared with the same period last year. But adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, fell 10.7% to $166 million. “While the growth of our consumer broadband business has been impacted as a result of our capacity constraints and other factors, we have continued to increase revenue by capitalizing on enterprise and government opportunities — both domestically and internationally,” EchoStar chief financial officer David Rayner said. “However, this change in our revenue mix has and will continue to put some pressure on our margins” until the company monetizes additional capacity from Jupiter-3. Hamid Akhavan, a former partner at private equity firm Twin Point Capital, took over as EchoStar’s CEO March 31 after Michael Dugan retired. EchoStar announced May 2 that Anders Johnson, the company’s chief strategy officer, had notified the company that he plans to resign June 3 to pursue other opportunities. Johnson spearheaded EchoStar’s efforts to expand its European S-band business globally with non-geostationary satellites. Akhavan said his departure should not be viewed as a step away from its S-band ambitions. On the contrary, he said EchoStar is “shifting resources there” to capture what he sees as an emerging opportunity. However, he said the company is conducting a “fresh reassessment of our resources and opportunities, and an examination of our industry and adjacent verticals, with the goal to reignite and refine our corporate growth profile.” This includes potentially making acquisitions to enter new markets. Echostar recorded $1.5 billion in cash, “cash equivalents and current marketable investment securities” as of March 31. Akhavan said the benefits of the company’s “uniquely strong balance sheet — something that most of our peers and competitors cannot say,” will become more evident as interest rates rise and the “likelihood of a recessionary environment becomes meaningful.” Edit May 16: An Echostar spokesperson confirmed Jupiter-3 is slated to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, not a Falcon 9
Adding microwave sounders to its constellation will not push back the timeline for startup Tomorrow.io to begin gathering weather data via satellite. By the end of 2024, the Boston-based startup plans to have a constellation in orbit acquiring radar and microwave observations. Tomorrow.io announced plans in March to add microwave sensors to its radar satellite constellation because “it will make everything better,” Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews . “A combo constellation is better because those instruments are very complementary to one another.” Since the company was founded in 2016, Tomorrow.io has been focused on equipping small satellites with storm-tracking radars to improve weather forecasts. At least initially, the microwave sounders will fly on different satellites. “We might consider marrying them own the road, but it not right now,” Goffer said. “It would just add time and cost, and not help us in any way.” The NASA and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency Global Precipitation Measurement Mission demonstrated the benefits of combining a passive microwave sensor to gather data on atmospheric temperature and moisture with radars, which excel at detecting precipitation at various altitudes. “We intend to take the same architecture of radars and sounders flying in concert, shrink down the size of the instruments and multiply the numbers of instruments to get much higher overall performance for a fraction of the budget,” Goffer said. Astro Digital is building Tomorrow.io’s first two mini-fridge-size satellites. Tomorrow.io has selected a microwave sensor for its constellation, but company executives declined to reveal which one. “All I can say is it has flown in space,” Goffer said. “We’re obviously doing some modifications, but we’re not starting from scratch.” Microwave sounding is an important component of weather forecasts, a message underscored by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ongoing evaluation of commercial sources of operational satellite-based microwave atmospheric sensor data as part of the agency’s Commercial Weather Data Pilot. “Microwave is ranked consistently as the top performer in terms of contribution to numerical weather models,” Goffer said. “We run our own numerical weather model. We know very well the impact of this data on our model.” Tomorrow.io also is part of the Raytheon Intelligence & Space team that won a $45 million contract last year to design and develop NOAA’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center program.
SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding a series of meetings next week with potential government, academic and industry partners to discuss the agency’s plan to evaluate emerging satellite and ground architecture technologies. NOAA released three Broad Agency Announcements April 29. Two of the BAAs focus on satellite sensors: one to measure atmospheric winds in three dimensions and a second for hyperspectral microwave remote sensing observations. In addition, NOAA is seeking information on a digital twin system for Earth observations using artificial intelligence. “The ultimate goal is to improve the forecast skills of NOAA,“ Sid Boukabara, principal scientist at NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service Office of System Architecture and Advanced Planning, told SpaceNews. “These technologies have the potential to take us a leap forward in our ability to provide good data to our customers.” Gathering data in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is a key ingredient of accurate weather forecasts. NOAA currently relies on the Northrop Grumman Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder, which gathers data in 22 channels, flying on polar-orbiting weather satellites. Future microwave sounders could “sample at a much higher spectral resolution and would have potentially hundreds of channels,” Boukabara said. “By having a lot more channels, we will be able to better measure the temperature and moisture in the atmosphere.” Measuring the vertical distribution of atmospheric wind from space is another NOAA goal. For now, meteorologists determine wind direction and intensity by observing the motion of moisture in the atmosphere. “What we are seeking here is to complement that by assessing technologies that will give us the entire vertical profile of the wind in the atmosphere,” Boukabara said. “Ideally, we would like to see a comparison between the different technologies so that we can learn the pros and cons of each one and see what their impact is on the NOAA mission.” One possible technological solution is a Doppler wind lidar like the one the European Space Agency launched in 2018 on Aeolus . To update the ground architecture, NOAA officials are eager to explore the potential of digital twin technology. “Digital twin has been applied in other fields,” Boukabara said. “What we are trying to do is leverage that to apply it to the Earth science.” NOAA’s current ground system architecture acquires data from satellite sensors operated by NOAA and its partners around the world. Each sensor produces a variety of data products related to different parts of the world and times of day. “What we want to do is basically fuse all the data and put it into a digital replica of the Earth environment from ocean to atmosphere to cryosphere all the way to space weather,” Boukabara said. With a common user interface, NOAA could establish a one-stop shop where data customers can select the type of data, the region and the time of the day that they are interested in. It’s important for NOAA to begin evaluating tools for fusing data because of the proliferation of weather satellites and sensors. NOAA’s National Weather Service already gathers data from dozens of satellites. As the agency moves toward reliance on smaller satellites in low Earth orbit and more commercial data sources, the volume of weather data is expected to surge. “It’s a good problem to have because it means we have more data,” Boukabara said. While NOAA is eager to evaluate the new technologies, it’s too soon to say when or if the agency will procure any of them. “The goal is to collect data and learn from it,” Boukabara said. “How well does this technology work? What’s the quality of the data? What’s the impact on the NOAA systems?” Only after answering those questions, will NOAA officials determine how these advanced technologies could fit into the future architecture.
NASA and Boeing say they’re confident they have resolved a valve issue that delayed a test flight of the company’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle last year and are ready to try again later this month. Boeing moved the Starliner spacecraft from a processing facility at the Kennedy Space Center May 4 to a United Launch Alliance vehicle processing facility at Space Launch Complex 40. The Starliner will be installed on the Atlas 5 rocket there for final preparations for the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission, scheduled for launch May 19 at 6:54 p.m. Eastern. The company was hours away from launching OFT-2 last August when it scrubbed the count because of problems opening propellant valves in the spacecraft’s service module. The company later called off the launch after discovering 13 valves were corroded shut when nitrogen tetroxide (NTO) interacted with moisture, creating nitric acid . In a May 3 call with reporters, Boeing officials said months of investigation, carried out with NASA, confirmed their earlier assessment that NTO, seeping through Teflon seals in the valve, interacted with ambient moisture to create nitric acid and corrode the aluminum housing of the valves. That assessment included extensive testing at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility and analysis of the corroded valves at the Marshall Space Flight Center. “There’s been a significant amount of testing and root cause analysis that’s been performed by the entire team,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Starliner at Boeing. “We are confident that we have the right mitigation in place.” That mitigation includes doing a “dry purge” of the valves with nitrogen gas to remove moisture and sealing up an electrical connector that could be a path for moisture to take. The NTO was loaded into the spacecraft later in the processing of the vehicle to reduce the time it could seep through the valve. The valves will also be activated every two to five days to confirm they can move properly. The valves themselves have not been redesigned, said Michelle Parker, vice president and deputy general manager of space and launch at Boeing. “We have a usable solution for OFT-2. We don’t expect to have any issues,” she said. “We’ll look long-term to see if there are improvements to be made. The aluminum housing may be one piece of that. But right now, we’re confident in the solution that we have.” The upcoming OFT-2 mission will be a second uncrewed test flight of Starliner. The original OFT mission in December 2019 suffered technical problems, including a mission timer that was incorrectly set that caused problems after the spacecraft reached orbit, as well as a software issue discovered during the truncated flight that could have caused the spacecraft’s service module to collide with the crew module after separation just before reentry. “We certainly learned a lot with OFT-1,” Parker said. The key tests for OFT-2 will be to confirm the software changes made to address the problems during the first flight as well as to approach and dock with the International Space Station, which it was unable to do during OFT. “Those areas that we haven’t yet demonstrated will be of particular interest to us, although the entire mission has criteria that we need to meet.” Starliner will deliver about 225 kilograms of cargo, mostly food, to the station, and remain docked to the station for several days. It will return with about 270 kilograms of cargo, such as empty nitrogen-oxygen gas recharge tanks. A successful OFT-2 flight would allow Boeing to proceed with its Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, the first crewed flight of the spacecraft. Nappi said Boeing could be ready to fly CFT as soon as the end of the year. “We understand we’re going to learn a lot from OFT-2,” he added. “That, and many other variables, will dictate where the final schedule falls with the launch of CFT.” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, confirmed that CFT could be ready to launch as soon as the end of the year. “We’re taking it one step at a time,” he said. “The best path to CFT is a successful OFT-2 flight.”
WASHINGTON – The United States is at risk of being outpaced by China in space capabilities, in part due to the slow adoption of commercial innovations such as small satellites, warns a new report released May 5 by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. “If the United States is to maintain space superiority, it will need to make substantive cultural, doctrinal, and operational changes to its multidimensional relationship with the commercial space industry,” says the report titled Small Satellites: The Implications for National Security. The so-called small-satellite revolution spawned by mass manufacturing and cheaper access to orbit has been a boon for the space economy but is not yet benefiting national security space programs, argues Nicholas Eftimiades, nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center, and author of the report. He points to the U.S. government’s “lack of understanding of commercial markets, outdated institutional processes, and a defense bureaucracy unwilling or unable to adapt to the changing environment” as reasons why small satellites are still viewed as platforms for experiments rather than as mainstream capabilities for U.S. defense and intelligence. Eftimiades cautions that other countries like China are embracing commercial innovation faster than the United States. This could put the U.S. at a disadvantage in areas like remote sensing, communications and on-orbit data processing — all areas that are advancing rapidly due to the growing capabilities and increasingly affordable prices of small satellites. “Over the next decade or so, commercial space activities will increase the number of operational satellites by nearly a full order of magnitude, mainly through the development of small satellites,” he writes. “A new space ecosystem is coming into being, with profound implications for the world’s security and economic development.” The speed at which commercial space companies are putting thousands of satellites into orbit presents “unique challenges for U.S. security in space, as well as for deployed armed forces. There will be increased congestion in certain orbits, competition for communications bandwidth, new types of space operations, increased transparency, and a changing threat paradigm,” says the report. “Competing in this changing environment will require the United States to make substantial changes in long-established defense acquisition processes, research and investment strategies, data classification and distribution,” writes Eftimiades. To increase the resilience of various US space systems, sys the report, DoD should use commercial systems, including proliferated satellite architectures and responsive space-launch capabilities, and buy data from allied and commercial providers. Other points made in the report: The report lists a number of recommended actions by the U.S. government to better take advantage of commercial space innovation: Thales Group, a multinational defense and aerospace contractor, provided financial support for the study.
A Long March rocket launched eight Jilin-1 remote sensing satellites late Wednesday, days after an earlier batch rode to orbit via launch from a sea platform. A Long March 2D lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, north China, at 10:38 p.m. Eastern May 4, with thermal insulation tiles falling away as the rocket climbed into the sky. Aboard were seven Jilin-1 Gaofen (“high resolution”) 03D satellites, numbered 27 to 33, and the larger, wide field of view Jilin-1 Kuanfu 01C, for Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST), a commercial remote sensing offshoot from the state-owned Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The roughly 43-kilogram Jilin-1 Gaofen satellites return panchromatic images with a resolution of 0.75 meters or three meters in multispectral mode. Jilin-1 Kuanfu 01C has a mass of around 1,250 kilograms. It has a swath width of greater than 150 kilometers, according to Changguang Satellite, providing image products with a resolution of 0.5 meters in full color and 2 meters in multispectral mode. The launch followed the April 30 (Universal time) launch of five other Jilin-1 satellites, namely Jilin-1 Gaofen 03D04 to 07 and the 0.50-meter-resolution Gaofen 04A. The launch had been delayed by bad weather. The satellites were sent into roughly 530 by 546-kilometer sun-synchronous orbits by a Long March 11 solid rocket launched from a platform in the Yellow Sea. It was China’s third sea launch and the most southerly so far from the sea launch facilities based at Haiyang, Shandong province. China has developed infrastructure at Haiyang to allow launches from the seas. The capabilities may help ease congestion at other national spaceports and reduce debris falling near inhabited areas following inland launches. It was also the first time that a nearby final assembly and test base had been used for a Long March 11 launch, positively impacting launch preparation time and transportation costs for the mission. CGST is one of the most prominent and well-funded of the commercial space companies to have emerged in China since a 2014 policy decision to open up the sector to private capital. The firm secured $375 million in funding for its Jilin-1 project in November 2020 and has by far the largest Chinese commercial constellation in orbit. CGST is based in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, for which the constellation is named. Changguang Satellite now has 54 satellites in orbit and claims its Jilin-1 constellation can revisit any spot on Earth 17 to 20 times a day, providing more remote sensing data and product services for use in sectors including agriculture, forestry, oceans, environmental protection, urban construction, and scientific experiments. CGST aims to complete the full, 138-satellite, 10-minute revisit constellation around 2030. The launches were China’s 13th and 14th of 2022, all of which have used Long March rockets developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). CASC is planning more than 50 launches in 2022, including six missions to the Chinese Space Station. Launch attempts from commercial actors including Landspace , Expace, Galactic Energy, CAS Space and more are expected to add to the activity.
Senators overwhelmingly voted against a motion May 4 that would have dealt a setback in NASA’s efforts to select a second company to develop an Artemis lunar lander. The motion, sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), would have instructed senators participating on a conference committee with the House on the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) to remove a section authorizing funding for the Human Landing System (HLS) program and directing NASA to support at least two companies. The Senate passed the bill last June but must reconcile it with a House bill without any NASA authorization language. In brief comments on the Senate floor during debate on the motion May 4, Sanders argued that the provision was a handout to Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, one of the bidders in the original HLS competition won by SpaceX in April 2021. “We can give $10 billion to Jeff Bezos, the second-wealthiest person in this country, who is the owner of the space company Blue Origin,” he said. “It does not make a lot of sense to give $10 billion to the second-wealthiest person in this country.” The bill, strictly speaking, does not give $10 billion to Bezos. Instead, the portion of the bill Sanders sough to remove authorized $10.032 billion for fiscal years 2021 through 2025 to carry out the overall HLS program, supporting “not fewer than 2 entities” in the program. Funding would have to be appropriated on an annual basis, with $928 million already appropriated in fiscal year 2021 and $1.195 billion in 2022, primarily to support the SpaceX HLS contract. NASA requested nearly $1.5 billion for HLS in 2023, including funding that would go to a second company to start work on a separate Artemis lunar lander. NASA is just starting the competition to make that second award, with Blue Origin one of several companies expressing an interest in competing. NASA anticipates selecting a winner in early 2023. Opponents of the motion emphasized the importance they placed on competition in the HLS program. “NASA recognizes that competition makes us better. That’s why they asked us to fund this second provider for the lunar lander,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on the Senate floor. The Sanders motion “would take a sledgehammer to American ingenuity and the Artemis program.” “This is about safety and it’s about redundancy and it’s about us authorizing the Artemis program,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. Sanders was unconvinced, arguing that the competition would be Blue Origin against SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, currently the wealthiest person in the country. “Is that really the kind of space program that the American people want?” he asked. “I think not.” Sanders, though, was unable to convince most of his colleagues. Only 17 senators, including Sanders, voted for the motion, with 78 voting against it. The motion did attract support from both ends of the political spectrum, with Sanders joined by fellow progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) but also by conservatives such as Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Florida’s two senators, Marco Rubio (R) and Rick Scott (R), also voted in favor of the motion. Earlier in the day, Joel Graham, a member of the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee, told a meeting of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) that a priority for the committee was passing a final version of USICA that retains the NASA authorization bill. That included, he said, the HLS authorization language. “You have to have dissimilar redundancy. You have to have multiple approaches,” he said. “You have to have a competitive environment when you move into the services phase later on.” He told COMSTAC that he had encountered “some pretty misleading talking points” about the HLS language, without elaborating. “The more I talk to member offices” about that section of the bill, “they get it.”
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s rocket propulsion arm is asking space companies to help identify technologies and capabilities the military will need to launch missions on short timelines. The organization known as AFRL’s “rocket lab” based at Edwards Air Force Base, California, is “soliciting information and comments from industry on their ability to meet future responsive launch missions and to identify specific investments in technology that would improve responsive capabilities,” said a request for information published last month. The request said AFRL is not looking to address any specific national security launch requirements but wants to better understand what technologies and capabilities are available and which ones need to be developed to help shorten the time it takes to plan and launch space missions. Congress has been pushing the Space Force to figure out “ responsive space ” concepts by working with commercial providers in the small launch industry. The thinking is that in a future conflict, if U.S. satellites are damaged by anti-satellite weapons, the military should be able to quickly deploy new ones. AFRL asked companies, for example, to explain how they would launch a small spacecraft to a specific targeted high energy orbit with only days or weeks’ notice. These are orbits considered to be beyond the reach of current small launch vehicles. Another scenario would be the deployment of up to five small spacecraft in different orbits using multiple vehicles “to provide new capabilities to the warfighter with minimal to no warning to the adversary.” The AFRL rocket lab, created in 1952, has increased the use of public private partnerships to keep its workers and facilities busy. The lab in 2020 signed an agreement with launch startup ABL Space Systems to jointly develop and test rocket propulsion components for future use in launch vehicles.
Updated May 5 with comment from Satellogic spokesperson. WASHINGTON — Earth imaging company Satellogic announced May 4 it signed a contract with SpaceX to launch 68 more satellites as it continues to build out its constellation. Satellogic said the multiple launch agreement with SpaceX reserves capacity for 68 satellites on an unspecified number of future SpaceX launches. The companies did not disclose the terms of the agreement. A spokesperson for Satellogic said late May 4 that the agreement covers payload son at least four launches starting in early 2023. Satellogic announced a similar agreement with SpaceX in January 2021 covering four rideshare launches. Satellogic flew four satellites on the Transporter-2 rideshare mission in June 2021 and five on the Transporter-4 mission that launched April 1. “Today’s announcement ensures that we will be able to continue to launch our satellites as they are produced and that we remain on track to collect every square meter of the Earth’s surface every week in 2023,” Emiliano Kargieman, chief executive and co-founder of Satellogic, in a statement announcing the contract. The contract announcement comes a day after Satellogic, which went public in January through a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) , published its financial results for 2021. The company reported revenue of $4.2 million, a net loss of $117.7 million and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of –$30.7 million. When Satellogic announced its SPAC merger in July 2021, it projected revenues of $7 million and adjusted EBITDA of –$32 million for 2021. Kargieman said in the earnings announcement that the company plans to launch up to 12 more satellites this year, bringing its constellation to 34 satellites. The company has a goal of operating 200 or more satellites by 2025 to provide daily global remapping, and is building a factory in the Netherlands that will be able to produce 25 satellites a quarter by the third quarter of 2023. That work is supported by the proceeds of the SPAC merger, which provided Satellogic with $168 million. “The capital will further position Satellogic to remap the entire surface of the Earth in sub-meter resolution, creating unprecedented data analytics and commercial applications,” Rick Dunn, chief financial officer of Satellogic, said in the earnings release. “We continue to expect rapid revenue growth over the near term.”
WASHINGTON – The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on May 4 issued a solicitation for proposals for the next phase of a demonstration of a nuclear powered spacecraft. The project, called Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO), started over a year ago when DARPA selected a preliminary design for a rocket engine reactor developed by General Atomics, and chose two conceptual spacecraft designs by Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin. The next phases of the program will focus on the design, development, fabrication and assembly of a nuclear thermal rocket engine. DARPA will conduct a “full and open competition” so this opportunity is not limited to the companies that participated in the first phase, a spokesperson told SpaceNews . Proposals are due Aug. 5. The goal is to launch a flight demonstration of nuclear thermal propulsion in fiscal year 2026. “A single award is anticipated” in phase 2 of DRACO, the spokesperson said. The objective to complete “preliminary and detailed design of a demonstration system and to construct and experimentally validate the nuclear thermal rocket flight engine.” In phase 3, the demonstration system will be built to host a nuclear thermal rocket for an in-orbit flight test. DARPA is investing in nuclear propulsion for space vehicles in hopes of successfully demonstrating an engine that can fly across vast distances in cislunar space, the area between Earth and the moon. “Nuclear thermal propulsion achieves high thrust-to-weight similar to chemical propulsion but with two to five times the efficiency,” said DARPA. NASA is participating in the project, with the goal of also using nuclear thermal propulsion for long-duration human spaceflight missions. “Maneuver is more challenging in space due to propulsion system limitations,” said Maj. Nathan Greiner, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “To maintain technological superiority in space, the United States requires leap-ahead propulsion technology.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Astroscale said May 4 it made another close-approach rendezvous between its two ELSA-d spacecraft last month but ongoing thruster problems continue to hold up a capture demonstration delayed from January. Astroscale’s ELSA-d servicer spacecraft, a 175-kilogram satellite designed to demonstrate orbital debris removal technologies, lost the use of four of its eight 1-newton thrusters in January. Despite the setback, Astroscale successfully commanded ELSA-d’s servicer craft to close within about 159 meters of the much smaller client satellite on April 7 from a starting distance of 1,700 kilometers. The rendezvous put the 17-kilogram client craft within range of the servicer’s low power radio (LPR) sensors, enabling it to take over navigational controls from the ground, Astroscale chief technology officer Mike Lindsay told SpaceNews . Lindsay said the successful hand-off to the servicer’s onboard sensors was a significant technical achievement — and not one Astroscale had planned to test before ELSA-d’s propulsion problems prompted the team to rethink the mission. Astroscale was getting ready for a Jan. 25 capture demonstration when ELSA-d’s propulsion anomaly occured, prompting the company to move the servicer to a distance beyond the range of its onboard sensors. The servicer craft is equipped with eight 1-newton High Performance Green Propulsion (HPGP) thrusters supplied by Swedish propulsion specialist ECAPS, which is owned by U.S.-based Bradford Space. Bradford Space CEO Ian Fichtenbaum told SpaceNews last month that ELSA-d’s thrusters are not at fault. “These issues do not relate to and are not a result of the design or build of the thrusters and we have full confidence in our products,” he said. In a May 4 news release describing the April 7 rendezvous operation, Astroscale said a “system issue” was to blame for the loss of three thrusters but “the root cause for the loss of the fourth thruster is not clear and is under joint investigation by Astroscale and Bradford/ECAPS.” Lindsay said Astroscale does not expect to bring any of the four thrusters online. Because the failed thrusters are not all on one side of the servicer, the craft remains maneuverable. The ELSA-d servicer did not lose any propellant when thrusters failed, Lindsay said, leaving the spacecraft with enough fuel to capture and de-orbit the client craft if Astroscale decides to attempt that part of the mission. Although the servicer successfully used its magnetic mechanism last August to release and recapture the client, Astroscale had planned to make another attempt with less direct support from flight operators on the ground. Before tests in January were called off, Lindsay said Astroscale validated the servicer’s LPR sensor for the station-keeping it would need for this semi-autonomous capture demo. “At that point, the spacecraft essentially says, I know where the client is, I know what I need to do to bring myself closer to the client and complete the rendezvous,” Lindsay said. Ground operators would still be required to conduct various safety checks if Astroscale proceeds with a semi-autonomous capture attempt. The servicer would also be approaching the client craft from a greater distance than the August capture mission if its next capture attempt goes ahead. After completing its April 7 rendezvous, ground operators took control of the servicer’s navigation to move it about 300 kilometers away from the client to an orbital position where it can remain stable for several months. The servicer and client, which were launched as a stack to low Earth orbit in March 2021, were never more than 30 meters apart for the August capture mission. Astroscale is discussing its options with partners, regulators and other groups. Lindsay said engineers still need to assess the servicer’s capabilities to decide the timing and nature of the mission’s next steps. He noted it is particularly important for Astroscale to avoid risks when it is building a debris-removing business built around the safety and sustainability of the space environment. “The ability of the team to overcome this anomaly and still succeed is really an amazing confidence boost for our capabilities here, so I think it bodes very well for our mission and our success in the future,” he added.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson offered a surprisingly strong endorsement of fixed-price contracts and competition at a congressional hearing May 3, calling traditional cost-plus contracts a “plague” on the agency. Testifying at a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, Nelson said the use of competition and fixed-price contracts was essential in its efforts to select a second commercial lunar lander alongside SpaceX’s Starship for the Human Landing System (HLS) program, something that many in Congress have sought. “Then we would have two landers somewhere in the 2027 time frame, both having already landed,” he said. NASA plans to use the Starship lander for Artemis 3 no earlier than 2025, with the second lander flying as soon as Artemis 5 in 2027. “I believe that that is the plan that can bring us all the value of competition, and get it done with that competitive spirit. You get it done cheaper, and that allows us to move away from what has been a plague on us in the past, which is a cost-plus contract,” he said. The HLS program and some other commercial initiatives, like cargo and crew transportation for the ISS, have used fixed-price contracts where the agency pays a fixed amount regardless of how much it costs the company with the contract to deliver the product or service. NASA has traditionally used “cost-plus” contracts, where a contractor is reimbursed for its costs along with a fee. Near the end of the hearing, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), chair of the commerce, justice and science subcommittee, brought up a “long-term problem” at NASA of cost and schedule overruns on major agency programs, citing reports by the Government Accountability Office. “Can you help us understand what you’re working on to improve this project management?” she asked. “There is no excuse for cost overruns, but the old way of doing business was cost-plus,” Nelson responded. “Because of the competition we’ve been talking about, we have been moving to fixed-price where we can under procurement law.” An example of the problems of cost-plus contracts, he said, was the award of a contract to Bechtel. NASA selected that company in June 2019 to build Mobile Launcher 2 , a second mobile launch platform designed for the Block 1B version of the Space Launch System. The contract had an original value of $383 million over 44 months. “Because Bechtel underbid on a cost-plus contract in order to, what appears, to get it,” he said, “they couldn’t perform. And NASA is stuck.” NASA hasn’t disclosed details of Bechtel’s performance on Mobile Launcher 2. At a Jan. 27 meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, members reported that the agency sent a second “letter of concern” to Bechtel about its performance on the contract, requesting a response by Feb. 1, and that NASA was considering changes to the structure and management of the contract. Bechtel repeatedly declined to answer questions about its work on the contract in the weeks following that meeting. Nelson said he’s met with Brendan Bechtel, chief executive of Bechtel, about that company’s work on Mobile Launcher 2, but suggested there was little else the agency could do. “There’s no way, under the contract, since it’s a cost-plus contract, that we can do anything but eat it,” he said. “And that’s not right. Times are changing.” In contrast to the problems with cost-plus contracts, he cited as an example of the benefits of competition reduced launch costs thanks to the emergence of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy by SpaceX. He said that, before his retirement last year, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that the competition those vehicles enabled provided the Defense Department $40 billion in savings, although he did not say over what period of time. Nelson said he’s assigned the position of chief acquisition officer to NASA’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy. That move is intended to emphasize the importance of acquisition within the agency as it works to implement recommendations from GAO and NASA’s inspector general on contract performance. “I think we’re beginning to make some progress in closing out the GAO recommendations related to strengthening this acquisition process,” he said. Senators were largely supportive of NASA’s proposed $26 billion budget for 2023 at the hearing, raising concerns only about minor issues, such as cuts in heliophysics or in support for spaceport infrastructure at the Wallops Flight Facility. Nelson made a specific plea for the increase in space technology funding in the proposal after Congress rejected increases in the past two years. “We need that extra oomph in our research and development,” he said, such as for space nuclear power and propulsion research.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean startup NaraSpace Technology said May 3 it had raised 10 billion won ($7.88 million) in a Series A financing round to pursue the development of electro-optical remote-sensing nanosatellites. Including 3.5 billion won ($2.76 million) raised in pre-Series A in August 2020, the Busan-based company has raised 13.5 billion won ($10.65 million) since its establishment in 2015. Investors include Korea Development Bank, Hana Ventures, Kolon GLotech, BNK Venture Capital, Posco Capital, and Hi Investment Partners. The company plans to launch its first two technology demonstration satellites — Observer-1A and Observer-1B — into low Earth orbit on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets in the first half and second half of 2023, respectively. The two satellites, which are 20 centimeters in width and 40 centimeters in height, are designed to have a spatial resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, according to the company’s website . “We will spend much of the fund on developing Observer-1A and Observer-1B,” marketing manager Oh Hyung-wook told SpaceNews . “If they operate properly in space, we will speed up production of commercial products.” He said another product the company is working on is BusanSat, a marine observation satellite with a resolution of 388 meters per pixel, which will monitor air and marine pollution around Busan, South Korea’s biggest port city. NaraSpace is also developing a geospatial imagery analytics platform named “Earthpaper” that will produce various satellite-based data based on high-resolution images captured by its own satellites and others. “We are planning to produce and launch more than 100 nanosatellites within five years with the goal of providing satellite-based real-time monitoring of major cities around the world,” said Park Jae-pil, co-founder and CEO of NaraSpace Technology.
WASHINGTON – Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee pressed Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond on the Space Force’s plans to acquire next-generation technologies and develop the future workforce. “Now that the Space Force is up and running, it is important to present a trained force with substantive capabilities to the combatant commands,” SASC Chairman Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said May 3 during a hearing on the Department of the Air Force’s 2023 budget request . “It is critical for the Space Force to design its warfighting objectives in the same way the Chief of Naval Operations designs our Navy fleets and the Chief of the Air Force designs our air posture,” Reed said. “I will want to know your progress toward that objective.” Raymond said the “number one mission” is to modernize the missile-warning space architecture to defend against increasingly advanced hypersonic missiles and glide vehicles being developed by U.S. adversaries. He said the Space Force is investing in a mix of early-warning and tracking satellites in different orbits that will supplement existing systems. “And it’s critical that we make this transformation,” he said. “We are diversifying the architecture to reduce the threat in space to an attack that may occur,” he added. “We pivot from handfuls of very exquisite, very expensive satellites, to an architecture that’s more diversified to get after both the emerging class of missiles and the threat that currently exists in space.” A shift to “less exquisite with higher numbers allows us to adopt more of a business model that you might see commercial companies doing. And so that’s the transformation of our capabilities, that’s the path we’re headed down,” Raymond said. Another priority is to keep track of objects orbiting in space and identify potential threats, said Raymond. “Space is becoming more congested, more contested and more competitive.” Just a couple of years ago, U.S. Space Command was tracking about 22,000 objects, he said. “Today we’re probably tracking close to mid-40,000 objects.” Access to space is now easier and more affordable, “which provides us opportunities and challenges.” Kendall said one of the challenges is deterring countries like Russia from conducting missile tests like the one in November that destroyed a satellite in orbit and left a huge cloud of debris. “So we’ve got to get people to agree not to do that,” he said. Those destructive tests “put everything we have in space, in low Earth orbit, particularly at risk.” He noted the recent decision by the United States to implement a self-imposed ban on anti-satellite missile tests . The next step will be to develop norms on how to conduct “proximity operations” such as when servicing vehicles approach satellites. The National Space Council has been working on this, said Kendall, “to try to get wider appreciation of the need to allow us all to operate in space as a commons and to do so to the benefit of every nation.” Preparing the future force To help prepare its next generation of leaders, the Space Force is assigning new officers who graduate from the Air Force Academy to work at commercial companies and gain experience in the private sector, said Raymond. Last year 118 graduates joined the Space Force. “We sent them to commercial companies and said, go figure out how they do that,” said Raymond. The Space Force wants to be agile and move fast, he said, “But I will tell you, it’s not like Amazon Prime where you can order it overnight. It’s going to take a little bit of time to build this, but that’s exactly where we’re headed.” This year 101 cadets graduating from the Air Force Academy will be commissioned into the Space Force and also will get private-sector assignments. Several senators asked whether the Space Force should have its own Space National Guard as a reserve component, an issue that is becoming more divisive. The White House in September said it opposed creating a separate Space National Guard due to concerns about cost and bureaucratic bloat . But some lawmakers continue to argue for the standup of a Space National Guard to ensure critical skills needed for space operations are not lost. According to a proposal the Department of the Air Force submitted to Congress April 1, instead of having a dedicated reserve force, the Space Force would have a regular active-duty force with full-time and part-time members. The proposal does not recommend establishing a Space National Guard, which is in line with the Biden administration’s position. Kendall said the Space Force needs the support now provided by more than 800 members of the Air National Guard in eight states. “We’re open to discuss” the way forward, he said, pointing out that the administration worries that “we would create a lot of overhead costs associated with a new organization.” “I think we can find a way to keep those people doing what they’re doing. They’re very valuable. So we want to keep them around. They’re important to us,” Kendall said. “We just need to find the right mechanism to do it.”
A key official for Europe’s ExoMars mission believes that the rover’s launch will be pushed back until at least 2028 to accommodate changes after ending cooperation with Russia. ExoMars was to launch in September on a Proton rocket through a partnership between Roscosmos and the European Space Agency. Roscosmos also provided the landing platform for the ESA-built Rosalind Franklin rover. However, ESA announced March 17 it was suspending cooperation with Russia on ExoMars in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That requires ESA to find not just a new launch for the mission but also replacing the landing platform. That meant pushing the launch back to at least 2026, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said at the time, adding that “even that is very challenging.” Speaking at a May 3 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist at ESA, said he doubted a new lander could be ready by 2026. “It is theoretically possible, but in practice we think it would be very difficult to reconfigure ourselves and produce our own lander for 2026,” he said. “Realistically, we would be looking at a launch in 2028.” Launching in 2028 could pose technical challenges for ExoMars. One trajectory would get the rover to Mars relatively quickly, but have it arrive just a month before dust storm seasons starts at the preferred landing site. An alternative trajectory would require traveling for more than two years to each Mars, but get the rover there six months before dust storms start. “We have been trying very hard to convince the engineering team that the dust storm season is not death,” Vago said. “We should concentrate on making the rover more robust and able to weather a dust storm.” A 2028 launch, he added, would require assistance from NASA. Specifically, he said ESA would need descent engines similar to those produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne for NASA Mars missions like Curiosity and Perseverance, because there are not European models the right size for ExoMars. A second item is radioisotope heating units, or RHUs, which use the heat produced from the radioactive decay of plutonium to keep the rover warm. Russia had provided RHUs for the rover, and there is no European replacement. Using American RHUs would likely also require that ExoMars launch from the United States, he said. Aschbacher said in an April 6 interview that ESA was working with NASA on potential cooperation with ExoMars while also looking at replacing Russian components of the mission with European alternatives. That will lead to a decision in July on a path forward for ExoMars, which would likely require additional funding that would be requested at ESA’s next ministerial meeting late this year. A delay to 2028 would mean ExoMars would be launching at the same time as the two landers for the revised Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign that NASA and ESA are jointly conducting. ESA’s contributions include a rover that would go on one of the landers to pick up samples cached by Perseverance, placing them into a rocket on the other lander that would place the samples in Mars orbit to be picked up and returned to Earth by an ESA orbiter. That’s led to some speculation in the Mars exploration community that the Rosalind Franklin rover could be repurposed to support the Mars Sample Return effort. Vago said he expected some kind of “quid pro quo” arrangement between NASA and ESA if NASA assisted ESA on ExoMars. That could mean, he said, to “look at both MSR and ExoMars in sort of a holistic way, if you like, and see if we can find solutions that work for both missions.” A unique aspect of the Rosalind Franklin rover is a drill that can collect samples from up to two meters below the surface. A similar drill is proposed for Mars Life Explorer, a Mars lander concept endorsed by the recent planetary science decadal survey for launch no earlier than the mid-2030s to look for signs of life in subsurface ice deposits. During MEPAG discussions May 2, some suggested a rover-mounted drill, like that for ExoMars, would be more effective than a drill mounted on a stationary lander. Vago confirmed that the ExoMars drill can handle ice as well as rock, although he said the mixture of ice and rock could complicate processing of the sample. 
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile secured an experimental license May 2 to test services in the United States from BlueWalker 3, the prototype satellite slated to launch this summer for its planned cellphone-compatible broadband constellation. The license from the Federal Communications Commission permits the company to connect unmodified cellular devices in Texas and Hawaii with BlueWalker 3 for up to several minutes daily. SpaceX is slated to launch BlueWalker 3 to low Earth orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket with other passengers. AST SpaceMobile said it has regulatory permission for BlueWalker 3 to use cellular frequencies to connect to phones in the U.S. — and then spectrum in Q and V bands to direct the traffic back to gateways on the ground — under certain restrictions. “The BlueWalker 3 satellite would give us about five minutes of coverage in most areas around the world every day, which we plan to use to configure our software and other systems related to the network core,” AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski told SpaceNews . “Such coverage should also provide opportunities to explore numerous uses of cellular broadband, including texting, voice, and data applications.” BlueWalker-3 has a 64-square-meter phased array antenna that will be stowed for launch and deployed in orbit to enable it to connect with unmodified 2G, 4G and 5G phones from hundreds of miles away. At around 1,500-kilograms, BlueWalker 3 is a much smaller version of the company’s planned operational BlueBird satellites AST SpaceMobile is building in-house. Each BlueBird will have a mass “well north” of BlueWalker 3, Wisniewski said, and have a larger field of view. BlueWalker 1, AST SpaceMobile’s first test satellite that was also built in-house, was launched in April 2019 to validate the company’s satellite-to-cellular architecture using the 4G-LTE wireless protocol. Getting operational AST SpaceMobile signed a launch contract March 8 with SpaceX that includes a milestone payment for its first operational BlueBird satellite, slated to launch in 2023, and a reservation for an additional BlueBird mission. The agreement provides a framework that runs until the end of 2024 for ordering additional SpaceX launches, and permits AST SpaceMobile to delay launches after paying a rebooking fee. AST SpaceMobile said it remains open to using other launch providers for deploying BlueBird satellites. The company expects to have deployed 110 satellites by the end of 2024 to achieve “substantial global” mobile coverage. “We’re designing BlueBirds for compatibility with numerous large launch vehicles that could deploy multiple operational satellites into orbit,” Wisniewski said. Wisniewski said the company aims to launch another 58 satellites in 2025 to improve services by enabling Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) capabilities, a technology using multiple transmitters and receivers to transfer more data at the same time. AST Space Mobile says its Texas manufacturing facilities are designed to assemble up to six BlueBird satellites per month at full capacity. Regulatory milestones AST SpaceMobile has so far only secured market access licenses to provide commercial services in Nigeria and five other countries across Africa and Asia, covering a population of about 360 million. “Despite it being early days on the regulatory front,” Wisniewski said the company and its mobile operator partners are actively working in the U.S. and other countries for permission to provide commercial services. Globe Telecom, a mobile network operator in the Philippines, said April 28 it had become the latest company to sign a deal with AST SpaceMobile, and will explore using services for its 86 million wireless subscribers. AST SpaceMobile’s applications for testing and commercial service in the Philippines are still in progress, Wisniewski said. Texas-based AST SpaceMobile, one of several space companies to go public last year via SPAC mergers, said it has entered into similar partnerships with additional mobile network operators that collectively serve more than 1.8 billion cellular customers. About 1 billion mobile subscribers are covered by preliminary agreements and understandings to set up revenue-sharing deals, AST SpaceMobile said in a March 31 financial update. AST SpaceMobile had previously planned to launch BlueWalker 3 in 2021 and 20 BlueBird satellites by the end of 2022 to begin commercial services in 2023. The company has said it plans to provide initial services with 20 satellites serving the equatorial region, comprising 49 countries and 1.6 billion people. In a December 2020 investor presentation outlining plans for its SPAC merger, the company had projected $181 million in revenue for 2023 that would rise to more than $1 billion for 2024. However, AST SpaceMobile currently expects to start generating “SpaceMobile Service” revenue from its constellation in 2024 following satellite manufacturing and launch delays. “After we launch and deploy our [BlueBird] satellites during 2023, we may seek to generate revenue by providing a limited SpaceMobile Service in certain countries,” the company said in its March 31 update. The limited SpaceMobile Service would not be available on a continuous basis, it added, and would be dependent on partnerships with mobile operators, regulatory approvals and other conditions. Despite securing an experimental license for the United States from the FCC, it is still waiting for permission to provide commercial services here. In addition to FCC approval for operating satellite spectrum, the company needs permission from the regulator’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau to use frequencies traditionally used by terrestrial mobile network operators. Virginia-based Lynk Global is also waiting for a U.S. market access license for a constellation it is developing to provide connectivity to unmodified phones. Lynk Global has deployed six satellites to date. The company says its latest satellite, Lynk Tower 1 that launched as part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 ride-share mission April 1 , is designed for operational services. It has plans to deploy a total of 10 operational satellites over around 12 months for initial services that include text messaging and emergency alerts. Three more operational satellites under construction for a launch this year will enable the company to begin “global commercial service in 2022 with a dozen flagship operators,” Lynk Global said April 6 without providing details. The company did not respond to requests for comment. Thousands of devices had successfully connected to its fifth demonstration satellite during pre-commercial tests, Lynk Global announced Feb. 8.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean rocket startup Innospace announced May 3 that it will conduct its first suborbital test launch of flight hardware in December from the Alcântara Space Center in Brazil, carrying a Brazilian military payload. The 16.3-meter, single-stage test rocket is a precursor to the company’s planned commercial satellite launcher Hanbit-Nano , a two-stage small satellite launcher designed to carry up to a 50-kilogram payload to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. The first stages of the two rockets are powered by a 15-ton-thrust hybrid rocket engine that uses liquid oxygen and paraffin-based propellants. Hanbit-Nano’s upper stage is equipped with a 3-ton hybrid engine, according to the Sejong-based company’s website . “If the upcoming test launch is successful, we will start preparing for a test launch of Hanbit-Nano,” Innospace spokesperson Kim Jung-hee told SpaceNews . Aboard the test rocket will be an inertial navigation system (INS) , developed by the Brazilian Department of Aerospace Science and Technology (DCTA) under the supervision of the Brazilian Air Force. The payload is a navigation device that uses a computer, motion sensors and rotation sensors to continuously calculate by dead reckoning the position, the orientation, and the velocity of a moving object without the need for external references. The payload won’t be deployed from the rocket in the test, according to the spokesperson. “The test launch will enable DCTA to verify if the inertial navigation system operates properly in specific environments such as vibration, shock, and high temperature that occur in the entire process from takeoff and during the transatmospheric flight,” Kim said. The spokesperson said the company is launching the Brazilian military payload in exchange for use of Alcântara Space Center, operated by the Brazilian air force. “We are in talks with our Brazilian counterpart to widen the scope of cooperation,” Kim said. Founded in 2017, Innospace has raised $27.76 million (35.2 billion won) through three financing rounds: Major investors include South Korea’s venture capital Kolon Investment , Company K Partners , Intervest , and car materials manufacturer Kolon Glotech . Meanwhile, Innospace signed a memorandum of understanding with Norwegian Andøya Space in January to launch its rockets into polar and sun-synchronous orbits from Norway. 
A NASA lunar cubesat mission is now scheduled to launch in late May on a Rocket Lab Electron after resolving issues with the rocket’s kick stage. In a call with reporters after the May 2 launch of an Electron rocket carrying 34 smallsats, Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said that the next Electron mission will be of the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat for NASA. He did not give a date for the launch. NASA previously projected a launch between May 3 and 15, but in an April 29 tweet , NASA’s Ames Research Center, which manages the mission, said the launch was now scheduled for no earlier than May. “The launch period is currently being reevaluated by the mission teams” at NASA, Rocket Lab and Advanced Space, the Colorado company that owns and operates the spacecraft for NASA. “CAPSTONE’s orbital requirements allow for launch opportunities every month,” NASA spokesperson Sarah Frazier told SpaceNews May 2. “NASA, Rocket Lab and Advanced Space are reevaluating the launch period to allow more time for launch vehicle processing.” In a May 2 presentation at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference in San Luis Obispo, California, Tom Gardner, CAPSTONE program manager at Advanced Space, said the company was now targeting a window that opens May 27. He said instantaneous launch windows are available daily until late June. The latest slip, he said, was due to “minor challenges in the final test program” of the Lunar Photon, the version of the Photon satellite bus configured as a kick stage that will send CAPSTONE out to the moon. Those problems have been resolved, he added. The spacecraft is scheduled to ship to the Electron launch site in New Zealand at the end of the week for fueling and integration with the launch vehicle. Rocket Lab built a new building at the launch site for fueling the spacecraft with hydrazine, Gardner said, because none of the payloads previously launched on Electron used that energetic but hazardous fuel. Once launched, CAPSTONE will take four months to go into a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, the same orbit NASA plans to use for the lunar Gateway. Its primary mission of testing the stability of the orbit and conducting navigation experiments with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will last six months, followed by an extended or “enhanced” mission of up to 11 months with additional tests. Gardner said the company had a goal of getting the spacecraft launched within 18 months. “That proved to be quite difficult,” he said, with 17 months of delays, 7 of which he said was caused by the pandemic. “The other 10 months are purely risk realizations on the spacecraft and on the launch vehicle.”
Updated after post-launch briefing. WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab declared success in its effort to catch an Electron booster in midair after launch May 2, even though the helicopter had to release the booster moments later. The Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 6:49 p.m. Eastern after a brief hold in the countdown. The rocket’s ascent went as planned, with the kick stage, carrying a payload of 34 smallsats, reaching orbit about 10 minutes later. On this mission, dubbed “There and Back Again” by Rocket Lab, the attention was on the rocket’s first stage. After three previous launches where the stage descended under a parachute to splash down in the ocean for recovery by a ship, the company planned to capture the stage in midair using a helicopter. A hook descending from the helicopter would grab the parachute, which would then return the stage to land or set it down on a ship without exposing it to salt water. The company billed the midair capture as the final step in its efforts to reuse the stage. A successful midair recovery could allow the company to fly the stage again later this year, enabling the company to increase its flight rate without manufacturing more boosters. About 15 minutes after launch, the descending booster came into view of Rocket Lab’s Sikorsky S-92 helicopter. Video from the helicopter appeared to show the hook grappling the parachute to cheers from mission control. Moments later, though, there were groans and the webcast cut away, suggesting that perhaps the helicopter lost the booster. More than a half-hour later, Rocket Lab confirmed that the helicopter had grappled, but then released, the booster. “After the catch, the helicopter pilot noticed different load characteristics than what we’ve experienced in testing,” company spokesperson Murielle Baker said on the webcast. “At his discretion, the pilot offloaded the stage for a successful splashdown” for recovery by a boat, like on the three previous recovery attempts. Despite the release, she called the catch “a monumental step forward in our program to make Electron a reusable launch vehicle.” It was not clear when Rocket Lab would next attempt a midair booster recovery. In a call with reporters four hours after liftoff, Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, called the brief catch a “huge achievement” despite having to release the booster moments later. He said the company had not yet had a chance to debrief the pilots in detail about the catch attempt. “They got a great catch and they just didn’t like the way the load was feeling beneath the helicopter,” he said. He said he believed it would be “trivial” for the company to determine why catching the actual booster was different from past tests using prototypes. “We’ll probably update our simulator to simulate the load accurately to what it was, go out and do a bunch of tests to get comfortable with the update load case,” he said, arguing that will be much easier than the effort needed to catch it in the first place. “That’s the hard thing.” The booster splashed down softly in the ocean and was retrieved by a boat a short time later. “Obviously we don’t like tanking it and dunking it in the sea, but there’s still a tremendous amount of the stage and the equipment that we can reuse,” he said. He didn’t rule out trying to fly the stage again. “It’s still my hope that you’ll see this vehicle back on the pad again.” While the booster catch attempt captured attention for the launch, the primary purpose of the mission was to place 34 smallsats into a sun synchronous orbit at an altitude of 520 kilometers, which the kick stage completed an hour after liftoff. On this dedicated rideshare mission, 24 of the satellites were Spacebee satellites from Swarm Technologies, the SpaceX-owned company that operates a constellation for internet-of-things services, in a launch arranged by Spaceflight. Also on the launch were three prototype satellites built by E-Space, a startup established by OneWeb founder Greg Wyler, that will test technologies for a future broadband constellation. Alba Orbital flew four small satellites for itself and various customers. Unseenlabs had its BRO-6 satellite for location radio-frequency signals. Aurora Propulsion Technologies launched its AuroraSat-1 spacecraft to test debris removal technologies. A New Zealand startup, Astrix Astronautics, included a technology demonstration payload called Copia that will remain attached to the kick stage.
SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force , has selected 125 industry teams for the initial phase of the Orbital Prime program, an effort to develop technologies for orbital debris cleanup and other space services. Each team will receive a $250,000 contract to flesh out their concepts and do early design work, officials told SpaceNews . “As of Friday, we notified 125 teams across 27 states that were selected and funded,” Lt. Col. Brian Holt, Orbital Prime co-lead, said May 2. Holt could not disclose the total number of proposals received but said it was a much larger-than-expected response. Orbital Prime is a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program which requires bidding teams to include small businesses, as well as academic or nonprofit institutions. Businesses have to be at least 51% U.S. owned and operated, and the work has to be performed in the United States. SpaceWERX plans to award the 125 contracts over the next 30 days and each team will have about 150 days to deliver a product or study. Later this year they will have an opportunity to compete for second-phase awards of up to $1.5 million to continue development and prototyping. The long-term goal is to select one or more teams two years from now to conduct an in-space demonstration of OSAM technologies, short for on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing. This includes a broad range of technologies to repair and refuel existing satellites, remove and recycle orbital debris, and manufacture products in space. These demonstrations would be funded with a combination of government and private matching funds, said Holt. Gabe Mounce, deputy director of SpaceWERX, noted that when Orbital Prime kicked off in November , it was unclear whether it would attract wide participation. Initially SpaceWERX expected to award 20 to 30 contracts, he said. “What we’re seeing is there’s way more than we thought going into this.” The extraordinary response reflects a “sense of urgency” about space sustainability, Mounce added. The large number of bids shows “why this is such an important topic and why this is the perfect timing for doing this.” The proposals include technologies for on-orbit approach, on orbit object acquisition and on-orbit object servicing. Holt said he was impressed by the maturity level of the technologies proposed. “The technology is there,” he said. “This is more about the adjustments and integration for this mission.” SpaceWERX sees Orbital Prime as a model for how the government can work with the commercial industry, said Holt. “We’ve heard multiple comments that what we’ve done is a good demonstration of revolutionizing the acquisition process.” To attract small businesses, SpaceWERX held regular webinars and helped connect startups with matchmaking services so they would find partners. “The biggest risk I saw was bringing in the university requirement or the research institutions,” he said. “We didn’t know how well that part was going to weave in, but the small businesses showed they have a great network with research institutions. So I think that was a huge success.” Holt said the selected teams include a mix of space startups and traditional defense companies.
TAMPA, Fla. — Evidence is mounting of a need to perform an environmental review before approving SpaceX’s plans to add nearly 30,000 satellites to its Starlink constellation, satellite broadband competitor Viasat told the FCC May 2. SpaceX shouldn’t be allowed to greatly expand its Starlink network while light pollution issues surrounding its deployed satellites remain unresolved, Jarrett Taubman, Viasat vice president and deputy chief of government affairs, said in a letter to the regulator. While calls for a thorough environmental review that Viasat made for Starlink’s current generation of satellites in December 2020 were largely rejected, Taubman said SpaceX’s plan to grow the constellation by seven times “would have significant aesthetic, scientific, social and cultural, and health effects on the human environment on Earth.” SpaceX has already deployed more than half of the 4,408 first-generation Starlink satellites the FCC has approved to operate at altitudes of around 550 kilometers. The company is seeking FCC permission for a larger constellation of second-generation Starlinks that it proposes to operate at lower altitudes — between 340 and 614 kilometers — in order to improve performance. Viasat and astronomers say operating significantly more satellites even closer to the Earth would exacerbate Starlink’s light pollution. In rejecting Viasat’s earlier petition to conduct a thorough environmental review on Starlink, the FCC urged SpaceX to continue to work closely with astronomers to mitigate the brightness of its satellites. SpaceX has said it is incorporating visors on Starlink satellites to prevent sunlight from reflecting off them, and implementing other measures to reduce interference with astronomers. But in the May 2 letter to the FCC, Taubman said these efforts “have not fully mitigated” the constellation’s light pollution issue. He said “there is mounting evidence—including analysis by independent experts—of the adverse, ongoing, and increasing impact of Starlink operations on the night sky notwithstanding any such efforts.” The letter pointed to a paper astronomers published in Nature Astronomy in April , which said none of the techniques that Starlink and other LEO constellations are exploring can fully avoid them “harming astronomical science … launching significantly fewer satellites is the only mitigation that could do this.” In a Feb. 8 letter to the FCC, NASA said SpaceX’s proposed Gen 2 network could double the number of Hubble Space Telescope images that contain satellite streaks, currently 8% of all images, and undermine the ability of the United States to detect and potentially redirect asteroids heading to Earth. “NASA estimates that there would be a Starlink in every single asteroid survey image taken for planetary defense against hazardous asteroid impacts, decreasing asteroid survey effectiveness by rendering portions of images unusable,” the space agency said in a letter signed by Samantha Fonder, NASA’s representative to the Commercial Space Transportation Interagency Group. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. Of the 17 Falcon 9 missions so far this year, 10 have been for Starlink. They alone have launched nearly 500 satellites for the constellation, according to statistics maintained by spaceflight analyst and astronomer Jonathan McDowell. The next batch of Starlink satellites is slated to launch May 5.
WASHINGTON – After being confirmed by the Senate, Frank Calvelli is expected to be sworn in this week as assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. Calvelli will assume duties as early as Thursday as the Department of the Air Force’s first acquisition executive focused on space. President Biden nominated Calvelli in December. The Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing in February and the full Senate confirmed him April 28 by voice vote. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in a tweet congratulated Calvelli “on his long-awaited Senate confirmation.” Calvelli was most recently senior vice president of national security programs at Booz Allen Hamilton. Before that, he served as principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office from 2012 to 2020, with responsibility over satellite and ground system acquisition, program management and systems engineering. Kendall said Calvelli’s experience will be valuable to help put “meaningful military capabilities into the hands of U.S. Space Force guardians” and to develop space-based capabilities for all U.S. armed services and allies. Some of Calvelli’s statements from prepared testimony submitted to the Senate Armed Armed Services Committee:
TAMPA, Fla. — German startup Vyoma said April 28 it has partnered with European IT giant Atos to build a database of tiny space objects that it plans to track with its own satellites from next year. Their partnership aims to develop solutions for delivering space situational awareness (SSA) data to satellite operators to help them avoid costly collisions and unnecessary spacecraft maneuvers. Stefan Frey, Vyoma’s CEO, said the startup is currently providing tracking services and data quality assessments to European defense customers through “third-party networks of ground-based sensors, including heterogeneous data providers such as telescopes and laser ranging stations.” Under favorable conditions, Frey said the best-performing ground telescopes in this network can observe objects down to between 5 to 10 centimeters in size in low Earth orbit, and down to around 50-centimeters in geostationary orbit. However, this can only be achieved “via dedicated target tracking” of objects in certain positions and under clear atmospheric conditions. The startup closed pre-seed and seed rounds last year to develop space-based cameras to track so-far untrackable objects as small as 1 centimeter with a semi-autonomous network of satellites working under “surveillance mode.” There is a big difference between what can currently be observed in space and what can be tracked often enough to build and maintain an operational database. Currently, the most comprehensive catalog of orbital observations comes from the U.S. Department of Defense’s terrestrial-based Space Surveillance Network, which provides information about objects that are 10 centimeters or larger. Statistical models are used to infer the population of objects in space that are smaller than 10 centimeters. Frey said Vyoma is currently raising a Series A round to fund two pilot microsatellites, which aim to provide more accurate orbit location and trajectory estimates that are unaffected by the weather. The satellites will target a launch toward the end of 2023 to initially focus on tracking and cataloging objects larger than 30-centimeters. According to Frey, these two satellites will be capable of observing objects down to 5 centimeters, however, “we will occasionally miss detections for such small objects when we operate in surveillance mode.” Cataloging smaller objects requires a larger constellation of satellites with improved sensors, he said, and Vyoma aims to launch an additional 10 satellites over the 18 months that follow its first launch. “The 12 satellites give us a high revisit frequency, required for the cataloguing of small fragments (>1 cm), whose orbits are heavily perturbed by drag and other forces,” Frey said via email. “We will soon announce our partners for the satellite integration and launch provision.” There are around one million objects in space between 1 and 10 centimeters in size, according to the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office, compared with estimates of roughly 36,000 greater than 10 centimeters. Even small objects have the energy in orbit to cause unrepairable damage if they collide with satellites or other spacecraft. “With our timely and comprehensive catalogue of space objects, we not only increase the satellite’s safety, but also decrease the number of false alerts that otherwise lead to costly manoeuvres and mission downtime,” Frey added. “Thus, we make sure space remains sustainable for future generations.” Rajeev Suri, CEO of British satellite operator Inmarsat, called for better space management in an April 26 speech that warned the industry was “moving in the wrong direction” to keep space sustainable. Addressing a Royal Aeronautical Society conference, Suri highlighted the increasing risk of debris from expanding megaconstellations, along with their potential for polluting the environment as they burn up in the atmosphere at the end of their operational lives. “Consider that in 2014 there were 1,200 active satellites in orbit,” he said. “Six years later, that number was approaching 5,000. Today, megaconstellations are talking about tens of thousands of new satellites during this decade – satellites with an expected life of only five to ten years. The resulting debris creates hazards not just in a particular orbit, but for anything passing through that orbit.” “We simply do not yet understand all the risks this creates and we do not yet have all the technologies needed to manage the situation effectively.” NorthStar, Privateer, Scout, Spaceable and Digantara are among other startups developing businesses to improve SSA data. Their use of different sensor types and observational characteristics makes them complementary to Vyoma, according to Frey, who said he plans to incorporate their data into its solutions where possible. “The hardest part is not the data generation, but the data association, i.e., going from millions of images to a concise catalogue of space objects,” he said. “This is where we are strongest.” Atos, which has 111,000 employees and generates about 11 billion euros in annual revenue, has supported satellite operators for 20 years with a broad range of products and services. These include payload testing equipment that megaconstellation operator OneWeb has used for its satellites.
A senator and former astronaut said he did not expect Russia to perform another test of an antisatellite weapon because of the debris that posed a risk to that country’s own satellites as well as others. At a panel session of the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum April 30, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), chair of the emerging threats subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he did not consider ASATs a threat to either government or commercial satellites in the near term even during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “They did an antisatellite test recently, but that test was just very well choreographed and produced to get a certain outcome,” he said, referencing the November 2021 ASAT test that destroyed the Cosmos 1408 satellite. “I wouldn’t say right now the Russians in particular have an antisatellite capability that I would be too worried about.” Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who flew on four shuttle missions, recalled on one flight in 2008 having to maneuver both the shuttle and the International Space Station to avoid debris from a 2007 Chinese ASAT test. The experience of both that test and last year’s ASAT demonstration, he suggested, makes it unlikely Russia will perform similar destructive ASAT tests in the foreseeable future. “I don’t expect this to be a routine thing because they have to deal with this debris field as well,” he said of Russia, citing its limited space situational awareness capabilities. “The Russians in particular don’t have a very good sense of where stuff is.” “I don’t expect them to routinely be shooting their own stuff down. They wanted to demonstrate they could do it, probably to send us a message,” he said. Vice President Kamala Harris announced April 18 that the United States would not perform similar destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests , calling on other nations to make that pledge. Another panelist, though, criticized that ban. “We can’t unilaterally tie our hands, because along with that call for a ban was also a unilateral decision to stop ASAT testing,” said Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee and House Science Committee. His comments echoed criticism from other Republican members of Congress. “Not all antisatellite testing is equal,” he argued, calling Russian and Chinese tests “reckless” for the amount of debris they created. “The way the United States does it, the last one we did created less than 100” pieces of debris. Waltz appeared to be referring to the 2008 ASAT demonstration by the United States that destroyed the USA 193 satellite. That test created 174 pieces of tracked debris, the last of which reentered 1.7 years later, according to data compiled by the Secure World Foundation . Kelly warned that growing debris populations could create a cascade, commonly called the Kessler Syndrome, that could make some orbits unusable. However, he was skeptical of proposals to address that problem by removing debris. “There’s some companies looking at doing that. I just don’t see that that’s a reasonable thing to do,” he said, without elaborating on why orbital debris removal is not feasible. He argued that natural decay from atmospheric drag could resolve much of the debris problem. However, many models predict that the amount of debris outside of very low orbits will continue to grow for decades because of breakups and collisions, even if no new objects were launched. Space station future The panel took place amid renewed claims that Russia was planning to leave the International Space Station partnership. A Bloomberg article April 30 , citing Russian state media, stated that Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, had said Russia had made a decision about its future on the ISS but would not publicly disclose it. However, one Russian-language article from the TASS news service , which reported on Rogozin’s comments, added that he said Russia would continue to participate on the station to at least 2024, the date it had previously committed to. Russia would provide its partners with one year’s notice of its plans to exit the partnership, he said. In a separate TASS article April 29 , Rogozin suggested no decision had been made, saying any decision on Russia’s future participation on the ISS “will depend to a great extent on the developing situation both in Russia and around it.” Asked about that latest development, Kelly said he talks regularly with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy on the issue. “Ending that partnership is going to be a challenging thing,” he said, because of Russia’s role in ISS operations. “It would be hard for either country to operate the ISS without the other country.” He said it may be possible to replace one Russian contribution, the ability to reboost the station’s orbit, with modified cargo spacecraft. “It would take some time to build that capability in.” Kelly predicted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will eventually affect the ISS partnership as the U.S. looks for additional ways to sanction Russia. “Eventually we will have done everything and there will be one thing left, and that’s this partnership in space on ISS with them,” he said. Waltz endorsed continuing ISS operations, citing the benefits of research performed there. “We don’t even know yet what we’re going to be able to discover up there,” he said, expressing his support for privatizing ISS operations and eventually replacing the station with commercial space stations. “If we don’t, the Chinese will be the only entity with their own space station, which they are building right now in low Earth orbit, and that’s not acceptable.” 
SpaceX had its busiest month yet in April in terms of launches as the company emphasizes the value of a high flight rate. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 5:27 p.m. Eastern April 29 carrying a payload of 53 Starlink satellites. SpaceX confirmed a successful deployment of the satellites an hour after liftoff. The rocket’s first stage landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean, completing its sixth flight. The booster was last used just three weeks earlier on the launch of a Crew Dragon on the Ax-1 private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, a 21-day turnaround that was the shortest between flights to date. That launch was the sixth by SpaceX in April, the most by the company in any single calendar month. The company has performed four launches in a month several times and five in December 2021. SpaceX has conducted 17 Falcon 9 launches so far this year, keeping the company on pace to meet a goal of one launch a week this year. “Flight rate is really, really important,” Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said during a panel discussion at the AIAA ASCENDx Texas conference April 28. “Flight rate lets you learn, it lets you grow. You have to fly it correctly. You have to fly it safely.” A key factor in that high flight rate is the company’s own Starlink constellation. While only two of the six launches in April were of Starlink satellites — the others were the Ax-1 and Crew-4 crewed missions, the Transporter-4 rideshare mission and the NROL-85 classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office — 10 of the 17 Falcon 9 launches so far this year have been for the deployment of the broadband constellation. The Starlink launches, Reed said, are important for such things as pushing the limits of reusability. “It allows us to really learn and expand the envelope of what it takes to fly at a very high flight rate,” he said. “This is the kind of flight rate that we need to be thinking about as an industry,” he added. “We should all look forward to the day soon when we are launching every day, every hour, every minute.” Starship environmental delay While SpaceX steps up its launch cadence, its Starship program remains mired in delays. The Federal Aviation Administration announced April 29 it was again pushing back the deadline for the completion of an environmental assessment for orbital launches of that vehicle from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, test site. The new deadline is now May 31, a one-month delay. “SpaceX made multiple changes to its application that require additional FAA analysis,” the FAA said in a statement to reporters. “The agency continues to review around 18,000 general public comments.” The FAA didn’t identify what changes SpaceX made and how they might affect the review of what is called a programmatic environmental assessment (PEA). “The FAA is finalizing the review of the Final PEA, including responding to comments and ensuring consistency with SpaceX’s licensing application,” a statement on the FAA website for the effort states. “The FAA is also completing consultation and confirming mitigations for the proposed SpaceX operations. All consultations must be complete before the FAA can issue the Final PEA.” According to a “permitting dashboard” operated by the Department of Transportation , the assessment did complete one such consultation, involving an Endangered Species Act consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service, April 22. Another consultation, called the Section 106 Review after its section of the National Historic Preservation Act, is scheduled to be completed in early May. While this is the fourth time that the FAA has pushed back completion of the environmental assessment, originally scheduled for the end of 2021, it is not clear that this alone is delaying the first orbital launch of Starship. While SpaceX showed a fully stacked Starship vehicle in February in Boca Chica , neither the Super Heavy booster nor Starship upper stage displayed then are expected to fly as the company moved to testing other hardware, with no firm timeline of having a vehicle ready to flight.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Space Force plans to request nearly $8 billion over the next five years to scale up development of classified communications satellite networks, according to DoD budget documents. The projected funding is for two geostationary orbit constellations: one for military tactical communications, and another for strategic communications to connect nuclear forces with national command authorities. The largest funding increase is for the Evolved Strategic Satcom, or ESS, program. The Space Force plans to spend more than $5 billion from 2023 through 2027 to continue the development of three proposed satellite payload and ground system concepts from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman . The companies are expected to complete prototype designs by 2025. The Space Force wants to keep three contractors in the program for the time being to ensure it has a diversity of suppliers, the budget documents said. The next round of contracts is expected to be awarded in 2025. The ESS satellites and ground systems are intended for nuclear command control and communications This is the highly classified architecture that enables the national command authority — the chain of command running from the president through the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the U.S. Strategic Command — to communicate with strategic bombers, ballistic submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles dispersed throughout the United States. The Space Force is funding a separate constellation for military tactical communications. It plans to spend about $2.5 billion over the next five years to continue the development of the Pr otected Tactical Satcom, or PTS, satellites and a ground system called Protected Tactical Enterprise Service, or PTES. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are developing the PTS payloads and Boeing is also the PTES prime contractor. Both companies are expected to launch prototype payloads in 2024 for on-orbit demonstrations. The ESS and PTS satellite networks, if all goes as planned, will augment the current Advanced Extremely High Frequency ( AEHF ) satellites, made by Lockheed Martin. The U.S. Air Force started the PTS program in 2018 in an effort to make military forces are less dependent on AEHF satellites, which are meant to be used for the most sensitive classified communications. The sixth and final AEHF satellite was launched in March 2020 . ESS satellites will have new features, such as enhanced cybersecurity and polar coverage. AEHF is a mid-latitude system so the U.S. military today relies on the Enhanced Polar System satellites to extend the AEHF satcom network over the North polar region.
The United Arab Emirates will fly an astronaut on a long-duration mission to the International Space Station through an agreement with Axiom Space. Axiom and the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced April 29 they signed an agreement whereby an Emirati astronaut will go to the station on the Crew-6 mission, a SpaceX Crew Dragon flight to the ISS scheduled for launch no earlier than the spring of 2023 for a six-month stay. Axiom was able to make the deal because it had received the seat from NASA in exchange for a Soyuz seat used to transport NASA’s Mark Vande Hei to the ISS last year. Axiom purchased the Soyuz seat from Roscosmos, then gave it to NASA in exchange for a seat on a future commercial crew mission, as an alternative to NASA working directly with Roscosmos. “Axiom Space is proud to provide MBRSC with a fight opportunity for a UAE astronaut, enabling its first long-term mission to the ISS,” Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, said in a statement. The UAE has not disclosed who will fly on that mission. It has an astronaut corps of four people, including two who are currently training with NASA’s latest class of astronaut candidates. One of the four, Hazza AlMansoori, became the first Emirati in space when he flew on a Soyuz mission in September 2019 , spending a week in space. In an interview last October, Salem AlMarri, at the time the deputy director general of MBRSC, said the center was looking at various options to fly the country’s next astronaut . That included both short-duration commercial missions, like the recent Ax-1 flight by Axiom, as well as partnerships with the United States and Russia. The Emirati astronaut selected to fly on Crew-6 will be the second person from the UAE to go into orbit and the first who is not from an ISS partner — Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States — to remain on the station for an extended mission. That astronaut will join two NASA astronauts, Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, who the agency assigned to Crew-6 last December as commander and pilot, respectively. The fourth seat on the mission has not been assigned but would likely go to a Russian cosmonaut if the United States and Russia complete a seat barter agreement. The UAE started its astronaut program as part of a broader initiative to build up its space presence, an effort that included its Hope spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars since February 2021 and a small lunar rover that will fly on a Japanese commercial lander mission later this year. Government officials said that effort is intended to build up a space industry in the company and provide inspiration for youth in the country and throughout the Middle East. “They reflect the vision of the UAE, which positions space exploration as an opportunity for enhanced cooperation between countries and entities in pursuit of the common goals of scientific discovery, and a sustainable future for humanity,” Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, chairman of MBRSC, said in a statement. “This will pave the way for future initiatives that will contribute to strengthening the UAE’s position as a leading nation in the world of space exploration,” added AlMarri, now director general of MBRSC, in the statement.
Sierra Space says it is making good progress on its first Dream Chaser spaceplane as the company looks ahead to versions of the vehicle that can carry crews and perform national security missions. The company provided SpaceNews with images of the first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, being assembled at its Colorado headquarters. The vehicle’s structure is now largely complete, but there is still more work to install its thermal protection system and other components. “We have the wings on now. It really looks like a spaceplane,” said Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, during a panel at the AIAA ASCENDx Texas conference in Houston April 28, where she played a video showing work building the vehicle. In a recent interview, Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said the company had completed structural testing of the vehicle and was moving into final integration and testing. It should be ready to ship to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, formerly known as Plum Brook Station, in August or September for four months of thermal vacuum testing. “Then we ship it to the Kennedy Space Center for integration onto the Vulcan rocket,” he said, with a launch tentatively planned for February. However, Kavandi said in her remarks at the AIAA conference that the launch was planned “about a year from now.” That launch will be the first in a series of cargo missions to the International Space Station under a NASA Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract awarded in 2016. Sierra Space is looking beyond cargo missions and is starting work on a crewed version of Dream Chaser that could launch as soon as 2026. Work on the crewed version is internally funded, he said, but with hopes of offering it to NASA for future ISS crew transportation missions. “We think that we’ve got a really good opportunity to on-ramp back on NASA crew,” he said. NASA supported earlier phases of Dream Chaser development through funded Space Act Agreements in its Commercial Crew Development program, but did not select the vehicle for contracts it awarded in 2014 to Boeing and SpaceX to complete development and testing of crewed vehicles. Vice said the company sees interest in crewed Dream Chaser flights beyond NASA. “We are pretty excited how fast the tourism pieces are coming together for Dream Chaser,” he said. Those flights would transport people to a commercial space station like Orbital Reef, a project led by Blue Origin with Sierra Space as a key partner. “Every person we’ve talked to that wants to go on Dream Chaser wants a destination.” Sierra Space has also discussed making a version of Dream Chaser for national security missions, but offered few specifics about how it would be different from the cargo or crew versions. There has been speculation it would have capabilities similar to the U.S. Space Force’s X-37B spaceplane, whose missions have been largely shrouded in secrecy. Vice declined to go into details on the national security variant, including whether Sierra Space or the national security space community started discussions about it. “I would just say it is an engaging two-way conversation,” he said.
TAMPA, Fla. — Saudi Arabian fleet operator Arabsat has ordered its first fully software-defined geostationary satellite to provide flexible coverage across the Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe. The company said April 29 it signed a contract for Arabsat 7A with Europe’s Thales Alenia Space, which will build the satellite based on its Space Inspire platform. Although launch plans were not disclosed, the companies said Arabsat-7A will replace the bulk of the existing C and Ku-band capacity at 30.5 East on Arabsat 5A, which was launched in 2010 with 15-years of expected operational life. Arabsat 7A will also have extra high-throughput Ku-band capacity to help the company expand services in markets including government and military, mobility, enterprise and oil and gas. Arabsat currently operates 10 satellites across four orbital positions. Its Arabsat 6A satellite is co-located with Arabsat 5A at 30.5 East, which Arabsat describes as its “data hotspot.” Unlike traditional “bent pipe” GEO satellites, software-defined communication payloads can be reprogrammed in orbit to adapt to different areas and markets as demand changes. They are increasingly being ordered by GEO operators in response to industry uncertainty as existing and planned megaconstellations in low Earth orbit (LEO) disrupt the market. Hadi Alhassani, Arabsat’s vice president and chief strategy officer, said March 21 during a Satellite 2022 panel that flexible GEO satellites are the answer to “ the LEO constellation competition .” “You’re going to see more and more ‘flex sat’ orders this year and the following years,” he said. According to research from Euroconsult, software-defined satellites made up more than 80% of GEO high-throughput satellite orders in 2021. Only one of the five GEO orders Thales Alenia Space announced in 2021 was for a fully software-defined satellite. However, all four GEO orders the manufacturer has announced so far this year have been for software-defined satellites. The latest was announced March 28 when SES ordered SES-26, which the operator expects will launch in 2024 or 2025 to extend content and connectivity services across Europe, Africa and Asia.
SEOUL, South Korea — A pair of satellites from Malaysia and India are slated to launch in late June on the Ariane 5 rocket’s first flight of the year. Arianespace announced the June 22 launch date this week . Liftoff from Europe’s Guiana Space Center spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, is targeted for an hour-and-forty-minute window that opens at 5:03 p.m. Eastern. Aboard the rocket will be Malaysian satellite operator Measat’s Measat-3d and state-funded NewSpace India Limited’s GSAT-24. Both are communications satellites bound for geostationary orbit. Measat-3d, built by Airbus Defence and Space , will co-locate with Measat-3a and Measat-3b at the 91.5 degrees East orbital slot to provide satellite broadband to areas with limited or no terrestrial network throughout Malaysia. Measat-3 will also provide redundancy and additional capacity for video distribution in the Asia-Pacific region. The multipurpose satellite is equipped with C- and Ku-band payloads for direct-to-home television broadcasting and other telecom services, and a high-throughput Ka-band payload for internet connectivity. Measat-3d will also carry an L-band navigation payload for South Korean satellite operator KT SAT as part of the Korea Augmentation Satellite System effort to boost GPS accuracy in the region. GSAT-24 is a Ku-band communications satellite built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), ISRO’s commercial arm. It will provide high-quality television, telecommunications and broadcasting services over India. While the satellite’s development was fully funded by NSIL, its capacity will be leased to Tata Sky, an Indian direct broadcast satellite service provider, in the first case of what NSIL called “demand-driven communications satellite mission” in which NSIL is mandated to build, launch, own and operate a satellite to provide its services to committed customers. This mission meant to promote India’s domestic space industry is part of the country’s space reform announced in June 2020 . 
A Long March 2C rocket sent a pair of optical remote sensing satellites into orbit early Friday to provide commercial remote sensing imagery. The Long March 2C lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 12:11 a.m. April 29, placing the Siwei-01 and 02 satellites into their planned sun-synchronous orbits. U.S. space tracking later detected the pair in 486 by 502-kilometer orbits inclined by 97 degrees. The satellites, also known as Superview Neo-1 01 and 02, each have a mass of around 540 kilograms and will deliver 0.5-meter resolution optical imagery. The satellites will provide commercial remote sensing data services for traditional satellite data customer industries including natural resources, surveying and mapping and marine and environmental protection, as well as emerging markets including urban security, digital rural development and smart agriculture and transport, according to Chinese media. The pair was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a major subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor and giant state-owned defense enterprise. The satellite operator, China Siwei Surveying and Mapping Technology Co., Ltd, is also a CASC subsidiary. The company also operates two pairs of co-planar “Gaojing” or Superview satellites launched in December 2016 and January 2018, delivering panchromatic 0.5-meter resolution imagery. China also has a commercial Earth observation firm in the shape of Changguang Satellite Technology. The Changchun-based remote sensing constellation operator is a well-backed spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ CIOMP, and has launched more than 30 Jilin-1 series optical and video satellites, with panchromatic resolution of around 0.70 meters. The Friday launch was China’s 12th of 2022, in which CASC plans more than 50 launches. Launch attempts from commercial actors including Landspace, Expace, Galactic Energy and more are expected to add to the activity. The planned April 29 launch of a Long March 11 solid rocket from a platform in the East China Sea was scrubbed because of weather. A new attempt is set for early April 30 universal time. The flight path will take the rocket over Taiwan, with spent stages to fall into the seas. It is expected to deliver new Jilin-1 satellites into orbit. China has developed infrastructure at Haiyang, Shandong province to allow launches from the seas. The capabilities may help ease congestion at other national spaceports and reduce debris falling near inhabited areas following inland launches.
DENVER – The U.S. Space Force plans to request funding in the 2024 budget for space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. Space Force deputy chief of space operations, said April 27 at the 2022 GEOINT Symposium here. After decades of focusing on gathering geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) from space, the U.S. military seeks GEOINT to track objects and activity in space. “I imagine many of you would describe our appetite thus far as insatiable,” Saltzman said. “I can tell you, it’s only going to grow in the future. We will continue to be demanding customers and what we need from GEOINT is persistence both terrestrially and in space in order to posture for potential encounters or conflicts.” During a keynote address near the conclusion of the GEOINT Symposium, Saltzman talked about the growing threat to U.S. spacecraft and the services they provide, like GPS. Specifically, Saltzman cited the Russian antisatellite test , China’s test of a hypersonic glide vehicle , radio frequency interference, cyberattacks on terrestrial nodes and “and provocative on-orbit antisatellite demonstrations, such as firing projectiles .” In addition, potential adversaries “have developed advanced space-based targeting capabilities that put our joint force at risk,” he added. To combat these threats, Saltzman called for training and equipping U.S. forces to attribute irresponsible or aggressive behavior in space and for improving space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). “Protecting and defending our space-based capabilities and defending our joint force from irresponsible or hostile use of space-based capabilities is the reason that your Space Force was established,” Saltzman said. “Our guardians must be trained and equipped to operate and prevail in a contested space domain against a thinking adversary. The failure to maintain our ability to attribute action and negate threats and protect interests diminishes our leadership, our ability to deter aggression, undermining norms of responsible behavior and increasing the likelihood of miscalculation and conflict.” While serving as a U.S. Air Force officer in the Middle East, Saltzman recognized the importance of attribution. “I’ve seen firsthand how the ability to attribute activities changes adversary behavior before the activities are even executed,” Salzman said. “In short, the ability to attribute deters adversaries or, at the very least, constrains their behavior.” Saltzman described how “bad actors” in the Middle East would “dismantle their attack systems and disappear because they saw us watching, and they did not want to be connected with the attack.” If the Space Force takes on attribution as a military mission, there would be budgetary and resource tradeoffs, “but I think it’s worthy of a community-wide discussion,” Saltzman said. Whether or not the Space Force adopts attribution as a new mission, the service is intent on improving space-based ISR. “We’re currently studying what our potential role in space-based ISR will look like,” Saltzman said. Saltzman acknowledged the work of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office in working with commercial firms providing data and services in this area. “We want to be sure our efforts do not compete with but complement the work already being done to identify, integrate and make available commercial products and data to meet national security needs,” he said. Before establishing requirements for space-based ISR, the Space Force will seek industry input. Traditionally, military agencies examine mission needs and write requirements before issuing a request for proposals that says, “Please be creative and innovative inside of this container,” Saltzman said. “That is not unleashing the potential of what the industry can provide. That’s not helping us get in at the leading edge of technology.” For space-based ISR, the Space Force will describe its operational challenges and the desired outcome. “Some of the work that our Space Warfighting Analysis Center is doing is intended to … engage in a conversation with industry around the process,” Saltzman said. “So when we get requirements, we’ve already agreed on what the innovation solution is or what we’re going to do.”
NASA and German space agency DLR announced April 28 they will end operations of an airborne astrophysics observatory in September. The agencies said that flights of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with a 2.7-meter infrared telescope mounted in its fuselage, will end no later than Sept. 30, at the conclusion of its current extended mission. SOFIA’s future has been in question in recent years because of its high operating cost. NASA spends about $85 million a year on SOFIA, more than any other operational astrophysics mission except the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA proposed terminating funding for SOFIA in its fiscal year 2021 and 2022 budget proposals, only to have Congress restore funding. The Astro2020 astrophysics decadal survey, published in November, recommended NASA shut down SOFIA, citing its high cost and limited scientific productivity . “Relative to its cost, SOFIA has not been scientifically productive or impactful over its duration,” the survey’s final report stated, concluding that NASA end SOFIA operations by 2023. SOFIA officials at the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), which handles science operations, argued in January that the decadal survey based its conclusion on older information that did not reflect improvements in SOFIA’s scientific productivity , such as more observing time and an increase in publications. NASA, though, again requested no funding for SOFIA in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal released March 28. The agency needed an agreement with DLR, though, to move ahead with any termination of SOFIA because the German agency has a 20% share of the program and its costs. The agencies did not offer details on how it will shut down SOFIA. “SOFIA will finish out its scheduled operations for the 2022 fiscal year, followed by an orderly shutdown,” NASA stated, with data it collected placed in online archives. Suraiya Farukhi, director of external communications for USRA, told SpaceNews that the plans for ending SOFIA operations are under discussion with NASA, DLR and the Deutsches SOFIA Institut, USRA’s German partners on SOFIA. About 70 more SOFIA flights are planned, including more than 30 flights during a southern deployment in New Zealand. She said more than 100 observing programs were selected in the most recent call for SOFIA proposals, called Cycle 9, and not all of them will be completed by the end of September. USRA solicited proposals earlier this year for a new round of SOFIA observations, Cycle 10, that was to begin in October 2022. Those proposals will be “kept on hold until further guidance from NASA,” she said. “The cessation of SOFIA’s flight operations is by no means the end of German-American cooperation,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said in a DLR statement. He said the agencies will hold a joint workshop this summer to identify potential new projects “in future scientific fields.”
WASHINGTON – Two space launch companies – United Launch Alliance and SpaceX – currently are under contract to launch military and intelligence satellites for the U.S. Space Force. But when these contracts are up for recompete in 2024, the Space Force might consider working with more than two companies, Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond told lawmakers April 27. “We are really at a transformation point in space,” Raymond said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Department of the Air Force’s fiscal year 2023 budget request. Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) pressed Raymond to shed light on the Space Force’s future plans to buy space launch services as more companies enter the market. Smith has been a longtime critic of the military launch program, arguing that it does not provide enough opportunities for new entrants. ULA and SpaceX in 2020 won National Security Space Launch five-year contracts known as Phase 2. ULA got 60% and SpaceX 40% of the projected national security missions over the five-year contract. The Space Force has held meetings with the launch industry and has asked for their input in preparation for a new competition for Phase 3 contracts. Raymond said there’s a real possibility that more than two launch providers could be selected in order to “promote competition.” “I think there’s opportunities, with a manifest that’s becoming more significant in numbers, that there’s room for increased competition,” Raymond said. Space Force officials said the Phase 3 contract is likely to include other services beyond the traditional launches from Earth to orbit. There is interest in buying, for example, in-space transportation services from space tugs that move satellites across orbits. Smith in recent years has pushed the military to open up opportunities for new players in the launch industry such as Blue Origin, based in Smith’s home state. “I very much believe that we have a huge opportunity in space, that there are so many companies, certainly the big ones that we’ve heard about, SpaceX, Blue Origin, others, but then gosh, probably a dozen others that are smaller,” he said. “And if we can encourage that competition, I think we can get a better product for a better price. So I want to make sure we do that. “ Blue Origin is developing a large rocket, New Glenn, and is expected to challenge ULA and SpaceX for national security contracts. Two well-funded emerging players in the small launch market — Rocket Lab and Relativity Space — last year revealed they are developing medium rockets aimed at the commercial market but also perhaps with Phase 3 of NSSL in mind. Another issue that could affect the selection of launch companies for Phase 3 is a projected transition to smaller satellites. “In the past, historically, a rocket would put one satellite up, or two satellites up,” said Raymond. “What we’re seeing now is a rocket putting 80 satellites up, if you will, at a time,” he said. “And so all that goes into account as we look forward to what a Phase 3 would look like.” The Pentagon in budget documents estimates it will spend more than $10 billion on national security space launch over five years, with 35 missions projected from fiscal year 2023 through 2027. The Space Force also has a separate budget for space launches by the Space Development Agency. SDA is building a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit for communications and missile detection, and plans to launch them in batches . The agency expects to spend $1.4 billion on launch services between 2023 and 2027.
WASHINGTON – Northrop Grumman is anticipating a $2 billion contract from United Launch Alliance for solid rocket boosters , Northrop Grumman’s president and CEO Kathy Warden said April 28. The contract is expected in the second quarter of 2022, Warden said during a first-quarter earnings call. The large order for solid rockets comes on the heels of ULA winning one of three contracts to launch Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation. ULA CEO Tory Bruno said earlier this month that the company plans to make major investments in its supply chain to support as many as 20 to 25 launches a year of its future vehicle Vulcan Centaur, expected to start flying late this year. ULA in 2015 decided to stop buying solid rockets from Aerojet Rocketdyne and selected Orbital ATK (which was later acquired by Northrop Grumman) as its strategic supplier of strap-on motors that burn solid propellant and augment the lifting capacity of the rocket’s first stage. Northrop Grumman makes the Graphite Epoxy Motors (GEMs) which ULA has used for decades on its Delta 2 and Delta 4 launch vehicles. An extended length 63-inch-diameter GEM 63XL was developed for Vulcan Centaur. The GEM 63XL version is 72-feet long while the GEM 63 motors used in the Atlas 5 rocket are 66-feet long. Warden during the call with analysts reported growing sales for Northrop Grumman’s space business for the first quarter of 2022. Overall first-quarter sales for the company, $8.8 billion, are down from $9.2 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Sales of military and civil space systems, $2.8 billion, are up from $2.5 billion a year ago.
A southern city hosting China’s newest, transformative spaceport is pushing to become a hub for commercial and international space activity. Wenchang International Aerospace City will accelerate efforts to establish a commercial launch site and rocket assembly plants, according to ThePaper . The efforts aim to put in place infrastructure to allow regular commercial launches by 2024. The Wenchang International Aerospace City project, established in 2020, will consist of three areas, focusing on launch, commerce and industry, and tourism. The commercial area seeks to attract space startups and will include rocket and satellite assembly and testing plants and satellite data application centers. Institutes belonging to China’s main space contractor, CASC, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and other state-entities, as well as commercial launch companies iSpace and Deep Blue Aerospace , have signed contracts to establish a presence in the city. The city, on the island province of Hainan in the South China Sea, already hosts the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center. The coastal spaceport was constructed specifically for launches of large, new-generation launch vehicles to allow China to undertake major space projects. Rockets are delivered to Wenchang by sea from Tianjin, north China, circumventing railway networks used to transport smaller launch vehicles to inland launch sites. Since opening in 2014 Wenchang has hosted 16 launches, including a space station module and cargo missions, a lunar sample return, and the country’s first interplanetary expedition, Tianwen-1 . Wenchang also facilitates launches of the Long March 8 rocket for commercial rideshares , and the Long March 7A. The new launchers could replace aging, toxic hypergolic Long March rockets which drop spent stages over land. New, dedicated launch towers for the Long March 8 could be constructed to allow greater launch cadence, according to the rocket maker, China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. Wenchang, which is also part of the Hainan Free Trade Port scheme, hosted China’s seventh national “space day” on April 24. During the event Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), inaugurated an international cooperation center for satellite data and applications, and a data and application center for the BRICS remote sensing satellite constellation. Chinese precedent and general secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping visited Wenchang Satellite Launch Center April 12, calling for the site to become a world class spaceport . “I hope you will vigorously carry forward the spirit of ‘Two Bombs and One Satellite’ and the spirit of manned space program, eye the frontier of global space development to meet the major strategic needs of China’s space industry,” Xi said. Wenchang is currently preparing a Long March 7 rocket to launch the Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft. The mission, expected to launch in early May, would be the first of six launches in 2022 to complete the construction phase of China’s Tiangong space station. The moves in Wenchang reflect an explosion in Chinese launch plans and space activities. China launched 55 times in 2021, with more than 60 planned this year, including commercial actors. In comparison China made 19 orbital launch attempts in 2015. China is also developing sea launch capabilities with facilities at Haiyang in the eastern province of Shandong, a new commercial launch site in Ningbo , and new launch complexes at the national Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.
TAMPA, Fla. — British satellite operator Inmarsat is preparing to use its telemetry relay network to support rocket launches this year for the first time, according to a company executive. Peter Hadinger, Inmarsat’s chief technology officer, said “some customers” are looking at using the operator’s new InRange launch support service in 2022 after it demonstrated the capability during ground tests. Using Inmarsat’s L-band constellation, Inmarsat says InRange will save launch providers from spending money on ground stations and other terrestrial infrastructure for tracking rockets in flight. While there are typically command and telemetry links at a launch site to support immediate monitoring and flight termination systems, rockets can quickly go out of range when they travel beyond the horizon. Launch providers typically use downrange stations on land or on ships to maintain telemetry through all stages of flight and payload deployment, Hadinger said, but “these are expensive to maintain.” “New launch providers, often using new launch locations, start off with no downrange ships or stations and these can be quite expensive to establish,” he said. “Further, terrestrial tracking visibility restricts the range of trajectories that can be supported and stations must often be staffed and configured weeks ahead of a launch which impacts responsiveness.” For decades NASA has used its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) spacecraft as an “all-seeing telemetry receiver,” Hadinger added, but this system “is expensive and is offered to others only on an as-available basis.” Inmarsat’s U.S. subsidiary April 21 became one of six companies to win a slice of $278.5 million in funding to demo services that could help replace TDRS. TDRS was set up in the 1980s to provide a relay between the United States and spacecraft in low Earth orbit — in addition to occasionally supporting launches when a rocket travels beyond the sight of its launch range. Inmarsat plans to use its $28.6 million share of the funding to demo InRange and other services for LEO spacecraft with its network of geostationary orbit satellites. The funding is a “large step up” from the roughly $350,000 in funds Inmarsat received from the UK Space Agency for InRange last year, Hadinger noted. Following investments from industry, the company had only secured around $500,000 in funding for InRange as of March 2021 . Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the prime contractor for Japan’s next-generation H3 launch vehicle, has partnered with Inmarsat to develop InRange. Safran Data Systems, the telemetry solutions provider based in Europe and North America, and U.S. antenna maker Haigh–Farr are also partners and are focusing on InRange’s L-band transmitter and antenna design. Hadinger expects the InRange-supported launches that could take place this year will still use telemetry and command facilities at the customer’s launch site for local control during liftoff, and other critical flight termination functions while the rocket is still in view. “For the planned missions, InRange will get them extended telemetry through all stages and payload deployment that they would not otherwise have,” he said. “It is also being looked at carefully by launch providers with existing telemetry networks for both operating cost reasons and because they can optimize their launch trajectories for certain orbits where today they have to take sub-optimal routes just to stay in contact. “By optimizing they can increase the payload mass that can be offered and reduce the orbit raising required of the satellite — both quite valuable.” The InRange services will initially use the four I-4 spacecraft that Inmarsat operates to provide global L-band coverage. In the future, Hadinger said the service will connect to its upgraded I-6 satellites. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries launched the first I-6 satellite in December and the all-electric propulsion spacecraft is due to reach its orbital position later in 2022. Other companies that won NASA funding to test how commercial satellites could support missions currently using TDRS also aim to demonstrate launch support services. One of those winners, Viasat, is seeking regulatory approval to buy Inmarsat for $7.3 billion. The other winners are Amazon’s Kuiper Government Solutions, SpaceX, SES Government Solutions, and Telesat U.S. Services. 
A Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station with a new set of American and European astronauts April 27. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom docked with the station at 7:37 p.m. Eastern. Hatches separating the spacecraft and station opened about an hour and a half later. The docking took place more than half an hour ahead of schedule and less than 16 hours after a Falcon 9 launched the spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center. That transit time is the shortest yet for a Crew Dragon mission, although Soyuz spacecraft frequently arrive at the station within a few hours of launch. That short transit was largely a matter of luck. “It’s just the orbital mechanics of where the ISS is and where it’s coming over Florida” for the launch, said Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, at a postlaunch briefing. That varies on a day-by-day basis, changing the transit times by 10 to 20 hours. “We’re not changing anything in the way we do our operations with NASA.” The quick rendezvous was fortunate, added Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, since it avoided conflicts with a Russian spacewalk scheduled for April 28. Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev will perform their second spacewalk in as many weeks to continue work to set up a European robotic arm on the Nauka module. The Crew-4 astronauts — NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Jessica Watkins and the European Space Agency’s Samantha Cristoforetti — will start work to take over station operations from the Crew-3 astronauts, who have been on the station since mid-November. That handover will take about five days. The Crew-3 astronauts — NASA’s Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron and ESA’s Matthias Maurer — will return to Earth next week on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance. Stich said that undocking is tentatively planned for May 4, with a splashdown off the coast of Florida May 5 “if the weather’s good.” Weather was a complication for the return of the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour on the Ax-1 mission earlier this month, requiring the four private astronauts to spend an extra week on the space station, nearly twice as long as originally planned. NASA officials previously said they want Crew-3 to undock by May 10 to avoid a period of unfavorable sun angles that would hinder dockings and undockings for about a week and a half.
The Commerce Department has hired a veteran of government and industry to be the next director of the Office of Space Commerce (OSC). Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced April 27 that Richard DalBello will be the next director of the office, effective May 9. The office, located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is responsible for a range of commercial space policy activities, from the licensing of commercial remote sensing systems to development of civil space traffic management capabilities. “He brings the experience and leadership needed that is critical right now as the OSC works closely with the Commerce leadership team, White House, Department of Defense, NASA and the private sector to advance U.S. leadership in the global commercial space industry,” Raimondo said in a statement. DalBello has worked in space for more than 30 years for both companies and government organizations. He was most recently vice president of global engagement at Virgin Galactic, and previously worked for Intelsat General and ICO Global. He also twice worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), including as director for space and aeronautics during the Obama administration. “This is an exciting opportunity and I appreciate the support and encouragement OSC is receiving from NOAA, the Department of Commerce, The White House and Congress,” DalBello said a NOAA statement. “Space safety and sustainability are two of the most critical issues facing the international community today and I am pleased the Biden administration has made these issues a priority.” Space safety, in the form of civil space traffic management, will be a key issue for DalBello in his new role. The office is in the process of developing an open architecture data repository (OADR) for space situational awareness data that will be used for providing services like conjunction warnings that are currently handled by the Defense Department. The department sought $87.7 million for OSC in its fiscal year 2023 budget request, up from just $16 million appropriated in 2022, primarily to ramp up work on the OADR. DalBello’s appointment won strong support from industry, who cited his experience in both the public and private sectors. “His wealth of experience as both a commercial satellite industry executive and adviser to the White House OSTP on commercial space matters makes him an ideal new director of the OSC,” said Tom Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, an industry group that DalBello previously led. “Richard’s deep industry and government experience are well aligned to build Commerce’s space sustainability role and serve as an advocate for maintaining U.S. industry’s leadership in the global space market,” said Mike French, vice president for space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association. DalBello also got an endorsement from his predecessor, Kevin O’Connell, who served as director of the office from June 2018 to January 2021. In comments during a panel at the GEOINT Symposium, he emphasized the important of leveraging the other parts of the Commerce Department. “What I hope Rich has access to, as I did, was the direct interest of the secretary and deputy secretary as well as access to the men and women of the Commerce Department where there are so many different tools, ranging from trade advocacy and export controls and the technical agencies,” he said. “Rich will need to have access to all of those organizations seamlessly to bring the businesses of space to bear on what we’re all trying to do in the space economy.” Debra Werner contributed to this article from Denver.
Five billion years ago, two galaxies collided, mixing astronomical gas clouds that produced a radio-wavelength laser called a megamaser . That laser traveled for billions of parsecs, crossing intergalactic space as all of Earth’s history played out. And in April 2022, it was detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa . It was the farthest megamaser of its kind ever detected, and researchers dubbed it Nkalakatha, the isiZulu word for “big boss.” This was an international achievement by researchers from South African universities, observatories and partners in 12 other countries. Today, South Africa is an evident center of gravity in the African space community. It hosts some of the world’s most sophisticated ground-based space infrastructure, its space supply chain is strong, and its public sector institutions are oriented toward growing the space industry and national capabilities. Ultimately, however, the heart of South Africa’s space story is not where it has been but where it is going—and the outcomes will shape space activity across the continent. The MeerKAT telescope that spotted Nkalakatha has made record-setting finds since it became operational nearly four years ago. However, the 64-radio antenna array is a precursor to a much larger and more powerful telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) , slated to come online in the coming years. SKA is an international project to build the world’s largest radio telescope. South Africa’s arid Karoo region will host SKA’s high- and mid-frequency dishes, while Australia will host the low-frequency antennas. Interestingly, while Karoo is the hub for the continent, other countries in Africa will also host radio telescopes as a part of SKA. It is an example of how South African space missions can invigorate space activity throughout the African continent, a case of what I call “partnership leadership.” This manifests in other ways, such as how South African satellites have been developed between universities and industry and placed in orbit by foreign launch providers. It is also true in the case of the formation of the continent-wide African Space Agency (AfSA), headquartered in Egypt. “South Africa was quite involved in developing the proposals around creating the African Space Agency,” said Pontsho Maruping, chairperson for the South African Council for Space Affairs . “Part of the intention is to create capabilities in Africa but also to look at joint missions. If nations launch complementary systems, then they can share the data equally among partners.” The global space community thrives on collaboration, but for South Africa, a reliance on space products and services purchased from other countries also means that the development of domestic capabilities may need further encouragement. For Maruping, this will require some updates to the foundational legislation, the Space Affairs Act, first passed in 1993. “That legislation was created before we had an agency and companies working in the space environment,” said Maruping. “What we want to focus on is creating an enabling legislation that will build local capacity, local competencies, support the growth of local companies, as well as create an infrastructure that supports the local space companies.” South Africa today enjoys a strong space supply chain with domestic suppliers that can deliver the specialized parts and materials needed for space assets. This supply chain is a vestige of the Apartheid era, when international sanctions on South Africa meant most of the country’s technology (particularly in the defense industry) had to be created with domestic resources and capabilities. With the end of Apartheid in 1994, the political calculus changed but the supply chain remained. Today, South African space companies have access to, for example, raw materials and precision manufacturing because the skills and machines needed in defense translate well to the kinds of materials needed for space activities. “South Africa has all the system primes, communications capabilities, great manufacturing base and supply chain, we have all the ingredients” for a strong commercial space sector, said James Barrington-Brown, CEO of New Space Systems and a 30-year veteran of the satellite industry. So what is standing in the way of runaway growth? “It’s a matter of confidence,” said Barrington-Brown. “Africans have been told for so long that they can’t do anything that they’ve started to believe it. When organizations want a satellite, they go to China or Russia or France and buy one because they don’t feel confident enough to create their own. Africans won’t buy from Africans because they are not confident they will get something that works or is a value for their money.” As a result, he said, South African space companies are export-focused, as there is not enough domestic demand to support a sustainable industry. Given that foreign space markets (particularly in the United States) account for the majority of the global space industry, exporting space products and services is necessary wherever a company operates. For South Africa, however, developing local capabilities will require a shift in confidence, according to Barrington-Brown, who added that selling domestic products and services to local customers has the add-on effect of building local capabilities, which in turn fuels more innovation, investment, and commercial activity. Fortunately, there is some progress in this direction. In January 2022, South Africa launched a constellation of nanosatellites developed exclusively on the African continent. The Maritime Domain Awareness Satellite constellation (MDASat-1) launched from Cape Canaveral on the SpaceX Transporter-3 mission. South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation Blade Nzimande said , “This will further cement South Africa’s position as an African leader in small satellite development, and help the country to capture a valuable share of a niche market in the fast-growing global satellite value chain.” The world is familiar with arguably the most successful South African in the space community, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, originally from Pretoria. The question for South Africa is how to identify and encourage more innovators, scientists, business leaders, and all the skilled talent needed to fuel a growing space economy. A chronic challenge for South Africa is significant inequality in access to opportunity that exists in different regions of the country. Today, just 6% of South Africans hold any university degree , and among OECD countries, South Africa ranks lowest in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with tertiary education. “Developing capabilities is unfortunately a numbers game,” said Maruping. “Not all students will take up engineering. Locally, it’s really difficult. Skilled talent is in demand, and a lot of sectors need the same skills. The biggest hurdle is just not being able to produce a lot of quality engineers in the numbers that are required to support the economy.” One advantage for South Africa is that nearly half the population (44%) is younger than 25 years old, which means there are millions of opportunities to attract more young people with an interest in space into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. It’s why Space Foundation is proud to count two South African educators in our Teacher Liaison program , Shaun Keyser with Keyser Training and Steve Sherman with Living Maths. The Teach Liaison program equips teachers with space-themed approaches and lesson plans that they can, in turn, share with their professional peers in their home country, thereby expanding capacity to foster student interest in space and STEM subjects worldwide. Overall, South Africa holds fantastic assets in the space economy, and it also faces challenges in accessing demand and nurturing the domestic space industry. In many ways, this is true for all space-faring nations. It’s why no matter how developed a country’s space capabilities. It takes collaboration across the global space community, and South Africa is a vital player for the continent and the world’s future in space. Shelli Brunswick is the chief operating officer of Space Foundation.
DENVER – U.S. defense and intelligence agencies have growing needs for satellite imagery and data analytics services, and the government needs to be better equipped to match requirements with commercially available technology, said Frank Avila, commercial and business operations deputy director at the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency . “We are putting in place a new process where we are asking the community what are the requirements that they have for commercial solutions,” Avila said in an interview at the GEOINT Symposium. Avila said NGA has increased its own demand for commercial geospatial data and analytics, which is the analysis of raw data to make conclusions and draw insights from the information. Last year the agency awarded $29 million to five commercial companies to extract insights on economic activity and trends around the world using geospatial data. NGA also is using commercial radar data from Capella Space and Iceye, two of the five companies that the National Reconnaissance Office signed agreements with last year in an effort to tap into the growing commercial market for synthetic aperture radar data from satellites. Once the NRO selects imagery providers, it’s the NGA’s job to validate their data, said Avila. “W e build the trust and confidence in that solution and the accuracy of their measurements before we start consuming that product,” he said. Avila said he expects U.S. intelligence agencies to start buying data analytics from commercial firms that use satellites to monitor the effects of climate change . “We want to be able to monitor emissions of methane gas and carbon dioxide, for example, on a global scale,” he said. “We would not be buying raw data. We’re looking at companies that already are doing that kind of business.” A challenge ahead for NGA is to streamline demands for data analytics so procurements are not duplicated, said Avila. “We are going to start collecting requirements from across the NSG,” he said. The NSG, short for national system for geospatial intelligence, includes all the agencies in the intelligence community, the Defense Department, civilian agencies and foreign allies that consume geospatial intelligence. The plan is for NGA to work more closely with geospatial intelligence buyers within each agency so their needs can be better supported with the latest commercial technologies, said Avila. “We need to really start collaborating and coordinating procurements of commercial solutions, and think of commercial as the first solution that we should be looking at, rather than government developed solutions,” he said. NASA, for example, has its own commercial procurement program and is buying “similar kinds of imagery as what we’re buying,” said Avila. “We’re talking with that group over at NASA to ensure that if we’re interested in similar kinds of data sources, that we coordinate our procurements. Again, we want to avoid duplicating purchases.”
DENVER – In the weeks and months before Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government came to the conclusion that it needed to publicly release sensitive intelligence to counter Russia’s “ false flag ” operations – a deception tactic designed to give them an excuse to intervene in Ukraine. The decision to release satellite imagery and other intelligence on Russia’s movements “was not taken lightly,” Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said April 26 in a speech at the GEOINT Symposium. “That decision was made by the commander in chief,” said Moultrie. It was a “gutsy decision to say: ‘We are going to disclose some of the most sensitive intelligence that we have. But it’s important enough for us to do that.’” “For quite some time, we saw the deployments, we saw their decision signals, we saw their desire to put false flag operations,” Moultrie said. He said concerted efforts by the U.S. government and commercial Earth observation companies to share information globally “has helped turn the tide.” Over his entire career, Moultrie said, he had never before “seen a more comprehensive picture as what we’ve had on Ukraine.” The war so far “has been a case study for us. And it really is one that’s going to really pave the way for the future,” he added. “The Russians are having a tough time in Ukraine, tougher than any of us ever thought that they would. But the Ukrainians are taking the fight to them. And it’s because of the work that you’re doing right now,” Moultrie told the audience of industry and government intelligence professionals. “We’re facilitating that humanitarian aid, and we’re just letting people know what’s really happening in Ukraine. So this is a case study,” Moultrie insisted. Partnership with private sector Moultrie said he would like to see DoD and intelligence agencies build on the partnership they already have established with the commercial geospatial intelligence industry. “We’re supposed to have this contractual relationship with industry. It’s not the kind of relationship I’d like to have,” said Moultrie. “I like to have a genuine partnership where I can come to you and say: ‘I have a challenge. I have a need. And you can say: ‘I think we can develop a solution and then we can iterate on that.’” But Moultrie recognized that his views on partnering with the private sector are not shared across the government. He referenced a conversation he had Monday night with Robert Cardillo, former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Cardillo told him that there are “people in the government that still don’t believe in working with industry,” said Moultrie. In part he agreed with Cardillo that “there are pockets of the government that still may have the ‘not invented here’ syndrome,” said Moultrie, out of fear that greater reliance on the private sector threatens government programs. “But that’s not us today,” he said. “We need to be an engaged partner.” Need for counterintelligence Moultrie said the U.S. can expect Russia to fight back following the success of U.S. intelligence efforts in support of Ukraine. Counterintelligence efforts will be needed by the U.S. government and by industry “because of the adversary that we’re facing,” he said. “You need to do that too. You’re an integral part of what we do.” “I guarantee you, our adversaries are monitoring this conference. They’re monitoring everything that we say, they’re monitoring who’s here. They know your companies, they know your supply chains, they’re gonna come after you,” Moultrie said. “So we have to all of us enhance what we’re doing on security and counterintelligence.” The Russians are a “learning adversary,” he added. “They have watched what the Ukrainians have done, they are actually modifying their game plan. They’re learning from all the things that are being thrown against them.”
China plans to set up a constellation around the moon to provide communication and navigation services for future operations on the lunar surface. China will take the lead in demonstrating a small, lunar relay communication and navigation system, Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told Chinese media on April 24. The first launch for the small constellation could take place in 2023 or 2024, according to Wu, who added that countries around the world are welcome to jointly build it. No further details were provided, but China’s lunar exploration roadmap and mission concepts provide insight into the plans. The most immediate use of the communications relay and navigation services would be to support the Chang’e-6 sample return mission and Chang’e-7 , which includes an orbiter, lander, rover and a small hopping spacecraft for investigating shadowed craters for water-ice. Wu stated at a national space day ceremony that Chang’e-6 could launch in 2024 or 2025. Chang’e-7 has previously been stated to be scheduled for launch around the same timeframe and possibly ahead of Chang’e-6. Both Chang’e-6 and Chang’e-7 are expected to target landings in the vicinity of the lunar south pole. While China has a relay satellite stationed in a halo orbit around Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 to facilitate communications with the Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover on the lunar far side, a different orbit would be needed to enhance communications and facilitate sending larger volumes of data between Earth and the lunar south pole. Chang’e-8, designed for in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology tests, will follow as a stepping stone towards the International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) with cooperation with Russia. The ILRS project would see the construction of a permanent, robotic facility on the moon across 2030-2035. The base would, once completed, be capable of hosting long term human stays. NASA , the European Space Agency and private firms are also planning lunar communication and navigation infrastructure to support the Artemis lunar exploration program. The Artemis and ILRS projects are seen by some as initial developments of an emerging cis-lunar economy. China’s lunar communications and navigation constellation is likely to be built incrementally, providing increasing capabilities as its lunar plans progress. One concept for a relay satellite to support Chang’e-7 would use an inclined highly elliptical frozen orbit, with a perilune of 300 kilometers and apolune of 8,600 kilometers and an inclination of 54.8 degrees. This would allow communication links between Earth and the lunar south pole for over 8 hours during its roughly 12-hour period orbit. Adding additional satellites in similar orbits would provide constant communications and navigation coverage, similar to how multiple satellites in Molniya orbits are used for high latitudes on Earth. Other possibilities are being considered, however. Kristin Burke, a researcher at the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), told SpaceNews that Chang’e-5 extended mission activities could be used to test out new orbits for a constellation. Chang’e-5, after delivering fresh lunar samples to Earth in late 2020, headed to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1 before returning to the Earth-moon system later in 2021. The orbiter is currently in distant retrograde orbit (DRO) of the moon, according to amateur satellite trackers. “China’s Chang’e-5 orbiter is supporting a few different follow on exploration missions, to include future solar science probes and now possibly future spacecraft at lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit,” Burke said. “Chinese academics’ English and Mandarin language articles indicate that China is considering a couple different orbital regime combinations for a communications and navigation architecture. Some of those include satellites in DRO,” says Burke. The first relay satellite could launch on a dedicated launcher or as part of the Chang’e-7 spacecraft stack. The relay satellite is likely to be a first step to facilitate new, more complex activities at the lunar south pole as part of China’s long term lunar exploration plans.
Four American and European astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station after their launch on a Crew Dragon spacecraft April 27, less than two days after another spacecraft returned from the station. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 3:52 a.m. Eastern, placing the Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom into orbit 12 minutes later. The rocket’s first stage, which launched three previous missions including Crew-3, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic. The Crew-4 mission is commanded by NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren with Bob Hines as pilot. NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti are mission specialists. The Crew Dragon is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 8:15 p.m. Eastern, a little more than 16 hours after liftoff. Freedom will use the same ISS docking port that was occupied just a few days earlier by another Crew Dragon spacecraft, Endeavour, that spent more than two weeks at the station for the Ax-1 private astronaut mission. The spacecraft undocked April 24 and splashed down off the Florida coast April 25 , less than 39 hours before the Crew-4 liftoff. Both NASA and SpaceX officials said the short turnaround between the Ax-1 splashdown and Crew-4 launch was not an issue. “Engineers have been pouring over the data over the last 18 hours,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at a prelaunch briefing April 26 of reviews from the return of the Ax-1 mission. “It’s been a clean flight overall. No major issues.” NASA and Roscosmos also worked to squeeze in the arrival of Crew-4 around a spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev, scheduled for April 28. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said at the prelaunch briefing that the traditional welcome ceremony for the Crew-4 astronauts will take place several hours after their arrival because the Russian cosmonauts will be asleep at the time of docking to stay on schedule for their spacewalk. NASA is planning a five-day handover between the new Crew-4 astronauts and the departing Crew-3 astronauts, who have been on the station since November 2021. Those four astronauts — NASA’s Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron and ESA’s Matthias Maurer — will depart in early May on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance. The Crew-4 astronauts will remain on the station until September. The Crew-5 mission, set to use the same spacecraft, Endurance, as Crew-3, will launch that month, with Crew-4 expected to return by mid-September, shortly before the launch of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. Crew-5 and Soyuz MS-22 may feature a seat exchange between an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut, if an agreement is completed by June . A hectic schedule will continue after Crew-4’s arrival with a second uncrewed test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle, scheduled for May 19. A SpaceX cargo Dragon mission to the station will follow in June. Those missions may have to work around new attempts to perform a wet dress rehearsal of the Space Launch System. “Spaceflight tends to be a magnet of dynamic activities,” Montalbano said at the prelaunch briefing. “They all tend to draw together.”
DENVER – Spurred by policymakers, intelligence agencies declassified information on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “first for our allies and then for the public, allowing others to better understand what our intelligence was telling us,” Stacey Dixon, U.S. deputy director of national intelligence, said April 26 at the 2022 GEOINT Symposium here. “Commercial industry enabled that sharing and has continued to update the public as the war has raged on.” The current conflict has underscored the need to fuse intelligence datasets, like geospatial intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence, earlier in the process, Dixon said, “not only because we must do so in order to push our craft further, but also because new tools and technologies give us the ability to do so. We must eliminate the vast majority of manual searching that is now required across systems by actively and automatically resolving entities and events based on all that it’s already known.” Dixon also emphasized the need for government and industry to work on parallel tracks to make datasets interoperable. For the intelligence community, that means increasing transparency by finding the right balance between protecting sources and methods, and sharing information with partners and the public as agencies did when Russia invaded Ukraine. “We in the intelligence community stepped outside our comfort zone and used our existing processes to clear information that can be shared on a scale not seen before,” Dixon said. “Commercial GEOINT literally gave people the opportunity to see for themselves.” As people leading intelligence agencies continue moving outside their comfort zone, the private sector needs to consider the correct balance between “proprietary, closely held systems, tools and technologies and those that can be shared openly in ways that encourage interoperability,” Dixon said. Finding that balance will not be easy because of the costly investment companies have made, Dixon said. Still, that work is necessary because “there are potentially enormous national security benefits to having more open competitive systems and sharing capabilities more broadly,” Dixon said. “We must be able to integrate the data and services you provide into our intelligence cycle. The systems you develop for and with us must be capable of handling data and information build to standards that allow this integration.”
DENVER – In spite of ever-expanding geospatial databases, certain objects like specific submarines are rarely spotted in satellite imagery. In those cases, synthetic imagery can help. “Subject matter experts to identify objects in scenarios are still very important,” Mark Munsell, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deputy director of data and digital information, told SpaceNews. “We anticipate they will be supplemented by synthetic moving forward.” Computer vision models only work after they have ingested extensive data of various objects, which is not always available. “Synthetic data is, I think, the future,” Kevin O’Brien, Orbital Insight CEO. “To be able to look at what we call rare objects, specific types of missile launchers or other things that can be used for military purposes, is going to benefit our end customers like NGA, but I think it’s also going to benefit the industry in general.” Orbital Insight is working under a Phase 2 NGA Small Business Innovation Research contract to explore the use of synthetically generated data to train computer vision models to detect novel objects in electro-optical satellite imagery. At the 2022 GEOINT Symposium, L3Harris Technologies was showcasing its ability to create synthetic training data both for electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar data. “We have a proven synthetic training data capability that offers an alternative solution for times when you do not have enough real images,” said William Rorrer, L3Harris business development and product manager principal. For example, L3Harris is demonstrating how the company creates synthetic imagery of fighter jets against different backgrounds, in various weather conditions, and at distinct viewing and sun angles. “Our focus has been on the accuracy of the synthetic data,” said Stacey Casella, L3Harris senior director for geospatial processing and analytics. “As long as you have that accuracy, the training of the AI algorithms can be robust.” L3Harris is among the companies that won Basic Order Agreements, similar to indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity awards, from the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center Data Readiness for Artificial Intelligence Development, a five-year program with a $242 million ceiling aimed at harnessing commercial capabilities to meet technical challenges. L3Harris’ synthetic data work draws on the company’s experience as a sensor manufacturer. “We have a legacy of creating fake data for things like satellite sensor trade studies,” Rorrer said. “We want to understand what this image is going to look like and have a very accurate understanding of the analytics before putting a payload on orbit.” Synthetic training data was a popular topic at the GEOINT Symposium. Talks on the subject were presented by CACI International, Rendered.ai, Riverside Research, Scale AI and Visimo.
TAMPA, Fla. — Ligado Networks faces renewed calls to block its terrestrial wireless plans over GPS interference concerns as the company prepares to turn part of its network on as early as Sept. 30. Satellite operators Iridium, PlanetiQ and GeoOptics joined a group of 90 companies, organizations and associations hoping to overturn the regulatory approval Ligado secured two years ago for the network. In letters addressed to U.S. President Joe Biden and Congress April 25, the group said more time is needed to assess how Ligado’s L-band spectrum could cause “harmful interference” with GPS technology. They said Ligado is due to start using the spectrum before the Federal Communications Commission can review eight pending petitions from Iridium, the Air Line Pilots Association and others to reconsider its approval. The group also highlighted how following FCC approval “Congress mandated an independent technical review to further assess the harmful interference that would be caused by Ligado’s proposed network,” and required the Department of Defense to brief federal representatives “on the potential for widespread harm” from the network. “On this basis alone, the FCC should stay the Order to adequately consider the material new information that will be uncovered as a result of these ongoing Congressionally-mandated processes,” the group wrote. The FCC granted Ligado permission in April 2020 to use its satellite L-band spectrum terrestrially — despite opposition from the Pentagon and other government agencies — following a four-year proceeding. The approval came with conditions including reduced power limits and a requirement that part of the spectrum be used as a “guard band” near GPS and other adjacent operations. In a March 31 regulatory filing, Ligado said it had reached out to federal agencies to obtain information on their GPS devices as required by its regulatory approval. However, it said it had “not received information about a single device that the federal government believes needs to be repaired or replaced due to Ligado’s proposed operations.” The company said the “lack of communication suggests either that no government devices are affected or that the agencies are ignoring the [FCC’s] directive.” In the same filing, Ligado said it plans to start operations in the 1526–1536 MHz band on or after Sept. 30 in parts of Virginia. Other details about the services Ligado plans with these frequencies were not disclosed, and the company was unable to provide a comment before this article was published. Ligado has 35 MHz of L-band spectrum in total. Nokia has been developing 5G base station radios that will be compatible with Ligado’s spectrum for deploying private wireless network solutions for energy, manufacturing, health care, transportation and other infrastructure sectors. Japan-based network operator Rakuten Mobile has also been working with Ligado to set up private wireless networks.
NASA says it expects to know by June whether a Russian cosmonaut will fly on a Crew Dragon mission in September in exchange for a NASA astronaut flying on a Soyuz, as the agency’s leadership continues to express optimism about long-term cooperation with Russia on the space station. At an April 26 briefing about the upcoming Crew-4 Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station, Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said the agency was waiting for Russia’s foreign ministry to approve an agreement that will allow NASA and Roscosmos to barter seats. Such an agreement will allow “mixed crews” of NASA astronauts and Roscosmos cosmonauts to fly on both Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles to the ISS. That will ensure there would be at least one American and one Russian on the station should a vehicle be out of service for an extended period. “We’re hoping to get that back in early to mid-May,” he said of the seat barter agreement. Assuming Russia approves the agreement, he said the U.S. State Department will perform a final review of any modifications Russia made before it goes into effect. He added he expected Russia to approve it. “We’re talking to our Russian colleagues on a regular basis on this,” he said. “They’ve been supportive of the crew swap, and so we’re expecting a positive response from the Russian government.” Montalbano said NASA needed a decision in the “mid-June to late June timeframe” to allow a crew swap for missions scheduled for launch this fall. One Russian cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, would then fly on the Crew-5 mission launching in the first half of September, while an American astronaut would fly on the Soyuz MS-22 mission launching later in September. Those plans for crew swaps continue despite the fraying of relations between Russia and the West in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Civil space cooperation between Western nations and Russia outside of the ISS program has largely been halted, such as the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission that is now on hold after ESA suspended cooperation with Russia that would have launched the Mars rover mission in September on a Proton. NASA officials have reiterated since the start of the invasion that day-to-day operations of the ISS have not been hindered by the geopolitical situation. However, there remain nagging doubts in the space community about Russia’s long-term commitment to the station, particularly since Roscosmos has yet to endorse an extension of ISS operations beyond 2024. At another briefing April 26, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he was confident in long-term cooperation with Russia on the station, citing cooperation with the former Soviet Union that dates back half a century during the Cold War. That extends to a “professional relationship” between cosmonauts and astronauts on the station and between flight controllers in Houston and Moscow. “Despite the horrors that we are seeing with our eyes daily on television of what’s happening in Ukraine as the result of political decisions that are being made by the president of Russia,” Nelson said, “I see that professional relationship with astronauts and cosmonauts and the ground teams in the two respective mission controls continuing.” While Nelson emphasized the good working-level relationship between NASA and Roscosmos on ISS operations, he did not discuss the rhetoric from his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos. Rogozin has continued to use his account on Twitter — a service blocked in Russia since shortly after the invasion — to disseminate propaganda and to mock Ukrainian and Western officials. Both Nelson and Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said at the briefing that they did not expect the war in Ukraine to affect their plans to seek extensions of the ISS from 2024 to 2030. Aschbacher said an extension will be considered by ESA’s member states at its next ministerial meeting late this year.
SAN FRANCISCO – Advanced Cooling Technologies, a thermal management specialist, announced a contract with Planet to design and build structures for the first two Carbon Mapper methane-monitoring satellites. Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based ACT manufacturers ammonia-based heat pipes for a variety of space programs including NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) lunar rover. Compared to those missions, heat management for the Carbon Mapper constellation is relatively straightforward, Kim Mankosa, ACT sales engineer, told SpaceNews . What’s unique about ACT’s role in Carbon Mapper is the structural component. ACT will design and produce the thermal architecture for the first two satellites scheduled to launch in 2023. “We have a little more scope than we typically do,” said Bryan Muzyka, ACT sales and marketing manager. “Because it’s a small spacecraft and the thermal is one of the major bottlenecks in performance, they wanted to have a thermal solutions provider as the lead for those areas. We are not only transferring the heat, but we’re also embedding that capability into radiator panels.” A consortium led by the State of California, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Planet announced plans in April 2021 to launch a constellation of Carbon Mapper satellites equipped with hyperspectral sensors to detect, quantify and track sources of methane and carbon dioxide. Additional partners include the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, the High Tide Foundation and the non-profit RMI. “While we’re proud of all our work in the space industry, the Carbon Mapper program provides not only an exciting scope of work, but also allows our team to be part of a truly rewarding program,” Ryan Spangler, ACT Orbital and Space Systems Group engineering manager, said in a statement. Carbon Mapper, Inc., is a non-profit organization focused on digital tools to mitigate the human impact on Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the name of Kim Mankosa, ACT sales engineer.
DENVER – Halifax International Security Forum, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., is trying to raise $10 million to build a constellation of imaging satellites for Ukraine. The Earth observation company Satellogic was selected to produce the satellites once the funds are raised, Ryan McKinney, vice president and general manager of Satellogic North America, said in an interview at the GEOINT Symposium. Halifax International started the “ Ukraine Victory Fund ” to raise $10 million “for Ukraine to purchase its own dedicated satellite constellation with multiple high-resolution satellites registered under the Ukrainian flag.” The U.S. government and commercial satellite operators provide imagery to the Ukrainian government . But Halifax International believes that Ukraine would be better postured to support its security needs if it had its own constellation. This would “allow Ukraine to track everything from the movement of Russian soldiers to identifying escape routes for millions of refugees,” the group said. McKinney said he could not discuss cost estimates or how many satellites Satellogic would produce for Ukraine. Having their own constellation would “ give them some control of their own destiny,’ he said. Satellogic manufactures satellites at its production facility in The Netherlands. The company, founded in 2010 in Argentina, is now a global operator with a growing presence in the United States. Satellogic became a publicly traded company earlier this year after completing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. It operates a constellation of 22 multispectral imaging satellites with sub-meter resolution and plans to keep launching satellites each quarter, Thomas VanMatre, Satellogic’s vice president of global business development, told SpaceNews . The newest satellite model has 70-centimeter resolution. The company’s goal is to deploy 200 satellites to provide daily global Earth imagery with frequent revisit rates.
DENVER – Several firms in the commercial space industry have each pledged $50,000 to finance humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, the companies announced April 26. The project called “Space Industry for Ukraine” was started by HawkEye 360 and the National Security Space Association. John Serafini, CEO of HawkEye 360, decided to launch a fundraising campaign after a visit to the Poland-Ukraine border last month. The company is a commercial operator of remote sensing satellites that collect radio-frequency data. Serafini said the funds will be administered by international NGOs and will pay for medical treatments, delivery of food supplies, and evacuation efforts. Organizations that donated funds and are part of the group’s steering committee includes HawkEye 360, the National Security Space Association, ABL Space Systems, ARKA, BlackSky, Capella Space, ICEYE, Insight Partners, Leidos, LeoLabs, Maxar, Raytheon Intelligence & Space, Rebellion Defense, Relativity Space, Riverside Research, Rocket Lab, Velos and Viasat. Additional participating donor companies include The Aerospace Corporation, Cognitive Space and Shield Capital. “After visiting the Poland-Ukraine border last month to assess the crisis situation and identify ways our community can help, I am eager to work in close collaboration with our space industry peers and NGO partners to help deliver critical aid for the people of Ukraine,” Serafini said. Space Industry for Ukraine says has fundraised to date nearly $1 million. Projects funded so far include:
DENVER – Adranos, a startup that manufactures solid rocket motors, announced April 26 it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round. Based in West Lafayette, Indiana, Adranos was founded in 2015 by former Purdue University aerospace engineer Brandon Terry and Chris Stoker. The company manufactures solid rocket motor propulsion systems for hypersonic boosters, tactical missiles and space launch vehicles. The funding round was led by Impala Asset Management’s Bob Bishop with participation from Explorer1 Fund, Elevate Ventures and Specific Impulse Capital. The fundraising was spurred by Adranos’ successful tests of its proprietary aluminum-lithium alloy fuel called ALITEC. The fuel was tested on tactical missile-sized solid rocket motors under a program jointly funded by the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force. “In 2019, we conducted flight tests under an Army program, demonstrating that motors utilizing ALITEC fuel could increase the range of a missile system by nearly 40 percent while keeping other variables constant,” said Brandon Terry, chief technology officer. In 2021, the company tested much larger motors and they performed successfully, Terry said. The tests were conducted at Adranos’ coastal Mississippi facility known as the Mississippi Rocket Complex. “We see significant market potential for Adranos in defense and space,” said Bob Bishop, founder of Impala Asset Management and longtime investor in defense and aerospace companies. He said Adranos is in a position to become a new solid rocket motor supplier to prime contractors building missiles, hypersonic boosters and other defense systems. Other potential customers are small launch companies looking at using solid boosters to increase the performance of their launch vehicles. Solid rocket motors is one sector of the defense industrial base where the Pentagon worries that there are not enough domestic sources. Currently only Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne are supplying solid rocket motors to the U.S. Defense Department. “We are seeing tremendous interest and demand from defense primes and commercial aerospace companies,” said Michael Grasso, Adranos’ vice president of space systems. “Additionally, the U.S. government views the limited number of firms in the energetics space as a weakness, and our entry will add further resiliency and capability that our nation can rely on.”
SEOUL, South Korea — The United States and South Korea have agreed to cooperate on space situational awareness (SSA) for military purposes. The SSA pact is part of a broader space security agreement reached between John D. Hill, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for space and missile defense, and Cho Yong-geun, the South Korean defense ministry’s director of North Korea policy, during the April 25 session of the Space Cooperation Working Group (SCWG) in Washington, according to an April 26 ministry statement . The SCWG is the two countries’ working-level consultative body on space security cooperation that has been operational since 2013. Under the agreement, Seoul and Washington will “share intelligence about outer space, nurture space experts through training and exercises, and enhance interoperability for combined space operations.” The ministry said the agreement contains “concrete missions” that will help bolster the two countries’ space security capabilities. A ministry spokesman refused to give more details. “South Korea first suggested the idea [of space security cooperation] in a February 2020 session, and the two sides have since worked closely to reach an agreement,” the ministry said. This is the latest in a series of efforts of South Korea to enhance its capabilities for space situational awareness and other space security-related issues. In August, South Korea’s Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Park In-ho, and U.S. Space Force Gen. John W. Raymond, chief of space operations, sign a memorandum of understanding on forming a joint space policy consultative body at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Under the agreement, the two sides have run a joint consultative body on space policy, shared information on space surveillance and worked together to enhance joint space operations capabilities such as missile defense. In line with this, the South Korean air force decided to join U.S. Space Force-led joint military drills. This was followed by the opening of South Korea first space operations center in Gyeryong, South Chungcheong Province, whose tasks include drawing space policies for the nation’s armed forces as well as enhancing cooperation with domestic and international partners, including U.S. Space Force. In October, the center’s inaugural chief, Col. Park Ki-tae, said the agreed joint drills would help enhance South Korea’s space situational awareness capabilities. “One of the primary things we want to achieve through cooperation with the U.S. Space Force is improving our capabilities to detect dangerous objects in space and how to avoid them when they approach our satellites,” Park said during a military technology seminar here. Improved capabilities would also make it possible for South Korea’s air force to issue timely warnings when an object falls to Earth from space, he said. For its part, he added, the ROK Air Force is building its own SSA infrastructure — including an electro-optical satellite surveillance system, a space weather forecast and warning system and reconnaissance satellites — with the goal of making it fully operational by the mid-2020s. In line with this, South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) signed a $13.9 million contract with Satrec Initiative in October to develop a space weather forecast system. Once developed, the system will help prevent satellites, high-altitude surveillance drones, and guided weapons systems from malfunctioning due to disruptions that space weather conditions could cause in GPS signals, according to DAPA. Meanwhile, South Korea’s newly elected president Yoon Suk-yeol said he would “positively review” South Korea’s joining of Quad, a U.S.-led security partnership aimed at countering China, if invited. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal , president-elect Yoon, set to take office May 10, said he does not expect South Korea to receive an invitation any time soon, but if approached, “will positively review joining.” In September, leaders of the Quad member counties — the U.S., Japan, Australia and India —agreed to expand the scope of cooperation to include space . 
DENVER – Radar imaging startup PredaSAR is preparing to deploy its first satellite on the SpaceX Transporter 6 rideshare, projected to launch in October. The company is planning a constellation of 96 radar satellites “to be fully deployed by the end of 2026,” Michael Moran, senior vice president of defense and intelligence systems at Terran Orbital Corp., told SpaceNews . “It’s a substantial increase in capability” from the company’s previous goal of just 48 satellites, he said. Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital is PredaSAR’s parent company. F ounded in 2019, PredaSAR will be joining the competitive market for synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is now gaining attention as a growing number of commercial SAR satellites collect imagery over Ukraine. Unlike visible spectrum imagery, SAR penetrates clouds, bad weather and can see at night. This capability is useful when monitoring Ukraine which is covered by clouds most of the time, Moran noted. “People want 24/7 all weather .You can’t wait until it’s sunny to have an answer,” he said. “We see that the demand signal for SAR has really spiked,” said Moran. A key target customer for PredaSAR is the National Reconnaissance Office, which traditionally has not purchased commercial radar data but is now looking to establish relationships with several providers. Unlike other SAR operators that use very small satellites, PredaSAR’s owner Terran Orbital is building larger spacecraft of about 350 to 400 kilograms. “This larger relative size gives us a host of advantages including substantial power generation and storage capability for the power-hungry mission of an advanced radar platform,” said Moran. Terran Orbital also is developing the radar payloads in house. 
 The company plans to split the constellation into sun-synchronous and mid-inclination orbit satellites in order to get high revisit rates over areas of the world of increasing interest like Ukraine. Moran noted that up until recently, only the U.S. government had mature space-based radar products for national security use and now the commercial industry is showing sophisticated capabilities. He credited organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit that five years ago started working with commercial SAR vendors. DIU was an early pilot customer of Capella Space which is now operating a seven-satellite SAR constellation. 
A NASA mission to return samples from one near Earth asteroid will get an extended mission to visit a second asteroid under a plan approved by the agency April 25. NASA announced that the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft, on its way back to Earth after collecting samples from the asteroid Bennu , will travel to the asteroid Apophis after returning samples in September 2023. The main spacecraft, after ejecting the sample return container that will land in the Utah desert, will fly by Earth on a trajectory that will bring it to Apophis in 2029, shortly after that asteroid passes just 32,000 kilometers from the Earth. The spacecraft will spend 18 months in the vicinity of Apophis, studying the 350-meter asteroid and coming close enough to use its thrusters to brush away surface rocks and expose subsurface materials. Apophis has long been an asteroid of interest to planetary scientists because of its close approaches to Earth in 2029 and 2036 that, for a time after its discovery, raised concerns about an impact. While scientists have ruled out an impact, the close approach offered the prospect of spacecraft missions to study the asteroid, something the OSIRIS-REx mission team had been discussing since 2020 . “Apophis is one of the most infamous asteroids,” said Dani DellaGiustina, deputy principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx, in a statement. She will become principal investigator of the extended mission, called OSIRIS-APEX for “Apophis Explorer,” after the Bennu samples are returned to Earth. “We were stoked to find out the mission was extended.” Scientists will use the extended mission to study the composition of the asteroid as well as determine if the asteroid’s structure was affected by the close Earth flyby. The project estimates the extended mission will cost $200 million over nine years. “The investigation is not without substantial technical risk,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, wrote in an April 25 memo approving the extension. The trajectory OSIRIS-APEX will take will bring it within half an astronomical unit of the sun, much closer than originally designed when the spacecraft traveled to Bennu, requiring what she called “significant engineering work” to ensue spacecraft systems can survive several such close approaches before arriving at Apophis. OSIRIS-REx was one of eight planetary science missions that won extensions after a “senior review” of spacecraft that had already completed their primary missions. NASA extended the other seven missions — Curiosity, InSight, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN and New Horizons — by three years each. NASA extended the InSight Mars lander despite expectations that declining output from its solar arrays will cause the mission to end later this year , before the extended mission can begin. A report from the panel that conducted the senior review noted the project gives the spacecraft only a 5% chance of surviving through the end of this year, with the expectation that, by December, power levels drop to a level called “dead bus recovery” (DBR) mode that render the spacecraft inoperable. The extended mission, though, would allow the possibility for some spacecraft operations if the spacecraft can revive itself in the next Martian summer in mid-2023. “If the spacecraft can ‘resurrect’ itself from DBR after depth of winter,” the report stated, “system operability would need to be determined at the time” to see if an extended mission was feasible. NASA is also closely monitoring fuel levels on Mars Odyssey, a spacecraft operating at more for more than two decades. The overall spacecraft is “remarkably healthy,” the senior review report stated, but uncertainty about how much fuel is left on the spacecraft raises questions about how long it can continue to operate to both conduct science and serve as a communications relay for other Mars missions. Other than OSIRIS-REx, NASA did not disclose the cost of extended missions. NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal projected spending between $7.8 million, on InSight, and $45 million, on the Curiosity Mars rover that year. Glaze wrote in her memo that for New Horizons, projected to spend $12.5 million in 2023, she would look to share costs with the agency’s astrophysics and heliophysics divisions because of the science that distant spacecraft would perform in its extended mission.
DENVER – Since Russian forces began mobilizing to invade Ukraine, commercial satellite operators have supplied U.S. intelligence agencies with extensive electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar and radio frequency data. BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet, for example, have shared “millions and millions of square kilometers of imagery” over Ukraine and Russia, specifically, Peter Muend, director of the National Reconnaissance Office Commercial Systems Program Office, said April 25 at the GEOINT Symposium. Muend also cited Capella Space for providing extensive SAR data and HawkEye 360 for supplying RF data to U.S. government agencies. Those agencies, in turn, are sharing imagery and data with U.S. partners and allies. Commercial satellite imagery and data have been featured prominently in news reports and social media posts since the Russia invaded Ukraine. “I have to say I’m very impressed and proud that the commercial providers in many cases that we have as our partners are leading the charge, making sure that it’s becoming a more transparent world especially in light of the actions going on in Ukraine,” Muend said. The war is occurring at an inflection point for commercial Earth observation. Dozens of companies in the United States and around the world are building constellations of tens or hundreds of satellites equipped with sensors to reveal what’s happening on the ground. Recognizing the value of those datasets, NRO has issued contracts to satisfy immediate needs, while undertaking the formal process of drafting requirements for long-term programs of record to bring commercial capabilities into an integrated architecture that includes classified U.S. government systems. Crisis Clause To track activity in and around Ukraine, NRO has “added scope and value to many” commercial data contracts, Muend said. In many cases, the agency “has added or exercised a crisis clause to enable enhanced responsiveness on a 24 by 7 basis,” he added. In addition, NRO has worked very closely with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and combatant commands “to facilitate access to and rapid dissemination of commercial imagery, RF data and certainly SAR data as well,” Muend said. Imagery and data have been shared with a wide variety of NRO partners through NGA’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery System, which has evolved to include SAR data. “We’re pushing some of our commercial radar data that we’re buying through that same platform and it is having a dramatic effect on those partners and allies that we are pushing the data to,” Muend said. Programs of Record NRO is the in the process of establishing a program of record for commercial satellite imagery called Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL). “EOCL is underpinned by validated requirements,” Muend said. “The community has formally stood up and said these are our requirements over the long term.” With requirements in place, NRO is seeking funding for the new program of record. “The budget reflects the requirements and those two, of course, need to align,” Muend said. The NRO plans to follow a similar process for SAR. After issuing a Broad Agency Announcement to survey commercial capabilities, NRO awarded contracts in January to Airbus U.S., Capella, Iceye U.S., PredaSAR and Umbra. Through the contracts, NRO is evaluating the various commercial capabilities. Informed by our study contracts, NRO is gaining “a good understanding of where the marketplace is going” and also working with NGA and the intelligence community to “think through what commercial class radar needs we are going to have in the future and how those are going to intersect with what we’re providing on the national side,” Muend said. RF Monitoring is the next capability NRO intends to explore in depth. For commercial RF monitoring, NRO will evaluate on-orbit capabilities as well as modeling and simulation data for planned constellations. It’s all part of the intelligence community effort to determines “how commercial RF is going to play in that larger next generation [signals intelligence] overhead architecture,” Muend said. NRO also is eager to explore commercial hyperspectral data. “We have contracts with at least one hyperspectral provider now and are eager to move that forward,” Muend said. HyspecIQ won an NRO study contract in 2019 that the agency extended through Sept. 30, 2022.
DENVER – Geospatial intelligence in the form of commercial imagery and analytical services “have been instrumental to those fighting in Ukraine, and to shaping world views of the crisis,” said Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In a keynote speech April 25 at the GEOINT Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, Sharp praised efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies, allies and commercial satellite operators “to provide context and clarity to complex situations.” Images collected by commercial spy satellites are “even being used effectively to provide transparency, and counter Russian disinformation,” he said. Sharp has served as director of NGA since 2019. He is retiring in June and will be replaced by President Biden’s nominee Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth. Despite an abundance of commercial satellite imagery, the demand continues to outpace supply, he said. “We’re not at the point that we’re overly saturated,” Sharp said. “Some people think we have persistence from space, that we’re constantly monitoring everything.” But that’s not the case, he said. “We are getting more frequent snapshots, so we’re heading in the right direction.” He told the audience of geospatial industry professionals: “I think you all have job security.” “Geospatially based products have been absolutely critical in providing world leaders and military planners a common understanding of what’s going on in Ukraine and its surrounding areas,” he said. The processes used by NGA to analyze and distribute intelligence are classified, Sharp said. But he did say that NGA is monitoring Ukraine and the broader region, and disseminating geospatial intelligence to partner nations. NGA also facilitates allies’ access to commercial imagery from U.S. companies. “Is NGA OK with all that, even encouraging it? Absolutely. Heck yeah. No restrictions,” he insisted. In another project in support of U.S. allies, NGA personnel helped U.S. European Command to train allies to operate a spy drone called the Aerial Reconnaissance Tactical Edge Mapping Imagery System, or Artemis . It’s a small aircraft that’s used when it’s cloudy and atmospheric conditions are unsuitable for satellite collection, which is frequently the case over Ukraine. Because of this initiative, he said, “we now have military forces in Europe who can use Artemis for high-resolution imagery, creating their own geoint at the tactical edge that can be easily shared at the unclassified level with international partners, and with no restrictions.”
Updated after post-launch briefing. WASHINGTON — A Crew Dragon spacecraft returned to Earth April 25, ending a 17-day mission that ferried four private astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast from Jacksonville, Florida, at 1:06 p.m. Eastern after a normal reentry. The spacecraft had undocked from the station 16 hours earlier . Unlike two previous Dragon splashdowns, where one of four main parachutes opened later than the other three, all four parachutes on this spacecraft opened at the same time. NASA and SpaceX had played down any concerns about the delayed parachute opening , saying it may be a normal aerodynamic phenomenon and did not pose a risk to the spacecraft or the people inside. Endeavour returned to Earth four private astronauts on Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission. Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut, commanded the mission. One customer, Larry Connor, served as pilot, while two others, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy, were mission specialists. The four launched April 8 and docked with the station less than 24 hours later for what was planned to be an eight-day stay. However, persistent bad weather at splashdown locations in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico kept Dragon in orbit for an extra week. NASA and Axiom Space said their agreement for the mission incorporated the possibility of such delays, so that Axiom Space was not charged extra for the additional time on the station. “Here we are at the conclusion of an incredible mission, and I must say the teams exceeded every expectation,” Amir Blachman, chief business officer of Axiom Space, said on the joint Axiom/SpaceX webcast after splashdown. “We could not be more proud of what has just been accomplished.” “Overall, this has been an amazing success. The crew performed beyond expectations,” said Derek Hassmann, operations director at Axiom Space, in call with reporters after splashdown. The additional time in orbit, he said, allowed the private astronauts to complete a “handful” of experiments they deferred earlier in the mission as well as perform additional outreach events. “Our Ax-1 crew pitched in on the general care and feeding and upkeep of ISS.” The crew itself went to Orlando, Florida, after being recovered from the capsule. Hassmann said they will spend a few days there for post-flight medical tests and rest before going home. The departure and return of Ax-1 allows NASA to proceed with the launch of a new set of professional astronauts to the ISS. The Crew-4 mission is scheduled to launch on another Crew Dragon spacecraft, Freedom, April 27 at 3:52 a.m. Eastern. It will deliver the Crew-4 astronauts of Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watson of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency to the ISS. The tight turnaround — less than 39 hours between splashdown and the scheduled Crew-4 launch — won’t be an issue, said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX. Both SpaceX and NASA were reviewing data from the Ax-1 mission throughout the flight, and he indicated no issues with the spacecraft. “Everything is looking great for our launch of Crew-4.” Approximately five days after the arrival of Crew-4, the Crew-3 astronauts of Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA will return to Earth on another Crew Dragon spacecraft, ending a mission that started with their launch to the station in November 2021. Ax-1 was the first in a series of private astronaut missions to the station planned by Axiom Space before it installed a private module on the station, scheduled for as soon as 2024. Hassmann said the next mission, Ax-2, was tentatively scheduled for early spring of 2023. The company previously announced that former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will command Ax-2 with an Axiom customer, John Shoffner, as pilot. Axiom has not announced who the other two members of the Ax-2 will be. “I believe you will hear something relatively soon” about those other crew members, he said. “Probably in the next few weeks.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Hawaiian Airlines said April 25 it plans to offer free Starlink services on transpacific flights to and from Hawaii next year, becoming the first major airline to announce a deal with SpaceX’s high-speed broadband network. “When we launch with Starlink we will have the best connectivity experience available in the air,” Hawaiian Airlines CEO Peter Ingram said in a statement. The companies did not disclose broadband speeds for the proposed service, although SpaceX has said its rapidly expanding low Earth orbit network can provide inflight Wi-Fi that is indistinguishable from conventional internet access . Many major airlines already offer inflight Wi-Fi services, and connect to satellites in geostationary orbit when flying over the oceans. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX vice president of Starlink commercial sales, said its agreement with Hawaiian Airlines makes “hassles like downloading movies before takeoff a relic of the past.” Hawaiian Airlines does not currently offer internet access to passengers on its flights. “We waited until technology caught up with our high standards for guest experience, but it will be worth the wait,” Ingram said The companies plan to start installing Starlink equipment next year on Airbus A330 and A321neo aircraft, and the Hawaiian company’s incoming fleet of Boeing 787-9s, as SpaceX works toward certifying the aviation terminal it has developed. Starlink will be offered onboard flights between the Hawaiian Islands and the continental U.S., Asia and Oceania, Hawaiian Airlines said. There are no plans to offer the service on the Boeing 717 aircraft that the airline uses for short flights between the Islands. The company offers daily nonstop flights between Hawaii and 16 U.S. cities, and services connecting Honolulu and American Samoa, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Tahiti. At the end of 2021, Hawaiian Airlines had 24 Airbus A330-200s and 18 A321s in its fleet. The airline said in 2008 that it had ordered 10 Boeing 787-9s to be its new flagship airplane for medium to long-haul flights. Boeing had expected to start delivering the planes in 2021. However, amid pandemic-related supply chain challenges, publicly listed Hawaiian Airlines said in its most recent financial quarterly update that it now expects to receive its first 787s in 2023. The Honolulu-based airline’s Starlink announcement comes days after JSX, a private jet charter company, said April 21 it reached a deal that puts it on course to be the first air carrier to offer Starlink this year. Most of the routes the Dallas-based charter servicer operates are around the southwest of the United States. JSX said it plans to offer Starlink broadband at no extra cost for passengers. Delta Airlines, which like many major airlines currently charges customers for inflight connectivity, has also conducted exploratory Starlink tests on its aircraft. Starlink’s looming entry into inflight connectivity services adds more pressure to rivals in a market that is already seen as overcrowded, and ripe for consolidation as players grapple with high antenna installation costs. Shares in established satellite inflight connectivity providers Viasat and Gogo have been declining since JSX signaled its Starlink plans.
Foreign influence operations, including covert actions by foreign governments to influence political sentiment or public discourse, can increasingly be predicted and tracked using open-source information, industry experts said. Darryl Murdock, national programs account executive at ManTech, said the company developed a model that uses open-source intelligence to measure the level of foreign influence in any country in the world. This is an area of interest to the U.S. government, as agencies seek to tap into the growing availability of data and artificial intelligence to generate intelligence, Murdock told SpaceNews . ManTech is a U.S. government contractor that has multiple contracts with intelligence agencies. Murdock said the company developed a foreign influence intelligence prototype in response to interest from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. NGA issued a sample task order for industry, said Murdock, and the prototype was funded internally by ManTech. “So we took that idea and built a minimum viable product using open source information,” he said. “We looked at how we could actually predict what non U.S. actors are doing.” The same model can be applied to any country, he said. “We looked at Latin America and also at activities that are happening in Ukraine.” The primary source of data for the project was a free platform called the GDELT database , or Global Database of Events, Language and Tone , said Murdock. Hosted by Google, the GDELT Project monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events. “We focused on critical infrastructure,” said Murdock. A lot of open source information can be tied specifically to activities at ports, investments in communications systems and facilities. “So you follow the money,” he said. “You know that somebody put their money where their mouth is if they actually invest in some level of critical infrastructure.” This type of insight is not necessarily new but can now be developed relatively quickly and inexpensively using software and AI tools, he said. ManTech called the prototype for tracking foreign influence “Project Syracuse,” named after the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse. At the GEOINT Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, ManTech unveiled its new machine learning, AI and data analytics platform, named Archimedes. The wizard-driven platform was used to develop Project Syracuse. “The beauty of open source information is that there is a ton of it,” said Murdock. “Open source data is ubiquitous.”
DENVER – Elon Musk earlier this month opened a new Tesla assembly plant in Austin, Texas, and predicted it will produce as many as 500,000 vehicles annually by next year. To keep a closer eye on activities at the plant, investors and financial firms are turning to Earth observation companies like BlackSky that use satellites to monitor locations for customers. “We have a lot of interest in monitoring the Tesla facility that just launched,” said Amy Minnick, chief commercial officer at BlackSky. Just by monitoring the Tesla factory’s parking lot and surrounding traffic, insights can be drawn on car production, she said. Electric vehicle market analysts and car companies, for example, will be trying to estimate how many cars are actually being made and will look at, for example, what suppliers are delivering parts and how often. BlackSky’s constellation of 14 satellites can image the same location 15 times a day. The company uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze images and combine the pictures with third-party data sources such as radar and radio-frequency imagery. Dozens of other companies are showcasing applications of geospatial intelligence at the GEOINT Symposium held this year in Aurora, Colorado. The industry is now in the spotlight as images from commercial satellites and data extracted from those images have become a key source of information on Russia’s war on Ukraine. The technology also is seeing growing applications in global supply chain monitoring and in tracking the effects of climate change. “Shippers who are shipping goods around the world want to be able to see if their planes are on the ground,” Minnick said. “Did their planes move at the time that they expected to move?” “I think you’re starting to see use cases being unlocked through what we can do with our satellites and the capabilities of lots of others in the industry,” she said. And as the cost of producing and launching satellites comes down, monitoring services are now within reach of more organizations, Minnick added. Just a few years ago, “it wasn’t possible to be able to have same day revisits over commercial locations at a cost that was reasonable or to get the analytic insights.” ‘Explosion in use cases’ Crises such as the covid pandemic, climate change and geopolitical events like what’s happening in Ukraine, is why “geospatial information will continue to be more and more valuable,” she said. The war is having ripple effects in the price of commodities, for instance, such as wheat and fertilizers. “Gas prices are the most visible, but there’s so many markets that are getting disrupted by the crisis,” Minnick said. “There’s an explosion in those use cases.” Kevin Weil, president of Planet, said a “ food crisis” is one of the effects of the war because Ukraine produces a lot of the world’s wheat. “And so we’re working with NGOs [non government organization] who are studying what’s going to happen with the food supply, what’s happening on the ground today, because you can actually understand what’s going on from 500 kilometers above the Earth from a satellite.” Planet operates more than 200 satellites that image the Earth. The company is launching a new constellation next year to meet growing demand for detailed imagery and higher revisit rates. Nathan De Ruiter, managing director of Euroconsult Canada, noted that just a few years ago the conversation in the Earth observation industry was about “the right data sets not being available.” Now with a surge of new constellations, “the next step is really building and developing the analytics around it,” De Ruiter said on a podcast. Scott Herman CEO, Cognitive Space, said the new space economy is attracting massive investment, which is benefiting the Earth observation industry. A use case that is now in high demand is known as tipping and cueing. A satellite image might reveal some information but to get more accurate data, “we can tip and cue other satellites.” In Ukraine, for example, “I take a picture, I instantly see there’s a Russian tank column, now I’m going to cue other satellites in my network” to verify and obtain additional information.
SAN FRANCISCO – Capella Space raised $97 million in a Series C investment round led by NightDragon. Existing Capella investors Data Collective Venture Capital and Cota Capital also participated in the funding round announced April 25. With the additional funding, Capella will expand its seven-satellite constellation, enhance its Capella Console data platform and expand its staff to meet growing demand for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and data. “If we could have another 10 satellites over certain regions, we would take it,” Payam Banazadeh, Capella Space founder and CEO, told SpaceNews . “We’ve doubled our revenue in the last 12 months and we expect to triple it in the next 12 months. This cash allows us to continue that momentum.” Since Capella was founded in 2016, the San Francisco-based company has raised a total of $190 million for its campaign to offer customers frequent and timely high-resolution SAR imagery through the Capella Console. The company unveiled three products April 14 to automate tasking of SAR satellites: Vessel Detection, Change Detection and Global Change Monitoring. “We’re not trying to become the analytics company for SAR, but we are selectively rolling out some analytics products,” Banazadeh said. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the ability of SAR constellations operated by companies including Capella to gather imagery day and night as well as through clouds, fog, smoke and rain. The conflict has shown “the power of SAR because obviously the invasion is not stopping because of the weather or night,” Banazadeh said. “We are looking at Ukraine many times per day and night. I think we are providing the largest amount of SAR in this conflict.” Capella currently employs about 160 people and relies heavily on automation to keep a lid on its employee head count. “We are going to grow more, especially with this financing we’ll continue hiring,” Banazadeh said. Capella also is developing a new generation of satellites to acquire higher resolution imagery. Banazadeh said the company is not yet ready to share details concerning the enhanced capabilities of the company’s next generation of satellites. “The past few months have shown us the importance of leveraging strong commercial companies like Capella to provide the technology and teams to help our government and allies monitor areas of conflict,” Ken Gonzalez, NightDragon managing director, said in a statement. “We are proud to support this mission through our investment and look forward to helping the Capella team expand their potential use cases and maximize on the immense innovation and market potential in front of them.” Since Capella began commercial sales of SAR imagery and data in early 2021, the company and the overall SAR market have experienced incredible growth, Banazadeh said. “I’m excited for our next phase of growth and the opportunity to bring even more innovation and accessibility to the Earth observation industry,” he added in a statement. Matt Ocko, DCVC co-founder and managing partner, said in a statement, “DCVC was the first to invest in Capella because we saw Capella ’s transformational power to make the world transparent for the ‘good guys’, where every organization has access to powerful satellite imaging tools for critical decisions involving disaster relief, land planning, or monitoring our critical infrastructure.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Geospatial intelligence company Orbital Insight announced plans April 25 to bring high-resolution imagery from Argentine Earth observation firm Satellogic into its geospatial intelligence platform. Through the partnership, Satellogic will feed high-resolution satellite imagery and full-motion video into Orbital Insight’s platform, providing Orbital Insight customers with access to higher quality data, improved revisit rates and lower cost analytics. For satellite imagery, “Satellogic’s business model of trying to lower those costs per square kilometer makes it much more attractive for not only partners like us, because we take in a lot of that data and process it and use AI to develop new types of insights, but for government and commercial customers,” Kevin O’Brien, Orbital Insight CEO, told SpaceNews . “I think that will open up the market.” Not all customers can afford to spend $10 million to monitor power plants or to monitor their supply chain, O’Brien said. “Satellogic helps lower the cost and get to more reasonable types of fees that they can charge to their customers,” O’Brien said. “That makes it easier for us to be able to work with both Satellogic as well as some of those customers down the food chain.” Satellogic designs, manufactures and operates a fleet of 22 Earth 0bservation satellites in low earth orbit. The company, which began trading shares publicly early this year after completing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, plans to launch as many as 12 additional satellites this year. By 2025, Satellogic intends to operate more than 200 satellites to provide daily global Earth imagery with frequent revisit rates. Palo Alto, California-based Orbital Insight fuses different types of sensor data into its Go platform, including electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar and RF monitoring, to shed light on economic, societal and environmental activity. The company is well known for working with corporations like Unilever and Chevron in addition to government customers like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. “Advanced geospatial analytics require access to high-resolution, high-frequency satellite imagery and simple tasking,” O’Brien said in a statement. “Satellogic is disrupting the industry with a cost-effective, vertically integrated business model. This approach aligns well with our philosophy of making geospatial intelligence efficient, intuitive and simple so that our customers can get timely insights, make critical decisions and respond faster.” Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic CEO and co-founder, said in a statement, “Our mission is to enable greater access to critical Earth Observation data. Working with Orbital Insight extends our reach, making our data available to more customers across diverse fields who need to know how the world around them is changing.”
A State Department official said the Biden administration’s announcement of a ban of one kind of antisatellite (ASAT) weapon tests was timed to support discussions at an upcoming United Nations forum on norms of behavior in space. Vice President Kamala Harris announced April 18 that the United States would ban tests of destructive direct-ascent ASATs because of the large amounts of debris they create. “These tests are dangerous and we will not conduct them,” she said in a speech at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Harris didn’t explain in her speech why the U.S. was enacting this ban now, with no public plans by the U.S. military to perform such tests. However, at an April 21 webinar by the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), Eric Desautels, acting assistant deputy of state for arms control, verification and compliance, linked the announcement to an upcoming U.N. meeting, formally known as an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), to discuss norms of behavior for reducing space threats. “The timing of our announcement by the vice president on Monday is meant to spur a meaningful discussion in the Open-Ended Working Group, as we view this as an important tool in our efforts to multilateralize this commitment,” he said. “Having our own proposal at the OEWG of a norm of responsible behavior will allow the United States to demonstrate our leadership in this area and to drive a conversation in a way that supports our position and doesn’t undermine U.S. and allied security in the face of what surely will be competing proposals,” he added. The meeting, scheduled for the week of May 9 in Geneva, is the first of four scheduled over two years to discuss norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors in space, a process created by a resolution approved late last year by the U.N. General Assembly. The initial meeting was scheduled for February but postponed at the request of the Russian government, which said at the time it was not prepared to start discussions. The U.S. ban has won support from several allies but also skepticism from China , which has been advocating, with Russia, for a treaty banning the placement of weapons in space for more than a decade. That treaty, notably, would not ban direct-ascent ASATs like the one Russia demonstrated in November 2021. A panel of experts at the BASIC webinar welcomed the announcement of the ban as a positive step for space security and for discussions at the OEWG. “We’re starting to see a gelling of responses in terms of what’s identified as responsible behavior,” said Victoria Samson, Washington office director of the Secure World Foundation, citing the ban as well as a set of tenets of responsible space behavior released by the Defense Department in July 2021 , which includes limiting the creation of long-lived space debris. “Hopefully, with the U.S. announcement, this may give some shape and some consideration, and give the delegates a starting point for discussion” at the OEWG, she said. “Whether or not there is consensus out of the OEWG, I think it’s very helpful to have these discussions to get the international community on the same page for what they see as responsible behavior.” “The test ban moratorium from the United States is a good move, but it is a quite a modest move as well,” said Bleddyn Bowen of the University of Leicester. While Desautels emphasized the role of U.S. leadership in the U.N. discussions, Bowen warned that could go too far, citing the experience with the failed “code of conduct” for outer space activities promulgated by the European Union last decade, which failed to gain widespread support. “A challenge for everyone involved in the process is to try to keep it inclusive and multilateral as much as possible,” he said. “Phrases like ‘U.S. leadership’ has to be quite carefully managed because it is meant to be a multilateral effort.” Desautels said the ASAT test ban is not the only issue the United States plans to bring up at the OEWG. “We think the OEWG is an excellent forum for developing concepts for addressing some of these other threats, given some of the challenges in attribution and definition,” he said. That includes enhancing communications, best practices for “safe and professional operations” of national security satellites to avoid collisions and harmful interference, and avoiding “purposeful interference” with satellite command and control systems. Another issue, he said, is “to ensure that the work of the Open-Ended Working Group does not in any way restrict the peaceful uses of outer space technology by developing countries.”
DENVER – Kleos Space announced plans April 25 to offer customers dedicated, taskable radio frequency monitoring capabilities. It’s a new business model for Kleos, a Luxembourg based company that operates three clusters of four satellites to detect RF signals and pinpoint their location. To date, Luxembourg-based Kleos has provided RF monitoring data to government and commercial customers. “Our discussions with government departments, national security agencies and commercial entities have highlighted a growing need for a dedicated mission capability, including unrestricted access,” Kleos CEO Andy Bowyer said in a statement. With the new Mission-as-a-Service model, Kleos will offer customers “exclusive access to Kleos’ dedicated, in-orbit radio frequency reconnaissance satellite clusters for fixed periods of time and capacity,” according to the April 25 news release. “Each Mission-as-a-Service contract will be tailored to suit the customer requirements and needs including on the percent of satellite capacity needed, level of taskability required and corresponding data rights.” At the same time, Kleos will continue to sell data from its constellation, which eventually could include as many as 20 satellite clusters. Kleos sent its third cluster to orbit April 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Another cluster of four Kleos satellites is scheduled to launch in a couple of months. Through Kleo’s Data-as-a-Service business, multiple customers gain access to the same commercial dataset. In contrast, the Mission-as-a-Service model “is tailored to meet the need of specific intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance requirements of an individual customer mission,” Bowyer said. The data service model relies on high volume to offset low contract values, while Mission-as-a-Service contracts are expected to have a higher price tag. “This blend of offering reflects the balance of needs between the commercial and non-commercial customer we have witnessed developing over the last few years,” Bowyer said.
A Crew Dragon undocked from the International Space Station April 24 carrying four private astronauts who spent nearly twice as long on the station as originally planned. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour undocked from the station at 9:10 p.m. Eastern. The undocking sets up a splashdown off the Florida coast scheduled for 1:06 p.m. Eastern April 25. While SpaceX has several potential landing sites to choose from, NASA said the primary site is in the Atlantic Ocean offshore from Jacksonville. “Thanks once again for all of the support through this amazing adventure that we’ve had, even longer and more exciting than we thought,” Michael López-Alegría, commander of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, told space station controllers once the spacecraft departed the vicinity of the ISS shortly after undocking. The undocking marks the final phase of Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission, which started with an April 8 launch on a Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center . The mission, the first private astronaut mission by a U.S. spacecraft to the ISS, is commanded by López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut, with three customers: Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy. Endeavour docked to the ISS April 9 for what was originally billed as an eight-day stay. However, the spacecraft spent more than 15 days at the station, its departure delayed primarily by poor weather at splashdown locations . Neither NASA nor Axiom Space elaborated on the specific weather criteria, like winds or wave conditions, that prevented a splashdown, other than “marginally high winds” that delayed the undocking from April 23 to April 24. The extended stay did not materially affect station operations. “NASA and Axiom mission planning prepared for the possibility of additional time on station for the private astronauts, and there are sufficient provisions for all 11 crew members aboard the space station,” the agency said in an April 20 blog post. It did raise questions, though, about whether it would cost Axiom and its private astronaut customers more money. “The agreement between NASA and Axiom allowed for the possibility of extra days,” Axiom spokesperson Dakota Orlando told SpaceNews April 24, but did not answer questions about the details of that agreement. NASA spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz said April 24 that the agreement included an “equitable balance” to cover delays. “Knowing that International Space Station mission objectives like the recently conducted Russian spacewalk or weather challenges could result in a delayed undock, NASA negotiated the contract with a strategy that does not require reimbursement for additional undock delays,” she said. The additional time on the station didn’t go to waste. The four private astronauts had a “tightly packed research schedule,” Orlando said, at times working 14 hours a day. “With the delay, they have continued working on these research and outreach projects at a more leisurely pace, with additional time to enjoy views of the blue planet.” Before the launch, Axiom executives emphasized the research they would do over the sightseeing that the station would offer. “They’re not up there to place their noses on the window. They really are going up there to do meaningful research,” said Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, at a briefing about the mission in February. The undocking was not affected by an ISS maneuver April 23. The Progress MS-18 spacecraft docked to the station’s Russian segment fired its thrusters for 10 minutes and 23 seconds to increase the station’s orbit by about two kilometers. NASA advertised the maneuver as one that “optimizes phasing for future visiting vehicles arriving at the station,” but was originally described as one to avoid a piece of debris projected to come close to the station. NASA spokesperson Gary Jordan said that while flight controllers were tracking a potential conjunction, or close approach, of debris to the station, “the conjunction went green,” or no longer posed a threat. “Flight control teams elected to proceed with a nominal reboost,” he said. The debris in question, Jordan said, was an object with a NORAD ID of 51157, and is one of more than a thousand pieces of tracked debris created by Russia’s antisatellite weapon demonstration in November 2021 that destroyed a defunct Russian satellite, Cosmos 1408.
China will aim to alter the orbit of a potentially threatening asteroid with a kinetic impactor test as part of plans for a planetary defense system. China is drafting a planetary defense plan and will conduct technical studies and research into developing systems to counter the threats posed by near Earth asteroids, Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told China Central Television (CCTV). At the same time, CNSA will establish an early warning system and develop software to simulate operations against the near Earth objects and test and verify basic procedures. Finally, a mission will make close up observations of a selected potentially dangerous asteroid and then impact the target to alter its orbit. The mission is scheduled around the end of the 14th Five-year plan period (2021-2025) or in 2026, Wu said. The system would help to deal with the threat of near Earth objects to humanity and make a new contribution to China in the future, according to Wu. Wu made the remarks at an event to mark China’s seventh national space day in Wenchang, Hainan province. April 24 marks the anniversary of the launch of China’s first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, which was sent into orbit in 1970. In a space “white paper” released in January it was stated that China will study plans for building a near-earth object defense system, and increase the capacity of near-earth object monitoring, cataloging, early warning, and response over the 2021-2025 period. China held its first Planetary Defense Conference in October 2021, with sessions, papers and presentations on a range of related issues. China is not the only nor the first space agency to be developing planetary defense capabilities. NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in November 2021. The spacecraft will collide with Dimorphos, a minor-planet moon orbiting the near Earth asteroid Didymos, in September this year. The European Space Agency will send its Hera mission to Didymos and Dimorphos later in the decade to examine the after effects of the DART mission impact. China is also developing a combined asteroid sample-return and comet rendezvous mission. The mission, expected to launch before 2025, will target Earth’s quasi-satellite Kamoʻoalewa, deliver samples to Earth and then head for a rendezvous with main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS.
A flat budget for NASA’s space technology programs is “very constraining” for the agency as it faces tough decisions about what efforts it can fund and at what amounts. NASA received $1.1 billion for space technology in the fiscal year 2022 omnibus spending bill passed in mid-March. That is the same amount that space technology received in both fiscal years 2020 and 2021. NASA had requested $1.425 billion for space technology in its proposal for fiscal year 2022. The House and Senate versions of appropriations bills fell short of that figure but did offer some increase, to $1.25 billion in the Senate’s version and $1.28 billion in the House. The omnibus version, developed by House and Senate appropriators, fell back to $1.1 billion. “It’s still a really good budget for us, but it’s also very constraining for what we were hoping for,” Jim Reuter, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said at an April 22 meeting of the National Academies’ Space Technology Industry-Government-University Roundtable (STIGUR). “It’s a challenge for us.” NASA is still working on an operating plan for fiscal year 2022, which must then receive congressional approval, so Reuter offered few details about how the reduced budget would affect space technology programs. However, he showed a chart that listed funding levels for some programs in the Space Technology Mission Directorate whose funding was specified in the omnibus bill, such as nuclear thermal propulsion and the OSAM-1 satellite servicing mission. When those programs are accounted for, the rest of the directorate will have $328 million to spend, compared to $705 million in the original budget request. Proposed new projects will likely feel the brunt of the reduced budget. “There’s very little we can do on new activities in FY22, and we’ve pretty much pushed those all off to FY23,” he said. That includes the Game Changing Development program within the directorate to advance technologies from lab concepts to complete prototypes. “That’s where the biggest growth we’ve been trying to get to over the last couple of years,” he said Existing space technology programs, like many others at the agency, are facing cost growth and schedule delays linked to the pandemic and associated supply chain problems. “COVID has been hitting fairly hard. It’s a significant impact on costs,” he said, exacerbating the budget crunch the directorate faces. Reuter, though, was hopeful about the future. NASA requested $1.438 billion for space technology in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal released March 28. Near the end of the half-day STIGUR meeting, he sought input from members on how to build advocacy in the space technology community for the budget. “I don’t mean to be complaining about it. It’s a great budget for us,” he said of the 2022 budget. “It’s just that we’re also optimistic in FY23 we can get back to a growth pattern.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government could address supply chain problems by embracing nontraditional business models and manufacturing approaches, space entrepreneurs said April 22 at the Miami Tech Week conference. Technologies such as highly automated production and in-space manufacturing could help the United States become less dependent on fragile supply chains, these executives said. Companies pursuing these emerging technologies are getting funding from venture investors, they noted, but also are looking for U.S. government support. “I just think it’s a huge defensive and strategic advantage if you have a large commercial manufacturing supply chain operating in low Earth orbit,” said Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda Space Industries. The two-year-old startup has raised $53 million to develop deployable factories to make products in space that can be brought back to Earth. It won a $25,000 prize from a Space Force accelerator , as the military is interested in the company’s reentry payload capsules to bring cargo back from space. The company plans to use Rocket Lab’s Photon satellites as the platform for the space factories. Asparouhov said the current supply chain crisis should motivate the U.S. government to invest in in-space manufacturing to reduce the nation’s dependence on China and Russia. Chris Power, CEO and founder of Hadrian Automation, said the U.S. aerospace industry is hampered by legacy production methods and is dependent on sources of supply that were offshored decades ago. Hadrian recently raised $90 million to build largely automated factories to produce components for rockets, satellites, aircraft and drones. “It’s become clear with situations like Ukraine and the covid pandemic that the supply chain is increasingly more important for our customers to meet their goals,” Power said. “They’ve got to be able to build stuff really fast.” “The aerospace supply chain has been terrible for years and it’s getting worse,” Power said. A shortage of components, for example, makes it difficult to do iterative design and development of new satellites. “If you’re an aerospace engineer and you can only get parts once every 10 weeks, you’ve got like four iteration cycles a year,” he said. If that happened in software, engineers would “only edit code four times a year. It’s completely ridiculous.” If a company or the government suddenly needed 100 satellites, an agile supply chain is key to spin up capability, said Power. John Gedmark, CEO and founder of satellite communications startup Astranis, said the aerospace industry “has been the same way for a very long time. This is going back to the beginning of the first space age when you build these massive satellites that take many years to build and each one costs hundreds of millions of dollars.” The company offers small geostationary satellites as an alternative to traditional spacecraft. An architecture with many small satellites on station, either active or as spares, sitting there on standby is more attainable with low cost satellites, said Gedmark. “And also having large numbers at the ready on the ground that you can launch very quickly,” he said. “It’s a completely different architecture than we have traditionally had in space.” Gedmark said the government can help the industry by “recognizing when there’s a new tool there that they could put in their toolbox that they didn’t have before.” If the government decides it wants to buy a service, industry needs a long-term commitment so “businesses can plan around it,” he said. “That’s the most important thing, setting up that commitment to buy these products and services.” The ideal partnership model is NASA’s commercial crew program where the government buys rides to the International Space Station from SpaceX and Boeing, he said. “We would love to see more examples of programs like that where NASA partners with private industry.”
WASHINGTON – Communications satellite operator Iridium and General Dynamics Mission Systems submitted a joint bid to operate and manage the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit constellation. A spokesman for Iridium confirmed the two companies teamed up on a proposal in response to an SDA request earlier this year. The agency in January issued a request for proposals for the “ground operations and integration segment” of a $1.8 billion constellation known as Transport Layer Tranche 1. Iridium’s CEO Matt Desch during an earnings call April 19 told analysts that the company was pursuing the SDA contract but did not discuss the teaming arrangement. SDA has ordered 126 satellites from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems. Each company is responsible for providing 42 satellites and operating them but SDA will select a separate contractor to manage the entire enterprise including the ground stations, data links and user equipment. “Iridium and General Dynamics Mission Systems have partnered and submitted an innovative proposal in response to SDA’s RFP for development of their proliferated LEO constellation’s system integration, ground systems, facilities, ground stations and management of day-to-day operations of their network,” Iridium said in a statement to SpaceNews . The company operates a constellation of 75 communications satellites in low Earth orbit and provides satcom services to the U.S. government and commercial customers. General Dynamics Mission Systems develops and integrates satcom antennas and ground systems. SDA’s technical director Frank Turner described the ground systems integration of Tranche 1 as a complex challenge. “What we need is a team of folks who can take a look at the missions, at what we need to operate from a ground perspective and how to build the constellation, mission and network management to make it all work together,” he said last month at an industry conference. The Transport Layer, a mesh network intended to move data in space via optical links, will have two operations centers at government facilities in Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota; and Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It will have multiple ground entry points, external locations, and terrestrial backhaul communications. “The ability of this contractor to work with and manage inputs and actions from multiple other performers will be critical to successfully field and operate Tranche 1,” SDA said. The agency is reviewing bids and expects to select a contractor in the coming months. 
Copernic Space, the latest company to bring Kevin O’Connell onto its advisory board, is unlike other ventures the former director of the U.S. Office of Space Commerce has joined. In contrast to the space situational awareness and space traffic management startups O’Connell tends to work with, Copernic Space has the lofty ambition of creating what the startup calls “the economic operating system for space in the digital economy.” The vision is a combination of Amazon’s e-commerce platform and Robinhood Market’s commission-free trading application for space, said Grant Blaisdell, Copernic Space CEO and co-founder. “The other companies that I’ve been supporting are developing the infrastructure for the space economy,” said O’Connell, who established Washington consulting firm Space Economy Rising after leaving the Commerce Department last year. “The space economy is accelerating and diversifying. We’re starting to see companies use, leverage, experiment with space that have never had anything to do with space before.” Increased participation in the space sector is leading to another wave of innovation, O’Connell said. “What Grant and the team of Copernic are doing is really establishing yet another aspect of the key economic infrastructure for this,” he added. The Copernic Space Platform is designed to make it easy for people to acquire, access, buy and sell space assets, payloads, venture tokens and services. The first asset up for sale on the blockchain-powered platform is tokenized payload on a Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) scheduled to travel to the moon’s south pole on an Intuitive Machines lunar lander. Lunar Outpost is selling a portion of the MAPP’s cargo capacity through the Copernic Space Platform. People can buy the rights to send a physical payload to the moon or they can acquire a fraction of the payload, which they can later resell. Copernic seeks to break down the barriers to participation in the space economy, Blaisdell said. While non-fungible, meaning unique, digital tokens are an important piece of the business Copernic is establishing, they are only one aspect of it. “Not everybody can pay for suborbital flight, not everybody can afford a satellite image,” O’Connell said. “With the approach that Copernic is taking, people will have access to these capabilities in ways that they’ve never had before, but that they will need in order to fuel the $1 trillion to $3 trillion space economy that that we’re all talking about.” Copernic Space is seeking O’Connell’s advice on the overall space market and various sectors as the company works to create the digital interface standards that will make them easier for customers and investors to discover, buy and sell space-related assets. “The issue with the space economy, to be honest, is that the transactional nature of it has no scalability,” Blaisdell said. The market for satellite data, for example, is segmented. “How do we streamline that, so I can buy the license digitally, request the data I want and, if the request is approved, download the data,” Blaisdell asked. “Maybe I don’t use my full license and can resell half of my license.” Copernic Space calls itself a Web3 digital platform. (Web3 is a popular term for a future internet that is based on blockchain and decentralized unlike the current internet, which tends to be dominated by major technology companies.) “We’re excited for Kevin O’Connell to join the Copernic Space team,” Blaisdell said in a statement. “Someone of his stature standing behind what we do only makes us feel stronger about working to become the economic operating system for space in the digital economy … His extensive knowledge and hands-on collaboration with us will expand our effectiveness within the space industry and wider new space economy.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Japanese lunar lander developer ispace said April 21 it is negotiating the world’s first insurance coverage for a commercial mission to the moon’s surface. The startup has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance (MSI), a Tokyo-based firm that started working with ispace in 2019, to insure its first attempt to send a lander to the moon later this year. The agreement outlines intentions to finalize terms for the insurance in the months leading up to ispace’s Mission 1 (M1), which is currently slated to fly on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2022. According to ispace, the insurance would cover any damage the lander takes between separating from the rocket in a trans-lunar orbit (TLO) and touching down on the moon. As well as covering a failed landing, the insurance would guard against issues stemming from radiation exposure as the lander travels through the Van Allen belts to its destination. The Japanese venture is building a lunar transportation business that sells accommodations on its landers to government and commercial customers. M1 aims to deliver lunar payloads for the UAE-based Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA and commercial firms in Japan and Canada. The insurance package ispace is negotiating with MSI would not cover these payloads. “As of now, the proposed scheme will cover ispace’s M1 lander,” ispace spokesperson Andrew Ames said. “However, in the future it may be possible to expand the coverage.” Ames declined to discuss financial details. The startup had raised $200 million as of late October , including an investment from Airbus’ venture capital arm. ArianeGroup, a joint venture between European aerospace giants Airbus and Safran, is supplying components for M1’s propulsion system and supporting integration and tests at facilities in Germany. The lander’s propulsion system and structural integration are both complete, ispace said April 21, while electrical integration is ongoing as payloads, external sensors and a rover deployment mechanism are installed. “If all continues according to plan, we aim to begin final testing by early June,” the venture said, when “we will transport our lander from the ArianeGroup GmbH facility in Lampoldshausen to an [German engineering company] IABG facility in Ottobrunn near Munich, Germany. “At this pace, we plan to ship our lander to Florida by early Autumn for launch preparations.” The startup expects to become the first privately led Japanese mission to perform a soft landing on the moon. U.S.-based startup Intuitive Machines is also attempting to send its first lander to the moon this year. A spokesperson for Intuitive Machines, which until recently had been preparing to launch its IM-1 mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in the first quarter of 2022, told SpaceNews April 19 that the venture intends to announce a new launch window “soon.” Intuitive Machines declined to comment on whether it was looking to insure its mission. While ispace appears set to become the first commercial company to insure a moon landing, an insurance source said governments have previously secured coverage for lunar missions.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Space Force announced April 22 that its tracking radar that monitors low Earth orbit is now able to feed data directly into the military’s cloud platform known as the Unified Data Library. The tracking radar, called Space Fence , started operating at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in 2020. But up until now the data collected by the radar had not been integrated into the Unified Data Library. The UDL is a Space Force-led initiative to integrate multiple sources of space domain awareness data of different classification levels into a common platform. It serves as a digital catalog for government and military organizations to access data on the space domain collected by satellites and ground-based sensors. After several weeks of testing, the ​​Space Systems Command has “established a permanent capability to directly ingest observation data from the Space Fence radar system into the UDL,” the command said in a news release. The Space Fence is the first of the military’s Space Surveillance Network sensors to be integrated into the UDL. The SSN is a collection of ground-based radar, telescopes and space-based sensors used by the military to monitor Earth’s orbit. Lt. Col. Daniel Kimmich, chief of the Space Systems Command’s Cross-Mission Ground and Communication Enterprise Data branch, said the addition of the Space Fence is an important milestone for the UDL. “We have data from academia, commercial space partners, from the U.S. government, and we are working to share with our international partners and allies so their sovereign data can be delivered to the UDL and we can share in return,” he said in a statement. “As the Russian anti-satellite test in November of 2021 highlighted, having an integrated awareness of the increasing number of objects and debris in the space domain is critical to the safety of our astronauts and the security of our space systems,” Kimmich said. The UDL, run by the contractor Bluestaq , has more than 3,500 individual users. The company works with commercial data suppliers to make sure their data formats are compliant with the UDL cloud platform. Government users can request data directly to commercial providers through the UDL. The Unified Data Library began as an experiment by Bluestaq engineers trying to figure out how data could be shared across agencies that had different levels of security clearances. The U.S. Air Force gave the company a contract in 2019 to build a repository of space domain awareness data from commercial providers that could be tapped by military users. It has been expanded to handle multiple types of data from space, air, maritime and ground sensors. Last year, the UDL was used to support the Kabul airlift in August , when the U.S. military had to evacuate tens of thousands of troops and civilians from Afghanistan. U.S. Northern Command and Air Mobility Command tapped into UDL data to track flights in and out of Kabul in real time.
TAMPA, Fla. — Jet service provider JSX said April 21 it is set to become the first air carrier to provide Starlink’s satellite broadband services later this year. The semi-private charter company said it signed a deal to provide Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi on up to 100 planes, covering the 77 30-seat Embraer jets currently in its fleet. Financial details were not disclosed but JSX said it intends to provide the services to passengers free of charge. The companies are testing a terminal that has been developed specifically for the aviation market, which Starlink vice president of commercial sales Jonathan Hofeller said March 22 is working toward certification on “ various aircraft .” JSX’s announcement comes days after Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told the Wall Street Journal April 18 that it has conducted exploratory Starlink tests on its aircraft. More than 300 Delta aircraft are currently equipped with Wi-Fi using Viasat’s satellite network, and the airline has plans to connect at least 200 more planes to that network by the end of 2022. Delta said March 14 more than 50% of domestic enplanements are served by Viasat connectivity. Viasat’s shares fell 1.4% to close at $45.54 April 18 after beginning the day at $46.17. Inflight connectivity provider Gogo’s shares also took a hit after the Wall Street Journal’s report, even though it sold the commercial part of its business that serves Delta planes to satellite operator Intelsat two years ago . Both companies’ stock prices suffered deeper declines after news of Starlink’s first airline deal emerged amid investor worries about future inflight connectivity competition. Viasat’s shares started April 22 at $42.31, down 7.1% compared to their April 18 opening price. Inmarsat, SES and many other established satellite broadband operators are also chasing an inflight connectivity market that — despite recently suffering under pandemic-related travel restrictions — promises significant growth as passengers increasingly demand better connectivity services. Hofeller said March 22 that SpaceX sees connectivity on airplanes as ripe for an overhaul and that its services will be indistinguishable from conventional internet access. The company started seeking regulatory permission in 2020 to test Starlink services on private jets and the vessels Falcon 9 rockets land on for reuse. SpaceX is also planning to connect vehicles and other types of boats to Starlink to expand the broadband network out of fixed homes and offices. Starlink has a quarter-million subscribers that, following a recent price hike , are charged $110 a month for its standard service or $500 a month for a premium tier that uses an improved antenna with a broader scan angle. To date, SpaceX has launched 2,388 satellites to expand its Starlink network, according to statistics maintained by spaceflight analyst and astronomer Jonathan McDowell. Of those, McDowell’s data shows 2,150 satellites remain in orbit and 2,121 are operational. SpaceX’s most recent Starlink mission launched April 21 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The Falcon 9’s reused first stage that helped the company deploy 53 Starlink satellites had previously flown eight Starlink missions.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea “welcomed” America’s self-imposed ban on direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile tests that create orbital debris. “The government [of the Republic of Korea] welcomes the United States’ April 18 announcement of its commitment to banning direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile tests,” said foreign ministry spokesman Choi Young-sam in an April 21 press briefing . “In addition to this, the government, as an advocate of creating a UN resolution on responsible behavior in space , will continue to play a role in advancing rules that will ensure peaceful and sustainable use of outer space.” In a May 3, 2021, statement to the United Nations’ Office of Disarmament Affairs, South Korea called on space actors to “behave transparently and responsibly” since verifying intention in space is difficult and challenging without official declarations from a space object’s operator. When Russia destroyed a Soviet-era satellite in an ASAT test in November, South Korea expressed concern over new debris created in low Earth orbit as the test’s result—though it stopped short of criticizing Russia. Meanwhile, China expressed skepticism about the self-imposed moratorium. China’s foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin noted in an April 19 press conference that the U.S. was the first country to carry out direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing in 1959 and “has so far conducted the largest number of such testing.” “Now, the U.S. announced that it would bar tests of ground-based direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons. But why not announce that it will not use such weapons? Why not announce to stop testing air-based, co-orbital and other types of anti-satellite weapons, and stop anti-missile testing of anti-satellite nature? Why not commit itself to banning the use of force against outer space objects?” the spokesman said. He fueled the skepticism with Washington’s refusal to discuss an arms control initiative for space, which China and Russia co-launched in 2008. “We [China] hope the U.S. will truly assume its due responsibility as a major country, fully reflect upon its negative moves in the field of outer space, stop the hypocritical practice of expanding unilateral military superiority in the name of arms control,” said the spokesman. Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov welcomed the moratorium in an April 19 interview , calling the decision “a step in the right direction.” And he called on the U.S. to come forward to discuss the 2008 arms control initiative. “I would like to remind you of Russia’s proposal, together with China, to develop a treaty on not being the first to place weapons in outer space,” Ryabkov said, adding that Moscow calls on Washington to return to constructive negotiations on this issue. 
The chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA says he expects his committee to develop spending bills “on time” this year but was noncommittal about the level of support NASA will receive. Speaking at an April 20 event here where Astrobotic unveiled its Peregrine lunar lander, Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), who chairs the commerce, justice and science (CJS) subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, said he would work in a bipartisan manner to develop a fiscal year 2023 spending bill but offered few hints about what might be included for NASA in the bill. “We’ll be making the hard choices but, you know, what we do on the appropriations committee is a product of compromise between Democrats and Republicans, between the House and the Senate,” he said. “We succeeded last year. We’ll succeed again in FY ’23.” The White House released a fiscal year 2023 budget proposal March 28 that requested nearly $26 billion for NASA , an 8% increase from what the agency received in fiscal year 2022. Neither the House nor the Senate have started formal work on appropriations bills. Cartwright, asked about the budget proposal, brought up a line he attributed to a former member of Congress, Charlie Dent: “The president proposes and the appropriations committee disposes.” That process of disposing will go on schedule, he said. “We intend to do it on time,” he said of developing a CJS spending bill. “We intend to mark it up on time and report the bill on time.” He didn’t give a specific schedule for developing the spending bill. Last year, the CJS subcommittee held a hearing on the NASA budget in May, and the full appropriations committee reported the bill in July . However, Congress did not pass an omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2022 until mid-March after a series of continuing resolutions that funded NASA and other government agencies at 2021 levels. “As delayed as it was, it still succeeded,” Cartwright said. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, also at the Astrobotic event, endorsed Cartwright’s work, citing bipartisan cooperation with the CJS subcommittee’s ranking member, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) “They work together. You don’t see a lot of this,” Nelson said. “It’s exactly as Matt said, in certain areas, you get bipartisan compromise and working together.” That 2022 spending bill was the first developed with Cartwright as chairman of the CJS subcommittee. He succeeded Rep. José Serrano (D-N.Y.), who retired after the 2020 elections. “As a result of that, I have learned a lot of about space and NASA and science in a big hurry,” he said. “It’s about $25 billion a year that America pours into our space program and absolutely appropriately, because this is what inspires young minds in this country to go on and figure out scientific and technological advancements things that lead to real wealth creation in this country.” “I’m proud to be a buff of the space program and I’m proud to be a part of helping fund it,” he added. Cartwright offered a similar message earlier in the day in a speech at the inaugural conference of the Keystone Space Collaborative, a regional space industry group. “People say, ‘How can you spend $25 billion a year on NASA when there are so many other pressing needs?’” he said. “And I say, how can we not?” He then moderated a panel discussion with NASA officials where he hinted at one area of interest to him, addressing orbital debris. “We have a good grasp of the enormity of the problem,” he said. “I can tell you, we’re ready, willing and able to fund research into the answers as soon as NASA asks for that money.” NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal does include more than $30 million for research and technology development associated with orbital debris risks.
Chinese launch firm Deep Blue Aerospace announced A+ round financing April 19, with funding in the Chinese commercial sector apparently on the rise. The new round was led by CMBC Int’l Holdings, three months after Deep Blue Aerospace raised $31.5 million in A round funding. The undisclosed funds will go towards the development of the reusable Nebula-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket, the development of the “Thunder” engine series and additive manufacturing processes, the company stated in a press release. The statement says the funding will help accelerate development of the rocket. However it also reveals that the first orbital launch and recovery is now expected in 2024, whereas earlier statements targeted a first launch in 2023. Deep Blue Aerospace last year carried out 10-meter and 100-meter level vertical takeoff, vertical landing tests. It is now working towards a kilometer level test using the Nebula-M test article, as well as testing a 20-ton thrust “Thunder-20” engine. The firm is targeting private launch contracts and a government satellite Internet project and the national space station program as possible revenue streams. Investment in China’s commercial space sector is expected to double year-on-year in 2022, according to Chinese media Zhidongxi, Global Times reports . Last year 37 Chinese firms reported financing of $992 million, according to the report. Launch startups have already attracted a frenzy of financing early this year. The most notable is the $200 million announced by Galactic Energy in January, eclipsing the previous Chinese record funding rounds for launch companies. Deep Blue Aerospace and Galactic Energy are two of a second wave of Chinese launch startups, with a focus on developing reusable launchers. Landspace, one of the earliest Chinese launch startups, is currently preparing for the country’s first privately-funded liquid rocket launch attempt. Meanwhile, cities and provinces are looking to attract space sector companies to boost innovation and economic activity, particularly following national level policy support announcements over the last couple of years. Earlier this month Beijing released a series of policy measures to boost construction of a commercial aerospace industrial base in the city’s Daxing district. The move also seeks to attract and support firms, with subsidies of up to 20 million yuan ($3 million) per year. Elsewhere a space technology industrialization base project in Nansha District of the southern city Guangzhou is expected to be completed and begin operations in August, according to an April 10 report . The base will host CAS Space , one of a number of launch companies created by Chinese state-owned entities. CAS Space’s first launch, the ZK-1A solid rocket, was earlier reported to be conducted early in 2022.
TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium expects to take advantage of a rideshare opportunity this year to launch up to five of the six spare satellites it has been storing in Arizona. The satellite operator expects to make a formal announcement about the potential $35 million launch deal in “the next couple weeks,” company spokesperson Jordan Hassin said. Matt Desch, Iridium’s CEO, first disclosed plans to deploy ground spares in the company’s April 19 earnings call for the first quarter of 2022. “I want to be clear that we do not have an immediate need to launch these satellites,” Desch said. “Our constellation is very healthy and is performing well, but our ground spares have little utility just sitting in storage.” The company had been waiting for a cost-effective opportunity to launch its remaining spares, according to Desch, who noted they have been racking up battery, solar array and other maintenance costs. Extra in-orbit spares add more network redundancy, and effectively extend the constellation’s operational life because each satellite is designed to operate for at least 15 years. SpaceX, which launched all 75 satellites for the operator’s $3 billion Iridium Next second-generation constellation, lofted its latest batch of 10 satellites in early 2019 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Using Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX had typically deployed 10 Iridium Next satellites with each launch mission. Europe’s Thales Alenia Space built the constellation but subcontracted Northrop Grumman to integrate the satellites at facilities in the United States, where the ground spares are kept. If Iridium chooses a SpaceX rideshare mission, it will likely again use trucks to transport satellites on their 550-mile journey from Arizona to California, avoiding aircraft shortages that mainly affect larger spacecraft destined for geostationary orbit. Desch declined to give an update on the constellation’s projected operational life after an analyst asked if launching most of its ground spares meant it still planned to refresh Iridium Next around 2035. Keeping up with demand Iridium reported a 15% increase in revenue to $168.2 million for the first three months of 2022, compared with the same period last year. Desch said sales were driven by connectivity markets recovering from the pandemic and “tremendous demand” in Ukraine following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion. “Our service is being used extensively” in Ukraine, he said, and “many thousands of handsets, and [Internet of Things (IoT)] and other devices have gone in from our partners,” adding that the company has “been stretched in terms of supply to meet all that” demand. Globally, he said Iridium generated a record $42.1 million of revenue related to equipment sales and engineering and support projects in the first quarter. However, the company hit a wall as demand exceeded forecasts while it works to build up an inventory for most of its products. Iridium reported 50,000 commercial IoT activations in the first quarter of 2022, and Desch said this “could have been even higher if we could have shipped more equipment.” “This is a high-quality problem to have even though frustrating,” he said. “We have the business and could ship even more units if our parts supplier could meet our growing needs. Even as we’ve been pretty successful working [through] supply chain issues, we’re also finding new challenges in the current environment, like expanding our team to address our growing set of business opportunities.” Future opportunities Iridium’s bid to operate a planned LEO constellation for the Department of Defense’s Space Development Agency (SDA) is one of these business opportunities. Desch said he expects the U.S. government will award a contract to operate the constellation this year, after selecting manufacturers Feb. 28 to build satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 1. One of those manufacturers is Northrop Grumman, which highlighted its work to integrate and test Iridium Next satellites when it announced its share of the contract. “I think there’s a lot of confidence among the government that [the constellation is] going to be a network that will be increasingly relied upon,” Desch said. “So it’s one of the reasons why we’ve chosen to sort of step out of what we normally do to go after supporting and running and operating their LEO network in addition to the … experience we’ve had running our own.” Longer-term, Iridium sees an opportunity to place its satellite chips in smartphones to enable them to tap into its L-band network. Rumors circulated last year that Apple was planning to release iPhones that could connect to Iridium rival Globalstar’s satellite network. Those rumors got another boost when Globalstar said Feb. 24 that an undisclosed customer was helping to fund plans to replenish its constellation . But while incoming wireless standards will support 5G directly from space, Desch said they are “years away from implementation and no one’s really committed to implementing them yet. “So I think that’s a longer-term trend that will happen in the industry that we obviously will keep track of, and consider how we might evolve to it,” he said.
WASHINGTON – Viasat is rushing to complete the integration of a small communications satellite for the U.S. military that is years behind schedule due to supply chain delays. The satellite is designed to serve as a data relay in space for the network of Link 16 tactical radios used by the U.S. military and allies. The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Viasat a $10 million contract in 2019 to integrate a cubesat with a Link 16 communications terminal. The original target launch date was in 2020. Andrew Williams, AFRL’s deputy technology executive officer for space programs, told reporters earlier this month that the project has suffered schedule setbacks due to delays in the delivery of the satellite bus, made by Blue Canyon Technologies. Adam Reinelt, program manager for the Link 16 satellite at AFRL, said April 21 that the bus recently was delivered to Viasat for payload integration and is “on track for launch readiness before the end of 2022.” The timely launch of the Link 16 satellite is a priority for the Space Development Agency, which plans to soon start deploying a constellation of data transport satellites in low Earth orbit for military use. Each satellite will have a Link 16 communications payload so they can be part of the tactical data network. SDA has a strong interest in the AFRL experiment because this would be the first ever space-based Link 16 node. Link 16 is an encrypted tactical data protocol used in military radios to connect aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles so they can exchange data, including text and voice messages, and imagery. Link 16 today only works as a line-of-sight network, so weapon systems can transmit and receive data only when in view of each other without any obstacle between them. Extending the network into space would provide beyond line-of-sight connectivity. The satellite connection would enable troops on the ground, for example, to communicate with others on the other side of a mountain. Viasat is building a 12U satellite, about the size of a small refrigerator, and will integrate a Link 16 terminal that is smaller than a shoebox. The company said in a statement that “ d espite some obstacles and delays with the bus delivery, Viasat has achieved a number of important milestones in preparation of the launch.” Viasat said it has tested a lab version of the spacecraft with terrestrial terminals and the ground segment. The completed vehicle will be delivered to AFRL this summer, Viasat said. The company manufactures Link 16 terminals used in weapon systems and has shipped more than 5,000 radios to the U.S.military and NATO. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Six months after unveiling its next generation Pelican satellite constellation, Planet shared details April 21 on the 32-satellite constellation designed to offer higher resolution Earth imagery with more frequently updates than the San Francisco company’s SkySat constellation. “As you get more operational with your customers, they want more capacity and they want it faster,” Robbie Schingler, Planet co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews. The Pelican constellation, scheduled to begin launching in early 2023 pending FCC license approval, will offer at least 10 daily views of Earth’s land mass and as many as 30 views of midlatitude locations with a resolution of 30 centimeters per pixel. To speed up data delivery, Planet is equipping Pelicans with Ka-band inter-satellite data links. Planet plans to work with commercial satellite communications providers to task satellites and relay data, but the company is not yet ready to name satellite communications partners. “We’re building the hardware ourselves and buying bandwidth from existing operators,” Schingler said. Onboard computing is another feature of the Pelican constellation. “When things move or things are unexpected, allowing for some analytics to run immediately is extremely useful for some applications,” Schingler said. “A good, efficient compute architecture transports answers. It’s smart to bake that into the architecture from the beginning.” In contrast to SkySats which rely on Bradford Space High Performance Green Propulsion, Pelicans will be equipped with Hall-effect thrusters. With electric propulsion, Planet will be able to fine-tune satellite orbits to prevent drift, avoid debris and travel at low altitudes to improve image resolution, Schingler said. Planet designs and manufactures satellites in-house following an iterative approach known as agile aerospace. That means that RF inter-satellite links can be replaced with optical inter-satellite links when the industry agrees on standards and constellations begin providing services, Schingler said. In addition to SkySats, which offer resolution as high as 50 centimeters per pixel and 30-centimeter-per-pixel Pelicans, Planet gathers 3-meter global Earth imagery daily with its Dove constellation. “We are seeing strong and growing demand from multiple market segments for our high resolution products today,” Will Marshall, Planet co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We have designed our next generation Pelican fleet to meet the evolving needs of customers who want real-time information about global events as they unfold – from floods and wildfires to political conflicts and threats to human rights. Pelican’s rapid response and higher resolution will do exactly that.
Astrobotic Technology showed off its nearly complete lunar lander it is building for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and said the spacecraft remains on schedule to launch this year. At an event as its headquarters here April 20, attended by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other agency officials, the company showed its Peregrine lander that it plans to send to the moon on the first United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur launch in late 2022. The lander is still being assembled, said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic. Remaining work includes installation of its solar panels, two fuel tanks and decks holding payloads. The engines are “just about done,” he said, and will soon be installed. He was optimistic that remaining work will be done quickly. “In just a couple months’ time, this will be heading out to environmental testing,” he said, followed by shipment to the launch site late this year. Astrobotic expects Peregrine to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, a schedule that depends on both the readiness of the lander and Vulcan. “Things are on track for a flight in Q4 of this year,” he said during a speech earlier in the day at a conference by the Keystone Space Collaborative, a regional space industry group, citing updates he received from ULA about their progress on Vulcan. “As far as we know, they’re on track for the end of the year.” Astrobotic will be carrying both NASA payloads through its CLPS program as well as commercial payloads. Seven countries, including the U.S., will have payloads on the lander, Thornton said. He billed Peregrine as NASA’s return to the lunar surface after half a century. “This is our nation’s first lander headed back to the surface of the moon, nearly 50 years since Apollo,” he said. Peregrine is, in fact, one of two commercial landers in development for launch in the next year for the CLPS program, with Intuitive Machines working on its Nova-C lander for the IM-1 mission. That company previously said IM-1 would launch later this year but hasn’t provided a specific date. Peregrine is also a pathfinder for a much larger lander, Griffin, that Astrobotic is building to deliver NASA’s VIPER rover to the south pole of the moon in late 2023. “This is very important, because their next one that’s going in ’23 is going to be us landing on the south pole of the moon where the resources are, where water is,” Nelson said at the event. “It’s a monster,” Thornton said of Griffin, nearly five meters in diameter and capable of delivering 500 kilograms of payload to the lunar surface. “It’s the largest lander of any kind since Apollo.” First, though, Peregrine must make it to the moon. NASA established the CLPS program with a “shots on goal” mindset, accepting that some fraction of the missions will fail to land. Only NASA, the former Soviet Union and China have successfully landed on the moon, with recent attempts by India’s space agency ISRO and SpaceIL, a privately funded Israeli group, ending in failure. “Pretty soon we’ll be sitting here, chewing off our fingernails, hoping and trusting everything will go just fine,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science and a leading advocate for the CLPS program. Peregrine, he said, will carry versions of instruments that will also be flown on VIPER, testing them ahead of that mission. “We can try them in the right environment. We can develop them faster,” he said of the instruments, keeping instrument development off the critical path for the later mission. “Everybody looks at the lander. I look at the payload.”
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea is boosting its space spending this year by 19% over 2021 levels as it seeks to bounce back from October’s failed attempt to prove it can put up a satellite without Russian rocket hardware. The $619 million that South Korea will invest in national space programs in 2022 is 15% more than the amount the government originally proposed. The double-digit difference between the final budget and what was initially sought is rare, indicating the growth opportunity South Korea’s government sees for its domestic space industry, according to An Hyoung-joon, a research fellow at Science and Technology Policy Institute, a state-funded think tank based in Sejong. South Korea’s Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology announced the nation’s 2022 space budget in late February, calling it the “first time in the nation’s space development history that projects regarding rocket, satellite and space exploration are included in a yearly to-do list at the same time.” “It’s an important year [for South Korea] because there are a series of much-anticipated space development missions that are set to take place,” Vice Science Minister Yong Hong-taek said, citing the second launch of South Korea’s fully domestic KSLV-2 rocket plus foreign launches of two South Korean-built satellites and the nation’s first lunar orbiter. Nearly 29 percent of the budget, $175.8 million, will be used for launch vehicle development. KSLV-2, the larger successor to the two-stage KSLV-1 rocket that relied on a Russian RD-191 engine for liftoff, is scheduled to make its second flight in June. In its October debut, the three-stage KSLV-2 reached its intended altitude but failed to put its dummy payload into orbit when its liquid-fueled upper stage shut down early. The budget also funds work on a high-performance liquid-fueled engine for KSLV-2’s eventual successor and an effort to help develop second-stage engines for commercial smallsat launchers that would use KSLV-2’s KRE-075 first-stage engine. South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development is working on solid-fuel rockets for future military surveillance satellite launches under an initiative sparked last year by the U.S. lifting decades-long restrictions on South Korean missile development. The lion’s share of the 2022 space budget, or $276.4 million, is set aside for satellite projects, among them the CAS500-2 and KOMPSAT-6 Earth-observation satellites set to launch on separate Russian Soyuz rockets this year. These launches, however, are uncertain because of international sanctions imposed on Russian for invading Ukraine. South Korea’s satellite budget also be used to fund the development of KOMPSAT-7, design the architecture of at least six remote sensing or communications satellites, and open a new satellite operations center. Some $70 million is budgeted for work on the Korean Positioning System, a constellation of eight navigation satellites South Korea aims to deploy between 2027 and 2034. Satellite production is expected to begin in 2024 after completing work this year on core navigation technology. South Korea’s 2022space budget sets aside $25 million for exploration, including the launch of the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO). NASA provided a high-resolution camera nicknamed ShadowCam that will be used to search the permanently shadowed regions near the moon’s poles for water. KPLO is slated to launch in August aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Six companies, including both traditional satellite operators and constellation developers, have won NASA awards to demonstrate services that could ultimately replace the agency’s existing fleet of communications satellites. NASA announced April 20 the Communications Services Project (CSP) awards, totaling $278.5 million, to test how commercial satellites in both low Earth orbit and geostationary orbit could support missions that currently use the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation of NASA-owned spacecraft that have provided service since the 1980s. Two of the winners, Amazon’s Kuiper Government Solutions and SpaceX, won $67 million and $69.95 million respectively to demonstrate how their LEO constellations, using optical links, can provide communications services for satellites and launches. Inmarsat Government Inc. and Viasat won $28.6 million and $53.3 million respectively to demonstrate services using GEO satellites. SES Government Solutions and Telesat U.S. Services won $28.96 million and $30.65 million respectively to demonstrate services using a mix of GEO satellites and constellations in LEO and medium Earth orbits. The awards are in the form of Space Act Agreements with the companies matching or exceeding the awards with their own funds. NASA estimated the total investment to be $1.5 billion over five years in this demonstration phase of the program. The goal of CSP is to demonstrate services that NASA could later procure as it seeks to gradually phase out the use of TDRS satellites. “We’ll be demonstrating the end-to-end capability that we would ultimately be able to go out and procure for NASA missions,” Eli Naffah, CSP project manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, said in an interview during the Satellite 2022 conference in March. The CSP awards cover services using a wide range of frequencies, including C-, L- and Ka-band, and are meant to support new missions rather than current ones designed for working with TDRS satellites on frequencies set aside for space research. “Right now we’re not looking for backward compatibility,” Naffah said. “We’re figuring that existing missions that are utilizing TDRS capability will continue to utilize TDRS for their life. What we’re looking at here is future missions.” One issue will be the use of those commercial frequencies for space-to-space communications. Existing spectrum bands for fixed and mobile satellite services don’t include allocations for space-to-space communications, something that may be addressed at future World Radiocommunication Conferences. “Getting those space-to-space allocations is going to be key to being able to offer an operational service to spacecraft,” he said. The awards will test not just technical feasibility but also approaches for buying services. “While we’re doing the demonstrations, we’re going to be looking at what that acquisition strategy is and what the transition plan is,” he said. The agency’s goal is to have commercial services in operation by 2030 as the TDRS fleet is gradually decommissioned. CSP is following approaches of previous NASA commercial services programs, such as commercial cargo and crew, adopting approaches like the use of funded Space Act Agreements. “All those lessons learned are rolled into what we’re trying to do for CSP and I think it’s really paying off for us,” he said. “I think that will translate very well for the very mature market of satcom.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Space Force plans to conduct in 2023 a “responsive space” demonstration where private launch companies will be challenged to deploy satellites on short notice. The demonstration is part of a congressionally directed effort to create a “tactically responsive launch” program. Congress inserted $50 million in the 2022 defense budget, arguing that DoD should figure out how to use commercial launch services during a conflict to replace damaged satellites or deploy new ones quickly if needed. Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, head of the U.S. Space Systems Command, said the Space Force needs to “understand where we need tactically responsive launch, but more importantly, tactically responsive space.” Speaking April 20 during a C4ISRNET online conference, Guetlein said the Space Force, like the rest of the U.S. military, has to prepare for future conflicts against technologically advanced competitors and will need capabilities for “rapid space replenishment.” The Pentagon predicts that rival nations like China and Russia during a conflict will use space weapons to interfere with or destroy U.S. satellites. A demonstration of responsive launch took place last year when the Space Force f lew the Tactically Responsive Launch-2 (TacRL-2) mission on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The whole process from the start of the mission planning to launch took less than 10 months, said Guetlein. The launch company was given 21 days to integrate the payload and get it to orbit. “Rather than just focusing on the launch problem we’re focusing on the entire launch to capability-on-orbit construct,” he said. “ We’re going to drastically accelerate that capability that we did under TacRL-2 to ensure that we can fill a gap in a time of crisis or conflict.” The $50 million congressional add-on for tactically responsive launch will fund a demonstration not just of launch vehicles but also of capabilities to integrate payloads faster. Companies like Virgin Orbit have actively lobbied for funding for this program, which would boost small launch services providers that don’t require conventional launch facilities and claim they can respond within days or hours. Congress has been critical of DoD for not funding tactically responsive launch. Defense appropriators said the $50 million should be spent on a comprehensive demonstration of responsive mission planning, deployment of satellites, on-orbit operations and delivery of data. Guetlein said the demonstration in 2023 will inform future budget requests and the results will give the Space Force a better grasp of “where technically responsive space can fill a wartime or crisis requirement.”
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration’s decision to ban anti-satellite missile tests had strong backing from the Defense Department as the military’s own guidelines prohibit debris-creating space activities, a senior official said April 20. Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday announced that the United States will not conduct so-called direct-ascent tests where missiles are launched from the ground to target and destroy satellites in orbit. She said the U.S. will push for every nation to join the test ban and establish norms for responsible behavior in space. “This has been a long time coming,” Hill said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies online event. “Space related rules and norms of responsible behavior are in our interest,” Hill said. He noted that DoD’s own space behavior guidelines issued last year require operators to “limit the generation of long-lived debris.” So the vice president’s announcement was a positive step forward, Hill said. All routine space activities generate some debris but anti-satellite (ASAT) tests like those conducted by China in 2007 and by Russia in 2021 create dangerous fragments that threaten all space operations, he said. One of the problems today is that different actors use different definitions of what constitutes dangerous debris, he said. “Even after the recent 2021 test, Russia has claimed that the debris they created was not harmful, despite astronauts and cosmonauts having to shelter [aboard the International Space Station] and despite having caused repeated risks to satellites in low Earth orbit, risks that will continue for years to come.” Hill pushed back on criticism from Republican lawmakers that placing a moratorium on ASAT tests weakens the U.S. posture in space. “Will this norm put the United States at a disadvantage? No, it will not,” said Hill. “This is not disarming, we’re not disarming. This norm is not focused on any technological capability, but on behavior that we want to dissuade and encourage people to not undertake.” “This is not just about space security, but about underpinning the long term ability to continue human exploration in space, to observe the Earth from space, to communicate around the world through space, and to expand new and novel economic uses of space such as in orbit, servicing, assembly and manufacturing,” Hill added. Test ban benefits U.S. Todd Harrison, CSIS senior fellow and defense analyst, said DoD has nothing to lose and a lot to gain by endorsing the ASAT test ban. “Direct ascent is a capability that we don’t really need,” he said. “It’s not that useful to us.” And if that capability were needed for some reason, “we don’t need to test it. We already know we have it. We know it works,” Harrison said. A destructive test makes no sense “even in a conflict,” he said. “I think this is something that we would rarely if ever consider using just because of the debris creation. It is going to hurt us, likely more than it would help in any kind of military conflict.” The benefit of adopting a test moratorium “certainly exceeds any risk or cost involved,” he said. “It allows the U.S. to retake a leadership role on the international stage when it comes to advancing responsible behavior and responsible norms of behavior,” Harrison added. “And it puts China and Russia in particular on the defensive to justify why they won’t implement a moratorium themselves and why they would want to continue testing in this irresponsible way.” Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, called the move to ban missile tests a “very pragmatic starting point.” One reason why international discussions on space weapons have been stagnant for decades is that they’ve been stuck on how to define a space weapon, and how to track, monitor and verify, Weeden said. Direct-ascent tests are “really easy to see and verify,” he said. It’s encouraging that the administration views this as a “starting point of a broader conversation,” Weeden said. If other countries follow along, “then maybe this turns into a broader set of pledges or even a legally binding agreement down the road, because that’s where we need to head.” “And this puts a lot of pressure on Russia and China, who have been saying that they’re against weaponization,” he said. “If they really believe that, then it should be easy for them to sign up to this and put up their own pledges. Because they’re also using space.”
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb has signed a contract to use India’s largest launch vehicle to deploy at least some of its remaining LEO broadband satellites this year, according to a company executive. The U.K.-based megaconstellation startup said in a brief April 20 news release it has reached an agreement with New Space India Limited, Indian space agency ISRO’s commercial arm, that covers launches from Satish Dhawan Space Centre for an undisclosed number of satellites. “The first launch with New Space India is anticipated in 2022 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. The launches will add to OneWeb’s total in-orbit constellation of 428 satellites, 66 per cent of the planned total fleet,” OneWeb said in a statement Chris McLaughlin, chief of government, regulatory affairs and engagement at OneWeb, told SpaceNews the company plans to use India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). He declined to disclose further details. The GSLV Mark 3 is India’s largest rocket and can lift about 9,000-kilograms to LEO, comparable with the Russian Soyuz vehicles that European launch provider Arianespace had been using to deploy OneWeb’s constellation — before they were caught up in sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. India last launched a GSLV Mark 3 in 2019 as part of the country’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar exploration mission. The rocket has roughly double the payload performance of GSLV Mark 2, which hasn’t flown since an August 2021 mission that ended in failure . GSLV Mark 2’s most recent successful launch was in December 2018 , when the rocket deployed ISRO’s GSAT-7A communications satellite. Resuming launches Using the Soyuz 2.1b vehicle, Arianespace had been able to deploy 34-36 OneWeb satellites per launch. OneWeb had planned to use six more Soyuz rockets this year to expand its services globally, but was forced to pause deployment March 4 to find alternative rockets. With just 66% of its planned 648-satellite constellation in orbit, OneWeb has only activated connectivity services in the upper parts of the Northern Hemisphere. OneWeb said March 21 it reached a deal with U.S.-based SpaceX that enables the operator to resume launches this year. However, details including the timing and number of satellites involved have still not been announced. It is unclear whether OneWeb could launch from India before SpaceX in the United States. Last October, well before the collapse of OneWeb’s plans to finish deploying its constellation by mid-2022 using Soyuz, OneWeb announced a non-binding letter of intent with NewSpace India Limited to launch its satellites on GSLV Mark 3, and the medium-lift Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), as soon as 2022. At the time, the agreement was seen as paving the foundations for potentially launching at least a part of OneWeb’s second-generation constellation in the future. India is also developing a small-lift rocket called Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) that, according to an India Today report , is slated to perform its maiden launch between July and September following delays. Although OneWeb is based in London and counts the British government as a shareholder, Indian conglomerate Bharti Global holds the biggest stake in the company. OneWeb said Jan. 20 it had signed a six-year deal to distribute broadband in India through Hughes Communications India Private Ltd (HCIPL), a joint venture between Bharti Global-owned telco Bharti Airtel and U.S.-based Hughes Network Systems. Hughes is a minority shareholder in OneWeb and is building gateways for the operator in India and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Sweden’s Beyond Gravity (formerly RUAG Space), which built the dispensers OneWeb used to deploy spacecraft from Soyuz rockets, said March 21 it is building a new facility to double its satellite dispenser production capabilities. The Swedish company is also building dispensers for Amazon’s Project Kuiper megaconstellation that announced an agreement April 5 to buy up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance.
VICTORIA, British Columbia — Canada’s military will establish a new space division later this year as it further develops its capabilities and skills for space operations. Royal Canadian Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Adamson, the services’s director general for space, said Canada is following its allies who have created similar organizations. The U.S. has a Space Force expected to number 16,000 people at full strength, but Adamson noted that Canada’s version would be much smaller. “It makes logical sense for us to look at standing up a Canadian Space Division that basically generates those forces that will then be able to be employed in operations for army, air force, navy and SOF (special operations forces),” Adamson said. The Canadian Space Division proposal is making its way through various organizations in the Department of National Defence and ultimately will be sent to Defence Minister Anita Anand. “We hope to have sign-off and stand up of the Canadian Space Division at some point in the next six to eight months,” Adamson said. “As we move forward to standing up the division, it’s just going to cement that [space] is critical to what the Canadian Armed Forces does at home and abroad.” The division would be responsible to the Royal Canadian Air Force commander for the generation of space capabilities for force employment missions. While the air force uses the word “division,” the actual numbers of personnel involved are more conservative. “At the moment, we’re probably 180-strong in the space enterprise,” explained Adamson. “We’re hoping to grow the enterprise across the entire Canadian Forces up to 270.” That, however, will include personnel working on space-related tasks in operations centers as well as civilian personnel. At one point, consideration was given to developing a specific space trade within the Canadian Armed Forces. But Adamson said Canada abandoned that idea. “We’ve looked at it, but I don’t think it’s a worthwhile endeavor at this point given the size we plan on,” he explained. “What we are doing is identifying the space cadre in the Canadian Armed Forces. There are certain occupations and jobs that really lend themselves well to coming and working in the space environment.” Adamson said he has been educating senior Canadian commanders about the importance of space and the potential threats to the space-based capabilities they need. The procurement of space capabilities is the purview of other offices within the RCAF and the Department of National Defence organizations. But Adamson said he closely monitors such proposed equipment acquisitions. “Obviously, I’m keenly interested in what’s coming down the pipe to make sure it’s what we need and it’s relevant to what we’re doing,” he said. “When we’re looking at procurement, we want it to be complementary to those other capabilities we are leveraging from our allies.” Adamson said it is important for Canada to determine what space capabilities it needs to develop and which ones it can leverage from allies or become involved in joint projects. “The other piece we need to consider is this incredible surge in commercial capability,” he explained. “They seem to be making even larger leaps and bounds in terms of tech advance than some of the government-funded R&D programs we see around the globe.” If a needed capability can be satisfied through commercial means with the appropriate security measures in place, then that is worth examining, Adamson added. “Some of the projects that we’ve got going along are not yet at a point where we’ve identified what the solution is going to be. [A commercial solution] is possibly one of the options we could look at.” 
Poor weather will delay the return to Earth of four private astronauts from the International Space Station, which could in turn push back the launch of the next set of NASA and ESA astronauts to the station. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour was scheduled to undock from the ISS April 19, setting up a splashdown on the morning of April 20 off the Florida coast to conclude the Ax-1 mission to the station by Axiom Space. NASA announced April 18, though, that the undocking had been delayed to the evening of April 19, with splashdown moved to the afternoon of April 20. The spacecraft’s departure faces further delays. NASA said April 19 the agency, working with Axiom Space and SpaceX, postponed the Crew Dragon departure, again because of weather. The agency and companies “are continuing to assess the next best opportunity for return of the first private astronaut mission to the orbiting laboratory based on weather conditions and space station operations,” NASA said in a brief statement. Axiom Space suggested an extended delay in its own statement. “Due to unfavorable weather conditions for return, tonight’s undocking has been waved off and the crew will be spending a few more days on the space station,” the company said in an April 19 statement. Neither NASA nor Axiom Space have stated when they expect the next opportunity to return to Earth will be. Federal Aviation Administration notices to air missions, or NOTAMs, restrict airspace at several potential splashdown locations on both April 21 and 22. That delayed return could affect the launch of another Crew Dragon on NASA’s Crew-4 mission, currently scheduled for early April 23. NASA officials previously stated they want at least 48 hours between the Ax-1 splashdown and the Crew-4 launch to provide time for post-splashdown reviews of the Crew Dragon’s performance during reentry. “We’ll have time to do a review between that landing and the Crew-4 launch, and we’ll preserve 48 hours in between the landing event and the launch just to make sure the recovery team is ready for the launch and that we review all that data,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at an April 15 briefing. Despite its delayed departure, NASA and Axiom Space held a departure ceremony April 19 for the Ax-1 crew on the ISS. The four private astronauts — mission commander Michael López-Alegría and customers Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy — arrived on the station April 9 for what was originally intended to be an eight-day stay. López-Alegría thanked the four NASA and ESA astronauts currently on the station for being “gracious and patient” with his private astronaut crew. “They’ve shared their time, their wisdom, their food, their stories,” he said. “Especially the first couple of days, we would not have gotten through without them bailing us out on more than one occasion.” “We hope to see a lot more PAM missions into the future,” Tom Marshburn, the NASA astronaut commanding the station, said, using NASA’s terminology for private astronaut missions (PAMs) like Ax-1. “We think we’ve accomplished a lot up here.”
The long-delayed first launch of a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Virginia is now scheduled for late this year, carrying satellites for HawkEye 360. Rocket Lab announced April 19 it signed a contract with HawkEye 360 to deliver 15 satellites over three launches. Two of the launches will be dedicated flights, carrying six satellites each, while the third will carry three satellites on a rideshare mission with other customers. The first of those launches, scheduled for no earlier than December, will be the first Electron launch from the company’s Launch Complex 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia. If that schedule holds, the launch will come three years after the company formally declared the launch pad complete . At that time a U.S. Space Force satellite called Monolith was going to be the first to launch from Wallops, but delays caused that satellite to launch from Rocket Lab’s New Zealand launch site in July 2021 . The delay in the first launch from Wallops has been due primarily to issues getting NASA certification of an autonomous flight termination system. That system, called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU), is required for Electron launches from Wallops. “Encouraged by NASA’s recent progress in certifying its Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU) software, which is required to enable Electron launches from Virginia, Rocket Lab has scheduled the mission from Launch Complex 2 no earlier than December 2022,” Rocket Lab said in a statement. A company spokesperson, asked if that launch date was driven by progress on NAFTU certification or customer readiness, said both were factors. In January, NASA announced it had provided launch companies like Rocket Lab an advanced release of the NAFTU software with the expectation that the system would be certified as soon as February. The agency has not updated progress on NAFTU since then. “My confidence level is high, but it was high last year, too,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said of launching from Wallops this year in an interview in February. “I would be extraordinarily disappointed if NASA doesn’t meet their deliveries to enable us to launch this year.” Rob Rainhart, chief operating officer of Herndon, Virginia-based HawkEye 360, said the 15 satellites that will be launched on Electron will help reduce revisit times for its overall constellation of radio-frequency monitoring satellites, particularly in mid-latitude regions. “We’re excited to be joining the inaugural launch from Virginia, as a Virginia-based company launching our satellites from our home state,” he said in a statement. Rocket Lab’s next mission is scheduled for no earlier than April 22 from New Zealand, carrying 34 satellites for various customers on a dedicated rideshare mission. The launch will be Rocket Lab’s next step toward rocket reuse, as it attempts to catch the booster, descending under parachutes, with a helicopter. A successful recovery would set the company up to attempt to reuse the stage on a future launch.
TAMPA, Fla. — Cloud computing startup Lonestar said April 19 it has contracted commercial lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines to deploy a mini proof-of-concept data center on the moon next year. The hardback novel-sized “data center in a box” is part of a series of increasingly larger payloads that Lonestar plans to install for data storage and edge processing from the lunar surface. According to Lonestar, operating data center capabilities from the moon offers a more secure and environmentally friendly alternative to deploying energy-intensive servers on Earth. The Florida-based venture said its initial hardware is joining IM-2, Intuitive Machines’ second mission to the moon, which aims to take a collection of government and commercial payloads to the lunar south pole aboard its Nova-C lander. Lonestar said it has also signed a contract with Intuitive Machines to test data transfer and storage capabilities during the lander developer’s first mission, IM-1, which will attempt to land Nova-C at Oceanus Procellarum located at the western edge of the near side of the moon. These tests will use a software-only “virtual payload.” IM-1 was previously set to launch in 2021 before launch provider SpaceX pushed the mission into the first quarter of 2022 because of its “ unique mission requirements .” Further delays have pushed this Falcon 9 launch later in 2022. IM-2 is slated to launch on a Falcon 9 in 2023 in what will be Intuitive Machines’ first dedicated launch, after previously targeting the fourth quarter of 2022. An Intuitive Machines spokesperson said more information about the launch windows for IM-1 and IM-2 will be announced “soon.” Funding secured Lonestar has fully funded its IM-1 and IM-2-enabled demos with the backing of early-stage investors Scout Ventures, Seldor Capital and 2 Future Holding, according to CEO and cofounder Chris Stott. Stott told SpaceNews that the venture is also in the “final stages” of closing a $5 million seed funding round for future data centers. Skycorp, a California company focused on orbital logistics, is building the first data center payload for Lonestar’s proof-of-concept service. The 1-kilogram payload will have 16 terabytes (TB) of capacity, according to Stott, who said it has passed a Preliminary Design Review and is heading to Critical Design Review. “Our first lunar data center payload will be integrated on the IM-2 NOVA C once it has passed its Flight Readiness Review (FRR) and finished testing, as per flight milestones expected at four months prior to launch,” he said. While the initial payload will draw power and communications from the lander, Stott said the startup aims to have a standalone data center on the moon in 2026. Before helping to establish Lonestar in 2021, Stott cofounded U.K.-based ManSat and had led the international spectrum regulation specialist for more than two decades. Stott said the startup has “secured S, X, and Ka-Band filings” via the United Kingdom to beam data to and from the moon to support its operations. He said Lonestar hopes to pioneer a moon-based market for data centers to support anticipated demand for commercial, government and academic lunar missions. Although the space-qualified equipment Lonestar plans to use “costs a little more than terrestrial counterparts,” he said it is cheaper to operate and uses “far less power.” “The traditional costs and concerns for a terrestrial data center — power to run it, power to cool it, cost of communications — are quite different [and] almost reversed in space,” he said. “For example, the heat generated by the equipment becomes a positive in space where we work hard to keep our equipment warm. We’re able to draw from green energy sources [solar] in space.” Its first physical payload is a revenue-generating proof-of-concept for undisclosed customers, he said, and is only expected to last for the duration of the IM-2 mission. The Intuitive Machines spokesperson said IM-2’s surface operations are expected to last about 11-14 days. Future Lonestar data centers are being designed to survive the lunar night, Stott said, and aim to match the 15-20-year lifecycle of satellites in geostationary orbit. Moon backups Rather than compete with terrestrial data centers, Lonestar aims to complement them in the disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) market, enabling organizations to back-up critical systems by storing them on the moon. Stott cofounded Lonestar with Mark Matossian, a former CEO of Finnish radar satellite operator Iceye’s U.S. subsidiary and head of data center hardware manufacturing at Google. Former ABN AMRO and Morgan Stanley banker Carol Goldstein and Del Smith, a former senior space business counsel at law firm Dentons, are also cofounders. In December 2021, Lonestar said it worked with British software company Canonical and U.S.-based space technology consolidator Redwire to successfully test its edge data center from the International Space Station. NASA is helping to fund Intuitive Machines’ landers. The Houston-based venture was one of the first to secure funding under the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. CLPS is part of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program that has been helping attract investments in multiple startups with hopes of developing a moon-based economy . Other companies that have announced plans to use Intuitive Machines landers to get to the moon include the Columbia Sportswear Company and time capsule venture Lunaprise .
A study outlining priorities in planetary science for the next decade backs continued efforts to return samples from Mars while recommending NASA pursue missions to the planet Uranus and an icy moon of Saturn. The final report of the planetary science decadal survey , developed by a committee of the National Academies and released April 19, also recommended work on a space telescope to track near Earth objects, a Mars lander to look for evidence of life and a lunar rover to collect samples that would be returned by astronauts. “This report sets out an ambitious but practicable vision for advancing the frontiers of planetary science, astrobiology and planetary defense in the next decade,” Robin Canup, co-chair of the steering committee for the decadal survey and assistant vice president of the Planetary Sciences Directorate at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement about the decadal. The previous planetary science decadal in 2011 recommended as its highest priority large, or flagship, mission, a Mars rover to collect samples to return to Earth. NASA implemented that recommendation as the Mars 2020 mission, whose Perseverance rover is now on Mars collecting samples. The decadal recommends NASA continue with the later phases of Mars Sample Return (MSR), which involve missions being jointly developed with the European Space Agency to take those samples, launch them into orbit around Mars and return them to Earth in the early 2030s. “The highest scientific priority of NASA’s robotic exploration efforts this decade should be completion of Mars Sample Return as soon as is practicably possible with no increase or decrease in its current scope,” the report states. It warned, though, about potential cost growth, citing a current estimate of $5.3 billion for the overall Mars Sample Return effort, a figure NASA had not previously publicized. The cost of MSR “should not be allowed to undermine the long-term programmatic balance of the planetary portfolio,” the report stated, recommending NASA seek a “budget augmentation” from Congress if its costs grow by 20% or more above that estimate. The decadal treated Mars separately from other proposed flagship missions. The report recommended as the top-ranking flagship mission concept the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, which would go into orbit to study the planet, its rings and moons, as well as deploy a probe into the planet’s atmosphere. Uranus has been visited only once by a spacecraft, the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986. The mission “will transform our knowledge of ice giants in general and the Uranian system in particular,” the report stated, calling Uranus “one of the most intriguing bodies in the solar system.” The mission, with an estimated cost of $4.2 billion, could launch as soon as 2031 on a Falcon Heavy or similar heavy-lift vehicle, arriving at Uranus 13 years later using a Jupiter gravity assist. The second-ranked flagship mission the decadal recommended was Enceladus Orbilander, which would fly a spacecraft to Saturn’s moon Enceladus, an icy world with a subsurface ocean and plumes bursting through its crust into space. “Conditions at Enceladus thus allow for direct investigation of the habitability of an ocean world and assessment of whether or not it is inhabited,” the report stated. Enceladus Orbilander would spend a year and a half orbiting Enceladus and sampling those plumes before landing for a two-year mission to study materials for evidence of life. The mission, with an estimated cost of $4.9 billion, could launch in the late 2030s on an SLS or Falcon Heavy with a landing in the early 2050s. The report considered four other flagship mission concepts: a Europa lander, Mercury lander, Neptune orbiter and probe, and a Venus mission that included orbiters, a lander, and a “aerobot” that would operate in the planet’s atmosphere. The decadal survey declined to endorse them because of issues such as cost and technology readiness. New Frontiers, Mars and the moon The decadal survey selected potential destinations for future missions in NASA’s New Frontiers line of competed medium-sized planetary science missions. For the New Frontiers 6 mission late this decade, it proposed concepts that include a mission to a Centaur, a family of icy bodies orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune; a sample return mission from Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt; a comet sample return mission; a spacecraft to perform multiple flybys of Enceladus; a network of lunar landers to collect geophysical data; a Saturn probe; a Titan orbiter; and a mission to perform in situ studies of the atmosphere of Venus. The following New Frontiers competition, likely to take place in the early to mid 2030s, would include those same mission themes with the exception of the one selected for New Frontiers 6, and add a mission to Neptune’s largest moon, Triton. The report also recommended the cost cap for New Frontiers missions be raised to $1.65 billion (in fiscal year 2025 dollars) to reflect experience such as the Dragonfly mission to Titan under development. For Mars, the decadal survey recommended that, once MSR passed the peak of its spending profile in the late 2020s, NASA start work on a lander mission called Mars Life Explorer that would look for evidence of current life on Mars by drilling into ice deposits to search for biosignatures. The lander, described as a “notional mission concept” in the report, would cost $2.1 billion and launch in the mid-2030s. Studies of the moon, the decadal stated, would involve an interplay with human exploration with the Artemis series of crewed landings scheduled to begin as soon as 2025. “The successful integration of science into programs of human exploration has historically been a challenge and remains so for Artemis,” the report stated. “Currently, science requirements do not drive the Artemis capabilities. However, in the committee’s view it is imperative that Artemis support breakthrough, decadal-level science. ” [Emphasis in original.] One way of doing so involves combining robotic and human exploration capabilities. The report endorsed a mission concept called Endurance-A that would send a robotic rover to the moon’s South Pole Aiken Basin on a commercial lander. The rover would travel 2,000 kilometers across the basin and collect 100 kilograms of samples. Those samples would be returned to Earth on a crewed Artemis mission. The $1.9 billion mission would cost a billion dollars less than an alternative that involved both a robotic rover and sample return spacecraft that would have returned only about two kilograms of material. Planetary defense and budgets The planetary science decadal included a review of planetary defense programs at NASA. It supported continued work to achieve a goal set by Congress in 2005 of discovering 90% of near Earth objects (NEOs) at least 140 meters across. It added, though, that NASA should also work to discover as many smaller objects as possible. The decadal backed continued work on the NEO Surveyor mission, calling for a “timely launch” of the space telescope designed to more effectively search for NEOs. That recommendation comes weeks after the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal cut the budget for the mission, pushing back its planned 2026 launch by at least two years. After NEO Surveyor, the decadal recommended NASA pursue a “rapid-response” mission to fly by a near Earth object between 50 and 100 meters across. “Such a mission should assess the capabilities and limitations of flyby characterization methods to better prepare for a short-warning-time NEO threat,” it stated. To accommodate all its recommendations, the decadal survey offered two budget profiles. A “level program” assumes 2% annual growth in NASA’s planetary sciences budget from 2023 through 2032, while the “recommended program” would increase overall spending in the decade by 17.5%. That latter profile “captures the highest priorities of the community as outlined in this report and is both aspirational and inspirational,” the report stated. Both profiles would fully fund Mars Sample Return and the other ongoing flagship-class mission, Europa Clipper, as well as planetary defense, lunar exploration programs and the Discovery line of relatively low-cost planetary missions. The recommended program provides additional funding for research and the New Frontiers line of missions. The recommended program would fully fund the Uranus flagship mission for launch in the early 2030s and start work on the Enceladus Orbilander, while the level program would push back the Uranus mission to the late 2030s and not provide any funding for the Enceladus mission. “In summary, the reductions associated with the Level Program would result in a less balanced portfolio with a significantly lower science return compared to the Recommended Program,” the report stated. Like the astrophysics decadal survey released last November, the planetary science decadal survey included a “state of the profession” assessment. The report recommended steps to gather more demographic information about the planetary science community, broaden opportunities and address bias, such as having NASA implement codes of conduct for its missions and for conferences it participates in. “While scientific understanding is the primary motivation for what our community does, we must also work to boldly address issues concerning our community’s most important resource, the people who propel its planetary science and exploration missions,” said Philip Christensen, an Arizona State University planetary science professor and other co-chair of the decadal survey steering committee. “Ensuring broad access and participation in the field is essential to maximizing scientific excellence and safeguarding the nation’s continued leadership in space exploration.”
NASA expects to make awards this spring in the next phase of its effort to transition from operating its decades-old network of communications satellites to purchasing commercial services. The Communications Services Project (CSP) completed its first phase in 2021 by determining long-term communications needs for missions currently served by the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation of NASA-owned satellites that have provided service since the 1980s. NASA is now evaluating proposals for demonstrations of commercial services to replace TDRS. Eli Naffah, CSP formulation manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, said in an interview during the Satellite 2022 conference March 22 that the agency expected to make multiple awards this spring. He declined to detail the number and size of the awards, citing the blackout period in the ongoing procurement. “We’ll be looking to do those demonstrations that will kick off this year and occur over the next three to four years,” he said. “We’ll be demonstrating the end-to-end capability that we would ultimately be able to go out and procure for NASA missions.” The awards are intended to demonstrate that commercial satellites can handle communications services currently performed through TDRS. However, those demonstrations will use different frequencies than TDRS satellites, which are set aside for space research. “Right now, we’re not looking for backward compatibility,” Naffah said. “We’re figuring that existing missions that are utilizing TDRS capability will continue to utilize TDRS for their life. What we’re looking at here is future missions.” Those future missions will be designed to communicate using commercial frequencies, allowing them to work with commercial satellites. One issue, he said, is that existing spectrum bands for fixed and mobile satellite services don’t include allocations for space-to-space communications, something that may be addressed at future World Radiocommunication Conferences. “Getting those space-to-space allocations is going to be key to being able to offer an operational service to spacecraft,” he said. Alternatives include optical communications that don’t have spectrum limitations and hybrid solutions that offer a mix of direct-to-Earth and space-based relay capabilities, he said. “We’re reaching out to industry and saying, ‘Based on what you can do and what you want to do, tell us what you want to invest in and we’ll invest with you and demonstrate those capabilities.’” The CSP demonstrations are intended to do more than just technical feasibility. They will also explore the best acquisition approaches to buying such services. “While we’re doing the demonstrations, we’re going to be looking at what that acquisition strategy is and what the transition plan is,” he said. Those acquisitions could begin even before the demonstrations are completed, with the goal of having services in operation by the end of the decade. Another element of the demonstrations is to get NASA missions that have been working with TDRS for decades to get used to a commercial alternative. “I think probably the biggest obstacle we face is working with the NASA culture, making sure that we build confidence with the NASA missions that this can be done,” he said. “We’re going to need to socialize with the missions and build confidence that commercial services will be robust and reliable.” CSP has the advantage of using lessons learned from past NASA commercialization initiatives, including the ongoing Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program to support the establishment of commercial space stations. That includes using multiple funded Space Act Agreements for the demonstration phase of the program, similar to what NASA did for commercial cargo and crew. “All those lessons learned are rolled into what we’re trying to do for CSP and I think it’s really paying off for us,” he said. “NASA has done this successfully with industry before, and we’re doing it now with CLD. I think that will translate very well for the very mature market of satcom.” 
SEOUL, South Korea — India’s space agency is examining a large metal ring and a cylinder-like object that fell into rural western India April 2, with a preliminary investigation suggesting they could be parts of a Chinese space rocket’s upper stage that reentered the atmosphere that day. Two scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) conducted the onsite investigation in Sindewahi on April 15. They tentatively labeled the objects as parts of a Chinese Long March rocket, according to local reports. A formal investigation is underway. The metal ring is reportedly two to three meters in diameter and weighs more than 40 kilograms. The cylinder-like object is about a half meter in diameter. Space-watcher Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tweeted April 4 that the ring was consistent with a piece of China’s Long March 3B rocket. In another tweet, McDowell said the crashed objects could be parts of the third stage of Long March 3B serial number Y77, which was launched in February 2021. China remains silent on the reentry incident. “They [two ISRO scientists] took photographs and videos of the objects and interacted with the Ladbori village people about the objects,” Suresh Chopne, an NGO activist who observed the investigation, told local English newspaper Hindustan Times . “As per their discussions, these objects are believed to be space debris from a Chinese Long March rocket. What type of fuel was there in the cylinders can be said only after it is checked by the laboratory.” The objects were remnants of what appeared to be a meteor shower in the night sky of western India, April 2. Video footage shows a blazing streak of light cutting through the night sky. 
 “We were preparing a community feast, when the sky blazed with the red disc, which fell with a bang on an open plot in the village,” a villager told The Times of India . “People ran to their home fearing (an) explosion and remained inside for nearly half an hour.” There were no reports of injuries or property damage. ISRO confirmed the crash of “a metal ring and a cylinder-like object” in an April 5 statement . If the objects are confirmed to be parts of a Chinese rocket, it would be the second time in less than a year that debris from a Chinese rocket made a troubling re-entry. In May 2021 , remnants from the roughly 30-meter-long, five-meter-wide core stage of China’s Long March 5B rocket fell into the Indian Ocean after days of speculation — and China’s silence — about where the debris would land. NASA criticized China for “failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.” One year earlier , debris from another Long March 5B fell onto at least two villages in the Ivory Coast, following an uncontrolled re-entry of the rocket’s core stage. In November 2019 , a spent stage of Long March 3B fell near the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China, destroying a house. 
NASA managers said a rollback of the Space Launch System from its launch pad after three truncated countdown tests will allow them to address issues both at the pad and with the vehicle, but that it was too early to predict what it would do to the schedule for the vehicle’s first launch. NASA announced late April 16 that it would roll back the SLS from Launch Complex 39B to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) . Doing so, the agency said then, would give them time to improve the supply of nitrogen gas at the pad that caused issues with two of the three tanking tests. The announcement came as something of a surprise, since at a briefing a little more than 24 hours earlier, NASA managers expressed optimism about finding the source of a hydrogen leak that scrubbed the third countdown attempt April 14. They predicted then that they could make another attempt to fuel the core stage with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and go through a countdown as soon as April 21. The need to correct the nitrogen gas issue at the pad prompted the change in plans, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director, in an April 18 call with reporters. There were problems with the supply of the gas both at the start of propellant loading operations and also after the scrub, when the core stage was drained. “When we looked at the timelines associated with that and we took that new data,” she said of the nitrogen upgrades, “it did cause us to look at what we could get done at the pad and did it make sense to stay at the pad.” The decision, she said, was to move the SLS back to the VAB while crews upgrade the nitrogen system. That upgrade involves bringing into operation new equipment at a facility just outside the Kennedy Space Center. “Those are already at the plant. They’re already installed. It’s just a matter of tying them in,” she said. That work doesn’t affect other sites at the center, like neighboring Launch Complex 39A, that also use nitrogen gas for launch operations. The new equipment provides a “more robust capability” for providing the larger volumes of nitrogen gas needed for SLS applications such as purging umbilical lines, said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development. Agency officials did not identify the company that provides the nitrogen used at the center, referring to it as only the “nitrogen supplier.” However, Air Liquide operates a plant just outside the KSC gates that generates nitrogen that is fed by pipeline to various launch pads and other center facilities, according to a NASA website . Workers are now preparing to roll back the SLS and its mobile launch platform to the VAB, with the move from the pad to the building tentatively scheduled for April 26, depending on weather. Once in the VAB, technicians will work to both fix the hydrogen leak found in the April 14 test and fix a faulty helium check valve in the rocket’s upper stage. Blackwell-Thompson said initial checks at the pad failed to identify the source of the hydrogen leak in mobile launcher. Additional work to locate the leak will wait until after the vehicle returns to the VAB. How long the SLS will remain the VAB remains to be seen. A “quick turn” option would focus on repairing the hydrogen leak and replacing the check valve before rolling back out to the pad for another wet dress rehearsal. A second option would add some additional work that NASA needs to complete before SLS is ready for launch that had been planned for after the wet dress rehearsal. A third option would get the vehicle ready for flight in the VAB, then roll out for a wet dress rehearsal followed by the Artemis 1 launch itself. NASA officials said they had yet to decide which option to pursue or schedule implications of those options. Blackwell-Thompson said it was too early to estimate a minimum amount of time the SLS would remain in the VAB before rolling back out. The first option would likely have the vehicle in the VAB “in the weeks kind of timeframe,” she said. The rollback, though, makes it unlikely the SLS would be ready to launch in a window that runs from June 6 to 16. “The earlier June window is challenged at this point,” Whitmeyer said. The next window opens June 29 and runs through July 12, with a cutout between July 2 and 4. He emphasized, though, that NASA would carry out a full-scale tanking test and practice countdown before attempting a launch. “We’re absolutely going to do a wet dress rehearsal,” he said. “It’s just a matter of what’s the right time and what’s the right way to do that.”
WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris announced April 18 that the United States will ban direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile tests that create orbital debris. “These tests are dangerous and we will not conduct them,” Harris said in a speech at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The self-imposed U.S. ban on destructive anti-satellite weapons tests is an effort to start an international push to develop “new norms for responsible behavior in space,” she said. Harris called on every nation to do the same. Tests like the one Russia carried out in November 2021 and China conducted in 2007 are “one of the most pressing threats to the security and sustainability of space,” she said. The destruction of space objects through direct-ascent ASAT missile testing is “reckless and irresponsible.” These tests are intended to develop anti-satellite weapons that would be used to “deny the United States our ability to use our space capabilities,” she said. Harris chairs the National Space Council, a White House-led interagency group that coordinates civil, commercial, and national security space activities. During her visit to Vandenberg on Monday accompanied by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, Harris was briefed at the Combined Space Operations Center on U.S. Space Command activities. She also met with a group of service members and their families at a closed event. Russia’s Nov. 15 missile strike that destroyed its own defunct satellite in low Earth orbit was widely condemned as dangerous and irresponsible for creating a large cloud of at least 1,500 pieces of debris that will endanger orbiting satellites and human spaceflight for years to come. Harris noted that there are still 2,800 pieces of debris from China’s 2007 test. Ending destructive ASAT tests should be part of a “shared understanding of what constitutes safe and responsible space activities,” Harris said. This is important given the ever-growing number of states and non-governmental entities that rely on satellites that are increasingly in danger of colliding with orbiting debris. These missile tests not only endanger space exploration and economic activities but also increase the risk of armed conflict, Harris warned. “Without clear norms we face unnecessary risk in space,” she said. The United States will work with commercial industry and allies to “lead in the development of new measures that contribute to the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of space activities,” Harris added. “Through this new commitment and other actions, the United States will demonstrate how space activities can be conducted in a responsible, peaceful, and sustainable manner.” Decision draws praise and criticism Space policy experts hailed Harris’s announcement as a necessary step to keep outer space safe and sustainable. “I’m really excited about this announcement because it’s not just the U.S. committing to refrain from these behaviors, it’s about trying to establish international norms for responsible behavior in space and really encouraging other countries to join in,” said Robin Dickey, space policy expert at the Aerospace Corp. “It’s becoming more and more clear every day that there is a higher level of national and international interest in norms of behavior,” Dickey said. “And that’s partially because there are ever more actors, commercial and national, that are vastly expanding the range of activities in space.” Although the ASAT testing ban is self-imposed and cannot be enforced on other countries, it’s an important step because the United States is the world’s biggest space power, noted Marlon Sorge, principal engineer at Aerospace’s Space Innovation Directorate. “Given all of the activity the U.S. has in space, it is a bigger problem for us than anybody else,” he said. “And getting this to stop is important even more so now, because we have all of this commercial activity that’s going on.” Sorge said a ban on ASAT tests would benefit everyone, including China and Russia due to their increased activity in space. Their own proposed large constellations would be particularly vulnerable to debris, said Sorge. Harris’ announcement, meanwhile, was met with criticism from Republicans. Colorado’s Rep. Doug Lamborn, the top Republican House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on strategic forces, called the decision to stop ASAT missile tests “a unilateral, voluntary, and completely unnecessary commitment.” “This decision creates more opportunities for China and Russia to hold our assets in space at risk while they continue to field ASAT technologies and create hazardous space debris,” Lamborn said in a statement. ”An American commitment to not conduct ASAT tests creates a false equivalence between our carefully calibrated behavior in space and the reckless actions of China and Russia.” Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement following Harris’ announcement: “This unilateral decision mistakes activity for achievement. It does nothing to deter our adversaries in an escalating war fighting domain. In fact, I’m worried it will have the opposite effect. I want answers from the administration on what exactly is being done to protect our national security. Simply declaring what they won’t do isn’t deterrence.” Dickey pointed out that the ban announced by Harris is “a very specific commitment and not a “broad ban on ASAT weapons.” “We’re not even talking about a broad ban on ASAT testing,” said Dickey. “It’s a unilateral commitment to not conduct destructive direct ascent missile tests, which is a specific use case.” She noted this is not a case of the United States imposing a behavior on others. “It’s an attempt to lead by example, and demonstrate we’re willing to make this commitment ourselves and then encourage others to follow.” The Secure World Foundation in a statement said Harris’ declaration “solidifies what has been implicit U.S. policy since 2008 and reinforces recent efforts to promote responsible behavior in space.” SWF said it “welcomes and applauds this action and its positive implications for the long-term sustainability of space activities.”
TAMPA, Fla. — German satellite startup Kleo Connect’s majority shareholders are challenging a deal they say minority investors illegally devised to give its spectrum to Rivada Networks, which plans to use the frequencies for its own low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation. U.S.-based technology firm Rivada announced plans March 21 to use Kleo as a springboard for deploying 600 broadband satellites after acquiring EightyLEO, a European investment vehicle with a minority stake in the German startup. Rivada CEO Declan Ganley told SpaceNews in an interview his company took spectrum rights away from Kleo’s majority Chinese shareholders by separately buying a majority of Trion Space, a Liechtenstein shell company that controls the filings. However, a shareholder dispute around how this arrangement came together has split Kleo into Chinese and European factions, each with competing claims to the LEO project’s future. Rivada bought 85% of Trion from Liechtenstein entrepreneur Michael Frommel. The rest of the shell company is held by Chinese investors through their majority ownership of Kleo that, according to Ganley, is mostly held through an investment vehicle with ties to China’s government. Kleo’s Chinese and European factions have strikingly similar websites outlining plans for deploying satellite networks : the original Kleo-connect.com domain that lists directors Shawn Shey and Min Luo representing Chinese interests, and Kleoconnect.com with Severin Meister and Clemens Kaiser on the European side. In a news release published on China’s Kleo-connect.com, the Chinese faction said a Feb. 28 meeting between Trion, Kaiser and Meister “secretly and illegally represented the company, violated the governance and contractual obligations of the company, and tried to lay the grounds for an infiltration of the KLEO project by RIVADA Networks.” The news release said Kleo minority investor EightyLEO was seeking to engineer a “hostile takeover” of Kleo by Rivada at the expense of majority shareholders that have invested heavily in the startup. “[Kaiser and Meister] have no right whatsoever to use the company’s name, business model and IP rights,” states the Chinese faction’s Kleo-connect.com site, adding that it is “currently pursuing all legal remedies against this attack.” China-controlled Kleo-connect.com declined to comment. Europe’s Kleoconnect.com site says: “We established this site because one side in this dispute has seized control of KLEO Connect’s web site and seeks to use it to create the appearance that their side has prevailed before the courts have even had a chance to weigh in.” In an April 9 news release , the European faction said shareholder representatives on both sides had sought to revoke the appointment of all four managing directors during a March 21 meeting. In a temporary injunction March 31, it said the Munich I Regional Court had ordered Kleo to continue treating Europe’s Meister and Kaiser as managing directors without restriction. “This applies until a decision is made on the merits of the case, which may take several years,” stated the news release, which added: “The Chinese side has applied for several similar and in some cases more far-reaching preliminary injunctions, but these have all been rejected by the courts (so far).” Ganley said Rivada has made an offer to buy out the Chinese investors to get a clean break from the group, although he is confident its majority control of Trion means its constellation plans can go ahead regardless. On March 4, former Kleo CEO Mark Rigolle told Liechtenstein newspaper Wirtschaft regional that disputes with its Chinese investors had stalled the venture’s development. “Nothing is going forward, decisions are being blocked by the Chinese side, the entire technical team and engineers recently left the company,” Rigolle said. “They are all behind the project in principle, but no progress is possible due to the dispute between the investors.” Asked whether the disputes stem from China seeking greater control of the constellation plans, he said “it seems that the Chinese side wants to use the European shell to launch a Chinese satellite project.” Rigolle, a former CEO of O3b Networks (now part of SES) and failed LEO startup LeoSat, said “a radical change in the shareholder structure is the only way to successfully implement the project.” Brian Carney, head of corporate communications at Rivada, said Trion was in danger of losing its spectrum filings before it bought a majority of the shell company. Although Kleo brought those filings “into use” April 2020 with two satellites that were built and launched by China-based companies, Carney said Trion had a March 3 deadline to file an acceptable business plan to the Liechtenstein regulator. “We stepped in, bought the company, and saved the project,” he said. Rivada has issued a request for information to space vendors amid plans to start launching a constellation of Ka-band satellites with “gigabit speeds” from 2024. The company said it has set up a German subsidiary called Rivada Space Networks to spearhead the efforts. Rivada Space Networks aims to leverage its parent’s spectrum sharing and other terrestrial networking solutions to give it an edge over OneWeb, Telesat Lightspeed and other LEO startups also planning to sell capacity to enterprise and government customers on a wholesale basis. Rivada has to launch 10% of its planned 600 satellites by September 2023 to keep its frequencies under regulatory rules that govern the spectrum, and Carney said it has not decided whether it needs to seek a waiver. Existing Rivada shareholders have committed to financing some of the project costs, he said, adding: “We are in active discussions with financiers and are not prepared yet to reveal projected costs, except to say it will be in the billions.” Despite giving Kleo’s Chinese shareholders what he feels is a fair offer, Ganley said he does not expect they will let Rivada buy them out. He anticipates “a whirlpool of litigation for years,” but said “it is amputated from the rest of” the company’s constellation plans. “From an investor standpoint, from our shareholders’ standpoint, the focus is on execution and getting the Rivada Space Networks operational and constellation operating, and that amputated situation is not going to affect that … it can’t,” he said.
WASHINGTON – The Pentagon could get far more bang for its missile-defense buck if all the sensor satellites located in different orbits could talk to each other and share data via optical links, according to a proposal floated by Lockheed Martin to create a multi-orbit data transport network in space. Data collected from every orbit is needed to defend against advanced ballistic and hypersonic missiles, said Eric Brown, senior director of military space mission strategy at Lockheed Martin. “You can imagine a chain all the way from early warning through intercept without ever having to go to the ground. That’s kind of the vision that we have, but that requires connecting all the various orbital regimes,” he told SpaceNews. DoD is spending billions of dollars on missile-warning space sensors located in geostationary (GEO) and polar orbits, but there are no plans to connect them with new constellations that DoD plans to field in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO), Brown said. In DoD the term “data transport layer” is associated with the LEO constellation planned by the Space Development Agency . To defend the U.S. and allies from newer types of hypersonic missiles developed by China and Russia, SDA designed an architecture of low-orbiting sensor satellites that would identify and track these threats. The tracking satellites would determine the location of an incoming hypersonic missile, for example, and pass that information to a constellation of data-relay satellites – known as the transport layer – that the agency also plans to field in LEO . The location data of the incoming missile would move through space via the transport layer and then downlinked to radar and weapon systems on the ground or at sea so they can try to intercept the incoming missile. Low-orbiting tracking satellites are needed, said SDA, because heat-seeking sensors in GEO would not be able to detect low-flying hypersonic missiles, as the heat signature dissipates when the target flies lower in the atmosphere. Lockheed Martin is one of the prime contractors selected to build SDA’s transport layer and also is the prime contractor for the Space Force’s new geostationary missile-warning satellites so “we are eager to see that be successful,” said Brown. “But SDA’s layer doesn’t solve the data transport needs at medium Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit, and the real power of deterrence is when you connect all of the various assets.” The Space Force is looking to deploy missile-warning satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO) to add another layer of defense. The ability to use data from multiple assets for missile defense data, known as “tip and cue,” means data is passed from one asset to another to keep awareness of a target. For Lockheed Martin’s concept to work, satellites would need optical crosslinks. SDA requires all its transport and tracking satellites to have laser communications terminals. But GEO satellites do not, so they send missile warning data directly to the ground. “A future GEO missile warning system would need optical links,” said Brown. “We are exploring these options and are working with customers to evaluate paths” to incorporate planned satellites into a space data transport architecture, he said. MEO layer could be GPS To fill the gap in medium Earth orbit until new satellites are fielded, Lockheed Martin is proposing adding data-relay payloads and optical crosslinks to MEO-based GPS satellites, which also are made by the company. Another option is to partner with a commercial company that offers data transport services in MEO, Brown said. “There are multiple commercial operators that have a MEO capability.” The SDA transport layer is an important “first step,” said Brown. “But the recognition is that it’s not going to be sufficient and we want to be able to bring all those other assets.” Every orbit has benefits and drawbacks, he said, “so relying on any one of them independently becomes problematic.” Brown said the data transport network could be applied to other use cases besides missile defense, such as the distribution of intelligence and battle management data. He said the company has conducted “extensive modeling, simulation and analysis of the entire transport tapestry construct – which includes government and other industry partners’ capabilities – to help bring multi-orbital communications to life.”
On the eve of the release of the planetary science decadal survey likely to place a decreased emphasis on Mars, scientists and NASA officials are planning how to continue exploration of the planet with less expensive missions. The National Academies is scheduled to release the latest decadal survey for planetary sciences April 19 . The report will set priorities for planetary science and astrobiology missions for 2023 through 2032. The previous planetary science decadal survey, released in 2011, recommended as its top priority for large, or flagship, missions a rover that could cache samples for later return to Earth. NASA ultimately implemented that recommendation as Mars 2020, with the Perseverance rover currently collecting those samples. Agency officials, speaking at a conference on low-cost Mars mission options in Pasadena, California, in late March, acknowledged it’s unlikely another flagship-class Mars mission will be the top priority of the new decadal survey. Even if it was, the expense of the ongoing Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign to return the samples Perseverance is caching makes it unlikely the agency could afford another large mission this decade. “In the coming years, MSR is going to be the top priority for NASA relative to Mars and it seems unlikely that the next large-scale mission that the decadal recommends will have Mars as a target,” said Eric Ianson, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, in remarks that opened the meeting. “As such, there will not be the budget to develop a flagship-level mission on the order of Perseverance or MRO,” the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission launched in 2005. Another factor, he added, was NASA’s push to send humans to Mars as soon as the late 2030s. “Large science missions are probably not going to be the number-one priority,” he said. Beyond MSR, the only other large Mars mission that NASA had announced was the International Mars Ice Mapper (I-MIM), an orbiter equipped with a radar to look for subsurface ice deposits of interest to both scientists and human exploration planners. The mission would include contributions from Canada, Italy and Japan, with NASA primarily responsible for mission management. However, just before the conference, NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal zeroed out funding for I-MIM . “Due to the need to fund higher priorities, including to cover cost growth expected from the Mars Sample Return mission, the budget terminates NASA financial support for the Mars Ice Mapper,” the agency’s budget document stated. At the conference, Rick Davis, NASA program executive for I-MIM, pressed ahead with a presentation about the mission, including how it could incorporate solar electric propulsion and also deploy a communications relay in Mars orbit to support other missions. “We have some programs that are overrunning and they’re very high priority programs. That’s the driver for the budget submit,” he said when asked about the budget proposal, adding it would be up to Congress to restore funding for the program. “The prime driver was overall stress on the budget for multiple projects,” Ianson said. “It’s not unprecedented for the budget to propose a cut to a mission and then Congress puts it back in.” He sounded skeptical, though, that I-MIM could be revived in that way. “It depends on what kind of advocacy there is,” he said, noting successful efforts to restore funding for astrophysics and Earth science missions. “It’s not as clear to me that a strong advocacy for Ice Mapper exists in Congress.” At the conference, many were pinning their hopes on smaller missions, both orbiters and landers, that could address key scientific issues. Recent studies, one by the Mars Architecture Strategy Working Group (MASWG) and another by a committee organized by Caltech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies, concluded that low-cost Mars missions were both feasible and useful. Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado, who chaired the MASWG study, said at the conference that there was potential for missions with a total lifecycle cost of between $100 million and $300 million. “We think missions in this range have the potential to do outstanding science,” he said. There are a couple recent examples, he noted, of such missions. Hope, the Mars orbiter by the United Arab Emirates launches in 2020, has an estimated cost of $200 million. NASA is also funding a smallsat mission to Mars called ESCAPADE with a cost cap of $55 million, scheduled to launch in 2024. Rob Lillis of the University of California Berkeley, principal investigator for ESCAPADE, cautioned at the conference that his mission might not be applicable to other concepts for low-cost Mars missions. The mission, to study the interaction of the solar wind with the Martian atmosphere, can use low-cost instruments that do not require high data rates. The mission also won a commitment from Rocket Lab, which is supplying the Photon buses for the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft , to stick to the cost cap for the mission. “$55 million is too low for most realistic missions,” he said. “It’s not the right cost cap for Mars missions in general.” Jakosky agreed. “The MASWG committee thought that opportunities would really begin to open up to do important science at around $100 million,” he said. Within a projected cost range of $100–300 million, “we have a wide range of capabilities and a wide range of boxes that we can fit in.”
SES announced plans March 22 to buy U.S. government satcoms provider Leonardo DRS as demand for connectivity in the defense market grows in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, the war is also adding more economic pressures on a space industry still grappling with a pandemic that has clogged up supply chains, delayed satellite projects and disrupted skilled workforces worldwide. “The Russian invasion in Ukraine is going to create a fair amount of stress in the economies of the world,” says SES CEO Steve Collar. “None of this is necessarily unheard of, but I think the number of global issues that will impact our industry is probably growing.” SES expects to deploy 14 satellites for its multi-orbit constellation in 2022 amid this uncertain climate. These include the first three satellites for O3b mPower, a next-generation constellation aiming to bring significantly faster speeds to SES’s O3b medium Earth orbit (MEO) network. SpaceX planned to start launching 11 Boeing-built O3b mPower satellites in 2021, and then the first quarter of 2022 before another delay pushed the first batch into the second quarter. SpaceNews spoke with Collar about how the industry is weathering shifting schedules as geopolitical issues add more complexities for the year ahead. The dates of individual launches have shifted, but getting the constellation up and operational and serving customers by the end of this year is very much on track. We’re at a time when everyone else is slipping. If we are up and operational by the end of this year, we’ll have our second-generation constellation delivering services and generating revenue as other constellations and some of the big GEOs are struggling. It’s tough. If you look at the world in general, there are all sorts of industries having supply chain issues, and I think that’s where a lot of the struggles are. Our vendors have done a good job and managed pretty well. We’ve got SES-17 on the way to orbit as well, after successfully launching that last year. Relative to the rest of the industry over the Americas, I think we will be there first versus the other big, Ka-band GEOs. Our mPower, SES-17 and C-band projects all go into service this year. I think it’s 14 satellites in total that we are launching during 2022. Just 2022 would make us the fourth largest satellite operator — and for the time being, they are all on track. It’s hard to say because it’s not fully resolved. It’s going to impact chipset manufacturers, so terminals are something we’re laser-focused on. We’re working with Gilat and ST Engineering, and they’re doing a good job in maintaining schedules. With vendor diversity, even where one might have a challenge, the other can step in. So I think [the effects of the pandemic are] not entirely done, and we, like others, will need to manage that. But we’re not big volume. High throughput, high flexibility services are where we differentiate ourselves. We are not residential broadband, so we don’t have to build tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of terminals. I think that helps us. We’ll still see it in 2022, although I don’t think it’ll be so much on the service providers. Cruise is now kind of back to pretty much full sailing. Aviation is probably not back to pre-pandemic levels, but on the upward track. I think the impact will be around the supply chain, which reflects what’s happening in the broader tech space. It’s not just satellite. My guess is yes. I think COVID and the associated implications will continue to have local impacts. Whether it be local lockdowns or supply chain challenges, I think we’re also going to start seeing the impact of inflation. Companies are also going to have to manage some of these geopolitical issues. The Russian invasion in Ukraine is going to create a fair amount of stress in the economies of the world. None of this is necessarily unheard of, but I think the number of global issues that will impact our industry is probably growing. No, we haven’t, but we’ve certainly increased our sensitivity there because these are sophisticated space actors, and we have to be aware of and thoughtful about those threats. We’ve been pretty proactive. We have people in Ukraine, so our priority was making sure they were safe. We engaged very strongly with the European Union and the Luxembourg government to make sure that there were clear sanctions against channels carrying Russian propaganda. That was important to us so we could take action against those channels in a clear, certain, and supportable way. We’ve implemented humanitarian solutions, and we’re making our resources available to support the defense of Ukraine. It’s valued at more than $100 million, but I think in reality it could be several times that. It’s multi-orbit, so it includes O3b mPower, and having access to the Indian market with O3b is something that we’ve not achieved until now. And we are also doing it with one of the largest and most disruptive telecommunications operators in the world. It’ll be tremendously beneficial for our business outside India because we will learn huge amounts as we integrate O3b mPower with the terrestrial capabilities that Jio has. We’ve been having this conversation with Jio for the last 18 months, so it’s sort of a happy circumstance that, at the same time, the regulatory environment in India is opening. To be honest, I wouldn’t link those things too closely. The synergy in terms of how SES and Jio think about the market was there anyway. We have mPower deals elsewhere that we expect to be able to announce in the next six to 12 months in the various segments that we’re operating in that have, I would say, similar weight and significance, but this one is unique. It’s difficult to imagine a more European company than SES, so we feel like we have a very strong role to play and a voice at the table as this space capability gets developed. In a sad way, the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows the strategic importance of space and the need for Europe to have a sovereign space capability that it can use and protect Europe should there be situations like this in the future where terrestrial networks can be interrupted. I think having an independent capability will ultimately be the thing that drives this project to happen. There’s still a huge amount of work to be done — a lot of architectural work, trade-offs and partnerships to be formed. The most exciting thing about this project is there’s a 20-30 year vision. This is not a quick fix, although there’s definitely an element of starting with services as soon as possible. There’s plenty of discussion about whether and how OneWeb can play a role. If Europe intends to develop its own LEO constellation, which I think is important in the context of an overall multi-orbit strategy, I’m not sure the presence of OneWeb or not has too much of a bearing on that strategic need and capability. We’ve always felt very good about how we line up against the competitive positioning in the industry. Mainly because we’re very differentiated from anyone else. If you look at the service that OneWeb can deliver, regardless of the current struggles they’re having in access to launch, they are very different from those we’ve targeted. We’re the right fit for a whole bunch of government services, for cruise, cloud, edge connect — these sorts of services. We are not a good solution, deliberately, for low-end, contented, residential broadband-type services. We are more than happy to leave that market to others. We are more focused on services where we think we have a meaningful advantage. I think that’s why you see four of the five largest cruise operators signing up, a lot of interest from government, the partnership with Microsoft — all of this suggests that we have something very different from anyone else out there. And it helps that we’re also going to be up first. We’re going to be up with our second-generation services before pretty much anyone else is up with their first. It doesn’t rule anything in or out, but I think it says that there are great synergies between our video and network businesses. Video delivers this fantastic visibility of revenues. It’s highly profitable. The majority of our cash flows are still generated in our video business. We see real longevity there, but it’s not the growth engine, which is networks. And so, we are using the cash flows coming from video to make sure that we’re investing in what will be the growth engine for the next decade. And when we think about our cloud strategy, that now straddles our video and our networks businesses. We looked at whether it made sense for us to separate these business units a couple of years ago. We decided it didn’t make sense, and we’re seeing the fruits of that decision now being born out in the performance of the two areas of the business. Our customers have, in general, done well over the pandemic. The global trend shows a return to linear, shared experience and more video consumed. Now, it’s definitely the case that video is being consumed on multiple platforms, not just the TV in the living room, but also on tablets, mobiles and so on. So having an ecosystem is important, and that’s something we take great pride in over in Germany, where we’ve got 50% of the market connected to SES satellites and two million subscribers on HD+. In 2021, we delivered HD+ ToGo, where subscribers can take their content on their mobile devices for a small incremental fee. And we’ve also just announced that we’ve launched HD+ at home [a German internet-based streaming service called HD+ IP], which gives us access to the other 17-18 million households that are not currently satellite households. I think satellite as an anchor in that broader media ecosystem is really important. Satellite remains the best way to transmit HD programming to millions of people simultaneously — it’s the cheapest and, by the way, the most environmentally friendly, which I think is not talked about very much. I saw a stat that said a movie stream is equivalent to boiling the kettle five times. Over the next five to 10 years, more companies will aggregate content at the edge of the network, and there’s no better way of aggregating than DTH. The other thing is, people watching the Super Bowl terrestrially were watching it typically 90 seconds behind those watching over satellite. The whole concept of watching sport is that it’s a shared experience; that I’m watching it not only in a room or in a pub or whatever with my mates, but I’m also texting others. Because we’re all connected, the shared experience now goes way beyond the people that you’re immediately with, and you want to be watching at the same time. If there’s this big difference between a streamed game and a DTH game, I think it’s a problem. So there are some very important enablers and trends that will keep satellite relevant in the video environment. Does that mean it’s going to be as big as it was 10-15 years ago? Probably not, but I think it will be as profitable. We’ll continue to drive costs out of the business. We’re going to replace 19.2 degrees with two satellites rather than four, and that means 50% capex efficiency, so from a profitability standpoint the business looks great. I think we will continue to see low single-digit declines in video, but we feel very good about the overall picture, certainly for SES and our neighborhoods. It has been a complicated period for our networks business. The good news is I think we’re coming out of it. The long-lasting impact will be everyone needing to be connected everywhere, wherever they are, and this emphasis on connectivity programs will remain in all countries of the world. Governments also have a big impact on connectivity for defense. This COVID period, and this instability in the world at the moment and the strategic importance of space, is one of those large megatrends that will influence our industry over the next five to 10 years. That will drive growth in the commercial satellite sector coming out of the pandemic as we look to leverage some of our capabilities for sovereignty, defense, border security and the like. This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
WASHINGTON – Travis Langster, vice president and general manager of COMSPOC, will be leaving the company to join the Defense Department as principal director of DoD space policy. COMSPOC , previously known as the Commercial Space Operations Center, located outside of Philadelphia, tracks and analyzes orbital data and provides space traffic management services. The company announced Langster’s DoD appointment April 15 on social media. Langster will fill a new post at the office of the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, which oversees a larger portfolio including space, nuclear weapons, cyber, missile defense, electromagnetic warfare, and countering weapons of mass destruction. He will work within the office of John Hill, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space and missile defense. Hill’s office is in charge of coordinating guidelines for “responsible behavior in space” issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in July. Before leading COMSPOC, Langster was vice president of its parent company, Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI). He advocated for a greater collaboration between the private sector, the Commerce Department and DoD in space traffic management and data sharing.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite into orbit April 17 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The payload, designated NROL-85, was the agency’s second mission of the year and the second orbital launch of 2022 from the Western Range. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at 9:13 a.m. Eastern. After separation from the upper stage, the rocket’s first stage landed back at Landing Zone 4 about eight minutes after liftoff. This was the 114th booster successfully recovered by SpaceX. NROL-85’s first stage previously flew NROL-87 in February . NROL-85 is the NRO’s first mission to reuse a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster. NROL-87 was the first NRO launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket intended to be reused for a future mission At the request of the NRO, SpaceX did not show any images of the rocket’s upper stage and ended the webcast after the first stage landed. SpaceX received a contract from the U.S. Air Force in February 2019 to launch NROL-85 and NROL-87. SpaceX had previously launched NRO satellites under commercial contracts. The NRO builds and operates classified U.S. government surveillance and intelligence satellites. NROL-85 is the 61st mission launched by the agency since its existence was disclosed in 1996. This was the 148th launch of the Falcon 9 and the rocket’s 14th mission of 2022.
Updated 10 p.m. Eastern after NASA decision to roll back SLS. WASHINGTON — NASA announced late April 16 it will roll back the Space Launch System from the launch pad for various repairs, further delaying the rocket’s long-anticipated first launch. In a statement late April 16, NASA announced it planned to roll back the SLS to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) “due to upgrades required at an off-site supplier of gaseous nitrogen used for the test,” the agency said. Problems with the supply of gaseous nitrogen, used to support activities at the pad, had delayed two previous countdown rehearsals. NASA did not state when the vehicle would go back from Launch Complex 39B, where it rolled out March 17, to the VAB. The agency said it will hold a briefing April 18 about its plans. The agency added it would use the time in the VAB to repair a faulty helium check valve in the SLS’s upper stage and a hydrogen leak detected shortly after starting to load liquid hydrogen into the rocket’s core stage during the April 14 attempt . It was the first time that controllers had reached that stage of the countdown after technical problems halted two previous attempts before liquid hydrogen could start loading. The leak is on the ground side of an umbilical plate on the mobile launcher’s tail service mast, and not on the SLS itself. “The good news is that there’s only a few things in that purge enclosure and there’s a couple of discrete penetrations that could be the culprit,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, during an April 15 briefing. At that briefing, agency officials expressed some optimism about correcting the problem on the pad. Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager, said those potential sources for the leak represented “low-hanging fruit” for fixing the problem and allowing another wet dress rehearsal as soon as April 21. However, he suggested even then that rolling the SLS back the VAB was an option. “There are some more invasive options that require getting further into the hardware and potentially having to get into some extended troubleshooting,” he said, work he indicated might be best done in the VAB. Sarafin said engineers also had to consider environmental issues of having the vehicle on the pad for an extended period, such as wind stresses on the towering vehicle. “The longer we stay at the pad, the more we stress the vehicle,” he explained. “Every time the wind blows against it, it creates a bending moment and, over time, that adds up.” “We haven’t fully outlined all the options right now,” he said at the April 15 briefing. “The one that we’re pursuing with great vigor is the low-hanging fruit option and we’ll let the team come up with some other options.” Blackwell-Thompson suggested one option would be to do another tanking test once the vehicle returns to the pad for the Artemis 1 launch. “You could certainly look at your schedule risk for launch countdown and make a decision whether or not you wanted to do a tanking prior to a launch countdown,” she said. In that scenario, the rocket would go through a tanking test and practice countdown and, if all went well, “some days later decide to go launch.” Despite not getting through the countdown test in three attempts to date, and uncertainty about when the hydrogen leak will be fixed, Blackwell-Thompson said she was not particularly concerned. She noted there were five or six tanking tests before the first launch of the shuttle more than four decades ago. “Putting it into context, I would say we’re within family of our experience in the past for first-time ops,” she said.
Three astronauts safely returned to Earth April 15 after spending a national record 182 days in orbit, completing China’s second crewed space station mission. Commander Zhai Zhigang and colleagues Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu touched down in the Dongfeng landing zone at 9:56 p.m Eastern (9:56 a.m. local, April 16), x hours after departing the Tianhe space station module. The landing occurred roughly 80 kilometers away from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, from which the trio lifted off atop a Long March 2F rocket back in October. The astronauts spent six months aboard Tianhe, the core module for China’s under construction space station. They conducted a pair of extravehicular activities totaling 12 hours and 36 minutes, carried out a range of science experiments and technology tests and hosted live science lectures for students back on Earth. Shenzhou-13 undocked from Tianhe at 12:44 p.m. Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center issued a command at 9:06 p.m. for the Shenzhou-13 return module to separate from the orbital module. It was the first time that China had employed a “rapid return,” cutting the number of orbits after leaving Tianhe from 11 down to five. Landing nine hours after undocking. Search and rescue teams reached the landing site soon after the capsule touched down, slowed by a main parachute and retrorockets shortly before impact. After exiting the capsule, Zhai said “I’d like to report to the motherland and the people that we have successfully fulfilled the Shenzhou-13 spaceflight mission.” Wang, the first woman aboard the space station and the first Chinese woman to embark on a spacewalk, asked that her young daughter be told that “her star-picking mother is back,” referring to a pre-mission promise that she would bring back a star for her child. “At this moment, I have accomplished my dream of flying into space and can report back to the motherland proudly,” Ye said. Each astronaut mentioned a combination of the motherland, President Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party in their post-landing remarks. “In the future, we will always strive for better achievements according to the call of the Party and the people, and live up to the times and the great trust of the Party and the people,” Ye said. The crew were then flown to Beijing, arriving at 5:06 a.m. Eastern on Saturday morning. Huang Weifen, chief designer of the astronaut system of China’s human spaceflight program, noted that the astronauts were in good shape. “Judging from the current status of the astronauts, we can say that our training and our support services were effective,” Huang said. The mission has demonstrated Chinese capabilities to conduct long-term human spaceflight missions, while also preparing future missions as emergency standbys. China is already gearing up for the next crewed mission. The Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft and its Long March 7 launch vehicle are now at the Wenchang spaceport, south China, being prepared for launch next month. Tianzhou-4 will deliver supplies and propellant to Tianhe to support the Shenzhou-14 crewed mission, expected to launch from Jiuquan in June. That mission will also welcome the arrival of two new modules, Wentian and Mengtian, expected to launch early in the second half of the year. The two new modules will dock with Tianhe and complete the T-shaped, three-module orbital outpost. The Shenzhou-13 crew were also aboard Tianhe for transposition tests in which the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft was used as an analog for the new space station modules. The mission was utilized in cultural events for domestic audiences, including an appearance in the flagship Lunar New Year live television show. The astronauts also interacted with young participants at an Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America event on space exploration held April 9. 
BOULDER, Colorado — Astronomers have always sought out remote and isolated spots from which their precision observations of the surrounding universe can be made. Now, add one more far-flung location – the moon. But there is growing concern within the international scientific community regarding the need to keep the far side of the moon free from human-made radio-frequency intrusion. The lunar far side always faces away from Earth. As a result, it is “radio-quiet,” shielded by the moon itself from radio-frequency interference (RFI) crackling through space, pumped out by powerful Earth-based transmitters. For years, placing a radio telescope on the moon’s far side has been viewed as the location of choice to carry out matchless studies, such as giving an extraordinary ear to listen for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. A newly established Moon Farside Protection Permanent Committee of the Paris, France-based International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has started to frame the problem and possible solutions to guard against RFI of the lunar far side, ideal landscape, they say, for a future radio telescope or phased array detector. Additionally, the International Telecommunication Union, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is engaged in defining and protecting what they label as the Shielded Zone of the moon. However, future moon exploration missions, the ITU warns, could spoil this pristine radio environment through uncontrolled radio emission and even enhance the lunar exosphere, the ultra-wispy layer of gases that acts as an atmosphere. With the first radio telescope landing on the moon later this year as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, radio astronomy from the Moon begins in earnest, said Jack Burns, a space scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. That radio astronomy instrument is called ROLSES, he said, a Radio Wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath. It will fly on the privately-provided Intuitive Machines lander. “This will be followed by a radio telescope on the lunar far side in 2025 and hopefully arrays of radio dipole antennas later in the decade. So now is the time to begin serious international efforts to protect the lunar far side as a unique radio-quiet preserve for exploration of the early universe,” Burns told SpaceNews. Claudio Maccone of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy is an astronomer, space scientist and mathematician. As chair of the new IAA committee, he is a leading voice to maintain the moon’s far side as unique real estate for scientific activities. Future space planners, Maccone argues, “need to think ahead and preserve the precious space resources that still remain unpolluted by humankind.” Unfortunately, the undeclared but quite real “current, new race to the moon” complicates matters terribly, he said. Maccone is pushing to establish a Protected Antipode Circle, or PAC, a large piece of lunar land about 1,130 miles (1,820 kilometers) in diameter that would become the most shielded area of the moon’s moon far side. He said the United Nations should recognize the PAC as an international protected area — a radio-contamination-free zone. Furthermore, the center of the moon’s far side, specifically Daedalus Crater, is being advanced; its high rim would block Earth-generated “radio smog” from fouling a future radio telescope planted there or other astronomical gear. Meanwhile, new ideas about taking advantage of the lunar far side’s special qualities have come to the forefront. For example, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has awarded study money for a Lunar Crater Radio Telescope. This proposal centers on using crater wall-climbing robots to deploy wire mesh to form a large parabolic reflector. Another moon-situated NIAC-supported proposal is FarView – a radio observatory fabricated on the moon. This concept would utilize roughly 100,000 networked dipole antennas spread across hundreds of miles of lunar terrain. FarView science would support a detailed investigation of the unexplored “Cosmic Dark Ages,” the conditions and processes under which the first stars, galaxies, and accreting black holes formed. “The far side of the moon is a unique place for us in the whole universe,” said Maccone. “It is close to the Earth, but protected from the radio emissions that we ourselves are creating in an ever-increasing amount, and that is making our radio telescopes blinder and blinder.” 
NASA says it’s gearing up for a rapid-fire series of events on the International Space Station that includes the return of a private astronaut mission and the launch of a new long-duration crew of American and European astronauts. NASA announced April 15 that Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission to the station, which launched April 8 and docked to the station the next day , will conclude with an undocking scheduled for 10:35 a.m. Eastern April 19. That would lead to a splashdown off the Florida coast at 7:19 a.m. Eastern April 20. That schedule means the Ax-1 crew will spend a couple extra days on the ISS than originally advertised. Axiom Space originally stated that they Ax-1 mission would last 10 days, including eight at the ISS. Under the current schedule, they will be on the station for 10 days and spend nearly 12 days in space. Neither NASA nor Axiom disclosed the reason for the extended stay, but weather considerations for splashdown have been a major factor for past returns to Earth of ISS crews on SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. A splashdown on April 20 will allow NASA to proceed with the launch of the Crew-4 mission to the ISS as soon as April 23. NASA held a flight readiness review April 15 for that Crew Dragon mission to the station, approving plans to proceed with a launch attempt April 23 at 5:26 a.m. Eastern from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A. Crew-4 will deliver NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins, and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, to the station for a mission lasting to at least September. NASA plans to return the four Crew-3 astronauts currently on the station — Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA — about five days after the arrival of Crew-4. Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said in a call with reporters after the Crew-4 flight readiness review that it was a “busy time ahead” for the station. “We all talked about how we’re needing to stay vigilant and we’re doing this one step at a time.” That vigilance includes at least 48 hours between the Ax-1 splashdown and the Crew-4 launch to perform post-flight reviews. “Our team has been flight-following that mission,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, calling the Ax-1 spacecraft “very clean” in terms of no technical issues. “We’ll have time to do a review between that landing and the Crew-4 launch.” Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said NASA will use the same tracking assets, such as an aircraft equipped with an infrared camera, to monitor the Ax-1 splashdown as it would for a NASA commercial crew mission. “We follow all the Dragon flights,” Stich said, including cargo and private astronaut missions. “We’ll follow that flight all the way to splashdown.” The upcoming Crew-4 launch comes as NASA continues to work on the countdown rehearsal for the Space Launch System at neighboring Launch Complex 39B. At a briefing earlier April 15, SLS managers said the earliest they would be ready to attempt another tanking of the rocket and go through a practice countdown is April 21, pending work to track down and fix a hydrogen leak found in the latest test April 14. However, Lueders said the Crew-4 launch would have priority on the range over any SLS tests. “Jim Free and I early on in this flow agreed that getting our crews up to the ISS is really the most important mission out there,” she said, referring to the associate administrator for exploration systems development. “There’s a difference between a test and getting a crew on orbit to maintain the on-orbit vehicle and get Crew-3 down.” NASA does have some slack in the schedule if Crew-4 is delayed. Stich said they want to have Crew-3 back by May 10, when a “beta cutout” caused by sun angles restricts undocking operations at the station. However, he added that the Crew-3 spacecraft is in good health and rated to remain at the station until mid-June. A return of Crew-3 by May 10, though, would allow NASA and Boeing to proceed with a second uncrewed test flight of the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle, currently scheduled for launch May 19. That will be followed by a SpaceX cargo Dragon mission to the station in June. At a separate media event April 15, the four Crew-3 astronauts said they were looking forward to returning to Earth soon but enjoying their time on the station. That included working with the four Ax-1 private astronauts. “It’s been a really exciting week,” said Marshburn of the Ax-1 crew. “We’ve had a lot of fun showing them around, showing them how to live and work in the space station. They’ve been great crew mates. They’ve been very kind and gracious with us as well. So, it’s been a wonderful week.” Chari added that it has not been crowded on the station with 11 people on board, including the Crew-4 and Ax-1 crews and three Russian cosmonauts. “This is definitely the dawn of a new era.”
NASA has hailed an agreement with the Space Force to share information on near Earth object impacts as a key step forward in planetary defense, even as the agency defers work on a mission it says is critical to tracking such objects. NASA announced April 7 that it signed an agreement with the U.S. Space Force to release data from military satellites of bolides, meteors that enter and explode in the upper atmosphere. The data is in the form of lightcurves, or changes in brightness of these objects over time, which NASA says can help scientists better model the effects of near Earth object (NEO) impacts. “The release of these new bolide data demonstrates another key area of collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Space Force and helps further the pursuit of improved capabilities for understanding these objects and our preparedness to respond to the impact hazard NEOs pose to Earth,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, said in an agency statement. The data released by the Space Force includes one bolide detected in January 2014 with an unusually high velocity that led some astronomers to speculate it came from outside the solar system. However, NASA noted in its statement that the limited data “makes it difficult to definitively determine if the object’s origin was indeed interstellar.” The announcement came a day after a planetary defense panel at the 37th Space Symposium that included representatives of NASA and the Space Force. “We are working today to disseminate that data more quickly and more widely than ever before,” Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said of sharing bolide data. He emphasized the cooperative role the Space Force plans with NASA and other agencies on planetary defense through a 2018 strategy and action plan. That included participating in a tabletop exercise recently that simulated a NEO that threatened to hit North Carolina. One lesson that came out of that was the need to better think about how government agencies would work together to deal with an impact threat, or an impact itself. “That’s probably something that the president and the National Security Council would probably bring to bear, but it’s worth thinking it through a little more than we have, to at least have some understanding of that problem statement and potential solutions,” he said. A real-world demonstration of dealing with NEO threats took place March 11, when astronomers discovered a very small asteroid, less than two meters across, hours before it hit the Earth. The object exploded harmlessly in the upper atmosphere northeast of Iceland with the energy equivalent of about four kilotons of TNT. “It allowed us to exercise our whole network of detection, warning and international collaboration that we have in place,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. The impact illustrated the need to improve detection capabilities to detect more objects and with more advance notice of any impacts. “By using ground-based assets, we’ve pretty much maxed out on the number of objects we can detect each year,” she said. NASA’s NEO Surveyor mission, in its early stages of development, is designed to do just that. “NEO Surveyor is specifically designed to detect and characterize” such objects, she said, allowing NASA to speed up meeting a long-standing congressional directive to discover at 90% of NEOs 140 meters or more across. “We expect that, once it’s launched into space, we could, in fact, complete that goal of 90% detection of those objects 140 meters and larger within a 10-year period. So, we’re excited about that mission moving forward.” However, NEO Surveyor is facing delays in NASA’s proposed budget. The fiscal year 2023 budget proposal seeks to delay development of NEO Surveyor by at least two years, to 2028, to address cost growth in flagship science programs like Mars Sample Return and Europa Clipper. Glaze, in her remarks at the conference panel, hinted at the issue but emphasized the importance of NEO Surveyor to planetary defense. “From my perspective, that is the biggest gap that we have right now,” she said. “We’ve got to identify more of these objects that are hazardous to Earth.” “If you’re following along with NASA’s budget, it’s one that’s had a bit of a rocky start,” she added, referring to NEO Surveyor. “We’re still trying to get that to move forward.”
A classified Chinese satellite has been tracked operating in a specialized orbit, six months after an anomaly during launch appeared to leave it stranded in an initial transfer orbit. Shiyan-10 is now in a “Molniya” orbit according to tracking data from the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron (SPCS). The satellite is in a highly elliptical 1,880 by 38,881 kilometer altitude orbit with an inclination of 63.6 degrees. This indicates that the spacecraft has made a big alteration to its earlier orbital inclination to serve a specific set of tasks over the northern hemisphere. Such orbits—the highly elliptical nature of which means spacecraft spend most of their roughly 12-hour orbital period visible over the northern hemisphere—are used for communications, remote sensing or missile early warning systems, climate and weather monitoring, early warning systems and other purposes such as signals intelligence. Geosynchronous orbits are used to provide constant communications services to equatorial and lower latitude regions, but these are not suitable for serving high latitudes. Molniya orbits are highly elliptical alternatives for high latitudes theorized by Soviet scientists in the 1960s. How China intends to use the Shiyan-10 satellite is not known. Shiyan series satellites are often classified and understood be used to test new technologies and payloads for Chinese space systems. The Soviet Union/Russia, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and other U.S. entities have used Molniya orbits, but Shiyan-10 appears to be a first case for China. Shiyan-10 launched on a Long March 3B from Xichang Satellite Launch Center Sept. 27, 2021. Chinese media reported that while the launch proceeded normally, the satellite operating conditions were abnormal. The satellite was initially in what appeared to be a geosynchronous transfer orbit, but apparently unable to fire its main engines to enter its likely intended geostationary orbit. However by mid-October the satellite had raised its perigee—the point of closest approach to Earth during its orbit— indicating that the satellite was active. However, the changes in altitude were small, suggesting only smaller engines were working. To enter GEO, Shiyan-10 would have gradually circularized its highly-elliptical orbit to enter an orbit which would keep it fixed over point over the Earth. Instead, after months of apparent inactivity between October and February 2022, it performed a fuel-intensive maneuver to change its inclination to enter a Molniya orbit. Satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted that Shiyan-10 was still in its 51.1 degree orbit following small orbit raising moves in late February. Then, however, McDowell notes that new orbital data from SPCS was not available until late March, when Shiyan-10 was apparently “rediscovered” in its new orbit and inclination. The highly elliptical orbit means Shiyan-10 will spend much of its 12-hour-period orbit over the northern hemisphere. When the spacecraft is near its apogee over the northern hemisphere, it will appear to move slowly over the Earth below. This makes the orbit useful for providing communications between two sites in the northern hemisphere or monitoring for early warning. Constant services can be provided by placing three satellites in similar Molniya orbits, each providing links for several hours each day. China operates its China Remote Sensing Satellite North Polar Ground Station, which is located in Kiruna, northern Sweden, which would be visible to Shiyan-10 for long periods near its apogee. China’s space capabilities and activities have grown in recent years. The country plans to launch more than 50 times in 2022 and complete its three-module crewed space station. Within the last 18 months China has successfully landed a rover on Mars and collected samples from the moon, while also testing classified spaceplanes and other systems . A new report released April 12 by the Defense Intelligence Agency notes that the space fleets of China and Russia grew more than 70% in just over two years. The unclassified report claims this is “evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut U.S. and allied global leadership in the space domain.” A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson responded April 13 by calling the US the “top threat to security in outer space,” and accused the country of “developing and deploying offensive space weapons.”
NASA cut short a third attempt to load propellants onto the Space Launch System for a countdown rehearsal April 14 after encountering several problems, including a hydrogen leak. NASA started loading liquid oxygen into the core stage of the SLS at Launch Complex 39B around 9:30 a.m. Eastern after a delay caused by issues with the supply of nitrogen gas at the pad used to support tanking operations. However, controllers stopped liquid oxygen loading shortly after beginning initial “slow fill” operations when a temperature limit was exceeded. NASA developed a solution to the issue, which the agency did not immediately describe, and restarted liquid oxygen loading shortly before 12 p.m. Eastern. About a half-hour later, liquid hydrogen started flowing into the core stage, according to updates provided by a NASA Twitter account . However, NASA said shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern that it halted loading of liquid hydrogen when engineers detected a surge in pressure when moving from the initial slow fill of the propellant to fast fill. Controllers halted liquid oxygen loading to fix that problem and go into what NASA called a “modified” fast fill. Controllers, though, stopped liquid hydrogen loading again after detecting a leak in an umbilical line connecting the core stage to the tail service mast on the launch platform. At that point the core stage’s liquid oxygen tank was 49% full but the liquid hydrogen tank only 5% full. NASA effectively scrubbed the test around 4 p.m. Eastern when it announced it would not continue filling the core stage tanks and instead focus on chilling down propellant lines in the SLS’s upper stage. NASA managers previously decided not to fill the tanks on that upper stage in this test because of a faulty helium check valve in the stage. It was not immediately clear when NASA would try again to complete the wet dress rehearsal of the SLS. NASA said only it would not proceed with the terminal stage of the countdown and instead “will assess next steps after today’s operations.” NASA scrubbed two earlier wet dress rehearsals of the SLS, although neither got quite as far as this test. The first, April 3, stopped before propellant loading could begin . The second, the next day, also filled the liquid oxygen tank in the core stage to about 50% but stopped before liquid hydrogen loading could begin because of a misconfigured valve on the mobile launcher. After the second attempt, technicians discovered the malfunctioning helium check valve in the upper stage, leading them to proceed with a modified plan for the wet dress rehearsal that did not involve filling that stage’s tanks with propellants . “We believe that we’ll be able to meet the majority of our test objectives and provide us with a reasonably good set of data prior to rollback” to the Vehicle Assembly Building, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director, during an April 11 call with reporters. As with the first two tanking tests, the flow of information was often as irregular as the flow of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. NASA provided limited updates via Twitter and a blog. NASA previously claimed it could not provide more detailed information, such as launch commentary, because of concerns it could release information that is subject to export controls.
WASHINGTON – Astranis Space Technologies is scheduled to launch this summer a small communications satellite to geostationary orbit that will provide internet services exclusively over Alaska . The San Francisco-based startup makes small geostationary satellites as a lower cost alternative to traditional GEO spacecraft like those used by large satellite operators and by the U.S. military . Amid a drumbeat of concern about the vulnerability of satellite networks to cyber attacks, Astranis sees an opportunity to break into the defense market as the military seeks to diversify its communications architecture. “What we’ve seen on the U.S. government side is a huge push towards resiliency,” Astranis CEO John Gedmark said in an interview. The company last summer hired Scott Jacobs, former national security sales director at Blue Origin, to lead Astranis’ federal sales, including defense and civilian space. One of the advantages of small GEO satellites is that they are more nimble and less costly to replace if they were taken down during a conflict, said Gedmark. “The U.S. military is totally dependent on really a quite surprisingly small number of large GEO satellites. And each of those has been described as a very tempting target in the case of a major conflict,” he said. “They are looking to make the current architecture more resilient,” said Gedmark. “That means having more capability up in every form, and the ability to replenish capabilities if those capabilities are lost through some form of attack.” Astranis’ small GEO satellites – ranging from 350 to 400 kilograms – can be repurposed relatively quickly “from one side of the world over to a different part of the world if some kind of conflict breaks out or there’s a natural disaster,” he said. Gedmark said the company plans to offer the military options to lease small satellites that could be directed to boost capacity in needed areas. Astranis on April 5 announced it signed a contract with SpaceX to launch four small GEO satellites in 2023 . Two are for inflight connectivity provider Anuvu, one for Peru’s telecommunications service Andesat and the fourth customer has not been announced. The company would not say whether it’s a commercial or government customer. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call about space being a contested domain, Gedmark said. “One of the very first things that the Russians did was take out a commercial satcom provider with a devastating cyber attack.” It is not a “theoretical threat that they might try to take out our existing large GEO capabilities if some kind of a conflict was to break down. They’ve shown exactly what they intend to do.” The Space Force in 2020 awarded Astranis a nearly $1 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 contract for its software-defined radio technology that was designed to change frequencies and reroute signals to circumvent interference and jamming. The company hopes to win a follow-on contract. Astranis was one of 23 companies selected by the U.S. Air Force in March to compete for task orders under an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract to support the Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS is a long-term effort to integrate weapon systems across the land, sea, air and space domains. Small GEO satellite services, while more affordable, have higher latency compared to low Earth orbit constellations because GEO is a much higher orbit. The U.S. military is becoming a key buyer of LEO broadband but Gedmark believes there is room in the market for multiple types of services. “I think we’re going to need it all,” he said. “We need capabilities across every possible orbit.”
TAMPA, Fla. — British satellite operator Avanti said April 13 it has cut its $810 million debt pile by two-thirds after investors agreed to swap debt for equity. Hedge funds Solus Alternative Asset Management and new investor HPS Investment Partners are now Avanti’s largest shareholders following a deal that reduced debt to $260 million. Avanti said it is not changing its business activities, assets or executive team as part of the recapitalization. “Achieving this significant reduction in our legacy debt burden leaves us in a strong position to continue the growth of our business,” Avanti CEO Kyle Whitehill said in a statement. Avanti provides broadband services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa with a fleet of five Ka-band satellites, but has struggled to generate enough revenue to pay back debt. In 2019, the company adjusted its business strategy away from consumer broadband to focus more on cellular backhaul, governments and selling capacity to other satellite operators. Pointing to signs of progress with this growth plan, Whitehill told SpaceNews in 2020 that Avanti aimed to increase its fleet fill rate from 48% to around 70-80% to be more in line with leading fleet operators. Avanti was unable to give an update on fleet utilization before this article was published. With less debt, the company hopes to close the chapter on long-running financial issues that in 2018 saw Avanti swap another chunk of debt for equity after warning it risked collapsing into administration — a U.K. procedure similar to declaring bankruptcy. Avanti put itself up for sale in 2017 but, after failing to get any acceptable offers, abandoned the plan later that year in favor of a $242 million debt refinancing package. HPS Investment Partners declined to comment on what led the investor to become one of Avanti’s largest shareholders. Before its latest recapitalization transaction, Solus and investment firms Blackrock and Great Elm Capital were Avanti’s largest shareholders. Blackrock and Great Elm Capital remain invested in the company after reducing their stakes, alongside investment firms Robus and MSD that also continue to be shareholders.
When China fired a missile into one of its own weather satellites in a 2007 show of force, experts called the demo the beginning of a new antisatellite arms race. Fast forward to 2022, and a Chinese space tug is spotted towing a dead navigation satellite into a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt. “This is the type of space event that makes the hair on the back of people’s necks stand up,” said Brian Young, a former space control officer at the U.S. Air Force Space Command and now vice president of KBR’s military space business. KBR, a Defense Department and NASA contractor with $6 billion in annual sales, paid $800 million in 2020 to acquire Centauri, a company focused on space sensors and satellite tracking. The acquisition gave KBR an entry into the business of “space domain awareness,” a military term for the capability to track objects in space and predict potential threats. In January, KBR won a $39.5 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to analyze the effects of natural and manufactured threats to spacecraft, payloads and space services. Young is based in Kihei, Hawaii, near the AFRL Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site better known as AMOS. KBR has several AFRL contracts to operate and maintain sensor sites and managed research projects on space domain awareness. Another key customer is the U.S. Space Command’s National Space Defense Center (NSDC), a Colorado Springs-based group of 300 military and intelligence officials and private contractors who monitor space for hazards to U.S. and allied satellites. Young, despite his many years as a U.S. Air Force space operator and military contractor, said he had never before seen China “grabbing a satellite and throwing it out into the graveyard” — as it did in January when a Shijian-21 spacecraft docked with a defunct Beidou-2 navigation satellite and towed it out of geostationary orbit. Close approaches and proximity operations, however, are nothing new. “That stuff is happening all the time,” he said. “And we’re always monitoring those situations.” What was also unusual about the Shijian-21 maneuver is that it was made public, Young noted. The events were detected by a commercial company, ExoAnalytic Solutions, which had been monitoring the Chinese spacecraft since it launched in October. Having these sensing capabilities in the private sector means more information can be revealed, whereas data collected and analyzed at the NSDC from government and commercial sources are typically classified. KBR tracks space objects and activities as part of the NSDC’s Joint Commercial Operations cell. Companies that work in this cell are bound by more rigid reporting structures than purely commercial space domain awareness companies like ExoAnalytic Solutions or LeoLabs. “Now we get to talk about that stuff because the commercial infrastructure is getting so good out there,” Young said. Space awareness is typically associated with collision avoidance. U.S. Space Command units and private contractors at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, track satellites and debris to help prevent crashes in orbit, a capability known as conjunction assessment. They warn satellite operators worldwide when their spacecraft are at risk of colliding with another object. The space domain awareness work done at the NSDC focuses entirely on military threats. “We call it indications and warnings,” said Young. The term is used in the intelligence world for activities to detect developments that could involve a threat to U.S. interests. Despite an abundance of space domain data, not many people know what to do with it or how to turn it into useful information, he said. KBR honed its expertise in indications and warnings in response to the growing U.S. military demand, Young said. Space Command has complex needs, for example, for intelligence and techniques to distinguish between naturally occurring events like orbital debris strikes versus intentional acts like maneuvering. Differentiating between those two can be done with data analytics and algorithms, he said, but it’s not easy. “Space is big, and there’s stuff all over the place.” “Sometimes you have to be at the right place at the right time with the sensors,” Young said. “And that’s why aggregating all of that data and being able to absorb all that data really helps in terms of trying to keep pace with the threat.” The United States can’t stop China from moving its own satellites. “But what I certainly want to do is know when they’re moving around, and be able to forecast a little bit to know if I need to defend myself or protect myself,” Young said. “And so that is really the crux of it.” For decades, space domain awareness was mainly about tracking orbital debris, updating the military space catalog and “making sure stuff didn’t hit each other,” he said. “And that’s just not good enough for today’s world.” The commander of U.S. Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, recently called space domain awareness the command’s “No. 1 need.” “We need to enhance our understanding of the congested and complex space operational environment, to include what is occurring and when, and the intent behind those engaged in such actions,” he said March 8 at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. China’s activities in space are worrisome, as many of its technological pursuits are aimed at countering the United States, Dickinson said. Space is at the center of Chinese military doctrine and strategy. The goal of the Chinese military is to “blind and deafen” the enemy by crippling reconnaissance, communications, navigation and early warning satellites, said Dickinson. “Shijian-17 and Shijian-21, which are satellites with robotic arm technology, could be used in a future system for grappling and disabling other satellites.” He noted that a Chinese spaceplane “could carry a payload designed to disable or capture a satellite while in orbit.” Meanwhile, Russia’s “unsafe and irresponsible behavior in space” reinforces the need for adequate space domain awareness capabilities, said Dickinson, citing the November antisatellite missile strike that destroyed a defunct Russian spacecraft, dispersing nearly 1,500 pieces of trackable debris in low Earth orbit. Dealing with debris congestion and antisatellite threats requires a “deep understanding of space objects and capabilities regardless of their national origin,” said Dickinson. A lot of the work done to identify threats in space is enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, said Shelly Bruemmer, a KBR operations unit director based in Los Angeles. But sophisticated actions in space like what China did with the tug vehicle create new challenges for the military. “The difficult part is determining intent,” she said. If Shijian-21 was cleaning up space debris, “is that the intent that they’re trying to show or was it another capability that they were trying to show? Sometimes you don’t necessarily know.” Part of KBR’s work for the NSDC is the development of software applications to help visualize space data and make it more accessible. The U.S. Air Force, and now the Space Force, over the past five decades built a system of ground-based optical and radar space sensors known as the Space Surveillance Network. The most recent addition is a $341 million radar site to be developed by Northrop Grumman by 2025, the first of three projected new deep-space radars to be located around the world. The military also relies on the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites to monitor the geostationary orbit belt. The fifth and sixth satellites of the GSSAP constellation, also built by Northrop Grumman, were launched in January. These satellites were a state secret until the Air Force Space Command revealed their existence in 2014. Over the past several years, AFRL and the Space Force have sought to boost space surveillance with data from commercial companies. They created what is known as the Unified Data Library, a cloud-based platform that hosts space situational awareness data from dozens of commercial, academic and government organizations, and provides a digital storefront for users. Having such diverse sources of raw data is great for space domain awareness, said Bruemmer, “but you need people to sift through that data and analyze it and tell you what’s going on.” Maj. Gen. Thomas James, commander of the Joint Task Force-Space Defense, a component of U.S. Space Command responsible for the protection of U.S. satellites, said that for years “we have watched China and Russia continue to build these capabilities” to counter the United States in space. “And every time there was an event like the Chinese test in 2007, the United States struggled, in my opinion, to respond, and to determine what we are going to do to protect those satellites,” James said March 8 on a National Security Space Association webcast. James said a more concerted effort to tackle antisatellite threats started during the Obama administration in reaction to Russian space activities. Alarms were set off after a Russian spacecraft in 2015 maneuvered around the geostationary belt, came close to French and Italian military communications satellites and parked itself between two Intelsat satellites in geosynchronous orbit for five months. In the wake of that event, leaders from the Defense Department and the intelligence community “came together and said, ‘we’ve got to have a better way to get at this … we need to get all the right players together in the same place,’” James recalled. That led to the establishment of the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSpOC) at Schriever Air Force Base. That center evolved to what is now the NSDC. Several U.S. intelligence agencies and all U.S. military services are represented on the NSDC floor, he said. Space domain awareness has never been more essential given the sophistication of the threats, James said. “We need to be able to see, sense and understand better and faster than the adversary does. If you can’t do that, you are not in a good position to gain superiority.” Despite some innovative approaches — like using commercial sensors to supplement the military’s Space Surveillance Network — there are still “a lot of gaps,” said James. Russia’s activities are always concerning but in the space domain “China is our pacing threat,” he said. He described China’s Shijian-21 servicing vehicle as a dual-use system. Capturing a defunct satellite and removing it from a useful orbit is a legitimate debris-removal act, he said. “But there’s a concern that it could also be a threat.” And establishing the difference between debris cleanup and a satellite grab is a major challenge, he added. “How you determine hostile intent is a very complicated process.” It’s not just about identifying the technical capabilities of a system but also doing an intelligence assessment of what an adversary might be trying to accomplish. Accurate intelligence about the space domain is a hard problem, James said. One of the challenges is that each sensor – the telescopes, radar sites and surveillance satellites – captures different portions of outer space so it’s not always possible to “maintain custody” of a specific object that might be of particular interest. That requires analysts to piece together the data from all these different sources so they can identify where the object has been and where it might be headed. This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Kepler Communications has successfully tested inter-satellite links with a terminal designed to tap into the Aether data-relay constellation it plans to start deploying early next year, an executive for the Canadian company said. Two of the four satellites SpaceX launched Jan. 13 to support Kepler’s current business, which provides low-data-rate services with a total 19 satellites to devices out of range of terrestrial networks, are equipped with the S-band terminal for the upcoming system. Kepler “successfully transferred the first [data] packet from one satellite to the other” four days after launch, CEO Mina Mitry said in an interview. “Every week we test with our satellites at varying distances, performing communications and validating the link as distance changes,” Mitry said. Although the “hardware is validated and is building flight heritage,” he said Kepler plans to continue making refinements ahead of deploying dedicated data-relay spacecraft next year. “Building a relay network is incredibly power consuming,” he said, so these satellites will be “an order of magnitude bigger” than the 19 cubesats in its current network, which Kepler expects to continue operaitng alongside the relay satellites. “The problem for customers is it’s really power expensive if they wanted to do their own in space communications network,” he said, while “it’s very power efficient if they talk to our satellites because our antennas are bigger so their antennas can be smaller.” These larger Aether satellites aim to provide real-time connectivity for low Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft that currently only relay information when passing over approved ground stations. A LEO satellite can communicate with ground systems “30% of the time at best, leaving 70% unaccounted for,” he said. “This discrepancy slows down the commissioning process and bottlenecks the ability to downlink time-sensitive data.” Russia’s war in Ukraine has helped underline the importance of real-time connectivity in the Earth observation market for government and defense applications, according to Mitry, and is “driving a lot of interest in uptake.” Kepler is also one of the companies hoping to provide a commercial alternative to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) that NASA is retiring. Next steps Kepler has secured spectrum rights through the German government that would allow nearly 115,000 satellites to use its terminals for accessing the Aether data-relay network. However, “out of an abundance of care,” Mitry said Kepler is voluntarily reaching out to satellite operators to ensure it does not interfere with the S-band frequencies they use for telemetry, tracking and control. There is no formalized body that facilitates these kinds of conversations, Mitry noted. “It is a really old process where you go in and you knock on someone’s door” to check for interference, he said, adding that so far the feedback has been positive. Mitry also said the $60 million Kepler raised in June covers funding for all the satellites it aims to deploy throughout 2023. He said Kepler has plans for 140 satellites in total but declined to discuss how many are expected to be deployed next year, or if launch agreements have been secured. The Canadian company has “built a sizable inventory” of satellite parts to guard against supply chain issues that could disrupt its expansion plans, he added. “We’ve secured all of our supply for this year and early next year,” he said, and is keeping “a close eye” on the potential for raw material and staffing shortages. The company is also planning to test its terminal on a third party nanosatellite operated by Spire Global that is slated to launch in late 2022 .
BOULDER, Colo. – NASA’s intention to replant bootprints on the moon is getting a kick-start by the launch of a microwave oven-sized smallsat, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, called CAPSTONE for short. Due for launch no earlier than May 3, CAPSTONE is owned and operated by Advanced Space of Westminster, Colorado. It is to be lofted from New Zealand aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket and sent moonward by Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon upper stage. Thomas Gardner, Advanced Space’s director of engineering, said the spacecraft would reach its lunar destination on or about Sept. 15. Critical partners in the CAPSTONE mission include Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Inc., a Terran Orbital Corp. company that provided spacecraft design, development and implementation, hardware manufacturing, assembly, testing and mission operations support. Stellar Exploration is the propulsion subsystem provider. Weighing 25 kilograms, CAPSTONE is no lightweight when it comes to its duties. A central objective is to test and verify the calculated orbital stability of a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon. That’s the same orbit scripted for NASA’s lunar Gateway, the small space station planned to orbit the moon to provide astronauts access to the lunar surface. Another key task for CAPSTONE is testing a navigation system that gauges its position relative to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying the moon since 2009. This demonstration of spacecraft-to-spacecraft navigation — a proprietary peer-to-peer navigation capability named Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS) — can allow future spacecraft to determine their location relative to the moon without relying exclusively on tracking from Earth. In January, Advanced Space entered into a Cooperative Research And Development Agreement with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate and Spacecraft Technology Division to share data collected from cislunar space through the CAPSTONE mission. Ribbon cutting Advanced Space staged an April 1 ribbon-cutting for its Mission Operations Center Facility, complete with a full-size spacecraft model of CAPSTONE on display. Attending the event was Jim Reuter, NASA ssociate administrator for space technology, as well as U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), chairman of the Senate Commerce space and science subcommittee. CAPSTONE is a foundational mission, Reuter said, a pathfinder for NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the moon. “Technology demonstrations like CAPSTONE are the result of continued investments in space technology,” he said. NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate supports CAPSTONE’s development via the Small Spacecraft Technology and Small Business Innovation Research programs at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California. Hickenlooper said Colorado, on a per capita basis, has one of the largest space economies in the country, citing a figure of $15 billion a year. CAPSTONE is an example, Hickenlooper said, of what happens when the right people are brought together, and they move in an orchestrated, synchronized fashion to get things done. “I think that NASA’s Artemis program is really going to excite this country,” Hickenlooper added. “We are in a serious, very important competition with China and Russia to a certain extent.” Hickenlooper said that it’s an “all hands on deck” situation “if we’re going to compete on a global basis in science and space.” Reuter told SpaceNews that CAPSTONE is pushing the boundaries of low-cost spacecraft and signals what small spacecraft can accomplish, not only at the moon but other deep-space destinations. 
Capella Space unveiled three products April 14 that automate tasking of the company’s constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. Capella’s online platform, the Capella Console, is designed to allow customers to task the constellation of SAR satellites to acquire imagery with 50-centimeter resolution. With the new products, Vessel Detection, Change Detection and Global Change Monitoring, “repeat tasking or monitoring is now automated,” Dan Getman, Capella vice president of product, told SpaceNews. “You can specify a location and say, ‘I would like to get an image of this location every day, once a week or once a month,’ and we automatically capture that for you.” SAR satellites obtain Earth imagery day and night through darkness and clouds, a capability that has been highlighted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where cloud cover often obscures electro-optical imagery. Detecting vessels at sea or near ports is another popular SAR application. With Capella’s new Vessel Detection product, “the ships are automatically found in the images and both the image and the ships are delivered to you,” Getman said. “Customers can then process those data themselves to look for behavioral differences.” For the Change Detection product, Capella provides a series of images of the area a customer wants to monitor. Objects entering the area are highlighted in blue and objects that leave the area in red. To create the Global Change Monitoring product, the Capella Console is ingesting SAR data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 program. Twin Sentinel-1 satellites capture imagery with a lower resolution than Capella’s but a larger swath width. Sentinel-1 satellites observe Earth’s entire landmass every 12 days. “We use Sentinel-1 data to do regional change detection that we then provide the customer,” Getman said. If a customer wants to zoom in on the change that occurred, the customer can task Capella’s constellation of seven satellites to acquire high-resolution imagery of the specific location or object in question, he added. “Eventually, the concept is that we automate new image collection based on our automated change detection,” Getman said. “If something interesting is happening, we would start collecting Capella data rapidly for the customer.” Payam Banazadeh, Capella CEO and co-founder, said in a statement, “We’re seeing how access to near-real-time information through routine revisit can be the difference in taking more efficient routes, catching preventable mistakes or even saving human lives. We are only scratching the surface of what can be done with data-integrated satellite technology.” Getman said in a statement, “The introduction of analytics tools in the Capella Console, in combination with the flexibility of our satellite constellation, delivers an entirely new experience for customers to tap into insights from space with the quality, reliability and timeliness they need to meet their mission and business objectives.”
A Long March rocket arrived at Wenchang spaceport Monday in preparation for a new round of space station missions starting May. The Long March 7 rocket was delivered to Wenchang after a near week-long voyage from the northern port city of Tianjin, China’s human spaceflight agency announced April 11. The rocket is planned to launch the roughly 13.5-metric-ton Tianzhou-4 cargo vessel next month to China’s Tianhe space station core module. Tianzhou-4 will deliver supplies and propellant for the Shenzhou-14 crewed mission, expected to launch from Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert in June. The three-person Shenzhou-14 crew will be aboard the Tianhe space module for the arrival of two new modules, named Wentian and Mengtian, which will complete the three-module, T-shaped Chinese space station, later in the year. China deorbited the Tianzhou-2 spacecraft late last month after using the cargo vessel for space station module transposition tests, making way for the new mission. The subsequent launch of the Tianzhou-5 and Shenzhou-15 late in 2022 will see a first crew handover, with six astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station, and completion of the project’s 11-mission construction phase. China plans to operate the Tiangong station for at least 10 years and has already announced plans to open the station to commercial activities and potentially tourist missions. Tianhe is currently hosting the three Shenzhou-13 astronauts Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu. The mission is China’s longest human spaceflight endeavor so far which, at 181 days in orbit, is nearly double the previous national record of 92 days set by the 2021 Shenzhou-12 mission. Airspace closure notices indicate that Shenzhou-13 will return to Earth between 9:35 and 10:05 p.m. Eastern April 15 (9:35-10:05 local time, April 16) following departure from Tianhe. The Shenzhou return capsule is planned to set down in a designated landing zone near Dongfeng in the Gobi Desert, Inner Mongolia. Previous landings occurred in the grasslands of Siziwang, Inner Mongolia. Factors for the change include increasing population density around Siziwang, and the need to optimize for astronaut recovery as the duration of China’s spaceflight missions increases. The Shenzhou-13 mission has included a pair of extravehicular activities , conducted a range of experiments and hosted live science lectures for students back on Earth. The mission was involved in a number of outreach and messaging events for domestic audiences, including an appearance in the flagship Lunar New Year live television show. However the astronauts also interacted with participants at an Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America event on space exploration held April 9. Notably Elon Musk contributed pre-recorded remarks to the event, saying he was looking forward to “humanity working together” in space. Ambassador Qin Gang commented that space exploration is a “huge project of mankind, and it requires extensive international cooperation.” The messaging, apparently signaling Chinese interest in cooperation with the U.S. at one level, comes in the wake of China amplifying Russia space officials’ comments on the possibility of Moscow working more closely with China in space. However, while Chinese media have interviewed senior Russian officials and reported Russian comments, there have been no public announcements from China’s space industry on potential further cooperation. Russia has said it is looking at the possibility of sending Russian cosmonauts to China’s space station, using either ESA’s launch site in French Guiana or spaceports in Russia. The former is no longer a possibility following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while the respective latitudes of Russian spaceports and inclination of the Tiangong station pose problems for the latter avenue.
NASA’s embrace of reused rockets continued with an agreement this month to switch the upcoming launch of an Earth science satellite from a new to a previously flown Falcon 9, a change whose full terms remain proprietary. A contract modification published April 6 for the agency’s NASA Launch Services 2 contract with SpaceX changes the upcoming launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite from a new Falcon 9 booster to a previously flown own. The contract modification did not explain that change. SWOT, a mission being developed in partnership with Canada, France and the United Kingdom, will monitor the location and volume of water both in the oceans as well as lakes and rivers, enabling scientists to measure the effects of climate change. The spacecraft, weighing about 2,000 kilograms, is scheduled to launch in November from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA selected SpaceX to launch SWOT in November 2016 , and at the time the mission was planned for launch in 2021. NASA said then the value of the contract was $112 million, which included the launch service as well as payload processing and integration services and other support. That amount was significantly higher than other Falcon 9 contracts NASA awarded to SpaceX, a difference NASA explained as being linked to the specific requirements of the mission. Interest in launch vehicle reuse has been primarily driven by a desire to lower costs. However, in the case of SWOT, NASA said it switched to a previously flown booster for schedule assurance. “From a SWOT perspective, knowing the booster assignment now (primary and back up) reduces overall schedule risk and enables NASA’s Launch Services Program team the opportunity to start performing vehicle insight early to ensure no increased technical risk,” NASA spokesperson Tylar Greene told SpaceNews. While NASA accepted the use of previously flown boosters on cargo missions to the International Space Station for several years, and with crewed missions starting with Crew-2 in April 2021, the first NASA science mission to launch on a reused booster was its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that launched in November 2021 , followed weeks later by the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission. “The success by SpaceX with previously flown boosters drove changes to the NASA Launch Services-2 contract that enables NASA to utilize this capability with missions already on contract,” Greene said. “The contract modification was executed after detailed evaluation of SpaceX’s vehicle refurbishment processes and the development of the government insight plan to ensure pre-flown boosters do not increase technical risk to missions.” The published contract modification did not change the value of the award. “In addition to the schedule benefits, the government received considerations from SpaceX directly benefiting the SWOT mission,” Greene said. “The specific consideration given to NASA for the switch to previously flown boosters is proprietary to SpaceX.” It’s unclear what sort of consideration SpaceX could offer that could remain proprietary in an unclassified government contract. SpaceX did not respond to questions about the SWOT contract change. The company infrequently responds to media inquiries. The switch from a new to a reused booster, though, illustrated NASA’s growing acceptance of reused rockets. “Even though I was always excited about utilizing flown @SpaceX boosters on principle and also the impact on mission cost, I have changed my opinion about them slightly: I now PREFER previously used boosters over totally new ones for most science applications,” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, shortly after the launch of the commercial Ax-1 mission to the ISS April 8, which also used a previously flown booster.
Months before Russian armored vehicles rolled into Ukraine on Feb. 24, companies monitoring satellite networks noticed an uptick in activity. Hackers were trying to penetrate Ukraine’s communications satellite infrastructure, including networks that relay commands to Ukrainian military drones. Meanwhile, Earth observation satellites detected intensifying GPS interference in the region. When the invasion began, cyberattacks escalated. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported jamming of Starlink communications near Ukrainian conflict areas. And hackers infiltrated Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite internet network, disabling modems that provide tens of thousands of customers in Ukraine and nearby countries with internet links. “The current situation is absolutely shedding light on the fact that space systems are being attacked because of their role as critical infrastructure and critical communication channels out to the broader population in the country,” Frank Backes, Kratos Federal Space senior vice president and chairman of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), said March 6 on the Defense and Aerospace Daily Downlink podcast. “We’re seeing that in real time in this regional conflict in a way that we’ve never seen it before.” That message was backed up by a March 17 alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The alert warned of “possible threats to U.S. and international satellite communications networks” and asked all organizations to report any “indications of malicious cyber activity.” Cybersecurity experts have been warning for years of increasing attacks on commercial satellites and working with companies to enhance security. The day before the Russian invasion began, Christopher Scolese, National Reconnaissance Officer director, warned that organizations tied to the Russian military were likely to target government and commercial satellites. Still, the war in Ukraine is adding a sense of urgency to ongoing initiatives like the Space ISAC’s creation of a Watch Center and informing discussion on how to safeguard space systems. “I regard space systems as critical to our national security and to our economic security,” said Sam Visner, Mitre Corp. technical fellow and Space ISAC vice chair. “To the extent that anybody would want to damage our infrastructure, either directly or indirectly, space systems are conceivably a target.” The Space ISAC, based in Colorado Springs, was established in 2019 to notify members of cyber threats and mitigation strategies. Now, the nonprofit group is working to establish a round-the-clock Watch Center to ingest a variety of data sources, including declassified intelligence, radio frequency interference reports and details of ransomware attacks coming from commercial sources as well as U.S. government and international government agencies. The Watch Center, scheduled to open this fall, will provide a platform for members to share information on threats or vulnerabilities, Erin Miller, Space ISAC executive director, said March 4 at the AFCEA Rocky Mountain Chapter’s Cyberspace Symposium. Meanwhile, the Space ISAC is among the groups encouraging the Biden Administration to add space systems to the government’s list of 16 critical infrastructure sectors. U.S. Reps. Ted W. Lieu (D-Calif.) and Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) introduced the Space Infrastructure Act in June, which calls for moving space systems, services and technology under the critical-infrastructure umbrella. If that happens, the Department of Homeland Security would assign an executive branch agency to work closely with space companies to establish cybersecurity standards and to reinforce safeguards with the support of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Being designated as critical infrastructure would get the space sector more attention and support from the executive branch and “stand as a statement of U.S. policy that this is critical infrastructure and that the country stands behind its security and resilience,” Visner said. While space has not been designated a critical infrastructure sector, the Department of Homeland Security established a Space Critical Infrastructure Working Group last year to enhance the security and resilience of space systems, James Platt, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Strategic Defense Initiative said March 21 at the Satellite 2022 conference. While the Biden administration studies the matter and Congress considers the Space Infrastructure Act, cybersecurity experts are urging satellite operators to pay heightened attention to what they call “cyber hygiene.” “Make sure your corporate systems and your business systems are secure,” Visner said. “Take a look at your supply chain to make sure you know where things are coming from, not only the hardware but certainly the software.” In addition, Visner said, companies should scrutinize all the systems they rely on to launch and operate satellites. That includes making sure anyone with authority to communicate with spacecraft and operate onboard payloads is focused on cybersecurity. Ryan Speelman, Aerospace Corp. Information Systems and Cyber Division principal director, said it’s important for companies “to understand their threat vectors and their place in the world.” For example, commercial satellites operating in conflict zones or supporting military maneuvers face different risks than satellites serving customers in peaceful locales. Equipment and communications infrastructure designed to support military operations follow more stringent cybersecurity standards than commercial infrastructure. “If you’re designing for commercial applications and then inserting yourself into a military conflict, there are all kinds of potential problems there,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO and co-founder of Shift5, a cybersecurity startup based in Arlington, Virginia. “Several very well-funded groups coming out of the Russian intelligence apparatus are very skilled in cyberspace. It’s not clear to me that even well-funded and smart commercial entities could stand up to the might of a nation-state advanced persistent threat. You’re inviting a level of cyber attacker that your information-security apparatus is not prepared for.” Not all companies are seeking to insert themselves into conflicts, though. When Viasat acquired KA-SAT from its joint venture with Eutelsat Communications in 2020, the satellite had been providing internet service in Europe for a decade before Russia invaded Ukraine. Since the cyberattack, Viasat has been working with law enforcement partners and government agencies to determine exactly what happened and to restore service in affected areas. Cybersecurity experts like to call cybersecurity “a team sport,” meaning that no single organization can protect itself from rapidly evolving cyber threats alone. This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The European Space Agency announced April 13 it was further cutting ties with Russia by dropping plans to cooperate on a series of lunar missions, turning instead to NASA and other agencies. At the conclusion of an ESA Council meeting, the agency said it was ending plans to cooperate with Roscosmos on that agency’s Luna-25 and Luna-27 landers and the Luna-26 orbiter. The announcement came nearly a month after ESA formally suspended cooperation with Russia on the ExoMars mission , postponing a launch of an ESA-built rover that had been scheduled for September. “As with ExoMars, the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions put in place represent a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation,” ESA said in a statement. The long-delayed Luna-25 lander, projected to launch later this year, was to carry an experimental navigation camera called PILOT-D that would collect images during the spacecraft’s landing to support ESA’s work developing a precision landing system for the European Large Logistic Lander (EL3), a proposed lander for delivering large cargoes to the lunar surface. PILOT-D was already mounted on Luna-25, Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said at a press briefing after the meeting. “I have already communicated this decision to the head of Roscosmos and also to request this instrument be put into safe storage until it can be returned to ESA,” he said. Luna-27, slated for launch later this decade, was to carry Prospect, a payload consisting of a drill and an instrument to study lunar volatiles. Instead, Aschbacher said ESA reached an agreement with NASA to fly the payload on a commercial lander through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, said Prospect would likely fly on a CLPS lander in 2025, although it had not been assigned to a specific mission. NASA’s seven CLPS awards announced to date cover missions scheduled for launch through 2024. A version of the mass spectrometer instrument on Prospect will also fly on one of the first CLPS missions, Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lander, scheduled for launch late this year on the inaugural flight of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur. ESA will fly another version of the instrument on a joint Indian-Japanese lunar rover mission called LUPEX under an agreement between ESA and the Japanese space agency JAXA signed April 4 during the 37th Space Symposium. That mission is scheduled for no earlier than 2024. Luna-27 was also going to carry PILOT, a full-fledged version of the precision landing technology. “We need to find a suitable flight opportunity for that,” Parker said, which could be augmented with additional ground testing to mature the technology for use on EL3. New programs, and hope for Sentinel-1B In addition to the decision to end cooperation with Russia on the lunar missions, Aschbacher used the briefing to announce support for three new initiatives that will be part of the package ESA will present to member states for funding at the next ministerial meeting late this year. One is Moonlight, a program to develop a satellite system to provide communications and navigation services around the moon. ESA awarded study contracts in May 2021 to teams led by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. and Telespazio to examine the technical feasibility of their concepts as well as the business case. Those studies were designed to conclude in time to support a decision on proceeding with Moonlight at the 2022 ministerial meeting. A second, called Civil Security from Space, will examine how space can support civil security needs. “It focuses mostly on the Earth observation and telecommunications aspects of space, obviously in combination with navigation where appropriate,” Aschabacher said. One example he gave was using space data to support agricultural studies and damage assessments in Ukraine. The third is Scale-up, which he described as supporting ESA commercialization initiatives but about which he did not go into details. Commercialization is one of the priorities of Agenda 2025, Aschbacher’s overall strategy for ESA released a year ago. The briefing also provided a glimmer of hope for Sentinel-1B, the radar imaging satellite that has been out of service since last December when the power supply for its radar payload malfunctioned. Engineers have spent months working to diagnose the problem in the hopes of being able to return it to service while E SA also makes plans to launch a replacement, Sentinel-1C, in the first half of 2023 . “There was quite an interesting reaction in one of the many tests we have conducted,” he said. In that test, the antenna power supply turned on for 4.4 seconds before turning off again. “We’re investigating what this means. We assume there’s some degradation of a capacitor at the core of this problem, but we are not sure yet.” He said ESA will continue efforts to get the Sentinel-1B payload working again until it’s “100% sure” it can’t be returned to service. “Still, it’s fair to assume that there’s a likelihood that Sentinel-1B may not be recovered.” 
Dirk Hoke, the former CEO of Airbus Defence and Space, is joining propulsion startup Plasmos Inc. as chairman of the board. Beginning Sept. 1, Hoke will lead the startup founded in September by entrepreneur Ali Baghchehsara to develop and additively manufacture spacecraft propulsion systems that combine elements of electric and chemical engines. “Ali and the team are working on a very efficient propulsion system,” Hoke told SpaceNews . “At Airbus Defence and Space, we were looking always at ways of improving the lifetime of satellites, which is mostly dependent on the fuel. A more efficient propulsion system serves as a buffer for avoiding collisions and of course for extending lifetime.” Before Plasmos, Baghchehsara founded AB360, a startup developing the same hybrid propulsion system for interplanetary journeys. In contrast to AB360, Plasmos is focused on propulsion to move satellites around in Earth orbit. “Interplanetary travel is still the vision but not our focus because there’s no market for that today,” Baghchehsara said. Plasmos, a Colorado corporation based in Los Angeles, plans to offer propulsion systems online. Customers will select engines based on the desired thrust and power levels for satellites with a mass of 250 kilograms to 5 metric tons. Plasmos is in the processing of raising funds and 3D-printing its first engine prototype. Hoke is preparing to join Plasmos one year after his departure from Airbus, which coincides with the conclusion of his anti-competitive agreement. In addition to the promise of Plasmos’ technology, Hoke said he enjoys working with Baghchehsara, who moved from Iran to Germany as a teenager. In Germany, Baghchehsara earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering and worked for the German Aerospace Center DLR and Airbus. “I like the story of Ali coming from Iran as a young person by himself, studying in Germany, building up a career and being a young innovator,” Hoke said. “Also to have the guts to again give up everything to go to the U.S. to start from scratch, I think that deserves all the support that we can give it.” Hoke served as Airbus Defence and Space CEO from 2016 to 2021. In September, Hoke will become the CEO of Volocopter, an urban air mobility startup. Hoke is a member of Spire Global’s board of directors and Voyager Space’s advisory board. Hoke sees promise in the NewSpace sector as “access to space is becoming cheaper by the day,” he said. “With that, of course, we will see a lot of new business opportunities opening up to build new components, products, systems, and of course also new services in space.” Plasmos, specifically, is making progress very fast, Hoke said. “It’s not only an idea, it’s becoming a reality,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing the engine testing, but also seeing how Ali is extending the network in order to get access to the different people he needs in order to grow the business.”
WASHINGTON – Many of the commercial companies that are openly sharing satellite imagery of Ukraine work with the U.S. government but are not restricted in what they can share, Stacey Dixon, principal deputy director of national intelligence, said April 13. The U.S. intelligence community has a “great partnership” with commercial imagery suppliers, but a lot of the imagery seen daily on news and social media are the result of “companies independently wanting to be able to share more of what’s happening in the world,” Dixon said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And frankly, I think it’s a great service that they’re providing, putting the information out there,” Dixon said of the commercial imagery providers. “I’m glad we were able to sort of spur it. But now, they’re actually leading in many ways and putting information out for others to see.” As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency more than doubled the procurement of commercial electro-optical imagery over Ukraine from companies like Maxar, BlackSky and Planet and sent it directly to allies. It’s easier for commercial companies to release open-source information at a rapid pace whereas in the government “we would have to declassify if we were to use our classified sources,” Dixon said. “Companies are able to actually just go forward and they’re putting things out there that we aren’t asking them to put out.” Beware of instant analysis Dixon said the U.S. intelligence community for years has supported efforts to bring in more open source information into daily operations. “There’s a lot of really useful information out there to complement the classified information we have,” she said. But Dixon cautioned that the vast amounts of imagery now available also enables sloppy analysis. The vast amount of imagery now “puts us into a different place where we are not the sole ones to have access to that information and there’s a lot of other people now looking at what’s happening around the world,” Dixon added. “I know the rigor with which our analysts interpret information. I don’t know the rigor with which all other analysts interpret information.” Dixon said she hears people make predictions, for example, about the war in Ukraine based on images. “I’ve seen some with perhaps less rigor in their analysis, make statements and claims,” she said. Government analysts tend to be more cautious and “would not take the next step to say that this is absolutely going to be what’s going to happen next.” CSIS associate Nina Easton asked Dixon why the U.S. intelligence community did not predict the difficulties the Russian military would have in Ukraine. “There are certain things that are very difficult to know 100%,” Dixon said. When a country is invaded by a foreign power, “how people think about it, how people on the ground are going to experience it, what their reaction is going to be, what their will is going to be in the face of someone coming in and invading their country … all that is very tough to predict.” Asked what she has learned about the Russian military that she didn’t already know, Dixon said the learning “is still ongoing. Many people are watching the situation and rethinking what we’ve seen historically, what we might have thought would have happened.” A lot of countries have been looking at this, and “making their own assessments as to what this means about Russia’s military, about Ukraine, about what’s going to happen in other countries,” Dixon said. “It’s a very challenging and disturbing time that we’re in right now.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Space Force in 2025 plans to launch to geostationary orbit three small satellites that will attempt to dock with a propellant tanker so they can be refueled in space. The idea is to “test out pieces of the refueling infrastructure,” Col. Joseph Roth, director of innovation and prototyping at U.S. Space Systems Command, told SpaceNews last week at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The $50 million experiment, called Tetra-5, is run by the Space Force’s Space Enterprise Consortium. Bids for the project closed earlier this month. Roth said the goal of Tetra-5 is to help the Space Force figure out how to take advantage of commercial in-space servicing technologies to extend the life of satellites in orbit, particularly geostationary spacecraft that perform critical missions and are expensive to replace. Having commercial options to refuel satellites also could be significant for national security. The U.S. military, for example, generally avoids maneuvering satellites because it consumes precious fuel. “If we can get fuel as a service, we don’t have to build the infrastructure on orbit, and we can focus on protecting the satellites,” said Roth. Each of the three satellites in the Tetra-5 experiment will have sensors for rendezvous and proximity operations, and docking interfaces for refueling. Bidders have to install refueling ports in the satellites and have a choice of using interfaces developed by Orbit Fab or by Northrop Grumman. Orbit Fab, a startup seeking to provide refueling services in space, developed the RAFTI port (rapidly attachable fluid transfer interface) and recently won a Space Force contract to integrate it with military satellites. Northrop Grumman’s satellite-servicing subsidiary SpaceLogistics developed a different port called Passive Refueling Module. “With on-orbit refueling of satellites we can extend the usable life of satellites by replenishing their fuel supplies while also enabling smaller fuel tanks and less restrictions on thruster use during life,” said the solicitation for industry proposals. The Space Enterprise Consortium plans to select a prime contractor to develop three satellites – Tetra-5A, Tetra-5B and Tetra-5C. The experiment is to demonstrate both on-orbit refueling of small satellites and rapid inspection of “non-cooperative resident space objects.” Space Force interest in refueling services The Tetra-5 experiment is just one piece of a larger Space Force effort to tap commercial services for in-orbit satellite servicing. “Servicing, maneuvering, refueling, those are all future things that we’re exploring,” said Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer of assured access to space. Purdy’s office oversees national security space launch operations but over time will expand into emerging activities associated with in-orbit services, he said. “The vision I have for this whole organization is to be known as ‘air mobility command for space,’” Purdy said. “O n-orbit servicing and maneuvering is in the Space Force core doctrine . We’ve never actually had actual program money allocated,” he said, but that is likely to change once requirements for these services are officially approved by the Pentagon. Satellite servicing and refueling are capabilities that have been talked about for years but now the industry is starting to come out with standards to make hardware interoperable, which is key to making this vision a reality, said Brig. Gen. Tim Sejba, program executive officer for space battle management command, control and communications. “Part of the first step is getting to standards that can be utilized so that we have the ability to plug in refuelers to satellites, and we can design that into the overall system going forward,” Sejba told reporters last week at the Space Symposium. The Space Enterprise Consortium’s work on Tetra-5 is the early prototyping that needs to be done before procurement decisions are made, he said. Defense Innovation Unit soliciting bids The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a DoD organization created to bring commercial technologies into military programs, also is interested in satellite refueling. “The Department of Defense seeks commercial solutions to conduct responsive, in-space refueling,” said a DIU solicitation that closes April 18. “As space operations expand beyond low Earth-orbit, maneuver is a critical capability employed during commercial, civil and national security space operations,” DIU said. The request for proposals notes that legacy military satellites were designed to operate independently and self-sufficiently for many years. As a result, the amount of fuel carried on board each of them is fixed. “Future space systems require the ability to maneuver without regret. As such, these spacecraft must be serviceable and have ready access to commoditized fuel of varying types across many orbits.” DIU is interested in technologies to transfer fuel between spacecraft, and to enable maneuver in order to provide timely access to the right fuel. “Solutions may include: interfaces, fuel depots, and related systems enabling autonomous operation between disparate spacecraft.”
When Daniel Bock and Istvan Lorinz founded Morpheus Space in 2018, they knew the German university spinoff’s propulsion technology might appeal to U.S. government customers, but they knew little about government contracting. “We had no idea how it worked,” said Lorinz, Morpheus president. “We started from zero, literally.” The 2019 Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator introduced Morpheus Space to potential government customers, mentors and advisors. The Morpheus founders met every member of their advisory board directly or indirectly through the Techstars accelerator, said Bock, Morpheus CEO. Startup accelerators are an important ingredient of the evolving space ecosystem. These intensive programs connect founders with advisors and mentors who can help them raise money, craft go-to-market strategies and identify potential customers. Entrepreneurs say accelerators are particularly helpful for startups looking to break into the military space market. The Techstars Space Accelerator attracts companies ready or almost ready to sell their technology. Before accepting companies, Techstars personnel research the market to determine whether the technologies companies are proposing are, in fact, feasible and whether there is demand for the products or services in the civil, military or commercial space sectors. Firms that join the accelerator receive $20,000, which founders often use to cover living expenses during the Los Angeles-based program. Techstars receives a 6% equity stake in companies in return for funding and guidance. “Obviously, I’m a fan of accelerator programs that get founders supported by mentors who have a lot of experience, can make introductions and offer advice,” said Matt Kozlov, Techstars Los Angeles managing director. Similarly, Starburst Aerospace runs an accelerator that connects startups with corporate partners, investors and government officials in a 12-month program. In return, Starburst receives shares in a company worth $120,000. Orbital Sidekick participated in the Lightspeed Innovations accelerator for aerospace startups in 2017. Lightspeed paired each startup with a U.S. Air Force officer. Since that introduction to military space, the hyperspectral imagery startup has claimed Small Business Innovation Research contracts, funding from the Air Force Strategic Financing program, known as STRATFI, and backing from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community. “It’s important to surround yourself with advocates and advisors that have ties to the defense and intelligence community,” said Daniel Katz, Orbital Sidekick CEO. Other space startups find advisors through the Catalyst Accelerator established in 2018 by the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate to support small businesses’ market technology with both commercial and military applications. Catalyst provides startups with $15,000 and office space at its Colorado Springs Catalyst Campus. In addition, each company that participates in the accelerator is paired with a liaison to help them navigate the defense market and a “Commercial Sherpa” to help startups connect with other businesses and hone sales strategies. This article originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A new federal strategy seeks to coordinate activities among agencies and interaction with the private sector to advance work making and repairing spacecraft in space. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a national strategy for what it calls in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) April 4. The document, released with little fanfare by the administration, establishes a set of goals for supporting the development of technologies and services ranging from refueling and repairing satellites to building new spacecraft in orbit. “We see this inflection point where, at least for us, sustaining U.S. leadership is important as we continue to support companies’ capabilities and novel technologies to move us further into space,” said Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, assistant director for space policy at OSTP, at an April 7 panel discussion hosted by the Secure World Foundation and U.K. Space Agency during the 37th Space Symposium. The strategy identifies six goals to support work on ISAM capabilities: Each of those six goals has several aspects to it, outlining in general terms what federal government agencies should do to support ISAM. As part of the research and development goal, the strategy calls for coordination of R&D activities to meet identified needs for ISAM capabilities and to develop a “coherent ISAM ecosystem” of capabilities. As part of the industry acceleration goal, the government will define its needs for ISAM capabilities to provide a “sustained demand signal” for industry as well as establish an alliance of stakeholders across government, industry and academia to better coordinate needs with capabilities. The strategy, as part of the international cooperation goal, also backs the development of standards and best practices for satellite servicing and proximity operations, as well as addressing any regulatory gaps. “As ISAM and related space activities evolve, the United States will update its domestic regulatory regime as necessary to improve clarity and certainty for the authorization and continuing supervision of non-governmental ISAM activities,” the document states. The ISAM strategy won a positive reception from companies and industry groups involved in various aspects of the field. “I think this strategy is an excellent step forward by the Biden administration that will help focus U.S. governments efforts towards supporting commercial satellite servicing,” said Brian Weeden, executive director of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), an industry-led group that seeks to develop standards for satellite servicing and related activities. He endorsed both the strategy’s support for standards as well as creating the government demand signal for ISAM services. “Like many other nascent commercial sectors, the government is a significant anchor client,” he said. “But in turn, we think commercial satellite servicing can provide significant benefits to civil and national security space programs.” The ISAM strategy, coordinated by OSTP, involved a wide range of government agencies. They include NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, several other defense and intelligence agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, among others. What the document does not describe, though, is how those agencies will implement the strategy. “We are looking forward to putting together an implementation plan,” said Uzo-Okoro. “We don’t want a strategy that’s released and forgotten about a week later. We want implementation actions that show we are serious about maturing these capabilities and moving the sector forward.” She didn’t offer a schedule for developing that plan, but said there would be opportunities for industry to provide its input to that plan. “Like all national policies and strategies, the key always comes down to how well they are implemented,” said Weeden. “A great strategy on paper can fail to have impact if there is not as much, if not more, effort put into implementing it as writing it.”
As space systems face growing cyberattacks, the Aerospace Corp. and TriSept Corp. are preparing separate flight tests of software to alert satellite operators of anomalies detected onboard. “One of the major things we want to demonstrate is that you can add security without creating additional risk or significant cost,” said Ryan Speelman, Aerospace’s Information Systems and Cyber Division principal director. Beyond cyber hygiene, which is the day-to-day work organizations perform to secure their networks, Aerospace recommends an approach to satellite security called Defense in Depth. Defense in Depth is an architectural approach that relies on multiple layers of security, including safeguarding supply chains and software development processes, adopting intrusion-detection mechanisms and training employees to be on the lookout for cyber threats. Think of it like an onion. “We will try and stop you at the outer layer, but we assume that you can defeat some protections, and we will continue to try and stop you,” Speelman said. Commercial satellite operators can tailor their Defense in Depth strategies to fit their business models. “Depending on what type of vendor you are and what threats you are susceptible to, you may pick and choose different layers,” he said. A key element of any Defense-in-Depth strategy is software to detect unauthorized satellite access by continuously monitoring and logging satellite telemetry, commands and flight software configuration. Aerospace plans to test its Starshield intrusion-detection software on Slingshot, a 12-unit cubesat launching in September and built with modular components, open standards and plug-and-play interfaces. “The software does more than encrypt the data because there are other threat vectors and attack surfaces that need to be protected,” said Benjamin Davidson, director of Aerospace’s Cybersecurity and Advanced Platforms Department. Rather than designing the software to look for troublesome commands, Aerospace engineers have trained machine learning algorithms on what is expected. The software then flags anything unexpected. After launch, Aerospace will test the software for a year or two to demonstrate that it provides additional security without interfering with traditional flight-control systems. In addition to flagging anomalies, the software could help satellite operators identify the culprit of a cyberattack. “Anytime you’re doing additional logging, gathering additional data and flagging events earlier, you’re going to make the job of attribution easier and more accurate,” Speelman said. “That itself is a deterrent… because if their probability of getting caught goes up then their risk model and their decision-making process changes.” In a parallel effort, TriSept is preparing a suborbital test in May and an orbital flight later this year of TriSept Security Enhanced Layer (TSEL), satellite security software the company developed with Old Dominion University engineering students. “There are not many options for ensuring the integrity of the mission software,” said Steven Bjornaas, TriSept software development director. “We want to be able to detect, report on and prevent anomalies.” TSEL alerts satellite operators to any changes in the operating system even if the change was prompted by hardware, because “you can’t always trust the hardware,” Bjornaas said. TSEL also logs events to create a record. This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
WASHINGTON – During a visit to Los Angeles last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks stopped by SpaceWERX, a new organization created to match technologies developed by commercial space businesses with Space Force buyers. “They hosted a roundtable with industry while I was there. It was an impressive set of exchanges,” Hicks told reporters April 12 at a breakfast meeting in Washington. Hicks said she liked what she heard about SpaceWERX and what it has done so far to attract startups. But she cautioned that DoD still has a long way to go in making its procurement process more suitable for the fast-moving commercial industry . At SpaceWERX Hicks met with approximately 15 space businesses and startups to hear about their experiences working with DoD. A frequently heard complaint from these businesses is that “we need to bridge the infamous valley of death,” Hicks said. The valley of death is a term used to describe the transition of technologies from research projects and prototypes to procurement programs with long-term funding. There is a lot of early-stage innovation but there is no process in place to identify where those innovations might fit in the larger defense programs, Hicks said. She spoke about the “handoffs” that have to take place in programs from the science and technology phase to applied research, development, prototyping, testing and ultimately production. “We could not have a more complicated system,” she said. Hicks last year created an “ innovation steering group ” precisely to look at this problem. The group is led by Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. One of the initiatives planned by the steering group is to fund experiments that would allow broader participation by small businesses and startups. This is important for DoD so it can create more competition in the defense industrial base that for decades has been shrinking as a result of mergers and acquisitions. Hicks said at SpaceWERX she got a glimpse of the emerging partnership between commercial space and the Space Force. “But SpaceWERX is one of the individual pieces of the innovation ecosystem in DoD,” he said. “They have a slice of that in which I think they are being extremely effective. The challenge for me at the enterprise level is to be able to see that system all the way across and understand where the challenges are so we can build some capacity.” “That’ll be my focus in the coming months,” said Hicks. She directed the innovation steering group to develop a “map of the ecosystem so we can understand who the innovation units are and what they are doing.” From the industry perspective, there are still a lot of barriers, said Hicks. “SpaceWERX is helping to lower barriers, I have no concerns about them . But across the system, I have concerns about the pain points to help folks get through the system.” SpaceWERX and its parent organization AFWERX created multiple paths for companies to compete for Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts. In the first phase, companies can win $50,000 for studies. Companies can then apply for Phase 2 and Phase 3 contracts to further develop technologies and deliver actual products. Those follow-on contracts can be worth up to $3 million. A more recent initiative called Strategic Financing, or STRATFI, provides funding of up to $15 million for companies that have hot products of significant interest to the military. Many companies that embark on the SBIR journey don’t go far and perish in the valley of death because they have no path to the market.
Colorado lawmakers announced April 12 that they have been briefed by the Government Accountability Office on the agency’s investigation of the January 2021 decision to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. GAO shared its findings with lawmakers but has not publicly released its report. The GAO and the Defense Department’s inspector general both were asked by members of the Colorado delegation to review how the decision was made. These lawmakers have argued that the process was tainted by politics and did not follow the standard military basing process. In a joint statement April 12, Senators Michael Bennet (D), John Hickenlooper (D), Rep. Doug Lamborn (R) and Rep. Jason Crow (D) said GAO’s briefing has not changed their views on the basing decision. “We have said before that the U.S. Space Command basing decision was the result of a flawed and untested process that lacked transparency and neglected key national security and cost considerations. After reviewing the draft GAO report, we are even more concerned about the questionable decision to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama,” the statement said. “We will continue to work on a bipartisan basis to urge the Biden Administration to keep U.S. Space Command at Peterson,” said the statement. “We look forward to the report’s public release in the near future.” U.S. Space Command is currently headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. Former Air Force secretary Barbara Barrett announced in January in the final days of the Trump administration that after a nine-month review, the Air Force was recommending Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville as the future home of U.S. Space Command headquarters. Colorado officials alleged the Trump White House improperly influenced the process. The Air Force defended its methods of selecting the base. Officials said they assessed candidate bases by relying on community questionnaires, installation questionnaires and publicly available information. Some of the criteria used to rank bases included access to qualified workforce, proximity to space organizations and quality of life considerations such as commuting time, availability of childcare, schools, transportation and affordable housing. Former president Donald Trump last year told al.com that he specifically directed that Space Command move to Redstone Arsenal, contradicting Air Force statements that the selection process followed objective criteria used for military basing decisions.
TAMPA, Fla. — Improvements Astranis has made to the propulsion systems of four small satellites slated to launch in 2023 will add at least another year to their operational lives, according to CEO John Gedmark. The San Francisco-based startup has added “a very elegant gimbal design to our electric propulsion system,” Gedmark said in an interview, enabling future satellites to use less propellant during in-orbit maneuvers. “That means we’re now going to get, conservatively, an extra year of lifetime,” Gedmark said, “from seven years out to eight years.” The gimbal is an in-house Astranis design, a company spokesperson added, and is not procured from an outside vendor. Astranis announced April 7 that it had signed a contract with SpaceX to book a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket for launching its latest generation of satellites. SpaceX is also due to fly Astranis’ first commercial satellite Arcturus this year as a secondary payload on a Falcon Heavy, which will launch Viasat’s first ViaSat-3 satellite in its primary mission. Although this launch has slipped from spring to late summer, Gedmark expects it will still be Falcon Heavy’s first commercial mission this year. Astranis builds and secures launches for the satellites it develops, which at around 400 kilograms are among the smallest in the GEO industry, and provides the capacity through long-term leases. The company has a deal to lease Arcturus to U.S.-based telco Pacific Dataport Inc (PDI) for broadband coverage over Alaska. Gedmark told SpaceNews in September that, despite being a secondary payload, the Falcon Heavy will place Arcturus in a direct-inject mission that enables the satellite to arrive at its orbital slot within days of liftoff. In comparison, a GEO satellite can take months of orbit-raising to reach an operational position after launching on a Falcon 9 to a highly elliptical geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), requiring more fuel. However, Astranis said its four-satellite payload on SpaceX’s 2023 mission — two for inflight connectivity provider Anuvu, one for Peruvian telco Andesat and another that has not announced a customer — is well below the maximum payload capacity for a Falcon 9. This means the satellites will be able to propel themselves into service sooner than with a shared ride because they will be sent to a more tailored insertion orbit, according to the company, adding a “few months” of additional life on top of what their improved propulsion systems provide. Gedmark said the company intends to “move toward dedicated launches from here on out” for all future satellites to gain more control of schedules and orbital parameters. “That could be from the larger classes of rockets for launching many Astranis satellites as a cluster or as a batch,” he said. “Or it could be dedicated launches with one of the smaller launchers when those get online, in cases where we want to launch a satellite or two together.” He said he is confident launch companies will be able to accelerate rocket production to keep pace with the demand Astranis and other satellite startups are expecting.
WASHINGTON – A new report by the Defense Intelligence Agency notes that the space fleets of China and Russia grew more than 70% in just over two years. “This is evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut U.S. and allied global leadership in the space domain,” according to “ Challenges to Security in Space 2022, ” an unclassified report from DIA released April 12. “China’s and Russia’s counterspace developments continue to mature, global space services proliferate, and orbital congestion has increased,” noted the report. John Huth, defense intelligence officer for space and counterspace, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference that the report is intended to inform the general public about the stakes involved as the world becomes increasingly dependent on satellites and powers like China and Russia seek to challenge the United States in space. “Challenges to Security in Space” was first published in early 2019 and focused on China and Russia. The 2022 edition discusses the space capabilities of North Korea and Iran. The new report was completed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and does not address the impact of the conflict on Russia’s space industry . Most of the information in the report was drawn from published research and news articles. Kevin Ryder, senior defense intelligence analyst for space and counterspace, said China’s and Russia’s interest in exploring the moon and Mars should be viewed as national security concerns because these nations have not been transparent about their intentions. China has built its military strategy on the assumption that the United States is hugely dependent on space capabilities and losing access to them would cripple the U.S. military. According to DIA, China’s military leadership “probably sees counterspace operations as a means to deter and counter a U.S. intervention during a regional military conflict.” The Chinese military believes that destroying U.S. and allies’ space assets like GPS, communications and missile-warning satellites would make it difficult for the U.S. and allied militaries to use precision-guided weapons and would essentially leave U.S. forces “blind and deaf,” said DIA. Russia also perceives the U.S. dependence on space as its Achilles’ heel, the report said, which has motivated Russia to pursue counterspace systems. DIA included a section in the report on the dangers of orbital debris. “The probability of collision between massive derelict objects in low Earth orbit is rising and almost certainly will continue to rise until at least 2030 as a result of fragmentation events such as collisions or battery explosions, anti-satellite testing, and a rapidly increasing number of space launches worldwide,” the report said. “The collision risk is to all civilian, commercial, and government satellites of all nations. This adds to the difficulty of ensuring safe space operations and the overall stability of the space environment.” 
SEOUL, South Korea — The United States and India have agreed to cooperate on space situational awareness , a deal that the U.S. Department of Defense said would “lay the groundwork for more advanced cooperation in space.” The agreement was reached April 11 by officials of the two countries on the sidelines of the U.S.-India 2+2 ministerial dialogue in Washington, co-hosted by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Secretary of State Tony Blinken. The Indian delegation was led by Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and Minister of External Affairs Dr. S. Jaishankar. “The four leaders committed to deepening cooperation in new defense domains, such as space and cyberspace, as the U.S. and Indian militaries jointly meet the challenges of this century,” the U.S. Department of Defense said in an April 11 statement . “The United States and India signed a Space Situational Awareness arrangement, which lays the groundwork for more advanced cooperation in space.” The two countries also agreed to launch an inaugural Defense Artificial Intelligence Dialogue, while expanding joint cyber training and exercises, according to the statement. “This [agreement] will support greater information sharing and cooperation in space,” Austin told reporters following the meeting, according to Indian newspaper The Indian Express . “We’re also deepening our cooperation in cyberspace, including through training and exercises later this year. And we’re expanding our information sharing partnership across all warfighting domains.” Austin said the two countries will “launch new defense space exchanges later this year between the U.S. Space Command and India’s Defense Space Agency.” India’s defense minister hoped this comprehensive partnership would give a boost to Indian defense companies. “I shared India’s desire to take this partnership towards co-development and co-production with U.S. companies,” the minister said in an April 12 statement . “We called for increased investments by U.S. defense companies in India under the ‘Make in India’ program. Participation of U.S. entities in industrial collaboration and partnership in research and development will be critical for success of India’s ‘ Aatmanirbhar Bharat ’ [self-reliant] campaigns.”
Astra Space announced April 12 an order of electric thrusters by LeoStella, part of the company’s efforts to move beyond launch. Astra said it sold “multiple” Astra Spacecraft Engines to LeoStella, the Seattle-based smallsat manufacturer. The companies did not disclose the value of the agreement or even the number of thrusters ordered, but Astra said those thrusters will be delivered starting later this year and continuing into 2023. Tod Byquist, director of programs and supply chain at LeoStella, said in a statement that his company was looking for “innovative options” for providing propulsion for the satellites it manufactures. “Astra’s Spacecraft Engine has good flight heritage and the performance we need to get our satellites to space on schedule.” Astra obtained the engine technology from Apollo Fusion, an electric propulsion startup that Astra acquired in 2021 . That thruster was originally marketed as the Apollo Constellation Engine and was successfully demonstrated on a Sherpa tug by Spaceflight last summer. The thruster can use krypton or xenon propellants, producing between 18 and 25 millinewtons of thrust with an input power of 400 watts. A “Max” version of the thruster, using 1,450 watts, can produce 54 to 60 millinewtons of thrust with five times the total impulse as the baseline model. The sale of thrusters to LeoStella is part of a second phase of Astra’s long-term strategy that company founder and chief executive Chris Kemp discussed in a March 31 earnings call. Phase 1, he said, was the development of small launch vehicles and selling those launch services. Phase 2, he said, is “focused on productizing core space technologies.” “Astra plans to develop, license and acquire core space technologies that will be productized and incorporated into our rockets, satellites and other infrastructure that will be used to deliver space services. Core technologies include propulsion and solar power,” he said, citing the Apollo Fusion acquisition and its electric thrusters as one example. A third phase, he said, involves vertical integration of its technologies “into an Astra constellation, which will be optimally launched and maintained by the Astra launch system, allowing us to power the space economy.” The company’s near-term focus remains on launch, though. After s uccessfully returning its Rocket 3.3 vehicle to flight March 15 , Astra is now preparing for a campaign of three launches for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) Earth science mission, a constellation of six cubesats. Those launches are scheduled for this spring from Cape Canaveral. The company has a goal of monthly launches by the end of this year. Kemp and Kelyn Brannon, Astra’s chief financial officer, said on the earnings call that the company will be working this year on a new vehicle, Rocket 4. “It’s going well,” Kemp said of development of the vehicle, but did not go into specifics. “We do remain on track to do some test flights of the 4.0 version of the rocket later this year.” Astra reported no revenue in 2021, stating in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that was still a “developmental stage company” until its first paid commercial launch for NASA in February 2022. Astra recorded a net loss of $257.8 million in 2021 and adjusted EBITDA of negative $102.8 million. Brannon said the company was adjusting its spending to focus on “capital efficiency” as it works on Rocket 4 and builds out a new factory at its Alameda, California, headquarters. “Our spending adjustments give me greater comfort about Astra’s liquidity in 2022 and 2023,” when Rocket 4 production ramps up, she said.
NASA officials defended their decision to proceed with a modified version of a countdown rehearsal for the Space Launch System that does not involve fueling the rocket’s upper stage, saying they’ll wait until after the test to determine the next steps toward launch. During an April 11 call with reporters, NASA SLS managers said they were ready to proceed with a third attempt to load the SLS at Launch Complex 39B with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and go through a countdown that stops just before ignition of the core stage’s four RS-25 engines. That fueling and terminal countdown is scheduled for the afternoon of April 14. NASA announced April 9 it was modifying the plan for the third attempt after discovering a faulty helium check valve in the rocket’s upper stage , the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS). The agency announced it will perform only “minimal propellant operations” on that upper stage during the wet dress rehearsal, and will not completely fill the stage with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as originally planned. “We believe that this is the best option moving forward,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director, during the call. “We believe that we’ll be able to meet the majority of our test objectives and provide us with a reasonably good set of data prior to rollback” to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). She and other agency officials argued that they will still get valuable data even though the test falls short of the wet dress rehearsal originally planned, where the core and upper stages are both fully loaded. Blackwell-Thompson said there are about 25 “critical events” in the terminal phase of the countdown, from T-10 minutes to the cutoff just under T-10 seconds. Only two, she said, were specific to ICPS. NASA plans to wait until after the test is complete to determine what to do next in preparing the SLS for launch. “We’ll take a look at where we’re at and ask ourselves what’s the right next step,” said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters. “There’s a value of taking a step-by-step approach.” There will be a small amount of propellant that will flow into the ICPS during the test, said John Blevins, NASA SLS chief engineer, enough to cool systems to cryogenic temperatures. That will stop just before “fast fill” of the propellant tanks would begin. “That’s a really important piece of data to get,” said Blackwell-Thompson. “Historically, when you see leaks, especially with something small like hydrogen, it is usually when you get down to cryogenic temperatures.” Blevins said it was too soon to say if NASA will need to do another wet dress rehearsal that includes tanking the ICPS, explaining that it will depend on data collected from other systems from the upcoming test. “If that missing data were the only missing data, and every model acted perfectly, I think we would look long and hard at whether we needed to or not,” he said, adding that it wasn’t possible to do a tanking test of the ICPS alone without also loading the core stage. Once the SLS is rolled back to the VAB, he said replacing the faulty helium check valve should be straightforward. “Easy to get to, easy to change out.” He declined to speculate on why the valve, which he described as a “high-reliability part,” malfunctioned. “It is somewhat of an unexpected outcome, an unexpected failure,” he said. NASA has also declined to speculate on what these issues mean for the schedule of the Artemis 1 launch itself. That mission has launch windows of June 6 to 16, June 29 to July 17 and July 26 to Aug. 9, defined by orbital mechanics of the Earth and moon and other mission constraints. Whitmeyer said there are no issues with the SLS or Orion spacecraft that would prevent a launch “well into the fall” if necessary. That margin may be needed since agency officials acknowledged there may be more problems yet to be found as NASA attempts another countdown test. “I can say that these will probably not be the last challenges we’ll encounter,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, “but I’m confident we have the right team in place and the ability to rally around those problems.”
U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are eager to tap into commercial innovation, and many startup founders are eager to win government funding. The problem is the two groups often have trouble communicating. “A lot of these founders are technologists, not government procurement experts,” said Matt Kozlov, Los Angeles managing director for seed accelerator Techstars. “Even with accelerator programs and Department of Defense initiatives to make it easier, navigating the government market is still really hard.” Founders without military or government contracting backgrounds face an indecipherable array of potential programs and funding sources. Imagine coming from academia or the software sector and trying to make sense of conversations that revolve around AFWERX, CFIUS, DIU, In-Q-Tel, SBIR and STRATFI. What’s a startup to do? Many turn to so-called sherpas — retired military officers who help them navigate the unfamiliar terrain. “A commercial startup company with great new technology to sell to DoD probably does still need to hire someone or find a consultant to do customer discovery, sales and make introductions,” said Warren Katz, chairman of the Alliance for Commercial Technology in Government, a nonprofit that helps commercial firms do business with government agencies on commercial terms. Consultants tend to fall into three categories. Some, having worked in the Pentagon or on Capitol Hill, specialize in introductions to members of Congress who can see to it that specific programs or technologies are included in the National Defense Authorization Act. A second group consists primarily of retired military officers who introduce founders to people in government agencies who can sign off on Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts or identify government applications for commercial technology. Former military contracting officers, who make up the third group, share their knowledge of the military’s complex process of writing requirements, acquiring technology through five-year funding cycles and creating programs of record, funded and approved campaigns to deploy new goods or services. It is not supposed to be this difficult. Government agencies have been working for years to identify commercial technology with military applications and make it easier for startups to sell dual-use products and services. However, they still provide far less support than large technology companies seeking cutting-edge hardware or software. “If I have a software company with a hot new artificial intelligence or cybersecurity technology and I go to a Microsoft tech scout, that Microsoft tech scout doesn’t tell me to find my own way around Microsoft,” said Katz, who previously served as managing director of the Techstars Air Force Accelerator. “They don’t say, ‘Go fumble around and bumble around and maybe you’ll stumble into somebody who might want your stuff.’ That tech scout’s job is to match my hot technology with internal customers inside that giant monolithic organization.” The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) plays a similar role within the Defense Department. DIU invites companies to submit papers of no more than five pages explaining how the firm’s technology could help address challenges related to space, artificial intelligence, autonomy and other topics. If DIU sees merit in a proposal, the agency can issue a prototype award in as little as two months and follow it up with a sole-source contract. The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force established AFWERX and SpaceWERX in 2017 and 2020, respectively, to speed up adoption of commercial technology for government missions. AFWERX, in particular, is prolific. The innovation program managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory hands out more than 1,000 Small Business Innovation Research contracts annually. The vast majority are Phase One SBIR awards of $50,000 or less. To win follow-on contracts, startups need a military customer, called an end-user, to sign a memorandum of understanding explaining the need for the technology. Entrepreneurs without military backgrounds often turn to consultants to introduce them to potential end-users. “It’s the conundrum of the unknown unknown,” said Andrew Bossert, a former Space and Missile Systems center contracting officer and managing partner of the Space Advisory Group, a consulting firm based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “The end-user doesn’t know that the technology exists, and the technologist doesn’t know that the end-user exists.” Consultants serve as guides, explaining potential uses for a startup’s technology and helping entrepreneurs find military laboratories, combatant commands or program offices that may be interested. “It’s not a realistic expectation for a little startup company to have that person on staff,” Katz said. What’s more, potential applications for commercial technology may be classified, something an entrepreneur is unlikely to discover without partners, advisors or consultants who possess security clearances. “Based on my experience and what I was briefed into, I can know that a company’s thruster will enable XYZ mission,” said Severin Blenkush, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and the Space Advisory Group’s other managing partner. “I can’t tell them what it’s going to be used for. But I can tell them there is a need for it and say, ‘Let’s go talk to this individual over here,’” said Blenkush, a former U.S. Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office contracting officer. This article originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
WASHINGTON – As Maxar Technologies’ satellites continue to collect images of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the company is working with customers so it can allocate more capacity to meet U.S. government needs, said Maxar’s CEO Daniel Jablonsky. With four satellites in orbit, “a lot of times we don’t have a lot of spare capacity,” Jablonsky said in an interview last week at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “But we made accommodations with some of our other customers to be able to surge capacity for the U.S. and allies,” he said. The company also gets about 200 requests a day for imagery from news media organizations. Maxar and other commercial imagery companies have been working with U.S. intelligence agencies and allied governments since before Russia’s invasion to track troop movements, and are also providing imagery in support of humanitarian aid efforts. Maxar’s primary customers – the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency – more than doubled purchases of commercial electro-optical imagery over Ukraine since the conflict started. The capacity crunch will be an issue “until we get the Legions launched,” Jablonsky said. WorldView Legion is a constellation of six imagery satellites that is critical to the company’s future. Legion has suffered a number of schedule setbacks , including delays in the delivery of the imaging instruments and production shutdowns during the covid pandemic. Most recently, the launch of the first two satellites that had been projected for early summer could be pushed to the right again because of a shortage of Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft used to transport spacecraft from factory to launch site. The first two satellites will be transported by truck from Maxar’s manufacturing plant in Northern California to SpaceX’s launch facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. That could add a couple of extra weeks to the schedule, said Jablonsky. Maxar initially had booked two SpaceX launches for the Legion constellation: one for the first two satellites and the second for the other four. But it later decided to add a third, splitting the constellation in pairs to be launched in three-month intervals, said Jablonsky. “We wanted to make sure we can get the capacity up there as quickly as possible, but also reduce the risk from having four Legions on one launch vehicle,” he said. Once new satellites are in orbit, it can take anywhere from 45 to 90 days of testing and calibration before they are fully operational, he said. “This will be a little different for us because we’ll be commissioning the first of its kind spacecraft. So there’ll be more things that we want to check out and we’ll be doing two at the same time. And we’ve never done that before.” Maxar’s current fleet includes WorldView-1 with 50-centimeter resolution; GeoEye-1 and WorldView-2 with 40-centimeter resolution and WorldView-3 that provides 30-centimeter imagery. The company in 2016 launched the 30-centimeter WorldView-4 but its instrument failed and the satellite was deorbited last year. The Legion satellites all provide 30-centimeter imagery. “We can get into the upper 20s if we fly them lower,” said Jablonsky. With a full constellation of six, “we will be doubling our area collection capacity every day. And tripling our 30-centimeter capacity.” 3D mapping of Ukraine Since the war started, Maxar has also increased production of 3D maps of Ukrainian cities to help assess the damage from Russian attacks, Jablonsky said. Jablonsky showed SpaceNews an immersive 3D map of a Ukrainian town with before-and-after representations of the damage. “It almost feels like a fly-through with a drone,” he said. A video of the 3D maps shown at the Space Symposium has not yet been released publicly. Maxar uses its own satellite imagery archive, drone imagery and video sources and combines them with 3D technology to produce immersive environments that replicate the real world. This capability known as “precision 3D georegistration” has been used to make digital representations of parts of the world for U.S. Army training, for example. The 3D renderings of the terrain of the Earth also can be turned into a navigation system so autonomous cars can drive and aircraft can fly safely without GPS. Jablonsky said the company has been delivering 3D maps of “areas in Ukraine that we thought were of importance.” “We have the imagery of the entire globe and the processes to do this with accuracy,” he said. “We found that it’s been really valuable for simulation, planning and assessments and also for helping people understand things in a visual way.” Maxar gained ownership of the 3D technology through the acquisition of Vricon in 2020. The company’s chief financial officer Biggs Porter said Maxar over the past year has invested an additional $30 million in 3D mapping technology. “It’s a growth opportunity,” Biggs said March 17 at a J.P. Morgan investors conference. 
Moog Inc. is quadrupling the size of its Colorado space vehicle production capacity as the New York-based company long known as a spacecraft component supplier expands its role as a space vehicle integrator. “It’s a proud moment for our company,” Maureen Athoe, Moog Space and Defense Group president, told SpaceNews . “This step takes us to the mission level. We’re going to hear from our customers about what they need not just with components, but with the actual mission.” This year, Moog is scheduled to integrate nine space vehicles in its new 8,800-square-meter facility in Arvada, Colorado, and its existing 3,000-square-meter plant nearby. “If customers would like to buy components, we’re happy to sell them,” Hallie Freeman, Moog Integrated Space Vehicles business unit director and site manager, said at the Space Symposium. “If they want to buy integrated subsystems, we’re happy to provide that. This gives us one more option for our customers who bring the payload and are looking for someone to be the integrated bus provider.” Moog held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and grand opening April 4 for the new Arvada facility. Now, the company is moving employees and components into the plant in preparation to begin production this summer. After decades of producing components and subsystems, Moog began selling entire small and medium spacecraft buses in 2018. Moog also offers a propulsive version of the company’s popular ESPA secondary payload ring and a Small Launch Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle. Moog won its first contract to supply its Small Launch Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle to a government customer that plans to launch it from the United Kingdom’s Sutherland, Scotland, launch site. Space industry expansion provided the opening for Moog to become an integrator. “There are so many more missions, so many more satellites,” Athoe said. “Because we have all of the component expertise that makes it much easier for us to go ahead and do the integrated vehicle.” Moog, a firm well known for providing spacecraft avionics, flight software and propulsion systems, relies on its supply chain for guidance, navigation and control sensors and the other components the firm does not produce internally. “Our avionics solutions are proven in geostationary and low Earth orbit,” Athoe said. “Our niche is providing dozens of high reliability space vehicles that can meet the government’s need for responsive missions that have to work.”
The SpaceNews editorial team produced four show dailies, a nightly email newsletter and all-day web coverage during the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs the week of April 4. We’ve compiled all our reporting into a special digital edition that’s free. SN Digital Edition | News from the 37th Space Symposium 
WASHINGTON – Instead of having a dedicated reserve force, the U.S. Space Force would have a regular active-duty force with full-time and part-time members, according to a proposal the Department of the Air Force submitted to Congress April 1. The proposal approved by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall would establish in law “a new approach to managing reserve component forces by merging what has traditionally been called active-duty forces and reserve forces into a new component that provides full-time and part-time service options to Guardians,” Kendall’s spokesman Lt. Col. Justin Brockhoff, said in a statement to SpaceNews . The proposal does not recommend establishing a Space National Guard, which is in line with the Biden administration’s position. The White House in September said it opposed creating a separate Space National Guard due to concerns about cost and bureaucratic bloat. About 1,500 personnel currently in the Air National Guard support space operations. Brockhoff said the Department of the Air Force “continues to coordinate across the executive branch on the appropriate future disposition of current Air National Guard space units in a manner that is efficient, effective and appropriate for space missions.” Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond told SpaceNews that the “one component” approach proposed by Kendall “will allow us to do innovative things and will give us more flexibility.” The proposal was written in response to a congressional mandate to “conduct a study to determine the appropriate role and organization of space-related assets within the reserve components of the armed forces.” The National Defense Authorization Act directed DoD to submit the report by March 31, 2022. Raymond said that after considerable debate, “one of the innovative things that we came up with was a solution to put the reserve and active duty together in one component, so you don’t have a separate reserve.” The Space Force, by virtue of being small with just 8,4000 active-duty guardians, needs to be able to manage forces differently than the larger branches of the military, Raymond said. Allowing some guardians to work part-time helps the Space Force recruit and retain specialized people who are also in high demand in the private sector, he said. “We would be giving opportunities for people to go to the commercial industry, to go to NASA, and then come back. Maybe at certain times in their life, if they want to have children they can go part-time for a while and then come back without having to get out of active duty and then go into the reserves.” Under the one-component concept – which would require new legislation from Congress – Space Force members could transition between what were formerly regular and reserve component positions without requiring a new appointment. With regard to the Space National Guard, Raymond noted that the administration opposes the idea and that the Air National Guard will continue to support the Space Force. Eight states — Alaska, Hawaii, California, Colorado, Florida, New York, Arkansas and Ohio — and Guam have approximately 1,500 personnel who specialize in space operations. Most are from the Air National Guard and a small number are from the Army National Guard. “We rely on those capabilities and that expertise today and we’ll continue to rely on them in the future,” said Raymond. Previous proposal recommended two components An earlier version of the proposal submitted April 1 – which was rejected by the White House – had recommended a two-component construct. According to the earlier proposal, a copy of which was reviewed by SpaceNews , the Department of the Air Force recommended combining the regular Space Force and Air Force Reserve space professionals into a combined component. And it also recommended a single reserve component comprised of a Space National Guard “generated by the seamless transition of current Air National Guard units performing space missions.” Congressional sources said the administration’s opposition to the establishment of a Space National Guard has angered lawmakers and leaders from states like Colorado and California where Guard units perform space duties. The House version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act would have created a Space National Guard but the Senate sided with the Biden administration and did not support it, so was removed from the final compromise bill. The Space National Guard is likely to once again be considered in the 2023 NDAA. 
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has signed a contract with SpaceX to launch five spy satellites by 2025, with the first launch on a Falcon 9 rocket by the end of 2023. A spokeswoman for the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) confirmed the deal April 11, saying the 2023 launch would deliver an 800-kilogram electro-optical infrared satellite to low Earth orbit. “The deal was made to launch five satellites involved in the ‘425 project,’ ” DAPA spokeswoman Park Geun-young told SpaceNews, referring to a space-based reconnaissance project the defense ministry launched in 2018 for closer monitoring of North Korea’s military activities. Under the project, five satellites — four synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites and one featuring an electro-optical infrared (EO/IR) telescope — will be launched to low Earth orbit between 600 and 700 km by 2025, enabling South Korea’s military to observe the nuclear-armed neighbor’s key military facilities every two hours with 30-50 centimeters resolution imagery, according to a 2019 report produced by the Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning. The spokeswoman declined to share the terms and conditions of the deal, as well as launch schedules for the other four satellites. The Agency for Defense Development (ADD) and Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) have led the $970 million project as primary contractors. Under the technical assistance from Europe’s Thales Alenia Space , ADD has worked with Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) and Hanwha Systems to develop the four SAR satellites. KARI has developed the EO/IR satellite. It is the second time South Korea has hired SpaceX to carry out a space-based military mission. In the first project , conducted in July 2020, a SpaceX Falcon 9 put South Korea’s first military communications satellite, code-named Anasis-2, into geostationary Earth orbit. The Anasis-2 satellite was manufactured in France by Airbus Defence and Space as part of an offset obligation related to a $7 billion sale of U.S. F-35 fighter jets to South Korea in 2014. Under the terms of the deal, F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin agreed to procure a telecommunications satellite for South Korea. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite communications equipment maker SatixFy said April 10 that cofounder and outgoing CEO Yoel Gat has died, days after announcing a leadership transition that would seat a new CEO in June amid plans to become a public company. Gat founded Israeli satcoms specialist Gilat Satellite Networks and had been CEO of SatixFy since its 2012 creation. The 69-year-old died April 8 from cancer, according to a spokesperson for Israel-based SatixFy. Two days earlier, in an April 6 news release, SatixFy said Gat was moving into a co-chair role to make way for a new CEO as part of sweeping leadership changes to prepare for a public market listing. SatixFy announced plans March 8 to trade shares on Nasdaq later this year by merging with Endurance Acquisition Corp , a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), in a deal that could potentially raise up to $230 million for its growth plans. As part of a list of potential risk factors in a March investor presentation for the merger, SatixFy said the company is “dependent on the continued services and performance of our founder, the loss of whom could adversely affect our business.” Gat’s passing does not change the SPAC merger’s timeline or details, the SatixFy spokesperson said. “I personally have partnered with Yoel for over 30 years and will miss both his personal friendship and business partnership,” said SatixFy cofounder and chief financial officer Yoav Leibovitch in a statement. “He was a true entrepreneur, a creator of new companies, technologies and markets. We will continue to follow his vision as we take SatixFy to its next stage of growth.” SatixFy named Leibovitch interim CEO until a successor the company intends to announce “in the coming weeks” takes the position June 26. Leibovitch is taking on Gat’s leadership responsibilities while also continuing his duties as chief financial officer. SatixFy’s merger with Endurance, which is backed by New York-based private equity firm Antarctica Capital, values the combined group at about $813 million. The company develops satellite antennas, terminals, and modems based on semiconductors it develops in-house. Customers include the low Earth orbit broadband constellations being developed by U.K.-based OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat.
Aerojet Rocketdyne announced April 11 it has received an order from United Launch Alliance for 116 engines for the upper stage of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. Aerojet said this was the company’s largest ever contract for the RL10 engine. The large purchase of rocket engines comes on the heels of Amazon’s announcement April 5 that it selected Arianespace, Blue Origin and ULA to launch up to 3,236 satellites for its Project Kuiper broadband constellation. CEO Tory Bruno said ULA plans to fly Vulcan’s first mission late in 2022. Winning the Amazon deal would more than double the annual rate of Vulcan launches to as many as 25 per year, and ULA will ramp up production to meet the demand, Bruno said last week at the Space Symposium. ULA’s engine choice for Vulcan’s upper stage dates back to 2018 when it selected a variant of the RL10, the same engine used to power the upper stages of ULA’s legacy rockets Atlas 5 and Delta 4 Heavy. Over the past 60 years, more than 450 RL10 engines have flown on various ULA heritage vehicles. Due to a congressional mandate to end the U.S. military’s reliance on the Russian RD-180 rocket engine used in the Atlas 5’s first stage, ULA in 2015 announced it would build Vulcan Centaur as its next-generation rocket and selected Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine for the first stage. Each Vulcan Centaur upper stage will use two RL10C-X engines. Aerojet said the RL10C-X is a variant of the RL1o developed for Vulcan Centaur that will “increase the use of additive manufacturing and introduce other advanced technologies to improve the quality, reliability, affordability and performance.” The RL10C-X uses a 3D-printed main injector and main combustion chamber, and has a 94-inch monolithic lightweight composite nozzle. According to Aerojet, the specific impulse, or Isp, of the RL10C-X is 461 seconds, which “puts it near the very top of the RL10 engine family in terms of performance. Specific impulse measures the amount of thrust generated by a rocket engine per unit of propellant consumed per second. The engine is made at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s facility near West Palm Beach, Florida. The RL10 also powers the upper stage of NASA’s Space Launch System. During a meeting with reporters at the Space Symposium, Bruno said one of his key “supply chain” concerns is building enough rocket engines for Vulcan to meet the projected demand. “We are most concerned about the things that are the most complicated to build and take the most time,” he said. “Those are rocket engines and rocket motors. So Blue Origin, Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman are the key places we’ll focus on.” Northrop Grumman supplies Vulcan’s strap-on solid boosters. 
Companies are adding to or creating new teams in anticipation of a NASA competition for a lunar rover to support later Artemis missions to the moon. Lockheed Martin announced April 4 that it was adding Canadian company MDA to its partnership with General Motors to develop a rover. MDA, which developed robotic arms for the shuttle and International Space Station, will provide a robotic arm for the Lockheed-GM rover. “It’s built on the decades of experience that we have on Canadarm,” said Holly Johnson, vice president of robotic and space operation at MDA, during a presentation about the partnership April 4 during the 37th Space Symposium. “We will be using the same software and control systems and operational lessons learned that we gained over the decades, but it will look a little bit different.” The arm will support operations both when the rover is being used by astronauts on Artemis missions and when the rover is being remotely operated from the Earth. “What we want to do is fully utilize this vehicle with autonomous capability for the other 50, 51 weeks of the year,” said Kirk Shireman, vice president of lunar exploration campaigns at Lockheed Martin. One example he gave was to drive the rover into permanently shadowed regions of craters, using the robotic arm to collect samples for analysis. Lockheed announced its partnership with GM last May to develop a lunar rover for Artemis missions in anticipation of a future NASA solicitation. In November, Northrop Grumman announced it formed a team with several other companies, ranging from lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines to tire manufacturer Michelin, to develop an Artemis rover. In March, startup Venturi Astrolab unveiled a prototype of its lunar rover it recently tested in Death Valley, California. Another industry group has unveiled plans to develop a lunar rover. Teledyne Brown Engineering announced April 5 that it is working with Sierra Space and Nissan North America to propose an Artemis lunar rover. Teledyne Brown will lead the work on the rover, with Sierra Space providing flight software and components and Nissan its experience in automotive design and autonomous driving. Teledyne Brown noted in a statement that the company’s work on lunar rover concepts dates back to building a lunar rover prototype in the 1960s for NASA. “We feel that we have created a dynamic, cutting-edge and proven team for this effort,” said Scott Hall, president of Teledyne Brown, in the statement. “Together this team will deliver a rugged, versatile and intuitive vehicle to support our future in space.” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in an interview that his company’s interest in a lunar rover was based on the company’s long-term view on space commercialization. “The reason why a big part of the company on the exploration side is focused on the moon is because we think it’s the next part that’s going to commercialize,” he said. “We think that’s how humanity is going to get off the planet.” NASA has yet to release a formal solicitation for a lunar rover after issuing two requests for information in recent years. Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA Headquarters, said at an Artemis town hall during the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in March that he expected the agency to issue a request for proposals for the rover in the next few months.
The leaders of the House Science Committee have asked the Biden administration to withdraw a controversial proposed rule regarding commercial spaceflight investigations, calling it “plainly unlawful.” In an April 6 letter to President Biden , Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Science Committee, called on the administration to withdraw proposed regulations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that would give the board new authority to investigate launch failures. The notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), published in November , would require companies to notify the NTSB in the event of a failure of launch licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, and give the board the authority to investigate such accidents. During a public comment period that closed in January, many companies and industry groups sharply criticized the proposed regulations , calling them duplicative with existing FAA regulations and warning that they could create “a chilling effect” on industry. In their letter, Johnson and Lucas argue that NTSB overstepped its bounds by proposing to take a role in commercial spaceflight investigations. “Responsibilities and authorities for space accident investigation are to be determined by congressional action, as reflected in Title 51 of the United States Code, not through proposed regulations that are outside of established authorities,” they wrote. “The NTSB’s proposed rulemaking is inconsistent with statutory authorities, existing interagency agreements and regulations, and it is plainly unlawful.” The letter is not the first time that members and staff of the committee have raised their concerns about the NTSB proposal. “We sent a letter to the NTSB asking for additional information about their NPRM,” recalled Tom Hammond of the House Science Committee staff during a panel discussion at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference in February. “They sent a very nice letter back saying they’re not going to respond to us. We anticipate following up.” Other staffers from House and Senate committees on that panel also objected to the NTSB rule. “We have significant concerns about how NTSB did this,” said Joel Graham of the Senate Commerce Committee. “It’s an agency charging off in one direction without consulting its partners.” The NTSB has not commented on its progress reviewing the comments it received on its draft rule, including whether it will move ahead with a final rule or instead publish a revised draft for additional comment. However, Johnson and Lucas stated the proposed regulations featured “fundamental conflicts” that could not be resolved with an updated draft. The letter included an eight-page appendix discussing in detail how Congress, in federal law, assigned authority to the Secretary of Transportation, not NTSB, to conduct investigations. “We reiterate that this rulemaking is plainly unlawful and we urge you to terminate any further action and rescind the proposed rule,” they write in the letter to Biden. 
COLORADO SPRINGS – The U.S. Space Force is requesting an additional $200 million in fiscal year 2023 to launch satellites for the Space Development Agency’s missile-tracking constellation. The funding for additional launches was included in a $600 million “unfunded requirements” list the Space Force submitted to Congress April 6. The other $400 million is for weapons systems upgrades and classified technologies. These requests would be added to the budget proposal the Biden administration r eleased March 28 . Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), said two more launches need to be funded in 2023 to accelerate the deployment of a $2.5 billion missile-tracking constellation that the agency initially planned to start launching in 2026 but is now looking to accelerate to 2025. SDA’s Tracking Layer, a constellation of infrared sensing satellites in low Earth orbit, has emerged as a top priority for the Pentagon amid concerns that current defense systems might not be able to detect high-speed maneuvering missiles. The Tracking Layer is envisioned as a global network of eyes in the sky that would provide a defensive shield against Russian and Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles. As many as 100 satellites are planned to be added to the Tracking Layer over the next five years. The program is getting a large influx of funding. The Pentagon in 2022 did not request funds for the Tracking Layer but Congress inserted $550 million to speed up the project . The Defense Department’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 includes $500 million for the Tracking Layer. The first eight satellites – made by L3Harris and SpaceX – are projected to launch in 2023. The next batch of at least 28 satellites would launch in 2025. After Congress passed the 2022 budget in March, SDA issued a request for industry bids for at least 28 satellites – Tracking Layer Tranche 1 – and proposals are due April 20. At a news conference April 5 at the Space Symposium, Tournear said he expects the agency to award contracts in June so satellites can be ready for launch in 2025. Two vendors are likely to be selected to provide 14 or more satellites each. Tournear said he anticipates six to 10 bids for this contract. The agency’s strategy, known as “spiral development,” is to buy satellites every two years so it can tap into the latest technologies and bring new vendors into the program. The next batch of satellites, Transport Layer Tranche 2, could have as many as 50. SDA also is developing a global network of broadband satellites in low Earth Orbit known as the Transport Layer . The data collected by Tracking Layer satellites would be sent via optical links to the Transport Layer so if a missile threat is detected, its location and trajectory data can be transmitted securely through space and downlinked to military command centers. “I think that proliferated low Earth orbit with spiral development is now accepted as an activity that will provide us the capabilities we need in the future,” Tournear said. “And if you look at the plus-ups that we received from Congress in 2022, that is an endorsement of our ability to be able to deliver on the capabilities that have been promised.” The Pentagon’s proposed 2023 budget includes $314 million for three launches for the Transport Layer. Tournear said the budget submitted March 28 did not include any Tracking Layer launches because that proposal was put together before Congress added $550 million for tracking satellites. The congressional add-on meant SDA had to move up the procurement of the satellites and the launches, Tournear said.“When the president’s budget request for 2023 was submitted from the department, we didn’t anticipate launching as early as 2025. So we’re working with the appropriators to correct any mismatch.” Because of the lead time required by the Space Force’s national security space launch program, launches are funded two years before the actual launch. 
After discovering a problem with a valve on the Space Launch System’s upper stage, NASA is delaying a countdown rehearsal and fueling test and modifying it to limit fueling of the upper stage. NASA said in an April 9 blog post that it was delaying the wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the SLS by another three days. NASA previously planned to restart the test with a “call to stations” for personnel April 9, leading up to the tanking test and practice countdown April 11. NASA said the call to stations is now set for April 12 and tanking on April 14. The latest delay is linked to a faulty helium check valve in the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), the upper stage of the SLS. The valve prevents helium, used to purge propellant lines and drain propellant, from escaping the rocket. NASA said April 7 that engineers found a problem maintain helium purge pressure in the ICPS after changing out a regulator in the mobile launch platform. At that time, the agency said it was able to restore normal pressure but was still studying the source of the problem, now linked to the faulty valve in the ICPS itself. Because that issue, NASA now plans to limit the amount of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant loaded into the ICPS during the WDR. NASA said the countdown rehearsal will be modified with “minimal propellant operations” on the ICPS, but didn’t elaborate on how much propellant would be transferred into the upper stage. “Wet dress rehearsal is an opportunity to refine the countdown procedures and validate critical models and software interfaces,” NASA said in the post. “The modified test will enable engineers to achieve the test objectives critical to launch success.” The ICPS is based on the second stage of the Delta 4 launch vehicle and uses a single RL10 engine. This particular stage was one of the first components of the overall vehicle that was completed. It was delivered and placed into storage several years ago while the core stage and solid rocket boosters were still being manufactured. The valve issue is the latest glitch in the WDR process that has delayed the full test of the vehicle by more than a week. NASA scrubbed the first countdown rehearsal April 3 after delays caused by severe weather the night before, followed by malfunctions of fans in the mobile launch platform designed to prevent the buildup of hazardous gases. A second attempt the next day resulted in filling the core stage’s liquid oxygen tank halfway, but several other problems, including a vent valve that failed to open, led controllers to halt the test before the start of liquid hydrogen loading. The delays in the in the WDR and the need to replace the helium valve in the ICPS now put into doubt the ability of SLS to be ready for a launch window that runs from June 6 to 16. NASA said in its April 9 blog post that it is “confident in the ability to replace the valve” once the SLS returns to the Vehicle Assembly Building after the WDR, but didn’t estimate how long that would take and what additional testing might be required.
The Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), an experiment funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, will fly to a geostationary Earth orbit in 2023 and will be used to augment the positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services currently provided by GPS satellites. The concept of adding another layer of PNT could be significant as the Pentagon fears that signals from GPS satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO) could be jammed or disrupted during a conflict. “We wanted to look at how you use a constellation that is truly a hybrid architecture,” Joanna Hinks, NTS-3 deputy program manager at AFRL, told reporters April 7 at the Space Symposium. When NTS-3 was first conceived, “initially we looked at MEO,” she said. But later it was decided that GEO would be a better location for NTS-3 so researchers could assess the potential benefits of having a multi-orbit PNT architecture. “The idea here is that we already understand very well how navigation works from MEO,” Hinks said. Another goal for NTS-3 is to test software-defined radio technologies so signals can be reprogrammed to confuse and defeat jammers. A ground system being developed by Parsons Corp. would integrate GPS and NTS-3 signals and assess the network’s performance in a jamming environment. “Reprogrammable signals is one major emphasis,” said Hinks. This is going to require a flexible ground system and user receivers “that can handle reprogrammability.” The 1,250-kilogram satellite is being assembled at an L3Harris facility in Palm Bay, Florida. The company in 2018 won an $84 million contract from AFRL to build NTS-3. L3Harris is integrating a digital mission data unit on a Northrop Grumman ESPAStar bus. The satellite is projected to launch on the USSF-106 mission planned by the U.S. Space Force. This would be the first national security mission to fly on United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Once in orbit, NTS-3 would provide PNT services only over the United States “because of the ease of access and the ability to easily install receivers in in locations of interest,” Hinks said. Because NTS-3 will be in geostationary orbit, “it is persistently in view of one location,” she said. By comparison, GPS satellites in six orbital planes circle the Earth twice per day broadcasting PNT signals. With a GEO satellite “you don’t need to worry that you’ve only got one or two satellites, and they’re going to be gone in a few hours and you won’t be able to see them,” said Hinks. “That’s one of the big things, but we are really just starting to lay the groundwork for how you could have a constellation that it’s not just in one orbit regime. That’s a big part of the experiment.”
WASHINGTON – Warpspace, a Japanese space startup developing an inter-satellite laser communications system, is establishing a U.S. presence to partner with American companies and compete for government and military contracts. “Warpspace USA Inc. was recently incorporated in Delaware,” chief strategy officer Hirokazu Mori told SpaceNews. The company is developing an optical inter-satellite data relay service in medium Earth orbit called WarpHub InterSat. The target customers are Earth observation satellite operators that need to quickly move large volumes of data from space to the ground. Warpspace also is pitching the service to the U.S. Defense Department’s Space Development Agency. SDA is building a so-called Transport Layer constellation of hundreds of data-relay satellites to support military communications. Founded in 2016, Warpspace currently operates one test cubesat in low Earth orbit. In 2024, it plans to start deploying a constellation of three satellites in medium Earth orbit that would receive and pass data from customers’ satellites in low Earth orbit using optical communications. The MEO satellites would send the data to ground stations initially using radio-frequency links and eventually moving to optical links when the space-to-ground laser communications technology matures, said Mori. All three satellites should be in orbit by 2025, he said. Once the constellation is operational, the company will start offering data transport as a service. As the number of satellites operating in low Earth orbit keeps growing, he said, “the demand for higher data sampling and downlink has been also increasing. However, the conventional communication infrastructure is not sufficient to meet demand,” he said. The concept behind the WarpHub InterSat service is to allow LEO satellites to “constantly communicate with ground stations with a high-speed optical link in near real-time.” Warpspace USA will start to get up and running this summer. “We look forward to strengthening our cooperation with U.S. companies and agencies. One of the main purposes to open up a branch in Washington, D.C., is to begin building a relationship with the U.S. government. We are particularly interested in the work that the Space Development Agency is doing on Tranche 1 of the Transport Layer.” The company in September closed a Series A funding round, raising approximately $10 million. Mori said Warpspace is looking to close a Series B funding round this summer. Mori noted that optical communications for space have been successfully deployed by national space agencies, but cost and technical maturity have prevented their widespread adoption. As the industry transitions to higher production rates and the technology is proven, he said, laser communications in space will become increasingly the norm. Warpspace in January announced it was selected by Japan’s space agency JAXA to conduct a study on the use of optical communications for lunar exploration activities, work that would support NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the moon. “Through the realization and expansion of the optical inter-satellite communication networks, we will contribute to the expansion of safe and peaceful utilization of outer space through public-private, and international cooperation,” said Warpspace CEO Satoru Tsunemachi.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying four private astronauts arrived at the International Space Station April 9 for a scheduled eight-day stay. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour docked with the station at 8:29 a.m. Eastern, about 21 hours after it reached orbit after its launch on a Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center . The docking took place about 45 minutes behind schedule as the Dragon loitered 20 meters from the station while the ISS crew and ground controllers worked on an issue with video they needed to support the docking. Hatches between the Dragon and station opened nearly two hours later, and the four members of Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission entered the station: mission commander Michael López-Alegría, pilot Larry Connor and mission specialists Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy. López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut, is an Axiom employee and Connor, Stibbe and Pathy are customers of Axiom, paying an estimated $55 million each. The four are scheduled to spend eight days on the ISS conducting research and performing other commercial activities and outreach. “We’re here to experience this, but we understand there’s a responsibility,” said Connor during a briefing welcoming ceremony on the ISS. “The responsibility is for this first civilian crew to get it right, and that’s what we’re fully committed to.” The time in space is not all serious, though. López-Alegría said his fellow crewmembers were all stunned by their first views of the Earth from space. “It’s just an amazing experience,” he said during the welcoming ceremony, which he also used to give and Connor, Stibbe and Pathy astronaut pins from the Association of Space Explorers, an international organization of astronauts. The Ax-1 mission is part of a busy schedule of activities on the ISS that includes the later Crew-4 mission that will transport four NASA and European Space Agency astronauts to the station, also on a Crew Dragon, and the later return of the four NASA and ESA Crew-3 astronauts currently on the station. “We have a really tight schedule,” Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, said at the Ax-1 postlaunch briefing April 8. NASA wants to launch Crew-4 in time to allow Crew-3 to return by around May 10 after a five-day “handover” when both crews are on the ISS. That would allow, in late May, the launch of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on a second uncrewed test flight called OFT-2. Crew-4 is currently planned for launch April 21, but Weigel called that a “really aggressive schedule.” She noted uncertainly about both launch and splashdown weather that could affect those schedules. “Our goal is to have Crew-4 launched by the end of April, and then have Crew-3 down by mid-May to be ready for OFT-2,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, at the postlaunch briefing.
The European Space Agency will launch its Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite on a Vega C rocket in 2023 as the agency continues to study potential impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on that launch vehicle. Arianespace announced April 7 that it won a contract from ESA to launch Sentinel-1C in the first half of 2023. Neither the company nor the agency disclosed them terms of the contract. The selection of Vega C was expected, since planning for the mission anticipated it flying on the Vega C rather than the much larger Ariane 6. The first two Sentinel-1 missions launched on Soyuz rockets from French Guiana, but Russia terminated Soyuz launches from that spaceport in February in response to European sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and even before that ESA was phasing out its use. There had been discussions earlier this year that the launch of Sentinel-1C could be moved up because of a malfunction of Sentinel-1B that took it out of service in December 2021. The spacecraft remains out of service because of problems with the power system for its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging payload. At a March 17 briefing, ESA officials were pessimistic about recovering Sentinel-1B , even as efforts to restore the SAR payload continued. “It doesn’t look very good, but for the moment it’s not the final word on 1B,” said Simonetta Cheli, director of Earth observation at ESA. She said then that Sentinel-1C would be ready for launch as soon as October, although at the time it was not scheduled to launch until the middle of 2023. “We are assessing, in the current situation, options with Arianespace for launch. We are looking at the earliest options because we want to support the users.” At the same briefing, ESA officials noted a potential issue with the Vega C , an upgraded, more powerful version of the existing Vega rocket scheduled to make its first launch by the middle of this year. The rocket’s upper stage, called AVUM, uses a liquid-propellant engine built by Ukrainian company Yuzhmash. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised questions about the long-term availability of the engine. At the March briefing, Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of space transportation, said Yuzhmash had delivered three of the engines, enough for Vega launches in 2022. The agency was considering options to potentially replace that engine with alternatives from both European and other sources, he said. Avio, the prime contractor for Vega, issued a statement March 25 downplaying any risk of losing access to the Ukrainian engine, saying it regularly received engines and has built up a “strategic stock” in reserve. “As of today Avio does not see specific risks related to the availability of engines in the medium term,” the company said. It did not respond to inquiries about the number of AVUM engines in reserve. In an April 6 interview during the 37th Space Symposium, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said three more engines had been delivered. “We now have enough AVUM engines for the flights in ’22 and ’23,” he said. He said ESA was continuing to look at alternative engines for Vega C missions beyond 2023. “There we have different options that we are pursuing now: European but also with the U.S.” “For Arianespace, this contract is a sign of the confidence in the Vega C system and a strong sign of the commitment of European institutions for an autonomous access to space,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said in a company statement about the launch contract.
Updated 1:45 p.m. Eastern with comments from postlaunch press briefing. COLORADO SPRINGS — SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft April 8 carrying four commercial astronauts to the International Space Station for Axiom Space. The Falcon 9 lifted off at 11:17 a.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour, which previously flew the Demo-2 and Crew-2 commercial crew missions for NASA, reached orbit and separated from the rocket’s upper stage 12 minutes later. The rocket’s first stage, on its fifth flight, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The stage previously launched SpaceX’s first non-NASA Crew Dragon mission, Inspiration4, last September, as well as two GPS missions and one set of Starlink satellites. Endeavour is flying the Ax-1 mission for commercial human spaceflight company Axiom Space. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 7:45 a.m. Eastern April 9 for an eight-day stay. “To say we are excited is a huge understatement,” Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, said at a postlaunch briefing about an hour after the Crew Dragon spacecraft reached orbit. Ax-1 is Axiom’s first mission and a key milestone in its long-term efforts to develop a commercial space station. The Ax-1 commander is Michael López-Alegría, chief astronaut for Axiom Space. A former NASA astronaut, he flew on three shuttle missions and one Soyuz mission, the latter for a six-month stay on the ISS. He holds NASA records for the most career spacewalks, 10, and cumulative spacewalk time, 67 hours and 40 minutes. After retiring from NASA a decade ago, he held several industry positions, including president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group. Larry Connor, one of the three customers of the mission, is also pilot of the Crew Dragon for Ax-1. He is founder and president of The Connor Group, a real estate investment firm in Ohio. He is a private pilot who has flown in aerobatic competitions and is also a race car driver. Eytan Stibbe is the second Israeli to go to space after Ilan Ramon, who died on the STS-107 shuttle mission in 2003. A former Israeli Air Force pilot, he is an investor who is calling his mission “Rakia,” a biblical term for the creation of the sky. Mark Pathy is a Canadian entrepreneur who is chief executive of Marvik, an investment and financing company. He is the 12th Canadian to go to space and the second Canadian private astronaut after Guy Laliberté, who flew to the ISS on a Soyuz mission in 2009. All four plan to perform dozens of experiments over more than 100 hours, supporting research from organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Canadian universities and Israel’s Ramon Foundation and the Israel Space Agency. The Ax-1 crew emphasized they considered themselves “private astronauts” and not space tourists because of the research they will be doing and their extensive training. “Our guys aren’t going up there and floating around for eight days taking pictures and looking out of the cupola,” said Derek Hassmann, operations director at Axiom Space, said at a prelaunch briefing April 7. Accommodating that work, which also includes commercial activities and more than 50 hours of outreach activities, was a challenge to fit into the station’s overall schedule. “It was just a large amount of items to go through,” said Angela Hart, NASA commercial LEO program manager, at the postlaunch briefing. “It’s more than a 1,000-piece puzzle, I’ll put it that way, to fit all that together,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, at the postlaunch briefing. The mission is a pathfinder for future commercial missions to the ISS, which themselves serve as a transition to the installation of commercial modules by Axiom on the ISS and, by the end of the decade, one or more commercial space stations that will succeed the ISS. “We’re super-excited to see this. We know we’re going to learn a lot from this first mission, working side-by-side in a very aggressive schedule on orbit during those eight days,” Hart said at the prelaunch briefing. “We’re committed to continue these private astronaut missions.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – Amid a surge in demand for satellite imagery, BlackSky is looking to expand its national security and defense business, CEO Brian O’Toole told SpaceNews. “The Defense Department is interested in tactical ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] from space,” he said. “There’s quite a bit of opportunity there. ISR is clearly becoming a priority and commercial capabilities have a role to play.” BlackSky is one of a handful of Earth observation companies whose business has surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the U.S. government turned to commercial providers for imagery to help track Russian forces and support humanitarian relief efforts in war-torn parts of Ukraine. O’Toole said the company provides imagery to news media and humanitarian organizations free of charge. The U.S. government is seeing the benefits of commercial capabilities for high-resolution and frequent revisit imagery, he said. It also is realizing that “there are only a few of us that can do what we’re doing right now.” “We’re demonstrating that it’s easy for any one of our partners to log into our platform, they can point and click and task a satellite, and get an image back in 90 minutes with analytics,” said O’Toole. To help grow its defense and inteligence business, BlackSky on April 4 announced it has formed a strategic advisory group led by former undersecretary of defense for intelligence and retired Navy vice admiral Joseph Kernan, former associate director for military affairs at the CIA and retired Army general John Mulholland, and former Space Force chief architect, retired Air Force colonel Michael Dickey. BlackSky last October tapped former principal deputy director of national intelligence Sue Gordon to serve on its board of directors. The company recently added two more satellites to its constellation, for a total of 14. Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket on April 2 launched the two satellites from New Zealand. O’Toole said he expects BlackSky to be one of the companies selected by the National Reconnaissance Office as primary providers of commercial imagery for the U.S. intelligence community. The NRO this year will select providers for its Electro-Optical Commercial Layer contract. “We also have efforts going on with the Army and the Space Force and others,” he said. Some military organizations are interested in services that combine traditional imagery collection with on-demand satellite tasking. BlackSky’s constellation will remain at 14 for now, although there are a couple more launches planned for later this year with Rocket Lab. Current satellites have less than one-meter resolution. Next year BlackSky plans to start launching a new generation that will bring the imaging resolution down to 35 centimeters at nadir – looking straight down – and 50 centimeters on average, said O’Toole. These satellite also will have infrared sensors, inter-satellite links and on-board data processing enabled by artificial intelligence. Market challenges BlackSky in September became a publicly traded company after closing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company , or SPAC. BlackSky and other space companies that went public over the past year through mergers with SPACs have suffered sharp declines in share prices and thus their valuations. O’Toole insisted the SPAC deal benefited BlackSky because it provided the capital to fund its next-generation satellites and other projects. “And it’s also given us the growth capital to expand our sales force and our product teams.” He said the SPAC method for taking a company public is “well suited for companies like ours.” Markets have soured on SPACs in general but not all companies are equal, he said. “We happen to be a company that had revenue and customers. There were a lot of SPACs that were very much early stage. We’ve been caught up in that but it’s accomplishing what we wanted.”
The first commercial mission by an American spacecraft to the International Space Station is ready for launch as a pathfinder for a new era of commercial orbital human spaceflight. At an April 7 briefing, officials from NASA, Axiom Space and SpaceX said the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Crew Dragon spacecraft are ready for launch at 11:17 a.m. Eastern April 8 from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Forecasters are projecting a 90% chance of acceptable weather for the launch. One issue still being looked at is weather at abort locations along the vehicle’s ascent to orbit off the East Coast and into the North Atlantic. Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said weather in those locations “was starting to trend a little bit better” after earlier concerns they might violate constraints involving conditions like wind and sea state. “A handful of those points that were looking no-go have now trended towards go,” he said. If Ax-2 does not launch April 8, there are additional launch opportunities April 9 or 10. Should the launch be delayed further, NASA officials said they would negotiate with the Space Launch System program, which is preparing for another attempt at a fueling test and countdown rehearsal as soon as April 11. The mission, called Ax-1, will transport four private astronauts to the ISS for an eight-day stay. Michael López-Alegría, an Axiom employee and former NASA astronaut, will command the mission, with three customers on board: Larry Connor, Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe. While nonprofessional astronauts have visited the station intermittently for more than two decades, all previous visits involved Soyuz missions to the station. Those missions also all had at least one government cosmonaut on board. Ax-1, by contrast, is the first involving an American spacecraft and the first crewed entirely by private individuals rather than government employees. Derek Hassmann, operations director at Axiom, described Ax-1 as a “precursor mission” for the company’s long-term plans, which include installing a series of commercial modules at the ISS that would later serve as the core of a stand-alone space station. “We’re going to build our relationships both with NASA and with SpaceX. We’re going to demonstrate the capabilities that NASA brings to the table,” he said. The mission is also a pathfinder for NASA as it gets used to having commercial astronauts on the U.S. segment of the ISS, which they rarely visited on past Russian missions. “They’ve come over to the U.S. segment, but their interest is usually in two different things. One is using our cupola so they can get great photos out of the window, and the other is using email,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager. “Our experience to date is really, really limited.” Axiom and NASA worked closely on various aspects of the mission, from the amount of training needed for the Ax-1 crew on ISS systems to determining what consumables and other cargo they needed to bring with them to the station. Ax-1, for example, will use some station resources like oxygen, compensating NASA for them, rather than being completely self-sufficient as originally proposed. “From our point of view, we’re really looking at this in terms of what do commercial missions want to look like,” said Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s commercial LEO program. “What are the customer needs, what are the markets that are interested. We are going to learn a lot from there.” Both Axiom and NASA said they were committed to working together on this mission and using the lessons learned to inform future missions. Axiom has a NASA agreement for its Ax-2 mission, another Crew Dragon flight to the ISS, in early 2023. NASA plans to seek proposals for additional private astronaut missions after Ax-1 flies. “The space station team is really excited for this first-of-its-kind mission and also to be on the leading edge of helping to commercialize low Earth orbit,” Weigel said, adding that interest extended to the astronauts on the ISS itself. “They’re really excited to welcome the Axiom crew on board, and excited to get to be a part of this first-time, historic mission.” “They want to be the best possible private astronauts that you can imagine,” Hassmann said of the Ax-1 crew. “They want to be good house guests, if you will.”
Astroscale plans to resume an attempt to capture a satellite acting as a piece of debris in low Earth orbit despite losing half the servicer’s eight thrusters. Most of the other issues that forced Astroscale to pause its End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration (ELSA-d) mission Jan. 26 have been mitigated or resolved, the Tokyo-based startup said in an April 6 news release . However, the company has been unable to fix ongoing technical issues affecting four “non-functional” 1-newton High Performance Green Propulsion (1N HPGP) thrusters. All eight thrusters were provided by Swedish propulsion specialist ECAPS, which is owned by U.S.-based Bradford Space. Bradford Space CEO Ian Fichtenbaum said his company is aware of the thruster issues and is providing support “to the best of our abilities.” Fichtenbaum said: “These issues do not relate to and are not a result of the design or build of the thrusters and we have full confidence in our products.” Astroscale said it aims to continue the ELSA-d mission after clearing the other undisclosed anomalies. However, the loss of thrusters has impacted the ability of its 175-kilogram servicer to capture the 17-kilogram client as planned. “With safety always paramount, our team has used a complex mix of burns with the remaining thrusters, aerodynamic drag, and the natural perturbations of Earth’s gravity to bring the servicer safely back to a distance where we can continue with operations,” the company said. Astroscale said it would move the servicer to within 160 meters of the client “in the near future,” where it will seek to validate a low-power radio sensor needed to detect and track the servicer to operate more autonomously. “Success in this demonstration would be an important advancement for rendezvous and proximity operations, especially under more challenging circumstances than planned,” it said. The company then plans to move the servicer to a safe distance while it decides whether to go ahead with a recapture mission. The servicer had earlier successfully captured the client in an Aug. 25 demonstration that involved more manual control by flight operators in the U.K. 
Some operators of low Earth orbit satellites are bracing for a storm of debris. Russia’s demonstration of an antisatellite weapon last November, destroying the Cosmos 1408 satellite, created thousands of tracked pieces of debris, and many more too small to be tracked. Much of that debris remains in orbits similar to the satellite, with an inclination of 82.3 degrees. That means the debris can end up running headlong into satellites operating in sun-synchronous orbits at inclinations of 97 degrees. “When they sync up, you have the perfect storm: they’re in the same orbit plane but counter-rotating, crossing each other twice an orbit, again and again,” said Dan Oltrogge, director of integrated operations and research at COMSPOC. They create surges of close approaches, or conjunctions, dubbed “squalls” by the company, that can last for several days before the orbits drift apart. The worst of the conjunction squalls is forecast for the first week of April, when the ASAT debris encounters several groups of Dove imaging cubesats operated by Planet as well as satellites operated by Satellogic, Spire and Swarm. The number of conjunctions will approach 50,000 per day during that time, compared to a background level of about 15,000 per day. Fortunately, because many of those satellites are cubesats, the risk of collisions won’t rise as dramatically. What’s notable about this analysis, beyond the existence of the squalls themselves, is that it was done by a private company, COMSPOC, and not by the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron or the Office of Space Commerce. Oltrogge said COMSPOC has met with Planet and others, including NASA and the Space Force, about its assessment. The COMSPOC analysis is part of a trend of growing private sector capabilities to track objects and warn of potential conjunctions. LeoLabs operates a network of radars to track objects in LEO, while ExoAnalytics and Numerica operate telescopes to keep tabs on satellites in geostationary orbit. NorthStar Earth and Space is planning a satellite constellation to track satellites from orbit. Startups like Kayhan Space and Neuraspace use various data sources to provide more accurate assessments of potential collisions. The newest entrant into the commercial space traffic management industry is Privateer. The company, based in Maui, Hawaii, had kept a low profile but attracted interest in large part because of one of its founders: Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak. Privateer emerged from stealth on March 1 with its first product: a visualization tool called Wayfinder that combined data from several sources, including data from U.S. Space Command and provided directly by satellite operators. Wayfinder is based on ASTRIAGraph, developed by Moriba Jah, a University of Texas at Austin professor who is also chief scientist of Privateer. “It’s a rearchitecting of ASTRIAGraph,” he said in an interview. “ASTRIAGraph is always going to exist, but this is going to be a branch off of that.” He described Wayfinder as a demonstration of other space traffic management capabilities that Privateer can provide. “Wayfinder will be this platform, a kind of Waze app, that people can build different services on top of,” he said. One example would be adding information about the characteristics of objects, in addition to their orbits, which would be valuable for companies planning satellite servicing or debris removal services. One of those new products is a collision warning service that Alex Fielding, chief executive of Privateer, calls Relssek, or “Kessler” spelled backwards: a play on the Kessler Syndrome of runaway growth of orbital debris. That will combine catalogs with data from satellite operators themselves or other sources to provide more accurate predictions of conjuctions. “We’ll use anybody’s assets that are already there,” he said. That includes potentially its own satellites. Privateer is working on a three-unit cubesat called Pono-1 that will launch later this year with 42 sensors to collect space situational awareness data. Fielding said the company was considering flying more sensors as hosted payloads on other companies’ satellites rather than their own. “We really don’t want to create more stuff in space.” While companies speed ahead, the development of government solutions is moving slowly. NOAA, which hosts the Office of Space Commerce, provided the first public demonstration in February of the open architecture data repository (OADR) it is developing to host space situational awareness data. But, officials said it won’t be ready to enter service, and take over the civil space traffic responsibilities assigned to the Commerce Department in Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018, until 2024. That mismatch between the public and private sectors is prompting calls to reconsider their respective roles. That includes, some argue, a greater role for companies to shape both space traffic management and the development of norms and rules for safe operating in increasingly congested orbits. “I’m really worried that we’re not doing enough, we’re not moving fast enough here,” said Kevin O’Connell, former director of the Office of Space Commerce. “How are we going to stay agile and adaptive? It’s largely through the efforts of the private sector.” O’Connell, speaking at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in February, said he supports Space Policy Directive 3, the 2018 policy that assigned civil space traffic management responsibilities to the Commerce Department, which hosts the office he once led, but that the scale of the problem means that the office needs to work more closely with those private-sector capabilities. “It’s not the government versus the private sector. That’s a silly way to think about it,” he said. “Where we need speed and innovation, we need to leverage the private sector.” How that cooperation would work in practice, though, is still a work in progress. SPD-3 envisioned that the Commerce Department would cooperate with both commercial and international partners on its civil STM system, incorporating their space situational awareness data into the OADR to improve the accuracy of conjunction predictions. NOAA issued a request for information (RFI) in February, seeking details about commercial data that could be incorporated into the OADR. That request included an emphasis on data from assets in the southern hemisphere and the capability to track “high-priority objects” on short notice. That RFI is the start of NOAA’s efforts to engage with the private sector in space traffic management. Stephen Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services, said at the FAA conference there will be workshops and other meetings with companies. “You can see where we’re going and where we can learn and improve,” he said. SPD-3 envisioned that Commerce would provide a basic level of space traffic management services free of charge. Companies would then be able to provide more advanced services using data from the OADR and other sources. Volz confirmed that he expected the Office of Space Commerce to provide “a basic set” of such services. “We do not see that as the role of NOAA or the DoC to provide everything to everyone, but to provide a certain minimum and growing capability standard that everyone can rely on.” What the difference is between basic and advanced, though, is not clear. O’Connell warned it may be difficult to quantify that, which can affect the business plans of companies planning to offer such services. It’s in the interest of global leadership of the United States to make some space safety data freely available to all, he said, but “we don’t want to get in the way of companies that want to go above and beyond that.” The same interactions between the public and private sectors apply to regulatory issues. The Federal Communications Commission is examining how to best evaluate the collision risk of new satellite constellations, including evaluating the aggregate risk of those systems to the overall orbital environment, rather than looking at the risks of individual systems. “One of the things that we’re advocating for is an understanding of what are limits to sustainability, quantitatively, on a global basis, because it’s a globally shared resource,” said Mark Dankberg, executive chairman of Viasat, who backs the FCC effort. But who does that quantitative assessment? “I think that, in the U.S., a government organization should be able to do that. So far, none have stepped forward,” he said. One approach would be for the FCC to work with private or nonprofit organizations with expertise in space sustainability, such as The Aerospace Corporation. Another option is the Space Sustainability Rating, a scale modeled on the LEED rating system for buildings to measure how well satellite systems follow best practices for space sustainability. A consortium organized by the World Economic Forum developed the rating system, which is being administered by Swiss university EPFL. “One of the things you might imagine is that a government licensing authority would want a rating. They may collect a fee from an applicant and then hand that fee to someone like EPFL and ask them to provide a rating,” Dankberg said. That would get around companies paying EPFL directly for sustainability ratings, which pose conflicts of interest concerns. There’s no lack of expertise in the FCC to tackle this issue, he argued. “I think what is lacking is the will to deal with it,” he said, particularly among FCC leadership. “I think that it opened a can of worms that is not as palatable on the eighth floor as it is in the satellite bureau.” Meanwhile, low Earth orbit is getting more crowded and dangerous, as the recent conjunction squalls identified by COMSPOC showed, even as companies plan new constellations, commercial space stations and other emerging space applications. “Lots of people think that improving conjunction analysis is the endgame. No, it’s the starting game for a whole new set of services in terms of space safety to enable all of these exciting things,” said O’Connell, referring to those new markets. “We’re going to have to pick up the pace on the many different things we’re doing, and leveraging the private sector is a critical tool for being able to do that. The clock is ticking.” This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, many considered international space cooperation safely insulated from geopolitical strife. “This has drastically changed now,” European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said April 6, pointing to the “very serious sanctions” imposed by Europe and other space powers against Russia. During some of the darkest stretches of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Western nations continued to engage in joint research activities, including the Apollo-Soyuz crewed docking mission in 1975. But now projects including the European-Russian ExoMars mission with its substantial sunk costs and unrealized scientific gain have been sidelined as partnerships are suspended. This makes it “very difficult to forecast the future” of collaboration with Russia, Philippe Baptiste, president of French space agency CNES, said during the 37th Space Symposium’s annual heads of agencies panel discussion here. The exception is the International Space Station, a 15-nation partnership with outsized roles for the United States and Russia. Panelists were keen to stress that partnerships governing its safe operation remain firmly in place. However, fractured space relations come when more international cooperation is needed to solve pressing global-scale issues, including measures to safeguard an increasingly crowded space environment. The panel highlighted a need for stronger international regulations to ensure space operations remain sustainable as the rapidly rising numbers of satellites being launched into Earth’s orbits increase the threat of potentially catastrophic in-space collisions. The amount of debris in space is already growing at a faster rate than the level of plastic being dumped in the Earth’s oceans, warned Paul Bate, CEO of the UK Space Agency. Although nations have been stepping up efforts to create mechanisms for protecting the space environment, the panel agreed far more needs to be done. Walther Pelzer, head of German space agency DLR, said the heads of space agencies panel during the 36th Space Symposium last year had also agreed this was a pressing issue. “Nevertheless, we made … little progress to really come up with solutions,” Pelzer said. While it is “nice to have” a group of like-minded nations on the same page, he said ultimately “it doesn’t matter if a bunch of nations don’t care about it, because then the problem will stay.” Pelzer called for a combination of bilateral and multilateral agreements to help accelerate the path to a framework at the United Nation-level, which he believes is the only way to create sustainable solutions. But this path has been shrouded in uncertainty now that space has proven to be susceptible to the same geopolitical strifes that hamper progress on Earth. “What is the alternative to not working together?” asked Pelzer.
COLORADO SPRINGS —SpaceX has lost the right to provide Starlink broadband services in France after the country’s highest administrative court revoked its spectrum license. France’s Conseil d’État ruled April 5 that French telecoms regulator ARCEP should have launched a public consultation before authorizing Starlink in February 2021 . “In law, they should normally cease [providing services] immediately, pending ARCEP’s public consultation” following the court’s decision, a Conseil d’État spokesperson told SpaceNews . ARCEP and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. ARCEP’s “contested decision” to authorize Starlink “is likely to have a significant impact on the market for the supply of high-speed internet access and affect the interests of end users,” Conseil d’État said, and therefore should have first consulted the public. The ruling came after Priartem and Agir Pour L’Environnement, two French environmental activist organizations, submitted an appeal to challenge ARCEP’s decision to award Starlink frequency rights. Stéphen Kerckhove, managing director of Agir pour l’Environnement (Acting for the Environment), called for stronger regulations on megaconstellations to protect views of the night sky and reduce space debris risks in an April 6 statement . googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1515201170046-0'); })
BOULDER, Colorado — Mars scientists and technologists are blueprinting inexpensive and novel ways to deepen the investigation of the multifaceted planet. Be it via economical orbiters and landers or souped-up penetrators and robotic aerial devices, scientists say it’s time to script new ways to gather more data from various places on that far-flung world. Ways to plumb the depths of the planet’s enormous Valles Marineris canyon system, dive into caves, and provide close-up inspections of the Martian polar caps were presented at a Low-Cost Science Mission Concepts for Mars Exploration workshop, held March 29-31 in Pasadena, California. The gathering showed that there is top-notch Mars science to be done at a low cost, said Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of planetary science at Caltech. “It’s an exciting time to be a Mars scientist. We are at a space exploration inflection point in which lowering launch costs, increasing availability of commercial hardware, and a growing number of space companies interested in landing on the moon and Mars,” she told SpaceNews. Participating in the low-cost Mars exploration workshop was Steve Bailey, chief engineer of Redwire Space and a Mars exploration veteran dating back to NASA’s 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission. More recently, he was spacecraft design lead for NASA’s 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission and played a role in the UAE’s 2020 Mars Mission. Both orbiters are still circuiting the Red Planet. Bailey has also seen failure. “I am five for seven with Mars exploration missions,” he said, recounting NASA’s back-to-back failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999. He sees those setbacks as the greatest teaching moments of his career. “We are seeing commercial microelectronics reach ever-higher levels of integration, as system-on-chip and system-on-module packages enable astonishing density of functions, capabilities, and performance,” Bailey said. Most of these packages are not suitable for spaceflight, but, with proper testing, ruggedization, and radiation-effects mitigations, some are, Bailey said. More importantly, the commercial design strategies and integration techniques are certainly applicable to custom space electronics, he added. Bailey said one obvious way to reduce costs is to reduce the number of components by integration, the consolidation of functionality, and the ability to use a single device for multiple purposes (e.g., science, navigation, instrumentation, communication, command, data, etc.). “We take these things for granted in our smartphones, and Redwire Space is actively changing the way we all think about what to expect from space flight systems.” Former NASA Ames Research Center director G. Scott Hubbard helped bring the agency’s Mars program back from the brink following its 1999 failures, serving from 2000 to 2001 as the first Mars Program Director, aka “NASA’s Mars Czar.” Now an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Hubbard said there are important Mars science questions that can be addressed by small missions. NASA is trying to define a comprehensive Mars Exploration Program, Hubbard says, that includes elements that might accompany, precede or succeed NASA’s Mars Sample Return effort, now projected to transport back to Earth a collection of Red Planet materials in 2033. Hubbard says that the just-held workshop “is a further step in the direction of digging deeper” to see what might be in the $100-300 million cost range, including launch or rideshare arrangements. He highlighted a recent Caltech Keck Institute for Space Studies report that concluded costs could be substantially reduced through proper technology and novel partnerships, especially with emerging entrepreneurs. “So, is there a pony in the barn? My answer is yes…significant science can fit into that cost box,” he said. Meanwhile, NASA and the Mars community are awaiting the upcoming release of the planetary science decadal survey. The National Academies-led report outlines scientific priorities for the decade ahead and makes recommendations on how to pursue them. The decadal is expected to be made public this month. 
Megaconstellation startup E-Space is preparing to deploy the first of potentially hundreds of thousands of satellites on a Rocket Lab mission slated for no earlier than April 19. Three E-space prototypes are part of the 34 payloads that Rocket Lab said April 5 are on the upcoming mission, including satellites for Alba Orbital, Astrix Astronautics, Aurora Propulsion Technologies, Unseenlabs and Swarm Technologies. Rocket Lab will also attempt a mid-air helicopter capture of its Electron launch vehicle for the first time after the flight. The launch is set to commence within a 14-day window starting on April 19 and represents a major step in Rocket Lab’s plans to make the rocket reusable. For E-Space, its prototypes will “validate and demonstrate our new technologies around guidance and control systems,” founder Greg Wyler said in an interview at the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. These systems have been designed to support satellites that have significantly smaller cross-sections than other low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellations, according to Wyler. He declined to discuss dimensions but said smaller satellites are a key part of E-Space’s goal to develop a sustainable megaconstellation. Their size reduces the potential for collisions and the debris created if there is an impact. Despite having Rwanda-backed spectrum filings for 300,000 satellites, Wyler says E-Space will ultimately have a net positive impact on the space environment. In addition to providing broadband services, its spacecraft will one day be able to capture and de-orbit debris too small to track. By December, Wyler said the venture plans to deploy “less than 10 satellites” that will be closer to its final design. “We’re going to be demonstrating other features in December of more of a production unit,” he said, “and if the production units meet our goals, then we’ll go into serial production in 2023.” However, a debris de-orbit capability the venture has yet to disclose will not be part of the satellites it is planning to launch this year. “The ability to capture and de-orbit these debris between one and 10 centimeters is something that is part of our goal, it’s something we’re working on, we think we’ll get there — it’s not a necessity for our system,” he said. According to Wyler, the system is also designed to continue operating in “a high-debris environment” that would follow a Kessler Syndrome event, where in-orbit collisions produce debris that leads to more collisions. “I’m assuming the worst, and we’re designing a system that will function in that environment,” he added. Growing the business E-Space announced $50 million in seed funding in February that Wyler said funds the startup up to serial satellite production next year. The startup has grown its team to “close to 50” employees spread across France, Boston, Washington, and California, he said, and plans to reach around 200 by the end of 2023 to help the company ramp up. Wyler also founded megaconstellation startup OneWeb, and plans to leverage the experience gained in setting up a high-volume facility in Florida for the company that was designed to produce up to two satellites a day. “Once we get our satellites up, and they function and do what we hope they do, then I don’t think the funding will be a challenge,” Wyler added.
A shortage of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft raises the prospect of more delays for satellite projects already bogged down by supply chain issues. Satellite manufacturers make heavy use of large cargo space on Antonovs to transport GEO spacecraft from factory to launch site. But some Antonovs have been destroyed amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, noted Mark Quinn, head of Willis Towers Watson’s satellite insurance business, and those that are in service tend to be owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions or are being used to support the war effort. “So they’re just not generally available,” Quinn said, “and you have potential launch delays that come into play.” With few if any airborne alternatives available for the commercial market, French Guiana-bound satellites would need to go by sea and U.S.-built commercial GEOs might need to travel by truck to reach their launchpads. SES told SpaceNews it now plans to use a boat instead of an Antonov to transport its SES-22 C-band satellite from Europe to the U.S., where it is slated to launch from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9. Although traveling via the ocean will take weeks longer, SES spokesperson Suzanne Ong said the satellite remains on track to launch before the end of June. “The sea transportation duration can be absorbed by SES-22 project margin, therefore not delaying SES-22 launch schedule and not impacting the timely clearing of C-band spectrum for 5G roll-out in the US,” Ong said. The Measat-3d satellite Airbus has been building in France will likely also need to travel by boat to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana this year. Viasat confirmed it is currently planning to truck its first ViaSat-3 satellite from California across the United States to Florida, where it is slated to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy later this year. It is unclear whether the company had previously planned to fly the spacecraft across the country. Meanwhile, aircraft manufacturers are considering certifying other planes with large cargo spaces for flying GEO satellites. Options include the Airbus Beluga, which in 2006 flew the Columbus module for the International Space Station from Germany’s Bremen Airport to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. “We are monitoring the situation closely together with our partners, customers, and suppliers with regard to the transport of satellites,” Airbus Defence and Space spokesperson Ralph Heinrich said. “We are continuing our preparations for the Beluga Transport project. It is too early to draw any conclusions from the situation for the moment.” GEO communications satellites require additional safety approvals because they contain pressurized heat pipes and other hazards.
Companies interested in a NASA competition for a second Artemis lunar lander are using this week’s 37th Space Symposium to find partners that may result in different teams than the earlier lander competition. NASA released a draft version of the request for proposals (RFP) for its Sustaining Lunar Development project March 30. That will fund development of a second lunar lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship, to take astronauts to and from the lunar surface for the later “sustainable” phase of the Artemis program. NASA expects to release the final RFP this summer with responses due within 60 days, agency officials said at an April 4 virtual industry day. NASA will a select one team in January 2023 for a five-year fixed-price award. With the draft RFP released, companies are moving into high gear to form teams to compete for a contract likely worth several billion dollars. “We’re going to be in the game somewhere,” Robert Lightfoot, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, said of the competition in an April 5 interview during Space Symposium. “We’re having a lot of conversations this week.” In the original Human Landing System (HLS) competition that SpaceX won, Lockheed Martin was part of the “National Team” led by Blue Origin that also included Northrop Grumman and Draper. Northrop executives said March 30 they were considering both working again with Blue Origin and leading a separate team . Lightfoot said the new Sustaining Lunar Development competition differs from HLS, which he described as being driven by the goal at the time to return humans to the moon by 2024. The new competition is focused on landers to support long-term lunar exploration that can support later missions to Mars. “That changes your discussion about what capability you want bring to the table,” he said. “Anything we do we want to be extensible to Mars.” He said Lockheed had several meetings this week to talk with prospective partners. “Space Symposium was actually a perfect opportunity for us because, for anybody we want to talk to, we can get together like that,” he said. In the original HLS competition, Sierra Space was part of a team led by Dynetics that was one of the finalists. The company, which is focusing most of its efforts on its Dream Chaser spaceplane and the Orbital Reef commercial space station, is considering participating in the new competition, but not necessarily with Dynetics. “We have a very unique, strong relationship with Blue Origin,” said Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, in an April 5 interview. The two companies are the lead partners on the Orbital Reef commercial space station, one of three that won NASA funding in December for initial design studies. He said Sierra Space would likely partner on any proposal from Blue Origin rather than lead its own team. “We would probably think about how we partner with them,” he said. “They’re still putting together their overall team, but that’s how I think it would play out for us. We wouldn’t go it alone.”
The European Space Agency is continuing discussions with NASA on how the agencies can work together to revive ESA’s ExoMars mission after ending cooperation with Russia. ESA announced March 17 it halted plans to launch the mission, featuring a European-built rover, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine . Russia was to launch the mission on a Proton rocket and provide a landing platform and other components. “It was not an easy decision,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said during a panel of space agency leaders at the 37th Space Symposium April 6. Scientists and engineers had worked for years on the mission and the rover now is nearly complete. At the time of the decision to suspend work with Russia, it being prepared to ship to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He thanked NASA for contacting ESA and offering assistance on ExoMars, adding in a later interview that discussions between the agencies are continuing. “Our teams are working with the teams in NASA about the technical steps that need to be done,” he said. The agencies are looking at options for replacing the Russian elements of ExoMars, such as the launch vehicle and landing platform. Other components that Russia was providing were radioisotope heating units to keep the rover warm at night, a technology commonly used by NASA but which for ESA is much less mature. Another option ESA is pursuing is to replace Russian components with European ones. Aschbacher said studies are ongoing on technical and financial aspects of both strategies, which should be completed by June. “By July, I expect to have a decision from my member states,” he said, which would become part of the package for ESA’s ministerial meeting late this year. ESA is also studying options for launching missions that were to fly on Soyuz rockets from French Guiana that were stranded by Russia’s decision in February to halt such launches. Those missions include two pairs of Galileo navigation satellites, two ESA science missions and a French reconnaissance satellite. Aschbacher said ESA is study ways to launch those satellites using Ariane 6 and Vega C launch vehicles, both of which are scheduled to make their inaugural launches this year. That will depend in part on an ongoing assessment of ramping up Ariane 6 launches expected to be done in a month. At that point, he said ESA will be able to better determine how to launch those payloads. “One option might be that we have to look, for a limited period of time, at backup launcher options,” he said, which would include non-European launch vehicles. “I would expect this would be a very limited period where we would need such solutions and then we can fully rely on Ariane 6.” Aschbacher, like NASA officials, said that International Space Station operations remain unaffected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that ESA was preparing proposals to extend its role on the ISS through 2030. “We’re working toward the normal continuation of the operations of the ISS.” Aschbacher said on the panel that, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government asked to join ESA. “This is a big decision and not something that can be done very quickly,” he said in the interview, with a years-long process that nations must follow to become full members. “This is not something that will happen tomorrow.” He said ESA was considering ways it could assist Ukraine in the near term, such as providing satellite data to support damage assessments and agriculture. “I would expect significant financial support from the West in rebuilding Ukraine, and space can help with that.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – The most likely form of attack facing satellite networks today does not happen in space but on the ground, where hackers seek to exploit vulnerabilities . “Cyberspace is the soft underbelly of our global space networks,” said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Operations Command. In an interview with SpaceNews , Whiting said the command is now looking to shift cybersecurity specialists who protect desktop systems at Space Force bases to more demanding roles defending military satellite networks. “We want to pivot more of those guardians into the defensive cyber mission,” said Whiting. The security of networks on bases is important “but we think there’s other ways we can get after that mission by going to commercial services, for example.” That shift already has started at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado where guardians operate sensitive systems like GPS and early warning satellites. Many of the satellites the U.S. military relies upon for key services “were built or designed in an era where we weren’t concerned about cyber threats,” said Whiting. “Our global space networks do reach around the globe, they reach out to geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface, and that creates a lot of novel attack surface where somebody could seek to attack us in cyber.” Even though China and Russia have demonstrated they could physically try to attack U.S. satellites in space, “we think they would prefer and probably start by attacks in cyber and certainly countries like North Korea and Iran, which are not as sophisticated in space, would definitely try to attack us in cyber.” “And so we have to defend all that attack surface,” said Whiting. “I would say today we put a lot of time, effort and energy on improving both our cybersecurity stance and then our cyber defenses. We’re making real progress there but there’s still more work to do.” Space Delta 6, a unit within Space Operations Command, operates the military’s satellite control network and also is responsible for defensive cyber operations, including the protection of the GPS constellation. The unit also has “mission defense teams” who constantly monitor network traffic. A separate unit, Space Delta 3, focuses on space electromagnetic warfare, which is the protection of satellites from radio-frequency jamming . Satellites providing services over warzones frequently face jamming attacks. 
COLORADO SPRINGS – An unprecedented release of commercial satellite imagery of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and the rapid sharing of that intelligence – was facilitated by U.S. intelligence agencies that already were familiar with the capabilities of the private sector and how they could be applied, a U.S. intelligence official said April 6. “We partner with over 100 companies, we’re currently using imagery from at least 200 commercial satellites and we have about 20 or so different analytic services in our pipeline,” David Gauthier, director of commercial and business operations at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), said during a panel discussion at the 37th Space Symposium. “Because of all that, when Russia prepared to invade, we and the NRO [National Reconnaissance Office] increased and accelerated several efforts that were underway commercially,” said Gauthier. The daily flow of intelligence that previously was only available from government sources and seldom released to the public is no accident, said Gauthier. “Thi s moment has really been set up by a lot of hard work by many companies and many in the government to prepare ourselves to take better advantage of commercial capabilities.” Leading up to the conflict, he said, “we more than doubled the commercial electro-optical imagery that was bought over Ukraine.” Imagery from companies like Maxar, BlackSky and Planet “was able to flow directly to those who need it, EUCOM [U.S. European Command], NATO and directly to Ukrainians,” Gauthier said. Use of radar to see through clouds The bad weather and heavy cloud coverage over Ukraine became a problem for optical imaging satellites that use visible, near-infrared and short-wave infrared sensors to produce photographic images. Those satellites can’t see through clouds so NGA turned to commercial operators of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor satellites that can penetrate cloud cover and shoot pictures at night. “We took commercial SAR, which was in our testing and evaluation pipeline, and we brought it directly to operations,” said Gauthier. “And we increased our purchasing power fivefold and started buying SAR capabilities all over the battlefield because of weather, quite honestly.” “Months earlier than we had planned, we rolled that into full operations and flowed data to NATO,” he said. “And we did the same thing with some aircraft detection services that we were using in the area.” Those efforts, however, still weren’t “good enough,” Gauthier said. “We still had this feeling in our minds that we needed to get more geoint directly into the hands of Ukrainians to really impact what was happening on the ground.” NGA then started to facilitate and coordinate independent private efforts to directly provide their products and services to Ukrainians in theater, he added. The data was shared through a web portal. “We took sort of the entire IT architecture we normally operate on and connected companies directly to analysts in Ukraine over the internet,” said Gauthier. “That was the fastest, most direct way to do that.” Even in bad weather conditions, commercial SAR images helped Ukrainian forces figure out where they needed to strengthen their defenses and where their infrastructure was suffering. Separately, NGA turned to companies like HawkEye 360 that use satellites to detect radio-frequency signals to help identify sources of electronic jamming that could impair U.S. communications or GPS satellites. “The ability to detect and understand where GPS interference was happening on the battlefield is incredibly important,” he said. Based on the experience over six weeks of war, “we’re now accelerating some new and untested commercial services that will help us in the humanitarian aid efforts for the long term,” said Gauthier. “The amount of commercial geoint being used is unprecedented in this engagement. It’s on the news every day. And I couldn’t be prouder of the way our companies and our government have responded.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – The war in Ukraine is demonstrating the rapid pace of change in modern warfare and underscoring the need for enhanced missile defense capabilities, Derek Tournear, director of the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, said April 6 at the Space Symposium here. “We have seen some hypersonics deployed over Ukraine,” Tournear said. Once it’s in place, SDA’s missile Tracking Layer “would allow you to detect them and track them,” he said. In addition, SDA’s communications or Transport Layer “will have connectivity directly to the warfighter so that not only can we warn people about where that missile is going, but we can actually send those data down directly to an interceptor so that we can engage and remove the threat,” Tournear said. Current Defense Department missile defense satellites in geostationary and highly elliptical orbits are designed to spot ballistic missiles. Once sensors note the path of ballistic missiles, they can determine their impact point based on the ballistic trajectory. “That worked great for many decades,” Tournear said. “Well, now we’re in a different realm.” The challenge today is detecting missiles after the booster rocket fires because “those systems actually maneuver, meaning that they can change their impact point dramatically,” Tournear said. “And so that is requiring us to take a whole different approach to being able to detect and track these systems.” Another challenge for missile defense is communications. “Right now, we have tactical data links that typically work over a 300 nautical mile area,” Tournear said. “What drove this architecture was defense against the Soviet Union coming across the Fulda Gap in Europe.” Instead, SDA is developing a network that can pass data on hypersonic glide vehicles or any other type of targeting data around the world. “We would enable those data to go over our Transport Layer and then be sent down directly via the existing tactical data links that are already in place,” Tournear said. Instead of regional communications, the network will offer global, low-latency connectivity, he added. SDA’s Tranche 0 constellation of 20 communications and eight missile-tracking satellites is scheduled to launch next year, Tournear said. Congress, recognizing the advanced missile threat, added $550 million to SDA’s 2022 budget “to get that tracking for the missile detection layer up as soon as possible,” Tournear said. “Because of that funding, we will be able to launch that Tranche One Tracking Layer starting in May of 2025.” SDA is focused on a spiral development strategy. Every two years, the agency plans to upgrade its technology. To improve the accuracy of missile tracking, SDA is closely following a Missile Defense Agency technology demonstration scheduled for March 2023. If the demonstration is successful, SDA would fold the technology into its Tracking Layer. “Maybe we’ll fly another couple in our Tranche One to show how it fits in with the overall architecture, but certainly in Tranche Two,” Tournear said. “We would want to have a mixture of what we call our wide field of view that does the missile warning, missile tracking and then medium field of view based on those MDA designs.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – The U.S. Space Force is working with allies to establish international norms of behavior for space activity and to share a common operating picture of activity occurring in space. “What’s lacking at the moment is the ability to then apply consequences,” Air Marshal Mel Hupfeld, Royal Australian Air Force chief, said during an April 5 Space Symposium panel. “Once we can get an agreed position on behaviors and norms in space, then how do we define consequences for those that may not follow it?” Many conversations at the 37th Space Symposium revolved around norms of behavior in light of the Russian antisatellite test in November, the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine and the international response. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the United States, European nations and allies have worked together to support Ukraine and to penalize Russia through economic sanctions. “How do we apply those lessons to the space domain,” Hupfeld asked. “How do we apply consequences of not following the norms and behaviors that we all agree on in a way that applies counterspace capabilities that don’t create debris? These are things that I’m not so sure of yet, but they are things that we’re working towards.” While those questions are being addressed, it’s important for countries to demonstrate responsible behavior in space through their own actions, said Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, U.S. Space Force chief of space operations. “We have to set the example,” he added. Another imperative is “to call out those that aren’t playing by the rules,” Raymond said. “Over the course of the last couple years, partners have gotten together and have messaged inappropriate or unprofessional behavior in space. I think the collective voices add a lot of power to that.” Finally, nations need to work together through the United Nations to establish binding agreements, panelists said. The United Kingdom has taken the lead on working with the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to establish norms of responsible behavior for military space activities. NATO is “fully supportive of that,” said Lt. Gen. David Julazadeh, deputy chief of staff for capability development at NATO’s Allied Command Transformation headquarters. “It’s incredibly important that we follow up with that.” Brig. Gen. Luca Capasso, Italian Space Operations Command chief, added, “We need something that is binding in order to stigmatize the wrong activity in space. I think that working together probably we are going to be able to achieve the goal of adopting new norms.” Equally important is obtaining a common operating picture, said Air Vice-Marshal Paul Godfrey, who leads the U.K. Space Command. “When we’re all seeing the same thing and we’re seeing nefarious activity, then we can all call it nefarious activity,” Godfrey said. While allied military leaders are eager to adopt norms for responsible behavior, “definitely we don’t want any legally binding treaty” like the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT) proposed by China and Russia, said Maj. Gen. Michel Friedling, French Space Command leader. “As you all know, PPWT is sponsored by two nations, China and Russia, who want to ban weapons in space,” Friedling said. “At the same time, we all know they do exactly the contrary. And we all know that such a treaty would be unverifiable and incomplete because it doesn’t address anything from the ground to space.”
Two new Chinese factories capable of producing hundreds of small satellites per year could help China achieve space objectives and impact the international market. Production trials are now underway at a new facility belonging to the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). The plant, situated within CAST’s aerospace industrial base in Tianjin, north China, will be capable of producing more than 200 satellites per year according to the company. This adds to capacity developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), a giant missile maker and defense contractor, which last year completed its own factory in Wuhan and will eventually be capable of manufacturing 240 small satellites each year. “We can likely consider this development as reaching a capability that is on the critical path for achieving national objectives in space,” Tomas Hrozensky, a researcher at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told SpaceNews . Notably the new capacity could be relevant for national plans to establish a low Earth orbit communications megaconstellation named Guowang. Initial plans suggest China wants to build a 13,000-satellite constellation to rival Western projects including SpaceX’s Starlink. “I also believe this can increase competition on the international markets, especially for those actors, whose industry is reliant on international markets,” Hrozensky says. China’s role in the global space economy is heavily impacted by the U.S. ITAR regulations Hrozensky notes, but it is still an active player. CAST belongs to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which handles the vast majority of the country’s civil and military space projects. CAST is the country’s main spacecraft maker, including space station modules, crewed spacecraft and satellite buses. The 68.8-square-kilometer Wuhan National Aerospace Industrial Base is the center for CASIC’s space ambitions and became fully operational in February 2021. It also hosts rocket manufacturing facilities and a host of other companies related to the supply chain. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and a number of private satellite manufacturers are also active in China, adding to overall capacity. Hrozensky also notes that this new capability can be a valuable asset for China’s space economic diplomacy. China has long offered integrated packages of communications and Earth observation satellites, covering manufacture, launch, ground support, training and insurance in its foreign policy, both through international satellite sales and as a part of broader diplomatic engagement, notably in Africa and Latin America. “I see the viability in that small satellite platforms would arguably be cheaper and offer more flexible options for these customer countries,” Hrozensky says.
After a series of problems scrubbed a second countdown rehearsal for the Space Launch System April 4, NASA will wait until after the launch of a SpaceX mission to the space station before trying again. NASA halted the wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the SLS at Launch Complex 39B at about 5 p.m. Eastern April 4. The decision to stop the test came after controllers could not open a vent valve on the mobile launcher required to start loading of liquid hydrogen into the rocket’s core stage. Technicians later found that the valves were physically closed in a way such that they could not be remotely commanded to open. NASA was several hours behind schedule that day because of other problems earlier in the test. An interruption in the supply of nitrogen gas at the launch site delayed the start of test activities early in the day. Shortly after liquid oxygen started going into the core stage, a temperature limit warning stopped fueling for several hours while engineers reconfigured the propellant loading process. At an April 5 briefing, NASA officials said that they made progress through some of the milestones of the overall WDR process, including filling the core stage liquid oxygen tank to about 50%. They made more progress than the first attempt April 3 , which NASA scrubbed before any propellants could be loaded into the vehicle. “A significant amount of our objectives have been completed,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director. NASA has not announced when they’ll try again, but it won’t be before the Falcon 9 launch of the commercial Ax-1 mission for Axiom Space to the International Space Station from neighboring Launch Complex 39A, scheduled for April 8. “We will follow Axiom on the range,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, during a panel at the 37th Space Symposium April 5. That mission needs to launch soon to avoid delaying NASA’s Crew-4 crew rotation mission to the ISS, also launched by SpaceX from LC-39A, now scheduled for April 20. NASA officials said they also needed the time to get ready for another countdown attempt. “We’ve got to finish sharpening the pencil on the open work, but we don’t anticipate it will be too much longer than after the Axiom launch,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager, at the briefing. NASA doesn’t consider any of the problems encountered so far in the two countdown rehearsal attempts to be serious issues with the SLS or ground systems. “It’s working through a lot of issues of bringing the vehicle together for the first time,” said Free. “We haven’t run into any fundamental design flaws or design issues. These are what I would characterize as nuisance or technical issues where we’re learning features and systems that we characterized in subscale testing, but when you put it all together you learn where some of your uncertainties are,” said Sarafin. Those problems will affect the schedule for the Artemis 1 mission, which had been looking to launch as soon as a window that runs from June 6 to 16. “We’re not ready to give up on it yet,” he said of that launch window. “We’ll reassess after wet dress.” By then NASA hopes to resolve another nuisance: a lack of detailed commentary during the countdown rehearsals, which the agency blamed on export control restrictions on technical information. NASA instead provided intermittent updates through social media and blogs. “We are working on having launch commentary. I know that’s been something that folks really want,” Free said. “We’re working towards that for launch.”
Boeing said April 6 it has expanded partnerships with three major cloud computing providers to digitize more of its engineering and manufacturing processes. The company said multi-year agreements with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft mark a “significant investment in the company’s digital future.” Most of Boeing’s applications are currently hosted and maintained through on-site servers that are managed by the company or external partners. Many of these legacy systems are aging to the point where they are posing infrastructure challenges, according to Boeing, requiring “considerable work to maintain” and limiting its ability to deploy digital solutions across the company. Boeing said offloading more cloud operations to the world’s largest cloud computing companies simplifies processes and also improves security. “Through these partnerships, hundreds of applications will migrate to the cloud,” a Boeing spokesperson said. “This cloud arrangement will support the entire Boeing business, and power applications across our portfolio serving commercial, defense and space customers.” Scalability is one of the biggest challenges to traditional hosting solutions, according to Susan Doniz, Boeing’s chief information officer and senior vice president of Information Technology & Data Analytics. “Cloud adoption unlocks those challenges by allowing developers to tap into additional storage or capacity when they need it. It’s like having a nationwide broadband network and we’re still using dial-up.” Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing for AWS, said its cloud infrastructure will enable Boeing to create new solutions to enhance services including Amazon Air, the cargo airline that uses Boeing aircraft to exclusively transport Amazon packages.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Amazon’s record-breaking deal to purchase up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance is “a big deal” in the context of recent geopolitical developments, ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno said April 5. These contracts are not just significant for the companies themselves, he said, but also a boon to the West’s industrial competitiveness following Russia’s abrupt exit from the global launch market. Arianespace, Blue Origin and ULA won contracts worth several billion dollars to deploy most of Amazon’s 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation. During a roundtable with reporters at the 37th Space Symposium, Bruno highlighted the significance of winning this contract for ULA and for the future of its next-generation Vulcan rocket , projected to fly for the first time later this year. These new orders will allow the company to expand Vulcan production and increase investments in infrastructure. Beyond that, this is “good for the country on multiple levels,” he said. The business that Amazon’s launch contracts will generate in the United States and Europe will ensure that the West is never again dependent on Russia for launch services, Bruno said. Bruno is well acquainted with Russian dependence. ULA’s workhorse Atlas 5 has always relied on Russian-built RD-180s engines. All the engines for Atlas 5’s remaining missions have already been brought over and are stored in the United States. “Russia is not coming back into the commercial launch marketplace, this is it,” he said. ULA was not in a position to help OneWeb after the company severed ties with its original launch provider, Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos, and had to stop deploying its broadband constellation on Russia’s Soyuz rocket. ULA’s remaining two dozen Atlas 5 missions are booked, including nine Amazon ordered last August for Project Kuiper. While OneWeb secured a deal with SpaceX last month to resume launches this year, Bruno did not rule out ULA supporting OneWeb launches beyond 2024 if there is still a need and Amazon’s commitments are met, Bruno said. “We want to help. We want to do anything we can to help the West get through this situation in Ukraine,” he said. “We are still looking at what we can do for them. Soyuz is gone, and they’re going to be gone for the foreseeable future.” Arianespace, the Evry, France-based launch provider that booked 19 Soyuz launches for OneWeb, including the remaining six needed to complete its constellation, is in a similar position as ULA. Its remaining Ariane 5 missions are booked as it looks to begin the transition to Ariane 6 this year. Bruno also suggested that production and infrastructure investments propelled by Amazon’s large order would benefit the U.S. government, a cornerstone ULA customer that has invested more than $1 billion in Vulcan and its Blue Origin-supplied BE-4 engines. A nd it would ensure that in the event of another crisis, that there’s enough launch capacity so the OneWeb story doesn’t repeat itself. Asked about any potential risks for ULA from the Amazon deal, Bruno said the only issue would be the infrastructure investment. “We looked pretty carefully at how much of that infrastructure would be available for other customers, would be wanted or needed,” he said. Bruno said he is confident about Amazon’s business plan for its low Earth orbit constellation because of how it ties into Amazon’s cloud business and broad base of internet services. “It seemed to us that if anyone will succeed, any LEO megaconstellation, that these guys will. They certainly have more stamina, more resources, more robustness than anyone else does.” All that said, “if against all odds Kuiper doesn’t make it, what will I do with all this infrastructure? Well, no one anticipated that Russia would invade Ukraine,” he said. “And as I look at the entire geopolitical scene, our relationship with Russia and where they’re going in space, and China’s extraordinarily aggressive posture with anti-satellite weapons, it seems to me that this country is going to need a much higher industrial capacity as we move forward over the next decade.” The U.S. military, further, “will need a high launch tempo certainly in time of conflict as they might have to replace assets on orbit. They’re going to need to launch more assets” so it could take advantage of the additional capacity generated by Amazon’s contracts. “So if Amazon goes away, the near term will be overcapacity, but in just a few years, the government would catch up to that and I would be able to use that capacity for them,” said Bruno. “That’s not as efficient as if I had Amazon, but it would certainly not go to waste.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – Proposed Securities and Exchange Commission rules could have a significant impact on space sector financing. “I would imagine SPACs will be a lot more narrowly used,” Jim Lee, Maxar Technologies senior vice president and general counsel, said April 4 during the 37th Space Symposium Space Law Workshop. In 2021, 12 space startups raised nearly $4 billion through SPAC deals. “Most of that is not debt,” Lee said. “It’s cash on the balance sheet.” Proposed SEC rules published March 30 would align SPAC disclosure and liability rules more closely with those of traditional IPOs. Companies would need to disclose, for example, who would profit from the SPAC deals and at what share price. In some cases, SPAC sponsors profit if a company’s share price exceeds $3 after the IPO. “If you’re a stockholder in that SPAC, obviously you’re not making money until you cross $10,” Lee said. “So that’s a pretty obvious conflict that a lot of people didn’t understand to be a conflict.” Under the proposed SEC rules, SPAC underwriters also would be liable for material misstatements of fact, just like the underwriters of traditional IPOs. Prior to the SEC proposal, space-related SPAC activity was slowing . Tomorrow.io cancelled plans for a SPAC merger in early March. When Terran Orbital went public in late March, company executives emphasized the firm’s national security and defense work . Many space companies that went public through SPAC mergers in 2021 are trading well below their $10 IPO price. “I think there are actually some SPACs that are somewhat devalued and they’re trading lower than they should because there’s a SPAC stink on them that they can’t get off of them,” said Monica Palko, York Space Systems chief legal and administrative officer. As a result, CEOs who did not conduct roadshows before IPOs to explain the promise of their companies are going on roadshows now to tell investors, “We’re not like those other SPACs. We have revenue. We have contracts,” Palko said. Overall, it’s important for companies to carefully consider both the advantages and disadvantages of SPACs. “A SPAC is a tool just like a shovel,” Palko said. “You can use a shovel to dig a garden or you can use a shovel to bludgeon someone to death. A SPAC is a legitimate way to go public, but it should really never be viewed as a shortcut to going public.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – Quantum Brilliance, an Australian and German quantum computing startup, is eager to identify space-based applications for its technology. “I’m here because I’m very keen to talk to lots of potential customers about feasibility studies,” Mark Mattingley-Scott, Quantum Brilliance managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told SpaceNews at the Space Symposium . “We really want to go into space as soon as possible.” Last year, Quantum Brilliance delivered its first quantum computer to the government-funded Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia. While this initial product is about half a meter wide and fits in a standard server rack, the company is working on smaller models. “We plan to get that down to a lunchbox size that consumers a couple hundred watts in the next few years,” said Mattingley-Scott, who spent nearly 32 years at IBM before joining Quantum Brilliance last year. “That’s a very interesting payload to put on a satellite in space.” Most quantum computing technology requires extremely cold temperatures. Quantum Brilliance works with synthetic diamonds to create quantum computers that operate at room temperature. Quantum computing technology is evolving rapidly, but most quantum computers remain extremely large. Quantum Brilliance is working to develop quantum computers that can outperform conventional microprocessors, like GPUs, for the same size, weight and power. “We were pretty certain we can get to quantum utility against the GPU in the next three years,” Mattingley-Scott said. “Those are the kind of timescales where for space, you need to start doing stuff now.” In general, quantum computers are good at solving extremely complex, multifaceted problems. For example, quantum computers could provide “much more accuracy but also more speed in optimization machine learning problems, pattern recognition and labeling,” Mattingley-Scott said. Still, it’s impossible to imagine all the potential applications for quantum computing today just like it was impossible to chart future applications for early integrated circuits. Quantum Brilliance, founded in Australia in 2019 established a German subsidiary last year. The firm’s German subsidiary is working with Ulm University on a 15.6 million euros ($17.1 million) research project, funded by the German government and led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics. The three-year project, announced in January , is focused on scalable quantum microprocessor technology based on synthetic diamonds.
COLORADO SPRINGS – U.S. Space Command, a military combatant command responsible for operations in outer space, needs more access to cutting-edge technology from the private sector, the head of the command Gen. James Dickinson said April 5. Of particular interest are services now offered by private companies that track space objects and analyze the data, he said at a news conference at the 37th Space Symposium. Dickinson said he recently submitted to the Defense Department a “commercial integration strategy” calling for more government-industry partnerships to give Space Command easier access to commercial space services. Greater collaboration with the commercial industry is “absolutely where we have to go,” said Dickinson. The command needs better space domain awareness and other capabilities, and is looking for commercial industry to contribute to that, he added. The existing processes for buying services from industry “need to change because the times have changed, capabilities by the industry have changed, and many more companies are providing those services,” said Dickinson. According to a summary of the strategy handed out to reporters, Space Command is interested in commercial capabilities in space domain awareness, command and control, artificial intelligence and big data management, modeling and simulation, space control systems and satellite communications and terminals. “How can we do that better? How can we make it easier, more efficient, more feasible for a commercial company to enter into an agreement with us and participate, for example, in space domain awareness?” he asked. Space Command does not manage procurements but does put forth requirements that the Pentagon has to approve so they can get funding. The Space Force, meanwhile, is standing up a new office to buy nontraditional commercial space services and is now trying to figure out contracting mechanisms for services like space domain awareness. Data as a service The military has established strong relationships with commercial satellite communications providers but needs to broaden its reach to newer sectors of the industry, Dickinson said. Partnerships with companies that provide space data as a service would help Space Command because the military does not have sensors that can monitor every area of space and many companies now have sophisticated sensor systems. Space Command has set up shop at the Catalyst Campus in Colorado Springs where space startups write software code and develop software apps used for space domain awareness. That connection is helpful but the command needs commercial companies to be more integrated into its day-to-day operations, said Dickinson. “We need information to understand what is happening in space,” he said. “ This is all about location. Because in order to be able to observe the space domain for any of the orbital regimes, you have to be in certain parts of the world and we’re not in all those parts of the world. That’s just a fact,” he said. By partnering with companies that help fill those gaps, “we can build a common operating picture in the space domain so we can have a better understanding of what we’re doing and what’s happening.” “There are companies today that have those capabilities that are ready to contribute,” he added. “Our pacing challenge is China. So our ability to move quickly is very important.” Having partnerships with commercial companies also improves the resiliency of military space systems because it adds more layers of capabilities, said Dickinson. A case in point is satellite imagery. The U.S. government operates its own spy satellites but by relying also on commercial remote sensing constellations, it is less vulnerable to disruptions if one or even a handful of satellites are attacked, he explained. The megaconstellations that the industry is building are “absolutely the resiliency that we’re looking for, the ability to have thousands of satellites,” he said. Enemies would “have to take out many of them to have any appreciable effect.” And the advantage of relying on commercial companies is that they have “the ability to rapidly replenish. That is really, in my mind, where we need to go and we’re going in that direction.”
Demand for satellite communications has outstripped supply in markets recovering from the pandemic, according to satcoms provider Speedcast CEO Joe Spytek. Spytek told SpaceNews the company is “about nine full satellites short” for meeting demand it sees next year across cruise, energy and other markets that were hit hard by COVID-19. “There hasn’t been a lot of GEO satellites being launched, plus we have some C-band capacity that’s going away,” he said, referring to the spectrum satellite operators were required to sell to terrestrial 5G operators. While a significant chunk of new capacity is due to come online from low Earth orbit broadband megaconstellations, those networks planning to sell services through wholesale models have suffered delays. SpaceX’s fast-growing Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which currently provides broadband services in about 30 nations and is primarily focused on the consumer market, has built its business around selling to customers directly. “We can integrate Starlink terminals into our unified global platform, but we can’t go buy bulk capacity from Starlink and provide it to our customers,” Spytek said. With a lack of available capacity in the market, he expects prices will “start to creep up a little bit,” but then come back down once OneWeb and other wholesale-focused LEO operators come fully online. “We’re just in this kind of weird point in time where there’s a dearth of capacity for our customers,” he said. Returning optimism “It’s a little bit odd to me that we find ourselves in this position,” Spytek said, “but that is where the industry is right now.” Speedcast emerged from restructuring in March 2021 after pandemic-related travel restrictions that drastically reduced demand in its core markets helped push it into bankruptcy. However, he said COVID-19 has also catalyzed “true change and user behavior” that is increasing demand for bandwidth in multiple sectors. The energy industry has talked about “the digitalization of the oilfield” for decades, Spytek added, but it took oil prices to plummet last year for the sector to shift to digital processes to improve efficiency. “They are trusting the comms, and they’re demanding remote assets, they’re driving efficiencies — it really is real this time,” he said. “We see rigs going from 3, 4, 5 megabits [of capacity] to 30, 50, 100 megabits … it’s an order of magnitude change. Even with the high-value customers that have been very cautious about that change.” In the cruise market, Spytek said one of its main customers went from ordering 8.5 gigabits of capacity to “north of 24 gigabits of capacity, just so far, with more to come.” After seeing growth in expedition cruise itineraries and polar vessel traffic, maritime connectivity specialist Marlink recently said it is buying more bandwidth capacity from Intelsat to meet demand. “Ultimately, that’s a great thing for the industry,” Spytek said, because “I think everyone was wondering who was going to absorb all this capacity and how it was going to be sold.” However, the shortfall on the horizon for delivering that planned bandwidth has left Speedcast hunting for bridge capacity. Spytek said this need for bridge capacity drove Speedcast to recently sign on as a distributor partner for OneWeb’s delayed LEO network. Customer trials with OneWeb are slated to begin in mid-2022 to bring two-thirds of the deployed LEO network into service for Speedcast’s energy and enterprise customers, followed by maritime mobility in 2023. For the time being, OneWeb’s services are limited to fixed applications, which would include Speedcast’s customers on oil rigs and cruise ships at ports, and full coverage is only attainable in the upper parts of the northern hemisphere.
An Amazon executive said the cost to produce antennas for its proposed Project Kuiper megaconstellation is already “well under $500,” even as SpaceX retreats from the subsidized $499 price it charges customers for its operational Starlink terminals. “I actually think we can go lower, but when you get under $500 you can then start penciling out a business model that scales broadly, globally,” Dave Limp, senior vice president for Amazon Devices and Services, said during the 37th Space Symposium April 5 here. Amazon has been leveraging its experience in producing low-cost devices at scale, including Echo smart speakers and Kindle e-readers, to bring down manufacturing costs for an antenna that Limp said is about the size of an LP record. He said the antennas, and the 3,236 satellites envisaged for the constellation, are also using custom microchip designs that Amazon is developing in-house to improve performance. Amazon has not released pricing information for Project Kuiper user equipment or internet service. The company has yet to launch a single Kuiper satellite, but announced April 5 launch agreements with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance that covers up to 83 launches over five years. SpaceX, in contrast, has launched more than 2,330 Starlink satellites to date and is serving customers in some 30 nations. SpaceX had been charging U.S. Starlink customers $499 for hardware and $99 per month for service. In March, however, SpaceX cited inflation in announcing price hikes . U.S. customers will now pay $549 to $599 for the hardware, depending on when they placed their order. The cost of the service increased to $110. Bringing down the cost of user terminals to meet price points that encourage widespread adoption is one of the greatest challenges that broadband megaconstellations face. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told the 36th Space Symposium last August that the company was losing money on user terminals with every customer it acquires, because the cost to make them is higher than the average user can afford. She said SpaceX aimed to cut production costs in half by the end of 2021, and then by half again at a later date. It is unclear whether pandemic-related supply chain issues that have slowed the delivery of Starlink antennas to customers have impacted these plans. 
COLORADO SPRINGS – Partnerships with industry, academia and government agencies around the world are supporting the U.S. intelligence community’s campaign to counter threats to democracy like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said Stacey Dixon, U.S. principal deputy director of national intelligence. “This constellation of independent and incredibly innovative partnerships and the values that sustain them is something autocracies cannot match,” Dixon said April 5 at the 37 th Space Symposium. “You are our invaluable partners in today’s strategic competition in space and on Earth, a competition between democracy and autocracy.” During the war in Ukraine, “the amount of information sharing that is taking place with other nations and with the world to counter Russia’s unprovoked an unwarranted invasion is unprecedented,” Dixon said. “A coalition of partners has supported Ukraine in a multitude of ways, including helping us to get in front of Russia’s planned disinformation and false flag efforts.” Prior to the Feb. 24 invasion, for example, intelligence agencies asked commercial companies that operate electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar satellites “to rapidly make available imagery that highlighted the buildup that was taking place around Ukraine’s borders and to help shed the light on what Russia was doing,” Dixon said. “This allowed others to independently interpret the images, piece them together with other information and tell the world what was about to happen.” Since the war began, companies have continued to post commercial satellite imagery online , revealing the moment of troops and equipment as well as damage and destruction. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also has prompted extensive information sharing among the U.S. and its allies. “This includes foreign partners and the military, law enforcement, intelligence communities with whom we have built trusting relationships over decades,” Dixon said. “As a result, when it came time to share what our intelligence was telling us and then to act with our allies in support of Ukraine, we were not strangers, but friends who were able to act swiftly, even more rapidly than Russia anticipated.” In addition to Russia, Dixon cited threats from the governments of the People’s Republic of China, Iran and North Korea. “All four governments have the ability and intent to promote their interests in ways that undermine not only U.S. interests, but also the interests of our allies,” Dixon said. “And we have a responsibility to identify, understand and mitigate the threats. China in particular is coming ever closer to being a pure competitive competitor in all the domains in which we operate, including space.” Still, the U.S. and its allies can successfully counter international threats because of shared values, which include “free, open and competitive markets and businesses working together with government, academic institutions and others outside of government, along with a vital role of the free press,” Dixon said. U.S. intelligence agencies are working to increase collaboration with the private sector. “Space Exploration is built on a superstructure of complex applications and innovations and on tools, technology and people,” Dixon said. “To maintain and extend our edge all involved must be innovative, responsive, resilient and capable partners.” One area of concern is cybersecurity . “In recent years, sophisticated cyber actors have persistently targeted sensitive data, supply chains and critical infrastructure including those in the space industry,” Dixon said. To counter those threats, “federal agencies have met with hundreds of companies in classified settings to offer briefings and resources to help them understand the threats, harden their defenses and increase information sharing about cybersecurity, counterintelligence, insider threats and how to mitigate them,” Dixon said. Dixon cited the importance of diversifying and protecting supply chains. Intelligence agencies are working “to identify weaknesses in critical supply chains, counter influence from adversaries and reduce supply chain risks, so we do not erode the edge that we currently have in many important areas, including space,” Dixon said. In an effort to forge closer ties with partners, the intelligence community is working “to reduce the barriers to innovation and competition” and to turn to commercial solutions before developing new government capabilities, Dixon said. As an example of this trend, Dixon cited policies established by the Intelligence Community Commercial Space Council that loosen regulations for commercial remote sensing licenses. “Working with our partners, with you, we will continue to seek even more ways to reduce barriers,” Dixon said. “We see this as a process of continuous improvement, a virtuous cycle driven not just by national security needs but by your needs to be competitive.” Increasingly, intelligence agencies are eager for partners to provide information products and services beyond data, Dixon said. “We are encouraging you to expand the kinds of products and service that you provide to us to go from producing pictures and providing raw data to interpret it, giving us deeper, richer insights,” Dixon said. “These kinds of direct, tailored services help us all to make discoveries about a rapidly changing world.” Through ever-expanding relationships with partners, the U.S. intelligence community and its allies can successfully combat “threat to democratic ideals,” Dixon said. “I believe democracies will prevail because of the strength of the partnerships we’ve built among like-minded free societies and the institutions designed to protect and defend both society and our privacy and civil liberties.”
United Launch Alliance is planning major production improvements for its Vulcan rocket while Arianespace will increase the performance of its Ariane 6 to meet the demands of their new Amazon contracts for Project Kuiper. At a briefing during the 37th Space Symposium April 5 about Amazon’s contracts for up to 83 launches to place the bulk of its 3,236-satellite constellation into orbit , executives of launch providers said the size of the deal prompted changes in their vehicles and production facilities. For ULA, that means major investments by itself and its suppliers to support a much higher rate of Vulcan launches, which he later estimated to be 20 to 25 per year. “We are essentially going to be doubling America’s launch industrial base,” said Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA. “These additional launches will take us to about twice our flight rate, which means about twice our infrastructure.” That includes building a new mobile launch platform and a second vertical integration facility where rockets are assembled before being transported to the launch pad. ULA will buy a second ship to transport Vulcan stages from its Alabama factory to the launch site. Suppliers will also be increasing production. Aerojet Rocketdyne will expand a factory to increase production of the RL10 engines used on Vulcan’s Centaur upper stage and Northrop Grumman will ramp up manufacturing of solid-fuel strap-on boosters. “This is a big impact for our country, and for our Western alliances, to be able to keep up with this truly amazing constellation,” Bruno said. That work has already started with new factory tooling, he said. The Spaceflight Processing Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, which ULA upgraded to assemble a new Vulcan launch platform, will serve as the basis for the second vertical integration facility. ULA started coordinating with major suppliers a year ago about the need to increase production for Kuiper launches. That investment will pay off in launching the largest share of the Kuiper constellation. Bruno said that each Vulcan will carry 45 satellites, meaning that the 38-launch contact will place 1,710 Kuiper satellites into orbit, a little more than half of the overall constellation. Arianespace does not expect to need to make improvements in Ariane 6 production or launch operations. Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said the 18 launches can be accommodated within a production rate of 11 to 12 vehicles per year currently planned. The Ariane 6 launch pad in French Guiana can support up to 20 launches per year. However, the company will upgrade the solid-fuel strap-on boosters for the Ariane 64, the version of the Ariane 6 that will launch Kuiper satellites. Sixteen of the launches will use boosters with a new, longer motor called the P120C+. That will increase the payload performance to low Earth orbit of the Ariane 64 by about two tons. Israël estimated each launch will carry 35 to 40 Kuiper satellites. “We are also considering with the European Space Agency other upgrades,” he said, which he did not specify and will depend on funding ESA can secure at its next ministerial meeting later this year. He said Arianespace will consider an increase in production of the vehicle to meet overall commercial and government demand. Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, did not discuss any changes to his company’s New Glenn needed to accommodate Amazon. That vehicle will have the largest capacity of the three selected by Amazon, carrying 61 Kuiper satellites. “We’re in build mode,” he said of work on New Glenn. That includes testing of the BE-4 engine that powers both New Glenn and Vulcan, which he said is undergoing its final development tests, such as a Vulcan mission duty cycle test April 1. He declined to give a date for the projected first launch of New Glenn other than “soon.” Dave Limp, senior vice president for Amazon Devices and Services, said Amazon chose three launch providers to ensure diversity, and these three in particular because of the larger but unspecified size of Kuiper satellites compared to other broadband constellations. “We do need new, larger launch vehicles that make it economic,” he said. “Many of them are coming online right now.” “This is billions of dollars’ worth of contracts,” he added. “The outcome of that is that we’re going to create a lot of great jobs. Being able to do that on a global basis, not only here in the United States but also in Europe, was a high priority for us.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – Top executives from the space industry on April 5 signed a pledge to advance diversity across the workforce. At the 37th Space Symposium, 24 executives committed to “diversity equity and inclusion,” a term used to describe policies and programs that promote the representation and participation of different races and ethnicities, genders, religions and cultures. The “Space Workforce 2030” pledge commits these companies to annual reporting of data on diversity in their collective technical workforce, and to work with universities to increase the number of diverse and underrepresented students in technical fields needed in the space industry. The companies agreed to take action to achieve the following results by 2030: It’s important for the industry to have a plan for diversity, equity and inclusion, Steve Isakowitz, president and CEO of the Aerospace Corp., told SpaceNews . “We’re fortunately going through a period of great growth,” he said. “The markets are hot and we do need to expand our workforce to include those who maybe haven’t had as much opportunity to participate.” A more inclusive workforce also is important for innovation, said Isakowitz. “Innovation without a doubt works better when you get people with diverse backgrounds and diverse perspectives, and frankly our breakthroughs of tomorrow are going to be driven by having a more diverse workforce.” Signatories of “Space Workforce 2030”
COLORADO SPRINGS – The U.S. Space Force cannot continue to acquire satellites and deploy constellations the same way it has in the past given the complexities to the current space environment, Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, said April 5 in a keynote address at the 37th Space Symposium. The threat are here and now, Raymond noted. Russia in November targeted and blew up another Russian satellite creating a massive debris field in orbit. Russia reportedly has deployed nesting satellites equipped with offensive weapons. Space observers saw China operating a satellite with a robotic arm that can grab other satellites. China also is advancing its space capabilities between the moon and Earth, an area called cislunar space that has been characterized as the new high ground. “We are living in the most complex strategic time in at least three generations,” said Raymond. Space is critical to national security and also provides an economic engine that fuels the global economy, he added. “But this is only possible, if and only if, space remains accessible, stable and secure. And today that is not a given. We find ourselves in a period of great competition for space with nations that don’t share our view.” Raymond noted that the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget request released March 28 “contains a substantial increase for the Space Force. The vast majority of that increase goes towards investment in the space capabilities we need for the future.” This is going to require a “pivot” to new satellites and new ways of deploying constellations so they are less vulnerable, he said. “Our legacy space capabilities were designed for a benign domain, where we were focused on exquisite technical performance. We didn’t prioritize speed because we enjoyed a substantial lead in our science and technology.” “We didn’t prioritize resiliency because there were fewer threats,” Raymond said. “Launch was expensive and only a few governments and large corporations could afford to field space capabilities. All of that has changed. We now operate in a contested space domain.” Moving away from ‘monolithic’ systems The challenge for the Space Force as it plans future acquisitions is how to balance cost and technical performance with resiliency against a multitude of threats.” Another challenge is to capture innovation from a space industry “that is fundamentally changing the way we access space and moving at the speed of the free market,” said Raymond. “In short, we must transform. We must pivot to a more resilient space architecture.” Raymond pushed back on the perception that resilience is just a Pentagon buzzword. “Resilient space architectures can be protected, they can survive attack, they degrade gracefully when attacked, and can be rapidly reconstituted if lost,” he said. Over the next year, he said, “we are embarking on a transformation to more resilient architectures, with diverse mixes of capabilities across multiple orbits.” The future architecture is being mapped out by the Space Warfighting and Analysis Center, or SWAC, where analysts use models and simulations to design space systems and assess how survivable they might be against different threats. “How many satellites, which payloads, in what orbits, with what ground infrastructure, to balance performance, cost, and resilience? SWAC helps us answer that question,” Raymond said. “If we are going to migrate away from our large, monolithic systems to hybrid, diversified space architectures, we cannot continue to build expensive satellites with exquisite mission assurance,” he said. Raymond called on the industry to help reduce the cost of space systems. “We need to focus on the reduction of cost as the key driver to build incredibly distributed architectures that are resilient in a fight. The government cannot afford a distributed, resilient force design unless industry changes with us.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – At a time when critical U.S. satellites are seen as likely targets for hostile attacks, adding billions of dollars to the Space Force’s budget was a necessary move, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said April 5 in a keynote speech at the 37th Space Symposium. “You may have noticed that the Space Force request is 40% above last year’s,” Kendall said of the Biden administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2023. “This is not evidence of bureaucratic success,” he said. “It’s a recognition of the importance of the Space Force and the capabilities it provides.” The Pentagon’s $773 billion budget request has $24.5 billion for the Space Force. That funding also includes the budget of the Space Development Agency, which is being moved from under the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the Space Force later this year. The budget for both Space Force and SDA is nearly $5 billion higher in 2023 than what Congress appropriated in 2022. Kendall said the extra funding is needed to “transform our capabilities in space to meet our pacing challenge: China, China, China.” China recently launched what appeared to be a fractional orbital bombardment system that deployed a hypersonic glide vehicle, said Kendall. “This act demonstrated a capability that represents a new and disturbing challenge to strategic stability.” “The fundamental problem we see is the growing threat to America’s ability to project power to deter aggression, and if necessary, defend our interests and our allies,” said Kendall. Space based systems and services enable that power projection, he added. However, “from direct ascent anti-satellite to co-orbital weapons of various types, our satellites are increasingly at risk.” In 2023 “we are requesting funds for resilient missile warning and tracking capabilities and, with SDA, the first instantiation of a communications architecture that will support the joint force in any conflict,” said Kendall. SDA is building the U.S. military’s first low Earth orbit megaconstellation – a Tracking Layer to detect and monitor missile threats and a Transport Layer to move targeting data and other critical information to users anywhere on the globe. “The simple fact is that the United States cannot project power effectively unless our space-based services are resilient enough to endure while under attack,” said Kendall. “Equally true, our terrestrial forces cannot survive and perform their missions if our adversary’s space-based operational support systems, especially targeting systems, are allowed to operate with impunity.” The funding proposed in 2023 “will allow the Space Force to grow a proliferated, multi-orbit, disaggregated architecture over the next several years,” he added. Kendall insisted that China is the United States’ primary rival in space, but Russia is a worrisome threat too. Russia “recently defied acceptable norms of behavior in space and recklessly tested anti-satellite capabilities” creating a large cloud of space debris in low Earth orbit, he said. “Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and has just demonstrated its lack of respect for the accepted constraints on aggression and for even the most basic human rights.” He said the Biden administration has made space a national security priority. “The White House continues to communicate the importance of space to U.S. national security,” he said. “The recent 2023 budget request begins the process of ensuring America’s enduring advantage in that operational domain. This budget begins the technological transformation of the Department of the Air Force and will provide resources to balance the current threat with future, more mature threats.”
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Orbital Reef, a commercial space station being developed by a consortium of companies, has completed an initial design review as part of a NASA award. Blue Origin and Sierra Space, the lead partners in the project, announced April 5 that Orbital Reef completed a system requirements review. The review was one of the first milestones in a $130 million funded Space Act Agreement NASA awarded the companies as part of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program. The review examined the design of Orbital Reef as well as its technical specifications, planned operations and feasibility of development plans. Sierra Space said the review led to no changes in the station’s design. The review “is a significant milestone toward commercializing low Earth orbit,” Brent Sherwood, senior vice president of advanced development programs for Blue Origin, said in a statement. “What’s especially exciting is how the Orbital Reef team is combining NASA’s goals with the needs of others to promote new commercial markets.” Blue Origin and Sierra Space announced Orbital Reef in October 2021 as part of a partnership with Boeing, Redwire Space and several other companies and organizations. The station will ultimately feature a series of laboratory and habitation modules. Blue Origin will develop the station’s core modules and provide launch services on its New Glenn rocket, while Sierra Space will offer its LIFE expandable modules and Dream Chaser vehicle for cargo and crew transportation. Orbital Reef was one of three proposals to win NASA CLD awards. A team that includes Nanoracks and Lockheed Martin received $160 million to work on its Starlab station, while Northrop Grumman received $125.6 million for a station based on its Cygnus cargo spacecraft and the HALO module it is developing for NASA’s lunar Gateway. In addition to the CLD awards, Axiom Space has a $140 million NASA contract to use a port on the International Space Station for attaching a series of commercial modules that will form the core of a later standalone space station. NASA expects one or more of these commercial space stations to be ready by late this decade so that the ISS can be retired in 2030. “We’re going as fast as we can,” Steve Lindsey, chief strategy officer at Sierra Space, said during a panel at the Goddard Memorial Symposium March 25. “We don’t want to have a gap like we did with crew back in the last decade.” NASA’s Commercial LEO Development effort received $101.5 million for 2022, the amount the agency requested. NASA is asking for $224 million for the program in its 2023 budget proposal released March 28. “We are building a platform in space to benefit life on Earth and forming a catalyst for disruptive technological breakthroughs and innovations that will shape the world of tomorrow,” said Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, in a statement. “It is clear that having achieved this key program milestone, and the maturity of the system we are building with Blue Origin, that we are a step closer to realizing that vision.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Japanese startup ArkEdge Space has raised $18.7 million this year to continue developing nanosatellite technologies needed for building an Earth-to-moon communication system and a multi-functional smallsat constellation. The Tokyo-based company, which raised $13.5 million in January, said March 29 that it raised an additional $5.2 million to close a Series A round. Including a March 2021 seed round , the company has raised $22 million. Investors include Incubate Fund, Real Tech Fund, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital, SPARX Innovation for Future Corporation, and Pavilion Capital PTE. “With the funds raised his time, we will accelerate the construction and reinforcement of our satellite development system through addition hires and other measures,” the company said in the statement. ArkEdge Space was awarded a contract in February by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to study navigation and communication technology development for lunar surface activities. The company led a consortium of Japanese organizations, including ispace, Mitsubishi Precision, Kiyohara Optics, KDDI Corporation, and the University of Tokyo that developed a concept of a lunar navigation satellite system, lunar-earth communication system and its development plan. The group finished its work last month. Another project the company is pushing forward is launching a constellation of seven multi-functional 6U nanosatellites by 2025, with the first satellite planned to launch in 2023. The constellation will enable governments and cooperate customers to carry out such missions as IoT communications, Earth observation, marine DX (VDES), and high precision attitude control, according to the company. Last year, ArkEdge Space received an undisclosed amount of subsidy from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) for developing the constellation.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, Space Development Agency Director Derek Tournear and other defense officials on April 4 toured the manufacturing facilities of Denver-based York Space Systems, one of three companies selected to build satellites for the Defense Department’s internet-in-space constellation. DoD’s Space Development Agency awarded York Space a $382 million contract to produce 42 satellites for the Tranche 1 Transport Layer . The company will build these satellites on its LX-class commercial bus. York Space was also selected by SDA in August 2020 to provide 10 satellites for Tranche 0 and expects to deliver those later this year. Tranche 0 is projected to launch in March 2023 and Tranche 1 in September 2024. The satellites produced by York will be part of a large constellation of transport satellites from multiple manufacturers. The Space Development Agency also selected Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to supply satellites for Tranche 1. To meet military and commercial demand, York is opening up a second manufacturing facility in the Denver Tech Center that the company says will triple the capacity of York’s original facility to 540 S-class and LX-class satellites per year. “We are happy that the government is taking advantage of the commercial sector’s investment in production lines, supply chains and speed,” said Dirk Wallinger, CEO of York Space. Further, the company in May announced it has begun planning the construction of a new Manufacturing Technology Center next door to the existing headquarters. Wallinger said the new facility is only in the early stages of development and the company is still working out the details and securing permits. In the new facility, York Space said it will produce as many as 80 satellites simultaneously, compared with the current production plant where employees can build 20 satellites at a time. This facility will have dedicated secure areas to support classified satellite design and integration work, Wallinger said. As the company grows its government and commercial business, he said, York Space plans to hire up to an additional 450 employees in the Denver metro area over the next two years.
In the largest commercial launch deal ever, Amazon is purchasing up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance to deploy most of its 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation, contracts worth several billion dollars. Amazon announced April 5 the agreements to launch an unspecified number of satellites on Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets over five years. The launches are in addition to nine Atlas 5 launches it purchased from ULA a year ago. Amazon did not disclose financial terms but said it is spending billions of dollars on these contracts as part of the constellation’s $10 billion overall cost. “Securing launch capacity from multiple providers has been a key part of our strategy from day one,” Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper at Amazon, said in a statement. “This approach reduces risk associated with launch vehicle stand-downs and supports competitive long-term pricing for Amazon.” Amazon is buying 38 Vulcan launches from ULA. The agreement includes additional investments in launch infrastructure to support a higher flight rate, such as a dedicated launch platform for Vulcan launches of Kuiper satellites. ULA will make its own investments to support processing two launch vehicles in parallel. “With a total of 47 launches between our Atlas and Vulcan vehicles, we are proud to launch the majority of this important constellation,” Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said in a company statement. “Amazon’s investments in launch infrastructure and capability upgrades will benefit both commercial and government customers.” The Arianespace deal includes 18 Ariane 6 launches, a contract that Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, described in a statement as the largest contract in his company’s history. Blue Origin is selling 12 New Glenn launches with an option for 15 more. Amazon declined to provide details about the launch agreements, including the number of satellites each vehicle will carry. Beyond Gravity, formerly known as RUAG Space, will build satellite dispensers for the Kuiper satellites at a new facility in Sweden. The launches will take place over five years, but Amazon declined to state when the launches would begin. None of the three vehicles are currently in service, although both Ariane 6 and Vulcan are scheduled to make their first launches this year. Blue Origin has not announced a revised date for the inaugural New Glenn launch but noted at the Satellite 2022 conference in March that it would not take place this year. Amazon did not disclose which vehicles it considered beyond the three it awarded contracts for. Notably absent is SpaceX, which in addition to its Falcon and Future Starship vehicles is developing its Starlink broadband constellation that will compete with Kuiper. “Amazon has talked to every major launch provider and they will continue to explore all options for future launch services,” a spokesperson representing Amazon told SpaceNews . Amazon needs many launches quickly to meet requirements of its Federal Communications Commission license awarded in July 2020. That license requires Amazon to have half its satellites in orbit by July 2026 and the complete constellation in orbit three years later. The spokesperson representing Amazon told SpaceNews that the contracts keep the company “on track to meet deadlines set forth in the FCC license.” Amazon has yet to launch any Kuiper satellites. Two prototype satellites are scheduled to launch later this year on ABL Space Systems’ RS1 small launch vehicle, which also has yet to make its first flight. “These launch agreements reflect our incredible commitment and belief in Project Kuiper, and we’re proud to be working with such an impressive lineup of partners to deliver on our mission,” said Dave Limp, senior vice president for Amazon Devices and Services, in a statement. 
COLORADO SPRINGS – Satellite propulsion startup Benchmark Space Systems announced plans April 5 to triple production capacity to meet growing demand for its Starling and Halcyon propulsion systems. Over the next 18 months, Burlington, Vermont-based Benchmark plans to produce more than 150 propulsion systems for government and commercial satellites destined for low Earth, geostationary and cislunar orbit. The whole industry has seen a transition from the early stage of constellations, where customers were building one or two of these satellites, to customers “now scaling up to build 10, 50 or 100,” Benchmark CEO Ryan McDeviitt told SpaceNews . “We’re building out to support those customers.” Last year, Benchmark demonstrated the performance of its Halcyon thruster on an undisclosed government satellite mission. “It proved that the core concept, the basic idea, works,” McDevitt said. “Getting the flight heritage and being able to talk to people, when we’re under [a nondisclosure agreement] about the performance characteristics” led to additional contract awards. Benchmark is preparing to open an office in the United Kingdom, where the company recently signed its first contract. “We’ve seen great alignment with the companies there,” McDevitt said. “They’re interested in space sustainability, thinking about space as a natural resource and the use of green propulsion.” Since proving Halycon in orbit, much of Benchmark’s attention has focused on development of a variant, the Halcyon Avant green bipropellant propulsion system. Halycon Avant is scheduled to fly for the first time on a Spaceflight Sherpa-LTC orbital transfer vehicle scheduled to launch later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Seven undisclosed government and commercial customers are scheduled to launch missions, which will often include multiple spacecraft, with Benchmark thrusters in 2022. Another 12 to 15 missions with Benchmark propulsion systems are slated for launch in 2023. After initially identifying problems with the thrusters on the Sherpa-LTC, Benchmark worked closely with engineers from SpaceX and Sherpa manufacturer Spaceflight “to perform technical diligence to ensure future mission success,” McDevitt said. “We remain fully aligned with Spaceflight and SpaceX and are fast approaching the debut mission of the Sherpa-LTC orbital transfer vehicle powered by a Benchmark Halcyon Avant propulsion system a bit later this year, with other missions with Spaceflight and SpaceX to follow.” Benchmark was founded in 2017 with two employees. By the end of 2021, the company had a 35-person staff. Benchmark now employs 50 people, is on track to hire 20 more by the end of the year and employ 120 people by mid-2023.
COLORADO SPRINGS – The United States this week will host the third gathering of international military space chiefs in Colorado Springs. “We are going to focus on how to mature our partnerships,” Chief of Space Operations of the U.S. Space Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond told SpaceNews in an interview at the 37th Space Symposium. At the international chiefs forum will be military space leaders from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Republic of Korea, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States. Raymond recently visited Australia’s newly established space command and toured space surveillance sites where U.S. and Australian forces operate side by side. He said one of the issues raised by Australia and other allies is the need to evolve current alliances “beyond just data sharing partnerships, but make them truly operational.” “We want to actually get to the point where we’re developing capabilities together,” said Raymond. “And so we’re going to continue to have those conversations with our closest partners.” The backdrop of the meeting are growing concerns about space security and sustainability, including the possibility that Russia could repeat the destructive anti-satellite missile test it carried out in November that created a huge cloud of orbital debris. “A lot of what we’re doing with our partners is figuring out what are responsible norms of behavior,” said Raymond. Proposals have been written on what those norms should be but ultimately “we demonstrate safe and responsible behavior by how we operate,” he said. “We need to have a better understanding of the space domain and that’s why the partnerships in Australia and other places are really important,” he said. “But there’s a lot of figuring out still to do.” International talks on space security will soon get underway by a United Nations-led working group. U.S. officials said it’s unlikely that Russia or China will participate in these talks but Raymond believes that “like-minded nations” can move forward with efforts to promote space security, “continue to demonstrate good behavior, and hopefully, others will follow.” Future U.S. space architecture could include allies Raymond said a high priority for the U.S. Space Force is to transition its legacy constellations of “exquisite” satellites to a more diversified architecture that would be harder for adversaries to disrupt. “ And that’s going to require doing things differently,” he said. “We can’t continue to acquire like we always have, where you have a handful of big exquisite satellites.” A future architecture for space-based communications, for example, should have a mix of exquisite and lower cost mass-produced satellites, and might include allied satellites, he said. “I think where you’ll see us land is with a kind of a hybrid architecture that has a mixture.” “If you go to a more proliferated architecture, rather than the handful of exquisite capabilities, you then open the opportunities for more commercial collaboration and you open opportunities for more collaboration with our allies and partners,” Raymond said.
COLORADO SPRINGS – The Department of the Air Force on April 4 announced six Space Force bases in Colorado, Florida and California are candidate locations for the headquarters of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Training and Readiness Command. The candidates are Los Angeles Air Force Base, California (soon to be renamed Space Force base); Vandenberg Space Force Base, California; Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado; Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado; Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado; and Patrick Space Force Base, Florida. The training and readiness command, known as STARCOM, is one of three U.S. Space Force field commands, responsible for the professional development, education and training of Space Force guardians, the development of space warfighting doctrine and tactics, and the operational test and evaluation of Space Force systems. The Department of the Air Force will begin site surveys in late April or early May to determine which location is best suited. “The assessment will be based on factors related to mission, infrastructure capacity, community support, environmental considerations and cost,” the Air Force said in a statement. STARCOM is provisionally located at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs until a permanent location is selected. The command of about 700 people, run by Maj Gen. Shawn Bratton, oversees five operational units known as space deltas that are currently scattered in different locations. STARCOM in December conducted the 13th Space Flag exercise with U.S. and allied forces.. The plan is to bring the STARCOM headquarters and deltas into a more integrated organization, Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, told SpaceNews . The basing process is not about “growing bureaucracy. This is taking people that were spread out across the Air Force and bringing them together into a unified whole that we haven’t had before.” The Space Force’s two other field commands are Space Operations Command, based at Peterson Space Force Base, and Space Systems Command, headquartered at Los Angeles Air Force Base.
COLORADO SPRINGS – The U.S. Space Systems Command, the procurement arm of the Space Force, is looking for opportunities to buy “space as a service” from companies that provide weather data, imagery and other intelligence collected by satellites. This is a departure from the customary practice of building bespoke military satellites, but the government wants to give it a try, said Debra Emmons, vice president and chief technology officer of Aerospace Corp. Emmons runs a new organization known as the Commercial Space Futures Office , created to help connect space companies with government buyers, and to vet companies’ technical capabilities before they pitch their services to the government. “W e’re seeing a real push across the Department of Defense, Space Force, the intelligence community and civil space to migrate to a more commercial-first approach,” Emmons told SpaceNews . Aerospace is a federally funded corporation based in Los Angeles that provides technical support to the Space Force and other agencies. Under its agreement with the Space Systems Command, the Commercial Space Futures Office can offer space companies access to 100,000 square feet of laboratory facilities to validate their technology, said Emmons. Since the office opened for business in December, it has received many queries from space startups looking to sell products and services to the Space Force, she said. It also has worked with established companies like Anduril, Freedom Photonics and Cubic Technologies, to help them assess whether their technologies fit the demands of the Space Force. “This is really about trying to ‘de-risk’ commercial solutions,” she said. The Space Force sees how much investment is going into commercial space and wants to leverage that technology, Emmons added. The issue is how mature and how ready some of those technologies are, which is what the new office seeks to answer. “We do due diligence and readiness assessments,” she said. That includes evaluations of companies’ financial and technical wherewithal, as well as their supply chains. George Tromba, principal director of the Commercial Space Futures Office, said he frequently hears from startups that need help overcoming high barriers to entry into the defense market. “We have noticed an uptick in different companies coming to us,” he said. “A lot of them have been basically cold calling us. They need help maturing technology and in some instances they need help to come up with a concept of operations that’s going to work for potential government customers.” Tromba said the Space Systems Command is looking at possible contracting mechanisms it could use to buy space services. The office that buys communications services from commercial satellite operators is providing “a wealth of knowledge” that will be applied to contracting for other types of services, he said. Aerospace wants to be an honest broker and not create hurdles for commercial players that want to work with DoD, said Tromba. “We are working to really change the model where the combined government-FFRDC [federally funded research and development corporation] team used to be more hesitant to engage and have a dialogue of substance with commercial entrants. That model is fundamentally shifting.” The conversations taking place with commercial space players, he said, are “shaping how the government can do this commercial-first approach because they are absolutely all in.”
With China and Russia embracing hypersonic weapons capable of evading U.S. missile shields, the Pentagon is spending billions of dollars on infrared sensor satellites to counter the threat. Kelle Wendling, the new president of L3Harris Technologies’ Space Systems sector, says U.S. programs are not moving as fast as they could be. “If we are going to take 10 or 12 years to catch up, we’ll be putting irrelevant capability on orbit, and that’s not where we want to be,” Wendling told SpaceNews . L3Harris, a $17 billion defense contractor, is one of the U.S. government’s major suppliers of infrared sensors used in weather and environmental satellites, a technology that the company spent years adapting for missile detection. It is currently producing ballistic and hypersonic missile-tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency. SDA’s first batch of eight sensor satellites – four from L3Harris and four from SpaceX – are projected to launch in early 2023. MDA in late 2023 will be launching two prototype infrared satellites – one from L3Harris and one from Northrop Grumman – to conduct experiments. Wendling has worked at L3Harris for more than two decades and in January took over as head of the company’s national security space business, a sector within L3Harris Space & Airborne Systems. She said the urgency of the hypersonic missile threat calls for DoD and the defense industry to adjust their risk tolerance and take a page from the commercial space sector. Major commercial space players like SpaceX “are really changing how we acquire and deliver capabilities, and they have a little bit higher tolerance for risk than we do,” she said. “Not only that, but they are pushing down costs. So we need to adapt.” The technological risk in developing satellites to detect and track hypersonic missiles is significant because these are sophisticated weapons that can pivot, glide and maneuver, Wendling said. “And they fly at a lower altitude which makes it incredibly difficult because they’re not as easy to pick out from the clutter.” The industry has developed increasingly sophisticated infrared sensing technology, but “we need to move quickly and field something” given the urgency of the threat, she said. “The challenge is how can we change how we do acquisition, development, integration, testing and deployment so that we can get through the cycle faster?” “We’ve had some interesting dialogue with the customer about how some of the commercial players approach things,” Wendling said. In commercial space, “some are willing to change their software very close to launch, and that would make us very, very nervous,” she added. “So there needs to be a discussion amongst ourselves and our customers about what risk tolerance we are willing to take.” The missile-tracking satellites that L3Harris is developing for DoD are being tested in labs and “we feel like this capability can be executed from space,” said Wendling. But things don’t always work out exactly as planned in the space environment, she noted. In DoD acquisitions, any type of technical setback can derail a program. To avoid such an outcome, “we should have a conversation not just about the design and development but about how we recover if something doesn’t work.” “We have to start pivoting to a more agile approach, and I know that word is overused but we need a more agile environment for us to deploy capabilities,” Wendling said.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy was in Boca Chica, Texas, last month visiting Starbase. That is SpaceX’s launch and rocket manufacturing and testing facility where the company hopes to operate Starship, the largest rocket ever built. Purdy is the commander of Florida’s Eastern Range and also serves as the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, a new post within the Space Systems Command overseeing launch services procurement for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. “I did get a chance to go down to Boca Chica and see it in person. It’s an amazing facility that gives you a lot of ideas of what the future could be,” Purdy told SpaceNews in an interview at the Space Symposium. There is still a lot of uncertainty about Starship, Purdy noted. It has not yet flown to orbit and SpaceX is awaiting a license from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch from Boca Chica, but the Space Force is keeping an eye on it. “The question is ‘how does it work?’” said Purdy. “Since they haven’t done it yet, there’s not a lot to go on, but we’re watching it closely.” Starship is a huge structure with a first-stage Super Heavy booster at the bottom and the second-stage Starship spacecraft on top. SpaceX said it will be capable of carrying more than 100 metric tons of cargo and crew per launch. The details about its concept of operations are still fuzzy but could include delivering supplies and propellant to low Earth orbit, or to the moon, and from there fly to Mars. “I’m excited to see how that will come about,” said Purdy. He noted that both the Space Force and NASA are supporting the construction of Starship test and launch facilities in Florida. Purdy said it’s too early to project how the Space Force might employ Starship. The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded SpaceX a $102 million contract to study ways in which the military could use the company’s launch vehicles to transport cargo and crews from point to point on Earth. Conceivably the Space Force could use Starship to launch satellites, depending on what capabilities the vehicle can provide, said Purdy. One scenario would be to employ Starship as mass transportation to fly satellites to low Earth orbit and then rely on orbital transfer vehicles to deploy the satellites to their final destination. “Traditionally launch has always been a direct injection to orbit because there was not really another path,” he said. “We’re absolutely looking at that to see what comes about and how we might use it,” Purdy added. There are still too many unknowns “but the generic concept of putting a satellite into low Earth orbit, and then moving it somehow into high Earth orbit is attractive and interesting. We’re definitely curious to see where the commercial market goes so we can leverage it.”
While the space industry workforce continues to increase, there are signs the industry may be struggling to attract people, which could stifle its long-term growth. At a briefing during the 37th Space Symposium April 4, the Space Foundation released new data on the size of the core space industry workforce in the United States. That research found that there were 151,797 people working in the industry in 2021, an 18.4% increase over the last five years. That growth continued even during the pandemic. “We did not see a dip in the space sector with COVID,” said Mariel Borowitz, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who worked on the employment data released by the Space Foundation. That growth is driven by manufacturing of launch vehicles and spacecraft. Salaries have also grown, she said, with the average space industry salary more than double the overall average private sector salary. “Working in the U.S. space sector is a pretty good place to be.” That good news, though, is tempered by concerns about training new employees, particularly for skilled labor positions like technicians. “There’s a real concern about the labor supply that is available, particularly in precision manufacturing,” said Lesley Conn, director of research and analysis at the Space Foundation. The organization’s research found enrollment in two-year programs for these fields has been dropping for the last four years. “When you look at the pipeline of students and new employees entering some of the fields where we see the demand, we’re not seeing the growth,” she said. Educators, she added, say they’re not seeing interest from students in those fields. She said that lack of interest appears to be a perception issue among students and young employees. That includes concerns they have about being able to handle math and engineering work. Another issue is the belief that this is “blue-collar, grungy, exhausting work” that’s less desirable than other disciplines. The Space Foundation is taking steps to address those perceptions by working to “demystify” the fields and also show what work in the industry is really like. “No one will say that space isn’t cool,” said Kelli Kedis Ogborn, vice president of space commerce and entrepreneurship at the Space Foundation. “But, a lot of times they self-select out because they don’t see their skill set or interests applying.” That is creating a “pain point” for space companies current as they seek to attract new employees. “It is driving up wages. There’s competition within companies to hire away,” Conn said.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Space-as-a-service startup Xplore Inc. announced the acquisition April 4 of spacecraft software developer Kubos Corp. including Major Tom, Kubos’ flight control software platform. More than a dozen government and commercial satellites in orbit plan and conduct mission operations with Major Tom, cloud-based software designed to handle a variety of tasks including ground station scheduling, satellite tasking and telemetry monitoring. Major Tom “is a software platform Xplore can expand and extend to other aspects of flight and ground software into tasking and data distribution,” Lisa Rich, Xplore founder and chief operating officer, told SpaceNews. Redmond, Washington-based Xplore announced in February that it had raised $16.2 million since it was established in 2017. Kubos partners and customers include RBC Signals, Viasat, Microsoft Azure and ISISpace of the Netherlands. Xplore is another Kubos customer. “We are a customer-focused commercial space company that is now both a customer and developer of Major Tom,” Rich said in a written statement. “As users, developers and stakeholders, the ability to easily connect and setup command and control systems for satellites and constellations is essential. Our unique perspective will enable us to continually improve the features and capabilities of our flight-ready mission control system from the inside out.” Kubos employees, including former CEO and co-founder Tyler Browder, are joining Xplore. “I’m delighted to join the Xplore team as business development director for mission operations,” Browder said in a statement. “In my new role, I will continue to build and grow the Major Tom platform into an expanded service offering.”
Hiring challenges in the space industry will lead to more acquisitions as way for companies to access talent and expand their workforces, investors said during an April 4 space finance session at the 37th Space Symposium here. Acquiring companies is a “quick shortcut” for filling job openings that risk slowing down projects across the industry , said Jon Lusczakoski, an executive at AE Industrial Partners. “Especially if you’re focused on the classified space or want to get into the classified space,” Lusczakoski said. The time it takes to get an individual security clearance is “getting longer and longer,” according to Lusczakoski. This makes small companies with classified-level engineers “a hot commodity to a company that’s trying to break into that [market], and can’t afford a two-year timeline to get their team up to that” level. Wells Fargo investment banker Paul Croci said smaller companies that win big contracts “often don’t have the people to scale fast enough” to deliver on time. Workforce shortages could push the small companies to partner with a larger contractor or be acquired by a bigger company with more resources. Consolidation on the way AE Industrial Partners created space technology company Redwire in June 2020 by combining two space technology companies it had acquired. After absorbing more space firms into Redwire through acquisitions, the private equity firm took the group public in September 2021 by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The industry is only in the “early innings” of a consolidation wave, according to Lusczakoski. He said there are a lot of mid-tier companies that “flatline” after reaching $10-20 million revenue. “They’ve kind of lost their innovation, because now the founder or upper management is worried about next year’s taxes, the HR handbook, making sure monthly financials are closing out [and] getting payroll for this week,” he said. Lusczakoski expects more companies like Redwire and fellow consolidator Voyager Space to “pop up over the next couple of years” to snap up these companies, enabling them to pool administrative tasks to reduce overhead. More institutional financing will also be available as the space industry’s operational costs become more palatable for these investors, said Patrick Judge, managing director of Camber Road Partners, a provider of non-dilutive financing. “I think you’ll see more capital allocation to space within general funds,” Judge said, and also “more specifically targeted funds for space.” He said that operational costs are falling partly due to a flood in early-stage investments. Panel moderator Ronald Lau, senior vice president of corporate development and capital programs at state development agency Space Florida, estimated that 328 space companies received $17 billion in venture funding combined in 2021. Venture capitalists, however, have more appetite for risk than investment banks, private equity firms and other large institutional sources of capital with more conservative investment criteria. “Top of that list is revenue,” Croci said, and second is cashflow. “Investors that are serious public investors are really going to struggle if you don’t have revenue and EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization],” he said. “The next best thing after that is contracts. If you don’t have revenue, or EBITDA, you’ve got to have contracts, and ideally hundreds of millions if not billions coming from … highly-rated customers.” Beyond those, institutional investors will also be looking for a team with a broad range of expertise, including employees that have worked at maturer companies, or involved in transitioning a startup to a going concern. “And then technology,” he added, which “can’t be an idea on a napkin” and ideally needs an operational prototype with the intellectual property that backs it up, and a clear regulatory path toward certification. “If you fall down in any one of those areas … it’s not necessarily catastrophic,” he said, “but certainly those are the things that the crossover investors and the public institutions are going to want to see before they’ll put large blocks of capital to work.”
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy plans to use this week’s Space Symposium to meet with international partners on both the long-term future of the International Space Station and roles in later phases of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration effort. In an interview, Melroy compared the symposium to the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) as a forum for meeting with other space agencies. She represented NASA at the most recent IAC in Dubai last October, holding similar meetings with other space agencies, including Roscosmos. There have been seismic geopolitical shifts in the five months since IAC, though, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to sanctions that cut off Russia from the West in nearly all space activities other than the ISS. Despite those tensions, she noted ISS operations continue largely unaffected and she remains optimistic that the station can be extended to 2030. NASA is also in discussions with international partners on Artemis as NASA lays the groundwork for the “sustainable” phase of the program later in the decade after the Artemis 3 landing no earlier than 2025. That includes, she said, working on a long-term strategy for the effort to identify the work NASA and partners want to do on the moon as preparation for human missions to Mars as soon as the late 2030s. Melroy spoke with SpaceNews about Artemis, ISS and other issues March 30, hours after NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned from nearly a year on the station on a Soyuz spacecraft. What specific issues do you plan to discuss with other space agencies at Space Symposium? ISS always comes up. It’s always a priority for us. It’ll be a good opportunity for us to talk about the progress and plans of our partners, in terms of working with their governments on the extension to 2030. They were waiting for us and, once we were able to get that extension through and the White House blessed it last year, they’ve now got to start working through their government processes. We’ll be very interested in hearing how they’re doing with that and if there’s any way we can support them. The other big thing on my mind to talk about is more future-based. I want to talk about what approach we are taking for the architecture for moon to Mars. I’ll be talking a little bit about this at the plenary, outlining a few key points, but going in a little deeper with the partners. We are seeking to build a consensus around what we are trying to achieve, particularly what we need to achieve at the moon to go on to Mars. This is the right time to do it. We’re in a place where we understand what we’re doing through Artemis 4, but we need to nail down the objectives of the subsequent Artemis missions and what we’re going to try to achieve. We can highlight gaps where partners, both in industry and internationally, may be interested in filling. How much of those ISS discussions will be about the extension to 2030 versus near-term issues, including questions about Russia’s commitment to the space station? I expect that will come up. I am sure we will discuss what we see and know. I was excited to see Mark Vande Hei land. That was a big deal, and that just goes to show this is a professional relationship on both sides. I think it’s a great thing that space and science is something that seems to unite us, even when we have disagreements elsewhere. Is there any contingency planning for a Russian decision not to participate in an extension of the ISS to 2030? We are NASA, so we always talk about all kinds of plans, and there’s a lot of stuff on the shelf for failure modes and things like that. We are just continuing to stay close to what’s going on. Everything is working very professionally and very smoothly. We are certainly a little bit stressed with our staff in Russia. One outcome of this is a reduced staff in Russia. I hesitate to use the word contingency planning. It’s thinking things through, especially if we are squeezed harder on staff in Russia. I feel pretty confident we have a good plan there. What is the status of negotiations on a seat barter agreement with Russia to allow astronauts to fly on Soyuz and cosmonauts on commercial crew vehicles? That’s a great question. We’re certainly watching that closely. That is something that the State Department is doing for us. Clearly, we support them, but it’s really a better question for State. Do you expect to talk with ISS partners about roles they will have on the commercial space stations that NASA is helping fund development of as successors to the ISS? There’s a varying level of urgency among our international partners about how much they want to engage in that. I think some are definitely thinking about it, and some are less concerned. My personal belief is that there’s tremendous value in government-to-government agreements. They help smooth over some of the policy issues. The question is, what does that look like? We’ve got some time to work that out. I’m more focused on the moon-to-Mars agreements and getting that in place. What feedback have you gotten about the agency’s $26 billion budget proposal for 2023? I’m sure it’ll be a topic of discussion. One of the things I’m excited about in the budget is that it’s beginning to lay in a steady and resilient cadence for our Artemis missions. That allows us to start mission planning to make the progress we need to prepare to send humans to Mars. The HLS second lander announcement is a part of looking at that whole architecture and filling in any gaps to get to a steady cadence with resiliency. That budget rollout included a manifest of missions that featured a sizable gap between the Artemis 3 lunar landing in 2025 and Artemis 4 in 2027. Do you risk losing momentum with a gap like that? The last administration was working hard to pull that first moon landing forward as far as it could to 2024. With COVID, contract protests, and other things, we’re at 2025. It’s absolutely an aggressive schedule, but we’re going to make a hard run at it with our partners. Doing that has exposed that we were really pulling things forward to try to achieve that date. How are we backfilling that to get to a more regular cadence? That’s what we’re beginning to address right now. I don’t like that little blank spot on the schedule any more than you do, but I’m not actually sure it’s going to turn out that way. The key thing is to make sure we really understand the hardware we need to get that steady cadence going, and that doesn’t happen overnight. This budget is going to help us do that. Congress, in its report accompanying the 2022 omnibus spending bill, asked NASA for a report on its long-term Artemis plans. When do you expect to have that ready? We have an architecture right now. It’s highly notional in many regards. This year, we’re focused on ensuring that we’re all on board with the objectives that we have to achieve: what do we have to do on the moon, what do we have to demonstrate, what do we have to design? We still want to consult with our international partners and with industry. It’s so important that we all see the same objective. I think that’s going to inform the architecture. We will have something that incorporates all the objectives we want to achieve and something that I believe will satisfy what everyone wants, including me, by the end of the calendar year. Singapore recently became the 18 th country to sign the Artemis Accords. What are your plans for attracting more countries, and what are you doing with the countries that have already signed? We have several more in the hopper, and I’m excited about that. It shows a strong awareness that the Outer Space Treaty, which I think we all stand behind, needs to take the next step about how we interpret it. We want to bring the best of humanity out into the solar system when we go. To me, the willingness of so many of our international partners to sign indicates that everyone sees that as a value too. As far as what is next, we are talking about that. If you are a signer of the Artemis Accords, we are hosting special events to share updates, discuss the approaches we’re taking and seek feedback. We’re also seeking feedback on governance, such as anything they would like added to the Artemis Accords. Besides Artemis, the ISS and science missions, what other milestones or upcoming events are on your radar? There are several things of interest to me that I’m tracking closely. One of them is the first flight of our first X-plane in a long time, the X-57, and then, we hope, the first flight of the X-59. That is going to be exciting. One thing I love about the X-59 program, which is our low-boom demonstrator, is that we’re laying the groundwork to fly it around the country to test the noise of the boom. Being able to show off this crazy-looking airplane all around the country is exciting because it gives people an opportunity to remember that aeronautics is a key part of our mission. We’re also kicking off the Earth System Observatory, which is incredibly important. Also, our Earth Information Center, which is a really small program but I think it’ll be mighty in the sharing of critical data between us and our partners in the government who all collect climate data and Earth data, and being able to make that more accessible. Those are the things that I’m excited about. 
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — For the moment, Millennium Space System’s new small satellite factory looks like a series of huge rooms that are mostly empty except for powerful yellow cranes in the corners and industrial-strength power strips lining the walls. Reporters were given a rare glimpse of the 2,787-square-meter plant before Millennium begins assembling satellites for commercial and government customers. Once satellites are moving down the assembly line, trade secrets and national security concerns are likely to prevent press tours. The factory’s open floor plan is designed for maximum flexibility. “This factory can do multiple different missions, multiple different sizes of smallsats and also multiple orbits,” said Millennium CEO Jason Kim. “This is a very flexible, scalable smallsat factory.” Millennium is following a carefully choreographed plan in setting up the factory, from installing the additive-manufacturing machines sized for 3D printing satellite buses to all the equipment required for environmental testing. First, though, employees are moving in the components and subsystems common to Millennium spacecraft like the batteries, flight computers, software-defined radios and solar array drive assemblies the company produces in-house. “We have 22 diverse products we are going to start moving in there in a phased approach,” Kim said. “As we grow and as the customers demand more constellations, we’re going to build up.” Sometime this fall, Millennium plans to achieve full operational capability, meaning “all the tooling, all the people and all the processes are in place,” Kim said. This story originally appeared in the April 4, 2022 issue of SpaceNews’ Space Symposium Show Daily.
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary best known for building small satellites for national security applications, is working closely with its corporate parent to gear up for rapid production of spacecraft for government and commercial constellations. Millennium is setting up a dedicated small satellite factory within the 93,000-square-meter manufacturing plant where Boeing has produced 300 satellites. When Millennium’s factory is up and running in the fourth quarter of this year, the company will be able to assemble, integrate and test constellations of tens, hundreds or even thousands of satellites, Millennium CEO Jason Kim said during a March 29 press briefing. In its original plant a mile away, Millennium will continue to build prototypes, the satellite equivalent of concept cars. Once a prototype is completed and a satellite is designed for manufacturability, “we bring it into the smallsat factory where we can execute at scale,” said Michelle Parker, Boeing’s Space and Launch vice president and general manager. Millennium, a 500-employee company founded in 2001, has built satellites for NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force. Since its acquisition by Boeing in 2018, Millennium has relied on the aerospace giant’s expertise in manufacturing and mission assurance as well as help navigating new markets. “We’re working with Millennium to bring scale not only in manufacturing capability but also in the size and range of missions their spacecraft can support,” said Ryan Reid, Boeing Commercial Satellite Systems International president. In return, Millennium is sharing its unique approach with Boeing. “They bring not only the platforms and technologies for smaller satellites, but also the rapid prototyping and the way they innovate,” Parker said. “The way Millennium does design, development and rapid prototyping is something we’re looking to infuse through all of our space products.” Both the government and commercial satellite markets have experienced dramatic changes in recent years. Orders for large geostationary communications satellites have waxed and waned as companies began to establish constellations of smaller satellites in low and medium Earth orbit. On the commercial side, “we see an evolving of the market from what primarily had been a geosynchronous market to a multi-orbit, multi-scale, rapidly produced satellite market,” Parker said. At the same time, government customers seek to enhance the resiliency of their space-based assets “through diversity, whether that’s diversity of orbit, diversity of size, diversity of mission life,” Parker said. Through its integration with Millennium, Boeing has broadened its portfolio. The aerospace giant continues to build large, high-throughput geostationary communications satellites for customers like Viasat and Pasifik Satelit Nusantara of Indonesia. For SES’s O3b mPOWER constellation, Boeing manufactures software-defined satellites destined for medium Earth orbit that are a fraction of the size of the geostationary spacecraft. Still, the mPower satellites with a dry mass of 1,900 kilograms dwarf Millennium spacecraft, which usually weigh less than 1,000 kilograms. Through its integration with Millennium, Boeing can look for “the best overall solution for customers,” Parker said. “It could be a combination of sizes and orbits. It could be a special development.” If small satellites are the solution for a particular mission, “Millennium brings us the ability to build those rapidly in our smallsat factory,” Parker said. Millennium could, for example, help Boeing produce satellites for a non-geostationary broadband constellation. In November, the Federal Communications Commission approved Boeing’s application for a 147-satellite constellation. “We are actively engaging with partners and looking at continuing technology advancements and working with Jason’s team,” Reid said. “Having Millennium as part of that journey with us, I think, is a necessary and beneficial element to our overall success.” This story originally appeared in the April 4, 2022 issue of SpaceNews’ Space Symposium Show Daily.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and NASA will share details at the 37 th Space Symposium on 24 research experiments completed to date on the International Space Station’s HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, including analysis of astronaut gloves that relies on artificial intelligence. Since the Spaceborne Computer-2 was installed in ISS in May 2021, HPE has been working with Microsoft and NASA to demonstrate a variety of applications. Experiments conducted to date have focused on astronaut healthcare, image processing, natural disasters, 3D printing and 5G communications. The astronaut glove experiment relies on artificial intelligence to analyze photos and videos of the gloves astronauts wear when repairing equipment and installing instruments outside ISS. NASA and Microsoft developed a glove-analyzer AI model that looks for signs of glove damage. When damage is detected, an annotated image is sent automatically to Earth for further review. “By introducing edge computing and AI capabilities to the International Space Station with Spaceborne Computer-2, we have helped foster a growing, collaborative research community that shares a common goal to make scientific and engineering breakthroughs that benefit humankind, in space and here on Earth,” Mark Fernandez, HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 principal investigator, said in a statement. Edge processing will become increasingly important for human space exploration because astronauts traveling to the moon, Mars and other deep space destinations will experience communications delays. If used wisely, AI, cloud computing and space-based edge processors could eliminate the need for astronauts to constantly send information to the ground for processing and analysis. Another widely discussed experiment looks for mutations in astronaut DNA. Prior to the Spaceborne Computer-2, sending a 1.8 gigabit raw DNA sequence took more than 12 hours to deliver the data to researchers on the ground for processing. Now, the data can be processed on the space station in six minutes, compressed and sent to Earth in two seconds, according to an HPE April 4 news release. The Spaceborne Computer-2 also is being used to test automatic interpretation of satellite imagery. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers use a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to automatically interpret data captured in orbit of land and structures after disasters like floods and hurricanes. Another experiment by the Cornell University Fracture Group tested modeling software that simulates 3D printing of metal parts and predicts failure or deformation that could result. Tests on the Spaceborne Computer-2 validated the software. Mobile network operator Cumucore tested various features of its 5G core network on Spaceborne Computer-2. The experiment indicated that installing 5G equipment on some satellites and spacecraft could enhance space-based communications. The Spaceborne Computer-2, which HPE sent to orbit in February 2021 in a Northrop Grumman Cygnus capsule in collaboration with the ISS National Laboratory, is expected to remain on ISS for approximately two more years.
Telesat has upgraded a quarter of its planned low Earth orbit constellation as supply chain issues force it to consider ordering fewer satellites for the delayed broadband network. The Canadian company’s plan to double the antennas onboard Telesat Lightspeed’s first 78 satellites brings the constellation back to a single satellite design that, according to a company executive, will help cut costs as production delays push out the service’s debut a year to 2026. These initial satellites are destined for polar orbits and the changes mean they will have two pairs of antennas like the inclined satellites planned for the rest of the constellation, said Erwin Hudson, Lightspeed’s system development vice president. Telesat had previously decided to make its polar satellites smaller than the 220 slated for inclined orbits, and with just one pair of antennas to accelerate production. Thales Alenia Space, which Telesat announced February 2021 had been picked to build 298 Lightspeed satellites, had hoped slimming down the initial set of spacecraft would clear the way for earlier tests in LEO. However, Thales ran into production issues later in 2021 that affect the whole constellation, and there is now “no benefit to building lesser capacity satellites for polar,” according to Hudson, who said Canada-based MDA is supplying the antennas. Under the original plan, the initial 78 polar satellites were to be followed by 110 larger satellites in inclined orbits to reach global coverage, and then another 110 to enable Lightspeed to provide 15 terabits per second of capacity globally. Telesat is now weighing the merits of initially ordering just 188 for reaching global converge, or raising more money as inflationary pressures also push up the project’s initially projected $5 billion cost. During a March 18 earnings call with analysts, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said the company would still be able to provide terabits of capacity globally with 100 less satellites. Supply chain woes While Telesat said last year that it had picked Thales to build 298 Lightspeed satellites, the deadline to execute that contract to move it out of its development phase has since passed, leaving the scope of the constellation open to adjustments. Hudson said Telesat had initially picked Thales to work toward building 298 satellites to take advantage of economies of scale. “The bigger the deal the more negotiating power the buyer has,” he said. But now it’s a seller’s market at the component level, he added, with “not much difference in the pricing by deferring” part of the constellation to a later date. “Back when parts were plentiful, you could order all that stuff and get a discount — nobody is going to give you a discount right now, because there’s more demand than supply,” he said. A lot of the supply chain issues in the satellite industry are for relatively simple parts, according to Hudson, including resistors and capacitors. “There’s nothing in electronics simpler than that,” he said, “but they’re hard to get right now.” As a general rule of thumb, Hudson said it used to take around four to five months to get space-grade parts that were 100% reliable and you “didn’t have to lose any sleep over it,” but “now those same suppliers are quoting more than double that.” Although Telesat is doubling the number of antennas for its polar satellites, he said a single satellite design will cut engineering costs, simplify production procedures and make coordinating in-orbit spares easier. He said ordering fewer satellites — while committing to others later — would also enable Telesat to close the last third of the constellation’s financing quicker. Goldberg said in the March 18 earnings call that he expects to have a “real good sense” about where Telesat stands in discussions with debt lenders for completing Lightspeed’s financing by the end of June. In 2019, Telesat announced separate contracts with Blue Origin and Relativity Space for an unspecified number of New Glenn and Terran 1 launches for Lightspeed. These companies plan to make their debut launches sometime this year. Telesat has also made regulatory filings to increase its constellation to 1,671 satellites for potentially adding growth capacity if needed.
COLORADO SPRINGS – Lockheed Martin on April 4 released the technical specifications of a docking adapter that could be used by manufacturers to make satellites interoperable and easier to update on orbit with new technology. The technical data for the Mission Augmentation Port (MAP) can be used by designers to develop their own docking adapters, said Lockheed Martin. The company used the MAP standard to design its own docking device, called Augmentation System Port Interface (ASPIN). “With this technology, we’re able to upgrade operational spacecraft at the speed of technology,” said Paul Pelley, senior director of advanced programs at Lockheed Martin Space. “Just like USB was designed to standardize computer connections, these documents are designed to standardize how spacecraft connect to each other on orbit,” he said. On-orbit satellite servicing usually is associated with refueling. That is just one aspect of life extension, Pelley said. There is also a need to keep satellites technologically up to date, especially large geosynchronous spacecraft that stay in service for decades. A standard docking port interface could facilitate the insertion of new processors, data storage devices or sensors, and some satellite components could be replaced with new hardware. “What Lockheed Martin is envisioning goes beyond ‘filling up the tank’ to extend mission life,” he said. Eric Brown, senior director of military space mission strategy at Lockheed Martin, said the company has tested the ASPIN adapter in simulations and plans to fly it to space to get it qualified. “We have multiple partners, both commercial and government, that are interested in taking that next step,” Brown told SpaceNews . He said Lockheed Martin decided to develop the docking interface standard and release it to fill a need in the industry. Many satellites that are in operation today have 20 or 30-year old technology and there is no means to update them in orbit, he said. One answer to that problem is to go to cheaper, smaller satellites that are more disposable and launched more frequently. But that solution doesn’t work for everybody, Brown said. Some missions require large satellites that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, “and we still have to solve that technology refresh, these satellites are not disposable,” he said. The vision that led to the MAP standard is that it could help create an aftermarket space industry that doesn’t exist today because satellites are not serviceable like airplanes, he said, In aerospace and defense, the aftermarket had created huge opportunities for a whole ecosystem of companies. “Space has suffered from not really having an actionable aftermarket. And so by introducing the idea of satellite augmentation and enhancements we can also bring in the maintenance, repair and overhaul type of ecosystem that the air domain has enjoyed for years and years, and has introduced a lot of companies into aerospace and defense.” A space aftermarket “could be beneficial for Lockheed Martin but also beneficial for a variety of new companies that maybe aren’t in a position to build the next generation of GPS but may be able to go and fly sensors that can augment a GPS vehicle.”
Canada’s Telesat said April 4 it has gained the security clearances it needs to sell directly to U.S. government customers. The approval for the satellite operator’s U.S.-based Telesat Government Solutions subsidiary is an important milestone for the company’s low Earth orbit (LEO) ambitions, according to the business unit’s new president Tom Eaton. “The direct interaction with the U.S. government customers is key for us in making sure that, as we roll out the network, that it’s designed with the important features that the U.S government customers are going to want,” said Eaton, who used to run Telesat’s non-Canadian international sales efforts. While providing capacity at a wholesale level to customers who would then distribute it to the U.S. government “worked fine for us in a [geostationary orbit] space,” he said its Lightspeed LEO network requires closer cooperation to fine-tune services. Telesat Government Solutions started the process for Facility Clearance from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency in August 2020. “I think our timing is perfect because there’s large [Request for Proposals (RFPs)] that are being issued for things like proliferated LEO, where the U.S government will select not just one but multiple commercial LEO systems to support their communication needs,” Eaton added. Although Lightspeed has run into production delays that have pushed out the launch of its services into 2026, Eaton said Telesat also sees growing demand for helping the U.S. government understand and take advantage of emerging LEO capabilities with other systems. He pointed to the study contract Telesat has with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Blackjack program, which involves two spacecraft slated to launch in October to LEO at roughly the same altitude as its planned Lightspeed network.
COLORADO SPRINGS – It’s hard to imagine how the world’s economies and military forces would operate without unfettered access to services provided by satellites in space. But as space becomes increasingly important to terrestrial activities, the tools and weapons available to disrupt and damage satellites are proliferating around the world, according to two reports released April 4. “The existence of counterspace capabilities is not new, but the circumstances surrounding them are,” says the 2022 edition of the Secure World Foundation’s “Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment.” “Today there are increased incentives for development, and potential use, of offensive counterspace capabilities. There are also greater potential consequences from their widespread use that could have global repercussions well beyond the military, as huge parts of the global economy and society are increasingly reliant on space applications,” the report says. Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation and one of the editors of the report, said the broad theme this year is “proliferation.” Previously only a handful of nations had space weapons. “We just keep adding more countries every year,” he said. Based on open-source information, this year’s report details the counterspace capabilities of the United States, Russia, China, India, Australia, France, Iran, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the United Kingdom. A separate report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Space Threat Assessment 2022 , also uses open-source information to track the developments of counterspace weapons that threaten U.S. national security interests in space. It wasn’t long ago that there was a duopoly in space: the United States and Russia, Susan Gordon, former principal deputy director of national intelligence, wrote in the introduction to the CSIS report. This is a new era where space has become the “domain in which every interest of an adversary or competitor is affected,” Gordon noted. China was once an afterthought in the space race, she added. This past year China launched the most satellites of any nation, “demonstrated its intention to project hard and soft power through the growth in on-orbit military support capabilities, and grabbed our attention and imagination with its counterspace demonstrations ranging from hypersonic missile launches to co-orbital rendezvous with other satellites.” Russia, the earliest innovator in space, “re-grabbed our attention with its direct-ascent anti-satellite test that created a threatening debris field as well as apparent GPS jamming in Ukraine that showed how counterspace is being integrated into combined operations,” Gordon said. “The proliferation of international and commercial vehicles on orbit, while presaging a new era of space use for every aspect of governmental, business, and societal advance, will demand attention on the responsible use of space as a shared environment.” Weeden said that of all the weapons that could be used to take down satellites, the most concerning today are cyberattacks because they are relatively easy to pull off, as seen in the February 24 attack against Viasat’s KA-SAT network that interrupted satellite broadband service in Ukraine just as Russian forces began invading the country. “The Viasat attack is a very interesting event,” Weeden told reporters. “It shows that attacks often are not against the satellites but the ground system, in this case the modems used to send and receive data.” Todd Harrison, CSIS senior fellow and co-author of the threat assessment report, noted that such cyberattacks “are not physically destructive, nobody’s life is at risk so they are viewed as the type of attack anybody can do with impunity.”
COLORADO SPRINGS – An experiment scheduled to launch this fall on Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket will try to show a faster and cheaper way to test technologies on orbit. Called Slingshot 1, the small satellite built by Aerospace Corp. on a bus from Blue Canyon Technologies, is about the size of a toaster and will carry 19 different payloads to low Earth orbit. A key technology Aerospace wants to demonstrate is an interface box where up to 20 payloads can plug into. Program manager Hannah Weiher said this interface could significantly simplify the process of integrating payloads and would allow space companies and government agencies to put together technology demonstrations relatively quickly. “What we’re looking at is to basically streamline satellite development in less time for less cost through modularity,” she told SpaceNews. The payload interface in Slingshot 1 was designed to be a “simple plug and play interface for payloads to communicate with the bus and other payloads regardless of the bus design, said Weiher. If the experiment performs well in orbit, the interface could be mass produced for use by industry and government, she said. The space industry for years has pushed for standards but satellites continue to be built using customized interfaces, Weiher said, and it can be difficult to accommodate a large number of payloads each with unique requirements. “There hasn’t been a standard interface that has gained widespread adoption” so the Slingshot experiment is an attempt to prove the value of having a single interface, Weiher said. If more companies embraced a standard interface, payloads could be developed so they can fly on just about any satellite. Most of the 19 payloads on Slingshot 1 were funded by Aerospace and a few are from customers, said Weiher. The payloads include artificial intelligence and machine learning demonstrations, a GPS transponder for space traffic management, IoT, laser communications, onboard malware detection, onboard ethernet, a camera module and a hydrogen peroxide thruster. The payload interface, named Handle, has been in development for two years and now needs to be proven on orbit, she said. “Our research has shown that the electrical interfaces in Handle’s design are compatible with many currently available small satellites on the market today,” Weiher said. “Handle regulates the host satellite’s power and distributes it to payloads, and it creates a local Ethernet network with a bridge to the host satellite’s communication protocol.” “It would be quite dramatic how much satellite production would change when you have a standard interface,” Weiher said. Slingshot 1 is manifested on Virgin Orbit’s STP-S28 mission, a Defense Department Space Test Program mission awarded to Virgin Orbit in 2020. STP-S28, currently projected to launch in September, also will fly a number of U.S. Space Force technology demonstrations.
Updated 6:30 p.m. with comments from briefing. DENVER — NASA called off the first attempt to fuel its Space Launch System rocket and go through a practice countdown April 3, citing a problem with the rocket’s mobile launcher, but hopes to try again April 4. NASA announced shortly before 12 p.m. Eastern that it was scrubbing its wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the SLS before crews started loading any liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant into the vehicle. The agency said fans in the mobile launch platform, required to create positive pressure in enclosed areas of the platform to avoid a buildup of hazardous gases, were not working. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director, said in a call with reporters late in the day that one fan malfunctioned when a breaker tripped. Technicians were sent in to look at it but could not resolve it, so controllers switched to a redundant fan. “It wasn’t long after that we got the call that that fan, too, had experienced an issue,” she said, adding it was a different problem. “We made the decision to stand down to get into a configuration to go troubleshoot that.” She said it should take four to five hours to resolve the problems. That would allow a second attempt at loading propellants onto the vehicle early April 4, following a schedule similar to what had been planned for April 3. The malfunctioning fans “is the only real issue” teams are examining, she added. Even before the fan problem NASA was running behind schedule with the test, where the core and upper stages of the SLS are filled with propellants and go through a countdown that stops at approximately T-10 seconds. Severe thunderstorms April 2 delayed WDR activities at Launch Complex 39B, including several lightning strikes on protective towers at the pad. There were four lightning strikes, including one particularly powerful one that hit a catenary between two lightning protection towers, said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager, on the call. All four were cleared before the the decision early April 3 to proceed with the WDR. Blackwell-Thompson said the fan problems don’t appear to be linked to the lightning strikes. The fans had been running continuously at a lower speed since the launch platform arrived at the pad, and moved into a different mode for hazardous operations for several hours before the problem. If NASA doesn’t complete the WDR on April 4, future plans will depend on how far into the test they get. Sarafin said if they get past a “certain point” in loading propellants, NASA would have to stand down for a couple days to replenish stocks of liquid hydrogen. If the test is scrubbed before that point, NASA may seek to try again April 5, but after that they run into “a number of range conflicts” like the launch of a Falcon 9 on the Ax-1 crewed mission to the International Space Station from neighboring Launch Complex 39A. “We’ve got Monday [April 4] in the bag for sure as as attempt. Tuesday is a definite possibility but requires some additional coordination,” he said. “After that, we’ll have to play it day by day.” NASA started WDR activities April 3 about one hour behind schedule, according to tweets posted by Jeremy Parsons , deputy manager of the Exploration Ground Systems program at KSC. Tweets and blog posts were the primary means NASA used to provide updates about the test after claiming that export control restrictions prevented it from providing audio from the launch control center or any other commentary . The WDR is the final major test before the inaugural launch of the SLS on the uncrewed Artemis-1 mission. NASA officials said at a March 29 briefing that, if the test goes well, the agency could be ready in about a week to set a launch date for the mission, likely no earlier than June. The WDR, while intended to simulate a countdown, offers greater flexibility to correct problems than what crews would have during an actual countdown. “We are fortunate to have this flexibility during today’s test, but would operate differently on launch day,” Parsons tweeted shortly before the test was scrubbed for the day.
After Western nations refused his demand to end sanctions on Russian companies involved in the International Space Station, the head of Roscosmos said he will make recommendations in the “near future” on Russia’s continued participation in the station, but there are no signs of any near-term changes in station operations. Dmitry Rogozin had set a March 31 deadline for the United States and other Western nations to lift sanctions on two Russian companies, TsNIMash and Rocket and Space Centre Progress, that support ISS operations. Rogozin warned in March he would make a decision of some kind if sanctions were not lifted, but declined to elaborate on the decision. In a lengthy Twitter thread April 2 , Rogozin posted letters he received from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Canadian Space Agency President Lisa Campbell and European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher. As expected, none announced that the sanctions were being lifted. Nelson, in his letter, stated that “U.S. export control measures continue to allow cooperation between the U.S. and Russia to ensured continued safe operations of the ISS.” NASA stated in February, when the White House imposed its first set of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, that ISS was excluded from the sanctions. Campbell said her agency has no “direct cooperation” with the sanctioned Russian companies but would work with the Canadian government to ensure safe ISS operations. Aschbacher responded that sanctions are the responsibility of ESA’s 22 member states. “I consider this state of affairs unacceptable,” Rogozin said in a translation of his Russian-language tweets. “I believe that the restoration of normal relations between partners in the International Space Station and other joint projects is possible only with the complete and unconditional lifting of illegal sanctions.” However, he took no step to end current cooperation on the ISS, despite some media reports to the contrary. Instead, he said that Roscosmos would make proposals on “the timing of the completion of cooperation” on the ISS to Russian leadership “in the near future.” NASA officials have emphasized since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that there had been no changes in the day-to-day operations of the ISS. That included the March 30 landing of a Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei along with two Russian cosmonauts. The recovery operations in Kazakhstan looked no different from for previous Soyuz landings, and Vande Hei was back in Houston about 24 hours after landing via a NASA jet. “I was really excited to see Mark Vande Hei land,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in a March 30 interview hours after his landing. “That just goes to show this is a very professional relationship on both sides, and we are continuing the business of the space station.” Those routine operations include discussions with Roscosmos and other partners to extend ISS operations from 2024 to 2030. Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said a multilateral control board meeting of the ISS partners was scheduled for June to discuss efforts by the partners to extend the ISS to 2030. “All our international partners, including Roscosmos, are making progress on moving towards station extension through 2030,” she said at a March 31 briefing about the Crew-4 mission to the station, scheduled to launch April 20. “We are certainly not immune to the geopolitical situation right now. These are very challenging times,” said NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, commander of Crew-4, at a briefing later that day. He said he and his crew were focused on space station operations and research. “We very much look forward to getting on orbit and working with our Russian colleagues, our friends up there, and having a safe and successful mission and getting everybody back home safely.”
Updated April 4 with revised launch date. WASHINGTON — The first private mission to the International Space Station by an American vehicle is scheduled to launch this week to serve as a first step in one company’s plans to establish a commercial space station. Axiom Space is now targeting April 8 for the launch of its Ax-1 mission on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center. The company said late April 3 it had delayed the launch from April 6 but did not give a reason, although it came after NASA scrubbed a Space Launch System countdown test and rescheduled it for April 4. That Crew Dragon spacecraft, Endeavour, will spend 10 days in space, including eight docked to the ISS. There are additional launch opportunities daily through at least April 9. Endeavour will be commanded by Michael López-Alegría, an Axiom employee and former NASA astronaut who spent six months on the ISS in 2006–2007. The other three are Axiom customers: Larry Connor, Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe. Preparations for the mission, delayed from late February first by spacecraft readiness and then to avoid conflicts with the Space Launch System’s wet dress rehearsal at KSC, are going well, the Ax-1 crew and company officials said at an April 1 briefing. “I can say with zero hesitation that we are ready to fly,” said López-Alegría. At both this briefing and during previous events, the company and its customers have gone to great lengths to emphasize that they do not consider themselves tourists. All four plan to carry out a range of experiments and investigations for organizations in Canada, Israel and the United States. “I think it’s important to address the difference between space tourists and private astronauts,” said Connor, who will also be the pilot of the spacecraft. Space tourists, he argued, will get 10 to 15 hours of training for 5 to 10 minutes in space, an apparent reference to suborbital vehicles operated by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. He considered the Ax-1 crew private astronauts. “In our case, depending on our role, we’ve spent anywhere from 750 to over 1,000 hours training,” he said. “Additionally, across all of the astronauts here, we’re going to do some 25 different experiments encompassing 100 hours of research on the eight days we’re on the ISS.” The Ax-1 crew will primarily live and work in what’s known as the U.S. Operational Segment of the station, which includes NASA, European and Japanese modules. Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space and a former NASA ISS program manager, said crew will be able to visit the Russian segment “by invitation” from Roscosmos cosmonauts. The mission is a major milestone for Axiom Space, which is preparing to fly a series of missions like Ax-1 to the ISS before installing a commercial module there as soon as 2024. That module, and others added to it, will allow the company to have a larger, potentially permanent, presence on the ISS, and serve as the core for a stand-alone commercial space station when the ISS is retired. “What’s unique about this mission is that it’s complete funded commercially,” Suffredini said. Axiom will compensate NASA for use of ISS resources but will also be paid by NASA for providing services, such as returning equipment and experiments on the Crew Dragon. Axiom, though, has provided few financial details about the mission, such as the price paid by its three customers, rumored to be approximately $55 million each. Suffredini declined to say if the Ax-1 mission was profitable for Axiom Space. “We’re a commercial entity. Our objective is to make money over the life of the company, or we’re not much of a company,” he said. “Suffice it to say, this is in line with what our original vision for the mission was.” “Ultimately, these will grow to a point where, when we’re flying to our own space station, we’ll have quite a bit more access,” he continued. “We’ll evolve these flights to do more and more commercial research work, leading on to manufacturing in space.” Axiom will follow Ax-1 with Ax-2, slated for launch in early 2023 and commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. Axiom has named one customer, John Shoffner, who will be the pilot of the vehicle, but has not identified who else will go on the mission. The company has an agreement with SpaceX for two additional Crew Dragon missions to the ISS. By Ax-4, Suffredini said, Axiom expects to fly four customers on the mission without a professional astronaut as commander. All four Ax-1 crew members said they were looking forward to carrying out research on the station. “I hope to be successful in highlighting the value and importance and sheer amount of Canadian research that is available,” said Pathy, a Canadian entrepreneur. “I’m happy to provide that opportunity.” It will not be all work, though. Stibbe noted the delay in the launch means that they will be on the ISS for Passover. He said he was looking forward to celebrating the holiday on the station, but with some changes in tradition, such as drinking wine. “I took a wine glass with me, but I don’t think I will find any wine in the station, and I don’t think I need a glass to drink wine.”
More than 10,000 people are expected to attend the 37 th Space Symposium in person at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs and online through a virtual platform. Roughly seven months after the 36 th Space Symposium, which was rescheduled repeatedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Space Foundation is preparing to welcome 275 exhibitors and representatives of 40 nations to the annual event that showcases military, civil and commercial space activities. “We had a smaller international presence this past August principally because of travel restrictions,” Space Foundation spokesman Rich Cooper told SpaceNews . “Since a lot of those restrictions have been lifted, a very healthy international presence is going to be on hand.” Still, online access to presentations and discussions is essential because “not everyone can travel right now,” Cooper said. “We want to make sure that whoever wants to participate in symposium can,” Cooper said. “The in-person option is great for people to be able to network, but we know that not everybody has the budget or the flexibility to travel.” Masks will not be required for attendees. “People who want to wear masks should feel comfortable wearing them and those that don’t want to wear masks should feel comfortable,” Cooper said. For the past two years, Space Foundation executives have closely tracked the rise and fall of COVID cases, plus local, state, national and international rules related to health, safety, travel and large gatherings. “Each Symposium reflects the environment that we were in,” Cooper said. “This past August was certainly in the midst of COVID. Now we’re still going through COVID, but things have certainly changed.” In addition to the traditional programming at the Broadmoor, the 2022 Space Symposium will include presentations focused on artificial intelligence, investment and space exploration at the nearby Cheyenne Mountain Resort. “We want to make sure that every attendee, whomever they may be, wherever they’re coming from, gets to have the best of Symposium experiences, where they can connect, meet, do business, partner, but most of all absorb what is happening in the global space community,” Cooper said. Approximately 15,000 people attended the 2019 pre-pandemic Space Symposium. The August event drew roughly 7,500 people in person and online.
A Rocket Lab Electron launched another pair of imaging satellites for BlackSky April 2 as the company gears up to attempt recovery of the rocket’s first stage. The Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 8:41 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage deployed a kick stage carrying two BlackSky satellites into orbit nearly 10 minutes later. The kick stage, after a burn of its Curie engine, released the satellites into a 430-kilometer orbit nearly an hour after liftoff. The launch was the latest in a series of Electron launches of BlackSky satellites arranged by Spaceflight. That deal included launches of pairs of BlackSky satellites in November and December 2021 as well as a failed Electron launch in May 2021. Rocket Lab said March 24 that the launch, the second Electron flight of the year, was previously scheduled for March but postponed by weather. Because of the delay of the launch, revenue from the launch would be recognized in its fiscal second quarter rather than its first. The company updated its revenue projection for the first quarter from $42–47 million to approximately $40 million. BlackSky said in December it would launch two to four satellites this year , joining the 12 it had in orbit at the time. The company is shifting its development focus to a new Gen 3 series of satellites with improved resolution, with the first of those satellites scheduled to launch in 2023. Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter , the final step before reusing those boosters. The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon. “The first one that we’ll catch in the air is coming up very soon,” said Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22. “Then we’re going to examine that and do any refurb that is necessary, and try to relaunch that as soon as it’s ready, hopefully this year.” He added that the company has a “full manifest” of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. “We’re keeping pace with the market. We’re trying not to get too far ahead.”
SpaceX launched the fourth in its series of dedicated rideshare missions April 1, placing one relatively large satellite and dozens of smallsats into low Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:24 p.m. Eastern. SpaceX beat predictions of poor weather, with just a 30% chance of acceptable weather projected the day before liftoff. However, conditions improved in the hours leading up to liftoff to allow the launch to proceed. The rocket’s booster landed on a droneship in the Caribbean near the Bahamas, because of the southerly trajectory taken the booster, at almost the exact time the upper stage reached orbit. That booster was on its seventh flight, having previously launched two NASA commercial crew missions, one commercial cargo mission, NASA’s IXPE astronomy satellite, the SXM-8 radio satellite and one set of Starlink satellites. The upper stage initially entered a sun-synchronous orbit at 650 kilometers, deploying three satellites, then maneuvered to 500 kilometers using two additional burns of the upper stage engine before deploying the remaining payloads. The mission, called Transporter-4 by SpaceX, was the fourth in a series of dedicated rideshare missions designed to carry large number of smallsats at relatively low prices. Unlike the previous three, which in some cases carried more than 100 satellites, SpaceX said there were only 40 satellites on this mission. One reason for the smaller number was the size of one of the payloads, EnMAP. The satellite, whose name stands for Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program, weighed nearly 1,000 kilograms at launch. Built by OHB for the German space agency DLR, EnMAP carried a hyperspectral instrument for environmental studies. “With the launch of EnMAP, Germany is making an indispensable contribution to climate protection. Its innovative hyperspectral sensor technology will really let us see Earth with different eyes,” Anna Christmann, federal government coordinator for German aerospace policy, said in a DLR statement. “With EnMAP, Germany is making an important contribution to European space technology for the benefit of our planet.” It also marks the second time this year that a European government has turned to SpaceX, rather than Europe’s own Arianespace, to launch a satellite. A Falcon 9 launched Italy’s Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation 2 radar imaging satellite Jan. 31 . The Italian space agency ASI said it selected SpaceX to launch that satellite because of delays with the Vega C rocket. The remaining payloads on Transporter-4 were smallsats more like the ones flown on the first three Transporter missions. Swarm, for example, flew 12 of its tiny SpaceBEE satellites, each a quarter of a single-unit cubesat in size, weeks after flying a set on an Astra Rocket 3.3 launch. Satellogic flew five of its high-resolution imaging satellites on the mission. One of the five was a new “Mark 5” model with an improved multispectral camera featuring a resolution of 70 centimeters and 40% larger imaging swath. HawkEye 360 flew three satellites to measure radio-frequency signals, joining nine others previously launched. The company said the new Cluster 4 satellites include enhanced antennas to better detect and geolocate terrestrial radio-frequency signals. A French competitor, Unseenlabs, flew its BRO-7 satellite on the mission. The company said in a statement that it will launch another satellite, BRO-6, later this month on a Rocket Lab Electron, with a long-term goal of operating 20 satellites. “Expanding our satellite fleet is an important step to provide a better service for our clients from all around the world, and to give more power and value to our RF technology,” Clément Galic, chief executive of Unseenlabs, said in a statement. Pixxel, an Indian startup planning a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites, launched its first “fully-fledged” satellite, called TD-2 or Shakuntala. The six-unit cubesat is designed to produce visible and infrared hyperspectral imagery at a resolution of 10 meters. Pixxel, which announced a $25 million Series A round March 28 , expects to launch another satellite in the near future on an Indian PSLV. Other customers Transporter-4 include PlanetiQ, which launches it GNOMES-3 satellite to collect GNSS radio occultation data for weather forecasting, and Lynk, which launched its Tower 01 satellite for direct-to-handset mobile connectivity services. Transporter-4 was originally scheduled to carry a Sherpa tug from Spaceflight. However, SpaceX removed the Sherpa from the mission because of what it said were environmental factors affecting the spacecraft on the tug. SpaceX later notified companies that it would no longer work with Spaceflight on future rideshare missions .
NASA officials say they are still hopeful to complete a seat barter agreement with Russia in time to allow an exchange of seats on missions this fall despite the tensions between Russia and the West. At briefings March 31 about the upcoming Crew-4 Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for launch April 20, agency officials said they were still waiting for Roscosmos and Russia’s foreign ministry to approve an agreement that would allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew vehicles in exchange for NASA astronauts flying on Soyuz spacecraft to the station. NASA has along emphasized the importance of such arrangements that ensure there would be at least one Russian and one American on the station in the event either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles were not available for an extended period. The agreement allowing the exchange was, as of earlier this year, pending approval by the Russian government. The goal at the time was to have the agreement in place to allow a Russian cosmonaut, Anna Kikina , to go on the Crew-5 mission launching in September, while a NASA astronaut, rumored to be Frank Rubio, would go on the Soyuz MS-22 mission also launching in September. That goal remains in place, but agency leaders said time is running out. “At some point, if we don’t get the paperwork out of the Russian and over to our side,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, “we won’t have enough time to be able to support crew training and operations for Crew-5. But we still feel like that’s our long-term logistics strategy.” Neither Lueders nor Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager, gave a specific deadline for completing the agreement to preserve a seat exchange in the fall. Weigel said one critical timeline is building the suits, which are different for Soyuz and Crew Dragon. “I don’t have specific schedules,” she said. “Everyone continues to refine how far out you can push that.” Training is another factor, with some cosmonauts having recently been in the United States for training but none currently. “There’s a point in time where you hit a limit,” she said of those preparations. “We’re not there yet. We’re still both working jointly on that and we’re hopeful we can stay on those timelines.” If the agreement isn’t ready in time, there is a plan for a backup crew member to go on Crew-5 in place of Kikina, said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager. “I think we have a little more time before we have to pull the trigger on a backup crew member.” Those discussions continue while questions remain about Russia’s long-term commitment to the ISS, particularly after sanctions imposed by Western nations after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, suggested in March he would make some kind of decision about Russia’s future on the station if sanctions were not lifted by the end of the month. Those sanctions remain in place. NASA officials reiterated that ISS operations remain normal with no changes to operations, including efforts to secure an extension of the station from 2024 to 2030. Lueders said the ISS partners were planning meetings of a space station control board in late April or early May, and of the multilateral control board that governs the overall ISS partnership in June. “All of our international partners, including Roscosmos, are making progress moving towards station extension to 2030,” she said. “We all understand the importance of this continued partnership even in really, really tough times.”
Updated 4 p.m. Eastern with comments from post-flight press conference. WASHINGTON — Blue Origin launched its New Shepard suborbital vehicle on its first flight of the year March 31, carrying six people on a brief trip to space and back. The vehicle lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:59 a.m. Eastern. The capsule landed under parachutes about 10 minutes later after reaching a peak altitude of approximately 107 kilometers. The booster landed on a nearby pad three minute earlier. The launch was delayed nearly an hour by several countdown holds, including one that lasted more than 45 minutes. Blue Origin later said they needed the time to work out an issue with the radio system on the vehicle that downlinks telemetry. The flight was the fourth crewed mission of New Shepard and the second to carry six people. Five of the people are paying customers: Marty Allen, Sharon and Marc Hagle, Jim Kitchen and George Nield. The sixth is Gary Lai, chief architect of the New Shepard system at Blue Origin. The six called themselves the “Roaring Twenties,” a reference to the NS-20 mission designation. Allen, the Hagles and Kitchen all have business backgrounds, including founding, leading and investing in businesses from retail to real estate. Nield spent his career in the space industry, including a decade as associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses New Shepard and other commercial launch vehicles. “That whole things was just an out-of-body experience. I don’t know what else to say other than that,” said Kitchen at a press conference several hours after the flight. He and others said the views and the several minutes of weightlessness during the flight exceeded expectations. Nield said the experience of the flight illustrated the importance of safety. “I recognized the importance of having an outstanding safety culture, of all the people at the company who ensure we’re not going to go until things are looking good,” he said. “Also, the importance of the training that we received. I can’t say enough about how important that is and what an outstanding job the Blue Origin team did in terms of making us feel ready and prepared for this amazing experience.” That included sitting through that 45-minute hold while sealed in the capsule. “Our energy level and our excitement was so high and then the hold hit,” recalled Marc Hagle. “My energy level dropped off dramatically, and we had a terrific fear that the flight was maybe not going to happen. But then the engines ignited and the whole world changed.” The five were to be joined by Pete Davidson, the comedian best known for being on the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” He was announced with the other five March 14, when the mission was scheduled for launch March 23. But, three days after the announcement, Blue Origin said that Davidson would not be on the flight. Neither the company nor Davidson explained why he had dropped out of the mission. The company announced March 21 that Davidson would be replaced by Lai, who joined Blue Origin in 2004 as one of its first 20 employees and is now senior director and chief architect for the suborbital system. He has also worked on Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch vehicle, engine development programs and its Blue Moon lunar lander. “It was 10 times more intense than I thought it would be,” he said of the flight. “There is nothing that will compare to this experience for anyone that takes it.” He said he took the flight in part to identify any improvements to the experience. The company is already working on changes to the vehicle that he described as “under the hood” improvements to decrease the time needed to process the vehicle between flights and lower the cost of that work. The flight was the first for New Shepard since a Dec. 11 flight, the first to carry six people. Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said at an FAA commercial space transportation conference Feb. 18 that the company planned to increase its launch rate this year and “easily double” the number of people that fly to space but didn’t state how many launches the company plans for the year. The company flew 14 people on three crewed flights in 2021. During the company’s webcast of the NS-20 flight, one of the hosts said that Blue Origin “expects to at least triple” the number of people flown to space. That would mean at least 42 people, or seven flights of six people each.
TAMPA, Fla. — The Philippines is set to become the first country in Southeast Asia to access SpaceX’s Starlink broadband services, its government announced March 31. Philippine Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez has committed to assist SpaceX’s expansion into the archipelago as it seeks to register services there, the country’s Department of Trade and Treasury said in a news release . “Their system will augment as well as complement existing broadband capacities,” Lopez said in a statement. “This will further capacitate micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), facilitate online learning, e-commerce and fintech.” The news release said Starlink aims to deploy three gateways in an initial phase and target areas where connectivity has been difficult or impossible. SpaceX is also in the process of setting up a wholly owned Philippine subsidiary. On March 21, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte signed legislation that allows up to 100% foreign ownership of public services in the Philippines. The amended Public Service Act encourages investments in telecoms, transport and other sectors deemed essential to public welfare. “I believe that through this law, the easing out of foreign equity restrictions will attract more global investors, modernize several sectors of public service and improve the delivery of essential services,” Philippine President Duterte said in a statement posted by the government’s presidential communications operations office. SpaceX did not return an email requesting comment. The Department of Trade and Treasury news release said SpaceX and the Philippine government “intently discussed the project’s entry timeline” during a U.S. investment mission in November, followed by a series of meetings as the amended Public Service Act legislation was finalized. “At present, their application is being processed and the locations of their gateways are being visited,” the Department of Trade and Treasury added. SpaceX has amassed a quarter of a million subscribers for its broadband service as it works to expand global coverage , Starlink commercial sales vice president Jonathan Hofeller said March 22, and has seen a sharp increase in demand amid the pandemic. The company has launched 2,335 Starlink satellites to date, according to statistics maintained by Jonathan McDowell , with 2,110 still in orbit.
Slingshot Aerospace announced March 31 it won a $25.2 million Space Force contract to develop a virtual replica of the space environment, a technology known as a digital twin. The 39-month contract includes $16.8 million from the Space Force’s Space Systems Command and $8.4 million from SpaceWERX, a new organization created to tap the commercial market for innovative technologies. “Slingshot Aerospace is also bringing several million dollars of its own funds to the table,” said Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot Aerospace. The contract funds the development of a digital space twin — a high-fidelity, physics-driven simulation that “reflects the current state of space at any given moment, enabling users to simulate various scenarios and identify the best approach to accomplishing missions,” Stricklan said. The contract also funds the deployment of Slingshot Laboratory, a space training product for use in classrooms . With the digital space twin, “guardians can simulate scenarios that are otherwise challenging to visualize,” she said. For example, they can map out a course of action when an unknown object approaches a satellite of interest. The virtual environment would allow the Space Force, for example, to design spacecraft and plan satellite deployments. Slingshot has been developing the digital space twin for more than two years, “which attracted the government’s attention,” Stricklan said. As it develops the digital twin for the Space Force, Slingshot also will release a commercial Digital Space Twin product. The deal won by Slingshot is a Strategic Financing ( STRATFI ) contract. The U.S. Air Force created the program as an alternative to traditional contracts, allowing multiple government customers and private investors to finance a project. “The intent of the SpaceWERX STRATFI program is to scale technology development over the ‘valley of death’ by capitalizing on the most promising emerging commercial solutions,” said Lt. Col. Walter “Rock” McMillan, director of SpaceWERX. “Each year, the STRATFI program places its ‘big bets’ on the most innovative technologies that meet critical mission gaps. Slingshot’s space education and simulation products have garnered support from across the Space Force operational and acquisition community as we see tremendous value in the technology,” said McMillan. 
China deorbited the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft Thursday after testing on-orbit docking, refueling and module transposition for the Chinese space station. Tianzhou-2 reentered the atmosphere over the South Pacific at 6:40 a.m. Eastern March 31, China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, announced minutes after the event. The area of the ocean is frequently used as a “spacecraft cemetery.” The spacecraft separated from the forward docking port of Tianhe, the core module of China’s space station, at 3:59 a.m. Eastern March 27. Tianzhou-2 makes way for the arrival of the Tianzhou-4 cargo spacecraft which will provide fresh supplies and fuel ahead of the arrival of the Shenzhou-14 crew, with the latter expected to launch around mid-to-late May. The 10-month-long mission verified a number of technologies and procedures needed to proceed with future construction of the Chinese space station. Tianzhou-2 launched May 29, 2021, on a Long March 7 rocket from Wenchang. It completed automated rendezvous and docking maneuvers with Tianhe just over eight hours later. The 13.5-ton spacecraft was the first to join the Tianhe module in orbit, verifying on-orbit docking and refueling required for further missions to begin. It delivered 4.69 tons of cargo in a pressurized segment, including three months’ worth of food for three Shenzhou-12 crew members and two EVA suits. It also carried 1.95 tons of propellant to the 22.5-ton Tianhe module, which had launched in late April. The spacecraft performed four rendezvous and docking maneuvers, including a manual remote operation rendezvous and docking, to test out procedures. Tianzhou-2 was also involved in a transposition test ahead of the arrival of two future modules, Wentian and Mengtian, due to launch later in the year. On Jan. 5 Tianhe’s 10-meter-long robotic arm grasped Tianzhou-2, moving it roughly 20 degrees before returning it to the forward port on the Tianhe docking hub. Both new modules will dock with the forward port before being transposed to respective lateral docking ports, creating the finished “T-shaped” orbital outpost. China plans six missions in 2022 to complete its space station, including two cargo and two crewed missions along with the two module launches. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) held a ceremony March 29 for launch teams that will be involved in the required Long March 2F, Long March 5B and Long March 7 rocket launches. The spacecraft for the ongoing Shenzhou-13 crewed mission is currently docked at the nadir port at Tianhe and is expected to depart in mid-April. Tianzhou-4 will launch for Tianhe following this, ahead of a new crew aboard Shenzhou-14. The 20-ton-plus Wentian and Mengtian modules will launch during the six-month-long Shenzhou-14 mission. Tianzhou-5 will launch ahead of Shenzhou-15, both scheduled for late in the year, with the latter expected to see the first Chinese crew handover aboard the completed space station. Tianzhou-5 will also carry five small satellite payloads among a range of experiments, CMSA announced March 30. The module launches will be followed closely, partly due to the significance of the missions, but also because of the use of the Long March 5B, the two previous launches of which saw the large first stages make high-profile uncontrolled reentries . The Tiangong space station is planned to operate in orbit for at least 10 years. It will host a range of international experiments through collaboration with the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs, and potentially foreign astronauts and further modules in the coming years.
Satellite operator SES announced March 31 it is working with Canadian startup NorthStar Earth & Space on developing space situational awareness (SSA) data products to support its fleet of communications satellites. The companies announced a partnership that will use data collected by NorthStar’s future fleet of spacecraft that will track objects from low Earth orbit to geostationary orbit. The companies will work together to develop SSA products “tailored to benefit SES’s satellite operations and fleet management,” they said in a statement. SES operates more than 70 satellites, primarily large GEO communications satellites. It also operates the O3b fleet of satellites in medium Earth orbit, which will be augmented by up to 11 mPOWER satellites that will be launched starting later this year. NorthStar has yet to launch any satellites that will collect SSA data. The startup originally had a contract with Thales Alenia Space for a series of satellites called Skylarks, but announced March 16 that it had an agreement with Spire to launch three 12-unit cubesats in 2023 with SSA sensors . Those satellites will be operated for NorthStar by Spire as part of its “space-as-a-service” business model. Both companies said the partnership was an important element of their commitments to space sustainability. NorthStar is one of the signatories of the Net Zero Space Declaration by the Paris Peace Forum, where companies commit to take concrete actions to reduce orbital debris. SES has added space sustainability to its broader environment, social and governance (ESG) goals alongside climate, diversity and using space communications “to meet critical human needs.” “Space sustainability is of fundamental importance to SES and to the industry,” Steve Collar, chief executive of SES, said in the statement. “The industry needs to come together quickly to protect space for future generations before it’s too late and our partnership with NorthStar is a strong step in that direction.” “NorthStar’s high-performance SSA services combined with SES’s leading role in the industry brings a necessary focus towards the increasingly unmanageable risks we are all witnessing in space,” said Stewart Bain, chief executive of NorthStar. He added the deal further cements the place of Montreal-based NorthStar in Luxembourg. The company opened a European headquarters in the country in December after the Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) joined a $45 million funding round. SES is headquartered in Luxembourg and Spire, building NorthStar’s initial satellites, also has European offices in the country. “This is a major step in NorthStar’s integration and growth within the fast-moving Luxembourg space ecosystem,” he said. “Recent investment from the LFF and support from the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy also contribute to accelerate NorthStar services in support of this important collaboration.”
Northrop Grumman says it’s still considering whether to rejoin a Blue Origin-led team for a second Artemis lunar lander competition or to go on its own. In a media briefing March 30 about the company’s overall contributions to the Artemis program, executives said they were “encouraged and excited” about NASA’s plans to procure a second lander through the new Sustaining Lunar Development effort announced March 23. That lander will join the one being developed by SpaceX and based on its Starship vehicle through Option A of the Human Landing System (HLS) program. Northrop Grumman competed for the original HLS award as part of a “National Team” led by Blue Origin that also included Lockheed Martin and Draper. Northrop’s role in that effort was to provide a transfer element that would transport the lunar module from the Gateway to low lunar orbit. Rick Mastracchio, director of business development for human exploration and operations at Northrop Grumman, said the company was interested in the new competition but had not decided its strategy for it. “As a result of this recently announced NASA plan, the company is now finalizing our plans for how we’re going to participate,” he said. That could include, he said later, rejoining the Blue Origin-led effort or by leading its own proposal. “We’ve done our own studies on the Human Landing System and we’ve worked with the National Team and Blue Origin,” he said. “Right now we’re in the decision-making process on that, and hopefully that will be a decision that comes out in the next few weeks.” He noted that Northrop Grumman has worked on its own lunar lander concepts for some time, supported by a series of NASA awards. The company won $34.8 million in September 2021 to support work on “sustainable” lunar lander concepts through a NASA effort formally known as Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Appendix N . “Through all of these efforts, Northrop Grumman has made significant progress in technology maturation and mission risk reduction related to these landers,” Mastracchio said, citing the Appendix N and earlier awards. At the time of that award last September, Northrop appeared to leave the door open to competing on its own in the future. Steve Krein, vice president of civil and commercial space at Northrop, said in a statement that, in addition to its role on the National Team, “we are also providing our unique skills and capabilities to exploring alternative perspectives for a long-term sustainable program to take humans back to the moon to stay.” Lockheed Martin, which won a $35.2 million Appendix N award at the same time, offered a similar perspective. “As a long-standing and trusted NASA partner, we also believe it is important to provide additional approaches to help shape the strategy for both a sustainable human presence on the moon and also future human missions to Mars,” Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of commercial civil space at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement at the time of the Appendix N award. NASA has not provided additional details about the Sustaining Lunar Development, also known as NextSTEP Appendix P , since the March 23 announcement. At the time, the agency said it would release a draft request for proposals by the end of March and hold industry days in early April. The final request for proposals would follow later in the spring. NASA requested nearly $1.5 billion for the overall HLS program in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal March 28 . However, agency officials declined to state how that funding would be allocated between the new lander effort and the existing Option A HLS award to SpaceX. Cygnus flexibility Northrop executives also used the briefing to address the uncertainty about the future of its Antares launch vehicle, which it uses to launch Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. That rocket uses a first stage produced in Ukraine and powered by a Russian RD-181 engine, both of which could no longer be available because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions. Sarah Schellpfeffer, space systems sector vice president and chief technology officer at Northrop, confirmed at the briefing that the company has all the Antares hardware needed for the next two missions, NG-18 and NG-19, which would take the company into 2023. “Since Cygnus is designed to be compatible with a range of launch vehicles, we continue to review options to provide the best service, performance and price for future missions,” she said. She didn’t elaborate on those options, including the possibility of replacing the RD-181 with an alternative engine. After an Antares launch failure in 2014, which led then-Orbital Sciences to replace the AJ26 engines originally used on the rocket with the newer RD-181, the company launched two Cygnus missions on United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets. However, all the remaining Atlas 5 rockets have been sold to other customers, and its replacement, the Vulcan Centaur, has yet to make its first flight. Despite the launch uncertainty, NASA awarded Northrop Grumman March 25 six additional Cygnus cargo missions to the ISS under its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract awarded in 2016. NASA has now ordered 14 Cygnus missions through its CRS-2 contract. NASA, which also awarded SpaceX six additional Dragon cargo missions under its CRS-2 contract at the same time, declined to state the value of the new awards. NASA spokesperson Sandra Jones said March 25 that the agency could not do so since they were orders under indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts. “Typically, orders made as a result of IDIQ competitions are not publicized,” she said. “Additionally, much of the pricing information is contractor confidential data.” Neither Northrop Grumman nor SpaceX responded to requests for comment about the value of their new CRS-2 missions.
LOS ANGELES – Radian Aerospace, a startup developing a reusable spaceplane, announced March 30 that Jeff Matthews, a founding member of Deloitte Consulting’s space sector practice, would become the company’s director of strategy. Matthew met Radian’s founders in 2016 when he produced the initial market study for the Renton, Washington, company. “Having known the Radian founders and helping them with due diligence, Radian has always been a favorite of mine,” Matthews told SpaceNews. Radian raised $27.5 million in a seed funding round announced in January for development of a fully reusable, single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane that takes off and lands horizontally. “The cost of transporting humans to orbit is at an inflection point that will create large-scale change in the market,” Matthews said. At the same time, Radian’s cargo capability will be one of the keys to development of a vibrant low Earth orbit economy, he added. To date, spaceplanes have tended to launch vertically and have not shown the level of rapid reusability that Radian seeks. “It will take a lot to get there, but we’re up for the challenge,” Matthews said. As Radian’s strategy director, Matthews will be in charge of assessing the market and Radian’s competition. Matthews also will be tasked with building relationships with U.S. government customers and establishing strategic industry partnerships. “Jeff is an incredibly well-respected and accomplished leader in the space sector and his work around the commercialization of LEO directly shaped the industry,” Richard Humphrey, Radian CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “The expertise and knowledge he brings to the table is unparalleled and we are confident Jeff will add significant value to the work we are doing to transform the industry and succeed in our mission.” Matthews led Deloitte’s work on the 2018 NASA study on commercializing low Earth orbit and on the Vandenberg Space Force Base Commercial Master Plan. He also contributed to an independent analysis of commercial high-speed transportation for NASA and to Deloitte’s updated report on commercialization of low Earth orbit. Prior to Deloitte, Matthews served as the director of venture strategy and research for the Space Frontier Foundation. He was also on the Space Frontier Foundation board of directors.
A Soyuz spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan March 30, an ordinary end of a mission in extraordinary times. The Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft landed in the designated landing zone in Kazakhstan at 7:28 a.m. Eastern, four hours after undocking from the International Space Station. The landing appeared to go as planned, with the Soyuz commander, Anton Shkaplerov, saying “we’re feeling great” as the Soyuz descended. The Soyuz returned Shkaplerov, who flew to the station on that Soyuz spacecraft nearly six months ago, as well as Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Dubrov and Vande Hei spent 355 days in space, having launched last April on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft to the station. Vande Hei set an American record for the longest single spaceflight, eclipsing the mark of 340 days set by Scott Kelly during a mission to the ISS in 2015-2016. Vande Hei has spent 523 days in space over two missions, third among American astronauts behind Peggy Whitson, at nearly 666 days, and Jeffrey Williams at 534 days. The landing was like those from previous missions to the ISS, but in times unlike those earlier flights. Russia’s ongoing military campaign in Ukraine has strained relations with the West to nearly a breaking point, including the termination of most civil and commercial space activities with the exception of the ISS. NASA has emphasized that activities on the ISS continue largely unaffected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “For the safety of our astronauts, the working relationship between NASA and our international partners continues, and that includes the professional relationship between the cosmonauts and our astronauts,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in his “State of NASA” address March 28 at the Kennedy Space Center. That included a change-of-command ceremony on the ISS March 29 when Shkaplerov formally handed over command of the station to NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn. “People have problems on Earth. On orbit, we are one crew,” he said in English during the brief ceremony. “I think ISS is like a symbol of friendship and cooperation and a symbol of the future of the exploration of space.” He mentioned the activities on the station during his time, there, including alluding to a Russian antisatellite weapon demonstration in November that created debris that caused the crew to shelter for several hours. “It’s like some satellites tried to kill us,” he said. He then handed a ceremonial key to the station to Marshburn, who will serve as commander of the ISS until he departs on the Crew-3 spacecraft in late April. 
Small launch vehicle company Virgin Orbit says it sees opportunities not just in satellite launch but also in hypersonics as it looks to increase its revenue. In its first financial results since going public in December after a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC), Virgin Orbit announced March 29 a net loss of $157.3 million for 2021 on $7.4 million in revenue. That compared to a net loss of $121.6 million on $3.8 million in revenue in 2020. Despite the significant loss, the company emphasized in an earnings call the increase in revenue, primarily from two LauncherOne missions conducted in 2021, as well as a slight improvement in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). Virgin Orbit reported an adjusted EBITDA of –$140.4 million in 2021 versus –$157.5 million in 2020. Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, noted the growing interest in the company’s air-launch system, including from national security and international customers. The company said its backlog grew from $86 million at the end of 2020 to $575 million at the end of 2021, although only $152 million of that was in the form of binding agreements. Hart said the company is planning four to six launches this year, compared to six the company forecast in January. The first of those launches took place Jan. 13, placing seven cubesats into orbit. The next, which the company described as a “national security-focused mission,” is scheduled for the second quarter. That will be followed by the first LauncherOne mission from Spaceport Cornwall in England. Virgin Orbit, though, is looking beyond satellite launch. Hart said the company recently concluded a study for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency “that underlines the utility of our system for missile defense targets and other uses.” He also played up the role the company could play in hypersonics. “We are seeing increased momentum for the use of the system to support hypersonic R&D,” he said. The company has had discussions with companies that are working on hypersonic technologies. He didn’t go into details about those discussions, but suggested that the interest is in using the LauncherOne system as a boost stage for hypersonic vehicles. “Our system is a bit of a simpler mousetrap, if you will, for the current test systems that are out there that use B-52 aircraft and things of that nature,” he said. “We’re aware there have been some booster issues in the hypersonic research arena. It’s likely an area we can help with.” The earnings call was not the first time Virgin Orbit has mentioned potential roles in missile defense and hypersonics. Speaking at Deutsche Bank’s 30th Annual Media, Internet & Telecom Conference March 15, Hart discussed opportunities for the company in those areas. “We can be a utility for missile defense, for hypersonics and other R&D efforts,” he said. “On targets alone the United States spends over half a billion dollars a year.” “We’ve had some discussions and we have some more planned in D.C. to talk about that,” he added of hypersonics opportunities at that event. Virgin Orbit raised $228 million in its SPAC merger , less than half of the amount it anticipated when it announced the deal in August 2021. The company announced it had $194.2 million in cash and cash equivalents on hand as of the end of 2021, “leaving us well-positioned to progress on our growth objectives in 2022,” said Brita O’Rear, chief financial officer of Virgin Orbit. The company has established a “standby equity purchase agreement” with Yorkville Advisors, a hedge fund, to sell up to $250 million in equity over three years. “This instrument can provide us with access to capital to execute our business plan and respond to opportunities as they appear in the market,” she said. 
A Chinese wide-field x-ray space observatory has passed a major review and is expected to launch next year to detect flashes from cataclysmic cosmic events. The Einstein Probe is expected to launch around mid-to-late 2023 to observe distant, violent interactions such as tidal disruption events—in which stars are pulled apart by supermassive black holes—supernovae, and detect and localize the high-energy, electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events. A March 25 review session organized by the National Space Science Center (NSSC) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) approved the mission to proceed to the spacecraft assembly, integration and testing phase, ahead of an expected launch next year. The roughly 1,400-kilogram spacecraft will be launched into a 600-kilometer altitude, low inclination orbit. From there it will observe the sky with a Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) with a field of view of 3,600 square degrees, using cutting edge “lobster eye” optics to allow the probe to view X-ray events more deeply and widely than previously possible. The spacecraft will feature onboard data processing and autonomous followup capabilities, meaning the probe’s Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT), developed in collaboration with Europe, can be quickly brought to bear after WXT detects an X-ray event. The Einstein Probe team hopes to detect violent extra-galactic events which have so far been only sparsely explored, with so far relatively few confirmed observations of tidal disruption events (TDEs). By picking up soft band X-ray emissions from stars being ripped apart by massive black holes, the probe could provide new insights into how stellar matter falls into black holes and the complex and rare phenomena of formations of jets of ionized matter emitted by the events. Mission Principal Investigator Yuan Weimin of the National Astronomical Observatories (NAOC) noted in a 2021 conference presentation that the probe could potentially detect up to one hundred TDEs per year. The probe’s surveying of the sky for transient X-ray events the probe could also provide insight into other phenomena including black holes, magentars, active galactic nuclei, red shifted gamma-ray bursts, and the interactions between comets and solar wind ions. The mission will utilize the Beidou navigation satellite constellation to allow rapid relay of alert data to the ground. Alerts will be publicly shared to allow rapid followup observations by other teams and telescopes. There have also been discussions on utilizing the VHF network belonging to France space agency CNES. CNES’s VHF network will support the China-France SVOM astronomical X-ray space telescope, with which the Einstein Probe will have synergies. SVOM could also launch in 2023. The Einstein Probe mission is being managed by the NSSC, with involvement of CAS’s NAOC, the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP) and the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites, the spacecraft maker, which has previously manufactured space science and Beidou navigation spacecraft. The ­European Space Agency is contributing to the mission by providing a mirror module for the FXT instrument as well as ground station and science management support. Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics is also involved in the FXT instrument. The Einstein Probe was proposed in 2013 and approved in 2017 as part of a second phase of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Strategic Priority Program (SPP) on Space Science. The SPP first phase consisted of four missions—the Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE), ShiJian-10 (SJ-10), Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) and Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT)—launched across 2016-17. Other missions in the second phase are the Gravitational wave high-energy Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor (GECAM), the Advanced space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) due to launch this year , and the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE), for which ESA recently shipped a module to China. The missions are part of China’s major space plans for the next five years. Proposals are being studied and reviewed for a further phase of Chinese space science missions, according to the NSSC. — Image and article updated at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, March 31.
NASA says it’s ready to go ahead with a practice countdown of the Space Launch System that will serve as a final key test before the rocket’s first launch, but one that will also take place largely out of public view. In a March 29 call with reporters, NASA officials said preparations remain on track for the SLS wet dress rehearsal (WDR), where the rocket is filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant and the countdown taken to just under T-10 seconds, shortly before the core stage’s four RS-25 engines would ignite. The WDR will test fueling and countdown procedures ahead of the Artemis 1 launch this summer. The test will begin with a “call to stations” for personnel at about 5 p.m. Eastern April 1, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA Artemis launch director. Tanking will start at around 7 a.m. Eastern April 3, entering the terminal part of the countdown seven and a half hours later. Controllers will take the vehicle first down to T-33 seconds then recycle to do another countdown to T-10 seconds. The test would end with detanking of the vehicle late that afternoon. While technical preparations continue for the test, NASA will be keeping an eye on the weather. “There is some chance that we’ll have a little bit of inclement weather in this area over the weekend,” she said. The primary concern is lightning, with a requirement of no more than a 20% chance of lightning within 9.3 kilometers of the pad in the first hour of tanking. If the test does go forward as planned, NASA expects to know fairly quickly how the vehicle performed and how soon it would be ready for launch. Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development, said the agency plans to hold a briefing April 4 with a first review of the results of the WDR. “We’re looking for two things: to see if we were able to successfully get through the timeline and the count, and get the data that we need to be able to prepare for the launch of the vehicle,” he said of that briefing, “and we’ll also look at the condition of the vehicle.” He said NASA won’t be prepared at that post-test briefing to set a launch date for Artemis 1, since there will be more work to inspect the vehicle and look for any issues that may need to be fixed before launch. “We’re hoping that in about a week after we’re done with all that,” he said, “we should be able to talk about what we’re looking for in terms of launch opportunities.” He declined to speculate on potential launch dates. A launch window is available May 7 to 21, but its considered unlikely the SLS would be ready before that window closes since the vehicle first has to roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for final closeout work before returning to the pad before launch. The next launch window is June 6 to 16, followed by June 29 to July 12. While Whitmeyer and others described WDR as the final major test before the Artemis 1 launch, NASA will provide little coverage of the test itself. The agency said March 28 that it will provide a live video feed of the pad during the test, but without any commentary or sound, including audio from launch control. Whitmeyer said the lack of audio from launch control was in response to export control concerns. “Typically what they’re looking for is timing and sequencing data,” he said. “That’s considered to be important information by other countries, so we have to be very careful when we share data, particularly for the first time.” That took many people by surprise, since there were not similar restrictions on controller audio during shuttle launches and tests; the SLS makes extensive use of shuttle-era hardware. “We’re really, really super sensitive to cryogenic launch vehicles of this size and capability. They’re very analogous to ballistic-type capabilities that other countries are very interested in,” he said. However, it’s rare for ballistic missiles to use cryogenic propellants given the extensive time and effort needed to prepare such vehicles for launch. He said NASA would provide updates on social media during the test and promised to provide a detailed guide to the countdown to media in advance. “They’re going to practice the whole thing they’re going to have for launch in parallel,” he said, so that by the time of the actual launch this summer NASA will be able “to provide the normal type of calls that you would expect to hear.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Indian startup Pixxel said March 28 it has raised $25 million for a hyperspectral imaging constellation that plans to deploy its first satellite this week. Canadian early-stage investor Radical Ventures led the Series A round, bringing Pixxel’s total funding to $33 million to date. Awais Ahmed, Pixxel’s CEO and co-founder, said proceeds will support plans to launch two satellites this year and six in early 2023 for the constellation. The startup aims to provide five-meter resolution imagery across 150 spectrum bands for agriculture, energy and other markets it believes are hungry for more data-rich Earth imagery. Earth observation companies have historically struggled to find compelling uses for hyperspectral services among commercial customers. However, multiple startups have been created in recent years with hopes of using reduced small satellite costs to realize new commercial markets for hyperspectral imagery, which has traditionally focused on defense. Capacity is now the biggest constraint for Californian hyperspectral imaging startup Orbital Sidekick, its CEO Daniel Katz recently told SpaceNews . Mining giant Rio Tinto said Jan. 13 it plans to use Pixxel’s data to see if it is useful for identifying mineral resources and monitoring its operations. Ahmed said the first iteration of the camera Pixxel plans to use for its services launched last year through a hosted payload partnership with Lithuanian satellite maker NanoAvionics. He said a second iteration of the camera is onboard its first satellite that is slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket April 1, as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-4 rideshare mission that aims to launch a total 40 spacecraft. Pixxel has plans to launch a second satellite “soon” aboard an Indian PSLV rocket. The six satellites slated to launch next year “will be more capable, higher resolution, more collection capacity” and have longer operational lives, he said via email. Pixxel had planned to have 30 satellites in orbit by the middle of 2023 but this has been delayed to the end of 2024. “Not dissimilar to other space companies, COVID supply chain issues have pushed out the timeline a bit,” Ahmed said in an email. He said “Pixxel designs, integrates and tests the satellites completely in-house” using parts from international suppliers including South African small satellite specialist Dragonfly Aerospace, which is building its cameras. Ultimately, he said Pixxel hopes to leverage India’s supply chain to bring down costs. Early-stage investors Jordan Noone, Seraphim Space Investment Trust Plc, Lightspeed Partners, Blume Ventures and Sparta LLC also participated in Pixxel’s Series A funding round.
SpiderOak Mission Systems announced March 29 it won a contract from Lockheed Martin Space for its cybersecurity software. The contract allows Lockheed Martin to use SpiderOak’s OrbitSecure software. “This is commercial technology that was developed for terrestrial applications and has been repurposed for the space business, specifically for low Earth orbit,” SpiderOak chairman Charles Beames told SpaceNews. Beames said he could not disclose the value of the contract with Lockheed Martin. “The goal is to make OrbitSecure available to Lockheed Martin customers as part of an offering to provide an extra level of cybersecurity,” he said. Lockheed Martin builds large satellites for the U.S. government but is now also moving into the small satellite market. The cybersecurity technology from SpiderOak uses what is known as a “zero-trust architecture” where network users by default are not trusted and special keys are required to access encrypted data. OrbitSecure also uses blockchain for data transactions so every modification made to the ledger is time stamped and signed, ensuring traceability. The distributed ledger platform is offered as a blockchain and encryption software development kit. Satellite network developers can embed the software at the application layer. Beames said the system was designed to operate with minimum power to make it practical for use on small satellites. “We’re in discussions with all the satellite builders, including the small ones,” said Beames, who is also chairman of the SmallSat Alliance. “One of the criticisms from small sat companies is that they need all this hardware to add cybersecurity. With OrbitSecure, with a software layer they will be able to have the same security that the very large, very expensive satellites do.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Singapore has become the 18th country to join the U.S.-led Artemis Accords for space exploration, hoping to use the agreement to enhance its nascent domestic space industry. Trade and Industry Minister Gan Kim Yong signed the agreement March 28 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, on the sidelines of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s working visit to the United States. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy and U.S. State Department principal deputy assistant secretary Jennifer Littlejohn attended the signing ceremony. “I hope that by joining the Artemis Accords, Singapore will be able to cooperate more closely with like-minded partners like the U.S. to progress the international conversation on the space norms and spur the development of the global space sector,” the trade minister said, according to a transcript published by his office. “I look forward to seeing more exchanges and collaborations among companies, officials and researchers between Singapore and the U.S. as well as other Artemis Accords signatories, leading to a robust space sector in Singapore.” The minister noted that space-based technologies are important to many civilian and government functions. “We also see strong economic potential in the application of space-based technologies in domains of great interest to us, such as aviation, maritime and the environment. We have therefore been working hard to support the development of our relatively nascent but fast-growing space ecosystem,” he said. Melroy, a former astronaut and NASA’s No. 2 official, said that space-based technologies represent a high-growth industry around the world, according to Singapore’s The Straits Times newspaper. “The commercial space industry is finding its way into almost every other industry. Those space-based technologies are becoming critical,” Melroy said. “As we go out into the solar system, with humans, with technologies, we find that it is very important to take those norms and behavior, the values that we share… with us.” Singapore is a relatively new space player, with its space sector having only about 50 companies and 1,000 professionals, according to the country’s national statement to a UN committee in 2021. Singapore’s space sector engages in a range of space-related activities, such as the designing and manufacturing of space components, as well as the provision of satellite-based services. Last month, Singapore announced a 150 million Singapore dollar ($110 million) investment plan to develop the country’s space capabilities. 
China launched its first Long March 6A from a new launch complex at Taiyuan Tuesday, successfully sending two satellites into sun-synchronous orbits. The 50-meter-long, 530-metric-ton Long March 6A lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 5:50 a.m. Eastern March 29. The rocket features two kerosene-liquid oxygen stages and four solid propellant side boosters. The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the rocket maker and subordinate to China’s main space contractor, CASC, declared success of the mission within half an hour of launch. Two satellites were placed into sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The Pujiang-2 satellite was developed by SAST for “scientific experimental research, land and resources census and other tasks.” Pujiang-1, launched on the first Long March 11 in 2015, was also developed by SAST and dedicated promoting “smart city” construction, according to Chinese reports. Tiankun-2 satellite was developed by the Space Engineering Group under the second academy of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) for “experimental verification of space environment detection technology.” CASIC’s second academy focuses on air and space defense systems. Tiankun-1, launched by CASIC’s Kaituozhe-2 rocket in 2017, was stated to test the performance of a small satellite bus. CASIC’s Space Engineering Group states that the new satellite inherits the “high functional density” of the earlier satellite while also being smaller and lower in cost and will verify new attitude and orbit control algorithms, multi-functional flexible cladding materials and computational optical imaging. The launch is the latest in a line of new generation launch vehicles since 2015, this time combining both new Chinese kerosene-liquid oxygen and solid propellant capabilities. Numerous launch systems elsewhere, such as the Space Shuttle and Ariane rockets, have long used solid rocket boosters. The Long March 6A launched was facilitated by a new launch complex constructed specifically for the new rocket at Taiyuan, north China. The new facility allows for more automated processes, such as fueling, and shorter launch preparations lasting 14 days. Images of the site also suggests a water deluge system to alleviate damage for high temperatures and cushion against acoustic vibrations. The new, 3.35-meter-diameter rocket bears little resemblance to the 2.25-meter-diameter Long March 6. The much larger 6A uses two YF-100 kerolox uses on its first stage can lift four tons to a 700-kilometer SSO, compared with up to 1,000 kilograms for the 29-meter-long Long March 6 which uses a single YF-100. The 6A is also expected to be available in variants with two boosters or none at all. The 6A fills a narrow gap in launch capabilities to SSO while also providing a new and differentiated alternative. Figures published by CASC show that the much lighter Long March 8 (360 tons) and its single core variant (200 tons), developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), can loft 5 and 3 tons to a 700-kilometer SSO respectively, launching from the coastal Wenchang launch center. SAST states that the development and launch of the rocket demonstrated breakthroughs in combining liquid and solid propellant stages and related separation and gimbaling technologies. It also allows for a wide payload fairings of 4.2 and 5.2 meters. CASC has also recently developed much larger , 3.2 and 3.5-meter-diamater solid rocket engines which it says could be used with heavy lift rockets for lunar and deep space missions. Its planned largest rocket, the Long March 9, does not appear to include solid boosters in its various designs , however. The country has also been developing a range of solid propellant launchers to meet growing launch demands and contribute to a wider strategy of making China a fully-fledged space power. The launch was CASC’s and China’s seventh of 2022, with CASC aiming to launch at least 140 spacecraft across more than 50 launches this year alone, including six missions to complete its modular space station. Commercial launch providers are expected to add to China’s launch activities.
Japanese startup Synspective announced March 29 it raised $100 million to continue its development of a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. Tokyo-based Synspective said it raised the Series B round from a group of investors led by Sompo Japan Insurance Inc., Nomura SPARX Investment, Inc. and Singapore-based Pavilion Capital Pte. Ltd. The funding round includes loans, although the company did not disclose the split between debt and equity. The Series B round comes nearly three years after a previous funding round that brought the amount raised by the company to $100 million. With a total of $200 million raised to date, Synspective said it is among the largest startups in Japan in any industry. Synspective plans to use the finding to accelerate development of a constellation of 30 SAR satellites it expects to have in orbit by 2026. The company has launched two satellites to date: StriX α in December 2020 and StriX β Feb. 28 , both on Rocket Lab Electron rockets. The latter launch was the first of a three-launch deal between Synspective and Rocket Lab announced in December 2021. Synspective says the funding will go toward development of “mass production facilities” for its satellites as well as development of products based on the data those satellites collect. The funding will also support the company’s global expansion plans, but it did not elaborate on what those plans entail. “We are very grateful for the opportunity to welcome new investors and collaborative partners to expand our business more strongly and globally,” Motoyuki Arai, chief executive of Synspective, said in a statement about the funding round. “We will further accelerate the expansion of a 30 SAR satellite constellation and enhance our data analysis technology to realize a ‘learning world’ for a sustainable future.” Investors in Synspective emphasized in the statement the company’s work in using SAR data to address the effects of climate change and natural disasters. “Synspective will be directly involved in disaster mitigation by developing and operating SAR satellites and providing solution services that utilize SAR data,” said Choun Chee Kong, head of Japan investments for Pavilion Capital. Synspective is just one of several companies actively developing constellations of SAR satellites, seeking to tap into growing interest in such imagery that can provide data regardless of lighting conditions or cloud cover. Capella Space, Iceye, PredaSAR and Umbra are among the others actively developing and launching SAR constellations.
President Biden’s $773 billion budget request for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2023 includes $24.5 billion for the U.S. Space Force and the Space Development Agency — about $5 billion more than what Congress enacted in 2022. The White House on March 28 unveiled the president’s funding request for the coming fiscal year that begins Oct 1. The proposed $773 billion would give the Pentagon $17 billion more than what Congress enacted for 2022. Congress in 2022 appropriated $18.05 billion for the Space Force and $1.5 billion for the Space Development Agency. SDA is currently under the Office of the Secretary of Defense and will be absorbed by the Space Force later this year so the president’s 2023 budget combines the funding. The proposed Space Force budget also includes $1 billion that was transferred from the Air Force to the Space Force’s military personnel account. “Space is vital to U.S. national security and integral to modern warfare,” the White House said in a budget summary document. “The budget maintains America’s advantage by improving the resilience of U.S. space architectures to bolster deterrence and increase survivability during hostilities.” DoD said the 2023 budget supports a national defense strategy that recognizes China “as our key strategic competitor and Russia as an acute threat to the interests of the U.S. and allies.” Breakdown of the Space Force’s $24.5 billion budget: Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the anti-satellite capabilities of adversaries like Russia and China require DoD to invest in advanced space systems. “This budget is driven by the threat,” he told reporters. There was a time when the United States could “put up expensive systems in space and not worry about them. That era is over, it’s been over for a while,” said Kendall. Early-warning satellites that use infrared sensors to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles received a significant funding boost: The 2023 budget includes $1.1 billion for three national security space launches (NSSL) and $314 million to launch three batches of Space Development Agency satellites to low Earth orbit. SDA plans to launch the Transport Layer in batches of 21 satellites, and the Tracking Layer in batches of 14 satellites. The Space Force’s national security space launch program office run by the Space Systems Command negotiated a more competitive price with the Space Development Agency that is closer to commercial pricing than the traditional NSSL missions. 
TAMPA, Fla. — SES said March 28 that it ordered a software-defined geostationary satellite from Thales Alenia Space to extend content and connectivity services across Europe, Africa and Asia. SES-26, the third satellite the Luxembourg-based fleet operator has ordered from Thales Alenia Space since November, will carry a communications payload that can be reprogrammed in orbit to adapt to changing mission needs. SES Chief Technology Officer Ruy Pinto said the satellite is expected to launch in 2024 or 2025, although the company has not selected a launch provider. SES-26 is the final satellite in a three-satellite contract with Thales Alenia Space for replacing spacecraft coming to the end of their operational lives. SES announced in November that it had ordered ASTRA 1P and ASTRA 1Q as part of this contract. ASTRA 1Q is a software-defined satellite, while ASTRA 1P is a classic wide-beam spacecraft that cannot be reprogrammed in orbit. Both ASTRA satellites are slated to launch in 2024 to 19.2 degrees East to replace four spacecraft that primarily serve broadcast markets. SES-26 will provide Ku-band and C-band frequencies with its software-defined payload from 57 degrees East, the company said, where it will replace the operator’s retiring NSS-12 satellite that was launched in 2009. Asked whether SES envisages replacing all its fleet in geostationary orbit (GEO) with software-defined satellites, Pinto said: “Whenever the business case calls for it, yes, we be will looking into future-proofing our satellites.” Software-defined satellites made up more than 80% of GEO high-throughput satellite orders in 2021, according to research from Euroconsult. SES said SES-26 will be an important platform for supporting government communications solutions, and “is synergic” with the company’s recently announced acquisition of DRS GES , which provides managed satcoms services to government agencies. Ethiopia’s free to air service Ethiosat also uses 57 degrees East to broadcast to 10 million TV households across the country. Pinto said ASTRA 1P and ASTRA 1Q remain on track to be ready for a 2024 launch despite pandemic-related supply chain issues that have delayed multiple satellite projects . French satellite operator Eutelsat said Feb. 17 it expects a revenue slump to stretch into 2023 as it awaits two delayed spacecraft from Thales Alenia Space. The operator’s Konnect VHTS is now slated to enter service in the second half of 2023, instead of the first, while Eutelsat 10B is being delayed within its existing window of the first half of 2023. Canadian satellite operator Telesat said March 18 that its Telesat Lightspeed low Earth orbit constellation is delayed by about a year after Thales Alenia Space ran into supply chain issues. According to Pinto, SES has been able to avoid the disruption. “We have five satellites under construction with [Thales Alenia Space] now, and they have been on track,” he said. “In fact, SES-22, a C-band satellite intended for the U.S., is ahead of schedule and will be the first C-band satellite we are launching this summer.” SES is counting down to launches this year that will deploy a total of 14 satellites for the company, comprising five GEO satellites for clearing C-band spectrum and nine satellites for its medium Earth orbit O3b mPower constellation.
Updated 9:30 p.m. Eastern with additional comments. WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal seeks nearly $26 billion for NASA, with increases for exploration, Earth science and space technology. Budget documents released by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) March 28 showed the administration is seeking $25.974 billion for the agency, an increase of $1.93 billion, or 8%, over the $24.041 billion the agency received in the final fiscal year 2022 omnibus spending bill earlier this month. NASA budget documents released shortly after the White House revealed few major new initiatives. Instead, funding would be increased to support ongoing initiatives, from the Artemis lunar exploration effort to science missions and space technology. “It’s a signal of support of our missions and a new era of exploration and discovery,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a “State of NASA” speech about the budget March 28 at the Kennedy Space Center. The agency is seeking more than $2.4 billion for Earth science, an increase of nearly $350 million from what it received for 2022. Much of that increase would go to support work on the Earth System Observatory, a series of missions intended to implement recommendations of the Earth science decadal survey. In planetary science, NASA’s Mars Sample Return would get $822.2 million, up from $653 million in 2022. The budget proposal confirms plans to split the Sample Retrieval Lander into two separate landers and delay their launch from 2026 to 2028 . The budget proposal also confirms a cost overrun for the Europa Clipper mission. The cost of the mission has increased by $703 million, to approximately $5 billion, to accommodate impacts from the pandemic and anticipated higher operations, or Phase E, costs later in the mission. “I have no joy in telling you that we need more money for Phase E,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said at a March 21 meeting of the Space Studies Board, but that it was important to ensure the science from the mission. “We’re nowhere near out of the woods on this one yet.” Those cost increases will have effects on other missions. NASA said it no longer plans to provide funding for the International Mars Ice Mapper mission, a Mars orbiter NASA was to develop in partnership with several other nations, including Canada, Italy and Japan. “Due to the need to fund higher priorities, including to cover cost growth expected from the Mars Sample Return mission, the budget terminates NASA financial support for the Mars Ice Mapper,” the budget document states. The budget for the mission had been modest since NASA was not providing hardware for the mission but instead handling missing management: NASA projected spending $40 million a year on the mission in 2023 and 2024, and $30 million a year in 2025 and 2026, in its 2022 budget proposal. NASA will also delay development of the Near Earth Object Surveyor Mission, a space telescope to look for near Earth objects that could pose an impact threat to the Earth. NASA said it’s delaying the launch of the mission by two years, to 2028, because of cost growth in other planetary programs. “The Mars Sample Return and Europa Clipper missions are experiencing cost growth and will continue to place pressure on other parts of the Planetary Science portfolio,” the budget document states. As in other recent budget requests, NASA is proposing the terminate the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne observatory. “SOFIA’s annual operations budget is the second-most expensive operating mission in Astrophysics, yet the science productivity of the mission is not commensurate with other large science missions,” the budget document states, adding that the most recent astrophysics decadal survey recommended shutting down SOFIA by 2023. Congress has restored funding for SOFIA in past efforts by NASA to end the project. The proposal includes $224 million for development of commercial space stations that will succeed the International Space Station. NASA received $101 million, the amount it requested, for that effort in 2022. “We’re very happy with the request,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, in a call with reported about the budget proposal. She added that the requested funding was not affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent concerns about the long-term future of the International Space Station. The budget proposal includes $1.438 billion for space technology, up from $1.1 billion it received in 2022. NASA sought a similar increase last year but Congress cut the funding to the same level as 2021. The OMB document specifically mentions more than $30 million for orbital debris research. The budget would provide NASA’s Human Landing System program with $1.486 billion, an increase of $290 million over what NASA received for the program in 2022. The budget proposal, though, does not break out how the money would be allocated among the existing HLS Option A award to SpaceX, a planned Option B award to upgrade SpaceX’s Starship lander to meet the agency’s requirements for later “sustainable” missions, and the new Sustaining Lunar Development project to select a second company to develop a lander that NASA announced March 23 . NASA officials on the call declined to offer a breakout of the HLS between Option A and new initiatives. “This budget is a really good start to the competition,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said. “This gets us on the right path.” Reactions The budget proposal got a warm reception from the space industry for its proposed increases in exploration, science and technology. “There a good balance across the portfolio,” said Mike French, vice president of space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, in an interview, praising Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy for winning an 8% increase for the agency. “NASA did a good job in the budget process to make sure their priorities were heard.” That included not just increases for major programs but also smaller initiatives, such as funding for orbital debris research and nuclear thermal propulsion. The request for orbital debris funding, he said, “helps clarify for NASA what direction it should be going on, and there’s community agreement these are really important topics for NASA to be working on.” French said the requested increases with NASA, along with proposed increases for the Space Force and for NOAA weather satellite programs, “is a reflection of the importance of space for national security and the economy.” The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group representing companies involved in Artemis, also endorsed the budget proposal. “It serves as a good foundation for advocates of space exploration to use as they work with Congress to move the needle even further towards a more robust NASA program of lunar exploration, while preparing to move on to exploring Mars and out into the solar system,” said Frank Slazer, president and chief executive of the organization, in a statement. Axiom Space, which is building a commercial module for the ISS that will serve as a precursor for a standalone space station, said in a statement it welcomed the funding for commercial LEO development. “NASA’s strong budget sends a message to our customers and investors about the agency’s intentions and confidence in our vision, and further supports U.S. competitive leadership in the commercial sector,” said Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom. NASA FY 2023 budget proposal (amounts in millions)
NASA plans to delay the next phase of its Mars Sample Return campaign and split a lander mission into two separate spacecraft to reduce the overall risk of the program. At a March 21 meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, revealed that NASA and the European Space Agency had agreed to revise the schedule and design for upcoming missions that will return samples being cached by the Perseverance rover to Earth. Original plans called for the launch of both a NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander and ESA-led Earth Return Orbiter in 2026. The lander, using an ESA-built rover, would collect the samples cached by Perseverance and load them into a rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which would launch them into orbit. The orbiter, using a NASA-provided collection system, would gather the samples and return them to Earth in 2031. An independent review, though, recommended in November 2020 that NASA delay those future missions to 2027 or 2028 to provide a more reasonable development schedule . Another panel recommendation was for NASA to investigate turning the single Sample Retrieval Lander spacecraft into two separate landers, one carrying the rover and the other the MAV. Zurbuchen told the Space Studies Board that NASA and ESA had agreed to split the Sample Retrieval Lander into two landers, which would now launch in 2028. “The Phase A analysis demonstrated that, frankly, the single lander breaks entry, descent and landing heritage. It is actually high risk,” he said. The single-lander approach would require a larger heat shield, estimated to be 5.4 meters in diameter, which in turn would require a larger payload fairing for the rocket launching it. The design also had “unproven” entry, descent and landing capabilities and would require electric propulsion on the cruise stage to increase its payload performance. A dual-lander approach, he said, could make use of the same landing system used by Perseverance and, before that, Curiosity. “It can be completed in the ’20s, just like we want to,” he said, and avoids the complexity of the larger design. Both NASA and ESA agreed to adopt the approach as well as a schedule that would delay the launches of the two landers to 2028. The Earth Return Orbiter would launch in 2027, and the samples would return to Earth in 2033 under that revised schedule. Zurbuchen said one lander, dubbed SRL1 and carrying the MAV and a robotic arm for sample transfer, would be built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory because of “criticality and integration.” NASA had not yet decided on who would build the second lander, SRL2, which will carry the fetch rover. The decision, he said, would come by June, when the mission reaches a programmatic milestone called Key Decision Point B. He did not discuss the cost implications of the schedule or design changes. Shortly before the launch of the Mars 2020 mission carrying the Perseverance rover, NASA and ESA officials estimated that the overall Mars Sample Return campaign would cost at least $7 billion . NASA will not make formal cost estimates of its future lander missions until the later Key Decision Point C review, although the agency’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, due for release March 28, may contain some additional details. A complicating factor for Mars Sample Return plans is the delay in ESA’s ExoMars rover mission, which was to launch in September until the agency suspended its partnership with Roscosmos earlier this month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ESA is now considering options for going forward with the mission that would delay its launch to at least 2026. ESA officials said March 17 that those options could include a renewed partnership with NASA. Zurbuchen alluded to those comments in his remarks at the meeting but did not elaborate on any NASA role in ExoMars. “We are having a lot of discussion with our European colleagues that may or may not affect some of the discussions here related to ExoMars,” he said. “It’s up to them to talk about that.”
A French startup has raised an initial round of funding to begin testing of solar sails it believes can sharply reduce the cost of deep space missions. Paris-based Gama announced March 22 it raised 2 million euros ($2.2 million) in seed funding to start work on solar sails, including a demonstration mission it plans to launch in October. The funding came from the French public investment bank BPI, the French space agency CNES and several private investors. The funding will allow the company to complete its first spacecraft, Gama Alpha, which is scheduled to launch in October on a SpaceX rideshare mission. The six-unit cubesat, using a bus provided by NanoAvionics, will test the deployment of a solar sail with an area of 73.3 square meters. Andrew Nutter, a co-founder of Gama, said in an interview that the primary purpose of Alpha is to test the sail’s deployment mechanism. “We’re employing a spin-sail solution,” he said, slowing rotating the satellite and using centrifugal force to deploy the sail. “This allows us further down the line to have much larger surfaces and reduce costs.” The technique does away with the need for booms to deploy and stabilize the sail. LightSail 2, a solar sail demonstration by The Planetary Society launched in 2019 , used booms to deploy its sail. “We’ve tried to learn as much as possible from what they’ve done and see where we can improve things,” he said. Alpha won’t generate any measurable thrust because of the atmospheric drag from its low orbit. “We’ll be launched to 550 kilometers, which will be too low to really be able to prove thrust in any meaningful way,” he said. A second mission, planned for launch by early 2024, will go to a higher orbit of at least 800 kilometers to generate thrust and test controls of the sail. Gama believes its sails can help space agencies develop low-cost missions by taking advantage of the ability of sails to generate thrust continuously without propellant. “The vision is to dramatically reduce the cost of deep space exploration,” Nutter said. The focus is on science missions, he said, “because there are still significant budgets for scientific exploration, especially if you can reduce the cost by 10, 50, 100 times.” Early targets for missions propelled by Gama’s sails include spacecraft going to Venus or to asteroids. The company’s roadmap of missions includes one called Gamma that would go to Venus as soon as 2024. “Venus is kind of the North Star for the company and it gets us very excited,” he said, “but I think we’ll have to adapt to the opportunities when we discuss them with our scientific partners.” The company is also looking at commercial applications of its solar sails. Such sails, he said, could allow spacecraft to sit over the poles or operate in “displaced” geostationary orbits a little above or below the geostationary arc. Nutter and his two co-founders, Louis de Gouyon Matignon and Thibaud Elziere, leveraged their contacts from past businesses in other sectors to line up this initial funding round. “The objective for us was just to find a group of people we consider friends who have built businesses in the past and who are very excited about space and what we’re trying to achieve,” he said. He said that it is becoming easier for space startups in Europe to raise money as venture capital funding increases, creating new opportunities. “In terms of engineers, France and Europe have a huge talent pool,” he said. “If you compare costs to an engineer in California, it’s a fraction of the cost.” “There’s much more commercial opportunity, and huge amounts of funds coming into Europe,” he said. “Fundraising beyond a certain level is always difficult, but I’m very confident that we’ll continue to fundraise.”
If you can’t beat them, join them. That is the thinking behind a new managed network service offered by satellite operator Intelsat that integrates geostationary satellites, SpaceX’s Starlink low Earth orbit constellation and cellular broadband. “A lot of our customers would like to use Starlink and many have been using it,” Don Claussen, Intelsat’s vice president of business development, told SpaceNews at last week’s Satellite 2022 conference. Satellite communications companies “spend so much time fighting each other over what orbits are better, what band is better,” he said. “If we’re really listening to our customers, what they are saying is ‘we kind of need all of you.’” Intelsat is buying Starlink terminals and services and reselling them as part of a multi-layer, multi-orbit managed network that includes geostationary satcom and LTE connectivity. “We combine them in one gateway so the user has one interface,” said Claussen. The company in November demonstrated a multi-orbit network with OneWeb but that constellation is not yet able to provide global coverage. “We’re still working with OneWeb but they’re just not as far along as Starlink,” Claussen said. “And our government users have been testing Starlink terminals. So we already see that demand is there.” Intelsat operates 52 geostationary satellites. Starting this month, users of the company’s Flex satcom service can opt for a bundle with the Starlink service and cellular. “Our government customers can get the whole package and just pay one bill,” said Claussen. Starlink has more than 2,000 operational satellites in orbit. A key target customer for the service is the Defense Department, he said. Military units could bring the entire network to the field in two large suitcases, he said. One would have a Satcube geostationary terminal, cables and a gateway. The other would have the Starlink terminal and cables, and they would all plug into the gateway. The Starlink setup is relatively easy, said Claussen. “I actually had my daughter do it a couple of weeks ago at my house.” Starlink has been “great to work with,” he added. “And the feedback that we got from customers about it is that it makes sense. Now the government and the industry have to come together to figure out how we get this in the hands of users.”
The Federal Aviation Administration has again delayed completion of an environmental assessment for orbital launches of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle from Texas, although it may have no effect on near-term launch plans. The FAA announced March 25 that it had pushed back the expected completion of the final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) of Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches from Boca Chica, Texas, by another month. The assessment, previously targeted from completion March 28, is now targeted for release April 29. This is the third delay in the completion of the assessment, which was originally scheduled for release at the end of December 2021. The FAA delayed the release first to Feb. 28 , then to March 28, citing ongoing work to complete the assessment and coordinate with other government agencies. “The FAA is currently reviewing the Final PEA and completing consultation and coordination with agencies at the local, State, and Federal level,” the FAA said in a statement about the latest delay. According to a federal government permitting timetable , the major elements awaiting completion for the environmental assessment are an Endangered Species Act consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service and consultations with agencies on an element of the National Historic Preservation Act called a Section 106 Review. While the environmental delays are frustrating for advocates of the company, it’s not clear that they are actually delaying launch activity by SpaceX. The environmental review is required for SpaceX to receive an FAA launch license for Starship orbital flights. At a Feb. 10 event in Boca Chica, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk spoke with a completed Starship/Super Heavy vehicle standing behind him on the pad . He said then that the company was “a couple months” away from a first launch based on both FAA licensing and technical work. However, it now appears likely that the vehicle that appeared on the pad will not be the one to make the first orbital launch attempt. Activity at SpaceX’s Starbase site in Boca Chica suggests that a different Super Heavy booster and Starship vehicle will be used for the first orbital flight, but only after extensive ground testing. A potential contributing factor is a shift in SpaceX resources. Musk tweeted March 5 that SpaceX had “reprioritized” resources to cybersecurity to address jamming of Starlink signals in Ukraine. “Will cause slight delays in Starship & Starlink V2,” he wrote, without elaborating. Musk, at the February event, suggested that Starship test launches could shift from Boca Chica to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida if there are extensive delays in getting a license for a launch from Boca Chica. SpaceX is working on both a launch pad for Starship at Launch Complex 39A as well as production facilities elsewhere at the center. “I guess our worst-case scenario is that we would be delayed for six to eight months to build up the Cape launch tower and launch from there,” he said then.
A practice countdown for NASA’s Space Launch System could cause a delay in the launch of a commercial mission to the International Space Station, a move with potential ripple effects for other missions to the station. Officials with NASA, Axiom Space and SpaceX said March 25 that they successfully completed a flight readiness review for the Ax-1 mission to the ISS. A Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch the Crew Dragon spacecraft on that mission April 3 from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. However, NASA is also planning to conduct a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) of the first Space Launch System from neighboring Launch Complex 39B that day. During that test, the rocket will be loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants and go through a practice countdown that stops at around T-10 seconds, just before the core stage’s RS-25 engines would ignite. NASA said at a briefing after the Ax-1 flight readiness review that the Artemis 1 WDR would have priority, assuming both remain on their current schedules. “Right now, Artemis 1 wet dress has the range. Our plan is to get that done as early as possible,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations. “We’ve still got 8 to 10 days of processing on both sides to get there.” She said there have been daily meetings among the NASA and SpaceX teams working on their respective missions, with another “check point” on March 28. “From a planning perspective, it made a lot of sense for us to just get the wet dress mission done,” she said, “and then letting us have the time for successive launch attempts.” If the Artemis 1 WDR does take place as planned, the earliest Ax-1 could launch is April 4 at 12:50 p.m. Eastern. Lueders said one of the factors that drives separation between the two missions is commodities like nitrogen gas needed at both launch sites. At one point, she said that might require a two-day separation between the missions, but that teams worked to shorten that to a day. “Potentially, if we get wet dress off on the 3rd, maybe we could launch on the 4th.” Like other Crew Dragon missions to the ISS, Ax-1 has an instantaneous launch window once per day. A complicating factor is the next NASA crew rotation mission to the ISS, Crew-4, which will launch on another Crew Dragon no earlier than April 19. “We’ve got a little bit of buffer” in the schedule, said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program manager. NASA wants two days between the Ax-1 splashdown and Crew-4 launch, so Ax-1 could launch on its 10-day mission as late as April 7 without affecting the Crew-4 launch date, she said. A complicating factor, though, is weather at the splashdown site, which could delay the return of Ax-1. “I think the real key for us is getting off as early as we can. We’ll want to take those early opportunities, assuming we have good launch weather, because we don’t know what we’ll get on the back end for undocking,” Weigel said. Any delays in the return of Ax-1 after April 17 would cause a day-for-day slip in Crew-4. NASA wants to have the Crew-3 Crew Dragon spacecraft currently at the station to return with its four astronauts by May 10, about six months after its launch and after a five-day handover between Crew-3 and Crew-4. The schedule conflict, though, is the only major issue with Ax-1 mission. That mission, the first in a series by Axiom Space as precursors to adding a commercial module to the ISS, will carry a former NASA astronaut, Michael López-Alegría, and three customers: Larry Connor, Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe. All have completed training and are in pre-launch quarantine, said Michael Suffredini, company president and chief executive. The Ax-1 mission will be the first for a Dragon spacecraft since a cargo Dragon spacecraft splashed down Jan. 24 after one of its four main parachutes was slow in opening. A similar “lagging” parachute was observed on the Crew-2 splashdown in November. Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said the company investigated the lagging parachutes but could not find a root cause for the issue, adding that it did not affect the safety of either splashdown. “We could not find anything that stood out as a contributing cause,” he said. “We spent a lot of time looking at that to figure out if there was anything we were missing. We can’t find anything. It’s almost a feature of this design.” He added SpaceX would dedicate more bandwidth to cameras on the spacecraft during reentry to get better imagery of the parachute deployment.
WASHINGTON – Shares in satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital Corp. were cleared to begin trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol LLAP, Live Long and Prosper, the Vulcan greeting from the Star Trek television series. The merger of the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp. and Terran Orbital was completed March 25, after a March 22 shareholder vote. Terran Orbital announced gross proceeds of approximately $255.4 million from the SPAC and a concurrent private investment in public equity (PIPE) round that includes equity and debt. Participants in the $50.8 million PIPE include AE Industrial Partners, Beach Point Capital, Lockheed Martin and Fuel Venture Capital. Debt financing of $175.3 million was provided by Francisco Partners, Beach Point Capital and Lockheed Martin. The debt total includes capital advanced to Terran Orbital in November 2021 and March 2022. “We are well-positioned to accelerate our growth strategy as a result of this business combination,” Marc Bell, Terran Orbital co-founder, chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “The capital raised through this transaction along with our new access to the public markets will enable us to continue to expand upon our manufacturing capabilities and launch one of the most advanced Earth observation constellations of small satellites on the planet.” With the merger completed, Bell has big plans for Terran Orbital. “We are on a mission to become the world’s largest manufacturer of small satellites,” Bell told SpaceNews at the Satellite 2022 conference. Although Terran Orbital has its roots in Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, the company is focused on building satellites in the 350- to 450-kilogram range rather than nanosatellites or cubesats. Satellites of 350 to 450 kilograms have enough power for most missions of interest to the Defense Department, U.S. intelligence agencies and NASA, Bell said. Terran Orbital “will continue to innovate across all of the different kinds of payloads: 5G, radio frequency, electro optical and synthetic aperture radar [SAR],” Bell said. “You come to us with a problem you want to solve from space, and we will help you solve it.” Tyvak and PredaSAR, a SAR constellation developer, are business units of Boca Raton, Florida-based Terran Orbital. With 300 employees, Terran Orbital’s staff has more than tripled in the past year “and we continue to see rapid growth,” Bell said. While stocks prices have fallen for many space-related companies that completed SPAC mergers in the last year, Bell said now “is a great time for Terran Orbital to go public” because the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated many important small satellite applications. “We consider ourselves a national security and defense company,” Bell said. The war in Ukraine “has opened up peoples’ eyes on the need for SAR at a refresh rate that is tactically relevant,” he added. With funds from the business combination, Terran Orbital intends to expand manufacturing capacity and to become more vertically integrated. Already, the company produces 65 components, or about 85 percent of the satellites it manufactures. “You have to be vertically integrated to control your destiny,” Bell said.
Companies developing commercial space station concepts for NASA say they’re working as fast as they can and that additional funding would not speed up their work significantly amid concerns about the long-term viability of the International Space Station. During a panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society’s Goddard Memorial Symposium March 25, executives with four companies developing commercial space stations said they were on track to have those facilities ready for at least initial operations late this decade, before the ISS is currently scheduled to be retired. Three of the companies — Nanoracks, Northrop Grumman and Sierra Space — are part of teams that won more than $400 million in awards in December from NASA in the first phase of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations effort. The fourth, Axiom Space, received a $140 million award from NASA in 2020 to develop a module that will be attached to the ISS as soon as 2024 and serve as a precursor for a stand-alone station. More money, though, would not necessarily speed up their plans. “Our schedules are aggressive, but if you don’t aim high you’re not going to make it,” said Marshall Smith, senior vice president of space systems at Nanoracks. “Our schedules are already aggressive. If you wanted to accelerate them, maybe that might happen. It depends on how much money.” He said additional funding would help in risk reduction, though. “What more money does do for you is allows you to take care of problems when they pop up,” he said. “More money would definitely be helpful to ensure that we at least hold the schedules that we have, if not accelerate them slightly.” “More money would always help,” said Tejpaul Bhatia, chief revenue officer of Axiom Space, citing risk mitigation work. “There are certain things where more money won’t necessarily change the timeline.” Steve Lindsey, chief strategy officer of Sierra Space, agreed. “We have a risk of a gap that we really have to pay attention to,” he said. “We’re going as fast as we can with the resources we have.” NASA’s current plan calls for retiring the ISS in 2030 after a roughly two-year transition period with commercial stations. However, NASA’s Office of Inspector General warned last November that, based on experience with past programs like commercial crew, a commercial station “is not likely to be ready until well after 2030.” That report added that commercial partners agreed that the agency’s schedule was “unrealistic.” That is complicated by the fact that Russian officials were openly skeptical of an extension of ISS operations from 2024 to 2030 even before Russaa’s invasion of Ukraine severed nearly all space ties between Russia and the West other than the ISS. Lindsey alluded to that in his comments. “NASA has agreed to extend ISS to 2030, but we have major partners — I won’t mention the name — who have only agreed to 2024, so we have a risk of a gap,” he said. NASA has emphasized that ISS operations remain normal for now, with no near-term changes despite Russia’s invasion and subsequent sanctions. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said March 23 that work on both the station itself and between mission control centers in Houston and Moscow continued “unaltered” a month after the invasion. There has been less discussion, though, about what might happen if Russia decided to withdraw from the station after 2024, or if sanctions degraded its ability to continue station operations. The panel avoided addressing that issue during the hourlong session. “The plan is to extend to 2030,” said Misty Snopkowski, commercial LEO program executive at NASA. “We are definitely not going to retire the space station until one of these platforms is ready.” Companies were upbeat about their prospects of their commercial stations, despite some uncertainties about the markets those stations will service. Smith, a longtime NASA employee, said he was initially uncertain about the size of the market for such stations. “The demand is actually pent up because ISS only has so much capability,” he said. “I see a tremendously bright future for the commercial destinations market for all of our companies.” One issue is how companies will work with international partners . “How does one of our companies deliver a space station to orbit but then sell services to international customers,” said Rick Mastracchio, director of business development at Northrop Grumman. He said the company has been in discussions with NASA on potential models but that “nothing has been resolved.” Bhatia offered a more cautionary note. “Is it pent-up demand, or pent-up desire?” he asked. “Those are two very different things.”
A constellation of about 40 geolocation satellites operated by Spire Global is collecting data used by the U.S. Space Force to detect GPS jamming, an issue now gaining worldwide attention due to Russia’s use of electronic warfare tactics in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. “All of our fellow space companies … everyone is playing a vital role for humanity in this battle for freedom and democracy,” Spire CEO Peter Platzer told analysts March 9 in an earnings call. Spire is providing GPS telemetry data to help detect jamming as part of a project run by the U.S. Space Systems Command to figure out way to automate manual data analysis techniques and produce more timely intelligence for military operations. The command’s Space Enterprise Consortium in September awarded a $2 million contract to Slingshot Aerospace to prototype an analytics tool that ingests data from low Earth orbit satellites. Slingshot’s cloud platform analyzes data from Spire and other proliferated LEO constellations to detect and locate radio frequency (RF) and GPS interference, which pose serious threats to the safe operation of U.S. satellites. Conor Brown, director of federal sales at Spire, told SpaceNews that the project is helping the military understand how it can take advantage of commercial data. Spire’s cubesats use a remote sensing technique called GPS radio occultation that measures properties of the Earth’s atmosphere from space. A radio signal transmitted by a GPS satellite in medium Earth Orbit — about 12,500 miles high — is bent as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere and received by a satellite in low Earth orbit. GPS RO data is widely used for weather forecasting and climate monitoring. The 40 radio occultation satellites are constantly collecting GPS telemetry. Brown said an immediate analysis of raw data can indicate signs of nefarious activity, jamming or disruptions in the GPS frequency bands but to get more detailed information, satellites have to do custom collections. “This is when the government will tell us areas of interest where they would like additional insight, and we task our satellites to collect data over those regions,” he said. “That’s where we really do the signal detection extraction. and analyze for detection of spoofers.” Spire’s contract ends in June when Slingshot’s prototype will be demonstrated and data will be made available in the military’s unified data library , an enterprise repository created by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Space Force. “We do hope that this program gets extended,” said Brown, so the government can take advantage of new satellites that Spire will develop with Sierra Nevada Corp . for RF collection and analysis. A cluster of four 6U cubesats will be deployed to detect and geolocate objects based on targeted RF emissions. The data is intended to help military and government organizations manage RF emissions and safeguard against RF and GPS interference. The demonstration of the Slingshot prototype, Brown said, will give the military a taste of how commercial data purchased as a service can be distributed to users around the globe in standardized formats. “So it’s not just one government office buying the data and making use of it. It’s about taking the data into a system and making that data accessible to any end user that is interested in the RF environment,” Brown said. “So this is a very innovative program in that regard.”
SpaceLogistics, a satellite-servicing firm owned by Northrop Grumman, last week successfully fired the electric propulsion system it is developing for the Mission Extension Pods it plans to launch in 2024. “It’s proceeding well. We achieved first light,” Rob Hauge, president of SpaceLogistics, told reporters March 24 at the Satellite 2022 conference. The Mission Extension Pods, or MEPs, are propulsion jet packs that will be installed on client satellites in orbit by a Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) that SpaceLogistics also is developing. The auxiliary propulsion devices were designed to extend the service life of satellites in geostationary orbit by up to six years. Australian satellite operator Optus will be the first customer for the MEP. “We’ve got a whole bunch of companies that are lined up ready to use it, which tells us that the market is there,” Hauge said. SpaceLogistics is developing the electric propulsion for the MEPs in-house so a successful first firing was a significant step, he said. There was no off-the-shelf propulsion system on the market that fit the size requirement so Northrop Grumman is developing its own. The hall thruster engine is being tested at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. The plan is to launch the 3,000 kilogram MRV and three MEPs each about 400 kilograms on a SpaceX rocket in 2024. They will be released from the launch vehicle, independently deploy and raise themselves to a geostationary orbit. Once in orbit each MEP will be captured by the MRV and transported to the client satellite. After delivering the MEP to the client vehicle, the MRV detaches itself and moves on to grab another MEP for the next customer. The MRV is designed to stay in orbit for 10 years. Hauge said there are five still undisclosed customers that already have signed up for the service. Hauge said the MEP was conceived as a more efficient and lower cost servicing option than the Mission Extension Vehicles that SpaceLogistics first launched in 2019. Two MEVs are in orbit docked with two Intelsat geostationary satellites that were running low on fuel. Hauge said there are no plans to build any more MEVs. The two existing vehicles will stay in orbit for about 15 years. SpaceLogistics expects most satellite operators will prefer the MRV and the propulsion pods because it’s less expensive. The MEP is a different business model. The propulsion pack is delivered on orbit, he explained. “We use our MRV to dock it to the satellite, we train the operators, we give them the software and they fly that satellite.” The MEV is the size of a minivan, stays docked to the client and essentially flies the other satellite, said Hauge. The company does not disclose pricing but Hauge said an MEV lease can run as much as one-quarter to one-half of the cost of a geostationary satellite. “With Intelsat, they operate their payload and we are flying their satellite.” Intelsat has five-year contracts and has the option to extend it. If it doesn’t, there are several telecommunications satellite companies that want to use it, said Hauge. The MEP is far less costly than the MEV, he said. “It was designed to meet all the needs for station keeping at a price point that makes it worthwhile for a satellite provider.” For most customers that are earning revenues from their satellites, adding six years of service life is a no brainer, he said. Hauge said he’s briefed the capabilities of the MEP to officials at the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command and the company hopes to generate government interest in using the system to extend the life of military satellites. 
WASHINGTON – Hiring remains the most serious challenge space companies face. The industry has ambitions goals that it can accomplish, “but getting the manpower and getting people with the right niche talents into our companies to execute on these ideas is a huge challenge right now,” Cara Sindir, Airbus U.S. Space and Defense chief operations officer, said at the Satellite 2022 conference. “The other part of that challenge is obviously the inflation of salaries. How can we all afford all of these people and how does that play into our business cases?” Hiring, a frequent topic of conversation throughout the Satellite conference, was discussed at length during the concluding panel focused on challenges ahead for the industry. While overseeing everything from contract bidding and proposal writing and execution, Sindir said she spends 50 percent of her time on recruiting. Panelists discussed potential solutions like recruiting people from adjacent industries and attracting a more diverse workforce. If those steps aren’t taken, space companies will continue to compete for the same pool for workers, panelists said. Hawthorne, California-based Mynaric U.S., for example, is in an area of the country with a large aerospace workforce. In many cases, though, workers simply move from one space company to another, said Tina Ghataore, Mynaric US chief commercial officer. There’s also extensive engineering talent near Munich, where the Mynaric’s parent company is based, “but we are competing with some of the ‘cooler tech’ out there,” Ghataore said. Momentus CEO John Rood noted that the labor shortage, a problem for the entire tech sector, was aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic had a distorting effect, driving people home, but I think we’re going to start to pull more of these folks back into the workplace,” Rood said. In the meantime, Rood somewhat light-heartedly invited people in the audience to leave their current posts to join Momentus. “Anybody interested? Catch me after the session here,” he said. On the flip side, the pandemic forced companies to become more flexible in terms of operating remotely. “This new hybrid way of doing things can be really good,” Sindir said. “We can all reach to talent that exists outside of our local markets. So that’s really exciting.” Contests have helped Telespazio tackle the recruitment problem. Since 2019, the European spaceflight services company has held prize competitions for technological solutions through the Telespazio Open Innovation initiative. The contests have attracted submissions from university students around the world. In many cases, the most interesting submissions have come from people who were not previously focused on space. “Of course this [contest] is a way to fish into the lake,” said Telespazio CEO Luigi Pasquali. While discussing workforce challenges, panelists also attempted to recruit the moderator, Naia Butler-Craig, a Georgia Institute of Technology space technology graduate research fellow.
Satellite makers are hopeful that higher frequency production rates will facilitate more innovation in the market, and fortify supply chains disrupted by the pandemic. While higher volume and lower cost satellite production “doesn’t sound very sexy,” York Space Systems CEO Dirk Wallinger told the Satellite 2022 trade show March 22 in Washington D.C. that it also accelerates technology cycles in the industry. “Consistent demand,” versus more periodic satellite orders, also supports relationships with suppliers that will bolster supply chains, Wallinger added. A shortage of parts and skilled workers resulting from the pandemic have delayed multiple satellite projects . Rising demand for software-defined satellites is helping manufacturers standardize common architecture to bring down costs and accelerate production times. According to data from research firm Euroconsult, fully software-defined satellite platforms from Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, Astranis and other manufacturers accounted for more than half of high throughput satellite (HTS) orders for geostationary orbit (GEO) over 2019-2021. In 2021, software-defined satellites made up more than 80% of GEO HTS orders, Euroconsult says. Alongside giving operators more flexibility to adapt to changing markets, Thales Alenia Space CEO Hervé Derrey said software-defined payloads also help simplify decision-making processes to accelerate project timelines. Artificial intelligence and machine learning advances are also helping manufacturers pull more data from software-defined satellites to learn more about ways to increase operational lives, beyond how much fuel is onboard, added Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of commercial civil space at Lockheed Martin.
Millennium Space Systems plans to launch to orbit a 3D printed metal flight structure the company intends to use to build its next generation of satellite buses. About the size of a small dorm refrigerator, the structure has been tested in simulators and the next step is to demonstrate it can withstand the stresses of space launch, Millennium Space CEO Jason Kim told SpaceNews at the Satellite 2022 conference. “At this point it’s space qualified but we want to get over the perception hump that it hasn’t flown yet,” said Kim. Once it’s flown to space it is likely to generate more interest from customers, he said. Since Millennium Space was acquired by Boeing in 2018, the company has increased investment in 3D printing technology to accelerate satellite production, Kim said. Boeing specializes in large spacecraft and Millennium focuses on smaller satellites, below 1,500 kilograms. A pathfinder 3D printed satellite flew to orbit successfully in 2018 but the technology is now far more advanced, he said. “The next logical step was to move away from polymer 3D printing to metal 3D printing.” The flight structure can be printed it in less than 100 hours, he said. By comparison, traditional manufacturing with honeycomb aluminum panels takes about six months. “The integration time that usually takes days is down to hours, because everything just fits the first time, due to software defined design.” Kim said the structure will launch as a rideshare payload in the near future as soon as the company can secure a ride. It will not deploy as a functioning spacecraft but only to qualify the structure. “The hardest part of the design for a structure is withstanding the launch vibration and loads,” said Kim. “Once it gets on orbit there’s nothing really impacting the structure other than micro meteorites.” It the space test is successful, Millennium plans to start offering satellite buses with the 3D printed structure, Kim said. There are cost benefits but most of the payoff is in the shorter production cycle. Millennium Space currently has a backlog of about 50 satellites, said Kim. To grow, the company needs to be able to mass produce hundreds or thousands of satellites and 3D printing a major contributor to that goal, he said. The company’s primary customer is the U.S. government. A potential opportunity is the Defense Department’s internet-in-space constellation being built by the Space Development Agency. SDA selected three vendors to produce 126 satellites to launch in 2024 and intends to solicit bids also in 2024 for another large batch of satellites. “The Space Development Agency, the Space Force, the intelligence community, they all have very strict, stressing requirements,” he said. “This capability we’re developing is very much aligned to their kinds of missions.” Millennium Space next week will unveil a new facility in El Segundo, California, with advanced tooling and test equipment “that is going to help us deliver these systems at a fast rate and high volume,” Kim said. 
Arianespace says it is working to remanifest payloads that were to launch on Soyuz rockets while SpaceX says it’s finding ways to accommodate new customers on its vehicles. During a panel at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22, Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, acknowledged the company’s plans had been upended by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent suspension of both Soyuz launches from French Guiana and those from the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying satellites for OneWeb. “2022 will be very different for us from what we were supposed to do,” he said. “We are working very closely with our customers to accommodate the best solutions for them.” That means finding alternative rides for five missions for European institutional customers that were to launch on Soyuz from French Guiana. Those payloads include two launches of Galileo navigation satellites, two European Space Agency science missions and a French military reconnaissance satellite. Israël said one option would be to shift the Galileo launches to the Ariane 6, slated to make its debut no earlier than late this year. “Ariane 6 has been designed to launch Galileo satellites,” he said. “Ariane 6 can launch these satellites in 2023.” The delay, he added, would not affect the performance of the Galileo constellation, which has enough operational satellites now to provide full service. The suspension of Soyuz launches, he said, vindicated the European decision in 2014 to develop the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets to serve the full range of European government and commercial satellites. “We wanted to give Arianespace and Europe full autonomous access to space and not have to rely on non-European rockets any more,” he said. “It was the right decision, and we see that more than ever.” However, even with Ariane 6 and Vega C Europe is not completely autonomous. The Vega C uses an upper stage engine provided by Ukraine’s Yuzhmash, and supplies of that engine are in question because of the ongoing invasion . ESA officials said March 17 that they have three of those engines, enough to handle the anticipated Vega C missions this year. ESA is supporting work on a new upper stage engine, M10, for a version of the Vega called Vega E that is slated to make its first launch around 2025. Israël said there was “no need” to accelerate work on Vega E, though, citing the Ukrainian engines in storage. “We can also explore backup solutions in Europe, if necessary,” he said, a reference to ESA discussions of replacing the Ukrainian engine with one from Europe. He said Arianespace was also working with OneWeb regarding its Soyuz launches from Baikonur. He provided no details on those discussions, though. OneWeb announced March 21 an agreement with SpaceX for one or more launches , but also did not disclose details about those arrangements. Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX, said at the conference that the company’s vertical integration and large fleet of reusable boosters offer the company flexibility to accommodate customers like OneWeb. “We can react very quickly because we’re just managing a fleet,” he said. “We love that we were able to step up and provide launches for people.” He declined to quantify how many additional launches or customers SpaceX can accommodate. “It’s much more fluid and flexible,” he said of how the company manages its manifest. That includes “reserve slots” that can be used for customers that require launches on short notice as well as other customers that need to move based on the readiness of their satellites. The flexibility also comes from working with an internal customer, Starlink. “I look at them as my friend that I can talk to and bump off as needed,” he said. “They can move or give up their vehicles. I’ve got a lot of flexibility there.” “It’s really difficult to say how many slots there are,” he said. “We’re going to try to do as much as we can.”
NASA announced March 23 that it will support development of a second lander to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface to provide competition with SpaceX for the later “sustainable” phase of the Artemis program. The agency said it will soon kick off a competition for what it calls Sustaining Lunar Development, which will back work on a second lander separate from the existing Human Landing System (HLS) award made to SpaceX in April 2021 . The award will include both an uncrewed demonstration landing and a crewed landing, much like SpaceX’s HLS Option A contract. The Sustaining Lunar Development award is intended to ensure there are two companies that can compete for later services contracts for Artemis landing missions, providing the competition that many in Congress had lobbied NASA to provide after it made a single Option A award to SpaceX. “Today’s announcement is what I said to Congress. I promised competition, so here it is,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a call with reporters about the new program. One difference about the Sustaining Lunar Development effort is that the landers will have to be designed for greater performance than under the HLS competition, including the ability to transport more astronauts and cargo to the lunar surface and support longer stays. Agency officials, though, did not provide any specific changes in requirements. SpaceX will not be eligible to compete for the Sustaining Lunar Development contract. However, NASA said it plans to exercise a provision in its HLS award, called Option B, to fund development of changes to SpaceX’s Starship lander to support the new requirements and a second crewed demonstration mission. NASA officials said the decision to hold a second competition did not reflect a lack of confidence in SpaceX on its HLS development. “We’re still targeting 2025 for that landing. SpaceX continues to make good progress toward that mission,” said Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development. “But beyond Artemis 3 we want to increase the healthy competition and advance our lunar capabilities to support more science, more exploration and an emerging lunar marketplace.” Sustaining Lunar Development will be run as part of the overall HLS program, said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager. She said there will be “multiple swim lanes” within HLS for SpaceX’s current Option A work, new Option B work and the Sustaining Lunar Development project. The new award will be a fixed-price, milestone-based award like the original HLS award, and will have very similar requirements to Option B. Watson-Morgan said NASA will release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the new project by the end of March, with an industry day in early April. A final RFP will come out later in the spring, with the goal of making an award early next year. Nelson declined to go into details about the budget for Sustaining Lunar Development. The White House is expected to release its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal as soon as March 28 that will include financial details for the effort. NASA has struggled, though, to secure funding for HLS, receiving only about a fourth of the $3.4 billion it requested in fiscal year 2021. It did receive full funding, albeit at the much lower level of $1.195 billion, for fiscal year 2022. Efforts to secure several billion dollars of additional funding for a second lander through infrastructure and stimulus bills last year also failed. A second lander could be significantly more expensive than the $2.9 billion cost of the HLS Option A award to SpaceX. In the original competition, a team led by Blue Origin bid $6 billion while a third proposal by Dynetics bid even more. Those were for the Option A landers that would be less capable, and presumably less expensive, that the ones that would meet the Sustaining Lunar Development requirements. Free said he hoped that some technology development contracts awarded in September for risk reduction work will lower the cost of the Sustaining Lunar Development landers. “Many folks have told us, ‘We’ve learned a lot and we think our bids can be better this time,’” he said.
Spanish satellite operator Hispasat is open to more acquisitions that vertically integrate its business after buying managed services provider AXESS Networks, according to its CEO Miguel Panduro. Hispasat said March 21 it has agreed to acquire AXESS Networks in a deal valuing the company at $96 million. From its headquarters in Spain, AXESS Networks operates four main teleports in Germany, Mexico, Colombia and Saudi Arabia. The company also has two smaller backup teleports in Dubai and Peru. In addition to expanding Hispasat’s geographical presence, Panduro said the deal “doubles its workforce” to around 400 people and broadens the company’s customer base across telecoms, energy, mining and other sectors. The acquisition brings Hispasat closer to end-users as a solutions and services provider amid rapid technological change in the industry, according to the satellite operator, and is part of a 2020-2025 growth plan the company launched after its sale to Spanish power company Red Eléctrica in 2019. Panduro told SpaceNews that this strategy plan is ongoing, although it is being updated to reflect future market needs following the deal, “so we remain open to new inorganic operations” as part of its expansion into the managed services value chain. “Our industry has changed a lot in the recent years,” he said in an email. “We are obliged to adapt to the new demands of the market or we will disappear. Therefore, if a few years ago we lived well in a system based on competition, now we are condemned to cooperate with each other to be as strong as possible in our target markets.” He added that Hispasat is in “constant conversations with companies in the sector and, if we consider that it is necessary to undertake a new inorganic operation, we will do so.” According to Hispasat, acquiring AXESS Networks also enables it to optimize services for extending cellular networks via satellites, products for enterprise customers and emerging markets that include networks that connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Of the three companies selected by the Space Development Agency to produce 126 satellites, only one, York Space Systems, manufactures satellites in-house. That likely explains why York Space’s bid for 42 satellites was nearly half the price of what the other two winners bid for the same number of satellites, Frank Turner, technical director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), said March 21 at the Satellite 2022 conference. SDA last month awarded three contracts: $700 million to Lockheed Martin, $692 million to Northrop Grumman and $382 million to York Space for the Transport Layer Tranche 1. Each company has to deliver 42 satellites by 2024. The Transport Layer will be the Defense Department’s first-ever internet in space — a network of small satellites in low Earth orbit to support military communications, surveillance and tracking of enemy targets. Turner pushed back on suggestions that SDA did not reward bidders for competitive pricing. “Did we pick the most expensive? Actually we didn’t,” he said, noting that the three companies selected ranked first, third and fourth on pricing from a total of eight bids. “I want to be very clear that when we put the requirements out for companies to bid against, the requirements are set, and we asked for the best possible firm fixed price bid, and that’s what everybody sent us,” said Turner. It’s obvious that one of them was much lower than the others, he added. What likely explains that is that York Space internally manufactures its satellites whereas Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are buying the satellite buses from partner companies. “That is something that we’re seeing on both of our first two tranches, that one company is much lower than the other,” he said. “When you see the three awards that we made, two to very large traditional defense primes that are not building their own satellites, they’re actually buying them,” Turner said. “Only one of our primes is literally building their own buses. And I think we’re seeing that in some of the costs that we’re getting.” The winners were selected based on their ability to “meet the requirements with a commoditized bus on the schedule that we need, at a reasonable fixed price,” he said. Turner said SDA is trying to create a competitive marketplace with real opportunities for companies to win satellite contracts every two years. The agency has said it wants to avoid “vendor lock,” or becoming dependent on a single vendor for any product or service. However, two of the winners of Transport Layer Tranche 1 — Lockheed Martin and York Space — also won Transport Layer Tranche 0 in 2020. That seems to contradict SDA’s rhetoric, Turner said. The agency is aware of that and is trying to figure out ways to open up the playing field despite government contracting rules that often favor incumbents because they have more experience. “That’s actually something that has bothered me a little bit since we did the acquisition for the latest round of satellites,” he said. “We firmly believe at SDA that we do not have incumbents. We firmly believe that what we’re trying to do is create a marketplace and send a demand signal to the market.” “The problem is we’re struggling a little bit to actually put our money where our mouth is, so to speak,” he said. “Two of our Tranche 0 incumbents got a Tranche 1 contract, not because we believe in incumbents but because they wrote the best proposals and as the government, that’s what we get to pick.” SDA also is concerned about lower-tier suppliers, said Turner. In some instances there is one provider of certain components that is supporting all three Transport Layer prime contractors. “So we’ve got single points of failure built into our system.” “The government is still struggling with how to do this,” Turner added. SDA, a three-year-old agency, is trying to come up with a new business model and is learning on the go. 
United Launch Alliance remains confident that its Vulcan Centaur rocket will make its first launch this year while Blue Origin is pushing back the first flight of its New Glenn vehicle. During a panel at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22, Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said that he expected the first launch of the Vulcan “later this year,” but did not offer a more specific schedule. That schedule is driven by the completion of testing of the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of Vulcan and delivery of the first flight units from Blue Origin. “The engine is in great shape,” Bruno said. “It is performing better than I anticipated.” Bruno said he expected to receive the first two flight models of the BE-4 in the middle of the year, “which supports me flying before the end of the year.” He added that testing of the engine is also going well, including firing of the engine three times a week “on a sustained basis” at a Blue Origin test site. Bruno described the ongoing testing of the BE-4 as “pre-qual” testing. “We like to pathfind, so pre-qual does all of that and then more, so that we’re sure it’s going to go smooth” when the formal qualification tests begin. “Pre-qual has been going great.” “We’re very pleased with where the BE-4 is and we expect to fly this year as a result,” he said. Jarrett Jones, senior vice president of New Glenn at Blue Origin, said the company had recorded more than 18,000 seconds, or five hours, of BE-4 firings. “We’ve proven it out. We’ve done the gimbaling test for ULA,” he said. “We’re right where we need to be.” Bruno also firmly closed the door on any consideration of Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine for Vulcan. Doing so would require major changes to the design of Vulcan, as AR1 uses kerosene fuel rather than methane. “You design your stage and your engine together as a pair. Vulcan is done being designed and it’s being built,” he said. “The BE-4 is nearly complete. It’s running beautifully. I have no interest in changing my partner at this point.” While Vulcan remains publicly on schedule for a first launch in 2022, Jones ruled out any chance that New Glenn will launch before the end of the year, a schedule that the company had previously cast doubt on . “The runway is closing on 2022,” Jones said. He said the company is in the process of setting a new date for the first launch and discussing that with customers, but said it was premature to announce it. “It will not be at the end of this year,” he acknowledged. Blue Origin has completed design reviews and is now in qualification tests of New Glenn, including the booster, forward structure and payload fairing. The fairing is being tested at NASA’s Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, formerly known as Plum Brook Station. “Basically, we are well into qualification of our vehicle, both the upper and the booster stages,” Jones said. Blue Origin has to balance New Glenn development with completion of the BE-4, which will be used by both New Glenn and Vulcan. “It’s fair to say you’re focusing on your most important customer, delivering BE-4s so I can fly this year,” quipped Bruno.
Leonardo DRS sold its satellite communications business to SES for $450 million after considering bids from several interested buyers, a company executive said. “It was very much a competitive process,” Dave Fields, senior vice president and general manager of Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, told SpaceNews at the Satellite 2022 conference. The companies announced the deal March 22. “Obviously, I can’t talk about the details but I can tell you that there was a lot of interest from all the segments of the industry, from satellite operators like SES, from other integrators like us and from private equity.” Leonardo DRS does not own any satellites. It provides managed satcom services to the Defense Department and other government agencies. The company has licensing agreements with multiple satellite operators and terrestrial broadband providers and integrates them into a common network. Fields said Leonardo DRS decided to sell the satcom business to “provide value to shareholders” and because it did not align with the company’s core defense business. Global Enterprise Solutions is one of eight business units. The other seven manufacture sensors, electronics and other defense equipment. The satcom unit is the only one that provides strictly services. The satcom unit will be integrated under SES Government Solutions. As an integrator, Leonardo DRS has always been agnostic about what satellite services it uses for customer networks, said Fields “Interestingly, I believe that SES understands that completely and doesn’t want to change that.” “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to look for opportunities and synergies to bring the best of what SES has to our customers,” said Fields. “But we’re also not looking to make wholesale changes” or planning to only offer services from SES satellites. As an integrator “we still want to bring the best capabilities,” said Fields. But SES will be “well represented” in satcom services that require connectivity from multiple orbits and frequencies. SES operates a fleet of satellites in geosynchronous and medium Earth orbit. With this acquisition, “I think the intention is to leverage our capabilities as an integrator. We don’t want to walk away from what’s made us successful,” Fields said. “We pride ourselves on being agnostic.” Under SES ownership, the plan is to “maintain our agnostic approach to bringing services to the market but now we are also going to have an underlying fleet that will give us capabilities that we’ve never had access to before.” “This gives us the ability to influence the future generations of satellites,” Fields said. “Access to fleet planning are things that our customers can benefit from and, frankly, we haven’t had access to before.”
WARSAW, Poland — The day after Russian missiles struck an airport near where Promin Aerospace has been developing a smallsat launcher, the startup’s 11 Dnipro-based engineers came into office. During the day, they are working on the Kyiv-headquartered startup’s lightweight solid-fuel rocket. But after hours, Promin employees volunteer to protect their homes and families as territorial defense members and humanitarian aid coordinators. “The engineering team stays in Dnipro and continues its work on developing a rocket. If we feel any danger for their lives, they will immediately move to the west part of Ukraine. The team from Kyiv has already moved to another c ity in our country. Also, we try to volunteer as … [it] has become a part of our daily routine,” Volodymyr Kravchuk, the head of communications at Promin Aerospace, told SpaceNews . Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has forced local space companies to adapt their activities to the realities of war, Promin plans to hold a suborbital trial launch this November, and a commercial suborbital launch in early 2023, according to Kravchuk. An orbital trial launch is scheduled for 2024, and in mid-2025, Promin Aerospace aims to perform an orbital rocket launch. With an ongoing armed conflict outside their offices and R&D facilities, Promin Aerospace’s staff in Kyiv and Dnipro have taken up new functions to protect their cities, the communications head said. “Some are strengthening the city defenses; some are helping the Ukrainian army with medicines, ammunition, and food. Our engineering team has decided to continue its technical development work along with additional daily responsibilities to protect their families,” according to Kravchuk. Among others, Vlady Berezina, the head of the company’s business development, is collecting humanitarian aid, including warm clothes and blankets. Meanwhile, Promin Aerospace’s lawyer Lisa Bordun coordinates aid supplies to Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. On his part, Kravchuk takes part in patrols as part of Ukraine’s territorial defense and prevents looting. Not everyone has a firearm, so he says he protects himself with an ordinary ax. Volodymyr Usov, the co-founder of Ukrainian space industry startup Kurs Orbital and the former head of Ukraine’s space agency, told SpaceNews that major state-run space companies that include spacecraft and components producer Yuzhmash, space technology design office Yuzhnoe, and Kyiv Radio Plant have so far not been damaged by the invaders. This could be because the Kremlin still hopes to acquire control over these high-profile facilities despite Russia’s military setbacks, he said. Co-founded by Ukrainian engineers Misha Rudominski and Vitaliy Yemets, Promin Aerospace closely cooperates with the state-run space industry giants. As part of its international expansion plans, the startup has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium to carry out a launch from the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean and has prepared a memorandum with the UK’s Spaceport 1 to launch from Scotland. “Our autophagic rocket engines will enable efficient, cost-friendly suborbital and later orbital launches,” he said, adding that the company’s launch vehicle will weigh 100 kilograms, making it one of the world’s lightest orbital rockets. The startup’s “new round of investments will be used to expand the team further and develop suborbital rockets. The first step is to re-test the technology by independent contractors such as Yuzhmash to identify possible flaws,” Kravchuk said. In the meantime, he says that research and development work continues at Promin Aerospace alongside wartime struggle. “Our engineering team has decided to continue its technical development work along with additional daily responsibilities to protect their families,” according to Kravchuk.
Boeing executives are meeting with startups at the Satellite 2022 conference with an eye toward investment and collaboration. “We’re looking for those technologies that would make our platforms and programs better,” Teresa Segura, Boeing’s Applied Innovation leader, told SpaceNews. Since spinning off its venture capital arm, HorizonX Ventures, last year to establish AEI HorizonX, a strategic partnership with private equity investor AE Industrial Partners, Boeing has focused on identifying promising technology, while AE Industrial Partners manages the investment portfolio and performs financial due diligence. With $62.3 billion in 2021 revenue, Chicago-based Boeing, is one of the world’s largest aerospace companies. In addition to playing a leading role in supporting the international space station and serving as prime contractor for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, Boeing produces commercial and military aircraft, satellites, communication systems and provides a variety of logistics and training services. Still, the 106-year-old company is eager to identify “innovative solutions that are going to move us forward for the next century,” Segura said . AEI HorizonX is raising money for two venture capital funds based in part on the expertise Boeing provides and Boeing’s promise as a potential customer for the startups. Specifically, Segura and her colleagues are focused on technologies with potential applications throughout Boeing’s business — like edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, antennas, propulsion, model-based engineering and predictive maintenance. “Our focus is on how startups can help us solve technology needs and fill gaps,” Segura said. “There are needs and gaps around the sustainability of future mobility and supplier management transformation. Those touch on space but some of the technologies are still relevant for other domains.” Startups also could help Boeing create more vertically integrated products and services “because they’re a lot more agile,” Segura said. After investing in startups, Boeing tests promising applications of the startup’s technology. “We make the investment and then we put in some money to test that use case and see if the investment thesis proves out,” Segura said. In addition to supporting existing programs, Boeing is eager to identify technology that could lead to new lines of business. The company’s 2019 HorizonX investment in Immfly of Spain, for example, led to Boeing Direct Digital, a wireless inflight entertainment platform and a new line of business for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. While meeting with startup founders, Boeing executives are discussing a wide range of resources the aerospace giant can offer aside from investment. “We can partner with these startups and do things like proofs of concept and test use cases even before investment,” Segura said. For example, Boeing can allocate funds to verifying that a startup’s technology is compatible with a Boeing product. Boeing also can work with startups on research and development contracts or sign on as a subcontractor for a startup’s Small Business Innovation Research program. “We’re open to other ways of working with startups that don’t necessarily involve investment,” Segura said. AEI HorizonX does not publicly disclose the amount of money raised for each fund. AEI HorizonX portfolio companies include Accion Systems, BridgeComm, EP Systems, Immfly, Isotropic and Skylo Technologies. While Boeing’s investment in British antenna manufacturer Isotropic Systems, a company developing multi-band electronically steerable antennas, is designed to benefit both companies, it also is intended to support an ecosystem that is important to Boeing’s government customers. All of the aerospace prime contractors invest in technology that benefits the whole ecosystem based on the premise that a rising tide raises all boats, Segura said.
WASHINGTON – Within a decade, satellite mobility providers expect to offer customers seamless transitions between terrestrial and satellite networks. Spanish satellite operator Hispasat, for example, envisions “a fully interoperable 5G- based network, melding terrestrial and multi-orbit satellite infrastructure into a single network” within five to 10 years, Ignacio Sanchis, Hispasat chief commercial officer, said during a March 22 panel at the Satellite 2022 conference. Jay Yass, Omnispace chief corporate development officer, predicted universal, global connectivity directly to consumer and enterprise devices within three to four years. While universal connectivity is possible, it will require significant collaboration among satellite communications and terrestrial communications firms as well as satellite equipment manufacturers. It also may require some standards to ensure that ground segments can communicate with the various communications networks. For the moment, satellite communications constellations are being designed to communicate in different waveforms and to operate at different frequencies. And while some satellites work as bent pipes, simply broadcasting data sent to space, others process the onboard the satellite, creating signals that are difficult for ground stations to interpret. That’s not to say that it will be impossible to achieve global connectivity, but manufacturing equipment to communicate with the various constellations will be challenging. The question is “how much complexity and money do you want to budget to get that right,” asked Louis Dubin, Comtech senior vice president for product management. Standards, which would ease the task, are a controversial subject among satellite mobility providers. “People like to talk about standards, but when thinking about how you differentiate your product or service, standards need to go out the window,” said Globalstar CEO David Kagain. “It’s really critical to have your own device or your own chipset that is different than what the competitors are doing. That is your core value proposition as a company.” Standards also can constrain innovation. “How do you drive standardization where you need to, but then allow yourself to innovate to differentiate the user experience,” McRae asked. Still, it may be worth the trouble and expense to adopt standards because it would make networks more valuable, said Neil McRae, chief architect for BT Group, formerly called British Telecom. As the network “becomes more valuable, it becomes more viable,” McRae said. “Customers depend upon it more and they use it more. I think that’s all within our grasp if we collaborate. When you look at 5G solutions, they are all about collaboration with different partners.” Adoption of standards also could alleviate some of the problems satellite equipment manufacturers are experiencing related to the global microchip shortage because it would be easier to swap out equipment from various suppliers. “If I have a network with a proprietary technology from Vendor A, I cannot count on Vendor B,” Sanchis said. “The more flexible your ecosystem is, the more solutions you can try to find.” Globalstar has “in excess of 20,000 devices on backorder that can’t be built right now because of the shortage,” Kagan said. Rather than a temporary problem, McRae expects supply chain woes to become the new normal. “How you manage your supply chain for the next five to 10 years is going to be crucial,” he said. Ground equipment manufacturers, meanwhile, are developing technology that is as flexible as possible to communicate with existing and new satellite constellations. Comtech Telecommunication Corp. unveiled its latest modem March 22, high-speed CDM-780 Gateway modem, designed to support emerging constellations by communicating with satellites in geostationary, medium and low Earth orbit. “This is a multi-gigabit modem,” Dubin told SpaceNews . “It is by far the fastest modem that our industry has now. We can do almost 7.5 gigabit per second in one box, 2.5 gigabit per link and we have three links.” At the conference, Isotropic System unveiled its Axiom-X modem for mobile applications. The modem is designed to support high-speed communications across geostationary and nongeostationary orbit constellations.
Indonesia’s Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN) said March 23 it has ordered a high-throughput satellite from Boeing to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2023. The Nusantara Lima Satellite aims to deliver 160 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity across the Indonesian archipelago and surrounding countries. PSN said the satellite will augment capacity on the SATRIA-1 satellite Thales Alenia Space is building for a launch in 2023, which together would make it one of the biggest satellite capacity providers in Asia. “This project shows that despite the pandemic situation, the acceleration of digital transformation continues to be developed in providing connectivity across the Indonesian Archipelago,” said Johnny G. Plate, Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Informatics. Plate said Nusantara Lima Satellite will provide 140 Gbps of capacity over Indonesia. About 80 Gbps will be used by BAKTI, an Indonesian government agency, for what it calls Hot Backup Satellite (HBS) to deliver services to remote places in Indonesia where terrestrial communications are unavailable. Plate said “the balance of 20 Gbps will be serving Malaysia and the Philippines.” Boeing, which delivered Indonesia’s first telecoms satellite Palapa A1 in 1976, said the satellite will be based on its 702MP platform. Kratos and Hughes Network Systems are among the ground segment suppliers for the Nusantara Lima network, PSN said. Thales Alenia Space announced Oct. 28 it is building another Indonesian satellite dubbed HTS 113BT for Telkomsat, a subsidiary of Indonesian state-owned telecoms operator Telkom, for a 2024 delivery. HTS 113BT aims to fill a gap left by the loss of the Nusantara-2 satellite in a 2020 Chinese launch failure.
WASHINGTON – Geospatial intelligence company Ursa Space raised $16 million in a Series C investment round led by Dorilton Ventures. Existing investors who participated in the round include Razor’s Edge Ventures, RRE Ventures and Paladin Capital Group. Ursa creates products and services with data from electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and radio frequency monitoring constellations. With funding from the round announced March 21 at the Satellite 2022 Conference, Ursa will expand its staff and invest in speeding up delivery of analysis-ready satellite data, Adam Maher, Ursa CEO and founder, told SpaceNews . The importance of SAR, which collects data in all weather conditions, day and night, is being demonstrated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Early this month, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, asked on Twitter for commercial SAR to track the movement of Russian troops and vehicles at night and through pervasive cloud cover. While government agencies were early adopters of SAR, Ursa is expanding its sales organization that supports emerging markets for Earth-observation data like supply chain optimization, logistics and insurance. SAR is essential for observing ports and oil storage facilities around, which are often obscured by clouds, Maher said. Since it was founded in 2014, Ursa has focused on easing access to satellite data and analytics. The company tasks, collects and processes data from hundreds of Earth-observation satellites. Ursa provides access to more than 16 million images, including more than 10 million SAR images, through the Amazon Web Services Data Exchange.
Launch vehicle developer Firefly Aerospace has raised $75 million in a new funding round as the company, now under new ownership, prepares for a second launch of its Alpha rocket this spring. Private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, or AEI, announced March 22 that it led the $75 million Series B round in Firefly, a month after it announced it was acquiring the “significant stake” of the space transportation company that had been owned by Noosphere Ventures for an undisclosed sum. AEI said in the statement that it has closed that acquisition. The companies did not disclose the valuation of the round other than it was higher than a $75 million Series A round Firefly raised in May 2021 that valued the company at more than $1 billion. “Firefly now has the resources to deliver new innovations in space launch vehicles,” Kirk Konert, partner at AEI, said in a statement about the funding round. “Having recently notched some significant milestones, the company is at an inflection point, and our investments will allow Firefly to take advantage of the significant opportunities ahead.” “These investments allow Firefly to build on the momentum from last year’s financing, and better position us for future growth,” Tom Markusic, chief executive of Firefly, said in the statement. Firefly has been developing the Alpha launch vehicle, which made its first orbital launch attempt last September. The failure of one of the four engines in the rocket’s first stage seconds after liftoff kept the vehicle from reaching orbit. The company, though, halted work at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California for a second launch in December after Noosphere, owned by Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov, announced it would sell its approximately 50% stake in Firefly at the request of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Polyakov said in the statement that the AEI deal “provides a clear path for Firefly to achieve lasting success,” adding that Noosphere returned “a multiple of our original investment” into the launch company. With the sale complete, Firefly says it’s now preparing for a second Alpha launch from Vandenberg in the second quarter of the year. The company recently completed testing of both stages of that Alpha vehicle at its Texas test site ahead of shipment to Vandenberg. “We did learn a lot from the first flight and fixed the minor problems, and are ready to get back to the launch pad,” Markusic said in a video shown during a session of the Satellite 2022 conference March 21. He said that the first Alpha vehicle required 18 tests “to get it fully functional,” while for the second flight, “both the vehicle and the team performed flawlessly on the first attempt.” Jason Mello, president of Firefly’s space transport services division, emphasized during the conference panel Firefly’s work beyond Alpha, including its Blue Ghost lunar lander it is building for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. That lander recently completed its critical design review. “We’re going to be back on the pad, hopefully in a few months, to be able to launch Flight 2 and become orbital,” he said of Alpha. Firefly is also continuing planning for a larger vehicle, called Beta. “It will accelerate our look at the entire marketplace,” he said, with an eye toward filling the gap in the market created by the withdrawal of the Soyuz. “There’s a number of customers out there that are looking at what we can do, and we’re providing very unique options to get there where they need to go at the end of the day.”
SpaceX has raised prices for both its Starlink broadband service and for dedicated and rideshare launches, in some cases by up to 20%, citing inflation. The company advised customers of its Starlink service March 22 of a price increase for both the service itself as well as the terminal. The cost of the service, which had been $99 in the United States, increased 11% to $110. The terminal, which cost $499 in the U.S., increased to $549 for those who had already paid a deposit and $599 for new customers, the latter a 20% increase. Starlink customers in other countries have reported getting similar notices of price increases. “The sole purpose of these adjustments is to keep pace with rising inflation,” SpaceX said in the message to customers, which also mentioned “excessive levels of inflation.” The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported March 10 that inflation over the previous 12 months was running at 7.9% before seasonal adjustments, the highest rate in four decades. Starlink is not the only service where SpaceX has recently increased prices. SpaceX’s smallsat rideshare program is now charging $1.1 million to place up to 200 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbits, with additional mass costing $5,500 per kilogram. The company has previously charged $1 million for up to 200 kilograms and $5,000 per kilogram for additional mass. The new prices represent a 10% increase. “Pricing adjusted in March 2022 to account for excessive levels of inflation,” the company stated on its website. SpaceX has also hiked prices for dedicated Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. A price sheet on the company website now lists a price of $67 million for a Falcon 9 and $97 million for a Falcon Heavy. A version of that document from earlier this year listed prices of $62 million for the Falcon 9 and $90 million for the Falcon Heavy. The new prices reflect increases of about 8%. “Pricing adjustments made in March 2022 to account for excessive levels of inflation,” the company states on the price sheet. “Missions purchased in 2022 but flown beyond 2023 may be subject to additional adjustments due to inflation.” SpaceX executives speaking at the Satellite 2022 conference here did not bring up cost increases of either Starlink or launch services. An increase in launch costs in particular is unlikely to have a significant effect on demand for Falcon launches given the constrained supply of competing launch vehicles currently. “We’ve been both lucky and successful rolling out a capability that is near-global,” Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said of Starlink during a panel at the conference March 22. “At least before Starlink there were many very unhappy customers of broadband in the United States, so we’re learning how to make them happy,” she added. “We are learning as we go, and we are getting new customers daily.” SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, who also runs automaker Tesla, did complain about the effects of inflation on both companies recently. “Tesla & SpaceX are seeing significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials & logistics,” he tweeted March 13.
Fred Kennedy, a former Pentagon official and veteran space executive , announced March 22 he is leading a new startup to commercialize nuclear thermal rocket propulsion. The startup, named Dark Fission Space Systems, “aims to accelerate the expansion of the space economy beyond low Earth orbit through the development and deployment of the first commercially available nuclear thermal rocket engine,” he said. Kennedy said advances in the space and manufacturing industries make it possible to “produce a safe and reliable in-space propulsion capability with performance characteristics exceeding anything available today.” For space activities beyond Earth’s orbit, because of the immense distances involved, current propulsion solutions are typically either inefficient or very slow, said Kennedy. Nuclear thermal rockets could provide short transit times and high fuel economy. Kennedy was previously president of the space services company Momentus and vice president of launch services provider Astra. Before that, he was director of the Defense Department’s Space Development Agency and director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Tactical Technology Office. While at DARPA from 2017 to 2019, Kennedy said, he started the agency’s nuclear space propulsion program known as DRACO , short for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations. Dark Fission will seek government and industry partners to pursue the on-orbit demonstration of an operational nuclear thermal rocket engine within the next five years, said Kennedy. “We’re focused on providing a commercial capability first and foremost, but we won’t rule out work on behalf of the federal government.” He believes the technology could be used for orbital transfer and lunar access services or by “anyone with an interest in deploying their gear quickly and efficiently to geosynchronous orbit or beyond.” Dark Fission co-founders are former vice president of Space Micro Michael Jacox and space entrepreneur Gregory Loboda. “We have prospective investors and we are working now to secure funds,” Kennedy told SpaceNews . A commercial entrant into the nuclear propulsion rocket arena “may well be the stabilizing element that has long been missing,” he said. “We need a strong, sustained push to get this capability to orbit, and enlisting the support of the private sector is what I believe will finally bring a nuclear thermal rocket to market.”
Changes in the geopolitical landscape following Russia’s war in Ukraine are pushing space companies to tighten international supply chains amid a renewed focus on security. “We’re having to scrutinize our supply chain even more,” Tina Ghataore, chief commercial officer at Germany-based optical communications terminal maker Mynaric, said March 22 on a panel for the Satellite 2022 conference here. “We already have restrictions on where the components and parts can come from, specifically electronics,” she said, but “that has just expanded, and that list is just going to grow.” Mynaric, which is developing terminals for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), already steers clear of Chinese components but is now scouring its network of suppliers for Russian ties. Ghataore also said the company is not just increasingly scrutinizing hardware to protect against new threats but also at the software level, where the company is adopting new standards and redoubling efforts to be “very careful about what goes into the makeup of our products.” While strengthening supply chains are important, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg highlighted a greater need to fortify cybersecurity networks amid increasingly sophisticated threats. Dankberg said he expects more attempts to compromise satellite networks following a February cyberattack on Viasat’s KA-SAT network, which distributes services through a third party as work continues to integrate its acquisition from Eutelsat. “There will be worse cyber attacks than that if we’re not really vigilant,” Dankberg warned. Speaking to SpaceNews on the conference’s sidelines, Dankberg added that Viasat uses a variety of artificial intelligence and other tools to guard against persistent attacks on the satellite operator’s network. “The likelihood that we would have detected that attack had those tools been used on that network is very, very high,” he said. Geopolitical impact “It certainly feels to me as if the Cold War” has restarted, OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson said during a panel discussion. The LEO broadband operator paused its constellation deployment after suspending its use of Russian Soyuz rockets. On March 21, OneWeb said it has a deal with SpaceX to resume launches this year. Masterson called for more regulation to address a “reality whereby the geopolitical [environment] has changed.” However, while the conflict in Ukraine has underscored how important and strategic space is, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg does not expect heightened scrutiny to materially affect how the industry already operates. “There have always been barriers to the ability to work with any company that you want to work with,” Goldberg said, including “massive restrictions around technology sharing” under U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations. “Space cries out for collaboration, given that it is a commons up there but also given that it’s expensive and you need countries working together and governments working together to fully leverage space,” he said, “but we’re not all able to work with each other just given the realities of geopolitics. “And I think Ukraine reinforces that, but I’m not sure that it changes it that much.”
Swarm Technologies was the unidentified customer of an Astra Space launch this month that placed 16 of its tiny satellites into orbit. The March 15 launch of Astra’s Rocket 3.3 from Kodiak Island, Alaska , carried the OreSat0 cubesat from the Portland State Aerospace Society as well as a payload by NearSpace Launch that remained attached to the rocket’s upper stage as planned. The launch also included payloads from a third, unnamed customer. Neither Astra nor Spaceflight, which arranged for the launch, disclosed the identity of that customer or how many payloads it had on board. U.S. Space Force tracking data on the Space-Track.org online database listed 20 objects associated with the launch. The large number prompted industry speculation that Swarm was the customer, since it has built and launched dozens of its SpaceBEE satellites that are one-quarter the size of a single-unit cubesat and thus could be easily accommodated on the rocket. Space-Track did not list the names of any of the objects linked to the launch, giving them only letter designations. In a March 21 email newsletter, Swarm mentioned a recent launch. “We recently launched 16 new VHF satellites into a 5:30 a.m. LTDN orbit, which splits our largest gap between orbital planes in half,” the company stated. LTDN, or local time of descending node, refers to the time when the satellites cross the equator from north to south. The newsletter did not mention when the satellites were launched or by whom. Sara Spangelo, chief executive of Swarm, confirmed in an interview after a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22 that her company — acquired by SpaceX in 2021 — was the unidentified customer for the launch. She said she expected the formal identification of the Swarm satellites to show up in Space-Track “within days.” Swarm plans additional launches to fill in gaps in the constellation and provide more frequent passes. The newsletter referred to “four committed upcoming launches this year.” That will reduce latencies for Swarm’s internet-of-things tracking services to less than one hour, at the 90th percentile, by June. Those latencies will drop to less than 30 minutes for locations poleward of 30 degrees latitude by August. “We’re excited to keep filling out the constellation, just like we were planning prior to the merger,” Spangelo said. She added that the Astra launch was a one-off event. Future launches would likely be on SpaceX’s Transporter series of Falcon 9 rideshare missions. Swarm is a rare case of a company acquired by SpaceX. During a separate panel discussion at Satellite 2022 March 22, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the only other company SpaceX has acquired in its 20-year history was a machine shop several years earlier. “It was a very interesting company,” she said of Swarm, citing its ability to build out a satellite network despite limited resources. “We were quite interested in how did they do it, how did they pull it together on that kind of budget with that number of people.” “And the people are great, so that was really what that was about,” she added. “A very like-minded company, albeit much tinier.”
The U.S. military traditionally relies on a core group of defense contractors to ensure it has access to critical supplies and equipment at all times. But as space becomes increasingly important to military operations, DoD should address supply risks in the space sector given the volatility of the market, experts said March 21 at the Satellite 2022 conference. In aerospace and defense, the government takes a long view on what capabilities it needs and where they will come from, said J. Armand Musey, president and founder of Summit Ridge Group, an investment banker and advisory firm. “They know what Lockheed is doing or what Boeing is doing and so forth,” Musey said. When it comes to space, “now you have a lot of entrepreneurs really mixing up the market. And the government really doesn’t have a good idea of what’s going to be competitive in five years.” “The market is changing so rapidly,” Musey said. Companies, especially lower tier suppliers, also are going bankrupt at a rapid rate, he added. “So it’s hard to predict what capacity will be available where and so the government has to take a more active role if it wants to assure that it has the capacity it needs in certain areas, at certain times.” This is not a trivial matter considering that “space is increasingly a strategic asset,” said Musey. This will be a challenge for the newly created U.S. Space Force, he said. It will need to make sure it has key capabilities within U.S. borders, or at least among allies. “And you can see that happening in Europe right now where they’re putting an enormous amount of money into new launch technologies to try to catch up with SpaceX, for example.” Reversal of globalization What is happening now is almost a reversal of the globalization tide seen over the last 20 to 30 years in the post Cold War era of everything moving towards a globally interdependent supply chain,. A global pandemic combined with growing nationalism has driven many countries, including U.S. allies, to create public-private partnerships to bolster their domestic industrial base, Musey noted. It’s a risk for the U.S. military to be dependent on foreign suppliers that could turn in a different direction politically or just be cut off because of a global pandemic or other kinds of events. The government, for that reason, should rethink its business model in order to protect sources of supply, he said. Public private partnerships are one approach. The United Kingdom’s Skynet satellite fleet is a case in point. When the U.K. funded the development of the military’s Skynet broadband satellites, he said, “it was a true public private partnership.” Paradigm Secure Communications, which is now part of Airbus, built and operates the satellites. The U.K. government is guaranteed a certain amount of capacity but Airbus can sell the excess capacity commercially “and get the kinds of returns that they expect as a corporation,” Musey said. “I think finding ways to incorporate that approach more into the procurement model for government will help strengthen the government’s options in terms of technology as well as help secure the national defense so it’s less dependent on outside supply chains.” In the current environment, he said, “the government has to be much more aggressive at understanding what’s happening and understanding where it needs to invest .” Which suppliers will survive? David Myers, CEO of satellite communications services provider Ultisat, said customers want services from cutting-edge commercial low Earth orbit satellites, Myers said. But one of the challenges is they don’t know “which ones are real or viable, and which ones are going to stand the test of time.” Conceivably some of them will launch quickly, “but they’ll fizzle out because they’ll run out of funding and they won’t get enough market share,” Myers said. “There is a desire and a willingness to leverage commercial and industrial space technology development. There’s an interest to use more commercial wherever the government can,” he said. “But I think the contract mechanisms, the vehicles that the government uses to buy products and services haven’t caught up yet.” The Space Force, for instance, has said it no longer wants to buy monolithic satellite infrastructure and wants to move to commercial satcom services . “And if it works great, and if it doesn’t, the government hasn’t taken the risk, the commercial industry has taken it.” That approach disincentives private investment in capabilities for the government, said Myers. “The contract mechanisms aren’t set up to allow commercial organizations to recoup their costs and to lease equipment over time, when contracts tend to be one base year plus multiple option years.” When it comes to working with the private sector, “the government is evolving in bursts,” Myers said. “There is interest and willingness to buy more commercial, to buy managed services versus buying fixed asset type infrastructure but I think there’s a lot of work to do to evolve to the point that they can really harness and leverage the capabilities of industry. “
Despite all the investment in low Earth orbit broadband megaconstellations, operators of geostationary satellites argue they can offer more cost-effective services. During a Satellite 2022 panel March 21, executives pointed to innovations such as very small GEO satellites and software-defined payloads that allow new GEO satellites to provide broadband services at lower costs than LEO systems, albeit with higher latency. “There’s no debate, at least for me, that from a cost-per-bit perspective and total cost of ownership, there’s no better economics than GEO, period,” said Bruno Fromont, chief technology officer of Intelsat. One reason for that is the ability to focus coverage over densely populated areas that LEO systems lack. “You have this illusion that you can launch a lot of LEO satellites and have this big amount of capacity, but 75% of those bits are wasted,” he said, because the satellites are passing over unpopulated areas. “If you really want a lot of capacity, it’s going to be very expensive.” “There’s no better way of covering high-density regions than with a GEO satellite,” said Adrian Morris, executive vice president of Hughes. “The large GEOs are very efficient. They create the lowest cost per bit.” The widespread implementation of software-defined flexible payloads on GEO satellites also helps them be competitive. “Flexible GEO satellites, I think, are the answer for the GEO operators to the LEO constellation competition,” said Hadi Alhassani, vice president and chief strategy officer of Arabsat. “It puts us in the race with the LEO constellations.” He said the uptake of flexible payloads helped the GEO market recover from a sharp drop in orders several years ago, when operators held off on making investments to see how the LEO constellations would take shape. “Now with the flexible satellites, the GEO operators are willing to commit their capex,” he said. “You’re going to see more and more ‘flex sat’ orders this year and the following years.” Small or “micro GEO” satellites have helped the field remain competitive. “We offer groups and countries and companies the ability to have their own satellite that had been out of reach before,” said Mike Mancini, chief financial officer of Astranis, a company that has signed several orders for its very small GEO satellites. “We think it’s all about driving cost down and access up.” One drawback of GEO systems compared to LEO constellations is latency because of their much higher orbits. Some operators have touted hybrid or “multi-orbit” solutions that combine GEO and LEO systems to provide low latency from LEO satellites for some applications and the better economics of GEO satellites for others. Alhassani, though, was skeptical that hybrid networks will be used much in the near term. 
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said of “orbit agnostic” systems. “For the foreseeable future it’s going to be siloed: you either have to go for GEO services or LEO services.” The ever-increasing appetite for connectivity may drive demand for both LEO and GEO systems. “The demand is infinite. It is insatiable,” said Mancini. “We need to throw everything up in space we possibly can and have that work together.”
WASHINGTON – Australian communications company Telstra announced plans March 22 to build and maintain three dedicated teleports to provide satellite gateway services in the Southern Hemisphere for OneWeb’s broadband constellation. The teleports, spread across Australia, are being built as part of a 10-year agreement between Telstra and OneWeb announced at the Satellite 2022 conference. Satellite constellation operators continue to forge ties with telecommunications companies that own and operate terrestrial and subsea assets, including fiber networks, IP backbones and data centers. The first OneWeb teleport, scheduled to begin operations in July, is located in Darwin Tivendale. Telstra plans to complete work on two additional sites in Charlton Toowoomba and Wangara, Perth, Western Australia later this year. Each facility is designed to provide turnkey ground station support for OneWeb’s growing fleet of low-earth orbit satellites. “OneWeb had exacting requirements from the outset, and we worked in close partnership with them from site selection through construction,” Vish Vishwanathan, Telstra Americas vice president for wholesale and satellite, said in a written statement. “Teleports are complex sites involving access to secure and resilient infrastructure and on-the-ground expertise, which Telstra has provided to OneWeb throughout this project.” OneWeb has 428 satellites in orbit, about two-thirds of its constellation. For now, OneWeb is providing coverage above the 50th parallel North, reaching areas in Alaska, Canada and the Arctic that often lack broadband. “Low Earth Orbit satellite technology is transforming the global connectivity landscape, not only by creating new business opportunities, but also giving more businesses, communities and governments the internet access they need for progress,” Michele Franci, OneWeb chief of delivery and operations, said in a statement. “More connectivity options benefit everyone and our approach in establishing strategic partnerships with experienced providers like Telstra is core to how we deliver the OneWeb mission.” Earlier this month OneWeb and Telstra announced a memorandum of understanding to look at ways to improve digital connectivity for Telstra customers in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. “We see lots of opportunities for our consumer, small business and enterprise customers using LEO satellite connectivity – from backhaul to back-up for resiliency, from internet of things to supporting emergency services, from home broadband to supporting agritech,” Andrew Penn, Telstra CEO said in a statement.
Leonardo DRS, a provider of satellite communications services to the U.S. government, announced March 22 it is selling its satcom business to commercial satellite operator SES in a $450 million deal. Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions — a business unit of defense contractor Leonardo DRS — is one of a handful of network integrators that provide managed satcom services to the Defense Department and other government agencies. The Pentagon relies on integrators to stitch together networks from multiple vendors. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of Leonardo DRS and of SES and the deal is expected to be completed by the second half of 2022 subject to regulatory approvals, the companies said. “While the DRS GES business has flourished, Leonardo DRS has shifted its portfolio focus, and selling it now makes the most business sense,” said Bill Lynn, CEO of Leonardo DRS. SES plans to organize the DRS GES business unit under SES Government Solutions subsidiary of SES. The company said the investment accelerates SES’s strategy of growing its defense and government business. “SES’s revenue from serving the U.S. government would double in the size with the combination of GES and SES GS,” said Pete Hoene, president and CEO of SES Government Solutions. SES operates a fleet of more than 70 geosynchronous and medium Earth orbit satellites. 
Lockheed Martin plans to launch to orbit later this year a new satellite bus the company designed for both the commercial and government markets. The first launch of the LM400 will be a demonstration mission to test the spacecraft and prove it out, Lockheed Martin’s executive vice president Robert Lightfoot said March 21. He is the head of the company’s space business based in Denver, Colorado. Lockheed plans to offer the bus as a lower cost alternative to its traditional bespoke designs, Lightfoot said during a lunch meeting with reporters on the sidelines of the Satellite 2022 conference. “We’re building a bus that we think fits a lot of the market segments that are required,” he said. “This is transformational for us,” said Lightfoot. “We are going make these buses not exquisite, not a one off, but a bus that we can use for several applications and that’s part of a common design and common hardware that drives my costs down and I can pass that cost on to several customers.” Lockheed Martin is developing a number of different payloads that will launch on LM400 for the demonstrations. Lightfoot said the LM400 already has attracted potential commercial and government customers which he could not disclose. At about 1,700 kilograms including payload, the bus would compete in the mid-size satellite market which is the “sweet spot for us,” said Lightfoot. For its small satellites, Lockheed uses buses made by Terran Orbital’s Tyvak NanoSatellites, a company in which it has made a strategic investment. “The LM400 would not compete with Tyvak,” he said. The satellites will be launched by ABL Space Systems, a new launch company that has yet to fly its RS1 rocket. Lockheed Martin is a strategic investor in ABL and signed a long-term deal to launch dozens of missions on RS1 over the next decade. ABL is also Lockheed’s partner in the United Kingdom where Lockheed is working to develop U.K. launch operations from Shetland Space Centre. The RS1 was expected to launch its first mission in early 2022 but suffered a setback in a test accident in January. “We’re working with them trying to help them get through the challenges they’ve had recently,” said Lightfoot. “They still have to get through the mishap investigation.”
Rwanda-backed megaconstellation startup E-Space said March 21 it has contracted Rocket Lab to launch three demo satellites in the second quarter of this year. The spacecraft aim to validate systems and technology for a broadband network that, according to founder and CEO Greg Wyler, will use satellites with significantly smaller cross-sections than other megaconstellations to reduce the risk of in-orbit collisions. Despite having spectrum filings for “ potentially over one hundred thousand ” satellites through Rwanda, Wyler says E-space will have a net positive impact on the space environment because its satellites will capture and deorbit debris too small to track. While the demo satellites E-Space is building in-house will not include this capability, the startup plans to begin serial satellite production in 2023. The first three demo satellites are slated to launch aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula. “E-Space will increase the speed for constellation delivery from years to months, allowing new opportunities for more people to access space-based platforms,” Wyler said in a statement. In early February, E-Space announced it had raised $50 million in seed funding. 
Correction at 8:55 pm Eastern Time on March 21: Spaceflight was notified of SpaceX’s decision by text. SAN FRANCISCO – SpaceX is severing ties with launch services company Spaceflight Inc. after years of working closely together, a move that surprised Spaceflight executives. In an email sent to companies that send satellites to orbit on its popular small satellite rideshare missions, the “SpaceX Rideshare Team” said SpaceX “will no longer be flying or working with Spaceflight Industries after the currently manifested missions. We look forward to reliably launching all customers currently on our manifest and growing our relationships with new operators as well.” Spaceflight was notified of SpaceX’s decision by text minutes before the email was sent to rideshare customers. “We were surprised to learn of it on Friday, and were not given any insight into the reasoning behind the decision,” Jodi Sorensen, Spaceflight marketing vice president, said by email. “We continue to reach out to SpaceX in an attempt to discuss their position but haven’t heard back yet.” In December, SpaceX removed a Spaceflight Sherpa tug from the SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-3 rideshare mission because the propulsion system, provided by Benchmark Space Systems, developed a leak. Then, SpaceX declined to fly another Sherpa tug on the SpaceX rideshare mission scheduled to launch in April because of concerns about unrelated environmental factors affecting the spacecraft installed on Sherpa. “Sherpa itself was subjected to all expected launch environments with industry standard factors,” Sorensen said by email. “Spaceflight and SpaceX continued to discuss analysis and test products up until Spaceflight was informed that SpaceX would not fly the vehicle, which was the day of final integration to the SpaceX vehicle.” SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. SpaceX, a leading satellite rideshare provider, sent 105 satellites to orbit on the Jan. 13 Transporter-3 flight. SpaceX accommodated 88 satellites on the June Transporter-2 mission and 143 on the first Transporter rideshare launched in January 2021. Launch integration is big business. Established and new launch providers rely on companies including Spaceflight, Exolaunch and D-Orbit to integrate cubesats and microsatellites as secondary payloads or on dedicated rideshare missions. “We bring down the launch costs per satellite, supply essential mission hardware, take care of the end-to-end mission management, provide environmental testing and perform the satellite-to-launch vehicle integration,” an Exolaunch executive said by email. Companies that have relied on Spaceflight to integrate satellites for SpaceX rideshare missions are considering their options for launching satellites beyond the current manifest. Firms that opt to book rideshare flights directly with SpaceX pay more than $1 million per payload, making it more expensive than relying on a rideshare provider. “SpaceX is renowned for its reliability and overall performance as the leading global launch provider,” an Exolaunch official said. “We are proud that SpaceX delegates significant portions of the technical work to the launch integrators, who must ensure that they match and meet SpaceX’s technical requirements and high standards. If these requirements and high standards are not met, then the safety of the whole mission can be placed in jeopardy, which is an unacceptable risk.” Spaceflight is a dominant player in the launch integration business. In 2021, Spaceflight supported the launch of 81 spacecraft from nine countries on 11 launches. In addition to integrating satellites for SpaceX, Spaceflight works with launch providers Rocket Lab and Astra Space. The propulsion leak on Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC vehicle was discovered about three weeks before the Jan. 13 SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-3 launch. Root-cause analysis of the leak traced the problem to an oxidizer circuit in the propulsion system. The circuit actuated per design. “Unfortunately, a design flaw allowed some trapped liquid to be vented during the process,” Sorensen said. “Out of utmost concern, Spaceflight decided not to fly the Sherpa vehicle,” Sorensen said. “All affected customers were re-manifested within weeks, and have already flown on alternative launches or are scheduled to fly in the next two months. Spaceflight has since worked with the vendor to address the root cause, and has subsequently received approval from SpaceX to fly the system on an upcoming Starlink mission.” Regarding the upcoming launch, Spaceflight began working with SpaceX to address concerns about “the analysis and test results of Sherpa and its customer payloads” as soon as it became aware of them. Despite Spaceflight’s “best efforts, SpaceX chose not to fly the Sherpa vehicle until the analysis and test approaches could be better understood,” Sorensen said. “We continue to work with SpaceX to understand their decision and address any concerns for future missions.” Meanwhile, Spaceflight has found rides for all the affected satellites. “Several will continue to fly on this mission, while the others have been rebooked on alternative launches,” Sorensen said. 
Attracting and retaining talent is becoming a bigger concern for the space industry than securing investments, according to early-stage space investors speaking at the Satellite 2022 trade show here. There are currently about 200,000 job openings in the aerospace sector, according to Michael Mealing, general partner at space investor Starbridge Venture Capital. “Across the entire sector, the ability to find talent is probably much more important to the ability of companies to deliver than the rest of the economy — what’s going on geopolitically [and the] financial situation,” Mealing said. He told conference delegates that space companies are being forced to search non-traditional sources for talent, including companies with early retirement programs. “You’re getting people coming back to this sector who are in their 70s,” he said, while companies are also doubling down on internship programs on the other side of the age spectrum. “People are just getting creative [and] getting outside of their comfort zones,” he said. He added that some companies outsourced engineering “to places like Ukraine where they can find new people. That comes with risks, as we’re already seeing.” Hiring more internationally, leveraging the trend toward remote working following the pandemic, is another route space companies are taking to tackle workforce shortages, said Seraphim Capital CEO Mark Boggett. “It remains to seen how they’re going to cope with such an internationally distributed workforce when the world comes back to [normality] again,” Boggett added. Half of Seraphim’s portfolio companies sell to the defense market, Boggett said, and have seen “very significant engagement with customers” in the last quarter amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. “A number of companies have hit their annual budgets already for the year,” he said. These companies are trying to hire staff to grow and are “now hitting capacity constraints” to serve this growing demand, according to Boggett. Emerging funding needs However, an uptick in demand from defense customers for imagery and other satellite services related to the conflict in Eastern Europe is not reflected in the share prices of space companies that have recently gone public. The majority of space companies that used mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to list on public stock exchanges in 2021 continue to trade below their initial listing price despite gains elsewhere in the defense sector. Michael Collett, managing partner at Promus Ventures, said the ability of a space company to work through workforce, supply chain and other challenges facing the sector will ultimately drive up valuations. “Execution is always the way out of the bag,” Collett said. This will be important to get on top of as 50-75% of recently listed space companies will need to return to the financial markets in the next couple of years to raise more funds, noted Phillip Ingle, managing director of Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division. “In the environment we’re in now, seeing who’s successful and who’s not is [ultimately going to determine] which businesses are successful,” he said. Companies searching for financing with lower valuations could also see them become targets of acquisitions .
The Air Force Research Laboratory is asking companies to submit ideas on how they would design and develop a spacecraft to monitor outer space beyond Earth’s orbit. AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate is planning an experiment called Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS). The satellite would operate beyond geosynchronous orbit, in the region near the moon. The project is being managed by the Space Force’s Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC). Only members of the consortium can view the details of the posting and can compete for contracts. Submissions are due April 1. “The CHPS program will deliver space domain awareness in a region that is one thousand times greater than our current area of responsibility,” said Michael Lopez, CHPS program manager. “AFRL is interested in hearing from companies that may have ideas that differ from ours, and could contribute to the satellite’s capabilities.” AFRL wants to develop capabilities to detect, track and identify objects operating at lunar distances and beyond, a range of 385,000 kilometers. Most Space Force sensors are designed to detect and track satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer. CHPS will search for objects like debris, rocket bodies, and other previously untracked cislunar objects, as well as provide position updates on spacecraft currently operating near the moon or other cislunar regions that are challenging to observe from Earth. Another objective in the CHPS project is to help the military gain experience operating hardware in the complicated gravitational environment between the Earth and the moon, and help mature technology required to communicate and navigate near the moon. ”Our goal is to create a satellite that will become critically important as the U.S. supports civil and commercial efforts in the cislunar domain,” said Lopez.
SpaceX now has a quarter of a million subscribers for its Starlink satellite broadband service as it looks to move into new markets like aviation. Jonathan Hofeller, vice president of Starlink commercial sales at SpaceX, said during a panel at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22 that while Starlink is best known for its consumer broadband service, it was also working to provide services for enterprises and other sectors. “We currently have 250,000 subscribers, and that’s across consumer, enterprise and many businesses,” he said. SpaceX is manufacturing “close to eight satellites a day” at its Redmond, Washington, facility as the company builds out its constellation. Beyond consumer broadband, he cited demand for Starlink from other markets, such as cellular backhaul and services for schools. “There’s just a number of different people coming out of the woodwork that need connectivity,” he said. One of those emerging markets for Starlink is aviation. “Connectivity on airplanes is something we think is ripe for an overhaul,” Hofeller said. “The expectation has changed faster than the technology has changed.” SpaceX has developed an aviation antenna currently being tested, he said, and is working to get it certified on “various aircraft.” He didn’t give an anticipated schedule for completing that, but said the company planned to offer a service for commercial airliners that would be indistinguishable from conventional internet access. “We’re designing a service where every single passenger on that plane can stream simultaneously.” Hofeller, asked how many subscribers the company needs for Starlink to be profitable, declined to give a number. However, he said the profitability of the system would improve with as second generation of satellites, something that company founder Elon Musk had previously suggested. “I think we have a successful architecture,” he said. “Version one is sustainable but, from where we want to get from a profit standpoint, version two will be much more profitable.” Pandemic and Ukraine Hofeller and other panelists said they have seen a sharp increase in demand for satellite broadband services prompted by the pandemic. “We found out how many people in our market were relying on broadband at their place of work or at school, and suddenly they couldn’t do that,” said Evan Dixon, president of global fixed broadband at Viasat. “It led us to double down on the idea that people want more bandwidth.” Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, senior adviser for regulatory and space policy at OneWeb, said she believed the financial community became convinced of the market for satellite broadband when, at the start of the pandemic two years ago, executives decamped from New York and London to rural areas, only to find spotty connectivity. “It really proved to the money people that this was a need, a real need, for everybody in the world.” Financiers, she added, were also convinced by the relatively late entry of Amazon into the satellite broadband business, a move made by former chief executive Jeff Bezos with its Project Kuiper system. “If he thinks he can be last and beat all of these competitors and be a viable competitor, this is a real business. This is not just a niche,” she said. While governments are investing more into expanding broadband services, Hofeller was critical of some approaches that funded infrastructure over results, he argued. “We support architectures where they’ve designed the funding to support the end user. The end user needs affordable internet,” he said. Satellite, he added, can provide broadband service far more quickly than building out fiber. “We had folks who would call us on a Friday and their school would be connected on Monday,” he said. “That sort of instant gratification is not something governments know how to react to.” Starlink has also garnered attention for providing services in Ukraine in response to a request from a government minister after Russia’s invasion of the country. Hofeller didn’t discuss the company’s work in Ukraine but Dixon appeared to criticize the publicity SpaceX generated for its work there. “The important thing for us, though, is not what we’re doing in Ukraine. We’re doing plenty in Ukraine, but it’s not something we publicize and we’re not going to. We’re certainly not going to make publicity out of a war,” Dixon said. He did, though, discuss Viasat’s work providing connectivity to Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia. Satellites can help refugees from war zones or natural disasters, said Pritchard-Kelly. “I think we’re all being approached by various government entities, seeing what can be done, both in and nearby Ukraine,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s that significantly different from other emergencies.”
OneWeb said March 21 that it reached a deal with SpaceX that will allow OneWeb to resume launching its LEO broadband constellation this year. “The first launch with SpaceX is anticipated in 2022 and will add to OneWeb’s total in-orbit constellation that currently stands at 428 satellites, or 66 percent of the fleet,” OneWeb said in a news release . OneWeb entered 2022 expecting to reach global coverage by August. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put the kibosh on the six Soyuz launches the London-based LEO broadband constellation operator was counting on to complete its 648-satellite constellation this year. “With these launch plans in place, we’re on track to finish building out our full fleet of satellites and deliver robust, fast, secure connectivity around the globe,” OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson said in a written statement. OneWeb did not disclose how soon its SpaceX launch would happen, how many satellites it would deploy, which SpaceX launch vehicle would be used, or whether the deal includes more than one launch. “We cannot comment on details of the agreement at this time,” OneWeb spokeswoman Katie Dowd said in response to questions.
European Space Agency officials said prospects are dimming for the recovery of a radar imaging satellite that malfunctioned nearly three months ago, but that efforts to save the spacecraft continue. The Sentinel-1B spacecraft malfunctioned in December, keeping the spacecraft from collecting C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. ESA said in January that they were investigating a problem with the power system for the SAR payload on the satellite , launched in April 2016. In a Feb. 25 update , ESA said work was continuing to investigate problems with both the main and backup power system for the payload but that effort had yet to identify a root cause of the anomaly. The problem doesn’t affect operations of the spacecraft itself, which has remained under control. ESA leaders were not optimistic about the prospects of recovering Sentinel-1B. “The situation doesn’t look very good, but we have not given up hope yet,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said in response to a question about the status of the satellite. “We are still looking into technical options of what the root cause could be.” Simonetta Cheli, director of Earth observation at ESA, said engineers have reviewed 18 potential causes for the power failure. “We are not yet at the end of the story,” she said, saying that investigations will continue for at least the next few weeks. But, like Aschbacher, she appeared pessimistic that Sentinel-1B could be recovered. “It doesn’t look very good, but for the moment it’s not the final word on 1B.” In January, ESA floated the possibility of moving up the launch of a new SAR satellite, Sentinel-1C, to compensate for the potential loss of Sentinel-1B. The mission currently is scheduled for launch in the middle of 2023 although the spacecraft would be ready for launch after a flight acceptance review scheduled for October. Cheli confirmed that Sentinel-1C would be ready for launch in October but said that ESA had not yet decided if the launch could be moved up. “We are assessing, in the current situation, options with Arianespace for launch. We are looking at the earliest options because we want to support the users.” A problem for any effort to move up the Sentinel-1C launch is the Russian decision to halt Soyuz launches from French Guiana, requiring five European missions that planned to fly on that rocket there to look for alternative vehicles . That would include the Vega C, the rocket currently planned to launch Sentinel-1C. The Vega C also faces concerns about access to a Ukrainian-built engine for its upper stage, leading ESA to examine options to replace it with an alternative that could affect future launches.
The U.S. government on March 17 advised satellite operators to put their guard up in the wake of a cyberattack that disrupted internet services in Europe provided by Viasat’s KA-SAT. “Given the current geopolitical situation, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency requests that all organizations significantly lower their threshold for reporting and sharing indications of malicious cyber activity,” said CISA, an organization within the Department of Homeland Security. Following CISA’s advisory, the Satellite Industry Association on March 18 issued a statement of “commitment to cybersecurity best practices” and expressed concern about “evolving attacks by criminals, terrorists, and nation states.” The February cyberattack on Viasat’s network, first reported by Reuters , is being investigated by French, U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence services as a potential act by Russian hackers. Viasat in a statement last week said the company believes “this was a deliberate, isolated and external cyber event” and customer data was not compromised. Because the attacks directly targeted modems, the company is providing some customers over-the-air updates and replacing other customer modems. “ Our commercial network is very well secured and we’ve learned a lot of lessons over the last few weeks,” Craig Miller, Viasat’s president of government systems, told SpaceNews . Miller said he could not discuss details of the KA-SAT incident. Any attack on a network is a reminder of why satellite operators pursue “multifaceted strategies” to protect their systems, he said. “Any network is only as strong as its weakest link. In some cases, that may be the satellite, in some cases that may be the terminal. In some cases, it may be the ground infrastructure. Or it may be the cyber posture of the system,” Miller said. “So you have to protect against every one of them because you’ll get attacks across the whole spectrum.” Government concerns The resilience of satellite networks is becoming a major concern for the Defense Department, which relies on a mix of government-owned and commercial satellites for internet and global communications. Miller said military communications services are resilient by virtue of using multiple providers that operate satellites in different orbits. “I think resilience through diversity is going to be a hot topic,” he said. “I’m encouraged to see that the DoD is investing in geostationary, medium and proliferated low Earth orbit satcom simultaneously. I think it’s important that you don’t throw all your eggs in one basket and that’s going to be an important conversation.” While the KA-SAT disruption was caused by a cyber attack, a different type of satellite internet system, SpaceX’s Starlink in low Earth orbit, experienced “ signal jamming ” in user terminals in Ukraine, according to CEO Elon Musk . Electronic radio-frequency jamming is typically done from the ground when a jammer sends a signal to the satellite that’s more powerful than the terminals. “A simple analogy is two people are in a room whispering to each other. If someone next door to them is screaming and you can’t hear the two people whispering because someone is much louder, and that’s how jamming works,” Miller explained. The U.S. military has to worry about all types of threats, he noted. Not just cyber and jamming attacks but also kinetic threats such as ground-to-air missiles that can blow a satellite to pieces. “It’s virtually impossible to build a single system that is resistant to all threats simultaneously,” said Miller. “Some systems may not be as resistant to jamming but may be very resistant to cyber. Even the military’s most exquisite satellites “can be destroyed with an ASAT [ant-satellite] weapon and you only have to shoot out a couple of satellites and the whole system’s gone.” Viasat is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory under a seven-year $50.8 million contract to develop concepts for “hybrid networks” of commercial satcom and government-owned satellites. DoD wants hybrid networks because it allows them to take advantage of commercial systems and gives them options especially in a crisis, said Miller. “DoD is embracing the concept of using lots of different services at different orbits and at different frequencies and that’s really the key to resilience, it’s having optionality and freedom to maneuver.” Under the AFRL contract, Viasat will conduct demonstrations of hybrid networks. “They will see how difficult it is to disrupt these types of communications, and how difficult it is for an adversary to even know if their effects are working, because you don’t even know what networks users are on.” Stronger security in commercial satellites Ryan Reid, president of Boeing Commercial Satellite Systems, said commercial operators have the same concerns the government has about resilience. Boeing builds jam-resistant satellites for the U.S. military and many of the technologies are being applied on the commercial side, Reid told SpaceNews . Techniques like beam shaping and frequency allocations give a commercial operator the ability to actively manage interference, said Reid. The military is increasingly interested in using commercial assets so it’s incumbent on commercial operators to provide “protected features” to add resilience, he said. To ensure commercial satcom networks that support the military are cyber secure, the U.S. Space Force started a program called Infrastructure Asset Pre-Assessment Program ( IA-Pre ). The military has always demanded cybersecurity in satcom systems but “they are increasing the level,” said Rick Lober, vice president and general manager of defense and intelligence systems at Hughes Network Systems. The recent network attacks in Ukraine have been “an eye opener for everybody,” Lober told SpaceNews . “A lot of government networks that are using commercial satellites do have a higher level of protection built into them. But certainly, everyone wants to make sure that they are applying all the latest techniques to protect these systems.” The use of hybrid networks with multiple transport options is gaining traction not just in DoD but also in private industry because of the added resilience, said Lober. “We in the commercial industry call it software defined networking, where we can put different traffic types over different satellite links or terrestrial links, and that does give you a degree of protection.”
The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency will begin a major upgrade of its cloud computing infrastructure after a protest over a $4.5 billion cloud-services contract was withdrawn by one of the competitors. General Dynamics Information Technology on Dec. 8 was selected for a 10-year deal to modernize NGA’s cloud platform and data centers. The award was challenged by another competitor, Leidos, which filed a protest Dec. 28 with the Government Accountability Office. General Dynamics on March 18 announced it won the contract. According to GAO, the protest filed by Leidos was withdrawn March 16, allowing NGA and General Dynamics to move forward with the work. Bid protests are common on government contracts this size, especially in the highly competitive cloud market. A component of the U.S. intelligence community, NGA analyzes satellite imagery and other geospatial data for the U.S. military, allies and homeland security agencies. NGA first solicited bids for the cloud services contract in 2019. The work covers a wide range of services in support of geospatial intelligence users, including the integration of commercial clouds, data center design and operations, mobile secure wireless across multiple networks and agency locations worldwide. Much of the new technology will support NGA’s new campus in St. Louis known as NGA West. The agency’s headquarters is in Northern Virginia in the Washington, D.C. metro area. The $1.7 billion facility in north St. Louis has been under construction since November 2019 and NGA expects it will be open for business in 2025. General Dynamics on Dec. 13 announced it is opening a new facility and geospatial innovation center at the Cortex in St. Louis. NGA officials said upgrading its cloud computing and data infrastructure is a top priority for the agency as it tries to improve the quality and speed of services. A modern cloud enterprise, for example, will facilitate interoperability between the agency and commercial geospatial data providers. 
SpaceX set records for the reuse of its Falcon 9 booster and the mass that rocket placed into orbit March 19 with the latest launch of Starlink satellites. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:42 a.m. Eastern. The launch took place in the second of two opportunities that night after storms in the area ruled out a launch at 11:24 p.m. Eastern March 18. The Falcon 9 placed 53 Starlink satellites into an orbit at an altitude of approximately 320 kilometers. SpaceX resumed launches on a northeastern trajectory on this mission after flying several previous Starlink launches on a southeastern trajectory where sea conditions for booster recovery were more favorable during the winter. In a tweet after the launch , SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said that the launch was the heaviest Falcon 9 payload ever launched, at 16.25 metric tons. That means that the individual Starlink satellites weigh up to 306 kilograms each, depending on whether that includes the tensioning rods used to deploy the satellites and, if so, the mass of those rods. By comparison, the earlier generation of Starlink satellites weighed about 260 kilograms each. With this mission, SpaceX has launched 2,335 Starlink satellites, according to statistics maintained by Jonathan McDowell . Of those, 2,112 satellites are in orbit, 1,575 of which in operational orbits and nearly 450 more moving toward operational orbits. SpaceX also set a new milestone in booster reuse with the 12th launch of this booster, designated B1051, which landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The booster first launched the Demo-1 commercial crew test flight three years ago and has also launched the Radarsat Constellation Mission, the SXM-7 radio satellite and nine Starlink missions, counting this flight. Two other boosters have flown 11 flights. Two Crew Dragon missions slip Hours before the Starlink launch, the 11th Falcon 9 mission of 2022, NASA and Axiom Space announced their upcoming Crew Dragon missions had slipped by a few days. Axiom Space said March 18 that its Ax-1 mission to the International Space Station, carrying four commercial astronauts, had been delayed from March 30 to April 3. The company said the four-day delay “will allow teams to complete final spacecraft processing ahead of the mission.” The company added the April 3 date is “pending range availability.” NASA announced at a March 14 briefing that the wet dress rehearsal for the Space Launch System, which rolled to Launch Complex 39B March 17, was scheduled for April 3. NASA officials said earlier this year that LC-39A, which hosts Falcon 9 launches of Crew Dragon, would need to be cleared during SLS launch operations at LC-39B, but that restriction would not necessarily apply to the wet dress rehearsal. NASA also announced March 18 that the Crew-4 commercial crew mission, which will send four NASA and ESA astronauts to the ISS, had slipped from April 15 to April 19. NASA said the delay will “allow appropriate spacing for operations and post-flight data reviews between human spaceflight missions” and also permit launch attempts on multiple consecutive days based on orbital mechanics. The launch date will be finalized after a review early next week.
TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat is considering ordering fewer satellites for its planned low Earth orbit broadband constellation as inflation and supply chain woes drive up the price tag and push out its completion to 2026. During a March 18 earnings call about Telesat’s 2021 results, CEO Dan Goldberg told analysts, “we either need to raise more money, or we need to descope the constellation” to keep it within a previously projected $5 billion budget. Telesat chose Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy in February 2021 as prime contractor for the 298-satellite Lightspeed constellation. By late last year, Thales told Telesat it had run into pandemic-related production delays. “There’s supply chain issues which are causing delays, and there are inflationary pressures just across the entire economy right now, and we’re getting bitten by kind of both of those things right now,” Goldberg said on the earnings call. He said it was too “early for us to say which direction we’re going to go here,” but Telesat has “a lot of scope” to “downsize the number of satellites” on order for Lightspeed. Goldberg said Lightspeed could reach global coverage with 188 of the envisioned 298 satellites. The first 78 would be deployed to polar orbits and another 110 to inclined orbits. “Then we were going to supplement it with another 110” to reach the 298 satellites that Lightspeed needs to provide 15 terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity worldwide, he said. “Even with 100 less satellites, for instance, we’ll still have terabits and terabits of capacity and a very capable global constellation that … we feel good about,” he added. Goldberg said he expects to have “a real good sense” for “what the constellation is going to look like” and where Telesat stands in discussions with debt lenders for financing the rest of the project by the end of June. Telesat, which became a public company in November , has received commitments for about two-thirds of the LEO network’s projected $5 billion cost, including about $1.15 billion from Canada’s government. Goldberg told analysts March 18 it “feels like” Lightspeed is “going to be about a year late” to enter global commercial service. “If things unfold the way we think they will right now, we’ll be launching in 2025 and entering service in 2026,” he said. Telesat announced separate contracts with Blue Origin and Relativity Space in 2019 for an unspecified number of New Glenn and Terran 1 launches for Lightspeed. Neither rocket has flown, but debut launches are planned for sometime this year. “I will say we’re not the only guys getting delayed right now,” Goldberg said, adding that “in OneWeb’s case they’ve now got this launch issue which I’m sure is going to be kind of schedule impacting for them in terms of when they can enter service.” OneWeb entered 2022 expecting to reach global coverage by August. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put the kibosh on the six Soyuz launches the London-based LEO broadband constellation operator was counting on for its remaining satellites. Goldberg also said he has heard of at least one other LEO constellation, which he did not name, “that is backed up because of supply chain issues.” While SpaceX continues to launch a fresh batch of Starlink satellites every week or so, chip shortages have slowed its delivery of Starlink user terminals . Telesat reported 758 million Canadian dollars ($602 million) in revenues for 2021, a decrease of 4% compared with 2020 when adjusted for foreign exchange rates. The company said the decrease was mainly driven by a reduction of service for one of its DTH customers in North America, and contracts not being renewed for certain enterprise services in part because of the pandemic. Net income for 2021 fell to 158 million Canadian dollars compared with 246 million Canadian dollars for 2020.
TAMPA, Fla. — Aquarian Space said March 17 it has raised seed funding to deploy a high-speed communications network for the moon to meet anticipated demand from government and commercial lunar missions. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Draper Associates, an early SpaceX investor, has injected $650,000 in Aquarian Space to support plans to deploy its first lunar satellite in the first quarter of 2024. The satellite is part of a constellation Aquarian Space is planning to improve communications above Earth’s orbit that John Rotondo, the startup’s chief technology officer, says is unequipped to handle a growing number of proposed missions to the moon. Rotondo said the startup has plans to deploy a second satellite in 2025 to provide “continuous South Pole coverage,” but has yet to secure a launch agreement for either satellite. European startup Plus Ultra Space Outposts signed a launch agreement late October with Rocket Factory Augsburg, an early-stage launch company based in Germany, to deploy its first communications satellite for the moon in the final quarter of 2023. Plus Ultra also has a deal to launch additional satellites for its planned constellation as soon as 2024 with ispace, the Japanese lunar transportation venture selling accommodations on its moon-bound landers. Lunar activity Aquarian Space’s funding comes as NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program drives investment in startups that see it as the start of an emerging lunar-based economy. Ahead of an Artemis 3 mission to land astronauts on the moon in 2025, NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has been awarding contracts to commercial companies to send robotic spacecraft to the lunar surface. While some of these commercial ventures have booked near-term launches, including lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines , most startups that have been created in recent years to establish lunar-based businesses have yet to confirm launches. Artemis’ overall strategy has also faced questions about its growing costs and slipping schedules. Following multiple delays, NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket rolled out to the launchpad March 17 at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for a countdown rehearsal ahead of the Artemis 1 uncrewed lunar flyby mission slated to launch no sooner than June. This mission marks the rocket’s first test flight and its success will be critical for the rest of the Artemis program. NASA aims to follow the mission with a crewed Artemis 2 lunar flyby in 2024, and then Artemis 3 the following year. Connecting the moon Aquarian Space is working with external suppliers to build and integrate its planned satellites, Rotondo said in an email without disclosing details. He said the Colorado-based startup is currently conducting technical reviews with several CLPS commercial providers, other U.S. lunar commercial explorers and international lunar missions to develop its technology. Aquarian Space and Plus Ultra and are both planning constellations that aim to provide 100 megabits per second (Mbps) connectivity on the moon, exceeding currently identified needs for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. “NASA’s [Deep Space Network (DSN)] was designed over 30 years ago with very large 70-meter antennas to focus on deep space customers, which have historically only needed bandwidths in the tens to hundreds of kilo-bits per second,” Rotondo said. “The DSN has already and can continue to upgrade the bandwidth capacity, but they currently do not plan to do that for lunar applications,” he said, adding that Aquarian Space’s system will also be able to downlink to smaller antennas while improving redundancy and geographical diversity. “Our unique and patentable technology is at the system-level, in how we implement the [radio frequency communication] protocols and the mission flexibility of our design,” Rotondo added.
WARSAW, Poland — In a bid to secure a domestic launch capability, the Polish Space Agency (POLSA) signed a letter of intent with Virgin Orbit to use the U.S. company’s air-launched LauncherOne system as soon as next year. POLSA and Virgin Orbit officials expect the project to advance space capabilities across the region. Numerous Eastern European nations are talking with Warsaw about participating in the initiative. Grzegorz Wrochna, the president of POLSA, said Poland’s space industry has grown rapidly. However, enabling local players to launch smallsats from Polish soil could relieve bottlenecks hampering further growth, he said. The Virgin Orbit agreement indicates Poland’s determination to secure its own launch capability and avoid Russian technology. “The European industry is dominated by French rockets, and its capacities are limited,” Wrochna told SpaceNews. “Some companies opt to use Chinese or Russian rockets, but, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the latter option is no longer valid for Poland.” Poland is not landlocked, but its 500 kilometers of Baltic Sea coastline sit directly across from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. That makes launching to orbit from a seaside spaceport untenable for Poland. “We can’t perform regular vertical flights from Poland because there is a risk a rocket could fall into inhabited land,” Wrochna said. “The technology offered by Virgin Orbit, under which a rocket is attached to an airplane which takes off from a Polish airport, flies over the North Sea and then launches from an altitude of 10,000 meters at a speed of 600 kilometers per hour, is a feasible way into the orbit.” Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart told SpaceNews the letter of intent allows POLSA and Virgin Orbit to “start the real work to figure out what it will make to make that happen” — beginning with evaluating Polish airports. Virgin Orbit’s two-stage Launcher One rocket has flown three successful missions since a failed May 2020 test flight. In December, the company went public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company and now trades on the Nasdaq. “Last year, we took our system from development to operation,” Hart said. “We married a 747 plane with a rocket, and for a naval country like Poland, such cooperation unlocks the capability to fly to space. Our system can serve Poland’s commercial, scientific, and national security purposes.” As a next step, POLSA plans to undertake an in-depth study to determine an optimal business model for the project. “We aim to host the first launch with the use of Virgin Orbit’s solution in the late summer of 2023. Afterwards, we would like to gradually transfer this technology to Poland and train our own pilots,” Wrochna said. According to Hart, “now is a very good time to be working towards a launch capability, and this unique capability could serve Poland, but also the entire region.” As part of Poland’s efforts to drive increased international cooperation across Central and Eastern Europe, POLSA’s ambition is to involve other nations from the Three Seas Initiative, which comprises countries situated along the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas axis. This could potentially expand the technology’s user base across the region with states such as Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia. Poland’s space sector hosts a group of fast-growing private industry players, and their involvement will be vital to advancing the project, POLSA’s president said. “Sat-Revolution has already launched several satellites using Virgin Orbit’s services, and launching from Poland could facilitate their operations and cut reliance on flights out of the U.S.,” Wrochn said. “Creotech Instruments are also readying for their first flight.” Last year under the Polish Imaging Satellites (PIAST) project, a consortium formed by local space companies began to develop three nanosatellites to be operated by Poland’s armed forces and placed into orbit in 2024. As part of the consortium, Creotech Instruments is building the nanosats in cooperation with the project’s leader, the country’s Military University of Technology (WAT). The initiative will give the Polish Armed Forces an Earth-observation constellation capable of acquiring images with a ground sample distance of roughly 5-meters resolution. Headquartered in Gdańsk, on Poland’s Baltic Sea shore, POLSA is a government entity set up in 2014 and became fully operational in late 2015. Poland’s prime minister oversees the agency. Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, the European Union in 2004, and the European Space Agency in 2012.
Chinese state-owned entities are developing a growing range of solid rockets to meet growing launch demands and contribute to a wider strategy of making China a fully-fledged space power. Jielong-3, also known as Smart Dragon-3, is expected to make its first flight in September according to recent state media reports . It will be able to launch from land or sea, with new maritime launch facilities both providing greater flexibility and reducing pressure on China’s main spaceports. The new launcher is being developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), a major rocket developer under the ownership of CASC, China’s main space contractor. It is also the latest in a line of planned solid rockets, despite some having very similar capabilities. “This very much fits with China’s long term doctrine of becoming a full-fledged space power, for which it is essential to master a wide array of capabilities,” Tomas Hrozensky, a researcher at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told SpaceNews . “Reading through some of the statements from officials behind these solid fuelled launchers, it seems to me there is a clear belief that these new vehicles, because of their inherent characteristics as solid-fueled launchers, will reply to important needs of China’s and international space sectors,” Hrozensky says. Light lift rockets would provide responsive launch opportunities, and possibly easier integration into operations from various spaceports, including sea-based launches. Meanwhile heavy lift rockets would provide “suitable options for mass-hungry, non-crewed infrastructure deployments for future in-orbit economy, such as constellations, space stations, or even deep space ambitions .” Jielong-3 is stated to be capable of sending 1,500 kilograms of payload into a 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Smart Dragon series rockets are operated by CALT spinoff China Rocket. The smaller Smart Dragon-1 launched for the first and so far only time in August 2019. Another similar entity, CAS Space, registered in December 2018 as Beijing Zhongke Aerospace Exploration Technology Co., Ltd., and spun off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is also developing solid rockets. CAS Space conducted ground tests for the four-stage ZK-1A in November 2021 and is expected to attempt a first launch in the near future. It will also be capable of lifting 1,500 kilograms to a 500-kilometer SSO. Last year the larger ZK-2 was slated to be ready for flight before the end of 2022 and able to send 3,550 kilograms into a 700-kilometer SSO. All of the above would be more capable than the Long March 11 , currently China’s most powerful solid propellant launch vehicle. “Overall, from a strategic point of view, mastering such a new capability gives China flexibility and redundancy, demonstrates technological prowess to the outside world and create important synergies for other, non-space objectives,” Hrozensky says, who also notes an inherent connection with China’s military programs for ballistic missiles and air defense. More competition–and redundancy and options–comes from CASIC, another giant state-owned defense contractor and considered a sister company to CASC. Spinoff Expace operates the Kuaizhou series of solid rockets. The Kuaizhou-1A (200 kilograms to 700-kilometer SSO) has flown 14 times. However, a Dec. 15 failure of its could bring lengthy delays, just months after the rocket returned to action following being grounded for one year due to a 2020 failure. The larger Kuaizhou-11–capable of delivering 1,000 kilograms to a 700-kilometer SSO–has yet to fly following the loss of its first flight in 2020. Design work on the Kuaizhou-21 launch vehicle began in 2017, according to Chinese state media. It will have a diameter of 4.5 meters and be capable of sending 20,000 kilograms into a low Earth orbit. The planned Kuaizhou-31 would be capable of sending 70,000 kilograms into LEO – almost three times the lift capacity of China’s current largest rocket, the Long March 5. A number of launch contract opportunities are emerging that could help support new vehicles, even beyond a planned national broadband megaconstellation . CASIC has commercial satellite constellation plans of its own with Xingyun, a planned 80-satellite narrowband constellation to be operated by spinoff Leobit. The CASIC-led 68.8-square-kilometer Wuhan National Aerospace Industrial Base became fully operational in February 2021 and capable of assembling and testing 20 solid rockets and producing 240 small satellites each year. On Wednesday the Wuhan municipal government released a policy document further supporting the development of the space industry in the city, noting launch vehicles and launch services, satellite platforms and payloads, space information application services and space ground equipment and manufacturing as activities to be promoted. CAS Space meanwhile has an industrial base in Guangzhou , where a space arm of Geely , an car maker with plans to build a low Earth constellation for autonomous driving, is also setting up and potentially providing launch contracts. Private firms iSpace and Galactic Energy , while developing reusable liquid launchers, are also operating light-lift solid rockets. China is also developing new spaceports to support its space sector boom, with the coastal cities of Ningbo and Wenchang planning construction of commercial spaceports to meet growing demand for launch. CASC alone is planning more than 50 launches in 2022. Just a handful will use the solid Long March 11 and Jielong-3 launchers. A new Long March 6A will also test the first Chinese combination of liquid core and solid side boosters from a dedicated new launch complex at Taiyuan.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The first Space Launch System rocket rolled out to its launch pad here March 17 for a countdown dress rehearsal ahead of its long-delayed launch this summer on the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission. A crawler-transporter carrying a mobile launch platform, with the SLS on it, left the Vehicle Assembly Building here at approximately 5:45 p.m. Eastern. It traveled the 6.8 kilometers to Launch Complex 39B, arriving there around 4 a.m. Eastern March 18. NASA turned the initial phase of the rollout, as the vehicle emerged from the VAB and then stopped for checks and reconfigurations, as a celebration of the long-delayed rocket. Employees and guests gathered near the vehicle to take photos and hear remarks from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and music from a college band. “There is no doubt we are in a golden era of space exploration, discovery and ingenuity in space, and it all begins with Artemis 1,” Nelson said. “Artemis 1 will demonstrate NASA’s commitment and capacity to extend humanity’s presence on the moon and beyond.” With SLS now on the pad, pomp and circumstance give way to preparations for a countdown test called a wet dress rehearsal (WDR). That work will start with connecting the vehicle to interfaces at the pad and go through tests of various systems. “At Stennis we did two core stage firings, so we know the tank is sound, but that ground system is different from ours,” said Brad McCain, vice president and deputy general manager at Jacobs, the prime contractor for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems, in an interview. That includes tests of both hardware and software systems on the vehicle and ground equipment. That will culminate in the WDR itself, when the SLS core stage is filled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants and goes through a countdown that stops at about T-10 seconds, just before the core stage’s engines would ignite. The fueling process takes eight hours, versus two and a half for the shuttle, because of the larger tanks and the addition of an upper stage. “Because I’ve got more interfaces, I’ve got more potential for leaks from a cryo perspective, so more things to worry about,” McCain said. The longer load time, he said, require two shifts of controllers to cover the fueling and the countdown, versus one for the shuttle. The WDR is scheduled for April 3. About a week and a half later, the vehicle will be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for any corrective work from the pad tests and for final preparations, then rolled back out to the pad for the Artemis 1 launch, no earlier than June. “We’ve got some planned work,” he said, such as final closeouts on the vehicle. He said there’s likely to be some minor repairs needed to the core stage’s thermal protection system after the tanking and detanking during the WDR. “It’s just looking for anything that tanking may have damaged and wear and tear. If there’s none of that, it’s just plain closeout work.” McCain said in the interview shortly before the rollout that he was looking forward to finally seeing the vehicle emerge from the Vehicle Assembly Building after years of work. “It’s exciting to be part of history,” he said. “You’ve done your part and you feel pride that you’ve done your part. If everybody does their part, then everything goes well.”
TITUSVILLE, Fla. — The European Space Agency is looking at options for launching missions that were to fly on Russia’s Soyuz rocket, including both non-European rockets and early use of the Ariane 6. The ESA Council meeting that concluded March 17 addressed Russia’s Feb. 26 decision to halt Soyuz launches from French Guiana and withdraw its personnel there in response to European sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. That decision puts five European missions in limbo: two launches of Galileo navigation satellites, ESA’s Euclid space observatory and EarthCARE Earth science satellites, and a French reconnaissance satellite. ESA officials said at a briefing after the meeting that they had made no decisions on how to launch those payloads originally manifested on Soyuz. “We will look into all the options,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general. “We need to make sure that we have a robust launcher setup that can launch our satellites.” The first priority, he said, is to move those payloads onto the new Vega C and Ariane 6 vehicles. Vega C is scheduled to make its first flight in May while Ariane 6 is set to make its debut no earlier than the second half of this year. Aschbacher said they won’t rush Ariane 6 to make its first flight. He declined to give a specific launch date for the first Ariane 6 launch, citing an upcoming hotfire test of the Ariane 6’s upper stage engine in Germany and tests of the vehicle at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. “We cannot stabilize a date until these two tests are carried out,” he said. The first Ariane 6 will carry a mass demonstrator and instrumentation, along with several small satellites and experiments from companies and institutions selected in February. Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of space transportation, would not rule out using that launch instead for one of the missions that was to launch on Soyuz, but said that it was not a leading option. “It’s not the baseline, to be clear, to use this launch for one of the payloads,” he said. “But, we are assessing it and we will come back with a clear assessment and a proposal to our member states.” Using the first Ariane 6 launch for one of the former Soyuz missions might also delay that launch, he said. “It is equally important to keep the timing and then increase the pace of launching again.” Vega C, meanwhile, faces a complication also linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The rocket’s upper stage, called AVUM, uses an RD-843 engine built by Ukrainian company Yuzhnoye/Yuzhmash. While the AVUM engines for the first three Vega C launches have been delivered, ESA officials acknowledged uncertainty about the Ukrainian company’s ability to produce more engines. “We’re assessing availability over the next few months,” Neuenschwander said. The Yuzhmash facilities are in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, a place where “hostile actions are ongoing,” he said, but didn’t provide details about the state of those facilities. “We are in contact with colleagues from Yuzhmash on a daily basis.” ESA is looking at potential replacements for the RD-843. Neuenschwander said the preference is for an engine from an ESA member state that permits a “rapid adaptation” of the AVUM upper stage. “We are also assessing non-European options because, here, time is of the essence and, consequently, you need to work with an engine that has the right maturity level.” Aschbacher said that while ESA’s preference is to launch payloads on European rockets, he would not rule out using vehicles from other countries. “First and foremost, we will focus on European launchers and then, if we see there are gaps, we will look into other partners,” he said. That option will be included in a new review of options for replacing the Soyuz launches, which will be done in about a month. “Then we’ll see what is a realistic scenario of launcher opportunities in the next months and years,” he said. “I’m not excluding looking at launchers outside of European ones, if needed.” 
Orbit Fab, a venture-funded startup offering a refueling service in space, announced it has won a $12 million deal to ensure its fueling interface works with U.S. military satellites. The funding includes $6 million from the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force, and $6 million from Orbit Fab’s private investors. The contract is for the integration of Orbit Fab’s fueling port, called RAFTI — short for rapidly attachable fluid transfer interface — with military satellites. The port allows satellites to receive propellant from Orbit Fab’s tankers in space. This is the largest government contract won by the company to date, Jeremy Schiel, founder and chief development officer, told SpaceNews March 17. “It’s another huge indicator that people really want refueling,” he said. “The government over the last two years has been pushing refueling efforts really hard. People want assurance that we are going to be able to provide that fuel in the orbit that they need.” The Air Force last year awarded Orbit Fab a $750,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract to flight quality the RAFTI port. Orbit Fab’s plan is to deploy propellant tankers to serve as gas stations in space. Its first tanker was launched last year to low Earth orbit. Its first geostationary tanker is projected to launch later this year or next year on a SpaceX commercial lunar lander mission. The company is working with commercial and government customers to equip their satellites with RAFTI ports so they can be refueled and continue operating. The military is interested in this technology primarily to get more mileage out of its satellites in geostationary orbit. Orbit Fab won what is known as a STRATFI contract, short for strategic financing. STRATFI is a funding initiative created by the Air Force to allow companies that win SBIR contracts to compete for bigger awards that are matched by private investment Schiel said there are no plans yet to conduct an on-orbit demonstration with a military satellite “but we’re in talks.” Founded in 2018, Orbit Fab is based in San Francisco but announced plans to move to Colorado. It has attracted financial support from defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
International talks aimed at preventing an arms race in space are expected to continue this year, a senior U.S. State Department official said March 17. However, bilateral U.S.-Russia space talks that had begun before the invasion of Ukraine are off the table for now. Eric Desautels, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for emerging security challenges and defense policy, said an “open ended working group” established by the U.N. General Assembly in December to address space security issues will hold its first session May 9-13 at the United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland. The goal is to make “recommendations on possible norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors relating to threats by states to space systems,” he said on a webcast hosted by the National Security Space Association. “The United States looks forward to supporting the process,” said Desautels, whose office is under the Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau at the U.S. Department of State. The working group, created in a resolution put forth by the United Kingdom with U.S. backing, is supported by 163 nations, and 12 countries voted against it, including Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. It is expected to meet twice in 2022 and two more times in 2023. Much of the discussion about rules of behavior in space will be aimed at preventing destructive events like China’s and Russia’s anti-satellite missile tests in 2007 and 2021, respectively, that generated thousands of pieces of debris that could endanger satellites and human spaceflight for years or decades. Desautels said he could not predict if the Russians will somehow try to disrupt the working group meeting. “If the Russians can get to Europe, they may block the progress on the open ended working group, but we’ll just have to see where we are in the May timeframe,” he said. “We will have preparatory meetings in advance of that where we will make our arguments for why they should go forward and we will have to just see what the Russians bring forward as their concerns about the discussions.” In light of the “incredibly irresponsible test by the Russians,” there is a lot of work to be done to prevent another debris generating event like that. Coming up with language around not doing those tests will be a task for the group. One of the U.S. concerns is that ground-based missiles that could be used to blow up a satellite also are used by the United States and allies to intercept enemy ballistic missiles. “Whatever we do around a norm, we have to be careful to protect our essential missile defense capabilities, because we don’t want to be constrained in how we defend ourselves against the incredibly growing North Korean and Iranian missile threats,” said Desautels. Bilateral talks with Russia are off Desautels was a member of the U.S. diplomatic delegation that had been in talks with Russia on arms control and space norms in late 2021 and early 2022. But following the “illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, there are certainly not any sort of direct bilateral engagements with the Russians,” he said. “Space was a major topic for some of those discussions,” said Desautels, “especially after the 2019 placement of a Russian satellite in close proximity to a U.S. government satellite, we felt that we needed to start having direct conversations with the Russians about our concerns about some of these behaviors.” Before the attack on Ukraine, “we had hoped to begin those conversations with the Russians,” he added. “We have paused those activities, we see no need for those discussions while they’re in active conflict with the Ukrainians. We have paused almost all bilateral conversations except those essential to national security. If there were a space matter to come up central the national security, we could undoubtedly engage with them. But for the time being, most of our engagements will be in multilateral venues.” Desautels noted that economic sanctions and the squeeze on Russia’s space program are likely to weaken the country’s military space capabilities. Russia is losing significant revenue as its Soyuz rocket has been sidelined from the global launch market. “The more we can deny Russia these streams of revenue the better that will be because it will cost them more to be able to develop and design their own counterspace systems,” said Desautels. “And we should continue to keep those sanctions up so that they are not allowed to use the money, the technology or whatever to help build their military counterspace capabilities,” he said. “And the same of course applies to China. We need to continue the steps that we’ve taken to prevent them from accessing Western technologies that they want to get at.” Realistically, “we’re probably not going to be able to get the Russians or the Chinese to ever abandon their counterspace capabilities,” he noted. “But to the extent we can use export controls and sanctions … I think that is going to have a tremendous impact in giving us time to prepare our own defenses against those capabilities, but also hopefully throwing a wrench in their capabilities as well.”
Updated 2:45 p.m. Eastern with comments with ESA press conference. TITUSVILLE, Fla. — The European Space Agency has formally halted plans to launch its ExoMars mission on a Russian rocket in September in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The ESA Council, at the conclusion of its latest meeting March 17, unanimously voted to suspend cooperation with Russia on the ExoMars mission, citing “the present impossibility of carrying out the ongoing cooperation with Roscosmos,” according to an ESA statement. “We deeply deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine,” ESA said in the statement. “While recognizing the impact on scientific exploration of space, ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its Member States.” “The decision was made that this launch cannot happen given the current circumstances,” ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher said at a briefing March 17, citing the sanctions imposed by European nations on Russia. “This makes it practically impossible but also politically impossible to have a launch in September. The announcement was all but inevitable after ESA announced Feb. 28 that it was “very unlikely” it would go forward with the late September launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan because of the sanctions imposed on Russia in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It’s a disappointment for the people involved in the project,” said David Parker, head of human and robotic exploration at ESA, noting the years they put into the mission. “It was an agonizing decision for the council to make.” A new plan for ExoMars would involve more than replacing the Proton rocket. Russia also built a landing platform called Kazachok that would have to be replaced. The rover itself includes Russian instruments and radioisotope heating units supplied by Russia. The council instructed Aschbacher to start a “fast-track industrial study” to look at alternatives for launching the mission, which will place the European-built Rosalind Franklin rover on Mars. “What we really need to do is to look into these options,” he said. “The options in terms of Europe alone or Europe with other partners.” One option, Aschbacher said, was renewed cooperation with NASA. ESA originally planned to cooperate with NASA on the ExoMars program, but turned to Russia a decade ago when NASA pulled out of the program. “Cooperation with NASA is an option we’ll look into,” he said. “NASA has expressed its very strong willingness to support us.” If the relationship with Roscosmos was restored, Parker said, a 2024 might be feasible. “A more radical reconfiguration would lead to launch in 2026, when there are two launch opportunities, or 2028.” “It will not be before 2026, realistically,” Aschbacher said of the revised launch date. “Even that is very challenging.” “I have a lot of sympathy for those people who have been working on this project for decades,” Ashchbacher said. “I can understand the frustration of people on the engineering side, the science side, the community side.” “But let me say, even if we launch later,” he added, “the science that will be produced by this rover is still outstanding and best in the world.” The statement also addressed Russia’s Feb. 26 decision to halt Soyuz launches from French Guiana and withdraw its personnel there in response to the European sanctions. That decision puts five European missions in limbo: two launches of Galileo navigation satellites, ESA’s Euclid space observatory and EarthCARE Earth science satellites, and a French reconnaissance satellite. The ESA statement said that Aschbacher “has initiated an assessment on potential alternative launch services for these missions, which will include a review of the Ariane 6 first exploitation flights.” The first Ariane 6 launch, scheduled for no earlier than the second half of this year, is currently set to carry an assortment of small private and educational spacecraft and instruments, along with a mass simulator.
Sierra Space and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) have signed an agreement to study collaboration on technologies to support a planned commercial space station. The two companies announced March 17 a memorandum of understanding regarding collaboration on a “wide range of technologies” that could be used for Orbital Reef, a commercial space station announced last October with Sierra Space as one of the lead partners. The companies did not elaborate on the technologies they will consider for Orbital Reef under the agreement. MHI does have extensive experience in International Space Station operations as the manufacturer of the Kibo laboratory module, which was installed on the station in 2008. The company also built the HTV cargo spacecraft and H-2 launch vehicle that launched those spacecraft to the station. “MHI is very excited to collaborate with Sierra Space and use MHI’s technologies and experience earned over years to contribute to the development of Orbital Reef,” said Tomoe Nishigaya, vice president and senior general manager of space systems at MHI, in a statement. “We look forward to further collaboration with Sierra Space as to how MHI’s technologies, products and services may provide better experience for users and customers of the space station.” Sierra Space’s role in Orbital Reef includes providing inflatable modules called the Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) Habitat. The company’s Dream Chaser vehicle under development will transport cargo and crew to and from the station. A consortium led by Blue Origin announced Orbital Reef last October . In addition to Blue Origin and Sierra Space, Boeing will provide a science module, CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle and support for station operations, while Redwire Space will handle microgravity research and manufacturing, payload operations and deployable structures. The team won $130 million from NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program in December to support design work on the station, one of three such awards NASA made to stimulate development of commercial space stations that will succeed the International Space Station by the end of the decade. “We are proud to formalize a long-standing relationship with MHI and look forward to leveraging its considerable technological expertise, as we continue building Orbital Reef and the next generation of space transportation,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Orbital Reef, said in a statement. The agreement with MHI is the second in as many months Sierra Space has announced with Japanese organizations. Sierra Space announced Feb. 26 an agreement with Kanematsu Corporation and Oita Prefecture to study the feasibility of using Oita Airport in Japan as a landing site for the Dream Chaser vehicle .
A Long March 4C rocket sent a new classified Yaogan satellite into orbit Thursday, marking China’s sixth orbital launch of 2022. The Long March 4C lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 3:09 a.m. Eastern (15:09 local time). The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed launch success within the hour, also revealing the mission payload. The yaogan-34 (02) satellite joins the first Yaogan-34 satellite which launched at 3:27 a.m. Eastern April 30, 2021. CASC states the two satellites and those on followup launches will operate as a network. Chinese state media reported that the new Yaogan satellites will be used to provide information services such as land census, urban planning, crop yield estimation and disaster prevention and reduction. The classified nature of the Yaogan (meaning “remote sensing”) missions and their respective orbits lead Western analysts to believe the series is military in nature, providing a range of reconnaissance capabilities. The first Yaogan-34 satellite is currently in a 1,116 by 1,063-kilometer orbit inclined by 63 degrees, an orbit which also closely matches that of three sets of Yaogan-31 designation satellite triplets . The Yaogan-31 satellites and their orbits suggest they could be analogous to U.S. Department of Defense Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) satellite triplets. A mission success screen displayed at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center provided a rare potential clue as to the nature of the satellite with an image of a spacecraft bus in the top right. The first satellite in the series, Yaogan-1, was launched by the first Long March 4C in April 2006. The Long March 4C is a three-stage rocket using a propellant combination of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. It was developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), one of the main institutes under CASC. The upper stage for Thursday’s launch included a technology verification system, according to SAST. The launch was China’s sixth orbital launch of the year, all of which have been conducted by CASC. CASC aims to launch at least 140 spacecraft across more than 50 launches this year alone, including six missions to complete its modular space station. Commercial launch providers are expected to add to China’s launch activities. China led the world for launches in 2021, setting a new national record of 55 launches in a calendar year.
NASA has completed the next step in the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope by fine-tuning the alignment of its primary mirror segments, confirming the telescope’s optics will meet or exceed expectations. The agency announced March 16 that spacecraft team had finished the “coarse phasing” and “fine phasing” steps of alignment of the telescope’s optics. Those steps involved very small changes in the positions of JWST’s 18 primary mirror segments such that their images were aligned on top of each other and then matched to within a wavelength of infrared light. The completion of the fine phasing means that the telescope is now fully aligned for one of its main instruments, the Near-Infrared Camera, and that there are no flaws like the spherical aberration in the primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope that diminished its performance after launch until corrective optics were installed. “The optical performance of the telescope is absolutely phenomenal,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a media briefing. “The performance is as good, if not better, than our most optimistic predictions.” Others at the briefing echoed his sentiments. “The telescope performance so far is everything that we dared hope,” said Jane Rigby, JWST operations project scientist at NASA Goddard. “We now have achieved what’s called diffraction-limited alignment of the telescope. The images are focused together as finely as the laws of physics allow,” said Marshall Perrin, JWST deputy telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “This is as sharp an image that you can get from a telescope of this size.” The completion of fine phasing comes as JWST nears the halfway mark in its six-month post-launch commissioning. Officials said at the briefing they will now check the alignment in three other instruments on the telescope, tweaking the mirror positions to optimize alignment for all the instruments. The instruments themselves will undergo tests to confirm they are ready to begin operations. Project officials stuck to the original schedule for commissioning at the briefing. “We will start science operations when we’re done with commissioning,” Rigby said. “Commissioning is nominally six months long. We launched on Christmas Day, so that would be the end of June.” Officials were pleased as much as they were relieved that the telescope alignment work confirmed there were no problems with the optics. “We do know now that we’ve built the right telescope in terms of the optics,” said Feinberg. “That’s a big deal.” Rigby said that, at this point, if something goes wrong, such as a problem with one of the instruments, there would be “partial degradation” of the science but not a total loss, which would have been the case in earlier phases of commissioning. “There were parts on this mission where this was going to work or we’re done. We’re past those points now.” “This is one of the most magnificent days in my whole career at NASA,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science since 2016. He said he had “sleepless nights” during the earlier phases of commissioning the telescope. “They’re all behind us now.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Kongsberg Satellite Services announced plans March 16 to establish a dedicated antenna network for lunar communications. “Building and operating networks is our core competency,” Arnulf Kjeldsen, KSAT executive vice president for strategy and technology, told SpaceNews. After spending decades operating communications networks for satellites in low, medium and geostationary Earth orbit, supporting lunar communications is a natural next step, he added. Companies are preparing to conduct robotic Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions, precursors to NASA’s return of astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program. Increasing cislunar activity is prompting KSAT to invest in a lunar communications network. In contrast to the KSATlite 3-meter antennas that communicate with small satellites in low Earth orbit, the KSAT lunar network is likely to rely on 20-meter antennas. This year, KSAT is designing the lunar network and identifying three sites for large antennas to provide continuous coverage for lunar missions and lunar data relay constellations. “You need to have your network spread out on different longitudes, ensuring that you have continuous visibility to the moon as the Earth rotates,” Kjeldsen said. In spite of the unique distances involved in lunar communications, many aspects of lunar communications will be similar to those of communicating with satellites in Earth orbit. Customers, for example, will reserve time to contact their spacecraft with the same API used by companies operating satellites in Earth orbit. “We have a one single interface,” Kjeldsen said. “If you want a lunar contact, you do the same things as you would for a low Earth orbit contact or a medium Earth orbit contact.” KSAT also intends to provide communications coverage for every stage of a customer’s lunar mission, including launch and early operations, transit, lunar or Lagrange orbital insertion, lunar landing, surface operations, Earth return and atmospheric re-entry. KSAT announced plans in February to offer communications for the Lunar InfraRed Imaging (LunIR) mission with ground stations in Punta Arenas, Chile, Svalbard, Norway, and Antarctica’s Troll station.
A satellite communication payload developed by Boeing for the U.S. Space Force has passed a critical design review, the company announced March 16. Boeing and Northrop Grumman in 2020 won separate contracts worth $191 million and $253 million, respectively, to design payloads for the Protected Tactical Satcom (PTS) program, a planned network of jam-resistant geostationary satellites for military classified and unclassified communications. Both companies are expected to launch the prototype payloads in 2024 for on-orbit demonstrations. Boeing said host vehicle integration and testing will begin next year. Troy Dawson, Boeing’s vice president of government satellite systems, said the PTS prototype is a “scalable software-defined payload and can be hosted on commercial or government platforms.” Justin Bruner, program manager for PTS at the Space Systems Command, said the specifics of the deployment and procurement timeline have not yet been finalized. “The Space Force is considering a range of possible constellation deployments with various size, number, and functionality of individual satellites to meet the total PTS mission requirements,” Bruner said in a statement to SpaceNews . “PTS payloads are intended to be modular and scalable.” He noted that the PTS is not intended to be a replacement for the Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) constellation but will be more focused on military users operating in contested areas where satellites are expected to be jammed. “PTS is one piece of U.S. Space Force’s future satcom architecture and offers advanced on-board protection features to mitigate jamming,” said Bruner. The two prototype PTS payloads now being built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman will operate in geosynchronous Earth orbit so they are compatible with military terminals with stationary antennas that point only to GEO satellites. However, the Space Force is continuing to study the use of other orbits, Bruner said. The U.S. Air Force started the PTS program in 2018 to develop secure satcom services for government agencies and military forces so they are less dependent on the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellites, which are used for the most sensitive classified communications.
TAMPA, Fla. — A week after calling off a SPAC merger intended to raise $420 million for a constellation of commercial weather radar satellites, Tomorrow.io said March 16 its two pathfinder spacecraft passed their critical design review. John Springmann, Tomorrow.io’s vice president for space, said the successful review clears the way for satellite production and keeps the operational constellation on track to start launching in 2023. The commercial weather data provider is building the radar and subsystems for a constellation it says will improve the forecasts it already provides Uber, Delta Air Lines and other businesses affected by weather patterns. The Boston-based company is using Astro Digital’s Corvus-XL platform for two demonstration satellites that Springmann said are slated to launch in the fourth quarter of this year with a provider he declined to disclose. “We remain on track, and closely tracking supply chain disruptions that might affect our timeline,” Springmann told SpaceNews . “Even in a worst case scenario, we do not anticipate material delays in those launches.” He said the company also continues to expect its operational constellation of around 30 small satellites will start being deployed in the fourth quarter in 2023, and complete the following year. CDR milestone Springmann said the critical design review was for its two pathfinder satellites, which demonstrate key radar technology and other components that are critical for the mission. “The [operational] radar system is similar, and the purpose of the pathfinders is to demonstrate not only the radar system, but also the end-to-end system of radar measurements through assimilation into weather models,” he said. Tomorrow.io conducted the CDR in partnership with the U.S. Air Force, which through the AFVentures Strategic Funding Increase program is supporting the development of the company’s first four satellites in a $19.3 million contract . “We completed CDRs at the lower level elements of the system over multiple days and sessions, and culminated in a single system-level CDR which was briefed to the Air Force customer,” Springmann said. The precursor subsystem-level CDRs were completed over multiple sessions between December and January, he added, and the final system-level CDR was presented to the customer remotely after no specific issues were identified. Timeline unchanged Plans that Tomorrow.io announced Dec. 7 to fuel its expansion plans by merging with Pine Technology Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), were nixed March 7 when they called off the deal because of unfavorable market conditions. The merger would have listed Tomorrow.io’s shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange and valued the company at $1.2 billion . “Given our previous funding rounds and revenue growth, the company is and has been well funded to pursue its plan since announcing the constellation last year,” Tomorrow.io CEO co-founder and chief strategy officer Rei Goffer said. “To further fuel growth and expansion across other parts of the business, the SPAC was one possible route. As the market conditions have changed and SPAC became a less attractive option we decided to choose a different route and stay private for the time being.” While geopolitical tensions following Russia’s war in Ukraine and the potential for rising interest rates cause uncertainty in the financial markets, questions also linger over the use of SPACs to grow space businesses. Tomorrow.io, which said sales more than doubled year-on-year to $19 million for 2021, received $77 million last year in a funding round led by private equity firm Stonecourt Capital.
The U.S. Air Force is funding a study to identify potential uses of NASA’s plant-growing technology to feed troops in remote locations. Eden Grow Systems and Rhea Space Activity announced March 16 they won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 contract to look at possible applications of aeroponic technology to grow produce at inhospitable locations where some Space Force units are deployed. Aeroponics is a more specialized version of hydroponics, a technology used to grow plants in sand or gravel instead of soil. With the aeroponics process, crop roots dangle in the air and are misted with a liquid nutrient solution. The technology developed by Eden Grow Systems leverages NASA-funded aeroponic technology, the company said in a statement. Greg Stutte, head researcher at Eden, previously worked at NASA on methods to grow plants on the International Space Station. The U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, based in Florida, operates a hydroponics facility to support launch operations at Ascension Island Auxiliary Airfield, located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where deliveries of fresh produce are infrequent. “Our scientists have developed varieties of new growing techniques on the ISS,” said Eden’s CEO Bart Womack, and these techniques could be leveraged to feed military troops. The company plan to apply for an SBIR Phase 2 award to carry out a micro-farming demonstration and validate the technology for broader deployment or for specific use cases at remote locations such as Ascension Island.
NorthStar Earth & Space, a company planning a satellite constellation to collect space situational awareness (SSA) data, is working with Spire to field an initial fleet of spacecraft. The companies announced March 16 that Spire will develop three 12-unit cubesats for launch in 2023 that will carry sensors for collecting SSA data for NorthStar. They did not disclose financial terms of the deal but said that the agreement includes options for dozens of additional satellites. The satellites will be operated as part of the broader Spire constellation of cubesats through what Spire calls a “space-as-a-service” agreement. The spacecraft will be Spire’s first 12-unit cubesats with additional power and edge computing capabilities. “Maintaining pace with the exponential increase in space activity demands immediate action from commercial innovators. Spire provides on-board processing, tasking, flexibility and agility within an attractive service level agreement business model,” Stewart Bain, chief executive of NorthStar, said in a statement. Montreal-based NorthStar previously ordered three larger satellites, called Skylarks, from Thales Alenia Space , working in cooperation with LeoStella. Those satellites were originally scheduled to launch in 2022, but as of August 2021 the company had expected those satellites to launch no earlier than 2023 as it worked to secure Canadian government licenses . Spire and NorthStar have European ties. Both companies have their European headquarters in Luxembourg and have raised funding from the Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF). NorthStar announced LFF would join a $45 million round in December 2021 , while LFF participated in Spire’s $70 million Series C round in 2017. “This is a landmark contract for the industry, demonstrating the speed, scale, and agility of Spire’s space- as-a-service model,” said Peter Platzer, chief executive of Spire, in a statement. “Leveraging Spire’s existing infrastructure and expertise will help NorthStar accelerate the timeline to deploy and scale in space.” Spire announced a similar space-as-a-service deal with Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) March 7. Under that agreement, Spire will build four six-unit cubesats for SNC for radio-frequency intelligence, such as identifying sources of interference. 
A $550 million increase to the Pentagon’s 2022 budget was directed by Congress to procure sensor satellites and launch them to low Earth orbit to detect and track Russian and Chinese hypersonic missiles. These funds are only a down payment to kickstart the deployment of the Tracking Layer Tranche 1, a constellation of 28 infrared sensor satellites that would cost about $2.5 billion to procure and launch, a senior defense official told reporters March 15. DoD’s Space Development Agency (SDA) in 2020 bought the first eight satellites of the Tracking Layer — four from L3Harris and four from a SpaceX-Leidos team. Both have passed design reviews and are scheduled to launch in 2023. The agency planned to start buying the next batch of 28 satellites in 2022 but no funding had been requested in the Pentagon’s budget. The official said DoD had to make budget tradeoffs and the Tracking Layer did not make the cut. Had Congress not added the $550 million, the procurement of the Tracking Layer would have been delayed until fiscal year 2023. “Appropriators knew that advanced missile tracking was a key mission that needed to be addressed,” the official said. Senate appropriators initially recommended adding $750 million but the House pushed back and they compromised on $550 million. “The $550 million allows us to start early,” the official said. “The total Tranche 1 budget would be closer to $2.5 billion.” Congress in the spending bill requires SDA to use the $550 million to demonstrate how the tracking satellites would protect U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region. The defense official said SDA would need to deploy all 28 satellites to get nearly global coverage, including the Indo-Pacific area. The $550 million is not enough to accomplish that so the expectation is that DoD will request the needed funding in the upcoming budget proposal. In the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine and China’s rapid advances in hypersonic missiles, it’s not surprising that appropriators saw the need to fund these satellites, the official said. “The one thing that the recent events have shown us is that these capabilities are not something that we want to delay in fielding,” he said. SDA is expected to release a solicitation for the 28 tracking satellites in the next one to two weeks. Two vendors are likely to be selected to supply 14 satellites each. The first 14 would launch in 2024 and the second half in 2025. If successful, the Tracking Layer would be the first U.S. defense system to provide global coverage for missile detection and tracking. Current DoD geostationary satellites provide global missile warning and detect launches of short-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles, but they were not designed to track advanced maneuvering missiles like hypersonic glide vehicles. By virtue of being closer to Earth, the Tracking Layer satellites can see targets with greater fidelity, the official said. The Congressional Research Service, which provides independent analysis of issues for congressional committees, noted in a recent report that there are still unanswered questions about DoD’s abilities to pull off a complex technical feat like a global hypersonic missile defense network. CRS analysts suggested that Congress should press DoD to answer key questions, such as whether the proposed hypersonic missile defense options are “necessary and technologically feasible.” 
Updated 6:45 p.m. Eastern with stock information. WASHINGTON — Astra successfully returned its Rocket 3.3 vehicle to flight March 15, placing several payloads into low Earth orbit. The Rocket 3.3 vehicle, designated LV0009 by Astra, lifted off at 12:22 p.m. Eastern from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island. The company scrubbed a launch attempt the previous day because of poor weather. The liftoff and ascent appeared to go as expected. That included the successful separation of the payload fairing after the first stage engines shut down and before separation of the second stage. On the previous Astra launch Feb. 10, a flawed design in the wiring for the payload fairing separation system prevented one mechanism from firing , keeping the fairing from separating as planned. The second stage engine shut down about eight minutes and 35 seconds after liftoff. Payload separation was scheduled to take place 10 seconds later, but there was no immediate confirmation that the payloads were released. A little more than an hour after liftoff, though, Astra Chief Executive Chris Kemp said the payloads were communicating with ground stations, confirming successful separation. “The flight was nominal,” he said on a company webcast. “We were able to precisely deliver to the targeted orbit and inclination at orbital velocity.” Astra said before the launch the vehicle would deliver the payloads to a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 525 kilometers. The mission, the first in a multilaunch agreement Astra announced with launch services provider Spaceflight March 14 , carried payloads for three customers. One payload, called EyeStar-S4 and developed by NearSpace Launch, was designed to remain attached to the second stage to test intersatellite communications technologies the company plans to use on future satellites. A second payload was OreSat0, a cubesat developed by a student group, the Portland State Aerospace Society. Spaceflight previously planned to launch OreSat0 on one of its Sherpa tugs manifested on the SpaceX Transporter-3 rideshare mission in January, but a propellant leak on the Sherpa forced the company to remove the vehicle from that launch and find other rides for OreSat0 and the other satellites it was to deploy. A third customer, not identified by either Astra or Spaceflight, also had one or more payloads on board. The launch was the first since the February launch failure from Cape Canaveral that carried four NASA and university cubesats on a launch arranged by NASA’s Venture Class Launch Services program. The subsequent investigation turned up both the payload fairing wiring problem as well as a software glitch with the thrust vector control system on the second stage. “The team worked really hard — every day, every weekend, many nights — to quickly identify the issues that we had on the flight, get another rocket back up to Kodiak, and fly it,” Kemp said on the webcast. Kemp previously said that the next three launches Astra has planned will take place from Florida, carrying cubesats for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) Earth science mission. Those launches are scheduled for this spring. Despite the successful launch, Astra was not rewarded on the stock market. Shares in Astra were volatile in trading March 13, soaring briefly after liftoff only to sharply plummet during the nearly one hour with no updates regarding payload separation. The stock rebounded when Kemp announced successful payload deployment, but shared closed for the day down nearly 0.6% at $3.49. Edison Yu, a research analyst at Deutsche Bank, said in a note after the launch that the success of this mission alone was not sufficient. “We think this will help sentiment on the stock but the company likely needs to put together a string of successful launches for a meaningful re-rating,” he wrote. Astra will release its fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results after the markets close March 17.
TAMPA, Fla. — Antenna maker Kymeta said March 15 it has raised $84 million to expand manufacturing facilities ahead of deploying its first flat panel, electronically steered user terminals for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites this year. Existing investor Bill Gates led the funding round, joined by South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Systems and other investors. Hanwha, which has plans to deploy a LEO megaconstellation by 2030, invested $30 million in Kymeta in December 2020. Kymeta said the company is now nearly fully funded after commercially launching the first version of its u8 steerable terminal in November 2020 for satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO). The company’s latest funding round had sought to raise nearly $132 million, according to a regulatory filing . Doug Hutcheson, executive chair and co-CEO of Kymeta, told SpaceNews the extra funds enable it to get “into the deeper phases of commercialization,” including expanding sales teams and manufacturing operations. He said Kymeta is preparing to deploy a third-generation u8 this year to reduce costs after selling “thousands” of the terminals to customers, including defense contractor Kratos and communications equipment maker Comtech. GEO satellite operator Intelsat is also a Kymeta investor and is on the antenna company’s board of directors. According to Hutcheson, Kymeta will be “selling terminals this year on select applications in volume” for GEO applications “in the thousands of dollars,” compared with available antennas in “the low tens of thousands.” He said Kymeta also plans to commercially launch two more antennas this year: One dedicated to connecting LEO spacecraft and another that can switch between satellites in GEO and LEO. Kymeta announced a partnership Dec. 1 to deploy terminals for stationary land applications on OneWeb’s LEO broadband network by the third quarter of 2022. OneWeb had planned to have deployed enough satellites in LEO by the end of this summer to provide global services. However, it paused deployment March 3 after deciding to stop using Russia’s Soyuz rocket amid the war in Ukraine. With nearly two-thirds of OneWeb’s 648 satellites in LEO, the company has said it can provide services to at least the upper parts of the northern hemisphere. Hutcheson said Kymeta’s partnership with OneWeb remains intact despite the deployment disruption. “The satellite coverage available in northern latitudes has been so deficient [because] the geosynchronous orbit has limits on what it can do,” he said. “So is there interest even in those northern latitudes for product from the likes of Kymeta? Absolutely — there’s no question.”
WARSAW, Poland — While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to impact the Ukrainian space sector, senior industry representatives say that local companies have so far managed to adapt their activities to the realities of war, and they are determined to advance joint projects with their European partners. Volodymyr Usov, the co-founder of Ukrainian space industry startup Kurs Orbital and the former head of Ukraine’s space agency, told SpaceNews that over the past few days areas surrounding Dnipro, a region in eastern Ukraine that hosts a major space industry hub, have witnessed an increasing number of attacks by Russian forces. This said, to date, Russia’s airstrikes and artillery fire have not targeted the key facilities of the country’s space sector, he said. An industry at work despite war In total, the State Space Agency of Ukraine and the state-run space companies that include spacecraft and components producer Yuzhmash, space technology design office Yuzhnoe, and Kyiv Radio Plant provide an aggregate of 16,000 jobs, according to Usov. “In Dnipro, Yuzhmash and Yuzhnoye have not been bombed or targeted by missile attacks so far. One of the possible reasons is that Russia’s plan is to take them over as part of their invasion, so they intend to keep these facilities intact,” Usov said. “Because of the Russian attacks in the Dnipro region, these facilities are not operating at full capacities, and they were forced to halt work on their projects. But a share of their employees ensures their operations continue.” Volodymyr Kravchuk, head of communications for Kyiv-based Promin Aerospace, said Ukrainian space companies both large and small are finding ways to continue their work despite the war. “All of these companies have continued their normal work,” Kravchuk wrote in a recent op-ed . At the beginning of the war, some adopted remote working, but they already had experience with this from the pandemic. Most companies have also created volunteering programs.” Ukraine’s space industry was previously hit by Russia’s annexation of the country’s Crimean peninsula in 2014. Following Moscow’s aggression, the Russian authorities unveiled plans to overhaul NIP-16, a Soviet-built space tracking facility located in Crimea, and re-integrate it into the country’s network. Another Ukrainian city targeted by Russia’s ongoing war, Kharkiv, is also home to a major space industry cluster. “The Ukrainian space industry functions within the Dnipro-Kyiv-Kharkiv triangle. Our company, Kurs Orbital, is based in Kyiv where we also operate our R&D facilities, working with Kyiv Radio Plant. Our activities in Dnipro are focused on launch technology, and we also have an office in Torino in Italy,” he said. Katie Miller, the head of communications at UK-Ukrainian launch vehicle developer Skyrora, told SpaceNews that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not hampered the company’s work. In addition to the staff who work at the Ukrainian R&D facility in Dnipro, Skyrora’s core business operations which include “ engineering, production, and central R&D activities, are continuing at pace at our UK facilities.” “ Our priority for our Ukrainian team who work at one of our manufacturing techniques R&D hubs is their safety and well-being, and we are providing all support possible to them,” she said. European launch capacities In addition to Kurs Orbital, which seeks to provide spacecraft in-orbit servicing through a fleet of reusable servicers in different orbits, Usov is also the co-founder of Orbit Boy, a Ukrainian startup involved in developing a microsatellite air-launch system for European customers. “The current invasion has demonstrated that Europe cannot depend on Russia and its Soyuz launchers to cover its needs. If the European Union’s member states want to maintain their own satellite constellation, they should carry out launches from their own territory,” Usov said. With this in mind, Orbit Boy is developing a solution in cooperation with Yuzhmash and other Ukrainian space industry players, hoping to secure a capacity for air launches with the use of mid-range aircraft. “In our case, the rocket will be placed inside the plane, and not under its wing. At an altitude of 10,000 meters, we make an airdrop,” he said. “It’s an international effort. Last week, we met with representatives of the Polish Space Agency in Lviv, in western Ukraine. We want to cooperate with Poland on a solid-propellant rocket.” “We have also established collaboration with Italian partners, and we wish to use an abandoned military base in Comiso, in Sicily. We will launch from there,” according to Usov. Usov says he is confident that, once the war in Ukraine is over, the country’s space industry will further bolster its ties with European partners. “Ukraine’s space sector has grown rapidly over the past years, and after the war, the government should encourage the development of private space businesses to compete with state-owned companies. Ukraine has applied to join the EU, and hopefully, the coming years will bring our space sector even closer to our European partners,” he said. 
NASA is ready to roll out the first Space Launch System rocket this week for a countdown rehearsal ahead of a launch later this year. Agency officials said at a March 14 briefing that they had completed reviews for the scheduled March 17 rollout of the SLS from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center to Launch Complex 39B several kilometers away. Rollout is scheduled to begin at approximately 5 p.m. Eastern and take 11 hours to reach the pad. The SLS, with the Orion spacecraft mounted on it, will spend a few weeks at the pad for tests that culminate in a practice countdown called a wet dress rehearsal, where the core stage of the rocket is filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and goes through a countdown that stops just before the core stage’s four RS-25 engines would ignite. “We are in very good shape and ready to proceed with this roll on Thursday evening,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director at NASA, said at the briefing. Weather forecasts project acceptable conditions for the rollout. Assuming the rollout and other tests at the pad remain on schedule, the formal countdown rehearsal will start with a “call to stations” for NASA personnel on April 1, she said. The fueling of the core stage and practice countdown will take place April 3. The propellant loading process, which took about two and a half hours for the shuttle, will take eight hours for the SLS despite its use of shuttle-heritage hardware. “That’s for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a big ol’ stage,” Blackwell-Thompson said. A second reason is that the SLS has an upper stage that must also be fueled, requiring personnel to stagger the loading of the two stages. The wet dress rehearsal will be the final major test before the first SLS launch on the Artemis 1 mission. NASA has not set a date for the launch but noted at a Feb. 24 briefing it was still keeping open an option for the “tail end” of a May launch window that runs from May 7 to 21. However, a launch in June or July is more likely. After the dress rehearsal, NASA anticipates spending eight to nine days working on the vehicle for post-test operations and servicing before rolling it back to the VAB for final launch preparations. That schedule is subject to change, though, depending on what happens during the test, said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development. NASA should then be able to set a more specific launch date for Artemis 1. “That’s the point where we’ll be in a good position as an agency to set a launch date,” he said. “We’re really getting close to being able to do that.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not affected operations of the International Space Station or plans for a NASA astronaut to return home on a Soyuz spacecraft late this month, according to agency officials. At a March 14 briefing about a pair of upcoming spacewalks at the station, Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, emphasized repeatedly that the geopolitical tensions on Earth between Russia and the West have not extended to the ISS. “Nothing has changed in the last three weeks,” he said. “We’re not seeing any impacts from what’s going on around us. We’re able to do our jobs. We’re aware of what’s going on, but we are able to do our jobs and continue operations.” That includes, he said, the March 18 launch of the Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft to the ISS, bringing three Russian cosmonauts to the station. On March 30, the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft will return to Earth with Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov on board, along with NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei. There had been media reports in recent days speculating that Vande Hei might be denied a seat on that Soyuz, based in part on a Russian video that showed Shkaplerov and Dubrov leaving without Vande Hei, taking with them the Russian segment of the station. Montalbano, though, said that Vande Hei would return as planned on Soyuz MS-19. “I can tell you for sure that Mark is coming home on that Soyuz,” he said. “We are in communications with our Russian colleagues. There’s no fuzz on that.” He reiterated that later in the briefing, noting that the ISS partners head a “readiness review” recently for that return. “Everybody confirmed that the three people coming home will be Anton, Pyotr and Mark.” NASA’s role in the recovery operations after landing will be unchanged, he said, including the use of a NASA Gulfstream G5 jet to pick up Vande Hei and return him to Houston. NASA has “just under 20” people involved in those operations, which includes both those who come over on the jet as well as U.S. embassy personnel in Kazakhstan. Other activities at the station are also proceeding as planned. That includes a spacewalk March 15 by NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari to install equipment that will be used by new solar arrays to be added later this year. Another spacewalk, scheduled for March 23, will involve a variety of maintenance work on the station’s exterior. The Ax-1 private astronaut mission by Axiom Space remains scheduled for launch March 30 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Montalbano said that work continues to finalize a seat barter agreement between NASA and Roscosmos that would allow NASA astronauts to fly on Soyuz spacecraft in exchange for flying Roscosmos cosmonauts on commercial crew vehicles. “We still plan to work the crew swap,” he said, with cosmonauts scheduled to train at the Johnson Space Center and at SpaceX’s California headquarters and NASA astronauts going to Star City, Russia. “Today, we’re continuing to work those agreements.” Roscosmos has also stated that ISS operations, including the upcoming Soyuz MS-19 return, remain normal. Roscosmos said in a statement published by the Tass news service that Vande Hei would return on Soyuz MS-19 along with Shkaplerov and Dubrov. “Roscosmos has never let anybody doubt its reliability as a partner,” the agency stated. One reason for that is that neither NASA nor Roscosmos can operate the station on its own. “Space Station was designed to be interdependent,” Montalbano said. “It’s not a process where one group can separate from the other. We need everything together in order to be successful.” The U.S. segment, he noted, handles “non-propulsive” attitude control as well as offers communications and surplus power for the Russian segment. Russia, in turn, provides propulsion to maintain the station’s orbit and for additional attitude control. A Cygnus cargo spacecraft currently attached to the station will perform a test this spring of reboosting the station, he said, but even that test will require Russian thrusters to provide attitude control. Robyn Gatens, ISS director at NASA Headquarters, offered a similar message in a March 12 interview after a panel discussion at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. “It would be a difficult situation if we were to try to operate independently from our partners,” she said. “We are interdependent on our partners and we hope that will continue to be the case.” That interdependence does raise questions in the longer term, though. While Canada, Europe and Japan have all backed NASA’s plan to extend ISS operations from 2024 to 2030, Russia was skeptical even before the invasion of Ukraine. Now, Russia may be even less supportive of a long-term future for the station even if it is willing to continue operations in the near term. “If we have time, that opens up some options for us” to plan on operating the station without Russia, Gatens said. “I think it would be difficult and limit our goals for the space station through 2030 if we had to focus our energy and resources on trying to backfill the capability that one of our partners is providing.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Agile Space Industries, a Durango, Colorado company focused on in-space chemical propulsion, is additively manufacturing thrusters for robotic lunar landers being built by Astrobotic Technology, ispace and Masten Space Systems. Specifically, Agile is manufacturing attitude control thrusters for Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander. For Tokyo-based ispace’s Series 2 lunar landers, Agile is supplying thrusters for both attitude and axial control. Masten is buying Agile’s axial control thrusters. In recent years, the vast majority of propulsion work has focuses on launch vehicles. As NASA and commercial companies prepare to send a series of robotic spacecraft to the moon ahead of Artemis missions to transport astronauts, in-space propulsion is attracting renewed attention and funding. That’s good news for Agile, a company with 55 employees that specializes in custom-built propulsion systems for government and commercial customers. “We can do designs that weren’t possible in normal kinds of machining and manufacturing technologies,” Jeff Max, Agile CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews . “It also allows us to work with materials which may not have been used historically in propulsion cases and to deliver engines at vastly lower mass because we’re only laying down as much material as the design needs in order to operate.” In addition to operating its own additive manufacturing facility, Agile has extensive testing infrastructure. “We are able to replicate the vacuum of space and the temperatures of space, so that we can test these engines on the ground in their lunar operating environment,” Max said. Agile has been designing, developing and testing propulsion technology for government agencies and prime contractors since the company was established in 2009. The first space-based demonstration of Agile’s technology is slated for late 2023 on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. NASA awarded Astrobotic a $199.5 million task order under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract to deliver a water-prospecting mission, Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover , or VIPER, to the lunar south pole on the Griffin lander. A dispute earlier this year that prompted Agile to file a lawsuit against Masten for nonpayment has been resolved. “Sometimes these things happen in business,” Max said. “You resolve them and move on. In this case, we’ve moved on in a collaborative way.” Agile has kept a low profile in recent years, rarely disclosing individual contract awards. The company is now revealing a trio of lunar lander propulsion contracts because much of the work has been completed and engine delivery is on the horizon. Agile executives declined to specify materials used for each propulsion system. In general, the company is working with pure nickel, nickel alloys, niobium C-103 and cobalt chrome. “We’re leveraging a broad range of materials based on what’s optimal for a specific engine,” Max said. “An engine that requires many long burns over a lifetime sends us in a different direction than a thruster that needs to fire five times for 90 seconds each time.”
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency decommissioned two missile-tracking satellites that have operated in low Earth orbit for more than 12 years, MDA said March 14. The two Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) satellites were taken out of service on March 8. Made by Northrop Grumman, the satellites launched in 2009 on a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket. MDA in its 2022 budget requested $15.2 million to retire the STSS satellites and close out the program. The satellites stopped collecting data in September 2021. MDA said it safely passivated the two space vehicles and moved them to orbits designed to prevent collisions with other space objects. They will remain there for over 6,000 years. The STSS satellites circled the Earth 12 times a day from an altitude of 1,350 kilometers, using infrared sensors to gather data on missile launches and track U.S. missile tests. The Pentagon in the 1990s originally planned to deploy a constellation of as many as 24 of these low-orbiting satellites — then named SBIRS Low — to supplement the coverage provided by the geostationary Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellites. The SBIRS Low program in 2001 was transferred to the Missile Defense Agency where it became the Space Tracking and Surveillance System. In 2009 the agency launched two STSS satellites but as costs escalated, the Pentagon abandoned the original SBIRS Low goal of a 24-satellite constellation. MDA said the STSS satellites were the agency’s “first attempt at exploring new ways to track threat missiles, and were originally expected to work for only four years.” The data gathered by the STSS spacecraft has contributed to the development of new missile-defense sensors and systems, including the MDA Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) program, said MDA Director Vice Admiral Jon Hill. “We’ve been able to use it eight years longer than planned.” In 2023, MDA will begin an on-orbit demonstration with two HBTSS prototype space vehicles made by Northrop Grumman and L3Harris Technologies. “Space-based sensors can detect and track hypersonic, ballistic and other advanced threats that may not be possible by terrestrial radars that are limited by line of sight and the curvature of the Earth,” said Walter Chai, MDA’s director of space sensors. 
The launch of a U.S. Space Force mission known as USSF-12 has been put on indefinite pause, for reasons that are not being disclosed. USSF-12 was planned as a two-satellite mission that United Launch Alliance was preparing to launch in April on an Atlas 5 rocket. The primary payload is the geosynchronous Wide Field of View mid-size satellite equipped with a missile-warning sensor. A rideshare spacecraft was expected to fly an unspecified number of small satellites for military experiments. ULA on March 9 announced that USSF-12 is being postponed “due to a customer request” but did not elaborate further. The Space Force confirmed March 12 that the launch of USSF-12 is being taken off the schedule for now. “We have no specifics to offer at this time on the exact cause for the delay, but we are working to get USSF-12 back on the launch schedule as soon as possible,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Space Systems Command said in a statement to SpaceNews. The manufacturer of the Wide Field of View satellite, Boeing’s Millennium Space Systems, in a statement March 14 said the payload was delivered last month to a launch processing facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Atlas 5 rocket remains at the Cape ready to launch. The Wide Field of View was shipped from the company’s facility in El Segundo, California, and “was delivered safely on February 2,” the company said in the statement. “This satellite was procured by the Space Systems Command to serve as a testbed for Wide Field of View technologies in geosynchronous orbit for the missile warning mission, and as an enabling asset for the missile tracking and missile defense missions,” the company said. The delay conceivably could be related to the secondary payload but neither the Space Systems Command nor Millennium Space would comment on that. Wide Field of View will be put back in storage until the Space Force decides how to move forward. “We will share additional information regarding a new launch date when it is available,” the spokesperson said. Wide Field of View has been in development since 2016. It was designed to test advanced technologies for missile warning, or the early detection of ballistic missile launches. It is not part of a missile-warning constellation but a stand-alone experiment. The satellite carries an infrared sensor made by L3Harris Technologies. ULA received a contract in 2018 to launch USSF-12. The launch was initially targeted for 2020, and last year was put on the calendar for early 2022. 
U.S. Space Command last month opened a small office at the Catalyst Campus, a business park in Colorado Springs where more than 30 startups and defense contractors have set up shop. Space Command, the U.S. military combatant command responsible for operations in outer space, tracks satellites and debris in orbit. Amid growing concerns about threats to U.S. spacecraft, the command wants swift access to technologies developed by companies at the campus, such as algorithms that analyze data on space objects to predict their path. Accurate intelligence about the space domain is one example of the capabilities the U.S. military is looking to upgrade using commercially developed products. As the Pentagon prepares for the possibility that adversaries will target national and commercial satellites, the government’s ability to adopt commercial industry’s best technologies has become a major topic of discussion. For decades the military has followed the traditional model of hiring defense contractors to develop custom-made satellites, sensors, ground stations and software. Meanwhile, private space companies using billions of dollars in venture capital are launching constellations at unprecedented speed, using artificial intelligence to analyze data and offering services that just a few years ago were only provided by government agencies. The requirements-based acquisition system that is the norm today means the “ vast amount of DoD procurement dollars going exclusively to traditional vendors focused on bespoke government solutions with little, if any, commercial nexus,” said State of the Space Industrial Base 2021, a report published in November by the U.S. Space Force, the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The military has to “accelerate the adoption of commercial innovation,” said the report, noting that two-thirds of U.S. research and development investments today come from non-government sources. “If the U.S. is to retain its technological leadership and compete globally, it must diversify its portfolio and increase the total percentage of commercial procurements.” A key reason the military does business the way it does is that, historically, “we had to guarantee that capabilities would be there in a time of conflict,” Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told SpaceNews. For example, when the military was fighting wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, it could not assume that the private sector would deliver all the needed services. “So we always had to have our own internal organic capabilities,” Guetlein said. That mindset is evolving as the Space Force and Space Command take a broader view of providing space capabilities to military forces at sea, in the air and in the field, Guetlein said. “The innovation coming out of industry today is bringing an enormous amount of capability and opportunity to the table that we traditionally didn’t have,” he added. “I think we’re in a culture change with the stand up with the Space Force,” which was created to focus on the space domain and to bring fresh energy to acquisitions. The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency, cautioned in a recent report that the U.S. military is at risk of being outpaced by rival power China in space, cyber warfare and artificial intelligence. “I think it’s important for Congress and DoD to continue to have this China pacing threat reality at the forefront of their thinking because business as usual for DoD is really a losing proposition,” said Cathleen Berrick, GAO’s managing director of defense capabilities. “This means they’re going to have to figure out how to adapt everything the department does away from the current industrial age approach to something more suitable for the information age.” Over the past several years, DoD, the Air Force and the Space Force have launched efforts to build closer ties to the private sector, recognizing that much of the breakthrough innovation is happening outside the military-industrial base. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2015 established the Defense Innovation Unit in Silicon Valley. DIU became an early supporter of emerging space launch companies like Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Relativity Space, which were selected to launch experimental payloads. The Air Force in 2017 created the Space Enterprise Consortium, known as SpEC, to attract commercial space startups and small businesses. The consortium awards contracts for prototypes of space systems, including satellites, payloads and ground systems. Joy White, executive director of the Space Systems Command, said the SpEC has grown to 644 companies, 477 of which are nontraditional firms. Another effort started in 2017 was the Air Force technology accelerator known as AFWERX, created to help commercialize technologies and also serve national security needs. A space-focused spinoff, called SpaceWERX, was formed in 2020 and last year kicked off its first program, Orbital Prime, that seeks commercial solutions for debris removal and other on-orbit services. The most visible push to bring commercial space technology into the military has come from the Space Development Agency, established in 2019. SDA is buying satellites, sensors and integration services from the commercial industry to build a military megaconstellation in low Earth orbit that could number close to 1,000 spacecraft by 2026. The agency on Feb. 28 announced contracts worth nearly $1.8 billion to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems to build 126 satellites. The $382 million deal awarded to York Space for 42 satellites is a major victory for a 10-year-old company that had never won a large defense deal. SDA later this year will be absorbed by the Space Force. Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond said the service over the next several years will start “to pivot significantly to a resilient architecture.” Resiliency means, for example, deploying proliferated constellations of large numbers of satellites and designing spacecraft with more advanced propulsion systems. A recent white paper by the National Security Space Association, an industry group, said the private sector is eager to support national security programs but needs DoD to better inform the industry about its requirements. “The national security space enterprise should collaborate with the private sector so that commercial companies are knowledgeable about its needs and requirements and invest to achieve specific desired and measurable defense or intelligence outcomes,” the paper said. “This dialogue could also convey government demand signals to influence commercial designs and investments.” At the same time, said NSSA, the government has to learn how to be a smart buyer and “apply the basic rule of caveat emptor – buyer beware. “It must base procurement decisions on facts, markets, and business plans — not marketing or the latest faddish ideas.” Preston Dunlap, the Space Force and Air Force chief architect, said there is a real desire to tap commercial space innovation, but that will require changes in procurement strategies and budget proposals. Dunlap oversees the architecture of the Department of the Air Force’s nearly $70 billion of research, development and acquisition programs. Many commercial space companies are winning contracts, but most are Small Business Innovation Research studies and demonstrations, not major procurements. “So we’ve got to be able to make sure we thread the needle,” Dunlap said last month at the SmallSat Symposium. “We’ve got great partnerships across DIU and SDA and others,” he said, but many space projects are still experiments. They don’t quite get across the proverbial valley of death, a term used to describe the transition of technologies from research projects and prototypes to procurement programs with long-term funding. “I’m seeing a twinkling of promise,” Dunlap said. “But we need to press start and get faster.” To oversee military space procurement, President Biden in December selected former National Reconnaissance Office executive Frank Calvelli to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration. Once confirmed by the Senate, Calvelli will become the first-ever senior procurement executive in charge of military space programs, a post mandated by Congress in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. During a confirmation hearing last month, Calvelli said the establishment of the Space Force “provided the Department of Defense a tremendous opportunity to take a fresh look at how to equip the force with new capabilities for the future fight.” The commercial sector is at the forefront of many new technologies that underpin space systems, such as artificial intelligence, edge computing and machine learning, Calvelli said, adding that he will “work to identify and reduce the barriers to leveraging the best available commercial technologies.” The cadre of defense contractors dominating the military space market has shrunk dramatically in a wave of mergers and acquisitions. The largest firms — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Boeing — collectively gobbled up 51 companies since the 1990s. That sector stands in sharp contrast to the commercial space industry, where there is healthy competition, so there is an opportunity for the government to “pick the best,” said Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, a venture fund that invests in defense and space companies. Some of Lux Capital’s portfolio companies — Kymeta, Planet, Relativity Space and Orbital Insights, among others — compete in a DoD space market that is notoriously risk-averse and where it’s difficult to challenge incumbents, Wolfe said in an interview. However, there are signs that they are willing to try something new. “Creating the Space Force was, I think, a net positive,” he said. While many people associate Space Force with the Netflix parody, “It’s not a joke. And I think people will take it seriously.” Wolfe said the Space Force will come under increasing pressure to bring new technology to bear as rival nations exhibit advanced capabilities like anti-satellite weapons and hypersonic vehicles. There is a flood of capital in the space industry and a wave of innovation that the government can ride on, he said. “They should put out solicitations for the best technology and they should award it to the best-performing companies. And those might not be the traditional big primes,” said Wolfe. “They should make room for the new entrants who might be able to deliver.” “Investors are putting up meaningful equity capital” and “trying on our own dime to develop technology that we hope the government will buy,” said Wolfe. “We just need to know that companies are going to get a fair shot to win the contracts and deliver. If they fail, they deserve to lose the contract,” he added. Military buyers “should set the expectation. The expectation should be vast, super high quality, low cost, and let the market do its thing.” In the industry today, “you have a really motivated, high tech entrepreneurial engineering workforce that is delivering new capabilities,” said Wolfe. “They want to win and just need the chance.” Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, has long advocated for a shift in how DoD buys technologies. Speaking on a panel at the SmallSat Symposium, Butow noted that the space industry is now offering an array of satellite-based services — imagery, analytics, weather data, broadband from low-Earth orbit constellations — that could be procured as an alternative to traditional acquisitions. But other than satellite communications, “very few things in DoD land are bought as services,” he said. An effort to start buying space industry services is now underway at Space Systems Command. Guetlein said a new office focused on the procurement of commercial services recently opened in the Washington, D.C., area. This new organization will assess opportunities to buy, for example, satellite imagery, weather and space domain awareness data as a service. “It is intended to be a one-stop shop,” he said. The next step is to develop a business plan for military users to fund these services. Guetlein said SSC is working with the Pentagon to create a working capital fund where military customers allocate money for space services. “We’re hoping we can put in place a working capital fund for all commercial services,” he added. Joseph Rouge, Space Force deputy director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said there is a growing demand across the military for imagery and other data as a service from low Earth orbit satellite operators. The question was posed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall: “How are we going to use commercial capabilities,” Rouge said at a recent ExecutiveBiz forum. Most of the satellite imagery used by the military comes from U.S. intelligence satellites operated by the NRO or from the NRO’s commercial providers. But battlefield commanders have growing demands for more specialized and timely ISR services. One way to support these needs is being proposed by the Space Development Agency, which is discussing agreements with commercial imagery providers to transfer data directly from their satellites to SDA’s through optical intersatellite links. There are many options to work with industry, but it takes some imagination, Rouge said. “In government, we have gotten used to defining a requirement. We go out to industry and say, okay, industry, can you give us that solution?” What DoD needs to do instead is “work with industry to figure out how their innovation can be utilized by us, in addition to telling them what we need,” Rouge said. “This requires us to have a very good understanding of what commercial technology and innovation can do for us. And it requires dialogue.” Claude Rousseau, a space industry consultant at Northern Sky Research, said governments are missing out on commercial space advances due to the complexities of requirements and their focus on process rather than outcomes, “which is a peculiar way to do business.” The industry is pushing for more initiatives like the NRO’s recent data-sharing agreements with commercial radar satellite operators Airbus, Capella Space, Iceye, PredaSAR and Umbra. “That helps space businesses get solid feedback from a demanding customer, so they can then turn around and say to prospective investors they’ve got a real government customer that likes their product,” Rousseau said. One way for commercial space companies to get a foot in the door and learn about the defense market is to talk directly to military users, said Kari Bingen, chief strategy officer of HawkEye360, a commercial remote sensing satellite operator. “You need to build trust, and it starts with the relationship,” Bingen said at the SmallSat Symposium. HawkEye360, for example, provides data to the military for use during exercises or experiments, and company officials work side-by-side with the military users of the data. This helps them understand “what commercial providers can do and, importantly, what they can’t do,” she said. “This also gives the commercial folks a better insight into what exactly are the problems that they [the military] are trying to solve,” Bingen said. “I can think of a couple of times when we went in thinking that we understood the government’s problem, but once we got into a combatant command, it was very different from what we anticipated.” At the Catalyst Campus in Colorado, software engineers and programmers from commercial firms work alongside Space Command officials to improve what the military calls space domain awareness. “We need to understand what’s happening,” said Lt. Gen. John Shaw, U.S. Space Command deputy commander. He described space domain awareness as a “big data problem” that can’t just be fixed with more sensors but requires advanced analytics to make sense of the raw data. The Space Systems Command has similar collaborative workspaces in Los Angeles, said Guetlein. “We want to build a partnership environment, where industry can come in, and we can help them understand how to do business with the government. We can connect them to the operator so they can understand what we’re trying to solve.” These are positive steps, but more needs to be done, argues the National Security Space Association. “Mechanisms like the Defense Innovation Unit and Catalyst Campus are useful means of discovering and accessing innovation. While they have improved the government’s ability to scout talent, the scaling and ‘valley of death’ challenges remain.” This article originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
AUSTIN, Texas — Astra Space says it will attempt its next Rocket 3.3 launch as soon as March 14 as the first flight in a multi-launch contract with Spaceflight. Astra said March 14 it received a license from the Federal Aviation Administration for that launch from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island. Liftoff is scheduled for 12:22 p.m. Eastern in a 27-minute launch window, with a backup date of March 15. The launch, of a vehicle designated LV0009, will be the first since a Feb. 10 launch for NASA failed to reach orbit when the rocket’s payload fairing did not separate correctly. The company said March 7 that it traced the problem to a flaw in a diagram for a wiring harness that kept the separation signal from reaching one mechanism . The company also identified a software flaw in the thrust vector control system of the rocket’s upper stage that caused the stage to keep tumbling once it was able to free itself of the payload fairing. The LV0009 launch will be the first in a new multi-launch agreement with launch services company Spaceflight that Astra announced March 14. The rocket will carry three Spaceflight customers to a 525-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. Two of the customers are NearSpace Launch and the Portland State Aerospace Society, the companies said, but did not reveal the third. The announcement did not include details about the payloads, although the Portland State Aerospace Society had previously arranged to launch the student-built OreSat0 cubesat through Spaceflight. “We continuously look for opportunities to provide our customers access to flexible and reliable options to get to orbit,” Curt Blake, president and chief executive of Spaceflight, said in a statement. “By expanding our launch partner portfolio to include Astra, we can increase the launch opportunities available to our customers.” Astra’s announcement of the launch was the first time the company officially confirmed its plans to launch LV0009 from Kodiak, although there was widespread speculation Astra was the company associated with an FAA Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, for a launch there March 13 to 15. A notice about the launch published by Alaska Aerospace Corporation, which runs the launch site, did not mention the company conducting the launch but included “Astra” in the document’s filename. In an interview after a panel discussion at the South by Southwest festival here March 12, Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said the company was waiting on an FAA license before announcing its launch plans. While Astra has received other FAA licenses for past launches, the company still needs to get licenses “a la carte” for launches there. That’s not the case in Florida, where the company secured a license for multiple launches using new streamlined FAA launch licensing regulations known as Part 450. Astra will return to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for its next three launches after LV0009, Kemp said, launching the six NASA Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) Earth science cubesats in the spring.
The defense spending bill for fiscal year 2022 that Congress passed last week gives the Pentagon $743.4 billion. Military space programs got a big boost. Appropriators added nearly $1.3 billion for U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency projects above what the Biden administration requested. President Biden is expected to sign the $1.5 trillion federal spending bill before current funding expires on March 15. The government has been operating under continuing resolutions since the 2022 fiscal year started Oct. 1. The $1.3 billion Congress added for military space funds technology development projects run by the Space Force, pays for an extra Global Positioning System satellite, increases spending on small launch services and Space Development Agency (SDA) missile-detecting satellites. One of the largest items appropriators inserted into the budget is a $550 million demonstration of missile-tracking satellites to be developed by SDA for the U.S. Indo-Pacific military command. “The threats are driving space spending,” said Peter Garretson, a space and defense consultant and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. China’s recent displays of advanced space technology have not gone unnoticed, and there are growing worries about Russian aggression, he said. SDA is building a large mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit to detect and track enemy missiles, and to move data around the globe. Increasing the agency’s budget is ”absolutely the right move at this point in time,” said Garretson. “I’m hoping that SDA with their multiple layers of satellites will really get the DoD back in the game of rapid innovation and technology development.” Congressional concerns The funding added to military space programs reflects concerns that defense appropriators have expressed for years, said Mike Tierney, industry analyst at the aerospace and defense consulting firm Velos. Congress year after year has “hammered the Defense Department on making space a priority,” he said. With the increase in the 2022 bill, “they put their money where their mouth is.” But the spending bill also includes language that is critical of DoD’s management of space programs and calls for the Space Force to incorporate cutting-edge commercial technologies into military systems, Tierney noted. House appropriators, for example, had previously withheld funding for the Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC), an organization created to design the military’s space architecture using digital models and simulations. The 2022 bill approved the $37 million DoD requested for SWAC but warns that “concerns persist that the analytical and decision-making process within the Space Force is overly complex and convoluted.” In a report accompanying the defense spending bill, Congress asks for “clarification of the roles and responsibilities of senior civilian and uniformed leaders with space responsibilities” and for an explanation of what space acquisition units do, including the SWAC, Space Development Agency, Space Rapid Capabilities Office, and space programs in the Department of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. Congress also appears frustrated by the Space Force’s old-school approaches to buying new systems that don’t take advantage of commercial innovations in areas like communications, space domain awareness, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. DoD and the Space Force “have publicly championed a hybrid space architecture that includes a combination of government and commercial space vehicles and services,” the bill says, but the Space Force has been slow to prioritize commercial offerings in its architecture. Congress asks DoD to submit a “strategy to integrate commercial satellites across its mission sets.” Big boost for small launch, missile defense The 2022 military spending bill added $70 million for small launch services, including $20 million for the Rocket Launch Systems Program and $50 million inserted into a new program called Tactically Responsive Launch. “This is a huge amount for small launch,” Tierney said. But it should not come as a surprise. Over the past several years there’s been a consistent drumbeat from Congress to get DoD to increase funding for small launch services, he said. Companies in the small launch sector like Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab have been pushing for more DoD support , arguing that DoD needs to maintain multiple commercial sources of launch services so it can respond during a crisis if, for example, U.S. satellites are damaged and new ones need to be deployed on short notice. The $70 million increase could create momentum for small launch after “years and years of congressional actions,” he said. On the $550 million added for SDA missile-tracking satellites, Tierney called it a major endorsement of the agency’s plan to use low Earth orbit satellites for critical military capabilities. Initially the Senate had inserted $750 million for the Indo-Pacific demonstration but the House pushed back. That they ended up compromising on $550 million shows the impact of China’s hypersonic missile tests, said Tierney. “The Congress is giving them a huge amount of money to go prosecute a major priority national security mission.”
This article originally appeared as a subscriber-exclusive in the June 6, 2016 issue of SpaceNews magazine. WASHINGTON — The last two years have been tough for Ukraine in general, and its space program in particular. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 meant Ukraine lost access to a major ground station located there. That annexation, and ongoing unrest in eastern Ukraine, have also cut off most business Ukraine’s space industry had with Russia. The conflict also put on hold plans to launch Lybid, a communications satellite for Ukraine built by Canada’s MDA Corp. There have been other problems as well. Demand for Ukraine’s Zenit launch vehicle has dried up as Sea Launch suspended operations, and its future remains uncertain. Brazil backed out — for now, at least — of an agreement to host a launch site for the Cyclone-4 rocket. The failure of an Orbital ATK Antares rocket in October 2014 also affected Ukraine, as the rocket’s first stage is designed and built by Ukrainian firms Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash. Despite these problems, Lyubomyr Sabadosh, chairman of the State Space Agency of Ukraine, remains optimistic about the future. Sabadosh, who took charge of Ukraine’s space agency last August, hopes to restart some of those international ventures while establishing new relationships, particularly with American companies. In May, he visited the United States, representing Ukraine in the first meeting of a U.S.-Ukraine space cooperation working group in Washington. Sabadosh, speaking through an interpreter, discussed those new cooperative efforts, and the overall state of the Ukrainian space program, in a May 26 interview with SpaceNews senior staff writer Jeff Foust. You’re here in Washington for bilateral meetings with the U.S. government. What was the outcome of those meetings? This meeting is a continuation of meetings we have conducted with the representatives of the U.S. State Department. As we have lost Russian markets, we are looking into opportunities to expand cooperation. To this purpose, and with the support of the U.S. State Department, we have established a working group. Its task is to identify issues that could be implemented by contractual relations with new partners and help Ukraine compensate for the loss of Russian markets. We got quite a list of offers. We presented our own proposals and hope for positive outcomes. Are there specific areas of cooperation with the U.S. you’re most interested in pursuing? We would be most interested in expanding our cooperation with Boeing and Orbital ATK. At the moment, we have a contract with Orbital ATK, and we hope the launch of the Antares vehicle planned for this year will be successful. It gives an encouraging signal to U.S. companies that Ukraine has technologies and scientific capabilities in terms of launch vehicle production, as well as spacecraft that could be used for other purposes. We also expect Boeing to bring up some ideas of their own in terms of how we can come back to the Sea Launch project. Are you meeting with other organizations, like NASA, or other companies while you’re here in the U.S.? We met with NASA and discussed the opportunities for running joint projects at the International Space Station. As part of the working group meeting, we had representatives of American companies who had meetings with representatives Vega project will also be discussed. We do hope for a positive outcome. Is it a long-term goal for Ukraine to become an ESA member state? Ukraine has strived to become a member of ESA for the past five years. So far, we have accomplished all of the requirements set by ESA in terms of entering this organization. It is one of many steps Ukraine makes to enter the European community. What effect has the crisis with Russia over the last two years had on the Ukrainian space program? We had many projects with Russia. We continue our cooperation with Russia, but only with projects that are related to peaceful space exploration and international cooperation. For example, the Soyuz control system is produced in Ukraine. However, all projects that had some sort of relationship to non-peaceful exploration have been terminated. This is why we look for some replacement elsewhere. When talking about the losses to the Ukrainian space industry, it’s in the millions of dollars. What about capabilities you’ve lost, like the ground station in Crimea? It’s very sensitive. It’s not that easy to replace it. Annexation of Crimea was one of the reasons why our Canadian partners on Lybid declared force majeure. We tried to compensate and use the facilities that already exist on the mainland. In fact, we have established a new center for satellite management and control not far away from Kyiv. That enabled us to continue the Lybid project. To compensate for the loss of Crimea in full … obviously, we can’t. Are you working on other satellite programs? The Ukrainian space program includes the construction of two satellites. We plan to launch them in 2018. They are for remote sensing and scientific purposes. As a part of our new space program, we plan to start construction of cubesats. We are also considering the construction of a new telecommunications satellite. Are you optimistic about the future of the Ukrainian space program? By all means. Space is unlimited. Everyone will find their place there. Ukraine has a vast intellectual potential. We will be able to find partners that will be able to continue working with us into the future.
This article originally appeared as a subscriber-exclusive in the June 6, 2016 issue of SpaceNews magazine. MOSCOW — In April 2015, the commander of Russia’s Space Forces, Alexander Golovko, announced plans to overhaul a Soviet-built space tracking facility known as NIP-16 and re-integrate it into Russia’s network by 2020. Located in Yevpatoria, a town situated on the Crimean Peninsula, the facility — built in the 1960s for tracking space probes bound for Venus and Mars — was among the spoils of Russia’s swift yet bloodless seizure of the region from independent Ukraine in March 2014. For Russia’s ailing space program, the government’s decision to annex Crimea was a mixed — though largely negative — blessing. The NIP-16 facility presents Russia with an opportunity to re-establish communications coverage that was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union, but the program has suffered under the pressure of Russia’s economic crisis and is now vulnerable to future Western economic sanctions against Russia. Ukraine’s space agency, and the country’s small but highly specialized space industry, have been hit harder than Russia by the conflict over Crimea. Sure, NIP-16 was a valuable facility that Ukraine could be rent out to astronomers for research. But beyond that facility, there was little more than an infrequently used cosmonaut training center lost with Crimea’s annexation. The real problem was the political impact on Ukraine’s industrial ties with Russia, the main customer for the two flagship enterprises of Ukraine’s space industry: launch vehicle, spacecraft and components manufacturer Yuzhmash in Dnipro, and a control system manufacturer in the city of Kharkiv. Replacing Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, as a customer is proving difficult. “Ukraine has tried to develop cooperation with the U.S., the EU, China, India and so on … but all of these efforts are still just diplomatic. There are still no real and sustainable results,” said Pavel Luzin, a space industry expert at Russia’s Perm State University. Ukraine’s space industry is still struggling to move beyond its traditional relationship with Russia. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and its subsequent support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s restive eastern regions, prompted a wide range breakdown of political and economic ties between Moscow and Kyiv —mostly through tit-for-tat sanctions and trade embargoes. This had a major impact in the military-industrial sphere, of which both Russia and Ukraine’s space industries are major components. The Russian and Ukrainian space industries are cut from the same cloth. They are legacy assets, inherited by the newly formed independent governments of Ukraine and Russia in the wake of the Soviet collapse in 1991. Industrial ties between the two lumbered on, but this was largely out of necessity. “The Ukrainian space industry has a huge problem, and that is adaptation to the global market economy,” said Luzin. It has survived largely as a component provider for Russia’s space industry. This role is now in serious jeopardy. Though the Ukrainian government did not embargo the import or export of space components to and from Russia, the political mood in Moscow may shut the door. “It is certainly Russia’s intention to ultimately sever its dependence on Ukraine’s space industry, an objective which will likely hurt Ukraine more than Russia because of the nature of the circumstances at play today,” said Phil Smith, a senior space industry analyst with the Alexandria, Virginia-based Tauri Group consultancy. “Ukraine, of course, could pursue stronger relationships with ESA and various civil space agencies in the West, a strategy that would make sense given the high potential for mutual benefits. I think Russia would prefer the same to be true of its dependence on Kazakhstan visa- vis Baikonur, but this is a difficult relationship to terminate.” After the West imposed economic sanctions on Russia for annexing Crimea, an element of economic nationalism has emerged in Moscow pushing for “import substitution” in all sectors. In other words, Russian manufacturers should make parts for Russian rockets, not Ukrainian manufacturers. And Ukraine should certainly not be building rockets for Russia, considering the completion of Russia’s new Angara rocket, which will eventually replace Proton and launch from Russia’s Far East, not neighboring Kazakhstan. Such sentiment has made its strongest mark on the troubled Sea Launch project. In recent years, Sea Launch has been a Russian and Ukrainian-dominated enterprise. The Zenit launch vehicles used by Sea Launch are produced by Ukraine’s Yuzhmash, but 70 percent of the components are provided by Russia’s RSC Energia. In February 2015, Roscosmos spokesman Igor Burenkov told the Izvestia newspaper that the agency would stop buying Zenit rockets and use Angara instead — leading to speculation that Sea Launch would be refitted and put back into action as a platform for the Angara family of rockets. But in March 2016, Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov said Sea Launch is being sold to a yet-unnamed investor. Meanwhile, Ukraine is looking to new markets to fill the void being left by Russia. The planned co-development of the Cyclone-4 launch vehicle with Brazil was canceled in 2015, but Ukraine has had more luck with Europe: Yuzhmash produces the RD-843 engine for the upper stage of Arianspace’s Vega launcher. Ukraine’s most high-profile Western partnership is with U.S. launch firm Orbital ATK, for whom Yuzhmash produces the first stage for the Antares rocket. But the question remains, said Luzin, “what can Ukraine supply other than Soviet-era components for launch vehicles?” Since 1991, its industry has produced just 28 spacecraft, and the launch vehicle market is becoming increasingly competitive and innovative.
After nearly a year of operations, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is still “as good as new” as it serves as a scout for the Perseverance rover. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced March 11 that Ingenuity completed its 21st flight on the planet, traveling 370 meters during the 129-second flight. The helicopter has now traveled more than 4.6 kilometers since its first flight in April 2021. Ingenuity was developed as a technology demonstration, with an original plan of no more than five flights over a month. The excellent performance of the 1.8-kilogram helicopter, though, led NASA to extend its mission, using it as a scout to examine terrain ahead of the Perseverance rover that carried Ingenuity to Mars. The information Ingenuity has provided has created some modest time savings for Perseverance. “It’s certainly shaved several sols, maybe a week, off of the time frame of the rover by having this advanced information,” said Matt Golombek, a senior research scientist at JPL who has been involved with Mars landers dating back to Mars Pathfinder, during a March 8 media briefing at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference. A sol is a Martian day, about 40 minutes longer than a terrestrial day. Other scientists involved with Perseverance agreed that Ingenuity has been useful. “I was really impressed with how well it worked and how useful it’s been,” said Justin Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center who works on the Perseverance mission, during a conference session March 7. “I don’t think that was fully anticipated, at least by myself.” Keyron Hickman-Lewis of the U.K.’s Natural History Museum, another Perseverance scientist, said at that conference session that Ingenuity has been particularly helpful as Perseverance negotiated a region called Séítah. “The terrain is not optimal for a rover,” he said of the region. “These insights have been invaluable.” That work will continue as Perseverance heads in the coming weeks to the remnants of a river delta. “The intent is to keep the helicopter out in front of the rover to provide advance information that would help in its exploration,” Golombek said. That includes scouting paths the rover could take into the delta and identifying rocks for the rover to study with its instrument suite. Ingenuity itself has shown no signs of wear and tear after nearly a year of flying on Mars. “So far, we have found no degradation or loss of anything on the helicopter. It is as good as new,” he said. The helicopter, which uses solar power, also has no consumables to limit its life. “There’s nothing consumable and nothing to stop us from continuing to operate as long as the helicopter remains healthy,” he said, with the expectation Ingenuity will continue operations until something finally breaks. That performance is all the more noteworthy, he added, because of the use of commercial off-the-shelf parts that had been previously qualified for space on Ingenuity, rather than customized components. “It is rather remarkable that we’ve had no degradation or loss of any aspect of the helicopter,” he said. Golombek said the performance of Ingenuity demonstrates how useful such helicopters could be in future exploration, although NASA has no firm plans currently for additional helicopter missions. “The idea of a technology demo is to demonstrate that here is a new way to explore Mars,” he said. “Ingenuity has shown the promise of this sort of way to continue our exploration of the red planet.”
Bahrain became the latest country to join the Artemis Accords as the agreement regarding principles for cooperation in space exploration continues to expand beyond traditional spacefaring nations. Mohamed Al Aseeri, head of the National Space Science Agency of Bahrain, signed the Accords March 2 during the U.S.-Bahrain Strategic Dialogue. While the signing was briefly mentioned as part of those meetings, it was not formally announced by NASA and the State Department until March 7. “I am so pleased to see Bahrain has shown its commitment to the peaceful exploration of space by signing the Artemis Accords,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the agency statement about Bahrain’s signing of the Accords. The Middle Eastern country is the 17th to join and comes days after Romania signed on. Bahrain is a newcomer to space, having established its space agency only in 2014. That agency has focused primarily on space applications, rather than exploration. The country’s launched its first satellite, a cubesat jointly developed with the United Arab Emirates called Light-1, on a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station in December 2021, where it was deployed in early February. The three-unit cubesat is designed to study flashes of gamma rays produced in the atmosphere. Bahrain has not announced any plans to participate in space exploration activities associated with the Artemis lunar exploration campaign. However, one of the agency’s goals listed on its website is “encouraging the Kingdom to become a party in international conventions and agreements of space science and associated technological concepts.” A former NASA official who helped spearhead development of the Artemis Accords in 2020 welcomed the addition of Bahrain to the agreement. “Bahrain is an excellent example of how the Accords are expanding the benefits of Artemis to a new and diverse set of international partners,” said Mike Gold, former associate administrator for space policy and partnerships at NASA and currently executive vice president for civil space and external affairs at Redwire Space. “More than ever, the world needs a global commitment to peaceful norms of behavior in space that the Accords represent,” he said, “and I applaud the Department of State, NASA, and the Vice President in particular, for focusing on this issue and keeping the light of hope and optimism that global space exploration represents shining so brightly even during these dark times.”
TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile is expanding a launch deal with SpaceX for its cellphone-compatible broadband constellation, following a 2021 decision to move its upcoming BlueWalker-3 prototype mission from Russia’s now-embargoed Soyuz to a Falcon 9. BlueWalker-3 was booked on a Soyuz as a secondary payload but moved its reservation to Falcon 9 last August after Russia’s primary customer for the launch ran into delays, AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski told SpaceNews . Wisniewski said BlueWalker-3 is slated to fly with SpaceX “this summer” with other undisclosed passengers, while the primary payload for AST SpaceMobile’s canceled Soyuz reservation has yet to launch. He declined to disclose the primary payload but said it was for a “non-Russian mission,” likely making it one of more than a dozen non-Russian satellite missions that have been left seeking Soyuz alternatives following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We’re happy to be launching out of the U.S. [and that] we took the proactive step to switch” launch vehicles, Wisniewski said. Multi-launch deal AST SpaceMobile, one of several space companies to go public last year via a SPAC merger, announced a multi-launch contract March 8 with SpaceX worth $22.75 million. The deal covers undisclosed technical launch changes for BlueWalker-3, a milestone payment for the first operational BlueBird satellite slated to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, and a reservation for an additional BlueBird mission. According to AST SpaceMobile, the company can provide initial services with 20 satellites that it expects to have deployed during the first two or three quarters of 2023. “We expect to achieve full global broadband coverage with 110 satellites, but we expect to be able to provide other commercial services in the equatorial region with only 20 satellites — this is a region with 49 countries and 1.6 billion people,” Wisniewski said. Assuming the first phase completes within the time frame, AST SpaceMobile has said it plans to start launching the additional 90 satellites “during the last quarter of 2023 and continue during 2024.” Operating at full capacity, Wisniewski said the company plans “to assemble up to six BlueBird satellites per month” from its Texas manufacturing facilities. While AST SpaceMobile is not disclosing BlueBird’s mass, Wisniewski said each satellite “is the size of a big truck” and “well north” of BlueWalker-3 at around 1,500-kilograms. He said the two BlueBird satellites in AST SpaceMobile’s contract with SpaceX don’t require dedicated launches. AST SpaceMobile said it picked a Falcon 9 for the first BlueBird but has not specified a SpaceX launch vehicle for the additional satellite, meaning Falcon Heavy or Starship could also be possibilities. “We’re intending to be compatible with the Falcon 9 as well as other industry vehicles [and] future industry vehicles,” Wisniewski said. The company is still waiting for the Federal Communications Commission to grant an experimental license for testing BlueWalker-3 services in the United States, after receiving similar licenses in certain other countries. AST SpaceMobile has also not yet obtained an FCC market access license to provide BlueBird services to customers in the U.S. In its latest update, the company said as of Sept. 30 it had market access licenses in six countries, covering a population of about 360 million. Virginia-based Lynk Global is also developing a constellation to connect standard smartphones and plans to deploy its first operational satellite with SpaceX in April, according to the company’s vice president of government affairs Tony DeTora. He said Lynk Global is awaiting an FCC license to provide initial services that include text messaging and emergency alerts with a total of 10 operational satellites, which aim to be deployed 12-15 months after the first operational satellite is launched. Lynk Global announced Feb. 8 that thousands of devices had connected to its fifth demonstration satellite during pre-commercial tests.
China is planning to open its space station to commercial missions and activities, according to a senior human spaceflight program official. “When our space station is completed and running, we will actively encourage the private sector to engage in space through various ways,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told China Central Television March 9. “There are many possibilities. We hope there will be competitive, cost-efficient commercial space players to participate in areas including space applications and space resource development. The prospects are good,” Zhou said. China’s launch startups last year began citing the Tiangong space station as an opportunity for securing contracts. This came apparently in response to a January 2021 call for proposals issued by China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, soliciting low-cost cargo transportation solutions for the Chinese space station. The announcement was the first indication that the national space station project would be opened up to the involvement of commercial companies. The move can be seen as similar to earlier NASA commercial cargo initiatives. “Commercial involvement in space has been on everyone’s mind at home and abroad. This shows the space sector’s increasing importance to science and economic development,” Zhou said. China is planning to complete the construction of the Tiangong space station this year. Six launches are scheduled to add two science modules to the in-orbit Tianhe core module, as well as send two cargo spacecraft and two crewed missions–Shenzhou 14 and 15–to the orbital outpost. The needs for China’s human spaceflight operations are already changing to meet science and other goals. CMSA, which operates under the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), selected seven pilots, seven spaceflight engineers and four payload specialists in a third astronaut selection round in late 2020. The Tiangong station is planned to operate in low Earth orbit for at least 10 years. Astronauts from other countries are also expected to visit the three-module, T-shaped outpost. NASA has in recent years been looking at ways to commercialize use of the International Space Station. The agency also issued awards valued at more than $400 million in December to three groups of companies to advance development of commercial space stations as part of ISS transition plans . The U.S. and partners had recently begun looking at extending use of the ISS to 2030. However the invasion of Ukraine and Western responses to it led the head of Roscosmos to threaten to terminate Russian participation in the project. Zhou also noted that China is inviting further international cooperation in space station operations. “I know many scientists and engineers are looking closely at opportunities to do experiments in China’s space lab. It’s a great thing,” ,” Zhou said. “CMSA has said many times that we are active in promoting openness for China’s space lab, and it’s open for domestic as well as international scientists and engineers.” CMSA is already working with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in a joint cooperation initiative to send international experiments to Tiangong. Jeff Manber, chief executive of Nanoracks, said last year that the company has already lost business to China and its space station. “I lost a customer, my first customer that I lost going to the Chinese space station,” Manber said in August. “We’re in a competition now.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Acme AtronOmatic, vendor of the MyRadar weather app, won FCC approval to launch satellites to demonstrate technology for a constellation that ultimately could include 250 satellites or more. The satellites, scheduled to launch in April on a Rocket Lab Electron from New Zealand, are designed to test and validate hardware for Orlando, Florida-based Acme’s Hyperspectral Orbital Remote Imaging Spectrometer (HORIS) constellation. Environmental data captured by the HORIS constellation will be paired with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create data-fusion products for the company’s government and commercial customers. Acme also intends to draw on data and imagery from the HORIS constellation to enhance its MyRadar weather app. The first batch of Acme satellites set to launch in April are PocketQubes , satellites measuring 5 centimeters on each side. The “batch consists of our own satellite and two others that we have informally helped design and build,” Acme CEO Andy Green told SpaceNews by email. “We’re mostly focusing on the primary satellite, MyRadar1,” which is a HORIS constellation prototype. Acme also intends to design and build one-unit cubesats equipped with hyperspectral, thermal and visible cameras for the HORIS constellation. The FCC granted Acme’s license through its streamlined procedures for commercial small satellite launches. “The new FCC streamlined process has definitely helped us accelerate our plans,” Green said in a statement. Acme’s free MyRadar app has been downloaded more than 50 million times and has more than 13 million active monthly users, according to Acme’s news release. With processed data from the HORIS constellation, Acme intends to create products to monitor extreme weather, coral reefs, algae blooms, illegal fishing, national security and wildfires, according to the company’s FCC license application submitted in August. Kongsberg Satellite Services is providing ground station services for the satellites Acme is preparing to send to sun synchronous orbit. Scottish PocketQube manufacturer Alba Orbital arranged for the Acme PocketQubes to fly on the Electron in a PocketQube cluster that includes Alba Orbital’s Unicorn-2 PocketQube, Acme’s MyRadar1, and TRSI-2 and TRSI-3. Acme launch the first TRSI satellite on an Electron in 2019.
A California startup has developed and tested a prototype of a lunar rover that it plans to offer to NASA for use on future Artemis missions. Venturi Astrolab revealed March 10 its work on a rover called Flexible Logistics and Exploration, or FLEX, that is intended to carry cargo or astronauts. The rover is designed to accommodate up to 1,500 kilograms of cargo, placed above or below a main deck, and either be driven remotely or by two astronauts on board. Jaret Matthews, founder and chief executive of Astrolab, said in an interview that his company created FLEX to address a near future of lunar exploration where both crewed landers like SpaceX’s Starship and robotic landers for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program deliver large amounts of cargo. “FLEX really represents a rethinking of how you might approach the surface in that context,” he said. “We’re making FLEX to be the most versatile rover ever created, and the primary innovation is the fact that we have this modular payload capability.” He contrasted FLEX with past rovers, like those developed for robotic Mars missions, that were customized for their specific missions. He worked on several Mars rover programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier in his career as well as a concept for a lunar rover called ATHLETE during the Constellation lunar exploration program. “That is a reasonable approach in an environment where you have an extreme emphasis on mass efficiency,” he said of those earlier designs. “But in this coming era of more lander capability, what we’re doing is thinking more about economies of scale that you might achieve if you rethink that approach.” FLEX is more than a concept. The company built a full-sized prototype of the rover and recently tested it near Death Valley, California. They simulated using the rover for a range of activities expected for a future lunar base, such as setting up solar arrays, as well as its ability to navigate terrain either with people onboard driving it or through teleoperation. Among those who drove FLEX in the test was former astronaut Chris Hadfield, who emphasized in a statement the value of mobility for future long-duration lunar exploration and settlement. “It was not only a joy to drive FLEX but also see its size, capability and get an intuitive sense of what this rover can do,” he said. “He was a great fit for us,” Matthews said of Hadfield, citing the former astronaut’s experience that included serving as chief of robotics in the NASA astronaut office. “He really gets what we’re doing and the potential.” Matthews said Hadfield and others provided invaluable feedback on the FLEX prototype, offering suggestions on changes to rover controls. “The intent was building the prototype quickly, so that we can start learning and be ready as soon as the first opportunity to go to the moon comes up,” he said. That first opportunity may be NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) project to develop a lunar rover for future Artemis landings. The agency has issued two requests for information seeking industry input on the requirements of the vehicle, most recently in August 2021. Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA Headquarters, said at an Artemis town hall during the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference March 9 that he expected the agency to issue a request for proposals for LTV in the next few months. Matthews said Astrolab has been developing its vehicle with the LTV competition in mind. That includes designing the rover to meet anticipated NASA requirements like the ability to operate for an eight-hour moonwalk, be able to work at the lunar south pole and survive the lunar night there, and be able to operate for 10 years. Astrolab will likely have major competition for the LTV contract. Lockheed Martin announced in May 2021 a partnership with General Motors to design lunar rovers but said at the time their concept was still in the early stages. Northrop Grumman announced in November it was working with several companies on a lunar rover design but also provided few technical details. By contrast, Astrolab, based in Hawthorne, California, is a 15-person company founded two years ago after Matthews left SpaceX. He declined to state how much money the company has raised, but it does have a strategic partnership with Venturi Group, an electric vehicle developer. The companies are collaborating on technologies such as batteries and tires, with Astrolab agreeing to buy those systems from Venturi for its flight vehicles. He said Astrolab is also looking at terrestrial applications of its rover. He was optimistic that Astrolab could have FLEX ready quickly because of the company’s approach of rapid, iterative development, which he described as “design, build, break, repeat.” NASA’s current plans don’t call for having LTV on the moon until at least the Artemis 5 mission, the second crewed landing of the program in the second half of the decade. However, he thinks it’s possible to have FLEX delivered to the moon ahead of the Artemis 3 landing, no earlier than 2025. “I would love FLEX to be the first rover that astronauts drive since the Apollo era,” he said. “We’re moving as fast as we can and I think we’ll be ready at the first opportunity.”
TAMPA, Fla. and WASHINGTON — While Russia’s share of the international launch market has shrunk, the Soyuz rocket’s sudden exit from the global stage has left more than a dozen non-Russian satellite missions without clear paths to orbit. Phil Smith, a BryceTech analyst who follows the commercial launch industry, said the sudden, indefinite removal of Soyuz from the market “puts some customers in a lurch.” And while “options exist” thanks to “new capability being introduced” this year by Arianespace and others, “prompt rescheduling will be challenging as these companies have existing backlogs.” The European Union counted on at least six Soyuz rockets this year and beyond to launch a mix of navigation, Earth observation, and science satellites from France’s South American spaceport. Smaller rideshare customers from Japan to Sweden say they may need new accommodations. And a South Korean imaging satellite is at Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome awaiting a launch that’s now in question . But it’s London-based OneWeb that has the biggest scheduling headache without Soyuz. The low Earth orbit broadband startup, which bought all but two of the 10 missions that Soyuz flew for non-Russian customers in 2021, planned to deploy its final six batches of satellites by the middle of this year using the Russian rocket. OneWeb’s latest batch of 36 satellites had been poised to lift off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 4 before Russia imposed poison-pill conditions on the launch. OneWeb subsequently suspended all further Soyuz missions . Russia’s Proton rocket, once a staple for commercial satellite launches, is likewise off-limits as Western nations continue to tighten sanctions. Some of the missions that were counting on Soyuz launches in 2022 or 2023 include: ESA spokesperson Ninja Menning said Europe is “currently looking at the alternatives and the roadmap” for launching Galileo, Euclid and EarthCARE satellites without Soyuz. The missions will be discussed at an ESA Council meeting on March 16, with updated statuses announced on March 17. Menning said it will “take a bit longer than that” to commit to next steps, “but at least we’ll [give] the variety of scenarios that are possible.” She said ESA is “currently identifying everything that’s affected” by the “geopolitical impact on space programs … we’re not done yet.” Swedish National Space Agency Director General Anna Rathsman said March 8 that the agency is “looking for other options outside Russia” for launching the Mesospheric Airglow/Aerosol Tomography and Spectroscopy, or MATS, satellite. Axelspace spokesperson Mei Ikumoto said March 9 Tokyo-based company is “closely monitoring the current situation and considering all possibilities” for the four GRUS satellites slated for a Soyuz later this year. EUMETSAT, Europe’s meteorological satellite agency, had planned to launch the first Metop-SG weather satellite with Soyuz from French Guiana in 2024. Two additional Metop satellites currently slated for 2025 and 2031 were penciled in for a combination of Soyuz and Ariane 6 launches. “We are currently assessing the situation with Arianespace and cannot say more at the moment,” said Paul Counet, EUMETSAT’s head of strategy, communication and international relations. SIDELINED SOYUZ MISSIONS More than a dozen non-Russian satellite missions were counting on Soyuz launches over the next year or so before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted those plans. The hardest hit is OneWeb, which was relying on Soyuz to deploy roughly 200 satellites by midyear. OneWeb typically launches 32-36 satellites at a time. Source: Seradata’s SpaceTrak database/SpaceNews research No single launch provider appears to have the available capacity to deploy OneWeb’s remaining satellites in the short-term, according to Gunter Krebs, a spaceflight historian and software engineer who created Gunter’s Space Page in 1996 to track satellite and launch activity. Three otherwise suitable flagship rockets — Arianespace’s Ariane 5, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ H-2A, and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 — are being phased out, with no room left on their manifests. India’s GSLV rocket, while large enough to pick up some of the Soyuz slack, has not demonstrated a high flight rate, Krebs said, making near-term availability unlikely. China’s Long March family of rockets, meanwhile, is off-limits to OneWeb’s American-made satellites and most if not all of the other stranded Soyuz payloads due to export-control restrictions on spacecraft with U.S. parts. “This leaves only Falcon 9 for short-term launches,” Krebs said. “But I am not sure [OneWeb’s] demand can be met at all in the next 12-18 months if OneWeb and SpaceX can not agree to launches.” OneWeb says it’s weighing all its options, starting with Arianespace, which is on the hook for the six Soyuz launches. “We’re looking at U.S., Japanese and Indian options,” Chris McLaughlin, OneWeb’s chief of government, regulatory affairs and engagement, said March 3 . “But in the first instance, we’re pointing to Ariane and saying you still owe us a number of launches.” “Arianespace is in close contact with its customers and French and European authorities to best assess all the consequences of this situation and develop alternative solutions,” Arianespace said in a March 4 statement , declining further comment. “The launch industry is in a state of major transition, making it very difficult to absorb near-term demand,” Quilty Analytics senior analyst Caleb Henry said. “With the exception of SpaceX, all of the world’s heavy-lift launch providers are retiring their flagship vehicles,” he said. “That means manufacturing of trusted and true rockets is slowing to a halt while new vehicles are just beginning to ramp production.” Additionally, new launch vehicles always take longer than expected to debut and settle into a flight rhythm, Henry said, meaning “launch rates will be low for many vehicles in the coming years.” The industry is still waiting for Arianespace’s Ariane 6, ULA’s Vulcan and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ H3 next-generation rockets and Blue Origin’s New Glenn to make their maiden flights following delays. As Russia was massing troops near Ukraine in December under the pretense of military exercises, satellite executives gathered in Paris for Euroconsult’s annual World Satellite Business Week conference noted the potential for schedule pressure and geopolitics to create a bottleneck. “If I was a commercial satellite operator, I’d be very concerned, and we are hearing those concerns,” said Tiphaine Louradour, president of International Launch Services, a U.S.-based company that markets Proton and Soyuz. Like Krebs and others, Henry noted that SpaceX is the only launch provider outside of China with an operational, high-cadence, heavy-launch capability that is not fully booked or winding down production. SpaceX, Henry said, would be “an undesirable choice for OneWeb.” Even though SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation is principally geared toward consumers, and OneWeb toward enterprises, he said the two still compete for government customers “and risk greater competition as they flesh out different services.” SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. Claude Rousseau, a consultant for Northern Sky Research, also sees “very little room to absorb a higher cadence of launch for Soyuz-class capacity” as “most of the current launch vehicles are fully manifested for the next 24 to 36 months.” However, Rousseau believes this also offers “opportunities for those who wanted to rise to the occasion,” pointing to multiple emerging small satellite launchers that are working toward launching at a regular cadence. “These unproven vehicles are making many potential customers uneasy, but they will eventually help unclog the launch bottleneck,” Rousseau said. Relativity Space’s Terran 1, Firefly’s Alpha and ABL’s RS1 are all advertising capabilities to send 1,000-kilograms or more to low Earth orbit. However, Quilty Analytics estimates the largest of the emerging small launch vehicles will only have the ability to carry four to six 150-kilogram OneWeb satellites per rocket, factoring in satellite mass, orbital inclination and typical separation altitude. “This means it would take anywhere from four to nine times as many launches just to fill the gap from one Soyuz, which is no doubt a more expensive proposition,” Henry said. New vehicles would also likely require new payload adaptors and related equipment that an industry source said could take at least several months to qualify. BryceTech’s Smith said the launch industry remains resilient, despite delays to qualify new launch vehicles, and does not think the loss of Soyuz will be much of an issue for the sector, “in particular because Russia commercial [launch] activity is basically nil.” “In general, the industry is resilient, there are options for payload, adapters — the launch providers like SpaceX and others [have] different options available for precisely this kind of thing to attract customers,” Smith said. He added: “Part of the resiliency is the ability to respond quickly — SpaceX, in particular, has been notable for that.” Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin, who said last week that the United States would be reduced to flying “broomsticks” to space without Russian engines, said March 8 that the rockets booked for OneWeb will instead be offered “practically free” to private Russian space companies. “By the end of the year, dozens of private Russian spacecraft for communication, meteorological observation and remote sensing of the Earth will be sent into orbit,” Rogozin tweeted . “For this, Soyuz-2 carrier rockets, which we have derived from the launch project of the British OneWeb satellite system, will be used.” Soyuz flew 21 missions last year, 11 of which were Russian government payloads. Nearly all the rest of Soyuz’s payloads came from abroad, including a Soyuz commercial rideshare mission carrying 38 satellites from 18 countries. There are few private Russian space companies to take Rogozin up on the offer. Dauria Aerospace, the first Russian space startup, is no longer in business. That leaves a handful of Moscow-based startups like Orbital Express, Avant Space and Sputnix. It is unclear if these or any other private Russian company could be ready to launch satellites in the timeframe Rogozin mentioned. “There does not appear to be anything remotely close to enough commercial Russian demand to fill six Soyuz rockets anytime soon, even at rock-bottom prices,” Henry said. Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com agreed. “I am not aware of any “private” company in Russia that have launched anything substantial up to this point,” he said by email. “There are some university departments trying to build nano-satellites. Possibly, [Rogozin] refers to the Smotr series of remote-sensing satellites promised by Gazprom/Gazkom venture, but I am not sure what is the real status of this project right now.” 
Each of the satellites in the Pentagon’s planned mesh network of communications satellites could have as many as four laser links so they can talk to other satellites, airplanes, ships and ground stations. Optical inter-satellite links are critical to the success of the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit constellation — known as Transport Layer — that will be used to route data traffic. Lasers provide much higher transmission data rates than traditional radio-frequency communications but are also far more expensive. SDA recently awarded nearly $1.8 billion in contracts for 126 satellites for the Transport Layer. By some estimates, about $500 million of that total would be for optical terminals, said Michael Abad-Santos, senior vice president of business development and strategy at BridgeComm, a Denver-based optical communications startup. The company developed a so-called “one-to-many” optical communications technology for point-to-multipoint transmissions. This technology could help reduce the cost of building constellations by requiring fewer terminals, Abad-Santos said. SDA last month awarded BridgeComm and Space Micro a $1.7 million Small Business Innovation Research contract to demonstrate the technology over the next two years. Space Micro, owned by Voyager Space, in January won a separate U.S. Air Force SBIR contract to develop an optical terminal to connect satellites with military aircraft. BridgeComm first demonstrated point to multipoint optical communications in 2019 in a project with Boeing and has since continued to mature the technology, Abad-Santos said. One-to-many connectivity is enabled by a device called managed optical communications array, or MOCA. “This is essentially the optical head and what is really unique about it is that it’s extremely modular,” he said. The MOCA aperture could make it possible for an optical inter-satellite link to talk to multiple other satellites. “In traditional laser comms now everything is point to point, it’s a one-to-one relationship,” said Abad-Santos. “With MOCA, one optical inter satellite link can talk to 40 different satellites.” SDA wants to further investigate how to apply this technology, he said. “This really allows the SDA and other satellite operators to potentially reduce the costs of the overall system architecture because they no longer need multiple gimbaled systems to talk in a one-to-one relationship.” If the cost of the nodes comes down, this opens up opportunities to implement different network architectures that allow for different levels of service, Abad-Santos explained. “You can have a gold tier, a silver tier and a bronze tier,” he said. “For those customers who want extremely low latency and high throughput you put them in the gold tier, and they are routed through the network in the most efficient way possible. For those customers that are less concerned about latency, you can put them in a lower tier at a lower cost and their traffic can be routed in the most economic way.” 
China needs to accelerate the development of space asset protection policies and related international coordination mechanisms, according to a space industry official. “We should proactively promote the formulation of space asset protection policies, so that space asset protection activities can be based on the law, and at the same time declare the importance that China attaches to space asset protection,” Yang Mengfei, an academician at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), told China National Radio . Yang also called for establishing a coordination mechanism between China’s space agencies and other national level agencies, to communicate the orbits and deployment plans of megaconstellations and collision warning information. Last year China informed the United Nations that its crewed space station twice maneuvered to avoid what it described as potential collisions with SpaceX Starlink satellites. U.S. views on the incidents differed from China’s account. “While sharing information about conjunctions is important, it is also increasingly important to have some sort of agreement about what level of risk is acceptable,” Victoria Samson, Washington Office director at the Secure World Foundation, told SpaceNews . Other measures proposed by Yang were construction of a space debris environment monitoring system and the acceleration of projects such as space debris removal. These include making up for the “lack of ground-based observation capability with space-based” capacity and quickly forming a monitoring capability for centimeter-level space debris. Ground-based radar, optical telescopes and laser systems are employed variously by entities across the world to detect, track and catalog objects larger than five to 10 centimeters in low Earth orbit by a number of groups, but reliably tracking smaller objects is very challenging. LeoLabs in 2021 set up a phased-array radar facility in Costa Rica to begin tracking objects as small as two centimeters. The European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office estimates there are 36,500 objects in orbit greater than 10 centimeters and 1,000,000 objects from greater than one and up to 10 centimeters. This proposed boost in China’s space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities would also help with the second proposal on active debris removal (ADR), says Samson. China launched a “space debris mitigation satellite” and towed a defunct Beidou navigation satellite from a geostationary orbit into a higher, “graveyard” orbit out of the way of operational spacecraft. Yang was speaking to the media in his role as a deputy to the National People’s Congress, the legislative body which forms part of China’s ongoing annual political sessions in Beijing. The proposals follow a strong acceleration in China’s orbital launch rate over the past decade and large increase in the number of operational spacecraft, now including a crewed space station. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) established its Space Debris Monitoring and Application Center in 2015, at the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Generally speaking, these seem like adaptations to a more complicated space environment, which makes sense,” says Samson. “But in that case, it’s also important to be as transparent as possible so that there isn’t inadvertent escalation or perceptions that these capabilities are intended to be offensive in nature.” The interview with Yang apparently did not touch on other aspects of spacecraft security, such as rapid-response launch and protecting against cyber attacks. Yang belongs to CAST, a major spacecraft maker under the country’s state-owned main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). He notes that as China’s space assets are growing rapidly, they also face a series of security risks such as approaches by spacecraft from other countries and the collision threat from space debris. “Last year, as you may have noticed, our space station was approached by two [SpaceX] satellites while in orbit, and also faced the risk of space debris collisions . So in this context, as the number of our satellites increases, it is increasingly important and urgent to protect space assets,” Yang said. The number of Chinese satellites operational in orbit is expected to exceed 400 in 2022, according to the CNR report. China’s main space contractor CASC aims to launch at least 140 spacecraft across more than 50 launches this year alone, including six missions to complete its modular space station. “In the future, as our national space industry develops, the number of spacecraft will increase and the risk of collisions will become greater,” Yang Mengfei said. SpaceX and OneWeb are just two of a number of companies planning constellations consisting of tens of thousands of satellites in LEO. China has also filed plans for a 13,000-strong national LEO satellite internet megaconstellation, while new commercial companies are also working on remote sensing and IoT constellations.
Slingshot Aerospace, a company that develops technologies for space situational awareness, announced March 10 it has raised $25 million in Series A-1 funds. The company has raised $42 million since it was founded in 2017. The new round was oversubscribed, said CEO and co-founder Melanie Stricklan. “We set out to raise $20 million and stopped at $25 million,” she said. The funding round was co-led by Draper Associates, the venture capital firm of Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper, and ATX Venture Partners. Other participants included Edison Partners, Embedded Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Lockheed Martin Ventures. Slingshot will use the new funds to accelerate the commercialization of Slingshot Beacon , a space collision avoidance platform where commercial, government and civil satellite operators can share space traffic information. Stricklan said the company plans to hire 40 employees over the next 12 months. Slingshot is based in Austin, Texas; and Los Angeles, California. “Space situational awareness is ripe for disruption,” said Daniel Herscovici, partner at Edison Partners. “No common platform exists for satellite operators to communicate and collaborate in real time with actionable information to resolve on-orbit conjunctions.” A lot of investment is going into rockets and satellites but less attention is paid to the “critical infrastructure that is necessary in order for these objects to be successful in space,” said Jenna Bryant CEO and co-founder of Embedded Ventures. For humans to continue to operate in space, a digital infrastructure to manage traffic and data transparency is key, said Stricklan said. An estimated 115,000 satellites will be in orbit by 2030, she said. “We need to be holistic and not draw lines between the civil, defense and and commercial industry when it comes to space domain awareness.” “You have to be able to predict the events that are going on,” Stricklan said. “And I think the government has to embrace the digital transformation that allows for that to happen and in order to do that, data can’t be in classified silos. So we’ve got to break those walls down. If we can predict it, then we can mitigate it.” Congestion will worsen as more constellations are deployed, coupled with uncontrolled debris, she said. The space community should be worried about “geopolitical aggressive behavior” like Russia’s anti-satellite missile test in November that blew up a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, creating a large cloud of debris. “I think Russia is pretty unpredictable,” said Stricklan. “So we’re really concerned, given the current events and the deliberate reckless anti-satellite test that that they conducted against their own satellite with their own cosmonauts on orbit. It was a travesty.”
Appropriators cut funding for a new generation of weather satellites while increasing funding for the Office of Space Commerce for fiscal year 2022. The omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2022, passed by the House late March 9 and scheduled to be taken up by the Senate in the next few days, trimmed spending for development of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, from the requested level of $1.68 billion to $1.29 billion. Most of that cut was absorbed by the Geostationary Extended Operations, or GeoXO, line of future weather satellites. NOAA requested $490 million for that program of geostationary weather satellites that will follow the current GOES-R series but received $150 million. The report stated that the GeoXO funding will support completion of Phase A studies of spacecraft and instruments for the system. Other NOAA weather satellite programs received all or nearly all of their request. That included $17 million for commercial data purchases, with up to $5 million to be used for acquiring commercial space weather data. The omnibus bill also provided $16 million for the Office of Space Commerce, located within NOAA. That office handles commercial remote sensing licensing and is responsible for taking over civil space traffic management. The office received $10 million in fiscal year 2021, and NOAA’s 2022 budget request sought the same amount. The report accompanying the bill did not elaborate on the increase, but did direct it to “advance space traffic management and space situational awareness capabilities, in collaboration with industry and Federal partners.” A key focus for the office is development of space situational awareness data system called the open architecture data repository (OADR). That system will combine space situational awareness data from government, commercial and international sources and provide a basic level of space traffic coordination services, such as conjunction warnings. NOAA unveiled a prototype of the OADR in February and plans to have the system operational in 2024. FAA funding The omnibus spending bill provided full funding for the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space transportation activities. That included $32.47 million for the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, $6.5 million for work on commercial space integration activities like the Space Data Integrator for air traffic management and $5.7 million for commercial space transportation safety work. The funding for the office itself was an increase over the $27.56 million it received in 2021. The report accompanying the omnibus bill urged the FAA to hire more people for the office. The FAA’s 2022 budget proposal stated that part of the budget increase for the office would go toward hiring several more people. The FAA will also have to hire a new head of the office. The agency said March 4 that Wayne Monteith, who has been associate administrator for commercial space transportation since early 2019, will retire at the end of March. An FAA spokesman did not disclose plans for hiring a successor, but said on March 7 that the office would run on an acting basis by the current deputy associate administrator, Kelvin Coleman, after Monteith’s retirement. Coleman also ran the office on an acting basis after the retirement of Monteith’s predecessor, George Nield, in March 2018.
Voters in a Georgia county have dealt a potentially fatal blow to a proposed spaceport, a move that may provide lessons for other prospective spaceports. In a special referendum held March 8 in Camden County, Georgia, 72% voted in favor of terminating an agreement between the county government and Union Carbide to purchase property that the county intended to use for Spaceport Camden, a vertical launch site. About 17% of the county’s registered voters participated in the election, with that issue the only one on the ballot. The referendum came two and a half months after the Federal Aviation Administration granted the county a spaceport license , formally known as a launch site operator’s license, the 13th so far. The license came after years of environmental reviews of the planned launch site, originally designed to accommodate larger vehicles like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 but later rescoped for smaller vehicles. Many residents and environmental groups, though, opposed the spaceport even after the FAA issued the license. They were concerned about the environmental effects on the area, including nearby Cumberland Island National Seashore, particularly in the event of a launch failure. Among the opponents of the spaceport is One Hundred Miles, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting Georgia’s coast. “Rocket failures that occur over Cumberland Island may cause falling debris, chemical spills and fire,” the organization stated. “Due to the remote location of Cumberland Island, it is unlikely that pollution or a fire would be contained before causing catastrophic damage to property, wildlife and habitat — some of which would be irreversible.” One Hundred Miles was among the backers of a petition seeking a referendum on the property purchase agreement through a little-used provision of the Georgia state constitution. A county judge allowed the referendum to proceed, although the county government is appealing the decision and seeking to invalidate the referendum. “The ability of a bare minority of registered voters to trigger a referendum election is among the key issues that the Georgia Court of Appeals determined should be decided by the Georgia Supreme Court,” a Camden County spokesperson said in a statement to SpaceNews March 9. “Camden County is assessing the results of last night’s outcome on the future of Spaceport Camden and is working to determine the best way to preserve taxpayers’ investment in the recently issued Launch Site Operator License while the Georgia Supreme Court reviews the legal issues surrounding this election.” Even if the courts throw out the referendum, the election illustrates strong public opposition to the planned launch site, which has not announced any customers. It is not alone. SpaceX’s plans for Starship orbital launches from its Boca Chica, Texas, site triggered both strong support as well as strong opposition from residents. The FAA is continuing its environmental review of those plans, with a decision delayed twice, most recently to March 28. “Current and prospective spaceports need to do a better job of engaging with local communities and other key stakeholders,” said George Nield, former FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation and current chair of the Global Spaceport Alliance, a group of about two dozen current and prospective spaceports. “Much of the opposition we are seeing is based on incorrect information or misunderstandings of what being a spaceport is all about.” He noted that the FAA has a “perfect safety record” when it comes to protecting the uninvolved public in licensed launches, and that spaceports have additional benefits beyond hosting launches, from being business development hubs to supporting education and workforce development. “Being able to clearly articulate the benefits that a spaceport can provide could go a long way in building community support.” Nield added that the government needs to do a better job evaluating spaceport license applications, a process he says can take five to seven years. “Collecting the necessary information, performing the appropriate assessments and then quickly coming to a decision, one way or the other, is a skill the U.S. really needs to master if it wants it wants to be a leader in space, whether for national security missions, for technological leadership or for economic competitiveness.”
In-space transportation company Momentus says it is making good progress toward the first launch of its Vigoride space tug, but that the schedule is “tight” for a launch in June. In an earnings call March 8 after the release of its fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results, company executives said its Vigoride 3 tug recently completed system-level thermal vacuum testing, and engineers are currently working on unspecified issues with the spacecraft found during those tests. “We continue to believe that our Vigoride 3 is on a path to complete ground tests in time for our inaugural launch, planned for June, although the schedule is tight,” said John Rood, chief executive of Momentus. The company faces both technical and regulatory obstacles to getting the tug launched in June. In addition to the engineering work on the spacecraft, the company also has to secure a Federal Communications Commission license, a Federal Aviation Administration payload review and what Rood called a “slight modification” to its existing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration imaging license. “We currently plan our inaugural mission with Vigoride in June of 2022, subject to the receipt of those licenses and government approvals, and completion of the work to get the system ready,” he said. Momentus has filed a license application with the FCC and started discussions with the FAA. Licensing proved to be a challenge for Momentus in 2021, when it was forced to postpone launches of an earlier version of its Vigoride tug on two SpaceX rideshare missions in January and June when it was unable to get an FAA payload review. Government agencies raised concerns about the company’s Russian co-founders, which led to the company buying them out and implementing a national security agreement with the Defense and Treasury Departments. Rood said the company was making “significant progress” implementing that agreement, with a focus on modernizing its information technology systems. “The IT modernization plan was a heavy lift for the company, but we’ve implemented the bulk of this modernization plan now.” In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission March 9, the company noted that it made two voluntary notifications to the Commerce Department last year of inadvertent transfers of information and hardware that are controlled under the Export Administration Regulations to entities in Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland and Singapore. The company said it is awaiting a ruling from the department on any potential penalties from those transfers. He emphasized that Vigoride 3, when it does launch, will primarily be a technology demonstration mission of the vehicle, which is designed to deploy satellites into different orbits as well as accommodate hosted payloads. “We also plan to take some customer payloads to orbit and generate a small amount of revenue from this mission,” he said. “However, the primary goals of the mission are to test Vigoride on orbit, learn from any issues that we encounter and take important steps toward establishing the viability of our initial market offering.” Vigoride 3 is currently scheduled to fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-5 dedicated rideshare mission in June. Momentus said it has signed an agreement with SpaceX for a second port on that launch, as well as space on the next four Transporter rideshare missions, scheduled for launch from October 2022 and October 2023. Those additional launches serve as both backups if Vigoride 3 is delayed as well as for future missions. The second port on Transporter-5 will be used for customers that don’t need the in-space transportation services that Vigoride provides, and at a lower price. Rood said Momentus will acquire a deployer from a “trusted partner” he did not identify for that second port. “While this system cannot provide the last-mile transportation service that Vigoride can, it is less expensive and the meets the needs of some of the customers in our backlog.” “We’re not certain whether this approach will be part of our long-term plans, and what we’re doing doesn’t require any upfront investment to develop the hardware or introduce the service,” he said. “As we go forward, we’ll determine whether this part of the market provides sufficient growth and profitability opportunities for us to include it on a more permanent basis.” Momentus reported no revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 and just $330,000 for the full year. It reported an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $59.4 million for 2021. Jikun Kim, chief financial officer of the company, said the company had enough cash to go to the “earlier part” of 2023.
Pentagon funding for space programs will grow in the coming years as the U.S. military increasingly relies on satellites to conduct operations, the Defense Department’s comptroller Mike McCord said March 9. “Space is probably emerging in our internal reviews as the most important foundational area for everything that we are doing and everything that we need to be doing,” McCord said at the McAleese & Associates’ annual defense programs conference. DoD has not yet released its funding request for fiscal year 2023 so McCord could not discuss specifics. During a wide-ranging talk on the military’s budget priorities, he noted that DoD is making space capabilities a higher priority “whether it’s versus China, versus Russia or anybody else.” Military space assets like satellites and ground systems typically have been considered “support” equipment that provide valuable services such as communications, navigation data and early warning of missile launches. But as the Pentagon has grown more dependent on space, satellites are becoming strategic assets and coveted targets for adversaries. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, also speaking at the McAleese conference, said the 2023 budget is “starting down the path to more resilient space capabilities.” The concern is that satellites need to “fight through” during a conflict if they come under attack, he said. “We have to do something about that.” He said there is a growing wish list of space technologies that the military cannot afford. “There’s a large unfunded requirement for the future of space.” It will likely take several years to identify the specific requirements and secure funding, he said. “We have a long way to go … and there’s a bill coming. I do see tough choices ahead as we define the things we need.” If more money were available, Kendall said, he would recommend buying additional missile-warning and missile-tracking satellites to deal with the threats of advanced ballistic and cruise missiles. Despite speculation to the contrary, a military presence on the moon is not on the priority list, Kendall said. There are more pressing concerns in Earth’s orbit, he added. “We’ve got big issues in LEO, MEO, GEO.” Going to the moon is obviously a NASA goal but “I don’t see a lot of interest from a defense perspective.” 2022 budget deal boosts defense spending A bipartisan $1.5 trillion budget deal announced March 8 by congressional leaders — which funds the federal government for the 2022 fiscal year that began Oct. 1 — includes $782 billion in defense funding, a $42 billion increase over fiscal year 2021. The omnibus package also provides $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine and Eastern European countries. The House passed the package of 12 appropriations bill late Wednesday. Congressional leaders are prepared to pass a continuing resolution to extend funding until March 15 to give the Senate time to vote on the omnibus. The deal increases funding for U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency programs above what the Biden administration requested. The Space Force procurement account grows from $2.7 billion to $3 billion, and the research-and-development account from $11.2 billion to $11.6 billion. Lawmakers inserted $260 million for a new GPS satellite that the Space Force did not request. Small launch gets big plus-up Small launch services provided by companies like Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and others increase by $70 million in the omnibus funding bill. The Rocket Systems Launch Program run by the U.S. Space Force to acquire launch services on small vehicles was upped from $10.4 million to $30.4 million. A separate $50 million was added for Tactically Responsive Launch, a program that Congress has directed DoD to establish but the Pentagon did not fund in 2022. “The fiscal year 2022 President’s budget request does not include any resources to establish the program this fiscal year despite a need to counter adversarial launches of disruptive technologies in a tactically relevant timeline,” the bill says. “Therefore, the agreement provides $50 million for Tactically Responsive Launch efforts. Further, the agreement directs the Secretary of the Air Force, in consultation with the Chief of Space Operations, not later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act, to provide the congressional defense committees with an acquisition strategy that operationalizes a tactically responsive space capability, including satellites, launch vehicles, control systems, and concept of operations.” More money for SDA’s missile-tracking satellites The omnibus bill adds $550 million to the Space Development Agency’s budget for medium field of view sensor satellites that would be used in the Indo-Pacific region to detect and track missiles. The Senate Appropriations Committee had recommended adding $750 million in response to a need from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command for wide and medium field of view satellites. The House did not provide any funding and the compromise was $550 million for a “satellite demonstration for U.S. Indo-Pacom, to be managed and executed only by the Space Development Agency.” Office of Space Commerce The omnibus spending bill provides $16 million for the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce, which is $6 million above the fiscal year 2021 level. Funding for the OSC has been an issue of concern for the space industry and for DoD as the office is supposed to take over space traffic management responsibilities. Congress in 2020 mandated a study from the National Academy of Public Administration to look at the space traffic management organization. The study re-affirmed the Trump administration’s decision to place this function under the OSC but there are still disagreements on whether the office should be moved from under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Satellite and Information Service to a higher rank within the Commerce Department. “NOAA is directed to advance space traffic management and space situational awareness capabilities, in collaboration with industry and Federal partners,” the omnibus bill says. “No later than 45 days after enactment of this Act, NOAA shall provide the Committees with a detailed spending plan for the funds provided to OSC. Further, no later than 90 days after enactment of this Act, NOAA shall provide the Committees a five-year strategic plan for OSC to achieve full operational capability.”
New trade sanctions aimed at Russia’s space sector were announced March 9 by UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. While the announcement focused on new aviation sanctions strengthening an overflight and landing ban imposed on Russian aircraft in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, additional trade measures “will prevent UK exports of aviation or space-related items and technology to Russia, including related services such as insurance and reinsurance services.” “This means cover is withdrawn on existing policies and UK insurers and reinsurers will be unable to pay claims in respect of existing policies in these sectors,” the announcement states. The announcement said “the new measures will further tighten the growing economic pressure on Russia and ensures the UK is in line with sanctions imposed by our allies.” The sanctions align the UK with aerospace-related export bans the European Union adopted in February “covering goods and technology suited for use in aviation and the space industry and prohibits the provision of insurance and reinsurance and maintenance services in relation to those goods and technology.” According to Seradata, a UK firm that tracks space insurance, the UK’s newly announced sanctions, combined with actions already taken by the United States and the European Union, further isolate Russia’s aerospace sector. David Todd, Seradata’s head of space content, said the moves could leave Russian communications satellites owned by Gazprom and Moscow-based RSCC uncovered in the event of a failure. “The big picture is that Russia is now isolated from space insurance unless there’s a regime change,” Todd said. The UK, Europe and U.S. are the core markets for space insurance services. Todd said underwriters in the UK alone provide about 30 percent of the global space insurance market’s coverage capacity. Following the sanctions, he said Russian companies will either need to scour markets that have not traditionally provided this kind of coverage to any meaningful extent, or seek domestic sources where this capacity has historically been limited. “A lot of companies self insure, and that might have to be the way it goes for the way forward,” he added. One insurance source described the ban on covering Russia’s space risks as “not a huge problem” for the market because “relatively little” Russian space hardware has coverage. “There’s a lot less Russian kit being launched compared to 10-20 years ago [when this] would have been much more of a headache from an insurance perspective,” the person said. “OneWeb is obviously a customer who is significantly impacted, but there are very few others that are and therefore the pain to the market, and the impact to the market, is relatively minor.” UK-based OneWeb said Sept. 2 that it had secured an insurance policy worth more than $1 billion to cover what was then 10 remaining Russian Soyuz launches to complete its constellation. However, in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the company said March 3 it had suspended the six launches it had left to find non-Russian alternatives . Because of the Soyuz’s high level of reliability, Todd said the loss of six insured OneWeb Soyuz launches affects only about $20 million premium income for the market. Insurers were set to reap $700 million in gross premiums (before broker deductions) for 2022 before the Ukraine crisis disrupted missions using Russian launch vehicles, according to Seradata’s research. But while a fraction of these premiums are derived from OneWeb and other non-Russian customers that had plans to launch with Russian vehicles, an underwriter said Russian space risks that are usually insured in Russia and then reinsured internationally are “not insignificant.” The underwriter said the market currently expects there is about “$120 million of premium in 2022 that the international market will forgo due to sanctions and prohibitions on insuring Russian risks.” This article was updated March 10 to provide more details on the impact of the UK’s ban on insurance services to Russia
VICTORIA, British Columbia — Canada’s MDA Corp. will provide satellite radar imagery to Ukraine’s government to help it counter Russia’s invasion of that country. Mike Greenley, chief executive officer of MDA, released a statement March 8 that the company has secured special authorization from the Canadian government to collect synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery over Ukraine. “Images captured by MDA’s SAR technology, which is unique for its ability to see through all weather and cloud conditions, will be merged and analyzed with other sources of imagery from commercial Earth observation companies to develop comprehensive near real-time intelligence reports for Ukrainian government officials,” he noted. Canadian government sources say that RADARSAT-2 will be used to collect the data. “We’re honoured that we are able to use our radar satellite capabilities to contribute to these international efforts, and will continue doing everything in our power to help the Government of Ukraine protect its citizens,” Greenley added. MDA’s imagery will be shared with a commercial space partner in the United States. The imagery will then be merged and analyzed with additional imagery collected by other Earth observation companies, and intelligence reports will then be shared with the Government of Ukraine. MDA has not released information on the other companies involved in this venture. SAR imagery of Russian formations was cited as an urgent need in a March 1 call for commercial assistance from Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov. “We badly need the opportunity to watch the movement of Russian troops, especially at night when our technologies are blind in fact! SAR data is important to understanding Russian troop and vehicle movements at night considering that clouds cover about 80 percent of Ukraine during the day,” Federov wrote. MDA has not put any timelines on the provision of space imagery to Ukraine and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Canadian government also announced March 3 that it would provide Ukraine with 1 million Canadian dollars ($780,000) to use for the purchase of high-resolution satellite imagery. That is separate from the MDA initiative. Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand said the money would be specifically used to buy imagery that will allow Ukraine’s military to track the movements of Russian troops and equipment. Canada had previously provided RADARSAT-2 imagery to Ukraine as part of an initiative announced in February 2015. That was an initiative by Canada’s then Conservative Party government to help Ukraine deal with Russian-backed separatist forces in the eastern part of the country. But that arrangement was stopped by Canada’s current Liberal Party government in 2016. There were concerns the imagery was being used to attack specific targets in eastern Ukraine. In addition, the transfer of the imagery to Ukraine was hindered by bureaucratic rules that limited the data’s effectiveness. Under the process, images were downloaded from the satellite to MDA Corp., which then sent the data to the Canadian military for review. In addition, the images had to be approved by Canadian diplomats to ensure they complied with Canadian government regulations. Next, the material was passed to the Canadian embassy in Kyiv and only then forwarded to the Ukrainian government. Canada cut off the flow of RADARSAT-2 data to Ukraine on May 6, 2016. “The decision was made after carefully considering the utility of this contribution – compared to Canada’s many other forms of assistance to Ukraine,” Diana Khaddaj, spokeswoman for Global Affairs Canada, said in an email at the time. 
Updated 10:10 a.m. Eastern with table and enhanced used lease extension. WASHINGTON — House and Senate appropriators completed work March 9 on an omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2022 that would give NASA a little more than $24 billion, $760 million below the administration’s request. The spending bill, which funds the federal government for a fiscal year that started the previous Oct. 1, provides $24.041 billion for NASA. The agency’s original request last spring sought $24.8 billion for the agency. NASA received $23.271 billion in fiscal year 2021. The largest cut came in NASA’s space technology directorate. The administration sought $1.425 billion for space technology, but the omnibus bill instead funds it at $1.1 billion, the same amount as 2021. It also directs $110 million of that funding to nuclear thermal propulsion development, which was not included in the administration’s proposal. Appropriators also cut $317 million from various science programs in the final bill as compared to the request, although overall funding of $7.614 billion is still more than $300 million above what they received in 2021. The report accompanying the bill provides mixed messages on NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne observatory that NASA sought to cancel in the request. “The agreement notes all recommendations of Astro2020,” it states, a reference to the astrophysics decadal survey released last November that recommended NASA terminate the program because of its high operating costs and “modest scientific productivity.” However, the report still allocated $85.2 million, or full funding, “from within current and prior year resources to continue SOFIA operations in fiscal year 2022.” The House version of the spending bill last July funded SOFIA, while the Senate version did not mention it. The omnibus bill includes $1.195 billion for NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program to develop a lunar lander version of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle for the Artemis 3 and potentially future missions. That is the funding NASA requested, although House offered $150 million more and the Senate $100 million more in their individual bills. The report does not include a requirement the Senate version included for NASA to select a second HLS provider. Instead, it directs NASA to provide a report within 30 days of enactment “explaining how it will ensure safety, redundancy, sustainability, and competition in the HLS program within the resources provided by this Act and included in the fiscal year 2023 budget request.” The bill also provides full funding, $101.1 million, for NASA’s commercial low Earth orbit development effort. The Senate bill provided the same funding while the House version provided less than half that amount. That program supports work on commercial space stations intended to succeed the International Space Station by the end of the decade. Language in the report restricts funding on several programs, including HLS, commercial LEO development, the lunar Gateway and other advanced exploration initiatives, to 40% of allocated levels until NASA submits a multiyear plan for the Artemis effort to Congress. That plan must include the schedule of Space Launch System launches for building the Gateway, additional scientific activities on the moon and “the commencement of partnerships with commercial entities for additional LEO missions to land humans and rovers on the Moon.” The funding limitation does not apply to the SLS, Orion or Exploration Ground Systems programs. In addition to funding, the bill includes a one-year extension of NASA’s authority to enter into enhanced used leases of agency property to companies and other organizations. That authority expired at the end of 2021 and a House bill originally intended for a long-term extension of that authority was turned into a legislative vehicle for a voting rights bill that passed the House in January but failed to win passage in the Senate. The House is expected to vote on the omnibus spending bill March 9. However, because of doubts that the bill can also pass the Senate before the existing continuing resolution (CR) that funds the government expires March 11, Congress is also planning to pass a four-day CR to fund the government through March 15. NASA Fiscal Year 2022 funding (amounts in millions of dollars)
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite communications equipment maker SatixFy said March 8 it has agreed to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, shrugging off market uncertainty that helped dash weather startup Tomorrow.io’s SPAC plans the day before. Israel-based SatixFy expects to raise up to $230 million in gross proceeds by merging with Endurance Acquisition Corp, depending on how many of the SPAC’s shareholders ask for money back ahead of closing the deal this year, instead of shares in the combined company. Endurance was created as a shell company last year by New York-based private equity firm Antarctica Capital. The blank check firm raised about $200 million by listing shares on the Nasdaq Capital Market Sept. 15, under the ticker symbol ‘ EDNCU ’. In addition to cash Endurance raised by selling shares, the combined entity also aims to receive around $29 million through a private investment in public equity — or PIPE — funding round from Antarctica Capital and China-based asset manager Sensegain Group. Antarctica Capital first signaled its push into the space industry last year when it formed EarthDaily Analytics, a Canadian optical satellite imagery provider, after buying parts of UrtheCast that sought creditor protection in 2020 to avoid bankruptcy. Established in 2012, SatixFy develops satellite antennas, terminals and modems that are based on semiconductors it develops in-house. Canadian satellite operator Telesat said Dec. 1 that SatixFy will provide modems for the 288 landing station antennas it envisages for Telesat Lightspeed, its planned low Earth orbit broadband (LEO) constellation. In March 2021, SatixFy announced an agreement to provide in-flight connectivity terminals for LEO operator OneWeb . Singapore-based satellite communications specialist ST iDirect and Europe’s Airbus are also among its customers, according to SatixFy. “We have high visibility to at least $40 million in 2022 revenue from contracts with existing customers,” SatixFy co-founder and CEO Yoel Gat said in a statement. “With the addition of the new available funds from this transaction, the company is targeting strong business expansion, which will result in strong revenue growth with profitability expected in 2023 and beyond.” SatixFy forecasted revenues to grow from $22 million in 2021 to $374 million in 2026 in an investor presentation . Gat said the company’s vertically integrated organization structure will enable it “to quickly grow in what we see as a $20 billion 2029 market opportunity across several segments, including both ground terminals and payloads for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellites, as well as commercial and business aircraft.” Gat also founded Gilat Satellite Networks in 1987, and helped the Israeli company list on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 1993 before departing as chair and CEO in 2003. Alongside the SPAC merger, SatixFy said it recently received a committed equity facility worth $75 million from an affiliate of U.S. investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and a $55 million loan from Californian private equity firm Francisco Partners. SatixFy said the SPAC deal values the combined company at about $813 million. Tomorrow.io staying private Many space companies that went public in the last year through SPAC mergers have suffered sharp share price declines, and corresponding valuations , as they work toward ambitious growth targets. Souring investor sentiment has led to high redemptions rates from SPAC shareholders for certain mergers in the space industry . A number of SPAC mergers have also been called off as financial market uncertainty is compounded by mounting geopolitical tensions and the potential for rising interest rates. Plans to merge Boston-based Tomorrow.io with Pine Technology Acquisition Corp. became the latest casualty in the SPAC market March 7, when they said the deal is being canceled “due to market conditions.” Tomorrow.io announced the SPAC merger Dec. 7 just three months earlier, as part of plans to raise up to $420 million for a constellation of weather satellites. Dan Slagen, Tomorrow.io’s chief commercial officer, said the “timeline and capabilities” for around 32 small satellites with storm-tracking radars for improving weather forecasts remain intact. “Our mission does not change and neither do our growth plans,” Slagen said in a March 8 email. Tomorrow.io has previously said California-based Astro Digital is building the first two spacecraft for a launch in late 2022. In March 2021, Tomorrow.io said it had received $77 million through a funding round led by private equity firm Stonecourt Capital to fund its expansion plans. Tomorrow.io currently uses data from NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite and other sources to provide analysis to Uber, Delta, and other companies affected by weather patterns. The company recently reported $19 million in sales for 2021, compared with $7.4 million in 2020. “While we had better than projected 2021 results and are off to a strong start in 2022, the current market would add unreasonable risk to our company,” Tomorrow.io CEO Shimon Elkabetz said in a March 7 LinkedIn post . He added: “We look forward to our next phase of growth, revisiting public market options in the future and exploring partnership opportunities that presented themselves over the course of the last year.” Tomorrow.io agreed to pay Pine Technology Acquisition Corp $1.5 million as part of their merger termination agreement, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Pine Technology Acquisition Corp. said it “intends to continue to pursue the consummation of a business combination with an appropriate target.”
The risk that conflicts on Earth will extend to space will grow as China and Russia step up developments of ant-satellite weapons, the U.S. intelligence community warns in its annual report on worldwide threats released March 8. “As states such as China and Russia increasingly see space as a warfighting domain, multilateral space security discussions have taken on greater importance as a way to reduce the risk of a confrontation that would affect every state’s ability to safely operate in space,” says the 2022 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. “Beijing is working to match or exceed U.S. capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership,” the report says. China’s military will continue to integrate space services — such as satellite reconnaissance and positioning, navigation, and timing — and satellite communications into its weapons and command-and-control systems to erode the U.S. military’s information advantage, says the threat assessment. “China has counter-space weapons intended to target U.S. and allied satellites. The PLA is fielding new destructive and nondestructive ground- and space-based anti-satellite weapons.” Russia also seeks to challenge the United States in space, says the report. “Moscow will focus on integrating space services — such as communications; positioning, navigation, and timing; geolocation; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — into its weapons and command-and-control systems,” the assessment says. These capabilities would allow Russia “to more quickly identify, track, and target U.S. satellites during a conflict.” Moscow would use its civil and commercial remote sensing satellites to supplement military dedicated capabilities that reduce U.S. ability to perform sensitive military activities undetected, says the report. “Russia continues to train its military space elements and field new anti-satellite weapons to disrupt and degrade U.S. and allied space capabilities,” it adds. “It is developing, testing, and fielding an array of nondestructive and destructive counter-space weapons, including jamming and cyberspace capabilities, directed energy weapons, on-orbit capabilities, and ground-based ASAT capabilities to target U.S. and allied satellites.” The intelligence community also notes that Russia is investing in electronic warfare and directed energy weapons to counter western on-orbit assets. These systems work by disrupting or disabling adversary communications networks and disrupting GPS, tactical and satellite communications, and radars. Russia also continues to develop ground-based direct ascent ASAT weapons capable of destroying space targets in low Earth orbit. The report says the intelligence community’s assessment is current as of January 21 and was completed just as Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine with well over 100,000 troops massed near the Ukraine border. 
Three decades ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union promised to usher in a new era of cooperation between the West, particularly the United States, and Russia. With the Cold War in the rearview mirror, the combination of American resources and Russian expertise promised new opportunities in space, from the International Space Station to rockets powered by Russian engines. It was a vision powered by idealism—former enemies working together in space— but also by pragmatism. Bringing Russia into the space station program helped secure support at a time when what was then Space Station Freedom was in danger of cancellation by Congress. And, American officials added, it was better having Russian engineers work on civil space programs than building missiles for Iran or North Korea. But now that partnership is nearing an end in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for the same reasons that brought it into being: idealism, for standing up for Ukraine after Russia’s unprovoked aggression, and pragmatism, because Russia and the West were already drifting apart in spaceflight, a decoupling that the response to this invasion will only accelerate. Western governments and companies had plenty of time to prepare for last week’s invasion. Russia had been telegraphing its plans for months with troop movements near the Ukrainian border that included “exercises” in Belarus. Commercial satellites, providing optical and radar imagery, helped keep track of those preparations and, since last week, the movement of Russian forces into Ukraine and attacks on airbases and other facilities in the country. Less than 24 hours before the invasion started, US and European officials reiterated their desire for continued cooperation with Russia on the ISS. “As the world follows the political activities related to Russia and Ukraine, NASA continues to safely conduct research on board the ISS, and cooperation continues with Roscosmos and our other international partners,” said Valda Vikmanis-Keller, director of the Office of Space Affairs in the State Department, during a Feb. 23 webinar by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “We are closely monitoring what is happening, but for now activities are ongoing as planned,” added another panelist, Sylvie Espinasse, head of the Washington office of the European Space Agency. On Feb. 24, the US, Europe, and other nations announced sanctions against Russia in response to the invasion that included export restrictions. “It will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military,” President Joe Biden said in a speech announcing the measures. “It’ll degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program.” NASA, in a statement late that day, said that the sanctions excluded ISS operations. “The new export control measures will continue to allow US-Russia civil space cooperation,” the agency stated. “No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in orbit and ground station operations.” Five days later, the NASA associate administrator who oversees ISS operations confirmed that it remained business as usual on the station. “Right now operations are nominal,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said at a press conference about the upcoming Ax-1 commercial mission to the station, which remains on schedule for a March 30 launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. “Obviously we’re continuing to monitor the situation.” She reiterated that later in the call. “We are not getting any indications at a working level that our counterparts are not committed to ongoing operation of the International Space Station,” she said, referring to Russia. “We, as a team, are operating just like we were operating three weeks ago. The flight controllers are still talking together, our teams are still talking together, we’re still doing training together, we’re still working together.” That included having Mark Vande Hei, the NASA astronaut who flew to the station nearly a year ago on a Soyuz spacecraft, return in late March on a Soyuz. She said there was no consideration of having Vande Hei return on Ax-1, which would require Axiom Space to remove one of its customers on that commercial mission to free up a seat for Vande Hei. However, she didn’t offer an update on negotiations with Russia on an agreement to swap Soyuz and commercial crew seats, something that would need to be finalized soon to enable a NASA astronaut to fly on a Soyuz mission this fall and a Russian cosmonaut on a Crew Dragon around the same time. ISS, though, is the exception to the rule. Roscosmos announced February 26 that it was suspending cooperation with Europe on Soyuz launches from the European spaceport in French Guiana. The Russian personnel there would leave in the coming days. The decision strands several European government, or “institutional,” missions for the EU and ESA, such as a pair of Galileo navigation satellites that were to launch on a Soyuz in April. “We will consequently assess for each European institutional payload under our responsibility the appropriate launch service based notably on launch systems currently in operation and the upcoming Vega-C and Ariane 6 launchers,” ESA said in a statement February 28. Both Vega C and Ariane 6 are scheduled to make their first launches later this year. ESA was also collaborating with Russia on ExoMars, a Mars lander mission scheduled for launch in September on a Proton that would deliver an ESA rover, Rosalind Franklin, to the Martian surface. As recently as February 25, ESA said that preparations for the launch would continue. However, in its February 28 statement, ESA cast doubt on those plans. “Regarding the ExoMars programme continuation, the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely,” the agency said, with ESA director general Josef Aschbacher to prepare a “formal decision” on the future of ExoMars at an unspecified date. That decision would, at the very least, delay ExoMars to the next Martian launch window in late 2024, by which time the Ariane 6 might be ready to launch the mission. (ExoMars missed its first launch window in mid-2020 because of technical problems and the pandemic.) However, Russia was also contributing the landing platform, called Kazachok, for the rover, and if the two agencies end collaboration on ExoMars it’s unclear what would replace it. Northrop Grumman may also feel the effects of both sides of the war. Its Antares rocket uses RD-181 engines from Russia and a first stage built by Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye/Yuzhmash. At a February 18 press conference the day before the latest Antares launch from Virginia carrying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, the company said it had all the components for two more Antares launches, which would take the company through early next year. “The best mitigation we can have is to be buying ahead,” said Kurt Eberly, director of space launch programs for Northrop Grumman Launch and Missile Defense Systems. “Hopefully, that will tide us over until these tensions can subside and we can be back to normal operating procedure.” And yet, the situation is far less disruptive in space than what one might have expected, or what might have been the case just a few years ago. In 2014, when the US and Europe issued sanctions after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister, threatened to cut off NASA’s access to Soyuz seats to get astronauts to the ISS as well as halt exports of the RD-180 engine used on the first stage of the Atlas 5. Neither threat would be effective today. NASA now has Crew Dragon to get astronauts and others to the station: Lueders’s comments were at a briefing about a commercial Crew Dragon flight to the station. United Launch Alliance has confirmed it has acquired all the RD-180 engines it needs for the roughly two dozen remaining Atlas 5 missions it has on its manifest before it shifts to the Vulcan Centaur rocket whose engines are made in the USA. Russia could cut off RD-181 engines for Antares. However, if that happens, or if Yuzhnoye/Yuzhmash is no longer able to supply Antares first stages, Northrop could decide to launch Cygnus missions on other vehicles, just as it used Atlas 5 for two Cygnus missions after an Antares launch failure in 2014. By the second half of 2023, when the first post-Antares Cygnus mission would likely launch, Northrop could turn to ULA’s Vulcan or possible Blue Origin’s New Glenn or even SpaceX. Northrop has no other customers for Antares. Russia’s decision to halt Soyuz launches from French Guiana will likely delay several European government missions. However, the long-term future of Soyuz launches from French Guiana were uncertain even before this decision. In January, Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël said he expected European institutional customers of Soyuz to shift to Vega C and Ariane 6. With little commercial activity for Soyuz out of French Guiana, he suggested Soyuz might not operate from there after 2023 without support from European governments. “We need to have the guarantee of a number of payloads, and it’s not certain because Ariane 6 and Vega C should now take over what Soyuz has delivered,” he said then. “We’ve had discussions with our Russian partners to see whether there is a business case to go beyond 2023 or not.” Russia in general has largely retreated from the commercial launch market. In the 1990s customers were eager to fly commercial GEO satellites on Proton because of its low costs and long track record, while Russia offered converted ICBMs as cheap launches for the nascent smallsat market. Proton, though, has not done a commercial launch for a Western customer since 2019, when it launched a communications satellite for Eutelsat along with the first Northrop Grumman Mission Extension Vehicle. Proton suffered self-inflicted wounds from several failures in the first half of the 2010s that raised questions about its reliability. Changes in US government licensing in the last year also made it more difficult for companies to secure approvals to use Russian rockets. Soyuz has managed to maintain some commercial launch business primarily through a contract to launch OneWeb’s constellation. But the remaining launches, all planned for Baikonur, are now in question, beyond the next launch that—for now— remains scheduled for March 4. Among the open questions are whether OneWeb will still have the regulatory approvals to export the Florida-built satellites to Baikonur, and how they will get there given airspace closures and concerns about the availability of the An-124 aircraft, built by Ukraine’s Antonov, for transporting them. In civil space, there are few other areas of cooperation between Russia and the West. Roscosmos, once penciled in to participate in the Artemis program’s lunar Gateway, declined to provide an airlock module as originally proposed. Rogozin, now the head of Roscosmos, said in late 2020 that Russia wasn’t interested because it was “too US-centric.” The lack of interactions meant there was little Russia could do to the United States in space to respond to the new sanctions. All Rogozin could say is that he considered it “inappropriate” for NASA to collaborate on Roscosmos’s Venera-D mission to Venus. However, that mission is unlikely to launch until late this decade, if at all, and NASA had no firm role in the mission. NASA also has two Venus missions of its own in development for launch later this decade. That hasn’t stopped Rogozin’s rhetoric on Twitter. He suggested that Atlas 5 reliability was in question without access to personnel from NPO Energomash, citing specifically the next CST-100 Starliner commercial crew test flight scheduled to launch on that vehicle as soon as May. “Well, let’s pray for our American friends!” (ULA CEO Tory Bruno responded that while ULA liked to be able to consult with Energomash engineers about the RD-180 engines, “we have been flying them for years and have developed considerable experience and expertise.”) Shortly after President Biden spoke about the sanctions, Rogozin fired off a tweetstorm in response, including suggesting that Biden had Alzheimer’s disease. “Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?” he wrote at one point in the rant, suggesting that the station would deorbit without the propulsion provided by the Russian segment. “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect?” That seems like an empty threat for now, because just as the US has reiterated its intent to cooperate on the ISS, Russia has shown no sign of halting cooperation. It added two modules to the station last year and, amid all of Rogozin’s airing of grievances, Roscosmos noted preparations continued to launch three cosmonauts to the station in mid-March. Lueders said at the Feb. 28 press conference that it was keeping its options open, just in case. “We always look for how to get more operational flexibility,” she said. The Cygnus that arrived at the station on the latest Antares launch will, in April, test the ability to reboost the station’s orbit, something done now only by Russian Progress cargo spacecraft and thrusters on Russian modules. “Currently, there is no plan—it would be very difficult—for us to be operating on our own. The ISS is an international partnership,” she said, “which is what makes it such an amazing program. It’s a place where we live and operate in space in a peaceful manner. That’s really a model for us to be operating in the future.” But that ISS partnership will eventually come to an end, whether it’s 2030 as NASA currently plans or somewhat earlier. (Rogozin’s comments may help secure funding for NASA efforts to promote commercial space stations to succeed the ISS, just as his threats in 2014 helped win funding for commercial crew.) When that happens, there may no longer be any major civil space cooperation or commercial space relationships between Russia and the West. The idealism and pragmatism of 30 years ago has been unwound by the harsh realities of today. This article originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
U.S. Space Command has been impressed by SpaceX’s ability to provide internet access in war-torn parts of Ukraine, the head of the command told lawmakers March 8. “What we’re seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation or a proliferated architecture can provide in terms of redundancy and capability,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said during a hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee. Dickinson’s comments were in response to questions from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who noted that Starlink’s ability to deliver communications from space over Ukraine is “positive news” and also an example of “private actors in space entering into contested environments.” “Russia has been trying to jam the signals and block coverage, and that’s made me wonder,” Kaine said. He asked Dickinson if there is a “legal framework” for U.S. commercial space companies that become involved in contested situations. “We do look at that, senator,” said Dickinson. “We work very closely in our commercial integration cell on that very issue.” The commercial integration cell, or CIC, is a group of 10 commercial satellite operators that work side-by-side with U.S. Space Command at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. U.S. Strategic Command originally created the CIC to share intelligence about threats in space and other issues of concern given the military’s dependence on commercial space services. The CIC includes Intelsat, SES Government Solutions, Inmarsat, Eutelsat, Maxar, Viasat, XTAR, SpaceX, Iridium Communications and Hughes Network Systems. Starlink, with nearly 2,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, is by far the world’s largest commercial satellite constellation. SpaceX has permission to launch 12,000 satellites and is seeking approval to deploy 30,000 more. SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell said March 7 that the company had been working for weeks to secure approval for Starlink services in Ukraine before a government minister tweeted a request to Elon Musk.
Astra Space said March 7 it identified two problems that led to the failure of a launch last month as the company gears up for a new launch that may be imminent. In a March 7 statement , the company said an investigation into a Feb. 10 failure of its Rocket 3.3 vehicle to reach orbit determined the root cause was an error in a wiring diagram for the payload fairing that kept all its separation mechanisms from firing. That, in turn, kept the fairing from separating until the rocket’s upper stage, which is encapsulated by the fairing, fired its engine. “This harness was built and installed onto the vehicle exactly as specified by our procedures and the engineering drawing,” wrote Andrew Griggs, senior director for mission management and assurance at Astra, in the statement. However, the drawing swapped two wiring harness channels. “The swapped separation channels caused a different deployment sequence than we expected, and this led to the failure to open the fairing.” Because of the different deployment sequence, there was an “off-nominal” movement of the fairing that caused an electrical disconnection, which kept the separation signal from reaching one of five separation mechanisms. That, he said, “prevented the fairing from separating completely before upper stage ignition.” Astra said tests before launch didn’t find the problem since those merely confirmed that the fairing was wired as designed, rather than detecting a flaw in the wiring design itself. The payload fairing did successfully separate on the previous Rocket 3.3 launch in November 2021, the first time the vehicle reached orbit. A second issue with the February launch was with the thrust vector control system on the upper stage. The stage started tumbling immediately after engine ignition, likely because it ran into the fairing. Briggs said the flight control software was vulnerable to a failure mode caused by packet loss. “A missed series of signals resulted in a chain of events, resulting in the upper stage’s inability to recover from its tumble,” he wrote. “Although we had designed our software suite to be resilient to packet loss, an unlikely combination of factors caused a failure that we didn’t predict.” The company didn’t state whether, had the software worked, it would have been able to stop the tumbling and still reach orbit. Astra said it corrected the payload fairing wiring harness flaw and instituted new tests that would be able to detect this problem for future vehicles. It also upgraded the software to better handle packet losses. The failure of the vehicle, called LV0008 by Astra, was the fourth failure in five orbital launch attempts by the company. In the March 7 statement, Astra said only that it is “preparing to return to the launch pad with LV0009 soon.” That could be very soon. A notice to air missions, or NOTAM, by the Federal Aviation Administration restricts airspace downrange from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island from March 13 to 15 for space operations . The NOTAM does not identify who is conducting the launch, and no companies or organizations have announced plans to conduct launches from that spaceport during that period. Astra performed its first four orbital launches from Kodiak before the Feb. 10 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Astra declined to comment on the NOTAM. Alaska Aerospace Corporation, which operates the spaceport, did not respond to a request for comment March 7 about the NOTAM. Its website does state that the next launch from the spaceport is scheduled for March 13 to 15, without giving additional details.
SpaceX’s president says the company had been working for weeks to secure approval for Starlink services in Ukraine before a government minister tweeted a request to Elon Musk. In a talk March 7 at the California Institute of Technology, Gwynne Shotwell said the company had been working for about a month and a half to get landing rights, or government approval to provide services in the country, before the Feb. 26 tweet by Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, requesting SpaceX provide Starlink terminals . “We had been working on trying to get permission — landing rights — to lay down capacity in Ukraine,” she said, describing it as a part of the company’s broader expansion of Starlink services in Europe and elsewhere. “We had been working with the Ukrainians for a month and a half or so.” The company, she said, had been waiting for a letter formally granting landing rights, but it never came before Russian forces invaded the country Feb. 24. “But then they tweeted,” she recalled. “There’s our permission.” Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, tweeted in response to Fedorov Feb. 26 that Starlink services had been activated for Ukraine and that the company was shipping terminals to the country. An initial set of terminals arrived in the country two days later. “They tweeted at Elon and so we turned it on,” she said. “That was our permission. That was the letter from the minister. It was a tweet.” “That was the right thing to do,” Shotwell said of providing services that enable the free flow of information. “I think the best way to uphold democracies is to make sure we all understand what the truth is.” Starlink in general is becoming an important part of the company still best known for its Falcon launch vehicles and Dragon cargo and crew spacecraft. “Our value right now is not based on Falcon and Dragon. It’s based on Starlink and Starship,” the company’s next-generation launch system. Even Starship, she added, still feels very speculative to many. “The value of this particular company is driven now by Starlink and will go further with Starship.” Demand for Starlink’s broadband internet services remains high. “Right now, more people want Starlink in the U.S. than I can provide service to,” she said. That demand is a key reason the company is planning a larger constellation that could ultimately include 30,000 satellites, which she described as the “sweet spot” in meeting anticipated demand. She reiterated the company’s efforts in space sustainability, which SpaceX outlined in a Feb. 22 statement that described efforts ranging from automated collision-avoidance maneuvers to deorbiting satellites quickly at the end of their lives. “We, I believe, are great stewards of the space environment,” she said, arguing it was in the company’s own interest in limiting debris. “The biggest contributor right now to debris in the space environment is ASAT testing,” she said, calling for a halt to tests like the November 2021 Russian demonstration of an antisatellite weapon that created thousands of pieces of debris. She also suggested limiting the use of cubesats that lack propulsion that allow them to maneuver. “I think there’s going to come a time when we’re not going to want to fly non-propulsive satellites or satellites that cannot deorbit.” Shotwell did not provide details on the development of Starship beyond emphasizing the company’s goal of enabling aircraft-like reusability. “We hope to turn these vehicles around just like an aircraft,” she said. The space industry, she added, was still coming to terms of what the projected cost and performance of Starship would enable. “Starship will change everything about space,” she said. “Once we get this fully operational reusability, like airplanes, once we nail that, then the cost of a Starship mission is the propellant, LOX and methane, which is not expensive.” “Has the community gotten their head around it yet? No,” she said. “Organizations will still optimize for mass, which will be dumb in that timeframe. They will optimize for size, which will be dumb because Starship is gigantic.”
SAN FRANCISCO – SmallSat Alliance Chairman Charles Beames is taking the helm of cybersecurity firm SpiderOak as chairman of the board. After meeting SpiderOak executives through the SmallSat Alliance, Beames became intrigued by the firm’s zero-trust software. “By far and away, the biggest threat to our satellites is cyberattack,” said Beames, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and former Defense Department principal director for space and intelligence systems. “A lot of companies are trying to attack this problem.” SpiderOak’s approach involves software for commercial, military and civil government customers that encrypts data throughout private blockchain networks and creates cryptographic keys that give various parties access only to the datasets they need to perform their work. “I think that’s the answer to the cybersecurity challenge,” Beames said. Cybersecurity is a growing problem. Government satellites have long endured attacks from individuals and state-sponsored organizations around the world. With increasing U.S. government reliance on commercial satellite constellations, companies are finding themselves in hackers’ crosshairs as well. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Christopher Scolese, National Reconnaissance Office director, warned satellite operators of possible Russian attacks to disrupt communications and GPS services. Viasat later reported a suspected cyberattack caused some network outages in Ukraine. HawkEye 360 also issued a report on increased GPS interference in recent months. “The biggest vulnerability for GPS is spoofing,” Beames said. “This technology that SpiderOak has will be able to help solve that problem.” Chicago-based SpiderOak has raised its profile in the last year. The company won two U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research contracts in 2021 for OrbitSecure, an off-the-shelf product to enhance satellite and constellation cybersecurity. While working with SpiderOak, Beames will remain York Space Systems executive chairman. “There’s a natural synergy between York, which manufactures and operates satellites for customers, and SpiderOak, which provides the foundational layer of software,” Beames said. SpiderOak CEO Dave Pearah said in a statement that the company is “very fortunate to have an experienced board chairman from the space industry, both military and commercial, with a renowned record of leading companies to great commercial success.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat has picked former Raytheon executive David Wajsgras as CEO to lead the satellite operator post-bankruptcy. Wajsgras will take the helm April 4 to replace Stephen Spengler, who announced plans to retire in October after more than 18 years at Intelsat. Spengler has been CEO of Intelsat for nearly seven years. His departure comes after the company said Feb. 23 it had successfully emerged from financial restructuring after securing $7 billion in fresh financing. Wajsgras is currently a partner at private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners, which seeks to invest in the U.S. and Canada in markets including aerospace and defense, cybersecurity and infrastructure. Intelsat said he has two decades of experience at the senior executive management level in commercial and defense industries. Most recently, he was president of the Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS) business at former defense contractor Raytheon Company, which is now a part of Raytheon Technologies. Wajsgras joined Raytheon Company as president and chief financial officer in 2006 and left the group in 2020, after it merged with United Technologies (UTC) to create Raytheon Technologies, according to his LinkedIn profile . Before joining Raytheon Company, he was vice president and chief financial officer at Lear Corporation, the U.S.-based automotive seating and electrical systems manufacturer. “While the company has made history over nearly 60 years, it’s Intelsat’s future that excites me most,” Wajsgras said in a statement. Intelsat’s restructuring deal cut its debt from about $16 billion to $7 billion, freeing the operator up to invest in a multi-orbit growth strategy that could also include its own low Earth orbit broadband constellation. In January, Intelsat ordered two software-defined satellites from Thales Alenia Space as part of this plan. The order came after Intelsat received a milestone payment from the Federal Communications Commission, worth $1.2 billion , for clearing part of its C-band spectrum for terrestrial cellular operators. Intelsat expects to receive nearly $5 billion in total from clearing C-band spectrum, however, it remains locked in a legal dispute with satellite operator SES over its share of the proceeds.
China launched a set of commercial satellites Saturday for testing broadband services, on-orbit networking and integrating communications and remote sensing technologies. A Long March 2C lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:01 a.m. March 5, carrying six satellites for private firm Galaxy Space and a further passenger in the Xingyuan-2 remote sensing satellite for startup SpaceWish. U.S. space tracking later picked up seven objects from the launch in roughly 500 by 480-kilometer orbits inclined by 63 degrees. The six satellites for private startup Galaxy Space are designated GS-2, GS-AP01, 02 and 03 and GS-2BP01 and 02, while also bearing secondary names through sponsorship. The experimental satellite network has been nicknamed “Mini-spider Constellation.” Each satellite has a mass of 190 kilograms and are capable of data speeds of 40Gbps according to the firm, and are smaller and more capable than the Yinhe-1 satellite launched in 2020. Notably the satellite could play an important part in the development of China’s plan to establish a national low Earth orbit broadband megaconstellation , overseen by a state-owned enterprise but apparently involving players from the country’s nascent commercial sector. “These six satellites will form an experimental network integrating communication and remote sensing,” Chang Ming of Galaxy Space told CCTV. “When the whole experimental network forms, it will be verified in various application scenarios. It will also be the first technical verification for China’s low-orbit broadband satellite constellation.” Galaxy Space was founded in 2016 and had designs on establishing a private constellation of satellites, according to founder Xu Ming. Deng Zongquan, head of the National Defense Program 793 and the director of the mysterious “Aerospace Institutions and Control Technology at a National Defense Key Discipline Laboratory,” according to SupChina , was later recruited as chairperson of Galaxy Space’s technical committee, providing value links to the traditional space sector. The private constellation plans appear to have been subsumed into China’s national broadband constellation plan. Verifying the performance of the new satellites in orbit along with its supply chains and mass-manufacturing capabilities could put it in position to make big contributions to the project. However, little is known about China’s plans, which ITU filings reveal tentative ideas of a 13,000-strong constellation. The project could support a number of new companies in the launch and satellite sectors, which were opened up to private capital in 2014. Galaxy Space established a satellite manufacturing factory in Nantong which it says can produce 300-500 satellites per year. The city, on the Yangtze river and near Shanghai, also hosts reusable rocket startup Deep Blue Aerospace . The mission also included participation from Four Squares Technology and a 3D printed CubeSat deployer from COSATS. The launch was China’s fifth of the year, with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) aiming for more than 50 launches in 2022. These include six major missions to complete the country’s space station .
ORLANDO, Fla. — An often-heard complaint about U.S. military satellites is that they’re not resilient — which generally means they don’t have enough protections against modern electronic jammers, advanced lasers and cyber hacks. This is a growing concern for the Pentagon as Russia threatens to extend the war against Ukraine into space, and China continues to roll out advanced technologies that could be used against U.S. and allies’ communications and navigation satellite networks. But what it will take to make constellations more resilient and achieve what the military calls “ space superiority ” is still being debated, industry executives said March 4 at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium. The executives spoke at a panel discussion moderated by Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein , commander of the Space Systems Command, who noted that the topic of space superiority was rarely discussed in public up until recently and is now a top concern for the U.S. Space Force. When the military talks about space superiority, it’s not about conquering actual sectors of the space domain but ensuring that satellites can provide capabilities, such as communications, navigation, and intelligence to military forces on the ground. “The dialogue that we should have is on how do we achieve that,” said Erich Hernandez-Baquero, executive director at Raytheon Intelligence & Space. “The doctrine today for space superiority is basically having freedom of action and denying the adversary that freedom of action,” he said. The U.S. military’s global networks that depend on space systems have to be able to face “stressing scenarios like the defense of Taiwan.” To ensure satellites networks can overcome cyber attacks and other threats DoD will have to change how it deploy and equips satellites, Hernandez-Baquero said. “Maneuver is becoming increasingly more important, as well as all the logistics and supply chains that are going to support any sort of response.” The next generation of U.S. space systems also needs to leverage technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning so they can autonomously defend against attacks, he said. There is some confusion across the industry on what DoD means by resilience, said Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt, senior director of global sales and marketing at Boeing Space & Security. “It depends on what you’re trying to do,” he said. “Are you really trying to get asset resiliency or are you trying to get mission resiliency?” Asset resilience in this case is protecting the actual satellites. But mission resilience is ensuring that objectives can be accomplished even if some satellites are lost. “We used to play those war games where you looked at reconstitution. And it would take you two years to reconstitute a satellite,” he said. “That’s totally unacceptable.” If a satellite is taken out by an adversary, how can DoD replace that asset quickly, Eberhardt asked. “Are we reconstituting from on orbit? Or are we going to reconstitute on the ground and have that capability ready?” Eberhardt noted that in air warfare strategy, it’s assumed that some aircraft will be lost. How that approach could apply to space is “kind of danced around a lot,” he said. “The air domain accounts for attrition. If you’re going to get into a fight, you’re accounting for losses. And they build that into their acquisition process.” “I think we’ve all recognized that freedom of action is under threat,” he said. So the traditional methods of building satellites for uncontested operations no longer apply. “I would offer that industry’s role is to let the engineers start thinking that way,” he said. “Classically, the engineers that were designing space systems weren’t thinking too much about what kind of resiliency features I need to have.” Once you start “running vignettes with engineers, it’s amazing the kind of innovation that they can come up with and design into the system,” he said. Sherman Johns, director of space strategy at SAIC, said the Space Force also needs modern technologies to train satellite operators for space warfare and to test systems for how they would perform under attack. All that is now achievable with digital engineering,” he said. “We’re all aware here that the United States no longer operates in a benign environment,” so the Space Force needs a “robust training infrastructure with models, simulations and visualization tools that allow commanders to look at a problem and actually make decisions in a timely manner.” Working with commercial systems Guetlein said there is an ongoing discussion about how DoD should operate with commercial space systems during a conflict. “When we were in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was clear to us what was Title 10 [military], Title 50 [intelligence] what was commercial, what was allied,” he said. “We drew very bright lines between them.” But the lines between government and commercial could become more blurred if DoD starts buying more commercial services, Guetlein said. “As we start going into the space fight and seek space superiority, there are those in a camp that says the government has to own all the capability on orbit.” However, he said, there is now a push to make hybrid networks where commercial and military systems are integrated. Eberhardt said the industry has struggled to move forward with the design of hybrid networks because policies are still clear. “The government has a policy debate on their hands on the use of commercial assets and what happens” during a conflict. He said other countries that buy satellites from Boeing have asked the company for communications services that go across the military and commercial Ka band, for example, but the U.S. government has not. DoD also has to think about what investments it will need in ground terminals that can talk to military and commercial satellites. “You can put satellites on orbit but if you haven’t thought through the ripple effects of what happens to the rest of the system all the way down to the end user, you start running into trouble.” “As you’re thinking about commercial versus government, you do have to get down to what’s the minimum viable product the warfighter needs to win the war,” Eberhardt said. Johns agreed that the question of how to blend military and commercial space systems “has been sort of asked forever and we haven’t cracked the code.” The policy “needs to be defined by the U.S. government,” he said. “And industry will obviously follow suit.” “What’s a minimum viable product, and commercial versus not, this one’s just hard,” Johns said. Business and investment strategies Another issue executives brought up is how the government communicates its demands. Hernandez-Baquero said a new Space Force organization, the Space Warfighting Analysis Center , is reaching out to the industry and sharing data about space threats so companies can design systems accordingly. But more information is needed about the threats that U.S. satellites face so the industry can “really align our investments to make sure that we are ready with the capabilities that the government is going to need,” he said. The Space Force says it wants to buy more commercial space services rather than build its own satellites “but there needs to be a good market signal that industry can then say, okay, if I put the investment in this area, I’m going to get a return because I know this is a capability that the government needs,” said Hernandez-Baquero. That helps companies prepare “ahead of time rather than react to a solicitation when it comes out,” he added. “When you look at the capital investment that’s happening in the commercial world on software, digital technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, modeling and simulation, autonomy for vehicles and 5G networking, there’s just huge capital that’s going into commercial,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “I haven’t seen this kind of energy around space, outside of defense, that we’re seeing now. So that’s really good,” he said. But the government has to figure out a business model to leverage commercial investment, he added. “When you look at the value that warrants the investment that commercial puts into these technologies, it’s because there’s scale,” he said. “But when you look at the way we’re selling these sort of technologies in the government, we’re not doing it that way” due to specific requirements that DoD has that don’t exist in the commercial world. 
Citing Starlink jamming “near conflict areas,” Elon Musk said March 5 that SpaceX will be “reprioritzed to cyber defense & overcoming signal jamming” at the expense of “slight delays” in Starship and Starlink V2. In a series of overnight tweets, Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said the company was shifting its resources in response to jamming of terminals, presumably in Ukraine. A recent update to Starlink software “bypasses the jamming,” he added, but did not elaborate. The moves come a week after Musk responded to a request by Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation, to provide Starlink service in the country to ensure access if Russia cut off other lines of communications. Musk said Feb. 26 that Starlink service has been turned on in the country and, two days later, an initial shipment of at least several dozen Starlink terminals arrived in Ukraine. Neither SpaceX nor Ukrainian government officials have disclosed how many Starlink terminals are active in the country. Musk tweeted March 3 that SpaceX made other software changes to reduce the terminal’s power consumption, allowing it to be powered by a cigarette lighter in a car, and to enable roaming on moving vehicles. Musk also claimed that Starlink “is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution.” While some experts have warned that Starlink terminals could be targeted by Russian forces, it’s unclear if they have. Moreover, in much of Ukraine terrestrial mobile connectivity remains working, as have satellite services such as Inmarsat and Iridium. However, Viasat’s KA-SAT broadband geostationary satellite, which provides service to Ukraine and other parts of Europe, has suffered service disruptions since the invasion started Feb. 24, which the company has blamed on a “cyber event.” The focus on cybersecurity and anti-jamming upgrades comes at the expense of other company initiatives. “SpaceX reprioritized to cyber defense & overcoming signal jamming. Will cause slight delays in Starship & Starlink V2,” Musk wrote. He did not elaborate on the nature of the delays. Starlink V2 is the second generation of the Starlink service, with its satellites designed to be launched on Starship vehicles. SpaceX has released few details about the capabilities of those satellites. SpaceX has been developing Starship vehicles at its Boca Chica, Texas, test site called Starbase, but cannot attempt an orbital launch of the vehicle until it received a license from the Federal Aviation Administration. That license, in turns, depends on the completion of an environmental assessment the FAA says will be done March 28, a date that has already slipped twice. That shift in resources, though, does not appear to affect other SpaceX initiatives, including launching additional current-generation Starlink satellites. SpaceX launched a set of 47 Starlink satellites March 3 from the Kennedy Space Center, the third such launch in the last two weeks. Another Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites is scheduled for no earlier than March 8 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Musk also said that Starlink would not block Russian news sources from its network “unless at gunpoint.” The European Union has sought to block Russian state-controlled broadcasters, such as Russia Today and Sputnik, from operating in its countries. That ban extends to internet service providers as well as cable and satellite television companies.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The U.S. Space Systems Command — the Space Force organization that oversees procurement of new technology — is being restructured in an effort to re-energize the bureaucracy and bring fresh focus on the competition with China, officials said March 4. Space Force leaders unveiled details of the reorganization at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium. Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond said he and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall directed a review of Space Systems Command shortly after SSC was established in August. Following a 90-day review, the head of Space Systems Command Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein proposed a new structure built around five program executive offices : Assured Access to Space; Battle Management Command, Control, and Communications (BMC3); Space Domain Awareness and Combat Support; Communications & Positioning Navigation and Timing (PNT); and Space Sensing. The five PEOs will report directly to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration — a civilian acquisition office within Kendall’s office. Former National Reconnaissance Office executive Frank Calvelli was named to that post and is awaiting Senate confirmation. Guetlein said his primary job will be “system of systems integration.” One of the issues he identified in the previous organization was that it focused on “system by system and not an integrated capability.” Kendall summed up the problem with current space acquisitions: “Overall, we start more programs than we can afford, and we don’t prioritize the most promising ones early so that we can ensure they cross the valley of death to production and fielding,” Kendall said. “We still have too much bureaucracy.” Over the past 30 years, he said, “the U.S. has not stood still, but we have not moved fast enough.” Need to ‘think differently’ The challenges posed by Russian and Chinese anti-satellite weapons require “a whole different way of looking at the problem,” Guetlein said in an interview with SpaceNews . The Space Systems Command was stood up in August 2021 and replaced the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) which was first established in 1954. A former deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, Guetlein was put in charge of a massive organization with approximately $11 billion in annual spending and nearly 10,000 personnel. Guetlein said he wants PEOs to think beyond just widgets and stand-along pieces of hardware, and take a big-picture approach to the mission that needs to be performed with the equipment. The SSC overhaul reverses the previous SMC structure — dubbed SMC 2.0 — that the Air Force conceived in 2018 and completed by 2019. Under SMC 2.0 programs were overseen by five major offices: a portfolio architect, a development corps, a production corps, an enterprise corps and an office of special programs. The SMC 2.0 structure focused on the life cycle of a program. So every program that was in the development stage was under one bucket, he explained. And every program that was in production was under another bucket. “And what we quickly found when we stood up Space Systems Command was that we had created a whole lot of artificial seams between programs.” That type of organization had some benefits but ultimately slowed SMC’s ability to rapidly respond to the threat with an “end-to-end capability,” Guetlein said. The focus was on the rapid delivery of stand-alone systems, but created challenges in integrating those systems into a network, which is what DoD needs to fight in today’s information-centric battlefield. “I want the entire command focused on the threat and countering the threat,” he said. This requires “unprecedented levels of integration and networking.” Under the SMC 2.0 structure, he said, there were six program offices responsible for delivering various elements of the missile-warning satellite constellation, but none of the PEOs were responsible for integrating all of the elements into a larger capability. “This is the problem that the secretary asked us to address,” said Guetlein. The integration of systems across the Department of the Air Force space programs will be a major priority, said Guetlein. What was previously SMC’s portfolio architect is being renamed the Space Systems Integration Office and will be responsible for managing the integration and sequencing of space programs. The Space Force in January hired Claire Leon , a former Boeing executive who previously led the national security space launch program, to run this new office. Brig. Gen. Steven Whitney, military deputy at the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told reporters March 4 that the restructuring of Space Systems Command is “the logical evolution of building a world class command. They’re specifically focused on the threat, agile decision making, fostering partnerships with our allies and our commercial partners, and they’re going to be delivering a unique and integrated unity of effort and I think that’s really the key.”
Updated March 4 at 10:40 am Eastern Time with comments from HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini. SAN FRANCISCO – GPS radio frequency interference can signal impending military activity. HawkEye 360 proved that point in a March 4 news release on GPS interference in and around Ukraine over the last four months. Prior to Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, the Herndon, Virginia-based geospatial analytics company noted continual and increasing GPS interference near Ukraine. “This is a modern war, with the Russians leveraging the latest in electronic warfare technologies,” HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini told SpaceNews by email. “This is representative of the tactics that Russian troops are deploying to degrade the effectiveness of space-based assets, such as the United States Global Positioning System. GPS jamming is one facet that we are seeing evidence through the use of our signal detection constellation and processing capabilities.” HawkEye 360’s satellite constellation began to collect GPS interference signals last fall and “quickly recognizing it as a useful signal to monitor,” Serafini said. “We continue to collect that signal and other data across Eastern Europe, as it has emerged as a critical indicator of human activity.” HawkEye 360 operates a constellation of satellites to monitor radio frequency signals and pinpoint their location. The firm demonstrated its ability to detect and monitor GPS interference last year and now sells related products. Shortly before the Russian invasion began, HawkEye 360 analysts detected GPS interference north of Chernobyl, “demonstrating the integration of electronic warfare tactics into Russian military operation to further degrade Ukraine’s ability for self-defense,” according to the HawkEye 360 news release. In November, HawkEye 360 also noted GPS interference near the border between pro-Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces in Luhansk and Donetsk regions. With publicly available information, the company confirmed that the operation of unpiloted aircraft in the region was disrupted by the interference. GPS interference is not always deliberate. It can be caused accidentally by communications signals operating close to GPS frequency bands. The world’s growing reliance on GPS also has prompted military forces and drug cartels to invest in equipment to jam or spoof GPS signals and for the U.S. government to look for backup sources of reliable position, navigation and timing data. “Whether unintentional or deliberate, interference that prevents people, vehicles, ships and planes from determining accurate locations can be devastating to government and commercial activities alike,” Serafini said in a statement. “Since HawkEye 360 can monitor hundreds of millions of square kilometers daily, we are able to notify clients when and where GPS interference occurs, so they can respond quickly to mitigate the impacts.” 
A new venture that emerged from stealth this week promises better information about objects in orbit and more tailored space situational awareness services for satellite operators. Privateer, based in Maui, Hawaii, unveiled its first product March 1, a visualization tool called Wayfinder that combines data from several sources, including data from U.S. Space Command and data provided directly by satellite operators. Wayfinder is based on ASTRIAGraph, a similar web application developed by Moriba Jah, a University of Texas at Austin professor who is also chief scientist of Privateer. “It’s a rearchitecting of ASTRIAGraph,” he said in an interview. “ASTRIAGraph is always going to exist, but this is going to be a branch off of that.” He described Wayfinder as a demonstration of other space traffic management capabilities that Privateer can provide. “Wayfinder will be this platform, a kind of Waze app, that people can build different services on top of,” he said. One example would be adding information about the characteristics of objects, in addition to their orbits, which would be valuable for companies planning satellite servicing or debris removal activities. One of those applications will be a conjunction screening service Privateer is developing, the company’s chief executive, Alex Fielding, said in an interview. The company is working with operators of satellite constellations to get trajectory information about their satellites to improve the accuracy of their predictions. Privateer will provide some of that information for free. “We’ll give away 24 hours ahead, and we’ll sell when you need to see farther ahead,” he said, such as up to 72 hours in low Earth orbit and seven days in geostationary orbit. “We think it’s fair to give away 24 hours ahead and charge for something more bespoke and more advanced.” Those bespoke solutions include providing tailored information to operators, allowing them access to just their orbits of interest through application programming interfaces or APIs. “It used to be you had to buy the whole catalog,” Fielding said. “It’s like if you want a croissant, you had to buy the bakery.” The company is open to collecting data from a wide range of sources. “We’ll use anybody’s assets that are already there,” he said. Privateer is also working on space-based systems to track objects. The company is completing work on a three-unit cubesat called Pono-1, scheduled to launch later this year, that will carry 42 sensors. “That’s mostly going to be a technology demonstration,” said Jah. “We’ll see what data we can get back from this and what makes sense.” Fielding said Privateer is interested in flying future systems as hosted payloads on other satellites rather than building its own constellation. “We really don’t want to create more stuff in space.” Such payloads, he said, could enable more accurate and persistent tracking of objects in LEO. The third co-founder of Privateer is Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. “We’re at a clear inflection point and facing exponential growth of space commercialization,” he said in a statement. “At Privateer, we see this turning point as a real opportunity to lead and educate people about space sustainability and, for space operators, help ensure their safety and sustainability.” Privateer is the latest company in a growing sector of the space industry focused on tracking and characterizing objects in orbit and providing services, such as collision warnings, to satellite operators. That growth stands in contrast to the much slower progress on government efforts, like the development of an open architecture data repository, or OADR, by the Office of Space Commerce that will be part of its efforts to take over civil space traffic management responsibilities in 2024. A former director of that office says that those growing commercial capabilities mean it’s time to reevaluate cooperation between the public and private sectors. “Private sector activities have a way of keeping up with the problem at speed in a way that governments do not,” said Kevin O’Connell, who served as director from 2018 to 2021, in a March 2 keynote at a space traffic management conference organized by the International Academy of Astronautics and the University of Texas at Austin. O’Connell is now an adviser to several companies in this sector, including Privateer. “What’s changing very rapidly right now is the potential character of any public private partnerships in this area as private sector capabilities leap forward and government approaches remain very conventional,” he said. “U.S. government funding towards this problem remains insufficient to the urgency and the importance of the task, and the impressive advance of the commercial sector in this area means that the government should immediately move to leverage these capabilities.”
TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb is considering American, European, Indian and Japanese rockets for launching its remaining 220 satellites after the company announced March 3 that it would stop using Russia’s Soyuz rocket. OneWeb, which is partly owned by the British government, has launched 428 of a planned 648 broadband satellites aboard Soyuz rockets under a 19-launch contract with Arianespace of Evry, France. All 13 of OneWeb’s launches to date have been on Soyuz and OneWeb planned to launch five more missions by the end of August to enable its low Earth orbit constellation to provide global services. A sixth Soyuz mission had been planned to provide in-orbit backup capacity. Those plans were upended after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of neighboring Ukraine sparked the most dangerous geopolitical crisis since the Cold War. Preparations for OneWeb’s scheduled March 4 launch from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan were suspended after Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said Russia would only allow the launch to proceed if OneWeb guaranteed its satellites would not be used for military purposes, and the British government divested its stake in the company. On March 2, Rogozin posted a video on social media of Baikonur workers removing OneWeb’s livery from a Soyuz rocket that had rolled out to the pad the same day carrying 36 OneWeb satellites. That same day, London-based OneWeb ordered its staff to leave Baikonur . OneWeb announced March 3 that its board of directors “has voted to suspend all launches from Baikonur.” U.K. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said that the British government supported OneWeb’s decision, adding: “In light of Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, we are reviewing our participation in all further projects involving Russian collaboration.” With Soyuz off the table, OneWeb told SpaceNews the company is seeking alternatives. “We’re looking at U.S., Japanese and Indian options,” Chris McLaughlin, OneWeb’s chief of government, regulatory affairs and engagement, said March 3. “But in the first instance, we’re pointing to Ariane and saying you still owe us a number of launches.” Arianespace spokeswoman Cyrielle Bouju did not respond to requests for comment. Soyuz out of the picture Roscosmos said March 4 that the Soyuz rocket, with the Fregat upper stage and OneWeb spacecraft, had been removed from the pad. “In the coming days, specialists from Roscosmos enterprises will disassemble it into its component parts,” the space agency said in a tweet translated via Twitter. Arianespace also announced in a March 4 news release that it is suspending all Soyuz launches operated by Arianespace and Starsem, a Russo-French joint venture that commercializes Soyuz launches. “Arianespace will work with its partners to ensure the well-being of the goods and means currently in Baikonur,” Arianespace said. “Arianespace is in close contact with its customers and French and European authorities to best assess all the consequences of this situation and develop alternative solutions.” This article was updated March 4 after the Soyuz was removed from the pad
ORLANDO, Fla. — Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall dropped a hint about the forthcoming U.S. national security strategy: “Russia and other threats will not be discounted, but China, with both regional and global ambitions, the resources to pursue them, and a repressive authoritarian system of government, will be our greatest strategic national security challenge,” he said March 3 at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium. China is the United States’ main competitor in space, Kendall noted. China’s advances in anti-satellite weapons threaten the security of U.S. and allied space systems and that concern will be reflected in the Biden administration’s forthcoming national security and national defense strategies. “I don’t want to get ahead of that process, but you can be confident that despite current events, the pacing challenge remains China,” said Kendall. In space and defense, China had spent the past 30 years building up its capabilities, said Kendall. Unlike Russia, China has significant financial resources and economic power, he said. “Its capabilities to pursue its ambitions are much greater than Russia’s.” “China quite clearly has global ambitions as you see it trying to establish bases around the world,” he said. “When you look at it objectively, China is a much greater strategic threat than Russia is. Obviously with what’s happening right now you cannot ignore Russia, it’s very much a national security concern.” With regard to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Kendall said, “In my view President Putin just made a very, very, serious miscalculation. He severely underestimated the global reaction the invasion of Ukraine would provoke, he severely underestimated the will and courage of the people of Ukraine, and he overestimated the capability of his own military.” “I would be more inclined to put Russia in the ‘near peer’ competitor category than the pure competitor category,” Kendall said. He cautioned that the exception is Russia’s nuclear capability which remains a concern as Putin has threatened to launch tactical nukes — a smaller size category of nuclear weapons that Russia developed but has never used.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said U.S. national security launches will not be affected by Russia’s decision to stop supplying rocket engines to the United States in retaliation for sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. “I think our launch needs will be met,” Kendall told reporters March 3 at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium. The Russian RD-180 rocket engine powers the first stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5, a launch vehicle used for national security space missions. ULA said it already has all the engines it needs to complete the remaining 24 launches of the Atlas 5 scheduled between now and 2025, and the engines are stored in the United States. CEO Tory Bruno said the company has an agreement with RD-180 manufacturer NPO Energomash for technical support and spare parts but if that support were cut off, ULA has in-house expertise to maintain and operate the engines. Kendall ran Defense Department acquisition programs during the Barack Obama administration when DoD had to respond to Congress’ push to ban military use of the RD-180. Following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Congress directed the Pentagon to stop using launch vehicles powered by Russian engines and only allowed DoD to award contracts for Atlas 5 launches through 2022. The RD-180 ban led the Air Force to change the national security space launch program from a single-vendor agreement with ULA to a two-vendor arrangement with ULA and SpaceX. ULA will be retiring the Atlas 5 by 2025 and plans to start transitioning this year to Vulcan Centaur — a new launch vehicle that will use the Blue Origin BE-4 engine made in the United States. “The whole point of the program we put in place several years ago was to work our way off of the RD-180,” Kendall said. “And I have not been informed at this point of any major launch concerns associated with” the recent decision by Dmitry Rogozin, head of the state space agency Roscosmos, to stop supplying engines to U.S. companies. According to Reuters, Rogozin said on Russian state television that due to the sanctions imposed by the West, “we can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.” Russia’s move, however, would affect Northrop Grumman’s rocket that flies missions for NASA. Rogozin said he would cut off the supply of the RD-181 engines used in Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which is used to launch cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the possibility of conflict in space is driving budget priorities as the military services prepare to submit funding requests for 2024. In a keynote speech March 3 at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium, Kendall said he has directed the Space Force to focus on how to make U.S. space systems “resilient enough to endure while under attack.” The entire U.S. military force “was designed for an era in which our potential adversaries did not possess space systems of their own that actively threaten our terrestrial joint forces,” he said. “We’ve only begun to define, and have not yet fully resourced, the space systems that we will need to secure the nation.” Kendall issued a list of priorities he calls “operational imperatives” for the Air Force and the Space Force to shape their budget requests so they are better prepared to compete with China. At the top of the list is a “resilient space order of battle,” said Kendall. The order of battle is a military term for how a force is structured, organized and equipped for combat. He wants the Space Force to think in those terms as it plans future investments. Space is tightly coupled with everything the U.S. military does, said Kendall. “The U.S. and its allies depend on space for a range of military services; communications, intelligence, targeting, navigation, and missile warning. Our potential adversaries have fielded their own versions of these services and are also fielding a variety of ways to attack U.S. systems.” At Kendall’s direction, the Space Force last month issued a request for information to industry on how constellations could be better protected and made more resilient. Another priority on Kendall’s list of imperatives are technologies to track moving targets, including the use of space sensors, he said. “The targets of interest are air, ground and maritime mobile targets associated with an act of violent aggression, such as the one we just saw in Europe or an invasion of Taiwan.” The Air Force currently uses “aging and vulnerable legacy systems” like the JSTARS and AWACS radar aircraft, Kendall said. “Ideally we’d prefer to do these functions from space, which should be more cost effective, but that isn’t the only possibility.” The technology needed to track moving targets from space may take some time to develop and mature so the Air Force may pursue other options. There is an “urgent need to replace some of our aging legacy systems,” said Kendall. 
The head of Roscosmos has renewed threats to terminate Russian participation in the International Space Station even as NASA says operations on the station remain normal. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, posted a link on his Twitter account March 2 to a video by Russian state-controlled broadcaster Russia Today . In the video, Rogozin suggested he would reconsider cooperation on the ISS if the United States maintains sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. “Americans are pragmatic people. They want to maintain cooperation with Russia within the International Space Station despite the numerous sanctions,” Rogozin said through a translator. “Why? Because it is impossible to manage the space station without us. We’re responsible for its navigation and fuel delivery. I’m not talking about the interdependence of all control systems.” “Therefore, we will closely monitor the actions of our American partners and, if they continue to be hostile, we will return to the question of the existence of the International Space Station,” he said. “I would not like such a scenario because I expect that the Americans will cool down.” In a separate interview with the Russian news service TASS , Rogozin offered similar comments, but suggested he was referring to the future of the ISS after 2024, rather than any near-term suspension of cooperation. “How will they cope with this ISS then? I don’t know,” he said in a translation of the Russian-language article. In contrast to Rogozin’s rhetoric, his NASA counterpart has emphasized continued cooperation with Russia on the station. “Despite the challenges here on Earth, and they are substantial, NASA is committed to the seven astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in remarks at a March 1 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council. “NASA continues the working relationship with all our international partners to ensure their safety and the ongoing safe operations of the ISS,” he said. Those are the only public comments Nelson has made about the ISS partnership since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine Feb. 24. Other agency officials have emphasized ongoing normal operations of the station, even while doing some planning if that changes. “We always look for how we get more operational flexibility,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said at a Feb. 28 briefing about the upcoming Ax-1 commercial mission to the station. “Our cargo providers are looking at how do we add different capabilities.” One example she cited was Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft. The NG-17 Cygnus spacecraft that arrived at the station Feb. 21 will conduct a test in April of its ability to reboost the station with its thrusters, a service that today is only provided by Russian Progress cargo spacecraft and the Russian segment of the station itself. She said SpaceX may provide unspecified “additional capability” as well. “We’ve been looking at that more from an operational flexibility perspective,” she said, acknowledging that there are no plans for NASA and other Western ISS partners to operate the station without Russia. One NASA adviser recommends that NASA work on contingency plans. “When I talk to my friends that are still at work at the ISS control center, they are very much operating normally, and we certainly hope that stays the same,” said Wayne Hale, a former shuttle flight director and shuttle program manager who currently serves on the NASA Advisory Council, at the council’s March 1 meeting. “But this old flight director feels that the situation indicates that NASA should consider assembling a tiger team to prepare contingency plans in case that situation changes,” he added. “Hopefully it doesn’t come to pass, but we’ve always prepared for contingencies.” Another council member expressed a hope for continued cooperation with Russia on the ISS. “Now is the time to make a huge deal about our excitement about space and also, if it lasts — and I do appreciate the caution — our collaboration with Russia on the space station,” said Jane Harman, a former member of Congress. “It could have a future that might be a good thing.”
This story was updated at 9:40 p.m. EST. SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s Earth observation company SI Imaging Services (SIIS) turned down a request from Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation to share satellite imagery of Ukraine and neighboring countries to assist Ukrainian efforts to repel Russia’s invasion. Daejeon-based SIIS was named along with seven other remote sensing companies in digital transformation minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s public letter, which he posted March 1 on Twitter . The other companies named are Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, Airbus SAS, BlackSky Global, Iceye, SpaceView and Capella Space. “We have nothing to share with Ukraine, at least for now,” SIIS President and CEO Kim Moon-gyu told SpaceNews on March 3. “We capture images using four [South Korean] government-owned remote sensing satellites . Therefore, the government always stands first in line to use them, and our turn comes when the government’s work is over. Since the conflict broke out, the government has substantially increased the time it uses the satellites, particularly when they fly above Ukraine, to see what’s happening down there. This has left us practically unable to capture images of Ukraine.” SI Imaging Services’ denial marked another setback for an effort initiated and promoted by Ukrainian-born entrepreneur Max Polyakov to rally the commercial imagery industry on Ukraine’s behalf. Federov’s public letter, issued after Polyakov announced an “urgent plea” for optical and SAR imagery of the region, reiterated the need for imagery support and said that Polyakov was acting on the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s behalf. “We badly need the opportunity to watch the movement of Russian troops, especially at night when our technologies are blind in fact! SAR data is important to understanding Russian troop and vehicle movements at night considering that clouds cover about 80 percent of Ukraine during the day,” Federov wrote. “Please treat Max Polyakov and EOS Data Analytics as our representatives for this cooperation.” Polyakov’s Silicon Valley-based investment vehicle Noosphere Venture Partners owns EOS Data Analytics, a Menlo Park, California, company that Polyakov told reporters is standing by to help process raw imagery to support Ukraine’s defense and humanitarian relief efforts. Both Polyakov and Fedorov have stressed the urgent need for SAR imagery, which can peer through the cloud cover that has hampered optical imagery collection in recent days. Federov is also Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation. In the week since Russia invaded Ukraine, the 31-year-old Fedorov has been making frequent use of Twitter to enlist the tech industry’s support for his embattled nation. On Feb. 26, he publicly called SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to rush Starlink satellite broadband internet terminals to Ukraine. On Feb. 28, Federov reported that a first shipment had arrived. Polyakov’s involvement in the call for imagery donations was cited in at least one company’s rejection of the request. Earlier this week, San Franciso-based SAR satellite operator Capella Space turned down the Polyakov-initiated request, saying, “We do not work with individuals or entities restricted or sanctioned under United States government export laws and regulations.” Polyakov’s Noosphere Venture Partners was added to the U.S. government’s Excluded Parties List System Dec. 22, around the same time the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) asked Noosphere to divest its stake in Firefly Aerospace. The Excluded Parties notice published on the SAM.gov website cited the U.S. Department of the Air Force as the “excluding agency” but does not explain why Noosphere is on the list. The Department of the Air Force encompasses the Air Force and the Space Force. Although Capella is a private company, it does business with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “Capella Space is working directly with the US and Ukrainian governments as well as other commercial entities to provide timely data and assistance around the ongoing conflict,” Capella CEO Payam Banazadeh wrote in a March 2 statement. Polyakov did not responded to a SpaceNews request for comment before this story was published. However, Noosphere told journalist Tim Fernholz on March that it resolved its CFIUS issues on Feb. 28 and was “working to have itself and related entities cleared from the Excluded Parties List System,” according to a March 1 tweet. Noosphere’s “indefinite” exclusion was still listed as active as of March 3, making the company ineligible for federal contracts or assistance. “We understand that Max’s plea has caused confusion among some imaging providers because the U.S. government recently required Polyakov to divest his shares in a U.S. rocketry company for national-security reasons, including U.S. concerns that Russia might be able to attain rocketry intellectual property when it invaded Ukraine,” Noosphere Venture Partners President Anisimov Artiom told SpaceNews via email after this story was first published. Artiom did not directly address a question from SpaceNews about whether EOSDA has received any imagery in response to Polyakov’s plea. “Today, Polyakov reiterated his plea for companies to assist Ukraine directly or through EOSDA, noting that the U.S. government does not control EOS’ relationship with the Ukraine government,” Artiom wrote. “He also reiterated that, while Noosphere is working with the U.S. government to be removed from the Excluded Parties list, the listing only affects work performed for the U.S. government. It does not affect commercial, business-to-business transactions that are unrelated to U.S. government work, and it does not affect work performed for non-U.S. governments. So companies are free to work with EOSDA and Noosphere in the way described in Max’s plea.” SpaceNews staff writer Brian Berger contributed to this article from Washington. 
Updated 5:30 p.m. Eastern with NASA comment on contract value. WASHINGTON — NASA ordered three more commercial crew missions to the International Space Station from SpaceX Feb. 28 at a price of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. NASA formally announced a modification of its existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability, or CCtCap, contract with SpaceX. The modification adds three missions to the original six operational, or post-certification, missions to the International Space Station covered by the original contract awarded in 2014. The NASA announcement did not disclose the value of the contract modification, only that the total value of the contract was now $3.49 billion. According to a federal contract database, NASA issued a $776 million modification for the contract Feb. 28 for the three flights. NASA spokesman Josh Finch confirmed that figure March 3, noting the figure “includes ground, launch, in-orbit, return and recovery operations, and cargo transportation for each mission, as well as a lifeboat capability while docked to the International Space Station.” Assuming all three additional flights carry four astronauts each, as have previous post-certification missions, the contact modification works out to a per-seat cost of $64.7 million. While NASA has not published per-seat prices in the past for commercial crew missions, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimated a cost of $55 million per seat for SpaceX’s original CCtCap contract in a November 2019 report . That increase of 17.6% is line with inflation between 2014 and 2022. That price is significantly less than alternatives. NASA paid as much as $86 million for Soyuz seats in past contracts directly with Roscosmos. The same OIG report estimated a per-seat cost on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner of $90 million under that company’s CCtCap contract. Delays in the development of Starliner prompted NASA to award the additional SpaceX commercial crew missions. The fourth of the six original SpaceX post-certification missions, Crew-4, is scheduled to launch April 15, followed by Crew-5 in the fall. Depending on the status of Starliner, Crew-6, the last of the originally contracted missions, could then fly in the spring of 2023. NASA announced Dec. 3 its intent to modify the SpaceX CCtCap contract to procure up to three additional missions . “Due to technical issues and the resulting delays experienced by Boeing, it is expected that SpaceX will launch its last [post-certification mission] in March 2023,” the agency stated in a procurement notice then. Neither NASA nor Boeing have provided a recent update on progress on Starliner. In January, NASA said that Boeing was working toward a May launch of the vehicle on a second uncrewed test flight, OFT-2, a schedule it said depended on the readiness of the vehicle itself as well as launch schedules and activities at the ISS.
Update: OneWeb announced March 3 that its board voted to “suspend all launches from Baikonur.” TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb on March 2 ordered staff to leave Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan amid an impasse over the planned March 4 launch of its latest batch of satellites on a Soyuz rocket, an executive for the U.K.-based company said. Chris McLaughlin, OneWeb’s chief of government, regulatory affairs and engagement, told SpaceNews it decided to leave the Russian-controlled launch site after Roscosmos issued an ultimatum on the mission. With geopolitical tensions rising amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said the planned March 4 launch could only go ahead if OneWeb guarantees the satellites would not be used for military purposes, and the British government divests its stake in the company. “There’s no negotiation on OneWeb: the UK Government is not selling its share,” U.K. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said in response . Roscosmos issued its ultimatum via Twitter March 2 shortly after the Soyuz rocket carrying 36 satellites was rolled out to the pad. In a further sign of fraying relations, Rogozin posted a video on Twitter purportedly showing OneWeb’s livery being removed from the Soyuz rocket. “The launchers at Baikonur decided that without the flags of some countries, our rocket would look more beautiful,” Rogozin tweeted in Russian, according to a translation. France-based Arianespace, which has a contract with OneWeb to launch the constellation and has so far deployed 428 of its 648-strong network on Soyuz rockets over 13 missions since February 2019, declined to comment. Prior to Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, OneWeb expected to deploy the remaining satellites in its planned constellation by the end of August to provide global services. Another potential wrinkle Widening sanctions and worsening relations between Russia and the West also pose manufacturing questions for OneWeb. Although OneWeb builds its satellites in Florida under a joint venture with Airbus, it uses spacecraft thrusters imported from Fakel, a Russian propulsion company. Airbus highlighted Airbus OneWeb Satellites’ cooperation with Fakel for OneWeb’s constellation in a news release ahead of a Moscow airshow last summer. The companies have not disclosed how many satellites still need to be built to complete OneWeb’s constellation, or whether enough thrusters have been stockpiled. Airbus OneWeb Satellites spokeswoman Molly Townsend and Airbus U.S. Space & Defense spokeswoman Morgan Keese directed questions about the thrusters to OneWeb, which declined to comment. It is also unclear whether the OneWeb-derived satellite platforms that San Francisco-based condosat operator Loft Orbital ordered from Airbus in January are designed to use Fakel thrusters. Ten of the more than 15 buses Loft Orbital ordered are intended for customer EarthDaily Analytics of Canada. Loft Orbital co-founder and CEO Pierre-Damien Vaujour did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A steady stream of imagery from commercial spy satellites provides extraordinary intelligence about Russian troop advances in Ukraine and attacks on Ukrainian cities. But as the conflict grinds on, intelligence analysts are still being challenged to figure out Russian intent, experts said March 2. “We’re seeing unprecedented sharing of intelligence,” said Kari Bingen, chief strategy officer of HawkEye 360, a commercial remote sensing satellite operator. “The challenge is getting after the intent,” she said. “We see capabilities but what’s their intent?” Bingen, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, spoke on a panel at an International Institute for Strategic Studies event. The availability of intelligence from commercial sources over the past few weeks has been remarkable and “clearly driven by the urgency of the moment,” Bingen said. It is a positive development that should be sustained going forward, she added. “It’s a competitive advantage we have vis-a-vis Russia and China.” Bingen said the Ukraine crisis has sent a loud demand signal for “sharable information, so let’s institutionalize greater sharing.” She noted that commercial imagery contributes to the overall intelligence picture but analysts don’t always get all the answers they need. Jake Harrington, an intelligence fellow with the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, made that point in a War on the Rocks article. “There are space-based remote sensors. Maxar and Planet conduct the geospatial intelligence mission, delivering near-persistent high resolution satellite imagery that allows analysts to document troop movements and build-ups in detail,” Harrington wrote. “On the ground, sensors are everywhere — often in the form of cellphone cameras — capturing military movements, such as transport west of military equipment from Russia’s far east. On Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, additional human sources — with varying credibility and access — are sharing real-time updates on key indicators, like long queues for gasoline or intensifying shelling in Donetsk,” he added. “What becomes clear in processing all of this data, however, is that insight into capabilities is often plentiful, while insight into intentions can be sparse.” Another issue to consider as more imagery becomes available is that adversaries will figure out a way to counter their effectiveness, said Col. Benjamin Ogden, space operations officer at the U.S. Army War College “It’s a double-edged sword,” he said. The high-quality imagery that is now openly shared makes it difficult for anybody to hide or conduct an ambush. “Will there be operational surprise any more?” Ogden said. “That is impossible now with the all imagery available to anyone that can pay for it.” That has implications for the U.S. military, he said. “Your activity is going to be watched.” One of the implications is that there will be a need for “deception operations,” a military tactic used to intentionally mislead adversaries. The central role being played by commercial satellite operators, meanwhile, means these companies could become targets, experts cautioned. “Russia for example may employ hacking or other cyber warfare against parties that they feel are acting against them,” Paul Hartman, chief engineer at the MITRE Space Warfighting Division, said in a statement to SpaceNews . “Nation states can also play in the release of information through embargoing the export of certain materials to include imagery which may be used by Russia to their advantage,” Hartman noted. Each commercial company has the right to determine who they will provide products to and when, he pointed out. A commercial imaging company can decide to deny service to one entity while providing it to another. “The consequences may involve settling grievances at an international level, but denial of service is a company decision,” said Hartman. 
SAN FRANCISCO – Skycorp Inc., a California company focused on orbital logistics, is preparing to test a key component of future satellite servicing vehicles on the International Space Station. Within days testing will begin of the robotic connector developed by Germany’s iBoss GmbH to transmit power and data like a computer’s USB cable, alongside a Skycorp computer and a radiation sensor built by Space Environmental Technologies and jointly funded by the Defense Department and NASA Science Mission Directorate. If successful, tests of the iBoss Intelligence Space Systems Interface will help pave the way for on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing, Dennis Wingo, Skycorp founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. The technology demonstration payload, called Intelligent Space Systems Interface Flight Qualification Experiment (iSSIFQE), traveled to ISS in February on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft. This week, astronauts assembled iSSIFQE in the Japanese Kibo module. Tomorrow, the payload is scheduled to be mounted on a platform outside the space station’s Japanese Experimental Module. The demonstration is scheduled to last more than six months. Funding and support for the project was provided by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, the ISS National Laboratory, Japanese startup Space BD and NASA. In addition to testing the robotic connector, the iSSIFQE experiment is expected to shed light on the ISS orbital debris environment. Launchspace Technologies, a Florida company focused on orbital debris detection, tracking and removal, plans to measure the impact of orbital debris on a multilayer insulation blanket that will cover iSSIFQE to provide passive thermal protection. After the iSSIFQE experiment concludes, the blanket will be returned to Earth in a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. Once on the ground, Launchspace will examine it in an effort to characterize the ISS orbital debris environment prior to deploying its own ISS experiment in 2023. Data on the orbital debris environment around ISS is increasingly important in light of the recent Russian antisatellite test, Bauman said. Launchspace is raising money and conducting research aimed at sending Debris Impact Pads to capture small debris in equatorial low Earth orbit as it crosses the equator. “We are extremely interested in the impact that orbital debris has on human and robotic spaceflight,” Wingo said in a statement. “We are happy to facilitate the work of Launchspace in this very important area that we believe is far worse than most people realize.”
A spent rocket upper stage from China’s 2014 Chang’e-5 T1 mission thought set to impact the moon did not reenter the atmosphere as previously stated, according to U.S. Space Command. The rocket stage has been identified by astronomers and academics tracking deep space objects as most likely to be the object set to impact the far side of the moon March 4. Official Chinese statements and space tracking data from U.S. Space Command had suggested that the upper stage of a Long March 3C rocket that launched Chang’e-5 T1 had already reentered the atmosphere and could not be the rocket debris calculated to soon hit the moon. However, a U.S. Space Command spokesperson told SpaceNews in an email that it can confirm that the stage did not deorbit and that the 18th Space Control Squadron (18 SPCS) is currently determining the appropriate update to its space catalog. It could not confirm the origin of the object set to impact the moon, however. “While U.S. Space Command can confirm the CHANG’E 5-T1 rocket body never deorbited, we cannot confirm the country of origin of the rocket body that may impact the moon. “With over 43,000 objects we track daily, which has grown by 1,500+ due to the intentional destruction of COSMOS 1408, and the dissemination of approximately 800,000 conjunction warnings daily, we focus on objects closer to the Earth,” the spokesperson noted. “When the rocket body passed geosynchronous orbit, the 18 SPCS deprioritized tracking and are now in the process of reevaluating the information at space-track.org.” It was first thought the rocket debris belonged to a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), but was later determined to best fit activity related to China’s Chang’e-5 T1 launch to test lunar sample-return technologies. Independent spectral analysis by students at the University of Arizona also adds to the evidence that the object’s identity most likely belongs to China’s 2014 Chang’e-5 T1 mission. Asked about the situation during a regular press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Feb. 21 that, “According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the rocket related to the Chang’e-5 mission entered into Earth’s atmosphere and completely burned up.” It was unclear if the reference to Chang’e-5 , a 2020 sample-return mission, was an error, a lack of specificity or a confusion of two, similarly-named missions. The upper stage of the Long March 5 which launched the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission reentered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean a week after launch. Bill Gray, the astronomer who first noted that a rocket stage was due to impact the moon back in January, calculates that the rocket stage will impact the moon at 7:25 a.m. Eastern March 4 in the vicinity of the crater Hertzsprung on the far side of the moon. The issue of deep space debris is expected to become more important in coming years as both the United States and a number of partners and China and Russia are planning respective Artemis and International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) programs to establish a long term presence on the moon. “The upcoming lunar impact illustrates well the need for a comprehensive regulatory regime in space, not only for the economically crucial orbits around Earth but also applying to the Moon,” Holger Krag, Head of ESA’s Space Safety Programme, said in a recent ESA release .
TAMPA, Fla. — This week’s Soyuz launch of a set of OneWeb satellites has been thrown into doubt after Russia made new demands on the company. In tweets Wednesday, just after the Soyuz rocket carrying 36 satellites rolled out to the pad at the Russian-controlled Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said the launch would proceed only if the U.K.-based company met new conditions. These include a guarantee its satellites would not be used for military purposes and that the British government divest its stake in the company — demands OneWeb is unlikely to accede to. The Soyuz-2.1b rocket will be removed from the pad unless OneWeb guarantees by 1:30 p.m Eastern Standard Time March 4 its satellites will not be used for military purposes, the Russian space agency tweeted March 2. “There’s no negotiation on OneWeb: the UK Government is not selling its share,” U.K. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng tweeted just hours later . “We are in touch with other shareholders to discuss next steps…” OneWeb and the British government were already feeling pressure from members of parliament to call off the launch in order not to support Russian ventures. Darren Jones, chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in Parliament, questioned the appropriateness of the upcoming mission in a March 1 letter to other government officials. Jones has previously criticized the British government’s decision to invest $500 million in OneWeb to help save the company from bankruptcy in 2020. Indian conglomerate Bharti Global owns about a third of OneWeb and is its largest shareholder. France-headquartered Arianespace has so far launched 428 of OneWeb’s planned 648-strong constellation, enabling the company to provide connectivity above 50 degrees North. OneWeb had aimed to deploy the rest of the satellites before the end of August to expand its reach into more parts of Europe, Africa, Asia and other regions to provide global services. Arianespace has performed 13 Soyuz missions for OneWeb to date across launch sites in Kazakhstan, Russia and French Guiana, where Arianespace launched OneWeb’s last batch of satellites Feb. 10 . Responding to European sanctions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s space agency said Feb. 26 it is halting cooperation with Europe on Soyuz launches from French Guiana. Neither OneWeb nor Arianespace have commented in recent days on the company’s latest launch.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea, at least for now, is pushing forward with its planned launch of two satellites on Russian rockets this year. Still, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that the missions could be delayed due to sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine. South Korea’s CAS500-2 remote sensing satellite is set to launch in the first half of this year on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. South Korea’s KOMPSAT-6 multipurpose satellite, equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is due to launch in the second half of the year on a Russian Angara rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. “For now, nothing has changed to the plan,” Korea Aerospace Research Institute spokesman Roh Hyung-il told SpaceNews . “We are taking a close look at how the situation unfolds because it could have a significant impact on our missions.” He admitted that it’s “very likely” that the satellites won’t be launched as planned. The KARI spokesman said he “wishes everything would be settled peacefully as soon as possible so that the missions would proceed as originally planned.” But if South Korea is put in a situation where it won’t be able to use Russian vehicles, he added, launching the satellites this year will be “impossible.” If the international sanctions hitting Russia remain in place long-term, the restrictions would deal a “substantial blow” to South Korea’s space programs, Roh said. In collaboration with the private sector, South Korea’s government plans to develop and launch over 100 small satellites by 2031 to establish a national security monitoring system and test next-generation network communications. They include 40 SAR satellites that the defense ministry will develop for national security and 14 communications satellites that the science ministry will build to explore 6G technology. “Some of them will go into space on homemade rockets and some on foreign vehicles,” he said. “If Russia is excluded from options available…it’s a big problem.” Meanwhile, South Korea no longer depends on Russia when it comes to launch vehicle development. Russia played a key role in developing South Kore’s KSLV-1 rocket , which flew three times between August 2009 and January 2013 from Naro Space Center here. The rocket’s first stage was powered by an RD-151 engine developed by Russia’s NPO Energomash. Based on lessons from KSLV-1 development, South Korea set off in 2010 to develop a fully homemade satellite launcher, KSLV-2 , which came to fruition in October last year. While the KSLV-2 reached space, it failed to put its dummy payload into orbit. A second KSLV-2 launch attempt is slated for June 15. 
SAN FRANCISCO – CesiumAstro Inc. raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Airbus Ventures and Forever Ventures. L3Harris Technologies also participated in the round alongside existing CesiumAstro investors: Kleiner Perkins, Lavrock Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blackhorse Fund and Heico Corp., an aerospace and electronics company based in Hollywood, Florida. Austin, Texas-based CesiumAstro has raised nearly $90 million since it was founded in 2017 to develop and manufacture active phased array communications payloads for satellites and airborne platforms. With the latest funding, CesiumAstro plans to expand manufacturing operations, establish offices and accelerate development of satellites built in-house, Shey Sabripour, CesiumAstro founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “ CesiumAstro will accelerate the growth of its core research, development and rapid manufacturing capabilities, and expand its facilities both domestically and abroad,” he added. CesiumAstro is preparing to open offices in Washington, Germany and El Segundo, California. The company already has facilities in Austin and Broomfield, Colorado. El Segundo is “rich with aerospace talent” thanks to the presence of prime contractors, aerospace suppliers and the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, Sabripour said. Another benefit of El Segundo is its proximity to existing and potential customers, he added. CesiumAstro’s German office is designed to establish the company’s European presence. “There’s a new set of commercial customers that are interested in our products for applications such as in-flight connectivity, both for traditional aircraft as well as for new air taxis,” Sabripour said. In addition, CesiumAstro anticipates demand from manufacturers of autonomous vehicles that are likely to be rely on satellite communications to maintain connectivity. While it would be easier to manage the startup with the majority of employees working in the same facility, “it’s a very competitive market,” Sabripour said. “You have to go where the talent is.” Currently, CesiumAstro employs about 80 people. Within the next 12 to 18 months, the company plans to double its staff as it expands its product line. CesiumAstro’s currently offers L-band, S-band, X-band, Ku-band and Ka-band payloads. In the future, the startup plans to offer additional frequencies including V-band and Q-band. At the same time, CesiumAstro is developing its own 150- to 180-kilogram satellite as it strives to become vertically integrated. CesiumAstro attempted to test communications payloads on two cubesats launched in September on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket alongside the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat 9 mission. Unfortunately, both cubesats experienced what Sabripour thinks were power failures that precluded demonstrations the company planned. Sabripour declined to name the cubesat manufacturer. “Airbus Ventures is proud to be co-leading this round, alongside the force-multiplying capabilities of the Forever Ventures team,” Thomas d’Halluin, Airbus Ventures managing partner, said in a statement. Wen Hsieh, Kleiner Perkins partner, said in a statement, “CesiumAstro’s full-stack system is critical to enabling higher connectivity speeds within our evolving aerial and space communications infrastructure. Its high-resiliency improves security, streamlines airline connectivity offerings, and enhances internet access in rural and over-crowded areas.” Christopher E. Kubasik, L3Harris vice chair and CEO, said in a statement that the company’s investment in CesiumAstro was a reflection of its “strategy of partnering across industry to rapidly develop advanced multi-domain solutions that address our customers’ critical needs.”
Romania became the 16th country to sign the NASA-led Artemis Accords for cooperation in space exploration March 1. Marius-Ioan Piso, the longtime head of the Romanian Space Agency, signed the accords in a ceremony in Bucharest attended in person by David Muniz, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Romania, and virtually by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. NASA announced the Artemis Accords in October 2020 with eight countries , including the U.S., as initial signatories. The document outlines principles for cooperation in space exploration, from sharing of data to rights to utilize space resources. Romania and seven other countries, a mix of traditional and emerging space partners, have joined the Accords since then. “Now more than ever, it is important that we work together across international boundaries to strengthen partnerships and ensure the use of outer space for peaceful purposes,” Nelson said in a statement. “Having Romania join the Artemis Accords is an important step toward achieving this goal.” Piso didn’t state what role Romania sought in the Artemis program that led it to sign the Accords. “This spirit of collaboration was a main impetus for us to join the Artemis Moon exploration endeavor,” he said in the statement. “Among the clear benefits that emerge from the participation in this unique program, we see Artemis also as an attractor for the younger generation towards science, discovery, innovation – things that robots still cannot do.” Romania is the fifth member of the European Space Agency to sign the Accords, joining Italy, Poland, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom. France has also expressed an interest in signing the Accords but has yet to do so. The NASA statement said that other countries may sign the Accords in the “months and years ahead,” but did not mention any specific candidates. “With numerous countries and private sector players conducting missions and operations in cislunar space, it’s critical to establish a common set of principles to govern the civil exploration and use of outer space,” said Valda Vikmanis-Keller, director of the Office of Space Affairs at the State Department, during a Feb. 23 panel discussion by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “We are looking to expand the number of countries committing to the Artemis Accords.”
Members of Congress, concerned about growing costs and slipping schedules, pressed NASA for more details about the management and overall strategy of the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration plan. At a March 1 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, members of both parties said they were impatiently waiting for long-promised plans from NASA on how Artemis will be managed while ensuring it supports eventual human missions to Mars. “By all accounts, Artemis is facing significant challenges. The advisory boards, reviews and audits are sounding warnings,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), chair of the subcommittee. “Schedule delays and cost growth years in the making, a confusion mishmash of contract types and untried approaches to organizations and management are just a few of the concerns that have been raised.” Members heard about those concerns from three organizations that have raised them. Witnesses from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) and NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) all recapped issues they previously discussed on topics such as how Artemis is managed to how much it will cost. NASA Inspector General Paul Martin, for example, summarized findings from a report his office published in November on delays and cost accounting , including an estimate that each of the first four Artemis missions will cost $4.1 billion in production costs alone for the Space Launch System, Orion and ground systems. That, he said, is “a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.” Both OIG and GAO have warned about schedule delays that make it doubtful that NASA can return humans to the lunar surface in 2025 on the Artemis 3 mission as currently projected by the agency. “The Artemis 3 schedule remains challenging,” said William Russell, director of contracting and national security acquisitions at the GAO, citing in part a seven-month delay in starting work on NASA’s Human Landing System award to SpaceX because of legal challenges. “It increases schedule risks as the program already planned to develop and launch the system months faster than other spaceflight programs and will need to mature critical technologies along the way.” Patricia Sanders, chair of ASAP, reiterated concerns by her panel about how NASA is managing Artemis. “NASA should manage Artemis as an integrated program with top-down alignment, and designate a program manager endowed with authority, responsibility and accountability, along with a robust bottoms-up collaborative feedback process,” she said. Members like Beyer said they were surprised that Artemis was not formally considered a program but instead a “campaign” of missions using a collection of programs. NASA has resisted creating an overarching Artemis program along the lines recommended by ASAP. Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said he is establishing an “Artemis campaign development division” that would provide centralized oversight of Artemis missions. “It will run all of our Artemis missions. There will be a mission manager for every single mission,” he said. “They will understand the requirements of the mission, the goals of the mission, and will be responsible for tracking the hardware through its development and bringing it together.” Free’s exploration systems development mission directorate, still being formally established from last year’s split of the former human exploration and operations mission directorate, has made some management changes. NASA announced Feb. 28 that Catherine Koerner, previously Orion program manager, will be deputy associate administrator. Free announced just as the hearing started that Mark Kirasich, who had led the directorate’s advanced exploration systems division, will now be deputy associate administrator for the new Artemis campaign development division. Other members pressed for details about the overall plan for the Artemis effort. “NASA needs to provide us with an updated plan, a precise timeline and a realistic budget,” said Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member of the full committee. “Simply put: tell us how long it will take, how we will do it and how much it costs. The Artemis program must be NASA’s highest priority.” Free, asked by Lucas about the status of those plans, said it would be a priority of the new Artemis campaign development division. “We have a longer-term architecture we’re trying to put the final details on by the end of this year,” he said, along with work on new budget proposals. He emphasized that development of those plans is driven by what’s needed to support later human missions to Mars. “Our ultimate goal is putting people on Mars,” he said. “It’s getting two people to Mars, on the surface for 30 days, getting them there and back safely. Everything we do should be driven by that on the moon.” He said later that includes testing technologies in the moon’s partial gravity, from spacesuits and habitats to power systems. “When we talk about adding elements to our lunar architecture, it’s always about how does that play forward into what it can do on Mars.” Beyer, though, wondered if some of the recommendations of the witnesses went too far, such as a recommendation by OIG of a full life-cycle cost estimate for Artemis. “Is there any sense that would terrify the American public and shut down the public like this?” he asked, by putting a single large price tag on the program. “The politics of it I will leave to you and the members of the committee,” responded Martin. “We just think, operationally and strategically, it’s in NASA’s best long-term interest to have an idea, when they’re presenting whatever, be it Artemis or be it the James Webb Space Telescope, to have a detailed and accurate life-cycle cost estimate so you know what the American taxpayer is buying.” Lucas asked the witnesses their estimate of when NASA will land astronauts on the moon. Free stuck to NASA’s current schedule of 2025. “That’s based on how I see the hardware coming together for the suit and the landers, and Orion and SLS,” he said. The other witnesses were more pessimistic. “Based on our current work, we say no earlier than 2026,” Martin said, based on work on the spacesuits and lander. “It could be later.” “Even 2025 may be optimistic,” said the GAO’s Russell. “2025 is not impossible but it seems improbable given the current situation.” “We don’t think it’s impossible, but it’s s stretch goal,” ASAP’s Sanders said of a 2025 landing. “It’s sometimes good to have stretch goals in terms of your schedule but you need to be realistic as well.” “From our perspective, the 2025 date is certainly on the optimistic stretch-goal side,” said Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former NASA official. “The 2025 to 2027 time frame is probably realistic with the right focus and the right resources.”
An Atlas 5 successfully launched the latest in a series of geostationary weather satellites March 1, exactly four years after the launch of the satellite it is replacing. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on schedule at 4:38 p.m. Eastern. The Centaur upper stage deployed its payload, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) T, more than three and a half hours later into a geostationary transfer orbit. The Centaur performed three burns to place the spacecraft in a transfer orbit with a higher perigee, in this case nearly 8,900 kilometers, than a typical geostationary transfer orbit. That is intended to shorten the time and reduce the propellant needed to reach geostationary orbit. “We do that final third burn to just get them right where they want to be,” Scott Messer, program manager for NASA launch services at ULA, said at a Feb. 26 briefing. The spacecraft, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will rename GOES-18, will initially be checked out at 89.5 degrees west in GEO. The spacecraft will then drift to 136.8 degrees west, the GOES-West slot, by August for final testing. It will take over as the operational GOES-West satellite in early January of 2023, said Candace Carlisle, flight project manager for the GOES-R series of satellites at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a Feb. 25 briefing. GOES-18 will take over for GOES-17, which launched as GOES-S on an Atlas 5 exactly four years ago. A problem with the performance of its main weather instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), led NOAA to replace it with GOES-18 . Once GOES-18 takes over as GOES-West, GOES-17 will move into on-orbit storage at 105 degrees west, ready to take over for either the GOES-16 satellite in the GOES-East slot or GOES-18 encounters problems. GOES-T is the third of four satellites in the GOES-R series of geostationary weather satellites built by Lockheed Martin. The fourth, GOES-U, is scheduled to launch in 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The satellites carry a suite of instruments like ABI that have improved both terrestrial weather forecasting and space weather monitoring. “GOES-T will help improve NOAA’s numerical weather prediction models used by National Weather Service forecasters,” said Jim Yoe, chief administrator of the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, at the Feb. 25 briefing. The GOES-West satellite is particularly important, he noted, because most weather systems travel from west to east. “Besides our work on spacecraft development and launch, NASA-supported science teams are looking forward to analyzing the precious data that GOES-T will provide,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said in a statement after the launch. “These observations are a key part of our research towards improving understanding and models of climate, weather and space weather — models that, in turn, support NOAA’s crucial work as they lead the weather and space weather forecasts for the nation.” The launch was the first of the year managed by NASA’s Launch Services Program, which handles launches of NASA science and related missions. At a Feb. 26 briefing, launch director Tim Dunn said the program had three other major missions to launch this year. A Falcon Heavy will launch the Psyche asteroid mission in August from the Kennedy Space Center, followed by the September launch of the Joint Polar Satellite System 2 spacecraft with NOAA from Vandenberg Space Force Base and then the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg in November. In addition, he said the program is overseeing the launch of the CAPSTONE cubesat mission to the lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit, scheduled for late spring on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. It is also responsible for the launches of six Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats (TROPICS) cubesats on three Rocket 3.3 vehicles from Astra Space. Those launches, from Cape Canaveral, are currently scheduled for late spring through early summer, pending the outcome of the investigation into Astra’s Feb. 10 launch failure.
The U.S. Space Force selected General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems and Orion Space Solutions to each develop and launch demonstration satellites for weather imaging and cloud characterization. The Space Systems Command announced the selection in a news release Feb. 28 but did not disclose the value of the contracts. The two companies were chosen following a three-way competition with Raytheon Technologies for the Electro-Optical/Infrared Weather System (EWS) program. Orion Space (previously known as Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates), based in Louisville, Colorado, will launch a cubesat in late 2022 for a one-year demonstration. The company did not provide details of its cubesat design or industry partners in the program. General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), based in San Diego, California, will develop a 400-kilogram satellite projected to launch in 2024 0r 2025 for a three-year demonstration. General Atomics’ satellite is intended to fill a gap in weather coverage as the military’s decades-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites are running out of fuel and projected to be out of service between 2023 and 2026. Both demonstration satellites will be launched into a low polar orbit to collect weather imaging and cloud characterization data. “This is a major step forward for the EWS Program,” said Lt. Col. Joseph L. Maguadog, EWS materiel leader and program manager. “This EO/IR imaging capability will succeed the aging DMSP at a lower cost to the government,” he said. The EWS satellites will be used by the U.S. and NATO allies to provide weather data that is critical to military operators such as flight routes, combat search and rescue, maritime surface tracking efforts, enemy missile observation and intelligence collection. Gregg Burgess, vice president of space systems at GA-EMS, told SpaceNews the company expects the demonstration will lead to additional orders. For the EWS program the company proposed a 12-satellite constellation that would provide a high refresh rate. GA-EMS since 2020 has received nearly $200 million in Space Force funding for the EWS satellite development and for the three-year demonstration. The company teamed with EO Vista , an electro-optical infrared sensor provider. The EWS program demands a high-resolution EO/IR sensor, Burgess said. “If you want a clear view of the ground, you need to know where the clouds are.” “Our sensor looks at the clouds in 16 different spectral bands ranging from visible to various wavelengths and infrared,” he said. The EWS demonstration contract also requires a ground system to operate the satellites and distribute the data. GA-EMS selected Parsons to develop the ground system. “Our contract is to deliver the complete end to end system for this first prototype demonstration,” he said. Burgess said the EWS award is a significant win for GA-EMS as the company tries to gain a foothold in the DoD satellite market. “I can’t minimize the importance to General Atomics of winning this program,” he said. “It has the potential for being what we call a franchise program. When you win a Department of Defense satellite project, it can go on for decades.” The Space Force has yet to decide a long-term procurement plan for the EWS program. Conceivably the Space Force would start buying satellites in 2023 and the constellation would require a “constant stream of replenishing” as satellites age out, he said. “Over time it could be a program that’s worth well over a billion dollars over the next 20 years.” Meanwhile, the Space Force is exploring the possibility of buying weather data as a service as an alternative to buying and operating satellites. Burgess said General Atomics is interested in pursuing that opportunity as well and responded to a recent request for information for industry ideas on how companies could provide weather data as a service. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Lockheed Martin is looking to set up a satellite manufacturing base in the United Kingdom to expand its global space business, the U.S.-based aerospace and defense giant said March 1. The facility could potentially focus on building entire satellites, their parts or ground networks for government and commercial customers, according to Nik Smith, Lockheed Martin’s U.K. and Europe regional director for space. Smith said the plans are still in the “fact-finding and feasibility” stage but also involve creating a research and development center in the U.K., and using the country to access more export markets. He described the move as the “next stage” for Lockheed Martin’s space ambitions in the U.K., where the company is currently helping the British government develop a domestic launch capability . He said Lockheed Martin is seeking to “build a viable and sustainable space business in the U.K., and that means actually having some kind of operating presence here in the U.K. [that generates] its own technology and own [intellectual property], and creates the jobs that come with it.” In a March 1 news release that announced plans to establish a space-focused facility in the northeast of England, Lockheed Martin outlined intentions to create up to 2,300 jobs for a facility it said would represent an investment of more than £50 million ($67 million). It would be Lockheed Martin’s largest space-focused expansion outside the United States, according to Smith, who said the company currently employs about 1,800 people in the U.K. across various aerospace and defense activities. Some of the new jobs outlined in the news release would be created outside Lockheed Martin, Smith added, and in an expanding supply chain that the company aims to foster. “[W]e would expect a lot of that growth to actually be realized in some of our strategic [and] delivery partners,” he said. The expansion plans come a month after the U.K. released a military space strategy Feb. 1, with an aim to invest nearly $2 billion in low Earth orbit satellites and other technologies over the next decade. In September, the British government published a space strategy that also outlined ambitions to turn the country into a major global space power . According to Lockheed Martin, its U.K. outpost could help the British government grow its space industry by providing satellites for a range of strategic applications, from monitoring weather to delivering GPS services and military connectivity. “With the aspirations that the government have laid out in both their national space strategy and their defense space strategy, we recognize that if we’re going to participate in the programs laid out in there then we need to be able to deliver against things like social value, and some of the other key economic policies here as well,” Smith said. He declined to discuss specific programs, including whether Lockheed Martin seeks a role in helping the British government equip OneWeb’s LEO broadband satellites with a global navigation satellite system . The British government partly owns OneWeb. Its satellites are currently built by a Florida-based joint venture the operator shares with Europe’s Airbus, the largest space company in the U.K. Airbus employs about 2,500 people across its aerospace and defense activities in the U.K., and says it supports more than 110,000 jobs in the country. The European aerospace and defense group also wholly owns U.K.-based small satellite specialist SSTL, which was established in 1985. However, Smith believes there is plenty of room for multiple satellite manufacturers as the U.K. seeks to expand its space industry. “I think what we would look to do is bring something in that complements the existing footprint and industrial base that’s here, with a view that through that diversity and supply chain, you can then start thinking about how we potentially do something different from a technology perspective — but also go and access new markets,” he said. He added: “This wouldn’t be about taking work off each other. It’d be about how do we actually, collectively, try and grow the sector overall.” Smith said Lockheed Martin will first seek to establish a small-scale operating facility before ramping up operations, adding that “our assessment says we would need to have something I think operating here by next year.” Lockheed Martin employs 114,000 people worldwide. Its space business generated $1.13 billion in sales in 2021. On Feb. 28, the U.S. Defense Department’s Space Development Agency awarded the company a $700 million contract to build 42 satellites by 2024 for a global communications network in low Earth orbit. Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems are also building 42 satellites each under a contract that is worth nearly $1.8 billion in total.
Lockheed Martin announced March 1 it has selected Raytheon Technologies to supply a second payload for the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next Gen OPIR) geosynchronous satellites. Lockheed Martin is producing three geosynchronous Next Gen OPIR satellites for the U.S. Space Force. The company in 2020 selected Raytheon and a Northrop Grumman/Ball Aerospace team to design competing sensor payloads for Next-Gen OPIR satellites. Both are on contract to each provide one payload, but only Raytheon was selected to make a second payload to complete the three-satellite constellation. The payload designs from both competitors completed critical design reviews in 2021 and are on track to fly on the first two Next Gen OPIR satellites, Lockheed Martin said. It has yet to be determined which payload will be aboard the first satellite scheduled to launch in 2025. “These advanced OPIR payloads will support the critical mission by leveraging technologies with new capabilities on an aggressive schedule,” said Lockheed Martin’s program vice president Joseph Rickers. Lockheed Martin in August 2018 received a $2.9 billion contract for development and in January 2021 a $4.9 billion contract for the production of three geosynchronous Next Gen OPIR satellites that provide initial warning of a ballistic or tactical missile launch anywhere on the globe. The Space Force said the Next-Gen OPIR satellites will augment the coverage provided by existing Space Based Infrared System satellites, which also were made by Lockheed Martin. The Space Force is acquiring five Next-Gen OPIR satellites — the three geosynchronous orbit satellites made by Lockheed Martin and two polar orbit satellites made by Northrop Grumman. Northrop, Ball to make payloads for polar satellites Northrop Grumman also announced on March 1 that both Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites will carry payloads made by the Northrop-Ball Aerospace team. “Our team’s solution for NGP will assure continuous coverage of the northern hemisphere – especially the critical Arctic region – to protect against incoming threats,” said Sarah Willoughby, vice president of overhead persistent infrared and geospatial systems at Northrop Grumman. In May 2020, the U.S. Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $2.37 billion contract for the development of two polar satellites. Randy Weidenheimer, acting deputy program manager for Next Gen OPIR polar at Northrop Grumman, told SpaceNews that the company expects to receive a production contract in mid-2025. The two satellites will operate in highly elliptical orbits, using infrared sensors to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles. They will have an enhanced communication system to transmit data to the ground to help identify infrared heat signatures of incoming threats.
Manufacturing components with 3D printing is one way Boeing is shortening the production cycle of the U.S. military’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) communications satellite, the company said March 1 in a news release. Boeing is building WGS-11+ , the 11th satellite of the WGS constellation, at its factory in El Segundo, California. The Space Force awarded the company a $605 million contract in October 2019. Boeing in 2020 announced the delivery is scheduled for 2024. Making a WGS satellite in five years is a shorter timeline compared to the typical seven-to-10-year production schedule for large and complex military spacecraft. “We’re printing more than a thousand parts for WGS-11+, giving us the capability to introduce customization in a way that improves system performance, without requiring extensive integration times or customized tooling,” said Troy Dawson, Boeing Government Satellite Systems vice president. Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, has not yet replaced traditional satellite manufacturing methods but it’s gaining ground. Boeing for years has 3D printed components for small satellites — such as those made by its subsidiary Millennium Space — but is now applying this technology to big-ticket satellites like WGS. Large geostationary satellites have anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of parts, so printing a thousand parts is a small percentage. However, that is still a 10-fold increase in the amount of metal 3D-printed parts compared to the most recent spacecraft Boeing designed before WGS-11, according to the company. The parts that are being 3D printed for WGS include structures and mechanisms, thermal control subsystems, dynamic isolation systems and passive microwave devices. Materials used include aluminum alloy, titanium alloy and high-performance polymer. Boeing said it is also qualifying other materials. WGS-11+ uses Boeing’s commercial 702X digital satellite payload that generates hundreds of electronically-steered beams simultaneously. According to the company, this provides users with more than twice the throughput capacity compared to existing satellites in the WGS fleet. The WGS constellation provides broadband communications to the United States military and several international partners that include Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Norway. The U.S. also has a separate bilateral agreement with Australia. Two new partner nations are in discussions to join the coalition but their identities have not yet been disclosed.
Roscosmos is looking to China as a supplier of vital space industry components and a partner in missions following the invasion of Ukraine, but sanctions could still heavily impact any new plans. Russian space agency head Dmitry Rogozin told Russian media Feb. 26 that sanctions imposed by Western countries would hit supplies of microelectronics necessary for spacecraft. “With all our efforts to promote the Russian national microelectronic industry… it is impossible to produce everything,” Rogozin said, adding that, “We have excellent relations with China … and we will solve these problems.” Russia is understood to have turned to Chinese state-owned aerospace companies for alternatives following sanctions imposed in 2014 in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea. But the invasion of Ukraine is having far greater repercussions. Reuters reported Feb. 27 that China so far does not seem to be helping Russia avoid sanctions. Chinese banks and other entities could face sanctions themselves and loss of access to the U.S. financial system by doing business with Russia, the report states. China has been seen as trying to balance its response to the Ukrainian conflict. Beijing is urging restraint and has declined to describe Russia’s actions as an invasion, but appears to be careful to avoid being caught in the repercussions faced by Russia. “China and Russia are comprehensive strategic partners of coordination. Our relationship features non-alliance, non-confrontation and non-targeting of any third party. China’s position on the Ukraine issue is consistent. We always decide on our position and policy based on the merits of the matter itself,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a regular press conference Feb. 28 , underlining that Moscow and Beijing were not allies. “I think China increasingly finds itself in between a rock and a hard place,” says Matti Nojonen, a professor of Chinese culture and economy at the University of Lapland, noting that while Beijing has moved toward a closer relationship with Moscow, nearly the whole world community is turning against Russia. “I think they [China] are very carefully monitoring now what they’re doing and what kind of reactions this has created. I think it must have surprised China how this united all the Western powers … and now it turns out that even countries like Kazakhstan are turning and criticizing what Putin did.” Nojonen told SpaceNews . The U.S. State Department in January also imposed sanctions on subsidiaries of China’s main space contractors, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) under the Arms Export Control Act and the Export Administration Act. Roscosmos says it is also looking for new partnerships following the breakdown in relations. Rogozin told the TASS news agency that he had instructed a team to initiate negotiations with Beijing on the coordination and mutual technical support of deep space missions. Sino-Russian cooperation has grown in recent years, including agreements for cooperation on the Chinese Chang’e-6 and Chang’e-7 and Russian Luna 27 missions, a joint data center for lunar and deep space exploration and a proposed joint International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Question marks over the respective roles in the lunar base plan emerge however with an expected heavy impact of sanctions on Russian space activities. The ILRS roadmap envisions a series of launches in the early 2030s by new super heavy-lift launch vehicles to be developed separately by both Russia and China. The ILRS aims to establish a robotic research base, likely targeting the lunar south pole, according to a roadmpap released in June 2021. Other missions could now see Chinese collaboration in place of American involvement. Rogozin said the Venera-D mission to Venus could no longer feature U.S. involvement. While discussions between American and Russian scientists on a potential role for NASA on mission, the project had experienced extensive delays. While International Space Station operations remain normal , cooperation with Russia elsewhere has come to a swift end. Roscosmos said in a pair of tweets Feb. 26, citing a statement by Rogozin, that the agency is suspending cooperation with European partners in organizing space launches from French Guiana. The European Space Agency said Feb. 28 that it is “very unlikely” that its ExoMars mission will launch this September because of sanctions on Russia and the wider context of its invasion of Ukraine. India meanwhile has so far refrained from criticizing Russia. In December the pair agreed to strengthen cooperation in the space sector, including human spaceflight programs and satellite navigation, as part of a wider set of agreements.
NASA said that operations of the International Space Station remain normal despite the growing rift between Russia and the West in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At a Feb. 28 briefing to discuss the upcoming Axiom Space Ax-1 commercial mission to the ISS, Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said ISS operations were unchanged despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine that prompted sanctions and related measures by the United States, Europe and others. “Right now, operations are nominal. Obviously, we’re continuing to monitor the situation, but our control centers are operating nominally together. We’ve gotten the support we’ve needed,” she said. After the first set of post-invasion sanctions Feb. 24, NASA said that the restrictions did not apply to civil space cooperation with Russia on the ISS. “No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in orbit and ground station operations,” the agency said. Russian officials have avoided the ISS in its response to those sanctions, instead suspending launches of Soyuz rockets from French Guiana. She reiterated that later in the call. “We are not getting any indication, at a working level, that our counterparts are not committed to ongoing operation of the International Space Station,” she said. “We, as a team, are operating just as we were operating three weeks ago.” That included plans to have NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei return on a Soyuz in late March. He launched to the station nearly a year ago and is scheduled to return on the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft currently docked to the station, along with two Russian cosmonauts, March 30. Lueders said there were no plans to have Vande Hei come home on the Ax-1 mission, which would require Axiom to bump one of its customers on the four-person Crew Dragon spacecraft to free up a seat for the astronaut. “That said, we always look for how to get more operational flexibility” for the station, she added. “Our cargo providers are looking at how to add different capabilities,” such as a test of reboosting the station by a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft that arrived at the station Feb. 21. “Currently, there is no plan — it would be very difficult — for us to be operating on our own,” she said. “The ISS is an international partnership, which is what makes it such an amazing program.” The geopolitical situation is also not affecting the Ax-1 mission itself, which will send four people to the station on a Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled to launch March 30. The spacecraft will dock with the station March 31 and its four-person crew will remain there until April 9. The mission will be commanded by Axiom Space employee and former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría with three customers: Larry Connor, Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe. Preparations of the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour, which previously flew the Demo-2 and Crew-2 commercial crew missions, are on schedule for Ax-1, said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX. A new Crew Dragon is being readied in parallel for NASA’s Crew-4 mission, scheduled to launch in mid-April. Reed said there should be no problem carrying out the back-to-back missions. “There is margin in both of those schedules,” he said, allowing Ax-1 to be delayed up to a few days while keeping Crew-4 on schedule. The Ax-1 crew is in final preparations as well, said López-Alegría, with some final refresher training at both the Johnson Space Center and SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters. The crew will enter prelaunch quarantine in about a week and a half. “We are ready to fly,” he said. He added he was impressed with his crew and their commitment to the mission. All three are planning to conduct research and outreach projects while on the station. “They’re busy people and they’ve taken a lot of time out of their lives to focus on this,” he said. “I think there’s an important role for space tourism but it’s not what Axiom is about.” Mike Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, also downplayed the space tourism angle. “The crew’s not just going to place their nose on the window. They really are going up there to do meaningful research and make a difference, each in their own way.”
Rocket Lab carried out its first Electron launch of the year Feb. 28, placing a Japanese radar imaging satellite into orbit at the same time the company released its financial results and selected Virginia for a rocket factory. The Electron rocket lifted off at 3:37 p.m. Eastern from Pad B at the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The rocket deployed its payload, the StriX β satellite for Japanese company Synspective, nearly an hour later. The satellite, placed into a 561-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, is the second in a series of up to 30 satellites proposed by Synspective to collect synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Rocket Lab launched the company’s first satellite, StriX α, in December 2020, and this launch was the first in a three-launch contract signed in late 2021. “With the successful insertion of our second SAR satellite, we will be able to improve our technology for operating multiple satellites and strengthen our data services,” Motoyuki Arai, chief executive of Synspective, said in a statement. The launch was the first to use Pad B, a second pad Rocket Lab built at its New Zealand launch site. Having two pads, the company says, provides schedule flexibility as well as the ability to conduct consecutive launches quickly. “With Pad B we’ve kept things efficient. Its systems and layout replicates Pad A and shares much of Pad A’s infrastructure,” said Shaun d’Mello, vice president of launch at Rocket Lab, in a statement about the new pad. That shared infrastructure includes a vehicle hangar and range control center. “With that we’ve been able to double our operational capacity, all on a concrete area smaller than the average tennis court.” Financial results While the launch was in progress, the company released its financial results for 2021. The company reported $62.2 million in revenue in 2021, an increase of 77% over 2020. The company, though, reported a net loss of $117.8 million, compared to a net loss of $55 million in 2020. Executives emphasized a growing backlog of business that includes not just launch orders but also satellites and satellite components. That backlog grew from $82 million at the end of 2020 to $241 million at the end of 2021 and $545 million as of the earnings announcement. “We’re very encouraged by the backlog growth,” said Adam Spice, chief financial officer of Rocket Lab, during a conference call with analysts. “People can talk about pipeline all day long, but it’s really all about backlog.” Spice and Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s chief executive, cited as one example the Feb. 24 contract to provide satellite buses to MDA for a new generation of Globalstar communications satellites , a deal valued at $143 million. “This contract reflects a deliberate and well-resourced strategy to grow Rocket Lab’s space systems business and deepen our value proposition beyond launch and into complete end-to-end space mission solutions,” Beck said. Much of that growth in both revenue and backlog is driven by the company’s acquisition of three companies in the last quarter of 2021: software developer ASI, satellite separation systems developer Planetary Systems Corporation and solar panel and structures manufacturer SolAero. In the earnings call, Spice declined to say how much of the company’s projected revenue of $42–47 million in the first quarter of 2022 came from those acquisitions versus existing lines of business. “They’re become a very diverse and intertwined set of businesses,” he said. The company did project $14 million in revenue from launch services from two Electron launches this quarter, one of which was the mission for Synspective. Rocket Lab is considering additional acquisitions. “We continue to see interesting and compelling assets out there,” Spice said, adding that would not be at a slower pace than the three deals in the fourth quarter of last year. “I still expect to find opportunities that we can execute on.” Neutron factory The company announced in parallel with its earnings its decision to build a factory for producing its medium-class Neutron reusable launch vehicle in Accomack County, Virginia, next to the Wallops Flight Facility, which will host Neutron launches at the state-run Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS). “The Commonwealth of Virginia came forward with a very attractive offer that we couldn’t turn down,” Beck said on the call. “Neutron is officially basing itself at Wallops Island, Virginia.” That offer included $30 million in state funding, provided through the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, or Virginia Space, for infrastructure and operational systems at the spaceport and up to $15 million from the state’s Major Employment and Investment Project Approval Commission for site improvements and construction of a building that will be owned by the state and leased to Rocket Lab. Wallops had been the front-runner to host both Neutron launches and the vehicle factory since the company announced the vehicle a year ago. Rocket Lab said it wanted to locate the factory as close as possible to the launch site to minimize transportation. “We were able to leverage our existing world-class assets and the significant investment the Commonwealth has made at MARS to enhance our capability, which was instrumental in convincing Rocket Lab to expand their operations and bring a new mission to Virginia,” Ted Mercer, chief executive and executive director of Virginia Space, said in a statement about the deal. Rocket Lab previously built a pad for Electron launches, called Launch Complex 2, at MARS. The first Electron launch from there has been delayed by issues with NASA-supplied autonomous flight termination software, and Beck said in the earnings call that the company was now reviewing a version of that software the agency supplied earlier this year. “It’s giving us much more confidence to be able to schedule something to launch out of LC-2,” he said, but didn’t estimate when the launch would take place. With the Neutron deal completed, he said construction of the factory will soon start. “We’ll be digging holes in the ground very, very shortly,” he said. The first Neutron launch is scheduled for 2024. Beck, in response to an analyst’s question about speeding up its development to serve as a replacement for the Soyuz rocket should sanctions take it off the commercial market, said that was unlikely. “We’re working on Neutron as quickly as we can, so I’m not sure we can accelerate that much more than it already is,” he said.
This article was updated March 1 at 8 p.m. Eastern time. SAN FRANCISCO — EOS Data Analytics asked Earth observation companies worldwide to share up-to-date optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery of Ukraine and neighboring countries to assist Ukrainian military and humanitarian efforts. U.S. imagery providers, though, could be prevented from working directly with EOS Data Analytics owner Noosphere Venture Partners, which was added in December to the U.S. government list of individuals and organizations not permitted to receive federal contracts or assistance. The notice published on the SAM.gov website cited the U.S. Air Force as the excluding agency but gave no explanation for the entry. SpaceNews confirmed Noosphere Venture Partners’ inclusion on the Excluded Parties List System after Tim Fernholz of Quartz tweeted a statement attributed to SAR-provider Capella saying it could not help EOS Data Analytics since “certain parties” associated with the request are on the list. EOS Data Analytics of Menlo Park, California, is a portfolio company of Noosphere Venture Partners, an investment firm based in the United States with offices throughout Ukraine. Both companies were founded by Ukrainian-born entrepreneur Max Polyakov, who is in the process of selling its stake in Firefly Aerospace, another Noosphere Venture company, to AE Industrial Partners. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States asked Polyakov to divest his stake in the launch vehicle developer. EOS Data Analytics announced Feb. 28 that it had updated its EOS Data Analytics platform to process, analyze and share remote sensing data with Ukraine’s armed forces and humanitarian organizations. “The economic, political, and humanitarian consequences of the war in Ukraine already are too high to stand on the sidelines,” Polyakov said in a statement. “If you can help us, please provide the SAR data that actually makes a difference, not the archived or otherwise outdated optical images that are good for PR purposes and as evidence of war crimes for future international criminal court proceedings.” EOS Data Analytics is particularly interested in gaining speedy access to SAR imagery because optical observations of the region often are obstructed by clouds. EOS Data Analytics “needs current/live SAR data to be able to provide awareness and relevant intelligence regarding enemy troops and equipment activities (especially refueling operations) during the night and irrespective of cloud coverage, which is impossible with optical data,” according to the news release. “In the best-case scenario, optical data is only useful for 2-3 hours during the day, while most enemy attacks and activities are conducted under the cover of the night.” The company also is interested in obtaining medium- or high-resolution electro-optical imagery that is delivered quickly to show activities on the ground, including the location of armored vehicles. EOS Data Analytics “understands that some data providers may face certain restrictions when engaging with a private company in Ukraine,” according to the news release. If companies prefer to deliver data directly to a government agency, EOS Data Analytics is offering to put people in contact with government officials, including Mykhailo Fedorov , Ukraine minister of digital transformation (the same official who issued a Feb. 26 call for SpaceX to send Starlink broadband terminals to the country). “We badly need the opportunity to watch the movement of Russian troops, especially at night when our technologies are blind in fact!” Fedorov wrote in a letter addressed to senior representatives of Planet, Maxar Technologies, Airbus, SI Imaging Services, BlackSky, Iceye, SpaceView and Capella.“Please treat Max Polyakov and EOS Data Analytics as our representatives for this cooperation.” After issuing a plea for companies to share imagery, Polyakov took aim at firms in the United States, Europe and South Korea that he said were taking advantage of the Russian invasion to recruit Ukrainian aerospace engineers. “All job offers to aerospace engineers in order to relocate will be considered as aggressive acts against Ukraine to steal our intellectual capital,” Polyakov said in a Feb. 28 LinkedIn post. While it’s OK for companies with research and development centers in Ukraine to offer to relocate workers, firms that did not have a presence in Ukraine and are using the “situation where my country is suffering in order to improve your companies” are “BAD,” Polyakov wrote. “Ukraine going to win and we need our talent, give respect please,” hewrote.
DEVELOPING: In tweets March 2, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said Friday’s launch of 36 OneWeb satellites would proceed only if the company guaranteed its satellites would not be used for military purposes and that the British government divest its stake in the company, demands the company is unlikely to accede to. 
TAMPA, Fla. — Mounting international sanctions amid Russia’s war on Ukraine have thrown plans to launch 36 OneWeb satellites this week into uncertainty. The latest batch of satellites for OneWeb’s broadband constellation is currently at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Russian-controlled launch site in Kazakhstan, where Europe’s Arianespace plans to launch them as soon as March 4 on a Russian Soyuz rocket. Arianespace, which has been using Soyuz to deploy the low Earth orbit constellation from Kazakhstan, Russia and French Guiana, did not respond to requests from SpaceNews for an update on the launch plan. Chris McLaughlin, OneWeb’s chief of government, regulatory affairs and engagement, told SpaceNews that “so far it looks like we’re on – but who knows?” “I wouldn’t like to speculate on the launch,” McLaughlin said, adding that it “ predates any sanctions.” In response to European sanctions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s space agency said Feb. 26 it is halting cooperation with Europe on Soyuz launches from French Guiana, where Arianespace launched OneWeb’s last batch of satellites Feb. 10 . However, McLaughlin said OneWeb had already planned to launch the second half of its constellation on Soyuz rockets from Kazakhstan this year. OneWeb’s remaining launches have also already been paid for, according to McLaughlin, meaning there are no payments that could be blocked by sanctions or efforts to limit Russia’s access to international financial services. Meanwhile, Russia ’ s space agency Roscosmos appears committed to moving ahead with OneWeb ’ s upcoming launch. The Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket has been cleared “ for rollout and installation at the launch pad on March 2, ” Roscosmos tweeted March 1. But even if Baikonur remains open, it is unclear whether export restrictions could affect the transport of OneWeb satellites from where they are made in Florida to the launchpad in Kazakhstan. Another potential wrinkle, unrelated to sanctions: OneWeb has traditionally used An-124 aircraft that are operated and maintained by Ukraine’s Antonov to ship its spacecraft overseas. Availability issues aside, airspace restrictions over Europe could complicate otherwise routine logistics. McLaughlin said OneWeb is “reviewing daily” its remaining launches as the geopolitical situation continues to evolve. Arianespace has launched 428 of OneWeb’s planned 648-strong constellation in 13 missions to date: Two from French Guiana, five from Kazakhstan and six from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia. In 2020, Arianespace and OneWeb detailed an agreement that covered a total 19 Soyuz launches for the constellation. OneWeb had aimed to have deployed the full constellation before the end of August to provide global connectivity services, according to McLaughlin. Russia’s decision to withdraw 87 employees of several Russian companies that support Soyuz launches in French Guiana will, at a minimum, delay a plan to launch two satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation system that was slated for April. This article was updated March 1 to include a tweet from Roscosmos
This story was updated March 1 at 1:55 p.m. EST WASHINGTON — SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Saturday that he’s sending Starlink terminals to Ukraine to help keep the embattled country connected to the outside world as Russia steps up its invasion. Details of SpaceX’s Starlink assistance remain under wraps. And while it’s not clear how quickly the promised Starlink broadband terminals will be up and running inside Ukraine, SpaceX’s response was another remarkable example of private companies and connected citizens pushing back on Russia’s effort to subjugate its neighbor. “I wish I could say more,” Musk told SpaceNews . “But, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Strange that SpaceX can do this.” As Russian forces were closing in on Kyiv on Saturday afternoon local time, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation called on Musk via Twitter to send Starlink terminals. “ @elonmusk , while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand [down],” tweeted Ukrainian Vice Priminister Mykhailo Fedorov . While Musk declined to talk about what transpired behind the scenes, just over 10 hours later — half past midnight in Kyiv — Musk publicly responded that help was on the way. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” Musk tweeted in reply to Fedorov. Late Sunday, a senior Ukrainian space official told SpaceNews that Starlink terminals had not arrived but were on the way. “I’ve heard from the minister himself that the first batch of terminals is coming. Not here yet. But this is not critical at all. No problems with connection for now in all regions of Ukraine,” Volodymyr Usov, former chairman of the Ukrainian State Space Agency and co-founder of Kyiv-based Kurs Orbital, told SpaceNews via a messaging app. Early Monday, Kyiv time, Usov said that telecommunications were still up and running inside Ukraine, easing the urgency for Starlink terminals. “We anticipated the disruption of our comms, but didn’t happen,” he said. Nevertheless, he expressed gratitude for SpaceX’s quick response. “Thanks to Elon for his support and good outreach,” Usov said. “Starlink can prove to be useful, especially outside big cities.” Shortly after 10 p.m. Monday, Kyiv, Fedorov tweeted that a truckload of Starlink terminals had arrived. Analyst John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who studies connectivity in conflict regions, warned over the weekend that Starlink uplinks could make Ukrainian combatants and noncombatants alike a target for Russian airstrikes. “Good to see,” Scott-Railton tweeted Feb. 26. “But remember: if #Putin controls the air above #Ukraine, users’ uplink transmissions become beacons…for airstrikes.” For a Russian invasion force that appears to be having trouble with core logistics , like keeping its armored vehicles fueled, the sort of sophisticated signals-intelligence operation that would be necessary to distinguish friend from foe and combatants from noncombatants is largely theoretical at this point, at least for Ustov and his fellow Ukrainians. “No concerns at all regarding location security,” Ustov said. Brian Weeden , a former U.S. Air Force officer and military space specialist at the Secure World Foundation think tank in Washington, said that Scott-Railton is correct that Starlink terminals are potentially targetable, but he doesn’t think they would rank as high-value targets. “It is true that the Starlink ground terminals will be broadcasting, and thus potentially targetable using RF signal detection equipment. But I doubt they’d be that high of a priority for Russian targeting, so I think the odds of them being targeted is probably low,” Weeden said Monday by email. “A much bigger challenge would be Russian ground-based mobile jamming, which is sophisticated and can already deal with existing satellite signals such as GPS and satellite communications.” Weeden said the near-term utility of sending Starlink terminal to Ukraine could be limited by a lack of teleports covering Europe’s largest country by area (after Russia). “The other big challenge is the lack of operational teleports covering Ukraine, which are necessary to link end user requests to the Internet,” Weeden said. “As far as I know, the only operational teleports covering Ukraine are in Poland, so I don’t think the eastern part of Ukraine can actually use Starlink service.” Mike Puchol , the chief technologist of a Kenya-based wireless internet service provider who built and maintains a popular Starlink coverage tracker in his spare time, told SpaceNews that Ukraine appears to be fully covered, perhaps with less total Starlink capacity over Eastern Ukraine. Puchol’s tracker simulates the links between gateways, satellites, and user terminals based on SpaceX filings and other public sources of information. “We know of three teleports, or gateways…one from regulatory filings in Poland, the second from photos in Turkey at a specific location, and the third from a construction company posting a photo in Lithuania,” Puchol told SpaceNews. “The location of the latter is not accurately known, but has been placed on my tracker at the most probable location you would build one.” Puchol said the gateways in Poland, Turkey and Lithuania “can provide full service over all of Ukraine, with less simultaneous satellites covering the Eastern part of the country.” “[T]here could be additional gateways that we don’t know of, as SpaceX doesn’t make their locations public,” Puchol said. 
A Starlink user in Kyiv, he said, can expect their terminal to be serviced by one of five to eight Starlink satellites at any given time.” One of the first Starlink users in Ukraine, if not the first, is Oleg Kutkov , a Kyiv-based engineer with a master’s degree in computer science from Kharkiv National Aerospace University. Kutkov, a self-described hardware hacker, bought a Starlink terminal off eBay in December to tinker with in his home workshop. On Monday evening, Kyiv time, Kutkov got his Starlink connection up and running with a little tech support help via chat. “The initial registration address was in the U.S., and I couldn’t change it to my Ukraine location,” Kutkov said. “The SpaceX team helped me to solve this issue.” Leaning the dish out his apartment window, Kutkov was able to get download speeds well over 100 Mbps, he said. SpaceNews spoke with Kutkov on Tuesday via video teleconference. Since his apartment’s fiber-optic internet connection is still working, he’s taken his Starlink dish down for now. Kutkov, who knows Puchol through their shared Starlink interests, told SpaceNews that Starlink satellite and teleport coverage appears to be adequate. “I believe that all of Ukraine territory should be covered. I also check satellite coverage,” he said. “Ukraine should be fine, at least northern Ukraine where there’s Kyiv and our major cities.” Kutkov said he had not heard anything official about Ukraine’s plans for distributing the Starlink dishes or how many the country can expect to receive. “But I think they should distribute the terminals between military and government facilities. That would be most logical.” Kutkov understands that any device that emits a strong enough radio-frequency or infrared signature can theoretically be used for military target identification. “I think it’s possible… I found transmission from the Dishy, its RF signal and the strength of the signals. Maybe it just transmits locally, but if [Russian military] used some sensitive receiver, maybe they could track the signal. Plus Dishy is hot, very hot, so there’s a lot of infrared radiation.” For now, Kutkov said he is more concerned about the possibility of Kyiv’s power stations being taken out by airstrikes or artillery than Russia targeting anything with an RF or infrared signature. Targeting combatants via Starlink uplink signals might be way down the list of near-term risks, However, Scott-Railton said Ukrainians should heed lessons from past conflicts. “A well-resourced military tracks a massive variety of radio emissions during a war. Even if capabilities are not initially specced out for a novel new communications protocol, if the transmission is interesting enough / the users worth killing, it will be worked on…” To that end, he shared a link to a 2013 case study he wrote for the U.S. Naval War College. Paul Hartman , Space Warfighting Division chief engineer at MITRE Air & Space Forces Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, told SpaceNews that one way to keep Starlink terminals from becoming high-value targets is to send more. “The more Starlink terminals deployed to Ukraine, the harder it will be to take them all out.” “Starlink uplinks can be used as target beacons, but it would be a game of attrition to knock them all out,” Hartman said. “In this case you are on the right side of the cost equation. It would cost the Russians much more to detect and knock out a Starlink terminal than it costs to produce and deploy them. The biggest issue is the collateral damage that could occur.” 
The European Space Agency said Feb. 28 that it is “very unlikely” that its ExoMars mission will launch this September because of sanctions on Russia from its invasion of Ukraine. In a brief statement , ESA all but ruled out a launch that had been planned for late September of the ExoMars mission on Proton launch vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, raising questions about when, or if, the mission will fly. “Regarding the ExoMars program continuation, the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely,” the agency said. “ESA’s Director General will analyze all the options and prepare a formal decision on the way forward by ESA Member States.” “We deplore the tragic events taking place in Ukraine, a crisis which escalated dramatically into war in recent days,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general, tweeted. “Many difficult decisions are now being taken at ESA in consideration of the sanctions implemented by the governments of our Member States.” As recently as Feb. 25, after European and other nations levied sanctions on Russia in reaction to the invasion of Ukraine, Aschbacher held out hope for keeping ExoMars on track for launch . “ESA continues to work on all of its programs, including on ISS & ExoMars launch campaign,” Aschbacher said, adding that “for now, support for our missions & colleagues continues until further notice.” ExoMars, carrying a rover named Rosalind Franklin, was previously scheduled to launch in mid-2020. However, ESA delayed the launch that spring to the next window, in September 2022, citing the impacts of the pandemic as well as technical issues, such as parachutes used as part of the landing system, unlikely to be resolved in time. Besides the launch itself, Russia is providing the landing platform, called Kazachok, that will deliver the rover to the Martian surface. If ESA elects not to cooperate further with Russia on ExoMars, it’s unclear whether or how ESA might replace Kazachok, as well as find an alternative launch. The next launch window will be in late 2024. ESA’s announcement came two days after Roscosmos announced it was suspending cooperation with Europe on Soyuz launches from the European spaceport in French Guiana and withdrawing Russian personnel there. That decision will, at a minimum, delay several upcoming launches of European institutional payloads from there. ESA mentioned that decision in its statement. “We will consequently assess for each European institutional payload under our responsibility the appropriate launch service based notably on launch systems currently in operation and the upcoming Vega-C and Ariane 6 launchers,” the agency said. ESA said in general it is “fully implementing” sanctions imposed by its 22 member states on Russia. “We are assessing the consequences on each of our ongoing programs conducted in cooperation with the Russian state space agency Roscosmos and align our decisions to the decisions of our Member States in close coordination with industrial and international partners.” That included, it noted, cooperation with NASA on the International Space Station. During a Feb. 28 press conference about the upcoming Ax-1 commercial mission to the ISS, Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said ISS operations had not been affected by the invasion and subsequent sanctions. “We are not getting any indications, at a working level, that our counterparts are not committed to ongoing operation of the International Space Station,” she said of cooperation with Russia on ISS operations. “We’re operating just like we were operating three weeks ago.”
The Defense Department’s Space Development Agency announced Feb. 28 it awarded Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems contracts worth nearly $1.8 billion to produce 126 satellites for a global communications network in low Earth orbit. The agency awarded three contracts: $700 million to Lockheed Martin, $692 million to Northrop Grumman and $382 million to York Space for the Transport Layer Tranche 1. Each company has to deliver 42 satellites by 2024. A total of eight bidders competed for the three awards. The Space Development Agency (SDA) is building the Pentagon’s first-ever internet in space — a network of small satellites in low Earth orbit to support military communications, surveillance and tracking of enemy targets. SDA plans to build the Transport Layer in batches, or “tranches.” The agency in 2020 ordered 20 Tranche 0 satellites – 10 each from Lockheed Martin and York Space. These are scheduled to launch later this year. For the much larger Tranche 1, SDA added a third contractor, Northrop Grumman. SDA Director Derek Tournear said the plan is to launch Tranche 1 starting in September 2024. The 126 spacecraft would launch in six batches of 21 satellites at a rate of one launch per month. The three satellite providers were awarded contracts known as Other Transaction Authority. OTAs are used as alternatives to traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) contracts. SDA had initially sought bids under the FAR contracting method but changed course after Maxar Technologies filed a protest in October alleging that terms unfairly favored certain companies over others. SDA re-issued the solicitation under the OTA approach, which gives government agencies more flexibility to evaluate and select contractors. The Competition in Contracting Act does not apply to OTA deals so they are less likely to be protested. SDA’s constellation, if successful, could become a model for how DoD can deploy satellite networks that are more resilient against cyber attacks and other threats. The Transport Layer is a “proliferated” constellation, meaning it has a large enough number of satellites that it would be extremely costly for an adversary to try to take it down. The Transport Layer marks DoD’s first major program to use smaller, lower-cost satellites for critical military operations. Most constellations deployed over the past decades were made up of car-size or schoolbus-size spacecraft, each costing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. SDA was established in 2019 precisely to tap into the emerging commercial space market and the innovations in small satellites, and apply them to military systems “SDA is changing the landscape for acquisition of national defense space capabilities by capitalizing on a unique business model that harnesses commercial development to achieve a proliferated low Earth orbit architecture that enhances resilience and lowers latency to process and move data from sensor to shooter,” said Tournear. The Tranche 1 constellation of 126 space vehicles will be divided into six orbital planes to be launched into near-polar low Earth orbit. Satellites will have laser links so they can pass data in space as a mesh network and minimize the need to transfer data through ground stations. Data gathered by a satellite on the location of a target, for example, can be instantly transmitted to whoever would have to shoot down that target. “We want to be able to detect, track and target anything that is a mobile missile launcher or ship and be able to send those targeting solutions directly down to a weapons platform,” said Tournear. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space have to equip their satellites with optical inter-satellite links that comply with SDA-mandated technical specifications to ensure that satellites can talk to each other regardless of what manufacturer made them. Under the contract, the three companies have to operate and maintain their portion of Tranche 1 satellites. SDA plans to select a separate contractor to integrate and manage ground operations. SDA contracts a win for Colorado Lockheed Martin and York Space both will produce the Tranche 1 satellites in the Denver area. Northrop Grumman has not yet announced a manufacturing partner or where its satellites will be produced. Blake Bullock, vice president of communication systems at Northrop Grumman, noted the company’s track record fielding constellations, including the assembly, integration and testing of 81 Iridium NEXT satellites that were deployed in low Earth orbit in 2019. Orbital Sciences Corp., a company later acquired by Northrop Grumman, produced those satellites under contract to Iridium’s prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space. Lockheed Martin’s Tranche 1 satellites will use buses supplied by Tyvak, a small satellite manufacturer owned by Terran Orbital. Chris Winslett, Lockheed Martin’s program director, told SpaceNews that SDA’s Transport Layer marks a departure from traditional military space procurements. “Having watched this marketplace evolve over the last 20 years, this is a new capability that is enabled by technology and manufacturing readiness levels.” Technologies like inter-satellite laser links are finally coming to fruition and becoming widely available, said Winslett. Small satellites are now advanced enough that they operate like computers in space, able to do things like mesh networking and battle management command and control on board the satellites. “All of that came together just at the right time to make this mesh network happen,” he said. SDA is now able to “take advantage of technologies that are ready to create a new architecture,” Winslett said. Chuck Beames, executive chairman of York Space Systems, said the SDA contract is “a big deal for the small satellite industry and for the role of small satellites in meeting national security needs.” While Lockheed and Northrop are two of the Pentagon’s top prime contractors, York Space is an underdog. The company was founded in 2012 with the goal of making satellites more like consumer electronics, which has been made possible by the miniaturization of components and mass production. Up to this point, small satellites were “interesting things to demonstrate but the Transport Layer is an actual operational mission constellation,” Beames told SpaceNews . “It’s not a demo or not just an exercise.” SDA’s planned architecture changes the way DoD buys satellites and is also a key step forward in how DoD provides connectivity to military forces in the field, Beames said. “What it does is it allows anybody in the military to be able to communicate through that network to everybody else,” he added. “It’s geared towards operational users, not just the Pentagon but folks in the field and warfighting commands in the field.”
The latest in a series of geostationary weather satellites is ready for launch as NASA takes the next step in plans for a next generation of such spacecraft. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) T satellite is scheduled to launch at 4:38 p.m. Eastern March 1 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. At a Feb. 26 briefing, mission officials said the spacecraft and rocket were ready for launch, with the main concern the weather: forecasts projected a 60% chance of acceptable conditions March 1, rising to 70% if the launch is delayed a day. GOES-T, which will be renamed GOES-18 if successfully launched, will replace GOES-17 at the GOES-West orbital slot at 137 degrees west by early 2023. While GOES-17 was launched only four years ago, problems with its main instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), prompted NOAA to replace it with GOES-T. GOES-17 will be placed into on-orbit storage to be activated in the event problems with another satellite. GOES-T is the third of four satellites in the GOES-R series. “The GOES-T satellite is very similar to its older siblings but has design changes incorporating lessons learned from GOES-R and -S on orbit,” said Pam Sullivan, director of the GOES-R program at NOAA, at the prelaunch briefing. Design changes to the radiator on ABI, which caused the problems seen on GOES-17, is the biggest change, she said. GOES-T also has a new magnetometer for space weather observations. The fourth and final satellite in the GOES-R series, GOES-U, is scheduled to launch in 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. It will be similar to the first three but will also include a compact coronagraph instrument built by the Naval Research Lab for space weather monitoring, Sullivan said. NASA and NOAA have started planning on the next generation of geostationary orbit weather satellites, called Geostationary Extended Operations or GeoXO . Those satellites, scheduled to start launching in the early 2030s, will continue the measurements made by the GOES-R series but also include new instruments such as a hyperspectral infrared sounder and atmospheric composition sensor. As with earlier GOES satellites, NASA will handle procurement and development work on the GeoXO satellites for NOAA. “The breadth of these observations are needed to meet the integrated and the growing climate observation measurements that are really needed to understand the planet,” said Steve Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services, at the briefing. While the first GeoXO satellite isn’t scheduled for launch until 2032, NASA has already started the procurement process for those spacecraft. The agency issued a request for proposals Feb. 24 for definition studies of the GeoXO spacecraft . NASA plans to award up to two Phase A study contracts in July, valued at up to $5 million over 10 months. According to the statement of work for that procurement, GEOXo will include six satellites that will operate at the GOES-East and GOES-West locations as well as a new GOES-Central orbital slot at 105 degrees west. The satellites at GOES-Central will carry new hyperspectral infrared sounder and atmospheric composition instruments, as well as an unspecified “partner payload.” The six satellites are projected to launch between 2032 and 2042. The studies will have to demonstrate whether the spacecraft can be launched on the Falcon Heavy as well as ULA’s Vulcan Centaur and Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicles. The studies will also examine trade-offs between launching the satellites into geostationary transfer orbits, from which the spacecraft would use onboard propulsion to go to GEO, versus direct injection into GEO by the launch vehicle. The latter approach allows the spacecraft to immediately arrive in GEO but requires higher performance by the launch vehicle. The GeoXO studies will also examine the potential for “limited, on-orbit robotic servicing” of the spacecraft, such as refueling. That would require the addition of equipment such as grappling fixtures and visual fiducials to assist a servicing spacecraft docking with the GeoXO satellite. The statement of work, though, says that individual spacecraft components “do not need to be specifically designed to be serviceable.”
WASHINGTON – Images collected by commercial satellites have chronicled the buildup of Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders and the ongoing invasion, providing intelligence previously only available from government sources — and seldom released to the public. The crisis has showcased the capabilities of companies like Maxar Technologies and BlackSky , whose high-resolution satellite images have been ubiquitous for the past several weeks as the conflict intensified. Last week, Daniel Jablonsky, Maxar’s president and CEO, told Wall Street analysts that the company is “working to increase global transparency.” An organization within the company, called Maxar News Bureau , has created a partnership program with “respected and trusted media organizations, and our team is in regular contact with hundreds of journalists, both here in the U.S. and abroad,” said Jablonsky. The company also provides pro bono access to satellite imagery to environmental and humanitarian groups through a “SecureWatch” platform. Jablonsky in a Feb. 28 statement to SpaceNews said Maxar “has made much of this imagery available to news organizations to support global transparency and combat the spread of disinformation. We are proud of our contributions to the public discourse around this situation and hopeful for a peaceful resolution.” 
 Increased awareness of the value of space data is a welcome development for the commercial geospatial business — a $9 billion industry projected to grow to $37 billion by 2026 — where many new venture-funded firms are rushing to deploy constellations and data analytics services. “The conflict in Ukraine and its global implications create an opportunity for the new Earth observation space companies to demonstrate their capabilities,” said Scott Herman, CEO of Cognitive Space and a geospatial data expert who works with commercial satellite operators. “You don’t get a better opportunity than this to show how remote sensing can support media storytelling and help with the general public’s understanding of a crisis like Ukraine,” he said. “The coverage by the major media, much of it is derived from geospatial data from a variety of commercial and open sources. ” But while companies like Maxar are financially able to provide imagery to the news media and nonprofits at no cost, it’s more difficult for emerging companies that need paying customers, Herman noted. One of the challenges for new Earth-observation companies is that they need to drive sufficient revenue, he said, and public service and media exposure may not be enough to satisfy investors. “Everybody wants to contribute and see their work out there, but you’re diverting resources, and you’re not getting any revenue out of it. So there’s always been kind of a tug-of-war within these companies around crisis support for the media. ” Other forms of space intelligence Optical imaging satellites use visible, near-infrared and short-wave infrared sensors to produce photographic images, but the downside is that they can’t see through clouds. And Ukraine in winter has notoriously overcast skies. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor satellites can penetrate cloud cover and shoot pictures at night, but “a bunch of radar blobs don’t necessarily make a newsworthy picture,” Herman noted. “I t may require some enhancement or interpretation for the general public.” Another challenge for satellite companies is knowing exactly where to point their sensors to get a newsworthy picture, he said. Many of the newer satellite operators have limited capabilities to gather sufficient intelligence of what’s happening on the ground in order to task their satellites effectively. They may depend on their customers to point them in the right direction to get a newsworthy shot. Other space data companies like Spire use nano-satellites with ADS-B receivers that track aviation traffic. Aircraft carry ADS-B transponders, short for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). Herman said this is another form of open-source intelligence that “people are paying a lot of attention to” for clues about Ukraine developments . “There’s a lot of interesting information out there right now about all the flight diversions,” he said. “A lot of people tracking that ADS-B data are doing it both in terms of what’s happening with commercial flights, but they’re also tracking a lot of the military activities as well.” Whether it’s overhead imagery, geo-located tweets and videos, ship tracking and air tracking data, Herman said, “the media can now do a lot of source confirmation in ways that they couldn’t do before. And a lot of that has been enabled by the rise in geospatial analytics that’s happened over the last several years.” Government support of commercial imagery Maxar’s primary customer for its satellite imagery is the U.S. government. But as a commercial provider, Maxar can also publicly release images of the Ukraine conflict. The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office pays Maxar about $300 million a year to access the company’s four high-resolution imagery satellites and image archives. This gives the government “preemption rights” for tasking satellites, said Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics. “The U.S. government can step to the front of the line and get control of the camera to take a picture,” he said. “The premium that the government is paying for access to imagery allows them to dictate what targets the camera shoots at over certain areas of the world.” But for the most part, all the pictures Maxar shoots for the government are publicly released, Quilty said. “The government has priority, but once the imagery goes into the image library, then Maxar can go ahead and offer it to other customers,” he said. The U.S. government likes that arrangement because it allows valuable intelligence to be shared, given that the NRO cannot release any images from its satellites, which are classified. “What they love about commercial providers is that the images are freely shareable,” he said. This is important during a conflict because U.S. allies worldwide who wouldn’t have access to the NRO’s data can get unclassified images. “With the commercial imagery from Maxar, it helps us to collaborate better,” Quilty said. Another benefit is that the media can use commercial imagery to corroborate government claims. “If commercial imagery didn’t exist, you would have had the U.S. administration waving their hands about the Russians massing troops around Ukraine” and not being able to prove it, Quilty said. “People on the ground with their cell phone cameras might have gotten some pictures of tanks,” he said, but only satellites could get overhead images of troops massing. “We couldn’t send a spy plane, or the Russians could shoot it down,” Quilty added, “so yes, it’s hugely beneficial to have a commercial provider that has unclassified imagery that can be shared.”
China’s second Long March 8 rocket launched late Saturday carrying a domestic record 22 satellites for a range of commercial Chinese space companies. The Long March 8 lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 10:06 p.m. Eastern Feb. 26, with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) later confirming launch success. The second Long March 8 flew without the pair of side boosters used in the rocket’s first mission back in December 2020. It has a length of 50.3 meters long and a mass at takeoff of 356 tons. The Long March 8 has been slated for test development of vertical takeoff, vertical landing, during which side boosters would remain attached to the first stage. Saturday’s mission was expendable, launching over the sea from Hainan island. The Long March 8 combines the 3.35-meter-diameter new-generation Long March 7 kerosene-liquid oxygen first stage with a 3-meter-diameter hydrolox second stage from the older Long March 3A series. “To put it simply, we have hammered out a ‘carpooling’ solution to launch many small satellites in one successful launch mission,” Xiao Yun, chief commander of the Long March 8 rocket program, told CCTV. The China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC), a subsidiary of CASC, launched the first “ Long March Express ” rideshare using a Long March 6 in April 2021. A number of contracts for the new rideshare were signed at the Zhuhai Airshow in late September. The payloads on the Long March 8 involved seven manufacturers with end users including seven commercial companies and two research institutes. Changguang Satellite Technology, a Changchun-based remote sensing constellation operator and spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ CIOMP, launched 10 new Jilin-1 satellites for its constellation of remote sensing satellites of the same name. These were the Jilin-1 GF03D10-18 satellites, with GF standing for “Gaofen” or high resolution, with each of the eight satellites having a mass of around 43 kilograms. Jilin-1 MF02A01 is a 32-kilogram multi-functional satellite to test a new platform. A number of the satellites also carry secondary names through sponsorships. Small satellite maker Minospace manufactured five satellites aboard the mission. Two of these were the Taijing-3 (01) 240-kilogram optical and Taijing-4 (01) 250-kilogram synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites which will be operated by Minospace. The firm also made the Wenchang-1 (01) and (02) wide-field multispectral satellites for the Sanya Institute of Remote Sensing and Hainan Westar Remote Sensing Technology Application Service respectively, each with a mass of 62.5 kilograms. The Xidian-1 hyperspectral remote sensing satellite is for the new Silk Road Tiantu constellation and operated by Shaanxi Silk Road Tiantu Satellite Technology. Changsha-based commercial spacecraft maker and constellation operator Spacety launched the Chaohu-1 satellite, the first of the planned Tianxian SAR constellation in cooperation with the China Electronics Technology Group (CETC). The 325-kilogram satellite builds on the Hisea-1 SAR satellite launched on the previous Long March 8 flight. Spacety also had the 14-kilogram Thor Smart Satellite on the mission. The satellite carries a distributed software protocol test payloads and three GRID gamma ray burst detectors and the Aurora-2 X-ray polarimeter. Tianqi-19 was manufactured by Shandong Institute of Aerospace Electronics Technology for Guodian Gaoke and its Tianqi low-Earth orbit narrow-band Internet of Things constellation. The roughly 60-kilogram Hainan-1 (01) and (02) satellites were developed by Shenzhen Aerospace Dongfanghong Satellite, ultimately under the ownership of CASC, for Hainan Westar Remote Sensing Technology Application Service. The satellites carry imagers and automatic identification system (AIS) receivers for maritime surveillance. Star Era-17 (Xingshidai-17), also referred to as “Dayun”, the Chinese name for the Universiade international sports event to be held this year in Chengdu, is a 20-kilogram satellite carrying visible light and thermal infrared imagers and “AI payloads” developed and operated by ADA Space, based in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, southwest China. The firm raised $55.6 million in Series B round late last year for its AI satellite constellation plans. Finally, the Phospherus-1 22-kilogram optical satellite was developed by Wuhan University for hyperspectral imaging. Earlier on Saturday China launched the L-SAR 01B satellite on a Long March 4C, sending the synthetic aperture radar satellite to operate in formation with the L-SAR 01A satellite launched in January. The hypergolic rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 6:44 p.m. Eastern Feb. 26, CASC confirmed . The launches were China’s third and fourth orbital missions of 2022 and the first following an extended break for the Lunar New Year celebrations. Main space contractor CASC is planning to launch more than 50 times this year, with a number of commercial companies also planning to launch a range of liquid and solid rockets. China set a new domestic record of 55 launches in 2021, far surpassing the previous record of 39 launches conducted by China in 2018 and 2020.
SAN FRANCISCO – Space-as-a-service startup Xplore has brought in $16.2 million to date including venture capital funding and contracts, the company announced Feb. 24. “Xplore’s funding is being used to support the aggressive growth of our team and enable us to meet our development milestones,” Lisa Rich, Xplore co-founder and chief operating officer, told SpaceNews by email. Xplore declined to provide details on funding rounds conducted to date, but the release notes the Washington state startup has attracted approximately $4 million in non-dilutive funding in the past 24 months, including awards from the U.S. Air Force, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. Xplore, founded in 2017, is preparing to launch its first satellite this year on an Orbital Astronautics Ltd. nanosatellite . National Security Innovation Capital, a hardware development accelerator within the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, awarded Xplore a $2 million contract last year to accelerate development of Xcraft, the company’s ESPA-class multi-mission spacecraft platform. In 2020, NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts gave a team that includes NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Aerospace Corp. and Xplore a $2 million grant for work on technology to harness the sun’s gravitational field to gather imagery of planets orbiting distant stars. In addition, the U.S. Air Force awarded Xplore a $50,000 contract in 2020 to study positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions for cislunar space. “Xplore’s approach to space exploration is to demonstrate existing PNT techniques and algorithmic solutions on its 2021 lunar mission that lay the foundation to establish a distributed set of commercial and government PNT nodes across cislunar space with every US launch,” according to the SBIR.gov website. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded Xplore a $670,112 contract in 2020 to evaluate the feasibility of sending a commercial mission to L1 to provide early detection of solar events that would threaten telecommunications satellites and the terrestrial power grid. Investor support has been key to the company’s early success, Jeff Rich, Xplore founder and CEO, said in a statement. Investors include: Alumni Ventures, Brightstone Venture Capital, KittyHawk Ventures, Private Shares Fund, Starbridge Venture Capital, Helios Capital, Lombard Street, Gaingels, Tremendous View, Kingfisher Capital and Dylan Taylor, the Voyager Space CEO who a passenger on the Dec. 11 flight of the Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital vehicle. Will Weisman, KittyHawk Ventures founder and managing partner, said in a statement that his firm was proud to add Xplore to its portfolio because the company “understands how to set business and technical milestones that reach the summit.” Erik Hammer, Alumni Ventures managing director, said in a statement that his firm was impressed with Xplore’s “technical progress and early commercial traction.” Steven Jorgenson, Starbridge Venture Capital founder and general partner, said in a statement that his firm believes Xplore can help clients “bypass the maze of issues faced when trying to gain value out of the space environment today: often these groups want space data, but don’t want the high cost and complexity of becoming satellite operations specialists to get it.” David Dalvey, Brightstone Venture Capital managing partner, said in a statement that his firm appreciated the fact that Xplore vehicles are designed not only for Earth orbit but for lunar and interplanetary operations, as well.
Roscosmos announced Feb. 26 that it is halting cooperation with Europe on Soyuz launches from French Guiana and withdrawing its personnel from the launch site in response to European sanctions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “In response to EU sanctions against our enterprises, Roscosmos is suspending cooperation with European partners in organizing space launches” from French Guiana, Roscosmos said in a pair of tweets, citing a statement by its head, Dmitry Rogozin. The agency said it will withdraw the 87 employees of several Russian companies that support Soyuz launches there, although the details of that withdrawal are “being worked out.” The announcement will, at a minimum, delay a Soyuz launch of two Galileo navigation satellites that had been scheduled for April from French Guiana, with another pair of Galileo satellites scheduled to launch later in the year on another Soyuz. The European Space Agency planned to launch its EarthCARE Earth science mission, developed in cooperation with the Japanese space agency JAXA, on a Soyuz in 2023, along with the Euclid infrared space telescope. The French government was also expected to launch its CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite on a Soyuz in early 2023. An ESA spokesperson told SpaceNews Feb. 26 that the agency had no immediate comment on the Roscosmos announcement. An “internal crisis coordination meeting” is scheduled for Feb. 28, after which ESA may issue a statement. Arianespace, which offers the Soyuz for commercial launches from French Guiana and other spaceports, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Thierry Breton, the European Union commissioner whose portfolio includes space, said in a Feb. 26 statement that the decision has no immediate effects on the “continuity and quality” of the Galileo system or on the Copernicus series of Earth science spacecraft. “We will take all relevant decisions in response to this decision in due course and continue developing resolutely the second generation of these two E.U. sovereign space infrastructures,” he said. The decision to suspend Soyuz launches from French Guiana is one of the few levers on space-related issues that Russia can pull to react to Western sanctions without jeopardizing its own space capabilities, such as operations of the International Space Station. Western dependence on Russian space systems and technologies has declined significantly since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, when Russia threatened to cut off access to seats on Soyuz spacecraft flying to the ISS and halt exports of the RD-180 engines used on the Atlas 5 in response to U.S. sanctions. Future use of the French Guiana launch site by Soyuz rockets was in question even before the Roscosmos announcement. In January, Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said he expected European institutional customers that had been using Soyuz to move to the Vega C and Ariane 6 vehicles , slated to make their first launches later this year. “We’ve had discussions with our Russian partners to see whether there is a business case to go beyond 2023 or not,” he said then, suggesting at the time that ESA support for continued Soyuz launches be discussed at the November ESA ministerial meeting. “It could be that maintaining a capability as a backup for Ariane 6 and Vega C could be part of the business case.” Roscosmos also announced via a tweet that Rogozin concluded that it was “inappropriate” for the U.S. to continue cooperation with Russia on the proposed Venera-D mission to Venus. That move is largely a ceremonial one because, while there have been discussions between American and Russian scientists on a potential role for NASA on Venera-D, the mission itself has suffered extensive delays and is unlikely to launch before the end of the decade, if at all.
Sierra Space has signed an agreement to study future landings of its Dream Chaser vehicle at a Japanese airport. Sierra Space, working in cooperation with Kanematsu Corporation and Oita Prefecture, announced Feb. 26 the memorandum of understanding regarding landings of Dream Chaser at Oita Airport. As part of the agreement Sierra Space and Kanematsu will collaborate on potential business opportunities in Japan and elsewhere in Asia for Dream Chaser. “Dream Chaser is a multi-variant space vehicle which leverages flexible design and performance versatility with the ability to land on existing commercial runways worldwide,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in a statement. “Through this project with Oita Prefecture and Kanematsu Corporation, Sierra Space can envisage a future where the Oita Space Port is a hub for Dream Chaser landings, enabling returning space missions to land in Japan as part of our growing global network of landing sites.” The local government has been working for several years to turn the airport into a spaceport. That included an agreement with Virgin Orbit in 2020 to host that company’s LauncherOne air-launch system, a rocket launched from a Boeing 747 aircraft that would take off and land from the airport. Virgin executives said in January the first LauncherOne mission from Oita could take place as soon as 2023 . “We will proceed with our feasibility study along with Kanematsu to utilize Oita Airport as a landing site in Asia for Sierra Space,” Katsusada Hirose, governor of Oita Prefecture, said in a statement. “Furthermore, we expect that this collaboration will expand to various fields such as business and education, inspiring children and companies in Oita.” The announcement didn’t give a schedule for the study or when the first landing in Oita could take place. Initial flights of Dream Chaser will land at Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility, the former Shuttle Landing Facility runway at the Kennedy Space Center, but Sierra Space has previously emphasized the ability of Dream Chaser to land on many conventional runways. One potential landing site for Dream Chaser is Huntsville International Airport in Alabama. The airport is applying for a reentry site operator license from the Federal Aviation Administration to allow Dream Chaser landings at the airport. Documents submitted as part on an ongoing environmental review for that license application projected landings to start at the airport as soon as 2023, growing to as many as three per year in 2027. Sierra Space is currently working on a version of Dream Chaser for transporting cargo to and from the International Space Station under a NASA Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract. The first flight of the vehicle is scheduled for the first quarter of 2023 on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, said Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, during a panel discussion at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 16. Dream Chaser was originally proposed as a crewed vehicle and won initial rounds of commercial crew awards from NASA before losing to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 for the contract to complete development and testing of those vehicles. The company is maintaining plans for a crewed version as well as a third variant “for other opportunities,” Kavandi said, such as missions that require a payload bay that can be depressurized or need additional power or propulsion. “Maybe someone on the [national security space] side might be interested in that kind of a vehicle,” she said at the conference. To support both Dream Chaser and its role on the proposed Orbital Reef commercial space station led by Blue Origin, Sierra Space is planning to nearly double its workforce. The company, which currently has 1,100 employees, said Feb. 24 it will create 1,000 new jobs by the end of the year. The majority of the positions will be in Colorado, where the company is headquartered, but others will be in locations in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Sierra Space was spun out of Sierra Nevada Corporation in 2021 and, in November, raised a $1.4 billion Series A funding round . “It really helped is accelerate our plans,” Kavandi said of that funding round.
SpaceX launched another set of Starlink satellites Feb. 25 as the company argues its satellite constellation is consistent with the safe and sustainable use of low Earth orbit. A Falcon 9 lifted off at 12:12 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The rocket deployed its payload of 50 Starlink satellites into an orbit at an altitude of about 315 kilometers a little more than an hour later. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean downrange of Vandenberg nearly nine minutes after liftoff. The booster previously launched the Sentinel-6A Michael Freilich and Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft for NASA as well as one Starlink mission. SpaceX noted in its webcast of the launch that it is now offering services in 29 countries, most recently Brazil and Bulgaria. The company also worked with the government of Tonga to provide connectivity after a volcanic eruption in January broke submarine cables providing internet connectivity for the Pacific island nation. While the main international cable serving Tonga has been repaired, the government is using Starlink antennas to provide connectivity to outlying islands where cables may not be repaired for months. Starlink’s sustainability case This launch came four days after another Falcon 9 launched 46 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral, Florida . The company now has 1,970 Starlink satellites in orbit, a constellation far larger than any other satellite system today. SpaceX is seeking permission from the Federal Communications Commission to place as many as 30,000 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit, prompting objections and other criticism. One example was a Feb. 8 letter from NASA outlining its concerns about SpaceX’s proposal , such as increased conjunctions between Starlink satellites and other space objects as well as interference with satellite and ground-based science. In an apparent response to that criticism, SpaceX published Feb. 22 a lengthy statement arguing that it is committed to space sustainability. “SpaceX has demonstrated this commitment to space safety through action, investing significant resources to ensure that all our launch vehicles, spacecraft, and satellites meet or exceed space safety regulations and best practices,” the company wrote. It cited as proof of that commitment designing “highly reliable, maneuverable” satellites designed to break up completely upon reentry; placing satellites initially in very low orbits after launch for initial checkouts; operating the entire constellation at altitudes below 600 kilometers, so that satellites will naturally reenter within 25 years of the end of their life if they are not deliberately deorbited; and the use of an autonomous collision avoidance system. While the statement largely reiterated past arguments by the company about the overall safety of the Starlink system, it did offer some new data points. SpaceX said that Starlink satellites performed 3,300 collision avoidance maneuvers in the second half of 2021, with more than 1,600 involving close approaches to debris and 1,400 with other satellites. Each Starlink satellite is designed to “duck” to avoid potential collisions by moving its large solar array to create the smallest possible cross-section to an approaching object. Doing so can further reduce the odds of a collision by a factor of 4 to 10. SpaceX said it has the ability to build 45 satellites, the approximate payload of a single launch, per week. Of the more than 2,000 satellites launched to date, SpaceX claimed only 1% have failed after going into their operational orbits. The company said it can deorbit a satellite within four weeks by first using onboard propellant to lower its orbit then initiating a “high drag mode” to maximize atmospheric drag for reentry. “SpaceX has safely deorbited over 200 satellites utilizing this approach,” the company said. “By building reliable, debris minimizing satellites, planning for active deorbit and designing for full demisability, we ensure we’re keeping space sustainable and safe.”
SAN FRANCISCO – While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have important space policy ramifications for the United States, the impact is not likely to be as significant as shifts that have already occurred in the wake Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. “What we’ve seen over the intervening eight years is a greater separation of Russia and the West in space,” Jeff Foust, senior SpaceNews staff writer, said Feb. 25 during a webinar from Duke University’s Space Diplomacy Lab. “Russia appears to be moving closer to China” with talks focused on an international lunar research station pegged for the 2030s and potential space station cooperation. And while Russia continues to conduct more orbital launches than any nation besides China and the United States, it has lost its once enviable share of the commercial launch market to competition from SpaceX and others. The United States and Russia remain partners through the International Space Station, which maintains its orbit thanks to periodic boosts from Russian vehicles and derives power from U.S. solar panels. In spite of economic sanctions being levied in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and anger expressed on Twitter by Dmitry Rogozin, Roscosmos director general, Russia is not likely to pull out of the ISS program. “There is reason for [Russia] to stay and grumble and complain, but still not put all their cards in the China deck,” said W. Robert Pearson, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Duke University Diplomacy Program fellow. “There’s a standard for Russia to keep one chair at another desk and that could be the space station.” “If Russia decided to terminate its participation in ISS in 2024, there really wouldn’t be much for its human spaceflight program to do,” Foust said. Russia has continued to invest in ISS upgrades. Last year, Russian cosmonauts attached a new Russian module . And while Russia is developing its own space station, its launch remains years away. If Russia were to walk away from ISS, the country’s human spaceflight program would have few options other than to “fly some Soyuz [capsules] around in orbit for a few days at a time,” Foust said. “I don’t think that’s particularly palatable to them.” Prior to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, U.S. and Russian space programs were tightly coupled. In response to sanctions, Rogozin, then Russian deputy prime minister, threatened to deny NASA access to seats on the Soyuz capsule and halt export of RD-180 rocket engines. While neither action was ultimately taken, the comments had serious repercussions for U.S. space policy. At the time, Soyuz was NASA’s only means of transporting astronauts to ISS, while the space agency was seeking congressional funding for its campaign to encourage U.S. companies to develop vehicles to provide crew transportation. “The threat of losing access to Soyuz seats wiped away the last of the skepticism on Capitol Hill about the Commercial Crew Program,” Foust said. After 2014, Congress gave NASA the funding the agency requested for the Commercial Crew Program, whereas in previous years Congress supplied only a fraction of the funding requested. NASA now relies on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS and expects to have a second U.S. option once Boeing’s Starliner CST-100 vehicle is ready to carry people. Similarly, while RD-180 engine exports continued, the United States launch sector and United Launch Alliance began looking for alternative propulsion. Rogozin threatened to cut off RD-180 exports around the same time that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was suing to force the U.S. Air Force to bring competition to national security launches rather than awarding contracts directly to ULA. Congress, meanwhile, took legislative action to curtail ULA’s use of RD-180 engines for national security launches. “That combination of the threat of losing the RD-180 and SpaceX demanding the chance for competition led to changes in the program,” Foust said. Now, both ULA and SpaceX conduct launches for the U.S. military. ULA is preparing to launch the new Vulcan rocket with a domestically produced engine. Atlas 5 rockets continue to rely on RD-180 engines, but ULA has all the RD-180s it needs for its remaining Atlas launches. ULA CEO Tory Bruno said Feb. 25 that ULA and propulsion partner Aerojet Rocketdyne have enough RD-180 expertise in-house to keep Atlas 5 flying without access to Energomash, the Russian company that built the engines under the RD-Amross joint venture with the former Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. “Been flying them for many years, lots of experience,” Bruno said via Twitter . “Also, I have personal experience in flying other people’s rockets without their support, which informs my confidence.”
Steve Howard is not superstitious, at least about a particular number. “Thirteen is my favorite number,” said Howard, the administrator of Camden County, Georgia, in early January. Just a few weeks earlier, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) awarded a launch site operator’s license, more commonly called a spaceport license, to Camden County, making it the thirteenth commercial launch site licensed by the agency. The license was the culmination of years of work, including extensive environmental reviews and coordination among many state and federal agencies. “This was a challenging project, with a lot of battle scars,” he said. The license, though, is just the beginning of the project. The county on Georgia’s Atlantic coast now must acquire the land for the spaceport, build the launch facilities and attract launch providers. The spaceport still faces potential legal challenges, including a petition from county residents seeking a referendum that, if approved by voters, would effectively kill the project by blocking the county from buying the land. Spaceport Camden would seem like a cautionary tale for other prospective spaceports that face regulatory, technical and business development challenges of their own. But state and local authorities pushing new projects seem undeterred by those obstacles or the fact that more than half of 13 FAA-licensed spaceports in the United States have yet to host a launch. Despite this, new spaceport projects are being proposed from coast to coast. Last August, the city council of Paso Robles, California, approved plans to begin pre-application discussions with the FAA regarding a spaceport license for the city’s airport. The state legislature in Maine is considering a bill that would establish a Maine Space Port Corporation, a public-private partnership to establish launch sites in the New England state. That exuberance, rational or otherwise, was evident at a meeting of the Global Spaceport Alliance in January in Orlando, Florida. Howard offered an update on Spaceport Camden’s progress to a packed room featuring officials with both licensed spaceports and those seeking licenses. That latter group included Francisco Partida, representing the airport in Brownsville, Texas, which started the FAA licensing process last year. He says the city wants to leverage SpaceX’s activity at its nearby Boca Chica, Texas, test site known as Starbase. “We’re the closest airport to that facility and, as such, we’ve been trying to position Brownsville as your gateway to SpaceX,” he said. It’s unclear what sort of launch activity the airport, which hosts commercial airline flights, would support. In the near term, the focus is on developing land around the airport set aside for an industrial park. “We attracted SpaceX to be our anchor tenant,” he said, with the company leasing 9,200 square meters of warehouse space that could be expanded. That’s a model that other FAA-licensed spaceports have followed. Spaceport Houston, located at Ellington Airport near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, has been licensed since 2015 but has never had a launch. The facility, though, is attracting a cluster of space companies, such as commercial space station developer Axiom Space and lunar lander company Intuitive Machines, who are building offices, test facilities and mission control centers there. In West Texas, Midland Air and Space Port got an FAA spaceport license to support launches by XCOR Aerospace, which intended to fly its Lynx suborbital spaceplane from the airport’s runways. XCOR has gone out of business, but the airport has retained its FAA license and attracted companies from other parts of the space industry like AST SpaceMobile, which is developing a satellite constellation for mobile telephony services. More companies, including those working on rocket engines, are coming to an expanded spaceport business park, said Oscar Garcia, a consultant representing Midland at the Global Spaceport Alliance meeting. “We will have announcements soon of two new tenants,” he promised. Spaceports, though, have their share of problems, including the licensing process. Most spaceports don’t face the same challenges that Spaceport Camden did to get a license, but some in the industry see room for improvement for how new spaceports are licensed. George Nield, the former FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation who now chairs the Global Spaceport Alliance, believes there’s an opportunity to streamline spaceport licensing by defining a “minimum-impact spaceport concept.” If a proposed spaceport fell below thresholds for factors like the size of vehicles it hosted and population density, he proposed, it could get a license right away. “That doesn’t mean you can launch a Falcon 9, but that’s OK,” he said. “You don’t need to launch a Falcon 9 to be a spaceport.” The FAA is considering such concepts, said Pam Underwood, director of the office of spaceports at FAA/AST. The agency, which completed a revision of launch and reentry regulations in 2020 to streamline the licensing process, is turning its attention to other regulations, including spaceports. However, she said it was unlikely the FAA would get to spaceport regulations this year. A bigger issue for spaceports is funding. Many prospective spaceports are not brand-new sites, like Spaceport Camden, but instead existing airports. However, they still need to build infrastructure for space activities, such as control centers, hangars and taxiways. A long-running challenge for spaceports is a lack of federal infrastructure funding. Industry advocates have tried for years to establish a spaceport grant program similar to what is available for airports. They hoped the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year would include funding for spaceports. However, the final version, while including $284 billion in new funding for other modes of transportation, had nothing for space. Nield blames that on the lack of advocates for the space industry, and spaceports in particular, in Congress. “There are few, if any, spaceport champions out there,” he said. Airports that have spaceport licenses can seek FAA funding for infrastructure projects through the Airport Improvement Program (AIP) but are strictly limited to using that funding for aviation, not space, efforts. “Grant funding for airports is tough. AIP funding is very specifically for aviation,” Underwood said. The FAA does have the authority to issue spaceport grants, she said, but has lacked funding for them. Underwood said her office is laying the groundwork for future spaceport grants by talking with others in the Department of Transportation on how they administer similar programs. “We can have a plan ready to go if we do get funding,” she said. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill does not include any money specifically for spaceports, she added that those sites could seek funding the bill offers for other modes of transportation. A spaceport on the coast, for example, could get funding for port facilities, while others could get funding for road and rail projects. Some spaceports have had success at the state level getting funding for projects. Cecil Spaceport, a former naval air station in Jacksonville, Florida, secured $13 million in grants last year from several state organizations, said Matt Bocchino, managing director of the spaceport. That funding will support new road and utility projects at the spaceport, which just completed a new air traffic control tower and mission control center. State funding, though, brings with it its own issues. A prime example: Spaceport America in New Mexico, where the state spent more than $200 million for a spaceport with Virgin Galactic as the anchor tenant. With Virgin’s extensive delays getting its 18-year-old suborbital spaceflight venture into commercial operations, some are getting restless. “We have a problem in New Mexico. We made a big investment and now we’re just saddled with this investment, and time keeps lagging on,” said Sen. George Muñoz, chairman of the finance committee of the New Mexico Senate, during a Jan. 27 hearing on the spaceport’s budget proposal. He pressed state officials at the hearing to find new sources of revenue, including renegotiating its lease agreement with Virgin Galactic, so that the spaceport no longer needs state funding. “We can no longer subsidize a $250 million infrastructure project,” he said. “It’s just getting old.” Despite having more than a dozen licensed spaceports, the vast majority of launches in the United States still take place from Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. That’s both an opportunity and a threat for new spaceports. The opportunity stems from the concerns about concentrating launch activity, including for national security missions, at just a couple sites. “There’s really a pretty vulnerable spaceport infrastructure out there,” Nield said. “Those places are known for hurricanes, wildfires and earthquakes. You could also have a launch pad accident.” There have also been concerns about congestion at Cape Canaveral in particular. Spaceport Camden, for example, has argued that it can provide better access to space for small launch vehicle companies than the Cape, which is dominated by launches from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. However, the Cape may be more accommodating to small launch vehicles and increased launch rates. Astra Space selected Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 46, operated by Space Florida, for a launch in February that will be its first outside of Alaska. The Kennedy Space Center in 2020 opened Launch Complex 48, a “clean pad” site for small launch vehicles that require little infrastructure. The Space Force is anticipating much greater launch activity at the Cape. A forecast from May 2021, published Jan. 5 in a Department of Defense Inspector General audit of range infrastructure, projected launches from the Eastern Range to increase to 121 in 2026, nearly four times the number of launches in 2021. Nearly all of that increase comes from commercial launches. Col. Mark Shoemaker, vice commander for operations of the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45, said at the Global Spaceport Alliance meeting that the range has been working with launch companies and the FAA on ways to maximize the capacity of the launch facilities there, including both the number of launches it can support as well as decreasing the time needed to schedule launches. “In the end, we are all working towards the same goal: maximizing throughput, maximizing mission success, maximizing opportunity for all actors on the range,” he said. “We’ve been successful the last two or three years as the rates have gone up.” Current efforts won’t work indefinitely, he cautioned. “At some point, within the current structures and the current institutions that we have, we’re going to hit a limit,” he said. “I don’t know when and where that limit is, and I’m not sure we’ll know we’ve hit it until it’s right in front of us, but we’re trying to understand what is.” The Space Force has range modernization plans, known as “Range of the Future,” to ensure it can accommodate that growth. That effort, though, worries some spaceports, fearing that Cape Canaveral will get federal funding that remains unavailable to them. “For those of you worried about money, we’re not asking for more money from appropriations,” said Col. James Horne, deputy director of launch and range operations for Space Systems Command at Patrick Space Force Base, Florida. “We’re using existing appropriations that we have traditionally leveraged to sustain that aging infrastructure to modernize it.” That could include public-private partnerships to fund infrastructure improvements. “We don’t think we’re competing with you,” he told Global Spaceport Alliance members. “As a matter of fact, I think it’s to our detriment if we do. We want to build a coalition of spaceports across the nation and the world, working together to really advance this industry.” David Buck, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who is now president of BRPH Mission Solutions, said he understands the concerns of other spaceports. “The Department of Defense will acknowledge they don’t have the answers and commercial industry has the answers,” he said. He predicted the Defense Department would eventually “get comfortable” with using other commercial spaceports. “I’m an optimist about the future,” he said but added that didn’t mean every emerging spaceport will be successful. “I think about half of the non-traditional ranges getting licenses will fail.” Spaceport Camden’s Howard is hoping to be in the half that succeeds despite the challenges it still faces. “We’re looking to a very bright future as we come online,” he said, including cooperating with other spaceports. “It’ll be a win-win for everybody.” This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
The Russian rocket engines that United Launch Alliance needs to complete the remaining launches of the Atlas 5 are stored in the United States. The company said the operation of the vehicle will not be affected by the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the Biden administration in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “As we manage the transition to the Vulcan launch system, all necessary RD-180 engines to execute the Atlas 5 fly-out are safely stored in our factory in Decatur, Alabama,” ULA spokesperson Jessica Rye said in a statement. The Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine powers the first stage of the Atlas 5 launch vehicle. Following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Congress directed the Pentagon to stop using launch vehicles powered by Russian engines and only allowed DoD to award contracts for Atlas 5 launches through 2022. ULA is transitioning to Vulcan Centaur — a new launch vehicle that will use the Blue Origin BE-4 engine made in the United States — but has contracts to launch about 25 more missions for government and commercial customers on the Atlas 5 between now and 2025. It’s still unclear if the latest sanctions announced by the Biden administration will restrict ULA from buying spare parts or obtaining technical support services from the RD-180 manufacturer NPO Energomash. “We have agreements for technical support and spares, but if that support is not available, we will still be able to safely and successfully fly out our Atlas program,” said Rye. ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno said the company has been flying these engines for many years and is not dependent on Energomash for technical expertise. “I have personal experience in flying other people’s rockets without their support, which informs my confidence,” Bruno tweeted Feb. 25. “We like to have a retainer in order to ask questions or do repairs if that were to come up. But we have a lot of experience and expertise here, so we can do without if necessary.” The RD-180 was put on Atlas “because the U.S. government asked us to,” Bruno noted . “They wanted to prevent Russian rocket scientists from going to North Korea and Iran after the Cold War. After Crimea in 2014, the U.S. government decided this was no longer a good idea. I came to ULA that summer and started Vulcan.” ULA on Feb. 15 announced an agreement with Milling Precision in Wichita, Kansas, to supply components for the Atlas 5 rocket. “We will continue to cultivate new supplier relationships to ensure we safely and successfully fly out the program,” Rye said. 
ESA is continuing work on the International Space Station and ExoMars programs in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but monitoring the situation, the agency’s director-general said Friday. “Notwithstanding the current conflict, civil space cooperation remains a bridge,” Josef Aschbacher tweeted . “ESA continues to work on all of its programmes, including on ISS and ExoMars launch campaign, in order to honor commitments with Member States and partners. We continue to monitor the evolving situation.” ExoMars 2022, involving the European-built Rosalind Franklin rover and a Roscosmos-made lander, is scheduled to launch on a Proton-M rocket from Baikonur in September. SpaceNews understands that for the time being, all ExoMars activities are proceeding in view of the launch of the mission with a window starting on 20 September. Any delay would likely mean the mission would miss a narrow launch window of a few weeks for launches to Mars and would again slip 26 months until the next opportunity. ESA is engaged in the multi-decade ISS program along with partners Russia, the United States and others. ESA currently has German astronaut Matthias Maurer on board with Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and NASA’s Mark Vande Hei, Kayla Barron, Thomas Marshburn and Raja Chari. Meanwhile a Soyuz rocket is scheduled to launch a new pair of Galileo GNSS satellites for the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) from Europe’s Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. Launch is currently set for the second quarter of 2022, with operations continuing as normal for the time being. The events in Ukraine are likely to have serious impacts on European civil cooperation with Russia, however. “The Crimea and Donbas wars from 2014 already put severe political stresses on Russia as a suitable partner in space,” Bleddyn Bowen, a lecturer in international relations and space policy at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, told SpaceNews . ”It looks like big cooperative projects with Russia in space might well be a thing of the past, unless European countries decide that they don’t mind Russia breaking the Ukrainian military, deposing the government, and installing a vassal regime. “Russia is not a partner in the Lunar Gateway and that seems like a headache that’s been avoided for the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada.” China and Russia are planning development of an International Lunar Research Station for the 2030s and have highlighted ESA and its member states as potentially valuable partners. In response to a question from Labour Member of Parliament Barry Gardiner about the implications of Russia’s invasion for the International Space Station in the House of Commons Thursday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it is hard to see how cooperation can continue as normal. “We will have to see what further downstream effects there are on collaboration of all kinds. I must say that hitherto I have been broadly in favor of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration. But in the current circumstances, it’s hard to see how even those can continue as normal.” Next, on top of these financial measures and in full concert with the United States and the EU, we will introduce new trade restrictions and stringent export controls similar to those that they in the US are implementing. We will bring forward new legislation to ban the export of all dual-use items to Russia, including a range of high-end and critical technological equipment and components in sectors including electronics, telecommunications and aerospace. The Prime Minister said in an opening statement during the Feb. 24 debate on Ukraine, Johnson, the UK government will, on top of financial measures and in full concert with the United States and the EU, “bring forward new legislation to ban the export of all dual-use items to Russia, including a range of high-end and critical technological equipment and components in sectors including electronics, telecommunications and aerospace.” A spokesperson for the UK Space Agency, which is involved in the Rosalind Franklin rover, said: “It is right for questions to be raised about future space cooperation with Russia following the illegal invasion of Ukraine. We are engaging regularly with our partners in the European Space Agency and monitoring the situation closely.” U.S. President Biden announced a range of sanctions Thursday in response to the invasion, noting that these would hit Russia’s aerospace industry . “We estimate that we will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, and it will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It will degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,” Biden said in a White House address outlining new sanctions. In a brief statement late Feb. 24, NASA said the new export restrictions would not affect its work with Roscosmos in operations of the International Space Station. “The new export control measures will continue to allow U.S.-Russia civil space cooperation,” the agency stated. “No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in orbit and ground station operations.” Launcher, a small launch vehicle developer, tweeted Friday that its staff at Dnipro in Ukraine had been relocated to a new European office in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the wake of the invasion. — Article updated at 10:07 a.m. Eastern with comment from UKSA.
NASA expects to roll out the Space Launch System rocket for the first time in mid-March for a dress rehearsal of a launch that could come as soon as May but more likely some time in the summer. NASA officials said Feb. 24 that workers had completed the last in a series of tests of the rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center and were now closing out work on the vehicle to prepare for rollout to Launch Complex 39B. That rollout is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Eastern March 17, Mike Bolger, Exploration Ground Systems program manager, said in a call with reporters. It will take about an hour for the vehicle and its mobile launch tower to move out of the VAB on a giant crawler-transporter vehicle, then 11 hours to the pad. SLS will spend about a month at the pad undergoing tests, highlighted by a tanking test and practice countdown called a wet dress rehearsal about two weeks after rollout. The core stage will be filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and then go through a practice countdown that will stop at T-9.34 seconds, just before the core stage’s four RS-25 engines would ignite during an actual launch. “We’re going to get very late in the count, purposefully, and demonstrate all the interfaces,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager. At the end of the wet dress rehearsal, the vehicle will roll back the VAB for final launch preparations. That includes resolving any issues found during the test as well as charging batteries on the Orion spacecraft and updating flight computer software on SLS. “There’s a fair amount of work still to go, but it’s all things I think we understand well, and we’ll look to turn around pretty quickly,” Bolger said. NASA expects that final work in the VAB to take about a month, although managers admitted some uncertainty in that schedule. “I wouldn’t want to say whether 30 days is conservative or not,” Bolger said. “I do acknowledge there’s a lot of work.” The agency doesn’t plan to set a launch date for the Artemis 1 mission until after the wet dress rehearsal. “We recognize that is a period of time that could be very challenging,” said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development. He did confirm, though, that a launch in April is no longer feasible. “We’re still evaluating the tail end of the May window,” he said, which runs from May 7 to 21. Future launch windows, governed by orbital mechanics and other mission constraints like a splashdown during daylight hours, are June 6 to 16 and June 29 to July 12, with a “cutout” of July 2 to 4 when a launch would not be possible. He added that he was unaware of any components of the vehicle that come from Russia or Ukraine and whose availability could this be affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “A lot of this is shuttle-heritage hardware,” he said, developed decades ago. The only major non-U.S. component is the service module for the Orion spacecraft, provided by the European Space Agency. Processing of future SLS launches should be faster as they work through first-time issues on this vehicle. “For every first flow of a major NASA mission, we’ve always recognized that we’re going to learn some things and it’s going to take longer than the follow-on flows,” Bolger said. “We’re pretty optimistic that the lessons learned that we’re collecting as we go through this are going to enable us to process these faster the second time and then even faster the third and the fourth time.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Capacity is the biggest constraint for Orbital Sidekick, the hyperspectral imaging startup that is acquiring data from Aurora, its first satellite launched in June. “There’s huge demand for dual-use satellite technology,” Daniel Katz, Orbital Sidekick CEO and co-founder told SpaceNews . “We are working to ramp up production and get hyperspectral data into the hands of customers.” San Francisco-based Orbital Sidekick is pleased with the performance of the Aurora sensor, which achieved its goal of outperforming NASA Hyperion hyperspectral sensor, Katz said. Hyperion is on the space agency’s Earth Observation-1 satellite launched in 2000. Orbital Sidekick plans to launch its six-satellite Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite constellation, known as GHOSt, later this year. While Aurora, like Hyperion, gathers hyperspectral imagery with a resolution of approximately 30 meters per pixel, the GHOSt constellation will “get down to 8 meter ground sample distance, which blows everything else out of the water,” Katz said. With capacity largely booked for the six GHOSt satellites, Orbital Sidekick is drafting plans to expand production, while hiring to nearly double its 33-person staff by the end of the year. In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s nonprofit investment arm, recently made a strategic investment in Orbital Sidekick, which already is backed by the AFVentures’s Strategic Financing program . In return, Orbital Sidekick has agreed to share data with In-Q-Tel government partners. Intelligence agencies increasingly are embracing a hybrid approach to Earth observation, gathering data from government sources and an array of commercial Earth-observation satellites . Still, Orbital Sidekick remains focused on commercial customers, including North American oil and gas pipeline operators . “For international expansion and imaging capacity in foreign regions, being able to have a solid base within the defense and intelligence community will be really important,” Katz said. The first two GHOSt satellites are equipped with sensors that are nearly identical to Aurora’s but are paired with much larger telescopes. The next four GHOSt satellites will feature “a slightly more advanced focal plane array” to achieve better performance, Katz said.
SAN FRANCISCO – SpaceLink announced plans Feb. 24 to establish an initial constellation of smaller satellites than previously planned, a move designed to slash the cost and speed up the rollout of initial data-relay services. “We’re inserting a set of smaller satellites into our constellation roadmap,” SpaceLink CEO Dave Bettinger told SpaceNews . “That will allow us to maintain the full capability of what we were launching before but with less capacity.” SpaceLink plans to spend $240 million to establish its initial constellation, compared with $750 million under its previous plan. The new plan also means the startup will begin offering service in early 2024 as opposed to mid-2024 as originally planned, according to a Feb. 24 news release from SpaceLink parent company Australia’s Electro Optic Systems Holdings. Under the terms of its FCC license, SpaceLink, must begin providing satellite communications service with satellites in medium Earth orbit by June 2024. With the large satellites the McLean, Virginia-based startup ordered from OHB Systems AG , there was some risk of missing the deadline. Under the new plan, “we’re more comfortable that we’ll make our FCC date,” said Tony Colucci, SpaceLink chief strategy and commercial officer. SpaceLink has not announced the manufacturer for its smaller satellites but has narrowed the choice to two vendors. Contracts for the satellites, which will be roughly half the size of the firm’s ultimate constellation of 1,000-kilogram spacecraft, are scheduled to be awarded in April, according to the news release. In spite of the change in its initial constellation, SpaceLink remains focused on its goal of establishing a constellation in medium Earth orbit to relay data to and from spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Every two to three years, SpaceLink plans to expand capacity with new generations of satellites, Colucci said. SpaceLink continues to work with OHB in an extended engineering phase to incorporate changes in the larger SpaceLink satellites, which like the initial constellation will feature both optical and RF communications links . SpaceLink executives anticipate strong demand for communications services from an array of potential customers including commercial Earth observation satellite constellations. “We are coming in at a good time because these business models have been proven and now the companies are searching for other ways to get their data to the ground,” Bettinger said. “We’ll be showing up exactly at the right time.” In addition, commercial human spaceflight missions are becoming more frequent. Those flights will need ongoing connectivity to operate safely, Bettinger added. When SpaceLink parent company, EOS, acquired Silicon Valley startup Audacy in 2020 , the Australian firm gained approximately 21 GHz of valuable radio frequency spectrum. “Given increasing congestion and demand for advanced satellite services, it is imperative to satisfy the FCC milestone date and preserve the access to the wide bandwidth conferred by the spectrum rights,” the news release said.
CHANTILLY, Va. — If Russia or any other actor were to intentionally interfere with U.S. satellites, it would be difficult to identify the aggressor, said the top commander of U.S. military space operations. “The challenge in the space domain is determining intent,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said Feb. 23. Dickinson spoke at the National Security Space Association’s Defense and Intelligence Space Conference via video conference from Colorado Springs. U.S. Space Command is a military combatant command in charge of operations in the space domain. Dickinson did not comment on reports that Russia might take aim at U.S. or allied satellites in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. A DoD official who briefed reporters Feb. 24 said no U.S. satellites have been attacked so far. Dickinson warned that the U.S. military and intelligence community need better tools to identify the source of nefarious activity in orbit. A key focus of U.S. Space Command is to protect satellite systems that provide communications, missile warning and GPS navigation. The destruction of a satellite with a missile strike — as Russia did Nov. 15 in an anti-satellite test — can be attributed right away. But other types of weapons that are deployed from satellites in space would be far more difficult to track and identify with existing sensors. Defense officials have warned, for example, about Russian spacecraft maneuvering toward an American satellite. “If a competitor satellite is near an allied satellite or an asset, it is extremely important that we understand not just distance and orbital characteristics, but why it is there? What exactly is its objective?” Dickinson said. “Many Americans understand the significance of the crisis in Ukraine. Fewer fully understand that sometimes reckless and potentially dangerous activities also are occurring in the space domain,” he said. If a U.S. satellite were attacked, U.S. Space Command would be responsible to recommend ways to respond. “Knowing what is happening is insufficient, knowing why it’s happening better informs the options we’re able to present to the Secretary [of Defense] and the President,” said Dickinson. One of Space Command’s top priorities is to acquire better tools to “understand, characterize and describe what’s happening in the space domain … and ultimately, it’s for me to understand and provide recommendations to the national level of leadership. So that’s probably one of the biggest problems or issues I’m working through right now.” U.S. Space Command operates a vast network of ground-based and space-based surveillance sensors that monitor outer space. But the data collected by these sensors often is not enough to answer important questions and provide context, said Dickinson. “While the system itself is an important part of the overall picture, it is useless without solid intelligence.” Dickinson said U.S. Space Command is strengthening partnerships with allied countries and with the private sector to share intelligence about the space domain. “Given the challenges that we see from both Russia and China, we need all of our allies and partners and we’re really looking to expand beyond the Five Eye partners,” he said. The Five Eyes include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Space Command plans to add liaison officers from France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea. Italy and Spain. Space Command also gets intelligence from a group of commercial satellite operators known as the “commercial integration cell.” Members include Intelsat, SES Government Solutions, Inmarsat, Eutelsat, Maxar, Viasat, XTAR, Iridium Communications and Hughes Network Systems.
AE Industrial Partners is buying the part of Firefly Aerospace currently owned by Noosphere Venture Partners, which previously announced it was being forced by the federal government to sell its stake in the launch vehicle developer. The companies announced Feb. 24 that AE Industrial Partners (AEI) was taking a “significant stake” in Firefly by purchasing it from Noosphere. The companies did not disclose the value of the deal or other terms. Noosphere, a fund run by Ukrainian-born investor Max Polyakov, announced Dec. 29 it had retained an investment bank to sell its stake in Firefly at the request of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews foreign investment in American companies. The sale to AEI appears to contradict a Facebook post by Polyakov Feb. 16 where he claimed he was selling his stake in Firefly to co-founder Tom Markusic for one dollar. “I am giving up for 1 usd consideration all my 58% stake in Firefly to my co-founder and partner Tom,” he wrote. “Dear CFIUS, Air Force and 23 agencies of USA who betrayed me and judge me in all your actions for past 15 months. I hope now you are happy.” Firefly did not respond to a request for comment at the time about the post. AEI has invested in several space companies. It created Redwire Space in 2020 through acquisitions of Adcole Maryland Aerospace, Deep Space Systems and Made In Space . Redwire has since acquired several other companies and went public through a SPAC merger in September 2021. Beyond its role establishing Redwire, AEI invested in several other companies in the industry. It participated in a concurrent funding round called a PIPE for small launch vehicle company Virgin Orbit as part of a SPAC merger announced in August and in another PIPE as part of Terran Orbital’s SPAC merger announced in October. It also participated in Sierra Space’s $1.4 billion Series A funding round led by General Atlantic, Coatue and Moore Strategic Ventures in November. In the statement, AEI noted its portfolio companies have done extensive work in the national security space sector. “AEI believes that leveraging this experience will be a critical advantage as Firefly looks to secure additional U.S. federal government contracts,” it stated. The companies did not disclose when they expect the deal to close, noting it was subject to regulatory approvals. Firefly said in December, when Noosphere announced the sale, that it was halting preparations at Vandenberg Space Force Base for a second launch of its Alpha small launch vehicle. The inaugural Alpha launch failed to reach orbit in September when one of the rocket’s four first-stage engines shut down shortly after liftoff. Firefly, though, has continued work at its Texas headquarters and test site. The company announced Feb. 17 that it had completed acceptance testing for the upper stage of the second Alpha rocket after previously completing testing of the first stage. “Now we’re really working to get back to Vandenberg and fly again,” Markusic said in a video update.
This is a developing story. Follow @SpaceNews_Inc for the latest and check back for updates. WASHINGTON — Russia’s space program won’t be shielded from U.S. sanctions in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday afternoon. “We estimate that we will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, and it will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It will degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,” Biden said in a White House address outlining new sanctions. A White House fact sheet released Feb. 24 did not elaborate on specific sanctions or restrictions for Russia’s space program. The administration said it is imposing “Russia-wide denial of exports of sensitive technology, primarily targeting the Russian defense, aviation, and maritime sectors to cut off Russia’s access to cutting-edge technology.” Examples of such technologies include semiconductors, telecommunication, encryption security, lasers, sensors, navigation, avionics and maritime technologies. “These severe and sustained controls will cut off Russia’s access to cutting edge technology,” the fact sheet stated. In a brief statement late Feb. 24, NASA said the new export restrictions would not affect its work with its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, of operations of the International Space Station. “The new export control measures will continue to allow U.S.-Russia civil space cooperation,” the agency stated. “No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in orbit and ground station operations.” In London, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said civil space cooperation with Russia could be impacted. “We will have to see what further downstream effects there are on collaboration of all kinds. I must say that hitherto I have been broadly in favor of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration. But in the current circumstances, it’s hard to see how even those can continue as normal.” Johnson was responding to a question asked in Parliament about the implications of Russia’s invasion for cooperation involving the International Space Station. Biden’s statement prompted a sharp rebuke from Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Roscosmos and former deputy prime minister of Russia. In a series Russian language tweets , he noted that the U.S. had already blocked imports of radiation-hardened electronics and made it difficult for Western nations to procure commercial launches on Russian rockets. “We are ready to act here, too,” he said regarding launch restrictions. Rogozin also raised questions about the future of the International Space Station. “Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?” he asked, noting that the station’s orbit is maintained by thruster firings on the Russian segment of the station, primarily by Progress cargo spacecraft. “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?” While the station depends on the Russian segment for propulsion, the U.S. segment provides key capabilities, like power, that the Russian segment lacks. Moreover, a Cygnus cargo spacecraft that arrived at the station Feb. 21 will conduct a test in April of reboosting the station as an alternative to Progress spacecraft. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has affected the operations of one U.S.-based launch vehicle developer. Launcher said Feb. 24 that it relocated 10 engineers in a Ukraine-based office, along with their immediate families, to Sofia, Bulgaria . It is also supporting six employees who elected to remain in Ukraine. Those engineers have been working on the design of the engine Launcher is developing for its Launcher Light small launch vehicle. Launcher added that it has no investment ties to either Russia or Ukraine. Computer translation of Dmitry Rogozin’s Feb. 24 tweet thread: “Biden said the new sanctions would affect the Russian space program. OK. It remains to find out the details: 1. Do you want to block our access to radiation-resistant space microelectronics? So you already did it quite officially in 2014. As you noticed, we, nevertheless, continue to make our own spacecraft. And we will do them by expanding the production of the necessary components and devices at home. “2. Do you want to ban all countries from launching their spacecraft on the most reliable Russian rockets in the world? This is how you are already doing it and are planning to finally destroy the world market of space competition from January 1, 2023 by imposing sanctions on our launch vehicles. We are aware. This is also not news. We are ready to act here too. “Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS? This is how you already do it by limiting exchanges between our cosmonaut and astronaut training centers. Or do you want to manage the ISS yourself? Maybe President Biden is off topic, so explain to him that the correction of the station’s orbit, its avoidance of dangerous rendezvous with space ..garbage, with which your talented businessmen have polluted the near-Earth orbit, is produced exclusively by the engines of the Russian Progress MS cargo ships. If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or…Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them? “Gentlemen, when planning sanctions, check those who generate them for illness Alzheimer’s. Just in case. To prevent your sanctions from falling on your head. And not only in a figurative sense. Therefore, for the time being, as a partner, I suggest that you do not behave like an irresponsible gamer, disavow the statement about “Alzheimer’s sanctions”. Friendly advice” 

Updated 7:20 p.m. Eastern with Globalstar 2021 financial results. WASHINGTON — Globalstar has selected MDA Ltd. and Rocket Lab to supply a set of satellites to replenish its constellation, funded by a mystery customer. Globalstar said Feb. 24 it awarded a contract valued at $327 million to MDA to build 17 satellites intended to extend the life of the company’s existing satellite constellation, which provides messaging and internet-of-things services. The contract includes an option for up to nine additional satellites at $11.4 million each. MDA, in turn, awarded a $143 million contract to Rocket Lab to provide the satellite buses. That contract includes options for additional satellites as well as satellite dispensers and launch integration. “The combination of these vendors offered us the best overall balance of innovation, technical capability, schedule reliability and cost,” David Kagan, chief executive of Globalstar, said in a statement. “We look forward to beginning the process of bending metal and readying the new satellites for launch beginning in approximately three years.” Globalstar will contract for the launch of those satellites separately, with the expectation all will be launched by the end of 2025. In its statement, Globalstar referred to a “potential customer” as a key reason to procure the new satellites. “Globalstar is acquiring the satellites to provide continuous satellite services to the potential customer under the Terms Agreement described in the Company’s Annual Reports, as well as services to Globalstar’s current and future customers,” the company said. That unnamed customer will reimburse 95% of the capital expenditures associated with the new satellites as well as interest costs for Globalstar’s financing of the system. Globalstar said it expects to have financing in place for the satellites by August and has deferred initial payments to MDA at 0% interest until Aug. 16. In its 2020 annual report , Globalstar said it entered into an agreement, called the Terms Agreement, in February 2020 with an unnamed potential customer. Under that agreement, that customer would pay for nonrecurring engineering services “in connection with the assessment of a potential service utilizing certain of our assets and capacity,” and work on terms for development of operation of that service. The report doesn’t elaborate on the service in question or identify the customer. Globalstar released its fourth quarter and full year earnings after the markets closed Feb. 24. The company reported revenue of $124.3 million for 2021, down 3% from 2020, and a net loss of $112.6 million, nearly 3% greater than 2020. Globalstar did not disclose new information about the identity of the potential customer mentioned in the Terms Agreement, but said that customer had provided $111.4 million in advance payments “to be recognized into revenue as we perform under the contract.” Much of the industry speculation regarding Globalstar’s mystery customer has focused on Apple. There were reports last fall that the latest version of Apple’s iPhone would include a satellite connectivity option, with Globalstar providing that service. However, Apple made no mention of a satellite service when it announced the iPhone 13 line in September 2021. Globalstar is also facing competition in providing satellite connectivity to smartphones. Lynk is working on a smallsat constellation to provide services, starting with messaging, to conventional smartphones, having recently tested that capability in the United States and several other countries . AST SpaceMobile is developing its own satellite constellation to provide services to mobile phones, raising $462 million in a SPAC merger last April to fund work on that system . MDA said in a statement it will assemble and test the Globalstar satellites in a new facility in Montreal. “Combining our deep expertise with new partners like Rocket Lab to bring exciting capability to the rapidly growing LEO constellation market further strengthens our position in the global satellite systems market,” Mike Greenley, chief executive of MDA, said in a statement. Rocket Lab, which will manufacture the buses, will leverage its growing vertical integration by using solar panels, structures, reaction wheels and software from companies it has acquired in the last two years. “With this contract Rocket Lab is executing on its strategy to go beyond launch and lead the new space economy by delivering complete mission solutions spanning spacecraft manufacture, satellite subsystems, flight software, ground operations and launch,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a company statement.
NASA’s plans to shift from the International Space Station to commercial space stations may force one key partner to rethink how it cooperates in low Earth orbit. Speaking at a panel on space diplomacy organized by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute Feb. 23, Sylvie Espinasse, head of the European Space Agency’s Washington office, said the current arrangements between ISS partners to barter resources won’t work well on future commercial stations in low Earth orbit. “ESA-NASA cooperation on the ISS is based on non-exchange of funds and barter of goods and services between the partners,” she said. “This allows ESA to use its asset in orbit, the Columbus module, and to fly its European astronauts.” Once NASA shifts to commercial stations, though, “ESA will probably not be in a position to buy commercial services from U.S. providers for its research activities in LEO or to fly its astronauts,” she warned. “This will probably not be acceptable for our member states.” Buying services from U.S. companies, she explained, would contradict an ESA mandate to support Europe’s space industry. ESA doesn’t have a formal plan for operations in LEO after the ISS is retired in 2030 but Espinasse said there were several possible options if the agency can’t buy services directly from American companies. One would be for NASA to be an intermediary, buying services from commercial stations and then bartering with ESA as it does today on the ISS. “NASA becomes a broker between ESA and U.S. providers,” she said. “But I don’t think this kind of solution can be a long-term solution. It’s too complex.” A long-term solution, she said, needs to involve some common interest among the partners. “In the case of Europe and ESA, we will have to find our own way to low Earth orbit with our industry,” she said. That could involve a “fully European” solution for a commercial station or industrial partnerships that include American and European companies that jointly operate a station. An example of such a partnership she cited is cooperation between Northrop Grumman and Thales Alenia Space on the Cygnus spacecraft, developed by Northrop but using major components built by Thales. “This could be beneficial for European industry, participating in these consortia, and may be acceptable for our member states.” Notably, Northrop is one of three companies that won NASA Commercial LEO Destination (CLD) awards in December , proposing a station that leverages its work on the Cygnus spacecraft. NASA’s own ISS transition plan , published in January, envisioned a role for current ISS partners on commercial space stations but offered few details about how future arrangements would work. “Each Partner is currently working to identify its needs in LEO through and beyond the ISS, and all have expressed interest in the expansion of commercial uses of LEO,” the document states. “It is NASA’s intention to ensure continued collaboration with Partners on a U.S. CLD through government-to-government, government- to-industry, or industry-to-industry arrangements.” “NASA is evaluating the capabilities and desires of the existing ISS Partnership, as well as new entrants to the space field, to partner in continuing LEO operations post-ISS,” the report added, including talks with partners on their “interest in capabilities on U.S. CLDs to include their potential requirements in the Agency’s forward planning.” ESA, meanwhile, has started what Espinasse called “an internal reflection on post-ISS and how to fulfill European needs in LEO.” At a Feb. 16 European space summit, ESA announced it would create a “high-level advisory group” to examine options for European human spaceflight , with an interim report due before ESA’s next ministerial meeting in November. “We will see where this leads us in the coming months,” she said. She added that the ISS partnership model should work well on exploration efforts like the NASA-led lunar Gateway, where ESA, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japanese space agency JAXA are all contributing components in exchange for flying astronauts to the moon. “There, the model of cooperation with the partners — CSA, JAXA and ESA — is quite similar to the one on the ISS,” she said. Lunar surface operations, she added, could enable additional partnership opportunities for those agencies and others. “I do not see one model of cooperation in the future, something as monolithic as the ISS,” she concluded, “but rather different models tailored on the common objectives, requirements and priorities of the various partners.”
American and European officials said Feb. 23 that space cooperation with Russia remains unaffected even as that country continues to threaten a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. During a panel discussion about space diplomacy organized by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, U.S. State Department officials said cooperation between NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos on the International Space Station had not been altered, at least so far, by the Ukraine crisis. “As the world follows the political activities related to Russia and Ukraine, NASA continues to safely conduct research on board the ISS, and cooperation continues with Roscosmos and our other international partners,” said Valda Vikmanis-Keller, director of the Office of Space Affairs in the State Department. She said there were no plans to change upcoming major activities, including the launch of a Soyuz spacecraft with three Russian cosmonauts on March 18, followed by the March 30 return of the Soyuz spacecraft currently on the station with two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Training of NASA astronauts in Russia continues, with up to five scheduled to go to Russia in mid-March, while three Russian cosmonauts train at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Despite what’s going on geopolitically, safe, secure operations and cooperation on the ISS continues,” she said. Later in the panel, Sylvie Espinasse, head of the Washington office of the European Space Agency, said European cooperation with Russia in space also remains unaffected. “We are closely monitoring what is happening, but for now activities are ongoing as planned,” she said. That includes not just cooperation on the ISS but also between ESA and Roscosmos on the ExoMars mission, scheduled to launch in late September on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The ExoMars launch campaign will formally start next month with the arrival of European personnel at Baikonur to start integration of the Mars lander spacecraft. Nicolas Maubert, counselor for space at the French Embassy in Washington, added the French space agency CNES still has its Moscow office open and is planning an event there this week to mark the agency’s 60th anniversary. Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Roscosmos, said in a Feb. 23 tweet that he has a good working relationship with NASA, even while criticizing the U.S. government in general. “We greatly value our professional relationship with NASA, but as a Russian and a citizen of Russia, I am completely unhappy with the sometimes openly hostile U.S. policy towards my country,” he wrote. That included, he said in another tweet , sanctions imposed against Russian space companies by the United States. “Who came up with the idea to announce U.S. sanctions a year ago against our leading space companies responsible for international cooperation on the ISS? I will answer you myself: the U.S. government did it.” Rogozin was referring to the decision by the Commerce Department in late 2020 to add Russia’s Central Research Institute of Machine Building, or TsNIIMash, and the Progress Rocket and Space Centre to what’s known as the Military End User list, restricting exports by U.S. companies to them. The two companies were among more than 100 Chinese and Russian firms added to that list. Rogozin himself is also sanctioned because of his role as deputy prime minister of Russia in 2014, during Russia’s previous conflict with Ukraine. “From the Russian military space perspective, we have been focused over a number of years on using sanctions or export controls to try to slow and delay their space programs,” said Eric Desautels, director of the Office of Emerging Security Challenges and Defense Policy in the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, during the panel discussion. That includes efforts by Russia to develop “counterspace systems” that threaten U.S. space assets. “That’s why we’ve been very much focused on slowing and delaying that type of cooperation to make sure they’re not getting parts from the United States or from U.S. allies to help them build those systems,” he said.
CHANTILLY, Va. — Claire Leon, a former Boeing executive who previously led the national security space launch program, is now in charge of a new office that will coordinate military space programs across multiple organizations. Leon was named director of the Space Systems Command’s Space Systems Integration Office. Hiring Leon to lead this new office is a “huge win for SSC,” Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein said Feb. 23 at the National Security Space Association’s Defense and Intelligence Space Conference. Guetlein, commander of Space Systems Command, is a former deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office and has been in charge of SSC since August. The command is a massive organization with an $11 billion annual budget and nearly 10,000 personnel. A key goal of SSC is to accelerate the pace of procurement programs so technologies get “into the hands of warfighters” sooner rather than later, Guetlein said. One of the challenges is that space programs have stakeholders across multiple agencies in the Space Force, the Air Force and the Department of Defense. SSC also wants to integrate allied nations’ space technologies into U.S. programs. What is needed is “unity of effort” so space programs move in the same direction and don’t get bogged down in analysis, reviews and bureaucratic in-fighting, said Guetlein. Leon’s job will require coordinating projects not just within SSC, but across the entire space enterprise, he said. “Her job is to do horizontal integration across systems to make sure that we’re actually delivering capabilities” rather than just hardware. The systems integration office will have a broad portfolio that is still being defined, Guetlein said. “I think we’re going to get an enormous amount of lift at that organization. That’s something we have never had in the past, somebody looking across the horizon.” An effort to improve coordination across space organizations started two years ago when the Space Force stood up a “program integration council” that includes the Space Systems Command, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Missile Defense Agency, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Space Development Agency and the Space Warfighting Analysis Center. “Unity of effort was a foreign concept to us at the time,” said Guetlein, noting that military organizations have a hard time with horizontal integration. “We are classically trained. The military is classically trained on unity of command,” he said. “I can look up above me to understand who’s in charge.” The problem in acquisitions is that they are spread across multiple organizational boundaries. The coordination done via the council “has been going extremely well,” he said. “We meet once a month. We have already been talking about data standards.” The first major initiative handled by the council is how to integrate missile warning and missile tracking satellites overseen by different agencies. “I have never seen greater collaboration amongst those organizations in my career prior to standing up a program integration council,” said Guetlein. “We’ve got to keep that dialogue going,” he added. “When we talk about architectures, it really comes down to how do I integrate, how do I network? How do I better get data from point A to point B, and make maximum use of that data?” ‘Getting after the threat’ Guetlein said he is pushing the message across the SSC workforce that their focus has to be on “getting after the threat” posed by Russia and China. These nations’ anti-satellite weapons are a “massive threat to our way of life,” he said. “And we are behind the power curve in delivering capability” to counter those threats. Because of the lengthy DoD budget cycles and requirements approval process, new capabilities can’t happen overnight, so Guetlein set a 2026 goal for SSC to deliver technologies that will make U.S. satellites more resilient to attacks. “The only way we’re gonna get this done by 2026 is by maximizing the capability that we already have today,” said Guetlein. “That means we got to squeeze every bit of juice out of the systems that we have today,” he said. “That means I’m going to be asking for a heck of a lot more heroics from our sustainers. I’m going to be asking for commercial services. I’m going to be looking at our allies to say hey, what can you bring to the fight? How can I better integrate what I already have?”
CHANTILLY, Va. — As the Ukraine crisis escalates, U.S. National Reconnaissance Office Director Christopher Scolese warned that Russia’s military could target satellites to disrupt communications and GPS services. “I think we’re seeing pretty clearly that Russia is committed to doing what they want to do in Ukraine, and they want to win,” Scolese said Feb. 23 at the National Security Space Association’s Defense and Intelligence Space Conference. “So I think it’s fair to assume that, to the extent that they can, and to the extent that they feel it won’t extend the conflict out of their control, that they will extend it into space,” Scolese said. The NRO operates U.S. government-owned spy satellites, but increasingly a lot of imagery and intelligence is collected and distributed by commercial satellite operators like Maxar, Planet, BlackSky, and others, so any attempt to disrupt the United States’ ability to gather intelligence could impact private and public assets. Scolese did not comment specifically on what actions the Russians might take, but he said it’s easy to imagine based on past behavior. “They are already doing GPS jamming, as an example.” Scolese said both government and commercial satellites systems are potential targets. “I would tell everybody that the important thing is to go off and ensure that your systems are secure and that you’re watching them very closely because we know that the Russians are effective cyber actors.” “And, again, it’s hard to say how far their reach is going to go in order to achieve their objectives. But it’s better to be prepared than surprised,” he added. For years, the U.S. military has worried that Russia and China will try to jam U.S. GPS and communications satellites during a conflict. In addition to denying GPS through electronic jamming attacks, Russia could also target U.S. military GPS users with falsified PNT data, a technique known as spoofing. A GPS outage could wreak havoc across all military activities involving aircraft, ships, munitions, land vehicles and ground troops. “In an active military conflict, even brief denials and spoofing of PNT might make a difference if well-timed with other operations,” said a RAND Corp. report.
A rocket stage expected to impact the moon is still most likely to belong to China’s 2014 moon mission, despite a denial from the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The response from a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson may have confused the mission in question, apparently referring to the 2020 “Chang’e-5 mission,” instead of the 2014 mission, Chang’e-5 T1. The second stage of the Long March 5 rocket which launched the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission reentered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean a week after launch. The fate of the rocket upper stage from the 2014 mission is murkier. Space tracking data from the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron (18SPCS) suggests the upper stage (international designator 2014-065B) of the Long March 3C rocket which launched Chang’e-5 T1 reentered the atmosphere in 2015, apparently backing China’s denial. However the reported orbital decay of the object may instead be an extrapolation of a single trajectory data point soon after launch, and therefore not reliable. Bill Gray, the astronomer who first noted that a rocket stage was due to impact the moon back in January, believes this may be the case. If the reentry date is a prediction a year ahead of time then it that would be like trying to predict weather a year ahead of time, says Gray. “It could be that 18SPCS did track it [2014-065B] over the following year. But if they had, they probably would have posted an updated trajectory publicly. They’re usually quite reliable about that,” Gray said in an updated post following Monday’s Foreign Ministry comment. 18SPCS did not respond to a request for comment by press time. Neither the China National Space Administration (CNSA) nor the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) responded to emails from SpaceNews requesting clarification. U.S. Space Force tracking is focused on lower orbits, relying mainly on radar for tracking data. Asteroid observers, using optical telescopes, are however understood to have tracked the object several times since, allowing Gray to state that the object would hit the moon in March. The European Space Agency’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), which also has its own tracking capabilities and space object database, does not list the 2,800-kilogram rocket stage 2014-065B as having reentered the atmosphere. Once again however, ESA tracking focuses on low, medium and geosynchronous orbits. CNSA established its Space Debris Monitoring and Application Center in 2015, at the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but does not keep a public space object database. Gray, who runs the Project Pluto webpages and related software, is one of few who track deep space debris. Independent spectral analysis by students at the University of Arizona also adds to the evidence that the object’s identity most likely belongs to China’s Chang’e-5 T1 mission. “We took a spectrum and compared it with Chinese and SpaceX rockets of similar types, and it matches the Chinese rocket,” said associate professor Vishnu Reddy, who co-leads the University of Arizona’s Space Domain Awareness lab. “This is the best match, and we have the best possible evidence at this point.” The interest in the object began in January when Bill Gray reported that a space object previously discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey and given the temporary name WE0913A was not a rock but likely a rocket stage and would impact the moon on March 4. It was initially thought to be a second stage from the February 2015 SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of the DSCOVR climate observatory, but then found to be more likely a fit with 2014-065B from China’s Chang’e-5 T1 mission. This led to the denial from China. “According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the rocket related to the Chang’e-5 mission entered into Earth’s atmosphere and completely burned up,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Feb. 21, in response to a question from the Associated Press, which specified the “lunar mission launched from China in 2014.” The Chang’e-5 mission, apparently referenced by Wang, launched in November 2020, collecting 1.7 kilograms of fresh lunar samples from the moon and delivering them to Earth in December 2020. Chang’e-5 T1 was a 2014 trial mission for the more ambitious Chang’e-5 lunar sample-return mission. It successfully tested a high-velocity spacecraft “skip reentry” after returning from the moon, verifying a reentry capsule could safely deliver lunar rocks to Earth. The rocket upper stage which inserted Chang’e-5 T1 into lunar transfer orbit has apparently been in a chaotic orbit , transferring between the Earth and moon, ever since. The Long March 3C rocket upper stage also carried the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission (4M) for Luxembourg. The 14-kilogram payload was designed to transmit signals during its journey to the moon. It is thought to be no longer active. The issue is expected to become more important in coming years as both the United States and a number of partners and China and Russia are planning respective Artemis and International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) programs to establish a long term presence on the moon. “The upcoming lunar impact illustrates well the need for a comprehensive regulatory regime in space, not only for the economically crucial orbits around Earth but also applying to the Moon,” Holger Krag, Head of ESA’s Space Safety Programme, said in a recent ESA release .
The U.S. Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $341 million contract to develop a radar site to track active satellites and debris in high orbits. The Space Systems Command’s Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC) awarded the contract Feb. 22 for the project known as Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC). The radar system to be developed by Northrop Grumman will be located in the Indo-Pacific region. It would be one of three planned ground-based radar sites to be installed in dispersed locations around the world. The company has to complete a prototype by September 2025. The DARC program was started by the U.S. Air Force in 2017. The Air Force spent $1.5 billion on the Space Fence space surveillance radar to track objects in low Earth orbit. DARC will track objects in geosynchronous orbit. The three DARC sites are projected to cost $1 billion. “DARC Site 1 will provide 24/7 all-weather capabilities that increases the ability to detect, track, identify and characterize objects in deep space,” said Space Systems Command programs leader Lt. Col. Kelly Greiner. DARC will be more advanced than current radar and optical sensors, said Greiner. It will “fill critical gaps and significantly enhance current space domain awareness capabilities.” “The DARC program will field a resilient ground-based radar providing our nation with significantly enhanced space domain awareness for geostationary orbit,” said Pablo Pezzimenti, Northrop Grumman’s vice president of integrated national systems. “While current ground-based systems operate at night and can be impacted by weather conditions, DARC will provide an all-weather, 24/7 capability to monitor the highly dynamic and rapidly evolving geosynchronous orbital environment critical to national and global security.”
The Commerce Department is seeking information on commercial sources of space situational awareness (SSA) data to augment its own space traffic management capabilities. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a request for information (RFI) Feb. 16 seeking details about commercial data for tracking space objects. NOAA is interested in observations of debris and satellites, trajectory information and conjunction assessments. Responses are due to NOAA March 21. NOAA says it is looking for commercial data that can fill gaps in existing government data provided primarily by the U.S. Space Force. “The ability to track debris and other objects that are not currently well-tracked and the capability to track objects in the southern hemisphere are of particular interest,” the RFI stated. “Also of interest is the capability to task observation assets to refine orbit estimates of high-priority objects on an ad-hoc basis and the capability to track calibration satellites.” NOAA is interested in data available now through 2030. The RFI is the precursor to potential future purchases of commercial SSA data to support the open architecture data repository (OADR), which is intended to combine data from several sources to handle space traffic management responsibilities that the Commerce Department will take over from the Defense Department in 2024. NOAA showed a prototype of the OADR earlier this month . The RFI is one part of a greater outreach by NOAA with the commercial sector on the OADR. “Starting in the very near term are going to be workshops and interaction with the commercial sector and all of our partners in more open domains. You can see where we’re going and where we can learn and improve,” said Stephen Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services, in a Feb. 16 presentation at the 24th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference. One issue will be how the OADR will interact with commercial space traffic management services. Space Policy Directive 3, which assigned the Commerce Department responsibility for civil space traffic management in 2018, instructed the government to provide basic data and services, including conjunction and reentry warnings, “free of direct user fees” while also allowing commercial services. Volz said the OADR would provide “a basic set of space situational awareness functions and capabilities” for operators. “I say a basic set because there’s never an end to what you can do with more information and more analysis. We do not see that as the role of NOAA or the DoC to provide everything to everyone, but to provide a certain minimum and growing capability standard that everyone can rely on.” One question, though, is exactly what will be considered a basic service offered by the government. “It’s actually very hard” to differentiate between basic and advanced services, said Kevin O’Connell, former director of the Office of Space Commerce, during a separate conference panel Feb. 17. “The economics wind up being difficult when you think about the service that the United States is going to give away for free and those that are going be created by industry as a purely commercial service.” It’s in the interest of global leadership of the United States to make some space safety data freely available to all, he said, but “we don’t want to get in the way of companies that want to go above and beyond that.” He said more work is needed to define parameters such as the precision of the free basic service to provide a starting point upon which companies can build commercial products. New director coming soon The Office of Space Commerce, located within NOAA, is delegated those civil space traffic management responsibilities assigned to the Commerce Department. However, the office has been without a full-time director since O’Connell departed at the end of the Trump administration in January 2021. Volz said at the conference that should soon change. “We have selected a candidate for the political appointee to lead the Office of Space Commerce,” he said, not identifying the person under consideration. “It’s in vetting within the administration right now.” The director of the office is a political appointee, and thus traditionally leaves at the end of a presidential administration. To provide some continuity for the office, Volz said the office will also hire a deputy director as a Senior Executive Service position. “That will provide some sustainability and continuation from one administration to the next,” he said. Volz added the office has developed a five-year budget to support getting the OADR into initial operations in 2024 and full operations in 2025. That budget will be included in the upcoming fiscal year 2023 budget request along with more details about how the OADR will become an operational system.
SAN FRANCISCO – Lynk Global announced contracts Feb. 23 with mobile network operators serving Pacific and Caribbean Island nations in the wake of the volcanic eruption that decimated Tonga’s communications infrastructure. Falls Church, Virginia-based Lynk revealed commercial contracts with mobile network operators, including Telikom PNG in Papua New Guinea and bmobile in the Solomon Islands, that provide coverage for seven island nations. “We continue to add carriers as launch partners and anticipate more in the coming months,” Lynk CEO Charles Miller said in a statement. “The recent Tonga disaster shows just how important connectivity is for people’s health and safety during a disaster.” While islands are particularly vulnerable to communications outages caused by volcanoes and tsunamis, people around the world face network outages stemming from “hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes and blizzards,” Miller said. Lynk plans to roll out its commercial “cell-towers-in-space” service later this year. In early February, the startup announced its fifth satellite established connections with thousands of unmodified smartphones, tablets, internet-of-things devices and vehicles. Lynk’s goal is to ensure that “everyone, everywhere in the world can access mobile connectivity, no matter what happens,” Miller said. Islands pose particular challenges for mobile connectivity providers, including remote locations where cell tower construction is expensive, exposure to the harsh maritime environment and populations dispersed across large geographies. Papua New Guinea’s nine million residents, for example, are spread across a land mass of 453,000 square kilometers. More than 80 percent of them have limited or no mobile connectivity from terrestrial cell infrastructure. The same is true for more than 75 percent of the residents of the Solomon Islands, according to the Lynk news release. “Mobile phone connectivity across land and sea continues to be a major priority for Papua New Guinea and our neighbor the Solomon Islands,” Amos Tepi, Telikom PNG acting CEO, said in a statement. The government of Papua New Guinea is re-evaluating “the infrastructure needed to keep our people, including our fishermen, safe and connected,” Tepi said. “The option to bypass mobile base stations is increasingly relevant to our communities especially in far flung locations.” In addition to providing ongoing connectivity for mobile devices, Lynk plans to offer an emergency alert service. If a tsunami is anticipated, for example, Lynk can send alerts to mobile phones to warn people to move to higher ground, Miller said at the recent SmallSat Symposium.
Virgin Galactic executives said Feb. 22 that they remain on schedule to begin commercial human suborbital missions before the end of the year but acknowledged it will take several years for the company to become profitable. In an earnings call after the release of Virgin Galactic’s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 financial results, executives said upgrades to the company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, VSS Unity, and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, remained on schedule to allow them to start commercial flights in the fourth quarter. “We remain on track and on schedule to commence commercial service later this year,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said on the call. “We are making excellent progress on the enhancements to our mothership Eve and our spaceship Unity.” The company announced in October that it started a long-term maintenance period for both vehicles earlier than expected after finding “a possible reduction in the strength margins of certain materials used to modify specific joints” on those vehicles. The company postponed a mission for the Italian Air Force scheduled for that fall and start maintenance work scheduled to last until the third quarter of 2022. Colglazier stuck to that schedule in the call. Work on the aircraft, Eve, is “progressing towards completion in the third quarter,” he said, with Unity also expected to complete its maintenance that quarter. The upgrades to various components of both vehicles are intended to improve their reliability and increase their flight rates. At the same time, the company is completing work on its next spaceplane, VSS Imagine, the first and perhaps only vehicle in the Spaceship III line announced last March . Colglazier said flight tests of Imagine will begin later this year, with a goal of beginning revenue flights in the first quarter of 2023, initially carrying research payloads. It will start flying customers later in the year, operating alongside Unity from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic expects Unity to be able to fly once per month when it emerges from its maintenance period, while Imagine is designed to fly twice per month. “We’re very excited about delivering this level of capacity from our current ships,” he said. That flight rate, though, won’t be sufficient to meet Virgin Galactic’s demand for flights. The company is betting its future on a future “Delta-class” spaceplane and next-generation carrier aircraft that the company announced last year. The company has disclosed few technical details about either, but Colglazier said the Delta-class vehicles are designed to be produced in volume and be capable of flying once a week. He said the company is shifting its manufacturing approach for those vehicles from its past approach of building everything in-house. Virgin Galactic now plans to work with “tier one” aerospace companies to build major subassemblies of those vehicles, with final integration to take place at a new Virgin Galactic facility to be ready by the end of 2023. “We expect this will provide us with a cost-effective and highly efficient manufacturing model for building out our Delta fleet and future motherships,” he said, with a goal of being able to produce up to six spaceplanes per year once in full operation. The company needs those additional spaceplanes to serve a growing backlog of customers. Colglazier said the company has a goal of having 1,000 customers by the time commercial flights resume later this year. Virgin Galactic has sold approximately 750 seats, he said, of which 150 came after the company reopened ticket sales last August first to those on a waiting list and, as of Feb. 15, to the general public at $450,000. The rest are from earlier ticket sales, some of which date back more than 15 years. The Delta-class spaceplanes won’t be able to meet that demand for some time, though. Doug Ahrens, chief financial officer of Virgin Galactic, said on the call that the first Delta-class vehicles should be ready to start commercial flights of research payloads in late 2025 and passenger flights in 2026. Asked later in the call if the company expected to have flown all its projected initial 1,000 customers by the time the Delta vehicles enter service, Ahrens and Colglazer declined to give a direct answer. “We’ve probably given you enough data out there to track this,” Colglazier said. “You can start to do some of that math on where the numbers will play.” With Unity capable of carrying four customers and flying once a month, while Imagine carrying six people and flying twice a month, Virgin Galactic will be able to fly 16 customers a month, or 192 people a year, if all flights are devoted to its private astronaut customers. That would take the company more than five years to work through the backlog if the Delta vehicles are not ready. The limited revenue that will come from those flights, along with the expenses associated with developing the Delta-class vehicles and new aircraft, will keep the company from being profitable for several years. Ahrens said that while the company was not providing multi-year guidance, he expected positive free cash flow by 2026. That is significantly later than what the company expected a few years ago. In a September 2019 investor presentation , Virgin Galactic projected having earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $12 million in 2021, based on plans then to start commercial operations in mid-2020. The company reported Feb. 22 having an adjusted EBITDA of –$244.8 million in 2021. Chairman departs That presentation was part of Virgin Galactic’s merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Social Capital Hedosophia, that took Virgin public in October 2019. The founder of Social Capital Hedosophia, Chamath Palihapitiya, became chairman of the board of the merged company. Virgin announced Feb. 18 that Palihapitiya has resigned from the board, effective immediately, “to focus on other public company board commitments.” Evan Lovell, a member of the board and chief investment officer of the Virgin Group, took over as board chairman on an interim basis. Colglazer offered no additional insights on Palihapitiya’s departure but suggested, despite the lack of advance notice, he knew Palihapitiya might leave. “We’ve known the time would come when Chamath would move on to new initiatives,” he said. “I’d like to thank Chamath for his vision and his groundbreaking work in transitioning Virgin Galactic to a public company.” Colglazer said Virgin has retained a firm to search for a new chairman, but did not give a schedule for selecting that person. Public company woes Virgin Galactic’s life as a public company has been a rocky one. The company’s stock closed down nearly 7% at $7.82 a share Feb. 22, near a 52-week low. The company released its financial results shortly after the markets closed, and the stock rebounded slightly in after-hours trading. Virgin was the forerunner of a wave of SPAC deals that have taken nearly a dozen space companies public, most in the last year. The shares in many of those companies have fallen significantly after going public. That decline is illustrated in a stock index by SpaceWorks Engineering, an Atlanta-based space engineering and consulting company. The SpaceWorks NewSpace Index (NSI) currently includes 13 public companies involved in commercial spaceflight, most of which have gone public through SPACs. The NSI started at 100 in January 2021, its value normalized to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500. As of Feb. 18, the Dow had a normalized value of 111.7, meaning $100 invested in it in January 2021 would be worth $111.70 now. The S&P 500 had a value of 117.5. The NSI, by contrast, was at 29, its value declining steadily over the last several months. “These negative trends can be attributed to a variety of reasons depending on the individual company, but we recognize that these are mostly immature companies just getting their products developed and to the market,” Hayden Magill, the SpaceWorks analyst who developed the index, said in a statement. “It will be interesting to observe their market performance over the next months and years.”
SAN FRANCISCO – Washington state’s space economy is booming. Between 2018 and 2021, the state long associated with aviation thanks to Boeing noted a 61 percent jump in economic activity tied to the space sector, according to a report released Feb. 22 by the Puget Sound Regional Council. In 2021, Washington’s space economy generated $4.6 billion compared with $1.8 billion in 2018. Space-related jobs, meanwhile, surged to 13,103 from 6,221. “While the development of launch vehicles and related activities by Blue Origin has been one source of growth, the advancement of satellite manufacturing and satellite-related services” by SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and LeoStella “has also been a major source of new regional employment,” according to “Washington State’s Space Economy: 2022 Update.” Washington is home to Blue Origin, an Aerojet Rocketdyne engine plant, and smaller companies like BlackSky, Kymeta, RBC Signals, Spaceflight Inc., Starfish Space, Stoke Space Technologies, Tethers Unlimited and Xplore. “Washington is poised to become a major global space hub,” said Stan Shull, principal of consulting firm Alliance Velocity. In fact, 38 percent of the 4,852 operational satellites in orbit on Jan. 1 were produced in Washington state, Shull noted in a Feb. 22 LinkedIn post . SpaceX manufactures Starlink broadband satellites in Redmond. LeoStella, a joint venture of Thales Alena Space and Spaceflight Inc., builds satellites in Tukwila. Without major NASA or military space facilities, Washington “from a space standpoint is uniquely entrepreneurial,” said Sean McClinton, RBC Signals business operations manager and founder of Space Entrepreneurs, a group with nearly 1,000-members based in Seattle. “That’s where I see the real potential.” To keep the state’s space economy growing, the Puget Sound Regional Council suggests the region focus on entrepreneurship, workforce development and venture capital. Already, there are more job openings that space sector employees available to fill them. As a result, space companies recruit from software and aviation firms as well as local schools. The University of Washington is taking a multidisciplinary approach to space-related research, education, training and outreach. Only by breaking down academic silos can the university create a digital space hub that brings together researchers, policymakers and organizations focused on space-related science, technology, engineering, law and policy, said Saadia Pekkanen, co-founder and director of the University of Washington Space Policy and Research Center.
U.S. officials are in talks with international users of the Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) communications satellites about a cost-sharing agreement to fund the launch of the new WGS-11+. “The Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Space Force conducted exploratory discussions with current WGS partners and two new partners to meet the costs associated with launch and ground integration of WGS 11+ throughout its acquisition strategy development,” Keith Anderson, business and financial manager for military satcom international partners, told SpaceNews Feb. 22 in a statement. Anderson’s office is under the U.S. Space Systems Command, in Los Angeles. The command is buying WGS-11+, currently being developed by Boeing and projected to launch in 2024 . It is the 11th satellite of the WGS constellation. WGS satellites provide broadband communications to the U.S. military and allies. The Pentagon never intended to buy WGS-11+ but Congress directed it. The Air Force’s budget request in 2018 did not include any funding for WGS satellites beyond the 10 already ordered from Boeing, leading Congress to add $600 million for two new satellites. The Air Force said the funding was only enough for one satellite but it would have significantly more capacity. It awarded Boeing a $605 million contract in April 2019 to design and build WGS-11+. The congressional add-on did not include money to launch the satellite — which could cost $150 millio n — so the Space Force is seeking contributions from international partners that use the WGS satellites. WGS partner nations include Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Norway. The U.S. also has a separate bilateral agreement with Australia. Anderson said Australia is not a signatory on the multilateral WGS 11+ agreement, which pays for launch costs, but is still a partner in the overall WGS program. Two new partner nations are in discussions to join the coalition but their identities have not yet been disclosed. Partners in the past have contributed funding for ground integration of WGS satellites and other services to ensure access to the constellation. “At this time, all currently signed partners have committed to providing additional funding to the WGS program, subject to the successful conclusion of an international agreement,” said Anderson. The $600 million appropriated by Congress “allowed Space Systems Command to procure a robust satellite vehicle, roughly doubling the capacity of the earlier WGS-10,” Anderson said. “There was enthusiastic interest from international partners to collaborate on WGS 11+, allowing partners to provide additional funding for the program, including some launch costs.” The launch will be procured through the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program.
The Defense Department announced Feb. 22 that the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have signed a joint vision document that calls for greater cooperation to prevent conflicts in space. The Combined Space Operations (CSpO) Vision 2031 states that the seven nations will “generate and improve cooperation, coordination, and interoperability opportunities to sustain freedom of action in space, optimize resources, enhance mission assurance and resilience, and prevent conflict.” DoD in a statement said the CSpO is an initiative to “address the overarching need to encourage responsible use of space, recognizing challenges to space sustainability, threats presented by technological advances, and the increasingly comprehensive and aggressive counterspace programs of other nation states.” The allies agreed to follow guiding principles such as freedom of use of space, responsible and sustainable use of space, partnering while recognizing sovereignty, and upholding international law. “Militaries have an important role in contributing to international efforts to ensure freedom of access to and use of space,” says the document. “The world is reliant on space-based systems — activities in space have consequences across the spectrum of human activity.” The document is being released in the wake of Russia’s anti-satellite missile test in November that destroyed one of its own satellites, creating a field of at least 1,500 trackable pieces of debris in low orbit, threatening space operations and human spaceflight. The Vision 2031 document notes that CSpO participants pursue space activities that “endeavor to minimize the creation of long-lived space debris.” DoD said CSpO representatives met in December, “reaffirming their nations’ support to the vision, including the intent to prevent conflicts extending to or originating in space and to hold accountable those who threaten the safety of the space environment and the space assets of others.” Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, said Vision 2031 shows that the United States and allies continue to evolve their thinking on International cooperation in space. “CSpO came out of the 2010 Schriever wargame, where they exercised the concept of a multinational command center for space,” Weeden said. “It sounds simple, but it was quite a revolutionary concept for the DoD at the time. Since then, they’ve gradually but persistently been working towards putting it into place, not as a single physical location but rather as a set of principles and operating practices for linking together their individual national space operations centers.” Weeden also said it’s notable is that this started as a Five Eyes effort but now formally includes France and Germany, which is “another big step for the U.S.” The language in this new document, Weeden said, is “intended to reinforce the messaging on establishing norms of behavior you’re seeing from the U.S. government and its allies in other places.”
A cubesat mission to test a lunar orbit critical to NASA’s Artemis program is in the final stages of preparations for a launch this spring. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, spacecraft is a cubesat mission that will test operations in the near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon that will be used by Artemis missions, including the lunar Gateway. NASA selected Colorado-based Advanced Space to develop the mission in 2019. The spacecraft is nearly ready for launch. “We are at a really critical stage for the mission. The hardware is all together and is going into testing,” Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Advanced Space, said during a panel at the 24th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 17. Advanced Space said Feb. 18 that it completed the fourth in a series of operational readiness tests for CAPSTONE, simulating a week of operations in lunar orbit. That included tests of one aspect of the mission, crosslinks with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to determine its position without the assistance of ground stations. “It’s basically a peer-to-peer GPS-like system for the moon,” said Cheetham. The spacecraft itself, built by Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, is what he called a “12U XL” cubesat, a 12-unit cubesat with a radio tower on top that extends its size. It will launch on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket using a version of that company’s Photon satellite bus to send the stage on a lunar trajectory. CAPSTONE will not go directly to the moon but instead follow a “ballistic lunar transfer” that will take it out as far as 1.5 million kilometers before returning into lunar orbit. That transfer, which will take about three months to complete, it designed to save propellant and make the mission feasible using a cubesat launched on a small rocket. “It’s a key enabling technology for CAPSTONE,” Cheetham said of that trajectory. “We trade about three months of transfer time for a significant reduction of the amount of fuel we have to bring.” Besides the positioning demonstration, CAPSTONE will help better understand operations in the near-rectilinear halo orbit, which has not been previously used. “This really gets to us operating in this NRHO,” he said, including the dynamics of an orbit influenced by both the Earth and moon. “It’s a capability we see extending not just for CAPSTONE and Gateway but also for a lot of future lunar missions.” While CAPSTONE is a NASA-funded mission, the spacecraft itself is owned and operated by Advanced Space. “We’re operating it and providing the data products that help inform Gateway and other programs,” he said. That included, he said, getting a payload approval from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation for a commercial launch of CAPSTONE. Neither NASA nor Advanced Space have announced a specific launch date for the mission. In October, NASA announced the mission was scheduled to launch in March 2022 after previously scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2021. Rocket Lab said at the time that lockdowns in New Zealand, where the Electron launch will take place, contributed to the delay. NASA still lists a March launch for CAPSTONE, but the mission is likely to lift off later in the spring. “We are delivering this spring NASA’s CAPSTONE mission,” said Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of Rocket Lab, during a separate presentation at the conference Feb. 16. “We’re going to be racing Artemis 1 to the pad this spring.” Artemis 1, the first launch of the Space Launch System, is expected to fly no earlier than April.
SpaceX launched a set of Starlink satellites Feb. 21 after more than three-fourths of the satellites from the previous launch were lost because of a solar storm. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 9:44 a.m. Eastern after a one-day delay because of recovery weather. The Falcon 9 upper stage deployed its payload of 46 Starlink satellites 62 minutes after liftoff, although confirmation of a successful deployment didn’t come until about 20 minutes later because of a lack of ground station coverage. The rocket’s first stage completed it eleventh flight with a landing on a droneship near the Bahamas. The stage had previously launched the Demo-2 commercial crew mission, CRS-21 cargo mission, the Anasis-2 satellite, two Transporter rideshare missions and five Starlink missions. The booster is the second in SpaceX’s fleet to have performed 11 launches. The launch was the seventh Falcon 9 mission this year, keeping the company on a pace for approximately 50 launches this year. This was the fourth Starlink launch this year, with the other launches carrying the CSG-2 radar imaging satellite for Italy, the Transporter-3 rideshare mission and a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. This was the first launch since a Feb. 3 mission that placed 49 Starlink satellites into orbit. However, the company announced five days later that up to 40 of them would reenter because of a solar storm that increased atmospheric drag at the low altitudes the satellites were placed into, keeping their electric propulsion systems from raising their orbits. Ultimately 38 of the 49 satellites reentered. SpaceX took a different approach with this mission. The previous launch deployed the satellites after a single burn of the upper stage, placing the satellites into orbit with a perigee of 210 kilometers. This flight conducted a second burn to place the satellites into a near circular orbit at an altitude of about 330 kilometers. The higher altitude reduces the atmospheric drag, but may also explain why this launch carried three fewer satellites than previous recent missions. SpaceX did not discuss the loss of most of the previous set of Starlink satellites in its launch webcast, focusing attention instead on recent milestones like an update on development of its Starship vehicle and the Polaris program of private crewed missions on Crew Dragon and Starship . Another set of Starlink satellites is scheduled to launch as soon as Feb. 25 on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
SpaceLogistics, a satellite-servicing firm owned by Northrop Grumman, announced Feb. 21 it plans to send to orbit a new servicing vehicle in 2024 on a SpaceX rocket. This will be the debut of the company’s Mission Robotic Vehicle , a servicing spacecraft equipped with a robotic arm that will install propulsion jet packs on dying satellites. The first customer for the MRV is Optus, Australia’s largest satellite operator. SpaceLogistics vice president Joseph Anderson told SpaceNews that the MRV was built with many of the same technologies used in the company’s Mission Extension Vehicles. Two MEVs are in orbit currently providing station-keeping services for two Intelsat geostationary satellites that were running low on fuel. The MRV’s robotic arm was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA in 2020 signed an agreement with Northrop Grumman allowing the company to use the robotic payload on the MRV in exchange for access to technology demonstrations and program data. The MRV and three propulsion jet packs — known as Mission Extension Pods — are now being assembled at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Dulles, Virginia. Anderson said all three pods will launch in 2024 with the MRV — one will be installed on an Optus satellite and the other two are for other customers that have not yet been announced. The MEPs are propulsion devices designed to extend the service life of a 2,000 kilogram satellite by six years. The mission in 2024 will launch the MRV — a 3,000 kilogram spacecraft — and three MEPs, each about 400 kilograms. The MRV and MEPs will be released from the launch vehicle, independently deploy and raise themselves to a geostationary orbit using solar electric propulsion. Once in orbit each MEP is captured by the MRV and stowed for transport to the client satellite. The MRV rendezvous and docks with the client to install the MEP, which operates like an auxiliary propulsion device and uses its own thrusters to maneuver the client vehicle. Then the MRV detaches itself and moves on to grab another MEP for the next customer. The MRV is designed to stay in orbit for 10 years. Anderson said the company expects to install as many as 30 propulsion pods over the life of the MRV. “Our manifest for the MRV is full through mid 2026,” he said. Besides Optus, five other customers have signed term sheets to purchase mission extension pods. The company is not disclosing the price of its MRV services. It’s a different service than the MEV, Anderson explained. The MEP is sold as a product. “Part of that purchase price includes the installation in orbit, and we use our mission robotic vehicle to do that installation.” SpaceLogistics owns the robotic vehicle but the mission extension pod is owned and operated by the client. The MRV uses the same sensor technologies, the same rendezvous and proximity operations concepts developed for the MEV, said Anderson. “We removed the docking mechanism and replaced it with the robotic payload from DARPA,” he added. “And the way we attach the MEP to the client vehicle with a docking mechanism, that also has direct heritage and from the mission extension vehicle.” The MEV and MRV will service satellites in geosynchronous orbit. SpaceLogistics has no plans currently to provide services in low Earth orbit, although it might consider opportunities in debris removal. “Certainly there’s a significant debris issue in low Earth orbit that one day will need to be addressed,” said Anderson. “Everything we’re doing today for satellite servicing in GEO can be directly applied to debris mitigation in low Earth orbit or to other services there, if and when customers decide to pay for those types of services.”
Rocket debris set to impact the moon in March does not originate from the 2014 Chang’e-5 T1 mission, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims. “According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the rocket related to the Chang’e-5 mission entered into Earth’s atmosphere and completely burned up,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Feb. 21. Space tracking data from the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron suggests that 2014-065B—the international designator for the rocket stage in question—reentered the atmosphere in October 2015, a year after launch, apparently backing China’s claim. The claim adds more mystery to an event that has captured widespread attention since it was first reported that an object would impact the moon. Astronomer Bill Gray reported Jan. 21 that an object designated WE0913A was on a trajectory that would collide with the moon March 4. Gray initially associated the debris with the February 2015 Falcon 9 launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). Gray revised the identification of WE0913A Feb. 12 however, suggesting a better fit to be the upper stage of a Long March 3C rocket stage that launched China’s Chang’e-5 T1 in 2014, an object cataloged with the international designator 2014-065B. “In a sense, this remains ‘circumstantial’ evidence,” Gray wrote, adding a caveat. The Washington Post later reported a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies which said the object is likely the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 booster launched in 2014. Independent spectral analysis by students at the University of Arizona also claimed to have confirmed the object’s identity as most likely belonging to China’s mission. The new development, if confirmed, highlights the challenges of tracking objects in deep space. Gray notes in his reports on the object that tracking deep space junk hasn’t been “all that major of a concern,” explaining that U.S. Space Force tracking is focused on lower orbits. Radar, which is mostly used, can track objects as small as around 10 centimeters in lower orbits, but telescopes are required for tracking even large objects when further away from Earth. The event also underlines the importance of sustainability in space operations going forward. Both the United States and a number of partners and China and Russia are planning respective Artemis and International Lunar Research Station ( ILRS ) programs to establish a long term presence on the moon. Chang’e-5 T1 was a trial mission for a more ambitious lunar sample-return mission. It successfully tested a high-velocity spacecraft “skip reentry” after returning from the moon, verifying a reentry capsule could safely deliver lunar rocks to Earth. The Long March 3C rocket upper stage for the mission also carried the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission for Luxembourg. The full Chang’e-5 mission launched in November 2020, collecting 1.7 kilograms of fresh lunar samples from the moon and delivering them to Earth in December 2020. The upper stage from that mission, launched by a Long March 5, reentered over the Pacific Ocean a week after launch. An element of possible confusion remains over which mission Wang referred to on Monday in response to the question about the impending lunar impact from the Associated Press. Both Chinese and English transcripts and Chinese language video of the press conference refer to the “Chang’e-5 mission,” rather than the Chang’e-5 T1 mission specifically. The question had specified the 2014 mission. “China’s aerospace endeavors are always in keeping with international law. We are committed to earnestly safeguarding the long-term sustainability of outer space activities and are ready to have extensive exchanges and cooperation with all sides,” Wang concluded. The service module for the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission is currently testing out a previously untried, esoteric orbit around the moon following an extended mission to deep space. — Article updated at 4:01 p.m. Feb. 21 to include note on which mission was cited during the Monday press conference.
The European Union is rolling out a new space traffic management initiative to build up its abilities in the field while working with both the United States and the United Nations. The European Commission released Feb. 15 a “joint communication” outlining the E.U.’s approach to space traffic management (STM), calling for increasing E.U. abilities to track objects as well as help develop international regulations for responsible, safe operations in space. “We intend to propose a European approach to the management of space traffic, covering operational and regulatory needs, but also to enable us to continue international cooperation,” said Thierry Breton, E.U. commissioner for the internal market, at a Feb. 15 press conference primarily devoted to a proposed secure connectivity constellation and defense programs. Part of that proposal in the joint communication involves improving the capabilities of the E.U. Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) program. That program provides conjunction notices to European satellite operators but relies primarily on the U.S. catalog of space objects, augmented with some European data. The E.U. is proposing to build up its own space situational awareness resources, including establishing tracking assets outside of continental Europe to provide better coverage. The proposal also calls on developing automated collision-avoidance technologies and “quantum technology” to reduce the risk of collisions. The document sets a goal of mid-2023 to “elaborate an architecture analysis” for the upgrades to the E.U. SST system and 2025 to start deployment of new tracking assets. European officials had previously recommended developing more space tracking capabilities. “We are very grateful that we get collision warnings from our U.S. partners, but it would be a lot nicer if we would not have to rely on others,” said Rolf Densing, director of operations for the European Space Agency, during a panel session of the European Space Conference in January. “We still rely today on U.S. data,” acknowledged Pascal Faucher, chairman of the E.U. SST consortium, during the same panel. He said European assets were able to track only about 300 of the more than 1,500 fragments from the November Russian antisatellite weapon demonstration. “It shows us that we need to invest more in our capabilities.” The joint communication does not specify funding for the SST upgrades but does state that 75% of the money would go to European companies. It suggests that the E.U.’s Cassini initiative for supporting emerging space companies could play a role in the effort. “There is more that the commercial sector can do,” said Chiara Manfletti, chief operating officer of Neuraspace, on the conference panel. That Portuguese company applies artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to space situational awareness data to provide more accurate notices of potential collisions. “It’s easy to say that the public sector has to put more money into it, but there’s an ecosystem that needs to be created around here as well.” Faucher said he was interested in working more closely with European companies on STM capabilities, such as buying commercial data and developing new services. “There are a number of new domains where we could rely on commercial operators,” he said. Improving European space tracking capabilities is only one part of the proposal. The joint communication also calls for development of European “guidelines and standards” for STM, but was vague about what those guidelines and standards would encompass. That would lead to an E.U. legislative proposal for STM rules by the end of 2024. Those rules could potentially apply to satellite operators outside of Europe. The proposed rules “should also guarantee that the EU operators do not suffer from distortion of competition by operators established outside the EU benefiting from less stringent standards,” the document states, perhaps “by imposing equal treatment to EU operators and to any satellite operator intending to provide services within the EU.” Another aspect of the proposal seeks to develop multinational agreements on STM, primarily through the U.N. That includes having the E.U. “engage with the UN to identify or help create specific bodies for STM with a view to implementing concrete STM solutions at global level.” The E.U., though, also seeks bilateral cooperation on STM, such as “privileged” discussions with the United States. “The US is the most advanced actor upon STM, having invested billions” of dollars on space situational awareness capabilities, the document states. “While the EU first needs to develop its own STM approach, it must do so in close cooperation with the US.” One former U.S. official offered a mixed assessment of the E.U.’s STM plans. “On the one hand, it’s very much another klaxon bell that points to the fact that this is such an important problem,” said Kevin O’Connell, former director of the Office of Space Commerce, during a session of the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 17. He saw as a strength its support for commercial STM capabilities. “On the other hand, there’s also a quest to be the world leader in standards and also a quest to put the ultimate ownership of this at the U.N.,” he said. “It’s not something we would agree with.” His skepticism about the U.N., he said, is based on the slow pace of progress that has been further slowed down by Russia, who forced the U.N. to delay the first meeting of a new open-ended working group on norms of behavior in space from mid-February to at least early May. “I think we have to look to the private sector” for developing those rules of the road in space, he said, comparing it to the development of maritime rules. “The private sector led with the development of practical rules of the road that ultimately became codified.”
Michigan colleges and universities offer extensive instruction in aerospace research and engineering. After college, though, many graduates leave the state for jobs in California, Florida and Texas. “We’re looking at building an entire ecosystem of value that supports growth and the retention of that talent that’s being trained here,” said Gavin Brown, executive director of the Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association. The Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association is working to build Michigan’s space sector through projects like Space Enabled Connectivity for Advanced Mobility or SECAM. SECAM brings together public, private and academic organizations working on satellite and terrestrial technologies related to secure 5G communications networks. Among the beneficiaries of these global communications networks will be autonomous cars developed by Michigan’s automotive industry. As part of SECAM, Michigan is securing funding for the Michigan Center of Excellence, a campus with office space and facilities for technology research, development, testing and evaluation. The SECAM campus is designed to attract organizations focused on various technologies from advanced manufacturing to artificial intelligence, cyber security, quantum and edge computing. “Other parts of the country are focused on bits and pieces of this,” Brown said. “I think the real value comes from the entire ecosystem: engineering and prototyping to production.” In December, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a $1 billion package of investments and tax incentives to help the state bring in critical industries. SECAM and the other Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association initiatives could qualify for those incentives as well as for federal funding from the Commerce, Education and Energy Departments. The Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association also is working with Midwestern research institutions, WrightPatterson Air Force Base and the Air Force Research Laboratory to secure funding for the proposed Mid-America Hypersonic Suborbital Test Range initiative. Through the Michigan Launch Initiative, the Michigan Aerospace Manufacturing Association leads a public-private partnership focused on identifying and establishing sites for horizontal and vertical satellite launches as well as a command and control center for satellite operations. This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Terran Orbital, which is going public this quarter by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, expects to break ground this year on a 660,000-square-foot facility billed as the world’s largest. The state’s incentive package is likewise large, but the payoff could be huge: approximately 2,100 new jobs by the end of 2025. “A lot of people are offering things like tax credits, which to a startup really means nothing,” said Marc Bell, Terran Orbital co-founder and CEO. “What Florida did was offer us a real financing package.” Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, is a heavyweight in the competition for space sector jobs. Since it was established in 2006 to chart the Space Coast’s post-Space Shuttle future as a hub of commercial, civil and military space activity, Space Florida has helped facilitate “well over” $2 billion of investments across the state, said Dale Ketcham, Space Florida vice president for government and external relations. In recent years, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Airbus OneWeb Satellites, Made In Space and others have established or expanded employment and facilities in Florida. One of Space Florida’s most popular incentives for attracting businesses is conduit financing, where companies raise capital through tax-exempt municipal bonds to pay for property or infrastructure. Space Florida’s playbook also includes synthetic leases that can be recorded in financial accounts as an expense rather than debt, enabling companies to spread large expenditures over multiple years. These sophisticated structures have existed for many years, but it “has only been in the last 10-15 years that we have had the opportunity to apply them to manufacturing and assembly facilities,” Ketcham said. While some companies have considered moving to Florida and ended up elsewhere, Ketcham said no one has yet decided to leave the state after investing significant capital. Space Florida works to retain companies by focusing on talent recruitment and development, Ketcham said. “If we have the talent available and a strong academic and industrial capacity, the marketplace will continue to find Florida a compelling location.” By 2030, Space Florida aims to have facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions to position the state for emerging space opportunities, including off-planet manufacturing, energy production and tourism. “A lofty goal, no doubt,” Ketcham said. “But when we look back on how far and how fast we have come since the devastating impact of the Shuttle retirement, we are confident and aggressive about the future for Florida.” This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket launched a Cygnus cargo spacecraft carrying several tons of cargo for the International Space Station Feb. 19. The Antares 230+ rocket lifted off on schedule at 12:40 p.m. Eastern from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, on the NG-17 mission. The two-stage rocket placed the Cygnus spacecraft into orbit nearly nine minutes later. The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the station early Feb. 21 and be berthed by the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm. The Cygnus spacecraft, named by Northrop the S.S. Piers Sellers after the late NASA astronaut, is carrying nearly 3,800 kilograms of cargo for the station. That includes 1,352 kilograms of crew supplies, 1,308 kilograms of vehicle hardware, 896 kilograms of science investigations and smaller amounts of spacewalk equipment and computer resources. The vehicle hardware includes a “mod kit” to support the future installation of another set of new solar arrays on the station that will be delivered on a Dragon cargo spacecraft, as well as equipment to allow the deployment of trash from Nanoracks’ Bishop airlock on the station. Research payloads include an experiment to study how tumor cells respond to a drug treatment and tests of a new Japanese lithium-ion battery designed to be safer and operate over a wider range of temperatures and in vacuum. Northrop has made changes to Cygnus to enable it to reboost the station. “We’ve optimized the Cygnus configuration to remove some secondary structural elements to maximize the cargo load and also allow for full fuel load that enables a new operational capability,” said Steve Krein, vice president for civil and commercial space at Northrop Grumman Tactical Space Systems, during a Feb. 18 media briefing. With a new gimbaled engine, Cygnus will be able to reboost the station’s orbit while berthed, tasks currently handled by thrusters on the Russian segment of the station or docked Progress cargo spacecraft. Krein said current plans call for a firing in April that would change the station’s velocity by 0.5 meters per second. Cygnus is scheduled to remain at the station for about 100 days, with an unberthing in late May. Antares geopolitics The launch took place amid rising tensions in Eastern Europe as Russia massed troops near the border with Ukraine. President Joe Biden said Feb. 18 that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine “in the coming days” and target its capital, Kyiv. An invasion and reactions to it could pose long-term issues for the Antares rocket. The rocket’s first stage is built in Ukraine by Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Building plant, and is powered by an RD-181 engine from Russia’s NPO Energomash. “We’re obviously monitoring the situation and hopefully it can be resolved,” said Kurt Eberly, director of space launch programs for Northrop Grumman Launch and Missile Defense Systems, at the Feb. 18 briefing about the launch. The company already had all the components needed for the next two Antares launches, scheduled for August and early 2023. “The best mitigation we can have is to be buying ahead,” he said. “Hopefully, that will tide us over until these tensions can subside and we can be back to normal operating procedure.” A 2014 Antares launch failure led Orbital ATK — later acquired by Northrop Grumman — to use United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket for two Cygnus missions in 2015 and 2016 while working to return Antares to flight. That would not be an option this time if Antares is unavailable as ULA has previously stated that it has sold all its remaining Atlas vehicles as it prepares to introduce the Vulcan rocket. Cargo contract status NG-17 is the sixth mission under Northrop’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract with NASA. That contract currently runs through the NG-19 mission in early 2023. NASA is in the process of extending its CRS2 contracts with both Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, at the Feb. 18 briefing. He declined to offer details about those extensions because of the ongoing procurement but said it would include missions through 2026. “We’re buying this a little bit a yard at a time or so, working with the different providers,” he said. “My hope is that in the next month or so we can get some more public information out.” That extension would not apply to Sierra Space, which has yet to fly the first of its CRS2 missions as it continues to develop its Dream Chaser vehicle. Montalbano said NASA expected the first Dream Chaser cargo mission in late 2022 or early 2023. Speaking at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 16, Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, said the first launch was now expected in the first quarter of 2023. She did not state if that schedule is paced by work on the Dream Chaser itself or the ULA Vulcan rocket that will launch it. NASA does not currently plan to hold a new competition for commercial cargo contracts. The agency released Feb. 3 a procurement document formally known as a “justification for other than full and open competition” regarding plans to extend the current CRS2 contracts. That document concluded that there are no other “certified visiting vehicles in the current marketplace for providing cargo resupply to the ISS.” As part of a market survey in 2021, NASA did receive capability statements from three other companies that proposed offering cargo services to the station. One was from Boeing, which unsuccessfully bid on the original CRS2 contract using a cargo version of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle. The NASA document, which redacted specific details about the proposals, stated that Starliner’s capability to deliver pressurized cargo to the station was “well below” the current contract requirement of 2,500 kilograms per mission. It added that redesign work on Starliner to carry cargo would also be required. NASA also received capability statements from two small launch vehicle developers, Astra Space and Firefly Aerospace. NASA concluded Astra’s cargo capacity was also well below the CRS2 contract requirement, and that the company had not started development of the cargo vehicle. Firefly could meet the cargo requirement using a medium-life rocket called Beta. That vehicle, though, just started development and had a projected first launch no earlier than mid-2024, NASA noted.
At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, city officials in Brownsville, Texas, anticipated double-digit declines in sales and property tax revenues. To their surprise, residential property values, sales tax collections and hotel tax revenues have continued to climb. Much of the credit goes to SpaceX. The Hawthorne, California-based rocket builder has been steadily expanding the workforce at its nearby Boca Chica launch site for the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster. SpaceX started ramping up activities at Boca Chica beach in 2016. “Since then, Brownsville has attracted “the interest of different industries and sectors that we thought would not have an interest in our community,” said Josh Mejia, CEO of Brownsville Community Improvement Corp. “Things like new space technologies, aerospace, tech companies. All of these industries want to be close to the big fish in the pond.” In addition, people are moving from California and other parts of Texas to establish businesses in Brownsville. SpaceX’s growing presence “has exponentially increased the entrepreneur activity that we have seen in our community,” Mejia said. “We’re talking about impacts and benefits that we will probably not see until 10-15 years from now.” Brownsville is welcoming new companies by extending its broadband infrastructure and working with the state to prepare workers to meet the needs of its new businesses. The Brownsville Community Improvement Corp. also is talking with venture capital firms about creating startup accelerator programs and encouraging development of speculative buildings that could house manufacturing or assembly plants. Still, navigating all these changes in a short time span poses challenges for Brownsville. “Just like every great thing, there’s always going to be some negativity associated with it,” Mejia said. “So many elements are changing so quickly. They can have a positive result for the community, or a negative result based on how quickly you can pivot to meet the needs of the local economy.” This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Federal space funding flows to New Mexico. The state is home to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the U.S. Space Systems Command Innovation and Prototyping Directorate, the U.S. Space Force Rapid Capabilities Office and the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range. Additional space-related research is conducted at the Energy Department’s Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Still, New Mexico was not often in the conversation about key space states until Virgin Galactic named Spaceport America its flight operations center in 2009. The nonprofit NewSpace New Mexico was established in 2018 to encourage the growing commercial space ecosystem. “New Mexico has a lot of research and development, but it needs to be put into play to help companies move from concept to products to sales to money,” said Casey DeRaad, NewSpace New Mexico founder and CEO. That’s the idea behind Unite and Ignite Space, a small satellite innovation hub in Albuquerque established through a partnership agreement between NewSpace New Mexico and AFRL. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, helped obtain a total of $11 million for the facility in the 2020 and 2021 National Defense Authorization Acts. New Mexico’s 140 space-related companies include BlueHalo, Redwire, SolAero and SpinLaunch. SpinLaunch leases more than 10 acres at Spaceport America, where the company built a 33-meter suborbital accelerator and conducted its first successful suborbital launch in October. “The Spaceport is strategically located adjacent to historic White Sands Missile Range, allowing for restricted airspace,” Raphael Feldman, SpinLaunch program management director, said by email. SpinLaunch also appreciates New Mexico’s engineering talent, government support and “plethora of assets to test new launch systems,” he added. The State of New Mexico offered SpinLaunch $4 million in economic development grants, which the company receives as it meets expansion milestones. NewSpace New Mexico works with local companies and organizations across the country seeking collaboration, testing facilities and introductions to potential customers. Through quarterly industry forums, NewSpace New Mexico has identified obstacles companies face in attracting skilled workers, gaining access to specialized equipment and finding secure facilities for work on classified space programs. To begin addressing those issues, Unite and Ignite Space will include offices, laboratories, manufacturing facilities, testing equipment and secure spaces for national security programs. “We know that setting up these resources will probably end up attracting industry to New Mexico, but the goal is to accelerate the pace of innovation for the space industry and for the nation,” DeRaad said. This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Luxembourg startup OQ Technology said Feb. 16 it has secured its first patent for a planned satellite constellation to connect internet of things (IoT) devices. OQ founder and CEO Omar Qaise said the patent, granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, will “give us an edge over competitors” in the increasingly crowded space-based IoT market. Qaise said the patent covers “wake-up” technology that enables OQ’s terminal devices to save power by only communicating with satellites as needed. He said the technology will help OQ develop devices that meet a 10-year battery-life goal that 3GPP, the international body that sets standards for terrestrial wireless providers, has created for narrowband IoT communications. However, other small satellite IoT companies are developing constellations promising similar capabilities, noted Northern Sky Research analyst Alan Crisp, which he said “should lead to 10-year battery life too, i.e., only send data when there’s a satellite overhead to save power.” One of these is Sateliot of Spain, which says the ability for its upcoming constellation to connect with non-proprietary IoT devices, also through 3GPP standards, is a key advantage it has over competitors. “Proprietary features are never an advantage,” Sateliot CEO Jaume Sanpera told SpaceNews , claiming these solutions “do not go far” despite being able to start sooner. “In a standard ecosystem, the difference is in the business model and how good your implementation, exploitation and evolution are,” he added. Sateliot is working closely with 3GPP to help shape standards due to be released this year, which Sanpera says will be critical for integrating satellite IoT solutions with terrestrial mobile operators. He said technologies developed before these standards are finalized will be unable to efficiently integrate with the terrestrial mobile ecosystem. However, OQ is confident of being able to adapt to incoming standards, according to Qaise, because the “3GPP standard provides guidelines for requirements for conformance and not the actual implementation itself.” He told SpaceNews these guidelines enable the startup to implement “efficient features based on the requirements and specifications at software level,” which can be updated as necessary. “The hardware aboard our satellites is programmable and the software can therefore be updated in-orbit,” he said. Racing ahead According to OQ, it has successfully tested a user terminal compatible with terrestrial 5G technology with Tiger-2, the startup’s first commercial nanosatellite that launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission in June. Lithuania’s NanoAvionics announced a contract last year to build, integrate and operate Tiger-2 on OQ’s behalf. Qaise has plans to deploy up to six more satellites in 2022, through an agreement with rideshare broker Spaceflight, for a constellation of more than 60 spacecraft in total. He said the company’s next satellite, Tiger-3, is slated to launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-4 rideshare mission “no earlier than April 2022.” OQ has five other patents pending in the U.S. and Europe that, according to Qaise, will also give it an advantage over other companies chasing an emerging small satellite IoT market. These patents cover frequency and timing synchronization technologies, IoT device localization, and inter-satellite links. The startup aims to use small satellites in low Earth orbit to connect low-power devices in rural and remote locations for asset tracking, drone control, vehicle telematics and other applications that need less than 10 milliseconds of latency. Sateliot said Feb. 9 it had raised 10 million euros ($11.4 million) in a Series A round, after also launching the inaugural satellite for a similar IoT business last year. The Spanish startup said the funds will support research and development activities to develop its business. It is also planning a Series B round to support the launch of 16 nanosatellites in 2022-2023.
Debris from a Russian antisatellite weapon demonstration in November are creating surges of close approaches, in some cases tens of thousands in a week, with active satellites in low Earth orbit. Such events, dubbed “conjunction squalls” by space situational awareness company COMSPOC, were first noticed in January and stem from the unique circumstances of the Nov. 15 Russian ASAT test that destroyed the Cosmos 1408 satellite and created thousands of pieces of debris. The squalls can result in thousands of close approaches, or conjunctions, over just a few days. “In the first week of April, in that week alone, there will be 40,000 conjunctions that we predict purely from that one event,” said Travis Langster, vice president and general manager of COMSPOC, during a panel at the 24th annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 17. Those surges come from the interaction of the Cosmos 1408 debris with constellations of remote sensing satellites. Cosmos 1408 was in an orbit at an inclination of 82.3 degrees, while many remote sensing satellites are in sun-synchronous orbits with inclinations of about 97 degrees. As the orbits precess, the debris overlaps the orbits of remote sensing satellites — but going in the opposite direction. “When they sync up, you have the perfect storm: they’re in the same orbit plane but counter rotating, crossing each other twice an orbit, again and again,” said Dan Oltrogge, director of integrated operations and research at COMSPOC, in an interview. Those squalls last for several days until the orbits precess out of sync. COMSPOC first noticed a surge on conjunctions at the beginning of the year, linked to a group or “Flock” of Dove imaging cubesats operated by Planet. That first surge peaked at about 4,000 daily conjunctions, defined as approaches within 10 kilometers, on Jan. 2. A second conjunction squall, peaking at about 2,000 conjunctions a day Jan. 25, linked to another set of Planet satellites. COMSPOC is predicting an even stronger conjunction squall in early April as the debris encounters several Flocks of Planet cubesats, including a peak of more than 14,000 conjunctions on a single day, April 5. Another squall is predicted with those same cubesats about six months later, but with a peak only about half as strong as debris spreads out and reenters. Planet feels some of the strongest effects of the Russian ASAT debris because of the size of its constellation, but it is not alone. “This is no different for any Earth observing system that uses sun-synchronous orbits at this altitude,” Oltrogge said. “We expect that a lot will be affected.” COMSPOC projects that, in the conjunction squall in early April, conjunctions involving all active satellites in low Earth orbit will peak at nearly 50,000 per day. That includes a background level of about 15,000 per day not associated with the ASAT test, along with those involving Planet’s satellites and with other companies and organizations, such as Satellogic, Spire and Swarm. However, because many of those satellites are cubesats, the risk of collisions does not rise as dramatically. While the background average daily collision rate has a background level of about 0.0005, during the surge in early April it reaches a peak of only a little more than 0.0008. Spacecraft outside of sun-synchronous orbits will also be affected, such as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. COMSPOC predicts that, given SpaceX’s threshold of performing automated collision avoidance maneuvers when there is a 1-in-100,000 chance of a collision, the Starlink constellation will perform as many as 80 such maneuvers a day just from Russian ASAT debris, with a peak in early March. Oltrogge warned that the conjunction squalls may overwhelm space situational awareness (SSA) systems and make it difficult for operators to identify other potential collisions. “The SSA systems, legacy and commercial, are all going to get hammered by this,” he said. “If you want to find a needle in a haystack, get rid of the hay. This is adding a lot of hay.”
Rocket city doesn’t intend to give up its title. “Huntsville will continue to be a really important place for space in many regards, obviously on the propulsion and launch vehicles side of the house,” said Mike Ward, Huntsville Chamber of Commerce senior vice president for government and public affairs. Huntsville is home to a Blue Origin engine production facility, Aerojet Rocketdyne’s rocket propulsion manufacturing facility and Dynetics work on NASA, U.S. military and commercial space programs. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Space Launch System and coordinates International Space Station experiments from Huntsville. Local employees also develop space station environmental support systems, manufacture space modules and perform space-based research. “All of those things make Huntsville relevant today and relevant tomorrow,” Ward said. In nearby Decatur, Alabama, United Launch Alliance manufactures Atlas, Delta and Vulcan Centaur rockets. Also nearby is U.S. Army missile development and testing at Redstone Arsenal. To keep its space sector humming, the state of Alabama promotes aerospace engineering at University of Alabama campuses, Auburn University and Tuskegee University. Calhoun Community College offers instruction in the high-end skills communities need to attract aerospace employers like welding, 3D printing and computer numerical control machining, ensuring “the pipeline of labor development is robust,” Ward said. The state, meanwhile, is making “investments on all fronts to support the industry, from education and workforce development programs to needed infrastructure and creating a business environment that allows companies to succeed here,” said Steve Sewell, executive vice president of the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama. “It is an absolute priority for Alabama, all the way to the highest levels in our state.” That’s partly due to the economic contribution of the space sector. The historic achievements of Alabama’s space sector also are “a real source of pride” for the state, Sewell said. This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine. 
Competition to attract space companies is going global. “Obviously, we are competing with our fellow states, but there’s even more competition for those companies that are looking for a U.S. location,” said Vicky Lea, aviation and aerospace director for the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. In recent years, Astroscale, the Japanese space sustainability company, Kleos Space, a radiofrequency-monitoring firm based in Luxembourg, and ground station operator Kongsberg Satellite Services of Norway have opened offices in Colorado. In addition, Orbit Fab, a satellite refueling startup, announced plans in August to relocate to Denver from San Francisco. “Silicon Valley is a great place to start,” said Orbit Fab CEO Daniel Faber. “There is capital and a creative mindset.” When it was time to expand, Orbit Fab chose Colorado largely because of its talent pool and proximity to potential customers and partners. Colorado also offered Orbit Fab tax incentives worth as much as $4.6 million based on its promise of creating nearly 200 high-paying jobs. “Talent is a huge driver for aerospace growth here,” Lea said, noting prominent educational institutions like the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Colorado School of Mines. “We have the nation’s second-most highly educated workforce.” Colorado’s 290 aerospace companies employed 33,460 people in 2020, according to the report, “Aerospace Colorado: home to the most intelligent life in the galaxy.” The state also is strong in adjacent fields: software, energy and advanced manufacturing, “which broadens and deepens the talent pool,” Lea said. For years, Colorado has attracted companies seeking military space talent thanks to the presence of U.S. Space Force Bases at Cheyenne Mountain, Schriever and Peterson, which is the current headquarters for U.S. Space Command. Supporting local industry is a community-wide effort, Lea said, pointing to the attendance of government leaders, industry executives and academics at the annual aerospace day at the state capital. The annual event, sponsored by Colorado Citizens for Space Exploration, is designed to ensure Colorado legislators recognize the importance of the state’s space economy. In the last five years, Colorado’s aerospace employment has grown 30 percent. The state now bills itself as having the nation’s highest concentration of private aerospace employment. “We live and breathe aerospace,” Lea said. This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine. 
Blue Origin expects to more than double the number of people it flies on its New Shepard suborbital system this year while adding another vehicle to its fleet. In a presentation at the 24th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 17, Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said the company saw “very robust” demand for those suborbital flights that the company is now working to meet. “The market is robust. It’s very robust. The challenge for Blue at this point is that we’re actually supply-limited. No business ever wants to be supply-limited when there’s robust demand,” he said. “It’s incumbent on us to go build new vehicles, get them ready and safely go fly, and also safely get our launch cadence up.” After years of development and a series of uncrewed test flights, Blue Origin made its first crewed New Shepard flight in July 2021, followed by launches in October and December. Those three flights carried 14 people: four each on the first two flights and a full complement of six people on the December launch. Smith said later that he expects Blue Origin to “easily double” the number of people it flies this year. He declined in a later interview to say how many New Shepard flights, which would include both crewed and payload-only missions, the company has scheduled for this year but said the crewed flights will carry six people each. That increase in launches will be enabled in part by a new vehicle that he said the company expects to bring into service this year. It will also require a faster turnaround of vehicles between flights. “That’s the one that we have to be thoughtful about because that’s the place where spaceflight has gotten into trouble,” he said. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking through how, methodically, to check out a reusable launch system.” The vehicles were “very clean” after each of those three crewed flights, he said. “Our launch rate is really going to be paced on how much we can convince ourselves that we can take out process and do it well.” The demand the company sees is based on an auction is conducted last year for a seat on the first crewed flight. The winning bid was $28 million from a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Justin Lin, who was unable to go on that flight. In December he announced he instead was buying a dedicated New Shepard flight scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2022. Blue Origin donated the winning bid to charities, but the company got something else out the auction. “How do you go to market? How do you establish pricing? How do you actually get demand?” Smith said. “That’s why we ran the auction.” The auction ensured not only a high price for that first ticket but also a base of future customers and knowledge of their price sensitivities. “Now we have a great understanding of not only, by name, people and what they would pay, but also the volume of people,” he said. “We can see what that curve is from higher prices down to lower prices in terms of volume.” “We’ve learned a lot of interesting things about the market over the past year,” said Audrey Powers, vice president of New Shepard flight and mission operations at Blue Origin who also flew on the vehicle in October. She said at the conference that, anecdotally, there seemed to be strong interest in flying on New Shepard even from people who had never considered going to space. “I’ve had so many people coming to me and saying, ‘I would do that in minute.,’” she said. “There are people whose interests have been sparked by what we did last year.” Blue Origin’s approach to the market is vastly different from the other leading suborbital space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, which sold tickets at fixed prices. Virgin officially restarted ticket sales to the general public Feb. 16 at a price of $450,000. The company had restarted ticket sales in August 2021 to those who had paid a $1,000 deposit to join its “One Small Step” program, and said in November it sold about 100 tickets . Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane has not flown since a July launch that carried the company’s founder, Richard Branson, among others. Both the spaceplane and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft are in an extended maintenance period that will last for much of this year. In a Feb. 15 statement about those ticket sales, Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said the company has a goal of having 1,000 customers when it starts commercial flights “later this year.” As of November 2021 the company had about 700 customers. During a later panel discussion at the FAA conference Feb. 17, Scott McLaughlin, executive director of Spaceport America in New Mexico, said he expected Virgin Galactic to return WhiteKnightTwo to the spaceport this summer after completing maintenance work in Mojave, California, bringing with it a second suborbital spaceplane. “They want to start operations some time in 2023,” he said, “and what they’ve announced is something on the order of three times a month to get started.”
Terran Orbital, a manufacturer and integrator of small satellites based in Boca Raton, Florida, announced Feb. 17 it won a contract from the U.S. military’s top contractor Lockheed Martin to produce and launch three spacecraft for a product demonstration. Lockheed Martin is not only a customer of Terran Orbital but a longtime investor in the company. Tyvak Nano Satellite Systems, a satellite bus provider owned by Terran Orbital, is Lockheed Martin’s partner for the contract the latter won in 2020 to build 10 satellites for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency. Terran Orbital is one of many companies in the space industry going public through a merger with a blank-check company or SPAC (special purpose acquisition company). During a presentation to investors Feb. 17, executives said they expect the SPAC deal with Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp., announced in October , to be completed in the coming weeks. The company is venturing into the public markets as space businesses that completed SPACs deals over the past year have seen their value drop precipitously as a result of broad selloffs and concerns about their timelines to profitability. Terran Orbital executives noted that the company is pursuing commercial customers but is heavily weighted toward government work, and expects significant revenue from military and intelligence contracts. “We have real revenues, and a real backlog.” said Terran Orbital CEO and co-founder Marc Bell. “Lockheed Martin is using Tyvak satellites for proposals to the United States government,” he said. “We can leverage the experience of the world’s largest government prime with the entrepreneurial spirit of a small company.” Lockheed Martin’s latest order for three satellites is one of several that Terran Orbit has won over the past six months, valued at more than $170 million, according to the company. This includes multiple awards from government and commercial customers. Bell in his pitch to investors said small satellites are “the future of space” and Terran Orbital is one of the few remaining independent manufacturers of small satellites. “Our competitors are owned by conglomerates. You can’t invest in them directly,” he said, referring to small satellite suppliers like Millennium Space Systems and Blue Canyon Technologies that in recent years were acquired by Boeing and Raytheon, respectively. New SAR constellation Terran Orbital has been reorganized into two business segments: Satellite Solutions and Earth Observation Solutions. Satellite Solutions is absorbing Tyvak. Bell said the company is phasing out the name Tyvak because Terran Orbital is transitioning to larger satellites — ranging from 150 to 500 kilograms — and will no longer be making nano-satellites. To boost its presence in the military market, Terran Orbital has hired a number of retired officers. The president of Satellite Solutions is Christian “Boris” Becker, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who ran the Navy’s space warfare command. Earth Observation Solutions is the business that will oversee PredaSAR, a company created by Terran Orbital in 2019 with the goal of building a 48-satellite constellatio n of radar imaging spacecraft. The first satellite is projected to launch later this year. Terran Orbital is manufacturing PredaSAR’s satellites in Irvine, California. It is also opening a new manufacturing plant near Cape Canaveral, Florida. The U.S. military and the intelligence community will be PredaSAR’s primary customers, said Bell. Roger Teague, a retired major general who ran strategic planning at U.S. Air Force Space Command; and Dave Mann, a retired lieutenant general who ran U.S. Army space and missile defense programs, told investors that they see a large demand across the U.S. military for synthetic aperture radar imagery. Mann said the Army is the military’s largest user of SAR imagery. PredaSAR in December won a $2 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to demonstrate interoperability between its satellites and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Blackjack constellation. And it is one of five SAR imagery providers selected last month by the National Reconnaissance Office for study contracts. Teague said he expects these study contracts to lead to long-term procurement deals. “The government likes to adopt a crawl, walk, run approach towards building relationships with commercial providers.” 
The past year saw 135 successful orbital launches worldwide, surpassing a record that had stood since 1967. While China edged out the United States 53 to 48, Florida’s Space Coast set a one-year launch record of its own. Thirty-one rockets reached orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s neighboring Kennedy Space Center in 2021 — one more than SpaceX and United Launch Alliance combined to launch in 2020 from the Eastern Range to break Florida’s personal best of 29 successful orbital launches set in 1966. Long the busiest space launch complex in the United States, Cape Canaveral and Kennedy extended their combined five-year streak as the busiest commercial, civil and military launch range in the world. Space Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, expects the launch tempo to increase appreciably in 2022 at the Eastern Range, with as many as 66 orbital launches penciled on the calendar. SpaceX, which launched 28 of Florida’s 31 orbital missions in 2021, is poised for another record year of satellite launches and human spaceflight missions, Purdy said. Although SpaceX hasn’t released a launch forecast for the year, a member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said during a Jan. 27 meeting that the company was planning for 52 launches in 2022 — most of which would launch from Florida. The Space Coast’s projected 2022 launch totals also include several planned launches from United Launch Alliance, including the debut of its Vulcan Centaur rocket, the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, and an unspecified number of missions for new smallsat launchers from Astra and Relativity Space slated for Florida debuts. “We’ll see if they hold the schedule,” Purdy said of the small launchers. “But we are prepared for a huge jump in activity,” he told SpaceNews. “It’s a fascinating future for the Eastern Range.” Purdy assumed command of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 at Florida’s Patrick Space Force Base in January 2021. Known as the 45th Space Wing when it was under the Air Force, Space Launch Delta 45 manages launch operations on the Eastern Range, which includes Cape Canaveral and Kennedy. Several new launch vehicles are in various stages of preparation to start flying from Cape Canaveral and Kennedy over the coming year, including NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket, ULA’s Vulcan Centaur and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. “And of course Starship as well,” said Purdy. Elon Musk in December announced SpaceX has started to build a pad in Florida for its massive Starship rocket. Other new arrivals include Astra Space, a five-year-old startup that has been launching from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska, and launched a NASA mission for the first time from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 10. The mission failed after the rocket’s upper stage appeared to tumble out of control after stage separation.. “We’re really proud about the fact that we managed to onboard Astra to the range and got them ready to launch within six months,” said Purdy. “It previously took us over two years to onboard new launch providers.” Purdy said he finds it striking that the vast majority of missions at Cape Canaveral will be commercial or civil for the foreseeable future. Only three national security space launches are scheduled for 2022. The long-term outlook for military launches is roughly five to eight missions in a single year, a small percentage of the overall launch activity. “We have pivoted to become a commercial spaceport even though our reason to exist was national security launch,” he said. “It’s really interesting to see this.” To keep up with the demand, the range has modified rules and procedures to help increase capacity and accommodate the fast-moving commercial industry. “We tell ourselves that we have to mentally plan for 100 launches a year,” said Purdy. Even if that target is not realistic today, “it helps you get into that framework and mindset about what we can do to speed up our processes and our technology.” Piecemeal changes now being implemented will add up over time to increase productivity so more launches can be squeezed into the calendar, Purdy said. Under the FAA’s new commercial space licensing rules, for example, fewer workers have to be evacuated during operations at the Eastern Range’s three busiest pads, Launch Complex 39, 40 and 41. By changing the risk analysis, “we can safely allow more people in the nearby area for a few more hours,” said Purdy. This new rule was first applied earlier this month when SpaceX launched the Transporter-3 rideshare mission carrying 105 small satellites. Another recent action by the Space Force and the FAA was to renegotiate airspace use with the Navy in order to maximize launch windows, Purdy said. The U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Unit based at Cape Canaveral flies aircraft sorties and conducts Trident ballistic missile test launches from submarines. Six were launched in 2021. These are examples of “things we’re doing to cram in more launch opportunities and capabilities,” he said. How launch pads are designed and managed also can boost productivity, Purdy said. Most of the launch providers at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy lease their pads for their exclusive use, but there are options to launch payloads from multi-user pads which provide more flexibility, Purdy said. “I’m a big proponent of clean pad concepts.” So-called clean pads are intended to be shared by multiple launch companies. Clean pads provide the basic infrastructure, but the launch providers bring in most of the support equipment needed to fly the rockets, Purdy said. “They launch from a flat concrete area, and sometimes all they need is water, power and internet. Then they leave and they take all their equipment with them so the pad is immediately available to other users.” Small rocket operator Relativity Space leased LC-16, a pad previously used by the U.S. Air Force, to launch its Terran 1 vehicle. Astra is launching its first demo mission from LC-46, a pad the Space Force licensed from Space Florida, the state’s economic development agency. “But our long-term thinking is to move them to LC-48, a clean pad area built by NASA,” said Purdy. ABL Space Systems plans to conduct the first launch of its RS1 rocket from Alaska later this year but is also looking to launch from Cape Canaveral perhaps next year, said Purdy. However, that timeline could slip after a Jan. 19 test incident destroyed the RS1 upper stage. ABL’s first mission from Florida will be the launch of two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation. Purdy said clean pads are ideal for companies like ABL that pack their ground system into shipping containers in order to launch from a variety of locations. The Space Force wants to see the industry design more innovative pads to support an assortment of launch vehicles and fast turnarounds. “I want to find a way so that everybody wins,” said Purdy. “How can we apply maximum multi-use launch concepts and build a common pad design that allows maybe 16 companies to launch? That’s the stretch goal.” A recent Defense Department inspector general audit found that both the Eastern and Western Range at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, are challenged to maintain aging equipment, including instruments and telemetry antennas. In a report published Jan. 5, the IG said the Space Force is at an “increased risk that aging range items with obsolete components could limit future launch capacity on the Eastern and Western ranges.” But the audit also found that the Space Force has successfully supported launches despite these challenges. “Range item performance enabled successful launches for the 30 launches we reviewed out of 90 DoD, civilian agencies and commercial space launches that occurred between January 2018 and March 2021,” said the report. Purdy’s take on the IG audit is that “they were really complimentary of what we’ve done,” he added. The problems associated with obsolete spare parts have been known for a long time, he added. “They highlighted some things that we’re aware of, and we’re monitoring.” Some of the aging instrumentation used at the ranges is needed to support launch vehicles that don’t have automated flight safety systems, which track vehicle performance and autonomously destroy a rocket if it flies off course. SpaceX has used automated technology for many years, but Purdy said not every launcher has it. The Space Force plans to make autonomous flight safety systems mandatory by 2025. Cape Canaveral is making upgrades to the communications infrastructure, Purdy said, so launch providers can use their own range instrumentation rather than rely on Space Force equipment. Years ago, the Space Force chief of space operations, Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, started an initiative called “range of the future” that emphasizes using technologies such as autonomous systems to make launch ranges more efficient and less costly to operate. “I really don’t like the term ‘range of the future,’ and I’m trying to change it” because it implies that the Space Force is looking 20 years out, Purdy said. Change is already happening and will be continuing, he said. “We’ve been constantly evolving for the last couple of years, changing business processes, changing safety analysis, changing our technology, and so we’re constantly evolving to get better and faster.” Meanwhile, questions about DoD’s capabilities to support commercial launches have drawn congressional attention. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act directs the Space Force to submit a detailed strategy to modernize the infrastructure at the launch ranges. Congress wants to know what investments are needed to update launch facilities for the new space economy and what legislative action might be required to allow the private sector to help pay for that. Purdy said he is currently drafting content for the report, due in early April. He said the NDAA provision represents a “really unique opportunity” for a national conversation about space launch infrastructure investments and business models to meet future demands. There is no question that space launch facilities have to catch up to the new space age, Purdy said, noting that they were stood up decades ago for military use when commercial activity did not exist. “The ranges were built back in the 1960s, and they were built in an era when all we had were national security launches,” he said. The rise of the private space industry calls for managing ranges more like a commercial airport. Before the Space Force was established, the Air Force Space Command in 2019 floated the idea of converting the ranges into multi-use national spaceports that could better accommodate commercial and civil space launch demands. That prospect is still being discussed, said Purdy, but federal spending rules are an obstacle to adopting a commercial business model. By law, DoD is responsible for operating and maintaining the ranges and cannot accept private funding for infrastructure upgrades. “We have had commercial partners launch service providers come onto the campus and say, ‘hey, I want to give you money because I need to add this infrastructure piece to our pad,’” he said. “I cannot accept it. I am not allowed to accept money from launch providers to help them do what they need to do with their pads because of existing rules.” As current law states, “we provide excess capacity to commercial launch providers,” Purdy explained. That means the Space Force and NASA can allow commercial companies to use existing launch pads and hangars, and the industry only pays for direct costs such as supplies and utilities. The problem with that is there are overhead costs associated with all of those kinds of services that the government has to pay for, he added. The growing population of commercial players is putting more stress on the government workforce managing and maintaining services. At some point, government resources will be overwhelmed, “and we’re going to slow it down because of that,” said Purdy. The Space Force has been in discussions with NASA, the FAA, the launch industry and Wall Street investors to figure out a way forward, said Purdy. “We need to make a tweak so that we can accept funds from companies if they want to provide them. And secondly, we have to have a better approach on infrastructure.” He said it is imperative to have a business model that allows users of the range to fund infrastructure and services. However, “I don’t want to dramatically increase the cost to the commercial industry. I really want to maximize our ability to launch, but we’ve got to get more into that sort of port authority model, where there’s additional funds that come in so we can get after some of those infrastructure improvements that can meet all the needs of the commercial providers without having a huge excess overhead.” These reforms eventually will have to be taken up by Congress. “If we get to a point where we want to be able to accept commercial funds, that’s going to require legislation because I can’t do that now,” Purdy said. But growth is a good problem to have, he said. Despite congestion and other challenges experienced at the Eastern Range, it will continue to be a preferred location as there aren’t many alternatives for vertical space launch. Air-launch companies like Virgin Orbit can take off from airfields to deploy small satellites. “As a military commander, I like that flexibility,” Purdy said. “If you manage to find another location to launch, that’s great.” But air launch today is limited to small payloads. The Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska and NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia can support vertical launches of smaller satellites. But the reality, Purdy said, “is that if you’re talking vertical launch capacity for medium and heavy payloads, there’s really only a couple places to do it: Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg.” This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat said Feb. 17 it expects a revenue slump to stretch into 2023 as it awaits the launch of two delayed satellites critical to a turnaround. The French satellite operator had previously forecast a return to growth when its new fiscal year begins July 1. But that was before pandemic-related issues delayed delivery of Konnect VHTS and Eutelsat 10B, pushing out the introduction of the two connectivity-focused satellites. The forecast slip underlines the importance of Eutelsat’s connectivity business to its financial performance as broadcast revenues continue to fall. Eutelsat said total year-over-year revenues fell 4.7% to 572 million euros ($640 million) during the second half of 2021 when adjusted for currency changes. Broadcast revenues fell 7.5% over the period to 351 million euros, which Eutelsat said was partly driven by a slowdown in new business from Europe. Revenue from government services dropped 3.8% to 74 million euros as the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan reduced demand. However, boosted by wholesale capacity agreements with terrestrial telcos in France and Italy, fixed broadband services rose 37.3% to 30 million euros. Mobile connectivity revenues also climbed 9.8% to 37 million euros as Eutelsat’s software-defined, reprogrammable Eutelsat Quantum satellite entered service following its launch in mid-2021. Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, fell 10% to 436 million euros. Eutelsat said it expects full-year revenue from operating verticals to total 1.11-1.15 billion euros for its current fiscal year ending June 30, down from 1.23 billion euros for the prior year. Satellite delays Konnect VHTS and Eutelsat 10B satellite delays have “a mechanical effect on our expectations for subsequent years,” Eutelsat said in its Feb. 17 financial report. Konnect VHTS is now slated to enter service in the second half of 2023 instead of the first. While Eutelsat continues to expect Eutelsat 10B to come online in the first half of 2023, it said its entry into service is delayed within that window. According to Eutelsat, the setbacks reflect the impact of manufacturing delays “and their knock-on effects, including pairing difficulties, related to launch rescheduling, in the context of global Covid crisis.” Thales Alenia Space, which recently told Canada’s Telesat that pandemic-related supply chain issues are delaying the production of its low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellation, is building both geostationary orbit satellites for Eutelsat. The disruption caused by COVID-19 on satellite supply chains is not limited to European manufacturers. In the United States, Viasat said Feb. 3 that the first ViaSat-3 satellite it is building in partnership with Boeing had been delayed until late summer , following impacts related to COVID-19. Eva Berneke, who joined as Eutelsat CEO at the start of 2022, said in a statement: “Although we have mechanically revised down our medium-term revenue expectations on the back of delayed availability of capacity, I am confident we have the elements in place to enable us to return to growth from FY 2023-24 and continue to deliver long-term value to our shareholders.” U.K.-based LEO broadband startup OneWeb, which has said it expects to launch global broadband services this year after deploying the remaining satellites in its constellation, is set to play an important role in Eutelsat’s connectivity growth engine. Eutelsat said it has built up a 22.9% stake in OneWeb. The French operator also said it had received $125 million in December through spectrum-clearing proceeds, after vacating C-band frequencies in the United States for use by terrestrial mobile operators.
SAN FRANCISCO – Copernic Space, a Los Angeles startup, unveiled its blockchain-powered platform for selling space assets. First up on the auction block is payload on a lunar rover traveling to the moon’s south pole courtesy of Lunar Outpost. “This sets a digital commercialization standard for payload/cargo while creating a new revenue model for space by turning its ownership into a space asset available for the retail market,” Copernic Space CEO Grant Blaisdell told SpaceNews by email. Lunar Outpost of Evergreen, Colorado, is preparing to send a 10-kilogram robotic rover to the moon on an Intuitive Machines lander and SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later this year. While the lander’s primary payload is a Nokia LTE 4G technology demonstration, Lunar Outpost is working with Copernic Space to sell an additional 3.475 kilograms on its first Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP). Lunar Outpost’s website refers to the sale as “a historic opportunity” for a company, brand or organization focused on marketing, scientific progress or working “to establish a sustainable human presence in space.” Copernic Space created the online platform to streamline the process of buying and selling space-related products and services like shares in a space startup, satellite sensor tasking or payload space. By applying blockchain technology, Copernic Space converts space assets into non-fungible or digital tokens, which are designed to be bought and sold online. For the next 11 days, Lunar Outpost is selling a gram of payload capacity on its MAPP Lunar Rover for $4,250. The minimum order is 100 grams. In April, the public sale begins, allowing people to buy or sell as little as one-hundredth of a gram of payload space. Copernic Space was founded in 2020 to help build the market for space assets to enable “the average person to own a piece of space and economically participate in the space economy,” Blaisdell said in a recent interview. Space assets converted to non-fungible tokens and can be fractionalized, or divided into smaller portions, and traded or resold. “Selling payload in token form presents customers with a new avenue for accessing space,” Julian Cyrus, Lunar Outpost cofounder and chief operating officer, said in a statement. “In this case, not only the purchase itself but also the method of purchase is important. We hope that it leads to more payloads operating on the Moon, as well as an expansion of the number of people interested in being a part of space missions.”
Cities, counties and states offer grants, tax incentives, land, facilities and workforce training to convince space companies to move. “California will still and forever remain the startup capital of the world just because of the venture capital ecosystem,” said Sean Casey, former Silicon Valley Space Center managing director and co-founder of the New York Space Alliance. “You’ll always pull them in based on Silicon Valley, but can you hold onto them?” In many cases, the answer is no. Companies leave California to open offices and production facilities in states with plentiful engineering talent, proximity to government customers and a lower cost of living. Like Alabama, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Texas and Virginia, California benefits from its extensive U.S. government space infrastructure and the billions of dollars in federal funds that flow into government space programs. Unlike the other states, California has no state commission supporting the sector. “California’s aerospace industry boasts a gross domestic product exceeding that of the state’s film and television and agricultural industries combined, but does not have a state commission like other major industries in the state,” said California Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, chairman of the Select Committee on Aerospace. Other states have adopted space strategies that play to their strengths. Space Florida welcomes new companies with financial packages tailored to their unique needs and offers facilities near the NASA Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing and launching rockets in Texas, a state known for less stringent regulation, generous relocation incentives and a lower cost of living than California, where SpaceX has its headquarters, or Washington, where Blue Origin is based. The Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association wants to attract firms developing space and terrestrial technologies for 5G communications networks as part of a campaign that highlights the important role 5G networks will play in linking autonomous cars produced by state automakers. The New York Space Alliance sees the state’s financial sector as a major resource. “The way space gets financed is the existential question,” said Joseph Fargnoli, New York Space Alliance co-founder. “We want to get the institutional investors in New York conversant on the new space economy.” Education is a key focus of many state and local organizations wooing space companies. Through visits with elected officials, citizens underscore the role space companies play in local economies, and the high salaries space jobs provide. In colorful brochures for companies considering a move, states tout their educated workforce, top-notch infrastructure and unique attributes. The California Space Authority played a similar role before the nonprofit ceased operations in 2011. A bill before the California legislature would establish a California Aerospace Commission. “California needs to maintain its competitive advantage in the face of increased competition from other states, changes to the industry and shifting aerospace priorities,” Muratsuchi, the bill’s author and primary sponsor, said by email. This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
This could be a pivotal year for the Virginia Space. Rocket Lab, the California company that has been sending payloads to orbit since 2018 on its Electron launch vehicle, may finally get the green light to begin flying rockets from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Virginia’s Wallops Island. Since Rocket Lab selected the site in 2018, the California company has been working with the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, which oversees the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, to get it up and running. Planned launches in 2020 and 2021 were postponed due to delays in NASA’s effort to develop and certify an autonomous flight safety system for Electron launches. NASA said last month, though, that the certification should be completed in February. If that happens, it will mark an important milestone for Virginia Space. To date, the NASA Wallops Flight Facility has been known for launching Northrop Grumman Antares rockets and Cygnus capsules to transport cargo to the International Space Station, and for launching sounding rockets. Rocket Lab operates a private launch site on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. When the company, based in Huntington Beach, California, was looking for a second launch site, it chose Wallops in part because Rocket Lab intends to conduct frequent launches of Electron and its new medium-class Neutron rocket and Wallops is not as busy as California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base or Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. To help seal the deal, Virginia promised Rocket Lab a $5 million grant. In addition to the new Rocket Lab launch pad, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport opened a Payload Processing Facility in 2020 that can accommodate classified national security missions. Virginia also is attracting startups. Herndon-based HawkEye 360 operates a constellation of radio-frequency-monitoring satellites. SpaceLink of McLean is working to establish a space-data relay constellation. LeoCloud of Ashburn is focused on satellite-based cloud computing. And TrustPoint, a firm developing a new global navigation satellite system, is based both in Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley. U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are investing in startups that offer space-related products and services that complement government capabilities. Being in Virginia provides geographic access to customers in the Department of Defense and intelligence community, said Chris DeMay, TrustPoint founder and chief operating officer. Since Virginia also is home to government agencies, federally funded research centers and defense contractors, “your odds are good in recruiting high quality NewSpace employees in Northern Virginia,” DeMay added. This article originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of SpaceNews magazine. 
China is researching and developing new vehicles for various human spaceflight missions, including a new methane-fueled launcher apparently inspired by SpaceX. The country is working on a new generation reusable launch vehicle for missions to low Earth orbit (LEO) and beyond, based on developed technologies, a winged space transportation system, and a fully reusable and low cost, two-stage methane-liquid oxygen launcher, apparently drawing on SpaceX’s Starship system concept. Notably the latter appears to be a new path for China. The system would see the first stage land vertically while the second stage utilizes wings for initial declaration, before a powered descent and vertical landing. The concept was presented during a keynote speech by Wang Xiaojun, president of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), a major state-owned rocket maker. “We are doing the research on a manned launch vehicle powered by LOX-methane propellant,” Wang said, through a translator, at the International Symposium on Outlook and Cooperation on Near-Earth Orbit Human Space Flight, Feb. 17. The event was organized by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), the Chinese Society of Astronautics (CSA) and CALT. However, while Starship and Super Heavy are planned to be able to carry in excess of 100 metric tons to LEO, CALT’s methalox system would be capable of launching around 20 tons to LEO, Wang said. The relevant slide appears to indicate use of a gas generator engine, whereas Starship uses more complex but more powerful staged combustion Raptor engines. While the illustrations are redolent of systems being developed in the U.S., the work on the launcher is in the research stage and likely does not represent a finalized concept nor an approved project. No timeline for a first launch was provided. Wang stated the potential for the system for transportation to LEO, reusability and point-to-point transportation. Last year another CALT presentation was noted to include a concept similar to Starship. CASC is understood to have developed methane-liquid oxygen engines in the past decade. Landspace, a private firm, is currently preparing for the first launch of its methane-fueled Zhuque-2 launch vehicle in the near future. China’s space transportation plans have evolved sharply in recent years, following the demonstration of reusable rockets. As context, Wang noted that recent rapid developments in spaceflight technology mean countries are urgently looking to upgrade rockets which feature high success rates, higher efficiencies and launch rates, and much lower unit costs. He also stated that major space faring nations are developing plans for human spaceflight to the moon and Mars, with utilizing space resources and establishing long-term stays off world as goals. Wang also provided an update on the new generation launch vehicle for human spaceflight which CALT has been developing in recent years. The rocket builds on breakthroughs made for the Long March 5, currently the country’s largest launcher. The new launcher will come in a two-stage, single core version for LEO and a three-stage, triple-core variant for missions beyond LEO. Previously China was understood to be looking to use human-rated Long March 7 and Long March 5B launchers for these roles. The two-stage version of the new-gen rocket will be able to carry around 14 tons to LEO in reusable mode, or 18 tons when expendable. CALT aims to recover the first stages using a tether system. A version of the rocket is expected to fly for the first time in the next five years and would be capable of carrying a new-generation crew spacecraft —a partially reusable successor to the Shenzhou—to the Chinese space station. A pair of launches of the larger variant could be used for a short duration crewed lunar landing mission, according to earlier reports. A slide on a winged space transportation system showed parallel suborbital and smaller orbital spaceplanes used to make repeatable trips to the Chinese space station. After vertical takeoff both would be capable of horizontal landing. CASC conducted secretive orbital and suborbital reusable spacecraft tests in September 2020 and July 2021 respectively. It is not known if these tests are directly related to the presented plans. Looking to the future of propulsion, Wang noted methalox rockets, new materials, combined cycle engines for single-stage-to-orbit systems, artificial intelligence and nuclear thermal propulsion as having potential for boosting spaceflight capabilities by leaps and bounds.
Frank Calvelli, nominated by President Biden to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said Feb. 17 that the United States needs to move quickly to protect satellites so they can be “counted on during times of crisis and conflict.” Calvelli spoke during a confirmation hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he testified along with three other DoD nominees. If confirmed by the Senate, Calvelli will become the first-ever senior procurement executive in charge of military space programs, a post mandated by Congress in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Calvelli said it would be one of key responsibilities to help protect the military’s space assets. “There is a real sense of urgency to act,” he said. “The nation needs to outpace its adversaries and maintain the technological advantage it gets from space,” Calvelli added. The White House announced Calvelli’s nomination on Dec. 15. He worked for 30 years at the National Reconnaissance Office and in September joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton to lead the company’s space and intelligence programs. Calvelli would report directly to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. The secretary oversees the procurement executives for both the Air Force and the Space Force. Andrew Hunter was confirmed this month as the Air Force’s acquisition executive. Calvelli would be a co-equal. The management of space acquisitions poses significant bureaucratic challenges as Calvelli’s office will have to work with a patchwork of agencies. The Space Force has a procurement organization, the Space Systems Command, but other agencies also fund space programs, including the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Missile Defense Agency, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Space Development Agency. The Space Force also works with the intelligence community, mainly the National Reconnaissance Office, on classified space programs. Congress and DoD created a multi-agency panel called the Space Acquisition Council to coordinate programs. Calvelli said he would “use that tool to my advantage to discuss space architecture, discuss space acquisition strategies and discuss across the services where we need to go with the space architecture.” Commercial space In prepared testimony, Calvelli said the rapid growth of the commercial space sector “provides a significant opportunity for the DoD to utilize innovative commercial capabilities and production processes.” But it remains to be seen how much commercial technology can be integrated into military systems, he noted. “Each mission area must be evaluated to determine the risks involved in order to achieve the proper balance between government and commercial capabilities.” He said the commercial sector is “at the forefront of many new technologies such as artificial intelligence, edge computing, and machine learning; technologies which will be beneficial to outpacing strategic competitors.” Examples of commercial innovation can be seen in proliferated constellations that use smaller satellites. However, the integration of proliferated constellations being designed for missile tracking with the military’s overall missile tracking architecture “could potentially be a challenge.” A key priority is to have “a more resilient defense space architecture,” Calvelli said. “From my experience, resiliency can be added by taking advantage of diverse orbits, adding new technical capabilities, using a mix of traditional satellites and smaller more proliferated satellites, robust space situational awareness, the ability for rapid reconstitution, and taking advantage of commercial capabilities.” Resiliency also requires ground systems that don’t have single point failures so they are less vulnerable to cyber attacks, he added. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) asked Calvelli for his views on space as a “warfighting domain.” Calvelli said using the term “warfighting domain or just space domain” is not the issue. “What I think is really important is that we are able to count on our space assets being there, whether that be peace, crisis or conflict,” he added. “The economy depends on space. The nation depends on space. The military depends on space. So I think we need to make sure that our architecture is resilient. And we need to make sure that we maintain a technological advantage over our near peer adversaries, particularly China and Russia.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) pressed Calvelli on his views on whether the Space Force should have “offensive” space weapons. Calvelli’s response: “I believe we need whatever capability that we can get that’s going to protect our assets. I think that a day without space would be a really bad day for our country, whether that’s in peacetime or in crisis and conflict.” Cotton noted that DoD is “unfortunately littered with a lot of expensive programs that have gone wrong, where the taxpayer doesn’t get what we paid for, and sometimes that’s due to immature technology, due to the leadership and management of program, every now and then it’s due to a little bit of congressional meddling and parochial politics back home.” He asked Calvelli if he would “end programs that aren’t performing and are not delivering value for the taxpayer.” Calvelli said he would. “If there’s programs that are awry or not heading in the right direction, I have no problem either taking corrective action or terminating them.” Calvelli’s nomination is expected to sail through the committee. During the hearing, he was praised by several senators for his NRO career and track record in space programs. 
SpaceLink announced plans Feb. 17 to work with Axiom Space to conduct the first demonstration of its space data relay service on the International Space Station. The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, manager of the ISS National Laboratory, awarded McLean, Virginia-based SpaceLink a contract to demonstrate data transmission from the Space Station through optical terminals at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. Once that contract was finalized, SpaceLink awarded Axiom a subcontract to support mission integration, launch and operations. Axiom also will serve as SpaceLink’s liaison with NASA, ensuring SpaceLink hardware meets stringent ISS safety requirements. SpaceLink CEO Dave Bettinger called the demonstration, scheduled for 2024, “an excellent validation to show data rates to the ISS that I believe are potentially one or two orders of magnitude higher than what they’ve seen.” OHB System AG is manufacturing four satellites, which it plans to send to medium Earth orbit in 2024, to relay data for government and commercial customers. The planned service is similar to what NASA provides today through the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite constellation in geostationary orbit. “We see it as a an important milestone for us to show NASA and the world that we are going to be able to provide the services in space that commercial, government and international entities will be using in the future,” Bettinger told SpaceNews. Axiom won a NASA contract in 2020 to develop a commercial module for the Space Station . Axiom also is planning a series of commercial ISS missions . “High-speed communication will be a critical component for the future where people live and work in space,” Michael Suffredini, Axiom president and CEO, said in a statement. “Axiom looks forward to collaborating with SpaceLink and supporting its relay network, beginning with this important demonstration on the ISS.” SpaceLink plans to conduct the data relay demonstration in 2024 after testing in-orbit testing of its communications satellites. NASA is preparing to hand off to industry the job of providing communications for dozens of spaceflight missions including ISS. Like transportation of crew and cargo to the ISS and cargo delivery to the moon, NASA sees communications in Earth orbit as a job commercial companies can take over. “NASA has done a great job of going commercial where it makes sense and saved a lot of money on that,” Bettinger said. “We see this as a perfect example. We’re very proud to be a part of the CASIS project.”
TAMPA, Fla. — Astroscale said Feb. 17 it is preparing to resume an attempt to capture a satellite acting as a piece of debris in low Earth orbit, after pausing the demonstration three weeks ago to troubleshoot undisclosed problems. The Japanese startup has started moving its 175-kilogram servicer spacecraft closer to the 17-kilogram client satellite ahead of deciding whether to restart the demonstration, Astroscale said in a social media post . According to Astroscale, it has made “good progress in working through solutions to the anomalous spacecraft conditions that we identified with ELSA-d,” or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration. The company did not disclose the nature of the issue, when it could restart the mission or the distance between the two objects. The servicer and client were a few centimeters apart before a successful capture demonstration Aug. 25 that was controlled manually by flight operators in the U.K. They were separated by tens of meters at the start of a demonstration that was called off Jan. 26 , when flight operators aimed to be less involved to enable the servicer to carry out the capture mission more autonomously. The decision to maneuver the servicer into position for another capture attempt follows multiple discussions with regulators and insurers on the company’s next steps. “The safety of ELSA-d, and of the orbital environment, remains our top priority,” Astroscale said in the Feb. 16 social media post. “Both spacecraft are under control and being continually monitored, we are keeping regulators and key partners updated on our status, and we are moving forward with confidence.” After performing a series of demonstrations designed to test the technology Astroscale plans to use to capture and remove objects in orbit, the servicer aims to deorbit the servicer and client in a controlled descent that it says will take seven to 10 years to complete.
Shanghai local government entered an agreement with the state company responsible for China’s planned broadband megaconstellation Wednesday, while also aiming to foster a space hub to support reusable rockets and satellite mass production. Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang met with Zhang Dongchen, chairperson of China Satellite Network Group, and Yang Baohua, the group’s general manager, for the signing ceremony of the strategic cooperation framework agreement in the city Feb. 16. China Satellite Network Group, sometimes abbreviated to “Xingwang” or SatNet, was established in 2021 to oversee a national project to establish a low Earth orbit megaconstellation consisting of around 13,000 satellites. Shanghai and SatNet agreed to in-depth cooperation and to achieve win-win results in various fields but p lanned developments were not detailed. The move follows SatNet establishing two companies in the city of Chongqing in southwestern China in December. The project was noted in China’s plans for the next five years in a recent space “white paper” but no timeline for the deployment of the constellation nor when it could enter service has been published. A number of Chinese commercial rocket companies are now citing the national “satellite internet” project as opportunities for contracts. Chinese entities including the CASC, CASIC and CETC earlier announced plans for LEO broadband constellations. These have not been openly discussed by the parties since the emergence of the SatNet-led national megaconstellation, sometimes referred to as Guowang, or national net, suggesting the earlier plans have been superseded. Shanghai meanwhile joins a number of Chinese cities seeking to foster commercial space hubs, including Beijing, Shenzhen , Wuhan , Chengdu , Xi’an, Changsha, Guangzhou , Changchun, Ningbo and Wenchang , as well as a cluster around the Yangtze Delta . Shanghai on Wednesday published its “Implementation Opinions on the City’s Promotion of High-Quality Development of Spatial Information Industry,” to guide development of the space industry across the 14th Five-year Plan period of 2021-2025. Shanghai’s “Implementation Opinions” propose 12 main tasks, including serving and supporting the overall needs of China in human spaceflight, lunar exploration and other areas, serve the construction of satellite constellations, and participate in cutting-edge scientific research. Digital and intelligent manufacturing capabilities, reusable rockets, spacecraft research and development platforms, intelligent satellite software, ground terminals, applications and commercial satellite production and rocket assembly lines are other priorities. China opened areas of the space sector to private and commercial actors in 2014 and has increased its policy support ever since, with provinces and cities now seeking to attract what are likely to be hundreds of new, high-end space companies to drive local innovation and growth. Shanghai already plays a major part in China’s space activities, with the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), a major subsidiary of the country’s main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).
The European Space Agency will establish a committee with representatives from both inside and outside the space industry to develop options for a European human space exploration program. The creation of what ESA called a “high-level advisory group” was one of the major outcomes of a one-day “space summit” held in Toulouse, France, Feb. 16 that brought together representatives of member states of both ESA and the European Union to discuss future European space initiatives. Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said the proposal for the advisory group came from French President Emmanuel Macron. “We got a very clear message from President Macron that such a group is needed. He has asked ESA to put the group together,” he said at a press conference at the end of the summit. In a speech earlier in the day, Macron mentioned his desire to study options for a European human spaceflight program. “Between now and summer, we want to come up with more specific European targets and ambitions for manned space travel,” he said through an interpreter. “We need to know what our priorities are, have the data to back it up and prepare the choices we are going to take for the November [ESA] ministerial meeting.” Those options, he said, included a European Mars mission by the end of the next decade or an “ISS-style” project. “These are bold ambitions,” he said. “These are fundamental human issues that we will be working on for the next decades.” Aschbacher said a draft mandate for the new advisory group will be presented to ESA members at a March meeting of the ESA Council, with the goal for the group to start working immediately thereafter. The committee will prepare an interim report in time for the ministerial meeting in November, with a final report by next spring. “It is clear that this group has to be independent and comprising mostly non-space experts,” he said, “because we really would like to look at various aspects of society from an economic point of view, a historical point of view, a geopolitical point of view.” That means including people such as artists and philosophers in the group to look at various aspects of exploration beyond science and technology. French economic minister Bruno Le Maire, who presided over the summit meeting, said the group would help Europe establish strategies for space exploration. “The Chinese have defined a strategy for exploration. The Americans, likewise,” he said through an interpreter at the press conference. “We haven’t done that yet, and we need the right method.” The issues the group would look it, he said, would include what level of cooperation Europe will seek with other nations as well as the roles of humans versus robots. “What are the timetables? What sort of funding arrangements? These are all important questions, and we’ve tasked this expert group with finding answers so that we can then set guidelines.” ESA had, in the weeks and months leading up to the summit, been pushing hard to win support for a human space exploration program. That included the release of a “European Astronauts’ Manifesto” by the European branch of the Association of Space Explorers, the professional organization of astronauts. “A Europe that projects itself as a leading society must have the capabilities to set its own goals, and to decide for itself how far it wants to go in space exploration, united in our European values,” the document stated. “We now have a unique window of opportunity to accelerate and become a fully recognized partner of the global space endeavor.” “While Europe is still at the forefront of many space endeavors, such as Earth observation, navigation and space science, it is lagging in the increasingly strategic domains of space transportation and exploration,” Luca Parmitano, an ESA astronaut, said in a luncheon speech at the summit, reading from the manifesto. “With utmost urgency, European leaders must decide now whether Europe shall accelerate its efforts to remain in the leading ranks of spacefaring nations that shape the future of this planet, or to fall behind into the role of a junior partner for decades to come.” The summit endorsed other European space initiatives with few major developments. That includes a set of “accelerators” and “inspirators” previously backed by ESA members , of which human space exploration is one, as well as European Union initiatives on a secure connectivity constellation and space traffic management. Participants also agreed to hold a second summit in 2023.